MARGARET ATWOOD

Women Writers
General Editors: Eva Figes and Adele King

Published titles
Margaret Atwood, Barbara Hill Rigney
Jane Austen, Meenakshi Mukherjee
Elizabeth Bowen, Phyllis Lassner
Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Langland
Charlotte Bronte, Pauline Nestor
Emily Bronte, Lyn Pykett
Fanny Burney, Judy Simons
Willa Cather, Susie Thomas
Colette, Diana Holmes
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Kathy Justice Gentile
Emily Dickinson, Joan Kirkby
George Eliot, Kristin Brady
Sylvia Plath, Susan Bassnett
Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Spencer
Christina Stead, Diana Brydon
Eudora Welty, Louise Westling
Edith Wharton, Katherine Joslin

Forthcoming
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Marjorie Stone
Nadine Gordimer, Kathy Wagner
Doris Lessing, Margaret Moan Rowe
Katherine Mansfield, Diane DeBell
Toni Morrison, Nellie McKay
Christina Rossetti, Linda Marshall
Jean Rhys, Carol Rumens
Stevie Smith, Romana Huk
Gertrude Stein, Jane Bowers
Virginia Woolf, Clare Hanson
 Women Writers

MARGARET
ATWOOD
Barbara Hill Rigney

M
MACMILLAN
©Barbara Hill Rigney 1987

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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.

First published 1987 by

THE' MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world

ISBN 978-0-333-43556-4 ISBN 978-1-349-18846-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18846-8

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.
Reprinted 1993
 Contents
Acknowledgements v1

Editors' Preface vii

Epigraph 1X

1 Maps of the Green World 1

2 Alice and the Animals: The Edible Woman and

Early Poems 18

3 'Border Country': Surfacing and The Journals of

Susanna Moodie 38

4 The 'Escape Artist': Lady Oracle 62

5 'The Roar of the Boneyard': Life Before Man 82

6 Politics and Prophecy: Bodily Harm, The

Handmaid's Tale and True Stories 103

7 Atwood as Critic; Critics on Atwood 122

Notes 136

Bibliography 139

Index 143

v
 Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Deans Michael Riley and John Muste and
to Chairman Morris Beja, not only for the time they
granted me for the completion of this book, but also for
the encouragement they so generously provided. I wish
also to thank Women's Studies Librarian Virginia Reynolds
for her research assistance and Professors Mildred Munday
and Pamela Transue for their proofreading abilities. The help
of my husband, Kim Rigney, was also invaluable.

The author and publishers wish to thank the following

who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright
material: ·
Oxford University Press Canada for 22lines from 'A Night
in the Royal Ontario Museum' in The Animals in that Country
(1968).
Margaret Atwood for 'Gothic Letter on a Hot Night' in
You are Happy (Harper and Row, 1974).

For Julie

Vl
 Editors' Preface
The study of women's writing has been long neglected by a
male critical establishment both in academic circles and
beyond. As a result, many women writers have either been
unfairly neglected, or have been marginalised in some way,
so that their true influence and importance have been
ignored. Other women writers have been accepted by male
critics and academics, but on terms which seem, to many
women readers of this generation, to be false or simplistic.
In the past the internal conflicts involved in being a woman
in a male-dominated society have been largely ignored by
readers of both sexes, and this has affected our reading of
women's work. The time has come for a serious reassessment
of women's writing in the light of what we understand
today.
This series is designed to help in that reassessment.
All the books are written by women, because we believe
that men's understanding of feminist critique is only, at
best, partial. And besides, men have held the floor quite
long enough.

EVA FIGES
ADELE KING

vii
 Epigraph
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,

eventually
you will be able to see me.

MARGARET ATWOOD

ix
1 Maps of the
Green World
'Literature is not only a mirror', Margaret Atwood writes
in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, 'it is
also a map, a geography of the mind' (18-19). In many
ways, Survival, which Atwood describes as a 'cross between
a personal statement ... and a political manifesto' (13), is
both a map and a mirror of Atwood's own poetry and
fiction as well as of that tradition of Canadian art and
sensibility which is Atwood's heritage. Atwood's subject in
Survival, as it is also primary in her other literary essays,
her six novels, two books of short stories, and ten volumes
of poetry, is an exploration of both the creation and
function of art and the assertion of its relevance in social
and political contexts. For Atwood, art is a moral issue,
and it is the responsibility of the writer/artist not only to
describe her world, but also to criticise it, to bear witness
to its failures, and, finally, to prescribe corrective measures-
perhaps even to redeem.
Atwood teaches mostly through negative example: her
protagonists are not very heroic heroines in the beginning
of their adventures and sometimes not even at the
conclusion. They are not totally reliable narrators; they
may lie to the reader as they sometimes lie to themselves,
or in some instances, they are even a bit mad. They are
often fragmented, isolated, 'seeing poorly, translating badly'
(Surfacing, 91). All are, in varying degrees, failed artists
like those metaphorically paralysed and amputated authors
whom Atwood describes in Survival, cut off from tradition,

1
2 MARGARET ATWOOD

bereft of audience and of social or political relevance. All

of Atwood's writer/artist protagonists share a curious
ambivalence towards their craft: they often use their fictions
for the evasion of reality rather than for confrontation; they
create illusion rather than transform reality. Much like
Atwood's mirror images, so central to all her novels and
poems, art can function, as it does for these heroines, as a
way to lose the self in a vision of the self, to establish a
conflict between the 'I' of the self and the 'she' of one's
fiction, to become object rather than subject, to create
polarities where none should exist. Like Alice in
Wonderland, Atwood's heroines often move through
mirrors and through their own self-deluding fictions into
worlds of myth, where it is possible to lose the self and
where they flounder amidst the ruins of traditional roles
and obsolete images of women. But Atwood is always
intent to state that, also like the mirror, art can and should
function as an agent of truth, a means to knowledge and
confrontation. Those of her heroines who resolve this basic
conflict of illusion versus reality, who ultimately discover
truth in and through art, also discover their own identities
and their own humanity. In the refutation of the fantasy of
the self as little-girl-lost, as innocent victim, they assert
their own maturity as powerfully-creative agents - as
artists.
Atwood's 'maps' for the arrival at such a destination are
often complex and sometimes difficult to read. There is
always more than one way to get there from here, and
'here', in Atwood's psychic geography, is sometimes the
greatest enigma of all. As Atwood writes in Survival, 'Part
of where you are is where you've been. If you aren't too
sure where you are, or if you're sure but don't like it,
there's a tendency, both in psychotherapy and in literature,
to retrace your history to see how you got there' (112).
Atwood's heroines always share with Atwood herself an
ambivalence about where they have been, about their
 MAPS OF THE GREEN WORLD 3

identity as Canadians, and this identity can be metaphoric

as well as actual. As Atwood writes in 'Night Poem', 'In
this country of water . . . your shadow is not your
shadow/but your reflection' (Two-Headed Poems, 106). The
writer heroine of Lady Oracle refers to herself as 'an escape
artist', but she cannot escape her identity as a Canadian:
'. . . my own country was embedded in my brain, like a
metal plate left over from an operation' (342).
To be Canadian, for Atwood, is a state of mind, and it
often has to do with psychological failure, with victimisation,
with, as she writes in the Afterword to The Journals of
Susanna Moodie, 'paranoid schizophrenia'. In all its
traditional symbolism of virgin wilderness and pristine
innocence, Canada is a kind of Eden of the imagination, a
'green world' which, by its very nature, is subject to
invasion and oppression by its stronger southern neighbour.
Canada represents victimisation of the kind that Atwood
describes in Survival under the classification of 'basic
victim positions' and, in this way, Canada is essentially
'feminine' in a powerfully 'masculine' world. Such
symbolism has its parallel in Atwood's novels and poems of
sexual politics: men victimise and oppress women, who in
tum exert a passive-aggressive power in the protestation of
their own innocence. Atwood's innocent and at least
symbolically virginal heroines, she implies, must, like
Canada as a whole, refute the illusion of their own
innocence, recognise their complicity in the destructive
cycle of power and victimisation, and thus confront their
own reality, divided and schizophrenic as that reality may
be. Just as Atwood's heroines must move from innocence
to confrontation, so Canada as a nation must recognise and
confront its own political identity.
Atwood's negative evaluations of Canada as fact and as
symbol are always tempered, however, by nostalgia: it is
home to which one returns for safety as well as for escape.
For the desperate heroine of The Handmaid's Tale, for
4 MARGARET ATWOOD

example, Canada becomes the only sane haven in an insane

world, the only possible refuge from slavery, and this, in
fact, has been Canada's historical tradition. It is the
'mother' country for which one longs, but which one yet
rejects. There is always, in Atwood, the necessity to
redefine the mother, to return to one's childhood home, to
explore the past in order to confront the present. As the
orphaned and isolated protagonist of Surfacing begins her
actual journey into the Canadian backwoods of her
childhood and her psychological journey toward selfhood,
she says, 'I can't believe I'm on this road again .. .' (9).
'This road' is both 'map' and 'trap', both imprisoning
convention and necessary tradition. So, the literary tradition
of Canada inhibits Atwood as artist, yet paradoxically
serves her as guide. As she writes in Survival, ' ... having
bleak ground under your feet is better than having no
ground at all. Any map is better than no map as long as it
is accurate, and knowing your starting points and your
frame of reference is better than being suspended in a void'
(246).
Certainly, Atwood's Canadian tradition provides her with
a preponderance of images and archetypes which are
poetically and novelistically intrinsic to her work. Not only
do her heroines share a symbolic identity with Canada in
their victimisation and initial powerlessness, but they also
affirm selfhood and power within the context of Canadian
literary tradition. What Atwood has described in Survival
as a prevailing fertility myth involving the archetype of 'the
Great Canadian Baby', for example, becomes, with some
significant transfigurations, a metaphor in her own fiction
for a rebirth of the self into artist. Those of Atwood's
heroines who do not bear children are correspondingly
failed artists, failed adults locked into their own childhoods,
doomed perpetually to the role of virginal young woman
which Atwood characterises in Survival as the 'Diana'
stereotype so prevalent in Canadian fiction.
 MAPS OF THE GREEN WORLD 5

Marian in The Edible Woman never truly grows up,

partly because she rejects and denies her own feminine
powers of procreation, which again are symbolic of her
potential for artistic creativity. The heroine of Surfacing,
on the other hand, assumes her own integration and thereby
her sanity with the symbolic re-creation of her self in the
conception of a baby. Also for Jeannie (Genie?) in Atwood's
short story, 'Giving Birth', the baby itself is a metaphor for
art and thus for creative power. The child's first word, says
the narrator, will be 'something miraculous, something
that has never yet been said' (Dancing Girls, 226). Atwood's
own daughter, the subject of a number of poems including
'Spelling', receives the legacy of her mother's art, which is
both how to spell and 'how to make spells'; Atwood writes
in this poem, 'A child is not a poem,/a poem is not a
child. /There is no either/or', but she hastens to qualify
with the word, 'However' (True Stories, 63). The child thus
is both created and creative. In another poem, 'A Red
Shirt', Atwood bestows upon her daughter the potential to
dance and to dispel myths. The colour red loses its
association with blood and thus its fatal implications as the
child puts on the red shirt which again is the product of
her mother's art, waves her arms, and makes the world
'explode with banners' (Two-Headed Poems, 105).
Within the Canadian tradition, Atwood writes in Survival,
the 'Great Canadian Baby' too frequently becomes the
'Great Canadian Coffin', an image of 'stunted or doomed
fertility' (208). So, too, in Atwood's novels and poems, the
fertility myth as a metaphor for art is frequently inverted:
babies are aborted, born dead or malformed, just as art is
sometimes misconceived. The possible birth of a monster
obsesses Lesje in Life Before Man; the poisoned women in
The Handmaid's Tale are likely to give birth to 'shredders'
rather than to normal children. The Frankenstein's monster
image is recurrent, particularly in Atwood's poetry, the
artist/woman/Frankenstein having 'given birth' to a terrible
6 MARGARET ATWOOD

art form she cannot control. In 'Five Poems for Dolls', the
hideously-smiling dolls represent aborted babies, or babies
never conceived. In 'Useless', 'words we never said' are
equated with 'our unborn children' (You Are Happy, 10).
In 'Chaos Poem', the speaker 'can hear/death growing in
me like a baby with no head' (You Are Happy, 14). In The
Journals of Susanna Moodie, the speaker shocks us with the
observation that 'unborn babies/fester like wounds in the
body' (42). For the wife in Atwood's short story, 'The
Resplendent Quetzal', her own dead baby is re-created in
the grotesque Christ child she steals from a plaster creche.
The controlling image in Two-Headed Poems is that of
Siamese twins, 'Joined Head to Head, and still alive' (59).
In Surfacing, the protagonist considers that her aborted
baby is her Siamese twin, the other half of her self which
is also her self as artist. The woman artist, Atwood makes
clear at various points in her writing, is herself a kind of
Siamese twin: 'the woman who is a writer who is also a
woman' is like 'Siamese twins pulling uneasily against each
other, the writer feeling suffocated by the woman, the
woman rendered sterile by the writer' (Second Words, 172).
The paradox is inescapable: 'The heads speak sometimes
singly, sometimes/together, sometimes alternately within a
poem./Like all Siamese twins, they dream of separation'
(Two-Headed Poems, 59).
As the fertility myth, in all its manifestations, is central
to Atwood as to much of literary tradition, including
Canadian literature and folk tales, so episodes of drowning,
of becoming submerged, of travelling beneath water or
beneath the earth dominate Canadian tradition and
Atwood's work as well. As in many literatures, such images
imply a rebirth, a return, a 'surfacing', a regeneration, all
leitmotifs for Atwood. In Procedures for Underground, for
example, the narrative voice is again a kind of Alice in an
underground Wonderland, a mythic region of the psyche
where wonders are both bizarre and beautiful yet
 MAPS OF THE GREEN WORLD 7

always threatening, always containing the possibility of

transformation or metamorphosis, perhaps even into the
sub-human or the supra-human. Also in Surfacing, the
protagonist dives too deeply into the lake and experiences
another kind of reality that is replete with monsters and yet
with truth. All Atwood's heroines experience such a sojourn
in magic realms, to whatever symbolic or imagistic degree;
all incarnate the mythological Persephone's part-time
residence in the underworld, or Alice's adventures down in
the rabbit burrow. To 'surface' from such experiences, to
return to what is conceived to be 'reality', as Alice returns
to a waking world and Persephone from the underworld to
her mother's meadow, is to achieve a special knowledge, to
assume the role of artist, which is synonymous with 'seer',
to become, as in Canadian tradition, the shaman.
The role of the artist, particularly in contemporary
society, is, for Atwood, shamanistic, even though she
indicates throughout her work a realisation of the dangers
for the artist herself that are implicit in such a distinction.
There is the inherent moral obligation to use one's art to
create life rather than reduce it to artifact, to avoid the
misuse of art which is the curse of 'the girl with the
Gorgon touch' and of the female Frankenstein, both of
whom appear throughout Atwood's fiction and poetry. One
of Atwood's few heroines who does not misuse her art is
Circe in 'Circe/Mud Poems'. Her role, certainly, is that of
shaman:

People come from all over to consult me, bringing

their limbs which have unaccountably fallen off,
they don't know why, my front porch is waist deep
in hands, bringing their blood hoarded in pickle
jars, bringing their fears about their hearts, which
they either can or can't hear at night. They offer me
their pain, hoping in return for a word, a word, any
word .... (You Are Happy, 49)
8 MARGARET ATWOOD

Art, then, is the magic power to cure, to comfort, to

transform. Circe can transform men into pigs, but, more
importantly, pigs into men, lover into human being. In a
real sense, Atwood's poems and fiction also do this: they
tum magic into art, myth into reality, archetype into
recognisable human being. The real power of art, for
Atwood, is to enhance life, to make it more fully humane
and thus to obliterate the polarities between the real and
the fantastic.
Myth and magic are thus not destinations on Atwood's
literary map, but places through which the artist passes on
her way to 'here'. 'This is how I got here', begins the
heroine of Bodily Harm, and the poems in Procedures for
Underground are, in one respect, a parody of a travel guide,
noting the wonders and dangers of the journey but always
pointing the direction home. Myth belongs then to the
geography of childhood, to the psychology of a Canadian
past. Atwood describes the mythologies inherent in
Canadian children's literature as '. . . a world of frozen
corpses, dead gophers, snow, dead children, and the ever-
present feeling of menace, not from an enemy set over
against you but from everything surrounding you' (Survival,
30). Atwood's poetic images and novelistic plots are replete
with similar references, with such feelings of menace.
Mistaken and misguided heroines consistently 'transform'
themselves into animals, particularly small, helpless ones of
the hunted variety: Marian in The Edible Woman is like a
rabbit who must burrow to safety to avoid the evil male as
hunter. The protagonist of Surfacing seeks safety by trying
to 'grow fur', by abdicating her human status. Joan Foster
in Lady Oracle is haunted and persecuted by a mysterious
person who leaves mutilated small animals, effigies of Joan
herself, at her door. Lesje of Life Before Man identifies
with dinosaurs (not small animals certainly but nevertheless
powerless to prevent their own extinction) who live in
some imaginary prehistoric green world which represents
 MAPS OF THE GREEN WORLD 9

yet another variation on the underground existence. Even

the titles of poems, like The Animals in That Country,
testify to Atwood's fascination with animal imagery and
her recognition of the necessity to move beyond such
seductive yet childish identification, an identification,
finally, which contributes to a view of the self as victim.
Victimisation, according to Atwood, is the subject of a
great deal of mythology, Canadian and otherwise. The
victimised heroines of fairy tales are also frequently a
source of identification for Atwood's protagonists, and they
inevitably prove to be destructive models. In Survival
Atwood describes the traditional heroine of Canadian fiction
as a Rapunzel or as a Lady of Shalott, an image of the
woman/artist imprisoned in a tower of mythology which is
of her own construction. Atwood repeatedly refers also to
the Little Mermaid, that archetypal victim/artist who
sacrifices her tongue in order to grow legs so that she can
search for the handsome prince. Atwood writes in Second
Words about the woman as writer, the paradox that 'If you
want to be female, you'll have to have your tongue
removed, like the Little Mermaid' (225).
Atwood's most pervasive fairy-tale image, also related
thematically to the Little Mermaid, is perhaps that of the
'dancing girl', the possessed victim in 'The Red Shoes',
and of her descendent, Moira Shearer in the film of the
same name. In the film, the dancer must dance herself
literally to death, having made the fatal choice for art over
love. In Second Words, Atwood talks about the impact of
the myth and the film on a generation of little girls who
'. . . were taken to see it as a special treat for their birthday
parties .... The message was clear. You could not have
both your artistic career and the love of a good man as
well, and if you tried, you would end up committing
suicide' (224). All of Atwood's heroines, including the
Persephone voice of Double Persephone, are 'dancing girls'
for at least a time, denying their identities as artists,
10 MARGARET ATWOOD

permitting the removal of their tongues, and opting for

victimisation in the games of sexual politics. In her poem,
'A Red Shirt', Atwood expresses the desire to protect her
daughter from such roles: ' ... she should/keep silent and
avoid/red shoes, red stockings, dancing./Dancing in red
shoes will kill you' (Two-Headed Poems, 101). The idea of
dancing one's self to death becomes, finally, a dominant
irony in The Handmaid's Tale in which the heroine, dressed
from head to toe in red, faces the possibility of dancing
from a hangman's noose.
Atwood derives her mythic metaphors from diverse
sources: classical accounts of metamorphoses (particularly
in the 'Circe/Mud Poems'), gothic horror stories, the ghost
tales of Henry James, Christian concepts of martyrdom,
Canadian folklore, and fairy tales for children, which,
among others, will be explored in the following chapters.
But always her use of myth is a deconstructive one; she
disassembles the myth to reconstruct it in terms of the
modern female psyche and the special circumstances of the
contemporary female kunstlerroman. Her protagonists are
always explorers through tradition and myth in search of
a new identity and in search of a voice, a tongue, a
language, an art, with which to proclaim that identity.
Particularly in this sense, Atwood can be seen as a
'feminist' writer: she is concerned for the psychological
and physical survival of women, and she sees this in terms,
not merely of individual survival, but of sisterhood. Almost
always there is a sister-figure in Atwood's fiction, a
secondary character, sometimes a confidant, who often aids
the protagonist, even if the protagonist solipsistically refuses
to recognise her value. Women friends, being subject to
the faults of the rest of humanity, may turn out to be as
treacherous as men, as is the case with Ainsley in The
Edible Woman and with Anna in Surfacing, but they may
also serve as unconditional supporters and faithful allies in
a way that men never do. Moira in The Handmaid's Tale
 MAPS OF THE GREEN WORLD 11

and Lora in Bodily Harm, for example, are more heroic

figures than are the heroines themselves.
Too, Atwood frequently incorporates the theme of the
rediscovered mother, a pervasive concern in feminist
literature as a whole from Jane Eyre to Adrienne Rich. In
such poems as 'Five Poems for Grandmothers' (Two-
Headed Poems), Atwood makes clear her sense of the bond
among women, particularly of that bond which is of blood.
In 'A Red Shirt' also, Atwood writes of '. . . the
procession/ of old leathery mothers . . . passing the work
from hand to hand,/mother to daughter,/a long thread of
red blood, not yet broken' (Two-Headed Poems, 102). Like
Persephone, however, most of Atwood's protagonists in
the novels have 'lost' their mothers, a factor which
contributes to or is symptomatic of their more. general
homelessness and isolation. Joan Foster in Lady Oracle
cannot recognise herself at least partly because she cannot
recognise a reality for her mother. The heroine of Surfacing
is one of the few who rediscovers her mother, and thus
rediscovers herself.
Atwood's sister and mother figures, however, are human
women rather than witches, goddesses or Demeter figures,
and it is the protagonists' recognition of this human status
which is a key to the discovery of their own identities.
Even that archetypal woman as artist, the Siren, pleads for
a restoration of her humanity: in 'Siren Song', she will
share her secret song in order to get out 'of this bird suit
... /1 don't enjoy it here/squatting on this island/looking
picturesque and mythical/with these two feathery maniacs'
(You Are Happy, 38-39). Perhaps Atwood's desire to
portray women as individuals rather than as incarnations of
myth, her attempt to 'take the capital W off Woman'
(Second Words, 227), is the aspect of her work which
provides the greatest problems for some feminist critics.
Atwood's view that women share in the guilt for their
victimisation, that women's problems are 'part of a larger,
12 MARGARET ATWOOD

non-exclusive picture . . . men can be just as disgusting,

and statistically more so, towards other men .. .' (Second
Words, 282), indicates that Atwood is as prescriptive
towards the feminist movement as towards the rest of
society. Atwood has also made clear in a number of
interviews that she is against the idea of 'power' in general,
whether held by men or women: 'there's no point in
destroying a male child instead of a female one'. 1 Again,
women, in Atwood's terms, are not myths but human
beings capable of all the evils and faults that term implies,
and such a belief does not render her less a feminist.
Atwood has grown up with the contemporary women's
movement and, like most of the best writers today, she has
transcended its infancy along with her own. From
what Atwood herself has termed in Second Words the
'protofeminism' of The Edible Woman, her work has
developed into an increasingly revolutionary vision of
women's place in a profoundly political world, a vision
based on women's humanity and their potential acceptance
of human responsibility, for evil as well as good. Like
many other feminist writers, she is concerned most
specifically with the role of women as artists and with the
political implications of that role. More than men, women
artists are subject to role prescriptions and the necessities
of the mundane; as the speaker/artist complains in 'Small
Poems for the Winter Solstice', 'You think I live in a glass
tower/where the phone doesn't ring/and nobody eats? But
it does, they do/ and leave the crumbs and greasy knives'
(True Stories, 33). Childbirth and artistic creativity may be
metaphorically linked, but in a practical world they may
also represent a conflict: 'and I wonder how many
women/denied themselves daughters,/ closed themselves in
rooms,/drew the curtains/so they could mainline words'
(True Stories, 63).
In the first place, to be a woman artist may be a
contradiction in terms; the 'red shoes' paradox and the
 MAPS OF THE GREEN WORLD 13

Siamese twins conflict are by no means obsolete. In her

short story 'Lives of the Poets', Atwood depicts the poet
protagonist on a lecture tour; in pursuit of her art, she
loses her husband to the attentions of another woman. Her
every public appearance is preceded by a nose bleed,
symbolic of the price of art: 'Blood, the elemental fluid, the
juice of life, by-product of birth, prelude to death. The red
badge of courage' (Dancing Girls, 191-92). Regardless of
the price, however, Atwood condemns her heroines to the
choice for art. Even in her own life, as Atwood has stated,
there is always a contradiction in roles:

You would come to a fork in the road where you'd

be forced to make a decision: 'woman' or 'writer'. I
chose being a writer, because I was very determined,
even though it was very painful for me then (the late
fifties and early sixties); but I'm very glad that I
made that decision because the other alternative
would have been ultimately much more painful. It's
more painful to renounce your gifts or your direction
in life than it is to renounce an individual. 2

Atwood's heroines have always to learn this same lesson.

For Atwood, the female kunstlerroman is both fictive subject
and political autobiography.
The literary tradition from which Atwood derives her
inspiration is, to a great extent, a female tradition. Her
studies, both academic and informal, began with an interest
in the nineteenth-century British novel, a genre dominated
by such female giants as the Brontes, Jane Austen and
George Eliot. Canadian literary tradition, too, according to
Atwood, is heavily populated by women authors. And, if
her many book reviews, some of which are reprinted in
Second Words, are an accurate indication, Atwood's current
literary interests are also in the area of women writers, for
she has written widely on the works of such contemporary
14 MARGARET ATWOOD

American feminist authors as Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath,

Anne Sexton, Marge Piercy, Kate Millett, and Tillie Olsen,
as well as on those of Canadian women writers such as
Margaret Laurence, Marie-Claire Blais, Margaret Avison,
and Audrey Thomas, all of whom have, to varying degrees,
influenced Atwood's own work. In these analyses of the
works of other writers (Atwood as critic will be discussed
in Chapter 7), Atwood proves herself an excellent feminist
critic, not only in the expansion of the canon of women
writers, but in the deconstruction of male texts as well, a
task which she undertakes with a great deal of characteristic
dry humour in such volumes as Murder in the Dark. In
defining a 'male' literary style as opposed to a female
aesthetic, Atwood jokes, 'Last time we looked,
monosyllables were male, still dominant but sinking fast,
wrapped in the octopoid arms of labial polysyllables,
whispering to them with arachnoid grace: darling, darling'
(Murder in the Dark, 34). All of Atwood's works, no matter
how ultimately and seriously profound, do not neglect the
aspect of humour, and her style is feminist humour most
often directed against the inflated egos of men, especially
men who wear cloaks.
Atwood's male characters in both the poetry and fiction,
are, however, most often depicted as human beings rather
than as archetypes or romantic images. Only men who
think of themselves as superhuman, like Ulysses in the
'Circe/Mud Poems', are ultimately ridiculous, even boring.
Circe's greatest feat of magic or art is her transformation of
Ulysses from god into human being: 'Men with the heads
of eagles/no longer interest me/or pig-men, or those who
can fly/with the aid of wax and feathers', she remarks. In
fact, their fallibility is amusing: 'on hot days you can watch
them/as they melt, come apart,/fall into the ocean'. Both
Atwood and Circe prefer ' ... the others,/the ones left
over/the ones who have escaped from these/mythologies
with barely their lives; I they have real faces and hands . . . '
 MAPS OF THE GREEN WORLD 15

(You Are Happy, 47). Atwood ponders the fallibility of the

demon lover in her short story, 'Hair Jewellery', and
concludes that 'What Psyche saw with the candle was not a
god with wings but a pigeon-chested youth with pimples,
and that's why it took her so long to win her way back to
true love. It is easier to love a daemon than a man, though
less heroic' (Dancing Girls, 105). For Atwood, men as
individuals are much like women as individuals, subject to
the same polar thinking, torn between good and evil: 'I
give you Albert Schweitzer in one corner, Hitler in
another', she writes in Second Words (414).
However, the Hitler bogey becomes increasingly
dangerous as Atwood's political consciousness and her
feminism become more defined in the later works. Men are
dangerous, she perceives, not because they are intrinsically
more evil than women, but because they are in control,
because they have the power. In 'Liking Men', for example,
Atwood sees the benign aspect of male power, '. . . quiet
and sane. Knowing what to do, doing it well. Sexy'. But
she also realises that men make war; they are capable of
rape and murder:

Now you see rows of them, marching, marching;

yours is the street-level view, because you are lying
down. Power is the power to smash, two hold your
legs, two your arms, the fifth shoves a pointed
instrument into you; a bayonet, the neck of a broken
bottle, and it's not even wartime, this is a park, with
a children's playground, tiny red and yellow horses
... who did this? Who defines enenry? How can you
like men? (Murder in the Dark, 54)

Each novel and poem of Atwood's seems more 'feminist'

than the last; her catalogue of the atrocities perpetrated on
women, from chastity belts to genital mutilation and
prostitution, which she describes in 'A Women's Issue', is
16 MARGARET ATWOOD

as terrifying as the descriptions by feminist-theologian

Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology of identical acts of violence.
Atwood's anger in 'A Woman's Issue' is unmitigated by
her usual humour, although the sense of irony is always
present: she writes of the tortured women of the poem,
'You'll notice that what they have in common/ is between
the legs .... Who invented the word love? (True Stories,
55).
But perhaps finally we must categorise Atwood's most
recent work (if such categorisation is desirable at all) as
something like 'radical humanism'. From her early
disclaimers of aspiration to a political voice, her frequent
statements that 'books don't save the world', she has
moved steadily towards a firm commitment to human
rights and the conviction that if books, in fact, don't save
the world, then nothing else can either. From early essays
reprinted inS econd Words we infer that Atwood's philosophy
was one of reservation, that there is '. . . a questionable
value of writers, male or female, becoming directly involved
in political movements of any sort: their involvement may
be good for the movement, but it has yet to be demonstrated
that it's good for the writer' (190). Later, however,
particularly as manifested in Bodily Harm, True Stories and
The Handmaid's Tale, that sentiment has changed, perhaps
due to Atwood's discovery of Amnesty International and
her growing recognition that we live in an increasingly
violent and power-oriented society. The facts and political
realities, atrocities committed in the name of ideology,
terrorism and brutality, become crucial for Atwood, 'not
because the writer is or is not consciously political but
because a writer is an observer, a witness, and such
observations are the air he breathes' (Second Words, 394).
Politics, which Atwood defines in deceptively simple terms
as 'who has the power', becomes a matter, not of choice,
but of human responsibility for which both novel and
poem become the vehicle.
 MAPS OF THE GREEN WORLD 17

