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Margaret (Eleanor) Atwood (1939-) |
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Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, noted for her feminism and mythological themes. Margaret 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. "You have good bones, they used to say, and I paid no attention. What did I care about good bones, then? I was more concerned with what was covering them. I was more concerned with lust, and pimples. The bones were backdrop. " (in Good Bones by Margaret Atwood, Toronto: Coach House Press, 1992) Margared Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada, the second of three
children. He father, Carl Atwood, was a forest entomologist, and her
mother, Margaret Killam, a nutritionist. Part of her early years Atwood
spent in the bush of northern Quebec, where her father undertook
research. "Certainly writing and art were not the foremost topics of
daily conversation in Canada when I was born -
in 1939, two and a half months after the outbreak of World War II",
Atwood has said. "People had other things on their minds, and even if
they hadn't, they wouldn't have been thinking about writers." Later
Atwood's childhood experiences gave material to her metaphorical use of
the wilderness and its animals in Wilderness Tips
(1991). Since her childhood, Atwood has been fond of cats; felines have
found their way into her stories as well. In the fable 'Our Cat Enters
Heaven' in The Tent (2006) God is conceived as a cat with elegant long whiskers. "Meow, said God." In 1946 Atwood's family moved to Toronto, the scene of several of her works. Atwood started to attended school full-time at the age of eleven. After graduating from Leaside High School in 1959, Atwood studied at the University of Toronto, where she met the literary critic Northrop Fry; his myth criticism and Jungian ideas influenced her deeply. She won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and 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.' For a period she worked for a market-research company in Toronto and taught English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (1964-65). Atwood has held a variety of academic posts and has been writer-in-residence at numerous Canadian and American universities. In 1967, she married James Polk, an American postgraduate student at Harvard; they divorced in 1973. Atwood had a daughter with the novelist Graeme Gibson, who died in September 2019. Dearly: New Poems (2020) was dedicated to her partner of more than 40 years: "For Graeme, in absentia". As a writer Atwood made her debut at the age of 19 with Double Persephone (1961), a collection of poems on the mythologigal figure of Persephone. Her privately printed book won the E.J. Pratt medal. Another early collection, The Circle Game (1964, rev. in 1966), marked by Gothic imagery, 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. 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." Atwood's early feminist treatise, The Edible Woman
(1969), was both funny and terrifying story about a young woman, who
works for a consumer company, and stops eating after becoming engaged. The Handmaid's Tale (1985) was a dystopia, influenced by Orwell's classic 1984.
Atwood started writing the book in 1984, continued with it in the
divided Berlin and finished the work in deeply conservative Alabama. The story is 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
narrator, Offred, is a "handmaid", valued for her ovaries. She is one
of the few women whose reproductive systems have survived the chemical
pollution and radiation from power plants. At the end she gets into a
van that will either take her "into the darkness within; or else the
light." Although Offred's fate is left uncertain in the novel, an
epilogue narrated by a professor delivering a lecture in 2195 implies
that Gilead eventually collapses. The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States boosted the sales of the book, which topped Amazon's bestseller list in 2017. Atwood has said that The Handmaid's Tale was inspired by her studies of the 17th-century puritan values. Trump has been criticized for his degrading remarks towards women. Following
the critical success of the TV adaptation, Atwood began to toy
seriously with the idea of writing a sequel. However, this long-awaited work, entitled The Testaments (2019), set 15 years after Offred's final scene, is not connected to the television series. In Volker Schlöndorff's film version from 1990 the protagonist, Kate / Offred, becomes an active revolutionary who finally
cuts the throat of her owner. However, in Atwood's book Offred's weapon is irony and
keen observation - she keeps a secret
diary. Moreover, Atwood often uses a first-person narrator, whose
pespective is limited. "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." (in 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. The screenplay was
written by Harold Pinter, who invented a new ending to show her
strength of will and courage to resist oppression. At the time Pinter
was writing the script he had a number of other tasks, and could not
develop it further. He suggested that Schlöndorff consult with Atwood
about changes and revisions. Dissatisfied with the final shooting
script Pinter even thought that he would not publish the
