Margaret Atwood's female protagonists show marked signs of bodily unease. From Marian's socio-political anorexia in The Edible Woman, to Elaine's shape-shifting in Cat's Eye, through Joan's aggressive consumption in Lady Oracle, and towards Iris's vicious verbal annihilations of her aging body in The Blind Assassin, Atwood's fictional female bodies become battlefields where anxieties relating to wider power structures are written onto female flesh. This chapter explores Atwood's writing of the female body, which in turn opens up debates relating to her analysis of power politics within a lived socio-culture. In addition, her writing of the female body (which often belongs to female writers or artists) raises dominant critical issues within women's writing and these issues refract back on Atwood's novels and cast new light upon them.

No reader could miss Atwood's preoccupation with the female body and nor could the reader fail to be aware of the various ways in which the body becomes associated with shape-shifting, masquerade, crisis, or play in these novels. Often Atwood dips into Gothic parody or carnivalesque grotesquerie in her writing of the female body; repeatedly it is written in terms of surveillance and hiddenness and it is connected with ideas of incarceration; it is linked with metaphors of disembodiment, a failure to be completely there, or with the occupation of liminal territories which mark uneasy gaps between “real” and “other”; the relationship between mind and body is stressed constantly so that fractured or disrupted psyches result in alienated bodies that become sinister enemies even to their inhabitants; the body is the site of diseases of the breast and the womb, of bad hearts and evil eyes; it is the site on which political power is exercised and the site on which abuse is practiced and in turn rehearsed.

“What is a human being?” This question, among others, constitutes what Atwood calls the “sub-sub-subtext” of her lecture delivered at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) in January of 2004, “Scientific Romancing: The Kesterton Lecture.” Primarily a lecture on science fiction, it also touches on themes that have informed her writing for several decades - despotism versus decency; obsessive control versus the spectrum of human desire; science and art; reason and the imagination - all of which contribute to her sense of the environment. How much imbalance in these pairs of terms can we tolerate? Or, as she says in her lecture, “How far can we go in the alteration department and still have a human being?”

The present is a turning point for Atwood. She states in the Kesterton Lecture and in her very short piece entitled “Writing Oryx and Crake” that, until now, the human animal has not changed. “What we want has not changed for thousands of years, because, as far as we can tell, human nature hasn’t changed either” (“Kesterton Lecture,” n.p.); and, “homo sapiens remains at heart what he’s been for tens of thousands of years – the same emotions, the same preoccupations.” Her view of the animal itself up to this turning point will emerge in analysis of her work. For now, keep in mind that given current scientific research we are able, for the first time, to alter that animal beyond recognition.

Unraveling history

These two quotations, one from Atwood's lecture on her first historical novel, Alias Grace, and the other from The Robber Bride and spoken by her female military historian Antonia Fremont, signal Atwood's interest in postmodern debates over history, which have been going on since the 1960s. Historians, cultural theorists, and literary critics have argued over the traditional claims of history to represent the objective truth about the past, in a context of general skepticism where the “master narratives” of history, religion, and nation have lost much of their authority, so that these “substantial edifices” are in danger of being reduced to “a pile of rubble.” Of course this is not to deny that the real past existed, but simply to point out that any historical account is only a reconstruction from fragments of the past which are available to us, and that any historical narrative is largely governed by the perspective adopted by a particular historian; telling history is always a question of interpretation. Moreover, there has been a shift away from macro-history to micro-history, where the story is told by marginalized voices or eyewitness accounts which were frequently omitted from official historical records. This forces us to acknowledge the fact that official histories only endorse the “truths” of the dominant power groups or as Michel Foucault has argued, “systems of discourse are often synonymous with systems of power.”

For more than forty years, Margaret Atwood has been a published author, well known for the intricacies of her poetry, the power of her fiction, and the illumination of her literary criticism. As her reputation has grown steadily in international circles, she has produced more than forty books that have been translated into more than forty languages. But she has rooted most of her writing in her own country of Canada. She is, above all else, Canadian.

