A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/108219/ Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications S t r a t e g i e s f o r I d e n t i t y : T h e F i c t i o n o f M a r g a r e t A t w o o d Eleonora Rao A thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick March 1991 Acknowledgments This study has been conceived and written while I was at the Department of English of the University of Warwick. During the years I have been helped and supported by a number of people. First I wish to thank Dr Paulina Palmer who has read all the several drafts of the manuscript and has been a perceptive and challenging critic, who constantly made me re­ think my assumptions. Her generous help has been crucial for the completion of this project. Andrew Benjamin also read parts of the manuscript in various stages and has my deep gratitude for advice and encouragement. I wish to mention the support I have received from members of The British Association for Canadian Studies, Dr Lynette Hunter, Colin Nicholson, Dr Coral Howells, and in particular by the the director Dr Ged Martin. I am also particularly indebted to Dr Tom Winnifrith for his support during the last phase of this project. I am grateful to Prof. Maria Teresa Chialant for her friendship and care. Many thanks to all the friends who cheered me along, Athena Economides, Ernesto Sanchez, Rachel Parkins, David Wright, Bob Fine, Fiona Beckett and many others. Dr Rachel Parkins has also been extremely helpful in solving my word-processor problems, together with Pauline Wilson. During these years of my permanence abroad I have received constant encouragement and support from my family, my father Renato, my sisters Rosa and Roberta and Anna Rao Fabrini to whom goes my profound gratitude. This study would not have been possible without them. This project has been partly financed by The British Council, The British Academy and The University of Warwick. ABSTRACT This study is a critical reading of the fiction of contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. My analysis focuses on problems pertaining to the questions of genre, identity and female subjectivity. The thesis is thematically structured. Chapter One, 'The Question of Genre: Creative Re- Appropriations, explores the plurality of genres and narrative styles present in the novels. The second Chapter' A Proliferation of Identities: Doubling and Intertextuality' examines constructions of the self ifi the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity which conceive of the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process. Atwood's challenge to the notion of the homogeneous ego finds a gendered vision wherein woman assumes a multiplicity of roles and positions. Chapter Three 'Cognitive Questions' discusses the text's emphasis on sense receptivity and the epistemological question they pose in relation to language, reality and interpretation. Chapter Four 'Writing the Female Character' analyses Atwood's configurations of femininity, sexual politics and sexual difference. Introduction 1 Chapter One The Question of Genre: Creative Reappropriations 28 1.1 Writing Across Generic Boundaries 28 1.2 A Critical Reappropriation: Surfacing and Canadian Literature 38 1.3 Contrasting Worlds: from Pastoral to Dystopia, Surfacing, Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale 47 1.4 The 'Quest' Revisited: Surfacing 67 1.5 A Fascination with Romance: Lady Oracle 82 C h a p t e r T wo A Proliferation of Identities: Doubling and INTERTEXTUALITY 101 2.1 Constructions of the Self 101 2.2 The Double: The Edible Homan and Bodily Harm 110 2.3 Destructuring the Subject: Surfacing 129 2.4 A Dispersed Self: Lady Oracle 148 2.5 A Body in Fragments: Life Before Man and The Handmaid's Tale 165 2.6 The Gendered Vision: Surfacing and Lady Oracle 190 Chapter Three Cognitive Questions 213 3.1 Introduction;'Seeing' and 'Knowing' 213 3.2 Narratives of Perception; Surfacing, Bodily Harm, Cat's Eye 219 3.3 Interpreting Reality; Bodily Harm, Life Before Man, Cat's Eye 235 3.4 Deceptive Surfaces: Bodily Harm 250 3.5 A Logic of Coexistence: Surfacing, Bodily Harm, The Handmaid's Tale 265 Chapter Four Writing the Female Subject 281 4.1 A Fractured Identity 281 4.2 The 'Masquerade' of Femininity: The Edible Homan 286 4.3 A Scopic Economy of Pleasure: Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale 297 4.4 The Specular Logic: Murder in the Dark, You Are Happy 310 4.5 A New Dialectics: Bodily Harm, Cat's Eye 320 4.6 Language, Sexuality, Displacement: Surfacing, Blubeard's Egg, Life Before Man 340 Afterword 362 Bibliography 366 Edition used: The Edible Woman (London, Virago, 1985) Surfacing (New York, Warner, 1983) Lady Oracle (London, Virago, 1986) Dancing Girls (London, Virago, 1981) Life Before Man (London, Virago, 