The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

READERS’ GUIDES TO ESSENTIAL CRITICISM SERIES

CONSULTANT EDITOR: NICOLAS TREDELL

Published
Thomas P. Adler Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire/Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof
Pascale Aebischer Jacobean Drama
Lucie Armitt George Eliot: Adam Bede/The Mill on the Floss/Middlemarch
Dana E. Aspinall William Shakespeare: As You Like It
Simon Avery Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge/Jude the Obscure
Paul Baines Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe/Moll Flanders
Brian Baker Science Fiction
Annika Bautz Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility/Pride and Prejudice/Emma
Matthew Beedham The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro
Nick Bentley Contemporary British Fiction
Richard Beynon D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow/Women in Love
Scott Boltwood Brian Friel
Peter Boxall Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot/Endgame
Claire Brennan The Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Susan Bruce Shakespeare: King Lear
Sandie Byrne Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
Sandie Byrne The Poetry of Ted Hughes
Alison Chapman Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton/North and South
Peter Childs The Fiction of Ian McEwan
Christine Clegg Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Jay Corwin Corwin: Gabriel García Márquez
John Coyle James Joyce: Ulysses/A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Martin Coyle Shakespeare: Richard II
Jessica Cox Victorian Sensation Fiction
Sarah Davison Modernist Literatures
Sarah Dewar-Watson Tragedy
Justin D. Edwards Postcolonial Literature
Robert C. Evans Philip Larkin
Michael Faherty The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
Sarah Gamble The Fiction of Angela Carter
Jodi-Anne George Beowulf
Jodi-Anne George Chaucer: The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Jane Goldman Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse/The Waves
Huw Griffiths Shakespeare: Hamlet
Vanessa Guignery The Fiction of Julian Barnes
Louisa Hadley The Fiction of A. S. Byatt
Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience
Geoffrey Harvey Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Paul Hendon The Poetry of W. H. Auden
Terry Hodgson The Plays of Tom Stoppard for Stage, Radio, TV and Film
William Hughes Bram Stoker: Dracula
Stuart Hutchinson Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn
Stuart Hutchinson Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth/The Custom of the
Country
Betty Jay E. M. Forster: A Passage to India
Aaron Kelly Twentieth-Century Irish Literature
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews The Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Daniel Lea George Orwell: Animal Farm/Nineteen Eighty-Four
Jinqi Ling Asian American Literature
Rachel Lister Alice Walker: The Color Purple
Sara Lodge Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Philippa Lyon Twentieth-Century War Poetry
Merja Makinen The Novels of Jeanette Winterson
Stephen Marino Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman/The Crucible
Britta Martens The Poetry of Robert Browning
Matt McGuire Contemporary Scottish Literature
Timothy Milnes Wordsworth: The Prelude
Jago Morrison The Fiction of Chinua Achebe
Merritt Moseley The Fiction of Pat Barker
Pat Pinsent Children’s Literature
Carl Plasa Toni Morrison: Beloved
Carl Plasa Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
Nicholas Potter Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra
Nicholas Potter Shakespeare: Othello
Nicholas Potter Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Pericles/Cymbeline/The Winter’s Tale/
The Tempest
Steven Price The Plays, Screenplays and Films of David Mamet
Julia Round, Rikke
Platz Cortsen and
Maaheen Ahmed Comics and Graphic Novels
Berthold Schoene-Harwood Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Nicholas Seager The Rise of the Novel
Nick Selby T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
Nick Selby Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Nick Selby The Poetry of Walt Whitman
David Smale Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children/The Satanic Verses
Enit Steiner Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey/Persuasion
Patsy Stoneman Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Susie Thomas Hanif Kureishi
Fiona Tolan The Fiction of Margaret Atwood
Nicolas Tredell Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Nicolas Tredell Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
Nicolas Tredell William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury/As I Lay Dying
Nicolas Tredell F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Nicolas Tredell Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Nicolas Tredell Shakespeare: Macbeth
Nicolas Tredell Shakespeare: The Tragedies
Nicolas Tredell The Fiction of Martin Amis
David Wheatley Contemporary British Poetry
Michael Whitworth Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Martin Willis Literature and Science
Matthew Woodcock Shakespeare: Henry V
Gillian Woods Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet
Angela Wright Gothic Fiction
Andrew Wyllie and
Catherine Rees The Plays of Harold Pinter
iv
The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Fiona Tolan
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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For Cecilia and Aurora – my clever, funny, beautiful girls
viii
 Contents

Introduction 1
Biography 2
Organization of this guide 7

1 Early works and early reception: The Edible Woman and Surfacing 9
The Edible Woman 10
Overview 11
Early reception 13
The romance plot and fairy-tale gothic 15
Fairy-tale imagery 17
Consumption and the body 19
Surfacing 20
Overview 20
Early reception 22
Feminist readings 24
A gothic novel 27
Language and form 28

2 A developing canon and developing themes: Lady Oracle, Life

Before Man and Bodily Harm 31
Lady Oracle 31
Overview 32
Gothic romance 34
Princesses and goddesses 36
Life Before Man 39
Overview 41
Between romance and realism 42
Consumption and survival 44
Bodily Harm 46
Overview 46
A postcolonial novel? 48
Touch and responsibility 50
A healing comedy? 51
x Contents

3 ‘Are there any questions?’: A focus on The Handmaid’s Tale 53

Overview 54
Early responses 56
What genre is it? 58
Writing about feminism in the 1980s 61
Offred’s storytelling: Language and narrative 63
Complicity, victimhood and responsibility 67
Reading the conclusion 70

4 Spotty-handed villainesses: Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride 75

Cat’s Eye 77
Overview 78
A fictional autobiography? 81
Women beware women 83
Art and representation 85
The Robber Bride 88
Overview 88
(Hi)storytellers: Narrative authority 91
Friendship/sisterhood/feminism 92
Another gothic tale 94
The conclusion 96

5 History, memory and recovering the past: Alias Grace, The Blind
Assassin and The Penelopiad 99
Alias Grace 100
Overview 100
Readerly desire 101
Historical fiction 103
The servant girl 104
The quilt motif 106
An anti-detective novel 107
The Blind Assassin 109
Overview 109
A self-conscious storyteller 111
A gothic tale of victims and villains 113
The Penelopiad 115
Overview 115
Is it a novel? 116
Reclaiming voices – the twelve hanged maids 117
Classical revisions and re-readings 119
 Contents xi

6 Atwood’s dystopian futures: The MaddAddam trilogy 121

Oryx and Crake 123
Overview 123
Textual allusions in Oryx and Crake 125
Our post-human future 127
An ethical novel 129
The Year of the Flood 131
Overview 133
Gendered futures 134
Humanism/posthumanism 136
Reading the conclusion 138
MaddAddam 138
Overview 138
Narrative structure: Who speaks? 139
After the Anthropocene 141

Conclusion 145
Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales 146
The Heart Goes Last 147
Hag-Seed 148
The Atwood phenomenon 149

Notes 153
Select bibliography 176
Index 191
xii
 Introduction

Margaret Atwood is inarguably one of the most successful and critically

acclaimed writers working today. She is commonly described as Canada’s
most eminent poet and novelist. Since the appearance of Double Persephone,
a poetry pamphlet she first published with the small press Hawkshead in
1961, she has gone on to produce a phenomenal body of work. This includes,
to date, seventeen novels, eight short story collections and eighteen poetry
collections. Her extended bibliography encompasses children’s books,
graphic novels, non-fiction and critical essays, reviews, edited collections and
television scripts. This versatility – and the creative pleasure she evidently
derives from experimenting with genres and forms – has only gathered pace
as her career has developed.
Her first full-length published book was another poetry volume, the
1966 collection The Circle Game, for which she received Canada’s prestigious
Governor General’s Award. She remains best known, however, as a novelist.
The Edible Woman, her first novel, appeared in 1969; a striking darkly comic
tale, it views contemporary expectations of women’s lives and the familiar
romance narrative through an unexpectedly gothic lens. Since then, she
has proceeded to produce works that manage to sustain clear, traceable
threads of the characteristically ‘Atwoodian’ (a notion that will recur in this
volume) while also persistently challenging readerly expectations. Her work
encompasses genre fiction, speculative fiction and adaptations, and her
settings stretch from the historic to the contemporary to the imagined future.
If anything can be said to unite this diverse body of work, it might perhaps
be best defined as both a close careful attention to language and its slippery
power and a deeply ethical concern with ‘Power Politics’ – a phrase she
notably adopted as the title of a 1971 poetry collection. Whether examining
contemporary gender roles, fairy tales and myths, fundamentalism or
multinational corporations, Atwood’s writing typically works to examine
and expose inequalities, myriad abuses of power and violence in all its forms.
2 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Biography

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in November 1939 in Ottawa, Canada,

and was raised in Northern Ontario and Quebec. Her father, Carl Atwood,
was an entomologist and the family would spend long extended summers
in the Canadian bush in makeshift accommodation while he conducted
his research. This was a formative period for Atwood; she and her older
brother Harold enjoyed the freedom of roaming outdoors and entertaining
themselves, largely undisturbed by either formal education or the
conservative social niceties of 1940s provincial Canada. Atwood recalls that
her mother, Margaret, also ‘preferred the bush. She hated hats, tea parties
and housework’.1 Shortly after the end of the Second World War, the family
settled permanently in Toronto, with her father taking up a university
professorship. This move represented a significant upheaval for the eight-
year-old Atwood. Suddenly, school beckoned, and in 1951 her younger sister,
Ruth, was born. Later, Atwood would capture something of this shock of
transition in her 1988 novel Cat’s Eye, in which Elaine Risley is similarly
abruptly socialized into the world of little girls after a childhood spent living
‘like nomads on the far edges of the war’ (25). The experience of living in the
bush and the influence of her father’s scientific interests can also be traced
in other works across her canon: from the 1972 novel Surfacing, in which
the narrator travels up into the lakes of Northern Quebec in search of her
missing father, to the story ‘The Boys at the Lab’, published more recently in
Moral Disorder (2006).
Atwood went on to study for a BA in English at Victoria College at the
University of Toronto and then moved to the United States to study at Radcliffe
College in Cambridge, Massachusetts (a women’s liberal arts college that later
merged with the originally all-male Harvard College). At Radcliffe she studied
Victorian and American literature, gaining an MA and commencing a PhD
thesis on ‘The English Metaphysical Romance’ that was never to be completed.
Discussing Atwood’s time in the United States in her 1996 monograph Margaret
Atwood, Coral Ann Howells describes the young Canadian’s sudden realization
that Canada was simply ‘invisible’ to Americans: a blank space on the map,
somewhere cold up north. For Howells, Atwood’s experience was ‘the common
colonial experience of moving to a metropolitan culture where people know
nothing and care nothing about one’s home place’.2 Howells locates in this
period, and in this sense of cultural erasure, the roots of Atwood’s Canadian
nationalism, which developed over the 1960s and typically defined Canada in
 Introduction 3

opposition to the nation’s more confident, more powerful southern neighbour:

an idea that shapes both Surfacing and her contemporaneous literary critical
work, Survival.
Atwood returned to Canada and spent some years taking up temporary posts
in various university English departments. In 1967, she married James Polk,
but the couple were to divorce in 1973 and Atwood began a long and happy
relationship with the writer Graeme Gibson, with whom she has a daughter,
Eleanor Jess Gibson, born in 1976. Against a backdrop of studying, teaching
and occasional employment across the 1950s and the 1960s (like Marian in
The Edible Woman, she worked in market research for a time), Atwood was
always at work on her true passion: writing. As Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson
notes, discussing the formative stages of Atwood’s career in The Cambridge
Introduction to Margaret Atwood, the limited sense, at that time, of a strong
canon of Canadian literature made her decision to become a writer ‘not only
unusual, but improbable (doubly improbable given that she was female too)’.3
But while the newly staked outfield of ‘Can Lit’ was yet to fully develop, there
was a burgeoning folk and experimental art scene in Canada in the 1960s, and
Atwood gave poetry readings in bohemian Toronto coffee houses alongside
other young avant-garde poets such as Fred Wah, Al Purdy and bpNichol. In
Writing in Our Time, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy document the radical
poetry scene in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the occasional, oblique
glimpses of Atwood that the book affords, we get another perspective on the
famous novelist as young experimental poet.4
By the time Atwood came to publish The Edible Woman, the novel which
was to bring her to wider critical attention, she had already published three
prize-winning collections of poetry. And since these early beginnings, she
has continued to write and publish poetry, most recently Dearly in 2020. But
increasingly, she became primarily known as a novelist and in this guise, she takes
her place within a generation of Canadian novelists that came to prominence
in the mid-to-late twentieth century, including Margaret Laurence, Michael
Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Anne Hébert, Timothy Findlay and Carol Shields.
Many of this new generation of writers were beneficiaries of arts funding
from the Canada Council. Established in 1957, the Council’s mandate was
to support the production of art in Canada by Canadians and to raise the
profile of Canadian cultural production. With sudden access to much-needed
financial support, literary journals and magazines and small presses sprang
up. Indeed, some of Atwood’s early work, in keeping with these developments,
was published by House of Anansi Press, a small publishing house founded in
4 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

1967 with Canada Council support and with a mandate to publish Canadian
writers. Paul Groetsch, in an essay on Atwood’s Canadian nationalism, notes
that this push for a cultural revival was intensified by a sense of economic and
political crisis prompted by Quebec separatism and US imperialism, ‘which
had shown its ugly head in Vietnam and seemed to threaten Canada with
an economic and political takeover’.5 Against this rather anxious backdrop,
Atwood published her controversial 1972 study, Survival: A Thematic Guide to
Canadian Literature.
With Survival, Atwood made a leap from being a product of the Canadian
cultural renaissance to becoming an instrumental figure in shaping the debate
around the nature of Canada’s national culture. The book was strongly influenced
by the then popular critical mode championed by Northrop Frye, who was
teaching at the University of Toronto when Atwood was there. In it, she identifies
the patterns and themes that she saw as characterizing and defining Canadian
literature in contrast to the national literature of the United States. Canadian
literature (and by extension, the Canadian national psyche), she argued, is notably
more pragmatic and less optimistic than American literature, and commonly
preoccupied with themes of survival and victimhood. The book was challenged
on many fronts. Goetsch notes that it annoyed Marxists for its liberal ahistoricism,
irritated some nationalists for its pessimistic vision of Canada and its severely
limited consideration of French-Canadian literature, and was rejected by others
for its failure to acknowledge Canada’s multiculturalism and for its erection of
a grand thematic meta-narrative at a time when such constructions were being
determinedly torn down. At the same time, argues Goetsch, in hindsight, Survival
is ‘a crucial book which fulfilled important functions in the 1970s and met needs
of the time’. It opened up a valuable debate, and its hypothesis, he suggests, ‘now
appears less restrictive than it did at first’.6 While Survival describes a now-dated
mode of nationalist literary criticism, and Atwood has acknowledged that she
would not write the same book today, in 1985 she declared that she stood by its
central premise: ‘that Canadian literature is a distinct entity, that it is informed by
its colonial or post-colonial status, and that it is worthy of study.’7
From her inception as a young poet in Toronto through the early years
of developing a reputation as a key figure in Canada’s cultural landscape,
Atwood’s work garnered international critical attention relatively quickly. The
first collection of critical essays to address her writing appeared in 1977 in The
Malahat Review: Margaret Atwood: A Symposium, edited by Linda Sandler.
Describing her as ‘the presiding genius of Canadian letters’, Sandler declares:
‘Nothing quite like Atwood has ever happened to Canada before.’8
 Introduction 5

Since then, and across nearly sixty years of literary production, a significant
body of secondary critical material has built up around her work. Indeed, there
are very few contemporary living writers who have amassed a comparable
amount of critical analysis. Some of these analyses are large, authoritative,
reception-defining works: from early, exploratory interventions such as Barbara
Hill Rigney’s Margaret Atwood (1987) and Judith McCombs’s Critical Essays on
Margaret Atwood (1988) to more recent, reflective considerations of Atwood’s
accumulated works such as Reingard Nischik’s monumental Margaret Atwood:
Works and Impact (2000) and Coral Ann Howells’s authoritative The Cambridge
Companion to Margaret Atwood (second edition, 2021). And numerous as these
monographs and edited collections are, more Atwood criticism is produced
by far in essays, chapters and journal articles. There is also a Margaret Atwood
Society ‘with whom she has an uneasy relationship’9 – stemming, one suspects,
from a certain discomfort at being the living subject of an association – a
Margaret Atwood Studies journal (affiliated to the Margaret Atwood Society) and
an international network of Atwood scholars, many of whom travel to consult
the well-used Margaret Atwood Archive, held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library at the University of Toronto.
Atwood’s work has been acknowledged by a host of international bodies.
Since winning early accolades such as the E. J. Pratt medal for Double Persephone
(1961) and the Centennial Commission Poetry Competition for The Animals
in That Country (1967), she has been awarded an extensive list of prizes and
commendations. Many of the early awards, naturally, came from Canadian
sources, and in 1987, she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Rapidly, however, Atwood’s literary reputation took on international standing.
There are many examples that one could choose to illustrate her reach and
impact. She has twice won the regional award for the Commonwealth Writers’
Best Book Prize (for The Handmaid’s Tale in 1987 and The Robber Bride in 1994).
She was awarded the Government of France’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et
des Lettres in 1994 and the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit in 1996. In 2000,
she won the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction for The Blind Assassin, a prize
for which she has been shortlisted a further four times (for The Handmaid’s Tale,
1986; Cat’s Eye, 1989; Alias Grace, 1996; and Oryx and Crake, 2003). In 2019, she
won the Booker Prize again, for The Testaments, sharing the award jointly with
British writer Bernadine Evaristo. She holds honorary doctorates from – among
others – the University of Cambridge, Harvard University and the Université
Sorbonne Nouvelle. In 2016, she won the PEN Pinter Prize, awarded annually
to a writer of ‘outstanding literary merit’ who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s
6 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Nobel Prize in Literature speech, ‘casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon

the world and shows a “fierce intellectual determination . . . to define the real
truth of our lives and our societies”’,10 and in 2017 she was given PEN’s Lifetime
Achievement Award. These latter honours, one imagines, are particularly
prized, as Atwood is a longstanding supporter of and advocate for both PEN
and Amnesty International, prominently championing liberty and freedom of
expression. Each of these awards, in turn, speaks to the high standing in which
Atwood is held as a literary figure of significant international stature.
While Atwood’s biography is well rehearsed, and the echoes between her life
and her work are often observed, she herself has been notably reluctant to engage
in biographical readings of her texts and is typically resistant to questions that
attempt to pursue such a mode of analysis. In 1998, two biographies of Atwood
were published, and both were unauthorized. Nathalie Cooke’s Margaret
Atwood: A Biography is an intimate portrait, charting Atwood’s progress
through childhood, education, relationships, motherhood and an increasingly
international career. Cooke explores the two halves of what she terms ‘a doubled
life’: that of Margaret Atwood (‘poet and novelist [. . .] known for her pointed
pen’) and Peggy Atwood (‘family member, stalwart friend, keen listener’).11
In The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, instead, Rosemary Sullivan
examines Atwood’s career in the context of a generation of Canadian women
writers and artists who resisted the idea that ‘women were meant to be muses,
not maestros’.12
In a recent interview, Atwood notes: ‘I was averse to biographical
interpretation when I was twenty. I wanted only the work, not the context for
it. But that was then. Context is more interesting to me now.’13 And in 2002, she
provided a brief autobiographical sketch in the first chapter of her non-fiction
work, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, in which she reflects on
her childhood and adolescence. The themes that recur are her parents’ self-
sufficiency, the manner in which they encouraged independence and curiosity
in their children, the freedom and adventure of outdoor living, a general lack of
gendered expectations for her and her brother, and the persistence of ‘books and
solitude’.14 As she proceeds through the years of settling into post-war suburban
life and attending school, her recollections are couched primarily in terms of
her reading, which was ‘wide but indiscriminate – everything from Jane Austen
to True Romance magazines to pulp science fiction to Moby-Dick’.15 Negotiating
with the Dead began life as a collection of lectures on what it means to be a
writer. By commencing with this autobiographical reflection, Atwood balances
the book’s encyclopaedic knowledge and sweeping reflections on writers and
 Introduction 7

writing throughout time with a simple acknowledgement that she – like all
writers – is the product of a very particular matrix of national, cultural and
familial influences.

Organization of this guide

The aim of this book is to provide the student and interested reader with an
overview of some of the most characteristic, influential and insightful critical
responses to Atwood’s work. Given the extraordinary amount of scholarship on
Atwood that exists and continues to proliferate without pause, it is impossible
to provide a comprehensive account of everything that has been written. Where
works are briefly cited, readers are encouraged to make use of the extensive
bibliography provided at the end of this volume to pursue in their entirety the
many excellent critical responses to Atwood. For those seeking still further
examples of Atwood criticism, and details of the most recent publications, the
Margaret Atwood Studies journal publishes an invaluable annual bibliography of
works by and about the author.
The Fiction of Margaret Atwood traces a broadly chronological path through
Atwood’s key publications, and each chapter highlights some significant themes
that have come to predominate in the evolving reception of particular texts.
Chapter 1 examines early responses to the first two published novels, The Edible
Woman and Surfacing. Chapter 2 addresses the texts that established Atwood as
a significant Canadian writer: Lady Oracle, Life Before Man and Bodily Harm.
Given its continued status as her most acclaimed novel, Chapter 3 focuses solely
on The Handmaid’s Tale, while Chapter 4 considers critical readings of two of
Atwood’s most morally ambiguous female characters in Cat’s Eye and The Robber
Bride. Chapter 5 examines Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and The Penelopiad as
Atwood’s most prominent forays into historical fiction, and Chapter 6 addresses
responses to Atwood’s dystopian trilogy, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood
and MaddAddam. And finally, in the conclusion, I briefly consider the short
story collection Stone Mattress, and Atwood’s later novels, The Heart Goes Last,
Hag-Seed and The Testaments, before ending with a reflection on the nature and
legacy of what has been termed ‘the Atwood phenomenon’.
8
 1

Early works and early reception

The Edible Woman and Surfacing

With the publication of her first two novels, Atwood’s status as an award-winning
young Canadian poet was rapidly supplemented by her newfound reputation
as a writer of striking and uncompromising prose. Her first two published
novels are in many ways very different texts. The Edible Woman commences as
a satirical urban comedy about a young office worker juggling a conservative
landlady, a progressive flatmate and the expectations of her handsome fiancé.
Surfacing is an immediately more elliptical text, in which a nameless narrator
searches for her missing father on a remote island. The setting, tone and style
of the two novels are quite distinct. Nevertheless, these early works contain
notable sympathies and continuities of concern, and together The Edible Woman
and Surfacing established some of the elements that would come to be deemed
characteristic of Atwood’s work: not least, a female protagonist, a concern with
gendered power relations and an interest in genre subversion.
The underlying similarities between the two novels are addressed in an early
essay on Atwood by fellow novelist Marge Piercy, in which she observes a larger
schematic pattern at work. Piercy acknowledges the two texts’ differences;
The Edible Woman, she notes, is a clever, comic novel with traces of terror (in
particular, we might think of the nightmarish scene in the middle of the novel, in
which Marian comes to perceive herself as quarry and tries to escape her hunter
boyfriend), while Surfacing contains satirical elements but is fundamentally
‘a grim, desperate novel’. She also, however, works to uncover continuities of
theme in Atwood’s developing canon. Piercy’s essay was written in 1973, when
Atwood had published just these two novels, alongside five books of poetry
and the critical text, Survival. In her analysis, Piercy identifies the persistence
of Atwood’s poetic technique in her fiction and develops her discussion of the
novels alongside a reading of key thematic concerns in Atwood’s poetry. She
also focuses in her essay on the theme of victimhood in Canadian fiction,
10 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

which Atwood explored in Survival, and considers how it might be applied to

a reading of Atwood’s own novels. In both, Piercy points out, the protagonist is
‘a woman who becomes aware she has lost her identity – her self – who comes
to experience herself as a victim, and finally to reject that state’. For Piercy, this
attempt to resolve the problem of identifying one’s self as a victim is the thematic
concern that underpins all Atwood’s early work and which provides continuity
between her poetry, her criticism and her fiction.1

The Edible Woman

Written in the mid-1960s, although not published until 1969, The Edible Woman
appeared on the cusp of the rising second wave of feminism and was quickly and
enthusiastically taken up by feminist critics. Marian’s epiphany that her female
body is a site of consumption, and her eventual rejection of the restrictions of
heteronormative marriage, were identified as clearly feminist conclusions. Such
readings did not sit comfortably with Atwood, however, who was reluctant to be
retrospectively co-opted by a movement that, for various reasons, she deemed
problematic. In 1979 she appended an introduction to the novel, in which she
states: ‘I myself see the book as protofeminist rather than feminist: there was no
women’s movement in sight when I was composing the book in 1965, and I’m
not gifted with clairvoyance.’2 For Atwood, simply put, a novel conceived before
the rise of feminism cannot be the product of feminism.
In my 2007 monograph Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction, I attempt
to get to grips with this rather defensive position, and I argue that it is based
in part on a falsely rigid chronology of the feminist movement. Second-wave
feminism did not spontaneously erupt in 1970 but instead had its roots in
myriad disparate reflections on the inequity of gender relations. Foundational
feminist texts such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), which Atwood acknowledges in her
introduction that she read ‘like many at the time [. . .] behind locked doors’,3
preceded the 1970s surge in feminist theorizing. My argument in Feminism and
Fiction is that, while Atwood’s self-conscious defence of her own ideological
autonomy certainly complicates any too-easy feminist reading of her work and
its intentions, ‘it cannot disengage her texts from a pervasive feminist discourse
in which they are inarguably implicated’.4 Atwood’s themes, particularly around
the packaging and consumption of the female body by a marketized society,
anxieties around pregnancy and motherhood, the exposition of the limited
 Early Works and Early Reception 11

options available to women in the labour market, and the manner in which men
and women play out socially constructed roles of victim and aggressor, all place
the novel squarely within the realm of feminist enquiry. And indeed, discussing
something of the issue of the novel’s contested feminism in 1977 with Linda
Sandler, Atwood describes herself, in writing the novel, as ‘plugging in to the
popular sensibility’ of the time.5 This is perhaps a better way to describe the
mood of a novel that is very much about a society on the cusp of seismic changes,
whether or not the coming revolution is yet to be consciously acknowledged by
the men and women within it.

Overview
In an early interview with Graeme Gibson from 1972, Atwood describes
her first novel as an anti-comedy: a romance in which the expected comic
resolution of marriage ‘would be a tragic solution for Marian’.6 Whereas in a
standard eighteenth-century comedy, as Atwood explains, a young couple has to
overcome some figure who represents the restrictive forces of society in order to
eventually marry, in The Edible Woman, Marian instead must ultimately come to
the realization that it is Peter, her fiancé, who represents the restrictive forces of
society and therefore it is Peter whom she must escape. This underlying premise
subsequently leads the novel along unexpected paths as it swerves to avoid
the conclusion expected of what initially appears to be a fairly conventional
contemporary romance.
The novel commences with Marian MacAlpine as a competent, financially
independent young woman living in Toronto in the 1960s. She shares a flat with
the somewhat erratic Ainsley, whose sexual exploits bemuse rather than shock
her, and she works at an uninspiring job for a marketing firm at which she has
no hope of progression. The company, as Marian explains, is ‘layered like an
ice-cream sandwich’, with a factory-like all-male lower floor of computers and
machines, an executive top floor, ‘referred to as the men upstairs, since they are
all men’, and a ‘gooey layer in the middle’ of women market researchers (19).
Marian accepts, without protest, that her opportunities are restricted to the
dispiriting all-female middle floor, where her co-workers are either husband-
hunting ‘office virgins’ or ageing matrons, toad-like and sluggish. Happily, she
is saved from sharing the desperate state of the office virgins by her boyfriend
and lover, Peter: a perfectly eligible, if rather uninspiring, young man, whom
Marian imagines as ‘ordinariness raised to perfection like the youngish, well-
groomed faces in cigarette ads’ (61). Indeed, normalcy is what Marian craves.
12 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

When her college friend Clara terms her ‘almost abnormally normal’, she finds
the description comforting and is ‘reassured’ (206).
Discussing this insistence on the ‘normal’ in the text, Rowland Smith
suggests that each of the characters are ‘perfectly drawn examples of the hellishly
commonplace’7 and that idea of the horror within the ordinary persists in the
novel. While Marian deems herself perfectly well adjusted and perfectly happy,
elements of a more disturbing alternate reality increasingly intrude into the
narrative as Atwood introduces what will become a familiar characteristic
of much of her subsequent work: the manner in which the ordinary and the
everyday can quickly turn sinister. For Marian, this turn towards the macabre is
prompted by a seemingly irresistible push towards marriage and motherhood,
suddenly accelerated when Peter unexpectedly proposes. From Clara, a
seemingly perpetually pregnant housewife, to Ainsley, determined to seduce
womanizer Len in order to conceive a child she plans to raise alone, Marian
is surrounded by unappetizing images of fertility and maternity. Despite her
increasing sense of unease, however, and a seemingly inexplicable incident in
which Marian’s body proceeds to act of its own accord and cause her to run from
Peter, when Peter asks her to marry him, she agrees.
The proposal acts as a turning point in the novel and marks a change in Marian.
Suddenly, she finds herself saying words that she does not recognize as her own:
passive, conciliatory phrases such as ‘I’d rather leave the big decisions up to you’
(90). Shortly afterwards, the narrative voice shifts from the first to the third person,
providing a clear signal to the reader, if not to Marian, that the protagonist has
lost her autonomy. This loss of voice is accompanied and compounded by a loss
of appetite. From initially finding herself uncharacteristically unable to finish a
filet steak, Marian rapidly finds herself almost entirely unable to consume any
food at all.
Against a growing sense of alienation, the narrative climaxes with Marian
and Peter’s engagement party, to which Marian invites all of the disparate figures
in her life, including Duncan, an enigmatic graduate student she met when
doing market research and has since had sporadic encounters with. Where
Peter represents the social normalcy Marian consciously desires, Duncan
functions as a kind of dark anti-hero and a fairy-tale guide to the underworld
of her unconscious desires. As Jane Rule argues, ‘It is his refusal of adult and
masculine roles which attracts Marian.’8 At the party, it is Duncan who voices
derision at Marian’s seeming capitulation to gendered social expectations, before
abruptly leaving. Dressed, at Peter’s request, in a tight red dress and full makeup,
Marian looks in the mirror and sees a kind of doll, ‘plastic, boneless, flexible’
 Early Works and Early Reception 13

(229). Overwhelmed with claustrophobic panic, she runs away from the party,
and from Peter. After spending the night with Duncan, she follows him on a
rambling journey through a ravine, until he tells her she must proceed alone.
After this surreal and disorientating journey, Marian returns home and bakes a
cake in the shape of a pink smiling woman. When Peter arrives, she accuses him
of trying to destroy her and offers him the cake instead. Confused and angry,
he leaves, and Marian, her appetite now returned, starts to eat the cake herself.
The cake proffers itself in the novel as a deeply symbolic object, resonant with
interpretative possibilities. The text, however, is highly ironically aware of this
over-abundance of signification as Marian archly declaims it ‘only a cake’ (273).

Early reception
Atwood has on a number of occasions reflected on some of the early responses
to her work, particularly the manner in which reviewers commonly focused
on her appearance and her gender. She often recollects that interviewers were
fascinated by her naturally curly hair. In Negotiating with the Dead, she recalls
being asked at a poetry reading: ‘Is your hair really like that or do you get it
done?’ (55–6). While she speaks now of these incidents with a dry humour,
it is also clear that she often felt a real frustration at what she perceived to be
an insistence on reading a women writer in terms of her relationships, her
personality and her body. Asked in a 1979 interview to comment on one critic’s
assessment that there is ‘a chill’ in her poetry, Atwood correctly identifies the
critic and dismissively responds: ‘She spent much of the article analysing my
cover photos, saying that I didn’t smile in them.’9
While this assessment is an exasperated overstatement, the article in question,
Linda Rogers’s 1974 essay for Canadian Literature, ‘Margaret the Magician’,
notably focuses on what Rogers terms ‘the Atwood persona’. Describing the
writer as a kind of haunting, magical figure, Rogers discusses Atwood in a
manner that blurs the author’s personality with her photographic image, her
image with her writing, and the author with her characters, particularly the
unnamed narrator of Surfacing. The analysis is oddly intimate – indeed Rogers
describes reading Atwood’s work as an intimate encounter – and it makes a
connection between reading one of Atwood’s books and then encountering the
author’s image on the back cover, where ‘The eyes stare out hypnotic from the
pale mask surrounded by her furry camouflage’. Atwood, for Rogers, functions
as an illusionist, with the implication that her writing has no substance, that
it ‘dazzles without illuminating’.10 This highly impressionistic account develops
14 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

into a discussion that seems at times to merge its assessment of characters and
author, so that when Rogers writes: ‘The woman at the centre of her universe is
numb’ (84), the subject of the assertion is impossible to discern.
In the light of such criticism, it is not unreasonable to conclude that
Atwood, as a woman writer in the 1960s and 1970s, was subject to the kind
of intrusive, body-oriented, quasi-mystical readings that frequently overlooked
the professionalism of the writer’s craft in the search for intimate, biographical
readings of her work. It is unsurprising, therefore, if Atwood sometimes felt
frustrated by early critical responses to her work.
We can see certain assumptions around what Atwood, as a young female
writer, was attempting to achieve with her first novel by examining some of the
early reviews of The Edible Woman. While The Edible Woman and Surfacing
soon secured Atwood’s reputation as a novelist, some early reviewers of the first
book focused primarily on the novel’s comic tone and readily accepted Marian’s
final disavowal of deeper meaning. A brief but excoriating review by Jane Miller
in the Times Literary Supplement identified in Atwood’s work ‘some kind of
embarrassment about her own intentions’, which has ‘made her trim her novel
with that self-deprecating humour lady columnists in Sunday newspapers use to
protect themselves’, and termed the cake-eating scene ‘excruciating’.11 With a less
dismissive tone, Millicent Bell, writing in The New York Times Review of Books,
read the novel as a simple zany comedy in which Marian wants a husband and
Ainsley does not, until eventually Marian rejects Peter and Ainsley realizes her
baby needs a father, ‘and the comic turn-about is achieved’. Bell rather damns
the novel with faint praise when she suggests that its ‘comic distortion veers at
times into surreal meaningfulness’. And while she recognizes the significance of
Marian’s inability to eat, describing it as ‘a piece of truth-telling dementia that is
a symbolic answer to lying sanity’, she again disavows the text’s weight when she
suggests that Atwood only ever intends us to read it ‘half-seriously’.12
T. D. MacLulich, discussing in 1978 the novel’s fairy-tale strategies, notes that
most early reviewers seem to have read The Edible Woman as ‘primarily a novel of
social commentary, an up-to-date comedy of manners’,13 and Jerome Rosenberg,
writing in Linda Sandler’s 1977 edition of The Malahat Review, reflects that, for
many readers and critics, Atwood in her early career was considered ‘a rather
terrifying writer who creates black humour out of the trivial absurdities of day-
to-day life’.14 But while The Edible Woman may have been deemed as a light,
sometimes farcical social comedy by some, a body of criticism soon developed
around Atwood’s work that was interested in more closely dissecting her
unflinching exposition of contemporary gendered society.
 Early Works and Early Reception 15

Critical readings of Atwood’s first novels, including Lady Oracle, most commonly
saw a writer concerned with a localized Canadian setting in which contemporary
characters navigate modern social relations. While this emphasis on the familiar
and the everyday was sometimes accompanied by a suspicion of triviality, many
critics recognized the potential for a deeply political reading of the quotidian. Jane
Rule, for example, in her 1977 essay ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Normalcy’,
examines Atwood’s interrogation of society’s expectations: in each of the first three
novels, Rule suggests, ‘While characters struggle to embrace normalcy, they are
often being pursued by it, so that the searcher becomes the victim of her own
hopes, projected into one man or another.’15 In this manner, suggests Rule, Atwood
questions and challenges social values, forcing her characters to reassess their
investment in a social system that is often detrimental to their well-being.
In ‘Margaret Atwood: The Stoic Comedian’, another essay from The
Malahat Review, Rowland Smith similarly sees both The Edible Woman
and Surfacing as a ruthless exposition of a contemporary society in which
Atwood’s narrators often feel ‘menaced and consumed’.16 For Smith, the
success of Atwood’s first novel is that she manages to make us care about the
survival of a character who is, ultimately, as ‘hellishly commonplace’ as the
people that surround her. As readers, he argues, we desperately hope to see
Marian emerge from the gaping void that threatens her, ‘Yet she is a mindless
creature. We react to her as a victim, and she moves in an aura of passivity.’17
Smith notes that Marian wants to be normal: she wants to marry the
up-and-coming young lawyer, Peter, and when that particular relationship
encounters problems, she looks to Duncan to save her (although Duncan
explicitly rejects the proposed role of saviour). For Smith, there is something
about Marian’s cool detachment that remains attractive to the reader, even
in her frustrating passivity. And crucially, he argues, despite the novel’s
deliberate undermining of the genre, the pull of the romance remains strong,
and the reader is left at the end of the novel to anticipate if Marian will end
up with either Peter or Duncan. (This view, it must be noted however, has
been countered quite decisively by many more critics who have instead read
Atwood as thoroughly closing down the possibility of either relationship.)

The romance plot and fairy-tale gothic

If some critics read The Edible Woman in terms of its representation of the
modern, urban, everyday life that Marian is ostensibly leading as she moves
through the familiar spaces of home, office and contemporary Toronto cityscape,
16 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

others instead identified in the novel an altogether more fantastical and non-
realist subtext.
In ‘The Dark Voyage: The Edible Woman as Romance’, a perceptive and
influential essay from 1981, Catherine McLay defines the novel as ‘a disguised
romance’. Using Northrop Frye’s definition of the traditional mythic romance
plot, McLay reads Atwood’s novel as crucially concerned with the central theme
of the loss and regaining of identity, which typically takes the form of some kind
of quest. In the quest romance, the protagonist-hero (typically male) ventures
into a nightmarish underworld, where he experiences trials of isolation,
imprisonment and symbolic death, before eventually enacting a rebirth and
return to the social world, which is reaffirmed ‘through ritual, as represented by
marriage and/or the feast’ (125).18
For McLay, the tri-part structure of The Edible Woman supports this
interpretation. The novel commences in the perfectly satisfactory, if not exactly
idyllic, world of the everyday, in which Marian has all that a modern young
woman might hope for: job, apartment, boyfriend and no real commitments.
This pleasing state of irresponsibility is increasingly imperilled, however, by
encroaching visions of pensions and old age, marriage and babies. As these
entrapments press closer and the narrative becomes more claustrophobic,
the novel’s episodes become increasingly bizarre. In one episode, Marian
instinctively hides under the bed, but like a rabbit run to ground and dug out by
a hunter, she is dragged out by an exasperated Peter. Marian, however, wilfully
ignores the signals of her unconscious mind, and ‘accepts her bondage to Peter
and to the conventions of society’.19 Consequently, she must endure the further
ordeals of Part Two, in which Marian enters into an enchanted, underground
world, which is also a space of madness, where her body and mind are no longer
unified. This alienation of mind and body climaxes in her inability to recognize
herself in her reflection in the mirror, seeing only an uncanny doll. In this phase,
Marian encounters Duncan, whom McLay identifies as the supernatural guide
– ‘dehumanized, even grotesque’ – who helps her to uncover the truth: that only
by rejecting the prospect of marriage to Peter can she find liberation. Finally,
following the logic of the romance, once Duncan’s function is complete, Marian
must also reject him ‘and return alone to the daylight world of freedom and true
selfhood’ represented by the novel’s brief Part Three.20
Sherrill Grace also develops a mythic reading of Duncan in her
1980 monograph, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, in which she
identifies in Atwood’s work a preoccupation with images of doubled, duplicitous
and divided selves, gothic and otherwise. Grace proposes that the protagonist
 Early Works and Early Reception 17

in Atwood’s works commonly oscillates between two unhealthy and destructive

extremes: either ‘withdrawal into the self ’ or, alternatively, submersion in ‘the
false perceptions of others or the natural world’. Only by accepting the duality
within us all can the protagonist be freed from destructive attempts to deny ‘the
subject/object duality of life’.21
Starting from this premise, rather than reading Duncan as Marian’s
supernatural guide, Grace proffers another potential reading of him as ‘another
Atwood double, a kind of doppelgänger, an objectified part of Marion [sic]
herself ’ (93).22 Where Smith suggests that the novel contains a residual pull of
the romantic plot, by which the reader is left to wonder if Marian will choose
Peter or Duncan, Grace instead argues that while Duncan is an opposite of Peter,
he is never a possible alternative. Recalling a scene in the text in which Duncan
tells Marian, who is wearing his dressing gown at the time, that she looks like
him, Grace concludes: ‘Duncan is most successful as a symbol of Marion’s inner
life or subconscious; he represents her fantasies, her attempts to escape, as well
as her sensible return to consumer reality.’23

Fairy-tale imagery
In addition to identifying the non-realist quest motif and gothic tropes of
uncanny doubles, other critics have also noted elements of fairy tale in The
Edible Woman. Indeed, there is a significant body of work concerned with
examining the predominance of fairy-tale motifs in Atwood’s writing: from
the Little Red Riding Hood imagery of Offred in her red cloak and shopping
basket in The Handmaid’s Tale, to Iris’s multi-layered self-identification as
Little Red Riding Hood, grandma and the wolf in The Blind Assassin. The
most influential critic of this theme is Sharon Rose Wilson, whose 1993 book,
Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics explores in detail Atwood’s use
of fairy-tale motifs throughout her earlier works. Examining The Edible
Woman, Wilson provides a sustained analysis of the fairy-tale aspects of
the plot. She commences her study by noting that the theme of eating has a
longstanding identification with ‘ancient images of witches, wizards, parents,
and spouses, who, deliberately or not, eat the precious “food” – other human
beings’. Specifically, Wilson points to the Grimm Brothers’ story, ‘The Robber
Bridegroom’, in which the monstrous husband eats each of his unsuspecting
brides in turn. This particular tale, of course, is notably appropriated by
Atwood in her 1993 novel, The Robber Bride, in which the voracious Zenia
overturns gendered expectations, preying on and ‘consuming’ a succession of
18 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

unwitting men. Wilson, however, demonstrates Atwood’s much earlier interest

in this fairy tale (and others), connecting it to her first novel and to Marian’s
‘mock-Gothic fears of eating, being eaten, suddenly changing into someone
else, and being unable to transform at all’.24
Marian, for Wilson, is the reluctant bride who surreptitiously enters the
Robber Bridegroom’s house in the woods and discovers his secret: that he chops
up and eats his many young brides. Like the plucky young heroine, Marian also
uncovers her fiancé’s secret just in time to avoid her scripted fate. In addition
to this primary intertext, Wilson also identifies a host of familiar fairy-tale
characters and tropes: from the witch who would keep young Rapunzel trapped
in the tower (the landlady and the child), to the ugly sisters seeking a prince (the
office virgins), and the three bears in their cottage (Duncan and his flatmates).
For Wilson, these multiple fairy-tale tropes combine in the novel to establish
‘a tone both comic and gothic’. The Edible Woman functions, she argues, as a
parody of Cinderella’s expectations of a happy-ever-after romance, exposing the
fear and suspicion that Prince Charming might actually prove to be Bluebeard
in disguise. By the end of Atwood’s novel, we are by no means assured, suggests
Wilson, ‘that, for either male or female, it is possible to marry anyone but the
Robber Bridegroom or death’. Set against such a deeply gloomy conclusion,
however, Wilson notes that, in fairy tales, the heroine is rarely eaten, and
eventually, ‘[l]ike Gretel, Marian tricks the trickster and escapes the oven’.25
While Wilson’s fairy-tale analyses have been influential, she was not the first to
examine The Edible Woman in this manner. In T. D. MacLulich’s 1988 essay ‘Atwood’s
Adult Fairy Tale: Lévi-Strauss, Bettelheim, and The Edible Woman’, MacLulich
adopts anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s method of investigating, not so much
the specific details of a particular story, but rather the mythic patterns or structures
discernible within a work. For Lévi-Strauss, these deeper, recurring patterns
tell us something crucial about the manner in which a culture devises meaning.
Consequently, MacLulich identifies at work in The Edible Woman Lévi-Strauss’s
primary topic of mythic thought: the dichotomy of culture and nature. Using Lévi-
Strauss’s structural method, MacLulich plots out, in a chart, the narrative of The
Edible Woman set against that of the fairy tale of the Gingerbread Man. Identifying
the fairy tale’s various elements (the Gingerbread Man is prepared, animated, runs
away, meets the fox, is eaten), he then draws parallels with Atwood’s novel. For
example, he argues that, in The Edible Woman, ‘the parallel to being eaten by the fox
is being seduced by Duncan’, who pretends to be a virgin.26
Like Wilson, MacLulich also identifies the influence of multiple overlapping
fairy tales at work in Atwood’s novel. He connects Marian in her tight red party
 Early Works and Early Reception 19

dress to Little Red Riding Hood, and describes the engagement party as a scene
in which ‘Redness, sexuality, and fear of being eaten are vividly brought together’.
In this fairy-tale scenario, there is a doubling of the wolf figure. Peter, with his
camera and his gun, is a technology-wielding wolf, whereas Duncan is the wolf
in sheep’s clothing. Where Marian thinks she must make the correct choice
between the two, she needs instead, argues MacLulich, to realize that Duncan is
merely an equally unpalatable obverse of conformist Peter. For MacLulich, ‘The
unknown alternative, the middle way between aggression and submission, still
eludes her at the novel’s end.’ As in a children’s fairy tale, he concludes, the heroine
survives, but the manner in which she does so is uncertain and unsettling. The
Edible Woman does not, therefore, represent the kind of wish-fulfilment that the
influential child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim describes as being the beneficial
function for children of fairy tales, but is instead ‘a problematic story, challenging
to grown-up intellects – a sort of adult fairy tale’.27

Consumption and the body

The Edible Woman is replete with highly suggestive symbolism and one such
element that has attracted much critical attention is Marian’s refusal of food.
Often described in fairly superficial terms as a mode of anorexic eating disorder,
the sudden, seemingly irresistible refusal of Marian’s body to consume does
not comfortably fit this medicalized analysis. Instead, multiple critics have
better pointed to symbolic readings of the protagonist’s refusal of food. Most
commonly, it has been connected to Surfacing, and the narrator of that novel’s
refusal to be a consumer/murderer/aggressor, or, instead, associated with a
more general interiorized misogynistic disgust expressed in the novel at the
female body and reproduction. For example, Rogers, in ‘Margaret the Magician’,
suggests that Marian experiences a ‘classic psychiatric phenomenon’ prompted
by repulsion at the feminine function of childbearing, and concludes that her
refusal to eat ‘is a rejection of the function of motherhood’.28
A particularly useful extended analysis of Marian’s relationship to food
and eating is offered by Sarah Sceats in Food, Consumption and the Body in
Contemporary Women’s Writing (2000). In a chapter that examines The Edible
Woman, Lady Oracle and Life Before Man, Sceats argues that Atwood’s first novel
uses food and its related activities as a means of interrogating gender roles in
mid-twentieth-century Canada. Marian’s growing inability to eat, suggests
Sceats, functions as a classic hysterical symptom, linking her to a psychoanalytic
tradition of supposedly hysterical women, but it also provides a resonant pun on
20 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Marian’s newfound inability ‘to swallow, or stomach, the facts and implications
of her situation’. Marian’s protest may appear stereotypically feminine and self-
negating, but it is, for Sceats, a subversive, inscrutable act; rather than representing
Marian’s attempt to become something else, ‘her not eating is simply a refusal’.29
Focusing on the motif of food, Sceats explores the idea that, for Atwood,
‘women collude in their oppression (in being edible), through passivity and
the assumption of innocence’.30 (This idea, as we will see, also comes to the
fore in Surfacing.) As Sceats rightly observes, Marian’s refusal to eat is deeply
problematic and leaves many questions unanswered. In her analysis, Sceats tries
to draw out some of these ambiguities and uncertainties. Most crucially, there
is the fact that Marian’s experience of not eating is a peculiarly passive one: she
wants to eat, but simply finds that she cannot. This passivity is hard to reconcile
with a reading of her actions as an empowering mode of protest. Relatedly, when
she returns to consumption, it seems that she becomes an empowered actor
once again. But eating is also an ambiguous trope in the novel, associated with
aggression and violence, but also with acquiescence to the status quo. If Marian’s
refusal to eat is a refusal to participate in the heteronormative script that Peter’s
proposal represents, what does her return to consumption signify? And finally,
as Sceats notes, Marian’s consumption of the cake-woman is entangled with
notions of self-consumption: which, again can be read in contradictory ways, as
either narcissistic or self-abnegating.
For Sceats, the deeply ambiguous symbolism of eating and not eating is
not resolved in Atwood’s text, but instead opens up a series of complex and
uncomfortable questions for the reader to ponder, including: ‘to what extent
do victim and persecutor collude and what are the possibilities for action for a
woman deeply implicated in a consumer culture that casts her as the (passive)
filling in a sandwich?’ (99).31

Surfacing

Overview
The elements of the romance quest narrative that critics such as McLay identified
in The Edible Woman recur with more visibility in Atwood’s second novel,
Surfacing. The story commences with the familiar literary trope of a journey
or quest, as the protagonists leave the socialized space of the city and head out
into the wilderness. The unnamed narrator travels with her partner Joe and two
 Early Works and Early Reception 21

casual friends, a married couple, Anna and David, up into Northern Quebec.
The ostensible purpose of the journey is to look for the narrator’s father, a
botanist living alone in the family cabin on the edge of a remote lake, who has
inexplicably gone missing. The novel functions, therefore – on the surface, at
least – as a kind of mystery or detective story.
Once they arrive at the cabin, relations between the four protagonists, which
initially seem amicable enough, quickly deteriorate. Anna and David’s marriage
appears to be founded on a dull mutual loathing that occasionally sparks into
sadistic cruelty, while the narrator’s feelings for Joe are muted and uncertain;
at one point, she muses: ‘I’m trying to decide whether or not I love him’ (36).
Cumulatively, human relations in the novel appear cold, exploitative and
superficial: a summation that the narrator extends, at various points in the novel,
to tourists, Americans and hunters.
As the city-dwellers explore the island, there follows a series of false clues
for the reader, as the narrator recalls fragments of her marriage and child –
providing disjointed snippets of information that do not quite seem to fit together.
Eventually, the mystery of her father’s disappearance is resolved. Having found
images of strange markings that he was seemingly obsessed with, the narrator
fears that her isolated father may have gone mad, but eventually realizes that
they were ‘Indian’ (the now-outdated term for indigenous Canadians used in the
novel) petroglyphs or rock markings found on the island, which her father had
been plotting on a map. Seeking to reassure herself that his project was rational
and real, she goes in search of the marks. Realizing that the one she is looking for
must be underwater, she dives down into the lake and finds her father’s floating
body, weighed down by his camera. Confronted by the watery corpse, repressed
memories resurface of her married lover and the abortion she felt coerced into.
As she imagines the aborted foetus as an animal seeking sanctuary in her body,
only to be killed by her hand, she is forced to acknowledge her own capacity for
violence.
As it becomes apparent that the unreliable narrator is nursing a repressed
trauma, it also becomes clear that her sense of traumatized, innocent
victimhood has been externalized and projected onto an innocent nature
brutalized by man’s unthinking technology. Disgusted and dismayed by
what she sees as the cruelty and destructive violence of society, she attempts
to retreat into innocence by relinquishing all social responsibility. Having
gained from her father the gift of knowledge with the return of her repressed
memories, she receives from her dead mother another gift, in the form of a
recovered childhood drawing of a pregnant woman. Suddenly knowing what
22 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

she must do, she initiates sex with Joe in the certainty that she will conceive
a child. Then, convinced that she must protect the growing foetus from the
three friends and the social corruption they represent, she burns her books
and clothes and flees into the bush, vowing to live like the animals: naked,
innocent and free. Eventually, however, the narrator comes to the realization
that she cannot live like an animal or a tree and must instead accept her social
responsibility. The novel ends, therefore, with Joe calling her name and the
narrator on the brink of stepping forward, out of the wilderness and back into
society.

Early reception
By the time Atwood comes to publish Surfacing, the review in The New York
Times Book Review is markedly longer than that previously afforded to The Edible
Woman. The reviewer, Paul Delany, invites a comparison between Atwood’s
second novel and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, published ten years earlier. Both, he
notes, are tales of a young woman ‘made desperate by a stifling social milieu and
who can find relief only by abandoning what those around her have defined as
sanity’. For Delany, where Plath’s Esther Greenwood can, in the early 1960s, only
rail against a world she has no hope of changing, Atwood’s nameless narrator, a
decade later, refuses to be resigned to victimhood and the novel ends on the hope
of re-entering the world on new terms. Like many others, this review connects
Surfacing to the thesis proposed in Survival, and argues that, taken together,
the texts ‘have brought into sharp focus for Canadian literary intellectuals the
problem of their country’s cultural identity in the seventies’.32
Picking up instead on the connected themes of artifice, appearance and
surface that run through the narrative of Surfacing, novelist Margaret Laurence,
in a laudatory review, sees the narrator’s journey as concerned with the attempt
to discover a sense of truth and a core reality to cling to in the face of social
artifice. In a manner that recalls some readings of The Edible Woman, Laurence
identifies in Surfacing the mythic trope of the quest, whereby the narrator must
leave civilization and descend into the wilderness – which is also a descent
into madness – before she can ‘break through’ into newfound knowledge and
return to the social world. For Laurence, this hard-won knowledge involves the
narrator’s recognition of her own power, ‘a power which had frightened her and
which she had therefore denied’, as well as a recognition that the desire to be a
blameless victim is an abnegation of responsibility that can lead to becoming
complicit in the victimization of others.33
 Early Works and Early Reception 23

This theme of victimization and, more contentiously, the question of who is

victimized and by whom, exercised many early critics of the novel. In a short
‘Reply’ that Atwood wrote for a 1976 issue of the journal Signs, which appeared
alongside two articles in the same issue that examined her second novel in terms
of feminist theology (discussed below), Atwood noted: ‘Surfacing was reviewed
in the United States almost exclusively as a feminist or ecological treatise; in
Canada, it was reviewed almost exclusively as a nationalist one.’34 Canadian
reviewers, she explains, tended to successfully draw from the text a series of
corresponding binary oppositions of man/woman, culture/nature, America/
Canada, in which the first element of the binary was invariably dominant and
aggressive. American reviewers, instead, generally failed to identify the final
pairing or chose instead to read ‘America’ as a purely metaphorical concept,
standing in for society as a whole rather than literally for the American state.
(And of course, the novel itself disrupts any too-easy identifications of aggressor
and victim when the noisy, thoughtless ‘Americans’ that the narrator abhors are
revealed to be Canadians after all.)
Delany’s review offers the Canadian perspective on these matters as he
picks up on the question of victimization in a national context. In it, he
draws a distinction between Atwood’s work, with its ‘acute responsiveness to
the Canadian landscape’ and that of ‘established Canadian writers of more
cosmopolitan outlook’ such as Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen and Irving
Layton. In her novel, he notes, Atwood creates an opposition between a corrupt
‘American’ society associated with violence, technology, and the ruthless
pillaging of natural resources, and the primitivism of the Canadian wilderness.
Reflecting on the manner in which moral values are associated with nations,
Delany looks back to a nineteenth-century common comparison between the
European novel (concerned with man as he is shaped by social institutions)
and the new American romance (‘man in relation to moral absolutes and to
nature’). In the twentieth century instead, suggests Delany, as America’s claim
to untainted innocence is long gone, it is Canadian literature that now conceives
of itself as powerless but virtuous. And so, as in Atwood’s second novel, for the
Canadian protagonist, the wilderness continues to provide a space of retreat in
which one can recover one’s true, untainted self.35
While Surfacing, with its wilderness setting and its narrator’s erroneous fury at
the ‘Americans’, certainly invites nation-focused readings, these were inevitably
further encouraged by the novel’s proximity to Survival, which was published
in the same year (and is discussed in more detail in the introduction). Poet and
critic Eli Mandel, for example, notes that the victim/aggressor pattern, which
24 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

recurs throughout the novel, is repeated from Survival, which, he suggests,

‘reads like a gloss on Surfacing’.36 In Survival, Atwood set out four basic victim
positions and proposed that the theme provided a useful way in which to examine
and understand the preoccupations of Canadian literature. The dynamics of
victimhood, she declares, are the same, ‘whether you are a victimised country, a
victimised minority group or a victimised individual’.37
Subsequently, this has remained a significant theme in readings of Surfacing,
from the earliest newspaper reviews to more recent analyses. For example,
Marion Wynne-Davies, in her 2009 monograph Margaret Atwood, argues that
Atwood’s early works explore her theories of victimization and survival and
connect these ideas particularly to her representations of women and Canada.
For Wynne-Davies, ‘Atwood neither ignores nor accepts national and gendered
victimization’ but instead – in the manner set out in Surfacing – looks to move
beyond negative, passive victimhood positions in order to attain the desired
state of what Atwood terms, in Survival, a ‘creative non- or ex-victim’.38 In such
readings – and there are plenty – we see how certain key understandings of
Atwood’s early works have maintained their influence and credibility across
decades of critical analysis.

