Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale

4. Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale: Postmodern Revisioning in Recent Texts

Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale Postmodern Revisioning in Recent Texts  .  Margaret Atwood is not only one of today’s best-known writers but also one who demonstrates the power and beauty of fairy tales. Fairy-tale intertexts function in nearly all of her work, including novels, short story collections, flash fictions and prose poems, poetry, children’s books, and essays; and some of these works are themselves meta–fairy tales. As I have previously shown, in addition to literary, film, biblical, mythic, and other popular intertexts, Atwood’s novels into the late s—The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, The Handmaid ’s Tale, and Cat’s Eye—all embed fairy tales. Although seldom recognized , Atwood’s short story, poetry, flash fiction, and essay collections, most evidently Bluebeard’s Egg, The Circle Game, You Are Happy, Power Politics, and Survival, and some of her visual art (Fitcher’s Bird), also demonstrate fairy-tale intertexts (Wilson, “Fiction Flashes”). By revisioning fairy-tale intertexts in a postmodern manner, Atwood explores power and sexual politics in patriarchal society and implies movement from symbolic dismem4 berment and cannibalism to metamorphosis, usually through the transformative and creative act of telling a story. To varying degrees, The Robber Bride (), Morning in the Burned House (), Alias Grace (), The Blind Assassin (), and Oryx and Crake (), my focus here, continue to use fairy-tale images, motifs, themes, structure, and characterization, always deconstructed and interlaced withtalesfromrelatedfolklore,otherpopularculture,history,literature,and opera. Atwood admits that the Grimms’ fairy tales, along with closely related biblical and mythic stories, are her major influences (Sandler ) and that “Fitcher’s Bird,” embedded in all of my focus texts, is one of the tales she uses most frequently. In addition, “The Robber Bridegroom,” “The Juniper Tree,” “The Girl without Hands,” “Little Red-Cap,” and “The White Snake,” from the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, appear often. Hans Christian Andersen’s literary tales, including “The Littlest Mermaid,” “The Red Shoes,” and “The Snow Queen”; French-Canadian tales; Native American tales; nursery rhymes; comic books; and children’s literature frequently recur . Rather than clearly distinguishing between myth and fairy tale as Angela Carter does, or using the fairy tale for its historical status as a genre, Atwood employs all intertexts in a similar postmodern way, simultaneously seriously, ironically, and parodically. Often, as illustrated nicely in the “Fitcher’s Bird” intertext in Bluebeard’s Egg, they are both comic and tragic. Surprisingly, in view of excellent studies by Jack Zipes and other folklorists , the numerous postmodern and postcolonial fiction writers who use fairy-tale intertexts, and the serious scholarship that investigates these intertexts , some readers still view fairy tales stereotypically as “poison apples” for female readers, as didactic tales enculturating societal expectations and rigid gender roles (Daly , –; Dworkin ). When used by writers such as Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison, some readers mistakenly criticize a supposed “appropriation” of “European” stories, particularly as part of an “experimental” and self-referential postmodernism, as a selling out of their own cultural traditions (see, for example, Silko ). Postmodern novelists who embed fairy-tale intertexts generally “revise” or deconstruct them, using irony, parody, and sometimes satire of these intertexts alongside the tales’ original character types, themes, motifs, and images. Often turning fairy-tale plots upside down, reversing outcomes, and using unreliable narrators , anti-heroes/heroines, and magical realism, the texts generally exist in a romance mode and may still depict transformation and metamorphosis.1 Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale  Very frequently, Atwood retains the oral quality of fairy tales in her texts: especially in her fiction flashes or prose pieces, there is a voice and a listener. Although she often uses trickster narrators and characteristically “writes beyond the ending” rather than resolving narratives (DuPlessis ), her fairytale intertexts generally imply movement from symbolic dismemberment and cannibalism to healing. In embedding fairy-tale intertexts, Atwood uses characteristic tactics. First, she often builds a scene on a fairy-tale image, such as the mother apparently turning into a jay in Surfacing. Second, by frequently reversing the gender of fairy-tale characters, as when Life Before Man’s Nate becomes a comic “Cinderella,” she moves the woman from object to subject and doubles characters. Third, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood displaces the “truth” of privileged, reliable traditional narratives to unreliable ones with self-conscious and developing narrators. Fourth, she uses tropes and symbols to deepen the meaning of the...