A Postcolonial Approach to Margaret Atwood's Novels Volume I
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UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES FACULTE DE PHILOSOPHIE ET LETTRES SECTION : LANGUES ET LITTERATURES MODERNES Escaping the Labyrinth of Deception: A Postcolonial Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels Volume I Thèse présentée en vue de l’obtention du grade de Docteur en Philosophie et Lettres par Christel Kerskens. Promoteur : Professeur M. Maufort ANNEE ACADEMIQUE 2006-2007 To Pascal. To my parents and grandparents. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Maufort for his enthusiasm, helpful corrections and constant support. I would also like to thank Professor Bellarsi for her precious information on ecocriticism, as well as Professor Tabah and Professor Den Tandt for the interesting doctoral seminars on alterity, which I attended with great pleasure. I also wish to express my gratitude to Professor Delbaere, for introducing me to Canadian Literature and especially to Margaret Atwood’s work during my undergraduate studies at the U.L.B. My gratitude also goes to the U.L.B. Centre for Canadian Studies, whose financial help contributed to my research stay in Toronto; to Professor Brydon; whose friendly welcome and insightful comments on postcolonialism have helped me fulfil this project; to her colleagues and students from the University of Western Ontario, who welcomed me and encouraged me; and to Luba Frastacky and her colleagues from the Fischer Library of Rare Books in Toronto, who kindly assisted me in my research in the Atwood Papers. Finally, I also wish to thank all my friends, especially Valérie Ledent, Cécile Maertens, and Evelyne Haberfeld, and colleagues, who made suggestions, encouraged me, or showed interest throughout my writing process. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: DECEPTION AS A POSTCOLONIAL STRATEGY IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S NOVELS 1 General Introduction 1 1. Atwoodian Criticism, with a Special Focus on Deception 8 2. Deception : A Theoretical Framework 15 2.1. Historical and Cultural Background 15 2.2. Significant Postmodern Aspects of Deception 23 2.2.1. Historiographic Metafiction or Variations on the Concept of Truth(s) 23 2.2.2. Atwood’s Metafictional Manipulation 26 2.3. Deception as a Postcolonial Process 28 2.3.1. Deception as Mimicry 28 2.3.2. Magic Realism and Deception 30 2.3.3. The Trickster Figure 33 2.3.4. Quest for Self / Quest for Hybridity? Getting Rid of One’s Masks 44 Chapter 1. The Edible Woman: A Case of Socially Induced Deception 51 1. Metafictional Intertext and Irony 54 2. Marian’s Mimicry Mania 60 3. Making Sense of Magic Realist Moments 66 4. Marian and Duncan as Tricksters 75 5. Hints at Hybridity 85 6. Quest for a Lost Voice 87 Chapter 2. Surfacing : Deception as Survival Strategy 99 1. Parodic Rewriting 100 2. Deceptive Mimicry : A Case Study 106 3. Uncanny Apparitions 115 4. The Narrator and her Parents : Inherited Tricksterism 123 5. Animal Regression as Quest for Hybridity 133 6. Surfacing or the Story of a Single Woman’s Alterity 136 Chapter 3. Lady Oracle: Joan Foster as Trickster 148 1. Atwood’s Sense of Parody: The Heroine as Writer 149 2. Variations on Mimicry 157 3. Grotesque and Gothic Magic Realism 173 4. Parodies of Trickster Figures 185 5. From Multiple Personalities to Hybridity 195 6. Joan’s Personal and Professional Self-discovery 209 Chapter 4. Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid’s Tale: Atwood’s “Subversion” Trilogy 221 1. Three Novels of Subversion 221 1.1. Bodily Harm: Subversion on Foreign Ground 222 1.2. Life Before Man : Subversion and Ethnicity 224 1.3. The Handmaid’s Tale: Subversion vs. Propaganda 225 2. Subversion through Parody 226 2.1. Along the Yellow Brick Road: Atwood’s Parody of The Wizard of Oz. 227 2.2. Life as a Game Parody 230 2.3. Metafictional Comments and Parodic Reflections on Art and Reality 233 3. Three Forms of Subversive Deception 235 4. When Reality Verges on the Unreal 262 5. The Trickster as Embodiment of Subversion 271 6. Forms of Hybridity: The Ethnic, the Pathological, and the Survivor 276 7. Atwood’s Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Quest Pattern 286 Chapter 5. Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride : Female Tricksters at Work 294 1. Parodic Twin Sisters and Fairy-Tale Deconstruction 296 2. Deception as a Means of Defence 304 3. Magic Realist Dreams and Incantations 314 4. Mature Tricksters 326 5. Hybridity of the Trickster Figure 334 6. Double Quests: Between Failure and Resurrection 345 Chapter 6. Deceptive Patterns in Alias Grace or the Narrator as Quilter 354 1. Fictionalising Historical Documents 356 2. Grace’s Deceptive Mimicry 365 3. Deceptive Magic Realism 371 4. Two Trickster Figures: Grace Marks and Jeremiah the Peddler 376 5. Grace’s Quest for Hybridity 387 6. Quilting One’s Way Towards Self-Knowledge 397 Chapter 7. The Blind Assassin’s Criminal Deception 402 1. Atwood’s Metafictional Reflections 403 2. Three-Tiered Deception 408 3. Iris’s Disruptions of Reality 415 4. Are All Tricksters “Blind Assassins?” 