Margaret Atwood Study Guide

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Table of ContentsBiography.............................................................................................................................................................1

Critical Essays.....................................................................................................................................................9

Analysis............................................................................................................................................................343

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Biography

Biography

Margaret Eleanor “Peggy” Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, on November 18, 1939, the second of threechildren of Margaret Dorothy (Killam) and Carl Edmund Atwood. Her father was an entomologist whoconducted research in the bush country of Quebec and Ontario. Therefore, Atwood spent many of hersummers at the family cottage exploring the Canadian wilderness until her family would return to Toronto forthe school year. This connection to and exploration of the natural world would have a dramatic effect on herlater writing.

Atwood’s passion for the creative arts began at a young age. Between the ages of eight and sixteen, she wasmore interested in painting and designing clothing than in writing. She jokingly calls this time her “darkperiod” because beyond these years, she was devoted to writing; however, she would go on to illustrate someof her books of poetry and to win respect as a painter.

Atwood wrote for the school paper during her teens at Leaside High School and contributed to the schoolmagazine Clan Call. From 1957 to 1961, she attended the University of Toronto, where she pursued her B.A.in English. During her undergraduate career, she formed a bond with teacher and critic Northrop Frye. Hermentor introduced her to the poetry of William Blake, which would subsequently impact her own poetry.Even the titles of some of her books, such as Double Persephone (1961) and Two-Headed Poems (1978),reveal a double vision of mythic contradictions that stems from the influence of Blake’s writings. Even moreimportant was her friendship with professor and poet Jay Macpherson, whose irony and formal choices arealso reflected in Atwood’s work. After graduating with honors from her undergraduate studies and publishingnumerous poems in the college’s magazines, Atwood completed her master’s degree in English at RadcliffeCollege, Harvard University, in 1963.

That year, Atwood took a position at a marketing research firm, which would give her context for her novelThe Edible Woman (1969). During this period, she wrote poetry that would appear in various literary journalsand would make her one of Toronto’s new literary voices in the 1960’s. At this time, she also worked on anovel, Up in the Air so Blue, which remains unpublished. In 1964 she provided CBC radio with The Trumpetsof Summer, a choral composition with music by John Beckwith.

She then moved to Vancouver and taught English at the University of British Columbia for one year. This wasthe first of many temporary teaching positions and writer-in-residence positions she would hold, includingthose at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), the University of Alberta, YorkUniversity in Toronto, and the University of Toronto. Also, in 1964 she wrote her novel The Edible Woman insix months, though mistakes made by her publishers would delay the novel’s release for five years.

Atwood returned to Radcliffe from 1965 to 1967 to pursue her doctorate. During this time she proposed athesis, “The English Metaphysical Romance,” but never finished the degree. At Harvard, she met James Polk,an American. In 1967 the two married, and this relationship would be an influence on Atwood’s love poetry.Nevertheless, they would separate in 1972 and eventually divorce. After separating from Polk, Atwood begana relationship with novelist Graeme Gibson. The couple moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, and theirdaughter, Eleanor Jess, was born on May 17, 1976.

In 1967 Atwood was awarded the General’s Award, Canada’s most esteemed literary honor, for her book ofpoems The Circle Game (1966). The poetry in this collection established major themes in Atwood’s workincluding Canadian identity and the conflict between humans and nature. Atwood also gained recognition for

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Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which she published in 1972. This piece became a workof importance for Canada’s cultural nationalists. In 1973 she was made an officer of the Order of Canada; shewas promoted to companion in 1981. Throughout Atwood’s career, she has been active in the Writer’s Unionof Canada, having helped to establish the union in the early 1970’s, and in the Anglophone Canadian divisionof PEN International; she has served as president of both. Also, she is a member of the Canadian CivilLiberties Union and the editorial board of the influential Toronto-based House of Anansi Press.

Atwood’s writing has influenced readers across the globe. Her novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) was notedas the most widely taught novel in America in 1996. Atwood has been the recipient of various literary awards,including honorary degrees from Smith College (1982) and the University of Toronto (1983), among manyothers. She has also received the City of Toronto Book Award, the Canadian Booksellers Association Award,and numerous other honors. Two of Atwood’s novels have been selected for CBC Radio’s Canada Readscompetition: The Handmaid’s Tale, supported by former prime minister Kim Campbell in 2002, and Oryx andCrake (2003), supported by Toronto city councillor Olivia Chow in 2005.

Biography

Atwood is a multitalented writer with a flare for sardonic humor. In her novels, poetry, and short stories, shemakes bold stylistic choices which resonate with the reader. Her concerns with feminist issues, with thestruggle between humankind and the natural world, and with Canadian nationalism are inherent in her work.She is a voice of magnitude in her native land and a critic of Canadian matters of trade, culture, and foreignpolicy. Atwood’s pieces are studied in many secondary schools and universities worldwide. She has won avariety of prestigious awards throughout her career.

Biography

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on November 18, 1939. She grew up innorthern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. Following graduation from Victoria College, University of Toronto,she attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, receiving a master’sdegree in English in 1962. She taught at a number of Canadian universities and traveled extensively. In theearly 1990’s Atwood was a lecturer of English at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver. She latersettled in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson and their daughter, Jess.

Atwood’s output was steady in fiction and particularly in nonfiction. She made successful forays into thefields of script writing for film and musical theater, and she also produced notable novels. It is her prolific,passionate essay and article writing on a variety of national and international social issues, however, of whichhuman rights is her central concern, that made her a bellwether of Canadian opinion. Her involvement withworld political and social issues became evident in her vice leadership of the Writers’ Union of Canada andher presidency of the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, and Novelists (PEN), where shewaged a vigorous battle against literary censorship. Her association with Amnesty International prompted anincreasingly strong expression of her moral vision.

Biography

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on November 18, 1939, the second of CarlEdmund Atwood and Margaret Killam Atwood’s three children. At the age of six months, she wasbackpacked into the Quebec wilderness, where her father, an entomologist, pursued his special interests inbees, spruce budworms, and forest tent caterpillars. Throughout her childhood, Atwood’s family spent severalmonths of the year in the bush of Quebec and northern Ontario. She did not attend school full time until she

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was twelve.

Though often interrupted, Atwood’s education seems to have been more than adequate. She was encouragedby her parents to read and write at an early age, and her creative efforts started at five, when she wrote stories,poems, and plays. Her serious composition, however, did not begin until she was sixteen.

In 1961, Atwood earned her B.A. in the English honors program from the University of Toronto, where shestudied with poets Jay Macpherson and Margaret Avison. Her M.A. from Radcliffe followed in 1962.Continuing graduate work at Harvard in 1963, Atwood interrupted her studies before reentering the programfor two more years in 1965. While she found graduate studies interesting, Atwood directed her energieslargely toward her creative efforts. For her, the Ph.D. program was chiefly a means of support while shewrote. Atwood left Harvard without writing her doctoral thesis.

Returning to Canada in 1967, Atwood accepted a position at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. Bythis time, her poetry was gaining recognition. With the publication of The Edible Woman and the sale of itsfilm rights, Atwood was able to concentrate more fully on writing, though she taught at York University andwas writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. In 1973, Atwood divorced her American husband of fiveyears, James Polk. After the publication of Surfacing, she was able to support herself through her creativeefforts. She moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, with Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson; the couple’sdaughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born in 1979. In 1980, Atwood and her family returned toToronto, where Atwood and Gibson became active in the Writers’ Union of Canada, Amnesty International,and the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN).

Biography

Margaret Atwood achieved fame with provocative novels and challenging poems while still a young woman.By age fifty she was acclaimed worldwide for her poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays. Quotable andfrequently abrasive, she became a media celebrity as well. Two concerns remained foremost in her work: theself-realization of women and the cultural independence of Canada. To celebrate Canada was also to venerateits environment and respect the habitat of wild animals.

Atwood’s early years provided broad experience of North American life. The daughter of a University ofToronto scientist, she accompanied her father on field trips into the Quebec bush. After undergraduate work inOntario, she attended Radcliffe on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Since matrimony was expected of hergeneration and class, she dutifully married a Harvard student, whom she later divorced. Returning to Canada,she taught at several major universities.

In 1970, Atwood met the Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson, who was to be her permanent companion. Theirdaughter Jess was born in 1976, and a farm near Alliston, Ontario, became their home. Atwood and Gibsonemerged as major figures in the lively Canadian literary scene. They were also untiring advocates of freedomfor writers everywhere and spoke for Amnesty International.

Atwood’s critical survey of Canadian literature, Survival, was acknowledged as a major study. She describedCanada, despite its richness of ethnic diversity, as a threatened cultural entity, intimidated by its giantneighbor. The one literary genre developed by Canadians had been, predictably, she believed, the realisticanimal story. Canadians identified with animal prey, stalked through the bush by the heavily armed hunterfrom the south, the American.

Despite an anti-Americanism which even some of her compatriots labeled xenophobic, Atwood claimed herlargest readership in the United States. Even before the North American women’s movement had identified its

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chief symbols and themes, The Edible Woman provided a definitive portrait of the female who sees herself asmerely another consumer product. Sixteen years later, with The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood published a novelabout a horrifying society built on female oppression. Readers valued Atwood for her ability to articulate theirdeepest apprehensions and entertain them with wittily crafted novels.

Biography

Margaret Atwood is often referred to as Canada’s greatest living writer. She was born on November 18, 1939,in Ottawa, Ontario. She wrote her first story when she was six. Atwood’s father, Carl Edmund Atwood, is anentomologist and her mother, Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood, is a dietician. In 1945, her family moved toToronto, where she graduated from high school and afterward attended Victoria College. While there, shestudied under Northrop Frye, another famous Canadian author and literary critic, and the poet JayMacPherson. Upon graduating from college, Atwood won the first of many literary prizes. The E. J. PrattMedal was awarded to her for her self-published book of poems, Double Persephone. She then went to theUnited States, where she earned her master’s degree at Harvard.

In 1966, Atwood won another prestigious honor, The Governor General’s Award, for yet another collection ofpoetry, The Circle Game. In 1967, Atwood married Jim Polk; they divorced in 1977. Atwood’s first novel,The Edible Woman, was published in 1969. By the 1970s, Atwood’s published works secured her a positionas one of Canada’s rising stars in both poetry and fiction.

To date, Atwood has written twelve books of poetry, four children’s stories, four nonfiction books, and tennovels. Alias Grace was her ninth novel. Atwood has also written scripts for television and has edited severalcollections promoting Canadian writers. Many of her works have been translated into foreign languages andpublished in other countries, where she enjoys a wide readership. Two of her novels, Surfacing and TheHandmaid’s Tale, have been made into movies.

Atwood’s ability to win awards began early in her career and has not diminished throughout her career. Oneof the most coveted was the Booker Prize, which she won for Blind Assassin in 2000.

Besides her writing and editing skills, Atwood has also taught at numerous universities: York University inToronto, New York University, and the University of Alabama–Tuscaloosa. Atwood is also a rather humorouscartoonist, especially when based on the experience she has gathered while promoting her works on booktours. (See her website.) Atwood is also prone to travel all over the world, giving lectures on literary themesor on her experiences as a writer. She is active in several organizations, such as Amnesty International.

Atwood is married to Graeme Gibson, another Canadian writer. They have three grown children. In 2004,Atwood was living in Toronto.

Biography

Margaret Atwood was born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to Carl Edmund (anentomologist) and Margaret Dorothy (Killam) Atwood. As she was growing up in northern Ontario, Quebec,and Toronto, she spent a great deal of time in the woods where, like the narrator of Surfacing, she developedan enthusiasm for environmental issues. She began writing when she was six-years-old. By the time shebecame a teenager, she had written poems, short stories, and cartoons for her high school newspaper, and shehad decided that she wanted to devote her life to writing. She earned an undergraduate degree from VictoriaCollege at the University of Toronto in 1961 and her master's degree from Radcliffe College in 1962. Aftercompleting her education, she taught at several universities including the University of British Columbia, theSir George Williams University in Montreal, and York University in Toronto. She and her husband, writer

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Graeme Gibson, live with their daughter Jess in Toronto.

Atwood has received much acclaim and several awards for her writing, including the Canadian GovernorGeneral's Award, Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and the National Arts ClubMedal of Honor for Literature. She has written more than thirty volumes of poetry, nonfiction and fiction,including children's books and short stories. Her work has been published in more than twenty-five countries.In addition to her best-selling novels and collections of poetry, Atwood gained recognition for Survival: AThematic Guide to Canadian Literature, (1972) a ground- breaking critical analysis of Canadian literature anda proposal for Canadian writers to focus on native traditions in their works rather than identifying with GreatBritain or the United States. Her works also include the best-selling novels Alias Grace and The RobberBride.

Biography

Margaret E. Atwood, born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1939, spent most of her early years in the wilderness areas ofNorthern Quebec. She lived with her family in a log cabin that had no electricity, no running water, and notelevision or radio. It was in this isolated setting that she learned to entertain herself by reading books likethose by the Brothers Grimm and Edgar Allan Poe.

Not until she was eleven-years-old, when her family moved to Toronto, did she attend school full-time. InGeraldine Bedell's "Nothing but the Truth Writing between the Lines," Atwood reportedly said that upon herintroduction to city life, as contrasted with her own unconventional childhood, all social groups seemed to her"equally bizarre, all artifacts and habits peculiar and strange." This outsider view plus her early and intensefascination with literature may have been responsible for pulling her toward writing, for by the time shegraduated from high school, her graduation yearbook declared that Atwood's intentions were to write the greatCanadian novel.

In 1961, the same year Atwood graduated from the University of Toronto, she was awarded the E. J. PrattMedal for her collection of self-published poems titled Double Persephone. Five years later, while she wasenrolled as a graduate fellow at Harvard University, she won the Canadian Governor General's Award foranother early collection of her poems, The Circle Game.

Atwood described this time of her life in a speech she delivered at Hay on Wye, Wales, in 1995:

After two years at graduate school at the dreaded Harvard University, two brokenengagements, a year of living in a tiny rooming-house room and working at a market researchcompany which was more fun than a barrel of drugged monkeys and a tin of orange-flavouredrice pudding, and after the massive rejection of my first novel, and of several other poetrycollections as well, I ended up in British Columbia, teaching grammar to Engineeringstudents at eight-thirty in the morning in a Quonset hut. It was all right, as none of us wereawake.

Atwood sent her first novel, The Edible Woman, to a publisher who subsequently lost it. Four years later, afterAtwood won her awards for poetry, this same publisher took her out to lunch and promised to publish hernovel. When Atwood asked him if he had read it, he answered no. As fate would have it, the timing of thebook's publication (1969) matched a resurgent interest in women's rights and feminism, thus promoting aconcurrent interest in The Edible Woman.

Over the years, Atwood has written, among other things, several books of poetry, novels, short stories,children's stories, a radio play, and a play for television. She is known internationally as a champion of

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Canadian literature.

Biography

Margaret Atwood is one of the best-known Canadian writers of our day. She is certainly one of the mostprolific authors in North America, having produced over twenty volumes of poetry and just as many books offiction (including novels and short story collections), as well as important essays, dramas, and children'sbooks. Recognition for her work has included winning the Governor-General's Award twice, as well as theColes Book of the Year Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Harvard University Centennial Medal.

She was born in Ottawa in 1939 and grew up in suburban Toronto. Her father was an entomologist, andduring her childhood, Atwood, showing as much ability in science as she did in writing, believed that shewould follow in his footsteps in the field of biology. Her talent as a writer became apparent early: in highschool, she contributed poetry, short stories, and cartoons to the school newspaper. Her first volume of poetrywas published the same year that she graduated from Victoria College, University of Toronto, and five yearslater her second book of poetry was given one of Canada's most coveted prizes, the Governor-General'sAward. Since the 1960s she has taught at several Canadian and American universities, usually throughhonorary guest fellowships, and she has produced a tremendous body of work.

Throughout her writing career, critics have often categorized Atwood's works as "feminist," a label that shehas avoided because it often applied to any work written by a woman with leading female characters. She hasbeen one of the foremost spokespersons for the previously under-examined tradition of Canadian literatureand wrote one of the most important and widely-read books about the subject, Survival: A Thematic Guide toCanadian Literature, indicating that gender identity is no more important in her work than national identity.

Biography

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Canada. Her father, Carl EdmundAtwood, was a forest entomologist; her mother, Margaret Dorothy (Killam) was a graduate in homeeconomics from the University of Toronto.

Atwood spent her earliest years in Ottawa during the winters and the rest of the year in northern Quebec andOntario. In 1946, her father took up a position as professor at the University of Toronto, and the family movedto Toronto.

In 1957, Atwood became a student of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto. In 1961, aftergraduation, she studied English at Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and was awarded a master's degreein 1962. She then went on to doctoral studies at Harvard until 1963. The following year she taught Englishliterature at the University of British Columbia. Her first collection of poetry, The Circle Game (1966), wonthe Governor General's Award.

Since then, Atwood has published poetry, novels, short stories, children's literature, and nonfiction and hastaught in many Canadian and American universities. Her poetry includes The Animals in That Country (1968),The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), You Are Happy (1975), Two-Headed Poems (1978), Interlunar(1984), and Morning in the Burned House (1995). Her novels are The Edible Woman (1969); Surfacing(1972); Lady Oracle (1976); Life before Man (1979); Bodily Harm (1981); Encounters with the Element Man(1982); Unearthing Suite (1983); The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which was a bestseller and won the GovernorGeneral's Award, the Los Angeles Times Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke science fiction award; Cat's Eye(1988); The Robber Bride (1993), which won the Canadian Authors Association Novel of the Year Award;Alias Grace (1996), which won the Giller Prize; and The Blind Assassin (2000). Atwood's short story

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collections include Dancing Girls and Other Stories (1977) and Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories (1983);her nonfiction includes Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972).

Atwood has worked and traveled extensively in Europe, and she has received honorary degrees from manyinstitutions, including Trent University, Smith College, and the University of Toronto. She was president ofthe Writers Union of Canada from 1982 to 1983, and president of P.E.N. International's Anglo-Canadianbranch from 1984 to 1985.

Atwood married James Polk, a novelist, in 1967. They divorced in 1973. Atwood now lives with Canadianwriter Graeme Gibson. They have a daughter, Jess, who was born in 1977.

Biography

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on November 18, 1939. She started reading andwriting at an early age and was particularly drawn to the Brothers Grimm fairy tales because of their activefemale characters. Greek mythology and its themes of metamorphosis, rebirth, and transformation furtherexcited the young girl's imagination. Atwood's father was an entomologist and an avid nature lover. Theyoung Atwood spent much time discovering nature in the wilds of Canada while she was growing up, a factthat is evident in much of her writing. In the book Conversations, Atwood discussed the impact her father'swork had on her: "The most transformative thing you can study is insects. They change from one thing intoanother, and the thing they change into bears no relation to what they were before."

As a high school student in Toronto, Ontario, in the 1950s, Atwood began to take writing seriously. In school,she studied mostly British writers, and the idea of a particularly Canadian literature was not common, a factthat she has successfully sought to change throughout her career. After receiving a degree from the Universityof Toronto in 1961, Atwood came to the United States to study at Radcliffe and Harvard. Cultural differencesbetween Canada and the United States first became an issue when she was attending Harvard University. Shediscovered that many Americans had only the vaguest notion of Canada.''They seemed to want to believe thatmy father was a Mounted Policeman and that we lived in igloos all year round, and I must admit that after awhile I took a certain pleasure in encouraging these beliefs," Atwood once said.

Atwood's first published work was a collection of poems, Double Persephone, which was published in 1961.It was not until 1970 that her first novel was published, The Edible Woman, the story of a reluctantly engagedwoman who becomes infatuated with a mysterious man utterly unlike her fiance. As her affair progresses, shebecomes unable to eat. Over the years, Atwood has published many collections of poetry, stories, and essaysin addition to her novels, and has won acclaim for all the genres in which she writes. No matter what form herwriting takes, it often incorporates irony, symbolism, and self-conscious narrators. Her themes usually explorethe relationship between humanity and nature, the unsettling aspects of human behavior, and power as itpertains to gender roles.

Now considered one of Canada's foremost writers, Atwood continues to write novels and stories to widepublic acclaim. In 1996 she published Alias, Grace, a fictionalized account of a real-life murder that tookplace in Canada in the eighteenth century. Other works by Atwood that have proved popular include Cat'sEye, the story of a Toronto-based artist who is haunted by the memory of a cruel childhood friend; TheHandmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel that takes place in the future, when child-bearing women are rare andforced into servitude as breeding machines; and The Robber Bride, in which three very different women losethe men in their lives to the scheming, preternaturally beautiful Zenia. In addition to her fiction, Atwoodcontributes to the body of contemporary literary criticism through her frequent reviews and essays onliterature and writing. She continues to live in Canada with her husband, the writer Graeme Gibson, and theirdaughter, Jess.

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Biography

Margaret Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Her childhood was dividedbetween the city and the country. Her family spent the school year in Ottawa and Toronto, where her fathertaught entomology or worked for government agencies, and summers in northern Quebec and Ontario whereher father conducted research. These early experiences away from urban society encouraged Atwood to readand develop her imagination.

As a child, Atwood composed and illustrated poems, which she collected into small books. She wrote proseand poetry for her high school’s literary magazine. While attending Victoria College, University of Toronto,from 1957 to 1961, she wrote for the newspaper and the dramatic society. As a young poet, she was an activemember of the literary scene, which included giving readings at coffeehouses and contributing reviews,poems, and parodies to the college newspaper.

In the year of her graduation from Victoria College, Atwood won the E. J. Pratt medal for a group of poems.She also won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study English at Radcliffe College, which is part of HarvardUniversity. She received her M. A. from Harvard in 1962 and began to work toward her Ph.D. However, in1963, she left Harvard and returned to Canada to focus her attention on Canadian literature. She taughtEnglish from 1964 to 1965 at the University of British Columbia, then returned to Harvard and eventuallycompleted all the requirements for her doctorate except for the dissertation. From 1967 through 1970, Atwoodtaught at several different Canadian universities.

In 1966, her poetry volume The Circle Game was published, and it won Canada’s Governor General’s Awardthe following year. Her poetry helped develop her reputation as an important Canadian writer, but Atwoodquickly branched out into other forms of writing.

Since the mid-1960s, Atwood has produced a steady string of publications, including novels, poetrycollections, short stories, children’s books, and nonfiction. She has also edited several anthologies and beeninvolved with a publishing venture. She has taught several creative writing and literature classes at variousAmerican and Canadian universities.

Atwood remains one of Canada’s most wellknown literary personalities. She has won many awardsthroughout her long career. Her versatility and her controversiality as a writer, combined with her literaryactivism, have made her a significant cultural force in Canada.

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Critical Essays

Critical Essays: Margaret Atwood American LiteratureAnalysis

Atwood is known as the “Octopus” and as a “Medusa” by critics for her wit and her biting sense of humor.She is concerned with the creation and function of art as well as its importance in both the political and socialworlds. For Atwood, art is an issue of morality; her writing provides a way to look at the world critically, towitness the world’s shortcomings, and to offer solutions for redemption. Atwood believes that, ultimately, artmust function as an agent of truth and that the artist should provide both knowledge and confrontation.

Often, Atwood teaches through negative example in her work. Many of her protagonists do not appear heroicat the start of her novels. Also, her narrators are usually not reliable, and they may even be mentally unstable.They are often fragmented and isolated from others and from their settings; they have mixed feelings abouttheir pasts and about their connections to their homeland, Canada.

Thematically, Atwood explores the contradictions behind Canada as a nation and the identity of those whoconsider themselves Canadians. She has argued that Canadians have always felt victimized. This victimizationis a result of the merciless nature that Canadians encountered when they first settled in the country’s vastwilderness and of the colonialist forces that overpowered their political and cultural trends. Through her work,Atwood hopes to encourage Canadian writers and readers to create a more positive and independent view ofthemselves. This fresh self-image is rooted in identification with indigenous cultures such as Native Americanand French-Canadian rather than with British and American cultures.

Atwood’s own contradictory feelings toward her native land are apparent in her work. Her negative feelingstoward Canada mingle with nostalgia. Her Canadian heritage is the source of plentiful images and archetypesthat are fundamental to her novels. Just as Atwood is constantly exploring her identity through her writing,each of her protagonists is fighting to find a new voice. Moreover, Atwood’s Canada, a symbol of unexploitedwilderness and innocence, is feminine in an otherwise masculine world. Atwood’s attention to gender goesbeyond her portrayal of Canada, for she is concerned with the power struggle between men and women onmany levels.

Although by the early 1970’s, many critics viewed Atwood as one of the most influential feminist writers,Atwood states that she is against the concept of power as a whole in the hands of men or women. Althoughshe does not consider herself a feminist writer, her concern with feminist issues began with her early interestin the nineteenth century British novel. Many such novels were written by women, such as Jane Austen andGeorge Eliot. Similarly, Atwood has chosen to write criticism on numerous contemporary female Americanand Canadian feminist authors; this is an indication of her interest in the content area.

In Atwood’s fiction, her female characters are often exposed to abundant suffering. Atwood has stated thatthese characters suffer because they mimic the experiences of women in reality. Also, she exposes women’sdeepest fear of being used by those around them, unable to extricate themselves from their situations.Atwood’s work presents the physical survival of women in terms of a sisterhood rather than on an individuallevel. Her feminist concerns are integral in many of her novels, specifically in The Edible Woman, Surfacing(1972), Life Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Just as Atwood does not identify herself as a feminist writer, neither does she consider herself ascience-fiction writer. A majority of her fiction is set in the present day, with details that allude to NorthAmerica. For this reason, she has been associated with realism: the way things are currently rather than how

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they might be. Her most popular novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, was a blatant exception to this trend. The workwon the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987 for the best science-fiction novel published in the United Kingdom.Additionally, a sprinkling of her short stories and poems, as well as her later novel The Blind Assassin (2000),illustrates a concern with the future and the fantastic. Atwood herself refuses to classify her own writing asscience fiction because her work does not contain technological hardware. She deems futuristic gadgetryfundamental to science fiction, so she prefers the term speculative fiction in regard to her own writing.

As a writer of poetry, Atwood states that she has a distinct personality from that of a writer of prose. Sheviews poetry as a lens through which one condenses and reflects. In her poetry, she often blurs the linebetween the real and the unreal. She accomplishes this to the degree that what the reader would view as realitybecomes illusion and the unseen becomes more tangible and true. However, Atwood’s prose and poetrycontain common thematic material and stylistic choices. Her novels and short stories are poetic in style, andher poems maintain a strong narrative strain.

Stylistically, Atwood chooses to incorporate irony, symbolism, self-conscious narrators, allegory, and boldimagery into her poetry and fiction in order to explore complex relationships between humans and the naturalworld, discomforting human characteristics, and power struggles between genders and political groups.Although her voice has been criticized as being overly formal and emotionally detached, she has beencompared to writers such as George Orwell.

Surfacing

First published: 1972

Type of work: Novel

A young woman who is made mentally unstable by her oppressive social surroundings finds stability byshedding what those around her have deemed sanity.

Surfacing has been applauded for its characterizations, style, and themes. Thematically, the novel is aboutvictimization and attempts to avoid victimization. The heroine of the novel battles the forces that suppress her,and at the end of the novel she gains confidence and a sense of freedom. In many ways, the novel is evocativeof Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963).

Surfacing begins with the nameless heroine and her lover Joe traveling away from the city. They areaccompanied by a married couple, David and Anna, and they are all visiting her family’s cabin on an island ina Quebec lake. The heroine’s father has disappeared, and the heroine is trying to find some answers as to hiswhereabouts. The men hope to take some photographs for a book they are creating together. Although thefather, a botanist, is not found, they decide to remain at the lake.

The flaws and ugliness in each character surface while they are at the lake. Relationships between David andAnna and between the heroine and Joe begin to unravel. Problems in the marriage of David and Anna becomeapparent, while Joe becomes discontented with his lover because she seems to be obsessed with her search forclues in the cabin. The heroine believes that her parents have left her these clues in her childhood home.

Toward the end of the novel, the heroine runs from all of her companions; the wild island seems to have takenhold of her. Although this journey may seem like a nervous breakdown, it is a time for her to make peace withher past and her identity. Only after the heroine frees herself from society’s influences and connects with herprimitive self is she able to develop her true character and to recapture the many memories that she thoughtshe had lost. She reconnects with her parents and with the spirits of indigenous people. She has saved herselfby embracing the voice of nature that demands that she avoid all human constructs. Symbolically, the

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antagonist forces that destroy nature throughout the novel also represent the United States. The theme ofanti-Americanism is present throughout the work; for example, American tourists overrun the previouslyunspoiled landscape.

Eventually, the heroine of Surfacing learns of her father’s death. She must leave the cabin and the lake, forwinter is approaching. When she returns, she will need to resume working and to attempt to better herrelationship with Joe. A new woman, she is no longer a passive victim.

“Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture”

First published: 1978 (collected in Two-Headed Poems, 1978)

Type of work: Poem

A man who works in a torture chamber tries to avoid thinking about the atrocities that occur in the room.

The first stanza of “Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture” introduces the torture chamber. The voice inthe poem describes how the chamber defies the human imagination; it does not resemble a dungeon, it is notreminiscent of a pornography magazine, and it is not futuristic. Instead, the chamber is compared to a dirtytrain station—a place that is all too familiar. The image of the train station includes a man who cleans thestation’s floor. This individual is the precursor to the unnamed man introduced in the third stanza who sweepsthe floor in the torture chamber.

The man who cleans the torture chamber must deal with the grotesque smells and remove the remnants of theprevious night’s activity. He reminds himself that he is grateful for his job and that he is not the torturer. Thisman remains unnamed and generic; he could be any man in any country.

Other shocking images in the poem include limp bodies of those who refuse to speak thrown onto the consul’slawn. Bodies of children who have been killed in order to extract information from their parents are alsodescribed. Despite these atrocities, the anonymous man performs his job each day and does his best todissociate himself. He completes his work because he must provide for his children and his wife; however, heis fear-ridden. In the back of his mind he cannot detach himself from this cruel world, and he knows that heand his family could be the government’s next targets. The poem makes a bold statement about the harshreality behind political systems.

The Handmaid’s Tale

First published: 1985

Type of work: Novel

A young woman is forced to become a potential “breeder” after Fundamentalist Christians impose adictatorial government on the United States.

The Handmaid’s Tale begins near Boston in the mid-1980’s. A faction of right-wing Christians establishes adictatorship after killing members of the United States government. The result is Gilead, an ultraconservativecountry that denies women power. Women are unable to hold jobs, use credit cards, or seek education. Also,massive pollution exists due to nuclear and biological warfare. Radioactive territory, known as the Colonies,becomes the home of Jews and of other minorities, because the new government wants only to propagatemembers of their own sect. Essentially, Atwood has created a dystopia which stands in direct opposition to anideal world or utopia. Atwood drew upon research about present-day trends in environmental degradation and

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diseases to create an authentic setting.

Due to massive pollution and to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, reproduction is difficult forwomen. Many babies are miscarried or born with defects. Women who cannot reproduce, as well ashomosexuals, are considered worthless and are banished to the Colonies. Women are divided up into classes;colored clothing is used to separate the classes. The government establishes a secret police force to arrestfertile women, who become Handmaids. These Handmaids are breeders who must participate in sexual acts inorder to create more members of the white race.

The women are given names that represent the men who control their lives; these names signify that womenhave lost their identities and that they are victimized by men. One such woman, named “Offred” is rippedaway from her family. She is forced to be a Handmaid and is relocated to a center to receive the propertraining for her new vocation. The Re-education Center is enclosed by barbed wire, and the conditions arerudimentary. Offred maintains her individuality, while acting as if she is conforming to the ways of the centerand to the demands of her overseers, matrons such as Aunt Lydia and Aunt Elizabeth, who attempt to controlthe thoughts of their prisoners.

In secret, the Handmaids attempt to maintain relationships with one another and to maintain their morale.However, others adapt to the robotic ways and mental states required of them by their restrictive daily lives.Offred finishes her training at the center and is made a member of Gilead’s Handmaids. Her first attempt atconception is fruitless, so she is sent to Commander Fred, for whom she is named. Her new routine consists offood shopping and seclusion in a protected room. Her only exposure to others consists of prayer sessions,birthing, medical procedures, and executions. In a monthly ceremony, Offred mates with the commander aftera Bible reading in front of his wife, Serena.

While Offred is being inseminated by the commander, she lies on Serena’s thighs. Although the commandersare considered high-ranking in the regime, they do not have much power over the household, for their agingwives govern the homes. This irony reinforces that the rigid nature of the government results in a lack offreedom for the commanders, too.

Unbeknownst to Serena, the commander develops a fondness for Offred beyond the ritualistic mating, and hecalls Offred for evening visits. On such visits, they play forbidden games, such as Scrabble, and he allows herto look at his fashion magazines. Fred even gives Offred snippets of information about the world beyond herconfinement. One particular evening, Fred gives her an ornate outfit of glitter and feathers to wear. Dressedprovocatively, Offred accompanies him to an illegal nightclub where women of ill repute and lesbians work.The women at this club are also subject to the oppressive forces of men.

Serena learns about Offred’s illicit relationship with her husband and confronts the Handmaid. As Offred isweighing her options—for Serena is accusing her of treason—a van appears. Offred meets the operatives ofan underground group called “The Eyes.” Although the commander objects, the two agents charge Offredwith divulging the state’s secret information, and she leaves in the van.

The reader learns more about Offred’s fate in a speech delivered by an archivist in 2195, although the endingis ambiguous. The professor offers information about Offred’s experiences, as found on cassette tapes. Theprofessor suggests that the Handmaid escaped her fate. He believes that she made the tapes before she escapedthe country and that she lived her life in isolation in order to save her family from repercussions. Offred’ssurvival conveys the strength of the human spirit regardless of oppressive forces. In conclusion, Atwoodrefuses to call the novel a warning, even though she has alluded to current events; she says she has no politicalagenda of that sort.

Cat’s Eye

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First published: 1988

Type of work: Novel

Elaine Risley, a reputable Canadian painter, returns to Toronto, where she revisits her childhood, her failedmarriage, and her former relationships.

Cat’s Eye focuses on a fifty-year-old protagonist, Elaine, who is revisiting the city of her childhood. Elaine isa controversial artist who is returning for an exhibition of her works. During her journey, she undergoes atransformation, for she learns about herself, her art, and her life at various stages in the novel.

Elaine’s childhood begins with her traveling with her family across northern Canada. Her father is anentomologist who follows infestations; therefore, the family moves from motel to motel until she is eightyears old. Elaine’s early childhood contrasts the new existence she faces when her family relocates toToronto. She is forced to adapt to suburbia, which includes learning a new vocabulary and local etiquette. Theclothing, speech, and items Elaine encounters reflect the rigidity associated with the 1940’s and 1950’s thatAtwood recalled from her upbringing.

Elaine must learn what it means to be feminine and to socialize with members of her own sex. She realizesthat she is different from the others at school and that her parents are not wealthy. During this time, Elainebecomes fascinated by another girl her age, named Cordelia. Cordelia lives in a large home with a cleaningwoman and with other extravagances that Elaine admires. Cordelia claims to befriend Elaine; however,Cordelia and her other friends constantly harass Elaine for her many shortcomings and submit her to torturousacts. Elaine does her very best to garner their approval, for she considers them her only friends and fearsfurther isolation. Atwood is illustrating the cruelty that exists in little-girl behavior.

Miraculously, Elaine breaks away from Cordelia. As teens, the two rekindle a friendship, although of adifferent kind; Elaine has become the stronger of the two. Cordelia fails out of school, and independent Elainedevelops a passion for art, which she studies at university. During her studies, she has a love affair with ateacher and mentor and then meets another art student, Jon, whom she marries. Among other events, Elainehas a daughter and tries to commit suicide. During this time, she finds herself involved in the emergingfeminist movement. In an ironic twist, Elaine encounters Cordelia as an adult. Cordelia is now the one whohas attempted suicide and who is confined to a mental institution.

Unfortunately, Elaine is still haunted by Cordelia and plagued by insecurities. Although Elaine does not meether friend when she revisits Toronto, she does return to the place where they were children together. Byreturning to this setting, Elaine undergoes a catharsis, and she makes peace with Cordelia by letting go of herpast. The novel portrays the personal and social implications of evil and redemption.

Cat’s Eye presents many similarities to Atwood’s experiences. Critics have commented that Elaine’s voicereflects Atwood’s own. Elaine’s travels in northern Canada, her passion for art, and her relationship with thefeminist movement are all reminiscent of Atwood’s life. The novel has received praise for its chronicle ofmemory through a weaving of the present and past. It has also been applauded for its electrifying imagery andpoetic language.

“Death by Landscape”

First published: 1991 (collected in Wilderness Tips, 1991)

Type of work: Short story

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Middle-aged Lois has recently relocated to a condominium apartment; she reflects on her childhood summercamp and the mystery surrounding a particular canoe trip.

In “Death by Landscape” Lois, a widowed mother, displays her art collection on the walls of her newwaterfront apartment. She spends time admiring the paintings, yet they do not fill her with peace. On thecontrary, the paintings show landscapes that make her very uneasy. Lois fears the depiction of the wilderness.

She recalls her summers at Camp Manitou, which she experienced from the ages of nine to thirteen. Sheremembers the traditions associated with her camp experience. She can still sing the words to the songs andremember the spunky counselors. The head of the camp, Cappie, kept the camp running during the Depressionand World War II, even when money was tight. The camp setting represents a domesticated wilderness, ahuman-made construction which hints at the true wilds.

At the beginning, Lois struggled to adapt to camp life. She did not like writing to her parents or sleeping in aroom full of other girls. She then grew to enjoy herself, and she made a strong friendship with a campernamed Lucy. The two maintained their friendship throughout the years and during the summers, but Lucyseemed to have changed by their last year at camp together. She grew disillusioned with her newly divorcedparents and became involved in a relationship with a gardener’s assistant.

The climax of the story occurs when the girls participate in a week-long excursion in the wilderness. They setout by canoe after a ceremonious departure. On the second day of the trip, the two girls separate from theother campers to climb a trail to a lookout point; it is a sheer cliff that overlooks the lake. Lucy says she isgoing to go urinate, yet she does not return. Instead, Lois hears a scream, although she cannot identify it. Thecampers head back to camp without Lucy; even the police cannot find her. When they return, Cappieinsinuates that Lois pushed Lucy.

In retrospect, Lois realizes that Cappie merely needed someone to blame for the unfortunate event, but Loisstruggles to let go of her friend. She is also haunted by the wilderness. The protagonist cannot believe thatLucy has died, and for this reason she has been living two lives. At the end of the story, Lois can finallyaccept the wilderness as part of herself.

Alias Grace

First published: 1996

Type of work: Novel

Grace Marks has been accused of murdering her employer and his mistress; Dr. Simon Jordan attempts tounlock her story.

In her novel Alias Grace, Atwood explores the psychological mind-set of one of the most infamous Canadianwomen of the mid-nineteenth century. The author’s fascination with the murderess began when the CanadianBroadcasting Corporation asked her to write a play about Grace in 1974. The protagonist is the historicalfigure Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant who worked in Toronto in the 1840’s. The setting is established asThe Kingston Penitentiary at the start of the novel, where Grace is carrying out her life sentence for themurder of her wealthy employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his pregnant mistress.

Grace is sentenced for the murder, along with James McDermott, her coworker and supposed lover. James, astable hand, claims that Grace incited him to perform the gruesome murders; he is hanged for his part. Thereis much dissent as to Grace’s guilt; she claims to have no recollection of the killings, which occurred whenshe was a scullery maid of sixteen. Among those who wish to exonerate Grace are a group of reformers who

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seek help from Dr. Simon Jordan. The reformers hope that by engaging the doctor, they can end Grace’sfifteen years of imprisonment. Jordan, a reputable figure in the fledgling field of mental health, is sufficientlyintrigued to help the prisoner. Jordan is riveted by Grace, yet he continues to find her an enigma.

As Jordan encourages Grace to reveal information about her experiences, the story of her impoverished lifetrickles to the surface. Jordan learns about her childhood, her brutal passage from Ireland to Canada, and heremployment with Thomas Kinnear from the age of twelve. By the middle of the book, the tension heightensas the secrets of her employer’s household come to light. Furthermore, Grace is haunted by flashbacks of themurder and by the memory of a friend who died during a botched abortion. As the mystery continues tounravel, antagonizing forces surface, such as gender roles, socioeconomic status, and the power of sexuality.

Still, Jordan does not know whether Grace is innocent or guilty. Despite the fact that Alias Grace is Atwood’sfirst venture into historical fiction, the book has commonalities with her other works. Themes include thechanges in women’s morality and the power struggle between the sexes. Although a few critics noted thatAtwood’s attention to historical details strains the momentum of the novel, several marveled at the author’sability to provide Grace with a lyrical and authentic voice. They also noted the skill with which Atwooddepicted the time and place in her haunting narrative.

Oryx and Crake

First published: 2003

Type of work: Novel

Snowman appears to be the only human to survive a catastrophic event; he must struggle to find nourishmentand other essentials in order to endure.

As in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood creates a futuristic dystopia in which she places her protagonist,Snowman. Although Snowman has managed to survive some kind of catastrophe, the specifics surroundingthe event are not revealed until the end of the work. The only other forms of life that Snowman meets on thebarren seaside landscape are humanoids and animals that have resulted from bioengineering. The humanoidsare called Crakers, innocent beings that are tractable and resistant to diseases. These green-eyed mutantsmanifest selected traits; they are uninterested in sex and violence, and their skin is impervious to ultravioletlight.

Along with the narrative of Snowman’s daily existence, the reader learns of his youth via flashbacks. As achild he was called Jimmy (he has renamed himself Snowman), and his best friend was named Glenn, wholater adopts the name Crake. Both lived in a compound built by a bioengineering firm for its employees. Thecompound was isolated from other cities. Crake, a scientific whiz, and Jimmy were raised in dysfunctionalfamilies. Jimmy’s mother left the family because of her moral resistance to her husband’s work; he wasresponsible for creating genetic hybrids.

Crake’s father appears to have been murdered in the wake of a scandal with the firm. Crake grows from ayouth who spends his time surfing the Web to a scientific mastermind in charge of a secret project. First hestudies at the Watson-Crick Institute, which has a reputation like that of Harvard University—before Harvardceased to exist. Jimmy attends Martha Graham Academy, a more liberal setting with a focus on thehumanities. Even though Crake is fundamental to the story, his character is never fully developed, and heproves to be more of an instrument for the plot.

As the gap between the friends grows, and time passes, Jimmy does little more than hold menial employmentand seduce women. The naïve Jimmy finally reconnects with Crake, who employs him. Crake reveals that he

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is altering human embryos to eliminate their faulty features; in a sense, Crake is playing a godlike role. Jimmyalso comes into contact with Oryx, a captivating woman whom Jimmy recognizes from pornography. Oryximparts snippets of her life to Jimmy, although she remains a hazy figure throughout.

Finally, it is revealed that the apocalyptic event was not a nuclear war; the cause was a potent and fatal plague.When the deadly virus took hold, it spanned the earth from Hong Kong to Toronto. Snowman perpetuates themyth of Oryx and Crake to keep the green-eyed mutants alive. At the end of the novel, there is a suggestionthat a new humanity has evolved; the Crakers may be exhibiting some of the traits that Crake had attempted toeliminate in them, such as the desire to lead or to organize religion.

In this cautionary tale, Atwood manages to keep the reader riveted with her careful use of dark humor andasides. The author is known for her ability to create authentic female voices in her novels; in Oryx and Crake,she manages to construct a realistic male voice and to convey both the twisted emotional environment inwhich he matured and a society propelled by commercialism, pornography, and technology.

Critical Essays: Margaret Atwood Short Fiction Analysis

One of Margaret Atwood’s central themes is storytelling itself, and most of her fiction relates to that theme insome way. The short-story collections each focus on key issues. Dancing Girls is primarily concerned withotherness, alienation, and the ways in which people estrange themselves from one another. Bluebeard’s Eggrevolves around a favorite theme of Atwood, the Bluebeard tale of a dangerous suitor or husband. The titlestory explores Sally’s excessive concern with her husband and lack of awareness of herself. Wilderness Tipscenters on the explanatory fiction people tell themselves and one another, on the need to order experiencethrough such fiction, and on the ways in which humans are posing threats to the wilderness, the forests, andopen space.

“The Man from Mars”

In Dancing Girls, a gift for comic and satiric invention is evident from the first story, “The Man from Mars.”Christine, an unattractive undergraduate at a Canadian university, is literally pursued by an odd-looking,desperately poor exchange student. The daily chases of a bizarre, small, Asian man in hot pursuit of a ratherlarge Christine (a mouse chasing an elephant, as Atwood describes it) attract the attention of other studentsand make Christine interesting to her male acquaintances for the first time. They begin to ask her out, curiousas to the mysterious sources of her charm. She begins to feel and actually to be more attractive. As monthspass, however, Christine begins to fantasize about this strange man about whom she knows nothing. Is heperhaps a sex maniac, a murderer? Eventually, through the overreactions and interventions of others,complaints are made to the police, and the inscrutable foreigner is deported, leaving Christine with mingledfeelings of relief and regret. She graduates and settles into a drab government job and a sterile existence.Years pass. A war breaks out somewhere in the Far East and vividly revives thoughts of the foreigner. Hiscountry is the scene of fighting, but Christine cannot remember the name of his city. She becomes obsessedwith worry, studying maps, poring over photographs of soldiers and photographs of the wounded and the deadin newspapers and magazines, compulsively searching the television screen for even a brief glimpse of hisface. Finally, it is too much. Christine stops looking at pictures, gives away her television set, and doesnothing except read nineteenth century novels.

The story is rich in comedy and in social satire, much of it directed against attitudes that make “a person fromanother culture” as alien as a “man from Mars.” Christine’s affluent parents think of themselves as liberal andprogressive. They have traveled, bringing back a sundial from England and a domestic servant from the WestIndies. Christine’s mother believes herself to be both tolerant and generous for employing foreigners asdomestic servants in her home; she observes that it is difficult to tell whether people from other cultures are

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insane. Christine also typifies supposedly enlightened, liberal attitudes, having been president of the UnitedNations Club in high school, and in college a member of the forensics team, debating such topics as theobsolescence of war. While the story is on the whole a comic and satiric look at the limits of shallowliberalism, there is, however, also some pathos in the end. It seems that the encounter with the alien is themost interesting or significant thing that has ever happened to Christine and that her only feeling of humanrelationship is for a person with whom she had no real relationship. At the story’s conclusion, she seems lost,now past either hope or love, retreating into the unreal but safe world of John Galsworthy and AnthonyTrollope.

“Dancing Girls”

Another encounter with the alien occurs in the collection’s title story, “Dancing Girls,” which is set in theUnited States during the 1960’s. Ann, a graduate student from Toronto, has a room in a seedy boardinghouse.Mrs. Nolan, its American proprietor, befriends Ann because a Canadian does not look “foreign.” Mrs. Nolan’sother tenants are mathematicians from Hong Kong and an Arab who is becoming crazed with loneliness andisolation. Ann’s only other acquaintances are Lelah, a Turkish woman studying Russian literature, and Jetske,a Dutch woman studying urban design. Ann also is studying urban design because she has fantasies ofrearranging Toronto. She frequently envisions the open, green spaces she will create, but she seems to havethe same limitation as “The City Planners” in Atwood’s poem of that name. People are a problem: They ruinher aesthetically perfect designs, cluttering and littering the landscape. Finally, she decides that people such asMrs. Nolan, Mrs. Nolan’s unruly children, and the entire collection of exotics who live in the boardinghousewill have to be excluded from urban utopia by a high wire fence.

Yet an event in the story causes Ann to change her mind. The Arab whose room is next to hers throws arowdy party one night for two other Arab students and three “dancing girls.” Ann sits in her room in the dark,fascinated, listening to the music, drinking sherry, but with her door securely bolted. As the noise level of theparty escalates, Mrs. Nolan calls the police but cannot wait for them to arrive. Overcome by xenophobic andpuritanical zeal, she drives the room’s occupants out of her house and down the street with a broom.

Ann finally sees Mrs. Nolan for what she evidently is, a “fat crazy woman” intent on destroying some“harmless hospitality.” Ann regrets that she lacked courage to open the door and so missed seeing what Mrs.Nolan referred to as the “dancing girls” (either Mrs. Nolan’s euphemism for prostitutes or a reflection of herconfused ideas about Middle Eastern culture). The story concludes with Ann again envisioning her ideal city,but this time there are many people and no fence. At the center of Ann’s fantasy now are the foreigners shehas met, with Lelah and Jetske as the “dancing girls.” The implication is clear: Ann has resolved herambivalent feelings about foreigners, has broken out of the need for exclusion and enclosure, and has rejectedthe racism, tribalism, and paranoia of Mrs. Nolan, who sees the world in terms of “us” versus “them.”

“Polarities”

The question of human warmth and life and where they are to be found is more acutely raised in “Polarities,”a strange, somewhat abstract story which also comments on the theme of alienation. Louise, a graduatestudent of literature, and Morrison, a faculty member, are both at the same western provincial university(probably in Alberta). Both are “aliens”: Morrison is American and therefore regarded as an outsider and ausurper of a job which should have been given to a Canadian; Louise is a fragile person searching for a placeof refuge against human coldness. Louise, a student of the poetry of William Blake, has developed her ownprivate mythology of circles, magnetic grids, and north-south polarities. Her friends, who believe that privatemythologies belong in poetry, judge her to be insane and commit her to a mental institution. At first Morrisonis not sure what to believe. Finally, he discovers that he loves Louise, but only because she is by now trulycrazy, defenseless, “drugged into manageability.”

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Examining his feelings for Louise and reflecting on her uncanny notebook entries about him, Morrison isforced to confront some unpleasant realities. He realizes that his own true nature is to be a user and a takerrather than a lover and a giver and that all his “efforts to remain human” have led only to “futile work andsterile love.” He gets in his car and drives. At the story’s end, he is staring into the chill, uninhabitable interiorof Canada’s far north, a perfect metaphor for the coldness of the human heart that the story has revealed andan ironic reversal of the story’s epigraph, with its hopeful reference to humans who somehow “have won fromspace/ This unchill, habitable interior.” The polarities between Louise’s initial vision of a warmly enclosingcircle of friends and Morrison’s final bleak vision of what poet William Butler Yeats called “the desolation ofreality” seem irreconcilable in this story.

“Giving Birth”

The final story in Dancing Girls is the most ambitious and complex in this collection. “Giving Birth” is abouta physical process, but it is also about language and the relationship between fiction and reality. The narrator(possibly Atwood herself, who gave birth to a daughter in 1976) tells a story of a happily pregnant womannamed Jeanie. Jeanie diligently attends natural-childbirth classes and cheerfully anticipates the experience ofbirth and motherhood. A thoroughly modern woman, she does “not intend to go through hell. Hell comesfrom the wrong attitude.” Yet Jeanie is shadowed by a phantom pregnant woman, clearly a projection of thevague apprehensions and deep fears that Jeanie has repressed. When the day arrives, Jeanie calmly rides to thehospital with her husband and her carefully packed suitcase; the other woman is picked up on a street cornercarrying a brown paper bag. As Jeanie waits cheerfully for a room, the other woman is screaming with pain.While Jeanie is taken to the labor room in a wheelchair, the other woman is rolled by on a table with her eyesclosed and a tube in her arm: “Something is wrong.”

In this story, Atwood suggests that such mysterious human ordeals as giving birth or dying can never beadequately prepared for or fully communicated through language: “When there is no pain she feels nothing,when there is pain, she feels nothing because there is no she. This, finally, is the disappearance of language.”For what happens to the shadowy woman, the narrator says, “there is no word in the language.” The story isconcerned with the archaic ineptness of language. Why the expression, “giving birth”? Who gives it? And towhom is it given? Why speak this way at all when birth is an event, not a thing? Why is there no corollaryexpression, “giving death”? The narrator believes some things need to be renamed, but she is not the one forthe task: “These are the only words I have, I’m stuck with them, stuck in them.” Her task is to descend intothe ancient tar pits of language (to use Atwood’s metaphor) and to retrieve an experience before it becomeslayered over by time and ultimately changed or lost. Jeanie is thus revealed to be an earlier version of thenarrator herself; the telling of the story thus gives birth to Jeanie, just as Jeanie gave birth to the narrator: “Itwas to me, after all, that birth was given, Jeanie gave it, I am the rez senses: the biological birth of an infant,the birth of successive selves wrought by experience and time, and the birth of a work of literature whichattempts to rescue and fix experience from the chaos and flux of being.

“Bluebeard’s Egg”

A frequent theme in Atwood’s fiction and poetry is the power struggle between men and women. At times, theconflict seems to verge on insanity, as in “Under Glass,” “Lives of the Poets,” “Loulou: Or, The DomesticLife of the Language,” and “Ugly Puss.” The title story in Bluebeard’s Egg, however, seems less bleak. In areversal of sexual stereotypes, Sally loves her husband, Ed, because he is beautiful and dumb. She is adominating, manipulating woman (of the type seen also in “The Resplendent Quetzal”), and her relationshipto her husband seems to be that of doting mother to overprotected child, despite the fact that he is a successfuland respected cardiologist, and she has no meaningful identity outside her marriage. Bored, Sally takes awriting class in which she is admonished to explore her inner world. Yet she is “fed up with her inner world;she doesn’t need to explore it. In her inner world is Ed, like a doll within a Russian wooden doll and in Ed isEd’s inner world, which she can’t get at.” The more she speculates about Ed’s inner world, the more

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perplexed she becomes. Required to write a version of the Bluebeard fable, Sally decides to retell the storyfrom the point of view of the egg, because it reminds her of Ed’s head, both “so closed and unaware.” Sally isshocked into a new assessment of Ed, however, when she witnesses a scene of sexual intimacy between herhusband and her best friend. Ed is after all not an inert object, a given; instead, he has a mysterious,frightening potential. Sally is no longer complacent, no longer certain she wants to know what lies beneath thesurface.

“Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother”

The first and last stories in Bluebeard’s Egg reveal Atwood in an atypically mellow mood. “SignificantMoments in the Life of My Mother” is a loving celebration of the narrator’s (presumably Atwood’s) motherand father and of an earlier, simpler time. Yet it is never sentimental because Atwood never loses her steelygrip on reality. Looking at an old photograph of her mother and friends, the narrator is interested inthebackground a world already hurtling towards ruin, unknown to them: the theory of relativity has beendiscovered, acid is accumulating at the roots of trees, the bull-frogs are doomed. But they smile withsomething that from this distance you could almost call gallantry, their right legs thrust forward in parody of achorus line.

The “significant moments” of the title inevitably include some significant moments in the life of the narratoras well. Amusing discrepancies between mother’s and daughter’s versions of reality emerge, but not all arefunny. For example, the narrator sees that her compulsive need to be solicitous toward men may be the resultof early, “lethal” conditioning; her mother sees “merely cute” childhood behavior. The narrator recalls theshock she felt when her mother expressed a wish to be in some future incarnation anarchaeologist—inconceivable that she could wish to be anything other than the narrator’s mother. Yet whenthe narrator becomes a mother herself, she gains a new perspective and “this moment altered for me.” Whatfinally emerges between mother and narrator-daughter is not communication but growing estrangement.Recalling herself as a university student, she feels as though she has become as unfathomable to her mother as“a visitor from outer space, a time-traveler come back from the future, bearing news of a great disaster.”There are distances too great for maternal love to cross. Atwood is too much of a realist to omit this fact.

“Unearthing Suite”

The final story, “Unearthing Suite,” another seemingly autobiographical reminiscence, begins with theparents’ pleased announcement that they have purchased their funeral urns. Their daughter is stunned— theyare far more alive than she. Mother at seventy-three figure skates, swims daily in glacial lakes, and sweepsleaves off steeply pitched roofs. Father pursues dozens of interests at once: botany, zoology, history, politics,carpentry, gardening. From her torpor, the narrator wonders at their vitality and, above all, at their enviablepoise in the face of life’s grim realities, those past as well as those yet to come. Perhaps the answer is that theyhave always remained close to the earth, making earthworks in the wild, moving granite, digging in gardens,and always responding joyously to earth’s little unexpected gifts such as the visit of a rare fisher bird at thestory’s end, for them the equivalent of a visit “by an unknown but by no means minor god.” The narratorappreciates her parents’ wise tranquillity. She cannot, however, share it.

Wilderness Tips

Atwood’s stories are frequently explorations of human limitation, presentations of people as victims ofhistory, biology, or cultural conditioning. The theme of isolation and alienation recurs: There are borders andfences; generational gaps, which make parents and children strangers to each other; failed communicationbetween women and men; gaps between language and felt experience. It is easy to overstate the pessimismwhich is present in her writings, to see only the wreckage of lives and relationships with which her work isstrewn. It is therefore important not to lose sight of the human strength and tenacity (a favorite Atwood word)

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which also informs her work.

Eight years later, the stories in Atwood’s short-fiction collection Wilderness Tips ultimately celebrated (stillgrudgingly) the same human strength and tenacity. This and related themes that shaped Atwood’s vision overher writing life are embodied in the sometimes humorous and self-deprecating, often grim and urgent,seekings of the (mostly) female protagonists both to liberate and to preserve themselves in an increasinglyugly world. The conflicts that oppress these characters are rendered more nastily brutish by the realities ofmiddle-class Canadian society in the late twentieth century. The predominant setting is Toronto, no longer“the Good” but now the polluted, the unsafe, the dingy, the dangerous, and, worst, the indifferent.

The battle between the sexes is again the focus of most of the ten stories, the combatants ranging from youththrough middle age. For the most part, the battles are lost or at best fought to a draw; the victories are Pyrrhic.In “True Trash,” the consequences of adolescent sexual and social betrayals at a wilderness summer camp aredealt with only by escape into the banal anonymity of adulthood in the city. In “Hairball,” Kat, who is in herthirties, is betrayed by both a previously acquiescent lover and her own body. Stripped of the brittle securityshe had carefully built for herself, she hits back with a spectacularly gross act of revenge. In “Isis inDarkness,” conventional, secretly romantic Richard invests the poet Selena with a spiritual transcendencetotally at odds with her real-life alienation and pathetic descent to early death over the years of their tenuousrelationship. In “Weight,” the narrator, a woman of substance, lives by compromise, paying defiant homage tothe memory of her scrappy, optimistic friend Molly, who was battered to death by her mad husband. For manyof these protagonists (as in Atwood’s other works), language is a weapon of choice: In “Uncles,” Susanna,though emotionally unfulfilled, is a successful, ambitious journalist; in “Hack Wednesday,” Marcia is afreelance columnist; in “Weight,” the narrator and Molly, aggressive lawyers, play elaborate word games toward off threatening realities; in “The Bog Man,” middle-aged Julie mythologizes her disastrous youthfulaffair with Connor. Nevertheless, as it does so often in Atwood’s works, the gulf between language andunderstanding yawns, exacerbating the difficulties of human connections.

In two of the collection’s most successful stories, however, that gulf is bridged by messages spoken,ironically, by the dead. In “The Age of Lead,” a television documentary chronicles the exhumation from theArctic permafrost of the body of young John Torrington, a member of the British Franklin Expedition, killedlike his fellows by lead poisoning contracted through their consumption of tinned food. The documentary,which protagonist Jane is sporadically watching, weaves in and out of her recollections of Vincent, a friendfrom her childhood, recently dead. All their lives, his identity was ephemeral and undefined, but as Janerecalls his slow decline and death of an unnamed disease and ponders his enigmatic nature, the televisionoffers the 150-years-dead Torrington, emerging virtually intact from his icy grave to “speak” eloquently to theliving. Similarly, in “Death by Landscape,” Lois’s childhood acquaintance Lucy, who vanished on a campcanoe trip, slyly returns to haunt the adult Lois in Lois’s collection of wilderness landscape paintings,assuming a solidity she never had as a live child.

Still, despite the pessimism, inadequacies, and guilt of many of the stories’ characters, the reader’s lastingimpression is a positive one. “Hack Wednesday,” the last story, speaks the same grumpy optimism thatinforms much of Atwood’s poetry and prose. Marcia knows she will cry on Christmas Day, because life,however horrific at times, rushes by, and she is helpless to stop it: “It’s all this hope. She gets distracted by it,and has trouble paying attention to the real news.”

Good Bones and Simple Murders

Good Bones and Simple Murders incorporates some material from Murder in the Dark. The short pieces inthis collection have been termed jeux d’esprit and speeded-up short stories. They showcase Atwood’s wit,control, and wordplay as she speculates about hypothetical situations, such as “What would happen if men didall the cooking?”, and revises traditional tales, such as “The Little Red Hen.” In Atwood’s version, the hen

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remains “henlike” and shares the loaf with all the animals that refused to help her produce it. In these pieces,characters who were silent in the original tales get to tell their side of the story. In “Gertrude Talks Back,”Hamlet’s mother explains matter-of-factly to her son that his father was a prig and that she murdered him. In“Simmering,” the women have been cast out of the kitchens and surreptitiously reminisce about the good olddays when they were allowed to cook.

Many of the short pieces here are explicitly about storytelling. The first story, “Murder in the Dark,” describesa detective game and presents the writer as a trickster, a spinner of lies. “Unpopular Gals” tells of themysterious women of traditional stories, the witches and evil stepmothers who tell their own side of the storyhere. “Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women” explains that it is not the careful, prudent, rational women whoinspire fiction but rather the careless “airheads,” the open, ingenuous, innocent women who set the plots inmotion and make stories happen. “Happy Endings” plays with variations on a simple plot, answering indifferent ways what happens after a man and a woman meet. “The Page” explores the blank whiteness of anempty page and the myriad stories that lurk beneath it.

Atwood does not imply that human experience is beyond understanding, that evil is necessarily beyondredemption, or that human beings are beyond transformation. Her wit, humor, irony, imagination, and sharpintelligence save her and her readers from despair, if anything can. To write at all in this negative age seems initself an act of courage and affirmation, an act Margaret Atwood gives no sign of renouncing. Though herreaders already know Atwood’s message, it bears repeating.

Critical Essays: Margaret Atwood Long Fiction Analysis

For Margaret Atwood, an unabashed Canadian, literature became a means to cultural and personalself-awareness. “To know ourselves,” she writes in Survival, “we must know our own literature; to knowourselves accurately, we need to know it as part of literature as a whole.” Thus, when she defines Canadianliterary concerns she relates her own as well, for Atwood’s fiction grows out of this tradition. In her opinion,Canada’s central reality is the act of survival: Canadian life and culture are decisively shaped by the demandsof a harsh environment. Closely related to this defining act of survival, in Atwood’s view, is the Canadiansearch for territorial identity—or, as literary theorist Northrop Frye put it, “Where is here?”

Atwood’s heroines invariably discover themselves to be emotional refugees, strangers in a territory they canaccurately label but one in which they are unable to feel at home. They are alienated not only from theirenvironment but also from language itself; for them, communication becomes a decoding process. To a greatdegree, their feelings of estrangement extend from a culture that, having reduced everything to products,threatens to consume them. Women are particularly singled out as products, items to be decorated and sold ascommodities, though men are threatened as well. Indeed, Canadian identity as a whole is in danger of beingengulfed by an acquisitive American culture, though Atwood’s “Americans” symbolize exploitation and oftenturn out to be Canadian nationals.

Reflective of their time and place, Atwood’s characters are appropriately ambivalent. Dead or dying traditionsprevent their return to the past, a past most have rejected. Their present is ephemeral at best, and their futureinconceivable. Emotionally maimed, her heroines plumb their conscious and unconscious impressions,searching for a return to feeling, a means of identification with the present.

Atwood often couches their struggle in terms of a journey, which serves as a controlling metaphor for innerexplorations: The unnamed heroine of Surfacing returns to the wilderness of Quebec, Lesje Green of LifeBefore Man wanders through imagined Mesozoic jungles, Rennie Wilford of Bodily Harm flies to theinsurgent islands of Ste. Agathe and St. Antoine. By setting contemporary culture in relief, these primitivesites define the difference between nature and culture and allow Atwood’s heroines to gain new perspectives

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on their own realities. They can see people and places in relation to each other, not as isolated entities.Ultimately, however, this resolves little, for Atwood’s novels end on a tenuous note. Although her heroinescome to terms with themselves, they remain estranged.

Supporting her characters’ ambivalence is Atwood’s versatile narrative technique. Her astringent prosereflects their emotional numbness; its ironic restraint reveals their wariness. Frequent contradictions suggestnot only the complexity of her characters but also the antagonistic times they must survive. By skillfuljuxtaposition of past and present through the use of flashbacks, Atwood evokes compelling fictionallandscapes that ironically comment on the untenable state of modern men and women. Still, there remainssome hope, for her characters survive with increased understanding of their world. Despite everything, lifedoes go on.

Surfacing

The first of Atwood’s novels to arouse critical praise and commentary, Surfacing explores new facets of thebildungsroman. What might have been a conventional novel of self-discovery develops into a resonant searchfor self-recovery imbued with mythic overtones and made accessible through Atwood’s skillful use of symboland ritual. At the same time, Atwood undercuts the romantic literary conventions of ultimate self-realizationas a plausible conclusion. To accept the heroine’s final emergence as an end in itself is to misread thissuggestively ironic novel.

The unnamed heroine of Surfacing, accompanied by her lover, Joe, and a married couple named David andAnna, returns to the Canadian wilderness where she was reared in hopes of locating her missing father. Hissudden disappearance has recalled her from a city life marked by personal and professional failures that haveleft her emotionally anesthetized. While her external search goes forward, the heroine conducts a moreimportant internal investigation to locate missing “gifts” from both parents. Through these, she hopes torediscover her lost ability to feel. In order to succeed, however, she will need to expose the fiction of her life.

At the outset of her narrative, the heroine warns her readers that she has led a double life when she recallsAnna’s question, “Do you have a twin?” She denies having one, for she apparently believes the elaboratefiction she has created, a story involving a spurious marriage, divorce, and abandonment of her child. Asadditional protection, the heroine has distanced herself from everyone. She refers to her family as “they,” “asif they were somebody else’s family.” Her relationship with Joe is notable for its coolness, and she has knownAnna, described as her best friend, for only two months.

By surrounding herself with friends whose occupation of making a film significantly titled Random Samplesreveals their rootlessness, the heroine seeks to escape the consequences of her actions. Indeed, she describesherself both as a commercial artist, indicating her sense of having sold out, and as an escape artist. Reluctantlyapproaching the past she sought to escape, the heroine feels as if she is in foreign territory.

That she feels alienated by the location of her past is not surprising, for she is an outsider in a number oftelling ways: of English descent in French territory; a non-Catholic, indeed nonreligious, person among thedevout; a woman in a man’s world. Her French is so halting that she could be mistaken for an American,representing yet another form of alienation, displacement by foreigners. Most of all, she is a stranger toherself. Rather than focusing on her self-alienation, she is consumed by the American usurpation of Canada,its wanton rape of virgin wilderness; this allows her to avoid a more personal loss of innocence.

Canada’s victimization by Americans reflects the heroine’s victimization by men. Having been subjected tothe concept that “with a paper bag over their head they’re all the same,” theprotagonist is perceived as eithercontemptible or threatening. Her artistic skills are denigrated by a culture in which no “important” artists havebeen women. Even her modest commercial success is treated as a personal assault by Joe, who has an

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“unvoiced claim to superior artistic skills.” By telling herself that the wilderness can never recover fromabuse, the protagonist denies her own recovery. Although she feels helpless at the beginning of the novel, shesoon rediscovers her own capabilities, and as these are increasingly tested, she proves to be a powerfulsurvivor. Thus, the wilderness, a self-reflection, provides the key to self-discovery.

Perhaps the most important lesson the heroine learns is that the wilderness is not innocent. Her encounter withand response to a senselessly slaughtered heron evoke a sense of complicity, leading her to reflect on similarcollusion in her brother’s animal experiments when they were children. Finding her refuge in childhoodinnocence blocked, the heroine goes forward with her search. Once again, nature provides information, for indiscovering her father’s body trapped under water, she finally recognizes her aborted child, her complicity inits death by yielding to her lover’s demands. On a broader scale, she acknowledges death as a part of life andreclaims her participation in the life process by conceiving a child by Joe.

In a ceremony evocative of primitive fertility rites, she seduces her lover. Then, assured of her pregnancy, sheundergoes a systematic purgation in order to penetrate to the very core of reality. During this process, theprotagonist discovers her parents’ gifts—her father’s sense of sight and her mother’s gift of life. With bodyand mind reunited, she takes an oath in which she refuses to be a victim. Whole, she feels free to reenter herown time, no longer either victim or stranger.

Atwood’s procedure for bringing her heroine to this state of consciousness is remarkable for its intricacy.Though she distrusts language, the protagonist proceeds to tell her story by describing what she sees. Sinceshe has lost her ability to feel, much of this description seems to be objective—until the reader realizes justhow unreliable her impressions can be. Contradictions abound, creating enormous uncertainty as intentionaland unintentional irony collide, lies converge, and opinion stated as fact proves to be false. Given this burdenof complexity, any simple conclusion to Surfacing is out of the question. Clearly, Atwood hints at a temporaryunion with Joe, but this is far from resolving the heroine’s dilemma. Outer reality, after all, has not altered.Atwood’s open-ended conclusion is thus both appropriate and plausible, for to resolve all difficulties would beto give in to the very romantic conventions that her fiction subverts.

Life Before Man

Coming after the gothic comedy of Lady Oracle, Life Before Man seems especially stark. Nevertheless, itssimilarity with all of Atwood’s novels is apparent. A penetrating examination of contemporary relationships,it peels away protective layers of deceptions, stripping the main characters until their fallible selves arepresented with relentless accuracy. Lesje Green and Elizabeth and Nate Schoenhof are adrift in a collapsingculture in which they struggle to survive. As she focuses on each character, Atwood reveals unrecognizedfacets of the others.

In this novel, wilderness and culture converge in the Royal Ontario Museum, where Lesje works as apaleontologist and Elizabeth works in public relations. There is little need for the bush country of Quebec,since culture is something of a jungle itself. Unlike the Mesozoic, however, the present anticipates its ownextinction because of abundant evidence: pollution, separatist movements, political upheaval, lost traditions,disintegrating families. Humanity is in danger of drowning in its own waste. Whatever predictability life heldin the past seems completely absent; even holidays are meaningless. Still, the novel is fascinated with the past,with the behavior of animals, both human and prehistoric, and with the perpetuation of memory, particularlyas it records the history of families.

As in Surfacing, a violent death precipitates emotional withdrawal. Most affected is Elizabeth Schoenhof,whose lover Chris has blown off his head as a final gesture of defiance, the ultimate form of escape. His actdestroys Elizabeth’s sense of security, which resides both in her home and in her ability to manipulate orpredict the actions of others. A supreme manipulator, Elizabeth attempts to make everyone act as reasonably

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as she. Not surprisingly, Elizabeth has at least two selves speaking different languages, genteel chic and streetargot, and what passes for “civilized” behavior is merely an escape from honest confrontation with such basichuman emotions as love, grief, rejection, and anger. In fact, all of the novel’s characters prefer escape toself-realization, and while they pay lip service to social decorum, they quietly rebel.

Their rebellious emotions are reflected in the larger world, a political world aflame with separatist zeal. RenéLévesque, with whom Nate identifies, is gaining momentum for the separation of Quebec and thereestablishment of French as the major language, threatening to displace the English. Indeed, the world seemsto be coming apart as international, national, and personal moves toward separation define this novel’smovement. As a solution, however, separation fails to satisfy the characters’ need to escape, for no matterhow far they run, all carry the baggage of their past.

Elizabeth in particular has survived a loveless past, including abandonment by both parents, the painful deathof her alcoholic mother, her sister’s mental breakdown and drowning, and her Auntie Muriel’s puritanicalupbringing. All of this has turned Elizabeth into a determined survivor. Beneath her polished exterior is astreet fighter from the slums, a primitive. Indeed, Elizabeth recognizes an important part of herself in Chris.Nate and Lesje share a different kind of past, where love created as much tension as affection. Lesje’s Jewishand Ukrainian grandmothers treated her as disputed territory, speaking to her in languages she could notunderstand and driving her to seek refuge in her fantasy world of Lesjeland.

Feeling like a refugee in treacherous territory, each character attempts to build a new, stable world,notwithstanding the continual impingement of the old, messy one. Nate, having forsaken his mother’s futileidealistic causes to save the world, falls in love with Lesje, whom he envisions as an exotic subtropical islandfree from rules. For a time, Elizabeth inhabits a clean expanse of space somewhere between her bed and theceiling, and Lesje explores prehistoric terrain, wishing for a return to innocence. When these fantasiesdiminish in power, the characters find substitutes, challenging the reader to reexamine the novel’spossibilities.

Despite its bleak tone, its grimy picture of a deteriorating culture, its feeling of estrangement and futility, andits rejection of simplistic resolutions, Life Before Man is not without hope. Each character emerges at the endof this novel with something he or she has desired. Nate has Lesje, now pregnant with his child—a child who,in turn, confirms Lesje’s commitment to life by displacing her preoccupation with death. Having exorcised theevil spirits of her past, Elizabeth experiences a return of direct emotion.

There is, however, a distinct possibility that the apparent resolution is as ambivalent as that of Surfacing.What appears to be a completely objective third-person point of view, presiding over chapters neatlycataloged by name and date, sometimes shifts to the first person, an unreliable first person at that. Through herrevolving characters, their identification with one another, and their multiple role reversals, Atwood createscontradictory, problematic, and deceptive human characters who defy neat categorization. Taken separately,Nate, Elizabeth, and Lesje can easily be misinterpreted; taken as a whole, they assume an even more complexmeaning, reflecting not only their own biased viewpoints but also the reader’s. Atwood’s ability to capturesuch shifting realities of character and place is one of her chief artistic distinctions.

Bodily Harm

Rather like the narrator of Surfacing, Rennie Wilford in Bodily Harm has abandoned her past, the stiflingworld of Griswold, Ontario, to achieve modest success as a freelance journalist. To Rennie, Griswoldrepresents values of duty, self-sacrifice, and decency found comic by modern-day standards. It is a placewhere women are narrowly confined to assigned roles that make them little better than servants. Rennie muchprefers city life, with its emphasis on mobility and trends such as slave-girl bracelets and pornographic art. Infact, Rennie has become an expert on just such trends, so adept that she can either describe or fabricate one

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with equal facility. Having learned to look only at surfaces, Rennie has difficulty accepting the reality of hercancerous breast, which looks so healthy.

Her cancer serves as the controlling metaphor in the novel, spreading from diseased personal relationships to apolitical eruption on St. Antoine. Indeed, the world seems shot through with moral cancer. The symptoms aremanifest: Honesty is a liability, friends are “contacts,” lovers are rapists, pharmacists are drug pushers, and noone wants to hear about issues. What should be healthy forms of human commerce have gone out of control,mirroring the rioting cells in Rennie’s breast. When confronted by yet another manifestation of this malaise, awould-be murderer who leaves a coil of rope on her bed, Rennie finds a fast escape route by landing amagazine assignment on St. Antoine.

Her hopes of being a tourist, exempt from participation and responsibility, are short-lived as she is drawn intoa political intrigue more life-threatening than her cancer. Before reaching St. Antoine, she learns of its comingelection, ignoring Dr. Minnow’s allusions to political corruption and makeshift operations. What puzzles hermost about their conversation is his reference to the “sweet Canadians.” Is he being ironic or not, shewonders. Her superficial observations of island life reveal little, though plenty of evidence points to a violenteruption. Rennie seems more concerned about avoiding sunburn and arrest for drug possession than she isabout the abundant poverty and casual violence. Her blindness allows her to become a gunrunner, duped byLora Lucas, a resilient survivor of many injurious experiences, and Paul, the local connection for drugs andguns, who initiates Rennie into genuine, albeit unwilling, massive involvement.

As a physical link to life, Paul’s sexual attention is important to Rennie, who appreciates the value of histouch. His hands call forth the “missing” hands of her grandmother, her doctor’s hands, and Lora’s bittenhands, hands that deny or offer help. Paul’s “aid” to the warring political factions, like Canada’s donation ofcanned hams and Rennie’s assistance, is highly questionable, and the results are the reverse of what wasplanned. Trying to escape from his botched plan, Rennie is brought to confront her own guilt.

Again, Atwood uses flight as a route to self-discovery and deprivation as a source of spiritual nourishment. InRennie’s case, however, these are externally imposed. In her underground cell, with only Lora as company,Rennie ultimately sees and understands the violent disease consuming the world, a disease growing out of ahuman need to express superiority in a variety of ways and at great spiritual expense. Rennie becomes “afraidof men because men are frightening.” Equally important, she understands that there is no difference betweenhere and there. Finally, she knows that she is not exempt: “Nobody is exempt from anything.”

If she survives this ordeal, Rennie plans to change her life, becoming a reporter who will tell what trulyhappened. Once again, however, Atwood leaves this resolution open to questions. Rennie is often mistakenabout what she sees and frequently misinterprets events. Her entire story may well be a prison journal, anaccount of how she arrived there. When projecting her emergence from prison, she uses the future tense. ForAtwood’s purposes, this is of relative unimportance, since Rennie has been restored in a way she neveranticipated. In the end, stroking Lora’s battered hand, Rennie finally embodies the best of Griswold with aclear vision of what lies beneath the surface of human reality.

The Handmaid’s Tale

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s fiction turns from the realistic to the speculative, though she merely takesthe political bent of the 1980’s to its logical—and chilling—conclusion. Awash in a swill of pollution,promiscuity, pornography, and venereal disease, late twentieth century America erupts into political andreligious battles. Rising from the ashes is the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy so conservative in itsreactionary bent that women are channeled into roles as Daughters, Wives, Marthas (maids), Econowives, orHandmaids (mistresses).

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The narrator, Offred (referring to her status as a possession of her master), is among the first group ofHandmaids, fertile women assigned to high-ranking government officials. Weaving between her past andpresent in flat, almost emotionless prose, Offred draws a terrifying picture of a culture retreating to religiousfundamentalist values in the name of stability. At first her prose seems to be accurate, a report from anobserver. Deeper in the story, readers come to understand that Offred is numb from all that has changed in herlife. Besides, she does not trust anyone, least of all herself. Still, as a survivor, she determines to stay alive,even if that means taking risks.

Her loss of freedom and identity create new hungers in Offred: curiosity about the world, a subversive desirefor power, a longing for feeling, a need to take risks. In many ways, The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel aboutwhat loss creates. Gilead, in fact, is created partially in response to men’s loss of feeling, according to Fred,Offred’s Commander. Offred, however, takes little comfort in his assurance that feeling has returned.

As she knows, feeling is ephemeral, often unstable, impossible to gauge. Perhaps this is why hercharacterization of others in the novel seems remote. While Offred observes gestures, facial movements, andvoice tone, she can only guess at intent. Implicit in the simplest statement may be an important message.Offred thus decodes all kinds of communication, beginning with the Latin inscription she finds scratched inher wardrobe: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.” Even this injunction, however, which becomes her motto,is a corruption. Though desperate for communication, Offred cautiously obscures her own message. Herstruggle to understand reflects Atwood’s familiar theme of the inability for an individual truly to understandanother person, another situation.

By having Offred acknowledge the impossibility of accurately decoding messages, Atwood calls attention tothe narrative itself. Another interesting fictional element is the narrative’s remove in time. Offred tells herstory in the present, except when she refers to her life before becoming a Handmaid. Ironically, readers learnthat not only is she telling her story after events, but her narrative has been reconstructed and presented to anaudience at a still greater temporal remove. All of this increases the equivocal quality of the novel and its richambiguity.

While Atwood demands attention, she provides direction in prefatory quotations. Most revealing is herquotation from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Like Swift’s satire, Atwood’s skates on the surface ofreality, often snagging on familiar actions and only slightly exaggerating some attitudes, especially thosecommonly held about women. Perennial issues of a woman’s place, the value of her work, and her true role insociety are at the center of this novel.

Cat’s Eye

These concerns appear again in Cat’s Eye, but in a more subdued form. In subject and theme, Cat’s Eye is anartistic retrospective. Elaine Risley, a middle-aged painter, is called to Toronto to prepare for her first artisticretrospective. Risley takes the occasion to come to terms with the dimensions of self in time, which sheperceives as a “series of transparencies, one laid on top of another.” Her return to Toronto, where she grew up,gives her an opportunity to look through the layers of people and events from her present position on thecurve of time. This perspective, often ironic and tenuous, allows Risley to accept herself, including herfoibles.

Cat’s Eye takes full advantage of Atwood’s visual style as it reiterates the importance of perspective inrelation to change. The novel’s art theme emphasizes interpretation while simultaneously satirizing the kind ofinflated yet highly subjective criticism published for public consumption. Atwood’s most personal novel todate, Cat’s Eye tackles the physics of life and art and arrives at Atwood’s least ambiguous conclusion.Returning to her family in Vancouver, Risley notes that the starlight she sees is only a reflection. Still, sheconcludes, “it’s enough to see by.”

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The Robber Bride

In The Robber Bride communication as a decoding process occurs both figuratively and literally, as one of thefour protagonists, the historian Antonia “Tony” Fremont, seeks to discover the underlying meaning of thepast. In her own storytelling she sometimes uses a reverse code, transforming herself into her imaginedheroine Ynot Tnomerf. In fact, each of the women in the novel has renamed herself to gain distance from pasttraumas: Karen becomes Charis to cast out the memory of sexual abuse; Tony hopes to escape the “raw sexeswar” that characterized her family; Roz Grunwald becomes Rosalind Greenwood as her family climbs thesocial ladder.

Although cast in comic form, the novel explores issues of identity, reality versus fiction, and women’sfriendship. The three friends meet for lunch and reminisce about their betrayal at the hands of Zenia, amysterious femme fatale who seduced Tony’s and Roz’s husbands and Charis’s lover. Zenia has multiplestories about her origins, all dramatic but plausible. She ensnares her victims by preying on their fears andhopes. Speaking about the novel, Atwood has remarked that Zenia is the equivalent of the fiction writer, a liar,a trickster who creates stories to captivate her audience.

Alias Grace

Alias Grace is a historical novel based on the real case of Grace Marks, a nineteenth century Irish immigrantto Canada who was accused of being an accomplice in the murder of her employer and hishousekeeper-mistress. The novel combines gothic elements, social commentary, and conventions ofnineteenth century fiction to tell its story. Spinning out several parallel courtship plots, the novel elucidatesthe implications of class and gender: Servant women were often the victims of wealthy employers or theiremployers’ bachelor sons. Grace’s friend Mary Whitney dies of a botched abortion when she becomespregnant.

The story is told through letters and narration by Grace and Dr. Simon Jordan, a young physician who hasbeen employed by Grace’s supporters to discover the truth of the murder. Dr. Jordan is a foil to Grace: As herfortunes rise, his fall. Hoping to win a pardon from her prison sentence, the shrewd Grace narrates her lifestory in great detail but claims she cannot clearly remember the events surrounding the murder. Dr. Jordanhopes to restore her faulty memory and to learn the facts of the case. However, in an ironic twist of plot, hebecomes embroiled in a shabby romantic liaison and, to avoid the consequences, flees Canada in haste. He isinjured while serving as a physician in the American Civil War and loses his recent memory. Grace is releasedfrom prison, given a job as a housekeeper, and marries her employer. Dr. Jordan remains in the care of hismother and the woman she has chosen to be her son’s wife. At the end of the novel all the plot threads areconveniently tied together as in the conventional nineteenth century novel, but at the heart of the story Graceherself remains a mystery.

The Blind Assassin

Some of Atwood’s loyal readers may have looked to The Blind Assassin as an opportunity for the NobelCommittee to grace the author with its literature prize. It is a “big novel,” not merely because it runs well overfive hundred pages but also because it offers a large slice of Canadian history in the twentieth century—or,perhaps more accurately, modern history, in its sweep through the two world wars and the Great Depression.It is a family chronicle of at least three generations of the Chase family, a wealthy, socially prominent familywhose progenitor enriched his heirs from the manufacture of buttons and underwear. Stylistically, The BlindAssassin is an especially complex text, a series of nested narratives, for the most part under the control of thenovel’s octogenarian narrator, Iris Chase Griffen, telling the story as a memoir of essentially how she hassurvived the rest of her family. Because she has a heart condition, Iris is racing against time to finish her story,the most important prospective reader of which is her lost granddaughter Sabrina.

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Iris begins with the blunt statement, “Ten days after the war [World War II] ended, my sister Laura drove acar off a bridge,” which this memoir promises to explain. Many readers of Alias Grace were disappointedbecause they expected to know eventually whether or not Grace was guilty of murder, but the opening pagesof The Blind Assassin give a strong sense that Iris not only knows “whodunit” but will eventually divulge thatinformation.

Before Iris can do so, she must explain everything that led up to that fatal day in 1945. She tells how herfather survived World War I—unlike his brothers—and struggled with his business through the Depression tosave his workers’ jobs, only to accept a merger that cost them those jobs and doomed Iris to a lovelessmarriage with his business rival, who delighted in leaving bruises on her body where only he could enjoythem as the stigmata of his domination. In rapid fashion Iris loses the only man she ever loved, then her sisterand her husband to suicide, and finally her daughter is taken from her as well—a tragic sequence of eventsreminiscent of Greek tragedy.

Oryx and Crake

Atwood has encouraged readers to approach Oryx and Crake as a “bookend” to The Handmaid’s Tale. Oryxand Crake is also set in a future United States. It involves speculation concerning humankind’s uses ofscience, but Atwood rejects the term “science fiction” for this novel as well as for The Handmaid’s Tale,preferring instead to call them “speculative fiction.” She has been adamant in arguing that all the scientificelements she needed for Oryx and Crake’s future world, in which global warming and genetic engineering arethe dominant forces, are either already in play or merely extensions of the present.

Oryx and Crake represents a new departure for the author as her first novel with a male viewpoint character.Snowman, short for “The Abominable Snowman,” struggles to survive in a postapocalyptic world. Snowmanwas once “Jimmy,” the childhood chum of Crake, a boy wonder of bioengineering. In its earlier stages,bioengineering was a boy’s game of dreaming up hybrids such as the “rakunk,” a mixture of raccoon andskunk. Now the field has developed into procedures such as NooSkins, which gradually replace human skinfor a youthful appearance.

As a young man, Crake moves into a powerful position in which he seduces Oryx, whom Jimmy and Crake“met” as boys surfing child pornography online, as well as Jimmy, as his instruments in a master plan toeradicate humanity and replace it with the Children of Crake, creatures he has genetically engineered tosurvive, as Homo sapiens no longer can, in the global swamp generated by contamination of the atmosphereand the melting of the polar icecaps. These Frankenstein’s “monsters” will inherit a brave new world fromwhich Snowman and a few remaining humans will soon depart.

The Penelopiad

Commissioned by Canongate Books for its series The Myths, The Penelopiad offers the long-suffering wifeof Odysseus an opportunity to tell her side of the story from the Underworld more than three millennia afterher death. Half of the novel is her memoir, a genre to which Atwood has become attracted in her later years.

Penelope begins with her unhappy childhood as the daughter of an indifferent water spirit and a royal fatherwho foolishly sought immortality by attempting to drown her when the Oracle prophesied that Penelopewould weave his shroud—actually it was her father-in-law whose shroud she would famously weave—but shewas saved by a flotilla of ducks, thus earning the nickname “Duckie.” From childhood she was tormentedwith the name by her beautiful cousin Helen, whose abduction by or elopement with Prince Paris would startthe Trojan War.

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Accordingly, if Penelope would cast herself as a figure in Greek tragedy—Atwood’s theater adaptation hasbeen successfully staged—Helen is the nemesis who brought about a fall from the good fortune of her earlymarried life with Odysseus, whom she grew to love, even if she could never trust him because he was a“storyteller” and because he had his eye on Helen. Like Iris with her writer-lover, Penelope learned to tellstories after making love. Almost obsessed with her cousin as rival for Odysseus’s love, Penelope devotes herenergies to managing Ithaca so well that Odysseus upon his return will tell his wife she is worth a thousandHelens.

Atwood has stated that she took the Canongate assignment because she had been haunted as an early teenagerby the summary execution of Penelope’s twelve maids by Odysseus and Telemachus. The maids function as aGreek chorus of cynical commentary on the royals. They are Penelope’s confidants, spies, and helpers withthe unweaving of the shroud their mistress must finish before choosing a new husband. At least one disclosedthe shroud ruse, and Penelope may have feared they would accuse her of adultery. The big question is whetherPenelope colluded in their murder. Like Grace, Penelope never reveals any guilt.

Atwood’s vision is as informed and humane as that of any contemporary novelist. Challenging her readers toform their own judgments, she combines the complexity of the best modern fiction with the moral rigor foundin the works of the great nineteenth century novelists. Atwood’s resonant symbols, her ironic reversals, andher example challenge readers and writers alike to confront the most difficult and important issues of today’sworld.

Critical Essays: Margaret Atwood Poetry: British Analysis

Margaret Atwood’s poetry deals essentially with paradox and struggle in both art and life. Her first (and nowgenerally inaccessible) chapbook of poetry, Double Persephone, contains the components of her vision, whichshe elucidates in her next nine poetry collections with more depth, conviction, and stylistic maturity, butwhose elements she changes little. An overview of Atwood’s poetry reveals patterns expressed throughmythological and biblical allusion and recurring imagery relating to mutability, metamorphosis, nearannihilation, and, ultimately, adaptation and definition. References to eyes, water, mirrors, glass, photographs,maps, and charts abound. The archetypal journey/quest motif is a vital component of Atwood’s vision. It isworked out metaphorically in the historical context of European exploration and settlement of the Canadianwilderness, the pioneer’s battle with alienation, loneliness, and the struggle to articulate a new self in a newworld. If the pioneer masters the new “language,” he or she will survive; his or her divided self will becomewhole. This life-and-death struggle is also carried out in the psychological arena of sexual politics. Much ofAtwood’s poetry (especially Procedures for Underground and Power Politics) explores—at first with anger,later with resignation, always with irony—the damage that men and women inflict on one another despitetheir interdependence. In Atwood’s poetry, chaos is perceived as the center of things; it is the individual’squest, as both artist and natural being, to define order, meaning, and purpose—to survive.

The Circle Game

The Circle Game, Atwood’s first major poetry collection, represents the outset of an artistic and personaljourney. The artist-poet (whose voice is personal, ironic, and female) struggles to shape chaos into orderthrough language, whose enigmatic symbols she must master and control. Language is a set of tools, the keycomponent of the poet’s bag of tricks, packed for the (metaphoric) journey undertaken, for example, in TheCircle Game’s “Evening Trainstation Before Departure”:

Here I am ina pause in spacehunched on the edgeof a tense suitcase.

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Language, however, is duplicitous; it is a weapon that can rebound against the poet herself. She is engaged ina constant struggle to interpret and communicate without being subsumed, as suggested in “The Sybil”: “shecalls to me with the many/ voices of the children/ not I want to die/ but You must die.”

In life, chaos comprises process, flux, and the temporal; the struggle for the individual is both to understandhis or her own nature and to reconcile himself or herself to the processes of nature, history, and culture. Theexternal, natural world mirrors the self; it speaks the siren language of the primitive and lies in wait to ambushwith casual cruelty human beings’ fragile civility. Through recognition, struggle, and reconciliation, theindividual can transcend his or her destructive self, mirrored in the natural world. Throughout The CircleGame, the self, both artistic and psychological, struggles to be born. The creative impulse is strong, theinstinct for survival great, but The Circle Game’s “Journey to the Interior” says that the individual does notyet understand the ambiguous messages of either art or life and is in danger: “and words here are as pointless/as calling in a vacant/ wilderness.”

The opening poem, “This Is a Photograph of Me,” presents a paradox. In the photograph, the speaker’s imageis barely discernible, suspended as if in a watery grave, yet awaiting redefinition, new birth: “I am in the lake,in the center/ of the picture, just under the surface.” In “Camera,” the artist is reviled for the impulse tocapture life in a static form when the impulse to the kinesis, the process of life, is so compelling: “Cameraman/ how can I love your glass eye? . . . that small black speck/ travelling towards the horizon/ at almost thespeed of life/ is me.” Who is “me”? It is the androgynous, divided self, defined metaphorically in the powerfulpoem “After the Flood, We.” “We” are Deucalion and Phyrra, in Greek mythology the sole male and femalesurvivors of the mythic flood, suspended over the misty shapelessness of the drowned old world, designatedby Zeus as the only humans deserving of survival. The female speaker differentiates between “I” and “you,”“you” being an intimate who is here (as elsewhere throughout Atwood’s poetry) the male. These two arecharged with creating a new world. The self-absorbed male is a casual progenitor, “tossing small pebbles/ atrandom over your shoulder,” but the female persona perceives horror, a Frankenstein’s monster rising up tooverwhelm “the beauty of the morning.” The threat to process and growth, both artistic and personal, is thestrongest of perceived evils. A sense that the artist-speaker is not yet equal to the task, has not yet found theappropriate language, is particularly strong in “The Messenger,” where “a random face/ revolving outside thewindow” fades into oblivion because, the poem’s ironic tone implies, the message is brought to theinappropriate recipient; the messenger shouts “desperate messages with his/ obliterated mouth/ in a silentlanguage.”

In The Circle Game, a game motif is evident in the titles and metaphoric significance of several poems(“Playing Cards,” “An Attempted Solution for Chess Problems,” and the collection’s title poem). Intelligence,even cunning, is required. Knowing the divided self is the key to becoming the artist fit to pass on themessage vital for survival. The collection’s final poem, “The Settlers,” suggests that perhaps success willcome in laying the foundation for future understanding. The poet-narrator optimistically envisions atransformation through natural evolution into messages for the future, though understanding is still in doubt:“children run, with green/ smiles (not knowing/ where).” As yet the tools, the language, are lacking. Thesimple innocence of a children’s circle game becomes weighted with foreboding; critic Rosemary Sullivanobserves, “The narcissism of the circle game claims the narrator, and confines Atwood herself in its prisoningrhythms. We have yet to see the circle effectively broken.”

The Animals in That Country

The journey of discovery continues in The Animals in That Country and is undertaken in several metaphoricalarenas: the natural, the historical, the cultural, and, above all, the arena of the self. Again, the artist-self isfound wanting. Several poems such as “Provisions” and “The Surveyors” suggest that the pioneer brings thewrong equipment to the new world because he or she has a faulty concept of the terrain and its naturalinhabitants. Later generations distance themselves as soon as possible from the natural interrelationship of

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human and animals, the hunt being transformed into a ritualized game and then an irrelevance, as thecollection’s title poem points out.

Self-definition in a modern cultural setting also eludes the speaker in this collection’s poems. At its writing,Atwood was on the second of her two sojourns at Harvard. Her own dislocation in American society and herdistaste (expressed in letters to friends and colleagues in Canada) for American materialism and theaccelerating Vietnam War are expressed in poems such as “The Landlady” and “It Is Dangerous to ReadNewspapers.” Her sense of alienation, from both place and people, is sadly noted in “Roominghouse, Winter”:“Tomorrow, when you come to dinner/ They will tell you I never lived here.” An ironic view emerges in anencounter with a relief map of Canada in the poem “At the Tourist Centre in Boston.” An increasingly iratenarrator asks first herself and then the receptionist, “Do you see nothing/ watching you from under thewater?// Was the sky ever that blue?// Who really lives there?” That series of ominous questions signals areturn journey to the interior of both Canada and the still unmapped and undefined self.

The definitive exploration of people’s relationship to the natural world, to history, and to their own warringselves takes place in two of the collection’s most powerful poems, “A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum”and “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer.” In the former, the speaker is inadvertently locked in the museum,“this crazed man-made/ stone brain,” and is compelled to undergo a metaphoric journey to the beginnings ofnatural and human history. The worst horror to contemplate is preexistence, nondefinition: “I am dragged tothe mind’s/ deadend, . . . lost/ among the mastodons.” In “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer,” this struggle toredefine the self out of chaos is explored in a metaphorical battle between a pioneer and the wilderness. Inseven sections, or chapters, the story of the pioneer’s failure unfolds relentlessly, the poem’s flat and tersediction underscoring the horror of his descent into insanity and death. Seeking to impose order on theperceived chaos of his surroundings, the pioneer fails to acknowledge the necessity of adapting to thewilderness rather than subjugating it. He does not learn the language; instead, he makes a futile effort tostructure, to classify. He is doomed to failure and annihilation, drowning in a metaphorical flux of Leviathanproportions.

The Journals of Susanna Moodie

Success in these parallel journeys both into the physical wilderness and into the self is achieved, however, bythe persona who informs and narrates Atwood’s next collection of poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. J.W. Dunbar Moodie and his wife, Susanna, were impoverished English gentry who emigrated to Canada in1832 and took up a land grant in the bush near what is now Peterborough, Ontario. Their seven-year sojournin the bush before they settled in the town of Belleville was a searing experience for Susanna. Steeped innineteenth century Romanticism and possessing to no small degree the arrogance of her class, Susanna arrivedin Canada with the rosy expectations of vulnerable people unscrupulously lured from home by the promise ofbountiful land, a temperate climate, congenial neighbors, and best of all, freedom from taxation. The harshreality of life in the wilderness destroyed many; Susanna, though, was able to draw on a previously untappedtoughness of spirit that eventually turned her from a homesick gentlewoman into a self-sufficient, grudginglyloyal Canadian who contributed much to a fledgling Canadian culture. She recorded her experiences in a pairof accounts entitled Roughing It in the Bush: Or, Forest Life in Canada (1852) and Life in the ClearingsVersus the Bush (1853). In them, readers detect a duality of her attitude and personality that Atwood exploitsto advantage in The Journals of Susanna Moodie. In her contemplation of the physical and spiritualwildernesses that confront her, Susanna’s fear and despair is evident but so, increasingly, is a testy strengthand a reluctant love for her new country.

The collection is divided into three sections that treat respectively Susanna’s immigration, her sojourn in thebush, and her later years in Belleville and Toronto. Metaphorically, the “journals” chronicle the passages ofSusanna’s life: the rebirth and redefinition of the self that beginning in a new land requires; the trial by fire (inSusanna’s case, literal) of life in the hostile wilderness; finally, reconciliation and death, where physical burial

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marks a spiritual intermingling with the new land, ironically becoming alien again through twentieth centuryurbanization.

In “Journal 1,” Susanna repeatedly expresses the realization of her need for a new identity; familiarpsychological landmarks are now irrelevant. In “Further Arrivals” she observes, “We left behind . . . ourcivilized/ distinctions// and entered a large darkness.” At first, she is threatened at every level, perceiving herhusband as “the wereman,” her “first neighbours” as “speaking a twisted dialect,” and the wilderness asconsciously malicious. Despite the familiar human instinct to order, catalog, and impose, Susanna recognizesthe need for compromise: “Resolve: to be both tentative and hard to startle/ . . . in this area where mydamaged knowing of the language means/ prediction is forever impossible.” Susanna survives seven years ofloneliness and physical hardship that transform her. She departs for Belleville with a sense that she does notyet fully understand her relationship with the wilderness. In “Departure from the Bush,” she observes, “Intime the animals/ arrived to inhabit me./ . . . There was something they almost taught me/ I came away nothaving learned.” From the relatively civilized perspective of Belleville, Susanna contemplates the relationshipbetween pioneer and wilderness with a mixture of bitterness and resignation. In the three “dream” poems ofthe “Journal 2” section, she recognizes in the natural cycle the inexorable interrelationship of life and death(often violent) of which humankind is an integral part. Her own ambivalence is expressed in “The DoubleVoice”: “Two voices/ took turns using my eyes”; while one saw “the rituals of seasons and rivers,” the otherpointed out “a dead dog/ jubilant with maggots.” In “Journal 3,” Susanna’s reconciliation with her new selfand with her harsh new land is completed; after her death, her defiant voice can still be heard over the roar ofthe twentieth century Toronto built over her bones. As Atwood says in the afterword to this collection,“Susanna Moodie has finally turned herself inside out, and has become the spirit of the land she once hated.”

Procedures for Underground

Having left Susanna Moodie speaking prophetically from her underground grave, Atwood made theunderground the shaping metaphor of her next poetry collection, Procedures for Underground. She returns toa theme that dominated The Circle Game: the power of the artist to shape and articulate both internal andexternal experience. Critic Jerome Rosenberg reminds readers of Atwood’s observation that artists whoexperience the creative process make “a descent to the underworld”; the artist’s role is a mystical andpowerful one (and perhaps subversive, the collection’s title suggests). The artist persona is set apart fromordinary human relationships, as a seer is, by the ability to interpret experience outside the literal. In the titlepoem, the expectations of the artist blessed (or cursed) with second sight are grimly described: “Few will seekyour help/ with love, none without fear.”

The artist’s compulsion to define, shape, interpret, and preserve permeates the collection’s imagery. In “ThreeDesk Objects,” the writer’s tools are transformed by this purpose: “My cool machines/ . . . I am afraid to touchyou/ I think you will cry out in pain// I think you will be warm, like skin.” Many of the poems describe thecapturing of images, meanings, and moments through a variety of artistic media. “Woman Skating” ends with“Over all I place/ a glass bell”; “Younger Sister, Going Swimming” has her dive recorded on the poet’s paper;“Girl and Horse, 1928” and “Projected Slide of an Unknown Soldier” explore time and history through the“freeze-frame” of photography. However, the artist fails to capture or interpret the “underground” aspect ofthe person. Human nature remains impenetrable, a language unlearned, a primeval mystery unsolved, as thepoem “A Soul, Geologically” says. “Where do the words go/ when we have said them?” is the plaintivequestion in “A Small Cabin.”

The most ominous note in the collection is struck by a poem that returns to the game motif of The CircleGame and makes a sad commentary on the passage from innocence to experience. In “Game After Supper,” amemory of a happy children’s game of twilight hide-and-seek turns macabre when the reader understands thatthe small child plays with spectral cousins long dead of diphtheria and that the seeker is a threatening,anonymous male figure. “He will be an uncle,/ if we are lucky,” comments the speaker wryly, but the sexual

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threat is clear, and the stage is set for the largely sexual struggle that provides the primary focus in Atwood’snext collection. From here onward, her concern is more with external relationships; it is probably fair to saythat this shift in focus marks the end of her most powerful work as a poet.

Power Politics

Power Politics, written when Atwood’s first marriage was breaking up, focuses primarily on humanrelationships, though Atwood’s parallel concerns with humans in natural and social history and withinterpreting the dual self are also strongly present. Specifically, Power Politics chronicles the destructivelove-hate relationship that can exist between incompatible men and women. In this pessimistic collection,signals are missed, messages are misinterpreted, and the battle is mutually lost. The menacing, shadowy “tallman” of “Game After Supper” resolves into an aggrieved male partner; the anguished female speaker explorestheir inability to fulfill each other sexually, intellectually, or spiritually. The inevitable failure of therelationship is evident from the collection’s terse, vicious (and gratuitous) opening epigram: “you fit into me/like a hook into an eye// a fish hook/ an open eye.” The poems’ titles provide an inexorable chronology ofdescent from love through suspicion, mutual betrayal, and accusation to sad resignation and parting. Much ofthe imagery is of battle; in the central, seven-section poem “They Are Hostile Nations,” battle lines are drawndespite a perceived mutual need: “Instead we are opposite, we/ touch as though attacking.” Ultimately, thespeaker blames herself for bringing to bear the weight of her expectations, emotional and artistic, on a partnerunable to carry them. In “Hesitation Outside the Door,” she addresses him sadly: “Get out while it is/ open,while you still can.” However, in the final poem, “He Is Last Seen,” the speaker mourns her partner’s seemingescape “towards firm ground and safety” and away from the still-unresolved conflict underlying all Atwood’spoetry thus far: that of the divided, unreconciled self.

You Are Happy

In You Are Happy, progress is made toward the resolution of this conflict. The ironic, pessimistic tone ofPower Politics continues in the opening section. Human relationships fail once again for both emotional andartistic reasons; they cannot withstand the double assault of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Imageryof water, ice, mirrors, eyes, and particularly cameras still prevails, as “Newsreel: Man and Firing Squad”shows: “No more of these closeups, this agony/ taken just for the record anyway.” In the collection’s middlesections, “Songs of the Transformed” and “Circe/Mud Poems,” the poet confronts the limitations of art incontrolling and interpreting human nature and behavior. Through the voice of the sorceress Circe, acompelling character in Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614) who transformed men intoswine, Atwood acknowledges the limitations of mythmaking and the attraction of accepting life as it is, withits ambivalence and vitality: “I search instead for the others,/ the ones left over,/ the ones who have escapedfrom these/ mythologies with barely their lives.” This positive realization is reiterated in the collection’s lastsection. In “Late August,” a new mood of voluptuous acceptance and fruitfulness is evident: “The air is still/warm, flesh moves over/ flesh, there is no// hurry.”

In this collection, Atwood’s poetic skills show new direction. She intersperses her familiar spare, short poeticforms with more fluid prose poems. Indeed, the early 1970’s marked the beginning of Atwood’s shift awayfrom poetry toward prose writing; the themes and imagery in many poems are explored more fully in novelsfrom the same periods. There was a hiatus of four years until Two-Headed Poems appeared.

Two-Headed Poems

Interestingly, much of Two-Headed Poems relates closely in tone, theme, and imagery to The Journals ofSusanna Moodie, but where the voice in the latter was objectified and dramatized as Moodie’s, the voice inTwo-Headed Poems is subjective and intimate. This relationship can perhaps be partly explained by the factthat Atwood gave birth to her daughter Jess in 1976, and her experience of motherhood is strongly reflected in

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this first collection of poems since her daughter’s birth. There is a subtle softening of the irony of tone andvision and of terse diction, a perceptible turn toward acceptance rather than rejection. The poems in this worksuggest that Atwood has experienced not only artistically, but also personally, Moodie’s sense of purpose andplace in human history; Atwood too belongs to “the procession/ of old leathery mothers// passing the workfrom hand to hand,/ mother to daughter,// a long thread of red blood, not yet broken” (“A Red Shirt”). Poemssuch as “You Begin” reflect a renewed emotional and artistic purpose; “All Bread,” with its motifs ofsacrifice, sacrament, and Communion, expresses on one level acknowledgment of the rhythms of life anddeath inherent in nature, and on a parallel level the interdependence of the sexes, which marriage sanctifies.The poet has reconciled herself to the sometimes violent paradoxes that define life: natural, human, andartistic.

True Stories

That emerging attitude of acceptance is put to the test in True Stories. This collection is Atwood’s poeticresponse to her increasing political commitment; its focus is even more external and marks a renewedemphasis on social themes less markedly evident in earlier collections such as The Animals in That Country.The generalized setting of many of the poems is the dusty, brutal, and brutalized countries of the Caribbeanand Central America. The central group of poems in True Stories deals with political torture: The descriptionof actual tortures is graphic and horrifying, emphasized rather than undercut by the spare, brutal, direct dictionand imagery of Atwood’s poetic style. Whether the original accounts themselves are true is a question withwhich Atwood grapples. In the three groups of poems in the collection (including a group of prose poems, “ATrue Romance”), she examines the role of artist as witness-bearer, and the ironies inherent in the examinationof truth and reality through art. As in Two-Headed Poems, there is a final expression of a tentative faith in andacceptance of life, for all its paradoxes. “Last Day” declares, “This egg/ in my hand is our last meal,/ youbreak it open and the sky/ turns orange again and the sun rises/ again and this is the last day again.” Thecollection’s final allusion, then, is to the egg, universal symbol of immortality and hope.

Interlunar

Interlunar returns to the strongly mythological themes, characters, and imagery of Atwood’s first collectionsof poems. From the first, the components of Atwood’s complex vision have been clear; reading her poetry inchronological order is an odyssey through the maturing and honing of her artistic skills rather than through adefinition and articulation of vision.

The mysticism suggested in Interlunar’s title is confirmed in the poems themselves. They are arranged insubtitled groups, a favorite device of Atwood; the most fascinating is “Snake Poems,” which explores thesymbolism of snakes throughout human cultural and religious history. This includes their association withdarkness, evil, destructiveness, and the male principle, as well as with wisdom, knowledge, creativity, and thefemale principle. Above all, their association with resurrection (for their ability to shed their skins) is exploredand viewed (especially in “Metempsychosis”) with Atwood’s customary ambivalence. Resurrection is also acentral theme of the title group of poems, “Interlunar.” Intimations of mortality are seen to be on the poet’smind in such poems as “Bedside,” “Anchorage,” and “Heart Test with an Echo Chamber”; the doubtfulcomfort of resurrection is ironically considered in a set of poems titled for and concerned with themythological figures of Orpheus, Eurydice, and Persephone. In this way, Atwood’s poems and vision comefull circle to her earliest poetic works, Double Persephone and The Circle Game.

The tone of the collection’s title poem, “Interlunar,” is uncharacteristically comforting and serene, thestatement of a mature artist who recognizes that her odyssey toward understanding in art and life must bewithout end but need not be frightening: “Trust me. This darkness/ is a place you can enter and be/ as safe inas you are anywhere.”

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Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House is Atwood’s first collection of new poems in a decade. It shows no falling off ofskill or intensity and a continuation of all her familiar themes. The poems in this volume tend to a darkerlyricism, a sharper awareness of mortality. Although it is difficult to separate the personal from the political inAtwood’s vision, the strongest newer poems seem to be those that are most intensely personal, such as theseries on the death of her father. In other poems, the satiric, sardonic, and sometimes outrageously feministAtwood is very much in evidence.

The Door

The Door is Atwood’s first book of new poems in twelve years, although before and after the publication ofMorning in the Burned House, she published collections of selected poems from her earlier career—beforeother genres, especially the novel, began to compete so strongly for her attention. Like Thomas Hardy,Atwood may be returning to poetry now that she is a comfortably independent writer. Additionally, novelsrequire a huge investment of time and energy, and following her “big novel” The Blind Assassin, she mayhave turned to writing poems, which produces the satisfaction of completion more quickly than other forms.

Concerns of time and energy are central to The Door, since a number of these poems deal with aging—nosurprise coming from a poet born in 1939. The dust jacket says it all: The photograph on the front is ofAtwood as a young girl, standing at her front door, while the publicity photograph of the author on the backflap reveals a woman approaching seventy. Thus, the photographs are graphic emblems of The Door and serveas an entry to the title poem. Throughout the persona’s lifetime, ironically represented in everyday languageand images, the door swings open, offering glimpses of darkness within before it closes. In the end, thepersona steps in, and the door closes behind her, suggesting her death.

The earlier poems in The Door often range between memories of childhood and concerns of the present. Forexample, the opening poem of the first section, “Gasoline,” seems to grow out of a sensory experience,allowing entry to the poet’s childhood. Among the poet’s more recent concerns are the advanced age of herparents, whose deaths will also move her toward the precipice. “My mother dwindles . . .” strikes a chord inall who have dealt with a parent’s failing body and mind.

Another section of poems focuses on being a poet, especially an older poet. The tone is often unsentimental tothe point of cynicism. In one poem, “The poet has come back . . .” from years of virtue to be a poet again. Inanother, “Owl and Pussycat, some years later,” Pussycat reminds Owl of how they have achieved majorreputations—won the prizes and written flattering blurbs about each other’s work—but wonders what this“moulting owl” and “arthritic pussycat” have actually accomplished.

These are tough poems, not in their obscurity, but in their strong impulse toward the kind of realism readersmore often expect in fiction than in poetry. “Nobody cares who wins”—wars, that is—although winning isbetter than losing. “Saint Joan of Arc on a postcard” looks like “a boned rolled leg of lamb.” The opening lineof the poem “The hurt child” ends with “will bite you.” The persona here is reminiscent of Iris, the narrator ofThe Blind Assassin, or Penelope, the narrator of The Penelopiad—old and experienced enough to have lost thepleasures of sentimentalism, avoided the traps of self-delusion, and decided it is too late to do anything buttell the truth.

Critical Essays: Margaret Atwood World Literature Analysis

Although she has written poetry, short stories, screenplays, and novels, Atwood’s work is remarkablyconsistent in content and theme. In spite of her international reputation, she remains resolutely Canadian in

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residence and in temperament. She has become more political and certainly is a writer of ideas, but, with thenotable exceptions of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, she is not propagandistic and heavy-handed.Regardless of the genres in which she writes, Atwood is analytical, almost anatomical, in her dissection ofcharacters and relationships. For the most part, hers is a landscape of the mind, although her writing is alsorooted in geography, whether it be Toronto, the Canadian wilderness, or futuristic settings. In many ways,Survival, her literary criticism of Canadian literature, is a key not only to Canadian writers but also to Atwoodherself. Much of her work is related to survival in an environment or relationship at once native and alienbecause, while ostensibly familiar, such contexts are also foreign to a character’s sense of wholeness. For themost part, her characters live defensively, creating superficial, ordered lives that enable them to live inmodern urban settings, but there is another, darker side that they repress. That darker, irrational self isassociated with the wilderness, with nature, in an almost Emersonian sense.

In her novels, Atwood’s protagonists are usually young women who have roots in the wilderness but whocurrently live in an arid urban (or suburban) environment characterized by materialism, consumerism,exploitation, and male chauvinism, all of which are seen as products of the United States. The landscapes,both literal and symbolic, of her novels shape the lives of her female characters, who are both women andproducts, objects in a society where everything is for sale. Ill at ease, uncomfortable, half-aware of theirproblems, they leave a society that ironically seems safe, despite the psychological and spiritual threats that itposes, for another environment, a more primitive and dangerous one; it is, nevertheless, a healingenvironment, because the journey, in Atwood’s novels, is mythical, psychological, and literal. In Surfacing,the protagonist travels to a wilderness island; in Bodily Harm, she goes to the Caribbean. In both cases, thenew environment seems alien or foreign, but in the new environments the characters confront the realities thatthey had repressed and emerge or “surface” as re-created people. The healing process is spiritual, usuallyrelated to a culture seen as more primitive. In Surfacing, the Native American culture aids the heroine.

Part of the healing process concerns regaining control of one’s body and one’s language. In Edible Woman,the protagonist sends her lover a woman-shaped cake as a substitute for herself; in Surfacing, the narrator usesher lover to replace the baby she had aborted; and in The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred flees her role as breeder. Inthe novels, Atwood equates language with power, and the protagonist must articulate her feelings ingender-bound language. For example, in Surfacing, language erodes as the narrator returns to the primitive,irrational side of her nature. By “reporting” their experiences, her protagonists gain power and expose theruling culture.

In her fiction, Atwood uses language as a poet would; she uses puns (“Offred” is “of Fred,” but also “off red”with many meanings in The Handmaid’s Tale), images (particularly water), and recurrent motifs. Moreover,she is aware, and hence suspicious, of the limits of language, of the problem of narration and voice. HerMurder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems (1983) explores the issue of writing and the relationshipbetween writer and reader (in 2002 she addressed the nature of writing in her Negotiating with the Dead: AWriter on Writing), but it also reflects the ease with which she moves from poetry to short fiction and blursthe distinction between the two genres. In fact, her short stories, as a group, are poetic in the way that she usesimages and experiments with form to explore human relationships.

Atwood’s poetry also concerns human relationships that are played out against geographical andpsychological landscapes. Her early poetry volume The Circle Game establishes the garrison mentality ofadults under emotional siege; they construct abstract patterns or maps that appropriate reality and keep othersat a safe distance. The volume also develops the images of water and drowning suggestive of the descent intoone’s repressed self, of mirrors that entrap those more concerned with image than reality, and of violence thatcharacterizes human relationships. In Power Politics (1971) she makes explicit the themes developed in TheCircle Game; the myth of romantic love is exposed as a sham. Love is a power struggle in which partnersvictimize, exploit, and consume (as in The Edible Woman) each other. The “Circe/Mud” poems of You AreHappy (1974) reinforce the idea of exploited women, who are shaped, like clay, to suit their lovers.

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The feminist politics of Power Politics and You Are Happy become more global in Two-Headed Poems(1978) and in True Stories (1981). In “Two-Headed Poems,” Atwood uses two speakers to explore Canadiancomplicity in the “Americanization” process, and in True Stories, she attacks national “circle games” thatenable Canadians to shield themselves from the harsh realities of international famine, violence, andterrorism. Atwood’s poetry, like her fiction, has become increasingly political, but in neither form has sheabandoned literature for propaganda. She remains committed to form and to experiments with narrative andlanguage; she also has the ability, despite the seriousness of content, to use humor, ranging from puns toirony, to convey her vision of human relationships.

Surfacing

First published: 1972

Type of work: Novel

In her search for her missing father, the narrator retreats to the literal and psychological wilderness ofnorthern Quebec, where she reexamines her life and symbolically re-creates herself.

Surfacing, Atwood’s second novel, recapitulates many of the themes and images from both her poems andThe Edible Woman (1969), her first novel. In both novels, for example, a young woman finally rebels againsta technological society that would mold and shape her life and then experiences a psychological breakdownbefore emerging as a survivor with an integrated or whole personality. Surfacing, however, is a richer, densernovel because the journey that the unnamed narrator undertakes is literal, psychological, and mythical; thenovel is further complicated by the unreliable narrator, who not only acknowledges fictionalizing her story butalso must use the very rational language that she comes to distrust because it is the language of theAmericanized culture that she rejects.

In the first part of the novel, the unnamed narrator (her lack of a name suggests a lack of real identity andimplies that she does not belong in her culture) leaves the city and travels to the Canadian wilderness to findher missing father, who is perhaps dead. Her companions are David, a would-be cinematographer; Anna, hispassive doll/girlfriend; and Joe, the narrator’s shaggy lover and a frustrated potter. As they travel north, thenarrator suggests that “either the three of them are in the wrong place or I am” and calls her “home ground” a“foreign country.” When she later adds, “I don’t know the way any more,” it seems clear that she has becomealienated from her parents (she also did not attend her mother’s funeral) and from her past. She also isalienated from “them,” the companions whom she comes to see as exploitive “Americans” with thetechnology, pollution, and violence that slowly creep northward. As she narrates the story, she mentions herhusband and a child, as well as a drowned brother. The brother, however, is not dead; he “surfaced,”foreshadowing her own surfacing. The husband and child are also part of her fiction; she aborted the baby sheconceived with her married lover, and that abortion, cutting her off from nature, still haunts her. She is anincomplete person, a point that Atwood makes by having her mention that Anna thought she was a twin; later,the narrator states, “I must have been all right then; but after that I’d allowed myself to be cut in two,”obliquely referring to the abortion.

The narrator returns to the divided self at the beginning of part 2 and maintains that the language that dividedthe body and the head is “wrong,” that she is “translating badly, a dialect problem.” Atwood’s concern withthe limitations of language continues throughout the novel and reflects the growing distrust of the rational andthe embracing of less conscious, more instructive modes of knowing. What the narrator comes to know is thatDavid and Anna are in a mutually destructive relationship, which David attempts to capture on film, therebydefining Anna as object rather than person. The narrator, who had believed that she and David were similar intheir lack of love, comes to understand that he is incapable of surfacing or becoming real: “He was infested,garbled, and I couldn’t help him; it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape him down to where he

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was true.” (This understanding occurs in part 3.) David is an exploiter, like the “Americans,”—ironically, realCanadians, who shot a heron “to prove they could do it,” who wish to develop her father’s island property,and who want to flood the area. In fact, part of David’s problem is that, despite his clichéd attacks on theAmericans, he has himself become “Americanized.”

As time passes, the narrator discovers her father’s drawings and her mother’s scrapbook, two guides that leadher to the cliff where she hopes to find the Native American paintings and clues about her father’s fate. Whenshe dives, she finds instead “a dark oval trailing limbs,” a vision that makes her confront the truth about herabortion. Since she describes the vision as a “chalice, an evil grail,” the narrator’s vision or epiphany becomesthe answer, the end of the mythical quest or journey, although she cannot yet interpret it correctly. The vision,however, does radically alter her, setting her apart from her companions, who have “turned against the gods”and yet would persecute her for “heresy.” “It was time for me to choose sides,” she writes, but her choice isseen ironically as “inhuman.” Part 2 concludes with her decision to immerse herself “in the other language,”the language not associated with the dominant culture.

Part 3 of the novel begins with the narrator being impregnated by Joe, who has already been described asmore “animal” than David or Anna and hence is the appropriate father foreshadowed in her childish picture ofthe moon-mother and horned man. While their union might reinforce the stereotypical gender roles that shehas rejected, the narrator’s description of their coupling is devoid of feeling; he is only a means of restoringthe “two halves” separated by her complicity in the abortion: “I can feel my lost child surfacing within me,forgiving me.” She then unwinds the film, symbolically denying David and Joe the power to capture theirvision of reality and freeing Anna from her passive celluloid image, though Anna remains trapped in hercompact, which shapes her appearance and life to the masculine will. The narrator hides when the othersleave, turns the entrapping mirror to the wall, discards her wedding ring and clothes, leaves the cabin, andenters her parents’ world. Language breaks down as she breaks “down” and then “through”; she sees bothparents, who then return to nature, one as a jay, the other as a fish. When she wakes the next morning, theghosts have been exorcised and she is free. At the end of the novel, she states that the most important thing is“to refuse to be a victim,” but she must decide whether or not to go back with Joe. If she does, her descriptionof him as “half-formed” implies that she, not he, will be the creator and shaper.

The Handmaid’s Tale

First published: 1985

Type of work: Novel

In a postnuclear war society governed by repressive, puritanical men, a young woman recounts on tape hersurvival and escape.

Set in the near future, a time just prior to the year 2000, The Handmaid’s Tale is science fiction but also anindictment of the present, since Atwood’s future is the reader’s present. It is an atypical Atwood novel, heronly novel not rooted in Canada and the only one to be so blatantly propagandistic. In it, she fulfills thepromise of her narrator protagonist in Lady Oracle (1976): “I won’t write any more Costume Gothics. . . . Butmaybe I’ll try some science fiction.” Atwood prefers the term “speculative fiction” because of the blending offuture and present and maintains that all the events in the novel have a “corresponding reality, either incontemporary conditions or historical fact.” Since the novel is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Atwood alsoindicts the American culture, which contains the “corresponding reality.”

The novel begins with a quotation from the book of Genesis about a barren Rachel encouraging her husbandJacob to have children by her maid, Bilhah. In the aftermath of nuclear war, a new North American republiccalled Gilead (another biblical reference to fertility) attempts to correct a declining birthrate, caused by

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nuclear radiation and pollutants, by relegating fertile women to the role of Bilhah-like Handmaids, thebreeders of society. (In fact, all Gilead women are assigned to one of eight roles, each distinguished by itsown uniform.) In such a patriarchal society where religion, state, and military are combined, women’sidentities are controlled by men. Offred, the narrator, has lost her real name; she is “of Fred,” in reference tothe commander whom she services in a perverse, impersonal sexual coupling with his wife, Serena Joy, at thehead of the bed. At the beginning of the novel, Offred recounts her training under the aunts—also a perverseparody of the training that nuns and sisters undergo; Offred’s uniform, though red, resembles a nun’s habit.

Despite her indoctrination, Offred chafes under the repressive regime, and, when her commander gives heraccess to his library, a male preserve—reading is dangerous for women—she becomes even more rebellious.She meets Moira, an old friend, at a brothel where the males circumvent their own repressive sexual roles anddiscovers that there is a revolutionary organization named Mayday, which suggests fertility and anarchy. Herrebellion is fueled by her illegal affair with Nick, the chauffeur, who restores her identity (she tells him herreal name), liberates her sexually, and ultimately aids in her escape via the Underground Femaleroad,reflecting, through its parody of the slave underground railroad, the slavish position of women in Gilead.

Offred survives to tell her tale, not in traditional epistolary form but in tapes that have been edited by scholarsin the year 2195. Atwood’s account of the tapes, similar to traditional accounts about finding ancientmanuscripts, is appended as “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale” to the text of the novel, but, insuggesting that two centuries have not altered female/male relationships, the notes continue the novel’sindictment of current culture. In keeping with utopian tradition, Atwood’s site for the scholarly proceedings isthe University of Denay, Nunavit (or the university of deny, none of it). Atwood’s wry denial of the validityof the proceedings calls into question the male editing of female discourse; Professors Pieixoto and Wadehave arranged “the blocks of speech in the order in which they appeared to go.” Since Offred frequentlyalludes to the problem of articulating her feelings and experiences, the professors’ presumptuous efforts areopen to question.

While the proceedings are chaired by a woman, Professor Maryann Crescent Moon (perhaps a criticism ofacademic tokenism), the keynote speaker is a man, Professor Pieixoto, whose comments hardly represent animprovement over current male chauvinism. In his opening remarks, he alludes to “enjoying” Crescent Moon,“the Arctic Chair.” His further comments about the title of the book (the “tale”/“tail” being a deliberate punby his male colleague) and his joke about the “Underground Frail-road” reveal the same chauvinisticcondescension that characterizes current academic discourse. His unwillingness to pass moral judgments onthe Gileadean society, because such judgments would be “culture-specific,” reflects not scientific objectivity,which he already has violated by his editing, but his moral bankruptcy.

The Handmaid’s Tale does survive, however, despite the male editing, as a “report” on the present/future;similarly, in Bodily Harm, the radicalized protagonist becomes a “subversive,” who vows to “report” on therepressive society. The novel, like Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), serves as ananatomy, an indictment, and a warning about current society. Among Atwood’s targets are religiousfanaticism, nuclear energy, environmental waste, and antifeminist practices. Like other utopian novels,however, The Handmaid’s Tale is weakened by its political agenda, which creates one-dimensional charactersand somewhat implausible events; the propaganda, however, also gives the novel its power, relevance, andappeal. Because of its popularity, it was adapted to film in 1990.

“The Circle Game”

First published: 1964 (collected in The Circle Game, 1966)

Type of work: Poem

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The speaker explores the emotional barriers that children and adults erect to remain separate and alienated.

The title poem of Atwood’s The Circle Game (1966) develops the circle motif that pervades her poetry andrepresents the patterned, structured world that both controls and shelters individuals who seek and fearfreedom from conformity. The seven-part poem juxtaposes the children’s world and the adult world butsuggests that childhood circle games, ostensibly so innocent, provide a training ground for the adult circlegames that promote estrangement and emotional isolation. In the first part of the poem, the children playring-around-a-rosy; but despite the surface appearance of unity, each child is separate, “singing, but not toeach other,” without joy in an unconscious “tranced moving.” As they continue going in circles, their eyes areso “fixed on the empty moving spaces just in front of them” that they ignore nature with its grass, trees, andlake. For them, the “whole point” is simply “going round and round,” a process without purpose or “point.” Inthe second part, the couple plays its own circle games as the lover remains apart, emotionally isolated despitesharing a room and a bed with the speaker. Like the children, his attention is focused elsewhere, not on theimmediate and the real, but on the people behind the walls. The bed is “losing its focus,” as he is concernedwith other “empty/ moving spaces” at a distance or with himself, “his own reflection.” The speaker concludesthat there is always “someone in the next room” that will enable him to erect barriers between them.

Part 3 moves from the isolation of part 1 to an abstract defensiveness that unconsciously enforces thatisolation. The innocent sand castles on the beach are comprised of “trenches,” “sand moats,” and “alake-enclosed island/ with no bridges,” which the speaker sees as a “last attempt” to establish a “refugehuman/ and secure from the reach/ of whatever walks along/ (sword hearted)/ these night beaches.” Since thespeaker has earlier equated “sword hearted” with the adult world, she implies that the adult world poses thereal or imagined threat. Protection from “the reach” becomes the metaphor for the lover’s unwillingness tohave her “reach him” in part 4 (part 2 described her as “groping” for him). The lover’s fortifications are moresubtle verbal and nonverbal games (“the witticisms/ of touch”) that enable him to keep her at a “certaindistance” through the intellect that abstracts and depersonalizes reality. As the lover has been a “tracer ofmaps,” which are themselves the abstraction of physical reality, he is now “tracing” her “like a country’sboundary” in a perverse parody of John Donne’s map imagery in his Metaphysical love poetry. For the lover,she becomes part of the map of the room, which is thus not real but abstract, and she is “here and yet nothere,” here only in the abstract as she is “transfixed/ by your eyes’! cold blue thumbtacks,” an image thatsuggests distance, control, and violence.

The last three parts of the poem draw together the children’s world and that of the adults. In part 5, thespeaker observes the contrast between the children’s imaginative perception of violence (the guns andcannons of the fort/museum) and the adult perception of the domestication of that violence as the “elaboratedefences” are shifted first to the glass cases of the museum and then, metaphorically, to their own relationship.The defenses become the “orphan game” of part 6, in which the lover prefers to be “alone” but issimultaneously attracted and repulsed by the family games in which parents “play” their roles.Metaphorically, he is on the outside looking in, observing but separated by the window barrier. In the last partof the poem, it is “summer again,” itself a circle of the seasons, and the children’s outside circle games areagain mirrored by the adult’s inside circle games. The earlier images—the “observations,” the noises in thenext room, the maps, the “obsolete fort”—resurface as the couple are neither “joined nor separate.” Thespeaker, “a spineless woman in/ a cage of bones” (another image of entrapment), wants to break the circle, toerase the maps, to break the glass cases, to free herself from his “prisoning rhythms.” The speaker recognizesand articulates the problem, but she cannot free herself of the circles.

“Two-Headed Poems”

First published: 1978 (collected in Two-Headed Poems, 1978)

Type of work: Poem

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Two speakers conduct a “duet” about the complex love-hate relationship between Canada and the UnitedStates.

The title poem of Two-Headed Poems is, according to the speaker, “not a debate/ but a duet/ with two deafsingers.” In fact, the poem concerns the problems of being a Canadian neighbor to a world power whosecorrupt values are expressed in the “duet.” Like the Siamese twins, described as “joined head to head, and stillalive,” the United States and Canada are awkwardly joined: “The heads speak sometimes singly, sometimes/together, sometimes alternately within a poem.” At times, it is clear which country speaks, but not always, forthe two countries do share, however reluctantly, some characteristics. The leaders of both countries arecriticized, though the leader who “is a monster/ sewn from dead soldiers” is an American president of theVietnam era, a recurrent motif in the poem. Yet Atwood is as concerned about language as she is with actions,the nonverbal gestures. One “head” asks, “Whose language/ is this anyway?” The corruption of CanadianEnglish, itself a political act, stems from the passive nature of a people content to be Americanized, to shutdown “the family business” that was “too small anyway/ to be, as they say, viable.” The Canadians whoseidentity comes from “down there” in the United States are associated with “nouns,” but they are also hostile(the candy hearts become “snipers”) and impatient to act on their own:

Our dreams thoughare of freedom, a hungerfor verbs, a songwhich rises double, gliding beside usover allthese rivers, borders,over ice and clouds.

The Canadian head calls for action to complete the sentence by combining with nouns, and the resultantlanguage should not be a political statement, but a celebratory song, a “double” that transcends borders. Thedreams of freedom are, however, only futile dreams, and the closing images are of being “mute” and of “twodeaf singers.” Communication between the two “heads” is, by definition, impossible, and Atwood clearlyimplies that the American/Canadian coupling that impedes both countries is an aberration of nature.

Alias Grace

First published: 1996

Type of work: Novel

Atwood creates a fictionalized account of the life of Grace Marks, a nineteenth century Canadian woman whowas convicted of killing her employer and his mistress.

Atwood read about Grace Marks, the convicted murderess of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his mistress,Nancy Montgomery, in Susanna Moodie’s Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853), but she soon realizedthat Moodie’s account was fictionalized. Grace added to the confusion by offering three different versions ofthe murder; James McDermott, who was hanged for his role in the murders, provided two more versions.Atwood had all this information, plus numerous newspaper accounts, when she wrote Alias Grace, to whichshe added prefatory materials and an “Author’s Afterword.” Despite the wealth of information, Grace’s role inthe murders remains, as Atwood put it, “an enigma.”

Grace, the first-person narrator, tells two stories in the novel, one a stream-of-consciousness rendering of herthoughts and the other the story she tells Dr. Simon Jordan, a well-meaning psychologist who interviewsGrace in prison. Aware of her situation, Grace tells Jordan what she thinks he wants to hear. Jordan, whodreams of establishing his own clinic, is bent on unlocking the “box” (the truth) but admits he does not havethe key. He and Grace play a cat-and-mouse game, which she wins. A series of events leads Jordan into anaffair with his landlady, who attempts to persuade him to help her murder her husband, who returnsunexpectedly; this plot provides an ironic counterpart to the Kinnear and Montgomery murders. Jordan’sreminiscences about the servant girls in his parents’ home, and his fantasies about prostitutes indicate that he,

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not Grace, is obsessed with sex. After he rejects his landlady’s plan, Jordan flees Canada, returns to his homein the United States, enlists in the Civil War, and then receives a head wound, which conveniently provideshim with the amnesia that makes him forget his Canadian experiences.

In addition to the murders and the planned murder, the novel also recounts the sexual exploitation of a womanby a man. Mary Whitney, a friend and confidant of Grace’s. Mary is seduced by a wealthy young man, whoseparents are Mary’s employers. He later rejects the pregnant Mary, whose subsequent death from a botchedabortion is hushed up by her employers. Atwood’s novel also includes marriages in addition to the onebetween Jordan and Faith Cartwright, a young woman chosen by Jordan’s mother. Lydia, the prisongovernor’s daughter, who has designs on Jordan, is married off to Reverend Verringer after Jordan’s flight inorder to preserve her reputation. Whether it is the exploitation of servant girls by their masters or theconventions of society that dictate the behavior of upper-class young women, women in this novel are not incharge of their lives.

In addition to the unreliable narrator, a staple of Atwood’s fiction, Alias Grace contains other familiarelements, many of them gothic: murder, demonic possession, madness, secrets, supernatural elements(including hypnosis), and a fear of women and their power. Atwood uses the epistolary form (letters betweenJordan and his dominating mother) and includes a ballad she wrote in a nineteenth century style. All of theseelements are used to question not only the nature of truth but also the notion of colonial innocence in EnglishCanada.

Oryx and Crake

First published: 2003

Type of work: Novel

In a dystopian future of unlimited biotechnological progress, a young man and a laboratory-created “people”survive a global disease.

Oryx and Crake also uses an unreliable narrator, the Snowman (his real name was Jimmy), an outcast andsurvivor of a global disease created by his friend Crake. In this dystopian novel, Snowman recounts what ledto the disaster and what is happening in the present. When the novel begins, Snowman is in the present,foraging for food and instructing the Crakers, “people” created by Crake. Crake and Jimmy were childhoodfriends with different interests: Jimmy was a “word person”; Crake was a “numbers person.” Both lived withtheir parents in the Compound, a gated community of people who work for biotech corporations. Aftergraduation, the friends drifted apart, Crake to the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute and Jimmy to therun-down Martha Graham Academy. The schools reflect the relative importance of the sciences (numbers)and the arts (words).

When they enter the job market, Crake works as a scientist for the biotech companies, and Jimmy becomesnot a “wordsmith” but a “wordserf” in advertising. Eventually, Crake lures Jimmy to Watson-Crick, whereCrake shows Jimmy the hybrid animals that the scientists are creating. Jimmy also learns that the scientists,who have cures for the known diseases, are creating new diseases and their cures to continue to make money.Crake’s own department is ironically named Paradice, and its work involves creating populations with “ideal”characteristics, such as beauty and docility, because “several world leaders had expressed interest in that.” TheCrakers, as they come to be called, were programmed not to be racist, aggressive, sexually charged, orreligious. Like other animals, they came into heat at regular intervals and urinated to mark their territory, butunlike other animals, they recycled their own excrement. Such “people” would therefore not experience themodern problems of “real” people.

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Despite his aversion to modern problems, Crake falls in love, an emotion that leads to possessiveness andviolence. Unfortunately, Jimmy is also in love with Oryx, a sexual waif he had seen on television when hewas a child. She reappears as Crake’s lover, after having been the victim of white slavery and pimps. Jimmyexhibits all the symptoms of romantic love: sleeplessness, jealousy (demanding information about Oryx’ssexual past), and possessiveness. Oryx, however, is rooted in the present as the instructor of the Crakers. Shealso acts as a salesperson for the drugs that Crake’s company is manufacturing. The drugs are programmed tocause instantaneous suffering and death, which occurs on a global scale. At Crake’s instructions, Jimmy clearsParadice of all other personnel, which leaves him alone as an insulated, protected being. When Crake andOryx appear at Paradice’s door, Jimmy kills them.

Jimmy/Snowman, who believes that he is the sole “human” survivor of the disease Crake has unleashed(Crake had thoughtfully provided him with the antidote), carries on the instruction Oryx had begun. Becauseof his love/hate relationship with Crake, he provides the Crakers with a mythology that includes Crake as theCreator/God and Oryx as the Earth Mother. He pretends to correspond with Crake through a wristwatch with ablank face, suggesting that he and the Crakers are suspended in time. Eventually, he has to travel from the“pleeblands” back to Paradice to get supplies, but in the course of his journey he recalls past events and keepsuttering random words, almost as if his existence depended upon language. In the present, however, hisjourney is threatened by the hybrid animals that Crake created. When he returns from Paradice to the Crakers,he discovers that despite Crake’s efforts, the Crakers are beginning to gain notions of ambition and hierarchy,notions that will lead to the problems Crake sought to prevent. Snowman also discovers that there are threeother human survivors. Armed with a weapon, he tracks them down, but cannot decide what action to take,and the novel ends at “zero hour.”

Atwood, Margaret (Short Story Criticism): Introduction

Margaret Atwood 1939–-

(Born Margaret Eleanor Atwood) Canadian novelist, poet, critic, short story writer, and author of children'sbooks.

International acclaimed as a poet, novelist, and short story writer, Atwood is recognized as a major figure inCanadian letters. Using such devices as irony, symbolism, and self-conscious narrators, she explores therelationship between humanity and nature, the dark side of human behavior, and power as it pertains to genderand politics. Popular with both literary scholars and the reading public, Atwood has helped to define andidentify the goals of contemporary Canadian literature and has earned a distinguished reputation amongfeminist writers for her exploration of women's issues.

Biographical Information

Atwood was born in Ottawa and grew up in suburban Toronto. She began to write while in high school,contributing poetry, short stories, and cartoons to the school newspaper. As an undergraduate at the Universityof Toronto, Atwood was influenced by critic Northrop Frye, who introduced her to the poetry of WilliamBlake. In 1961 she published her first volume of poetry, Double Persephone. Atwood completed her A.M.degree in 1962 at Radcliffe College of Harvard University. She returned to Toronto in 1963, where she begancollaborating with artist Charles Pachter, who designed and illustrated several volumes of her poetry. In 1964Atwood moved to Vancouver, where she taught English at the University of British Columbia for a year andcompleted her first novel, The Edible Woman. After a year of teaching Victorian and American literature atSir George Williams University in Montreal in 1967, Atwood began teaching creative writing at theUniversity of Alberta while continuing to write and publish poetry. After the publication of her poetrycollection Power Politics in 1971, she left a teaching position at the University of Toronto to move to a farm

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near Alliston, Ontario. Atwood received the Governor General's Award in 1986 for her novel The Handmaid'sTale, which was published that same year. She continues to be a prominent voice in Canada's cultural andpolitical life.