Feminist readings
In addition to her reading of Surfacing as a quest narrative, Laurence’s review
concludes by pointing to a number of other key themes that occur in the novel –
themes that she identifies as some of the most urgent of contemporary issues: ‘the
role of women, the facts of urban life, and most of all, the wounding and perhaps
killing of our only home, Earth’.39 With this summation, Laurence points to two
of the key approaches that, alongside the kind of Canadianist readings noted
above, would later come to characterize much Atwood criticism, specifically:
ecological readings and feminist readings.
As with analyses of The Edible Woman that sometimes struggled to square the
passivity and self-negation of Marian’s refusal to eat with an active and articulate
feminist protest, so feminist responses to Surfacing, and particularly to its
troublesome concluding scenes, have been mixed. While the unnamed narrator
undergoes an epiphany in which she recognizes that she can no longer continue
to passively collude in the casual sexist violence of others, her response to this
realization is deeply ambiguous. Shucking off the limits of a corrupt patriarchal
society, the narrator temporarily attains a natural wildness, conceiving a child
beneath the light of the moon, before returning to a society full of a vital, maternal
 Early Works and Early Reception 25

life force. The imagery here is towards some kind of timeless female power that
exists outside of the social. This resolution is problematic, however; as feminist
critic Carol P. Christ observes, ‘Atwood does not show how her protagonist will
integrate motherhood with work, relations with other adults, or politics.’40
In an influential 1976 article ‘Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Quest
and Spiritual Vision’ – which she later went on to develop into a book, Diving Deep
and Surfacing (1980) – Christ provided a potent reading of Atwood’s novel as a
tale of spiritual quest in which a woman seeks redemption. For Christ, the novel
requires a critical reading that sits at the juncture of theology and literary studies.
Where the social quest describes an alienated protagonist seeking integration into a
human community, the protagonist on a spiritual quest instead seeks a kind of self-
knowledge that does not necessarily translate into a new social role. In her article,
Christ notes some of the reservations some feminist critics had about Atwood’s novel,
and she cites Piercy’s questioning of whether the narrator can really choose to refuse
victimhood: ‘I don’t believe one woman can single-handedly leave off being a victim;
power exists and some have it.’41 Piercy’s concern here is that the symbolism of the
narrator’s individual refusal to be a victim neglects to acknowledge or address the
structures that deprive certain groups of power. Christ’s argument, however, is that
feminism’s task is to challenge not just social and political structures, but also ‘the
perception of reality which underlies and legitimates them’: which is an altogether
more intimate and individual task.42
The key transformational element in Surfacing, for Christ, occurs at the
moment in which the narrator recovers her repressed memories. At this point,
faced with the resurfacing fact of her abortion, she refuses the masculine,
logical, hierarchical distinctions between creatures that are deemed fit to live
and those that can instead be destroyed: between ‘“good” (legitimate) foetuses
which grow up to have birthday parties, and “bad” (illegitimate) foetuses which
must be killed’. The narrator asserts instead a more feminine, intuitive sense
of reality. At this same moment, the narrator also experiences a revelation of
her newfound feminine power. Communing with the gods of nature, having
visions: she becomes cognizant of herself as powerful. Discussing this sense of
feminine power that she identifies in Atwood’s novel, and responding to Piercy’s
objections, Christ argues that the female quest involves an awakening to the
violence and the limits of the ‘male-defined world’.43 This awakening may involve
the recovery of feelings that have been suppressed in order to acquiesce to the
male logic of the social, which can be painful, but also results in the potential
for healing and joy. This transformation, she argues, represents a move from
victimhood to power.
26 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

In Judith Plaskow’s response to Christ’s article, and in other readings of

the novel elsewhere, the feminist debate around Surfacing largely hinges on
interrogations of what Plaskow terms ‘the old idea that there exists a special
sympathy or a special connection between women and nature’. Whereas, for
Christ, there is revolutionary power to be unlocked in exploiting women’s
connection with nature, Plaskow notes that this supposed connection has
historically been co-opted as an ideological basis for the subordination of
women. The question, then, is whether the problems of associating women with
nature ‘render its theological use inadvisable’.44
Plaskow cautions against Christ’s celebration of the narrator’s seeking of ‘self
in cosmos’ – her internalized, spiritual quest for selfhood – rather than ‘self
in society’. She argues, much like Piercy, that an internalized quest for power
within will only leave social power in the hands of others. In theological terms,
Plaskow argues, a preoccupation with the spiritual to the neglect of the social
may pretend to be politically neutral, or even progressive, ‘but actually supports
the status quo’.45 That is to say, the narrator running naked in the woods will
change nothing.
In a further notable element of this essay, Plaskow touches on what has always
been a controversial element of the novel: the narrator’s response to her unwanted
abortion. While recognizing that it would be too crass to simply describe the
novel as an anti-abortion text, Plaskow suggests that in only giving voice to the
narrator’s traumatized view that all modes of killing are inherently evil – in
refusing to acknowledge that there may be justified killings – the novel retreats
from the difficult but necessary engagement with the human dimension of our
relationship to nature and the decisions and responsibilities that it necessarily
entails. Atwood, she states, ‘does not allow us to say when an abortion might be
appropriate or allowed’. For Plaskow, the novel poses complex questions around
our connection to nature and the extent to which women can safely explore this
connection without being corralled into longstanding and limiting beliefs that
women are more ‘natural’ and therefore less fully human and less rational than
men. The novel, for Plaskow, fails to offer a workable middle ground between
exploitative culture and victimized nature; and what is needed, but absent, is
‘a conception of identification with nature as the basis for responsible action’.46
For Atwood, writing in her Reply to the two essays, ‘The crux of the Christ-
Plaskow debate seems to be a disagreement over whether stories should be about
what is or what should be.’ Refusing to be drawn on whether she advocates a view
of women as closer to nature or not, she notes that as a writer, her responsibility is
to the text – ‘to the thing being made’.47 Her story unfurls as it does, she declares,
 Early Works and Early Reception 27

because it follows the logic of the narrator and what she has experienced. It does
not seek to make either a statement of how things are or a prescription for how
things ought to be.

A gothic novel
In an early interview, Atwood describes Surfacing as a ghost story, and in an
essay on what he calls ‘Atwood Gothic’ (an increasingly prevalent term), Mandel
notes that this comment inspired much subsequent analysis of the novel. More
significant for Mandel, however, is the wider element of the gothic that runs
through much of Atwood’s writing. Reading the novel alongside repeated
instances of ghosts, haunting, doubling and the uncanny in works such as You
Are Happy, The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Survival, Mandel returns to the
novel, and asks: ‘Who are the ghosts of Surfacing?’ It is, as he observes, a text
filled with the dead: the narrator’s parents, her unborn child, the indigenous
peoples, the animals. For Mandel, these ‘ghosts’ all function as ‘symbols of
vitality, life, our real humanity, that has disappeared and must be brought back’.48
Like Grace in Violent Duality, Mandel notes the persistence of the trope
of doubleness in Atwood’s work. Patterns, he observes, repeat, as she recycles
images across her poetry and prose. He points, for example, to the poem, ‘This
is a Photograph of Me’ from The Circle Game, which commences with the image
of a body submerged in a lake. In Surfacing, as elsewhere in Atwood’s work,
images of birth and death repeat, overlap and blur, creating uncanny continuities
between ‘the baby not born, the baby aborted, the baby about to be born’.49 As the
narrator comes to imagine that the ghosts of her parents are becoming human
again, there is, proposes Mandel, a promise that the text’s gothic horrors might
be vanquished. But, he argues, nothing is ultimately resolved in this doubling
and reduplicating text in which there is potential for recovery, but also the threat
of repetition.
For Cynthia Sugars, instead, Surfacing is haunted – as has famously been
said about Canada – by its lack of ghosts. In her essay she points to the
similarity between the death of the narrator’s father and that of the real-life
Canadian artist and naturist, Tom Thomson, who drowned in an Ontario lake
in 1917. Sugars identifies in Atwood’s novel a desire for native ghosts – for a
genius loci, or spirit of the place – which, she suggests, Thomson fulfils in the
Canadian national psyche. But the desire for ‘native’ ghosts is complicated
by Canada’s colonial history, which troubles any call to a ‘native’ culture. For
Sugars, crucially, the figure of Thomson’s ghost emerges in a novel in which
28 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

indigenous people ‘constitute a prominent absence’. In recalling Thomson as the

prototypical Canadian pioneer, the novel, argues Sugars, only ‘skirts around this
guilty absence’.50

Language and form

While acknowledging the pull of both nationalist and feminist readings of the
novel, in her reflections on Surfacing in Violent Duality, Grace calls on the reader
to also consider the text’s formal aspects, particularly the unreliable narrative
voice of the unnamed protagonist. Noting that we learn few concrete details
about this woman with whom we share such intense experiences, Grace draws
attention to the ‘cool distance’ created by this voice, which is so seemingly in
control and competent, yet proves in the end to have been ‘a trap’, as we discover
that we have been deceived.51 With the deferred realization of this deception,
the reader is forced to reconsider the novel and its events and to question all
of the narrator’s judgements and assertions. Just as the references to a husband
and child prove false, along with allusions to the disapproved-of divorce that
prompted her estrangement from her parents, so we must question each of the
suspicions and intuitions we have been subject to. As Grace asks, ‘How accurately
has she ever seen Joe?’52
This deceptive mode of narrative address is crucial to the novel and the
way it works. As Grace observes, the reader, alongside the narrator, effectively
experiences a false perception of the world, followed by a revelatory revision
of everything he or she has held to be true. While this strategy is potent,
however, it also creates problems. Language, as Grace points out, is crucial to
the text of Surfacing. Through her impersonal, economical use of language,
the narrator strives to maintain control over her resurfacing memories and
her rising hysteria. In the allusive brevity of her writing, Atwood conveys the
narrator’s ‘cerebral approach to life, her inability to feel’, while the frequently
brief, fragmented sentence structure resonantly conveys the narrator’s disjointed
alienation from the world.53 But caught within this cool, authoritative narrative
perspective, we can struggle to be convinced that the narrator has achieved the
sense of development and reintegration that she eventually claims for herself.
Once we realize that we have been lied to throughout the body of her narrative,
how can we bring ourselves to trust her at the end?
For many critics, Surfacing concludes on a problematic irresolution. Atwood,
however, proposes an alternative reading. In an interview with Sandler, she
suggests that, if the plot of The Edible Woman is circular, with Marian concluding
 Early Works and Early Reception 29

in more or less the same situation in which we find her at the start of the novel,
the plot of Surfacing, instead, might be better described as a spiral: circuitous and
winding, but ultimately progressing; ‘the heroine of Surfacing’, declares Atwood,
‘does not end up where she began’.54
Following the success of The Edible Woman and Surfacing and the growing
critical acclaim they garnered, Atwood’s next three novels work to develop the
concerns she displays in her early fiction. Over the next decade of writing, her
preoccupation with genre, particularly fairy tale, myth and romance, continues
to develop, as does her deep concern with gender and power.
30
 2

A developing canon and developing themes

Lady Oracle, Life Before Man and Bodily Harm

From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, as Atwood was steadily building her
reputation as a significant contemporary writer and attracting an increasingly
international readership, critics looked to conceptualize her developing canon
and identify the characteristically ‘Atwoodian’. In Margaret Atwood (2009),
Marion Wynne-Davies divides Atwood’s writing into four distinct periods. She
encompasses the first three novels within the theme of ‘Refusing to be a Victim:
1966-1978’ and observes that in the second period, 1979–87, Life Before Man and
The Handmaid’s Tale see the established theme of survival ‘drawn further back
into prehistory and pushed forwards into science fiction’. Terming this second
period: ‘It’s Time to Like Men Again’, Wynne-Davies argues that male characters
at this point in Atwood’s work become more complex, more finely drawn figures.1
Focusing on recurring concerns, in the introduction to the 1988 collection
Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, Kathryn VanSpanckeren highlights the
author’s preoccupation with genre, feminism and nature, and pays particular
attention to her critical engagement with the United States, specifically its
‘ecological carelessness, excessive materialism, and violence’.2 Other commonly
noted Atwoodian tropes at this time include a notable interest in gender, power
and the body, as well as, typically, a focus on a female protagonist within a
contemporary setting. As Atwood’s writing progresses into the 1980s, she
establishes herself as a writer concerned with exposing the manner in which
society constructs potent narratives from familiar tropes and forms.

Lady Oracle

After Surfacing, with its elliptical plot and traumatized narrator, Atwood’s third
novel revived something of the comic aspects of her first. Like both of the earlier
32 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

novels, Lady Oracle foregrounds the disruptive potential of genre subversion.

Where The Edible Woman is an urban romance that unexpectedly turns into
a mythical quest romance and Surfacing combines the quest with elements
of detective fiction, Lady Oracle instead provides a riotous, increasingly
irrepressible engagement with gothic romance in all its most pleasurably
melodramatic aspects.

Overview
The novel opens with Joan Foster, a celebrated poet and pseudonymous writer
of historical romance novels, living in hiding in Italy, having recently faked her
own death in a desperate attempt to escape an increasingly complicated series of
events. Commencing in the present-day frame narrative, Joan proceeds to give an
account of her life, from an unhappy childhood up to the recent entanglements
that necessitated her dramatic escape. Joan, it becomes clear, has undergone
many transformations in her life. She describes a troubled relationship with her
overbearing mother and an adolescent retreat into obesity in defiance of her
mother’s attempts to control and improve her. Joan is, by her own admission,
‘hooked on plots’ (342) and a ‘compulsive and romantic liar’ (165), and much
of the novel involves her various attempts to rewrite herself. In her study of
Atwood’s reworking of the female Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams makes
connections between Joan’s various appetites that see her ‘voraciously consuming’
textual narratives as she constructs a life story that seems to ‘relish, even gorge
on’ multiple pillaged literary sources.3 As Barbara Hill Rigney observes in her
1987 monograph Margaret Atwood, Joan conceives of her life story ‘as a series
of recognisable patterns’.4 From the fairy-tale plots of childhood, which cast her
mother as the evil queen to Joan’s Snow White, to the various tragic romantic
heroines gleaned from film, poetry and art, Joan constructs her identity from a
bricolage of familiar plots, from highbrow to low.
Trapped, like Rapunzel, in the imprisoning tower of her mother’s house, the
young Joan is equally trapped in the sexless anonymity of her obesity: a ‘magic
cloak of blubber and invisibility’ (157). For Sofia Sanchez-Grant, examining
embodiment in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, Joan’s size, and that of
the hallucinatory figure of the Fat Lady by which she is haunted, ‘symbolizes
the patriarchal fear of unchecked femininity and the need to cut the female
body down to size’.5 Even when she loses weight and becomes conventionally
attractive, Joan will continue to battle against this cultural prohibition against
women who take up too much space.
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 33

As an adolescent, however, Joan’s only friend is her beloved Aunt Lou,

equally overweight and equally unsatisfactory to Joan’s exasperated mother.
Together, they enjoy companionable trips to the cinema and attend services at
Jordan Chapel, an eccentric Spiritualist church: both of which provide Joan’s
imagination with yet more romantic and gothic plots. When Aunt Lou dies,
leaving her an inheritance on the condition that she lose 100 lbs, Joan is hurt
by the perceived implication that her Aunt secretly wished her to change, but
nevertheless accepts the challenge, claims the money and runs away to London:
one of many escapes that occur in the novel. In London, she meets Paul, a
melancholy émigré Polish Count, and becomes his lover. Upon discovering that
he supplements his income by writing nurse romances, Joan attempts her own
romance novel. Finding that she has a talent for constructing page-turning plots,
she commences a successful career as a romance writer, publishing under her
Aunt’s name as Louisa K. Delacourt.
In Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion, Nathalie Cooke makes a
connection between the figure of the female artist in Lady Oracle (in this
instance, a writer), and the narrator of Surfacing, who works as an illustrator.
She notes that later novels, such as Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, also have
artist-writer protagonists, and for Cooke, Atwood’s choice to make Joan a writer
enables Atwood to illuminate the difficulties of being a woman in a male-
dominated field and also to display ‘her strategies for resolving her concerns’.6 In
part, Cooke suggests, these strategies include a purposeful disruption of male-
dominated narrative codes and forms. And so, in Lady Oracle, we see Atwood
setting out to ‘trouble’ the reader’s expectations of genre and form.
Eventually, Joan leaves the increasingly possessive Count for Arthur, a young
Canadian political activist. When her mother’s unexpected death obliges her
return to Toronto, Arthur unexpectedly follows her home, and Joan commences
another role within another familiar plot, agreeing to marry him. While she
plays at being a ramshackle housewife, supporting Arthur’s various short-lived
radical campaigns, she hides her (economically productive) writing from him,
both afraid of his condescension but also secretly glad to have a second, hidden
identity. Joan’s life, as always, is comprised of increasingly disjointed elements
that she struggles to hold together. This sense of precariousness (which manifests
in the novel in the recurring image of the Fat Lady tightrope-walking) is rapidly
heightened when an experiment with automatic writing – a trick learnt at Jordan
Chapel – unexpectedly produces reams of enigmatic verse. Impulsively, Joan
sends the writing to a publisher under her own name and the ensuing epic poem,
‘Lady Oracle’, becomes a literary sensation and Joan becomes a ‘real’ writer.
34 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

The novel’s plot becomes rapidly more complicated and its various subplots
increasingly entwined. When Joan begins an affair with a performance artist, a
bitter literary critic threatens to tell Arthur. Simultaneously, another unknown
party starts to blackmail her, promising to reveal her true identity. Surrounded
by menace and threat, Joan plots yet another escape, faking her own death
in Lake Ontario. In Italy, however, she finds herself once again the target of
multiple sinister men. Reality and the plot of her incomplete novel, Stalked by
Love, become increasingly entangled. When she discovers that the friends who
assisted her escape have been arrested on suspicion of her murder, the novel is
finally revealed as an account she gives to a journalist in Italy in an attempt to set
the complicated record straight. As Molly Hite observes, however, Joan’s attempt
to tell her side of the story and wrestle back her narrative authority is inevitably
an exercise in telling ‘the story of her construction by others’.7

Gothic romance
For Annette Kolodny, Joan’s increasingly melodramatic life ‘is a catalog of the
gothic conventions she employs in her writing’. Examining the shift in Atwood’s
work from romance to realism, Kolodny identifies in Lady Oracle the continuation
of key elements of gothic romance: the magical transformation of Joan from an
obese unattractive child to a beautiful slender young woman; the element of
the supernatural provided by Joan’s automatic writing; and the recurrence of
ambiguous and potentially dangerously attractive men. As the novel progresses,
Joan’s multiple selves start to collide, and threats – both real and imagined –
begin to coalesce, as her real life becomes increasingly indistinguishable from
the plot of her gothic romance fiction. Just as she threatens to lose her grip on
reality entirely, Joan finally comes to realize that ‘her belief in miraculous rescues
and timely escapes is the real danger’. Forcing herself to confront the man at the
door, Joan realizes that she has been pursued by a reporter, not a murderer, and
the necessary process of disentangling fact from fiction can begin. For Kolodny,
Lady Oracle is ‘a romance about the dangers of romance’.8
In Reading the Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s Novels (2003), Colette Tennant
extends the discussion of Atwood’s use of the gothic in Lady Oracle to her
other works. In a chapter that examines ‘Shadow Males’ in Atwood’s gothic
fictions, she argues that Atwood’s heroines are commonly forced to confront
the danger posed to them by the men in their lives. Crucially, however, by
placing her protagonists in a gothic world in which men are ambiguous
figures, neither heroes nor villains, Atwood removes the traditional gothic
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 35

role of a passive female victim and ‘forces her heroines to accept responsibility
for their own survival’.9
Tennant borrows the term ‘Shadow Males’ from Joanna Russ’s 1983 essay
‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband’, in which Russ argues
that the emotional centre of the gothic novel is typically the ‘handsome, magnetic
suitor or husband who may or may not be a lunatic or murderer’.10 For Tennant,
all of Atwood’s male characters are Shadow Males of one kind or another. In
Lady Oracle, the various unsuitable men in Joan’s life, from Paul to Arthur to The
Royal Porcupine, all combine elements of the ridiculous and the mundane with
glimpses of potential gothic violence. Tennant suggests that Joan’s attraction to
such men is explained by the psychological impact of her emotionally absent
father, whose role as a doctor in the war and later as an anaesthetist with the power
to put people to sleep and return them to life, encapsulates a gothic duplicity.
When Joan’s mother dies in uncertain circumstances, Joan starts to suspect that
her inscrutable father may have been responsible. It is only when she starts to
recognize her father’s call to her complicity as an act of violence against his wife
that Joan, for the first time, experiences sympathy for her unhappy mother. As
Tennant notes, Joan finally realizes that ‘Joan’s home was a prison for her mother
and her father was the jail keeper’.11
While critical readings of Atwood’s gothic aesthetic have always been popular,
Lady Oracle, with its metafictional techniques, inevitably invites particular
attention. In The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, a 1993 critical
companion to the novel, Marjorie Fee devotes the larger part of her short
monograph to discussing the novel’s gothic themes. Like Tennant, Fee focuses
on the heroine’s unconscious desires and points to Joan’s active role in imagining
and exaggerating the threat posed by the various men in her life. Reflecting on
the improbability that any of the variously inept or mild-mannered men in her
life are actually gothic murderers, Fee argues that Atwood has to make the male
characters innocuous, because if any were to prove to be true gothic villains, the
textual resolution would require a gothic hero. ‘But, as Joan discovers, all men
are complex mixtures of both, which complicates life enormously.’12 For Fee, this
lesson is one that Joan has been taught since childhood, but which she refuses
to learn. She points, for example, to ‘the daffodil man’: a stranger who comes to
Joan’s rescue when she is abandoned by bullying girls in a ravine, and who may
or may not be the same man who, on another occasion, had exposed himself to
her in the same ravine. As Joan muses to herself: ‘Was the man who untied me a
rescuer or a villain? Or, an even more baffling thought: was it possible for a man
to be both at once?’ (61). Repeatedly, Joan is faced with the evidence that men,
36 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

like women, can be ambiguous and contradictory, but she nevertheless persists
in her gothic romance-inspired pursuit of their ‘true’ identity as hero or villain.
While Atwood may satirize the gothic romance genre and its tendency to
see male villainy and threat around every corner, the possibility of violence
remains real in this comic novel, as it does in all of Atwood’s work. Fee makes
the same point: Atwood, she notes, gently mocks Joan’s melodramatic fears that
the various men in her life might be conspiring to kill her, but nevertheless,
collectively, they represent a genuine threat to her safety in a patriarchal society
that disempowers women. Developing this argument, Fee reflects that the
original nineteenth-century reader of gothic romances was typically a middle-
class young woman facing probable marriage to ‘a relative stranger . . . with
sexual rights and absolute authority’ over her. The terror at the heart of the female
gothic tradition, therefore, is a terror of violence, of impotence and, crucially for
Fee, of ‘the loss of identity, a loss that can lead to madness’.13
This same anxiety around the loss of identity motivates Atwood’s novel, in
which Joan has many selves and many names. She is Joan Delacourt, named by
her mother after Joan Crawford whose real name was Lucille LeSueur; she is also
Louisa K. Delacourt and Joan Foster and the Lady Oracle. Each name is taken
in turn from someone else; none of them are truly hers. If a name signifies an
identity, Joan’s troubling excess of names signifies, paradoxically, the absence of
identity, or at least, the absence of a secure, unified selfhood. This instability – in
itself a gothic trope – echoes throughout Lady Oracle. In a novel full of mirrors,
reflections and doubles, Fee argues that the gothic transformations of the various
men in Joan’s life into strangers, monsters and murderers are best understood as
a projection of Joan’s anxieties about her own lack of identity: they represent the
fear that a person’s identity is inherently unstable – that they could, eventually,
prove to be anyone at all. For Fee, crucially, this fear tells us less about the men
in Joan’s life than it does about Joan herself.

Princesses and goddesses

Many of the features that mark Lady Oracle’s gothic aspect – elements of the
fantastical, themes of entrapment, transformation, rescue and so on – are
also common fairy-tale tropes. Picking up this thread, critics such as Sharon
Rose Wilson, Shuli Barzilai and Marilyn Patton have identified in the novel a
significant preoccupation with images taken from fairy tale and myth, all of
which are productively used by Atwood to explore cultural constructions of
femininity.
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 37

In a 1991 article ‘The Politics of the Body’, Patton makes good use of archival
research to trace Atwood’s interest in the mythic figure of the White Goddess.
Patton explains that the Goddess, which Atwood encountered via Robert
Graves’s book The White Goddess, is a multifaceted myth: she is the earth
mother, a cannibal, the (silent) muse, ‘both lovely and cruel, ugly and kind’.
She is a Triple Goddess: ‘seen in three phases: virginity, fecundity and hag’.14 As
a mythic trope, she embodies and condenses many fears and desires. Patton’s
article excavates earlier drafts of Atwood’s third novel, identifying later-excised
sections that contained more instances of Goddess imagery and also points to
research that Atwood undertook on the White Goddess while preparing her
manuscript. The image, suggests Patton, interests Atwood because it makes
connections between powerful female bodies and powerful female imaginations
as she ‘condenses fears of being large and fat, fears of being powerful, fears of
devouring or overpowering lovers and children, and the fear of being a writer’.15
In Lady Oracle, Joan experiences – like many Atwood protagonists – a
deeply rooted ambivalence towards femininity, and particularly towards the
female body. For Hite, the figure of the Fat Lady in the novel embodies the
cultural repulsion at excessive, unchecked femininity that threatens to ‘overflow
boundaries, obliterating distinctions and violating proprieties’.16 If Marian in
The Edible Woman unexpectedly found herself unable to eat, getting thinner
and hungrier, then Joan in Lady Oracle represents her counterpart: she is the fat
woman, all body and excess. Where Marian denies herself, refusing to consume,
Patton observes that Lady Oracle, instead, ‘is about the eating woman’.17 The
disgust and fear that this figure inspires are evident in various scenes in the novel.
For example, Patton points to the grotesque, gothic scene in which Joan dreams
that the clothes that she buried after making her escape become inhabited by the
animated flesh she ‘lost’ when dieting. Joan imagines this monstrous creation
digging its way to the surface and coming to look for her: ‘it would look like a
big thigh, it would have a face like a breast minus the nipple’ (353). For Patton,
such passages signify women’s fear ‘that their own female bodies will overpower
their minds’.18
The significance of ‘the Triple Goddess’ is also noted in Sharon Rose Wilson’s
discussion of Lady Oracle in Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, where
it is placed alongside a number of other mythic and fairy-tale themes that shape
the novel.19 For Wilson, the most significant intertext in Lady Oracle is Hans
Christian Anderson’s ‘The Red Shoes’, in which a woman is forced to dance to
exhaustion by a pair of enchanted shoes. The story inspired the 1948 film of
the same name, starring Moira Shearer and directed by Michael Powell and
38 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Emeric Pressburger, which Atwood has often cited as an early influence and
which Joan watches at the cinema with Aunt Lou. Wilson argues that Atwood’s
female characters commonly recognize that they can either ‘dance’ ‘(be artists,
be “themselves,” be “free”)’ or marry, but that they cannot do both. As a comic
novel, however, Lady Oracle, she suggests, resists this imperative and instead
parodies the moralizing of ‘The Red Shoes’, in which dancing is a symbol of
uncontrolled sexuality and female vanity. In Atwood’s novel, instead, dancing
becomes ‘a means of self-expression, communion with other women, magic,
transformation, and art’. Eventually released from the compulsion to keep
‘dancing’ in her increasingly manic plot, Joan nevertheless refuses to repent, and
chooses instead to tell another story, or as Wilson puts it, to simply become ‘a
different kind of dancer’.20
Fairy-tale imagery is also explored by Barzilai in a 2000 article in which
she examines Lady Oracle’s playful replication of ‘the Rapunzel Syndrome’,
a phenomenon that Atwood first described in Survival. In that critical work,
Atwood argues that the narrative pattern of the Rapunzel fairy tale is commonly
adopted in ‘“realistic” novels about “normal” women’. Defining the Rapunzel
Syndrome, she identifies four key elements: the main character (Rapunzel); the
wicked witch (‘usually her mother’); the imprisoning tower (‘the attitudes of
society, symbolized usually by her house and children’); and the rescuing prince,
whom Atwood notes is usually ‘not much help’. In some instances, Rapunzel is
her own tower; having thoroughly internalized society’s restrictions, she carries
her prison within her. Typically, argues Atwood, such novels fail to enact a
rescue and conclude with Rapunzel still trapped in her tower, only better able
‘to cope with it’.21
Lady Oracle is full of images of imprisonment and would-be rescuers.
The novel’s self-conscious engagement with Rapunzel, however (refigured
as Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott: another princess trapped in a tower), remains
vigilant to the traps afforded by the fairy tale and works to disrupt and reroute
narrative expectations. And so Joan eventually comes to recognize that her
mother was both the wicked witch and, in Barzilai’s phrase, ‘a self-as-prison
figure, an unhappy Rapunzel with no prince in sight’. The novel is full of such
contradictory reversals of fairy-tale expectations. Familiar tropes occur, but
are inverted or revised, so that they take on multiple, often contradictory
meanings; Joan’s obesity is both a prison and a ‘fortress-defense’, an act of
resistance and a rebellion.22 In such ways, the novel works against the simple
moralizing of mythic and fairy-tale narratives that would police female
behaviour. Consequently, Joan must come to realize that, like her mother,
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 39

she is both the princess trapped in the tower and the imprisoning witch who
holds the keys that might release her.
For Barzilai, Atwood’s novel is a tale of two Rapunzels: where Joan eventually
escapes her tower and learns how to survive outside of its limits, her mother,
instead, remains trapped. As Joan comes to realize, like the Lady of Shalott, her
mother ‘couldn’t stand the view from her window, life was her curse’, and death
is her only release.23 Her mother’s fate acts as a warning to Joan of the danger
of the various romantic, gothic, fairy tale and mythic narratives to which she is
compulsively drawn. And yet, as Barzilai notes, the novel’s ending is ambiguous:
Joan’s apparent relinquishing of stories is enacted by a telling of her story, and
the reporter she visits in the hospital every day becomes yet another potential
prince. Joan, it seems, is not entirely free of the pull of romance, and Barzilai
suggests that her dry, ironic tone does not, in itself, indicate her readiness to
abandon old habits. Reflecting on this imperfect resolution, Barzilai cites
Atwood’s observation: ‘You cannot create a character who is fully liberated in
every sense of the word in a society which is not.’24

Life Before Man

Atwood’s fourth novel remains in many ways a distinctive text within her
canon. The shift in tone from the comic excess of Lady Oracle is striking, as is
the novel’s structure, in which the third-person narrative is divided into brief
sections, each one focalized through one of three central characters: Elizabeth,
Lesje and Nate. The tone of the novel is determinedly realist, and the labelling
and dating of each narrative section, with its connotations of data or evidence
collection, add to the attempt to achieve a scientific, rational perspective on
the quotidian lives of the three protagonists. Coral Ann Howells notes that
Atwood has described the novel as a homage to George Eliot’s classic Victorian
realist novel, Middlemarch. Howells points out, however, a crucial difference
between Middlemarch and Life Before Man: Atwood’s novel omits the
authoritative voice of an omniscient narrator, directing the reader’s judgement
and understanding, and relies instead on three competing, partial narrative
voices. Consequently, Life Before Man is revealed to be ‘a very slippery text
indeed, composed of multiple discourses, some of which conform to realism
but many of which do not’.25
For Wynne-Davies, the novel’s inclusion of Nate’s perspective ensures that
Life Before Man is Atwood’s first novel to really consider ‘how men might
40 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

also be trapped within social conventions’.26 While a number of critics, as she

notes, found Nate to be childish and weak, Wynne-Davies argues that he is a
more complex and nuanced character than such assessments allow. Where
the two other significant male characters in the novel, ‘animal-like Chris’ and
‘career-orientated William’, draw on ‘one dimensional stereotypes of the 1960s’
(something she suggests also occurs in Atwood’s previous novels), the decision
to divide the narrative between three equally finely drawn perspectives ensures
that Nate’s character and view of the world are taken seriously. Just like Atwood’s
many female protagonists, Nate, argues Wynne-Davis, is depicted as ‘a self-
acknowledged victim who might just survive’.27
In addition to representing the fullest examination to date of a male character’s
interior life, Life Before Man also presents a more self-conscious depiction of
multi-ethnic contemporary Canada. While characters of different nationalities
and ethnicities have appeared in Atwood’s work before, in Life Before Man she
foregrounds Lesje’s experience as a Lithuanian-Canadian. Lesje’s relationship
with ‘William Wasp’ founders, in part, on her realization that, while he finds
her ‘impossibly exotic’, he could not imagine having children with someone who
was not of ‘his own kind’ (20–1). In Living Over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood’s
Life Before Man, a short critical companion volume to the novel, Carol Beran
notes that some early reviewers were unconvinced by this aspect of the text,
finding it ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘superficial’. Barbara Amiel’s review in Maclean’s,
for example, dismisses it as ‘Atwood’s nod to multiculturalism’.28 Beran, however,
points to archival evidence that Atwood researched Lesje’s ethnic background
with some care. And certainly, by describing part of the novel from Lesje’s
perspective, Atwood throws Canadian ‘WASP’ identity into relief as never
before. Canada’s perception of itself as an open and tolerant society is viewed
with some scepticism. As Wynne-Davies notes, while Toronto’s developing
multiculturalism emerges in Life Before Man, Atwood also ‘makes it clear that
the racial codes that govern the city’s hierarchy are still firmly in place’.29
Despite these innovations, Life Before Man remains under-represented in
criticism on Atwood. While critics writing today do sometimes return to The
Edible Woman, Surfacing and Lady Oracle, few seem motivated to re-examine
Life Before Man. Even in companion texts, it is the novel that is most readily
overlooked. It is, for example, one of the novels Nathalie Cooke’s 2004 work,
Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion skips over, as she proceeds from
chapters on the first three novels straight to Cat’s Eye. This relative neglect is
consistent with responses at the time of the novel’s publication. Reviewing the
critical reception of Life Before Man, Beran notes that many readers found the
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 41

book problematic, with common complaints being that it was bleak, inconclusive
and despairing. In an interview from 1985, Atwood acknowledges that critics
struggled with the novel, stating: ‘they didn’t quite know what to do with that
one because it didn’t have the things in it that they were looking for’.30 For Beran,
this absence was the desired happy ending. She argues, however, that the novel’s
conclusion, ‘although not a joyous affirmation’, does contain the germs of the
traditional comic resolution of reintegration and new life and offers the hope, at
least, ‘that life before man – that is, a life yet to come – will not be totally bleak’.31

Overview
Life Before Man is set in the present-day Toronto of the late 1970s, and the
city’s landmarks – particularly, the Royal Ontario Museum where two of the
central characters work – are closely drawn from life. The novel is comprised of
the interiorized reflections of Elizabeth, director of the museum, her husband
Nate, formerly a lawyer and now a maker of artisanal children’s toys, and Lesje,
a palaeontologist and colleague of Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth and Nate are unhappily
married but attempting to stay together for the good of the children. As the
novel opens, Elizabeth is mourning the death of her former lover, Chris, who has
committed suicide, and Nate is recovering from the end of an affair. As the novel
progresses, Lesje begins an affair with Nate, which Elizabeth reveals to Lesje’s
boyfriend, William, who then attempts to rape Lesje. Elizabeth and Nate eventually
separate, and Nate moves in with Lesje, but he and his wife remain closely entangled
in their shared parenting. Frustrated at the continuing influence of Elizabeth on
their lives, and by the comparative precarity of her own role in Nate’s life, Lesje
secretly endeavours to become pregnant: ‘if having [children] was the only way she
could stop being invisible, then she would goddam well have some herself ’ (293). It
is, in the spirit of the novel, a Darwinian strategy for survival.
In its account of failed and damaged relationships, the action of the novel –
which takes place across approximately two years – is grounded in reflection,
recrimination and regret. At the same time, the characters must start to conceive
of a future that might potentially relinquish the past and evolve. As Elizabeth
slowly comes to terms with Chris’s death, which throws up long-repressed
memories of her unhappy childhood and her sister’s perhaps self-inflicted
drowning, Nate and Lesje work towards a relationship that might, in defiance of
all the pain and suffering, be life-giving and forward-looking.
The novel’s plot is relatively light, especially when compared to the excess of
plot in Lady Oracle. Where Atwood’s previous novels had all, in different ways,
42 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

relied on the twists and revelations of external details, in Life Before Man, the
focus instead is largely on the interiority of the three characters. Marilyn French,
in a very positive 1980 review for The New York Times, suggests that ‘the life of the
novel really lies in its texture, in the densely interwoven feelings, memories and
insights of the characters’.32 In a 1988 essay, Gayle Greene describes the ‘powerful
and haunting’ novel as more closely affiliated with modernism than realism, and
compares it to Virginia Woolf ’s experiments with time, reality, perspective and
interpretation. With Life Before Man, she suggests, Atwood accomplishes what
the modernists were striving for: ‘she has freed the narrative from plot so that she
can focus on the inner events that are the real adventures.’33 Karen Stein similarly
describes Life Before Man as a minimalist novel: one with few characters and
little action, set in a limited space and time, where all the major events happen
off-stage, either before the novel commences or taking place elsewhere.34

Between romance and realism

Although sometimes overlooked as an anomaly in Atwood’s canon, many
critics have usefully reflected instead on how Life Before Man connects to the
author’s ongoing concerns and preoccupations. For Stein, the novel is the first
of a sequence of three in which ‘the observer’s gaze is powerful and destructive’.
In Bodily Harm, she suggests, violence against women rapidly escalates from
pornography to physical violence and rape, while images of violent observation
proliferate in The Handmaid’s Tale in which the secret police are called ‘Eyes’
and women are covered to protect them from the male gaze. In Life Before Man,
instead, ‘the violence of observation is psychological rather than political’ and
characters constantly feel under scrutiny and inadequate.35
Kolodny, instead, offers a persuasive reading of Life Before Man as Atwood’s
‘first true novel’. She observes that each of the first three novels invent ‘worlds
in which the marvellous and the mundane easily intermingle’. In each, at certain
points in the narrative, ‘monsters . . . invade the stage’ and the protagonists must
subsequently work at ‘untangling the real from the unreal’.36 For Kolodny, these
discernible elements of the fantastic underscore Atwood’s involvement in the
major conventions of the romance form: where The Edible Woman is a comic
romance, Surfacing represents a serious romance quest, and eventually, with
Lady Oracle, Atwood ends up parodying the form. Indeed, Kolodny discerns
an impatience, by the end of the third novel, with the idea of romance, and
particularly with the romance motifs of rescue and magical transformation.
Noting that Lady Oracle concludes with Joan deciding to forgo her usual escapist
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 43

fantasies and instead to tell the full and unembellished truth for once, Kolodny
proposes that, in Joan’s resolution, ‘Atwood was announcing her own intention to
take up a different narrative design’.37 What follows, of course, is the determinedly
realist Life Before Man, which Sherrill Grace terms ‘Atwood’s first attempt at
social and domestic realism’. Like Kolodny, Grace discerns a move away from
the ‘romance conventions’ of the previous novels – fantasy, satire, myth and
the gothic – and an attempt instead to ‘capture the empty inconclusiveness of
modern marriage and urban existence’.38 And unlike the earlier texts, Life Before
Man offers no promises of fantastical transformation or escape, no matter how
much the protagonists may wish for them.
In sympathy with this new commitment to realism, the long-extinct creatures
on display in the Royal Ontario Museum where Elizabeth and Lesje work do
not come alive, but function instead only as a suggestive backdrop, commenting
on the lives of the present-day characters and the novel’s themes of threat and
survival. When Nate jogs through the city, Kolodny observes that he passes
between the Parliament Buildings, representing ‘political statecraft’, and the
Museum, representing prehistory. For Kolodny, crucially, neither politics nor
the past ‘provide alternate realities for healing or escape’.39 In this transitional
novel, in which the elements of romance that shaped Atwood’s previous three
works are still discernible, romance is always ultimately exposed and rejected.
Although they may yearn for a magical transformation or a mythical guide,
each of the three central characters eventually discovers that transformation is
still possible within the realms of the real. While these resolutions might lack
the kind of mysterious metamorphoses that the protagonists of The Edible
Woman, Surfacing and Lady Oracle undergo, each character survives, recovers
and abandons fantasies and daydreams of the past in order to make a necessary
commitment to the present and the future. For Kolodny, with the publication of
Life Before Man, ‘Atwood the romancer had turned realist’.40
Kolodny’s reading of the novel as a transitional text, marking Atwood’s
progress from romance to realism, is taken up and examined by Stein in her
essay, ‘It’s About Time: Temporal Dimensions in Margaret Atwood’s Life Before
Man’. Stein argues that the novel is better read as a text that contains and
juxtaposes two contrasting narratives: a surface realist narrative and a mythic
subtext. In the surface narrative, ‘time drags on and the characters are bored
and disillusioned’, but in the mythic subtext, instead, the characters trace a more
natural, cyclical pattern of birth, death and rebirth. In these two different layers
of narrative, the novel opposes a ‘gray world of contemporary urban culture’ to
‘a green world of nature’.41 Consequently, there is a tension, argues Stein, between
44 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

the realist narrative (linear, chronological and full of precise, verifiable detail)
and the more mythic counter-narrative (multiple, contradictory and circular).
While surface readers of Life Before Man most readily observe a cruel and
pessimistic plot functioning in the realist tradition, a deeper reading reveals the
novel’s ‘covert subtext’ which offers a more optimistic promise of revival and
rebirth.42
Where critics such as Kolodny and Howells point to the dating of the
various sections in Life Before Man as indicative of the novel’s commitment
to realism, Stein instead suggests that the dates draw the reader’s attention
to the passing of the seasons, foregrounding the ritualistic holidays of an
earlier, agrarian concept of natural time before mechanization. Time, for
Atwood’s characters, seems to represent the inevitability of death – just as
the dinosaurs died out, so will man – and the novel is, as Stein notes, filled
with memories of the dead and the rituals of mourning and memorializing.
But set against this bleak, deadening aspect is the pressure on the characters
to look forwards: to enact the pagan rituals of renewal and new life. Atwood’s
novel repeatedly intertwines the realist and the mythic in its imagery and
symbolism. Stein, for example, points to the symbolic function of Lesje
in the novel: as a palaeontologist, she is associated with the dead world
of fossils and the fixed, unitary world of the past, but her forename (a
Ukrainian version of Alice) connects her to Alice in Wonderland, and thus
a multiplicity of dimensions of space and time, while her surname – ‘Green’
– affiliates her with the natural, fertile world. Eventually, she becomes ‘A
pregnant paleontologist [. . .] a contradiction in terms’ (308). Ultimately, for
Stein, in its juxtaposition of linear/realist time and cyclical/mythic time, the
novel, rather than being bleak and pessimistic, suggests instead ‘possibilities
of healing and transformation through connection to nature’.43

Consumption and survival

Life Before Man develops a number of Atwood’s characteristic concerns,
specifically around gendered power relations, violence and threat, and the
consumption of the female body. In ‘The Politics of Eating’, Emma Parker places
Life Before Man at the heart of an extended thematic analysis of eating as a
metaphor for gendered power in Atwood’s work. While The Edible Woman and
Lady Oracle readily lend themselves to such readings, Parker notably extends
the theme to Life Before Man and identifies the relationship between eating and
power as central to the text. From Elizabeth’s determination to maintain tight
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 45

control over everything, including her own appetites, to Lesje’s powerlessness,

‘conveyed by the fact that she eats very little and frequently refuses food’, Parker
traces the various power plays in the novel. Meetings, she observes, commonly
take place over meals, and the novel contains persistent images of rotting food.
The smell of decay, she argues, evokes ‘the unhealthiness of relationships based
on the pursuit of power’.44
Sarah Sceats identifies a ‘quid pro quo in the food relations of lovers and
potential partners’ across Atwood’s work, and although her study does not
focus on Life Before Man, she does note that when Nate first takes Lesje out
for a cheap sandwich lunch, ‘the highly charged atmosphere indicates that this
food has a higher tariff ’.45 Parker’s essay makes a similar connection between
eating, power, and sex. She notes the frequency with which mouths, stomachs,
throats and teeth recur in Atwood’s imagery, and how often male protagonists
are described in terms of their teeth, particularly during sexual encounters – at
various times gritting, clenching, prominent and bared. In this way, as Parker
observes, ‘Consummation slides easily into consumption; sexual and physical
appetites converge’. The erotic chain of significance between food, sex and
violence is particularly prominent in Bodily Harm and Life Before Man, in which
Jake almost kills Rennie and William almost kills Lesje, both through near-
strangulation during sex. In Atwood’s fiction, concludes Parker, ‘the powerful
not only eat, they eat the powerless’.46
This cannibalistic motif provides a potent undercurrent in Life Before Man.
During a tense dinner party, the characters play ‘the Lifeboat game’, in which
each participant must justify his or her place in the lifeboat. Elizabeth proves
her determination to survive, arguing that the losers should be eaten rather
than thrown overboard: an example, notes Parker, of how the ‘strongest sustain
themselves by eating the weakest’.47 Discussing this same scene, Patton suggests
that the game ‘serves as a miniature of the human interactions throughout the
novel’. Where Elizabeth is the ruthless consumer-survivor, Nate’s distaste for
aggression, she argues, marks him as a potential victim. Representing both the
figure of the artist in the text and the role of Canada on the world stage, he is
‘forced to choose between action and silence’.48 This game of death and survival
is put into relief in the novel by Lesje’s recurring fantasies of walking among
dinosaurs; the extinction of creatures of such large appetites seems to forebode
man’s future demise, ‘when men and women treat each other as meat in a fight
for survival’.49 Atwood’s foregrounding of consumption exposes the myriad ways
in which the strong consume the weak: a theme that once again comes to the
fore in her next novel, Bodily Harm.
46 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Bodily Harm

Life Before Man exposes the threat of violence lurking beneath the veneer of civility
and demonstrates Atwood’s preoccupation with survival ‘in a world characterised
by hostility and violence that is both latent and overt’.50 With Bodily Harm, these
concerns are further expanded in what Rigney terms Atwood’s ‘profoundly political’
fifth novel, which significantly extends the geographical reach of her work, making
looping connections between violence and coercion on an intimate, local, national
and international scale.51 A similar point is made by Patton in an article that
examines early drafts of the novel. She suggests that Bodily Harm is more profoundly
political than The Handmaid’s Tale; where the latter novel focuses primarily on the
rise of the evangelical right, Bodily Harm uses cancer as a metaphor by which to
connect seemingly disparate systems of power and misogyny, from the police to
the CIA to authoritarian governments, to drug cartels, healthcare, pornography
and advertising, ‘thus making visible the relationship between sexual and political
oppression’.52 In this manner, as Diana Brydon argues, the novel’s title conflates
the ‘body politic, female body, and colonized space/tropical island’, pointing to the
ubiquity of violence and harm.53

Overview
Bodily Harm proceeds in the present day, with the protagonist’s past revealed in
episodic flashbacks. The narrator, speaking to an unknown interlocutor in an
unknown location, commences: ‘This is how I got here’ (11). Once a politicized
student journalist, now a ‘lifestyles’ features writer producing determinedly
non-political feel-good pieces, Rennie’s life is thrown off track by a breast cancer
diagnosis. The consequent stress throws up complicated feelings about her body and
disturbs memories about her unhappy childhood in conservative Grimswold, where
she learned to be quiet and no trouble. The disruption to her usual equilibrium
precipitates the breakdown of her relationship with her boyfriend Jake, who moves
out of their shared apartment. All of these events precede the start of the novel,
which opens instead on a disturbing scene in which an unknown intruder has
entered Rennie’s empty apartment, leaving behind a suggestive coil of rope on her
bed. Feeling uneasy, and with no particular responsibilities to keep her in Toronto,
Rennie offers to do a travel piece on a little-known Caribbean island and sets off in
pursuit of a relaxing escape from reality.
Like Lady Oracle, Bodily Harm adopts a pastiche of styles and genres. It
begins in the mode of a crime novel when Rennie comes home to find the police
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 47

in her apartment, although Rennie imagines it more like a Golden Age detective
puzzle: ‘Miss Wilford, in the bedroom, with a rope’ (14). When she falls in love
with her oncologist, she chides herself for betraying the clichéd behaviour of
‘women in nurse novels and sex-and-scalpel epics with titles like Surgery’ (33) –
indeed, the kind of novels that Paul in Lady Oracle writes. And when her ‘Fun
in the Sun’ (16) travel piece leads her into unanticipated dangers, the holiday
romance novel unexpectedly swerves into a dark political spy thriller. As each
of these genres is alluded to and rejected, Rennie progressively learns that there
are no ‘sidesteps’, no ‘small absences from real life’ (16). By the end of the novel,
she will instead accept that she is a reporter, with a duty to observe and report.
Rennie’s development fits with the trajectory of Kolodny’s thesis, which reads
Life Before Man as a transitional text in Atwood’s progression from romance
to realism. As Kolodny notes, when Atwood discussed Bodily Harm (as she
would also discuss The Handmaid’s Tale), she was at pains to point out that she
had ‘anchored even the most bizarre elements [. . .] to demonstrable realities’.
For Kolodny, this new emphasis on the real is a crucial element in Atwood’s
fictions at this time. From Bodily Harm onwards, Atwood moves away from
her previous preoccupation with ‘the power politics of intimate relations’ and
begins to concentrate instead on ‘the abuse of power in the public arena’.54 If Life
Before Man was a transitional text, marking a rejection of romance, Bodily Harm
represents Atwood’s realism come to fruition.
When Rennie finally reaches St Antoine, the relaxed holiday escape she was
seeking proves elusive. Even before she arrives, there are intimations – which
Rennie seems determined to ignore – that she is entering a complex, highly fraught
political situation. Dr Minnow, a former government minister she meets on the
small local plane, gestures towards the island’s poverty, government corruption,
poor infrastructure and fragile stability in the wake of the very recent departure of
the British colonial administration, but Rennie misreads him as an overly familiar
bore and potential pest. Rennie’s subsequent experiences are similarly shaped by
her fundamental miscomprehension of the political realities that surround her. As a
single white Canadian woman on islands that are not common tourist destinations,
she finds herself standing out and feeling watched. Local tensions, she discovers,
are running high in the run-up to the first independent elections in the region.
Rennie’s sudden appearance as a travel writer is generally deemed unlikely, and she
is assumed to be a political journalist and probably a spy.
Simone Drichel notes that, in the scene with Minnow and others, Rennie–
an avid reader of thrillers and murder mysteries – wishes she had a book to
insulate herself from unwanted attention. For Rennie, fiction is a mode of
48 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

escapism. Drichel extends this equation, making connections between the kinds
of texts that Rennie consumes and produces. She argues that travel writing
(like pornography – a key theme in the novel) provides the reader/viewer with
a safe, controlled image that protects him or her from ‘an unsettling (or even
threatening) encounter with the real’.55
Throughout the novel, Rennie is subject to various advances that she rarely
fully understands. At her hotel, she runs into Paul, an American who lives and
works on the island. With a history of involvement in geopolitical hotspots,
‘always advising’ (46), Paul, it appears, is either a mercenary or a spy, or perhaps
both. Once again, however, Rennie seems oblivious to what is before her and
conceives of their developing relationship as a holiday romance. It is Paul
who explains the turbulent local politics to her and assures her ‘you won’t get
hurt. You’re a tourist, you’re exempt’ (78). Later, Rennie is picked up by Lora,
another white Canadian woman, whom Rennie instinctively dislikes but is
unable to shake off. Lora, it turns out, is the girlfriend of Prince, one of the
opposition candidates in the forthcoming elections. Like Minnow, and like the
various locals, waiters, vendors and beggars she encounters, Lora seems to want
something from Rennie that she feels unable and unwilling to give.
As the novel proceeds, events on the islands rapidly gather pace. Minnow,
also standing as opposition candidate, appears to have won the elections, but is
shot by a CIA agent. A brief insurrection is brutally put down and, unwittingly
caught up in the turmoil on the streets, Rennie is imprisoned and finds herself
sharing a cell with Lora. In prison, Lora exchanges sexual favours with the guards
for the promise of being allowed to see Prince. When they eventually reveal
that he was killed in the uprising, her howls of protest are met with a brutal,
possibly lethal beating. Shortly afterwards, Rennie is released and interviewed
by a Canadian official, who tacitly requests her silence about what she has
witnessed. Wanting only her passport and passage home, Rennie concurs, but
secretly, she knows everything has now changed: ‘she is a subversive. She was
not one once but now she is. A reporter. She will pick her time; then she will
report’ (301).

