Self-Fashioning in Margaret Atwood's Fiction: Dress, Culture, and Identity (review)

'Pick any strand and snip, and history comes unraveled.' With these words, the military historian Antonia (Tony) Fremont in Margaret Atwood's novel The Robber Bride uses an implied clothing metaphor to introduce her lecture. Her meaning is not that history unravels into anarchy and chaos, but that any theme or approach will serve as an entry point for explication, for unravelling the strands of meaning. In this monograph, Cynthia Kuhn picks the strand of clothing as entry point for analysis of two Atwood novels, The Robber Bride and Alias Grace. Clothing is an effective strand for this purpose, for it is charged with potent symbolic cultural value. Clothing is an indicator of status, a means of social control, and a tool of self-revelation or concealment. Moreover, Atwood is an astute observer of society whose fiction represents and investigates the cultural implications of artifacts such as food and clothing. Kuhn's book follows the clothing strand and expands into a provocative reading of the two novels. It is an interesting and informative text, although for me, and likely for other readers, its value would be greatly enhanced by an index.

Kuhn begins her analysis with a comprehensive review of theories of clothing. According to Kuhn, 'a clothed body represents a temporary mediation between the public image and the private self.' The introduction and first two chapters examine the ways that clothes function, especially for women, as self-fashioning, as metaphor, as masquerade, as a means of group identity, and as performance. Kuhn refers to Atwood's use of clothing imagery in several of her novels, and then explains that she will analyse 'the ways in which Atwood's use of dress speaks especially to the often-contradictory intersections of feminism and femininity.'

The third and fourth chapters then focus in depth on the two Atwood novels. The scope of analysis expands to include a range of topics such as dreams, women's bodies, and the ways in which two characters function as doubles. Thus, the discussion broadens out from the entry point, the analytic strand of clothing, although Kuhn does keep returning to the idea of clothing in its myriad literal and metaphorical meanings.

In chapter 3, Kuhn analyses the relationships among the four female characters in The Robber Bride using the tripartite division of body (Roz), mind (Tony), and soul (Charis). The mysterious Zenia is 'the high priestess of the body.' The characters' sartorial self-presentations emphasize their personality traits. Each of the other three fear, admire, and envy the svelte, sophisticated, and fashionable Zenia.

Chapter 4 analyses the way that Grace Marks in Alias Grace manipulates her story as a 'cover-up.' Describing Grace's narrative as a patchwork quilt, Kuhn observes that 'readers have scraps and bits that make a highly satisfying textual quilt, but beneath the veils, behind the stories, a woman of mystery endures.'

Kuhn's book is well researched, readable, knowledgeable, and interesting. It is a welcome addition to studies of Atwood's work.