Major Works of Short Fiction

In her short fiction, Atwood specializes in revealing unexpected, often unsettling aspects of the humanpersonality and behavior normally hidden by social conventions. However, her narrative voice has beendescribed as distanced and unemotional, and her characters as two-dimensional representations of ideas ratherthan fully rounded individuals. Her stories, like her poems, often pivot on a single symbolic object: a visit to aMayan sacrificial well in “The Resplendent Quetzal,” a plane crash in “A Travel Piece,” and the bizarreamorous behavior of a foreign student in “The Man from Mars,” all serve as catalysts for her protagonists'confrontations with their conflicted inner selves. More loosely structured than her poems or novels, Atwood'sstories nonetheless bear her novels' trademarks of careful plotting and concise use of language. More notably,her short fiction shares with her other works Atwood's common theme of personal identity in conflict withsociety. In her first collection of short fiction, Dancing Girls, the title refers to the leading characters of thestories, women who obligingly dance repressive, stereotyped roles assigned to them by a male-dominatedsociety rather than following their inner desires. Atwood portrays patriarchal social systems as oppressive anddamaging to the individual psyche and her male characters as often malevolent or emotionally withdrawn. Thetypical heroine of Atwood's stories is intelligent, urbane, and discontented, alienated from her true nature aswell as her environment. In later collections, such as Murder in the Dark and Bluebeard's Egg, she oftenincorporates autobiographical material into her stories.

Critical Reception

Although for the most part Atwood's story collections have met with critical favor, some reviewers note thatAtwood's short fiction is of uneven quality and is secondary to her novels and poetry. Other critics maintainthat her stories retain much of the wit and penetrating insight of her longer works of fiction while displayingthe same compelling imagery found in her poetry. Reviewers have detected the significant influence of theGerman fairy tales of Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm on her work, and several commentators assert that much ofher writing has been inspired by her studies of North American and European folklore and Gothic fiction.Moreover, her fiction has often been compared to another critically and commercially popular Canadianauthor, Alice Munro. In general Atwood's stories have earned positive attention and are regarded as furtherevidence of her prodigious literary talent.

Atwood, Margaret (Short Story Criticism): Principal Works

Dancing Girls, and Other Stories 1977

Bluebeard's Egg 1983

Murder in the Dark 1983

Wilderness Tips 1991

Good Bones and Simple Murders 1992

Double Persephone (poetry) 1961

The Circle Game (poetry) 1966

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The Animals in That Country (poetry) 1968

The Edible Woman (novel) 1969

The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poetry) 1970

Procedures for Underground (poetry) 1970

Power Politics (poetry) 1971

Surfacing (novel) 1972

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (criticism) 1972

You Are Happy (poetry) 1974

Lady Oracle (novel) 1976

Selected Poems 1976

Life before Man (novel) 1978

Two-Headed Poems (poetry) 1978

Up in the Tree (juvenilia) 1978

True Stories (poetry) 1981

Bodily Harm (novel) 1982

Second Words (criticism) 1982

Interlunar (poetry) 1984

The Handmaid's Tale (novel) 1986

Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986 (poetry) 1987

Cat's Eye (novel) 1990

The Robber Bride (novel) 1993

Morning in the Burned House (poetry) 1995

Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (criticism) 1995

Alias Grace (novel) 1996

Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965–1995 (poetry) 1998

Blind Assassin (novel) 2000

45

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (essays) 2001

Criticism: Sherrill Grace (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: “Versions of Reality,” in Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, edited by Ken Norris,Véhicule Press, 1980, pp. 79–86.

[In the following excerpt, Grace finds parallels between Atwood's stories and her poetry and assesses themerits and weaknesses of the stories in Dancing Girls.]

Jeannie isn't real in the same way that I am real. But by now, and I mean your time, both of uswill have the same degree of reality, we will be equal: wraiths, echoes, reverberations in yourown brain.

(“Giving birth,” DG, p. 242)

The price of this version of reality was testing the other one.

(EW, p. 271)

In an effort to distinguish between creating a poem and a novel, Atwood has remarked:

You can talk about it, but not very successfully. A poem is something you hear, and theprimary focus of interest is words. A novel is something you see, and the primary focus ofinterest is people.1

Distinctions between poetry and prose can become gratuitous, nowhere more so than with Margaret Atwood.Her poems need to be seen on the page as well as heard, while the power of language in her best prose is fullyrealized when read aloud. Indeed, I am most struck with what George Woodcock calls the “capillary linksbetween her poetry, her fiction (and) her criticism.”2

Despite the larger structure of narrative, her stories and novels resemble her poems not only in theme andsymbol, but in tone, point of view and voice. As we have seen, many of the poems have a duplistic structure.A comparable sense of counter-weighted settings and the use of doubled or split characters are pervasive inthe fiction as well. Atwood further neutralizes the distinction between prose and poetry by frequently writingpoem sequences (as well as prose poems), thereby capturing the element of continuity expected in fiction.

On the basis of the stories and the three novels about to be considered, some generalizations can be made,however, about the type of fiction Atwood writes. The people in her fictional world are less thethree-dimensional realistic characters of the traditional English novel than the types associated with romance.To some extent, this is a function of point of view, for each of the novels has a first person narrator tightlyenclosed within a limited perspective. Quite naturally, then, perception of others will be one-sided. But eventhe narrators remain aloof from the reader and this sense of two-dimensionality results in large part from thecool, acerbic nature of the narrative itself. Atwood's stories, and even more so her novels, are highly plotted,often fantastic, her intention being to focus our attention upon the significance of event and pattern.

The importance of plot, together with the emphasis placed on symbol, is consistent with Atwood's view ofliterature in general, of language and her view of the self. A novel is not intended to simply reflect theobjective world, but to offer us a mirror in which we may detect the shapes and patterns of our experience.Language itself is dangerous and deceptive; hence, the constant stretching and probing of words in the fiction

46

(as in the poetry) until one senses that nothing can be assumed or taken for granted. Finally, Atwood'scontention that the self is a place, not an ego, a view to which I return in subsequent discussion, rules out theportrayal of character in the Jamesian or Faulknerian sense; nowhere yet has Atwood given us a roundedpersonality, a firm sense of the self, such as I find in Margaret Laurence's Morag Gunn. Atwood's fiction iswritten in what I call a mixed style combining realist and romance elements. It is a style well suited to theexploration of the contingency of life, the nature of language, and the duplicity of human perception.

DANCING GIRLS

Dancing Girls is a selection of representative stories which Atwood has written over thirteen years.3 All butthree of the fourteen stories have been published before; the earliest “The War in the Bathroom” appeared inJames Reaney's Alphabet in 1964. “Training,” “Dancing Girls” and “Giving Birth” are new. In general, thestories are of mixed quality, but I feel that none of them places Atwood in the first ranks of modernshort-story writers like Bernard Malamud, Doris Lessing, or closer to home, Sinclair Ross, Alice Munro, andClark Blaise.

The stories lack variety as individual pieces while, at the same time, they do not cohere as a collection or aunit in the way that several other collections by Canadian writers do.4 One characteristic which they have incommon is the disturbing, inconclusive ending. While this is effective, especially in “The War in theBathroom” and “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” so many of the stories end in uncertainty that the sense ofbeing left dangling becomes exasperating. This type of conclusion mars otherwise interesting stories such as“Polarities,” “A Travel Piece,” or “Training”—something of urgent significance, I feel, almost shines throughonly to be finally obscured; the irony fails.

A second quality that each story shares is the confessional/autobiographical focus, not necessarily of Atwoodherself, but on the part of her fictional characters. They are, for the most part, stories of the self, involvingcrises of perception and identity either within the individual psyche (“The War in the Bathroom,” “When ItHappens,” “Giving Birth”) or arising from encounters between men and women (“Polarities,” “The Grave ofthe Famous Poet,” “Hair Jewellery,” “The Resplendent Quetzal”). These problems of identity and perceptionare recurrent, central themes in Atwood's work, and while they have been treated masterfully in short storyform—Lessing's “Our Friend Judith” for example—Atwood has greater success with these themes in herpoems or in the longer novel form.

Since it hardly seems necessary, nor is there space, to discuss all eleven stories, I have decided to look atAtwood's handling of the short story form and her themes in two of the more successful stories, “The War inthe Bathroom” and “Rape Fantasies,” as well as in each of the new stories.

“The War in the Bathroom” is a small tour de force in which the reader is uncertain, almost from the outset,about who is speaking. The story is written in the first person present and the tone is that of personal, directaddress to the reader. The heroine of the story, however, is referred to throughout as “she,” and “I” is clearlytelling us about “she's” move from one flat to another followed by the mundane events of one week in the newplace, presented under daily headings from “Monday” to “Sunday.” At first, “I” seems to be separate from“she”: “I have told her never to accept help from strangers” (p. 9). But this illusion in narrative conventionsoon slips—not only does “I” share “she's” bed, advise her on clothing, food, mathematicians and an exotictattooed Arab. In her own “native costume” of plain wool sweaters and skirts, Ann is not exotic. She dreams,however, of re-designing cities—“Toronto would do for a start” (DG, p. 227)—into pastoral paradises. Thedancing girls of the title precipitate the overthrow of Ann's urban planning dreams and the “Arabian Nights”glamour of the foreign students.

One night the silent Arab throws a wild party with three “dancing girls.” Because she is unwilling to becomeinvolved, Ann locks herself in her room while Mrs. Nolan handles the situation by calling the police and

47

chasing the men from her house. Consequently, Ann does not see “the dancing girls” who “were probably justsome whores from Scollay Square” (DG, p. 235), and does not have to relinquish entirely her image of anexotic event. She does, however, realize that her “green, perfect space of the future” has been “cancelled inadvance” (DG, p. 236). The story closes as Ann indulges herself “one last time” in her urban fantasy:

The fence was gone now, and the green stretched out endlessly, fields and trees and flowingwater, … The man from next door was there, in his native costume, and the mathematicians,they were all in their native costumes. Beside the stream a man was playing the flute; andaround him, in long flowered robes and mauve scuffies, their auburn hair floating around theirhealthy pink faces, smiling their Dutch smiles, the dancing girls were sedately dancing.

(DG, p. 236)

This time the image of a re-designed pastoral city draws together the various fantasies of the story as if in onefinal effort to fend off the real world of Mrs. Nolan.

There is a problem that hovers over “Dancing Girls,” however, much the same problem that vitiates“Training”: what motivates Ann's fantasies? Why is she drawn to the illusory exoticism of foreign students orpastoral visions of modern cities? It is easy to sympathize with her naive desire to replace the ugly sordidnessof modern cities with open, green spaces. The sense of claustrophobia arising from cramped spaces (here, theboardinghouse room), closed circles, or rigid squares is a constant Atwood preoccupation for which Ann is anexponent. Perhaps the attraction of the students with their “native costumes” can only be explained in terms ofAnn's insecure sense of her own identity. As a Canadian in the United States she is not perceived as distinct,let alone foreign; she does not have a “native costume” (DG, p. 231).

“Giving Birth” is by far the most interesting and challenging story in the collection. It is, I feel, of a qualityand importance equal to Atwood's finest poems. Furthermore, it is something of a personal statement on thenature of the creative process for which the birth of a child is an obvious metaphor. What is being born,however, is more than, or other than, a baby; it is a story, and an aspect of the self. The success of this storydepends in part upon the fact that the birth is both metaphor and event. Also of importance, and handled withequal skill, is the narrative voice. These two elements of the narrative are inextricably woven together.

Approximately two thirds of the way through “Giving Birth,” the first person narrator asks herself why shemust try to describe “events of the body” such as childbirth: “why should the mind distress itself trying to finda language for them?” (DG, p. 249) The story is the answer. The narrator begins by questioning the languagewe use to describe life. Words such as “giving” and “delivering” are troublesome and inadequate because theyimply an end-product, an object, whereas birth like death is an event, not a thing. In order to overcome thelimitations of language, in order to understand the significance of event, the narrator must, paradoxically, uselanguage to write about the event. Thus, the narrator/writer creates her protagonist “Jeannie,” named after thelight-brown haired Jeannie of the song.

Atwood goes to considerable effort to distinguish between the “I” of the story and “Jeannie”:

(By this time you may be thinking that I've invented Jeannie in order to distance myself fromthese experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am, in fact, trying to bringmyself closer to something that time has already made distant. As for Jeannie, my intention issimple: I am bringing her back to life.)

(DG, p. 243)

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By “bringing [Jeannie] back to life” in fiction, the narrator can attempt to recapture the significance of anevent for the self. The story is the writer's way of ‘bringing something back’ from her experience so that shewill not forget entirely “what it was like” (DG, p. 252). Therefore, towards the end of the story, the narrator,who is still troubled by the words “giving birth” can realize that,

(It was to me, after all, that birth was given, Jeannie gave it, I am the result.)

(DG, p. 253)

The birth has been given to the narrator because it is an event that has become a part of her, that has changedher. Because the narrator is a writer, however, the reality of this event takes its final shape in language, in astory.

With the last lines of the story Atwood pinpoints the relationship between narrator/Jeannie/reader, and thenature of experience. Atwood has said that for her “the self is a place in which things happen.”5 Birth hashappened to Jeannie, in the story, and through Jeannie to the narrator. The story has happened to us; it is theevent we experience. Just as Jeannie's hair darkens and she “is replaced, gradually, by someone else” (DG, p.254), so the narrator has changed. Atwood is asking us to reconsider the relationship between experience andthe self. She is attempting, through language, to grasp the meaning of event and the significance of a universalhuman event for the individual self. Life, like birth and death, is a process, not a static thing or object. Theself, Atwood claims, is not a hard fixed kernel, an ego, but a place where events happen, a place that ischanged by events. In a sense, then, we the readers are changed by “Giving Birth.”

As noted earlier, the baby in the story is more than a metaphor for the creative process; the chief protagonistdoes have a baby. But the story is never tiresomely gynecological in the way that Audrey Thomas' “If OneGreen Bottle …” finally is. Through Jeannie and her other self, the woman with “the haggard face, the bloatedtorso, the kerchief holding back the too sparse hair” (DG, p. 254), Atwood portrays the very real sense ofterror and estrangment from the self that a person can feel when facing an unknown ordeal. The woman whoshadows Jeannie is not “really there,” but she is the embodiment both of fear and of the self's unwillingness tobe absorbed by event. Jeannie and her other self, then, are the counter-weights in “Giving Birth.” By writingthe story, the narrator is able to absorb event into the self rather than be overwhelmed by it. Throughlanguage, ‘the mind's distress,’ meaning is born.

Notes

“Interview with Margaret Atwood,” Linda Sandler, The Malahat Review, 41 (January, 1977), p. 19.For a further discussion of her fiction see her interview with Graeme Gibson in Eleven CanadianNovelists (Toronto: Anansi, 1973).

1.

“Margaret Atwood: Poet as Novelist,” The Canadian Novel in the Twentieth Century (Toronto:McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1975), p. 314.

2.

Margaret Atwood, Dancing Girls (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1977). All further referencesare to this text. The following eleven stories were previously published: “The War in the Bathroom,”Alphabet, 8 (1964); “The Man from Mars,” Ontario Review (Spring-Summer, 1977); “Polarities,”Tamarack Review, 58 (1971), “Rape Fantasies,” The Fiddlehead, 104 (Winter, 1975); “Under Glass,”Harper's, 244 (February, 1972); “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” Oberon Press (1972); “HairJewellry,” Ms. Magazine (December, 1976); Saturday Night, 90 (May, 1975); “The ResplendentQuetzal,” The Malahat Review, 41 (January, 1977); “Lives of the Poets,” Saturday Night (April,1977).

3.

While I do not suggest that formal and thematic unity is the best, let alone only, way to prepare acollection of stories, it has proved remarkably effective in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women,Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House, Clark Blaise's A North American Education and Gabrielle

4.

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Roy's Rue Deschambault.Quoted from Atwood's introductory remarks on the cassette by High Barnett, Toronto, 1973.5.

Criticism: Gregory Houghton (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: “Margaret Atwood: Some Observations and Textual Considerations,” in World Literature Writtenin English, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 85–92.

[In the following essay, Houghton analyzes Atwood's attempt to construct meaning by drawing attention toand highlighting the “process of exclusion in everyday experience, by focusing upon the inadequacies andillusions of overt fabrications.”]

Margaret Atwood's presentation of a public self remains enigmatic, elusive and contradictory. Sheself-consciously refuses all the diverse personas that have been foisted upon her, working hard at escaping thenet of our expectations. Her interviews are fascinating moments of flight and of flux. In part thisunapproachability can be attributed to her legitimate desire for privacy and the preservation of some sense ofprivate self, but there are other very important motives.

There can be few women writers so aware of the dangers of form, both personal and literary. In our neverending attempts to construct meaning, we must inevitably exclude, repress, oppress and ignore. Atwood, intwo pieces of short fiction, twice draws attention to and highlights this process of exclusion in everydayexperience, by focussing upon the inadequacies and illusions of overt fabrications. Both of these elaborateconstructions are utopian.

In “Polarities”1 Louise, a graduate student obsessed with the works of Blake, seeks after what she believes tobe an all-embracing communality and wholeness. As a result of her efforts she finds herself in a mentalasylum, a parallel perhaps to the exclusive nature of her visions, which are actually erecting boundaries ratherthan breaking them down. The realization of what Louise's vision really amounted to comes too late both forher and for Morrison, her alienated, schizoid companion.

Poor Louise, he saw now what she had been trying desperately to do: the point of the circle,closed and self-sufficient, was not what it included but what it shut out.

(p. 68)

The central character of “Dancing Girls,” who is also a detached and alienated student, this time of urbandesign, has her own ideas of the perfect world, so perfect that people could not live there.

She wasn't yet too certain of the specific details. What she saw were spaces, beautiful greenspaces, with water flowing through them, and trees. Not big golf-course lawns, though,something more winding … surprising vistas. And no formal flower beds. The houses, orwhatever they were, set unobtrusively among the trees, the cars kept … where? And wherewould people shop, and who would live in these places? This was the problem: she could seethe vistas, the trees and the streams or canals, quite clearly, but she could never visualize thepeople.

(p. 227)

These flawed utopias are an important instance of a deeper level that operates in many Atwood texts. That isthe tension between construction and the impulse to de-construction, a tension which Atwood occasionally

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even overtly articulates. In those moments often it is language, as it inevitably must be, upon which andthrough which the battle is glimpsed and fought. Michel Foucault is of interest here in his juxtaposition ofutopias and heterotopias and of their respective relationships to language:

utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part ofthe fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias … desiccate speech, stop words in theirtracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths andsterilize the lyricism of our sentences.2

Atwood's willingness to combat the categories we might wish to impose, such as nationalist or feminist, ismore than a playful impulse to disorder, it is one manifestation of a project which she believes is vital topersonal and societal liberation. That this sometimes latent, sometimes explicit desire to overthrow ourarbitrary orderings of the world is possibly evidenced more often when Atwood is engaged as public personahas two obvious causes.

First, as a literary artist she is making and shaping literary artefacts. Texts are made of language, whichinevitably commits the artist to the forces of constructed and given meanings, meanings which obscure theirown arbitrary construction. Yet as I said earlier, Atwood's texts do threaten to disintegrate, to self-destruct.Atwood has no faith in the possibilities of non-illusory communication. She would rather locate meaning inwhatever is not or cannot be heard, spoken or present. Of course such an intense awareness of the inherentcontradictions in writing seriously affects her capacity to proceed with prose forms. In “Giving Birth,” a cryof despair is barely contained:

Words ripple at my feet, black, sluggish, lethal. Let me try once more, before the sun gets me,before I starve or drown, while I can. It's only a tableau after all, it's only a metaphor. See, Ican speak, I am not trapped, and you on your part can understand. So we will go ahead as ifthere were no problem about language.

(p. 240)

Secondly, biography and autobiography hold out to us the possibility of an illusory form, a means to makesense of ourselves and the world, in a century where realist modes of art have been largely undermined,overthrown and replaced by endless engagements with the labyrinths of form.3 More than ever before we seekto impose on or find in the artist's life an order that we cannot attain either in art or our own lives. Atwoodgoes out of her way to deny such attempts. In doing so she is also vitally aware of the prevailing patriarchalcritical discourse about the woman writer, perceiving that this obsession with “the life,” to the neglect of thetext, may well intensify the long-standing “critical” idea that there is a necessary and determinant relationshipbetween the woman artist's experience and her creations. The male critic says that to know her life is to knowher work, and many female critics, feminist or otherwise, make sure he is not alone in this reductive andoppressive belief.

Meaghen Morris sees this as perhaps the most pervasive of the “big dichotomies” with which critics seem tofeel the urge to “interrogate” women's texts. She argues that

In earlier criticism, where the life-text relation was a simple and acceptable problematic, the“speciality” of women's writing in this respect was a question of degree and of performance.Today, with this problematic largely discarded, continuing to talk of women's writing in thoseterms almost amounts to an admission of belief in feminine sorcery.4

Feminists who have sought to give this conception a positive inversion have not fundamentally altered itsideological foundations. Both critic and artist must do more than move within the boundaries of this

51

discourse; Atwood has had the political and intellectual courage to try to move publicly beyond it, urging “thedevelopment of a vocabulary that can treat structures of words as though they are exactly that, not biologicalentities possessed of sexual organs.”5

Atwood's understanding of this biographical mode of criticism is acute. Sometimes it can lead to anunnecessary defensiveness and ambiguity, such as over the issue of feminism,6 yet her reluctance to commitherself publicly is understandable in the light of the rather absurd debate on the subject of her feminism orlack of it. On other occasions, though, it results in a delightful and deliberate ridicule of critical assumptions.She constantly urges us to separate the “I” of the text and herself. Her flexible narrative voice, which deniesthe possibility of one truth or one vision, is only one means by which our presuppositions are challenged. Inthe face of a widespread critical belief that the biographical element is the dominant one in women'sliterature,7 an Atwood text can contain the following passages (from “Giving Birth”), which are at least onestep ahead of those critics who are constantly bemoaning recent women's fiction as a glut of feministself-advertisement.8

This story about giving birth is not about me. In order to convince you of that I should tellyou what I did this morning, before I sat down at this desk.

(p. 240)

By this time you may be thinking that I've invented Jeannie in order to dissociate myself fromthese experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth.

(p. 245)

Atwood's indulgence in such self-conscious play as part of her comic mode has parallels in the work of,among others, Kenneth Burke9 and Michel Foucault,10 but like Foucault she is more concerned with a level ofdisruption and disorder deeper than the merely incongruous or humorous. Absurdity is one term Foucaultoffers for this level, which he sees as destroying “the and of the enumeration by making impossible the inwhere the things enumerated would be divided up.”11

What, briefly, are some of the implications of Atwood's unwillingness to be named? One reading of DancingGirls, her collection of short stories, could point to an absence in the text so overwhelming that it drawsattention to itself. Story after story operates outside conventional geographical space. We are given the barestclues as to where these various worlds may be situated. How are we to understand these works in terms ofAtwood as the passionate, articulate, and committed Canadian nationalist? Nationalism, while it works in verydifferent ways, has been locatable in much of Atwood's prior output.

Attention has been drawn elsewhere to her continuous mocking and undermining of would-be nationalists;12

in fact they are very often the most ludricrous and also sometimes most oppressive characters in the text. Yetmore importantly, Atwood seems consciously and/or unconsciously intent on excluding any content whichcould provide fuel for an unthinking reductionism: “Atwood the nationalist.” Perhaps she goes too far, butthen she has always been more concerned with psychic space and states of being than with the material world.For example, one critic has described the ending of “Polarities” as a surrealistic image of the land thatexpresses the emptiness of the central character's life.13 The land from which Morrison felt so excluded canonly reflect his utter sterility and irrelevancy:

In the corner of his eye the old women swelled, wavered, then seemed to disappear, and theland opened before him. It swept away to the north and he thought he could see themountains, white-covered, their crests glittering in the falling sun, then forest upon forest,after that the barren tundra and the blank solid rivers, and beyond, so far that the endless night

52

had already descended, the frozen sea.

(p. 69)

Morrison can be situated within the political and economic debates over Canadian nationalism. He is anAmerican academic recruited northwards by the lure of money and some undefined project of self-discovery,but these questions do not exercise Atwood. In fact once again “cheap nationalism” is the subject for attack inthis story (p. 59).

Two further points could be made about this absence. First, the characters that populate these texts are by andlarge extremely alienated, some of them well beyond any possibility of rebirth. The texts often tell us moreabout states of alienation, whether it be from the character's work, body, emotions, space or time, than aboutits causes. Nevertheless, many of them share a rootlessness, in some cases literally, in other instances as ageographical image of their own sense of unreality.

Secondly, Atwood continues to call for the term Canada to be more than a euphemism for an Americancolony, while seeming to believe increasingly that Canadian nationalism is a lost cause. Thus in a world of“Americans,” “Americanization” and economic and cultural imperialism, she psychically has no country, no“primary reality”14 to which she can orientate herself. So problematic has Canada become to Atwood that thetext can no longer articulate it.

If the question of Canada and its future is ever present both despite and as a result of its exclusion from thesetexts, then what is included in the texts is often undermined, as Atwood, particularly in the last story of thecollection, allows the text free reign in its de-construction tendencies. It could be argued that in “GivingBirth,” there is an homology between the spoken and the unspoken in the text, and between Jeannie and theunnamed woman, both of whom experience labour and birth. The text's construction inevitably proceedswithin the bounds of conventional discourse, putting aside or putting down the unexplainable and theunpleasant in whatever limited way it can.15

Thus language, muttering in its archaic tongues of something, yet one more thing, that needsto be renamed. It won't be by me, though. These are the only words I have, I'm stuck withthem, stuck with them.

(p. 239)

So too does Jeannie separate off from herself those aspects of birth which her well-intentioned, liberalconsciousness cannot come to terms with. Jeannie's imagination gives form to these repressed aspects in theimage of a working-class woman to whom birth represents no more than pain, oppression and monotony: “thehaggard face, the bloated torso, the kerchief holding back the too-sparse hair” (p. 245).

The homology of this separation with that which is within and that which is outside the boundaries oflinguistic discourse, and further the power relations that underpin it, can be clearly located in the followingtwo passages. Jeannie says of the other woman,

She too is pregnant. She is not going to the hospital to give birth, however, because the word,the words are too alien to her experience, the experience she is about to have, to be used aboutit at all.

(p. 244)

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Later we are told that “the word in English for unwanted intercourse is rape, but there is no word in thelanguage for what is about to happen to this woman” (p. 244). These split selves cannot begin to be reuniteduntil Jeannie's experience of birth radically undermines her deeply held belief structure, a structure groundedpartly in the language and ideology of fashionable birth manuals. Its apparent openness and flexibility isshown to be closed and rigid, sufficing only to alienate Jeannie from the realities of herself, the birth and herinterpersonal environment. “She realizes she has practised for the wrong thing, … she should have practisedfor this, whatever it is” (p. 250).

The text has held in suspension the question of “giving birth,” which it explored in its opening, and puts in itsplace a deceptive narrative that reveals the forces against which de-construction must struggle. “Jeannie is onher way to the hospital, to give birth, to be delivered. She is not quibbling over these terms” (p. 242). As herexpectations are challenged by experience, so these terms once again become problematic. “This finally, is thedisappearance of language.”

Thus the ending of the text throws open even further the discursive fields Jeannie has been forced to begin tobe aware of. It offers a stunning metaphor of this initial awareness but more powerfully still of thede-constructive project.

All she can see from the window is a building. It's an old stone building, heavy and Victorian,with a copper roof oxidized to green. It's solid, hard, darkened by soot, dour, leaden. But asshe looks at this building, so old and seemingly immutable, she sees that it's made of water.Water and some tenuous jellylike substance. Light flows through it from behind … thebuilding is so thin, so fragile, that it quivers in the slight dawn wind. Jeannie sees that if thebuilding is this way (a touch could destroy it, a ripple of the earth, why has no one noticed,guarded it against accidents?) then the rest of the world must be like this too, the entire earth,the rocks, people, trees.

(p. 253)

Notes

“Polarities,” in Dancing Girls (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977). All further references toMargaret Atwood's short stories will be to this edition and will be incorporated in the text.

1.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), p. xviii.2. For a tentative, plausible, if overly simple explanation of this historical process from a Marxistperspective, see Terry Eagleton, “Aesthetics and Politics,” New Left Review, No. 107 (1978), p. 24.

3.

Meaghen Morris, “Aspects of Current French Feminist Literary Criticism,” Hecate, 5, No. 2 (1979),70.

4.

“Paradoxes and Dilemmas: The Woman as Writer,” in Women in the Canadian Mosaic, ed. G.Matheson (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1976), p. 266.

5.

Atwood's hedging on this difficult question is evidenced in her interview with Linda Sandler. See theMalahat Review, 41 (1977), 24.

6.

For one instance of this belief see Patricia Spacks, The Female Imagination (London: George Allenand Unwin, 1972), p. 5.

7.

A not uncommon complaint from the New York Review of Books.8. Kenneth Burke, Perspectives by Incongruity, ed. S. Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1964).

9.

See in particular John K. Simon, “A Conversation with Michel Foucault,” Partisan Review, 38, No. 2(1971), 201.

10.

Foucault, p. xvii.11.

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As one critic among others to make this point, see Karl Miller, “Orphans and Oracles: What ClaraKnew,” New York Review of Books, 26 Sept. 1976, p. 32.

12.

P.R. Bilan, “Fiction,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 47 (1978), 331.13. This phrase was used by Margaret Atwood in an interview. See Meanjin, 37 (1978), 195.14. Consider for instance this passage: “Vitamized, conscientious, well-read Jeannie, who has managed toavoid morning sickness, varicose veins, stretch marks, toxemia and depression, who has had noaberrations of appetite, no blurring of vision—why is she followed, then, by this other?” (p. 245).

15.

Criticism: Lee Briscoe Thompson (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: “Minuets and Madness: Margaret Atwood's ‘Dancing Girls,’” in The Art of Margaret Atwood:Essays in Criticism, edited by Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson, Anansi, 1981, pp. 107–22.

[In the following essay, Thompson offers a detailed survey of the stories in Dancing Girls.]

Two-headed poems; polarities, mythic reversals: it may be from Margaret Atwood's own delight inoppositions and strong contradictions that critics often take their cue. One notices, at any rate, a tendency forcommentators to deplore or dwell exclusively upon the clinical chill, the frightening detachment in Atwood'spoetry, at the same time as they often criticize her fiction, particularly The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, asshallow, flippant, frivolous, with silly protagonists, in a phrase, “not the essential Atwood.”1 The poetry isseen as cold, strange, mythical, ritualistic, while the prose is considered comparatively warm, full of commontouches and ordinary bumblers; one intense and austere, the other almost frothy, rambling, diffused; onehumourless, the other marked by considerable (to some tastes, too much) humour. This polarized view, whilerarely pushed and almost always obliged to ignore Surfacing or term it a “poetic novel,” implies aschizophrenia, a two-headedness of the poet, two separate and distinct psyches joined only at the body levelfor the mechanical purposes of writing and never overlapping territories.

For this interpretation there is reinforcement in Atwood's own analysis of her endeavours in verse and fiction.Interviewed for The New York Times (May 21, 1978) by novelist Joyce Carol Oates, Atwood was remindedthat “You work with a number of different ‘voices’ in your poetry and prose” and asked, “Have you ever feltthat the discipline of prose evokes a somewhat different ‘personality’ (or consciousness) than the discipline ofpoetry?” Atwood replied, “Not just a ‘somewhat different’ personality, an almost totally different one.Though readers and critics, of course, make connections because the same name appears on these differentforms, I'd make a bet that I could invent a pseudonym for a reviewer and that no one would guess it was me.”She explained, further, that “Poetry is the most joyful form, and prose fiction—the personality I feel there is acurious, often bemused, sometimes disheartened observer of society.” The appended remark, like a T.S. Eliotfootnote, raises more questions than it answers. Poetry joyful? She must mean in its tight, rich creation, itssoarings and plunges, its sophisticated levels of “naming.” And the narrators of many of her fictions areindeed puzzled, uncertain, frequently demoralized. In this they stand contrasted to the assured tone of some ofher poetic personae. But to argue that a reader is prompted to connect the fiction and poetry solely by theappearance of Atwood's name on both is to overlook or pay insufficient attention to importantly congruentelements which unify the genres. In so saying, Atwood underrates the organic quality of her writing.

A single case in point is the incidence of humour in Atwood. It is conceded by all but the grumpiest to be asignificant force in her fiction. One thinks of the hilarious passage in Edible Woman when Marion sulkilyretreats beneath the bed/chesterfield, realizes that her absence has gone unnoticed, but cannot then devise agraceful way to emerge from the dustballs. Or there's the memorable contemplation of how to smuggleAinsley's lover out past the watchful landlady. Lady Oracle offers, among many other gems, the brilliant coupof “Bravo, Mothball,” the passionate advances to obese Joan of the Italian restauranteur, the tender humour ofher encounter with the Daffodil Man. It is admittedly more difficult to cite hilarities in the poetry, except of a

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sardonic turn. But the task becomes easier in the perspective of Atwood's article, “What's so funny? Notes onCanadian Humour.”2 She there distinguishes among British humour (based largely on class consciousness),U.S. humour (based on the tall tale, the confidence trick, and highly competitive and individualistic ratherthan “proper” British behaviour), and Canadian humour. Atwood unites the parody of Sarah Binks, the satireof The Incomparable Atuk, the genial humour of Sunshine Sketches, and Newfie jokes under the commonheading of “concealed self-deprecation”. Given the latitude of that definition, no side-splitters emerge,perhaps, but recognition is given to the comic talent of such funny passages as:

I tightened my lips; knew that Englandwas now unreachable; had sunk down into the seawithout ever teaching me about washtubs

(“First Neighbours,” JSM)

or

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island.I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

(“Circe/Mud Poems,” YAH)

or the entire poem “They Eat Out,” where

the ceiling opensa voice sings Love Is A ManySplendoured Thingyou hang suspended above the cityin blue tights and a red cape,your eyes flashing in unison.The other diners regard yousome with awe, some only with boredom:they cannot decide if you are a new weaponor only a new advertisement.As for me, I continue eating;I liked you better the way you were,but you were always ambitious.

(PP)

Concession to the comic doesn't blunt the terrors and exorcisms of much of Atwood's poetry; it simplyacknowledges a major aspect often buried in assessments of her as an ice princess with a gorgon touch.

What is perhaps even more useful is the way such a reevaluation of the “humourlessness” of the poetrystimulates a reviewing of the humour in the fiction. Almost at once one begins to detect the darker side, thealienation and essential isolation of Marian, the willful manipulation by Ainsley, the humiliation of Mothballthrough the perverted values of Miss Flegg, the pathetic loneliness of the Daffodil Man and the disastrousconfusion of rescuer and villain in Joan's Gothicism-fuddled mind. Comedy slides into tragedy, minuets intomadness, as they invariably do in the best of literature, and the categories of literary analysts fall into disarray.

Nevertheless Atwood's idea of two voices has a superficial validity, in that pulse readings of Lady Oracle,Edible Woman, and many of Atwood's short pieces undeniably detect a somewhat sunnier, more ‘ordinary’approach to the universe than the bulk of Atwood's poetry. John Metcalf has pointed to the short story as theliterary form closest to poetry by virtue of its intensity, brevity, and striving for a single effect. Assuming thatis correct, one could then regard Atwood's short fiction, specifically her 1977 volume, Dancing Girls, as a

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visible bridge between the dominant ‘voices’ of her poetry and her long fiction. There are bemused fictivenarrators, it is true, but there are also the characteristics of the poetry, especially the madness, the heightenedconsciousness, the mythic elements. Rather than speak in a voice utterly different from that of her verse, theshort stories share the non-rational attributes of the poetry, and mingle the qualities of the mundane (minuets)and the poetic/mythic (madness) which have been misrepresented by some as exclusive to prose and poetryrespectively.

The fourteen stories which appear in the Canadian version of Dancing Girls (an American version isapparently in the works) are resistant to glib systematization in that their original, individual publication spansfourteen years, from 1964 through 1977. Let us for convenience retain the loose terms “minuet” and“madness” to refer to the headsets which Atwood has suggested dominate her writing of prose and poetry.One is inclined to set in the “minuets” category: “The War in the Bathroom,” “The Man from Mars,” “RapeFantasies,” “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” “Hair Jewellery,” “Training,” “Lives of the Poets,” “TheResplendent Quetzal,” “Dancing Girls,” and perhaps “A Travel Piece” and “Giving Birth.” Eleven out offourteen: only “Polarities,” “When It Happens,” and “Under Glass” seem to commit themselves totally andimmediately to the world of madness, in the dance metaphor a “danse macabre.” Under examination,however, one finds that even these categories within categories, these voices within a genre, fluctuate andtransform themselves. In the work of a lover of metamorphoses, surely this is to be expected.

“The War in the Bathroom” is a week in the life of a typical Atwood character—rootless, alienated,meticulous, relentlessly self-analytic, keeping madness at bay only by a series of rituals and inventories. Usingthe first person narration throughout, the story presents a deliberately ambiguous relationship between thenarrator and the “she” whose slightest movements are described. Is it a mind-body split we are overhearing? Aspontaneous, self-indulgent persona fused with a disciplined, self-denying persona? The reader rummages forsignals among the domestic details, the small joys and sorrows, coming up with only indirect evidence of time(modern, with supermarkets, fridges, apartments, and current products) and place (somewhere NorthAmerican, far enough north to have snow) and no concrete bearings on the situation. But the narrator is notdoing much better than the reader, carefully cataloguing everything to achieve the illusion of control. Theminuet is reinforced by small standards (“I draw the line at margarine”), the madness by paranoia (suspicionsof a check-out girl, of the German woman). The unsettling duality on the narrator's side of the apartment wallbecomes echoed on Tuesday, the second day of the ‘diary,’ by the emergence of two voices in the next-doorcommunal bathroom, one high and querulous, the other an urgent whisper, like daylight and nighttime selves.The narrator assumes that it is one person rather more swiftly than even the hearing of single footsteps wouldexplain; this encourages the reader to notice that the puzzling and parallel “I-she” split is clarifying along linesof “she” doing all the physical action and “I” doing all the cerebral action and direction. “Perhaps she is aforeigner,” the narrator guesses of the dual voices by Friday, forging yet another link between Atwood'spoetry and fiction. On all fronts, one is a stranger confronted by foreigners, an alien subtly warring withaliens.

Actually the major war in this story focusses not on the enigmatic voices (whose secret is resolved before theweek is up) but on a consumptive old man, a fellow tenant of the apartment block. The narrator takes anexcessive and cruel dislike to him on account of his compulsively regular schedule in the bathroom,despite—possibly because of—her (?) own compulsiveness. (One is tempted to comparisons with such poemsas “Roominghouse, Winter” and must fight the impulse to wander into a lengthy digression on bathrooms inAtwood's work.) The story concludes on the same terms as almost all of Atwood's poetry and fiction, the viewof life as a series of small, uncertain battles on the fringe of madness: “For the time being I have won.”

“The Man from Mars” presents a mother and daughter team much like the one in Lady Oracle: a fragile,dainty mom trying to manipulate a King Kong daughter. And like the fat Joan in Lady Oracle, Christine fits adominant pattern of Atwoodian women: manless, acutely self-aware, inclined to animal imagery in herdescription of herself and others, making a wry, running commentary upon life in general and in particular.

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The narrator, while in the third person, concentrates on Christine's point of view. And the gothic combinationsof pursuit, flight, and terror which play such large parts in Lady Oracle, Surfacing, and some of the poetryturn up here as the centre both hilarious and horrible of the story.

The title is a tip-off to the transitional quality of the tale: the foreigner again, here explicitly identified as aboutas alien as the common stock of metaphors permits: a Martian, a creature from other worlds. With that startingpoint, the movement of the story is rhythmic: the less-than-attractive Christine, whose life is so dull that shedreads the end of the school year; the slide into a magic, slightly mad phase, as she is mysteriously, hotlypursued by the “person from another culture”; the escalation of mystery into nightmare as she begins to broodover blood-drenched visions of assault and murder. The recession into mediocrity, the removal of theMartian/mystery/madness, finds Christine remembering her now romanticized pursuer and, when he isproclaimed “nuts,” countering defensively that there is “more than one way of being sane.” Graduation withmediocre grades is followed by a tolerable career and an adequate little life. Near the conclusion theVietnamese conflict makes for a flickering revival of exoticism and Christine finds “the distant countrybecoming almost more familiar to her than her own” (a characteristic Atwood reversal). Predictably, however,the mood threatens again to become madness (shades of the poem “It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers”); thenew nightmare visions provoke a deliberate retreat into the mundane, out of graphic modern television intogenteel nineteenth-century novels and a carefully nondescript, domesticated final view. A certain control hasbeen regained but only to the tenuous degree familiar throughout Atwood's writings.

The title story, “Dancing Girls,” autobiographically set in the United States in the 1960s with a female gradstudent protagonist from Toronto, aligns itself with “The Wars in the Bathroom” in its boarding-housecheapness and with “The Man from Mars” in Ann's “encountering” another alien male, an Arab neighbour.Ann and her landlady, while staunchly defending the prosaic side of life, are acutely aware of and fascinatedby the exotic and alien: Turkish Lelah with her gypsy earrings and gold tooth, the tattooed Arab with his noisypartying, dancing girls, and vacuumed-up dirt. Indeed, these polarities give Atwood a chance to voice thechagrin Canadians so often feel at the American view that “You're not, like, foreign.” Parallel to theparadoxical approach-avoidance Atwood's characters experience regarding Gothic pursuers is the web ofcontradictory responses concerning aliens and alienation. One wants, simply, to be different—but not toodifferent; the balance is rarely managed; hence the metaphor of the dance. And in a deft pirouette, Atwoodcasts the sober landlady and her sort as “cold, mad people” in the eyes of the amazed, terrified, and pursuedalien. A wistful conclusion underscores the longing of so many of Atwood's creatures, from pioneer tohigh-rise dweller, for escape, for gentle, green spaces, for a world where human contact is no longer measuredout in razors in the bathroom or hair in the drain.

Four of the short stories in this collection concentrate on late stages of what Chaucer called the “olde daunce,”the minuet between the sexes, and one finds again polarities of vulnerability and insensitivity, control andchaos, humour and rage. The war dance is cast, typically for this writer, as trivial guerilla warfare rather thanovert bloodshed: surface minuet and subliminal massacre; it is this observance of the properties, this stayingmiserably within the rules of the dance floor, that gives the impact of a particularly Canadian truth.

“The Grave of the Famous Poet” and “Hair Jewellery” speak through the predominant Atwood voice, firstperson very singular female. “The Grave of the Famous Poet” involves the imminent split-up with an as-usualnameless “him.” There is an emphasis on alienation, contrasted with the man and woman's joint purpose of aliterary pilgrimage in England. The story ties itself closely to Atwood's poetry in its clinical tone, its emphasison victimhood, emotional paralysis, traps and helplessness. “Hair Jewellery,” dealing with similarcircumstances, handles it somewhat differently. The diction is more formal, its self-consciousness thetrademark of the literary academic (Atwood and her character), the analysis and delivery more amusing.Speaking of her preference for the safety of unrequired love, the narrator explains to her lover of long ago:

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If, as had happened several times, my love was requited, if it became a question of the future,of making a decision that would lead inevitably to the sound of one's beloved shaving with anelectric razor while one scraped congealed egg from his breakfast plate, I was filled withpanic. … What Psyche saw with the candle was not a god with wings but a pigeon-chestedyouth with pimples, and that's why it took her so long to win her way back to true love. It iseasier to love a daemon than a man, though less heroic.

You were, of course, the perfect object. No banal shadow of lawnmowers and bungalowslurked in your melancholy eyes, opaque as black marble, recondite as urns, you coughed likeRoderick Usher, you were, in your own eyes and therefore in mine, doomed and restless asDracula. Why is it that dolefulness and a sense of futility are so irresistible to young women?

She fluctuates, as we have seen elsewhere, between the mundane world of Filene's bargain basement and theGothic horrors of such moments as the boyfriend's hand on her throat and announcement that he is the BostonStrangler. But in this story, the sequel to terror is regularly ironic humour and then wistful, romanticmelancholy, a posture with implicit self-mockery. One realizes at the last the appropriateness of the title “HairJewellery”—memorial jewellery made from the hair of the dear departed—for the story presents just suchdusty, obsolete, romantic kitsch, with all the right macabre undertones.

“The Resplendent Quetzal” carries on the basically humane tone of “Hair Jewellery,” but offers this time a bitof insight into both dance partners' steps. The story makes use of dramatic, mythic, poetic effects from thevery first line: “Sarah was sitting near the edge of the sacrificial well.” However, Atwoodian reductio operatesthroughout; here, “Sarah thought there might be some point to being a sacrificial victim if the well were nicer,but you would never get her to jump into a muddy hole like that.” Her husband, Edward, exhibits the samevacillation between fantasies of the mythic past and glum realization of modern mediocrity; his vision ofhimself, “in the feathered costume of the high priest, sprinkl[ing] her with blood drawn with thorns from hisown tongue and penis,” becomes debased to a Grade Six special project with scale models of the temples,slides, canned tortillas and tamales. Atwood tells of an abrupt reversal of roles near the end. Yet, even in theintense scene of ritual sacrifice of the doll baby, practical Sarah has noted wrinkles in her skirt and thelikelihood of more flea bites. A moment of potential reconciliation or at least the introduction of strangersarises:

Sarah took her hands away from her face, and as she did so Edward felt cold fear. Surely whathe would see would be the face of someone else, someone entirely different, a woman he hadnever seen before in his life. Or there would be no face at all. But (and this was almost worse)it was only Sarah, looking much as she always did.

The still point at the centre of the dance between the mundane and the mad has been reached again.

The fourth of the stories about deteriorated romance is “The Lives of the Poets,” which opens with Juliaspeaking but, as she realizes her lack of control, shifts quickly into third person. Starting with the indignitiesof an actual, boring nosebleed, the tale alternates complexly through relationships not only between lovers butalso between a person and his environment, a writer and his audience, words and the mind, reality andmetaphor, before coming to a closing drenched in symbolic blood. In the midst of increasing emotional pain,Julia humorously anatomizes the small idiocies of the visiting poet's lot. Once more Atwood's conclusioncombines the self-deprecating wit of an edible woman with the raging, apocalyptic visions of many of herpoetic personae:

They park the virtuous car and she is led by the two young men into the auditorium, greycinderblock, where a gathering of polite faces waits to hear the word. Hands will clap, thingswill be said about her, nothing astonishing, she is supposed to be good for them, they must

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open their mouths and take her in, like vitamins, like bland medicine. No. No sweet identity,she will clench herself against it. She will step across the stage, words coiled, she will openher mouth and the room will explode in blood.

The story which best fits the critical stereotype of Atwood's “bubbleheaded ladies' magazine fiction” (vs. her“serious poetry”) is probably “Rape Fantasies.” Agreed, its lower-middle-class diction, full of babbling asidesand slang, is far removed from the fine intuitions of the Power Politics voices. And the subject matter, thedynamics of a female office/lunch room and the “girls'” revelations of their extremely unimaginative rapefantasies, hardly seems in the same league as the mythic patterns of You Are Happy or the multiple metaphorsof The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Nevertheless, when the intellectual snobberies are put aside (andappropriately so, since that is one of Atwood's satiric targets here), the narrator does demonstrate an admirablesense of humour, appreciation of the ridiculous, and considerable compassion. For once in Atwood the cuttingedge seems thoroughly dulled by the sheer zaniness of the monologue.

One imaginary rapist is “absolutely covered in pimples. So he gets me pinned against the wall, he's short buthe's heavy, and he starts to undo himself and the zipper gets stuck. I mean, one of the most significantmoments in a girl's life, it's almost like getting married or having a baby or something, and he sticks thezipper.” She ends up drawing him out and referring him to a dermatologist. In another incarnation, she and therapist are both slowed down by ferocious headcolds, which make the would-be assault “like raping a bottle ofLePage's mucilage the way my nose is running.” The cheerful remedy here is conversation, Neo-Citran andScotch, plus the Late Show on the tube. “I mean, they aren't all sex maniacs, the rest of the time they mustlead a normal life. I figure they enjoy watching the Late Show just like anybody else.” As the reader isintroduced to these and other alternatives, it becomes apparent that the naïve narrator's innocent premise is thepower of the word. “Like, how could a fellow do that to a person he's just had a long conversation with, onceyou let them know you're human, you have a life too, I don't see how they could go ahead with it, right?” Thatwe see so easily the flaws in this simplistic and determined optimism serves to underscore a subtlecounterpoint Atwood strikes throughout her writing—the actually severe limitations of language, and thedoubtfulness of real communication. The sunny normalcy of this lady's world view glosses over a chaoticrealm even she must tentatively acknowledge: “I mean, I know [rape] happens but I just don't understand it,that's the part I really don't understand.”

What is also noteworthy is that this story explicitly draws men into the circle of victimhood that Atwood tendsto populate with women. Rapists, yes, but failed rapists; they are betrayed by their jammed flies, their sinuses,their gullibility, their pimples, their inadequacies. And one sees that the filing clerk's rape fantasies areactually scenarios of kinship, friendship with and support of other mediocre, in fact worse-off, human beings.

“A Travel Piece” also operates in a chatty, colloquial (here third-person) voice, with a heavy measure (evenfor Atwood) of run-on sentences and comma splices presumably bespeaking a slightly mindless protagonistskimming on the surface of life. The story is less successful than “Rape Fantasies” in that we, like Annette,never quite penetrate to the reality of her being. But the juxtaposition of her everlasting calm/numbness withthe increasingly dramatic events has a definitely surreal power, and demonstrates ably Atwood's skill atcombining minuets and madness, the mundane and the bizarre. Drifting in a life raft after a plane crash,surrounded by masks and bloody markings which it is increasingly hard to remember are merely plasticsandwich trays and lipstick donned for protection against the sun,

Annette feels she is about to witness something mundane and horrible, doubly so because itwill be bathed not in sinister blood-red lighting but in the ordinary sunlight she has walked inall her life … she is … stuck in the present, with four Martians and one madman, waiting forher to say something.

Annette's predicament, in Atwood's work, is not all that unusual.

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“Training” too concerns itself with emotional paralysis and human inadequacies, but here the reader becomesfar more involved. The story centres on the unorthodox relationship of a healthy teenaged boy and anine-year-old cerebral palsy victim confined to a wheelchair. Jordan's cages are explicit: the uncontrolledbody, the “metal net” of machinery upon which she must depend; “that mind trapped and strangling.” Rob'sare subtler: his overachieving medical family and their and everyone else's expectations for him; feeling the“bumbling third son in a fairy tale, with no princess and no good luck.” Superficial antitheses are set up—the“crips” or the “spazzes” vs. the “norms.” Then the distinctions are gradually demolished. Rob feels abnormalregarding his sexuality; the possibility of the healthy person failing to cope with reality introduces madness(“Real life would be too much for him, he would not be able to take it. … He would go crazy. He would runout into the snow with no galoshes, he would vanish, he would be lost forever.”) And steady-eyed Jordan,meanwhile, comes to represent the honest, psychologically whole person. In the grotesqueries of thecompelling conclusion, the polarized worlds are poignantly united in the “danse macabre”: the wheelchairsquare dancers “danced like comic robots. They danced like him.”

“Giving Birth,” which with “Training” and “Dancing Girls” comprise the only previously unpublishedmaterial in the collection, has been taken by some critics as autobiographical evidence of a mellowing of theformidable Atwood as a result of motherhood. In fact, one reviewer has summarized the story as “goodreading for many parents, past or prospective;”3 another, less pleased, considers it “a mass magazine approachto a lesson in childbirth, tinged, of course, with female chauvinist irony.”4 Sniffs a third, it will have appealonly for those who have “been there.”5

Certainly the story is a detailed account of one birthing experience, told with Atwood's remarkable clarity andprecision and having some fun with prenatal classes and maternity fads. It is also correct to say that mostreaders will notice a warmth and positivity, a wholeness, that is very scarce in Atwood's writings. Nor is themale figure here a nebbish; both the narrator's mate and the pregnant woman's companion, “A.,” aresupportive, helpful, reasonable, in no way threatening. But Atwood's concerns in the collection have not beenabandoned in this, the last story. Split and multiple personalities have appeared elsewhere, and in “GivingBirth” one has not only the complications of the narrator differentiating herself from but obviously in somerespects coinciding with Jeannie, but also the fluctuating presence of Jeannie's mysterious brown alter ego.There is “pain and terror” as well, an undercurrent of fear, a consideration of death, the need for talismansagainst the Evil Eye, cages of conventional thought, descent into a “dark place,” the “tubular strangeapparatus like a science fiction movie,” the screams. “‘You see, there was nothing to be afraid of,’ A. saysbefore he leaves [after the birth], but he was wrong.”

Most important, “Giving Birth” tackles yet again Atwood's intense interest in the relationship betweenlanguage and the body. The story opens with contemplation upon the title phrase and its true meaning.Numerous explanations are discarded; “Thus language muttering in its archaic tongues of something, yet onemore thing, that needs to be re-named.” The narrator abandons that struggle for the moment, but almost atonce resumes it in the form of naming the universe with her child—dog, cat, bluejays, goldfinches, winter.The young daughter “puts her fingers on my lips as I pronounce these words; she hasn't yet learned the secretof making them, I am waiting for her first word; surely it will be miraculous, something that has never yetbeen said. But if so, perhaps she's already said it and I, in my entrapment, my addiction to the usual, have notheard it.” This compares remarkably closely with the considerations of several selections in the recentTwo-Headed Poems, but also traces its lineage to pieces from The Journals of Susanna Moodie, PowerPolitics, The Animals in That Country, and Circle Game. The struggle of birth gives the relationship betweenflesh and the word a focus, but offers no answers: “indescribable, events of the body … ; why should the minddistress itself trying to find a language for them?” When, in the middle of a contraction, a nurse speaks ofpain, “What pain? Jeannie thinks. When there is no pain she feels nothing, when there is pain, she feelsnothing because there is no she. This, finally, is the disappearance of language.” In a surreal postpartumillusion Jeannie sees the watery fragility of a solid building and is overwhelmed by the enormity of hermaternal perception that “the entire earth, the rocks, people, trees, everything needs to be protected, cared for,

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tended.” But that technically mad anxiety is counterbalanced by the normalcy of her baby, “solid, substantial,packed together like an apple. Jeannie examines her, she is complete, and in the days that follow Jeannieherself becomes drifted over with new words, her hair slowly darkens, she ceases to be what she was and isreplaced, gradually, by someone else.” As with Rob in “Training,” too much “reality” might have drivenJeannie permanently insane; protective metamorphosis is a necessity.

The justice of this view is demonstrated by a look at the three short stories one may clearly designate as talesof madness rather than mundane minuets: “Polarities,” “Under Glass,” and “When It Happens.” Leastsuccessfully realized of the three (and arguably of the entire collection), “When It Happens” anticipates theapocalypse with an unruffled certainty and overlay of domestic chores which serves to heighten theatmosphere of insanity. Agreed, the characters, Mrs. Burridge and her husband Frank, are too cardboard andplodding to infuse the contrast of the mundane and the mad (personal and global) with real terror. But theclosing intimation of bloody destruction, restrainedly expressed as “the burst of red,” juxtaposed with Mrs.Burridge's final housewifely gesture of adding cheese to the shopping list, does play its part in the cumulativeeffect of Dancing Girls.

From the first semi-insane paragraph of “Under Glass,” it is clear that this female narrator is holding herselfand her universe together with only the flimsiest of threads. She notes with satisfaction that, on this good day,“the trees come solidly up through the earth as though they belong there, nothing wavers. I have confidence inthe grass and the distant buildings, they can take care of themselves. …” Her identification with the plantworld is intimate, speaking as she does from the start of “all of us [greenhouse plants and the narrator]keeping quite still.” “Today, however … I walk on two legs, I wear clothes,” she explains, making adistinction between the human and the natural very near to that of the Surfacing narrator. Similarly, it isabundantly clear where her real allegiances lie, how strained her human “affiliation.”

As in “When It Happens,” the narrator of “Under Glass” maintains an impeccably “normal” surface and aderanged interior. The story moves quickly from her vegetarian fantasies into her relationship with a man, thedescription of which dazzles with its authenticity and all the fancy footwork of the sexual dance. A favourite:“I'm annoyed with him for some reason, though I can't recall which. I thumb through my card-file of nastyremarks, choose one: You make love like a cowboy raping a sheep.” And closer to the bone: “I steer mycourse so he will have to go through all the puddles. If I can't win, I tell him, neither can you. I was saner then,I had defences.”

From contemplation of self as “something altogether different, an artichoke” through her abruptself-admonition, “None of that,” to moving a moment later “about the room in a parody of domesticity,” thenarrator dances among animal, vegetable, and human incarnations. References abound to animals in zoos,“under glass,” hunted, huddled, hiding. Her death fantasy is crazily followed by visions of ducks and a line ofcartoon dancing mice. Angered, she uses animal and plant images, serene and “doing nothing,” to get a gripon her rage. Estranged from her lover, she feels “bloodless as a mushroom,” finds “he's too human.” Turningher metaphoric tables when she wants a reconciliation with him, she sees her lover's face as “a paper flowerdropped in water,” spreading tendrils, becoming “inscrutable as an eggplant.” The couple appear to have madeup their differences by the conclusion of the story but Atwood inexorably slows the action from the normal,mundane pace of the purposefully departing narrator (“I ponder again his need for more glasses and considerbuying him a large bath towel”) to the motionless, insane world under glass, the dream of no more dancing,the longing for annihilation or zerodom:

I find myself being moved, gradually, station by station, back towards the 7-B greenhouse.Soon I will be there: inside are the plants that have taught themselves to look like stones. Ithink of them; they grow silently, hiding in dry soil, minor events, little zeros, containingnothing but themselves; no food value, to the eye soothing and round, then suddenly nowhere.I wonder how long it takes, how they do it.

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“Polarities” is the story whose titular metaphor competes most strongly with dance for control of the entirecollection. It begins with an excerpt from a Margaret Avison poem which complements the other Margaret'ssurvival ethic of “beyond truth, tenacity”:

Gentle and just pleasureIt is, being human, to have won from space This unchill, habitable interior. …

(“New Year's Poem”)

The obvious introductory contrast is between no-nonsense, brisk Louise and shambling, slothful Morrison, afalse effect the omniscient narrator begins reversing almost immediately. Louise's progression into completemadness is handled in slyly paradoxical fashion, for her vision of Blakean wholeness looks remarkablyreasonable, a sort of metropolitan yin and yang, in comparison with those “sane” friends who eagerly tuck heraway in the loony bin and violate her privacy. Like the aphorisms and short poems in her notebooks, “whichwere thoroughly sane in themselves but which taken together were not,” Louise's understanding is frequentlyperfect, as in her fine assessment of Morrison, even when her total picture is askew. “Morrison is not acomplete person. He needs to be completed, he refuses to admit his body is part of his mind. He can be in thecircle possibly, but only if he will surrender his role as a fragment and show himself willing to merge with thegreater whole.” Morrison, rather impressive in his awareness and swift comprehension, interprets Louisecorrectly in turn: “she's taken as real what the rest of us pretend is only metaphorical.”

All these polarities, then: of wholeness and partiality, exposure and retreat, the mind-body split,interchangeable madness and sanity, energy and the inert, decorating apartments and facing the void, zoos andasylums, living colour and glacial whiteness, chosen and involuntary isolation, inclusion and exclusion, thedream of the “unchill, habitable interior” and the reality of Morrison's “chill interior, embryonic andblighted.” Morrison, the American, the actual and metaphoric outsider, can understand but not change; thereader's position, Atwood suggests by the act of writing, is less bleak.

Travels through these tales make quite unworkable the Atwoodian notion that her poetry and fiction areexpressed in two entirely different, stylistically unrelated, philosophically dissimilar voices. Two voices thereare, and more, but they are found throughout her work and come from a remarkably unified consciousness. Itmay be that Atwood's theory is subtly related to her own two public faces: mythic Margaret, the fox-woman,laconic even at readings, reserved, cool, detached, distant, vs. earth-mother Maggie on the farm, folksilyrecommending Aussie french fries and chatting about Jess's cute tricks. Behind the promotional masks,however, Atwood seems to have no confusion about who she is, and reading her stories and poems, heraudience has no doubt about the quality of her dance. Proceeding from a single, powerful sensibility, DancingGirls is a virtuoso performance.

Notes

R.P. Bilan, “Letters in Canada 1977: Fiction,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 47 (Summer 1978),329–331.

1.

M. Atwood, “What's so funny? Notes on Canadian Humour,” This Magazine, 8, no. 3(August-September 1974), 24–27.

2.

Lawrence Fast, “Tripping the Light Fantastic,” Vancouver Sun, September 16, 1977, p. 33L.3. Keith Garebian, “Mediocre clichés from Atwood,” Montreal Star, March 4, 1978, p. D3.4. Sharon Nicoll, “Pirouettes and Falls,” Branching Out, 5, no. 1 (1978), 44–45.5.

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Criticism: Frank Davey (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: “The Short Stories,” in Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics, Talonbooks, 1984, pp. 128–52.

[In the following essay, Davey discusses recurring themes in Atwood's short fiction.]

1. ICONIC PROSE

Atwood's short fiction contains some of her most successful prose outside Life Before Man and the prosepoems of Murder in the Dark. For Atwood, the short story always has the iconic potential of poetry—to beoblique and enigmatic, to be a language structure of intrinsic attraction rather than one dependent on theaction it narrates. It has the potential, in short, to act in the implicit way of ‘female’ language rather than in theexplicit way of the male.

The brevity of the short story makes it a difficult form in which to tell a ‘complete’ story such as that of acharacter who undergoes instructive change. Unlike Atwood's four comic novels, most of her stories endinconclusively, with the characters gaining not changed lives but, at best, increased self-knowledge. Thenarrator of “Under Glass” gains strengthened awareness of her neurotic attachment to the world of plants;Christine in “The Man from Mars” comes to see only the emptiness of her life. The brevity of the short storyalso makes it particularly suitable to the use of symbols. But while in Atwood's novels characters have anopportunity to consciously interpret these symbols, and to attempt to act upon the interpretations, in thebriefer form the characters usually apprehend symbols intuitively, and absorb the intuitions almost passively.For many characters—Morrison in “Polarities” confronting the “barren tundra and blank northern rivers” ofAlberta, Will in “Spring Song of the Frogs” hearing the frogs' “thin and ill” sound (BE 180), Yvonne in “TheSunrise” standing in the “chilly and thin” light of a Toronto dawn (BE 265), or Sarah in “The ResplendentQuetzal” standing by the Aztec well of Chichen Itza—the symbol they have glimpsed seems to declare afateful summary of their lives; rather than leading them to action and decision, like the symbolism ofSurfacing leads its main character, the symbolism moves them toward acquiescence and stoicism.

Throughout Dancing Girls and Bluebeard's Egg, symbolism dwarfs plot; central symbols like the chemicalgarden of “The Salt Garden,” the blood-stained egg of “Bluebeard's Egg,” the greenhouse of “Under Glass,”the gothic crypt of “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” resonate throughout the narrative; characters respond lessto each other's actions than to the symbols which impinge upon them. In many of the stories of Bluebeard'sEgg, Atwood further diminishes sequential narration by constructing the stories in short modules of discreteincident; the story grows by repetition and accumulation of image and symbol rather than by linear narration.The modules resemble the seemingly disconnected stanzas of her poetry; like these stanzas they could bearranged into other sequences without significantly changing the whole.

Some of the most powerful stories of Bluebeard's Egg—“Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother,”“Bluebeard's Egg,” “The Sunrise,” “Unearthing Suite”—possess this oblique, discontinuous structure. Noneof these stories have a meaningful chain of narrative event; “Significant Moments” and “Unearthing Suite,”the opening and closing stories of the collection, both portray their central characters by the juxtaposition ofseparate anecdotes and the foregrounding within these anecdotes of an identifiable pattern of recurrentsymbolism. The characters in all four stories are the same at the end as at the beginning; they have beenintensely illuminated for us, however, by Atwood's isolation of their characteristic actions—Sally's repeatedtrivialization of her own person in “Bluebeard's Egg,” Yvonne's compulsively segmented life of routinized artand one-day friendships in “Sunrise.”

2. DANCING GIRLS

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The first information we receive in Dancing Girls is carried by its paradigmatic title—not girls who dance butdancing girls. These women are not silhouettes on beer glasses, or on the stages of cabarets and lounges. Theyare the other female performers, filling social roles they have stumbled into—housewife, journalist, younglady poet, botanist, Blake scholar.

The emphasis of the stories of Dancing Girls falls on the gap between the usual and the unusual, between thesuperficial veneer of social behaviour which convention, gentility, and propriety provide, and that ‘female’underworld of violence, obsession, and jealousy that rages below. The sudden revelation in the stories of thehorrific beneath the normal is reminiscent of similar effects in Poe's short fiction, of the crypts that lurkbeneath ostensibly ‘normal’ monastic buildings in Radcliffe's The Italian, and remind us of the extent towhich Atwood has adapted the resources of traditional Gothic literature to her twentieth-century materials.

The opening story, “The War in the Bathroom,” focusses on the paranoid schizophrenia of the elderly womanfirst-person narrator, who describes herself in the third-person throughout. She is rootless, like most of thecharacters in Dancing Girls, living in rooming houses and having little trust in any human being. Sheimagines her previous landlady “was glad to see her go” (1), and believes an elderly male roomer in her newhouse uses the bathroom adjacent to her room at precisely nine o'clock each morning because “he does notwant her in the house” (7). The schizoid separation between her thinking first-person self and actingthird-person self dramatizes the usual Atwood separation between unconscious motive and conscious act. Thisseparation is symbolically reinforced in this story by the presence of an old woman roomer, “the woman withtwo voices,” one “violent, almost hysterical,” and the other “formless” (8) whom the narrator later discoversto be two women, an old woman and her nurse. These are clearly another version of herself, the hysterical andviolent agent controlled by the first-person “nurse.” Because within her own personality this “nurse”completely rationalizes the fantasies of the underground self, the woman can learn nothing of herself, evenwhen her violence results in apparent disaster for the old man whom she locks from the bathroom at nine a.m.

Surface reality in “The Man from Mars” is represented by the point-of-view character's upper middle-classToronto home and by her expectations of various social proprieties; the underground world is represented bythe young man from Viet Nam, who inexplicably insinuates himself into Christine's life, deluges her withletters, follows her “at a distance, smiling his changeless smile” wherever she goes. Being liberal politicallyby family tradition (her family employs a black maid, she herself had once even condescended to representEgypt in her highschool U.N. Club), she attempts to rationalize his behaviour as part of “his culture.”Although she finds the man unattractive and annoying, she also finds his attentions awaken parts of her thatshe has forgotten. A “solid,” athletic girl, she finds herself being “mysterious” (28) to other men.

In the bathtub she no longer imagined she was a dolphin; instead she imagined she was anelusive water-pixie, or sometimes, in moments of audacity, Marilyn Monroe.

(29)

After she has made the sensible conscious decision to have the man apprehended by the police, and learnedthat he has also been doggedly pursuing a sixty-year old nun in Montreal, her “aura of mystery fades.” Shereverts to the very orderly ‘dancing girl’ life she had been raised for; “she graduated with mediocre grades andwent into the Department of Health and Welfare; she did a good job …” (36). Again, this character learnslittle of herself from this encounter with someone “from another culture.” While her unconscious selfremembers her tormenter as an id-figure who might break through the French doors of suppressed sexuality(she has “nightmares in which he was crashing through the French doors of her mother's house in his shabbyjacket, carrying a packsack and a rifle and a huge bouquet of richly coloured flowers”), her conscious selfescapes into “nineteenth century novels” and rationalizes him as “something nondescript, something in thebackground, like herself” (37).

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Repeatedly in Dancing Girls the underground and surface worlds fail to meet and nourish each other. In“Polarities” this failure is dramatised in the relationship between two young Edmonton universityteachers—Morrison, who is cautious, controlled, self-sufficient, and Louise, who becomes passionatelyattached to a vision of a communal society that creates a mystic “electromagnetic” circle against “civil war”(57). Together they are two poles of existence: Morrison practical and isolated, Louise visionary andgregarious. His self-sufficiency leaves his life “futile” and “barren”; her visionary delusions so disconnect herfrom the everyday that she cannot prevent herself being committed to a psychiatric hospital.

In the closing passage of the story, Morrison encounters one of Atwood's recurrent ‘signpost’ images. He hasreturned to the city zoo's wolf pen which he had earlier visited with Louise. Beside the pen are “an old couple,a man and woman in nearly identical grey coats”—human versions of the wolves. The woman answers hisquestion “Are they timber wolves?” only with another—“You from around here?”—and looks away.Morrison “follows” her “fixed gaze,” as if it were an oracular instruction.

… something was being told, something that had nothing to do with him, the thing you couldlearn only after the rest was finished with and discarded … the old woman swelled, wavered,then seemed to disappear, and the land opened before him. It swept away to the north and hethought he could see the mountains, white-covered, their crests glittering in the falling sun,then forest upon forest, after that the barren tundra and the blank solid rivers, and beyond, sofar that the endless night had already descended, the frozen sea.

(64–65)

Before this moment the story had been dominated by the circle image of the man-made electromagnetic fieldwhich the increasingly unstable Louise had believed maintained life in their northern city; here Morrison inthe wolf-woman's eyes at last sees the real underground Louise had subconsciously feared—“the barrentundra and the blank solid rivers … endless night … the frozen sea.”

Another familiar Atwood image appears in “Under Glass”—the glass image of Double Persephone's world of“glass” and “carven word.” Here the title refers both to the claustrophobic relationship between the narratorand her non-committal lover and to the greenhouse in which the narrator works. Another schizoid character,she wavers between human society and that of the plants she tends. When the story opens she is on her way toher lover's flat. “Today,” she tells us, “the greenhouse has no attraction. I walk on two legs, I wear clothes.”Like Joan Foster, she has unrealistic Gothic fears about men, plus a fear of the underworld of violence anddream.

He's on the bed, asleep in a tangled net of blankets, on his back with his knees up. I'm alwaysafraid to wake him: I remember the stories about men who kill in their sleep with their eyesopen, thinking the woman is a burglar or an enemy soldier. You can't be convicted for it. Itouch him on the leg and stand back, ready to run, but he wakes immediately and turns hishead towards me.

Like Lesje Green, and like Louise in “Polarities,” she tries to protect herself from change and uncertainty bycreating a non-human fantasy world—in her case a world of near self-annihilation, silent, and “nowhere.”

Soon I will be there; inside are the plants that have taught themselves to look like stones. Ithink of them; they grow silently, hiding in dry soil, minor events, little zeros, containingnothing but themselves; no food value, to the eye soothing and round, then suddenly nowhere.I wonder how long it takes, how they do it.

(78)

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Death attracts many of the characters in Dancing Girls. For all of them the dance is deadly, formal,ceremonial, the dance of “plants that have taught themselves to look like stones.” Moribund relationships arethe rule in these stories—“Polarities,” “Under Glass,” “The Resplendent Quetzal,” “Lives of the Poets,”“When it Happens,” “Hair Jewellery,” “The Grave of the Famous Poet”; in most cases these are relationshipsthat have been continued even though they have effectively died some time ago. In “The Grave of the FamousPoet” it is death which motivates the characters, which brings the man on his pilgrimage to Dylan Thomas'sgrave (“dead people are more real to him than living ones” [85]) and which keeps the woman in an almostnecrophiliac fascination with her own situation.

One of us should just get up from the bench, shake hands and leave … it would sidestep therecriminations, the totalling up of scores, the reclaiming of possessions, your key, my book.But it won't be that way. … What keeps me is a passive curiosity, it's like an Elizabethantragedy or a horror movie, I know which ones will be killed, but not how.

(87)

This is the most visibly Gothic of the Dancing Girls stories. The man's imagination is captive of graves andruined castles; the woman's of being “trapped” by him in “a coffin” (84), and of murder—“maybe I should killhim, that's a novel idea, how melodramatic …” (88).

Fantasies of being raped are imaginatively little different from fantasies of being the victim of a stylishmurderer or of being that murderer oneself. For the ‘dancing girl’ rape is perhaps the ultimate in being askedto dance a pattern that has been externally determined. Many of the fantasies of the narrator of “RapeFantasies” (who throughout the story addresses a man whom she has just picked up in a bar) and those of heroffice co-workers are cast in standard forms of popular romance. Greta's man with “black gloves,” Chrissy'sbathtub visitor, and the narrator's “obliging” man who helps her find the plastic lemon with which she squirtshim in the eye are versions of the simultaneously threatening and attractive Gothic hero. The narrator'svariously inept rapists—one becomes suicidal after getting his zipper stuck, another has such a bad case ofacne she sends him to a dermatologist, yet another such a bad cold she fixes him “a NeoCitran and scotch”(100)—all involve her in variations of the nurse romance. The narrator, however, does struggle somewhat toovercome the romance stereotypes. At the end of many of the fantasies, she insists, perhaps naively, on theessential humanity of even a rapist. “I mean they aren't all sex maniacs, the rest of the time they must lead anormal life. I figure they must enjoy watching the late show just like anybody else” (100). Her overallnarrative, which she speaks as a kind of “conversation” to someone we must regard as a potential rapist, endson a similarly plaintive and hopeful note.

… I think it would be better if you could get a conversation going. Like how could a fellowdo that to a person he's just had a long conversation with, once you let them know you'rehuman, you have a life too, I don't see how they could go ahead with it, right? I mean I knowit happens but I just don't understand it, that's the part I really don't understand.

Significantly, her companion does not once enter into her lengthily offered “conversation.”

“Hair Jewellery” presents us with another woman who does not understand why a man in her life could causeher pain. As in the situation of the rather reckless narrator of “Rape Fantasies,” part of the answer is thewoman's own behaviour—her finding it “easier to love a daemon than a man,” her believing “dolefulness anda sense of futility are … irresistible to young women” (109). Like the narrators of both “Rape Fantasies” and“The Grave of the Famous Poet,” this woman is victimized because of her attachment to death and deathfantasies. Her lover seduces her with his “melancholy eyes, opaque as black marble, recondite as urns”; hecoughs “like Roderick Usher,” and believes himself “doomed and restless as Dracula.” The implicitnecrophilia of this attachment becomes apparent to her in the central symbol of hair jewellery, the “memento

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mori” of allegedly enduring love.

The hair jewellery consists of memorial brooches woven of the hair of deceased relatives; through herambiguously academic study of them (she is visiting the museum at Salem, Connecticut, to do research for apaper on Nathaniel Hawthorne) the narrator comes to see that her fixation on her gloomy lover is as rewardingas the self-inflicted griefs the brooches memorialize.

I knew whose hair was in the massive black and gold memento mori in the second row ofbrooches, I knew who I had heard in the vacant hotel room to the left of mine breathingalmost inaudibly between the spasms of the radiator.

(115–116)

Her Gothic fantasies are played out against a background remarkable for its banality and seediness—ill-fittingbargain clothing, rundown hotel rooms, a Salem where wind and construction noises drown out all thought ofgraveyards and witches. The hair jewellery symbol, like many similar symbols in Atwood fiction, makes aconcealed reality concrete and visible to the narrator; it allows it to ‘surface’ from a mass of mundane detailthat have hitherto disguised its lethal power as something at worst tiresome and banal.

This narrator seems, however, to have no other options than the Gothic pretence or the banality ofmaterialistic concern. When she leaves her lover, it is for an academic job, a “silver haircut,” a “supportive”husband, a “two-story colonial” house. When she wearies of these, she imagines her lover imprisoned in hercellar, “standing dirty and stuffed, like Jeremy Bentham in his glass case” (123–124). As in “Polarities,” theunconscious life remains disconnected from the conscious life; fantasy or imagination undermine rather thanenrich the narrator's intellectual achievements.

Fantasy takes over the main character, the elderly farmwife Mrs. Burridge, in the rather flawed story “When itHappens.” Hers is a paranoid fantasy, similar to that of the point-of-view character of “A War in theBathroom.” In a period of strikes, shortages, famines, lay-offs, price increases, and inflating land values, Mrs.Burridge, who appears to live somewhat north of Toronto, begins to fear the outbreak of war, to watch for“smoke coming up from the horizon … off to the south” (127), and to fantasize about how she would dealwith the resulting social breakdown. As in “War in the Bathroom,” she focusses on the violence she expects inothers, imagines herself forced to stoically abandon her treasured heirlooms and possessions by “hungrypeople … young and tough” (134) and deliberately killing to protect herself from two ambiguously “smiling”strange men.

Clearly, if all humanity were driven during emergencies by such fantasies as those of Mrs. Burridge, thesewould no longer be fantasies but realistic fears. The problem with this story is that, unlike in “The War in theBathroom,” Atwood does not signal whether her character is justified or unjustified in her fears, whether theauthor expects more from humanity than what Mrs. Burridge promises, or whether the story is merely an Onthe Beach doomsday scenario. Read alone, it has the effect of the latter. Read in the context of Atwood'sgeneral concern with the dangers of paranoid and Gothic fantasy, however, it becomes another statement ofLady Oracle's lesson that fantasy limits human potential, prevents communication, and creates potentiallylethal distrust.

In Mrs. Burridge, murderousness born of paranoid fantasy lurks just below the surface of a seemingly gentle,stereotypically grey-haired farmlady who cans, freezes, and pickles. Conservatism—symbolized by Mrs.Burridge's preoccupation with the preservation of fruits, meats and vegetables—conceals raw andunacknowledged violence. This is a common occurrence in Atwood's stories: the bizarre, violent, andunsettling, often associated with repressed sexual desires, appears suddenly from beneath an ostensibly banalor conventional surface. Such violence is a part of Atwood's ‘underground’ imagery—kept hidden in the

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cellars of bourgeois houses in “Hair Jewellery,” or bursting with sudden ‘Martian’ energy into the lives ofconventional characters in “The Man from Mars.” It is usually associated with characters who have either nosexual life, such as Christine or the old woman of “The War in the Bathroom,” or are involved in unfulfilling,grudging relationships. Mrs. Burridge, we note, has become bored with her husband (“she doesn't even feellike teasing him about his spare tire any more though she does it all the same because he would miss it if shestopped” [126]), has lost faith in his strength, and fantasizes his death with cold-blooded resignation (“shesupposes she ought to feel more emotional about it, but she is well-prepared, she has been saying goodbye tohim silently for years” [134]).

Annette, the point-of-view character of “A Travel Piece,” as a travel writer works professionally to suppress“danger” and “unpleasantness,” and to maintain the illusion of a conventional, smoothly-running world. Herreaders “did not want to hear about danger or even unpleasantness; it was as if they wanted to believe thatthere was somewhere left in the world where all was well, where unpleasant things did not happen” (139).Similarly in her marriage, her husband, an intern, insists that all be well. When Annette tries to share with himsome of her uneasy feelings, he seems “hurt that she was not totally and altogether happy” (141) and gives hertranquilizers to preserve that illusion. Annette has a vision of the world as

… a giant screen, flat and with pictures painted on it to create the illusion of solidity. If youwalked up to it and kicked it, it would tear and your foot would go right through, into anotherspace which Annette could only visualize as darkness, as a night in which something she didnot want to look at was hiding.

(140)

Usually, of course, the foot comes through the screen from the other side, from the repressed underground‘night’ forces like the “man from Mars.” Here the “foot” is not Annette herself but the crash of the airplane onwhich she is flying, a crash which leaves her floating on the Caribbean with five other examples of averagehumanity. Annette's immediate response is to ‘paper’ the event with travel clichés—“For exploring theCaribbean, a round orange lifeboat strikes an unusual note. The vistas are charming …” (147). But as norescuers appear, she begins to believe “they have gone through the screen to the other side” (148). Therequirements for survival are simple and primitive—food, water, sex, sanity, protection from the sun. They eatraw fish, she hears “furtive copulation” in the night, the young student drinks sea water and becomes violentand delirious. At the close of the story he must be dealt with, but should he be allowed overboard as hewishes, “wasted,” (152), or kept and killed for food? Even in entertaining these thoughts, her companionshave become “Martians” (153)—not creatures from outer space but from that repressed, unintegratedunderworld of unconscious savagery that no one on the raft has previously experienced.

Such a contrast between the superficial and the authentic, the conventional and the savage, is present in “TheResplendent Quetzal” both in the title image and the sacrificial Mayan well or cenote which the Canadiannarrator and her husband visit. The well's primitiveness dwarfs the genteel “wishing well” which Sarah hadexpected.

She had imagined something smaller, more like a wishing well, but this was huge, and thewater at the bottom wasn't clear at all. It was mud-brown; a few clumps of reeds weregrowing over to one side, and the trees at the top dangled their roots, or were they vines,down the limestone walls into the water. Sarah thought there might be some point to being asacrificial victim if the well were nicer, but you would never get her to jump into a muddyhole like that.

(154)

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The explicit sexual connotations of the well—here enlarged by the guide's tossing of his cigarette intoit—make Sarah, who tends to believe she has “forgot” men, unconsciously aware that she is sexuallyattractive.

The guide tossed his cigarette butt into the sacrificial well and turned to follow his flock.Sarah forgot about him immediately. She'd just felt something crawling up her leg, but whenshe looked nothing was there. She tucked the full skirt of her cotton dress in under her thighsand clamped it between her knees.

(155)

Ultimately the well moves Sarah to psychological honesty with herself, bringing to her consciousness herrepressed grief for her stillborn child, and moving her, even beyond her conscious understanding, to attempt toallay this grief. Stealing an out-of-scale figurine of the infant Christ from a crêche that decorates the hoteltelevision set—“it was inconceivable to her that she had done such a thing, but there it was, she really had”(167)—she hurls it back into the womb-like cenote. Two signposts, statuette and cenote, have reminded thewould-be tourist that she is not a tourist but a refugee, a refugee from grief and death, and have pointed hertoward a symbolic act of atonement and self-honesty. The ‘other world’ of her child's conception and death“for which there was no explanation” (169) has become real for Sarah in the ‘otherness’ of a Mayan well.

Throughout this story the familiar superficial Atwood world is also visible—in the tourists' guidebooks, sunglasses, and kleenexes, the ill-matched plaster crêche set, the Fred Flintstone-shaped radio that plays aCanadian-authored U.S. popular song, a television set that plays “a re-run of The Cisco Kid.”Spanish-America is clearly being reshaped into a bourgeois U.S. image. The ‘underground’ world is visiblenot only in the cenote but in the ruined pyramids, the carvings of the Mayan rain-god Chac-Mool, and in thefleas whose bites “swell-up” on the narrator's husband.

The marriage between Sarah and Edward is another of the passionless, mechanical relationships that afflictAtwood characters. Not only does Sarah hide her grief over her ‘lost’ child from Edward, but she is bored byhis interest in bird-watching, annoyed by his insistent economizing, and wishes he would “conveniently”die—“It wasn't that she wished him dead, but she couldn't imagine any other way for him to disappear” (161).Edward in turn fantasizes about

… crashing out of the undergrowth like King Kong, picking Sarah up and hurling her over theedge, down into the sacrificial well. Anything to shatter that imperturbable expression, blandand pale and plump and smug. …

(158)

Theirs is a surface relationship that engages the deeper unconscious areas of their psyches only in frustrationand fictionalized violence. Edward's fantasy cries out against the impenetrable surface that Sarah shows tohim, “that imperturbable expression,” and sees himself as reverting from a careful, penny-counting tourist to acrashing “King Kong.” His envisaging the well as the means of Sarah's death implicitly acknowledges itsancient and primitive power, invoking this power against what he sees as her “bland” exterior.

As an acknowledgement of the well's power, Edward's fantasy parallels Sarah's throwing of the plasticChrist-child into the well. Her ‘sacrifice’ is visibly a propitiation of natural ‘underground’ forces shehas—“self-righteous” (158) and “concerned for appearances, always”—apparently offended. She hadapproached giving birth analytically, mathematically.

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All the time she was pregnant, she'd taken meticulous care of herself, counting out thevitamin pills prescribed by the doctor and eating only what the books recommended. She haddrunk four glasses of milk a day … had done the exercises and gone to the classes. No onewould be able to say she had not done the right things.

(168)

After nature denied her the child, “she took the pill every day, without telling” (168).

Interestingly, although Edward has yearned to “shatter” her “imperturbable expression,” when she does breakthrough her reserve by means of the ‘sacrifice’ and weeps “soundlessly” beside the well, he is unhappy andfearful.

‘This isn't like you,’ Edward said, pleading, as if that was a final argument which would snapher out of it, bring back the old calm Sarah.

(170)

Although a character may yearn for something deeper and more authentic than shallow tourism andmeaningless marriage, it takes more courage than Edward seems to possess to face ‘underground’ passionsthat are unpredictable and turbulent as much as they are inspiring and enriching. As for Sarah, althoughmomentarily shaken by her glimpse into the depths of her own unhappiness, she “smoothed her skirt oncemore … then collected her purse and her collapsible umbrella,” and resumed her functional relationship withEdward. “Did you find your bird?” (170) she asks. The bird is the quetzal, like the cenote a magic symbol ofMayan civilization and its direct, if often brutal, relationship to the forces of earth. It is the thing lost,simultaneously an unrepressed incarnation of Sarah herself and Edward's own sexual energies. We do nothave to be told he has not found it.

Alienated from passion, alienated from the natural responses of their own bodies, characters like Sarah andEdward, Annette of “A Travel Piece,” or Morrison of “Polarities,” require extraordinarycircumstance—Mayan wells, plane crashes, visions of humanoid wolves—to regain awareness of theunderground from which they have banished themselves. Rob, the main character of “Training,” is a youngman who has always felt intimidated by his parents in attempting to meet their various expectations. He toodances to alien choreography. His surgeon father expects him to follow the male family traditions of medicalschool and recreational baseball. Although not interested in either, Rob tries both, finding himself nauseated atthe sight of blood and prone to injury in baseball. His mother's favourite picture of him is “in his choir-boysurplice, taken the year before his voice had cracked” (178). His parents have chosen his summer job onwhich the story focusses—counselor at a camp for crippled children, a job that meets both his father's medicalpriorities and his mother's sentimental piety.

For Rob the camp with its babbling hydrocephalics, its spastics with their plastic feeding tubes, and its earthyand exhibitionistic teenage cripples, is as unsettling as a Caribbean plane-wreck. He has nightmares of“bodies, pieces of bodies, arms and legs and torsos, detached and floating in mid-air; or he would feel hecouldn't move, couldn't breathe” (180), nightmares which reflect his own unconscious crippling by his family,his having been amputated from both his own body and his wishes. He is confused by the latent primitiveenergy in Jordan, the severely crippled girl he is given charge of—“like some small fierce animal captured ina metal net” (172), embarrassed by the male teenager's locker-room humour, made both angry and jealous bythe casual sexual couplings of the other counselors. He yearns for some vestige of the primitive andspontaneous—perhaps some Gothic fancy—to appear on his “bland and freckled” face.

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He would have preferred a scar, a patch over one eye, sunburned wrinkles, a fang. Howuntouched he looked, like the fat on uncooked bacon: nobody's fingerprints on him, no dirt,and he despised this purity.

(192)

Ann of “Dancing Girls” is in many ways Rob's female counterpart. Continuing in graduate school because herfather believes you should “finish what you start,” envious of graceful women with beautiful long hair, and“circumspect” in her relationships with men, she has given up her dream of being an architect in order tostudy in the U.S. the more practical profession of “Urban Design.” Further, “she intended to be sowell-qualified, so armoured with qualifications, that no one back home would dare turn her down for the jobshe coveted.” As the “armoured” metaphor suggests, Ann dislikes people. In the green areas she hopes todesign “she could never visualize the people. Her green spaces were always empty” (217). For her, green isnot an underground image of vitality, but one of repression. If she considers the inhabitants of her designprojects, they often become children who “would turn her grass to mud, they'd nail things to her trees, theirmangy dogs would shit on her ferns, they'd throw bottles and pop cans into her aqueduct” (220). Or theybecome abstracted, desexualized, like the “dancing girls” at the wild party a “vaguely Arabian” roomer at herrooming house throws, who become in her fantasies “sedate” pastoral figures:

Indeed there is a gap between the superficial and pretentious language of Loulou's poet-friends and the‘realities’ of her experiences, but Phil's analysis here amusingly adds to the problem rather than relieving it. Interms of Atwood's work, Phil—an intellectual user of words—is very much on the wrong side of the gap; onthe other side is Loulou—who is “not that fond of talking” at any time.

Most of the stories of Bluebeard's Egg involve characters isolated from one another by this ‘language gap.’Most focus on characters to whom the chthonic secret language of things and symbols is more real thanrational human speech—characters for whom the world speaks in scarlet birds, multiplying crystals, sunrises,star-shaped cookies, an indulged cat, or fainting spells. These characters are misunderstood by those aroundthem who trust man-made order and language more than the female language of nature—like Loulou ismisunderstood above, like Yvonne in “The Sunrise” is misunderstood by the conventional young couple fromwhom she rents her room, or like Alma in “The Salt Garden” is misunderstood by her estranged husbandMort, whose favorite word is “arrange” (BE 207).

The characters of Bluebeard's Egg are for the most part older than those of Dancing Girls. Most aremiddle-aged, have been involved in disappointing marriages or long-term relationships, possess minoraccumulations of property, major ones of history. Yet the women find that they are still ‘dancing girls,’ stillfilling roles assigned to them by men. Sally in “Bluebeard's Egg” plays both devoted wife to her diffidenthusband and girl-Friday to her incompetent boss. Loulou may always have to play the uneducated earthmother. Like the two older sisters in the fable of the wizard's egg which Sally encounters in her “Forms ofNarrative Fiction” class, most accept men's rules for life, or—like the youngest—give continued power tomen's rules by pretending to follow them.

The central character of “Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother” is a woman who has accepted mostof the rules she has been given for her life. She has played with these rules—hoodwinked her autocratic fatherinto letting her have her hair cut, invented comic ways of maintaining propriety when afflicted with poppedzippers or fallen underpants, devised a means to attend university despite her father's disapproval. But she hasnever perceived these rules as anything other than benign, or her transgressions as anything more than “fun”.In consequence, she has become a good-humoured trivializer of life and death:

“I remember the time we almost died,” says my mother. Many of her stories begin this way.

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(BE 22)

She re-writes her family's history into charming but superficial stories of amusing misbehaviour, ‘cute’idiosyncrasy. The language of these stories is the received one of cliché—“He could wind you around his littlefinger” (25), “There you sat, happy as a clam” (26), “You had something cooking.” Not surprisingly, when thedaughter who narrates the story matures and returns home with “modern poetry and histories of Naziatrocities” (28)—material which resists sentimentalization—the mother appears distressed, looks at her as if“at any time I might open my mouth and out would come a language she had never heard before” (29).

Despite her various rebellions, the mother's language has remained that of the rule-giver; her view of alldissatisfaction with the status quo is that it can be overcome by exercise and cheerfulness—“There wasn't a lotthat a brisk sprint through dead leaves, howling winds, or sleet couldn't cure” (28). The daughter's “creepingdespondency” and angst make her seem to the mother, like the Vietnamese student seemed to the stolidChristine of “The Man from Mars,” utterly alien.

I had become a visitant from outer space, a time traveller come back from the future, bearingnews of a great disaster.

(29)

Throughout “Significant Moments” there is an impression—partly created by the modular structure, partly bythe narrator's observations, partly by the different stories the mother tells to men and to women, and partly bythe contrast between her comic narrative style and the non-comic quality of the events she narrates—that menand women inhabit separate worlds.

Here my father looked modestly down at his plate. For him, there are two worlds: onecontaining ladies, in which you do not use certain expressions, and another one—consistingof logging camps and certain haunts of his youth, and of gatherings of acceptable sorts ofmen—in which you do. To let the men's world slip over verbally into the ladies' would revealyou as a mannerless boor, but to carry the ladies' world over into the men's brands you a prigand maybe even a pansy. This is the word for it. All this is well understood between them.

There are some stories which my mother does not tell when there are men present. … Theseare stories of romantic betrayals, unwanted pregnancies, illnesses of various horrible kinds,marital infidelities, mental breakdowns, tragic suicides …

(21)

These women's stories are recognizably those of Gothic romance, in which evil can be entertaining withoutbeing dangerous. Here too, men and women occupy separate worlds—the men of power and arrogance, thewomen of weakness and despair.

In “Hurricane Hazel” this separation of the sexes takes the form of the young narrator's father being an“explorer for a logging company” and therefore absent much of the year, while her mother looks after thefamily in a series of makeshift cabins. Similarly, the narrator's brother is away in the summers as a “JuniorRanger, cutting brush by the sides of highways somewhere in northern Ontario” (35), while she stays with hermother aspiring to have a boyfriend in order to be “normal”. In both stories the men define themselves bytheir jobs or professions, while the women define themselves in terms of their men, whose presence bestows‘normality.’ This normality, whether expressed in conventional marriages, cliché language, or in high schooldating customs, becomes for the stories' narrators the ‘Bluebeard's egg’—the payment women accept tosurrender their selfhood. Normality, the ordinary, is dangerous, the narrator of “Hurricane Hazel” concludes

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on the stormy night when she and her gas-station attendant boyfriend break up because she has refused to goout with him in ominous weather. The night is that in 1954 of Toronto's Hurricane Hazel, and in the morningshe looks at the storm's deadly debris and is surprised by its banality. “This is what I have remembered mostclearly about Buddy: the ordinary looking wreckage, the flatness of the water, the melancholy light” (59).

The title story of Bluebeard's Egg underscores these conventional and unequal relationships between men andwomen. The main character is Sally, a woman who wants a conventional marriage, a conventionally beautifulhouse, and who has hired an interior decorator to shape her house and married Ed, a “cute” heart surgeon whohas “allure” to women, to serve as her husband. Like the mother of “Significant Moments,” Sally habituallytrivializes and jokes about things that she may truly care about—particularly her night school courses.

She was … intending to belittle the course, just slightly. She always did this with her nightschool courses, so that Ed wouldn't get the idea that there was anything in her life that waseven remotely as important as he is. But Ed didn't seem to need this amusement or thisbelittlement. He took her information earnestly, gravely.

(155)

In fact, women are quite irrelevant, almost inter-changeable, to Ed, for whom Sally is his third wife. He isself-absorbed, absorbed in his profession, self-insulated from any emotional demands which might complicatehis life. He listens to all women in the same ingenuous, grave, but unhearing way.

The wizard's egg fable, embedded into the story as material Sally has received in her fiction course, concernsa similar man—one to whom women are interchangeable. Three sisters are seized in turn by a wizard, taken tohis house, and tested to determine their suitability to be his bride. The test entrusts them with an egg they mustcarry with them, and with custody of a room they are forbidden to enter. The first two enter the room,discover dismembered female bodies, let the egg fall into a basin of blood, and are found out, killed, anddismembered by the wizard. But the third puts the egg aside before opening the room; the wizard thus doesnot discover her disobedience and marries her. The three sisters correspond not only to the three wives of theheart surgeon and to the three wives of the psychiatrist Joseph in “The Sin Eater” but in a metaphoric way toall women in the collection who, like the mothers of “Significant Moments” and “Hurricane Hazel,” haveaccepted the Bluebeard's egg of self-effacement and dependency in a traditional marriage.

All three of the above stories suggest that women accept the ‘egg’ of deferential existence ingenuously. Theymistake the man by seeing him as powerful and glamourous; they mistake themselves by taking the role ofcustodian of his egg seriously. Such is also the case in “Betty,” a story which is more about the growth of itsyoung female narrator than about the title character. As a little girl, the narrator is fascinated by Betty'swomanizing salesman husband Fred, a fascination she also finds in the commercial shipping of the St. Mary'sRiver beside which she lives.

The freighters were huge, cumbersome, with rust staining the holes for their anchor chainsand enormous chimneys from which the smoke spurted in grey burps. When they blew theirhorns, as they always did when approaching the locks, the windows in our cottage rattled. Forus, they were magical. Sometimes things would drop or be thrown from them, and we wouldwatch these floating objects eagerly, running along the beach to be there when they landed,wading out to fish them in. Usually these treasures turned out to be only empty cardboardboxes or punctured oil cans, oozing dark brown grease and good for nothing. Several timeswe got orange crates, which we used as cupboards or stools in our hide-outs.

Structurally this passage shows the narrator in the same relationship to the freighters as Betty is toFred—living in the shadow of his glamour, accepting cast-offs. As the narrator grows, however, her interest

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turns to Betty. At first she tries to romanticize her into a Gothic victim—“a stricken and martyred woman … awoman who had narrowly escaped death … an aura of sacrificial blood surrounded her” (129–130). WhenBetty dies of a brain tumour, she sees her as someone punished “for being devoted and obliging,” who diedscreaming “against the unfairness of life” (131). These images show the narrator now trying to glamourizefailure; like the Gothic throughout Atwood's work, they serve to subjugate woman by making her fate asBluebeard's wife seem interesting. The narrator's final act, however, is to refuse both the gothic and herchildhood impression that Fred was attractive and significant. It is Betty who is now “mysterious”.

Fred … no longer intrigues me. The Freds of this world make themselves explicit by whatthey do and choose. It is the Bettys who are mysterious.

(132)

In effect, the narrator has deconstructed the Bluebeard legend; Bluebeard is not powerful, he is ordinary; themystery lies not in his dominance but in the woman's having naively granted it to him.

‘In Wales,’ he says, ‘mostly in the rural areas, there was a personage known as the Sin Eater.When someone was dying the Sin Eater would be sent for. The people of the house wouldprepare a meal and place it on the coffin.

They would have the coffin all ready, of course: once they'd decided you were going off, youhad scarcely any choice in the matter. According to other versions, the meal would be placedon the dead person's body, which must have made for some sloppy eating, one would havethought. In any case the Sin Eater would devour this meal and would also be given a sum ofmoney. It was believed that all the sins the dying person had accumulated during his lifetimewould be removed from him and transmitted to the Sin Eater. The Sin Eater thus becameabsolutely bloated with other people's sins. She'd accumulate such a heavy load of them thatnobody wanted to have anything to do with her; a kind of syphilitic of the soul, you mightsay.’

(“The Sin Eater,” BE 231–232)

Soon after relating this, Joseph, the narrator's psychiatrist, dies and his wife and two ex-wives host apost-funeral reception at which they and his mostly female patients feed. Here are more images of thesubservient female, patient to the man's doctoral wisdom, martyr to his need to be “free from sin” (241). Therole deprives the woman of individuality; Joseph's three wives “have a family resemblance—they're allblondish and vague around the edges” (240).

“The Sin Eater” is narrated in a discontinuous first person narrative in which the discontinuity and thefrequent telescoping of time suggests further the fragmentation of personality a woman's dependency on aman creates. The female language of symbolic image and dream informs the narrator's awareness but does notinfluence her conscious decisions. She dimly perceives a picture of blue “Krishna playing the flute,surrounded by adoring maidens” as having something to do with herself and the death of Joseph, but canmake no clear connection. At the story's close she is dreaming of eating Joseph's sins—in the shape of themoon and star cookies baked by his first wife—but as cosmic shapes in “dark space.”

… this is not what I ordered, it's too much for me, I might get sick. Maybe I could send itback; but I know this isn't possible.

(244)

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And she reaches out to begin eating.

Four of the stories in Bluebeard's Egg—“Uglypuss,” “Spring Song of the Frogs,” “Scarlet Ibis,” and “TheSunrise”—show characters in search of something more than what the inherited social patterns offer. But, likethe narrator of “The Sin Eater,” they have extreme difficulty in making their intuitions conscious. Theirproblem tends to be linguistic; there seems to be no words available to articulate what they feel or desire. In“Spring Song of the Frogs,” Will, whether with his anorexic niece Cynthia, his narcissistic date Robyn, or hisself-preoccupied lover Diana, “doesn't know what to say” (172). He frequently desires not to speak—not toask Diana about her illness, not to risk telling Cynthia “You're pretty now” (174). The three women havewithdrawn from inherited female roles, particularly Robyn and Cynthia, but have not found authentic creativeselves. They have become shadows of traditional woman, crippled moons (both Diana and Cynthia, we note,were Roman moon-goddesses). At the close of the story Will and Diana stand under a “cold and lopsidedmoon”. He finds her “angular, awkward,” and though he “would like to kiss her” hesitates just as he hashesitated to speak before.

In “Uglypuss,” Joel wanders from woman to woman looking for “someone to go home with … in the hopethat this unknown place, yet another unknown place, will finally contain something he wants to have” (95).But Joel cannot define ‘home’. He too lacks language, possesses only clichés—“a golden oldie, a mansionthat's seen better days” (83) he describes his rooming house as the story opens.

In two of these four stories the characters encounter a symbol which illuminates their lives yet which they areunable to make full use of because of their difficulties with language. Yvonne, in “The Sunrise,” who writesjokes and pleasantries on filing cards so she will not fail in conversation, cannot fully seize even the sunrisesshe is so compulsively drawn to watch. The correct word escapes her.

And yet she knows that her dependence is not on something that can be grasped, held in thehand, kept, but only on an accident of language, because sunrise should not be a noun. Thesunrise is not a thing, but only an effect of the light caused by the positions of twoastronomical bodies in relation to each other. The sun does not really rise at all, it's the earththat turns. The sunrise is a fraud.

Thus too male-female relationships—clearly symbolized in the mating of the two planetary ‘bodies,’ are afraud to Yvonne. The conjunction cannot be be either spoken or valued.

Christine in “Scarlet Ibis” (a story remarkably similar in its symbolism to “The Resplendent Quetzal” ofDancing Girls) successfully guides her unhappy husband and child to a view of birds so splendid that the“weight” of life lifts momentarily from her body.

Don took hold of Christine's hand, a thing he had not done for some time; but Christine,watching the birds, noticed this only afterwards. She felt she was looking at a picture, ofexotic flowers or of red fruit growing on trees, evenly spaced, like the fruit in the gardens ofmediaeval paintings, solid, clear-edged, in primary colours. On the other side of the fence wasanother world, not real but at the same time more real than the one on this side, the men andwomen in their flimsy clothes and aging bodies, the decrepit boat. Her own body seemedfragile and empty, like blown glass.

But when back in Canada she comes to retell the story, she lapses into formulaic humour, travelogue clichés.

She put in the rather hilarious trip back to the wharf, with the Indian standing up in the bow,beaming his heavy-duty flashlight at the endless, boring mangroves, and the two men in thebaseball caps getting into a mickey and singing dirty songs.

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She ended with the birds, which were worth every minute of it, she said. She presented themas a form of entertainment, like the Grand Canyon: something that really ought to be seen, ifyou liked birds, and if you should happen to be in that part of the world.

(200–201)

Like the mother in “Significant Moments,” Christine cannot face for long the primitive but authentic languageof objects and events, but must trivialize it with banal humour and the superficial formulae of everydayspeech.

Bluebeard's Egg ends not in optimism, as does Dancing Girls, but in benevolence. The concluding story,“Unearthing Suite,” is narrated by a young woman who loves her parents despite being aware of the inequalityof their relationship. She is particularly aware of the lack of privacy, the overwork, and emotional stress herindependent-spirited mother has incurred by having allowed her husband, an “affable” entomologist, to givethroughout their marriage a total commitment to his profession. The conclusion of the story emphasizes thedifferent “languages” the mother and father speak—the father the male language of management and control,the mother a female one of intuition and poesis. They have discovered a fisher's droppings on the roof of theircabin.

For my father this dropping is an interesting biological phenomenon. He has noted it and filedit, along with all the other scraps of fascinating data he notes and files.

For my mother however, this is something else. For her this dropping—this hand-long,two-fingers-thick, black, hairy dropping—not to put too fine a point on it, this deposit ofanimal shit—is a miraculous token, a sign of divine grace; as if their mundane, familiar,much-patched but at times still-leaking roof has been visited and made momentarily radiantby an unknown but by no means minor god.

The story returns to the ‘language gap’ of “Loulou,” “Significant Moments,” and “Hurricane Hazel.” We arestill, despite the warmth of the story, in the world of the wizard and his egg, where man dissects, dismembers,“notes and files,” and where woman ‘pays a price’ to be both married and “cheerful.” “What is my mother'ssecret? … What was the trade-off, what did she sign over to the Devil, for this limpid tranquility?” (276) thedaughter asks herself. The price, she discovers, is innocence, not knowing.

“I don't know why not,” said my mother. That is her secret.

(278)

In this innocence she resembles “accepting, uncomplaining” (132) Betty and Loulou—women who havenever questioned the male assumptions which surround their lives or seen consciously how differentBluebeard's analytical dismembering language is from their own.

Criticism: Frank Davey (essay date 1986)

SOURCE: “Alternate Stories: The Short Fiction of Audrey Thomas and Margaret Atwood,” in CanadianLiterature, Vol. 109, Summer, 1986, pp. 5–14.

[In the following essay, Davey considers ways in which Atwood's characters cope with reality by viewing itthrough fictional frameworks.]

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She knew now that almost certainly, whenever she saw a street musician, either he was blindor lame or leprous or there was a terribly deformed creature, just out of sight, on behalf ofwhom he was playing his music.1

Short stories have often focused on a character's discovery of a second perspective on experience, as inMansfield's “The Garden Party” or Joyce's “The Dead,” or in Alice Munro's collection Lives of Girls andWomen in which Del Jordan discovers Garnet French's narrow view of family life, or her mother's vision ofherself as “Princess Ida.” Often the discovery of such alternate perspectives has marked moments of traumaticinsight or dramatic growth for the character, and has—like Del's discovery of Bobby Sheriff'sbanality—constituted a pivotal or terminal element in the story. In Munro's fiction, as recent criticism byHelen Hoy, Lorraine McMullen, and others2 has suggested, these moments participate in oxymoronic figuresand imply the paradoxical existence of multiple and conflicting “realities”—the train companion who is both aclergyman and a molester, the high school teacher who is both an extrovert and a suicide.

In the short fiction of Audrey Thomas and Margaret Atwood, there are other kinds of alternate stories, secretscripts which characters have written one for another, stories inherited from mythology and literature thatbecome superimposed on characters' lives, stories concealed within symbolic objects, as well as stories thecharacters have written to rationalize their lives. These “other” stories are contained within the apparent story,becoming ironic participants in it, qualifying it, interrogating it, sometimes working against it. In Atwood theseparation between the various “stories” of the characters contributes to the detached tone of many of herfictions and to special uses of language and symbol. In Thomas the presence of multiple “stories” is reflectedin disjunctive narratives in which brief “stories” are abruptly contained within or juxtaposed to other “stories.”

Most of the fictions of Thomas' first two collections are visibly constructed of variant scripts. In some asecond script is implicit in the first, as in “One is One and All Alone” in which the young wife of a Britishofficial in Africa enacts a self-assured self to mask pervasive feelings of fear and ineptitude. When she loses afilling from a tooth, this fabricated self, like the tooth, crumbles, exposing the “raw nerves” of her irrationalfears. In “A Monday Dream at Alameda Park” a married couple have created the story that they are “veryliberated, very liberal”—a story which partly collapses when the husband finds himself drawn into group sexwith another couple. In other fictions the alternative scripts are embedded in the first. In “Omo” the embeddeddiary of one character disqualifies the perceptions of the story's narrator. In “The Albatross” one character,Herman, has composed for himself a life-story of romantic World War II adventure, a story unconnected tohis current hope to succeed as a life-insurance salesman. Thomas' text is in turn composed, among otherthings, of Herman's narrative, the sound track of an insurance company sales film, and another character'sparody of Herman's stories. In “Three Women and Two Men” the main text is repeatedly interrupted by thecharacters' private fictions. “They must have needed to die. It must have been their karma,” Peter says of thevictims of a mass-murder. Of her husband's careless driving Margaret says “I think he drives that way becausehe's small. It makes him feel powerful.”

It is easier to conjure up a fairy tale … than to put one's finger on the pulse of truth. In the taleit is all so easy. I, the princess, and he, the prince. We meet and of a sudden fall in love. Thereare dragons, of course, and wicked dukes and many other dangers; but these can all bebanished, crushed or conquered. We mount the milk-white steed, ride off into the silver dawn.No sequel; nothing sordid. When the storytellers say ‘The end’ they mean it. Never the namesof Cinderella's children.

Like the narrator of “A Winter's Tale,” most of Thomas' characters find it easier to “conjure up” a false storythan to accept “the pulse of truth.” As here, the false story is usually fabricated of familiar materials. “Lovingis letting go,” writes Peter in “Three Women and Two Men.” The bulk of these materials are those ofromance, especially the fairy tale and Shakespearean comedy. The reference points include Shakespeare's AWinter's Tale and The Tempest (“A Winter's Tale,” “Xanadu,” and “Omo”), folk tales like Cinderella (“A

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Winter's Tale,” “Crossing the Rubicon”), Andersen's “The Snow Queen” (“Elephants to Ride Upon”), TheNibelungenlied (“Aquarius”), the tales collected by the brothers Grimm (“Rapunzel,” “Natural History”), andJohn Donne's love poems (“Aquarius,” “A Monday Dream at Alameda Park,” “The More Little Mummy inthe World”).

In Ten Green Bottles and Ladies & Escorts men and women seem equally vulnerable to the roles demandedby these inherited fictions, and greet these roles with varying amounts of insight. Unlike the female mentalpatients of “Salon des Refusés” who unquestioningly prefer their delusions of wealth and love to the facts oftheir actual conditions, the young woman of “A Winter's Tale” can see that her life is but a poor imitation ofromantic fantasy. In “Elephants to Ride Upon” a young man who feels forced back together, after severalmonths separation, with a young woman he has made pregnant, projects onto her and himself stereotypicallyevil roles—“an ice maiden, the snow queen.”

He remembered how in the old romances the beautiful maiden turns into a hag if the wrongquestions are asked, if the right answers are not given. He stood now, defeated, horrified todiscover that he hated her—not only for what she had become, but for what he had become: afalse knight, an imposter.

But his discovery that her coldness has been caused mostly by her fear of his family and by her concern forhim eventually dissipates his fantasy. The male point of view character of “Aquarius,” however, has no sensethat, by having variously cast his wife Erica as Brunhilde to his Siegfried, as a vampire who “renewed herselfwith his passion,” as “the very essence of female,” as the “barefoot wife” of the romantic artist, he has cheatedhimself out of ever discovering who this Erica may actually be.

The major change between these collections and the subsequent one, Real Mothers, is that in the latter theseinherited romantic stories appear most often as stories which women have allowed men to impose upon them.Men are seldom—like the young man of “Elephants to Ride Upon” or the husband of “Aquarius”—presentedas being impoverished by such stories, but rather as receiving advantage from them. In “Galatea” and “Out inthe Midday Sun” both female protagonists feel as if they have been co-opted into a script written by theirhusbands. In “Galatea” the woman is a painter who has stopped painting “large canvases full of brutalcolours” because these “disturb” her husband, and has “gone back to watercolours” of “decorative” subjectswhich he finds “less disturbing.” Her husband, a womanizing writer, links himself with inherited romancewhen he defines greatness as “one of those magic pitchers in a fairytale—you pour it out and it is still full tothe top.” Thomas' title, “Galatea,” which invokes the inherited story of the sea-nymph who was bullied by thecyclops Polyphemos, whose lover Acis was pinned by Polyphemos beneath a rock, and who saved Acis bytransforming him into a river, casts ironic light on both the narrator and her marriage. The narrator is abusedby nothing but her own passivity; the French river she walks beside has never been her lover; the watercoloursshe paints mark not an historic affinity with sea and water but merely her own weakness.

In “Out in the Midday Sun” the woman is a beginning writer who has married a successful scholar. His scriptfor her is that of the traditional helpmate—“he is the kind of man,” she says, “who will love you only so longas you walk a few steps behind. Only so long as you arrange the dinners and airline tickets. …” She hassecretly written her own book (that is, written her own story) which has been accepted by a major publisher;her success will unwrite the script he has mentally composed for her. “As soon as she told him,” she tells us,as she narrates a peripatetic outer story (that contains in effect both his script and her new book) “he wouldleave her.” In “Timbuktu” Thomas presents the wife of an American B'hai convert who has naively broughther and their children to Africa to work as missionaries. Again the woman has been entangled in her husband'sscript. Here the script reaches to the inherited story of the Bible, its implicit definition of “motherhood,” itspatriarchal god, its self-presumed authority. Rona, the point-of view character of “Timbuktu,” has her ownnarrative of uneasy role-playing in her husband's story, a narrative which at this moment contains not only theB'hai wife's story but the Biblical story both women inherit.

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‘She'll do what God wants her to,’ Janet said. ‘It's out of our hands.’

Rona found this aphorism, coming from the mouth of a child, almost obscene. On the bedsidetable by the sick child was a jug of water and a book, Baha'u'llah and the New Era. Sheleafed through it … There was an almost Germanic profusion of capital letters: ‘He, His,Servant of the Blessed Perfection, Declaration, Supreme Singleness, the Most Great Peace.’But … the basic tenets of the faith were harmless, indeed inarguable ‘motherhood issues’, onemight say. B'hai. How exotic it sounded! Like The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. But also,sheep-like. Baa-Baa-Baa. … There were a lot of old-fashioned Biblical endings on the verbs:‘enacteth, enforceth, sitteth, cometh, shineth.’

Rona's own situation is that she has married her husband Philip out of fascination with his “stories aboutGibraltar, Malta, Morocco, the Ivory Coast, and Senegal … she had married Africa, not Philip.” Now she istravelling to another story external to herself—the legendary Timbuktu—and finding herself occasionallyneeding a man to protect her. “She should be wandering around the streets by herself, finding some little placethat caught her fancy, not going to a meal that had been ordered in advance by someone else.”

A meal “ordered,” in all three senses of the word, in advance by someone else—such are the stories acceptedby most of the men and women of Thomas' first two collections and by most of the women of the third.Almost each story contains not only smaller stories but the explicit words “story” or “fairy tale.” “That storywas one of her best ones” (“Aquarius”); “As he told his new tale, our steward's hands would clench withexcitement” (“Joseph and his Brother”); “Marie-Anne felt as if someone had been telling her a continuousfairy story” (“Real Mothers”); “Old wives' tales came back to her” (“Natural History”); “She felt like one ofthose queens in the fairy tales” (“Déjeuner sur l'herbe”); “she doesn't look back. In my story, that is”(“Crossing the Rubicon”). A typical Thomas story is a story about characters who have so many inheritedstories that they have no single authentic story. That is, it is a story about not having a story. The containedstories—the petty lies the characters tell about themselves, the scripts they accept from their spouses or fromtraditional mythology or literature—demolish the container.

In “Two in the Bush” a young woman, bored with her marriage, hitches a ride with another young marriedwoman from Ghana to the Ivory Coast, expecting sexual adventure, meeting people who are implicit stories ofgunrunner, freedom-fighter, shady banker, corrupt soldier, romantic lover, but returns having had no sexualadventure, no “miracle,” no story. “I know nothing about Africa, nothing,” she concludes, and for Africa weread romance, story. At its closing, the story is implicitly about a story which didn't happen, a gunrunner whodoesn't run guns, a lover who missed his tryst. “Crossing the Rubicon” contains various stories—the narrator'sstory of a love affair with a married man, of being attracted as a girl by abusive boys, the stories told by themottoes on Valentine candy (“Be my Sugar Daddy,” “You're a Slick Chick”), the story told and untold by themotto on a button—(“Cinderella married for money”), the story of Liza Minnelli and Michael York inCabaret—but ends with the woman still unable to not “look back” at her married lover, unable to refuse theinherited story.

In “Déjeuner sur l'Herbe,” two ex-lovers pretend (one story) to be brother and sister while travelling inEurope. The woman's “latest lover” has told her she is “too insipid” (two stories). Her husband has told herthat she “‘leaned on him’ too much” (three stories). “‘I have had this pain,’ she told the imaginary doctor, ‘allmy life’” (four stories or perhaps five). In London she reads warning signs about unattended parcels: “DON'TTOUCH. DON'T GET INVOLVED”—a sixth story. She is “content, for the most part, merely to go whereverhe suggested”—another story. In a Parisian garden, “slender metal chairs” have been “left in groups whichseemed … to tell stories.” At a restaurant, she asks her lover, “Do we have to play out roles that other peopleimpose on us?” She reads a French phrase book, each phrase a story. In a French cemetery while picnickingthey encounter a distraught and incoherent woman with a kitten, who returns past them without it, her handscovered with dirt. Her companion says that he believes the woman said “that the kitten was sick. That she

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killed it.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I'm not sure. But there really is nothing that we can do.”

But she was already running down the path. “I'm going to find that kitten. You made it up,about what the woman said!”

“And what if you do?” he called after her. “What then?”

What indeed. What would happen if any Thomas character found his or her authentic story?

In Margaret Atwood's short stories there is a similarly recurrent separation between culturally “received”stories and other potentially more authentic stories available to the characters. Whereas in Thomas' fictionthese received stories seem unconsciously adopted by the characters, who may become aware of them in thecourse of the story, in Atwood's they tend to be consciously followed. As in Thomas, the major source ofthese inherited stories is romance, but specifically gothic romance—from the gothic fairy tale, as in the titlestory of Bluebeard's Egg,3 to the graveyard and dungeon melodramas invoked by “The Grave of the FamousPoet” and “Hair Jewellery.” Atwood also—following the example of Mary Shelley—repeatedly links thegothic story to yet another story—that of technological hubris. Both the gothic and the technological story arenarrow, simplistic, and offer to Atwood's usually unsure characters reassuring predictabilities. In “UnderGlass” the female narrator's gothic imagination leads her both to see her diffident lover as an “enemy soldier”and to withdraw psychologically into the silent “nowhere” of a greenhouse. In “Polarities” Louise defendsherself against her fears by constructing a geometrical “electromagnetic” theory for the psychic structure ofEdmonton. In “Hair Jewellery” a woman who first uses gothic necrophilia—imagining her lover to cough“like Roderick Usher” and to be “doomed and restless as Dracula”—as an escape story to avoid theresponsibilities of authentic relationship later uses the banality of a regular job, a two-storey colonial house, a“salon haircut,” a “supportive” husband to identical purpose.

Throughout Atwood's fictions the main characters are inarticulate about their personal stories, unable toexpress their fears to one another—as the married couple in “The Resplendent Quetzal,” unable to signal theirhopes except through metaphorical acts such as Louise's electromagnetic map in “Polarities.” Charactersgrope for speech. Will, in “Spring Song of the Frogs,” keeps finding he “doesn't know what to say” to thevarious women he encounters—that is, he doesn't know what story to tell. Joel, in “Uglypuss,” can only speakin clichés—“a golden oldie, a mansion that's seen better days,” he describes his rooming house, and ironicallydescribes his own speech. Yvonne, in “The Sunrise,” is so desperate for language that she writes jokes andpleasantries on filing cards so she will not lack words or stories in conversation.

Such characters seem afflicted by what Atwood in another story, “Loulou; or, the Domestic life of theLanguage,” humorously terms a language gap when the title character's poet-friends become obsessed with anapparent disparity between her mundane name and the “earth mother” role they see her filling.

“What gap?” Loulou asked suspiciously. She knew her upper front teeth were a little wideapart and had been self-conscious about it when she was younger. “The gap between the wordand the thing signified,” Phil said. His hand was on her breast and he'd given anabsent-minded squeeze, as if to illustrate what he meant. They were in bed at the time. MostlyLoulou doesn't like talking in bed. But she's not that fond of talking at other times, either.

The stories which characters like Loulou wish to tell often have no words and are somehow separate from theworld where poets talk in bed, or where friends conduct dinner-conversation from sets of file-cards.

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The unarticulated stories of these characters, in fact, have an “alternate” wordless language of symbol andaphoristic gesture. This language reveals itself in objects, like the hurricane wreckage at the end of “HurricaneHazel” or the crystalline forms that Alma grows in “The Salt Garden.” In “The Resplendent Quetzal” bothhusband and wife carry unspoken stories—Edward of explosive, passionate action, Sarah of bitter grief overtheir stillborn child—(which is in turn an unspoken story of its parents' frozen passions). Both conceal thesestories, Edward under an obsession with bird-watching, Sarah under a precisely conventional code ofbehaviour. Atwood's text reveals their secret stories primarily through symbols—the Mayan sacrificial well atChichen Itza, which is not the civilized “wishing well” Sarah had expected, but a large, earthy, andsuggestively vaginal hole; the plaster Christ-child Sarah steals from a crèche that decorates their hotel andhurls into the well; the magical Mayan bird Edward seeks with his metal binoculars. He doesn't find it, andSarah—she “smoothed her skirt once more … then collected her purse and collapsible umbrella”—after herlapse into passion resumes her usual practicality. The hidden stories here briefly declare themselves, but thereceived, cliché stories of bourgeois life retain, for Edward and Sarah at least, greater power.

The later story “Scarlet Ibis” makes a similar contrast between the mechanical life of a bourgeois couple andthe hidden story which a tropical object—birds on an island preserve—can bring to consciousness. Christine'sresponse to these birds emphasizes their “otherness”—“on the other side of the fence was another world, notreal but at the same time more real than the one on this side, the men and women in their flimsy clothes andaging bodies. …” The ibis is to her a symbol almost outside of comprehension, beyond her powers oflanguage. In “Bluebeard's Egg” the story of the wizard's egg that Sally encounters at her writing class issimilarly mysterious to her. The story troubles her but she cannot intellectualize how it might apply to herown life; in the concluding lines of the story the egg remains for her an unintegrated image “glowing softly”in their imagination “as though there's something red and hot inside it.”

This inarticulate and unintellectualizable level of meaning requires an extraordinarily large amount ofsymbolism. The alternate story is nearly always implicit, iconic, and only marginally understood by thecharacters—a fainting spell (“The Salt Garden”), a cosmic dream (“The Sin Eaters”), a compelling sunrise(“The Sunrise”), a depressing tone in the croaking of “Spring Song of the Frogs,” an exhilaratingly red bird(“Scarlet Ibis”). Denotative language in an Atwood fiction is the preserve of the gothic wizard, the scientist, orof characters who attempt to rationalize or trivialize the symbols that trouble them. This is the language of theofficial story. Both official and iconic languages are apparent at the conclusion of “Unearthing Suite,” whenthe narrator's mother and father discover a fisher's droppings on the roof of their cabin.

For my father, this dropping is an interesting biological phenomenon. He has noted it andfiled it, along with all the other scraps of fascinating data he notes and files.

For my mother however, this is something else. For her this dropping—this hand-long,two-fingers thick, black, hairy dropping—not to put too fine a point on it, this deposit ofanimal shit—is a miraculous token, a sign of divine grace; as if their mundane, familiar,much-patched but at times still-leaking roof has been visited and made momentarily radiantby an unknown but by no means minor god.

The father views the event as knowable, but for the mother it is an “other” story, “miraculous” beyondexplanation, “unknown.”

Repeatedly in Atwood's recent fictions characters defend themselves against such iconic events by trivializingtheir emotional responses to them, turning away from the event much like Sarah in “The ResplendentQuetzal” turns away from the Mayan well and toward her collapsible umbrella. The title character of“Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” deals with each major symbolic event of her life in clichélanguage. “‘I remember the time we almost died,’ says my mother. Many of her stories begin this way.” In“Scarlet Ibis,” after witnessing birds which evoke for her “the gardens of mediaeval paintings,” Christine

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jovially describes them to friends “as a form of entertainment, like the Grand Canyon: something that reallyought to be seen, if you liked birds, and if you should happen to be in that part of the world.” In “Bluebeard'sEgg” Sally succumbs to a similar trivializing when she describes her night school course in writing.

She was … intending to belittle the course, just slightly. She always did this with her nightcourses, so Ed wouldn't get the idea there was anything in her life that was even remotely asimportant as he.

The real “other” story is that Sally cares deeply about that part of herself that seeks to define itself throughthese courses. The trivialized version is merely the official story, created for her husband's benefit.

The juxtaposition of these two kinds of narrative creates recurrently surreal effects. Many of the characters,particularly the women, live psychologically in the hidden story while functioning physically in the officialstory. They dream and think in the language of symbols but they speak in cliché. They trivialize their innerlives in order to live a life of conventional fiction. Almost all of Atwood's couples remain strangers to eachother because of this failure to declare the hidden story. Edward in “The Resplendent Quetzal” keeps secrethis passionate fantasies and his unhappiness with Sarah's controlled behaviour! Sarah conceals her profoundgrief at the loss of their child beneath a pretense of control and self-righteousness. When Sarah momentarilyloses her composure, however, and weeps beside the well, he is afraid. “‘This isn't like you,’ Edward said,pleadingly.” Despite his unhappiness, he prefers the official story.

This isn't like you. The official story impoverishes the language of its users, not only restricting it to factualobservation and cliché, but limiting its tone. It also limits the tone of those who are aware of hidden stories,like the narrators of “Under Glass,” “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” and “Hair Jewellery,” by making themfeel disconnected from the lives of others. Their narratives have a flat, passive tone that echoes their beliefsthat they are forever witnesses to events rather than participants in them. The ineffectuality of characters likeSally in “Bluebeard's Egg” is in part a property of their hidden stories, stories that are unacknowledged,marginalized, trivialized even by the people who dream them.

Ladies & Escorts, Real Mothers, Dancing Girls, Bluebeard's Egg—all these Thomas and Atwood titles areparadigmatic, denoting received “official” stories, scripts that their characters have been asked to enter. InAtwood's story “Bluebeard's Egg,” the fable of the wizard's egg assigns to each of three sisters a three-partstory—an egg to protect, a room not to enter, a death by dismemberment should they fail the first two parts.The three sisters' story, like that of Sally who is told the story, like that of Edward and Sarah in “TheResplendent Quetzal,” of Will in “Spring Song of the Frogs,” of the mother in “Significant Moments in theLife of My Mother,” or of many of Thomas' characters, is the story of having embraced no authentic story.Ladies & Escorts contains stories of ladies without escorts, with titular escorts, with unwanted escorts—all arequalified not only by the source assumption of the old beer parlour sign, “ladies and escorts” but by thewomen's private derivative fictions about themselves and an escort. The dance of Atwood's Dancing Girls is asimilar ever-present qualifier, an inherited script of social behaviour. The title generically links as socialperformer a housewife, a young lady poet, a botanist, a journalist, a Blake scholar. The inheritances implicit inthese titles, like the inherited stories contained generally in the fictions of these two authors, are oppressive.Perhaps most important for us to consider, a major part of the western literary heritage—particularly theromance mode with its roots in Greek mythology and the Bible, its pervasive presence in myth and fairy tale,its huge presence in medieval and Renaissance literature, especially in Shakespeare—is marked in these booksas destructive to authentic story. The romance is presented as an unyielding, unitary, and patriarchalinheritance that leads the passive character, male or female, ultimately to no story.

By implication, the romance, and all the other unitary forms that Northrop Frye tells us descend bydisplacement from it—the heroic, the comic, the tragic, the pastoral, the realistic novel, the ironic novel, therealistic short story—are discredited by Thomas' and Atwood's short fiction as literary models. The archetypal

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story Frye finds behind these, the Biblical one of a quest to re-enter the lost garden, is a “male” story—in itscentralized theme, its Freudian symbolism, its Aristotelian structure. Disjunctive structure and multiplicity ofstory are used by Thomas and Atwood not to affirm through irony the Biblical story, as they are, for example,by Eliot in The Waste Land, but to suggest counter-structures. There may be other gardens, their fictions say,than the one lost by Adam or re-invented by Bluebeard; there may be unnamed, inarticulate, unchosen, oruninherited gardens; there may even be alternatives to garden. All these possibilities promise furtheralternatives to familiar story.

Notes

Audrey Thomas, “The More Little Mummy in the World,” Ladies & Escorts (Ottawa: Oberon Press,1977), p. 138. Subsequent quotations from Thomas' work are from this book, and from Ten GreenBottles (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1977 [1967]), and Real Mothers (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1981).

1.

See Hallvard Dahlie, “The Fiction of Alice Munro,” Ploughshares 4 (Summer 1978), pp. 56–71;Helen Hoy, “‘Dull, Simple, Amazing, and Unfathomable’: Paradox and Double Vision in AliceMunro's Fiction,” Studies in Canadian Literature, 5 (Spring 1980), pp. 100–15; Lorraine McMullen,“‘Shameless, Marvellous, Shattering Absurdity’: the Humour of Paradox in Alice Munro,” in Louis J.MacKendrick, ed., Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts (Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press,1983), pp. 144–62; and Gerald Noonan, “The Structure of Style in Alice Munro's Fiction,” inMacKendrick, pp. 163–80.

2.

Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1983). Subsequent quotationsfrom Atwood's work are from this book and the collection Dancing Girls (Toronto: McClelland &Stewart, 1977).

3.

Criticism: Bonnie Lyons (review date 1987)

SOURCE: A review of Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 3,Summer, 1987, p. 312.

[In the following positive review of Bluebeard's Egg, Lyons asserts that the “stories have many virtues andsources of interest, including the revelations about Atwood's biography, the exploration of her major themesand motifs, and not least of all, their excellence as stories.”]

In “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” the first story of this collection, the narrator recalls a keychildhood anecdote about bunny rabbit cookies. Offered a wonderful cookie shaped like a bunny rabbit anddecorated with a face and clothes of colored icing, the narrator as a child went off to a corner and talked to hercookie instead of gobbling many like her brother. The narrator muses about why her mother repeatedly toldher boyfriends this story, whether to prove her “kindliness and essential femininity,” to suggest herharmlessness (“that they could expect to be talked to but not devoured”) or to warn them of her mentalinstability (suggesting that she was “the kind of person who might be expected to leap up suddenly from thedinner table and shout, ‘Don't eat that! It's alive!’”). A portrait of the artist as a young girl? It would seem so.

Atwood has said that this collection contains portraits of her parents. The volume is dedicated to them and thefirst two stories, “Significant Moments” and “Hurricane Hazel,” and two of the last, “In Search of theRattlesnake Plantain” and “Unearthing Suite,” are written like first person memoirs told by a narrator whoseems like Atwood herself. Since most readers covet information about an author's life and since Surfacing isoften mistakenly seen as containing portraits of her parents, this volume of stories has special interest.Reading these stories as autobiography one sees the source of many of Atwood's strengths: her family'sresilience, independence, relative obliviousness to social convention, and their knowledge of and deepaffection for nature. When the Atwood-like narrator of “Hurricane Hazel” observes, “In our family you were

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supposed to know the names of the things you picked up and put in jars,” one can see the roots of theextremely exact observation and obsession with naming in Atwood's work. The portraits of her parents areetched with a warmth that is unusual for Atwood, and she closes the collection with the muted but clearlypositive image related to her parents. While “In Search” emphasizes loss and decline—her father's stroke,dying birch trees, disappearing species of plants and animals—the story closes with the narrator's parents'triumphant discovery on their roof of the dropping of a fisher, a “beautiful arboreal voracious” predator. Thisdeposit is for them all a miraculous token, a sign of divine grace; their roof “has been visited and mademomentarily radiant by an unknown but by no means minor god.”

Various stories evoke the dangers and terrors of modern life, from the mundane and ordinary, like intrusiveneighbors and incessant noise, to the catastrophic: nuclear war and biological destruction of the earth. As inall her work, there is an acute sensitivity to the subtleties of human relationships and the power strugglesbetween women and men and between generations.

The best stories like the title story are interesting simply as stories. “Bluebeard's Egg” is about Sally, who istotally focussed on her husband Ed whom she considers opaque and charmingly stupid. Instructed by herevening course teacher to write a five page transposition of the Bluebeard story, set in the present and cast inthe realistic mode, using the point of view of someone or something in the story, Sally decides to tell the storyfrom the point of view of the egg which Bluebeard required his wives to protect and carry about with them.She thinks, “Ed isn't the Bluebeard. Ed is the egg. Ed Egg, blank and pristine and lovely. Stupid too. Boiled,probably.” But when Sally discovers Ed in a sexually ambiguous situation with her best friend, she suddenlyawakens and realizes how little she knows about her husband or his first two wives (Bluebeard killed his firsttwo wives; Ed just divorced his). And the egg, which seemed “closed and unaware,” now pulses and darkensand frightens Sally. Her last thought is “the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch. But what will come out ofit?” Sally may never write a realistic Bluebeard story, but Atwood has.

The stories have many virtues and sources of interest, including the revelations about Atwood's biography, theexploration of her major themes and motifs, and not least of all, their excellence as stories.

Criticism: Mona Knapp (review date 1987)

SOURCE: A review of Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories, in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4,Autumn, 1987, p. 629.

[In the following review, Knapp offers a negative assessment of Bluebeard's Egg.]

As much as The Handmaid's Tale was a minor literary sensation which marked Atwood's move tointernational prominence, her second collection of short fiction is patently unsensational. With the exceptionof two stories new to the American edition, the volume appeared already in 1983 in Canada. Two-thirds of thestories, in addition, have been featured previously in Harper's and other magazines, making theirreappearance under one cover as much a matter of publishing convenience as of artistic necessity. Not a singledate of original publication is given; and whether this is mere negligence or deliberate obfuscation by thepublisher, it makes the critic's evaluation of the texts more difficult.

Of course, Atwood's unique voice, with its wry understatement and sensitive characterization, rings clearthroughout. The twelve texts can be roughly divided into two groups. Four fall into the “My Parents” categoryof quasi-autobiographical fiction much abused by well-known authors. Their plots are elementary: childhoodin the Canadian wilderness, rise and fall of the first boyfriend, civilization and nature in the Northern wilds,anecdotes about individualist parents whose “exhausting vitality” guarantees their physical and spiritualsurvival. These stories exemplify well Atwood's talent for evocative, almost lyrical nature description, plied

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earlier by the distinctive narrative voice in Surfacing.

The second, much larger group of stories presents variations on frustrated love affairs and marriages. Theprotagonists reflect on their wives and husbands, the offspring and ex-wives of same, on lovers andex-lovers—all somehow dreary and unfulfilling. They reach the resigned conclusion that communicationbetween the sexes is perpetually deficient. Love itself is, to paraphrase, something that merely “goes on asusual, until it stops.”

Special mention is deserved for three outstanding pieces. The title story uses the Bluebeard fairy tale (inwhich the antihero slaughters his wives for their disobedience) to describe the inner fears of the third wife ofan unaffectionate husband. Also memorable, and reminsicent in its black humor of Lady Oracle, is“Uglypuss,” the story of two down-and-out left-wing activists whose affair ends with the bloody kidnappingof a cat. Two Stories about Emma, finally, describes the peculiar phenomenon of certain people born withoutfear, who go through life in a “bubble of invulnerability.” It was precisely the aspect of horrendous humanvulnerability, however, that made The Handmaid's Tale (and Bodily Harm before it) so gripping. The absenceof that aspect from the stories of Bluebeard's Egg makes them, despite their undeniable merits,two-dimensional in comparison.

Criticism: Nancy J. Peterson (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: “‘Bluebeard's Egg’: Not Entirely a ‘Grimm’ Tale,” in Margaret Atwood: Reflection and Reality,edited by Beatrice Mendez-Egle and James M. Haule, Pan American University, 1987, pp. 131–38.

[In the following essay, Peterson evaluates the influence of legends and fairy tales on Atwood's short fiction.]

In a 1977 interview, Margaret Atwood speculated that her childhood reading led to the emphasis on evolutionand transformation evident in her adult fiction. As a child, Atwood said, she read legends, fairy tales, andreligious stories, all involving “miraculous changes of shape” (Sandler 14). The influence of these tales onAtwood's fiction is a largely untouched area of scholarship. However, the publication of her collection ofshort stories, Bluebeard's Egg, which overtly uses fairy tales and legends to make a statement about modernlife, calls for a further examination of this influence. The story that gives the collection its title is particularlyfascinating because it is based on a legend everyone knows—the tale of Bluebeard. Also, the story uses thelesser—known version of the Bluebeard story recounted by the Brothers Grimm. In the interview mentionedabove, Atwood singled out the one book from her childhood that affected her later writing: “I would say thatGrimm's Fairy Tales [sic] was the most influential book I ever read” (Sandler 14).

The tale that Atwood uses in “Bluebeard's Egg” can be easily identified because her short story contains astory within a story. The inner story is Grimms' version of the Bluebeard tale, as recalled by the maincharacter, Sally. This tale is included in Atwood's story because Sally is taking a writing course and has beenassigned to write “a five—page transposition [of the legend], set in the present and cast in the realistic mode”(156). Sally never writes this transposition. However, Atwood's short story—the outer story—is thefulfillment of Sally's assignment. “Bluebeard's Egg” is longer than five pages (it runs 33 pages), but it doessuccessfully transpose the Bluebeard legend into a modern, realistic setting.

The Grimms' tale included in Atwood's story is entitled “Fitchers Vogel.” Atwood's use of this particular taleas the source for her short story cannot be explained entirely as the result of her childhood reading, however.The Bluebeard legend has been passed down in several different versions. The most widely known is CharlesPerrault's “La Barbe Bleue,” in which the character actually is called Bluebeard. Although Perrault's characterlends his name to the title of Atwood's story, Atwood rejects his well-known tale in favor of Grimms' version.The writing teacher in Atwood's story gives one reason why Perrault's tale is not used: it is too “sentimental”

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(156). A comparison of Perrault's tale and Grimms' tale with each other and with Atwood's story, however,reveals several reasons why Atwood uses Grimms' version. In addition, such a comparison highlightsAtwood's ability to take an idea from a fairy tale, transform it, and make it her own.

In Perrault's “La Barbe Bleue,” Bluebeard is a rich man who has a difficult time finding a wife because hisbeard is blue, making him unattractive to women, and because his previous wives have disappeared without atrace. His wealth—not he himself—attracts women. Grimms' character is not called Bluebeard because hedoes not have a beard of that color; moreover, he has no trouble attracting women because he is a wizard andcan cast a spell on any woman so that she must follow him. The husband in Atwood's story, Ed Bear, is thewizard—type, but he is realistic. His ability to attract women is not supernatural. At parties, women flock toEd because he is “a heart man, one of the best,” and “they want him to fix their hearts” (139). The phrase“heart man” is deliberately ambiguous. Realistically Ed is a doctor, perhaps a cardiologist, who specializes intreating heart problems. The legendary figure Bluebeard is also a kind of heart man—the kind that stealswomen's hearts. And Ed fits this mold too. Just like Grimms' wizard, who goes through two wives in the taleuntil the third wife uncovers his murders, Ed is married to his third wife, Sally. Sally is perplexed because Edcannot (or will not) tell her what went wrong with his previous marriages, which both ended in divorce. Sheworries: “What if he wakes up one day and decides that she [Sally] isn't the true bride after all, but the falseone? Then she will be put into a barrel stuck full of nails and rolled downhill, endlessly, while he is sitting inyet another bridal bed, drinking champagne” (136). Sally married Ed not for his wealth but because she isunder a kind of spell—love. Using Grimms' version of the tale allows Atwood to explore the power politics ofa love relationship, a theme that runs throughout Atwood's poetry and prose.

Another striking difference between Perrault's and Grimms' tales is who saves Bluebeard's wife from death. InPerrault's tale, the woman is saved with the help of her sister, who signals their brothers to hurry on their wayto Bluebeard's home. The brothers arrive just in time to prevent Bluebeard from cutting off his wife's head.They kill Bluebeard, who dies without an heir, thereby leaving his fortune to his only surviving wife. InGrimms' version of the tale, the third wife is more clever that her two deceased sisters. She saves herself andbrings her sisters back to life through her cunning and curiosity. She, like her sisters, enters the forbiddenroom, but only after she has put Bluebeard's egg in a safe place. (Her two sisters had carried the egg with theminto the room and dropped it into the blood-filled basin out of shock, whereupon it became the indelible markof their disobedience.) Thus, the third wife learns that her husband-to-be is a murdered without revealing hertransgression. She also puts the severed parts of her sisters back together, and they miraculously revive. Shethen outwits the wizard and burns him and his friends in the house while they are waiting for the wedding tobegin.

