Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is one of
Canada's most well-known and
celebrated writers.
She debuted in 1966 with the
Governor-General's Awardwinning The Circle Game.
Since then, she has produced
at least a dozen books per
decade, including more poetry,
criticism, and children's books.
She is probably best known,
though, for her novels,
including The Handmaid's
Tale, which haveachieved an
international readership in
more than thirty languages.

1

Northrop Frye

1965 Literary History of Canada: Suggested that
Canada had enough literature to have a history
Frye’s “Conclusion”: defining characteristics of
CanLit:
• Old Testament sense of justice and fate
• “a tone of deep horror in regard to nature”
• A sense of difficulty in coming to speech
(“Strangledarticulateness”)
• “garrison mentality”
1971: The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian
Imagination
Thematic movement in Canadian criticism:
• D.G. Jones’ Butterfly on Rock: A Study of themes and
Images in Canadian Literature (1970)
• Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to
Canadian Literature (1972
• John Moss’ Patterns of Isolation in English Canadian 2

Late 1960s: intensenationalism

• 1967: Canadian Centennial--Montreal Expo:
celebration of the nation’s first century
• Intensification of anti-Americanism:
rejection of U.S race riots, it’s involvement
in Vietnam.
• New Canadian writers
• “Canadian Content” enters
 The teaching curriculum
 The media

• New Canadian publishing ventures: The
House of Anansi Press enlists young
Margaret Atwood to publish ateaching
guide for all the new instructors of
Canadian literature

3

Margaret Atwood’s Survival

• A student of Frye’s at the University of Toronto
• Garrison thesis and survival as central to the
Canadian Character and to Canadian Literature—
not heroic endurance but the continuing
experience of victimhood.
• Victimhood as a result, not of environment, but
of Canada’s politicalsituation
• Best-selling work of Canadian criticism despite the
negative characterization of Canadians
• Atwood found her work affirmative: identifiable
literary tradition, capable of sustaining further
literary production
• Both literature and literary criticism can enable a
culture to be self-conscious and self-reflexive, and
to decide what it wants to become: agents of
social change
4mid-1970s:

reaction against Frye-influenced thematicism

• Ideological questions underlay the literary
critical ones
• Discomfort in Canada about the concept of
nation (Frye: centripetal forces drawing the
nation together)
• Emphasis on the centrifugal forces drawing
away from the center—internal anticolonialism:



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Powerful regionalism
Urban-rural tension
ImmigrationMulticulturalism as an official state policy
5

Voice and Themes

Remarkably distinctive voice:
• Witty
• Self-ironic
• Politically and morally engaged

Major thematic preocupations:

• Gender politics
• Representation of women’s lives, their bodies, and
their fantasies
• Questions of Canada’s identity
• Canada’s international relations
• Human rights
6
• Environmental concernsthemes in Atwood’s novels
1. The Gothic:
Major

(from Cuder)

• Mystery (corpse); narrators obsessed with the past;
death; characters’ sensation of danger
• Clues to solve the mystery (Manuscripts, inscriptions)
• Behind the mysteries there’s usually a male villain,
holding the strings of other people’s lives: endowed with
authority they have power over women only until womenrealize that it is their passivity that grants men their power
• Gothic settings: Familiar settings turn unfamiliar
•
•

Outdoors: Nature as menacing and hostile (lakes as
unsafe and hiding some mystery underwater despite their
calm surfaces)
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Indoors: Claustrophobic buildings (prisons, asylums…)

themes in Atwood’s novels (from Cuder)
2. Women’s stories, women’s bodies:
Major

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