Atwood as Literary and Cultural Critic
ATWOOD AS CRITIC
For such a prolific writer of fiction and poetry, Margaret Atwood has an astonishingly large output of expository prose on diverse literary, cultural, and political issues to her credit. She is a poeta doctus if ever there was one. Her expository prose extends from reviews of literary texts and introductions to her own works and those by other authors, via statements on politics such as US-Canadian relations and human rights, to lecture series on the myth of the North in Canadian literature and culture, on the concept of debt in human history and culture, as well as on writing and the position of the writer.
By now, her literary and cultural criticism encompasses seven books ranging over four decades. With the best-selling Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood catapulted CanLit and, as it turned out, herself onto the literary map. Written in the vein of Northrop Frye’s myth criticism, the often-quoted survey of Canadian literature is an important document of thematic criticism. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982) is the first of two collections of critical prose, this one covering the period from 1960 to 1982. The second such collection, Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004 (2004), picks up the thread from the earlier collection and covers the following two decades into the twenty-first century. In between, Atwood published three critical books with unified themes: Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995), In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Historical Fiction (1997), and Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002). Her latest book in this genre, also devoted to a unified theme, is Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008).
Considering the range of Atwood’s critical oeuvre and her status and influence, rather little significant criticism has so far been published on her expository prose, with critical responses mainly framed in reviews of the individual works or briefly scattered in books and articles. The most useful of the few more extensive contributions are those by Walter Pache (2000/02)—the most substantial and up-to-date evaluation—and by George Woodcock (1981), as well as the relevant chapters in Jerome H. Rosenberg (1984) and Barbara Hill Rigney (1987), though they date back more than twenty years. So does a review by William Keith (1983), which is mainly negative in its evaluations of Atwood as critic, partly also because Keith does not seem to appreciate her sense of humour in serious analytical contexts. Neither does he give her the benefit of the doubt when Atwood herself has insisted that she is, by her own choice, first and foremost a writer of literature and a critic only from necessity or, rather, from moral and “national” obligation. In the four-page introduction to Second Words, she ruminates on her motivations for turning to criticism in the first place, which she calls a “rescue operation” in Canada at the time:
When I began writing and first discovered that there were other people writing in Canada, it was fairly clear that unless some writers reviewed Canadian books, some of the time, they wouldn’t get reviewed at all. That has changed a great deal, but ... occasionally I may review a book, still, just to get it reviewed, or, because I feel it’s been badly treated or misunderstood. ... Book reviews seem to me one of the dues you pay for being a writer, especially in Canada. (12)
Atwood also claims that her gender has been a reason for people inviting her to write critical prose, be it in the form of reviews, essays, or speeches: “Even in the 1980’s I’m still being approached by groups who say I just have to do it because this or that august body has never had a woman before (as they’re fond of putting it). ... Sometimes it’s a writer, and sometimes, even and especially in Canada, it’s a Canadian. Sometimes it’s all three” (13). Other motivations for her critical activities are what can be called self-expressive and self-educative, even self-revelatory: “I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me” (15). Atwood calls book reviews “the most difficult form for me” and characterizes the critical essay as “more like talking to yourself. It’s a way, too, of finding out what you really think” (13).
In the introduction to Moving Targets, written more than twenty years after the introduction to Second Words, Atwood reviews her critical practices and confirms them. She produces most of these “pieces written for special occasions” (1) on invitation, rarely on her own initiative. She states that these texts feel “so much like homework” (3) to her that she shelves them for as long as possible and writes them mostly from a sense of duty: “Those who are reviewed must review in their turn or the principle of reciprocity fails” (3). Increasingly, at this later stage in her career (in which she has advanced from “being world-famous in Canada to being world-famous, sort of, in the way that writers are” [5]), she has written these texts for worthy causes such as fundraising: “I have a difficult time resisting such lend-a-hand appeals” (1). It again becomes obvious that Atwood much prefers her literary writing and that her much-sought-after critical activities are dutiful, obliging tasks done on request. And it is obvious that a writer with the intellectual, verbal, and personal appeal of Atwood must have turned down many more offers than she has accepted. Being free to choose—“It’s a great luxury not to be a professional full-time reviewer: I’m at liberty to close books that don’t seize hold of me” (4)— she speaks or writes only on issues truly relevant to her: “Why Moving Targets? ... One, ... I can’t write about subjects for which I feel nothing. Thus moving” (5). The other meaning of “moving” in the context suggests that the subjects of her critical writings are not stationary, even if, as she claims, “my interests have remained fairly constant, although I like to pretend their scope has broadened somewhat” (3).
ATWOOD’S CRITICAL WRITING AND GENDER
One of these “fairly constant interests” and nevertheless a “moving target” for her critical pursuits has been the issue of gender, especially the role of women in both society and literature and the significance of being a woman writer. On all these aspects, Atwood writes with her usual wit, humour, and gift for language, her astute mind, and, of course, her first-hand experience.
I will start my thematic analysis of the relevance of gender in Atwood’s expository prose with Second Words since—though published ten years after Survival—its initial thirteen selected contributions of Part I (1960–71) first appeared in print in the years before Survival. They go back to her student years at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where Atwood co-edited and contributed to Acta Victoriana, the literary journal of Victoria College: “A handful of us, all in black, not only edited the magazine but practically wrote the whole thing, under pseudonyms and otherwise” (19). In this early phase of her critical activities, she reviewed Canadian books exclusively (see the quotation above concerning criticism as a “rescue operation”). Any potential naive prejudice about Atwood as a woman writer being partial to books written by women is thwarted right from the beginning—in her early phase, the vast majority of the books she reviewed were written by male authors. Her earliest critical activities may concern practically the only books she reviewed on her own initiative, yet even then, after her first successes as a poet and a writer of fiction before the publication of Survival in 1972, she wrote reviews at the request of the editors of Alphabet, Canadian Literature, and Poetry.
