Grotesque Femininity and the Crisis of Representation in Lady Oracle and The Gaze

This article examines how Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle and Elif Shafak’s The Gaze mobilize grotesque femininity to destabilize the mimetic ideals of beauty, coherence, and narrative unity. Both novels center on protagonists whose excessive bodies and fractured identities render them unreadable within dominant aesthetic frameworks, thereby raising critical questions about who may be represented, desired, or made visible. Drawing on feminist theory—particularly Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, Luce Irigaray’s critique of phallocentric discourse, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque—the study develops the concept of abject mimesis: a feminist representational strategy in which distortion and excess expose the exclusions that sustain mimetic norms. In Lady Oracle, Joan’s grotesque embodiment and parodic use of popular genres disrupt the logic of coherence and closure. In The Gaze, the unnamed obese narrator and the novel’s structure reveal the violence embedded in visual regimes. Taken together, these texts reconfigure mimesis not as faithful imitation but as rupture, where bodily and narrative excess become sites of feminist resistance. By pairing Atwood’s postmodern irony with Shafak’s mythopoetic layering, the article advances a theory of abject mimesis as a feminist poetics of grotesque excess, contributing to debates in feminist aesthetics, genre studies, and the politics of representation.