SOURCE: “‘Yet I Speak, Yet I Exist’: Affirmation of the Subject in Atwood's Short Fiction,” in Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, New Critical Essays, edited by Colin Nicholson, St. Martin's Press, 1994, pp. 230–47.

Margaret Atwood's creative world, as has repeatedly been noted, possesses a coherence which spreads across genres, its motifs and structures recurring in different texts, whether fiction, poetry or essay. In a study published in 1983 Sherill E. Grace attempts to describe this coherence by defining Atwood's system with reference to four elements: duality, nature, self and language.¹ While all four are found to some extent in any volume of Atwood's, it is the latter two that seem to dictate the literary function of nature and duality, and to constitute the key to the author's literary world. A reading of the three volumes of short stories published so far, Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard's Egg (1983) and Wilderness Tips (1991),² allows, by means of the cumulative effect of the genre, some insight into the recurrences and changes in the treatment of the self and its representation in language. Such a reading shows a gradual amplification of the subject, a self which survives (and communicates) against all theoretical odds, against fragmentation, gaps and deconstructions. This affirmation of the subject and of language is suggested in selected stories of Dancing Girls and asserted in the subsequent volumes.

Considered together, the three collections of stories waver between confirming and contradicting Atwood's statement that authors do not ‘grow’ or ‘develop’, but rather do something which is closer to ‘a theme with variations’.³ Perhaps ‘growth’, with its proximity to ‘growing up’ (or, in Atwood's own simile, radishes) is the wrong metaphor to apply to the progression of her work. In the essay quoted, she goes on to affirm that ‘writers’ universes may become more elaborate, but they do not become essentially different’, and this is true of her collections of stories and their treatment of the subject. However, while the latter does not become essentially different from one collection to another, it is the concept of the subject, together with its relationship to language, that marks the evolution (if not growth or development) in the universe of Atwood's short fiction. There is a shift in emphasis from the individual, soul-searching subject of Dancing Girls to a wider extended subject, begun in the family ‘we’ of Bluebeard's Egg and expanded further, as in a widening ripple, in Wilderness Tips. The relation of this subject to language also experiences a shift, as a rather deterministic view of the limitations of language gives way to a more pragmatic critique of its use as instrument of power, modified by a belief in the possibility of appropriation and transformation of words.

Nine of the 16 stories in Dancing Girls (including ‘The War in the Bathroom’ and ‘Rape Fantasies’),⁴ are narrated in the first person; a significant number when compared with the later collections: four in Bluebeard's Egg, one in Wilderness Tips. The voice in all these stories is female and predominantly young. This young female subject perceives itself as struggling against an Other who, more often than not is a he and a sexual partner, but can also be her own unacknowledged self or, more widely, the world. In several of the stories the main syntactical opposition is I/he, a metonymy for the main conflict in the text (‘Under Glass’, ‘The Grave of the Famous Poet’, ‘Lives of the Poets’, ‘The Sin Eater’). In others, the same opposition appears in the form of I/you, the you referring again to a sexual partner (‘Hair Jewellery’, ‘Rape Fantasies’). The struggle is rarely limited to this opposition, however, and most of the protagonists are engaged in a battle with their own unacknowledged or repressed selves, or the selves they have left behind, having ‘shed identities like snake-skins’ (‘Hair Jewellery’). Their split personalities are described in detail, as in the schizoid pains of the woman in ‘Under Glass’, or conveyed by the narrative technique, as in ‘The War in the Bathroom’, where the two narrative voices, in the first and third persons, are revealed as having only one owner. A similar grammatical and thematic predominance can be found in the rest of the stories in the collection; in most, the dialectics of she/he are central, and reveal a hidden structure of a female subject defining itself mainly against a male antagonist, and/or struggling to accept supposedly unacceptable aspects of her own personality.

This recurrent pattern, however, is broken totally or partially in certain stories within the collection, notably in ‘Betty’ and ‘Giving Birth’, where the antagonists are multiple and female, and in ‘Polarities’, where the binary opposition he/she is secondary to the more crucial struggle by Louise to reconcile her fragmented selves, or the fragments out of which she has attempted to create her personality.

