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Reflecting Upon Her First Novel Written at Age Twenty-Three

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Reflecting Upon Her First Novel Written at Age Twenty-Three DAMES OF DISTRESS: FEMALE VIOLENCE AND REVISED SOCIO-CULTURAL DISCOURSES IN THE FICTION OF MARGARET ATWOOD by Kiley Kapuscinski A thesis submitted to the Department of English In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (July, 2008) Copyright ©Kiley Kapuscinski, 2008 Abstract This study examines the figure of the violent woman in Atwood’s fiction as a productive starting point for the re-evaluation of various socio-cultural debates. Emerging from Atwood’s conviction that art, in its various forms, is often involved in the re-writing of convention, I begin by re-defining traditional constructions of womanhood and violence in order to evince the reformative work and often unconventional forms of brutality employed by women in Atwood’s novels, including Surfacing, The Blind Assassin, Lady Oracle, and Cat’s Eye, and in her collections of short fiction, such as Dancing Girls, Bluebeard’s Egg, The Penelopiad, and The Tent. Throughout, I demonstrate the ambivalence of violence as both destructive and generative, Canadian and un-Canadian, and Atwood’s drawing on this destabilizing ambivalence in order to propose change within her broader social milieu. More precisely, the introductory chapter offers an overview of representations of female violence in Canadian fiction, and of the various responses to this figure as she appears in Atwood’s fiction, that point to the need for a critical vocabulary that addresses women’s capacity to enact harm. The second chapter examines the various mythologies that define Canada and its people, and how the violent woman troubles these mythologies by inciting recognition of national identity as a narrative process open to re-evaluation. The third chapter moves away from this focus on national narratives to highlight the discourses that similarly shape our understanding of art, and those who participate in it. Here, the violent woman can be seen to engage in revisionary work by exposing the limits of the Red Shoes Syndrome that has in many ways come to define the fraught relationship between the female artist and her art. The final chapter examines Atwood’s on-going fascination with various kinds of mythologies ii and her revisions of Classical and Biblical myths in order to highlight the veritable range of female violence and the possibility, and at times necessity, of responding to these behaviors in ways that circumnavigate traditionally masculine forms of justice ethics. In focusing on how Atwood’s violent women engage these various socio-cultural discourses, this study concludes that traditionally marginal and nonliterary figures can perform central and necessary roles and that Atwood’s fiction responds to, and in turn (re)creates, the social environment from which it emerges. iii Acknowledgements A major project like this is never done alone, and my endless gratitude goes out to all of those who inspired and guided me along the way. My greatest thanks are extended to Tracy Ware, whose encouragement and support have been extraordinary, and to Glenn Willmott and Shannon Hengen for their thorough and insightful suggestions. A special thank you also to my wonderful partner Mark Yourkevich and to my mother, both of whom have always been proud of and excited about anything I do, and to my father, who was always there in spirit. I am also grateful to Elisabeth Oliver, who offered sanity, perspective, and many craft nights to help me work out the knots. iv Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………… v Chapter 1: “Where have all the Lady Macbeths gone?”………………………………….1 Chapter 2: Negotiating the Nation……………………………………………………… 50 Chapter 3: Exis-tensions………………………………………………………………. 107 Chapter 4: Writing the Wrong………………………………………………………… 165 Chapter 5: “exploring the shadow side”………………………………………………. 218 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………… 229 v Chapter 1 “Where have all the Lady Macbeths gone?”: The En-gendering of Violence … I will enter a simple plea; women, both as characters and as people, must be allowed their imperfections. (Atwood “The Curse of Eve” 227) Reflecting upon her first novel, Up in the Air So Blue, written at age twenty-three, Margaret Atwood recalls the centrality of violence to the unpublished narrative that concludes on a grim note “with the female protagonist wondering whether or not to push one of the male characters off a roof” (“Where Is How” 9). The rendering offered here of the violent woman with the dangerous potential and willingness to respond to her aggressive impulses is one that Atwood develops throughout her fiction. Venturing to disrupt the enduring myth of Canada as a peaceable