Atwood, Margaret (1939 -) | Eli Mandel (Essay Date 1977)
ELI MANDEL (ESSAY DATE 1977)
SOURCE: Mandel, Eli. "Atwood Gothic." The Malahat Review 41 (1977): 165-74.
In the following essay, Mandel studies Atwood's utilization of Gothic themes and devices to express and comment upon complex social, political, and psychological issues in her works.
Margaret Atwood's You Are Happy offers not only her usual poetic transformations, identifica-tions, witch-woman figures, animal-men, and photograph-poems but also an intriguing set of "Tricks with Mirrors." It is the mirror poems that suggest, more pointedly than usual in her work, questions about duplicity and reflexiveness—concerns quite different from apparently clear and accessible social comment. She writes:
Don't assume it is passive
or easy, this clarity
with which I give you yourself,
Consider what restraint...
[The entire page is 3659 words long]
Navigate