While containing a ‘he’ (Fred), and an opposition of I/she (sister), ‘Betty’ centres on the mirror image of the character who gives name to the story. A retrospective narration, it shows the choices made in the development of the self, and those left behind. It presents an adult first-person narrator who, while telling the story of her childhood neighbour Betty (a devoted, obliging wife, eventually abandoned by her husband, Fred), analyses her own past motives for seeing this woman as her double, and her later arrival at the ability to choose a different role-model. The young narrator feels that Betty's marital failure, and subsequent death, is the doom of ‘nice’ girls like herself, as opposed to that of ‘vivacious’ girls like her sister, whom Fred had clearly preferred. A romanticised version of Betty's death recedes into the background when the narrator decides to reject her as a model: ‘People change, though … As I passed beyond the age of melodrama I came to see that if I did not want to be Betty, I would have to be someone else. … People stopped calling me a nice girl and started calling me a clever one, and after a while I enjoyed this’ (DG, p. 50). This story offers one of Atwood's most optimistic endings, in the possibilities it leaves open for change, for the construction of the self, or rebirth. The narrator, faced with two opposed role-models, has been able to discard both and adopt her own, escaping her victim position.

As a counterpoint, ‘Polarities’ shows the main character, Louise, trying and failing to bring her self to life. Her personality seems to suffer multiple splits, suggested by the fissures detected in her brisk, practical manner (her poetry, the fuzzy slippers, the frilly underwear) and also represented, after her internment, in her invention of a schizophrenic parentage for herself (mother a French Protestant, father an English Catholic; mother an Italian opera singer, father a Nazi general). Her friend Morrison, focaliser of the story, provides a crucial image when he observes that her house has the strange effect of separate rooms, whose decoration is copied from acquaintances' houses: ‘Poor Louise had been trying to construct herself out of the other people she had met’ (DG, p. 70). Her growing mental unbalance, reflected in her plans to form a circle which would hold the world together, does not prevent her seeing Morrison's own unreconciled duality more clearly than anyone else: ‘He needs to be completed, he refuses to admit his body is part of his mind’ (p. 69). Louise tries to create a circle and contain the polarities, to be ‘all-inclusive’ (p. 55), but her practice of excluding things from this circle seems to lie at the root of the theoretical failure of her system. In her metaphor, as in her own personality, she fragments instead of embracing, and the story remains one of failure of the self.

Throughout the collection, the treatment of the subject is closely linked to its definition in language. Characters are represented, or misrepresented, by the language applied to them. In some cases, they are labelled by others: Christine, in ‘The Man from Mars’ (DG), is in turn ‘ordinary’ (as seen by her parents), ‘plain’ (by her sisters) or an ‘honorary person’ (as defined by men, who cannot fit her into the female categories of cock-teaser, cold fish, easy lay or snarky bitch). This self she temporarily escapes from through the fantasies awakened by her persecution by a ‘person from another culture’. In other stories characters invent their own personality through words: ‘the word she had chosen for herself some time ago was “comely”’ (‘The Resplendent Quetzal’, DG, p. 145), and split identities find their expression in duality of language, as does the writer in ‘Lives of the Poets’ (DG), who must choose between her ‘nice’ persona, represented by her gentle poems, and her repressed rage, with its ‘bloody’ language.

Characters in these early stories struggle with language, with a need to speak or make themselves understood. While the healing nature of speech is shown in ‘The Sin Eater’, most of the stories in Dancing Girls underline the inadequacies of the word as a means of communication: ‘We've talked too much or not enough: for what we have to say to each other there's no language, we've tried them all’ (‘The Grave of the Famous Poet’, DG, p. 93). ‘My hands function, exchanging round silver discs for oblong paper [buying a ticket]. That this can be done, that everyone knows what it means, there may be a chance. If we could do that: I would give him a pebble, a flower, he would understand, he would translate exactly’ (DG, pp. 86–7). The woman in ‘Under Glass’ thus wishes for comprehension through other gestures, or for the chimera of perfect interpretation. A theoretical argument is provided by Joseph, the psychiatrist of ‘The Sin Eater’, who has a phobia about telephones because ‘most of the message in any act of communication [is] non-verbal’ (DG, p. 216). And non-verbal communication is, in fact, the distinctive trait of some of Atwood's ‘inarticulate’ characters, such as the eponymous Betty and Loulou, who transmit thought or feeling through gestures; but significantly, this characteristic renders them the powerless element of the binomy which they form with their partners (Fred/Betty, the poets/Loulou).

I have elsewhere discussed Atwood's short stories, together with Doris Lessing's, as an example of the subversive strategies in women's writing, and the move away from a concentration on the traps of language into a more hopeful acceptance of the possibility of change in linguistic practices.⁵ This attitude has run parallel with an evolution in linguistic and literary theory, towards the rejection of notions of fixed meanings and of linguistic determinism (present in early structuralism, including feminist critics such as Dale Spender, and also in Lacanian theory) in favour of the idea of construction of meaning, and the subsequent responsibility of users in transforming the language. Linking in with current philosophical and psychological theories, but with a more pragmatic focus, feminist Deborah Cameron defends an integrational theory,⁶ in which external factors (social, psychological, familial) are taken into account, and earlier linguistic theories are abandoned in favour of communicative concepts such as those defined by Roy Harris or Trevor Pateman. The latter's radical discourse explores an active discourse that subverts, instead of reproducing, the established social institutions. Imperfect communication is thus accepted as the natural consequence of the indeterminacy of linguistic signs, but the focus is put on precisely this indeterminacy, which allows for multiplicity of meaning, for change and thus for subversion. Freed from the belief that we are controlled by our language, we can begin to assume control of it ourselves.