Largely for this reason, I have chosen not to separate

discussions of Atwood's poetry from discussions of her
fiction in the following chapters. Although Atwood has
stated in an interview that, as a writer of prose, she is not
just a 'somewhat different' personality from the writer of
poetry, but 'an almost totally different one' ,3 the poems
and novels are nonetheless related ideologically and even
stylistically. Atwood's novels and short stories are poetic in
style and diction, and her poems have a distinct narrative
quality. The heroines of both poems and novels are similar
in character and in psychological condition. Most important,
however, is the fact that both fiction and poems are in the
form of testaments: 'eye-witnesses, !-witnesses' (Second
Words, 203). They, in essence, comprise one story, which
Atwood calls 'the story of the disaster which is the world'.
Atwood herself is chronicler of this disaster: 'I only am
escaped alone to tell thee: When a story, "true" or not,
begins like this, we must listen' (Second Words, 350).
2 Alice and the
Animals:
The Edible Woman
and Early Poems
On one level, Atwood's first published novel, The Edible
Woman, is a 'realistic' and often comic account of a young
woman's rather prosaic life in Toronto. Marian MacAlpin
attends her job at 'Seymour Surveys', a marketing research
firm; she lives with a roommate, Ainsley; she becomes
engaged to a very proper young man, Peter; she meets a
second, less proper young man, Duncan; she becomes
disen~anted with the first; she stops eating; she breaks off
her engagement; she begins to eat; she ends with no lover,
no job, no roommate, but with a remarkably healthy
appetite. Readers, however, should not be deceived by
what appears to be a simple plot. Atwood's novels are
never on one level; they are often, like The Edible Woman,
quite elaborate detective stories in which the reader must
become the detective, and Atwood herself, as she indicates
in Murder in the Dark, is the criminal: ' ... that's me in the
dark. I have designs on you. I'm plotting my sinister
crime, my hands are reaching for your neck or perhaps, by
mistake, your thigh .... Just remember this, when the
scream at last has ended and you've turned on the lights:

18
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 19

by the rules of the game, I must always lie' (Murder in the

Dark, 30). Thus Atwood invites our participation in her
creations; the images and allusions are clues, and the reader
is challenged to interpret the evidence, to divine the lies, to
reassemble and to propose hypotheses for solutions.
Like all of Atwood's heroines, Marian lives a double life,
the more interesting of which is her psychic 'underground'
life, her Alice-in-Wonderland-like dream existence.
Atwood's invitation to interpretation in this literary context
is provided by a long passage in which 'Fish', appropriately
enough an English graduate student and adept at fishing
for symbolic interpretations of literature, explains his
current research project to Marian and also provides a
number of clues for the reader of The Edible Woman:

Of course everybody knows Alice is a sexual-identity-

crisis book that's old stuff, it's been around for a long
time, I'd like to go into it a little deeper though.
What we have here, if you only look at it closely,
this is the little girl descending into the very
suggestive rabbit-burrow, becoming as it were pre-
natal, trying to find her role ... as a Woman. Yes,
well that's clear enough. These patterns emerge.
Patterns emerge. One sexual role after another is
presented to her but she seems unable to accept any
of them, I mean she's really blocked. She rejects
Maternity when the baby she's been nursing turns
into a pig, nor does she respond positively to the
dominating-female role of the Queen and her
castration cries of 'Off with his head!' .... And
right after that you'll recall she goes to talk with the
Mock-Turtle, enclosed in his shell and his self-pity, a
definitely pre-adolescent character; then there are
those most suggestive scenes, most suggestive, the
one where her neck becomes elongated and she is
accused of being a serpent, hostile to eggs, you'll
20 MARGARET ATWOOD

remember, a rather destructively-phallic identity she

indignantly rejects; and her negative reaction to the
dictatorial Caterpillar, just six inches high,
importantly perched on the all-too-female mushroom
which is perfectly round but which has the power to
make you either smaller or larger than normal, I find
that particularly interesting . . . . (199)

Patterns do indeed emerge, in spite of Fish's inflated

rhetoric and his fascination with the grotesque (yet another
of his projects involves 'Womb-Symbols in Beatrix Potter'),
for Marian is also in search of her identity as 'Woman',
although her search is not a conscious one. Like Alice, she
lives partly in a surreal world of the subconscious where
the bizarre is an aspect of the logical, the physical world
a manifestation of the psychological. Marian's body,
like Alice's, is subject to sudden metamorphoses,
transformations which are symbolic of her mental state:
'Marian gazed down at the small silvery image reflected in
the bowl of the spoon: herself upside down with a huge
torso narrowing to a pinhead at the handle end. She tilted
the spoon and her forehead swelled, then receded' (150).
At another point, she dreams that her toes and fingers are
turning transparent and melting into jelly. Also like Alice,
Marian symbolically burrows into rabbit holes; early in the
novel she eats or drinks anything labelled as edible; she
considers Ainsley's suggestion that she carry a bouquet of
mushrooms at her wedding; and she insists on seeing both
herself and her friends as Mock-Turtles and varieties of
other quasi-human species. Quite certainly, Marian is like
Alice in that she regards babies as pigs.
That 'female identity' which Marian's prefeminist society
presents to young women is clearly marriage and maternity,
in that order. Atwood explains that The Edible Woman was
conceived 'while gazing ... at a confectioner's display
window full of marzipan pigs ... I'd been speculating for
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 21

some time about symbolic cannibalism. Wedding cakes

with sugar brides and grooms were at that time of particular
interest to me' (Second Words, 369). The Edible Woman
could, in fact, be seen as a case study in aversion to female
roles, much as Fish interprets Alice in Wonderland in the
paragraph cited above. Real-life brides and grooms, in
Marian's experience, do, in essence, 'eat' each other, and
maternity also becomes associated with cannibalism. Every
other young woman of Marian's acquaintance is either
pregnant or would like to be, and Marian finds herself
surrounded with fecundity of a nature she finds appalling.
The novel opens at the beginning of the Labour Day
weekend, an appropriate holiday on which to visit Clara,
an old college friend who is soon expecting her third child,
an entity as unwelcomed as the first two. The formerly-
beautiful Clara has, as Marian perceives her, been
metamorphosed into the very serpent which Alice is
accused of becoming in Fish's explanation: she looks to
Marian like a 'boa-constrictor that has swallowed a
watermelon' (30). Her pregnancy is a kind of mental
'vegetation', symbolised by the stylised flowers, more
ominous than decorative, on her maternity smock which
'moved with her breathing, as though they were coming
alive' (36). Children hang from her body like leeches; they
scream and wet on the guests' clothing; they have bowel
movements in inappropriate places; and, in general, behave
in an extremely piggish fashion. They are, after all,
products of what both Marian and Clara perceive as a kind
of disease; as Clara characterises her pregnancy: 'Maybe it
isn't a baby at all but a kind of parasitic growth, like galls
on trees, or elephantiasis of the navel, or a huge bunion'
(117). Clara has been ' ... dragged slowly down into the
gigantic pumpkin-like growth that was enveloping her
body' (117). Given the recurrence of the pumpkin as an
image of pregnancy, it is small wonder that Marian
ultimately rejects Peter, whose name and character recall
22 MARGARET ATWOOD

the nursery rhyme about the Pumpkin-Eater, and regards

Duncan with suspicion when he is seen to have been
consuming large numbers of pumpkin seeds. As Marian
flees the maternity ward where Clara has finally given
birth, she has 'the sense of having escaped, as if from a
culvert or cave' (135).
Ainsley, Marian's at least theoretically liberated
roommate, next decides to make her contribution to society
in the form of a super-baby (perhaps 'the Great Canadian
Baby' itself which Atwood discusses in Survival) which she
plans to raise without the inhibiting effects of paternal
influence. When Marian learns that the baby has been
conceived in her bed, the situation becomes doubly
threatening, undoubtedly because she feels somehow
implicated, involved in a process which repels her. Marian
shares the prospective father's disgust at Ainsley's
announcement; Len waves his beer-bottle and laments,
'Now I'm going to be all mentally tangled up in Birth.
Fecundity. Gestation. Don't you realize what that will do
to me? It's obscene, that horrible oozy .. .' (163). Len
attributes his phobic reaction to a traumatic incident in
childhood in which his mother forced him to eat an egg
which he was convinced contained an unborn chicken:
'. . . there was a little beak and little claws and everything'
(164). Marian's next experience with an egg is predictable:
'. . . she opened her soft-boiled egg and saw the yolk
looking up at her with its one significant and accusing
yellow eye' (165). Alice as a serpent, according to Fish,
was also 'hostile to eggs', that obvious symbol of maternity
complicated by distinct suggestions of cannibalism.
Talk of future parenthood precedes Marian's first attack
of anorexia. She and Peter are eating steak in a restaurant
(much of the novel is set in restaurants or kitchens, and
much of the action and imagery involve mouths and the
process of eating, as is also the case in the Alice books)
when Marian visualises her meat as that most maternal of
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 23

creatures, a cow, first as the kind of cow pictured in cook

books with the lines drawn to indicate the cuts, and then as
the living animal, 'flesh and blood, rare, and she had been
devouring it. Gorging herself on it' (155). Soon Marian is
unable to eat anything but salads, and even carrots begin
to take on a kind of life. The very mould growing on the
accumulating dirty dishes in her kitchen has, she believes,
as much right to life as she has. But it is not a respect for
life which prevents Marian from eating; in fact, the opposite
is true. Life disgusts her, as do the functions of living; she
watches her female coworkers eating, and she is
simultaneously fascinated and repelled by '. . . the continual
flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in,
giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps,
grease, hair, babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit,
coffee, tomato-juice, blood ... she felt suffocated by this
thick sargasso-sea of femininity'. Claustrophobia ensues,
as is the case when Marian visits Clara in the maternity
ward, and she wants only to escape this 'sweet organic
scent' and to place 'a fixed barrier between herself and that
liquid amorphous other' (172).
Psychiatric explanations for anorexia are, of course,
complex, but Atwood does in this novel prefigure a great
many current theories: in one sense, Marian's antipathy to
food is clearly a rejection of her female identity and the
maternity that identity seems to her inevitably to imply.
Pregnancy, like food, makes one fat, but it also represents
a loss of autonomy, an alien presence in one's own body
which directs action, in effect, takes over. Just as Alice
underground cannot control what effects on her body the
various substances she ingests will have ('Eat Me', 'Drink
Me', but there is no warning label as to whether she will
grow or shrink and with what dire consequences), so
Marian is 'afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not
being able to contain herself any longer' (225). Marian
fears this loss of control, which is both physical and
24 MARGARET ATWOOD

emotional, and, in fact, her life and her future are out of
her control, subject to role prescriptions and the desires of
others. Her only autonomy, she feels, is to direct what she
will eat or not eat. Such eating disorders symbolic of role
rejection are also frequent images in Atwood's later fiction:
Joan Foster in Lady Oracle, for example, can manipulate
her world only by changing the size of her body. By eating
a very great deal, Joan can separate herself from her
domineering mother by refusing to resemble her; in this
way she rejects not only her individual mother but the
maternal role in general. The motivation behind anorexia,
a disease which Atwood sees as so problematic in young
women, is not so much a desire for fashionable slimness, as
an attempt to avoid womanhood, to remain a little girl, in
essence to escape one's very humanity.
Yet another means of escaping one's humanity is, simply,
to abdicate, to think of one's self in terms of a child, an
animal, or even of an inanimate object. Marian's anorexia
is also clearly linked with her vision of herself as an animal,
a prey to the male hunter in the person of Peter. Her own
victimisation is thus mirrored in the sacrificial deaths of
animals for food. Atwood writes in Survival about animal
victims as a theme in Canadian literature, and theorises
that 'the English Canadian projects himself through his
animal images as a threatened victim' (Survival, 80).
Certainly, as we will see in Chapter 3, the protagonist of
Surfacing sees her own victimisation as symbolised by the
crucified heron, even in the fish she herself kills for food.
For Marian in The Edible Woman, the primary identification
is with rabbits, not for their legendary fertility, but for
their vulnerability. She listens while Peter describes a
hunting incident to Len, man-to-man:

So I let her off and Wham. One shot, right through

the heart . . . I picked it up and Trigger said,
"You know how to gut them, you just slit her down
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 25

the belly and give her a good hard shake and all the
guts'll fall out." So I whipped out my knife, good
knife, German steel, and slit the belly and took her
by the hind legs and gave her one hell of a crack, like
a whip you see, and the next thing you know there
was blood and guts all over the place. All over me,
what a mess, rabbit guts dangling from the trees,
god the trees were red for yards. . . . (70)

Peter and his friend 'Trigger' then proceed to take 'shots'

of the 'whole mess' with a camera, an instrument Atwood
frequently associates with guns or with psychological
annihilation. In her poem 'Camera', for example, Atwood
transforms the mechanical object into an instrument of a
lover's manipulation: 'How can I love your glass eye?' the
speaker asks (Circle Game, 56). In 'This is a Photograph of
Me', the 'drowned' speaker identifies her presence in the
photograph as 'in the lake, under the center/of the
picture, just under the surface' (Circle Game, 17), and the
implication is that the photograph itself rather than the
lake is responsible for her drowning. We will see in the
next chapter that the movie camera in Surfacing functions
as a device for torture, an instrument for symbolic rape.
Peter, too, is a camera enthusiast and it is his insistence
on 'getting a shot' at Marian later in the novel which
precipitates her final flight.
Shortly after Peter's account of his hunting expedition,
Marian begins to withdraw, even physically to the point
that she hides beneath a bed in Len's apartment while the
conversation continues above her: 'I was thinking of the
room as "up there". I myself was underground, I had dug
myself a private burrow' (77). Marian's bizarre behaviour
is somehow attractive to Peter, and the evening ends with
his proposal of marriage and her acceptance, although, in
the flash of lightning which ominously accompanies his
proposal, she sees herself 'small and oval, mirrored in his
26 MARGARET ATWOOD

eyes' (84). Following the engagement, Marian finds herself

unable to eat anything but salad: 'She felt like a rabbit,
crunching all the time on mounds of leafy greenery' (178).
Her final escape from Peter on the night of their engagement
party is a kind of nightmare flight, a rabbit's terror,
combined with the surreal imagery and claustrophic paranoia
encountered so frequently in the Alice books:

It had been a long search. She retraced through time

the corridors and rooms, long corridors, large rooms.
Everything seemed to be slowing down . . . . She
opened the door to the right and went in. There was
Peter, forty-five and balding but still recognizable as
Peter, standing in bright sunlight beside a barbecue
with a long fork in his hand . . . . She looked
carefully for herself in the garden, but she wasn't
there .... No, she thought, this has to be the
wrong room. It can't be the last one. And now she
could see there was another door, in the hedge at the
other side of the garden . . . . She was back in
Peter's living room with the people and the noise
. . . except that people seemed even clearer now,
more sharply focused, further away, and they were
moving faster and faster . . . . She ran for the next
door, yanked it open. Peter was there, dressed in his
dark opulent winter suit. He had a camera in his
hand .... (250)

Marian has projected the image of Peter as hunter from

the beginning of the novel. Under the facade of the
impeccably-dressed young lawyer and prospective husband,
Marian finds the heart of a killer, a reader of detective
novels, a collector of guns and cameras, even the possibility
of perversion as 'the Underwear Man', that anonymous
male voice reputed to telephone women in order to learn
their preference in intimate garments. Marian's own market
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 27

survey which she conducts as part of her job at Seymour

Surveys is an analogous invasion of privacy, though she
does not realise this. She searches for male reactions to a
beer commercial, a commercial designed to appeal to the
male as hunter, to elicit the 'mystical identity with the
plaid-jacketed sportsman shown in the pictures with his
foot on a deer or scooping a trout into his net' (25). Marian
thus divides her world by establishing polarities between
the male and female psyche, between the hunter and the
hunted, eater and eaten, victor and victim, consumer and
consumed. Marian is like the speaker in 'A Descent
Through the Carpet' who moves into a womb-like watery
world to find 'cold jewelled symmetries' and yet 'total fear'
in the form of sea creatures which represent 'the voracious
eater/the voracious eaten' (Circle Game, 30). Such divisions
allow Marian to regard herself as powerless, as innocent, as
child-like or even animal-like. She cannot eat or love or
marry Peter or have a baby or write a poem, because these
activities would force a recognition of her own humanity
and the guilt thereby implicit. Like the protagonist of
Surfacing, Marian 'refuses to be human'.
Critic Nina Auerbach in Romantic Imprisonment argues
in similar terms about the innocence versus the guilt of
Lewis Carroll's Alice. According to Auerbach, Alice herself
projects 'the bizarre anarchy of her dream country . . . .
The sea that almost drowns her is composed of her own
tears, and the dream that nearly obliterates her is composed
of fragments of her own personality'. 1 Alice thus is both
eater and eaten, writes Auerbach, and this is symbolised in
the final banquet in Through the Looking Glass as 'the food
comes alive and begins to eat the guests'. 2 Auerbach sees
that 'the core of Alice's nature ... seems to lie in her
mouth: the eating and drinking that direct her size changes
and motivate much of her behavior, the songs and verses
that pop out of her inadvertently, all are involved with
things entering and leaving her mouth'. 3 The 'demonic
28 MARGARET ATWOOD

Alice', the cannibalistic 'hungry Alice', are images

juxtaposed to the model of Victorian childhood and
innocence, and they indicate, according to Auerbach,
Carroll's concerns about Original Sin. Alice and the Rabbit,
the girl and the animal, Auerbach contends, are but aspects
of one self, 'looking glass versions of each other'. 4
While it is not likely that Atwood is concerned with
Original Sin in any theological sense, she is certainly
concerned with the tendency of women to reject their
human capacities and to insist on their own innocence.
Mutual guilt for victimisation is a recurrent theme in
Atwood's poetry as well as in her novels. Both men and
women are losers in the struggle for power which is the
subject of much of her poetry including Power Politics:
'Next time we commit/love, we ought to/ choose in advance
what to kill' (35). For Atwood, brutality feeds on
vulnerability, and the horrible is juxtaposed to the
commonplace: 'You fit into me/like a hook into an eye/a
fish hook/an open eye' (Power Politics, 1). In 'They Eat
Out', it is the woman's fantasy of murder and mutilation
which is recounted; it is she who is the eater and killer,
and yet her victim is somehow triumphant in the end: 'I
raise the magic fork/over the plate of beef fried rice/and
plunge it into your heart./There is a faint pop, a sizzle/and
through your own split head/you rise up glowing' (Power
Politics, 5). The symbolic hunter and the hunted are in
reality on~ identity, as Atwood writes in 'A Pursuit':
'Through the wilderness of the flesh/ across the mind's
ice/ expanses, we hunt each other. . . . Through the tangle
of each other/we hunt ourselves' (The Animals in That
Country, 66-67). So also, as in Canadian folk tradition, the
actual hunter and his animal prey are aspects of each other:
in 'The Trappers', Atwood writes, 'I can understand/the
guilt they feel because/they are not animals/the guilt they
feel/because they are' (The Animals in That Country, 35).
According to Sherrill Grace in Violent Duality, Atwood's
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 29

primary concern is our insistence on dividing the world into

polarities; thus we subvert the 'underlying unity in life':
'Atwood implies that subject and object are one, that by
polarizing them we create power and suffering.' 5
Certainly Marian in The Edible Woman is held largely
responsible for the projection of her world; the guilt that is
inherent there is a reflection of her own human guilt, given
Atwood's system of justice. If, as Marian illogically
suspects, Peter is the infamous Underwear Man, this is
only because Marian is also somehow perverted. Atwood
frequently uses the image of the killer or the rapist as a
reflection or mirror image of the victim. In a poem called
'The Green Man; For the Boston Strangler', for example,
Atwood writes: 'He turned toward them/his face, a clear
mirror . . . . In it they saw reflected their I own sanity' (The
Animals in That Country, 12). Similarly, in a review of
Erica Jong's poetry, Atwood discusses Jong's 'sexual gothic
figure' in 'The Man Under the Bed': 'He is Death, sinister
and frightening, but he is also a lover and attractive; he is
the lure of suicide, and he is thus created by the poet
herself' (Second Words, 170).
As Marian in The Edible Woman creates a sinister aspect
of Peter, she also projects a purely subjective reality for the
other characters in the novel: her women coworkers are
perceived as caged armadillos, '. . . going around in figure-
eights, just around and around in the same path' (98); her
landlady, 'the lady down below', is surely a kind of Queen
of Hearts who would gladly decapitate the young men who
visit. She is a force for propriety, like the character in
Atwood's poem, 'The Landlady', who is 'solid as bacon', 'a
slab of what is real' (The Animals in That Country, 15).
Marian's world, and all the people in it, are thus reflections
of herself, projections of her own disturbed and immature
psyche.
The most complexly symbolic of Marian's friends is
Duncan, combination Rabbit-guide and Mock-Turtle, who
30 MARGARET ATWOOD

serves as Marian's double. Early in the novel, Marian puts

on Duncan's dressing gown, and he comments that she
looks exactly like him. Duncan is, in fact, Marian's anorexic
and hungry self, 'a starved buddha burning incense to
itself' (51), eating seeds meant for birds, 'his spare body,
the gaunt slope of a starved animal in time of famine'
(176). Acting as a link between Marian's fantasy world and
her real one, he appears mysteriously in illogical places
where Marian least expects him. 'But really', he says, 'I'm
not human at all, I come from the underground' (144).
Like the Mock-Turtle in Fish's analysis of Alice, and like
Marian herself, Duncan is full of self-pity; he and Marian,
in fact, exploit each other shamelessly in the matter of
comparing pain to see who suffers more and thus deserves
the greater sympathy: 'You shouldn't expect me to do
anything,' Duncan tells Marian, 'I want to go back to my
shell. . . . You aren't an escape any more, you're too
real' (265). Duncan's androgynous personality cannot
accommodate sex and sexuality any more than Marian can.
Most of their relationship is asexual, just as Marian would
also prefer. When Marian decides, however, that it is her
role to force the issue, both the setting and the act are a
grotesque parody. The hotel is a sleazy place renting rooms
by the hour, Marian is dressed in gaudy red suggesting the
costume of a prostitute, and Duncan's first attempts at
sex result in impotence: 'I feel like some kind of little
stunted creature crawling over the surface of a huge
mass of flesh', he explains. 'Not that you're fat ... you
aren't. There's just altogether too much flesh around here.
It's suffocating' (261). Again, Marian's own claustrophobia
in relation to femaleness is evoked.
Duncan is not only sexless, but ageless as well. He is not
merely adolescent, like the Mock-Turtle of Fish's analysis,
but infantile. His roommates are surrogate parents who
feed him one moment and scold him the next: 'I've been
running away from understudy mothers ever since I can
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 31

remember', Duncan tells Marian; ' ... that's what you get
for being an orphan' (143). At times Marian too must
struggle against the temptation to mother Duncan, to kiss
his wounds: 'you need me' (247), she tells him on the night
of their sexual encounter. Their first kiss takes place in the
'Mummy Room' of the Royal Ontario Museum where
Duncan introduces Marian to his 'womb symbol', the
skeleton of a child in a fetal pose: 'with its jutting ribs and
frail legs and starved shoulder-blades it looked like the
photographs of people from underprivileged countries or
concentration camps' (193). The preserved child is Duncan's
image of himself, but it is also an image of the self for
Marian. Duncan is not Marian's surrogate baby, but her
self as baby. When Duncan finally begins to assume a
sexual role in the hotel room, it is Marian who responds by
curling into a fetal position. Neither is in an emotional
position to 'GIVE THE GIFT OF LIFE', an advertisement
Marian notices on the bus one day. The slogan accompanies
the photograph of a nurse, crisp and competent; from the
beginning of their relationship, Marian has considered that
she ought to approach Duncan as a kind of patient: 'The
situation, she thought, called for stout shoes and starched
cuffs and a leather bag full of hypodermic needles' (195).
By the end of the novel, however, Marian recognises the
manipulative aspects of such an approach: 'the starched
nurse-like image of herself she had tried to preserve as a
last resort crumpled like wet newsprint' (271). Duncan has
warned Marian earlier that 'I bring out the Florence
Nightingale' in women. He recognises the paradox that to
nurse is to render the receiver either infantile or invalid;
therefore Marian should beware: 'You might do something
destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence
Nightingale was a cannibal, you know' (102).
Duncan may be a projection of Marian's self, but he is
also her alter-ego: he does point directions; he ultimately
leads her to some form of understanding and frees her
32 MARGARET ATWOOD

from her self, or at least from her sense of her self as either
nurse or victim. On the morning after Marian's engagement
party and her night in the hotel with Duncan, he conducts
her through the twisted maze of Toronto's streets and
ravines and brings her finally to a great open pit, a 'gigantic
hole scooped into the ground' (270). Together, they sit in
the snow at the edge of the abyss, which looks like
nothingness, like absence, like death, perhaps. 'It's your
own personal cul-de-sac', Duncan tells Marian, 'you
invented it, you'll have to think of your own way out'
(272). With this exhortation to responsibility, Marian leaves
the ravine, the pit, the burrow, the underground, and
moves back to the street alone, towards reality and,
perhaps, out of her Alice existence. Duncan remains
behind, '. . . a dark shape against the snow, crouched on
the edge and gazing into the empty pit' (272).
Following these events, several abrupt changes take
place. The narrative returns to first person, as it was in the
beginning of the novel, which indicates a quality of self-
direction, of autonomy. Marian returns to her apartment,
takes off the red sequined dress which had made her such a
good 'target' for Peter, washes her dishes, restores order in
general, and proceeds to bake a cake, an elaborate cake cut
and decorated to look like a woman in a bright pink ruffled
dress wearing her hair in 'intricate baroque scrolls and
swirls', just as Marian had worn hers to her engagement
party. 'Her creation gazed up at her, its face doll-like and
vacant except for the small silver glitter of intelligence in
each green eye ... "You look delicious," she told her ...
"And that's what will happen to you; that's what you get
for being food'" (277-78). The cake is, of course, an effigy
of Marian's self and of her identity as a consumable item in
a consumer society. She invites Peter to partake: 'You've
been trying to destroy me, haven't you .... You've been
trying to assimilate me. But I've made you a substitute,
something you'll like much better' (279). Peter is horrified
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 33

and leaves Marian to eat the cake alone, which she does
with great relish, spearing chunks of pink thigh and
plunging her fork 'into the carcass, neatly severing the
body from the head' (280). Duncan, however, is willing to
share in Marian's self-cannibalism, and he sees in the cake
the symbolic significance Marian intended, although he
indicates that her motives are mistaken: 'Peter wasn't
trying to destroy you', he tells Marian, 'That's just
something you made up. Actually you were trying to
destroy him' (287).
Perhaps there are as many interpretations of Marian's
symbolic cake and of the ending of The Edible Woman as
there are readers. According to Robert Lecker in 'Janus
through the Looking Glass', Marian has been from the
beginning a 'packaged product of a male-dominated
corporate society', and her rejection of food 'is synonymous
with her rejection of a culture which tends to exploit
women and treat them as edible objects'. Her final act of
eating the cake, according to Lecker, is a form of
reconciliation, a recognition that she is herself 'a mixture of
consumer and consumed'. 6 For Catherine McLay in 'The
Dark Voyage: The Edible Woman as Romance', Marian's
cake represents a 'feast, the celebration of Marian's new
freedom and even rebirth . . . '. She is 'released from the
spell, from her identification of herself with the victim. No
longer isolated and alien, Marian has rejoined society'. 7
Kim Chernin in The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of
Slenderness sees the final scenes in The Edible Woman as
even more highly symbolic: 'By eating up this cake fetish
of a woman's body she assimilates for the first time her
own body and its feelings. It is a re-enactment of the ritual
feast, in which the eating of an animal's flesh, or a piece of
cake shaped like a breast, signifies the coming together of
human and divine, individual with collective . . . a woman
with her own body and feelings'. 8
Atwood herself, however, is not so optimistic about the
34 MARGARET ATWOOD

conclusion of The Edible Woman: ' ... in the end it's more
pessimistic than Surfacing. The difference between them is
that The Edible Woman is a circle and Surfacing is a spiral
... the heroine of Surfacing does not end where she
began'. 9 And, in Second Words, Atwood remarks,' ... my
heroine's choices remain much the same at the end of the
book as they are at the beginning: career going nowhere, or
marriage as an exit from it' (370). Perhaps the cake and the
self-cannibalism it symbolises are but another of Atwood's
'self-indulgent grotesqueries', as she herself has
characterised certain of her images in the novel (Second
Words, 369). Certainly, Atwood has incorporated every
relevant fairy tale into the elaborate detective game which
is this novel. (Even Goldilocks and the Three Bears is
invoked at that point when Marian first enters Duncan's
apartment and tries out all the various chairs. Goldilocks,
too, is a consumer, an eater of other people's porridge.)
Surely Atwood would not be so remiss as to ignore other
examples of cannibalism in fairy tales, like those Duncan
cites as a pattern: ' ... the husband kills the wife's lover,
or vice versa, and cuts out the heart and makes it into a
stew or a pie and serves it up in a silver dish, and the other
one eats it' (53). No matter how desperately the reader
seeks for heroism in this novel, Atwood will not permit our
private mythologies to contradict her ironic humour.
Nevertheless, we are tempted to argue with Atwood
about the ending of The Edible Woman, that surely Marian
knows more than she did in the beginning; if she is not, in
fact, celebrating the unity of the 'human and the divine' or
has not changed either her society or her own social
condition, at least she has come to terms with something,
has objectified her situation and apprehended it more
realistically. The cake thus serves as a reflection, a way of
seeing herself as in a mirror, and it expresses a truth not
before perceived. The cake is 'doll-like', and Marian has
previously conceived of herself as a kind of doll. On the
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 35

night of her engagement party, she looks into a mirror at

herself in the flamboyant red dress, her hair elaborately
done, the make-up forming a mask: 'She held both of her
naked arms out towards the mirror. They were the only
portion of her flesh that was without a cloth or nylon or
leather or varnish covering, but in the glass even they
looked fake, like soft pinkish-white rubber or plastic,
boneless, flexible . . .' (235). Another mirror scene just
previous to this one is also associated with dolls, the actual
ones that Marian has retained since her childhood and
which represent another indication that she has refused to
grow up. The two dolls, one blonde and one dark, are also
symbolic of Marian's two-sided and split self, the result of
her insistence on dividing the world into polarities of light
and dark, eaten and eater, good and evil. The dolls regard
her accusingly:

