GEORGE, LEDA, AND A POURED CONCRETE BALCONY A Study of Three Aspects of the Evolution of "Lady Oracle"

ь LTHOUGH MARGARET ATWOOD has stated that the prob-lem with writing a novel is "sustaining your interest long enough to actually sit down and work it out " (Gibson 6), the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto has five boxes of manuscripts of Lady Oracle * Study-ing three different kinds of revisions Atwood made as she created Lady Oracle suggests that the organizing principle that unifies the novel is that each element in Lady Oracle is chosen to heighten the reader's awareness of the interrelation-ships between fantasy and reality, art and life. A close examination of the effects of changing the audience of the novel from Joan's husband to the reader, adding the character Leda Sprott, and revising the first paragraph of the initial draft reveals Atwood's concern with our perceptions about fiction and reality. In the early drafts of Lady Oracle Joan speaks not to the reader, as she does in the published novel, but to her husband George (later called Arthur) — in her mind — in a voice totally unheard: I would have preferred to have maintained your illusions for you intact, and I could have done it by never telling you any of the real things about myself. Most of the time I never did, which may account for my need, my compulsion to tell them to you now, if only in fantasy, (early typed draft, 10)1 In fantasizing her life story to George, Joan completely denies our existence as readers:... I wonder how long I will continue to make these feeble jokes about myself, how long I will continue to apologize even though there is no longer any one to listen to me. (First Draft, 3) Listening to Joan tell her life story to her husband is quite different from listen-ing to her tell it to us. Not only is the reader a voyeur rather than a participant, * Research for this article was supported by the Canadian Studies Faculty Enrichment Pro