‘Giving Birth’, the final story in Dancing Girls, is the first to suggest such an attitude to language. One of the most complex and original of Atwood's early stories, it splits into three women, a trinity who protagonise the act and word of ‘giving birth’, and emerge as a remarkably solid subject at the end of the process. ‘Giving Birth’ is an explicit commentary on the difficulties of verbal communication and a practical example of the link between language and subject in Atwood's writing. Beginning with a long commentary on the phrase ‘giving birth’ and such related terms as delivering, the narrator mediates on their inadequacy and the need to rename the act. While she refuses to rename it herself, she is determined, nevertheless, to speak:

These are the only words I have, I'm stuck with them, stuck in them. (That image of the tar sands, old tableau in the Royal Ontario Museum, how persistent it is. Will I break free, or will I be sucked down, fossilized, a sabre-toothed tiger or lumbering brontosaurus who ventured out too far? Words ripple at my feet, black, sluggish, lethal. Let me try once more, before the sun gets me, before I starve or drown, while I can. It's only a tableau after all, it's only a metaphor. See, I can speak, I am not trapped, and you on your part can understand. So we will go ahead as if there were no problem about language.)

(DG, p. 226)

It is worth noting there that the distinction between metaphor and reality, which will recur in later work, functions as an antidote for inaction, allowing communication, and therefore the story, to take place.

Thus the subject begins to be defined in language, the three women who make it up (the narrator, Jeanie and her unnamed alter ego) being differentiated by their attitudes to words: Jeanie, in her articulateness and obsession with reading manuals, her alter ego in her wordless existence, the narrator as a writer, self-consciously bring her past self back to life in the story, and naming that self Jeanie. These three selves, and the concepts of language and the subject, are brought together again in the description of the pain at the culminating moment of giving birth: ‘When there is no pain she feels nothing, when there is pain she feels nothing because there is no she. This, finally, is the disappearance of language’ (p. 237). The statement reinforces the argument used elsewhere in the story that events of the body, such as giving birth or orgasm, may be impossible to describe in words. It also unites the three subjects in a common disappearance: the inarticulate other, for whom the words ‘giving birth’ don't exist, the articulate Jeanie, who loses the power of speech, and the narrator, who admits her difficulty in putting this event into words. All three go through the experience, a reality untranslatable into language, but whose existence is affirmed to the point of superseding the concepts of subject and of speech: rather than a reduction of the subject to text, there is a reduction of both, text and subject, to the event. After the birth, the final lines express the new order: ‘in the days that follow Jeanie herself becomes drifted over with new words, her hair slowly darkens, she ceases to be what she was and is replaced, gradually by someone else’ (p. 240), and ‘it was to me, after all, that the birth was given, Jeanie gave it, I am the result’ (p. 239). Both statements emphasis the notion of the subject as process, every stage the result of previous (multiple) others. Such a conception of the self will be crucial in later stories, and particularly in the third collection, Wilderness Tips.

Bluebeard's Egg, published six years after Dancing Girls, lifts the emphasis from the l/he pair, and explores a first extension of the self into family grounds. If we ascribe ‘Betty’ and ‘The Sin Eater’ to the first collection or period, there is a substantial change in narrative technique, since only four stories (‘Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother’, ‘Hurricane Hazel’, ‘In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain’ and ‘Unearthing Suite’) are narrated in the first person; furthermore, the ‘I’ that these stories present, again female, could more accurately be described as a family ‘we’, being defined mainly by its relationship to the parents. Rather than a self by opposition, we face a self by addition, an ‘I’ not in struggle with its other, but accepting its extension into the family circle, with its influences and limitations.

‘Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother’, the opening and perhaps key story in the collection, blends in its narrative technique the point of view of the mother (who tells stories about herself and her family) with that of the daughter and ultimately leaves the reader to complete the portrait by adding her own. It is not, as the title may suggest, a story about the narrator's mother, for it clearly shows the narrator in the act of reconstructing her own past and present, analysing herself as a result of her childhood as recreated in the older woman's narration. The stories told by them both show the gap between daughter and mother, but just as obviously show their continuity, thus offering a portrait of daughter with mother (or m/other). The self becomes an entity whose borders are undefined, a subject, as Barbara Godard has pointed out,⁷ with the blurred ego boundaries described by Nancy Chodorow for women's subjectivity. The continuity of the mother-daughter dyad is shown not only in their connection through story-telling itself (a rich motif in the collection), but also in the parallel stores about their lives (haircuts as rites of passage, dodging as tactics) and in their respective constructions of each other through narration.

