Joan’s Multiple Life-A Psychological Analysis On Lady Oracle By Margret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a famous Canadian novelist, poet and literary critic. She is "a standard-bearer of the Canadian Dominant Culture" who is honored as "the Queen of the Canadian Literature". Lady Oracle is the third novel by Atwood published in 1976, which earned popularity among readers due to its unique plot. Atwood depicts the formation of the heroine Joan’s multiple personalities in her girlhood due to family background, social psychology and self-awareness. Focusing on the complex relationships with various characters in the novel, the thesis has explored Joan’s frustrations and struggles encountering id, ego and superego in her personality. The independence of personality is complemented with Joan’s balance of multiple personalities. Joan’s story teveals Canadian female writers’living conditions and their fighting for independent personality in that special period.The thesis has elaborately analyzed Joan’s multiple lives by applying the id, the ego and the superego structure based on Freud’s Psychoanalysis. It probes Joan’s living conditions and functions of Joan’s multiple-personalities at different stages in life. It can be concluded that Joan is dominated by the id in her childhood both mentally and physically. Joan frees herself from the id basically in teenage, while Joan’s adult life is mainly dominated by the superego. Joan names herself after Luisa K Delacourt and becomes a writer living to the superego moral principles. Joan exploits the reality principle of the ego to balance the contradictions in marriage because she realizes the unbalance between the id and the superego. Felicia, Penelope and Charlotte are three characters created by Joan in her novels, standing respectively for the id, the superego and the ego.Joan lives in the confusion and frustrations due to the bias from others in her childhood and teenage. Later Joan lives in the disorders and chaos resulting from her multiple personalities. Finally Joan plans a fake death to escape the chaotic life to balance id, superego and ego. Canadian female writers’ multiple lives is interpreted from Joan’s multiple lives in Atwood’s time. They establish independence in personality after balances and struggles.