“ B A N I S H E D T O T H I S O T H E R P L A C E ” : A T W O O D ’ S L A D Y O R A C L E CATHERINE SHELDRICK ROSS University of Western Ontario I n a revealing passage in Lady Oracle, the narrator, Joan Foster, says: I longed for the simplicity of that world, where happiness was possible and wounds were only ritual ones. W hy had I been closed out from that impossible white paradise where love was as final as death, and banished to this other place where everything changed and shifted?1 Atwood has frequently made this distinction between ritualized art and our shape-shifting world — for example in the clearly marked opposition between “ The animals in that country” who are “ceremonial” and “heraldic” and the animals in “ this country” whose “eyes / flash once in car headlights / and are gone.” 2 More recently, the last of the “Circe/Mud Poems” in You Are Happy begins: “ There are two islands / at least, they do not exclude each other.” On the first island, the pattern of events has the ritualized shape of a familiar story; on the second, events are open and their outcome not yet decided: On the first I am right, the events run themselves through almost without us The second I know nothing about because it has never happened.3 The people in Atwood’s universe have typically sought the permanence of that first world and are turned into works of art — a statue, a billboard fig ure, a photograph.4 In You Are Happy, however, Atwood seems to be cele brating the second world. At the end of the poem quoted above, Circe and Odysseus leave the repeatable rituals of the first island for a more risky place: this land is not finished This body is not reversible. [YAH , p. 69) Joan in Lady Oracle wants both landscapes. The novel’s pattern of referE n g l is h St u d ie s in C anada, vi, 4, Winter 1980 ences to the conventions of art on the one hand and to metamorphosis, shapeshifting , and double identities on the other serves to distinguish between the two worlds. Joan’s usual strategy is to keep these two worlds separate but to live in both, and this involves splitting herself in two. She both desires and fears the process of becoming whole, saying: “ If I brought the separate parts of my life together. . . surely there would be an explosion” (p. 218). The explosion that occurs is the blowing up of the literary conventions as they come into contact with Joan’s own life, hence the novel’s repeated pattern of the romance convention being undercut by the parody of that convention. The ending is ironic, with no comforting resolution of the tension between the two worlds. The world of art — opera, music, films, poems, and Gothic romances —■ is one source for sustained patterns of imagery and allusion. The cluster of references to opera includes the Walt Disney movie about the whale who wanted to sing at the Met (pp. 5, 16, 276, 283) ; the Texaco Saturday after noon opera broadcasts with Milton Cross discussing “lovers being stabbed or abandoned or betrayed . . . jealousy and madness . . . unending love triumph ing over the grave” (p. 74) ; and the various crippled singers who make comebacks in tearjerkers like With a Song in M y Heart and Interrupted Melody (pp. 78-80, 82). Various motifs come together here: the fatness of Joan, the whale, and the opera singers; the extravagant costumes; the stock characters of opera and their “passionate, tragic and preposterous events” (p. 74); and the frightening obligation to succeed, like Susan Hayward and Eleanor Parker, despite obstacles. Most important of all, opera represents for Joan a way of triumphing over this world’s pain by transmuting its ugli ness into the serene beauty of art. Throughout her life she has “learned to stifle” “a legion of voices, crying, What about me? What about my own pain? When is it my turn?” (p. 90). But as an opera singer she would be “ able to stand...