Mirror Images in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle

The opening passage of Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle is paradigmatic, for it illuminates a specular play of openness and closure, of sameness and difference, of multiple voices and resounding silences. As Atwood's work progresses, the text, like the heroine's life, opens, spreads, and multiplies beyond boundaries. The open form of Lady Oracle is integrally related to a problem which has influenced modern feminist theory: the problem of articulating what has been silenced by a language which reduces the other to the same. In her attempt to express a female language which has been repressed, Atwood does not begin outside the boundaries of phallocentric discourse; instead, she presents what Linda Hutcheon refers to as an "unmasking of dead conventions by challenging, by mirroring.