“I want the circle / broken”:
Female Victimhood and Transformation in the Poetry of Margaret Atwood
By Anne Hoen 10803270
Supervised by Dr. Joyce Goggin
M.A. Thesis English Literature and Culture Graduate School of Humanities
University of Amsterdam
Plagiarism Acknowledgment
I hereby acknowledge that I have read the UvA guidelines on plagiarism and take full responsibility for the contents of this document. I claim this work as my own work and declare that no other sources than those referred to in the text have been used in writing it.
Abstract
This thesis examines the depiction of female victimhood in Margaret Atwood's poetry of the 1960s to the mid-1980s. By linking feminist theory on discourse to Atwood's “Basic Victim Positions” as identified in her critical work Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), this thesis will argue that the female subject in Atwood's poetry is able to overcome her victimization by redefining the discourse in which her experience is articulated. Whereas Atwood's earlier poetry collections capture the female subject as trapped within patriarchal structures of discourse and space, her later poetry shows a shift from this perspective when Atwood engages in revisionist mythmaking and attempts to redefine the patriarchal discourse. As I will argue in this thesis, by rewriting culturally embedded symbols and figures, Atwood's female subject is able to become an ex-victim and claim autonomous self-hood.
Table of Contents
Plagiarism Acknowledgment 2
Abstract 3
Introduction 5
Chapter 1: Female Entrapment in The Circle Game and The Journals of Susanna Moodie 11 Chapter 2: Female Resistance in Power Politics and You Are Happy 26
Chapter 3: Female Transformation in Interlunar 39
Conclusion 51
Introduction
As Margaret Atwood once remarked in an interview with Judy Klemesrud for the New York Times, the recurring theme of female suffering in her work is based on real life occurrences: “My women suffer because most of the women I talk to seem to have suffered” (Chapman 12). Although this topic has mostly been discussed with regard to her novels, Atwood's poetry shows a similar concern with victimhood and the struggle for survival. By tracing a development in the depiction of female victimhood throughout five of her poetry collections, I will argue that Atwood's female subject is able to overcome her victimization by redefining the discourse in which her experience is
articulated. In my close-reading of a selection of poems, I will connect Atwood's “Basic Victim Positions” as defined in her critical work Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) to feminist theory on the relation between women and discourse. Whereas Atwood's early poetry depicts the female speaker as trapped within patriarchal structures of discourse and space, her later poetry shows a shift from this perspective when Atwood engages in revisionist mythmaking and attempts to redefine the patriarchal discourse.
Although Margaret Atwood is a widely discussed author with international success, her poetry continues to receive much less attention than her prose works. While different critics have identified the theme of victimhood in her novels and have traced a development of the female subject through Atwood's “Basic Victim Positions”, I have not come across studies that make a similar argument with regard to her poetry. Some critics that have studied Atwood's poetry in a feminist context have limited their focus to one or two specific poetry collections. This is evident, for example, in Christine C. Keating's study (2014) of Atwood's poetry collections Interlunar (1984) and Morning in the Burned House (1995). In other studies such as Reingard M. Nischik's “Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood” (2009), Atwood's poetry is discussed
alongside her prose works, but thereby forms an inferior part of the analysis. Therefore, by studying Atwood's poetry as a narrative of its own, I intend to trace a development that makes her poetry stand independently as a journey toward ex-victimhood.
In the 1960s, when Margaret Atwood published her first poetry collections, women “found themselves still entrenched in a public/private split that consigned them to labor in the home, while the public realm remained a 'man's world'” (Jackson 476). During this time, the search for “words to speak the self, words that did not necessarily parallel the ones the culture offered ready-made, seemed a way toward self-discovery, and was one reason why women's poetry flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s” (Showalter et al. 309). Although “discussions about the cultural
construction of gender or of language were not common then […] the search for this language and the belief in its potential were very real” (309).
The discussion of the cultural construction of language took root in the 1970s, when feminist theorists began to discuss “women's historical and cultural position as one of absence from, or marginalization to, dominant cultural forms” (Jackson 476). As part of a larger discussion of the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Iragaray turned to the position of women in the “deep economy of language” where the understanding of the feminine has been reduced to “an abstract nonexistent reality” (Irigaray 20). According to Lacan, meaning in the “symbolic realm of discourse and communication” is “generated in relation to the primal transcendental signifier, the phallus”, thereby reducing women to the “object by which the patriarchal subject can define himself” (Jackson 476). In this phallogocentric discourse, “women have no means of expressing themselves; without language they cannot speak their own authentic experience, unless in ways defined by men” (McQuial ix).
In her iconic essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976), Cixous draws attention to the ways in which literature has been effected by such power structures:
I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing, that, until now, far more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural – hence political, typically masculine – economy, that this is a locus where the
repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less, consciously, and in a manner that's frightening since it's often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction; that this
locus has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (and not sexual difference), where woman has never her turn to speak.
(“The Laugh of the Medusa”, 879)
Because language has come to be seen as one of the most significant sources of women's alienation, numerous theorist have also understood language to be an instrument that could function as “a resource of their transformation”, believing that “a woman can only find some whole, authentic self through a process of personal and political transformation that involves the denial or transformation of the patriarchal discourse” (Teslenko 58). Similarly, Cixous finds in writing “the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory
movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (Cixous 879).