Of the thirteen texts of Part I of Second Words, only two are of some interest to a gender-conscious reading of Atwood’s criticism: the earliest review (of 1961) on the collected poems by Margaret Avison, written for Acta Victoriana, and an article of 1970 on Gwendolyn MacEwen’s poetry, written for Canadian Literature (then edited by George Woodcock). The earlier text refers to Avison the poet repeatedly as “Miss Avison,” a gender-asymmetrical kind of address that came to be criticized by the Women’s Movement in the following decade (see my analysis of such forms of address and their development in Atwood’s novels in chapter 4). Atwood also addresses one of the best-known gender clichés (still) around, the housewife accomplished only at non-expert, non-demanding activities: “If one praises a poet’s descriptive powers, one risks conveying the image of a housewife cooking up a poem ... by applying adjectives to an object like icing to a cake, with the same result: if one swallows much of it, one feels a little ill” (22). If in these early few instances Atwood shows herself to be a product of her times, rather than working against problematic mainstream phenomena, as she tends to do later on, we need to remember that this review was written by a twenty-two-year-old student literarily already accomplished if not precocious. In her article on MacEwen’s poetry for Canadian Literature, “MacEwen’s Muse,” Atwood explains to what extent MacEwen’s “muse” is clearly a male one. Atwood herself, in contrast, when asked in 1993 whether her muse was male or female, replied: “Oh, she’s a woman” (cited in Sullivan 1998, 37; on this, see also Nischik 2007).
The seventeen reviews and articles of Part II of Second Words were first published in the four years between 1972 and 1976, 1972 being the year in which Survival appeared. As Atwood herself explains in Second Words,
Having written an expository work about Canadian literature, I was suddenly called upon to produce yet more expositions of my exposition. ...
This was also a period in which I was asked to review a number of books by women ... “women” had now become a subject. I began to get worried about the possibility of a new ghetto: women’s books reviewed only by women, men’s books reviewed only by men, with a corresponding split in the readership. It wasn’t what one had in mind as a desirable future for the species.
It’s in this period too that I began to get requests for reviews from publications other than Canadian ones. (105–06)
Indeed, in this period, as many as nine of the eleven books reviewed by Atwood were written by female authors, most of them American: Adrienne Rich (three book reviews), Audrey Thomas (two book reviews), Erica Jong, Kate Millett, Marie-Claire Blais, and Marge Piercy; in the following period, the years 1977–82 of Part III of Second Words, the ratio was still more than half in favour of female writers, again most of them American: Atwood reviewed books by Anne Sexton, Tillie Olsen, Sylvia Plath, Ann Beattie, Jay Macpherson, and Nadine Gordimer. These writers, of course, may be counted as more or less gender-conscious authors and, with the exception of Plath, as part of or sympathetic to the Women’s Movement, which was making itself heard at the time against centuries-old traditions of male voices.
It was also in these ten years between 1972 and 1982 that several essays by Atwood on the special problem of being a woman writer in Canada first appeared, which may be regarded as classic statements on the issue: “On Being a ‘Woman Writer’: Paradoxes and Dilemmas,” “The Curse of Eve: Or, What I Learned in School,” and “Writing the Male Character.”1 In an immediate review of Second Words, John W. MacDonald (1982) rightly calls these three essays “real masterpieces of essay writing—thoughtful, wise and witty ... filled with illuminations of a very serious kind.”
“On Being a ‘Woman Writer’: Paradoxes and Dilemmas” (1976) starts out by focusing on Atwood’s own aversion to writing on this topic and indeed derives “illuminating” thoughts from this aversion. Atwood states first of all the drawbacks of writers’ involvement in political movements of any sort (including the Women’s Movement): “Their involvement may be good for the movement, but it has yet to be demonstrated that it’s good for the writer” (190). Pleading for the writer’s independence from any such allegiances, she goes on to comment on the individual female writer’s potential stances toward the Women’s Movement: those female writers who had made it by that time (e.g., Atwood) might feel “grudging admiration, tempered with envy” (191), because they had had to fight against earlier sexual/gender discrimination practically on their own. Atwood also mentions the memory of guilty feelings and the (self-)indictment of gender “abnormality” (191) when they tried to set aside time for their writing (by necessity often at night), thereby acting against the essentialist, biological view of women that restricts them to the role of wife, mother, homemaker. She concludes that “These writers, if they are honest, don’t want to be wrongly identified as the children of a movement that did not give birth to them. Being adopted is not the same as being born” (192). As a third kind of reservation against being incorporated into the Women’s Movement, Atwood mentions her dread of implied restrictions on the writer’s imaginative creativity, potentially postulated as a one-dimensional conformity to a particular ideological position by which writerly achievements might be judged. Atwood adds perceptively, “However, a feminist criticism need not necessarily be one-dimensional. And ... no matter how narrow, purblind and stupid such a criticism in its lowest manifestations may be, it cannot possibly be more narrow, purblind and stupid than some of the non-feminist critical attitudes and styles that have preceded it” (192).