A postcolonial novel?
In an article entitled ‘Tourists and Terrorists’, Patton describes Surfacing, Life
Before Man, the 1975 short story ‘A Travel Piece’ and Bodily Harm as ‘tourist
stories’. In each, the protagonist believes herself to be a neutral observer – a
tourist – but must eventually accept ‘the impossibility of real “neutrality” in an
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 49

increasingly interdependent “global village”’.56 A similar point, as Patton notes, is

made by Ildiko de Papp Carrington, who also discusses the connections between
‘A Travel Piece’ and Bodily Harm. For the protagonists of both texts, suggests
Carrington, tourism equates to being an onlooker, to refusing ‘the vulnerability
of active participation’, but both are ultimately forced to take responsibility and
participate.57 Patton builds on Carrington’s reading, connecting the figure of the
tourist to Atwood’s concern with the politics of writing; in Bodily Harm, she
suggests, Atwood’s ‘political and aesthetic principles are finally combined’ as she
expounds on the political implications of writing.58 Noting that Atwood’s first
working title for Bodily Harm was ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, Patton reflects on the
fairy tale, in which a young girl secretly visits her fiancé’s house and witnesses
atrocities, before returning home and telling her tale. Patton takes from this
intertext the message that ‘telling tales may be a way of saving lives’.59
Patton and Carrington’s essays both gesture towards the postcolonial politics
implicit in Bodily Harm. With its Caribbean setting and departing colonial
administration, Bodily Harm’s postcolonial concerns make it anomalous in
Atwood’s canon. For Drichel (writing in 2008), this explains why, apart from
some critical work done in the 1980s and 1990s, the novel has rather fallen
out of favour with Atwood critics. At the same time, however, as she observes,
it was never taken up by postcolonial critics, and instead has a contested and
problematic status in the field. For Helen Tiffin, the novel’s paralleling of sexual
and political violence ‘glosses over’ material differences: ‘the metaphorical
connection is made at the expense of real engagement with the “other” culture’.60
Brydon, instead, while acknowledging this limitation, argues that the novel both
exposes Canada’s complicity in colonizing practices and refuses Rennie’s dearly
held belief in her own innocence. For Brydon, Atwood’s novel ‘locates some
gaps in the apparently seamless web of white cultural discourse’ and ‘challenges
postcolonial critics to refine their terminologies and rethink their methods’.61
Drichel takes up this debate between Tiffin and Brydon and suggests that
Bodily Harm has been overlooked by postcolonial critics because it does not
do what they expect it to do. But like Brydon, she argues that, because it ‘sits
uncomfortably’ in the field, it works to ‘reveal postcolonialism’s blind spots’ (26).
Drichel’s essay focuses on Atwood’s exposition of the manner in which the
tourist’s gaze unwittingly replicates the colonizing gaze. Atwood once again
complicates claims to victimhood by showing how ‘a male gaze of which Rennie
is the object in Canada is replicated in the neo-colonial gaze of the tourists that
Rennie brings to the islands’.62 After the break-in, Rennie feels watched, ‘as if
she was a moving target in someone else’s binoculars’ (40). Caught in a maze
50 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

of ‘violating gazes’ that transform her from a self-determining subject into the
object of someone else’s predatory desire, Rennie’s instinct is to flee, to make
herself invisible. But for Drichel, the ethical conclusion of the novel only occurs
when she learns to exchange the violent gaze for ‘the immediacy of touch’.63
Working against the ready equation of sexual-violence-done-to-women and
colonial-violence-done-to-nations that critics such as Rigney, Patton and Drydon
all identify in Bodily Harm, Kate Marantz offers a more sceptical reading in her
focus on gaps and absences in the text. Pointing to the opening scenes in which
the objects of fear are the absent intruder, the rope coiled around nothing, and the
removed breast, she suggests that these ‘absences in space, text, and meaning often
“speak” or signify the most complex and troubling messages’ of the novel.64 While
the narrative traces Rennie’s ‘political and emotional awakening’, Atwood, argues
Marantz, disbars her readers from the empathetic resolution they desire. Instead,
she employs gaps to expose the limits of seeing, comprehension and telling, and
to point to the difficulties and problems of equating different modes of violence
and oppression (even as she admits connections and parallels). She suggests that
Atwood cautions her predominantly North American feminist readership against
‘totalitizing political narratives’ that erase context and difference. This critique,
she suggests, is directed at a second-wave feminism that proved too ready to erase
material differences between women while still prioritizing the perspectives of
white women. For Marantz, Atwood’s exposition of the gaps in experience and
understanding is not a refusal of the importance of trying to make connections
– and of exposing the ubiquity of violence – but is instead a determination to
acknowledge that such gaps exist. This results in a novel that is ‘more nuanced
and self-reflexive’ than it might initially appear to be.65

Touch and responsibility

Just as Drichel’s essay finds resolution in the power of touch, so the importance of
touch in Atwood’s novel is examined by Jerome Rosenberg in his 1984 monograph
Margaret Atwood, in which he traces the significance of hand imagery in Bodily
Harm. Rennie has a recurrent disturbing memory of her grandmother, suffering
from dementia, wandering into the kitchen looking for her hands. When the
young Rennie tells her they are still on the ends of her arms, her grandmother
impatiently replies: ‘Not those . . . the ones I had before, the ones I touch things
with’ (57). Rennie’s cold and unyielding grandmother lost her capacity to touch
others – her capacity for care and compassion – long before her mind gave way.
At one point, Rennie recalls herself as a small and frightened child, desperately
 A Developing Canon and Developing Themes 51

clinging to her grandmother’s legs: ‘but she’s prying my hands away, finger by
finger’ (53). It is apparent that Rennie has been damaged by the coldness and
distance imposed by her grandmother. As Frank Davey puts it, ‘Later as an adult,
she will look at the world without touching it’, writing superficial articles and
conducting superficial relationships that touch no one.66
For Rosenberg, this recurring hand motif is primarily about connection:
about the manner in which our lives touch others. Rennie, so invested in her
independence and her lack of responsibility, must eventually accept ‘the cancerous
emblem of involvement in human imperfection and mortality’, but also, in a
more positive sense, look towards ‘joining in communion with her fellow human
beings’.67 At the novel’s conclusion, the moral urgency of connecting with others
comes to the fore, again through the imagery of hands and touching. Sharing a
prison cell with Lora, Rennie finds the other woman’s tears embarrassing and
distasteful. She ‘looks down at her hands, which ought to contain comfort.
Compassion’, but cannot bring herself to touch her (286). Later, when Lora is
beaten almost beyond recognition, Rennie undergoes, in Rosenberg’s words, a
‘spiritual transformation’.68 Where previously she had maintained her distance,
not wanting to feel obliged or entangled, her experiences in prison teach her that
‘she is not exempt’ (301).
Rosenberg argues that ‘Rennie’s newly formed moral landscape’ is revealed
in the novel when she finally remembers the conclusion of the scene with her
grandmother, in which her mother soothes the confused old woman by clasping
her dangling hands in her own. Knowing now what she must do, Rennie
approaches the bloodied body of a possibly dead Lora and holds her hands,
willing life back into Lora’s cold frame. Rosenberg notes that some reviewers
were sceptical of this scene, arguing that Rennie is ‘an unlikely healer’, too ‘self-
absorbed’ to provide the healing touch of God. But he argues that this is not the
point: as the novel closes, ‘we do not know whether Rennie has accomplished
a miracle, only that she has tried’.69 As with many of Atwood’s inconclusive
endings, the novel does not offer a resolution so much as a proposition that
something has changed.

A healing comedy?
Contemplating the conclusion of Bodily Harm, Kolodny contends: ‘[e]ssentially,
the plot is about recovery.’ Commencing in a state of damage and emotional
frigidity, Rennie recovers her sexuality, her compassion and the ‘outrage at
injustice that had once fuelled her journalism’.70 A similar assessment is proposed
52 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

by Davey in Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (1984). In a chapter titled ‘Four

Female Comedies’, Davey connects Bodily Harm to Atwood’s first three novels
(once again, skipping over Life Before Man). While his reading of Bodily Harm
as a comedy contradicts Kolodny’s assessment of the novel’s political realism,
Davey argues that it follows the familiar comic romance narrative pattern in
which a protagonist commences in social disruption, enters a healing green
world and then returns to society ‘capable of restoring it to wholeness’.71
Crucially, for Davey, the familiar comic romance pattern represents another
form of entrapment within ‘patriarchal second-order constructions’ that the
protagonists must escape.72 He argues that critics such as Catherine McLay
(whose essay on the quest motif in The Edible Woman is discussed in the
previous chapter) have failed to recognize this and continue to read the novels
as though the protagonists can achieve liberation through established patterns.
These archetypal patterns that recur in Atwood’s novel, Davey argues instead,
‘are circle games which trap characters into fruitless repetitive action’. Like
Joan in Lady Oracle, imprisoned in the maze of her formulaic plots, Atwood’s
protagonists do not need to complete the comic formula of descent and
renewal, rather they need to escape prescriptive narrative patterns altogether.
In Bodily Harm, Rennie eventually succeeds in doing this. Through touch,
which circumvents language, and through a new understanding of ‘language’s
inadequacies and ambiguities’, she envisions a way to subvert patriarchal plots.
By the end of the novel, suggests Davey, ‘the action of her hands becomes
infinitely more powerful than spoken words’.73
Read together, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man and Bodily Harm securely
establish Atwood’s reputation as a writer of female-centred, present-day
narratives that work to expose the gendered nature of power structures. We see,
over this period, the expansion of her interest in themes of power, violence and
victimhood. With her next novel, the phenomenally successful The Handmaid’s
Tale, Atwood further explores these themes, while also taking her most notable
early foray into an alternate world from her own contemporary Canadian setting
and constructs what will go on to become a foundational work of feminist
dystopian fiction.
 3

‘Are there any questions?’

A focus on The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s sixth novel, is her most well known and critically
acclaimed to date. This remains true, despite the fact that any new novel by Atwood
is now an assured publishing ‘event’. A dystopian fiction set in the United States
of the near future in which a brutal theocratic regime has come to power, it was
immediately successful, and its striking imagery of silent Handmaids dressed
in red is now embedded in the popular cultural imagination. The Handmaid’s
Tale has become something of a contemporary literary phenomenon. Writing
in an article for The Guardian in 2012, Atwood notes that it ‘has sold millions
of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations
and editions’.1 In 1990, it was adapted into a film starring Natasha Richardson,
Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. In 2000,
an opera based on the novel was commissioned by the Royal Danish Opera
and in 2003 Poul Ruders’s work was transferred to London by the English
National Opera. This was followed by the hugely successful 2017 Hulu television
production, starring Elisabeth Moss and Joseph Fiennes. With a ten-part first
series based on the plot of Atwood’s novel, a subsequent second, third and fourth
series take the story of Offred in new directions, extending the world of Gilead
beyond the ending of the text.
Renewed interest in Atwood’s 1985 novel was also generated by the
inauguration of President Trump in January 2017. Atwood responded directly
to the connections being made by many commentators between the current
political climate and her then thirty-two-year-old novel. In an article for The
New York Times entitled ‘What The Handmaid’s Tale Means in the Age of Trump’,
she observes: ‘In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties
proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the
rights for women won over the past decades.’2 For Atwood, the novel’s call to
bear witness remains current whenever human rights are in danger of erosion.
54 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Trump’s presidency prompted a spike of interest in classic dystopian fictions such

as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in
the High Castle (1962) and motivated a spate of newspaper articles with titles such
as ‘Prescient About the President: Which Writers Can Help Us Read Trump?’3
While most of the typically discussed writers were male, Atwood’s novel clearly
spoke to a particular set of concerns. As I observed in 2017, ‘renewed battles
in the US over women’s access to affordable health care and abortion providers
means that Atwood’s novel, which imagines a fundamentalist Christian regime
predicated on the absolute control of female sexuality and reproduction, has
taken on a new resonance’.4 Indeed, The New York Times reported at the time
that Atwood’s publisher had reprinted 100,000 copies of The Handmaid’s Tale
to meet renewed demand.5 As Atwood reflects, ‘Some books haunt the reader.
Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid’s Tale has done both.’6
As if prompted by the novel’s concluding line – ‘Are there any questions?’7
– analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale continues unabated to this day. Given
the continuing relevance and popularity of Atwood’s sixth novel, this
chapter provides an extended close examination of critical responses to The
Handmaid’s Tale.

Overview

The Handmaid’s Tale is set around Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United

States: a region settled by the Puritans in the early 1600s. The date of the
novel’s present day is around the early twenty-first century. Through scraps of
information gleaned from Offred’s disjointed narrative, we learn that America in
the late twentieth century was facing a crisis of falling birth rates, cumulatively
caused by pollution, sexually transmitted diseases and a conscientious refusal of
many women to reproduce at a time of significant nuclear threat. This imagined
America of the 1990s, while familiar, also appears to be characterized by a
heightened threat of violence against women, a rampant unregulated market for
sex and pornography, and, consequently, a more militant feminist block. In an
article that draws out the influence of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four on
The Handmaid’s Tale, Earl Ingersoll notes that Atwood and Orwell both depict a
totalitarian future that offers a grim choice between ‘either freedom and anarchy
or repression and security’.8 Accordingly, in response to perceived social decay
and disorder, the Christian New Right have consolidated their forces and staged
a coup, gunning down Congress and the President, and establishing Gilead, a
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 55

totalitarian state organized around Old Testament principles combined with the
seventeenth-century values of American Puritanism.
In Gilead, individualism is something to be stamped out and everyone
has a state-appointed role. The architects and authorities of the regime
are Commanders, who wield total patriarchal power. Households are led
by Commanders’ Wives, dressed in maternal blue, servants are Marthas,
dressed in functional dark green, while Handmaids, dressed in red, are fertile
women whose function it is to conceive and deliver a child to be raised by the
Commander and his Wife. State authority is enforced by a combination of
Aunts, who take charge of the indoctrination and discipline of the Handmaids,
by a security force of Guardians and by a shadowy web of spies and informers
known as Eyes. Everyone must act in service to the state, and as a Handmaid,
Offred – her name a patronymic of her Commander, Fred – is little more than
a vessel of reproduction: a useful body, forbidden to read or write, and with
strictly delimited speech. Because the narrative is delivered by Offred, women
such as her are the most visible victims of this regime. We also learn, however,
that all non-conformist or transgressive groups are deemed enemies of the
state, whether homosexuals, Roman Catholics, Quakers or Baptists, while the
‘Children of Ham’ – all black citizens – are ‘relocated’ outside of Gilead’s borders.
As Coral Ann Howells notes, ‘Atwood’s feminist concerns are plain here but so
too are her concerns for basic human rights.’9
Offred’s narrative is filled with the minutiae of everyday domestic life, as she
walks and shops with Ofglen, and describes the boredom of marking time in
her room between the monthly ‘ceremonies’ in which the Commander attempts
to impregnate her in the presence of his wife, Serena Joy. In his essay, Ingersoll
picks up on this depiction of Offred’s room and connects it to Orwell’s Winston
Smith seeking refuge in his room from the surveillance of the state. Atwood, he
suggests, draws on the image of Winston as a ‘writer in his room’, producing his
illicit diary, to encourage us to see Offred as a writer, ‘or at least as the generator
of a “text”’.10 For both Offred and Winston, ‘writing’ is simultaneously an
attempt to recover privacy and to overcome crippling isolation. Where Winston,
however, eventually faces the devastating revelation that everything he thought
was private and hidden was always known, the absence of a key to her room
leaves Offred under no illusion that she has any control over this space that is
nominally hers. For Ingersoll, ‘Winston and Offred are quite different “writers” in
large part because their relations to their rooms are radically different.’11 Where
Winston has a misplaced sense of privacy and autonomy that drives his written
account, Offred is always conscious of the fragility and permeability of her tale.
56 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Offred’s life in Gilead, while punctuated by brutal violence and characterized

by persistent threat, is also highly ordered and oddly mundane. Her narrative
is a survival narrative; she manages trauma by keeping quiet, staying still and
repressing her emotions. Her accounts of attending the regime’s various ritualized
practices, including group executions, are factual and often impassive. In an article
that examines Atwood’s use of ‘fascist style’ in the novel, Angela Laflen looks at how
fascist regimes edit and censor imagery to manipulate their citizens.12 Disparate
visual exhibits in The Handmaid’s Tale, from public hangings to Puritan artwork,
all act as ‘spectacular displays’ that publicly enforce the regime’s ideological
agenda. Throughout the novel, Gilead’s success in ‘re-educating’ Offred is evident
in the struggle she often has to identify and reject the regime’s influence on her
thoughts. For example, in her memories of ‘the time before’ (16), her very ordinary
life now appears to her as extraordinarily free. In this manner, suggests Laflen, we
understand that she now views the world ‘at least initially, through Gilead’s lens’.13
Offred’s disjointed memories of the past are peopled by her mother, her best
friend Moira, her partner Luke and their daughter. We learn that during a foiled
escape from Gilead in its chaotic early days, Luke was probably killed, and the child
was taken by the regime. As a fertile woman, Offred was offered a choice between
forced labour and becoming a Handmaid. As she dryly notes, while enduring the
ritualized rape of the monthly ceremony: ‘Nothing is going on here that I haven’t
signed up for’ (105). Commencing in relative stasis, events rapidly develop. Firstly,
the Commander initiates a clandestine relationship, inviting Offred to his study to
play scrabble and talk: both strictly prohibited activities. Around the same time,
Ofglen reveals herself to be part of Mayday, an underground resistance network,
and Serena Joy, desperate for a child, pushes Offred into a sexual liaison with Nick,
the Commander’s driver. Offred and Nick commence a secret relationship that
consumes Offred’s attention, and she relinquishes her interest in the resistance.
Later, the Ofglen she knew is replaced by a new Ofglen and she learns that her
subversive former companion killed herself when she saw the secret police coming.
The novel concludes with a similarly ominous black van arriving for Offred. As
she is led away, Nick reveals himself as a Mayday rescuer, rather than an Eye, and
Offred, with no way of knowing the truth, relinquishes herself to an uncertain fate.

Early responses

Contemporary reviews typically identify The Handmaid’s Tale as a significant

work from an important writer, although some find cause for criticism. Mary
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 57

McCarthy in The New York Times terms it an accomplished and engaging work –
‘a poet’s novel’ – but ultimately unimaginative and ‘powerless to scare’. She laments
Atwood’s failure to imagine a new form of future language in the mode of Nineteen
Eighty-Four or A Clockwork Orange, arguing that ‘a future that has no language
invented for it lacks a personality’. This complaint seemingly overlooks the fact
that Gilead is a near-future dystopia, set just twenty years ahead, and also neglects
the various neologisms that Atwood does introduce. Nevertheless, for McCarthy,
the novel lacks the necessary shock of surprised recognition: ‘the book just does
not tell me what there is in our present mores that I ought to look out for’.14
Lorna Sage’s review for The Times Literary Supplement is largely descriptive
and non-committal but declares that Atwood synthesizes a fictionalized future
‘with aplomb’. Her significant observation is that Offred seems to struggle to
inhabit the imagination of the male characters. Sage argues that, on the one
hand, Offred/Atwood (Sage assumes some overlap between character and author
on this matter) is rather too sympathetic to the Commander, who is presented
to the reader as ‘a puzzled, mildly perverse ex-market researcher’ who seems
to require our understanding. On the other hand, however, Offred’s alienated
attempt to imagine sexual intercourse from a male perspective – ‘To have them
putting him on, trying him on, trying him out, while he himself puts them on,
like a sock over a foot’15 – is akin to someone trying to describe the behaviours
of a different species; ‘Surely’, asks Sage, ‘even patriarchal male sexuality can’t feel
this strange?’16
Like McCarthy, novelist John Updike, writing in The New Yorker, has some
reservations around the likelihood of Atwood’s imagined scenario and suggests
that few Americans could take seriously the idea of an armed uprising of the
New Right. Overall, however, Updike’s review is very appreciative. Noting that
futuristic novels are often in danger of rapidly dating, he suggests that The
Handmaid’s Tale is protected from this fate because, among its many critiques
and warnings, Atwood has ‘threaded a curious poem to the female condition’.
Noting the manner in which Offred’s life is lived amid the details of shopping
and waiting, ‘timorous strategizing and sudden bursts of daring’, he observes
that it provides ‘an intensified and darkened version of woman’s customary
existence’.17 Crucially, for Updike, Atwood’s novel is ultimately far less pessimistic
and claustrophobic than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Where Orwell’s novel shuts down
all opposition and is suffused with the author’s knowledge of his impending
death, Atwood’s novel, Updike argues, is instead suffused ‘by life – the heroine’s
irrepressible vitality and the author’s lovely subversive hymn to our ordinary life,
as lived, amid perils and pollution, now’.18
58 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

What genre is it?

In a 1996 chapter titled ‘Science Fiction in the Feminine’, Howells suggests that
much as Offred’s narrative voice evades Gilead’s imposed silence, so Atwood’s
novel ‘eludes classification’.19 Indeed, there have been many attempts to define
the novel’s genre. If some early reviewers struggled to find the novel’s dystopian
premise persuasive, Atwood, on the contrary, insists on its rootedness in reality.
Howells cites her in an unpublished essay explaining: ‘there’s nothing in it that
we as a species have not done, aren’t doing now, or don’t have the technological
capability to do’20 – a variation of which formula Atwood has gone on to repeat
many times. With such declarations, Atwood deliberately pushes against
attempts to locate her dystopian novel within the correlate genre of science
fiction. When asked if her novel might be termed science fiction, Atwood
responds, quite directly:

No, it certainly isn’t science fiction. Science fiction is filled with Martians and
space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn’t this book at all. The
Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written not as science fiction
but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, The Handmaid’s Tale is a slight
twist on the society we have now.21

Commenting on this same early interview, Gina Wisker observes that Atwood’s
definition of science fiction is deemed by many to be too narrow and prescriptive.
(Indeed, Atwood got into a very public debate with science fiction writer Ursula
Le Guin about this very matter.22) For Wisker, ‘the transfer into the future or
elsewhere of issues common today is precisely what much science fiction does’.23
In a later 2006 essay on The Handmaid’s Tale, Howells attempts to breach
the gap between opposing definitions of science fiction, speculative fiction and
dystopia. Reading the 1985 novel in conjunction with the 2003 work, Oryx
and Crake, Howells examines them both as ‘an imaginative writer’s response to
contemporary situations of cultural crisis’ (161). Both texts are evidently working
within the realm of dystopia, but in notably different ways: The Handmaid’s Tale,
with its totalitarian state, belongs to a tradition of political dystopias, while Oryx
and Crake is part of another distinct tradition of post-apocalyptic narratives.
For Howells, Oryx and Crake, with its overreaching scientist and irresponsible
genetic experiments, is firmly embedded in a lineage of science fiction by
writers such as Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells, whereas The Handmaid’s Tale is
determinedly of this world. Indeed, its practices are wilfully archaic, harking
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 59

back as they do to the seventeenth-century Puritans. The distance between the

two texts, therefore, seems wide. Howells, however, makes the striking suggestion
that Oryx and Crake can be read as a kind of sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale,
where elements in the earlier text are accelerated in the later work. And so, the
‘pollution and environmental destruction which threatened one region of North
America in the earlier novel’ have escalated in Oryx and Crake ‘into worldwide
climate change through global warming’. Similarly, the kind of liberal-market
mass-consumerism that the morally conservative architects of Gilead violently
rejected has metamorphosed, in the future world of Oryx and Crake, into the
high-tech ‘consumerist decadence’ that characterizes the later novel.24
Atwood uses a dystopian framework to explore contemporary political
concerns. While her spectacular vision draws attention to the imagery and
the ritual of the regime’s extraordinary practices, Barbara Hill Rigney, in her
1987 book, Margaret Atwood, focuses on the novel’s political realism. Rigney
reads The Handmaid’s Tale in conjunction with Bodily Harm and the 1981 poetry
collection, True Stories, categorizing them as a trio of works concerned with
oppression ‘in all its manifestations, both physical and psychological’.25 Like
Annette Kolodny’s thesis that Life Before Man represents a transition in Atwood’s
work from romance to realism (discussed in the previous chapter), Rigney
focuses less on the memorable idiosyncrasies of Atwood’s dystopian vision in
The Handmaid’s Tale – the uniforms and the rituals – and more on the manner
in which the novel continues the author’s developing preoccupation with real-
world power and its (all too commonplace) ‘universal forms: dictatorship,
tyranny, torture and the reality of violence’. For Rigney, there is a clear correlation
between Rennie’s decision at the end of Bodily Harm to report the truth of what
she has witnessed and Offred’s subversive eye-witness account of the Gilead
regime’s atrocities. In this manner, Rigney’s work exemplifies a strand of critical
readings of The Handmaid’s Tale that locate it within the realms of political
witness, testimonial or survival narratives.
While The Handmaid’s Tale is Atwood’s first extended foray into dystopian
fiction – a form that will become increasingly prevalent in her work over the
coming decades – it nevertheless betrays a familiar interest in genre subversion.
In its speculations around Ofglen and Nick’s shadowy affiliations, it functions as
a spy thriller, while Offred’s red cape and basket mark her as a fairy-tale Little Red
Riding Hood surrounded by wolves. It is also a romance of sorts, charting Offred
and Nick’s developing relationship. Examining Atwood’s use of the romance plot
in The Handmaid’s Tale, Madonne Miner notes that, for many critics, love in
the novel is a subversive force, providing an intimate site of resistance against
60 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

the regime’s authority. While acknowledging that such readings are persuasive,
Miner argues instead that the novel exposes ‘love’s tendency to follow decidedly
conservative narrative forms’.26
Miner observes that Offred strives to separate and distinguish between the
three significant men in her life: Luke, the Commander and Nick. At one point,
she declares: ‘They cannot be exchanged, one for the other’ (198). However,
argues Miner, despite her best efforts, the three men increasingly merge and
blur in the text. In particular, Atwood draws attention to similarities between
Luke and the Commander: both men are interested in language; both say that
women are incapable of abstract thought (Luke in a light-hearted manner,
the Commander in all seriousness); Offred suspects that Luke rather enjoys
her new dependence on him, much as the Commander later does; and both
men take Offred to the same hotel to cheat on their wives with her. When the
regime starts to strip women of their rights, Offred suddenly realizes that her
relationship with Luke has fundamentally changed: ‘We are not each other’s,
anymore. Instead, I am his’ (188). This inequality stifles honesty and trust within
their once equitable relationship in a manner that is echoed and intensified in
her later relationship with the Commander, in which she is entirely supplicant
to his whims. The Handmaid’s Tale, argues Miner, ‘provides us with two male
characters who mirror one another; structurally, these two are twins’.27
The similarities between Luke and the Commander, argues Miner, cast doubt
on Offred’s love story with Luke, ‘but also upon love stories more generally’.28
Consequently, while Luke and Nick appear very different, the reader must be
alert to potential connections. Notably, just as Luke discourages Offred from
attending a women’s protest march, so Offred’s affair with Nick lessens her
interest in Ofglen and the resistance. Romance, it seems, diminishes Offred’s
political commitment. As Miner observes, when Offred first describes her
sexual encounter with Nick, she instinctively reaches for the language of
romance novels of the kind that Joan Foster writes in Lady Oracle: ‘I can hardly
breathe [. . .] his mouth is on me [. . .] I’m alive in my skin, again, arms around
him, falling’ (269). For Tae Yamamoto, discussing the difficulties of reading
The Handmaid’s Tale as a feminist, such scenes are indicative of the manner in
which Offred seems frustratingly willing to ‘niche herself so meekly into a banal
romance plot’.29 Offred remains, argues Miner, trapped within ‘a limited number
of scripts’.30 Unable to conceive of a scenario that exists outside of the traditional
romance plot, Offred ignores the alternative script potentially being offered by
Ofglen and Mayday – one of resistance and self-determination – and remains
instead a passive princess awaiting her rescuing prince.
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 61

Writing about feminism in the 1980s

Atwood’s fictions commonly engage with feminist debates, particularly in their

depiction of women’s entrapment within conservative narrative structures. The
Handmaid’s Tale goes further than her previous novels, however, in its explicit
commentary on the contemporary feminist movement. Consequently, the nature
of the novel’s feminist intent has been the object of much critical scrutiny. When
asked in an early interview for The New York Times if the novel is ‘a feminist
tract’, Atwood was unsurprisingly dismissive of the idea, responding promptly:
‘Novels are not slogans [. . .] If I wanted to say just one thing I would hire a
billboard.’ The Handmaid’s Tale, suggests Atwood, is concerned with questions
of ‘power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who
are living within that kind of regime’. Repeatedly, in such discussions, she looks
to redirect focus away from the text as a feminist work and towards a broader
conception of the novel’s concern with human rights, and the degradation of
individual freedoms within the apparatus of a totalitarian state.31
This somewhat defensive response chimes with Atwood’s longstanding
reluctance to be claimed as an advocate for the second-wave feminist movement.
Shirley Neuman makes this same point in her article, ‘“Just a Backlash”: Margaret
Atwood, Feminism and The Handmaid’s Tale’, in which she traces the lineage of
the author’s relationship with feminism. While Atwood was, from the start of
her novel-writing career, enthusiastically taken up by feminist critics, she often
felt that the label was too easily used to mischaracterize her work. She frequently
attempted to qualify her understanding of what feminism entails or to reiterate
that it does not preclude her advocacy of other interests. Neuman, for example,
cites an interview from 1985 in which Atwood defines her feminism along the
lines of universal human rights and cautions: ‘if practical, hardline, anti-male
feminists took over and became the government, I would resist them’.32
To understand such seemingly melodramatic concerns, it is necessary to
have a sense of the contemporary moment in which Atwood was writing. As
Wisker notes, the novel was published at the height of second-wave feminism,
and Atwood’s preoccupations are with some of the foremost issues of her day:
‘women’s lives, freedoms, procreation and rights over their own bodies’. Wisker
also notes that the 1980s was ‘a period of the rise of fundamentalist religious
regimes, especially in Iran, which Atwood visited just prior to writing the
novel’.33 So Atwood’s sense of what can happen when women’s rights are eroded
is very real. Similarly, Theodore Sheckels in The Political in Margaret Atwood’s
Fiction (2012) suggests that the 1990s setting of Offred’s pre-Gilead life depicts
62 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

some of the nascent elements of Atwood’s own 1980s society come to fruition.
Heightened casual violence against women is met by a rising fanatical feminism,
and the government and the police ‘seem powerless to stop either the violence
directed against women or the increasingly angry reactions by women’. (Indeed,
moving beyond the timeframe of the novel, Sheckels observes that Atwood’s
vision of the ubiquitous ‘PornoMarts’ industry has in fact come to pass in our
own time, albeit in then unimagined digital form: ‘not on street corners but on
the Internet’.) Sheckels proposes that, in Atwood’s very-near-future world of the
imagined 1990s, fear of a rising militant women’s movement is a large part of
what prompts the misogynistic founders of Gilead to enact their patriarchal
revolution.34
The mid-1980s was a period of transition and reflection for feminism,
as a second generation inherited the women’s movement of the 1970s and
took it in new directions. The 1980s also saw a concerted attack on feminist
gains orchestrated by the conservative New Right in America, as closely
documented by Susan Faludi in her 1991 polemic, Backlash: The Undeclared
War against American Women.35 For Neuman, this cultural context is crucial
to understanding The Handmaid’s Tale, which she describes as ‘a fictional
realization of the backlash against women’s rights that gathered force during the
early 1980s’.36 This was a period in which the ‘Moral Majority’, galvanized by the
Televangelists and the increasingly militant anti-abortion movement, mounted
a sustained attack on feminism and attempted to row back on hard-won equality
legislation. Offred, as Neuman notes, belongs to a generation that, ‘in the
confidence born of their mothers’ success [. . .] asserted that they didn’t need
feminism’.37 A similar observation is made by Greene, who notes that Offred
‘grew up as a postfeminist’. For both critics, a key lesson that Offred learns as a
Handmaid involves reassessing her mother and their often difficult relationship.
For Greene, the revelation, however, is left to ‘the thoughtful reader’, who ‘takes
the mother’s feminism more seriously than the condescending daughter’.38
Neuman instead notes that, in her interior life, Offred engages in ‘a rich dialogue’
with her mother in which she is finally able ‘to acknowledge some of the ways in
which her mother was right’.39
In ‘Feminist Utopias and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second-Wave Feminism’, I also examine the
manner in which Atwood reflects on contemporary feminism in her novel. Key
to understanding the often-anxious feminist politics of The Handmaid’s Tale, I
argue, is a recognition of the high regard in which Atwood holds the correlate
notions of liberty and free will. At times, these principles run up against the
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 63

collectivist spirit of second-wave feminism, which famously called women to

‘sisterhood’. In Atwood’s novel, pressures towards conformity and group identity
(made most visible in the colour-coded uniforms of the various social groups)
are totalitarian in nature and to be resisted. Atwood also remains sceptical of
the utopian impulse inherent in second-wave feminism which was, ultimately,
an attempt to reimagine the world as a better place. Atwood, however, cautions
that utopian aims can unintentionally lead to dystopian consequences, and The
Handmaid’s Tale ‘depicts a society that has unconsciously and paradoxically met
certain feminist demands’.40
Unexpected sympathies between the principles of the feminist movement and
the actions of the Gilead regime recur throughout the novel. When Aunt Lydia
shows the Handmaids old video clips of sadistic pornography, she asks them:
‘You see what things used to be like? That was what they thought of women,
then’ (124). As I point out in my article, in eradicating pornography, Gilead ‘has
realized a feminist goal’.41 This deliberate, sardonic echo of feminist ideology
is further reinforced in what Greene terms the ‘spooky resemblance’ between
the feminists’ bonfire of pornography, which Offred recalls attending as a child
with her mother, and the regime’s fascist policy of book-burnings, ‘house-to-
house searches, bonfires’ (162). Similarly, Aunt Lydia’s vision of ‘Women united
for a common end! Helping one another in their daily chores as they walk the
path of life together’ (167) apes the language of the feminist project. For Greene,
Atwood demonstrates that the ‘feminist sentimentalization of women’s bodies
and “women’s work” produces new forms of old stereotypes’.42 Atwood’s novel
is not anti-feminist, but it advises readers to ‘defend liberty before ideology’.43
For Neuman, a women’s utopia is not to be found in The Handmaid’s Tale, either
in Gilead, or in the time before: ‘It exists outside of the “either/or” thinking so
beloved of Aunt Lydia, and outside the world of the novel.’44 Atwood, suggests
Neuman, does not offer us a utopia, but she does caution the reader to stay
vigilant and prepare to bear witness.

Offred’s storytelling: Language and narrative

While Atwood’s novel is sceptical of some of the developments in the feminist

movement of the 1980s, the narrative structure of her novel, in which a
disenfranchised woman speaks her story in defiance of the patriarchal state,
naturally lends itself to a mode of feminist-engaged critical analysis. Gender
typically plays a large part in critical analyses of Offred’s storytelling, although
64 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

the complexities and nuances of Atwood’s narrative form have inspired multiple
and various close readings. As Marta Dvorak notes, the novel’s structure is
complex, ‘involving multiple producers and receivers’, and frequently blurs the
distinction between fact and fiction.45 Forced into silence and isolation, Offred
resorts to constructing a fictive listener: ‘Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a
name. [. . .] You can mean thousands. [. . .] I’ll pretend you can hear me’ (46).
Offred’s narrative also contains the stories of many other women within her
own. In this manner, argues Howells, she creates ‘the impression of a multi-
voiced narrative which undermines Gilead’s myth of women’s silence and
submissiveness’.46 In addition to this multiplicity, Offred’s tale contains many
self-conscious reflections on the veracity of her narrative, on the nature of her
interlocuter and on the reliability of her memory. At different times, she variously
admits: ‘I made that up. It didn’t happen that way. Here is what happened’ (269).
For Dvorak, such interjections serve to highlight the fact that ‘history too is an
invention, a collage, a subjectively pieced-together text’.47 In these instances and
more, The Handmaid’s Tale invites and rewards close careful analysis of its uses
of language and narrative form.
In an analysis that focuses on the gender politics of Offred’s narrative, Mario
Klarer examines the oral nature of her tale. Noting that the banning of books is a
common trope in dystopian fiction, he suggests that The Handmaid’s Tale adapts
this ‘dichotomy of literacy and orality’ in a notably gendered way. In Atwood’s
novel, the imposition of an oral culture on women becomes another means of
asserting power. Orality is used by the regime to cement its authority and as a way
of ‘eliminating the destabilizing potential inherent in literature’.48 Klarer notes
the importance of literacy in Offred’s pre-Gileadean life in which she worked as
a librarian and her friend Moira worked for a feminist publishing house. When
the regime seizes power, this close female engagement with language comes
under sustained attack as it systematically dismantles the structures of literacy,
abolishing journalism, publishing presses and libraries, and forbidding women
to read or write. Reflecting on the specifically gendered significance of this push
to orality, Klarer observes some significant distinctions between oral and literate
cultures, specifically the manner in which orality necessitates a close proximity
between speaker and listener, while written communication allows spatial
distance between author and reader. Orality traps Offred in a kind of present
tense, denying her the time and space to develop a wider perspective. While the
‘archaeological character’ of a literate culture enables a documented history to
accrue, the immediacy of oral culture is fleeting, preventing historical thinking.
For Klarer, these various elements of orality combine with the intention ‘to make
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 65

female criticism of a system impossible’. Atwood, he suggests, champions literacy

as a means to resist tyranny.49
Examining the nature of Offred’s ‘pieced-together text’, Wisker concentrates
on Atwood’s playful exploration of language and its power. She observes that
ironies and subtexts proliferate in the text. For example, the regime’s chosen
term for servants overlooks the fact that the dutiful Martha of the Bible was
admonished by Christ for failing to recognize what is truly important (while
her sister Mary, who neglected to serve, was praised). Wisker also reflects on the
unintended allusions conjured by ‘the Red Centre’: a term intended to indicate
a site of submission and indoctrination, but which also suggests ‘blood, power,
violence, fertility’.50 As Laflen noted when discussing fascist imagery, the regime
uses and abuses language to impose its ideology. Through its many euphemisms
and neologisms, it works to corrupt language so that words reverse and obscure
rather than reveal meaning. For example, as Wisker observes, ‘[s]alvagings are
also a form of control; they are not strictly about salvaging which is a form of
rescue and rehabilitation, but instead about destroying’.51 But language, as Wisker
demonstrates, is slippery and elusive and often works against official intentions
to become unexpectedly subversive. By using and musing on language, Offred’s
story resists the limits and manipulations of the regime; it offers an alternative
perspective and utilizes a richly allusive, nuanced discourse that exists beyond
the limits of the totalitarian vision. Echoing Dvorak’s point, Wisker argues that
Offred’s habit of self-consciously foregrounding the processes of her storytelling
exposes the manner in which histories are simply ‘versions of events that are
legitimated’.52
The elements of irony in Offred’s narrative, which Wisker reads as disruptive
and subversive, are taken up by Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, who proposes that,
on first sight, ‘Offred’s narrative is simply too ironic’. For readers looking for a
sincere feminist politics, Offred’s discourse is too self-consciously artful, non-
committal and unremitting. Irony is employed in the text through black humour
and wordplay, through incongruities and discrepancies between surface meaning
and reality. Verbal irony pervades the text as Offred becomes increasingly alert
to both ‘the satisfactions and the risks of using it’.53 When Offred tests the new
Ofglen’s allegiances with an oblique reference to ‘May Day’, her sudden intuition
that Ofglen recognizes the codeword but is not a sympathizer leaves her horribly
shaken at the danger to which she has exposed herself: ‘I walk the last blocks in
terror. I’ve been stupid’ (297). At the same time, despite such risks, what Wagner-
Lawlor terms ‘ironic double talk’ enables those trapped within the regime to
communicate illicitly: to use sanctioned phrases to transmit submerged coded
66 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

meanings. When messages are successfully exchanged in this manner, it opens

up ‘a small space of freedom’ in Offred’s world. Like Wisker, Wagner-Lawson
suggests that the multiplicity and mobility of irony resist the kind of monologic
fixity of totalitarian discourse. Irony opens up ‘gaps’ in Gilead’s defences,
providing ‘spaces for negotiation’.54
Dvorak also focuses on narrative as a mode of resistance. In her essay, she
examines The Handmaid’s Tale as a postmodern text. She identifies a number of
postmodern narrative strategies at work: for example, the way in which Offred’s
self-conscious narrative repeatedly draws attention to its own constructedness
with lines such as ‘There wasn’t any thunder though, I added that in’ (269).
Dvorak further points to the novel’s ‘fractured time sequence, its embedding
and doubling back, its gaps and blanks, its hesitations and multiple variants of
the same event’ as postmodern techniques. Through its frequent, complex use
of analepsis and prolepsis (flashback and flashforward), the novel exposes and
problematizes the way that we see the world. This, explains Dvorak, is part of
the larger postmodern challenge to traditional constraints on perspective, ‘such
as linearity, causality or textual closure’. Removing the comforting security
of verisimilitude exposes the ideological constructedness of the systems we
inhabit, which we otherwise assume are natural and inevitable. For example,
by providing multiple contradictory versions of the same scene – the three
versions of what really happened to Luke, or the three versions of her first sexual
encounter with Nick – Offred’s narrative works to ‘question the authenticity of
any one image, of any one “truth”’. Within a totalitarian state, which insists on
there being only one, unopposable way of being, multiplicity, ambiguity and
contradiction become powerfully subversive narrative techniques.55
In Gilead, Offred’s narrative – feminine, intimate, unauthorized – is
relegated to the margins and to the private, domestic spaces that persist within
the patriarchal, dystopian society of Gilead. As Greene observes, Offred’s
marginalized status impacts on the reader’s comprehension of events. Because
of her low status in the social hierarchy, ‘she does not see the total picture’, and
consequently we, who can only know what she knows, ‘share her bewilderment
and disorientation’.56 Nevertheless, as Howells notes, ‘Offred asserts her right
to tell her story.’ For Howells, the novel is a ‘survival narrative’. Like Rennie
in Bodily Harm, Offred provides an eye-witness account of the atrocities
committed by power. In defiance of the many limitations placed on her voice,
Offred constructs a female-centred ‘herstory’ that successfully overshadows
the dominant patriarchal history of the regime and thereby ‘relegates the grand
narratives to the margins as mere framework for her story’.57 Offred’s narrative
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 67

is a rebellion against the state, but it is also a reclamation of her own existence
as a thinking, feeling subject. To the state, Handmaids are merely ‘two-legged
wombs’ (142). In telling her own story, Offred insists instead ‘on chronicling her
subjective life from within her own skin’.58
In her examination of Offred’s narrative, Yamamoto picks up on a number
of the concerns just discussed and reflects on the extent to which Offred seems
able to resist the totalizing narrative of the Gilead regime. For Yamamoto, there
are moments in the text when Offred’s perceptions seem closely assimilated
with the regime, for example when she succumbs to the hypnotic ritual of the
birthing ceremony. At other points, instead, Offred works hard to maintain
a critical distance on Gilead’s doctrine. When Offred is at her most critical
and circumspect, the distance between her and the implied author, suggests
Yamamoto, is very narrow. When instead she is ‘unaware that she is under the
sway of predominant cultural discourses’, that distance becomes much greater.
For Yamamoto, one of the frustrations for feminist readers of The Handmaid’s
Tale is the absence of a feminist alternative to either the repressive Gilead regime
or the highly sexualized consumer culture of Offred’s past. Tying this frustration
to Offred’s narrative, she suggests that the author points us towards recognizing
that when Offred is able to maintain a critical distance from the persuasive
rhetoric of the oppressive regime, while she may still be prisoner of the regime
in those moments, she is nevertheless freer than when she simply succumbs
to its will. As Yamamoto puts it, the novel tells us: ‘we cannot go out of our
language system, but we can know what kind of system we are in’. This then, for
Yamamoto, provides the reply to the feminist’s dilemma: like Offred, with whom
we are encouraged to empathize, we must recognize that even when our capacity
for action is limited, we must remain critical and aware if we are to have any
chance of effecting change.59

Complicity, victimhood and responsibility

As Allan Weiss observes in an article that examines Offred’s complicity with

the state, there are three dominant critical readings regarding the nature of her
engagement with the Gilead regime: she is either ‘a valiant rebel’, a ‘powerless
victim’, or a ‘willing or unwitting participant’. For those that would term her
a rebel fighting against the regime’s oppressive tyranny, most, working in the
mould of those discussed in the previous section, cite her storytelling as an act
of subversive resistance. For Weiss, however, such readings, which commonly
68 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

assert the capacity of language to effect change, generally ignore the fact that
Offred’s narrative changes nothing. After her departure, the regime continues to
operate, and indeed, according to the Historical Notes at the end, it gets worse.60
Addressing the second reading, Weiss cites critics such as J. Brooks Bouson,
for whom Offred is ‘the victim of circumstances, not an active agent capable of
directing the plot of her own life’.61 These readings, he suggests, fail to account
for the ambiguities of power in the novel and the limited forms of resistance that
Offred does engage in. Weiss instead places Offred within a lineage of ‘heroes’ of
twentieth-century dystopian fiction, few of whom are heroic. In much the same
way as many of these predecessors, Offred is exposed as a participant in the
processes of her own oppression. Reflecting on her life before Gilead, she admits:
‘We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have
to work at it’ (66). For Weiss, this failure to act underpins Atwood’s main point:
totalitarian regimes arise when the population is too complacent or scared to
resist. Consequently, Offred’s ‘cowardice and complicity convict us all’.62
Where Weiss suggests that Offred’s guilt is collectively shared, other critics
more directly interrogate and condemn her role and choices in the text. In
an interesting instance of careful close reading, Patricia Stapleton, in an essay
entitled ‘Suicide as Apocalypse in The Handmaid’s Tale’, searches the novel for
clues as to what may have happened to Offred after her story has been recorded
and concludes that she most probably kills herself. As supporting evidence,
Stapleton points to an elliptical, embedded vignette in Offred’s narrative in
which she recalls, as a young child, watching a documentary about the Second
World War. While most of Offred’s memories are hazy, she remembers in some
detail an interview with the mistress of a Nazi concentration camp supervisor.
Photographed lounging by the pool, just a short distance from the camp, the
woman ‘denied knowing about the ovens’; asked about her lover, she replies ‘He
was not a monster’ (151). Later, when Offred is having sex with the Commander
at Jezebel’s nightclub, she will think to herself: ‘He is not a monster’ (263). For
Stapleton, this echo purposely draws a parallel between Offred and the Nazi
mistress. In Gilead, musing on the other woman’s proximity to such unthinkable
atrocities, Offred wonders what she could have been thinking, and then answers
her own question: ‘She was thinking about how not to think. The times were
abnormal.’ The documentary, Offred recalls, included the final notice: ‘Several
days after this interview with her was filmed, she killed herself ’ (152). Stapleton
argues that this suicide, in conjunction with the mirroring of Offred and the
previous Offred, who also kills herself, provides a coded indication in the novel
of Offred’s probable fate. Just as the Nazi mistress, once she has told her tale and
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 69

accounted for her complicity through inaction, realizes that ‘there is nothing left’,
so, suggests Stapleton, after recounting her tale of being a ‘Gileadean mistress’,
in order to ‘reclaim her autonomy and to atone for her complicity, Offred takes
her own life’.63
Stapleton charges Offred with complicity, which is a complicated notion in
the novel. As Offred concedes, ‘There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some,
and this is what I chose’ (105). For Neuman, examining the ethics of Offred’s
engagement with the regime, there is a qualitative difference between Offred’s
acquiescence to the role of Handmaid, given the severely limited ‘choices’ available
to her, and her subsequent account of playing Scrabble with the Commander,
which ‘renders him both human and comic’.64 Other instances in the novel are
still more problematic. Attending a ‘particicution’ of an alleged rapist, Offred
admits that she succumbs to group hysteria and is overwhelmed by ‘bloodlust; I
want to tear, gouge, rend’ (287). For Neuman, the novel involves Offred coming to
terms with her own complicity within the structures of the regime. Her political
awakening, however, stumbles when it meets the burgeoning relationship with
Nick. Like Miner, who examines the romance plot in the novel with some
scepticism, Neuman reads the relationship, and the ‘rescue’ at the end, as an act
of self-preservation rather than romance. Like Miner, she also notes that Nick
distracts Offred from Ofglen and Mayday, and that Offred chooses romance over
resistance. For Neuman, by the end of the novel, Offred finally recognizes that
she has relapsed into ‘willed ignorance’, and this realization ‘partly motivates the
shame that so strongly marks her narrative’ towards the end.65 When the dreaded
black van suddenly appears, Offred understands, too late, that she ‘should have
paid attention’ (301).
The question of collaboration and guilt is also addressed by Rigney, who
extends the charge of complicity beyond the actors within the Gilead regime
to the members of Offred’s former, pre-Gilead society. Like Rennie in Bodily
Harm, Offred and her pre-Gilead contemporaries prefer not to look too closely
at what is happening around them. When the President is shot and Congress is
massacred, a stunned Offred can only ineffectually ask, ‘How did they get in, how
did it happen?’ (179). For Rigney, Offred’s entire society is guilty of complacent
inattention, and it pays a deadly cost. Offred, like Rennie, believes herself to
be innocent and powerless and retreats in the face of growing oppression and
both characters reflect Atwood’s longstanding concern that ‘victimisation, in
a real sense, is at least partly a matter of choice’. While Offred is inarguably a
victim of a violent and oppressive misogynistic regime, Atwood contests that
male aggression does not absolve women of their own actions or inactions.
70 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

This assertion is most visible in the strata of female control that the state inserts
within the edifice of its security systems. Both Aunts and Wives display their
capacity for cruelty; both factions participate with enthusiasm in the brutalizing
and dehumanizing of other women. For Atwood, clearly, no group – whether
defined by gender, race, religion or any other characteristic – can be deemed
exempt from complicity or blame. Rigney argues that, ultimately, like all of
Atwood’s previous heroines, ‘Offred values her own physical survival above
sisterhood, and in so doing sacrifices her own integrity’. Unlike Moira, whom
Rigney identifies as the sole heroic woman in the novel, Offred retreats into
self-preservation and thus sacrifices her liberty. For Rigney, Offred’s eventual
decision to defy the regime, to record her testimony and perform as a witness
to atrocity is, finally, a recognition that political engagement is not a choice but
‘a human responsibility’. With the act of bearing witness, Offred finally makes a
commitment to her society, and to her own humanity.66

Reading the conclusion

The Handmaid’s Tale is a deeply claustrophobic novel. Offred’s liberty and agency
are circumscribed at every turn. It is, therefore, suggests Howells, particularly
pleasing to discover in the ‘Historical Notes’ on which the novel concludes that
‘it is Offred the silenced Handmaid who becomes Gilead’s principal historian’.67
At the same time, there remains an unresolved tension in The Handmaid’s Tale
between the immediacy and power of Offred’s present-tense narrative, and the
distance and limitation imposed on her ‘tale’ when it becomes the past-tense
history of the novel’s eventually-revealed frame narrative. Having concluded on
the deep ambiguity of Offred’s final line – ‘And so I step up, into the darkness
within; or else the light.’ (303) – the reader is abruptly wrenched from Offred’s
dystopian world into the civilized rituals of an academic conference being held
in the Arctic region almost 200 years later. The implications of this shift are
myriad and have prompted much critical reflection.
Through the keynote paper being delivered by Professor Pieixoto, a historian
and expert in Gileadean Studies, Atwood fills in some of the missing details
regarding the delivery and reproduction of Offred’s story. We learn that the
narrative that comprises the text of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was discovered in
fragmented recordings in a box of approximately thirty jumbled cassette tapes.
Pieixoto and his colleague transcribed the recordings and determined their
correct sequence ‘based on some guesswork [. . .] pending further research’
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 71

(310). Nothing more is discovered about Offred herself, including her name or
her eventual fate, although the fact of the tapes’ existence suggests that she at
the very least managed to reach some kind of safe house where she was able to
record her testimony. Discussing this frame narrative, Stapleton concludes of
Offred: ‘history will not be kind to her, and her narrative will not be understood’.
Just as in the Gilead regime women are interchangeable – ‘Offred for Offred,
Ofglen for Ofglen’ – so in the Historical Notes it is apparent that the scholars of
the future have failed to identify the speaker and that she will remain forever the
anonymous ‘Handmaid’.68
In a 1988 essay, ‘Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid’s Tale’,
Arnold Davidson focuses closely on the novel’s epilogue and presents an
alternative reading to Stapleton’s. The Handmaid’s Tale, he notes, offers ‘two
different projected futures’: the future regime of Gilead and the second, later
future depicted in the Historical Notes.69 The purpose of the epilogue, he
suggests, is manifold: it gives ‘the history of Offred’s history’ (an explanation of
how her private account became a public document); it provides some external
scrutiny of Offred’s intimate, insular version of events; it supplies theoretical
context to the Gilead regime (observing, for example, that the Aunts were a ‘cost-
effective’ security measure); and it also, crucially, signifies hope: the conference
is evidence that Gilead eventually fell.70 This latter point is endorsed by Atwood,
who states that the existence of Offred’s narrative means that ‘The possibility of
escape exists. [. . .] Her little message in a bottle has gotten through to someone
– which is about all we can hope, isn’t it?’71
In addition to such productive functions, however, Davidson also
suggests that there is ‘something ominous’ in the authoritative, masculine,
academic tone of the final section. Pieixoto’s lecture implicitly assumes that a
‘Retrospective analysis by a Cambridge don – male, of course – is ostensibly
more authoritative than a participant woman’s eyewitness account’ (114). Also
discussing the epilogue, Hilde Staels notes that, although Offred repeatedly
insists that neither the objective truth nor her full experience can be related,
the historians persist in trying to reconstruct a complete factual account of her
time in Gilead. Despite Offred’s characterization of her tale as a reconstruction,
prone to misrememberings and ambiguity, the historians are in pursuit of ‘closed
interpretations’.72 Pieixoto’s academic voice valorizes ‘objectivity’ in assessing an
account in which women and all minorities have been brutally objectified by
the state, with real consequences. For Staels, the conference paper represents
an ‘ironic repetition of Gileadean discourse’ – a kind of ‘supreme rationalism’
that precludes empathy.73 Furthermore, Howells also suggests that the epilogue
72 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

works to shock us into realizing that we are implicated in this final scene: the
fact that we have access to Pieixoto’s 2195 lecture suggests that we are of his time,
rather than Offred’s. The narrative’s temporal shift, she suggests, ‘challenges the
reader on questions of interpretation’, forcing us to reflect on what assumptions
we bring to Offred’s story.74
Like the rest of the novel, the Historical Notes repay close attention. The
conference in the Arctic circle offers a new vision of a further future. Unlike the
rest of America in Offred’s time, the northern region, it seems, is not massively
polluted (as Howells notes, the participants are invited on a nature walk and
a fishing trip), and many of the participants are Native Peoples (Professor
Crescent Moon and Professor Running Dog). Davidson, however, observes
that, while the unpolluted far north ‘has apparently become the seat of power
in North America’, gendered power hierarchies clearly persist. Discussing the
perpetuation of patriarchal systems, he points to the sexual innuendo and mildly
sexist jokes that litter Pieixoto’s presentation. Pieixoto assumes that Offred’s
passive domestic role within the regime is of less significance than the active role
of the masculine resistance movement and regrets that it is her story that has
survived, rather than that of someone more important. The Professor trivializes
Offred’s account, argues Davidson, because he assumes that women’s lives are
inherently trivial. Misogyny, it appears, persists far into the foreseeable future.
In some ways, suggests Davidson, the Historical Notes provide a kind of ‘comic
relief ’ after the claustrophobia of Offred’s traumatized narrative, but in crucial
ways – specifically, in how it diminishes, re-objectifies and marginalizes Offred’s
voice – ‘the epilogue is the most pessimistic part of the book’.75
Tellingly, Offred appears to have foreseen this erasure. Reflecting on the
absence of Handmaids in family photo albums, she thinks ‘From the point of
view of future history [. . .] we’ll be invisible’ (236). Howells, however, argues
against this pessimistic conclusion. Although she observes that Pieixoto
‘is abusing Offred as Gilead abused her’, she points out that Offred’s voice
survives. Even when delivered to us through the frame of Pieixoto’s masculine
academic presentation, which always threatens to drown out Offred’s voice,
the interest of the tale is sustained by Offred’s ability to capture our attention:
‘This is history written in the feminine gender’. For Howells, just as Offred’s
resistive story shows up the limits of Gilead’s authority, ‘so it defies Pieixoto’s
appropriation 200 years later’. If Pieixoto’s account gives us pause – if we are
dissatisfied by his framing of Offred’s experience – it is her voice that calls
us to reflect on his method. Howells also points to a resonant pun in the
location of the conference in ‘Denay, Nunavit’; to ‘deny none of it’ is, she
 ‘Are There Any Questions?’ 73

suggests, ‘a piece of authorial advice to the reader to believe Offred’s story,

no matter what interpretations or misinterpretations might be offered in the
Historical Notes’.76
With the later expansion of her interest in dystopian writing, most notably
in the MaddAddam trilogy, as well as the publication of The Testaments, her
unexpected return to Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale will later go on to garner new
connections and parallels in Atwood’s canon. Immediately after its publication,
however, Atwood seems to return to something closer to the kind of fiction she
was writing previously. Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, with its near-future setting
and far-future frame narrative, she situates her next two novels in the more
familiar present-day Toronto that features in so many of her early works.
74
 4

Spotty-handed villainesses
Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride

Following the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood produced a number

of substantial novels that extend and develop her characteristic themes and
concerns, and which cumulatively signal the work of a mature and ambitious
writer at the height of her powers. In this chapter, I examine some of the critical
responses to two of those works. Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride both return
Atwood firmly to the Toronto settings that she knows so well; both are set in
the contemporary moment but are predominantly comprised of retrospective
narratives that take their protagonists variously back through the 1950s, 1960s,
1970s and 1980s. These analepses unfold in a manner that allows Atwood
to ventriloquize the quotidian past in all its sensual and ephemeral details:
a process at which she excels. They are also, notably, novels of female bad
behaviour. In this, they can be readily connected to Atwood’s subsequent novel,
Alias Grace, although for the organizational purposes of this volume, I examine
that 1996 work alongside Atwood’s historical fictions.
Atwood’s fictions of the late 1980s and 1990s are commonly read together.
For Marion Wynne-Davies, this period is characterized by a return to the
themes of the author’s earlier works. In novels such as Cat’s Eye, The Robber
Bride and Alias Grace there is, she suggests, evidence of ‘a dramatic revisionist
reframing of gender, politics, time, space and the role of the author’. For Wynne-
Davies, this phase in Atwood’s writing is notably introspective, as the author
retreats from her earlier concerns with large questions of national identity
and gender identity, and instead focuses more closely on ‘the inner, concealed
discourses of individual and collective memory’.1 Karen Stein similarly observes
that the texts from this period revisit familiar Atwoodian themes, of which she
particularly identifies a preoccupation with ‘Gothic quests, female friendship,
victims, doubles and doubling, memory, myth, and storytelling’.2 Alice Palumbo,
in an essay for Reingard Nischik’s collection Margaret Atwood: Works and
76 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Impact (2000), sees these same works as being connected by dominant themes
of memory and the past. Like Wynne-Davis, Palumbo also identifies a turn away
from the kind of examination of ‘macro power relations’ that occurs in Bodily
Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale towards a more intimate focus in the following
three novels on ‘an analysis of power in women’s relationships, and the conflict
between the conscious and unconscious, and memory and the present’.3
Alongside such notable recurring examinations of memory, friendship and
similar topics, Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride, like Alias Grace, most strikingly
foreground the trope of what Atwood has termed ‘spotty-handed villainesses’: a
concept that informs a significant amount of criticism on her mid-career fictions.
Barbara Hill Rigney, for example, writing in 2000, observes: ‘Mostly men do
terrible things to women in Atwood’s fictions, but increasingly and particularly
in the most recent novels, women do them to each other.’4 The term itself is taken
from an essay Atwood wrote, entitled ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems
of Female Bad Behaviour in the Creation of Literature’. Originally delivered
as a lecture in 1993 – the same year she published The Robber Bride – it was
later collected in Curious Pursuits (2005), an anthology of Atwood’s occasional
writings. In the essay, Atwood discusses what it means to write female villains and
asks: ‘is it not, today – well, somehow unfeminist – to depict a woman behaving
badly?’5 The question, of course, is rhetorical, and Atwood decidedly rejects the
proposition. Arguing against what she identifies as a kind of misguided second-
wave feminist compulsion to depict women as inherently morally superior to
men, Atwood suggests that the beatification of women is merely another form
of misogyny, confining women to a pedestal of Victorian virtue – or in Atwood’s
words, to the ‘salt-mines of goodness’ – while granting men free reign to be
‘gleefully and enjoyably worse than women’.6 On the contrary, for Atwood, the
depiction of evil women in literature is a vital acknowledgement that women too
‘are fully dimensional human beings’ that justify and require nuanced literary
expression.7
Accordingly, Atwood’s novels at this time closely explore manifestations
of female treachery, aggression and malevolence. From Aunt Lydia in The
Handmaid’s Tale to Penelope in The Penelopiad, Atwood’s female protagonists
frequently commit acts of breathtaking cruelty against other women, but the
two novels under discussion here arguably represent the pinnacle of the theme.
As Wynne-Davies observes, the ‘villainesses’ of this period challenge feminist
ideals of sisterhood and solidarity. Connecting Cordelia in Cat’s Eye to Grace
in Alias Grace, both of whom are incarcerated in a lunatic asylum, she cites
Atwood’s 1993 essay in observing that each of these characters, rather than being
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 77

termed ‘mad’, might be better described, much like Zenia in The Robber Bride,
as ‘a woman behaving badly’. In these novels, suggests Wynne-Davies, Atwood
draws on literary archetypes taken from myth and fairy tale (wicked witches,
evil twins, ugly sisters), but rewrites these figures as ‘attractive, sympathetic and
realistic characters’.8 Questions of realism and sympathy prompt different critical
responses in analyses of Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride, but it is certainly true that
both Cordelia and Zenia are able to enact their treachery in large part because of
their ability to attract and charm their victims.

