“Canada is an unknown territory for the people who live in it, and I’m not talking about the fact that you may not have taken a trip to the Arctic or to Newfoundland, you may not have explored as the travel folders have it – This Great Land of Ours. I’m talking about Canada as a state of mind, as the space you inhabit not just with your body but with your head. It’s that kind of space in which we find ourselves lost.

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mid. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately; we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.”
Margaret Atwood, Survival

As Atwood’s statement demonstrates, Canadian literature is concerned with place and displacement, and with the development of an effective identifying relationship between self and environs.

Canada’s literature whether written in English or French reflects three main parts of Canadian experience. First, Canadian writers often emphasize the effects of climate and geography on the life and work of their people. Second, frontier’s life is part of Canada’s experience that appears frequently in its literature; Third, Canada’s position in the world profoundly affects many Canadian writers. French Canadians often feel surrounded by their English speaking neighbors. They have made a determined effort to preserve their own institutions and culture. But English Canadians frequently have a similar feeling of being surrounded by the people and culture of the United States. Many novels and poems show how Canadian writers feel about such problems.

The Canadian novel takes an altogether new turn in the 1960s with the appearance of women novelists who tend to write more as women than as patriots. Though separated by time and gender, the woman and the Canadian find, they have much in common. Women and Canadian writers seem to share a necessary, self-defining challenge to the dominant traditions. Feminist writing may thus appear more conservative but in fact it is just different. Women must define their subjectivity before they can question it; they must first assert the selfhood they have been denied by the dominant culture.

Many of Canadian women writers are, “engaged in a struggle with language and inherited conventions to find more adequate ways of telling about women’s experiences, fighting their way out of silence to project more authentic images of how women feel and what they do” through their protagonists. A close study of their novels reveal that their focus is so much on, “the inner world of feeling and sensibility that even the impact of feminist movements has generated more of poetic or lyrical articulation of the inner tensions of women than social documentaries voicing the cause of women.”

Margaret Atwood is the first major novelist of Canada who attempts to focus on the new-woman as self-aware, independent, seeking to evolve an identity of her own. Margaret Atwood in her writing systematically shows the personal quest for fulfillment as inextricably involved in a communal quest for cultural identity.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada on November 18, 1939. Her father was a forest etymologist and she spent part of her early years in the bush of northern Quebec, where he undertook research. The childhood experiences gave material, later to Margaret Atwood’s metaphorical use of the wilderness and its animals as in Wilderness Tips (1991).

She graduated from Leaside High School in 1959 and studied at the University of Toronto. She won a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, and became a graduate student at Radcliffe College, Cambridge Massachusetts, receiving here M.A. in 1962. She has held a variety of academic posts and has been writer-in-residence of numerous Canadian and American Universities.

As a writer Margaret Atwood made her debut with Couble Persephone (1961), a collection of poem, at the age of nineteen. Another early collection, The Circle Game, received the Canadian Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1966.

In 1995, Margaret Atwood published Morning in the Burned House, her first collection of new poems in a decade, which included a sequence of elegiac poems, demonstrating a new emotional range in here work.

Her short stories collection Dancing Girls (1977) attracted more positive notice, winning the City of Toronto Book Award, the Canadian Booksellers Association Award and the Periodical Distributors of Canada Short Fiction Award. Her another collection Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) explores the question of women’s marginal position within hegemonic discourse. Wilderness Tips (1991) is the collection of stories with Gothic overtones about women facing middle age mixed with narratives about confrontations with the wilderness; followed by Good Bones (1992) which is about female body parts and social constraints written with overwhelming wit.

While working as an editor at the Toronto Publishing House, Anansi in the early 1970, Margaret Atwood published here controversial study Survival; A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) in which she stated that the key pattern in Canadian writing is that of victimization. It is considered as the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. It is often described as her “literary history”, “the victim survival thesis” and “Layman’s guide”. Her second work of criticism is Second Words (1984) in which she describes Canadian poetry and contemporary women’s writing to feminism and international human rights. Her another literary criticism are Strange Things : The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995) and Negotiating with the Dead : A Writer on Writing (2002)

She has also written Children’s books. Up in the Tree (1978) introduced Atwood the artist, which is followed by For the Birds (1990) and Princess Prunella and the Purple and Peanut (1995) exhibiting here delight in word play.