Another stance adopted by women writers that Atwood observes is the “phenomenon of the member of a despised social group who manages to transcend the limitations imposed on the group, at least enough to become ‘successful,’ ... to dissociate him/herself from the group and to side with its implicit opponents” (192). Evidence of this may be the claims of successful women that they have never had any career hindrances based on gender. Atwood concludes that “Such a woman tends to regard herself, and to be treated by her male [and, one might add, sometimes also female] colleagues, as a sort of honorary man. ... ‘You think like a man,’ she is told, with admiration and unconscious put-down” (193). Being accepted on false terms in such a context implies denigration not only of the individual but also of the whole group she is part of and helps to define. Atwood puts her finger on the “traditionally incompatible notions of ‘woman’ and ‘good at something’” (193); one might also think of the still almost insurmountable, deeply ingrained hindrances established for highly competent female politicians who grasp at positions of important leadership, with the truly denigrating statements clearly attached mainly or even exclusively to the female sex.2
Atwood eventually turns to an analysis of gendered reviewing practices that she noticed over the years, based in part on a project she was involved with at York University in 1971–72. Her findings are, among others, that in many reviews of books authored by women, the author’s sex is made an issue of, as in comments “on the cute picture of the (female) author on the cover, coupled with dismissal of her as a writer” (199). A further “essentializing” is the frequent attribution of a “feminine” style to women writers, considered to be “vague, weak, ... ‘subjective,’ ... ‘confessional,’ ... ‘personal,’ or even ‘narcissistic’ and ‘neurotic’” (197). A crasser form of what one might call a biological or even sexual approach to reviewing occurs when works by male writers are appreciatively described as having “balls.” Atwood counters provocatively: “Ever hear anyone speak admiringly of work by a woman as having ‘tits’?” She sarcastically continues: “Possible antidotes: Development of a ‘good/female’ vocabulary (‘Wow, has that ever got Womb ... ’)” (198). And, as so often, after such a sarcastic challenge, she clinches the argument in a serious manner: “preferably, 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” (198).
Other gendered strategies that put down the writing of female authors are the focus on and the diminishment of their supposed “domestic themes,” while ignoring other themes in the book (“when a man writes about things like doing the dishes, it’s realism; when a woman does, it’s an unfortunate feminine genetic limitation” [199]), or an exclusive attention to content, eclipsing the aesthetic quality of the writing. With regard to interviews and media stereotypes about female writers, the results are similar. Interviewers, Atwood finds at the time, tend to be more interested in the author’s life than in her work, in the idea of writing as a hobby rather than a serious profession for women; they assume that female writers are “crazy freak[s] ... Suicidal Sylvia” (201, 200) or that they are mere spokeswomen for a movement—such as Women’s Lib or Canadian nationalism—not inventive, independently thinking writers in their own right. Drawing the sums of her observations first published in 1976—in the decade that saw a blooming of writing by women in North America—Atwood feels bound to conclude that “The woman writer, then, exists in a society that, though it may turn certain individual writers into revered cult objects, has little respect for writing as a profession, and not much respect for women either. If there were more of both, articles like this would be obsolete. I hope they become so” (204).
Because of its yet more fundamental orientation, “The Curse of Eve: Or, What I Learned in School” (1978) is probably even more topical today than the previously discussed essay, which focuses mainly on gendered principles and prejudices in reviewing and interviewing. “The Curse of Eve” could/should be required reading not only in literature classes interested in gender differences but also in political science or sociology classes or in any contexts in which the status of woman and man is at stake.3 Atwood in this essay traces different evaluative patterns concerning women and men back to gender-biased socialization and to the deeply ingrained ways gender has been handled in literature over the centuries, by both male and female writers.
Atwood again begins by pointing out that, when she grew up, the public sphere was clearly reserved for men, the domestic sphere for women (“I was asked by one of my professors whether I really wanted to go to graduate school ... wouldn’t I rather get married?” [215]). She then turns to the question of representation of women and men in literature: “When writing about women, what constitutes success? Is success even plausible? Why, for instance, did George Eliot, herself a successful female writer, never compose a story with a successful female writer as the central character?” (218). The answer, of course, is that female writers, too, are part of their cultural context and upbringing as well as victims of a kind of indoctrination from their social context (“the media, books, films, radios, television and newspapers, from home and school, and from the culture at large, the body of received opinion” [219]). This “body of received opinion” essentializes women into fixed entities, with women usually getting the negative or at least non-dynamic end of the contrastive gender definitions:
Passive helpless men are aberrations; passive women within the range of the norm. But powerful, or at any rate active, heroes ... are seen as the fulfillment of a human ideal; whereas powerful women, and there are many of them in literature, are usually given a supernatural aura. They are witches, Wonder Women or Grendel’s mothers. They are monsters.4 They are not quite human. (223)
Powerful women, because they do not match their received gender roles, are considered not only “not quite human” but also non-feminine. Wonder Woman, the female comic-book creation of male cartoonists, loses her “superhuman” strength when kissed by her boyfriend (223, 224). That, for a woman, being good at something often involves the sacrifice of “femininity” can be seen with many female writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Atwood ironically suggests the received opinion in connection with Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton: “These women were writers, true, but they were somehow not women, or if they were women, they were not good women. They were bad role models, or so their biographies implied” (225). Having to choose between professional writing and personal happiness, between being successful at work and being allowed to keep up one’s gender identity, is a choice presenting itself only to female, not male, writers. Atwood concludes that
It is more difficult for a woman writer in this society than for a male writer. But not because of any innate mysterious hormonal or spiritual differences: it is more difficult because it has been made more difficult, and the stereotypes still lurk in the wings, ready to spring fully formed from the heads of critics, both male and female. ... Women are still expected to be better than men, morally that is, even by women, ... and if you are not an angel, if you happen to have human failings, as most of us do, especially if you display any kind of strength or power, creative or otherwise, then you are not merely human, you’re worse than human. You are a witch, a Medusa, a destructive, powerful, scary monster. (226)
Atwood argues that women, just like men both inside and outside literature, “must be allowed their imperfections” (227), without this resulting in their general damnation. They must also be regarded as individuals, just as men are, rather than first and foremost as typical representatives of their (downgraded or idolized) gender: “Perhaps it is time to take the capital W off Woman” (227). Atwood realizes along the way that she herself is, of course, part of these social gender negotiations: “Even I may judge women more harshly than I do men; after all, they were responsible for Original Sin, or that is what I learned in school” (228).
