IMPLEMENTACIÓN DEL VMI 1 ¿Por qué el VMI?

Fleenor writes, a 'protean' quality. (The Female Gothic (Montreal, 1983), p.4). They are, however, all present and parodied in Lady Oracle. The so-called

'Modern Gothic', for example, bears little, if any, resemblance to the eighteenth-century literary classics. The genre is more like a 'crossbreed' of Jane Eyre and Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. These plots normally focus on a mystery, usually a murder, implicating the heroine's husband. As a result he appears to both heroine and readers as a menacing, sinister figure, ultimately a stranger. This element is present in Lady Oracle when Joan suspects that she is being blackmailed by Arthur, who in fact acquires these stereotypically frightening characteristics: 'Arthur was someone I didn't know at all. And he was right in bed beside me. I was afraid now, almost afraid to move; what if he woke up, eyes glittering, and reached for me...? For the rest of the night I listened to him breathe. He sounded so peaceful.'

(p.292). Joanna Russ, 'Somebody Is Trying To Kill Me and I Think Is My Husband: the Modern Gothic', Journal of Popular Culture, 6 (Spring 1973), 666-691.

•heroine' (that is, woman as manipulative 'seductress' and woman as innocent 'virgin'), into which female characters in Gothic fiction tend to be divided. Yet at the same time the novel also constitutes an attempt to comprehend the pleasure the reader takes in romantic fiction, and its therapeutic value.

We are given samples of women’s popular romance in the novels which Joan writes. The fiction which she produces resembles the historical romance of Barbara Cartland and the popular gothic romance of Victoria Holt, and shares their generic conventions. Charlotte, the heroine whose adventures we follow, has all the conventional characteristics of the protagonists in such fiction. With her features left sufficiently vague in order to encourage a degree of reader-identification, the heroine is usually presented as being alone in the world. She is portrayed as poor but well bred, naive, simple and pure hearted, yet also able to display determination when necessary. Charlotte’s feelings towards Redmond, the hateful but always ambiguous master of the mansion where she lives, combine sexual attraction with moral distaste. The triangle is closed by the figure of the master's wife, Felicia, who, since she is unfaithful, plays here the role of rival and villainess.

One of the variations within the genre which Stalked by Love, the novel which Joan Forster is writing, sees the role of rival or villainess as embodied by the wife herself; she is therefore characterized as wicked and lustful. In addition to this, Atwood introduces the typical Gothic location of the mansion described as a place of menace, and the family mystery that surrounds it. Redmond's wife Felicia, who is also the typical villainess, is portrayed as stunningly beautiful. Her elegance, which takes the form of a display of wealth, is accompanied by attributes of arrogance,

lasciviousness and sexual infidelity. As befits the conventions, the hero plays a menacing role in relation to the heroine Charlotte, who tries at all costs to defend her virtue. Charlotte is confused and sexually aroused by Redmond, even though she is too young and inexperienced to acknowledge her desire. The more she is intrigued by Redmond, the more threatened she feels by the environment of the mansion. The plot of a popular Gothic novel generally develops with the sudden disappearance of the wicked wife (who, as convention dictates, dies or goes mad) so that the hero can marry the young heroine, enjoy a domestic way of life, and live happily ever after.

When the Gothic Romance which Joan is writing is approaching the supposedly happy conclusion of the

heroine Charlotte's adventures, Joan recognizes she cannot continue in this vein. She refuses to fulfil generic expectations and deliberately disrupts them. It is at this point that Lady Oracle both mirrors and a deconstructs the very genre which it is parodying. Joan, tired of the heroine Charlotte's 'perfection', tries to retell the story from the perspective of the evil Felicia. After having composed Felicia's version of events she perceives that the idea is untenable, since 'sympathy for Felicia was out of the question, it was against the rules, it would foul up the plot completely' (p.319) . The reader is thus made aware of the significance of literary conventions, including the rigid division of destinies that awaits the wife/villainess and the heroine. At the same time Atwood illustrate the alternative structure such stories could employ. A transgression of the genre, and of the patriarchal perspective on women which it reflects, is implemented at the very moment the novel emphasizes the importance of its norm.

One of the consequences of this defiance of the limits imposed by the genre, is the interrogation and problematization of the traditional representation of woman in literature, which is frequently located around the two polarities of good and evil, angel and monster. Lady Oracle undermines and subverts these simplistic stereotypes by both employing Gothic

representations of femininity and working against them.

In Stalked by Love, the novel written by Joan Forster, passages of which are reported in the text, the shift from generic conventions occurs slowly and culminates in the author's overt expression of empathy for Felicia. The account of Felicia's sexual escapade is followed by the insertion of an element alien to the Gothic tradition, that is she makes a plea for love from the hero Redmond. The paragraph that follows, written entirely from Felicia's point of view, centres on her sorrow at the recognition of the fact that Redmond no longer loves her. She keeps imagining Redmond with Charlotte,

torturing herself, gnawing on her nether lip, that full sensuous lip Redmond once loved to caress. Tonight he was later than usual....Perhaps she could foresee that life would be arranged for the convenience of Charlotte, after all, and that she herself would have to be disposed of. A tear rolled down her cheek, tiny electric sparks jumped from the ends of her hair.... She was afraid of death. All she wanted was happiness with the man she loved. It was this one impossible wish that had ruined her life; she ought to have settled for contentment, for the usual lies (p.319).

The unconventional shift to Felicia's

perspective is reminiscent of Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which in turn is a rewriting of Jane Eyre narrated mainly from the point of view of Bronte's Bertha Mason, the mad wife locked away in

the attic of Thornfield Hall. At play here, as in Jane Eyre and in Du Maurier's Rebecca, is the setting up of two contrasting and irreconcilable versions of femininity centred on the polarities of innocence and experience: the naive, virginal, modest girl, who is destined to triumph, as always happens in romance, and the wife, with a strongly assertive character and an aura of intense sensuality. In Lady Oracle, however, through the highlighting of these

contradictions, Atwood shows how the two versions of feminity are not natural but culturally constructed. Her deconstruction of these stereotypes reveals that a real woman combines attitudes of both 'purity' and

'sensuality'.

Felicia's long wavy red hair, a typical feature of the villainess or the heroine's rival in Romance fiction,93 agrees with her fiery temperament. Everything about her is powerfully sensual. Soon she becomes, in a similar manner to her ancestress, Rebecca De Winter, not only a representative of 'the sexual',®4 but the embodiment of a sexuality in excess, overflowing, animal-like, which is also a characteristic trait of Bertha Mason.

93 Rachel Anderson, The Purple Heart Throbs: The