The Political in Margaret Atwood's Fiction: The Writing on the Wall of the Tent by Theodore F. Sheckels (review)

Over the years, Margaret Atwood has become known as an author with outspoken political views. Yet, when it comes to the political within her fiction, its presence is far from straightforward. Margaret Atwood has frequently expressed her discomfort at the use of political labels such as "feminist" to describe her novels. Theodore Sheckels outlines this uneasy union of the political and fiction: "In her mind, writing that raises such issues was propaganda, and true writers, such as herself, do not author propaganda"(1). Likewise, literary critics focusing on politics run the risk of instrumentalizing the text to suit their own (perhaps unconscious) ideological outlook, as the author of this volume shows in a brilliant analysis of the handmaid's dystopian tale: her account retrospectively comes under the scrutiny of sexist male academics who distort and transform her words (83).

The same problem emerges when it comes to criticism devoted to Atwood's novels. On the one hand, Atwood's undeniable political commitment and its inscription within her fictional texts have to be taken into account; on the other hand, the scholar will want to avoid distorting the texts to make them politically meaningful or "correct" at all costs.

The critical lens adopted in The Political in Margaret Atwood's Fiction is unquestionably post-structuralist, especially in its use of Foucault's account of power, discipline and resistance. In Foucault's work, power is not seen as merely top-down and external, but as internalized by individuals themselves. Likewise, resistance is not perceived as located outside power, but as being situated within hegemonic structures, often even produced by them. In addition to this theoretical framework, Sheckels borrows an arguably less pertinent conception of power from Kenneth Boulding, which divides human activity into three much more conventional realms - the political, the economic, and the social - and distinguishes three types of power balances or imbalances: threat power, exchange power and love power.

The book consists of a chronological discussion of the novels, which are grouped together according to the predominance of interiority or exteriority of power. Starting with the oldest novel - The Edible Woman - and ending with the first two novels of a science fiction trilogy, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, the volume covers an impressive forty years of writing. It is written in a clear, accessible style, and the absence of jargon and the well-worked-out transitions carry the reader along in the author's exploration of power in Atwood's fiction.

One aspect of the study that could have benefitted from a more rigorous approach is the use of theory. Although the reference to literary theory and philosophy within this volume sheds an often fascinating light on the novels, it occasionally leaves the reader hungry for a more in-depth use of the frameworks. This is particularly the case with notions borrowed from feminist theory such as écriture féminine or Foucault's texts, which are more often than not alluded to in general terms but rarely backed up by any specific references. Similarly, the use of two different theoretical frameworks, Foucault's and Boulding's, at times leads to confusion, as it causes the definitions of the two central terms, "political" and "power," to shift. The introduction clearly uses them as synonymous; indeed, Sheckels explains that "the political" can be defined in broad terms. From a post-structuralist point of view, this interchangeability is fully justified, since the political has increasingly been defined as seeping into each domain, including the personal and the intimate, such as sexuality. Although this is the definition Sheckels adheres to most of the time, a certain amount of confusion arises when the author returns to the more classic definition of the "political": the term is then narrowed down to its etymological meaning, based on the Greek word polis, city-state, pertaining to the state and its administration.

An example of this...