In “Writing the Male Character” (1982), Atwood again shows such prejudiced treatment and evaluation of the two sexes at work in her own metier and according to her own experiences: “We’re handing out black marks for what male critics (and, to be fair, some female ones) consider to be unfavourable depictions of men by female authors” (418). She argues that men are not better human beings than women and that it is therefore not objectionable if the female novelist “depicts men behaving the way they do behave a lot of the time” (419). She also argues that, both with male and with female characters, those with pronounced weaknesses or moral stains are the most challenging and interesting characters for writers to construct and that the most obnoxious male characters have been created by male writers:
Is Hamlet, for instance, a slur on men? Is Macbeth? Is Faust, in any version? How about the behaviour of the men in Moll Flanders? Or Tom Jones? Is A Sentimental Journey about the quintessential wimp? [The list goes on.] Please note that all these characters ... were the creations of men, not women; but nobody, to my knowledge, has accused these male authors of being mean to men. ... If a man depicts a male character unfavourably, it’s The Human Condition; if a woman does it, she’s being mean to men. ... Woman authors have historically been easier on men in their books than male authors have. (421–22)
Again Atwood redresses the gender imbalance, pointing out prejudiced, slanted evaluations of the writer’s craft based on gender.
Her second collection of criticism, Moving Targets (2004), covers a selection of her critical writings first published in the years 1982–2004. In this period, some of Atwood’s great novels foregrounding gender appeared: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), and Alias Grace (1996). In her critical works of these two decades, there seems to be less focus on gender issues than in the earlier period covered by Second Words. Then, too, the book reviews accepted by Atwood during the later period are rather balanced between books written by male and female writers.5 Yet there are also a few essays in Moving Targets that are specifically involved with gender. In fact, gender does remain an issue sprinkled throughout the book, and the broadening of Atwood’s range throughout the decades becomes apparent also in her statements on gender issues in this collection of her expository prose.
An important, illuminating contribution is Atwood’s autobiographical essay “Great Aunts” written for the book Family Portraits: Remembrances by Twenty Distinguished Writers (see Anthony 1989). This essay can be read as a non-fictional companion piece to Atwood’s resonant short story “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” (which I analyzed elsewhere; see Nischik 2007) in that it makes clear the dominant female family impact on Atwood in the formative period of her life, extending from grandmother to aunts. Although the Atwood inner family circle consisted also of grandfather, father, and two uncles, they are only briefly and factually mentioned: it was Atwood’s mother and grandmother and, according to this essay, especially her two aunts who had the most important influence on the budding writer. The mother, as in “Significant Moments,” is the model narrator, mainly of family stories, for the daughter: “They [the aunts] were even more alive in my mother’s stories, for, although she was no poet, my mother was a raconteur and deadly mimic. The characters in her stories about ‘home’ became as familiar to me as characters in books” (76). Her mother’s stories were also Atwood’s first lesson in reading between the lines (78), indirectly teaching her the art of omission and suggestion.
In her relationship with the world outside the family, especially the writer’s world, her two aunts seem to have been important mediators. Aunt J. (Joyce Barkhouse), author of five books and children’s stories, took the eighteen-year-old Margaret to her first writers’ conference (by the Canadian Authors Association in 1958). The aunts also took Atwood on a “literary outing” (80) to visit Canadian writer Ernest Buckler in the early 1970s—that is, around the time when Atwood was already becoming better known than Buckler was. Indeed, the aunts always seem to support her: “‘That was something! He said you had a teeming brain!’” (82). Together with the mother’s sometimes unconventional behaviour (“‘Do what you think is right, no matter what other people think,’” [83]), the aunts provide an alternative model to received notions of womanhood such as modesty and politeness (“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” [83]6) or marriage as women’s only, practically compulsory, life option (79). They introduce a culture of writing into their family (“The three sisters wrote one another every week, and my mother read these letters out loud” [75]) and encourage Atwood in her early writing endeavours in various ways: “Aunt J. showed me his [an English professor’s] letter, beaming with pleasure. This was my first official encouragement” (73). Aunt J., the literary minded, is indeed the one young Atwood showed her poems to, not her mother, and the aunt took her ambition seriously (“She read them and did not laugh” [73]). Aunt K. was the one “who had told me something everyone else had forgotten, including myself: that I had announced, at the age of five, that I was going to be a writer” (81).
The end of the essay forms the climax of Atwood’s expression of gratitude toward her two aunts. The virulence of gender-role socialization even in the context of such a relatively unconventional family becomes apparent when Atwood, upon the appearance of her “first real book” (83), dreads disapproval by her family:
I suppose any person, but especially any woman, who takes up writing has felt, especially at first, that she was doing it against a huge largely unspoken pressure, the pressure of expectation and decorum. This pressure is most strongly felt, by women, from within the family, and more so when the family is a strong unit. ... I didn’t worry much about my father and mother, who had gracefully survived several other eccentricities of mine. ... Instead, I worried about my aunts. (83)
This singling out of the aunts probably occurs because they seemed to be more into writing than Atwood’s parents and therefore in a better, more accepted, position to judge her literary product. The end of the essay is particularly moving, not only brilliantly conceived and written but also with noteworthy indirect comments on gender roles and the importance of a female supportive family network for Atwood’s development and self-esteem as a writer:
To my surprise, my aunts came through with flying colours. Aunt J. thought it was wonderful—a real book! She said she was bursting with pride. Aunt K. said that there were certain things that were not done in her generation, but they could be done by mine, and more power to me for doing them.
