Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Introduction
- 1 Refusing to be a Victim: 1966–1978
- 2 It's Time to Like Men Again: 1979–1987
- 3 The Mysteries of Time and Memory: 1988–1999
- 4 Only a Listener, Perhaps: 2000–2008
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
1 - Refusing to be a Victim: 1966–1978
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Introduction
- 1 Refusing to be a Victim: 1966–1978
- 2 It's Time to Like Men Again: 1979–1987
- 3 The Mysteries of Time and Memory: 1988–1999
- 4 Only a Listener, Perhaps: 2000–2008
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Atwood's first full-length critical work, Survival (1972), discusses four basic victim positions: denial, fatalistic acceptance, repudiation, and creative non- or ex-victim (Surv 36–9). She goes on to argue that these definitions provide a useful way of approaching Canadian literature, although she acknowledges that these ‘positions are the same whether you are a victimised country, a victimised minority group or a victimised individual’ (Surv 36). This chapter explores the way in which Atwood's theories of victimization and survival are central to her early works and are manifested particularly in the representation of women and of a Canada defined by its colonial roots and economic dependency upon the United States. Atwood neither ignores nor accepts national and gendered victimization (denial and fatalistic acceptance), but moves beyond these negative positions to challenge suppositions and engage in dynamic creative activity (repudiation and creative non- or ex-victim). The second part of this chapter interrogates the mechanisms for the creative activity Atwood uses in her early work, focusing on the themes of identity, geographical space and myth, as well as on genre, language and form.
Atwood is often thought of as a feminist author because the central characters of her novels are primarily women who question patriarchal discourses, although she disputes such ghettoization, preferring to define herself as a ‘citizen’ (Lang 22). Nevertheless, Atwood acknowledges that Survival has been interpreted as a feminist text,
Women as well as Canadians have been colonised or have been victims of cultural imperialism, if you like, so that a lot of feminists in the United States have taken up Survival not because of its nationalism, but because of the kinds of models it employs – of victimisation and the response to it. They take it as a book about women, even though it isn't ‘about women’. They take it as a paradigm of how to get yourself out of certain cultural binds. (Con 94–5)
These ‘cultural binds’ and the way in which female identity may be redefined by women themselves are also central concerns in the poetry and novels that Atwood wrote during the 1960s and 70s. Her concern with the victimization of women and the positions that are adopted in relation to that repression is particularly evident in her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969).
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- Information
- Margaret Atwood , pp. 11 - 25Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2009