She saw herself in the mirror between them for an

instant as though she was inside them, inside both
of them at once, looking out . . . the two overlapping
images drawing further and further away from each
other; the centre, whatever it was in the glass, the
thing that held them together, would soon be quite
empty. By the strength of their separate visions they
were trying to pull her apart. (225-226)

In 'Five Poems for Dolls', Atwood reiterates this image

of dolls as self-projections, as embodiments of the speaker's
own guilt: 'see how the dolls resent us/with their bulging
foreheads/and minimal chins. This is not a smile,/this
glossy mouth/two stunted teeth;/the dolls gaze at us/with
the filmed eyes of killers' (Two-Headed Poems, 17). But
perhaps, the poems continue, dolls represent our guilt
because they are our unborn children: '. . . all dolls
come/from the land of the unborn,/the almost-born;
each/doll is a future/dead at the roots' (Two-Headed Poems,
36 MARGARET ATWOOD

20). Atwood's 'doll' poems recall T. S. Eliot's image of the

rose garden which is the land of unborn children, and also,
by extension, Alice's vision of the tiny rose garden from
which she is excluded by her size. In Surfacing also, the
mutilated doll left to drown in the lake is a prefiguration of
the protagonist's abortion and of her own self-victimisation.
In The Edible Woman, Marian's cake also functions as a
doll, a representation of Marian herself as both doll and
infant, but it is also perhaps her symbolic child, an
indication of her recognition if not her acceptance of her
identity as 'Woman'. When Ainsley exclaims with horror,
'You're rejecting your femininity!' (280), she is correct in
her observation, but wrong in her interpretation. Marian
does indeed reject the childish and doll-like femininity of
her former self, but in order to affirm the adult woman,
the human being the reader can at least hope she has
become.
The cake also clearly represents Marian's one truly
creative act. Like all of Atwood's heroines, Marian is a
frustrated artist, a writer who doesn't write. She has
rejected or denied her own creative possibilities by becoming
a 'manipulator of words' at Seymour Surveys ('see-more'?).
Her rejection of the maternal role is consummate with her
rejection of creativity in general. Fish again provides the
clue to the validity of the theme recurrent in Atwood's
work that artistic creativity is symbolically analogous to
giving birth:

And so then consequently the poet also thought of

himself as the same kind of natural producer; his
poem was something begotten so to speak on him by
the Muses, or let's say maybe Apollo, hence the
term 'inspiration,' the instilling of breath as it were
into, the poet was pregnant with his work, the poem
went through a period of gestation, often a long one,
and when it was finally ready to see the light of day
 ALICE AND THE ANIMALS 37

the poet was delivered of it often with much painful

labor. In this way the very process of artistic
creation was itself an imitation of Nature, of the
thing in nature that was most important to the
survival of Mankind. I mean birth; birth. (203-204)

Fish is of course pontificating as usual, but, in the end, we

must believe that his is a version of truth. Ultimately, Fish
takes his place in Atwood's parodic version of the Holy
Family as surrogate father, a Joseph figure, to Ainsley's
unborn baby. But Marian will not, we must assume,
deliver herself of The Edible Woman, nor will she come to
embody Fish's ideal of the creative spirit as 'a new Venus,
big-bellied, teeming with life, potential, about to give birth
to a new world in all its plenitude, a new Venus rising from
the sea' (205). Of the female literary stereotypes Atwood
discusses in Survival, Marian will remain a Diana rather
than become a Venus. But she has at least graduated from
her Alice phase, and she has learned a great deal about life
and the processes of living, about being human. For Atwood
as for the reader, such recognition is a form of heroism.
Marian, finally, is like the speaker in Atwood's poem, 'All
Bread', who urges a reconciliation between innocence and
guilt: 'Lift these ashes/into your mouth, your blood;/to
know what you devour/is to consecrate it,/almost. All
bread must be broken/so it can be shared. Together/we
eat this earth' (Two-Headed Poems, 108).
3 'Border Country':
Surfacing and
The Journals of
Susanna Moodie
'This is border country' (30), the nameless protagonist of
Surfacing reminds herself as she journeys toward her
childhood home in the wilderness of northern Canada. She
means that she is on the border between English and
French Canada, that division of a country which Atwood
sees in The Journals of Susanna Moodie and in Survival as a
manifestation of a national schizophrenia. But, like Susanna
Moodie who is her spiritual ancestor, the protagonist has
spent most of her life in metaphorical 'border country',
maintaining a precarious balance between truth and lies,
between reality and fantasy, between sanity and utter
derangement. And, Surfacing, more than any other of
Atwood's novels, is also 'border country', halfway between
poem and novel, theological treatise and political manifesto,
myth and realism. Unlike that of her protagonist, Atwood's
balance between generic worlds is almost perfect, and
Surfacing is, quite possibly, the best of all her work.
Like all of Atwood's poetry and fiction including The
Edible Woman, Surfacing can be read on a series of levels,
the most superficial but still entertaining of which is the

38
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 39

detective story. In recognisable Nancy Drew style, the

protagonist in this novel sets out from the city, accompanied
by three friends, to solve the mystery of her scientist
father's disappearance. They search for clues on the remote
island where the protagonist spent much of her childhood
and where the father has lived alone since the death of his
wife some years earlier. Possible solutions to the mystery
are that the father has been murdered by avaricious
Americans who want his land for a hunting lodge, that he
has committed suicide, or that he is alive but insane,
'bushed' by living in the wilderness too long alone. None
of the above provides the answer, and the sense of menace
grows along with the protagonist's recognition that the
island itself is treacherous, perhaps even haunted. The
mystery is solved only when the protagonist, using the
enigmatic maps and 'pictographs' left by her father, finds
his drowned body in the lake, weighted down and prevented
from 'surfacing' by the camera he used to photograph
underwater cave paintings of ancient Indians. The 'ghosts'
of both her mother and father appear briefly to the
protagonist, and, the mystery resolved, she packs up to go
home to the city.
But, again, this is 'border country': nothing is definite.
There are no solutions to the real mystery with which
Atwood presents us, which is the identity of the protagonist
and the reliability of her narrative. Atwood has remarked in
an interview that Surfacing is a 'ghost story', ' ... the Henry
James kind, in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a
fragment of one's own self which has split off, and that to me
is the most interesting and that is obviously the tradition I'm
working in'. 1 James's Turn of the Screw, to which Atwood
refers, is, like many other great mystery stories including
those of Edgar Allen Poe, dependent for its quality of horror
on the psychopathology of the narrator rather than on any
manifestation of the supernatural. Atwood's narrator is
similarly undependable, perhaps mad; certainly the reader
40 MARGARET ATWOOD

cannot trust her judgement, based as it is on the lies, the

'alibis', that she tells both the reader and herself. The ghost
in this novel finally is the protagonist's self: she is a
psychological suicide, a woman with no name, an artist with
no art form and no past or tradition that she can recall
correctly. She can neither 'feel' nor communicate effectively.
She has a lover she cannot love; she is a mother without a
child, and a child without a mother.
From the beginning of the novel Atwood provides
indications that her narrator cannot be trusted, that she has
somehow lost touch with the reality of her own life: 'I have
to be more careful about my memories', she says, 'I have to
be sure they're my own. . . . I run quickly over my version
of it, my life, checking it like an alibi' (84). One of the lies
that the protagonist tells the reader, her friends and her
lover, and even herself is that she is divorced and the
mother of a young child who lives with the former husband.
What she and we learn as the novel progresses, however, is
that she was never married, but rather involved with her
married art teacher who gave her C's in his class, told her
there were no great women artists and insisted she have an
abortion rather than disrupt his life with her pregnancy.
Only after the trauma of discovering her father's body in
the lake, 'a dark oval trailing limbs' (167), does the
protagonist connect with the other 'something I knew
about, a dead thing' (167) which is her aborted baby: 'I
knew when it was, it was in a bottle curled up, staring out
at me like a cat pickled . . . it had drowned in air . . .
whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed
it. It wasn't a child but it could have been one, I didn't
allow it' (168). Like a criminal pleading innocence, the
protagonist creates an alibi to avoid the inevitable
confrontation with her own guilt.
As she begins to recognise her complicity in the abortion,
so the protagonist must also recognise that she has killed
yet another and analogous part of herself. Given Atwood's
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 41

frequent use of the archetypal fertility myth and her

association of artistic creativity with procreation as was
discussed in earlier chapters, it is not surprising that the
protagonist of Surfacing is also, like all of Atwood's other
heroines, a failed artist as well as a failed mother: 'I'm what
they call a commercial artist, or, when the job is more
pretentious, an illustrator. . . . I can imitate anything: fake
Walt Disney, Victorian etchings in sepia, Bavarian cookies,
ersatz Eskimo for the home market' (60-61). Her current
project is the illustration of a volume of fairy tales for
children, but she is not as successful at imitation as she
would have us believe. Her princesses look like the vapid
movie-star paper dolls she created as a child, 'sausage rolls
of hair across their foreheads, with puffed red mouths and
eyelashes like toothbrush bristles' (49), and the evil giants
who pursue them resemble nothing more ominous than
lumpy football players. The fairy tale she invents on paper,
then, is as unsuccessful as the fairy-tale alibi she invents for
her life. In thus betraying her talent through compromise,
choosing to be an illustrator rather than an artist, putting
her career in a 'samsonite case', the protagonist fails in her
responsibility to herself as much as if she had committed
suicide: both her art and her aborted baby represent 'A
section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese
twin, my own flesh cancelled' (56).
The protagonist's lover, Joe, and his friend David, are
also failed artists, the film they are making on the way to
the island a parody of art. 'Random Samples' depends for
its effects on that which is degraded or bizarre in Canada
and in human nature: the stuffed moose family on the
restaurant roof, the house made of coke bottles, the
WELCOME sign with the bullet holes, the carcasses of
dead animals, and the naked body of Anna, David's wife.
To work with cameras, given Atwood's recurrent
symbolism, is to cheat at art, to fail at seeing, to exploit the
natural, perhaps even to 'steal not only your soul but your
42 MARGARET ATWOOD

body also' (139). Certainly that is David's motive and his

perversion of art as he trains his phallic movie camera on
his wife's naked body like 'a bazooka or a strange
instrument of torture' (160). One certain sign which
Atwood provides of the protagonist's ultimate regeneration
is her act of destroying the false art, stealing the film and
throwing it into the lake, that symbol of both life and
death which, we know from early in the novel, is 'blue and
cool as redemption' (18).
The protagonist cannot, however, redeem Anna, who is
also a failed artist of sorts, practising her craft before a
mirror where she carefully applies the cosmetic camouflage
so necessary to her in the war of sexual politics in which
she is engaged with her husband. Anna's soul, the
protagonist imagines, is 'closed in the gold compact, that
and not the camera is what I should have broken' (205).
Anna, an older and more debased version of Ainsley, the
roommate in The Edible Woman, is also a princess in flight,
a parody of a fairy tale, an incarnation of the evil queen in
'Snow White' who sits before her mirror but never asks the
fatal questions: '. . . pink on the cheeks and black discreetly
around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a
seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is
itself an imitation of a woman who also is an imitation . . .
captive princess in someone's head' (194). Anna, too, is
childless, a slave to the technology of birth control pills and
the violation of both nature and art they imply in Atwood's
symbolic scheme. The pills, in fact, function like the
camera, that other product of technology, in that they too,
according to the protagonist's experience, have the side
effect of obscuring and distorting vision, 'like having a film
ofvasoline on my eyes' (95). Anna, however, does not need
to see; she is not an artist but an object of art, the product
of artifice as much as if she had stepped from the pages of
the scrapbooks of the protagonist's childhood pictures of
'ladies'.
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 43

In spite of his participation in the creation of 'Random

Samples', Joe is in one sense a better artist than any of the
others, including the protagonist. His squashed ceramic
pots, unsold and unusable, litter their apartment in the
city; he too is a failure, but at least he does not compromise,
he does not opt for the commercial or the expedient. Joe
does not tell lies with art or reduce it to artifice. 'Perhaps
it's not only his body I like', the protagonist recognises,
'perhaps it's his failure; that also has a kind of purity' (67).
Atwood then is highly moral in this novel as in others
about what function art ought to fulfil, whether on the
personal level or on the political level. Whether art is
perversion or idealism, whether it is the protagonist's
childhood drawings of 'ladies' and movie stars or the
equally child-like cave drawings of the ancient Indians her
father died in discovering, it represents a key to
understanding individual and cultural identity: 'You draw
on the wall what's important to you, what you're hunting'
(142).
In preserving her children's drawings in volumes of
scrapbooks, the protagonist's mother has, in essence, given
them their past. Having destroyed her own past, the
protagonist is sorely in need of such a 'gift' from her
mother, for the drawings are a key to her own identity, a
'pictograph'. She looks first at the scrapbook containing
her brother's drawings and discovers there what she
perceives as quintessential masculinity: 'explosions in red
and orange, soldiers dismembering in the air, planes and
tanks . . . little swastikas on the sides. . . . a man-eating
plant, engulfing a careless victim, a balloon with HELP in
it squeezing out of his mouth like bubble gum' (108). The
protagonist's own drawings, those that precede the movie
stars, are, in contrast, expressions of an innocent femininity:
'Page after page of eggs and rabbits, grass and trees,
normal and green, surrounding them, flowers blooming,
sun in the upper right-hand comer of each picture, moon
44 MARGARET ATWOOD

symmetrically in the left.... No monsters, no wars, no

explosions, no heroism . . . perhaps it was a vision of
Heaven' (109-10). The protagonist begins the process of
recalling her vision of herself, for art does indeed represent
'what you're hunting'. She recalls her sense of herself as
good and innocent: remaining aloof or repairing the
damages of cruelty perpetrated by her brother, freeing the
insects he had imprisoned in bottles and then forgotten,
suffering while he threw 'the bad kind' of leeches on the
campfire where they sizzled and smoked and writhed.
Sometimes, the protagonist herself was the animal-victim,
tied to a tree in the school yard by boys who ran away and
forgot her: 'I became an escape artist of sorts, expert at
undoing knots' (83).
But sometimes, the protagonist begins to remember, she
lost her innocence, was not merely a victim but an actual
participant in the games of cruelty. No person, adult or
child, male or female, is truly innocent in Atwood's literary
world, and perhaps especially not children: 'To become a
little child again, a barbarian, a vandal; it was in us too, it
was innate' (156). At one point, the protagonist recalls, she
and her brother collaborated in a kind of murder:

. . . we killed other people besides Hitler, before my

brother went to school and learned about him and
the games became war games. Earlier we would play
we were animals; our parents were the humans, the
enemies who might shoot us or catch us, we would
hide from them. But sometimes the animals had
power too: one time we were a swarm of bees, we
gnawed the fingers, feet and nose off our least
favorite doll, ripped her cloth body open and pulled
out the stuffing, it was gray and :fluffy like the insides
of mattresses; then we threw her body into the
lake. . . . Of course the doll wasn't hurt, it wasn't
alive; though children think everything is alive. (154).
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 45

This passage prefigures the protagonist's complicity in the

abortion, one of the acts for which she must accept
responsibility before she can regain her identity and assume
her humanity.
But the protagonist is 'an escape artist of sorts' and
'expert at undoing knots' (83), except for the psychological
knots in which she finds herself so tied and bound. The
primary escape route is through thinking of herself as
victim, but she also depends for psychological survival on a
kind of passive aggression: she becomes 'invisible'. The
protagonist recalls that, on being introduced to Christianity
and the idea of prayer when she was a child, she prayed
'for something real. I prayed to be made invisible, and
when in the morning everyone could still see me I knew
they had the wrong God' (84). If, in fact, the world is
divided cleanly between good and evil, victim and victor,
princesses and giants, as the protagonist continues to see it,
then one can choose simply to abdicate, refuse to participate
or take sides, cease to be visible or even to exist: 'There
were only two things you could be, a winner or a loser ...
they couldn't figuure out what to do about me since I
wouldn't play' (82). The heroine at this point is still not
playing, still opting for the third alternative of non-
existence: remaining in 'border country'. She refuses to
'feel' and thus protects herself from pain: 'Anesthesia,
that's one technique' (15). She also finds herself unable to
communicate, identifying with deaf and dumb children she
imagines to be locked away in rooms and never taught a
language as part of some inhumane scientific experiment;
language, she says 'divides us into fragments' (172). The
very style in which her first -person narrative is delivered is
fragmented, unemotional, reportorial.
She is thus totally isolated from her friends who are not
really her friends, because she prevents such a relationship.
She has known Anna only two months, yet she is 'my best
woman friend' (12). Even her relationship with Joe is
46 MARGARET ATWOOD

characterised by this same refusal to feel or to commit

herself in any real sense. She lives with him because he
asked her to: 'It wasn't even a real decision, it was more
like buying a goldfish or a potted cactus plant, not because
you want one in advance but because you happen to be in
the store and you see them lined up on the counter' (49).
She ponders the benefits of sex between two people with
paper bags over their heads; she considers the possibility of
sticking pins in her arms because even 'rats prefer any
sensation to none' (133). 'I rehearsed emotions, naming
them: joy, peace, guilt, love and hate, react, relate; what to
feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and
memorized it. But the only thing there was the fear that I
wasn't alive: a negative ... ' (132).
The state of being a 'negative' is also a desirable condition
of life for the mad heroine of Atwood's short story, 'Under
Glass'. She too wants desperately not to feel, to abdicate
her humanity and become a plant, insensitive. She suffers
in a destructive relationship with a man as insane as she;
she dreams of giving birth to babies who are creatures from
other planets, who are covered with fur, or who are born
dead, 'scrawny as kittens' (Dancing Girls, 77). She haunts
the zoo, but finds little comfort in the otters eating bones
and detached heads, the tortoises in their cement cubicles,
the echidnas, 'waddling through the sawdust like fat fur-
coated madwomen' (85). Finally she prefers the greenhouse,
the plants grown 'under glass', and particularly those plants
which 'have taught themselves to look like stones. I think
of them; they grow silently, hiding in dry soil, minor
events, little zeros .... I wonder how long it takes, how
they do it' (87).
What or who has 'killed' Atwood's protagonists and
turned them into zeros, negatives? Perhaps, as the
protagonist of Surfacing tells herself, it is an accident of
some kind:
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 47

Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a

bathing suit, smiling, a trick done with mirrors, I
read it in a comic book; only with me there had been
an accident and I came apart. The other half, the
one locked away, was the only one that could live; I
was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was
nothing but a head, or, no, something minor like a
severed thumb; numb. (129)
Similar images of amputation, symbolising the
protagonist's own split psyche, occur on almost every page:
Madame in the grocery store who has one arm, the
protagonist and her brother wrapping their legs in blankets
and pretending 'the Germans shot our feet off' (9), the
schoolyard game of placing one's finger through a hole in a
box and pretending it was a 'dead finger', heads
metaphorically and literally separated from bodies. But
these are the projections of the protagonist's own psyche
just as surely as Marian in The Edible Woman chooses to
see and to create her world as imbued with images of
mouths and food. If the protagonist of Surfacing is dead, it
is because she has killed herself; if she is divided and
amputated, it is because she has chosen to see herself in
this way. There is a great deal of the existentialist in
Atwood: the world indeed is absurd, but what one chooses
to do about given conditions is one's own responsibility.
To decide not to decide, to remain in 'border country', is
in itself a decision. One is condemned to one's freedom
and must bear the responsibility for both action or refusal
to act. As Atwood has characterised her heroine in an
interview:
If you define yourself as intrinsically innocent, then
you have a lot of problems, because in fact you
aren't. And the thing with her is she wishes not to be
human. She wishes to be not human, because being
48 MARGARET ATWOOD

human inevitably involves being guilty, and if you

define yourself as innocent, you can't accept that. 2

In Survival, Atwood groups the subjects of Canadian

literature into 'basic victim positions', and asks the central
question, 'Who is responsible?' (Survival, 222). The answer
to that question, provided in all of Atwood's books, is that
responsibility lies almost inevitably in the self.
As the protagonist of Surfacing has divided herself, so
she divides her world, projecting 'the good and the bad
kind of everything' (44). Women are good and men are
bad; little girls draw Easter bunnies and little boys draw
torture scenes; women are innocent and men are rapists
and exploiters in sexual relationships. The sexes are divided
and isolated from each other much as in the little wooden
barometer which impressed the protagonist as a child: the
woman emerges from the little house on sunny days and
the man on rainy days. So David and Anna, as the
protagonist sees them, are divided and separated, he the
criminal and she the victim, balanced forever in some
terrible polarity of opposition, she hiding behind her make-
up and the screen from her cigarette smoke, reading
murder mysteries but never realising that she herself is the
victim of another kind of murder. As the protagonist
overhears Anna and David making love in the next room,
she thinks of Anna's cry as that of 'an animal's at the
moment the trap closes' (99). The protagonist cannot say
to Joe that she loves him because that would be a
capitulation, and he would be the victor, waving a flag, a
'parade' in his head.
As men destroy women in the protagonist's Manichean
vision of the world, so groups and nations destroy and
oppress other groups and nations. The military images
associated with individual men have their prototype in
Hitler, that bogey of the protagonist's childhood: ' ...
when we were small the origin was Hitler, he was the great
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 49

evil, many-tentacled, ancient and indestructible as the

Devil' (153). But even when Hitler bas been reduced in
actuality to 'a few cinders and teeth', his evil manifests
itself, like a tapeworm dividing, in 'the Americans', those
oppressors of Canada and invaders of the wilderness. And
still as an adult, the protagonist divides people into
Canadians (victims) and Americans (victors). On the first
page of the novel, the protagonist notes the pollution and
the dying elm trees of her homeland caused by 'the disease
spreading up from the south' (9). The Americans invade as
hunters, as spoilers; 'Getting any?' they ask, referring to
fish but alluding as well to sexual conquest. It is they, she
thinks, who have killed the symbolic heron she discovers
on the island, killed it for sport, mutilated and then
crucified it, left it hanging in a tree 'like something in a
butcher's window, desecrated, unredeemed' (154).
The heron is a metaphor for the protagonist's victimised
self, for Canada as a nation, and for Christ as well.
Animals, she feels, share the innocence of women and of
Christian martyrs. All are dismembered, divided, rendered
holy: 'miraculous in an unspecified way like the toes of
saints or the cut-off pieces of early martyrs, the eyes on the
plate, the severed breasts, the heart with letters on it
shining like a light bulb through the trim bole painted in
the chest, art history' (31). Like Marian in The Edible
Woman, the protagonist finds it difficult to eat animals,
rationalising her guilt for this act in a variety of ways: that
the fish 'bad chosen to die and forgiven me in advance'
(72). The heron and all other animals killed for food
become deified: '. . . anything that suffers and dies instead
of us is Christ. . . . The animals die that we may live, they
are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer,
that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or
otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh
resurrecting inside us, gtanting us life. Canned Spam,
canned Jesus .. .' (164-65). Atwood's poem, 'Brian the
50 MARGARET ATWOOD

Still-Hunter', echoes a similar guilt: 'I kill because I have

to/but every time I aim, I feel/my skin grow fur' (The
Journals of Susanna Moodie, 36).
Even in childhood, the protagonist of Surfacing was
fascinated with the idea of martyrdom and with religion, a
subject as forbidden in her home as sex is in other homes.
At school she exchanged information about sex for
information about religion, although she was terrified by
her idea that 'there was a dead man in the sky watching
everything I did' (52). Just as self-destructive and illusory
as Christianity in this context is the protagonist's sudden
conversion, inspired by her father's diagrams of the cave
paintings, to the ancient Indian religions. This crisis point
occurs in the context of her discovery of her father's body.
She is only now beginning to face the reality of her recent
past and the abortion; she has possibly conceived a baby
with Joe, and she has committed her one act of heroism in
the destruction of 'Random Samples'. She escapes her
friends, who now seem to her totally malevolent, and hides
in the words where she reverts almost completely to an
animal identity, wearing only a blanket which must serve
her 'until the fur grows' (208). She imagines that she is
now directed by a mysterious 'power', not that of 'the
bland oleo-tinted Jesus prints . . . holy triple name
shrunken to swear-words' (170), but of the Indian gods
who had 'marked the sacred places, the places where you
could learn the truth' (171). According to the dictates of
the gods, she must avoid 'man-made' structures and
objects; she must become a part of nature, immerse herself
in it and discard her human form. She eats only the food of
the gods, including an hallucinogenic mushroom, and a
series of visions ensues. She loses herself in both place and
time, becoming a part of the forest in its prehistoric state:
'The forest leaps upward, enormous, the way it was before
they cut it, columns of sunlight frozen; the boulders float,
melt, everything is made of water. . . . The animals have
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 51

no need for speech, why talk when you are a word . . . I

lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning' (212). And soon
after, even the animal identity is suspended: 'I am not an
animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and
animals move and grow, I am a place' (213). Both of her
parents appear to her in separate visions, her mother,
hands outstretched feeding the blue jays as the protagonist
remembers her in life, and her father who is transformed
before her eyes into a manifestation of her own madness,
'the thing you meet when you've stayed out here too long
alone' (218).
Critical evaluations of Atwood's intentions in these
passages are varied, and perhaps Atwood herself invites
such diversity through her use of ambiguity. Feminist
myth critic Annis Pratt sees the protagonist's sojourn in
the wilderness as an archetypal quest '. . . in which the
hero plunges down through subconscious to unconscious
materials and is empowered by absorbing the archetypal
symbols available to her at the fountainhead of her
personality and being'. 3 The appearance of the mother and
the essentially female imagery which dominates the
descriptions of nature lead Pratt to conclude that Atwood
and other women writers have

. . . dug the goddess out of our ruins and cleansed

the debris from her face, casting aside the gynophobic
masks hiding her power and her beneficence. In so
doing, they have made of women's fiction a pathway
to the authentic self, the roots of our selves before
consciousness of self, and shown us the way to the
healing waters of our innermost being. 4

In Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction, Pratt sees the

protagonist's religious conversion and mysticism in terms
of a 'reconciliation of the spiritual to the physical'. 5 Carol
Christ in Diving Deep and Surfacing also sees the
52 MARGARET ATWOOD

protagonist's experience as validly religious, as 'a revelation

from great powers' which results in the achievement of
'authentic selfhood and power'. 6 Other critics are more
cynical: Marie-Fran~oise Guedon in 'Surfacing: Amerindian
Themes and Shamanism' sees Atwood's representation of
the out of body experience as inspired by shamanic
tradition, but views her treatment of the gods as purely
symbolic: there is, she argues, no coherent systematising of
Indian motifs in Atwood, no 'Indian perception of the
world. "Indian" people inhabit only the mind of the
heroine' .7 Jerome H. Rosenberg warns that 'feminist'
readers should beware of overly subjective interpretations:
'. . . we must prevent our spirits from travelling too deeply
on interior journeys, lest we become lost and confused
' 8
Certainly Atwood is employing a version of what Joseph
Campbell in Hero with a Thousand Faces refers to as the
'monomyth', the archetypal descent and return of the
religious hero. She is also consciously making reference to
initiation rites, which also have their origin in ancient
religions, and which incorporate such patterns as the
temporary withdrawal from society, the removal of the old
clothing, the eating of new food, the symbolic arrival into
adulthood. The myths are there; they are artistically useful,
but they do not perhaps represent an ethos for Atwood or
what she sees as a model of religious belief. Like Joseph
Conrad's Marlowe in The Heart of Darkness who also
journeys into an 'interior' of multiple symbolic significance
including the discovery of the self, Atwood's heroine is,
finally, no religious hero, no archetypal law-giver, but
instead a better, more complete human being.
Atwood's primary interest, then, is the psychological
rather than the mystical or the religious. The protagonist is
close to mental collapse in the beginning of the novel, and
she must actually break down before she can bt;eak through,
as I have argued in a previous book, Madness and Sexual
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 53

Politics in the Feminist N oveU Her immersion in the

wilderness as well as her religious ecstasies are metaphors
for her journey through her own subconscious mind, that
place in which she can discover her past and affirm her
identity, much as in a process of psychoanalysis. The gods
are a manifestation of insanity, not a cure, but her visions
and delusions lead her towards a confrontation with reality,
with responsibility. One travels through the 'green world' of
myth and delusion and innocence, as Atwood indicates in
Procedures for Underground:

The country beneath the earth has a green sun

and the rivers flow backwards;
the trees and rocks are the same
as they are here, but shifted.
Those who live there are always hungry;
from them you can learn
wisdom and great power
if you can descend and return safely.