Atwood's Sally follows the role of the third wife in Grimms' tale. She does not revive Ed's previous wives, butshe does raise their children. Even though she finds it difficult to be a mother to these children who are closeto her own age, the narrator says “Considering everything, she hasn't done badly. She likes the kids and triesto be a friend to them, since she can hardly pretend to be a mother” (150). Sally is also depicted as the kind ofwoman who can take care of herself. She does not need a man to help her out of her predicament, as does thewife in Perrault's tale. Sally's self-sufficiency is a quality emphasized by the narrator. Sally is capable at herjob: “her job is supposed to be full-time, but in effect it's part-time, because Sally can take a lot of the workaway and do it at home, and, as she says, with one arm tied behind her back” (140). Sally can even manageher incompetent, alcoholic boss. He lets her run the show, and she lets him take the official credit. Sally cancook gourmet meals. She can set up a dinner party and make sure everyone has a good time. She can entertainEd's associates with her clever stories and remarks. She takes night classes: medieval history, cooking,anthropology, geology, comparative folklore, forms of narrative fiction. In these classes, Sally is always the“star pupil” (153).

But the one thing that Sally cannot control is her heart. Sally depends emotionally on Ed. Her dependence onhim is dramatically illustrated in one scene in which Sally talks Ed into showing her how a new piece of

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medical equipment operates. Using sound waves, the machine projects a picture of a person's heart onto ablack-and-white television screen.

“There,” he said, and Sally turned her head. On the screen was a large grey object, like a giantfig, paler in the middle, a dark line running down the centre. The side moved in and out; twowings fluttered in it, like an uncertain moth's.

“That's it?” said Sally dubiously. Her heart looked so insubstantial, like a bag of gelatin,something that would melt, fade, disintegrate, if you squeezed it even a little.

Ed moved the probe, and they looked at the heart from the bottom, then the top. Then hestopped the frame, then changed it from a positive to a negative image. Sally began to shiver.

“That's wonderful,” she said. He seemed so distant, absorbed in his machine, taking themeasure of her heart, which was beating over there all by itself, detached from her, exposedand under his control.

(146–147)

This scene dramatizes Atwood's ambiguous portrayal of Ed as a “heart man.” Ed has the power as a doctorand, by implication, as a husband to control Sally's heart. For Atwood, Bluebeard is not the blood-thirstyvillain of the traditional legends, but a power-hungry man who “severs” his wife's heart from her body and hercontrol. By portraying Bluebeard in a realistic setting, Atwood also broadens the implications of theBluebeard motif: the predicament faced by Bluebeard's wives and by Sally is an archetypal situation resultingfrom their belief in romantic love. Atwood's story shows that women who fall blindly in love relinquishcontrol over their hearts and their lives.

Another way in which Atwood modernizes the Bluebeard tale is by using a limited, third-person unreliablenarrator. Even though this is Sally's story, it is not told in first person. Use of the third-person narratoremphasizes Sally's loss of control over her relationship with Ed. The reader is allowed to see into Sally'smind, but the narrator never confirms whether Sally's feelings and fears about her relationship with Ed aregenuine or the result of paranoia. Consequently, we start to wonder if Sally's perceptions are accurate. The useof an unreliable narrator (or, at best, one who is not necessarily reliable) adds to the realism of Atwood'stransposition. In both Perrault's and Grimms' tales, Bluebeard is clearly identified as an evil husband; thewives' bodies are tangible evidence of his villainy. But in Atwood's tale, as in real life, the villain is hard torecognize. Is Ed Bear indeed a Bluebeard type of husband? Or is Sally just an insecure wife who is imaginingthings? Since Ed has not murdered his two former wives, how can Sally—or any woman—determine if he isthe loving husband he seems to be or a man who, by preying on women's affections, kills them spiritually ifnot literally?

The moment of recognition comes when Sally asks her best friend, Marylynn, to show Ed the antique keyholedesk that Sally has just purchased. Up until this point in the story, Sally has remarked that Ed is too stupid tobe devious, that he is so dumb he needs her to protect him, that he is too innocent to know when women aretrying to seduce him. At the same time, however, Sally admits that “Ed is a surface, one she has troublegetting beneath” (152). Yet, when she mulls over her writing assignment, Sally thinks, “Ed isn't theBluebeard: Ed is the egg. Ed Egg, blank and pristine and lovely. Stupid, too. Boiled, probably” (159). The factremains, however, that Ed's last name is not “Egg”; it is “Bear” as in Bluebeard. And Ed cannot be completelystupid; he is, after all, a successful doctor.

The scene at the keyhole desk, however, changes Sally's perceptions of Ed. As Sally enters the alcove wherethe desk is,

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Marylynn is bending forward, one hand on the veneer. Ed is standing too close to her, and asSally comes up behind them she sees his left arm, held close to his side, the back of it pressedagainst Marylynn, her shimmering upper thigh, her ass to be exact. Marylynn does not moveaway.

It's a split second, and then Ed sees Sally and the hand is gone; there it is, on top of the desk,reaching for a liqueur glass.

(163)

In this instant, Sally realizes that Ed might not be a faithful, loving husband. This realization takes place at akeyhole desk in Atwood's story; in the Bluebeard tales, the key is the means of entering the forbidden roomwhere the wife finds out what kind of man she has married. Atwood, however, does not include muchincriminating evidence because her story aims for realism and because the important matter in the story is thechange in the woman's perception of her husband. After the scene at the desk, Sally, for the first time, getsupset with Ed for not calling their cleaning lady—who has worked for them for three years—by her propername: Mrs. Rudge. He calls her “the woman.” Then Sally remembers that he called the previous cleaninglady, Mrs. Bird, “the woman” too—“as though they are interchangeable” (165). This detail shows the changein Sally's perception of Ed; she realizes he might not be the person she thinks he is. In fact, his resemblance toBluebeard, for whom women and wives are also interchangeable, becomes more apparent as the story drawsto a close. Later in the evening, Sally goes to bed after Ed. As she crawls in beside him, she notes that Ed “isbreathing deeply as if asleep. As if” (165). She no longer trusts him completely and admits that her version ofEd might not be “something she's perceived but something that's been perpetrated on her, by Ed himself, forreasons of his own” (164). Once she admits this possibility, Sally is in a position to regain control of her lifeand emotions. The image of the egg is the principal means by which Atwood conveys this transformation.

The image of the egg brings up another difference between Perrault's and Grimms' Bluebeard tales. InPerrault's tale, the key to the forbidden room becomes indelibly stained with blood, telling Bluebeard that hiswife has disobeyed his command. In Grimms' tale, not the key but the egg becomes stained. In none of theother variants of the Bluebeard motif does and egg become stained. As the title of Atwood's short storysuggests, the egg is the most important symbol in her reworking of the legend. Exactly what the eggrepresents in this story is not easy to decide, however. Sally identifies Ed as the egg, but as mentioned before,the narrator is not necessarily reliable and the evidence indicates that Ed is not as simple, dumb, and passiveas Sally thinks he is. Sally herself rejects three other meanings for the egg: in this story, it is not a fertilitysymbol or something the world hatched out of or a symbol of female virginity.

To illustrate what the egg symbolizes in this story, we can turn to Atwood's poem cycle “True Romances,”published in the volume True Stories. This poem cycle contains allusions to the Bluebeard legend, and the eggappears as an image in two of the poems. The first prose-poem/romance tells of a man who chops up his wifeand leaves her in garbage cans all over Barcelona. He is obviously a modern-day Bluebeard. The secondprose-poem relates the feelings of a woman who was once “desperately in love” (41)—in other words, she fellvictim to a painful, romantic love. The egg image is found in poems 4 and 5, but is most significant in theformer. In poem 4, the egg represents the ego:

Most people in that country don't eat eggs, she told me, they can't afford to; if they're luckyenough to have a chicken that lays eggs they sell the eggs. There is no such thing as inside,there's no such thing as I. The landscape is continuous, it flows through whatever passes forhouses there, dried mud in and out, famine in and out, there is only we.

(43)

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The egg can be seen as a symbol of the ego in “Bluebeard's Egg” also. The meaning of the egg eludes Sallyuntil the very end. Meanwhile, the narrator relates Sally's fears about having no identity: “Sometimes Sallyworries that she's a nothing, the way Marylynn was before she got a divorce and a job. But Sally isn't anothing; therefore, she doesn't need a divorce to stop being one” (140). Sally's reasoning clearly begs thequestion; she evades the issue because she subconsciously knows that she is not her own person emotionally.In addition, the use of the third-person narrator shows Sally's selflessness.

The egg also symbolizes a person who, by himself, is whole. The country described in poem 4 of “TrueRomances” is a place where “They cut off the hands and heads to prevent identification.” The narrator of thepoem adds, “Among those of us who still have heads and hands there are no marriages” (43). In other words,marriage is a place where the individual does not exist whole; he must sever part of himself to be married, inwhich case he also loses his identity. This same situation is found in “Bluebeard's Egg,” where Sally spendsmost of her free time thinking about Ed. At her dinner party, Sally admits that “Although she never looksdirectly, she's always conscious of Ed's presence in the room, any room” (163). In another place, Sally saysthat her motivation to take so many night courses is to concentrate on something besides Ed for a while. Butwhen her writing teacher asks the students to explore their inner and outer worlds, Sally rebels: “she's fed upwith her inner world; she doesn't need to explore it. In her inner world is Ed, like a doll within a Russianwooden doll, and in Ed is Ed's inner world, which she can't get at” (152). Neither can she picture herself as aperson distinct from Ed. In short, Sally is not a whole person, and she realizes it.

By emphasizing the egg from Grimms' version of the Bluebeard legend, Atwood creates a new moral for thisstory: romantic love—the kind that makes a woman emotionally dependent, the kind that puts her heart undera man's control—is dangerous. This moral is suggested by the narrator's inclusion of Grimms' tale in the story,as Sally remembers it. Sally stops at the point when the third wife has looked into the forbidden room, revivedher sisters, and deceived the wizard. Because the egg is spotless, according to the legend the wizard no longerhas any power over his wife. Here Sally ends the story even though Grimm goes on to tell how the wifearranges for the wizard and his friends to be killed. The point of Atwood's story is not that an evil person getshis just rewards, but that a woman whose eyes are opened can gain control of her life and her heart.

The theme of Atwood's story is much different from Perrault's. Perrault added a moral to the end of his fairytales. “La Barbe Bleue” got not only one moral, but two. The first moral is the often-repeated warning againstcuriousity as a female vice that always brings about unhappiness and misery. Bluebeard's wife in this view isjust another Pandora. Atwood's story acknowledges that curiosity can cause unhappiness, but only because itcan lead to a moment of insight for a person who is blindly in love. The second moral Perrault added to histale is meant to appease husbands: “cette histoire / Est un conte du temps passé; Il n'est plus d'Epoux siterrible” (29). Atwood, of course, would disagree with this “moral.” True, husbands who dismember theirwives are not common today. However, husbands who want to control their wives (and wives who want to bedominated) are not only part of ancient history, but present in today's society. Throughout Atwood's fiction,the female characters struggle—not always successfully—to to get out of destructive relationships with menwho want to control or dominate them. The volume of poetry Power Politics, of all of Atwood's works,perhaps best portrays the sado-masochism that is intrinsic in many male/female relationships.

Atwood's story affirms the idea that curiosity—leading to painful insight—can transform a woman's life. Thechange in Sally's perception of Ed is symbolized at the end of the story by the merging of the egg and heartimages. First, the image of the heart controlled by Ed—the black-and-white heart—recedes into the distance.

Sally lies in bed with her eyes closed. What she sees is her own heart, in black and white,beating with that insubstantial moth-like flutter, a ghostly heart, torn out of her and floating inspace, an animated valentine with no colour. It will go on and on forever; she has no controlover it.

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(165)

A valentine heart represents romantic love. It floats away from Sally as she lets go of her blind romanticism.Then Sally sees the egg transformed:

But now she's seeing the egg, which is not small and cold and white and inert but larger thana real egg and golden pink, resting in a nest of brambles, glowing softly as though there'ssomething red and hot inside it. It's almost pulsing; Sally is afraid of it. As she looks itdarkens: rose-red, crimson.

(165–166)

The image of the egg takes on the blood-red color of a heart, and it assumes the rhythmic pulsing of a living,beating heart. The egg—representing the ego, a whole person—merges with the heart only when Sally'sperceptions of Ed are transformed, enabling her to regain control of her life and emotions.

Unlike the egg in Grimms' tale, in Atwood's story the egg is spotted to show that Sally's transformation will bea painful, active process. The ending of Grimms' tale is, of course, happy; in contrast, Atwood's ending ismore cautious: “This is something the story left out, Sally thinks: the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch.But what will come out of it?” (166). Atwood leaves Sally on the verge of positive movement much like sheleaves the narrator of Surfacing at a moment of decision. In Atwood's myth, neither is assured of livinghappily ever after.

The success of “Bluebeard's Egg” ultimately rests not on its borrowings from Grimms' legend, but onAtwood's ability to shape Grimms' material to her own purposes. As Atwood commented to one interviewer,“I think the thing to do with a mythology is not to discard the mythology at all, but to transform it, rearrange itand shift the values” (Van Varseveld 67). In the process of stripping the supernatural elements from theBluebeard legend, Atwood uncovers a universal archetype: Bluebeard can be any man and his wife, anywoman. While fulfilling Sally's class assignment, Atwood's short story reaffirms the value of legends andfairy tales to depict a timeless, essential part of the human condition.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. “Bluebeard's Egg.” Bluebeard's Egg. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1983.133–66.

———. “True Romances.” True Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. 40–44.

Perrault, Charles. Popular Tales. Ed. Andrew Lang. Oxford, 1888. Rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1977.

Sandler, Linda. “Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Malahat Review, 41 (1977): 7–27.

Van Varsveld, Gail. “Talking with Atwood.” Room of One's Own 1.2 (Summer 1975): 66–70.

Criticism: Russell Brown (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: “Atwood's Sacred Wells (Dancing Girls, poetry, and Surfacing),” in Critical Essays on MargaretAtwood, edited by Judith McCombs, G. K. Hall & Co., 1988, pp. 213–29.

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[In the following essay, Brown explores the recurring images in Atwood's work, focusing on how they functionin her fiction and poetry.]

“Think about pools.”

There is a Margaret Atwood story—“The Resplendent Quetzal”—which opens with a young Canadianwoman in Mexico, sitting at the edge of a sacrificial well. The well is an unprepossessing relic of an ancientcivilization, now reduced to an object at which tourists come to gaze, their attention superficial and brief.Sarah, the woman at this well, is herself a tourist, but unlike the ones she watches hurrying by, she has sometime to spend and feels at least some sense of the symbolism of this once-sacred site. Still Sarah is alsodisappointed in the well, almost as much so as other tourists: it is less interesting to look at than she hadimagined, and shallower than her guidebook had promised. A guide who has finished lecturing his tour groupflirts with her briefly, but it is not romance that Sarah longs for. Rebuffed, the guide flicks his cigarette intothe well and departs.

This brief scene is an extremely significant one in Atwood's canon. Some of her most important images areclustered together here, images which reappear in her work to the point of obsessive concern. Frequentlydrawn together in this way, they become structural elements; they form a constellation which does not readilyyield single or easy meaning. Their reappearance is a sign of an ongoing investigation, of a continued pursuitof the meaning and inter-relationships of certain themes and of the metaphors which convey them. The resultis that when we read widely in Atwood's work the images in any single story or poem take on enrichedsignificance; they trigger previously established associations. We experience a sense of déjà vu: notunpleasant, it is the feeling of drifting back into a familiar dream.

I

“You from around here?” she asked.

“No,” Morrison said.1

The tourists at the beginning of “The Resplendent Quetzal” stand out because the figure of the tourist is sooften present in Atwood's world. The person not “from around here,” embodies a general sense of dislocation,a feeling of not being at home: these are so much a part of the fiction and poetry that they become moreatmosphere and mood than content.

More than half the stories collected in Dancing Girls revolve around tourists and other individuals estrangedfrom the culture in which they find themselves. Sometimes these are people with whom the protagonist mustenact transactions which are invariably uncomfortable—as in “The Man from Mars,” where a strange foreignman pursues and dismays the central character. When we encounter such outsiders, the stories suggest, ourproblems arise from our inability to understand or interpret unfamiliar patterns of behaviour: “Her mothervolunteered that the thing about people from another culture was that you could never tell whether they wereinsane or not because their ways were so different” (“The Man from Mars,” DG, p. 32).

In other stories, it is the protagonist who is the outsider, the traveller into foreign lands. “Lives of the Poets”begins with a woman “lying on the bathroom floor of this anonymous hotel room”; “The Grave of the FamousPoet” opens with a pair of young vacationers riding a bus into a Welsh town. In “A Travel Piece” the centralcharacter's job is that of travel writer: “a professional tourist, she works at being pleased and not participating;at sitting and watching” (DG, p. 152).

Elsewhere in “A Travel Piece,” the authorial voice defines “tourists” as “those who are not responsible …those who make the lives of others their transient spectacle and pleasure” (DG, p. 152). In such poems as “At

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the Tourist Centre in Boston” and “Interview with a Tourist,” these people are treated more negatively still:they are those who always see things superficially, who perpetually condescend to unfamiliar cultures, andwho impose what they desire on what they find.

This sense of the tourist accounts for some of the attraction the historic figure of Susanna Moodie holds: forAtwood, Moodie becomes an embodiment of these failures. …

All of the characters of Life Before Man, Atwood's most recent novel, are, in fact, “refugees” in some way oranother, with the defence mechanisms and sense of alienation which that condition entails. Tourists,immigrants, refugees, “exiles and invaders”—there is a pervasive failure to claim one's own territory, a failurewhich inevitably also shows up as a failure to assert identity.

The way the alienation felt by the tourist severs him from the place where he finds himself, allowing him totreat it as “spectacle,” is nowhere more clear than in Surfacing, with its depiction of what it is like to be on“home ground, foreign territory.” In that novel David exhibits the attitude of the tourist at its most frightening,and it is that attitude which permits him to reduce the world—and with it his companions—to an emotionallydistant environment, one suitable as raw material for his film Random Samples, most valued when mostbizarre.

But there is no easy escape from the sense of displacement that may lead one to become a David. Even thosewho are not tourists, even those who do not travel to unfamiliar places, are not found comfortably at home.The image of the boarding house appears in Atwood's landscapes almost as often as that of the tourist, and forthe same reason—to suggest that there is never any “home ground,” that all occupy turf which is not theirs.

Atwood conveys the sense of a lost home ground most clearly in an early poem about the state of mindproduced by living in a boarding house (ATC, p. 28–29). … Throughout Dancing Girls, boardinghouses,rented rooms, and hotels are almost the only accommodations mentioned, and all exude a sense of residentswho “never lived here”; nowhere is there stability; nowhere does a genuine “home” exist. Within thesetemporary shelters, the inhabitants are driven to compensate for their rootlessness by engaging in pettystruggles, symbolic but intense, that mark off territory as their own. Like the psychological warfare over abathroom that opens Dancing Girls, battles over borders are being covertly fought by many of Atwood'scharacters. Others simply redecorate, or rearrange furniture, as they attempt to turn rented rooms into theirown.

The inhabitants who share these roominghouses are always the same rootless immigrants, the same aliens andtourists that turn up elsewhere. In “Polarities,” Morrison—a man marked by “his own search forplace”—notices that his landlady “seemed to prefer foreign students, probably because they were afraid tocomplain.” In the title story, Ann—a Canadian in America who finds it confusing to be a foreigner and not beseen as one—has a landlady who plays stationary tourist by requesting that each new boarder wear his “nativecostume” for her children.

There are few permanent residences in the novels either. …

The danger suggested … is always that of xenophobia: at some point one identifies the “other” as being notmerely foreign but as truly “alien”: the stranger comes to be seen as “a man from Mars.” In the conclusion to“A Travel Piece,” the protagonist, horrified by the actions of those with whom she is sharing a lifeboat, feelsas if she is confronted with “four Martians and one madman waiting for her to say something” (DG, p. 153).But the strength of Atwood's version of this is that she never lets us escape so easily: she always eventuallyforces us to confront the question with which “A Travel Piece” concludes: “Am I one of them or not?”

II

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… The well, even more than the tourists, is what commands our attention in that opening scene of “TheResplendent Quetzal.” Like the totem poles in “Some Objects of Wood and Stone,” it is a remnant of a lostreligion, an object which serves to remind us that lives were once lived on a more mythic plane. The conditionof tourism is that of a fallen state. The tourist passes among the relics of a visionary people without evenseeing that there has been a loss: he prefers replicas and photographs to the thing itself.

Still, if the well no longer has the meaning it once did, if “There are few totems that remain / living for us,”that does not mean that the world does not contain objects which can function for us as these did for their timeand people. “Some Objects of Wood and Stone” continues:

There are few totems that remainliving for us.Though in passing,through glass we noticedead trees in the seared meadowsdead roots bleaching in the swamps.

(CG, p. 60)

“Dead trees” and “dead roots” are not much to cling to perhaps, and we notice them only “in passing,” butthere is still a sense here that something remains to stir deep, instinctual responses.

So it is elsewhere in Atwood's world: certain things take on unexpected import, become keys to hiddenmeaning, gateways to visionary insight. We may not understand what we have encountered but if we aresensitive we may at least catch glimpses that tell us there is something there:

… each of thefew solid objects took some greatimplication, hidden butmore sudden than a signpost

(“Migration: C.P.R.” CG, p. 53)

Atwood repeatedly depicts totems and totem-like objects that still exist in our world and that can convey thenuminous world to us; they are the sacramenta that we may stumble across in our daily lives. Since the worldof myth is linked for Atwood, as for most modern writers, with the world of the unconscious self, thisphenomenon is like that described by Joseph Campbell:

The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors and deluding images up into themind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity. … And they may remain unsuspected,or, on the other hand, some chance word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, orthe glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then dangerous messengers begin toappear in the brain. These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security intowhich we have built ourselves and our family. But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for theycarry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery ofthe self.2

These objects with “great implication hidden” are ontophanous, able to serve as reminders of what MirceaEliade calls “the plenary manifestation of Being.” Moving through Atwood's landscapes, we find ourselvesamong objects that have meaning packed into them like so many Jacks-in-the-box. Her fiction and poetry sooften contain descriptions of such things that the work itself becomes one of the signposts, pointing out the“underground” realms. Along with the sacrificial well, and the “wooden people” of “Some Objects of Woodand Stone,” there is “a talisman” carried by the protagonist of the story “Giving Birth”: “It's a rounded oblong

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of opaque blue glass, with four yellow and white shapes on it … it makes her feel safer to have it in the roomwith her” (DG, p. 238). Perhaps not always so explicitly “magical,” a host of other significant objectsmanifest themselves. There are, for example, Marian's famous cake at the conclusion of The Edible Woman,and the petroglyphs in Surfacing: “a talisman, my father has left me the guides, the man-animals and the mazeof numbers” (S, p. 149). The very titles of poems and stories name more: “Playing Cards” (CG), “This is aPhotograph of Me” (CG), “Three Desk Objects” (PU), “Weed Seeds Near a Beaver Pond” (PU), “Buffalo inCompound, Alberta” (“the god / of this place” [PU]), “Hair Jewelry” (DG), “The Grave of the Famous Poet”(DG), and the subtitle “Carved Animals” (CG). There is the fabulous bird which gives its name to “TheResplendent Quetzal” (DG), and the “Dancing Girls” who are said to have appeared in one final splendidparty given by that foreign student in the room next door before he was evicted.

That both the Quetzal and the Dancing Girls are rumoured only and remain unseen, that the sacrificial well isdisappointing and the famous grave proves dull, does not deny their significance, for we are, as we have seenalready, living in a time and a place where, like tourists, we may get only unsatisfactory glimpses of thesemana-endowed things. They are too often like the tortoises depicted in “Elegy for the Giant Tortoises,” “therelics of what we have destroyed, / our holy and obsolete symbols” (ATC, p. 23). …

In the poetry Atwood's two ways of seeing become a common structural device: a visionary mode ofperception is balanced against a quotidian one.3 …

Still, even if we fail to perceive the hidden nature of the things around us, that richer world is not entirely lostto us nor does it cease to make demands on us. As “Two Gardens” in Procedures for Underground remindsus, the “underground” meaning remains even though we may deny it, the numinous impinges though we maythink we can hold it apart. …

III

Now this country is underwater;we can love only the drowned

(“Interview with a Tourist,” PU, p. 23)

As Joseph Campbell has pointed out, one of the tasks of the individual in search of enlightenment is to findthe centre of things, the omphalos, which is the point of contact between time and eternity, the “place ofbreakthrough into abundance.”4 Every important religious site (the Bo tree, Calvary) has been thought of assuch a centre, and all shrines and sacred places participate, at least symbolically, in centredness and thus serveas portals to the numinous realm.

Discovery of the centre means renewal: “… the World Navel is the symbol of the continuous creation; themystery of the maintenance of the world through that continuous miracle of vivification which wells withinall things.”5 Of course one of the greatest discoveries that the individual makes is that the centre iseverywhere, that the other world is always available, and hence anything, properly understood, may serve toconvey us there. Still the experiences of certain objects fill our needs better than others; some things seemnatural gateways. The sacred well in “The Resplendent Quetzal” is one such object. Wells and other bodies ofwater have always provided symbolic representations of entrances to an unseen, mysterious world beneath thesurface of our own. The presence of lakes and pools, coupled with larger patterns of descent, of “journeys tothe interior,” and of submerging, is ubiquitous in Atwood's writing; and, in Survival, Atwood alludes todrowning as a convenient “metaphor for the descent into the unconscious” (Surv., p. 55). Several critics haveprovided discussions of the metaphoric structures of Atwood's quests for depths; the best of these is an essayby Roberta Rubenstein entitled “Surfacing: Margaret Atwood's Journey to the Interior.” Rubenstein describesthe action of Surfacing—with its heroine's climactic plunge into a lake that contains a primitive rock painting,

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her father's drowned body, and a vision of her own repressed guilt—as an “archetypal journey into the self”which is also a “symbolic journey into both the private and collective heart of darkness.”6

Although the personal material of the subconscious self is part of what is discovered in those underwaterexplorations, the primitive and powerful imagery of universal myth also lies there and it is that which has thegreater power to transform:

in the waterunder my shadowthere was an outline, mansurfacing, his body sheathedin feathers, his teethglinting like nails, fierce godhead crested with blue flame

(“Dream: Bluejay or Archeopteryx,” PU, p. 9)

In “The Resplendent Quetzal,” Sarah never makes the plunge we have come to expect, but she doessomething in the conclusion of the story that may be even better. Grasping the nature of symbolic and ritualaction in an intuitive moment, she throws a surrogate self into the well. This final act, we sense, moves herback into participation with her mythic unconscious and gives her fragmented psyche a new potential forwholeness.

“The Resplendent Quetzal” thus contains the repeated pattern of Atwood's narratives—a submerging, whethersymbolic or actual, in search of vision that may permit a final surfacing of the restored or renewed individual.…

In Atwood's version of our history, we live not only after a fall but after the deluge—and the waters have notreceded. We move on the surface of that great flood, while a rich and valuable world lies beneath our feet, aworld that is lost to us because it is “far undersea.”

Even to recognize our inundated condition, as in “After the Flood,” is a small victory (CG, p. 12). …

The cause of the catastrophe that has come to pass is suggested in several places, among them this passagefrom Surfacing: “In the bay the felled trees and numbered posts showed where the surveyors had been, powercompany. My country, sold or drowned, a reservoir; the people were sold along with the land and the animals,a bargain, sale, solde. Les soldes they called them, sellouts, the flood would depend on who got elected, nothere but somewhere else” (S, p. 132). The world in Surfacing is being covered over because of a desire for“power,” because of greed and political venality, but the pattern that Atwood wants us to recognize is largerthan this. Recall the opening of “The Resplendent Quetzal” once more: there is a third element there, besidesthose of tourist and well, one which seemed less important but which is also the most disturbing feature of thescene: the cigarette butt which the guide discards. Even without being told, the reader knows it is probably anAmerican cigarette that falls upon those once-sacred wates. A Canadian tourist has travelled to Mexico to seea Mexican guide throw a bit of American refuse into one of the few remaining sites of a once-vital indigenousculture.

The throwing of the cigarette into the well may be viewed as an act rich in meaning. In Freudian terms, forexample, it could be read as a displacement of the sexual violation that the guide longs for, since it follows hisbrief flirtation with Sarah. Though such a reading is reductive by itself, it is worth holding in mind for the setsof paired oppositions which it evokes: guide and tourist, male and female, the modern society of cigarettebutts, the lost world of sacred wells. Indeed—as the production of such parallels begins to suggest—thecigarette is not so much symbolic as synedochic, a very small part directing our attention to the much larger

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whole which has produced it.

The cigarette is one result of a system of values to which Atwood frequently calls our attention, against whichshe is labouring to warn us. The discarded cigarette floating on the water suggests the pervasive presence ofthe products of commerce, especially American commerce, and of the technology that furnishes them—thesame technology that has literally flooded the landscape in Surfacing. The fact that it is a cigarette furtherreminds us of the unhealthful byproducts of many of those products, as well as of the fact that they fulfillneeds which they also create.

The pollution of the sacred well is not merely attributed to “commercialism” or to “technology” however. Thecigarette represents something still larger as well: the omnipresent mass culture of modern society. Thismeaning of the cigarette becomes clear in reading the whole of “The Resplendent Quetzal,” because it is oneof a series of objects that belongs to the mass, and mass-produced, culture and that overwhelms what remainsof an older, more personal order of things.

The restaurant at which Sarah and her husband dine, and which she thinks about as she sits beside the well, isthe chief embodiment of this pattern. We first recognize this when we see the Mexican children who come notto meet for play but to watch TV, for they find there “a re-run of The Cisco Kid, with dubbed voices” (DG, p.162). This moment is perhaps the most devastating in our entire experience of the story: we see thatHollywood fantasies not only sanitize those social orders not yet fully assimilated to the mass culture, but thatthese sanitized versions of the past are eventually retranslated and returned back to the youngest members ofthat society, providing them with a false tradition and a history that never existed.

The restaurant is more, however, than the focus of a vanishing social order. As Sarah sits thinking about it, anearby tourist says of her recent sight-seeing, “What beats me is why they built all those things in the firstplace,” and another answers, “It was their religion, that's what he said” (DG, p. 163). We are not merelyreminded that the ancient religions are being forgotten: the juxtaposition of these remarks with description ofthe restaurant's interior makes it plain that the process is continuing, that Christianity is now likewise beingsecularized:

On the bar beside the television set there was a crêche, with three painted plaster Wise Men,one on an elephant, the others on camels. The first Wise Man was missing his hand. Inside thestable a stunted Joseph and Mary adored an enormous Christ Child which was more than halfas big as the elephant. … Beside the crêche was a Santa Claus haloed with flashing lights, andbeside that a radio in the shape of Fred Flintstone, which was playing American popularsongs, all of them ancient.

(DG, pp. 162–63)

The crêche, which should be a repository for the symbolism of the central Christian mystery—God becomeman—has, like the well, become seedy and neglected, allowed to lose its significance. The adjacent SantaClaus, the saint become completely desacralized by his adoption into the culture of commerce, signals thereason for the decay within the manger, his flashing-light halo an indication of how far the miraculous hasbeen displaced by the technological.

The figure of Fred Flintstone completes the progression away from the crêche: he stands both as ultimatedevaluation of the primitive and as an example of the only mythic figure that modern society possesses—thecartoon character. His function as a radio shows how quickly even modern myths are harnessed bytechnology, but at the same time this technology has been hopelessly trivialized, the real potential of theelectronic age reduced to a radio in the shape of a banal cartoon character playing superficial and outwornmusic.

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The obvious source of the disruption depicted here is the exportation of American culture—The Cisco Kid,Fred Flintstone, popular song—but Atwood will not let Canadian readers escape their share of responsibility.As in Surfacing, where the “Americans” who killed the heron turn out to be Canadians after all, there is ashock of recognition when we listen to the only song that we actually hear.

“Oh someone help me, help me, plee-ee-ee-eeze …”“Isn't that Paul Anka?” Sarah asked.

(DG, 163)

Nor is Canada the only country that has willingly become part of the modern mass culture. After all, in theopening scene those were “Mexican tourists,” and “Sarah found it reassuring that other people besidesCanadians and Americans wore big hats and sunglasses and took pictures of everything” (DG, p. 154).

It is mass culture that has “drowned” the world. Realizing that fact means that the question of myth and ofsacred object is not as simple as it first seemed. It is not that we have no myths and no totems: The Cisco Kidand Fred Flintstone-as-a-radio are proof that we do. It is rather that the mythic narratives and the totemicobjects that we now possess are false or dangerous. They have been corrupted by their sources and degradedby their ends. Their unfortunate omnipresence has formed an overlay—or to borrow a term from geology, anoverburden—obscuring the more meaningful world in which we once lived. The modern deluge of theseoffspring of the marriage of commercial technology with popular consciousness creates an obscuring surfaceover the more essential world in which we once dwelt.

For this reason Atwood regularly shows us that there are bad totems as well as good, objects of dangerouspower as well as benign. …

It is not only the flood of consumer goods that has drowned the world, it is also the mythos that has beencreated for consumers, the myths that these objects, their producers, and possessers have brought into being,often just to explain and justify the new technological era. Like the Mexican boys watching Cisco Kid re-runs,we see the image of ourselves given back, however distortedly, in these myths, expressed in the omnipresentforms of popular entertainment, conveyed by the engulfing media. We can no longer see the truth of our worldbecause a new one has risen up around it like

… the mist that has riseneverywhere as wellas in these woods

(“After the Flood, We,” CG, p. 12)

Atwood returns to this problem often [in “Backdrop addresses cowboy” (ATC, p. 50), Surfacing, Lady Oracle,and The Edible Woman]. …

Ours is a fallen world drowned in advertising and escape literature; man is damned to live out inauthenticlives in it, lives lived “by quotation.”

Atwood's version of the Fall is not, however, simply historical. In the present age each individual recapitulatesthat lapse, because the child is born without imposed culture. An important scene in Surfacing, when theprotagonist finds childhood notebooks, demonstrates this—and helps explain why Atwood's charactersgenerally seek anamnesis. There is an Atwood poem that proposes to look at a soul “geologically”; elsewherethe word “archeological” repeatedly occurs to describe the investigations that compel us inward. Thescrapbooks extend that metaphor: there is a geology of character offered in them; a stratum at a time, we seethe archeology of the psyche recorded. The passages describing these books, pp. 90–91, 158, are worth our

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attention. …

By reversing the surfacer's process of discovery, we can reconstruct the history of development presentedhere. At the core of being lies primaeval, mythic material, and an intuitive religious vision that unites Godwith man, man with animal, Christ with Satan.7 The most important single act in Surfacing is probably thisrediscovery of the primitive stuff of which visions are made and the assertion of rights to this lost “firstmeaning” (“mine, I had made it”), but as the subsequent contents of the scrapbooks show, this state ofinnocence does not last. The child's primal vision is displaced; we feel the “shades of the prison-house”beginning to close in.

At first, the loss is not so great. The singleness of the loose page gives way to more generalized, but stillpowerful mythic content: “early people” with rays coming out of their heads—an anticipation of thatimportant moment when the surfacer looks into the lake and sees “My other shape …, not my reflection butmy shadow, … rays streaming out from around the head” (S, p. 141). As the child gets older, the record of themyths which she intuitively glimpsed in the depths of her mind is replaced by a collection of less vital andless meaningful mythologies given her by her culture and her society. Semi-divine beings give way to Eastereggs and rabbits. Just as the crêche in “The Resplendent Quetzal” calls our attention to the modern failure tounderstand one of the central events in Christianity, so these childish pictures indicate that another crucialevent—the death and resurrection of God—has also suffered a devaluation: like a Christmas reduced to SantaClaus, Easter seems to have become puerile fantasies of bunnies and eggs.

The “translation” (to use a word that is generally important in Surfacing) of the narrative of Golgotha andResurrection into a story about a rabbit that brings eggs to children marks a transitional phase in thedevelopment of individual consciousness. After all, this juvenile story of Easter does show the child'scontinuing responsiveness to essential myth (“perhaps it was a vision of Heaven”), partly because the tale ofthe Easter bunny points, however distantly, to the pagan fertility rituals that form a tradition older thanChristianity, underlying and giving force to its later customs. At the same time we recognize these Easterfantasies as part of a general modern abandonment of religious stories for secular fables that will turn sacredholidays into occasions for commerce.

As the surfacer's most recent scrapbook shows, the modern mythos of the consumer society has completed thecovering over of her earliest picture and its first meaning. The magazines and mail-order catalogues of herchildhood, like the comic books of her brother's, provide a new, impersonal set of images that replace herearlier, personal ones (“no drawings at all, just illustrations cut … and pasted in” [S, p. 91]). There is a veryreal fall recorded here, since the pastoral order that prevailed in the world of rabbits gives way to the hostilewarring world depicted by her brother.

The existence of two scrapbooks at this stage of childhood may indicate that it is also the point at whichsocially-defined sex roles are furnished for the child, with the boy offered various heroic models(soldier-spaceman-superhero) and the girl given two “safe” domestic ones: “lady” and “mother.” The extent towhich these female roles are arbitrarily limited, superficial, and depersonalized is shown by the way thechildhood scissors have trimmed the figures: to “dresses … no bodies in them” (S, p. 91).

It is striking that two separate books exist only at this final and most fallen stage of the child's development. Itmay suggest that both brother and sister previously shared in the acts of creation recorded here—operatingtogether in a kind of undivided androgynous consciousness. Or it may call our attention to the uncertainty thatruns throughout the novel about the actual status of this brother. He seems to have existed, but much of whatwe are told about him turns out to be untrue; he most often serves as a way for the protagonist to talk abouther own repressed memories: “… it wasn't ever my brother I'd been remembering, that had been a disguise”(S, p. 143). Perhaps, then, the appearance of a “male” scrapbook is a similar disguise, a response by thesurfacer to the necessity of segregating and suppressing the maleness of her own nature. Such an

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understanding of things would help explain a passage in the opening chapter, Anna's reading of her friend'spalm: “‘Do you have a twin?’ I said No. ‘Are you positive,’ she said, ‘because some of your lines are double.… You had a good childhood but then there's this funny break’” (S, p. 8).

The process by which primal myths, essential narratives, and undivided images of self are covered over withnew ones that serve modern society by suppressing individuality and encouraging materialism, is one inwhich Marian McAlpin, Joan Foster, and the protagonist of Surfacing are sometimes victims, but they are alsoimplicated as collaborators: in their complicity we read Atwood's own anxieties about the place of artist andwriter in the consumer society. Does the work of the creative artist help us regain the world of lostmeaning—or does it become another obscuring layer on the surface? By allowing her work to be publishedand circulated through the channels of commerce, will the artist inevitably become corrupted, become part ofthe ineluctable process she protests?

Surfacing deals most directly with those questions. …

IV

… The mirror as an image and a metaphor is perhaps the most ubiquitous of all of the elements repeated inAtwood's poetry and fiction, but it is missing from “The Resplendent Quetzal.” At best we are aware of thelack of reflections in that story, when Sarah looks into the well and finds the water muddy-brown, the bottommurky. Still, as “Tricks with Mirrors” reveals, mirror and pool are actually the same, though we often makethe mistake of not recognizing their identity.

Mirrors are dangerous. …

It is our awareness that every mirror may really be a pool and that every photograph has a world behind itwhich gives richness to Atwood's work. The mythic patterns of action that we internalize, our understandingof our roles in life, and our images of our self: all are derived from what we see around us, from the “mirror”that our environment—whether social, cultural, or psychic—holds up to us. The danger is that by attending tothese reflections we may not see the depths that lie behind or beneath them. The true beginning of vision forthe surfacer comes when she looks into the lake and sees “not my reflection but my shadow” (S, p. 141). It iswhy the poet protests when her companion cannot see the drowned world at their feet and why—in “ADialogue”—she can speak of her sister's perception of a lake as a dark swamp while for the poet it is like“clear day.”

It is the fear of what that unseen world may hold that is much of the source of terror for the “professionaltourist” of “A Travel Piece.” Her awareness of a world under the surface makes her usual world of “spectacle”“… come to seem like a giant screen, flat and with pictures painted on it to create the illusion of solidity. Ifyou walked up to it and kicked it, it would tear and your foot would go right through, into another spacewhich Annette could only visualize as darkness, a night in which something she did not want to look at washiding” (DG, p. 140). On the other hand, this world beneath the surface is the source of vision, of allvisions—as it is of that longed-for one which concludes “Giving Birth,” the last story in Dancing Girls.Jeannie, the fictional projection of the I-narrator, discovers that it is partly to herself that she has given birth,and that in consequence she can see the world with new perception:

All she can see from the window is a building. It's an old stone building, heavy and Victorianwith a copper roof oxidized to green. It's solid, hard, darkened by soot, dour, leaden. But asshe looks at this building, so old and seemingly immutable, she sees it's made of water.Water, and some tenuous jellylike substance. Light flows through it from behind (the sun iscoming up), the building is so thin, so fragile, that it quivers in the slight dawn wind. Jeanniesees that if the building is this way … then the rest of the world must be like this too, the

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entire earth, the rocks, people, trees. …

(DG, p. 244)

We must “look long enough” to rid ourselves of the distortion of light on surface, and move through themirror, or the lake, or the picture. To do so would be like “Seeing the ice / as what it is, water” (“WomanSkating,” PU, p. 65). As happens so often in Atwood's landscapes, the apparently solid world will turn out tobe a permeable one once the initial surface is broken through. Mirrors become pools; earth, water; substance,mist, [as in the “Progressive insanities of a pioneer,” ATC, p. 38]. … In such a world the best strategy may beto become one with the watery realm, [as in “Hypotheses: City,” PU, p. 37]. …

The quest from the earliest of Atwood's writing to the most recent work has been for a sacred space—which iswhy all maps are found inadequate. The space may be sought in the external world—in Canada, Mexico,Italy—but that world can at best offer entrances to the true locus, which is an interior one: “there are nodestinations / apart from this.”

The discovery of the gateways to that internal world [may] become the final goal to which all other efforts aredirected. Often—like Sarah sitting beside her sacred well—Atwood's characters discover that they are at theentrance already, and need only to recognize it and to find how to pass through. It is no accident that Sarah's isa sacrificial well: the act needed to open these portals usually is a sacrificial one. The need “to clear a space”in Surfacing demands the immolation of history; compulsive fasting, in The Edible Woman, brings Marian'sloss of ego; Joan Foster enacts an almost ritualistic death of identity in Lady Oracle.

As “The Resplendent Quetzal” makes clear, the symbolism of sacrifice may be enough, the mythic pattern ofthe scapegoat that releases us from the sin of selfhood may still hold if intuitively understood. Sarah graspsthat when, without knowing why, she steals the plaster Christ child from the crêche (“Separated from thedwarfish Virgin and Joseph, it didn't look quite so absurd” [DG, p. 168]) and throws it into the well. Themoment of ritual sacrifice is re-enacted once more: the most primal of human urges is paid homage to. In thissacramental act, Sarah overcomes her deadening reserve and breaks through—we hope—into a new kind ofexistence.

The plaster Christ penetrates the depths for Sarah. The pool is breached once more. As always, it is notsurfacing but submerging which is the crucial action, an action which often depends on subverting, even if itmeans the subversion of the whole of modern culture.

If one reaches the underwater world the future remains a secret of the deep: perhaps it goes beyond telling.The poem “Pre-Amphibian” suggests one possibility, however. It may be that the drowned world can beredeemed, the inundating waves pushed back. If that is so, then “when / these tides recede,” we will havemade our next evolutionary step (recall that the surfacer is left pregnant with “the first true human; it must beborn, allowed”); we will awaken and find ourselves

stranded, astoundedin a drying worldwe flounder, the airungainly in our new lungswith sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning

(“Pre-Amphibian,” CG, p. 64)

V

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There may be a Position Five, for mystics; I postulate it but will not explore it here, sincemystics do not as a rule write books.

(Surv., p. 39)

Ultimately the hidden world that Atwood seeks has been covered over by more surfaces than just the oneprovided by our modern condition. It has been obscured by something more pervasive, more inevitable, andmore inescapable—language itself. The narrator of “Giving Birth” makes a story of her experience, creating anew character—Jeannie—in order to tell that story, but as she does this she cannot help but reflect upon thelayers with which she covers over the events as she speaks of them. “The point …” she begins, about toexplain how she has named her fictional counterpart after Stephen Foster's Jeannie, and then interrupts herselfto say,

(for in language there are always these “points,” these reflections; this is what makes it so richand sticky, this is why so many have disappeared beneath its dark and shining surface, whyyou should never try to see your own reflection in it; you will lean over too far, a strand ofyour hair will fall in and come out gold, and thinking it is gold all the way down, you yourselfwill follow, sliding into those outstretched arms, toward the mouth you think is opening topronounce your name but instead, just before your eyes fill with pure sound will form a wordyou never heard before …)

(DG, p. 231)

Language itself, the medium in which we are doomed to attempt our accounts of reality, as well as the fictionswe create from it when normal language does not represent our realities satisfactorily, and what the surfacercalls the “pure logic … secreted by my head” that produces language in the first place—all of these turn out tobe both dangerous mirror and beckoning pool. Julia, the poet of “Lives of the Poets” realizes this: “But whatwas her mistake? Thinking she could save her soul, no doubt. By the word alone” (DG, p. 207). Still if Juliadespairs, she also articulates most clearly Atwood's hopes for redemption: “Things would get better, timewould reverse itself … silence would open, language would flow again” (DG, p. 206).

“Giving Birth” stands out among the short stories as the one which most shows a character achieving such aredeemed state. The protagonist longs for a vision, thinks it has not come, and then abruptly experiences itafter all. She feels trapped by words in the story, but as she gives birth she experiences “finally … thedisappearance of language” (DG, p. 241). As nowhere else in Atwood's writing, the sacred and the profaneworlds seem able to coexist with one another, albeit briefly. And, at the same time, fiction and realityconverge within the very fabric of the story itself.

“Giving Birth” is Atwood's only real venture into what is sometimes called metafiction—that self-reflexivemode that calls attention to its own fictive nature and thus to its own surfaces. Such fiction always offers itsreaders the fascinating paradox of the mirror/pool. It becomes more opaque since we begin to see the surfacesagain that we have learned to ignore (language, structure, the narrator—all the inventions of story-telling andthe processes involved in making a story coalesce—are brought to the foreground where we become aware ofthem). At the same time, such a story becomes unexpectedly transparent as well. Rather than simply seeingthrough the patterns of words on the page to the characters and the plot, we find ourselves seeing throughthose as well—to an author managing and manipulating those events, a living human being struggling to findand convey the meaning of her own human existence. As we progress through “Giving Birth,” we are awarenot only of the narrative voice bringing Jeannie into being but of Atwood standing just behind that voice andcreating it; not only of a narrator using Jeannie to talk about the birth of her child, but of Atwood using bothnarrator and Jeannie to talk about her own recent experiences of actually having given birth. This storycompletes the project of the first three novels: the subversion of conventional narrative. It shows the surfaces

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and it invites us to consider the unspoken words and the unarticulated reality that lie beneath.

Along with some of her contemporaries, Atwood sees every act of intellection as distancing from a moreprimary world. Looking back at the whole of her work, we can now recognize in Atwood's writing apersistently mystical vein—for she would have us not only be more aware of the primary reality we inhabitbut of the primal material of the universe itself. She, like many mystics, does not want to renounce the worldbut rather to draw us more deeply into it, to pull us through its surfaces and into the crue and essentialdimensions which have been waiting for us all this time.

We see now why the well itself is such a powerful symbol for Atwood. It emerges into our daily world but itsexistence begins in another, underground, realm. It is a source of the water that we must have to survive andthat lies everywhere around us—hidden, yet at our feet. We can drink from such wells and we can drown inthem, but we must learn to see them as the portals they are. And as the portals they may be.

Notes

Margaret Atwood, “Polarities,” Dancing Girls (1977; rpt. Toronto: Bantam-Seal, 1978), p. 64. Allfurther references to this work (DG) appear in the text.

———, The Circle Game (1966; rpt. Toronto: House of Anansi, 1967). All references to this work(CG) appear in the text.

———, The Animals in That Country (Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968). All references to thiswork (ATC) appear in the text.

———, The Edible Woman, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969). All references to this work(EW) appear in the text.

———, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970). All references to thiswork (JSM) appear in the text.

———, Procedures for Underground (Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970). All references to thiswork (PU) appear in the text.

———, Surfacing (1972; rpt. Don Mills: PaperJacks, 1973). All references to this work (S) appear inthe text.

———, Survival (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972). All references to this work (Surv.) appear in thetext.

———, Lady Oracle (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976). All references to this work (LO)appear in the text.

———, Life Before Man (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979). All references to this work(LBM) appear in the text.

1.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; rpt. Cleveland: World, 1956), p. 8. Therelevance of the mythography of post-Jungians such as Campbell and Robert Graves for Atwood isevident. See especially, Josie P. Campbell, “The Woman as Hero in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing(Mosaic, 11, No. 3 [Spring 1978], 17–28) for connections between Surfacing and The Hero with aThousand Faces. In many ways my essay and hers are complementary.

2.

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Frank Davey, in “Atwood's Gorgon Touch” (Studies in Canadian Literature, 2 [1977], 146–63),makes a similar observation. Davey, however, sees the continued antitheses in Atwood's poetry asbeing between time, process, and decay on the one hand, and space, stasis, and the attempt to controlon the other—a reworking of the Dionysiac/Apollonian dualism (Heraclitean and Platonic are theterms Davey prefers in From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature since 1960[1974]) within which he often locates authors for discussion.

3.

Campbell, p. 43. See pp. 40–46 et passim.4. Campbell, p. 41.5. Roberta Rubenstein, “Surfacing: Margaret Atwood's Journey to the Interior,” Modern Fiction Studies,22, No. 3 (Autumn 1976), 398, 397.

6.

Compare Rubenstein, p. 396.7.

Criticism: Ildikó de Papp Carrington (essay date 1991)

SOURCE: “Definitions of a Fool: Alice Munro's ‘Walking on Water’ and Margaret Atwood's Two Storiesabout Emma: ‘The Whirlpool Rapids’ and ‘Walking on Water,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 2,Spring, 1991, pp. 138–46.

[In the following essay, Carrington finds parallels between Alice Munro's “Walking on Water” and MargaretAtwood's “The Whirlpool Rapids” and “Walking on Water.”]

In 1974 Alice Munro published “Walking on Water” in Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You. In 1986Margaret Atwood also published a short story entitled “Walking on Water.” Appearing originally inChatelaine, it was republished in a longer version in the second, American edition of Bluebeard's Egg.1 Inboth Munro's and Atwood's stories, the titles' Biblical allusion refers to a young character who risks drowningby trying to walk on water. In both stories this attempt is ironically labeled the activity of a fool. Thesesimilarities, especially in the light of Atwood's later comment on Munro, constitute Atwood's invitation tocompare her story with Munro's. In her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1989, Atwood writesthat, even if she read Munro's short stories in Braille, she would immediately “recognize” the “strength anddistinctiveness” of her fellow-Canadian's unmistakable “voice” (xxii).

A comparison of the stories reveals that “Walking on Water” is one of a pair of Atwood stories alluding toMunro's story. In Bluebeard's Egg “Walking on Water” is the second of Two Stories About Emma. The firststory about Emma, “The Whirlpool Rapids,” which originally appeared in Toronto and, in a different,Americanized version, in Redbook, also alludes to Munro's story.2 Through these allusions Atwood is onceagain self-consciously illustrating one of Northrop Frye's central principles, that all literature is ultimatelyderived from other literature (Secular Scripture 10). The allusions in the Emma stories thus become a satiricrecontextualization of Munro's story, but the parallels between this pair of stories and Munro's storyemphasize more than the radical differences between Munro's “Walking on Water” and Atwood's.3 Throughsynecdoche, the stylistic, narrative, and thematic differences between their definitions of a fool become arevelation of some of the most characteristic differences between Munro's fiction and Atwood's.

These differences are reflected in the two writers' conceptions of the purpose of their fiction. Munro sees herfiction as a series of assaults on life's unsolvable mysteries: “you … have to go back over and over again andmine the same material … and sometimes you get to it and sometimes you don't” (Struthers, “The RealMaterial” 12). But getting to it is neither an explanation nor a solution, for

the whole act of writing is more an attempt at recognition than of understanding, because Idon't understand many things. I feel a kind of satisfaction in just approaching something thatis mysterious and important. Then writing is the art of approach and recognition.

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(Gardiner 178)

In sharp contrast, Atwood conceives of her writing as a combination of two activities, playing intellectualgames and instructing the reader. Both of these activities imply that she understands things but the reader doesnot: “people don't realize … that a lot of what [writers] do is play. You know, playing around with. Thatdoesn't mean it isn't serious …” (Struthers, “An Interview with Margaret Atwood” 24). Thus, if animperceptive interviewer misses a serious point, Atwood quickly cautions her: “you have to watch that kind ofplaying around” (Brans 143). “Playing around” includes pyrotechnic poetic punning and playing games withcomplex patterns of wide-ranging allusions often combined with a sharply satirical didacticism.4 Atwoodrepeatedly argues that the writer always has a message because the writer's “engagement is unavoidable”(Hancock, “Margaret Atwood” 271).5 In contrast, when Munro is asked whether her fiction contains anymessage, she insists, “No lessons. No lessons ever” (Hancock, “Alice Munro” 223).6 Munro's “Walking onWater” and Atwood's Two Stories About Emma epitomize these differences of purpose.

By maintaining a strictly limited, third-person point of view, Munro's “Walking on Water” immerses thereader in the deeply unsettling emotional experience of Mr. Lougheed, an elderly retired druggist in a WestCoast Canadian town in the sixties. Eugene, his only friend, a young philosophy student recovering from amental breakdown, tries to walk on water. When he disappears after his attempt fails, Mr. Lougheed fears thatEugene may have repeated his experiment and drowned. Early in the story, when Mr. Lougheed and Eugenediscuss the latter's plans to walk on water, Eugene cites the example of people who “have walked on hotcoals” without incurring any burns (76). His purpose is to convince the skeptical old man that the world of“external reality … responds to more methods of control than we are conditioned to accept” (76). But Mr.Lougheed insists that he cannot believe such things unless he sees them with his own eyes. In reply, Eugenecites another example, “Road to Emmaus,” referring to the passage in the Gospel of St. Luke in which theresurrected Christ meets two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus, but they fail to recognize Him as onewho has returned from the dead (76).

In the first Emma story, “The Whirlpool Rapids,” Atwood alludes to both of Eugene's examples, walking oncoals and the road to Emmaus. The initial allusion occurs when Emma, a college student working at NiagaraFalls, is persuaded by a friend to participate in a rubber-raft test “on the dangerous Niagara Whirlpool Rapids”(124). “A bit of a daredevil,” she excitedly compares the test's challenge to a “religious trial: walking barefootover the coals, ordeal by water” (123–24). Atwood's second allusion to Munro's story occurs in the context oftwo other allusions, a historical allusion to the Canadian invention of the telephone and a self-reflexivereference to her earlier fiction. The raft test is launched on the American side of the Falls because theCanadian authorities have “refused permission” for the “hazardous” test (124). Although Emma does notknow the reason until later, the first-person narrator remarks that their refusal “wouldn't have stopped her”(124). In a passage deleted from the Americanized Redbook version, the narrator explains why: Emma, “likemany” Canadians, “considered her fellow Canadians to be a lacklustre bunch,” as illustrated by their failure torecognize the importance of “the telephone when Alexander Bell first invented it” (124–25). Bell, a Scottishimmigrant in Canada, said that he “conceived” the telephone at his home in Brantford, Ontario, in 1874. Butwhen he tried to secure financial backing for his invention from Canadian businessmen, such as the HonorableGeorge Brown, the influential owner and editor of the Toronto Globe, he did not succeed because they did notbelieve that his invention would be commercially viable (Bruce 483, 158, 165). By including this allusion in astory that originally appeared in Toronto, a magazine published by the Toronto Globe and Mail, Atwoodsharpens her satiric point.7 But Americans who assume that Bell invented the telephone in Boston are unlikelyto recognize her historical allusion and its function in preparing for her second, punning allusion to Munro'sstory.

When the raft “buckle[s]” and flings its passengers into the raging rapids, four of them drown. But Emma,although “sucked” underwater, does not (126). Surfacing and surviving like the narrators of Surfacing andLady Oracle, she swims to the rocky shore. After this tongue-in-cheek, self-reflexive passage, Atwood

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introduces the second allusion to Munro, which combines the two references to walking barefoot over coalsand the road to Emmaus. Realizing that she has lost her shoes in the water and wondering how she is “goingto get over the rocks without” them, Emma begins to walk barefoot along a road (127). On this road sheencounters two people who, although she is “cut,” “bruised and scraped,” and dressed in “ripped” and soakingclothes, fail to “notice anything unusual about her” (127). “‘What country am I in?’ Emma ask[s] them.‘Canada,’ [says] the man” (127). Atwood believes that “words have been exhausted and you have tore-energize them by putting them in different contexts—contexts that we don't ordinarily put them in”(O'Brien 183). In this carefully prepared context—the road, the two Canadians walking along and failing torecognize the miraculous survivor of a fatal accident—“Emma ask[s]” becomes a typically outrageousAtwoodian pun, recontextualizing Munro's allusion to Emmaus. Emma, too, has just returned from the dead,but the lacklustre Canadians who did not recognize Bell's miraculous invention probably would not recognizeJesus Christ Himself.

The title of “Walking on Water” obviously alludes to Christ's miraculous feat, but the title of Munro's storyand Atwood's second story is not the only allusion to Christ in either story. The character who informs Mr.Lougheed of Eugene's plan to walk on water concludes that Eugene is “either cracked” or “Jesus Christ” (68).Important not only for its content but also for the chronology it introduces, this conversation occurs on Friday,and Eugene makes his abortive attempt on Sunday morning. Watched by spectators who resemble NewTestament characters, a blind woman and a hippie “wrapped” in a “bedspread like a Biblical woman,” hecrawls underwater along a pier for a few moments, then emerges, addresses the spectators, and laterdisappears. The chronology, the crowd of spectators, and the description of Eugene's strangely empty roomafter his disappearance suggest the climactic events of Holy Week and Christ's empty tomb after Hisresurrection, foreshadowed by Eugene's earlier reference to Emmaus.

Similarly, in Atwood's “Walking on Water” Emma conceives her plan to walk on water because she hopes toearn the title of “Miss Jesus” (144). Vacationing on the Caribbean island of St. Eunice with Robbie, hermarried lover, she hears the tale of a native who at low tide walked along an underwater ridge of coral andlava to another island and was therefore hailed “as Jesus Christ” (137). Convinced by her earlier survival atNiagara Falls that she is invulnerable, she challenges Robbie, a middle-aged archaeology professor “writing abook on comparative tombs,” to attempt this feat with her (134). Entering the water of the bay and finding it“up to her armpits,” she wonders how Jesus had managed to walk on water: “Jesus Christ must have been ashort man,” and she is tall (138–39). However, Emma succeeds in walking along the reef to the other island,but Robbie, who is “swept off the reef” and “out to sea” by the current, has to be rescued by a native in arowboat (140). All this, as in Munro's story, is watched by a Biblical crowd of spectators: “The hilloverlooking the bay was black with people …” (140). And like Munro, Atwood also alludes to Easter at theend of her second story. Robbie, still in shock after his narrow escape from a watery tomb, resembles “anEaster card” (142).

But, as already indicated by Atwood's satirical allusion to Emmaus in “The Whirlpool Rapids,” these parallelBiblical allusions do not function in the same way in the two stories. Munro's allusions create the mysteriousaura surrounding Eugene's failed experiment. Her story is an intricately narrated puzzle in which the tensionsand mysteries experienced by her watching protagonist, Mr. Lougheed, are never fully resolved. By referringto Munro's story, Atwood's Biblical allusions sharpen the edge of her satiric knife against the whetstone ofcontrast. Instead of failing in a mystical experiment like Eugene, Emma succeeds in an athletic feat, all themore astonishing because of her sex. Thus, Atwood's story is the clearly developed exemplum of an ironicargument about gender roles, one of the central topics of her fiction, her poetry, and her criticism. And insteadof limiting her point of view to her protagonist, Atwood uses a first-person narrator whose comments—asalready indicated—frame and interpret the action. These differences in the function of the Biblical allusions,in characterization, and in point of view and narrative technique produce very different definitions of “a fool,”the key word in both stories.

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Although both stories label the attempt to walk on water the activity of a fool, in Munro's story, in spite ofEugene's failure, this realistic initial definition disintegrates. At the story's climax, Mr. Lougheed suspectsfrightening possibilities, although he never consciously understands that recognizing a fool might meanrecognizing his own disturbed self. In contrast, in Atwood's story, the definition accumulates several distinctlayers of meaning. At the climax of her story, there are three kinds of fools, but the satiric twist of theconclusion introduces a fourth kind. Thus, both stories are ironic, but in very different ways. By limiting ourpoint of view to Mr. Lougheed's, Munro immerses us in the confusing subjectivity of his emotionalexperience. Atwood, while maintaining her narrator's objective distance from Emma's experiences,manipulates them to tell us what she wants us to understand.

The nature of Munro's narration, inseparable from the nature of her protagonist's experience, makes us feelwhat he feels. His surname, Lougheed, suggests that he will avoid all foolishness, especially foolishnessinvolving water. “Lough” in Irish means a bay or inlet, and “heed” connotes the realistic prudence naturallycharacteristic of an old-fashioned country druggist. Thus, he sees Eugene's attempt to walk on water as a fool'sexperiment. But from the story's beginning, Munro undermines Mr. Lougheed's sense of reality in severalways.

His age and the setting of the action are the two most obvious factors that create his disturbing sense ofdislocation. Bewildered by the radical upheaval of the sixties, he repeatedly fears that he, too, is seen as a fool.For example, when he comes upon two hippies publicly copulating in the hall of the house where he lives, heis not upset by the act itself because, in his rough rural childhood, very similar to Munro's own childhood inrural Ontario, he has seen much worse; but he is shocked by the hippies' reaction to his being their involuntarywitness: flaunting themselves, they laugh at him, “not only unashamed but full of derision” (70). Thisexperience is narrated in a flashback to a memory that interrupts the chronological narration of Mr.Lougheed's visit to Eugene's room to discuss his plan to walk on water.

Such flashbacks to Mr. Lougheed's memories are the third—and psychologically the most significant—way inwhich Munro creates his sense of dislocation. These flashbacks interrupt, complicate, and confuse thechronological narration of the actual events of the weekend. Intensely vivid but disjointed, Mr. Lougheed'smemories are very confusing because he cannot always distinguish between what he remembers and what hehas dreamt in a recurring dream that he has had “on and off since middle age” and now recalls in fragmentsthat repeatedly intrude into his perception of external reality (81). The association linking his memories andhis recurring dream to actual events is the disturbing similarity between Eugene and Frank McArter, the maincharacter in Mr. Lougheed's dreams and childhood memories.

Although Eugene is both spiritually serene and enormously erudite—his room is filled with well-used bookson philosophy, religion, psychology, and science—the fact that he is still “recovering” from a long mental“breakdown” suggests that he might be insane, a fool in the sense of a madman (73). Frank McArter was amad young man who murdered his parents and perhaps drowned himself. Eugene's plans to walk on water notonly expose him to the same danger of drowning but are based on ideas that Mr. Lougheed, althoughimpressed by Eugene's erudition, finds frighteningly irrational. Arguing that “the mind can work in someways to control matter,” Eugene wants to test this principle by trying to walk on water (76): “Now suppose Istep out on the water and my apparent body—this body—sinks down like a stone, there is a possibility thatmy other body will rise, and I will be able to look down into the water and watch myself” (77). Mr. Lougheedrejects this possibility with scorn: “Watch yourself drown” (77). But Munro's discontinuous narration,scrambling past and present, suggests that Mr. Lougheed's own memories and dreams will give him adisturbing glimpse of the same mystery hidden under the surface of “external reality” that Eugene'sexperiment is designed to reveal (76).

In sharp contrast to Munro's method of narration, Atwood uses a first-person narrator in both stories aboutEmma. Identified as one of Emma's women friends, who in one passage becomes a concerned chorus, as in

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Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” this narrator performs many important functions.8 She introduces theillustrative plots of the stories with a clearly defined thesis; she speaks as Atwood's persona, thinking for herprotagonist and defining the symbolic role of both the protagonist and of a minor character; and she interpretsboth plots, not only in running commentary but also in carefully organized concluding summaries.

Like a briskly efficient essayist, the narrator begins the first story with her thesis sentence: “There are somewomen who seem to be born without fear …,” but “there aren't very many of them around” (120). There aren'tvery many around in Atwood's fiction, either, but in contrast to the immensely vulnerable heroines of BodilyHarm and The Handmaid's Tale, Emma seems to live in “a bubble of invulnerability” (142). She is acharacter, Atwood has told an interviewer, “who doesn't think a lot,” but “does things.” Such an activecharacter interests her for a double reason, first, because Emma's personality is the direct opposite of “femalecharacters [who are] … fearful and timorous.” A physically “foolhardy” woman who “would do anything,” nomatter how dangerous, is a woman who “goes against [her] socialization” (Hancock, “Margaret Atwood”272). Second, as Elaine Risley, the wilderness-bred narrator of Cat's Eye, Atwood's latest novel,demonstrates, female socialization fascinates Atwood for personal reasons. Her nomadic childhood in theCanadian bush, where her father did entomological research for the government, made her “someone who wasintroduced to conventional social roles too late ever to mistake them for natural states of being” (Schreiber208). “I was not socialized the way a lot of women describe themselves as being socialized. … I was not told Icouldn't do things because I was a girl” (Lyons 69–70).

Thus, Atwood's categorizing generalizations—in the introduction of “The Whirlpool Rapids” and in severalinterviews—define not only Emma's character but also the narrator's. Like many other Atwood characters, forexample, the Everywoman-narrator of The Handmaid's Tale, Emma is a flat symbolic character, whosefunction is to embody a thesis about female socialization and gender roles. The narrator is Atwood's persona,who does her protagonist's thinking for her, explaining in the first story how Emma “got likethat”—convinced of her invulnerability—and, in the satiric conclusion of the second story, how ironically shechanged (121). The narrator also defines the symbolic function of a minor character, identifying Bill, thefriend who persuades Emma to take the raft trip, as “one of those agents of Fate who have intruded on Emma'slife from time to time and departed from it, mission accomplished” (123). At the end of the story, narrativemission accomplished, Atwood discards narration. In a climactically organized summary, she analyzes theeffects of her protagonist's experience: “Emma has told me that she learned several things from thisexperience. First,. … Second, … third. … But the most obvious effect of the accident on Emma was …”(128–29). Atwood repeats this pattern at the end of the second story, “Walking on Water”: “From thisepisode, she told me, Emma learned that …” (142). Atwood's point of view, her narrative method, herargumentative framework for the narration, and her insistent repetition of the verb learned make her twostories typically didactic.

The contrast between Munro's narrative method and Atwood's is also apparent in their definitions of the foolsin their respective stories. The tension between Mr. Lougheed and Eugene in Munro's story motivates thequestion the old man asks Eugene before his experiment: “Aren't you bothered by the thought that you mightmake a fool of yourself in front of … people?” (78). Eugene's reply reveals that, unlike Mr. Lougheed, hedoes not fear public humiliation: “That isn't an expression that means anything to me, really. Make a fool ofyourself. How can anybody do that? How can you make a fool? Show a fool, yes, expose the fool, but isn't thefool just yourself, isn't it there all the time?” (78). After Eugene fails to walk on water, he “gently” apologizesto the crowd of spectators on the beach: “I haven't reached the point I hoped I might have reached, in mycontrol. However if this has been disappointing for you it has been very interesting and wonderful for me andI have learned something important” (87). Unlike Atwood's narrator, he does not say what he has learned.Instead, he wanders away, and Mr. Lougheed, who has been anxiously watching Eugene's experiment, goesoff to a café.

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There his recent anxiety makes him recall the end of his recurrent dream about Frank. When Frank murderedhis parents, the men in the community went out to search for him. In his dream Mr. Lougheed, a little boyaccompanying his father on the search, felt an urgently growing sense “that there was something they weregoing to find” (82). At the climax of the story, he suddenly recalls standing on a broken bridge and looking“down” at “a boy's body spread out, face down,” in the river below, but he does not know whether he isremembering what he actually found as a boy or only what he dreamt (90). When he returns to Eugene's roomand finds it empty, this confused image of a drowned young man fuels his fear that Eugene's disappearancemight mean that he, too, has drowned himself.

But there is a second, much more significant associative link between Mr. Lougheed's past and his present thathe does not consciously recognize. The drowned male figure of his dream is not only Frank, and perhapsEugene, but also Mr. Lougheed himself. Just as Eugene hoped to look down into the water to watch his ownbody floating below him, in his dream Mr. Lougheed looks down and sees himself drowning in confusion inan alien environment, not only the strange new world of the sixties but also the unfamiliar internal world ofhis own memories, intruding into the present and paradoxically both distorting and illuminating his perceptionof external reality. His lack of recognition thus adds a second meaning to Eugene's earlier allusion toEmmaus. Although the resurrected Christ appeared to His disciples on the road to Emmaus, “their eyes werekept from recognizing Him” (Luke 24:16). In much the same way, Mr. Lougheed's eyes are kept fromrecognizing the similarity between himself and his persistent memory of the drowned dream figure. But,although he does not consciously recognize this parallel, he is sufficiently disturbed by his fear of Eugene'spossible suicide to doubt the firmness of his own grasp on reality. He concludes that Eugene's “mind wasdisturbed,” but the sequence of ideas and emotions that has led him to this conclusion leaves him also sodisturbed that at the end of the story he wonders if he can go on (91). So Eugene's question, “isn't the fool justyourself, isn't it there all the time?,” finally receives a disquietingly affirmative answer: the hidden fool iscarried within.

In Atwood's “Walking on Water” the identity of the fool is defined in four different ways. The first threedefinitions support the thesis of Atwood's story; until the unexpected conclusion, the gender roles seem tosubvert the usual stereotypes of the physically courageous man and the weak and timid woman. Thissubversion is first suggested in “The Whirlpool Rapids” in a passage that functions as an ironic link to“Walking on Water.” When Emma, a coffee-shop waitress at a honeymooners' motel in Niagara Falls,wonders what the sight of the Falls is supposed to do for the honeymooners' sexuality, she theorizes that “thesight of all that water falling over a cliff” might make the bridegrooms “feel more potent” and the brides“quivery and weak-kneed in the face of such brute inhuman force, a quality they wistfully hope that theirbridegrooms may prove to possess” (122). But because contemporary newlyweds have already hadintercourse with each other, she concludes that the brides do not cherish any illusions about their husband'ssexual force.

Such sexual force as Emma's lover, her former college professor, possesses is “excited by his own erudition”when he lectures to her about the “maze pattern painted” on a grave in an island cemetery (136). In thiscemetery scene in “Walking on Water,” Atwood develops another important contrast between her charactersand Munro's. Instead of the spiritually serene, wide-ranging erudition of Eugene, which makes him difficultfor Mr. Lougheed to understand, Atwood makes Robbie's erudition narrow. He is a grumpy, self-centeredspecialist, “a leading man in his field, which was not large” (134). But, discounting his “grumpiness” becauseshe believes that he is “more spiritually mature than she” is and “therefore difficult to understand,” Emmalistens docilely to his explanation that “mazes had originally been the entrances or exits to burial mounds …to confuse the dead, so they'd never get out” (134–36). The flattering success of this cemetery lecture inspireshim to “make love to Emma in the middle of the afternoon,” which, the narrator ironically observes, “she wasstill young enough to find novel” (136).

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To emphasize her subversion of gender stereotypes, Atwood makes Robbie a male chauvinist who believesthat women cannot take care of themselves. He accepts Emma's “challenge” to walk on water because “she'dneed someone to keep an eye on her, in case she got into trouble” (138). Preparing for their expedition, shebuys sun hats, pink for herself and blue for Robbie. These two symbolic colors, which initiate thesocialization of babies at birth, become ironic when Emma, walking along the underwater reef, turns aroundand sees that it is Robbie who has gotten into trouble. Hearing his faint call for help, she sees “his light bluesun hat” and his “weakly” flailing arm (140). When she yells for help, the only person foolish enough to riskthe rapidly turning tide is literally a fool: Horace, a stubborn, “feeble-minded” native, “strong as an ox,” rowsout to rescue the professor as the watching crowd cheers him on (141).

After Robbie's rescue, his earlier reference to the dead getting out of their tombs is ironically echoed by hisown appearance. He looks “like half a corpse … wan and … pastel as an Easter card, his red hair making hisface look whitish green” (142). This color combination suggests an allusion to Piero della Francesca's“Resurrection,” in which the eerie paleness of Christ's face is emphasized by His red hair and pastel robe.9This allusion, just as satiric as the one to Emmaus, shows that Robbie's “resurrection” demonstrates, not hissuperhuman powers, but his human helplessness. So, although the local bartender calls Emma “a damn fool”for attempting to walk on water, Robbie is obviously a bigger fool, “humiliated by the whole episode” ofbeing shown up by a young woman and of being rescued by the local idiot (141–42). In dramatic contrast toEugene's calm apology to his public in Munro's story, here the erudite man who tries to walk on water ispublicly humiliated by his failure. Thus, all three characters, Emma, Robbie, and Horace the idiot, are fools,but in different senses.

However, Atwood's story does not end here. In the aftermath of Robbie's rescue, Emma becomes a fourth kindof fool. To prepare for this final ironic twist, Atwood introduces the Bluebeard's Egg version of the story withan episode that acquires its satiric significance only at the end of the story, for which it prepares by analogy.Emma, traveling alone on a boat going up the Nile, is accosted by an Arab, who, “puzzled by the culturaldiscrepancies that had placed a young woman on a boat, wearing peculiar clothing and not enough of it,”mistakes her for a prostitute. Watched by his laughing male friends, he offers her money and tries to kiss her.To avoid these attentions, Emma jumps overboard, but, “as she'd known” she would be, she is immediatelyrescued (133). Now the men who laughed at her discuss her respectfully. “They hadn't believed a youngWestern woman traveling alone could ever have been serious enough about what they considered her honourto risk death for it” (133). Although Emma knows that she hasn't risked “anything at all,” to the men on theboat her symbolic “gesture” defines her as what they believe a woman should be (133). She is conforming totheir cultural stereotype for her gender.

This introductory episode is connected to the main narrative in the Caribbean by the comments of theFaulknerian narrators' chorus.10 Deploring Emma's lack of self-protectiveness in her relationships with men,“Emma's friends,” pluralized as “we,” recognize what she does not: that her “fearless” behavior exposes hernot only to physical danger but also to psychological damage from the “awful” men “she adores,” of whomRobbie is only one example (133–34). However, the irony that the conclusion of the Caribbean incidentreveals is not the damage that Robbie does to Emma, but the damage that she inflicts upon herself. For at theend of the story, Emma, just as in the introductory Nile scene, once again conforms to the gender stereotypethat her daredevil personality gave only the illusion of subverting.

Her reaction to Robbie's close shave is guilt. To expiate this guilt, she meekly reverts to a woman'straditionally subservient role. As the narrator insistently nudges us to notice, “Emma, like most people,rapidly falls into stock postures in times of stress” (141). In this posture, she becomes her lover's solicitousnurse, anxiously calling a doctor, “coax[ing]” Robbie to eat, brewing him “weak tea,” baking him cookies,“an extra effort in the heat,” and “grovel[ing]” (142). She even develops a gnawing anxiety not only about hisfuture safety but about that of all the other awful men she later falls in love with. Thus, Atwood shows thatEmma may be physically invulnerable, but not emotionally. For example, because Robbie is married, he has

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avoided committing himself. So he has “never [been] averse to having [Emma] join him [on hisarchaeological field trips], as long as she paid her own way” like a “liberated woman” (134).Recontextualized, this contemporary catchword becomes a heavily ironic antonym, for Emma is not“liberated” at all. When she falls in love, even this embodiment of female machismo becomes a fool. As thetypically Atwoodian willing victim, she is the hidden fool in this story: “Robbie was a kind and agreeable manwhom she loved, and she'd almost killed him” (141). The pink hat fits, after all.11

Atwood's rhetorical insistence on demonstrating that Emma's physical courage does not mean that she hassucceeded in totally transcending her socialization forms the most significant contrast between her two storiesand Munro's story. Often torn between creating a fictional world and proving an argument, Atwood makes her“Walking on Water” an ironically didactic design: the reader learns what Emma has not learned. In Munro'sstory, neither Mr. Lougheed nor the reader ever finds out what Eugene has learned underwater. But, althoughthis mysteriously important epiphany is denied to us and although Mr. Lougheed is left struggling to solve theequally mysterious workings of his own mind, Eugene can be seen as a writer-figure because he does whatMunro says that she herself does when she writes: he approaches “something that is mysterious andimportant” (Gardiner 178). Like Munro, Eugene recognizes a hidden reality concealed under the externalsurface of life, but Munro refuses to spell out her character's symbolic meaning for the reader.12 “What I mostadmire,” she has told an interviewer, “is where the fictionalizing is as unobtrusive as possible, where there hasbeen as strong an attempt, as honest an attempt, as one can make to get at what is really there” (Struthers,“The Real Material” 6). Atwood's incisive definitions and Munro's determination to smudge and shundefinitions are the hallmarks of their respective fictional techniques and purposes.

Notes

The two editions of Bluebeard's Egg and the two versions of Atwood's “Walking on Water” are bothdifferent. The first, 1983 Canadian edition of Bluebeard's Egg contains “Betty” and “The Sin Eater.”In the second, 1986 American edition of Bluebeard's Egg, these stories are replaced by Two StoriesAbout Emma: “The Whirlpool Rapids” and “Walking on Water,” and by “In Search of the RattlesnakePlantain.” The shorter, Chatelaine version of “Walking on Water” begins with the tenth paragraph ofthe Bluebeard's Egg version. Atwood obviously added the first ten paragraphs to the Bluebeard's Eggversion to make “Walking on Water” a sequel to “The Whirlpool Rapids” and to introduce the story'smajor action by preparing for its satirical conclusion. Unless otherwise indicated, all references in thetext are to the Bluebeard's Egg version.

1.

The Toronto version of “The Whirlpool Rapids” and the Bluebeard's Egg version are identical exceptfor their paragraphing. The Redbook version of the story is different from these versions in two mainways. The first difference is in Emma's characterization. The end of the Redbook versioncharacterizes Emma as far more selfish and strange than the other versions do. After surviving theaccident in the Whirlpool Rapids at Niagara Falls, Emma knows “how very little difference she makesin the general scheme of things. …” As a result, in the Redbook version she develops into anunpleasant character who gets what her friends want at auctions and who “trashe[s]” four marriages,only to discard the man “in every case” as not “right for her after all” (55). The last paragraph of thisversion also describes Emma's skin as remaining strangely unwrinkled because she has beenimmunized by her “small injection of death” (55).

The second difference between the Redbook version and the others is in their tone and audience. TheToronto and the Bluebeard's Egg version, which contains material deleted from the Redbook version,is more satirical and more clearly aimed at a Canadian audience than the American magazine versionis. The material deleted from the Redbook version includes a satirical paragraph about “theassociation of Niagara Falls with honeymoons,” and additional details about the honeymoon motelwhere Emma works; examples of “religious trials”; a satirical comment about Canadians' failure torecognize the importance of the telephone “when Alexander Bell first invented it”; and some changes

2.

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in the list of things that Emma learned from her Niagara Falls experience. Unless otherwise indicated,all references in the text are to the Bluebeard's Egg version.In discussing Bluebeard's Egg, Barbara Godard points out that critics have analyzed Atwood's“parodic recontextualization of a wide range of texts …” (51). But she mentions neither the Emmastories nor Alice Munro.

3.

For the range of Atwood's allusions, see Carrington, Margaret Atwood and Her Works 4.4. For a few other examples, see Atwood, “A Disneyland of the Soul” 129; “An End to Audience?” 353;Gillen 241; Lyons 81; and Van Gelder 90.

5.

For another example of Munro's rejection of any didactic purpose, see “What Is Real?” 36.6. The telephone is not an isolated example of a Canadian invention marketed abroad. In ContinentalDivide Seymour Martin Lipset quotes Herschel Hardin's conclusion that “private enterprise in Canada‘has been a monumental failure’ in developing new technology and industry. Canadian business hasrarely been involved in creating industries to process inventions by Canadians, who have had to goabroad to get their discoveries marketed” (Hardin 102–05; Lipset 121–22).

7.

Atwood says that she “read Faulkner at quite an early age” and that she considers him the “Americanauthor who has had the most influence on Canadian writing …” (Gillen 233).

8.

For a similar reference to a religious Christmas card, see “Scarlet Ibis,” Bluebeard's Egg (1986) 213,225, and my discussion of its meaning in Margaret Atwood and Her Works 69, 70–71.

9.

Because the narrators' chorus begins the Chatelaine version of the story, its comments become thethesis that the story illustrates.

10.

The satiric conclusion of Atwood's “Walking on Water” reveals the important reason for her deletionof the Redbook ending of “The Whirlpool Rapids” from the Bluebeard's Egg version, in which thetwo stories appear together. The Redbook Emma who “trashe[s]” marriages only to discard thehusbands is certainly not the same character who in “Walking on Water” falls in love with “awful”married men who do not want to marry her. The Redbook Emma is a victimizer; the Bluebeard's EggEmma is a victim.

11.

For a more detailed discussion of the importance of this story in defining Munro's evolvingconception of the writer, see Carrington, Controlling the Uncontrollable 117–22.

12.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland, 1983.

———. Bodily Harm. Toronto: McClelland, 1981.

———. Cat's Eye. Toronto: McClelland, 1988.

———. “A Disneyland of the Soul.” The Writer and Human Rights. Ed. Toronto Arts Group for HumanRights. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1983. 129–32.

———. “An End to Audience.” Second Words. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. 334–57.

———. The Handmaid's Tale. Toronto: McClelland, 1985.

———. “Introduction: Reading Blind.” The Best American Short Stories 1989. Ed. Margaret Atwood withShannon Ravenel. Boston: Houghton, 1989. xi-xxiii.

———. Lady Oracle. Toronto: McClelland, 1976.

———. Surfacing. Toronto: McClelland, 1972.

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———. Two Stories About Emma: “The Whirlpool Rapids” and “Walking on Water.” Bluebeard's Egg andOther Stories. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1986. 120–43.

———. “Walking on Water.” Chatelaine Oct. 1986: 68, 121–22.

———. “The Whirlpool Rapids.” Toronto June 1986: 58, 75, 77, 79. Insert in Toronto Globe and Mail 30May 1986.

———. “The Whirlpool Rapids.” Redbook Nov. 1986: 51–52, 55, 57.

Brans, Jo. “Margaret Atwood: ‘Using What You're Given.’” Listen to the Voices: Conversations withContemporary Writers. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1988. 125–47.

Bruce, Robert V. Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Boston: Little, 1973.

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb: NorthernIllinois UP, 1989.

———. Margaret Atwood and Her Works. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987.

Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976.

Gardiner, Jill. Untitled Interview with Alice Munro. Appendix. “The Early Short Stories of Alice Munro.”MA Thesis, New Brunswick U 1973. 169–82.

Gillen, Francis X., moderator. “A Conversation: margaret Atwood and Students.” Margaret Atwood: Visionand Forms. Ed. Kathryn Van Spanckeren and Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988.233–43.

Godard, Barbara. “Palimpsest: Margaret Atwood's Bluebeard's Egg.” Recherches Anglaises etNord-Américaines 20 (1987): 51–60.

Hancock, Geoff. “Alice Munro.” Canadian Writers at Work. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987. 187–224.

———. “Margaret Atwood.” Canadian Writers at Work. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987. 265–87.

Hardin, Herschel. A Nation Unaware: The Canadian Economic Culture. Vancouver: T. J. Douglas, 1974.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada.New York: Routledge, 1990.

Lyons, Bonnie. “An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Shenandoah 37.2 (1987): 69–89.

Munro, Alice. “Walking on Water.” Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You. Toronto: McGraw-HillRyerson, 1974. 67–92.

———. “What Is Real?” Canadian Forum Sept. 1982: 5, 36. (Rpt. in Making It New: ContemporaryCanadian Stories. Ed. John Metcalf. Toronto: Methuen, 1982. 223–26.)

O'Brien, Peter, ed. “Margaret Atwood.” With Barbara Leckie and Peter O'Brien. So To Speak: Interviews withContemporary Canadian Writers. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1987. 174–93.

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Schreiber, Le Anne. “Female Trouble.” Vogue Jan. 1986: 208–09.

Struthers, J. R. (Tim). “An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Essays on Canadian Writing 6 (1977): 18–27.

———. “The Real Material: An Interview with Alice Munro.” Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's NarrativeActs. Ed. Louis K. MacKendrick. Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1983. 5–36.

Van Gelder, Lindsy. “Margaret Atwood.” Ms. Jan. 1987: 49–59, 90.

Criticism: Sandra Nelson (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: “Blood Taboo: A Response to Margaret Atwood's ‘Lives of the Poets’,” in Mid-American Review,Vol. 12, No. 2, 1992, pp. 111–15.

[In the following essay, Nelson considers the poetic language of Atwood's “Lives of the Poets.”]

I am a poet and represent an interpretive community of poets when I read. When I read the name MargaretAtwood as the author of a story, I know I am about to read words which I will interpret as poetic. I readAtwood's line, “An ice cube would be nice. Image of the Coke-and-ice” (“Lives of the Poets” 183). I will readit to myself aloud creating the poetry I expect. I pick “ice,” “nice,” and “Coke-and-ice.” I recall from theancient poetry cave a couple lines from Gertrude Stein's prose, “To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays”:“And it was ice and it was so. / And it was dates and it was snow” (23). I interpret Atwood's and Stein's linesas musical pleasure, as an intercourse in my ear. I am a poet and I am always creating sensations from words.I write, “Like hips that part, parts can part like lips that part.” I feel “lips” like snakes in my teeth. I feel the“part, parts can part,” like parts moving together and apart, like lips moving to part. I am a poet and havegiven myself pleasure with sounds. I project webs of sound patterns over “Lives of the Poets.” I soak on thesounds of the words, “balled at the back” (183). I tease myself with the “i” sounds in, “Inn? Instead it's this”(183).

I represent an interpretive community of poets when I read. I project patterns. I took creative writing classeson how to pattern. I teach creative writing classes on how to pattern. “Pattern” is a poetic pattern here. Iproject a blood pattern on “Lives of the Poets.” Here is my pattern: “bloody nosebleed,” “nosebleed,”“bloodstain,” and “blood” (183). As I read, “blood” is the unifying drumbeat among the jazz of improvisation.I literally swing on the sounds of syllables. My blood beats in my ears. My blood flows behind my nose, downmy legs.

I am menstruating. I represent the interpretive community of women. “Lives of the Poets” is about a womanwho happens to be a poet. She could be an artist, housewife, welder, politician or Black. What is important isthat she is a woman, and that the story is also written by a woman. As a representative of the interpretivecommunity of women, I feel I can give a more valid reading of Atwood, the woman writer. The story openswith Julia lying on the bathroom floor with a “bloody nosebleed” (183). The first thing I think about is that anosebleed is always bloody. I recall my bloody menstruation. Menstruation is always bloody. I think aboutblood. It is not a mere drumming in a poetic ear. Blood is what makes women. “Soon you will become awoman. You will know when you find blood in your panties. Here is a Kotex to wear when it happens.” (Awhite towel—the bloodstain spreading through it.)

At Edison Junior High I ran out of class, a red stain on my skirt, and a red streak down my leg (“Horrors, anaccident”). My nickel jammed into the sanitary napkin machine—the safe blue box dropped down.

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Menstruation was frightening when blood-loss always meant something was wrong. Womanhood still carriesthis in it. Throughout the world menstruating women are often set apart as if menstruation were an illness.“Don't pay any attention to her; she's on the rag.”

The metaphor of blood has personal meaning for women. It is the advent of menstruation when people aretransformed into women (the opposite sex). In Atwood's story Julia is opposite, or not male. In Julia'spresence the men make “furtive glances at one another, young beardy faces, one pipesmokes, they writefootnotes, on their way up, why do we always get stuck with the visiting poet,” they ask (184). I interpret thisto mean, “Why do we [men] get stuck with a woman? Women are opposite, and talk crazily about the moonand cycles.”

“Julia moved her head. The blood trickled gently down the back of her throat, thick and purple-tasting” (184).I imagine myself as Julia, turning from the other, and swallowing down the difference. Yet it is her poetry,her womanness, her blood that they have paid her for: “she would rise and move to the microphone, smiling,she would open her mouth and blood would start to drip from her nose. Would they clap? … Would theythink it was part of the poem?” (184). Or would they “pretend not to notice” while she fumbled throughnickels, Kotex and Kleenex in her purse?

A warm slug of blood like a salty tear crawled toward her lip. To be a woman is to always be a woman, witheverything that means. We are reduced from humans to giant aquatic insects, puking like dogs on the car rug.“Just wait till we get tenure,” think the men who can't wait to dismiss women completely.

But women know they can never really be dismissed, and that the ones who are trying to dismiss them areafraid of them. Of course women were burned; all girls are taught that in grade school as a reminder to obey.But blood doesn't obey. Menstruation arrives as unexpected as Julia's sneeze. “She'd sneezed and the page infront of her had suddenly been spattered with blood. Totally unprovoked” (184). Blood is fearsome, horribleto look at. The teacher in Atwood's story had her teeth outlined in blood like a vampire. Julia says, “We wereall so afraid of her none of us said anything and we spent the afternoon drawing three tulips in a vase,presided over by that bloodthirsty smile” (191). Julia reminds herself that blood has that power over others. Ifshe were bloody she “might be disturbing to the audience” (191). The audience might fear her because of herblood.

Audiences often fear the California poet Alta, who writes about menstruation, and the fear men have of thismystery. In her poem, “I Don't Have No Bunny Tail On My Behind,” I read the lines, “i don't have no bunnytail on my behind. / i'm a sister of the blood taboo” (47). I see Playboy Bunnies and I know I am no bunny, butI am a woman who bleeds every month. It feels like a taboo to be a woman and bleed. At home my fatherrefused to take out the women's personal trash. As a torture in high school, boys attached used Kotex to otherboy's windshield wipers. The boys said, “That was the lowest thing anyone could do.”

My husband fears period blood as much as girls are supposed to fear snakes. When I show him the object ofpower, a used Kotex, he nearly faints, “Oh my God—all that blood—you must be dying.” He rubs hisforehead painfully. I often leave bloody tissues floating in the toilet for him to discover. I picture his shockedface and then hear the flushing sound. I'm not worried about leaving bloody tissues around; he has no ideawhat bad things he could do with them yet (he does no outside reading).

Alta's poem curses all the men who oppress women. One of her curses is the curse of bleeding: “in my cunt isblood & i always want it to be your blood. / i hope you bleed 5 days every month. i hope your strength / drainsdown the toilet” (48). It is amazing that the curse of menstruation can be such a frightening curse to some. Tobe made a woman is indeed horrible.

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As I read “Lives of the Poets,” I see Alta, Diane Wakoski, Sylvia Plath, and all the other women poets whoshare the blood taboo. When I read Atwood I see Sylvia Plath after her second failed suicide talking aboutperformance and audience: “And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit ofblood” (8). Atwood asks of her audience, “Would they clap? Would they think it [the blood] was part of thepoem?” (184).

As a poet I play it safe. In readings on campus I avoid the poems about menstruation, abortion, fucking, andall other functions that take place in that area. I never feel disturbed, because I read only the soothing poemsabout trees and fishing. I don't want to disturb anyone. I want them to say, “Sandy is such a nice girl; let'skeep her on.” But I feel they distrust me anyway. When I look at the few tenured women on the faculty, Iknow every one of us is marked with blood.

The ending of “Lives of the Poets” is marked with blood. There is red snow, a solid red wall, a stomach full ofblood, head full of blood, all burning red. Julia is a woman, and the full meaning of it has surfaced. I see Juliatransformed into Alta. I see the room fill with the unsoothing poetry that is the real Julia. I see her exposed upthere, but with the power and fire of Alta's last curse: “the curse of every wicked witch be upon your heart. / icould not hate you more if hatred were my bones” (49).

Sometimes I read something that blows away every theory as I know it. Last time this happened was when Iread Alice Munro's short story, “A Royal Beating.” It occurs most often when I read stories written bywomen, about women. The theories seem to drop away and I experience the writing as if I'm in an intimateconversation with a close girlfriend, hearing her story which is also mine. This happened when I read “Livesof the Poets,” and encountered Bernie.

So here is the story: I am a poet married to the poet, A, who has made almost no money now for six years. Atfirst he had Federal and State grants to help with the bills, but in the last two years he had none. I have kept apart-time job, as a T.A., and have supplemented that income with various portrait jobs (bronze busts) thathave come up. I am also responsible for supplying a car, and keeping one running. My holidays consist ofrebuilding carburetors, replacing water pumps, soldering radiators, etc. A has borrowed money from me topay for graduate school where he enjoys composing poems and sharing them with his classmates.

“Why don't you try for one of those big government commissions?” A asks. “You could bring home maybe$400,000 for a couple of bronze veterans holding up a flag on a hill or something.”

“I already have too much to do: the house, car, food, school, my job.”

“But it would be for us,” he says, “our future.”

“Well you could. …”

“No way, I need my time to write.”

There is no other woman; there is no Marika. That I am thankful for. But then there is no liquid pool of flesh,or furry pleasure.

“I get no pleasure out of French kissing,” A told me. “I get no pleasure from eating a woman either. That'swhy I don't do these things.”

“Oh,” I said. “What do you do?”

“I do it,” he smiled. “That's it. Nothing kinky.”

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It is up to me to be ready for him to do it to me. I'm really tired of doing it. I mean, he could do it himselfmuch faster with less mess. I used to have lovers before A: exquisite men who slid me along the razor ofsensation until I shook everything away. I find it odd that some men would rather not know these kinds ofthings. Perhaps if one is too beautiful he never needs to learn how to make someone love him.

Often I feel my whole purpose is work. I feel like an outsider who supplies a service—cash. I sometimeswonder what would happen if I was temporarily out of service. Would he trade roles, or trade women?

When I come to the end of “Lives of the Poets,” I read, “she will open her mouth and the room will explode inblood” (195). I try to forecast my own future from this, but I'm stumped as to whose blood it should be.

Works Cited

Alta. “I Don't Have No Bunny Tail On My Behind.” A Geography of Poets: An Anthology of the New Poetry.Ed. Edward Field. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.

Atwood, Margaret. “Lives of the Poets.” Dancing Girls: And Other Stories. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” Ariel. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

Stein, Gertrude. “To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays.” Alphabets and Birthdays. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1957.

Criticism: Peter Kemp (review date 1992)

SOURCE: “The Atwood Variations,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 6, 1992, p. 20.

[In the following review, Kemp praises Good Bones as a “sample-case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonictalents.”]

Pocket-sized and with sturdy covers, Good Bones looks a bit like a sketchbook in which an artist might jotcaricatures, cartoons, preliminary studies, trial pieces and quick little exercises in catching the essence of asubject or delineating it from unusual angles. The miscellany with which Margaret Atwood fills its pages is, infact, a writer's equivalent of this: a collection of lively verbal doodlings, smartly dashed off vignettes andimages that are inventively enlarged, tilted, turned upside down. Playing with the conventions of her narrativecraft is a frequent pastime. Fiction's motives and motifs are outlined with witty flourish.

“Bad News,” the opening piece, is a fantasia about the appeal of disaster tales. It's followed by a monologuein which The Little Red Hen, clucking with indignation, re-tells the story of her thrifty response to the grain ofwheat as a cautionary tale of put-upon domesticity. Elsewhere, Gertrude gives her version of what happens inHamlet, and an Ugly Sister and a Wicked Stepmother put in a good word for themselves. Political correctnessis lampooned in “There Was Once,” as the reciting of a standard fairy-tale gets subverted by progressiveemendations and bowdlerizings. With sly funniness, a litany, “Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women,” listseverything fiction owes to unwise females. As it catalogues the contributions to literature of “The Muse asFluffball,” aspects of genres like the fairy-story or the Gothic tale are captured in thumbnail sketches ofimpressionistic brio: “trapped inside the white pages, she can't hear us, and goes prancing and warbling andlolloping innocently towards her doom … incest-minded stepfathers chase her through ruined cloisters, whereshe's been lured by ruses too transparent to fool a gerbil.”

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In other places, Atwood's pen prods verbal raw material around to see what it turns into in differing contexts.Three brief stories each incorporate, in the order they occur in the verse, the words of a stanza from JohnMcCrae's “In Flanders Fields the Poppies Blow”. The title work, which ends the book, is a series of virtuosovariations on the phrase, “good bones”, using changing connotations—fine bone structure, hallowed relics,strong bones—to chronicle the phases of a life.

In its weird poeticizing of physiology, that piece is typical of many in the book (as well as some of the mosthaunting passages in Atwood's novels). Bodily life, male and female, is inspected with jaunty acumen, and acool eye is sent playing over its representations in fiction, sculpture and painting. These sections often call tomind that Atwood's father was an entomologist. Her stance in them sometimes jokily emulates scientificdistance and dispassion, though her spoof zoologies of the human being and its gender habits soon mutate intosequences of gaudy, ingenious metaphor.

“No freak show can hold a candle to my father expounding Nature”, Atwood wrote in an autobiographicalessay in Bluebeard's Egg. In Good Bones, to achieve and heighten a similar sense of the extraordinary, avantage-point much favoured is that of the extra-terrestrial. “Homelanding” acquaints the inhabitants ofanother world with the behaviour-patterns peculiar to Earth's “prong people” and “cavern people”. In“Cold-Blooded,” extra-planetary lepidoptera observe the activities of the “blood creatures” so surprisinglydominant on Earth, and note crude resemblances to their own patterns of pupation and metamorphosis: “Atsome indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or woodencocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state,which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings.”

Death isn't the only phenomenon to receive this Martian treatment. One piece, “Alien Territory,” narrates theevents of birth in terms of an adventure tale. Another turns the travelling of sperms towards an ovum into ascience-fiction epic: “the mission becomes a race which only one may win, as, ahead of them, vast andluminous, the longed-for, the loved planet swims into view. …”

Some of these flights of fantasy float away into buoyant humour. Gravity holds others closer to such globalconcerns as over-population, war and ecological catastrophe. As in Atwood's novels, the pervading style isfluently accomplished, fluctuating between amusement and seriousness, allowing mockery to meld affectinglyinto poetry: a meditation on bats moves with easy skill, for instance, from exuberant burlesque of the Draculamyth—“O flying leukaemia, in your cloak like a living umbrella”—to tender, exact evocation of the mammals“dank lazy half-sleep of daytime, with bodies rounded and soft as furred plums … the mothers licking the tinyamazed faces of the newborn”. Mingling the incisive and the colourful, Good Bones makes a marvellousminiature sample-case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonic talents.

Criticism: Neil Besner (review date 1993)

SOURCE: “A Poet's Bones,” in Canadian Literature, Vols. 138–139, Fall, 1993, pp. 105–06

[In the following laudatory review of Good Bones, Besner deems the stories in the collection as “fictions forour time, and, arguably, fictions that show Atwood's narrative talents at their finest.”]

Because Atwood is a better poet than a fiction writer, I have always read her novels and short stories withgrudging admiration. Yes, I teach The Handmaid's Tale and The Edible Woman, and I recognize the ways inwhich these and other Atwood novels are exciting in the classroom and out of it, but I would much ratherread, teach, talk about her poems.

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That this view should run against the rising tide of Atwood's reputation as a novelist might only reflect on theincreasingly rarefied readership of poetry in Canada outside of academic circles (increasingly rarefied, italmost seems, in inverse proportion to the rising number of books of poems published annually). More's thepity. But to my mind Good Bones demonstrates marvellously—as did Murder in the Dark to a lesserextent—how the fragmented and deceptively offhand form of these short pieces serves the turn of Atwood'simagination more powerfully than does her more conventional fiction. Despite what Atwood herself, or herpublishers, might think Good Bones is all about (I heard her suggest to June Callwood on television two nightago—trust the tale, forget the teller—that the book is simply helping out a small literary press in hard times),the truth is that Good Bones is a much better book than, say, Wilderness Tips. This is no backhandedcompliment; Good Bones pulses with a grim drollery that engages and entertains even as it looks back attradition with a knowing little leer and ahead towards various versions of apocalypse with a deftly controlledgrimace. These are fictions for our time, and, arguably, fictions that show Atwood's narrative talents at theirfinest.

I came to Good Bones ready to find in it all of the distinctive Atwood virtues, all of the strength that at timesresonates less powerfully in her prose than in her poems (and that, tellingly, so often calls to mind's eye andear, in this age that has so blithely proclaimed the death of the author, the pervasive and indecipherable life oftext, Atwood's own face and voice): the ground-glass wit; the dry and cool and flat menace of her sentences,posed, posed, compressed, composed; the taut hilarity of characters, most often female, contemplating civilwreckage, domestic havoc, psychic chaos with casual terror; the steely insight delivered deadpan. They are allthere and more. But Good Bones is worth glancing at, and rereading, and opening up at random because inthese twenty-seven pieces (they are not stories, poems, postcards, fables—they really are fine pieces). Atwoodis free both to call up and to dismember conventional demands for coherence, unity, plot complication andextension, and character development; she is more free to play, always a deadly serious game for Atwood, toinvoke familiar storylines, tales, and traditions and to trick them out in new, riddling, fragmented form.

Among this collection's delights are its protean pluralities. Variations on traditional myths are retold withunnerving familiarity, featuring contemporary reincarnations of old protagonists: in “Bad News,” the openingpiece, as a sleeping metamythical bird on a rooftop contemplates the unutterable boredom of uneventfulmundaneity, readers can revel in a rhythm, diction, and tone worthy of Atwood's best poetry:

She perches on a rooftop, her brass wings folded, her head with its coiffure of literate serpentstucked beneath the left one, snoozing like a noon pigeon. There's nothing to do but hertoenails.

This is canny writing, sinuous with allusion, alive with cliché made strange; at a glance, it is writing to spendtime with, and not simply or primarily to see through or beyond. And it is typically of the writing in thecollection.

As often as these pieces look pastwards from another perspective (try “Gertrude Talks Back” for a female andmaternal corrective to a suddenly prissy Hamlet), they look ahead with elegant, stylish gloom to a sterile andattenuated world under a dome (“Hardball”), or at our own world from a point of view at once soothinglyfamiliar and freakishly alien, the perspective of moths, bats, spermatozoa, of a consciousness from anotherplanet (“Cold-Blooded,” “My Life as a Bat,” “Adventure Story,” and “Homelanding,” with its “cave people”and “prong people”: guess who?) Many pieces celebrate the skewed stories of women past and present,revelling in the status of the unloved ones—of the ugly sister, the witch (“I'm the plot, babe, and don't everforget it” gloats the voice of “Unpopular Gals”)—and showing that the very impulse to tell stories often arisesfrom the myriad sadnesses, the predictable loneliness and sorrow of women singled out (“Let Us Now PraiseStupid Women,” “The Female Body”). And the hoary old art of telling any story comes in for someself-consuming and revisionist pruning as the narrator of “There Was Once” is subjected to a mercilesslycorrect (and very funny) ideological inquisition.

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Of course Atwood's men, those sly and silent, murderously abstract ghosts, are at large here again (“Making aMan,” “Epaulettes,” “Men At Sea”); they are artfully empty figures, and like so many of the creatures slippingalong these pages, they seem to haunt and beguile the wry and rueful voice that reads them into being. Andthere is a new tone in amongst Atwood's better-known registers, a reflective, meditative tone that gentlybroods over mortality, its own and others'. You can hear it most clearly in the title piece at the end of thebook, but it also inhabits passages of “Death Scenes,” for one.

As some elements in the Atwood canon recede into fixity—think of Survival, a bare twenty years later it isheartening to see how her new writing can still surprise us with its old fluency, its old delights. Good Bones, Iam happy to report, is not a new Atwood novel, not just another book of stories. But it most ably shimmiesand shakes, rattles and drolly rolls its bones—“them bones, them dry bones, them and their goodconnections.”

Criticism: Isabel Carrera Suarez (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: “‘Yet I Speak, Yet I Exist’: Affirmation of the Subject in Atwood's Short Fiction,” in MargaretAtwood: Writing and Subjectivity, New Critical Essays, edited by Colin Nicholson, St. Martin's Press, 1994,pp. 230–47.

[In the following essay, Suarez traces the development of Atwood's narrative technique as evinced in her shortfiction.]

Margaret Atwood's creative world, as has repeatedly been noted, possesses a coherence which spreads acrossgenres, its motifs and structures recurring in different texts, whether fiction, poetry or essay. In a studypublished in 1983 Sherill E. Grace attempts to describe this coherence by defining Atwood's system withreference to four elements: duality, nature, self and language.1 While all four are found to some extent in anyvolume of Atwood's, it is the latter two that seem to dictate the literary function of nature and duality, and toconstitute the key to the author's literary world. A reading of the three volumes of short stories published sofar, Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard's Egg (1983) and Wilderness Tips (1991),2 allows, by means of thecumulative effect of the genre, some insight into the recurrences and changes in the treatment of the self andits representation in language. Such a reading shows a gradual amplification of the subject, a self whichsurvives (and communicates) against all theoretical odds, against fragmentation, gaps and deconstructions.This affirmation of the subject and of language is suggested in selected stories of Dancing Girls and assertedin the subsequent volumes.

Considered together, the three collections of stories waver between confirming and contradicting Atwood'sstatement that authors do not ‘grow’ or ‘develop’, but rather do something which is closer to ‘a theme withvariations’.3 Perhaps ‘growth’, with its proximity to ‘growing up’ (or, in Atwood's own simile, radishes) is thewrong metaphor to apply to the progression of her work. In the essay quoted, she goes on to affirm that‘writers’ universes may become more elaborate, but they do not become essentially different’, and this is trueof her collections of stories and their treatment of the subject. However, while the latter does not becomeessentially different from one collection to another, it is the concept of the subject, together with itsrelationship to language, that marks the evolution (if not growth or development) in the universe of Atwood'sshort fiction. There is a shift in emphasis from the individual, soul-searching subject of Dancing Girls to awider extended subject, begun in the family ‘we’ of Bluebeard's Egg and expanded further, as in a wideningripple, in Wilderness Tips. The relation of this subject to language also experiences a shift, as a ratherdeterministic view of the limitations of language gives way to a more pragmatic critique of its use asinstrument of power, modified by a belief in the possibility of appropriation and transformation of words.

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Nine of the 16 stories in Dancing Girls (including ‘The War in the Bathroom’ and ‘Rape Fantasies’),4 arenarrated in the first person; a significant number when compared with the later collections: four in Bluebeard'sEgg, one in Wilderness Tips. The voice in all these stories is female and predominantly young. This youngfemale subject perceives itself as struggling against an Other who, more often than not is a he and a sexualpartner, but can also be her own unacknowledged self or, more widely, the world. In several of the stories themain syntactical opposition is I/he, a metonymy for the main conflict in the text (‘Under Glass’, ‘The Grave ofthe Famous Poet’, ‘Lives of the Poets’, ‘The Sin Eater’). In others, the same opposition appears in the form ofI/you, the you referring again to a sexual partner (‘Hair Jewellery’, ‘Rape Fantasies’). The struggle is rarelylimited to this opposition, however, and most of the protagonists are engaged in a battle with their ownunacknowledged or repressed selves, or the selves they have left behind, having ‘shed identities likesnake-skins’ (‘Hair Jewellery’). Their split personalities are described in detail, as in the schizoid pains of thewoman in ‘Under Glass’, or conveyed by the narrative technique, as in ‘The War in the Bathroom’, where thetwo narrative voices, in the first and third persons, are revealed as having only one owner. A similargrammatical and thematic predominance can be found in the rest of the stories in the collection; in most, thedialectics of she/he are central, and reveal a hidden structure of a female subject defining itself mainly againsta male antagonist, and/or struggling to accept supposedly unacceptable aspects of her own personality.

This recurrent pattern, however, is broken totally or partially in certain stories within the collection, notably in‘Betty’ and ‘Giving Birth’, where the antagonists are multiple and female, and in ‘Polarities’, where thebinary opposition he/she is secondary to the more crucial struggle by Louise to reconcile her fragmentedselves, or the fragments out of which she has attempted to create her personality.

While containing a ‘he’ (Fred), and an opposition of I/she (sister), ‘Betty’ centres on the mirror image of thecharacter who gives name to the story. A retrospective narration, it shows the choices made in thedevelopment of the self, and those left behind. It presents an adult first-person narrator who, while telling thestory of her childhood neighbour Betty (a devoted, obliging wife, eventually abandoned by her husband,Fred), analyses her own past motives for seeing this woman as her double, and her later arrival at the ability tochoose a different role-model. The young narrator feels that Betty's marital failure, and subsequent death, isthe doom of ‘nice’ girls like herself, as opposed to that of ‘vivacious’ girls like her sister, whom Fred hadclearly preferred. A romanticised version of Betty's death recedes into the background when the narratordecides to reject her as a model: ‘People change, though … As I passed beyond the age of melodrama I cameto see that if I did not want to be Betty, I would have to be someone else. … People stopped calling me a nicegirl and started calling me a clever one, and after a while I enjoyed this’ (DG, p. 50). This story offers one ofAtwood's most optimistic endings, in the possibilities it leaves open for change, for the construction of theself, or rebirth. The narrator, faced with two opposed role-models, has been able to discard both and adopt herown, escaping her victim position.

As a counterpoint, ‘Polarities’ shows the main character, Louise, trying and failing to bring her self to life.Her personality seems to suffer multiple splits, suggested by the fissures detected in her brisk, practicalmanner (her poetry, the fuzzy slippers, the frilly underwear) and also represented, after her internment, in herinvention of a schizophrenic parentage for herself (mother a French Protestant, father an English Catholic;mother an Italian opera singer, father a Nazi general). Her friend Morrison, focaliser of the story, provides acrucial image when he observes that her house has the strange effect of separate rooms, whose decoration iscopied from acquaintances' houses: ‘Poor Louise had been trying to construct herself out of the other peopleshe had met’ (DG, p. 70). Her growing mental unbalance, reflected in her plans to form a circle which wouldhold the world together, does not prevent her seeing Morrison's own unreconciled duality more clearly thananyone else: ‘He needs to be completed, he refuses to admit his body is part of his mind’ (p. 69). Louise triesto create a circle and contain the polarities, to be ‘all-inclusive’ (p. 55), but her practice of excluding thingsfrom this circle seems to lie at the root of the theoretical failure of her system. In her metaphor, as in her ownpersonality, she fragments instead of embracing, and the story remains one of failure of the self.

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Throughout the collection, the treatment of the subject is closely linked to its definition in language.Characters are represented, or misrepresented, by the language applied to them. In some cases, they arelabelled by others: Christine, in ‘The Man from Mars’ (DG), is in turn ‘ordinary’ (as seen by her parents),‘plain’ (by her sisters) or an ‘honorary person’ (as defined by men, who cannot fit her into the femalecategories of cock-teaser, cold fish, easy lay or snarky bitch). This self she temporarily escapes from throughthe fantasies awakened by her persecution by a ‘person from another culture’. In other stories charactersinvent their own personality through words: ‘the word she had chosen for herself some time ago was“comely”’ (‘The Resplendent Quetzal’, DG, p. 145), and split identities find their expression in duality oflanguage, as does the writer in ‘Lives of the Poets’ (DG), who must choose between her ‘nice’ persona,represented by her gentle poems, and her repressed rage, with its ‘bloody’ language.

Characters in these early stories struggle with language, with a need to speak or make themselves understood.While the healing nature of speech is shown in ‘The Sin Eater’, most of the stories in Dancing Girls underlinethe inadequacies of the word as a means of communication: ‘We've talked too much or not enough: for whatwe have to say to each other there's no language, we've tried them all’ (‘The Grave of the Famous Poet’, DG,p. 93). ‘My hands function, exchanging round silver discs for oblong paper [buying a ticket]. That this can bedone, that everyone knows what it means, there may be a chance. If we could do that: I would give him apebble, a flower, he would understand, he would translate exactly’ (DG, pp. 86–7). The woman in ‘UnderGlass’ thus wishes for comprehension through other gestures, or for the chimera of perfect interpretation. Atheoretical argument is provided by Joseph, the psychiatrist of ‘The Sin Eater’, who has a phobia abouttelephones because ‘most of the message in any act of communication [is] non-verbal’ (DG, p. 216). Andnon-verbal communication is, in fact, the distinctive trait of some of Atwood's ‘inarticulate’ characters, suchas the eponymous Betty and Loulou, who transmit thought or feeling through gestures; but significantly, thischaracteristic renders them the powerless element of the binomy which they form with their partners(Fred/Betty, the poets/Loulou).

I have elsewhere discussed Atwood's short stories, together with Doris Lessing's, as an example of thesubversive strategies in women's writing, and the move away from a concentration on the traps of languageinto a more hopeful acceptance of the possibility of change in linguistic practices.5 This attitude has runparallel with an evolution in linguistic and literary theory, towards the rejection of notions of fixed meaningsand of linguistic determinism (present in early structuralism, including feminist critics such as Dale Spender,and also in Lacanian theory) in favour of the idea of construction of meaning, and the subsequentresponsibility of users in transforming the language. Linking in with current philosophical and psychologicaltheories, but with a more pragmatic focus, feminist Deborah Cameron defends an integrational theory,6 inwhich external factors (social, psychological, familial) are taken into account, and earlier linguistic theoriesare abandoned in favour of communicative concepts such as those defined by Roy Harris or Trevor Pateman.The latter's radical discourse explores an active discourse that subverts, instead of reproducing, theestablished social institutions. Imperfect communication is thus accepted as the natural consequence of theindeterminacy of linguistic signs, but the focus is put on precisely this indeterminacy, which allows formultiplicity of meaning, for change and thus for subversion. Freed from the belief that we are controlled byour language, we can begin to assume control of it ourselves.

‘Giving Birth’, the final story in Dancing Girls, is the first to suggest such an attitude to language. One of themost complex and original of Atwood's early stories, it splits into three women, a trinity who protagonise theact and word of ‘giving birth’, and emerge as a remarkably solid subject at the end of the process. ‘GivingBirth’ is an explicit commentary on the difficulties of verbal communication and a practical example of thelink between language and subject in Atwood's writing. Beginning with a long commentary on the phrase‘giving birth’ and such related terms as delivering, the narrator mediates on their inadequacy and the need torename the act. While she refuses to rename it herself, she is determined, nevertheless, to speak:

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These are the only words I have, I'm stuck with them, stuck in them. (That image of the tarsands, old tableau in the Royal Ontario Museum, how persistent it is. Will I break free, or willI be sucked down, fossilized, a sabre-toothed tiger or lumbering brontosaurus who venturedout too far? Words ripple at my feet, black, sluggish, lethal. Let me try once more, before thesun gets me, before I starve or drown, while I can. It's only a tableau after all, it's only ametaphor. See, I can speak, I am not trapped, and you on your part can understand. So we willgo ahead as if there were no problem about language.)

(DG, p. 226)

It is worth noting there that the distinction between metaphor and reality, which will recur in later work,functions as an antidote for inaction, allowing communication, and therefore the story, to take place.

Thus the subject begins to be defined in language, the three women who make it up (the narrator, Jeanie andher unnamed alter ego) being differentiated by their attitudes to words: Jeanie, in her articulateness andobsession with reading manuals, her alter ego in her wordless existence, the narrator as a writer,self-consciously bring her past self back to life in the story, and naming that self Jeanie. These three selves,and the concepts of language and the subject, are brought together again in the description of the pain at theculminating moment of giving birth: ‘When there is no pain she feels nothing, when there is pain she feelsnothing because there is no she. This, finally, is the disappearance of language’ (p. 237). The statementreinforces the argument used elsewhere in the story that events of the body, such as giving birth or orgasm,may be impossible to describe in words. It also unites the three subjects in a common disappearance: theinarticulate other, for whom the words ‘giving birth’ don't exist, the articulate Jeanie, who loses the power ofspeech, and the narrator, who admits her difficulty in putting this event into words. All three go through theexperience, a reality untranslatable into language, but whose existence is affirmed to the point of supersedingthe concepts of subject and of speech: rather than a reduction of the subject to text, there is a reduction ofboth, text and subject, to the event. After the birth, the final lines express the new order: ‘in the days thatfollow Jeanie herself becomes drifted over with new words, her hair slowly darkens, she ceases to be what shewas and is replaced, gradually by someone else’ (p. 240), and ‘it was to me, after all, that the birth was given,Jeanie gave it, I am the result’ (p. 239). Both statements emphasis the notion of the subject as process, everystage the result of previous (multiple) others. Such a conception of the self will be crucial in later stories, andparticularly in the third collection, Wilderness Tips.

Bluebeard's Egg, published six years after Dancing Girls, lifts the emphasis from the l/he pair, and explores afirst extension of the self into family grounds. If we ascribe ‘Betty’ and ‘The Sin Eater’ to the first collectionor period, there is a substantial change in narrative technique, since only four stories (‘Significant Moments inthe Life of my Mother’, ‘Hurricane Hazel’, ‘In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain’ and ‘Unearthing Suite’) arenarrated in the first person; furthermore, the ‘I’ that these stories present, again female, could more accuratelybe described as a family ‘we’, being defined mainly by its relationship to the parents. Rather than a self byopposition, we face a self by addition, an ‘I’ not in struggle with its other, but accepting its extension into thefamily circle, with its influences and limitations.

‘Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother’, the opening and perhaps key story in the collection, blendsin its narrative technique the point of view of the mother (who tells stories about herself and her family) withthat of the daughter and ultimately leaves the reader to complete the portrait by adding her own. It is not, asthe title may suggest, a story about the narrator's mother, for it clearly shows the narrator in the act ofreconstructing her own past and present, analysing herself as a result of her childhood as recreated in the olderwoman's narration. The stories told by them both show the gap between daughter and mother, but just asobviously show their continuity, thus offering a portrait of daughter with mother (or m/other). The selfbecomes an entity whose borders are undefined, a subject, as Barbara Godard has pointed out,7 with theblurred ego boundaries described by Nancy Chodorow for women's subjectivity. The continuity of the

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mother-daughter dyad is shown not only in their connection through story-telling itself (a rich motif in thecollection), but also in the parallel stores about their lives (haircuts as rites of passage, dodging as tactics) andin their respective constructions of each other through narration.

‘Unearthing Suite’, which closes the collection, insists on the idea of self as process/result, with the narrator‘unearthing’, among other things, her own past and the origins of her dual tendency to slothfulness (the father)and order (the mother), made tangible in the two rooms of her house, one chaotic, one neatly designed andkept. She also traces back her tendency to inertia (as a reaction to a childhood training in movement) and,more crucially, her ‘translation of the world into words’ (p. 271), the beginnings of her writing. ‘HurricaneHazel’, for its part, makes patent the family identity that others, neighbours and friends, attribute to thenarrator in her adolescent years, and some of its uncomfortable consequences. The family context and itsintricacies are also explored, more incidentally, in ‘In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain’.

Other stories in the collection link with those in the previous book, and instances of suppressed selves recur.The most significant feature for our purposes, however, lies in the treatment of the first-person narrative, thepluralisation of the subject through its extension to the family circle (and hence, given the characteristics ofthe parents described, to nature). It hardly seems coincidental that the opening line in ‘Unearthing Suite’ is thesuggestive ‘My parents have something to tell me’ (p. 263).

Questions of language in Bluebeard's Egg are mainly treated with reference to power and gender politics, bothof which are closely related to the definition of the subject through language. ‘Significant Moments’ and‘Unearthing Suite’ characterise the parents through their speech, and expose their generation's conventionaldivision between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ territories: ‘To let the men's world slip over verbally into theladies' would reveal you as a mannerless boor, but to carry the ladies' world over into the men's brands you aprig and even a pansy’ (BE, p. 21). Men therefore swear, but not in front of women, while women reservecertain stories for female company only, stories of ‘romantic betrayals, unwanted pregnancies, illnesses ofvarious horrible kinds, marital infidelities, mental breakdowns, tragic suicides, unpleasant lingering deaths’(p. 21), stories which men, it is argued, are not equipped to bear or understand. The difference in languageamounts to a difference of worlds, it is both consequence and cause of the social order; an order which, thedaughter-narrator suggests, is changing, as her own linguistic universe reflects.

The mother of ‘Significant Moments’ is defined entirely though her language, shown in her story-telling.Other characters in the collection are reflected in their letters: Buddy's peculiar punctuation, ponderouscompliments, blue splotchy ball-point; the brother's funny, vulgar, illustrated letters to his sister followed byfactual ones to the mother (‘Hurricane Hazel’). But most persistently, we find descriptions of the power oflanguage and its use or misuse. The narrator in ‘Hurricane Hazel’ learns of its effects through her brother, whovery effectively ridicules the advertisements of remedies for teenage problems, and through Buddy's standard(though naïve) attempt to pin her down by giving her a bracelet with his name (his ‘identity’ bracelet).

Linguistic disadvantage constitutes the conflict per se in ‘Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language’,also collected in Bluebeard's Egg. It tells the story of the unbalanced relationship between a group ofover-articulate poets and ‘earthy’ Loulou, whose mismatched name and personality embody, in the poets'opinion, the ‘gap between the signifier and the signified’. The gap, in another of Atwood's ironic symbioseswith theory, becomes the central motif of the story. Loulou supports a group of poets under her roof,materially with her earnings as a potter, morally with the healing power of her sexual and motherly love.Despite their constant teasing and play on her ignorance of words, she has an intuitive understanding of theirmotivations and abuses, and sees the trap of the role she has been cast in, that of nourishing earth-mother.While the poets wonder what there is ‘in the space between Loulou and her name’, she asks herself a far morerelevant question: What is there between Loulou and the poets' construction of her? The question becomesmore pressing after she seeks out an accountant and seduces him in his office: ‘he is other, he is another. Shetoo could be other. But which other? What, underneath it all, is Loulou really like? How can she tell? Maybe

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she is what the poets say she is, after all; maybe she has only their word, their words, for herself’ (p. 80). Thestory ends unresolved, an ambiguous mixture of affirmation of Loulou, of her understanding by non-verbalmeans, her refusal to be defined (‘nobody invented her, thank you very much’; p. 80), and of resignationtowards her trap. The ending, in which she decides that being ‘like Loulou’, as the poets require, is not so badafter all, seems a capitulation to the power of their words, but concludes, perhaps, that it is simply too late: shelacks the confidence (or the language) to explore further, and the hope for change remains only a thwartedpossibility.

The story, however, also reads as a warning against false (and convenient) metaphors posing as reality.Loulou's insistence that her name is ‘just a name’ tries to counteract the effects of the poets' confusionbetween her personality and her name, their misuse of its relationship as metaphor; we are reminded of thenarrator in ‘Significant Moments’, checking herself after trying to interpret one of her mother's stories: ‘Thereis, however, a difference between symbolism and anecdote. Listening to my mother, I sometimes rememberthis’ (p. 27).

The treatment of the self and of language in Atwood's latest collection of stories, Wilderness Tips, once moreis not radically different from that of previous books, though there is a feeling that the main characterscontinue from a point where Bluebeard stopped. They are one stage further in age (some have grown-upchildren, even grandchildren), and most of them look back to their formative years, whether in childhood or,more frequently, in the early years of adulthood and of their careers. The focalisation is still mainly female,though at times shared or relinquished (‘True Trash’ alternates Joanne and Donny; Richard is the focaliserwho constructs Selena in ‘Isis in Darkness’). The male characters are studied in some detail, their role oftengoing well beyond that of the antagonist. But the most pervasive presence in the collection is that of thepassing of time, with the changes produced in the individual and the collective self. Almost without exception,we face a subject and its history, a history which takes place during the past few decades, and of which thepresent person is the result.

Several of the texts explicitly remark on the changes brought about by specific decades, mainly the 1960s,1970s and 1980s (‘Hairball’, ‘Isis in Darkness’, ‘The Age of Lead’, ‘Hack Wednesday’, ‘The Bog Man’);others go further back in time or, at the other end, reach the beginning of the 1990s. In ‘Isis in Darkness’ the‘zero years’ of three decades serve as a structuring element for the plot. There is a feeling of the importance ofthe Zeitgeist, which is perhaps most clearly represented in ‘Isis’, where Richard moves from a youth of being‘good with words’, interested in their abstract meanings, towards becoming the archaeologist of the past,searching for significance in its events, which he will translate into words. The collection as a whole producesthe effect of the subject expanding further, the self seen in a context which encompasses more than the familyand the present circumstances. The immediacy of the first-person narration is abandoned almost entirely (theexception is ‘Weight’), seemingly in favour of a more distant, but also more knowledgeable and alwaysretrospective, third-person narrator.

This collection presents an interesting new version of ‘we’ (or ‘they’) as a syntactical and psychologicalsubject: that of the double subject formed by two characters who, while being each other's alter ego, share acomplicity amounting to spiritual twinhood: Richard and Selena in ‘Isis’, Molly and the narrator in ‘Weight’,Lois and Lucy in ‘Death by Landscape’. The relationship between these characters is closer to the idea of thelost possibilities of the self (as in ‘Hair Jewellery’; DG) than to the opposed antagonist of the earlier I/hestories. They compose a self by addition rather than by opposition; the split is not the source of battles but ofinclusion of opposites into one consciousness.

In many respects, the collection Wilderness Tips is, as Atwood would have it, a more elaborate variation onprevious themes, a step further in diverse explorations. Elements such as duality reappear under a slightlydifferent treatment; five of the ten stories contain the double subject mentioned above, a ‘twin’ of the maincharacter who, rather than function merely by opposition, has been incorporated, to become an integral part of

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her/his self. This twin is poignantly symbolised in ‘Hairball’, where Katherine's strange ovarian cyst,surgically removed, kept on the mantelpiece in formaldehyde and referred to as ‘Hairball’, turns out to be her‘undeveloped twin’ (WT, p. 54), the possibility of a self that she has not allowed to grow, but which crops upto remind her of the fact. In a similar way, Selena (‘Isis in Darkness’) has continued the artistic career whichRichard has traded for the shelter of an income, but which he has always pined for, however romantically. Sheis always part of his own self and, ultimately, in putting together her pieces (writing her biography), hebecomes part of her life too.

It is Selena's death, however, that triggers off Richard's conscious involvement, and death also plays aprominent role in the other three ‘twin’ stories. While Dancing Girls presented death as desire, as Gothicpresence, in Wilderness Tips it has become a reality or a justified fear. Vincent's death, in ‘The Age of Lead’,breaks up the hopeful world which he and Jane had inhabited in the past, a perfectly synchronised pair, unitedfrom adolescence by their mockery of obsolete values and clichéd language. ‘Death by Landscape’ and‘Weight’ offer a main character whose present self is explained by the death of a close friend, an alter ego. Inthe first case, Lucy disappears mysteriously, leaving her friend Lois suspected of pushing her off a cliff; in hermature age, a grandmother living alone, Lois sees Lucy in the landscape paintings she has collectedcompulsively, and remembers going through life ‘as if she was living not one life but two: her own, andanother, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized—the life of what wouldhave happened if Lucy had not stepped sideways, and disappeared from time’ (WT, p. 128). This carefullyconstructed story emphasises the effect of an accident on someone's life, but the depiction of Lucy as the alterego of Lois, and their past naming in the plural ‘Lois and Lucy’ is equally important and points towardsunrealised possibilities of the psyche.

‘Weight’, for its part, presents another pair of close female friends who make different choices in life, andlater come together in the survivor's unique self. Like Vincent and Jane, the narrator and Molly have sharednot only a view of the world, but a language game: the invention of absurd definitions for the abusive termsused of women. Molly becomes militant in the defence of women, marries, has children; the narrator remainssingle, pursues a successful career; Molly leads ‘the life I [the narrator] might have led, if it hadn't been forcaution and a certain fastidiousness’ (WT, p. 189). When Molly is murdered by her husband, her friend beginsa personal campaign to raise funds for a shelter for battered women, to be called Molly's Place. Conducted inher own terms (including blackmailing of ex-lovers), it nevertheless continues Molly's commitment, with thenarrator becoming again, as in the times of law school, ‘Molly and I’, a composite subject, the result of herfriend's life and death.

The preoccupation with the subject as result is, of course, concomitant with the retrospective form of most ofthe narratives. In this collection, the examination of lost possibilities, whether by choice or sheer chance,predominates over schizophrenic division; there is a quieter acceptance of the latter, reflected in Julie'sdiscovery (‘The Bog Man’) that one of the first axioms of Logic, ‘A thing cannot be both self and non-self atthe same time’ (WT, p. 98), is not so clear-cut in terms of personality.

Characters in this collection also continue to be defined, or to define themselves, through language as such.The prime example is the manipulation of names: Katherine, in ‘Hairball’, successfully becomes Kathy, Kathand Kat, in accordance with time, place and the image she wants to project of herself. Her lover, Ger, had alsobeen Gerard in his conventional past, before she transformed him into a successful man. The change of namesis a structural element in the story: towards the end, Katherine dismisses Gerald by calling him by his fullname; she signs her own merely K, and in the last line, having faced the truth about herself and taken a drasticdecision, feels ‘temporarily without a name’ (p. 56). Selena, in ‘Isis in Darkness’, has also chosen this newname for herself, her previous one being the common Marjorie (dangerously close to ‘Mary Jo’, name of thenarrator's wife). When Selena loses faith in poetry, she also denies her chosen name.

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As in earlier collections, certain adjectives define a character: the deceived wife in ‘The Bog Man’ will alwayshave the upper hand because she is ‘homely’; Molly dies because she is a ‘toad-kisser’, a ‘fixer’; that is, forher belief that she can transform men. She also significantly uses the term cynicism for what the narrator callscompromise. Ronette, the naïve, desired waitress in ‘True Trash’ is defined by the sexist language that judgesher for being sexually active; like Loulou, she is ‘stuck with other people's adjectives’ (WT, p. 77). Like Bettyand Loulou, she fails to articulate her thought or feeling in words, and offers her body instead.

No story in this collection is free from self-conscious questioning of specific words, from the exposure of ‘thegap between the signifier and the signified’. This gap, however, no longer seems unbridgeable. It is a reality tobe dealt with and even taken advantage of. While the socio-linguistic powerlessness of characters like Ronetteis given full credit, the attitude to language allows a more playful response than previous volumes, shownparticularly in ‘The Age of Lead’ and ‘Weight’. This attitude is often united to an acute awareness of the usesto which language is put, the power of abusive labels and the symbolic power of words. Molly and her friendinvent new meanings of terms such as strident, shrill, hysteria, pushy, in a playful subversion of their poweragainst women. Clichés are mocked not only by Jane and Vincent in ‘The Age of Lead’ but also in‘Wilderness Tips’, as signs of the mentality behind language. But overall, the deterministic view of languageas an unavoidable and paralysing trap is absent from the collection, as are the instances of violent struggle; intheir place, a more pragmatic view of communication, and the subversive power of word-play, show a beliefin an active participation in the creation of language, and in the potential for transformation also contained inwords.

Seen together, the three collections of stories form a continuum in the two aspects of the subject and itsrepresentation in language. The subject, always complex, moves from the struggle with itself and the othertowards an inclusion of opposites and an extension into its context. The self as process/result/place, onlysuggested in the earlier stories, is stressed in the last collection. A similar evolution can be observed in thereflections on the use of language: the earlier characters struggle, feel trapped or doomed; the later stories,without losing sight of inadequacies or abuses, take a more pragmatic approach and assume, howevertentatively, control of speech.

Thus language and the subject evolve together in Atwood's stories, towards a more inclusive, but also morepragmatic conception. For it would be mistaken to equate the author's perception of the subject with thedeconstructionist view of its fictionality, its reduction to words. Without doubt Atwood makes use of theinsights of contemporary theory, as has been evident in our analysis. She deconstructs the traditional subjectand its language, fragments it and represents the self by reducing it symbolically to language—but‘symbolically’ is, as her texts repeatedly warn us, as far as we can go in the equation of both elements. Fornowhere in her texts does Atwood give evidence of the conversion of the subject into a fiction, nowhere is itequated with its construction in words, nor does fragmentation suppose a negation of the subject. Rather,while pointing out the importance, the motivation, and the consequences of the various constructions of a self(Bluebeard's Egg), her stories suggest the existence of a hidden, perhaps intangible but experiential self,which either survives fragmentation, de/construction and language problems (‘Betty’, ‘Giving Birth’), orperishes through madness (‘Polarities’). In later stories the division is less clear-cut, the self emerging neithertriumphant nor wholly deconstructed, but the result of a previous process, a turning point or a temporary stagein an evolution which is left open.

The notion of the subject in Atwood's texts, therefore, is closest to Ihab Hassan's theory:8 a kind of‘common-sense’ belief in the experiential self, as perceived by the subject from childhood to old age, despite(or by means of) the multiple transformations of a lifetime.

It is possible, of course, to find resonances of almost any current theory in Atwood's work, as her awarenessof academic debate often finds reflection in her writing, albeit in her own terms (I do not think it entirelycoincidental, for example, that in Foucaultian times archaeology is such a prominent symbol in Wilderness

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Tips). I should like to sketch, however, the proximity between some of the arguments and metaphors used byHassan and Atwood.

‘The self may rest on no ontological rock’, Hassan declares, ‘yet as a functional concept, as a historicalconstruct, as a habit of existence, above all, as an experienced or existential reality, it serves us all even as wedeny it theoretically. The self represents something to us, even when we select some aspect of it to act.’ Hisessay reviews the theories (philosophical, psychological, political) which in the twentieth century havecontributed to defining the self as a fictional construct; but despite these, Hassan maintains the survival of thesubject, argues for the metaphors of ‘accident, invention, pattern, process, or mutation’ to describe it, andanswers French deconstructionists and Hillis Miller's nihilism by exposing the ‘intellectualistic fallacy … thatlogic invariably grounds practice’.9 Refusing the equation of self or identity with unity or coherence, heclaims that current theories have only served to change our perception of the subject, but not to deny itsexistence.

There is much in these descriptions which is immediately relevant to Atwood's writing, and which ties in withfeminist debates. Experienced reality, revalued by some feminisms, is pervasive in Atwood's stories, and herwork has a strong ‘realistic’ component blended in with its theoretical complexity: it is not surprising, then,that the duality experience/abstract representation should be present in her conception of the subject. As to themetaphors of accident, invention, pattern, process and mutation, they all apply, as we have seen, to thetreatment of fictional selves by the author, while the fallacies of logic are also exposed in her work, notably inthe direct reference in ‘The Bog Man’ (WT, p. 98).

Against deconstructive theories of the subject, Hassan poses those of psychologists of identity, andspecifically those of Norman Holland and Sharon R. Kaufman.10 Holland “limns a model of human identitycomposed of theme and variations, much like a sonata, much like any work of art. The self maintains anintense, if unnamed awareness of itself through great changes, from infancy to death’.11 The parallel withAtwood's' concept of an author's creation, quoted at the beginning of this essay, speaks for itself, and allowsfor an extension of her metaphor to her conception of the subject.

An equally interesting coincidence is found in the metaphor used to describe Kaufman's definition of the‘ageless self’. Having quoted her as saying that ‘I have found that in the expression of the ageless self,individuals not only symbolically preserve and integrate meaningful components of their past, but they alsouse these symbols as frameworks for understanding and being in the present’,12 Hassan defends thisapparently ‘naïve’ insight as containing the crucial concept of an ‘inhabited self’, an expression with strongresonances of Atwood's metaphor of a ‘habitable interior’ in ‘Polarities’. This ‘habitable interior’ (quotedfrom Margaret Avison) is the comfortable identity, the reconciled self that neither Louise nor Morrison haveachieved.

Atwood's multiple, ever-expanding and contextualised subject is an example of Hassan's ‘survivor self’ (434),a self redefined by contemporary theory, rather than reduced to a textual fiction. Writing in the same issue ofContemporary Literature which features Hassan's essay, Eugene Goodheart reinforces Hassan's approach byinsisting that the experiential self is a natural fact, without which ‘we would go crazy, suffering a radical senseof fragmentation, discontinuity and emptiness’,14 and that the coherent or repressed selves are not necessarilythe true selves. The contrast between texts such as ‘Polarities’ and ‘Giving Birth’ seems to exemplify this: inthe first, Louise, lacking a sense of self, suffers tragic fragmentation and final madness; ‘Giving Birth’,however, shows a subject indeed redefined by contemporary theory, who survives, emerging from theexperience of the multiple, mutating selves as a solid entity, capable of finding meaning in her past andawaiting a future. The narrating subject perceives herself in wider terms than language: the repressed self, thetransforming power of events, her representation in language, are all integrated into the final result, a new,presumably temporary, but solid, self. The subject becomes language, inasmuch as words are the raw materialof narration, and, again, in the metaphor which language constitutes for representing the self (Jeanie becomes

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drifted over with new words; in pain, both she and language disappear). But language, like the tar sands, is‘only a metaphor’ in the stories, a metaphor of the self.

The fallacy of the textual self as superseding the experiential self is described by Goodheart in the conclusionto his essay in the following terms: ‘The danger posed by writing is the temptation it offers to life to imitatewriting—that is, to imitate the adventurous incoherence of the self that is possible only in writing.’15 Thestatement compares with Morrison's analysis of Louise's madness: ‘she's taken as real what the rest of uspretend is only metaphorical’ (p. 69). The moral joins other warnings pointed out earlier, warnings againstexcessive theorising of events, against reducing people to metaphors, or trapping subjects in language.

The ‘survivor self’, the pragmatic vision, is then, though not without struggle, the protagonist of Atwood'swork, whether as presence or as suggested option. Equally surviving, after its own struggle, is the ‘commonsense’ communicative experience of language. From tentative explorations into the exclusion of women fromlanguage (whether viewed from structuralist-deterministic positions, or as Lacanian exclusion from thesymbolic), there is a movement towards a pragmatic analysis of social facts (Ronnette, Loulou) and anacceptance of imperfect communication through language, a language which can and must be transformed;the embryo of this attitude is contained in the early statement of intention in ‘Giving Birth’: ‘we will go aheadas if there were no problem about language’.

Margaret Atwood's combination of pragmatic and textual elements, of which the treatment of the subject is anexample, undoubtedly constitutes one of the keys to her success for readers and is largely responsible for thecontroversy over her ascription to postmodernism, within whose boundaries certain practices seem to situateher. Poststructuralist notions and deconstruction have, like other theoretical concepts, influenced Atwood'swriting; but from the evidence of her stories, they seem to constitute a tool for more inclusive analysis orrepresentation, rather than a view of the world. From Atwood's careful process of redefinition, both languageand the subject emerge affirmed.

