ATWOOD, Margaret (Eleanor)

Nationality: Canadian. Born: Ottawa, Ontario, 18 November 1939. Education: Victoria College, University of Toronto, 1957-61, B.A. 1961. Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, A.M. 1962. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1962-63, 1965-67. Family: Divorced; one daughter. Career: Lecturer in English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1964-65; instructor in English, Sir George Williams University Montreal, 1967-68; teacher of creative writing, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1969-70; assistant professor of English, York University, Toronto, 1971-72; editor and member of board of directors, House of Anansi Press, Toronto, 1971-73; writer-in-residence, University of Toronto, 1972-73, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 1985, Macquarie University, North Ryde, New South Wales, 1987, and Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, 1989; Berg Visiting Professor of English, New York University, 1986. President, Writers Union of Canada, 1981-82, and PEN Canadian Centre, 1984-86. Awards: E. J. Pratt medal, 1961; President's medal, University of Western Ontario, 1965; Governor-General's award, 1966, 1986; Centennial Commission prize, 1967; Union League Civic and Arts Foundation prize, 1969, and Bess Hokin prize, 1974 (Poetry, Chicago); City of Toronto award, 1976, 1989; The Canadian Bookseller's Association award, 1977; Periodical Distributors of Canada Short Fiction, 1977; St. Lawrence award, 1978; Radcliffe medal, 1980; Molson award, 1981; Guggenheim fellowship, 1981; Companion of the Order of Canada, 1981; Welsh Arts Council International Writers prize, 1982; Periodical Distributors of Canada Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters of the Year award, 1983; Ida Nudel Humanitarian award, 1986; Toronto Arts award, 1986; Governor General's award, for The Handmaid's Tale, 1986; Los Angeles Times Book award, 1986; Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year, 1986; Arthur C. Clarke Science-Fiction award, for novel, 1987; Commonwealth Literary Prize, Regional winner, 1987; Council for Advancement and Support of Education, Silver Medal, Best Article of the Year, 1987; Humanist of the Year award, 1987; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, 1987; YWCA Women of Distinction award, 1988; National Magazine award, for journalism, 1988; American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foreign Honourary Member, Literature, 1988; Cat's Eye, Torgi Talking Book, 1989; Cat's Eye, City of Toronto Book award, 1989; Cat's Eye, Coles Book of the Year, 1989; Canadian Booksellers Association Author Of the Year, 1989; Order of Ontario, 1990; Harvard University Centennial medal, 1990; Trillium Award for Excellence in Ontario writing, for Wilderness Tips, 1992; 1992 John Hughes prize, from Welsh Development Board; Book of the Year award from the Periodical Marketers of Canada, for Wilderness Tips; Commemorative Medal for the 125th Anniversary of Canadian Confederation; Canadian Author's Association Novel of the Year, for The Robber Bride, 1993; Trillium Award for Excellence in Ontario Writing, for The Robber Bride, 1994; Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canadian and Caribbean Region, 1994; Government of France's Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1994; Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, for The Robber Bride, 1994; Swedish Houmour Associations' International Humorous Writer award, 1995; Trillium Award for Excellence in Ontario Writing, for Morning in the Burned House, 1995; Norwegian Order of Literary Merit, 1996; Giller Prize, for Alias Grace, 1996; Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year, 1996; National Arts Club 1997 Medal of Honor for Literature; Premio Mondello, for Alias Grace, 1997. Honorary degrees: Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, 1973; Concordia University, Montreal, 1980; Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1982; University of Toronto, 1983; Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1985; University of Waterloo, Ontario, 1985; University of Guelph, Ontario, 1985; Victoria College, 1987; Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1974. Companion, Order of Canada, 1981. Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, 1987; Université de Montréal, 1991; University of Leeds, 1994; McMaster University, 1996. Member: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1988 (honorary member).

Publications

Short Stories

Dancing Girls and Other Stories. 1977.

Encounters with the Element Man. 1982.

Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems. 1983.

Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories. 1983.

Unearthing Suite. 1983.

Wilderness Tips. 1991.

Good Bones. 1992.

Novels

The Edible Woman. 1969.

Surfacing. 1972.

Lady Oracle. 1976.

Life Before Man. 1979.

Bodily Harm. 1981.

The Handmaid's Tale. 1985.

Cat's Eye. 1988.

The Robber Bride. 1993.

Alias Grace. 1996.

Plays

Radio Play:

The Trumpets of Summer, 1964.

Television Plays:

The Servant Girl, 1974; Snowbird, 1981; Heaven on Earth, with Peter Pearson, 1986.

Poetry

Double Persephone. 1961.

The Circle Game (single poem). 1964.

Talismans for Children. 1965.

Kaleidoscopes: Baroque. 1965.

Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein. 1966.

The Circle Game (collection). 1966.

The Animals in That County. 1968.

The Journals of Susanna Moodie. 1970.

Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man and Two Androids: Poems for

Voices. 1970.

Procedures for Underground. 1970.

Power Politics. 1971.

You Are Happy. 1974.

Selected Poems. 1976.

Marsh, Hawk. 1977.

Two-Headed Poems. 1978.

True Stories. 1981.

Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written. 1981.

Snake Poems. 1983.

Interlunar. 1984.

Selected Poems 2: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986. 1986.

Selected Poems 1966-1984. 1990.

Poems 1965-1975. 1991.

Other

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. 1972.

Days of the Rebels 1815-1840. 1977.

Up in the Tree (for children). 1978.

Anna's Pet (for children), with Joyce Barkhouse. 1980.

Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. 1982.

Atwood: Conversations, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll. 1990.

For the Birds (for children). 1990.

Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (for children). 1995.

Strange Things: Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. 1995.

Editor, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. 1982.

Editor, with Robert Weaver, The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. 1986.