Cat’s Eye

If The Handmaid’s Tale performed a peculiar feat in depicting Offred’s

experience of an authoritarian patriarchal regime as a deeply woman-centred
and domestic affair, Atwood’s next novel does something similar. Growing
up in the conservative, patriarchal 1950s era of working fathers and stay-at-
home mothers, Elaine’s world, while putatively ruled and ordered by men, is,
in its lived experience, almost entirely shaped by women and girls. And as in
The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood proposes that, afforded a little power within a
structure that largely renders women powerless, there can be no assurance that
women will behave better than men; indeed, given psychological pressures and
the perverse incentives of an unequal system, they may well behave even worse.
In an interview, Atwood reflects on the risks of writing Cat’s Eye, which
depicts the claustrophobic world of pre-adolescent female friendships:
‘wouldn’t I be trashed’, she recalls worrying, ‘for writing about little girls, how
trivial?’9 The novel, however, works against the dismissal of female experience.
As Molly Hite observes, Cat’s Eye – like Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s
Tale – ‘is set in an environment of extremity, where the central concern is not
merely well-being but survival’.10 The visceral violence that Hite detects in the
novel is in knowing discordance with its middle-class suburban setting. In the
same interview, Atwood remarks that writing Cat’s Eye provided her with an
opportunity to indulge in a rich reconstruction of the materiality of her own
1950s childhood: the paper dolls, the Eaton’s catalogues and the comic books.
Writing this largely forgotten ephemera back into evocative being provides
for a text that she terms ‘elegiac’.11 The comforting nostalgia of childhood,
however, is brutally undercut in a novel in which little girls, innocent in their
white socks and Mary Janes, also sport ‘assessing eyes’ and ‘slippery deceitful
smiles’ like little Lady Macbeths (113).
78 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Overview
Cat’s Eye commences with Elaine Risley, a successful artist, happily married with
two grown-up daughters and living in British Columbia, returning for the first
time in many years to her hometown of Toronto to attend a retrospective of her
work being held by a Toronto art gallery. The present-day narrative takes place
over the few days of Elaine’s trip, but the retrospective narrative that it contains
spins back over the years of her childhood and adolescence. In an article that
examines the fantastic in the novel, Julie Brown refers to this as the ‘dream time’
of the narrative, when Elaine ‘wander[s] through a retrospective showing of her
life’.12 Each section of the novel is named after one of Elaine’s deeply symbolic
paintings, and unlocking the significance of the enigmatic imagery proves
part of the puzzle of a text in which the traumatized narrator gradually comes to
recognize the truth of her opening observation that time is liquid: ‘[s]ometimes
this comes to the surface, sometime that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes
away’ (3).
As Chinmoy Banerjee observes, the novel ‘offers a coherent surface in the
realistic mode’,13 but as with many Atwood fictions, the surface is soon revealed
as concealing dark, gothic depths. Walking around the hated city of her youth,
Elaine is confronted by memories of her complex relationship with the enigmatic,
bullying Cordelia. In fragmented sections, Elaine recalls her early childhood,
which is strikingly similar to Atwood’s own and is spent in the backwoods of
northern Ontario. After the war, the family settle in suburban Toronto, where
Elaine and her older brother Stephen enter full-time formal education and Elaine
first encounters the highly gendered, socialized world of girls and women. In the
freedom of the wilderness, little distinguished Elaine from her brother in their
manner of dress and play. In Toronto, however, Elaine is rapidly indoctrinated
into an alien system of feminine codes of dress, behaviour, speech and manner.
She reflects: ‘at first I feel strange as I do it, self-conscious, as if I’m only doing
an imitation of a girl. But I soon get more used to it’ (52). As she learns to play
at scrapbooking images of feminine domesticity cut from catalogues, these
‘artifacts of desire’, as Laura Martocci terms them, inscribe in Elaine ‘feminine
virtues’ of ‘self-effacement, conformity, and submission to authority’.14 For Hite,
focusing on the novel’s function as a Künstlerroman – a narrative about an artist’s
progress and maturation – Cat’s Eye is about ‘the process of socialization’.15 Art,
suggests Hite, is used by Elaine as a means to escape the general fate of women to
be socialized into womanhood. By becoming an artist, Elaine evades the world
of suburban domestic femininity.
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 79

Elaine’s immersion into school life is disorientating and anxious. As she

acclimatizes to what Hite terms the ‘gender-segregated urban landscape of the
novel’s Fifties’, she is guided by two newly acquired friends, Carol Campbell
and Grace Smeath.16 The girls initiate Elaine into an unfamiliar world of social
etiquette, popular culture and mass consumerism. The Smeaths also take on
the religious education of Elaine, inviting her to their church, where she learns
of sin and guilt under the disapproving, censorious eye of Mrs Smeath. With
the arrival of Cordelia, the friendship dynamic shifts and Elaine is subject to a
sustained campaign of bullying and psychological torment. Alternating derision
and humiliation with approval and charm, Cordelia steadily breaks down Elaine’s
sense of self-confidence and self-worth. Bemused and defenceless, Elaine resorts
to self-harm, stripping skin from her fingers and toes, and experiencing fantasies
of suicide. While a pervasive sense of shame prevents her from seeking help, her
realization that Mrs Smeath sees and tacitly condones the girls’ behaviour adds
to the illogical guilt of victimhood. In a chapter that examines the construction
of shame in the novel, Martocci suggests that the moment when Elaine is able to
turn her shaming by Mrs Smeath into hatred towards the woman is pivotal in the
text, as her newfound rage shakes her from ‘passive acceptance’ and provides the
‘means of resisting the further degradation and dissolution of self ’.17 Rage and
shame, Martocci proposes, become inextricably entwined for Elaine; for many
years, the experience of one triggers the other, until she is eventually able to
disentangle the emotional knot.
Cordelia’s reign of terror climaxes when Elaine is abandoned in a freezing
ravine. Tempted to surrender to the obliterating cold, she is saved by an
apparition of the Virgin Mary. Bolstered by this supernatural vision of maternal
love and protection, a half-frozen Elaine is able to rouse herself and find her
way home. The incident marks a shift in Elaine’s relationship with Cordelia.
Suddenly, she is able to defy her tormentor, and the whole edifice of coercive
control crumbles. The girls drift apart, and Elaine sustains a kind of self-
protective amnesia that persists into adulthood, shielding her from trauma but
also shaping her relationships and limiting her self-knowledge. Over the years,
repressed anger and fear resurface in her art, although she struggles to read its
meaning. Examining one of her grotesque images of Mrs Smeath, Elaine thinks:
‘It’s still a mystery to me, why I hate her so much’ (352).
Discussing language and representation in the novel, Kiriaki Massoura suggests
that Elaine’s ‘insufficient cultural and linguistic knowledge’ is part of what makes
her an ideal victim for Cordelia.18 Uncertain of cultural codes, Elaine’s naivety
is easily manipulated by a ruthless predator. Banerjee, however, offers a quite
80 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

different reading of the compulsive attraction/repulsion between the two girls.

Elaine and Cordelia, she suggests, are drawn together by their mutual ‘wildness’
– a concept developed by the young Elaine, who divides people into ‘wild’ and
‘tame’. The wild ones, like Elaine’s family, and like Cordelia, ‘are elusive and wily
and look out for themselves’ (130). Elaine and Cordelia’s shared wildness is in
opposition to the middle-class tameness represented by Carol and Grace. ‘Dirt
and imagination’, suggests Banerjee, ‘unite the two girls in a subversive intimacy
against the repressive codes of middle-class propriety and femininity’.19 By this
reading, Cordelia is attracted to a wild element in Elaine that she also recognizes
within herself. Her persecution of Elaine, therefore, can be read as a kind of
externalized masochistic self-punishment.
In adolescence, Elaine reconnects with Cordelia. As teenagers, they are a
fearsome pair, sharp-mouthed and disdainful of everything, but the power
dynamic has shifted, as Elaine recognizes: ‘energy has passed between us, and I
am stronger’ (233). In another Atwoodian gothic doubling, Elaine becomes a dark
shadow of Cordelia: best friend and tormentor. Banerjee explains this reversal in
terms of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, whereby both sides of the power relation
require the complicity of the other. While Cordelia’s early power over Elaine is
based on her understanding of Elaine’s deep need for social acceptance, once
Elaine is able to break this reliance on Cordelia’s approval – when her near-death
experience frees her of her dependence – the relationship then reverses. ‘Elaine’s
mastery, on the other hand’, argues Banerjee, ‘is the mastery of a liberated Slave
that does not need a Slave to maintain its position’.20 In this manner, Elaine is
actually stronger than Cordelia because she can live without her. Consequently,
Elaine eventually leaves an increasingly erratic and troubled Cordelia behind,
escaping into a masculine world of art.
At art school, Elaine commences an affair with her tutor, who embodies the
clichés of a chauvinistic art world, and then another with Jon, a fellow student,
by whom she gets pregnant. As the relationship breaks down, Elaine is overcome
by a depressive impulse that she experiences as an externalized ‘voice of a
nine-year-old child’ (374) inciting her to self-harm, and she slashes her wrist.
Recognizing that something must change, Elaine leaves Jon, moves to Vancouver,
meets Ben and settles into a happy, uncomplicated marriage and has a second
child. Over this period, there are sporadic glimpses of an unravelling Cordelia.
Their last encounter takes place in a mental asylum, where Elaine refuses a
heavily sedated Cordelia’s pleas to help her to escape. When she next attempts
to contact her, Elaine is informed that Cordelia’s whereabouts are unknown. In
her essay, Banerjee makes a connection between the escapism of the two women,
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 81

suggesting that through, respectively, art and madness, Elaine and Cordelia both
reject the ‘core of “normalcy” embodied in Grace and Carol’.21 Both women
remain bound together by their past, and by their damaged, disintegrated sense
of self. As Wynne-Davies notes, much as Elaine’s sense of self is always partial,
so the character of Cordelia is constructed in the text from disparate scraps,
split between ‘what the child sees; what the adult remembers; what the artist
constructs; and how others interpret that construction’.22 This fragmentary
depiction, she suggests, is a key aspect of Atwood’s reflection on how the past
is constructed in memory. It is only in middle age, helping her ailing mother to
clear out the family basement, that Elaine discovers an old purse and within it
the cat’s eye marble she used to carry as a child. Gazing into the totemic object,
Elaine experiences a sudden access to the past: ‘I look into it, and see my life
entire’ (398). With her memory restored, she is able to reintegrate her past, her
art, and her feelings towards Cordelia, and rather than a tale of bullying and
victimhood, the novel becomes, as Banerjee notes, ‘an account of survival’.23

A fictional autobiography?
In its detailed rendition of Elaine’s childhood, adolescence and maturation into
an established artist, Cat’s Eye is both Künstlerroman and fictional autobiography.
Examining the latter, a number of critics address the novel’s narrative structure
and the manner in which Atwood balances the voice of the older and younger
Elaine. As Marta Dvorak observes, the novel distinguishes between the narrative
voice of ‘the older, wiser, narrating “I” which crosses and overlaps the limited
point of view of the narrated “I,” Elaine as child, adolescent, and young adult’.24
For Earl Ingersoll, who suggests that, in its playfully self-referential use of
fictional autobiography, Cat’s Eye is Atwood’s ‘first full-fledged “postmodern”
work’, Elaine’s recollections are self-consciously constructed. While the artist
may seem, on the surface, to be recovering the truth of the past, in a truer sense,
he suggests, she is ‘creating, or writing, a past as she chooses now to see it’.25
For Hite, similarly, Cat’s Eye is self-consciously concerned with autobiography,
continually ‘advancing and withdrawing it as a mode of authorization’. The
novel, she suggests, simultaneously proposes a direct access to Elaine’s past self
and raises questions about our reliance on and belief in the notion of ‘true’ and
‘real’.26 Consequently, Hite points out, Elaine is fundamentally an unreliable
narrator, ‘inasmuch as she cannot see enough – either of her own motivations
and desires and the forces conditioning them, or of the consequences of certain
of her choices’. Her development in the novel, argues Hite, is marked by her
82 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

growing awareness of her past, her feelings and the perspectives of others –
although, like other Atwood narrators, her comprehension always remains more
limited than that made available to the attentive reader.27
In addition to the structural complexities of narrating the past, Cat’s Eye
garners attention for its inclusion of elements from Atwood’s own life story.
Wynne-Davies catalogues the many points of congruence, gleaning her evidence
from the short pieces of autobiographical writing Atwood has published in
Morning in the Burned House (1995) and in On Writers and Writing (2002), in
which Atwood recalls, like Elaine, moving to the city and being confronted by
‘little girls – their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on
whispering and vicious gossip’.28 While Atwood asserts that her own experience
of school was largely happy, if disorientating, Wynne-Davies identifies further
autobiographical echoes in Elaine’s desire, like Atwood’s, to escape respectable
convention by embracing the bohemian art and poetry scene of 1960s Canada.
For Wynne-Davies, the coincidences are too great, and there can be no doubt
that Atwood has made use of autobiographical material to animate her fiction.
Pondering why she might undermine her own anti-biographical position with
such clearly traceable details, Wynne-Davies proposes that these autobiographical
ambiguities enable Atwood to explore a key theme in her writing. By introducing
elements of autobiography while simultaneously resisting the label, she is
able to ‘explore authorial identity, to question the veracity of narrative, and to
explore the inner-self as a means of fragmenting and undermining any fixed
interpretation of the past’.29 In a similar vein, Ingersoll suggests that, given how
frequently Atwood has expressed frustration at biographical readings of her
work, her inclusion in Cat’s Eye of recognizable details from her own past can
only be read as a self-conscious and ‘highly sophisticated expression of play with
her audience’s expectations’.30
Stein also observes the similarities between Elaine and Atwood’s biographies,
and like Wynne-Davies and Ingersoll, suggests that the decision is purposeful.
She proposes that Atwood uses the conventions of autobiography ‘to explore
the possibilities and limits of autobiography, and of women’s autobiography in
particular’. Expanding on this idea, Stein notes that Cat’s Eye was published when
Atwood was approaching fifty (the same age as Elaine) and had just published
her Selected Poems II (1987): ‘a poet’s equivalent of the artist’s retrospective
exhibit’.31 These similarities, she suggests, heighten the sense of what is at stake
in the novel. In her discussion, Stein draws on the work of Jill Ker Conway, who
distinguishes between the common male autobiography plot structure of life
as ‘an odyssey, a journey through many trials and tests’, and the more common
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 83

female autobiography plot, taken from the romance, in which the heroine’s life
story ends with marriage.32 Starting with this premise, Stein argues that Cat’s
Eye works to disrupt this ‘odyssey/romance dichotomy’ and resist traditional
patterns of autobiography. Elaine’s narrative, as she observes, is much less
concerned with her love affairs and marriages – although these are depicted
in the latter half of the novel – than it is with ‘her girlhood and her career’.33 In
this manner, Atwood provides an alternative plot for charting the life story of a
female artist.

Women beware women

In a review of The Robber Bride, Salman Rushdie suggests that the novel
might better have been called Women Beware Women, ‘if the title hadn’t
already been used’, and the same might be said of Cat’s Eye.34 Indeed, the fact
that the ‘villainesses’ in this earlier novel are not grown women but little girls
arguably makes their malevolence even more sinister. As Dvorak points out in
a discussion of Atwood’s rendition of Elaine’s childhood perspective, the device
works to ‘defamiliarize and to recontextualize, to question preconceptions or
conventions and transmit a fresh vision’. Consequently, when as readers we are
within the retrospective scenes of the novel, we largely stay within the limited,
naïve perspective of the young Elaine. This limited perspective, as Dvorak argues,
makes the account of bullying and torment all the more powerful because it is
communicated in the context of Elaine’s bewilderment and powerlessness.35
Just as Atwood pondered whether the lives of little girls would be deemed too
inconsequential to sustain a novel, so she also worried: ‘wouldn’t I be trashed
for saying that they weren’t all sugar and spice?’36 The question is perhaps
disingenuous, however, for Atwood has never been afraid to depict the cruelty
of little girls. Indeed, the climactic scene in Cat’s Eye in which Elaine nearly dies
in the ravine is strikingly similar to an earlier scene from Lady Oracle in which
Joan is tied up and abandoned in a freezing ravine by some malevolent Girl
Guides, leaving her in real material danger. For Atwood, the games of little girls
are never inconsequential. More than merely exposing the capacity of women
and girls to commit acts of cruelty, however, Atwood’s novel is an examination
of what motivates such destructive behaviour. This idea is proposed by Hite, who
suggests that the restrictions and prohibitions of a conservative 1950s patriarchal
society that limit and shape the girls are, for Atwood, central to understanding
their behaviour. Elaine, she argues, is persecuted by the girls ‘as a scapegoat in
order to displace their own suffering as members of a patriarchy’.37
84 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Throughout the novel, the young girls can be seen to enact a form of self-
socialization. As Ingersoll observes, by cutting out pictures of household
appliances, ‘they study to be future housewives’.38 But while the girls mimic the
social mores of their mothers, they are always cognizant that real power resides
with their fathers: distant and forbidding figures of authority and punishment.
When they torture Elaine, they enact a regime of discipline and control in which
they thrillingly adopt the patriarchal role. When she berates Elaine, Cordelia
ventriloquizes her father with phrases such as ‘What do you have to say for
yourself?’ (117). The real anger in the text, however, as Hite observes, is directed
not at fathers but mothers – at the women who acquiesce to the patriarchy and
educate young girls to do the same.
If fathers are distant figures of unassailable authority, mothers are much
more ambiguous figures in Cat’s Eye. Motherhood, argues Hite, is held up in the
novel as an ideal, a ‘force that can reverse the partitioning, blaming structure
of the whole society’.39 But real-life mothers inevitably fail to live up to such
idealization. As Ingersoll observes, Elaine loves her mother, yet resents her
failure to prepare Elaine for the treacherous world of girls and women. Her
inexpressible resentment is internalized as guilt, which is then, he suggests,
projected onto Mrs Smeath, who becomes the embodiment of the monstrous
‘Bad Mother’ in the text.40 Elaine desperately desires a maternal figure who will
protect her as her own well-meaning but insufficient mother does not. Hite notes
that, in defiance of the Smeaths’ Protestantism, Elaine chooses to worship the
Catholic figure of the Virgin Mary. An icon of maternal love, the Virgin mother
contrasts with the Smeaths’ watchful, paternal God and functions, in Ingersoll’s
words, as ‘the ultimate Good Mother’.41 She also represents, as Hite suggests, a
return to a pre-verbal, all-encompassing, life-giving nurturance, providing the
‘succor and concern impossible for actual subjects of a disciplinary society’.42
Massoura similarly identifies Elaine’s attachment to the Virgin Mary as an
attempt to return to the pre-oedipal moment of infancy, when the child does
not distinguish itself as separate from the maternal body. Using Julia Kristeva’s
psychoanalytic definition of this ‘semiotic’ phase, Massoura concludes that, for
Elaine, the figure of the Virgin Mary represents a healing return to the ‘universal
substitute mother’.43
When mothers fail to protect, when they actively sustain the violence of
patriarchy, the anger they elicit is deep-rooted and visceral. At the same time,
mothers maintain an adult authority that makes them untouchable, and the
hatred expressed towards the femininity that they represent is instead manifest
in bullying and self-harm. For Elaine, unable to voice her suffering or to direct
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 85

it outwards, self-harm becomes a mode of inarticulate expression and release, as

she punishes her unsatisfactory female flesh. As Massoura observes, Elaine uses
self-directed pain to provide a sense of order and to control the chaotic violence
inflicted on her by Cordelia. Her attempts to diminish her own body through
pain – almost to the point of suicide – are, suggests Massoura, ‘an attempt to save
it from its own vulnerability’: to transcend the body’s pain by attaining ‘complete
disembodiment’.44
Eventually, Elaine is able to forgive her mother, and to acknowledge and
relinquish her long-repressed feelings of anger and betrayal at her mother’s
failure to protect her. Much more difficult, however, is the forgiveness of Mrs
Smeath. Discussing the visceral hatred of Mrs Smeath that finds expression in
Elaine’s painting, White Gift, Wynne-Davies notes how, with time, the painting’s
meaning changes and evolves, both for Elaine and for the various audiences that
encounter it over the years. It eventually comes to represent Elaine’s ability to
find some measure of empathy, if not exactly forgiveness, for Mrs Smeath, as she
starts to acknowledge the restrictions and pressures on the older woman: her
worries and disappointments. Mrs Smeath, suggests Wynne-Davies, becomes
a metaphor for changing social structures. The angry, grotesque image of her
that Elaine creates is simultaneously ‘the retaliation of a child against bigotry,
a comment upon class, a challenge to morality; a feminist statement and an
awareness of demographic changes in Canada’.45 By painting both Mrs Smeath
and the Virgin Mary, Elaine works towards a unified image of maternity and
femininity that does not divide women into monsters and saints, but rather
embodies complexity and ambiguity, strengths and weaknesses. It is an attempt,
through art, to reconstruct the pivotal scene in the ravine, which Brown argues
acts as a juncture of ‘female cruelty, female suffering, and female comfort’.46 For
Massoura, this acceptance of the multifaceted nature of femininity is crucial,
for while Cat’s Eye is a novel ‘about female cruelty, about women being their
own worst enemies’, it is also, eventually, a novel about ‘surviving, aging and
forgiving’.47

Art and representation

Although primarily known as a novelist, poet and short story writer, Atwood is
also a visual artist. As Dvorak notes, she ‘works in media not frequently exhibited
in museums: sketches, watercolours, collages, linocuts’.48 Also observing the
manner in which Atwood’s artworks are commonly deemed peripheral and
incidental, Sharon Rose Wilson was one of the first critics to pay close attention
86 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

to their significance. In a 1993 essay, Wilson argues that, while the parallels
between her visual and literary images are typically ignored, since the publication
of Cat’s Eye, which positions a female visual artist at the centre of Atwood’s
written work, exploring such connections has ‘become imperative’.49 In a later
and rare sustained study of one branch of these peripheral productions, read
alongside Atwood’s more canonical work, Reingard Nischik devotes a chapter of
her 2009 book Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood to Atwood’s
work as a cartoonist. Noting that Atwood often describes her earliest reading
and writing experiences as being shaped by the American comics she grew up
with, Nischik suggests that Atwood’s youthful experiments in this ‘hybrid genre’
provided good training in ‘pointed, minimalist, and often humorous language
use’.50 Of all her prose works, Cat’s Eye, with its artist protagonist and closely
imagined artworks, is the one that best draws together these different elements
of Atwood’s literary and visual production.
Art is crucial to the novel’s exploration of memory. As Brown observes, just as
the Toronto gallery director ‘chronologizes, labels, and hangs’ Elaine’s artwork,
so Elaine is similarly engaged in curating her own memories of the past.51 Brown
suggests that Elaine uses art to explore different modes of femininity, with
witches representing female cruelty, the Virgin Mary representing comfort and
female suffering being depicted in images of decapitation. Just as these images
recur in the literary text of the novel, so they populate Elaine’s visual art. For
example, in what Brown identifies as one of Elaine’s earliest artworks, created
when the stress of Cordelia’s bullying makes her retreat to her bed, Elaine creates
a collage by cutting out ladies from the catalogue (as she was taught to do by
Grace), and then chopping off their heads. By reading this imagery, we see that
Elaine has ‘internalised the cruel criticism of other women’ and ‘divided herself
into fragments’.52 Brown suggests that, in reconstituting the stereotypical images
of women as witches and virgins through Elaine’s art, Atwood proposes that if
these stereotypes cannot be erased, we should at least learn to examine them
anew.
Dvorak also focuses on the different visual and linguistic modes of
representation and perception that Atwood uses in the ‘doubled narrative’ of
her novel. She suggests that the two perspectives of the young and old Elaine
create an ‘anamorphosis’ – a distorted projection that assumes its proper shape
when seen from a specific angle – by ‘telescoping past and present, ignorance
and knowledge, seeing and telling’.53 Art provides Elaine with a way to express
her deepest feelings without being trapped by language, which, under Cordelia’s
authoritarian discipline, Elaine has come to fear. Similarly, Massoura also
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 87

suggests that Elaine’s art is a flight from language. Through the ‘vision’ of her art,
she is able to ‘come to terms with her past and reacquire her identity’.54 Dvorak’s
analysis broadly concords with this reading but suggests that the novel also
acknowledges the limitations of visual art.
Dvorak reflects on Atwood’s use of ekphrasis – the detailed description of
a visual artwork within a work of poetry or prose – and the manner in which
Elaine’s paintings are experienced by the reader and made to ‘exist’ in the text.
Atwood describes Elaine’s paintings in close, careful detail. She also sets up
an ironic distance, whereby the reader often understands the significance of
the painting’s imagery, even where Elaine (consciously, at least) does not. In
this manner, argues Dvorak, we both do not see the paintings as the fictional
viewers in the gallery literally see them, but we also ‘see’ them more clearly,
as we better understand what they represent. ‘This would suggest’, concludes
Dvorak, ‘a powerlessness of both text and painting to produce what could be
called a “full” representation’. And she argues instead that it is somewhere in
the space between these ‘two imperfect media, linguistic and iconographic’ –
in the dynamic dialectic that is set up between them – that Atwood eventually
arrives at something close to the wholeness that, with Cat’s Eye, she is struggling
to attain.55
Examining the use of art in the novel, Hite focuses on the theme of gendered
‘looking’. She identifies an inherent tension for the woman artist because women
are expected to be the object of the gaze rather than the observer. Paraphrasing
the kind of analysis that John Berger outlined in his influential 1972 book, Ways
of Seeing, Hite states: ‘Women look like, while in general men only look.’ This
idea, Hite demonstrates, is self-consciously explored by Atwood in Cat’s Eye.
In a novel full of mirrors and full of shame, girls and women are repeatedly
cautioned against ‘making a spectacle’.56 Using the work of French philosopher
Michel Foucault and his famous analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s model prison,
the Panopticon, Hite suggests that, just as Bentham’s prisoners are taught to
internalize the watching gaze of the warden and to effectively police themselves,
so Atwood’s little girls police one another. And the consequences of a failure to
comply are severe; when a young girl is found molested and murdered, Elaine
thinks: ‘it’s as if this girl has done something shameful’ (241). In becoming an
artist, Elaine succeeds in evading and reversing the direction of the gaze, refusing
to be its object. But this escape comes at a cost; in choosing to be an artist, she
rejects the world of girls and women and allies herself with boys and men.
If Elaine’s art is a mode of survival that requires a rejection of femininity, it
also eventually provides a route back to her repressed selfhood. Wynne-Davies
88 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

suggests that Atwood uses art to explore ideas about memory and the past,
which are inherently unstable in the novel. This instability haunts Elaine, who
often imagines that she glimpses Cordelia on the street. Cordelia is impossible
to pin down, however, because she exists as both a defiant, bullying child and
an uncertain, frightened adult. In response to such radical instability, Wynne-
Davies suggests that Elaine’s paintings are an attempt to pin down the past,
and while they fail to manifest the ‘real’ Cordelia, they offer ‘an inner and more
intuitive interpretation’.57 Crucially for Wynne-Davies, however, Atwood also
observes and acknowledges that even Elaine’s art remains unstable, as it is always
subject to the interpretation of viewers who, to Elaine’s surprise, most recently
read her work as feminist and postfeminist. As Elaine reflects at the end of the
novel, ‘I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean’ (409).
This acceptance of the dynamic, shifting nature of the paintings goes
somewhat against Lorraine York’s reading of the function of Elaine’s art; noting
that there is an ‘autumnal’ quality about the novel as a whole, York suggests
that Elaine’s paintings ‘have been placed in a morgue of sorts, though it more
commonly goes by the name of an art gallery’. For York, the life of the paintings
lies not in the viewers who bring their own interpretations to the work but in
the artist from whom they originate. When Elaine walks through the gallery,
argues York, ‘it’s as though she is bringing life back to these paintings in the act
of reviving their moments of creation and of their inspiration in her past’.58 In
a typically Atwoodian, questioning novel, such different readings perhaps best
attest to the novel’s own uncertainties around the ability of memory, or language,
or art, to attain Elaine’s desired ‘unified field theory’ that might bring together
the disparate, shifting and often contradictory elements of a single life.

The Robber Bride

If in Cat’s Eye Atwood constructs a tale of little girls acting as unwitting agents
of the patriarchy, in The Robber Bride she creates instead a female villain who
is voraciously self-serving and who destroys men as much as she devastates
women: a fairy-tale gothic villain of mythic proportions.

Overview
The Robber Bride charts the intertwined personal histories of three middle-aged
friends: Tony, an academic war historian, Charis, a gentle New Ager, and Roz,
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 89

a successful businesswoman. In a closely patterned narrative, the alternating

sequences are focalized through each woman in turn, as they recount their
initial seduction and later betrayal by the charismatic and deeply manipulative
Zenia. Unlikely companions, the women first meet at University in the 1960s
and each, in turn, is targeted by Zenia: Tony in the 1960s, Charis in the 1970s
and Roz in the 1980s. Now, in the present-day setting of 1990s Toronto, the
three friends gather at the suggestively named Toxique café to share a regular
monthly lunch date. A kind of survivors’ support group established in the wake
of Zenia’s death five years earlier in a suitably dramatic terrorist attack in Beirut,
the women provide one another with friendship and solidarity: ‘they have
battle scars, they’ve been through fire’ (29). They are therefore understandably
horrified when, like a vampire returning from the dead, their former friend and
tormentor casually walks in.
The ensuing narrative recounts each woman’s relationship with Zenia, who
has a particular skill for rooting out pain and trauma and exploiting weaknesses.
Through a carefully orchestrated combination of empathy and mimicry, she
presents herself to each woman as an idealized reflection of themselves. Zenia
variously offers each woman an opportunity to nurture and soothe the damaged
child within and also presents her with a vision of herself made stronger: more
powerful, more beautiful, more sensual and more exciting. Just as Tony, at one
point in the novel, looks into Zenia’s eyes and ‘sees her own reflection: herself,
as she would like to be’ (167), so Charis and Roz similarly project their idealized
selves onto Zenia. As Donna Bontatibus notes, the women must eventually
accept that they ‘unconsciously summon and will Zenia back into their lives’
because each of them has unresolved issues.59
Like other Atwood novels, The Robber Bride is rich in intertextual allusions.
Donna Potts identifies, among others: soap opera plots, folk tales, nursery
rhymes, vampire and ghost stories, classical myths, comic books, Bible stories
and murder mysteries.60 Working in the gothic mode, the novel is full of images
of twins and dark doubles, and each protagonist experiences some kind of
splitting and dual identity. In childhood, Tony develops a coping mechanism
that persists into adulthood, spelling words backwards and creating a bigger,
tougher alter ego, Tnomerf Ynot: her name reversed. Charis is similarly twinned;
as a child called Karen, she develops a method of psychic dissociation from her
body to block out the violence of abuse until she is able to escape into a new life
and a new name, although in moments of pain and fear, Karen always threatens
to return. Roz, the mother of twins, also experiences division as she attempts
to integrate her Jewish and Catholic heritage, her family’s early poverty, their
90 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

subsequent illegitimate wealth and her later respectable affluence. Like Tony and
Charis, Roz has a surfeit of names: she is both Rosalind and Roz and carries
her Jewish family name, its Anglicized revision and her married name. These
unstable identities, the novel suggests, provide Zenia with a way into each
woman’s life. They also provide her with a ready role to inhabit, as J. Brooks
Bouson observes when she suggests that, for Tony, Zenia is ‘her own lawless,
angry twin identity’, for Charis, she is ‘her split-off vulnerable and enraged child’,
and for Roz, she represents ‘the envious and greedy aspects of her self she wants
to deny’.61
Animating the repressed desires of the three women, stepping into gaps
provided by their unresolved painful histories, Zenia – the Robber Bride –
‘steals’ and ‘consumes’ each of their men in turn. Tony’s relationship with her
husband West (the only male–female relationship that eventually survives
Zenia) involves her twice nursing him back to well-being after being abandoned
by Zenia, although the second time round, as Laurie Vickroy notes in an essay
on trauma in the novel, she is ‘stronger emotionally and more realistic about the
man she loves’.62 When Zenia comes knocking at Charis’s door a decade later,
she finds Charis living with American draft-dodger Billy, the father of Charis’s
then-unborn daughter; when Billy and Zenia run away together, Charis never
hears from him again and is left uncertain whether he is dead or alive. And
finally, when she enters Roz and Mitch’s marriage, Zenia once again wreaks
havoc; when she inevitably moves on and Roz refuses to allow her repentant
husband to return to the family home, he kills himself, leaving Roz alone with
their three children and her guilt. Tony, Charis and Roz are each targeted by
Zenia through the man they love, but in each case, the man is almost incidental:
the truly significant relationships in the novel are always the relationships – loyal
or duplicitous – between the four women.
Eventually, the closely patterned novel concludes with the three friends back
in the same café, each disclosing how she has gone alone to visit Zenia in her hotel
room, each with murderous fantasy or intent. When Charis has a premonition
that Zenia has fallen to her death, they return to the hotel together, only to find
her lying (definitely) dead in the hotel fountain. Continuing the gothic theme of
the novel, Zenia requires multiple killings to finally assure her death: suffering
an overdose, falling from a balcony, drowning and a terminal cancer diagnosed
post-mortem. The precise cause of death, however, remains uncertain, with each
of the three women remaining under possible suspicion. The novel concludes
with Tony musing on the unknowable yet intimately familiar nature of Zenia:
‘Was she in any way like us? [. . .] Or, to put it the other way around: Are we
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 91

in any way like her?’ (470). For Phyllis Perrakis, extending a psychoanalytic
reading of the novel, the women, in defeating the vampire, learn ‘to celebrate the
vampire’s power because it is also theirs’.63

(Hi)storytellers: Narrative authority

In his review of the novel, Rushdie describes The Robber Bride as a light ‘fairy tale
of malicious simplicity’. Discussing the characterization of Zenia, he reflects that
she is ‘a perfectly credible monster’, but regrets that we never see her ‘as we see
the other women, from the inside’.64 That internalized perspective is limited by
the novel’s tripartite narrative structure to Tony, Charis and Roz, who each take
turns to tell their version of events. For Bouson, this method works to provide
‘a rich interplay of female voices’ that forces readers to perform what she terms
‘a complicated act of narrative reconstruction and psychoanalytic detection’. In
piecing together three partial narrative perspectives, the reader – like the three
friends in the novel – must attempt to reconstruct a complex and often seemingly
contradictory history in order to decipher the enigma of Zenia. Zenia, however,
suggests Bouson, ultimately resists attempts to know her.65
For Vickroy, the gaps and absences that make up Zenia are indicative of
the fact that she represents ‘a symbolic challenge to the others’ endurance
and self-regard’ rather than ever functioning in the text as ‘a fully developed
character’.66 This reading of Zenia, as more of a symbol or emblem than a
psychologically coherent figure in her own right, chimes with an essay by
Roxanne Fand in which she describes what she terms the ‘Nietzschean Fairy-
Tale’ elements of The Robber Bride. Like Bouson, Fand also pays attention to
the novel’s narrative structure. In addition to the three distinct narrative voices
focalized through the three friends, she identifies the overlapping presence
of a seemingly omniscient narrator orchestrating the three perspectives
and purposely omitting Zenia’s point of view. This structural influence, she
suggests, directs the reader’s sympathies, much like a moralizing fairy tale.
For Fand, however, the three protagonists’ slow realization of their complex
responses to Zenia and eventual acknowledgement of the role they each played
in enabling her, ensures that the novel’s moral position ‘is more complex than
that of the sanitized popular fairy tale’.67
Working alongside the novel’s familiar fairy-tale elements is a particular
concern with historiography. History, and the shadows it casts, is a central
preoccupation of The Robber Bride. As Fand notes, while the three friends
are given broadly equal prominence within the novel’s tripartite structure, the
92 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

opening and closing narrative sections are focalized through Tony the historian.
As the character most consciously concerned with what Fand terms ‘the problem
of historical and narrative truth’, Tony’s prominence draws the reader’s attention
to those same issues.68
Discussing the trauma of history, Vickroy points out that Atwood purposely
places the novel’s various tales of parental neglect and childhood abuse in
the context of the Second World War and its psychological consequences. In
this manner, she suggests, ‘Atwood links larger historical traumas to personal
ones by showing the disastrous effects of war on parenting in the novel’.69 We
see evidence of this in each of the three friends’ childhoods: Tony’s mother is a
traumatized and resentful war bride, while her father refuses to discuss his war
record and eventually commits suicide; Charis’s father dies in the war, leaving
her in the care of her mentally unstable and suicidal mother; and Roz’s charming
but unfaithful father cuts a morally ambiguous figure as a Jewish émigré and a
war profiteer whom she struggles to come to terms with throughout her life.
Each woman is shaped by history – personal, national and international –
and as Hilde Staels observes, it is Tony who finally recognizes their ‘desire for
storytelling as a necessary precondition to pacify the ghosts that haunt them’.70

Friendship/sisterhood/feminism
In its foregrounding of interrelated concerns around trauma, history and
storytelling, The Robber Bride can be compared to Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s
Tale and Cat’s Eye, while its preoccupation with the complexity of female
relationships also invites connections with earlier works. Briefly comparing The
Robber Bride to Cat’s Eye, Fand suggests that, where the earlier novel defies the
feminist call to sisterhood by depicting a power struggle between women, The
Robber Bride extrapolates this idea, taking it to further extremes. She identifies
in the novel a dialogic struggle between, on the one hand, ‘the centrifugal forces
dividing women’, and on the other, ‘the centripetal power of sisterhood’.71 Rather
than resolving this tension, she suggests, the novel is propelled by the dynamism
of this opposition. Atwood’s novel, argues Fand, reverses gender roles and
demonstrates that, while it may be fought on different terms, ‘a struggle between
women is as dangerous as one between men’.72
Published in 1993 against a backdrop of conservative retreat from many early
second-wave feminist advances, The Robber Bride inevitably inspired many
critical reflections on its response to contemporary feminist politics. In her essay
on ‘power feminism’ in the novel, Bouson takes up this discussion, and considers
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 93

how the novel chimes with the kind of analysis being put forward at the time
by postfeminists such as Naomi Wolf. In her 1993 polemic, Fire with Fire, Wolf
advocates for a new power feminism that would reject an earlier mode of ‘victim
feminism’, which viewed women as fragile and in need of protection. According
to Wolf, second-wave feminism’s eagerness to celebrate women as ‘naturally
non-competitive, cooperative, and peace loving’ led it to reject evidence of
female aggression as an aberration caused by patriarchy.73 Extending Wolf ’s
suggestion that popular culture commonly provides an outlet for women’s
‘repressed fantasises of power and revenge’, Bouson argues that The Robber Bride
‘does the dream work of power feminism’ by exploring the fantasy enactment of
forbidden female desires.74
While many critics focus on the novel’s depiction of female rivalry and
betrayal, others point to its powerful vision of female comradery. Indeed,
for Rigney, female friendship is at the heart of Atwood’s novels. Atwood, she
argues, ‘restores women to women as friends, ultimately, though they may
have suffered horrors at one another’s hands’.75 Even in The Robber Bride, with
its overt performance of female treachery, Zenia’s villainy ultimately unites her
victims as co-survivors. And for Stein, similarly, while the novel is superficially
about women fighting over men, it is more importantly ‘the story of an evolving
friendship between three women’. The Robber Bride, observes Stein, is ‘a woman-
centred book’, transforming the Robber Bridegroom fairy tale of male villainy
into a story about women.76 For Bouson, however, while the novel inarguably
depicts the friendship of Roz, Charis and Tony as ‘nurturing and supportive’, its
prime concern is ultimately with the ‘antagonisms, rivalries, manipulations, and
betrayals’ of each woman’s relationship with Zenia.77
In an essay on ‘the Lacanian double and feminist community’ in The Robber
Bride, Jean Wyatt extends this discussion of the tensions in the novel around
female friendship and rivalry. She argues that The Robber Bride depicts the
experience of intense envy: ‘each of the three protagonists wants to be Zenia’.
Echoing Atwood’s position in ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses’, Wyatt suggests
that the feminist ideal of sisterhood made the existence of jealousy and
competitiveness taboo. By placing envy and violence at the centre of her female
characters’ relations, Wyatt argues, Atwood calls on her readers ‘to confront and
deal with the negative feelings between women’. In this, she suggests, Atwood’s
novel addresses the feminist community. Atwood’s three protagonists are the
products of feminism, and each follows an ethics of feminist sisterhood that
‘excludes all negative feelings, including envy’. Adopting a psychoanalytic
reading that envy is natural (it is a healthy part of child development to envy
94 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

and aspire to the power and autonomy of the parent), Wyatt suggests that the
feminist prohibition on envy leads, inevitably, to repression and guilt.78
Hobbled by the feminist exclusion of negative emotions, each woman in turn
represses her envy of Zenia and instead welcomes her, as Tony does, ‘like a long-
lost friend, like a sister’ (114). This unquestioning act of empathy and goodness
leaves Tony, like Charis and Ros, vulnerable to exploitation. While Atwood
does not advocate for the abandonment of care and mutual support, The Robber
Bride, argues Wyatt, is ‘a story about restoring to a feminist community the right
to envy’. When that right is denied, each woman is isolated in her repressed
rage and guilt; but when envy and rage are allowed to be brought ‘into the
conversation, these feelings can be contextualised, seen to coexist with other,
more positive emotions towards women’.79

Another gothic tale

Wyatt’s essay on feminism and envy makes use of a familiar psychoanalytic
reading of Zenia as an uncanny double, which is just one of the novel’s many
gothic tropes. If Lady Oracle provided a comic exaggeration of the genre of
gothic romance, The Robber Bride is instead deadly serious in its depiction of
violence, terror and threat, while simultaneously joyous in its uninhibited and
occasionally camp depiction of Zenia’s super-villainy. As Wilson observes,
Zenia is ‘a cannibal and a vampire: she dismembers friends, lovers, and possibly
chickens for fun’.80 Discussing this tension in the novel between its alternating
modes, Fand suggests that Atwood manages to successfully create ‘a dialogic
interplay between fantasy and realistic believability’, constructing a gothic fairy
tale within a broadly realist frame.81
In her essay on ‘border crossings’ in The Robber Bride, Staels discusses the
gothic fairy-tale roots of the novel, in which Zenia takes on the role of trickster
and female counterpart of the murderous husband in the Grimm Brothers’ tale
of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’. Zenia, argues Staels, not only steals the men of
the three women but also robs the women of their ‘illusory coherent identities’.
Discussing the novel in terms of contemporary women’s gothic writing, she
suggests that such fictions explore the ‘other’, which is everything that represents
disorder and difference, and which challenges the authority of the dominant
cultural order. Consequently, Tony, Charis and Roz encounter, in the ‘lawless
and radically “other” but ultimately liberating Zenia’, a threat to the familiar
bourgeois world. For Staels, however, the novel parodies gothic conventions.
While traditional gothic fiction is fascinated by dualisms and transgressions,
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 95

it also ultimately exposes and condemns wrongdoing, restoring order and

reconfirming the moral and social code. Contemporary postmodern gothic
novels such as Atwood’s instead ‘emphasize the need to welcome the transgressive
other as part of the self ’.82
A number of critics, getting to grips with the nature of the transgressive other
that Zenia represents, reach for a notably gothic vocabulary. For Staels, she is a
‘revenant’ and ‘an angry spirit’, taking possession of ‘the ghost of banished Karen,
Charis’s muted and mutilated other’.83 For Wilson instead, like Dr Jekyll’s Mr
Hyde, she is ‘the shadow self that we must know in order not to be controlled
by it’.84 And for Palumbo, Zenia returns like an irrepressible ‘ghost, a vampire, or
a patched together monster’.85 Whatever the nature of her gothic form, Zenia’s
villainous energy, as Rigney observes, is inextricably bound up with her gender
– a connection that Rigney also extends to Atwood’s other works, noting that her
female characters, ‘more than their comparatively benign male counterparts, are
capable of virtually demonic power’.86
For most critics pursuing the gothic function of The Robber Bride, Zenia’s
role is explained in specifically psychoanalytic terms. This is the argument put
forward by Staels, for whom Zenia’s return as a vampiric, vengeful monster is
‘a result of long-term denial’.87 This reading is also developed by Palumbo, for
whom the novel can be described as ‘one long act of exorcism’. Each of the three
protagonists, as she observes, is plagued by secret twins and unruly doubles –
from Tony’s unborn twin and alter ego, to Roz’s multiple selves and Charis’s
repressed ‘Karen’ self – while also always twinned with their dark double, Zenia.
Extending the psychoanalytic reading (and echoing Wyatt’s analysis), Palumbo
suggests that Zenia enacts a kind of Freudian return of the repressed. In order
to exorcise their seemingly supernaturally immortal foe, each woman must
address her capacity for ‘conventionally nonfeminine emotions’ – ‘hostility,
anger, and rage’ – and learn to integrate rather than repress and expel such
feelings. Otherwise, suggests Palumbo, that which is denied is bound to return,
like an irrepressible ‘ghost, a vampire, or a patched together monster’.88 Finally,
critics such as Bouson also extend this reading to implicate, not just the three
central protagonists, but also the reader. Bouson contends that Atwood, in
encouraging her readers to consume and enjoy Zenia’s unrepentant satisfying
of her monstrous appetites, pushes them to ‘recognize – and thus begin to take
ownership of – their disowned feelings and urges’.89
An essentially gothic conception of otherness and threat also underpins
Eleonora Rao’s essay on ‘home and nation’ in Atwood’s work. For Rao, The Robber
Bride is preoccupied with questions of ‘home, and estrangement, national identity
96 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

and belonging’, constructing an uneasy and unstable opposition between a white

Anglophone ‘us’ and an immigrant ‘them’. While Zenia functions as the ‘foreigner
par excellence’ – exotic, threatening, and other – each of the three friends also
experiences feelings of homelessness and rootlessness. Like exiles, the women
are divided subjects, split between their present and their past. Displaced and
orphaned, they work hard to create a sense of stability and security, which Zenia
threatens.90 Rao observes that each woman builds herself a place of safety –
Roz’s mansion, Charis’s cottage, and Tony’s ‘turreted fortress’ (391) – but each
sanctuary fails to repel Zenia’s invasion. (An article by Jennifer Murray notes the
echoes of the Three Little Pigs, with Zenia as the wolf attacking each house in
turn.91) Rao touches on something of the terror that Zenia wreaks: ‘The dividing
line between the inside and the outside begins to falter: closed borders do not
hold.’92 Zenia disrupts the illusory stability of the other women’s lives, exposing
the fragility of their own status as secure insiders. For Rao, the three women’s
response to the threat of Zenia illuminates divisions within Canadian society
and belies the Canadian self-valedictory narrative of the nation’s openness to
migrants. It also, she argues, warns, in true gothic manner, of the fragility of
borders, of ‘home’, of all supposedly secure barriers intended to keep out the
dangerous other.

The conclusion
The Robber Bride concludes on the neutralization of threat, the vanquishing
of the vampire, the expulsion of the dangerous other. Critics, however, remain
divided in their responses to Atwood’s resolution. As Stein notes, the novel
‘ends with a ceremonial meal and with storytelling’. The stories that they tell,
she suggests, work to cement the women’s friendship and to underline that
history, like people, ‘remains complex, multiple, and ultimately indeterminate’.93
Wyatt also focuses on the concluding meal, which is ‘structurally parallel’ to the
opening lunch as the Toxique, but ‘represents a more substantial communion’.94
Returning to her envy thesis, she suggests that the overly symbolic patterning of
the novel’s conclusion, in which each woman confesses to secretly visiting Zenia
with the intention to somehow eradicate her, coupled with Zenia’s coincidental
death on the same day, takes the novel out of the realms of realism and into that
of symbolism, where each envious women in turn ‘kills’ the object of her envy.
If Zenia’s reincarnation at the start of the novel functions as a Freudian return
of the repressed in Bouson’s psychoanalytic perspective, her second death at
the novel’s end ‘suggests her return to the watery (unconscious) element from
 Spotty-Handed Villainesses 97

which she has surfaced as a fantasy projection’. Bouson entertains the possibility
of a constructive reading of the conclusion: having confronted Zenia and
acknowledged the repressed will to power that she represents, the women are
finally able to rid themselves of her ‘troubling presence’. There is also, however,
as Bouson suggests, a less satisfactory conclusion, whereby Zenia’s death is
better understood as ‘a defensive need to expel, rather than assimilate, the Zenia
within’.95 Functioning in the text as a kind of cipher for female malevolence,
Zenia is violently removed from the narrative. For Bouson, regardless of the
actual cause of Zenia’s death, the three women’s shared vengeful, murderous
fantasies point to their ‘collective guilt’ in stamping out threatening femininity.96
For Fand, however, who reads the novel as an exploration of what the
nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche termed the ‘will
to power’, Zenia performs a valuable function for the three protagonists. By
making each woman in turn face her own ‘dark impulses’, she becomes, in Fand’s
words, ‘like their Nietzschean best friend in being their best enemy’.97 Through
their various interactions, Zenia forces the women to become themselves more
fully, and while the experience is painful and even violent, surviving it makes
each of them stronger. The key to understanding the Nietzschean dialogic of
the text, Fand argues, resides in its insistence on contradiction. The friends are
‘undone by their impulse to do good – to Zenia’, but also, ultimately, ‘saved by
that same impulse toward each other’. In this manner, she suggests, the novel
both interrogates and upholds the ethic of sisterhood, much as it shows both
the violence done by the will to power and the danger of denying the will to
power. Zenia, argues Fand (adapting Nietzsche’s term), ‘has the superwoman’s
compulsion to succeed “over all” by regarding others as mere objects for her
purposes’.98 The goal of the three friends, therefore, is not to duplicate this
monstrous narcissism, but rather to combine something of the same drive with
the love and solidarity of which Zenia is incapable, thereby achieving a stronger,
healthier mode of female power.
Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride represent significant late twentieth-century
engagements with the gender politics shaped and defined by second-wave
feminism. In the late 1990s and on the cusp of the twenty-first century, Atwood’s
lengthy, complex novels take a reflective turn, continuing to explore gender
relations, but expanding the historical sweep of her narrative into the nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries.
98
 5

History, memory and recovering the past

Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and The Penelopiad

Atwood’s novels as she approaches the end of the twentieth century and moves
into the twenty-first century are increasingly ambitious, weighty volumes, self-
consciously engaged with the difficulties of recovering and representing the
past in the present. With Alias Grace, she published her first extended foray
into historical fiction, writing a fictionalized account of the real-life figure
Grace Marks, a young working-class Irish immigrant to Canada accused
of conspiring to murder her employer and his housekeeper. In exploring the
circumstances around and the responses to this mid-nineteenth-century cause
célèbre, Atwood engages in both a close psychoanalytic study of an offender
and broader reflections on the preoccupations of a community, a period and a
nation. Similarly, with The Blind Assassin, she juxtaposes the personal memoir of
the novel’s octogenarian narrator, Iris, against an obliquely described developing
social and cultural history of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada.
Iris, some twenty or so years older than Atwood when she was writing the novel,
extends the text’s reach beyond the previously described 1950s of Atwood’s own
childhood to provide a rich reconstruction of the 1930s and 1940s.
In this chapter, I examine some of the critical responses to these two substantial
novels and also include some discussion of the 2005 text, The Penelopiad. This
later work represents yet another mode of historical writing for Atwood, as she
takes on the rewriting of Homer’s classical epic, The Odyssey. A very different text
from Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, The Penelopiad nevertheless contains
characteristically Atwoodian reflections on the desires and the dangers of
rewriting the past that bear useful comparisons with the project she undertakes
in the two earlier works. In each of the three texts, Atwood draws attention to
the limits and restrictions of genre, to the fallibility of both private memory and
the public historical record, and, in Coral Ann Howells’s words, to ‘the multiple
inherited scripts through which our perceptions are structured’.1
100 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

In an article that focuses primarily on The Blind Assassin, Ruth Parkin-

Gounelas comments on the length of Atwood’s novels from this period. She
places these later Atwood works within the context of other similarly massive
recent fictions and diagnoses a kind of late-twentieth-century reaction against
the mid-century minimalism of writers such as Samuel Beckett. Contemporary
writers, she suggests, have retreated to the densely realized worlds of their
eighteenth and nineteenth-century predecessors. And yet, she argues, ‘the
postmodern doorstop’ novel is notable different from its Victorian ancestor,
‘with its fleshed-out characters in a solid and stable world’. While a work such
as The Blind Assassin replicates many of the qualities of the nineteenth-century
realist novel, it always remains highly self-conscious of the limits of its own
fictionality. As Parkin-Gounelas puts it: ‘The more it adds or remembers, the less
it seems to know.’2 This same postmodern scepticism can be discerned in Alias
Grace and The Penelopiad.