However, Atwood warns at the end of the poem, 'be

careful/never to eat their food' ('Procedures for Under-
ground', 25). One must always 'return safely', must 'surface'
into a real world of sanity.
The descent and return pattern in Atwood's novel is also
associated symbolically with images of rebirth. If the
protagonist is 'dead' at the beginning of the novel, she
must somehow be reborn, not in a religious sense, but
psychologically. In order to re-create herself, she must re-
create her parents, remove them also from the world of lies
and myths where in her madness she has placed them. Her
present conception of her father as insane, lurking in the
woods and manifesting himself as a kind of wolf in a
ghostly apparition, is only slightly more sophisticated than
the old games of hide and seek in which '. . . even when
we knew what tree he had gone behind there was the fear
54 MARGARET ATWOOD

that what would come out when you called would be

someone else' (58). The protagonist in this context is like
the young cousins in Atwood's poem 'Game After Supper':
'though we giggle, we are afraid./From the shadows
around/the corner of the house/a tall man is coming to
find us:/He will be an uncle,/if we are lucky' (Procedures
for Underground, 7). The father in Surfacing is in reality no
monster, no devil figure with 'antlers in the brain', no god
capable of metamorphosis, no madman, and he undoubtedly
never experiences the visions which the protagonist imagines
for him, visions of 'stepping through a usual door and
finding yourself in a different galaxy, purple trees and red
moons and a green sun' (171). His reality is that of a
reasonable person, a scientist, a believer in the mode of the
eighteenth-century rationalists. He wanted to protect his
children from the evils of a society torn by World War II
and from the negative effects of superstitions like religion.
His limitations are those of reason and logic, male attributes
in the protagonist's mind, but he is also benevolent, both
guide and map-maker.
While the ostensible search on the island is for the
father, the metaphoric search is for the mother. The
protagonist, like other of Atwood's fictional and poetic
heroines, is a kind of Persephone who must return from
the underworld to find and to re-create herself in her
mother. And the protagonist insists for a time that her
mother is, in fact, a Demeter, a goddess capable of
restoring life to the dead as she revives the protagonist's
brother from near death by drowning. It is somehow a
betrayal that the mother refuses to resurrect herself from
death, to 'get out of that glass case' like Snow White, and
'go away by herself into the forest' (176). The protagonist
believes that her mother possessed a kind of magic, an
ability to charm the animals, conjure the blue jays and
command a bear. Her power is perceived as extending to
include all of nature itself, as she records and thus orders
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 55

the seasons and the weather in her magic journal. Wearing

her powerful leather jacket and her hair in a style of 'thirty
years ago', she is capable of transcending time: 'Impossible
to be like my mother', the protagonist believes, 'it would
need a time warp; she was either ten thousand years behind
the rest or fifty years ahead of them' (60).
But the protagonist must indeed become like her mother.
In order to be reborn, to heal her divided psyche, she must
receive a 'legacy' from both parents; she has received the
gift of knowledge from her father, but her mother's gift,
yet to be discovered, will be 'beyond logic'. She is
mysteriously guided, she believes, to one of her own
childhood drawings, a picture of a woman 'with a round
moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside gazing out'
(185), just as the protagonist has earlier envisioned herself
as conscious before her birth, able to see the world through
her mother's transparent womb. She interprets the picture
as an instruction: to become alive, she must resurrect that
part of herself which she has killed; she must replace her
aborted baby and become, like her mother in the picture,
'the miraculous double woman' giving birth to herself as
well as to new life. The protagonist takes her lover to the
shore of the lake and carefully arranges their positions:

I lie down, keeping the moon on my left hand and

the absent sun on my right. He kneels .... He
trembles and then I can feel my lost child surfacing
within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where
it has been prisoned for so long, its eyes and teeth
phosphorescent; the two halves clasp, interlocking
like fingers, it buds, it sends out fronds .... it will
be covered with shining fur, a god, I will never
teach it any words. (190-191)

From this point onward, the novel replaces the images

of division and death with images of unity, wholeness, life.
56 MARGARET ATWOOD

However, Atwood is again ambiguous: even the ritual

conception is a re-enactment of the childhood drawings of
'heaven', the moon and the sun in perfect balance. Also
her belief that she is to be forgiven by her aborted baby,
who fish-like 'drowned in air', is reminiscent of her childish
conviction that the fish she eats 'forgive her in advance'.
Still suffering from delusions of her own innocence, the
protagonist has yet to enter and confront her own madness.
Only after her withdrawal into the forest where 'there
are no longer any rational points of view' (199), where she
loses her identity, worships the Indian gods which she
confuses with her parents, and experiences visions, can the
protagonist truly be reborn into the adult she must become
in order to survive. One of the first indications that she is,
perhaps for the first time, truly human, is that she restores
her parents to their humanity, removes them from 'behind
a wall as translucent as Jell-0, mammoths frozen in a
glacier' (11), from the Edenic state of innocence where she
has placed them. She is like the speaker in the poem 'Eden
is a Zoo' who keeps her 'parents in a garden/ among lumpy
trees, green sponges/ on popsickle sticks' (Procedures for
Underground, 6). The protagonist of Surfacing allows her
parents, finally, to go 'back into the earth, the air, the
water, wherever they were when I summoned them' (219).
'To prefer life, I owe them that' (220), she affirms, and her
sanity is finally secure with her existential recognition that
there is, in fact,

No total salvation, resurrection, Our father, Our

mother, I pray, Reach down for me, but it won't
work: they dwindle, grow, become what they were,
human. Something I never gave them credit for; but
their totalitarian innocence was my own. (221)

The gods also become what they were, projections of the

protagonist's own madness: 'No gods to help me now,
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 57

they're questionable once more, theoretical as Jesus'. They

will not appear to her again, because 'I can't afford it; from
now on I'll have to live in the usual way, defining them by
their absence ... they give only one kind of truth' (221).
Even the baby, 'perhaps not real, even that is uncertain', is
restored to human status: 'No god ... it might be the first
one, the first true human' (223). Nature itself, formerly an
extension of the gods, also becomes real, understandable,
benign: 'the lake is quiet, the trees surround me, asking
and giving nothing' (224).
The ultimate affirmation of sanity and humanity,
however, is provided by the symbolic mirror, that agent of
truth and objective reality in which the protagonist asserts
her identity and rejects her madness: 'I turn the mirror
around: in it there's a creature neither animal nor human,
furless ... eyes staring blue as ice from the deep sockets .
. . . This was the stereotype, straws in the hair, talking
nonsense or not talking at all' (222). Language again
becomes meaningful; it is human to communicate: 'For us
it is necessary, the intercession of words' (224). The
protagonist's perception of her world has changed; divisions
and polarities exist, but they can be dealt with, even 'the
Americans', who are advancing, 'can be watched and
predicted and stopped' (221). Most important, the
protagonist is no longer seeing herself as victim, but as
human and responsible:

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can

do that I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up
the old belief that I am powerless and because of it
nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which
was always more disastrous than the truth would
have been. (222-223)

She is ready to rejoin society. Joe calls her name and

waits, 'a mediator, an ambassador' (224). 'To immerse
58 MARGARET ATWOOD

oneself, join in the war, or to be destroyed. Though there

ought to be other choices' (220), she says, realising that she
is now capable of commitment, action: 'withdrawing is no
longer possible and the alternative is death' (223). The
protagonist's world is not perfect, not 'heaven', but neither
is it the hell of madness: she is out of 'border country'.
The Journals of Susanna Moodie was written slightly
earlier than Surfacing, and the historical pioneer protagonist
of the poems bears a considerable resemblance to her
modern counterpart, who is also a kind of pioneer in that
wilderness which is the modern world, a tourist in a foreign
country. Susanna Moodie also lives in 'border country', a
stranger in her own world, divided and half insane, torn
between love and hate for the wilderness in which she finds
herself immersed. Like the protagonist of Surfacing,
Susanna Moodie has lost herself; she refuses to look in
mirrors, even 'The moving water will not show me/my
reflection' (The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 11). When
finally, after years of living in the wilderness, she does
confront herself, she sees a vision much like that of the
reflected protagonist in Surfacing: her 'skin thickened/with
bark and the white hairs of roots' (24). Susanna Moodie,
too, is doubled and divided, perceiving her world as
dominated by terrible polarities. In 'The Double Voice',
Susanna Moodie recognises that 'Two voices/took turns
using my eyes'. The first voice praises the beauty of
Canada, extolling the virtues of mountains and rivers; the
other confronts a 'dead dog/jubilant with maggots/half-
buried among the sweet peas' (42). She dreams of her bush
garden where she picks strawberries, but in the dream, the
strawberries stain her hands: 'I should have known/ anything
planted here/would come up blood' (34).
As the protagonist of Surfacing meets adversity by
symbolically transforming herself into an animal, so
Susanna Moodie conceives of herself in grotesque animal
images: her brain 'gropes nervous/tentacles', her fears are
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 59

'hairy as bears', she needs 'wolf's eyes to see/the truth'

(13), on her aging face 'the wrinkles branch/ out,
overlapping like hair or feathers', and at her death, she
thinks, she will 'prowl and slink/ in crystal darkness . . .
with new/formed plumage ... /my fingers/curving and
scaled' (49). 'In time the animals/arrived to inhabit me'
(26), she says, while at other times she imagines herself as a
plant, her fingers 'brittle as twigs', her eyes 'blind/buds,
which can see/only the wind' (25); 'at the last/judgement
we will all be trees' (59). She transforms others as well as
herself: her husband walks into the forest in 'The
Wereman'; as he disappears from sight, she asks 'what
does he change into/what other shape/blends with the
under-/growth' (19).
Mrs Moodie's transformations are credited to art, magic,
witchcraft. She is a version of the Hecate figure of the
Triple Goddess which Atwood defines in Survival, solely
responsible for the creation of her world, a fact she
understands much more clearly than does the protagonist
of Surfacing. She knows that in the wilderness or in the
mind, aspects of a single entity, 'you find only I the shape
you already are' (25). But also like the protagonist of
Surfacing, Susanna Moodie is a 'failed artist', a writer
frustrated by her own inability to define herself as artist.
Her 'disintegrated children' are emblematic of this failure,
and they clutch at her skirts with their dead fingers, like
briars, like guilt (41).
Unlike Surfacing, there can be no resolution of sanity
and completion in The Journals of Susanna Moodie. The
speaker in the poems remains divided, herself symbolic of
the 'violent duality' with which Atwood characterises
Canada (62). The best that can be construed is that she
ultimately 'accepts the reality of the country she is in, and
. . . she accepts also the inescapable doubleness of her own
vision', as Atwood explains in the Afterword (63). In the
last poem, 'A Bus Along St. Clair: December', Susanna
60 MARGARET ATWOOD

Moodie has transcended her death and, witch-like, has

returned to curse the very civilisation she once longed for:
'I am the old woman/ sitting across from you on the bus',
she warns, and, 'out of her eyes come secret/hatpins,
destroying/the walls, the ceiling'. She transforms the city
back into the wilderness: 'there is no city;/this is a
forest/your place is empty' (61).
The Journals of Susanna Moodie is the most narrative in
style and structure of Atwood's poems, just as Surfacing is
the most poetic of her novels. These two major works
share a wealth of similar images; both are maps to the
psyches of individual heroines, yet also to some vaster
concept of the Canadian mind. 'My mind is a wide pink
map', says Susanna Moodie, 'across which move year after
year/arrows and dotted lines' (33). In the Afterword to the
poems, Atwood compares Susanna Moodie's doubleness to
the 'paranoid schizophrenia' that is Canada. As Sherill E.
Grace writes in 'Margaret Atwood and the Poetics of
Duplicity', the Journals are 'at once an emblem of Canada's
cultural past, a model for national potential and a symbol
of human physiological, psychological, and linguistic
doubleness'. 10
The same might be said of Surfacing, which, like the
Journals, could not have been written about any other
country in the world. Susanna Moodie is, in fact, the
landscape, the female tradition, through which the
protagonist of Surfacing searches for her identity. Identity,
for Atwood, is always to be discovered through a recognition
of one's relationship to one's ancestors. As Atwood also
establishes in 'Five Poems for Grandmothers', 'one woman
leads to another./Finally I know you/through your
daughters,/my mother, her sisters,/and through myself'
(Two-Headed Poems, 38). Identity and sanity, at least for
the protagonist of Surfacing, ultimately lie in the
confrontation with the outer duality of Canada reflected in
the inner duality of the self. One sees the self in the context
 'BORDER COUNTRY' 61

of a national history, and faces the paradox that

'history /breeds death', but 'if you kill/ it you will kill
yourself' (Twa-Headed Poems, 71).
4 The 'Escape
Artist': Lady
Oracle
In a poem entitled 'Hesitations outside the Door', Atwood
writes, 'If we make stories for each other/about what is in
the room/we will never have to go in .. .'(Selected Poems,
171 ). She refers to the story of Bluebeard and the forbidden
castle room which contains the bodies of murdered former
wives, 'the thin women' who hang 'on their hooks,
dismembered'. But Atwood is also making a statement
about the misuse of art; she implies that one may escape
confrontation with reality by creating fiction. As the
protagonist of Surfacing misuses art to create an alternative
and more ideal world through her drawings and her 'alibis',
so Joan Foster of Lady Oracle is also an 'escape artist'
(367), intent on evading reality and commitment by
'writing' her world. She moves through mirrors and
through her own self-deluding fictions into a realm of fairy
tales and myth where, instead of escaping, she becomes
trapped in the very surfaces she strives to create. Although
she searches for her self in many mirrors and in the
numerous gothic romances she writes for her living,
romances in which all the heroines are always versions of
herself, Joan never comes to terms with a reality beneath
the surface of her schizophrenic existence. Like Cervantes'
Don Quixote or Henry James's Isabel Archer or Flaubert's

62
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 63

Emma Bovary or any number of other literary heroes and

heroines who substitute art for life and fictive roles for
their own identities, Joan models her life after a concept of
romance: 'All my life,' she says, 'I'd been hooked on plots'
(342).
The first 'plots' one encounters in childhood are, of
course, fairy tales, and Joan conceives of even her adult life
as a series of recognisable patterns. Quite early in the
novel, she adopts the role of Snow White, that image of
virtue and victimisation who is the object of the wrath and
envy of the evil stepmother. Joan's actual mother, whom
Joan often imagines to be her stepmother, is preoccupied
with beauty. Like the evil queen, she sits before her magic
mirror in Joan's childhood memory and in her recurring
dream; Joan is permitted to watch while her mother applies
her make-up and her 'double mouth' (71), the mouth of
lipstick over the shadow of her real lips:

I would stare at the proceedings, fascinated and

mute. I thought my mother was very beautiful, even
more beautiful when she was colored in. And this
was what I did in the dream: I sat and stared . . .
my mother always had a triple mirror, so she could
see both sides as well as the front of her head. In the
dream, as I watched, I suddenly realised that instead
of three reflections she had three actual heads, which
rose from her toweled shoulders on three separate
necks. This didn't frighten me, as it seemed merely
a confirmation of something I'd always known: ...
my mother was a monster. (70)

Joan's mother does indeed have a 'double mouth' which

says one thing and means another. She wears white gloves
which disguise her blood-red nails in Joan's vision of her;
she never touches or kisses. Her temper is violent and, in
fact, she precipitates Joan's flight from home by actually
64 MARGARET ATWOOD

stabbing her daughter with a kitchen knife. But it is the

queen and not Snow White who, in this story, is
prematurely entombed in the glass coffin which is her
suburban house, a 'plastic-shrouded tomb from which
there was no exit' (201). Her punishment will be an early
death, not from dancing in red-hot iron shoes as actually
happens in the Snow White story and symbolically in so
many of Atwood's 'dancing girl' stories, but from tripping
over her floppy pink bedroom slippers and falling down
the basement stairs.
Joan's mother is a Walt Disney version of evil, an
anomaly in Atwood's complex fictional world in which
characters are seldom so simplistic. It is, then, altogether
possible that she represents, at least partly, Joan's subjective
projection. Joan sees her as a single entity, a monster, but
the mirror, as is usually the case in Atwood's fiction and
poetry, reflects the true and multiple image. Joan is our
only narrator, and she is almost as unreliable as the narrator
of Surfacing. By her own admission a 'compulsive and
romantic' liar (165), she is telling the story, which is this
novel, to a reporter, a man in whom she is interested and
to whom she 'didn't tell any lies. Well, not many ... but
nothing major' (378). Along with all her other fabrications,
Joan perhaps creates this image of her mother as the evil
queen in order to preserve her corresponding image of herself
as Snow White. The myth is necessary to her, and, as she tells
the reporter, she cannot bear to part with her fantasy mother,
with 'the image of her that I carried for years, hanging from
my neck like an iron locket' (71).
Joan periodically conjures her mother's ghost, imagining
that she is being visited by an 'astral body', one wearing a
navy suit and neat white gloves, mascara streaming down
the cheeks in black tears. Joan does ultimately come to a
sort of recognition, a final confrontation with her mother's
ghost in which she realises that 'She'd never really let go of
me because I had never let her go. It had been she standing
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 65

behind me in the mirror. . . . My mother was a vortex, a

dark vacuum, I would never be able to make her happy .
. . . Maybe it was time for me to stop trying' (363). But
Joan does not ever truly recognise her complicity in this
relationship with the evil stepmother who is her double, a
reflected version of herself, nor does she ever successfully
extricate herself from the vortex which is her own inability
to confront this and other realities.
Many of Joan's mythologically-inspired identities, like
the Snow White persona, are derived from mirrors; even
the fat lady image is one she sees reflected in a fun-house
mirror as a child. As Marian in The Edible Woman rejects
her female identity, her 'role as Woman', by refusing to
eat, so Joan rejects her prescribed roles by eating to excess
until the real Joan is hidden and protected in a cocoon of
fat, a 'magic cloak of blubber and invisibility' (157). Thus
she successfully evades the sexual attentions of men, while,
at the same time, she manages to enrage her mother: 'I had
defeated her: I wouldn't ever let her make me over in her
image, thin and beautiful' (94). To be 'thin and beautiful',
according to the psychiatrist to whom Joan is sent by her
mother, is the prerequisite for marriage, and given the
disaster which is her parents' marriage, Joan prefers
exemption. Like the protagonist of Surfacing, she simply
'refuses to play'. 'But why did I feel I had to be excused',
Joan asks. 'Why did I want to be exempted, and what
from? In high school you didn't have to play baseball if
you had your period or a pain in your stomach, and I
preferred the sidelines' (242).
For the rest of the novel, Joan's recurring vision is of the
fat lady self, not on the sidelines, but in the spotlight,
dressed in an obscene tutu, dancing on a highwire. This
particular fiction is inspired by her childhood experience in
which her mother and her dancing teacher in collusion
decide that Joan is too plump to make a convincing
butterfly in the ballet recital. She is accordingly robbed of
66 MARGARET ATWOOD

her wings and reduced to the role of moth ball. Even years
later when Joan sheds her pounds of fat, emerging finally
into the role of butterfly, she is haunted by the ghost of
her fat self, 'my dark twin. . . . She wanted to kill me and
take my place' (279).
The fat lady in the tutu, who works in the same 'freak
show' with the 'dancing girls', also has a double, another of
Atwood's 'dancing girls' who recur throughout the poetry
and fiction in any variety of disguises. Moira Shearer in
The Red Shoes (whose importance as an image for Atwood
is discussed in Chapter 1) also becomes an identity for
Joan, who shares the luxurious red hair of her idol and
who repeatedly attempts to also dance herself to death and
to suffer 'more than anyone' (87). Joan is still Moira
Shearer at the end of the novel when, her entire life in a
shambles, she decides to 'dance for no one but myself':

I raised myself onto my bare toes and twirled around,

tentatively at first. The air filled with spangles. I
lifted my arms and swayed them in time to the gentle
music, I remembered the music, I remembered
every step and gesture .... I closed my eyes. Wings
grew from my shoulders .... I'd danced right
through the broken glass, in my bare feet too. Some
butterfly . . .. The real red shoes, the feet punished
for dancing. You could dance, or you could have the
love of a good man. But you were afraid to dance,
because you had this unnatural fear that if you
danced they'd cut your feet off so you wouldn't be
able to dance. Finally you overcame your fear and
danced, and they cut your feet off. The good man
went away too, because you wanted to dance (368).

Both Moira Shearer and the fat lady then merge identities
with that other innocent and victimised heroine, yet another
'dancing girl' identity for Joan, the Little Mermaid of the
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 67

fairy tale who traded her tongue for legs only to find
herself dancing at the prince's wedding to somebody else.
Again, Atwood invokes her familiar paradox of the woman
as artist: to sacrifice art for love is to sacrifice art, love and
the self as well.
Still another of Joan's identities is also a victim of the
same paradox. The Lady of Shalott sits in her gothic tower
weaving her ornate tapestries, creating her art and watching
the medieval world through a mirror. She is content until
the reflection of the handsome knight appears, at which
point she leaves the tower, the tapestry, and the mirror in
search of love, only to encounter her own death and
minimal attention from the knight who barely notices as
she floats by in her death barge. Joan has the Tennyson
poem in mind, but perhaps Atwood also identifies her with
the Pre-Raphaelite painting by William Holman Hunt of
the Lady of Shalott. An ornate mirror dominates the
painting, and the central figure of a woman is a caricature
of femininity with her baroque and wild red hair (the
colour of Joan's). She wears the costume of a dancing girl,
and she appears to be entangled in the threads from her
own weaving. Like Homer's Penelope or any number of
other weaving or spinning women in mythology and
literature (including Philomela, who, like the Little
Mermaid, also lost her tongue), the lady in Holman Hunt's
painting represents a fearful kind of witch-like power. The
hair, like the weaving, symbolises power of a sexual nature;
it can function to ensnare men, as is also true in the case of
Rapunzel (whom Atwood sees in Survival as a prototype
for Canadian literary heroines), or Circe (another of
Atwood's woman/artist heroines in 'Circe/Mud Poems'), or
even snake-haired Medusa, the original 'girl with the
Gorgon touch' (whose image dominates in Double
Persephone). All of these ultimately doomed women of
mythology, regardless of how powerful they may be in the
beginning, end in sorry circumstances, and thus they
68 MARGARET ATWOOD

represent a warning: untold dangers await the woman who

presumes to see herself as artist.
Joan, too, perceives herself as doomed to a tragic fate;
her life, she thinks, is out of her control. On the first page
of the novel, she invokes the dual images of the fat lady
and the Lady of Shalott as metaphors for her own life,
which, she says, 'had a tendency to spread, to get flabby,
to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror'
(3). Isolated in a metaphoric tower which she only partly
realises is of her own creation, Joan plays her part of the
artist, writing her gothic novels and gazing in a mirror at
her concept of reality. The 'knight' she invents for her
medieval lady self is her husband, appropriately named
Arthur. Finally, Joan choreographs her own 'death' to
correspond to Tennyson's poem (and perhaps to another
Pre-Raphaelite painting, that by John William Waterhouse
which depicts the Lady of Shalott floating in a barge down
a beautiful river, her long red hair as remarkable here as in
Holman Hunt's painting). Joan becomes 'the lady in the
boat, the death barge, the tragic lady with flowing hair and
stricken eyes, the lady in the tower. She couldn't stand the
view from the window, life was her curse' (363). Joan too
cannot stand the view of her own life, and, attempting to
untangle herself from her ornate tapestry of lies, she
imitates her own suicide, pretending to have drowned but
actually floating to the illusion of freedom in a death barge.
Unlike the 'drownings' in Atwood's poems and in Surfacing,
this journey under water is not revelatory, but rather part
of the con-game which is Joan's life. She holds on to her
fictions: 'You could stay in the tower for years', she says,
'weaving away, looking in the mirror, but one glance out
the window at real life and that was that. The curse, the
doom' (346).
Joan's early fascination with her mother's kind of art
practised ritualistically before the three-way mirror is never
dispelled; significantly, the adult Joan also buys herself a
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 69

triple mirror in front of which she, too, perpetrates an

illusion. It is here that her real literary career as Lady
Oracle begins. Acting on the advice of spiritualist Leda
Sprott, Joan begins her experiments with automatic writing,
another indication of a failure to accept responsibility for
her actions. She lights a candle, seats herself at the mirror,
closes her eyes and enters a 'dark, shining corridor' (246).
When she returns, she finds a series of words manifested
on the paper before her; predictably, these evolve into a
poem which relies heavily on imagery involving the Lady
of Shalott 'standing in the prow' of 'the death boat',
singing and crying simultaneously. The lady of Joan's
poem lives 'under the earth somewhere, or inside something,
a cave or a huge building'; she is 'enormously powerful,
like a goddess, but it was an unhappy power' (248).
Ultimately, Joan's creation evolves into 'the redgold lady'
who has lost her 'glass wings' (252), and she is thus related
to the rest of Joan's heroines, all of whom are, of course,
herself.
The goddess identity also persists throughout Joan's
fantasies. Her first lover, Paul, has said to Joan's thin self
that she has 'the body of a goddess' (158). But Joan has
seen depictions of headless and armless Venuses, mutilated
women like the wives of Bluebeard, and she rejects the
analogy. Some years later, Joan visits the Tivoli in Italy
with Arthur where she encounters the fountain statue of
Diana of Ephesus, a kind of fertility goddess whose 'serene
face' is 'perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of
grapes. She was draped in breasts from neck to ankle, as
though afflicted with a case of yaws .... The nipples were
equipped with spouts, but several of the breasts were out
of order'. Joan rejects this fantasy of the goddess as fat lady
and as archetypal mother as well: 'Once I would have seen
her as an image of myself, but not any more. My ability to
give was limited, I was not inexhaustible' (282).
Joan's triple mirror not only inspires her Lady Oracle
70 MARGARET ATWOOD

poems, but her later gothic novels as well. These she

writes with her eyes closed, refusing to take the
consequences for what she commits to paper: 'It was
somehow inhibiting to have to see what I'd put on the
page' (146). When Joan sits at the mirror and closes the
two sides around her, her own image becomes multiplied
to an infinite number, 'extending in a line as far as I could
see' (245). She is also thus able to create the illusion of a
mirror maze, a correspondingly infinite number of doors
and hallways, like the sinister maze in her current novel,
Stalked by Love, which confuses and entraps Felicia, the
red-haired wife who takes over the novel in spite of Joan
and Charlotte, the appropriate 'good' heroine. What Felicia
and Joan both discover in the 'central plot' of the maze is
multiple manifestations of themselves; they themselves are
all the wives of Bluebeard, all the mythological victims and
'dancing girls' of fairy-tale tradition:

Suddenly she found herself in the central plot. A

stone bench ran along one side, and on it were
seated four women. Two of them looked a lot like
her, with red hair and green eyes and small white
teeth. The third was middle-aged, dressed in a
strange garment that ended halfway up her calves,
with a ratty piece of fur around her neck. The last
was enormously fat. She was wearing a pair of pink
tights and a short pink skirt covered with spangles.
From her head sprouted two antennae, like a
butterfly's, and a pair of obviously false wings was
pinned to her back ... 'We are Lady Redmond'
.... (375-76)

There is no exit from this maze, nor from the multiplicity

of Joan's identities. Just as Joan has been trapped in the
mirror maze at an earlier point, '. . . stuck there, in the
midst of darkness, unable to move' (249), so she is caught
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 71

up in her own fictions, entangled, like Holman Hunt's

Lady of Shalott, in the threads of her own art.
As in Atwood's earlier novels, the mirror as a symbol for
art represents a basic and inescapable paradox: it is
simultaneously a trap and an instrument of truth. As
Atwood's earlier heroines, like Alice in Wonderland or
Persephone in the underworld, must symbolically journey
underground in order to discover truth and identity, so
Joan must enter the mirror maze to find her many selves.
Atwood has remarked in an interview that the maze in
Lady Oracle is 'a descent into the underworld. There's a
passage in Virgil's Aeneid which I found very useful, where
Aeneas goes to the underworld to learn about his future.
He's guided by the Sibyl and he learns what he has to from
his dead father, and then he returns home'. 1 While the
heroine of Surfacing emerges with knowledge from the
'tangled maze' of the island wilderness, Joan never seems
to learn from the maze 'what she has to': that there is no
escape from the confrontation with doubleness, multiplicity.
Art, like the mirror, is ambiguous and dangerous, lending
itself readily to misuse by the creation of lies, but leading
finally to an inevitable confrontation with reality. Joan
longs to enter the long dark corridor in the mirror where
she imagines she might find '. . . the thing, the truth or
word or person that was mine, that was waiting for me'
(247), but there is no single or integrated person for her to
find. Neither Snow White nor Joan ever truly learns what
the evil stepmother always knew: that magic mirrors are
condemned to the truth, and truth is inevitably and
inescapably multiple and complex.
In Lady Oracle, as in all of her novels, Atwood explores
identities through the symbolism of names. Joan's names,
like her personality, are multiple and reflective of the
fantasy world from which they are most often derived. She
was named for film-star Joan Crawford, a pseudonym for
the actual Lucille Le Seur. Her maiden name is Joan
72 MARGARET ATWOOD

Delacourt, her married name is Foster, her pen name is

Louisa K. Delacourt (after her aunt), and she is also Lady
Oracle. With each name, Joan is 're-born' into a new
personality, all of which are variations on her own theme.
She describes her emergence from the cocoon of fat as a
rebirth into a new self; marrying Arthur is an assumption
of a new personality; beginning an affair with 'the Royal
Porcupine' leads her to the realisation that 'This was the
beginning of my double life' (274); and the faked death by
drowning leads to a new identity in Italy. Even cutting and
dying her hair, Joan believes, will provide a new life and
an escape from the problems which so beset the old Joan.
'I was more than double', Joan says, 'I was triple, multiple,
and now I could see that there was more than one life to
come, there were many' (274).
Joan's numerous names and personalities lead Jerome
Rosenberg in Margaret Atwood to conclude that Atwood is
portraying '. . . something like multiple personality
disorder, in which traumatic episodes initiated in early
childhood trigger the formation of separate personalities
which constitute distinct parts of the victim's psyche and
exist side by side'. 2 However, Joan is not idiosyncratic in
her disorder, which, Atwood implies, might be symptomatic
of the female condition: '. . . men who changed their
names were likely to be conmen, criminals, undercover
agents or magicians, whereas women who changed their
names were probably just married' (226). Joan's protean
nature is reflected in the other women who populate her
actual as well as her fictional world. They are female
magicians, capable of transforming themselves from fairy
godmother to evil queen and back again.
Aunt Lou, for example, is perceived as the good mother,
loving, permissive, and cuddly:

Aunt Lou ... was soft, billowy, woolly, befurred;

even her face, powdered and rouged, was covered
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 73

with tiny hairs, like a bee. Wisps escaped from her

head, threads from her hems, sweetish odors from
the space between her collar and her neck, where I
would rest my forehead, listening to the stories of
her talking fox. (95-96)

Through the medium of her talking fox stole, Aunt Lou

opens the world of fantasy, of stories, of romantic movies
like The Red Shoes, of carnivals and spiritualist gatherings.
It is she who waves her magic wand and originates those
fictions which Joan never outgrows. It is not surprising
that Joan borrows Aunt Lou's very name in her career as
gothic novelist. Aunt Lou's own literary career consists of
signing her name to pamphlets on menstruation, pamphlets
which perpetrate the outrageous lie that 'Growing up can
be fun' (91). Like Aunt Lou, Joan also lies to her readers
as well as to herself. She too provides fantasy and escape
for the women who buy her books in drugstores, 'neatly
packaged like the other painkillers' (34).
Aunt Lou, in fact, is a walking paradox. Playing the role
of maiden aunt, she conceals from Joan for years the fact
that she was once married and now has a married lover.
Fat herself, Aunt Lou understands the psychology of
obesity, yet she abets Joan in her fat lady disguise by
treating her to ice cream, crab meat sandwiches and gallons
of popcorn. She then confounds the ambiguity by leaving a
will resembling the archetypal bargain of fairy tales: Joan
must lose one hundred pounds before she can inherit her
legacy, the money that will free her from her mother and
allow her to begin a new life. Thus, Aunt Lou's mixed
messages add to Joan's confusion; the fairy godmother
changes Cinderella into the princess, and then introduces
her to Bluebeard. Although her mother seems always to
have been the stage director of Joan's life, Aunt Lou and
Joan herself have been in reality the secret choreographers
of destruction.
74 MARGARET ATWOOD

Aunt Lou also functions indirectly in the initiation of

Joan's career as gothic novelist by introducing her to yet
another enigmatic double lady, the spiritualist Leda Sprott.
As proprietor of Jordan Chapel, Leda Sprott conducts
seances, conjures Joan's mother who is not at this point
dead, predicts the circumstances of Aunt Lou's death by
heart failure after slipping on a bath mat, and promulgates
the art of automatic writing. 'You have great gifts ...
great powers' (122), she tells Joan. Clearly, Leda Sprott is
a perpetrator of lies, and yet Atwood permits her to redeem
herself. Years later when Leda Sprott has become the
Reverend Eunice P. Revele and performs Joan's marriage
ceremony to Arthur, she is transformed into a kind of
Sibyl, as in the Aeneas legend. She provides revelations, as
her new name indicates is her function, and her advice to
Joan is little short of oracular:

You do not choose a gift, it chooses you, and if you

deny it it will make use of you in any case, though
perhaps in a less desirable way. I used my own gift,
as long as I had it. You may think I'm a stupid old
woman or a charlatan, I'm used to that. But
sometimes I had the truth to tell: there's no
mistaking it when you do. When I had no truth to
tell, I told them what they wanted to hear. I
shouldn't have done that. You may think it's
harmless, but it isn't .... People have faith in you .
. . . They trust you. That can be dangerous,
especially if you take advantage of it. Everything
catches up to you sooner or later .... Don't say
what you don't mean. (229-230)

Leda Sprott alias Eunice P. Revele has one good eye and
one bad eye. Like the rest of Atwood's literary characters,
she is split, multiple, complex. But the truth she has to tell
is one aspect of Atwood's own philosophy of literature and
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 75

summarises what Atwood has stated in both poetry and

fiction as the proper function of art.
Joan confuses life and art, truth and fiction. Her lover,
the Royal Porcupine, inventor and .sole practitioner of
'con-create art' (268), alias Chuck Brewer, commercial
designer, is as schizophrenic as Joan, but in one sense, he
does not misuse art in the same way that she does. Like
Joe's squashed pots in Surfacing, the squashed and frozen
animals displayed by the Royal Porcupine have a kind of
bizarre integrity. On the one hand, these destroyed and
mutilated animals, found along highways and preserved in
a giant freezer, represent victims of civilisation; they
manifest that fixation of the Canadian psyche with
victimisation which Atwood discusses in Survival. Carefully
preserved in the positions in which they were found,
labelled as to place of discovery and actual cause of death,
they also represent a form of truth, even, if one stretches
the imagination, a political statement of an ecological
nature. 'The new poetry', explains the Royal Porcupine, 'is
the poetry of things (269). This is 'truth' taken to extremes,
but at least the Royal Porcupine is generally sincere, which
is a great deal more than can be said for Joan.
The aspect of truth which Joan continues to repress,
even though it is manifested so obviously in her own
mirror, in every person in her world, and is intrinsic in her
own psyche, is that aspect of multiplicity. 'But every man
has more than one wife', explain Joan's discarded selves at
the centre of the maze in Stalked by Love, 'Sometimes all
at once, sometimes one at a time, sometimes ones he
doesn't even know about' (376). Arthur, for example,
never solves the mystery of Joan's complexity; she never
permits him to discover the gothic novelist beneath the
surface of the inept housewife. Joan's fat lady identity also
remains a secret, relegated to old photographs and identified
to Arthur as 'Aunt Deirdre ... Aunt Deirdre was a bitch'
(98).
76 MARGARET ATWOOD

And it is also true that every woman has more than one
husband, men being as doubled and multiplied as women
in Atwood's books. Just as the multiple Joan is represented
by the murdered wives of Redmond in Stalked by Love, so
Redmond is a composite of all the men in Joan's life.
Joan's father, whom she perceives as so ineffectual in
comparison to her dominant mother, is ultimately revealed
as a kind of Merlin who, in the practice of medicine,
returns life to people whether they want it or not, and, in
the practice of war, is responsible for the deaths of people
who wanted life. In his role as anesthesiologist, he can
simulate the deaths of living people. 'He was a man in a
cage, like other men,' Joan observes, 'but what made him
different was his dabbling in lives and deaths' (154). One
of the faces of Redmond encountered at the centre of the
maze is swathed in 'a white gauze mask' (377).
Joan is taught in childhood that there are 'two categories:
nice men did things for you, bad men did things to you'
(73). But she soon learns that life, and particularly men,
defy classification. The 'daffodil man' might be the
perverted exhibitionist whom little Joan encounters on her
way home from a Brownie meeting (another version of
Atwood's ubiquitous 'Underwear Man' from The Edible
Woman), or he might be the rescuer who frees her from the
tree to which her malicious sister Brownies have tied her.
Even more disconcerting, perhaps he is both, just as Joan's
Polish count in London is both Paul, the heroic political
refugee, and Mavis Quilp, the author of Lucy Gallant:
Army Nurse. The cloaked figure of the Royal Porcupine,
eccentric artist and romantic lover, hides the identity of
Chuck Brewer, '. . . gray and multidimensional and
complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a
Linton in disguise?' (300).
Arthur is perhaps less readily understandable than the
other male characters Joan invents for the romance she sees
as her life, but he, too, is multiple:
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 77

Every man I'd ever been involved with, I realized,

had had two selves: my father, healer and killer; the
man in the tweed coat, my rescuer and possibly also
a pervert; the Royal Porcupine and his double,
Chuck Brewer; even Paul, who I'd always believed
had a sinister other life I couldn't penetrate. Why
should Arthur be any exception? ... Arthur was
someone I didn't know at all. And he was right in
bed beside me ... what if he woke up, eyes
glittering, and reached for me . . . ? (325-326)

Hiding behind the mask of a 'Linton', an ineffectual

idealist, a dispenser of socialist pamphlets, could be the
mad Marxist, the potential bomber. Many identities in
one, Arthur is by himself the peanut-crunching crowd
gathered to watch Joan's show. She imagines herself at the
centre of the Colosseum amidst '. . . noise and tumult,
cheering crowds, death on the sands, wild animals growling,
snarling, screams, and martyrs weeping in the wings .. .'
(16). There Arthur sits, 'front row center ... from time to
time making a slight gesture that would preserve or destroy:
thumbs up or thumbs down' (17).
The Colosseum fantasy is, of course, stolen from films,
as are most of Joan's plots and characters, whether for her
novels or for her life. Unlike Atwood, Joan is not a very
literary kind of writer: she does not know who Tolstoy is,
and she remembers 'The Lady of Shalott' only from her
early school experience with Narrative Poems for Juniors.
Her plots are via Walt Disney rather than the Brothers
Grimm. Under Joan's scrutiny, the mythic fat woman of
the Fellini films is reduced to Disney's The Whale Who
Wanted to Sing at the Met (6). Her gothic romances are
parodies of the genre, and even her Lady Oracle poems are
'a mixture of Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen' (251), a
judgement which pleases Joan enormously. Certainly,
Atwood leaves us much room for doubt about the education
and tastes of her heroine.
78 MARGARET ATWOOD

Arthur as film hero is a projection of Joan's solipsistic

psyche as surely as is her mother and everyone else in the
novel. Like the speaker in the poems in Power Politics,
Joan is a Dr Frankenstein who has lost contol of her art.
Unlike Joan, however, the speaker in the poems faces the
consequences and accepts at least partial responsibility for
what she creates: 'They were all inaccurate:/the hinged
bronze man, the fragile man/built of glass pebbles,/the
fanged man with his opulent capes and boots. . . . It was
my fault but you helped,/you enjoyed it' (Selected Poems,
176). Joan herself is all the wives of Bluebeard, and Arthur,
like the lover in 'Hesitations outside the Door', is created as
the mass murderer, around his head a 'crown/ of shining
blood' (Selected Poems, 169). The speaker in the poem,
finally, must enter the secret chamber, must confront a
reality that all the fictions do not disguise: 'In the room we
will find nothing/In the room we will find each other'
(Selected Poems, 172). It is doubtful that Joan achieves a
similar confrontation.
The ending of Lady Oracle, as is the case with all of
Atwood's fiction, is ambiguous: the reader is not granted
the expected resolution. Joan does not learn the lesson so
crucial to the speaker in 'Hesitations outside the Door';
perhaps she does not even enter the secret room. Like the
protagonist of Surfacing, Joan lives in 'border country',
trapped between alternatives, unable to make decisions.
From the beginning of the novel, Joan has trembled on
thresholds, hesitated outside doors, been terrified to cross
bridges. Things happen to her, and, at least in her
imagination, nothing is her fault. Her very birth, according
to her mother, is an 'accident', and so decisions are
irrelevant in such a fated existence. Joan never exercises
the great existential NO in her dealings with men and
women, but rather waits 'for something to happen, the
next turn of events (a circle? a spiral?)' (342). Her self-
created maze represents, not revelation and discovery, but
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 79

a mere plot device: ' ... in any labyrinth I would have let
go of the thread in order to follow a wandering light, a
fleeting voice' (170). Even if she enters the secret room,
she does not confront its significance: 'In a fairy tale I
would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the
forbidden door and are shocked by the murdered wives,
not the third, clever one who keeps to the essentials:
presence of mind, foresight, the telling of watertight lies'
(170).
Truth does not translate into art nor art into truth for Joan,
as Atwood always indicates that it must. Joan resolves at
the end of the novel to abandon her costume Gothics
because 'I think they were bad for me' (379), but she will
make a poor substitution in the form of science fiction,
merely another kind of romance. 'I keep thinking I should
learn some lesson from all of this', Joan says, but the
reader's hopes for her regeneration are not rewarded. Of
her life and her staged death, she says, 'It did make a mess;
but then, I don't think I'll ever be a very tidy person'
(380).
Nor is Lady Oracle intended to be a 'tidy' novel. As
Atwood says, ' ... the book I set out to write was a kind of
antithesis to Surfacing, which is very tight and everything
in it fits and there's not anything that's out of place and no
tangents .... In Lady Oracle I set out to write a book that
was all tangents' .3 If, as many critics have noted and as
Atwood herself has said, Lady Oracle is an 'anti-Gothic'
novel, a satire on the conventions of the nineteenth-century
romances which Atwood discusses in Second Words, then
perhaps the novel's lack of resolution is part of that satiric
intent. Certainly, Joan is a parody of the Gothic heroine
who, according to Judith McCombs in 'Atwood's Haunted
Sequences', is '. . . tempted by male Others whose power
animates and captivates, whose guises enthrall, whose love
spells death'. 4
But Joan is nothing if not a survivor. She may imagine
80 MARGARET ATWOOD

demon lovers, but she will run for her life if they actually
appear. Joan's Gothic novels thus function like her other
lies and like her fat lady disguise: they protect her from
'what is in the room', from a reality she wishes to avoid.
She prefers Arthur as Linton rather than as a ' ... cloaked,
sinuous and faintly menacing stranger'; she is safe, she
rationalises, because '. . . cloaked strangers didn't leave
their socks on the floor or stick their fingers in their ears or
gargle in the morning to kill germs. I kept Arthur in our
apartment and the strangers in their castles and mansions,
where they belonged' (241). Thus, largely because of Joan's
talents for survival, Lady Oracle is essentially a comic
work. According to Clara Thomas, who sees Joan as an
archetypal 'fool-heroine', the novel is ' ... written with a
light touch and to analyze it in other and academic language
is inevitably to desecrate it. This is a funny book and we
are carried along on the crests of its fun with all the
buoyancy of swimming in salt water'. 5
However, like all great comedy, Lady Oracle has a dark
side, an aspect recognised by Robert Lecker who writes
that its function is to 'corrupt the prototypical romance
movement from descent to ascent by demonstrating that
the upper world is merely a reflection of the lower world of
darkness, ambiguity and isolation' .6 Joan remains isolated
in her tower of false art, victimised by her self-created
mythologies. Finally, she is helpless to extricate herself
from the threads of her own tapestry, nor can she accept
that reality which the mirror reflects. Her only recognition
of consequence is that she is 'an escape artist . . . the real
romance of my life was that between Houdini and his ropes
and locked trunk; entering the embrace of bondage,
slithering out again. What else had I ever done' (367). But
even this recognition is perhaps an illusion: Joan does not
escape her own greatest enemy, which is herself. Funny as
she is, Joan shares the essentially tragic position of the
 THE 'ESCAPE ARTIST' 81

woman writer portrayed in 'Gothic Letter on a Hot Night',

who lives only through her fictions:

. . . It was the addiction

to stories, every
story about herself or anyone
led to the sabotage of each address
and all those kidnappings

Stories that could be told

on nights like these to account for the losses,
litanies of escapes, bad novels, thrillers
deficient in villains;
now there is nothing to write . . ..

Who knows what stories

would ever satisfy her
who knows what savageries
have been inflicted on her
and others by herself and others
in the name of freedom,
in the name of paper. (You are Happy, 15-16)
5 'The Roar of the
Boneyard': Life
Before Man
Who locked me
into this crazed man-made
stone brain
where the weathered
totempole jabs a blunt
finger at the byzantine
mosaic dome

Under that ornate

golden cranium I wander
among fragments of gods, tarnished
coins, embalmed gestures
chronologically arranged,
looking for the exit sign
but in spite of the diagrams
at every corner, labelled
in red: YOU ARE HERE
the labyrinth holds me.

* * * *
and I am dragged to the mind's
deadend, the roar of the bone-
yard, I am lost

82
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 83

among the mastodons

and beyond .... (The Animals in That Country, 20)

Although written at least ten years before her novel Life

Before Man, Atwood's nightmare poem 'A Night in the
Royal Ontario Museum' is a companion piece. Both poem
and novel centre on the museum as a metaphor for modem
life, which Atwood sees here as a vast tomb or an elaborate
labyrinth, a maze in which human beings are lost,
entrapped, looking for the EXIT sign. All the maps are
obsolete, tradition is no longer a guide, and mirrors have
lost their magic power to reveal truth. Pervasive in the
novel, as in the poem, is a sensation of panic at
the possibility of madness, of being 'dragged to the
mind's/deadend'. And always there is the realisation of
inevitable death, the sand running through the 'glass body'
(Life Before Man, 78).
Unlike Lady Oracle, The Edible Woman or evenSurfacing,
Life Before Man is almost unrelieved by humour except in
its most ironic form. The three protagonists - Lesje,
Elizabeth and Nate -live relentlessly depressing lives, their
states of mind reflected by a surreal cityscape characterised
either by intense heat and the smog of pollution or by
leaden skies and 'fish-grey' snow. Dominating the novel as
it dominates the lives of the protagonists, is the forbidding
image of the Royal Ontario Museum, that grey monument
to an irretrievable past, a temple of death, a massive
'animal morgue' (55). Lesje, who spends her life cataloguing
pieces of bone and teeth, 'shards of the real world', winds
her way through the labyrinth of hallways and exhibits:

She climbs the grey steps of the Museum, walks past

the ticket-takers, hurries up the stairs to the Hall of
Vertebrate Evolution, tracing again her daily path:
the human skull, the saber-toothed cat in its tar pit,
the illuminated scenes of undersea life, with their
84 MARGARET ATWOOD

hungry mosasaurs and doomed ammonites. The

door that leads to her office is reached through this
portion of the ancient sea floor. (191)

The biblical quotation written across the domed 'golden

cranium' of the lobby, 'THAT ALL MEN MAY KNOW
HIS WORK' (54), is surely ironic in the context of
Atwood's study in extinction.
The characters in this novel are also, like the stuffed
dinosaurs and mastodons in the museum, classified and
catalogued. Nate, Lesje and Elizabeth are scientifically
categorised and arranged in chapters as on file cards,
according to name, date, habitat and present activity:
'Elizabeth is lying in bed ... ', 'Nate sits in the Selby Hotel
. . . ', 'Lesje is doing something seedy . . . '. The impersonal
and objective third-person narrator, scientist-like, makes no
evaluative comments; the lives of the three protagonists are
simply the subjects of a report covering a representative
two-year period from Friday, 29 October 1976 to Friday, 18
August 1978. Often a single date is repeated, as the activities
and perceptions of the subjects on that date will differ;
occasionally there is a flashback to 1975, at which point
another major character, Chris, shot his head off.
The reader is not invited to empathise with any of the
characters; none is likable or perhaps even redeemable. We
remain detached yet fascinated as they interact. As Lesje
passes her time wondering about the breeding habits of
various dinosaurs, so we view the behaviour of the subjects
in the novel: there are two suicides, three contemplated
suicides, two faked suicides, two funerals, two rapes,
numerous seductions, abundant mental cruelty. None of
the sexual acts is even vaguely erotic. Rather Atwood gives
us case histories, records of 'sex among the ossified' (128).
The characters are fossils of human beings, guilty of
'embalmed gestures', incapable of love and spiritually
exhausted. Atwood's poem, 'Letters', explores a similar set
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 85

of characteristics: 'I do not know/the manner of your

deaths, daily/or final, blood/will not flow in the fossil/heart
at my command, I can't/put the life back into those/lives,
those lies .. .' (Two-Headed Poems, 31).
As the characters are classified within the structure of
the novel, so they attempt to classify and categorise each
other, fit each other neatly into labelled boxes. Lesje
attempts to relate to Nate, 'Elizabeth's husband, the
husband belonging to Elizabeth. Possessive, or, in Latin,
genitive' (53). Nate is, indeed, Elizabeth's husband, father
to Nancy and Janet, lover to Lesje, father to Lesje's
unborn baby, former lover to Martha, son to Mrs Schoenhof
and to a father dead in World War II, former lawyer
turned toy-maker, former idealist turned cynic. Tall, thin,
bearded, shabby, having only recently discarded his love-
beads, Nate is a refugee from the 1960s lost in the maze of
the 70s, homesick for his own youth. Nate has no actual
home, we are repeatedly made aware; the house he lives in
belongs to Elizabeth, even though it is Nate who cleans
and cooks and mothers the children. He cooks liver and
plays his Harry Belafonte records from the 60s, two
activities hateful to Elizabeth, only when Elizabeth is not
at home. Later, he moves to Lesje's apartment, where he
also cooks and cleans and mothers Lesje. Always he is
nostalgic for a home, an impossible and absurd vision of a
'. . . shared harmonious life, left over from some Christmas
card of the forties, a log fire, knitting in a basket, glued on
snow ... ' (212). Ironically, 'Schoenhof' translates from the
German as 'beautiful farm'.
Nate cleans and cooks and serves women out of a
prevailing and intense sense of guilt, guilt because his
surname is German (the protagonist of Surfacing at one
point remarks, 'The trouble some people have being
German I have being human'), because he cannot live up
to the heroic image he has of the father he never met, and,
more acutely, because he is male in what for him is a
86 MARGARET ATWOOD

female world. Nate is, in fact, terrified of the women who

dominate his life. Raised by a mother who is a dedicated if
ineffectual political activist, Nate .is guilty for failing in his
role as 'radical lawyer', defender of the oppressed. Married
to Elizabeth, 'Queen Elizabeth', who will 'stop at nothing.
Or, put another way: when she reaches nothing she will
stop' (133), Nate only tolerates her lovers and serves her
tea in bed. He has imagined her at her office in the Royal
Ontario Museum, 'sitting like a Madonna in a shrine,
shedding a quiet light . . . . He would think of himself
running towards her as she receded in front of him, holding
a lamp in her hand like Florence Nightingale'. Even when
Nate has become disenchanted, even when he realises that
Elizabeth is less the 'lady with the lamp' than 'the lady
with the axe' (41), he still runs towards her, seeking
approval, seeking absolution. Nor can he expect forgiveness
from his two daughters who will soon be women, 'and that
recognition runs through him like a needle. . . . they will
criticize his clothes, his job, his turn of phrase .... they
will judge him. Motherless, childless, he sits at the kitchen
table, the solitary wanderer, under the cold red stars'
(265).
Absolution is what Nate also hopes from Lesje, 'Our
Lady of the Bones' (71), 'unattainable, shining like a
crescent moon' (115). Nate's sexual fantasies about Lesje,
as about all women, are firmly grounded in arrested
adolescence, having to do with his viewing of the film She
'when he was an impressionable twelve and masturbating
nightly' (62). He imagines the following scenario:

Holding Lesje would be like holding some strange

plant, smooth, thin, with sudden orange flowers.
Exotics, the florists called them. The light would be
odd, the ground underfoot littered with bones. Over
which she would have power. She would stand
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 87

before him, the bearer of healing wisdom, swathed

in veils. He would fall to his knees, dissolve. (62)

However, as Atwood points out in her essay 'Superwoman

Drawn and Quartered: The Early Forms of She', the
image of 'She' is associated by H. Rider Haggard in his
novel, with 'She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed' (Second Words,
38). Like all the women in Nate's experience, even the
innocent young Lesje turns out to be manipulative and
domineering, yet another 'lady with an axe'. Like Elizabeth
and Martha, Lesje also requires that Nate grow up, accept
the role of fatherhood, commit himself to her, return to his
legal career, abandon his toys. Nate, however, remains a
child, unable to truly commit himself to any person or
thing. In imagery typical of Atwood's earlier descriptions
of failed artists, Nate sees himself as divided, amputated,
his own toys effigies of himself: 'The head screwed on,
holding the man together. A clown's smile he used. This is
his body, stiff fragments held together by his spine and his
screwtop head. Segmented man' (223).
Clearly Nate nurtures a vision of himself as victim; like
the female protagonists of Atwood's earlier fiction, he uses
this sense of himself to mitigate his guilt, to absolve himself
of complicity in the violence which he sees as implicit in
sexual relationships in general. Yet, he is an accomplice, at
least in his imagination: he envisions Elizabeth in the grip
of her maddened lover, beaten and helpless, 'white flesh
buckling under those fists, powerless, whimpering', but
the vision is 'only momentarily erotic' (214). Nate creates
Chris as the male monster, an alternate self permitted the
excesses which Nate represses in himself. Imagining Chris
as the brutal rapist and savage beast enables Nate to remain
the chaste knight in the service of his ladies, a role which
renders him psychologically and sometimes physically
impotent, always ineffectual. He thinks of himself in terms
88 MARGARET ATWOOD

of 'a lump of putty, helplessly molded by the relentless

demands and flinty disapprovals of the women he can't
help being involved with' (33). Like numerous other of
Atwood's characters, Nate is an 'escape artist', but a failed
one. His obsessive jogging only traps him more hopelessly
within the labyrinth as he runs in circles around Toronto's
Parliament Buildings, running from women, from himself,
for his life: 'His shadow paces him, thin and pinheaded,
stretching away to his right, a blackness flickering over the
grass. A premonition, always with him; his own eventual
death' (287).
Elizabeth also is preoccupied with death. Those chapters
of which Elizabeth is the subject frequently open with her
lying on her bed, arms at her sides, staring at the ceiling,
simulating death. Her carefully-decorated parlour, in which
she frequently sits 'as if waiting for a plane' (15), is funereal
in its atmosphere. The walls and furniture are a uniform
grey/mushroom colour, devoid of personality and of light
save for a quality of 'underwater light'. She derives most
pleasure from the two porcelain bowls on the sideboard,
'good pieces', but empty, without use: ' ... they were
meant for offerings. Right now they hold their own space,
their own beautifully shaped absence' (16). Elizabeth is
also an absence, mechanically eating and bathing, 'servicing'
her body 'for the time when she may be able to use it
again, inhabit it' (74). Within the scope of the novel, such
a time does not arrive.
Elizabeth is also concerned about the actual and possible
deaths of others. Her two daughters, she fears, could
disappear, could 'drown in two inches of water', could die
in any number of terrible and bizarre ways. She repeatedly
dreams that she is searching for her missing babies through
deserted streets, but she knows that the lost babies in the
dreams are also her mother, burned to death in a drunken
stupor by the fire started from her own cigarette, and her
sister, Caroline, who, mad since childhood, drowned
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 89

herself in a bathtub. These ghosts preoccupy her: 'She's

shut them out, both of them, as well as she could, but they
come back anyway, using the forms that will most torment
her' (171). Equally persistent is the ghost of her former
lover, Chris, whose suicide is the ostensible reason for her
present severe depression. Elizabeth must also endure yet
another death, that of her seemingly indestructible and
witch-like foster mother, Auntie Muriel, who is dying of
cancer.
Elizabeth's demons, both real and symbolic, haunt her
throughout the novel. The opening pages depict the
children's preparations for Hallowe'en, but even this image
of innocence becomes sinister as the little girls perform
'some grotesque and radical form of brain surgery' (28) on
their pumpkins; one of them dresses as a devil. Other
children come to the door, disguised as Frankenstein's
monsters or as rats; to Elizabeth they represent 'All souls.
Not just friendly souls but all souls. They are souls, come
back, crying at the door, hungry, mourning their lost lives.
You give them food, money, anything to substitute for
your love and blood, hoping it will be enough, waiting for
them to go away' (45). Predictably, the next holiday
recorded in the novel is Remembrance Day, set aside in
memory of the dead.
Elizabeth resurrects her demons out of guilt, a guilt
which seems a great deal more justifiable than Nate's self-
indulgent suffering. She understands that her mother died
as if by her own hand, that her mother, in fact, had 'sold'
her two little daughters to Auntie Muriel. Yet the mother's
death is also somehow due to Elizabeth's rejection and
denial, her refusal to recognise her mother as the pathetic
figure beneath the street lamp, gazing hungrily up at the
window of her daughters' bedroom. Elizabeth has also
prevented the younger Caroline from reconciliation with
the mother and has thus contributed to Caroline's tragic
breakdown and eventual death. On the night that Caroline
90 MARGARET ATWOOD

symbolically leaves her body, enters into a state of catatonic

collapse, Elizabeth has left her alone in order to seek her
own thrills and lose her virginity to a boy she picks up on
the street. She has also precipitated Chris's death by
refusing to marry him, by ordering him from her house.
Even the death of the evil Auntie Muriel is somehow partly
her fault: she has hurled one of her precious bowls at
Auntie Muriel, who has melted as a result. Lying in the
hospital, the cancer consuming her body, Auntie Muriel
appears to be 'falling in on herself, she's melting, like the
witch in The Wizard of Oz, and seeing it Elizabeth remem-
bers: Dorothy was not jubilant when the witch turned
into a puddle of brown sugar. She was terrified' (258).
Perhaps Elizabeth's guilt is, in a convoluted way,
responsible for her punishment of others, punishments
almost as cruel as those she metes out to herself. She is the
sadist in the sado-masochistic relationship with both Nate
and Chris, the long leather gloves she wears and removes
so deliberately, finger by finger, an emblem of her role. All
her sexual relationships, which she interprets as tests of her
dominance and power, manifest forms of perversity. Her
parlour becomes a kind of web into which she seduces such
victims as William, Lesje's lover before Nate. According to
Elizabeth, William is comparable in bed to 'a large and
fairly active slab of Philadelphia cream cheese', but he may
also contain 'pockets of energy, even violence' (196), an
accurate interpretation as we know from Lesje's experience
of William. The real challenge for Elizabeth, however, has
been Chris, 'a dangerous country, swarming with ambushes
and guerrillas, the center of a whirlpool, a demon lover'
(196). Even Elizabeth's youthful escapades are flirtations
with rape and violence; her adult forays into sleazy bars are
equally degrading and dangerous. While Marian in The
Edible Woman only fantasises about 'the Underwear Man',
Elizabeth actually arranges a date with a travelling salesman
of fetishistic underwear for women. 'We both know what
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 91

you're here for' (209), he says just before he rapes a now-

frigid Elizabeth while holding the microphone of his two-
way radio against her throat in order to give his listeners 'a
thrill'.
There is also an element of voyeurism in Elizabeth's
relationships with Nate's lovers. She invites their confidences
and confessions, and her manipulation of both Martha and
Lesje is almost sexual in its cruelty. Again, Elizabeth is the
Spider Woman who invites the innocent flies into her
parlour, takes them to lunch, snickers as they spill their
coffee and expose their weaknesses. Lesje is not so terribly
erroneous in her classification of Elizabeth as 'CLASS:
Chondrichthyes; ORDER: Selachii; GENUS: Squalidae;
SPECIES: Elizabetha. Today she classifies Elizabeth as a
shark; on other days it's as a huge Jurassic toad, primitive,
squat, venomous; on other days a cephalopod, a giant
squid, soft and tentacled, with a hidden beak' (245).
As always, however, Atwood does not permit her readers
such a simple interpretation of character. Elizabeth cannot
be so easily categorised and dismissed. For one thing, she
is subject to unexpected expressions of tenderness, towards
her children especially, but also towards Auntie Muriel,
whom she has good reason to hate. At their last encounter
in the hospital, Elizabeth wishes to run, to leave Auntie
Muriel to the fate she deserves, but she recalls her mother's
death, and the good, the vulnerable part of her prevents
her flight:

... she leans forward and takes Auntie Muriel's

blinded hands. Desperately the stubby fingers clutch
her. Elizabeth is no priest: she cannot give absolution.
What can she offer? Nothing sincerely. Beside her
own burning mother she has sat, not saying anything,
holding the one good hand. The one good fine-boned
hand. The ruined hand, still beautiful, unlike the
veined and mottled stumps she now cradles in hers,
92 MARGARET ATWOOD

soothing them with her thumbs as in illness she has

soothed the hands of her children.
Sickness grips her. Nevertheless, nevertheless, she
whispers: It's all right. It's all right. (260)

A similar gesture, that of touching, will prove the salvation

of the protagonist of Bodily Harm.
Elizabeth is like Auntie Muriel in many ways,
domineering, spiteful, with 'the backbone of a rhinoceros'.
Yet there is a positive aspect to Elizabeth's strengths. She
is a survivor, a 'homemaker' in a world where homes are
not possible. Literally homeless in childhood while the
other characters in Life Before Man are only symbolically
homeless, Elizabeth has created, by the end of the novel, a
home against all the odds. She will go to her home and
make peanut butter sandwiches for her children:

It suddenly amazes her that she is able to do this,

something this simple. How close has she come,
how many times, to doing what Chris did? More
important: what stopped her?
... But she's still alive, she wears clothes, she
walks around, she holds down a job even. She has
two children. Despite the rushing of wind, the
summoning voices she can hear from underground,
the dissolving trees, the chasms that open at her feet;
and will always from time to time open. She has no
difficulty seeing the visible world as a transparent
veil or a whirlwind. The miracle is to make it solid.
She thinks with anticipation of her house, her
quiet living room with its empty bowls, pure grace,
her kitchen table. Her house is not perfect; parts of
it are in fact crumbling, most noticeably the front
porch. But it's a wonder that she has a house at all,
that she's managed to accomplish a house. Despite
the wreckage. She's built a dwelling over the abyss,
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 93

but where else was there to build it? So far, it

stands. (278)

In the final analysis, Elizabeth is the only adult in the

novel. She has, as she says, 'been down the yellow brick
road' (86), and she knows well enough that the Wizard
does not exist. Her own escape fantasy, inspired by Chinese
paintings she commissions for a showing at the museum,
involves the idealisation of peasant life, the intensely
artificial beauty of fruit and vegetables, the sentimental
assertion that 'Everyone Helps in Building each Others'
Houses'. But Elizabeth knows that no one helps, that
'paradise does not exist', that the Chinese paintings do not
represent reality but only desire: 'Like cavemen, they paint
not what they see but what they want' (291). Elizabeth is
not an heroic figure in any ordinary sense, but she is strong
in her loneliness, ready to face a reality that is unmitigatedly
hostile. She resolves the existential dilemma evaded by all
of Atwood's earlier heroines: she has pitted her own free
will against the absurd, and she survives.
Lesje, on the other hand, is one of Atwood's more
familiar perennial child/women, and, as Lesje classifies her
fossils, other people, and the world in general, so we are
tempted to classify her among Atwood's Diana figures
patterned after the archetypes discussed in Survival. Like
Marian in The Edible Woman and like Alice in Wonderland,
Lesje avoids growing up or confronting reality by becoming
a tourist 'underground'. Lesje's chapters, including the
first one of which she is the subject, frequently describe
her wandering through the Jurassic swamp of her
imagination: she is in prehistory, 'Under a sun more orange
than her own has ever been, in the middle of a swampy
plain lush with thick-stalked plants and oversized ferns, a
group of bony-plated stegosaurs is grazing .... She mixes
eras, adds colors: why not a metallic blue stegosaurus with
red and yellow dots ... ?' (10). Lesje is a paleontologist, a
94 MARGARET AlWOOD

scientist, compulsively objective just as Joan Foster in

Lady Oracle is compulsively romantic. Yet Lesje's views on
prehistory are derived from the imagination rather than
from textbooks. Her 'passion for fossils' originates with her
reading of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World when
she was ten, and she has never outgrown the idea that, like
the hero of the novel, she might also discover some lost
world in which prehistoric life survives.
When that event occurs, as she still imagines it inevitably
will, she will name her country after herself, a plan which
poses a problem because, also like Joan Foster, Lesje has
multiple names. Her last name would have been Etlin had
not her Ukrainian grandfather changed it to Green when
he arrived in Canada, and 'There already was a Greenland,
which wasn't at all the sort of place she had in mind.
Greenland was barren, icy, devoid of life, whereas the
place Lesje intended to discover would be tropical, rich
and crawling with wondrous life forms ... ' (82). Lesje is
Ukrainian for Alice, a name Lesje uses for a time, but she
finally prefers Lesje because 'Aliceland' simply 'wasn't
right'. Nevertheless, Atwood here establishes her familiar
theme: Lesje is another Alice travelling in a 'green world'
of her own creation.
Although Lesje's fantasies are redolent with lush sexual
imagery- steaming swamps, phallic shapes, dinosaurs with
two penises - and although she spends an inordinate
amount of time musing on the sexual habits of her
prehistoric creatures - the 'gargantuan passions, the earth
actually moving ... sighs of lust like a full-blast factory
whistle' (128)- these fantasies actually represent an evasion
of sex in any real context. Lesje is not a participant in life,
prehistoric or otherwise, but a voyeur watching from
behind a large fern, 'invisible' to the dinosaurs to whom
she is 'so totally alien that they will not be able to focus on
her. When the aborigines sighted Captain Cook's ships,
they ignored them because they knew such things could
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 95

not exist. It's the next best thing to being invisible' (10). As
the heroine of Surfacing prays to be made invisible, as Joan
Foster in Lady Oracle regards her excess weight as 'a magic
cloak of invisibility', and as Marian in The Edible Woman
seeks to disappear by refusing to eat, so Lesje in this novel
finds it convenient to temporarily eliminate herself.
Invisibility in Atwood's terms, is a complex symbol: at
times, it represents a refusal to deal with reality, a means of
escape from a necessary confrontation, but invisibility is
also the prerogative of the artist. Atwood writes in Second
Words that one of the things she used to wish for when she
was very young 'and reading a lot of comic books and fairy
tales', was 'the cloak of invisibility, so I could follow
people around and listen to what they were saying when I
wasn't there . . . '. This is what novelists do, says Atwood,
'every time they write a page' (Second Words, 429). But,
like Joan Foster and Marian McAlpin, Lesje may have the
soul of an artist, but she misuses and misinterprets her
talents. Like other of Atwood's heroines, she is a
'failed artist', solipsistic and incapable of translating the
imagination into language. To remain invisible in the green
world is to escape 'real life', adulthood, the sexual
recognition that implies, and the moral implications of the
role of artist as well.
For Lesje, 'men replaced dinosaurs, true, in her head as
in geological time; but thinking about men has become too
unrewarding' (11). The men in Lesje's life are in fact
remarkably unrewarding. At first she lives with William,
who is a double to Peter in The Edible Woman, a 'good
man', theoretically safe but unutterably boring. 'William
Wasp', as Lesje thinks of him, is 'pink-cheeked' and
'hairless' (20), and an incurable optimist who believes that
'every catastrophe is merely a problem looking for a
brilliant solution' (19). William, he and Lesje both believe,
will save the world in his professional capacity as a specialist
in environmental engineering, translate 'sewage disposal':
96 MARGARET ATWOOD

'. . . they're all in danger of drowning in their own shit.

William will save them. You can see it just by looking at
him, his confidence, his enthusiasm' (19).
But, as is almost always the case in Atwood's novels and
poems, beneath the clean white shirt beats the heart of a
Bluebeard; the facade of an Albert Schweitzer hides the
reality of a Hitler; the redeemer inevitably becomes the
infamous Underwear Man. Elizabeth has recognised those
'pockets of violence' latent in William, but Lesje is shocked
to find herself raped, violated: 'She always thought of rape
as something the Russians did to the Ukrainians, something
the Germans did, more furtively, to the Jews; something
blacks did in Detroit, in dark alleys. But not something
William Wasp, from a good family in London, Ontario,
would ever do to her' (169). Like the naive narrator in
Atwood's short story, 'Rape Fantasies', who believes that
rape always happens to someone else and is an event that
might be avoided by simply reasoning with the rapist,
Lesje does not even know what to call William's act of
violence. 'The incident', nevertheless, is traumatic enough
to precipitate Lesje's departure from their apartment,
paving the way for her intensified relationship with Nate.
Whereas William regards Lesje as racially suspect, her
Ukrainian-Jewish heritage rendering her unfit in his
judgement to meet his parents or bear his child, Nate is
attracted to what he considers exotic in Lesje. And Lesje is
attracted to Nate because he sees her as exotic: 'the fact is
that she's addicted to Nate's version of her .... she wants
to be this beautiful phantom, this boneless wraith he's
conjured up. Sometimes she really does want it' (247).
Lesje is, of course and with good reason, terrified of
Elizabeth, and yet there is a perverse desire on her part to
'become' Elizabeth, a thing she can best accomplish by
marrying Nate: ' ... she wants to belong, to be seen to
belong; she wants to be classifiable, a member of a group.
There is already a group of Mrs Schoenhofs: one is Nate's
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 97

mother, the other is the mother of his children' (246).

Lesje considers that 'maybe she's been thinking too much
about Elizabeth. . .. If she isn't careful she'll turn into
Elizabeth' (247).
In significant ways, Lesje does just this. Whether it is
Nate's necessity to create domineering women in order to
absolve his guilt, or whether Lesje is innately this and her
role of ingenue is merely a disguise, she begins more and
more to resemble Elizabeth. Her first sexual experience
with Nate takes place in Elizabeth's bed, and her later
evaluations of Nate reflect Elizabeth's perceptions: he
becomes for her an object of ridicule, an object to be
possessed and used. Her very language takes on the
qualities of Elizabeth's hard-edged tone: Lesje tells Nate,
'I've got news for you . . . . Elizabeth doesn't need any
support. Elizabeth needs support like a nun needs tits'
(268). Lesje comes to regard Nate with 'ball-shriveling
looks', as if 'he was a teeny little dog turd' (237). And, she
begins to understand Nate's real value in terms that were
Elizabeth's as well: he can provide a classification for her;
he can make her a mother.
Atwood's great fertility myth as a symbol of rebirth and
artistic creativity, as it figures so prominently in all her novels
and in so many of her poems, is completely inverted in Life
Before Man. In a doomed world, its inhabitants on the verge
of extinction, even childbirth becomes an ironic commen-
tary, a mockery of artistic and biological creativity. Lesje's
act of throwing away her birth control pills, an act of
liberation for the protagonist of Surfacing, is here committed
in revenge and with malice. 'Surely no child conceived in
such a rage could come to much good', Lesje worries. 'She
would have a throwback, a reptile, a mutant of some kind
with scales and a little horn on the snout' (270).
Lesje herself, however, is the real monster. Earlier she
has identified herself as a 'herbivore', peaceful and benign.
But Lesje's teeth, a feature she comments upon at various
98 MARGARET ATWOOD

points in the novel, are too big; they indicate an ominous

hunger. On the morning following the conception of her
baby, Lesje is 'gnawing a bran muffin, hair falling over her
face'; she looks at Nate 'like Fate, sullen, gauging'. She
wants him to know that she has not been 'caged' (270).
Three months later, her pregnancy confirmed but Nate
still unnotified, Lesje imagines locking herself into one of
the museum's display cases, 'hairy mask on her face, she'll
stow away, they'll never get her out' (284). Always one of
Atwood's 'dancing girls', Lesje is, at the end of the noYel,
still dancing, this time among the carnivores: 'Here are her
old acquaintances, familiar to her as pet rabbits:
allosaurus, the carnivore, parrot-beaked chasmosaurus,
parasaurolophus with its deer-antler crest' (285). She
joins a bizarre parade: '. . . one after another the fossils
would lift their ponderous feet, moving off along the grove
of resurrected trees, flesh coalescing like ice or mist around
them. They'd dance stumpily down the stairs of the
Museum and out the front door' (286).
Nate may imagine that he has found a home with Lesje
(although his continued presence at the Selby Hotel bar
would indicate otherwise), but Lesje at the end is wearing
her white coat, symbol, not of wifehood, but of her
perennial 'virginity' and of her status as museum employee,
as scientist. The white coat is Lesje's 'label' for herself, her
need for labels being analogous to Nate's search for a
home. Throughout the novel, Lesje longs for an identity, a
label, a category to which to belong. She wishes she were
either Ukrainian or Jewish and not a combination of the
two, not 'multicultural'. She tries on fashionable clothes in
the stores, but cannot determine into which style of fashion
she fits. She decides, finally, that the 'Mrs. Schoenhof
label is not compatible with her role as scientist: 'a pregnant
paleontologist is surely a contradiction in terms. Her
business is the naming of bones, not the creation of flesh'
(284). Her real home then is the museum: 'She does belong
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 99

here .... This is the only membership she values' (283).

None of these convictions represents. a favourable sign for
the success of Lesje's possible marriage to Nate or for the
positive symbolism of her future motherhood. Lesje's
labels, like the polar thinking in terms of good and evil on
the part of the protagonist of Surfacing, entrap her in the
realm of childhood. She remains, at least psychologically,
among the guardians of death, a permanent resident yet
still a tourist in an ideal world in which the only life is 'a
life before man'.
The greater number of Atwood scholars would not agree
with the above interpretation of Lesje's pregnancy and the
novel's final resolution. Linda Hutcheon in 'From Poetic
to Narrative Structures: The Novels of Margaret Atwood'
sees Lesje's pregnancy as a 'truly creative act' which
becomes 'the real paradigm of the novelist's act of creation,
an act of moral responsibility for the creation of life'. 1
Frank Davey also concludes that Lesje discards her birth
control pills 'in order to claim her future'. 2 Such evaluations
are based, understandably, on an accurate interpretation of
Atwood's use of fertility symbolism in earlier novels.
However, Life Before Man marks, not so much a change in
Atwood's literary directions, as an intensification of her
ironic sensibility and of her political consciousness. Sherrill
Grace's predictions in Violent Duality that this novel
represents 'what may prove to be a new stage in Atwood's
artistic evolution', that of 'social and domestic realism' ,3
were indeed perceptive, although Grace might well have
added the term 'political' to describe Atwood's areas of
artistic concern.
As I have argued in Chapter 1, Atwood's works have
always been 'political' in that they represent a social
consciousness, a concern for the survival of individuals,
particularly women, in a world characterised by hostility
and violence that is both latent and overt. The Edible
Woman is a study of the evils of a consumer society as well
100 MARGARET ATWOOD

as of the psychology of young womanhood; beneath the

narrative of Surfacing and The Journals of Susanna Moodie
is a pervading sense of the violation of nature and a concern
for ecological balance. In Life Before Man, such concerns
become paramount: for Atwood, the human race may
indeed be confronting its own extinction, its own mass
suicide.
The characters in this novel are in fact homeless, for one
major reason: their world is no longer habitable. William's
sanitation efforts are absurdly futile, but at least he makes
an attempt to salvage what is possible. His gloomy
predictions are annoying to Lesje, and, through her
perceptions, we too see William as a joke. Atwood's jokes,
however, are almost inevitably laced with a deadly irony,
and, as is often the case in her fiction, the least likely
character becomes a speaker of truth. William serves as
both fool and prophet in the following passages:

. . . pollutants are pouring into the air, over three

hundred of them, more than have yet been identified.
Sulfuric acid and mercury are falling, metallic mist,
acid rain, into the pure lakes of Muskoka and points
north. Queasy fish rise, roll over, exposing bellies
soon to bloat. If ten times more control is not
implemented at once (at once!) the Great Lakes will
die. A fifth of the fresh water in the world. And for
what? Panty-hose . . . rubber bands, cars, plastic
buttons ....

. . . birds are eating worms, and stable, unbreakable

PCB's are concentrating in their fatty tissues. Lesje
herself has probably been incapacitated for safe child-
bearing due to the large quantity of DDT she has
already stored in her own fatty tissues. Not to
mention the radiation bombardment on her ovaries,
which will almost certainly cause her to give birth to
 'THE ROAR OF THE BONEYARD' 101

a two-headed child or to a lump of flesh the size of a

grapefruit, containing hair and a fully developed set
of teeth . . . or to a child with its eyes on one side of
its face, like a flounder. (126)

Not only are human beings violating nature, they are

also violating each other with a similar destructive intensity.
Nate scans the newspaper headlines, and what he sees is
'one long blurred howl of rage and pain':

... the Pakistani pushed onto the subway tracks.

. . . The child who strangled while being forced by
her mother to stand on one foot with a rope around
her neck as punishment. Gossip about Margaret
Trudeau, for weeks. An exploding butcher's shop in
Northern Ireland. Widening rift between English
and French Canada. Murdered Portuguese shoeshine
boy; cleanup of Toronto's Sin Strip. Quebec
language laws: Greek grocers in all-Greek districts
forbidden to put up Coca-Cola signs in Greek. (184)

'What else can be expected', Nate asks himself, and his

own impotence is confirmed in his vision of the newspapers
as studies in 'distilled futility'. Language itself, at this
point in Atwood's literary philosophy, is suspect, often
futile; 'the true story is vicious/and multiple and
untrue/after all ... ', Atwood writes in True Stories (11).
Many of the poems in this volume, in You Are Happy and
in Two-Headed Poems are concerned with the inadequacy
of poetry, of art, in the face of the destruction and atrocity
that constitute reality. How can one write poems or novels
about that which is indescribable? 'How can I justify/this
gentle poem then in the face of sheer/horror?' (True
Stories, 34). How does one dare, like Elizabeth, to build a
house over the abyss?
The alternative is to remain silent, to refuse the
102 MARGARET ATWOOD

confrontation, to hide from reality in fantasy, or to be

detached. One of Atwood's great ironic observations about
Lesje is that she was named for a famous Ukrainian poet,
and yet Lesje either refuses or is unable to speak. She is
always 'afraid of saying the wrong thing; of being accused'
(53); she is always inept in social situations, and she has no
close friends. After their first lunch together, Nate is
unable to remember what she said: 'did she even say
anything?' (61). For Lesje, the names of rocks are the only
meaningful language: 'not many people might know it, but
if you found one who did, you would be able to talk
together' (83). But the truly monstrous thing about Lesje,
Atwood implies, is that she chooses to regard even
the inevitable destruction of humankind with scientific
detachment. Unlike Nate or even Elizabeth, Lesje chooses
to remain emotionally uninvolved: 'the real question is:
Does she care whether the human race survives or not? She
doesn't know. The dinosaurs didn't survive and it wasn't
the end of the world ... the human race has it coming.
Nature will think up something else. Or not, as the case
may be' (19).
The human race may indeed 'have it coming', and yet,
in Atwood's own terms, it is still possible to care, to forgive
and to redeem. Language is a 'fragile protest', but it
represents the only salvation possible: '. . . you must write
this poem', she says, 'because there is nothing more to do'
(True Stories, 70). In her next two novels, Bodily Hann and
The Handmaid's Tale, and in her poems, True Stories,
Atwood writes that poem, the one '. . . that invents
nothing/and excuses nothing' (True Stories, 70): 'Here is
the handful/of shadow I have brought back to you:/this
decay, this hope, this mouth-/ful of dirt, this poetry' (True
Stories, 93).
6 Politics and
Prophecy:
Bodily Harm,
The Handmaid's
Tale and True
Stories
At that moment when the nameless heroine of Surfacing
walks out of the Canadian forest, brushes the leaves from
her matted hair, puts on her clothes and proclaims to
herself and the trees that she refuses 'to be a victim',
Atwood's subsequent fiction and poetry also begin to
emphasise a quality of proclamation. Atwood's principal
concern in Surfacing and in earlier fiction and poetry has
been to delineate the psychological factors of sexual politics,
the behaviour of women in conflict with men. But only in
the later novels and poems does Atwood expand her
political view to encompass a world in which both men and
women are caught up in the struggle to see 'who can do
what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death'
(Handmaid's Tale, 144). Oppression in all its manifestations,

103
104 MARGARET ATWOOD

both physical and psychological, is Atwood's subject in

Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale and in the poems
entitled True Stories. Both novels and the poetry are
profoundly political; all represent the confrontation with
power and its universal forms: dictatorship, tyranny,
torture and the reality of violence.
The heroines of the novels begin as typical Atwood
women; they are not quite so young as earlier protagonists,
but like them they protest their own innocence and attempt
a withdrawal from circumstances for which they do not
accept responsibility. Rennie Wilford of Bodily Harm is,
like Joan Foster of Lady Oracle, 'an escape artist', intent on
the evasion of the uncompromising realities that make up
her life. Atwood presents these realities as unmitigatedly
horrific, for they include a recent mastectomy and the
possible death sentence of cancer. Like Atwood's images of
amputation discussed in earlier chapters, the mastectomy is
symbolic of a psychological separation from the self both as
woman and as artist, a division between the actual self and
the self one attempts to create, a condition which is
potentially as deadly as the cancer. Comparatively less
immediately threatening but still problematic are Rennie's
persistent memories of a lonely and loveless childhood
passed in the small town of 'Griswold', the atmosphere of
which is almost as ominous as its name and is surely an
inversion of the 'green world' of earlier Atwood fiction.
Rennie's other problems include a current lover who enjoys
rape games and an actual rapist who has entered her
apartment in her absence and left a coiled rope as a calling
card. Her job writing trivia for pupil magazines represents
a misuse of her talents and is itself a kind of bondage.
The lover and the job, of course, are indications that
Rennie has, at least in part, chosen her life. She
tolerates the lover's eccentricities, passively accepting his
management of her world. She acquiesces while he
redecorates her apartment, kills her plants because they
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY 105

don't reflect a concept of modern decor, dictates her

clothing, and choreographs their sexual relationship with
black lace nightgowns and suggestions of bondage. From
the beginning, Rennie abdicates power; she is passive to
the point that even Jake loses interest, not so much because
of her mastectomy as she believes, but because of her
remarkable acceptance of his exploitive behaviour. Rennie
reacts to her abandonment with predictable passivity, for it
allows her to feel that her victimisation is complete; it
reinforces her view of herself as innocent in contrast to a
perverse world. She seems almost deliberately to manifest
the victim psychology which Atwood announces as her
subject in the epigraph to the novel taken from John
Berger's Ways of Seeing: 'A man's presence suggests what
he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a
woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be
done to her'.
Rennie's job accomplishes a similar end in securing this
image of herself as victim. Like earlier Atwood heroines and
like some of the Canadian writers whose works Atwood ex-
plores in Survival, she is a failed artist, deliberately renouncing
her responsibility as artist and as human being to confront
reality, to search for truth. But Rennie does not choose to
see. Rather, she concentrates on ephemera, purposefully
limiting her assignments to articles on 'relationships' and
such fashion trends as 'drain chain jewelry', symbolic,
again, of her own emotional bondage. She assiduously
avoids the political; Atwood writes, 'Instead of writing
about the issues, she began interviewing the people who
were involved in them . . . the in wardrobe for the picket
line, the importance of the denim overall, what the
feminists eat for breakfast' (64). Rennie is most comfortable
with short 'pieces' for the 'Swinging Toronto' section of
the Pandora magazine, although, unlike the Pandora of
mythology, she prefers to keep reality under a closed lid: 'I
see into the present, that's all ... Surfaces. There's not a
106 MARGARET ATWOOD

whole lot to it' (26). According to Sherrill Grace in Violent

DualifJI, Atwood consistently describes the limitations of
seeing in ' ... McLuhanesque terms. The exclusive reliance
upon the visual sense separates objects in space, splits
things off from their contexts, isolates the viewer from the
thing viewed. By simply looking at something we are able
to keep ourselves at a distance, uninvolved.' 1 Rennie is a
mistress of remaining uninvolved; her first lesson enforced
by her mother back in Griswold had been 'how to look at
things without touching them' (54).
When reality is unavoidable, as in the form of personal
crises, Rennie seeks to trivialise even these by turning
them into 'pieces'. She counters the threat of the anonymous
rapist by attempting an article on pornography, a project
she abandons when the evidence encountered in her
research in a local police station, a photograph of a rat
emerging from a vagina, makes her physically ill. Even
when Rennie is faced with the medical diagnosis of cancer,
she attempts, unsuccessfully, to reduce and thereby escape
her experience in the usual way: 'as she walked home she was
still thinking in the ways she used to. For instance, she could
do a piece on it. "Cancer, The Coming Thing." Homemakers
might take it, or Chatelaine. How about "the CufoffPoint"?'
(27).
Rennie again uses her job as an escape route by
convincing her editor that she should do a travel article on
the Caribbean, an analysis of tennis courts and restaurants.
But island paradises, whether actual ones or those of the
mind, do not serve Atwood's heroines well, as we know
from the preceeding chapters. In True Stories Atwood
includes a number of poems which reveal the underside of
paradise: in 'Postcard', we learn that 'The palm trees on
the reverse/are a delusion; so is the pink sand./What we
have are the usual/fractured coke bottles and the smell/of
backed-up drains, too sweet .. .' (18). In 'Dinner', it is the
tourists themselves who dispel any possible magic as they
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY 107

feed ' ... on starch and grease./Engorged buttocks

and/thighs jiggle by,/surly soft paunches ... ' (24). Yet
there is some element evident that is worse than bad
scenery and bad company; just beyond the palms, one
catches a glimpse of the cripples and the prisoners, their
heads shaved by bayonets. The littered beaches are 'smeared
with grease' and 'exhausted lunches' in 'Sunset I', but also
with 'clumps of tom-out/hair' (80). In the prose poem,
'True Romances', the ominous becomes the actual:

They cut off the hands and heads to prevent

identification but they cannot prevent it. Everyone
knows who has been shot and thrown into the sea,
who has been beaten, which man or woman has
been methodically raped, which left to starve and
bum in a pit under the noon sun. It's bright there
and clear, you can see a long way. (True Stories, 43)

As is also the case in Bodily Harm and in other of

Atwood's novels, escape thus becomes unavoidable
confrontation. In Rennie's experience, however, the
confrontation is with reality of an order so brutal as to
seem uncharacteristic for Atwood if we base our judgement
on earlier novels. Horrendous heat, glaring sunlight,
scorpions, bad food and oil-washed beaches are the least of
concerns as Rennie is implicated and involved against her
will in a political revolution. She is imprisoned and forced
to witness the commission of atrocities; she begins to
understand what for Atwood is a crucial point: that no one
is 'exempt', even those who have presumably already paid
their dues to an illusion of universal justice. The island,
Atwood implies, is, like Camus' Algeria, a land of perfect
truth, a land which 'casts no shadows' (71). And, in the
glare, Rennie watches a series of executions:

She leans against the wall, she is shaking. It's

108 MARGARET ATWOOD

indecent, it's not done with ketchup, nothing is

inconceivable here, no rats in the vagina but only
because they haven't though of it yet. . . . Rennie
understands for the first time that this is not
necessarily a place she will get out of, ever. She is
not exempt. Nobody is exempt from anything. (290)