The early years

Born in the city of Ottawa, Canada's capital, on 18 November 1939, Atwood spent her early years in wintry Ottawa and in northern Quebec, where her father, a biologist, pursued his entomological studies. Moving to Toronto in 1946, her parents continued to take young Atwood and her older brother to the northern wilderness in the summers. “I didn't spend a full year in school until I was 11,” Atwood recalls. “Americans usually find this account of my childhood - woodsy, isolated, nomadic - less surprising than do Canadians: after all, it's what the glossy magazine ads say Canada is supposed to be like.”

Atwood’s parents are from Nova Scotia, and her extended family lives there: “The orientation of my entire family was scientific rather than literary . . . So while the society around me, in the fifties, was very bent on having girls collect china, become cheerleaders, and get married, my parents were from a different culture. They just believed that it was incumbent on me to become as educated as possible.”2 Her parents were great readers, and though they did not encourage her to become a writer, “they gave me a more important kind of support; that is, they expected me to make use of my intelligence and abilities, and they did not pressure me into getting married.”

Surveying earlier criticism of Margaret Atwood's short fiction, one becomes aware of a seeming critical paradox: Atwood is a major figure on the contemporary literary scene, and is the figurehead of Canadian literature; the short story, in turn, has been hailed by the German critic Helmut Bonheim in 1981 as “the most active ambassador of Canadian literature abroad.” Atwood's short stories, nevertheless, have long been passed over in survey works on her writing, have been treated as preparatory exercises, or simply as less important than her major novels and poetry collections. There is indeed always the danger that one branch of a multitalented author's work should languish in relative critical neglect. And there is the additional barrier of an implied genre hierarchy, which, at least in the mind of the general reading public, gives precedence to the novel over other forms of literary expression. Seen from this perspective, the critical fate of Atwood's short fiction for some two decades reflects that of the reception of the genre as a whole. The decade leading to the turn of the century, however, also saw a turn in the reception of Atwood's short fictional prose, with several contributions which either exclusively or in combination with other generic texts by Atwood finally devoted their attention to Atwood's short fiction. From the perspective of teaching, Atwood's short stories have always been a favorite which could perhaps even rival her novels, and rightly so: Atwood's short stories alone would suffice to place her in the forefront of twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century writers. She has thus far published six short fiction collections (between 1977 and 2004), alongside twelve volumes of poetry and eleven novels. Although there are discernible currents and even cross-references linking Atwood's short stories to her poetry and novels, her work in the genre is as free of derivativeness as it is varied. This chapter traces some of its main themes, techniques, and lines of development, taking the prominent theme of gender relations in Atwood's short fiction as its cue.

Introducing Margaret Atwood

In November 2004 Margaret Atwood and Dame Gillian Beer engaged in a public conversation about her writing at the British Academy in London, a very “Establishment” literary event, where they discussed the image of the labyrinth as an appropriate description of the processes of writing novels and reading them. Two months later, Atwood appeared on a popular Canadian television show, rigged out in full ice hockey gear, showing the host, Richard Mercer, how to deflect a puck in Canada's favorite national sport. These two images of Atwood, as internationally famous writer talking seriously with a Cambridge professor about the mysteries of her craft, and the other as Canadian celebrity advertising her national identity in a playful masquerade, illustrates the combination of high seriousness and witty ironic vision which is the hallmark of Atwood's literary production. In this book, our primary concern is with Margaret Atwood the writer, but there is also Atwood the literary celebrity, media star, and public performer, Atwood the cultural critic, social historian, environmentalist, and human rights spokeswoman, and Atwood the political satirist and cartoonist. The chapters in this volume address all these features in the Atwood profile, as they consider her career from a variety of perspectives and with very different emphases, though it is her Canadianness and her international appeal as an imaginative writer which are the two leitmotifs.