Her literary career as a novelist begins with her maiden novel, The Edible Woman (1969). It is a novel in which themes of women’s alienation echo those in her poetry. It is an early feminist treatise, a both funny and terrifying story about a young woman, who works for a consumer company.

Surfacing (1972) is Atwood’s most remarkable novelistic achievement in which the technology nature conflict is cast in political terms. It serves to illuminate Atwood’s strong nationalist as well as feminist ideologies. As in here other novel, the protagonist goes through typical retreat to the irrational the wilderness where she undergoes transformation through contact with native and Quebec cultures before reintegrating into society.

Her third novel Lady Oracle (1976) is a gothic romance. Margaret Atwood as a feminist uses parody to deconstruct male discursive form of writing. It won the 1977 City of Toronto Book Award and a Canadian Booksellers Award. Life Before Man (1979) is her most domestic novel with its triangular plot. This novel has brought international recognition for Atwood. Bodily Harm (1981) focuses on the contrast between affluent thinking and the brutal reality of power and sexual politics.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) received the Governor General’s Award, the Los Angeles Times Prize, and short-listed for the Booker Prize. It is a dystopian novel, a tale of a bleak future portraying a time where women and prized only for their reproductive gift. Although the novel is shocking, there are moments of lyrical comfort and wit. Cat’s Eye (1988) focuses on the issues of women through art, for the first time in history. It exposes male prejudices against women’s creativity and talent and shows how art can be used as a weapon against tyranny in all its manifestations.

The Robber Bride (1993) is a feminist thought provoking novel. It examined Toronto lifestyle and women’s friendships. Alias Grace (1996) used a genuine 19th century criminal case to weave a fictional exploration of the class, psychological and gender politics surrounding a female alleged murderer. It is also Atwood’s most sophisticated articulation of her longstanding philosophical and political concerns with power, culture and identity. The book was nominated for the Booker Prize and short-list for the Governor General’s Award.

The Blind Assassin (2000) earned Atwood the Booker Prize. It is a meta-fictional fairy tale. Her latest novel Oryx and Crake published in 2003 is a vision of mankind’s uncompromisingly bleak future.

Margaret Atwood is a prominent figure in national and international cultural politics. She is also a founder member of the Writer’s Union of Canada and an active member of Amnesty International and P.E.N. She is the recipient of many honorary doctorates, and fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a companion of order of Canada and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. All her writing is noted for its careful craftsmanship and precision of language, which give a sense of inevitability and a resonance to her words.

Atwood’s recognition as a versatile writer becomes clear when we go through several critical works based on her fiction and non-fiction. Margaret Atwood : Language, Text and System (1983) edited by Sherill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir is one of these critical books. In this essay collection the authors examine her ‘system’ or ‘set of codes’ from variety of critical perspectives, which, considered together, demonstrate the overall consistence of Margaret Atwood’s work.

Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (1993) authored by Sharon Rose Wilson is a feminist structuralist analysis of Margaret Atwood’s texts. Wilson describes the motifs found in Atwood’s works. Particularly she catalogues, analyses and interprets the fairly tale parallels in her fiction.

Margaret Atwood, The Shape Shifter (1998) edited by Coomi S., Vevaina and Coral Ann Howells, regards Atwood as a writer. It is a collection of various essays on Atwood’s fiction, short stories and poetry. The various articles show that there are hundreds of possibilities for changing shape in Atwood’s writing and her fictive world is one of continual metamorphosis.

Judith McCombs’s Book Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood (1988) focuses on themes and patterns of social criticism, feminism and women’s literature. The book also describes Gothic and popular genres and folklore in Atwood’s fiction. Sherill E. Grace in her book Violent Duality (1980) has not discussed Atwood’s work as a specific critical category but she argues that Atwood’s work is a ‘violent duality’.
Babara Hill Rigney’s Margaret Atwood (1987) covers Atwood’s work from the 1960s and it draws out her recurring themes of Canadian identity and the wilderness, the representation of women and female bodies and history and its narration. Arnold Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson in their book, The Art of Margaret Atwood (1981) explore Margaret Atwood as a versatile writer – a poet, a novelist and a critic.

Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms (1988) edited and published by Kathryn Van Spanckeren and Jan Garden Castro is a study of Atwood’s novels, poetry and non-fictional prose. It discusses feminism in Atwood’s work including the gothic element and cultural politics.

Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (1984) authored by Professor Frank Davey seems to be biased and it offers a male perspective. It is a misinterpretation of Margaret Atwood’s progressive protagonists. In this study Davey argues that all Atwood’s protagonists are against to the reconstruction and unity of the world and they refused doctrine of liberalism and desired to be ‘whole’. In this way Davey blames Atwood of exaggerating the problems of women in her fiction. My study shows that Atwood has not overestimating the problems of women but holds a mirror to actual social status of women in patriarchal society through her female characters who are true to life. She has described the portraits of realistic protagonists. As a writer of realistic fiction, Atwood cannot claim for her characters greater autonomy than actual women can reasonably claim.

A study of these critical books on Margaret Atwood shows that many of them reveal similar narrative and feminist concerns. There is no particular full-length study available in which women characters are viewed on the basis of victim positions described by Margaret Atwood in her non-fiction Survival. Atwood’s female characters present different concept of feminism and challenge the traditional roles of women and propose image of women not just a “two legged womb” but a dynamic human, different from the male but no less human for that. As Margaret Atwood says:

Women both as characters and as people must be allowed their imperfections. If I create a female character, I would like her to be able to show her having emotions all human beings have… without having here pronounced as a monster, a slur or a bad example.

Margaret Atwood’s feminist ideology, which has been most powerfully expressed through her fiction is explicitly stated in an interview that, “I’m defining my feminism as human equality and freedom of choice.” What Atwood is concerned with the treatment of woman as normal human being and therefore she must be allowed here imperfections. She criticizes the social system that assigns roles to the sexes and then categorically labels them as inferior or superior, sinful or chaste. She is intensely preoccupied with women fighting against the female norms of life-sexuality, dichotomy between career and the claims of the family.

Margaret Atwood’s fictions often organized thematically around images of both cultural and individual issues of survival, as she has sought to portray the entrapment of women in patriarchy, and of men and women in surrocating social cultural imprisonment. Her feminist concerns are, “her wider humanitarian concerns with basic human rights and their infringement by institutional oppression.” Her fiction provides a comprehensive review of the problems women confront in attaining full recognition and enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedom. The basic premise of Margaret Atwood’s feminist thought is survival which shows women the ways of struggle and the means of survival in an antagonistic, male chauvinistic, and sexiest society. By ‘survival’ she does not mean continuity of mere physical existence, but a striving for dignity in the battle with society and circumstances. Her fiction is a reflection on the violation of women’s rights and it includes:

Any act, omission or conduct by means of which physical, sexual or mental suffering is inflicted, directly or indirectly, though deceit, seduction, threat (harassment), coercion, or any other means, on any women with the purpose or effect of intimidating, punishing or humiliating here or of maintaining here in sex-stereotyped roles, or of denying her human dignity, sexual self-determination, physical, mental and moral integrity or of undermining the security of her person, her self-respect, or her personality or of diminishing her physical or mental capabilities.

In her work Margaret Atwood problematize the alignment of woman with nature and silence, as well as the complete adherence of the female subject to the symbolic order of communication. She shows a preoccupation with examining the question of the women’s place in society vis-à-vis the patriarchal structures of dominion and power and since she sees a relation between the feminine search for a distinctive identity and Canada’s similar quest for a national identity, the narratives of her women characters become also, by implication and extension, the narratives of the nation. As Linda Hutcheon says, “the two issues are not, wholly distinct for Atwood.” As a Canadian woman writer, Margaret Atwood deals with the issues of victimization and survival as conditions of both, “the Canadian experience and female experience.” She says, “I have always seen Canadian nationalism and the concern for women’s right as part of a larger, non exclusive picture.”