Notes

Sherrill E. Grace, ‘Articulating the “Space Between”: Atwood's Untold Stories and FreshBeginnings’, in Margaret Atwood: Language, Text and System (Vancouver: University of BritishColumbia Press, 1983) pp. 1–16.

1.

All references in the text are to the British editions, except in the stories ‘The War in the Bathroom’and ‘Rape Fantasies’ (Dancing Girls and Other Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977));Dancing Girls (London: Virago, 1984); Bluebeard's Egg (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987); WildernessTips (London: Bloomsbury, 1991). The following abbreviations will be used in the text: DG, BE andWT.

2.

Margaret Atwood, ‘Valgardsonland’, Essays on Canadian Writing, vol. 16 (Fall-Winter 1979–80) p.188. Grace quotes this as support for her own argument, ‘Articulating the “Space Between”’.

3.

Dancing Girls has a slightly different selection in the Canadian and British editions; the formerincludes ‘The War in the Bathroom’ and ‘Rape Fantasies’, excluded in Britain, while the latterincludes ‘Betty’ and ‘The Sin Eater’, which were to appear in Canada in the later collection,Bluebeard's Egg. For purposes of our generalisations, we shall treat all four stories as part of the firstvolume, though keeping in mind that ‘Betty’ and ‘The Sin Eater’ lie between the two books, and canbe seen as transitional.

4.

I. Carrera Suarez, ‘Metalinguistic Features in Short Fiction, by Lessing and Atwood: From Sign andSubversion to Symbol and Deconstruction’, in J. Bardolph (ed.), Short Fiction in the New Literaturesin English (Nice: Faculté des Lettres, 1988) pp. 159–64.

5.

Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistics (London: Macmillan, 1985).6. Barbara Godard, ‘My (m)Other, My Self: Strategies for Subversion in Atwood and Herbert’, Essayson Canadian Writing, vol. 26 (1983) pp. 13–44. Godard discusses the importance of Chodorow's

7.

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theory of female identity with relation to Atwood's novels (Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction ofMothering (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1978).Ihab Hassan, ‘Quest for the Subject: the Self in Literature’, Contemporary Literature, vol. 29(3)(1988) pp. 420–37.

8.

Ibid., pp. 422, 425, 429.9. Norman Holland, The I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Sharon R. Kaufman, TheAgeless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

10.

Holland, The I, p. 432.11. Kaufman, Ageless Self, p. 433.12. Hassan, ‘Quest for a Subject’, p. 434.13. Eugene Goodheart, ‘Writing and the Unmaking of the Self’, Contemporary Literature, vol. 29(3)(1988) pp. 438–53.

14.

Ibid., p. 453.15.

Criticism: Ursula K. Le Guin (review date 1995)

SOURCE: “Of Bimbos and Men's Bodies,” in The Washington Post Book World, Vol. 25, No. 3, January 8,1995, p. 3.

[In the following review, Le Guin provides a favorable assessment of Good Bones and Simple Murders.]

If you know any writers or would-be writers, give them this little book, with a bookmark at the piece called“The Page.” In a couple of hundred words it says more than all the dozens of how-to-write books say aboutthe act of writing, the reality of it.

Margaret Atwood knows a lot about reality. Too much, maybe. She scares people. She doesn't respect theinstitutions of our civilization or the tender feelings of her readers. There is something uncanny in herinsights. Could it be that there really are witches? She seems to know so much about them:

“Hell, I used to have breasts! Not just two. Lots. Ever wonder why a third tit was the crucialtest, once, for women like me? … You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around allyou like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't getme out of the story. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it.”

Her brilliance is daunting: her wit and aplomb can make her seem cold, aloof. She tends to be on thedefensive, favoring the preemptive strike. Not without reason. Along with fame and praise, she encounters acurious enmity. At a reading in Canada I have seen members of the audience attack and goad her almosthysterically. Such resentment may rise from mere envy, but it may also be that she makes us feel a bitdefenseless ourselves.

This marvelous little collection of short prose pieces [in Good Bones and Simple Murders] should help winover the distrustful, if only because it is so funny. It's hard to pull out bits because the pieces are so tight-knit;you've got to read all of “The Little Red Hen Tells All” or “Homelanding.” Here are some bits from “Let UsNow Praise Stupid Women”: “—the airheads, the bubble brains, the ditzy blondes … all those who dry theirfreshly shampooed poodles in the microwave,

“all those whose boyfriends tell them chlorophyll chewing gum is a contraceptive, and whobelieve it. …”

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“She talks with wolves, without knowing what sort of beasts they are: Where have you beenall my life? they ask. Where have I been all my life? she replies. …”

The compression, the lack of waste, is marvelous as with the Gorgon who gets to narrate her own story andsays she has “nothing to do but her toenails,” or the novel-in-three-pages called “Death Scenes,” or a sentencesuch as, “It's a boy, they cry with joy. Let's cut some off!’

This last line comes from “Alien Territory,” an intense, complex meditation on men's bodies. As a feministAtwood is chiefly concerned with the pain we cause one another by our curious constructions of gender. “Aman and his body are soon parted,” she says, and “Men's bodies are the most dangerous things on earth,” and“Every morning I get down on my knees and thank God for not creating me a man. A man so chained tounpredictability. A man so much at the mercy of himself. A man so prone to sadness. A man who has to takeit like a man. A man who can't fake it.”

There is compassion beneath the wit. The seeming coldness guards a profound comprehension of suffering.Atwood is a writer not only of great power and intelligence but of great wisdom and generosity. In these shortpieces, where prose touches the compactness of poetry, all these qualities shine memorably, endearingly:

“And when you walk through the snow, in the blizzard, growing cold and then unaccountablywarmer, as night descends and sleep numbs you and you know you are lost, it's the third handthat slips confidingly into your own, a small hand, the hand of a child, leading you onward.”

Good things come in small packages and this one's a treasure.

Criticism: Kathleen Wall (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: “Representing the Other Body: Frame Narratives in Margaret Atwood's ‘Giving Birth’ and AliceMunro's ‘Meneseteung,’” in Canadian Literature, Vol. 154, Autumn, 1997, pp. 74–90.

[In the following essay, Wall examines the portrayal of women as well as the narrative structures in AliceMunro's “Meneseteung” and Margaret Atwood's “Giving Birth.”]

When I think of the framed depiction of women's bodies, I cannot help thinking of the nineteenth-centurynude, those women depicted by Ingres, Bonnard, Courbet, and Manet in their baths, their beds, their dressingrooms. Those paintings might be said to represent an iconography of what Simone de Beauvoir identified asearly as 1952 in The Second Sex as the woman as “other” in a culture where the masculine was the same, thenorm. Additionally, paintings like Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe emphasize the extent to which the bodythat is the object of the male gaze is, in this iconography, reified and abstract. Zola, trying to justify Manet'sinclusion of the nude woman among the clothed men, the unlikeliness of the whole scene, wrote “Thus, surelythe nude woman of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe is there only to furnish the artist an occasion to paint a bit of flesh”(Brooks 133).

Further, the poses of these representations suggest an oxymoronic knowing unself-consciousness: for how cana woman be both self-absorbed in her own toilet and yet be posing for the man who paints her? Thus wemight see her as self-divided or doubled, depending on whether we attend to the painting's frame: she is aloneand subject to her own self-absorption in the context of her representation within the frame that contains her.Yet before the frame separates her from the context of the artist's studio, she is certainly not alone, but ratherobject of the male artist's gaze. Thus the framed female body typically might be said to represent femaleotherness, to embody woman as both object and subject. Such a status renders her both self-divided anddoubled, in contrast to the unified, singular male of whose gaze she is the object. Subject of her

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representation, she is the object of the desire to know and understand, but is finally unknowable andincomprehensible. In Body Work, Peter Brooks writes about the traditional connection between the desire toknow the body and narrative, as well as about “the inherently unsatisfiable desire resulting from the drive toknow”:

The body in the field of vision—more precisely, in that field of vision which is so central torealist narrative—inevitably relates to scopophilia, the erotic investment of the gaze which istraditionally defined as masculine, its object the female body. … As the fictions mostconsciously concerned with the epistemology of observation demonstrate, scopophilia isinextricably linked with epistemophilia, the erotic investment in the desire to know … [Yet]another body never is wholly knowable; it is an imaginary object that returns us to questionsabout the meaning of difference.

(122)

Both Margaret Atwood's story “Giving Birth,” from her 1977 collection Dancing Girls, and Alice Munro'sstory “Meneseteung,” first published in the New Yorker in January 1988 and subsequently collected in Friendof my Youth in 1990, contain framed representations of women. Yet unlike the nineteenth-century nudes andthe objects of scopophilia that Brooks describes, the bodies depicted in the stories of Atwood and Munro arenot those that are traditionally the object of the male gaze, almost suggesting an effort on the authors' part tode-romanticize and de-reify the female body. In “Giving Birth,” the protagonist is a woman in labor; in“Meneseteung,” she is a nineteenth-century “poetess” awaiting the onset of menses. In yet another way theyare unlike those nudes: their enclosure is not effected by a picture frame, which we might see as a supplementto or reification of their representation, but by a frame narrative, the kind of frame that Derrida describes as“not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from the outside. … [I]ts transcendentexteriority touches, plays with, brushes, rubs, or presses against the limit” (Derrida 20–21). In these twostories, the frame and the framed bodies interact in a way that subversively calls attention to the margin andthe marginal. Such a strategy, as Molly Hite notes, questions our tendency to ignore frames and to view themas means of cutting off, and hence making an object of, that which is framed: “To call attention to the marginis to render it no longer marginal and consequently to collapse the centre in a general unsettling ofoppositional hierarchies” (Other Side 121–22). As a consequence, both the nature of the body represented andthe authors' ways of framing that representation challenge the iconography of those nineteenth-century nudesas well as articulating the nature of self-division and otherness that their framing entails.

The narrators of both stories (who are, not coincidentally, both writers) evince ambiguous relationships totheir respective protagonists that, in evoking both similarities and differences, correspondences anddiscordances between themselves and the women they represent, recall another aspect of painting, the mise enabyme (Dällenbach 33).1 A further similarity in the structure of these two stories is the author's use of asecond mise en abyme that depicts what Atwood's narrator terms “the other woman” whose experience of herbody, related to yet different from that of the protagonist, highly colors the protagonist's own interpretation ofand reaction to her body and its distinctively female experiences. First explored by André Gide in 1893, the“mirror in the text” reflects both what is and what is not represented in the narrative or in the representationbetween the frames. One thinks here of The Arnolfini Marriage, with its convex mirror that depicts the backsof the husband and wife as well as the painter and the wedding guests, all of whom are outside the space thatvan Eyck is ostensibly representing, but all of whom are represented nevertheless. The mirror thus presents adifferent version of what is represented within the frame (the backs of the couple) as well as what is beyond(the wedding guests and painter) the field of representation.2 Velásquez's Ladies in Waiting provides anotherfamiliar example; the King and Queen appear in a mirror on the wall of the salon. In both paintings, themirrors—the convex mirror in The Arnolfini Marriage and the badly silvered one in Ladies inWaiting—distort as well as reflect. Hence, Dällenbach concludes that the mise en abyme reflects and distorts,articulates differences and similarities, concordances and discordances between the field of representation and

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the mirror in the text.

Inevitably, we see played out in the doubled, mirroring structure used by Munro and Atwood three major andinterrelated concerns identified as central to women's writing. The first is woman's often multiple andcontradictory reactions to the experiences of her body perhaps first theoretically articulated by de Beauvoir,and then differently focused by Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One (for an illustration of theinterrelatedness of these issues, note how Irigaray floats from the issue of a woman's pleasure to that oflanguage):

the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, morecomplex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined—in an imaginary rather too narrowlyfocused on sameness. … “She” is indefinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she issaid to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious … not to mention her language,in which “she” sets off in all directions leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of anymeaning.

(28–29; ellipses in original)

The second concern central to our explorations of women's writing is the project of “writing the body” easilysummed up by Cixous's injunction, in “Laugh of the Medusa,” that because so much of our experience ismediated by a variety of social discourses, including literary texts, woman must “write the body,” re-create itas—or in—discourse for other women, change and challenge the representations that shape our perceptionsand experiences of ourselves. There is some concensus about the characteristics of literature that writes thebody: Cixous describes discourse that overflows, exceeds, that “jams sociality” (344), that “does not contain,it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible” and that expresses “the wonder of being several” (345).Certainly, “writing the body celebrates women as sexual subjects not objects of male desire” (Dallery 58).Writing the body involves, in addition, the recognition that the body, as it is now represented, is the equivalentof a text; that, like a text, it is constructed of and by the discourses in circulation around it. That equivalence ishumorously acknowledged by Cixous when she threatens to show men women's “sexts” (342).

The third concern addressed by feminist criticism is the belief that women must or should write differentlyfrom men (whether they are “writing bodies” or not). Yet this belief is fraught with problems andcontradictions. On one hand, Irigaray believes that a civilization that was capable of expressing women'sdesire “would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, a different language … Woman's desire would not beexpected to speak the same language as man's (This Sex 25; ellipses in original). On the other hand, thepractice of an “un-masculinized” language produces

… the “other” language of witches advocated by some women—a language of the body,singsong, visceral cries, etc.—(silence even, which supposedly can be heard, what was thepoint of asking for your turn to speak then?), this language of the body, this cry-language, isthat enough to fight oppression? If one should not hesitate to cry out one's guts against thewords that leave you out in the cold, there is no good reason to reject as “masculine andoppressive” a certain form of conceptual discourse and thus give men the exclusive controlover discourse.

(Marks and Courtivron 221).

Finally, belief in a female style or language is not born out, Nancy K. Miller argues, by examinations of styleon the sentence level, except in the case of individual authors whose individual styles do not provide anadequate basis for generalization about a female one (37). Thorne, Kramerae and Henley similarly found that“few expected sex differences have been firmly substantiated by empirical studies of actual speech” (640).

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Hite, discussing Irigaray's metaphor of the speculum (another mirror; the reverse of van Eyck's), writes: “Ifthere can be no clearly delineated Other language, no direct route to the articulation of difference, it followedthat difference must use the language of the Same—if rather differently. That is, representation must beskewed or oblique, a perverse mimesis employing the sort of concave mirror that is the primary image of thespeculum for Irigaray, the mirror that inverts the image as a condition of reflecting it. Mimesis as mimicry;representation with a difference” (Other Side 144). Might not that “mirror in the text,” Lucien Dällenbach'sphrase for the mise en abyme, be these narrative structures that frame, multiply, and problematize the bodiesthey represent? What I propose here is that narrative structure—the use of the doubled mise en abyme alongwith the various interrelationships that this device creates—constitutes another language.3

It is no coincidence, then, that Atwood's story opens with just such a reference to the problems of using theavailable language to represent women's experience, as the narrator questions the appropriateness of thephrase “giving birth” for the experience that she is about to describe. The story's very first sentence‘overflows’ boundaries by interrogating the title in a gesture that already problematizes the relationshipbetween the inside and the outside of the text, given that we assume that it is authors who give texts theirtitles, but narrators who tell stories: “But who gives it? And to whom is it given? Certainly it doesn't feel likegiving, which implies a flow, a gentle handling over, no coercion. But there is scant gentleness here, it's toostrenuous, the belly like a knotted fist, squeezing, the heavy trudge of the heart, every muscle in the body tightand moving” (228).4 The narrator, nevertheless, resolves to “go ahead as if there were no problem aboutlanguage” (229), even though language will often fail her or her protagonist, Jeannie, in this depiction ofchildbirth, late seventies style with the pre-natal classes and breathing exercises, the emphasis onbreastfeeding, the eschewing of painkillers that arose out of the belief that “pain” in childbirth is caused by thewrong attitude. While Atwood's depiction of childbirth has a curious kind of historical and cultural accuracy,what is most significant about its representation is the disconnection of Jeannie from the experiencing body.When Jeannie's labor pains begin to intensify, the narrator reports: “At the moment she can't remember whyshe wanted to have a baby in the first place. That decision was made by someone else, whose motives are nowunclear” (239). When yet another strong contraction begins, Jeannie's options seem to be escape ordissociation from her body: “she slips back into the dark place, which is not hell, which is more like beinginside, trying to get out. Out, she says or thinks. … When there is no pain, she feels nothing, when there ispain, she feels nothing because there is no she” (241). Frequently, this disconnection is related to theinadequacy of a language that has no words for “the events of the body” (239), for the kind of pain or“whatever it is” (240) that she is experiencing. The fact that there is no she is accounted for by the“disappearance of language” (241).5

But Jeannie's disconnection from her body is mainly projected onto “the other woman,” a pregnant figure thatJeannie may actually have seen a couple of times, but who is “not real in the usual sense” (235). Jeannie mayfeel that the decision to have a baby “was made by someone else whose motives are now unclear,” and thatthe language for her experience is inadequate. But “the other woman's” pregnancy has even less to do with herown volition; and the language for what is about to happen to her is even more non-existent:

She, like Jeannie, is going to the hospital. She too is pregnant. She is not going to the hospitalto give birth, however, because the word, the words, are too alien to her experience, theexperience she is about to have, to be used about it at all. … She is a woman who did notwish to become pregnant, who did not choose to divide herself like this, who did not chooseany of these ordeals, these initiations. It would be no use telling her that everything is goingto be fine. The word in English for unwanted intercourse is rape, but there is no word in thelanguage for what is about to happen to this woman.

(234; italics mine)

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Placing the “other woman” in a mise en abyme allows Atwood to depict what is paradoxically contained in yetabsent from Jeannie's own experience. Consider again The Arnolfini Marriage (with its pregnant woman), andthe convex mirror (the obverse of Irigaray's concave mirror) that depicts what is just outside the representedplane: the wedding guests, the painter, the couple's backs. Yet of course, the picture does represent theseothers in their distorted, mirrored forms; they are there and not there; they are simultaneously outside thespace the artist represents, yet are inserted into that representation. Similarly, the other woman, who is realand “not real in the usual sense,” shadows Jeannie throughout her experience of giving birth, representing the“other” side of childbirth. It is the “other woman” who screams from pain. It is the “other woman” whodoesn't want to have a baby—perhaps, Jeannie hypothesizes, because she's been raped, because she has tenother children, because she's poor and starving. It is the “other woman” whose childbirth is fraught withcomplications (238). In other words, Jeannie can project the anxieties that she doesn't want fully to claim ontothe other woman. Such a projection expresses Jeannie's disconnection from her body's potential experienceand her fears. Thus, “the other woman,” who occupies a miniature, distorted place in Jeannie's narrative ofgiving birth, allows Jeannie to construct the saving fiction that it is “other women” who are [more]disconnected from the experiences of their bodies, and that these disconnections are caused by externalcircumstances (like rape or poverty), not by some inherent disconnection between [the female] body andmind.

As the recipient of these projections, the other woman also functions as a talisman. The morning after herdaughter's birth, Jeannie hears footsteps in the hallway: “She thinks it must be the other woman, in her brownand maroon checked coat, carrying her paper bag, leaving the hospital now that her job is done. She has seenJeannie safely through, she must go now to hunt through the streets of the city for her next case” (245). Insome uncomfortable way, then, she seems both to protect and represent all those women whose experience ofchildbirth does not involve choice, supportive husbands, natural childbirth, healthy and desired babies, andshe thus symbolizes all of the possible ways in which women can be alienated from the experience of givingbirth.

But just as this figure plays the “other woman” to Jeannie, so does Jeannie play the other woman for thenarrator, who wants both to claim and disclaim identity with Jeannie, though, in the telling of the story ofJeannie's childbirth, the gap between the two is slowly closed. The first sentences after the preamble about theinadequacy of language deny any equivalence between the narrator and Jeannie: “This story about giving birthis not about me. In order to convince you of that I should tell you what I did this morning, before I sat down atthis desk” (229). Yet her proof is not particularly convincing; in fact, one is all but directed to wonder howthis description of a morning with a child proves that she is not some one who gave birth.

Once Jeannie's story properly begins, the narrator makes use of several techniques that keep to the fore herambiguous relationship to Jeannie. On one hand, Jeannie's story is told in the present tense, a kind ofAtwoodian anti-convention that theoretically makes the narrative immediate, but that also has the paradoxicaleffect of suggesting that the story is a construction, is “made up,” since, according to narrative conventions,“real” stories can only be told after the events have occurred. Because the frame narrative uses past tense, andthe mise en abyme makes use of the present, the naturalness of the frame and the artificiality of Jeannie's storyare emphasized. Second, the psycho-narration is not entirely consonant: the narrator frequently makesjudgments about Jeannie's behavior that distance her from Jeannie yet indicate the narrator's privilegedknowledge.6 As Jeannie waits for her labor to become more strenuous, for example, the narrator comments:“But—and this is the part of Jeannie that goes with the talisman hidden in her bag, not with the part that longsto build kitchen cabinets and smoke hams—she is, secretly, hoping for a mystery. Something more than this,something else, a vision” (239). What kind of person takes a Turkish glass talisman into a modern hospital?What kind of woman expects that childbirth will bring mysteries with it? the narrator seems to ask.

At the same time, this narrator attempts to reassure the reader that she really wants to shrink any distinctionbetween herself and Jeannie. In a parenthetical note that interrupts the story of Jeannie's childbirth, the

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narrator remarks: “(By this time you may be thinking that I've invented Jeannie in order to distance myselffrom these experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am, in fact, trying to bring myself closer tosomething that time has already made distant. As for Jeannie, my intention is simple: I am bringing her backto life)” (232). But why the reader should suspect the narrator of creating distance is unclear. Does thenarrator sense that the culture text tends to separate women from the experience of their bodies? Or that theculture text teaches women to separate themselves from their bodies, particularly with respect to childbirth?(Shirley Neuman's survey of mothers in autobiographical literature certainly reveals the rarity with whichmothers are presented as subjects in their own right, as mothers, experiencing motherhood.) Or is shesuggesting that our lack of language about childbirth makes memory difficult? Or are women encouraged topretend these intimate, immediate events happened to someone other than our “proper” public selves, tobracket off in a kind of emotional mise en abyme the experience that is there and not there, because it is notnameable—and therefore not to be spoken of?

In the narrator's second parenthetical remark on her relationship to Jeannie, she is more forthcoming abouttheir precise relationship: “(It was to me, after all, that the birth was given, Jeannie gave it, I am the result.What would she make of me? Would she be pleased?)” (244). Jeannie, a number of readers agree, is aprevious incarnation of the narrator who is using the narrative to recapture an experience not easilyremembered, partly because she has been so transformed by childbirth and motherhood that her earlier self isnot readily recalled (Davey 142; Rosenberg 125), partly because there is no language to facilitate memory.Thus, she narrates, literally, “to know.” There are no real words for this identity, this similar difference, thisdifferent similarity. There is only the mise en abyme with its inherent distortions and paradoxes regardingwhat is within the frame and what is not, what is outside the sphere of representation, yet represented. Hence,the narrative structure articulates a relationship for which we have no ready language; it is the narrativestructure with the complex inter-relationships between the narrator, Jeannie, and the other women that givesthis new meaning to the phrase “giving birth” that was questioned at the story's outset.

The relationship between the narrator of “Meneseteung” and Almeda Joynt Roth bears some resemblance tothe parallel relationship in “Giving Birth” in that the narrator establishes a distance from and a sympathy withthe sensibilities of her protagonist. But her representation of Almeda is mediated by a number of framingdevices, almost amounting to frames within frames, areas of differing degrees of narratorial authority oromniscience. In section I of the story, Munro's narrator might be seen as self-consciously engaged in “writingthe body,” since Meda is presented as a text to be read and interpreted. In this frame, which extends nearly tothe end of section III, the narrator ostensibly constructs her protagonist out of textual evidence: Meda's bookof poems with its autobiographical preface; the poems themselves; gossipy commentary in the local paper, theVidette. Such a construction of Meda reminds us “that woman's body is always mediated by language; thehuman body is a text, a sign, not just a piece of fleshy matter” (Dallery 54), particularly given that thenarrator's goal is eventually an intense exploration of that body's experience of a menstrual period.

The narrator establishes her identity as a kind of researcher, and as such her narrative pretends to a kind ofhistorical authority.7 This authority is at its strongest when she cites documents like the Vidette, or when,based on the Vidette's accounts of life in this western Ontario town, she can make generalizations about themores and values of the town's citizens.8 Her authority is increased even further by her knowing,twentieth-century commentary upon the values of the time, upon the town's fear that, should a “man andwoman of almost any age [be] alone together within four walls, it is assumed that anything may happen.Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, an attack of passion” (59). Her authority similarly appears in hercritique of the doctor who “believes that [Almeda's] troubles [with her health] would clear up if she gotmarried. He believes this in spite of the fact that most of his nerve medicine is prescribed for married women”(62). But this authority only serves to highlight those moments when she admits to uncertainty, as when sheattempts her initial description of Almeda—though note here the fluctuation from twentieth-century analysisof the roles and habits of women to the questions about Meda's life:

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Almeda Roth has a bit of money, which her father left her, and she has her house. She is nottoo old to have a couple of children. She is a good enough housekeeper, with the tendencytoward fancy iced cakes and decorated tarts that is seen fairly often in old maids. (Honourablemention at the Fall Fair.) There is nothing wrong with her looks, and naturally she is in bettershape than most married women of her age, not having been loaded down with work andchildren. But why was she passed over in her earlier, more marriageable years, in a place thatneeds women to be partnered and fruitful? She was a rather gloomy girl—that may have beenthe trouble. The deaths of her brother and sister, and then of her mother, who lost her reason,in fact, a year before she died, and lay in her bed talking nonsense—those weighed on her, soshe was not likely company. And all that reading and poetry—it seemed more of a drawback,a barrier, an obsession, in the young girl than in the middle-aged women, who neededsomething, after all, to fill her time. Anyway, it's five years since her book was published, soperhaps she has got over that. Perhaps it was the proud, bookish father encouraging her?

(58–59)9

The narrator uses, then, a whole host of narrative devices to suggest her inability to have any intimateknowledge of Almeda's consciousness. She does so by establishing herself as a researcher who is constructingAlmeda from texts, or by reminding us that she is a twentieth-century person who can comment on the socialmores of Almeda's time, or by framing questions about aspects of Almeda's and Jarvis Poulter's lives andpersonalities that she cannot construct from the “evidence” that remains. Like Atwood, she further reminds usof this distance through her jarring use of the present-tense of the verb “to be” in such statements as “Thepopulation [of this town west of Kingston] is younger than it is now, than it will ever be again” (54; italicsmine). Or: “the grand barns that are to dominate the countryside for the next hundred years are just beginningto be built” (61; italics mine).

But these frames, these claims to authority and admitted lapses of authority all serve the same purpose: theyforeground the impossibility of the narrator's entry into Almeda's consciousness, given that we conventionallyexpect some consistency in a narrator's knowledge and presentation of a character's inner states. Or, to put itanother way, the limits that the narrator places on her knowledge highlight those anomalous moments whenshe exceeds those limits. Thus, if the narrator does present Almeda's thoughts, she's clearly “making it up.” Soit is interesting that the narrator most simply and confidently enters Meda's consciousness when she describesMeda's experience of her body: her physical reaction to Jarvis's heavy clothing and masculine smell, herthoughts and feelings on the hot afternoon when, under the influence of laudanum and the flow of menses, shesits in the dining room and plans the poem from which the story takes its title.

Unlike “Giving Birth,” which places the question of language in the outer frame, “Meneseteung” places thatquestion at its centre. Here, “Almeda in her observations cannot escape words” in her attempt to articulate thecomplex relationship between body and mind, body and society. Her thoughts about the heat, her menstrualperiod, the woman found beaten and unconscious at the bottom of her garden, the effect of the laudanum onher frame of mind are expressed in language that recalls in style and content Cixous' descriptions of writingthe body:

Soon this glowing and swelling begins to suggest words—not specific words but a flow ofwords somewhere, just about ready to make themselves known to her. Poems, even. Yes,again, poems. Or one poem. Isn't that the idea—one very great poem that will containeverything. … Stars and flowers and birds and trees and angels in the snow and dead childrenat twilight—that is not the half of it. You have to get in the obscene racket on Pearl Street andthe polished toe of Jarvie Poulter's boot and the plucked-chicken haunch with its blue-blackflower. Almeda is a long way now from human sympathies or fears or cozy householdconsiderations. She doesn't think about what could be done for that woman or about keeping

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Jarvis Poulter's dinner warm and hanging his long underwear on the line. The basin of grapejuice has overflowed and is running over her kitchen floor, staining the boards of the floor,and the stain will never come out. … She doesn't leave the room until dusk, when she goesout to the privy again and discovers that she is bleeding, her flow has started.

(69–71)10

Munro has violated a near taboo against the representation of menstruation in literature,11 and perhaps isengaging with Cixous's poetically expressed connection between women's bodies and their language byconnecting Meda's period with her creativity. In some ways, Munro challenges Cixous, whose good mother“writes in white ink”—which of course privileges the bodily experience of motherhood (Cixous 339). Cixous'metaphor would certainly be questionable in the case of Almeda Roth, given that the majority ofnineteenth-century women who were able to create writing careers for themselves had no children. Inaddition, that metaphor, besides excluding women who choose not to be mothers, potentially renders awoman's creativity invisible: white ink is not visible on white paper. Meda's creativity instead is linked to hermenstruation, to the impossibility—this month anyway—of motherhood, to her rejection of convention andconventional roles for women, to her aesthetic critique of her mother's “bunchy and foolish … crocheted roses… [that] don't look much like real flowers,” to her refusal of Jarvis Poulter's significant invitation, to herrejection of the cozy domesticity of grape jelly which, we are told in the framed narrative, she never makes. InMunro's story, poems come out of embracing the experience of body and rejecting society's constraints, and inthis sense, is very much like the writing of the body that Cixous envisioned. Furthermore, through themetonymic connection between the experience of menses and the conception of Almeda's poem,“Meneseteung,” body has literally become—flowed into—text.

But this scene does not depict the experience or thought of the diegetically historical Almeda Roth; rather, itrepresents the narrator's invention or imaginative leap—a fact emphasized by the narrator's admission in thelast sentences of the story: “I may have got it wrong” (73). This assertion reminds the reader that the story'scentral, intense scene, along with the metonymy that connects Almeda's menstrual period with her creativity isa “fiction.” That the narrator does not know precisely why Almeda never married, but feels comfortable“inventing” this intimate experience of the body speaks to the nature of the relationship between the narratorand Meda, and the extent to which this narrator can “imagine” the experience of another body. Yet thenarrator, by constructing the mise en abyme, as well as by purposefully emphasizing the aporia, suggests thathalf the point of her representation is an exploration of the relationship between the two of them.

Yet the narrator fails to explore Meda's relationship to “the other woman” who is beaten and raped12 at thebottom of Meda's garden on the hot summer night before the onset of her period, in a scene which comprisesthis story's inner mise en abyme. What little we do know suggests that Meda's relationship to the other womanremains distant. We are told, for instance, that her dreams have transformed “something foul and sorrowful”into an inert and unoffending “wheelbarrow” (64); or that “[i]f she had touched the woman, if she had forcedherself to touch her, she would not have made such a mistake” as calling on the help of Jarvis Poulter (66).Beyond that, there is much that we do not know about Meda's reaction to the other woman except for thehelpless panic that sends her to Jarvis Poulter's house for help and advice. Why does she taste “bile at the backof her throat” (66)? Is it a reaction to the prostrate, half clothed female body at her feet, or a reaction to JarvisPoulter's gesture, to the fact that he “nudges at the leg with the toe of his boot, just as you'd nudge a dog or asow” (66)? Why does she feel she will retch? Is it because of the body that “weaves and stumbles down thestreet”? Or is it caused by Jarvis Poulter's tone of “harsh joviality” (67)? If the narrator can present us withAlmeda's reaction to her period, she can also fill in these gaps. But Almeda's reaction to the ambiguous,disturbing, destructive and violent sexuality of the other woman she finds at the foot of her garden is neverarticulated—beyond the important fact that it must be included now in the view of her world she presents inher poetry.

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The final frame returns us to the narrator's original relationship to her protagonist, presenting Almeda Roth asa historical figure whose tombstone the narrator eventually found, as well as someone whose experience andconsciousness she has partly invented: “I may have got it wrong. I don't know if she ever took laudanum.Many ladies did. I don't know if she ever made grape jelly” (73). In the context of this re-established framethat reminds us of the limits of the narrator's authority—and inevitably of her willingness to burst those limitswhen she chooses—we can only conclude that the narrator has chosen to facilitate our view of Almeda'sexperience of her own body, and has blocked (or cannot help blocking) Meda's experience of “the otherwoman.”

The similar narrative construction of these two quite different stories, then, reveals something about womenwriters' representation of bodies. The respective narrators' representation of the bodies of their protagonists isvariously problematized by the construction of a “frame” around the represented body, and by psychologicalor temporal disconnections between the narrator and the protagonist made manifest in that frame. The narratorof “Giving Birth” does this simply by affirming that she is not Jeannie; while the narrator of “Meneseteung”accomplishes this distancing by appearing in the guise of a twentieth-century writer doing research on a figurewho lived in the past. Yet each narrator can, nevertheless, relate to her protagonist, and can claim someidentity with her, either by attempting to define that identity or by intense, imaginative engagement in anexperience that is, given the limits of the frame narrator's knowledge, theoretically unknowable. Despite theambiguous, qualified, and problematic relationship between the frame narrator and the protagonist in theprimary mise en abyme, then, the potential for identification is foregrounded. Munro and Atwood, rather thandefining woman “by an act of marginalization, by a thrusting of ‘women’ to a position outside the order of theSame” (Hite Other Side 159), have used their frame narrators to redefine the margins and then to proceed toplace women's bodies firmly at the centre. Those women, moreover, are not defined by their relationships tomen (pace A, the good childbirth coach) or to the male gaze but rather by their own inward gaze, their intenseengagement with their experience of childbirth or menstruation.

The inner mise en abyme, in contrast, highlights the distance between the story's protagonist (and herexperience of her body) and “the other woman” (and her experience of her body), even while the possibility ofidentification is admitted and rejected. The relationship between the protagonist and the other woman is ratherlike that between the young women in Manet's Bar at the Folies Bérgere and her reflection: regardless ofwhere one stands to observe that painting, a viewer cannot get the woman and reflection to cohere spatially, inspite of the fact that they belong to the same figure. Similarly, each protagonist senses the possibility ofbecoming [like] the other woman, but it is a possibility which each of them finally seeks to avoid. The otherwoman—who is largely silent, in contrast to the frame narrator whose profession is words—is frighteningbecause she is (seen as) the helpless object of various typical abuses—rape, poverty, violence, and it isperhaps precisely the protagonists' fear of her and her experience that makes her ‘Other.’ Or, to put it anotherway, while the other woman may be socially marginal, her position within the centre of the frames rendersher—and her experience—central. In spite of the admitted difficulties the narrators have representing herexperience, she is “Other” only by virtue of being, in some ways, the “Same.” In the context of the doubledframe, and in spite of her silence, the other woman is not marginal but central.

Notes

I am here entering the fiction of these stories that conventionally equates the authoritative narratorwith the author. Thus when I refer to the “narrators' protagonists,” I am not mistaking the impliedauthor for the narrator (something which several readings of Atwood's story tend to do) but amaddressing the conventionalized situation the stories establish.

1.

It is possible that Atwood was thinking of this painting when she wrote the story, given that thenarrator's life in “Giving Birth” is compared to Dutch genre painting and Atwood uses the image ofthis mirror in The Handmaid's Tale.

2.

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I intend to argue elsewhere that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the prototype of this narrativestructure; like these two stories, Frankenstein makes use of a double frame that asserts numerous (andwell-documented) similarities between Victor Frankenstein and his interlocutor, Robert Walton, thusrecalling the painterly mise en abyme. Also similar is the “other body” of Frankenstein's monster,whose experience comprises the innermost narrative.

3.

Conventionally, the implied author is “heard” only in devices like titles and epigraphs; otherwise we“hear” only the narrator. For the narrator to respond to the title blurs this distinction. See Chatman,Coming to Terms, Chapter 5.

4.

Once Jeannie's baby is born, this inadequacy is once again posed as the mother contemplates herdaughter: “Birth isn't something that has been given to her, nor has she taken it. It was just somethingthat has happened so they could greet each other like this” (243).

5.

See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds. Psychonarration (for which Cohn provides no succinctdefinition) is the presentation of a character's consciousness that utilizes (largely) the narrator's style,diction, and viewpoint. One of its trademarks is a predominance of verbs of consciousness—“shethought” or “she felt.” Psychonarration always implies some degree of superiority on the part of thenarrator, who generally remains more “knowing” than the character. Nevertheless, psychonarrationcan be consonant or dissonant, depending upon whether the narrator shares or critiques the thoughtsor perspective of the character.

6.

The influence of Susan Lanser's exploration of the issues of authority in Fictions of Authoritypermeates my discussion of this issue in Munro's story.

7.

She frequently engages in a kind of social psychonarration, in which her voice merges with the valuesof the townsfolk, as in this description of a hot summer day:

One day a man goes through the streets ringing a cowbell and calling, “Repent!Repent!” It's not a stranger this time, it's a young man who works at the butcher shop.Take him home, wrap him in cold wet cloths, giving him some nerve medicine, keephim in bed, pray for his wits. If he doesn't recover, he must go to the asylum.

(55)

8.

There is a passage that similarly asks questions about Jarvis Poulter: “This is the Vidette, full of shyjokes, innuendo, plain accusation that no newspaper would get away with today. It's Jarvis Poulterthey're talking about—though in other passages he is spoken of with great respect, as a civilmagistrate, an employer, a churchman. He is close, that's all. An eccentric, to a degree. All of whichmay be a result of his single condition, his widower's life. … This is a decent citizen, prosperous:tall—slightly paunchy?—man in a dark suite with polished boots. A beard? Black hair streaked withgray. A severe and self-possessed air, and a large pale wart among the bushy hairs of one eyebrow?”(57).

9.

See Pam Houston's essay, “A Hopeful Sign: The Making of Metonymic Meaning in Munro's‘Meneseteung’,” page 85, for a discussion of the metonymic connections between the story's title,Almeda's menstrual flow, and the grape juice.

10.

Doris Lessing was quite aware of breaking this taboo in The Golden Notebook, in which Anna, whohas resolved to write an uncensored day in her journal suddenly finds herself faced with theunrepresentable: her period. She resolves to write anyway, to break the taboo, but is aware of theextent to which her experience of her period may distort her representation.

11.

The word “rape” may be only partially appropriate, since the other woman's reaction to what happensto her remains unclear, filtered as it is through Meda's sleepy consciousness. The narrator describesthe sounds Meda hears almost oxymoronically, and certainly equivocally, as “a long, vibrating,choking sound of pain and self-abasement, self-abandonment, which could come from either or bothof them” (64).

12.

Works Cited

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Atwood, Margaret. Dancing Girls. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977; rpt. Toronto: Seal, 1989.

Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault.”Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Ed. Alison M. Jaggar and SusanR. Bordo. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1989. 13–33.

Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb, Illinois:Northern Illinois UP, 1989.

———“Definitions of a Fool: Alice Munro's ‘Walking on Water’ and Margaret Atwood's Two Stories AboutEmma: ‘The Whirlpool Rapids’ and ‘Walking on Water’.” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Spring 1991): 135–50.

Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP,1990.

———Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminisms. Ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. NewBrunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1991. 334–49.

Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1978.

Dällenbach, Lucien. The Mirror in the Text. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Dallery, Arleen B. “The Politics of Writing (the) Body: Ecriture Feminine.” Gender/Body/Knowledge:Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick,N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1989. 52–67.

Davey, Frank. Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984.

Derrida, Jacques. “The Parergon.” Trans. Craig Owens. October 9 (1979): 3–41.

Hite, Molly. “Writing—and Reading—the Body: Female Sexuality and Recent Feminist Fiction.” FeministStudies 14 (Spring 1988): 121–42.

———The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1989.

Houston, Pam. “A Hopeful Sign: The Making of Metonymic Meaning in Munro's “Meneseteung.” TheKenyon Review, 14.4 (1992): 79–92.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Lanser, Susan. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.

Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

Miller, Nancy K. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction.” PMLA 96.1 (1981): 36–48.

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Munro, Alice. Friend of My Youth. Toronto: Penguin, 1991.

Neuman, Shirley. “Your past/Your future: Autobiography and Mother's Bodies.” In Genre, Trope Gender:Critical Essays by Northrop Frye, Linda Hutcheon, and Shirley Neuman. Ed. Barry Rutland. Ottawa: CarletonUP, 1992.

Redekop, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Stovel, Nora. “Reflections on Mirror Images: Doubles and Identity in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.”Essays on Canadian Writing 33 (Fall 1986): 50–67.

Thompson, Lee Briscoe. “Minuets and Madness: Margaret Atwood's Dancing Girls.” In The Art of MargaretAtwood: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson. Toronto: Anansi, 1981.107–22.

Thorne, B., Christine Kramerae, and Nancy Henley. Language, Gender, and Society. Newbury, MA: RowleyHouse, 1983.

Criticism: Karen F. Stein (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: “Scarlet Ibises and Frog Songs: Short Fiction,” in Margaret Atwood Revisited, Twayne Publishers,1999, pp. 125–44.

[In the following essay, Stein offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Atwood's short fiction.]

Atwood's stories combine realism and whimsy, fairy tale, myth, and fantasy as they represent the lives ofcontemporary women and men struggling to cope with an often puzzling or difficult world. Many of thestories contain striking symbols that stand in dramatic counterpoint to the routine or dulled lives of thecharacters. These short fictions explore a range of situations, from playful or provocative meditations onlanguage and on women's bodies to examinations of our darkest fears. Atwood is especially interested in thefictions characters invent about their lives and in the ways that these stories may become traps orself-fulfilling prophecies or may be rewritten to offer new possibility. Dramatic symbols drawn from theworld of nature (a flock of scarlet ibises, a cistern, a hurricane, ancient bog people) often mark these stories.Characters who are locked in narrow, self-enclosed fantasy worlds cannot read these signs or they misinterpretthem. In contrast, the characters who are receptive to the signs are vital, creative, and able to modify or learnfrom their stories.

Atwood's first short story collection, Dancing Girls (1977), depicts characters who are alienated from eachother and sometimes even psychically alienated from themselves. Most of them face disasters, either real orimagined, but their alienation and isolation are in fact the worst disasters. The second collection, Bluebeard'sEgg (1983), focuses on themes of sexual politics and storytelling as they relate to the Bluebeard story of thedemon lover. In the Grimms' version of this story, the female protagonist saves herself from a dangeroussuitor by telling the story that reveals the murders he has committed. The women here tell stories, but most ofthem remain locked in obsessive relationships with their demon lovers. Murder in the Dark (1983), publishedin the same year as Bluebeard's Egg, contains short fictions and prose poems that play a series of variations onthemes of language, perception, stories, and sexual politics. Wilderness Tips (1991) is primarily aboutreclaiming lost women through storytelling and about the stories we tell ourselves and each other, out of ourneed for fictions to explain the often incomprehensible world. Good Bones (1992) is a series of playful

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meditations retelling popular myths.

DANCING GIRLS (1977)

Dancing Girls is Atwood's first collection of short stories. The 14 stories in this book, most of thempreviously published in a wide range of magazines in the United States and Canada, tell of difficult humanrelations, of missed connections, of failed communication, of loss. Most of the protagonists are victims in oneway or another, although they usually do not recognize or admit that they are (Atwood claims in Survival thatthe first victim position is denial). Their lives are lackluster, boring, and unsatisfying. Yet dramatic symbolspunctuate these stories: ancient sacrificial cisterns, timber wolves, the grave of a famous poet, a plate ofcookies shaped like moons and stars. But the protagonists are unable to read these portents and thus cannotresolve their problems. Consequently, they remain isolated and emotionally frozen. Most of them live moredeeply in fantasy than in the real world; their stories serve to isolate them even further.

Disaster, real or imagined, large or small, hovers over all the stories: one woman fantasizes about anunspecified apocalyptic event, another about rape; several experience the ends of romantic relationships; onewoman is sent to a mental hospital; a plane crashes; a child dies at birth and leaves its parents' lives empty.Most of the women expect danger or disaster. Are they more aware than most people of the world's dangers?Or are they more paranoid? Or perhaps they are simply more used to being victims and thus continuallyexpect the worst. And if the world is a dangerous place, how does one prepare for disaster? What would ourresponses to these situations be? Apart from the plane crash and the baby's death, these disasters are createdby people rather than forces of nature. In fact, the most frequent disaster here is the isolation of individualsand their consequent entrapment in narrow lives of emotional paralysis.

As in “The Man from Mars,” other people seem so alien as to be incomprehensible, fearsome, as if from otherplanets. Sometimes even the disparate parts of the self are alien to each other, as in “The War in theBathroom.” Central figures here are often tourists, aliens, foreigners, displaced persons. Although they travel,as tourists or travel writers, their journeys may lead them to unpleasant revelations but do not result inpersonal transformation. Locked in their separate worlds, the main characters lead lives of “quietdesperation,” emotional flatness. They are split, schizoid, for they sustain public roles but keep their feelingsprivate, hidden from others and even from themselves.

The first story, “The War in the Bathroom,” sets the book's tone of claustrophobia and despair and introducesthe first of its doubled protagonists who have minimal expectations and who experience isolation andalienation. It is narrated by an unpleasant, vindictive, and bossy woman who orders around the other unnamedwoman in the story, proffering such advice as never to accept help from strangers. It turns out that the voice isa split self—the “I” is the ego or the mental function of the “she” who carries out the mechanical activities ofher constricted daily routine: washing, dressing, marketing, eating. The narrating “I” is like a character in aSamuel Beckett story; she is obsessive about detail and locked into a minimal round of repeated daily chores.Compounding her vindictiveness, she achieves what she perceives as a small victory by arranging to lock anelderly man out of the shared bathroom.

This protagonist is explicitly split into two, a speaking voice and an acting person. But all the characters inthis volume share her doubleness to some degree. They lead secret fantasy lives that contrast dramaticallywith their public lives. Often the fantasies are more compelling than their daily routines. As a result, they areunable to form deep connections with others, and they remain fragmented.

In “The Man from Mars” and in “Dancing Girls,” foreign students cause consternation for women who seethem as aliens, as if from other planets. Frightened by their differences, the women imagine that these youngmen from other cultures will endanger them. Their fears and fantasies produce emotional withholding. In“The Man from Mars,” Christine is stalked by a small Asian man, “a person from another culture” (10). She is

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outwardly polite to him but avoids him and resists his attempts to become friends. After he is deported forstalking the Mother Superior of a convent in Montreal, Christine finds that she is obsessed with him andfantasizes about his fate in his home country. She realizes her similarity to him when she thinks that “hewould be something nondescript, something in the background, like herself” (37). In “Dancing Girls,” Annobserves her landlady, Mrs. Nolan, watching her new tenant, the foreign student. Mrs. Nolan is fascinated byhis foreignness and asks him to dress up in his native costume for her children, but she is secretly terrified thathe will be disruptive or violent. She uses the occasion of a party he holds to call the police to get rid of him.

“Polarities” tells of a graduate student, Louise, who attempts to create connections among a group of peoplethat she knows. She enacts her wish in increasingly bizarre ways. At first she wishes to become friends withMorrison, but he is indifferent. She fantasizes building a “circle” of human linkage to counteract the alienationof a desolate and uncongenial urban environment. She repeatedly approaches Morrison, but he puts her off,remaining noncommittal. Reingard M. Nischik analyzes this story in terms of speech act theory and finds thatMorrison speaks indirectly and insincerely, and that he uses questions to distance himself rather than to seekinformation or to establish communication: we learn repeatedly that he “lies,” feigns interest he does not feel,and does not listen to Louise.1 While Louise refers to herself and reveals her feelings, Morrison holds himselfaloof.

The story is told from Morrison's point of view. He and a group of colleagues commit Louise to a mentalhospital because of her bizarre behavior. Prying into her notebooks on the pretext of looking for the one shewants, they find that she has a clearer insight into Morrison than he has into himself; she has written,“Morrison is not a complete person … he refuses to admit his body is part of his mind” (58). Morrisonreluctantly comes to believe that he loves her, but he is uncomfortable because he realizes “it was only thehopeless, mad Louise he wanted. … A sane one, one that could judge him, he would never be able to handle”(62). Dismayed and at loose ends, Morrison drives to the zoo that he and Louise had once visited. He standsoutside the pen where the wolves are now looking at him and senses that this is a portent he cannotunderstand. “Something was being told, something that had nothing to do with him, the thing you could learnonly after the rest was finished with and discarded” (64). Yet he cannot comprehend what this might be.

A married couple who are likewise emotionally shut off, Sarah and Edward in “The Resplendent Quetzal” areunable to discuss their mutual grief and consequently face a loveless marriage after their baby dies at birth.Edward is a relentless tourist, a bird-watcher, a devotee of pre-Columbian ruins. He has planned their tour ofancient Mayan ruins in Mexico. His enthusiastic pursuits are a kind of quest for purpose, for meaning in amundane life. Since the death of the baby, Sarah has not returned to school and “wouldn't get a job”; insteadshe “sat at home,” listlessly, as if “waiting for something” (160). Sarah believes that after their baby's deathEdward “had lost interest, he had deserted her” (169). Edward suggests that she try to become pregnant again,hoping that this will bring them comfort, but she secretly takes birth-control pills to prevent pregnancy.

Their life together is built of avoidance, indirection, evasion, and outright dishonesty. For example, Sarahpretends to see distant birds so as to get Edward to leave her alone for a few minutes. Although he knows hersubterfuge, he pretends to believe her: “Her lie about the birds was one of the many lies that propped thingsup. He was afraid to confront her, that would be the end, all the pretenses would come crashing down and theywould be left standing in the rubble, staring at each other” (158).

The exotic setting and a telling incident lend drama to the story. Sarah steals a figure of the infant Jesus from acrèche at a small restaurant, and she throws it into the cistern where formerly sacrificial victims were thrownto carry messages to the gods and to insure continuing fertility for the community. Her act is a symbolicsacrifice, an unconscious prayer for a restoration of her own fertility and engagement with life. Edward seesher standing on the brink of the cistern and fears that she is about to jump in. But when he reaches her andfinds that she is crying silently, he is “dismayed … desperate,” because he is unprepared to deal with herfeelings, to confront the emotion beneath her pretense of control. The implication is that their marriage will

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continue, sterile and suffocating.

Physical disaster sets the stage for the human disasters that follow in “A Travel Piece.” This is the story ofAnnette, a travel writer whose airplane crashes into the ocean while she is returning from her latest exoticexcursion. Annette has increasingly felt as if her life is unreal and the places she visits for her job merelyscenery, painted backdrops. “Real events happen to other people, she thinks, why not me?” (141). In thelifeboat with a small group of others she thinks, “[S]omething real had happened to her,” then decides thatafter all, “[T]here is no danger here, it is as safe in this lifeboat as everywhere else” (147). The expectedrescue does not come, and the stranded survivors contrive stratagems to remain alive, for it is indeeddangerous in the lifeboat (as dangerous as everywhere else?). They make sunshades out of plastic food traysand smear lipstick on their faces as sunscreen, causing them to look like interplanetary aliens. Annette thinksof taking a photo but does not, probably because she no longer believes they will be rescued. When one of themen on the boat becomes delirious and tries to jump overboard, Annette realizes that the group on the boat isconsidering the possibility of killing him and eating him for their own survival. She sees her predicament as“stuck in the present with four Martians and one madman waiting for her to say something” (153) andwonders, “Am I one of them or not?” (153). Are other people like Martians or madmen? Is there an “us” and a“them”? This is real life, not the game of lifeboat played at Elizabeth Schoenhof's dinner party in Life BeforeMan. Cannibalism is a recurring motif in Atwood's work, sometimes treated humorously (as in MarianMcAlpin's woman-shaped cake) but contemplated as a terrifyingly real possibility in this story.

The narrators of “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” “Lives of the Poets,” and “Hair Jewellery” describe failingrelationships as the couples in each grow distant from each other and subside into emotional stagnation. Thepoet's grave does not bring redemption or inspiration to the tourists who seek it out; indeed, the gravesymbolizes the death of their relationship. The narrator of “Hair Jewellery” enjoys her fantasies of unrequitedlove, rationalizing that although she experiences the “emotional jolts of the other kind,” she can continue tolive her “meager … and predictable” life (108). She and her partner romanticize and demonize each other (asdo the sparring pair in Power Politics). Yet when they meet unexpectedly at a conference years later, they areboth disappointed that the other “has sold out” and is leading a respectable academic life, complete withspouse and children. Julia Morse narrates “Lives of the Poets,” referring to herself in both the first and thethird person as she describes her travels to give poetry readings to support herself and her partner, Bernie, anartist involved in a small and unlucrative cooperative gallery. Julia has come increasingly to dislike thesereadings, although she does not tell Bernie. As if her body is rebelling, she gets headaches, colds, and swollenhands and ankles. At the current reading, in Sudbury, Ontario, she develops a nosebleed. Waiting for theescorts from the university to bring her to the reading, she calls Bernie. “Something is frozen,” she thinks,reflecting on her life on the road; “Bernie, save me” (206). When a woman answers the phone she realizes thatBernie has been carrying on an affair. Furious, Julia determines that at this poetry reading she will not bepolite and decorous as usual. Instead, at the start of the reading, “she will open her mouth and the room willexplode in blood” (195).

“When It Happens” describes the apocalyptic fantasies of Mrs. Burridge, another woman who leads a doublelife. While she conducts her daily routines of harvesting tomatoes, canning pickles, and writing marketinglists for the weekly trip to town, she has absorbing fantasies of a national disaster that will prompt her to runaway into the woods for safety. Certain that a disaster will occur, although she is unsure of its nature, shementally prepares for the event, hiding one of her husband's guns and thinking of her escape route. Again, asin the other stories here, she does not share her thoughts with her husband, for she believes he would notunderstand her fears. Thus she perpetuates their lack of communication. Is she intuiting an actual approachingcatastrophe? Or is she becoming paranoid, as she continues to live more fully in her disaster fantasy than inher life?

In “Rape Fantasies” a young woman does share her fantasies of possible danger with a man, but the situationis complicated, and we are left to wonder if her stories protect her or endanger her. The story takes the form of

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a monologue of a young secretary out at a bar on a Friday night. Like Scheherazade she tells stories to apossibly threatening male in the hope that her narratives will intrigue him and establish a rapport so that hewill not harm her. Her monologue talks about female fantasies of a disastrous event, rape. She is trying todebunk the notion that women find rape fantasies pleasurable, and to that end she describes her ownnonsexual fantasies. In each of her scenarios she uses compassion as a vehicle to avoid becoming a victim. Ineach instance, she and/or the would-be rapist come to sympathize with and help each other, and each of therapists is deterred from attacking her. In one of her fantasies the would-be rapist has a cold and she gives hima hot soothing drink; in another she tells the man that she is dying of leukemia, and it turns out that he has thesame ailment, so they agree to spend their last months together. As she talks to the man she meets at the bar,she is trying to use conversation to build a connection so that he will not rape her: “I think it would be better ifyou could get a conversation going. Like, how could a fellow do that to a person he's just had a longconversation with, once you let them know you're human, you have a life too, I don't see how they could goahead with it, right?” (104). The story ends with this question, a chilling one, for as we know, date rape is acommon occurrence.

After the major and minor disasters, the losses and endings, the book ends with a story about a birth. Jeanniegives birth and, as a new woman, writes the story, and her life changes; as a mother, she becomes a differentperson.

Two of the stories in the Canadian edition of Dancing Girls (“The War in the Bathroom” and “RapeFantasies”) did not appear in the first American edition, although they are included in subsequent editions;instead, two more-recently published stories, “Betty” and “The Sin Eater,” appeared in their place. “The SinEater,” a complex story with richly ambiguous symbolic overtones, deals with the subjects of redemptionthrough storytelling and the responsibility of people for each other. Indeed, this story is the subject of avolume of essays entitled The Daemonic Imagination that presents a range of interpretive approaches andpairs critiques of Atwood's story with discussions of a New Testament passage, Mark 5:1–19, that tells thestory of Jesus exorcising demons besieging a suffering man.2

In “The Sin Eater” the unnamed woman narrator recounts her memories of her therapist, Joseph, on the nightafter his funeral. She remembers his cynicism, his refusal to explain her dreams, his insistence that life is “adesert island … Forget about the rescue” (215). After he dies, the narrator laments his loss because for her hewas the one person “who is there only to be told” (223). She also remembers a story he told her about the “sineaters”: in rural areas of Wales, food was placed on the coffin already prepared for dying people. The SinEater, an elderly person that Joseph believes was probably a woman, was invited to come and eat the food,thus symbolically transferring the sins of the dying person to herself.

The narrator attends Joseph's funeral, where his two ex-wives and his third, now widowed, wife are dressed inpastels rather than black, and where the guests eat rich chocolate cake and cookies in the shape of stars andmoons. That night she dreams of being delayed at an airport, lacking her passport (again, the alien, the tourist,the displaced person), and meeting Joseph, who takes her to a restaurant where the first wife, in a waitress'suniform, serves them a plate of star and moon cookies. Joseph says wistfully, “My sins,” and the narratorpanics as she looks at the plate, thinking, “[I]t's too much for me, I might get sick” (224). But as the story endsthe plate floats toward her, she reaches for the cookies, the table disappears, and she notes, “There arethousands of stars, thousands of moons, and as I reach out for one they begin to shine” (224).

The story, replete with richly ambiguous biblical and mythic symbols, tells of loss and its possibletransformation. The biblical Joseph, the hero cast out by his brothers, interpreted the Pharaoh's dreams to saveEgypt from famine, but the contemporary Joseph refuses to decipher the narrator's dreams. The Sin Eaters arelinked to Jesus, who takes on sins to redeem repentant sinners. And, of course, communion food is symbolicof Christ's body just as the funeral food symbolizes resurrection and continuing life. Martha Burdette writes:“Joseph, the powerful male deity of her dream, associated with the moon, stars, and darkness, and with

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Dumuzi/Tammuz, the vegetation god of presence/absence mourned especially by women, refuses to stayburied” (164–65).3

Yet Atwood's story is complicated. The old women who eat sins are outcasts in their communities, womenwho “became absolutely bloated with other people's sins,” although they had some “perks”: it was bad luck tokill them (213–14). Moreover, the story reminds us that in Atwood's fiction the consumption of food isusually linked to power. And the nature of this power is ambiguous here. For example, Ann-Janine Moreycompares the narrator to another Atwood protagonist who is linked with food, Marian McAlpin of The EdibleWoman. Morey believes that in “The Sin Eater” the narrator has regressed. “We leave the nameless femalenarrator at some point of transformation, but we have no idea if, in reaching for the cookies, she enacts atriumph or a further loss. … Has this been a narrative about the loss of a therapist, or the loss of a self whonever has a chance to appear?” (175).4

Other questions are raised as well. Who is the Sin Eater in this story? Is it the therapist, who listens to the sinsand absolves the guilt of his clients? Or is it the narrator, whom Joseph is asking to absolve him from hisguilt? And when the narrator recounts the story to the reader—who takes the place of Joseph as the one “whois there only to be told”—does the reader then become the Sin Eater, the one who consumes the story that thenarrator tells in her search for absolution?

What are the sins that must be eaten to insure the sinner's redemption? In the world of Dancing Girls the sinsare those of self-absorption, removing oneself from human connections. And if this is so, then story-tellingmay participate in the sin-eating process. For telling stories performs many functions. Stories may beexemplary, cautionary tales. A story may also be a confession, a seeking for absolution. And telling storiesmay become a means of making connections and of sharing experiences. Atwood, as a satirist, a moralist, iswriting cautionary tales about the dangers of isolation and alienation, the human disasters of everyday life.

BLUEBEARD'S EGG (1983)

These 13 stories, 12 of them narrated by women, focus on storytellers and storytelling and on the themes ofsexual politics embedded in the Bluebeard fairy tale of the title story. In the one story narrated by a man,“Spring Song of the Frogs,” Will speaks in a flat, unemotional voice. His marriage has ended, and he has hadseveral affairs, but we learn nothing of the emotions and conflicts that characterized these relationships. In thisstory he tries to initiate or resume affairs with two women, but neither attempt succeeds. Self-absorbed anddevoid of emotions, he is a Bluebeard figure, a man who brings emptiness rather than passion to hisrelationships.

Two types of women inhabit these stories. One type is the “ice maiden” so often encountered in Atwood'sworld—the narrator of Surfacing or of Power Politics, for example—a woman uncertain of her direction,frozen emotionally, a victim trapped in a difficult relationship with a Bluebeard-like male. These women(Alma, Becka, Christine, Sally) live in cities, gray urban wastes of alienation, and they are distanced fromtheir own stories, locked into cliché and superficiality, failing to confront the deeper significance of theirlives. The second type is “a creative non-victim,” akin to Joan Foster's aunt, Louisa Delacourt, in LadyOracle, a mature woman with a sense of purpose. The strong, purposeful Loulou, the fearless Emma, theself-contained artist Yvonne are approaching this state; the narrator's mother in the autobiographical fictionshas achieved it. (“What is her secret?” the narrator keeps asking.) These women are more vital, associatedwith the life force, marked by their connections to nature's green world; they bake bread, watch the sunrise,take risks.

In this book, characters such as the narrator's mother who find meaning in natural symbols are engaged, opento life and to other people. When Christine views the flock of scarlet ibises, she and her husband feel closerthan they have in some time, and she feels more solid, more grounded (224–25). When Yvonne watches the

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sunrise, her sense of order returns (298–99). In contrast, Will in “Spring Song of the Frogs” hopes to findpleasure and satisfaction (and romance) when the frogs sing, but he is thwarted: “The voices … sound thinand ill. There aren't as many frogs as there used to be, either” (201). Frogs symbolize transformation, therenewal of life. His inability to hear meaning in the songs reveals that he is cut off from the world of natureand from others.

The Bluebeard story forms a central motif in Atwood's work, providing a framework to explore heterosexualrelationships. This tale, as is usually the case, exists in many versions and concerns the dangers of marriage.The “Fitcher's Bird” story typically involves three sisters. While the first two marry and are killed by theBluebeard figure, the third outsmarts him, discovers his murderous secrets, and restores her sisters to life. Thevillain is a wizard who gives each successive wife an egg to carry wherever she goes but forbids her to enterone room in his castle. Of course, all of them do, finding murdered women in a basin of blood and causingtheir eggs to become bloodstained. When he finds out, he punishes them with dismemberment. The cleverthird sister leaves her egg outside, escapes from the wizard, and reassembles her siblings. In “The RobberBridegroom” variant, the maiden foils the killer by telling what she has discovered, pretending that it is afiction. The villain is then put to death. Thus, the young woman finds her power through storytelling, afrequent theme in Atwood.

While the Bluebeard tale casts the man as the villain, Atwood's texts suggest that women internalize socialconventions that deny them power. Thus, social pressures contribute to the victims' problem. For example,Marian McAlpin opts to let her fiancé make all her decisions when they become engaged; the girls in Cat'sEye cut pictures out of an Eaton's catalogue and paste them in scrapbooks, thus learning how to becomeconsumers. In contrast, the narrator's mother in “Unearthing Suite” resists social pressures. She considers hermarriage “an escape [from convention]. … Instead of becoming the wife of some local small-townprofessional and settling down, in skirts and proper surroundings, to do charity work … she married my fatherand took off down the St. John's river in a canoe. … She … must have felt that she had been rescued from afate worse than death: antimacassars on the chairs” (312).

Atwood takes a tongue-in-cheek look at sexual (and linguistic) politics in “Loulou, or the Domestic Life of theLanguage.” Loulou is an earth mother whose house has become the gathering place for a group offree-loading poets. A potter, Loulou is absorbed in the physical world; she embodies the female “secretlife—the life of pie crusts, clean sheets, … the loaves in the oven” (4). Loulou wedges her own clay, bakesbread, cooks casseroles. The poets, on the other hand, deal with abstractions, with language. They are comicBluebeard wanna-bes. They write poems about Loulou, live in her house without paying rent, eat the food shecooks for them, tease her, and refer to her solidity and earthiness in big words she doesn't understand:marmoreal, geomorphic, chthonic, telluric. One teases her, “[W]hat existed in the space between Loulou andher name? Loulou didn't know what he was talking about” (66). Eleonora Rao explicates this story asexploring “women's marginal position within hegemonic [i.e., male-dominated] discourse. The storydramatizes woman's (self) exclusion from language, and the strategies of resistance and survival she adopts ina male-dominated context, where the power of naming is in the hands of male poets” (Rao, 167). Loulouchooses to reject the poets' abstract and arcane language, to live in the physical realm. But there is a delightfultwist here. Because the story is told from Loulou's point of view, we see the poets through her eyes: they arequite helpless without her practical capability. And so she has “the last word” about them.

Repeatedly in Atwood, telling stories is an imperative, a way for a protagonist to achieve insight into hersituation, to establish connections, or to make her voice heard. In “Bluebeard's Egg” Sally fails to achieve apositive outcome. Sally's problem is that she tells the wrong kinds of stories and doesn't tell her own story.Obsessed with her husband Ed, a cardiologist, “a heart man,” she tells herself stories about him: that womenare chasing him, hiding from him, then making sexual advances. She tells him these stories as well. Becauseshe is the narrator, the reader may wonder: Is her repeated story a reflection of her personal insecurity? Is Edinnocently oblivious to the flirtations of women who approach him at parties to ask about their hearts? Is Sally

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aware (or suspicious) that he is a philanderer? Or do her repeated stories precipitate the very situation shefears? Moreover, when Sally repeatedly tells these stories to her new friend, the divorcée Marylynn, she maybe setting up the very outcome she fears.

Because she focuses on her husband's story, Sally fails to learn her own story that could offer her greaterself-awareness and release from her obsession. When she persuades Ed to examine her heart with a newmachine at his office, she finds that her heart seems foreign and insubstantial to her: “a large gray object, likea giant fig” (161). She takes adult education courses to “concentrate her attention on other things,” yetsomehow her attention always returns to Ed. Her instructor tells the class to “explore your inner world,” butSally is “fed up with her inner world; she doesn't need to explore it. In her inner world is Ed … and in Ed isEd's inner world, which she can't get at” (167). For her current course, Forms of Narrative Fiction, she has totell a modern version of the Bluebeard tale from the point of view of one of the characters. To be creative,Sally decides to tell the story from the egg's point of view. But she doesn't know yet what her story will be.She identifies Ed with the egg, and he is a mystery to her.

Meanwhile, Sally hosts a party and sees Ed standing with his arm brushing her friend Marylynn's rump. Whatis the meaning of this gesture? Is it casual, unplanned, or does it signal a liaison between the two? Or hasSally imagined the gesture? In contrast to the inquisitive heroine of the “The Robber Bridegroom” fairy tale,she is afraid to find the answer to her question. The fairy tale heroine discovered the truth and confronted herprospective husband by telling the story in the guise of fiction, thereby saving her life. In contrast, Sally ishesitant and fearful; accordingly, she keeps quiet about her discovery. She lies beside Ed and thinks of herpale and “ghostly” heart, in contrast to her vibrant image of an egg, “glowing softly as though there'ssomething red and hot inside it. It's almost pulsing; Sally is afraid of it. … the egg is alive and one day it willhatch. But what will come out of it?” We must wonder what the consequences will be for her marriage and forher understanding of her “inner world.”

“Uglypuss” and “The Salt Garden” are also variants of the Bluebeard story, featuring men who are destructiveand hostile to their partners. Joel in “Uglypuss” is self-centered and unfaithful, and Becka gets revenge. Almain “The Salt Garden” is drifting, caught up in two complicated, overlapping romance triangles.

Four of the stories here, “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” “Hurricane Hazel,” “In Search ofthe Rattlesnake Plantain,” and “Unearthing Suite,” purport to be autobiographical. Like the later Cat's Eye,these fictions blur the line between autobiography and fiction, and of course, all autobiography is to somedegree fiction.

The mother in “Significant Moments” is a gifted storyteller, aware of her audience. She speaks with emotion,uses different voices and gestures, and dramatizes the stories. She tailors stories for different occasions andtells the more serious ones, about divorces and romantic tragedies, to women, because men need to beshielded from the unpleasant facts of life. The narrator explains that “the structure of the house [her mothergrew up in] was hierarchical, with my grandfather at the top, but its secret life—the life of pie crusts, cleansheets, the box of rags in the linen closet, the loaves in the oven—was female” (4). The narrative here focuseson anecdotes the mother tells about her life, interspersed with the narrator's commentary. The significantmoments are childhood memories: how her mother convinced her father (the narrator's grandfather) to allowher to get a haircut, how her pet chicks died, how she jumped from the barn rafters attempting to fly. Thenthere are stories about the narrator as a child: how she talked to her rabbit cookie at a tea party. What lessonam I to learn from this, she wonders.

“Hurricane Hazel” is another family story. The narrator is 14 and has her first boyfriend, the older Buddy. Shetries to pretend to be “normal,” but her family is different from the conventional suburban family because theylive in the bush in the summers, where her father conducts entomological research. Buddy visits her at theircabin, and she spends the day with him. She accepts his ID bracelet even though she does not want it because

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“I felt that Buddy had something on me: that, now he had accidentally seen something about me that was real,he knew too much about my deviations from the norm. I felt I had to correct that somehow. It occurred to me,years later, that many women probably had become engaged and even married this way” (48). Sharon RoseWilson comments wryly that here, as in much of Atwood's fiction, “[P]assing the test of socialization, being aconventionally ‘true bride’ or good date, is failing the test of being a human being” (Wilson, 266).

The volume's closing story, “Unearthing Suite,” is cast as a memoir of the narrator's parents. In fact, Atwoodreads a passage from this story as a voice-over in the videotape Atwood and Family as her parents enact theparts, her mother swimming in the lake and her father surveying the dock for repairs. In this story, the narratorcontrasts herself with her more agile, active, and healthy parents. They are healthy; she has a cold. She wouldcling anxiously to the roof if she climbed it; her mother. “clambers nimbly” to sweep off the leaves every fall.They are energetic and carry out projects; she does “as little as possible” (311). Among their projects, herparents build houses that she calls “earths” and explains, “[T]hey are more like stopping places, seasonal dens,watering holes on some caravan route which my nomadic parents are always following” (306).

The narrator finds that her vocation as a storyteller emerged from childhood patterns. When she was young,her parents exhorted her to be still so as not to tip a canoe, touch a tent in the rain, or unsettle the precariousbalance of a heavily laden motorboat. “Perhaps it was then that I began the translation of the world intowords. It was something you could do without moving” (311). And perhaps also, enforced stillness in naturalsurroundings taught her to observe carefully and to enjoy her imagination.

In contrast to the unmoving narrator, the mother is active, always moving—ice-skating, skiing, swimming, ororganizing the family moves from house to house. The narrator explains: “Photographs have never donejustice to my mother. This is because they stop time; to really reflect her they would have to show her as ablur” (303). Unlike the passive, frozen women, the mother cannot be “captured” by a camera.

Her mother is optimistic, unconventional; she asserts herself as a real person, lively, active, interesting, a fullpartner in the marriage. The unconventional, nomadic life she found in her marriage was a way tofreedom—out of the stifling conventions of the parlor and drawing room, into the bush. She is a welcomecounterpoint to the women who are figuratively Bluebeard's victims in the book's other stories (Sally, Alma,Becka).

The incident that ends the story, and the book, reveals the mother's character and is another “significantmoment.” When her mother was sweeping the roof, she found the droppings of an unusual animal, a fisher.The father finds this “an interesting biological phenomenon.” For her mother; however, it is a “miraculoustoken, a sign of divine grace; as if their mundane, familiar, much-patched … roof has been visited and mademomentarily radiant by an unknown but by no means minor god” (323). Thus, her mother, attuned to thegreen world, reads divine grace into animal droppings. Thus, the book's framing stories depict a comfortable,stable marriage and present a woman who escapes from restrictive social conventions to become her ownperson, a “creative nonvictim.”

MURDER IN THE DARK (1983)

This collection appeared in Canada in 1983 and was combined with Good Bones when published in theUnited States as Good Bones and Simple Murders (Doubleday, 1994). Many of the pieces here are about thewriting and storytelling process. They are small snippets of stories: young children making poison, schoolgirlsreading horror comics and throwing snowballs. Some are mental games: What if men did the cooking? Whatif words were tangible objects?

The title piece describes a party game in which the person taking the role of the murderer lies while the otherstell the truth. The narrator claims that the writer is the murderer, and “by the rules of the game, I must always

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lie” (30). “Simmering” is a role-reversal fantasy. It retells the subversive stories told by women who havebeen exiled from the sacred mysteries of the kitchen and sent off by their husbands to work. There was a timewhen women's “kitchen envy” was treated by amputating the tips of their tongues. Now, women gather inliving rooms and whisper the secret tales of a time when women did cook. “The Page” describes the terror anddanger of entering the world beneath the blank page, for “beneath the page is everything that has everhappened, most of which you would rather not hear about” (45). “Happy Endings” details various plots thatmay be written, but the author notes that the endings are all the same: “John and Mary die” (40).

The book ends with “Instructions for the Third Eye,” the eye that sees things we would rather not see. Thethird eye sees more, and more clearly: “The third eye can be merciless, especially when wounded. … Try notto resist the third eye: it knows what it's doing. Leave it alone and it will show you that this truth is not theonly truth. One day you will wake up and everything, the stones by the driveway, … each brick, each leaf …your own body, will be glowing from within, lit up, so bright you can hardly look. You will reach out … andyou will touch the light itself” (62).

WILDERNESS TIPS (1991)

This collection of 10 stories is unified through the themes of loss of innocence, difficult relationships, death,and storytelling. In particular, these stories reveal our need of storytelling as a way of discovering meaning,explaining our experiences, and coming to terms with ourselves and others. For the stories we tell oftendetermine our survival. The stories counterpose ordinary life with our fantasies about it, which are ofteninadequate or misleading, such as the fashion magazine's fantasies of sexual allure (“Hairball”), the romancemagazine's tales of sex and betrayal (“True Trash”), and Greek myths of transformation (“Isis in Darkness”).Particularly Canadian fantasies of the Northern landscape underlie three of these stories, “The Age of Lead,”“Death by Landscape,” and “Wilderness Tips.” It is instructive to read these stories in tandem with Atwood'sStrange Things, a discussion of Canadian popular myths about “the malevolent North.” In Atwood's storieshere, the focus is on the dangers humans cause rather than the dangers posed by the landscape. The Bluebeardstory, the demon lover fairy tale, is an intertext of “Weight” and “Hack Wednesday.” “Uncles” foregroundsthe gap between our own fictions about ourselves and the way others see us.

Telling stories is a major theme here, especially in “True Trash,” “Isis in Darkness,” and “Death byLandscape,” three stories about the reclamation of lost women through storytelling. The first story, “TrueTrash,” is about the process of telling stories. Joanne, a freelance writer, is the perceiver who gives structureto the tale. When the story begins she is about 18 and a waitress at a boys' summer camp in the 1950s. Thetitle is the waitresses' parody of the True Romance magazine that the waitresses read, snickering at thecontrived melodramatic tales of forbidden lust and sex. Yet even as they are reading the tales, a similar storyis unfolding among them: one of them becomes pregnant out of wedlock. Joanne later discovers who theunsuspecting father of the child is and wonders if she should tell him: “The melodrama tempts her, the idea ofa revelation, a sensation, a neat ending. But it would not be an ending, it would only be the beginning ofsomething else. In any case, the story itself seems to her outmoded. … It's a story that would never happennow” (30).

“Hairball” is narrated by Kat, a fashion magazine editor who comes to realize that she has designed her life tomirror a slick magazine. She dresses at the height of fashion—tough, hard, edgy—and assumes a demeanor tomatch but discovers that what she really wants is comfort, marriage, security. Similarly, she chooses clothingto transform her lover into a sexier man but then realizes that she liked him better as he was before. Thehairball of the title is her ovarian cyst, a benign growth that has been surgically removed. Kat comes to thinkof the hairy growth as the child she has never had. She keeps it in a jar and uses it to dramatic purpose at thestory's conclusion.

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“Isis in Darkness” is the title of a poem sequence written by the mysteriously alluring young woman Selena.Her poems recount the story of the Egyptian fertility goddess searching for the bones of her beloved Osiris,the vegetation god, and piecing them back together. The story tells of the transformations of myth and poetryand points to the missed opportunities for human transformation. Selena is named after the Greek goddess ofthe moon. But the contemporary Selena becomes an alcoholic and dies young, while the story's narrator,Richard, a less-talented poet who loves her from afar, lapses into a dull marriage, a divorce, and an uninspiredcareer. Richard is in the position of Isis at the story's end, assembling his fragments of Selena's life onnotecards and planning to write the book that will reveal her poetic genius and troubled life. In memorializingher he finally finds the subject that inspires him. In contrast to Richard, whose retelling of Selena's storyenhances and magnifies her, Julie's story of Connor (“The Bog Man”) diminishes him, for her memory of himdwindles over time.

“Death by Landscape” is a haunting tale of Lois, whose friend Lucy disappears on a canoe trip one summer atcamp. A typical Canadian nature story, according to Atwood, is about being lost or killed in a dangerouslandscape (SV. 55). In this story, the focus shifts from the dangerous landscape to the characters' stories aboutit. The camp director needs to account for the inexplicable event and persuades herself that Lois pushed Lucyoff a cliff. Lois finds the event inexplicable. She lacks a story about the accident and retreats into hermemories of Lucy. She collects landscape paintings by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven and believesthat “every one of them is a picture of Lucy” (118).5 Interestingly, Tom Thomson himself was drowned whilecanoeing on one of his painting expeditions.

“The Age of Lead” juxtaposes two seemingly unrelated narratives: a TV documentary describing the death ofJohn Torrington, a young sailor on the ill-fated Franklin expedition of 1845, and the story of Jane's friendVincent. As Jane tells the story, the links between the two narratives emerge. The documentary recounts ascientific expedition led by Owen Beattie, a Canadian forensic anthropologist, in 1984 and 1986 to exhumeTorrington's body from the permafrost. In 1845, Captain John Franklin of the British Royal Navy led a groupof 134 men in two specially equipped ships to search for a Northwest Passage that would link England andnorthern Europe with the Pacific through the Arctic Ocean. The entire expedition died, the cause of theirdeaths a mystery: “At the end those that had not yet died in the ships set out in an idiotic trek across the stony,icy ground, pulling a lifeboat laden down with toothbrushes, soap, handkerchiefs, and slippers, useless piecesof junk” (161). It has taken more than one hundred years to develop the story that explains their deaths. Janelearns that Franklin and his explorers were poisoned by the lead solder in their cans of provisions: “It waswhat they'd been eating that had killed them” (161).

Jane juxtaposes the documentary with memories of Vincent, who died recently at age 43 of an unidentifieddisease and who had joked that his disease “must have been something I ate” (160). Jane thinks about “thesidewalk that runs past her house … cluttered with plastic drinking cups, crumpled soft-drink cans, usedtake-out plates,” very like the “useless pieces of junk” left behind by the Franklin expedition (162). Sherrill E.Grace writes: “[W]e are positioned to perceive that the moral … is that we, like Franklin and his men, arebeing poisoned by what we eat or by what we are doing to the environment upon which we depend for food.… If [they] could not read the signs connecting their destruction with the conveniences of their world in timeto save themselves, why should we? If they were not safe in their science and technology, why should we besafe?”6 Thus, interestingly, the danger lies more in technology than in the Northern landscape that proved sodangerous in Atwood's early poems. And perhaps we need to revise our own stories about contemporarytechnology.

Two stories tell of the demon lover, the deathlike male. In “Weight” the gentle and forgiving Molly clings toromantic hopes for redeeming her obsessively jealous husband and is murdered, while her friend, thepragmatic and cynical narrator, survives to commemorate Molly with a battered women's shelter. For Mollyand the narrator, telling the right stories is a life-or-death imperative. “Hack Wednesday” is a comic variant, aday in the life of a middle-aged newspaper columnist, Marcia, and her political activist husband, one of the

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rigid, “straight-line” personalities whose version of political correctness imposes artificial and needlesslyconstraining rules of behavior.

“Wilderness Tips,” the title story, is narrated by George, an immigrant to Canada, whose polite surface charmbelies his amoral behavior. The story is a complex one, alluding to actual and invented stories of the North asit questions the meanings of wilderness for Canadian identity (Howells, 32–37). Each of the characters has aset of assumptions about the values implicit in wilderness, and in the course of the story, these values aredestabilized, turned upside down: again, humans prove more treacherous than the wilderness.

In each of the stories here, the characters must reevaluate the fictions on which they have based their lives. Inher next collection of short fiction, Good Bones, Atwood plays with a variety of popular myths, rewritingthem from unusual points of view.

GOOD BONES (1992)

The 27 short fictions and prose poems collected in this book are confections, jeux d'esprit, stories told withwit from unusual points of view, wryly revising cultural myths although often carrying sly undertones, as in“The Female Body” and “Making a Man.” The bat tells of its fear of humans in “My Life as a Bat.” The mothin “Cold-Blooded” reports to its home planet about a race of strange and backward “blood-creatures.” When“The Little Red Hen Tells All,” she explains that, being henlike, she shared the loaf of bread with all the lazyanimals who never helped her. When “Gertrude Talks Back,” she tells her son Hamlet that he is an “awfulprig sometimes,” just like his father.

“Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women” tells us that the wise, smart, careful women lead wise, ordered lives, butthe stupid ones are endearing because “they make even stupid men [and women] feel smart” (32). Moreover,the stupid women, because of their general innocent ineptness, generate the plots of narratives; they are theones “who have given us Literature” (37). And where would we be without stories, for, as the narratorexclaims, “No stories! Imagine a world without stories!” (32).

The pieces here, like those in Murder in the Dark, have been called fables, speeded-up short stories, and prosepoems. They blur the boundaries between fiction and poetry, thus “expanding the brackets” of the genres.They are testaments to Atwood's love of story and to her continuing exploration of the complex, multiple,ambiguous fictions we invent in our ongoing quest for survival.

Notes

Reingard M. Nischik, “Speech Act Theory, Speech Acts, and the Analysis of Fiction,” ModernLanguage Review 88, no. 2 (April 1993): 297–304.

1.

Robert Detweiler and William G. Doty, The Daemonic Imagination: Biblical Text and Secular Story(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990); hereafter cited in text.

2.

Martha Burdette, “Sin Eating and Sin Making: The Power and Limits of Language” in Detweiler andDoty, 159–68.

3.

Ann-Janine Morey, “The Old In/Out,” in Detweiler and Doty, 169–80.4. The Group of Seven was a group of Canadian painters formed in 1920. Influenced by Tom Thomson(1877–1917), the group was eager “to develop a new style of Canadian painting” featuring landscapesand Northern scenes. “In constrast to the farmers and industrialists who sought to conquer the landand to prosper from it, these artists saw in the untamed terrain a reflection of the country's spirit.”Members of the group were Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston,Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. McDonald, and F. J. Varley. Anne Newlands, The Group of Seven and TomThomson (Willowdale, Ontario: Firefly Books, 1995), 6.

5.

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Sherrill E. Grace, “‘Franklin Lives’: Atwood's Northern Ghosts,” in Various Atwoods, ed. LorraineM. York (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1995), 159–61.

6.

Atwood, Margaret (Short Story Criticism): Further Reading

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McCombs, Judith and Carole L. Palmer. Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.,1991, 735 p.

Primary and secondary bibliography.

BIOGRAPHY

Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto: ECW, 1998, 378 p.

Biography of Atwood.

CRITICISM

Alvarez, Kate. Reviews of Surfacing and Good Bones. TLS: Times Literary Supplement (1 July 1994): 22.

Negative assessment of Good Bones.

Clute, John. “Embracing the Wilderness.” TLS No. 4393 (12 June 1987): 626.

Review of Bluebird's Egg and Other Stories and The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English whichAtwood edited with Robert Weaver.

Crace, Jim. “Off-Cuts.” TLS (23 March 1984): 311.

Negative review of Murder in the Dark.

Deery, June. “Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood's Body of Knowledge.” Twentieth Century Literature43, No. 4 (Winter 1997): 470–86.

Analyzes the role of science in Atwood's work.

Deveson, Richard. “Lashing Out.” New Statesman 107, No. 2764 (9 March 1984): 25.

Mixed review of Murder in the Dark.

Kildahl, Karen A. “Margaret Atwood.” Critical Survey of Short Fiction, edited by Frank N. Magill, pp.13–19. Salem Press, 1987.

Discusses defining characteristics of Atwood's short fiction.

McCombs, Judith, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988, 306 p.

Collection of critical essays on Atwood's work, including her short fiction.

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Morris, Mary. “The Art of Fiction CXXI: Margaret Atwood.” Paris Review 32, No. 117 (Winter 1990):69–88.

Atwood discusses the major themes of her work as well as her creative process.

Nicholson, Colin, ed. Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. New York: St.Martin's Press, 1994, 261 p.

Compiles recent critical essays on Atwood's fiction and poetry.

Nischik, Reingard M. “Speech Act Theory, Speech Acts, and the Analysis of Fiction.” Modern LanguageReview 88, No. 2 (April 1993): 298–306.

Analyzes Atwood's utilization of language.

Richards, Beth. “Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Prairie Schooner 67, No. 4 (Winter 1993): 8–12.

Brief interview.

Roraback, Dick. Review of Good Bones & Simple Murders. Los Angles Times Book Review 62 (19 February1995): 6.

Laudatory review.

Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984, 184 p.

Critical survey of Atwood's works.

Russell, Brandon. “Eavesdropping.” TLS (17 August 1984).

Review of Dancing Girls.

Additional coverage of Atwood's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the GaleGroup: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 12; Bestsellers, 1989:2; Contemporary Authors, Vols.49–52; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 3, 24, 33, 59; Contemporary Literary Criticism,Vols. 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 15, 25, 44, 84, 135; Contemporary Novelists; Contemporary Poets; ContemporaryPopular Writers; Contemporary Women Poets; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 53; DISCoveringAuthors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules:Most-studied Authors, Novelists, Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Feminist Writers; Major 20th-CenturyWriters, Vols. 1, 2; Novels for Students, Vol. 4; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 8; Poetry for Students, Vol. 7; ShortStories for Students, Vol. 3; Something About the Author, Vol. 50; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers;and World Literature Criticism.

Atwood, Margaret (Feminism in Literature): Introduction

Internationally acclaimed as a novelist, poet, and short story writer, Atwood has emerged as a major figure incontemporary feminist writing. Through female protagonists and narrators who often journey fromvictimization to self-actualization, Atwood explores women's issues using elements of science fiction,historical fact, fairy tale, and dystopian vision.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Atwood was born in Ottawa and grew up in suburban Toronto. As a child she spent her summers at herfamily's cottage in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where her father, a forest entomologist, conductedresearch. She began to write while in high school, contributing poetry, short stories, and cartoons to the schoolnewspaper. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, Atwood was influenced by critic NorthropFrye, who introduced her to the poetry of William Blake. Impressed with Blake's use of mythologicalimagery, Atwood wrote her first volume of poetry, Double Persephone, which was published in 1961. Thefollowing year Atwood completed her A.M. degree at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. She returned toToronto in 1963, where she began collaborating with artist Charles Pachter, who designed and illustratedseveral volumes of her poetry. In 1964 Atwood moved to Vancouver, where she taught English for a year atthe University of British Columbia and completed her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). After a year ofteaching literature at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Atwood moved to Alberta to teach creativewriting at the University of Alberta. Her poetry collection The Circle Game (1966) won the 1967 GovernorGeneral's Award, Canada's highest literary honor. Atwood's public visibility increased significantly with thepublication of the poetry collection Power Politics in 1971. Seeking an escape from increasing mediaattention, Atwood left her teaching position at the University of Toronto to move to a farm in Ontario with herhusband. In 1986 she again received the Governor General's Award for her novel The Handmaid's Tale.

MAJOR WORKS

Most of Atwood's fiction and poetry concerns women's issues on some level, but her novel The Handmaid'sTale has generated the most feminist commentary. The story is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the earlytwenty-first century, after Christian fundamentalists have transformed the United States into a fascistictheocracy called Gilead. Birth rates are down in the post-nuclear age of Gilead, so Handmaids—women whoare fertile—are designated as sexual slaves to produce offspring for childless couples considered morally fit toraise children. Women in Gilead are not allowed to read, hold jobs, or have money. Narrated by a youngHandmaid named Offred—or Of Fred, the man to whom she belongs—the novel is considered a powerfuldystopian vision of anti-feminist totalitarianism. The protagonist of Atwood's next novel, Cat's Eye (1990),Elaine Risley, is a controversial middle-aged painter who returns to her hometown of Toronto for aretrospective exhibition of her work. The trip triggers unexpected memories and emotions for Elaine,particularly thoughts of Cordelia, a childhood friend to whom Elaine was attracted despite the girl's extremecruelty. The story is a nonlinear telling of Elaine's confrontation of her past, specifically her complex anddifficult friendship with Cordelia, and the ways in which women routinely betray one another. In The RobberBride (1993) Atwood transforms the grisly Brothers Grimm fairy tale "The Robber Bridegroom," about ademonic groom who lures three innocent maidens into his lair and then devours them, into another statementabout women's treatment of each other. Three middle-aged friends are relieved to reunite at the funeral of thewoman who tormented them in college, stealing from them money, time, and men, and threatening theircareers and lives. But the villainous Zenia turns up alive, forcing them to relive painful memories and come toterms with the connection between love and destruction. In earlier novels such as The Edible Woman andLady Oracle (1976), Atwood used sarcastic wit and irony to explore the masks women wear to impress men.In her essays and criticism she often discusses the difficulties of being a woman writer and the challenge ofdeveloping meaningful female and male characters.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Atwood's works have achieved both wide popular readership and much critical attention. Criticism has tendedto focus on her political and social views as they are represented in her works, most notably her feminism, ofwhich she has spoken frequently in interviews. Because her works often portray physical and psychologicalviolence in relationships between men and women, some commentators have labeled Atwood pessimistic anddismissed her as little more than an ideologue, but other critics have hailed her as a visionary interpreter of

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contemporary feminist thought.

Atwood, Margaret (Feminism in Literature): Principal Works

Double Persephone (poetry) 1961

The Circle Game (poetry) 1966

The Animals in That Country (poetry) 1968

The Edible Woman (novel) 1969

The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poetry) 1970

Procedures for Underground (poetry) 1970

Power Politics (poetry) 1971

Surfacing (novel) 1972

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (criticism) 1972

You Are Happy (poetry) 1974

Lady Oracle (novel) 1976

Selected Poems (poetry) 1976

Dancing Girls, and Other Stories (short stories) 1977

Two-Headed Poems (poetry) 1978

Up in the Tree (juvenilia) 1978

Life before Man (novel) 1979

True Stories (poetry) 1981

Bodily Harm (novel) 1982

Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (criticism) 1982

Bluebeard's Egg (short stories) 1983

Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems (short stories and poetry) 1983

Interlunar (poetry) 1984

The Handmaid's Tale (novel) 1986

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Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976-1986 (poetry) 1987

Cat's Eye (novel) 1990

Wilderness Tips (short stories) 1991

Good Bones (short stories) 1992

The Robber Bride (novel) 1993

The Blind Assassin (novel) 2001

Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (essays) 2002

Oryx and Crake (novel) 2003

Atwood, Margaret (Feminism in Literature): PrimarySources

SOURCE: Atwood, Margaret. "On Being a 'Woman Writer': Paradoxes and Dilemmas." InSecond Words, pp. 190-204. Toronto, Can.: Anansi Press Limited, 1982.

In the following essay, Atwood explores the difficulties of being considered a "woman writer."

I approach this article with a good deal of reluctance. Once having promised to do it, in fact, I've beenprocrastinating to such an extent that my own aversion is probably the first subject I should attempt to dealwith. Some of my reservations have to do with the questionable value of writers, male or female, becomingdirectly involved in political movements of any sort: their involvement may be good for the movement, but ithas yet to be demonstrated that it's good for the writer. The rest concern my sense of the enormous complexitynot only of the relationships between Man and Woman, but also of those between those other abstractintangibles, Art and Life, Form and Content, Writer and Critic, etcetera.

Judging from conversations I've had with many other woman writers in this country, my qualms are notunique. I can think of only one writer I know who has any formal connection with any of the diverseorganizations usually lumped together under the titles of Women's Liberation or the Women's Movement.There are several who have gone out of their way to disavow even any fellow-feeling; but the usual attitude isone of grudging admiration, tempered with envy: the younger generation, they feel, has it a hell of a lot betterthan they did. Most writers old enough to have a career of any length behind them grew up when it was stillassumed that a woman's place was in the home and nowhere else, and that anyone who took time off for anindividual selfish activity like writing was either neurotic or wicked or both, derelict in her duties to a man,child, aged relatives or whoever else was supposed to justify her existence on earth. I've heard stories ofwriters so consumed by guilt over what they had been taught to feel was their abnormality that they did theirwriting at night, secretly, so no one would accuse them of failing as housewives, as "women." These writersaccomplished what they did by themselves, often at great personal expense; in order to write at all, they had todefy other women's as well as men's ideas of what was proper, and it's not finally all that comforting to have aphalanx of women—some younger and relatively unscathed, others from their own generation, the bunch thatwas collecting china, changing diapers and sneering at any female with intellectual pretensions twenty or eventen years ago—come breezing up now to tell them they were right all along. It's like being judged innocentafter you've been hanged: the satisfaction, if any, is grim. There's a great temptation to say to Womens' Lib,"Where were you when I really needed you?" or "It's too late for me now." And you can see, too, that it would

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be fairly galling for these writers, if they have any respect for historical accuracy, which most do, to be hailedas products, spokeswomen, or advocates of the Women's Movement. When they were undergoing their oftendrastic formative years there was no Women's Movement. No matter that a lot of what they say can be takenby the theorists of the Movement as supporting evidence, useful analysis, and so forth: their own inspirationwas not theoretical, it came from wherever all writing comes from. Call it experience and imagination. Thesewriters, if they are honest, don't want to be wrongly identified as the children of a movement that did not givebirth to them. Being adopted is not the same as being born.

A third area of reservation is undoubtedly a fear of the development of a one-dimensional Feminist Criticism,a way of approaching literature produced by women that would award points according to conformity ornon-conformity to an ideological position. A feminist criticism is, in fact, already emerging. I've read at leastone review, and I'm sure there have been and will be more, in which a novelist was criticized for not havingmade her heroine's life different, even though that life was more typical of the average woman's life in thissociety than the reviewer's "liberated" version would have been. Perhaps Women's Lib reviewers will startdemanding that heroines resolve their difficulties with husband, kids, or themselves by stomping out to join aconsciousness raising group, which will be no more satisfactory from the point of view of literature than thelegendary Socialist Realist romance with one's tractor. However, a feminist criticism need not necessarily beone-dimensional. And—small comfort—no matter how narrow, purblind and stupid such a criticism in itslowest manifestations may be, it cannot possibly be more narrow, pur-blind and stupid than some of thenon-feminist critical attitudes and styles that have preceded it.

There's a fourth possible factor, a less noble one: the often observed phenomenon of the member of a despisedsocial group who manages to transcend the limitations imposed on the group, at least enough to become"successful." For such a person the impulse—whether obeyed or not—is to disassociate him/herself from thegroup and to side with its implicit opponents. Thus the Black millionaire who deplores the Panthers, the richQuébecois who is anti-Separatist, the North American immigrant who changes his name to an "English" one;thus, alas, the Canadian writer who makes it, sort of, in New York, and spends many magazine pages decryingprovincial dull Canadian writers; and thus the women with successful careers who say "I've never had anyproblems, I don't know what they're talking about." Such a woman tends to regard herself, and to be treated byher male colleagues, as a sort of honorary man. It's the rest of them who are inept, brainless, tearfulself-defeating: not her. "You think like a man," she is told, with admiration and unconscious put-down. Forboth men and women, it's just too much of a strain to fit together the traditionally incompatible notions of"woman" and "good at something." And if you are good at something, why carry with you the stigma attachedto that dismal category you've gone to such lengths to escape from? The only reason for rocking the boat is ifyou're still chained to the oars. Not everyone reacts like this, but this factor may explain some of the morehysterical opposition to Women's Lib on the part of a few woman writers, even though they may havebenefitted from the Movement in the form of increased sales and more serious attention.

A couple of ironies remain; perhaps they are even paradoxes. One is that, in the development of modernWestern civilization, writing was the first of the arts, before painting, music, composing, and sculpting, whichit was possible for women to practice; and it was the fourth of the job categories, after prostitution, domesticservice and the stage, and before wide-scale factory work, nursing, secretarial work, telephone operating andschool teaching, at which it was possible for them to make any money. The reason for both is the same:writing as a physical activity is private. You do it by yourself, on your own time; no teachers or employers areinvolved, you don't have to apprentice in a studio or work with musicians. Your only business arrangementsare with your publisher, and these can be conducted through the mails; your real "employers" can be deceived,if you choose, by the adoption of an assumed (male) name; witness the Brontës and George Eliot. But theprivate and individual nature of writing may also account for the low incidence of direct involvement bywoman writers in the Movement now. If you are a writer, prejudice against women will affect you as a writernot directly but indirectly. You won't suffer from wage discrimination, because you aren't paid any wages;you won't be hired last and fired first, because you aren't hired or fired anyway. You have relatively little to

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complain of, and, absorbed in your own work as you are likely to be, you will find it quite easy to shut youreyes to what goes on at the spool factory, or even at the university. Paradox: reason for involvement thenequals reason for non-involvement now.

Another paradox goes like this. As writers, woman writers are like other writers. They have the sameprofessional concerns, they have to deal with the same contracts and publishing procedures, they have thesame need for solitude to work and the same concern that their work be accurately evaluated by reviewers.There is nothing "male" or "female" about these conditions; they are just attributes of the activity known aswriting. As biological specimens and as citizens, however, women are like other women: subject to the samediscriminatory laws, encountering the same demeaning attitudes, burdened with the same good reasons for notwalking through the park alone after dark. They too have bodies, the capacity to bear children; they eat, sleepand bleed, just like everyone else. In bookstores and publishers' offices and among groups of other writers, awoman writer may get the impression that she is "special;" but in the eyes of the law, in the loan office orbank, in the hospital and on the street she's just another woman. She doesn't get to wear a sign to the grocerystore saying "Respect me, I'm a Woman Writer." No matter how good she may feel about herself, strangerswho aren't aware of her shelf-full of nifty volumes with cover blurbs saying how gifted she is will still regardher as a nit.

We all have ways of filtering out aspects of our experience we would rather not think about. Woman writerscan keep as much as possible to the "writing" end of their life, avoiding the less desirable aspects of the"woman" end. Or they can divide themselves in two, thinking of themselves as two different people: a"writer" and a "woman." Time after time, I've had interviewers talk to me about my writing for a while, thenask me, "As a woman, what do you think about—for instance—the Women's Movement," as if I could thinktwo sets of thoughts about the same thing, one set as a writer or person, the other as a woman. But no onecomes apart this easily; categories like Woman, White, Canadian, Writer are only ways of looking at a thing,and the thing itself is whole, entire and indivisible. Paradox: Woman and Writer are separate categories; butin any individual woman writer, they are inseparable.

One of the results of the paradox is that there are certain attitudes, some overt, some concealed, which womenwriters encounter as writers, but because they are women. I shall try to deal with a few of these, as objectivelyas I can. After that, I'll attempt a limited personal statement.

A. Reviewing and the Absence of an Adequate Critical Vocabulary

Cynthia Ozick, in the American magazine Ms., says, "For many years, I had noticed that no book of poetry bya woman was ever reviewed without reference to the poet's sex. The curious thing was that, in the two decadesof my scrutiny, there were no exceptions whatever. It did not matter whether the reviewer was a man or awoman; in every case, the question of the 'feminine sensibility' of the poet was at the centre of the reviewer'sresponse. The maleness of male poets, on the other hand, hardly ever seemed to matter."

Things aren't this bad in Canada, possibly because we were never fully indoctrinated with the Holy Gospelaccording to the distorters of Freud. Many reviewers manage to get through a review without displaying thekind of bias Ozick is talking about. But that it does occur was demonstrated to me by a project I was involvedwith at York University in 1971-72.

One of my groups was attempting to study what we called "sexual bias in reviewing," by which we meant notunfavourable reviews, but points being added or subtracted by the reviewer on the basis of the author's sexand supposedly associated characteristics rather than on the basis of the work itself. Our study fell into twoparts: i) a survey of writers, half male, half female, conducted by letter: had they ever experienced sexual biasdirected against them in a review? ii) the reading of a large number of reviews from a wide range ofperiodicals and newspapers.

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The results of the writers' survey were perhaps predictable. Of the men, none said Yes, a quarter said Maybe,and three quarters said No. Half of the women said Yes, a quarter said Maybe and a quarter said No. Thewomen replying Yes often wrote long, detailed letters, giving instances and discussing their own attitudes. Allthe men's letters were short.

This proved only that women were more likely to feel they had been discriminated against on the basis of sex.When we got around to the reviews, we discovered that they were sometimes justified. Here are the kinds ofthings we found.

I) ASSIGNMENT OF REVIEWS

Several of our letter writers mentioned this. Some felt books by women tended to be passed over bybook-page editors assigning books for review; others that books by women tended to get assigned to womenreviewers. When we started totting up reviews we found that most books in this society are written by men,and so are most reviews. Disproportionately often, books by women were assigned to women reviewers,indicating that books by women fell in the minds of those dishing out the reviews into some kind of "special"category. Likewise, woman reviewers tended to be reviewing books by women rather than by men (thoughbecause of the preponderance of male reviewers, there were quite a few male-written reviews of books bywomen).

II) THE QUILLER-COUCH SYNDROME

The heading of this one refers to the turn-ofthe-century essay by Quiller-Couch, defining "masculine" and"feminine" styles in writing. The "masculine" style is, of course, bold, forceful, clear, vigorous, etc.; the"feminine" style is vague, weak, tremulous, pastel, etc. In the list of pairs you can include "objective" and"subjective," "universal" or "accurate depiction of society" versus "confessional," "personal," or even"narcissistic" and "neurotic." It's roughly seventy years since Quiller-Couch's essay, but the "masculine"group of adjectives is still much more likely to be applied to the work of male writers; female writers aremuch more likely to get hit with some version of "the feminine style" or "feminine sensibility," whether theirwork merits it or not.

III) THE LADY PAINTER, OR SHE WRITES LIKE A MAN

This is a pattern in which good equals male, and bad equals female. I call it the Lady Painter Syndromebecause of a conversation I had about female painters with a male painter in 1960. "When she's good," hesaid, "we call her a painter; when she's bad, we call her a lady painter." "She writes like a man" is part of thesame pattern; it's usually used by a male reviewer who is impressed by a female writer. It's meant as acompliment. See also "She thinks like a man," which means the author thinks, unlike most women, who areheld to be incapable of objective thought (their province is "feeling"). Adjectives which often have similarconnotations are ones such as "strong," "gutsy," "hard," "mean," etc. A hard-hitting piece of writing by a manis liable to be thought of as merely realistic; an equivalent piece by a woman is much more likely to belabelled "cruel" or "tough." The assumption is that women are by nature soft, weak and not very good, andthat if a woman writer happens to be good, she should be deprived of her identity as a female and providedwith higher (male) status. Thus the woman writer has, in the minds of such reviewers, two choices. She can bebad but female, a carrier of the "feminine sensibility" virus; or she can be "good" in male-adjective terms, butsexless. Badness seems to be ascribed then to a surplus of female hormones, whereas badness in a male writeris usually ascribed to nothing but badness (though a "bad" male writer is sometimes held, by adjectivesimplying sterility or impotence, to be deficient in maleness). "Maleness" is exemplified by the "good" malewriter; "femaleness," since it is seen by such reviewers as a handicap or deficiency, is held to be transcendedor discarded by the "good" female one. In other words, there is no critical vocabulary for expressing theconcept "good/female." Work by a male writer is often spoken of by critics admiring it as having "balls;" ever

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hear anyone speak admiringly of work by a woman as having "tits?"

Possible antidotes: Development of a "good/female" vocabulary ("Wow, has that ever got Womb …"); or,preferably, the development of a vocabulary that can treat structures made of words as though they are exactlythat, not biological entities possessed of sexual organs.

IV) DOMESTICITY

One of our writers noted a (usually male) habit of concentrating on domestic themes in the work of a femalewriter, ignoring any other topic she might have dealt with, then patronizing her for an excessive interest indomestic themes. We found several instances of reviewers identifying an author as a "housewife" andconsequently dismissing anything she has produced (since, in our society, a "housewife" is viewed as arelatively brainless and talentless creature). We even found one instance in which the author was called a"housewife" and put down for writing like one when in fact she was no such thing.

For such reviewers, when a man writes about things like doing the dishes, it's realism; when a woman does,it's an unfortunate feminine genetic limitation.

V) SEXUAL COMPLIMENT-PUT-DOWN This syndrome can be summed up as follows;

She: "How do you like my (design for an airplane/mathematical formula/medical miracle)?"

He: "You sure have a nice ass."

In reviewing it usually takes the form of commenting on the cute picture of the (female) author on the cover,coupled with dismissal of her as a writer.

VI) PANIC REACTION

When something the author writes hits too close to home, panic reaction may set in. One of ourcorrespondents noticed this phenomenon in connection with one of her books: she felt that the content of thebook threatened male reviewers, who gave it much worse reviews than did any female reviewer. Theirreaction seemed to be that if a character such as she'd depicted did exist, they didn't want to know about it. Inpanic reaction, a reviewer is reacting to content, not to technique or craftsmanship or a book's internalcoherence or faithfulness to its own assumptions. (Panic reaction can be touched off in any area, not justmale-female relationships.)

B. Interviewers and Media Stereotypes

Associated with the reviewing problem, but distinct from it, is the problem of the interview. Reviewers aresupposed to concentrate on books, interviewers on the writer as a person, human being, or, in the case ofwomen, woman. This means that an interviewer is ostensibly trying to find out what sort of person you are. Inreality, he or she may merely be trying to match you up with a stereotype of "Woman Author" that pre-existsin her/his mind; doing it that way is both easier for the interviewer, since it limits the range and slant ofquestions, and shorter, since the interview can be practically written in advance. It isn't just women who getthis treatment: all writers get it. But the range for male authors is somewhat wider, and usually comes fromthe literary tradition itself, whereas stereotypes for female authors are often borrowed from other media, sincethe ones provided by the tradition are limited in number.

In a bourgeois, industrial society, so the theory goes, the creative artist is supposed to act out suppresseddesires and prohibited activities for the audience; thus we get certain Post-romantic male-author stereotypes,

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such as Potted Poe, Bleeding Byron, Doomed Dylan, Lustful Layton, Crucified Cohen, etc. Until recently theonly personality stereotype of this kind was Elusive Emily, otherwise known as Recluse Rossetti: the womanwriter as aberration, neurotically denying herself the delights of sex, kiddies and other fun. The TwentiethCentury has added Suicidal Sylvia, a somewhat more dire version of the same thing. The point about thesestereotypes is that attention is focused not on the actual achievements of the authors, but on their lives, whichare distorted and romanticized; their work is then interpreted in the light of the distorted version. Stereotypeslike these, even when the author cooperates in their formation and especially when the author becomes a cultobject, do no service to anyone or anything, least of all the author's work. Behind all of them is the notion thatauthors must be more special, peculiar or weird than other people, and that their lives are more interestingthan their work.

The following examples are taken from personal experience (mine, of interviewers); they indicate the range ofpossibilities. There are a few others, such as Earth Mother, but for those you have to be older.

I) HAPPY HOUSEWIFE

This one is almost obsolete: it used to be for Woman's Page or programme. Questions were about what youliked to fix for dinner; attitude was, "Gosh, all the housework and you're a writer too!" Writing was viewed asa hobby, like knitting, one did in one's spare time.

II) OPHELIA

The writer as crazy freak. Female version of Doomed Dylan, with more than a little hope on the part of theinterviewer that you'll turn into Suicidal Sylvia and give them something to really write about. Questions like"Do you think you're in danger of going insane?" or "Are writers closer to insanity than other people?" Noneed to point out that most mental institutions are crammed with people who have never written a word intheir life. "Say something interesting," one interviewer said to me. "Say you write all your poems on drugs."

III) MISS MARTYR; OR, MOVIE MAG

Read any movie mag on Liz Taylor and translate into writing terms and you've got the picture. The writer assomeone who suffers more than others. Why does the writer suffer more? Because she's successful, and youall know Success Must Be Paid For. In blood and tears, if possible. If you say you're happy and enjoy yourlife and work, you'll be ignored.

IV) MISS MESSAGE

Interviewer incapable of treating your work as what it is, i.e. poetry and/or fiction. Great attempt to get you tosay something about an Issue and then make you into an exponent, spokeswoman or theorist. (The twoMessages I'm most frequently saddled with are Women's Lib and Canadian Nationalism, though I belong tono formal organization devoted to either.) Interviewer unable to see that putting, for instance, a nationalist intoa novel doesn't make it a nationalistic novel, any more than putting in a preacher makes it a religious novel.Interviewer incapable of handling more than one dimension at a time.

What is Hard to Find is an interviewer who regards writing as a respectable profession, not as some kind ofmagic, madness, trickery or evasive disguise for a Message; and who regards an author as someone engagedin a professional activity.

C. Other Writers and Rivalry

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Regarding yourself as an "exception," part of an unspoken quota system, can have interesting results. If thereare only so many available slots for your minority in the medical school/law school/literary world, of courseyou will feel rivalry, not only with members of the majority for whom no quota operates, but especially formembers of your minority who are competing with you for the few coveted places. And you will have to bebetter than the average Majority member to get in at all. But we're familiar with that.

Woman-woman rivalry does occur, though it is surprisingly less severe than you'd expect; it's likely to takethe form of wanting another woman writer to be better than she is, expecting more of her than you would of amale writer, and being exasperated with certain kinds of traditional "female" writing. One of ourcorrespondents discussed these biases and expectations very thoroughly and with great intelligence: her letterdidn't solve any problems but it did emphasize the complexities of the situation. Male-male rivalry is moreextreme; we've all been treated to media-exploited examples of it.

What a woman writer is often unprepared for is the unexpected personal attack on her by a jealous malewriter. The motivation is envy and competitiveness, but the form is often sexual put-down. "You may be agood writer," one older man said to a young woman writer who had just had a publishing success, "but Iwouldn't want to fuck you." Another version goes more like the compliment-put-down noted underReviewing. In either case, the ploy diverts attention from the woman's achievement as a writer—the areawhere the man feels threatened—to her sexuality, where either way he can score a verbal point.

Personal Statement

I've been trying to give you a picture of the arena, or that part of it where being a "woman" and "writer," asconcepts, overlap. But, of course, the arena I've been talking about has to do largely with externals: reviewing,the media, relationships with other writers. This, for the writer, may affect the tangibles of her career: how sheis received, how viewed, how much money she makes. But in relationship to the writing itself, this is a falsearena. The real one is in her head, her real struggle the daily battle with words, the language itself. The falsearena becomes valid for writing itself only insofar as it becomes part of her material and is transformed intoone of the verbal and imaginative structures she is constantly engaged in making. Writers, as writers, are notpropagandists or examples of social trends or preachers or politicians. They are makers of books, and unlessthey can make books well they will be bad writers, no matter what the social validity of their views.

At the beginning of this article, I suggested a few reasons for the infrequent participation in the Movement ofwoman writers. Maybe these reasons were the wrong ones, and this is the real one: no good writer wants to bemerely a transmitter of someone else's ideology, no matter how fine that ideology may be. The aim ofpropaganda is to convince, and to spur people to action; the aim of writing is to create a plausible and movingimaginative world, and to create it from words. Or, to put it another way, the aim of a political movement is toimprove the quality of people's lives on all levels, spiritual and imaginative as well as material (and anypolitical movement that doesn't have this aim is worth nothing). Writing, however, tends to concentrate moreon life, not as it ought to be, but as it is, as the writer feels it, experiences it. Writers are eye-witnesses,I-witnesses. Political movements, once successful, have historically been intolerant of writers, even thosewriters who initially aided them; in any revolution, writers have been among the first to be lined up againstthe wall, perhaps for their intransigence, their insistence on saying what they perceive, not what, according tothe ideology, ought to exist. Politicians, even revolutionary politicians, have traditionally had no more respectfor writing as an activity valuable in itself, quite apart from any message or content, than has the rest of thesociety. And writers, even revolutionary writers, have traditionally been suspicious of anyone who tells themwhat they ought to write.

The woman writer, then, exists in a society that, though it may turn certain individual writers into revered cultobjects, has little respect for writing as a profession, and not much respect for women either. If there weremore of both, articles like this would be obsolete. I hope they become so. In the meantime, it seems to me that

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the proper path for a woman writer is not an all-out manning (or womaning) of the barricades, however muchshe may agree with the aims of the Movement. The proper path is to become better as a writer. Insofar aswriters are lenses, condensers of their society, her work may include the Movement, since it is so palpablyamong the things that exist. The picture that she gives of it is altogether another thing, and will depend, atleast partly, on the course of the Movement itself.

Atwood, Margaret (Feminism in Literature): GeneralCommentary

SOURCE: Goldblatt, Patricia F. "Reconstructing Margaret Atwood's Protagonists." WorldLiterature Today 73, no. 2 (spring 1999): 275-82.

In the following essay, Goldblatt discusses the transformation of Atwood's femaleprotagonists "from ingenues to insightful women."

A weaver employs fragments from life, silk, raw yarns, wool, straw, perhaps even a few twigs, stones, orfeathers, and transforms them into a tapestry of color, shape, and form. An author's work is similar, for sheselects individuals, locations, images, and ideas, rearranging them to create a believable picture. Each smacksof reality, but is not. This is the artist's art: to reconstruct the familiar into new, fascinating, but oftendisturbing tableaux from which stories can unfold.

Margaret Atwood weaves stories from her own life in the bush and cities of Canada. Intensely conscious ofher political and social context, Atwood dispels the notion that caribou-clad Canadians remain perpetuallylocked in blizzards while simultaneously seeming to be a polite mass of gray faces, often indistinguishablefrom their American neighbors. Atwood has continually pondered the lack of an identifiable Canadian culture.For over thirty years her work has aided in fashioning a distinct Canadian literary identity. Her criticalcatalogue and analysis of Canadian Literature, Survival [Sv], offered "a political manifesto telling Canadians… [to] value their own" (Sullivan, 265). In an attempt to focus on Canadian experiences, Atwood haspopulated her stories with Canadian cities, conflicts, and contemporary people, conscious of a landscapewhose borders have been permeated by the frost of Nature, her colonizers and her neighbors. Her examinationof how an individual interacts, succeeds, or stagnates within her world speaks to an emerging sense of self andoften parallels the battles fought to establish self-determination.

In her novels, Margaret Atwood creates situations in which women, burdened by the rules and inequalities oftheir societies, discover that they must reconstruct braver, self-reliant personae in order to survive. Not too farfrom the Canadian blueprint of the voyageur faced with an inclement, hostile environment, these womenstruggle to overcome and to change systems that block and inhibit their security. Atwood's pragmatic womenare drawn from women in the 1950s and 1960s: young women blissfully building their trousseaus andimagining a paradise of silver bells and picket fences.

Yet the author herself was neither encumbered nor restricted by the definition of contemporary female in herlife as a child. Having grown up in the Canadian North, outside of societal propaganda, she could criticallyobserve the behaviors that were indoctrinated into her urban peers who lacked diverse role models. AsAtwood has noted, "Not even the artistic community offered you a viable choice as a woman" (Sullivan, 103).Her stories deal with the transformation of female characters from ingenues to insightful women. Byexamining her heroes, their predators, and how they cope in society, we will discover where Atwood believesthe ability to reconstruct our lives lies.

Who are the victims?

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"But pathos as a literary mode simply demands that an innocent victim suffer" (Sv, 75). Unlike Shakespeare'shubris-laden kings or Jane Austen's pert and private aristocratic landowning families, Margaret Atwood relieson a collection of ordinary people to carry her tales: university students, museum workers, market researchers,writers, illustrators, and even housemaids. In her novels, almost all dwell on their childhood years in flashbackor in the chronological telling of their stories. Many of her protagonists' early days are situated in a virtualGarden of Eden setting, replete with untamed natural environments. Exploring shorelines, gazing at stars,gathering rocks, and listening to waves, they are solitary souls, but not lonely individuals: innocent, curious,and affable creatures. Elaine Risley in Cat's Eye and an unnamed narrator in Surfacing are two women whorecall idyllic days unfolded in a land of lakes, berries, and animals. Offred in The Handmaid's Tale, in her citylandscape, also relates a tale of a happy childhood. She is a complacent and assured child, her mother aconstant loving companion. In their comfortable milieus, these girls intuit no danger.

However, other Atwood protagonists are not as fortunate. Their backgrounds suggest an unhealthy, weedy soilthat causes their young plants to twist and permutate. Lady Oracle's [LO] Joan is overweight. Herdomineering, impatient mother and her weak father propel her to seek emotional satisfaction away from them.Lesje in Life before Man is the offspring of dueling immigrant grandmothers who cannot agree on the child'sproper upbringing. Not allowed to frequent the Ukrainian "golden church with its fairytale onion" (LBM, 93)of the one, or the synagogue of the other, Lesje is unable to develop self-confidence and focuses instead onthe inanimate, the solid traditions of rocks and dinosaurs as her progenitors. Similarly, the females in TheRobber Bride reveal miserable childhoods united by parental abuse, absence, and disregard: Roz must performas her mother's helper, a landlady cum cleaning woman; her father is absent, involved in shady dealings in"the old country." Charis, a second character in The Robber Bride, abandoned by her mother and depositedwith Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern, is sexually violated by those who should have offered love and trust. Toni, thethird of the trio, admits to loneliness and alienation in a well-educated, wealthy family. Marked by birth andpoverty, Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant in the early 1800s in Alias Grace, loses her mother en route toCanada. Grace is almost drowned by the demands of her drunken father and clinging, needy siblings. Theseexiled little girls, from weak, absent, or cruel families, made vulnerable by their early situations, cling to thenotion that their lives will be improved by the arrival of a kind stranger, most likely a handsome suitor. Ratherthan becoming recalcitrant and cynical, all sustain the golden illusion of the fairy-tale ending. In short, theyhold to the belief, the myth perpetrated by society: marriage.

Atwood's women are cognizant of the nurturing omissions in their environments. They attempt to cultivateand cope. Charis in The Robber Bride decides to reinvent herself. She changes her name and focuses on whatshe considers her healing powers inherited from her chicken-raising grandmother. She, Roz, and Toni turntheir faith to the power of friendship, a solid ring that lessens the painful lack of supportive families. In AliasGrace Grace's burden of an absent family is briefly alleviated by her friendship with another house-maid,Mary Whitney. Mary takes an adoring Grace under her wing and creates for Grace a fleeting vision of sisterlysupport. Unfortunately for Grace, Mary herself, another trusting young woman, is deceived by her employer'sson and dies in a botched abortion, leaving Grace once again abandoned and friendless.

In an attempt to reestablish stable, satisfying homes, these women pursue a path, as have women throughouthistory, to marriage. They search for a male figure, imagining a refuge. Caught up in the romantic stereotypesthat assign and perpetuate gender roles, each girl does not doubt that a man is the solution to her problems.

In The Edible Woman Marian and her coworkers at Seymour Surveys, "the office virgins," certainly do notquestion that marriage will provide fulfillment. In spite of the fact that Marian is suspended between twounappealing men, she does not deviate from the proper behavior. Marian's suitor, Peter, with his well-chosenclothes and suave friends, his perfectly decorated apartment, and even Marian as the appropriate marriagechoice, is rendered as no more than the wedding cake's blankly smiling ornament. If appearance is all, heshould suffice. Peter is juxtaposed to the slovenly, self-centered graduate student, Duncan, whose mainpleasure is watching his laundry whirl in the washing machine. Marian is merely a blank slate upon which

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each man can write or erase his concept of female.

FROM THE AUTHOR

ATWOOD ON STEREOTYPICAL MALE CHARACTERS AND SOCIAL ROLES

It's true that the male sexual role model had a lot of drawbacks, even for men—not everybody could beSuperman, many were stuck with Clark Kent—but there were certain positive and, at that time, usefulfeatures. What have we replaced this package with? We know that women have been in a state of upheavaland ferment for some time now, and movement generates energy; many things can be said by women nowthat were once not possible, many things can be thought that were once unthinkable. But what are we offeringmen? Their territory, though still large, is shrinking. The confusion and desperation and anger and conflictsthat we find in male characters in novels don't exist only in novels. They're out there in the real world. "Be aperson, my son," doesn't yet have the same ring to it as "Be a man," though it is indeed a worthy goal. Thenovelist qua novelist, as opposed to the utopian romancer, takes what is there as a point of departure. What isthere, when we're talking about men, is a state of change, new attitudes overlapping with old ones, no simplerules any more. Some exciting form of life may emerge from all this.

Meanwhile, I think women have to take the concerns of men as seriously as they expect men to take theirs,both as novelists and as inhabitants of this earth. One encounters, too often, the attitude that only the pain feltby persons of the female sex is real pain, that only female fears are real fears. That for me is the equivalent ofthe notion that only working-class people are real, that middle-class people are not, and so forth. Of coursethere's a distinction between earned pain and mere childish self-pity, and yes, women's fear of being killed bymen is grounded in authenticity, not to mention statistics, to a greater extent than men's fear of being laughedat. Damage to one's self-image is not quite the same as damage to one's neck, though not to beunderestimated: men have been known to murder and kill themselves because of it.

Atwood, Margaret. Excerpt from "Writing the Male Character." In Second Words, pp. 427-28. Toronto:Anansi Press, 1982.

The narrator and her friend Anna, in Surfacing, are also plagued by moody men who are not supportive ofwomen's dreams. In one particularly horrifying scene, Anna's husband Dave orders her to strip off her clothesfor the movie camera. Anna, humiliated by the request, nevertheless complies. She admits to nightly rapes butrationalizes his behavior: "He likes to make me cry because he can't do it himself" (Sf, 80). Similarly, whenJoe, the narrator's boyfriend, proposes, "We should get married … we might as well" (56), he is dumbfoundedand furious at her refusal. Men aware of the role they play accept their desirability as "catches." They believethat women desire lives of "babies and sewing" (LO, 159). These thoughts are parroted by Peter in The EdibleWoman when he proclaims, "People who aren't married get funny in middle age" (EW, 102). Men uphold thevalues of the patriarchy and women conform, few trespassing into gardens of their own design.

In Alias Grace Grace's aspirations for a brighter future also dwell on finding the right man: "It was the customfor young girls in this country to hire themselves out, in order to earn the money for their dowries, and thenthey would marry … and one day … be mistress of a tidy farmhouse" (AG, 157-58). In the employment ofMr. Thomas Kinnear in Richmond Hill, Grace quickly ascertains that the handsome, dark-haired housekeeper,Nancy Montgomery, enjoys many privileges as the reward for being her master's mistress. Yet, although menmay be the only way to elevate status, Grace learns that they cannot be trusted when their advances arerejected. Grace, on trial for the murders of Kinnear and Montgomery, is incredulous when she hears a formerfriend, Jamie Welsh, testify against her.

Then I was hoping for some token of sympathy from him; but he gave me a stare filled withsuch reproach and sorrowful anger. He felt betrayed in love.… I was transformed to a demon

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and he would do all in his power to destroy me. I had been counting on him to say a goodword for me … for I valued his good opinion of me, and it was a grief to lose it.

(AG, 360)

Women, it seems, must be made malleable to men's desires, accepting their proposals, their advances. Theymust submit to their socially determined roles or be seen as "demons."

However, it is not only men but also women as agents of society who betray. In The Robber Bride Charis,Roz, and Toni are tricked in their friendship by Zenia, an acquaintance from their university days. Eachsuccumbs to Zenia's web of deceit. Playing the part of a confidante and thoughtful listener, Zenia encouragesthe three women to divest themselves of their tales of their traumatic childhoods. She learns their torturedsecrets and uses their confidences to spirit away the men each woman believes to be the cornerstone in herlife.

From little girls to sophisticated women, Atwood's protagonists have not yet discerned that trust can beperverted, that they can be reeled in, taken advantage of, constantly abused, if they are not careful of lurkingpredators in their landscapes. Joan in Lady Oracle, longing for friendship, endures the inventive torments ofher Brownie friends: deadly ploys that tie little girls to trees with skipping ropes, exposing them to strangeleering men under cavernous bridges. Her assassins jeer, "How do ya' like the club?" (LO, 59). Elaine Risleyin Cat's Eye, like Joan, is a young girl when she discovers the power of betrayal by members of her own sex.For years she passively succumbs to their games. Perhaps, because she has grown up alone in the CanadianNorth with her parents and brother, Elaine seeks the warming society of girls. Only when Elaine is deserted,left to freeze in a disintegrating creek, does she recognize her peers' malevolence that almost leads to herdeath. Elaine knows that she is a defeated human, but rather than confronting her tormentors, she increases herown punishment nightly: she peels the skin off her feet and bites her lips.

Unable to turn outward in a society that perpetuates the ideal of a submissive female, these women turninward to their bodies as shields or ploys. Each has learned that a woman is a commodity, valued only for herappearance. Therefore it comes as no surprise that Atwood's protagonists measure their worth in terms ofbody. Joan in Lady Oracle sees herself as "a huge shapeless cloud" (LO, 65); she drifts. However, her softedges do not keep her from the bruising accusations of society. Although she loves to dance, Joan's bulgingbody is an affront to her mother and ballet teacher's sensibilities, and so at her ballet recital she is forced toperform as a mothball, not as a butterfly in tulle and spangles.

Joan certainly does not fit her mother's definition of femininity. Because her ungainly shape is rejected, Joandecides to hide her form in a mountain of fat, food serving as a constant to her mother's reproaches: "I waseating steadily, doggedly, stubbornly, anything I could get. The war between myself and my mother was on inearnest: the disputed territory was my body" (LO, 67). Interestingly, Joan's loving, supportive, and also fataunt Louisa bequeaths to Joan an inheritance with the stipulation that she lose one hundred pounds. Atwoodherself was fascinated by transformations in fairy stories: a person could not become a swan and depart thedreaded scene that mocked the tender aspirations of an awkward ingenue in real life; she could, however, dona new mask and trick those people who had previously proffered harm.

In The Edible Woman Marian's body is also a battlefield. Unable to cope with her impending marriage toPeter, Marian finds herself unable to ingest any food that was once alive. Repulsed by her society's attitude ofconsumerism, Marian concludes that her refusal to eat is ethical. However, her mind and body have split awayfrom each other. Her mind's revulsion at a dog-eat-dog world holds her body hostage: captive territory when awoman disagrees with her world. Marian "tri[es] to reason with [her body], accus[ing] it of having frivolouswhims." She coaxes and tempts, "but it was adamant" (EW, 177). Marian's mind expresses her disapproval onthe only level on which she possesses control: ironically, herself. Her punishment is circular: first, as a victim

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susceptible because she is a woman subject to her society's values; and second, as a woman only able tocommand other women, namely herself. Her sphere is so small she becomes both victim and victimizer.

This view of a woman who connects and projects her image of self onto her body also extends to the functionsof a female body: the ability to control life by giving birth. Sarah in the story "The Resplendent Quetzal"(1977) is drained of all vitality and desire when her baby dies at birth. Her concept of identity is entangledwith her ability to produce a child. When this biological function fails, Sarah's being ebbs. Lesje in Life beforeMan also observes that, without children, "officially she is nothing" (LBM, 267). Offred's identity and value asa childbearer as well, in The Handmaid's Tale, are proclaimed by her clothes in her totalitarian city of Gilead.She is "two viable ovaries" (HT, 135). She no longer owns a name; she is "Of Fred," the concubine named forthe man who will impregnate her. Every step, every mouthful of food, every move is observed, reported,circumvented, or approved for the sake of the child she might carry to term. Her only worth resides in herbiological function. Her dreams and desires are unimportant. Her goal is survival.

The women described here do not lash out openly. Each who once trusted in family, marriage, and friendshipdiscovers that treading societal paths does not result in happiness. These disillusioned women, with abortedexpectations, turn their misery inward, accepting responsibility that not society and its expectations but theythemselves are weak, unworthy, and have therefore failed.

Who has laid prey and why?

"Sometimes fear of these obstacles becomes itself the obstacle" (Sv, 33). Atwood's girls are a vulnerable lot,manipulated, packaged, and devastated by the familiar faces in uncaring, dictatorial circles that reinforcesocietal imperatives. Those once free to roam and explore as children as well as those repressed from an earlyage are subject to the civilizing forces that customize young girls to the fate of females. Ironically, thisprocess, for the most part, is performed by mothers.

Mothers, rather than alleviating their girls' distress, increase their children's alienation. When Elaine's motherin Cat's Eye ventures to discuss the cruelty of Elaine's friends, her words do not fortify Elaine; they admonishher: "Don't let them push you around. Don't be spineless. You have to have more backbone" (CE, 156).Fearing her weakness is comparable to the tiny crumbling bones of sardines, Elaine maligns herself: "What ishappening is my own fault, for not having more backbone" (156). Joan's mother in Lady Oracle doesn't mincewords: "You were stupid to let the other girls fool you like that" (LO, 61). Instead of offering support, themothers blame their daughters, aligning themselves with the girls' accusers.

Mothers who themselves have not found acceptance, success, or ease in society persist in transmitting the oldmessages of conformity. Joan's mother in Lady Oracle is dumbfounded that "even though she'd done the rightthing,… devoted her life to us,… made her family her career as she had been told to do," she had beenburdened with "a sulky fat slob of a daughter and a husband who wouldn't talk to her" (LO, 179). Joan echoesher mother's complaints when she murmurs, "How destructive to me were the attitudes of society" (102).

Even the work women do conspires to maintain the subjection of their own kind. In her job, in The EdibleWoman, Marian investigates what soups, laxatives, or drinks will please and be purchased. Sanctioned femaleactivities also reinforce the imposition of correct values. In Surfacing and Cat's Eye little girls are engrossedin cutting up pictures from Eaton's catalogues that offer labor-saving devices along with fashionable clothes:children piece together a utopia of doll-house dreams. So brainwashed are these girls that when asked toindicate a possible job or profession, they answer, "A lady" or "A mother" (CE, 91).

In Cat's Eye Elaine Risley's mother does not fit the stereotype. She wears pants, she ice skates, she "does notgive a hoot" (CE, 214) about the rules that women are supposed to obey. Rendered impotent as a role modelin her daughter's eyes because she does not abide by the Establishment's code of correct deportment, Elaine's

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mother is an outsider to a woman's world that captivates Elaine.

Instead of her own nonconforming mother, Elaine is most deeply affected by the indictments from her friendGrace Smeath's mother. Mrs. Smeath, spread out on the sofa and covered with afghans every afternoon to resther bad heart, damns Elaine for being a heathen: there is something very wrong with Elaine's family, whoignore the protocol of proper women's wear, summer city vacations, and regular church attendance. Worseyet, Mrs. Smeath, aware of the cruel games inflicted on Elaine, does not intervene. Instead she invokesdeserved suffering when she decrees, "It's God's punishment for the way the other children treat her [Elaine].It serves her right" (CE, 180). With God on her side, Mrs. Smeath relies on the Bible as the oldest and surestway of prescribing a female identity—and instilling fear.

In The Handmaid's Tale the Bible is likewise the chief source of female repression. Words are corrupted,perverted, or presented out of context to establish a man's holy vision of women: Sarah's use of her handmaid,Hagar, as a surrogate womb for an heir for Abraham becomes the legalizing basis for fornication with thehandmaids. Acts of love are reduced to institutionalized rapes, and random acts of violence, banishment toslag heaps, public hangings, endorsed public killings, bribery, deceit, and pornography all persist under othernames in order to maintain a pious hold on women endorsed by the Gilead Fathers.

In spite of the fact that Gilead is praised by its creators as a place where women need not fear, carefullychosen "aunts" persist in treachery that robs women of trust. To perpetuate the status quo, women are keptvulnerable and treated as children: girls must ask permission, dress in silly frocks, are allowed no money, playno part in their own self-determination. Yet Atwood's girls tire of their rigidly enforced placement that wouldpreserve some outdated notion of female acceptability.

The escape.

"She feels the need for escape" (Sv, 131). After enduring, accepting, regurgitating, denying, and attempting toplease and cope, Atwood's protagonists begin to take action and change their lives. Atwood herself, raised onGrimms' Fairy Tales, knew that "by using intelligence, cleverness and perseverance" (Sullivan, 36), magicalpowers could transform a forest into a garden. However, before realizing their possibilities, many of Atwood'sprotagonists hit rock bottom, some even contemplating death as an escape. In Surfacing the narrator, fed upwith the superficiality of her companions, banishes them and submits to paranoia.

Everything I can't break … I throw on the floor.… I take off my clothes … I dip my headbeneath the water … I leave my dung, droppings on the ground … I hollow a lair near thewoodpile … I scramble on hands and knees … I could be anything, a tree, a deer skeleton, arock.

(Sf, 177-87)

She descends to madness, stripping herself of all the trappings of civilized society.

Although often consumed with thoughts of suicide in Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood's heroinesnever succumb. Instead they consciously assassinate their former identities through ritual deaths by water.Joan in Lady Oracle orchestrates a baptism in Lake Ontario. Pretending to drown, she relinquishes her formerlife. With sunglasses and scarf, she believes herself reborn, free to begin anew in Italy. Elaine Risley, after herbone-chilling encounter in the icy ravine in Cat's Eye, is finally able to ignore the taunts of her friends.Resurrected after two days in bed, a stronger Elaine affirms that "she is happy as a clam, hard-shelled andfirmly closed" (CE, 201) against those who would sabotage her; she announces, "I'm ready" (203). Fortifiedby a new body image with a tougher veneer and a protective mask, Elaine no longer heeds her formertormentors. She has sealed herself from further outrage and invasion.

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Marian's revelation in The Edible Woman is experienced at the precipice of a ravine, where she comments, "Inthe snow you're as near as possible to nothing" (EW, 263). Perhaps the fear of becoming one with theubiquitous whiteness of the landscape and forever losing herself motivates a stand. Similarly, Sarah in "TheResplendent Quetzal" forges a more determined persona after her trial by water. Instead of throwing herselfinto the sacrificial well in Mexico as her husband Edward fears, she hurls a plaster Christ child stolen from acrèche into the water. Believing the tribal folklore that young children take messages to the rain god and liveforever in paradise at the bottom of the well, Sarah pins her hopes on a representative facsimile that she hopeswill bring her peace for her lost child in the next world as well as rebirth, freeing herself from anxiety andguilt regarding the child's death.

Rather than resorting to the cool, cleansing agent of water, Grace Marks, the convicted murderess in AliasGrace, reconstructs her life through stories of her own invention. She fashions a creature always beyond thepale of her listeners' complete comprehension. As told to Dr. Simon Jordan, who has come to study Grace as apossible madwoman, her story ensnares him in a piteous romance. Grace appears outwardly as a humbleservant girl always at peril from salacious employers; however, when Grace ruminates in her private thoughts,she reveals that she is wordly wise, knowing how to avoid bad impressions and the advances of salesmen. Sheis knowledgeable, stringing along Dr. Jordan: "I say something just to keep him happy.… I do not give him astraight answer" (AG, 66, 98). After rambling from employ to employ in search of security, Grace constructs ahome for herself in her stories. Her words, gossamer thin, have the power to erect a façade, a frame that holdsher illusions together.

In an attempt to discover the missing parts and prove the veracity of Grace's story, her supporters encourageher to undergo a seance. Although she recognizes Dr. Jerome Dupont, the man who will orchestrate the event,as a former button peddler, she does not speak out. When a voice emerges from the hypnotized Grace, itproclaims, "I am not Grace" (403). As listeners, we ponder the speaker's authenticity. Just who our narratormight be, madwoman or manipulator, is cast into doubt. We can only be sure that the young innocent whoarrived on Canada's shores penniless and motherless has been altered by the necessity to cope with adestructive hierarchical society unsympathetic to an immigrant girl. Rather than persist and be tossed foreverat the whim of a wizened world, each saddened young girl moves to reconstruct her tarnished image of herself.

How?

"One way of coming to terms, making sense of one's roots, is to become a creator" (Sv, 181). Atwood'svictims who take control of their lives discover the need to displace societal values, and they replace themwith their own. In Lady Oracle Joan ponders the film The Red Shoes, in which the moral warns that if awoman chooses both family and career, tragedy ensues. Reflecting on childbirth, the narrator in "GivingBirth" (1977) hopes for some vision: "After all she is risking her life.… As for the vision, there wasn't one"(GB, 252; italics mine). Toni in The Robber Bride and Grace Marks in Alias Grace acknowledge that it is notnecessary to procreate. Each is more than her body. A grown-up Elaine Risley in Cat's Eye and the narrator inSurfacing accept motherhood, but not as an outcome of their gender that will foreclose the possibilities of acreative job. In fact, Roz in The Robber Bride is quite able to combine motherhood and a successful career.Dissatisfied with traditional knowledge, Atwood's women again turn inward, now avoiding masochistic traps,fully able to deviate from society's dicta. Freed from constraining fears, they locate talents, wings that freethem.

Rather than becoming cynical and devastated by society's visions and its perpetrators, Atwood's women forgeon. Roz, Toni, and Charis in The Robber Bride, who have been betrayed by Zenia, put their faith back intofriendship, allowing mutual support to sustain them. It is solid; it has been tested. They have turned to oneanother, cried and laughed, shared painful experiences, knowing that their friendship has endured in alabyrinth of twisted paths.

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Offred in The Handmaid's Tale also begins to reshape her world. She envisions a better place in her thoughts,recording her words on tape. She has hope. Consciously, she reconstructs her present reality, knowing she ismaking an effort to project an optimistic picture. She says, "Here is a different story, a better one.… This iswhat I'd like to tell" (HT, 234). She relates that her tryst with Nick the chauffeur, arranged by hercommander's wife, is caring and loving, enhanced by memories from her earlier life in order to conjure anoutcome of happiness. In the short story "Hair Jewellery" (1977) Atwood's narrator is an academic, a writerwho warns, "Be careful.… There is a future" (113). With the possibility of a new beginning, there is a chancethat life can improve. In Alias Grace Grace's fabrications in her stories provide an escape hatch, a version ofreality tailored to fit her needs. For both Offred and Grace, stories are ways of rebelling, of avoiding thetentacles of a society that would demean and remold them. Their stories are outward masks, behind whichthey frantically repair their damaged spirits. Each alters her world through language. Each woman speaks areconstructed world into existence, herself the engineering god of her own fate. Offred confides thathandmaids live in the spaces and the gaps between their stories, in their private silences: only alone in theirimaginations are they free to control their own destinies.

However, Atwood's protagonists inhabit not only their minds in secret, but also their bodies in the outsideworld. Joan, after her disappearance from Toronto in Lady Oracle, decides that she must return home andsupport the friends who have aided her disguise. In the past, just as she had wielded her bulk as a weapon, soshe has used her writing in order to resolve relationships. She has indulged in Gothic romances, positingscenarios; she has even played out roles with lovers in capes. In the end, she rejects her former craft ofsubterfuge: "I won't write any more Costume Gothics." Yet we must ponder her choice to "try some sciencefiction" (LO, 345).