1982) Bodily Harm (London, Virago, 1983) Murder In the Dark (London, Cape, 1984) The Handmaid's Tale (London, Virago, 1987) Blubeard's Egg ( London, Cape, 1987) Cat's Eye (London, Bloomsbury, 1989) Poetry: Double Persephone (Toronto, Hawkshead Press, 1961) The Circle Game (Toronto, Anansi, 1978) The Animals in That Country (Toronto, 1968) The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1970) Procedures for Underground (Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1970) Power Politics (Toronto, Anansi,1971) You Are Happy (Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1974) Two-Headed Poems (Toronto, Oxford University Press 1978) True Stories (London, Cape, 1982) Interlunar (London, Cape, 1988)) All these signs can be ascribed to a generalized anti-Hegelianism: difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and of the negative of identity and of contradiction. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition And yet it is not the style of a woman: no, certainly, it is too strong and concise - not diffuse enough for a woman. Jane Austen, Emma 1 Introduction Nobody can claim to have the absolute, whole, objective, total, complete truth. The truth is composite, and that is a cheering thought. It mitigates tendencies toward autocracy.1 A 'composite' quality informs Atwood's writing. This study aims at exploring the heterogeneity present in Atwood's novels and the implications which it carries. My analysis focuses on the manner in which this heterogeneous plurality permeates Atwood's fiction and can be seen in the use of literary genre; in the presentation of character and subjectivity; in the problematization of the notion of the 'real'. These epistemological and ontological concerns which Atwood's writing explores are characteristic of postmodernist fiction. It is only recently, however, that critics of Atwood's work have contextualized her fiction within the parameters of postmodernist writing. Patricia Wough includes Atwood in her book Feminine Fiction: Revisiting the Postmodern. However, I find her definition of postmodernism rather reductive. She confines the postmodern almost exclusively within the problematics of the 'dissolution of identity' and 1 Jan Garden Castro, 'An Interview with Margaret Atwood 20 April 1983' in VanSpanckeren, Kathryn and Jan Garden Castro eds., Margaret Atwood: Vision and Form (Illinois, 1988), pp.215-232 (p.232). 2 discusses how women writers have dealt with this predicament. Linda Hutcheon argues for Atwood's postmodernism more interestingly in a short essay which gives guidelines for further research on the topic.2 Postmodernism, in fact, involves more than the challenge to humanist notions of stability of the self. Postmodernist fiction epitomises paradoxes and contradictions. In Linda Hutcheon's concise definition, postmodernism is presented as 'fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, inescapably political'.3 In postmodernist fiction the presence of parody and self-reflexive metafiction, probings into the nature of 'the self', coexist with political and ideological concerns. Similarly Atwood combines in her reflexive and multifaceted writing problems of identity and her interests in the political implications of patriarchal power.4 In Atwood's fiction, in so far as it is characteristic of postmodermism, the re-evaluation of mimesis is combined with a degree of self- consciousness. This is another postmodern paradox which Atwood's fiction articulates. The modernist view of art as an autonomous artefice separate from the world is 2 Linda Hutcheon, 'Process, Product and Politics: The Postmodernism of Margaret Atwood', in The Canadian Postmodern (Toronto, 1988), pp. 138-159. 3 The Poetics of Postmodernism, (London, 1988), p.4. 4 Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory (London, 1989) . refuted, as well as notions of realist transparency, that see art as the reflection of the world 5. Like many other postmodernist writers who were formed in the sixties, Atwood criticizes the values and ideologies of the sixties: the sexist nature of the sixities atmosphere of permissiviness, the cult of the 'natural', the 'authentic', the myth of spontaneity. What postmodernist writers like Atwood have shown, is that the natural is in fact the 'constructed'.*’ One aspect of the postmodern interest in history is the parodic re-visitation of literary genres that it has produced. By means of this device postmodernist fiction incorporates the past and then tries to inscribe a criticism of that past.7 This is achieved by bringing together genres belonging to 'high' and 'low' forms of art traditionally kept apart, with the result that texts like Atwood's can be read at very different levels, as they are at the same time popular and academic, accessible and Elitist.