Approaches to such a transformation of the patriarchal discourse have, however, been a topic of discussion. Whereas Cixous has argued for a separate mode of writing (écriture féminine) that helps women “return to the body” (Cixous 880) and that replaces the patriarchal discourse, other critics have questioned the possibility of such a language. In her study of women writers, Alicia Ostriker states that “the question of whether a female language, separate but equal to male language, either actually exists or can (or should) be created, awaits further research into the past and further gynocentric writing in the present” (Ostriker 1982, 70). Instead, Ostriker introduces the concept of revisionist mythmaking that, she argues, “may offer us one significant means of
redefining ourselves and consequently our culture” (70). In revisiting and rewriting culturally embedded figures and myths, Ostriker sees an effective method to redefine the representation of women in literature. After all, it is there, she explains, “we find the conquering gods and heroes, the deities of pure thought and spirituality so superior to Mother Nature; there we find the sexually wicked Venus, Circe, Pandora, Helen, Medea, Eve, and the virtuously passive Iphigenia, Alcestis, Mary, Cinderella. It is thanks to myth we believe that woman must be either 'angel' or 'monster'” (71).
As I aim to show in this thesis, Atwood's female subject similarly succeeds in reaching autonomous self-definition through Atwood's revision of culturally embedded symbols and figures. Without creating a new, separate female language, Atwood attempts to transform the patriarchal discourse and to dismantle female victimization by creating new patterns. As she herself once remarked, “[a]s a writer you're part of that process – using an old language, but making new patterns with it. Your choices are numerous” (Atwood 1992, 112).
In order to trace and mark such a development to ex-victimhood in Atwood's poetry, I will link my analysis to Atwood's “Basic Victim Positions” that she defines in her critical work Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). In this essay, that she defines as “a cross between a personal manifesto” and “a political manifesto” (Atwood 1972, 13), Atwood argues that the dominant trope of Canadian literature is the concept of survival with the victim functioning as the dominant character: “Stick a pin in Canadian literature at random, and nine times out of ten you'll hit a victim” (39). According to Atwood, the “great Canadian victim complex” (13) is what distinguishes Canadian literature from American or British literature. In her argument, Atwood introduces four victim positions:
Position One: To deny the fact that you are a victim. Position Two:
To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim, but to explain this as an act of Fate, the Will of God, the dictates of Biology (in the case of women, for instance), the necessity decreed by History, or Economics, or the Unconscious, or any other large general powerful idea.
Position Three:
To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable.
Position Four: To be a creative non-victim.
These positions, as Atwood explains, “are the same whether you are a victimized country, a
victimized minority group or a victimized individual” (36). Important to note is that I will not refer to Victim Position One in my analysis of Atwood's poetry. This is because Atwood defines this position as occupied by those that “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 posses” (36). I do not believe this is the case for the female speakers in the poems I will discuss.
When Survival was first published, it received much criticism. Frank Davey, for example, defined the project as an example of “culture fixing: An untouchable canon of Canadian Lit according to Atwood” (Davey 83). He also condemned the “breezy journalistic style” (84) of the work. According to Robin Mathews, the book only served to perpetuate a “'non-evaluative', colonized tradition” (Matthews 120). Moreover, Atwood's argument that victimhood is the distinguishing feature of Canadian literature was considered unoriginal and not particularly Canadian – a point made by Joseph Pivato among others.
Keeping these critiques in mind, I will not refer to Survival for its theory of Canadian literature, but rather for the insights it offers into Atwood's own ideas. Because Atwood argues that victimhood is a central aspect of the literary tradition to which she belongs, this notion may help to bring structure into her broad range of ideas. It also provides an obvious link to feminist theory in which the victimization of women and their entrapment in patriarchal structures has long been a topic of discussion.
Building on these ideas, my first chapter will focus on Atwood's earlier poetry collections The Circle Game (1966) and The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970). In this chapter, I will argue that Atwood's female subject is a victim of male domination of discourse and space. In both collections, Atwood does not yet offer a way out and the female speaker remains stuck in Victim Position Two. My second chapter will focus on Power Politics (1971) and You Are Happy (1974). In this chapter, I will depict a shift from the previous perspective as the female subject illustrates a desire to transform her victimization through a new expression of anger, thereby shifting between
Victim Position Two and Victim Position Three. In both collections, the female subject attempts to reclaim language as a source of female power. At the same time, however, Atwood illustrates the difficulty in transitioning out of one's position because of the still existent patriarchal structures that continues to surround and restrict her female speakers. Finally, my third chapter will focus on Interlunar (1984) and will illustrate how Atwood's female subject comes closest to Victim Position Four of being an ex-victim. As I will argue in this thesis, by rethinking and redefining patriarchal symbols and myths, Atwood is able to deconstruct the male-dominated discourse and transform it into a discourse that includes rather than excludes women.
Chapter 1:
Female Entrapment in The Circle Game and The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Introduction
In her poetry collection The Circle Game, first published in 1964 and revised in 1966, Margaret Atwood introduces her concern with different forms of victimization, often appearing at the level of both culture and gender. Building from this, this chapter will argue that Atwood's early poetry collections portray the female subject as a victim of male domination of discourse and space. With particular attention to The Circle Game (1966) and The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), this chapter will consider how Atwood often addresses female struggles for self-definition by drawing connections between imperialism and sexual politics. Ultimately, this chapter aims to illustrate how Atwood does not yet offer a way out as the female subject is claimed and pinned down “on the outspread map / of this room, of your mind's continent” (Atwood 19), as she writes in the title poem of The Circle Game. Trapped in male-dominated discourse, Atwood's female speakers are unable to claim autonomous self-hood and remain stuck in Victim Position Two.
