• Margaret Eleanor
Atwood, OC (born
November 18, 1939) is
a Canadian writer. A
prolific poet, novelist,
literary critic, feminist
and activist, she is a
winner of the Booker
Prize and Arthur C.
Clarke Award, and has
been a finalist for the
Governor General's
Award seven times,
winning twice. Atwood
is among the mosthonored authors of
fiction in recent history.
• Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa,
Canada, the second of three children. He
father was a forest entomologist. Part of
her early years Atwood spent part in the
bush of northern Quebec, where her father
undertook research. Later these childhood
experiences gave material to her
metaphorical use of the wilderness and its
animals in WILDERNESS TIPS (1991).
•
In 1946 Atwood's family moved
to Toronto. She was eleven
before she attended school fulltime. Atwood graduated from
Leaside High School in 1959.
She then studied at the
University of Toronto, where she
met the literary analyst Northrop
Fry; his myth criticism and
Jungian ideas influenced her
deeply. She became a graduate
student at Radcliffe College,
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
receiving her M.A. in 1962.
Atwood continued her studies of
Victorian literature at Harvard
(1962-63, 1965-67), reading for
Ph.D., but interrupted her studies
in 1967 after having failed to
complete her dissertation on
'The English Metaphysical
Romance'.
• She worked for a
market-research
company in Toronto and
taught English at the
University of British
Columbia in Vancouver
(1964-65). She has held
a variety of academic
posts and has been
writer-in-residence at
numerous Canadian
and American
universities.
UBC - View of the north part of the
Point Grey Campus, including Green
College, the Chan Centre for the
Performing Arts, and the Museum of
Anthropology.
• As a writer Atwood
made her debut at
the age of 19 with
DOUBLE
PERSEPHONE
(1961), a collection
of poems. Her
privately printed
book won the E.J.
Pratt medal. Another
early collection, THE
CIRCLE GAME (1964,
rev. in 1966) received
the Canadian
Governor General's
Award for poetry in
1966.
• While working as an
editor at the Toronto
publishing house Anansi
in the early 1970s,
Atwood published her
controversial study
SURVIVAL: A THEMATIC
GUIDE TO CANADIAN
LITERATURE (1972). For
scholars Atwood's
tongue-in-cheek humour
was hard to swallow,
especially when she
asserted that Canadian
literature has remained
blighted by subservient,
colonial mentality.
Table of Contents
What, Why, and Where Is Here?
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1. Survival
2. Nature the Monster
3. Animal Victims
4. First People: Indians and Eskimos as
Symbols
5. Ancestral Totems: Explorers, Settlers
6. Family Portrait: Masks of the Bear
7. Failed Sacrifices: The Reluctant
Immigrant
8. The Casual Incident of Death: Futile
Heroes, Unconvincing martyrs and
Other Bad Ends
9. The Paralyzed Artist
10. Ice Women vs Earth Mothers: The
Stone Angel and the Absent Venus
11. Québec: Burning Mansions
12. Jail-Breaks and Re-Creations
• Later she returned to the theme in STRANGE
THINGS: THE MALEVOLENT NORTH IN
CANADIAN LITERATURE (1995). Atwood
searched for the "fabled Canadian identity",
stating that "Canadians are fond of a good
disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in
it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf,
didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got
axed in the snow."
The Edible Woman
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Atwood's THE EDIBLE WOMAN (1969), is
both a funny and terrifying story about a
young woman, whose sane, structured,
consumer-oriented world suddenly slips
strangely out of focus.
The story chronicles the fantastic and
dramatic ego disintegration of Marian
McAlprin, who seems at first to be a
perfectly conventional young woman, with
friends, a successful and attractive man in
her life, and a reasonably good job
working for a market research company.
Everything in her life seems to fly out of
control with her engagement, just as
Marian seems ready to fulfill "every
woman's" dream of trading in her
troublesome job for marriage and a new
life at home with children. As Marian
begins endowing food with human
qualities that cause her to identify with it,
she finds herself unable to eat, repelled by
metaphorical cannibalism.
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Atwood explores gender stereotypes through characters who strictly adhere
to them, such as Peter or Lucy, and those who defy their constraints, such
as Duncan.
The narrative point of view shifts from first to third person, accentuating
Marian's slow detachment from reality. At the conclusion, first person
narration returns, consistent with the character's willingness to take control
of her life again.
Food and clothing are major symbols used by the author to explore themes
and grant the reader insight on each of the characters' personalities, moods
and motivations.