Atwood's hypothesis about narrative beginnings assumes a particular urgency in relation to her two near-future novels, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003), for both of them are an imaginative writer's response to contemporary situations of cultural crisis as they suppose what may happen at what Atwood has called “definitive moments” after which “things were never the same again.” Already the shifts between past, present, and future in my opening remarks will have illustrated the distinctive qualities of the genre to which these two novels belong, namely the dystopia. Perhaps the primary function of a dystopia is to send out danger signals to its readers: “Many dystopias are self-consciously warnings. A warning implies that choice, and therefore hope, are still possible.” This chapter will focus on Atwood's two dystopian novels, their narrators and narrative techniques, arguing that together they represent a synthesis of her political, social, and environmental concerns transformed into speculative fiction. They are embedded in very different historical contexts: The Handmaid's Tale is a product of the 1980s, focusing on the possible consequences of neo-conservative religious and political trends in the United States, while Oryx and Crake written at the beginning of the twenty-first century projects not a national disaster but a global catastrophe “in a world that has become one vast uncontrolled experiment.”

As Reingard Nischik notes, Atwood is “one of the most important literary chroniclers of our time” and an international bestseller; thus, the Atwood industry is “booming.” According to Coral Ann Howells, “From The Edible Woman onwards, her novels have focused on contemporary social and political issues,” challenging contemporary social myths and fashionable ideologies and “endlessly surprising her readers with her ongoing experimentalism.” Critics have viewed Atwood's novels using formalist, biographical, psychoanalytic, feminist, Jungian, dialogic, intertextual, phenomenological, narratological, cultural, postmodern, postcolonial, generic, and deconstructionist approaches. Atwood's novels are variously described as realism, romance, ghost story, thriller, memoir, Bildungsroman, Kunstlerroman, science fiction, metafiction, anti-novel, fairy tale, satire, parody, Gothic, dystopian, nationalist, feminist, revisionist, modernist, intramodern, postmodern, and postcolonial.

As I suggest in Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations, “The issues of power and sexual politics that mark Atwood’s earliest work have evolved.” In addition to the self-divided, alienated, and oppositional characters and character pairs Sherrill Grace helped us recognize with Violent Duality (1980), by the eighties and nineties

Sylvia Plath's first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in England in October 1960 and in the US in 1962. Crossing the Water, the third of Plath's collections, was published posthumously, after Ariel, in 1971. It contains some poems written around the same time as those in The Colossus ('Private Ground' (CW) and 'The Manor Garden' (C) were both written in 1959) and others which predate, or in some cases coincide with, the poems of Ariel; 'In Plaster' (CW), for example, was written on the same day as Ariel's 'Tulips'.

The poems in these two collections, then, span some five or six years. They include a range of voices, themes and styles and have their roots in diverse locations; the American coast and desert, the Yorkshire moors, Cambridge, Devon and numerous indeterminate and imaginary places. Influenced by Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Marianne Moore, among others, they look back to classical mythology, to Shakespeare and to folk stories. Ted Hughes describes these poems as mathematical in design and as a form of science or alchemy (WP, pp. 174, 180-82, J Abr., p. xiii). One might equally think of them as visual and painterly, as influenced by art and sculpture (Brueghel, de Chirico, Baskin, Gaugin, Klee ( J, p. 359)). And one might also note their struggle to represent the unconscious and unknown.