Entrapment in the Circle Game
In her poetry collection The Circle Game, Margaret Atwood introduces her interest in female victimization and the struggle for self-definition through images of invisibility and imprisonment in male-dominated space. In this context, space “is not a neutral entity; rather, it is culturally
constructed, creating symbolic meanings with regard to gender relations, roles, and values” (Fenster 468). In her study on space and imprisonment imagery in women's writing, Kerstin W. Shands points out that although “[w]omen authors hold no monopoly on a confinement-escape imagery”, stating that “Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe, for example, have written eloquently about prisons and cages and other lethally constrictive and contracting spaces” (Shands 71), a particular and distinctive use of entrapment imagery appears in women's writing. In her explanation, Shands
refers to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who have similarly observed images of female entrapment that are used by women writers to discuss “their parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies” (Gilbert and Gubar 89). Moreover, Annette Kolodny identified the “fear of being fixed in false images or trapped in inauthentic roles” as “the most compelling fear in women's fiction” of the 1960s and 1970s (Shands 72).
In The Circle Game, Margaret Atwood similarly includes images of entrapment in her discussion of female victimization and repeatedly does this through the vocabulary of maps and boundaries. In the collection, Atwood introduces the circle motif that returns throughout her work and that resembles the patterns and structures that pressure individuals, and women in particular, to conform to social norms. With this collection, Atwood captures her female speaker in Victim Position Two that is defined by the acknowledgment of “the fact that you are a victim” but it is ascribed to biological differences (Atwood 1972, 37). In this position, “you can neither be blamed for your position nor be expected to do anything about it” (37). The only options are to “be resigned and long-suffering, or you can kick against the pricks and make a fuss, […] for who can fight Fate (or the Will of God, or Biology)?” (38).
The title poem of the collection uses childhood circle games as a metaphor to discuss the emotional estrangement and isolation often experienced by adults. In the poem, the circle game represents a false sense of unity as the children are playing; they are “singing, but / not to each other” (14). As they go “round and round”, they lose any sense of purpose or end point and are merely “fixed on the empty spaces just in front of them”, insisting “there is no joy in it” (14). The poem then shifts from the playing children to two lovers that are captured to experience a similar sense of estrangement from their environment and each other; “you look past me, listening” (16). The female speaker, a “spineless woman” (23), describes herself in contrast to her lover:
I notice how all your word-
plays, calculated ploys of the body, the witticisms of touch, are now
attempts to keep me at a certain distance and (at length) avoid admitting I am here (The Circle Game, 48)
Although the “you” figure is not explicitly gendered, different aspects of the poem make the character resemble a patriarchal figure of power. In the lines above, this is illustrated through the lover's use of language (“word-/plays”) and typically masculine forms of reasoning (“calculated”) as a tool to control the female subject; they are “attempts to keep me / at a certain distance”. The refusal to acknowledge the woman's existence, to admit “I am here”, depicts her position as one of inferiority and invisibility. This absence also exists on another level, as the lack of acknowledgment of the speaker's existence resembles the lack of representation in the larger structures of discourse.
The speaker's entrapment in masculine space is also illustrated through the description of her partner as “a tracer of maps” (49), someone who memorizes “names (to hold / these places / in their proper places)” (49). As Kelli Lyon Johnson points out, feminist theorists have expressed a
particular interest in maps as they “not only reinforce traditional paradigms of the landscape as female, but they also represent masculine space, a means of containing and constraining the spaces of the Other(s) in the geographies of contact” (Johnson xi). The spaces represented on maps are defined by borders and boundaries and in this sense are what Doreen Massey describes as “culturally masculine”; they depict “the need for the security of boundaries, the requirement for such a defensive and counter-positional definition of identity” (Massey 7). In the poem, the presence of a masculine need for sharply segregated and well-defined places is captured through such language of borders as well as the lover's description as someone with the power to “hold
places in their proper places”. The line suggests a refusal to alter the existing structures and divisions of space as both are believed to be justified; they are in “their proper places”.
As the poem continues, Atwood proceeds with the use of imagery of maps to draw attention to the woman's entrapment in patriarchal space:
So now you trace me like a country's boundary or a strange new wrinkle in your own wellknown skin and I am fixed, stuck down on the outspread map
of this room, of your mind's continent (The Circle Game, 49)
As she is traced “like a country's boundary / or a strange new wrinkle / in your own wellknown skin”, the speaker is claimed and named like land. As Marion Wynne-Davies points out, the lines demonstrate “how closely connected gendered and national victimization is for Atwood” as “the female body and the map of Canada become interchangeable” (Wynne-Davies 14). In this sense, Atwood's discussion of female victimization forms part of a larger discussion of victimization as she connects it to the position of Canada as a colonial country. In both cases “power is held by people other than those having the realization. In the case of women, it's men; in the case of Canada, it's Americans” (Atwood 119).
The lines that follow illustrate the connection between the lover's position of power and the larger structures of patriarchal discourse. As the woman is pinned down “on the outspread map / of this room, of your mind's continent”, her entrapment is constituted by the boundaries of the male's intellect; “your mind's continent”. As Colin Nicholson states, “it has been part of Atwood's
woman writing in a male-dominated world of discourse with newly emergent post-colonial structures of consciousness” (Nicholson 18). In this sense, as Nicholson continues, Atwood gives the “colonized woman voice” (20). Indeed, the speaker's voice is claimed by the dominant masculine structures of discourse and through this, Atwood depicts female entrapment in what Adrienne Rich refers to as the “oppressor's language” (Rich 364).
