Margaret Atwood Revisited

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1999 by W.S. Hampl

by Karen F. Stein. Twayne's World Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1999. xx 176 pages. $35.

One of the final entries in the Twayne authors' series, Karen F. Stein's thoroughly researched Margaret Atwood Revisited proves to be an engaging and inviting text. Stein considers Atwood's nine novels in groups of threes, thereby highlighting the interconnecting themes (such as the trickster, woman-as-storyteller, woman-as-commodity, eating and cannibalism) within these works. Although readers are probably more familiar with Atwood as a novelist, Stein notes that Atwood's early Canadian fame came as a poet. She devotes two entire chapters to Atwood's poetry, again noting common themes and how one may read the poetry and the other texts against each other. Additionally, Stein addresses Atwood as a non-fiction writer, a prolific short fiction writer with five collections, and an author of four children's books.

Stein demonstrates many strengths; one that immediately strikes the reader is her ability to historicize Atwood's texts, from the first poetry collection, Double Persephone (1961) through her recent novel, Alias Grace (1996). For instance, Stein notes the interesting publication history and circumstances surrounding Atwood's first novel, The Edible Woman (1969). Atwood wrote the first draft on examination booklets, and due to her publishers' misplacing of her submitted manuscript, the novel remained in limbo for four years. Later, by considering the (anti-)Gothic Lady Oracle (1976) on the heels of other Gothic novels written by women such as Doris Lessing, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Sheila Ballantyne, Stein is able to contextualize Atwood's entry in this genre.

While engaged in such historical work, Stein meticulously explains the significance of names and anagrams in Atwood's works. As an example, the protagonist in Lady Oracle dates men whose names suggest royalty, such as Count, Arthur, and the Royal Porcupine, although none of these men proves to be the protagonist's Prince Charming. In her breakthrough dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Atwood suggests the subservient social roles of women by having the names of certain female characters reflect upon their respective (male) Commanders' names (Of-Fred, Of-Warren, Of-Glen). The copyright for The Robber Bride (1993), we learn, is held by O. W. Toad, an anagram for Atwood. In this same novel, the character Zenia's name joins together pieces of the names of the three narrators; even the restaurant named the Toxique, though referring to the "toxic" nature of Zenia, contains another meaning since Toxique is an anagram of (Don) Quixote.

Stein's text abounds with others' critical analyses, with which she carefully addresses Atwood's texts. Many of these readings address the changing roles of women. A particularly telling instance is Stein's deft interpolation, in the section on Lady Oracle, of psychoanalytic readings by writers such as Roberta Rubenstein, Margery Fee, and Roberta Sciff-Zamaro. Stein's integration of these suggestive readings, which involve the character Joan's troubled relationship with her distant mother, result in a fuller understanding of the novel and of Atwood's portrayal of the complexity of female relationships. In a similar vein, Stein's use of Eleonora Rao's work illuminates the role of the earth mother surrounded by male poets in the short story "Loulou, or the Domestic Life of the Language," from Bluebeard's Egg (1983).

Again, Stein's reference to Atwood's nonfiction, short stories, poems, and even cartoons allows one to trace certain motifs across genres and to read with new attention Atwood's entire oeuvre. For example, Stein contrasts Atwood's use of cannibalism as a playful theme in The Edible Woman with cannibalism as a terrifying possibility in "A Travel Piece, from Dancing Girls (1977). At several points, Stein highlights the importance of Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), which ultimately became a widely read critical text, to Canadian literature, and of Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995), a collection of four lectures Atwood presented at Oxford University. Stein employs these texts' consideration of the four stages of victimhood and the danger of the outdoors to read Atwood's first five collections of poetry and the short story collections Dancing Girls (1977) and Wilderness Tips (1991).

Keeping in mind Stein's insistence on the importance of Atwood's nonfiction, one might wish that Stein herself had devoted more space to such works. However, her Margaret Atwood Revisited is a welcome and well-wrought addition to Atwood scholarship.

W.S. HAMPL
University of Rhode Island