Setting is used to sharply accentuate the differences between the
characters; for example, Duncan is encountered in a mundane laundromat,
gloomy theatre or sleazy hotel. In comparison, Peter inhabits genteel bars
and a sparkling new apartment. However these changing environments are
also used to explore different angles of existence, contrasting a freer, wilder
glimpse of life, with a civilised, gilded cage. This highlights the difficulties
presented to women in the era, where freedom was synonymous with
uncertainty but marriage presented problems of its own.
This novel's publication coincided with the rise of the women's movement in
North America, but is described by Atwood as "protofeminist" because it
was written in 1965 and thus anticipated feminism by several years.
The Handmaid’s Tale
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THE HANDMAID'S TALE (1985) is a
dystopia, influenced by Orwell's classic 1984.
The story set in the near future USA in the
Republic of Gilead, a state ruled by religious
fundamentalism. All the freedoms women
have gained are revoked and language is
forbidden to all but the male élite. The
heroine, Offred, is one of the few women
whose reproductive systems have survived
the chemical pollution and radiation from
power plants. The book was filmed in 1990
by Volker Schlöndorff from a screenplay by
Harold Pinter. In the film version the
protagonist becomes an active revolutionary
who finally cuts the throat of her owner.
However, in Atwood's book the events are
seen through the eyes of the main character,
whose weapon is irony and keen observation
- she keeps a secret diary. "I try not to think
too much. Like other things now, thought
must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't
bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your
chances, and I intend to last." (from The
Handmaid's Tale) The tale is interspersed
with flashbacks to her earlier life, when she
had a husband, Luke, a 5-year-old daughter,
and was allowed to read.
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Offred discovers that the people in her life, while paying lip service to Gilead's rigid mores, seek
various means of expressing their illicit desires.
Offred initially becomes aware of these transgressions when Fred orders her to visit his study late
at night. He wishes to establish a more personal relationship with her, as he is forbidden to
converse with her outside of their monthly sex. He offers to play Scrabble with her. Since women
are forbidden from reading and restricted to specific duties assigned to them, this is an illicit
activity. He also obtains forbidden hand lotion for her and allows her to read books and magazines
from the past. On one occasion, he dresses her in a sexy costume and smuggles her into
Jezebel's, a nightclub and brothel run by the party.
At the same time, Serena Joy has also asked Offred to keep secrets from the Commander.
Resentful of having been deprived of her formerly prominent role as a televangelist and right-wing
lecturer, she feels the only thing that can give meaning to her life is a child. Since the Commander
is likely to be sterile (his previous handmaids did not conceive), Serena Joy suggests that Offred
attempt to conceive a child with Nick, the chauffeur, later revealed to be a member of the Mayday
underground resistance.
Nick and Offred begin a relationship which they continue until the end of the novel where it is left a
little ambiguous whether Offred's transgressions have been discovered and is taken away for
them or is being smuggled out of the household by the resistance movement. By this time, Offred
and Nick believe that she might be pregnant.
Even though her fate is not made clear by the ambiguous ending, since she was able to make
tapes on which she recounts her experiences — as stated in the appendix — it seems likely that
she was rescued and may have been able to leave the country via the "Underground
Femaleroad." Offred's on-tape narrative is treated as a historical document and is discussed at an
academic conference far in the future.
Cat’s Eye
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Cat's Eye is a 1988 novel by
Margaret Atwood.
In it, painter Elaine Risley vividly
reflects on her childhood and
teenage years. Her strongest
memories are of Cordelia, who
was the leader of a trio of girls
who were both very cruel and very
kind to young Elaine, in ways that
tint Elaine's perceptions of
relationships and her world - not to
mention her art - into the
character's middle years. The
novel unfolds in Canada of the
mid-20th century, from World War
II to the late 1980s, and includes a
look at many of the cultural
elements of that time period,
including feminism and various
modern art movements.
• Explanation of the title
• Elaine and her brother play
marbles as children; Elaine
keeps a prized cat's eye
marble in her red purse. The
cat's eye later appears as a
common motif in Elaine's
paintings, linked with those
she perceived to be an ally,
although she does not
remember why it is associated
with those feelings. Elaine
rediscovers the red purse
years later, and as she looks
through it, she regains all the
memories she had lost: "her
life entire".