Perhaps because it is Plath's only published novel, The Bell Jar has assumed iconic significance in literary and popular culture. One might even say that The Bell Jar enjoys its own celebrity, having made cameo appearances in American films as different as 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and Natural Born Killers (1994). In the first, the novel appears in the hands of the film's central character, Kat Stratford, a cynical, depressed and angry teenage feminist who, in one early scene, defends Plath's status within the literary canon against what she calls 'the oppressive, patriarchal values that dictate our education'. In the latter, the novel can be glimpsed lying face down on the bed next to a sleeping Mallory (née Wilson) Knox just moments before she and her boyfriend Mickey murder her abusive parents and subsequently set off on their cross-country murder spree. References to the novel - and to Plath more generally - are common in television as well, especially those shows that centre on young adult women, such as Freaks and Geeks and The Gilmore Girls. Nor are such cameos limited to Hollywood. The novels Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer and Seven Moves by Carol Anshaw both depict female characters who, as part of important plot developments within the stories, read The Bell Jar. Indeed, there is a certain variety of entertainment in which one just expects to encounter a young woman reading or referencing The Bell Jar. One would hardly be surprised to find The Bell Jar in the hands of Clare Fisher from the current HBO drama Six Feet Under or any of the central characters who plot female revenge in the film The Smokers (2000), to name just a couple of examples.

To consider the effect of Sylvia Plath's writing on today's poetry scene is to marvel at the endurance of her poems. Nearly thirty years ago, Denise Levertov remarked that a poet need write only a few remarkable poems to be remembered. It goes almost without saying that Plath wrote more than several such poems. More to the point is the fact that the poems of Plath's Ariel and, in retrospect, The Colossus, had the power to transform the direction of American - and to some extent, British - poetics. Here in the twenty-first century, the results of the impact of Plath's work are as pervasive as the influence of Ernest Hemingway's terse yet open prose. These effects are so commonplace that readers today no longer comment that contemporary fiction owes a great deal to Hemingway, the classic modernist. Nor do they align much of contemporary poetry with the influence of Plath's Ariel in 1965 and, even more dramatically, with her Collected Poems in 1981.

Changes in stylistic expression, in each case, marked more than shifts in the techniques of writing. Both Hemingway and Plath thrust deep into their inner lives to find what was worthy of their expression. Impolitic as it was for Hemingway to reveal the painful divergence of his Oak Park, Illinois, parents - which he did so sharply in such In Our Time stories as 'Indian Camp', 'The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife', and 'Cat in the Rain', even more dangerous to her family and her psyche was the insistent anger of Plath's 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy' and 'Medusa'. To voice these strident emotions was to unearth new ways of writing. Neither Hemingway nor Plath had earlier models to follow.

There are many reasons why Sylvia Plath's letters and journals matter. They are strewn with the sharp writing and observations of a poet and novelist, as we see in Plath's descriptions of people she knew: 'I'm having Mrs. Hamilton, the wife of the dead coffee plantation owner and local power, to tea today. She is old, booming, half-deaf with a dachshund named Pixie' (LH, p. 432). 'Linda is . . . nondescript as an art gum eraser. Her eyes are nervous and bright like neurotic goldfish' ( J, p. 38). Plath writes honestly and subversively about the body: A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger can catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucous in the nostril . . . a heavier, determined forefinger can reach up and smear down-and-out the soft, resilient, elastic greenish-yellow smallish blobs of mucous . . . sometimes there will be blood . . . God, what a sexual satisfaction! ( J, p. 165) In her explicit anatomization of the grotesque, Plath breaks the rules of decorum. She looks at the body as if through a magnifying glass, and does so with wry humour.

The first syllables Sylvia Plath ever spoke to Ted Hughes were lifted from a poem that he had written and that she had memorized. '''I did it, I''', she called to him over the dance music at a crowded party at Cambridge University - a launch party for the first issue of a college literary magazine, St. Botolph's Review, in which Hughes's work appeared prominently. 'You like?' he responded, and led her into a quieter room where they could say more.

That playful exchange was an overture to the distinctive creative partnership they established soon afterwards. Working side by side, they developed a dynamic of mutual influence that produced the poems we read today. This aspect of their bond can be tracked in their poetry from the months of their courtship through the years of their marriage and separation. And it can also be found in the poetry Hughes published in the year he died, in two volumes addressed to Plath: Birthday Letters and the limited edition Howls & Whispers.