Although it is difficult to extirpate behavior, women trust the methods that have helped them cope in the pastin order to alter the future. In The Edible Woman the womanly art of baking provides Marian with a way tofree herself: she bakes a cake that resembles herself. Offering a piece to Peter, she is controlling the tastyimage of a woman, allowing him and, more importantly, herself to ingest and destroy it. "It gave me a peculiarsense of satisfaction to see him eat," she says, adding, "I smiled comfortably at him" (EW, 281). Her pleasurein their consumption of her former self is symbolic of the death of the old Marian.

One might say that Marian's ingestion of her own image, Joan's adoption of science fiction, and both Offred'sand Grace's stories "in the head" do not promise new fulfilling lives, only tactics of escape. However, theirpersonal growth through conscious effort represents a means to wrest control of their lives from society andtransform their destinies. These women become manipulators rather than allowing themselves to bemanipulated.

In Cat's Eye Elaine Risley deals with the torment of her early life in her art by moving to Vancouver andexerting power in paint over the people who had condemned her. She creates surreal studies of Mrs. Smeath:"I paint Mrs. Smeath … like a dead fish.…One picture of Mrs. Smeath leads to another. She multiplies on thewalls like bacteria, standing, sitting, with clothes, without clothes" (CE, 338). Empowered by her success asan artist, Elaine returns to Toronto for a showing of her work, able to resist the pleas of her former tormentor,Cordelia, now a pitiful patient in a psychiatric facility. In a dream, Elaine surpasses her desire for revenge andoffers Cordelia Christian charity: "I'm the stronger.… I reach out my arms to her, bend down.… It's all right, Isay to her. You can go home" (CE, 419). Elaine is reinforced by the very words spoken to her in the vision thatsaved her life years before. Her work fosters her liberation. By projecting her rage outside of herself, sheconfronts her demons and exalts herself as a divine redeemer.

Conclusion.

"You don't even have to concentrate on rejecting the role of victim because the role is no longer a temptationfor you" (Sv, 39). The creative aspect that fortifies each woman enables her to control her life: it is the

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triumphant tool that resurrects each one. As artists, writers, friends, each ameliorates her situation and herworld, positively metamorphosing reality in the process. In societies tailored to the submission of females,Atwood's protagonists refuse to be pinned down to the measurements of the perfect woman. Instead, theyreconstruct their lives, imprinting their own designs in worlds of patterned fabric. Atwood has observed thatall writing is political: "The writer simply by examining how the forces of society interact with the individual… seek[s] to change social structure" (Sullivan, 129).

Literature has always been the place where journeys have been sought, battles fought, insights gleaned. Andauthors have always dallied with the plight of women in society: young or old, body or mind, mother orworker, traveler or settler. The woman has been the divided or fragmented icon who, broken and downcast,has gazed back forlornly at us from the pages of her telling tale. Margaret Atwood has reconstructed thisvictim, proving to her and to us that we all possess the talent and the strength to revitalize our lives and rejectsociety's well-trodden paths that suppress the human spirit. She has shown us that we can be vicariouslyempowered by our surrogate, who not only now smiles but winks back at us, daring us to reclaim our ownfemale identities.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1996. (AG)

——. Cat's Eye. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1988. (CE)

——. "Giving Birth." In Dancing Girls. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1977. (GB)

——. "Hair Jewellery." In Dancing Girls. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1977. (HJ)

——. Lady Oracle. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1976. (LO)

——. Life before Man. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1979. (LBM)

——. Surfacing. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1972. (Sf)

——. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto. Anansi. 1972. (Sv)

——. The Edible Woman. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1969. (EW)

——. The Handmaid's Tale. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1985. (HT)

——. "The Resplendent Quetzal." In Dancing Girls. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1977. (RQ)

——. The Robber Bride. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1993. (RB)

Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. Toronto. HarperCollins. 1998.

Atwood, Margaret (Feminism in Literature): TitleCommentary

EARL G. INGERSOLL (ESSAY DATE OCTOBER 1991)

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SOURCE: Ingersoll, Earl G. "Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye: Re-Viewing Women in aPostmodern World." ARIEL 22, no. 4 (October 1991): 17-27.

In the following essay, Ingersoll explores the postmodern implications of theautobiographical elements in Cat's Eye.

Although one finds evidence of postmodernism in the manipulation of popular forms such as the Gothic inLady Oracle and science fiction in The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye is Margaret Atwood's first full-fledged"postmodern" work. Always the wily evader of critics' pigeonholes, Atwood, in a recent interview,1 hasdenied the classification of her work as "postmodern." She expresses her own amused disdain towards thecritical-academic world for its attraction to "isms"2 in the discourse of Cat's Eye when Elaine Risley visits thegallery where her retrospective show is to be mounted. Risley dismisses the paintings still on display: "I don'tgive a glance to what's still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, postthis, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we're just a footnote to something earlier that was realenough to have a name of its own" (90). At the same time, this novel is clearly Atwood's most postmodern inits play with form—the fictional autobiography—and in its continual self-referentiality as a text.

At the centre of this postmodern text is Atwood's complex use of her own past. Few writers have spoken outso vehemently against readings of their work as autobiography. As her interviews indicate, she is very awarethat her audience is bent upon biographical readings of her fiction.3 With obvious amusement she tells how inquestion-and-answer sessions following her public readings she has often just finished disclaimingautobiographical roots for her characters when someone in her audience asks if she was over-weight as a childlike Joan in Lady Oracle or anorexic as a young woman like the unnamed narrator of The Edible Woman. ForAtwood, there are clearly gender implications here since, as she has argued, women have traditionally beenthought so imaginatively impoverished that all they could write about was themselves.

At the same time, although there is no Atwood biography—and she would be one of the last writers toauthorize one—she is among the most interviewed contemporary writers. Thus, as she herself must know,serious readers of her work are familiar enough with the outlines of her family and her early life4 to be enticedinto seeing the painter Elaine Risley—that stereotyped persona of modernist fiction—as at least partly herown reflection. Obviously she is not; and yet she is, despite the curious warning on the copyright page whichreads in part as follows:

This is a work of fiction. Although its form is that of an autobiography, it is not one … withthe exception of public figures, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purelycoincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confusedwith the author's.

It is easy enough to see that Atwood is attempting to protect herself from potential legal action generated byformer friends or associates who might choose to see themselves as models for the less appealing characters inCat's Eye. However, the attempt to deny any connection with Elaine Risley must encourage the reader tosuspect that the lady doth protest too much. In this way, part of the enjoyment of this text involves a shiftingback and forth between invention and the facts of the inventor's past.

Atwood has provided her audience with so many of those facts of her early life that it is next to impossible forthe informed reader to dismiss as coincidental the roots of Elaine's childhood in Atwood's. She has told herinterviewers, for example, about the summers she spent as a child living in tents and motels while the familyaccompanied her father, an entomologist, doing research in the Canadian north. On more than one occasionshe has described to her interviewers how she and her brother would help their father collect insects he shookfrom trees. In this context, given the writer's having gone on record as frustrated with her audience'smisguided autobiographical readings of her earlier work, it is difficult not to conclude that Cat's Eye is,

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among many things, a highly sophisticated expression of play with her audience's expectations. Atwood mayplead ignorance of contemporary critical theory, but she is undercutting the conventional notion thatautobiography privileges an autobiographical fiction as more truthful than other forms of fiction. She showsus in Elaine Risley, a painter/writer who may seem in a conventional sense to be exploring the truth of herpast but who in a truer sense is creating, or writing, a past as she chooses now to see it, rather than as it mighthave once existed.

The novel begins with a definition of time, justified perhaps by Risley's having returned to Toronto, her home,for a retrospective exhibition of her art. She dismisses linear time in favor of "time as having a shape …, like aseries of liquid transparencies.…You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimesthis comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away" (3). In the story she tells ofher youth, Elaine offers a retrospective of the woman she has been and the women who have been importantto her as she now sees herself and them. That past is very much seen through the cat's eye marble into whichElaine looked at eight and saw her future as an artist. The image of the cat's eye is central, since it represents aworld into which she has been allowed access; at the same time, it is a world of inevitably distorted vision.Thus, the truth is not an entity to which we struggle to gain access so much as a way of looking and, in theprocess, creating the text of that truth.

Elaine Risley's retrospective allows her to review the people and relationships that have been important to thefirst fifty years of her life. In reconstructing her past—or the critical years from age eight to youngwomanhood—Elaine Risley is in large part deconstructing that past. The consequences of thatdeconstruction—what turns out to be the novel itself—is a complicated series of transformations throughwhich the persona discovers that the past is only what we continue to reconstruct for the purposes of thepresent. And perhaps beyond that, Elaine Risley discovers that of all her relationships—with the opposite sexand with her own—the most important may have been the strange friendship with her tormentor/doubleCordelia. By the end of the narrative, the persona will have finally exorcised the spirit of an alter ego who wasperhaps primarily that, another self whom she no longer needs to fear, hate, or even love.

The focus of the early chapters is the very young Elaine Risley's struggle to find models in the two womenwho are crucial to her formative years. She begins her retrospective with her eighth birthday, a not surprisingage for the onset of consciousness. For Risley, like Atwood, this was the time of her move to Toronto, and forRisley at least the end of happiness. Through the move to Toronto, a backwater of civilization in the 1940s,but still civilization, Elaine as a child is suddenly forced to confront "femininity." Having lived in tents andmotels, she and her mother must don the costumes and the roles appropriate to their gender and put away theirunfeminine clothes and ungendered roles until the warm weather when they return to the North. OvernightElaine feels like an alien from another planet. The future of painful socialization is represented by thedoorway in her new school marked "GIRLS," the doorway which makes her wonder what the other onemarked "BOYS" has behind it from which she has been shut out (49).

We might expect Elaine to cherish the memory of a paradise lost of relatively ungendered life as a child innature. Instead, she feels guilty for being unprepared to operate in a world of mothers who are housekeeperspreoccupied with clothes and labour-saving devices. Although the mature Elaine mutes the resentment, thechild Elaine suspects that her mother has failed her as the role model needed to help her find her way in aworld of "twin sets" (54) and wearing hats to church. The young Elaine's inability to fault the mother sheloves forces her to internalize as guilt her sense of inadequacy. If she is suffering the pain of being out ofplace, it must be something that is wrong with her; certainly it cannot be anything wrong with the definitionof womanhood embodied in the mothers of her friends, Cordelia, Carol, but especially Grace Smeath.

Clearly Mrs. Smeath is the Bad Mother that Elaine suspects her own mother of being for not having preparedher for socialization. In the Smeath household, Elaine and her friends are involved in that socialization; theystudy to be future housewives by cutting out pictures of "frying pans and washing machines" to paste into

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scrapbooks for their "ladies" (71). A more important aspect of that socialization is represented by regularattendance at church. When the Smeaths invite Elaine to join them for the first of what eventually seems anendless series of Sundays, Atwood describes the interior of the church through the eyes of the young Elainewho might as well be a creature from Mars. One feature that becomes crucially important to Elaine are theinscriptions under the stained-glass pictures of Jesus—"SUFFER•THE•LITTLE•CHILDREN" (102)—and ofMary—"THE•GREATEST•OF•THESE•IS•CHARITY" (103).

Because she feels radically incapable of fitting into the world outside her home, Elaine becomes the victim ofCordelia's sadistic punishments for her incompetence as a student of womanhood. These punishments, whichrange from reprimands and shunnings to being buried alive, culminate in the scene of Elaine's almost freezingto death in a nearby ravine where Cordelia has thrown her hat. This is a ravine where "men" (51) lurk tomolest careless little girls. It is Elaine's victimization at the hands of other little girls, not those mysteriouslydangerous men, which leads her to the nervous reaction of peeling the skin off her feet and hands, almost asthough she is studying to become a child martyr by flaying herself alive. She is saved, she convinces herself,not so much by her own mother as by the apparition of the ultimate Good Mother, the Virgin Mary.

Mrs. Risley and Mrs. Smeath function then as variants of the Good Mother and the Bad Mother. Elaine'smother suspects that Cordelia and the other girls are tormenting her daughter, but she assumes that Elaine cantell her the truth and she never notices the marks of Elaine's flaying herself.

Mrs. Smeath, on the other hand, knows that Elaine is being tormented but does nothing. In fact, Mrs. Smeatheven knows that Elaine has overheard her saying that Elaine deserves to be punished for being at heart agraceless heathen. It is not until Elaine almost dies that Mrs. Risley acts. Somewhere down in the pool of thepast lurks the monster of resentment against this Good Mother who should have known and acted sooner.Mrs. Risley becomes the representation, like her husband, of the well-intentioned, virtuous, but not terriblyeffective liberal humanists who sense that evil exists but refuse to acknowledge it, since a knowledge of evilwould force them to find a place for it in their world.

Mrs. Smeath, on the other hand, is much easier for Elaine to deal with. Even as a child, Elaine can clearly seeMrs. Smeath's evil in the transparent world of that cat's eye which will be the emblem of her insight as anartist. She comes to see the crucial difference within Mrs. Smeath as a woman who professes to being aChristian—"SUFFER•THE•LITTLE•CHILDREN" and "THE•GREATEST•OF•THESE•IS•CHARITY"—yet believes that the greatest charity to little children who happento be "heathens" is to make them indeed suffer. And, it is very much to the point that the individual whofunctions as Elaine's Muse is Mrs. Smeath, not Mrs. Risley. This variety of the Bad Mother, more in line withFreud's reality principle, generates a whole series of paintings through which Elaine vents her anger, hatred,and malice. Mrs. Smeath as the bad mother may very well represent much of what she finds most despicablein the conventional notion of Woman. At the same time, it is an evil which generates art and it is that artwhich liberates her from a self enslaved in anger towards and hatred of that image of "Woman."

That same indeterminacy is evident in Elaine's bizarre relationship with Cordelia. When she declares herindependence, following Cordelia's move to another school, Elaine becomes powerful, assertive, verballyaggressive, and Cordelia fades into powerlessness, into the kind of silence which was Elaine's position earlyon in this power struggle veiled as a friendship. Elaine's enjoyment of a new facility with words, as though hertongue has been empowered by her earlier victimization, makes it clear how important the element of theretrospective is in this text. Told in a traditionally chronological fashion, Elaine's empowerment throughlanguage would have led the reader to anticipate that she would become a writer, rather than a painter.

In this symbiotic relationship, Elaine's friend/persecutor is given the name Cordelia. Most readers sense theirony in Atwood's borrowing the name of one of Shakespeare's innocent tragic heroines, but there are alsoimplications of a transfer being transacted here. In the years following the Second World War, King Lear

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became one of our most attractive cultural myths in part because Cordelia reminds us how the innocent areswept up in the destruction of war and civil disorder and perhaps also that the innocent embody theredemptive power of love. At the same time, it is the refusal of Lear's single faithful daughter to speak, just asmuch as her sisters' hypocritical flattery, which sets in motion the machinery of conflict and destruction bywhich she and her family are overwhelmed. In this sense, Elaine, perhaps following her mother's example, issomewhat like Cordelia, choosing silence and martyrdom rather than risk the anxiety and guilt ofself-assertion. Eventually, anger and resentment find their sublimated or socialized modes of expression, firstin her verbal assaults on the imperfections of others and finally in her art, so often a visualization of heranguish at the hands of her tormentors.

More than anyone else, Cordelia is the one from whom she must free herself by acknowledging not onlydifference but kinship. Cordelia is a "secret sharer." Like her readers, Elaine keeps expecting her formertormentor to show up at the gallery, the most appropriate ghost to appear in this retrospective. Cordelia,however, does not need to appear: Elaine has already exorcized much of the guilt, hatred, and anger generatedin her relationships with Mrs. Smeath and Cordelia through her art, conveniently brought together so that theartist, like her audience, can read this retrospective as a testimony to the transformative power of art. WhenElaine returns to the bridge, the power of her creative consciousness calls up an apparition of Cordelia fromthe deeps of that pool of time with which we began. She tells us:

I know she's looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a little, the face closed and defiant.There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my ownwrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; thesame fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia's; as they alwayswere.

I am the older now, I'm the stronger. If she stays here any longer she will freeze to death; shewill be left behind, in the wrong time. It's almost too late.

I reach out my arms to her, bend down, hands open to show I have no weapon. It's all right, Isay to her. You can go home now.

(443)

In a strange and unexpected sense, Cordelia has become her name. Just as Elaine earlier was rescued fromphysical death in the icy stream below this bridge, this time she acknowledges another variety of rescue. Sheconfirms what this retrospective has been moving toward all along—the recognition that her art has rescuedher from the spiritual death of a lifetime wasted in anger and resentment. Having recognized the power ofCordelia within herself, Elaine can at last release the Cordelia she has made to appear in the final hours beforeshe prepares to leave home again. Perhaps she recognizes also that she and Cordelia had identities less distinctfrom each other than it seemed in childhood, that each had been fashioning the other in the image of a self shecould not otherwise confront. Now Elaine herself can be a variety of the "Good Mother" and simply sendCordelia home before she freezes to death in "the wrong time" (443).

In the end, Cat's Eye is postmodern in several interrelated ways. Atwood offers the informed reader the lure ofa few well-known features of her own childhood and then proceeds to invent an autobiography which is theexperience of Elaine Risley, a character who may bear only the most superficial similarities. Autobiography,even when intended, is obviously enough only another form of fiction. By offering us, in the words of thenovel's preliminary note, a work of fiction whose form is that of an autobiography, she gives us a text whichconfirms that truth by showing how Elaine Risley has invented herself, constructed an autobiography, throughher art. Elaine is even allowed to be amused by her critics' (mis)readings of her painting, one of whom writesof Risley's "disconcerting deconstruction of perceived gender and its relationship to perceived power,

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especially in respect to numinous imagery" (406).

In addition, this text raises questions about the representation of women, about writing as a woman, aboutautobiography, and about mothers and daughters. As Barbara Johnson has argued, autobiography and itsreflection in autobiographical fiction are a supplanting of the mother, a kind of giving birth to oneself throughthe creation of the text. Using the classic text of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Johnson argues that what awoman writer (the very term "woman writer" has traditionally been conceived of as a "freak of nature")creates has conventionally seemed a "monster." Johnson asks: "Is autobiography somehow always in theprocess of symbolically killing the mother off by telling her the lie that we have given birth to ourselves?"(147). In telling us the story of her life, Elaine Risley foregrounds Cordelia as a monster only to show how shefreed herself from Cordelia to become as a young woman monstrous in her own way, and appropriatelythrough language, with her "mean mouth" (247). She offers us in Mrs. Smeath, the Bad Mother, whom shesubsumes psychologically in her art, a kind of monstrosity which exorcizes the monstrous complicity of Mrs.Smeath in her persecution by Cordelia and the other girls. And she offers us in Mrs. Risley, the Good Mother,a failed guide to the intricacies of femininity in the outside world and, therefore, a mother who must be killedoff before Elaine can achieve selfhood at fifty.

Why, we might ask, has it taken Elaine so long to give birth to herself, the sort of act managed by the PaulMorels and the Stephen Dedaluses of modernist fiction by their twenty-fifth birthdays? Part of the answer isobvious in the question. Elaine Risley is a female rather than a male character. In this context, a goodanalogue is Virginia Woolf who was well aware that she could not begin work on To the Lighthouse, dealingin part with the loss of her mother, until she was in her forties. As we have learned from sociologists likeNancy Chodorow, women must struggle to achieve a sense of self separate from others, in part because theyare "mothered" or nurtured primarily by women (93). In this vein, Chodorow argues, mothers see themselvesas continuous with their daughters:

Because they are the same gender as their daughters and have been girls, mothers ofdaughters tend not to experience these infant daughters as separate from them in the sameway as mothers of infant sons. In both cases, a mother is likely to experience a sense ofoneness and continuity with her infant. However, this sense is stronger, and lasts longer,vis-à-vis daughters.

(109)

In these ways, the retrospective of her art is partly an invention to allow Elaine to achieve a sense of self,distinct from both Mrs. Risley and Mrs. Smeath. It is also a belated recognition of her mothering herself as thechild and the young woman Elaine as well as her mothering of Cordelia whom she now can release from herhatred and her love. Having completed this retrospective of her life and given birth to herself, Elaine canacknowledge the separateness of her "daughters"—both the girl she was and Cordelia as her "other." At therisk of increasing Atwood's anxiety with yet another autobiographical reading of her fiction, it might berecalled that Cat's Eye is the revision and completion of a manuscript she began in her mid-twenties (Hubbard205) and finished as she approached her fiftieth birthday. Despite Margaret Atwood's disclaimer that the novelis not autobiographical, it is a text performing itself as a text, a text of the author's own struggle to achieveselfhood as a woman and as an artist.5

Notes

Unpublished interview with Deborah Weiner and Cristina Bacchilega, 1987.1. Atwood indicates her disdain of deconstruction: "What it also means is that the text is of noimportance. What is of interest is what the critic makes of the text. Alas, alack, pretty soon we'll begetting to pure critical readings with no text at all" (Interview, Hancock 208).

2.

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Atwood says: "I am very tired of people making autobiographical constructions about my novels, allof which until that time [Life before Man] had been first-person-singular novels. And I just get reallytired of answering those questions: Are you the person in Surfacing? Are your parents dead? Did yourfather drown? Have you ever been anorexic? Have you ever been crazy? All those autobiographicalquestions" (Interview, Draine 376).

3.

Atwood tells Joyce Carol Oates the story of her family following her father into the Northern bush(Interview, Oates 70). She tells Elizabeth Meese about rebelling against her parents and going tochurch with her friends (Interview, Meese 182). In the Bonnie Lyons interview, she talks about theculture shock of moving to Toronto as a girl and suddenly being forced to wear dresses (Interview,Lyons 221).

4.

This article is based upon a paper presented in the Margaret Atwood Society session at the ModernLanguage Association Convention, Washington, D.C., December 1989.

5.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Cat's Eye. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

——. Interview. With Betsy Draine. Interviews With Contemporary Writers: Second Series 1972-1982. Ed. L.S. Dembo. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983. 366-81.

——. Interview. With Geoff Hancock. Ingersoll 191-220.

——. Interview. With Bonnie Lyons. Ingersoll 221-33.

——. Interview. With Elizabeth Meese. Ingersoll 177-90.

——. Interview. With Joyce Carol Oates. Ingersoll 69-73.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeleyand Los Angeles: U of California P, 1978.

Hubbard, Kim. "Reflected in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye." People Weekly 6 Mar. 1989: 205-06.

Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990.

Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

CAROL OSBORNE (ESSAY DATE 1994)

SOURCE: Osborne, Carol. "Constructing the Self through Memory: Cat's Eye as a Novel ofFemale Development." Frontiers 14, no. 3 (1994): 95-112.

In the following essay, Osborne analyzes Atwood's use of the circular return to past events toallow her protagonist in Cat's Eye develop and establish an identity.

The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that isremembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living andthe dead.

—Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings, 114

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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series ofliquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but downthrough it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimesnothing. Nothing goes away.

—Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye, 3

It is against blockage between ourselves and others—those who are alive and those who aredead—that we must work. In blocking off what hurts us, we think we are walling ourselvesoff from pain. But in the long run the wall, which prevents growth, hurts us more than thepain, which, if we will only bear it, soon passes over us. Washes over us and is gone. Longwill we remember pain, but the pain itself, as it was at that point of intensity that made us feelas if we must die of it, eventually vanishes. Our memory of it becomes its only trace. Wallsremain. They grow moss. They are difficult barriers to cross, to get to others, to get toclosed-down parts of ourselves.

—Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar, 353

Recovering memories of the past leads Margaret Atwood's protagonist in Cat's Eye to her own recovery. Inhaving Elaine create a complete sense of herself through art, dream, and memory, Atwood revises thestructure of the traditional bildungsroman and kunstlerroman, privileging what feminist psychoanalytictheorists have posited as a feminine way of achieving self-knowledge. Instead of following a linear plot thatemphasizes separation from the past as the mark of maturity, Atwood creates a circular structure emphasizingthe protagonist's return to the scenes of her childhood and her reunion, if only in her imagination, with keyfigures from her past.

In her exploration of memory and the importance of the past for her protagonist, Atwood is part of a trend incontemporary fiction, represented particularly in the works of African-American women writers. Such aparallel is noteworthy, for Elaine identifies with members of minority groups in Canada as she faces thepressures of conforming to white, protestant, middle-class standards. Atwood's alternate plot structure,emphasis on memory, and attention to the pressures placed on minorities link her project in many ways withthe concerns of such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones.

The traditional bildungsroman traces the development of the male protagonist in a linear fashion to the end ofadolescence when he declares himself free and independent. In Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan, for example, Stephen first appears as a young boy being initiated into language as his father tells himstories of the moo-cow and baby tuckoo. The plot progresses chronologically, with a wave-like pattern ofepiphanies ending each chapter, until Stephen is able to turn his back on family, nation, and religion "to forgein the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race."1 His gestures are of renunciation; he seversall ties so that he can "fly by those nets" of "nationality, language, religion"2 to become the independent artistwho "remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence,indifferent."3 Such a structure emphasizes the male's Oedipal phase in which the boy defines himself incontrast to the mother and in alliance with the father. Stephen rejects his mother and Ireland, "the old sow whoeats her farrow," in favor of his symbolic father, Daedalus, the artificer he addresses in the last lines of thenovel.4

In contrast to this model, many contemporary women writers are adopting structures of circular return.5 Theseplots, in emphasizing a woman's need to define herself relationally, reflect the differences in male and femaleidentity formation noted by such feminist scholars as Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and MargaretHomans.6

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In structuring Cat's Eye, Atwood mimics the wave-like motion of Joyce's Portrait, but in a much morecomplex way. The book begins with Elaine's return to Toronto on the occasion of a retrospective art show.The return to her childhood home, along with the review of her art, causes her to reconstruct the past,assembling the fragments, as she has subconsciously assembled fragments of her past in her paintings, onlythis time making sense of them by confronting the memories directly and arranging them in some kind oforder. In each section, the reader travels along the same path. Beginning each part of the book in the presenttense with Elaine in Toronto, Atwood then switches to the past tense when the surroundings spark a particularmemory of Elaine's childhood.

ON THE SUBJECT OF…

ATWOOD'S USE OF FOOD IMAGERY IN HER WORKS

For all Atwoodian heroines the search for self-hood is symbolized by the search for something satisfying toeat. Initially, although Marion eats, she eats poorly. She lives on snack food, frozen meals, and TV dinners.Marion is hungry throughout The Edible Woman but cannot find anything to satiate her. Whatever she eatsmakes her sick. In Surfacing the narrator's search for physical sustenance in the natural world becomessymbolic of her lack of spiritual sustenance in the social world. At the end of Lady Oracle Joan has nothing toeat except some biscuits which are "hard as plaster and tasted of shelf" and "some cooked pasta, drying outalready, and a yellowing bunch of parsley." She has failed to escape her old life and her old self, and theabsence of proper, nourishing food indicates that, at the end of the novel, Joan is still trapped in the role ofvictim. In Bodily Harm Rennie seems to spend the entire novel searching for something decent to eat. All herfood is awful. In hospital the food is "unbelievable. Green Jello salad and a choice of peas or peas"; on theplane the butter is rancid and the beef leaves a taste of rotting flesh in her mouth; in the hotel there is nochoice and all the food is unappetizing and unnourishing… In prison, the guards put salt in the tea.Throughout Cat's Eye Elaine never eats substantial or nutritious food. The sections of the novel set inmodern-day Toronto trace her search for something to eat. When she wakes up in Jon's flat she finds thekitchen devoid of food. She decides she needs "to go shopping and get some decent food, organize.… I willbuy or anges, yogurt without jam. I will have a positive attitude, take care of myself, I'll feed myself enzymesand friendly bacteria." Her intention to eat health food signals her desire for a positive sense of self.Nevertheless, she is never able to provide herself with the food she knows she needs. She wanders aroundToronto moving from one location of food to another without eating… She eats leftovers and eggs mashed upin teacups. She eats "haphazardly now, snack[s] on junk food and take-outs without worrying about balancedmeals." Because of her poor self-image, she is unable to nourish herself. She abuses herself with a poor diet.When she arrives at the gallery or the opening of her exhibition nobody is there because they have gone out toeat. Elaine stands alone and unnourished. After the party, Charna invites her to dinner but she declines. By theclose of the novel Elaine has not rediscovered Cordelia and so has not been able to redefine her relationshipwith her old tormentor by breaking the strong bond between victim and persecutor. It is possible to interpretthe scene in which Elaine returns to the ravine and conjures up a vision of Cordelia as a child as the point ofreconciliation, the point at which Elaine finally forgives her old foe and the interdependent positions of victimand victor are transcended. However, the moment of epiphany is equivocal, and at the end of the novel Elaineis still eating mashed-up eggs in teacups.

All the heroines interpret the world in terms of food and negotiate their way through life using food. Forwomen, eating and non-eating articulate that which is ideologically unspeakable. Food functions as a mutedform of female self-expression but, more than that, it also becomes a medium of experience. Food imagerysaturates the novels and becomes the dominant metaphor the heroines use to describe people, landscape, andemotion. As Sally Cline has pointed out, women appropriate food as a language because traditionally theyhave always been associated with food. In addition, food is one of the few resources available to women. As aconsumer surveyor, Marion is constantly submerged in a food environment, and the other heroines have themajor responsibility for cooking and shopping. Women control food, Cline insists, because they cannot

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control their lives. Given the patriarchal nature of language and its inability to accommodate femaleexperience, it is unsurprising that women choose an alternative, non-verbal form of communication. Thefailure of language, the inadequacy of words as a mode of communication, is a recurrent theme in Atwood'swork.

Parker, Emma. Excerpt from "You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of MargaretAtwood." Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 3 (fall 1995): 349-68.

Then the reader becomes completely submerged in the past event when Atwood begins narrating this episodein present tense. These moments from the past progress chronologically, following Elaine's development fromage eight to the point of her mother's death a few years before the art show.

With this alternate structure, Atwood explores the nature of memory, showing that "nothing goes away"7 andthat "there is never only one, of anyone."8 Unlike the male protagonists of bildungsromans who separatethemselves from earlier experiences, Elaine finds her identity through consciously going back to andaccepting her past and the people in it, and embracing herself as she was and is. In this way, Atwoodprivileges the relational needs of a female protagonist; although Elaine's childhood makes it difficult for her toform actual relationships with other women, her inner concerns reflect a desire for connection rather thanseparation from others.

Atwood also departs from the traditional structure of female bildungsromans such as Jane Eyre and TheAwakening. By making her protagonist middle-aged, secure professionally as a minor artist, and already awife and a mother, Atwood avoids the traditional pattern in which the point of maturation is marked by theheroine's marrying, giving birth, or finding a career. Her protagonist will not have to surrender her newlyfound sense of self at the end in exchange for security in marriage or society. The reader trained to expect aman to enter the plot, providing a fountain of wisdom through which the woman discovers herself, will bedisappointed. No man in Cat's Eye is given such power; husbands, lovers, and even a male psychologist donot provide the insight that Elaine must achieve on her own. By making Elaine already secure in job andfamily, Atwood shows that these aspects of a woman's life do not necessarily lead her to a betterunderstanding of herself. While Atwood does follow the female tradition in making Elaine's developmentinternal, that withdrawal into the inner life is a healing one and does not lead to madness or death as was truewith earlier protagonists.9

In an interview with Geoff Hancock in December of 1986, Atwood speaks of how intriguing it is for a writerto make changes in traditional forms. Once a writer understands a form and how it works, she says, she can"move beyond the conventions to include things not considered includable. [Therefore] the kind of materialthought to be suitable for novels is constantly changing."10 In an interview conducted in November of 1989,she speaks specifically of Cat's Eye, saying that she is dealing with an area of life, the world of girls age eightthrough twelve, that is not "regarded as serious 'literary' material."11 Atwood becomes interested in storiesbecause she notices a blank, an area that has not been written about, or because she thinks of a narrative formthat could be approached from a different angle.

Because Atwood is consciously altering the traditional structure of the bildungsroman in Cat's Eye, sheaccentuates notions of male and female difference within the text. Elaine communicates with images, findsherself often without words, and is able to use language to her benefit only later in her development. On theother hand, her brother, Stephen, has the power to control the narrative when they play war and to write in thesnow with his pee while she stands idly by. (Atwood here seems to be playing with Freud's association ofpenis and pen.) Stephen becomes more abstract and theoretical as he develops, moving "away from theimprecision of words"12 to a reliance on numbers, while she is grounded in concrete images.13 Even Elaine'sart differs from the abstract paintings of her first husband, Jon, not serving to dismember, as his statues do, butto re-form, using memories from her past. Most importantly, Elaine, during her prepubescent period, shows

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the longing for relations, friendships, and mother-daughter bonds, that marks female development as differentfrom male.

It is important to note what triggers Elaine's retrospection in terms of female development before tracing hermaturation process. Elaine has reached middle age, her children have grown up, and she is having troubleaccepting herself as being as old as the women that used to seem so foreign to her and Cordelia, her childhoodfriend. She reveals her discomfort with her mid-life status by saying that she feels everyone else her age is anadult and she is in disguise. When passing the cosmetics counter in Simpsons during her stay in Toronto, shewishes she could mummify herself, "stop the drip-drip of time, stay" the way she is, but she is forced to seeherself through the eyes of the young saleslady as a middle-aged woman, and she thinks of Macbeth's lines,"My way of life / Is fall'n into the sere and yellow leaf."14

Her retrospective is a way for her to deal with this new stage of her life, a way of filling the void, overcomingthe inertia, and allaying the threat of madness. As she has done earlier in her life, Elaine projects her ownconcerns onto the image of Cordelia. When she pictures Cordelia, it is as a woman who is fighting against thedeterioration of the body or trapped in an iron lung, in a state of inertia. This projection mirrors the emptinessElaine feels during her stay in Toronto, especially when she tries to call her husband, Ben, in BritishColumbia. He is not at home, and she hears her own disembodied voice on the answering machine. Thenothingness that has threatened at two other key moments in her life seems to be approaching. At this time,Elaine does not walk away from the sources of her discomfort as she has in the past. Such movements towardseparation fit the male model of maturation. Instead, she works to reintegrate, to re-member the variousprojections of herself so that she can feel that she has a full identity. She recognizes, through her picture onthe art show poster, that she has reached a point where she has an identity, a face that can be defaced, butinternally she must realize this identity by filling the void with memories she has blocked out earlier in herlife.

Atwood's depiction of Elaine's development agrees with the theories of aging discussed in KathleenWoodward and Murray Schwartz's Memory and Desire. Apparently, aging "generates a multiplicity ofself-images," and through "varieties of playing" and "uses of illusion," we can connect past experiences into acontinuous narrative that helps us deal with old age.15 According to Schwartz, "The space of illusion can failto achieve its integrating aims and yield instead to a regressive search for imaginary unities of youth. Or wemay be confronted with a violent return of the repressed, a rupture of all sense of continuity."16

In the same volume, Kathleen Woodward suggests that as we age, "we separate what we take to be our realselves from our bodies."17 She believes "the recognition of our own old age comes to us from the other, thatis, from society. We study our own reflection in the body of the others, and as we reflect upon thatreflection—reflection is of course a metaphor for thought—we ultimately are compelled to acknowledge thepoint of view of the Other which has, as it were, installed itself in our body."18 This recognition makes usexperience what Freud called the uncanny, as we recognize our possible future absence, our nothingness, ourdeath. As a result, we react against the images in mirrors and the images we see of ourselves in others.19

Carol Gilligan also speaks of mid-life as being "a time of return to the unfinished business of adolescence."20

When facing the "issues of separation that arise at mid-life," women are vulnerable due to the confusion ofidentity and intimacy at the crucial stage of adolescence when they formed a notion of themselves as theyrelated with others.21 These theories explain why Elaine, when encountering middle age, needs to re-establishher own identity, to integrate past experience into her present sense of self. At first she seems to be looking forthe imaginary unities of her youth as she searches for Cordelia in Toronto. As she stays there, scenes she hasrepressed surface. She sees herself in mirrors and is surprised by the sight; she sees herself in the figures ofladies begging on the streets and answers to their needs; and she plays with illusion, in seeing herself throughthe eyes of others, even those who seemed so oppressive to her as a child. She is able, through her play withimages and with memory, to find continuity, a continuity seen in the narrative that structures the novel and

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that determines the arrangement of paintings in the art show. But she must work through the unfinishedbusiness of her adolescence, and that involves dredging up memories of a very difficult time in herdevelopment.

In her concern with memory, with the need for her protagonist to confront the past in coming to know herself,Atwood most resembles contemporary African-American novelists. In Corregidora, Gayl Jones portrays Ursarepeatedly recalling her grandmother's words until she understands their meaning; in The Temple of MyFamiliar, Alice Walker stresses how vital recapturing the past is for the personal growth of her protagonists,particularly Suwelo; and in Beloved, Toni Morrison depicts Sethe working through the memories of hertraumatic escape from slavery and the murder of her daughter so that she can let go of the past. Likewise,Atwood presents Elaine undergoing her own form of psychotherapy in gradually uncovering, for the readerand for herself, the scenes of her childhood.

Atwood, Walker, Morrison and Jones all portray their protagonists' encounters with parental figures,particularly the mother, but the African-American writers place more importance on the interactions betweenthe generations. Storytelling, within the texts, becomes not only a tribute to a cultural tradition, but also an actof community building as characters strive to keep the cultural past alive. While the African-American writersuse oral narrative in their works as a tool for uncovering what has been repressed in a character'sconsciousness, Atwood depends more on Elaine's paintings and her visit to the scenes of her youth to triggerher memory. Few words are spoken, for Atwood is more concerned with Elaine's personal understandinggained through private reflection and is perhaps more skeptical of finding a common cultural past within themetropolis of Toronto, even among individuals who are of the same race, class, and gender.

Cat's Eye differs from the work of contemporary African-American women writers in another significant way:Elaine's memories are restricted to her personal past, and her encounters with the figures of her past arepresented in a realistic manner. While Elaine may think she sees the characters from her past as she walksaround Toronto, her interactions with these figures are always explained as occurring in her mind. Encounterswith the dead come only in her dreams, in her invented narratives, in her reviewing of her art, and in thememories sparked by her return to the scenes of her past.22

In commenting on Walker's The Temple of My Familiar, Ikenna Dieke writes, "Recollective art is a rhetoricalstrategy of relocating the lost self, of seeking and uncovering an inner tapestry of identity, not merepsychological identity, but the exterior contexts—social, political, and personal—that make up the human selfin all its complexity."23 He could easily be speaking of Atwood's project in Cat's Eye. Atwood may restrictherself to the personal recollections of her protagonist in this work, but the forces that have shaped Elainereflect much about social and cultural conditions in Canada, particularly in the coercive nature of the whitemiddle class, so dominant in the 1940s and 1950s.

Throughout the novel, the middle-aged Elaine expresses her hatred for Toronto. Even though it may nowproclaim itself a multicultural mecca, a "world-class city," offering diversified restaurants, boutiques, andrenovated districts, underneath she recognizes the same old city, with "street after street of thick red brickhouses, with their front porch pillars like the off-white stems of toadstools and their watchful, calculatingwindows. Malicious, greedy, vindictive, implacable."24 Elaine always feels lost in Toronto, even in 1989,because to her it still represents middle-class conformity and intolerance.

During her first eight years while her father is a forest-insect field researcher and the family leads anunconventional, nomadic life in northern Canada, Elaine longs for real girl friends, for a relationship withsomeone like herself. Then her father takes a position as a professor in Toronto, and Elaine is able to becomefriends with other girls her age. She finds herself an outsider. Despite being the same race, class, and genderas the girls who befriend her, Elaine painfully discovers how different she is from the rest of middle-classsociety. She has no religious training since her father, a scientist, does not believe in organized religion. She

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knows nothing about the material trappings of middle-class culture: pageboy haircuts, Eaton catalogues,chintz curtains, and twin sets. By comparing her home to the homes of her friends, she recognizes that herfamily is not as well-off financially. Finally, the customs and rituals of little girls seem strange to her becauseshe has grown up playing with and freely emulating her closest companion, her brother, without worryingabout society's gender restrictions.

When Elaine first moves to Toronto, Carol Campbell befriends her. Besides offering companionship, Elaine,as an exotic oddity, serves as a means of enhancing Carol's own status. Carol treats Elaine as she would amember of a primitive tribe, marveling at Elaine's ignorance of the objects, rituals, and ways of life of theToronto middle class. But the differences that amaze Carol at first soon become the targets for attack whenother girls join the group.

Elaine begins playing a part so that she can fit in with her girlfriends. Caught between her own tendencies toexpress herself as her brother would and her society's expectations for her to be delicate, modest, andconforming, she loses her own voice and identity, copying the behavior of her friends and remaining silentwhen her views do not agree with theirs.

During the summer following her introduction to the society of little girls through Carol Campbell and GraceSmeath, Elaine stands outside her parents' window, imagining that they do not exist. She becomes critical ofher parents and begins searching for replacement figures for them. Chodorow explains that as an adolescentgirl begins to reject her parents, she longs for a best friend "whom she loves, with whom she is identified, withwhom she shares everything.…Her friendship permits her to continue to experience merging, while at thesame time denying feelings of merging with her mother."25 The mother substitute Elaine takes is Cordelia,who has joined the group by the time Elaine returns. Attracted by Cordelia's wildness and her potential to besubversive in defying the conventions of society, Elaine soon finds that Cordelia can get away with beingdifferent because she is older and wealthier. Instead of providing an outlet for Elaine, Cordelia becomes theembodiment of the culture's intolerance, directing the other girls in their persecution of Elaine.

Cordelia is an abusive mother figure who reinforces Elaine's sense of difference at every turn, making herconstantly feel that she is not normal, not like other girls. We learn later that Cordelia feels alienated in herhome environment because she is not as gifted as her two sisters are. Cordelia's treatment of Elaine, then,mirrors her own family's treatment of her. In tormenting Elaine, Cordelia is simply acting out of the lonelinessand rejection she feels within her own family, even echoing her parents' words in her reprimands of Elaine.

Despite the ill treatment, Elaine doesn't betray her "friend," so strong is her need for relationship. Elaine fearsbeing cast out forever from her circle of friends. Her only defense becomes her silence, and she grows muteeven to herself. Even though she tries her best to fit into this new social group, attending church with GraceSmeath, submitting herself to the harsh treatment of Cordelia, and even reaching the point of negating herself,Elaine never feels comfortable conforming in this manner. Elaine shows her continued sense of alienationwhen she states that she likes cat's eye marbles best because they are "the eyes of something that isn't knownbut exists anyway … like the eyes of aliens from a distant planet."26 Symbolically, Elaine removes the cat'seye marble, a sign of her secret difference, from her purse when she goes to church.

In church, Elaine feels perhaps the greatest pressure to conform under the watchful eyes of Grace. At firstwhen Elaine notices the pictures of Jesus surrounded by children of all different colors who look at Him withthe same worshipful gaze Elaine has directed toward Grace, she feels included, taken in. Yet she also senses aproblem with society's desire to privilege what is white over that which is colored. As the Sunday school classwatches slides in which knights with very white skin battle evil, Elaine sees through this illusion, so to speak,noticing the light switches and the wainscoting beneath the projected image. And on White Gift Sunday,Elaine is disturbed because the gifts are "made uniform, bleached of their identity and colors.… They lookdead."27 The color white in both circumstances is important, for it introduces a racial element that is

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reinforced not only by Elaine's identification with ethnic and racial minority figures, but by the association ofElaine with the color black throughout the novel, an association that will be discussed in more detail later. AsToni Morrison notes in Playing in the Dark, characters of color are often used to define, through theirdifference, the implications of whiteness.28

The individuals portrayed in Elaine's painting "Three Muses" all share with Elaine an outsider status inToronto. She includes these figures in her portrait because as a child, not only is she treated kindly by eachone, but she identifies with all of them in their alienation from the dominant culture. First, she sees in herfather's associate from India, Mr. Banerji, a creature like herself, "alien and apprehensive."29 She notices hischewed nails, the misery underneath his smile, the pressure he feels living in a society so foreign to him. LikeElaine, Mr. Banerji is never totally accepted in Toronto. After suffering through years of racial discriminationin the university's promotional system, he finally returns to India.

The second muse is Mrs. Finestein. Elaine enjoys baby-sitting for her son, Brian, since he is uncritical, unlikeher friends. But when Grace and Carol point out that Brian is a Jew, revealing their prejudice against thepeople they call the killers of Jesus, Elaine fears her own ability to protect the child and stops baby-sitting.Still, she feels there is "something extra and a little heroic" about Brian because he is a member of a groupthat has suffered under Hitler's rule.30 She later feels the same dimension of heroism added to her owncharacter when her painting "White Gift" is attacked at the art show by a conservative middle-class womanoutraged by its blasphemy.

The third figure with whom Elaine identifies is her teacher, Mrs. Stuart. Elaine enjoys Mrs. Stuart's classmuch more than Mrs. Lumley's. Instead of indoctrinating the students about the superiority of British cultureover the culture of the colonies, Mrs. Stuart, a Scot, stresses the positive aspects of foreign lands. Mrs. Stuart,an exile herself, gives Elaine hope, for she offers her images of wonderful foreign places where she may beable to escape the stifling atmosphere of Toronto.

While Elaine is a white Canadian, not ostensibly a member of a minority in Toronto, Atwood encodes racialdifference within the text to accentuate Elaine's feelings of oppression. As Elaine surrenders power over herown self-definition, Atwood associates her more and more with the color black while her oppressors,Cordelia, Carol and Grace, are aligned with white images. For example, Elaine derives her strategy forsurviving the taunts of her friends through two sources, both associated with blackness. When she discovers adead raven one summer, she notices that no matter how she pokes it, it does not feel a thing. She notes itscolor, black like a hole, and reflects that no one can get at it, no matter what they do. When she subsequentlyblocks her own feelings, she becomes like the dead raven. After fainting at the Conversat, she discovers aneven better way of escaping from her tormentors. By holding her breath until she faints, a sensation shedescribes as blackness closing in around the edges of her eyes, she is able to avoid Cordelia's reprimands.

When Cordelia and the other girls bury her, Elaine has no image of herself in the dark hole, just a square ofblackness, because at this point, she essentially loses her identity. Elaine learns to protect herself by not being,not feeling, not talking. In picturing Cordelia pushing her off a cliff, drawing a self-portrait that shows herfigure as a small speck of light in the middle of blackness, and finally finding some type of escape throughfainting, losing consciousness, and going into a state of nothingness, Elaine works harder and harder to negateherself.

This negation continues until Elaine is able to find a mother figure who can replace the harmful Cordelia andthus fulfill Elaine's pre-Oedipal need to form an attachment with someone like herself. Her need for a mothersubstitute becomes exacerbated when her own mother's miscarriage and depression distance her from Elaine.At this point, by dreaming that Mrs. Finestein and Mr. Banerji are her parents, Elaine reveals her perceptionthat these characters, as members of ethnic minorities, have more in common with her and thus promise moresupport as parents than her own family is able to provide. In the same dream, Elaine pictures her mother

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giving birth to twins, one gray and the other missing. She sees herself as one twin, gray and without identity,and the double, the role Cordelia serves, is missing. At this point, Elaine realizes, through her dreams, theneed for a new figure to whom she can become attached.

The figure that replaces Cordelia is an imaginary one that Elaine chooses in deliberate opposition to thesociety responsible for the erasure of her identity. When Elaine overhears Grace's mother and aunt discussingher, she realizes that despite her efforts to conform, they still view her as a heathen, and more importantly,that the adult society sanctions the abuse she receives from her peers for being different. At this point, inrebellion against the God Mrs. Smeath and her society seem to control, she chooses her own private icon, theVirgin Mary, a figure always in the background in Grace's religion. Elaine rebels against the rules of the"onion church" by aligning herself with an opposed minority, the Catholics, and kneeling as she prays to thisalternate mother figure.

In the scene in which these prayers are answered and Elaine finds the strength to break with Cordelia, blackand white imagery again plays a crucial role. Cordelia makes an angel in the white snow and her face appearsas a white oval right before she throws Elaine's hat into the ravine. These images of whiteness contain asinister aspect, however, for the imprint of Cordelia's fingers in the snow makes the angel appear to haveclaws, and the chilling ice of the ravine threatens death for Elaine. What comes to her rescue, in contrast to thewhiteness, is not the traditional image of Mary, with blue dress and crown, but the figure of Mary dressed inblack. Elaine, then, aligns herself with minorities, both literally and figuratively, in order to overcome theoppression of white, middle-class Canadian society.

Once Elaine is able to create a mother substitute, Mary, with her imagination, she can break free of Cordelia'sdomination. Elaine, released from her silence, begins to seize control through language, becoming the meanmouth that can frighten Cordelia through her stories. Earlier, Cordelia had seized narrative control by tellingof her family, the dead people in the ravine, and witches in eggshells, but now Elaine relishes her power overCordelia by telling her she is a vampire. The figures associated with her power over Cordelia, Mary and avampire, come again to Elaine's mind as she returns to Toronto. Regretting wearing her powder-blue joggingsuit to the interview at the gallery, she wishes for a Nun black or Dracula black outfit to make her feel morepowerful. Before reunion with the images of her past, she is still daunted by the judgmental atmosphere sheencounters in the gallery, and she looks to black disguises to aid her.

While the imaginary mother substitute, Mary, allows Elaine to escape Cordelia's domination, this vision doesnot offer a permanent resolution to her relational needs. In the next stage of her development, Elaine avoidsothers who resemble her, for she still fears facing herself. Not until she can make a connection with herdouble, with the image of Cordelia, will she feel comfortable with herself or with those who reflect what sheis.

In art school, then, Elaine stays away from other girls and looks for acceptance from male students. Securelydressed in black, living in a neighborhood of immigrants, she fits into the art school crowd. Elaine seems tofollow traditional lines of development at this point, finding in her art teacher, Joseph, a father figure whopromises that although he is beginning with nothing, he can "finish" her. Joseph, called D. P. (DisplacedPerson) by the other art students because he is an Eastern European refugee, needs Elaine's support as much asshe needs his. Once again, Elaine aligns herself with someone else who feels alienated from the culture. Evenher intimate life with Joseph is associated with a foreign world, for they always have sex on his Mexicanblanket.

The need in Joseph, and later in Jon, does not frighten Elaine the way that need in other women does, for it isthe need of someone different from herself. With Cordelia and with her fellow art student, Susie, whoparallels Cordelia and is conflated with her in Elaine's dream, Elaine is more frightened, for she sees herselfmirrored in both. Susie and Elaine are both dating Joseph and thus parallel. When Elaine meets Cordelia

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again, her image is mirrored in Cordelia's sunglasses, and Elaine realizes that she is acting her role inrelationships with men in her life just as much as Cordelia is acting on stage. Elaine refuses to help either ofthese women, to form bonds with them, for that would mean confronting herself. She does not become friendswith Susie, and she later refuses to aid Cordelia in leaving the mental institution.

Once again, as Elaine had negated herself to fit into the female world of the little girls, she negates herself infitting into the roles defined by the men in her life. By first allowing Joseph to mold her, and then later inconforming to Jon's expectations when she moves in with and then marries him, she loses a sense of her ownidentity. She becomes silent, feels vacant, and upon discovering that she is pregnant, feels once again that sheis a black square that is totally empty. Indeed, neither Joseph nor Jon sees Elaine; instead, they project ontoher the image of their need. Elaine's understanding of how each man views her becomes obvious in herpainting of them. In this painting, Elaine, with a cat's eye marble head, appears as the model for Joseph andJon, yet their portraits are not of her. The symbolism in this piece of art shows that Elaine is capable of seeing,but not of being seen.

Elaine's unresolved problems with her past lead her eventually, in considering her life a ruin, to attemptsuicide, longing for death as she did in the ravine. The voice that pushes her in this scene is Cordelia's, forCordelia is the first to make Elaine feel as though she is nothing. Once Elaine realizes that Cordelia's voicewill not go away as long as she stays in Toronto, that the echoes of the past will continue to haunt her, shefinds the strength to leave. Within the childhood world of young girls and within the structures of marriageand motherhood, Elaine fails to find her own identity because of the pressure middle-class society places onher to conform. She flees to British Columbia, she says, not only to mark the end of her marriage, but also toescape the city of Toronto.

In her new locale, through her painting, Elaine once again regains control of her life, and she is even able toremarry, but she is unable to find connections with women because her relations with the women earlier in herlife have not been resolved. The act of separating oneself from the past, the act that culminates the malebildungsroman, does not lead to resolution in Atwood's novel. Elaine claims that she is good at leaving andnot looking back, but while such a separation may allow her to heal some of her wounds, her completeself-knowledge occurs only when she is able to look back, to return and confront the past.

It seems important that Atwood does not portray Elaine as finding herself through feminist collectives ormotherhood. Perhaps Atwood is rebelling against the myths that maintain that a woman can get a better senseof herself through organized groups of women who share the same experiences of oppression, or throughbecoming a mother and thus satisfying her longing, according to Freud, for a penis. Repeatedly, Atwoodemphasizes Elaine's alienation from other women—those in her art group, in her consciousness-raising group,and in the gallery holding her retrospective show—for all these women seem as judgmental to her as her firstfemale friends, Cordelia, Grace, and Carol.31

The third stage of Elaine's development parallels patterns Diana George notes in the work of female poets.Using Kathleen Woodward's theories on female aging, George concludes that "an encounter with one'sparents (and in the case of aging women poets, especially the mother) may permit the poetic self to movetoward wholeness, even if not to achieve it."32 In Atwood's portrayal of Elaine's return to her mother, she alsoparallels trends in the work of African-American authors. Joyce Pettis, in discussing works by Paule Marshall,Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison, notes that often in black women's texts, "Characters travel back to theircultural origins or to the origin of their maternal ancestors in search of bringing coherence to fragmentedlives."33 In the last episode of the chronological narrative that structures Cat's Eye, Elaine returns to Torontoto be with her dying mother. Together, they uncover layer upon layer of the past in an old trunk, eventuallycoming to the red purse, associated in Elaine's mind with the saving figure of Mary.

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Earlier in the narrative after Elaine describes the figure of Mary rescuing her from the ravine, she tells ofvisiting churches wherever she goes, searching for statues of the Virgin Mary. Though she approaches eachwith hope, she is always disappointed—until she and Ben travel to Mexico. There, in a foreign environmentfar away from Toronto, she sees a statue of Mary, dressed in black, the only statue of Mary that seems real toher. Recognizing Mary as "a Virgin of lost things, one who restored what was lost," Elaine wants to pray toher but does not because she does not "know what to pray for."34 At this point in her life, when she hasescaped from her past and is beginning a life with Ben, she recognizes the importance of the symbol of Mary,but she does not yet realize what the finder of lost things can restore to her. Once she and her mother beginuncovering the past by going through the trunk, however, Elaine realizes that what was lost were thememories of her past, the sense of self of which Cordelia and others had robbed her.

As the items in the trunk and her mother's recollections help Elaine recover repressed memories, she is able tolook into the last item she finds, the cat's eye marble, and see her life entire. Even though her mother isunaware of the importance of these artifacts, they enable Elaine to confront the events of the past and herself.Elaine, now that she is a mother, can understand and forgive her own mother for not protecting her againstCordelia. She realizes that her mother was concerned but powerless, unable to control the social pressure thathad been so traumatic for her daughter. Elaine's growth, it seems, depends not so much on her mother'sactions, then or now, but on Elaine's efforts to deal with her past during her final trip to Toronto.

Elaine, throughout her life, has resisted being a spectacle, being the subject of either her own gaze or the gazeof others. She does not like Joseph to stand behind her; that reminds her of Cordelia walking behind andjudging her. She avoids mirrors, declaring that women do not want to see themselves. Indeed, she resists thewhole idea of returning to Toronto for the art show and of staying at Jon's because it is "a silly thing to do, tooretrospective," but the retrospective art show forces Elaine to look again not only at her painting as it reflectsher life, but also at herself and her past.35 The cat's eye marble once gave her power to see without feeling sothat she could separate herself from others; now that this separation has prepared her for a new kind ofbonding, she is granted the ability to see with feeling, through her painting and her dredging up of oldmemories. In looking again at her portraits of Mrs. Smeath, Elaine notices that what she always believed wereself-righteous eyes were actually the eyes of a displaced person who shared her own fear and loneliness.

As Elaine imagines seeing herself as a child through the eyes of Mrs. Smeath, she changes her opinion of thiswoman. Rather than reacting to her with the accustomed hatred, wishing to exact an eye for an eye, she reactswith sympathy and empathy. By imaginatively placing herself in the position of another, Elaine creates thebonds that had been impossible to form earlier in her life. After reviewing the paintings that depict herunconscious grappling with the past, Elaine, drunk and disappointed with the show, cries, making what shefeels is a "spectacle" of herself, even though no one is watching. She has become a spectacle for herself, ameans of seeing and the object being seen.

Finally, Elaine is able to overcome the haunting figure of Cordelia by recognizing that the fear and lonelinessand pain she felt as a child were the emotions Cordelia experienced as well. When she returns to the ravine,she no longer has to depend on imaginary figures of Mary to help her, for she has become the older figurenow, capable of seeing Cordelia from a different perspective. Atwood dispenses with the traditional symbol ofmaternal care and artistic inspiration by having Elaine dismiss the vision of Mary as being "nobody andnothing."36 Memory makes the vision return in absolute clarity, but a mature Elaine recognizes that she directsthe images of Mary and Cordelia; they no longer control her. By reaching out to comfort the imaginary figureof Cordelia, Elaine shows that she has reached an acceptance, not only of her past and the figures in it, but ofherself.37 That is the reason that, as she turns to look down the path, the image of Cordelia is no longer there.In her place is a middle-aged woman. Elaine has come to accept herself, her present position in life, by takingthe inner journey through her past and renewing the relationships from which she had previously run away.

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The ending of Cat's Eye is not entirely positive, for Elaine still feels the loss from failed relationships. But asshe flies home, Elaine realizes that she has regained a sense of herself and that the echoes of her past, like thestars above her, provide her with enough light to see by. Atwood's heroine, unlike the protagonists of earlierbildungsromans, completes her growth in self-knowledge. She does not go mad, she does not commit suicide,and she corrects her earlier actions of separating from others. She achieves full maturity by reforming thepre-Oedipal bonds in accepting, if only in her imagination, the other who is like herself.

In Cat's Eye, Atwood shows that Elaine, in search of self-definition, is hampered by the pressure middle-classsociety places on her to conform to established roles. By establishing her kinship with minority figures, Elainebecomes empowered enough to break away from the coercive influence first of Cordelia and then of Jon andJoseph. But not until Elaine is able to reconnect with these figures in her past does she feel whole. In returningto Toronto, Elaine first makes peace with Jon. Then, through looking again at her art, reviving old memories,and summoning visions of Cordelia and Mrs. Smeath, Elaine is also able to reconnect with the abusive figuresof her childhood, recognizing that they felt the same alienation and loneliness as she did. Atwood shows thatgrowth for individuals and for societies comes when people are able to empathize and connect with those whodiffer from them while also embracing themselves.

In having Elaine return to her childhood home to participate in a retrospective art show, Atwood, like many ofher contemporaries, stresses the importance of memory in the maturation process. The bildungsromanevolves, as a result of this change in emphasis, from a linear structure to a circular one that illustrates even inits form the interaction of past and present in a protagonist's psyche. Earlier in her life, when Elaine severedher ties with Cordelia and Jon, she used the imagined mother substitute, Mary, and her painting to help herescape from her past. But such avoidance left her development incomplete so that at middle age, she mustovercome her depression by returning to Toronto. There, she fully develops her identity by playing withimages of herself as seen in the bodies of others and by embracing those images both as they appeared in herchildhood and as they appear now. While growing up under the pressures of white, middle class conformitymade Elaine's childhood traumatic, she is able to find emotional release by returning to the scene of thistrauma and learning, in her imagination, to identify not only with those who shared her sense of alienation, butalso with those who were her oppressors.

Notes

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in The Portable James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin(New York: Viking Press, 1946), 526.

1.

Joyce, Portrait, 469.2. Joyce, Portrait, 483.3. Joyce, Portrait, 470.4. Gayle Greene, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1991), 15-16.

5.

While I am aware of the objections made to Chodorow's work as universalizing the experience ofwhite women, I find her theories useful in discussing Elaine's development since Elaine fits the modelon which Chodorow's observations are based. I do not wish to suggest by my use of Chodorow,however, that all women, regardless of socio-economic, ethnic or racial difference, follow this modelexactly. Nor do I believe that this plot structure is restricted only to female authors and femaleprotagonists. Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides proves otherwise. I simply believe that women raisedwithin the family structure Chodorow describes tend to have greater relational needs than men andthat contemporary women authors often adopt the circular plot structure as a means of writing againstthe earlier tradition of the bildungsroman.

6.

Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 3.7. Atwood, Cat's Eye, 6.8.

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Elizabeth Abel, Elizabeth Hirsch and Langland, The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983), 9-13.

9.

Earl G. Ingersoll, Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990),194-195.

10.

Ingersoll, Margaret Atwood: Conversations, 236.11. Atwood, Cat's Eye, 3.12. Claudine Hermann's observations of differences between male and female conceptions of space andtime come to mind here. She links women's being cut off from space and subjected to time withoutany means of recuperating it through action to an absence of grammar, an inclination toward poetry.She quotes Professor Anastasi of Fordham University: "On the whole, girls are better than boys insubjects that rely primarily on verbal activity, memory, and perceptual speed. Boys are better insubjects involving numerical reasoning, spatial aptitudes, and in certain informational subjects likehistory, geography, or the sciences in general." Claudine Hermann, "Women in Space and Time,"New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books,1981), 173.

13.

Atwood, Cat's Eye, 119-120.14. Murray M. Schwartz, "Introduction," Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis, ed.Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 3-5.

15.

Schwartz, "Introduction," 3-5.16. Kathleen Woodward, "The Mirror Stage of Old Age," Memory and Desire:Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis, ed. Kathleen Woodward and Murray M. Schwartz(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 104.

17.

Woodward, "The Mirror Stage," 104-105.18. Woodward, "The Mirror Stage," 109-110.19. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 170.20. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 170.21. In Surfacing, Atwood uses more of the techniques common to Walker and Morrison, for in this novel,Atwood deals with the way in which one culture, from the United States, threatens to obliterateanother culture, that of the Canadians, especially the native Indian population of the North. As Lissie'smemory, in extending through many generations in her various incarnations as animal and human,connects Walker's characters with their cultural past, Atwood's protagonist in Surfacing goes beyondher own personal past in using Indian cave painting as clues to her father's disappearance and infollowing Indian ritual to revert to a more animalistic state in which she has visions of her deadparents. In her protagonist's interaction with the dead, Atwood uses a similar technique to the oneMorrison employs in Beloved.

22.

Ikenna Dieke, "Toward a Monistic Idealism: The Thematics of Alice Walker's The Temple of MyFamiliar," African American Review 26/3 (Fall 1992); 509.

23.

Atwood, Cat's Eye, 14.24. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 138.

25.

Atwood, Cat's Eye, 67.26. Atwood, Cat's Eye, 132.27. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).28. Atwood, Cat's Eye, 138.29. Atwood, Cat's Eye, 143.30. Gayle Greene argues in Changing the Story that Cat's Eye is a misogynist text reflecting the currentbacklash against feminism. I disagree. I feel Atwood is merely attacking the assumption that womenreadily connect because of their common experience.

31.

Diana Hume George, "'Who Is the Double Ghost Whose Head Is Smoke?' Women Poets on Aging,"Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis, ed. Kathleen Woodward and Murray M.Schwartz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 143.

32.

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Joyce Pettis, "'She Sung Back in Return': Literary (Re)vision and Transformation in Gayl Jones'sCorregidora," College English 52/7 (November 1990): 787-799.

33.

Atwood, Cat's Eye, 212.34. Atwood, Cat's Eye, 16.35. Atwood, Cat's Eye, 422.36. Note the difference between this image and the image at the end of Portrait when Stephen becomesthe "spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus," turning away from Emma, his mother, and his friends toembrace "the white arms of roads" and to be alone. Joyce, Portrait, 525.

37.

Atwood, Margaret (Feminism in Literature): Further Reading

Criticism

Blakely, Barbara. "The Pronunciation of the Flesh: A Feminist Reading of Margaret Atwood's Poetry." InMargaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System, edited by Sherrill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir, pp. 33-51.Vancouver, Can.: University of British Columbia Press, 1983.

Examines the notion of identity in Atwood's poetry.

Bouson, J. Brooks. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels ofMargaret Atwood. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.

Draws on feminist and psychoanalytic theory to examine political and psychological linksamong Atwood's novels.

Coad, David. "Hymens, Lips, and Masks: The Veil in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." Literatureand Psychology 47, nos. 1-2 (2001): 54-67.

Analyzes the political symbolism of veils in The Handmaid's Tale.

Cooper, Pamela. "Sexual Surveillance and Medical Authority in Two Versions of The Handmaid's Tale."Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 4 (spring 1995): 49-66.

Examines the surveillance of women in The Handmaid's Tale, arguing that the film version ofthe novel forces the audience to be complicit in the surveillance.

Davey, Frank. Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics. Vancouver, Can.: Talonbooks Ltd., 1998.

Discusses Atwood's development of a formal feminist poetics throughout her canon.

Deery, June. "Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood's Body of Knowledge." Twentieth Century Literature43, no. 4 (winter 1997): 470-86.

Contends that Atwood's representation of women's experience draws heavily from theprinciples of modern physics.

Klarer, Mario. "Orality and Literacy as Gender-Supporting Structures in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid'sTale." Mosaic 28, no. 4 (December 1995): 129-42.

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Examination of Atwood's portrayal of the oral tradition in The Handmaid's Tale as a politicaltactic in which orality is used to uphold gender roles and stereotypes.

Nicolson, Colin, ed. Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. New York: PalgraveMacmillan, 1994.

Thirteen essays examining Atwood as a woman writing about women.

Nischik, Reingard M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000.

Collection of essays on a wide variety of topics in Atwood's works as well as her influence onliterature and culture. Contains an interview with Atwood, examples of her artwork andphotographs, and a bibliography.

VanSpanckeren, Kathryn, and Jan Garden Castro, eds. Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Carbondale andEdwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.

Collection of essays with a primarily feminist grounding. Includes an autobiographicalforeword by Atwood, an interview, and a moderated discussion with students.

Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood's Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson, Miss.: University Press ofMississippi, 1993.

Examines Atwood's interpretive use of fairy tales as transformative for women.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Atwood's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the GaleGroup: American Writers Supplement, Vol. 13; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 12, 47; Beacham'sEncyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 1; Bestsellers, Vol. 89:2; ContemporaryAuthors, Vols. 49-52; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 3, 24, 33, 59, 95; ContemporaryLiterary Criticism, Vols. 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 15, 25, 44, 84, 135; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; ContemporaryPoets, Ed. 7; Contemporary Popular Writers; Contemporary Women Poets; Dictionary of Literary Biography,Vols. 53, 251; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: CanadianEdition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied, Novelists and Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0;Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Novels; Feminist Writers; Literatureand Its Times, Vol. 5; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Novels forStudents, Vols. 4, 12, 13, 14; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 8; Poetry for Students, Vol. 7; Reference Guide to ShortFiction, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 3, 13; Short StoryCriticism, Vols. 2, 46; Something about the Author, Vol. 50; Twayne's World Authors; World LiteratureCriticism; and World Writers in English, Vol. 1.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Introduction

Margaret (Eleanor) Atwood 1939–

Canadian novelist, poet, critic, and short story writer.

Since the publication of her first collection of poetry, Double Persephone, in the early sixties, MargaretAtwood has been recognized as an outstanding poet. The publication of The Edible Woman several years later

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initiated her reputation as an important novelist—a reputation confirmed by her feminine quest novel,Surfacing, judged by many to be a contemporary classic. Although Atwood writes well in either form, mostcritics maintain that her true gift lies in poetic expression because of her spare, controlled, and direct style.

As a spokesperson for the culture and psyche of her native Canada and, also, for the feminist point of view,Atwood frequently uses dual themes and images. A favored combination is the search for identity coupledwith a journey motif, especially a journey into the wilderness, such as the one outlined in an early collectionof poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Atwood advocates a return to a simpler, more natural way of life,in order to shed the roles imposed upon people by commercial culture. She aims to find the real, hidden selfand to regain the lost past. This attempt to break out of role-playing, survive the accompanying pains, andestablish relationships without illusions, is the basis for Dancing Girls and Other Stories and the novel, BodilyHarm. A recent collection of poetry, True Stories, also emphasizes the importance of self, bolstered by theinstinct for survival. But despite her often solemn subject matter, Atwood infuses her writing with satiric wit,and both The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle are regarded as comic novels.

Although most of Atwood's writing has been widely acclaimed, there is one point upon which many criticsagree: that her characterizations lack depth. Her males in particular are stereotypical, representing onlynegative and destructive elements. In addition, critics note that the constant re-use of her themes, images, andnarrative styles has tended to make her work somewhat predictable. Nevertheless, such techniques as directaddress, dramatic monologue, and the use of personal and historic events allow Atwood to achieve a uniquelypersonal style and voice. She has the ability to present the ordinary in extraordinary ways, giving the readernew options for reevaluating those things previously taken for granted.

(See also CLC, Vols. 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 15; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52; and Contemporary Authors NewRevision Series, Vol. 3.)

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): R. P. Bilan

Margaret Atwood's first collection of short stories [Dancing Girls] … centres on the relationships betweenmen and women…. Atwood writes mainly of the struggles between men and women, of painful failures andof equally painful readjustments. Atwood's women tend to suffer the most in these relationships; their malefriends have affairs, or simply leave them, and the women have to shore up their defences just to get by….[Atwood's stories] range in tone from cool detachment, to suppressed hysteria, to the lightly ironic andhumorous. And Atwood's considerable ability as a poet is often evident in the stories in the vividness ofphrasing and imagery. The use of suggestive imagery to convey meaning is in fact one of the most distinctivefeatures of the best stories—'Under Glass' and 'Polarities,' for instance.

By the standard of Atwood's own best fiction—Surfacing, that is—Dancing Girls is a reasonably good, butnot major work. It may be unfair or even inappropriate to compare a collection of short stories with a novel,but none of the stories has the reach or depth of Surfacing. Further, many if not most short-story collectionsare of uneven quality, and Atwood's is no exception; her stories, it is true, do not differ radically in quality,but distinctions between them can be made. The stories of sexual politics, nearly all told in the first personfrom the woman's point of view, achieve varying degrees of success. 'Under Glass,' for instance, is successfulbecause the narrator is fully individualized, and, even as she considers that ultimate defence of Atwood'sheroines, withdrawal and a retreat from all pain, she shows an appealing sense of humor. In 'The Grave of theFamous Poet,' on the other hand, the central situation is simply never brought to life. The story portrays thetypical Atwood battle: the characters fight for the role of victim, establish a truce, resume the battle. Theformat is familiar, but we never really see the characters; they never become individualized, realized, alive.(pp. 329-30)

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'The Resplendant Quetzal,' one of the finer stories in the book, has a mellow tone unusual in Atwood, andwhile the story may lack the sheer emotional power found in Atwood's presentation of the savage hostilitybetween David and Anna in Surfacing or in the bitter warfare of the lovers in Power Politics, her balanced,sympathetic portrayal of the problems of both the husband and the wife has a compensating gentleness,humaneness. Atwood, however, occasionally presents her tales of men and women in a much lighter manner.In one story she creates the voice of an unsophisticated working-class woman who is recounting her rapefantasies; another more or less comic tale focuses on a rather ordinary, not particularly attractive girl whoseonly moment of glory comes when she is suddenly 'courted' by a strange foreigner. These stories successfullyachieve what they attempt but they are light, and they are not the essential Atwood; they relate to the world ofLady Oracle rather than to that of Surfacing.

Sexual politics, of course, is only one of Atwood's major concerns; extreme alienation, both from society andfrom oneself, as in 'The War in the Bathroom,' is another. Atwood is expert at mapping out feelings ofalienation, but there is an aspect of her dealings with these experiences that needs to be questioned. Theproblem that arises can be seen most obviously in 'A Travel Piece.' The main character increasingly feels asense of unreality about her own life and waits longingly for some 'real' event to occur. When the plane she ison crashes into the sea, even the accident doesn't seem real to her until some of the other survivors in the raftthink of slitting the throat of one of the others to get his blood to quench their thirst. This act, or the possibilityof it, the woman takes to be definitive of 'reality.' Although there is an obvious distance between Atwood andthe main character, we can't say that this is simply the character's view of reality; the third-personnarrator—Atwood—seems, to some degree, to share it. Certainly in other stories we encounter the sense thatonly the grotesque, the bizarre, the disordered are 'real.' Undoubtedly much of the strength of Atwood's workcomes from the intensity with which she explores this vision of reality, but it is in itself a narrow, partialvision.

In 'Polarities,' which I think is the best story in the book, Atwood to some extent goes beyond this limitedvision…. Atwood doesn't sentimentalize her portrayal of Louise, who is presented as being virtually 'mad,' butalso partly a visionary, and the story at least points to possibilities beyond a totally alienated view of reality.And the story doesn't merely portray and accept alienation, inner paralysis, but diagnoses it. The main malecharacter, Morrison, makes some effort to help Louise but he's trapped by his essential inability to respond, byhis 'chill interior, embryonic and blighted.' In a stunning ending Atwood gives us a surrealistic image of theland that expresses the emptiness of Morrison's emotional life…. Here we have an example of Atwood's art atits best, and, in her analysis of alienation, of her insight. (pp. 330-31)

R. P. Bilan, "Letters in Canada: 'Dancing Girls'," in University of Toronto Quarterly (©University of Toronto Press 1978; reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press).Vol. XLVII, No. 4, Summer, 1978, pp. 326-38.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Tom Marshall

Atwood is a swimmer. The familiar Canadian "underwater" motif, the notion of the self and Canada itselftrapped underwater like Atlantis, occurs in the first poems of her first full collection and is repeatedthroughout her work, reaching a kind of climax in the novel Surfacing. The notions of inner order and outerspace, garrison and wilderness, the issue of perspective and of the ways of seeing also recur, as they do in thework of Avison, Page and numerous other writers. Like Al Purdy and others, she has a concern for ancestorsand for evolution, even for the geological past. There is the familiar Canadian identification with animals anda sense of fierce native gods. There is both social satire and an interest in the metaphysics of landscape, as inthe work of P. K. Page…. [But] Atwood utilizes Canadian traditions in an apparently more conscious waythan most writers of her generation. She taps Canadian culture's most important concerns. And she brings totraditional materials her own sensibility, her own way of saying things: the famous cool, apparently detached

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tone, the canny disposition of loaded words in short, punchy lines without much heightening of rhythm. It is astyle highly distinctive both in its limitations and its strengths. Atwood attempts, for better and/or worse, andcertainly to her immediate advantage with readers, to clarify what is complex and difficult, to get right to whatshe regards as the essential point.

Metaphysics and metaphor: the search for ways in which to find one's whole self, to find identity with one'sbody, one's instincts, one's country—in this emotional pioneering Atwood moves to the centre of nationalconcerns. (pp. 154-55)

The Journals of Susanna Moodie enlarges upon the national theme; as a poem sequence it enlarges Atwood'sscope and is highly successful, indeed an advance on her two earlier books [The Circle Game and TheAnimals in That Country], which were uneven though often striking. In the person and experience of SusannaMoodie the poet finds an appropriate objective correlative for her own thoughts and emotions. The book isboth personal and objective, both nationalist and universal in its metaphysical enquiry….

Procedures for Underground presents family poems, the deep well of childhood memories, the bush, Canadaunder water, the descent into the earth to recover the wisdom of the spirits of place, alienation in cities, travel,and marriage. It is a quieter book of individual poems with a quieter and, for some, a more enduring appealthan the one that follows. Power Politics is, as they say, something else again—an account of grim sexualwarfare that restores all the Atwood bite and mordant humour. It makes surreal black comedy out of thehistoric difficulties of women and the destructive games, projections and illusions of modern lovers in a worldbuilt on war and the destruction of the environment. But in You Are Happy, which can be regarded as a kindof sequel, the Atwood protagonist moves forward toward a new country of relationship without false hopes,promises, defences, evasions, mythologies. The singularity, the uniqueness of things, of people, in the flux:this is something nameless, beyond language, as in Surfacing. One gives oneself to the flux. (p. 157)

Her first two novels, The Edible Woman and Surfacing, are enlargements upon the themes of her poems. Ineach of them a young woman is driven to rebellion against what seems to be her fate in the moderntechnological "Americanized" world and to psychic breakdown and breakthrough. But they are quite differentin tone and style.

The Edible Woman is delightfully, wickedly funny. It is feminist, certainly, but it provides a satirical accountof the absurd ways of Canadian men and women. It is kindly in its irony: never so fierce in its assault as isPower Politics. There is anger but there is also good humour. The major characters are satirized—theyrepresent various undesirable ways of existing in the modern consumer society—but they are also seensympathetically as human beings, even the pompous Peter and the pathetic Lothario Leonard. They are notgrotesque caricatures like David and Anna in Surfacing. (p. 158)

[The Edible Woman] is a largely successful comic novel, even if the mechanics are sometimes a little clumsy,the satirical accounts of consumerism a little drawn out. It is skilfully written, shifting easily from first to thirdperson and back again to convey the stages of Marian's mental travels, her journey into self-alienation and outagain. Of Atwood's three novels it is least a poet's novel….

Surfacing introduces a young woman far more fearful, desperate, and alienated from her true self than MarianMcAlpin. The atmosphere is correspondingly tense and eerie, for this is a psychological ghost story like TheTurn of the Screw, in which the ghosts, the young woman's parents, are lost parts of herself that she mustrecover. She has been unable to feel for years, even though she had a good childhood, much of it spent on anisland in northern Quebec. She believes (as the reader does for much of the book) that she has been marriedand divorced, abandoning a child. Her encounter with the gods of place and, apparently, with the corpse of herdrowned father when she returns to the scene of her childhood reveals the truth—that she had in fact had atraumatic abortion—and this drives her to a healing madness, a descent to animal simplicity and a rejection of

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the destructive, mechanical "civilization" that has wounded her and of all its works, even words. (p. 159)

The first-person point of view combined with the evocative description of setting makes it possible forAtwood to get away with a certain shallowness of characterization; only the narrator seems at all complex.But this is not something that interferes with the powerful flow of the novel as one reads it.

Still, it is evident here, as it is more seriously in Lady Oracle, the third novel, that characterization is notAtwood's strong point. And it is revealing that much of her fiction, including her shorter fiction, employs thefirst person. Everything must be filtered through the mind of the Atwood protagonist, who is usually supposedto be both shrewd and confused, a combination that is possible but which tends in certain cases to put somestrain on the reader's credulity. In this respect The Edible Woman is a more balanced novel than Surfacing,and yet it is Surfacing, the poet's novel, that more powerfully engages the reader's emotions.

In Surfacing the repeated imagery of bottled, trapped and murdered animals builds powerfully to the keyscene in which the father's corpse and the aborted foetus are encountered…. In Lady Oracle, however, asimilar patterning of images, metaphors, and ideas fails to compensate for the fuzzy personality of thenarrator, even if this last is part of the author's point. Nor is there the power of language found in the latterpart of Surfacing. Indeed, the female-picaresque Lady Oracle is decidedly thinner than the other novels andlacking in over-all shape or focus, even if it is in places very interesting and enjoyable and even if it offerssome rewarding insights into the need for and nature of art and the fantasy life. It is just that all of this seemstoo intellectually worked out, too far removed from any very deeply felt or imagined experience of the kindthat "stood in," so to speak, for any very searching exploration of human character in Surfacing. Though aserious emotional resonance seems quite clearly intended, it is not achieved, mainly because recurrent poeticimagery is finally no substitute for depth of characterization. This is the major limitation of Atwood thenovelist. Also, the reader may suspect that Atwood is indulging herself a little in this book, even to the extentof succumbing somewhat to the old-style "woman's fiction" she parodies…. (pp. 160-61)

It is in Surfacing, where a considerable emotional power is allowed to develop (as in The Journals of SusannaMoodie, another excursion into "large darkness" and out again), that Atwood's vision and gifts may be seen tobest advantage. Here she has given the theme of quest into darkness and the journey to wholeness, a themethat she shares in recent Canadian fiction with Klein, LePan, Watson, Cohen, and MacEwen, its most overtlyCanadian expression, and this is no doubt one reason for her considerable success at a time when this greatand universal theme has a special significance for a rapidly developing and "surfacing" Canadianconsciousness. (p. 161)

Tom Marshall, "Atwood Under and Above Water," in his Harsh and Lovely Land: The MajorCanadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition (© The University of BritishColumbia 1979), University of British Columbia Press, 1978, pp. 154-61.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Sherrill Grace

Margaret Atwood has remarked that her poetic tradition is Canadian…. [Her nearest of kin] are James Reaneyand, possibly, Jay Macpherson. (p. 129)

Influenced by Frye, both Reaney and Macpherson believe in the power of the imagination to createautonomous poetic worlds. Atwood, while celebrating the imagination, often in disturbing images that recall,for example, Reaney's The Red Heart … or Macpherson's Welcoming Disaster …, is aware of its dangers. Inher poetry physical reality constantly assails imagination, challenging its proud autonomy so that the poetmust adopt an ironic eye and an ambivalent attitude towards both realms. Atwood further resembles Reaney inthe emphasis she places upon perception, although she is again less willing than he to trust the eye of the

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beholder, the individual's inner vision. Her use of myth owes much to Reaney's theories in Alphabet,…because Reaney provided a model for the intersection of immediate experience and myth. Macpherson's TheBoatman, published in 1957, was one of Canada's first series of poems artistically shaped as a book instead ofa collection. With Double Persephone, The Circle Game, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and to a lesserdegree in other volumes. Atwood creates comparable unity—poems inter-related through theme and image tocreate a structural and imaginative whole.

Atwood's differences from Reaney and Macpherson underline her affinities with poets like Al Purdy andDennis Lee. Both write about personal experience and historical event in a style that relies less on myth,symbol, or imaginative structure than on colloquial speech rhythms and statement. Though fascinated by thepower of imagination and the independence of a verbal universe, Atwood remains committed to social andethical perspectives in her art. As well, her style is one of direct personal address or dramatic monologuewhich involves a deft use of colloquialisms; even the most ordinary words, "this" or "but", carry startlingimportance. Because the theory of art as mirror or map, outlined in Survival, is basic to her writing, oneshould admire the beauty of the mirror, the colour and complexity of the map, without neglecting the socialrelevance of poem or novel, the connection between art and life.

This connection indicates the central dialectic and tension in Atwood's work, the pull towards art on one handand towards life on the other. How does one capture living forms in imaginative and verbal structures? Howdoes the artist work from life to art and still reflect life? Atwood asks these questions repeatedly…. Thetension that exists between art and life informs the subject/object dialectic as well. Atwood's artistic worldrests upon a Blakean world of contraries and William Blake is, I suspect, the most significant non-Canadianinfluence upon Atwood's imagination. (pp. 129-30)

More important than Atwood's relationship to other poets is the development of her own voice and style.While a cool, acerbic wit, ironic eye and laconic phrase are characteristic of her poetry, she continues toexplore new forms. Up to and including You Are Happy, the combination of detachment and irony coupledwith cut-off line and duplistic form dominates her poetry. Selected Poems marks a plateau in thisdevelopment. (p. 131)

As a fiction writer Atwood's tradition is tenuous. Her novels are best read in the context of twentieth-centuryfiction where first person narrators, ironic self-reflexive narratives, and symbolic or even mythic structures,are common. There are, however, elements that place her within a broadly-defined Canadian tradition:Atwood's emphasis on the past and the individual's need to be part of a social context, as well as her treatmentof victimization and struggle for survival, are common features in [Canadian] novels. In The Edible Womanand Lady Oracle, Atwood consciously draws upon the tradition of Canadian satire from Haliburton toLeacock and Davies. This satire is heavily ironic and self-critical, while affirming fundamental humanvalues…. (pp. 131-32)

Although Atwood's published fiction is polished and enjoyable, it is as a poet that she is truly distinctive andcommanding. There are several reasons for this distinction between the power of her poetry and prose. Someof these are matters of voice and style. The sense of challenge and tension so effective in the poems is harderto maintain in a narrative. Moreover, the ironic exploration of self, a constant Atwood theme, is moresuccessful in the poems because the irony of first person narration in the novels too often blurs. The poems aremore dramatic vehicles for the exploration of the self because of the possibilities they provide for abruptjuxtaposition of points of view or creation of hallucinatory distortions of a solipsistic eye. With the exceptionof Surfacing, Atwood fails to sustain in her fiction the eerie, disembodied voice that rivets our attention in thepoetry. Beckett's experiments with voice in Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable resemble the voice inAtwood's poetry, but in general the novel form cannot avoid some sense of ego, of particularizedindividuality. Certainly, it is in her poetry that Atwood best combines voice and style in order to exploreperception, the philosophical extremes of solipsist and materialist, and her concept of the self as a place where

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experiences intersect.

The closest Atwood comes to resolving the paradoxes of self and perception is in terms of duplicity. Duality isneither negative nor ambivalent. Duality, whether of structure or metaphor, is not the same as polarity. But thehuman tendency to polarize experience, to affirm one perspective while denying the other, is deeply ingrained,and this makes choosing to live with duality very difficult. (p. 132)

For Atwood the dynamic of violent duality is a function of the creative act. From Double Persephone, to LadyOracle and now Two Headed-Poems, she has continued to explore the inescapable tension between art andlife, the two immortalities…. She is constantly aware of opposites—self/other, subject/object. Male/female,nature/man—and of the need to accept and work within them. To create, Atwood chooses violent dualities,and her art re-works, probes, and dramatizes the ability to see double. (p. 134)

Sherrill Grace, in her Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, edited by Ken Norris (©copyright Sherrill Grace, 1980), Véhicule Press. 1980, 154 p.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): David Macfarlane

The most obvious and compelling strength of True Stories is that, like much of Atwood's verse, it seems togrow naturally and with ease from a personal vision no less articulate for its privacy. Reading Atwood hasalways been like following a guide's brilliant flashlight through an eerie but not entirely unfamiliar cellar. InTrue Stories the guide has emerged to the light of day only to find the world no less frightening a place.Gestures of love and family and day-to-day life jive in a danse macabre with the incomprehensible andchaotic lunges of poverty, torture, and imprisonment. Familiar and foreign become indistinct, and Atwood'sremarkable sensibility finds itself the choreographer of two strange partners….

In many ways, True Stories is a collection of anti-travel poems, dismissing our assumptions of both home andaway as facile and ridiculous. "The palm trees on the reverse / are a delusion," she writes on a postcard, andone senses that Atwood is bent on decrying a great many delusions, about herself as much as anything else….

Throughout the collection the juxtaposition of false tranquillity and real terror weave irony after bitter irony.Ever the most gruesome poems—"Torture," "A Women's Issue," and "Spelling"—possess a grim, sardonicawareness of the cruel and absurd co-existence of love and hate. Poverty and affluence are seen as torturouslyentangled as the pleasures of sensuality and the pain of rape. The two worlds meet in a place that Atwoodmaps out in one of the most disturbing and potent poems in the book, "Notes Towards a Poem That CanNever Be Written."…

If there is not much that is pretty here, there is a great deal that is beautiful. Atwood's language andunderstanding of the power of language work together in careful harmonies. At times the effect is, like achant, magical….

Margaret Atwood has a level-headed sense of compassion that strips all the potential radical chic and romanticfashionability from the causes she espouses. She does not react to issues so much as create them, finding themwithin herself. Even the subtle humour she employs is used to keep any nonsense from creeping into herpoetry…. True Stories is a remarkable book.

David Macfarlane, "A Terrible Beauty," in Books in Canada, Vol. 10. No. 3, March, 1981, p.10.

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Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Mark Abley

[True Stories] is centred on Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written, a sequence about present-daytorture and the brutality of the past…. At moments, Atwood seems damaged by her own security; unable toshut her eyes on "darkness, drowned history," she knows prison cells and death camps by a recurrent ache ofthe imagination. Some poems are painful to read, for she doesn't flinch from showing us the methods andeffects of evil….

Not all her poems are explicitly political, though many inhabit a borderland between private and publicunease. As ever, Atwood moves with brilliant fluency from objects to emotions; her ideas often take shapeand force from sharp physical details such as "cooking steak or bruised lips" and "mouthpink light." Thatfamous cool intelligence can be sardonic with a vengeance…. In True Stories, however, the abrasiveness issubdued by tenderness, a surprising vulnerability and her consciousness of our need for love (an impossibleword to define, an impossible word to do without). It's a measure of Atwood's stature as a poet that the sheerexcellence of the writing can be almost taken for granted. Because it is blooded by political comment, TrueStories may not be one of her most immediately appealing books of poetry, but it's among her best. (p. 52)

Mark Abley, "Bitter Wisdom of Moral Concern," in Maclean's Magazine (© 1981 byMaclean's Magazine; reprinted by permission), Vol. 94, No. 13, March 30, 1981, pp. 52-3.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): George Woodcock

[Much] of True Stories consists of a kind of poetic actuality, a continuing oblique comment on the world thatis our here and now. It is perhaps the best verse Atwood has written, honed down to a stark directness, anaccuracy of sound, yet imbued with the visual luminosity that makes poetry more than a verbal exercise. Ittells us not only of the abdication of reason, but also of the tyranny of the senses and the cruel proximity ofviolence and love.

One of the striking aspects of True Stories, which it shares with much of the poetry in Atwood's previousvolume Two-Headed Poems, is the metamorphic process by which thoughts merge into sensations, so that themind seems imprisoned in its flesh, yet things in a curious and compensating way become liberated intothought….

The constant interplay between the sensual and the intellectual, between things and thoughts, provides thekind of formal remoteness from which Atwood can, like Auden's "Just," exchange her messages. For these arepoems that, even while they warn us not to rely too much on reason, nevertheless tell us factual things aboutthe world in which love exists on sufferance, threatened by kinds of violence and injustice that none of ourtheories or our codes of conduct can comprehend.

The poems assembled in the middle section of the book—"Notes towards a poem that can never bewritten"—read often like a verse abstract of the more harrowing sections of Amnesty International reports.They depict a condition of unreasoning barbarity, where cruelty and death are no longer tragic but merelygratuitous, absurd in their horror. (p. 55)

These poems may not—cannot—portray the rational, yet they are some of the most intensely moral writing Ihave read in recent years, and not less so because they savage romantic notions of love, motherhood, etc., andshow how such myths can imprison and, indeed, destroy.

Yet True Stories is not all negation; its very moral intensity makes that impossible. It is about human crueltyand human love, and the two are far less necessarily intertwined than they were in earlier Atwood poetry….

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(p. 56)

George Woodcock, "Love and Horror" (copyright © 1981 by Saturday Night; reprinted bypermission of the author), in Saturday Night, Vol. 96, No. 5, May, 1981, pp. 55-6.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Judith Fitzgerald

Although Bodily Harm is a gripping and horrific narrative (complete with CIA and spy vs. spy reinforcement)it is not merely a suspense-filled adventure thriller set in the Caribbean for an added touch of exotic flair. It isthe story of Rennie Wilson, an "options open" drifter who takes a seemingly harmless vacation in St. Antoineto escape the pressures and perversions of her life….

My first impulse was to dismiss the ineffectual and introspective hold that Rennie has on her life, but nothingis that simple, a fact that becomes all too clear as Rennie attempts to escape from an essentially middle-classenvironment. The novel possesses the unrelenting sub-surface terror of Under the Volcano, the irony andcondemnation of innocence and laissez-faire that can be found in The Quiet American, and Atwood's ownunflinching belief in her characters' ability to bring the story home, in all its violence and nightmare reality.The book is also concerned with that same violence, magnified several times, that major political forces effectin their race for oil, for power, for control. St. Antoine is a devastating example of what that cold and brutalmentality can do both against a country and its citizens.

Bodily Harm is an overwhelming novel; it goes for the hands (the motif is used frequently) and arrives at thethroat, possessing Atwood's usual ability to harness the energy of language and implication.

Judith Fitzgerald, "Fiction: 'Bodily Harm'," in Quill and Quire (reprinted by permission ofQuill and Quire), Vol. 47, No. 10, October, 1981, p. 34.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Linda W. Wagner

For Margaret Atwood, life is quest, and her writing—particularly her poetry—is the charting of that journey.Atwood's journey is seldom geographical…. Unlike Charles Olson, Atwood does not dwell on location,physical presence, details of place. Her search is instead a piercing interior exploration, driving through anypersonal self-consciousness into regions marked by primitive responses both violent and beautiful. Atwood isinterested in the human condition, a condition which exists independent of sex; and she plays a variety ofgames in order to explore that condition fully.

The strategies Atwood uses in her poems are similar to those of her fiction: personae described in terms ofsuch basic biological functions as eating and sleeping; myriad patterns of disguise, whether literal oranthropomorphic; duality presented as separation, as in relationships between lovers (the hints of Jungiantraits suggest that Atwood's "males" could represent the rational side of her female characters as well as theirown selves); praise for life simplified, closer and closer to the natural; and a stark diction and rhythm, meantto be as far from the "literary" as Atwood's own ideal life is from the conventionally "feminine."

Whether the Atwood persona is a Circe, a Lady Oracle, a Susanna Moodie, a Marian MacAlpin, or theunnamed heroine of Surfacing [1972] she is a questioning and often bitter woman, at first resisting thepassions that eventually lead her to knowledge. She pits accepted roles of womanliness, with all their finalineffectuality, against those of outraged non-conformity…. (pp. 81-2)

Ironically, given the tools of the writer, Atwood finds that the most significant knowledge comes withoutwords…. Atwood's poetry and fiction teem with characters who fail, consistently and harshly, in expressing

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themselves; and she often comments on the ineffectuality of purely rational knowledge….

By her 1974 collection, You Are Happy, however, Atwood has stopped lamenting and instead shows heracceptance of the nonverbal…. One learns because one senses in the blood/heart/hands—centers of touch andemotion rather than intellect. And one is happy, without qualification, only when she, or he, has accepted thatresolution of the quest. Self-knowledge must go deeper than fragile, temporal self. It must include an other….(p. 82)

Atwood's progression to this new and apparently satisfying resolution is clearly drawn through her first sixbooks of poetry. While the poems of The Circle Game in 1966 appeared to be direct, cutting in theirperceptions, the personae of those poems never did make contact, never did anything but lament the humancondition…. Relationships in these poems are sterile if not destructive…. The lovers in "Spring in the Igloo"are touching the edge of drowning; the lover in "Winter Sleepers" has already gone down. The female personain "A Sibyl" admits her "bottled anguish" and "glass despair."

Even in this first collection, however, the problem as Atwood sees it is more than personal. There are complexreasons why love between a man and a woman is tenuous—cultural, philosophical, anthropological reasons,many of which grow from mistaken values in modern living. Because contemporary people judge in terms oftechnology and scientific progress, they value "improvements," devices, the urban over the rural, the new overthe timeless. Much of Atwood's first collection is filled with her arguments against these attitudes…. (p. 83)

This dissatisfaction with the modern milieu, and the ethos it has spawned, leads Atwood first to the immediatemove away from urban life…. "Pre-Amphibian" reinforces that tactic, and in the three-part poem "PrimitiveSources" she studies ancient beliefs about god-systems, magic, and other devices for understanding theprocess of life—and a sentient human being's place in it. (p. 84)

Although most of the attention in the poems of The Circle Game falls on personae other than the femalecharacter, the book can easily be read as her portrait. The collection opens with "This Is a Photograph of Me,"which describes the landscape surrounding the lake in which the heroine has recently drowned. In Atwood'swry directions to the viewer lies her admission of the long and difficult process that "surfacing" is to be. Firstone must realize the need to surface. Identity comes after that, and full definition much later…. As the lastlines [of "This Is a Photograph of Me"] imply, part of that full definition must also come from theviewer/reader/lover. Attention in The Circle Game tends to be given more regularly to the male persona—hemay be disappointing but he is the authority, the determinant. Atwood is not yet able to draw her femalecharacters as if they had distinctive qualities. They are instead mirrors, listeners, watchers…. Atwood'seventual development from woman as pupil to the authoritative protagonist of Lady Oracle [1976] illustrateswell the journey to self-definition.

That Atwood has excluded so many of these poems first published in The Circle Game from her 1976Selected Poems suggests that—for all their thematic accuracy—she finds them less satisfying as poems thansome later work. Perhaps the very directness and flat diction that in the sixties appeared to be strengths hadgrown comparatively uninteresting, for Atwood later set her direct statements in more metaphorical contexts,and often avoided making statements at all, unless they were ironic. She also began the search for poeticpersonae other than the woman-lover of the poems in The Circle Game.

In The Animals in That Country [1968] she wrote about anthropomorphic characters who seemed to representthe human types already drawn in her early poems. Metaphor suffuses these poems…. The young femininepersona remains submissive, coerced into action, dissatisfied with what choices do exist—and with herdecisions about those choices. Repeatedly, she wrongs herself, whether she takes in "A Foundling" or blursinto the obliging lover ("more and more frequently the edges / of me dissolve and I become / a wish"). (pp.85-7)

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Her experiments here with varying rhythms and tones probably equipped her to catch the ambivalent personaof the book-length sequence of poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970). Her achievement in thiscollection is to present a protagonist believable in her conflicts. Through Moodie/Atwood, we experiencehope, anguish, fear, joy, resignation, and anger. It may be more important for the thematic development ofAtwood's poetry that we experience the paradox of Canadian nationalism. Like Atwood, Moodie wroteenthusiastically about life in Canada yet her journals also showed her real fear of the wild, the primitive, theuntamed. (p. 87)

The character of Susanna Moodie becomes a perfect mask for the journey to self-exploration that Atwoodattempts. Her statement "Whether the wilderness is / real or not / depends on who lives there" sounds muchlike Atwood's later surfacer. "Looking in a Mirror" and "The Wereman" repeat this theme of unwittingmetamorphosis, identity shaped by the wilderness and its arduous living. Not all changes are negative,however; and one of the results of this acrid confrontation with natural forces is an acceptance of dreamknowledge….

Published in the same year as the Susanna Moodie collection, Atwood's Procedures for Underground has ascentral persona a pioneer woman, whose memories seem to be given voice as she looks at old photographs.Her family, the old cabin, hard winters, her husband—she speaks with a spare wisdom, moving easilybetween fact and dream, myth and custom. In "Procedures for Underground" she speaks as a Persephone whohas gone below, been tested, learned "wisdom and great power," but returns to live separate, feared, from hercompanions. Knowledge of whatever source is the prize for Atwood's persona, and many of the poems in thecollection play with the definition of truth, fact, knowledge, the "search for the actual." In some of the poemsAtwood moves to present-day Canada and continues the theme of search through the sexual power conflictthat is to be the subject of her 1971 Power Politics. (p. 88)

Power Politics is Atwood's comic scenario of the themes she had treated with relative sombreness in SusannaMoodie and Underground. If the former was an exploration of a sentient woman character, caught in andfinally able to acknowledge "the inescapable doubleness of her own vision," then Procedures forUnderground is a survival manual for the kind of learning that a perceptive woman would have to undertake.Handicapped as she is (with her head resting in her "gentle" husband's sack), she must make use of emotion,dream, the occult, the primitive, even the animal to find her way. In Power Politics the assumption that anywoman's protective male is her handicap becomes a given, and the fun in the book comes through Atwood'smyriad inventive descriptions of the power struggle—as politics, war, physical waste, innuendo, sly attack.(pp. 88-9)

One of the changes Atwood made in choosing work for Selected Poems was to omit many of the poems inPower Politics that were titled as if for stage directions: "He reappears," "He is a strange biologicalphenomenon," "He is last seen." By emphasizing instead poems about the two people in the relationship, andoften the woman, she manages to reverse the expected power positions. In Selected Poems the male ego is lessoften central. The collection as represented in the 1976 book thus meshes more closely with Atwood's earlierpoems, in which the female persona often moves independently on her search for self-awareness, although inher omissions Atwood has deleted some poems important to thematic strains. "Small Tactics," for example, aseven-part sequence in Power Politics, relates the war games described in this collection to those of "TheCircle Game," but here the feminine voice laments, "Let's go back please / to the games, they were / more funand less painful."… More often, in [Selected Poems], the woman is wise and loving, ready to admit her ownnecessary anger, but not misshapen by it. (p. 90)

Atwood's reasons for deleting [the] powerful poem ["He is last seen"] with its important recognition of dualemotions remain unexplained, but the poem does picture the male as dominant—decisive, aggressive—inways that tend to contrast with the transformation and Circe poems of You Are Happy. In tone, however, inthe strong balance of antipathy and desire, it leads [towards the poems of You Are Happy] with its somewhat

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richer diction and more varied rhythms.

The ironically generous central persona of You Are Happy is Atwood's fully-realized female—maker, poet,lover, prophet—a Circe with the power to change all men into animals, all men except Odysseus. Her capacityto control and yet give marks her as truly royal; her sometimes coy reluctance to accept praise suggests herbasic awareness of the futility of bucking convention. Her powers may be dramatic, as the poems of "Songs ofthe Transformed" indicate, but they are limited to the physical, and fragile compared to the "wrecked words"Circe laments. Powerful as she is, Circe still cannot create words, and it is words for which her people beg.(pp. 92-3)

Circe differs from Atwood's earlier protagonists in that she is more aware of inhibiting mythologies. Her greatunderstanding—of individuals as well as of patterns and cultural expectations—sharpens her perception butdoes not make her less vulnerable. (p. 93)

As Odysseus' dissatisfaction [with Circe] grows (his basic greed is impossible to satisfy), he thinks often ofPenelope, and Circe realizes the wife's power to draw him back…. At the base of reality is the word. Despiteomens and auguries, fire signs and bird flights, happenings return to the word, as Odysseus did:

You move within range of my words you land on the dry shore

You find what there is …

Atwood changes the image of conquering male into the image of man lured by a subtler power. Verbal magicbests physical force; feminine wiles and words convince the male persona—no matter what thecircumstance—that "you are happy." The ambivalence of the opening poem, "Newsreel: Man and FiringSquad" suggests the transitory and often indefinable quality of any happiness. One learns to say No to themost unpleasant of life's experiences; one counters fate and myth with strategy; one develops powers of his orher own kind and value, and for the poet, those powers are verbal….

Atwood's poems suggest that the range of human promise is wide, that exploring that range—for woman,man, artist, or lover—should be a primary life experience: "To learn how to live," "to choose," "to be alsohuman," and, as culmination, "to surface." (p. 94)

Linda W. Wagner, "The Making of 'Selected Poems', the Process of Surfacing," in The Art ofMargaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, edited by Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson(copyright © 1981, House of Anansi Press Limited; reprinted by permission of the publisher),Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1981, pp. 81-94.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Frank Davey

[In] Margaret Atwood's new novel, Bodily Harm,… readers of her previous comic novels will find much thatis familiar. Here again is the opposition between a superficial world of social convention and a subsurface oneof unconscious will, physiological need and barbaric impulse. Again the narrative pattern is that ofShakespearean comedy—alienation from natural order (Rennie's Toronto career), followed by descent into amore primitive but healing reality (cancer and Caribbean violence), and finally some reestablishment of order(the concluding insight). Rennie, the point-of-view character, is another of the self-preoccupied femaleparticipants in intellectual Toronto that one encounters in The Edible Woman, Surfacing and Lady Oracle;although carrying a different history, she has the same general vocabulary, ironic wit and speech patterns ofthe earlier characters….

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Atwood has consistently used the human body as a metaphor for surface and depth; concern for the skin as inAnna's make-up in Surfacing, Joan's weight-loss in Lady Oracle, Rennie's fashion stories here in BodilyHarm, have stood for repression of organic reality. The body itself has stood for that reality, refusing to eat inThe Edible Woman, being stripped of make-up and clothing to reveal itself in Surfacing, and here asserting itsmortal flesh and blood nature through Rennie's cancer.

The central irony of Bodily Harm is that this cancer, which Rennie fears may reappear and kill her, is theprincipal agent of her spiritual healing. The cancer forces Rennie to turn her attention from the surface beautyof her body (and of herself as sexual package) and toward her body's inner nature; she becomes dissatisfiedwith her superficially affectionate relationship with Jake and seeks a man to whom she can be willingly"open." It leads her to the Caribbean island where she will transcend her glib condescension toward those whosuffer ("everyone gets what they deserve") and come to experience true compassion. Cancer heals. (p. 29)

Bodily Harm is overall a more satisfying novel than its forerunners. The recurrent Atwood argument that thechic veneer of civilization conceals and even apologizes for unspeakable barbarism is much more persuasivewhen the consequences of such concealment are not merely the bourgeois ones of unhappy liaison andneurotic despair but are instead torture, disfigurement and death. The book is stronger also because itsconclusion—the comic return to society and healthful reintegration into it—is related in the future tense(either by Rennie or the unidentified third person narrator—the point of view is unclear here) only as a fantasyprediction, possibly Rennie's wish, of what may happen. The transformation and salvation of Atwood's threeearlier comic heroines was less than totally credible because so abruptly achieved in the concluding pages.Here it is not achieved; we know not whether her captors will permit her return nor whether Rennie herself iscapable of living out her new vision of life in a Canadian context. We know only that she has experienced anew vision, which for the novel's structural requirements is enough.

I am troubled by the similarity between the narrators of the four novels—several times I had the eerie feeling Iwas once again reading Surfacing or Lady Oracle. Also troubling is Atwood's re-use of the narrative structureof the earlier three books. One wishes the general patterns were less obvious so that one's primary experienceof the book could be its own events. Similarly, the surface imagery of fashion, packaging, cosmetics,jewellery and furniture, the subsurface organic imagery of blood, wounds, dirt, insects and openness, as wellas the numerous mirrors that reflect back the false doppelganger of illusory surface, have after appearing infour novels become predictable and lack the power they had when the author originated them. In short,Atwood doesn't risk much with this book; it is constructed almost entirely out of well-tested elements. Thesereservations aside. Bodily Harm is still a pleasure to read. (pp. 29-30)

Frank Davey, "Life After Man," in The Canadian Forum, Vol. LXI, No. 714,December-January, 1981–82, pp. 29-30.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Eve Siegel

[True Stories] is a worthy successor to [Atwood's] previous works. As in an earlier book of poetry, TheJournals of Susanna Moodie, the poet stakes a claim in the world against natural, human and inhuman forcesof uncontained, inexplicable oppression….

Through a personae of professional torturers, seen as artistic poseurs, Atwood probes for clues to the insanityand irrationality that mock the life principle. Again, the truth varies and wavers, takes on plausible andimplausible facades. In "Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written" (dedicated to poet CarolynForche, whom Atwood admires for her courage as a political journalist in El Salvador), her linguistic controland detachment convey more horror than any overwrought, "social conscience" poetry….

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Atwood's strength derives from the fact that she seems to know exactly where she has come to at any statedpoint. The lay of the land is visible to her through a myriad of perspectives. The "true story" is not a constant,but kaleidoscopic and relative to its originator or the objects it encompasses. Truth, like happiness, is not agoal, but the result…. Dynamic tension is always present, inducing a springy, taut rhythm to the languageitself.

Atwood's message in True Stories seems to be an assertion of the importance of self, whether alone on anisland, beaten in prison, or sharing experiences with the beloved. Like the protagonist in her novel, Surfacing,Atwood escapes the pervasive, spiritual takeover of mass culture and slick ad campaigns. She pares away theextraneous and reveals herself naked but independent, offering only her self in the immediate moment. This isthe only relationship or pact which the poet can genuinely offer, the only thing that matters….

In Surfacing, Atwood's writing tends more towards the poetic as the protagonist retreats further and furtherfrom a society victimized by the invidious effects of cultural imperialism. However, True Stories carries someof the imperative of prose in that the author moves from the language of personal isolation to that whichconfronts the reality of widespread politically/sexually-based torture. This extends Atwood's range ofexpression and enables her to capture a more representative slice of humanity's contemporary conditions. Inother words, Atwood makes the transition from personal to political worldview carefully, avoiding the pitfallsof polemicism by adhering to her craft….

Atwood's use of bold, primal imagery conjures up echoes of Sylvia Plath. But Atwood steps beyond theconfines of what she described at a recent seminar as the way critics stereotype modern women poetspossessed of strong voices. Either they are neurotic, suicidal Plaths/Sextons or else hysterical, repressedDickinsons. In Atwood's cosmology there is a need to define a new model of the assertive, articulate poet witha feminist perspective who can step away from the wholly personal to a more powerful, universal language. Inearlier times the words or "spells" of some women were powerful enough to be feared by men, who labelledthem witches. In more recent times there is still fear of women's words when they speak out against inequityand outright repression. But poets like Atwood are conscious of their power as writers and are determined towield it….

With True Stories Margaret Atwood demonstrates that the Canadian instinct for survival in precariousenvironments prevails again. This poet has torn the gag irrevocably from her mouth, and her message is clear:a poem after a poem after a poem from a committed poet, if they can be heard, is power.

Eve Siegel, "Poetry: 'True Stories'," in San Francisco Review of Books (copyright © by theSan Francisco Review of Books 1982), January, 1982, p. 21.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Jonathan Penner

Bodily Harm, a constantly diverting novel, fairly breathes narrative grace and skill. (p. 1)

The novel has flaws. One is narrative design run riot. There are first-person sections, set in Canada, told in thepast tense, with un-quote-marked dialogue; and there are third-person sections, set on St. Antoine, told in thepresent, with dialogue in quotes.

So far so clear: But one understands near the end that the first-person sections are being told by Rennie toLora in the jail cell they share; and that this setting is also the justification for the several first-person passagesfrom Lora's point of view—passages that have had the reader rapping the walls for secret passageways.Logically, and in hindsight, it all hangs together, but fiction ought to cohere in the reading, not in the readingexplained.

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A more serious flaw is that the novel-of-adventure element is permitted to run so far that this wonderful bookbecomes hard to take with full seriousness. As it thickens with drastic events, the foreshortened plot leavesless and less room for character, often squeezing it out of the story entirely. Rennie becomes a passiveobserver, a narrative convenience, now posted and now moved wherever she can see the action best.

Rennie's character (who she is, the choices she makes) doesn't affect the plot; and in turn the plot, though itsweeps her up along with everyone else, finally affects her least of all (only she can fly away from it). A closerelationship of mutual influence between plot and character is what distinguishes literary from genre fiction.The perfect brilliance of the writing insists that this novel is by birthright literary, but it finally sells thatbirthright for a delightful mess of delicious plottage. (p. 2)

Jonathan Penner, "Plots and Counterplots," in Book World—The Washington Post (© 1982,The Washington Post), March 14, 1982, pp. 1-2.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Dana Gioia

Margaret Atwood's Two-Headed Poems are full of interesting ideas, memorable images, and intelligentobservations. She has a deep understanding of human motivation, and her poetry deals naturally with anintricate sort of psychology most poets ignore. Her poems are often painfully accurate when dealing with therelationships between men and women or mothers and daughters. And yet with all these strengths, Atwood isnot an effective poet. She writes poetry with ideas and images, not with words; her diction lies dead on thepage. Her poems have a conceptual and structural integrity, but the language itself does not create theheightened awareness one looks for in poetry. The problem centers in her rhythms, not only the movement ofwords and syllables within the line, but also the larger rhythms of the poem, the movements from line to lineand stanza to stanza. While the pacing of her ideas works beautifully, her language never picks up force.

One notices the curious neutrality of Atwood's language most clearly in her sequence of prose poems,"Marrying the Hangman," which obliquely tells the story of Françoise Laurent, a woman sentenced to deathfor stealing, who legally avoids punishment by convincing the man in the next cell to become a hangman andthen marrying him. (Atwood uses a real historic incident here, but the plot seems like something out of aMascagni opera.) The language in these prose poems is qualitatively no different from the language of herverse, except that it has no line breaks. It most resembles a passage of "elevated" prose, like an excerpt fromJoan Didion's histrionic Book of Common Prayer.

The few times in Two-Headed Poems that Atwood's language condenses into genuinely arresting rhythms, theresults are fresh and convincing, as in "Foretelling the Future."… But these moments are rare. Imaginative inconception, these Two-Headed Poems are mostly flat and perfunctory in execution. If images and ideas alonecould make poetry, Atwood would be a major poet. (pp. 110-11)

Dana Gioia, "Eight Poets," in Poetry (© 1982 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprintedby permission of the Editor of Poetry), Vol. CXL, No. 2, May, 1982, pp. 102-14.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Julia O'Faolain

["Bodily Harm"] bristles with intelligence and is often so witty that I wondered why I wasn't enjoying it more.The trouble may lie with the tropes. These are clever but obtrusive and can make the story seem to be no morethan a hook for hanging symbols on. Atwood's metaphors are deft, but there are just too many of them: almostanything can stand for something else. When Rennie's untidy lover fails to throw out empty containers andkeeps glancing at her blouse, it is because Rennie has had a mastectomy and the blouse too is an emptycontainer.

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The mastectomy itself—bodily harm—prefigures worse to come and may be an emblem of the harmswreaked by the consumer society…. Reification is rampant. We are objects for each other's skills andjokes—the most painful being inadvertent, as when Rennie's doctor, just before diagnosing cancer, askswhether she's ready yet to have babies and adds, 'You're heading for the cutoff point.'

Rennie is not, however, allowed to wallow in wise-cracking self-pity. The author has shock therapy in store: avisit to a Third World country with an unstable régime in whose eruptions she becomes engulfed. Ever sinceGraham Greene used revolutionary Mexico as a metaphor for hell, such settings have served novelists forharrowing souls. When Rennie finally escapes she has been sufficiently politicised to plan some seriousreporting—and has learned that there are worse things than cancer. The neat conclusion suggests that therevolutionary country is a purely contingent place, devised to bring Rennie to her moment of truth. 'BodilyHarm' is an imaginative, thoughtful novel, but perhaps over-controlled.

Julia O'Faolain, "Desperate Remedies," in The Observer (reprinted by permission of TheObserver Limited), June 13, 1982, p. 31.

Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Nancy Ramsey

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, has one of current fiction's more detached voices. Her tone towardher characters reflects the nature of the characters themselves: women who are divided into separatepersonae—one half defined by the role they feel society has thrust upon them, the other, their true self(insecure and amorphous as it is) trying to break out. Like many other characters in recent fiction, their livesare directionless; they drift in and out of relationships and find little satisfaction in work. Atwood doesn't treatthem as whole persons, but rather as fragmented parts of a human being. Consequently, it's often difficult forthe reader to gather much sympathy for them—they're too much the victims of every current neurosis. Her lastnovel, Life Before Man, examined the lives of three narcissistic, shallow individuals; although the novelprogressed along a linear time span, and set out to analyze the characters' changing over time, we saw almostno change in their lives, and little of redeeming value to justify such a detailed presentation of their neuroses.

But in Bodily Harm, her most recent novel, by placing Rennie Wilford, her protagonist, on a Caribbean islandin the throes of revolution, and adding a scare with cancer to her life, Atwood has, in a sense, saved Renniefrom the stagnant fate of her other novels' characters. The stakes are higher; survival, one of Atwood's favoritethemes, is no longer a 1970s term tossed around at cocktail parties. Death, rather than the modern sense ofennui, threatens Rennie and the people around her, and ultimately gives her life a meaning she hadn't knownbefore….

The structure of the novel effectively plays off Rennie's Toronto life against her Caribbean life. Herexperiences in the Caribbean are interrupted by flashbacks from her childhood, growing up among anoppressive mother and grandmother—the standard background of Atwood's women—and her life around thetime of her mastectomy. The sections in the Caribbean move more quickly than do those in Canada; the latteroften producing a sense of frustration in the reader, since its stagnancy is juxtaposed with the urgency of theCaribbean scenes. When one has confronted life-and-death situations and people constantly living on theedge, it's difficult to turn back to people who wonder what trend to follow next. Let's hope Atwood's nextnovel continues along the same lines, for this is her most readable to date.

Nancy Ramsey, "'Bodily Harm'," in San Francisco Review of Books (copyright © by the SanFrancisco Review of Books 1982), Summer, 1982, p. 21.

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Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor): Linda Rolens

"In a way I admire her, she gets through the days." That is what Margaret Atwood's characters do—getthrough the days. In other stories by other writers, these characters would commit suicide or join supportgroups and we would be forced to recognize them as contemporary victims/heroines….

Margaret Atwood does not write that kind of story. She looks deeper and sees more clearly and she insists thatthe reader see as well. The stories in "Dancing Girls" are painful and subtle, for Atwood's characters do notthrash but suffer quietly in ways they do not quite understand. Most are women too alone to realize their ownaloneness….

Each is unsure of herself as a woman, somehow incomplete. They suffer from wounds too deep toacknowledge and they give off the desperation of the unloved.

Though Atwood's characters yearn for love, they suffer from an odd insistence on being hurt. Most are best atexperiencing loss; it is what they know and somehow it solaces them. These characters almost seek loss andmake bad choices or choices that keep them small. They linger in the prolonged adolescence of graduateschool; they pick men who will betray them.

Margaret Atwood's attitude makes these dark stories extraordinary: She trusts her characters and knows theyare survivors. No one here is going to stick her head in an oven or gas herself in the garage. They survive bythe force of strengths they do not understand.

The momentum of this collection is much like that of a novel and, by the final stories, the heroines havedeveloped wry senses of humor and ways of moving through the world without damaging themselves….These last women have pieced themselves together and grown from vulnerable to tender.

Atwood's prose is poet's prose, full of startlingly accurate images, much of it rich enough to be relined asverse. She has a poet's sense of how deep to lay open her characters.

If Hemingway is correct and "good books are truer than if they really happened and that after you are finishedreading one you will feel that it all happened to you," then this is such a book. Margaret Atwood is one of ourfinest contemporary writers.

Linda Rolens, "Women Too Alone to Realize Their Aloneness," in Los Angeles Times BookReview (copyright, 1982, Los Angeles Times, reprinted by permission), October 17, 1982, p.3.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 13): Introduction

Atwood, Margaret 1939–

Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, critic, and scriptwriter. At times nearly confessional in nature, hers isintensely personal poetry, praised for its imaginative imagery and striking detail. Elements of fantasy pervadeher fiction and poetry alike. Atwood's tightly controlled, deceptively simple style allows her work an impactwhich Melvin Maddocks calls "the kick of a perfume bottle converted into a Molotov cocktail." (See alsoCLC, Vols. 2, 3, 4, 8, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)

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Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 13): Patricia Morley

You could call it an adventure thriller set in the wilds of northern Quebec. You could call it a detective storycentering on the search for the main character's missing father. You could call it a psychological novel, astudy of madness both individual and social. You could call it a religious novel which examines the origin andnature of the human lust to kill and destroy. You could call it any of these and I wouldn't quarrel. But you'dbetter call it a novel to be reckoned with, a step in the direction of that mythic creature, the Great CanadianNovel, whose siren song echoes mockingly in the ears of our writers. (p. 99)

[Margaret Atwood] said that it took a stay in Boston to make her realize she was a Canadian. This isinteresting, in connection with a motif in [Surfacing] which might appear as anti-American until one examinesit more closely. Americans tend to destroy what they can't eat or take home. Americans prefer powerboats tocanoes, and build dams at the cost of flooding and killing the land. Come now, murmurs the voice of reasonand fair play, Americans aren't the only ones who do these things. But it's okay, Atwood knows this too.

In Surfacing, the American is a metaphor of modern man in his most unlovable state: "It doesn't matter whatcountry they're from, my head said, they're still Americans, they're what's in store for us, what we are turninginto". Eyes blank behind dark glasses, they spread like a virus: if you look and think and talk like them, thenyou are them. We're all Americans now, evolving, "halfway to machine, the leftover flesh atrophied anddiseased". Atwood's American is a fictional version of Jacques Ellul's technological man who has let hismechanical means come to dominate and determine his ends, his values, his goals. (pp. 99-100)

The narrator, like so many of the characters in the novels of Hugh MacLennan, is an orphan figure, a femaleOdysseus, a disturbed and frightened individual in search of a lost father and a lost way of life. She is insearch of roots….

We find we can't believe everything the narrator tells us. She can't believe herself. A modifiedstream-of-consciousness technique is effective here. The last half-dozen chapters become increasingly surrealand fantastic. After some literal deep-diving, where the drowned body of her father merges in her mind withher aborted child, the narrator accepts the mistakes of her earlier life. She returns, like a time-traveller homefrom a prehistoric junket, to present realities. Withdrawal, secrecy, non-feeling is no longer possible. To'surface' is to choose love, defined by its failures, over the safety of death: "To trust is to let go". (p. 100)

Patricia Morley, "Multiple Surfaces," in Journal of Canadian Fiction (reprinted by permissionfrom Journal of Canadian Fiction, 2050 Mackay St., Montreal, Quebec H3G 2J1, Canada),Vol. 1, No. 4, 1972, pp. 99-100.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 13): Gloria Onley

In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature … Margaret Atwood argues that every country orculture has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core: for America, the Frontier; for England, theIsland; for Canada, Survival, la Survivance. In her Afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) shehad previously diagnosed the national mental illness as paranoid schizophrenia …; here she develops the ideathat most Canadian writers must be neurotic because, "given a choice of the negative or positive aspects ofany symbol—sea as life-giving Mother, sea as what your ship goes down in; tree as symbol of growth, tree aswhat falls on your head—Canadians show a marked preference for the negative."… This general immersionin the turgid depths of what Northrop Frye calls "the world of experience," where tragedy darkens into irony,she attributes to Canada's colonial status. The very function of a colony and of a colonial person is to beexploited; politics are always Power Politics (Atwood, 1971), whether the area of experience is sexual love orfinance and international relations.

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The poet who earlier wrote of modern woman's anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (althoughalso exploiting) by the imposition of a sex role power structure … now perceives a strong sado-masochisticpatterning in Canadian literature as a whole. She believes that there is a national fictional tendency toparticipate, usually at some level as Victim, in a Victor/Victim basic pattern. Only rarely, in Atwood's view,which has no patience with old-fashioned concepts of spiritual or ethical victory, do Canadian charactersmove from ignorance to self-knowledge, from projection to creative interaction with other characters…. Shesees earlier Canadian writers preoccupied with external obstacles to survival, such as the land or climate, andlater writers concerned with "harder to identify and more internal" obstacles to "spiritual survival, to life asanything more than a minimally human being."… She begins with "capsule Canadian plots" as examples ofwhat she means, some displaying outright "failures", others, "crippled successes"…. Her satirical style, here atits crudest, relentlessly drives home her sense of a basic difficulty in human relations that seems to emergewith particular acuteness in what she briskly refers to as "Canlit." From her human relations point of view, thename of the game is to move forward into Position Four, that of creative non-victim. By definition, an authoris in Position Four at the moment of writing.

To me, the structure of Atwood's thematic analysis is reminiscent of the psychology of R. D. Laing who talksabout violence disguised as love, about people imposing psychological power structures or value structures onone another and on themselves, and about people in bondage to these structures. In fact, I feel that Atwood'sfour Basic Victim Positions (and the fifth mystical one which she postulates but leaves undefined), are almosta non-symmetrical "mapping" of Laing's psychology onto Northrop Frye's theory of fictional modes in whichfictions are classified by the hero's power of action, ranging from the frustration and bondage of the ironicmode to the mythic creativity of the divine hero. For Atwood, power of action is directly related to degree ofenlightenment. Atwood states that she has not read Laing, but the general idea of psychological powerstructures is now very much with us and has been linked, in various ways, with Laing's psychology…. Theseideas have been, we might say, Surfacing all over the place for some time now, and especially in MargaretAtwood's own work, beginning with The Edible Woman (1969). To me, her most exciting contemporarysignificance as poet, novelist, and observer of her country's literature, lies in the fact that she is so clearly intune with the radical spirit of her times.

In her early poetry, such as The Circle Game (1966), where she first enunciates the theme "Talking isdifficult,"… she is acutely aware of the problem of alienation, the need for real human communication and theestablishment of genuine human community—real as opposed to mechanical or manipulative; genuine asopposed to the counterfeit community of the body politic…. A persistent strain in her imagery, appearing inthe poetry as well as in Surfacing …, is the head as disconnected from or floating above the body. Sometimesthe neck is sealed over; always the intellectual part of the psyche is felt to be a fragment, dissociated from thewhole. (pp. 51-2)

As Atwood notes in the Introduction to Survival, Northrop Frye suggests that in Canada "Who am I?" at leastpartly equals "Where is here?" Here, in Surfacing, is the liberated naked consciousness, its doors of perceptionsymbolically cleansed; the "place" is the Canadian wilderness, which becomes the new body or rediscoveredoriginal body of the psychosomatic human Canadian man/woman in contradistinction to Americanschizophrenic man/woman, exiled from the biosphere and from himself/herself.

Surfacing, is, for Canadians, an anatomy of the "deluge of values and artifacts flowing in from outside" which"render invisible the values and artifacts that actually exist 'here'."… A fusion of many literary forms,Menippean satire, diary, wilderness venture, even the Canadian animal story, Surfacing is mainly concernedwith indicating what must be removed so that a true sense of self may be uncovered and a movement begun inthe direction of communication and community. The suggestion is implanted at the end of the psychologicalquest, when the surfaced female self decides to rejoin the "half-formed" father of her recently conceived childand attempt to have a human as opposed to mechanical relationship with him, that the often unsatisfactorynature of male-female relationships in modern urban society is a function of a general human failure to

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communicate, to use language as a tool instead of a weapon. Exile from the biosphere is related, almostmetaphysically, to the exploitative use of language to impose psychological power structures. (pp. 52-3)

Atwood's wit ranges in Survival from a running put down of all power structures embodied and exposed in"Canlit" to the scathing dismissal of fictional characters as if they were one's neurotic neighbors for whomself-destruction is a kind of busy work…. This somewhat one-dimensional interpretation of "Canlit" as if itwere a series of case histories of human failure can be both funny and, one hopes, enlightening to potentialvictims. It can also, of course, be considered an oversimplification unless one keeps firmly in mind that thebasic premise of the book is to "articulate the skeleton of Canadian literature," and, as it were, let others(critics, teachers, the students themselves) put the flesh back on the bones….

Chapter Ten, "Ice Women versus Earth Mothers,"… translates women's liberation insights into fairytalesymbolism and mythic terms. Canadian women, to Margaret Atwood, suffer from the "Rapunzel syndrome";in fact, in Canada Rapunzel and the tower are the same, for Canadian heroines "have internalized the values oftheir culture to such an extent that they have become their own prisons." Moreover, the struggle of Canadianwomen in the Canadian novel is the attempt of buried Venuses and Dianas to free themselves from theHecate-Ice-Goddess stereotype. These depth charges should clear out a lot of murky underwater territory: ifreading A Jest of God discourages spinsterhood, surely reading The Fire Dwellers equally discouragesmatrimony. The net result for the Canadian girl observing these unsatisfactory patterns of womanly fulfilmentmight be to make her less idealistic and romantic, less the Sensuous Woman manqué, and rather morepragmatic and realistic in her approach to love and human relationships. In fact, for the Canadian student,Atwood's guide to "Canlit" is a map of dangerous territories to study vicariously and avoid as much aspossible in one's own life. As Atwood points out in the Introduction: "Much of our literature is a diagram ofwhat is not desired. Knowing what you don't want isn't the same as knowing what you want, but it helps."…

What if it is not a national neurosis after all, but part of what might be called the civilized human condition tocreate/become a victim? The victor/victim patterning may have become a risk inherent in any use of languagewhatsoever, since, depending on the experiential and interpretative context, and the circumstances andpsychological background of the persons involved, even a single word can be used as/become a powerstructure implying superiority/inferiority, aggression/destruction, and many other polarities. The need forcommunication in Power Politics is paralleled by the realization that language tends to warp in the hand fromtool to weapon …, and there is a corresponding recognition of the value of silence…. (p. 53)

To use language at all is to risk participation in its induction structure; to define is to risk committing orinciting violence in the name of love.

In her poetry Atwood implicitly recognizes that the new frontier is the language barrier and the new pioneersare those who can help us avoid what Laing calls "the mystification of experience," that is the use of languageto cultivate a false consciousness in ourselves and others. Obviously the highly literate, articulate self is moresensitive to the distortions imposed by the language barrier than is the average person, although the averageperson is, if anything, more subject to it because less aware of what's going on.

Survival is a first step towards awareness, the basic realization that there is a victor/victim patterning inherentin life, that it may be traced in the relationships of characters in a novel, in external action, in psychologicalmovement, in image patterns, in symbolism. (pp. 53-4)

If it were not for the inherent tendency to use language for the "mystification of experience" or, as Atwoodwould say, for "mythologizing", we might venture forth more confidently with the verbal diagram of Survivalin our hands. As the wilderness guide in Surfacing discovers, imaginary maps may lead to real discoveries butonly if we can be flexible enough in our approaches. (p. 54)

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Gloria Onley, "Margaret Atwood: Surfacing in the Interests of Survival," in West CoastReview (copyright © January, 1973 West Coast Review Publishing Society), January, 1973,pp. 51-4.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 13): Valerie Trueblood

It is the life-impulse [Atwood] uncovers and venerates [in Surfacing] alone on the island peeling off hercivilized skins. This is the impulse [she] uncovers in her poetry, honoring the claim-to-life of whatever lives.

The narrator of Surfacing sees a heron killed for sport hanging in a tree and is as powerfully converted asSaint Eustace coming upon the stag with the cross between its antlers…. Her magnified understanding is notoccupied with what the heron might stand for, or mean to humans, but with the mutilated bird itself, theviolation of its life. Atwood's birds and beasts aren't symbols. She hails in each thing its own life, and its ownphysique: for her these are enough to express its sacredness. (p. 19)

A new poetry of love and death has been taking shape since the outrush of feminist energy in the 60's. Someof its elements are that the speaker is (usually) a woman, revoked love is seen as a public act which deflectsthe secure progression of life, a grave, reciting, schoolgirl voice may announce intention to do violent harm,and the poet's quarrel is less with an individual than with a modern temperament unsuccessful at keeping lovegoing or assenting to Yeats' idea of love as a discipline. In [the poems in You Are Happy] Atwood avoids thelitigious, civic-minded mood of the bereft that has colored much of this poetry. Her misdoers are just ashapless as their victims…. The thrill of the carnal, when it is allowed at all, is a sad thrill. (pp. 19-20)

In this book, and each of her others, what is at the root of the sorrow? While it feeds the feminism and angerthat show aboveground, the root seems to tap something much purer and colder, two things really: adisaffection from people, the mishandlers of all that is sacred, and a female sense of kinship with the naturalworld that waits to be plundered. People are the unhungry consumers, killers of animals, disrupters of oldrhythms, living in a time they have appropriated for themselves and for whose wretchedness they areresponsible…. The same sense is present everywhere in her work, most notably in The Animals in thatCountry and in the fine Procedures for Underground, where poem after poem celebrates the patience of thelandscape under the human spur….

[Unlike Annie Dillard, who works in the same area and] can become rhapsodic, Margaret Atwood is not apoet susceptible to happiness. Flushing out the harm-doers she keeps encountering herself. Her personae atvarious times repudiate food, love, which is predatory, Americans (this belongs elsewhere than in aparenthesis: Atwood is a Canadian with a deep fear of usurpation by the consumerism of the United States),and civilization. Her poetry has the steady unrelenting pace of conscience. But out of the same mouthproceedeth blessing and cursing, and Atwood makes blessings of her exquisite cold landscapes and theanimals watching from them, and of the struggle of some of her characters to be humane.

Many of the earlier poems were baleful, a quality that persists in the first section of You Are Happy, where thesubject is loss, and occasionally in Part Two, "Songs of the Transformed", where animals and a corpse speakas revolutionaries. "Pig Song" is a good example of what [D. B.] Wyndham Lewis called theEnumerative-Vituperative. But Part One closes with "You Are Happy" and an ordinary but somehowmiraculous "Bird/running across the glaring/road against the low pink sun", and in the final Song of theTransformed a corpse asks the living for prayers and warns them "Sing now/… or you will drift as I do/…swollen with hoarded love". Part Three, "Circe/Mud Poems", has a chastened Circe alternating benevolencewith a child's fitful rancor reminiscent of Plath, but trying to keep the wanderer—his protective moly heresimply masculinity—near her.

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Occasionally, too, we can hear Plath in the pathologist's dissecting-describing cadence (here is …, this is …, itis …) and directions to an infuriating lover or to the reader (see, take) as if to a slow-witted assistant. "Trickswith Mirrors", the mordant, unenamoured poem that most brings Plath to mind, seems to lack the tone ofclemency that is Atwood's own. The only other poem I felt belied her gifts, "Is/Not", is an odd combination:sharp disclaimer of interest in curability (of a love affair or marriage) and concession to theCalifornia-transactional vocabulary. But it contains the dry, lively "Permit me the present tense" and theauthor's reverential feeling for words as the only totems left, needing "to be said and said".

"A language is everything you do," she says in Surfacing. Her sense of words as things, as having properties,permeates these poems…. She has pared her language to what proves, what alerts the senses and then theimagination to rightness, and she creates a world of ice and burned forest and deer tracks, and the reprieve ofthis world by the wet spring that makes her "dream of reconciliations". The lavish "Spring Poem" is full of thenames of rebirths: "dandelions/whirl their blades upwards", a snake "side-winds" in its "chained hide", "thehens/roll in the dust, squinting with bliss". For Atwood, to name a thing is to make a gesture towards it, topropitiate it. Words are the repositories of spirit; their sway is strict; it is the words of the sirens that luresailors…. Atwood's dictum "There Is Only One of Everything" is expressed in the lovely poem by that name,in which the speaker tells us she can say the incantation "I want this" only once, it is so powerful (a rareglimpse, in a poem, of the droll Atwood we saw in the novel Edible Woman: she then says it twice)….

The poem that seems to me the strongest in the book (though the hushed "Late August" rivals it) is one of themost accessible and the most pervaded by the mysticism Atwood everywhere resists and makes ironic: "FirstPrayer", a hymn to the human body…. This poem will be anthologized; it is passionate and wistful by turns,its ending "O body, descend/from the wall where I have nailed you/… give me this day" inverts the profaneby its humility and leads to the final poem "Book of Ancestors" in which the task of being alive is a sacredone: "to take/that risk, to offer life and remain/alive, open yourself like this and become whole."

Delmore Schwartz says "Every living poet would like to be direct, lucid and immediately intelligible" but thepoet's immersion in the powers and reaches of language cut him off from people not so preoccupied. Atwood'sgift is to make us share her extravagant interest in what exists and discover a language inhabited, as the worldshe recreates is inhabited, by spirit. (p. 20)

Valerie Trueblood, "Conscience and Spirit," in The American Poetry Review (copyright ©1977 by World Poetry, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Valerie Trueblood), March/April,1977, pp. 19-20.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 13): Elspeth Cameron

Atwood's central theme in [Lady Oracle and Dancing Girls] is the "self,"… a complex and fascinatingmixture of reality and fantasy. Playing a part, or, as Atwood would put it, dancing a role, involves difficultdecisions. Mainly it means choosing between a private and a public life…. Both in Lady Oracle and DancingGirls the "self" competes with one or more "roles" for center stage.

With characteristic wit, Atwood explores the tensions involved in the fractured identity of the artist in LadyOracle. The first overlay of Joan's real self occurs as a result of her mother's determined imposition of twomutually inconsistent roles on her daughter…. Responding early in life to what others need her to be, shebecomes devious in her efforts to preserve the real self within from annihilation. Recognition of this real selfcomes only from her Aunt Lou…. Through Aunt Lou's support, moral and financial, Joan is able to fly by thenets her mother casts, reducing to normal size, moving to London and changing her name to that of her AuntLou—Louisa K. Delacourt. Through this new name, Joan adopts another identity, not one inflicted upon her,but one, as her surname suggests, "fostered" by identification with the Aunt she has idealized. And, like Aunt

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Lou, she writes; not editorial letters to girls in distress, but tales of girls in distress in Costume Gothicnovels…. (pp. 36-7)

For a time in London, Joan (now Louisa), indulges in the role of "mistress" to a Polish Count whose romanticpatter and writing career insulate her from the banality of Canada House and the tawdriness of London. In ashort time, however, another identity takes over in the form of an affair with a young fringe radical namedArthur whom she eventually marries in Toronto. At this point, Joan "fosters" yet another identity, that of theAutomatic Writer who produces a book of poems called Lady Oracle, "a combination of Rod McKuen andKahlil Gibran," which catapult her into instant fame. Meanwhile, behind Arthur's back, she launches anintense affair with the Royal Porcupine, Concreate Artist, whose frozen animal carcasses have wowed theToronto art scene. The tension of keeping all these selves separate and functional is finally too much for her,so she "kills" Joan Foster by faking her drowning in Lake Ontario. Free again to begin yet another life, LouisaK. Delacourt, appearance transformed, boards the plane for Italy where she plans to continue writing herCostume Gothics in a small Italian village, the scene of the novel's brilliant denouement.

For Joan/Louisa, this plethora of roles is the fate of the artist: "I might as well face it," she thinks after herflight to Italy, "I was an artist, an escape artist. I'd sometimes talked about love and commitment, but the realromance of my life was that between Houdini and his ropes and locked trunk; entering the embrace ofbondage, slithering out again." "Hooked on plots" in life and in art, Joan uses her ingenious imagination tosurvive—economically through her writing and emotionally through her series of lives she invents and lives.

Though Joan Foster is the main example of this view of life, the other artists or pseudo-artists in Lady Oraclealso inhabit more than one self…. Without exception, the real self behind the mask is more ordinary, lessdramatic than the projected persona. The real self, Atwood seems to say, is too dull to be valued, must bedressed up and dramatized to attract attention. The problem is that the attention so gained is for the "role" andnot for the "self" who, consequently, feels unloved, insignificant and angry.

Much is made of the significance of clothes, not only in Louisa's Costume Gothics, but in life's roles as well.As the narrator of "Hair Jewellery" in Dancing Girls says:

I resurrect myself through clothes. In fact it's impossible for me to remember what I did, whathappened to me, unless I can remember what I was wearing, and every time I discard asweater or a dress I am discarding part of my life. I shed identities like a snake, leaving thempale and shrivelled behind me, a trail of them, and if I want any memories at all I have tocollect, one by one, those cotton and wool fragments, piece them together, achieving at last apatchwork self.

Seen in this way, life is nothing more than a series of roles tenuously "pieced together" into "a patchwork self"by a central consciousness. And the Costume Gothics which Louisa writes are not, as one might suppose,sheer fantasy, unrelated to real life; they are elaborate dramatizations of the issues of Joan Foster's life, whichis itself, in turn, an elaborate combination of the roles others devise for her and those she devises for herself.