‘Unearthing Suite’, which closes the collection, insists on the idea of self as process/result, with the narrator ‘unearthing’, among other things, her own past and the origins of her dual tendency to slothfulness (the father) and order (the mother), made tangible in the two rooms of her house, one chaotic, one neatly designed and kept. She also traces back her tendency to inertia (as a reaction to a childhood training in movement) and, more crucially, her ‘translation of the world into words’ (p. 271), the beginnings of her writing. ‘Hurricane Hazel’, for its part, makes patent the family identity that others, neighbours and friends, attribute to the narrator in her adolescent years, and some of its uncomfortable consequences. The family context and its intricacies are also explored, more incidentally, in ‘In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain’.

Other stories in the collection link with those in the previous book, and instances of suppressed selves recur. The most significant feature for our purposes, however, lies in the treatment of the first-person narrative, the pluralisation of the subject through its extension to the family circle (and hence, given the characteristics of the parents described, to nature). It hardly seems coincidental that the opening line in ‘Unearthing Suite’ is the suggestive ‘My parents have something to tell me’ (p. 263).

Questions of language in Bluebeard's Egg are mainly treated with reference to power and gender politics, both of which are closely related to the definition of the subject through language. ‘Significant Moments’ and ‘Unearthing Suite’ characterise the parents through their speech, and expose their generation's conventional division between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ territories: ‘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 even a pansy’ (BE, p. 21). Men therefore swear, but not in front of women, while women reserve certain stories for female company only, stories of ‘romantic betrayals, unwanted pregnancies, illnesses of various horrible kinds, marital infidelities, mental breakdowns, tragic suicides, unpleasant lingering deaths’ (p. 21), stories which men, it is argued, are not equipped to bear or understand. The difference in language amounts to a difference of worlds, it is both consequence and cause of the social order; an order which, the daughter-narrator suggests, is changing, as her own linguistic universe reflects.

The mother of ‘Significant Moments’ is defined entirely though her language, shown in her story-telling. Other characters in the collection are reflected in their letters: Buddy's peculiar punctuation, ponderous compliments, blue splotchy ball-point; the brother's funny, vulgar, illustrated letters to his sister followed by factual ones to the mother (‘Hurricane Hazel’). But most persistently, we find descriptions of the power of language and its use or misuse. The narrator in ‘Hurricane Hazel’ learns of its effects through her brother, who very effectively ridicules the advertisements of remedies for teenage problems, and through Buddy's standard (though naïve) attempt to pin her down by giving her a bracelet with his name (his ‘identity’ bracelet).

Linguistic disadvantage constitutes the conflict per se in ‘Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language’, also collected in Bluebeard's Egg. It tells the story of the unbalanced relationship between a group of over-articulate poets and ‘earthy’ Loulou, whose mismatched name and personality embody, in the poets' opinion, the ‘gap between the signifier and the signified’. The gap, in another of Atwood's ironic symbioses with theory, becomes the central motif of the story. Loulou supports a group of poets under her roof, materially with her earnings as a potter, morally with the healing power of her sexual and motherly love. Despite their constant teasing and play on her ignorance of words, she has an intuitive understanding of their motivations and abuses, and sees the trap of the role she has been cast in, that of nourishing earth-mother. While the poets wonder what there is ‘in the space between Loulou and her name’, she asks herself a far more relevant question: What is there between Loulou and the poets' construction of her? The question becomes more pressing after she seeks out an accountant and seduces him in his office: ‘he is other, he is another. She too could be other. But which other? What, underneath it all, is Loulou really like? How can she tell? Maybe she is what the poets say she is, after all; maybe she has only their word, their words, for herself’ (p. 80). The story ends unresolved, an ambiguous mixture of affirmation of Loulou, of her understanding by non-verbal means, her refusal to be defined (‘nobody invented her, thank you very much’; p. 80), and of resignation towards her trap. The ending, in which she decides that being ‘like Loulou’, as the poets require, is not so bad after all, seems a capitulation to the power of their words, but concludes, perhaps, that it is simply too late: she lacks the confidence (or the language) to explore further, and the hope for change remains only a thwarted possibility.

