“Lady Oracle” by Margaret Atwood (post 7): Protagonist depicted as having multiple personality by her use of automatic writing and by her own statement.

I have previously quoted from Atwood’s nonfiction book on writing, in which she said, in effect, that fiction writers have multiple personality. In this novel, her protagonist is a fiction writer, who, not surprisingly, is depicted as having multiple personality: she uses automatic writing to write one of her novels and she states that she has multiple personalities.

Automatic Writing

As previously discussed, the title, “Lady Oracle,” is also the title of a novel written by the protagonist using the process of “automatic writing”:

“At this point I told the truth. I shouldn’t have done it, but once I’d started I couldn’t stop. ‘Well, I was trying some experiments with Automatic Writing,’ I said. ‘You know, you sit in front of a mirror, with a paper and pencil and a lighted candle, and then…Well, these words would sort of be given to me. I mean, I’d find them written down, without having done it myself, if you know what I mean.’ ”

Historically, automatic writing was an experimental method used by psychologists to demonstrate that even some normal people had “double consciousness” (1), an old synonym for multiple personality. More recently, automatic writing has been used clinically as one way to communicate with a patient’s alternate personalities (2, p. 94).

Protagonist’s Statement

As previously quoted:

“This was the beginning of my double life. But hadn’t my life always been double? There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin…It was never-never land she wanted, that reckless twin. But not twin even, for I was more than double, I was triple, multiple…”

Since Atwood has stated that fiction writers, in real life, have multiple personality, the above statement by her fictional writer cannot be interpreted in any other way.

Multiple Personality Unnamed

Yet, in Atwood’s novel about a writer, as in her essay on writing, although she describes the writer as having multiple personality, she does so without using the term. Why?

In post 4, I speculated that she thinks of “multiple personality” as a term that would apply only to a person who was mentally ill. And since she does not wish to imply that either novelists in general or the writer in this novel is crazy, she does not feel the term applies. Perhaps she would use the term if she read this blog and came to accept that multiple personality has a normal version.

Salient Fact and Main Point

The salient fact of Lady Oracle is that the protagonist is a fiction writer. Any analysis of this novel that could apply even if the protagonist were not a fiction writer, and which does not interpret the novel in the context of Atwood’s views on the fiction writer, misses the main point, which is that the protagonist has multiple personality.

1. Alfred Binet. On Double Consciousness: Experimental Psychological Studies. Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Company, 1905.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.