As Atwood's speaker is trapped within “the closed rules of your game” (54), the circle motif returns:
I want to break
these bones, your prisoning rhythms […]
erase all maps, crack the protecting eggshell of your turning singing children:
I want the circle broken.
(The Circle Game, 55)
In these lines, the woman expresses a desire to break the structures that provide the male with power, but she is not in a position to do so. The lover's “prisoning rhythms” depict the masculine discourse as a cage that keeps the woman locked in. The magnitude of the project (“erase all maps”) illustrates the complete domination of the male figure over the speaker's world. Although she wants to get out, wants “the circle broken”, the speaker remains “fixed, stuck” (49) on a male continent of power.
In other poems in the collection, Atwood similarly deals with the struggle of autonomous self-definition as the female subject has to conform to the principles of the male order. In “An
Attempted Solution for Chess Problems”, Atwood writes:
The white king moves by memories and procedures and corners
no final ending but a stalemate,
forcing her universe to his geographies.
(The Circle Game, 18)
Here, as in “The Circle Game”, the female character has to fit within the confines of male space, of “his geographies”, making her merely an object on the map of his world. As the poem describes, this act is one of force, violating “her universe” to make it fit the male rules. Whereas male space, as Frank Davey points out, “is mathematical, imposes 'ruled squares on the green landscape', […] female space is its Other – the 'girl' who must be fitted into the pastoral conventions, the 'green landscape' that must yield to chessboard pattern” (Davey 15).
In other poems such as “This is a Photograph of Me”, the landscape also has an important role in Atwood's discussion of sexual politics. In the poem, Atwood's speaker describes a
photograph that “was taken some time ago” and that is marked by “blurred lines and grey flecks” (8). The picture shows a landscape with “a lake” and “some low hills” (8). Although the poem initially seems to merely describe such natural scenery, it soon takes on a much more gruesome tone as the speaker claims the pictured lake contains her drowned body:
(The photograph was taken the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am […]
but if you look long enough eventually
you will be able to see me. ) (The Circle Game, 17)
Although the speaker acknowledges the difficultly of locating her exact position (“it is difficult to say where precisely”), she insists that she is there. In his reading of the poem, Ronald B. Hatch notes that “as we become aware that the speaker has lost her individuality to such an extent that she has become submerged in the landscape, the actual landscape of lakes and trees and cottages
gradually transforms into the landscape of language through which we can see the individual – if we look 'long enough'” (Hatch 182). Indeed, the landscape becomes a discourse in which Atwood's speaker tries to speak herself into existence.
The speaker's struggle for acknowledgment takes on another meaning when it is interpreted in the context of sexual politics. According to Karen F. Stein, the drowned speaker tells us “that women have become invisible in contemporary Western culture and ask that society acknowledge them” (Stein 17). In this reading, the speaker's position is one of entrapment in male-dominated space, represented by her existence within the frame of the picture as well as her position “under the surface”. In this sense, as Stein similarly observes, Atwood describes the collective position of women as one of inferiority and invisibility.
That the speaker occupies an inferior position is also represented by the use of parentheses in the speaker's introduction of herself. As parentheses represent that which can be erased without
causing a significant change in meaning, their usage in the poem appears to be symbolic of the speaker's inferior position in a male-dominated space, and emphasizes that the woman cannot take up a definite space of her own. Moreover, whether the woman is acknowledged at all seems to be dependent on the observer. Whereas photographs are typically considered to be quite objective or reliable in the sense that they simply represent an image, the photograph's blurriness as described in the poem makes its subject matter appear vague and questionable. As the landscape is turned into a discourse, the reader, it seems, can only engage if they speak the same language, a language that is non-patriarchal. Otherwise, the woman would not be acknowledged at all, as her suffering exists beneath the surface of what is visible in the dominant (male) culture.
Entrapment in the Bush
Entrapment is also a central theme in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, in this case likewise territorial entrapment in which 'Susanna Moodie' struggles to define herself as she is torn between two voices. This poetry collection, first published in 1970, is Atwood's attempt to trace the journey of nineteenth century non-fictional Susanna Moodie, loosely based on Moodie's own accounts of her immigration from England to Canada in Roughing it in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853). Although, as Atwood states, “the poems can be read in connection with Mrs. Moodie's books, they don't have to be; they have detached themselves from the books in the same way that other poems detach themselves from the events that give rise to them” (Atwood 1970, 62).
In this sense, Moodie is Atwood's literary construction and it is for this reason that Sid Stephen referred to the collection as “A Self-Portrait of Margaret Atwood” (Stephen 32). Indeed, when analyzing the collection in depth, many of Moodie's struggles seem to resemble Atwood's own concerns, both as a woman and a woman writer. Although the collection has most often been discussed with regard to questions of national identity and Canadian tradition, as is evident in studies by Laura Groening and Faye Hammill among others, Atwood's choice to trace the
experience of alienation is continuously linked to her struggle for self-definition in the language of the patriarchal territory.