screenplay. Bruce Miller's television adaptation based on the novel, which premiered in April 2017, won five Emmy awards including Outstanding Drama Series, and the 2018 Golden Globe for Best TV Series in the Drama category. Atwood served as a consulting producer on the series. Due to Miller's decision to place the story closer to the present day, Atwood had one of most intense conversations with the production team. Moreover, the novel had only white characters. "I wanted our audience to be able to relate to the world of the show," Miller argued, "and to exclude people of color is leaving so much of our audience out." ('Balm Gilead?' by Anna Menta, Newsweek, 11.05.2018, p. 43) The second season went further beyond the confines of the book. Reflecting the huge following of the TV show, the most fashionable protesters across the world have dressed in the Handmaid's Tale costumes, the red cloaks and white bonnets, as a symbol of female oppression. Atwood herself was not involved in developing the costumes. They were designed by Ane Crabtree, who took her inspiration from various sources. "The dress shape came from a knit dress that everyone was wearing when I was at school in the Eighties, but the fluidity was inspired by a priest I sketched in the Duomo di Milano in 2001." ('The Handmaid’s Tale Costume Designer On Dressing Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia' by Alice Newbold, Vogue, 16 Jul 2017) In Cat's Eye (1989) Atwood exchanged the futuristic world of Gilead for the real world, which however is also very puritanical and rigid. The story tells of a Canadian painter, Elaine, who returns to Toronto and explorers her lost childhood. The title of the book comes from her self-portrait, called 'Unified Field Theory,' in which she holds a cat's eye marble with a blue center. Cats see better than humans at night; Elaine tries to see through the darkness of forgotten memories into her own life. "It is a novel of images, nightmarish, evocative, heartbreaking and mundane, that taken together offer us not a retrospective but an addition: a new work entirely and Margaret Atwood's most emotionally engaging fiction thus far." ('What Little Girls Are Made Of' by Alice McDermott, The New York Times, February 5, 1989) Alias Grace (1996) used a genuine 19th-century criminal case of Grace Marks, one of the most notorious women in Canada. Grace, a servant, 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 had escaped 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. The Blind Assassin (2000) was 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 postmodern 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. Atwood's novel earned her in 2000 the Booker Prize, Britain's top literary award for fiction. Atwood's fiction is often symbolic. She has moved easily between satire and fantasy, and enlarged the boundaries of traditional realism. Her first and third novels were comic, the fourth, Life Before Man (1979), presented a bleak, harsh view of human life in which marriage is a wanishing way of life. Oryx and Crake
(2003) was a love triangle set in the near-future world, where human
beings have all but destroyed the planet. "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." There is no happy future for
the humankind Atwood also predicts in The Year of the Flood (2009), set in an apocalyptic landscape of Oryx and Crake. Atwood's dystopian trilogy concluded with MaddAddam (2013).
Atwood has been politically active in PEN International and in Amnesty
International. She has lived since 1973 on a farm near Alliston,
Ontario, with the writer Graeme Gibson and their daughter. Atwood has
been appointed Honorary Doctor at several universities worldwide. In
1993 she was named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts and des Lettres by
Government of France. The 2019 Booker Prize – and the prize money of £50,000 – was split between Margaret Atwood for The Testament and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. According to the rules of Great Britain's most prestigious literary award, the prize "may not be divided or withheld". For further reading: Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood by S. Grace (1979); The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in criticism, ed. by A.E. Davidson and C.N. Davidson (1980); Margaret Atwood: Language, Text and System, ed. by S. Grace and L. Weir (1983) ; Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics by F. Davey (1984); Margaret Atwood by J. Rosenberg (1984); Romantic Imprisonment by Nina Auerbach (1985); Margaret Atwood by Jerome H. Rosenberg (1984); Margaret Atwood by Barbara Hill Rigney (1987); Critical Essays on Margaret Arwood, ed. by I. McCombs (1988); Margaret Atwood: Conversations, ed. by Earl Ingersoll (1990); Strategies fo Identity by Eleonora Rao (1993); Margret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, ed. by Colin Nicholson (1994); Margaret Atwood by Coral Ann Howells (1996); Margaret Atwood: A Biography by Nathalie Cooke (1998) Margaret Atwood Revisited by Karen F. Stein (1999); The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood by Coral Ann Howells (2006); Margaret Atwood's Apocalypses, edited by Karma Waltonen (2015); Margaret Atwood's Voices and Representations: from Poetry to Tweets by Christine Evain (2015); Margaret Atwood, Crime Fiction Writer: the Reworking of a Popular Genre by Jackie Shead (2015); Comparative North American Studies: Transnational Approaches to American and Canadian Literature and Culture by Reingard M. Nischik (2016); Apocalyptic Fiction by Andrew Tate (2017); The Fiction of Margaret Atwood by Fiona Tolan (2022) Selected works:
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