Rennie's situation and experience are foreshadowed in

Atwood's short story, 'A Travel Piece'. Annette, too, writes
travel articles for magazines (as does Atwood herself on
occasion), and her search, like Rennie's, is for an Eden in
the Caribbean, a place in the world, 'where all was well,
where unpleasant things did not happen' (Dancing Girls,
131). Annette soon learns that sunny skies and an
'indecently blue ocean' always imply an incongruous reality,
that they are finally 'a giant screen, flat 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 visualise as darkness, a night in which something she
did not want to look at was hiding' (132). The 'hiding'
thing is, of course, herself and her own failure at
comprehending the realities of her world, her failure at
seeing. Atwood arranges the inevitable confrontation before
Annette ever arrives on the island. The plane crashes
somewhere in the Bermuda triangle, and Annette, along
with other passengers, finds herself drifting in a lifeboat.
Unlike the others, however, Annette has been resourceful,
has thought to bring sandwiches and a toothbrush along
with her always-present camera, that instrument which is
always for Atwood a symbol of a failure of vision. Annette
looks at life through a lens, filtering her experience and
thereby distancing herself from it. The camera turns out to
be as useless as the toothbrush, because, as is more and
more the case in Atwood's fiction, the unthinkable occurs;
the group is not rescued, and what had been an orderly and
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY 109

cooperative attempt at survival quickly degenerates into

panic and cannibalism. The story ends with Annette's
contemplation of the inhumane behaviour of her comrades
as they attempt to slit the throat of a young male passenger.
She only watches, concentrating on a numbed sensibility of
her own non-involvement, her own innocence. Then there
is the vision of the foot through the screen: she is involved,
and 'this is what it means to be alive. . .. Am I one of
them or not?' (143).
Atwood's point in this story, as well as in Bodily Harm
and in all her previous works, is that we are all somehow
guilty of being human and that malignancy is, quite
possibly, a metaphor for the human condition. Atwood
argues, as she also does at the conclusion of Surfacing, for a
recognition of and a commitment to that human condition,
no matter how malignant, and for an engagement with life,
with reality, no matter how brutal or absurd. 'Massive
involvement' is for Atwood, and finally for Rennie as well,
a term which reflects, not medical pathology, but positive
action. The mistaken conviction that 'innocence is
merely/not to act', as Atwood writes in 'The Arrest of the
Stockbroker', is the ultimate illusion: 'then suddenly you're
in there/in this mistake, this stage, this box,/this war
grinding across/your body' (True Stories, 49). For Atwood,
the genteel and the complacent are merely surfaces for
the disguise of the horrible; the title of Atwood's prose
poem, 'True Romances', implies a terrible irony: 'One of
these mornings, when you reach the bottom of your cup,
coffee or tea, it could be either, you will look and there will
be a severed finger, bloodless, anonymous, a little signal of
death sent to you from the foreign country where they
grow such things' (True Stories, 44). Thus Atwood forces
her readers to see beneath surfaces, to confront a kind of
reality that is revolutionary as a subject for poetry.
And, no matter how strong her reluctance, Rennie also
must look beneath the surfaces, for she is cursed (or finally
110 MARGARET ATWOOD

blessed) with a 'closet honesty' which she before has

considered a 'professional liability' (64). She must write
about what she sees, and not about what she would like to
see, as she is directed by the enigmatic Dr Minnow, for
whose acquaintance she has paid the price of imprisonment.
Minnow himself pays for his political involvement with his
life, and his very name is perhaps indicative of his quasi-
religious nature; as Christ is associated symbolically with
the image of the fish, so Minnow is, in his way, a minor
Christ, embattled against 'Prince', the Prince of Darkness.
Given Atwood's by now familiar use of ambiguity, however,
Prince might also represent the Prince of Peace, in which
case Minnow's role is also reversed. His funeral is like
'some horrible little morality play' in which the expected
resurrection fails to occur (250). Even though Atwood has
referred to Minnow as 'the one good man in the book'
(Second Words, 425), there is nevertheless the same
enigmatic quality about his symbolic identity that surrounds
almost all of her fictional characters. Regardless of how we
choose to see him, however, Dr Minnow's earlier sermon
to Rennie is exactly what Atwood would like her heroine to
hear: '. . . there are still things that are inconceivable', he
tells Rennie. 'Here nothing is inconceivable .... I wish
you to write about it. . . . All I ask you to do is look. . . .
Look with your eyes open and you will see the truth of the
matter. Since you are a reporter, it is your duty to report'
(133-34).
Rennie's woman cellmate in the prison, who has resorted
to prostitution for her own and Rennie's survival and who
has been brutally beaten, also directs her: 'Tell someone
I'm here .... Tell someone what happened' (289). To tell,
to report, to bear witness, then, is Rennie's moral
obligation; by the end of the novel, Rennie realises that she
'. . . is a subversive. She was not once but now she is. A
reporter. She will pick her time; then she will report'
(301). The same necessity, the same indication of political
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY lll

commitment, will also validate the experience of the heroine

of The Handmaid's Tale. For Atwood, writing itself becomes
a political act; the writer is always a reporter of truth, even
when her subject is fiction.
In her former self-proclaimed innocence, Rennie has
avoided, not only truth in an abstract political sense, but
the truth about relationships, between men and women
and between women. She has inevitably chosen men who
maintain power over her: Daniel, the surgeon who removed
her breast and has seen the 'inside' of her and who refuses
to sleep with her, manifests one kind of power. He is, in
her later dreams, the man with the knife, double to the
anonymous would-be rapist. (Interestingly, Annette's
husband in 'A Travel Piece' is also a physician, and he too
represents a judgemental sort of power. He is a dispenser
of tranquilisers, and thus he is responsible for the
manipulation of Annette's perceptions.) Paul, the Caribbean
adventurer who is either gunrunner or drug smuggler, hero
or villain, holds Rennie's very safety in his keeping, and
she is almost as self-effacing with him, grateful for his
acceptance of her body mutilated by the mastectomy, as
she has been with Jake in their destructive long-term
relationship. Finally, Rennie comes to realise that all the
men in her life are, in reality, one man, and that she herself
has chosen him, created him in her own image, his face
'. . . familiar, with silver eyes that twin and reflect her
own' (287). Always she has been like the malleable women
of Atwood's earlier poetry who deliberately subject
themselves to rearrangement, even dismemberment, by
men who invade them body and soul. Atwood writes in
'Letters, Towards and Away': 'You collapse my house of
cards/merely by breathing/ .. : and put together my
own/body, another/place/for me to live/in' (The Circle
Game, 85). Again in Atwood's prose poem 'Iconography', a
woman submits to every male whim, and for the man in
question, 'To make her do something she didn't like and
112 MARGARET ATWOOD

then make her like it, that was the greatest power'. Finally,
Atwood advises her selfless and nameless woman of this
poem, 'watch yourself. That's what mirrors are for, this
story is a mirror story which rhymes with horror story,
almost but not quite'. Men are powerful, Atwood concludes
the poem, because they have the 'last word', they have, in
fact, 'the word' (Murder in the Dark, 52).
And through her experiences in the prison and her first-
hand apprehension of outrage, Rennie, too, comes to see
men in the light of the power they wield, through violence
as well as through language: 'She's afraid of men and it's
simple, it's rational, she's afraid of men because men are
frightening (290). Only in the light of such a recognition
can Rennie free herself of their power and come to terms
with her own male-identified tendency to reject other
women because she sees her own weaknesses mirrored in
theirs. Female bonding is not a concept that comes easily
to Atwood's heroines, even in connection with their own
mothers, as we have seen in previous chapters. But those
who do discover such a source of strength are the true
survivors in Atwood's fiction and poetry. Again, it requires
the most dire circumstances to force Rennie to realise and
then accept that her cellmate, Lora, is more noble in her
acts of prostitution than is Rennie in her fastidious virtue.
Lora is, in fact, a sister in the real sense, who pays for
Rennie's survival with her body and, finally, perhaps with
her life. It is surely a form of salvation or a redemption, a
secular pieta, when Rennie huddles in a corner of her cell,
holding the battered Lora in her arms, licking the encrusted
blood away from the ruined face with her own tongue.
Here Rennie reverses her lifelong practice of the lesson
learned in childhood; she finally touches and doesn't look.
The images are of giving birth as Rennie strains and pants,
trying to push Lora back into life, but the actual birth is
Rennie's own. Only in this unspoken declaration of
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY 113

sisterhood does Rennie fully assume her own humanity

through a recognition of the humanity of others.
The ending of this novel is another example of Atwood's
by now characteristic ambiguity. It is altogether possible
that Rennie does not escape the prison, that she dies there,
that the last paragraphs describing her return flight to
Canada are merely the fancies of desperation. Jerome H.
Rosenberg is quite possibly correct in his critical biography
of Atwood when he maintains that the novel's conclusion
represents '. . . a linguistic wish-fulfillment of Rennie's
desires', an 'imagined future', a 'dream interlude', and that
Rennie 'sits in her dark prison cell, rotting away to the
bitter end'. 2 'This is how I got here', the novel begins, and
the 'here' is perhaps the cell as well as the metaphysical
state of Rennie's regeneration. The flight home, then, is
related in future tense, and Rennie's reflections include the
enigmatic statement, 'She will never be rescued. She has
already been rescued' (301). On the other hand, Rennie
may be released. As Judith McCombs suggests in her
article, 'Atwood's Fictive Portraits of the Artist', it is
entirely possible that Rennie returns to Toronto in order to
write Bodily Harm. 3 Atwood's point, we must conclude
however, is that Rennie's death, whether immediate in the
prison or imminent from cancer, is irrelevant. It is her
vision which counts, and the confrontation with death is
the existential affirmation that 'Zero is waiting somewhere,
whoever said there was life everlasting; so why feel grateful?
She doesn't have much time left, for anything. But neither
does anyone else. She's paying attention, that's all' (301).
To 'pay attention', to look beneath surfaces, to touch
and to tell are also imperatives for Offred of The Handmaid's
Tale. Not paying attention, in fact, is the great fault of
Offred's entire society, and the price exacted is the loss of
freedom. By remaining uninvolved, by maintaining
innocence, the people of a nation have forfeited human
114 MARGARET ATWOOD

rights and become slaves in the near-future society of

Gilead, an Orwellian dystopia dominated by the horrors of
theocracy and puritanism. Big Brother, in this novel, is not
simply an embodiment of patriarchy, nor of God, but
rather of ideology in general; Gilead has permitted itself
to be poisoned with radioactivity and with a far more
pernicious entity: fanaticism that is political, religious and
moral.
Atwood dedicates her novel to Perry Miller, whose books
on the Puritans have informed American history, and to
her own ancestor, Mary Webster, hanged for a witch in
Connecticut. An atavistic puritanism, then, is the force
which controls Gilead in the form of a profoundly immoral
majority gone beserk. As in Orwell's 1984, eroticism is
prohibited on pain of death; pleasure is a crime against
society; sex is valuable for the sole purpose of procreation
in a depopulated world; books are burned; abortion and
birth control are dim memories of some pagan past.
Ugliness is universal; even nature itself has been tamed and
ordered. Offred would like to tell us about the flowers, she
says at one point in apology for the grim nature of her
story, but even the tulips grow in fanatically-controlled
rows like soldiers, their petals dropping 'one by one, like
teeth' (161). People are compensated for the loss of nature
and of sex, not exactly by 'two-minute Hates' in the
Ministry of Truth as in Orwell's novel, but by analogous
'Prayvaganzas' and 'Salvaging' ceremonies in which
the congregation participates in the ritual murder by
dismemberment of arbitrarily-selected scapegoats, much
like the victims in nightmare visions from Euripides'
Bacchae to Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery'. Thus, collusion
is insured; the individual is truly a part of the whole and
shares responsibility for every aspect of the system,
including the perpetration of atrocity.
The real collusion, however, is in avoidance of
responsibility. What was true for Rennie and for Annette
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY 115

of 'A Travel Piece' and for every other of Atwood's

heroines in their insistence on their own non-involvement
is here true for an entire society: 'There were marches, of
course, a lot of women and some men. But they were
smaller than you might have thought'. And Offred too is
guilty, not of apathy, but of moral cowardice: 'I didn't go
on any of the marches .... I had to think about them, my
family, him and her. I did think about my family. I started
doing more housework, more baking ... ' (189). Offred
and other women have waited too long, have protested too
little. They are reflections of Atwood's basic concern that
victimisation, in a real sense, is at least partly a matter of
choice. As Atwood writes in Two-Headed Poems, 'As for the
women, who did not/want to be involved, they are involved./
It's that blood on the snow/which turns out to be not/some
bludgeoned or machine-gunned/animal's, but your
own/that does it' (83).
There is one heroic woman in The Handmaid's Tale, an
equivalent to Lora in Bodily Harm, who does rebel; Moira
protests repeatedly, escapes periodically, is tortured, but
presumably survives. She represents an ideal for Offred,
but also a source of guilt, for she accomplishes what Offred
is too frightened to attempt. 'I'd like her to end with
something daring and spectacular', says Offred, 'some
outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I
know that didn't happen. I don't know how she ended, or
even if she did, because I never saw her again' (262).
Revolution or rebellion is precluded in Gilead, as in the
real world, not only by terrorist tactics, but also by the
suppression of news and the prevention of communication,
on a personal level as well as a national one. In 'Notes
Towards A Poem That Can Never Be Written', Atwood
tells of 'the woman/they did not kill./Instead they sewed
her face/shut, closed her mouth/to a hole the size of a
straw,/and put her back on the streets,/a mute symbol'
(True Stories, 50). Such, then, are the ultimate implications
116 MARGARET ATWOOD

for Atwood's Little Mermaid of earlier poems and novels.

The sacrifice of one's tongue, one's language, whether for
love or for survival, is a price beyond reason.
So Offred is isolated and rendered mute by a prohibition
against communication, and by her own solipsistic wish for
survival. She finds it unthinkable to share experience with
the commander's wives, who are all, like Serena Joy,
incarnations of the Phyllis Schlaflys and Maribel Morgans
of our own society, totally brain-washed yet unhappily
aware of their imprisonment within their self-created
ideological system. Offred makes some furtive attempts at
communication with other Handmaids, but fear of betrayal
prevents any meaningful exchange. As is the case with all
of Atwood's previous heroines, Offred values her own
physical survival above sisterhood, and in so doing sacrifices
her own integrity, that which is, for Atwood, more crucial
even than life.
The price for non-involvement in fact is slavery, and
Offred, along with almost all other women in Gilead, has
forfeited, not only freedom, but her identity and even parts
of her memory as well. Women, in particular, seem to have
forgotten that they ever had roles other than those
determined for them by some vaguely-defined hierarchy of
government. They have lost their very names; the
Handmaids, in particular, are known by patronymics
composed of the possessive preposition and a man's first
name. All civil rights, including even the ownership of
the most insignificant personal property, are cancelled.
All the women wear uniforms, colour-coded to their
functions: the 'Aunts' who run the 'Rachel and Leah
Re-education Center', where the indoctrination of the
Handmaids begins, wear brown. The 'Marthas' or house-
keepers wear green; wives of officials or 'commanders'
wear a kind of Virgin-Mary blue, perhaps an ironic
reference to their infertility.
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY 117

The Handmaids are identically dressed in red gowns

which incongruously resemble religious habits; their faces
are obscured by peaked hats which also function to prevent
their seeing anything but what lies immediately in front of
them. They are, in fact, personifications of a religious
sacrifice, temple prostitutes doomed to a kind of purdah in
perpetuity. As Atwood cautions in her poem, 'The Red
Shirt', the colour red is highly significant: 'Young girls
should not wear red. I In some countries it is the color I of
death; in others passion,/in others war, in others anger,/in
others the sacrifice/of shed blood ... /Dancing in red
shoes will kill you' (Two-Headed Poems, 101). Offred's
friend, Moira, perhaps the only woman in Gilead who
retains her actual name, is surely intended to recall Moira
Shearer who dances herself to death in 'The Red Shoes,' a
film to which Atwood refers with great frequency,
particularly in Lady Oracle and in Second Words.
Handmaids turned malefactor in Gilead are hanged and
suspended from a wall: 'Beneath the hems of the dresses
the feet dangle, two pairs of red shoes .... If it weren't for
the ropes and the sacks it could be a kind of dance, a
ballet .... They look like showbiz' (289). 'I don't want to
be a dancer', Offred later declares (298).
Perhaps the greatest deprivation of personal property,
given Atwood's system of symbolism in all her novels and
in her poetry, is that of the mirror, that instrument for
establishing identity, for seeing into the truth about one's
self. In Bodily Harm, Rennie and Lora have no mirror in
their prison cell, and this requires that they depend upon
each other for reflection. They literally must see themselves
through each other's eyes in order to reassure themselves
that they exist. Offred has no such partner, and her only
vision of herself is fleetingly captured in reflective surfaces
of windows surreptitiously regarded in passing. She is like
the speaker in Atwood's poem, 'Marrying the Hangman',
118 MARGARET ATWOOD

who observes that 'To live in prison is to live without

mirrors. To live/without mirrors is to live without the self
.. .'(Two-Headed Poems, 49).
But despite her isolation, despite her lack of a reflection
either in a mirror or in the eyes of a friend, Offred does not
entirely 'live without a self'. She is able to somehow
objectify her situation, to see it phenomenologically, to
separate herself from an unbearable reality, this time in a
salutary way. Even under the most dehumanising of
circumstances, Offred retains a kind of dignity. Her job as
'handmaid', as was the job of Rachel's handmaid in the
Old Testament, is to offer her body as a vessel for
procreation. In a grotesque threesome with her aging
commander and his sterile wife, Offred is a sacrificial victim
in a ritual of insemination that is at once pornographic and
asexual. As she lies almost fully clothed in her red habit
between the open thighs of the wife and receives the
attentions of the husband, his only nudity an open zipper,
Offred remains aloof, vaguely interested in the obscenity of
repressed eroticism. Kissing is forbidden, Offred observes,
and 'this makes it bearable. One detaches oneself. One
describes' (106). Always, Offred's descriptions are a study
in ironic understatement, her detached humour a foil to
the horrific nature of events. 'Sanity is a valuable
possession', she says, 'I hoard it the way people once
hoarded money. I save it so I will have enough when the
time comes' (119).
However, while Offred is clearly a victim, characteristic
of Atwood's fiction is the message that victims in general
are somehow implicated, at least partly responsible for
their state. Man's inhumanity to man, and to women, does
not absolve women from complicity. The control agency in
this novel is, not the commanders, but 'the Aunts', who
run their re-education centres with cattle prods, torture
techniques, and brain washing slogans. The nursery-rhyme
indoctrination for women, attributed by the Aunts to their
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY 119

hero, Saint Paul, is 'From each according to her ability; to

each according to his need' (127). Surely Atwood intends
her reader to recall the 'total woman' mentality, popularised
in the early 60s to counteract an emerging feminism. Yet
Atwood does not exonerate a radical feminist movement
either, for it is this agent which instituted the original book
burnings which have led to the universal censorship which
characterises Gilead. Offred recalls her feminist mother's
participation in a kind of witch's sabbath, a midnight
ceremony of destruction in the name of anti-pornography.
In the light of the burning books, 'the faces were happy,
ecstatic almost. Fire can do that'. The child, before her
name was Offred, is also allowed to add to the pyre: 'I
threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the
wind of its burning; big flakes of paper came loose, sailed
into the air, still on fire, parts of women's bodies, turning
to black ash, in the air, before my eyes' (48-49). A
'women's culture', elements of which dominate in Gilead,
can be as dangerous, Atwood indicates, as any other rigidly
enforced system based on ideology. The 'Salvaging', for
Atwood, is no more acceptable because a man is tom to
bits by women than if the reverse had been the case.
No one is exempt from guilt, no one is blameless,
Atwood implies, when it comes to the creation of a Gilead.
The Handmaid's Tale is a study of guilt and an anatomy of
power, but it is also a novel about forgiveness, about 'who
can do what to whom and be forgiven for it' (145). Offred's
lover Nick redeems all men by his act of saving Offred,
although it may mean his own death. He is a kind of
Orpheus to her Eurydice, as he brings her out of the world
of the dead. For this is also a novel about survival. Offred
perhaps escapes, we learn from the novel's appendix which
is set in a further and presumably better future in which
women again participate as human beings in a basically
benevolent society. Perhaps it is this element of forgiveness,
the persistence of love even in a loveless world, which
120 MARGARET ATWOOD

makes Atwood's later novels and poems so powerful. The

political horror poems in True Stories are similarly balanced
by poems that are tender beyond any of Atwood's earlier
work. Atrocity itself, even death, are somehow cancelled
by one's love for a child, a daughter, who names herself,
'your own name first,/your first naming, your first
name,/your first word' (64). The word 'Love' is 'not
enough but it will/have to do. It's a single/vowel in this
metallic/silence, a mouth that says/0 again and again in
wonder/and pain, a breath, a finger-/grip on a cliffside'
(True Stories, 83).
Like the protagonist of Surfacing or like Rennie in Bodily
Harm, Offred surfaces, not at all perhaps in control of her
world (her actual fate is as uncertain as that of Rennie; we
do not learn whether she is recaptured or whether she
makes her way through Canada to the freedom of Europe),
but at least in control of herself, and certainly with the
recognition that political confrontation is not merely a
choice but a human responsibility. Her responsibility, as it
was the responsibility for Rennie, and even for Orwell's
Winston Smith before his destruction, is to report, to
chronicle her time, to warn another world. Handmaids in
Gilead are not permitted to read or write because, according
to their catechism enforced by the Aunts, 'Pen is Envy'.
To have in one's possession a pencil is to commit a crime
against the state; to participate in a clandestine game of
Scrabble is to chance disaster. But Offred knows by now
that communication is imperative; she must assume a
future audience: '. . . I keep on going with this sad and
hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story,
because after all I want you to hear it. . . . By telling you
anything at all I'm at least believing in you. . . . Because
I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell,
therefore you are' (279). Offred finds an antiquated artifact,
a tape recorder, and, over the music of Montavani, Elvis
 POLITICS AND PROPHECY 121

Presley and Twisted Sister, she records her message: and I

only am escaped alone to tell thee.
The very act of writing, of recording, is for Atwood as
well as for her heroines, the final and irrevocable
commitment to one's society and to one's own humanity.
As Atwood has said, 'Far from thinking of writers as
totally isolated individuals, I see them as inescapably
connected with their society. The nature of the connection
will vary - the writer may unconsciously reflect the society,
he may consciously examine it and project ways of changing
it; and the connection between the writer and society will
increase in intensity as the society . . . becomes the
"subject" of the writer'. 4 Society, surely, is Atwood's
subject. Art, thus, in political, and cannot help but be.
Language, in itself, is the ultimate affirmation and the
greatest revolution. 'A word after a word/after a word is
power' (True Stories, 64).
7 Atwood as
Critic; Critics
on Atwood
Given Atwood's literary philosophy concerning the morality
of language and the political responsibility of the artist,
which has been the focus of the foregoing chapters, the
reader is right to expect that philosophy predominates in
Atwood's critical books and essays as well. In spite of
Atwood's disclaimers that she is not primarily a literary
critic, that she prefers other kinds of writing, and that
critical writing is 'too much like homework' (Second Words,
11), her achievements in this area are nevertheless
significant. With the publication of Survival: A Thematic
Guide to Canadian Literature, a volume she modestly
describes as a guide for 'students and teachers in high
schools, community colleges and universities' (11), Atwood
helped to put Canada on the literary world map and
contributed to an impetus for Canadian nationalism. As the
author of other book reviews descriptive of the works of
Canadian authors, many of which are collected in Second
Words, 1\twood contributed to an international recognition of
the fact of a Canadian literary identity. With her reviews of
books by women authors from Canada as well as from the
United States, Atwood advanced the cause of a growing
feminist literary tradition. Atwood as critic, then, is almost
as influential as Atwood as poet and novelist.
Atwood writes in Survival, ' ... if a writer feels himself

122
 ATWOOD AS CRITIC; CRITICS ON ATWOOD 123

living in a place whose shape is unclear to him . . . one of

his impulses will be to explore it, another will be to name
it' (114). In Suroiool, Atwood explores and names her own
'ancestral totems', her own tradition and national identity
through a study of Canadian literature. She discovers a
tradition replete with images of victimisation: animals,
Indians, women, Eskimos, settlers and explorers are all
victims of one another or of nature, just as nature itself is a
victim of human beings. As the pervasive symbol of
American literature, according to Atwood, is the frontier,
so the dominant image in Canadian fiction is survival, the
unheroic survival of victimisation:

. . . the main idea is the first one: hanging on,

staying alive. Canadians are forever taking the.
national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is
not to see whether the patient will live well but
simply whether he will live at all. Our central idea is
one which generates, not the excitement and sense
of adventure or danger which The Frontier holds out
. . . but an almost intolerable anxiety. Our stories
are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of
those who made it back, from the awful experience -
the North, the snow-storm, the sinking ship - that
killed everyone else. The survivor has no triumph or
victory but the fact of this survival; he has litde after
his ordeal that he did not have before, except
gratitude for having escaped with his life. (33)

The Canadian literary tradition is so victim oriented,

Atwood states throughout Suroival, largely because of
Canada's political status as a colony. To be a 'colony',
Atwood writes, is to be victimised, exploited, as 'an
oppressed minority' (35). Atwood outlines what she terms
'Basic Victim Positions', from the denial of victimisation as
Position One, through the process of recognition and
124 MARGARET ATWOOD

confrontation, to the status of 'creative non-victim' of

Position Four. The political significance of these victim
positions is obvious, whether for Canadians or for any
other 'oppressed minority', including women, as Atwood
observes in her essay 'Mathews and Misrepresentation'
(Second Words, 145). Atwood argues for Canadian
nationalism through the analysis, not only of Canadian
literature, but of how that literature reflects a Canadian
psyche. As always for Atwood, art is a mirror: 'The reader
looks at the mirror and sees not the writer but himself; and
behind his own image in the foreground, a reflection of the
world he lives in' (15).
Atwood's deeply political messages in Survival have met
with a great deal of predictable criticism, from Canadians
as well as others. The ramifications of the controversy over
Survival are not a subject for this study, but they frequently
centre on largely uninteresting quibbles over which authors
ought to have been included, whether Atwood should have
explored the works of more authors from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries rather than those from the
1930s through to the end of the 60s 1 and whether or not
she did or should have concentrated on authors published
by House of Anansi to the exclusion of other Canadian
writers. 2 Critics have also disagreed with her attempts to
thematically classify what seems to them a more diverse
literature than Atwood's classifications indicate. According
to Frank Davey in Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics,
Survival is guilty of' ... overly narrow cultural definitions'
which present 'a unitary, Ontario-based centralist view of
the literature. Atwood did not see Canada and its literature
through the differing perspectives of its regions or the
differing aesthetics of its writers, but attempted to explain
Canada through a single theory based on a single symbolic
image'. 3 Still others, including George Woodcock in his
essay unfortunately titled 'Bashful But Bold: Notes on
Margaret Atwood as Critic', take exception to the influence
 ATWOOD AS CRITIC; CRITICS ON ATWOOD 125

on Atwood of critic Northrop Frye and to what Woodcock

interprets as an excessively polemical approach. Survival,
writes Woodcock, 'is one of those mildly exasperating
books in which a brilliant intelligence has been unable to
put the brakes on its activity and has run far ahead of the
task undertaken .. .' .4 While giving Atwood much credit
for her insights into Canadian literature, for her humour
and wit, Woodcock nevertheless patronisingly concludes:
'Let us take her seriously, but not too seriously. . . . in
her mutable way she has been a good and important [critic]
at this crucial time in the development of our sense of a
literary culture'. 5
Atwood's own responses to the critical reactions of
Survival, particularly those of Robin Mathews as published
in This Magazine, are both dignified and angry. As she
writes in 'Mathews and Misrepresentation', responding to
such critics is 'like trying to get through a church stuffed
with bread dough: sanctimonious perimeter, amorphous
content' (Second Words, 129). To Mathews' charges of
distortion, Atwood argues that she did not present the
heroic and victorious aspects of Canadian literature because
these simply do not exist within the canon; her intention,
rather, is to represent the truth of what she sees:

I feel that in order to change any society, you have to

have a fairly general consciousness of what is wrong -
or at least that something is wrong - among the
members of the society; call it 'consciousness-raising'
if you like; and an examination of the effects of the
situation on the heads of those in the society. . . . In
other words: to fight the Monster, you have to know
that there is a Monster, and what it is like (both in
its external and internalized manifestations). (Second
Words, 147)