Most of her novels grapple with the politics of gender and deal with women’s experiences in a male dominated society. She explains in Second Words, “By ‘political’ I mean having to do with power : who’s got it, who wants it, how it operates; in a word who’s allowed to do what to whom, who gets what from whom, who gets away with it and how.”

In her fiction she challenges traditional image of women presented by patriarchy. She believes that the silencing of woman, the thematic of victimization functions not only through women’s conscious or unconscious complexity in the matter. In her novel she exposes the silent and hidden operations of gender and confront its politics there by recommending for rewriting of women’s history. She demands demolition of gender system and hopes for a new world in which men and women are equal at every level of existence. In the process of struggle for change the protagonists in her fiction are sought to be organized into a powerful force and invested with a streak of rebellion. As Christine Gomez says:

At the thematic level, Atwood’s novel examines themes related to the politics of gender such as the enforced alienation of women under patriarchy, the delimiting definition of woman as a function, the patriarchal attempt to annihilate the selfhood of women, the gradual carving out of female space by woman through various strategies and woman’s quest for identity, self-definition and autonomy… not only at the thematic and structural levels, but also in the organization of women characters, Atwood’s novels are based on the politics of gender.

Margaret Atwood’s novels deal with women’s experience in a male dominated culture. They present women caught in oppressive stereotypes from which some women struggle to create a female space for themselves. This may be done through autonomy of thought, through self-definition and self-reconstruction of one’s own history, through creative composition, oral or written, through bonding among women and through a refusal to the role of subjugation.

Margaret Atwood describes the four basic victim positions to categorize her female protagonists. It serves as the theoretical model or organizing framework for the characterization of women in her novels:
(1) Denial of the fact that one is victim,
(2) Acknowledgement of the fact of being a victim but the acceptance of it as something inevitable “an act of fate, the will of god, the dictates of Biology”,
(3) Acknowledgement of the fact of being a victim but a repudiation of the victim role, and
(4) Becoming a creative non-victim.

Margaret Atwood firmly believes that one fixed notion in Canadian writing is the sense of victimization which she classifies by defining basic victim position. These positions can be applicable to women in general and to fictional women characters in particular. As Atwood herself says, “the positions are the same whether you are a victimized country, a victimized minority group or a victimized individual”.

The first kind of basic victim position denies one’s victimhood because they, “are a little better off than the others in the group and so are afraid to recognize that they are victims for fear of losing the privileges they possess”. It implies a suppression of anger in this denial and bestows a sense of superiority on its adherents for having risen above victimhood.

The second position is to acknowledge oneself as the inevitable victim of Fate, God, Biology, History, Economics or the Unconscious. Such victims do not want to change their position and suppress anger against self and others by displacing or transferring their sense of oppression to unreal sources. They accept their position as if it is given by a greater power. As R.W. Connel says, “men… enjoy patriarchal power but accept it as if it were given to them by an external force, by nature or convention or even by women themselves, rather than by an active social subordination of women going on here and now”.

The third basic victim position implies awareness of the cause of oppression and the ability to mobilize into constructive action. It is dynamic and rebellion. It is very difficult to maintain this position. In an interview, Atwood herself says, “It is all very well to say I refuse to be a victim, but then you have to look at the context in which one is or isn’t a victim. You can’t simply refuse. You can refuse to define yourself that way, but it’s not quite so simple as that.”

The fourth position is to be a creative non-victim so that one can avoid the anger of victim one, the injustice of victim two, and the forced remedial action of victim three. By becoming a creative non-victim, one can set oneself free from the dialectic of the gender-power struggle. The creative, non-victim accepts individual experience for what it is and does not seek to distort it like the other victims.

These four victim positions are not strait jackets, which imprison the characters. The same character may occupy more than one position at different times. It works as a helpful method of approaching woman’s grievances and it is also useful to explore victim-victimizer syndrome in Margaret Atwood’s fiction.

Particularly this is the parameter I had adopted to categorize the female characters of Margaret Atwood and place them in the particular category they belong to, in the following chapters.