Atwood, Margaret (1939 -) | Introduction
Introduction
(Full name Margaret Eleanor Atwood) Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, critic, and author of children's books.
Internationally acclaimed as a novelist, poet, and short story writer, Atwood is widely considered a major figure in Canadian letters. Using such devices as irony, symbolism, and self-conscious narrators, she explores the relationship between humanity and nature, unsettling aspects of human behavior, and power as it pertains to gender and political roles. Her authorial voice has sometimes been described as formal and emotionally distant, but her talent for allegory and intense imagery informs an intellectual and sardonic style popular with both literary scholars and the reading public. Atwood has also been instrumental as a critic. She has helped define the identity and goals of contemporary Canadian literature and has earned a distinguished reputation among feminist writers for her exploration of women's issues.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Atwood was born in Ottawa and grew up in suburban Toronto. As a child she spent her summers at her family's cottage in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where her father, a forest
MAJOR WORKS
The poems in Atwood's first volume, Double Persephone reflect the influence of Blake's contrasting mythological imagery. While this collection demonstrates her penchant for using metaphorical language, Atwood's second volume of poetry, The Circle Game, garnered widespread critical recognition. Atwood explores the meaning of art and literature, as well as the Gothic, in the poetry collection The Animals in That Country (1968). Presenting the poet as both performer and creator, she questions the authenticity of the writing process and the effects of literature on both the writer and the reader. In The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) Atwood devotes her attention to what she calls the schizoid, double nature of Canada. Centered on the narratives of a Canadian pioneer woman, Journals investigates why Canadians came to develop ambivalent feelings toward their country. Atwood further develops this dichotomy in Power Politics, in which she explores the relationship between sexual roles and power structures by focusing on personal relationships and international politics.
The story of an unnamed freelance artist who journeys to the wilderness of Quebec to investigate her father's disappearance, Surfacing (1972) focuses on the dichotomous nature of family relationships, cultural heritage, and self-perception. The protagonist of Atwood's novel Lady Oracle (1976) is Joan Foster, who writes "costume Gothics" and fakes her own death to avoid the consequences of her past mistakes. The novel depicts relations between mothers and daughters and explores twentieth-century female identity by illustrating the monstrosity of the societal roles created by and for women. Just as Atwood uses monsters (Joan's three-way vanity mirror is a "triple-headed monster" and Joan becomes a "duplicitous monster") to highlight the novel's thematic concerns, so does Joan utilize her own costume Gothic characters and narratives to explore the issues that concern her, and in the end is able to begin writing in a new discipline—science fiction. In her novel Life before Man (1979) Atwood dissects the relationships between three characters: Elizabeth, a married woman who mourns the recent death of her lover; Elizabeth's husband, Nate, who is unable to choose between his wife and his lover; and Lesje, Nate's lover, who works with Elizabeth at a museum of natural history. All three characters are emotionally isolated from one another and are unable to take responsibility for their feelings as their relationships deteriorate.
Atwood turned to speculative fiction with her novel The Handmaid's Tale, depicting the dystopia of Gilead, a future America in which Fundamentalist Christians have imposed dictatorial rule. Here, in a world polluted by toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation, most women are sterile; those who are able to bear children are forced to become Handmaids, official surrogate mothers who enjoy some privileges yet remain under constant surveillance. Almost all other women have been deemed expendable. While The Handmaid's Tale focuses on an imagined future, Atwood's novel Cat's Eye (1990) explores how misconceptions about the past can influence people's present lives. The story of Elaine Risley, a prominent artist who returns to her childhood home in Toronto, Cat's Eye traces Elaine's discovery that her childhood relationships were often manipulative and that her memories of past events have not always been accurate or honest. Considered by many an allegorical exploration of the realities confronting individuals at the approach of the twenty-first century, this work reveals the implications of evil and redemption in both a personal and social context. In Cat's Eye, as in all her works, Atwood forgoes specific political or moral ideologies, concentrating instead on the emotional and psychological complexities that confront individuals in conflict with society.
In The Robber Bride (1993) Atwood transforms the Brothers Grimm's grisly fairy tale "The Robber Bridegroom," about a demonic groom who lures three innocent maidens into his lair and then devours them, into a statement about women's treatment of each other. Three middle-aged friends are relieved to reunite at the funeral of the woman who tormented them in college, stealing from them money, time, and men, and threatening their careers and lives. But the villainous Zenia turns up alive, forcing them to relive painful memories and come to terms with the connection between love and destruction. Alias Grace (1996) represents Atwood's first venture into historical fiction. Based on a true story Atwood had explored previously in a television script titled The Servant Girl, Alias Grace centers on Grace Marks, a servant who was found guilty of murdering her employer and his mistress in northern Canada in 1843. Some people doubt Grace's guilt, however, and she serves out her sentence of life in prison, claiming not to remember the murders. Eventually, reformers begin to agitate for clemency for Grace. In a quest for evidence to support their position, they assign a young doctor, versed in the new science of psychiatry, to evaluate her soundness of mind. Over many meetings, Grace tells the doctor the harrowing story of her life, which has been marked by extreme hardship. Much about Grace, though, remains puzzling; she is haunted by flashbacks of the supposedly forgotten murders and by the presence of a friend who had died from a mishandled abortion. The doctor, Simon Jordan, does not know what to believe in Grace's tales. The Blind Assassin involves multiple story lines. It is the memoir of Iris, a dying woman in her eighties who retraces her past with the wealthy and conniving industrialist Richard Griffen and the deaths of her sister Laura, her husband, and her daughter, and it is also a novel-within-a-novel, as interspersed with Iris's wry narrative threads are sections devoted to Laura's novel, The Blind Assassin, published after her death.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
The winner of the 1967 Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honor, The Circle Game established the major themes of Atwood's poetry: the inconsistencies of self-perception, the paradoxical nature of language, Canadian identity, and the conflicts between humankind and nature. In addition to her numerous collections of poetry, Atwood earned widespread attention for Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), a seminal critical analysis of Canadian literature that served as a rallying point for the country's cultural nationalists. In Survival Atwood argues that Canadians have always viewed themselves as victims, both of the forces of nature that confronted them as they settled in wilderness territory and of the colonialist powers that dominated their culture and politics. She proposes that Canadian writers should cultivate a more positive self-image by embracing indigenous traditions, including those of Native Americans and French Canadians, rather than identifying with Great Britain or the United States.
Several commentators have noted a wide range of Gothic themes, characters, devices, and stylistic elements in Atwood's works. Her poetry collection, The Animals in That Country, has been assessed as fitting neatly into the Gothic tradition. This volume contains the poem "Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein," in which Atwood explores dualities, dichotomies, tension between opposites, and doubling. Surfacing has been regarded as an example of modern female Gothic for its depiction of an emotionally and socially repressed protagonist who, after learning of her father's disappearance from his cabin, takes a harrowing trip with her lover and another couple to the wilderness. During the journey, she confronts painful memories from her past and, by moving beyond the "surface" of her emotions and allowing herself to truly explore her pain, she is able to free herself from it. Lady Oracle, which Sybil Korff Vincent calls "the most Gothic of Gothic novels, a Gothic novel about Gothic novels," has been widely discussed as Atwood's most overtly Gothic work. Lady Oracle has been compared to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey for its parodic elements and commentary on the relationship between reality and the representation of it in Gothic literature. Michiko Kakutani (see Further Reading) has asserted that The Blind Assassin "showcases Ms. Atwood's narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic." This novel, with its parallel narrative structure, twisted, complex plot, murders, mystery, and underlying sense of defeat, has been characterized as closely resembling classic works of Gothic fiction.
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