Atwood, Margaret (1939- ) novelist, poet

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, to Carl Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Kil- lam Atwood, a nutritionist. She spent her childhood accompanying her father on his researches in the wilderness of Quebec. She graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A. in 1961, received an M.A. from Radcliffe in 1962, and did some graduate work at Harvard University, beginning a thesis on gothic fiction.

Atwood’s first published work, Double Persephone (1961), was a book of poetry exploring the mythological figure Persephone. Her most important collection of verse, The Circle Game (1966), uses gothic imagery to explore issues of gender. For example, the first poem, “This Is a Photograph of Me,” is narrated by a dead woman: “The photograph was taken / the day after I drowned.” Her first novel, Edible Woman (1969), is a darkly comic tale of a woman who fears marriage and stops eating.

Atwood’s most celebrated novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), is set in a horrifying future society, Gilead, where women are condemned to illiteracy and servitude. The novel purports to be the recorded narration of Offred, a servant: “Where the edges are we aren’t sure, they vary, according to the attacks and counterattacks; but this is the centre, where nothing moves. The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead is within you.” Critic Sandra Tomc sees the novel as a critique not merely of male oppression but also of American domination over Canada: “In the nightmare future she imagines, women have succumbed to a totalizing patriarchy. Appropriately, given Atwood’s conflation of feminism and nationalism, Canada, in some analogous gesture, has succumbed to its totalizing southern neighbor.”

The Robber Bride (1993) focuses on the demonic Zenia’s haunting of her three friends, robbing them of their money and men. This book has dark gothic undertones: “Zenia, with her dark hair sleeked down by the rain, wet and shivering, standing on the back step as she had done once before, long ago. Zenia, who had been dead for five years.” Alias Grace (1996), which continues Atwood’s exploration of gender and power, is based on the true story of Grace Marks, a servant accused of murdering her master in 1843.

Atwood’s most recent novel, Blind Assassin (2000), tells three interconnected stories, beginning with a woman, Iris Griffin, telling of her sister’s death in 1945. This novel won the Booker Prize. Fellow Canadian writer Alice Munro comments: “It’s easy to appreciate the grand array of Margaret Atwood’s work—the novels, the stories, the poems, in all their power and grace and variety. This work in itself has opened up the gates for a recognition of Canadian writing all over the world.”

Critical Analysis. Atwood has said that she deferred writing The Handmaid’s Tale for more than three years after the idea for the novel first came to her because she feared that the concept was too “crazy,” even for a work of dystopian fiction. During those three years, however, she began to see things that seemed to confirm her ideas and fears, including a charismatic Catholic sect that refers to women as “handmaids” and, in Atwood’s words, tells women to “sit down and shut up.” In the 20 years since the work was first published, even more of the circumstances Atwood depicts in the novel seem to have come to pass, making the work all the more frightening to read.

The novel opens in a not-too-distant future. The United States has been taken over by a fundamentalist Christian sect whose primary aim is to govern the nation by what they take to be biblical precepts. Their particular focus is on women, whose primary roles are as wives and mothers. To help enforce male domination, women are forbidden to read, own property, or hold jobs and are divided into discrete groups that are marked by the color of clothing they wear. The protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale is a handmaid, called Offred, who must wear red. She is a virtual slave in the household of the Commander and his wife, Serena Joy, a former televangelist. The couple has been unable to have children—a common circumstance in this dystopian future because of toxic air and water pollution—and Offred is expected to bear a child for them. Should she fail, she will be sent to the home of another Commander, where she will take his name (Offred is “of Fred”). If she fails three times, she will be declared an Unwoman and sent to clean up toxic waste dumps, along with other women deemed unfit or irredeemable.

The world of The Handmaid’s Tale is a fascist social order, in which spies are everywhere and even the most minor misdeeds may lead to death by stoning in what were once sports venues— much as women are stoned to death by Islamic extremists. Those who do not accept the new religion, pro-choice advocates, and homosexuals are executed by hanging, and their bodies are displayed on “The Wall” as a warning to others. Blacks and Jews are transported and resettled.

Certainly the most frightening aspect of The Handmaid’s Tale is how logically it flows from current events and trends. Atwood herself said, “I found myself increasingly alarmed by statements made frequently by religious leaders in the United States; and then a variety of events from around the world could not be ignored, particularly the rising fanaticism of the Iranian monotheocracy. The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have . . . been done before, more than once.” Without vigilance, Atwood suggests, it can happen again.

Other Works by Margaret Atwood:
- Cat’s Eye. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
- The Door. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
- Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor, 2004.
- Power Politics. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Works about Margaret Atwood:
- Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography.
- Toronto: ECW Press, 1998.
- Nischik, Reingard M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House 2000.
- Wisker, Gina. Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.