The story, however, also reads as a warning against false (and convenient) metaphors posing as reality. Loulou's insistence that her name is ‘just a name’ tries to counteract the effects of the poets' confusion between her personality and her name, their misuse of its relationship as metaphor; we are reminded of the narrator in ‘Significant Moments’, checking herself after trying to interpret one of her mother's stories: ‘There is, however, a difference between symbolism and anecdote. Listening to my mother, I sometimes remember this’ (p. 27).

The treatment of the self and of language in Atwood's latest collection of stories, Wilderness Tips, once more is not radically different from that of previous books, though there is a feeling that the main characters continue from a point where Bluebeard stopped. They are one stage further in age (some have grown-up children, even grandchildren), and most of them look back to their formative years, whether in childhood or, more frequently, in the early years of adulthood and of their careers. The focalisation is still mainly female, though at times shared or relinquished (‘True Trash’ alternates Joanne and Donny; Richard is the focaliser who constructs Selena in ‘Isis in Darkness’). The male characters are studied in some detail, their role often going well beyond that of the antagonist. But the most pervasive presence in the collection is that of the passing of time, with the changes produced in the individual and the collective self. Almost without exception, we face a subject and its history, a history which takes place during the past few decades, and of which the present person is the result.

Several of the texts explicitly remark on the changes brought about by specific decades, mainly the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (‘Hairball’, ‘Isis in Darkness’, ‘The Age of Lead’, ‘Hack Wednesday’, ‘The Bog Man’); others go further back in time or, at the other end, reach the beginning of the 1990s. In ‘Isis in Darkness’ the ‘zero years’ of three decades serve as a structuring element for the plot. There is a feeling of the importance of the Zeitgeist, which is perhaps most clearly represented in ‘Isis’, where Richard moves from a youth of being ‘good with words’, interested in their abstract meanings, towards becoming the archaeologist of the past, searching for significance in its events, which he will translate into words. The collection as a whole produces the effect of the subject expanding further, the self seen in a context which encompasses more than the family and the present circumstances. The immediacy of the first-person narration is abandoned almost entirely (the exception is ‘Weight’), seemingly in favour of a more distant, but also more knowledgeable and always retrospective, third-person narrator.

This collection presents an interesting new version of ‘we’ (or ‘they’) as a syntactical and psychological subject: that of the double subject formed by two characters who, while being each other's alter ego, share a complicity amounting to spiritual twinhood: Richard and Selena in ‘Isis’, Molly and the narrator in ‘Weight’, Lois and Lucy in ‘Death by Landscape’. The relationship between these characters is closer to the idea of the lost possibilities of the self (as in ‘Hair Jewellery’; DG) than to the opposed antagonist of the earlier I/he stories. They compose a self by addition rather than by opposition; the split is not the source of battles but of inclusion of opposites into one consciousness.

In many respects, the collection Wilderness Tips is, as Atwood would have it, a more elaborate variation on previous themes, a step further in diverse explorations. Elements such as duality reappear under a slightly different treatment; five of the ten stories contain the double subject mentioned above, a ‘twin’ of the main character who, rather than function merely by opposition, has been incorporated, to become an integral part of her/his self. This twin is poignantly symbolised in ‘Hairball’, where Katherine's strange ovarian cyst, surgically removed, kept on the mantelpiece in formaldehyde and referred to as ‘Hairball’, turns out to be her ‘undeveloped twin’ (WT, p. 54), the possibility of a self that she has not allowed to grow, but which crops up to remind her of the fact. In a similar way, Selena (‘Isis in Darkness’) has continued the artistic career which Richard has traded for the shelter of an income, but which he has always pined for, however romantically. She is always part of his own self and, ultimately, in putting together her pieces (writing her biography), he becomes part of her life too.

It is Selena's death, however, that triggers off Richard's conscious involvement, and death also plays a prominent role in the other three ‘twin’ stories. While Dancing Girls presented death as desire, as Gothic presence, in Wilderness Tips it has become a reality or a justified fear. Vincent's death, in ‘The Age of Lead’, breaks up the hopeful world which he and Jane had inhabited in the past, a perfectly synchronised pair, united from adolescence by their mockery of obsolete values and clichéd language. ‘Death by Landscape’ and ‘Weight’ offer a main character whose present self is explained by the death of a close friend, an alter ego. In the first case, Lucy disappears mysteriously, leaving her friend Lois suspected of pushing her off a cliff; in her mature age, a grandmother living alone, Lois sees Lucy in the landscape paintings she has collected compulsively, and remembers going through life ‘as if she was living not one life but two: her own, and another, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized—the life of what would have happened if Lucy had not stepped sideways, and disappeared from time’ (WT, p. 128). This carefully constructed story emphasises the effect of an accident on someone's life, but the depiction of Lucy as the alter ego of Lois, and their past naming in the plural ‘Lois and Lucy’ is equally important and points towards unrealised possibilities of the psyche.