kingdom first articulated in the 1867 constitutional call for the definitively Canadian principles of “peace, order and good government,” and the traditional roles of women as exclusively victims and witnesses of violence, Atwood’s fiction offers images of female violence that boldly challenge conventional representations of women in Canadian literature, and that destabilize lingering historical tendencies to equate passivity and morality with the female gender. Not surprisingly, Atwood’s various representations of violent women have left many readers and critics unsettled,1 to the extent that when Atwood poses the question, “Where have all the Lady Macbeths gone?” (“Margaret Atwood’s Address”), the answer is not only self-evident in the context of Atwood’s corpus, but evocative of distressing images of female brutality that Atwood critics have hitherto failed to interpret within a fully- developed or nuanced critical frame. Endeavoring to speak the seemingly unspeakable, 1 the purpose of this study is to examine Atwood’s critically neglected fascination with the figure of the violent woman in her novels, short stories, and mini-fictions and her construction of this female figure as a destabilizing entity within the context of various social and cultural debates. Beginning with an effort to contextualize Atwood’s representations of violent women within her more widely ranging interest in violence and the aggregate of other Canadian writers grappling with the very real potential of women to do harm, this discussion frames its broader study of female brutality in Atwood’s fiction by addressing the dispersed work of Atwoodian scholars who have only begun to offer Atwood’s violent women the critical and theoretical attention they warrant, and the more general dearth of critical frames within which to examine female brutality. Moreover, despite the diffuse attempts of critics to acknowledge the presence of violent women in Atwood’s fiction, such scholarly evaluations remain sparse and often misleading, thus preventing this leitmotiv from achieving the critical mass necessary to allow aggressive women to emerge on their own terms. While acknowledging that any examination of a thematic figure in literature will necessarily be an incomplete and ongoing one, this study nonetheless posits that an understanding of Atwood’s representations of violent women is essential to address the broader issues of how Atwood imagines women’s place in literature, and the relationship between literature and its social context. Emerging from Atwood’s conviction that art, in its various forms, is often engaged in the re-writing of conventions,2 and thus that new ways of thinking proposed by creative works should be anticipated and celebrated, rather than resisted, this discussion re-defines traditional constructions of womanhood and violence in order to evince the communicative intent and often unconventional forms of 2 brutality employed by women in Atwood’s novels, such as Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye, The Blind Assassin, and The Penelopiad, and in her short fiction, including works from Dancing Girls, Bluebeard’s Egg, Wilderness Tips, and The Tent. The exclusion of Atwood’s poetry from this discussion, despite its frequent examination of human brutality and violation, is intended not only to focus the scope of this study and to draw attention to Atwood’s critically neglected short fiction, but also to reflect Atwood’s sense of poetry as a supersaturated form and “a condensing lens” (“Uncollected Prose [A]”) that distils its surroundings, and of prose as offering a broader vision that ambitiously attempts to account for “all of the cultural milieu” (“Evading” 137).3 More aptly, the latter form enables Atwood to more adequately address the revision of social narratives and to provide a more extensive depiction of individuals interacting with their continually changing social environment. Atwood’s interest in the intersections between the creative act and engagement with one’s broader socio-cultural milieu, confirmed early in her career through her “axiomatic” assertion that “art has its roots in social realities” (“A Question” 53), has been repeatedly demonstrated by the manner in which her fictional representations of female violence contribute to, and consistently challenge, the discourses of feminism, nationalism, female artistry, and ethics. While violence is typically experienced by both the victimizer and the victim as an intensely personal event, focusing exclusively on this intimacy in Atwood’s fiction limits one’s ability to see the broader social resonances created by the violent act. Alternatively, by exploring how Atwood’s violent women engage various socio-cultural topics, one is enabled to see how Atwood’s fiction responds
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