Alias Grace

Overview
Atwood commences the present-tense narrative of Alias Grace in 1859. Grace,
in her early thirties, has been imprisoned for sixteen years – half of her young
life. She is a ‘model prisoner’ (5), who repents of her sins and is entrusted with
a job as maid and seamstress in the prison Governor’s home, but she continues
to claim amnesia of the actual event of the murders. When the novel begins,
a well-intentioned group of Christians, prison reformists and those who, like
the Governor’s wife, have a morbid fascination with famous murderers have
commissioned the services of Dr Simon Jordan, an American medic specializing
in the modern treatment of ‘lunatics’, to undertake a kind of pre-Freudian
talking cure to recover Grace’s repressed memories and hopefully exonerate her
of the crime.
The subsequent narrative involves Grace – ‘the most duplicitous of all
Atwood’s female protagonists’, as Barbara Hill Rigney terms her – recounting her
life story to Simon in the attempt to unlock her memory.3 Grace’s account is rich
with detail and the ephemera of nineteenth-century domestic life. She describes
her journey to Canada and the death of her mother at sea; how she was left with
a drunken father and younger siblings to care for and was relieved to escape
into employment as a housemaid. In the home of Mrs Alderman Parkinson,
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 101

Grace is taken under the wing of her great friend, Mary Whitney, who is seduced
and abandoned by the family’s son, and eventually dies in Grace’s arms from a
botched abortion. Grace escapes to service in Thomas Kinnear’s house, where
she hopes to find another friend in the Housekeeper, Nancy. Instead, she enters
a household riven with jealousies and tensions, all of which culminate in the
brutal murder of Nancy and Kinnear.
Repeatedly in the novel Simon reports feeling overwhelmed by the abundance
of Grace’s narrative. While she claims to have no memory of the murders, she
seems to have a minute recollection of ‘every item of laundry she ever washed’
(434). As Sandra Kumamoto Stanley observes, she provides multiple versions
of herself ‘which, like Scheherazade’s stories, become narratives of survival’.4
Her stories work to sustain Simon’s interest in her, without ever providing the
satisfaction he desires. For Karen Stein, Grace is a ‘trickster’ – ‘She is apparently
powerless, yet she contrives to liberate herself from prison through her carefully
crafted storytelling.’5 This suspected duplicity comes to a head when the narrative
eventually reaches its critical point: the supposed gap in Grace’s memory. When
Simon is persuaded, against his better judgement, to allow a visiting Dr Jerome
Dupont (recognized by Grace as a former acquaintance, Jeremiah the peddler)
to attempt hypnosis, Grace appears to enter a trance in which the spirit of Mary
Whitney claims to have taken possession of Grace’s body at the time of the
murders. Whether Grace is hypnotized against her will, possessed, coached into
lying or constructing a performance that she purposely keeps from the reader
remains opaque.
Subsequently, a disillusioned Simon returns to America, where he is later
injured in the Civil War and loses his memory. Grace instead is eventually
pardoned and marries Jamie Walsh, whom she knew as a young boy at Kinnear’s.
The novel ends with Grace, in her mid-forties, revealing that she may either be
pregnant or sick with a tumour: an ambiguity that speaks to the novel’s broader
refusal to provide satisfactory answers.

Readerly desire
Alias Grace has an extended genesis in Atwood’s canon. In 1974, she wrote a
television screenplay about Grace Marks for CBC, entitled The Servant Girl.
Atwood notes that she partially based this earlier depiction of Grace on an
account by Susanna Moodie in her 1853 book, Life in the Clearings, in which she
describes seeing ‘a shrieking, capering’ Grace incarcerated in both the Kingston
Penitentiary and the Toronto Lunatic Asylum.6 Atwood, however, later came
102 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

to reconsider the motives behind Moodie’s work. A well-known writer about

pioneer life in the Canadian bush, Moodie’s writing, suggests Sharon Rose
Wilson, was deliberately designed ‘to reconfirm English attitudes about the
“uncivilized” life in Canada’.7 Reflecting on Moodie’s account in her ‘Author’s
Afterword’, Atwood concludes that Moodie ‘can’t resist the potential for literary
melodrama’ (538). Bringing this same critical eye to Alias Grace, Atwood
foregrounds the many modes of readerly desire that motivate the deconstruction
of a ‘text’ such as Grace.
Grace’s story has always been sensationalized. As Stanley observes, ‘with
its mixture of sex and violence imbricated with class warfare’ it attracted
multiple lurid and highly gendered reactions from reporters and the public.8
Jackie Shead, in her study of Atwood as a crime fiction writer, expands on
this point. As it concerned a pretty young girl working in a small, relatively
isolated household, the case prompted titillating speculation about the sexual
arrangements of the inhabitants. The case, notes Shead, also confronted
Canada’s ruling classes with ‘the alarming spectacle of servants rising up
against their master’.9 Class tensions were further exacerbated by sectarian
divisions. Citing Revered Verringer in the novel – ‘The Tories appear to have
confused Grace with the Irish Question’ (91) – Shead points out that, while
Grace is a Protestant, her Irishness implicates her by association with Catholic
rabble-rousing.
Given the wider anxieties that Grace’s case seemed to excite, many critics note
that Atwood’s interest in her story is less to do with what Grace did, than with
how she was received, and why. For Alison Toron, focusing on themes of prison
and confinement in the novel, ‘Grace’s gender, class, and Irishness taint her as
guilty before she has been convicted of any crime.’10 Grace becomes a locus for
competing theories around class, gender, nation and religion: each of which
would ‘explain’ Grace in differing ways. As Stanley puts it, Grace, caught up in
scandalous events, ‘is examined, categorized, and imprisoned’.11
For Lorraine York, who has written persuasively on Atwood and celebrity, the
intensity of the speculation around Grace is also key to Atwood’s interest in her
case. York suggests that Alias Grace repeats familiar themes of ‘twinning, fame,
and destruction: a powerful constellation in the work of Margaret Atwood’. York
identifies in Atwood’s fiction a recurring trope of ‘the infamous woman as the
evil twin of the famous star’ and suggests that this imagery speaks to the writer’s
caution around celebrity, which can elicit hostility as well as adulation.12 Like
Joan in Lady Oracle, for whom fame is deeply problematic, Grace’s ‘celebrity’ – or
rather, her infamy – brings a complex array of responses. Vilified and idealized,
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 103

‘Grace’ becomes a composite of the various competing newspaper accounts of

her character, with the ‘real’ Grace seeming increasingly impossible to discern.

Historical fiction
Embodying the same multiplicity that comes to epitomize Grace, the novel
contains a number of competing genres and styles. Stein identifies at work
in the text: ‘social realism, epistolary form, Gothic fiction, and even a ballad
[. . .] Jamesian ghost story, detective thriller, Gothic tale, autobiography, and
Scheherazade’s story’.13 This clashing of genres and foregrounding of textuality
most commonly leads critics to define the novel as postmodern, although
Wilson, in her 2003 book, Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations, takes
another view. Noting the ‘considerable research’ Atwood undertook for the
novel, she suggests that Alias Grace ‘takes seriously’ themes such as double
personalities, sex scandals and murder mysteries that have previously occurred
in her work in the form of parody. Consequently, she argues, Alias Grace ‘seems
less experimental, less postmodern’ than The Handmaid’s Tale and The Robber
Bride.14 Much more prevalent, however, are readings such as that offered by
Jennifer Murray in her study of the novel’s quilt metaphor that identify the
work as ‘historiographic metafiction’: a mode of postmodern writing that Linda
Hutcheon defines as displaying ‘theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction
as human constructs’.15
Alias Grace is self-consciously concerned with what Murray terms ‘the
problematic of history and its representation’.16 In an essay entitled ‘In Search
of Alias Grace’, Atwood identifies a tension in the historical record between
‘individual memory and experience’ and ‘collective memory and experience’
and argues that fiction works best in drawing these two perspectives together.
She declares, in combative mode: ‘Whoever tells you that history is not about
individuals, only about large trends and movements, is lying.’17 Accordingly,
Alias Grace works to reclaim Grace from the documented accounts of her case
and provide her with an intimate, idiosyncratic voice. At the same time, as critics
have noted, a broader social history can be glimpsed around the edges of Grace’s
narrative.
For Shead, the novel exposes darker elements of Canadian Victorian society,
specifically, ‘the exploitation of immigrant labour and the power politics of its
class and gender relations’.18 Wilson, like Shead, also points out that the novel is set
in a very particular moment of Canadian history: after the Mackenzie rebellion,
which did much to expose class tensions, and during a period of increased Irish
104 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

immigration with its attendant joint anxieties around Catholicism and fears of
being overrun by the lawless poor. For Wilson, the novel is both an examination
of ‘nineteenth century colonial attitudes about Canada, the lower classes, and the
Irish’ and a critique of those attitudes.19 Reading the novel as prison literature,
Toron notes that ‘Grace’s personal history of oppression frames her supposed
crime’. This, she suggests, is typical of the genre, which is concerned with both
the individual’s experience of the penal system and wider social attitudes.20 In
Alias Grace, Atwood foregrounds the manner in which the historical cultural
moment shaped both Grace and the public’s response to Grace.

The servant girl

One of the social forces to which Alias Grace pays particularly close attention
is class. When Atwood titled her 1974 screenplay The Servant Girl, she drew
attention to labour and class relations in a manner that her later novel title
does not. Nevertheless, Grace’s occupation as servant is central to the novel’s
examination of gender, class and power. For Maria J. Lopez, examining
Atwood’s representation of marginalized and vulnerable groups, the novel
describes ‘communities of power’ – scientific, legal, medical – that work, in
Foucauldian terms, to discipline and punish; Grace belongs instead to ‘the
marginal communities of immigrants, servants, and mad people’ who challenge
the structures of middle- and upper-class social identity. Referring to Atwood’s
description of Moodie and her contemporaries visiting the lunatic asylum as
if they were visiting a zoo, Lopez suggests that ‘Grace, as a low-class woman,
becomes the object of knowledge of a middle-to-upper-class woman’. Grace’s
narrative, subsequently, becomes a mode of resistance whereby she wrests back
her own story, in her own voice.21
In an essay on ‘the eroticism of class’ in Alias Grace, Stanley also focuses
closely on social hierarchies. She points to Atwood’s acknowledgements, which
cite Isabella Beeton’s The Book of Household Management (1861) – a guide for
middle-class women on managing domestic servants – and Mary S. Hartman’s
Victorian Murderesses (1976) – a study of murders by middle-class women – as
evidence of Atwood’s interest in class as a context for Grace’s actions. Stanley
places Alias Grace within a history of texts, including some of Freud’s famous
case studies, that eroticize ‘the debased and abject servant who promises desired
but forbidden knowledge to the bourgeois male’. As she observes, Grace is an
enigma: simultaneously a knowing seductress and an innocent young maid –
both of which constructions excite the fantasies of others. Eventually, suggests
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 105

Stanley, Grace owes her survival to ‘an erotic strategy of deferral’ by which she
successfully moves from the servant’s role of fulfilling the master’s desires, to
one of denying satisfaction by withholding knowledge. Although she undergoes
a succession of attempts to define her – as servant, seductress, victim, murderer,
prisoner, madwoman, con-woman – Grace successfully resists them all,
remaining ‘unknowable’.22
Marlene Goldman also explores the significance of Grace’s status as servant
and suggests that it is inextricably bound up in the text with her nationality
and gender: all of which mark her out as dangerous. Alias Grace, she suggests,
explores nineteenth-century Canadian middle- and upper-class anxieties
around the Irish diaspora, class mobility and female emancipation. The
novel’s gothic themes of hysteria and haunting, she suggests, speak directly to
gothic fiction’s preoccupation with threats of invasion and corruption and its
obsession with ‘securing the home, the family line, and the nation state against
perceived internal and external threats’. The intensity of the public scrutiny of
Grace’s case, suggests Goldman, was motivated by an anxious desire to keep
women, the working class and the Irish in their place. Applying a historical and
materialist reading to hysteria and haunting in the novel, Goldman situates
Grace’s story within that of a multitude of ‘impoverished diasporic Irish women
who were marginalized and dispossessed’ when they emigrated to Canada.
The ghosts that haunt Alias Grace, and Grace’s hysterical episodes, are best
read, argues Goldman, as the uncanny return of nineteenth-century Canada’s
repressed guilt about the abuse of working-class women like Grace, Nancy and
Mary, who were left entirely vulnerable to physical and sexual exploitation by
their employers.23
The vulnerability of working-class women at this time is also noted by
Stanley. As she observes, the kind of strategies of resistance and survival that
Grace, Nancy and Mary employ have serious material consequences should
they go wrong. Conscious that both Mary and Nancy paid for their choices
with their lives, Grace, suggests Stanley, shows a keen awareness that women
like her are ‘judged by their use value to the master’. Consequently, both in
Kinnear’s household, and later when undergoing analysis with Simon, Grace
carefully preserves her value by deferring their desire to ‘know’ her. For Stanley,
crucially, class underpins the ambiguity of the novel’s conclusion. Atwood, she
suggests, is reluctant to become complicit with middle-class Simon’s attempt
to expose and consume working-class Grace’s story. Grace, therefore, remains
inscrutable, eluding ‘her potential colonizers, including the gaze of her avid
bourgeois readers’.24
106 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

The quilt motif

Grace, always sewing and talking, evades those who would objectify and
possess her. Describing the ubiquity of sewing, knitting and handcrafting
as metaphors for history in Atwood’s work, Murray observes that, in
Alias Grace, the patchwork quilt ‘emerges as the privileged motif ’.25 The
novel, she argues, draws attention to the manner in which, like a quilt, it
is pieced together from fragments of disparate historical documents. In
A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon asks of documentary sources, ‘can
they be objectively, neutrally related? Or does interpretation inevitably
enter with narrativization?’26 Historiographic metafiction, argues Murray,
is therefore caught in a paradox of desiring unimpeded access to the past
while remaining aware of the impossibility of the endeavour. A similar point
is made by Wilson, for whom the ‘increasing documentation’ commonly
incorporated by postmodern fictions only ‘compounds textual gaps’.27
Accordingly, Atwood laces Alias Grace (as she does The Blind Assassin) with
extracts from contemporary sources such as newspaper articles, popular
songs, court proceedings, etcetera, but for all this ‘evidence’, the reader
remains unenlightened. For Murray, Atwood uses the quilt as an expression
of this paradox. Both fragmentary and unified, the quilt comes to represent
the act of ‘making present meaning from traces of the past’.28
While Murray largely focuses on quilting as a metaphor for constructing
history and narrative, Wilson addresses the cultural history that Atwood’s
novel taps into. Grace concludes her story by describing the ‘Tree of Paradise’
pattern she is sewing – the first quilt she has ever made for herself – into
which she is stitching material from Mary’s petticoat, Nancy’s dress and her
own prison nightgown. Examining the history of quilt-making, Wilson notes
that quilts were commonly made from fabric worn by family and friends,
often on significant occasions: and so ‘bits of the past become useful parts of
the present’.29 For Murray, Grace’s inclusion of Mary and Nancy’s fabrics is
an assertion of ‘solidarity among women victims’.30 Classic quilting patterns
tell stories – often biblical or folkloric – and significantly, ‘quilters have
traditionally been women’. Wilson suggests, therefore, that quilting was a
mode of socially sanctioned communal activity for women: ‘a means for
women to be with other women’. Where other arts were prohibited to women
as too costly or too immodest, quilting provided an accessible mode of artistic
expression. This history is also taken up by Magali Cornier Michael, who
notes that the relegation of quilting to domestic craft left the practice ‘doubly
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 107

marginalized’ – excluded from both public and artistic realms.31 As Wilson

observes, however, this history of exclusion and belittlement is largely what
makes quilting ‘an appropriate vehicle for retelling a nineteenth-century
woman’s story’.32
Michael’s essay takes up the quilting motif and reflects on its implications
for the conceptualization of truth. She suggests that the novel’s patchwork
mode of representation, whereby different documents and voices appear
alongside each other, ‘undermines linearity and the cause-and-effect
logic that derives from it’. For Michael, Atwood’s juxtaposition of public
documents alongside Grace’s intimate and clearly fictionalized account,
results in a ‘curious leveling out’ of the authority of all the novel’s various
texts and challenges the idea of a unified, prioritized truth.33 Crucially,
however, the novel does not lapse into relativism (whereby all versions of
‘truth’ are equally valid), for as Michael observes, historical accounts are
fundamentally important for marginalized people as a way to retain cultural
memory and bear witness to past events. Alias Grace, therefore, treads a
line between acknowledging the existence of fact (someone did kill Nancy
and Kinnear), while also pointing out that ‘layers and layers of texts’ stand
between the reader and the event, and concluding that the real, material
Grace ‘can never be recuperated’.34
For Michael, Grace’s quilt functions to both unsettle linear, patriarchal
histories and elevate marginalized feminine narratives. Crucially, it manages
to expose the power dynamics that shape the interpretation of history, while
also ‘retaining sight of the concrete, material bodies’ (real people, to whom real
things happened) at stake in narrativizations of the past.35 Murray’s reading,
however, is rather more sceptical. While Wilson suggests that Grace’s ‘piecing
together of different stories into a new pattern’ is a revolutionary act, creating a
new pattern ‘that questions master patterns’, Murray is less convinced.36 Rather
than ripping up the old patterns and constructing something entirely new,
she argues, Grace can only imagine minor amendments and diversions from
traditional motifs, ‘a form of indecisiveness’ which she reads as an essentially
conservative conclusion.37

An anti-detective novel
If Grace’s quilting adapts known patterns, her storytelling similarly revises
familiar plots: most notably, the detective novel. As Shead observes,
the double-murder cold-case at the heart of Alias Grace subverts the
108 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

conventions of ‘the Holmesian whodunit’, particularly the assumption that

the truth will eventually emerge. 38 Similarly, Earl Ingersoll describes Alias
Grace as an ‘anti-detective novel’, luring readers in with the mystery of
Grace’s culpability, only to leave them ‘without any confidence that she is
clearly guilty or innocent’.39 Hilde Staels, examining the novel’s intertexts,
reads the text as ‘a parody’ of detective fiction – a genre that began in
the nineteenth century, and which traditionally functions as realism.40 As
Atwood disrupts the conventions of realism – linearity, logic, ‘knowable’
characters – so she undermines the foundation on which detective fiction
rests. Consequently, where the novel commences with the psychoanalyst-
detective’s desire to achieve knowledge through logical deduction, it ends
instead, as Staels notes, in ‘epistemological fallibility’.41
John O’Neill, in an article on memory and narrative uncertainty in Alias
Grace, also addresses the novel’s departure from realism in its seeming embrace
of the gothic ghost story. Focusing on Grace’s unreliability and her alleged
haunting by Mary, O’Neill argues that the conventional detective plot, which
demands revelation and closure, is ‘undermined by contact with the ghost genre’.
When the dead continue to speak after death – when they can continue to offer
new revelations – the comfort of a secure ending is disrupted. Consequently, in
Alias Grace, Mary’s haunting of Grace refuses the certainty that Simon seeks,
opening up more questions than it answers. For O’Neill, the inaccessible truth
of Grace’s apparent haunting ‘is the gap at the heart of Alias Grace’ which, like
Grace herself, ‘resists resolution’.42
For Shead, Atwood proves distinctly sceptical of detective work, particularly
its valorizing of a masculinist logical detachment in the Sherlockian mode.
While Simon variously refers to Grace as a nut to crack (61) and an oyster
to prise open (153), his attempts at scientific observation quickly unravel
as Grace, defying the ‘Cartesian divide between detective and subject’,
starts to act upon Simon, penetrating his sense of smell, his concentration
and his dreams. Where Simon assumes his own neutral objectivity, Shead
instead proposes that his failure to detect a unifying pattern in the scattered
fragments of Grace’s narrative is due to his inability to see the world from the
perspective of a lower-class woman. Grace’s tale, argues Shead, ‘is the dirty
linen of patriarchy and class injustice hung out to view’, and Simon remains
blind to it. Consequently, the trajectory of the novel’s story of detection
becomes one of ‘failure and decline’ rather than of progress and triumphant
revelation, as Atwood undermines patriarchal Victorian ideals of rationality
and moral certainty.43
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 109

The Blind Assassin

Atwood’s tenth novel, The Blind Assassin, commonly elicits comparison with
Alias Grace. For Alan Robinson, the two novels address ‘similar historiographic
difficulties’. Faced with a protagonist suspected of playing some role in the
death of others, readers of both texts ‘confront a biased, possibly unreliable
narrator’.44 Howells, instead, observes that, while both novels attempt to recover
the past, The Blind Assassin, unlike Alias Grace, is ‘not about things which have
been forgotten but about things that have been deliberately hidden’.45 And for
Stein, much as Grace’s narrative provided a glimpse of the broader cultural and
political concerns of nineteenth-century Canada, so The Blind Assassin offers a
‘social critique of the hypocrisy, injustice, classism, and sexism of the twentieth
century’.46 In these and many other analyses, critics note recurring concerns with
storytelling, the entwining of personal and national histories, and the difficulties
and desires involved in reconstructing the past.

Overview
The Blind Assassin is one of Atwood’s most structurally complex narratives.
Constructed, as Stein describes, ‘like a Russian wooden doll’, it contains stories
nested within stories.47 The novel is framed by a present-day narrative delivered
in the last years of the twentieth century by 82-year-old Iris Chase Griffen. With
a failing heart, Iris determines to write a memoir before she dies in which she
will reveal family secrets, particularly those related to the suicide of her sister
Laura in 1945.
Iris is what Marta Dvorak terms ‘a knowledgeable narrating I’.48 Her story
stretches back to the late-nineteenth century, when Iris’s grandfather built the
button factory on which the Chase family fortune is founded. It proceeds through
the courtship and marriage of her parents, Iris and Laura’s childhood, Iris’s
unhappy marriage to the industrialist Richard Griffen and Iris’s estrangement
from her daughter Aimee, and eventually looks forward to her granddaughter,
Sabrina, the imagined addressee of Iris’s revelations.
The family history that Iris recounts is interspersed with details from her present
life in Port Ticonderoga, Ontario, historical newspaper reports, extracts from The
Blind Assassin, a cult novella written by Laura and published posthumously by
Iris to great scandal and later acclaim, and – finally – extracted from the novella,
excerpts from a series of science fiction tales of the Planet Zycron, told to Laura by
110 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

her unnamed lover. As the novel proceeds, Iris is eventually revealed as the true
author of the novella that she credited to her sister. Howells describes Atwood’s
The Blind Assassin novel, Laura’s The Blind Assassin novella and the science fiction
stories about blind assassins as ‘three interlocking but apparently interrelated stories,
all written in different styles and with different narrators’.49 And as Robinson notes,
Iris’s revelation means that the novel actually contains two autobiographies by Iris:
‘one written with coded obliquity during the 1940s’ and one written over fifty years
later, which has ‘the benefit of hindsight but the added unreliability’ of having been
written long after the original events.50
Ingersoll terms The Blind Assassin ‘a “whodunnit” – with a vengeance’, in
which the reader is enticed by the mystery of the opening line – ‘Ten days after
the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge’ (3) – and the ensuing
desire to understand the motive for Laura’s death.51 To explain this event, Iris
returns to her childhood. She recalls her father, Norval, returning traumatized
from the Great War, having lost two brothers and an eye, and her beautiful, self-
sacrificing mother, Liliana, always urging Iris to take care of her younger sister:
an imposition that Iris resents. As Howells observes, Iris’s identity ‘is defined by
her gender, her class and her role as “good sister to Laura”’.52 When Liliana dies of
a miscarriage in 1925, a young Iris overhears whispered gossip that Norval made
too many sexual demands on his fragile wife. In this manner, suggests Stein,
Iris internalises a gendered dichotomy of ‘frail, sexless women and demanding,
dangerous men’ – a lesson she later takes with her into her marriage to Richard.53
If Iris reluctantly accepts her role as her sister’s keeper, Laura – a dreamy
and, to Iris, often infuriating character – is instinctively drawn to images of self-
sacrifice. When the teenaged sisters meet Alex Thomas, ‘an unknown young man
of indeterminate social class’, at a Labor Day picnic in 1934, Laura commences an
intense devotion.54 When Alex is revealed to be a communist agitator wanted by
the police, the sisters combine forces to shelter him in the Chase family mansion,
but subsequently, their competing feelings for him drive each to secrecy.
With the family fortune threatened, Norval marries off Iris to Richard,
who Iris later reveals physically and sexually abuses both her and her
sister: ‘he’d got a bargain’, reflects Iris, ‘two for the price of one’ (617). If Iris
marries Richard out of a sense of familial duty, Laura submits to his sexual
abuse in order – as she believes – to save Alex. For Stein, Richard remains
‘a flat character, almost a caricature, a Dickensian villain’: a judgement that,
as Stein observes, Iris the self-reflexive memoirist also acknowledges.55 His
pantomime villainy, however, is well-suited to what becomes an increasingly
gothic and melodramatic account. Richard, along with his witch-like sister,
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 111

Winifred, continues to control both sisters, and when Iris is pregnant with
Aimee, Richard has Laura committed to a mental asylum, from which she
escapes. Later, when a telegram arrives announcing Alex’s death, Iris, knowing
that Laura would be devastated at the news, informs her sister that she and
Alex had been lovers. Shortly afterwards, Laura drives off a bridge and Iris
remains convinced that her revelation pushed her to it.
Iris publishes her novella under Laura’s name, engulfing Richard in the ensuing
scandal and destroying his rising political career. When he later commits suicide
in a boating ‘accident’, a vengeful Winifred mounts a campaign against Iris and
wins custody of Aimee and, subsequently, when Aimee dies of an overdose, of
Sabrina. After this succession of abuses, Iris’s tell-all end-of-life memoir is, notes
Robinson, her ‘final act of revenge against the Griffens’.56 By revealing her affair
with Alex, Iris tells Sabrina that she is no blood relation to the Griffens and is
therefore free of the tangled family history. For Howells, The Blind Assassin is
ultimately ‘the memoir of a survivor’ that also potentially functions ‘as public
memorial, as revenge, or as exorcism’.57

A self-conscious storyteller
Iris, like Grace, is a self-conscious storyteller, always aware of the impact and
power of her voice and the limits placed on her as a woman writer. Discussing the
‘textual revenge’ that Iris enacts through the writing of her memoir, Alice Ridout
compares Iris’s multiple thwarted attempts to tell her story to her grandfather’s
privately printed volume, The Chase Industries: A History, presented to business
associates by a man with the ‘freedom, power and money to authorize his own
version of himself ’. Unlike the poorly produced first editions of ‘The Blind
Assassin’, which carry a blurry image of Laura and from which Iris’s name is
absent, Benjamin Chase’s signature is embossed in gold across the leather-bound
covers of his book, confidently declaring his authorship and his authority. In
contrast, Iris’s novella is ‘at first ignored and then viewed as transgressive’. Ridout
suggests that this experience of authorial marginalization and ‘the fear of not
being read’ is a large part of what compels Iris’s second attempt at autobiography.58
In an essay examining the recurring trope of blindness in Atwood’s fiction,
Wilson also tackles the question of why Iris decides to write her final memoir.
She argues that because Iris has been culpably, wilfully blind, ‘lacking insight
into history, current events, mythology, her father, husband, sister Laura, and
her own motivations’, she has endangered the safety of herself and others.59
Realizing and regretting this in old age, Iris’s second attempt at autobiography,
112 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

suggests Wilson, can be understood as an attempt to rectify some of the mistakes

she has made due to her lack of insight.
While blindness is obviously a prominent trope in The Blind Assassin, so too
is muteness. The sacrificial virgins in Alex’s stories have their tongues cut out
so they cannot be heard screaming. So too is Iris repeatedly silenced, unable to
voice her desires or speak her fears and accusations. Discussing this silencing,
and the erasure of women’s voices, Ridout points to a recurring motif in the
novel of transient writing – children writing their names in the snow, washroom
graffiti – and argues that Iris’s memoir aspires to permanence. Ridout argues
that Benjamin’s history of the family’s rising fortunes (to which Laura and Iris
will both be sacrificed) silences the voices of the Chase women. In contrast, Iris’s
memoir is notably matrilineal, tracing a lineage from her grandmother Adelia to
her granddaughter Sabrina. Iris, she suggests, is aware of the harm that writing
can do, but is still more wary of ‘the dangers of silence’.60
In defiance of the injunction on her to be silent and biddable, Iris produces
an incendiary, ‘palimpsestic’ text in which, in Dvorak’s words, ‘multiple subtexts
or countertexts [. . .] criss-cross one another’ providing a rich, multi-voiced
and subversive narrative. Where Ridout focuses on the motives driving Iris’s
memoir, Dvorak examines instead the methods by which Atwood constructs her
‘resolutely postmodern’ text.61 By drawing attention to the story-within-a-story
structure of the narrative, she suggests, the novel undermines the illusion of the
framing narrative, cautioning the reader that this version, too, is yet another self-
conscious act of storytelling.
Iris’s memoir is carefully crafted to create intrigue and momentum.
Commencing in medias res with Laura’s unexplained death, Iris then proceeds
to gather and order the threads of different narratives, public and private, from
which she constructs her family history. Despite its close orchestration, however,
Iris’s narrative is also fragmented and interrupted. As Dvorak observes, Iris’s
present, knowing voice is frequently invaded by the narrative perspectives of
multiple younger, less-knowing incarnations of Iris, which are in turn overlaid
by newspaper accounts, scraps of gossip, local histories and oral narratives from
various sources. For Dvorak, these multiple versions of the ‘truth’ eventually
lead the reader to recognize that each version is only ever ‘partial’.62 Yet despite
the text’s typically postmodern indeterminacy, Dvorak argues that its many
multidimensional strands and layers eventually combine to create a coherent
‘meta-structure’ that, when deciphered, is ‘undeniably unifying’.63 Unlike Alias
Grace, which remains resolutely ambiguous, The Blind Assassin reveals its secrets
and resolves its mysteries.
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 113

This sense of closure in The Blind Assassin is the focus of Ingersoll’s essay
on the novel, ‘Waiting for the End’, in which he describes the ‘textual erotics’
aroused in the reader by two competing desires: ‘a desire for the end and a desire
to postpone the end of the narrative’.64 Using the metafictional techniques of
self-conscious fiction, The Blind Assassin, with Iris’s many observations about
the difficulties of writing it, ‘masquerades’ as a novel being written before our
eyes.65 Iris’s preoccupation with completing her memoir before her heart gives
way creates a sense of urgency and elicits anxiety that Iris might not reach the
ending in time. Other metafictional tropes that Ingersoll identifies include Iris’s
reflections on the difficulty of providing an honest account of one’s own actions
and her likening of her writing to spinning – a crafting trope that recalls Grace’s
quilting in Alias Grace. For Ingersoll, where readers of the earlier novel grow
increasingly unsure of ever discovering what happened, The Blind Assassin,
in contrast, seems to reassure its readers that ‘the truth will ultimately be
revealed’.66
As a self-conscious storyteller, Iris first proposes that she will strive to write
for no one: as though the right hand were writing and the left hand erasing.
This, she suggests, is the only way to ensure absolute integrity as a writer. With
time, however, she accepts the impossibility of this attempt and starts instead
to conceive of her text as addressed to Sabrina. Iris comes to recognize that
there can be no full and omniscient truth, ‘not because of what I’ve set down,
but because of what I’ve omitted’ (484). Like Dvorak, Ingersoll accepts that
the novel provides significant answers; the reader, he concedes, experiences ‘a
tremendous sense of gratification’ in confirming that Alex was Iris’s lover and
that she knowingly revealed this to Laura. Ingersoll, however, locates these ‘facts’
within the modernist mode as raising ‘traditionally modernist issues such as
the unreliability of narrators’. He suggests that because, by her own admission,
Iris is writing for her granddaughter, her final revelations require some
scepticism around motive (which the novel encourages), regarding Iris’s guilt,
for example, and her desire to secure her legacy. Unlike Dvorak, who identifies a
fundamentally coherent structure beneath the novel’s fragmentary, postmodern
façade, Ingersoll suggests that The Blind Assassin concludes by ‘offering a “truth”
more indeterminate than readers might otherwise desire’.67

A gothic tale of victims and villains

Much as The Blind Assassin contains fragments of competing textual discourses,
so it combines elements of competing genres. In her essay, Dvorak draws
114 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

attention to the opening segment of the novel, taken from Laura’s novella, in
which the unnamed male narrator offers to tell a story in any mode of pulp
fiction that his lover requests. ‘You can have your pick’, he tells her: ‘jungles,
tropical islands, mountains. Or another dimension of space – that’s what I’m
best at’ (11). In this way, Dvorak suggests, Atwood highlights the manner in
which genre conventions shape a narrative, and exposes ‘the cultural clichés
from which these fictional formulas emerge, and which they prolong’.68 By
drawing out recurring motifs of gendered violence, silencing and sacrifice across
the novel’s strands of romance, crime story and science fiction, she also exposes
their ubiquity.
While crime, romance and science fiction are foregrounded in The Blind
Assassin, many critics identify its primary genre as the gothic. For Robinson, the
novel is characteristically Atwoodian in its depiction of a ‘female protagonist’s
hauntings by ghosts which defy repression and must be confronted and
appeased’.69 Howells suggests the novel is ‘as complicated as any Gothic romance
or Victorian sensation novel’.70 Ingersoll also draws attention to Iris’s indulgence
in the melodrama of gothic romance when she speculates, rather spitefully (as
she half-expects Myra, the daughter of the Chase family’s housekeeper, to be
her first reader), as to whether Myra’s biological father was not in fact Reenie’s
husband, but Iris’s own father. This unexpected aside, argues Ingersoll, gestures
towards the gothic genre’s familiar tropes of master–servant relations and ‘secret
blood-ties’, and also provides a glimpse into the ‘iciness’ of Iris’s character as she
alludes quite dispassionately to another possible sister.71
An extended reading of the novel’s gothic aspect is offered by Stein. Where
Lady Oracle is a comic gothic romance, The Blind Assassin, she suggests, is
instead ‘a tragic novel that uses Gothic plot devices’. These include familiar gothic
conventions such as ‘dreams, interrupted narration, imprisoning structures,
disguises, exploration of secrets, mysterious pictures, signs, and secret or hidden
rooms or other enclosures’.72 Outlining feminist-engaged critiques of gothic
fiction, which typically point to the genre’s exposition of women’s anxieties
around imprisonment and powerlessness within a patriarchal society, Stein
observes similar gothic fears at play in the stories of Laura and Iris.
Stein’s essay explores the way in which Atwood uses and subverts gothic
conventions. In a gothic reversal, Iris and Laura become Alex’s protectors,
hiding him in the attic. At the same time, notes Stein, the sisters will also
experience the gothic fate of being trapped in the home of a villainous older
man. Indeed, in Atwood’s novel, with its many references to young men killed
in war, both men and women are sometimes sacrificial victims. Gothic fiction,
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 115

observes Stein, typically concludes on the freeing of the imprisoned heroine, the
revelation of secret knowledge, and equilibrium as ‘a young lover supersedes the
older man’. In The Blind Assassin, instead, the young lover is long dead, and Iris
frees both herself and her granddaughter from the prison of the past. Where
once Iris was the blank page on which a gothic narrative of Richard’s bruises
was written, now she takes charge of the story, and in doing so, suggests Stein,
‘registers her transformation from silence to speech, from dominated wife to
independent agent’.73 By writing in the gothic mode, Iris is able to both construct
a melodramatic tale of violence and entrapment and escape its confines.

The Penelopiad

In 2005, Atwood published The Penelopiad. A slim volume, and a rewriting of

a canonical text – a departure for Atwood – it is in many ways quite different
from Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin. Nevertheless, the three texts share
many concerns, specifically: the difficulties of narrating a past accessible only
via myriad, unverifiable sources; the politics of storytelling (of who gets to tell
their version of events); and a gendered critique of violence and power.

Overview
Described by Hilde Staels as ‘a multivoiced and multiperspectival novella’,
The Penelopiad retells the story of Homer’s The Odyssey from the perspective
of Odysseus’s famously faithful wife, Penelope.74 Where Homer describes
Odysseus’s epic adventures on his ill-fated attempt to return to Ithaca after
fighting in the Trojan War, Atwood’s revision stays close to home. The narrative
commences with Penelope, centuries after her death, speaking from the
shadowy underworld of Hades and desirous to set the record straight. As she
declares, after years of being mythologized as the wife of a legendary soldier
and King, ‘it’s my turn to do a little story-making’ (3). Penelope’s life is largely
taken up with domestic duties and managing female relationships – first with
her beautiful and selfish cousin, the famous Helen of Troy and later with her
mother-in-law and Odysseus’s old nurse, both jealous of Odysseus’s affections.
The petty rivalries and general household management that Penelope describes
are familiar in their mundanity as Atwood engages in what Howells terms a
‘postmodern domestification of myth’, reducing ‘Odysseus’s adventures with
monsters and goddesses [. . .] to the level of gossip and tall tales’.75 Crucially,
116 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

however, as I point out in an essay on Atwood’s revisions of classic texts, this

domestic tale of women and home ‘proves no less bloody, no less treacherous,
and no less dramatic’.76
Penelope proceeds to recount her story, with which readers are familiar but
which is traditionally relegated to the periphery of Odysseus’s tale: how Penelope
successfully maintains Odysseus’s kingdom in his twenty-year absence and raises
their son, Telemachus, alone; how she is pursued by the carousing, gluttonous
suitors, who set up camp in her home and demand that she declare herself a
widow and take another husband; and how, with the help of her twelve maids,
she uses her wiles to outwit them; and finally, how Odysseus returns, tests his
wife’s constancy and then avenges himself on the suitors and hangs Penelope’s
maids as traitors. For Atwood, the hanging of the twelve maids remains the most
troublesome element of Homer’s narrative, and in The Penelopiad, she gives these
violently silenced women a voice. Speaking in a succession of chorus interludes
delivered in a range of musical and dramatic forms, the maids challenge Penelope
from beyond the grave. Accusing her of betrayal – of inducing Odysseus to kill
them so that they might never reveal her secrets – the rebellious maids challenge
the upper-class authority of Penelope’s narrative much as Penelope challenges
the primacy of Odysseus’s masculine experiences.

Is it a novel?
The disruptive, rebellious function of the maids’ voices in The Penelopiad is
given structural expression in the text through Atwood’s use of the Greek
chorus, whereby the maids episodically interject into Penelope’s narrative,
providing a destabilizing additional commentary. This practice is taken directly
from the tradition of Greek theatre and is indicative of the manner in which
Atwood plays with form in this text, which seems to lie on the cusp of novel and
drama. Indeed, Atwood later adapted The Penelopiad for the stage, prompting
Susanne Jung to describe it as ‘quite literally situated at a crossroads of genres’.77
Discussing the adaptation with the director, Phyllida Lloyd, Atwood explains:
‘The book is in essence theatrical. It’s a lot like the structure of a Greek tragedy.’78
Developing this point, Ingersoll suggests that the text’s ambiguous status as
novel, novella or drama is shaped by its genesis in the Canongate Myths series of
adaptations. Finding herself bound by the fundamental elements of the original
plot, Ingersoll proposes that Atwood responded to this limitation by subverting
the conventions of the novel genre to the point at which The Penelopiad might be
better described, more cautiously, as ‘a prose fiction version of the myth’.79
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 117

Ingersoll suggests that, with The Penelopiad, Atwood appears ‘less interested
in writing a novel than offering a pastiche of literary forms or genres’.80 While the
most obvious of these is the Greek chorus, the choral interludes are themselves
a succession of pastiches: a rope-jumping rhyme, a lament, a popular tune, an
idyll, a sea shanty, a ballad, a drama, a lecture, a trial and a love song. Examining
these episodes, Jung connects Atwood’s version of the Greek chorus with its
many musical numbers to the more contemporary genre of musical theatre,
‘so the maids literally appear as chorus line girls’.81 Focusing on form, Ingersoll
observes that Penelope’s first-person narrative, which describes her life and its
trials, is the most obviously novelistic element of the text. He argues, however,
that at times the book becomes too contemporary – ‘more reminiscent of soap
opera’ than classical tragedy. It is Ingersoll’s contention that Penelope aspires to
tragedy, but the text persistently resists her. Instead, he locates The Penelopiad
within the genre of fictionalized memoir, which he suggests Atwood is attracted
to for its ‘efficacy in problematizing the search for truth’ by addressing issues of
memory, guilt and competing desires for both reparation and revenge – all of
which pertain to Penelope’s attempt to speak her story.82

Reclaiming voices – the twelve hanged maids

Atwood’s decision to reimagine The Odyssey as The Penelopiad points to a
familiar feminist literary strategy of reclaiming lost women’s voices. Atwood’s
title, I suggest, ‘wrests attention from Odysseus’s Odyssey, placing Penelope
at the centre of the narrative’ and prioritizing the dutiful wife within ‘the
alternative “herstory” that follows’. But while this revisionary method may be
well established as a means to challenge the patriarchal hegemony of Western
literature, I also observe that Atwood complicates this practice. While I argue
that ‘To speak – to speak up, speak out, be heard, to refuse to be silent – is a
feminist act’, when Penelope starts to speak, so too do her maids, and they accuse
her of violence, betrayal and complicity. The neat binary shift from ‘his-story’ to
‘her-story’ is complicated by the incursion of the maids’ bawdy chorus of voices,
which haunt Penelope throughout the text. In a typically complicated Atwoodian
move, Atwood ‘grants Penelope the right to reply to the patriarchal myth’, but
simultaneously extends that same right to the silenced and disenfranchised
women who believe themselves to have been wronged by their mistress. In doing
so, Atwood demonstrates that victimhood ‘is not exclusive, and rarely simple’.83
Howells similarly locates The Penelopiad within a tradition of ‘feminist
revisionary mythmaking’. As she points out, the hanging of the maids barely
118 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

gets a mention in Homer’s epic, whereas Atwood’s feminist revision relocates the
relationship between Penelope and her maids to the centre of the story, and – in
a link to Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin – makes the question of Penelope’s
collusion in their deaths ‘the unsolved mystery at the heart of the narrative’. For
Howells, ‘A whiff of scandal surrounds Atwood’s woman-centred revision of The
Odyssey’ which tries to get to the bottom of the text’s central conundrum.84 In the
words of Atwood’s introduction: ‘what led to the hanging of the maids, and what
was Penelope really up to?’ (xxi).
While Penelope clearly remains haunted by the murdered maids, the manner
and the extent to which their voices are recovered by the text remains contentious.
In the tradition of Greek tragedy, Penelope is an individualized character whose
monologues are interrupted by the chorus, who provide commentary and
context but do not interact with the central character. Jung observes that this
dramatic convention ensures that the maids remain excluded from Penelope’s
central prose narrative, pushed to the periphery of her text as unruly intruders.
Making a similar point, Howells draws a connection with the Handmaids of The
Handmaid’s Tale, relegated to silence and to the margins of history.
Jung, however, suggests that, as outsiders, the maids also speak ‘from a position
of epistemic privilege’. Much to Penelope’s discomfort, the maids have privileged
access to the text’s central matter of the ‘truth’ of what really happened.85 Howells
also makes a further connection here with Atwood’s mythographic techniques
in Alias Grace, and cites Atwood’s description of herself as a historical novelist,
‘digging below official versions of history to unearth “the mysterious, the buried,
the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo”’.86 If Penelope’s story draws attention to
the silencing of women in the Western canon, Howells points out that the story
of the maids further draws attention to both gender and class, focusing on the
physical and sexual exploitation of a female underclass who have no rights over
their own bodies. By allowing the maids to speak – even in a peripheral, oblique
and coded manner – Atwood prevents Penelope from too easily substituting one
edifying myth for another.
In an article that examines feminist rewritings of The Odyssey, Mihoko
Suzuki suggests that The Penelopiad raises a dilemma facing feminist adaptations
of canonical texts: whether to revise and rewrite female characters who have
traditionally (misogynistically) been reviled as immoral or destructive, or,
instead, to ‘allow agency, intelligence, and voice to female protagonists who may
not be unequivocally admirable?’ For Suzuki, Atwood addresses this problem
through her innovative decision to bring to the fore the story of the maids.
Atwood re-envisions the maids, she observes, not as silenced victims, but as
 History, Memory and Recovering the Past 119

‘energetic satirists of the dominant order, who literally put Odysseus on trial’.
By providing the maids with a transgressive and disruptive voice, by allowing
them to invade Penelope’s stage, Suzuki argues that Atwood enables them to
eloquently speak back to the dominant patriarchal order ‘that normalized their
slaughter by condemning them as unchaste and disloyal’, while still leaving
Penelope open to criticism and critique.87

Classical revisions and re-readings

Atwood’s rewriting of Homer’s epic has inspired comparisons with other
contemporary works by women writers that ventriloquize classic mythology
– works that, in Susanna Braund’s words, ‘ask uncomfortable or disconcerting
questions’ about familiar canonical texts.88 Comparing The Penelopiad to Carol
Ann Duffy’s 1999 poetry collection, The World’s Wife, Braund, like Howells,
discusses the manner in which these contemporary interventions work to make
their familiar classical sources strange by reimagining mythic tales within the
limits of the prosaic and the mundane. In her article, Braund also examines
Atwood’s 1974 poem, ‘Siren Song’, from the collection You Are Happy, and
identifies a clear feminist agenda in Atwood’s reimagining of the ‘quintessentially
misogynistic myth’ of the sirens as ruthless seducers of men. By allowing one of
the Sirens to speak, thereby providing context, motivation and humour, Atwood
injects ‘depth and complexity’ into the mythical tale.89 In contrast, Braund
suggests that the inclusion of the maids’ voices in The Penelopiad complicates
the clear feminism of the earlier revision, and she proposes that Atwood’s focus
on the ‘utterly powerless’ maids functions – in a manner previously seen in The
Robber Bride – as a ‘caution against mutual betrayal among women’.90
A different comparison is offered by Staels, who examines The Penelopiad
alongside Jeanette Winterson’s Weight (2005), which rewrites the myth of Atlas
and which, like Atwood’s text, mixes high and low genres, to parodic effect. In
her discussion, Staels uses Hutcheon’s definition of parody as ‘repetition with
critical difference’ and notes that parody uses mimicry and imitation with
serious critical purpose.91 Staels argues that The Penelopiad uses both parody and
‘burlesque travesty’ – a more comic disruptive mode – as a means of ‘liberating
the protagonists from the boundaries and limitations of the ancient epic story
world’.92 Elements of burlesque travesty, she explains, are introduced into the
text through anachronistic contemporary colloquialisms (e.g. when Penelope
describes Helen as ‘stuck-up’ (20)), or in the maids’ bawdy interludes. Parody,
suggests Staels, enables writers like Atwood and Winterson to create a continuity
120 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

with the classical world depicted in their narratives while also exposing
discontinuities. In parodying and burlesquing the ancient Homeric myth,
argues Staels, Atwood engages in a process of ‘demythologizing’: once the female
characters have access to contemporary speech, and once the contradictions of
Penelope and the maids’ versions of events are exposed and the distinctions
of high and low culture are undermined, ‘the idealization of the distant past is
destroyed’.93
For Staels, the irreverence with which Atwood treats her classical source
material has a dual consequence. Penelope’s down-to-earth narrative strips
Homer’s characters of many of their marvellous, mystical attributes and
results in what Staels terms a ‘depreciation of epic characters’ (Odysseus has
short legs; Helen is vain). But at the same time, she argues, they also undergo
an ‘appreciation’, as the distant, mythical figures take on a new ‘psychological
realism and individualization’.94 Suzuki makes a related point when she focuses
on the manner in which Atwood’s contemporary language brings her mythical
characters sharply down to earth. For example, when Penelope declares that Circe’s
enchanted island was really just ‘an expensive whorehouse’ (84), Atwood is able,
Suzuki suggests, to reinforce, in her contemporary reading, ‘the shrewdness and
scepticism’ that are Penelope’s ‘defining features’ in The Odyssey.95 In examining
the effects of language, form, parody and feminist revision, each of these critics
suggests that Atwood’s interventions in the classical text reinvigorate Homer’s
original work.
In examining The Penelopiad alongside Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin,
this chapter skips over the intervening 2003 publication of Oryx and Crake.
Originally intended as a stand-alone work, Oryx and Crake later became the first
volume in the MaddAddam trilogy. Until the 2019 publication of The Testaments,
which returns Atwood’s readers to the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale, the three
dystopian MaddAddam novels represented Atwood’s only experiment with
connecting her fictional worlds and characters across texts. The next chapter
examines the works of the trilogy together.
 6

Atwood’s dystopian futures

The MaddAddam trilogy

When Atwood published her eleventh novel, Oryx and Crake, in 2003, it was
received as a significant turn to apocalyptic writing with environmental concerns
at the fore. It was typically viewed as a departure in her work, not least for its
primary male protagonist. In a review of the novel for the London Review of
Books, Elaine Showalter suggested that, while the politics of Oryx and Crake
are largely consistent with Atwood’s ‘pacifism, feminism, environmentalism and
anti-globalism’, she is ‘much more forgiving of Americans and men [. . .] than in
her earlier books’.1 Like all of Atwood’s previous works before the publication of
The Testaments in 2019, the novel was initially presented as a stand-alone text,
and was read as such. It was followed by four very different books (The Penelopiad,
2005; Moral Disorder, 2006; The Tent, 2006; and Payback, 2007) comprising a
mythic rewriting, an ‘almost a novel’ story cycle, poetry, short stories and essays.
In time, however, Atwood declared her intention to return to the world of Oryx
and Crake and, with The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), she
eventually completed what came to be known as the MaddAddam trilogy. As
such, this triumvirate of texts represents something unique in Atwood’s canon:
a significant engagement with a unified project that stretches across a decade.
Despite the trilogy’s distinctiveness, however, many critics also readily
recognized that the concerns prioritized in the three novels have a long genesis in
Atwood’s writing. Connections were most commonly made with the dystopian
aspect of The Handmaid’s Tale, in which environmental degradation provides
the backdrop to the fertility crisis that fuels the rise of Gilead. For Coral Ann
Howells, reading Oryx and Crake alongside The Handmaid’s Tale, the two texts
represent Atwood’s imaginative response to ‘contemporary situations of cultural
crisis’. She suggests that Oryx and Crake (and, consequently, the imagined world
of the trilogy) can be read as a kind of sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. While the
earlier novel is a product of the neoconservative politics of the 1980s and the later
122 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

text addresses notably twenty-first-century concerns, the pollution that plagues

North America in The Handmaid’s Tale has, by the imagined time of Oyrx and
Crake, ‘escalated into worldwide climate change through global warming’.2
Other critics make still earlier connections, pointing to the environmental
concerns raised in works such as the 1972 novel, Surfacing, in which ‘the
Americans’ poison the lake and kill a heron: the symbol of victimized nature
in the text. In an essay that explores the longstanding preoccupation with
environmentalism in Atwood’s work, Shannon Hengen draws a connection
between Surfacing, Life Before Man and Oryx and Crake as three novels that
display Atwood’s ‘ongoing concern with how humans fit into the environment’.3
And in an essay that primarily focuses on The Year of the Flood, Miles Weafer
uses the four victim positions outlined by Atwood in her 1972 thematic guide
to Canadian literature, Survival, and applies them to the MaddAddam trilogy.
Weafer locates Atwood’s post-apocalyptic novels within a history of Canadian
literary works that confront ‘an unforgiving landscape and a history of colonial
exploitation’ – works in which an encounter with nature is not a Romantic
experience of the sublime but rather a confrontation with ‘hostile elements to
be survived’.4
Moving beyond the focus on environmental damage, the trilogy’s concern
with biotechnology and advances in the genetic sciences placed Atwood’s
representation of science under scrutiny. Showalter describes Oryx and Crake
as ‘a tightly worked-out and intellectually gripping sci-fi mystery’.5 While for
Natasha Walter, reviewing Oryx and Crake in The Guardian, the novel holds a
simple message: ‘don’t trust the scientists and the big corporations to run the
world.’6 The novel was also reviewed in Science magazine, suggesting a certain
level of interest in Atwood’s vision by the scientific community. Noting Atwood’s
reluctance to accept the science-fiction label, Susan Squier suggests that novels
such as Life Before Man, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake are more
accurately described as ‘inspired by the imaginative force and urgent social
importance of scientific fact’. The seriousness of Atwood’s literary reflections
on science, argues Squier, is epitomized in her juxtaposition of the woefully
underfunded Martha Graham liberal arts Academy with the lavishly equipped
Watson-Crick Scientific Institute. Atwood’s concern, she concludes, is to
‘challenge our fascination with what science can do at the expense of what art
can say’.7
A more combative response to Atwood’s science is provided by Anthony
Griffiths in a review essay for the journal Canadian Literature. Griffiths argues
that if Atwood wants her scientific warnings to be taken seriously, then her
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 123

science must stand up to scrutiny. Where Squier takes Atwood’s extensive list of
acknowledged sources as evidence of the depth of her research, Griffiths finds
a dearth of peer-reviewed research science and argues that Atwood betrays
an overreliance on the kind of sensationalist popular science that commonly
circulates in the press. He argues that Oryx and Crake uses genetic engineering
as ‘a lightning rod for wrath aimed at the negative outcomes of science in
general’. Targeting genetic science, however, ‘is inappropriate and misleading’
and fails to acknowledge the field’s positive effects and the suffering it has the
potential to eradicate.8 Taking the example of the pigoons – genetically modified
pigs that escape and terrorize the protagonist Jimmy – Griffiths points to the
very real ecological damage done by releasing non-native imported species into
new habitats and describes it as ‘another instance where the imaginary problems
expressed in Oryx and Crake distract our attention from the real ones that assail
us’.9 Responses such as Griffiths’s highlight the scrutiny to which Atwood’s most
recent fictions are subject, particularly where they make claims to tackle real-
world concerns such as biotechnology, globalization and climate change.

