EVALUACIÓN FINANCIERA DE LAS PROPUESTAS DE MEJORA EN LA CADENA DE SUMINISTRO

have stressed.(Marie-Françoise Guedon, 'Surfacing: Amerindian Themes and Shamanism' in Margaret Atwood: Language, Text and System, ed. by Sherrill Grace and Lorraine Weir (Vancouver, 1983) pp.91-112). In this respect it is quite similar to the shamanic experience of radical transformation of self.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The parodic revisitation of Romance fiction which occurs in Lady Oracle explores the 'limitations' and the 'pleasures' of the genre. It points out its norms at the very moment in which it subverts them in a parodic distortion that exposes the constraints of the generic rules of Romance fiction.

Parody, however, does not constitute the only significant element of the novel. Lady Oracle is permeated by an element of sharp satire. The satire is directed at radical militant politics, especially the Canadian nationalism of the 1960's and early 1970's, and the cult of 'sincerity', especially in relation to sex and feeling. The novel also presents a vivid description of the anxieties and terror of female childhood and adolescence.

Lady Oracle draws largely on the Gothic tradition of dualism and divided selves, which are frequently alluded to the representation of Joan's double life and double identities. In nineteenth century Gothic fiction 'the double signifies a desire to be re-united with a lost cente of

personality'.65 The Gothic fascination for otherness, however, represents the unity of self and other as impossible. In Lady Oracle instead there is an acceptance of the various different selves which constitute a single identity.

Joan Forster keeps her identity as Louisa K Delacourt, author of Costume Gothics, secret from the young revolutionary Arthur whom she eventually marries. She is ashamed to admit that she makes a living from writing popular fiction, and until the very end of the novel nothing breaks this silence, this deception. Represented as strategic device for survival , deception is an element recurrently present in women's popular narrative, where it usually acts as a strategy to conquer/keep the hero's love. In Lady Oracle it reinforces Joan's self division and highlights her duplicity, thus helping to create the character's double voice. Joan's narrative juxtaposes in fact a public voice, one that is cheerfully accepting and accommodating, and a silent one, which is double-edged, critical, enquiring, discontented and desiring.

It is Joan Forster's writing that allows her to explore a plural subjectivity, and it is her writing that enables her to live though this division, this split. In Stalked by Love, the work of Romance 65 Rosemary Jackson, p.108.

fiction Joan is writing, the maze in the castle, a typically gothic location, is a narrative device for the development of the plot of costume Gothic. The descent into the maze also signifies a 'descent into the underworld',®® as the author herself indicates, and the image of the maze is suggestive of the labyrinth of the psyche. The scene provides a confrontation in which the self alters and is altered by aspects of itself which it confronts for the first time. The women Felicia encounters in the labyrinth are her husband's previous wives, who resemble aspects of Joan's past selves, besides representing conventional stereotypes of femininity which in the past have been assigned to Joan:

A stone bench ran along one side, and on it were seated four women. Two of them looked a lot like her, with red hair and green eyes and small white teeth. The third was middle aged, dressed in a strange garment that ended half way up her calves, with a ratty piece of fur around her neck. The last was enor mously fat. She was wearing a pair of pink tights and a short skirt covered with spangles. From her head sprouted two anten nae, like a butterfly's, and a pair of obviously false wings was pinned to her back

(p.341) .

Confronting the images of her past and present selves, Joan comes to terms with her own self­ division, with the 'otherness' within herself. This time she does not suppress one self in favour of 66 Linda Sandler, 'Interview with Margaret Atwood', p. 16.

another. Instead, she realizes that she has to accept her multiple, numerous selves. Art on this occasion transforms life, enabling Joan to face reality.

The different stylistic levels of the text, especially in the fictional narratives which Joan creates, become a sign of the contradictory tendencies that co-exist within the character. They show two contrasting world-views and systems of belief, thereby proposing the self as a site of antithetical positions and conflicts. Popular art, in fact, does not merely reproduce ways and means belonging to the dominant discourse. On the contrary, it acts as the locus of conflict, where a double movement between acceptance and dissent can be continually discerned. 67 Subjectivity is the locus where this oscillation takes place, and the double movement is embodied by Joan herself, who appears to have within her two opposing models of being. Her humanist self, in constant search for a reassuring certitude and unity, resents 'this other place where everything changed and shifted'(p.284) It doesn't accept being 'closed out from that impossible white paradise where love was final as death' (p.284). Her drive to write romance fiction responds to this

67 Stuart Hall, 'Notes on deconstructiong the