Fashioning Identity and Identity Fashioned in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle

This article attempts to investigate the notion of identity. It is a study of the temporal and spatial possibility of fashioning Canadian identity in a postcolonial context. Literature, novel in particular, has always been an appropriate text for such an investigation. Therefore, Margaret Atwood’s third novel, Lady Oracle, (1976) is examined here. Atwood, the most recognized Canadian writer in the world of literature publicly and academically, wrote this novel when the question of identity was not only the current problem of Canadian writers and scholars but also the main concern of Canadian government and people. Like her first two novels, Lady Oracle also questions Canadian identity as a borderline case between apparently dominant British and American identities on the one hand, and as an independently voiced one in the world on the other. Following the main character’s textual footprints from her abandonment, concealment, and multiple identities to her revelation and unified identity, the study revisits one of the ways of fashioning identity in general and Canadian identity in particular.