Margaret Atwood by Coral Ann Howells (review)

HUMANITIES 337 Her thematic approach means that each lecture ranges across many literary works, old and new, obscure and well known, with forays into history, for example she reveals that Ernest Thompson Seton's relatively democratic Woodcraft Indian Movement was high-jacked by Baden-Powell and Teddy Roosevelt, who substituted something much more militaristic. Atwood discusses not only the well-known names, but also writers such as M.T. Kelly, William Henry Drummond, W.H. Blake, Wayland Drew, Pauline Johnson, Joyce Marshall, and Ann Tracy, whose work rarely receives attention from contemporary mainstream critics. Despite the feeling that given such an audience one might have wished for something a little less skittish and dated, Atwood certainly gave good value, which surely is what matters in public lectures, however exalted. (For example, did you know that Ogden Nash wrote a poem on t}:le Wendigo?: 'The Wendigo, The Wendigo, I saw it just a friend ago ...') (MARGERY FEE) Coral Ann Howells. Margaret Atwood St Martin's Modem Novelists. St Martin's Press. ix, 186. $84.00 cloth, $22.95 paper Part ofSt Martin's Modern Novelists series (general editor, Norman Page), Margaret Atwoodprovides a critical introductionto the eight novels Atwood wrote between 1969 (The Edible Woman) and 1993 (The Robber Btide), when need be also commenting on poetry, short fiction, and literary criticism. After an introduction providing biographical and sociocultural context come three chapters organized around themes - wilderness, the female, and the (female) Gothic - and then chapters devoted to each of Life before Man, Bodily Harm, The Handmaid's Tale, and Cat's Eye. Howells uses the story 'Wilderness Tips' (1991) to show Atwood's revisions of her earlier use of wilderness as a symbol of CanadialUless (particularly in Surfacing, 1972). For example, she notes the characters' lack of shared assumptions (one, George, immigrated from Hungary in the 1950S) and examines the story's allusions to Wacousta, a novel in which the hero disguises himself as a Native person. Then Howells uses Toril Moi's essay 'Feminist, Female, Feminine' and references to French feminism to organize a discuss. on of changes in the depiction of the female body and sexual politics in Atwood between The Edible Woman (1969) and a 'feminist fable of resistance' from Good Bones (1992) called 'The Female Body.' The chapter 'Atwoodian Gothic' moves from Lady Oracle (1976) to The Robber Bride (1993). The latter novel reveals how Ithe Other Woman' operates to disrupt female solidarity; since I good' women define themselves in opposition to her, she can never - must never - really die, and thus, paradoxically, they help preserve the stereotype that most repels them. These three chapters, then, look at how Atwood's deployment ofparticular recurrent themes has changed over twenty or so years - a useful tack, indeed. The chapter on Life before Man focuses on the issues of preservation 338 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 (as in one of its primary settings, the Royal Ontario Museum) and extinction (Lesje's fixation on dinosaurs): on how we must reimagine the future if we are to survive as a race. Howells usefully approaches Bodily Harm through the various epigraphs and titles Atwood considered for it. The Handmaid's Tale is tackled from the perspective of Helene Cixous's ecriture feminine. Finally, her discussion of Cat's Eye takes Paul de Man's comments on autobiography, in which he turns the conventional belief that the text is a representation of the life - around to suggest that art also produces the life. Certainly in Elaine Risley's paintings we s~e how she has used her art to make certain incidents and people central and iconic. As she walks around her retrospective exhibition, she begins to realize how the story (and her life) might have been different, thus undoing both the idea of astablesubjectand ofaccurate autobiographicalrepresentation. Howells concludes bystating that Atwood does not'supplicate for divine revelation but for the power to see without distortion of vision, while urging the need for clarity of mind in order to know our position in the universe.' And, I would add, for Atwood seeinginvolves not justthe eye or the mind,but the heart. 'This book has real strengths. Atwood's involvement with a wide...