This kind of acceptance meant more to me than it should have, to my single-minded all-for-art twenty-six-year-old self. (Surely I ought to be impervious to aunts.) However, like the morals of my mother’s stories, what exactly it meant is far from clear to me. Perhaps it was a laying-on of hands, a passing of something from one generation to another. What was being passed on was the story itself: what was known, and what could be told. What was between the lines. The permission to tell the story, wherever that might lead.
Or perhaps it meant that I too was being allowed into the magical static but ever-continuing saga of the photo album. Instead of three different-looking young women with archaic clothes and identical Roman noses, standing with their arms around each other, there would now be four. I was being allowed into home. (84)
This ending might also serve to support John W. MacDonald’s claim (1982) that no contemporary writer in Canada writes better non-fiction prose than Atwood does.7
In “The Public Woman as Honorary Man” (1989), Atwood’s three-page review of Antonia Fraser’s analysis of powerful female leaders entitled The Warrior Queens, we see again how the age-old gender ideology has twisted the tradition of successful females, confirming Atwood’s earlier arguments, here in the context of women’s agency in politics and the military. Atwood finds that these female leaders’
styles vary enormously, but they have one thing in common: All were instantly mythologized. ... They are aberrations, and as such are thought to partake of the supernatural or the monstrous: angels or devils, paragons of chastity or demons of lust, Whores of Babylon or Iron Maidens. ... Women leaders, it seems, find it difficult to be life sized. For good or ill, they are gigantic. (100–01)
Atwood also discovers in Fraser’s analysis what she herself calls the “honorary male” syndrome, with successful women distancing themselves from their sex group. She comments, sarcastically, “If you’re playing boys’ games, you need to be one of the boys” (101).
With “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behaviour in the Creation of Literature,” a lecture delivered in 1993 on the occasion of the publication of The Robber Bride, Atwood returns to what she calls “practical” (162) writerly problems in connection with gender representation. This text may be regarded as a companion to her earlier essay “Writing the Male Character” in that Atwood now defends, indeed calls for, the presentation of morally stained female characters in literature: first because such women obviously also exist in real life, second because “women have more to them than virtue. They are fully dimensional human beings; they too have subterranean depths; why shouldn’t their many-dimensionality be given literary expression?” (172). Atwood also stresses that the Women’s Movement significantly contributed to opening up whole new areas for the writer’s exploration, whereas more traditional plot patterns, such as “the Cinderella happy ending—the Prince Charming one” (164), have lost their matter-of-course quality. In more general terms, “The tendency of innovative literature is to include the hitherto excluded, which often has the effect of rendering ludicrous the conventions that have just preceded the innovation” (164–65)—with the “conventions” here referring to the female character as either a paragon of virtue or a whore, according to the Madonna-Whore Split, denying women multidimensionality.
In her more recent book survey “Resisting the Veil: Report from a Revolution” (2003), Atwood ventures into the Iranian Islamic world, pointing out how the Iranian mullah regime systematically suppresses women, “forced into the veil, deprived of most of their autonomy. Their fate reminds all women of the fragility of their so-called rights and freedoms, for, under the rule of the Iranian mullahs, the female body itself was transformed into a highly charged symbol, a vehicle for projections and religious fantasies” (368). Through Atwood’s discussion of largely autobiographical texts by Marjane Satrapi and Azar Nafisi, as well as of a novel by Farnoosh Moshiri, we see the dismal consequences of this allegedly religiously legitimized political system for Iranian women. As Atwood stated elsewhere, and indirectly in her own version of a theocratic society that acts on women’s bodies (The Handmaid’s Tale), the liberality of a social system may be detected in the kind of rights it grants—or does not grant—to women. Atwood ends on a pessimistic or, one may fear, realistic note: if vice is socially supported, she argues, “that licence will be used to the full. ... Unfortunately, although we continue to dream of heaven, we aren’t very good at creating it. We’re so much better at hell” (371). One function of literature is to counteract such tendencies with warnings—the precious value of freedom of thought and expression also becomes clear in Nafisi’s high esteem of Western literature, considered absolutely essential by her in a social context of oppression such as exists in Iran.
The fifty-first and final contribution in Moving Targets, “Mortification” (2003), also shows the continuing problems, challenges, and often “mortifying” relevance of gender in relationships and identification processes, here eventually prolonged from exterior to interior mortifications. Atwood structures this three-page piece episodically into three parts, early, middle, and modern periods (of her writing life). The earliest episode goes back to 1969, with Atwood having just published her first novel, The Edible Woman, and struggling to become a recognized writer. Her publisher arranged her first-ever book signing in the Edmonton Hudson’s Bay Company department store (a disillusioning experience Atwood keeps returning to), where the signing table was set up in the men’s sock and underwear department (possibly because of the resonant title of the novel)—no wonder that Atwood sold only two copies of the book on this occasion. The second episode, from the late 1970s, is about her appearance on an American TV talk show, where Atwood was placed after a group from the Colostomy8 Association, with the result that no one seemed to be particularly interested in her, to say nothing of her creative art: “‘What did you say your name was? And tell us the plot of your book, just in a couple of sentences, please’” (408). These two episodes show Atwood’s long-time experiences with a social context and particularly a media circus ignorant of the value and essentials of literature (see also her treatment of this issue in her autobiographical comics, chapter 7).