‘Weight’, for its part, presents another pair of close female friends who make different choices in life, and later come together in the survivor's unique self. Like Vincent and Jane, the narrator and Molly have shared not only a view of the world, but a language game: the invention of absurd definitions for the abusive terms used of women. Molly becomes militant in the defence of women, marries, has children; the narrator remains single, pursues a successful career; Molly leads ‘the life I [the narrator] might have led, if it hadn't been for caution and a certain fastidiousness’ (WT, p. 189). When Molly is murdered by her husband, her friend begins a personal campaign to raise funds for a shelter for battered women, to be called Molly's Place. Conducted in her own terms (including blackmailing of ex-lovers), it nevertheless continues Molly's commitment, with the narrator becoming again, as in the times of law school, ‘Molly and I’, a composite subject, the result of her friend's life and death.

The preoccupation with the subject as result is, of course, concomitant with the retrospective form of most of the narratives. In this collection, the examination of lost possibilities, whether by choice or sheer chance, predominates over schizophrenic division; there is a quieter acceptance of the latter, reflected in Julie's discovery (‘The Bog Man’) that one of the first axioms of Logic, ‘A thing cannot be both self and non-self at the same time’ (WT, p. 98), is not so clear-cut in terms of personality.

Characters in this collection also continue to be defined, or to define themselves, through language as such. The prime example is the manipulation of names: Katherine, in ‘Hairball’, successfully becomes Kathy, Kath and Kat, in accordance with time, place and the image she wants to project of herself. Her lover, Ger, had also been Gerard in his conventional past, before she transformed him into a successful man. The change of names is a structural element in the story: towards the end, Katherine dismisses Gerald by calling him by his full name; she signs her own merely K, and in the last line, having faced the truth about herself and taken a drastic decision, feels ‘temporarily without a name’ (p. 56). Selena, in ‘Isis in Darkness’, has also chosen this new name for herself, her previous one being the common Marjorie (dangerously close to ‘Mary Jo’, name of the narrator's wife). When Selena loses faith in poetry, she also denies her chosen name.

As in earlier collections, certain adjectives define a character: the deceived wife in ‘The Bog Man’ will always have the upper hand because she is ‘homely’; Molly dies because she is a ‘toad-kisser’, a ‘fixer’; that is, for her belief that she can transform men. She also significantly uses the term cynicism for what the narrator calls compromise. Ronette, the naïve, desired waitress in ‘True Trash’ is defined by the sexist language that judges her for being sexually active; like Loulou, she is ‘stuck with other people's adjectives’ (WT, p. 77). Like Betty and Loulou, she fails to articulate her thought or feeling in words, and offers her body instead.

No story in this collection is free from self-conscious questioning of specific words, from the exposure of ‘the gap between the signifier and the signified’. This gap, however, no longer seems unbridgeable. It is a reality to be dealt with and even taken advantage of. While the socio-linguistic powerlessness of characters like Ronette is given full credit, the attitude to language allows a more playful response than previous volumes, shown particularly in ‘The Age of Lead’ and ‘Weight’. This attitude is often united to an acute awareness of the uses to which language is put, the power of abusive labels and the symbolic power of words. Molly and her friend invent new meanings of terms such as strident, shrill, hysteria, pushy, in a playful subversion of their power against women. Clichés are mocked not only by Jane and Vincent in ‘The Age of Lead’ but also in ‘Wilderness Tips’, as signs of the mentality behind language. But overall, the deterministic view of language as an unavoidable and paralysing trap is absent from the collection, as are the instances of violent struggle; in their place, a more pragmatic view of communication, and the subversive power of word-play, show a belief in an active participation in the creation of language, and in the potential for transformation also contained in words.

Seen together, the three collections of stories form a continuum in the two aspects of the subject and its representation in language. The subject, always complex, moves from the struggle with itself and the other towards an inclusion of opposites and an extension into its context. The self as process/result/place, only suggested in the earlier stories, is stressed in the last collection. A similar evolution can be observed in the reflections on the use of language: the earlier characters struggle, feel trapped or doomed; the later stories, without losing sight of inadequacies or abuses, take a more pragmatic approach and assume, however tentatively, control of speech.