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Plot summary
After being called back to her childhood home of Toronto for a retrospective
show of her art, Elaine reminisces about her childhood. At the age of eight
she becomes friends with Carol and Grace, and, through their eyes, realises
her atypical background of traveling with her entomologist father has left her
ill-equipped for conventional femininity. When Cordelia joins the group,
Elaine is bullied by her "best friends". The bullying escalates that winter,
when the girls abandon Elaine in the ravine; half-frozen, she sees a vision
of the Virgin Mary who guides her to safety. Afterwards, realising she had
allowed herself to be a victim, Elaine makes new friends.
Themes
Construction of identity - Cat's Eye is written mostly as flashbacks, as
Elaine reflects on the forgotten events of her childhood that shaped her
personality and struggles to integrate lost aspects of her self. In Elaine's
self portrait, a pier glass reflects three little girls who are not in the painting
(evocative of Jan Van Eyck's reflection of himself in The Arnolfini Portrait):
demonstrating their simultaneous absence from Elaine's past and their
presence in who she has become.
The Arnolfini Portrait - Jan van Eyck, 1434
• In the background
mirror one can
see two figures
(probably one of
them is that of the
painter himself).
Giovanni Arnolfini
raises his right
hand as if he were
greeting them.
Alias Grace
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ALIAS GRACE (1996) used a
genuine 19th-century criminal case
of Grace Marks, one of the most
notorious women in Canada. Grace
was imprisoned in 1843, at the age
of sixteen, for almost 30 years as an
accomplice to the murder of her
employer Thomas Kinnear and his
mistress, the housekeeper Nancy.
Her guilt was never incontrovertibly
established, but she raised the
interest of journalists and
researches. Before she was
arrested, she tried to escape with
another servant, James McDermott
to the United States. Atwood first
found her story from Life in the
Clearings (1853) by Susanna
Moodie. "A lot of what is written
down is either wishful thinking or
spiteful gossip," Atwood has said.
• Although the novel is based on factual events, Atwood
constructs a narrative with a fictional doctor, Simon
Jordan, who researches the case. Although conducting
research into criminal behaviour, he slowly becomes
personally involved in the story of Grace Marks and
seeks to reconcile the mild mannered woman he sees
with the murder of which she has been convicted.
• The question of Grace's madness or sanity is never
resolved in the novel. She appears, at one point, to be
possessed by the spirit of her dead fellow servant and
confidante, Mary Whitney.
• “Alias Grace” uses post-modern narrative techniques to
explore the instability of personal identity and historical
knowledge.
The Robber Bride
• The Robber Bride is
in present-day
Toronto, Ontario, the
novel begins with
three women (Roz,
Charis, and Tony)
who meet once a
month in a restaurant
to share a meal.
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Plot summary
During their most recent outing, they see Zenia, a long-dead college
classmate who had stolen, one by one, their respective beaux. The novel
alternates between the present and flashbacks featuring the points of view
of Tony, Charis, and Roz, respectively. Zenia has given each woman a
different version of her biography, tailor-made to insinuate herself into their
lives. No one version of Zenia is the truth, and the reader knows no more
than the characters.
Their betrayals by Zenia are what initially bring the three together as friends,
and bind their lives together irrevocably; their monthly luncheons began
after her funeral. The novel, like other works by Atwood, deals with power
struggles between men and women; it is also a meditation on the nature of
friendship, power, and trust between women. Zenia's character can be read
as either the ultimate self-empowered woman, a traitor who abuses
sisterhood, or simply a self-interested mercenary who cunningly uses the
'war between the sexes' to further her own interests. One reading posits
Zenia as a kind of guardian angel to the women, saving them from unworthy
men.
• Atwood claims that of all the characters she has written,
she identifies most "with Zenia. She is the professional
liar, and what else do fiction writers do but create lies
that other people will believe?"
• In the novel's present, Roz, Charis, and Tony finally each
individually confront Zenia in a Toronto hotel room,
where she tells each of them that the men they'd been
with got what they deserved, and gives various versions
of her earlier staged death, each as implausible as the
accounts of her life. One of the four women never leaves
that hotel alive. The novel itself leaves the reader
questioning who was (or were) the victim(s) of life.
The Blind Assassin
• THE BLIND ASSASSIN (2000) is about two sisters, one of whom,
Laura Chase, dies in a car accident in 1945 under ambiguous
circumstances. Two years later the body of Richard E. Griffen, a
prominent industrialist, is found dead. And in 1975 Aimee Griffen
dies of a broken neck. The only person who knows the
circumstances behind these deaths is Iris Chase Griffen, Laura's
elder sister, Richard's wife, Aimee's mother. The richly layered story
then continues as a novel within a novel, using an excerpt from
Laura Chase's novella, The Blind Assassin, posthumously published
in 1947. It deals with an affair between a wealthy young woman and
her lover, a radical on the run for. "I look back back over what I've
written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I've set down, but
because of what I've omitted. What isn't there has a presence, like
the absence of light." Much of the action consists of a fantasy,
improvised by the man, in which child carpet weavers, blinded by
the work, find new work as assassins.