The most recent episode rendered in the text, from a TV show in Mexico, continues along the same line but moreover shows patterns of personal, sexist assumptions, which Atwood, also in her capacity as a writer, keeps being confronted with—and keeps putting her finger on. The interview proceeded pleasantly enough until the male interviewer “hit me with the F-question. The do-you-consider-yourself-a-feminist question.” Even worse, “‘Do you consider yourself feminine?’ he said” (408). Even in the twenty-first century, sexist prejudices persist: a female writer presenting her stories from a woman’s perspective is branded a “feminist,” whereas a male writer doing the same from a male perspective is simply the norm and is not branded a “masculinist” writer. A successful female writer, the second question suggests, loses, or at least jeopardizes, her femininity, high achievement and success apparently still being outside the female gender role in many quarters. Atwood reacted shrewdly in the awkward situation by turning the sexist undercurrent of this offensive question inside out: “‘You really shouldn’t be asking me. You should be asking the men in my life. ... Just as I would ask the women in your life if you are masculine. They’d tell me the truth’” (409). Atwood’s retort, clever and effective as it may have been in the situation, runs counter to one of the maxims of her childhood concerning the education of girls, however (see “Great Aunts”): “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” As a result, the conflict became internalized, her adequate tit-for-tat behaviour in the situation troubling her for days. With gender issues, “mortifications never end” (406), it seems, even with a literary icon such as Atwood, who was reduced to her sex/gender by the interviewer. This incident shows the deep-rootedness and persistence of essentialist, trivializing views of women—even her stardom does not protect Atwood from what we may call the sexist fallacy, even in the twenty-first century.
In her four thematically unified critical books so far, Atwood turns to predominant themes in CanLit (Survival, 1972), the theme of the North in Canadian literature and culture (Strange Things, 1995), writing and the position of the writer in general (Negotiating with the Dead, 2002), and the highly topical examination of the concept of debt as a human construct (Payback, 2008). None of these four books is thus explicitly devoted to gender, but Atwood’s gender awareness nevertheless shines through again and again. Concerning Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, the hotly debated best-selling book of literary criticism on CanLit (by 1980, within eight years, it had sold over 70,000 copies; see Rosenberg 1984, 135), the famous victim positions—which Atwood claims to be of relevance for CanLit as a whole in connection with its supposed main theme, survival—can also be linked to the position of women. Atwood herself establishes this connection early on in her presentation of the four victim positions:
Position Two:
To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim, but to explain this as an act of Fate, the Will of God, the dictates of Biology (in the case of women, for instance), the necessity decreed by History, or Economics, or the Unconscious, or any other large general powerful idea. (37)
In chapter 10 of Survival, Atwood surveys the predominant views of women in Canadian literature, according to her point of view9 (“Ice Women vs Earth Mothers: The Stone Angel and the Absent Venus”), and concludes that “most of the strong and vividly-portrayed female characters in Canadian literature are old women10 ... , and a tough, sterile, suppressed and granite-jawed lot they are” (199).
In Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, Atwood shows that the Canadian North, inhabited primarily by men in Canadian literature, has usually been personified as a “savage but fascinating female ... hostile to white men, but alluring; ... it would drive you crazy, and, finally, would claim you for its own” (18–19). Again and again the North is negatively rendered as a giant female, “icy, connected with madness, and destructive” (26). As in Survival, Atwood devotes one chapter mainly to women, asking what happens to the representation of the North when it is rendered from the perspective of women. She starts out by giving interesting potential answers to the question of why there are so many Canadian women writers (89–93);11 in fact, there are not more than “men writers,” but even this rather balanced state of affairs seems to be unusual about Canadian literature. Atwood states the consequences of the traditional, strictly complementary, role distribution for character constellations in literature on the North: “I can’t offer you any female Franklins—no one would have funded an expedition headed by such a person—or any female prospectors, ... or any female Mounties” (91). She points out that, as early as 1892, Canadian writer E. Pauline Johnson, partly of Mohawk ancestry, published a piece in a Toronto newspaper in which she criticized “white authors for dishing up, again and again, the same kind of Indian maiden in their books—a poor, doomed creature, who passionately loves the white hero ... and usually ends her life by suicide, because of the perfidy of her white lover” (93). Atwood also diagnoses other differences in the plots of early literature on the North written by women such as Anna Jameson, Susanna Moodie, and Catharine Parr Traill: female characters are usually presented at home with their families, not out on the land; nor, in their relation to nature, do they “utilize verbs of the staking and penetrating variety” (97).
Later women writers dealing with the North (Atwood discusses texts by Margaret Laurence, Joyce Marshall, Ethel Wilson, Marian Engel, Aritha van Herk, and Ann Tracy) deal with literary conventions even more creatively. Thus, “the old woman”—the power plant luring Molly’s husband into madness in Marshall’s eponymous short story—is not only a substitute for mother or wife but also the “incarnation of that cold, savage, alluring, female power of the North” (101). In literature from the middle of the twentieth century onward, female protagonists often “go off into the woods” by themselves, sometimes with the very purpose to distance themselves from a man, such as the protagonist Lou in Engel’s novel Bear, who even falls in love with that animal: “She does not conquer the natural world, or penetrate it—she befriends it” (106). From the 1970s onward, there has been a notable increase in women who write about the North, and women have claimed the territory, finally, for their own purposes:
When second-wave women write about the wilderness, they render it female in relation to male characters. ... But when the protagonist is a woman, the wilderness is apt to be sexually neuter. It’s also apt to be refreshing or renewing in some way, and in the 1970s at any rate this renewal has something to do with the absence of men from the scene. (108)
The North, in other words, formerly the territory for men to test their masculine strength and power, has become an area of retreat and intensified identity formation for female characters. Yet, in a typical Atwoodian manner, Atwood ends her lectures/book on an even more fundamental note, channelling questions of gender into questions of humanity. She warns of the pressing ecological problems endangering the North, former incarnation of pristine nature: “The North will be neither female nor male, neither fearful nor health-giving, because it will be dead. The earth, like trees, dies from top down. The things that are killing the North will kill, if left unchecked, everything else” (116).