Thus language and the subject evolve together in Atwood's stories, towards a more inclusive, but also more pragmatic conception. For it would be mistaken to equate the author's perception of the subject with the deconstructionist view of its fictionality, its reduction to words. Without doubt Atwood makes use of the insights of contemporary theory, as has been evident in our analysis. She deconstructs the traditional subject and its language, fragments it and represents the self by reducing it symbolically to language—but ‘symbolically’ is, as her texts repeatedly warn us, as far as we can go in the equation of both elements. For nowhere in her texts does Atwood give evidence of the conversion of the subject into a fiction, nowhere is it equated with its construction in words, nor does fragmentation suppose a negation of the subject. Rather, while pointing out the importance, the motivation, and the consequences of the various constructions of a self (Bluebeard's Egg), her stories suggest the existence of a hidden, perhaps intangible but experiential self, which either survives fragmentation, de/construction and language problems (‘Betty’, ‘Giving Birth’), or perishes through madness (‘Polarities’). In later stories the division is less clear-cut, the self emerging neither triumphant nor wholly deconstructed, but the result of a previous process, a turning point or a temporary stage in an evolution which is left open.

The notion of the subject in Atwood's texts, therefore, is closest to Ihab Hassan's theory:⁸ a kind of ‘common-sense’ belief in the experiential self, as perceived by the subject from childhood to old age, despite (or by means of) the multiple transformations of a lifetime.

It is possible, of course, to find resonances of almost any current theory in Atwood's work, as her awareness of academic debate often finds reflection in her writing, albeit in her own terms (I do not think it entirely coincidental, for example, that in Foucaultian times archaeology is such a prominent symbol in Wilderness Tips). I should like to sketch, however, the proximity between some of the arguments and metaphors used by Hassan and Atwood.

‘The self may rest on no ontological rock’, Hassan declares, ‘yet as a functional concept, as a historical construct, as a habit of existence, above all, as an experienced or existential reality, it serves us all even as we deny it theoretically. The self represents something to us, even when we select some aspect of it to act.’ His essay reviews the theories (philosophical, psychological, political) which in the twentieth century have contributed to defining the self as a fictional construct; but despite these, Hassan maintains the survival of the subject, argues for the metaphors of ‘accident, invention, pattern, process, or mutation’ to describe it, and answers French deconstructionists and Hillis Miller's nihilism by exposing the ‘intellectualistic fallacy … that logic invariably grounds practice’.⁹ Refusing the equation of self or identity with unity or coherence, he claims that current theories have only served to change our perception of the subject, but not to deny its existence.

There is much in these descriptions which is immediately relevant to Atwood's writing, and which ties in with feminist debates. Experienced reality, revalued by some feminisms, is pervasive in Atwood's stories, and her work has a strong ‘realistic’ component blended in with its theoretical complexity: it is not surprising, then, that the duality experience/abstract representation should be present in her conception of the subject. As to the metaphors of accident, invention, pattern, process and mutation, they all apply, as we have seen, to the treatment of fictional selves by the author, while the fallacies of logic are also exposed in her work, notably in the direct reference in ‘The Bog Man’ (WT, p. 98).

Against deconstructive theories of the subject, Hassan poses those of psychologists of identity, and specifically those of Norman Holland and Sharon R. Kaufman.¹⁰ Holland “limns a model of human identity composed of theme and variations, much like a sonata, much like any work of art. The self maintains an intense, if unnamed awareness of itself through great changes, from infancy to death’.¹¹ The parallel with Atwood's' concept of an author's creation, quoted at the beginning of this essay, speaks for itself, and allows for an extension of her metaphor to her conception of the subject.

An equally interesting coincidence is found in the metaphor used to describe Kaufman's definition of the ‘ageless self’. Having quoted her as saying that ‘I have found that in the expression of the ageless self, individuals not only symbolically preserve and integrate meaningful components of their past, but they also use these symbols as frameworks for understanding and being in the present’,¹² Hassan defends this apparently ‘naïve’ insight as containing the crucial concept of an ‘inhabited self’, an expression with strong resonances of Atwood's metaphor of a ‘habitable interior’ in ‘Polarities’. This ‘habitable interior’ (quoted from Margaret Avison) is the comfortable identity, the reconciled self that neither Louise nor Morrison have achieved.

Atwood's multiple, ever-expanding and contextualised subject is an example of Hassan's ‘survivor self’ (434), a self redefined by contemporary theory, rather than reduced to a textual fiction. Writing in the same issue of Contemporary Literature which features Hassan's essay, Eugene Goodheart reinforces Hassan's approach by insisting that the experiential self is a natural fact, without which ‘we would go crazy, suffering a radical sense of fragmentation, discontinuity and emptiness’,¹⁴ and that the coherent or repressed selves are not necessarily the true selves. The contrast between texts such as ‘Polarities’ and ‘Giving Birth’ seems to exemplify this: in the first, Louise, lacking a sense of self, suffers tragic fragmentation and final madness; ‘Giving Birth’, however, shows a subject indeed redefined by contemporary theory, who survives, emerging from the experience of the multiple, mutating selves as a solid entity, capable of finding meaning in her past and awaiting a future. The narrating subject perceives herself in wider terms than language: the repressed self, the transforming power of events, her representation in language, are all integrated into the final result, a new, presumably temporary, but solid, self. The subject becomes language, inasmuch as words are the raw material of narration, and, again, in the metaphor which language constitutes for representing the self (Jeanie becomes drifted over with new words; in pain, both she and language disappear). But language, like the tar sands, is ‘only a metaphor’ in the stories, a metaphor of the self.

