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

1. ICONIC PROSE

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

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

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

Some of the most powerful stories of Bluebeard's Egg—“Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother,” “Bluebeard's Egg,” “The Sunrise,” “Unearthing Suite”—possess this oblique, discontinuous structure. None of these stories have a meaningful chain of narrative event; “Significant Moments” and “Unearthing Suite,” the opening and closing stories of the collection, both portray their central characters by the juxtaposition of separate anecdotes and the foregrounding within these anecdotes of an identifiable pattern of recurrent symbolism. The characters in all four stories are the same at the end as at the beginning; they have been intensely illuminated for us, however, by Atwood's isolation of their characteristic actions—Sally's repeated trivialization of her own person in “Bluebeard's Egg,” Yvonne's compulsively segmented life of routinized art and one-day friendships in “Sunrise.”

2. DANCING GIRLS

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

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

The opening story, “The War in the Bathroom,” focusses on the paranoid schizophrenia of the elderly woman first-person narrator, who describes herself in the third-person throughout. She is rootless, like most of the characters in Dancing Girls, living in rooming houses and having little trust in any human being. She imagines her previous landlady “was glad to see her go” (1), and believes an elderly male roomer in her new house uses the bathroom adjacent to her room at precisely nine o'clock each morning because “he does not want her in the house” (7). The schizoid separation between her thinking first-person self and acting third-person self dramatizes the usual Atwood separation between unconscious motive and conscious act. This separation is symbolically reinforced in this story by the presence of an old woman roomer, “the woman with two voices,” one “violent, almost hysterical,” and the other “formless” (8) whom the narrator later discovers to be two women, an old woman and her nurse. These are clearly another version of herself, the hysterical and violent agent controlled by the first-person “nurse.” Because within her own personality this “nurse” completely rationalizes the fantasies of the underground self, the woman can learn nothing of herself, even when her violence results in apparent disaster for the old man whom she locks from the bathroom at nine a.m.

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

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

(29)

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

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

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

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

(64–65)

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

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

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

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

Soon I will be there; inside are the plants that have taught themselves to look like stones. I think of them; they grow silently, hiding in dry soil, minor events, little zeros, containing nothing but themselves; no food value, to the eye soothing and round, then suddenly nowhere. I wonder how long it takes, how they do it.

(78)

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

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

(87)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(115–116)

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

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

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

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

In Mrs. Burridge, murderousness born of paranoid fantasy lurks just below the surface of a seemingly gentle, stereotypically grey-haired farmlady who cans, freezes, and pickles. Conservatism—symbolized by Mrs. Burridge's preoccupation with the preservation of fruits, meats and vegetables—conceals raw and unacknowledged violence. This is a common occurrence in Atwood's stories: the bizarre, violent, and unsettling, often associated with repressed sexual desires, appears suddenly from beneath an ostensibly banal or conventional surface. Such violence is a part of Atwood's ‘underground’ imagery—kept hidden in the cellars of bourgeois houses in “Hair Jewellery,” or bursting with sudden ‘Martian’ energy into the lives of conventional characters in “The Man from Mars.” It is usually associated with characters who have either no sexual life, such as Christine or the old woman of “The War in the Bathroom,” or are involved in unfulfilling, grudging relationships. Mrs. Burridge, we note, has become bored with her husband (“she doesn't even feel like teasing him about his spare tire any more though she does it all the same because he would miss it if she stopped” [126]), has lost faith in his strength, and fantasizes his death with cold-blooded resignation (“she supposes she ought to feel more emotional about it, but she is well-prepared, she has been saying goodbye to him silently for years” [134]).

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

… a giant screen, flat and with pictures painted on it to create the illusion of solidity. If you walked up to it and kicked it, it would tear and your foot would go right through, into another space which Annette could only visualize as darkness, as a night in which something she did not want to look at was hiding.

(140)

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

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

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

(154)

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

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

(155)

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

Throughout this story the familiar superficial Atwood world is also visible—in the tourists' guidebooks, sun glasses, and kleenexes, the ill-matched plaster crêche set, the Fred Flintstone-shaped radio that plays a Canadian-authored U.S. popular song, a television set that plays “a re-run of The Cisco Kid.” Spanish-America is clearly being reshaped into a bourgeois U.S. image. The ‘underground’ world is visible not only in the cenote but in the ruined pyramids, the carvings of the Mayan rain-god Chac-Mool, and in the fleas whose bites “swell-up” on the narrator's husband.