Bizarre and whimsical as Joan's world is, tensions as sinister as those in the Costume Gothic novels lurkbeneath the surface. The real self is always in danger of being annihilated if the persona takes over. Andpersonae as unalike as the Stone and Bronze Ages must be kept separate in space and time lest they neutralizeeach other. How, Atwood asks, can one patch together aspects of the self which threaten to pull apart theidentity? The novel's story line involves the reader in this question with a suspense reminiscent of thedetective novels Joan reads in her father's library…. As Joan confesses, "If I brought the separate parts of mylife together …, surely there would be an explosion." (pp. 37-9)

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In "Lives of the Poets," from Dancing Girls, Atwood treats the same theme of the split within the artist whohas a public "role" and a private "self." Mocking Samuel Johnson's title, she describes an evening in the life ofa Canadian poet which is a far cry from the eminent lives of Pope, Milton and others that Johnson described.Just prior to giving a reading in the bleak industrial town of Sudbury, Ontario, she develops a nosebleed—oneof the several minor symptoms that often plague her before the readings she gives to keep herself and her mansolvent. His inaccessibility by phone may or may not be evidence of infidelity—an anxiety which jolts herfrom the concerns of the "self" into the "role" she must play. Sending out her "dancing girl" persona to readonstage, she feels a powerful hostility to the docile audience who cannot possibly appreciate how herdedication to art has jeopardized her personal life…. (p. 39)

Especially when it comes to relationships between men and women is the conflict of "role" and "self" a deadlyone. Though Atwood focuses on the artist as a complex example of the creation of roles, fantasies andfictions, hers is no esoteric portrait of the artist which excludes ordinary people. In both these books, sheshows the ways in which all people create "roles" for themselves and others, especially when they fall inlove….

Only relationships between the real "selves" of men and women bring fulfillment; interaction between the"roles" they play is hollow and unsatisfying.

Several of the stories in Dancing Girls are based on this theme; that of the romantic persona sent out to lovewho has no chance of succeeding because the real self remains hidden. (p. 40)

The institution of marriage with its continuous intimacy is bound to result in profound disillusionment forromantic men and women. In "The Resplendent Quetzal," the married couple, Sarah and Edward, are trappedin a hideous relationship in which neither is free to be authentic. The images each has had of the other at firsthave faded into incompatible reality. "It was almost as if he'd had an affair with another woman, she had beenso different. He'd treated her body then as something holy, a white and gold chalice, to be touched with careand tenderness." As for Sarah, "At first Edward's obsessions had fascinated her, since she didn't understandthem, but now they merely made her tired." To confront their many deceptions "would be the end, all thepretences would come crashing down and they would be left standing in the middle, staring at each other."Atwood shows here the pain and true heroism involved in loving another human being once the masks areremoved.

Atwood at her most extreme shows, in some of the stories in Dancing Girls, how the stress of realrelationships can lead to insanity. Her treatment of madness is best understood by considering psychiatrist R.D. Laing's well-known theories on the subject. For Laing, "normality" in a culture like ours that suppressesboth the instincts and any form of transcendence, is nothing more than a collective "pervasive madness."…Those who have transcendent experiences, like the heroine of Surfacing, even those who simply refuse toadjust to society's standards of "normal," like Marian in The Edible Woman, may be viewed as mad by"normal" people. If "normal" means only the way in which things are done in a given society, people fromother societies are likely to seem mad; as one character puts it in "The Man From Mars," "the thing aboutpeople from another culture was that you could never tell whether they were insane or not because their wayswere so different." Atwood plays with the ambiguity of such frames of reference by using first personnarration to let us see the cogency of people who, observed objectively, would be to a greater or lesser degree,certifiable. She is most effective when she presents madness and sanity as shades of gray, indistinguishableone from the other. She strikes this ambivalence in "Polarities" where the heroine, Louise, seeks forcompleteness in a fragmentary world and ends up in a mental institution. Seen from society's point of view,she is insane, but compared to her lover, Morrison and their friends, her utterances and notes indicate anotherlevel of reality the reader is inclined to accept. The story's title suggests not only the "polar" landscape and the"polar" opposites, Louise and Morrison, but also the "polarities" within Louise and, by extension, otherindividuals. As Louise, in what is taken for mad raving, confides, "I am the circle. I have the poles within

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myself. What I have to do is keep myself in one piece." As her room, with its "air of pastiche," suggests,Louise struggles grimly to hold a "patchwork self" together. (pp. 41-2)

[Atwood's] techniques for the dissection of the human personality—the detached point of view, the clinicalprecision of language, the scientific imagery—all are reminiscent of the scientist or medical expert….Frequently, the effectiveness of her narrator's point of view comes from the tension that arises when highlycharged emotional situations are observed with the cool detachment of someone looking through amicroscope. This detachment is especially suitable when the narrator is insane, as in "When it Happens"—adevice Atwood may have gleaned from Agatha Christie's most famous mystery, The Murder of RogerAckroyd. Other techniques which Atwood uses related to this scientific point of view are the journal form, thesplitting of point of view and scientific analogy. In "The War in the Bathroom," for example, the journal formis used to give a day-by-day record of precise observations which eventually enable the narrator to retaliateeffectively. The same technique, in a more subtle way, is used in both Atwood's previous novels, as well as inseveral of the other stories in Dancing Girls. Atwood's narrators are often seen to keep a close watch oneverything around them as if, like people stranded in the bush, their very lives depended on it. In cases wherea real self, such as we have seen in Lady Oracle, hides behind one or more personae, Atwood frequently splitsthe point of view, using first person for the real self, third person for the persona. This device is the organizingprinciple in The Edible Woman, as it is in such stories as "Giving Birth" and "The War in the Bathroom."…Finally, analogy with scientific situations, especially those drawn from biology, provide Atwood withsymbols suitable for her subjects. "Under Glass," as the title suggests, views the breakdown of a relationshipin much the same way as the narrator herself watches the animals in the Moonlight Pavilion of the zoo…. (pp.42-3)

Atwood's prose is filled with images and descriptions taken from the world of science. (p. 43)

This adaptation of the scientific for literary purposes, gives Atwood's prose its characteristic cool, tense tone.For her, it is a way of seeing clearly, of getting close to the truth, since it allows a rational penetration throughsuperficial appearance to an underlying truth. Though some readers will feel that the "expert surgeon" Atwoodmurders to dissect, there is no denying the powerful impact of the tension between her emotional subjectmatter and her emotionless tone. "Natural," then, in Atwood's view, is true or authentic; "artificial" ismisleading or distorted. This view of life inevitably gives rise to biting satire when such "artificial" aspects ofcontemporary life as dress, customs, even language, are examined carefully. Atwood often seems like ananthropologist from another world, accurately recording the things people do in our society as if she herselfhad never done them…. Atwood shows that through the "artifice" of social behavior which represses realfeelings and hides or distorts the real self, man has created for himself dense and chaotic mazes which aresurely hideous, were they not so funny. (p. 44)

Atwood shows men and women at their best, their truest, when social masks are stripped away so that mancan be viewed as a species in nature. The real issues, she shows, are those which mankind hold in commonwith all living creatures—survival of the fittest (Lady Oracle), territorial aggression ("The War in theBathroom"), the finding of a mate ("The Man From Mars"), anger and jealousy ("Lives of the Poets") andreproduction ("Giving Birth"). Man's "creativity" through which he imagines and then lives roles with valuesother than these simple basic truths, interferes with and threatens his potential for happiness and for spiritualfulfillment. "For true happiness," Eunice P. Revele advises Arthur and Joan in Lady Oracle, "you mustapproach life with a feeling of reverence…. Avoid deception and falsehood…. Above all, you should loveeach other for what you are and forgive each other for what you are not." Coming from a woman who hasherself adopted a persona, these words indicate ironically both what is best for man and the impossibility forman of living out this truth. Since art itself is a kind of falsehood, Atwood often gives the impression, like theRussian novelist Nabokov, that the very forms with which she works are a distortion, even to the point inSurfacing and "Giving Birth," of suggesting that language itself is an "artifice" that interferes with thesingleness of emotion, thought and action that animals experience. Atwood views character as a series of

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transformations in the form of imagined personae who, chameleon-like, enable the inner "self" to survive.Holding together all these phases of the identity in some sort of "patchwork self" may be the most difficulttask man faces in contemporary society. (pp. 44-5)

Elspeth Cameron, "Margaret Atwood: A Patchwork Self," in Book Forum (copyright © 1978by The Hudson River Press), Vol. IV, No. 1, 1978, pp. 35-45.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 15): Susan Wood

In the last decade Margaret Atwood has emerged as a champion of Canadian literature and of the peculiarlyCanadian experience of isolation and survival, a theme that runs throughout her poems, three novels andcriticism. But Atwood is no narrow, doctrinaire chauvinist…. [Selected Poems] brings together selectionsfrom her six books of poetry…. It is fascinating to be able to see the development of Atwood's style andsubject matter from book to book in this way; from the beginning, Atwood has had a startlingly original voice,full of toughness and energy and a very powerful intelligence, and she has continued to explore a basic core ofsubjects—the function and nature of myth; humanity's relationship to nature; the nature of power in humanrelationships and in the natural world; the possibilities for change and metamorphosis. (p. E6)

Susan Wood, "A Garland of Verse," in Book World—The Washington Post (© 1978, TheWashington Post), December 3, 1978, pp. E6-E7.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 15): Marshall Matson

[The poems collected in Two-Headed Poems are] of disappointment, political and personal. The "two-headedpoems" are specifically the political ones in the middle of the book where the heads speak for two politicalbodies joined like Siamese twins who dream of separation. Because the bodies are joined at the head,separation is especially risky. And because the heads speak two different languages, words are especiallymisleading. (p. 12)

After the wintry middle poems of our political discontent, we may look in the later poems for the progress ofseasons to bring new life. But we get just a glimpse of muddy spring, followed by a winter solstice poem.Then, after Easter, it's January again. In other words, the poems reflect no progress of seasons; there is onlyrepetition. Easter is not a matter of rebirth but of dissolution and re-formation….

The years since You Are Happy (1974) have had their effect: these are sadder poems. Elegy marks the passingof time, and it marks these times. It tells of life on the land, and of this land. In the gloom the poet's quickedge still flashes, however, and sometimes cuts too easily. The long prose poem "Marrying the Hangman"proceeds from the true story of a servant woman in colonial Quebec…. Margaret Atwood inventively unfoldsthe implications of this story, but her quickness flirts with fatuity when she explains that the woman stoleclothes because she wanted to be more beautiful, and adds: "This desire in servants was not legal."…

The metaphors in these poems are characteristically sharp. The images are often biological, blending disgustand relish. There is that bravura violence: an eye is "crushed by pliers," the heart is a pincushion…. Blood andbleeding are so frequent they may come to seem gratuitous, as when apples are regarded as drops of blood.When, however, the bleeding apple tree is further conceived as showing compassion in the creation ofsomething out of nothing, the apples condensing like dew as well as dripping like blood, we realize the graceof the gratuity. (p. 13)

Marshall Matson, "Yoked by Violence," in Books in Canada, Vol. 8, No. 1, January, 1979, pp.12-13.

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Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 15): Barbara Amiel

Margaret Atwood's work has a razor-edge incisiveness. Best-known for her literary thesis, Survival,…Atwood's extraordinary talent is in her poetry. Though unmistakably of this country in her images and tone, asa poet Atwood has always been more concerned with private than with public ghosts: the crippling boredomthat can strangle love; the vicious cycle of self-gratification that tears men and women apart, and, on a moremetaphysical level, the stubborn task of reconciling civilization with this land studded with rocks and peopledwith indifference…. [This] singular woman writes with a steeliness unequalled in English poetry today. Hermagnificent new book, Two-Headed Poems, is a spare, exquisite and merciless look at the many selves of thepoet's persona. Such an examination might be a mere self-indulgence in the hands of a less inspiredpractitioner, but Atwood's art makes it universal. The two-headed poems are about every one of us…. (p. 50)

Barbara Amiel, "Poetry: Capsule Comments on Canada," in Maclean's Magazine (© 1979 byMaclean's Magazine; reprinted by permission), Vol. 92, No. 3, January 15, 1979, pp. 49-51.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 15): Gayle Wood

To criticize Margaret Atwood's work would require that I forget how much I admired her. Edible Woman,Surfacing and Lady Oracle had been personal supports for me, sturdy fictions knotted with so many of theunmentionable feelings most women and many men recognize. Surely she would bring to her Selected Poemsthe sardonic messages of her fiction? But she didn't. Not at first, anyway. The initial awkwardness of SelectedPoems, however, only underscores the book's resolution.

The Circle Game (1966), first of the six in this collection, seems to begin at the end of something—romanticlove? To be sure, love is a recurrent theme for Atwood. The poems included from this book vacillate frommonosyllabic punch, to flagrant paunch. A sullen, unfocused anger that will neither burn nor quite die out, isreflected in these poems. There is nothing wrong with writing about life's cool fevers, but Atwood's sin here isthat the writing style itself suffers from the lack of focus about which she writes….

These poems mean what they say without quite saying what they mean. Atwood admits only to the existenceof pain, not to the source of it. By failing to identify this source, she also fails to identify herself in these earlypoems. But the uncertainty is only temporary and it is exactly this early uncertainty on which the book, herphilosophy and indeed, the poet, later pivot. Her evolution peaks in Circe/Mud Poems, with "There's OnlyOne of Everything."…

Nowhere before does Atwood so directly, so breathlessly yield to hope and desire. Nowhere else does she socourageously celebrate her interior moment of joy. Before this, relationships have emerged almostaccidentally out of metaphors about a life too despicable to discuss; a love too silent to bother complainingabout out loud; or the mean gesture too self-indulgent to keep silent about….

[What] is most perturbing (and not in a constructive way, either) about Atwood's early poems [is that] we areasked to locate a danger Atwood herself has not yet located. Too much is caught and hanging motionless, toomuch is monotonous and brooding without tangible reason. The reader longs for particulars—why are thedefenses up, why these sullen silences? What Atwood provides, instead, is a kind of sterile, existential anger,a formless wound, a hurt followed by a hollowing. (p. 30)

[With Power Politics a] character begins to emerge, someone who—for all her self-knowledge—still subjectsherself to the wrong lover….

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Anger evolves: "You fit into me/like a hook into an eye/a fish hook/an open eye." These feelings disturb; andat last they identify a palpable anger….

We see the lovers who haunt this poetry: one moment dependent, pathetic and forebearing in the mightiestmartyred sense; the next moment, charming, independent, parental. Above all they are lovers full of fear.They are contemporary lovers, approach-avoidance lovers….

In Songs of the Transformed (1974), we come to realize just how far Atwood can extend her obsessions.These poems are so entirely repugnant that they are brilliant. They are not formed by the earlier short, cleverbursts of academic wit but rather a sustained, identifiable scorn….

Her double meanings are at once vulgar and absolutely fascinating. The "Songs" are more pungent andphilosophic than ever before….

The metaphors are as clear as Atwood's growing understanding about her own part in the romantic malaise….

The search is no longer vague; is not about being the victim or victimizer of love; is not an attempt to coax alover to love her. Instead, the poems reach a maturity that realizes the limitations of the self. Atwood begins toknow and to insist on nothing less than what she wants….

By "Four Auguries" …, she has gone from bondage to an ability to bond….

The poems now show that the thing strived for is achieved only at the end of striving. And every painfulstep—for both Atwood and the reader—leads to "There's Only One of Everything." This poem is entirelyworth the wait….

Selected Poems covers geographies other than those of love and hate. (p. 31)

Too often, though, even in these "non-love" poems, Atwood parcels out the brilliant phrase and then retracts itby going past the point. The impression is that some of the poems don't rise out of themselves but are built byslapping mud on the sides of one clever line, stanza or thought, as with "Resurrection":

god is not the voice in the whirlwind god is the whirlwind.

When she is being academic and clever, she is tiresome. Many of the poems from The Journals of SusannaMoodie (1970) drone before the clever phrase, as with "Resurrection;" or after it, as with "Elegy for the GiantTortoises," which makes the plea seem like a ploy…. (pp. 31-2)

It isn't that Atwood has simply not prepared us for the sort of "liberal's" guilt [that poems like "It Is Dangerousto Read Newspapers"] convey, which makes them so repellent. It is more because they begin so believably,perhaps, that their endings are anticlimactic, dispensable, difficult to believe. She is easily at her best on herown turf, with topics that feed and drive her personally. Even—or especially—when she is striking out againsta passive world (or the passive side of herself?) and refuses to submit to that passivity….

[Atwood's] capacity to name the maladies takes her poetry from its early passive hostility to involvement,movement and finally, identity. By the time she writes Songs of the Transformed, the former shy spurts ofanger explode into a welcome, noisy surliness….

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Margaret Atwood takes a sidelong glance at the world from within the dark oval on the cover of SelectedPoems…. This portrait of contradictions, this face, this book, deserve reading. (p. 32)

Gayle Wood, "On Margaret Atwood's 'Selected Poems'," in The American Poetry Review(copyright © 1979 by World Poetry, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Gayle Wood), Vol. 8,No. 5, September-October, 1979, pp. 30-2.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 15): Laurie Stone

The characters in Margaret Atwood's fierce new novel, Life Before Man (life after man is the implied gallowsjoke), can't seem to get through a day without obsessing on extinction. Unlike Doris Lessing's fixation onfuture cataclysm, Atwood's people … look back to the dinosaur's prophetic tale. Although nobody knowsexactly why the giant lizzards didn't make it, Life Before Man posits the notion that obsolescence may simplybe built into the process of life. We're not doomed because we're irresponsible and wicked; we're just doomed.Quel consolation.

Life Before Man is full of variations on the theme of extinction, but whereas total obliteration of the specieshas a rather limited mirth-yield, Atwood the satirist shoots mainly at smaller scale extinctions—monogamy,repressed feelings, polite conversations, and novels of manners that describe these fossils. Though far fromextinct, the rotten childhood, failed marriage, failed affair, failed fuck, successful suicide, and cancer deathalso figure in the story. Life Before Man is wry, pitiless, and sometimes moving. But there are problems.

Atwood gets trapped by her own cleverness and skill at literary games. An omniscient narrator tells the story,alternating between the perspectives of the three main characters: Elizabeth, the survivor, Lesje, anarcheologist and lover of old bones, and Nate, estranged husband of Elizabeth and tepid lover of Lesje. Thepoint of this narrative device is partly to send up the Jamesian novel, where dramatic tension derives mainlyfrom the disparity between statement and feeling—a vision in which the pulse races not at consummation, butat interruptus, at the exquisitely restrained sentiment and suspended confession.

As well as parodying them, Atwood's narrator speaks for her characters because, like tongue-tied dinosaursliving in the age of candor, not one is capable of spitting out an honest thought. Elizabeth lies in order tocontrol. Lesje covers up out of fear. Nate dissimulates because he has no idea what he feels. But whileAtwood is good at satirizing perverse withholding, the novel's formal structure ultimately dwarfs thecharacters. They don't have the blood and the story doesn't have the juice Atwood intended. The emotionalcore isn't in the comedy, but in the way real life is shown being lived, and this should have cracked the novel'sstructure at some points, plumped its skeleton with irregular contours. Instead, Life Before Man is tight as apoem in which nothing much happens; thematic obsessions take the place of drama, and the writing becomesprecious. Also, because the characters are observed rather than recorded, they become stereotypes: Elizabethis too calculating and cold, Lesje too naive, and Nate too noncommital to be believed.

Still, Atwood can unquestionably write a sentence. Her meditations on extinction, adaptation, and survivaldeepen on each successive page….

At her most powerful, Atwood shows what it's like to ride and trip toward extinction without quite feeling ithappen, to see the signs of obsolescence in the faces of children, and to feel the pull toward shelter on the onehand, and toward blood-pumping danger on the other. Mutatis mutandis, momento mori, and danse macabreis the dinosaur's message.

Laurie Stone, "Dinosaur Dance," in The Village Voice (reprinted by permission; copyright ©1980), Vol. XXV, No. 1, January 7, 1980, p. 32.

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Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 15): Victoria Glendinning

[Life Before Man] has a subtly documentary air, like the best kind of women's journalism or the mostsympathetic case notes. Events are precisely dated. Canadian social structure, domestic interiors, street habitsare inconspicuously documented…. Yet the writing is not pedestrian. The novelist is also a poet; one isreminded of this not by her lyricism but by her precision, as when Nate at a party stares down the meaninglesscleavage of a meaningless girl: "He watches this pinched landscape idly."

Life Before Man is a very skillful work, linguistically sensitive, not at all boring, utterly realized, disciplined,perceptive. It provokes a slight unease. Margaret Atwood is one of a number of contemporary womennovelists adding to a body of fiction that in terms of technique, thoughtfulness, honesty and sheer intelligencehas probably never been equaled. That sounds like a school-report; and there lies the unease.

Life Before Man is so responsible. There is in it no theme, no piece of characterization or narrative that couldnot be shown in an academic English department discussion to be functional, ordered, structurally sound, partof the overall conception. Lesje in the novel says to Elizabeth, "You wanted to supervise us. Like some kindof playground organizer." Margaret Atwood controls her characters in the same sort of way.

The great works of art are anarchic and have something irrational and inexplicable about them. "Organismsadapt to their environments. Of necessity, most of the time," though occasionally "with a certain whimsy,"writes Margaret Atwood in this book, citing as an example the modified third claw of the hind foot of theDeinonychus dinosaur. Since the claw never touched the ground, paleontologists have speculated that itspurpose was to disembowel prey. The dinosaur would have held an animal with his forefeet and balanced onone hind foot while using the third claw of the other foot "to slash open the stomach of the prey." It was "abalancing act, an eccentric way of coping with life," and it was "this eccentricity, this uniqueness, thisacrobatic gaiety" that appealed to Lesje. Life Before Man is a good novel, but the author has both her feet onthe ground. I suspect very good novels are written with the third claw.

Victoria Glendinning, "Survival of the Fittest," in Book World—The Washington Post (©1980, The Washington Post), January 27, 1980, p. 4.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 15): Rosellen Brown

Life Before Man, Atwood's fourth novel, makes the same kind of potent connections [that one finds in her bestpoetry], and makes them not so much with a poet's language … as with a poet's economy. On a single typicalpage we are moved from a routine listing of the detritus of a young woman's life, "a straight black skirt, amauve slip … a pair of pantyhose, the kind that comes in plastic eggs," to an apprehension of mood asextravagantly bleak as [that of "Mid-Winter, pre-solstice"]: "She thinks about her hands, lying at her sides,rubber gloves: she thinks about forcing the bones and flesh down into those shapes of hands, one finger at atime, like dough."

Life Before Man moves by a succession of countless such small surprises, from the everyday world of Torontoin the mid-Seventies back into the unpeopled drafts of prehistory…. (p. 33)

The book, however, is not apocalyptic; Atwood is not a Canadian Lessing. She concentrates withextraordinary patience on the day-to-day details of her characters' psychological lives, arranging husband andwife and shifting third party in a series of conventional if extreme lovers' triangles. But if the force of a poemcan be said to be centripetal, all details finally pulled in away from the random edges, so can the best ofAtwood's novels. Surfacing was in the end, like so many of her poems, preoccupied with her own stylizedgeology—with water and stone, drowning, dissolution and rebirth. Life Before Man is similarly drawn in

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toward the rich image at its center, a fascination with time and past life, the habits of extinct animals, theperpetuation of memory in us and of us, as palimpsest of history, our own and our families'. (pp. 33-4)

Elizabeth has made herself into a victor, though she suffers more pain than we tend to attribute to thepowerful….

She is surely, among modern heroines, a woman who challenges the reader to decide whether characters needto be liked, or only (only?) understood. She asks no forgiveness, though those who live in her power aresomehow able to forgive more than we can. (p. 34)

Life Before Man makes slow going until the muted irony of its voice becomes familiar. Even the luridness ofsome of its events and imagery are numbed and forbidding much of the time. That the three principals whoseminds we inhabit sound identical, that the actual facts of their situation accrete very gradually, parceled out tous without haste, with a control that is almost a form of dignity—are in the end not flaws; they are anintentional function of Atwood's vision. This is a book meant to be heard as a disembodied voice, very nearlyobjective for all the intimate details it renders. It is, in its way, a mockup of a scientific treatise on thebehavior of primates rapt in their ritual love-hate behavior.

However dour the delivery, the book has the uncannily satisfying feel of exhaustive, unremitting inquiry. (It isalso grimly funny in its reflections on Canadian—alas, see American—cultural life, though, unlike Surfacing,there are virtually no political overtones. Prehistory was perforce prenationalism.)

What is moving in Life Before Man is hard-won; that these characters do so little to solicit our affection verynearly becomes their virtue. By the end of the book Elizabeth, alone and not victorious but still ruthlesslyhonest with herself, looks at a picture of China and knows that it is propaganda, that it lies because "likecavemen they paint not what they see but what they want." Atwood has uncompromisingly—and with herpoet's talent for imagining with a nearly hypnotic concreteness—given us real lives that are far more true thanwhat we want. She has seen them in a highly original perspective. This anatomy of melancholy is MargaretAtwood's finest novel. (pp. 34-5)

Rosellen Brown, "Anatomy of Melancholia," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1980 bySaturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. 7, No. 3, February 2,1980, pp. 33-5.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 15): Marilyn French

It is no surprise to discover, on the publication of "Life Before Man," that the Canadian Margaret Atwood is awriter of importance, with a deep understanding of human behavior, a beautiful understated style and, rarestof all, broad scope—an awareness of wide stretches of time and space….

That she is gifted was clear even in her first novel, "The Edible Woman," though that satiric feminist booktends toward the lightness of the confection that is its central image. "Surfacing," her second novel, is anaccomplished work and was recognized as such by feminists, even though the work is not politically feminist.It is a sparely written, strong, lyrical recounting of a woman's return to her childhood home in anear-wilderness…. "Surfacing" is vivid and deeply felt.

"Lady Oracle," her third novel, proved a disappointment. Despite some lively sections, it is eventuallyweighed down by the unwieldy plot. (p. 1)

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All three of Miss Atwood's previous novels share a theme that is often called the search for identity but ismore accurately defined in her fiction as a search for a better way to be—for a way of life that both satisfiesthe passionate, needy self and yet is decent, humane and natural. When Miss Atwood has attempted satire inthe past, her work has dwindled into triviality. Until now, her not inconsiderable gift has seemedintrospective, lyrical, poetic. But in "Life Before Man" she combines several talents—powerful introspection,honesty, satire and a taut, limpid style—to create a splendid, fully integrated work. (pp. 1, 26)

[The life of the novel] lies in its texture, in the densely interwoven feelings, memories and insights of thecharacters.

Elizabeth is a powerful, but poignant figure…. She is cruel, monstrous, but perceptive to the point of genius.She strains to be a kind, loving mother, but, like Lucifer in Dante's hell, she is a soul freezing in agony. Andshe survives. Given her pain, her survival is a triumph—and the novelist's triumph as well. Elizabeth's pain isunderstated, but it is so palpable, so encompassing, that all her behavior—and indeed, the entire novel—isframed by it. Thus, Miss Atwood makes what could be called evil seem not only understandable but alsoinevitable; and that requires great honesty of thought and expression. Formidable and pitiable, Elizabeth existsin a gaping universe, a void.

Elizabeth's antagonist is Lesje, a younger woman who is a paleontologist…. Sensitive and intelligent, Lesje isan endearing innocent stumbling around in a world booby-trapped by other people's opacities andambivalences….

Miss Atwood's portrait of Nate is a brilliant depiction of a well-intentioned, liberal, "liberated"—which is tosay deracinated—male.

In fact, all of the characters are deracinated. There are no roots, no traditions worth saving….

This novel suggests that we are still living life before man, before the human—as we like to define it—hasevolved. Lesje's lover articulates Miss Atwood's concern with man's destruction of nature. Though Chris is asatirical figure, Miss Atwood's serious concern is evident, and it is paralleled by her dissection of culturaltraditions and attitudes—of a history that is also destructive of human life. Elizabeth provides a powerfulstatement of what is, of reality. And Lesje offers perspective on that. Although in the course of the novel, sheevolves from "prehistoric" innocence and un-self-consciousness into history, knowledge, pain, maturity …,she consoles herself by thinking that "she is only a pattern."… Humans are a mere dot on the graph of time:we may become extinct, our stories frozen tracks like fossils; we may be only a beginning.

"Life Before Man," however, is not. It is superb, complete. (p. 26)

Marilyn French, "Spouses and Lovers," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1980 byThe New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), February 3, 1980, pp. 1, 26.

Critical Essays: Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 2)

Atwood, Margaret 1939–

A Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, Ms. Atwood is the author of The Circle Game, poems, and Surfacing, anovel.

Canadian poet Margaret Atwood's second book [The Animals in That Country] is one of the most interesting Ihave read in a long time. There is nothing "feminine" about the poems, which are unmetered and unrhymed,

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pruned of any excessive words; some of them present a sequence of uninterpreted details, but these areintriguing enough to beguile the reader into an attempt to penetrate their mystery….

What interests me is the compulsive subject of these poems: a distrust of the mind of man, the word, theimagination, even the poem. To Miss Atwood the world is a sacred mystery which can suffer death by theimagination, and man's every conceivable way of dealing with his world is a "surveying", "dissecting","mapping", "anatomizing", and "trapping" of it, an "invasion" and a "desecration". A pencil, even in the handsof a poet, is a "cleaver"; what is completely captured by the poem dies.

Mona Van Duyn, "Seven Women," in Poetry (© 1970 by The Modern Poetry Association;reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), March, 1970, pp. 430-39.

The Canadian poet Margaret Atwood has written a work of feminist black humor ["The Edible Woman"] inwhich she seems to say that a woman is herself likely to become another "edible" product, marketed for themale appetite that has been created (or, at least, organized) by the media.

This may put the matter more blackly than one should. Miss Atwood's comedy does not bare its teeth. It reads,in fact, like a contemporary "My Sister Eileen."… But Miss Atwood's imagination is too wacky and sinisterfor situation comedy—and, to our considerable diversion, her comic distortion veers at times into surrealmeaningfulness.

Millicent Bell, "The Girl on the Wedding Cake," in The New York Times Book Review (©1970 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), October 18, 1970, p. 51.

Margaret Atwood the poet generally operates on the basis of a tactile world hallucinated and at the same timeengineered by her imagination. Thus a bowl of fruit or a photograph is never simply discovered "there", butrather arranged so that the form is understood to be wrought for its greatest intensity. That is, all phenomena,all we are allowed to see, mean, and the author is always behind, leading, pushing, but never giving, themeaning. Or at least not giving it away (MMargaret Avison's distinction).

Working that way, Margaret Atwood gives you just what she wants, and while that is usually enough forbeautiful poetry, you often want to know more, maybe more than you should. Power Politics is a book ofbeautiful poetry. It offers lots of refracted material for the sense and opinions, and it remains a puzzle, ormaybe a mystery. Probably the author wanted it that way.

If there's one thing Margaret Atwood is on top of it is the current sense of love as a political struggle. Thesuccess of the writing in this book depends on the composition's being attended to in the same perplex (seeDoris Lessing's Golden Notebook). I think that the verse is the best that Atwood has done, because it takesitself seriously as subject, not as conveyance.

George Bowering, "Get Used to It," in Canadian Literature, No. 52, Spring, 1972, pp. 91-2.

Power Politics, by the Canadian Margaret Atwood, is … a top-flight sequence of poems about a love affair,written with intensity of feeling, careful craft, and harrowing imagery. The "he" of the poem is never given aname, and perhaps we have to guess too hard what "he" is doing or has done; is it a measure of the strength ofthis volume that we yearn for more factual details?…

Power Politics is an honest, searching book which touches deeply; it goes about as close to the core of thelove struggle as Sylvia Plath did at her very best; we emerge from the experience shaken and at once toughand tender.

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Dick Allen, "Shifts," in Poetry (© 1972 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted bypermission of the Editor of Poetry), July, 1972, pp. 235-45.

In her first novel, The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood seemed unable to effect a resolution between a novelof manners and an expression of her essential vision. With Surfacing, she has brilliantly succeeded in creatinga narrative style which fuses content and form—a quality of prose comfortably close to the diction of herpoetry…. [A] central passage from Surfacing summarizes themes that have informed her five books of poetry:anger at wanton destruction; the dehumanization of people to the point where the crucifixion of othercreatures elicits only a morbid eagerness to record it; and the supine resignation of the witnesses to thedesecration.

Surfacing is about victimization—both external and self-imposed. Atwood has already written about it inmany poems…. This novel—like all Atwood's writing—is so richly complex that a review of this length cando no more than sketch some of its aspects. Exploration in depth can be achieved only by complete immersionin her work. When one surfaces, the world looks startingly new.

Phyllis Grosskurth, "Victimization or Survival," in Canadian Literature, Winter, 1973, pp.108-10.

On its face Margaret Atwood's Surfacing is merely another novelistic go, this time by a Canadian poet, at theoldest North American literary theme—that of "lighting out for the Territory," finding yourself by losingothers, trading culture for nature. The unnamed heroine-narrator is a divorced freelance artist, city-bound, wholearns that her father has disappeared from the family home, a primitive northern Ontario lakefront camp. Incompany with her lover and a married couple, the young woman goes to the wilderness to search for him.When the search fails, the couples stay on, fishing, gardening, making love, smoking grass, canoe-tripping,pursuing new skills or rediscovering old ones….

The heroine at first bends herself to survival problems almost unconsciously. But later, as she recovers moreof the natural knowledge learned from her father and mother in childhood, she draws the inevitable contrastsbetween her city and wilderness selves, and between her own character and those of her fellow campers. Abreach widens; she strikes out at the others, not without provocation, then strikes even at her past, hersurroundings—at every mode of "unnatural" conditioning, including memory. At the end she is by herself inthe woods, aware of an animal being quivering to life within her; voices call out, summoning her back to"reality," but she hangs fire, unable to commit herself to a return.

A familiar pattern, to repeat—but the execution is extraordinary. This is so partly because Atwood'sperformance as a natural woman is totally convincing. The feeling for real work—paddling stern, bringingback a garden, killing a landed pike, frogbaiting a hook, finding the ripest berries—is straight and true. Thesame holds for the natural observation…. And the voice of repugnance at the plastic world mixes humor andpain in proportions demanding trust.

But what is most striking about Surfacing is the integrity of the writer's imagination, a quality somewhat morevisible in her earlier books of poetry than in the imagery of An Edible Woman (1970), her first novel.Everywhere in the language of this story there are dependencies, associative prefigurings, linkages extendingand refining meaning. Moments of dramatic crisis evolve from metaphor itself, as it seems, so that when, in afury at false art, the heroine destroys the cinéma vérité film, the act reverberates in the reader's mind with awhole set of connected matters—the heroine's searchings through her own childhood drawings for somethinggenuine, her response to her father's fascination in Indian rock paintings, and much more. The action of thebook as a purification by violence of false identity is never erratic; the same standard that denies the heroineherself a name governs her judgment of other human beings….

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Atwood's overarching theme—the sin of trivialization, the unpardonable crime of strangling your ownseriousness—is better managed than some of its subsidiaries: as, for example, America as locus of universalcorruption. And her prose, to speak of that, is mannered: kinky about pronoun references, flashback signals,other bitty-bitchy details. But the writing does invariably have solid objects—a specified social context—inview. There is news in Surfacing of minor and major kinds—news about where the grass is packed inrucksacks and when it's broken out, news also about where exactly the rot comes in nowadays in so-calledgood marriages of youngsters turning 30, and news about the character of the tensions suffered by a womanonce browbeaten into marriage and determined never to be thus intimidated again. Doubtless many sensitiveand intelligent younger women will feel, as they read this tale, a special sense of possessiveness, the solace ofsolidarity (someone else has been here, someone besides me knows what's what). But like all moving andinstructive novels, Surfacing shuts nobody out.

Benjamin DeMott, "Recycling Art," in Saturday Review of the Arts (copyright © 1973 bySaturday Review; first appeared in Saturday Review, April, 1973; used with permission),April, 1973, pp. 85-6.

Critical Essays: Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 3)

Atwood, Margaret 1939–

Ms. Atwood is an award-winning Canadian poet, novelist, and critic.

Power Politics looks at the relationship between man and woman from only one angle, and perhaps even fromthe point of view of one particular relationship, and maybe through the kind of telephoto close-ups achievedby keeping a long distance away from the subject. This is fine; other poets are free to examine the samesubject from another angle, or from the point of view of a different kind of relationship, or by jamming theircameras right down their subject's throat. Margaret Atwood might do this herself in another book, but inPower Politics she does it this way and she does it well. Her book is controlled, intelligent, incisive andrevealing, and it is totally free of stridency, self-pity, or any other kind of vulgarity of the mind….

Power Politics—perhaps with a few of its images reversed—could have been written by any mature andaccomplished poet. This of course means that it could have been written only by a very few men or womenbesides Margaret Atwood.

George Jonas, "Cool Sounds in a Minor Key," in Saturday Night, May, 1971, pp. 30-1.

Critics and reviewers have tended to link the names of Margaret Atwood and Sylvia Plath. The resemblances,though superficial, are hard to avoid; they fit the easiest human categories; each author is young, modern invoice (nothing to read with a box of chocolates) and, of course, female. Those who read running cannotescape the parallels. But this is unjust and inaccurate….

There are comparisons that help understand Atwood, but they are all rugged and "masculine." She is apioneer, she is Huck Finn on the raft, she is Hemingway in darkest Africa; she is not a Smith young lady,fetching up her marks and prizes to fuel the gas oven.

The beauty of [Surfacing] is that it saves everything. All the themes Atwood has been brooding over for years(successfully! in five volumes of verse and a less-noticed novel) are here tied together and made into a wholethat is much more than the sum of its parts. The title is better than accurate; it is a well-developed metaphor.She knows the difference, looking into black bright water, between the shadow and the reflection. She issharp-sensed, tutored, and physically strong. The novel picks up themes brooded over in the poetry, and knits

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them together coherently….

The novel will be read by liberationists as an Uncle Tom's Cabin, a tract against the horrors attendant on abisexual world: unhappy marriage, lost child, backstairs abortion. It will be read by nationalists andseparationsists of all persuasions however they want to read it.

Margaret Wimsatt, "The Lady as Humphrey Bogart," in Commonweal (reprinted bypermission of Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.), July 9, 1973, pp. 483-84.

The central problem with Margaret Atwood's second novel [Surfacing] is its utter transparency. It presents sosimplistic a thesis about women in capitalistic society that the book loses any impact it might otherwise have.

Ms. Atwood apparently has yet to learn that good literature does not result from disguised political statements.At every turn her characters are sacrificed to her ideas. Eventually the plot is twisted out of shape altogether,and the novel's considerable lyric power is subverted—reduced to trite symbolism. Moreover, not satisfiedwith imitating Sylvia Plath in her first work, The Edible Woman, Ms. Atwood has now absconded with thevery image of the bell jar itself: "I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through thewalls of his mother's stomach, like a frog in a jar." The picture of a fetus enclosed in glass, once taken up, isdriven into the ground….

If anything comes to the surface in this thoroughly unconvincing novel, it is probably the need for those at thefore-front of the Women's Movement to reassess their roles in respect to those for whom they would speak.No longer the butt of jokes told by third-rate comics, feminists such as Ms. Atwood are in danger of beingabsorbed by the very society they (to quote the narrator) "refuse to be a victim" of. By repeating the sametired phrases, by sketching the same stereotypes in lieu of convictions, they risk serving neither their art norwomen, only themselves.

David Gleicher, "Female Chauvinism," in The New Leader, September 3, 1973, pp. 20-1.

Love in [Power Politics] is collision, obsession, disaster, wreckage. Love is surreal, and language in order toperform up to it has always to be making and unmaking itself. Much of the book is fragmentary, some of itpretentious, but one gets the distinct feeling that Margaret Atwood knows what she is talking about, that herpoems, like Eliot's, truly germinate in an "obscure impulse" and have no choice but to work themselves out.The poetry does not matter.

William H. Pritchard, in The Hudson Review (copyright © 1973 by The Hudson Review,Inc.; reprinted by permission), Vol. XXVI, No. 3, Autumn, 1973, pp. 586-87.

Margaret Atwood is an extraordinarily good writer who has produced widely different books: so far, twonovels, five books of poetry, and a critical guide to Canadian literature. She possesses an unusual combinationof wit and satiric edge, a fine critical intelligence, and an ability to go deep into the irrational earth of thepsyche. Her books are varied in genre yet through every one of them run victor/victim and quest for selfthemes, a set of symbols, and a developing underlay of theory. Some themes she shares with other Canadians,and others are characteristic of our developing women's culture. All are vital and juicy. Technique she has inplenty….

In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Atwood finds throughout a preoccupation withsurvival….

Survival is an extremely canny and witty book, but I am using it, or misusing it, not for its insight intoCanadian literature, but for what it tells us about Atwood's ideas. I find in Survival a license to apply it to her

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own work, as she argues that discovery of a writer's tradition may be of use, in that it makes available aconscious choice of how to deal with that body of themes. She suggests that exploring a given traditionconsciously can lead to writing in new and more interesting ways. I think her work demonstrates that aconsciousness of Canadian themes has enriched her ability to manipulate them….

Atwood's latest book of poetry, Power Politics, explores the area of victor, victim games, pain and lossgames, the confined war in intimacy between a woman and a man. The conception of the book and individualpoems are brilliant….

Between the first and the fifth book of poetry, she has gained enormously in compression, daring, shape of thepoem, precision of language….

Love, in Atwood, is often an imitation of the real: an aquarium instead of the sea, in one poem. Rather thancommunicating her people evade each other, are absent in their presence, try to consume, manipulate, control.By saying, "in Atwood" or "her people" I'm not implying I find such behavior unusual. What she describes isdismally familiar; only the precision and the very shaped often witty anguish of the descriptions make themunusual….

Still I find both The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Procedures for Underground finally more successful astotal books. Few of the poems have individual titles, and we are clearly to find Power Politics not a collectionbut a book. Why does the shape of the book, especially toward the end, bother me? When she says:

In the room we will find nothingIn the room we will find each other

why do I not believe? Perhaps the language does not change enough, the terms of the struggle deepenmythologically but do not change in any convincing way from the conventional power struggle. Some fearseems to prevent her breaking through in this book as she breaks through with her protagonist in Surfacing.To put it another way, she doesn't seem able to imagine the next stage, and a book that remains caught in itsfirst terms while seeming to suggest that it will transcend them, is frustrating, but brilliantly so. It is still astrong and good sequence and a far more satisfying book as a book than ninety per cent of the poetrycollections I read. Only in reading her work I have come to want more than that. A talent like hers needs totranscend its own categories, to integrate the preconscious and conscious materials, the imagery and ideas.Her wit can lead her into trivia; just as her passion for the omen can lead her to see the portentous in grains ofsand and jam jars….

The source of integration of the self, the reservoir of insight in Atwood lie deep in a wild and holy layer ofexperience usually inaccessible in modern life—in how her characters make a living, how they act with eachother, how they respond or fail to respond to birth, death, loss, passion, how they permit themselves to live outof touch with what they want and what they feel. The landscape of the psyche in Atwood tends to be a cabinin the Canadian woods, on a lake, on a river—the outpost of contact between straight lines (roads, houses,gardens) and natural curves (trees, deer, running water): the imposed order and the wild organic community.

Everyplace the fundamental fact of being alive is being eater or being eaten….

This strand in Atwood is an emerging theme of women's culture, I believe, for women have been forced to becloser to food, to know more of where it comes from and what it looks like raw … and where the garbagegoes afterward….

The procedures for getting in touch with the power in a place that can connect you with the power in yourselfin Atwood include openness to knowledge received from other living creatures, fasting and usually physical

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exposure, a respect for the earth, a concern with taking only what you need, respect for dream and vision asholy and instructive. In Atwood the trip to be taken is something like this: you go into the forest, the naturaland wild ground that is the past inside, the deep collective mostly unconscious past not knowable with thelogical controlling brain, the ground of being, food and terror, birth and death: you experience the other whichis yourself, your deeper nature, your animal and god half. The experience of transcendence is the gift of thetotem animal and the god who is both human and animal and something else, energy perhaps….

Atwood is a large and remarkable writer. Her concerns are nowhere petty. Her novels and poems move andengage me deeply, can matter to people who read them. As she has come to identify herself consciously,cannily, looking all ways in that tradition she has defined as literature of a victimized colony, I hope that shewill also come to help consciously define another growing body to which her work in many of its themesbelongs: a women's culture. With her concern with living by eating, with that quest for the self that BarbaraDemming has found at the heart of major works by women from the last one hundred fifty years (Liberation,Summer 1973), with her passion for becoming conscious of one's victimization and ceasing to acquiesce, withher insistence on nature as a living whole of which we are all interdependent parts, with her respect for theirrational center of the psyche and the healing experiences beyond logical control, her insistence on joiningthe divided head and body, her awareness of roleplaying and how women suffocate in the narrow crevices ofsexual identity, she is part of that growing women's culture already, a great quilt for which we are eachstitching our own particolored blocks out of old petticoats, skirts, coats, bedsheets, blood and berry juice.

Marge Piercy, "Margaret Atwood: Beyond Victimhood," in American Poetry Review,November/December, 1973, pp. 41-4.

Critical Essays: Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 4)

Atwood, Margaret 1939–

Ms Atwood is an accomplished Canadian poet and novelist whose richly complex work has been awardedseveral important Canadian prizes. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)

Much of what Margaret Atwood says in [Procedures For Underground] she has said in her previous books.She presents a world of peripheries, under-surfaces, divisions and isolation similar to the one in The CircleGame, but it would be a mistake to think that Procedures For Underground is simply a repetition of herearlier work. Certainly the surface of these poems remains the same; many of the images of drowning, buriedlife, still life, dreams, journeys and returns recur and the book is locked into a very repressive and inhibitedatmosphere, even though the time-scope of the book is large, covering the chronological stretch frompre-history to the present. As in The Circle Game, personal relationships offer only minimal hope, yet most ofthe second half of this book expresses a promise of breaking-out that did not occur in the earlier work.

Even the title suggests that people need not be trapped or buried in stasis but that they can take action: thereare motions that will push life and the individual forward. This volume moves in its second half more andmore to the notion that words can break the authorities and inhibitions that fetter us and even a cry of agony isworth shouting, for it expresses that deep underside with its "mouth filled with darkness". This howl may bean automatic response to fear or pain, simply "uttering itself", but it is a statement, and, as such, is preferableto the blankness of "a white comic-strip balloon/with a question mark; or a blank button."

People still live on the edge in these poems, surrounded by flux, impermanence and repression, haunted bybad dreams, menaced by objects but

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in fear everything lives, impermanence makes the edges of things burn

brighter.

In our present pre-historic state of human relationships we are at least evolving; "we are learning to makefire." Flux and disintegration continue but the poet has the means of preserving experience—"Over all Iplace/a glass bell"…. Things may frighten man but he is a creator; he may in fact create his own fears, hisown divisions, his own dreams and nightmares but the act of creation, in particular the act of poetry, becomesan important procedure….

The progression in the book is towards a fundamental belief in the prerogatives of poetry in a threatening,tense world. Even the lining of the poems, still the usual broken, tentative expression she has used before,somehow sounds firmer, playing some kind of strength against the details of violence, repression, doubt andfear, finally emphasizing the courage of coming to terms with that lower layer where "you can learn/wisdomand great power,/if you can descend and return safely."

Margaret Atwood has returned safely, broken the circle, shaken off the persona of Susanna Moodie [thenineteenth-century Canadian poet and novelist] which to my mind was a restriction on her own personality asa poet. Her own clear voice rings out from this book to give us her best collection to date.

Peter Stevens, "Dark Mouth," in Canadian Literature, Autumn, 1971, pp. 91-2.

Margaret Atwood's "Surfacing" invites comparison with Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar": both novels by poets,both about a young woman who has been made desperate by a stifling social milieu and who can find reliefonly by abandoning what those around her have defined as sanity. Yet Plath's novel, written 10 years ago,expresses only a pure and private suffering; her heroine, Esther, can make no more impression on theconditions of her life … than a fly on the walls of the jar enclosing it….

Miss Atwood's nameless heroine expresses a more sweeping revolt than Esther, but she is able at the novel'send to come up for air, to move confidently out of the destructive element and into freedom. The more recentnovel, then, avoids the tone of flat, sealed-off resignation on which "The Bell Jar" ends; rather, it invigoratesby its heroine's resolve to trust herself to the world while refusing, at the same time, to be a victim of it.

Victimization, and how to avoid it, is also the theme of Miss Atwood's companion volume to"Surfacing"—"Survival" (1972), a thematic guide to Canadian literature. In the latter book she indicts theliterary tradition of her country for perennially reducing its heroes to victims, whether of confining socialinstitutions, Canada's harsh geography, American power, or just their own inanition. Together, "Surfacing"and "Survival" have brought into sharp focus for Canadian literary intellectuals the problem of their country'scultural identity in the seventies.

Miss Atwood … has thereby outsoared her previous status as a widely-respected younger poet, author of fivevolumes of verse; she has become the literary standard-bearer of a resurgence of nativism and nationalism inCanada, eclipsing established Canadian writers of more cosmopolitan outlook…. Her work is alsodistinguished from theirs by its acute responsiveness to the Canadian landscape; we are constantly remindedthat her formative years were passed largely in the sparsely settled "bush" of Northern Ontario and Quebec,rather than in the cities adjacent to the United States border….

Within the novel, anti-Americanism serves to construct a new version of the 19th-century contrast betweenthe English novel, concerned with man as he is shaped by social institutions, and the American romance,

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concerned with man in relation to moral absolutes and to nature. Then, the typical American hero wasrepresented as an innocent being, untainted by Europe's moral obliquities. But now, when America's claim toinnocence has been discredited by the brutalities of power politics, Atwood can assert the Canadian's claim tohave virtue in his very powerlessness and uncertainty about his mission, if not in any more positive quality.Like her mute and destructive heroine, he must "clear a space" before he can know who, or where, he is….

At a time when many novelists restrict themselves to a single mode of expression, such as documentaryrealism or unrestrained fantasy, Miss Atwood has undertaken a more serious and complex task. DenyingEmerson's maxim that the true art of life is to skate well on surfaces, she shows the depths that must beexplored if one attempts to live an examined life today.

Paul Delany, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1973 by The New York TimesCompany; reprinted by permission), March 4, 1973, p. 5.

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, one of the best, and [Surfacing] is a poet's novel. The story takes placeon an island two miles long in the wilderness of northern Quebec, on the last rim of marginal civilization.Miss Atwood's sense of the place, of the lake in its various moods, of the animal life retreating before theintruder, is beautifully conveyed. In the most intense passages of the book her writing reminds me of IrisMurdoch….

There are … passages of fine writing in this book, and scenes of considerable power [as well as] identificationof sensibilities in this North country which I believe to be true. I think it a pity that at the end … the heroine'sbehavior and her future … are so hard to believe.

Edward Weeks, in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1973 by The Atlantic MonthlyCompany, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission), April, 1973, p. 127.

If the "argument" of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella is "Cruel Chastity," the argument of Atwood's PowerPolitics is cruel sexuality…. In Power Politics, as in Atwood's two novels, the unrequited love of courtlymyth gives way to its equally frustrating modern form, a hedonistic, yet somehow mechanical union. Thewoman in Power Politics feels that her being is lacerated and her capacity for vision destroyed by subjectionto a sadomasochistic sexual love….

Atwood's ironic inversion of courtly love connects her art with the revelations of MacLuhan, Millett, Roszak,and Chesler about the social mythology of Western culture. Romantic obsession with lover or husband ispresumed to provide the woman with her most satisfying form of existence….

To Atwood, the love-aggression complex is an historical-personal fact. The cover of Power Politics expressesthe predicament of women in the sexist society….

The theme of Power Politics is role-engulfment: "You refuse to own/yourself, you permit/others to do it foryou…." The self is lost to the social role of romantic lover, warrior, wife, superman: fulfilment meansincarnation within the archetype…. Beyond the mask of social role lies the paradox of Western culture: apostulated uniqueness of self that may not exist, or perhaps cannot be known, if it does exist…. The antithesisof the mask is the "face corroded by truth,/crippled, persistent," asking "like the wind, again and again andwordlessly,/for the one forbidden thing:/love without mirrors and not for/my reasons but your own."… [The]implicit quest is always for some alternative to the sadistic penetration and destruction of the [sadomasochisticsexual] relationship, for some "reality" behind the engulfing political role, and for some communion with that"reality". Power Politics confronts us with an entropic modern world in which a formerly solar masculinitynow operates as a suction pump to exhaust and destroy the environment….

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The imagery in Atwood's novels also expresses mechanization and destruction, but there the woman's helplesssuffering or retaliation changes into an urgent desire for liberation. [Onley notes, though, that "the movementfrom bondage to liberation is not a chronological development of theme.]…

A persistent strain in Atwood's imagery, appearing in the poetry as well as in Surfacing, is the head asdisconnected from, or floating above, the body…. Often the imagery describes the body as a mechanismremotely controlled by the head; sometimes the neck is sealed over; always the intellectual part of the psycheis felt to be a fragment, dissociated from the whole. The "head" of Atwood schizoid persona is the "Head"described in Michael McClure's "Revolt" (reprinted in Roszak's Sources), the Head that "quickly … fills withpreconception and becomes locked in a vision of the outer world and itself…. The Head [that] finally may actby self-image of itself, by a set and unchanging vision that ignores the demands of its Body."…

Through the perceptions of her narrator [Anna in Surfacing], Atwood records again the pathology of a sexualrelationship in which the male asserts his masculinity by inflicting physical or psychological pain….

Throughout Surfacing, as in Sadian fantasy, sex is linked with mechanization, coercion, and death….

To Atwood's intuitively psychoanalytical consciousness of human nature, engulfment in the sexual role, asshe satirically exposes it in Surfacing, means that the ego of the cultural personality tends to become fixated atthe stage of anal-sadism, condemned to the hellish circle of self-definition through violence, in which eachman kills the thing he loves, in one way or another….

The basic metaphor of descent and surfacing is a transformation of Atwood's inherited romantic image ofdeath by drowning. The last part of the novel is thus a paradigm of descent into and ascent from the fluid egoboundary state of schizophrenia. But it is a carefully controlled, artistically simulated descent, of therapeuticpurpose and value within the psychoanalytic dimension of the novel. The ego core (or inner self) of thenarrator always retains its integrity, except for a fleeting moment during the peak experience of hallucinatoryoneness with nature where Atwood seems to be synthesizing a primitive state of mind analogous toLévy-Brühl's "participation mystique". Like [R. D.] Laing, Atwood seems to believe that schizophrenia is aform of psychic anarchy: a usually involuntary attempt by the self to free itself from a repressive social realitystructure….

In Surfacing and The Edible Woman, it is as if Atwood had inferred from the glittering surfaces of our socialimages the Freudian theory of personality as narcissistic, accomplishing self-definition through various formsof aggression, ranging from overt coercion to the subtle forms of unconscious "induction" revealed byLaing….

A fusion of many literary forms, Menippean satire, diary, wilderness venture, even the Canadian animal story,Surfacing is the classic human animal story: the wilderness guide as social deviant becomes a scapegoat,driven out of the technological society for her sexist peers so that they may define themselves by theirrejection of her.

By the end of the psychological quest, it is clear why, as Atwood stated earlier in The Circle Game, "Talkingis difficult" and why in Surfacing "language is everything you do". The difficulty in human relations,metaphored in Surfacing as exile from the biosphere, is metaphysically related to the exploitative use oflanguage to impose psychological power structures. The need for communion in Power Politics is paralleledby the realization that language tends to warp in the hand from tool to weapon….

In Atwood's poetry, the psychological basis and the value in human relationships of the individualism ofWestern man is very much in question: partly by reference to her sense of self-definition by violence exploredin the transactional social worlds of the two novels, where individualism becomes a potent carrier of death;

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and partly by reference to a presumed primitive, non-linear, and pluralistic state of being which functions as amythic reference in most of her poetry from the earliest work on, emerging in Surfacing as a utopianalternative to alienation. In the love poems the tension between individuality and isolation, on the one hand,and loss of identity and sexual fulfilment on the other, is extreme and cannot be resolved. Imagistically it is ananguished oscillation within the either/or psycholinguistic structures of Western man, the existentialist trapthe wilderness guide describes as the "walls" of "logic". An oscillation between the polarities ofcivilized/primitive, individual/generic, male/female (in terms of Atwood's camera imagery,focussed/unfocussed), in which reciprocity of being, psychosomatic, wholeness, and a sense of genuinecommunion, as integrated qualities of experience, remain mythic states forever beyond reach. The channels ofcommunication and action are patriarchal almost beyond redemption: "… you rise above me/smooth, chill,stone/white … you descend on me like age/you descend on me like earth"….

The anguished lack of communion between the lovers in Power Politics is, for Atwood, the inability of thealienated self to break through the thought structures of Western culture….

To read Atwood's description of insanity by social definition and of psychic iconoclasm in "Polarities" [ashort story published in The Tamarack Review, 58 (1971)] and Surfacing in conjunction with contemporaryworks which analyze the social construction of reality is to realize that what Atwood calls "mythologizing" isusually a conscious or unconscious enforcement of the sexual "polarities" inherent in the myths of romanticlove, nuclear marriage, the machismo male, and the "feminine" woman. As an intelligent woman and a poet,Atwood indicates that we must somehow escape from this alienating cultural definition of personality andhuman relations….

The narrator of Surfacing returns to sanity with the realization that she can refuse to participate in thedestructive "mythologizing" of her society: "This above all, to refuse to be a victim…. The word games, thewinning and losing games are finished; at the moment there are no others but they will have to be invented,withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death." Arising renewed from the non-evaluativeplurality of nature, the wilderness guide comprehends that reality is, as William James said, a"multi-dimensional continuum." For the first time she understands and has compassion for the subjectivedimensions of others. She realizes "the effort it must have taken [her father] to sustain his illusions of reasonand benevolent order," and how her mother's "meticulous records" of the weather "allowed her to omit … thepain and isolation." Her perception of her lover is altered. "He isn't an American, I can see that now … he isonly half-formed, and for that reason I can trust him." She has escaped her former sense of total closure, thusachieving a liberated self and a basis for action within the world.

Gloria Onley, "Power Politics in Bluebeard's Castle," in Canadian Literature, Spring, 1974,pp. 21-41.

We sense right from the opening poem of The Circle Game—"This is a Photograph of Me"—in which thepoet is unable to place herself in any sort of harmony with the landscape, that the haunting mood of isolationin the book is associated, in some undefined way, with geographical wilderness. No human form is visible inthe photo; we get the feeling that wilderness somehow precludes human existence….

Owing in part to the repeated conjunction of wilderness setting with moods of fear and alienation, physicallandscape very soon comes to imply a good deal more than neutral, external reality…. [The] unspecifiedconflict between poet and landscape is internalized within the poet herself to the extent that the wildernessworld comes to stand for the outside correspondent of some internal state. The element of schizophreniaevident in several poems is, in this light, not only explicable, but indeed quite justified.

Atwood's treatment of civilization—what we might be tempted to regard as the opposite ofwilderness—affords evidence, if any be needed, that her use of landscape is predominantly and consistently

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figurative. Modern writers have, of course, long made use of the ironical truism that as more people crowdinto an area, the more superficial becomes the contact among them. In other words, the city (and all it implies)has long supplied writers with contexts and symbols of human alienation. But Atwood provides her own twist:she portrays the city as nothing more than a variation on the wilderness theme. Civilization is a glass and steeland asphalt veneer, not a change so much as a disguise ("the landscape behind or under/the future cracks inthe plaster"), and a temporary one at that….

Like the wilderness, the city exists in an emotional vacuum. Civilization obliterates humanity as surely as aflood or the plague…. In whatever setting, people are trapped, impotent. The poet can say "outside there is alake/or this time is it a street" ("Playing Cards"), because it really makes no difference. The outer world, inwhatever form, is wilderness.

But the wilderness, we have said, symbolizes something within the poet. That something, the barren side, thegravitation toward chaos, the isolation, prevents any type of valuable human relationship. An assimilation isnever achieved, never even a happy alignment; instead there is always actual or potential repulsion, thereaction against, a jerky attraction reversed, like magnets…. The need for love is real and strong, but it findslittle sustenance and no parallel outside itself. Wilderness is dominant….

The problem, however, refuses such a simple solution. Love itself turns out to be a dubious blessing. As theneed for an involved human relationship approaches satisfaction, a counter-reaction grows proportionallystronger. Hence the poet, struggling to escape isolation, suddenly finds herself saying "How could youinvade/me when/I ordered you not/to." Whenever the existence of a love relationship is assumed, thisrepellent force is very powerful. New variables are brought into the equation of self, and these are as difficultto understand and solve as the old….

An important question thus arises: how does one reconcile the need for individual identity, for separatewholeness, with the simultaneous and equally urgent need for others, an escape from total isolation? In otherwords, we have come full circle and arrived at the question that has been implicit from the outset: how toreconcile the inner and outer worlds?

It would be a gross oversimplification to say that physical wilderness is neutral, incapable of love, and that theinner, private world of self resembles external nature only when the capacity for love goes unused; but surelythe poetry is drawing us in the direction of such an understanding. At the least we could say that nature,generally, is benign when the perception of it is shared. Even a landscape of threat is less terrifying through acommon lens. We could say also that those poems dealing directly with the two-person relationship("Eventual Proteus", "A Meal", "The Circle Game", "Letter, Towards and Away") tend to contain very littlewilderness imagery.

"The Islands" is irrefutable evidence that physical landscape reflects quite clearly the inner state of theperceiver…. We have [in this poem] for the first time, an acceptance of aloneness, of personal isolation, andthe very acceptance robs the fact of its terrifying connotation. Again, a kind of freedom is attained. The mostsignificant point, though, is that she can accommodate herself to the condition of solitude only in the presenceof someone else. What enables her to accept with such equanimity is the realization that her state is shared;everyone is cut off. Ironically, when things are shared—even things like despair and alienation—bonds aremade, invisible bridges formed between islands, and insularity overcome.

The effect of landscape is altered by an alteration in attitude towards it. The change has come about throughthe poet's recognition of her affinities with others, and, by extension, with the outside world. It is not theconflicts between self and nature that she dwells on now, but the likenesses; and once you start seekingoverlappings, affinities, you find them….

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A tentative balance has been struck, a reconciliation achieved. The poles of isolation and community are notmutually exclusive. The poet is on her way toward creating a viable inner order; it remains now only to extendthe integration by applying its implications back out to the real, physical wilderness. The connection is madethrough the direct juxtaposition of the outer landscape with the personal one, its human correspondent….Inner and outer worlds do not differ in kind; the two selves need not conflict. Each is an integral part ofsomething more…. In the recognition of this identity, the terror of landscape disintegrates.

Gary Ross, "'The Circle Game'," in Canadian Literature, Spring, 1974, pp. 51-63.

When the dart is an icicle aimed right between your eyes it is difficult to separate the magic from themagician. Reading the novels and poetry of Margaret Atwood is an intensely personal experience whichculminates in a confrontation with the ubiquitous image of the poet on the back cover of the book….

The used words subside like snowflakes as Atwood, the magician, hypnotizes with the brilliant image whichdazzles without illuminating. The hypnotic subject participates involuntarily in a grotesque, dances withoutknowing the steps. There is nothing shared in the experience of manipulation. The puppet learns nothing ofitself or of the puppeteer.

The refusal to be known, except as female god or witch doctor is articulated in the motif of invisibility as theAtwood persona struggles to extricate herself from personal relationships. Like the extraterrestrial cliché ofpopular science fiction, she cannot feel, exists only to comment. In Surfacing, the protagonist "prayed to bemade invisible, and when in the morning everyone could still see me I knew they had the wrong god." She isalways the outsider, existing only to shatter the illusions of her fellow beings….

The world stripped of emotions and words is left visual and tactile and this is where Margaret Atwood findsher real strength. Her poems are petroglyphs indelibly printed on the brain. It is the image which persists whenthe words, often cruel and bitter, subside. Words are a substitute for and distortion of her world, which issilent and concerned only with survival and the passing seasons. One of the reasons The Edible Woman failsas a novel is the awkwardness of the dialogue. Atwood is self conscious in the urban environment whichrequires language. There is little dialogue in Surfacing to disturb the sounds of the country and this is one ofthe strengths of the more mature novel.

There is no warmth in the natural world where she takes refuge, only a lack of hypocrisy. Atwood, theobserver, knows she has no control over the northern landscape she describes as no one else does and sheadmires its proud refusal to submit, except to death. In spite of her identification with animals, the fur coats,the leather jackets and startled grace, the Atwood persona is left to salvage what she can of the humancondition. She knows a language and is burdened with a personal and social history. She cannot be animal. InSurfacing, she proves her dependance upon society. She cannot live alone in the wilderness….

There is a pervasive chill in her imagery. Death is cold. Love is cold. Snow is cold. The lack of a warmingcounterpoint in her work is the failure of compassion in the characters who dance in an involuntary circlearound her ice-woman. No one is strong enough to challenge her supremacy at the centre of the universe andthis is a weakness, as her voice becomes too strident, losing conviction. There is no dialogue on any level.

There is no life-giving warmth in her metaphorical water either. The ascent from drowning is no resurrection,just a return to conventional reality. In or out of the water, the drowned soul persists. Even life in the womb issurreal, grotesque. There is no state of innocence and there is no state of grace. The nightmare overcomes thedream. There is no escape. The fiction is a glassy mirror to cold realities.

The poet is the agent of beauty and the sharp instrument of death. She is a knife cutting through onion. Eachlayer falls away in beautiful symmetry. But there is no relationship between the layers and the centre is

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hollow.

Linda Rogers, "Margaret the Magician," in Canadian Literature, Spring, 1974, pp. 83-5.

Critical Essays: Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 8)

Atwood, Margaret 1939–

Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, Atwood utilizes a highly developed introspective technique in herexploration of self and country. (See also CLC, Vols. 2, 3, 4, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)

What is remarkable about [Power Politics] is not so much [its] highly distilled acid nastiness, nor evenAtwood's controlled progress from relatively narrow personal bitterness to a broad and mythic view at the endwhich shows the lovers as part of a vast geological and then amphibian mass, but their humor in the face of it.The book is a tour de force, though that isn't all. To change metaphors as abruptly as Atwood, it is amurderously sharp weapon, cauterizing, not self-serving, and there is pleasure in the hefting of it. For onething, she, the speaker, is a writer. Take that literally, take it metaphorically, what she seems to be saying isthat it is not so much the deadly clinches that hurt as the distances: the irony, the incessant creation andrevision of their images of each other, their attempts at control, their subtle, posturing self-victimization, itsliterary satisfaction. Killing him, no matter how deserving of murder he may be, she gives her performanceself-consciously, and so despises herself as well…. [Those] moments in which she floats away from herself,decomposing, turning to water, or crystallizing at a grotesque distance from herself, will be familiar to anyonewho has read Atwood before…. She has even made a novel, Surfacing, almost entirely out of [a] mythologyof earth-air-water (now much fire in her, except that, as reader, you burn: she is at home in stone and coldness,not in heat)…. (pp. 149-51)

I find it remarkable that Atwood has been able to take those images, which must by now be comfortable toher, nearly domesticated by familiarity, and make them live so fiercely. It is the dynamic structure of the bookthat does it, the near-plot of the drama of dissolution, the illusion of specificity, done with mirrors (though heasks for the "One forbidden thing: love without mirrors"). In the end she has convinced us that

In the room we will find nothing In the room we will find each other

which may sound like Merwin but comes out of a universe of killers and near-suicides much more dramatic,less metaphysical, than his. (pp. 151-52)

No man could take offense at the knives Atwood has so skillfully wielded (thrown?) in Power Politics. Shemay go for his private parts (which are not necessarily or solely sexual) with the blade of this book, but thosemirrors she uses do not distort. Her poems are terribly fleshless, bony, as vulnerable as they are cutting. Theyshow her naked and impaled, fiercely alone. The blood belongs to both of them, man and woman, and, by herhard and deadly skill, to anyone who touches it. (p. 152)

Rosellen Brown, in Parnassus: Poetry in Review (copyright © by Parnassus: Poetry inReview), Spring/Summer, 1974.

Quite simply, I cannot trust these poems [in You Are Happy], nor are they trustworthy in an exciting way.Poetry, after all, is a serious and dangerous game, playing with words, thoughts, feelings. I, for one, don't havemuch else. But the elements of Atwood's poetry and of her own predicament are carelessly squandered, andthe reader is little convinced of the importance of caring when the poet clearly does not…. One's expectations

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are laughed at, one's imagination turned into fancy. Atwood plays cheap tricks, tricks with more thanmirrors….

Atwood uses a wilful obscurity to pretend to profundity; her fashionably arcane invitations do not function asinitiations; and the imperatives which she histrionically declares are facile—childish whimpers, adolescentmoans, social anguish. (pp. 129-30)

J. E. Chamberlin, in The Hudson Review (copyright © 1975 by The Hudson Review, Inc.;reprinted by permission), Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1975.

Margaret Atwood continues to construct her guided missiles which have a deadly force of their own, poems soneat and silent that they move in space like an invisible invasion, descend, pierce the mind and leave a wound.And yet in spite of her sense of life as mostly wounds given and received (expressed in ["You Are Happy"] ina long series of Circe poems, no small boldness in the act of taking a myth so sacrosanct and doing it anew),Atwood attempts here both a new indifference and a new humility in her chronicle of the relations betweenman and woman (the chronicle as spiky and lethal in "Power Politics," her last book)…. We recall thatStevens wanted to write a fourth section of his "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," to be called "It Must BeHuman," and could not. To be human, Atwood daringly reminds us in the quotation from the gospel of thetaunt addressed to Jesus by the mockers at the crucifixion, is to be "incapable of saving" oneself. I must notleave this volume, which has virtues on every page, without mentioning Atwood's comic sense, beautifullyvisible in the poem from the Circe sequence, "Siren Song," where we learn the secret of

the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible:

the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see the bleached skulls.

The siren continues, luring the man closer and closer: Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me! Only you, only you can, you are unique

at last. Alas it is a boring song but it works every time.

This light side (with its own tight-lipped truth behind it) engenders the various songs of transformations of themen-turned-to-animals in the Circe sequence, which, though they have good lines, seem more often the workof the fancy than of the imagination, and are occasionally willed into being. Nonetheless, Atwood lets verylittle dross into her volumes, and she always repays rereading. (pp. 33-4)

Helen Vendler, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1975 by The New York TimesCompany; reprinted by permission), April 6, 1975.

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[You Are Happy] is an affirmative book …, and I was surprised to see Toronto reviewers going on as usualabout Atwood's bleak, relentless, morbid vision as if this were only Power Politics revisited. Even the firstsection, in which the protagonist expresses grief, regret and remorse (as well as anger) over the failure of apast relationship, is warmer and more sympathetic than any of Atwood's earlier icy (and often accurate)analyses of the wicked ways of men, women and modern urban societies. My favourites among her earlierbooks, Surfacing and The Journals of Susanna Moodie, perhaps foreshadowed the development that is foundhere. Her new poems are earthier in the best and most positive sense. (p. 87)

The book's second section, "Songs of the Transformed," contains marvellously imaginative poems spoken byhumans who have been changed into animals. From this perspective "there are no angels / but the angels ofhunger"; these poems get down to the basic realities of hunger and death. All life is predatory, and all of us aretransformed to corpses in the end. In the third section, "Circe/Mud Poems," the problem of the sexualrelationship is re-explored in terms of the story of Circe and Ulysses; again, this is a highly imaginativetreatment in which Circe's enchanted island is recognizably a Canadian rural setting. The section concludeswith the suggestion that perhaps the lovers are not after all trapped in that unhappy story. In the fourth section,"There is only one of everything," a man and a woman appear to move, at first tentatively and then withjoyous confidence, toward the new kind of relationship described above. The cruelty of myth has been leftbehind; the sacrifice and offering are voluntary, and in this there is freedom. In earlier Atwood collections onefelt that even the body was regarded as a prison, but here it is singled out for praise.

The book seems, then, to be a turning point in the poet's development. Technically, too, it is an advance overPower Politics. Many individual poems from that book tend to lose their force when removed from thecontext of the whole sequence; moreover, some of the shock-tactics and surreal effects seem to me inadequateto the psychological processes they are attempting to represent. Here there is more technical variety than inthe past, manifesting itself partly in an effective use of the prose poem; one feels that most poems areautonomous and interesting in and for themselves, as is each of the four sections, and yet all contribute to acoherent whole—a human statement, a journey. I think we may be grateful to Margaret Atwood for facing upto the most difficult facts of our existence and for putting the case for joy so minimally and so well. (p. 88)

Tom Marshall, in The Ontario Review (copyright © 1975 by The Ontario Review),Spring-Summer, 1975.

Margaret Atwood is all things to all people. If you want, she's a nationalist. If you want, she's essentially afeminist or a psychologist or a comedian. She's a maker and breaker of myths or she's a gothic writer. She's allthese things, but finally she's unaccountably Other. Her writing has the discipline of a social purpose but itremains elusive, complex, passionate. It has all the intensity of an act of exorcism….

Selected Poems has the coherence of a grand design. By the end of the book you can't help seeing that there'sa consistent goal underlying all Atwood's poetic adventures. She has a poem, "Tricks with Mirrors," where themirror is addressing a narcissistic lover: I like to read it as a parable about her art.

Don't assume it is passive or easy, this clarity with which I give you yourself. Consider what restraint it

takes: breath withheld, no anger or joy disturbing the surface …

It is not a trick either, it is a craft:

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mirrors are crafty….

Metaphors aside, this craft is easy for mirrors and hard for poets. It's especially hard if you're trying to reflecta country which has no image of itself, and this is the premise of The Circle Game. On the surface, it's aconventional book, a parable of the mid-1960s, featuring an exodus from the city to the wilderness in searchof the real Canada. But if you look closely, it's the story of someone who is trying to enter the cycles of natureby becoming part of the "warm rotting / of vegetable flesh."…

The Animals in That Country (1968) introduces that now-famous brand of Atwoodian irony, and it's Atwood'smost overtly political book. Industrial expansion, for her, means that the machine takes over mind and body,making people into lethal robots: "I reach out in love, my hands are guns." This is the germ of Power Politics,where the lover will become the imperial aggressor, and the love affair an imitation of guerrilla warfare.Irony, of course, is the weapon of a civilized mind. For the duration of the book, Atwood reinstates the mindwhich was renounced in The Circle Game and will again be abdicated in The Journals of Susanna Moodie(1970)….

I have a special fondness for Atwood in her ironical aspect, but Susanna Moodie, in its way, is a perfect book.Procedures for Underground appeared in the same year. Poetically, it's a pale reflection of Susanna Moodieand it's the only one of Atwood's books that doesn't break new ground. (p. 59)

Power Politics is vintage Atwood, it's a mirror where every vampire/victim finds his/her own face. And it'sher best known book because it strikes a nerve in the collective tooth….

Atwood's affinities … are with an earlier form of society, closer to nature than ours. It could be that she seesclearly because she's outside, watching the war: Reason and Progress in one camp, Innocence and Fate in theopposite camp. Or it could be that she knows how seductive false gods are. At any rate, violence and warhover on the edge of the lovers' magic circle—mankind is present on the island in the section called "Songs ofthe Transformed," where those of us who have surrendered our humanity have a chance to speak.

The bestiary is perhaps Atwood's most brilliantly conceived series of poems. The domestic animals arebitterly resentful, the wild animals are sorrowful. They sing about good and evil, and about a society whichcannot distinguish between good and evil. They are sometimes comic and always deadly serious. Mirrors, asAtwood says, are crafty. Mirrors also have the disgusting habit of revealing what we would rather forget. Butlet the corpse have the last word, because the corpse knows what kind of mirror Atwood's poems are…. (p.60)

Linda Sandler, "The Exorcisms of Atwood," in Saturday Night (copyright © 1976 by SaturdayNight), July/August, 1976, pp. 59-60.

As a literary genre, growing-up-female-in-the-1950s is as threadbare as a pair of bleached denims, but LadyOracle is utterly unlike any feminist novel I know. For one thing, Atwood has a sense of humour. For another,she's working with "common woman." Joan [the protagonist] doesn't belong to any neurotic élite, and whenshe encounters the species she finds it puzzling and inconsistent. It wants multiple orgasms, but it also wantshelp with the dishes. "The Scarlet Pimpernel," she says to herself, "does not have time for meaningfulin-depth relationships."…

Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle … is an exquisite parody of an obsolete generation. So far, it's beenprivileged information that Atwood's a brilliant comedian. I vote we make it public, because one or two criticsshould know. (p. 59)

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Linda Sandler, in Saturday Night (copyright © 1976 by Saturday Night), September, 1976.

Margaret Atwood … writes novels whose pervading theme is—yes—beginning again: old material but freshlyand deftly arranged, which is what matters. The protagonist of her first novel, The Edible Woman, consumesher past in the form of a cake, thus freeing herself from it, at least symbolically. In her second, Surfacing, theliteral surfacing of the protagonist from the waters of the lake in which her father had drowned represents herrising from death (the past) to life.

Eating and drowning are Miss Atwood's favored modes of escape. The protagonist of Lady Oracle [JoanFoster] … casts off the shambles of her complicated past by faking her own drowning in the foul waters ofLake Ontario….

In this novel, as in life, true escape from the detritus of the past is as impossible as the notion is sometimestantalizing. Joan Foster is a compulsive examiner of shards as well as a compulsive dreamer; the two are asirreconcilable and inextricable as Joan and Louisa. Her problem is that they must be reconciled….Joan/Louisa may no more escape the past, real and imagined, or evade the future than Hamlet his death, butby journeying into the ruins she may, possibly, rise above them….

Words are Miss Atwood's medium, and she uses them well. To lay out the seemingly bizarre skeletons of hernovels may do them a disservice, particularly Lady Oracle. It is, in fact, a very funny novel, lightly told withwry detachment and considerable art. Disbelief is willingly suspended. Its plot is complicated but the novel isnever confusing and if, in the end, it remains only tentatively resolved, so does life, except in the end.

William McPherson, "New Lives for Old," in Book World—The Washington Post (© TheWashington Post), September 26, 1976, p. 1.

Joan Foster has an identity crisis with a difference: she knows who she is all right, but there are too many ofher. As Joan, she is the colorless wife of Arthur, a pompous graduate student who spends most of his timeflitting from one tiny leftist movement to another. As Louisa K. Delacourt, she is an enthusiastic writer of thesort of quickie Gothics that are sold in the dime stores she claims to work at when she's really at the librarydoing costume research. Joan chose her nom de plume in honor of her Aunt Lou, the only person who caredabout her when she was a miserable, fat teen-ager, and this past is another secret: Arthur must never find outthat her stories of high-school popularity and cheerleading are lies. It's a hard act to keep up. When Joanproduces "Lady Oracle," a book of automatic writing described by her publishers as halfway between RodMcKuen and Kahlil Gibran, her new status as the toast of Toronto brings her little pleasure….

In spite of many funny moments, "Lady Oracle" moves too slowly and is basically too serious to distract usfrom its clumsy contrivances. And so the zany narrative, perhaps intended to spice a familiar tale of feministwoe, points all the more plainly to a deeper unanswered question: who are these people, anyway? (p. 7)

Like her heroine, Margaret Atwood seems to have two literary selves. The first, upon which her considerablereputation is based, writes spare, tense poems full of images drawn from the bleak landscape of her nativeCanada and suffused with a quasi-mystical animism. This self has also written an extraordinary novel,"Surfacing," in which the sick relations between the sexes are explored as part of a larger sickness in therelations between man and nature. In both "Surfacing" and the poetry a powerful sense of place compensatesfor a large vagueness where human beings are concerned. The other Atwood is the author of "Lady Oracle"and an earlier "The Edible Woman," a comic novel about a young woman who escapes a conventionalmarriage by raising her consciousness in the nick of time. Both these books lack the metaphoric and mythicforce of the other work while sharing with it a limited interest in individual character. Instead of archetypesand myths, they offer us the stock figures and pat insights of a certain kind of popular feminist-orientedfiction. It may be that the genre is not congenial to Atwood's real gifts: perhaps the very confusion of "Lady

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Oracle" is a measure of her discomfort. Her best work is so original, so energetic, that one is tempted to guessthat "Lady Oracle" is for Atwood what Gothics were for Joan: a flight from the demands of her truest, mostthoughtful self. (pp. 7-8)

Katha Pollitt, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1976 by The New York TimesCompany; reprinted by permission), September 26, 1976.

[Surfacing] synthesizes a number of motifs that have dominated [Atwood's] consciousness since her earliestpoems: the elusiveness and variety of "language" in its several senses; the continuum between human andanimal, human being and nature; the significance of one's heritage, including not only personal ancestors butthe gods and totemic figures of primitive cultures; the search for a location (in both time and place); thebrutalizations and victimizations of love; drowning and surviving. (pp. 387-88)

The "search for the father" and the sense of a symbolic journey underline the novel's mythical implicationsfrom the outset…. Told from the first person point of view in a flat, emotionless tone, the narrative echoeswhat the protagonist gradually discovers and reveals about herself: a total spiritual numbness which datesback, as one learns through flashbacks, not only to her dead marriage and the abortion but to the break fromher parents and the confused values of her childhood. (p. 388)

The mixture of anticipation and reticence, promise and danger, attending such a journey is one of Atwood'spoetic preoccupations, articulated most directly in the title poem in the volume, Procedures forUnderground…. Though the narrator of Surfacing expects that she must pass through the proverbial hell andpurgatory before reaching her destination, the reader gradually learns that the hell is, in fact, behind her; notnew suffering but assimilation and acceptance of her previous suffering is the path towards wholeness.

That the journey has a sacred dimension becomes even clearer through the course of the narrative, as Atwoodexplores the confusing religious values that have become paralyzing rather than redemptive for her narrator.(pp. 389-90)

Drowning or submersion is … one of the most persistent images in Atwood's writing, appearing not only asthe central metaphor in Surfacing but in numerous poems…. In her study of Canadian literature [Survival],Atwood explains the ubiquitous metaphor, observing "The Canadian author's two favourite 'natural' methodsfor dispatching his victims are drowning and freezing, drowning being preferred by poets—probably becauseit can be used as a metaphor for a descent into the unconscious …". (pp. 392-93)

Using the symmetry of drowning by water/drowning by air, and death of the parent/death of the child inSurfacing, Atwood … imaginatively condenses the implications of the contemporary schism between fleshand spirit, secular and sacred, conscious and unconscious; the destroyed fetus is the anomalous buried half ofthese necessarily complementary pairs. The frequent references to mutilation, amputation, anaesthesia, and therobot-like, mechanized or wooden reality of the narrator's own immediate past are now seen as theconsequences of her abortion. In removing life, "they had planted death in me like a seed…. Since then I'dcarried that death around inside me, layering it over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl …"…. To interpret thisimage simply as a political statement against abortion would be to misunderstood the significance of the fetusas Atwood's metaphor for the self-destructive diseases of contemporary life, and the incomplete developmentof the self.

Moreover, the narrator's spiritual malaise is revealed as a product of her separation not only from the future(the unborn child) but the past (her dead parents). Her descent into her deeper self discloses the poverty of theconventional religious values she had only partly assimilated; the reality of her father's death (the death of herchildhood "god") is the catalyzing shock which forces her guilt to surface. At the same time, however, sherealizes that her father's legacy was not negation but affirmation: his rejection of Christianity was actually a

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liberation from dogma, and his gift to her is the map to a genuine sacred place where each person confrontshis or her own personal truth. "These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten,were the only ones who had ever given me anything I needed; and freely"…. Atwood's poem, "Dream:Bluejay or Archeopteryx," powerfully adumbrates this same cluster of archaic and contemporary images:

in the water under my shadow there was an outline, man surfacing, his body sheathed in feathers, his teeth glinting like nails, fierce god head crested with blue flame.

Whereas language has been a key to unlocking her past self thus far, the narrator realizes that she must nowtranscend it in order to complete her quest, for "language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole"….Through her protagonist's journey, Atwood suggests the broader paradox of the poet, who must use languageto signal what is ineffable. At this point the narrative shifts to increasingly mythic images (suggesting thecollective unconscious and its archetypal motifs as proposed by Jung). The narrator, in gratitude for herrevelation at the bottom of the lake, leaves an item of clothing to propitiate the gods; at the same time, she isbeginning to strip away the layers of civilization, and feeling begins to seep back into her numbed being.Accepting the message from her father's gods—the knowledge from the head, or how to see—she now seeksout the lesson she knows must be waiting for her from her mother—a knowledge from the heart, or how tofeel. Again, she returns to her parents' cabin for further clues and again finds them in visual rather than verbalform.

The picture she recognizes as her mother's legacy is actually a drawing that she herself had made as a child:

On the left was a women with a round moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside hergazing out. Opposite her was a man with horns on his head like cow horns and a barbed tail.

The picture was mine, I had made it. The baby was myself before I was born, the man wasGod, I'd drawn him when my brother learned in the winter about the Devil and God: if theDevil was allowed a tail and horns, God needed them also, they were advantages….

Of the images in Surfacing, either verbal or visual, this pictograph most poetically and economicallysynthesizes the motifs that Atwood has so meticulously developed. The typical childhood schematicresembles the primitive rock drawings that the narrator's father had recorded, besides repeating the linkbetween ontogeny and phylogeny suggested throughout the novel. Moreover, it anticipates not only thenarrator's later career as an artist, but also reflects the fact that the truth she seeks is already withinherself—and is a non-verbal one. The subject of the picture is her own past: herself in the fetal state in hermother's womb, and the collective representation of the feminine principle expressed throughmaternity—which she had aborted. The male figure "opposite" in the drawing represents the complementaryaspects of these elements: it is simultaneously her father, the masculine principle, a god (who, with his hornsand tail, mends the Christian rift between God and Devil, good and evil), and, specifically, the nature deity ofthe rock paintings whose sacred place discloses the truth. In order to become whole, the narrator must"translate" the pictograph—immersing herself in its metaphoric language by living out all of its implications.

Significantly, just as she finds the drawing, her companions announce to her that the body of her father hasbeen found on the lake bottom. But the confirmation of her own earlier discovery is not cause for grief.Denying the limiting reality of such facts, she exults, from the perspective of her newly found vision, that"nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive"…. (pp. 394-96)

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The knowledge of the meaning of death revealed at the bottom of the lake corresponds to her unconscioushalf, now joined with her conscious self to form a whole. She vows to bear the symbolic child—who is boththe released guilt of her past and the potentiality of the future—by herself, animal-like, alone, rather thanstrapped into the death machine that civilization provides. (p. 396)

[The] narrator finds taboos and directives everywhere; she exists in a state of primitive consciousness inwhich each object in the outer world is invested with sacred and personal significance. Everything remotelyassociated with human civilization is forbidden, even food and shelter. She eats roots and builds ananimal-like lair. By reducing herself as much as possible to a kind of animal state that is symbolically bothpre-human and pre-birth, she hopes to recover the archaic language necessary to communicate with the spiritsof her parents. (Several of Atwood's poems focus on the transformation into and out of an animal state,including "Eventual Proteus" in The Circle Game; "Arctic syndrome: dream fox" in The Animals in ThatCountry; "Departure from the Bush" and "Looking in a Mirror" in The Journals of Susanna Moodie.) Feelingherself pregnant with what may be a "fur god with tail and horns" …—an emblem of the godhead recentlyconceived within her—she is rewarded for her purifying sacrifices by momentary visions of each of herparents.

These visions crystallize the parallel themes which Atwood has consistently developed throughout Surfacing.On the metaphysical level, the narrator returns to the primeval time before the Fall and the knowledge of goodand evil, when man was undifferentiated from the godhead, unconscious of his separate (and divided) self.Having incorporated the redemptive values of the nature deities embodied by her parents' spirits in place ofthe earlier confusions of distorted Christianity, she has forgiven herself for her sins against the humancondition, thus reaffirming the sacred ties between generations and between man and nature. On thepsychological level, she has relived her guilt-ridden personal past as well as the collective past—regressingthrough the abortion, her dead marriage (which she had experienced as the state of continual falling, "goingdown, waiting for the smash at the bottom" …), and her own pre-human vestiges. In establishingidentification with both the feminine (maternal, generative) and masculine (knowledge, wisdom) principles,she generates her own creative potentiality through rejoining the severed halves of her being.

As the visionary reality recedes "back to the past, inside the skull, it is the same place" …, she re-enters her"own time"…. She has recovered not so much the images of her actual parents as their symbolic reality andsignificance for her; their spirits can only provide one kind of truth. From them she has learned that salvationand redemption are never total, never complete; they must be constantly renewed in the present. As herparents shrink to what they really were, mere human beings and not gods, she accepts their imperfection,including the one fact that she had resisted for so long—their mortality. To accept that is to accept death itself,which, she has learned, is simply to accept life. But she also realizes that she can refuse to be a victim or toplay word games that in their falsification of reality are (like her brother's arbitrary categories of good andevil) a form of death.

Like the hero of the mythological quest, she must bring the boon of knowledge back to the level of mundanereality, must translate it back into the language of sanity. In keeping with this realization, she "surfaces,"choosing to return to Joe. Though he is only half-formed (and not a particularly positive character, asdeveloped earlier in the novel), he represents a kind of animal purity and dogged devotion to her. Moreover,having recovered the capacity for love and faith, she has no one else with whom she can live out her newself-discoveries. Such a muted affirmation to conclude the novel may ring false, in view of the wholeness ofvision finally achieved by the narrator. But it is consistent with Atwood's observation that.

in Canadian literature, a character who does much more than survive stands out almost as ananomaly…. [Still], having bleak ground under your feet is better than having no ground atall….

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(pp. 397-98)

Mapping the symbolic journey into both the private and collective heart of darkness, Atwood has thus createda powerful account of modern civilization and its diseases. Elsewhere she has noted that paranoidschizophrenia—the split personality—is "the national mental illness" of Canada. However, the problem ofself-division that she diagnoses in Surfacing resonates on a number of other levels; the illness is a metaphor ofthe human condition itself. The only cure is the journey of self-discovery: down and through the darkness ofthe divided self to the undifferentiated wholeness of archaic consciousness—and back…. Surfacing rendersnot only the archetypal journey into the self but Atwood's own personal journey back through the stages of herevolution as a poet. The novel both reveals and imaginatively extends the unity of theme and image of herprevious work, expressing her ability to work within traditional frameworks to achieve an original vision. Inthe poem entitled "The Journey to the Interior," the narrator—like the protagonist of Surfacing—realizes

that travel is not the easy going from point to point, a dotted line on a map, location plotted on a square surface but that I move surrounded by a tangle of branches, a net of air and alternate light and dark, at all times; that there are no destinations apart from this. (pp. 398-99)

Roberta Rubenstein, "'Surfacing': Margaret Atwood's Journey to the Interior," in ModernFiction Studies (copyright © 1976, by Purdue Research Foundation, West Lafayette, Indiana,U.S.A.), Autumn, 1976, pp. 387-99.

Margaret Atwood's new novel [Lady Oracle] is a compound of domestic comedy, Jungian psychology andsocial satire, stirred with wit and flavoured with the occult. (p. 84)

Atwood means to give her heroine [Joan] a quality of helpless vulnerability, but endows her with an ironicsensibility so keen as to make her seem the strongest character in the book, a cool and amused observer ratherthan the chief sufferer. This is a minor failing, however, and it is a relief to turn from the humourless intensityof Surfacing to the urbane comedy of Lady Oracle. In the former novel, the heroine's grim entry into aprimeval world and her determined rejection of human contact conveyed a kind of superior contempt for theequivocations and compromises of everyday life, as well as a feminist hostility to a society which reduceswomen to the level of sex objects. In some respects the pattern is repeated in Lady Oracle: the heroine,trapped in an identity she detests, searches for some meaning in her life; shedding men along the way, sheundergoes a ritual death and rebirth, flirts with dark powers in her psyche, and emerges to a new awareness ofself. Also reminiscent of Surfacing is the book's attack on the crassly materialistic concerns of NorthAmerican life, on the vulgarity of a society dedicated to show. Yet in Lady Oracle these themes becomelargely a source of satiric humour; there is none of the morose self-righteousness which marks the tone of theearlier novel. Atwood has not lost her seriousness of purpose, but her vision has broadened, and she hasdeveloped a maturer sense of the possibilities inherent in any given situation. (pp. 84-5)

The heroine's search for emotional fulfilment and psychic integration gives coherence and direction to a plotthat might otherwise seem rather creaky and disjointed. As is often the case with fiction cast inautobiographical form, the narrative follows an episodic line, and parts of the action are sometimes verytenuously connected…. Still, such weaknesses seem slight beside the deftness in Joan's career and introducesso many unusual and interesting characters. She has, too, an admirable control of style; her ability to insert the

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telling phrase and her eclecticism of reference give her writing a liveliness and polish that are unusual inCanadian fiction. (pp. 86-7)

Herbert Rosengarten, "Urbane Comedy," in Canadian Literature, Spring, 1977, pp. 84-7.

Lady Oracle is proof that when it comes to fiction, the whole is sometimes not equal to, let alone more than,its parts. Many of the parts of Atwood's finally unsatisfying third novel are witty, excellent, insightful….

Lady Oracle is … an uneasy mixture of Gothic parody and a comedy of manners. The parody of the Gothicshows us still another side of Atwood…. Her main character's Costume Gothics reveal what might be ascholarly knowledge of the field as well as an uncanny feel for the psychology behind them. Likewise, muchof the comedy of manners, the social comedy, strikes precisely the right note….

But these various aspects never emotionally connect or mesh into a unity: in fact, the parodic and satiric partsdetract from the most interesting and moving material—the evocation of the heroine's childhood…. [The]vision of fatness—its causes, trial and results—is the finest aspect of the novel. (p. 283)

What is perhaps most disturbing about Lady Oracle—and a clue to its ultimate failure—is its strangecloseness and yet distance from Surfacing, Atwood's last novel. Many of the same themes and images pervadeboth works. In both first-person novels we have heroines interested in magical transformation, exploration ofthe past, especially in relationship to parents, death and the disappearance of a body, mystical religion, anexamination of the sources and uses of art. But where magical transformation involved a genuine quest inSurfacing, here it is automatic writing and false drowning. Where mystical religion meant trying urgently tocontact the local nature-spirits in Surfacing, here it is an easy world of aged spiritualists. Where the growth inSurfacing involved abandoning commercial art and seeking deeper roots in childhood drawings and Indianpictographs, here the art is Gothic novels rejected in the end—in favor of science fiction. On one level, LadyOracle seems almost a parody or weird distortion of Atwood's most serious themes.

In essence, Surfacing is an exploration, a quest novel; Lady Oracle is an entertainment, an escape novel—inboth senses of the word. The resolution of Surfacing is aesthetically and emotionally satisfying, entailing as itdoes a genuine metamorphosis, a psychological transformation. The resolution of Lady Oracle is witty,emblematic and contrived—a comic gesture. This is unsatisfying because the novel is basically serious, unlikeAtwood's first novel The Edible Woman, which has the same sort of conclusion. (pp. 283-84)

[Finally,] when we hear the mysterious footsteps down the hall approaching our heroine, we no longer care ifshe is "saved" or "got"—we and, I suspect, her creator, can't quite believe, let alone feel for her. (p. 284)

Bonnie Lyons, in The New Orleans Review (© 1977 by Loyola University), Vol. 5, No. 3.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 84): Introduction

Margaret Atwood 1939–

(Full name Margaret Eleanor Atwood) Canadian poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, and author ofchildren's books.

The following entry provides an overview of Atwood's career through 1994. For further information on hercareer and works, see CLC, Volumes 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 15, 25, and 44.

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Internationally acclaimed as a poet, novelist and short story writer, Margaret Atwood has emerged as a majorfigure in Canadian letters. Using such devices as irony, symbolism, and self-conscious narrators, she exploresthe relationship between humanity and nature, the dark side of human behavior, and power as it pertains togender and politics. Popular with both literary scholars and the reading public, Atwood has helped to defineand identify the goals of contemporary Canadian literature and has earned a distinguished reputation amongfeminist writers for her exploration of women's issues.

Biographical Information

Atwood was born in Ottawa and grew up in suburban Toronto. As a child she spent her summers at herfamily's cottage in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where her father, a forest entomologist, conductedresearch. She first began to write while in high school, contributing poetry, short stories, and cartoons to theschool newspaper. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, Atwood was influenced by criticNorthrop Frye, who introduced her to the poetry of William Blake. Impressed with Blake's use ofmythological imagery, Atwood published her first volume of poetry, Double Persephone, in 1961. In 1962Atwood completed her A.M. degree at Radcliffe College of Harvard University. She returned to Toronto in1963, where she began collaborating with artist Charles Pachter, who designed and illustrated several volumesof her poetry. In 1964 Atwood moved to Vancouver, where she taught English at the University of BritishColumbia for a year and completed her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). After a year of teachingVictorian and American literature at Sir George Williams University in Montreal in 1967, Atwood beganteaching creative writing at the University of Alberta while continuing to write and publish poetry. Her poetrycollection The Circle Game (1966) won the 1967 Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor.Atwood's public visibility increased significantly with the publication of Power Politics in 1971. Requiring anescape from increasing media attention, Atwood left a teaching position at the University of Toronto to moveto a farm near Alliston, Ontario, with her husband, Graeme Gibson. Atwood received the Governor General'sAward in 1986 for her novel The Handmaid's Tale, which was published that same year. She continues to be aprominent voice in Canada's cultural and political life.

Major Works

Since 1961 Atwood has produced a highly acclaimed body of work that includes fiction, poetry, and literarycriticism. The Circle Game established the major themes of Atwood's writing: inconsistencies ofself-perception, the paradoxical nature of language, the issue of Canadian identity, and conflicts betweenhumankind and nature. In the same year that she published her second novel, Surfacing (1972), Atwood alsoearned widespread attention for Survival (1972), a seminal critical analysis of Canadian literature that servedas a rallying point for the country's cultural nationalists. In the poetry collection The Journals of SusannaMoodie (1970), Atwood devoted her attention to what she calls the schizoid, or double, nature of Canada.Based on the autobiographies of a Canadian pioneer woman, The Journals of Susanna Moodie examines whyCanadians came to develop ambivalent feelings toward their country. Atwood further developed thisdichotomy in Power Politics, in which she explores the relationship between sexual roles and power structuresby focusing on personal relationships. Atwood's novels explore the relationship between personal behaviorand political issues as well. These include Lady Oracle (1976), about a protagonist who fakes her own deathand thereby creates a new life for herself; The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel concerning an oppressivefuture society; Cat's Eye (1990), a coming-of-age novel that contains autobiographical elements; and TheRobber Bride (1993), a contemporary recasting of a folktale, which explores jealousy and sexualmanipulation.

Critical Reception

Criticism of Atwood's work has tended to emphasize her political and social views. Many critics identify heruse of grotesque, shocking imagery and heavy irony as hallmarks of her style. Because her poetry and fiction

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often portray physical and psychological violence in relationships between men and women, somecommentators have labeled Atwood pessimistic and dismissed her as little more than an ideologue, but othercritics have found her a visionary interpreter of feminist thought. The Handmaid's Tale, for example, has beenfavorably compared with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and other distinguished dystopiannovels for its disturbing extension of contemporary trends and its allegorical portrait of political extremism.The many critics who praise Atwood's work admire her spareness of language, emotional restraint, andwillingness to examine the harsh realities of both society and the natural world.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 84): Principal Works

Double Persephone (poetry) 1961The Circle Game (poetry) 1966The Animals in That Country (poetry) 1968The Edible Woman (novel) 1969The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poetry) 1970Procedures for Underground (poetry) 1970Power Politics (poetry) 1971Surfacing (novel) 1972Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (criticism) 1972You Are Happy (poetry) 1974Lady Oracle (novel) 1976Selected Poems (poetry) 1976Dancing Girls, and Other Stories (short stories) 1977Two-Headed Poems (poetry) 1978Up in the Tree (juvenilia) 1978Life before Man (novel) 1979True Stories (poetry) 1981Bodily Harm (novel) 1982Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (criticism) 1982Bluebeard's Egg (short stories) 1983Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems (short stories and poetry) 1983Interlunar (poetry) 1984The Handmaid's Tale (novel) 1986Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986 (poetry) 1987Cat's Eye (novel) 1990Wilderness Tips (short stories) 1991Good Bones (short stories) 1992The Robber Bride (novel) 1993

Criticism: Barbara Hill Rigney (essay date 1978)

SOURCE: "'After the Failure of Logic': Descent and Return in Surfacing," in her Madness and Sexual Politicsin the Feminist Novel, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978, pp. 91-115.

[In the following excerpt, Rigney discusses the theme of discovering the self through descent and return inAtwood's Surfacing.]

It is inevitable for Margaret Atwood's nameless protagonist of Surfacing that there should occur a "failure oflogic," for her journey "home" is an exploration of a world beyond logic. Her quest, like that of Jane Eyre,Clarissa Dalloway, and Martha Quest Hesse, is for an identity, a vision of self. She must find that self—not

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only through the father for whom she searches the Canadian backwoods, but also through the mother forwhom she must search in the depths of her own psyche.

Atwood, much like Virginia Woolf, juxtaposes and compares two internal worlds: the world of the maleprinciple, characterized by rationality and logic but often also by cruelty and destruction, and the world of thefemale principle, which for Atwood implies an existence beyond reason, a realm of primitive nature wherethere are connections between life and death, suffering and joy, madness and true sanity, where opposites areresolved into wholes. A failure to recognize these connections is a failure to perceive the "female" part ofone's self, and this results, for Atwood, in a catastrophic splitting of the self. Like R. D. Laing's patients in TheDivided Self, alienated from the self and from society, Atwood's protagonist perceives herself as rent, tornasunder:

I'd allowed myself to be cut in two. Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathingsuit, smiling, a trick done with mirrors, I read it in a comic book; only with me there had beenan accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one thatcould live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was nothing but a head, or, no,something minor like a severed thumb; numb.

The protagonist has separated her body from her head, divided the parts of her self, and thus committedpsychological suicide: "If the head is detached from the body, both of them will die." "At some point," shesays, "my neck must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into my head…."

The division of the self is, at least partly, "a trick done with mirrors." In Atwood's novel and in much of herpoetry, the mirror becomes a symbol of the split self, and one's own reflection functions like a kind ofnegative doppelgänger. Presumably, the mirror provides a distorted image of the self, thus stealing one's senseof a real or complete self, robbing one of an identity. Anna, that character in Surfacing who has no self left tolose, whose identity has been lost in her preoccupation with the false, made-up self in the mirror, has become"closed in the gold compact." In order to see herself as whole, the protagonist ultimately realizes, she must"stop being in the mirror." The mirror must be turned to the wall so that its reflection will not intrude between"my eyes and vision." She wishes, finally, "not to see myself but to see." In the poem "Tricks with Mirrors"Atwood considers the dangers of perceiving reflection rather than whatever reality might exist, and concludes:"It is not a trick either, / It is a craft: / mirrors are crafty." It is interesting at this point to recall that in Brontë'sJane Eyre, Jane's first visual contact with the mad Bertha, her doppelgänger, is a reflection in a mirror.

The camera is another device which Atwood sees as revealing the split self or doppelgänger, the "not me butthe missing part of me." Cameras, like mirrors, according to Atwood's protagonist, can also steal the soul, asthe Indians believed. Like "toilets and vacuum cleaners," other examples of "logic become visible," camerasmight operate to "make people vanish," stealing "not only your soul but your body also." Photographs serve toshut one in "behind the paper."

As products of the world of logic, cameras are always operated by men in Atwood's works. The fiancé in TheEdible Woman, for example, is a camera enthusiast. When he explodes his flash attachment in the eyes of theprotagonist, she runs for her psychological life. In Surfacing, David and Joe complete their victimization ofAnna by what amounts to a form of rape as they coerce her into revealing her naked body before theirintrusive, phallic movie camera, which they use against her "like a bazooka or a strange instrument of torture."The protagonist considers herself reprieved in having evaded the movie camera, and, ultimately, shedemonstrates a superior wisdom by emptying the footage of movie film into the lake. But those characters inAtwood's works who victimize others with cameras are themselves victims of faulty vision. David perhapsmore than Joe sees reality only through a lens, which clouds and distorts. Perhaps it is also symbolic of a lackof vision that the protagonist's father is associated with cameras; it is the weight of a camera which preventshis drowned body from "surfacing."

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Cameras and mirrors thus serve to make the self more vulnerable by emphasizing its division, but thedoppelgänger or missing part of the self is also detectable by other means. Anna, employing a pervertedversion of the magic which is part of Atwood's representation of the female principle, reads the protagonist'spalm. She perceives that some of the lines are double and asks, "Do you have a twin?" The protagonist's twin,of course, is that part of herself which is alienated, suppressed, and almost irretrievably lost.

Part of that lost self is an artist who compromised and became an illustrator, acting on the advice that "therehas never been any important women artists." All Canadian artists, according to Atwood, suffer a kind ofschizophrenia. In Survival Atwood's exploration of Canadian literature and the Canadian psyche, she writes:

We speak of isolated people as being "cut off," but in fact something is cut off from them; asartists, deprived of audience and cultural tradition, they are mutilated. If your arm or leg hasbeen cut off you are a cripple, if your tongue has been cut off you are a mute, if part of yourbrain has been removed you are an idiot or an amnesiac, if your balls have been cut off youare a eunuch or a castrato…. Artists have suffered emotional and artistic death at the hands ofan indifferent or hostile audience.

The subject of the protagonist's illustrations is, significantly, children's fairy tales. "I can imitate anything,"she declares. She does not, however, imitate reality, but rather she creates a fantasy world with her sketches ofidealized princesses and unconvincing giants. She also has created a fairy tale for her own history, the facts ofwhich are obscured even in her own mind. Thus, she has lost a part of herself somewhere between memoryand lie. She fears the truth, but also fears losing it, as she takes inventory of her memories. "I'll start inventingthem and then there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone. I run quickly over myversion of it, my life, checking it like an alibi."

For example, she has invented the alibi of an unsuccessful marriage and a childbirth to sublimate the morepainful fact that she unwillingly underwent an abortion and was then abandoned by a complacent,middle-aged lover. Fragments of memory of the abortion itself—often described in terms of amputation,cutting, splitting—cause such pain that she cannot accept their reality. She considers that her invented son, inreality an aborted fetus, is "sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled." But it is anunborn child who represents her twin, a part of her self, and she is haunted by unbidden visions of the abortionwhich symbolizes her division from herself:

I knew when it was, it was in a bottle curled up, staring out at me like a cat pickled; it hadhuge jelly eyes and fins instead of hands, fish gills, I couldn't let it out, it was dead already, ithad drowned in air.

The abortion itself, however, is not a cause for but an effect of the protagonist's split psyche. If a complete selfhad been in control, she is ultimately to realize, the operation would never have occurred. In order to becomean autonomous, completed self, however, the protagonist must heal yet another kind of split—that between"good" and "evil." She must come to terms with herself as perpetrator as well as victim, or at least as acorrespondent in her own victimization. During an interview, Atwood explained her protagonist's problem inthe following way:

If you define yourself as intrinsically innocent, then you have a lot of problems, because infact you aren't. And the thing with her is she wishes not to be human. She wishes to be nothuman, because being human inevitably involves being guilty, and if you define yourself asinnocent, you can't accept that.

Atwood's concern with this delusion of female innocence is also reflected in other of her works. Marian in TheEdible Woman, for example, maintains her own innocence throughout a destructive sexual relationship until

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the very end when she realizes that she, too, is guilty of exploitation and destruction. In Survival, Atwoodgroups the subjects of Canadian literature into what she terms "basic Victim Positions." She states that thecentral question in Canadian literature is: "Who is responsible?" The answer to that question, provided mostclearly in Surfacing, is that ultimate responsibility lies almost inevitably in the self. Like Lessing's MarthaQuest Hesse in The Four-Gated City confronting the "self-hater," that part of the self which victimizes boththe self and others, Atwood's protagonist must confront her own complicity in such acts as the abortion. CarolP. Christ, in her article "Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women's Spiritual Quest and Vision," upholds asimilar contention:

Her association of power with evil and her dissociation of herself from both reflect a typicalfemale delusion of innocence, which hides her complicity in evil and feeds her fake belief thatshe can do nothing but witness her victimization. In order to regain her power the protagonistmust realize that she does not live in a world where only others have power to do evil.

Even God, or perhaps most especially God, the protagonist comes to realize, incorporates evil: "If the Devilwas allowed a tail and horns, God needed them also, they were advantages."

In searching her childhood for the self she has lost and the memories of evil which she has unconsciouslysuppressed, the protagonist comes across two scrapbooks preserved by her mother. One contains drawings byher brother, all depicting war, bomber planes decorated with swastikas, people under torture—all obvioussymbols for what the protagonist sees as male power in its most evil form. Her own drawings, in contrast, arerepresentations of an impossible innocence, a feminine vision of fertility represented by artificial Easterheavens of bunnies and eggs and colored grass. The male and female principles, always in perfect balance inthese childish drawings, are represented by a moon in the upper left hand corner and a sun in the right. A moreenlightened, adult protagonist recalls:

I didn't want there to be wars and death, I wanted them not to exist; only rabbits with theircolored egg houses, sun and moon orderly above the flat earth, summer always, I wantedeveryone to be happy. But his pictures were more accurate, the weapons, the disintegratingsoldiers: he was a realist, that protected him.

At another point in her memory gathering, the protagonist recalls her brother's childhood occupation ofcapturing and imprisoning wild animals and insects, and then allowing them to die. Her own "feminine" rolewas to free the animals, risking her brother's anger. A memory which is less congenial to her self-delusion offeminine innocence involves her cooperation with her brother in an act which foreshadows her cooperation inthe abortion, the stabbing and dismembering of a doll, left then to float, mutilated, in the lake.

For the protagonist, the brother thus represents male power in general, manifesting itself in war games and inthe violation of an essentially feminine nature, the wilderness. His exploitation of animals is repeated in theactions of "the Americans," hunters and fishermen who come to Canada to gratuitously destroy for sport. TheAmericans represent society's destruction of nature, obvious even in the Canadian backwoods as pollution andland "development" encroach upon the island sanctuary which is the protagonist's home. Americans, she says,"spread themselves like a virus." They represent power: "Straight power, they mainlined it…. The innocentsget slaughtered because they exist." Finally, the Americans are manifestations of that origin of evil, theHitler-boogie of the protagonist's childhood. They call to mind the fascist figure as sexual oppressor in theworks of Woolf and Lessing.

Atwood's symbolism involving nature as victim is, quite obviously, multilayered. The protagonist, like theexploited wilderness, represents Canada itself and its predicament as a political victim. As Brontë, Woolf,Lessing, and Laing have also maintained,… individual schizophrenia is often a reflection of a greater, morepernicious national schizophrenia. Atwood's protagonist is a divided self, as Canada is a country divided and

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exploited by Americans. Atwood writes in the afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie: "If the nationalmental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."

The representative crime of the Americans in Surfacing is the killing of a heron, slaughtered not for food butin truth merely because "it exists." The bird, as a trophy of power, is hanged from a tree, wings outspread, incrucifixion position. The protagonist sees the heron as symbolic of her own psychological death, but seesherself as free of responsibility for both the heron's and her own fate. She is to learn, however, that the"Americans" are, in reality, Canadians, like herself, and thus she too is somehow guilty, involved. Throughher passivity in refusing to prevent the heron's death, she has cooperated in its execution, very much in thesame way that she has cooperated in the perpetration of the abortion. Of the heron's death she says, "I felt asickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands, as though I had been there and watched withoutsaying No or doing anything to stop it." Later in the novel, she says of her participation in the abortion:"Instead of granting it sanctuary, I let them catch it. I could have said No but I didn't; that made me one ofthem, too, a killer."

Thus the exploiter is not "they" but "we"; women too are human and therefore killers—but perhaps with somemitigation. The protagonist kills animals only for food and then only with a kind of religious reverence for thecreature she has destroyed. She fantasizes, as she clubs a flailing fish on the back of the head or fastens asquealing frog onto a fish hook, that the animals will their own victimization just as people do and are willingto die to sustain her: "They had chosen to die and forgiven me in advance." Later, she thinks:

The shape of the heron flying above us the first evening we fished, legs and neck stretched,wings outspread, a blue-gray cross, and the other heron or was it the same one, hangingwrecked from the tree. Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly,anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish theywould have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters inthe fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them out of cans or otherwise; we areeaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam,canned Jesus….

It is perhaps her delusive claim to innocence, and thus her lack of reverence, which prevents Marian in TheEdible Woman from eating meat and, later in the novel, from eating almost anything at all. Only when sherecognizes her complicity in her own victimization, when she understands that she has allowed men to "eat"or destroy her and that she has also attempted to destroy them, can Marian overcome her antipathy to food,bake a huge cake which is an effigy of herself, and gobble it down.

The traditional greeting of the fishermen in Surfacing, "Getting any?", is also a sexual allusion. The violationof nature by society is, for Atwood's protagonist, paradigmatic of the violation of women by men. Sexualpolitics, too, she sees as a battle, with herself as victim. The protagonist recalls her childhood arguments withher brother in which "after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight,invisibility."

More victimized in sexual politics than the protagonist, who at least intuits something of her complicity in hersituation, is Anna, whose "invisibility" is achieved behind her excessively applied cosmetics and the smokefrom her constant cigarette. Her only reading material is murder mysteries, though she never realizes theironic fact that she herself is a victim of another sort of murder. In Anna's relationship with David, her body is"her only weapon and she was fighting for her life, he was her life, her life was the fight: she was fighting himbecause if she ever surrendered the balance of power would be broken and he would go elsewhere. Tocontinue the war." Anna says of David's tyranny over her: "He's got this little set of rules. If I break one ofthem I get punished, except he keeps changing them so I'm never sure." David, thus, is uncontestably thewinner as Anna masochistically endures, perhaps even enjoys, his crude and insulting sexual allusions, his

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insistence on her stupidity, her own reduction as a human being.

The protagonist, perhaps, has chosen her mate a bit more wisely. Joe is more "natural" than civilized, moreanimal than man, with his exceptionally hairy body and his inability to communicate verbally: "Everything Ivalue about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous." "What willpreserve him," she says at another point, "is the absence of words." Joe's ability to manipulate power, too, islimited, as indicated by his professional failure as a potter whose grotesque vases no one ever buys. "Perhapsit's not only his body I like," the protagonist thinks, "perhaps it's his failure; that also has a kind of purity."Finally, Joe is desirable because "he isn't anything, he is only half formed, and for that reason I can trust him."

But even Joe, for a time, insists on commitment, "love" and marriage. For the protagonist, with the livingproof provided by Anna and David constantly before her, marriage is more a surrender than a commitment; itis, for the woman, total immersion in the male world and thus a further division of the female self. One ceases,in marriage, to be a whole self and turns "into part of a couple." The protagonist thinks of her imagined formermarriage as "like jumping off a cliff. That was the feeling I had all the time I was married; in the air, goingdown, waiting for the smash at the bottom." Married people, she thinks, are like the wooden man and womanin the barometer she saw when she was little, balancing each other in a perpetual kind of opposition.

Marriage and sex, for Atwood much as for Brontë, Woolf, and Lessing, are linked not only to thepsychological death of the self, but to physical death as well. Atwood's protagonist perhaps confuseschildbirth and abortion, but the process is nonetheless grotesque. "They take the baby out with a fork like apickle out of a jar. After that they fill your veins up with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube, Iwon't let them do that to me ever again." Contraception in itself poses a very real and practical danger. Theprotagonist discusses with Anna the adverse and potentially lethal effects of "the pill" on women's bodies. It isdiabolic that pills come in "moon-shaped" packages, masquerading as feminine creations, because, likecameras, they are inventions of male logic. Also, like cameras, they act to obscure vision, covering the eyewith a film like vaseline. The protagonist concludes:

Love without fear, sex without risk, that's what they wanted to be true; and they almost pulledit off, but as in magicians' tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we're back to theother things. Love is taking precautions…. Sex used to smell like rubber gloves and now itdoes again, no more handy green plastic packages, moon-shaped so that the woman canpretend she's still natural, cyclical, instead of a chemical slot machine. But soon they'll havethe artificial womb, I wonder how I feel about that.

Later, as she overhears Anna's strangled cries and inhuman moans through the thin walls of the cabin, theprotagonist thinks that sex is "like death." Love and sex as destructive forces are also themes in Atwood'spoetry: "next time we commit / love, we ought to / choose in advance what to kill." By the conclusion ofSurfacing, however, the protagonist is able to understand that sex includes life as well as death, that it can, atleast theoretically, be natural and positive as well as mechanical and destructive.

In the meantime, however, the protagonist is still divided, unable to achieve any resolution of such oppositesas life and death, creation and destruction. She fears sexual commitment and so elects the defensivemechanism of refusing to "feel." A similar technique … is used by Woolf's Septimus Warren Smith andClarissa Dalloway and by Lessing's Martha Quest Hesse. The first indication that Atwood's protagonist haschosen such a procedure is her dispassionate, almost journalistic narrative reporting of events anddevelopments. "Anesthesia," she says, "that's one technique…." Most often, however, she does not accept theresponsibility for her inability to feel, classing it as a kind of congenital condition or birth defect: "Perhaps I'dbeen like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch." But as she observesher companions, hears their "canned laughter," and realizes that they too are incapable of feeling, she thinks"or perhaps we are normal and the ones who can love are freaks, they have an extra organ, like the vestigial

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eye in the foreheads of amphibians they've never found the use for."

Another protective technique … is the depersonalization of sex. Atwood takes the idea to its extremeabsurdity: "two people making love with paper bags over their heads, not even any eyeholes. Would that begood or bad?" But, she imagines, if sex and marriage could be relegated to the inconsequential, the trivial,they could not perhaps claim so many victims. Marriage, says the protagonist, is "like playing Monopoly ordoing crossword puzzles;" moving in with Joe is "more like buying a gold fish or a potted cactus plant, notbecause you want one in advance but because you happen to be in the store and you see them lined up on thecounter." Even relationships with other women are superficial; the protagonist has known Anna only twomonths, yet she is "my best woman friend."

Such procedures as refusing to feel and to relate to other people, however, limit and divide the self almost aseffectively as the dangers they minimize. The protagonist longs for the ability to feel: "I rehearsed emotions,naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate; what to feel was like what to wear, youwatched others and memorized it." The protagonist has even resorted to pricking herself with pins toexperience at least a physical feeling: "They've discovered rats prefer any sensation to none. The insides ofmy arms were stippled with tiny wounds, like an addict's."

Coincidental with the inability to feel is the protagonist's inability to communicate. The very language, forher, becomes useless and finally undesirable: "Language divides us into fragments." In replying to Joe'sproposal of marriage, she finds "the words were coming out of me like the mechanical words from a talkingdoll, the kind with the pull tape at the back; the whole speech was unwinding, everything in order, a spool." Inorder to ever communicate again, the protagonist thinks that she must find a language of her own:

I was seeing poorly, translating badly, a dialect problem. I should have used my own. In theexperiments they did with children, shutting them up with deaf-and-dumb nurses, lockingthem in closets, depriving them of words, they found that after a certain age the mind isincapable of absorbing any language; but how could they tell the child hadn't invented one,unrecognizable to everyone but itself?

Woolf's Septimus Warren Smith can understand the birds; Lessing's Lynda Coldridge communicates withspirits in code. Atwood's protagonist ultimately is to conclude: "The animals have no need for speech, whytalk when you are a word…."

If one cannot communicate, cannot feel, has no name, has been so thoroughly divided, one is, like Atwood'sprotagonist at the beginning of the novel, psychologically dead. Atwood herself has referred to Surfacing as "aghost story." Her protagonist has, in the sense of Laing in The Divided Self, been engulfed, "drowned," ceasedto exist as a self, just as both her father and her aborted baby have drowned, one in the lake, the other "in air."She speaks also of her brother having drowned as an infant, an event which she has vicariously experienced,or at least somehow observed from what she describes as her mother's transparent womb. Later we learn thatthe brother was saved by the mother's intervention, but according to the protagonist, he has not regarded hisexperience with the respect it warrants; it was, the protagonist thinks, a kind of rebirth. "If it had happened tome I would have felt there was something special about me, to be raised from the dead like that; I would havereturned with secrets, I would have known things most people didn't."

Drowning thus comes to represent not only death or a loss of self, but also a procedure for finding the self.The protagonist's descent into the lake in search of the Indian cave paintings is symbolic of her descent intoher own psyche, from which return, resurrection, "surfacing," is possible. Similarly, Lessing's Marthadescends into madness before she can emerge as truly and divinely sane. Surfacing is as much an allegory ofthe quest for psychological rebirth, for life, as it is a search for the theological meaning Carol P. Christdescribes.

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To be "reborn," just as to be born, the protagonist must have a "gift" from both father and mother. She hascarried "death around inside me, layering it over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl." To be alive, whole, she mustrecognize that she is a product of both the male and the female principles. She must understand her parentageand her origins before she can understand herself.

Her search for the father ends in the depths of the lake. "Return" for him is impossible; his body, weigheddown by the symbolic camera, has never "surfaced." He is reduced to "a dark oval trailing limbs." Like Virgil,who can guide Dante's descent and show him the way through hell but never enter paradise himself, theprotagonist's father represents human reason and its limitations. He can point the way with his drawings andmaps, "pictographs," to "the place of the gods," the sacred places "where you could learn the truth," but hecannot himself see truth.

In the beginning, the protagonist imagines that her missing father has gone mad and lurks in the wildernessoutside their cabin. His madness, she imagines, would be "like stepping through a usual door and findingyourself in a different galaxy, purple trees and red moons and a green sun." Such experiences, she thinks,could lead to revelation: "He had discovered new places, new oracles, they were things he was seeing the wayI had seen, true vision; at the end, after the failure of logic." But it is only the protagonist herself and not herfather who has such visions. In her dive deep into the lake she discovers not the cave paintings her father hasdescribed but the "galaxy" of her own psyche: "pale green pinpricks of light," strange shapes and mysteriousfish, "chasm-dwellers."

The father himself is incapable of such visions because, for him, logic has never failed. He represents,however, the best of the male principle—logic without destruction. He has, for himself and his children,reasoned away evil, teaching them that even Hitler, "many-tentacled, ancient and indestructible as the Devil,"is not, after all, "the triumph of evil but the failure of reason." The father has attempted to protect his familyfrom evil by secluding them in the Canadian wilderness where World War II is only a subject for children'sgames. Yet these very games reflect the failure of the father's teaching and indicate the inevitability of evil:the first pages of the novel describe the young brother and sister, their feet wrapped in blankets, pretendingthat "the Germans shot our feet off."

As the father tries to eclipse evil, so he tries to reason away superstition, fear, religion: "Christianity wassomething he'd escaped from, he wished to protect us from its distortions." But this too is impossible. Theprotagonist's childhood is haunted by the idea that "there was a dead man in the sky watching everything Idid." Ultimately, she must go beyond the father, beyond the world of logic which he represents. She mustconfront the presence of evil, in the world and in the self, and she must also confront the gods: "The powerfrom my father's intercession wasn't enough to protect me, it gave only knowledge and there were more godsthan his, his were the gods of the head, antlers rooted in the brain."

The father's gift of knowledge, however, cannot be considered inconsequential. He has led the way toself-knowledge and pointed out reality. Even the father's drowned body is "something I knew about," it is,symbolically, also the body of her own aborted fetus, "drowned in air," its fishlike corpse having been flushedthrough the sewers, "travelling … back to the sea." As she recognizes her father's body, the protagonist's pastsuddenly becomes very clear to her and her fantasy past disintegrates. "I killed it. It wasn't a child but it couldhave been one, I didn't allow it." "It was all real enough, it was reality enough for ever…." With thisrecognition the protagonist begins to experience feeling, life: "Feeling was beginning to seep back into me, Itingled like a foot that's been asleep." Shortly afterward she finds that she is even able to cry. But herresurrection is not yet complete: "I wanted to be whole."

The father thus participates in a kind of conception, but the actual birth process is the business of the female.In order to be reborn, to become whole, the protagonist must also find a "gift" from her dead mother:

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It would be right for my mother to have left something for me also, a legacy. His wascomplicated, tangled, but hers would be simple as a hand, it would be final. I was notcompleted yet; there had to be a gift from each of them.

The mother's legacy is the revelation of a drawing from the protagonist's childhood of a woman "with a roundmoon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside gazing out." Just as the protagonist has earlier envisionedherself as present before her birth, able to see the world through her mother's transparent womb.

The protagonist interprets the message of the drawing as an instruction: in order to be alive and whole shemust replace, resurrect, that part of herself which she has killed—the aborted fetus and the fertility aspect ofthe female principle which it represents. Early in the novel the protagonist has found it "impossible to be likemy mother": now she must become her mother, "the miraculous double woman," giving birth to herself aswell as to new life. The protagonist thus seeks out her lover and takes him to the shore of the lake, carefullyarranging their positions so that the moon, representing the female principle as in the childhood drawings, ison her left hand and the absent male sun on her right. According to Carol P. Christ the conception itself is areligious act: "As she conceives, the protagonist resembles the Virgin Mother goddesses of old: at one withher sexual power, she is complete in herself; the male is incidental." The conception is also, however, apsychological rebirth, a healing of the divided self:

He trembles and then I can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising fromthe lake where it had been prisoned so long, its eyes and teeth phosphorescent; the two halvesclasp, interlocking like fingers, it buds, it sends out fronds.

Whereas images of cutting, splitting, division, fragmentation have dominated the novel to this point, nowimages of unity, joining, completeness begin to supercede. The protagonist has united the two halves ofherself, found her parentage, reconciled the male and female principles within the self. Thus the "two halves"of herself also "clasp, interlocking like fingers." The body, which has been for her "even scarier than god," hasbeen integrated with the head: "I'm not against the body or the head either; only the neck which creates theillusion that they are separate," For a second time the protagonist refers to palmistry: "When the heartline andthe headline are one … you are either a criminal, an idiot or a saint." Now saintlike, in the sense that Woolf'sSeptimus is a saint, Atwood's protagonist has also resolved within herself the opposites of life and death. Thusshe reflects nature itself:

I lie down on the bottom of the canoe and wait. The still water gathers the heat; birds, off inthe forest a woodpecker, somewhere a thrush. Through the trees the sun glances; the swamparound me smolders, energy of decay turning to growth, green fire. I remember the heron; bynow it will be insects, frogs, fish, other herons. My body sends out filaments in me; I ferry itsecure between death and life, I multiply.

Although the argument for androgynous vision may be made with some relevancy in the case of VirginiaWoolf, it is not a meaningful concept when applied to Atwood. For Atwood even more than for Woolf themale principle is ultimately expendable. The female principle alone and in itself incorporates and resolvesopposites. Life and death, good and evil, exist within the protagonist, within all women, as they exist innature. Atwood has described nature in Survival as being, not benevolently motherlike or nurselike in theWordsworthian sense, but rather as a living process "which includes opposites: life and death, 'gentleness' and'hostility.'" She invariably associates the female principle with nature; she deals, not with nature as a woman,but rather with women as nature. Therefore, although nature is not a mother in Atwood's novel, theprotagonist's mother is aligned with nature, at home with it as with an extension of herself. Almost witchlike,with her long hair and wearing her magically powerful leather jacket, the mother feeds wild birds from herhand, charms a bear, and is in tune with the seasons which she carefully records in a special diary. It is sheand not the father who represents life as she gives birth, saves her drowning son, prohibits cruelty; yet, dying

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herself, she also understands the mysteries of death. The protagonist, as a child asking about death, isconvinced that her mother "had the answers but wouldn't tell." The protagonist recalls her mother's own deathand wishes she might have taken her from the hospital room to die in the forest. There, perhaps, she mighthave been reborn, like nature itself: "It sprang up from the earth, pure joy, pure death, burning white likesnow." It is only the male world of logic which insists on the finality of death. "The reason they inventedcoffins, to lock the dead in, to preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading orchanging into anything else. The stone with the name and the date was on them to weight them down."

Like her mother, the protagonist, although she hardly realizes it, is also aligned with nature, acting as guidefor her companions in the backwoods and insuring their survival. She is instinctively aware of the dangers ofthe wilderness; she knows how to catch a fish and balance a canoe. She is even immune from the insectswhich so plague the others.

The protagonist is truly a part of nature, able to incorporate its powers into herself, however, only after she hasreceived her mother's legacy and conceived both herself and her child. Her next act is to reject the world ofmale logic, the elements of civilization, its canned food and its clothing and its values. "Everything fromhistory must be eliminated," she says, as she burns and tears books, clothing, even her fake wedding ring. Thecabin itself is unbearable because it is man-made, and so she enters the forest naked except for a blanketwhich she will need "until the fur grows."

Here she can experience her own birth:

My back is on the sand, my head rests against the rock, innocent as plankton; my hair spreadsout, moving and fluid in the water. The earth rotates, holding my body down to it as it holdsthe moon; the sun pounds in the sky, red flames and rays pulsing from it, searing away thewrong form that encases me, dry rain soaking through me, warming the blood egg I carry. Idip my head beneath the water, washing my eyes….

When I am clean I come up out of the lake, leaving my false body floated on the surface….

Now in tune with the powers of nature, the protagonist is granted a series of visions, one of prehistory itself:"The forest leaps upward, enormous, the way it was before they cut it, columns of sunlight frozen; theboulders float, melt, everything is made of water." She also sees her mother, who has always been "tenthousand years behind the rest," and who is also an extension of eternal nature. The protagonist becomes hermother, placing her feet in the footprints left by the vision, and finding "that they are my own." Thus she toois synonomous with nature: "I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals moveand grow, I am a place."

In this mystical identification with nature and with the female principle it represents, the protagonistsurrenders individual human identity. In so doing, she comes face to face with the world beyond logic."Logic," she says, "is like a wall"; in tearing down this wall she finds "on the other side is terror." Once thewall is destroyed, however, there is no choice: "From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are nolonger any rational points of view." She confronts madness personified, the ultimate mirror:

It is what my father saw, the thing you meet when you've stayed here too long alone.

I'm not frightened, it's too dangerous for me to be frightened of it; it gazes at me for a timewith its yellow eyes, Wolf's eyes, depthless but lambent as the eyes of animals seen at night inthe car headlight. Reflectors.

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In Survival, Atwood discusses the theme of "bushing" in Canadian literature and the fascination of Canadianauthors with the madness which occurs when one merges human identity with nature.

But for the protagonist the descent into madness, into the "chasm" of experience, must be temporary andtherapeutic, rather than permanent. She desires survival, and she knows, for example, that what society sees asinsanity might well serve as an excuse for persecution; she might be victimized, like the heron:

They can't be trusted. They'll mistake me for a human being, a naked woman wrapped in ablanket: possibly that's what they've come here for, if it's running around loose, ownerless,why not take it. They won't be able to tell what I really am. But if they guess my true form,identity, they will shoot me or bludgeon in my skull and hang me up by the feet from a tree.

Society is incapable of recognizing that what they perceive as a mad woman is, in reality, "only a naturalwoman, state of nature."

Thus the protagonist, like Lessing's Martha, loses a tenuous identity only to gain a firmer one. She "surfaces"from the illogical to return to a world of logic, but not now, as before, divided, incapable of coping. Theirpurpose accomplished, father and mother, as principles of nature and as "gods," have reassumed theirhumanity and the vision has faded. "No total salvation, resurrection. Our father, our mother, I pray, Reachdown for me, but it won't work: they dwindle, grow, become what they were, human." There are "no gods tohelp me now." Even nature's power is now benign, impersonal: "The lake is quiet, the trees surround me,asking and giving nothing." Like Jane Eyre, Atwood's protagonist has found the mother within herself. Securein an undivided self, the protagonist no longer needs parents or gods; she recognizes her own power and thefact that she can refuse victimization. "This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can donothing." Now even "the Americans" can be managed and seen in perspective: "They must be dealt with, butpossibly they can be watched and predicted and stopped without being copied." As Carol P. Christ says, theprotagonist is "awakening from a male-defined world, to the greater terror and risk, and also the greatpotential healing and joy, of a world defined by the heroine's own feeling and judgment."

Atwood writes in Survival: "A reader must face the fact that Canadian literature is undeniably sombre andnegative, and that this to a large extent is both a reflection and a chosen definition of the national sensibility."In its ringing affirmation, Surfacing is the exception to prove the rule. Withdrawal is no longer possible, saysthe protagonist, and "the alternative is death." She chooses instead a new life and a new way of seeing. Shecarries a new child, a new messiah: "It might be the first one, the first true human; it must be born, allowed."To the protagonist belongs the ultimate sanity: the knowledge that woman can descend, and return—sane,whole, victorious.

Criticism: Carol P. Christ (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: "Refusing to be a Victim: Margaret Atwood," in her Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writerson Spiritual Quest, Beacon Press, 1980, pp. 41-53.

[In the following essay, Christ offers an analysis of Surfacing, focusing on the protagonist's quest forself-discovery and Atwood's focus on nature and power in the novel.]

The spiritual quest of the unnamed protagonist of Surfacing begins with her return to the Canadian wilderness,where she had lived as a child. Ostensibly, the protagonist is in search of her missing father, who is presumeddead. But the search is really for her missing parents, her mother having died a few years earlier, and for thepower she feels it was their duty to have communicated to her. The external detective story of theprotagonist's search for her father is paralleled by an internal search—half obscured by her obsession with her

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father—to discover how she lost the ability to feel. The scene of the mystery is strewn with false clues fromher fictitious memories, which she created to shield herself from the pain of confronting her true past. Whilethe protagonist's interest remains focused on her father's disappearance, the reader struggles to make sense ofthe inconsistencies in her story about her marriage, husband, and child. Why couldn't she return home afterthe wedding? Why did she hide the child from her parents? Why is she obsessed with the bizarre image of herbrother floating just below the surface of the water, a near drowning that occurred before she was born? Theunraveling of her father's mystery awakens her to the powers that enlighten her, but the unraveling of her ownmystery is the key to the redemption she seeks. The two mysteries intersect when she recognizes that "it wasno longer his death but my own that concerned me."

Even at the beginning of the journey the protagonist recognizes that she has experienced a death. Like thethree friends, Anna, David, and Joe, who accompany her, she is completely cut off from her past: "Any one ofus could have amnesia for years and the others wouldn't notice." She has also lost the ability to experiencenormal feelings. She recalls that her current man-friend, Joe, was impressed by her coolness the first time theymade love. She, on the other hand, found her behavior unremarkable because she did not feel anything. She istortured by Joe's demand that she say she love him because she does not believe the word has any meaning.

The protagonist's alienation from her feelings is reflected in her dispassionate voice. Everything is seen;nothing is felt. The small town, the cabin in the woods where she grew up, her three friends, even hermemories are accurately recorded—or so it seems. Occasionally she slips, as when she says, "I keep myoutside hand on the [car] door … so I can get out quickly if I have to," causing the reader to ask whether she issimilarly defensive about her life, perhaps censoring her story. The reader is suspicious when the protagonistreports how she copes with the pain of seeing the town of her childhood changed: "I bite down into the coneand I can't feel anything for a minute but the knife—hard pain up the side of my face. Anesthesia, that's onetechnique: if it hurts invent a different pain." How much unacknowledged anesthesia, the reader wonders,does the protagonist use? Might her whole story be a shield from a pain she wishes to deny?

The protagonist's inability to feel is paralleled by an inability to act. Her selective vision holds fast to theillusion that she is helpless and "they" do things to her. Hurt and angry that her parents died before endowingher with their power, she accuses them of having hurt her. "They have no right to get old," she complains,remaining blind to the pain her abrupt departure from home doubtless caused them. Always conscious of howshe might be hurt, she remains oblivious to her power to hurt others. Moreover, as the reader later discovers,she studiously avoids confronting the center of her pain, the place where she lost the ability to feel and toact—her betrayal by the first man she loved.

Unable to come to terms with his violation of her self and her body she obsessively focuses her attention onthe violation of the Canadian wilderness by the men she calls "Americans," some of whom turn out to beCanadians. In Surfacing, the image of Canada victimized by Americans is a mirror of the protagonist'svictimization by men. The conflict between Americans in powerboats and Canadians in canoes—oneapparently stronger but alienated from nature, the other seemingly weaker but in tune with it—becomes acover for her own pain. She identifies with Canada, the wilderness, innocent, virgin, and violated by namelessAmerican men. Her illusion that the wilderness has no power to recover from American violation prevents herfrom realizing her own power to overcome her sense of violation. Though the wilderness initially deflects hervision, in the end it will provide the key, the revelation that releases her power.

Though the protagonist continually imagines herself as powerless, she is extraordinarily concerned withpower Anything out of the ordinary—Madame with one hand, a purple bean at the top of a high pole, the coolblue lake, a white mushroom, the toes of saints—all are seen as harboring magical power. To her, religion andmagic are one—a view modern Westerners have often associated with children or people they call primitives.Eventually the protagonist's sense of the magic-religious powers resident in things will become a key torevelations that enable her to contact the source of her power.

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At first, however, the protagonist seeks her lost power in the wrong places. Realizing that she lost the abilityto feel somewhere in the past, she imagines that a simple return to childhood will provide the answer.Searching through old scrapbooks kept by her mother, she discovers that she looked normal in all thepictures—no clues there. There is a clue in the drawings from her childhood—hers of eggs and bunnies,everything peaceful, her brother's of airplanes and bombs—but she cannot quite fathom it. Another cluesurfaces from the garden. She remembers that once she thought a certain purple bean on a high pole was asource of power. She says she is glad the bean did not give power to her because "if I'd turned out like theothers with power I would have been evil." Her association of power with evil and her dissociation of herselffrom both reflect a typical female delusion of innocence. Hiding from her complicity in evil feeds a falsebelief that she can do nothing but witness her victimization. In order to regain her power the protagonist mustrealize that she does not live in a world where only others have power or do evil. An unexpected thing, thesight of a dead heron strung up on a tree, monument to some "American" victory, mediates revelation.

The reaction of the protagonist and her friends to the dead heron, symbol of purposeless killing, reveals sometruth about each of them. Anna's weakness is evident when she holds her nose, not from any real feeling, butsimply to make an impression on the men. David's concern to preserve the Canadian wilderness from crasscommercialism is revealed as mere rhetoric when he and Joe film the bird, trapping its humiliation whiledistancing themselves with their "art." Only the protagonist realizes the enormity of the crime as she imaginesthe heron in its natural habitat killing its appointed food with effortless grace. She identifies herself with thebird, wondering "what part of them the heron was, that they need so much to kill it," but she does nothing toprotect the heron from further humiliation.

When they pass the spot again, a day later, the sight of the heron mediates the knowledge the protagonistrequires to escape her passive sense of victimization, the delusion of her childhood innocence. For her theheron is sacred object, mediator, like Christ to the Christian. Seeing it again, she realizes that her passivity isnot innocence. She does not live in a world of eggs and bunnies; she did not escape the evil others areimmersed in. "I felt a sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands, as though I had been there andwatched without saying No or doing anything to stop it." Memories of her active participation in acts ofcruelty equally senseless surface in her as she remembers how she and her brother used to throw the "badkind" of leeches into the fire. She realizes there is no innocence in childhood. "To become like a little childagain, a barbarian, a vandal: it was in us too, it was innate. A thing closed in my head, hand, synapse, cuttingoff my escape." Though she feels trapped, recognizing her guilt and responsibility is a step toward claimingher power to refuse to be a victim.

