Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood

6: “On Being a Woman Writer” Atwood as Literary and Cultural Critic

atwood as crItIc F or such a prolific writer of fiction and poetry, Margaret Atwood has an astonishingly large output of expository prose on diverse literary, cultural, and political issues to her credit. She is a poeta doctus if ever there was one. Her expository prose extends from reviews of literary texts and introductions to her own works and those by other authors, via statements on politics such as US-Canadian relations and human rights, to lecture series on the myth of the North in Canadian literature and culture, on the concept of debt in human history and culture, as well as on writing and the position of the writer. By now, her literary and cultural criticism encompasses seven books ranging over four decades. With the best-selling Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood catapulted CanLit and, as it turned out, herself onto the literary map. Written in the vein of Northrop Frye’s myth criticism, the often-quoted survey of Canadian literature is an important document of thematic criticism. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982) is the first of two collections of critical prose, this one covering the period from 1960 to 1982. The second such collection, Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004 (2004), picks up the thread from the earlier collection and covers the following two decades into the twenty-first century. In between, Atwood published three critical books with unified themes: Strange Things: The Malevolent 6 “On Being a Woman Writer” Atwood as Literary and Cultural Critic 170 EngEndEring gEnrE: ThE Works of MargarET aTWood North in Canadian Literature (1995), In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Historical Fiction (1997), and Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002). Her latest book in this genre, also devoted to a unified theme, is Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008). Considering the range of Atwood’s critical oeuvre and her status and influence, rather little significant criticism has so far been published on her expository prose, with critical responses mainly framed in reviews of the individual works or briefly scattered in books and articles. The most useful of the few more extensive contributions are those by Walter Pache (2000/02)—the most substantial and up-to-date evaluation—and by George Woodcock (1981), as well as the relevant chapters in Jerome H. Rosenberg (1984) and Barbara Hill Rigney (1987), though they date back more than twenty years. So does a review by William Keith (1983), which is mainly negative in its evaluations of Atwood as critic, partly also because Keith does not seem to appreciate her sense of humour in serious analytical contexts. Neither does he give her the benefit of the doubt when Atwood herself has insisted that she is, by her own choice, first and foremost a writer of literature and a critic only from necessity or, rather, from moral and “national” obligation. In the four-page introduction to Second Words, she ruminates on her motivations for turning to criticism in the first place, which she calls a “rescue operation” in Canada at the time: When I began writing and first discovered that there were other people writing in Canada, it was fairly clear that unless some writers reviewed Canadian books, some of the time, they wouldn’t get reviewed at all. That has changed a great deal, but ... occasionally I may review a book, still, just to get it reviewed, or, because I feel it’s been badly treated or misunderstood. ... Book reviews seem to me one of the dues you pay for being a writer, especially in Canada. (12) Atwood also claims that her gender has been a reason for people inviting her to write critical prose, be it in the form of reviews, essays, or speeches: “Even in the 1980’s I’m still being approached by groups who say I just have to do it because this or that august body has never had a woman before (as they’re fond of putting it). ... Sometimes it’s a writer, and sometimes, even and especially in Canada, it’s a Canadian. “on Being a Woman Writer” 171 Sometimes it’s all three” (13). Other motivations for her critical activities are what can be called self-expressive and self-educative, even self-revelatory: “I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began...