A poetics of metamorphosis

In his book The Protean Self, the renowned American psychologist Robert Jay Lifton describes the contemporary individual as possessing an identity that is “fluid and many-sided . . . [and therefore] appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time.” Like Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god of Greek mythology, the contemporary individual is understood by Lifton to be engaged in an ongoing process of re-creating the self. While this process “is by no means without confusion and danger,” Lifton believes that “it allows for an opening out of individual life, for a self of many possibilities” (The Protean Self, p. 5). Margaret Atwood's poetry and poetics make clear that she shares this belief.

Most critics have approached Atwood's work in terms of what Sherrill Grace has described as the aesthetics of “violent duality.” They point to a long line of oppositional forces that are laid out in startling contrast throughout Atwood's poetry and her prose. In the discussion of Atwood's poetry that follows here, I suggest that Atwood's poetics of metamorphosis contains this “violent duality” of oppositional forces (civilization and nature, male and female, etc.) but also offers a way of transcending it. I will argue here that Atwood's interest in the transformative power of the imagination, in evidence throughout her poetry, overrides the rigid boundaries of a dualistic universe and allows for the emergence of the protean self described by Lifton.