Editor, The Canlit Food Book: From Pen to Palate: A Collection of Tasty Literary Fare. 1987.

Editor, with Shannon Ravenel, The Best American Short Stories. 1989.

Editor, Barbed Lyres. 1990.

*

Bibliography:

"Atwood: An Annotated Bibliography" (prose and poetry) by Alan J. Horne, in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors 1-2 edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David, 2 vols., 1979-80.

Critical Studies:

Atwood: A Symposium edited by Linda Sandler, 1977; A Violent Duality by Sherrill E. Grace, 1979, and Atwood: Language, Text, and System edited by Grace and Lorraine Weir, 1983; The Art of Atwood: Essays in Criticism edited by Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson, 1981; Atwood by Jerome H. Rosenberg, 1984; Atwood: A Feminist Poetics by Frank Davey, 1984; Forbidden Fruit: On the Relationship Between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Slema Lagerlöf, Kate Chopin, and Atwood by Bonnie St. Andrews, 1986; Atwood by Barbara Hill Rigney, 1987; Atwood: Reflection and Reality by Beatrice Mendez-Egle, 1987; Critical Essays on Atwood edited by Judith McCombs, 1988; Atwood: Vision and Forms edited by Kathryn van Spanckeren and Jan Garden Castro, 1988; Collecting Clues: Margaret Atwood's Bodsily Harm by Lorna Irvine, 1993; Margaret Atwood's Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics by Sharon Rose Wilson, 1993; Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood by Eleonora Rao, 1994; Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels by Lorraine M. York, 1995; Margaret Atwood's Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse by Hilda Staels, 1995; Re/Membering Selves: Alienation and Survival in the Novels of Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence by Coomi S. Vevaina, 1996; In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood by Sonia Mycak, 1996.

* * *

Margaret Atwood is one of the best Canadian writers in her generation and certainly the most versatile of all. As a critic in books like Survival and Second Words, she has developed a thematically based critique—particularly of Canadian fiction—that presents the victor-victim theme as a frequent though not universal motif; it has been convincing so far as her own fiction is concerned, though less so in relation to Canadian novels and stories as a whole. Atwood is also one of the three or four best poets practicing in Canada, and her sharp ear as a poet is related to her sharp eye as a critic, which in turn is related to the combination of playful wit, Jungian demonology, and penetrative psychological insight that characterizes her fiction.

Atwood's seven novels have been widely discussed, but the differences as well as the relations between her short and her major fiction are considerable; in the short stories her vision tends to sharpen rather than narrow as she turns away from the moral-historical preoccupations of her novels towards the special, intimate, often isolated behavior of individuals. It is as if she were turning her eyes away from a telescope to a microscope and following for a while a kind of intimate enquiry like those pursued by her entomologist father, but with the behavior of humans rather than that of moths and beetles as subject. The kind of eye with which she looks, as well as the clear prose she uses, tends to link Atwood, in so far as an artist can be linked with a scientist, with the classic naturalist writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If there is anything that Atwood's short stories have in common, it is that they isolate for observation adolescents as they enter the "mature" world, or adults entering alien settings, or people limited both emotionally and mentally who have not yet made any terms with the world.

Atwood was writing stories quite early in her career, but only in 1977 did she publish her first collection, Dancing Girls and Other Stories, shortly after her third novel, Lady Oracle. It was followed in 1983 by Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories and in 1991 by Wilderness Tips, though these larger collections have been interspersed by small collections published by small presses, like Encounters with the Element Man, Murder in the Dark: Short Fiction and Prose Poems, Hurricane Hazel and Other Stories, and Good Bones, described as "short parables, prose poems, monologues."

Atwood's short fiction ranges in its preoccupations—and its mood—from the deathly to the trivial, for Atwood has the unusual ability to be chilling at one moment and jokingly playful the next so that one is not always sure whether that skull has just been dug out of a graveyard or manufactured by a Halloween mask-maker. The main common element is the enviable skill with which the writer works. Her short stories can be seen as the small (not always lesser) products of an imagination and an observation incessantly at work. (Her friends always open her new books fearing yet hoping to be somehow there.) The stories are, despite their assurance of touch, tentative in effect, even less likely to answer our questions fully than her novels. Yet there is a typical Atwood relentlessness about them, and we are meant to keep on questioning what is happening in this world between rationality and madness that we precariously inhabit when we read them.

The tourist, most often a woman alienated from her habitual past, is a character in many of these stories, and in other stories the trembling fear of being at the heart of the unfamiliar and the threatening is extended, as it is in Atwood's novels. In a 1980 essay on Atwood, published in Essays on Canadian Writing, Russell Brown elaborately compares one of her stories, "The Resplendent Quetzal," with her slightly later novel Life before Man and finds similar patterns of alienation. He says, and in doing so gives an important insight into Atwood's shorter fiction, "Throughout Dancing Girls, boarding houses, rented rooms, and hotels are almost the only accommodations mentioned, and all exude a sense of residents who 'never lived here'; nowhere is there stability; nowhere does a genuine 'home' exist."

One could of course apply this insight to all of Atwood's fiction. Nowhere does a real home exist. The terrible patriarchal collectivity of The Handmaid's Tale is the opposite of home, and it is surely significant that the more one can significantly link the central character of an Atwood story or a novel with its author, the more one is involved in a fluid family situation that is not based on a settled home but on a wandering existence depending on seasonal imperatives: an unsettling existence but one rich in data about human existence since awareness flourishes in instability. And so we find in Atwood's stories sharp observations on existence that resemble the occasional papers that in a scientist's career can vary her major theoretical pieces with the trivia by which her interest and her urge are sustained.

—George Woodcock

See the essays on "The Salt Garden" and "Wilderness Tips."