In the collection, Atwood first depicts Susanna Moodie upon her arrival in the Canadian wilderness, which may be understood as performing different functions. On the one hand, the wilderness may be understood as a metaphorical space that women writers have come to invade and take over from male legends and their archetypal heroes, such as Paul Bunyan and Daniel Boone. The Canadian North had long been a place for male writers, such as Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, and had often been depicted as a space to be tamed or conquered. Coral Ann Howells points out, however, that images of wilderness were taken over by women writers “as the symbol of unmapped territory to be transformed through writing into female imaginative space” (Howells 15). The wilderness provides, as Howells explains, “a textual space for women writers' exploration of female difference and a site of resistance to traditional structures of patriarchy and imperialism” (106). In this sense, as Howells acknowledges, the wilderness may function in a manner that recalls Elaine Showalter's notion of a “wild zone” that she defines as “the mother country of liberated desire and female authenticity” (Showalter 201). Notably, wild zones also exist outside of the dominant (male) culture.
In The Journals of Susanna Moodie, the wilderness seems to function as a similar space through which Atwood outlines Moodie's quest for an autonomous self. But the search for female authenticity is complicated because certain patriarchal structures are reinforced in the process, and this complexity illustrates Moodie's entrapment in the existing binaries. In this sense, the wilderness also functions as a real space that both men and women occupy and that reinforces social power structures. This space displays women's struggle for autonomous self-definition because of the patriarchal boundaries that enclose them. Especially in the early parts of the collection, the
wilderness ostensibly speaks more to a masculine imagination than to a feminine one when Moodie is “surrounded, stormed, broken / in upon by branches, roots, tendrils, the dark / side of light” (84), thereby depicting the landscape as an enemy. Although Moodie is reconciled with nature, her
eventual merging with the landscape is hardly a liberating conclusion as it reinforces patriarchal world views by maintaining the connection between woman and nature.
In the first poem of the collection, “Disembarking at Québec”, Atwood immediately captures Moodie's alienation. As she reflects upon her surroundings, Moodie wonders:
Is it my clothes, my way of walking, the things I carry in my hand – a book, a bag with knitting – the incongruous pink of my shawl this space cannot hear
(Selected Poems: 1965-1975, 80)
In these lines, Moodie acknowledges an inability to be heard by her environment; “this space cannot hear”. Moodie herself immediately ascribes this to her appearance, wondering if it is caused by her clothes or her “way of walking”. This kind of self-scrutiny, particularly where one's appearance is concerned, is stereotypically female. Likewise, she carries objects that are culturally coded as “feminine” such as the “bag with knitting” and while her shawl, a garment associated with women, is “incongruous pink”; pink as well being a color commonly associated with women. These lines, moreover, suggest that Moodie's struggle to be acknowledged by her environment is rooted in her femininity and thereby illustrate the invisibility experienced by women, especially after marriage and motherhood. The poem continues:
The moving water will not show me my reflection.
I am a word
in a foreign language.
(Selected Poems: 1965-1975, 80)
Moodie's struggle with identity is first displayed here in her attempt to find herself reflected in the water, but it “will not show me / my reflection”. As is evident in other poems such as “Looking in a Mirror”, reflective surfaces are important in Moodie's attempt to construct a coherent self and thereby can be understood to function as a mirror in the cultural representation of women. As Susan Stanford Friedman points out, the “mirror does not reflect back a unique, individual identity to each living woman; it projects an image of woman, a category that is supposed to define the living woman's identity” (Stanford Friedman 75). Similarly, Moodie's statement that the water will not show “my reflection” suggests an inability to see her individual identity reflected there.
In the lines that follow, Moodie states that “the rocks ignore”. As Moodie has omitted “me” as the object of the sentence, the line suggests a complete lack of self-hood or identity. Importantly, Moodie's alienation is also described in linguistic terms, as “a word / in a foreign language”. At first sight, this pronouncement might be understood from within the French-Anglo conflict in Québec. As Paul-André Linteau et al. point out, although the language issue in Québec “was in the forefront of the debates taking place in Québec society in the 1960s and 1970s” (at the time Atwood
published the book), this was not a new problem: “Several times since the conquest in 1760, French Canadian political leaders had had to defend the constitutional rights of the French language in the British country that was Canada” (Linteau et al. 436). When Susanna Moodie arrived in Canada in 1832, a period of resistance had emerged and “religious, linguistic, and even legal differences frequently bedeviled relations between English and French Canadians” (Edwards 508). In this context, the poem can be read as Atwood's response to this conflict as she captures the territorial domination of one language over another language. The feelings of displacement that were typically experienced by the French Canadians are reversed through Moodie's experienced alienation. As an English speaking immigrant, she becomes an outsider in the Québec territory.
Other critics such as Erin Smith have argued that the alienation described by Moodie's voice in the poem is rooted in the difference between the English world of civilization and the world of nature in Canada; “she belongs to civilized, rational England, and she has arrived in the wilderness where those civilized rules of existence no longer apply” (Smith 79). Such reading corresponds with Atwood's own argument that the opposition between nature and civilization defines Canadian life. In Canadian literature, as Atwood observes, nature has often been “perceived as a 'monster', an evil betrayer” (Mackey 128). According to Atwood, this distrust of nature emerged “because of the disjuncture during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, between expectations imported with the settlers from England about the gentle nature of nature, and the harsh realities of Canadian settlement” (128). As a result, these literary texts capture “a tension between 'what you were officially supposed to feel and what you were actually encountering when you got there' – a sense of being betrayed somehow by the 'divine Mother'” (128). In this sense, Moodie's alienation is part of a collective immigrant experience in Canada.