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The novel centres around the
protagonist, Iris Chase, and her sister
Laura, who committed suicide
immediately after the Second World
War. Iris, now an old woman, recalls the
events and relationships of her
childhood, youth and middle age, as
well as her unhappy marriage to
Richard Griffen, a rival of her
industrialist father.
As the novel unfolds, and the novelwithin-a-novel becomes ever more
obviously inspired by real events, it
becomes clear that Laura's novel isn't
what it seems; it is eventually revealed
that Iris herself, not Laura, was the
novel-within-a-novel's author and
protagonist.
• The book is set in the fictional Ontario town of
Port Ticonderoga and in the Toronto of the
1930s and 1940s. It is a work of historical fiction
with the major events of Canadian history
forming an important backdrop to the novel.
Greater verisimilitude is given through a series
of newspaper articles that comment on events
and on the novel's characters from a distance.
The Blind Assassin (Quote)
• “I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life
swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the
pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you,
every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them,
so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as
precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your
skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to
you, everything that made you cringe and wish to
conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and
must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack
flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright
fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of
secrets used to be inside you?” (448)
The Blind Assassin earned Atwood in 2000 the Booker Prize, Britain's top literary
award for fiction.
Life before Man
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Atwood's fiction is often symbolic. She
has moved easily between satire and
fantasy, and enlarged the boundaries of
traditional realism. Her fourth novel, LIFE
BEFORE MAN (1979), presented a bleak,
harsh view of human life in which
marriage is a vanishing way of life.
The novel has three main characters,
Nate, Elizabeth and Lesje. Nate and
Elizabeth are an unhappily married
couple, and are both having extramarital
affairs. Lesje is Nate's lover and a
coworker of Elizabeth's; Elizabeth's lover,
Chris, has just committed suicide. Lesje is
of Ukrainian ancestry.
All three of the main characters are
narrators. Each chapter presents events
from one character's perspective.
Elizabeth and Lesje both work in the
museum of natural history. Lesje, a
paleontologist, is fascinated by dinosaurs
giving the book its title.
Onyx and Crake
• ORYX & CRAKE (2003) is a love
triangle story set in the near-future
world, where human beings have all
but destroyed the planet.
• The book critically examines
developments in science and
technology such as
xenotransplantation and genetic
engineering, particularly the creation
of transgenic animals such as
"wolvogs" (hybrids between wolves
and dogs), "rakunks" (racoon and
skunk), and "pigoons" (pigs and
baboons, for organ transplants). If
progress continues unchecked — the
world warms, multinationals prosper,
society schisms and science stays
one small leap ahead of morality how will humanity adapt?
•
• "Yet for all Atwood's imaginative powers, her meticulous
research, her clever literary allusions to Defoe, Swift and
H G Wells, and her satire, this is an unsatisfactory novel
which fails to engage the reader fully." (Catherine
Pepinster in The Independent, 1 June 2003)
• Some reviewers labelled the work as science fiction, but
Atwood herself considered it speculative fiction. "Had I
written it 20 years ago, I would have called it science
fiction," she said in an interview, "but now it's speculative
fiction, believe me."
• Margaret Atwood has
been politically active in
PEN and in Amnesty
International. She has
lived for years on a
farm near Alliston,
Ontario, with her
second husband, the
writer Graeme Gibson
and their daughter.
• Atwood's work has
been regarded as a
barometer of feminist
thought. Her
protagonists are often a
kind of 'everywoman'
characters, or weaker
members of society.
Several of Atwood's
novels can be classified
as science fiction,
although her writing is
above the normal
formulae of the genre.
On the responsabilities of the poet
• No one made you do this,
This fooling with syllables
and hurt,
This rolling naked in
thistles
And sticking your tongue
on to nails.
You could have been a
bricklayer.
You could have been a
dentist.
Hard-shelled. Impervious.
("Poetry Reading" )
http://www.owtoad.com/
• Pic: Margaret
Atwood
2007 National
Book Festival
Breakfast
at The White
House
Washington, DC 29.09.07