Most relevant for the purposes of this study is that in

126 MARGARET ATWOOD

Survival as in her other works, Atwood continues to 'fight

the Monster'; like Perseus, she holds the reflective shield
and asks us merely to look: 'Even the things we look at
demand our participation, and our commitment . . . what
can result is a "jailbreak," an escape from our old habits of
looking at things, and a "recreation," a new way of seeing,
experiencing and imaging - or imagining - which we
ourselves have helped to shape' (Survival, 246).
An analysis of Survival is important, not only for the
insight it gives into Atwood's moral and political stands,
but for the clues it also provides for an interpretation of
Atwood's imagery and style in the novels and poems. As
has been discussed in Chapter 1, many of the traditions
and images Atwood describes in Survival also occur, with
significant transformations, in her own works: the
'Great Canadian Baby', the 'Triple Goddess', the journey
underground, the pervasive sense of victimisation, and,
certainly, the survival theme itself. In Survival, as always
in Atwood's works, is the plea for a release from literary
stereotypes, from the terrible Triple Goddess, from the
inhibiting effects of myth accepted without question.
Paradoxically, however, Atwood also incorporates these
myths and traditions into her own work, and both Survival
and Second Words provide a kind of record of the ways in
which Canadian and other traditions have influenced
Atwood herself.
In Atwood's essay on H. Rider Haggard, 'Superwoman
Drawn and Quartered: The Early Forms of She' (reprinted
in Second Words), we see a reflection of Atwood's own
interest in romantic literature and the kind of Gothic
imagery she employs in many of her poems and novels.
Atwood's treatment of these same Gothic and romantic
images, however, is always ironic, as most obviously is the
case in Lady Oracle, which is a parody of the Gothic
tradition, an inversion of romantic mythology. Atwood's
essay, 'What's so Funny? Notes on Canadian Humour',
 ATWOOD AS CRITIC; CRITICS ON ATWOOD 127

provides a commentary on her own anti-Gothic novel as

well as on such writers as H. Rider Haggard: 'Parody
habitually works in a double-edged way: by trivializing a
specific work or style whose original has pretensions to
profundity, it allows the audience an escape from the
magical and mysterious in art' (Second Words, 181). All of
Atwood's works are, in some sense, parodies, critical of
any ideology or literary style which has 'pretensions to
profundity'. But her concerns, as we know most particularly
from True Stories, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid's Tale,
go deeper than mere parody can convey. The objects of
rebuke in these novels and poems are far more pernicious
and evil than pretentious profundity, and Atwood's humour
takes on that quality of what she calls 'survival laughter,
born from conditions so awful t4at you either have to laugh
or stick your head in the o~en' (Second Words, 176).
Atwood herself is the 'satirist' she defines in 'Canadian
Humour' as the artist who wishes 'to arouse moral
indignation with a view to reform', who aims 'to expose,
rebuke and correct' (Second Words, 183).
Atwood as a critic of other writers does not 'expose and
rebuke', or, at least, she does so very gently. Those for
whom she reserves praise are rewarded for the kinds of
'truth' for which Atwood herself also searches. Her reviews
of works by poet Adrienne Rich, for example, seem almost
an echo of what reviewers have said of Atwood. Rich,
according to Atwood, pursues 'the quest for something
beyond myths, for the truths about men and women, about
the I and the You, the He and the She, and more generally
... about the powerless and the powerful' (Second Words,
161). Atwood's comments on the poetic style of Erica Jong
are also indications of what Atwood values in her own
work: Jong's style, Atwood writes, is 'tricky .... But a
good magician's best trick is to leave some doubt in the
minds of the audience: perhaps the magic is real, perhaps
the magic power is real' (Second Words, 174). Atwood is less
128 MARGARET ATWOOD

comfortable with such works as Flying by Kate Millett,

which Atwood sees as 'a somewhat confused object lesson
in the integration of the political and the personal'. Millett's
confessional style, that aspect of her writing which is most
opposite to Atwood's style, is for Atwood a mixed virtue;
while she grants the 'insights and revelations' of Millett's
prose, she also comments that 'you may wonder whether
you've been caught by the Ancient Mariner' (Second Words,
212).
Atwood is not primarily a critic of individual authors so
much as she is a critic of systems, whether artistic or
ideological. Her best essays in Second Words are those
which expose social and intellectual injustices and attempt
to prescribe remedies or alternative ways of seeing. For
Atwood, there is no institution, no matter how sacred or
how immediate to her own philosophical orientation, which
is above reproach or which would not benefit from self-
examination. One such institution is feminism and the
kind of approach to art taken by many feminist critics. In
'On Being a Woman Writer: Parodoxes and Dilemmas',
Atwood expresses concern about the development of what
she terms 'one-dimensional' feminist criticism, 'a way of
approaching literature produced by women that would
award points according to conformity or non-conformity to
an ideological position' (Second Words, 192). Feminist
critics are as guilty as other critics, Atwood implies, in
their insistence on art as gender-determined; what is
necessary, Atwood writes, is the 'development of a
vocabulary that can treat structures made of words as
though they are exactly that, not biological entities
possessed of sexual organs' (Second Words, 198). Atwood
refuses the feminist literary stereotypes of women as she
refuses the stereotyped female characters of any other
tradition; we must search, she says, for a heroine who is
'not a natural force, whether good or evil', but a woman
who 'makes decisions, performs actions, causes as well as
 ATWOOD AS CRITIC; CRITICS ON ATWOOD 129

endures events, and has perhaps even some ambition, some

creative power . . . . Women, both as characters and as
people, must be allowed their imperfections' (Second Words,
227).
As Atwood states at several points in Second Words, she
refuses the term 'role model', whether as applied to herself
or to her characters. As we have seen in the foregoing
chapters, Atwood's protagonists are human beings, women
with a small 'w'; they most frequently constitute negative
examples rather than role models. Most importantly, they
do not represent Atwood herself, nor do they speak for her
except conversely. A great many critics, feminist critics as
well as others, have confused Atwood's heroines with
Atwood. They have read Surfacing as a hymn to the Great
Mother rather than as the psychologically-oriented case
study it actually is. They have seen Lesje in Life Before
Man as the spokeswoman for what they consider Atwood's
philosophy: the human race 'has it coming'. Joan Foster of
Lady Oracle has been seen as an autobiographical
representation of Atwood's own literary career. Particularly
feminist critics have interpreted Atwood's portrayals of
victims as paradigmatic of the female condition. In an
insistence on seeing Atwood as a confessional writer and
her works as autobiographical statements, critics have
overlooked the irony implicit in Atwood's work and have,
thereby, largely misinterpreted her messages.
According to Atwood, both men and women critics have
taken exception to her portrayals of men, but certainly
male critics seem particularly threatened by Atwood's
characterisations. Frank Davey, for example, has subtitled
his book on Atwood 'A Feminist Poetics', but yet objects
to Atwood's 'female/male dichotomy . . . and the
profound mistrust of men articulated in "Liking Men". ' 6
Other male reviewers are more subtle (or less honest);
Philip Stratford in 'The Uses of Ambiguity', for example,
merely refers to 'a rankling sense of alienation' which
130 MARGARET ATWOOD

'permeates all her fiction' and is 'expressed in the neurotic

edginess of her prose'. 7 Similarly, John Wilson Foster
criticises Atwood's poetry as 'barely controlled hysteria'
which takes 'specifically feminine forms' and represents
'certain fashionable minority psychologies'. 8 Jerome
Rosenberg in Margaret Atwood also wishes at times for
some quality in Atwood's work that could only be
interpreted as an idea of femininity: of The Journals of
Susanna Moodie, he writes that the poems are completely
devoid of 'love and compassion, of simple and realistic
human warmth'. Rosenberg seeks an 'emotionally
compelling language of faith' instead of the 'abstract,
formalized language of reason'. 9 Too, Rosenberg and other
male critics are particularly loath to see Atwood in terms of
a female literary tradition, comparing her work to a
tradition of male writers from William Blake to John
Barth, rather than to authors which Atwood herself has
credited as influential, including poets Margaret Avison,
Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton.
Atwood has made her own opinions clear on the subject
of earlier male critics, particularly those who find curly
hair, 'petite' stature and marital status of supreme literary
importance. In an interview with Karla Hammond, Atwood
says,

I've been reviewed in the most viciously sexist ways -

more so in Canada than in the States because
American reviewers are suaver about the way they
attack people. I've been called a Medusa, an
Octopus, etc., the attack being: here is a woman
who doesn't use words in a soft, compliant way;
therefore, she is an evil witch. And I'm tired of it;
but it's impossible to educate them. You're getting
someone who really has a tremendous fear of
women. 10
 ATWOOD AS CRITIC; CRITICS ON ATWOOD 131

Atwood takes this image of the woman writer as witch and

turns it to her own advantage. In her essay, 'Witches', she
celebrates the identification with her ancestor, Mary
Webster, who was hanged for a witch but survived: 'She is
my favorite ancestor, more dear to my heart even than the
privateers and the massacred French Protestants, and if
there's one thing I hope I've inherited from her, it's her
neck' (Second Words, 331). All women writers, according
to Atwood, are on trial for witchcraft:

We still think of a powerful woman as an anomaly, a

potentially dangerous anomaly; there is something
subversive about such women, even when they take
care to be good role models. They cannot have come
by their power naturally, it is felt. They must have
got it from somewhere. Women writers are particularly
subject to such projections, for writing itself is
uncanny: it uses words for evocation rather than for
denotation; it is spell-making. A man who is good at
it is a craftsman. A woman who is good at it is a
dubious proposition. (Second Words, 331)

Atwood's essay on 'Witches' provides a crucial image for

an understanding of her later novels and poems in
particular. The Handmaid's Tale is dedicated to Mary
Webster and its principal subject is the suppression of
language, especially language as used by women. Women
who think or speak, other than by rote, or who dare to
write, are hanged in Gilead, just as they are tortured or
killed in those countries which Atwood describes in True
Stories. In 'Spelling', the poet teaches her daughter 'how to
spell,/spelling,/how to make spells'. To what fate, she
wonders, does she thereby condemn her daughter, and she
thinks of 'Ancestress: the burning witch,/her mouth
covered by leather/to strangle words' (True Stories, 63-64).
Again, in 'Torture', we find the image of the silenced
132 MARGARET ATWOOD

woman: the woman with her face sewn shut, and her
mouth closed 'to a hole the size of a straw' (True Stories,
50). Similarly, in 'Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never
be Written', Atwood describes the tortured and mutilated
woman who is '. . . dying because she said. I She is dying
for the sake of the word./It is her body, silent/and
fingerless, writing this poem' (True Stories, 67).
Atwood does not write pleasant 'feminine' poems; neither
is she tolerant of that masculine collective, 'They', as I
have noted in Chapter 1. Atwood's most frequent weapon
against her critics, particularly those who accuse her of
being 'mean to men', however, is humour. Women authors
in general, including Atwood herself, she indicates, are on
the whole kinder to men in fiction than male authors are to
men. In her essay, 'Writing the Male Character', Atwood
catalogues the 'heroes' of past literature, including Hamlet,
Macbeth and Faust. 'How about the behaviour of the men
in Moll Flanders', she asks; 'Is A Sentimental Journey about
the quintessential wimp?' (Second Words, 421). Although
Atwood states that her intention is to depict men fairly and
realistically, that women should 'take the concerns of men
as seriously as they expect men to take theirs, both as
novelists and as inhabitants of this earth' (Second Words,
428), she also concludes that the critics are insatiable, that
they demand an unrealistic portrayal of male characters:
'Captain Marvel without the Billy Batson alter ego; nothing
less will do' (Second Words, 420).
Atwood's other sin as defined by numerous critics is a
general pessimism, a negative outlook on the world.
Atwood, however, considers herself a realist rather
than a pessimist: 'What you think is pessimistic depends
very largely on what you think is out there in the world'
(Second Words, 349). In 'Witches', she promises a year's
free subscription to the Amnesty International Bulletin to
the next critic who accuses her of pessimism. The world as
Atwood sees it is in fact a dangerous and hostile place, and
 ATWOOD AS CRITIC; CRITICS ON ATWOOD 133

the writer's job is to define and judge that world, not to see
it through rose-coloured glasses. In an early review of
Margaret Avison's poetry, Atwood justifies Avison's
'realism': the subject of poetry ought not to be '. . . a
chocolate-covered poetic pill, guaranteed to taste nice, go
down easily, and eliminate all need for effort' (Second
Words, 22). What the critics, booksellers, and the 'media
bunnies' would like, Atwood says in 'An End to Audience?',
is an 'entertainment package', money-making and film-
producing fiction written, not by authors with political
views, but by 'elements', ciphers who lend their words to
slogans on T -shirts, who provide 'writing to suck your
thumb by' (Second Words, 355). Atwood prefers truth to
lies and realism to romance; her intention is not to
communicate pessimism, but to inform and instruct and,
finally, to provide hope: 'Writing, no matter what its
subject, is an act of faith ... it's also an act of hope, the
hope that things can be better than they are' (Second
Words, 349). Words themselves, Atwood reiterates
throughout Murder in the Dark, constitute the defeat of
pessimism:

Outside, the plague bulges, slops over, flows down

the streets and so we stay here, holding on and
holding on, to the one small thing which is not yet
withering, not yet marked for death, this armful of
words, together, with. This is as good as it gets,
nothing can be better and so there's nothing to hope
for, but I do it anyway. In the distance, beyond the
war in the midground, there's a river, and some
willows, in sunlight, and some hills. (Murder in the
Dark, 57)

If the writer is, as Atwood contends, the moral agent,

the judge, then suppression of that writer's words is the
truly immoral act. Atwood faults religious groups which
134 MARGARET ATWOOD

remove books from high school library shelves on the basis

that they are sexually explicit or contain 'objectionable'
language; it is the act of the censors which is, in fact,
obscene. In The Handmaid's Tale, as in the actual and
current situation, some feminist groups exercise the same
faulty judgement, thereby forefeiting their own freedom
along with that of both the writers and the reading
audience. 'A country or a community which does not take
serious literature seriously will lose it', Atwood writes
(Second Words, 357). Atwood is surely thinking of the
censors and the critics more than of the antagonistic lover
in her poem 'Spell for the Director of Protocol': 'You
would like to keep me/from saying anything: you would
prefer it/if when I opened my mouth/nothing came out/but
a white comic-strip balloon/with a question mark; or a
blank button ... ' (Procedures for Underground, 45).
It now seems an understatement rather than a summary
to repeat that Atwood is a political writer and a moral
writer. Like a great many other serious modern poets,
Wallace Stevens for example, Atwood creates a 'supreme
fiction' which transcends religion. Art itself is 'the word',
and the artist its vehicle, its priest:

. . . art happens. It happens when you have the craft

and the vocation .... It's the extra rabbit coming
out of the hat, the one you didn't put there. It's
Odysseus standing by the blood-filled trench, except
that the blood is his own. It is bringing the dead to
life and giving voices to those who lack them so that
they may speak for themselves. It is not "expressing
yourself." It is opening yourself, discarding your
self, so that the language and the world may be
evoked through you .... Writing is also a kind of
sooth-saying, a truth-telling. It is a naming of the
world, a reverse incarnation: the flesh becoming
word. It's also a witnessing. Come 'With me, the writer
 ATWOOD AS CRITIC; CRITICS ON ATWOOD 135

is saying to the reader. There is a story I have to teU

you, there is something you need to know. (Second
Words, 347-48)

Whether she is priest or witch - or both or neither -

Atwood does have something terribly important to tell us,
something we do, in fact, need to know.
 Notes
Notes to Chapter 1
1. Karla Hammond, 'An Interview with Margaret Atwood', The
American Poetry Review, Vol. 8, No. 5 (September/October, 1979),
p. 29.
2. Ibid., p. 29.
3. Joyce Carol Oates, 'Margaret Atwood: Poems and Poet', New York
Times Book Review, 21 May 1978, pp. IS, 43-45.

Notes to Chapter 2
1. Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified
Outcasts (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 133.
2. Ibid., p. 138.
3. Ibid., p. 140.
4. Ibid., p. 164.
5. Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood
(Montreal, Vehicule Press, 1980), p. 59.
6. Robert Lecker, 'Janus Through the Looking Glass: Atwood's First
Three Novels', The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds
Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press,
1981), pp. 179-80.
7. Catherine McLay, 'The Dark Voyage: The Edible Woman as
Romance', The Art of Margaret Arwood: Essays in Criticism, eds Arnold
E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press, 1981),
p. 138.
8. Kim Chemin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness
(New York, Harper & Row, 1981), p. 71.
9. Linda Sandler, 'Interview with Margaret Atwood', The Malahat
Review, 4 (January, 1977), p. 19.

Notes to Chapter 3
1. Graeme Gibson, Eleven Canadian Novelists (Toronto, Anansi Press,
1973), p. 29.
2. Ibid., p. 22.

136
 NOTES 137

3. Annis Pratt, 'Surfacing and the Rebirth Journey', The An of Margaret

Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N.
Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press, 1981), p. 151.
4. Ibid., p. 157.
5. Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 158.
6. Carol P. Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on
Spiritual Quest (Boston, Beacon Press, 1980), p. 46.
7. Marie-Frans;oise Guedon, 'Surfacing: Amerindian Themes and
Shamanism', Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System, eds Sherrill
E. Grace and Lorraine Weir (Vancouver, University of British Columbia
Press, 1983), p. 91.
8. Jerome H. Rosenberg, Margaret Atwood (Boston, G. K. Hall, 1984),
p. 122.
9. Barbara Hill Rigney, Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist
Novel (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
10. Sherrill E. Grace, 'Margaret Atwood and the Poetics of Duplicity',
The An of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds Arnold E. Davidson
and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press, 1981), p. 57.

Notes to Chapter 4
1. Linda Sandler, 'Interview with Margaret Atwood', The Malahat
Review, Vol. 4 (January, 1977), p. 19.
2. Jerome H. Rosenberg, Margaret Atwood (Boston, G. K. Hall, 1984),
p. 116.
3. Ibid., p. 112.
4. Judith McCombs, 'Atwood's Haunted Sequences: The Circle Game,
The Journals of Susanna Moodie', and Power Politics, The An of Margaret
Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N.
Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press, 1981), pp. 36-37.
S. Clara Thomas, 'Lady Oracle: The Narrative of a Fool-Heroine', The
Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds Arnold E. Davidson and
Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press, 1981), p. 173.
6. Robert Lecker, 'Janus Through the Looking Glass: Atwood's First
Three Novels', The An of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds
Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press,
1981), p. 203.

Notes to Chapter 5
I. Linda Hutcheon, 'From Poetic to Narrative Structures: The Novels
of Margaret Atwood', Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System, eds
138 NOTES

Sherrill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir (Vancouver, University of British

Columbia Press, 1983), p. 29.
2. Frank Davey, Margaret Arwood: A Feminist Poetics (Vancouver,
Talonbooks, 1984), p. 92.
3. Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality: A Study ofMargaret Atwood (Montreal,
Vehicule Press, 1980), p. 135.

Notes to Chapter 6
I. Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood
(Montreal, Vehicule Press, 1980), p. 67.
2. Jerome H. Rosenberg, Margaret Atwood (Boston, G. K. Hall, 1984),
p. 92.
3. Judith McCombs, 'Atwood's Fictive Portraits of the Artist: From
Victim to Surfacer, From Oracle to Birth', Women's Studies, Vol. 12
(1986), pp. 69-88.
4. Margaret Atwood, 'Surviving the Critics', This Magazine is About
Schools (1973), p. 33.

Notes to Chapter 7
1. Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood
(Montreal, Vehicule Press, 1980), p. I.
2. Frank Davey, Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (Vancouver,
Talonbooks, 1984), p. 153.
3. Ibid., p. 1.
4. George Woodcock, 'Bashful but Bold: Notes on Margaret Atwood as
Literary Critics', The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds
Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto, Anansi, 1981),
p. 237.
5. Ibid., p. 241.
6. Frank Davey, op. cit., p. 163.
7. Philip Stratford, 'The uses of Ambiguity: Margaret Atwood and
Hubert Aquin' Margaret Arwood: Language, Text, and System, eds
Sherrill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir (Vancouver, University of British
Columbia Press, 1983), p. 113.
8. John Wilson Foster, 'The Poetry of Margaret Atwood', Canadian
Literature, Vol. 74 (1977), p. 5.
9. Jerome H. Rosenberg, Margaret Arwood (Boston, G. K. Hall, 1984),
p. so.
10. Karla Hammond, 'An Interview with Margaret Atwood', The
American Poetry Review, Vol. 8, No. 5 (September/October, 1979), p. 29.
 Bibliography
Primary Works
(All references are to the following editions. Paperback
books were used when possible.)

Poetry

Double Persephone (Toronto, Hawkshead Press, 1961).

Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Pros~.~~ms (Toronto,
Coach House Press, 1983).
Power Politics (New York, Harper and Row, 1973).
Procedures for Underground (Boston, Little, Brown and Company,
1970).
Selected Poems (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978).
The Animals in That Country (Boston, Little, Brown and
Company, 1968).
The Circle Game (Toronto, Anansi, 1978).
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto, Oxford University
Press, 1970).
True Stories (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1981).
Two-Headed Poems (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978).
You Are Happy (New York, Harper and Row, 1974).

Novels and Short Stories

Bluebeard's Egg (Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1983).
Bodily Harm (New York, Bantam, 1983).
Dancing Girls and Other Stories (New York, Bantam, 1985).
Lady Oracle (New York, Avon, 1978).
Life Before Man (New York, Warner, 1983).
Surfacing (New York, Popular Library, 1976).
The Edible Woman (New York, Popular Library, 1976).
The Handmaid's Tale (Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1985).

139
140 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Non-fiction
Second Words (Toronto, Anansi, 1983).
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto,
Anansi, 1972).

Secondary Sources

Auerbach, Nina, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other

Glorified Outcasts (New York, Columbia University Press,
1985).
Chernin, Kim, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of
Slenderness (New York, Harper and Row, 1981).
Christ, Carol, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on
Spiritual Quest (Boston, Beacon Press, 1980).
--,'Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women's Spiritual
Quest and Vision', Signs 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 316--30.
Davey, Frank, Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (Vancouver,
Talonbooks, 1984).
Davidson, Arnold E. and Davidson, Cathy N. (eds), The Art of
Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism (Toronto, Anansi, 1981).
Foster, John Wilson, 'The Poetry of Margaret Atwood', Canadian
Literature, 74 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 5-20.
Gibson, Graeme, Eleven Canadian Novelists (Toronto, Anansi,
1973).
Grace, Sherrill E., Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood
(Montreal, Vehicule Press, 1980).
Grace, Sherrill E. and Lorraine Weir (eds), Margaret Atwood:
Language, Text, and System (Vancouver, University of British
Columbua Press, 1983).
Hammond, Karla, 'An Interview with Margaret Atwood',
American Poetry Review, 8 (September/October, 1979), pp. 27-
29.
Home, Alan J., 'Margaret Atwood: An Annotated Bibliography',
The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors, eds
Robert Lecker and Jack David (Downsview, Ontario, ECW
Press, 1979 and 1980), Vols 1 and 2.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 141

Juhasz, Suzanne, 'Renunciation Transformed, the Dickinson

Heritage: Emily Dickinson and Margaret Atwood', Women's
Studies, 12 (1986), pp. 251-70.
Mandel, Eli, 'Atwood Gothic', The Malaluzt Review, 41 (January,
1977), pp. 165-74.
Mathews, Robin, 'Survival and Struggle in Canadian Literature',
This Magazine is About Schools, 6 (Winter, 1972-73), pp. 109-
24.
McCombs, Judith, 'Atwood's Fictive Portraits of the Artist:
From Victim to Surfacer, from Oracle to Birth', Women's
Studies, 12 (1986), pp. 69-88.
Oates, Joyce Carol, 'Margaret Atwood: Poems and Poet', New
York Times Book Review, 21 (May 1978), pp. 15, 43-45.
Pratt, Annis, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Bloomington,
Indiana University Press, 1981).
Rigney, Barbara Hill, Lilith's Daughters: Women and Religion in
Contemporary Fiction (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press,
1982).
--,Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies
in Bronte, Woolf, Lessing and Atwood (Madison, University of
Wisconsin Press, 1978).
Rosenberg, Jerome H., Margaret Atwood (Boston, G. K. Hall,
1984).
Rubenstein, Roberta, 'Surfacing: Margaret Atwood's Journey to
the Interior', Modern Fiction Studies 22 (Autumn, 1976),
pp. 387-99.
Sandler, Linda, 'Interview with Margaret Atwood', Malaluzt
Review 41 (January, 1977), pp. 7-27.
Index
abortion 5, 36, 40, 45, 50, 56 'Camera' 25
'A Bus Along St. Clair; cameras, images of 25, 39,
December' 59-60 41-2, 108
'A Descent Through the Campbell, Joseph 52
Carpet' 27 Camus, Albert 107
Alice in Wonderland 2, 6, 7, cannibalism, images of 20-l,
18,19-20,21,23,26,2 7-8, 33, 34, 109
29, 30, 37, 71, 93, 94 censorship 119, 134-5
'All Bread' 37 'Chaos Poem' 6
Amnesty International 16, Chernin, Kim 33
132 childbirth see fertility myth
amputation, images of 47, 49, children, images of 21, 44, 89
62, 69, 87, 104, 111 children's literature see fairy
'An End to Audience?' 133 tales
'A Night in the Royal Ontario Christ, Carol 51-2
Museum' 82-3 Christianity 10, 49, 50, 110
animal imagery 8--9, 24-5,29, Cinderella 73
46,48,50-1,58--9,75 ,93- 'Circe/Mud Poems' 7-8, 10,
94, 98, 123 14,67
anorexia 22-4, 26, 30, 49, 65 Conrad, Joseph 52
'A Pursuit' 28
'A Red Shirt' 5, 9, 11 Daly, Mary 16
'A Travel Piece' 108--9, 111, Dancing Girls 5, 13, 15, 46,
114-15 108--9
Auerbach, Nina 27-8 Davey, Frank 99, 124, 129
Austin, Jane 13 Demeter, as archetypal
Avison, Margaret 14, 130, 133 mother 11, 54-5
'A Woman's Issue' 15-16 detective stories 39, 48
Diana, as stereotype of women
Berger, John 105 in fiction 4, 37, 93
birth control pills 97, 99 'Dinner' 106-7
Blais, Marie-Claire 14 Disney, Walt 41, 64, 77
Bluebeard 62, 69, 70, 73, 78 dolls, as images of women 6,
Bodily Harm 8, 11, 16, 92, 32-3,34-6
102, 103-13, 114, 115, 117, Double Persephone 9, 67
120, 127 Doyle, Arthur Conan 94
'Brian the Still-Hunter' 49-50 Drew, Nancy 39

143
144 INDEX

drowning, images of 6-7, 39, humour 14, 83, 118, 126-7,

40, 68,72 132
Hunt, William Holman 67,
ecology 49, 75, 95-6, 100-1 68,71
'Eden is a Zoo' 56 Hutcheon, Linda 99
Eliot, George 13
Eliot, T. S. 36 'Iconography' 111-12
existentialism 47, 78, 93, 113 initiation rites 52
invisibility 45, 94-5
fairy tales 34, 41, 42, 62, 63, Jackson, Shirley 114
66-7' 70, 73, 77' 79 James, Henry 10, 39, 62
fertility myth ~. 36-7, 40- ]aneEyre 11
41, 42, 46, 55, 59, 97' 99 Jong, Erica 29, 127
'Five Poems for Dolls' 6, 35
'Five Poems for labyrinth 70-1, 79, 82, 83,
Grandmothers' 11, 60 85, 88
Foster, John Wilson 130 Lady of Shalott, as image of
Frankenstein, as image of woman artist 9, 67-8, 77
artist 5, 7, 78 Lady Oracle 3, 8, 11, 24, 62-
Frye, Northrop 125 81, 83, 94, 95, 104, 117'
126, 129
'Game After Supper' 54 Laurence, Margaret 14
'Giving Birth' 5 Lecker, Robert J. 33, 80
Goldilocks 34 'Letters, Towards and Away'
gothic imagery 10, 62, 67, 84-5, 111
126 Life Before Man 5, 8, 82-102,
'Gothic Letter on a Hot 129
Night' 81 'Liking Men' 15, 129
Grace, Sherrill E. 28-9, 99, Little Mermaid, as image of
106 woman artist 9, 66-7, 116
'Great Canadian Baby' see 'Lives of the Poets' 13
fertility myth
Guedon, Marie-Fran<;oise 52 maps, as images of tradition
1, 2, 4, 60, 83
'Hair Jewellery' 15 'Marrying the Hangman' 117-
Hammond, Karla 130 118
Hecate 59 martyrdom 10, 49-50, 77
'Hesitations outside the Door' 'Mathews and
62, 78 Misrepresentation' 124
Hitler, as image of evil 15, Mathews, Robin 125
44,48-9 maze see labyrinth
homelessness 85, 92-3, 98 McCombs, Judith 79, 113
 INDEX 145

McLay, Catherine 33 Pre-Raphaelites 67, 68

Medusa, as image of woman Procedures for Underground 6,
artist 67 8, 53, 54, 56, 134
metamorphoses 10, 14, 20,
59-60, 72, 76--7
rape 25, 29, 48, 84, 87, 90-
Miller, Perry 114
91, 96, 104, 106, Ill
Millett, Kate 14, 128
'Rape Fantasies' 96
mirrors 1, 2, 29, 34-5, 42, Rapunzel, as image of woman
47, 57, 62,63-4,65, 67,
artist 9, 67
68-9,71,83, lll, ll7,
Rich, Adrienne 11, 14, 127,
118, 124
130
mothers and daughters 4, 11- Rigney, Barbara Hill 52-3
12,24,43,54-5,63-5,88-
Rosenberg, Jerome H. 52, 72,
89,91-2 113,130
Murder in the Dark 14, 15,
18-19, 112, 133
Second Words 6, 9, 11, 12,
'Night Poem' 3 13-14, 15, 16, 17, 20-1,
Nightingale, Florence, as 29, 34, 79, 87, 95, 117, 122,
image of woman 31, 86 124-34
'Notes Towards a Poem that Selected Poems 78
Can Never Be Written' Sexton, Anne 14, 130
115, 132 She 86--7
Shearer, Moira, as image of
obesity 65-6, 72, 73 woman artist 9, 66, 117
Olsen, Tillie 14 Siamese twins, as image of
'On Being a Woman Writer: woman artist 6, 13, 41, 66
Paradoxes and Dilemmas' Sibyl 74
128 'Siren Song' 11
Orwell, George 114, 120 sisterhood 10-11, 112-13, 116
'Small Poems for the Winter
Penelope, as image of woman Solstice' 12
artist 67 Snow White, as image of
Persephone, as image of woman 42, 54, 63-4, 71
woman artist 7, 11, 54, 71 'Spell for the Director of
Philomela, as image of woman Protocol' 134
artist 67 'Spelling' 5, 31
Piercy, Marge 14 Stevens, Wallace 134
Plath, Sylvia 14 Stratford, Philip 129--30
'Postcard' 106 'Sunset I' 107
pornography 106, 119, 134 'Superwoman Drawn and
Power Politics 28, 78 Quartered: The Early Forms
Pratt, Annis 51 of She 87,126
146 INDEX

Surfacing 1, 6, 7, 8, 10,11, 'They Eat Out' 28

24, 25, 27, 36, 38-61, 62, 'This is a Photograph of Me'
64, 65, 68, 78, 83, 95, 99, 25
100, 103, 109, 120, 129 Thomas, Audrey 14
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Thomas, Clara 80
Canadian Literature 1-17, 'Torture' 131-2
24, 37' 48, 59, 67' 93, 105, 'True Romances' 107, 109
122-6 True Stories 5, 12, 15-16, 101,
102, 104, 106-7' 109, 115,
The Animals in That Country 120, 121, 127, 131-2
9, 28, 82-3 Two-Headed Poems 3, 5, 6,
'The Arrest of the 10, 11, 35, 37' 60, 61, 84-
Stockbroker' 109 85, 101, 115, 117-18
The Circle Game 25, 27, 111
'The Double Voice' 58 'Under Glass' 46
The Edible Woman 5, 8, 10, 'Useless' 6
12, 18--37' 38, 42, 47' 49,
65, 83, 90, 93, 95, 99
Venus, as image of woman in
'The Green Man: For the
literature 37
Boston Strangler' 29 Virgil 71, 74
The Handmaid's Tale 3, 5, 10,
16, 102, 103-4, 111, 113--21,
127, 131, 134 Waterhouse, John William 68
The Journals of Susanna 'What's So Funny? Notes on
Moodie 3, 6, 38, 49-50, 58-- Canadian Humour' 126-7
61, 100, 130 Webster, Mary 114, 131
'The Landlady' 29 'Witches' 131, 132
'The Red Shoes' 5, 9-10, 12- witchcraft, as image of art 67,
13, 64, 66, 73, 117 114, 130-1
'The Resplendent Quetzal' 6 Woodcock, George 124-5
'The Trappers' 28 'Writing the Male Character'
'The Underwear Man' 26, 29, 132
90
'The Wereman' 59 You Are Happy 6, 7, 11, 14-
The Wizard of Oz 90, 93 15, 81, 101