Sylvia Plath is arguably the best-known and most iconic poet of her generation. Try to imagine, for instance, a major Hollywood studio producing a film about any of her contemporaries, much less casting an A-list actor, Gwyneth Paltrow, in the feature role. This reputation rests largely on one volume of poetry, Ariel, and a novel, The Bell Jar, that, while very good, would not be nearly as well known, nor so often taught, if not for the incandescence of the poetry. Ariel had this tremendous impact for three interlocking reasons. One, it is extraordinary, unmistakably original poetry. Two, its psychological intensity remains palpable four decades after its shocking debut. Three, its publication followed the suicide of the poet, who was young, beautiful and married to another major poet of the era. There is no way to separate these elements. As brilliant as the poetry is, there has been a good deal of excellent poetry written in the past forty years that has not earned international celebrity for its authors. Moreover, it is important not to separate aesthetic achievement, psychological extremity and biographical scandal. It is precisely this convergence that struck a nerve with postwar readers.

Sylvia Plath produced one of the most riveting poetic oeuvres in English. Her poems reveal a perspective and a language use that are utterly unique. Yet they are also related to the Renaissance, Romantic, modernist and Cold War rhetorics she inherited and to the postmodernism that her work helped to generate through both positive and negative example. Plath's poems seethe with anger, hope, desire and disappointment. They glow with brilliant turns of phrase: 'What is so real as the cry of a child? / A rabbit's cry may be wilder / But it has no soul' ('Kindness'). They construct breathtaking images of the injured body and psyche - the 'trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl' of 'Cut', for example. And they evoke their social and political milieu in a telling way, expressing the dilemmas of a woman enmeshed in a sexist, racist and classist social structure, yearning for affirmation, 'waist-deep in history'. Plath's poems plunge into the contradictions of mid-twentieth century Anglo-American selfhood and culture. Written within a remarkably brief timespan, they emanate a heat and light that can still combust a reader today.

Psychoanalysis is both a body of doctrine and a system of psychotherapy developed principally by Sigmund Freud. Concerned with the study and interpretation of mental states, the body of doctrine describes conflicts and processes originating in the unconscious. As a form of therapy, psychoanalysis seeks to alleviate neuroses and other mental disorders by the systematic technical analysis of unconscious factors as revealed, for example, in dreams and fantasies, slips of the tongue and free-association, neurotic symptoms or lapses in memory, and does so by revealing unconscious contents and motives in the patient's psyche and behaviour. Both as doctrine and therapy, psychoanalysis relies on the concept of the unconscious - mental processes, ideas and desires of which the conscious mind is unaware - and interpretively seeks to make what is unconscious, conscious. In the context of literary studies, psychoanalysis is particularly interested in the ways in which the language of the text may displace or conceal its subject. Psychoanalysis in this context should be understood not so much as a tool with which to diagnose the pathology of the individual author but as an interpretative and narrative practice which, as for example in the work of Jacqueline Rose, discussed below, is alert to the place of fantasy, desire and repression in our personal and collective lives.

Ariel, the slim volume of poems published posthumously under Sylvia Plath's name in 1965, has become an iconic document in twentieth-century literary history, a status underlined by the most recently published edition, which restores the selection and sequencing of the poems Plath left at the time of her death in 1963 (A Rest.). Ariel is closely identified with the disturbing power of a poetic voice whose reverberations were felt to be, from the outset, distinctively, even scandalously, female and embodied. The 'Ariel voice' seems to trope a return of the repressed, at both the personal and the political level. For the volume's first readers, of course, this voice was marked above all by its proximity to her suicide, and was apprehended as a psychic unleashing or release. Reviews frequently invoked a 'breakthrough' in style: a discovery, or recovery, of a liberating immediacy of feeling. This binary model of Plath's poetic development, grounded in a biographical narrative, was partially undermined by the appearance of the Collected Poems in 1981, which revealed the range and extent of Plath's work, and the many continuities between The Colossus (UK 1960/US 1962) and Ariel (1965/1966).