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

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

(158)

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

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

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

(168)

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

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

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

(170)

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

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

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

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

(192)

Ann of “Dancing Girls” is in many ways Rob's female counterpart. Continuing in graduate school because her father believes you should “finish what you start,” envious of graceful women with beautiful long hair, and “circumspect” in her relationships with men, she has given up her dream of being an architect in order to study in the U.S. the more practical profession of “Urban Design.” Further, “she intended to be so well-qualified, so armoured with qualifications, that no one back home would dare turn her down for the job she coveted.” As the “armoured” metaphor suggests, Ann dislikes people. In the green areas she hopes to design “she could never visualize the people. Her green spaces were always empty” (217). For her, green is not an underground image of vitality, but one of repression. If she considers the inhabitants of her design projects, they often become children who “would turn her grass to mud, they'd nail things to her trees, their mangy dogs would shit on her ferns, they'd throw bottles and pop cans into her aqueduct” (220). Or they become abstracted, desexualized, like the “dancing girls” at the wild party a “vaguely Arabian” roomer at her rooming house throws, who become in her fantasies “sedate” pastoral figures:

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

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

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

The central character of “Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother” is a woman who has accepted most of the rules she has been given for her life. She has played with these rules—hoodwinked her autocratic father into letting her have her hair cut, invented comic ways of maintaining propriety when afflicted with popped zippers or fallen underpants, devised a means to attend university despite her father's disapproval. But she has never perceived these rules as anything other than benign, or her transgressions as anything more than “fun”. In consequence, she has become a good-humoured trivializer of life and death:

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

(BE 22)

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

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

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

(29)

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

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

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

(21)

These women's stories are recognizably those of Gothic romance, in which evil can be entertaining without being dangerous. Here too, men and women occupy separate worlds—the men of power and arrogance, the women of weakness and despair.

In “Hurricane Hazel” this separation of the sexes takes the form of the young narrator's father being an “explorer for a logging company” and therefore absent much of the year, while her mother looks after the family in a series of makeshift cabins. Similarly, the narrator's brother is away in the summers as a “Junior Ranger, cutting brush by the sides of highways somewhere in northern Ontario” (35), while she stays with her mother aspiring to have a boyfriend in order to be “normal”. In both stories the men define themselves by their jobs or professions, while the women define themselves in terms of their men, whose presence bestows ‘normality.’ This normality, whether expressed in conventional marriages, cliché language, or in high school dating customs, becomes for the stories' narrators the ‘Bluebeard's egg’—the payment women accept to surrender their selfhood. Normality, the ordinary, is dangerous, the narrator of “Hurricane Hazel” concludes on the stormy night when she and her gas-station attendant boyfriend break up because she has refused to go out with him in ominous weather. The night is that in 1954 of Toronto's Hurricane Hazel, and in the morning she looks at the storm's deadly debris and is surprised by its banality. “This is what I have remembered most clearly about Buddy: the ordinary looking wreckage, the flatness of the water, the melancholy light” (59).

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

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

(155)

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

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

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

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

Structurally this passage shows the narrator in the same relationship to the freighters as Betty is to Fred—living in the shadow of his glamour, accepting cast-offs. As the narrator grows, however, her interest turns to Betty. At first she tries to romanticize her into a Gothic victim—“a stricken and martyred woman … a woman who had narrowly escaped death … an aura of sacrificial blood surrounded her” (129–130). When Betty dies of a brain tumour, she sees her as someone punished “for being devoted and obliging,” who died screaming “against the unfairness of life” (131). These images show the narrator now trying to glamourize failure; like the Gothic throughout Atwood's work, they serve to subjugate woman by making her fate as Bluebeard's wife seem interesting. The narrator's final act, however, is to refuse both the gothic and her childhood impression that Fred was attractive and significant. It is Betty who is now “mysterious”.

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

(132)

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

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

They would have the coffin all ready, of course: once they'd decided you were going off, you had scarcely any choice in the matter. According to other versions, the meal would be placed on the dead person's body, which must have made for some sloppy eating, one would have thought. In any case the Sin Eater would devour this meal and would also be given a sum of money. It was believed that all the sins the dying person had accumulated during his lifetime would be removed from him and transmitted to the Sin Eater. The Sin Eater thus became absolutely bloated with other people's sins. She'd accumulate such a heavy load of them that nobody wanted to have anything to do with her; a kind of syphilitic of the soul, you might say.’

(“The Sin Eater,” BE 231–232)

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

“The Sin Eater” is narrated in a discontinuous first person narrative in which the discontinuity and the frequent telescoping of time suggests further the fragmentation of personality a woman's dependency on a man creates. The female language of symbolic image and dream informs the narrator's awareness but does not influence her conscious decisions. She dimly perceives a picture of blue “Krishna playing the flute, surrounded by adoring maidens” as having something to do with herself and the death of Joseph, but can make no clear connection. At the story's close she is dreaming of eating Joseph's sins—in the shape of the moon and star cookies baked by his first wife—but as cosmic shapes in “dark space.”

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

(244)

And she reaches out to begin eating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(200–201)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(278)

In this innocence she resembles “accepting, uncomplaining” (132) Betty and Loulou—women who have never questioned the male assumptions which surround their lives or seen consciously how different Bluebeard's analytical dismembering language is from their own.