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, though not focusing explicitly on gender either, states in the introduction what we are reminded of in places throughout the volume: the book is “about the position the writer finds himself in; or herself, which is always a little different” (xvii). Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Atwood goes on: “If I had suspected anything about the role I would be expected to fulfil, not just as a writer, but as a female writer—how irrevocably doomed!— I would have ... plastered myself over with an impenetrable nom de plume, ... never have done any interviews, nor allowed my photo to appear on book jackets” (15). The persistent gender contrasting also in the context of writing, most frequently disadvantageous to women, refers to principles Atwood has pointed out before in her critical writing: the irrational professional role distribution between women and men (on her early idea of becoming a journalist, she notes, “I changed my mind, because he [a journalist] told me that as a girl I would be put to work writing the obituaries and the ladies’ pages, and nothing else” [17]); the ascription of “masculine” and “feminine” writing styles, so that Atwood in her early writing used initials instead of her first name (21); the different expectations/treatments of reviewers concerning male and female authors (21) and of society concerning the writing life (“You couldn’t be a wife and mother and also an artist, because each one of these things required total dedication. ... Love and marriage pulled one way, Art another. ... Art would dance you to death. ... Or it would destroy you as an ordinary woman” [85]); the prejudices in language use, indicative of the collective mentality behind it (“the word ‘genius’ and the word ‘woman’ just don’t really fit together in our language, because the kind of eccentricity expected of male ‘geniuses’ would simply result in the label ‘crazy,’ should it be practiced by woman” [100]); “the F-word. If you’re a woman and a writer, does the combination of gender and vocation automatically make you a feminist, and what does that mean, exactly?” (106). Although the intricacies of gender still make life hard for female writers, it is some consolation that nowadays things do not seem to be as bad as they used to be. As Atwood cautiously states at the end of chapter 3 of Negotiating with the Dead, “Now it is more possible for a woman writer to be seen as, well, just that: neither nun nor orgiastic priestess, neither more nor less than human. Nevertheless, the mythology still has power, because such mythologies about women still have power” (90).
Atwood’s latest essay collection, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, based on her Massey Lectures, investigates (with what seems to be uncanny prescience of the current global economic crisis) how the cultural concept of debt has structured human thinking and behaviour from antiquity to the present day. Not surprisingly for Atwood, she repeatedly looks at this topic with an awareness of gender, though in this collection, too, gender is not one of her focal concerns. She points out gender imbalances by showing that Christianity has no goddesses, just female saints (33), that the first slaves were women because they could be controlled more easily (59), that women, just like slaves, were excluded from citizenship in ancient Athens (though the allegorical figure of Justice remained female [39]), and that ruin for a man in the nineteenth century meant financial ruin, whereas for a woman it meant sexual ruin (by having extramarital sex, 106–07). With an autobiographical touch, Atwood repeatedly draws on her family’s experience during the Great Depression and her own childhood in the still credit-card-free Canada of the 1940s. She points out that in her family her mother was the keeper of finances and that she therefore was instrumental in forming Atwood’s sense of balance (43). That mothers have not been as appreciated in their role as they should be is suggested by this sarcastic comparison in her remodelling of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for the twenty-first century in chapter 5: “It’s like Mother’s Day—dump a card and some flowers on the old hen once a year, then exploit her the rest of the time” (179). Yet, as Atwood reveals, it was her mother who showed wise premonition in keeping a newspaper clipping from 1972 that featured an MIT study predicting that “the world economy is headed for collapse within 70 years—bringing widespread pestilence, poverty and starvation—unless economic growth is halted soon” (196). In chapter 3, “Debt as Plot,” Atwood deals with debt as a literary motif. She points out that much of the money-lending business has been in male hands, and she treats a broad range of novels demonstrating debt as it impacts women (105–19). She concludes from her reading of Victorian novels that, “When I was young and simple, I thought the nineteenth-century novel was driven by love; but now, in my more complicated riper years, I see that it’s also driven by money, which indeed holds a more central place in it than love does, no matter how much the virtues of love may be waved idealistically aloft” (100).
CONCLUSION
Atwood’s status as a literary and cultural critic has repeatedly been evaluated, in spite of all the critical turmoil over Survival, in a predominantly positive manner (see the works mentioned at the beginning of this chapter). In trying to assess her critical writing, we can first of all distinguish broadly between two different traditions of essay writing: the first going back to Michel de Montaigne, characterized by meandering, subjective, detail-oriented progress of thought; the second going back to Sir Francis Bacon and the English tradition of essay writing, in which there is a more logical, didactic, rational progress of thought. Clearly Atwood’s sharply analytical essays are more indebted to the latter tradition.