Although these readings are plausible, considering Moodie's acknowledgment of her femininity in the earlier parts of the poem, her alienation may also be interpreted as a continuation of that line of thought. Understanding the wilderness as a space traditionally constructed and dominated by men, Moodie's entering into this territory resembles the struggle of women writers to invade a male-dominated tradition and their need to conform to the language of patriarchy in this process.
That Moodie's alienation is rooted in language, yet in a different context, becomes more clear as the collection progresses. In “The Planters”, Atwood sets Moodie apart from the men around her and describes Moodie's “husband, a neighbour, another men” as living an “illusion solid to them as a shovel” and who “pretend this dirt is the future” (84). While the men around her know the ways of the wilderness because it is a territory traditionally defined by their domination, Moodie acknowledges that the “forest can still trick” her since her “damaged / knowing of the language means / prediction is forever impossible” (83). In her reading of the collection, Diana Relke draws a
connection between Margaret Atwood and the non-fictional Susanna Moodie who, as woman writers, share this “damaged / knowing of the language” (83). As Relke convincingly argues, Atwood outlines many of the struggles faced by women writers through the persona of Moodie (Relke 55). This becomes particularly evident when Moodie lives through long periods of isolation. It is only during the absence of her husband that she becomes aware of the system of male thinking that encloses her; she recognizes “the extent to which she is imprisoned in the cage of male logic” (Relke 52). Indeed, as Atwood illustrates in the poem “The Two Fires”, when a fire breaks out, Moodie sits in the house and concentrates on “form, geometry […] the logic of windows” (88). The structure of the house, and symbolically of rationality, a traditionally male attribute, becomes what imprisons Moodie.
What Atwood reads as Moodie's fragmented state, between the patriarchal boundaries that surround her and her own struggle with self-definition, is most explicitly worked out in “The Double Voice” in which Moodie's voice tells us that “[t]wo voices / took turns using my eyes” (104). On the one hand, she describes a voice that expresses itself through conventions of the female artist, someone who “had manners”, spoke with “hushed tones” and “composed uplifting verse” (104). At the same time, she has a voice of “knowledge” (104) but she cannot articulate that knowledge from within the dominant, patriarchal structures of language. Moodie, who like Atwood struggled with the complexities of being a female writer, has to engage in what Elaine Showalter calls a “double-voiced discourse” in which women have to speak, if at all, in “the language of the dominant order” (Showalter 200). Like Atwood's characterization of Moodie as “a word in a foreign language”, Moodie's double voice expresses her position as one of supposed inferiority and
conformity to tradition, which complicates her search for autonomous self-definition.
Moreover, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued, for women writers “the essential process of self-definition is complicated by all those patriarchal definitions that intervene between herself and herself” (Gilbert and Gubar 17). Atwood's enactment of this duality in
under patriarchal domination has meant overcoming or at least learning to live with an oppressive and often unconscious 'anxiety of authorship' that has given their texts an especially double, 'palimpsestic' quality” (143), functioning as both the source of female power and the product of their oppression. In Atwood's depiction of Moodie's journey, this fear seems to be realized as Moodie's “mind saw double” and she “began to forget myself / in the middle / of sentences” (111).
As the collection progresses, Atwood's depiction of the connection between the landscape and Moodie becomes the ultimate image of her entrapment. In “The Deaths of the Other Children”, Moodie questions her very being and wonders “did I spend all those years / building up this edifice / my composite / self, this crumbling hovel?” (103). These lines emphasize the existing duality in Moodie, in her “composite / self”, as she exists between two traditions. Moodie then describes her fragmented self as being taken over by the landscape:
Everywhere I walk, along the overgrowing paths, my skirt tugged at by the spreading briers
they catch at my heels with their fingers (Selected Poems: 1965-1975, 103)
The “spreading briers” tug at her skirt and claim her “with their fingers” as she merges with the natural world.
In the afterword to the collection, Atwood states that with her death, Moodie has finally become “spirit of the land she once hated” (Atwood 1970, 63). However, rather than seeing such a reconciliation with nature as a liberating conclusion, the reinforcement of the connection between woman and nature creates a state in which both continue to be objectified. The appeal to “traditional feminine values, such as woman and her rapport with nature” is, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, a “renewed attempt to pin women down to their traditional role” (Beauvoir 103). Indeed, Atwood's
depiction of Moodie as becoming one with the land merely means that she will continue to be trapped in patriarchal territory, never reaching an autonomous sense of self-hood.
Conclusion
In her early poetry collections, Margaret Atwood discusses female victimization through images of invisibility and entrapment in patriarchal structures and world views. In The Circle Game,
victimhood is depicted through the female speaker's struggle for acknowledgment and autonomous self-definition, under the yoke of her continued objectification through the language of maps and borders. In The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Atwood's character Susanna Moodie is similarly depicted as struggling to define herself in male-dominated territory, that is, in the Canadian wilderness. Moodie, like many women writers throughout history, is torn between two voices, ultimately making her unable to arrive at a sense of autonomous self-definition. In both of these collections, Atwood's female speaker is stuck in Victim Position Two as she acknowledges her victimhood but is not in a position to change it. Although Atwood does not yet provide an escape for the women she portrays in these collections, the potential for such transformation will be considered in the following chapters.
Chapter 2:
Female Resistance in Power Politics and You Are Happy
Introduction
From the publication of Power Politics (1971) onward, Margaret Atwood's poetry becomes more political and she continues to write on, revisit and transform her earlier discussion of female
victimization as identified in chapter one. With Power Politics and its sequel You Are Happy (1974), Atwood seems to shift between Victim Position Two and Victim Position Three as her female
speakers express the desire to overcome their victimization while still trapped within certain oppressive structures and patterns.
