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Articles

Volume 05, Number 2 (1980)

Lady Oracle's Secret: Atwood's Comic Novels

  • Frank Davey
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1980-06-06

Abstract

The basic outline of Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, as well as of her earlier novels -- The Edible Woman and Surfacing -- is the actual structure of comedy, as in the Shakespearean sequence of social disorder, exile reintegration, and return to "natural" order. Atwood's term, "anti-comedy," is therefore misleading. All three novels rely heavily on opposites: order out of disorder personal wholeness out of mental collapse. The comic structure is embellished by twentieth century psychoanalytic paradigms, such as "neuroses" and "self-actualization."