With the path to redemption through childhood closed, the protagonist decides the clue to her redemption liesin deciphering her father's final obsession—a series of unintelligible drawings and marks on maps. At first shefears he had gone mad and wandered off into the woods, but then she discovers he was copying Indianpaintings and marking their locations on maps. She goes in search of the paintings to verify his sanity and herown. Deciding that the painting she seeks is submerged underwater, she dives deep into the lake to look for it.Instead of a painting, she discovers an image from her past: "It was there but it wasn't a painting, it wasn't onthe rock. It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark ovaltrailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, itwas dead." Seeing the body of her father forces her to acknowledge he is dead. The mystery of her father'sdeath solved, his image becomes a clue to her own mystery, her own death. The open eyes of his corpseremind her of the bizarre image of her brother's near drowning, but with a shock she recognizes, "it wasn'tever my brother I'd been remembering." The thing approaching becomes the image of her aborted fetus"drowned in air." This revelation unlocks the mystery of the confusing stories of husband, child, marriage.The childbirth was an abortion; the wedding day—the day of the abortion; the husband—the lover who toldher to have the abortion. "It wasn't a wedding, there were no pigeons, the post office and the lawn were inanother part of the city," she remembers, finally accepting the truth about her first love affair.

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The protagonist sees the fetus as a living thing, not yet a child, but an animal deserving protection like theheron. Wanting to convince her to have the abortion, her lover "said it wasn't a person, only an animal." Nowshe realizes, "I should have seen that it was no different, it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead ofgranting it sanctuary I let them catch it." She views her abortion as no more or less a crime than the murder ofthe heron, but her guilt is more direct, because the creature was in her body. As the knowledge of hercomplicity in a killing comes to her, she realizes why she hid her past in false memories. "It was all realenough, it was enough reality forever, I couldn't accept it, that mutilation, ruin I'd made, I needed a differentversion." She understands, too, that the anesthesia of false memory is no escape, but rather the beginning of afatal disease: blocked feelings do not go away; they fester inside. "Since then I'd carried that death aroundinside me, layering it over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl." Her ability to accept the painful truth about the pastcounteracts the anesthesia, abolishes the need for false stories to cover up true pain. By allowing herself tofeel pain, she unblocks her feelings and contacts her energy and power. "Feeling was beginning to seep backinto me, I tingled like a foot that's been asleep."

The protagonist sees this new self-knowledge for what it is—a revelation from great powers. "These gods,here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten, were the only ones who had ever given meanything I needed … The Indians did not own salvation but they had once known where it lived." In thepresence of great powers, she feels the need to worship. She leaves her sweatshirt as a thank offering to thegods whose names she does not know but whose power she has felt.

She correctly understands that her redemption comes from facing the truth and accepting the pain, guilt, andresponsibility it entails. With this act, the protagonist also divorces herself from the interpretations men use tojustify their crimes. She no longer believes killing can be justified as "sport." She rejects her brother'sdistinction between "good" leeches that deserve to live and "bad" leeches that deserve to die. She rejects herlover's distinction between "good" (legitimate) fetuses that grow up to have birthday parties and "bad"(illegitimate) fetuses that must be killed. The protagonist is allowing her own feeling, not male "morality," todefine reality for her.

The revelations that come to the protagonist through the heron and the underwater image of death provide herwith the knowledge that unlocks her past, but she finds the revelation incomplete. Her father's "were the godsof the head, antlers rooted in the brain." She believes a gift from her mother must complement her father'sgift—"Not only how to see but how to act." Searching again for something out of the ordinary to provideguidance, she senses power in one of the scrapbooks her mother had made. Heavy and warm, the scrapbookopens to a picture the protagonist had drawn as a child of "a woman with a round moon stomach: the babywas sitting up inside her gazing out." Her mother's gift is a reminder of the powers of her body. Though thegifts of the parents reflect a traditional stereotyping of men with the mind, women with the body, theprotagonist incorporates both gifts and transcends the limitations of her parents' lives.

That night she conceives a child by Joe with the moon, a Goddess symbol, on her left. In a heightened state ofawareness she feels "my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has beenprisoned for so long … it buds, it sends out fronds." As she conceives, the protagonist resembles the VirginMother Goddesses of old: at one with nature and her sexual power, in tune with the rhythms of the moon,complete in herself, the male being incidental.

The protagonist's extraordinary insight and sense of her power alienates her from her friends. She realizes thatif she wishes to pursue the revelations and experience the powers more deeply, she must choose the isolationof the visionary quest. She can't stay with people because "they'd had their chance but they had turned againstthe gods, and it was time for me to choose sides." When the time to leave the island comes, she hides,escaping from her friends. "I am by myself; this is what I wanted, to stay here alone." "The truth is here." Thechoice of solitude is not so much a rejection of community as a recognition that certain experiences and truthsare so alien to ordinary consciousness that the individual must withdraw in order to experience them.

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After the others have left, the protagonist has time and space to plumb more deeply the knowledge andexperience that has been given her. Lying alone at the bottom of her canoe she has a vision of the greatpowers of the universe, the gods who have guided her journey: "Through the trees the sun glances; the swamparound me smolders, energy of decay turning to growth, green fire. I remember the heron; by now it will beinsects, frogs, fish, other herons." The great powers of the universe transform the swamp; they transform theheron from death to life. The life power rises from death. This is the meaning of the incredible words she hadspoken earlier, "nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive."

The protagonist recognizes her body as both revelation and incarnation of the great powers of life and death."My body also changes, the creature in me, plant-animal, sends out filaments in me; I ferry it secure betweendeath and life, I multiply." The female experience of the transformation of parts of her body into plant,animal, and infant is perhaps the most complete human incarnation of the great powers. The protagonist'svision of the universal transformative energy of life into death and death into life is reflected in hercharacteristic perception of the fluidity of the boundaries between objects, plants, animals, humans. Joe has"fur" like a bear, canoers are "amphibian," the fetus is "plant-animal" sending out "filaments."

After her vision, the protagonist enters the final phase of her visionary journey: transformation itself. Sherealizes that she can see her dead parents, and perhaps the gods themselves, if she follows the path she isbeginning to sense. "The gods, their likenesses: to see them in their true shape is fatal. While you are human;but after the transformation they could be reached." Her transformation is frightening. Though she knows it isbeyond "any rational point of view," it is neither mad nor illogical. Whereas before she had abandoned falsememories, now she will give up all identity as a human. Before she had experienced the fetus transforming herbody, now she will change herself into a different state.

She ritually breaks her connections to the human world—burning or purifying clothing, books, one ofeverything in the cabin. She is purified and transformed by immersion in the lake. Like the fetus in her womb,she changes in water. "The earth rotates, holding my body down as it holds the moon; the sun pounds in thesky, red flames pulsing from it, searing away the wrong form that encases me." The powers guide her awayfrom the garden, the house, into the woods. She becomes wild. She is animal: "I hollow a lair near thewoodpile, dry leaves underneath and dead branches leaned over." Having undergone transformation, sheexperiences mystical identification with all forms of life: "Leopard frog with green spots and gold-rimmedeyes, ancestor. It includes me, it shines, nothing moves but its throat breathing." She experiences direct unionwith the great powers of life and death in nature. All boundaries between herself and other forms of life areabolished. She becomes the transformative energy: "I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning … I am not ananimal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow."

Later she sees a vision of her mother feeding the birds; then her mother disappears, the birds remain. She istranslated. This vision confirms her sense that her mother's gift is connection to nature. As Barbara HillRigney says, "Almost witchlike, with her long hair and wearing her magically powerful leather jacket, themother feeds wild birds from her hand, charms a bear, and is in tune with the seasons." In a similar vein,Adrienne Rich calls the mother as she appears "Mistress of the Animals."

The next day she sees what her father saw. What he has seen "gazes at me with its yellow eyes, wolf's eyes,depthless but lambent as the eyes of animals seen at night in the car headlights." The eyes of the wolf remindher that her father's gift is the power of seeing, or insight. The protagonist is terrified as she realizes that in thestate of transformation individual human identity has no meaning. Her father's vision is impersonal, but it isalso strangely comforting because it means that the life power survives a particular identity. With the vision ofthe parents, the protagonist's circle is complete. Her parents' power has been communicated to her.

The vision granted, the gods then retreat into "the earth, the air, the water, wherever they were when Isummoned them." Translated back to human form, the protagonist returns to the cabin and opens a can of

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beans, symbolizing her return to modern human life. Though she is no longer in direct contact with thepowers, she has gained wisdom and consciousness of her own power through her encounter with them. Shemarks her new power with a declaration: "This above all, to refuse to be a victim … give up the old belief thatI am powerless." The source of her newly discovered power is twofold. First, she renounces the fictitiousmemories that held together her delusions of innocence and powerlessness. Letting go and allowing her truepast to surface is itself a source of tremendous energy. Second, her grounding in her own past and in thepowers of the universe provides her with a sense of authentic selfhood.

Though Atwood has effectively portrayed a woman's spiritual quest, she has left the question of its integrationwith the social quest open. It seems likely that the protagonist, now pregnant, will return to the city with Joeand attempt to reconstruct their relationship on the basis of her recovered ability to feel. The potential for adeeper relationship with Joe is "a possibility which wasn't there at the outset." But it remains an unexploredpossibility. Will Joe understand how she has changed? Will he assume equal responsibility for the care oftheir child? Will he view her work and personal growth as being as important as his own? Atwood's failure toaddress such questions makes Marge Piercy skeptical that the protagonist has achieved power at all. Using asocial or political definition of power, she objects, "Power exists and some have it." To Piercy, Atwood'sprotagonist might reply, "Power exists in many more forms than are usually recognized. I have gained powerby experiencing my grounding in the great transformative powers of the universe. I don't know yet how I willtranslate my power into social and political forms. But you cannot deny that I have gained power." Atwood'sprotagonist has experienced a spiritual and psychological transformation that will give her the inner strengthto change her social and political relationships. She no longer sees herself as inevitably powerless andvictimized. And since Atwood's story is set in the 1970s, not the 1890s, the reader has some reason to hopethat her quest to integrate the spiritual and the social will be more successful than Edna Pontellier's [as relatedin Kate Chopin's The Awakening.] I am not as uneasy about Atwood's protagonist's future as Piercy. But likeher, I recognize the need for stories that describe how the woman who has awakened will live in the socialworld. Still, I wish Piercy had understood more clearly the contribution novels like Surfacing make towomen's total quest: by naming anew the great powers and women's grounding in them, such novels providewomen with alternatives to patriarchal notions of power that can aid their struggle to change the social world.

The newly named power, the transformative energy of life to death and death to life in Surfacing is, of course,not new to the historian of religions. Atwood believes that her protagonist has discovered the great powerworshiped by the Canadian Indians. Many tribal and ancient peoples, both men and women, have worshipedsimilar powers. However, as Ruether has shown, when societies become urbanized, the culture-creating malescelebrate their relative freedom from the body and nature in myth, symbol, philosophy, and theology. Thetraditional values derived from the body and nature then become identified primarily with women, bothbecause women's close relation to the body and nature is evident in their traditional roles of child-bearing andnurture of the young and because the culture-creating males identify the traditional values their culture hastranscended with the other, woman. This development produces the paradox that the surfacing of femalevalues in alienated urban cultures may also be a return to some—but not all—of the values of traditional tribalor less urbanized cultures. Even the experience of connection to nature as a life and death power may reflect aparticularly female viewpoint in modern culture. Western male heroes commonly envision nature assomething that must be conquered or as inert matter that can be shaped to their purposes. A woman'sexperience of the intertwining of life and death processes in pregnancy and childbirth—the fetus might die orits movement toward life might kill her—seems to encourage in her a realistic acceptance of death as anelement in all life processes.

Tribal and ancient peoples who worshiped natural powers such as those represented in Surfacing knew thatthe close connection of life and death in the hunting and agricultural cycles and in the birth processes was areflection of the interpenetration of life and death in all natural processes. They knew the hunted ordomesticated animal and the wild plant or crop as sacred sacrifices to human life. But in Christianity, thetransformative mysteries of birth and the earth were spiritualized and the notion of sacrifice was limited to

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Christ's death for the sins of humankind. Atwood's protagonist reverses this spiritualization when she intuits,"the animals die that we may live … we are the eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us …Canned spam, canned Jesus … but we refuse to worship." Though speaking irreverently, the protagonist isexpressing her sense that the ultimate mystery of life and death is reflected in the process of eating. Indeed theoriginal guilt may be that we must kill to live. By showing how the ancient sense of the mysteries of life anddeath emerges in the consciousness of a thoroughly modern woman, Atwood has done more than nostalgicallyrecall an ancient world view. She has suggested a direction for the transformation of modern consciousnessthat would be beneficial for women and all life. Reverence for the human connection to natural processeswould create an atmosphere in which the natural functions of women's bodies would be celebrated rather thanignored or treated as sources of shame. Menstruation, childbirth, and menopause might once again be viewedas religiously significant events. And while it would not provide solutions to all the complex problems thatarise in modern technological societies, a new naming of humankind's grounding in nature might create anatmosphere, or in Crites's terms, an "orientation," in which solutions to the ecological crisis could bedeveloped.

The issue of abortion raised by the novel provides a crucial test of the viability of the novel's vision forwomen's quest. The affirmation of a woman's right to control her own body and to choose abortion has beenfundamental in the women's movement. And the question naturally arises: Does Atwood's protagonist's visionof her connection to nature mean that women must not have abortions but must give birth over and over again,"naturally"? A careful reading of the novel's vision suggests that this would be the wrong conclusion to draw.The novel compares the fetus in the womb to an animal in a burrow and suggests the comparison of thetermination of a pregnancy to the killing of an animal living in one's body. The novel suggests that no killingshould be undertaken lightly, but it also recognizes that some must die so that others may live. Theprotagonist's abortion was wrong for her because she did not choose it herself, but allowed her lover to chooseit for his own personal convenience and because she did not allow herself to feel the sense of loss that willnaturally be felt when a life is taken. The novel does not suggest that abortion is wrong, but it does suggestthat abortion is not a matter of little consequence. The woman who decides that she must have an abortionshould recognize, as she does in eating, that some deaths are necessary for other life and that the properresponse to the sacrifice of one life for another is worship and gratitude.

The emergence of a powerful vision of women's connection to nature in a novel of women's spiritual questseems to suggest that women can achieve power through the acceptance of female biological roles. Thetraditional identification of women and nature that has been a legacy of oppression can also be a potentialsource of power and vision. As one critic has written, to entirely reject the identification of women with thebody and nature might be "to neglect that part of ourselves we have been left to cultivate and to buy—into thatvery polarization [of culture and nature] of which we have been the primary victims." More importantly, itmay lead to the kind of psychic suicide that the first part of Surfacing portrays.

It seems to me that women must positively name the power that resides in their bodies and their sense ofcloseness to nature and use this new naming to transform the pervasive cultural and religious devaluation ofnature and the body. Atwood's novel suggests that the opposition of spirit and body, nature and person, whichis endemic in Western culture, is neither necessary nor salutary; that spiritual insight surfaces throughattention to the body; and that the achievement of authentic selfhood and power depends on understandingone's grounding in nature and natural energies.

Criticism: Estella Lauter (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: "Margaret Atwood: Remythologizing Circe," in her Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Artby Twentieth Century Women, Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 62-78.

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[In the following essay, Lauter examines Atwood's revision of the myth of Odysseus and Circe in her"Circe/Mud Poems."]

In her sequence of poems entitled "Circe/Mud Poems," Margaret Atwood engages in a complex act ofremythologizing. That is, she steps back into the mythic realm of Homer's Odyssey to recreate and revise thestory of the year-long sojourn of Odysseus with Circe from Circe's point of view. Simply by refocusing ourattention within the story, Atwood reveals a more essential power in Circe than her infamous ability to seduceand deform men—namely, her highly developed capacity to see, see into, and see beyond her relationships tothe persons, things, and events called "reality." Because Atwood shows how Circe exercises her capacity forinsight, we are able to penetrate the masks and armor of the "hero with a thousand faces," and understand withher how the myth of the quest has become a disease in whose clutches the hero is helpless. By adoptingCirce's perspective within the quest myth, Atwood is able to revalue Circe positively; at the same time, sheexposes the limitations of a myth that still dominates Western civilization. Atwood's strategy of participatingin mythic thinking, instead of making the usual distinction between myth and truth, allows her to suggest asurprisingly radical revision of the myth itself. She points out that we do not yet know the ending of Circe'sstory after Odysseus leaves her island, and that in our visions of a new ending lie the possibilities for analternative myth, in which there is no need to journey. Atwood's work has implications for those of us who areexploring alternative images of women, and for others who believe that mythic structures offer essentialknowledge that can be used to free as well as to enslave us.

In order to involve us in her mythmaking process, Atwood has us enter the island landscape of a forestblackened by fire as we would enter a dream, in a boat that glides over land "as if there is water." She explainsthrough Circe's voice that she has not given us a full description of the landscape because she is quite sure thatwe live there right now and can see for ourselves. Atwood has Circe speak directly to a person who is nevernamed, leaving open the possibility that she is addressing us. Since her awareness of Bronze Age rituals andmodern steam-engines transcends ordinary boundaries of time and culture, we begin to believe that she canalso transcend other restrictions that operate on our thought. Atwood reinforces this expectation of mythicbehavior in her surrealistic images of bodies coming apart and crashing to the ground or trays of foodcontaining "an ear, a finger."

In order to retain the degree of power Homer has assigned to Circe while she relocates its source and meaning,Atwood includes many of the trappings of Greek mythology: Circe has a temple where moon snakes speak ofthe future, and she wears a withered fist on a chain around her neck. But Circe knows the meaning of suchsymbols better than Odysseus or Homer did. As for her supposed power to turn her lovers into swine, shedenies that she is anything more than a silent accomplice in the metamorphoses: she explains, "they happened/ because I did not say anything." Actually, the men came to her in accordance with their own drives. She"decided nothing." They became animals because they allowed their skin to harden into impenetrable,armor-like hide, and because they failed to speak.

Homer was misguided on several other counts. Circe was not superhuman in the sense of being above feelinglove, pain, fear, and anxiety; she did not willingly grant Odysseus' request to leave her. Nor was she renderedpowerless during his stay. In Atwood's version, the lover unbuckles the fist on Circe's chain; instead ofgaining control over her, he frees her from a dehumanizing pattern of action. He frees her, not to be like thetotally receptive and unfeeling surrogate woman made out of mud, reported in a story by another traveller, butto penetrate his armor because her caring for him enables her to see who he is, what he intends, and how itwill affect her life. The nineteenth poem shows clearly who is in command of reality. In it, Circe says (inprose),

You think you are safe at last.

..…

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I bring you things on trays, food mostly, an ear, a finger. You trust me so you are no longercautious, you abandon yourself to your memoranda …; in the clutch of your story, yourdisease, you are helpless.

But it is not finished, that saga. The fresh monsters are already breeding in my head. I try towarn you, though I know you will not listen.

So much for art. So much for prophecy.

Circe's power is not sufficient to transform her lover's story without his consent, but her insight that the storycontinues to happen partly because she has not revealed how she felt about it, and partly because "freshmonsters" are "breeding" in her head to test his mortal courage with more misadventures, suggests that shemay also have some unused ability to alter Odysseus' script.

In Atwood's sequence, Circe does attempt to change her relationship to the quest myth by proclaiming herdisinterest in Odysseus' heroic gesticulations. Her attitude toward his infamous arrival on her island isscornful. The merits of his courage, pride and perseverance dissolve as she questions: "Don't you get tired ofsaying Onward?" With Circe's revelation of her boredom with the masks of heroism and of her disgust for thegreedy, deceitful, arrogant, oppressive, vain men who have predictable desires for fame and immortality,Atwood dislodges one of the reasons that the myth of the hero survives: female approval of heroic behavior.

As the poems proceed, it becomes clear that the hero's dissatisfaction with mere material abundance has adeleterious effect not only on his lover, but also on the landscape, which is burned over, worn down, andstrewn with skeletons. Since Circe states at the outset her intention to search (without journeying) for the"ones who have escaped from these / mythologies with barely their lives," and since she gives ample proof ofher ability to love those who will unmask, clearly she is not the source of the misery on her island.

By the final poem, we are convinced not only that Circe's position outside the framework of the quest allowsher to see more than those who remain inside it can, but also that her boundary position is a source of hope.Her capacity for breeding new disasters to appease the hero's desire for action is easily converted into acapacity for creating valid images. In the final poem, she "sees" two islands—one on which things happenpretty much as she has just recounted, over and over again like a bad film running faster and more jerkily eachtime it goes through the projector. The second island, independent of the first, exists only in her imagination.On the second, "we" walk together in a November landscape and are astonished by the orange hue of theapples "still on the trees." We lick the "melted snow / from each other's mouths" without sexual passion, andwe are free to notice the track of a deer in the mud beside the not-yet-frozen stream. On this island, whichCirce says "has never happened," our delight in the November landscape does not require any journey; thebirds are birds, not omens from the dead whispering "Everything dies;" the gentle, sensuous caress betweentwo people is enough; and mud is mud, not a symbolic woman to be fucked by man.

Circe's story remains unfinished in Atwood's sequence. We still do not know her fate after Odysseus leavesher island. We do know that she is not the seductress we thought she was. As an enchantress, her talents lay ingathering the syllables from the earth into healing words. Even without her magic powers, she is capable ofimagining an alternative to the story that has imprisoned her. She emerges from the poem as an independentwoman (perhaps a poet) who is capable of turning her considerable talent for seeing through others' storiesinto a strategy for her own survival—and perhaps the survival of all who are wise enough to trust her.Atwood's revision of Circe's story strikes us as true because it corresponds to centuries of partly-consciousexperience of silent complicity in a myth we did not choose. Atwood's work raises important questions: Howmany other stories remain similarly unfinished? Should we finish them now? Is it really possible to change amyth?

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Atwood does not provide us with an ideal goddess so much as with a believable woman, "by turns comic,cynical, haughty, vulnerable and sad," as Sherrill Grace has observed [in Violent Quality: A Study of MargaretAtwood]. But for all her realism, Atwood does not "demythologize" Circe. In the context of moderntheological debate, that term is reserved for the process of stripping away the fanciful layers of image andstory in order to penetrate to the (preferably historical) truth. Since, we have no reason, apart from the say-soof poets like Homer and Hesiod, to believe that Circe ever exsisted (she was never an object of widespreadworship, for example), the most likely approach of the demythologizer would be to ignore or discredit her. Asscholar or poet, then, the demythologizer might turn to the records of history for information about the lives ofGreek women, but she would not bother to retell Homer's story.

In fact, of course, Atwood is sufficiently aware of Homer's conventions to give her poem exactly the samenumber of parts as Homer's book. She counts on our knowing the appropriate section (book X) so well thatshe can alter the story without repeating it first (as a daring jazz musician might begin a piece with animprovisation without stating the tune on which it is based). In other words, Atwood assumes that Circe isfamiliar enough to seem "real" to us before we begin reading her poem. Whether this reality has accrued fromaesthetic persuasion (the effectiveness of Homer's text) or from psychological persuasion (our familiarity withwomen who seem to correspond with Homer's story) matters very little. Atwood does not want to disturb ourbelief; she wants to restructure it.

The extent of her investment can be measured by comparing her poem to Katherine Anne Porter's brief andcharming essay, "A Defense of Circe." Porter not only accepts but repeats Homer's story, presumably in orderto earn the right to reinterpret it. Enthralled by the bard's "sunny high comedy," she exclaims, "this is all puremagic, this poem, the most enchanting thing ever dreamed of in the human imagination, how have I dared totouch it?" Indeed, she does touch it lightly, retelling all sorts of details that Atwood omits: about Circe'simmortal lineage and sunny disposition, her lovely stone hall in the forest glade, her handmaidens, her loom,her song, the role of Hermes in providing the herb (moly) to disarm her, her oath that she will not harmOdysseus, her restoration of Odysseus' men to forms more beautiful than the ones they had, her advice abouthow to visit Teiresias in Hades, and so on.

Porter does point out several minor flaws in Homer's logic. She cannot quite believe that the immortal Circewould feel threatened by Odysseus' sword. She finds unfounded the hero's claim that Circe promised to sendhim and his companions safely on their way. She knows that Circe's "divine amiability and fostering care"could not save Odysseus and his men from their ordained suffering. She also wonders why Circe did not stealthe moly to destroy Odysseus' power, or why she did not break her oath and turn him into a fox! She resolvesthese problems by accepting the text as given ("this is Circe") and by offering her own non-traditionalinterpretation of Circe's character: whereas Odysseus and Hermes are foxy by nature, Circe can be trustedcompletely. Her purity extends to other realms as well; she is a "creatrix," an "aesthetic genius," whose"unique power as goddess was that she could reveal to men the truth about themselves by showing each manhimself in his true shape according to his inmost nature. For this she was rightly dreaded and feared; her veryname was a word of terror." This assertion of Circe's superior understanding is Porter's "defense" of Circeagainst those who fasten on her reputation for turning human beings into monsters.

Porter does not accept the theological distinction between myth and truth. She expects us to find herinterpretation of Homer's story truthful, and she believes that The Odyssey is true in a way that "still hoversglimmering at the farthest edge of consciousness, a nearly remembered dream of glory." For her, the story is amyth only in the sense of being something that was once believed, or in the sense of being an enduring fictionthat continues to touch a sensitive nerve. Its truth is limited. Porter's main reason for not altering the fiction isrespect for her venerable colleague.

Not so in Atwood's case. Although she shares with Porter the interpretation that the men turned themselves toswine, Atwood knows that no successful "defense" of Circe is possible within the framework of Odysseus'

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story. I speculate that she also knows how difficult it is to rid the human consciousness of a stereotype that hassuch a long and venerable history. She could have created an historical prototype, from Greece or elsewhere,to counter the myth; indeed, many critics agree that her most successful book of poems to date is The Journalsof Susanna Moodie, where she shows an uncanny ability to work with historical materials. She chose insteadto remythologize the figure of Circe.

If the reader is to believe that women's essential power is not to seduce (or shall we say influence?) men but tosee through them and free them from their stories, then the poet must demonstrate this power in the figurewho carries the imago of seduction. The image must be transformed from within. Atwood chooses the surestway to convince us that her vision of Circe is true by letting Circe tell her own story in an authentic language.She counts on our natural desire to believe the stories that people tell about themselves—when the stories aregood. But such a strategy alone would not suffice. The poet must preserve enough of the character of theoriginal myth to give weight to her story; she must also extend it enough so that it stands on its own in themodern world. The poet must perform Circe's feats of penetrating vision with respect to the myth that hasentrapped both of them.

Thus, Atwood has Circe describe her setting as the opposite of Homer's lush idyllic island. It is instead aburned forest which nonetheless spawns fireweed that splatters the air, symbolizing both nature's power ofregeneration and Circe's verbal power over those who land within range of her voice. The voice, instead ofsinging seductive songs, asserts that Circe prefers self-effacing men who stand in humble relationship withnature to heroes who, like Icarus, regularly "swoop and thunder" around her island. She denies blame, or evenresponsibility, for the dismal fate of these "common" heroes; at the same time she admits her complicity. Thefact that she "did not say anything" until now has meant that her words were wrecked along with their bodies.

In the fourth poem, Atwood begins to alter our image of Circe's role, presenting her as a healer (perhaps apsychiatrist?) whose people call upon her to soothe their pain, fear, and guilt with words from the earth theyhave assaulted. She is a hardworking witch who presses her head to the earth faithfully to collect the "fewmuted syllables left over." So depleted is her island that she can collect only syllables, "a letter at a time." Herwonderfully wry comment that she is a desert island (which she reports having quipped to the arriving hero)works on several levels at once. While she scores a point for clever repartee in the battle of the sexes, she alsoaccepts the ancient identification of woman with earth as her source of power, and admits to the depletion ofher own as well as the earth's resources.

In the next eight poems, a curious reversal of our expectations occurs as Circe "loses" the battle she initiates.The poems correspond to and replace about sixty lines of Odysseus' story about his "victory" over Circewhich supposedly culminated in her invitation: "Come then, put away your sword into its sheath, and let us /two go up into my bed so that, lying together / in the bed of love, we may then have faith and trust in eachother." In Atwood's sequence, the battle between the two is more strenuous. Circe's part in it is largely verbal;she openly berates Odysseus for his lies, his passivity, his greed, and his delusions of power, interjecting thathe need only inquire of the moon snakes at her temples in order to know the future. Her magic may bediminished, but she still knows "what is sacred." In the seventh poem, she includes us in the fray, taunting orchiding us to recognize this scene as part of our own landscape, but also revealing that it is a landscape of"ennui" that offers little satisfaction.

What is remarkable about this Circe is her consciousness of what is happening to her and her articulation ofthat consciousness at the moment of interaction with the "other." She watches Odysseus coldly as heapproaches her for her sexual favors clothed in his shell of confident expectation. She anticipates that if shegrants him his wish, she will either fear or despise him. Finally, she does capitulate, and she even allowsherself some moments of generosity before she notices that he receives her gifts as his due withoutacknowledging them. Still, she protests his rough approach to her body, calling it "extortion" and pointing outthe fine line between love and hate in such gestures. She knows that underneath her own soft masks there is a

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face of steel to match his own, and she dares the hero to see his reflection in it.

Despite her consciousness and her protests, however, Odysseus "wins." Atwood invents her own symbol forCirce's magic power—a closed fist on a chain around Circe's neck—and presents Odysseus' conquest as atriumph of the hero's armor over the fist's stuttering and muttering in the language of magic. Finding its foeunas-sailable, the fist gives up—even "renounces" Circe. So, far from graciously offering her body to achievea fantasy of faith and trust (or to continue the struggle for power in a more "seductive" way), Atwood's Circeis overpowered. The prettiness of Homer's version is stripped away.

The surprising feature of Atwood's poem is that having "lost" the battle of wills, Circe is released from thementality of battle. Circe "opens" like a hand cut off at the wrist clutching at freedom. The image is grotesqueand not entirely successful. It is not clear how a hand can open and clutch at the same time; and the arm thatfeels the pain of her absence (the goddess who surrenders to patriarchal force?) is not sufficiently defined.Still, the poem clearly asserts that Circe is released into the freedom of guiltless sexual enjoyment. The resultis that she is able to see her lover's body for what it is—a scarred and flawed instrument—and to continue tofeel desire for him, even though she knows that his body is not the essence of what she wants.

At the same time, she suspects that her body is all he wants. Extreme as the image of the "mud woman" is, inthe story "told by another traveller," Circe is vulnerable to it. She has already acknowledged her affinity withthe earth, and in her present state of sexual responsiveness, she admits that it would be "simple" for her to givein to his desire, especially if Odysseus allows himself to be transformed into a gentle lover (as it appears hedoes later in the poem).

Circe's "freedom" is short-lived. The lovers are assailed from all sides. Their pleasure offends "the suicides,returned / in the shapes of birds" to warn or complain that "everything dies," who had not found the fruits ofthe earth sufficient, and who demand the lovers' death as vengeance for their own unhappiness. Circe stillfears the goddess "of the two dimensions" (Hecate), who wants her to resist her lover, wants her to makeherself "deaf as an eye, / deaf as a wound, which listens / to nothing but its own pain." Hecate would haveCirce kick Odysseus out, and Circe knows that Hecate "gets results."

As for the hero, he becomes preoccupied with his own story, and perhaps too trusting: as Circe becomes moreservant than lover, her mind turns to the creation of "fresh monsters" to feed his heroic appetite. Whetherthese monsters are created to make him afraid to leave, or to keep him from leaving by giving him somethingmore to write about, they have the negative effect of undermining the couple's newly found ability to valueeach other apart from their stories. That ability is also undermined by Circe's jealousy of Penelope, and herresentment of the fact (which she foresees) that Odysseus will believe Penelope's defense of her wifely honor.

The hero's lack of contentment with the present, the only motive Homer provides for Odysseus' departure, isalso an element in the disintegration of the lovers' relationship in Atwood's poem. Odysseus naively wantsCirce to tell him the future. She responds caustically,

That's my job, one of them, but I advise you don't push your luck.

To know the future there must be a death. Hand me the axe.

As you can see the future is a mess.

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Here, as elsewhere in the last eight poems of the sequence, Circe has powers that may be explained aspsychological or cognitive rather than magical. Her ability to change the island's summer climate to winter inthe twenty-second poem is presumably a correlative for the psychological state of coldness she must developin order to let her lover go. Her knowledge and insight are more acute in relationship to others, however, thanthey are in predicting her own fate. She worries that when Odysseus leaves the animals "may transformthemselves back into men" and threaten her life. She questions whether her father, Helios, cares about herenough to restore her immortality. She wonders if Odysseus will give her back the facility with words that hereleased from her fist. In the face of her own fate, she is the vulnerable woman.

The final poem shows, however, that despite her worries Circe the woman retains her goddess-like capacityfor envisioning the future. The first island that she sees would maintain the power of the story—revised, ofcourse, so that she "is right." The second island seems more than anything to be a place where neither storycounts. On it, the deer is not a stag to be killed for Odysseus' men, as it is in The Odyssey. The birds are notdisguised suicides and the snow is not a symbol of psychological coldness as they are in Circe's story. Thelandscape is neither idyllic nor burned. The lovers are not surrogates for the traveller and his mud woman. Theimage of the second island is too open to be quite convincing—but perhaps that is its source of power. SinceCirce does not articulate her dream fully, we are encouraged to dream it onward ourselves.

The Circe we see here needs no defense, although she is vulnerable. Certainly she is not pure, although she isno worse than Odysseus. Despite all the fanciful elements in the poem, we believe that Atwood has put herfinger on a significant aspect of woman's power that was embodied in the ancient figure of Circe and neededonly to be articulated clearly: the ability to see, see into, and see beyond the stories we tell about who we are.This is not exclusively a female power; traditionally it belongs to both Cassandra and Teiresias. But perhapswomen have more often been consigned to the islands where such capacities flourish. Specifically, we havelong had a different vantage point from which to view the male hero. Perhaps the delight that this poemproduces in female audiences has to do with Atwood's success in modelling how to reveal the dark spot on theback of the man's head, without which, Virginia Woolf said, the man's portrait remains incomplete.

Some will say that Atwood's Circe is ungenerous; Homer's Odysseus, after all, was capable of great sorrowand guilt, not to mention aesthetic appreciation. But Atwood knows, as most of us do, how often thosecapacities have been repressed in favor of rapaciousness. Others will say she is too generous—that men likeOdysseus have no reason to change. Atwood presents the many difficulties we would experience in achievinga real partnership, but at the same time she holds out hope for change. Whereas Homer's Circe is a minorgoddess whose power to seduce men is overcome by the superior connections of Odysseus with the pantheonof gods, Atwood's is a woman who had certain enduring goddess-like capacities.

Atwood herself might describe Circe as a Venus released from the "Rapunzel Syndrome" the poet describedin her book of criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, published two years before YouAre Happy. This literary pattern "for realistic novels about 'normal' women" includes Rapunzel, "the wickedwitch who has imprisoned her," "the tower she's imprisoned in," and the Rescuer "who provides momentaryescape." In the literary versions of the fairy tale, however, "the Rescuer is not much help…. Rapunzel is infact stuck in the tower, and the best thing she can do is to learn how to cope with it." Atwood speculates thatalthough the Rapunzel Syndrome transcends national boundaries, it takes a Canadian form: the Rapunzelfigures have difficulty in communicating, or even acknowledging, their fears and hatreds; "they walk aroundwith mouths like clenched fists."

Certainly Atwood's Circe symbolizes the release from such difficulties of communication. She has notbecome her own tower by internalizing the values of Western culture that would consign her to the role ofcold seductress, la belle dame sans merci. Her enjoyment of sexual pleasure in the center of the poemidentifies her as more Venus than Diana or Hecate, in the triple goddess figure from Robert Graves thatAtwood uses to describe the possibilities for women in fiction. Circe is perhaps not a perfect Venus, as

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Atwood understands the figure, both sexual and maternal—unless we think of Circe's healing and servingcapacities as products of maternal impulse. She is Venus with a difference: a Venus who finally does not loseher self in expressing her sexuality; one with the capacity to conceive of a new tower (island) in which shewill not be imprisoned; one with the potential to be her own muse.

If the potential of this Rapunzel to liberate herself is not yet fully realized, we should not complain. It is up tous to do better. Whatever we might wish for Circe's future, we must admit that Atwood, through herknowledge of the psychology and history of relationships between males and females and through her brilliantuse of literary precedents both ancient and modern, has restored her to the realm of living myth where there isno opposition between myth and truth. In this realm, myth is one kind of truth—a kind that retains its powerlong after philosophers and historians have revealed its impossibility, a kind that continues to glide throughour dreams, fantasies, and even our gestures "as if there is water." Atwood gambles here on the possibility thatmyth can be transformed from within without losing its power.

Clearly the transformation worked for Atwood, as she demonstrates in the poems surrounding "Circe/MudPoems." The first section of You Are Happy is the record of relationships between men and women that arejust short of violent in their outcome—where the only moment of "happiness" occurs when the woman,walking alone in sub-freezing weather, feels the images "hitting" her eyes "like needles, crystals." Then,"Songs of the Transformed," a contemporary bestiary, ends with the warning song of the human corpse whohoarded both words and love until it was too late.

The section that follows the Circe poems, however, is markedly different. In these poems, enigmaticallycalled "There Is Only One of Everything," the lovers make an honest attempt to inhabit their bodies instead ofabandoning them "in favour of word games or jigsaw puzzles." The woman seeks to express both her angerand her desire. They move from the experience of love based on need to an experience based on ripeness.Together, they transform an ancient ritual of sacrifice into a ritual of love. Coming after the Circe poems anddrawing on the same mythic elements, these poems have the effect of confirming Circe's vision of the newisland and validating its essential truthfulness.

In turn, the presence of the Circe poems in the volume gives to the final sequence the status of myth. In it twopeople transcend both the powerful myth of the war between the sexes and its brutal history in order toparticipate in life organized by the values of Circe's vision. The lovers' responsiveness to each other and tonature, in a moment to be appreciated for its own unique presence, is sufficient to overcome all otherimperatives—whether of life or of death. "There Is Only One of Everything" does not mean that the loverssubmerge their identities to achieve the "oneness" promised in the traditional marriage ceremony, but that insharing the uniqueness of each moment ("the tree / we saw."), each opens him/herself and becomes whole.

In the poem "Is/Not," from the fourth section of You Are Happy, Atwood's female protagonist explains to herlover,

This is a journey, not a war, there is no outcome. I renounce predictions

and aspirins, I resign the future as I would resign an expired passport: …

we're stuck here

…

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where we must walk slowly, where we may not get anywhere

or anything, where we keep going, fighting our ways, our way not out but through.

What kind of a journey has no outcome and goes nowhere? Unlike Circe's flippant dismissal of her powers ina moment of frustration ("So much for art. So much for prophecy,") this paradoxical formulation seems to beserious. But what does Atwood mean?

Furthermore, what should we make of the fact that "Circe/Mud Poems" does not take the form of a journey atall? Indeed, one of its most intriguing features is that it does not propose an alternative form of the quest itcriticizes so bitingly—not even the form Annis Pratt describes as the female rebirth journey. Perhaps we couldsay that Circe's island itself represents a release from societal norms, or that Circe's rejection of Odysseus'story about her represents such a release. But this is more a matter of externalizing her private knowledge(splattering the fire-weed) than it is part of an inward exploration—more an assertion of ego in defiance ofpatriarchal norms than a retreat from its concerns, as in other rebirth journeys by women. It would likewise bedifficult to locate a green-world guide or token, unless it is the syllables from the earth that Circe gathers inher role as witch/healer. But that is the substance of her reality, not a deviation from it. Odysseus never reallybecomes Circe's "green-world lover"; although for a brief period he does reveal his body beneath his armor,he quickly returns to his own concerns. Perhaps we can see him as a catalyst in Circe's life, since he does undothe fist and release her capacity for passion. There is no overt confrontation with parental figures, althoughCirce does wonder whether her father, the sun, will rescue her. But her immortality is assured by language,not by Helios.

Circe's report of Hecate's desire for her relationship to fail, her jealousy of Penelope, and her spiteful creationof new monsters to inhibit Odysseus might appropriately be described as manifestations of self-destructivepotential (or "shadow"). If she gives in to the part of herself that experiences Odysseus' love as an invasion ofher privacy, she dooms herself to loneliness. If she derides Penelope's story, she devalues her own capacity fortelling a believable story. If she creates new monsters for Odysseus to conquer, she becomes a participant inthe quest she criticizes. Presumably she manages to overcome all of these impulses in order to envision thesecond island. But can we call these acts a "plunge into the unconscious" for purposes of rebirth? This Circeseems to emerge from centuries in the unconscious to complete the cleansing acts of telling off the hero andadmitting all sorts of other feelings she did not know she had.

It would be more accurate to see the whole poem sequence as proceeding from the inside out rather than in theusual manner of the spiritual quest. Circe says she "searches" for a certain kind of man. But it is more true tosay that she opens herself to the possibility of a relationship that will develop that kind of man—and in turnwill allow her to be the loving woman she would like to be. The poem is not so much a rebirth journey (thereis no journey) as it is an exploration of what might happen if we stopped questing and made the most of thecapabilities for relationship that we have "Right now I mean. See for yourself."

This is curious, for elsewhere in her work Atwood seems to be as committed to the idea of the quest as anymodernist writer. Certainly Surfacing fits the pattern Annis Pratt describes, and many of her titles suggest apreoccupation with a psychological journey, usually in the form of a descent. Robert Lecker suggests thatAtwood uses such patterns to question their assumptions—even to prove them false. He points out, forexample, that Atwood often makes use of the romance pattern without its happy ending, return or ascent. Inthe case of Surfacing, he claims, "What Atwood really seems to be saying is that the mythical pattern ofseparation, initiation and return must itself be seen as a sham in a culture where rituals have lost their

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potency."

I doubt this explanation. Clearly rituals have not lost their potency for Atwood. In Two-Headed Poems, sheand her sister sew a red shirt for her baby girl with every expectation of passing on to her daughter theheritage or "birth-right" of the world's mothers. She says,

It may not be true that one myth cancels another. Nevertheless, in a corner of the hem, where it will not be seen, where you will inherit it, I make this tiny stitch, my private magic.

And the child, as innocently as Sleeping Beauty once received her fatal prick from the wicked fairy, receivesher mother's life-supporting gift with joy. Atwood still hopes that one myth does cancel another.

I think that what is finally mythologized in Atwood's poems is the possibility of altering myths that are sobasic that we can scarcely dream of existence without them. Atwood knows that if one myth cancels another,it happens slowly, "Circe/Mud Poems," then, is part of a long process of rearranging the elements of the questmyth into a shape which may finally negate the idea of questing, as we now understand it, in order to embracean idea of self-acceptance and relationship quite different from the traditional ideal of self-transcendence andattainment perpetuated by the quest. Atwood's vision is not "duplicitous" so much as it is double.

Like Circe, she envisions two possibilities, and she sees that, at least for the moment, "they do not excludeeach other." In the first, the quest myth is simply changed from within so that the silent participants have theiropportunity to "be right." In the second, the image of the journey itself is transformed, so that it becomesadmirable to go through experience without going forward or getting anywhere. It is an image of movement"in place." The challenge of this kind of "journey" is simply to "Be Alive." Eventually, the antinomy betweenself and other that informed the quest will appear quite different, as it does in a later poem:

We do not walk on the earth but in it, wading in that acid sea where flesh is etched from molten bone and re-forms.

In this massive tide warm as liquid sun, all waves are one wave; there is no other.

Atwood's mythic sequence stands in a pivotal position in her work, looking back to the "power politics" ofearlier volumes and ahead to her developing sense of fruitful relationship among forms of life she does notregard as totally separate from each other. Thus her title "Circe/Mud Poems," cuts both ways. On the onehand, it protests the vision of woman which reduces her to her sexuality and materiality without recognizingher consciousness. On the other hand, from that same woman's consciousness comes a vision of thesatisfaction of material reality. Perhaps Atwood will be the "poet of earth" that Wallace Stevens wanted to be,to match the poets of heaven and hell of the great tradition. As she says,

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So much for the gods and their static demands, our demands, former demands …

History is over, we take place in a season, an undivided space, no necessities

hold us closed, distort us.

Change is possible—even at the roots of our lives, in the myths that govern our experience.

Criticism: John Lanchester (review date 23 July 1987)

SOURCE: "Dying Falls," in London Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 14, July 23, 1987, pp. 24, 26.

[In the following excerpt, Lanchester provides a mixed assessment of the short story collection Bluebeard'sEgg.]

[The endings of Margaret Atwood's fiction] tend to leave things slightly in the air, and to present themselvesto the reader for interpretation. The dystopian fantasy of The Handmaid's Tale was followed by a framingfiction—of the kind that is more usually put in front of a narrative—which pretended that what we had justread had been the material presented at an academic conference, centuries after the events depicted. Theacademic ended with a question: 'Are there any questions?' Many of the stories in Bluebeard's Egg implicitlyask the same thing.

The material treated in Bluebeard's Egg is largely conventional, consisting as it does of relationships of onekind or another (parents in the stories which begin and end the collection, elsewhere first boyfriends,ex-lovers, new husbands: the usual). Her narrators are constantly interpreting themselves, their pasts and theirrelationships—a business that often goes on ruefully and after-the-event. The ideas behind this interest in theact of interpretation have been around for a little while now, and Atwood's focus on the subject is notflame-belchingly original. But the subject is an important one for her for reasons which can be discerned fromlittle asides in the stories. When a boy gives an identification bracelet to his girlfriend, he misnames it an'identity bracelet': she ponders a possible reason for the error, and then says: 'Another interpretation has sincebecome possible.' The remark is more of a clue to her concerns than the interpretation which follows it: itgives us a sense of the way feminism has empowered Atwood to take familiar material and scrutinise it from anew perspective. The point about 'Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother', the first story, is that not solong ago, or to another writer, the moments would not have seemed to signify anything at all. Perhaps it is herCanadianness—the fact of coming from a country where you can say 'Yes, I am a liberal' without feelingridiculous—which helps her to retain that combination of feminist ideas with an essentially traditionalaesthetic which is one of her great strengths. 'If writing novels—and reading them—have any redeemingsocial value it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else.' George Eliotmight have said the same.

A flexible and thought-out moral and critical position is rare enough: Atwood is also a talented writer. She hasa particular gift for aperçus which combine sympathy (for the character), insight (into the character) and awry, ironic humour (which is often a matter of catching the reader's eye behind the character's back). She isvery good at all varieties of rationalisation and minor deceit. Loulou, a sculptor, lives with a whole collective

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of male poets—very bad poets, too, we soon gather, though are never directly told. The poets use their moredeveloped vocabularies to tease and bully her: when they call her 'marmoreal' she looks it up in the dictionary'to find out whether she'd been insulted'. (The story's full title is 'Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of theLanguage'.) After sleeping with one of the poets for the first time, she had cleaned up his definitively squalidroom for him. 'Bob looked on, sullen but appreciative, as she hurled and scoured. Possibly this was why hedecided to love her: because she would do this kind of thing. What he said though was, "You complete me.'"

Moments like that provide much of the pleasure of Bluebeard's Egg; that kind of insight, and that kind ofcomedy, come very easily to Atwood. Perhaps too easily. There are times when it seems that characters arebeing described and events are being evoked rather mechanically, through a few carefully-chosen details and awell-modulated irony or two-giving a feeling that things are being made to happen in order to give the ironictone of voice a work-out. In 'Scarlet Ibis', for instance, a character wheeled on to provide local colour on page187 ('a trim grey haired woman in a tailored pink summer suit that must have been far too hot') changes herhair colour by her next appearance, two pages and about five minutes of narrative time later ('Christine talkedwith the pink-suited woman, who had blonde hair elegantly done up in a French roll. She was from Vienna…'). It's not a disastrous lapse, but for me it crystallised an unease with the way that what goes on in thestories sometimes comes to seem a consequence of the kind of narratorial voice Atwood has decided inadvance to employ.

The title story shows her at her best. Sally is in love with Ed 'because of his stupidity, his monumental andalmost energetic stupidity'; he is a heart doctor, 'and the irony of this is not lost on Sally: who could know lessabout hearts, the kind symbolised by red satin surrounded by lace and topped by pink bows, than Ed.' In plotterms, very little happens. We meet Sally as she stands looking out the kitchen window at Ed: their marriageis described (it's his third); we see that Sally, though brighter than her husband, is not as bright as she thinksshe is; we watch the progress of the dinner party Sally was preparing (as in a lot of the stories, the backgroundis filled in while the main character is performing a domestic chore). After the dinner party she walks into herstudy and sees Ed with his hand on her best friend's bum. Everyone acts as though nothing has happened.

While this has been going on, Atwood has been exploring Sally's attempts to understand Ed, whose wall-likestupidity makes him very enigmatic. Sally has been attending a night class in 'Forms of Narrative Fiction', inwhich the set text is an old version of the Bluebeard story: the class has been told to write the story from thepoint of view of any one character. Sally is inside a version of the Bluebeard story herself, of course, thoughshe cannot realise it: the incidental ironies of the narrative all serve this larger structural irony. There is anunsummarisable richness about the thirty-page 'Bluebeard's Egg'. Many of Atwood's concerns are present in it,vividly dramatised: her interest in adapting and co-opting genre; relationships between women; the nuances ofmodern marriages and remarriages; the nature of female experience; what men are like. The climax of thestory—as well as being thematically important (it presents Sally with a crisis of interpretation) and funny (inan adult and uncomfortable way)—is a moment of pure, dreamlike awfulness for the heroine, who is seeinghappen what is for her the worst possible thing. The personal, for Atwood, is political—but it is personal too.Enjoyable though most of this collection is, 'Bluebeard's Egg' gives the reader a sense that Atwood hasavailable a whole extra set of gears.

Criticism: Dave Smith (review date Summer 1988)

SOURCE: "Formal Allegiances: Selected Poems × 6," in The Kenyon Review, n.s. Vol. X, No. 3, Summer,1988, pp. 127-46.

[In the excerpt below, Smith offers a mixed review of Atwood's Selected Poems II.]

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Among American readers Margaret Atwood is Canadian literature. She has published a book annually formore than two decades, deploying a strong historical consciousness, a rich narrative imagination, and awillingness to use formal literary expression to confront whatever wrongs human dignity and freedom. Heraccomplishments have been manifest in best-selling fiction, in literary criticism (the often cited Survival: AThematic Guide to Canadian Literature suggests her range), and in ten books of poetry beginning with TheCircle Game in 1966. Many readers consider her foremost a poet. The simultaneous republication of her 1978volume Selected Poems 1965–1975 with her 1987 Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976–1986may do more than confuse readers with over-lapping titles. It may raise questions about how often MargaretAtwood has written successful poetry.

An Atwood poem is an intense sermonic in shortish, spare lines that whip domestic dramas and wildernessimagery down the page. Deliberately unliterary, its righteousness puts a finger in the middle of your chest.The results are predictable: a mixture of exhilaration, irritation, and boredom. A style meant to simulateno-bullshit veracity, this language has studied biology, current affairs, and recent movies. Even the belligerenttone of "A Woman's Issue" asserts blunt authenticity: "You'll notice that what they have in common / isbetween the legs."

Political or issue-centered poetry claims us by shock or argument, while most other poetry works throughaccumulation of specific image or the clear tug of narrative. Atwood's poems often slacken anecdotally orslide into mission chatter, oddly both the curse of the poetry-writing fictioneer and Emily Dickinson,mechanical lineation being a grid, not form. It's actually a pseudo-poem as in "The Words Continue TheirJourney":

Do poets really suffer more than other people? Isn't it only that they get their pictures taken and are seen to do it? The loony bins are full of those who never wrote a poem. Most suicides are not poets: a good statistic.

Margaret Atwood's imagination, which sees the world as plastic, is metaphoric and metamorphic. She isextraordinarily receptive to places and moments resonant with apocalyptic significance, and is equally willingto render words stiffened by moral indignation. As she says, "my passive eyes transmute / everything I look atto the pocked / black and white of a war photo." For Atwood the poem frees the muted voice; it's poetry asliberation, as therapeutic function. Can art make anything happen?

Atwood suggests poetry is the happening, its language the public psychiatric process of exposure, rehearsal,correction. Metaphor (poetry = sight / sight = metamorphosis) is enactment. Her preferred form is the lyricalmonologue, sincerity and diagnosis at once. It's good form for fiction, but why is the following poetry, if it is?

:moles dream of darkness and delicate mole smells

frogs dream of green and golden frogs sparkling like wet suns among the lilies

"Dreams of the Animals"

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Merely personal, perhaps trivial, this world is a papiermâché background. Such writing trots along in theself-absorption of idealism that strains credulity with childish personification, melodramatic effects, and thegimmicks of standup persuaders. Banality replaces profundity:

though we knew we had never been there before we knew we had been there before.

"A Morning"

Atwood's discomfort with the demands and resources of lyric form encouraged her to employ her strengths:fictional coherence, dramatic immediacy, the arresting strangeness and authority of tale. In Procedures forUnderground (1970) she echoed the mythic journey of psychoanalysis (and Dostoyevski) which leads tospiritual rebirth. With Power Politics (1971) she dramatized sexual struggles and revelations. Both bookssearched for large, coherent form in theme. In 1976, with The Journals of Susanna Moodie she joined in asegmented long poem a witnessing character, story, and historical veracity to testify to "Those who wentahead / of us in the forest" and thereby evoked the archetypal society and memory which is poetry's trade.Fiction gave her a form of coherence she had been unable to achieve with lyric.

From The Journals of Susanna Moodie Atwood moved to poems in sequences of numbered sections orsignaling repetitions of place, subject, or title. What might be called "sequentialing form" dominatedTwo-Headed Poems (1978) and Interlunar (1981), but Atwood also encountered some old troubles, asevidenced in a stanza about pain and poetry:

This is the place you would rather not know about, this is the place that will inhabit you, this is the place you cannot imagine, this is the place that will finally defeat you

where the word why shrivels and empties itself. This is famine. "Notes towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written"

This is less poetry than merely evasive language. Nothing offered necessarily defines famine any more than itdefines Cleveland.

But with rare energy and an acute eye, Atwood has created passages remarkable for density of particulars andrhythmic prowess. Her preacherly imagination is also pastoral: she celebrates unspoiled worlds, landscapeswhich now mirror the fouled human enterprise. Her view in "A Sunday Drive" reveals "a beach reeking ofshit" and a "maze / of condemned flesh without beginning or end." As priestess of the revolutionary spirit, shemakes arrowed accusations of poems. While her animistic identity with wild creatures may verge on comicbook simplemindedness, as does Ted Hughes's, her wolves, crabs, and vultures leap from inert words to realbeasts. Even in "Mushrooms" there is the powerful acknowledgment of lives utterly apart from and yetancestral to one's own: "They taste / of rotten meat or cloves / or cooking steak bruised / lips or new snow."And in "Marsh, Hawk" the inward echoing of the scene provides the lyric form her passion has needed:

Diseased or unwanted trees, cut into pieces, thrown away here, damp and soft in the run, rotting and half covered with sand, burst truck tires, abandoned, bottles and cans hit

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with rocks or bullets, a mass grave, someone made it, spreads on the land like a bruise and we stand on it, vantage point, looking out over the marsh.

Atwood's particulars compose a landscape-medallion of ultimate knowledge, while controlled cadence andperspective establish emotional congruity. The voice "feels" with the eye from object to object—as the bodywould move, with cumulative jarrings—drawing us into the metaphor rather than pressing its grid upon us.Poetry is discovered and released, not commanded. A life of sores—seen instead of explained—leads not tostrident opinion but to record and conviction, the voice of human will.

Although certain permutations of form are obvious in Atwood's two selecteds, she remains the same poetearly and late. She is a naturalist, a traveler, but a woman ill-suited to the urban world. One finds little humor,less joy in her. Surprisingly, her best poems concern love: tenderness for ancestors, yearning for individualbelonging, erotic gratification. To Atwood love defines us all: "those who think they have love / and thosewho think they are without it." In the fifteen new poems in Selected Poems II, Atwood, now a year shy of herfiftieth birthday, seems to try to work beyond characteristic anger, bitter portraits of harmed women, andblunt-tongued raking of those less pure-hearted than herself. She seeks "Some form of cheering. / There ispain but no arrival at anything." Still, she shows greater tolerance, an understanding, is occasionally bemused.Among all that takes the edge off revolutionary fervor, nothing beats age. Atwood's poems, now tighter, arenot serene, but they approach the grace of love through understanding. Maybe she speaks for us all—alittle—in a parable of maturing:

Amazingly young beautiful women poets with a lot of hair falling down around their faces like a bad ballet, their eyes oblique over their cheekbones; they write poems like blood in a dead person that comes out black, or at least deep purple, like smashed grapes. Perhaps I was one of them once. Too late to remember the details, the veils. If I were a man I would want to console them, and would not succeed.

"Aging Female Reads Little Magazines"

Criticism: Helen Yglesias (review date July 1989)

SOURCE: "Odd Woman Out," in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. VI, Nos. 10-11, July 1989, pp. 3-4.

[Yglesias is an American-born educator and novelist whose works include How She Died (1972), FamilyFeeling (1976), and Sweetsir (1981). In the following review, Yglesias praises Atwood's style and commitmentto issues, but finds the novel Cat's Eye an uneven work.]

The successful publication of The Handmaid's Tale transformed the distinguished Canadian poet and prosewriter Margaret Atwood into a world-class, internationally acclaimed, best-selling writer—to use some ofpublishing's most favored phrases. Her next novel, Cat's Eye, inevitably became an occasion for critics toweigh and measure this current work against the brilliant evocation of a repressively anti-woman dystopiadepicted in The Handmaid's Tale. Those looking for a falling off found it. Though Cat's Eye has been

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sufficiently well-marketed and praised, placing Atwood once again on the best-seller list, reviewers have alsoexpressed disappointment. (Sharon Thompson in the Village Voice, Vivian Gornick in New York Woman areonly two examples.)

Why this carping? Atwood's oeuvre is astonishingly varied, copious and good. Beginning publication in 1961with a book of poems, she continued with other works of poetry, a solid body of short fiction, and sevennovels, including the stunning Surfacing. She has written children's books and collections of prose criticismand theory, so rich an outpouring in fact that the usual rumblings have been voiced, the uneasiness that oftengreets prolific "serious" writers. (Joyce Carol Oates is a prime target for this specious concern of critics.)There is no such thing as too much good and important writing, and Atwood's work is certainly good andimportant; but there is room, within the rejoicing over her accomplishment, to inquire into the force and futuredirection of her output. Where are Atwood the writer, and her creation. The Atwood Woman, going?

Not directly in response to this question, but to a related one, the title poem of a 1985 collection, True Stories,reins the reader in. Atwood writes:

Don't ask for the true story; Why do you need it?

It's not what I set out with or what I carry.

What I'm sailing with, a knife, blue fire,

luck, a few good words that still work, and the tide.

But in Cat's Eye it is Atwood herself who is in desperate quest for "the true story" of a childhood experiencewhich has eluded her until now in her fiction. If she has at long last reworked this material to her ownsatisfaction, she fumbles in passing on gratification to her readers.

The power to pleasure the reader, to gratify, is perhaps the single most important gift a writer possesses, notteachable in creative writing courses, not to be enforced in fact by any of the devices in the critic's arsenaland, conceivably, useless to talk about. If it's a case of the writer either having it, what is left to analyzebeyond the harsh sentence of an absence of gift? The overwhelming love the great heroines of literature havecalled up from readers, those girls and women who step off the page into one's own life and consciousness,imparting an almost physical quality of identification and hope, seems to be, if not entirely lost tocontemporary literature, then so diminished as to be effectively gone. It doesn't even seem proper for thereader to request a passionate response any more.

Post-Modernism (a term I use reluctantly as a shortcut definition of a pervasive type of contemporary novel)scoffs at such yearnings, finding them repulsively nostalgic. Understandably, since Romanticism has had itsday and its say, and didn't do all that much for us anyway. But must the reader give up altogether theemotional release of gratification? Are dreariness, misery and failure, and the negative joys of satire, thesubstitutes we must accept as part of the modernist resolve to move beyond romantic realism?

The current Atwood Woman, Elaine Risley, is an accomplished artist who returns to Toronto, where shemostly grew up, to attend a retrospective of her work, heralded by the women's movement. Like Atwoodherself, she is nearing 50, and the occasion becomes a memory trip in which her tormented girlhood is relivedin the kind of detail Atwood can shape so obsessively. But there is an uneasiness in Atwood's handling of this

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experience, an uncertainty of direction and, yes, meaning—though, again, in modernist terms stories are notsupposed to "mean," or at least no more or less than whatever they may happen to signify to individualreaders. But Atwood isn't that kind of writer, or critic either. She means to "mean" something specific whenshe writes, no matter the disclaimers she supplies at the front of the book. But in Cat's Eye her purpose isopaquely veiled.

Much of the matter of Cat's Eye, as well as its themes (to borrow an Atwood word from her quite brilliant1972 survey of Canadian literature, Survival: A Thematic Guide), will be recognized from earlier Atwoodfictions: the unconventional parents, the challenge of the natural world, the thin quality of men-womenrelationships, the suppressed horror of the heroine's inner life, and the excitement and nourishment ofcreativity, in art and in science. And here, once again, she gives us the ultimate outsider as nail-bitingthird-world person, a mirror-image of her heroine, echoing the disquieting parallels she has found beforebetween that displaced condition and the heroine's precarious sense of herself in a middle-class corner of acolonized country.

Mr. Banerji is a guest at Christmas dinner,

a student of my father's a young man from India who's here to study insects and who hasnever seen snow before. He's polite and ill at ease and he giggles frequently, looking withwhat I sense is terror at the array of food spread out before him, the mashed potatoes, thegravy, the lurid green and red Jell-O salad, the enormous turkey … I know he's miserableunderneath his smiles and politeness … His spindly wrists extend from his over-large cuffs,his hands are long and thin, ragged around the nails like mine. I think he is very beautiful,with his brown skin and brilliant white teeth and his dark, appalled eyes … I can hardlybelieve he's a man, he seems so unlike one. He's a creature more like myself: alien andapprehensive. He's afraid of us. He has no idea what we will do next, what impossibilities wewill expect of him, what we will make him eat. No wonder he bites his fingers.

We have met this creature before in Atwood fictions, most notably in the masterly short story, "The ManFrom Mars," from Dancing Girls, where too-large, unattractive Christine, "statuesque her mother called itwhen she was straining," is relentlessly pursued by "a person from another culture" because she has been kindto him in a perfunctory fashion, giving him directions to a particular location on campus. He is so small, shemistakes him for a child at first; then she notes his thinning hair and the aging lines on his face. The threadededges of his jacket sleeves hang down over his thin wrists, his nails and the ends of his fingers are so badlybitten "they seemed almost deformed." His insanely fixed obsession with Christine makes her alaughing-stock. He ends up arrested and deported, and Christine remains an odd-woman-out for the rest of herlife.

Atwood's persons "from another culture," dual images for her heroines (in Cat's Eye Elaine not only bites hernails and her fingers, she peels the skin of her feet every night until she is barely able to walk), also addcomplex values to her fiction, deepening the narrow, mean-spirited, middle-class dreariness of her milieuswith a more painfully sharp social reality, just as the neat, swiftly executed satirical scenes at which she excelssupply a deliciously nasty refreshment.

The core of Cat's Eye, the terrors and heartbreak of the realm of "girls" and "best-friends," has already beenexplored in Murder in the Dark and especially in Lady Oracle, where the anguish of the innocent youngstervictimized by her best-friends is similarly played out, down to the symbolic locale of the sexually threateningravine, the shaky bridge to safety, and the fall from grace, though without the mesmerizing effect Atwoodproduces in Cat's Eye.

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That Atwood can mesmerize to some purpose was amply proven by The Handmaid's Tale. There her strengthsand weaknesses came together to produce a classic, and the narrow path of her vision worked perfectly for astory in which every detail was controlled by the artists's imagination. But Cat's Eye is about life here andnow, the life we all know, the life we live and question daily, not a construct totally bent to the author's will,and it is subject therefore to a set of different reader demands: a stacking up of the work's achievement notonly against the author's intent, but against our own concept of what's what in the world.

What Atwood seems to be grappling with in Cat's Eye is a fundamental ambivalence about women, whichmany women share and should not be dismissed out of hand as simple-minded. It is the first, basicdisfigurement of the oppressed: being taught, and learning well, to hate oneself. From her first novel, TheEdible Woman. Atwood has mapped the syndrome eloquently. Among her women coworkers at an officeparty, this Atwood Woman reflects:

She examined the women's bodies with interest, critically, as though she had never seen thembefore … she could see the roll of fat pushed up across Mrs. Gundridge's back by the top ofher corset, the ham-like bulge of thigh, the creases around the neck, the large porous cheeks;the blotch of varicose veins glimpsed at the back of one plump crossed leg, the way her jowlsjellied when she chewed, her sweater a wooly tea cosy over those rounded shoulders; and theothers too, similar in structure but with varying proportions and textures of bumpypermanents and dune-like contours of breast and waist and hip … What peculiar creaturesthey were … and the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in,giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps, grease, hair, babies, milk, excrement,cookies, vomit, coffee … blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears and garbage … she was one of them,her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the floweredroom with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity… she wanted something solid, clear: a man; she wanted Peter in the room so that she couldput her hand out and hold on to him to keep from being sucked down.

There are similar passages in all Atwood's novels.

In Cat's Eye, ambivalence lives at the center of the story. Elaine Risley is pulled towards the rich intellectualand scientific interests of her father, and particularly of her brilliant brother. At the same time, she worries thatshe is failing at being one of the boys, and longs for the mysteries of best-friends, the unknown world of girls.The vagaries of attitude of her unconventional mother leave her prey to the stupid and cruelly distortingconventions of the middle-class mothers and girls of the neighborhood in Toronto in which her odd familysettles down after the Second World War. Torn, and ignorant of feminine lore, she tries to make her way.

Boys are easier in some ways, but girls and their exotic concerns are irresistible. She dissects frogs withaplomb, but the complexities of sweater-sets, girdles, perms, Church-going and Sunday School areunattainable however hard she strives. She never measures up. Among the group of best-friends into whichshe is initiated, Elaine is chosen as victim to be mocked, teased, mistreated and tortured to the point of realharm. She is buried at one point, and left to freeze or possibly be raped at another. As she grows intoadolescence, she finds her relationships with boys "effortless … It's girls I feel awkward with. It's girls I feel Ihave to defend myself against; not boys."

And well she might. Apart from her mother, the women in Elaine Risley's girlhood are very nasty indeed.Cordelia, the particular best-friend who leads the pack in torturing Elaine, seems to be utterly withoutredeeming characteristics, yet Elaine remains obsessed with her even into her own maturity and success as anartist, though Cordelia has achieved nothing in contrast, and is last seen confined to a mental institution. Itisn't Cordelia who is the subject of Elaine's paintings, however, but the mother of one of the other best-friends,a woman who devoted herself to remolding Elaine into a proper, Church-going, right-thinking, middle-class

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female—and failed. In the paintings so praised by the women's movement, Elaine exacts the ultimate revengeand Mrs. Smeath is rendered in canvas after canvas as the damaging, monstrous creature she had been to theyoung girl.

But the women's movement is no haven. Here too ambivalence flourishes. Elaine is between husbands, asingle mother, and a beginning artist when she becomes reluctantly involved in a support group:

Confession is popular, not of your flaws but of your sufferings at the hands of men. Pain isimportant, but only certain kinds of it: the pain of women, but not the pain of men. Tellingabout your pain is called sharing. I don't want to share in this way; also I am insufficient inscars. I have lived a privileged life, I've never been beaten up, raped, gone hungry … Anumber of these women are lesbians … according to some, it's the only equal relationshippossible, for women. You are not genuine otherwise … I am ashamed of my own reluctance… but I would be terrified to get into bed with a woman. Women collect grievances, holdgrudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgments, unlike the purblind guessesof men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. Women know too much,they can neither be deceived nor trusted. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as theyare frequently accused of being … I avoid gatherings of these women, walking as I do in fearof being sanctified, or else burned at the stake. I think they are talking about me behind myback … They want to improve me. At times I feel defiant … I am not Woman, and I'mdamned if I'll be shoved into it. Bitch, I think silently. Don't boss me around … But also Ienvy their conviction, their optimism, their carelessness, their fearlessness about men, theircamaraderie. I am like someone watching from the sidelines, waving a cowardlyhandkerchief, as the troops go boyishly off to war, singing brave songs.

The most mystifying event in the book is the scene in which Elaine is deserted by her best-friends and left tofreeze in the snow at the bottom of a ravine. Rescue comes in the shape of a vision of the Virgin, though it isthe down-to-earth concern of her mother that truly leads Elaine to warmth and safety. Oddly, too, in windingup the threads of this long book, Elaine's beloved brother Stephen is killed off suddenly, without a designintrinsic to the book's intent, or at least to the reader's understanding. On a journey to Frankfurt to present ascientific paper "on the subject of the probable composition of the universe," his plane is hijacked, and he issingled out by the terrorists and killed. This act of cruelty summarily ejects the reader from the world of thebook, in a state of shock and blame for its senselessness. There is something so wayward and arbitrary in thiskilling that one's primary emotion is rage at the author: You killed him and I don't know why and I don't thinkyou do either.

On the final page, in what was for me a failed attempt to sum up and resolve the book's concerns, Elaine isherself on a plane, returning home from her memory trip. In the two seats beside her are

two old ladies, old women, each with a knitted cardigan, each with yellow-white hair andthick-lensed glasses with a chain for around the neck, each with a desiccated mouth lipstickedbright red with bravado … They have saved up for this trip and they are damn well going toenjoy it, despite the arthritis of one, the swollen legs of the other. They're rambunctious,they're full of beans; they're tough as thirteen, they're innocent and dirty, they don't give ahoot. Responsibilities have fallen away from them, obligations, old hates and grievances; nowfor a short time they can play again like children, but this time without the pain … This iswhat I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone but something that will never happen. Twoold women giggling over their tea.

Stubbornly, these happenings fail to coalesce or to peak. Does the death of Stephen signify anything? Is itdivine punishment for being male? (Women and children are allowed to leave the plane.) Does the vision of

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the Virgin? Woman as a force for good? That notion takes some straining. "Two old women giggling overtheir tea"—a (condescending) image for the strengthening joys of long-lasting friendships between women.Perhaps Atwood is straining out the essence of her ambivalence, locating the pure liquid of her passionatenegation of traditional femininity, seeking its source so as to choke it off; or perhaps she is struggling throughto an open acknowledgement and embrace of sisterhood, down to its most repellent characteristics.

A novel is like a single breaking ocean wave, its waters gathered from far-away coasts, diverted by channelsand chance winds, yet moving inexorably towards a crashing silvery moment that peaks and breaks on adesignated shore. Cat's Eye gathers its many streams, sends them flowing forward in wash after wash of richdetail and observation, but disappointingly no wave forms. Fizzling, it disperses its brilliant watersineffectually, allowing them to be sucked back into the general stream. But water is one of Margaret Atwood'spowerful elements, and there is no doubt that her extraordinary gifts will keep her and her readers sailing.

Criticism: J. Brooks Bouson (essay date 1989)

SOURCE: "Comic Storytelling as Escape and Narcissistic Self-Expression in Atwood's Lady Oracle," in hisThe Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self, The University ofMassachusetts Press, 1989, pp. 154-168.

[In the following excerpt, Bouson explores the psychology of the protagonist in Lady Oracle.]

Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle has tantalized, amused, and baffled critics who are fascinated with itsduplicitous, protean narrator-heroine. "The task of fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, the puzzle of JoanFoster," writes one critic, "is left to the reader." As Joan narrates the story of her life and exposes hernarcissistic anxieties, hurts, and rage, she is undeniably funny. But even while we laugh at her comicdescriptions of her mother-dominated childhood, her childhood obesity, her recurring fat lady fantasies, andher troubled relationships with men, we are aware that her comedic voice "covers a prolonged scream ofpain." Like the opera singer, Joan wants to "stand up there in front of everyone and shriek as loud" as possible"about hatred and love and rage and despair," to "scream at the top" of her lungs "and have it come outmusic." The kind of storyteller we've encountered before, Joan wants to seduce her listeners, compel theirattention. Creating a character who amuses and disarms, keeping reader attention riveted on Joan, Atwoodenjoins us to become accomplices, an appreciative audience for Joan's secret but nevertheless exhibitionisticexploits. Urging us into a pact with her storyteller-heroine, Atwood takes us into a comic version of a worldwe've come to know well … the solipsistic, hall-of-mirrors world of the narcissistic character.

A text replete with messages and clues for the psychoanalytic inquirer, Lady Oracle focuses attention on atroubled mother-daughter relationship. The preestablished plot Joan acts out finds its source in hermother-controlled and tormented childhood, a world in which the "huge but ill-defined figure" of her motherblocks "the foreground" while her father is essentially an "absence." An autobiographer, Joan tells the story ofher childhood in an attempt to understand and thus master her memories of the corrosive emotional hurts ofher past and also to verbally retaliate against her mother. Cast in the role of sympathetic listener, the reader isencouraged to take Joan's side in the mother-daughter conflict. Part of the text's agenda is to use comicaccusation to expose and undercut the lethal powers of the unempathic, and hence dangerous, mother figure.

Her mother is "the manager, the creator, the agent," and she "the product," says Joan as she reconstructs herchildhood relationship with her mother. Motherly "concern" in Joan's childhood is equated with "pain," hermother's anger barely camouflaged by her public pose as the concerned mother. "On her hands, in her hair,"these are the metaphors Joan's mother uses to describe her, even though she "seldom" touches her.Unconsciously, her mother conspires to deny Joan's healthy childhood assertiveness and curtail herdevelopment of feelings of self-worth and authenticity. She wants Joan to "change into someone else,"

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continually berates and finds fault with her, and always tries to teach her "some lesson or other." When Joanbecomes an overweight child, she becomes a "reproach" of her mother, the "embodiment" of her mother's"failure and depression, a huge edgeless cloud of inchoate matter which refused to be shaped into anything"for which her mother "could get a prize." Joan's dreams depict her childhood anxieties about herself-absorbed, non-responsive, and angry mother. In one dream, she envisions herself struggling on acollapsing bridge; as she falls into a ravine, her nearby mother remains oblivious of the fact that "anythingunusual" is happening. In another dream, Joan's memory of her mother putting on make-up in front of herthree-sided mirror surfaces as a nightmare in which her mother metamorphoses into a three-headed monsterand only Joan is aware of her "secret" monstrousness. And in her most terrifying dream, Joan, overhearingvoices talking about her and realizing that "something very bad" is about to happen, feels utterly "helpless."The persecutory fears that Joan fictionalizes in her Gothic novels and that plague her as an adult in her dreamsand real life—like her Gothic heroines, she feels vulnerable, exposed, haunted and hunted down bymalevolent, spectral pursuers—find their source in her crippling childhood encounters with her mother. Withher childhood contemporaries, her companion Brownies who take special delight in persecuting her since shemakes such a good victim and cries so readily, she repeats her troubled relationship with her mother. Later,when she meets Marlene, one of her childhood tormentors, these painful memories erupt. "Like a virusmeeting an exhausted throat, my dormant past burst into rank life…. I was trapped again in the nightmare ofmy childhood, where I ran eternally after the others, the oblivious or scornful ones, hands outstretched,begging for a word of praise." What Joan attempts to elicit from others is the confirming attention she neverreceived in childhood. Like Atwood, who plays the "good mother" to Joan by making her the focal point ofattention, the reader is encouraged to enact the "good mother" role by becoming an appreciative audience forJoan's comic misadventures. Divulging to us her character's needs and hurts, positioning us as confidants,Atwood invites our active listening and empathic interest.

Joan's early pursuit of audience recognition is dramatized in her childhood experiences as an overweight,would-be ballet dancer. Exposing herself to control her fear of exposure, laughing at herself to disarm thosewho would laugh at her, Joan describes her childhood fascination with ballet dancers. "I idealized balletdancers …," she recalls, "and I used to press my short piggy nose up against jewelry store windows andgoggle at the china music-box figurines of shiny ladies in brittle pink skirts, with roses on their hard ceramicheads, and imagine myself leaping through the air … my hair full of rhinestones and glittering like hope."Enrolled in Miss Flegg's dancing school, Joan eagerly awaits the recital performance of the "Butterfly Frolic,"which is her "favorite" dance and which features her favorite costume: a short pink skirt, a head-piece withinsect antennae, and a pair of cellophane wings. In her outfit, as she later reconstructs this incident, she looks"grotesque": "with my jiggly thighs and the bulges of fat where breasts would later be and my plump upperarms and floppy waist, I must have looked obscene, senile almost, indecent…." Provoked to laugh as Joanmakes wisecrack after wisecrack about her weight, Atwood forces us to confront, even as we laugh at Joan'sjokes about her obesity, our own—and the text's—latent cruelty.

After her embarrassed mother betrays her to Miss Flegg, Joan is given a new role in the dance: that of amothball. Joan's "humiliation [is] disguised as a privilege," for Miss Flegg tells her it is a special part that shehas been selected to dance. "There were no steps to my dance, as I hadn't been taught any, so I made it up as Iwent along…. I threw myself into the part, it was a dance of rage and destruction, tears rolled down mycheeks behind the fur, the butterflies would die…. 'This isn't me,' I kept saying to myself, 'they're making medo it'; yet even though I was concealed in the teddy-bear suit … I felt naked and exposed, as if this ridiculousdance was the truth about me and everyone could see it." Though thwarted in her desire to have wings, shedoes provoke both laughter and vigorous applause. Left alone, center stage, she is a special person, agrotesque clown.

At the time, she is filled with "rage, helplessness and [a] sense of betrayal," but she gradually comes to viewthis episode as "preposterous," most particularly when she thinks about telling others about it. "Instead ofdenouncing my mother's injustice, they would probably laugh at me. It's hard to feel undiluted sympathy for

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an overweight seven-year-old stuffed into a mothball suit and forced to dance; the image is simply tooludicrous." While we are invited to laugh at this episode, we also are meant to feel sorry for Joan anddisapprove of her mother's unempathic behavior. As one critic observes, "Joan swings back and forth betweenself-pity and self-mockery. She thinks of herself as a victim and the 'pity the unwanted child' tone is verystrong, but she also sees and shows herself to be ridiculous as well as pathetic." Despite Joan's comicdismissal, this incident causes a deep narcissistic wound. It later resurfaces in her recurring fat lady fantasyand gives birth to her identity as the escape artist who fears exposure and thus compulsively assumes a seriesof identities, each identity becoming a new trap. And here we find the precursor of the writer who achievesnarcissistic revenge via her art and the comedian who later learns how to disarmingly throw the cloak ofhumor over her rage to win the approval of others. This also points to one of the defensive strategies of thenarrative: the use of humor to partially contain and diffuse the explosive anger that threatens to erupt from justbeneath the surface of the text. "All that screaming with your mouth closed," Joan says, her depiction of anItalian fotoromanzo an apt depiction of her own inner life.

As Joan battles her hostile and intrusive mother during adolescence, she transforms herself into a grotesquemonster. Insistently, the text draws attention to Joan's defective body. A physical statement, Joan's obesity is avisible signifier of her thwarted and angry grandiosity, her inner defectiveness and hollowness, and herintrojection of her mother's monstrousness. "Eat, eat, that's all you ever do," Joan recalls her mother saying."You're disgusting, you really are, if I were you I'd be ashamed to show my face outside the house." Usingeating as a weapon, Joan eats "steadily, doggedly, stubbornly." "The war between myself and my mother wason in earnest; the disputed territory was my body," as she later analyzes it. "I swelled visibly, relentlessly,before her very eyes, I rose like dough, my body advanced inch by inch towards her across the dining-roomtable, in this at least I was undefeated." Determined not to be "diminished, neutralized" by the nondescriptclothes her mother wants her to wear, she chooses outfits of "a peculiar and offensive hideousness, violentlycolored, horizontally striped." Her confidence undercut when she recognizes that others view her obesity as an"unfortunate handicap," she comes to derive a "morose pleasure" from her weight "only in relation" to hermother. In particular, she enjoys her ability to clutter up her mother's "gracious-hostess act." Putting on herfashion shows "in reverse," she calls attention to herself by "clomping silently but very visibly" through therooms where her mother sits. "[I]t was a display, I wanted her to see and recognize what little effect hernagging and pleas were having." Eating to "defy" her mother, Joan also eats from "panic": "Sometimes I wasafraid I wasn't really there, I was an accident; I'd heard her call me an accident. Did I want to become solid,solid as a stone so she wouldn't be able to get rid of me?" Conflating her memory of herself as a fat ballerinaand her fantasy of the fat lady in the freak show, she envisions herself as a fat lady in a pink ballerina costumewalking the high wire, proceeding inch by inch across Canada, the initial jeers of the audience transforminginto the roar of applause when she triumphantly completes her death-defying feat. Dramatizing Joan's need toexhibit her grandiose self and gain self-confirming attention, this fantasy also depicts her anxieties about herfragile self-stability, which is expressed as the fear of falling.

When Joan, left two thousand dollars by her Aunt Lou on condition that she lose one hundred pounds, goes ona diet, the mother-daughter battle enters a new phase. "Well, it's about time, but it's probably too late," hermother says at first. But when Joan begins to successfully shed her fat, her mother becomes progressively"distraught and uncertain," for as Joan grows thinner and thinner her mother loses control over her. "About theonly explanation I could think of for this behavior of hers was that making me thin was her last availableproject. She'd finished all the houses, there was nothing left for her to do, and she had counted on me to lasther forever." After Joan has stripped away most of her protective covering of fat, her mother's "cuttingremarks" are finally literalized: she attacks Joan with a knife, this actual infliction of a narcissistic woundconcretizing the verbal wounds Joan has suffered for years. Consequently, Joan leaves home, determined tosever her connection with her mother and to discard her past with all its "acute concealed misery."

Discovering that she is the "right shape" but has "the wrong past," she determines "to get rid of it entirely" andcreate "a different" and "more agreeable one" for herself. Thus she begins her life-long habit of compulsive

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lying and storytelling, as she invents, first for her lover Paul and later for Arthur and her adoring public, a"more agreeable" personal history. Consciously, she attempts to divest herself of her past. But she remainshaunted by it, and she constantly fears exposure. No matter what she achieves, she feels that she is animpostor, a fraud, and that others will uncover her persisting defectiveness. She is also unable to escape hermother's malevolent presence and her own buried rage. When Joan receives a telegram announcing hermother's death, she thinks it might be a trap, her mother's attempt to bring her "back within striking distance."Subsequently, she imagines that she somehow has killed her mother for unconsciously she perceives her angrythoughts as lethal. Strategically "killed off" and banished from the text, the mother figure resurfaces in apotentially more dangerous form. Twice after her mother's death Joan hallucinates what she thinks is hermother's astral body. Married to Arthur, she remains a partial prisoner of her noxious past. "All this time," sherecalls, "I carried my mother around my neck like a rotting albatross. I dreamed about her often, mythree-headed mother, menacing and cold." When she looks at herself in the mirror, she does not see whatothers see. Instead, she imagines the "outline" of her "former body" still surrounding her "like a mist, like aphantom moon, like the image of Dumbo the Flying Elephant superimposed on my own. I wanted to forgetthe past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me." That the narrative seeminglydelivers Joan from her mother's noxious presence and from her own grotesque shape only to sabotage therescue points to a drama which recurs in the text: the thwarted rescue.

In Joan's relationships with men, we find a repetition of this narrative pattern of thwarted rescues. Desiringmagic transformations, wishing to escape from her past, Joan imagines that the men in her life are like theromantic figures populating her Gothic novels. When she meets Paul, the Polish count, and listens to his story,she thinks she has met "a liar as compulsive and romantic" as herself. Arthur, at first, seems a "melancholyfighter for almost-lost causes, idealistic and doomed, sort of like Lord Byron." Similarly, the Royal Porcupinehas "something Byronic about him." But when the romance wears off and these men become "gray andmultidimensional and complicated like everyone else," the inevitable happens: Joan relives her past in herrelationships with men.

Her husband, Arthur, for example, is an amalgam of her father's aloofness and her mother's disapprovingbehavior. Arthur faults Joan for being obtuse and disorganized, is in the habit of giving expositions on herfailures, and, like her mother, is "full of plans" for her. Fearing that Arthur will find her unworthy, sheprotects her fragile self-esteem by keeping secret her childhood obesity and her identity as Louisa K.Delacourt, the writer of costume Gothics. Both Arthur and Paul, her first lover, seem bent on changing her,transforming her into their own likenesses. While Arthur enjoys her defeats in the kitchen—"[m]y failure wasa performance and Arthur was the audience. His applause kept me going"—she also comes to feel that nomatter what she does Arthur is "bound to despise" her and that she can never be what he wants.

What Joan seeks from the men in her life is the mirroring attention she never got from her mother. "I'dpolished them with my love," as she puts it, "and expected them to shine, brightly enough to return my ownreflection, enhanced and sparkling." But the men she loves are also objects of fear. She realizes that all themen she has been involved with have had "two selves": her father, a doctor-savior and wartime killer; the manin the tweed coat, her childhood rescuer but also possibly the daffodil man, a pervert; Paul, an author ofinnocuous nurse novels and a man she suspects of having a secret sinister life; the Royal Porcupine, herfantasy lover and feared "homicidal maniac"; and Arthur, her loving husband and suspected madman, possiblythe unknown tormentor sending her death threats. She splits men into dual identities: the apparently good manis a lurking menace, a hidden pervert, a secret killer. In the text's code, men are an embodiment of Joan's splitgood/bad mother and her own hidden energies and killing rage. What Arthur doesn't know about her, she tellsus, is that behind her "compassionate smile" is "a set of tightly clenched teeth, and behind that a legion ofvoices, crying, What about me? What about my own pain? When is it my turn? But I'd learned to stifle thesevoices, to be calm and receptive."

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Perpetually trapped, Joan perpetually attempts to escape as she assumes a series of identities and becomes awriter of Gothic novels. "Escape literature," Paul tells Joan, "should be an escape for the writer as well as thereader." While Joan uses her writing to escape her daily life, she also persistently dramatizes in her work heramorphous anxieties, her conflicted selfhood, and her need for self-rescue. For while her heroine isperpetually "in peril" and "on the run," she is also, of course, always rescued. In her work-in-progress, StalkedBy Love, Joan fictionalizes her contrasting selves. Charlotte represents her socially compliant, conventionalfemale self, the role that she assumes with Paul and Arthur, while the possessive, angry, powerful Feliciaembodies her camouflaged grandiosity. Publicly, Joan plays the role of Arthur's self-effacing, inept,always-apologizing wife; in secret, she becomes Louisa Delacourt, writer of Gothic novels. As time passes,Joan's desire for public acknowledgment grows. But she also fears that if she brings the two parts of her lifetogether there will be "an explosion." And in a sense there is.

In an episode designed to compel reader attention and provoke the critic's speculative gaze, Atwood describesJoan's discovery of her own "lethal energies" when she experiments with automatic writing. Sitting in the darkin front of her triple mirror and staring at a candle, Joan, in a symbolic act of narcissistic introversion,imagines herself journeying into the world of the mirror. "There was the sense of going along a narrowpassage that led downward," she recalls, "the certainty that if I could only turn the next corner or thenext—for these journeys became longer—I would find the thing, the truth or word or person that was mine,that was waiting for me." On the trail of an elusive stranger, she discovers, in the subterranean world of theunconscious, a woman unlike anybody she's "ever imagined," a woman who, she feels, has "nothing to do"with her. "[S]he lived under the earth somewhere, or inside something, a cave or a huge building…. She wasenormously powerful, almost like a goddess, but it was an unhappy power":

She sits on the iron throne She is one and three The dark lady the redgold lady the blank lady oracle of blood, she who must be obeyed forever.

Figured as the mother-goddess Demeter, Lady Oracle—who is potent and blank—is a composite of theinternalized mother and Joan's grandiose, empty self. It is the Lady Oracle in Joan that compels her toendlessly construct herself, to create a series of fictional lives for herself, each new creation ultimatelybecoming a new trap, a new replication of her past. "There was always," she remarks, "that shadowy twin,thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative, with dark teeth and shining white pupilsglowing in the black sunlight of that other world."

When Joan publishes her Lady Oracle poems and consequently becomes a cult figure, she achieves therecognition she has always craved. But this only serves to deepen the cracks in her fractured self. Again thenarrative pattern of the thwarted rescue is repeated. Joan's celebrity self, which takes on a deadly energy of itsown, seems alien. "[I]t was as if someone with my name were out there in the real world, impersonating me… doing things for which I had to take the consequences: my dark twin, my fun-house-mirror reflection. Shewas taller than I was, more beautiful, more threatening. She wanted to kill me and take my place…." At longlast Joan acts out her archaic grandiosity only to feel unreal, that she is "hollow, a hoax, a delusion." In a newvariation on her recurrent fat lady fantasy, she expresses her growing recognition of her subjective emptiness.Fantasying the fat lady floating up like a helium balloon, she realizes that the fat lady, despite her large size, is"very light" for she is "hollow." "Why am I doing this?… Who's doing this to me?" Joan asks herself. Unableto "turn off" her "out-of-control fantasies," she is forced to "watch them through to the end." Although we findJoan's apparent lack of control unsettling, we also sense that as a storyteller she is perpetually playing up toher audience, embroidering her preposterous fantasies. "As the teller of a humorous tale," writes SybilVincent, "Joan gains a sense of power. She deliberately manipulates her audience and experiences a sense of

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control lacking in her actual life." Situated as appreciative listeners and suspicious critics, we sense that one ofthe text's errands is to rivet reader attention on Joan and thus, as it were, to gratify hergrandiose-exhibitionistic needs.

When all the convoluted plots of Joan's life converge—her current lover, the Royal Porcupine, wants her tomarry him; Paul, her former lover, traces her and wants her back; a blackmailer hounds her; she imagines thatArthur is the persecutor sending her death threats—she determines to escape her life which has become "asnarl, a rat's nest of dangling threads and loose ends." Accordingly, she fakes her death by drowning and lives,incognito she thinks, in Italy. In a symbolic gesture, she buries her clothes, attempting to shed her pastidentity. But what she can never escape is her inner sense of defectiveness. In one of her more lurid fantasies,she imagines her buried clothes growing a body, which shapes itself into "a creature composed of all the fleshthat used to be mine and which must have gone somewhere." Transforming into a featureless monstrous form,it engulfs her. "It was the Fat Lady. She rose into the air and descended on me…. For a moment she hoveredaround me like ectoplasm, like a gelatin shell, my ghost, my angel; then she settled and I was absorbed intoher. Within my former body, I gasped for air. Disguised, concealed…. Obliterated." When Joan suspects thatMr. Vitroni may be in league with her secret pursuers, she fantasies herself spending the rest of her life "in acage, as a fat whore, a captive Earth Mother for whom somebody else collected the admission tickets." As hernarcissistic anxieties become more and more ungovernable, not only do her Gothic fantasies intrude into herreal life, her real life invades her art: Felicia metamorphoses into the bloated, drowned fat lady and is rejectedby her husband, Redmond-Arthur.

As the narrative progresses and Atwood carries us deeper and deeper into Joan's fun-house, hall-of-mirrorsworld, a kind of infinite regression occurs as fantasy and reality coalesce and we gradually come to therealization that Joan's descriptions of others—those in her life and her art—are autorepresentational. Joan'sfinal and terrifying dream encounter with the "dark vacuum" of her mother forces her to recognize that hermother is her own reflection. "She'd never really let go of me because I had never let her go. It had been shestanding behind me in the mirror, she was the one who was waiting around each turn, her voice whispered thewords…. [S]he had been my reflection too long." In her Gothic novel, Stalked by Love, Joan's stand-in,Felicia, is compulsively drawn into the labyrinth's "central plot." At the psychocenter of the novel, the "centralplot" of the maze depicted in the inset Gothic text provides interpretive clues to the narrative plot of the textwe are reading. For at the maze's center, Joan-Felicia encounters her mirror selves. There she finds theubiquitous fat lady, her defective self; there she also finds an embodiment of her identity as Louisa Delacourt,the middle-aged writer of Gothic novels and her dual red-haired, green-eyed self: Joan, the self-effacing wifeand Joan the powerful poet cult figure. And there behind a closed door which she imagines is her pathway tofreedom, her escape from the trap of self-entanglement, she discovers yet another alter-ego, fictional self,Redmond, who transforms sequentially into the men in her life—her father, Paul, the Royal Porcupine,Arthur—and then into a death's skull. In the specular world of the maze, Joan encounters, recursively, imagesof self. As Redmond reaches out to grab her, she experiences, once again, the smothering, self-fragmentingdominance of her childhood mother who unconsciously sought to obliterate Joan's fledgling self. Twicebefore—first during her Lady Oracle experiments with automatic writing and then in a terrifying nightmare inwhich she seemed about to be sucked into the "vortex" of her mother—Joan approached this world ofsuffocating darkness, the self-annihilating world of the engulfing, destructive mother. Joan's faked drowning,in effect, is stage managed by her dead but potent mother, who remains a menacing presence in Joan's psyche.But Joan's faked death is faked. She is the escape artist who uses deception to appease her lethal, interiorizedmother-self. Her faked suicide is a signifier of her desire to live, to rescue and repair her self.

To the Italian village women, the resurrected Joan becomes an object of fear. Joan imagines that they see heras a kind of science fiction creature, "[a] female monster, larger than life … striding down the hill, her hairstanding on end with electrical force, volts of malevolent energy shooting from her fingers…." The monster ofher own narcissistic ire possesses her like an alien presence. In her anger, she resembles her mother. Nowonder she is bent on escape, on comic diffusion of her deadly rage. In a comic denouement, Joan, fearing

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that her murderous pursuer is at the door, exposes her wrath when she attacks a reporter who has come tointerview her. "I've begun to feel," she comments, "he's the only person who knows anything about me.Maybe because I've never hit anyone else with a bottle, so they never got to see that part of me." As the novelends, Joan determines to stop writing Gothic novels and to turn, instead, to science fiction, a process she hasalready begun in her comic, self-parodic depiction of herself as a science fiction monster.

The victim of repeated maternal denials of her self, Joan, as she repeatedly fabricates her life, constructs aseries of fictional identities which she disposes of at will. Through this symbolic act of self-creation andself-annihilation, she replicates and replaces her mother and becomes the guarantor of her own identity. Thevictim of maternal betrayal and control, Joan becomes a dissembler who secretly betrays and controls others.When Joan describes herself as "essentially devious, with a patina of honesty," readers may suspect that they,too, despite their privileged perspective, are being deceived. Again and again, critics have remarked on this.One critic comments that Joan's "absolute honesty in confessing her lies, tricks, and deceptions becomes, initself, a confidence game which lulls the reader into a misguided trust in Joan's ability to interpret herexperiences"; another insists that readers "have more reason to suspect Joan than to believe her"; and yetanother says that Atwood's novel leaves readers with "the vague suspicion" that they have been "duped." Intheir uneasy feeling that they are being gulled and manipulated, critic/readers repeat Joan's childhood andpersisting experiences of being deceived and controlled by others, by her mother and the men in her life.Depicted as a confessed liar, Joan escapes reader control and stubbornly resists being made into a stable,literary property.

"Most said soonest mended"—this garbled rendering of one of her Aunt Lou's trite sayings provides a centralclue to the impulse behind Joan's autobiographical writing. Admitting, at one point, that she could never saythe word "fat" aloud, Joan describes, in a vivid, comic-angry way, her childhood obesity and her persisting fatlady fantasies. Her self-exposure and self-condemnation repeat her mother's cutting remarks and also act as aform of verbal exorcism. Verbally striking back at the mother who verbally abused her as a child, Joan, as awielder of words, fictively mothers and then obliterates the mother who attempted to annihilate her. In asimilar vein, readers of Lady Oracle are urged to collude in the narrational plot to fictively "kill off" Joan'smother, who is represented in the text, in the words of one critic, "not as a woman, but as a fetish orwitch-doll." Achieving verbal mastery over the men in her life who attempted to master her, Joan secretlyattacks her perceived attackers and becomes a hidden menace to those who menace her. She acts this out inthe novel's final scene when she assaults the reporter. When she consequently gives a bunch of wilted flowersto the hospitalized reporter as she plays nurse to him, she unconsciously signals her identification not onlywith the Mavis Quilp nurse heroines, but also with the daffodil man, an exhibitionist. Her artistry springs, inpart, from her covert exhibitionism and rage, both expressed in her genesis as an artist—her mothballdance—and in her Lady Oracle manifestation.

In Lady Oracle autobiographical creation allows Joan to assert her grandiosity, vent her anger, and express herautonomy. Situated as a witness of Joan's conspiracy against others, the reader revels in her disguises andconcocted plots and laughs at her descriptions of political activism, spiritualism, the publishing establishment,artistic creation, and faddish artists. Again and again Joan confesses her inability to control her overactiveimagination, describing how her fantasies must play themselves out to their appointed ends. Indeed there areundertones of hysteria in her Gothic imaginings—her fears about being pursued in Italy—and in her fat ladyfantasies, which progressively grow more and more ludicrous and elaborate. But just as Joan, as a Gothicstoryteller, adroitly manipulates her audience, so she, as a comic character, compels our attention. At theoutset of the novel, Joan, newly arrived in Italy, imagines all the people she has left behind. She envisionsthem grouped on the seashore talking to each other and ignoring her. But one thing the reader cannot do isignore Joan. Atwood prompts us to give Joan the smiling attention that her mother never gave to her and thatArthur, who is subject to periodic depression—he gives off a "gray aura … like a halo in reverse," as she putsit—gives her less and less frequently.

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"I longed for happy endings," Joan remarks, "I needed the feeling of release when everything turned out rightand I could scatter joy like rice all over my characters and dismiss them into bliss." While some readers ofLady Oracle might share Joan's longing and wish to see a conclusive ending to her story and a final rescue,Atwood frustrates such a desire. "[T]here is no way for the reader to be certain that anything has changed bythe end of Joan's narration," observes one critic. At the end "the reader suspects that there are more Joans tocome," writes another; the reader watches "in helpless recognition," writes yet another, as Joan assumes a newrole at the novel's end. Thwarting our desire for happy endings, for artistic coherence, for neat foreclosures,for final rescues, Atwood creates a plot like her character: one that is entangled and full of loose ends.

Installed as appreciative listeners, collaborators, and accomplices, we revel in Joan's zany exploits, herproliferating mirror encounters and angry-comic rhetoric. Joan's confessions are designed to entertain us, towin our smiling approbation of her thwarted grandiosity. But we are also implicitly led to reflect on our ownneed to escape through and live vicariously in art and to ask ourselves whether we, like Joan the compulsivecreator of plots, are compulsive readers of plots. We are also led to ask ourselves to what extent we readourselves into a fictional text just as Joan writes herself into her art. Coaxed throughout the novel to see theparallels between Joan's fictional and real worlds, we are also urged to consider to what extent we blur factand fantasy as we construct the plots and texts of our own lives.

"I might as well face it," Joan admits in the novel's conclusion, "I was an artist, an escape artist…. [T]he realromance of my life was that between Houdini and his ropes and locked trunk; entering the embrace ofbondage, slithering out again." So, too, she escapes our grasp as she multiplies before our eyes. As therealistic surface of her autobiographical account dissolves into a richly complex and redundant subjectivefantasy, we gain momentary access to the shape-shifting world of the narcissist. Swerving out of our grasp,Joan lures us into a strange world in and beyond the looking glass: the multiple, mirrored, decertainized worldof the narcissistic character.

Criticism: Margaret Atwood with Earl G. Ingersoll (interviewdate Spring-Summer 1990)

SOURCE: "Waltzing Again: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood," in Margaret Atwood: Conversations,Ontario Review Press, 1990, pp. 234-38.

[In the following interview, Atwood discusses her relationship to her readers and critics of her works as wellas the themes of Cat's Eye.]

[Ingersoll]: Since as you know I've been working on a collection of your interviews, could we begin by talkingabout interviews? You have been interviewed very frequently. How do you feel about being interviewed?

[Atwood]: I don't mind "being interviewed" any more than I mind Viennese waltzing—that is, my responsewill depend on the agility and grace and attitude and intelligence of the other person. Some do it well, someclumsily, some step on your toes by accident, and some aim for them. I've had interviews that were pleasantand stimulating experiences for me, and I've had others that were hell. And of course you do get tired of beingmisquoted, quoted out of context, and misunderstood. You yourself may be striving for accuracy (which isalways complicated), whereas journalists are striving mainly for hot copy, the more one-dimensional thebetter. Not all of them of course, but enough.

I think the "Get the Guest" or "David and Goliath" interview tends to become less likely as you age; theinterviewer less frequently expects you to prove you're a real writer, or a real woman, or any of the otherthings they expect you to prove. And you run into a generation of interviewers who studied you in high schooland want to help you hobble across the street, rather than wishing to smack you down for being a

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presumptuous young upstart.

Let's not pretend however that an interview will necessarily result in any absolute and blinding revelations.Interviews too are an art form; that is to say, they indulge in the science of illusion.

You've said that when you began writing you imagined you'd have to starve in an attic without an audiencesufficiently large to support your writing. Is there a Margaret Atwood who would have preferred the obscurityof a Herman Melville to whom you refer so frequently, or do you draw upon your readers' responses to yourwork? How much do you feel involved in a kind of dialogue with your readers?

The alternative, for me, to selling enough books or writing enough scripts and travel articles to keep meindependent and to buy my time as a writer would be teaching in a university, or some other job. I've donethat, and I've been poor, and I prefer things the way they are. For instance, this way I can say what I want to,because nobody can fire me. Not very many people in our society have that privilege.

I did not expect a large readership when I began writing, but that doesn't mean I'm not pleased to have one. Itdoesn't mean either that I write for a "mass audience." It means I'm one of the few literary writers who getlucky in their lifetimes.

My readers' responses to my work interest me, but I don't "draw upon" them. The response comes after thebook is published; by the time I get responses, I'm thinking about something new. Dialogue with the readers?Not exactly. Dickens could have a dialogue with his readers that affected the books when he was publishinghis novels in serial form, but we've lost that possibility. Though it does of course cheer me when someonelikes, appreciates, or shows me that he or she has read my books intelligently.

Are you worried by self-consciousness as you write? Or is it an asset?

Self-consciousness? Do you mean consciousness of my self? That's what you have to give up whenwriting—in exchange for consciousness of the work. That's why most of what writers say about how theywrite—the process—is either imperfect memory or fabrication. If you're paying proper attention to whatyou're doing, you are so absorbed in it that you shouldn't be able to tell anyone afterwards exactly how youdid it. In sports they have instant replay. We don't have that for writers.

The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle and now Cat's Eye seem in large part jeux d'esprit. You give your readersthe impression that you are having a good time writing—it's hard work, but also good fun. How important is"play" to you in writing? Do you have a sense of how much the reader will enjoy what you write, as you'rewriting it?

I don't think Cat's Eye is a jeu d'esprit. (Oxford Shorter: "a witty or humorous trifle.") In fact, I don't think myother "comic" novels are jeux d'esprit, either. I suspect that sort of definition is something people fall back onbecause they can't take women's concerns or life patterns at all seriously; so they see the wit in those books,and that's all they see. Writing is play in the same way that playing the piano is "play," or putting on atheatrical "play" is play. Just because something's fun doesn't mean it isn't serious. For instance, some get akick out of war. Others enjoy falling in love. Yet others get a bang out of a really good funeral. Does thatmean war, love, and death are trifles?

Cat's Eye strikes me as unusual in one especially dramatic way: it builds upon the most detailed andperceptive exploration of young girlhood that I can recall having read. Once we've read that section of thenovel, we readers might think, we've had fiction which explores this stage of young boyhood, but why haven'twriters, even writers who are women, dealt with this stage of a woman's development before? How did youget interested in this area of girlhood, from roughly eight to twelve?

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I think the answer to this one is fairly simple: writers haven't dealt with girls age eight to twelve because thisarea of life was not regarded as serious "literary" material. You do get girls this age in juvenile fiction—allthose English boarding-school books. And there have been some—I'm thinking of Frost in May. But it's partof that "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, / 'Tis woman's whole existence" tendency—that is, thetendency to think that the only relationships of importance to women are their dealings with men (parents,boyfriends, husbands, God) or babies. What could be of importance in what young girls do with and to oneanother? Well, lots, it seems, judging from the mail…. I guess that's where "dialogue with the readers" comesin. Cordelia really got around, and she had a profound influence on how the little girls who got run over byher were able to respond to other women when they grew up.

I sometimes get interested in stories because I notice a sort of blank—why hasn't anyone written about this?Can it be written about? Do I dare to write it? Cat's Eye was risky business, in a way—wouldn't I be trashedfor writing about little girls, how trivial? Or wouldn't I be trashed for saying they weren't all sugar and spice?

Or I might think about a story form, and see how it could be approached from a different angle—Cinderellafrom the point of view of the ugly sister, for instance. But also I wanted a literary home for all those vanishedthings from my own childhood—the marbles, the Eaton's catalogues, the Watchbird Watching You, thesmells, sounds, colors. The textures. Part of fiction writing I think is a celebration of the physical world weknow—and when you're writing about the past, it's a physical world that's vanished. So the impulse is partlyelegiac. And partly it's an attempt to stop or bring back time.

The reviewer in Time said that "Elaine's emotional life is effectively over at puberty." Does that seemaccurate to you now as a reader of your own work?

That ain't the book I wrote, and it ain't the one I read when I go back to it; as I'm doing now, since I'm writingthe screenplay. I don't think Elaine's emotional life is over at puberty any more than any of our lives are overthen. Childhood is very intense, because children can't imagine a future. They can't imagine pain being over.Which is why children are nearer to the absolute states of Heaven and Hell than adults are. Purgatory seems tome a more adult concept.

There are loose ends left from Elaine's life at that time, especially her unresolved relationship with Cordelia.These things have been baggage for her for a long time. But that's quite different from saying she stoppeddead at twelve.

At the end of Cat's Eye Elaine has lost both her parents and her brother, and said goodby finally to her ex-and to Cordelia. She has a husband and daughters she loves, but she seems very alone. What do you make ofher aloneness now as a reader of your own novel?

Writers can never really read their own books, just as film directors can never really see their own movies—ornot in the way that a fresh viewer can. Because THEY KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

Elaine "seems" alone at the end of the book because she's on an airplane. Also: because the story has beenabout a certain part of her life, and that part—that story—has reached a conclusion. She will of course land,get out of the plane, and carry on with the next part of her life, i.e. her ongoing time-line with some othercharacters about whom we have not been told very much, because the story was not about them.

Why do authors kill off certain characters? Usually for aesthetic, that is, structural reasons. If Elaine's parentsetc. had still been around, we would have to have scenes with them, and that wasn't appropriate for thisparticular story. Cat's Eye is partly about being haunted. Why did Dickens kill off Little Nell? Because he wasmaking a statement about the nature of humanity or the cruelty of fate? I don't think so. He just had to polishher off because that was where the story was going.

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Related to that question, a reviewer in New Statesman has written: "The novel is extremely bleak abouthumanity…. Through most of the novel you feel distance, dissection: a cat's eye. It ends on a note of gaiety,forgiveness and hope: but I don't believe it." When you were writing the novel did you have the sense ofpainting a "bleak" picture of "humanity"?

One reason I don't like interviews, when I don't like them, is that people tend to come up with these weirdquotes from reviewers, assume the quote is true, and then ask you why you did it that way. There are a lot of"when did you stop beating your wife" questions in interviews.

For instance, what is this "gaiety, forgiveness and hope" stuff? I'm thinking of doing a calendar in which eachday would contain a quote by a reviewer of which the next day's quote would be a total contradiction byanother reviewer. I'll buy the forgiveness, sort of; but gaiety? Eh? Where? The jolly old women on the planeare something she doesn't have. You find yourself looking under the sofa for some other book by the samename that might have strayed into the reviewer's hands by mistake. Or maybe they got one with some of thepages left out.

Nor, judging from the mail I received, did readers "feel distance, dissection." Total identification is more likeit. Maybe the readers were identifying with the character's attempt to achieve distance, etc. She certainlyattempts it, but she doesn't get it. As for "bleak," that's a word that tends to be used by people who've neverbeen outside Western Europe or North America, and the middle class in either location. They think bleak isnot having a two-car garage. If they think I'm bleak, they have no idea of what real bleak is like. TryKierkegaard. Try Tadeusz Konwicki. Try Russell Banks, for that matter.

Or maybe … yes, maybe … I'm bleak for a woman. Is that the key? Are we getting somewhere now?

Criticism: David Lucking (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: "In Pursuit of the Faceless Stranger: Depths and Surfaces in Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm," inStudies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1990, pp. 76-93.

[In the following essay, Lucking discusses the motifs of depth and surface in relation to Atwood's "thematicconcern with the quest for authentic selfhood" in Bodily Harm.]

Margaret Atwood's recurrent use of the descent motif to dramatize her thematic concern with the quest forauthentic selfhood makes her work a tempting target for explication in terms of the initiatory archetype as thishas been analyzed by such writers as C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell. This aspect of herwriting has come in for considerable attention on the part of critics who, like the novelist herself, experiencedthe impact of Northrop Frye's theories concerning the relationship between myth and literature in the latefifties and sixties. At the same time, the irony implicit in Atwood's repeated use of what has been described asa "basic romance structure" involving a "symbolic journey to an underground prison" has also not escapednotice, and critics such as Frank Davey put us on our guard against the tendency to "mistake novels whichdeconstruct archetypes for novels which confirm them." There can be no doubt that there is a complexinterplay, amounting at points almost to a formal dialectical tension, between the underlying structure of thisauthor's works and the direction of moral implication in which those same works tend. Whereas the classicromance scenario concludes with the triumphant return to his community of a hero newly possessed oflife-giving powers or knowledge, in Atwood's work the question of whether anything positive is ultimately tobe gained from her protagonist's revelatory flight from a destructive civilization never receives an unequivocalanswer. In The Edible Woman, Surfacing and Lady Oracle we are not informed whether or on what terms theprotagonists will rejoin the social order from which they have severed themselves, while in The Handmaid'sTale doubts are raised as to whether the fugitive is destined to survive at all. Though it may well be subjected

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to ironic qualification or inversion or "deconstruction" in the very course of its fictional embodiment,however, the fact remains that the initiatory archetype is present in Atwood's works, and that no criticaldiscussion of these novels can afford to ignore a pattern whose validity in the contemporary context the authorherself is so obviously concerned to examine.

A work in the Atwood canon that illustrates with particular clarity the ambivalence attaching to the initiatoryjourney is Bodily Harm (1981), the thematic and metaphorical structure of which hinges on a paradoxical"rebirth" into the knowledge of death and of the things that death can symbolize. The plot of the novel is notcomplicated in itself, although some effort must be expended in order to reconstruct the precise chronology ofevents from the intricately wrought analeptic structure of the work. The protagonist Rennie (Renata) Wilfordis a journalist, living in Toronto with an advertising designer named Jake. She is diagnosed as having cancerand undergoes a partial mastectomy which is clinically successful, although she continues to be haunted bythe fear of recurrence. She falls in love with Daniel, her physician, but although he partially reciprocates herfeelings the affair is more a source of frustration than of fulfillment, and in the meantime the relationship withJake comes to an end. Shortly afterwards Rennie learns that somebody has broken into her home in herabsence and before being frightened away by the police has been waiting for her "as if he was an intimate."The intruder has left a length of rope coiled on the bed, and the police warn Rennie that he will probablyreturn. This sinister incident prompts Rennie's decision to travel to the Caribbean and write a piece about theisland of St. Antoine. Among the people she encounters here and on the neighbouring island of Ste. Agatheare Paul, an American involved in contraband activities, and his former mistress Lora, who exploits Rennie tosmuggle weapons into the country on Paul's behalf. Despite herself, Rennie becomes embroiled in the turmoilof a local election, a political assassination and an aborted uprising, and together with Lora is arrested andconfined to a subterranean cell in an old fort. Here she is forced to witness various scenes of brutality,culminating in the sadistic beating of Lora by their prison guards. The novel ends with the anticipation ofRennie's release through the intervention of Canadian diplomatic authorities, although there is someuncertainty as to whether this will in fact take place or is only a hopeful fantasy on her part.

Atwood has been accused, not without an element of justice, of sacrificing characterization to thematicrepresentation, of making her personages the vehicles of ideas or attitudes that she is intent on exploring ratherthan endowing them with an autonomous fictional life of their own. The character of Rennie Wilford, too, likethat of her predecessors in Atwood's fiction, is somewhat excessively determined by the function she performsin articulating the novel's structure of ideas, and there is much in her portrayal which tends toward the merelyschematic. Her personality is not so much dramatized as it is defined for us, with the consequence that shereads on occasion like a textbook on alienation. She is described as being almost neurotically disengaged,striving even in her dress for "neutrality" and "invisibility," deliberately living at the level of "surfaces" and"appearances." She "couldn't stand the idea of anyone doing her a favour," thinks of sex as no more than "apleasant form of exercise," fears love because it "made you visible, soft, penetrable [and] ludicrous," looksupon herself as "off to the side. She preferred it there." As a journalist she has abandoned social and politicalissues in favour of what she terms "lifestyles," the ephemeral mores of the society she lives in and to a largedegree is evidently meant to reflect. Of the celebrities monopolizing the cultural limelight she decides that"she would much rather be the one who wrote things about people like this than be the one they got writtenabout." Rennie's studiously cultivated detachment, her calculated nonparticipation in life, is summed up in thelugubrious pun with which she greets the news that drastic cancer operations are performed only in the case ofwhat Daniel describes as "massive involvement." "Massive involvement," says Rennie: "It's never been mything."

It is arguable of course that the self-consciousness with which Rennie formulates her own attitude towards lifeis in itself symptomatic of her estrangement, and that these explicit comments are therefore meant to beobliquely rather than directly revealing. Whether this is indeed the case or not, Atwood does not limit herselfto exhibiting Rennie's character exclusively through the filter of her own self-conception, and many readerswill doubtless prefer the alternative strategies that the author brings to bear. When we learn for instance that

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Rennie has written an article about picking up men in laundromats, although "she never actually picked menup in laundromats, she just went through the preliminaries and then explained that she was doing research,"the irony involved is of a different order from that with which Rennie perceives her own situation. A similarirony informs the scene in which Paul initiates a conversation with her at her hotel on St. Antoine, and shedecides that his overture "does not have the flavour of a pickup. File it under attempt at human contact." Atone point in the hotel restaurant she catches herself compulsively churning out deftly turned phrasesconcerning the cuisine, and impatiently "wishes she could stop reviewing the food and just eat it." Thetechniques of thematic exposition and symbolic commentary mesh imperfectly when Rennie takes anexcursion on a boat with an observation window set in the bottom, and, although she "looks, which is herfunction," she manages to see very little because of the murkiness of the marine floor. The strikingly effectiveimage of the observation window, which relates (through Dr. Minnow, whose political sobriquet is "Fish") toRennie's incapacity to fathom local politics, as well as to the dream in which she surveys her own body "underglass," is somewhat spoiled by the intrusive definition of her function.

The epigraph to Bodily Harm is taken from John Berger's Ways of Seeing, a work which is centrallyconcerned with the social and ideological determinants of perception. It is perfectly apparent that Rennie,though she affects a spectator attitude towards life which is emphasized still further when she assumes the roleof tourist, is anxious more than anything else to cultivate ways of not seeing. Atwood elaborates a dense buthighly subtle pattern of imagery to characterize Rennie's tendency to experience the world not at first hand butas filtered through the clichés of a media-ridden civilization. She habitually thinks in terms of films, orphotographs, or pictures, or the various other civilized stratagems by which events are framed and neutralizedand rendered innocuous. She persists in writing about St. Antoine in tourist brochure terms while an uprisingis brewing all around her, and carries a camera slung over her shoulder even while she is transporting anillegal machine gun from one island to another. Dr. Minnow, a native of Ste. Agathe who, after a period oftraining abroad, chose to return to his birthplace and involve himself in local politics, urges her to modify herperspective. "All I ask you to do is look," he tells her: "We will call you an observer…. Look with your eyesopen and you will see the truth of the matter." That this is no elementary undertaking becomes apparent toRennie when she is compelled at the end to witness the raw spectacle of human viciousness, and she "doesn'twant to see, she has to see, why isn't someone covering her eyes?"

As the allusion to Berger's work perhaps suggests, Rennie's addiction to the world of surfaces and appearancesis not meant to be viewed as a purely individual phenomenon, but rather as characteristic of the culture towhich she belongs. At the same time, however, Atwood does furnish a psychological explanation for Rennie'sattitude, relating it to specific incidents in her personal past which are recalled through flashback. Much ofRennie's attitude to life is the direct legacy of her upbringing in a small Ontario town with the gloomilysuggestive name of Griswold, which she thinks of as a "subground … full of gritty old rocks and buriedstumps, worms and bones"—the reverse of a surface. In her adult life she "tries to avoid thinking aboutGriswold," which is reduced to being "merely something she defines herself against." "Those who'd latelybeen clamouring for roots had never seen a root up close" is her characteristically ironic comment on herbackground, the obvious implication being that she is consciously detaching herself as completely as possiblefrom her own roots. To some degree this would seem to represent a purely personal reaction against aclaustrophobic environment, a determination not to assume potentially encumbering responsibilities orcommitments:

All I could think of at the time was how to get away from Griswold. I didn't want to betrapped … I didn't want to have a family or be anyone's mother, ever; I had none of thoseambitions. I didn't want to own any objects or inherit any.

But the spiritual climate of Griswold itself, with its vacant formalisms and grim pieties, seems more than anypersonal failure of adaptation to have been responsible for this almost pathological detachment. "As a child,"recalls Rennie, "I learned three things well: how to be quiet, what not to say, and how to look at things

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without touching them." One of Rennie's earliest recollections is of her grandmother in Griswold, "prying myhands away finger by finger" in punishment for some unremembered transgression, after which the girl wasconfined in a cellar which is a "depth" par excellence, and which foreshadows the cell in which her older selfwill be incarcerated on St. Antoine.

This emblematic episode of the severing of hand contact assumes its place in an elaborate pattern of imagesconstructed around hands and what hands represent both as vehicles of human contact and as instruments ofmanipulation and domination. Rennie's grandmother, who had attempted to eradicate in the girl any impulsetowards tactile participation in her environment, succumbs finally to the senile delusion that she has lost herown hands. She insists to Rennie that the hands on the ends of her arms "are no good any more," and wants"my other hands, the ones I had before, the ones I touch things with." Only at the conclusion of the novel dowe learn what Rennie's actual response to her grandmother's delusion has been. "Rennie cannot bear to betouched by those groping hands…. She puts her own hands behind her and backs away," while it is her motherwho saves the situation by "tak[ing] hold of the grandmother's dangling hands, clasping them in her own."Rennie is evidently afflicted by subconscious guilt at having duplicated her grandmother's cold gesture ofrejection. This latent sense of guilt, the obscure recognition of her own failure, manifests itself in her dreamthat her dead grandmother is appearing to her, extending an impossibly remote promise of salvation:

Rennie puts out her hands but she can't touch her grandmother, her hands go right in, through,it's like touching water or new snow. Her grandmother smiles at her, the humming-birds arearound her head, lighting on her hands. Life everlasting, she says.

When Rennie wakes from this dream, or thinks she does, she is convinced as her grandmother was yearsbefore that "there's something she has to find…. It's her hands she's looking for," and a few days later shedreams that "her hands are cold, she lifts them up to look at them, but they elude her. Something's missing." Itis clear that Jake's remark to Rennie that "you're cutting yourself off" has a punning significance that extendswell beyond her relationship with him.

The event that precipitates the gradual awakening to her own symbolic handlessness which such dreams asthese reflect is Rennie's discovery that she has cancer. The disease begins to restore in the most brutal waypossible the severed contact between "surface" and "depths," between the individual and her "roots," betweenRennie and the body in which she has up to then merely been a tenant. The first stage of this process is therecognition that those elements in her which have been rejected or repressed or simply ignored are in factinseparable from the self they are now menacing with extinction:

The body, sinister twin, taking its revenge for whatever crimes the mind was supposed tohave committed on it…. She'd given her body swimming twice a week, forbidden it junk foodand cigarette smoke, allowed it a normal amount of sexual release. She'd trusted it. Why thenhad it turned against her?

Rennie has been treating her body as a machine to be kept in good repair, as something subordinate to whatshe considers to be her real self, and has accordingly tended to regard illnesses such as cancer as no more thanthe outward manifestations of some mental disability. Daniel tells her that while "the mind isn't separate fromthe body," neither can the body and its ailments be regarded merely as a function of the mind. Cancer, hereminds her, "isn't a symbol, it's a disease." After the operation that makes this only too vivid to her, her literal"opening up" at Daniel's hands, Rennie finds it increasingly difficult to live at the same level as before, and, asshe anxiously probes her body for symptoms of recurrence, she reflects that "from the surface you can feelnothing, but she no longer trusts surfaces."

Rennie's evolving view as to the relative importance of surfaces and depths reveals itself among other thingsin her relation with two men who represent real or potential aspects of herself: her companion Jake and her

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physician Daniel. Jake, an adept in the field of advertising, inhabits the plane of disembodied appearancesalone, manipulating images which bear no relation to the world of substance. "He was a packager" byprofession, and Rennie eventually discovers that "she was one of the things Jake was packaging." Prior to herillness, Rennie has resembled Jake in evaluating attitudes and beliefs not according to their intrinsic validityor sincerity but in terms of whether they are fashionable or not, while one of her own favourite games hasbeen "redoing" people, imagining how they would look if they were differently attired or otherwise altered.

In her way, she has also been a "packager," exploiting the media in order to manipulate tastes and inspirefashion trends of almost awesome triviality. The casual, non-binding relationship she has formed with Jake, acontract of mutual gratification, cannot survive the revelation of depths that Rennie's illness both entails andsymbolizes: afterwards "she didn't want him to touch her and she didn't know why, and he didn't really wantto touch her either but he wouldn't admit it." On the one hand Rennie's surface is too marred after heroperation to lend itself any longer as a convenient screen on which Jake can project his fantasies, while on theother the deeper implications of these same fantasies become increasingly obvious to Rennie herself.

Daniel, by contrast, lives and works at the level of depths rather than surfaces. Rennie attributes thesentiments he arouses in her to the fact that "he knows something about her she doesn't know, he knows whatshe's like inside." She supposes that he must exert a similar fascination on all of his patients, for "he's the onlyman in the world who knows the truth, he's looked into each one of us and seen death." At the same time,unlike Jake and Rennie herself, he is virtually unconscious of himself, indifferent to his own surface or publicimage: "he didn't seem to think of himself much in any way at all. This was the difference between Daniel andthe people she knew." When Daniel asks her how she would "redo" him her reply is formulated in terms of thehand imagery that is employed throughout the novel as a kind of symbolic notation: "'If I could get my handson you?' said Rennie. 'I wouldn't, you're perfect the way you are.'" In making this disclaimer she is not beingaltogether sincere, for she does in her way try to "redo" him by manoeuvering him into an affair which iscontrary to his principles, an effort that might be a displaced manifestation of her compulsion to control theknowledge of disease and death that he has gained by "looking into" her. She is unsuccessful in thisendeavour, however, and her incapacity to relate to Daniel on his own terms indicates her continuing failure tocome to grips with the depths at which he both literally and figuratively operates.

At this point Rennie is still suspended between the dimensions of surface and depths, dislodged from the onebut not yet able to immerse herself in the other. She thinks of her position with respect to these dimensions interms of the impossibility of contact with the two men who represent them—"One man I'm not allowed totouch … and another I won't allow to touch me"—but it is clear that this incapacity to relate to people in theexternal world reflects a profound schism within herself. It is above all with her own forgotten self, her"sinister twin," that Rennie must establish contact, as she herself intuits during a dream she has of herselfundergoing a surgical operation: "she can see everything, clear and sharp, under glass, her body is down thereon the table … she wants to rejoin her body but she can't get down." It is thus symbolically appropriate thatthe actual operation through which Daniel saves Rennie's life and at the same time initiates the process bywhich she awakens to an understanding of her own real nature should be described in terms of a rebirth. Whenshe recovers from the anaesthetic after her operation her hand is being held by Daniel, who is "telling her thathe had saved her life … and now he was dragging her back into it, this life that he had saved. By the hand."Later Daniel says of her operation that "it was almost like being given a second life," and Rennie thinks ofhim that "he knows we've been resurrected."

Although the symbolic significance of the name Renata is reinforced by these images of resurrection fromsome figurative death, the future projection implied by the name Wilford suggests quite clearly that rebirth isonly the first stage in a long journey. For a descent into the "depths" that underlie surfaces cannot cease withthe simple acknowledgement that one has a vulnerable and in the end "provisional" body, however importanta phase in the process of self-discovery this may be. Shortly before her operation Rennie has been conductingresearch into the pornographic exploitation of sexual violence, and she been so repelled by the momentary

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glimpse she has caught into the dark abyss of human depravity that she has abandoned the project, decidingthat "there were some things it was better not to know any more about than you had to. Surfaces, in manycases, were preferable to depths." Once having been evicted from the world of surfaces by the consciousnessof her own susceptibility to the diseases of the flesh, however, Rennie is obliged to pursue her exploration ofthe depths still further, learning in the end that the "malignancy" she has encountered in the form of her illnessis in fact an attribute of the world at large.

From the symbolic point of view, the discovery that a stranger has been occupying her home while she isaway is an external correlative of Rennie's anguished discovery that a tumour has lodged itself within herbody. The police warn Rennie that the stranger will return ("That kind always comes back"), just as she fearsa recurrence of her illness. The incident therefore objectifies her growing awareness of the destructive forceslurking just below the familiar surface of life, while the rope the intruder leaves with evidently vicious intentbetokens a connection which must be established, however undesired it may be. Perhaps significantly, ropesare several times associated with hands and arms in this novel. On St. Antoine Rennie is assisted into a boatby a man who "reaches out a long ropy arm, a hand like a clamp, to help her up," while another boat is laterdescribed as having "looped ropes thick as a wrist." Ropes, like hands, can serve as symbols of mediation, andthe intruder who breaks into Rennie's Toronto apartment thus assumes the bizarre function of emissary:

He was an ambassador, from some place she didn't want to know any more about. The pieceof rope … was … a message; it was someone's twisted idea of love…. And when you pulledon the rope, which after all reached down into darkness, what would come up? What was atthe end, the end? A hand, then an arm, a shoulder, and finally a face. At the end of the ropethere was someone. Everyone had a face, there was no such thing as a faceless stranger.

After this invasion Rennie can no longer maintain her pose of cool detachment from the world: "She feltimplicated, even though she had done nothing and nothing had been done to her." The sense of dissociationfrom herself which has already been growing in her in consequence of her illness, which expresses itselfamong other things in the dream in which she witnesses an operation being performed on her own body, isaggravated still further, to the point that she begins to "see herself from the outside, as if she was a movingtarget in someone else's binoculars."

Rennie's initial reaction to this intrusion and to her consequent sense of having been implicated despite herself(the "massive involvement" which refers both to cancer and to an attitude of mind) is one of refusal and flight,a reversion to the strategy of avoidance which has already prompted her repudiation of Griswold and all itrepresents. Her decision to travel to St. Antoine is explained in terms of a search for anonymity: "She is away,she is out, which is what she wanted…. In a way she's invisible. In a way she's safe." After witnessing theexaggerated terror with which she recoils from an innocent attempt at personal contact on the island, Paul tellsher that she is suffering from what he terms "alien reaction paranoia," that "because you don't know what'sdangerous and what isn't, everything seems dangerous." But her effort to avoid danger by attaining to apersonal limbo of perfect neutrality is destined to failure. Not only do the destructive forces she fears resideno less within herself than in the external world, but her desire to insulate herself from that world runs counterto an even more powerful impulse operating within her, the instinctive craving for physical and emotionalcontact which is gradually leading her back towards her own forgotten humanity.

Once again it is the imagery of hands that functions as an index of her developing attitude. When she has beenwith Daniel, Rennie has yearned for "the touch of the hand that could transform you, change everything,magic." Passionately dedicated to helping other people, Daniel is virtually identified with the hands thatRennie comes to realize she herself has lost: "all she could imagine were his hands … his soul was in hishands." The morning after her arrival on St. Antoine Rennie wonders whether she, like other cancer victims,will resort to faith healing, "the laying on of hands by those who say they can see vibrations flowing out oftheir fingers in the form of a holy red light." Shortly afterwards she finds herself being pursued by a deaf and

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dumb man, whose inexplicable attentions strike her as being "too much like the kind of bad dream she wishesshe could stop having." It is only when Paul explains that the man simply wants to shake hands with her in theconviction that the gesture will bring her good luck that Rennie realizes that "he's only been trying to give hersomething." Some time later Rennie witnesses an old woman on Ste. Agathe applying her healing powers to atourist, and she too "wants to know what it feels like, she wants to put herself into the care of those magichands." Immediately afterwards she quite literally puts herself into Paul's hands—he "reaches down for her.She takes hold of his hands; she doesn't know where they're going"—and after she and Paul have becomelovers, finds her hands being taken by a group of native girls.

It is Paul who serves as the agency whereby Rennie is at last restored to her own body. At first she is afraidthat the scar left by her operation will repel him as it has Jake, but these fears are dispelled when she perceiveshis actual reaction, and understands that "he's seen people a lot deader than her." The lovemaking scene thatfollows implicates Rennie's final coming to terms not only with her physical self, but also with the certainconsciousness of her own inevitable decline and death:

He reaches out his hands and Rennie can't remember ever having been touched before.Nobody lives forever, who said you could? This much will have to do, this much is enough.She's open now, she's been opened, she's being drawn back down, she enters her body againand there's a moment of pain, incarnation, this may be only the body's desperation, a flareup,a last clutch at the world before the long slide into final illness and death; but meanwhile she'ssolid after all, she's still here on the earth, she's grateful, he's touching her, she can still betouched.

This quasi-mystical moment of "incarnation" represents the bridging of the gap between mind and body thatRennie has recognized in the dream in which she perceives her own body "under glass." Having discoveredthat contact with the world is still possible, that she can after all be touched, Rennie herself is enabled in herturn to "lay on hands." She begins with Paul himself: "She owes him something: he was the one who gave herback her body; wasn't he?… Rennie puts her hands on him. It can be, after all, a sort of comfort. A kindness."

But the process of enlightenment in which she is engaged does not reach its termination even here. Renniemay have become reconciled to the perpetual threat of physical malignancy within herself, but she has yet toconfront a still more terrifying form of malignancy in the world about her, a spiritual cancer menacing hervery conception of what it is to be human in the first place. This is the capacity for cruelty which she brieflyglimpsed in Toronto, while researching her article on pornography, and which so profoundly disturbed her onthat occasion that she refused to pursue her investigations any further. Once again the process of discoveryexpresses itself symbolically as a journey of descent, assuming the form this time of Rennie's physicalincarceration in a subterranean cell on the Kafkaesque charge of "suspicion." When she first visits FortIndustry in the company of Dr. Minnow, the underground corridor he shows her is "too much like a cellar forRennie." It recalls the cellar to which she was confined by her grandmother for real or imaginedmisdemeanours, a punishment which as we have seen is both psychologically and symbolically linked withher preference for surfaces over depths. "When I was shut in the cellar I always sat on the top stair," Rennierecalls in connection with the ordeals to which she was subjected as a child. Here she is afforded no suchoption.

Rennie shares her cell with Lora, a woman she regards as different from herself in every respect. Lora isdeeply immersed in the life of the island, not excluding its criminal aspects, and displays nothing of Rennie'sown fastidious detachment; when the old native healer on Ste. Agathe is wounded, for instance, it is Lora whowashes the blood from her face, whereas Rennie herself feels squeamish at the sight of blood and wants onlyto be let "off the hook." Thrust into each other's company, the two women pass the time by recounting theirpersonal experiences; much of the novel, indeed, as the reader only now learns, has in fact consisted in thesenarrations. Listening to her companion, Rennie is chagrined to discover that "Lora has better stories" than

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herself, that she has undergone experiences whose lurid authenticity contrasts vividly with thepseudo-existence that Rennie has been living. Lora, it turns out, has actually been raised in cellars of one kindand another, and she is therefore conversant with the depths that Rennie has always shunned. She has pickedup certain tricks for survival in the course of her adventures, and Rennie is disgusted to learn that she isprostituting herself in order to secure minor concessions from the prison guards. Although she realizes quicklyenough that she is hardly in a position to pass judgement on Lora, she is still unable to overcome herrepugnance. "She looks down at her hands, which ought to contain comfort. Compassion. She ought to goover to Lora and put her arms around her and pat her on the back, but she can't."

Rennie's attitude begins to undergo a transformation once she understands where the rope that has been left inher apartment in Toronto in fact leads. The rope has been rather smugly exhibited to her by two policeofficers, ostensibly the personifications of civilized order, who while waiting for her return have ensconcedthemselves in her kitchen like the faceless stranger himself. One of these men asks questions concerningRennie's personal life and habits that are not altogether innocent of malice, and may indeed betray a supressedvoyeuristic streak. Rennie encounters subsequent pairs of policemen, none of whom inspire much confidence,at the air terminal on St. Antoine, at a bar, in the street outside her hotel, and in her own hotel room when sheis arrested on the charge of "suspicion." After the uprising on Ste. Agathe has been quelled, the local policehave rounded up the insurgents and "tied the men up with ropes." Some time later a number of these prisonersare tortured by their police guards in a courtyard dominated by a scaffold, a structure which, dating back tothe British occupation of the island, recalls the use civilization makes of ropes as instruments of socialregimentation. One prisoner, who turns out to be the deaf and dumb man met earlier, is treated with particularferocity: "The man falls forward, he's kept from hitting the pavement by the ropes that link him to the othermen." As she witnesses this orgy of gratuitous cruelty Rennie is overwhelmed by a dark revelation ofuniversal complicity in evil:

She's seen the man with the rope, now she knows what he looks like. She has been turnedinside out, there's no longer a here and a there. Rennie understands for the first time that thisis not necessarily a place she will get out of, ever. She is not exempt. Nobody is exempt fromanything.

After this climactic vision, which subverts the categories of inside and outside, of here and there, by whichshe has hitherto sought to confer moral immunity on herself, Rennie can no longer deny her own involvementin anything. Depths have become surfaces. The diagrammatic simplicity of the victor/victim dichotomy isundermined by the consciousness that the roles can be reversed without in the least affecting the essentialstructure of relationships. As Paul, in some ways Rennie's mentor in her journey towards enlightenment, hasearlier remarked, "there's only people with power and people without power. Sometimes they change places,that's all."

But although this obliteration of the tidy distinctions upon which her existence has been founded leavesRennie feeling fatally implicated in everything she sees, it also has its positive aspect. When, shortly after thetorture episode, Lora too is savagely beaten by the prison guards, Rennie finally finds it within herself toacknowledge her essential kinship with her companion and embody that recognition in a concrete act. At firstLora's mangled face seems to be "the face of a stranger"—the mask of the "faceless stranger" that Rennie hasbeen fleeing from throughout the novel—but then she realizes that "it's the face of Lora after all, there's nosuch thing as a faceless stranger, every face is someone's, it has a name." She uses her own saliva to wash theblood off Lora's face, as Lora herself has earlier washed the blood from the face of the old healer. After this,

She's holding Lora's left hand, between both of her own, perfectly still, nothing is moving,and yet she knows she is pulling on the hand, as hard as she can, there's an invisible hole inthe air. Lora is on the other side of it and she has to pull her through, she's gritting her teethwith the effort … this is a gift, this is the hardest thing she's ever done.

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She holds the hand, perfectly still, with all her strength. Surely, if she can only try hardenough, something will move and live again, something will get born.

Rennie is thus duplicating in her own way the act that Daniel performed for her sake some time before, layingon hands in order to bring another human being back to life. By so doing she rediscovers the hands sheforfeited in her youth, "feel[ing] the shape of a hand in hers … there but not there…. It will always be therenow." The consequence of this crucial act of midwifery would seem to be that "something" is indeed "born,"if not Lora herself then the new "subversive" reporter Rennie, who is capable for the first time in her life ofseeing things not as society pretends they are but as they are in reality. "What she sees has not altered; onlythe way she sees it. It's all exactly the same. Nothing is the same." What remains uncertain is whether this"rebirth" is a purely private, existential event only, or one that might bring some benefit to the rest ofmankind.

A number of critics have debated the question of whether Rennie is actually released from prison or not, aswell as that of whether Lora is literally restored to life through Rennie's ministrations. Atwood's convolutednarrative design seems expressly calculated to generate doubts as to the "reality" of the final episodes, and asCarrington points out the "paradoxical statements" with which the novel concludes "suggest that these scenesof rescue and return represent only a fantasy ascent from the dark underground of the dungeon." Withoutwishing to go too deeply into this question, I would suggest that Atwood, in shifting to the future tense todescribe Rennie's release, intends to introduce an element of formal ambiguity which is essential to hermeaning. For the clear implication of the work is that Rennie, whether she is physically liberated from theprison or not, can never escape the knowledge of human evil which that prison has come to symbolize. At thesame time the recognition of human kinship which finds positive expression in Rennie's effort to revive Lorais one whose redemptive value is entirely independent of its practical consequences. In a certain sense, then, itis irrelevant whether Rennie is liberated or not, or whether Lora is resuscitated or not. Rennie remainsimprisoned within the malignant cell even if she is free, and is freed by the capacity to lay on hands even ifshe remains in prison. It is this paradox that explains the apparently contradictory statements with which thenovel concludes: "She will never be rescued. She has already been rescued. She is not exempt. Instead she islucky."

Bodily Harm is, as Atwood herself once described it, an "anti-thriller," and frustrates the reader's conditionedexpectation that suspense will be resolved in the customary manner. This refusal to play the game would seemto be part and parcel of Atwood's didactic point, for the conventions of the thriller (or of any other populargenre) might also be seen as culturally transmitted moulds through which raw experience is crystallized,neutralized and packaged for general consumption. Writing about life as if it were susceptible to thrillertreatment is not much different from treating life as if it were simply a potential photograph or film or seriesof "lifestyles" articles. It is another way of not seeing, of confining one's experience to a fraudulent surface, away which is parodied by Rennie's own abbreviated technique for reading mystery stories. But murder is real,as is human evil in all its manifestations, and an unmediated encounter with the crude actuality of bodily harmentails the shattering of the conventionalized modes of perceiving the world that genres of this kindexemplify. Looked at from a certain point of view, then, Bodily Harm is a self-deconstructing novel, to use anunwieldy but perhaps useful term. When Atwood says that her book takes the components of the thriller genre"and then pulls them inside out, as you would a glove," it is clear that the process she is describing mirrorsthat through which her protagonist is "turned inside out" during her climactic moment of vision in the prison.In overturning the very convention it implicitly invokes, denying its own generic postulates, the book enactson a formal level the more general process of subverting those illusory categories that distance the perceiverfrom the world and from herself: the distinctions between aggressors and victims, depths and surfaces, hereand there, mind and body, "I" and "thou." The structural ambiguity of the novel thus serves to reinforce amoral message which is very far from ambiguous, that only through a process of radical subversion is itpossible to confront the malignant cell that lurks both within and outside the self, and to recognize in it thestranger's face which is our own.

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Criticism: Earl G. Ingersoll (essay date October 1991)

SOURCE: "Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye: Re-Viewing Women in a Postmodern World," in Ariel: A Reviewof International English Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4, October, 1991, pp. 17-27.