The fallacy of the textual self as superseding the experiential self is described by Goodheart in the conclusion to his essay in the following terms: ‘The danger posed by writing is the temptation it offers to life to imitate writing—that is, to imitate the adventurous incoherence of the self that is possible only in writing.’¹⁵ The statement compares with Morrison's analysis of Louise's madness: ‘she's taken as real what the rest of us pretend is only metaphorical’ (p. 69). The moral joins other warnings pointed out earlier, warnings against excessive theorising of events, against reducing people to metaphors, or trapping subjects in language.

The ‘survivor self’, the pragmatic vision, is then, though not without struggle, the protagonist of Atwood's work, whether as presence or as suggested option. Equally surviving, after its own struggle, is the ‘common sense’ communicative experience of language. From tentative explorations into the exclusion of women from language (whether viewed from structuralist-deterministic positions, or as Lacanian exclusion from the symbolic), there is a movement towards a pragmatic analysis of social facts (Ronnette, Loulou) and an acceptance of imperfect communication through language, a language which can and must be transformed; the embryo of this attitude is contained in the early statement of intention in ‘Giving Birth’: ‘we will go ahead as if there were no problem about language’.

Margaret Atwood's combination of pragmatic and textual elements, of which the treatment of the subject is an example, undoubtedly constitutes one of the keys to her success for readers and is largely responsible for the controversy over her ascription to postmodernism, within whose boundaries certain practices seem to situate her. Poststructuralist notions and deconstruction have, like other theoretical concepts, influenced Atwood's writing; but from the evidence of her stories, they seem to constitute a tool for more inclusive analysis or representation, rather than a view of the world. From Atwood's careful process of redefinition, both language and the subject emerge affirmed.

Notes

1. Sherrill E. Grace, ‘Articulating the “Space Between”: Atwood's Untold Stories and Fresh Beginnings’, in Margaret Atwood: Language, Text and System (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983) pp. 1–16.

2. All references in the text are to the British editions, except in the stories ‘The War in the Bathroom’ and ‘Rape Fantasies’ (Dancing Girls and Other Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977)); Dancing Girls (London: Virago, 1984); Bluebeard's Egg (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987); Wilderness Tips (London: Bloomsbury, 1991). The following abbreviations will be used in the text: DG, BE and WT.

3. Margaret Atwood, ‘Valgardsonland’, Essays on Canadian Writing, vol. 16 (Fall-Winter 1979–80) p. 188. Grace quotes this as support for her own argument, ‘Articulating the “Space Between”’.

4. Dancing Girls has a slightly different selection in the Canadian and British editions; the former includes ‘The War in the Bathroom’ and ‘Rape Fantasies’, excluded in Britain, while the latter includes ‘Betty’ and ‘The Sin Eater’, which were to appear in Canada in the later collection, Bluebeard's Egg. For purposes of our generalisations, we shall treat all four stories as part of the first volume, though keeping in mind that ‘Betty’ and ‘The Sin Eater’ lie between the two books, and can be seen as transitional.

5. I. Carrera Suarez, ‘Metalinguistic Features in Short Fiction, by Lessing and Atwood: From Sign and Subversion to Symbol and Deconstruction’, in J. Bardolph (ed.), Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English (Nice: Faculté des Lettres, 1988) pp. 159–64.

6. Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistics (London: Macmillan, 1985).

7. Barbara Godard, ‘My (m)Other, My Self: Strategies for Subversion in Atwood and Herbert’, Essays on Canadian Writing, vol. 26 (1983) pp. 13–44. Godard discusses the importance of Chodorow's theory of female identity with relation to Atwood's novels (Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1978).

8. Ihab Hassan, ‘Quest for the Subject: the Self in Literature’, Contemporary Literature, vol. 29(3) (1988) pp. 420–37.

9. Ibid., pp. 422, 425, 429.

10. Norman Holland, The I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Sharon R. Kaufman, The Ageless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

11. Holland, The I, p. 432.

12. Kaufman, Ageless Self, p. 433.

13. Hassan, ‘Quest for a Subject’, p. 434.

14. Eugene Goodheart, ‘Writing and the Unmaking of the Self’, Contemporary Literature, vol. 29(3) (1988) pp. 438–53.

15. Ibid., p. 453.