Oryx and Crake

Overview
Oryx and Crake commences with the protagonist Snowman, formerly known as
Jimmy, scrabbling out a subsistence living on a scorched beach. Jimmy – as I will
continue to refer to him, although some critics prefer Snowman – is seemingly
the last man standing in the wake of an apocalyptic holocaust orchestrated by his
former best friend, Crake, via a pharmaceutically released global plague. While
the novel’s post-apocalyptic setting lends itself to a general sense of timelessness,
this is a near-future catastrophe. Jimmy describes his present as ‘zero hour’ (3)
and the novel seems to exist in what Lee Rozelle terms ‘a chronological pause
between an unsustainable past and an uncertain future’.10 In her article on Oryx
and Crake, J. Brooks Bouson pays close attention to the novel’s timeline; noting
that Atwood has said elsewhere that the novel is set around Massachusetts on the
East Coast of the United States, and that Jimmy is born in 1999, and is twenty-
eight at the time the novel opens, Bouson dates the novel’s setting as circa 2027.11
Although the novel commences in the immediate aftermath of Crake’s
catastrophic eradication of mankind, Jimmy is not alone. His depleted landscape
is stalked by various genetically modified animals: splices of different species,
124 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

engineered at the whim of irresponsible scientists, that present surprising and

often alarming new capacities. More significantly, he keeps a resentful watch over
a small community of Crakers – a genetically enhanced humanoid population
bioengineered by Crake to replace and improve on irredeemable humanity. Their
effect, as creatures both human and non-human, is uncanny. Crake’s desire was
to eradicate humanity’s weaknesses – lust, competition, prejudice, aggression,
greed and so forth – and his creatures are, indeed, beautiful, peaceable creatures,
fostering ‘post-racial, non-hierarchical vegetarianism’.12 At the same time, as
Hengen observes, the creatures are deeply unnerving, lacking ‘a sense of humor
or ambiguity or loss’.13 Bouson, however, acknowledging the Crakers’ weirdness,
suggests that they were never really intended as a model for human improvement,
but rather provide Atwood’s ‘satiric vision of a bioengineered posthuman future’.14
The slow pace of Jimmy’s sun-scorched present-tense narrative contrasts with
his interwoven memories, which rapidly progress from childhood into young
adulthood. He charts his relationship with Crake from their school days growing
up in a corporation compound, through their differing paths into higher
education and eventual reunion when Crake brings Jimmy in to work for him in
marketing his top-secret project, which a naïve and self-absorbed Jimmy fails to
fully understands until it is much too late. As Katharine Snyder puts it, Jimmy
has been ‘largely unwitting, yet also wilfully unknowing’ in his complicity with
Crake’s scheme.15
Oryx and Crake, as most critics observe, is a double dystopia: Jimmy’s post-
apocalyptic present succeeds a bleakly dystopian vision of the near future. For
Walter, discussing Atwood’s first foray into a male central protagonist, the novel
successfully captures the perspective of a man ‘brought up in an emotionally
stunted environment saturated with pornography and commercialism’.16 The
world of Jimmy’s youth is full of recognizable details from our present: internet
pornography, fast food, videogames, advertising, voracious pharma and beauty
industries, and enormous economic inequalities. It is a world in which a
techno-literate elite have retreated into gated compounds, leaving the masses
to fend for themselves in the largely lawless ‘pleeblands’ beyond. As Berthold
Schoene describes it, the novel’s pre-apocalyptic past is ‘a dystopian hyperbole
of our present’. Reflecting on the various neologisms that Atwood introduces –
CorpSeCorps, rakunks, pleeblands, etcetera – Schoene suggests that, in a world
in which everything is degraded, language itself ‘seems battered and mushed up
by advertising’.17 Making a similar point, Gerry Canavan suggests that Jimmy and
Crake grow up in ‘a hyperextended, hypertrophic version of US-style consumer
capitalism – our mad world, gone even madder’.18
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 125

In this degraded near future, Jimmy and Crake first encounter Oryx on a porn
site as an exploited child sex worker from an unidentified impoverished country.
Drawn to her enigmatic gaze, the boys download her picture and she becomes
an object of deeply problematic desire for them both. Citing this same moment,
Snyder argues that Crake and Jimmy engage in ‘a form of fetishistic souvenir-
collecting similar to those of the globe-trotting sex tourists whom they watch
online’.19 Later, Crake facilitates Oryx’s entry into the United States, and her role
remains ambiguous: she is a sex worker, romanticized by Jimmy as his girlfriend,
and also Crake’s collaborator, working as his assistant on the Craker project.
Only ever very sketchily drawn, Oryx is, for Showalter, a vehicle for ‘Atwood’s
indignation at child slavery, prostitution, sex tourism and other extreme forms
of female victimisation’.20 While for Bouson, she is a fitting character for the
‘body-identified and sex-addicted postfeminist world of the future’ that Atwood
constructs.21 Used and objectified to the last, Crake eventually orchestrates his
own death by killing Oryx in front of Jimmy, knowing that Jimmy will respond
by shooting him in turn.
Crake’s apocalyptic plan makes provision for an unwittingly vaccinated Jimmy
to survive in order to act as shepherd and guide to the Crakers in the early days
of the new order. Jimmy reluctantly oversees the population’s nascent culture and
takes a grim satisfaction from observing the first green shoots of their seemingly
irrepressible myth-making facilities. Simultaneously, the present-day frame
narrative finds Jimmy rapidly running out of supplies and, having cut his foot,
in desperate need of medicine. He reluctantly concludes that he must return to
the ‘Paradice’ dome in which Crake developed his great experiment. An epic
journey thus ensues through a devastated landscape stalked by predators such
as wolvogs and pigoons and concludes by revealing the murder-suicide of Oryx
and Crake. Upon his return to the beach, Jimmy – like Robinson Crusoe before
him – discovers a footprint in the sand. Hearing voices, he spies a small group
of two armed men and a woman in a clearing, and realizes he is not after all a
sole survivor. The novel concludes on a pause; Jimmy, still hidden, must decide
whether to run away, to kill the intruders in order to ensure the safety of the
Crakers or to make his presence known and re-join human society.

Textual allusions in Oryx and Crake

Like so much of Atwood’s work, Oryx and Crake is self-consciously referential
of a host of literary forebears and knowingly nods to many genres. Bouson
describes it as ‘a complex, and game-like, multi-layered narrative’ and points to
126 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

the particular influence of castaway-survivor narratives, detective stories and

action-thrillers, romance and of course dystopian fiction.22 In the tradition of
much classic dystopian fiction, Jimmy is a lone figure reporting on a disturbing,
alien world. Rozelle, however, argues that Oryx and Crake only inhabits the
‘dystopian’ category in the broadest sense, as ‘all Orwellian social, legal, and
cultural apparatus has seemingly been eliminated by the novel’s first chapter’.23
Stephen Dunning suggests that while The Handmaid’s Tale works in the dystopian
tradition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – an ‘oppressive regime’ which
maintains itself by ‘inflicting pain’ – the pre-apocalyptic world of Oryx and
Crake, instead, functions in the mode of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: a
regime which functions by inflicting ‘a hardly less humiliating pleasure’.24
Also discussing the extent of Atwood’s dystopia, Howells draws attention to
the fact that, in both The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, Atwood uses an
epigraph from Swift (‘A Modest Proposal’ and Gulliver’s Travels respectively).
She suggests that Jimmy, living alongside the Crakers, is a kind of Gulliver,
acting as ‘both mouthpiece and butt of Atwood’s satire’. Where Gulliver, however,
eventually becomes alienated from human beings, Jimmy instead, ‘emerges as a
morally responsible man and the novel’s unlikely hero’.25 As he contemplates,
with both trepidation and excitement, a return to the companionship of his
fellow humans, Howells suggests that Atwood opens up a small window
of optimism that is absent in Swift’s much bleaker work. This reading is also
supported by Schoene, who concludes that Oryx and Crake ‘never rigidifies into
pure dystopia’.26
In addition to issues of genre, certain readily identified literary allusions recur
in critical responses to the novel. A New York Times review by Sven Birkerts
typically nods to Huxley, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe, while also discerning the influence of Samuel Beckett on the opening
scenes of Jimmy, alone and muttering amid a blighted landscape.27 Howells
similarly makes a connection with Defoe in noting that, compared to Offred’s
prison narrative in The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is ‘closer to a wilderness
or castaway narrative’.28 Similarly, for Snyder, Jimmy is ‘marooned in time, cast
away between a human past and a post-human future’.29 While Shuli Barzilai
describes him as ‘the remnant of a colossal shipwreck, as it were, washed up on
a barely habitable and lonely planet’.30
If Jimmy is Crusoe, then for many critics, Crake is Frankenstein. In Bouson’s
words, he is ‘an amalgam of the mad-impersonal-amoral scientist figures’ familiar
from film and prose fiction.31 A similar point is made by Showalter, who also
connects Crake to a literary lineage when she declares: ‘Like all mad scientists in
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 127

literature, from [H. G. Wells’s] Dr Moreau to [Stanley Kubrick’s] Dr Strangelove,

Crake would rather destroy than create life.’32 Bouson also observes that Atwood’s
characterization of Crake, which emphasizes his ‘rationalistic and game-like – and
utterly affectless – approach to life’, draws on familiar scientist stereotypes. She
suggests, however, that the novel’s various allusions to autism work to medicalize
this aspect of Crake’s behaviour, and thus complicate the literary cliché.33
Others instead draw attention to Atwood’s biblical allusions. Chien-Hung
Chen, in an article that examines Oryx and Crake alongside its companion
novels, notes the theme of the biblical flood and suggests that the MaddAddam
trilogy ‘is meant to mock (up) the Biblical myth of origin through a pseudo-
diluvian clean-up of digital annihilation’.34 Lorrie Moore instead traces the
biblical theme through Dante’s influence, observing that Jimmy, trying to make
his way to ‘Paradice’, is a Dante-like ‘pilgrim in Hell’.35 In Howell’s words, he
undergoes ‘a journey to the Underworld’ where he must confront his ghosts in
order to ‘become aware of the complex dimensions of his own humanity’.36
Finally, an extended Shakespearian intertextual analysis is offered by Barzilai
in which she reads Oryx and Crake as a revenge tragedy, with Crake as ‘an avenging
son – a latter-day Hamlet’. Crake’s story, she points out, traces Hamlet’s: his father
is murdered; his mother marries ‘Uncle Pete’, the man implicated in the crime;
and the son vows revenge. As in Shakespearean tragedies, the final act (Jimmy’s
present-day narrative) sees the stage littered with bodies. Jimmy, suggests Barzilai,
is Horatio, the play’s survivor who lives to tell Hamlet’s tale. Whereas Hamlet’s
father returns as a ghost to entreat his son’s revenge, in Atwood’s digital future,
Crake learns of Uncle Pete’s betrayal via his father’s emails. Citing Atwood’s 1992
short story, ‘Gertrude Talks Back’, Barzilai suggests that Hamlet is an important
intertext for Atwood – one that speaks to two recurring key themes in her work:
poor parenting and revenge. Barzilai (writing before the publication of The Year
of the Flood) also turns to Hamlet as a guide to reading the ambiguous conclusion
of the novel; just as Hamlet/Crake procrastinates but eventually avenges his dead
father, so Barzilai argues that Jimmy – who is repeatedly exhorted by Crake:
‘Don’t let me down’ – will complete his dead friend’s work and protect the
Crakers from the potential violence of the strange men: ‘He will step forward,
spray gun raised, to complete Crake’s lethally altruistic plan.’37

Our post-human future

Raising the spectre of yet another literary influence, Lorrie Moore proposes that,
in Oryx and Crake’s ‘whimsical fantasies of biological evolution and technology’,
128 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

we can trace ‘the dark left hand of Ursula K. Le Guin’.38 Despite her reservations
about the term, Atwood’s novel is commonly identified and discussed as science
fiction, with particular attention being paid to her vision of a post-human
future. Bouson commences her article on the novel by reflecting on political
scientist Francis Fukuyama’s warning that biotechnology might potentially
push humanity into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history. She suggests that Oryx and
Crake provides a ‘deadly serious and darkly satiric’ examination of this threat.39
For Bouson, Crake’s affectless observation that ‘pretty soon, demand is going
to exceed supply for everyone’ (347) is better read as Atwood’s own sincere
warning. And while the Crakers, she argues, function as a kind of ‘bizarre
spectacle and extended authorial joke’, an ‘over-the-top spoof ’ on some of the
excesses of bioengineering (the blue penises obviously spring to mind), they are
also intended to sound a serious warning about the dangers of reckless genetic
modification.40 A similar point is made by Canavan, for whom the Crakers
are a Swiftian satire of primitivist fantasies that would turn back the clock of
civilization and have man try to start again. Instead, he argues, rather than an
actual plan to save the world, the Crakers function as an allegory of ‘the radical
transformation of both society and subjectivity that will be necessary in order
to save the planet’.41 Atwood, argues Bouson, urges real caution around reckless
scientific advancements and warns against blindly stumbling into a catastrophic
future in which scientists play God and we, like Jimmy, ignore the warning signs
until it is too late.
Discussing Bouson’s article, Rozelle argues that her dichotomous conclusion
– that it will either be ‘game over for ever’ or, at best, that Atwood proffers some
small glimmer of hope for human survival – dismisses ‘the complex viability of
remaining flora and fauna that still thrive in the novel’. Indeed, Rozelle charges
much Atwood criticism with a similar anthropocentrism that focuses exclusively
on the actions, responsibilities and fate of the human characters and disregards
the wider ecosystem. This, he suggests, results in a ‘missed opportunity’ to closely
examine the environmental implications of Atwood’s work.42 Focusing instead
on the novel’s ‘liminal ecologies’, Rozelle argues that Oryx and Crake offers
hope for humanity and other life forms. Where we may initially assume that
Jimmy’s post-apocalyptic landscape is barren and forsaken – Jimmy calls it the
‘Great Emptiness’ (119) – by adopting an ecocritical perspective, we can instead
identify a liminal zone in which plant and animal species continue to adapt and
grow. And as an equally liminal figure, stranded between the past and the future,
Jimmy, suggests Rozelle, must try to imagine a new future relationship between
humans and ecosystems. By focusing, not on the end of humanity, but instead on
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 129

‘the fate of all life’, we come to see Jimmy in a drastically new perspective as just
one element within a much larger ecosystem.43
For Earl Ingersoll, Atwood’s novel concludes that ‘if traditional human
qualities have to be sacrificed in order to survive, it may not be worth surviving’.44
Responding to Ingersoll, Rozelle contends that the text, nonetheless, shows that
life will continue, even if in increasingly diverse forms. He suggests that Oryx
and Crake – perhaps despite Atwood’s intentions – prioritizes man’s relationship
to other animals and ecosystems over the importance of ‘human nature’. Oryx
and Crake, argues Rozelle, does not simply depict ‘The End’, but also betrays
a ‘yearning for a new beginning – an ecological communitas’ that might exist
beyond the destruction of the world as we know it.45 This, he suggests, is an
essentially optimistic vision, and one for which Atwood is not often credited.
Like Schoene, who notes that the novel ends ‘in open-ended suspension’, in a
space of ‘indeterminate potentialities’, Rozelle also draws attention to the novel’s
open conclusion.46 Jimmy’s predicament at the end of the novel, he argues, is the
same as the reader’s: suspended at a ‘crossroads in environmental history’, we too
must decide which way to jump.47

An ethical novel
Oryx and Crake, as Rozelle suggests, raises many ethical questions for its
readers. In an essay that examines the novel’s preoccupation with time
and temporality, Snyder notes the disorientating nature of the narrative’s
chronology, in which Jimmy’s past is our dystopian future. This, she suggests,
creates a text that ‘projects forward’ from the social and political realities of
our present moment, urging us to reflect on our society.48 Snyder reads Jimmy
as a traumatized figure, and she notes that the novel repeatedly juxtaposes
the enormous catastrophe of human extinction against a number of smaller,
personal tragedies from Jimmy’s past, such as his abandonment by his
mother. This overlap, she argues, is central to Atwood’s purpose in the novel:
by juxtaposing global horror with mundane but intense private losses and
traumas, the novel challenges ‘attempts to draw a cordon sanitaire’ between the
domestic and the political, the local and the global. Atwood demonstrates the
futility of efforts to separate and distinguish relationships that are inextricably
interconnected in what Snyder terms ‘ever-widening, overlapping circles of
power and obligation: the familial, the corporate, the national, the global, the
non-human and the post-human’.49 By making connections between small and
large actions, Atwood resists the kind of compartmentalized thinking that – in
130 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

a novel full of gated communities – underpins the collapse of ethical social

behaviour.
Danette DiMarco addresses the ethics of Oryx and Crake in terms of its
depiction of ‘homo faber’ (he who labours or builds). The idealization of homo
faber is, she suggests, an essentially capitalist perspective, which views the world
and its resources in purely material terms. In her discussion, DiMarco makes use
of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work, The Human Condition, in which Arendt
describes homo faber’s tendency to see himself as the centre of everything and
to destroy nature rather than work with it. This self-absorption leaves him
blind to his interconnectedness to others and to nature. A similar conclusion
is also reached by Anna Bedford in her ecofeminist reading of the novel. By
‘contemplating a future of unfettered capitalism’, argues Bedford, Atwood draws
a connection between the ‘capitalist instrumentalism that abuses and denigrates
animals’ and the ‘pronounced commodification of human bodies’ exemplified by
the sex industry and child trafficking described in the novel. In both instances,
the vulnerable are exploited – as raw materials or labour – for profit.50
For DiMarco, Crake is ‘the quintessential homo faber’, and his materialist
vision of humanity would seem to dominate in the text. She proposes, however,
that Jimmy represents an alternative to Crake’s world building. Jimmy’s adoption
of the abominable snowman as an alter-ego – a liminal creature surviving on the
edge of society and the wilderness, both real and unreal – points to his capacity
to take up a new, previously unimagined position. There is evidence, DiMarco
suggests, that Jimmy, who has always felt like an outsider, has the capacity to be
ethical and compassionate and to view himself as ‘embedded within the world’
rather than separate from it. Consequently, when Jimmy is eventually faced with
the novel’s concluding options – to attack, to retreat, or to ‘engage humanely’
with the strangers – Atwood provides for the possibility that, in choosing the
third, Jimmy may help to build a new, more equitable world than that which has
previously been imagined by homo faber.51
If DiMarco seeks in Atwood’s novel a reimagining of what man might become,
Dunning’s essay instead looks backwards, reading the novel as a call to regain
something that has been lost by a ruthless and profit-driven late modernity. For
Dunning, the extreme neoliberal imagined future of Oryx and Crake depicts a
society, ‘driven by base appetites and fears’, which has lost its faith in the great
metanarratives of religion, civil society, art and culture. Like DiMarco, he points
to the novel’s focus on the deleterious effects of prioritizing profit and progress
over all else. For Dunning, however, Crake does not simply exemplify detached
rationalism, but actually seeks ‘to remedy the ills of a world in deep distress’. He
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 131

likens Crake to Freud: a therapist who diagnoses the disease of unrestrained

instincts. But unlike his psychoanalyst forbear, Crake’s ‘drastic therapy’ has the
technological resources to reengineer what were presumed indelible features of
human nature.52
For Dunning, while Atwood shows a grudging admiration for Crake, she
also undermines the egotism of his vision. As noted by Canavan, Bouson and
others, Crake’s marvellous creations are also faintly ridiculous, and their instinct
for myth-making seemingly mocks his rationalist vision. Dunning points to
the triangular relationship of Jimmy, Crake and Oryx as one that ‘unmistakably
suggests the Christian Trinity’, with Crake as the creator-father, Jimmy as the
sacrificial son, and Oryx as the feminine spirit.53 In the end, argues Dunning,
Crake’s actions, for all his rationalism, do not make sense (why leave Jimmy
and not Oryx to care for the Crakers?), suggesting that he is as motivated by
jealousy and revenge as anyone else. Ultimately, suggests Dunning, Atwood
shares something of Crake’s pessimism, but she remains clear on what must be
done if we are to avoid the worst: we cannot sacrifice qualitative value to a purely
rational quantitative science. While the novel, suggests Dunning, is somewhat
‘coy’ about the status of the kind of origin myths and sacred stories Jimmy tells,
it nevertheless affirms that ‘we cannot do without such tales, not, at least, if we
wish to remain even marginally human’.54

The Year of the Flood

Atwood’s 2009 ‘midquel’ to Oryx and Crake (as Canavan describes it) provides
an altogether different perspective on Crake’s apocalypse than that offered by
Jimmy’s ‘last man’ narrative. For Schoene, the novel’s parallel chronology has the
effect to ‘further obfuscate the identity of Atwood’s quasi-mythical envisioning
as either dystopian or utopian’.55 Its arrival, he suggests, allows for both the
singularity of Jimmy’s apocalyptic vision and the more hopeful plurality of
alternative simultaneous experiences. Hannes Bergthaller notes that Atwood has
termed The Year of the Flood a ‘simultanial’ and points out that it ‘covers roughly
the same time-span and follows a similar narrative pattern’: commencing with a
description of the current situation of the survivor-protagonists; proceeding to
move backwards and forwards in time in order to explain how things arrived at
the current point; before concluding on an unresolved cusp moment of reunion
with others.56 For Bouson, in an article examining the nature of Atwood’s ‘return
to the future’ with The Year of the Flood, the novel acts like a kind of ‘repetition
132 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

of a novelistic trauma’ in which the author, like a victim unable to relinquish a

traumatic event, seems compelled to return to her ‘apocalyptic-traumatic end-
of-the-world story’.57 The return to Jimmy’s world is not, however, repetitive.
With this second book, Atwood widens her lens and reveals that which could
not be shown from Jimmy’s limited perspective, and which is hinted at in the
final scenes of Oryx and Crake: the existence of multiple other survivors. It also
moves beyond the exclusive Compounds of Jimmy’s sheltered youth and into
the lawless pleeblands only ever glimpsed in the earlier text. As Debrah Raschke
observes, this allows Atwood to reveal what life is like for ‘the 99% that make up
the pleebland’.58
Another notable innovation of The Year of the Flood is the inclusion of hymns
taken from ‘The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook’ and interspersed throughout
the novel. For Le Guin, reviewing the novel, the hymns ‘may be read as kindly
spoofs of hippy mysticism, green fervour, and religious naivety, and at the same
time can be taken quite seriously’.59 In another review, Gillian Beer also discusses
these easily overlooked textual elements, and sees significance in their structural
regularity. Their rhyming, she argues, is crucial: ‘It knits up disorder; it discovers
kinships; it solaces; it reveals. It persists to the end. These are songs to be sung,
together.’60 In an article examining the trilogy, Richard Alan Northover instead
suggests that the hymns are often comic in their reinterpretation of biblical myths
in ecological terms, although he notes that the Gardeners, who ‘tend to take
themselves quite seriously’, do not find them funny.61 In an essay that discusses
the trilogy’s engagement with ecological notions of sustainability and collapse,
Dana Phillips argues that Atwood’s primary mode is satirical and irreverent, and
she points specifically to the ‘tedious’ hymns as an example of Atwood’s ‘even-
handed approach to her antagonists and protagonists’.62 Bergthaller, meanwhile,
observes that the hymns work both to explain the Gardeners’ theology and to
provide ‘an increasingly dark commentary’ on the group’s fate.63
Much as readings of the hymns range from closely analytical to vaguely
bemused, so early responses to the novel were mixed. Novelist Jeanette
Winterson, writing in The New York Times, observes that, while ‘not everything
in the novel works’, nevertheless, ‘Atwood knows how to show us ourselves’, even
if the mirror is disconcertingly distorted.64 Bonnie Greer’s review for The New
Statesman argues that The Year of the Flood, while subtly plotted, is ‘little more
than a big, fat eco-pamphlet’. While the novel’s various vignettes are ‘beautifully
realised’, there is a sense, argues Greer, that Atwood is more interested in the
novel’s message than its characters.65 Noting such reservations, Gina Wisker
suggests that they are due in part to the slightly discordant mixture of the novel’s
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 133

‘post-apocalyptic, sustainability theme and its mixture of the homey arts and
crafts, its quasi-religious tone, and its sometimes cartoonish characters’.66

Overview
In contrast to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood is a notably female-centred
text, focused on the experiences of two women: Toby and Ren. For Beer,
reviewing the novel for The Globe and Mail, the alternations between Toby’s third
person, past-tense perspective and Ren’s first person, present-tense voice add
pace and variation to the novel, while also subtly exposing character differences,
underlining that Toby is ‘older, less exposed, less febrile than Ren’.67 Both women
are former members of the God’s Gardeners: a survivalist eco-religious cult that
correctly predicted the end of the world, if not the eventual manner of its ending.
As Susan Watkins notes, the group offers the women ‘a space of apparent safety,
away from the techno-scientific corporate world’.68 Founded by Adam One, the
Gardeners are led by senior members known as Adams and Eves. For Fredric
Jameson, writing in the London Review of Books, the Gardeners are ‘perhaps the
most stimulating new feature of The Year of the Flood’.69
Toby, we learn, first joined the Gardeners as a young woman, after escaping from
Blanco, a brutal, sexually abusive employer. Despite what Andrew Hoogheem
terms ‘her strong undercurrent of skepticism’ regarding the Gardener’s eco-
theology, she appreciates the group’s offer of refuge and eventually becomes a
skilled herbalist and a leading member of the group.70 When a vengeful Blanco,
years later, discovers Toby’s location and mounts an attack on the Gardeners’
rooftop encampment, her friends help her to escape again, securing her a job as
manager of the AnooYoo day spa. This is where we first encounter Toby, waiting
out the period of chaos caused by Crake’s ‘Waterless Flood’ (7) and tending the
garden that provides her with food and medicine.
Toby’s narrative is interspersed with the story of Ren, a dancer and sex worker
who survives Crake’s apocalypse because she was serendipitously quarantined at
the Scales and Tails strip club where she works. Ren’s story is initially delivered
from this locked biohazard room, where she has limited supplies and no way to
escape. Younger than Toby, Ren first joined the God’s Gardeners as a child when
her mother, Lucerne, fell in love with Zeb, Adam One’s brother, and ran away
from the HelthWyzer Compound to be with him, bringing Ren along. As a young
Gardener, Ren befriends Amanda, a street kid from the pleeblands, who also
joins the group. When Ren’s disillusioned mother returns to the Compounds,
claiming they were kidnapped, a teenaged Ren ends up at school with Jimmy
134 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

and Crake, developing an unrequited crush on Jimmy. Unhappy and unwanted,

Ren runs away – at first to work with Toby, and then, when she discovers that
Amanda is dating Jimmy, to the strip club in the pleeblands. Noting a familiar
Atwoodian preoccupation with blending genres, Bouson adds to those already
identified in Oryx and Crake the various romance plots of The Year of the Flood,
specifically the love triangles between Ren, Amanda and Jimmy, and Toby, Zeb
and Lucerne, as well as ‘the coming-of-age story’, political thriller and mystery
story, as the novel hints at collusion between Crake and the male leaders of the
God’s Gardeners.71
The novel concludes on a collision of characters and events, as it is revealed
that a number of the well-prepared Gardeners have survived. For Canavan, in
rewarding with survival those who have chosen to change their lifestyles, the
novel ‘is almost as straightforwardly moralistic as a fable’.72 Amanda and some
boys from the Gardeners head to Scales and Tails to look for Ren. Freeing her,
they make their way to Toby but are attacked by two Painballers: brutalized
criminals and professional fighters. The men take Amanda and Ren with them
for sex, but Toby manages to shoot one of them and rescue Ren. She and Ren
then pursue the Painballers who still have Amanda. Just as they finally discover
the group in a clearing in the woods they also come across a feverish Jimmy, and
the novel converges with the conclusion of Oryx and Crake. They disarm the
Painballers, rescue Amanda, and just as the novel ends, the Crakers approach.

Gendered futures
Watkins proposes that women’s apocalyptic writing typically betrays a
‘suspicion of techno-science for its destructive complicity with patriarchal and
colonial enterprises’.73 She distinguishes between ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’ modes of
apocalyptic narrative: the first is catastrophic, despairing, and linear, while the
second is open-ended, cyclical, and contains elements of hope. For Watkins,
Ren and Toby in The Year of the Flood provide ‘a feminine, comic reworking’ of
Jimmy’s ‘tragic masculine perspective’ in Oryx and Crake. Refusing to accept the
tragic mode, they instead continue to support and protect one another, to resist
male dominance and to show empathy and humanity. For Watkins, apocalyptic
narratives in the comic mode, such as The Year of the Flood, avoid blame and
judgement and instead champion ‘plural, hybrid narratives and spaces’.74
Other critics also observe a shifting gender politics concomitant with the
change in narrative voice across the two texts. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood
diagnosed an unhealthy division between Crake’s ‘masculine’ scientific
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 135

rationalism and the more ‘feminine’ traits of compassion and empathy fostered
by the beleaguered arts and humanities, associated with Jimmy. Hengen
suggests that Jimmy’s mother, whose language speaks of ‘a lost ethics and
spirituality’, resists the biological materialism of his father’s work.75 Jimmy’s
generous, artistic instincts, however, while bolstered by his mother, are, argues
Hengen, largely thwarted by a society that prioritizes greed. For Howells, the
gender politics of Oryx and Crake are further exposed by its comparison with
The Handmaid’s Tale. Where the earlier novel concludes with Offred resigning
her fate into the hands of others, Oryx and Crake ends with Jimmy trying to
decide what to do. While both are faced with uncertain outcomes, for Howells,
‘that shift in balance from passivity to action codes in the gender differences’ of
these two very different dystopian texts.76 With The Year of the Flood, Atwood
does significant work to redress the masculine logic of Jimmy’s male-centred
narrative.
In her review of The Year of the Flood, Winterson observes two significant
gendered tropes in the novel. Atwood, she suggests, is particularly adept at
showing what happens ‘when human beings (usually men) cannot love’. At worst,
as with Blanco, ‘brutality and sadism take over’, while for others, like Crake, ‘a
utopian desire for perfectability replaces the lost and lonely self ’. For Winterson,
Crake’s desire to genetically edit love and romance from human experience is less
about rationalism and more about his unacknowledged desire to avoid jealousy
and pain. Ultimately, she suggests, in this ‘strangely lonely book’ in which love
and romance are absent or unsatisfactory, it is in friendship – particularly female
friendships – that Atwood finds hope.77 A similar point is made by Watkins, who
observes that, despite a recurring theme of maternal neglect, the novel’s focus
is nevertheless on positive female relationships. As Winterson puts it: ‘Atwood
believes in human beings, and she likes women’, and the generosity of Ren and
Toby’s friendship provides hope for a future beyond the end of the novel.78
For Bouson, while Atwood’s work has always been concerned with ‘the
victimhood and survival of women’, The Year of the Flood ‘takes this organizing
idea to a new level’, depicting a world in which young ‘postfeminist’ women
like Amanda and Ren (and like Oryx) have learned to exploit their bodies
as commodities.79 Bouson argues that Atwood exposes the metaphorical
‘consumption’ of women in a ruthless and predatory culture. This horror is
embodied in the text by Blanco, who uses women as disposable sexual slaves
before – it is rumoured – murdering them and disposing of their remains in
his burger-processing machinery. To Blanco, Toby – like all women – is used to
satisfy desires: ‘turned into meat’, both metaphorically and literally.80
136 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Central to Bouson’s analysis is the generational divide between middle-aged

Toby and Ren, who is twenty-five when the cataclysm strikes. Bouson reads
Toby as a figure of second-wave feminism, readily aware of male violence and
gendered power imbalance. Ren, instead, is identified with a later, postfeminist
generation. A product of postfeminist culture with its ‘bottom-line corporate
business culture mentality’, she ‘seemingly chooses, or at least accepts, her own
sexual commodification and humiliation’.81 Bouson suggests that Atwood depicts
Ren and Amanda’s passivity to demonstrate her fear (which also motivates The
Handmaid’s Tale) that the gains of feminism are precarious and vulnerable to
attack. For Atwood, there is little difference between ‘the postfeminist’s embrace
of her sexuality and the sexist world of the prefeminist past’.82 Bouson concludes
that The Year of the Flood offers two possible paths for humanity: the sexist
savagery of the Painballers’ rampage of torture, rape and murder, or Toby and
Ren’s female solidarity. That both groups survive the ‘waterless flood’ suggests
Bouson, is Atwood’s comment on the persistence of both strains of human
nature.

Humanism/posthumanism
While some critics read The Year of the Flood as an expansion of the world of Oryx
and Crake to encompass female experience and life in the pleeblands, others view
the second novel more particularly as a development of Atwood’s fundamental
arguments. This is the position taken by Bergthaller in his essay on humanism
and sustainability in the first two novels of the trilogy. For Bergthaller, Oryx
and Crake ends on an impasse; traditional liberal humanism has ‘pathetically
failed’, but the triumph of Crake’s posthumanism appears ‘indistinguishable
from catastrophe’. With The Year of the Flood, Atwood attempts to resolve this
deadlock by proposing ‘a qualified humanism informed by evolutionary biology
and disenchanted with human nature’.83
Discussing ‘the ecological imperative’ – that humans must acknowledge that
they too are part of nature – Bergthaller identifies in both Oryx and Crake and
The Year of the Flood Atwood’s sense that this formula is inadequate. Crake
reduces humans to animals to the point where he wishes to eradicate human
nature, while the God’s Gardeners tangle themselves in theological knots,
turning to the biblical idea of the Fall to explain why humans must ‘cultivate
themselves’ in order to become ‘natural’ again. Both of these positions fail to
address a crucial element of nature, in which, as Bergthaller explains, certain
species exhaust their environment to the point where they endanger their own
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 137

existence. This phenomenon is perfectly ‘natural’; what is unnatural, is for a

species to consciously limit its own engagements with its environment in order to
prolong its own existence. The question raised by Atwood’s novels, therefore, is
‘how to tame the human animal?’84 How do we curb humanity’s natural instincts
to expand and consume? Crake’s solution is to restrain human nature, ‘taming’
the human beyond the point of remaining human, while Jimmy ‘represents a
humanism that fails to understand itself as a bio-political project’.85 In The Year
of the Flood, instead, argues Bergthaller, Atwood proposes a possible solution in
the Gardeners’ belief that faith can complement and moderate science. This same
sense of balance underlies Atwood’s belief that art and culture can sustain ethical
behaviour and self-discipline, directing humanity towards its own salvation.
A useful addition to the discussion of Atwood’s belief in the value and purpose
of the arts is explored by Hoogheem in an essay in which he tackles the arguments
of ‘evocriticism’ – evolutionary literary criticism. This mode of criticism looks to
apply a Darwinian model of evolution to understand why humans have evolved
a love for storytelling. It proposes that stories are an evolutionary tactic that
enable us to make sense of the world and ‘test hypotheses in safe, low-stakes
settings’.86 For Hoogheem, the Gardeners’ theology – described in their hymns
– supports the idea that stories and religion provide an evolutionary function:
creating supportive communities, communicating knowledge and teaching
necessary social values. He argues, however, that Atwood’s ‘ambivalent, sardonic,
and ultimately fond portrayal of religion’ moves beyond a simple evolutionary
explanation of its function and persistence and demonstrates the need for
a ‘deeper, more textured’ understanding of the role religion plays in human
experience.87 With the endurance of Toby and Ren (both of whom benefit from
the Gardeners’ teachings), Atwood makes a link between religious belief and
survival that seems to support an evocritical reading, while also demonstrating
that the factors that favour human survival are far more complex and potentially
surprising.
Hoogheem’s proposition that storytelling provides an evolutionary advantage
balances a sceptical, biological view of human nature with a belief in the need for
humanism. If we veer, like Crake, too close to a purely rational biological reading
of humanity, then, as Bergthaller argues, it becomes difficult to argue why the
survival of humanity should ‘be regarded as an ethical good to begin with’?
Bergthaller suggests that, for Atwood, even if ‘no answer to this question could
be validated by the natural sciences’ we still need to find one, and this necessity,
ultimately, motivates her defence of the humanities, which are so under attack in
her near-future dystopian scenario.88
138 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Reading the conclusion

When the closing scenes of The Year of the Flood converge on the final moments
of Oryx and Crake, Atwood leaves her characters once again on the cusp of a
momentous decision. For Bouson, the conclusion leaves open the possibility
that the survivors might rebuild society and construct a ‘new social-political
utopian enclave among the dystopian ruins of the old order’.89 Writing before
the publication of MaddAddam, she also suggests that the faint singing that
Jimmy and Ren hear at the end of the novel, which is commonly understood
to announce the arrival of the Crakers, might equally herald the revelation of
more human survivors, as hymn-singing God’s Gardeners emerge from their
safe houses. For Bergthaller, the novel provides a ‘bitter-sweet, almost fairytale-
like ending’ in which various Gardeners survive and find each other and Blanco
– the gothic villain – returns once again, only to be finally defeated. Atwood, he
suggests, requires us to overlook the improbability of these events and indulge
in the same kind of ‘leap of faith’ that the Gardeners’ eco-theology requires.90
If the conjoined conclusions of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood
require some suspension of disbelief, the novels also, suggest Canavan, call
on us to expand the limits of our imaginative horizons. Canavan begins his
essay on the first two instalments of Atwood’s trilogy with Fredric Jameson’s
often quoted statement that it ‘is easier to imagine the end of the world than to
imagine the end of capitalism’.91 He suggests, however, that ‘eco-apocalypse’ is
increasingly the manner in which both of these eventualities are being imagined,
as we come to suspect that ‘the one is catapulting us faster and faster towards
the other’. Visions of the apocalypse such as that created by Atwood work to
demonstrate that capitalism is not in fact inevitable and eternal. Consequently,
argues Canavan, there is an ‘unexpected utopian potency’ discernible within
contemporary visions of the eco-apocalypse rendered in texts such as Oryx and
Crake and The Year of the Flood. Both books, he suggests, ‘seek to open up new
space for imagining a post-capitalist future’.92

MaddAddam

Overview
With the final instalment of the trilogy, Atwood brings together elements of the
first two novels and draws various narrative threads towards an open-ended
conclusion. Like both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 139

retells events leading up to Crake’s apocalypse but also introduces more stories
into the web of narrative. As Zeb and Toby become lovers, he recounts to her tales
of his earlier life with Adam and the brothers’ later ideological divergence between
Adam’s pacifist Gardeners and Zeb’s alignment with the terrorist MaddAddamites.
In this manner, Atwood fills in many of the missing details from the earlier novels.
The narrative commences, as Raschke notes, with a ‘chaotic, uncomprehending
camera-eye recording’ of the rescue of a severely traumatized Amanda,
the discovery of a feverish Jimmy and the release of the Painballers by the
guileless Crakers.93 In the confusion, the Crakers, suffering ‘a major cultural
misunderstanding’, as Toby later terms it (13), assume that Ren and Amanda are
fertile and willing participants and rape the two young women. The issue from
this encounter will be the first of a new generation of inter-species children.
In Bedford’s ecofeminist reading, these ‘hybridisations’ seem ‘hopeful, and
part of a future that’s full of singing and stories, quite removed from the fear of
miscegenation that populated much early science fiction’.94
The novel subsequently brings together the various camps of survivors – the
God’s Gardeners, the MaddAddamites and the Crakers. The humans scrabble
together a subsistence while searching for fellow survivors, always under
threat of attack from the freed Painballers and roaming pigoons. As Jimmy
convalesces, Toby takes up his mantle as storyteller and mythmaker to the
Crakers, teaching one particularly inquisitive young Craker, Blackbeard, how to
write. The narrative culminates in a final battle with the Painballers, in which the
humans collaborate with the highly intelligent pigoons with whom the Crakers
can communicate. Jimmy dies in the battle, and the remaining Painballers are
executed. The novel proceeds to a conclusion, with Toby writing her account
of all that happened, and then transitions into Blackbeard’s narrative, as he
becomes Toby’s scribe. Blackbeard recounts the humans’ truce with the pigoons,
Toby and Zeb’s marriage and the births of the first human–Craker children. In
the final section, entitled ‘Book’, Blackbeard has taken charge of the narrative.
He recounts the death of Zeb and Toby, and also the birth of more human–
Craker children. For Northover, the novel is apocalyptic, ‘not in the sense of the
end of human history, but in the way it envisions a new age where the human
oppression of nature has ended’.95

Narrative structure: Who speaks?

Throughout the trilogy, Atwood raises questions about narration. As Raschke
puts it, her concern is with ‘who sees and who tells’.96 As Northover observes,
140 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

both Jimmy in Oryx and Crake and Toby in MaddAddam question the purpose of
their own storytelling and contemplate the futility of writing when the existence
of future readers is doubtful. For Northover, these worries are bound up with
what he calls the ‘impossibility of the apocalyptic perspective’ – the difficulty
of imagining beyond our own end.97 Drawing on Watkins’s description of The
Year of the Flood as functioning in the comic mode, Northover suggests that
MaddAddam extends this alignment towards the comic in Atwood’s apocalyptic
tale. Although containing instances of horror and brutality, the third novel, he
suggests, has a dark, ironic sense of humour. It also displays the same ‘polyphony’
that characterized The Year of the Flood, as multiple voices carry the narrative
forward. Indeed, across the trilogy, Northover identifies a progressive narrative
evolution, as ‘control of the Word shifts from male domination through female
mediation to the non-human Crakers’.98
With MaddAddam, we eventually understand that Blackbeard has transcribed
the narratives that comprise both MaddAddam and The Year of the Flood, but
not Jimmy’s tale as told in Oryx and Crake. For Raschke, this revelation changes
everything: ‘It becomes the palimpsest for understanding what the trilogy
critiques and its gestures toward remedy’.99 Where Oryx and Crake, as Howells
observes, tells Jimmy’s story ‘refracted through an omniscient narrative voice’,
Raschke notes that this omniscient narrator is absent from the third novel.100
And so when Blackbeard, for example, describes the death of Toby, he admits
that he can’t confirm which of the three versions of her death are true, ‘because
I do not know’ (390). The revelations of MaddAddam, for Raschke, compel us to
reread Oryx and Crake. Examining the trilogy’s narrative composition with close
attention, Raschke puzzles over the origin of Jimmy’s story in the first novel. If
the Crakers are the only living witnesses to Jimmy’s story, then it stands to reason
that they wrote the narrative of Oryx and Crake. Support for this reading, she
suggests, is supplied by the novel’s ‘odd uses of metaphor and idiom’, its tendency
towards literalism (when Jimmy cries, ‘salt water is running down his face’ [13]),
and the various editorial interjections that recur, prefaced by: ‘Revision’ (11).
This proclivity for precision exposes, argues Raschke, the presence of ‘some
other voice who is editing his past for consistency’.101
At the heart of Raschke’s analysis is a critique of postmodernism. When Atwood
was writing The Handmaid’s Tale, she argues, postmodernism’s multiplicity
represented a subversive resistance to Gilead’s fundamentalist insistence on a
single, irrefutable truth. A similar multiplicity is discerned in the polyphonic
MaddAddam. Northover, for example, notes that the novel’s continuation of the
story is not linear, but repeatedly circles back in time, returning to and revising
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 141

previously recounted events. Consequently, he argues, the third novel ‘can be

considered an anti-type to the first two, rewriting them and opening up more
imaginative possibilities’.102 For Raschke, however, by the time Atwood comes to
write the MaddAddam trilogy, postmodernism has been co-opted and neutered,
and its subversive deconstruction of meaning and truth has resulted in a kind of
‘cultural paralysis’. Commencing with Jimmy’s childhood – a world of computer
simulations, fake houses, fake food, and fake news, in which human relations are
inauthentic and unsatisfying – Raschke argues that Atwood’s trilogy ‘dramatizes
the postmodern condition gone amuck’.103
For Raschke, the bland plurality of the post-racial Crakers – seemingly
celebrated in MaddAddam – represents only subordination; in their pliable
passivity and inability to distinguish between true and false, the Crakers, she
argues, ‘are the perfect corporate citizens’.104 Consequently, by paying attention
to the narrative structure, we must recognize that the fairy-tale conclusion of
MaddAddam, in which the earth is recovering and babies are being born, actually
points us back to the start of the trilogy. ‘Following the logic of the palindrome,
Snowman’s death at the end of MaddAddam is his beginning’, as his narrated
story comes into being sometime after his death, written by more sophisticated
later Crakers. This circular ending confronts us with our complacency and
drives us back to the start of Oryx and Crake and ‘back into the seeds of our
apocalypse’.105 In this manner, for Raschke, the novel points to the continuing
need for meaningful narrative in defiance of postmodernism’s emptying out of
the power and meaning of narrative. This is, she suggests, the moral imperative
at the heart of the MaddAddam trilogy.

After the Anthropocene

If Raschke reads the MaddAddam trilogy as resisting the consequences of
throwing out grand metanarratives, a number of critics instead examine the
trilogy as Atwood’s critique of anthropocentricism: a grand narrative whereby
human beings are assumed to be the most important element of existence. In
her essay on Atwood’s environmentalism, Hengen identifies an evolution in the
writer’s thinking on this matter. Where earlier works such as Surfacing display
an implicit assumption that the natural is superior to the artificial, Hengen
suggests that, with Oryx and Crake, Atwood begins to contemplate a genetically
engineered human, and in doing so, ‘dares to look beyond her own repeated
belief that human nature cannot change’. Hengen concludes, however, that
Atwood remains convinced that human nature involves a complex range of
142 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

physical, emotional, spiritual and emotional states, and that to ‘splice out’ any of
those elements is to ‘amputate the self as it has been known so far, and so stress
nature perilously’.106
While Hengen points to Atwood’s sense of what makes humans unique,
Amelia Defalco’s essay on biocapitalism focuses on Atwood’s depiction of
‘the fantasy of human independence and invulnerability’ that underpins
neoliberalism as it reaches its ‘devastating endgame’. The trilogy, she
suggests, indicts a ‘catastrophic anthropocentricism’ that relegates plants,
animals, and the human body to ‘marketable, utilitarian objects’. At the same
time, however, the novel’s vision of cross-species collaboration, she argues,
‘suggests the possibility of posthumanist regeneration’.107 A similar nod to
optimism is offered by Chen, for whom the trilogy ‘is a meditation on the
heterogenetic human at the end of the Anthropocene’.108 (The Anthropocene
describes a geological epoch marked by man’s impact on the earth, ‘similar
to past epochal changes caused by volcanic eruptions, continent shifts, or
a meteorite strike’.109) Focusing on the potential opened up by this critical
moment, Chen argues that Crake’s apocalypse allows Atwood, over the course
of the trilogy, to imagine a shift from the ‘macro-politics of globalization’ to
the ‘micro-politics of an intentional community’.110 This shift in perspective
– as ‘humanity’ becomes a handful of survivors – prompts a new ethical
awareness in Jimmy, drawing him out of his anthropocentric assumption of
his own centrality and importance. From Oryx and Crake to MaddAddam,
argues Chen, Jimmy ‘outgrows his being-in-and-for-itself ’ and eventually
‘realizes being-for-others’, as he relinquishes his early selfishness to finally
sacrifice himself to save both his fellow surviving humans and the Crakers.111
Djuna Mohr proposes that the MaddAddam trilogy might be termed
‘Anthropocene fiction’, which differs from traditional science fiction with its
typically ‘escapist technophile and anthropocentric inclination’. Anthropocene
fictions, she argues, imagine life beyond anthropocentrism, whether in terms
of the posthuman or other bioforms with agency. She notes that, while Oryx
and Crake and The Year of the Flood focus on the immediate aftermath of
Crake’s apocalypse, MaddAddam instead focuses on ‘the transitional period of
establishing a post-anthropocentric network of species’. Mohr notes a similar
narrative progression across the three books as that observed by Northover: the
‘privileged male narration’ of Oryx and Crake is associated with irresponsible
bioscience; The Year of the Flood prioritizes female experience in terms of
‘victimization and resistance’; and MaddAddam, collated by Blackbeard,
marks a shift to ‘posthuman perspectives’. For Mohr, Atwood resists the
 Atwood’s Dystopian Futures 143

logic of anthropocentrism, and the trilogy essentially ‘narrates how to save

an overpopulated world from humanity’.112 This reading conflicts with that
of Raschke, for whom ‘The Crakers are us, adrift in the postmodern world:
our current present’. Where Mohr sees a transformative advance beyond
anthropocentricism, Raschke, in a notably anthropocentric analysis, sees the
posthuman Crakers as both metaphors for humanity and harbingers of the
death of the human: they are, she argues, ‘our alien future, or more aptly our
lack of future’.113
For Bedford, instead, a key conclusion of the trilogy involves the human
characters’ necessary reconceptualization of their fellow animals. As wolvogs
and pigoons are variously revealed to have ‘their own communities and cultures’,
the humans must reassess their assumed superiority.114 This shift marks a
retreat from anthropocentric instrumentalist thinking. Also discussing the
pigoons’ intelligence, Northover notes that only the Crakers can understand and
communicate with the genetically modified pigs, and suggests that the humans’
exclusion from this communication signals ‘a loss of power’ and ‘the beginning
of a more just dispensation’. When humans are no longer the supreme purveyors
of language, they ‘have to negotiate and share power with other animals’.115 This
is part of a process of radical decentring of the human narrative in the text.
It also involves the realization that, from a purely ecological point of view, as
Bedford notes, the wiping out of humanity ‘is not a tragedy, and can only be
dystopian from an anthropocentric perspective’.116 And as Northover observes,
by giving the last chapter to Blackbeard, Atwood ensures that the non-human
Crakers ‘literally have the last word’.117
Critics have variously found the MaddAddam trilogy bleak and cautiously
optimistic. Philips, for example, sees in the characters’ scavenging and reusing
of the scraps of industrially produced goods recovered from the devastated
landscape a familiar industriousness that threatens to restart the same processes
that brought humanity to the brink of environmental collapse. For this reason,
she argues, the trilogy describes ‘a doom cycle’.118 In large part, what optimism is
discerned is gleaned from the vision of inter-species cooperation and the vision
of a radically changed but vital future for humanity. In an essay that examines
the persistent theme of breakfast in the final novel, Shelley Boyd suggests that
the meal symbolizes Atwood’s ‘guarded optimism’ that there will, ultimately, be
‘near-future worlds (and meals) not unlike our own’. That the survivors continue
to come together and share a meal, often of necessity made from incongruous and
unappetizing ingredients, demonstrates, she proposes, their capacity to ‘imagine
and reimagine themselves into the future’.119 The nature of that reimagining is
144 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

crucial, however. As Mohr observes, where Crake thought he could remodel

the world and make it better, the text rejects his vision. In its place, Atwood
offers a post-anthropocentric world comprised of ‘a network of species, respect
for nature and the Other, communication and cooperation’.120 On this basis, the
trilogy offers a vision of a new humanity that can remain humane.
 Conclusion

The preceding chapters have testified to the richness and diversity of the critical
readings available on Margaret Atwood’s work. Inevitably, the sheer volume of
material has necessitated certain choices around selection. Some useful resources
have been addressed only briefly, while others have been examined more closely,
often because they are indicative or exemplary of a particular focus or method
adopted by a number of critics. My intention has always been to provide a
breadth of analyses while also giving full attention to the more influential or
paradigm-shifting approaches to Atwood’s writing.
More significant still, in terms of the choices made in shaping this guide, has
been the focus on Atwood’s most prominent long-form fictions. Again, given the
enormous volume of Atwood’s creative production, every editor and critic who
attempts some kind of overview of her work must tackle questions of coverage and
selection. Most typically, edited companion collections such as Coral Ann Howells’s
The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, or more thematic approaches such
as Karma Waltonen’s Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses, focus primarily on Atwood’s
novels while including a small number of chapters that examine her short fiction
and poetry. Some collections, such as John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich’s Margaret
Atwood: The Open Eye (2006), do provide a substantial number of essays that
examine works other than the novels, but this is much rarer. Certainly, by far the
majority of journal articles and book chapters on Atwood’s work tend to address her
major novels. Within this book, the most significant omissions, I would suggest, are
some of the more recent substantial works, which are necessarily currently attended
by a limited amount of critical analysis. In particular, Moral Disorder (2006), Stone
Mattress (2014), The Heart Goes Last (2015) and Hag-Seed (2016) develop familiar
thematic and genre preoccupations and provide for potentially fruitful comparisons
with earlier works. And most recently, The Testaments (2019), Atwood’s much-
anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, will undoubtedly attract a significant
amount of critical attention in the years to come.
One notable early critical response to three of these works is provided by Howells’s
article, ‘True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited in Stone Mattress, The Heart Goes Last
and Hag-Seed’. Discussing Atwood’s predilection for ‘true trash’ – a term she takes
146 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

from the title of a short story in the 1991 collection, Wilderness Tips – Howells
examines the manner in which these recent works make use of popular genres to
produce ‘transgressive entertainments’. This triumvirate of texts, all published within
three years, reprise, as Howells observes, previous experiments with gothic romance
and gothic horror, vampire fiction, fantasy, dystopia, crime fiction and thrillers.
Paraphrasing an observation recently made by Atwood that ‘this age of anxiety and
uncertainty about the future is not the time for realistic fiction’, Howells makes a
connection between the dark tales of Stone Mattress, the sometimes farcical dystopia
of The Heart Goes Last and the ghostly magical comedy of her Shakespearean
rewriting in Hag-Seed. Each of these works, suggests Howells, while they vary in form
and focus, uses popular, often fantastical, genres to make astute, ethical observations
about the politics of the present day.1

Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales

In Stone Mattress, the first book Atwood published after completing her epic
MaddAddam trilogy, we see, as Howells observes, a notable shift in perspective
and scale from the global apocalypse to more local, intimate stories of individuals,
many of whom are ageing and suddenly faced with their own mortality. This is
a theme that Helen Snaith picks up in her examination of Stone Mattress from
a feminist perspective on gerontology. Snaith suggests that with these ‘wicked
tales’, Atwood appropriates the landscape of dystopia and ‘deliberately subverts
the standardised behaviours of old age’, showing older women who centre their
sexuality within their narratives and seek revenge on men who have wronged
them in the past.2
Stone Mattress concludes with a darkly satiric dystopian tale titled ‘Torching
the Dusties’, in which a terrorist movement called ‘Our Turn’, composed of
disenfranchised and frustrated youths, turn their anger on the older generation,
attacking and setting alight retirement homes. In an ageist society in which
the ageing body is itself a form of dystopia, Snaith examines the manner in
which Atwood’s elderly female protagonists use technology to transcend bodily
limitations and explore ‘a virtual utopia’ in cyberspace.3 In stories such as
‘Alphinland’, in which Constance, an elderly writer of fantasy fictions, creates
and maintains an online virtual reality, technology provides Constance with the
freedom and mobility that are increasingly absent to her in the real world.
In its centring of ageing protagonists, Stone Mattress can be connected to
other works by Atwood in which old age is an increasingly prevalent theme. This
 Conclusion 147

recurring interest has been observed in critical works such as Teresa Gibert’s
essay on the aesthetics of ageing in Atwood’s fiction, Pilar Sánchez Calle’s article
on ageing and death in Atwood’s The Door, and Susan Watkins’s comparative
examination of ageing in the fictions of Penelope Lively, Doris Lessing and
Atwood.4 It is also key to Amelia Defalco’s analysis of issues around the ethics
of care raised by Atwood in the short story cycle, Moral Disorder.5 I also discuss
ageing as a crucial paradigm in Atwood’s work in a 2017 article that compares
the depiction of old age in The Blind Assassin and Moral Disorder. Drawing
connections with a much earlier 1983 short story, ‘The Victory Burlesk’, in which
the narrator is horrified to be confronted by an ageing stripper, I suggest that
each of these later works represents an ‘essentially ethical attempt’ to inhabit old
age, ‘a phenomenon most commonly seen from without’.6 As Atwood herself
grows older, the theme of ageing recurs in her work and will arguably become
increasingly pertinent to critical responses.