[In the following essay, Ingersoll analyzes what he perceives as the autobiographical elements in Cat's Eye.]

Although one finds evidence of postmodernism in the manipulation of popular forms such as the Gothic inLady Oracle and science fiction in The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye is Margaret Atwood's first full-fledged"postmodern" work. Always the wily evader of critics' pigeonholes, Atwood, in a recent interview, has deniedthe classification of her work as "postmodern." She expresses her own amused disdain towards thecritical-academic world for its attraction to "isms" in the discourse of Cat's Eye when Elaine Risley visits thegallery where her retrospective show is to be mounted. Risley dismisses the paintings still on display: "I don'tgive a glance to what's still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, postthis, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we're just a footnote to something earlier that was realenough to have a name of its own." At the same time, this novel is clearly Atwood's most postmodern in itsplay with form—the fictional autobiography—and in its continual self-referentiality as a text.

At the centre of this postmodern text is Atwood's complex use of her own past. Few writers have spoken outso vehemently against readings of their work as autobiography. As her interviews indicate, she is very awarethat her audience is bent upon biographical readings of her fiction. With obvious amusement she tells how inquestion-and-answer sessions following her public readings she has often just finished disclaimingautobiographical roots for her characters when someone in her audience asks if she was overweight as a childlike Joan in Lady Oracle or anorexic as a young woman like the unnamed narrator of The Edible Woman. ForAtwood, there are clearly gender implications here since, as she has argued, women have traditionally beenthought so imaginatively impoverished that all they could write about was themselves.

At the same time, although there is no Atwood biography—and she would be one of the last writers toauthorize one—she is among the most interviewed contemporary writers. Thus, as she herself must know,serious readers of her work are familiar enough with the outlines of her family and her early life to be enticedinto seeing the painter Elaine Risley—that stereotyped persona of modernist fiction—as at least partly herown reflection. Obviously she is not; and yet she is, despite the curious warning on the copyright page whichreads in part as follows:

This is a work of fiction. Although its form is that of an autobiography, it is not one … withthe exception of public figures, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purelycoincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confusedwith the author's.

It is easy enough to see that Atwood is attempting to protect herself from potential legal action generated byformer friends or associates who might choose to see themselves as models for the less appealing characters inCat's Eye. However, the attempt to deny any connection with Elaine Risley must encourage the reader tosuspect that the lady doth protest too much. In this way, part of the enjoyment of this text involves a shiftingback and forth between invention and the facts of the inventor's past.

Atwood has provided her audience with so many of those facts of her early life that it is next to impossible forthe informed reader to dismiss as coincidental the roots of Elaine's childhood in Atwood's. She has told herinterviewers, for example, about the summers she spent as a child living in tents and motels while the familyaccompanied her father, an entomologist, doing research in the Canadian north. On more than one occasionshe has described to her interviewers how she and her brother would help their father collect insects he shook

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from trees. In this context, given the writer's having gone on record as frustrated with her audience'smisguided autobiographical readings of her earlier work, it is difficult not to conclude that Cat's Eye is,among many things, a highly sophisticated expression of play with her audience's expectations. Atwood mayplead ignorance of contemporary critical theory, but she is undercutting the conventional notion thatautobiography privileges an autobiographical fiction as more truthful than other forms of fiction. She showsus in Elaine Risley, a painter/writer who may seem in a conventional sense to be exploring the truth of herpast but who in a truer sense is creating, or writing, a past as she chooses now to see it, rather than as it mighthave once existed.

The novel begins with a definition of time, justified perhaps by Risley's having returned to Toronto, her home,for a retrospective exhibition of her art. She dismisses linear time in favor of "time as having a shape …, like aseries of liquid transparencies … You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimesthis comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away." In the story she tells ofher youth, Elaine offers a retrospective of the woman she has been and the women who have been importantto her as she now sees herself and them. That past is very much seen through the cat's eye marble into whichElaine looked at eight and saw her future as an artist. The image of the cat's eye is central, since it represents aworld into which she has been allowed access; at the same time, it is a world of inevitably distorted vision.Thus, the truth is not an entity to which we struggle to gain access so much as a way of looking and, in theprocess, creating the text of that truth.

Elaine Risley's retrospective allows her to review the people and relationships that have been important to thefirst fifty years of her life. In reconstructing her past—or the critical years from age eight to youngwomanhood—Elaine Risley is in large part deconstructing that past. The consequences of thatdeconstruction—what turns out to be the novel itself—is a complicated series of transformations throughwhich the persona discovers that the past is only what we continue to reconstruct for the purposes of thepresent. And perhaps beyond that, Elaine Risley discovers that of all her relationships—with the opposite sexand with her own—the most important may have been the strange friendship with her tormentor/doubleCordelia. By the end of the narrative, the persona will have finally exorcised the spirit of an alter ego who wasperhaps primarily that, another self whom she no longer needs to fear, hate, or even love.

The focus of the early chapters is the very young Elaine Risley's struggle to find models in the two womenwho are crucial to her formative years. She begins her retrospective with her eighth birthday, a not surprisingage for the onset of consciousness. For Risley, like Atwood, this was the time of her move to Toronto, and forRisley at least the end of happiness. Through the move to Toronto, a backwater of civilization in the 1940s,but still civilization, Elaine as a child is suddenly forced to confront "femininity." Having lived in tents andmotels, she and her mother must don the costumes and the roles appropriate to their gender and put away theirunfeminine clothes and ungendered roles until the warm weather when they return to the North. OvernightElaine feels like an alien from another planet. The future of painful socialization is represented by thedoorway in her new school marked "GIRLS," the doorway which makes her wonder what the other onemarked "BOYS" has behind it from which she has been shut out.

We might expect Elaine to cherish the memory of a paradise lost of relatively ungendered life as a child innature. Instead, she feels guilty for being unprepared to operate in a world of mothers who are housekeeperspreoccupied with clothes and labour-saving devices. Although the mature Elaine mutes the resentment, thechild Elaine suspects that her mother has failed her as the role model needed to help her find her way in aworld of "twin sets" and wearing hats to church. The young Elaine's inability to fault the mother she lovesforces her to internalize as guilt her sense of inadequacy. If she is suffering the pain of being out of place, itmust be something that is wrong with her; certainly it cannot be anything wrong with the definition ofwomanhood embodied in the mothers of her friends, Cordelia, Carol, but especially Grace Smeath.

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Clearly Mrs. Smeath is the Bad Mother that Elaine suspects her own mother of being for not having preparedher for socialization. In the Smeath household, Elaine and her friends are involved in that socialization; theystudy to be future housewives by cutting out pictures of "frying pans and washing machines" to paste intoscrapbooks for their "ladies." A more important aspect of that socialization is represented by regularattendance at church. When the Smeaths invite Elaine to join them for the first of what eventually seems anendless series of Sundays, Atwood describes the interior of the church through the eyes of the young Elainewho might as well be a creature from Mars. One feature that becomes crucially important to Elaine are theinscriptions under the stained-glass pictures of Jesus—"SUFFER • THE • LITTLE • CHILDREN"—and ofMary—"THE • GREATEST • OF • THESE • IS • CHARITY."

Because she feels radically incapable of fitting into the world outside her home, Elaine becomes the victim ofCordelia's sadistic punishments for her incompetence as a student of womanhood. These punishments, whichrange from reprimands and shunnings to being buried alive, culminate in the scene of Elaine's almost freezingto death in a nearby ravine where Cordelia has thrown her hat. This is a ravine where "men" lurk to molestcareless little girls. It is Elaine's victimization at the hands of other little girls, not those mysteriouslydangerous men, which leads her to the nervous reaction of peeling the skin off her feet and hands, almost asthough she is studying to become a child martyr by flaying herself alive. She is saved, she convinces herself,not so much by her own mother as by the apparition of the ultimate Good Mother, the Virgin Mary.

Mrs. Risley and Mrs. Smeath function then as variants of the Good Mother and the Bad Mother. Elaine'smother suspects that Cordelia and the other girls are tormenting her daughter, but she assumes that Elaine cantell her the truth and she never notices the marks of Elaine's flaying herself. Mrs. Smeath, on the other hand,knows that Elaine is being tormented but does nothing. In fact, Mrs. Smeath even knows that Elaine hasoverheard her saying that Elaine deserves to be punished for being at heart a graceless heathen. It is not untilElaine almost dies that Mrs. Risley acts. Somewhere down in the pool of the past lurks the monster ofresentment against this Good Mother who should have known and acted sooner. Mrs. Risley becomes therepresentation, like her husband, of the well-intentioned, virtuous, but not terribly effective liberal humanistswho sense that evil exists but refuse to acknowledge it, since a knowledge of evil would force them to find aplace for it in their world.

Mrs. Smeath, on the other hand, is much easier for Elaine to deal with. Even as a child, Elaine can clearly seeMrs. Smeath's evil in the transparent world of that cat's eye which will be the emblem of her insight as anartist. She comes to see the crucial difference within Mrs. Smeath as a woman who professes to being aChristian—"SUFFER • THE • LITTLE • CHILDREN" and "THE • GREATEST • OF • THESE • IS •CHARITY"—yet believes that the greatest charity to little children who happen to be "heathens" is to makethem indeed suffer. And, it is very much to the point that the individual who functions as Elaine's Muse isMrs. Smeath, not Mrs. Risley. This variety of the Bad Mother, more in line with Freud's reality principle,generates a whole series of paintings through which Elaine vents her anger, hatred, and malice. Mrs. Smeathas the bad mother may very well represent much of what she finds most despicable in the conventional notionof Woman. At the same time, it is an evil which generates art and it is that art which liberates her from a selfenslaved in anger towards and hatred of that image of "Woman."

That same indeterminacy is evident in Elaine's bizarre relationship with Cordelia. When she declares herindependence, following Cordelia's move to another school, Elaine becomes powerful, assertive, verballyaggressive, and Cordelia fades into powerlessness, into the kind of silence which was Elaine's position earlyon in this power struggle veiled as a friendship. Elaine's enjoyment of a new facility with words, as though hertongue has been empowered by her earlier victimization, makes it clear how important the element of theretrospective is in this text. Told in a traditionally chronological fashion, Elaine's empowerment throughlanguage would have led the reader to anticipate that she would become a writer, rather than a painter.

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In this symbiotic relationship, Elaine's friend/persecutor is given the name Cordelia. Most readers sense theirony in Atwood's borrowing the name of one of Shakespeare's innocent tragic heroines, but there are alsoimplications of a transfer being transacted here. In the years following the Second World War, King Learbecame one of our most attractive cultural myths in part because Cordelia reminds us how the innocent areswept up in the destruction of war and civil disorder and perhaps also that the innocent embody theredemptive power of love. At the same time, it is the refusal of Lear's single faithful daughter to speak, just asmuch as her sisters' hypocritical flattery, which sets in motion the machinery of conflict and destruction bywhich she and her family are overwhelmed. In this sense, Elaine, perhaps following her mother's example, issomewhat like Cordelia, choosing silence and martyrdom rather than risk the anxiety and guilt ofself-assertion. Eventually, anger and resentment find their sublimated or socialized modes of expression, firstin her verbal assaults on the imperfections of others and finally in her art, so often a visualization of heranguish at the hands of her tormentors.

More than anyone else, Cordelia is the one from whom she must free herself by acknowledging not onlydifference but kinship. Cordelia is a "secret sharer." Like her readers, Elaine keeps expecting her formertormentor to show up at the gallery, the most appropriate ghost to appear in this retrospective. Cordelia,however, does not need to appear: Elaine has already exorcized much of the guilt, hatred, and anger generatedin her relationships with Mrs. Smeath and Cordelia through her art, conveniently brought together so that theartist, like her audience, can read this retrospective as a testimony to the transformative power of art. WhenElaine returns to the bridge, the power of her creative consciousness calls up an apparition of Cordelia fromthe deeps of that pool of time with which we began. She tells us:

I know she's looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a little, the face closed and defiant.There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my ownwrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; thesame fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia's; as they alwayswere.

I am the older now, I'm the stronger. If she stays here any longer she will freeze to death; shewill be left behind, in the wrong time. It's almost too late.

I reach out my arms to her, bend down, hands open to show I have no weapon. It's all right, Isay to her. You can go home now.

In a strange and unexpected sense, Cordelia has become her name. Just as Elaine earlier was rescued fromphysical death in the icy stream below this bridge, this time she acknowledges another variety of rescue. Sheconfirms what this retrospective has been moving toward all along—the recognition that her art has rescuedher from the spiritual death of a lifetime wasted in anger and resentment. Having recognized the power ofCordelia within herself. Elaine can at last release the Cordelia she has made to appear in the final hours beforeshe prepares to leave home again. Perhaps she recognizes also that she and Cordelia had identities less distinctfrom each other than it seemed in childhood, that each had been fashioning the other in the image of a self shecould not otherwise confront. Now Elaine herself can be a variety of the "Good Mother" and simply sendCordelia home before she freezes to death in "the wrong time."

In the end, Cat's Eye is postmodern in several interrelated ways. Atwood offers the informed reader the lure ofa few well-known features of her own childhood and then proceeds to invent an autobiography which is theexperience of Elaine Risley, a character who may bear only the most superficial similarities. Autobiography,even when intended, is obviously enough only another form of fiction. By offering us, in the words of thenovel's preliminary note, a work of fiction whose form is that of an autobiography, she gives us a text whichconfirms that truth by showing how Elaine Risley has invented herself, constructed an autobiography, throughher art. Elaine is even allowed to be amused by her critics' (mis)readings of her painting, one of whom writes

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of Risley's "disconcerting deconstruction of perceived gender and its relationship to perceived power,especially in respect to numinous imagery."

In addition, this text raises questions about the representation of women, about writing as a woman, aboutautobiography, and about mothers and daughters. As Barbara Johnson has argued, autobiography and itsreflection in autobiographical fiction are a supplanting of the mother, a kind of giving birth to oneself throughthe creation of the text. Using the classic text of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Johnson argues that what awoman writer (the very term "woman writer" has traditionally been conceived of as a "freak of nature")creates has conventionally seemed a "monster." Johnson asks: "Is autobiography somehow always in theprocess of symbolically killing the mother off by telling her the lie that we have given birth to ourselves?" Intelling us the story of her life, Elaine Risley foregrounds Cordelia as a monster only to show how she freedherself from Cordelia to become as a young woman monstrous in her own way, and appropriately, throughlanguage, with her "mean mouth." She offers us in Mrs. Smeath, the Bad Mother, whom she subsumespsychologically in her art, a kind of monstrosity which exorcizes the monstrous complicity of Mrs. Smeath inher persecution by Cordelia and the other girls. And she offers us in Mrs. Risley, the Good Mother, a failedguide to the intricacies of femininity in the outside world and, therefore, a mother who must be killed offbefore Elaine can achieve selfhood at fifty.

Why, we might ask, has it taken Elaine so long to give birth to herself, the sort of act managed by the PaulMorels and the Stephen Dedaluses of modernist fiction by their twenty-fifth birthdays? Part of the answer isobvious in the question. Elaine Risley is a female rather than a male character. In this context, a goodanalogue is Virginia Woolf who was well aware that she could not begin work on To the Lighthouse, dealingin part with the loss of her mother, until she was in her forties. As we have learned from sociologists likeNancy Chodorow, women must struggle to achieve a sense of self separate from others, in part because theyare "mothered" or nurtured primarily by women. In this vein, Chodorow argues, mothers see themselves ascontinuous with their daughters:

Because they are the same gender as their daughters and have been girls, mothers ofdaughters tend not to experience these infant daughters as separate from them in the sameway as mothers of infant sons. In both cases, a mother is likely to experience a sense ofoneness and continuity with her infant. However, this sense is stronger, and lasts longer,vis-à-vis daughters.

In these ways, the retrospective of her art is partly an invention to allow Elaine to achieve a sense of self,distinct from both Mrs. Risley and Mrs. Smeath. It is also a belated recognition of her mothering herself as thechild and the young woman Elaine as well as her mothering of Cordelia whom she now can release from herhatred and her love. Having completed this retrospective of her life and given birth to herself, Elaine canacknowledge the separateness of her "daughters"—both the girl she was and Cordelia as her "other." At therisk of increasing Atwood's anxiety with yet another autobiographical reading of her fiction, it might berecalled that Cat's Eye is the revision and completion of a manuscript she began in her mid-twenties andfinished as she approached her fiftieth birthday. Despite Margaret Atwood's disclaimer that the novel is notautobiographical, it is a text performing itself as a text, a text of the author's own struggle to achieve selfhoodas a woman and as an artist.

Criticism: Marilyn Patton (essay date October 1991)

SOURCE: "'Lady Oracle': The Politics of the Body," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature,Vol. 22, No. 4, October, 1991, pp. 29-48.

[In the following essay, Patton analyzes Atwood's use of goddess mythology in Lady Oracle.]

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I search instead for the others the ones left over, the ones who have escaped from these mythologies with barely their lives

Margaret Atwood wrote these words as if they were spoken by the Circe persona in the "Circe/Mud Poems"section of her book of poetry called You Are Happy. Atwood's career as poet, storyteller, and critic has been acoming to terms with "these mythologies," a general term for myths about women and myths about genderrelations which have been inscribed in our literature. Her career has been also a search for an escape from"these mythologies." Although numerous critics have analyzed Atwood's work with myths about women, theirreadings have been limited to primarily psychological interpretations. For the many women who have escaped"with barely their lives," however, cultural myths about women are very much a form of "power politics." Todo justice to Atwood's work, we must look beyond psychology to the politics of her work with—andagainst—myth.

By far the most potent myth in Atwood's imagination has been the White Goddess, a multi-faceted mythwhich reflects socially constructed images of women's roles. Ever since Atwood's first reading of RobertGraves's book, The White Goddess, when she was of college age, this Goddess has shadowed her thinking.One could easily argue that even her most recent novel, Cat's Eye (1988), is a reworking of goddess images.In fact, while she was working on Cat's Eye which is a novel of retrospectives, Atwood wrote a retrospectiveon her own career for Ms. magazine's fifteenth-anniversary issue. She described the influence of the Goddess:

I read Robert Graves' The White Goddess which … terrified me. Graves … placed womenright at the center of his poetic theory, but they were to be inspirations rather than creators….They were to be incarnations of the White Goddess herself, alternatively loving anddestructive…. A woman just might—might, mind you—have a chance of becoming a decentpoet, but only if she took on the attributes of the White Goddess and spent her time seducingmen and then doing them in…. White Goddess did not have time for children, being too takenup with cannibalistic sex.

The depth of Atwood's early obsession with this Goddess can be assessed by noting that her unpublisheddoctoral dissertation, "Nature and Power in the English Metaphysical Romance of the Nineteenth andTwentieth Centuries" (Atwood Papers), revolves around the idea of supernatural women and goddesses asmanifestations of ideas about nature. Remnants of this thesis are visible in published materials such as"Superwoman Drawn and Quartered: The Early Forms of She" and "The Curse of Eve," as well as the chapteron fictional women in Survival, her survey of Canadian literature. Double Persephone, Atwood's firstcollection of poetry, reflects the Demeter/Persephone myth, while other poetry, especially the "Circe/MudPoems," utilizes the Goddess figure.

Robert Graves's version of the Goddess is a figure descended from earth mothers and grain goddesses fromthe matriarchal past, yet she often eats children, even her own. As Artemis or Diana, one of her major"incarnations," she is associated with the moon, and therefore is seen in three phases: virginity, fecundity, andhag. The Goddess is ambivalent, "both lovely and cruel, ugly and kind." Most important for Graves, she is theMuse, worshipped by all great poets. "Woman," writes Graves, "is not a poet: she is either a silent muse or sheis nothing." The domestic is the enemy of the poetic for Graves; the worst thing that could happen to a poetwould be that some "domestic Woman" would turn him into a "domesticated man." "The White Goddess isanti-domestic," he writes; "she is the perpetual 'other woman.'"

The myth of the White Goddess condenses, as myths do, many of the deepest, often unarticulated fears ofwomen and men. Atwood's project is in part to articulate, to give form to, those fears—through reworkingimages of the Goddess. In her own versions of the Goddess, Atwood condenses fears of being large and fat,

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fears of being powerful, fears of devouring or overpowering lovers and children, and the fear of being awriter. Finally, because she is the Triple Goddess, of multiple identities, she represents the difficulty ofcoming to a sense of one "true" single identity, the Self, a goal which Western culture has invoked as the greatdesideratum.

Evidence in the Atwood collection of manuscript drafts and files of research materials (in the Thomas FisherRare Book Library) indicates that Atwood's novels are written both in terms of and also "against" theGoddess. I read Atwood's work as an attempt to come to grips with the hidden agendas of patriarchy, withsocially constructed myths about women. Thinking back to Barthes's definitions of myths in Mythologies, thatmyth is "depoliticized speech" which "has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, andmaking contingency appear eternal," then the myth of the White Goddess represents exactly the sort of"depoliticized speech" which has historically been used to define, limit, and disempower women. She is onemajor instance of the myths, legends, and texts which have been used as tools in women's subordination.Atwood has begun to deconstruct, historicize, and reappropriate the myth of the Goddess; she has begun, inshort, to politicize it.

While in her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), Margaret Atwood transformed Robert Graves's fearsome"White Goddess" into a "delicious" cake, Lady Oracle (1976) represents a second major attempt to deal withthe Goddess, who is in this text more powerful than ever before. Atwood comes to terms with the mostterrifying aspect of the Goddess in the Graves text, the devouring, powerful cannibalistic Venus who mateswith men and eats them. She is the power of nature made visible, and the poet's necessary muse.

Lady Oracle is a representation of the narrator's attempt to act out the role of the Goddess. By having hernarrator become the Goddess, Margaret Atwood takes on the issue of cultural control of women (and women'sbodies) as represented in literature and in prescribed images or roles for women; she does combat with Gravesin particular and patriarchy in general. Atwood's reading of Graves emphasizes two aspects: the cannibalisticnature of the Goddess and her role as silent Muse. The poetic vocation is thus a key to Lady Oracle, and acontinuation of the discussion about the relationship between the artist and her world raised in Surfacing,Atwood's second novel. How can a woman inhabit the space of literature without being overwhelmed by theideological preconceptions of that literature? How can a modern woman live without becoming a victim of theideological constructs of the Western world?

Lady Oracle, Atwood's third novel, is about the eating woman. The heroine, Joan Delacourt Foster, is an avidconsumer who literalizes the "oral" in "oracle." As a noticeably overweight child, she imagines her mother'simage of her, which "must have been a one-hole object, like an inner tube, that took things in at one end butdidn't let them out at the other." As she grew older, her mother "was tired of having a teen-aged daughter wholooked like a beluga whale and never opened her mouth except to put something in it." Although Joan dietsaway her one hundred pounds of excess weight, she is occasionally haunted by nightmares of her fatchildhood body and by meeting people who might remember her "Before" self. She earns her living writing"Costume Gothics," formulaic romance novels; sections of her latest book, Stalked By Love, are interpolatedinto Lady Oracle.

Joan's husband, a serious academic and political radical, does not even know about her Gothic romances; healso does not know that she is having an affair with "The Royal Porcupine," an avant-garde artist. He doesknow that she is becoming famous for a book published under her married name, a volume ofautomatic-writing poetry called Lady Oracle. Then a blackmailer threatens to reveal Joan's multiple identities.In an effort to disentangle herself from her complicated life, she enacts an imitation drowning death, flies toItaly, and buries her wet "drowning" costume, planning to begin a new life as easily as she usually beginswriting a new book.

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The Goddess is such a significant image to Lady Oracle that Atwood's research materials for the novel consistprimarily of photocopied articles and references to the Goddess and to the Sibyl (another form of theGoddess). Basing my analysis upon the materials in these files, I argue against purely psychologicalexplanations of Atwood's use of the mythological material, the route chosen by critics such as BarbaraGodard, Roberta Sciff-Zamaro, and Sherrill Grace. Rather, the Goddess has both political and aestheticdimensions for Atwood—she represents women's fears, but she also represents cultural constructions ofwomen's roles. As Susan J. Rosowski notes, "In Lady Oracle, Atwood turns this tradition back upon itself,confronting the Gothic dimensions that exist within our social mythology" because "[o]nce established,fictional constructs become impervious to human reality."

Perhaps the most striking item in Atwood's research materials for Lady Oracle is the photocopy of a photo ofa statue of the Goddess, labelled "Mother Nature," but generally known as the Artemis of Ephesus. This statueis, serendipitously, located within the enormous maze of the Villa d'Este, which she calls in her screenplayversion of Lady Oracle, "the Tivoli Gardens, built by a Renaissance Cardinal for his dirty-weekend-palace.The Gardens are filled with statues that squirt water from various orifices of their bodies, run by hydraulicpressure." Atwood uses this figure in the published novel as part of the scenery. On a vacation in Italy, Arthurand Joan are wandering in the Villa D'Este when they suddenly come upon the Goddess:

She had a serene face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. She wasdraped in breasts from neck to ankle, as though afflicted with a case of yaws: little breasts atthe top and bottom, big ones around the middle. The nipples were equipped with spouts, butseveral of the breasts were out of order.

This is a significantly more provocative image of the White Goddess than that in the Graves text; Gravesstresses the role of the Goddess as a beautiful muse and as a destroyer of men and children, but ignores her"nature goddess" shape. If we think critically about this passage, what stands out is the difference between the"serene" head and the incredibly grotesque body. Unlike the other statues in the Gardens, with normal humanbodies attached to normal human heads, this monstrosity encapsulates the complete lack of fit between mindand body. The contrast emphasizes "Mother Nature's" (and woman's) alienation from her own body, as if thefemale function of the body (childbearing and breast-feeding) had gone completely out of control, usurpingevery other function. To have breasts, to be female, is compared by Atwood to a disease, yaws. And theunreliability of the female body is emphasized by the note that "several of the breasts were out of order." Thiscultural limitation of the female body is part of what troubles Joan Foster.

Chapter 25 of the published version of Lady Oracle concludes with the passage quoted above followed by ashort paragraph in which the narrator says that she

stood licking my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly. Once I would have seen her asan image of myself, but not any more. My ability to give was limited, I was not inexhaustible.I was not serene, not really. I wanted things, for myself.

The complacent and distant attitude of the narrator in this published version is a reworking of a page of loosetypescript in the files for Lady Oracle which gives a much more troubled version of this scene. It is apparentin the published version that Atwood has chosen to define the narrator as a person whose personal boundariesand self-definition are clear. In quite an opposite way the unpublished material emphasizes the conflicts, fears,and desires of Joan Delacourt Foster.

If two breasts are a virtue in woman, why not three, why not a hundred? We stood hand inhand, licking up the last of our vanilla ice cream, regarding the goddess, who did not regardus. Her head rose from its nest of breasts like the head of a beautiful leper. What prayerscould be addressed to such a deity? Something easy for the breasts to understand for the head

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was merely human, the body divine, its deformity made this obvious. Something repetitiveand monosyllabic. Give. Give.

The interesting complexity in this section is that the point of view is not strictly limited. There is a dangeroussympathy with the Goddess, a connection that is too close. The narrator seems to be in part imagining herselfas the Goddess, constantly asked to "Give. Give."

The emotional entanglement is signalled by the complex, contradictory language, the oxymoronic phrases: "abeautiful leper," the "body divine [because of] its deformity." The conflicting, intertwined emotions, the fearthat one is the Goddess, the longing for the Goddess, the desire to escape from the Goddess, are all capturedhere. The very complexity of point of view, the multiple, mutually antagonistic desires suggest that thecharacter of Joan Delacourt Foster which finally emerges in the published novel is in some sense a distillationof even wilder and less controlled versions.

The unpublished quotation continues in an even more vivid imaginative sequence:

An image of inexhaustibility, and you looked at her with a certain longing, or so I imagined.Yet several of the breasts were not working, and the rest merely dribbled; think about that, thenext time you treat a woman as the incarnation of the dream of largesse, and that goes forboth of you. I know that I was two things for you, what you saw and what you would ratherhave seen; but how can I complain? We are never adequate to the dreams of others and thesedreams infest our lives, like termites, like bloodworms. Any of these dreams come true wouldbe a monster. Who carved this goddess? I can imagine her coming to life, reeling topheavilydown the street, every breast wobbling, sprinkling lawns and flower borders as she passes,like a new portable irrigation system, her nurturing face twisted into a different expression,rage, the desire for revenge, seeking her creator. Women scream, men laugh in [page ends]

Leaving aside the issue of the addressee, the emotional weight of this passage in the final lines is terror,"women scream," a cry that may or may not have been displaced from the narrator onto other women. Theterror is both personal and generic, both generalized fear of the Goddess as a "type," and also the particularfear of the narrator. The Goddess resembles not just a mythological figure, but also Joan's own former self,"reeling topheavily down the street." The Goddess is a terrible vision because of her "rage," "the desire forrevenge." She is monstrous and linked to monsters—yet as a mythological archetype she is supposed to be thefemale, that which is part of, or a possibility in, every woman. Paradoxically, the narrator's fear is mixed with,as she says, "a certain longing," associated with the fact that she is "licking up the last of [her] ice cream," andworrying that the breasts are not inexhaustible. But these desires are repressed. The longing for breast milk,while licking on the breast-shaped and disappearing ice-cream cone, is transformed in the published versioninto an association with cold rather than nourishment, as the narrator watches "the goddess coldly."

We can see the degree to which the Goddess figure becomes a generalized "sign" of myths about women byconnecting this unpublished material to Joan's attempt to bury her clothes, her former identity. The heroinehas dug a hole under her rented "villa" in Italy in order to bury the wet clothes that were evidence of her fakeddeath. Then she begins to imagine that the clothes are a buried body and that she is a murderer: "The clotheswere my own, I hadn't done anything wrong, but I still felt as though I was getting rid of a body, the corpse ofsomeone I'd killed." In fact, three hundred pages later, the clothes do return to haunt her. Her landlord's fatherdigs them up and returns them, revealing the fact that he and the townspeople had been aware of her "buried"identity all along. But just before Mr. Vitroni returns the clothes, Joan has a revealing nightmare which tiestogether the buried clothes, her imaginary buried "body," and her vision of herself as fat.

Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growingthemselves a body. It was almost completed; it was digging itself out, like a huge blind mole,

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slowly and painfully shambling up the hill to the balcony … a creature composed of all theflesh that used to be mine and which must have gone somewhere. It would have no features, itwould be smooth as a potato, pale as starch, it would look like a big thigh, it would have aface like a breast minus the nipple. (ellipses in original)

The text has conflated the buried or murdered "body" with Joan's dieted-off fat. But there is also a strikingsimilarity between "the creature composed of all the flesh that used to be mine" and the Goddess partiallysuppressed earlier, who came "reeling topheavily down the street," making every woman scream. Themultiple breasts have been turned into a "face like a breast minus the nipple." She is enormously fat,featureless, wandering blindly "like a huge mole" as if she were magnetically attracted to Joan, as if she wereJoan.

These passages constitute a climax to Atwood's ongoing obsession with the function of the Goddess as a"sign" of "woman" and of female possibility. They signify the terror of women, their fear that their ownfemale bodies will overpower their minds, will search them out and destroy their lives—or that their bodieswill become alienated from their heads, that their bodies will be "composed of flesh" which will "have nofeatures." What is common to all of these terrifying images is the exaggerated size, the inhuman disproportionof the breast-covered Goddess, as if the fact of having a female body overpowered any other personalcharacteristics. As Atwood noted so clearly in her 1987 retrospective, "Great Unexpectations," the images ofwhat a woman could be scared her "to death." If women actually incarnated the characteristics attributed tothem in myths such as the White Goddess, then one would not want to be female.

What is perhaps most significant, then, in the Artemis of Ephesus statue and in Atwood's writing about thatstatue is what we might call its "essentialism," that it reduces "Nature" to "Woman" (and "Woman" to"Nature"), that it defines both "Woman" and "Nature" by one characteristic (nourishment), and that the resultis completely grotesque. It is as if Atwood took the most ludicrous examples of women embodying nature inthe nineteenth-century romances she had studied in her doctoral dissertation, and then pushed those evenfurther towards the grotesque. In a similar fashion, the philosophical import of Joan's childhood andadolescent obesity (and of her adult obsession with that discarded "Fat Lady") is that it is a sign, a grotesquereduction, of an individual to one single characteristic which erases all other meanings. This essentialism isperfectly incarnated in Joan's nightmare of the "body" which the clothes have grown, which has "no features,"is "smooth as a potato," with "a face like a breast minus the nipple." As Molly Hite remarks, "this is a book inwhich fat is a feminist issue, and in which excess of body becomes symbolic of female resistance to a societythat wishes to constrict women to dimensions it deems appropriate."

I have argued that Atwood sees amazing power in the White Goddess, but that in Lady Oracle she manages totake control over the goddess by rendering her powerless, even ridiculous. The "Fat Lady" in the pink skatingcostume, the sequence in which Felicia turns fat, the comic incident with the arrow in Joan's rear end,even—perhaps especially—the scene in which Joan and Arthur lick ice cream cones in front of the Goddess;these all appropriate and domesticate the Goddess. The powerless Goddess is even found inside of Joan'sCostume Gothic, Stalked by Love, disguised as one of four women who sits in the maze; she is the one who is"enormously fat." The novel both constructs the Goddess and trivializes her, takes power over her, uses her.She may be a sign, but she is also just a sign.

Earlier I defined the myth of the White Goddess, using Barthes's terminology, as "depoliticized speech" which"has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal."Atwood's approach to mythologizing and essentializing of "woman" is to appropriate, deconstruct anddomesticate that myth. Using Susan McKinstry's observation that Joan "is, precisely, a character" who hasturned herself into fiction, we can see this manoeuvre as political, as turning the powerful Goddess into afigure one can control, manipulate, and parody. When Judith McCombs writes of Lady Oracle that "this ismyth and genre upside-down, reflexive, parodied," one can think about those moves (parody, turning a genre

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upside-down) as acts of appropriation of cultural myths about women. If we look at the context in whichAtwood wrote the novel, it is clear that the story may be interpreted as political, as taking seriously the socialconstruction of "woman," especially the goddess figure, and rendering that construction powerless.

Thus far, I have noted the stimulating effect which the figure of the Goddess has on Atwood's imagination andhave pointed towards evidence that this figure represents a kind of uncontrolled power which the text bothuses and attempts to contain. The problem with the Goddess figure, as represented up until now, is her silence.Each image of the Goddess is speechless, inarticulate. She may have an expressive face, but she never shouts,curses, or yells, much less writes. She is, in short, Graves's perfect White Goddess, completely the Muse,never the inspired, never the poet.

Atwood solves the problem of the silenced Goddess by giving her a voice—by turning her into Joan Foster,author. We readers hear the Goddess speak through Joan. She tells us, at least, her side(s) of the story.Atwood's act of giving voice to the Goddess, her destruction of the myth of the silent Goddess, is enabled tosome extent by additional material about the Goddess provided by her researcher. While one aspect of"woman" is epitomized by the silent statue, reduced to the single function of nurturing, other attributes arepossible. The research file contains numerous entries from encyclopedias, dictionaries, and classical workswhich emphasize the role of the Goddess as "Sibyl," her position as "oracle." It includes excerpts from Virgil'sAeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book XIV), both of which concern the incident in which Aeneas consultsthe Sibyl in order to discover how to find his dead father's shade; the Sibyl gives information and prophesiesat length. Some of the references discuss Diana or Artemis; others mention the Delphic oracle, namingDaphnis and Pythia; Ovid and Virgil simply call her "Sibyl."

Other names for the Goddess were Proseprine and Hecate, and the research even includes sketches of twostatues of this triple Goddess. One entry notes that the "most famous of her temples was that of Ephesus….She was there represented with a great number of breasts, and other symbols which signified the earth, orCybele." The entry concludes with remarks that allude to a certain bloodthirstiness on the part of the Goddess,that some worshippers "cruelly offered on her altar all the strangers that were shipwrecked on their coasts"and that she "had some oracles."

Another entry from the Classical Dictionary, on "Pythia," describes in detail how "Pythia, the priestess ofApollo at Delphi" would deliver her oracle:

… she was supposed to be suddenly inspired by the sulphureous vapours which issued fromthe hole of a subterranean cavity within the temple, over which she sat bare on a three-leggedstool, called a tripod. In this stool was a small aperture, through which the vapour was inhaledby the priestess, at the divine inspiration, her eye suddenly sparkled, her hair stood on end,and a shivering ran over all her body. In this convulsive state she spoke the oracles of the god,often with loud howlings and cries, and her articulations were taken down by the priest, andset in order.

The similarity between Pythia's inspiration and Joan's "automatic writing" of "Lady Oracle" is quite striking;it is clear that Joan is acting as a sort of oracle. Her three-sided mirror substitutes for the tripod, the candle forthe vapour, and her automatic writing takes the place of the priest.

But Joan is also partly modelled upon the Cumean Sibyl, an oracle of Apollo who spoke to Aeneas. Atwoodused this excerpt from the C. Day Lewis translation of the Aeneid, with the Sibyl speaking from a cave:

The Sibyl cried, "for lo! the god is with me. And speaking / There by the threshold, her features, her colours were all at once / Different, her hair flew wildly about; her breast was heaving, /

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Her fey heart swelled in ecstasy; larger than life she seemed, / More than mortal her utterance:

The significance of this Sibyl is that she is able to lead Aeneas into the underworld; her power opens up the"maze" of Hades, just as Joan's experiments with her candle and triple mirror conjure up a goddess/guide:"she lived under the earth somewhere, or inside something, a cave or a huge building; sometimes she was on aboat."

The intriguing connection between the marked excerpt from the Aeneid and Joan's Costume Gothic romancesis almost parodic, since the romances make a formulaic routine of the heaving breast and flying hair. Yet theCumean Sibyl does retain the power of prophecy and speech. She is woman unsilenced; in another passagefrom Atwood's excerpts from the Aeneid, "her voice came booming out of the cavern, / Wrapping truth inenigma; she was possessed."

The most significant materials of all are the xeroxed references (both from Robert Graves's The Greek Myths)to the silencing of the oracles which had belonged to women—in other words, to women's loss of the powerof the word. In Graves's section on "Oracles," for example, he notes that "The Delphic Oracle first belonged toMother Earth, who appointed Daphnis as her prophetess; and Daphnis, seated on a tripod, drank in the fumesof prophecy, as the Pythian priestess still does." Graves then suggests alternative explanations of why MotherEarth no longer controls the oracle, and the final explanation, that the priests of "Apollo robbed the oracle"seems definitive. This conclusion is substantiated by a note on the following pages that all "oracles wereoriginally delivered by the Earth-goddess, whose authority was so great that patriarchal invaders made apractice of seizing her shrines and either appointing priests or retaining the priestess in their own service."

Margaret Atwood seems to be attempting to recover the Oracular or the Sibyllic role of the Goddess, to undothe overthrow of the "woman" (not lady) oracle by the priests of Apollo, and to reinstate the Goddess who is apoet. Paradoxically, she is empowered by the writings of Robert Graves, who most forcefully presentedAtwood with her problem in her early years. By looking back to the legends of the original transition frommatriarchy to patriarchy, Atwood is placing the almost trivial, definitely comic, story of Joan Delacourt Fosterwithin the much more cosmic frame of the gendered arrangements of contemporary culture, which even todaykeep women as merely the priestesses and the Muses of patriarchal writing. These research materials, in otherwords, remind us that Atwood's primary obsession, as she framed it in Ms. magazine, is with therepresentation of the Goddess as the muse of the male poet, with Graves's contention that a woman could notbe a poet. But what even Graves's own notes on "Oracles" hypothesize, and what the Aeneid demonstrates, isthe power of a woman's voice, of the woman oracle, when she is allowed to speak.

I believe that if we think of the novel Lady Oracle as having sprung, in some sense, from musings upon themythology of Artemis/Diana, Hecate/Mother Nature as represented in these excerpts and illustrations, then itbecomes even more clear that one of the aims of the text is to reimagine the Delphic oracle again under thecontrol of women. This is a figurative way of saying that the novel is attempting to imagine a way in whichwomen can take back their rightful place as poets and writers. We can think of the various modes of writing inLady Oracle as musings upon the place of gender in the politics of literary production, or even as musingsupon the place of literary production in the realm of sexual politics. If we return to the published novel, wecan see evidence that Atwood is, indeed, articulating the difficulties for women writers in assuming an equalplace in the marketplace of literary production.

In Lady Oracle, the domination of publishing by editors who are primarily interested not in quality of writingbut in sales, not in feminism but in money, is represented by John Morton, Doug Sturgess, and Colin Harper,the men who decide to publish Joan's poem. Sturgess's reduction of Joan Foster to a seductive object todecorate the bookjacket is typical: "Don't you worry your pretty head about good. We'll worry about good,that's our business, right?" Not only do men control women writers, but in addition, the modes of writing and

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creative expression practiced by men are presented as inherently repulsive: Fraser Buchanan's blackmailletters and avant-garde poetry of rejection slips, and the Royal Porcupine's "poetry" of frozen dead animals.This "art" is a burlesque, as McCombs says, [in Women's Studies, Vol. 12, 1986] of "Survival's colonialmentality, victims, dead animal and frozen Nature stories," but it is nevertheless unappealing to a womanwriter. If we take these examples as representative, the role of men in the politics of literary production is toexploit women and animals.

Can women writers then enter into political writing? Atwood discusses this possibility through her descriptionof Resurgence, the "small Canadian-nationalist left-wing magazine" which Arthur, Sam, and Don write. Thisjournal provides an alternative form of literary production, and the fact that Marlene is the managing editoremphasizes the point that women can enter this sort of literary marketplace. Within the context of the novel,however, Resurgence becomes a joke because of the maelstrom created by the sexual politics of its staff, themerry-go-round of beds. Further, as Joan points out "Nobody … read Resurgence except the editors, someuniversity professors, and all the rival radical groups who edited magazines of their own and spent a third ofeach issue attacking each other." Thus, as of 1976, Atwood did not see political writing as an attractive fieldfor writing women.

Rejecting avant-garde art and political commentary, one discovers that the formulaic romance is possibly themost appealing field for women writers, so available to women that Paul has to disguise himself as MavisQuilp in order to have his novels accepted. Further, as McCombs reminds us, the genre is definitely "natural"to Canada, since Harlequins are "Canada's most viable literary art, and a major publishing export." Withfemale authors, female protagonists, and an enormous female audience, the market is ready for use.

At one point, Joan even considers the possibility of recuperating the Costume Gothic for political purposes.She knows that these formulaic stories (as compared to Resurgence) actually appeal to the masses which theleft-wing radicals believe they want to reach: "Terror at Casa Loma, I'll call it, I would get in the evils of theFamily compact, the martyrdom of Louis Riel, the horror of colonialism, both English and American, thestruggle of the workers, the Winnipeg General Strike."

The idea of the power of the cheap romance remains as one of the pleasures of reading Lady Oracle. Theinterpolated scenes from Joan's novel in progress are vividly written and enticing enough to engender desirefor a satisfactory resolution of the plot, so that even the sophisticated reader feels the attraction of the genre.Her allusions to fotoromanzi, Italian love stories written almost like comic strips with voice balloons, butphotograph pictures, point to a similar genre. In Margaret Atwood's letter to "Donya" requesting researchmaterials for Lady Oracle she specifically requested a copy of a "photoromanza": "In case you don't knowwhat these are, they are cheesy magazines, sort of like True Romances except that the story is told in stillblack & white photos, with captions & cartoon balloons. The cheesier the better, and if you find severalequally cheesy ones, buy all of them." No actual fotoromanzi have been preserved in the files but these"cheesy" romances, mentioned several times in Lady Oracle, have characteristics which clearly appeal toJoan: "The stories were all of torrid passion, but the women and men never had their mouths open … Italywas more like Canada than it seemed at first. All the screaming with your mouth closed."

Yet it is the popular appeal and the ephemeral nature of the fotoromanzi which distinguish them from highculture. With Lady Oracle and Joan's poem of the same name, Atwood begins her search for a mode of artisticexpression which is anti-élitist in that it is deliberately designed for wide appeal, open to women authors andwomen characters, and which can also be opened up for larger purposes than escape.

Finally, Joan Foster's creation of her Gothic romances and her oracle poem is a story, like that of Atwood'sstrategies for appropriating to herself the potent image of the Goddess, in which the artist takes to herself thepower of the Sibyl. Although the critic Frank Davey argues [in Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics] that, asa narrator, Joan is "drowning in language," we could also say that she is letting loose the power of language.

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The power of the Sibyl, however, is an ambiguous power. It is like the power of the mother, the power ofcreation. Yet on the other hand, it is also a giving away of one's self. Out of Joan's subconscious comes LadyOracle, and after Joan's supposed suicide has been publicized in the media, the poem is turned into an item forpopular consumption: "Sales of Lady Oracle were booming, every necrophiliac in the country was rushing tobuy a copy."

The similarity between the many-breasted Goddess and the woman writer is apparent in this quoted sentence.Like the Goddess who offers her breasts, her substance, for public consumption, the poet offers herself, herideas, her selves, and her fears for public consumption. Her novels or poems will be "condensed," "digested"by reviewers, "consumed" by the public, "devoured" by fans, "regurgitated" in literature classes—she will bemetaphorically cannibalized.

Atwood is acutely aware of these possibilities. Her attention to the fotoromanzi suggests that she is meditatingupon the role of the writer as producer of ephemera, thinking about the offering of a woman writer's createdidentities (of her "selves") for digestion by the public. The covers of Atwood's novels make the booksresemble supermarket literature, which one might pick up along with the bread, milk, and fruit. A recent seriessimply has Margaret Atwood's face on every cover, as if the author were the product to be sold. The Frenchlanguage version of Lady Oracle has the real Margaret Atwood's face in a circular frame next to a parody ofMargaret Atwood's face, with red hair and red eyebrows, in a rectangular frame.

Ultimately, I suggest, the writer is in the position of the narrator of the ice-cream-eating sequence, longing forthe milk of an inexhaustible muse, Goddess and Mother, yet also in the position of the Goddess herself,constantly required to "Give. Give" of her self, to offer her heart to the public. An unpublished poem, entitled"Oracle Poem Three," poignantly raises this issue:

What would you like today you who sit in rows and are bored and are hungry?

Shall I describe a flower for you? Shall I describe a cripple? Would that make you feel better? I can do either.

Or maybe you would like to kill me, that would be fun, that would be participation.

Then you could divide me into segments, relics: that's what you do with saints, it makes them last longer.

A finger to take home and place under your pillow and pray every night: perhaps it will cure you—

But the heart, the golden heart, that's the element

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you will squabble over: wars have been fought for it.

You think it will be secret, you think it will be magic, with the valuable heart you can do anything you want.

But when you dig it out you are disappointed: it's scarcely larger than a chicken liver, it's pale, it's normal,

and when you've swallowed it diamonds don't drop from your lips, you can't hear the trees talking.

Is it because you have no faith?

The Delphic oracle is again under the control of a woman, a sibyl. She speaks. She may be devoured, she maydevour, but at least she speaks.

In Lady Oracle, Atwood both destroys the Goddess (parodies her, makes her trivial) and celebrates heroracular powers, the force of her language. The triumph of Lady Oracle is that finally, after years of obsessionwith the Goddess, Atwood confronts her in her most horrifying aspect and, in Barthes's terminology,"vanquishes [the] myth from the inside."

Criticism: James Wilcox (review date 24 November 1991)

SOURCE: "The Hairball on the Mantlepiece," in The New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1991, p.7.

[Wilcox is an American-born short story writer and novelist whose works include Modern Baptists (1983),North Gladiola (1985), and Miss Undine's Living Room (1987). In the following review, Wilcox generallypraises Atwood's Wilderness Tips, but finds some of the prose awkward and over-mannered.]

In "Hack Wednesday," one of the most engaging stories in Margaret Atwood's third volume of short fiction,Wilderness Tips, a middle-aged newspaper columnist sizes up men in an unusual way: "She can just look at aface and see in past the surface, to that other—child's—face which is still there. She has seen Eric [herhusband] in this way, stocky and freckled and defiant, outraged by schoolyard lapses from honor." Thisuncanny ability applies just as well to Margaret Atwood herself. Almost every one of the 10 stories in thiscollection superimposes the past upon the present in an unsettling, often startling manner, which conjures up asense of the mysterious in even the most banal relationships.

The first story, "True Trash," a deceptively easygoing coming-of-age tale, accustoms us to the author's boldleaps in time. Set mainly in a summer camp on an island in Ontario's Georgian Bay, "True Trash" gives us aleisurely account of teen-age waitresses' fitful interaction with the "small fry" and counselors at CampAdanaqui.

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But it is only in a flash-forward of 11 years, when the former schoolboy camper Donny has dropped the lastsyllable from his name and grown a beard, that the story begins to take shape. During a chance encounter withhim in Toronto, Joanne, a former waitress at the camp, begins to put together the missing pieces in a real-lifeTrue Romance story—or rather, as one of the waitresses called this type of magazine, True Trash. "Themelodrama tempts [Joanne], the idea of a revelation, a sensation, a neat ending." But she is too sophisticatednow for such a pat, "outmoded" story, and withholds from Don a revelation that would make him seem a TrueTrash character.

Information withheld gives a contemporary twist to another basically old-fashioned tale. In "Death byLandscape," also set in a Canadian summer camp—Manitou is for girls, though—the mysteriousdisappearance of Lucy, one of the campers, during a canoe trip brings the disparate elements of the story intosharp focus. Cappie, the owner and director of Camp Manitou, cannot live with the unknowable. As Lois,Lucy's best friend, realizes later when she is a grown woman, Cappie had a desperate "need for a story, a realstory with a reason in it; anything but the senseless vacancy Lucy had left for her to deal with." Cappie's storyis pure fiction, though, with no basis in fact. Lois's attempt to fill the "senseless vacancy" with some meaningleads beyond any literal rendering to a mythical landscape of her own disturbed mind.

This yearning for meaning in a post-modern world is further explored in "The Age of Lead," Here the pastthat confronts Jane, a financial consultant in her 40's, is not just her youth. While watching a televisionprogram on the exhumation of a member of the Franklin expedition that was lost in the Arctic 150 years ago,Jane recalls her touching friendship with Vincent, a designer she had known since high school. Whereas it iseventually learned why John Torrington, the 20-year-old petty officer on the expedition, died, 43-year-oldVincent's recent death from "a mutated virus" cannot be explained by modern science. As Jane muses uponthe two deaths, the more personal theme emerging from her school days with Vincent is united with the story'slarger concern with indeterminacy: "She felt desolate…. Their mothers had finally caught up to them and beenproven right. There were consequences after all; but they were the consequences to things you didn't evenknow you'd done."

If the frozen corpse of the petty officer seems "like a werewolf meditating," so too does the 2,000-year-oldman discovered by a peat digger in "The Bog Man" appear "to be meditating." Here again the past confrontsthe present in what at first seems a merely sensational, irrelevant way. Julie, a naïve Canadian student in lovewith her married archeology professor, goes to Scotland, where she endures boredom, "congealed oatmeal"and "rock-hard lamb chops" in order to be with her lover on a field trip. Trying to escape the boredom, Julieventures out to the bog, where she is upset by the sight of the well-preserved corpse. This unearthing of thepast seems to her "a desecration. Surely there should be boundaries set upon the wish to know, on knowledgemerely for its own sake." Not surprisingly, she follows her instinct of leaving the past—or rather, theinconvenient parts of the past—buried when she later, as a mature, twice-married woman, tells the story of heraffair to her women friends. "She leaves out entirely any damage she may have caused to Connor…. It doesnot really fit into the story."

Other characters in Wilderness Tips are more honest as they "sift through the rubble, groping for the shape ofthe past." In "Isis in Darkness," a professor tries to revive the magic power that words held in his youth bywriting about a brilliant woman poet who once had him under her spell. "Uncles" introduces us to Susanna,who ascends with the speed and ease of a romance-novel heroine from lowly newspaper obit writer tocelebrated radio and television interviewer. Though she has considered herself a well-loved, deservingwoman, the publication of a former colleague's memoir causes Susanna to wonder if she has "remembered mywhole life wrong."

Kat, like Susanna, enjoys a slick rise to the top, though hers, in "Hairball," is more easily explained. "Whenknives were slated for backs, she'd always done the stabbing." What would otherwise be an all-too-familiartale of comeuppance in the dreary world of fashion magazines is given an uncanny aura by the presence of a

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benign tumor, dubbed Hairball, which Kat has preserved from an operation and given a place of honor on hermantelpiece. "The hair in it was red—long strands of it wound round and round inside."

Like the red-haired bog man and the frozen corpse haunting "The Age of Lead," the pickled tumor opens upanother dimension, revising the story of Kat's life in a way over which she, for once, has no control: "Hairballspeaks to her, without words…. What it tells her is everything she's never wanted to hear about herself. This isnew knowledge, dark and precious and necessary. It cuts."

Well constructed as these stories are, some may seem to belabor their themes with built-in explanations. Attimes, we're told what to make of the inexplicable, and such wonderful anomalies as the bog man or the frozenpetty officer may wind up as too-convenient symbols. Now and then, the language itself can be troubling. InMs. Atwood's previous collections, Dancing Girls and Bluebeard's Egg, the prose was supple, finely tunedwith a variety of inflections. But in Wilderness Tips the stylized repetition of words and phrases ("Jane doesn'twatch very much television. She used to watch it more. She used to watch comedy series") can seemmannered. And for a writer so abundantly talented, there are patches of curiously flat, unimaginativenarrative, where we might encounter someone going "cold with dread" or bad luck gathering around asummer camp "like a fog."

These reservations, however, do not apply to such complex, beguiling stories as "Wilderness Tips" and "HackWednesday." In "Wilderness Tips," the same themes are in evidence, but handled more deftly, with a buoyantirony that can keep even so ponderous an image as a sinking passenger liner afloat. Instead of a bog man or adead English sailor, Ms. Atwood here serves up a roguish Hungarian émigré with the Anglicized name ofGeorge. The first time he visited Wacousta Lodge, the rustic lakefront house belonging to Prue's staid family,"he was led in chains, trailed in Prue's wake, like a barbarian in a Roman triumph…. He was supposed toalarm Prue's family." Nevertheless, Wacousta Lodge is conquered by the "barbarian" when George marriesPrue's more docile sister Portia.

Browsing one day through the lodge's bookshelves, George comes across a book, published in 1905, calledWilderness Tips. "The book itself told how to do useful things, like snaring small animals and eatingthem—something George himself had done, though not in forests." This casual aside, suggesting so muchabout George's savage past, sets up a useful counterpoise to his wife's New World innocence. Portia "wishesshe could go back a few decades, grow up again. The first time, she missed something … some vitalinformation other people seemed to have." Here again is the familiar theme of life stories seeming incompletebecause of missing information. But it is in many ways a willful ignorance that Portia lives with, refusing toexplore the barbarian's own wilderness with any of the tips so conveniently at hand.

The barbarian hovering on the periphery of "Hack Wednesday" is perhaps the most disconcerting alien in thiscollection. It is Manuel Noriega himself, "his round face pocked and bleak as an asteroid." How Ms. Atwoodworks him so naturally into her tale of a middle-aged newspaper columnist at odds with her editor isstorytelling at its best. Here a vision of the past helps bring about a sense of forgiveness, riot in any facileway, but with a tough-minded good humor that makes Marcia the columnist, one of Ms. Atwood's mostappealing characters.

Criticism: Merle Rubin (review date 27 December 1991)

SOURCE: "Time Telescoping Tales," in The Christian Science Monitor, December 27, 1991, p. 14.

[In the following review of Wilderness Tips, Rubin praises Atwood's ability to function as a "barometer" ofthe social climate of present and past decades in her writing, but faults her work for "a lack of energy andélan."]

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I find it hard to dislike Margaret Atwood's fiction, or even to offer serious criticism of it. Thoughtfullyfeminist, ecologically sensitive, a clear-eyed observer of social trends from urban alienation to rural isolation,Atwood is one of those writers who seem to function as barometers of their times.

One seldom feels one has wasted one's time in reading her. Often, one comes away from her work with amemorable insight or two. But I cannot say that I approach a new Margaret Atwood novel or story collectionwith a keen sense of anticipatory pleasure or excitement. Something about her gray, flat style communicates adamp, cold feeling of weariness, which is not simply the effect of her commitment to exposing thesometimes-depressing truth about living on an exploited, violence-prone planet, but also a lack of energy andélan in the way she does what she does.

Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood published her first book of poems in 1961, and now has about a dozenvolumes of poetry to her credit. But it was the appearance of her novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s thatgained her a wider audience. In poetry and prose alike, she has tackled a variety of modes, from the socialrealism of Life Before Man and Bodily Harm to the historical re-creation of her poetic sequence about apioneer woman, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and her dystopic futurist fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale,which was made into a film.

Wilderness Tips is Atwood's third collection of short stories. Many of these 10 neatly constructed,present-tense narratives unfold backward or forward over several decades. The characters definethemselves—or fail to define themselves—in terms of the way they and the world have changed over theyears.

The opening story, "True Trash." is set at a summer camp in the late 1950s, where a group of girls who havesummer jobs as waitresses amuse themselves by reading and laughing at the stories in True Romancemagazines. But life turns out to be more like fiction—even bad fiction—than they suspected. The innocentand not-so-innocent pleasures of summer flirtation and the scandal of a teenage pregnancy seem to lose theirmeaning over the years, however, as the story concludes: "You can do anything now and it won't cause ashock. Just a shrug…. A line has been drawn and on the other side of it is the past, both darker and morebrightly intense than the present."

The hard-driving heroine of "Hairball" also changes with—or even slightly ahead of—the times. She beginsas a "romanticized Katherine," dressed by her mother in frilly dresses, then sheds the frills in high school toemerge as a "bouncy, round-faced Kathy … eager to please and no more interesting than a health food ad." Atuniversity, she becomes "Kath" in her "Take-Back the-Night" jeans. By the time she runs off to England andlands a job with an avant-garde magazine, she's "sliced herself down to Kat … economical, street-feline, andpointed as a nail." Kat's toughness is shown to be a valuable asset, but in the hard-nosed world she's helped tocreate, even someone like herself can be tossed on the trash heap.

Richard of "Isis in Darkness" meets Selena in Toronto in 1960. Like other young people who hang out at thecoffeehouse there, Selena styles herself a poet. The difference is, her talent is real. Richard recognizes herquality and falls in love with her. It's not that he wants to marry her, or even that he feels the usual kind ofdesire for her. What he feels is a mysterious wish "to be transformed by her, into someone he was not."Richard marries a librarian and settles down to become an academic. But every 10 years, Selena turns up inhis life, first as a living reminder of an existence dedicated to poetry, later as a walking emblem ofdiscouragement and despair. Schematic as it is, this story achieves a measure of poignancy lacking in some ofthe other pieces.

The title story, about three sisters and the vaguely disreputable charmer who romanced the middle one butmarried the youngest, has a gloomy ending that left me as cold as its bloodless, stiffly drawn characters.Similarly, the childhood tragedy in "Death by Landscape" is such a literary cliché that any reader following

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the meanderings of this predictable story line would be more shocked if the troubled teenager had not metwith misfortune on the camp canoe trip.

In "Bog Man," a student's risqué affair with her archaeology professor in the early 1960s is a story that keepschanging as years go by. At first, it's a tale she tells only in confidence and only to other women: a story aboutthe mysterious ways of men. Later, she tells the story more freely, emphasizing its comical elements, nolonger idealizing the professor and feeling now a touch of sympathy for his hapless wife. The more time goesby, the more comical and cynical the story becomes and the less remains of her original emotions. "Connor[the professor] … loses in substance every time she forms him in words. He becomes flatter … more life goesout of him…. By this time he is almost an anecdote, and Julie [the former student] is almost old."

A similar process of disillusion is described in "The Age of Lead." As teenagers, Jane and. Vincent mockedtheir mothers' joyless warnings about the dire consequences of deviation from the work ethic. But after theexcitement of the 1960s and the expansion of opportunities for women in the 1970s, the 1980s fall like a tonof bricks: acid rain, urban decline, pollution, poverty, AIDS, and early death for many of Jane'scontemporaries. "Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There wereconsequences after all; but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done."

The bleakness of Atwood's outlook is underscored by the chilly third-person narration she favors: detached,slightly wry, often a little monotonous, but sometimes tightening to a dour sort of elegance. One can hardlyfault Atwood for her pessimism or her resolutely pared-down style. But the vision offered here is a limitedone: like a black-and-white television continuously tuned to nightly bad news.

What must be commended, however, is Atwood's ability to evoke the passing of entire decades—to conveyhow it feels to live at a given time and how it feels to view it in retrospect—all within the brief compass of ashort story.

Criticism: Jill LeBihan (essay date 1991)

SOURCE: "The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye and Interlunar: Margaret Atwood's Feminist (?) Futures (?)," inNarrative Strategies in Canadian Literature: Feminism and Postcolonialism, edited by Coral Ann Howellsand Lynette Hunter, Open University Press, 1991, pp. 93-107.

[In the following essay, LeBihan analyzes the narrative technique and major themes in The Handmaid's Tale,Cat's Eye and some of the poems in Interlunar.]

Margaret Atwood is nothing if not formidable in her utilization of different forms in her writing. Her twolatest novels are strikingly different from one another in terms of the formal traditions within which theymight be placed. Cat's Eye is a woman painter's cynical retrospective principally on her relationships withother women and feminism. The Handmaid's Tale is most often labelled 'feminist dystopian'. I intend to callinto question the use of this title here, for the way in which it has been employed to place Atwood's novelagainst the mainstream of fiction, conveniently reading the location and label as marginalizing.Marginalization then becomes construed as having the function of undermining the subversive effects of thetext. In what follows, I will suggest some alternative readings of location, which offer the possibility ofserious challenges to mainstream thought from places other than from the conventional centres of power.

Her latest collection of new poetry, Interlunar, contains poems whose narrators speak from locations whichfind echoes in the setting of The Handmaid's Tale. They are voices that have been given to them, voiceswhich aim to discover precisely where they have been put, voices which protest against the order which hasthis locational power over them. The voices in the poetry are nearly all weakened however, by disease, death,

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despair. The Handmaid's Tale is offered as a prediction of the future only if its warnings against oppressivecentral powers to mute protest are ignored. The world of Gilead is not quite an inevitable destiny. This kind ofhope is not offered by the poetry of Interlunar. 'Letter From The House Of Questions' is not like the talewhich has fortunately survived as proof that in some small, though ambiguous way, a protest has beenregistered. Instead it begins with a sense of its own inevitable annihilation:

Everything about me is broken. Even my fingers, forming these words in the dust a bootprint will wipe out by morning, even these words.

Atwood has used a different writing genre or generic style for three of her most recent publications, then:poetry, 'feminist dystopian' novel and almost realist novel (since the bizarre or fantastic is never entirelymissing from Atwood's work). I want to explore in this paper some of the connections between texts usingdifferent kinds of genre, of which Atwood makes use in her later writing: the speculative fiction andautobiographical confession of The Handmaid's Tale, the retrospective first person speaker of Cat's Eye andthe less assertive narrational voices in the poetry of Interlunar. This study is an attempt to discover whetherAtwood's work offers hope for feminist fiction in the future, whether it can challenge the position offered to itby the literary mainstream or whether its words in the dust will be obliterated by a savage bootprint.

Putting Margaret Atwood's name on a feminist agenda immediately causes problems. In refusing to overtlyalign herself with the women's movement, Atwood has been seen as a reactionary artist, separating her artfrom her politics and undermining feminist solidarity. This latter perceived fracturing of sisterhood has beenwelcomed by masculist critics, who see any kind of criticism and internal political division into factions asdestructive wrangling or bitching. Pro-feminist critics have also begun to reject Atwood's work as a result ofher apparent distance, despite the fact that her textual concerns are very relevant to many issues discussed as'feminist', irrespective of her personal declarations of non-alignment to specific feminist groups.

The agenda of 'feminist (?) futures (?)', the reason for all the question marks relating to Atwood's work,converges for me at a much debated current critical problem. The questions meet at a spot marked by a 'post'.Does Atwood's writing exemplify postfeminism, postmodernism or postmodernist feminism? In what waysare these critical, political and chronological categories useful in reading her later fiction and in what waysdoes her writing help us better articulate these positions?

The post stands at a crossroads, as a sign pointing the (literary and critical) directions. The post marks onespot, its own stable site where it is embedded in concrete, but being a directional indicator, it is clearlyattempting to order and to ease the transit of others, who look to it to learn where they are, where they havebeen and where they are going. Perhaps one of the biggest questions relating to the post is the one of whoerects such a solid, stable, privileged signifier. For He who attaches the sign (and I use He advisedly) is thestyle merchant of today, the director of what is central and therefore of what is marginal. The presence of thepost is a sign of the cultural times (just like fashion designer labels, it is a marker of who is in and who is out).The post is tagged to descriptions to indicate the contemporaneity of the signified. Postmodernism,Postfeminism and the like are titles which tell us the time.

But the chronological issue of the post is a vexing one, for it is a prefix which in addition to marking what isin vogue, what is current and up to date, is an attachment which also indicates time passing, and politicsprogressing beyond their starting points. As I read it, then, the post may seem static and upright, but in fact itis a moment of utter uncertainty. It relates at once to several planes of history, offering both a relevantconnection with the movement from which it has evolved but also a distinction from those origins. The post isalso generally an attachment which appears to offer some kind of engagement with current critical theory, a

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warning triangle—'Caution. Theory Ahead!'—or the post can even turn out to be a sign which points to readerin a misleading direction.

Elaine Risley, the narrator of Cat's Eye, comments upon the post problem with some bitterness. Afterprocrastinating as far as possible, she finally enters the feminist art gallery where her retrospective collectionis to be shown. She comments with irritation:

I don't give a glance to what's still on the walls. I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greensand putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we're all just afootnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

Elaine Risley firmly rejects any attempt to make her a member of a post movement because she equates thepost with the past. Elaine Risley distinguishes between the past, as something which is dated andirrecoverably lost, and history, which is a subjective reconstruction influenced by elements of that past, butwhich is by no means the same thing. But for her the post marks not a position in an historical continuum butrather a radical break in genre, style and politics. According to the formulation of Elaine Risley here, the postbecomes a sign that the past is no longer a relevant or fashionable referent. Elaine Risley wants her paintingsto be current, which is why she has such ambivalent feelings about the retrospective exhibition ('first theretrospective, then the morgue' she comments). But she wants to be current on her own terms, not in postterms. 'Language is leaving me behind', she says, which is precisely what she believes the action of the postprefix to be. To have her work termed postfeminist appears to Elaine Risley to specifically date her feminism,and thereby make it outdated. This post categorization process appears to make her feminism 'past it' whenshe still sees it as necessary and relevant. As Margaret Atwood herself says in an introduction to The EdibleWoman:

The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved and those who claim we're livingin a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.

The Handmaid's Tale confronts the issue of postfeminism in a different way from Cat's Eye, by having thenarrator speak from a time when postfeminism is no longer meaningful because the feminist precedent has allbut been eradicated in a way that Elaine Risley fears might happen as a result of it being posted. References topreceding political, historical and artistic movements are still meaningful in all these discourses in ElaineRisley's era despite her fears that dating processes are used to relegate the past rather than make reference toit. The catalogue for her exhibition, for example, describes one of the paintings as:

A jeu d'esprit … which takes on the Group of Seven and reconstructs their vision oflandscape in the light of contemporary experiment and post-modern pastiche.

The post prefix can no longer be attached to politics, art or history in The Handmaid's Tale in the way it isused in Cat's Eye because there is no official recognition of any preceding movements. There has been anattempt to erase awareness of a multiple and subjective past through the institution of a single, approvedversion of history. Gilead orthodoxy replaces various perspectives on the past which are accessible onlythrough different histories by equating its one history with the past; this history is appointed to give access towhat it propagates as the only true past which, this orthodoxy says, is to be disowned because of its corruptionand dissolution. The only acceptable reality in Gilead is the present. Fantasy and memory (the personal,subjective stories confessed by the narrator) do not conform to this orthodoxy—they challenge the singlehistorical canon which purports to tell the past as it really was. Fantasy and memory are consequently the verystrategies which the narrator uses as part of her resistance of contemporaneity, erupting through the Gileadperiod in the regular 'Night' episodes that haunt the novel with the narrator's consciously reconstructed, or herunconscious/dream worked personal history.

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Like Elaine Risley's rejection of the post label, like the unconventional narrator of the tale, the Handmaidherself, who keeps at least one of her identities secret, The Handmaid's Tale similarly resists labels thatposition it within a particular generic stream. The maintenance of a covert or multiple identity is shown in thenovel to be part of a policy of subversion of the dominant, as I shall discuss later. The projection of the novelinto the 22nd century, then, the intervals of fantasy and nightmare, the shifts in temporal position, thenarratorial insistence that the text is just one version of a story that can be told in different ways by otherpeople, the multiple examples of women's communities with their different (and sometimes oppositional)political struggles, the perspective given by the final chapter that what we grasp as a single text is in fact areassembled transcription from a surviving jumble of cassette recordings: through all these strategies the novelconstantly reiterates its uncertain, problematic relationship with the concept of a single reality, one identity, atruthful history as propagated by both the political orthodoxy of Gilead and by much of literary criticismtoday.

There are four levels of narrative time in The Handmaid's Tale:

1) The pre-Revolution past, characterized by the narrator's memories of her childhood withher mother, her student days with Moira, her memories of her daughter and her relationshipwith Luke.

2) The period of the Revolution itself, and the time immediately subsequent to that, includingthe time spent training at the Red Centre.

3) The main narrative time, Gileadean time. It is this narratorial period that is interrupted bythe dream sequences. The Gileadean present is what the narrator is telling her tale about,although the events of this present are still retold as past occurrences, narrated retrospectivelyon to cassette tape, a fact of which we are informed at the final textual time level.

4) The time of the 'present' (our future?), the period of the Symposium of GileadeanStudies—25 June 2195.

Apart from these textual times there is the question of the reader's own temporal context for the novel, herown recognition of events in the text and the placement of them within her own time scheme. For instance,some of the pre-Revolution period accounts of the novel deal with the narrator's mother's involvement in thewomen's movement of the late 1960s and the narrator's somewhat reactionary response to her mother'smilitancy. The narrator recalls witnessing the ritualistic burning of pornographic publications, for example,and she remembers the return of angry and injured women from abortion demonstrations. This is an inclusionof what can be seen as 'real history' or rather, what is sometimes called 'faction': a fictionalization orgeneralized account of real occurrences. This is what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction. Theproblem which I think this novel addresses is whether historical accounts can ever be more than 'faction'. Thenovel suggests that the privileging of history, notably in the form of 'authentic' first person narrative accountsof the past, as something more truthful and accurate than faction, is fallacious. The narrator insists that the taleshe is telling is a 'reconstruction' which is always going to be at some level inaccurate, partial, incomplete,because it is retrospective and told by only one voice. But she suggests that this 'factitious' status, neitherwholly fact nor complete fiction, is something that her story has in common with other historiographicmetanarratives.

The novel operates on friction between narrative and theory, and between fiction and history. The story beingtold is one which comes from the personal experience of the narrating subject, although she does make use ofstories told to her by others from their own lives. This first person confessional I rubs uneasily against theperspective provided by the viewing eyes of the academics which only cross the reader's field of vision at theconclusion of the novel. These organizing theoretical and editorial intrusions establish the text and

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'establishmentarize' it. They drag the underground into the open, making public the story the Handmaidwanted to tell but they also attempt to uncover her secrets, trying to signpost her identity, giving her tale astable location and thereby diffuse any resistance it might otherwise provide against the single authoritative,authentic history.

The preserved tapes on which The Handmaid's Tale is supposedly recorded can be viewed as vital records ofthe past, primary sources, a woman's voice speaking from a time when she should have been silent. Thenarration, because of its historical context, has become (like the scrabble game she plays) an act of subversionand rebellion. There is a level at which certain groups positioned within the women's studies category believein these kind of recovered sources as challenges to a mainstream, canonical and patriarchal version of the past.But the narrative also consumes the past as it represents it, rewriting history by itself as its own fictionalnarrative, not The One Truth, but story, as the narrator insists.

The narrator's story is, on one level, a subversive act, because of the time in which she lived. She lives in adystopian time when there is a patriarchal state domination of information. To withhold information, or tospread unauthorized material, is an act of treason for which the punishments are brutal and public. Thenarrator keeps a secret of her own name apart from the patronymic 'Of/fred'. Keeping this private knowledgeforges a link with the past, but it is also an act of defiance, as the narrator is proving, at least to herself, thatsecrets can still be kept.

The private name has the same defiant linguistic pleasure for the narrator as her discovery of another piece ofwomen's history. The carved incantation found in the bottom of her wardrobe, the pig latin joke 'Nolite tebastardes carborundorum' (don't let the bastards grind you down) is an example of women's history, literallystaying in the closet. Women's history is as illicit in Gilead as homosexuality now, made subject to acts ofsuppression, under a similarly fearful state. The carving is a sign of the power of the secret in a time ofoppression for the narrator, but the non-classically educated narrator has to ask the Commander for atranslation of the coded message left by the previous Handmaid as a legacy to her follower.

The past is being reproduced at one level as a subversive act, but it is not a reproduction that is free of thedetermining factors of the prevailing ideology. Pig latin is a boy's school joke at the expense of classicalteaching methods, but is a joke made from within the boys' school and interpretable only by the same classicalscholars. Similarly, the recovery of the Handmaid's narrative by an academic institution in the 22nd century,the placing of the narrative in a literary continuum with Chaucer and all that that implies about a static canon,means that an act of feminist subversion has become part of the establishment. Elaine Risley is able to beself-conscious about this recuperation of her work since it happens in her own lifetime, and her comments arenot without ambivalence:

My career is why I'm here, on this futon, under this duvet. I'm having a retrospective, myfirst. The name of the gallery is Sub-Versions, one of those puns that used to delight mebefore they became so fashionable. I ought to be pleased by this retrospective, but myfeelings are mixed; I don't like admitting I'm old enough and established enough to have sucha thing, even at an alternative gallery run by a bunch of women. I find it improbable, andominous: first the retrospective, then the morgue. But also I'm cheesed off because the ArtGallery of Ontario wouldn't do it. Their bias is toward dead foreign men.

Elaine Risley recognizes that she has become part of the feminist establishment, but she is still not takenseriously by the national art scene; that scene is still, as Atwood eloquently puts it, occupied by 'dead foreignmen'.

Successful resistance for Elaine Risley depends upon standards of success set by her own culture and forRisley this means widespread, establishment recognition of her art. Risley's rebellion is public resistance to

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trends set both by the establishment and the 'alternatives' including mainstream feminism. For the narrator ofThe Handmaid's Tale resistance, if it is to be survived, has to remain underground. In the narrator's past, lackof public resistance was in part a result of her apathy. She writes:

Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whateveris going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it… The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful,we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were toomelodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at theedges of the print. It gave us more freedom.

We lived in the gaps between the stories.

The gaps between the stories told in black print can, despite their apparent blankness be read in a number ofways. They are not necessarily invisible to the reading eye (nor to the disciplinary one). The gaps are for thenarrator in her earlier, pre-Revolution life, acquiescences to 'the usual', representing ways of surviving in anoppressive patriarchal state, where it is easier to keep a low profile than to draw attention to the way in which'the usual' is formed according to gender.

Another way of reading the white spaces is to view them as being essential to the black print, a contrast whichthe human eye requires before it can recognize shapes and signs to read. Christopher Dewdney explains thislucidly in his Immaculate Perception in a section called 'Edge Features', and he also goes some way toshowing here how the post can be used to illuminate and refer to the past, rather than just annihilating it:

Our vision relies on discontinuity and change. It seems the majority of neural processing inthe striate cortex consists of an analysis of edge-features. An object is perceived by its edges,the relationship of discontinuous lines. All written languages are the abstraction anddistillation of only the essential edge-features necessary to perceive the form on whichmeaning is concomitant.

The black print never acknowledges its dependence on the white spaces with which it is discontinuous andthereby made perceptible. The consciousness has not been taught to focus on the white page against which theblack letters are defined, and it is the print which is given the privileged attention as the unusual, thesignificant, not 'the usual' background.

The Handmaid is obliged to occupy the white space, and to live as usual. She can make this 'as usual' morethan superficial by acquiescing completely, as Janine appears to do, at least initially, transforming herself intoa semitransparent blur (like 'raw egg-white',), to which no one pays attention. The narrator can, alternativelymaintain only the superficial whiteness and have her own black spaces, her positive side. These do notchallenge the orthodox centre page print; there is no question of their publication at that time. For the narratorin Gilead, the significances consist in the blackness of the 'Night' sequences which are as contrasts to thepresent white spaces in which she is supposed to invisibly subsist. By giving prominence to recollection of thesubjective experience of the past, particularly as a private, illicit act, the narrator has found a way of providingGilead with edge features.

The fantasy dream and memory of the 'Night' and the illicit relationship with Nick are the Handmaid's versionof black print which has to remain invisible, whitewashed, at least while she is in Gilead. Finally, she goes the

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closest she can to taking over the black print and turning it to her own uses, by narrating her story in a formwhich clearly is intended to preserve it for others, although which others can never be known. But, of course,in this novel which is ever aware of determining power systems and the impossibility of escape from them,the controllers of the black print eventually take centre page. The mainstream academicians are the ones whotranscribe, who organize, edit and publish the Handmaid's tale, and therefore relocate it firmly within theblack print, once again neglecting the white ground.

I will reintroduce the post at this point. Up to now, the post has been discussed both as a signifier ofchronological location—the prefix that indicates temporal movement away from origins—and it has also beendiscussed as the sign of the contemporary. The post has been seen, and feared (by Elaine Risley) as a markerof discontinuity and change, making the break with the past into a sign of fashion: the post as the designerlabel. In The Handmaid's Tale the character of Aunt Lydia is said to have a fondness for the either/or; that is,she cannot see the black print and the white spaces at the same time. In tune with Gilead orthodoxy, she wouldsee the presence of the past as a threat to current stability, except that her either/or mentality enables her todeny that any vestige or reconstruction of a past remains. For Aunt Lydia there is only now.

The either/or viewpoint can be shown to be a fallacious one. The fusion of meanings into the word 'faction'shows that simple either/or divisions fail to operate at any linguistic or political level. The Handmaid's Taleitself proves the existence of a blend of what is considered historical fact and what is thought to be sciencefiction. The division of kinds of feminists into different political groups in the novel offers the possibility offeminist political, as well as literary, factions which are neither destructive bitchy squabbles nor pluralistutopias. I want to suggest that Dewdney's term 'edge-feature' is appropriate to the post because it functions asa marker of discontinuity and change, but one which illuminates the interdependence of the either/or, ratherthan insisting on the mutual exclusion of one term by the other.

A poem from Interlunar which recalls the quality of horror in some of the sequences from The Handmaid'sTale is 'No Name', and it comments upon a moment of stasis between dream and reality, between life anddeath, a transition point where there is no firm post to cling to. The scene described in the poem is in anightmare setting, a moment where the relationship and power between the man and the narrator, againstwhose door he is bleeding, is not established and is entirely uncertain:

He is a man in the act of vanishing one way or another. He wants you to let him in. He is like the soul of a dead lover, come back to the surface of the earth because he did not have enough of it and is still hungry but he is far from dead. Though the hair lifts on your arms and cold air flows over your threshold from him, you have never seen anyone so alive.

This man corpse returns with a powerful grip on the narrator, with his 'Please / In any language'. The hauntingof the narrator in the poem is like those moments of the narrator's past that re-occur in The Handmaid's Tale.They have a narrative power over her, stories which demand to be told. She prefaces certain sections of thetale with the reluctant 'I don't want to be telling this', but somehow the narrator appreciates the necessity forher history to be recorded. 'No Name' ends with the same suspended moment with which it begins, a poem ofnon-progression:

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Your door is either half open or half closed. It stays that way and you cannot wake.

In the poem a third position of stasis results from failing to occupy either one position, that offered by thefully open door, or another, that provided by the fully closed door. The narrator is locked into her dreamlikestate apparently because she has refused the either/or. The half-open/half-closed state becomes just a thirdfixed term. But there is a fourth, more mutable condition where all the positions are potentially ones that canbe taken, or even all occupied at once. In the poem the narrator is locked into a dream, in the novel she islocked into a nightmarish dystopic world from which dreams are sometimes an escape, sometimes a torture. Inboth novel and the poem there is a tangential location which is implicit, an alternative to the fixed either/orchoices, but both texts arrive finally at the rigid third term. The choice ultimately appears to be between thewhite space, the black print, or the stasis of indecision. The option of recognition of the fourth 'edge-feature'does not appear as a possibility.

The Handmaids themselves are supposed to have, like the poem, 'no name', no stability. This is to make theminterchangeable and replaceable. The stable, pre-Revolution name to which Offred attaches herself secretivelyis the name that the 22nd century academic researchers really require in their belief that it will give them notjust another history but a fully open door to a single, retrievable past. Their attempts to discover the narrator'ssecret go precisely against the attempts of the Handmaid herself to preserve this one aspect of her private bodyand her private past in the face of the violations of freedom being perpetrated in the state of Gilead. The stateof Gilead has removed the mythical private family unit and this is nowhere more obvious than in the figure ofthe Handmaid herself, announcing her function in her red robes. The sexual act is transformed from thecontainment of the nuclear family in the pre-Revolution, when two metaphorically fused to form one, into amultiple fission of the familial unit, with the Handmaid standing for the wife, but precisely positioning herselfin between the wife and the Commander as a rupture in the once traditional coupling. Unfortunately, thepotential of this rupture of the private unit to deconstruct the power and hierarchy of the monogamouspatriarchal family is not realized. Rather, the intervening Handmaid simply reinforces the ties that bind theCommander and the wife. The Handmaid's role is subordinate to that of the privileged couple, and she is anitem in the male-controlled chain of trade in women.

The biological division of power in The Handmaid's Tale, then, accordingly not only to gender but alsofertility, is another symptom of what Aunt Lydia is fond of, the either/or. Gender ambiguity, bisexuality orplurality of sexuality are impossibilities in Gilead. The signposts are on the genitalia. The narrator isconsistent in her attempt to undermine the division into the two gendered posts which keeps her attached tothe powerless and subordinate half of the binary. One of the ways in which she does this is with the repeatedmotif: 'context is all'. The shock of the old, the specifically dated in the modern environment—for instance,the fashions in the Vogue magazine, the ridiculous garments retrieved for use in Jezebel's—prompts the veryimportant recognition that versions of normality are not static. Elaine Risley, in a world whose versions offemininity are more contradictory and complex than those of Gilead, although by no means unrelated, ofcourse, walks up to a drunk bag-lady on the street. The incident provides Elaine with a review of the languageof gender and power:

When I get up even, I see that this person is a woman. She's lying on her back, staring straightat me. 'Lady', she says. 'Lady, Lady.' That word has been through a lot. Noble lady, DarkLady, she's a real lady, old-lady lace, Listen lady, Hey lady watch where you're going, Ladiesroom, run through with lipstick and replaced with women. But still the final word of appeal.If you want something very badly you do not say Woman, Woman, you say Lady, Lady.

The sign on the door of the toilet is run through with lipstick but the writing underneath can still be seen. Thesubstitution of 'women' for 'ladies' as acceptable terminology does not mean that 'ladies' and all its baggage of

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meaning is eradicated, as the bag-lady is there to indicate with her plea. As Elaine Risley says at the beginningof the novel:

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space … I began then to think oftime as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, onelaid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water.Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

The selective process of recovery of the past in The Handmaid's Tale is used as a characterization device forthe narrator and it also becomes a damning indictment of the Gilead state organization. The commander isconstructed as living in the past, with 'old-fashioned values', although in a less conscious way than thenarrator, who actively reconstructs her past for herself as a political and personal survival tactic. TheCommander takes Offred to a Disneyland version of a brothel, nicknamed Jezebel's by the women who workthere. All the prostitutes have to wear sequinned, low-cut, frivolous attire that has been salvaged from thepast: bunny-girl outfits, swimming costumes, frilly lingerie. The narrator recalls:

'It's like walking into the past,' says the Commander. His voice sounds pleased, delightedeven. 'Don't you think?'

I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I'm not sure, now. I know it contained thesethings, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

Of all things the Gileadean statesmen could choose to replicate out of the past, these men choose prostitution.The sanctioned prostitution and surrogacy of the Handmaid system has its roots in the practices of many erasand cultures, but Jezebel's recreates a trade of sexual illegitimacy, a parody of sexual relations from theimmediately pre-Revolution past. The narrator emphasizes the 'inauthenticity' of her mental reconstructions ofthe past in her stories. But the construction behind the Gilead system appears to believe in the annihilation ofthe Utopian 1960s permissiveness, and a replacement of the failed fabricated world from that era by a 'natural'system, the return to the 'usual' which means a system based on female subordination, with women as items ina complex scheme of ownership and reproduction.

The tale telling functions as a reassurance of the existence of the past, that things were different once. Theneed to juxtapose past and present is a desire for perspective, looking down through the waters of time ratherthan along the line as Elaine Risley sees it, reading the sign underneath the lipstick scoring. The Handmaidsays:

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement ofshapes on a flat surface … Otherwise, you live in the moment. Which is not where I want tobe.

The perspective is provided by the white background to counteract the black print which fixes the subject inthe moment. The subject needs to be able to see the frame, to be conscious that the arrangement of shapes on aflat surface is precisely that. Therefore there is an arranging subject in addition to an arranged one. Thechange of perspective is provided for the reader as much by the science fiction style of the novel and its futuredystopian setting as by the narrator's recounting of her past. The shift in time-scales in the novel is part of itsemphasis on avoiding complacency, of avoiding the danger of accepting the present moment as usual when atanother point in time its standards would have been rejected as appalling or horrific. The dystopian genre andtemporal shifts are ways of drawing attention to the frame, the arrangers, and the white space and flat surfaceswhich make perception of the signs and shapes possible.

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The Handmaid's Tale demonstrates the juxtaposition of past standards of normality with present 'usualness'and within this, the function of some kind of historical evidence to jog the memory into recognition of change.As the narrator reminds us: 'Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiledto death before you knew it'.' In the 'Night' episodes of the novel, the narrator explains how she claims spacefor her thoughts, and more particularly for her past as a way of judging the temperature of the water. Sherecalls her mother urging her out of complacency, her mother's nagging insistence on the importance of thehistory of the women's movement, a selective version of the past:

You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had to gothrough, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you knowhow many women's bodies the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?

It is the 'Night' episodes of the novel, significantly, in which these stories from the past emerge. In thedaylight, under the scrutiny of the Eyes, the narrator's recollection of the past puts her at risk. 'Night' becomesa definite, positive location from which to articulate resistance to the status quo, provided by the structuralorganization of the novel, interspersed as it is with these sequences which challenge the narrative of thepresent. Of course, Atwood does not allow this imposed structural division to go without examination. Thereis emphasis on the necessity of drawing attention to the frame throughout the novel and the final chapter,which claims to have organized the material in the tale, reincorporates into the academy what has up to thispoint been seen as a disruptive narrative strategy. But this demonstrates the impossibility of a clear divisionbetween the light and dark, the mainstream and the subversive, the inoperative 'either/or', something suggestedalso by the title poem from Interlunar:

The lake, vast and dimensionless, doubles everything, the stars, the boulders, itself, even the darkness that you can walk so long in it becomes light.

The post as a chronological locator does not mean that its terms are divided off from the theories of literaturethat came before or that are to follow. The post does not give privilege to the prior theories either. Rather, itinsists on recalling them and partially incorporating them within the present. The post does mark out the polesbetween which meanings shuffle, but the movement is not necessarily between only two signposts, and themovement can be back and forth: the post does not mark the entrance to a one-way street. 'The lake' is 'vastand dimensionless' as the poem says. The posts are used to mark out sections within it, making their ownpatterns and boundaries. Even this marking out of areas for concern does not prevent the darkness fromturning into light, or the light from fading into dark. What this means for the future is uncertain, as thenarrator of The Handmaid's Tale concludes:

Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myselfover into the hands of strangers, because it can't be helped.

And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.

The compromise that 'can't be helped' is the relinquishing of privacy and the safe white spaces away fromprint, the giving of oneself into the hands of strangers through telling a story. The most recent of ElaineRisley's paintings in Cat's Eye is a similar recognition of the risks of constructing a central subject, anarratorial I (or 'an oversized cat's eye marble'). The adoption of another genre, another way of telling a storyin Atwood's latest novel, that is the paintings put into words: these provide another perspective on thepositioning of a public subject, a subject which is both an attempt to resist the mainstream but also requiresrecognition provided by convention in order to achieve an effect. The frames can be stretched: Elaine Risley's

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latest painting, 'Unified Field Theory', is 'vertical oblong, larger than the other paintings'; The Handmaid'sTale is dystopian fiction, but also historiographic metafiction with a confessional journal-style first personnarrator. The single identifiable generic frame is stretched to include as many different writing strategies aspossible within its construction. But the story once in print or paint, as both novels' narrators accept, is notunder the subject's control. Elaine Risley says, whilst looking around her exhibition:

I walk the room, surrounded by the time I've made; which is not a place, which is only a blur,the moving edge we live in; which is fluid, which turns back on itself, like a wave. I may havethought I was preserving something from time, salvaging something; like all those painters,centuries ago, who thought they were bringing Heaven to earth, the revelation of God, theeternal stars, only to have their slabs of wood and plaster stolen, mislaid, burnt, hacked topieces, destroyed by rot and mildew.

A leaky ceiling, a match and some kerosine would finish all this off. Why does this thoughtpresent itself to me, not as a fear, but as a temptation?

Because I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energythey have came out of me. I'm what's left over.

Elaine Risley lives to see how her work takes off without her, how it changes with each additional postattached to it, framing it, mildewing it. The Handmaid's Tale survives in a form as battered as those paintingsof centuries ago. Interlunar is a reminder to pay attention to the lighting, to the way it colours and changesshapes, the way everything can be doubled in the reflection of that vast and dimensionless lake or elseobscured and submerged without trace.

Criticism: Peter Kemp (review date 6 November 1992)

SOURCE: "The Atwood Variations," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4675, November 6, 1992, p. 20.

[In the following review, Kemp praises Good Bones as a "sample-case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonictalents."]

Pocket-sized and with sturdy covers, Good Bones looks a bit like a sketchbook in which an artist might jotcaricatures, cartoons, preliminary studies, trial pieces and quick little exercises in catching the essence of asubject or delineating it from unusual angles. The miscellany with which Margaret Atwood fills its pages is, infact, a writer's equivalent of this: a collection of lively verbal doodlings, smartly dashed off vignettes andimages that are inventively enlarged, titled, turned upside down. Playing with the conventions of her narrativecraft is a frequent pastime. Fiction's motives and motifs are outlined with witty flourish.

"Bad News", the opening piece, is a fantasia about the appeal of disaster tales. It's followed by a monologue inwhich The Little Red Hen, clucking with indignation, retells the story of her thrifty response to the grain ofwheat as a cautionary tale of put-upon domesticity. Elsewhere, Gertrude gives her version of what happens inHamlet, and an Ugly Sister and a Wicked Stepmother put in a good word for themselves. Political correctnessis lampooned in "There Was Once", as the reciting of a standard fairy-tale gets subverted by progressiveemendations and bowdlerizings. With sly funniness, a litany, "Let Us Now Praise Stupid Women", listseverything fiction owes to unwise females. As it catalogues the contributions to literature of "The Muse asFluffball", aspects of genres like the fairy-story or the Gothic tale are captured in thumbnail sketches ofimpressionistic brio: "trapped inside the white pages, she can't hear us, and goes prancing and warbling andlolloping innocently towards her doom … incest-minded stepfathers chase her through ruined cloisters, whereshe's been lured by ruses too transparent to fool a gerbil."

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In other places, Atwood's pen prods verbal raw material around to see what it turns into in differing contexts.Three brief stories each incorporate, in the order they occur in the verse, the words of a stanza from JohnMcCrae's "In Flanders Fields the Poppies Blow". The title work, which ends the book, is a series of virtuosovariations on the phrase, "good bones", using changing connotations—fine bone structure, hallowed relics,strong bones—to chronicle the phases of a life.

In its weird poeticizing of physiology, that piece is typical of many in the book (as well as some of the mosthaunting passages in Atwood's novels). Bodily life, male and female, is inspected with jaunty acumen, and acool eye is sent playing over its representations in fiction, sculpture and painting. These sections often call tomind that Atwood's father was an entomologist. Her stance in them sometimes jokily emulates scientificdistance and dispassion, though her spoof zoologies of the human being and its gender habits soon mutate intosequences of gaudy, ingenious metaphor.

"No freak show can hold a candle to my father expounding Nature", Atwood wrote in an autobiographicalessay in Bluebeard's Egg. In Good Bones to achieve and heighten a similar sense of the extraordinary, avantage-point much favoured is that of the extra-terrestrial. "Homelanding" acquaints the inhabitants ofanother world with the behaviour-patterns peculiar to Earth's "prong people" and "cavern people". In"Cold-Blooded", extra-planetary lepidoptera observe the activities of the "blood creatures" so surprisinglydominant on Earth, and note crude resemblances to their own patterns of pupation and metamorphosis: "Atsome indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or woodencocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state,which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings."

Death isn't the only phenomenon to receive this Martian treatment. One piece, "Alien Territory", narrates theevents of birth in terms of an adventure tale. Another turns the travelling of sperms towards an ovum into ascience-fiction epic: "the mission becomes a race which only one may win, as, ahead of them, vast andluminous, the longed-for, the loved planet swims into view…."

Some of these flights of fantasy float away into buoyant humour. Gravity holds others closer to such globalconcerns as over-population, war and ecological catastrophe. As in Atwood's novels, the pervading style isfluently accomplished, fluctuating between amusement and seriousness, allowing mockery to meld affectinglyinto poetry: a meditation on bats moves with easy skill, for instance, from exuberant burlesque of the Draculamyth—"O flying leukaemia, in your cloak like a living umbrella"—to tender, exact evocation of the mammals"dank lazy half-sleep of daytime, with bodies rounded and soft as furred plums … the mothers licking the tinyamazed faces of the newborn". Mingling the incisive and the colourful, Good Bones makes a marvellousminiature sample-case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonic talents.

Criticism: Nathalie Cooke (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: "Reading Reflections: The Autobiographical Illusion in Cat's Eye," in Essays on Life Writing:From Genre to Critical Practice, edited by Marlene Kadar, University of Toronto Press, 1992, pp. 162-70.

[In the following essay, Cooke explores Atwood's use of a fictional protagonist and an autobiographical formin Cat's Eye.]

I have been told by friends, relatives, colleagues, and teachers—in fact, by everyone I know who has readit—that Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye is 'more autobiographical than her other books.' And, of course, they areright. It is more autobiographical—or, anyway, it is more obviously about self-representation—than her otherbooks. But it is autobiographical in the same way that Lady Oracle is gothic: it speaks to the form as much asit speaks from or within it.

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The fascinating part about all this is that those experienced readers who would be embarrassed to classifyLady Oracle as just another costume gothic, or Surfacing as a simple unironic quest narrative, are the verysame readers who seem to dismiss this novel by describing it as 'autobiographical.' They have been fooled byAtwood—yes—but also by the literary conventions she is exploring in this novel, those of autobiographyitself. Most important, they have been fooled into looking at the autobiographical illusion that Atwoodcreates, and into overlooking the deft sleight of hand involved in its creation.

My argument is that autobiography is not so much a generic category as it is a literary strategy. Atwood'sreaders must do more than classify Cat's Eye in terms of autobiography; they must focus their attention on theway autobiography is used in the novel. Accordingly, the emphasis of my discussion of the autobiographicalelements in Cat's Eye lies more on Atwood's artistry than on the links between Atwood's life and her art.

I am choosing my terms carefully because as critics have come to question their confidence in the'referentiality of language' and the 'authenticity of the self' they have become increasingly uncomfortableabout classifying autobiography at all, particularly about differentiating between autobiography, on the onehand, and fictional autobiography, on the other. After all, the project of categorizing various kinds ofautobiographical writing places limits on a form that seeks to challenge limits—those between expression andexperience, in particular. Northrop Frye, for example, traces autobiography back to 'a creative, and thereforefictional' impulse. And Paul Jay argues that 'the attempt to differentiate between autobiography and fictionalautobiography is finally pointless. For if by "fictional" we mean "made up," "created," or"imagined"—something, that is, which is literary and not "real"—then we have merely defined the ontologicalstatus of any text, autobiographical or not.' However, by conflating forms of autobiography and fiction, Jayignores the invitation that autobiographical fiction sends to its readers, to be read as both fiction andnonfiction—at the same time. Readers of autobiographical fiction, that is, are asked to read with a kind ofdouble vision. I am by no means suggesting that such writing is any less fictional than fiction itself, just thatwe are invited to believe it might be. Herein, to my mind, lies all the difference.

What reason do we have to identify autobiographical elements as distinguised from fictional ones? I think wesuspect that autobiography reads differently from fiction. Before we open the cover, for example, we findourselves wanting to know whether a book is fiction or non-fiction. To be sure, when we say that a work isautobiographical we suggest that it has a claim to truth. This is why, as Alice Munro attests, those whoclassify a work as autobiographical go on to comment on its validity, and its author's 'good faith' or 'honesty.'In spite of ourselves, then, we readers check to see what shelf a book is on in the library; we read the dustjacket; we watch for markers within the text.

When we do these things with Cat's Eye we find quite a bit of evidence to suggest that it is autobiographical.Briefly, it is a first-person narratives about an artist who sanctions autobiographical readings of her own work.Then there is Margaret Atwood's dust-jacket biography that bears striking resemblances to the events ofElaine's narrative: the entomologist father, the brother, the summers in the countryside, the Torontochildhood, to name only a few things. Further, some of the episodes in Elaine's life cannot help but remind usof episodes in the lives of her fictional sisters. Take that Toronto ravine, for instance. It haunts Joan of LadyOracle just as it haunts Elaine. And, by now, it has made a deep and lasting impression on all of Atwood'sreaders.

Ironically, too, Atwood's disclaimer only makes us focus our attention on the autobiographical elementswithin the novel. 'This is a work of fiction,' she tells us. 'Although its form is that of an autobiography, it is notone.' But we all know enough not to take Atwood's comments at face value, so we pursue the issue. In whatway does Cat's Eye have the form of an autobiography? In what way is it fiction? Can we not assume that theincidents in Cat's Eye, as well as the first-person narrator, are grounded in Atwood's own life? I think we can;but how does that help us?

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One answer is that Cat's Eye is both fiction and autobiography: a 'fictive autobiography,' to coin my ownterm, an autobiography composed by a fictional protagonist, which draws attention to its own problematicalstatus as a fictive construct. As a result, we expect more from this book, and from Atwood herself:entertainment and honesty, craft and good faith. But that does not solve the problem. It is not enough for meto classify this as a fictive autobiography (as I have), as autobiography, as fiction, or, as Douglas Gloverwrites in his review (for Books in Canada), Atwood playing 'hide-and-seek at the place where autobiographyand fiction meet, always ensuring there is a back door open for quick escapes.' More important than our tryingto define Cat's Eye in relation to those two terms, fiction and autobiography, is our exploring the implicationsof Atwood's challenging us to try.

That is, Atwood is deliberately using the autobiographical form in her fiction. But why? I can think of at leastthree reasons for this: there are probably many more.

First, Atwood has always forced us to explore our assumptions as readers. When she writes, 'You fit into me /like a hook into an eye,' we are certain we understand the kind of relationship she is talking about: the solid,comfortable, close male-female kind. But then she makes us take another look. 'A fish hook,' she writes. 'Anopen eye' ('Epigraph,' Power Politics). What she is doing in Cat's Eye is an expanded version of this kind ofpulling-the-rug-out-from-under-us. By now, in this post-Saussurean, post-post-modern literary era, weprobably think that we can no longer be taken in by anything that has the ontological status of a literary text.However sophisticated we are as readers, though, we can all still be caught on the autobiographical hook. Wethink of ourselves as 'sophisticated readers,' after all, precisely because we enjoy reading; it satisfies aninsatiable curiosity, a desire to solve questions, to find things out. And autobiographical fiction offers the lureof a particular individual's answers (in good faith) to the questions that concern him or her.

Further, when the writer is a woman, the temptation to ignore the distance between the text and the eventsrepresented in it seems to be even greater. Women have long been credited with the dubious honour of bestbeing able to understand and communicate their emotions and personal experience. Mary Jacobus calls thisthe 'autobiographical "phallacy,"'—with a "ph"—'whereby male critics hold that women's writing is somehowcloser to experience than men's, that the female text is the author, or at any rate a dramatic extension of herunconsciousness.' But it is not only male critics who give credence to the 'autobiographical "phallacy"'; so toodo feminists. Sylvia Plath proudly proclaims that women have long been associated with the 'blood-hot andpersonal.' And as Molly Hite quite rightly notes, 'many of the Anglo-American feminist critics who beganwith the intent of doing justice to women's fiction as a chronicle of female experience seem to have foundthemselves in the process purveying an exaggerated theory of mimesis in which authors are simply mirroredin their own texts.'

In fine, when we read Cat's Eye we are drawn by the prospect of the author within the text, of finding outabout Atwood, or perhaps by having those stories we have heard about her confirmed, by her. It is not that thisbook is any less fictional than her others, but rather that the autobiographical elements in it suggest that itmight be.

Atwood knows this. She has recognized that autobiographical fiction, by its very definition, forces its readersto do a kind of double-take—the same kind of double-take she has always demanded for her readers. At firstglance, that is, generic classification seems to be a central issue. On closer inspection, however, it becomesapparent that this is no more than a red herring. When we read Cat's Eye, we are forced to redirect ourattention from Atwood's presence or absence in this seemingly autobiographical text to ourselves and, inparticular, to our assumptions about autobiographical fiction itself. This is indeed a book about self-reflection;and the reader's role is to reflect upon the various reflections of the self contained within it.

Another reason why Atwood uses the autobiographical in her fiction is that it provides one alternative to thenarrative closure that seems to make her so uncomfortable. Cause of much critical anxiety, you will

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remember, was the absence of closure in Atwood's novel Surfacing. Hiding silently at the end of the novel, thestill-unnamed protagonist is unable to move, let alone set about reintegrating herself into society. Theconclusion of Atwood's next novel, Lady Oracle, is still more unstable. Not only do we find out that a strangerhas probably recorded what we have so far taken to be Joan's first-hand account of her life, but we find thatJoan is unable to impose closure on the book she herself is writing. If closure is anywhere to be found in thisnovel, it is in the opening lines, where Joan describes the death she has orchestrated for herself. As soon as weread further, though, we find that this ending, like all closure within the novel, has been exploded. Otherendings are problematic as well: think of The Handmaid's Tale or The Edible Woman. Certainly, Atwoodresists the two endings frequently reserved for a novel's heroine: marriage or death. This limited option, asRachel Blau du Plessis has pointed out, is inadequate for any female writer. Instead, du Plessis argues, somewomen writers choose to 'write beyond' the traditional endings they inherit as a way of illustrating theirproblematic nature. And Atwood, in particular, has consistently shown her discomfort with narrativeconventions by 'unwriting' the novelistic forms she takes up—the quest in Surfacing, the gothic in LadyOracle, to name just two examples.

Of course, that Cat's Eye is a fictive autobiography would seem to eliminate the problem of closure: since thefuture is unclear to the autobiographer as well as to his or her audience, the ending of any autobiographicalwork is often ambiguous. And Cat's Eye is no exception in that the ending points to the limited nature ofhuman perception:

Now it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as was oncethought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, ofsomething that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light,shining out of the midst of nothing.

It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it's enough to see by.

But the autobiographical elements in Cat's Eye serve to challenge closure in a different way. As we recognizematerial from both Surfacing and Lady Oracle, we realize that Atwood draws upon and uses theautobiographical in these novels too. And surely, this is a way of forcing us to look beyond the text—to theunwritten world of Atwood's own experiences, perhaps, but certainly to other texts.

Finally, Atwood used the autobiographical as a tool in her ongoing challenge of classification, literary andotherwise. In her earlier novels, discomfort with rigid schemes of classification was voiced by the novel'sheroines. Joan Foster, for instance, fights against the gothic as it begins to encroach upon her life and her art,seeing herself as a kind of 'escape artist.' Offred, too, attempts to escape from the prison-house that her societyhas created around biblical words and phrases. And even such an early protagonist as the Surfacer isuncomfortable with the restrictions society imposes upon women. To be sure, by alerting us to the fact thatwomen in the Quebec countryside have no names, she emphasizes her—and yes, Atwood's—discomfort withnaming. Neither the Surfacer nor the protagonist of The Handmaid's Tale have names (although ConnieRooke argues very convincingly that she has discovered Offred's 'real' name). Generally, though, Offred iscalled 'The Handmaid' by the academics of the text and within it who piece together her story. And, as theysuggest, the name 'Offred' is itself only a 'patronymic, composed of the possessive preposition and the firstname of the gentleman in question.'

For an Atwood heroine, though, Elaine Risley seems curiously resigned to the ways in which she and her artare classified. When Charna, one of the capital 'f' feminists in the book, describes The Three Muses as 'herdisconcerting deconstruction of perceived gender and its relationship to perceived power, especially in respectto numinous imagery,' Risley agrees—up to a point. 'If I hold my breath and squint,' she says, 'I can see whereshe gets that.' As readers, though, we cannot help seeing that Charna's description of the painting isinadequate. It is not wrong, exactly; it is just limited. Because we see the paintings through Elaine's eyes, we

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are able to see more in them than feminist concerns.

What is happening, then, is that the heroine no longer has to battle against the hegemony of rigid classificationprecisely because the reader does it for her. Whereas, we readers are now very comfortable suggesting that theparodic elements in novels such as Surfacing, Lady Oracle, and The Handmaid's Tale are motivated byAtwood's 'feminist' concerns, we are suddenly uncomfortable with the term. Somehow that vexed tag'feminist'—which means something different to Charna, Jody, Carolyn, Zillah, and Elaine, to name just a fewexamples—is more problematic than descriptive. And yet it is still necessary: for Cat's Eye is a book about thethoughts and images that make up Elaine's reflections—feminist, humanist, and personal.

To be sure, reviewers have already shown that they are uncomfortable putting any labels to Cat's Eye. Just asin the past they have been quick to categorize—and recategorize—Atwood's work, they are now hesitating.Even more surprising than this resistance to classification, however, are the grounds upon which thatresistance is based: the sense that this is more than a feminist tract, more than a postmodern exploration ofliterary self-reflection, precisely, because it speaks from and about the autobiographical form.

In other words, Atwood is forcing us to rethink our position—again. Just as we had become comfortable withthe idea that a biographical reading is a reductive one, Atwood shows us that it is quite the opposite. It isprecisely the autobiographical aspect in and of Cat's Eye that makes us resist our temptation to master the text.We want to say that Cat's Eye is all of fiction and autobiography, feminist tract and personal meditation,contemporary metafiction and classical narrative precisely because it is more than these. But to say that wouldbe to admit that Atwood has restored our faith in story and in the magic of literary illusion; and we are surelymuch too experienced as readers to say that.

Criticism: Laura Shapiro (review date 8 November 1993)

SOURCE: "Mirror, Mirror, Who's the Evilest?" in Newsweek, Vol. CXXII, No. 19, November 8, 1993, p. 81.

[In the following review, Shapiro praises Atwood's novel The Robber Bride.]

Nobody maps female psychic territory the way Margaret Atwood does, sure-footed even in the wilds. Herlatest novel, The Robber Bride takes its title from the Grimm fairy tale about the robber bridegroom whokidnaps maidens and carries them off to his house to be cut up and eaten. Here the malevolent suitor is awoman named Zenia, mysterious and alluring, who insinuates herself into other women's lives and carries offtheir husbands and boyfriends. If they're lucky, they escape.

At the center of the book are three women, longtime friends who became so after Zenia slashed and burnedher way through each of their lives. Zenia herself lurks just out of sight until close to the end, when each ofthe women confronts her—and in her, their own worst demons. The three are classic Atwood creations, sovivid and idiosyncratic they could live next door, while perfectly evoking their time (now) and place (bigCanadian city with a university). There's Tony, the maverick military historian enthralled by the human faceof war, who lectures on such topics as fly-front fastenings and their effect on speed and efficiency in battle.There's Roz, the rich but desperately insecure business-woman. If only she were world-class at something, shefrets—saintliness, or better yet, sin. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the evilest of us all?" she wonders.And it answers, "Take off a few pounds, cookie, and maybe I can do something for you." The third is Charis,born Karen, a name she left behind when she took up a life of herbal remedies, reading people's auras andoneness with nature. It's a measure of Atwood's great gifts that she can describe Karen's childhood experienceof incest—a crime on the brink of becoming a literary cliché—so poignantly that it's freshly agonizing.

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Moving amid these three women, touching up their portraits with one perfect detail after another, conjuringZenia from their memories and fears, Atwood is in her glory. What a treasure she is, and what a fine new bookshe has written.

Criticism: Margaret Atwood with Lauri Miller (interview dateFebruary-March 1994)

SOURCE: "On the Villainess," in San Francisco Review of Books, February-March, 1994, pp. 30-32, 34.

[In the following excerpt, Atwood discusses her writing process and the role of the literary villainess inreference to her book The Robber Bride.]

[Miller]: In The Robber Bride, your character Zenia is cruel, cold-blooded and calculated, so able tomanipulate the female protagonists in the book …

[Atwood]:… And the male …

In a recent New York Times article you said there has been a gap in the literary appearance of the villainess.Has this been particularly on the part of women writers, and have you met any resistance to Zenia fromfeminists?

No. There is a whole list of manipulative characters, some of them written by women. We need go back nofurther than Edith Wharton. Have you read The Custom of the Country?

No, I haven't.

Well, you should. (She laughs.) It is about a manipulative, social climbing woman who steps on the bodies ofall the men she climbs over. Also The House of Mirth, about an extremely evil women, the adulterer's wife,who essentially destroys the heroine of this book. So there are several such characters; when I was talkingabout it, it was that this character had disappeared in the fifties. I was at a feminist conference called 'WomenReviewing Women' in Wellesley; I was surrounded by feminists. They were buying this book like crazy. AndI also get this a lot at readings, that it's so wonderful that women don't just have to be good and victims all thetime because if you make women nice all the time that's the equivalent to making them powerless all the time.Of course, there have been many more villainesses created by men. And do you know why that is? Becausethere have been so many more characters created by men. And why was that? Because women really didn'tstart writing books until the late nineteenth century. Why was that? Because they couldn't write. If you wantto see a villainess character, take a look at Toni Morrison's Sula.

So you don't feel there has been a recent gap in women writers depicting such evil in women?

There was a gap beginning in the fifties. The femme fatale disappeared for awhile, and I think the reason forthat was that there was a big push to get women back into the home. And you can't set up housekeeping withthe Marlene Dietrich of The Blue Angel. It's not going to work out. So women had to be made much moremommy-like, much more Doris Day-like or cute and pert and Debbie Reynolds-like or sexual and stupid, likeMarilyn Monroe and not a threat. But the threatening, smart, cunning, manipulative women, which ClareBoothe Luce's play The Women was all about—have you ever seen it?

No I haven't.

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Well there's a movie version of it too. Take a look. All of the women in it are out scheming one another.There's never a man visible. It's very cleverly done. You see the women talking to them on the phone, but younever actually see a man in the whole movie. It's all women, and there are good ones and bad ones, and theplot finally turns when the good one decides to fight for the man that the bad one has stolen. And that was aforties movie, and I think it may have been a thirties play. This was a familiar character until the fifties, andthen she disappeared. And then we got the sixties, and she wasn't around much then either because the sixtieswere the fifties until 1967, and then everybody was so focused on quote the sexual revolution that we weren'teven thinking about that, and then came the women's movement with, "If you can't say anything nice aboutwomen, don't say anything at all." I think we're now through with all that, and we can put the full cast ofcharacters back on the stage. Because to say that women can't be malicious and intentionally bad is to say thatthey're congenitally incapable of that, which is really very limiting.

For all her evil, it does seem that ultimately Zenia has a positive effect on the three female protagonists?Would you agree?

I like to leave judgments like that to the reader. Some people have said that; other people have said all kindsof other things that have nothing to do with that.

Well, their relationship to Zenia does seem to represent the fact that if one is not willing to look squarely atone's darker side, one is ultimately less able and less powerful.

Well, I would certainly take that point of view. I think you could say that. I don't know whether you'refamiliar with the opera Tales of Hoffman. There's a character in that who gets his shadow stolen from him, andin fact, to lose your shadow is to lose your soul. So insofar as Zenia is the shadow side of the characters, she isa necessary component. But you must realize that any character in a novel, if the novel is of any interest at all,has more than one dimension. Zenia is also a tricky con artist and a magician; by magician I mean the kindthat says, "Look here," and while you're looking there, they're picking your pocket with the other hand. As anexample, if I want to sell you the Golden Gate Bridge and you want to buy it, you give me the money. If it's alegitimate transaction, I give you the Bridge. If it's not a legitimate transaction, then you give me the money,and I skip town, and then you find out that I never had the Bridge in the first place. That's a con artisttransaction, and that's what Zenia does. But notice that it is dependent on the desire of the person who getsconned. I can't sell you the Golden Gate Bridge unless you want to buy it. So Zenia has something to offereach of the characters that they want. And part of it is their notions of themselves as nice people, because ineach case, she appeals to them for help, and because it is part of their image of themselves and they help oneanother, they help her. And with one another, it's real help that they have to give, and it's needed, and all ofthose exchanges are legitimate exchanges. So it's not saying, "Don't be a nice person." I think it's saying,"Look in the bag or else you're going to get left holding the sack," or "A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teachesyou nothing," or "Illusion is the first of all pleasures."

Would you say that you enjoy creating a certain amount of stir? In a past interview you said, "If you're notannoying someone, you're not really alive."

Well, I don't think it's cause and effect. In other words, I don't set out to annoy people. I set out to write books,and in all books there is conflict, in all books that hold your interest for more than ten pages. There is change,there is conflict, there are things that rub against one another, and that is just the nature of the novel. Wouldn'tyou say?

Yes I would.

Because if you have a book in which John and Mary get up in the morning and have a wonderful day, andthey are very nice to each other, and their kids turn out well, and their dog is just terrific, and they have a great

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house, and they both have wonderful jobs, how much longer are you going to go on reading? Something hasto happen. So it can be the invasion of monsters from outer space; it can be a flaw in their own characters oranother character in the book, but something has to happen.

Politics and the relationship of the powerful to the powerless is a thread that runs throughout your work. Youhave commented in the past about how you don't like the distinction made between politics and art, as thoughone is sullied and the other is pure.

No, what I don't like is people thinking that they can't put politics into art because one is contaminated and theother pure, that art should only be about the psyche, that it should only be about the individual. Well, thenovel has never only been about that because the novel shows people moving through time in society, and nomatter what kind of novel it is, it always has that, and once you have society, you have power structure, andonce you have power structure, you have politics. By that I don't mean that all novels should be about whatgoes on in Washington. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is that in the world that weobserve, power is distributed unevenly … not a huge insight. (She laughs.)

Is the most interesting work for you personally that which is written by those who are disenfranchised in someway?

No, I don't make that kind of distinction. The most interesting work is that which is well done. In other words,you can't categorize things in that way in terms of subject matter or genre either. Some people think there issomething called a legitimate novel and that there are other forms that aren't quite right, such as detectivefiction or science fiction. I don't make those kinds of distinctions. If a book is well done and gripping, I don'tcare what kind of book it is, and I don't care what its arena is. It happens to be so that books in which a personis contending with forces may very well be about a person in a disadvantaged group contending with theforces of society. It may be about that or it could be about something quite different. You never know. But ifwe were to say these kinds of books are good because of their subject matter and these kinds of books are badbecause of their subject matter, we would certainly generate a lot of mediocre literature about certain subjectmatter.

Who are some of the writers you presently feel a certain affinity with, whose books you most eagerlyanticipate?

I just got hold of E. Annie Proulx, not because I have read any of her work but just because she soundsinteresting and I will read her work. The lists get very long, and they also irritate those who happen to be leftout. I hate giving off-the-cuff lists. I read so much, and there are so many books that have been memorable tome that in order to answer this question properly, I would probably have to sit down and write you abibliography that would be at least ten pages. But let me mention a new writer that you probably haven't heardof—Barbara Gowdy.

What is the range of your reading?

Very broad. I read all kinds of books from all kinds of times from all kinds of countries and from all kinds ofgenres. And by all kinds of genders. In fact, I just checked out a book called Lesbian Vampire Stories. Nowthere's a category. And it's full of evil women, I have to tell you, and it's very much promoted as a feministbook. What do you make of that? (She laughs.) Literature is full of male anti-heroes; maybe Zenia is a femaleanti-hero. (Laughter.) Certainly my publicity person at Doubleday … she said, "Oh I love this book. You canuse it as a sort of litmus test for your friends. You can say, this is a Zenia person; this is a Charis person; thisis a Tony person; this is a Roz person." And I said, "And what about you?" She said, "Zenia." I said, "Oh, I'mshocked and horrified. Why do you think Zenia?" She said, "Because I am all of the others, and I want to beher." I said, "Why are you saying that?" She said, "Because she has power." And it's true; she has power, and

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power can be power to help, and it can be power to harm, but it also has to contain within itself a potential forharm, otherwise it's not power. I think that's one of the things women found out when they got some power,that once you have some power you're going to do some things that other people don't like.

What are the seeds for your novels and short stories?

I used to thrash around trying to think of answers for this, and another writer gave me the answer. Whenasked, "Where do you get your ideas?," she says, "I think them up." And that's what happens.

Do you work on your poetry, novels, and short stories at the same time, alternating between them?

When I'm working on a novel, I do almost nothing else; although with this one, I did a few pieces which aremore or less unclassifiable: some are monologues, some are short prose pieces, one is a rewrite of "The LittleRed Hen" story, and one is what Gertrude really said to Hamlet when he came into her dressing room and toldher how to behave. And that you'll get next year. But apart from that, when I'm writing a novel, I don't usuallywrite poetry. And when I'm writing short stories, I seem to write nothing but short stories.

What is your next step in writing a novel? Once you have that seed of plot, do you concentrate then ondeveloping characters?

Well, I don't even necessarily start with a seed of plot. I start with an image, a theme, a voice, a situation, acircumstance. I think writing a novel is a lot like making things out of mud, with the same amount ofsquashing it up and throwing it away and starting again all of those kinds of things. I don't think novelsproceed from the top down. I don't think they start with abstract concepts and move down. Some have beencreated like that; certain kinds of experimental writing are like certain kinds of conceptual art in that peoplesay, "Oh, I think it would be a good idea to dig a great big, circular hole in the ground and then line it withpink plastic." And in a way once you have that notion, it's almost secondary to create the object. But I feel thatI build my novels up much more from the ground and from details than from saying, "Now I'm going to writea novel about this."

So in creating your characters you don't first start with a concept of what you would like them to embody?

I don't start with that thing that people always wish you to produce. They say, "What is the main idea of yournovel?" They think that novels are how-to books or books of philosophy or that they are my-theory-of-lifetype books. If I wanted to write that kind of book, I would have written it. Novels are about people, peoplemoving through time interacting with one another, and I don't think they can be reduced to "What is the themein twenty words or less?" As one person said, "What would you like the reader to take away with her?" Inother words, "What's the prize in the box of crackers? Why did I have to go through all this popcorn just to getthis little plastic thing?" When I was in high school, we had to take a poem and then write a prose rendition ofit. I think a lot of people still have this notion that a writer is an inarticulate person who can't get it out, that ittakes them 500 pages to say, "War is hell" or whatever the message may be, and I don't think that fiction orpoetry work like that. I think that what the book means is the experience that you bring to the book, andtherefore it's going to have a somewhat different meaning to every single individual because everyone bringshis or her totality to a book. I will see different things from the things that somebody else will see, just as Iwill see different things in a painting or different things in a film. "Mr. Shakespeare, tell us what is the readerto take with her from Hamlet? Never put off tomorrow what you can do today." And that's often what we'reasked to do, summarize and condense and come out with this message.

Do you revise as you write or get it all down and then revise?

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I write it through and then I revise it, often as much as six times. After you've done that and after you've gonethrough your editor, who is a very picky person, and then gone through the galleys and the page proofs,you've gone through it a lot of times. But to get into it, it means you have to, at least I do, write quite freelyand that means I discard a lot and have a lot of crumpled pieces of paper.

Do you allow your editor to read your work while it's in progress?

Absolutely not.

Is there anyone you allow to read it?

No, I didn't go to creative writing school.

Are you surprised by the turns your characters take?

Well if I wasn't, I would get very bored.

Is that part of what fuels you to write?

Nobody knows what fuels him or her. It's an unknown mystery, and nobody knows in the writing departmentand nobody knows in the rest of life. That's another one of those crackerjack questions: "Where's the battery?Where's the little box with what makes you go in it?"

But is the surprise element one of the things you most enjoy about writing?

I certainly enjoy those when they occur. I don't know, I've been doing this since I was 16 years old. It's kind ofuseless by this time to ask me why I do it. And really why should anybody have to answer that question? Imean, why do you like running? Why do you like horseback riding? I like it. It's in my personality to like it.

Edna O'Brien has said that whether a novel is autobiographical or not does not matter, that what is importantis the truth in it and the way that truth is expressed. Do you agree with that?

Yes, because in fact who knows? You will never know. I mean I could lie my head off and tell you that in factI'm Charis or some other thing like that, and you would never know. We certainly don't know whetherShakespeare thought he was Richard III. We will never get to interview him. The author interview is a veryrecent phenomenon. Probably authors shouldn't be allowed to go out in public at all.

Atwood, Margaret (Vol. 84): Further Reading

Criticism

Banerjee, Chinmoy. "Atwood's Time: Hiding Art in Cat's Eye." Modern Fiction Studies 36, No. 4 (Winter1990): 513-22.

Discusses the various narrative voices Atwood uses in Cat's Eye.

Bayley, John. "Dry Eyes." London Review of Books 13, No. 23 (5 December 1991): 20.

Compares the stories in Atwood's Wilderness Tips favorably to the works of NadineGordimer and Elizabeth Bowen.

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Beaver, Harold. Review of Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986, by Margaret Atwood.The New York Times Book Review (3 April 1988): 12.

Praises Atwood's insights into women's issues in Selected Poems II.

Berne, Suzanne. "Watch Your Back." Belles Lettres 7, No. 1 (Fall 1991): 43.

Positive review of Wilderness Tips noting Atwood's "wry [and] disdainful" authorial voice.

Birch, Dinah. "Post Feminism." The London Review of Books II, No. 2 (19 January 1989): 3, 5.

Explores Atwood's Cat's Eye and Interlunar as expressions of the author's "personalpostfeminism" and praises Atwood's insights about the nature of suffering.

Givner, Jessie. "Mirror Images in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle." Studies in Canadian Literature 14, No. 1(1989): 139-46.

Analyzes Atwood's displacement of conventional literary imagery in Lady Oracle.

------. "Names, Faces, and Signatures in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale." CanadianLiterature, No. 133 (Summer 1992): 56-75.

Discusses Atwood's use of autobiographical elements in the two novels.

Greene, Gayle. "Survival Strategies." The Women's Review of Books IX, No. 4 (January 1992): 6-7.

Praises Wilderness Tips for combining "the power of [Atwood's] fiction with the complexityof her poetry."

Keefe, Joan Trodden. Review of Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986, by MargaretAtwood. World Literature Today 63, No. 1 (Winter 1989): 103-04.

Praises Selected Poems II and calls attention to the literary significance of Atwood's career.

Makay, Shena. "The Painter's Revenges." The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4479 (3 February 1989): 113.

Applauds Atwood's fidelity to childhood experience in Cat's Eye and calls the book "probablyAtwood's finest novel to date."

Miner, Madonne. "'Trust Me': Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale."Twentieth Century Literature 37, No. 2 (Summer 1991): 148-68.

Examines Atwood's treatment of heterosexual love in The Handmaid's Tale.

Norfolk, Lawrence W. "Do They Travel?" The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4507 (24 August 1989): 903.

Praises Interlunar and analyzes Atwood's use of dark and light imagery.

St. Andrews, B. A. "Requiem for an Age." Belles Lettres 5, No. 3 (Spring 1990): 9.

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Calls Atwood "a master at distilling essences and delineating profiles of our age" and praisesCat's Eye as "a massive and moving novel."

Thurman, Judith. "Books: When You Wish Upon a Star." The New Yorker LXV, No. 15 (29 May 1989):108-10.

Finds Atwood's depiction of childhood in Cat's Eye to be truthful and compelling, but objectsto the "bullying" tone of the book's prose.

Towers, Robert. "Mystery Women." The New York Review of Books XXXVI, No. 7 (27 April 1989): 50-2.

Praises Atwood's attention to detail in Cat's Eye.

Additional coverage of Atwood's life and career is contained in the following sources published by GaleResearch: Bestsellers 1989, No. 2; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52; Contemporary Authors New RevisionSeries, Vols. 3, 24; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 15, 25, 44; Dictionary of LiteraryBiography, Vol. 53; DISCovering Authors; Major 20th-Century Writers; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 8; Short StoryCriticism, Vol. 2; Something about the Author, Vol. 50; and World Literature Criticism.

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Analysis

Analysis: Discussion Topics

In what ways do Margaret Atwood’s early childhood experiences in the Canadian wilderness affect herworks?

Compare and contrast the dystopias in Atwood’s novels The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.

In “Death by Landscape,” why does the protagonist have trouble letting go of her friend?

Alias Grace has been both praised and criticized for its attention to the details of Victorian life. How and whydo such details affect the momentum of the novel?

Chronicle Elaine’s growth as an individual throughout her journey in Cat’s Eye.

Analysis: Other Literary Forms

Margaret Atwood’s publishing history is a testimonial to her remarkable productivity and versatility as anauthor. She is the author of numerous books, including poetry, novels, children’s literature, and nonfiction. InCanada, she is most admired for her poetry; elsewhere, she is better known as a novelist, particularly forSurfacing (1972) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Her other novels include The Edible Woman (1969), LadyOracle (1976), Bodily Harm (1981), and Alias Grace (1996). Among her volumes of poetry are The CircleGame (1964), The Animals in That Country (1968), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Interlunar(1984), and Morning in the Burned House (1995). In 1972 she published Survival: A Thematic Guide toCanadian Literature, a controversial critical work on Canadian literature, and in 1982, Second Words:Selected Critical Prose, which is in the vanguard of feminist criticism in Canada. Atwood has also written fortelevision and theater, one of her successful ventures being “The Festival of Missed Crass,” a short story madeinto a musical for Toronto’s Young People’s Theater. Atwood’s conscious scrutiny, undertaken largely in hernonfiction writing, turned from external political and cultural repression to the internalized effects of variouskinds of repression on the individual psyche. The same theme is evident in her fiction; her novel Cat’s Eye(1988) explores the subordination of character Elaine Risley’s personality to that of her domineering “friend”Cordelia.

Analysis: Achievements

Margaret Atwood is a prolific and controversial writer of international prominence whose works have beentranslated into many languages. She has received several honorary doctorates and is the recipient of numeroushonors, prizes, and awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry in 1967 for The Circle Game,the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in 1986 and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fictionin 1987 for The Handmaid’s Tale, the Ida Nudel Humanitarian Award in 1986 from the Canadian JewishCongress, the American Humanist of the Year Award in 1987, and the Trillium Award for Excellence inOntario Writing for Wilderness Tips in 1992 and for her 1993 novel The Robber Bride in 1994. The Frenchgovernment honored her with the prestigious Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1994.

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Analysis: Other literary forms

A skillful and prolific writer, Margaret Atwood has published many volumes of poetry. Collections such asDouble Persephone (1961), The Animals in That Country (1968), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970),Procedures for Underground (1970), Power Politics(1971), You Are Happy (1974), Two-Headed Poems(1978), True Stories (1981), Interlunar (1984), and Morning in the Burned House (1995) have enjoyed a wideand enthusiastic readership, especially in Canada. During the 1960’s, Atwood published in limited editionspoems and broadsides illustrated by Charles Pachter: The Circle Game (1964), Kaleidoscopes Baroque: APoem (1965), Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein (1966), Expeditions (1966), and What Was in the Garden (1969).

Atwood has also written books for children, including Up in the Tree (1978), which she also illustrated, andRude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2004). Her volumes of short stories, a collection of short fiction andprose poems (Murder in the Dark, 1983), a volume of criticism (Survival: A Thematic Guide to CanadianLiterature, 1972), and a collection of literary essays (Second Words, 1982) further demonstrate Atwood’swide-ranging talent. In 1982, Atwood coedited The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. She hasalso written articles and critical reviews too numerous to list. She has contributed prose and poetry to literaryjournals such as Acta Victoriana and Canadian Forum, and her teleplays have been aired by the CanadianBroadcasting Corporation.

Analysis: Achievements

Early in her career, Margaret Atwood received critical recognition for her work. This is particularly true of herpoetry, which has earned her numerous awards, including the E. J. Pratt Medal in 1961, the President’s Medalfrom the University of Western Ontario in 1965, and the Governor-General’s Award, Canada’s highestliterary honor, for The Circle Game in 1966. Twenty years later, Atwood again won this prize for TheHandmaid’s Tale. Atwood won first prize in the Canadian Centennial Commission Poetry Competition in1967 and won a prize for poetry from the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation in 1969. She has receivedhonorary doctorates from Trent University and Queen’s University. Additional honors and awards she hasreceived include the Bess Hoskins Prize for poetry (1974), the City of Toronto Award (1977), the CanadianBooksellers Association Award (1977), the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction (1978), the Canada CouncilMolson Prize (1980), and the Radcliffe Medal (1980). The Blind Assassin won the 2000 Booker Prize, andAtwood received Spain’s Prince of Asturias literary prize for 2008.

Analysis: Other literary forms

Margaret Atwood’s publishing history is a testimonial to her remarkable productivity and versatility as awriter. As well as a poet, she is a novelist, a short-fiction writer, a children’s author, an editor, and an essayist.The Edible Woman (1969), Atwood’s first novel, defined the focus of her fiction: mainly satirical explorationsof sexual politics, where self-deprecating female protagonists defend themselves against men, chiefly with theweapon of language. Other novels include Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1979),Bodily Harm (1981), Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin(2000), Oryx and Crake (2003), The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005), and The Year ofthe Flood (2009). The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), a dystopian novel set in a postnuclear, monotheocraticBoston, where life is restricted by censorship and state control of reproduction, is the best known of Atwood’snovels and was made into a commercial film of the same title, directed by Volker Schlöndorff.

Dancing Girls, and Other Stories (1977) and Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) are books of short fiction, as areWilderness Tips (1991), Good Bones (1992), and Moral Disorder (2006). Atwood has written children’sbooks: Up in the Tree (1978), which she also illustrated, Anna’s Pet (1980, with Joyce Barkhouse), For the

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Birds (1990), Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995), Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes(2003), and Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004). A nonfiction book for young readers is Days of theRebels: 1815-1840 (1977).

Atwood’s contributions to literary theory and criticism have also been significant. Her idiosyncratic,controversial, but well-researched Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) is essential forthe student interested in Atwood’s version of the themes that have shaped Canadian creative writing over acentury. Her Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982) is one of the first works of the feminist criticismthat has flourished in Canada. She also produced Strange Things: The Malevolent North in CanadianLiterature (1995). A related title is Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002).

Analysis: Achievements

Critical success and national and international acclaim have greeted Margaret Atwood’s work since her firstmajor publication, the poetry collection The Circle Game. Poems from that collection were awarded the 1965President’s Medal for Poetry by the University of Western Ontario in 1966, and after commercial publication,the collection won for Atwood the prestigious Governor-General’s Award for poetry in 1967. In that sameyear, Atwood’s The Animals in That Country was awarded first prize in Canada’s Centennial CommissionPoetry Competition. The Chicago periodical Poetry awarded Atwood the Union League Civic and Arts PoetryPrize in 1969 and the Bess Hokin Prize in 1974. Since that time, Atwood’s numerous awards and distinctionshave been more for her work in fiction, nonfiction, and humanitarian affairs. She has received severalhonorary doctorates and many prestigious prizes, among them the Toronto Arts Award (1986), Ms.magazine’s Woman of the Year for 1986, the Ida Nudel Humanitarian Award from the Canadian JewishCongress, and the American Humanist of the Year Award for 1987. In fact, at one time or another, Atwoodhas won just about every literary award for Canadian writers. In 2000, Atwood won the Booker Prize for thebest novel by a citizen of the United Kingdom or British Commonwealth.

Analysis: Discussion Topics

Margaret Atwood’s works always seem to involve a journey of some kind—literal, emotional, or both. Whatinitiates the journeys, what impedes them, and how do the journeys end, if they do?

Often in an effort to improve society, authorities resort to repressive measures. Discuss the motivations,expressed or covert, behind such efforts in Atwood’s novels, especially The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx andCrake.

Prisons, metaphorical and literal, play a large role in Atwood’s works. Discuss the effect of both kinds ofprisons on the characters in her works.

Identity or the obfuscation of identity is a theme in many of Atwood’s works, especially her novels. Not onlydo characters’ names change, but they change with their names. Discuss Atwood’s use of names and theproblem of identifying just who some of her characters are. Why do you think Atwood uses this theme?

Identify some positive or semipositive male characters in Atwood’s fiction. What appear to be their flaws andwhat do their flaws disclose about the society and the nature of male/female relationships?

Atwood uses unreliable narrators in many of her novels. To what purpose? How are the narrators related tothe nature of truth in her novels?

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Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Margaret Atwood. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Collection of essays by literarycritics provides analyses of Atwood’s major novels. Includes brief biography, chronology of Atwood’s life,and an informative editor’s introduction.

Brown, Jane W. “Constructing the Narrative of Women’s Friendship: Margaret Atwood’s Reflexive Fiction.”Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6 (1995): 197-212. Argues that Atwood’s narrative reflects the struggle ofwomen to attain friendship and asserts that Atwood achieves this with such reflexive devices as embeddeddiscourse, narrative fragmentation, and doubling.

Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto, Ont.: ECW Press, 1998. Although this is not anauthorized biography, Atwood answered Cooke’s questions and allowed her access, albeit limited, tomaterials for her research. A more substantive work than Sullivan’s biography The Red Shoes (cited below).

Davey, Frank. Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics. Vancouver, B.C.: Talonbooks, 1984. Presented from afeminist perspective, this book is a nine-chapter examination of Atwood’s language, patterns of thought, andimagery in her poetry and prose. The accompanying bibliography and index are thorough and useful.

Deery, June. “Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood’s Body of Knowledge.” Twentieth Century Literature43 (Winter, 1997): 470-486. Shows how the themes of feminine identity, personal and cultural history, bodyimage, and colonization in Atwood’s fiction are described in terms of basic laws of physics. Comments onAtwood’s application of scientific concepts of time, space, energy, and matter to the experience of womenunder patriarchy in an adaptation of male discourse.

Grace, Sherrill E., and Lorraine Weir, eds. Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System. Vancouver:University of British Columbia Press, 1983. These nine essays by nine different critics treat Atwood’s poetryand prose, examining the “Atwood system,” her themes and her style from a variety of perspectives, includingthe feminist and the syntactical.

Hengen, Shannon, and Ashley Thomson. Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005. Lanham, MD:Scarecrow, 2007. Atwood’s writings from 1988-2005 are covered in this resource which includes citations,reviews, quotations, and interviews. Also contains a guide to Atwood resources on the Internet and achronology of her publishing career.

Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative.Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. Feminist criticism on the writing of Atwood, Alice Walker, andJean Rhys. The chapter on Atwood presents an insightful commentary on her novel Lady Oracle withreference to other criticism available on this novel. Discusses the novel’s gothic elements, the use of satire,and its political implications.

Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Lively critical and biographicalstudy elucidates issues that have energized all of Atwood’s fiction: feminist issues, literary genres, and herown identity as a Canadian, a woman, and a writer.

Howells, Coral Ann, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006. Collection of twelve excellent essays provides critical examination of Atwood’s novels as well asa concise biography of the author.

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Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1990.Contains many interviews with Atwood.

McCombs, Judith, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Indispensable volumecomprises thirty-two essays, including assessments of patterns and themes in Atwood’s poetry and prose.Discusses her primary works in chronological order, beginning with The Circle Game and ending with TheHandmaid’s Tale. An editor’s introduction provides an illuminating overview of Atwood’s writing career.Includes a primary bibliography to 1986 and a thorough index.

Meindl, Dieter. “Gender and Narrative Perspective in Atwood’s Stories.” In Margaret Atwood: Writing andSubjectivity, edited by Colin Nelson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Discusses female narrativeperspective in Atwood’s stories. Shows how stories such as “The Man from Mars” and “The Sin Eater” focuson women’s failure to communicate with men, thus trapping themselves inside their own inner worlds.

Nischik, Reingard M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000. Thissturdy gathering of original (not reprinted) criticism includes Lothar Hönnighausen’s comprehensive“Margaret Atwood’s Poetry 1966-1995” as well as Ronald B. Hatch’s ”Margaret Atwood, the Land, andEcology,” which draws heavily on Atwood’s poetry to make its case.

Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Boston: Twayne, 1984. This satisfying book consists of sixchapters, examining Atwood’s works, poetry, and prose, up to the early 1980’s. Chapters 2 and 3 dealexclusively with her poetry. The chapters are preceded by a useful chronology and succeeded by thoroughnotes and references, a select bibliography, and an index. Rosenberg’s writing is lucid and readable; hisrationale for this study is presented in his preface, providing insight into the focus of his examination ofAtwood’s writing. An indispensable study.

Stein, Karen F. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Presents a thorough overview ofAtwood’s writings in all genres. Includes references and a selected bibliography.

Suarez, Isabel Carrera. “’Yet I Speak, Yet I Exist’: Affirmation of the Subject in Atwood’s Short Stories.” InMargaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, edited by Colin Nelson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.Discusses Atwood’s treatment of the self and its representation in language in her short stories. Demonstrateshow in Atwood’s early stories characters are represented or misrepresented by language and how strugglewith language is a way to make themselves understood; explains how this struggle is amplified in later stories.

Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Toronto, Ont.: HarperFlamingo Canada,1998. Biography focuses on Atwood’s early life, until the end of the 1970’s. Attempts to answer the questionof how Atwood became a writer and to describe the unfolding of her career.

Wall, Kathleen. “Representing the Other Body: Frame Narratives in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Giving Birth’ andAlice Munro’s ‘Meneseteung.’” Canadian Literature, no. 154 (Autumn, 1997): 74-90. Argues that thenineteenth century nude pictures in these stories are not the traditional object of male observation but ratherserve to remove the image of the female body from the reification of Romanticism. Contends that in bothstories the images subversively call attention to the margin and the marginal.

Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University Press ofMississippi, 1993. One of the most extensive and thorough investigations available of Atwood’s use offairy-tale elements in her graphic art as well as her writing. Covers her novels up to Cat’s Eye.

Wilson, Sharon Rose, ed. Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Columbus:Ohio State University Press, 2003. Collection of scholarly essays examines Atwood’s work, with a focus on

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her writings published since the late 1980’s. Includes discussion of the novels Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride,Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin.

York, Lorraine M., ed. Various Atwoods. Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1995. Critical essays chiefly on the laterpoetry and fiction.

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