Her special contribution to Canadian criticism is her blend of partly self-ironic, humorous, always highly readable, and engaging presentation— appealing to a large readership—and serious, demanding, often problematic topics, on which Atwood presents her illuminating arguments in “didactic,” convincing diction and rhetoric. As with her fiction, she is a rare case of a critic reaching both scholars and the general reading public. Her sometimes playful attitude and flippant style should not distract, however, from the fact that there is an analytical, highly perceptive, and intellectual mind at work on complex, sometimes notoriously difficult because emotion-laden gender issues, which are embedded in traditional power structures and supported by time-honoured social systems. Atwood’s kind of criticism has been characterized as “literary journalism” and “practical-mediational criticism” (Woodcock 1981, 224, 236), as “practical, text-centered, and value-oriented craft,” “mediator between art and the audience, between an increasingly elusive and elitist literary theory on the one hand and a non-committal anything goes on the other,” and “criticism as creative art” (Pache 2000/02, 132, 133). In her pragmatic effort to reach mainly the public with her criticism and to provide helpful guiding—rather than to write merely for scholars (whom she repeatedly and facetiously calls “the footnote crowd”)—Atwood has been an important counterbalance against a long trend of criticism in Canada (and elsewhere, e.g., the United States) between the 1950s and the 1990s that Robert Lecker diagnosed and deplored in 1994: “Canadian criticism has become a private affair, removed from public access. ... [S]cholars write for each other, rather than for the public. ... Atwood, an exacademic, sees the academic walls closing in on Canadian literature. She wants to break the trend towards privacy. She wants a public” (88, 93, 94).
At the same time, with her turning to issues of gender right from her early through to her later criticism, particularly in the context of writing, Atwood tackled a crucial problem that had long been ignored or, as the case may be, silently taken for granted, until Virginia Woolf put the question on the map with her “writerly” A Room of One’s Own (first published in 1929):12 the difference it makes to be a woman writer. With a wealth of first-hand experience in the literary world and her breadth of knowledge of world literature, Atwood gives us her view on women and literature, countering the male master discourse. Her essays “On Being a ‘Woman Writer,’” “The Curse of Eve,” “Writing the Male Character” (from Second Words), “Spotty-Handed Villainesses,” and “Mortification” (from Moving Targets) may be regarded as classic statements on the issue. As with her creative writing, gender forms just one, albeit an important, strand of thought of this politically minded writer. Focusing on the status, situation, and discrimination of the woman writer and the handling of literary characters, Atwood rightly claims that this attention is part of her general humanistic involvement, her engagement with human rights. As she retorts to the offensive male interviewer in “Mortification,” “‘Women are human beings, don’t you agree?’” (408). Similarly revealing what should be obvious is the following statement, from which it actually follows that every thinking human being, according to the logic of the sentence, would have to be called a “feminist”: “‘If feminism is dealing with women as independent entities, ... then I’m a feminist’” (cited in Rosenberg 1984, 147–48). Atwood thereby also questions the legitimacy of the breadth of meaning of this asymmetrically handled and often derogatorily used term “feminism.” At the same time, she explicitly refused to be claimed by the Women’s Liberation Movement, which may partly also be put down to her down-to-earth, straightforward style of essay writing (in the English tradition), which clearly distinguishes itself from the more inflammatory rhetorics of avowed feminists such as Hélène Cixous, whose “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) became a founding text of écriture féminine.
Atwood’s critical essays also throw light on her own creative writing— compare Survival with Surfacing, “Great Aunts” with “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” “Spotty-Handed Villainesses” with The Robber Bride as well as Cat’s Eye, “Mortification” with The Edible Woman as well as Lady Oracle, and so on. Yet Atwood’s literary and cultural criticism, deriving as it does from a sharp intellect, effects important statements in its own right, often with a clearly political impact. Her critical writing is another instance of her firm view of the writer having moral and political responsibility toward the public, and it aims at what Margaret Atwood generally proposes in “What’s So Funny? Notes on Canadian Humour” (1974, collected in Second Words) as the writer’s task, where necessary, namely “to arouse moral indignation with a view to reform ... to expose, rebuke and correct” (183).
NOTES
1. “Witches” also falls into this category but is shorter and truly an “occasional piece”; Atwood alleges in the text that she wrote it in a restaurant on the very day of the speech.
2. E.g., “Sie kann’s nicht” (“She is incapable of doing this”), as Chancellor Schroeder said about his later successor Angela Merkel, who then proved to be a very capable and powerful chancellor under adverse governing conditions; or the misogynist remarks about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (often called a “bitch” on Internet sites).
3. Regarding the sadly revelatory phenomena characterizing the presidential primaries in the United States in 2008, for instance, see Metzler and Nischik 2010.
4. On the continued topicality of this argument, note that none less than a female Harvard professor in an interview in March 2008 called Hillary Clinton a “monster” (and had to resign from her post in the Obama campaign).
5. Those by male writers are more frequent (eight to six).
6. “Good” instead of “nice” earlier (78).
7. The ending may be fully appreciated in all its repercussions only with a closer knowledge of the essay as a whole, of course.
8. A surgical operation during which a permanent opening from the colon is made to allow feces to leave the patient’s body via this opening.
9. On the restrictions on her text selection for the book and some of the partly harsh criticism launched against Survival, see Rosenberg 1984, 139–43.
10. From her stance of a roughly thirty-year-old at the time, she considers “over fifty” to be “old” (199).
11. See, e.g., “Canadians never developed the concept of women as merely brainless decoration. Canadian oral folklore is still full of tales of our grandmothers’ generation, when women ran farms, chased off bears, delivered their own babies in remote locations and bit off the umbilical cords” (90).
12. In what is widely considered one of the founding texts of feminist critique, Woolf, like Atwood, engages with questions concerning gender from a socioliterary perspective yet frames them within a markedly more experimental style than that of Atwood’s sharp analytical prose. Woolf stretches the essay genre toward the fictional “liberties and licenses of the novel” (1929, 4)—and a modernist novel at that: blurring fiction and criticism, A Room of One’s Own splits the first-person narrator into multiple personae and voices, argues for the (higher) truth of fiction, and embraces its own contradictions as inevitable and resonant.