The Heart Goes Last

Following her darkly satirical extrapolation of the generation gap in Stone

Mattress, a similarly bleak exploration of contemporary anxieties is provided by
The Heart Goes Last: another Atwoodian dystopia that feels, at times, a little too
close to home. The novel commences in a post-economic-crash America. A litany
of banking crisis, redundancies, foreclosures and widespread destitution has left
formerly middle-class protagonists Stan and Charmaine living in their car and
trying to evade the criminal gangs that roam the lawless streets. In desperation,
and fuelled by nostalgia for a safer, happier age, the couple sign up to a ‘social
experiment’ that involves dividing their time between living in a picket-fence
fantasy of fifties suburbia and incarceration in a privately run prison.
The novel itself has an interesting genesis, first written and published in
serial form in 2012 by the eBook publisher Byliner as a four-part serial entitled
Positron, before being revised and published as The Heart Goes Last in 2015. The
project combined Atwood’s interest in both the nineteenth-century tradition
of publishing novels in serial form and the possibilities opened up for writing
and writers by new technologies. (I discuss this in the introduction to my
2017 interview with Atwood.7) This idiosyncratic genesis perhaps resulted in
what many reviewers saw as the somewhat uneven tone of the novel, which
veers from its opening scenes of broadly realist dystopia through an at times
disorientating array of genres and eventually concludes in comedy and farce
148 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

involving Elvis impersonators and sex robots. In a fairly typical summation,

Lionel Shriver, writing in The Financial Times, affirms Atwood’s skill and
experience, but nevertheless proposes that the novel is ‘overextended’ and suffers
from shaky foundations.8 For Howells, however, despite the carnivalesque chaos,
The Heart Goes Last ‘engages with serious ethical questions about institutional
power versus individual freedom and free will’.9
A rare extended discussion of The Heart Goes Last is provided by Tim Engles
in his book, White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature.
Engles argues that white male power ‘weaponizes nostalgia’ in its attempt to
regain its lost status and dominance. He suggests that, in its exposition of the
ravages of neoliberalism, The Heart Goes Last imagines an America in which
white people are reduced to the kind of precarious living conditions ‘long
endured by many of their subordinated ethnoracial others’.10 The promised
manicured security of the suburban community appeals to Stan and Charmaine
in much the same way that conservative political parties play on nostalgia for
security and status in white men who have suffered from economic precarity,
and who struggle with the increased visibility of women and ethnic minorities.
Such nostalgia, argues Engles, works to displace anger that would be better
directed at the class system and economic structure onto groups of non-white
‘others’, or women. Accordingly, Stan gets angry at Charmaine when he finds
himself unemployed and reliant on her pay cheque. For Engles, Stan’s fantasies
about ‘Jasmine’, a mysterious other woman, stem from a ‘nostalgia that includes
restoration of himself as head-of-the-home breadwinner’.11 While Stan tells
himself that his fantasies are prompted by his wife’s lack of sexual passion,
Engles points to the sexbot trope in the novel as a metaphor for the emasculation
of men in a neoliberal economy that demands an unrealistic enactment of
heteronormative masculinity. Feeling powerless and resentful, men look to
assert their masculinity over an entirely compliant woman. Ultimately, suggests
Engles, Atwood demonstrates that the weaponizing of nostalgia to prop up the
failing neoliberal economy is bad for both men and women.

Hag-Seed

The Heart Goes Last, although grounded in a highly contemporary world of

mortgage debt, casualized labour and for-profit prisons, is also a Shakespearian
revision of sorts, ‘a place of illusion, masquerade, and mistaken identities’ influenced
by A Midsummer Night’s Dream.12 As such, it has something in common with Hag-
 Conclusion 149

Seed, Atwood’s rewriting of The Tempest. Again, there is little available criticism on
this relatively recent text. In an essay on Atwood’s revisions of classic texts, I compare
it to The Penelopiad and read it as a highly self-conscious adaptation: ‘a novel about a
man producing a play about a man producing a play.’ Where The Penelopiad follows
a familiar strategy of rewriting classic works from the perspective of peripheral and
largely silent characters, with Hag-Seed, Atwood adopts a quite different approach,
in which her protagonist directs a production of Shakespeare’s play as part of a
prison education programme. I argue that the anxiety around revision glimpsed at
times in The Penelopiad is absent in Hag-Seed. After the performance, the prisoner-
actors imagine new after-lives for Shakespeare’s characters, and Atwood provides a
celebratory conclusion, in which ‘the readers have become writers and have claimed
the text for themselves’.13
Other critics also focus on Hag-Seed’s Shakespearian revisions. In an
article that considers how Atwood strives to balance innovation and fidelity
in her reading of Shakespeare’s play, Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso suggests that The
Tempest’s combination of comedy, tragedy and romance, which would appear
to make it difficult to adapt, actually chimes well with Atwood’s own proclivity
for genre-shifting texts. Her article focuses on the strategies of adaptation that
Atwood employs in order to achieve a text that is ‘a contemporary double of the
original’ while still managing to be ‘its own creature’.14
For Philip Smith, instead, Atwood is less interested in Shakespeare ‘than
in what we do with him’. In an article that reads Hag-Seed alongside Bodily
Harm, Smith suggests that the earlier novel, with its claustrophobic island
setting and postcolonial power struggles, is another Atwoodian reading of
The Tempest. In his discussion, Smith is notably sceptical of transhistorical
readings of Shakespeare’s ‘timelessness’ and suggests instead that Hag-Seed
offers ‘an extended counter-thesis to an essentialist view of Shakespeare’.15
Atwood, he argues, emphasizes the artifice, free will and desire that contribute
to the characters’ discovery of personal connections with the play and its
apparent resemblance to their lives. Once again, Atwood is read as a highly
self-conscious, sceptical writer always concerned to examine and test cultural
assumptions.

The Atwood phenomenon

The speed at which Atwood continues to produce substantial, significant works

is dizzying. And in recent years, her work has also encompassed increasingly
150 The Fiction of Margaret Atwood

diverse formats and collaborations, from the multimedia book tour of The
Year of the Flood in 2009, at which the God’s Gardeners hymns, set to music
by composer Orville Stoeber, were sung by local choirs, through The Happy
Zombie Sunrise Home, a serialized novel co-authored with Naomi Alderman and
published on Wattpad in 2012, to Angel Catbird, Atwood’s graphic novel series
illustrated by Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain (2016–17). Most recently,
the 2019 publication of The Testaments was a genuine literary phenomenon, with
a midnight bookshop launch in central London, at which Atwood was cheered,
followed the next day with an event at the National Theatre screened live to
1,000 cinemas across the world. The success of The Testaments was built, in large
part, on the renewed interest in The Handmaid’s Tale inspired by the successful
2017 Hulu television adaptation of the novel. This has, in turn, given rise to
a rich new seam of Atwood studies focusing on adaptation: a topic usefully
explored by Eva-Marie Kröller, in her essay ‘The Hulu and MGM Adaptation of
The Handmaid’s Tale’, and in Adapting Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
and Beyond, edited by Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Fiona McMahon. Perfectly
timed to capture this moment of popular and critical interest, the launch of The
Testaments represents a new high-water mark of Atwood’s cultural impact.
Discussing The Testaments in a review for The Conversation, Watkins notes
the manner in which The Handmaid’s Tale has been reread in recent years in
light of the #MeToo movement, the Trump administration and charges of ‘fake
news’. Where the 1985 novel concluded on the deeply troubling scepticism of the
Gileadean Studies conference, Watkins suggests that, in 2019, ‘Atwood replaces
that incredulity with a much clearer sense of the validity of women’s stories.’16
A similar point is made by Sophie Gilbert in her review for The Atlantic, in
which she also contextualizes Atwood’s unexpected return to Gilead against the
adoption of the Handmaid’s uniform as a symbol of protest in the #MeToo era:
‘A movement has swept her up’, suggests Gilbert, ‘though she hadn’t set out to
write for one’.17
While it seems to expand exponentially, what Graham Huggan termed in
2001 the ‘Atwood phenomenon’ has been building for many years, inspiring
something of a sub-genre of Atwood criticism in itself.18 In an early essay on the
theme, ‘Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Media’,
Susanne Becker, for example, discusses Atwood’s developing relationship with
the media and its fascination with her.19 The topic is further explored in Huggan’s
The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, in which he addresses the
material and symbolic economies of cultural value surrounding the marketing
of postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul and Michael
 Conclusion 151

Ondaatje, and devotes a chapter to Atwood. Focusing on ideas of exoticism

and celebrity glamour, Huggan describes the ‘global image-making machinery’
that has contributed to the turning of Atwood into a ‘national icon and cultural
celebrity’.20 Huggan points to several factors, including Atwood’s tireless
promotion of her own work, her ability to speak eloquently (and quotably) on
a variety of topics, and her controversial and fraught twin reputation as both
the most famous Canadian writer and a spokesperson for feminist issues.
(Laura Moss also discusses Atwood’s branding as a Canadian icon abroad in
a 2006 essay21). Each of these elements, suggests Huggan, accumulate cultural
capital, eventually attaining the point at which Atwood’s name alone sells books.
Huggan’s work is extended by Lorraine York’s influential studies of Atwood’s
celebrity in Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007) and Margaret Atwood and the
Labour of Literary Celebrity (2013). In the earlier work, York places Atwood
within a national context, reading her fame alongside that of fellow Canadian
writers, Michael Ondaatje and Carol Shields. For York, Atwood’s often wry self-
consciousness about her fame sets her apart from Ondaatje and Shields, and she
identifies in Atwood a ‘powerfully shrewd and subtly uneasy’ engagement with
her own celebrity.22 Examining the depiction of characters such as Joan in Lady
Oracle and Elaine in Cat’s Eye, who name and satirize the voracious appetite for
artistic celebrities, York’s concern is less, she explains, with why Atwood is so
famous, and more with how she and her books are read in terms of her fame.
In her later work instead, York’s focus is more on the idea of literary celebrity
as the product of the labour of many parties – publishers, editors, agents,
publicists and so forth – all working alongside the writer. As the public face
of a professional industry that works hard to achieve the seemingly ephemeral
status of fame, York identifies in Atwood a ‘nuanced and strategic approach to
literary production’. The book pays attention to peripheral but crucial aspects of
the writer’s work, such as Atwood’s relationships with her agent and editor, her
Toronto office and her use of social media. Atwood’s writerly celebrity, suggest
York, exists somewhere in between her existence as ‘both economic labourer
and mystic creator’.23
As Atwood moves into her eighties, with little indication of any inclination
to slow down, both her labour and her creativity remain formidable. And as her
longstanding concern with equality, liberty and human rights is met by an equally
compelling preoccupation with impending climate catastrophe, she challenges
her critics to keep up – to rise to the challenge of evaluating, critiquing and
examining her complex, ethical, urgent fictions.
152
 Notes

Introduction

1 Margaret Atwood, ‘Margaret Dorothy Killam Atwood’, The Globe and Mail, 23 April
2007. https://www​.theglobeandmail​.com​/life​/margaret​-dorothy​-killam​-atwood​/
article684022/. Accessed 17 May 2020.
2 Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 3–4.
3 Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 2.
4 Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in
English (1957–2003) (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005).
5 Paul Groetsch, ‘Margaret Atwood: A Canadian Nationalist’, in Reingard M. Nischik
(ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (Rochester: Camden House, 2000), p. 169.
6 Groetsch (2000), p. 175.
7 Margaret Atwood, ‘After Survival . . . Excerpts from a Speech Delivered at Princeton
University, 19 April 1985’, The CEA Critic 50 (Fall 1987), p. 38. Cited in Groetsch
(2000), p. 176.
8 Linda Sandler, ‘Preface’, Margaret Atwood: A Symposium. Ed. Linda Sandler, The
Malahat Review: An International Quarterly of Life and Letters 41 (January 1977),
p. 5.
9 Slettedahl Macpherson (2010), p. 5.
10 Robert Sharp, ‘Margaret Atwood Awarded 2016 PEN Pinter Prize’, English PEN,
16 June 2016. www​.englishpen​.org​/events​/atwood​-pen​-pinter​-prize​-2016/.
Accessed 14 March 2019.
11 Nathalie Cook, Margaret Atwood: A Biography (Toronto: ECW Press, 1998),
pp. 19–20.
12 Rosemary Sullivan, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out (Toronto: Harper
Flamingo, 1998), p. 6.
13 Fiona Tolan, ‘“I Could Say That Too”: An Interview with Margaret Atwood’,
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11.3 (November 2017), p. 461.
14 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 7.
15 Atwood (2002), p. 13.
154 Notes

Chapter 1

1 Marge Piercy, ‘Margaret Atwood: Beyond Victimhood’ (1973), in Judith

McCombs (ed.), Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood (Boston: G.K. Hall,
1988), p. 54.
2 Margaret Atwood, ‘Introduction’ to The Edible Woman (London: Virago,
1988), pp. 7–8.
3 Atwood (1988).
4 Fiona Tolan, Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2007), p. 10.
5 Linda Sandler, ‘Interview with Margaret Atwood’, The Malahat Review: An
International Quarterly of Life and Letters 41 (January 1977), p. 11.
6 Graeme Gibson, ‘Dissecting the Way a Writer Works’ (1972), in Earl G. Ingersoll
(ed.), Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Ontario: Ontario Review, 1990), p. 12.
7 Rowland Smith, ‘Margaret Atwood: The Stoic Comedian’, The Malahat Review: An
International Quarterly of Life and Letters 41 (January 1977), p. 137.
8 Jane Rule, ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Normalcy: The Novels of Margaret
Atwood’, The Malahat Review: An International Quarterly of Life and Letters 41
(January 1977), p. 44.
9 Gregory Fitz Gerald and Kathryn Crabbe, ‘Evading the Pigeonholers’ (1979), in
Earl G. Ingersoll (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Ontario: Ontario Review,
1990), p. 132.
10 Linda Rogers, ‘Margaret the Magician’, Canadian Literature 60 (Spring
1974), p. 83.
11 Jane Miller, ‘Self-Deprecating’, Review. The Times Literary Supplement 3527 (2
October 1969), p. 1122.
12 Millicent Bell, ‘The Girl on the Wedding Cake’, Review. New York Times Book
Review (18 October 1970), p. 26.
13 T. D. MacLulich, ‘Atwood’s Adult Fairy Tale: Lévi-Strauss, Bettelheim, and The
Edible Woman’, in Judith McCombs (ed.) Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood
(Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988), p. 180.
14 Jerome H. Rosenberg, ‘On Reading the Atwood Papers in the Thomas Fisher
Library’, The Malahat Review: An International Quarterly of Life and Letters 41
(January 1977), p. 191.
15 Rule (1977), p. 42.
16 Smith (1977), p. 134.
17 Smith (1977), p. 138.
18 Catherine McLay, ‘The Dark Voyage: The Edible Woman as Romance’, in Arnold
E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (eds), The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in
Criticism (Toronto: Anansi, 1981), pp. 124, 125.
 Notes 155

19 McLay (1981), p. 126.

20 McLay (1981), p. 131.
21 Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood (Montreal: Véhicule
Press, 1980), p. 3.
22 Grace (1980), p. 93.
23 Grace (1980), p. 93.
24 Sharon Rose Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1993), pp. 82, 85.
25 Wilson (1993), pp. 94, 94, 95.
26 MacLulich (1988), p. 183.
27 MacLulich (1988), pp. 187, 184, 188.
28 Rogers (1974), p. 84.
29 Sarah Sceats, Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 96, 97.
30 Sceats (2000), p. 98.
31 Sceats (2000), p. 99.
32 Paul Delany, ‘Surfacing: Clearing a Canadian Space’, Review. New York Times Book
Review (4 March 1973), p. 441.
33 Margaret Laurence, ‘Review of Surfacing’ (1973), in Judith McCombs (ed.), Critical
Essays on Margaret Atwood (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988), pp. 46, 47.
34 Margaret Atwood, ‘A Reply’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2.2
(1976), p. 340.
35 Delany (1973), p. 441.
36 Eli Mandel, ‘Atwood Gothic’, in Judith McCombs (ed.), Critical Essays on Margaret
Atwood (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988), p. 118.
37 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto:
House of Anansi Press, 2012), p. 32.
38 Marion Wynne-Davies, Margaret Atwood (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2009), p. 11.
39 Laurence (1973), p. 47.
40 Carol Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and
Vision’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2.2 (Winter 1976), p. 317.
41 Piercy (1973), p. 44. Cited in Christ (1976), p. 317.
42 Christ (1976), p. 318.
43 Christ (1976), p. 324.
44 Judith Plaskow, ‘On Carol Christ on Margaret Atwood: Some Theological
Reflections’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2.2 (Winter
1976), p. 331.
45 Plaskow (1976), p. 337.
46 Plaskow (1976), pp. 337, 338.
47 Atwood (1976), p. 340.
156 Notes

48 Mandel (1988), p. 118.

49 Mandel (1988), p. 118.
50 Cynthia Sugars, ‘“Saying Boo to Colonialism”: Surfacing, Tom Thomson, and the
National Ghost’, in John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The
Open Eye (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), p. 152.
51 Grace (1980), p. 98.
52 Grace (1980), p. 99.
53 Grace (1980), p. 101.
54 Sandler (1977), pp. 13–14.

Chapter 2

1 Marion Wynne-Davies, Margaret Atwood (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2009),

pp. vii, 26, vii.
2 Kathryn VanSpanckeren, ‘Introduction’, in Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden
Castro (eds), Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. xx.
3 Ellen McWilliams, Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009), p. 82.
4 Barbara Hill Rigney, Margaret Atwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. 63.
5 Sofia Sanchez-Grant, ‘The Female Body in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman
and Lady Oracle’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 9.2 (March 2009), p. 84.
6 Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion (Westport: Greenwood,
2004), p. 79.
7 Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary
Feminist Narratives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 127.
8 Annette Kolodny, ‘Margaret Atwood and the Politics of Narrative’, in Arnold E.
Davidson (ed.), Studies on Canadian Literature: Introductory and Critical Essays
(New York: MLA, 1990), p. 94.
9 Colette Tennant, Reading the Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s Novels (New York: Edwin
Mellen, 2003), p. 66.
10 Joanna Russ, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The
Modern Gothic’, in Juliann Fleenor (ed.), The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden Press,
1983), p. 44. Cited in Tennant (2003), p. 67.
11 Tennant (2003), p. 70.
12 Marjorie Fee, The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (Toronto: ECW,
1993), p. 59.
13 Fee (1993), pp. 64, 63.
 Notes 157

14 Graves, cited in Marilyn Patton, ‘Lady Oracle: The Politics of the Body’, ARIEL: A
Review of International English Literature 22.4 (October 1991), p. 30.
15 Patton (1991), p. 31.
16 Hite (1989), p. 139.
17 Patton (1991), p. 32.
18 Patton (1991), p. 37.
19 Sharon Rose Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1993), p. 121.
20 Wilson (1993), p. 133.
21 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto:
House of Anansi Press, 2012), p. 235.
22 Shuli Barzilai, ‘“Say That I Had a Lovely Face”: The Grimms’ “Rapunzel,” Tennyson’s
“Lady of Shalott,” and Atwood’s Lady Oracle’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature
19.2 (Autumn 2000), pp. 235, 237.
23 Barzilai (2000), p. 331.
24 Barzilai (2000), p. 250.
25 Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 88.
26 Wynne-Davies (2009), p. 27.
27 Wynne-Davies (2009), p. 29.
28 Barbara Amiel, ‘Life After Surviving’, Maclean’s (15 October 1979), p. 66. Cited in
Carol Beran, Living Over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man (Toronto:
ECW, 1993), p. 17.
29 Wynne-Davies (2009), p. 31.
30 Elizabeth Meese, ‘An Interview with Margaret Atwood’, Black Warrior Review 12.1
(1985), pp. 88–108, 89. Cited in Kolodny (1990), p. 96.
31 Beran (1993), p. 25.
32 Marilyn French, ‘Spouses and Lovers’, Review. The New York Times, 3 February
1980. www​.nytimes​.​com. Accessed 18 December 2018.
33 Gayle Greene, ‘Life Before Man: Can Anything Be Saved?’, in Kathryn
VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro (eds), Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 65, 67.
34 Karen Stein, ‘It’s About Time: Temporal Dimensions in Margaret Atwood’s Life
Before Man’, in Sarah A. Appleton (ed.), Once upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and
Legends in Margaret Atwood’s Writings (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars,
2008), p. 98.
35 Stein (2008), p. 99.
36 Kolodny (1990), pp. 91–2.
37 Kolodny (1990), p. 95.
38 Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood (Montreal: Véhicule
Press, 1980), pp. 135, 137.
158 Notes

39 Kolodny (1990), p. 95.

40 Kolodny (1990), p. 96.
41 Stein (2008), p. 96.
42 Stein (2008), p. 97.
43 Stein (2008), p. 111.
44 Emma Parker, ‘You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of
Margaret Atwood’, Twentieth Century Literature 41.3 (Autumn 1995),
pp. 352, 353.
45 Sarah Sceats, Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 21.
46 Parker (1995), pp. 360, 363.
47 Parker (1995), p. 364.
48 Patton (1991), pp. 158, 160.
49 Parker (1995), p. 364.
50 Hill Rigney (1987), p. 99.
51 Hill Rigney (1987), p. 104.
52 Marilyn Patton, ‘Tourists and Terrorists: The Creation of Bodily Harm’, Papers on
Language & Literature 28.2 (Spring 1992), p. 151.
53 Diana Brydon, ‘Atwood’s Postcolonial Imagination: Rereading Bodily Harm’, in
Lorraine M. York (ed.), Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction,
and Novels (Toronto: Anansi, 1995), p. 109.
54 Kolodny (1990), pp. 96, 97.
55 Simone Drichel, ‘Regarding the Other: Postcolonial Violations and Ethical
Resistance in Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 54.1
(Spring 2008), pp. 312.
56 Patton (1992), p. 154.
57 Ildiko de Papp Carrington, ‘Another Symbolic Descent’, Essays on Canadian Writing
26 (1983), p. 46.
58 Patton (1992), p. 161.
59 Patton (1992), p. 165.
60 Helen Tiffin, ‘“Everyone Is in Politics”: Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm and
Blanche D’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach. Part II: Voice and Form’, in Russell McDougall
and Gillian Whitlock (eds), Australian/Canadian Literatures in English: A
Comparative Perspective (Melbourne: Methuen, 1987), p. 125.
61 Brydon (1995), p. 112.
62 Drichel (2008), p. 27.
63 Drichel (2008), p. 23.
64 Kate Marantz, ‘Making It (In)Visible: The Politics of Absence in Margaret Atwood’s
Bodily Harm’, Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en Literature Canadienne 41.2
(2016), p. 138.
 Notes 159

65 Marantz (2016), pp. 139, 149.

66 Frank Davey, Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984),
p. 70.
67 Jerome H. Rosenberg, Margaret Atwood (Boston: Twayne, 1984), p. 131.
68 Rosenberg (1984), p. 131.
69 Rosenberg (1984), p. 133.
70 Kolodny (1990), p. 98.
71 Davey (1984), p. 57.
72 Davey (1984), p. 61.
73 Davey (1984), pp. 78, 79.

Chapter 3

1 Margaret Atwood, ‘Haunted by The Handmaid’s Tale’, The Guardian, 20 January

2012. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2012​/jan​/20​/handmaids​-tale​-margaret​
-atwood. Accessed 26 March 2019.
2 Margaret Atwood, ‘What The Handmaid’s Tale Means in the Age of Trump’, The New
York Times, 10 March 2017.
3 Danuta Kean, ‘Prescient About the President: Which Writers Can Help Us to Read
Trump?’ The Guardian, 24 January 2017. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2017​
/jan​/24​/prescient​-about​-the​-president​-which​-writers​-can​-help​-us​-read​-trump.
Accessed 26 March 2019.
4 Fiona Tolan, ‘“I Could Say That, Too”: An Interview with Margaret Atwood’,
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11.3 (November 2017), p. 452.
5 Alexandra Alter, ‘Uneasy About the Future, Readers Turn to Dystopian Classics’,
The New York Times, 27 January 2017, www​.nytimes​.com​/2017​/01​/27​/business​
/media​/dystopian​-classics​-1984​-animal​-farm​-the​-handmaids​-tale​.html?​_r​=0.
Accessed 29 September 2017.
6 Atwood (2012), n.p.
7 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 324.
8 Earl Ingersoll, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Echoes of Orwell’, Journal
of the Fantastic in the Arts 5.4 (1993), p. 64.
9 Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996), p. 128.
10 Ingersoll (1993), p. 65.
11 Ingersoll (1993), p. 67.
12 Angela Laflen, ‘“From a Distance It Looks Like Peace”: Reading Beneath the Fascist
Style of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Studies in Canadian
Literature/Études en Literature Canadienne 32.1 (2007), p. 87.
13 Laflen (2007), p. 94.
160 Notes

14 Mary McCarthy, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, Review. The New York Times. Books,
9 February 1986. http://movies2​.nytimes​.com​/books​/00​/03​/26​/specials​/mccarthy​
-atwood​.html. Accessed 18 December 2018.
15 Atwood (1997), p. 98.
16 Lorna Sage, ‘Projections from a Messy Present’, Review. Times Literary Supplement,
21 March 1986, p. 307.
17 John Updike, ‘Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard’, Review. The New Yorker, 12 May
1986, p. 121.
18 Updike (1986), p. 123.
19 Howells (1996), p. 127.
20 Atwood, unpublished essay. Cited in Howells (1996), p. 129.
21 ‘An interview with Margaret Atwood on her novel The Handmaid’s Tale’, No author.
No date. Everyman’s Library. http://www​.randomhouse​.com​/knopf​/classics/​/catalog​
/display​.pperl​?isbn​=9780307264602​&view​=qa. Accessed 26 March 2019.
22 See, for example, Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood’,
The Guardian, 29 August 2009. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2009​/aug​/29​/
margaret​-atwood​-year​-of​-flood. Accessed 26 March 2019.
23 Gina Wisker, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: A Reader’s Guide (London:
Continuum, 2010), p. 122.
24 Coral Ann Howells, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale
and Oryx and Crake’, in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Margaret Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 161.
25 Barbara Hill Rigney, Margaret Atwood (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 103–4.
26 Madonne Miner, ‘“Trust Me”: Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale’, Twentieth Century Literature 37.2 (Summer 1991), p. 150.
27 Miner (1991), p. 160.
28 Miner (1991), p. 161.
29 Tae Yamamoto, ‘How Can a Feminist Read The Handmaid’s Tale? A Study of
Offred’s Narrative’, in John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The
Open Eye (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), p. 195.
30 Miner (1991), p. 164.
31 Mervyn Rothstein, ‘No Balm in Gilead for Margaret Atwood’, Interview. The New
York Times. Books, 17 February 1986. http://movies2​.nytimes​.com​/books​/00​/09​/03​/
specials​/atwood​-gilead​.html. Accessed 18 December 2018.
32 Elizabeth Meese, ‘The Empress Has No Clothes’ (1985), in Earl G. Ingersoll (ed.),
Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Princeton: Ontario Review, 1990), p. 183. Cited
in Shirley Neuman, ‘“Just a Backlash”: Margaret Atwood, Feminism and The
Handmaid’s Tale’, University of Toronto Quarterly 75.3 (Summer 2006), p. 858.
33 Wisker (2010), p. 3.
34 Theodore F. Sheckels, The Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: The Writing on the
Wall of the Tent (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 78.
 Notes 161

35 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. 1991
(London: Vintage, 1993).
36 Neuman (2006), p. 858.
37 Neuman (2006), p. 861.
38 Gayle Greene, ‘Choice of Evils’, Review. The Women’s Review of Books 3.10 (July
1986), p. 14.
39 Neuman (2006), pp. 861–2.
40 Fiona Tolan. ‘Feminist Utopias and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second Wave Feminism’, Women: A Cultural Review
16.1 (Spring 2005), p. 19.
41 Tolan (2005), p. 23.
42 Greene (1986), p. 10.
43 Tolan (2005), p. 31.
44 Neuman (2006), p. 866.
45 Marta Dvorak, ‘What is Real/Reel? Margaret Atwood’s “Rearrangement of
Shapes on a Flat Surface,” Or Narrative as Collage’, Études Anglaises 51.4
(October 1988), p. 448.
46 Howells (2006), p. 168.
47 Dvorak (1988), p. 449.
48 Mario Klarer, ‘Orality and Literacy as Gender-Supporting Structures in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Mosaic 28.4 (December 1995), p. 130.
49 Klarer (1995), pp. 134, 136.
50 Wisker (2010), p. 18.
51 Wisker (2010), p. 19.
52 Wisker (2010), p. 21.
53 Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, ‘From Irony to Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45.1 (2003),
pp. 83, 84.
54 Wagner-Lawlor (2003), pp. 85, 93.
55 Dvorak (1988), pp. 449, 450, 456.
56 Greene (1986), p. 14.
57 Howells (1996), pp. 126, 127.
58 Howells (1996), p. 137.
59 Yamamoto (2006), pp. 199, 203.
60 Allan Weiss, ‘Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en Literature
Canadienne 34.1 (2009), p. 120.
61 J. Broooks Bouson, Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative
Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1993), p. 154.
62 Weiss (2009), p. 137.
162 Notes

63 Patricia A. Stapleton, ‘Suicide as Apocalypse in The Handmaid’s Tale’, in Karma

Waltonen (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2015), pp. 35, 38.
64 Neuman (2006), p. 864.
65 Neuman (2006), p. 864.
66 Rigney (1987), pp. 115, 116, 120.
67 Howells (2006), p. 165.
68 Stapleton (2015), p. 38.
69 Arnold E. Davidson, ‘Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid’s Tale’, in
Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro (eds), Margaret Atwood: Visions
and Forms (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1988), p. 113.
70 Davidson (1988), p. 114.
71 Rothstein (1986).
72 Hilde Staels, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through
Narrating’, English Studies 76.5 (1995), p. 464.
73 Staels (1995), pp. 456, 464.
74 Howells (1996), p. 146.
75 Davidson (1988), pp. 119, 120.
76 Howells (1996), pp. 146, 135, 147, 146.

Chapter 4

1 Marion Wynne-Davies, Margaret Atwood (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2010),

pp. 5, 44.
2 Karen Stein, Margaret Atwood Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1999), p. 86.
3 Alice M. Palumbo, ‘On the Border: Margaret Atwood’s Novels’, in Reingard M.
Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (Rochester: Camden House,
2000), pp. 81–2.
4 Barbara Hill Rigney, ‘Alias Atwood: Narrative Games and Gender Politics’, in
Reingard M. Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (Rochester:
Camden House, 2000), p. 161.
5 Margaret Atwood, ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behaviour
in the Creation of Literature’, Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970–2005
(London: Virago, 2005), p. 172.
6 Atwood (2005), p. 180.
7 Atwood (2005), p. 185.
8 Wynne-Davies (2010), pp. 42, 6.
9 Earl G. Ingersoll, ‘Waltzing Again’, in Earl G. Ingersoll (ed.), Margaret Atwood:
Conversations (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990), p. 236.
 Notes 163

10 Molly Hite, ‘Optics and Autobiography in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’, Twentieth
Century Literature 41.2 (Summer 1995), p. 136.
11 Ingersoll (1990), p. 236.
12 Julie Brown, ‘Our Ladies of Perpetual Hell: Witches and Fantastic Virgins in
Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 4.3 (1991), p. 40.
13 Chinmoy Banerjee, ‘Atwood’s Time: Hiding Art in Cat’s Eye’, MFS: Modern Fiction
Studies 36.4 (Winter 1990), p. 513.
14 Laura Martocci, ‘Girl World and Bullying: Intersubjective Shame in Margaret
Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’, in Patricia Moran and Erica L. Johnson (eds), The Female Face
of Shame (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 150.
15 Hite (1995), p. 138.
16 Hite (1995), p. 139.
17 Martocci (2016), p. 153.
18 Kiriaki Massoura, ‘“I Look At It and See My Life Entire”: Language, Third-Eye
Vision and Painting in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’, British Journal of Canadian
Studies 17.2 (September 2004), p. 211.
19 Banerjee (1990), p. 516.
20 Banerjee (1990), p. 517.
21 Banerjee (1990), p. 516.
22 Wynne-Davies (2010), p. 47.
23 Banerjee (1990), p. 520.
24 Marta Dvorak, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye: or the Trembling Canvas’, Études
Anglaises 54.3 (2001), p. 300.
25 Earl G. Ingersoll, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye: Re-Viewing Women in a
Postmodern World’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 22.4
(October 1991), pp. 17, 19.
26 Hite (1995), p. 135.
27 Hite (1995), p. 153.
28 Margaret Atwood, On Writers and Writing. 2002 (London: Virago, 2003).
29 Wynne-Davies (2010), p. 46.
30 Ingersoll (1991), p. 19.
31 Stein (1999), pp. 88, 87.
32 Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York:
Knopf, 1998), p. 7.
33 Stein (1999), p. 90.
34 Salman Rushdie, ‘The Best Fears of Our Lives: The Robber Bride’, Review. The
Independent, 17 October 1993. https://www​.independent​.co​.uk​/arts​-entertainment​
/book​-review​-the​-best​-fears​-of​-our​-lives​-the​-robber​-bride​-margaret​-atwood​
-bloomsbury​-1499​-pounds​-1511278​.html. Accessed 18 December 2018.
35 Dvorak (2001), p. 300.
36 Ingersoll (1990), p. 236.
164 Notes

37 Hite (1995), p. 137.

38 Ingersoll (1991), p. 21.
39 Hite (1995), p. 145.
40 Ingersoll (1991), p. 21.
41 Ingersoll (1991), p. 21.
42 Hite (1995), p. 145.
43 Massoura (2004), p. 212.
44 Massoura (2004), p. 212.
45 Wynne-Davies (2010), p. 51.
46 Brown (1991), p. 42.
47 Massoura (2004), p. 210.
48 Dvorak (2001), p. 300.
49 Sharon R. Wilson, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Visual Art’, Essays on Canadian Writing 50
(Fall 1993), p. 129.
50 Reingard M. Nischik, Engendering Gender: The Works of Margaret Atwood (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2009).
51 Brown (1991), pp. 40–1.
52 Brown (1991), p. 46.
53 Dvorak (2001), p. 300.
54 Massoura (2004), p. 210.
55 Dvorak (2001), p. 305.
56 Hite (1995), pp. 139, 164.
57 Wynne-Davies (2010), p. 48.
58 Lorraine York, ‘Biography/Autobiography’, in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), p. 36.
59 Donna Bontatibus, ‘Reconnecting with the Past: Personal Hauntings in Margaret
Atwood’s the Robber Bride’, Papers on Language and Literature 34 (1998), p. 359.
60 Donna L. Potts, ‘“The Old Maps are Dissolving”: Intertextuality and Identity in
Atwood’s The Robber Bride’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18.2 (Autumn
1999), p. 281.
61 J. Brooks Bouson, ‘Slipping Sideways into the Dreams of Women: The Female
Dream Work of Power Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride’, Lit:
Literature Interpretation Theory 6.3–4 (1995), p. 151.
62 Laurie Vickroy, ‘You’re History: Living with Trauma in The Robber Bride’, in J.
Brooks Bouson (ed.), Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx
and Crake (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 57.
63 Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, ‘Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Vampire as
Intersubjective Catalyst’, Mosaic 30.3 (September 1997), p. 167.
64 Rushdie (1993), n.p.
65 Bouson (1995), p. 151.
 Notes 165

66 Vickroy (2010), p. 50.

67 Roxanne J. Fand, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Dialogic Moral of a
Nietzschean Fairy Tale’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45.1 (2003),
p. 68.
68 Fand (2003), p. 73.
69 Vickroy (2010), p. 53.
70 Hilde Staels, ‘Parodic Border Crossings in The Robber Bride’, in J. Brooks Bouson
(ed.) Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake
(London: Continuum, 2010), p. 39.
71 Fand (2003), p. 69.
72 Fand (2003), p. 72.
73 Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st
Century (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 136.
74 Bouson (1995), pp. 149–50.
75 Rigney (2000), p. 163.
76 Stein (1999), p. 96.
77 Bouson (1995), p. 150.
78 Jean Wyatt, ‘I Want to be You: Envy, the Lacanian Double, and Feminist
Community in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s
Literature 17.1 (Spring 1998), pp. 37, 38, 52.
79 Wyatt (1998), pp. 52, 59.
80 Sharon R. Wilson, ‘Mythological Intertexts in Margaret Atwood’s Work’, in Reingard
M. Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (Rochester: Camden House,
2000), p. 224.
81 Fand (2003), p. 73.
82 Staels (2010), pp. 36, 38, 40.
83 Stein (1999), pp. 40, 41, 42.
84 Wilson (2000), p. 224.
85 Palumbo (2000), p. 83.
86 Rigney (2000), p. 162.
87 Staels (2010), p. 43.
88 Palumbo (2000), pp. 82–3.
89 Bouson (1995), p. 151.
90 Eleonora Rao, ‘Home and Nation in Margaret Atwood’s Later Fiction’, in Coral
Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 102, 103.
91 Jennifer Murray, ‘Questioning the Triple Goddess: Myth and Meaning in Margaret
Atwood’s The Robber Bride’, Canadian Literature 173 (Summer 2002), pp. 72–90.
92 Rao (2006), p. 106.
93 Stein (1990), p. 102.
94 Wyatt (1998), p. 58.
166 Notes

95 Bouson (1995), p. 162.

96 Bouson (1995), p. 161.
97 Fand (2003), p. 72.
98 Fand (2003), p. 75.

Chapter 5

1 Coral Ann Howells, ‘Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret

Atwood’s Novels’, in Reingard M. Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and
Impact (Rochester: Camden House, 2000), p. 153.
2 Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: The Psychoanalysis
of Duplicity’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (Fall 2004), p. 681.
3 Barbara Hill Rigney, ‘Alias Atwood: Narrative Games and Gender Politics’, in
Reingard M. Nischik (ed.) Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (Rochester:
Camden House, 2000), p. 157.
4 Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, ‘The Eroticism of Class and the Enigma of Margaret
Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22.2 (Autumn 2003), p. 380.
5 Karen Stein, ‘Talking Back to Bluebeard: Atwood’s Fictional Storytellers’, in Sharon
Rose Wilson (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and
Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003a), p. 164.
6 Margaret Atwood, ‘Author’s Afterword’, in Alias Grace (London: Virago, 1997), p. 539.
7 Sharon Rose Wilson, ‘Quilting as Narrative Art: Metafictional Construction in
Alias Grace’, in Sharon Rose Wilson (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations:
Recent Poetry and Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), p. 122.
8 Stanley (2003), p. 372.
9 Jackie Shead, Margaret Atwood: Crime Fiction Writer – The Reworking of a Popular
Genre (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 87.
10 Alison Toron, ‘The Model Prisoner: Reading Confinement in Alias Grace’, Canadian
Literature 208 (Spring 2011), p. 16.
11 Stanley (2003), p. 372.
12 Lorraine York, ‘Biography/Autobiography’, in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), pp. 36, 37.
13 Karen Stein, Margaret Atwood Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1999), p. 103.
14 Wilson (2003), p. 121.
15 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1988), p. 5.
16 Jennifer Murray, ‘Historical Figures and Paradoxical Patterns: The Quilting
Metaphor in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Studies in Canadian Literature 26.1
(March 2001), p. 64.
 Notes 167

17 Margaret Atwood, ‘In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical

Fiction’, The American Historical Review 103.5 (December 1998), pp. 1504–5.
18 Shead (2015), p. 88.
19 Wilson (2003), pp. 122–3.
20 Toron (2011), p. 15.
21 Maria J. Lopez, ‘“You Are One of Us”: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability,
and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’, ESC: English Studies in Canada 38.2
(June 2012), p. 158.
22 Stanley (2003), pp. 371, 373, 374.
23 Marlene Goldman, DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction (Montreal &
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), pp. 149, 152.
24 Stanley (2003), pp. 376, 383.
25 Murray (2001), p. 65.
26 Hutcheon (1988), p. 122.
27 Wilson (2003), p. 122.
28 Murray (2001), p. 66.
29 Wilson (2003), p. 125.
30 Murray (2001), p. 79.
31 Magali Cornier Michael, ‘Rethinking History as Patchwork: The Case of Atwood’s
Alias Grace’, Modern Fiction Studies 47.2 (Summer 2001), p. 426.
32 Wilson (2003), p. 125.
33 Michael (2001), p. 421.
34 Michael (2001), p. 425.
35 Michael (2001), p. 441.
36 Wilson (2003), p. 123.
37 Murray (2001), p. 81.
38 Shead (2015), p. 88.
39 Earl Ingersoll, ‘Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind
Assassin’, Studies in the Novel 35.4 (Winter 2003), p. 543.
40 Hilde Staels, ‘Intertexts of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Modern Fiction Studies
46.2 (Summer 2000), p. 428.
41 Staels (2000), p. 432.
42 John O’Neill, ‘Dying in a State of Grace: Memory, Duality and Uncertainty in
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Textual Practice 27.4 (2013), pp. 663, 655.
43 Shead (2015), pp. 94, 96, 89.
44 Alan Robinson, ‘“Alias Laura”: Representations of the Past in Margaret
Atwood’s The Blind Assassin’, The Modern Language Review 101.2 (April 2006),
p. 348.
45 Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood. 2nd edn. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), p. 155.
168 Notes

46 Karen Stein, ‘A Left-Handed Story: The Blind Assassin’, in Sharon Rose Wilson (ed.),
Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 2003b), p. 136.
47 Stein (2003b), p. 135.
48 Marta Dvorak, ‘The Right Hand Writing and the Left Hand Erasing in Margaret
Atwood’s The Blind Assassin’, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 25.1 (Autumn
2002), p. 60.
49 Howells (2005), p. 156.
50 Robinson (2006), p. 348.
51 Ingersoll (2003), p. 543.
52 Howells (2005), p. 159.
53 Stein (2003b), p. 139.
54 Howells (2005), p. 159.
55 Stein (2003b), p. 148.
56 Robinson (2006), p. 349.
57 Howells (2005), pp. 155, 156.
58 Alice Ridout, ‘“Without Memory, There Can Be No Revenge”: Iris Chase Griffen’s
Textual Revenge in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin’, Margaret Atwood Studies
2.2 (December 2008), pp. 14–15.
59 Sharon R. Wilson, ‘Blindness and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Major Novels’,
in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 185.
60 Ridout (2008), pp. 16, 23.
61 Dvorak (2002), pp. 59, 68.
62 Dvorak (2002), p. 60.
63 Dvorak (2002), p. 68.
64 Ingersoll (2003), p. 544.
65 Ingersoll (2003), p. 546.
66 Ingersoll (2003), p. 549.
67 Ingersoll (2003), p. 555.
68 Dvorak (2002), p. 65.
69 Robinson (2006), p. 347.
70 Howells (2005), p. 156.
71 Ingersoll (2003), p. 554.
72 Stein (2003b), pp. 138, 137.
73 Stein (2003b), p. 151.
74 Hilde Staels, ‘The Penelopiad and Weight: Contemporary Parodic and Burlesque
Transformations of Classical Myths’, College Literature 6.4 (Fall 2009), p. 106.
75 Coral Ann Howells, ‘“We Can’t Help but Be Modern”: The Penelopiad’, in S. A.
Appleton (ed.), Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret
Atwood’s Writings (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), p. 65.
 Notes 169

76 Fiona Tolan, ‘Atwood’s Revision of Classic Texts’, in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2021).
77 Susanne Jung, ‘“A Chorus Line”: Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad at the Crossroads of
Narrative, Poetic and Dramatic Genres’, Connotations 24.1 (2014/2015), p. 42.
78 Phyllida Lloyd, ‘She’s Left Holding the Fort’, The Guardian, 26 October 2005. www​
.guardian​.co​.uk​/stage​/2005​/oct​/26​/theatre​.classics. Accessed 9 February 2019.
79 Earl G. Ingersoll, ‘Flirting with Tragedy: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and the
Play of the Text’, Intertexts 12.1–2 (Spring 2008), p. 111.
80 Ingersoll (2008), p. 112.
81 Jung (2014/2015), p. 44.
82 Ingersoll (2008), pp. 118, 125.
83 Tolan (2021), n.p.
84 Howells (2008), pp. 59, 62, 57.
85 Jung (2014/2015), p. 58.
86 Howells (2008), p. 64.
87 Mihoko Suzuki, ‘Rewriting the Odyssey in the Twenty-First Century: Mary
Zimmerman’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad’, College Literature 34.2
(Spring 2007), pp. 270, 275, 272.
88 Susanna Braund, “‘We’re Here Too, the Ones Without Names.” A Study of Female
Voices as Imagined by Margaret Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, and Marguerite
Yourcenar,’ Classical Reception Journal, 4.2 (2012), p. 190.
89 Braund (2012), p. 194.
90 Braund (2012), p. 206.
91 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms
(London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 32.
92 Staels (2009), p. 101.
93 Staels (2009), pp. 104, 106.
94 Staels (2009), p. 106.
95 Suzuki (2007), p. 269.

Chapter 6

1 Elaine Showalter, ‘The Snowman Cometh’, London Review of Books 25.14 (24
July 2003). https://www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/v25​/n14​/elaine​-showalter​/the​-snowman​
-cometh n.p.
2 Coral Ann Howells, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale
and Oryx and Crake’, in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Margaret Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 161.
170 Notes

3 Shannon Hengen, ‘Margaret Atwood and Environmentalism’, in Coral Ann

Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 80.
4 Miles Weafer, ‘Writing from the Margin: Victim Positions in Atwood’s The Year
of the Flood’, in Karma Waltonen (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses (Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), pp. 57–8.
5 Showalter (2003), n.p.
6 Natasha Walter, ‘Pigoons Might Fly’, The Guardian, 10 May 2003. https://www​
.theguardian​.com​/books​/2003​/may​/10​/bookerprize2003​.bookerprize n.p.
7 Susan Squier, ‘A Tale Meant to Inform, Not to Amuse’, Science 302.5648 (14
November 2003), pp. 1154–5.
8 Anthony Griffiths, ‘Genetics according to Oryx and Crake’, Canadian Literature 181
(2004), p. 192.
9 Griffiths (2004), p. 194.
10 Lee Rozelle, ‘Liminal Ecologies in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, Canadian
Literature 206 (Autumn 2010), p. 63.
11 J. Brooks Bouson, ‘“It’s Game Over Forever”: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a
Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake’, Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 39.3 (September 2004), p. 140.
12 Rozelle (2010), p. 69.
13 Hengen (2006), p. 83.
14 Bouson (2004), p. 139.
15 Katherine V. Snyder, ‘“Time to Go”: The Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, Studies in the Novel 43.4 (Winter 2011), p. 471.
16 Walter (2003), n.p.
17 Berthold Schoene, ‘Getting World Going in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’,
Senses and Society 8.1 (2013), p. 98.
18 Gerry Canavan, ‘Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of
the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood’, LIT:
Literature Interpretation Theory 23.2 (2012), p. 140.
19 Snyder (2011), p. 482.
20 Showalter (2003), n.p.
21 Bouson (2004), p. 147.
22 Bouson (2004), p. 141.
23 Rozelle (2010), p. 63.
24 Stephen Dunning, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the
Theraputic’, Canadian Literature 186 (2005), p. 86.
25 Howells (2006), p. 169.
26 Schoene (2013), p. 98.
27 Sven Birkerts, ‘Present at the Re-Creation’, The New York Times, 18 May 2003. https://
www​.nytimes​.com​/2003​/05​/18​/books​/present​-at​-the​-re​-creation​.html n.p.
 Notes 171

28 Howells (2006), p. 170.

29 Snyder (2011), p. 472.
30 Shuli Barzilai, ‘“Tell My Story”: Remembrance and Revenge in Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary
Fiction 50.1 (Fall 2008), p. 88.
31 Bouson (2004), p. 145.
32 Showalter (2003), n.p.
33 Bouson (2004), p. 146.
34 Chien-Hung Chen, ‘Micro-biopolitics at the End of the Anthropocene: Margaret
Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy’, Mosaic 51.3 (September 2018), p. 189.
35 Lorrie Moore, ‘Bioperversity: Margaret Atwood’s Genetically Engineered
Nightmare’, The New Yorker, 19 May 2003. https://www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​
/2003​/05​/19​/bioperversity n.p.
36 Howells (2006), p. 170.
37 Barzilai (2008), p. 108.
38 Moore (2003), n.p.
39 Bouson (2004), p. 140.
40 Bouson (2004), pp. 141, 151.
41 Canavan (2012), p. 152.
42 Rozelle (2010), p. 63.
43 Rozelle (2010), p. 64.
44 Earl G. Ingersoll, ‘Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel, Oryx and Crake’,
Extrapolation 45.2 (2004), p 167.
45 Rozelle (2010), p. 70.
46 Schoene (2013), p. 101.
47 Rozelle (2010), p. 71.
48 Snyder (2011), p. 471.
49 Snyder (2011), p. 473.
50 Anna Bedford, ‘Survival in the Post-Apocalypse: Ecofeminism in MaddAddam’,
in Karma Waltonen (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars, 2015), pp. 76, 80.
51 Danette DiMarco, ‘Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: homo faber and the Makings
of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake’, Papers on Language and Literature 41.2
(2005), pp. 170, 188, 171.
52 Dunning (2005), pp. 87, 89, 94.
53 Dunning (2005), p. 95.
54 Dunning (2005), p. 98.
55 Schoene (2013), p. 98.
56 Hannes Bergthaller, ‘Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the
Problem of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the
Flood’, English Studies 91.7 (November 2010), p. 738.
172 Notes

57 J. Brooks Bouson, ‘“We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”: A Return to the
Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood’, Journal of
Commonwealth Literature 46.1 (2011), p. 10.
58 Debrah Raschke, ‘Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Postmodernism,
Apocalypse, and Rapture’, Studies in Canadian Literature 39.2 (2014), p. 22.
59 Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood’, The Guardian,
29 August 2009. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2009​/aug​/29​/margaret​
-atwood​-year​-of​-flood. n.p.
60 Gillian Beer, ‘Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood’, The Globe and
Mail, 11 September 2009. https://www​.theglobeandmail​.com​/arts​/books​-and​
-media​/review​-the​-year​-of​-the​-flood​-by​-margaret​-atwood​/article4292431/. n.p.
61 Richard Alan Northover, ‘Ecological Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s
MaddAddam Trilogy’, Studia Neophilologica 88 (2016), p. 83.
62 Dana Phillips, ‘Collapse, Resilience, Stability and Sustainability in Margaret
Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy’, in Adeline Johns-Putra, John Parham and Louise
Squires (eds), Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 147.
63 Bergthaller (2010), p. 738.
64 Jeanette Winterson, ‘Strange New World’, The New York Times, 17 September 2009.
https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2009​/09​/20​/books​/review​/Winterson​-t​.html. n.p.
65 Bonnie Greer, ‘The Year of the Flood’, New Statesman, 17 September 2009. https://
www​.newstatesman​.com​/books​/2009​/09​/flood​-atwood​-novel​-crake​-world. n.p.
66 Gina Wisker, Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 176.
67 Beer (2009), n.p.
68 Susan Watkins, ‘Future Shock: Rewriting the Apocalypse in Contemporary
Women’s Fiction’, Literature Interpretation Theory 23.2 (2012), p. 122.
69 Fredric Jameson, ‘Then You Are Them’, London Review of Books 31.17 (10
September 2009), pp. 7–8.
70 Andrew Hoogheem, ‘Secular Apocalypses: Darwinian Criticism and Atwoodian
Floods’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 45.2 (June 2012), p. 59.
71 Bouson (2011), p. 11.
72 Canavan (2012), p. 155.
73 Watkins (2012), p. 119.
74 Watkins (2012), pp. 132, 135.
75 Hengen (2006), p. 83.
76 Howells (2006), p. 170.
77 Winterson (2009), n.p.
78 Winterson (2009), n.p.
79 Bouson (2011), p. 12.
 Notes 173

80 Bouson (2011), p. 13.

81 Bouson (2011), p. 14.
82 Bouson (2011), p. 15.
83 Bergthaller (2010), p. 729.
84 Bergthaller (2010), p. 732.
85 Bergthaller (2010), p. 737.
86 Hoogheem (2012), p. 56.
87 Hoogheem (2012), p. 57.
88 Bergthaller (2010), p. 742.
89 Bouson (2011), p. 23.
90 Bergthaller (2010), p. 741.
91 Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review, 21 May–June 2003. https://
newleftreview​.org​/issues​/II21. n.p.
92 Canavan (2012), p. 139.
93 Raschke (2014), p. 24.
94 Bedford (2015), p. 91.
95 Northover (2016), p. 91.
96 Raschke (2014), p. 23.
97 Northover (2016), p. 82.
98 Northover (2016), p. 85.
99 Raschke (2014), p. 23.
100 Howells (2006), p. 171.
101 Raschke (2014), p. 24.
102 Northover (2016), p. 91.
103 Raschke (2014), p. 23.
104 Raschke (2014), pp. 31–2.
105 Raschke (2014), pp. 27, 29.
106 Hengen (2006), p. 74.
107 Amelia Defalco, ‘MaddAddam, Biocapitalism, and Affective Things’, Contemporary
Women’s Writing 11.3 (November 2017), pp. 434–5.
108 Chen (2018), p. 93.
109 Dunja M. Mohr, ‘Anthropocene Fiction: Narrating the “Zero Hour” in Margaret
Atwood’s MadAddam Trilogy’, in Ursula Mathis-Moser and Marie J. Carrière (eds),
Writing Beyond the End Times? The Literatures of Canada and Quebec (Innsbruck:
Innsbruck University Press, 2017), p. 26.
110 Chen (2018), p. 180.
111 Chen (2018), p. 188.
112 Mohr (2017), pp. 27–8.
113 Raschke (2014), p. 36.
114 Bedford (2015), p. 83.
174 Notes

115 Northover (2016), p. 93.

116 Bedford 92015), p. 88.
117 Northover (2016), p. 94.
118 Phillips (2017), p. 157.
119 Shelley Boyd, ‘Ustopian Breakfasts: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam’, Utopian
Studies 26.1 (2005), p. 162.
120 Mohr (2017), p. 37.