418 5. Hybrid Sisters 425 6. A Three-Tiered Variation on the Quest Pattern 429 Chapter 8. Oryx and Crake: Hybridisation and Colonisation 435 1. Snowman: An Inverted Frankenstein or an Apocalyptic Caliban? 437 2. The Dangers of Mimicry 444 3. Snowman’s Magic Realist Fantasies 451 4. Oryx, Crake, and Snowman: Three Aspects of Tricksterism 454 5. The Hybridity of the Colonised Subject 457 6. Atwood’s Ecological Stance 462 7. Snowman’s Quest for Humanity 465 CONCLUSION: EXPLORING THE LABYRINTH 473 BIBLIOGRAPHY 484 Appendix I 524 Appendix II 525 Appendix III 526 Appendix IV 527 If you like, you can play games with this game. You can say: the murderer is the writer, the detective is the reader, the victim is the book. Or perhaps, the murderer is the writer, the detective is the critic and the victim is the reader. (…) Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie. Now: do you believe me? Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark, 49-50. INTRODUCTION: DECEPTION AS A POSTCOLONIAL STRATEGY IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S NOVELS A poet, novelist, short-story writer, and author of numerous reviews and critical essays, Margaret Atwood has become one of Canada’s major writers in recent decades. Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood spent her childhood in-between the city and the bush, where her father conducted scientific research. This might account for the deep respect for nature which pervades Atwood’s work. In the 1960s, as an undergraduate student at Victoria College, Toronto, Atwood witnessed a renewed interest in Canadian literature and culture. As a centre for poetry, the University of Toronto, with its major figures, such as Jay Macpherson, Northrop Frye, and E.J. Pratt operated a decisive influence on Atwood’s career. She started writing poems, parodies, and reviews for the college newspaper, while attending and giving readings at the local coffeehouses. She continued her studies at Harvard, devoting her interest to Victorian literature and early American literature. She also worked on a Ph.D. degree, but never completed her dissertation on H. Rider Haggard and the English metaphysical romance. Atwood’s interest in the English tradition and the gothic romance, a genre she undeniably parodies in her early novel Lady Oracle, possibly derives from this failed academic endeavour. From her early poems and novels, Atwood’s career rapidly evolved towards international recognition in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Her work has become the subject of numerous academic publications and she has won several outstanding awards. 1 However, one might wonder what draws so many readers, all over the world, to Atwood’s writings. I personally regard Atwood as an author who situates herself at the crossroad between various traditions: the feminist, the nationalist, the postmodern, and, one might argue, the postcolonial. Atwood’s repeated refusal to be classified as a member of a particular tradition might well be attributed to the fact that she actually draws elements from each of them. Indeed, whereas early novels such as The Edible Woman or Lady Oracle, and most of her poetry collections, among which the famous Power Politics, display overt feminist overtones, other works – Surfacing, to name but one – express Atwood’s defence of Canadian culture and nature. Most critics have offered postmodern readings of Atwood, focusing on her protagonists’ inner contradictions, as well as on her novels’ multiple layers and lack of closure. More recently, however, scholars have devoted their attention to the postcolonial implications of Atwood’s writings: preoccupied both by the situation of Canada as a colony and by women’s empowerment, Atwood often thematically associates these themes. She considers it the writer’s task to defend the colonised country’s cultural tradition. Likewise, as a female writer, Atwood equally addresses the question of the female condition. Other postcolonial themes often mentioned in relation to Atwood’s work comprise irony, voice, and marginality. Atwood’s production strikes the reader with a balanced mixture of parody and seriousness. She tackles difficult themes, such as war, often present in her protagonists’ childhood reminiscences, or the power relationships between men and women. Her writings challenge the conventions of literary genres and social dichotomies, providing a rich intertextual layer of cross-cultural allusions. In 1994, Atwood, on a lecture tour around the world, for the first time presented the writer as a trickster-figure (Stein, Margaret Atwood Revisited, 6), a character known for its tendency to cross boundaries and defy traditions. Atwood’s fondness for open endings, tricky 2 language, dubious characters, and multiple interpretations, should therefore not surprise her readers.