In both Power Politics and You Are Happy, the speaker's aversion to the existing power structures is illustrated through a new expression of anger. Although feminist theorist Adrienne Rich identified the presence of anger in women's writing of the 1970s as an “awakening of
consciousness” (Rich 1972, 25) that should be used and transformed into positive action, this chapter will argue that Atwood's female speakers struggle with using anger for transformational purposes as a means of dealing with oppressive structures that continue to surround and restrict them.
In Power Politics, anger is a catastrophic emotion and is used in the speaker's attempt to reclaim language as an instrument of female power. However, this form of resistance is ultimately unable to function as a solution for the woman's position as it reinforces her entrapment within patriarchal structures. In You Are Happy, which starts from a similar concern with anger, the
potential for positive transformation is more present as Atwood engages in revisionist mythmaking. In both collections, however, Atwood depicts the limitations that still surround her female speakers and that complicate their journey out of victimhood.
Resistance in Power Politics
In her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1972), Adrienne Rich addresses women's writing of the 1970s and acknowledges that “[m]uch of woman's poetry has been of the blues song: a cry of pain, of victimization, or a lyric of seduction. And today, much poetry by
women – and prose for that matter – is charged with anger” (Rich 25). Such expressions of anger, as Rich explains, stand in stark contrast to earlier attitudes in women's writing when the tone was often “the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity” (20).
For Margaret Atwood, the expression of anger similarly takes root in her poetry with the publication of Power Politics. In this collection, the speaker's frustration with the existing gender roles and power divisions is openly and repeatedly expressed, and is linked to Atwood's own understanding of the concepts of power and politics. As she once remarked, “I began as a
profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me” (Atwood 1982, 15). To Atwood, politics is “everything that involves who gets to do what to whom” (Brans 149). It has to do with “how people order their societies, to whom power is ascribed, who is considered to have power. A lot of power is ascription. People have power because we think they have power, and that's all politics is” (149).
Atwood's engagement with and understanding of power bears a resemblance to the ideas of Michel Foucault. According to Foucault, power “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Foucault 39). In Power Politics, Atwood's concern with divisions of power is expressed through her depiction of a male-female love affair, and articulates how power dynamics play out in everyday life. The female “I” and the male “you” repeatedly shift from victim and victor positions, a dynamic that for Atwood is one of the characteristics of Victim Position Two (Atwood 237). I suggest, however, that Atwood's speaker moves between Position Two and Position Three,
the latter of which is defined by “the fact that you are a victim” but refuse “to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable” (237). Atwood's depiction of female resistance in the collection is namely a new form of expression that differentiates her speaker from the speakers in her earlier work. However, as Atwood explains, Position Three is “a dynamic position rather than a static one” because “from it you can move on to Position Four, but if you become locked into your anger and fail to change your situation, you might well find yourself back in Position Two” (237-38). This latter scenario is, as I aim to show, what happens in Power Politics. Anger as a form of resistance is ultimately unable to function as a solution for the women's entrapment and merely locks them more securely into patriarchal structures.
In the iconic opening lines of Power Politics, Atwood writes:
You fit into me like a hook into an eye
a fish hook an open eye
(Selected Poems: 1965-1975, 141)
Initially, the first two lines provide a comforting image as they refer to what one initially reads as a clothing fastener, being compared to a perfect “fit” between lovers. Such a clichéd image of romantic love suggests a sense of satisfaction that exists on both an emotional and a sexual level, and is emphasized by the domesticity of the words “hook” and “eye”. The second two lines, however, quickly shift the perspective to a much more vicious image. The “fish hook” suggests the act of luring a potential victim for personal benefit and might be understood in a sexual context. As Sarah Wyman observes, “the cozy feminine and domestic item one uses to fasten a skirt transfigures into a horrifying and grotesque phallic image, as both hook and eye are qualified in disturbing ways” (Wyman 36). By understanding the fish hook as a phallic image, the lines draw attention to
sexual inequality in the relationship, thereby giving it a brutal charge.
In poems such as “You Take My Hand”, Atwood similarly draws attention to unbalanced relationships in which the speaker reflects on her difficultly in leaving toxic relationships; “have to face it I'm / finally an addict” (142). Other poems describe the male lover as a figure of power, a “General” and a “beautiful wooden leader” (147). The female speaker, in contrast, is weak and an object of domination, having to “peel you off of me” (142).
Although these examples suggest that the collection merely displays a continuation of Atwood's previous subject matter of female victimization, many poems included in the collection depict a shift from this perspective. In “They Eat Out”, Atwood describes the female speaker as reversing the victim and victor positions when she appears to be the dominant and manipulative one. In the poem, Atwood captures the couple as they sit in a restaurant arguing
over which of us will pay for your funeral
though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal. (Selected Poems: 1965-1975, 144)
The speaker's domination is here defined by her ability to “make you immortal” through the act of writing. She acknowledges “at the moment only I / can do it” and moves to “raise the magic fork / over the plate of beef fried rice / and plunge it into your heart” (144). Although turned into
Superman, the male character has lost his ability to dominate, hanging “suspended above the city / in blue tights and a red cape” (144). In these lines, Atwood challenges notions of masculinity as it is not the male figure, not Superman, that is in control. Destroying the illusion of male heroism, Atwood's speaker illustrates her domination and simply “continue[s] eating” (145).