Conclusion

1 Coral Ann Howells, ‘True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited in Margaret Atwood’s
Stone Mattress, The Heart Goes Last, and Hag-Seed’, Contemporary Women’s Writing
11.3 (November 2017), pp. 298–9.
2 Helen Snaith, ‘Dystopia, Gerontology and the Writing of Margaret Atwood’,
Feminist Review 116.1 (2017), p. 119.
3 Snaith (2017), p. 125.
4 Teresa Gibert, ‘The Aesthetics of Ageing in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction’, in Brian
J. Worsfold (ed.), Women Ageing Through Literature and Experience (Lleida:
University of Lleida Press, 2005), pp. 31–42; Pilar Sánchez Calle, ‘Writing, Aging
and Death in Margaret Atwood’s The Door’, ES Review 39 (2018), pp. 135–56; Susan
Watkins, ‘“Summoning Your Youth at Will”: Memory, Time, and Aging in the Work
of Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing’, Frontiers: A Journal of
Women Studies 34.2 (2013), pp. 222–44.
5 Amelia Defalco, ‘Moral Obligation, Disordered Care: The Ethics of Caregiving in
Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder’, Contemporary Literature 52.2 (Summer 2011),
pp. 236–63.
6 Fiona Tolan, ‘Ageing and Subjectivity in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction’, Contemporary
Women’s Writing 11.3 (November 2017), p. 337.
7 Fiona Tolan, ‘“I Could Say That Too”: An Interview with Margaret Atwood’,
Contemporary Women’s Writing 11.3 (November 2017), p. 455.
8 Lionel Shriver, ‘The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood’, The Financial Times,
25 September 2015. https://www​.ft​.com​/content​/bd29a288​-5e2b​-11e5​-9846​
-de406ccb37f2. n.p.
9 Howells (2017), p. 305.
10 Tim Engles, White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature
(Cham: Springer, 2018), pp. 225, 224.
11 Engles (2018), p. 229.
12 Howells (2017), p. 306.
 Notes 175

13 Fiona Tolan, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Rewriting of Classic Texts’, in Coral Ann Howells
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd edn. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2021).
14 Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso, ‘Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 2016: Margaret
Atwood’s Rewriting of The Tempest in Hag-Seed’, Sederi – Yearbook of the Spanish
and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies 27 (2017), p. 125.
15 Philip Smith, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Tempests: Critiques of Shakespearian Essentialism
in Bodily Harm and Hag-Seed’, Margaret Atwood Studies 11 (2017), pp. 30, 33.
16 Susan Watkins, ‘Review: The Testaments – Margaret Atwood’s Sequel to The
Handmaid’s Tale’, The Conversation, 12 September 2019. https://theconversation​
.com​/review​-the​-testaments​-margaret​-atwoods​-sequel​-to​-the​-handmaids​-tale​
-123465. n.p.
17 Sophie Gilbert, ‘Margaret Atwood Bears Witness’, The Atlantic, December 2019.
https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/magazine​/archive​/2019​/12​/margaret​-atwood​-bears​
-witness​/600796/. n.p.
18 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London:
Routledge, 2001), p. 211.
19 Susanne Becker, ‘Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and
the Media’, in Reingard M. Nischik (ed.) Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact
(Rochester: Camden House, 2000), pp. 28–40.
20 Huggan (2001), p. 210.
21 Laura Moss, ‘Margaret Atwood: Branding a Canadian Abroad’, in John Moss and
Tobi Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye (Ottawa: University of
Ottawa Press, 2006), pp. 19–33.
22 Lorraine York, Literary Celebrity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2007), p. 101.
23 Lorraine York, Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 24, 195.
 Select bibliography

Works by Atwood

(Where applicable, details are given of editions used for quotations in this guide.)

Novels
The Edible Woman. 1969 (London: Virago, 1988).
Surfacing. 1972 (London: Virago, 1979).
Lady Oracle. 1976 (London: Virago, 1982).
Life Before Man. 1979 (London: Vintage, 1996).
Bodily Harm. 1981 (London: Vintage, 1996).
The Handmaid’s Tale. 1985 (London: Vintage, 1996).
Cat’s Eye. 1988 (London: Virago, 1990).
The Robber Bride. 1993 (London: Virago, 1994).
Alias Grace. 1996 (London: Virago, 1997).
The Blind Assassin. 2000 (London: Virago, 2001).
Oryx and Crake. 2003 (London: Virago, 2009).
The Penelopiad (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005).
The Year of the Flood (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).
MaddAddam (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
The Heart Goes Last (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
Hag-Seed. 2016 (London: Vintage, 2017).
The Testaments (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

Short stories
Dancing Girls and Other Stories. 1977 (London: Vintage, 1996).
Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories. 1983 (London: Vintage, 1996).
Murder in the Dark. 1983 (London: Virago, 1994).
Wilderness Tips. 1991 (London: Bloomsbury, 1995).
Good Bones (London: Virago, 1992).
Moral Disorder (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).
The Tent (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).
Stone Mattress (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
 Select Bibliography 177

Poetry
Double Persephone (Toronto: Hawkshead Press, 1961).
The Circle Game. 1964 (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1967).
The Animals in That Country. 1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Procedures for Underground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Power Politics (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971).
You Are Happy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
Two-Headed Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
True Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Interlunar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Morning in the Burned House (London: Virago, 1995).
Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965–1995 (London: Virago, 1998).
The Door (London: Virago, 2007).
Dearly (London: Chatto & Windus, 2020).

Non-fiction
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. 1972 (Toronto: House of Anansi,
2012).
Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1982).
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995).
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004 (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2004).
Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing (London: Virago, 2005).
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005 (New York: Carroll &
Graf, 2005).
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2008).
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (London: Virago, 2011).

Graphic novels
Angel Catbird, with Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain (Milwaukie: Dark Horse
Books, 2016)
Angel Catbird: To Castle Catula, with Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain
(Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 2017).
Angel Catbird: The Catbird Roars, with Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain
(Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 2017).
178 Select Bibliography

War Bears. Vols. 1–3, with Ken Steacy (Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 2018).
The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, with Renée Nault (London: Jonathan Cape,
2019).

Children’s fiction
Up in the Tree (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978).
Anna’s Pet, with Joyce Barkhouse (Halifax: Lorimer, 1980).
For the Birds (Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990).
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (New York: Workman Publishing, 1995).
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (London: Bloomsbury, 2003).
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).
Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop’s Wunderground Washery (Toronto: McArthur,
2011).

Books about Atwood

Appleton, Sarah A. Once upon A Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret
Atwood’s Writings (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008).
Beran, Carol. Living Over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood’s Life before Man (Toronto: ECW,
1993).
Bouson, Brooks J. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in
the Novels of Margaret Atwood (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).
Bouson, Brooks J (ed.). Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx
and Crake (London: Continuum, 2010).
Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Margaret Atwood and Her Works (Toronto: ECW Press,
1987).
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography (Toronto: ECW Press, 1998).
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion (Westport: Greenwood,
2004).
Davey, Frank. Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984).
Davidson, Arnold E. and Cathy N. Davidson (eds) The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays
in Criticism (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1981).
Fee, Marjorie. The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (Toronto: ECW,
1993).
Grace, Sherrill. Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood (Montreal: Véhicule Press,
1980).
Grace, Sherrill and Lorraine Weir (eds). Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983).
 Select Bibliography 179

Hengen, Shannon. Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors, Reflections and Images in Select
Fiction and Poetry (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1993).
Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. 2nd edn (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005).
Howells, Coral Ann (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Howells, Coral Ann (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd edn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Ingersoll, Earl G. Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Princeton: Ontario Review Press,
1990).
Ingersoll, Earl G. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret
Atwood (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 2006).
Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
McCombs, Judith (ed.). Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988).
McWilliams, Ellen. Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009).
Mendez-Egles, Beatrice. Margaret Atwood: Reflection and Reality (Edinburg: Pan
American University Press, 1987).
Moss, John and Tobi Kozakewich (eds). Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2006).
Nicholson, Colin (ed.). Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).
Nischik, Reingard M (ed.). Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (Toronto: House of
Anansi, 2002).
Nischik, Reingard M. Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2009).
Rao, Eleonora. Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood (New York: Peter
Lang, 1993).
Reynolds, Margaret. Margaret Atwood: The Essential Guide to Contemporary Literature
(London: Vintage, 2002).
Reynolds, Margaret and Jonathan Noakes. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale,
Bluebeard’s Egg, The Blind Assassin (London: Vintage, 2012).
Rigney, Barbara Hill. Margaret Atwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood (Boston: Twayne, 1984).
Shead, Jackie. Margaret Atwood: Crime Fiction Writer – The Reworking of a Popular
Genre (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
Sheckels, Theodore F. The Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: The Writing on the Wall
of the Tent (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
Stein, Karen. Margaret Atwood Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1999).
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out (Toronto:
HarperCollins, 1998).
180 Select Bibliography

Tennant, Colette. Reading the Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s Novels (New York: Edwin
Mellen, 2003).
Tolan, Fiona. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).
VanSpanckeren, Kathryn and Jan Garden Castro (eds). Margaret Atwood: Vision and
Forms (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988).
Waltonen, Karma (ed.). Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars, 2015).
Wells-Lassagne, Shannon and Fiona McMahon (eds). Adapting Margaret Atwood: The
Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (Jackson: University
of Mississippi Press, 1993).
Wilson, Sharon Rose (ed.). Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and
Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003).
Wisker, Gina. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2010).
Wisker, Gina. Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Wynne-Davies, Marion. Margaret Atwood (Tavistockl: Northcote House, 2009).
York, Lorraine. Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2013).

Books with substantial discussion of Atwood

Banerjee, Suparna. Science, Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and
Margaret Atwood (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014).
Engles, Tim. White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature (Cham:
Springer, 2018).
Goldman, Marlene. DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction (Montreal & Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).
Howells, Coral Ann. Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction: Refiguring Identities
(Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003).
Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge,
2001).
Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works
of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women Writers
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007).
Ridout, Alice. Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia
(London: Continuum, 2012).
Sceats, Sarah. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
 Select Bibliography 181

Sheckels, Theodore F. The Island Motif in the Fiction of L.M. Montgomery, Margaret
Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and other Canadian Women Novelists (New York: Peter
Lang, 2003).
Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-
Century Literature (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2007).
Watkins, Susan. Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2020).
York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

Book chapters and critical essays

General, or covering more than one title

Becker, Susanne. ‘Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and
the Media’, in Reingard M. Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact
(Rochester: Camden House, 2000), pp. 28–40.
Gibert, Teresa. ‘The Aesthetics of Ageing in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction’, in Brian J.
Worsfold (ed.), Women Ageing Through Literature and Experience (Lleida: University
of Lleida Press, 2005), pp. 31–42.
Hengen, Shannon. ‘Margaret Atwood and Environmentalism’, in Coral Ann Howells
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 72–85.
Howells, Coral Ann. ‘Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s
Novels’, in Reingard M. Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact
(Rochester: Camden House, 2000), pp. 139–53.
Howells, Coral Ann. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and
Oryx and Crake’, in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret
Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 161–75.
Howells, Coral Ann. ‘True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited in Margaret Atwood’s Stone
Mattress, The Heart Goes Last, and Hag-Seed’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 11.3
(November 2017), pp. 297–315.
Irvine, Lorna. ‘Murder and Mayhem: Margaret Atwood Deconstructs’, Contemporary
Literature 29.2 (Summer 1988), pp. 265–76.
Moss, Laura. ‘Margaret Atwood: Branding a Canadian Abroad’, in John Moss and Tobi
Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye (Ottawa: University of Ottawa
Press, 2006), pp. 19–33.
Palumbo, Alice M. ‘On the Border: Margaret Atwood’s Novels’, in Reingard M. Nischik
(ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (Rochester: Camden House, 2000), pp. 81–2.
Parker, Emma. ‘You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret
Atwood’, Twentieth Century Literature 41.3 (Autumn 1995), pp. 349–68.
182 Select Bibliography

Rao, Eleonora. ‘Home and Nation in Margaret Atwood’s Later Fiction’, in Coral
Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 100–13.
Sanchez-Grant, Sofia. ‘The Female Body in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman
and Lady Oracle’, Journal of International Women’s Studies 9.2 (March 2008),
pp. 77–92.
Smith, Philip. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Tempests: Critiques of Shakespearian Essentialism in
Bodily Harm and Hag-Seed’, Margaret Atwood Studies 11 (2017), pp. 29–40.
Snaith, Helen. ‘Dystopia, Gerontology and the Writing of Margaret Atwood’, Feminist
Review 116.1 (2017), pp. 118–32.
Stein, Karen. ‘Talking Back to Bluebeard: Atwood’s Fictional Storytellers’, in Sharon
Rose Wilson (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and
Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), pp. 154–71.
Tolan, Fiona. ‘Ageing and Subjectivity in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction’, Contemporary
Women’s Writing 11.3 (November 2017), pp. 336–53.
Tolan, Fiona. ‘Atwood’s Revision of Classic Texts’, in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2021).
Wilson, Sharon R. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Visual Art’, Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (Fall
1993), pp. 129–73.
Wilson, Sharon R. ‘Mythological Intertexts in Margaret Atwood’s Work’, in Reingard
M. Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (Rochester: Camden House,
2000), pp. 215–28.
Wilson, Sharon R. ‘Blindness and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Major Novels’, in Coral
Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 176–90.
York, Lorraine ‘Biography/Autobiography’, in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
pp. 28–42.

About The Edible Woman

Bajwa, Poonam. ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and the Commercialization
of Literary Scholarship’, Studies in Canadian Literature 35.2 (2010),
pp. 145–64.
Bouson, Brooks J. ‘The Anxiety of Being Influenced: Reading and Responding
to Character in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman’, Style 24.2 (July 1990),
pp. 228–41.
Greene, Gayle. ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman: “Rebelling Against the System”’,
in Beatrice Mendez-Egle (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Reflection and Reality (Edinburg:
Pan American University Press, 1987), pp. 95–115.
 Select Bibliography 183

MacLulich, T. D. ‘Atwood’s Adult Fairy Tale: Lévi-Strauss, Bettelheim, and The Edible
Woman’, in Judith McCombs (ed.) Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood (Boston: G.K.
Hall, 1988), pp. 179–97.
McLay, Catherine. ‘The Dark Voyage: The Edible Woman as Romance’, in Arnold E.
Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (eds), The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in
Criticism (Toronto: Anansi, 1981), pp. 123–38.
Patterson, Jayne. ‘The Taming of Externals: A Linguistic Study of Character
Transformation in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman’, Studies in Canadian
Literature 7.2 (Summer 1982), pp. 141–50.

About Surfacing
Christ, Carol. ‘Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and Vision’,
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2.2 (Winter 1976), pp. 316–30.
Davidson, Arnold E. and Cathy N. Davidson. ‘The Anatomy of Margaret Atwood’s
Surfacing’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 10.3 (July 1979), pp.
38–54.
Fiamengo, Janice. ‘“It Looked at Me with Its Mashed Eye”: Animal and Human Suffering
in Surfacing’, in John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The Open
Eye (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), pp. 171–84.
Granofsky, Ronald. ‘Fairy-Tale Morphology in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing’, Mosaic
23.4 (1990), pp. 51–65.
Kapuscinski, Kiley. ‘Negotiating the Nation: The Reproduction and Reconstruction of
the National Imaginary in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing’, English Studies in Canada
33.3 (September 2007), pp. 95–123.
Murray, Jennifer. ‘For the Love of a Fish: A Lacanian Reading of Margaret Atwood’s
Surfacing’, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 26.1 (2015), pp. 1–21.
Plaskow, Judith. ‘On Carol Christ on Margaret Atwood: Some Theological
Reflections’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2.2 (Winter 1976),
pp. 331–9.
Sugars, Cynthia. ‘“Saying Boo to Colonialism”: Surfacing, Tom Thomson, and the
National Ghost’, in John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The
Open Eye (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), pp. 137–58.
Thomas, Sue. ‘Mythic Reconception and the Mother/Daughter Relationship in Margaret
Atwood’s Surfacing’, Ariel 19.2 (April 1988), pp. 73–85.
Tolan, Fiona. ‘Guilt and Responsibility in the Community and the Self: An Examination
of Mutual Responsibility in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing’, British Journal of
Canadian Studies 17.1 (2004), pp. 105–16.
Trigg, Tina. ‘A Silhouette of Madness: Reading Atwood’s Surfacing’, in John Moss and
Tobi Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye (Ottawa: University of
Ottawa Press, 2006), pp.159–70.
184 Select Bibliography

About Lady Oracle

Barzilai, Shuli. ‘“Say That I Had a Lovely Face”: The Grimms’ “Rapunzel,” Tennyson’s
“Lady of Shalott,” and Atwood’s Lady Oracle’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 19.2
(Autumn 2000), pp. 231–54.
Barzilai, Shuli. ‘The Bluebeard Syndrome in Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Fear and Femininity’,
Marvels & Tales 19.2 (2005), pp. 249–73.
Kozakewich, Tobi. ‘Having It Both Ways? Romance, Realism, and Irony in Lady Oracle’s
Adulterous Affairs’, in John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The
Open Eye (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), pp. 185–94.
Patton, Marilyn. ‘Lady Oracle: The Politics of the Body’, ARIEL: A Review of
International English Literature 22.4 (October 1991), pp. 29–48.
Szalay, Edina. ‘The Gothic as Maternal Legacy in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle’,
Neohelicon 28.1 (2001), pp. 216–33.
Thieme, John. ‘A Female Houdini: Popular Culture in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle’,
Kunapipi 14.1 (1992), pp. 71–80.

About Life Before Man

Afrougheh, Shahram and Kalantari Mandana. ‘A Study of Hélène Cixous’ Concepts of
Neuter and Other in Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man’, International Journal of
Applied Linguistics and English Literature 3.3 (2014), pp. 104–11.
Greene, Gayle. ‘Life Before Man: Can Anything Be Saved?’, in Kathryn VanSpanckeren
and Jan Garden Castro (eds), Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 65–84.
Stein, Karen. ‘It’s About Time: Temporal Dimensions in Margaret Atwood’s Life Before
Man’, in Sarah A. Appleton (ed.), Once upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends
in Margaret Atwood’s Writings (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008),
pp. 95–113.

About Bodily Harm

Brydon, Diana. ‘Atwood’s Postcolonial Imagination: Rereading Bodily Harm’, in
Lorraine M. York (ed.), Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction,
and Novels (Toronto: Anansi, 1995), pp. 89–116.
Drichel, Simone. ‘Regarding the Other: Postcolonial Violations and Ethical Resistance
in Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 54.1 (Spring 2008),
pp. 31–2.
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. ‘Fiction and (Post) Feminism in Atwood’s Bodily Harm’, Novel
19.1 (1985), pp. 5–21.
Irvine, Lorna. ‘The Here and Now of Bodily Harm’, in Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan
Garden Castro (eds), Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 85–100.
 Select Bibliography 185

Lucking, David. ‘In Pursuit of the Faceless Stranger: Depths and Surfaces in Margaret
Atwood’s Bodily Harm’, Studies in Canadian Literature 15.1 (1990), pp. 76–93.
Marantz, Kate. ‘Making It (In)Visible: The Politics of Absence in Margaret Atwood’s
Bodily Harm’, Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en Literature Canadienne 41.2
(2016), p. 138.
Mycak, Sonia. ‘Divided and Dismembered: The Decentred Subject in Margaret
Atwood’s Bodily Harm’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 20.3 (1993),
pp. 469–78.
Patton, Marilyn. ‘Tourists and Terrorists: The Creation of Bodily Harm’, Papers on
Language & Literature 28.2 (Spring 1992), p. 151.
Rubenstein, Roberta. ‘Pandora’s Box and Female Survival: Margaret Atwood’s Bodily
Harm’, in Judith McCombs (ed.), Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood (Boston: G. K.
Hall, 1988), pp. 259–75.

About The Handmaid’s Tale

Davidson, Arnold E. ‘Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid’s Tale’, in Kathryn
VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro (eds), Margaret Atwood: Visions and Forms
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 113–21.
Dvorak, Marta. ‘What is Real/Reel? Margaret Atwood’s “Rearrangement of Shapes on a
Flat Surface,” Or Narrative as Collage’, Études Anglaises 51.4 (October 1988),
pp. 448–60.
Hammer, Stephanie Barbé. ‘The World as It will Be? Satire and Technology of Power in
The Handmaid’s Tale’, Modern Language Studies 20.2 (1990), pp. 39–49.
Hooker, Deborah. ‘(Fl)orality, Gender, and the Environmental Ethos of Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale’, Twentieth Century Literature 52.3 (Fall 2006),
pp. 275–305.
Ingersoll, Earl. ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Echoes of Orwell’, Journal of
the Fantastic in the Arts 5.4 (1993), pp. 64–72.
Klarer, Mario. ‘Orality and Literacy as Gender-Supporting Structures in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Mosaic 28.4 (December 1995), pp. 129–42.
Kröller, Eva-Marie. ‘The Hulu and MGM Television Adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale’,
in Coral Ann Howells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. 2nd
edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 189–205.
Laflen, Angela. ‘“From a Distance it Looks Like Peace”: Reading Beneath the Fascist
Style of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Studies in Canadian
Literature / Études en Literature Canadienne 32.1 (2007), pp. 82–105.
Miner, Madonne. ‘“Trust Me”: Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale’, Twentieth Century Literature 37.2 (Summer 1991),
pp. 148–68.
Neuman, Shirley. ‘“Just a Backlash”: Margaret Atwood, Feminism and The Handmaid’s
Tale’, University of Toronto Quarterly 75.3 (Summer 2006), pp. 857–68.
186 Select Bibliography

Staels, Hilde. ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through Narrating’,
English Studies 76.5 (1995), pp. 455–67.
Stapleton, Patricia A. ‘Suicide as Apocalypse in The Handmaid’s Tale’, in Karma
Waltonen (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2015), pp. 27–39.
Tolan, Fiona. ‘Feminist Utopias and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second Wave Feminism’, Women: A Cultural Review
16.1 (Spring 2005), pp. 18–32.
Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. ‘From Irony to Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45.1 (2003),
pp. 83–96.
Weiss, Allan. ‘Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale’, Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en Literature
Canadienne 34.1 (2009), pp. 120–41.
Yamamoto, Tae. ‘How Can a Feminist Read The Handmaid’s Tale? A Study of Offred’s
Narrative’, in John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich (eds), Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye
(Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), pp. 195–206.

About Cat’s Eye

Banerjee, Chinmoy. ‘Atwood’s Time: Hiding Art in Cat’s Eye’, MFS: Modern Fiction
Studies 36.4 (Winter 1990), pp. 513–22.
De Jong, Nicole. ‘Mirror Images in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’, NORA: Nordic Journal
of Feminist and Gender Research 6.2 (September 1998), pp. 97–107.
Derry, Ken. ‘Blood on the Wall: Christianity, Colonialism, and the Mimetic Conflict
in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’, Religion & Literature 48.3 (Autumn 2016),
pp. 91–112.
Dvorak, Marta. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye: or the Trembling Canvas’, Études
Anglaises 54.3 (2001), pp. 299–309.
Hite, Molly. ‘Optics and Autobiography in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’, Twentieth
Century Literature 41.2 (Summer 1995), pp. 135–59.
Ingersoll, Earl G. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye: Re-Viewing Women in a Postmodern
World’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 22.4 (October 1991),
pp. 17–27.
Massoura, Kiriaki. ‘“I Look at It and See My Life Entire”: Language, Third-Eye Vision
and Painting in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’, British Journal of Canadian Studies
17.2 (September 2004), pp. 210–22.
Potvin, Liza. ‘Voodooism and Female Quest Patters in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’,
Journal of Popular Culture 36.3 (January 2003), pp. 636–50.
Ross, Rob. ‘A Paler Shade of Green: Suburban Nature in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’,
Studies in Canadian Literature 39.1 (2014), pp. 98–120.
 Select Bibliography 187

About The Robber Bride

Bouson, J. Brooks. ‘Slipping Sideways into the Dreams of Women: The Female Dream
Work of Power Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride’, Lit: Literature
Interpretation Theory 6.3–4 (1995), pp. 149–66.
Fand, Roxanne J. ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Dialogic Moral of a Nietzschean
Fairy Tale’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45.1 (2003), pp. 65–81.
Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. ‘Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Vampire as Intersubjective
Catalyst’, Mosaic 30.3 (1997), pp. 151–68.
Potts, Donna L. ‘“The Old Maps are Dissolving”: Intertextuality and Identity in Atwood’s
The Robber Bride’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18.2 (1999), pp. 281–92.
Staels, Hilde. ‘Parodic Border Crossings in The Robber Bride’, in J. Brooks Bouson (ed.),
Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake (London:
Continuum, 2010), pp. 36–49.
Tolan, Fiona. ‘Sucking the Blood Out of Second Wave Feminism: Postfeminist
Vampirism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride’, Gothic Studies 9.2 (November
2007), pp. 45–57.
Vickroy, Laurie. ‘You’re History: Living with Trauma in The Robber Bride’, in J. Brooks
Bouson (ed.), Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and
Crake (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 50–65.
Wyatt, Jean. ‘I Want to be You: Envy, the Lacanian Double, and Feminist Community
in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17.1
(Spring 1998), pp. 37–64.

About Alias Grace

Defalco, Amelia. ‘Haunting Physicality: Corpses, Cannibalism, and Carnality in Margaret
Atwood’s Alias Grace’, University of Toronto Quarterly 75.2 (Spring 2006), pp. 771–83.
Hutchison, Lorna. ‘The Book Reads Well: Atwood’s Alias Grace and the Middle Voice’,
Pacific Coast Philology 38 (2003), pp. 40–59.
Lopez, Maria J. ‘“You are One of Us”: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability, and
Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’, ESC: English Studies in Canada 38.2 (June
2012), pp. 157–77.
Mannon, Bethany Ober. ‘Fictive Memoir and Girlhood Resistance in Margaret Atwood’s
Alias Grace’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.5 (2014), pp. 551–66.
Michael, Magali Cornier. ‘Rethinking History as Patchwork: The Case of Atwood’s Alias
Grace’, Modern Fiction Studies 47.2 (Summer 2001), pp. 421–47.
Murray, Jennifer. ‘Historical Figures and Paradoxical Patterns: The Quilting Metaphor
in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Studies in Canadian Literature 26.1 (Spring 2001),
pp. 64–83.
188 Select Bibliography

O’Neill, John. ‘Dying in a State of Grace: Memory, Duality and Uncertainty in Margaret
Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Textual Practice 27.4 (2013), pp. 651–70.
Staels, Hilde. ‘Intertexts of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Modern Fiction Studies 46.2
(Summer 2000), pp. 427–50.
Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. ‘The Eroticism of Class and the Enigma of Margaret
Atwood’s Alias Grace’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22.2 (Autumn 2003),
pp. 371–86.
Wilson, Sharon Rose. ‘Quilting as Narrative Art: Metafictional Construction in Alias
Grace’, in Sharon Rose Wilson (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations:
Recent Poetry and Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), pp.
121–34.

About The Blind Assassin

Dvorak, Marta. ‘The Right Hand Writing and the Left Hand Erasing in Margaret
Atwood’s The Blind Assassin’, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 25.1 (Autumn
2002), pp. 59–68.
Ingersoll, Earl G. ‘Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind
Assassin’, Studies in the Novel 35.4 (Winter 2003), pp. 543–58.
Michael, Magali Cornier. ‘Narrative Multiplicity and the Multi-layered Self in The Blind
Assassin’, in J. Brooks Bouson (ed.), Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind
Assassin, Oryx and Crake (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 88–102.
Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth. ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: The Psychoanalysis of
Duplicity’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (Fall 2004), pp. 681–700.
Ridout, Alice. ‘“Without Memory, There Can Be No Revenge”: Iris Chase Griffen’s
Textual Revenge in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin’, Margaret Atwood Studies
2.2 (December 2008), pp. 14–25.
Robinson, Alan. ‘“Alias Laura”: Representations of the Past in Margaret Atwood’s The
Blind Assassin’, The Modern Language Review 101.2 (April 2006), pp. 347–59.
Stein, Karen. ‘A Left-Handed Story: The Blind Assassin’, in Sharon Rose Wilson (ed.),
Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 2003), pp. 135–53.
Tolan, Fiona. ‘“Was I My Sister’s Keeper?”: The Blind Assassin and Problematic
Feminisms’, in J. Brooks Bouson (ed.), Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind
Assassin, Oryx and Crake (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 73–87.

About the MaddAddam trilogy

Barzilai, Shuli. ‘“Tell My Story”: Remembrance and Revenge in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx
and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50.1
(Fall 2008), pp. 87–110.
 Select Bibliography 189

Bedford, Anna. ‘Survival in the Post-Apocalypse: Ecofeminism in MaddAddam’, in

Karma Waltonen (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars, 2015), pp. 71–92.
Bergthaller, Hannes. ‘Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the Problem
of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood’,
English Studies 91.7 (November 2010), pp. 728–43.
Bouson, J. Brooks. ‘“It’s Game Over Forever”: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered
Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3
(September 2004), pp. 139–56.
Bouson, J. Brooks. ‘“We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”: A Return to the
Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood’, Journal of
Commonwealth Literature 46.1 (2011), pp. 9–26.
Boyd, Shelley. ‘Ustopian Breakfasts: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam’, Utopian Studies
26.1 (2005), pp. 160–82.
Canavan, Gerry. ‘Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of
the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood’, LIT:
Literature Interpretation Theory 23.2 (2012), pp. 138–59.
Chen, Chien-Hung. ‘Micro-biopolitics at the End of the Anthropocene: Margaret
Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy’, Mosaic 51.3 (September 2018), pp. 179–98.
Defalco, Amelia. ‘MaddAddam, Biocapitalism, and Affective Things’, Contemporary
Women’s Writing 11.3 (November 2017), pp. 432–51.
DiMarco, Danette. ‘Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: Homo faber and the Makings of a
New Beginning in Oryx and Crake’, Papers on Language and Literature 41.2 (2005),
pp. 170–95.
Dunning, Stephen. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic’,
Canadian Literature 186 (2005), pp. 86–101.
Griffiths, Anthony. ‘Genetics according to Oryx and Crake’, Canadian Literature 181
(2004), pp. 192–5.
Hoogheem, Andrew. ‘Secular Apocalypses: Darwinian Criticism and Atwoodian
Floods’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 45.2 (June 2012), pp. 55–71.
Ingersoll, Earl G. ‘Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel, Oryx and Crake’, Extrapolation
45.2 (2004), pp. 162–75.
Mohr, Dunja M. ‘Anthropocene Fiction: Narrating the “Zero Hour” in Margaret
Atwood’s MadAddam Trilogy’, in Ursula Mathis-Moser and Marie J. Carrière (eds),
Writing Beyond the End Times? The Literatures of Canada and Quebec (Innsbruck:
Innsbruck University Press, 2017), pp. 25–45.
Northover, Richard Alan. ‘Ecological Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam
Trilogy’, Studia Neophilologica 88 (2016), pp. 81–95.
Raschke, Debrah. ‘Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Postmodernism,
Apocalypse, and Rapture’, Studies in Canadian Literature 39.2 (2014), pp. 22–44.
Rozelle, Lee. ‘Liminal Ecologies in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, Canadian
Literature 206 (Autumn 2010), pp. 61–72.
190 Select Bibliography

Schoene, Berthold. ‘Getting World Going in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, Senses
and Society 8.1 (2013), pp. 96–105.
Snyder, Katherine V. ‘“Time to Go”: The Post-Apocalyptic and the Post-Traumatic in
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, Studies in the Novel 43.4 (Winter 2011),
pp. 470–89.
Weafer, Miles. ‘Writing from the Margin: Victim Positions in Atwood’s The Year of the
Flood’, in Karma Waltonen (ed.), Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses (Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), pp. 57–70.

About The Penelopiad

Braund, Susanna. ‘“We’re Here Too, the Ones Without Names.” A Study of Female
Voices as Imagined by Margaret Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, and Marguerite
Yourcenar’, Classical Reception Journal 4.2 (2012), pp. 190–208.
Howells, Coral Ann. ‘“We Can’t Help but Be Modern”: The Penelopiad’, in S. A. Appleton
(ed.), Once upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood’s
Writings (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 57–72.
Ingersoll, Earl G. ‘Flirting with Tragedy: Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and the Play
of the Text’, Intertexts 12.1–2 (Spring 2008), pp. 111–28.
Jung, Susanne ‘“A Chorus Line”: Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad at the Crossroads of
Narrative, Poetic and Dramatic Genres’, Connotations 24.1 (2014/2015), pp. 41–62.
Staels, Hilde. ‘The Penelopiad and Weight: Contemporary Parodic and Burlesque
Transformations of Classical Myths’, College Literature 6.4 (Fall 2009), pp. 100–18.
Suzuki, Mihoko. ‘Rewriting the Odyssey in the Twenty-First Century: Mary
Zimmerman’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad’, College Literature 34.2
(Spring 2007), pp. 263–78.
 Index

Adapting Margaret Atwood: The Dearly 3

Handmaid’s Tale and Door, The 147
Beyond (Wells-Lassagne and Double Persephone 1, 5
McMahon) 150 Edible Woman, The 1, 3, 7, 9–20,
Alderman, Naomi 28–9, 32, 37, 40, 42–4, 52
Happy Zombie Sunrise Home 150 ‘English Metaphysical Romance,
Alias Grace (Atwood) 5, 7, 75, 76, The’ 2
99–109, 113, 118 ‘Gertrude Talks Back’ 127
anti-detective novel 107–8 God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook,
historical fiction 103–4 The 132
overview 100–1 Governor General’s Award 1
quilt motif 106–7 Hag-Seed 7, 145, 146, 148–9
readerly desire 101–3 Handmaid’s Tale, The 5, 7, 17, 31, 42,
servant girl 104–5 46, 47, 52, 53–73, 75–7, 92, 103,
Amnesty International 6 118, 120–2, 126, 135, 136, 140,
Anderson, Hans Christian 145, 150
‘Red Shoes, The’ 37, 38 Happy Zombie Sunrise Home 150
Angel Catbird (Atwood) 150 Heart Goes Last, The 7, 145–8
Animals in That Country, The ‘In Search of Alias Grace’ 103
(Atwood) 5 Journals of Susanna Moodie, The 27
Anthropocene fiction 141–4 Lady Oracle 7, 15, 19, 31–44, 46, 47,
anthropocentrism 128, 142, 143 52, 60, 83, 94, 102, 114, 151
apocalyptic narrative, ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’ Life Before Man 7, 19, 31, 39–47, 52,
modes of 134 59, 122
Arendt, Hannah MaddAddam 7, 73, 120–2, 127,
Human Condition, The 130 138–44, 147
Atwood, Carl 2 Moral Disorder 2, 145, 147
Atwood, Margaret Eleanor Morning in the Burned House 82
Alias Grace 5, 7, 75, 76, 99–109, 113, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on
118 Writing 6, 13
Angel Catbird 150 On Writers and Writing 82
Animals in That Country, The 5 Oryx and Crake 5, 7, 58, 59, 120–36,
biography of 2–7 138, 140–2
Blind Assassin, The 5, 7, 17, 33, 99, Penelopiad, The 7, 99, 100, 115–20,
100, 106, 109–15, 118, 147 149
Bodily Harm 7, 42, 45–52, 59, 66, 76, Positron 147
92, 149 Robber Bride, The 5, 7, 17–18, 75–7,
‘Boys at the Lab, The’ 2 119
Cat’s Eye 2, 5, 7, 33, 40, 75–88, 92, Robber Bridegroom, The 49
97, 151 Selected Poems II 82
Circle Game, The 1, 27 Servant Girl, The 104
Curious Pursuits 76 ‘Siren Song’ 119
192 Index

‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems Bergthaller, Hannes 131, 132, 136, 137

of Female Bad Behaviour in the Bettelheim, Bruno 19
Creation of Literature’ 76 Birkerts, Sven 126
Stone Mattress 7, 145–7 Blind Assassin, The (Atwood) 5, 7, 17,
Surfacing 2, 3, 9, 13, 22–9, 31–3, 40, 33, 99, 100, 106, 109–15, 118,
42, 43, 122, 141 147
Survival: A Thematic Guide to gothic tale of victims and
Canadian Literature 3, 4, 10, villains 113–15
22, 24, 27, 31, 32, 38 overview 109–11
Testaments, The 5, 10, 73, 120, 121, self-conscious storyteller 111–13
145, 150 Bodily Harm (Atwood) 7, 42, 45–52, 59,
True Stories 59 66, 76, 92, 149
‘Victory Burlesk, The’ 147 healing comedy 51–2
Year of the Flood, The 7, 121, 122, overview 46–8
127, 131–8, 140, 142, 150 postcolonial novel 48–50
You Are Happy 27, 119 responsibility 50–1
Atwood: A Biography (Cooke) 6 touch 50–1
Atwoodian 1, 31, 75, 80, 88, 99, 114, 117, Bonvillain, Tamra 150
134, 147, 149 Booker Prize for Fiction 5
Atwood persona, the 13 Book of Household Management, The
Atwood phenomenon, the 7, 149–51 (Beeton) 104
‘Atwood’s Adult Fairy Tale: Lévi-Strauss, Bouson, J. Brooks 68, 92, 97, 123–6, 128,
Bettelheim, and The Edible 131–2, 134–6
Woman’ (MacLulich) 17 ‘Boys at the Lab, The’ (Atwood) 2
Austen, Jane 6 bpNichol 3
Braund, Susanna 119
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Brave New World (Huxley) 126
American Women (Faludi) 62 Brown, Julie 78, 85, 86
Banerjee, Chinmoy 78–80 Brydon, Diana 46, 49, 50
Barzilai, Shuli 36, 38, 39, 127 Butling, Pauline
Beauvoir, Simone de Writing in Our Time 3
Second Sex, The 10 Byliner 147
Becker, Susanne
‘Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Calle, Pilar Sánchez 147
Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Cambridge Companion to Margaret
Media’ 150 Atwood, The (Howells) 5, 145
Beckett, Samuel 100 Cambridge Introduction to Margaret
Bedford, Anna 130, 139, 143 Atwood, The (Macpherson) 3
Beer, Gillian 132 Canada/Canadian 15, 19, 23
Beeton, Isabella cultural production 3
Book of Household Management, Governor General’s Award 1
The 104 multiculturalism 4
Bell, Millicent 14 nationalism 2, 4
Bell Jar, The (Plath) 22 Canada Council 3, 4
Bentham, Jeremy 87 Canadian Literature 13, 122
Beran, Carol 41 Canavan, Gerry 124, 131
Living Over the Abyss: Margaret Carrington, Ildikó de Papp 49
Atwood’s Life Before Man 40 catastrophic anthropocentricism 142
Berger, John Cat’s Eye (Atwood) 2, 5, 7, 33, 40, 75–88,
Ways of Seeing 87 92, 97, 151
 Index 193

art and representation 85–8 Dearly (Atwood) 3

fictional autobiography 81–3 Defalco, Amelia 142, 147
overview 78–81 Defoe, Daniel
Women Beware Women 83–5 Robinson Crusoe 126
celebrity 102, 150 Delany, Paul 22, 23
cultural 151 detective fiction 32, 108
glamour 151 Dick, Philip K.
literary 151 Man in the High Castle, The 54
‘Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: DiMarco, Danette 130
Margaret Atwood and the Diving Deep and Surfacing (Christ) 25
Media’ (Becker) 150 Door, The (Atwood) 147
Centennial Commission Poetry Double Persephone (Atwood) 1, 5
Competition 5 Drichel, Simone 47–50
Chen, Chien-Hung 127 Duffy, Carol Ann
Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des World’s Wife, The 119
Lettres 5 Dunaway, Faye 53
Christ, Carol P. Dunning, Stephen 126, 130–1
Diving Deep and Surfacing 25 Duvall, Robert 53
‘Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Dvorak, Marta 64–6, 81, 83, 85–7, 109,
Women’s Quest and Spiritual 112–14
Vision’ 25 dystopia 7, 52–4, 57–9, 63, 64, 66, 68, 70,
Christmas, Johnnie 150 73, 120–44, 146, 147
Circle Game, The (Atwood) 1
‘This is a Photograph of Me’ 27 ecological carelessness 31
Clockwork Orange, A 57 ecological imperative 136
Cohen, Leonard 23 ecology 23, 24, 31, 123, 128, 129, 132,
comic romance 52 143
Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Edible Woman, The (Atwood) 1, 3, 7,
Prize 5 9–20, 28–9, 32, 37, 40, 42–4, 52
communities of power 104 body, the 19–20, 22
Conversation, The 150 consumption 19–20
Conway, Jill Ker 82–3 early reception 13–15
Cooke, Nathalie fairy-tale gothic 15–17
Atwood: A Biography 6 fairy-tale imagery 17–19
Margaret Atwood: A Critical feminist readings 24
Companion 33, 40 overview 11–13
crime fiction 102, 146 romance plot 15–17
Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood Eliot, George
(McCombs) 5 Middlemarch 39
Curious Pursuits (Atwood) 76 Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret
Atwood (Nischik) 86
Dante 127 Engles, Tim
Darwinian model of evolution 137 White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary
Davey, Frank 51 North American Literature 148
Margaret Atwood: A Feminist ‘English Metaphysical Romance, The’
Poetics 52 (Atwood) 2
Davidson, Arnold 71, 72 English National Opera 53
‘Future Tense: Making History in The environmental damage 122
Handmaid’s Tale’ 71 environmentalism 121, 122, 141
194 Index

Evaristo, Bernadine 5 Gibson, Eleanor Jess 3

excessive materialism 31 Gibson, Greame 3, 11
Gilbert, Sophie 150
fairy tale 1, 12, 14, 29, 32, 36, 37, 39, 49, Gileadean Studies 70, 150
59, 77, 91, 93, 141 Globe and Mail, The 133
gothic 15–17, 88, 94 goddesses 36–9
imagery 17–19, 38 God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook, The
Faludi, Susan (Atwood) 132
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Goldman, Marlene 105
American Women 62 gothic, the 1, 18, 33, 37, 43, 75, 78, 80,
fanatical feminism 62 89, 90, 94–6, 103, 105, 108, 110,
fantasy 43, 90, 93, 94, 97, 142, 146, 147 138
Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood’s Lady fairy-tale 15–17, 39, 88, 94
Oracle, The (Fee) 35 horror 27, 146
Fee, Marjorie 36 novel 27–8
Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood’s romance 32, 34–6, 94, 114, 146
Lady Oracle, The 35 tale of victims and villains 113–15
Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) 10 Grace, Sherrill 43
feminism 11, 25, 31, 92–4, 119, 121 Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret
in 1980s 61–3 Atwood 16–17, 27, 28
fanatical 62 Graham, Martha 122
power 92, 93 Graves, Robert
second-wave 10, 50, 61–3, 93, 97, 136 White Goddess, The 37
victim 93 Greene, Gayle 42, 63
Fiennes, Joseph 53 Greer, Bonnie 132
Financial Times, The 148 Griffiths, Anthony 122–3
Findlay, Timothy 3 Grimm, Brothers
Fire with Fire (Wolf) 93 ‘Robber Bridegroom, The’ 17, 93, 94
Food, Consumption and the Body in Guardian, The 53, 122
Contemporary Women’s Writing Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 126
(Sceats) 19
Foster, Joan 60 Hag-Seed (Atwood) 7, 145, 146, 148–9
Foucault, Michel 87 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 127
Frankenstein (Shelley) 126 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood) 5, 7, 17,
French, Marilyn 42 31, 42, 46, 47, 52–73, 75–7, 92,
Freud, Sigmund 104 103, 118, 120–2, 126, 135, 136,
Friedan, Betty 140, 145, 150
Feminine Mystique, The 10 complicity 67–70
Frye, Northrop 4, 16 early responses 56–7
Fukuyama, Francis 128 feminism 61–3
‘Future Tense: Making History in ‘Feminist Utopias and Questions
The Handmaid’s Tale’ of Liberty: Margaret
(Davidson) 71 Atwood’s’ 62
genre 58–60
gendered futures 134–6 language 63–7
gender politics 134 narrative 63–7
genre fiction 1 overview 54–6
‘Gertrude Talks Back’ (Atwood) 127 responsibility 67–70
Gibert, Teresa 147 victimhood 67–70
 Index 195

Happy Zombie Sunrise Home (Atwood and Kröller, Eva-Marie 150

Alderman) 150 Kubrick, Stanley 127
Hartman, Mary S.
Victorian Murderesses 104 Lady Oracle (Atwood) 7, 15, 19, 31–44,
Hawkshead 1 46, 47, 52, 60, 83, 94, 102, 114,
Heart Goes Last, The (Atwood) 7, 145–8 151
Hébert, Anne 3 fairy-tale imagery 38
Hengen, Shannon 122, 124, 135, 141–2 goddesses 36–9
historical fiction 103–4 gothic romance 34–6
Hite, Molly 34, 77, 81–4, 87 overview 32–4
Homer princesses 36–9
Odyssey, The 99, 115, 117, 118, 120 Laflen, Angela 56, 65
homo faber 130 language 28–9
Hoogheem, Andrew 133, 137 Laurence, Margaret 3
House of Anansi Press 3–4 Layton, Irving 23
Howells, Coral Ann 39, 44, 55, 58, 66, Le Guin, Ursula K. 58, 128, 132
71–3, 99, 111, 117–18, 121, 126, Lessing, Doris 147
135 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 18
Cambridge Companion to Margaret liberal ahistoricism 4
Atwood, The 5, 145 ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Normalcy’
Margaret Atwood 2 (Rule) 15
‘Science Fiction in the Feminine’ 58 Life Before Man (Atwood) 7, 19, 31,
‘True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited in 39–47, 52, 59, 122
Stone Mattress, The Heart Goes consumption 44–5
Last and Hag-Seed’ 145–6 overview 41–2
Huggan, Graham 151 between romance and realism 42–4
Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the survival 44–5
Margins, The 150 Life in the Clearings (Moodie) 101
Human Condition, The (Arendt) 130 Literary Celebrity in Canada (York) 151
humanism 136–7 Lively, Penelope 147
Hutcheon, Linda 103 Living Over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood’s
Poetics of Postmodernism, A 106 Life Before Man (Beran) 40
Huxley, Aldous Lloyd, Phyllida 116
Brave New World 126 London Review of Books 121, 133
Lopez, Maria J. 104
Ingersoll, Earl 54, 55, 81, 82, 84,
108, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, McCarthy, Mary 56–7
129 McCombs, Judith
‘In Search of Alias Grace’ (Atwood) 103 Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood 5
McLay, Catherine 16, 20, 52
Jameson, Fredric 133 MacLulich, T. D. 14, 18–19
Journals of Susanna Moodie, The ‘Atwood’s Adult Fairy Tale: Lévi-
(Atwood) 27 Strauss, Bettelheim, and The
Edible Woman’ 18
Klarer, Mario 64–5 McMahon, Fiona
Kolodny, Annette 34, 42–4, 47, 51, 52, Adapting Margaret Atwood:
59 The Handmaid’s Tale and
Kozakewich, Tobi Beyond 150
Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye 145 Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl
196 Index

Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Miller, Jane 14

Atwood, The 3 Miner, Madonne 59–60, 69
McWilliams, Ellen 32 misogyny 72
MaddAddam (Atwood) 7 ‘Modest Proposal, A’ (Swift) 126
after the Anthropocene 141–4 Moodie, Susanna 102
narrative structure 139–41 Life in the Clearings 101
overview 138–9 Moore, Lorrie 127–8
trilogy 73, 120–2, 127, 138–44, 146 Moral Disorder (Atwood) 2, 145, 147
Malahat Review, The 14, 15 Morning in the Burned House
Mandel, Eli 23–4 (Atwood) 82
Man in the High Castle, The (Dick) 54 Moss, Elisabeth 53
Marantz, Kate 50 Moss, John
Margaret Atwood (Howells) 2 Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye
Margaret Atwood (Rigney) 5, 32, 59 145
Margaret Atwood (Rosenberg) 50 Moss, Laura 151
Margaret Atwood (Wynne-Davies) 24, 31 multiculturalism 4, 40
Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion Muñoz-Valdivieso, Sofía 149
(Cooke) 33, 40 Munro, Alice 3
Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics Murray, Jennifer 103
(Davey) 52
Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Naipaul, V. S. 150
Literary Celebrity (York) 151 Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on
Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction Writing (Atwood) 6, 13
(Tolan) 10 Neuman, Shirley 61, 62, 69
Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses New Statesman, The 132
(Waltonen) 145 New York Times, The 42, 53, 54, 57, 61,
Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual 126, 132
Politics (Wilson) 17, 37 New York Times Review of Books, The 14,
Margaret Atwood Society 5 22
Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations Nietzsche, Friedrich 97
(Wilson) 103 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 54, 57,
Margaret Atwood Studies 5, 7 58, 126
Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye (Moss Nischik, Reingard M.
and Kozakewich) 145 Engendering Genre: The Works of
‘Margaret Atwood: The Stoic Comedian’ Margaret Atwood 86
(Smith) 15 Margaret Atwood: Works and
‘Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Impact 5, 75–6
Women’s Quest and Spiritual Northover, Richard Alan 132
Vision’ (Christ) 25 Norwegian Order of Literary Merit 5
Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms
(VanSpanckeren) 31 Odyssey, The (Homer) 99, 115, 117, 118,
Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact 120
(Nischik) 5, 75–6 Ondaatje, Michael 3, 150–1
‘Margaret the Magician’ (Rogers) 13 O’Neill, John 108
Massoura, Kiriaki 79, 84–7 On Writers and Writing (Atwood) 82
Michael, Magali Cornier 106–7 oppression 20, 46, 50, 59, 67–9, 104,
Middlemarch (Eliot) 39 126, 139
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Orwell, George
(Shakespeare) 148 Nineteen Eighty-Four 54, 57, 58, 126
 Index 197

Oryx and Crake (Atwood) 5, 7, 58, 59, Pratt, E. J. 5

120–36, 138, 140–2 princesses 36–9
ethical novel 129–31 psychological realism 120
overview 123–5 Purdy, Al 3
post-human future 127–9
textual allusions in 125–7 Quebec separatism 4

Palumbo, Alice M. 75–6 Rao, Eleonora 95–6

Parker, Emma Raschke, Debrah 132, 139–41, 143
‘Politics of Eating, The’ 44–5 Reading the Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s
Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth 100 Novels (Tennant) 34
Patton, Marilyn 36, 48–50 realism 34, 39, 42–4, 47, 77, 96, 108
‘Politics of the Body, The’ 37 political 52, 59
‘Tourists and Terrorists’ 48 psychological 120
Penelopiad, The (Atwood) 7, 99, 100, social 103
115–20, 149 ‘Red Shoes, The’ (Anderson) 37, 38
classical revisions and Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out,
re-readings 119–20 The (Sullivan) 6
as novel 116–17 Richardson, Natasha 53
overview 115–16 Richler, Mordecai 23
voices, reclaiming 117–19 Rigney, Barbara Hill 69, 70, 93, 94, 100
PEN Pinter Prize 5 Margaret Atwood 5, 32, 59
PEN’s Lifetime Achievement Award 6 Robber Bride, The (Atwood) 5, 7, 17–18,
Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg 91 75–7, 103, 119
Phillips, Dana 132 friendship/sisterhood/feminism 92–
Piercy, Marge 9–10, 25, 26 4
Pinter, Harold 5–6, 53 gothic tale 94–6
Plaskow, Judith 26 narrative authority 91–2
Plath, Sylvia overview 88–91
Bell Jar, The 22 Women Beware Women 85
Poetics of Postmodernism, A Robber Bridegroom, The (Atwood) 49
(Hutcheon) 106 ‘Robber Bridegroom, The’ (Grimm) 17
Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction, The Robinson, Alan 109
(Sheckels) 61–2 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 126
political realism 52, 59 Rogers, Linda 13–14
‘Politics of Eating, The’ (Parker) 44 ‘Margaret the Magician’ 13
‘Politics of the Body, The’ (Patton) 37 romance 1, 11, 18, 20, 23, 29, 33, 39,
Polk, James 3 42–4, 47, 48, 59, 60, 83, 126,
pollution 54, 57, 59, 122 135, 149
Positron (Atwood) 147 comic 52
Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, conventions 43
The (Huggan) 150 gothic 32, 34–6, 94, 114, 146
posthumanism 136–7 mythic 16
postmodernism 140, 141 plot 15–17, 69, 134
Potts, Donna 89 quest 16
Powell, Michael 37 urban 32
power feminism 92, 93 Rosenberg, Jerome H. 51
Pressburger, Emeric 38 Margaret Atwood 50
primitivism 23 Royal Danish Opera 53
198 Index

Royal Ontario Museum 41, 43 Smith, Rowland

Royal Society of Canada 5 ‘Margaret Atwood: The Stoic
Rozelle, Lee 123, 126, 128, 129 Comedian’ 15
Rudy, Susan Snaith, Helen 146
Writing in Our Time 3 Snyder, Katherine V. 124, 125, 129
Rule, Jane 12 social realism 103
‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think
Normalcy,’ 15 It’s My Husband’ (Russ) 35
Rushdie, Salman 150 speculative fiction 1, 58
Russ, Joanna spotty-handed villainesses 75–97
‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems
Think It’s My Husband’ 35 of Female Bad Behaviour in
the Creation of Literature’
Sage, Lorna 57 (Atwood) 76
Sanchez-Grant, Sofia 32 Staels, Hilde 71, 92, 95, 108, 119, 120
Sandler, Linda 4, 11, 14, 28–9 Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto 101, 102
Sceats, Sarah 45 Stapleton, Patricia 68–9, 71
Food, Consumption and the Body Stein, Karen 42–4, 75, 82, 101, 110, 114,
in Contemporary Women’s 115
Writing 19–20 Stoeber, Orville 150
Schoene, Berthold 124, 126, 129, 131 Stone Mattress (Atwood) 7, 145–7
science fiction 6, 31, 58, 109, 110, 114, structural method 18
122, 128, 139, 142 Sugars, Cynthia 27
‘Science Fiction in the Feminine’ Sullivan, Rosemary
(Howells) 58 Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting
Second Sex, The (Beauvoir) 10 Out, The 6
second-wave feminism 10, 50, 61–3, 93, Surfacing (Atwood) 2, 3, 9, 31–3, 40, 42,
97, 136 43, 122, 141
Selected Poems II (Atwood) 82 body, the 20
self-conscious storyteller 111–13 consumption 19
Servant Girl, The (Atwood) 101, 104 early reception 13–15, 22–4
Shadow Males 34, 35 feminist readings 24–7
Shakespeare, W. form 28–9
Hamlet 127 gothic novel 27–8
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 148 language 28–9
Tempest, The 149 overview 20–2
Shead, Jackie 102, 107–8 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Shearer, Moira 37 Literature (Atwood) 3, 4, 10,
Sheckels, Theodore 22, 24, 27, 38
Political in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction, Suzuki, Mihoko 118–20
The 61–2
Shelley, Mary 58 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 149
Frankenstein 126 Tennant, Colette 35
Shields, Carol 3, 151 Reading the Gothic in Margaret
Showalter, Elaine 121, 122, 126 Atwood’s Novels 34
Shriver, Lionel 148 Testaments, The (Atwood) 5, 10, 73, 120,
Signs 23 121, 145, 150
‘Siren Song’ (Atwood) 119 Thomson, Tom 27–8
Smith, Philip 149 Tiffin, Helen 49
 Index 199

Times Literary Supplement, The 14, 57 Adapting Margaret Atwood:

Tolan, Fiona The Handmaid’s Tale and
Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Beyond 150
Fiction 10 White Goddess, The (Graves) 37
‘Tourists and Terrorists’ (Patton) 48 White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary
True Stories (Atwood) 59 North American Literature
‘True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited (Engels) 148
in Stone Mattress, The Heart Wilderness Tips (Atwood) 146
Goes Last and Hag-Seed’ will to power 97
(Howells) 145–6 Wilson, Sharon Rose 36, 38, 85–6, 95,
102
United States (US) 31 Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual
imperialism 4 Politics 17, 37
US, see United States Margaret Atwood’s Textual
Assassinations 103
vampire fiction 146 Winterson, Jeanette 132, 135
VanSpanckeren, Kathryn Weight 119
Margaret Atwood: Vision and Wisker, Gina 58, 61, 65, 132–3
Forms 31 Wolf, Naomi
Vickroy, Laurie 90 Fire with Fire 93
victim feminism 93 Woolf, Virginia 42
victimhood 4, 9, 21, 22, 24, 25, 49, 52, World’s Wife, The (Duffy) 119
67–70, 79, 81, 117, 135 Writing in Our Time (Butling and
Victorian Murderesses (Hartman) 104 Rudy) 3
‘Victory Burlesk, The’ (Atwood) 147 Wyatt, Jean 93, 95
violence 31, 50, 62, 115 Wynne-Davies, Marion 39–40, 75–7, 81,
gendered 114 85, 87–8
Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Margaret Atwood 24, 31
Atwood (Grace) 17, 27, 28
Yamamoto, Tae 60
Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. 65–6 Year of the Flood, The (Atwood) 7, 121,
Wah, Fred 3 122, 127, 131–8, 140, 142, 150
Walter, Natasha 122 gendered futures 134–6
Waltonen, Karma humanism/posthumanism 136–7
Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses 145 overview 133–4
Watkins, Susan 133–5, 140, 147, 150 York, Lorraine 102
Ways of Seeing (Berger) 87 Literary Celebrity in Canada 151
Weight (Winterson) 119 Margaret Atwood and the Labour of
Wells, H. G. 58, 127 Literary Celebrity 151
Wells-Lassagne, Shannon You Are Happy (Atwood) 27, 119
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