In “After the Agony”, the speaker describes the male figure's need for confirmation in their relationship:
You say, Do you love me, do you love me
I answer you:
I stretch your arms out one to either side, your head slumps forward
(Selected Poems: 1965-1975, 146)
In her refusal to provide him with the comfort of a verbal response, the speaker seems to
nonverbally express a denial of love. In this sense, taking control of language becomes the speaker's attempt at reestablishing the power dynamics in the relationship. Moreover, as Reingard M. Nischik observes, “the lyrical I's refusal to answer even takes on macabre connotations if we interpret the posture of the 'you', as guided by the lyrical I, as an image of crucifixion” (Nischik 27). Indeed, rather than receiving the confirmation he so desperately needs, the description of the man's physical position suggests an already carried out execution.
Repeatedly, the speaker expresses destructive desires in her attempt to overcome her victimization. In this process, language is a source of power and manipulation. In “Their Attitudes Differ”, the speaker expresses a desire to use the man's death for artistic purposes: “Please die I said / so I can write about it” (149). As the creator of these stories, the speaker is able to experience a sense of power that is rooted in language as she tries to reclaim it as an instrument of domination. But her attempt at using language to wound the other person is not always successful, and she acknowledges that “I'm telling the wrong lies, / they are not even useful” (168).
In these examples, the female speaker is presented as being revengeful, and as wanting to reverse her victimization by inflicting pain upon the male lover. At first sight, her anger and use of violence might seem liberating, as she attempts to reclaim emotions and behaviors that are
oppressed female character into the position of the oppressive male character, thereby maintaining the gender dichotomy created by the patriarchal order. That this approach cannot function as a solution for the woman's entrapment becomes clear as the collection progresses. The more Atwood's speaker tries to claim control, the more she herself gets trapped as the male figure continues his domineering acts: “You will not listen / to resistances, you cover me / with flags” (170). These lines are essentially a return to images of The Circle Game in which the woman's objectification is defined through colonial vocabulary. Power becomes a verbal struggle, an act of accusing and attacking, ultimately reaching the core of the inventive task of the writer: “How can I stop you / why did I create you?” (167).
Although Atwood does challenge the conventions and norms of female (and male) behavior, the use of anger itself only reinforces the speaker’s entrapment. The speaker acknowledges that “we should be kind, we should / take warning, we should forgive each other” (161), but their
relationship is built on violence: “instead we are opposite, / we touch as though attacking” (161). Anger, although necessary, becomes toxic and defeating rather than empowering and liberating. The speaker's attempt to break with her victimization through anger only locks her further into a never-ending power struggle. As the male figure rejects her acts of resistance and reclaims her like land, the female speaker is again reduced to a position of inferiority.
Another way in which the speaker's victimization is reinforced in these poems is through Atwood's use of surrealism, a point made by Alicia Ostriker: “In contrast to tragic and lyric modes which persuade us that their visionary worlds are deeply true, and must be accepted, surrealism persuades us that its world is arbitrary and questionable”, thereby subverting “one's ability to accept suffering as ultimately necessary or ennobling” (Ostriker 1984, 500). When Atwood turns her speaker into a sorceress that kills her lover with a magic fork, she alters the context in which her suffering is discussed and reduces it to an act of ridicule. Rather than transforming her entrapment through constructive action, the woman's anger and violent tendencies ultimately make her remain stuck in Victim Position Two.
Rethinking Patterns in You Are Happy
In 1974, Atwood published her poetry collection You Are Happy, which may be considered the sequel to Power Politics. Especially in the first part of the collection, Atwood proceeds with her description of the anger that she expressed in Power Politics. In the poem “Digging”, for example, she writes:
I dig because I hold grudges, I dig with anger,
I dig because I am hungry, the dungpile scintillates with flies. (Selected Poems: 1965-1975, 181)
The speaker's explicit expression of anger seems to be rooted in her exclusion from history because, as she states, “I defend myself with the past / which is not mine” (181). Through these words, Atwood already seems to be setting up her interest in the practice of revision and the historical representation of women that she further elaborates on in the following parts of the collection. In “Siren Song”, Atwood shows her interest in mythology as she provides the perspective of a siren, one of the bird-women in Greek mythology. Traditionally, sirens are known for luring sailors to their death with their irresistible songs. With this poem, Atwood engages in revisionist mythmaking, a concept defined by Alicia Ostriker:
Whenever a poet employs a figure or a story previously accepted and defined by a culture, the poet is using myth, and the potential is always present that the use will be revisionist: that is, the figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends, the old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible.
This practice of revision is closely linked to the feminist attempt to transform the patriarchal discourse. As Klaus Peter Müller points out, “[m]yths depend on language, and a language consists not only of words and rules for connecting them with one another, but also of the stories preserved in it” (Müller 249). Because (mis)representations of women have become culturally embedded through myths, it is there, Ostriker suggests, that the potential for transformation might be found. However, as I aim to show, Atwood's use of revision in You Are Happy is not always effective in transforming the speaker's victimized position.
In “Siren Song”, Atwood draws attention to the power of the siren's song, stating that “[t]his is the one song everyone / would like to learn: the song / that is irresistible” (195). It is “the song nobody knows / because anyone who has heard it / is dead, and the others can't remember” (195). In the early parts of the poem, Atwood's siren occupies the position of a victim as she describes
feelings of resentment toward her role:
I don't enjoy it here squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical (Selected Poems 1965-1975)
Describing her discomfort with her position in which she has to look “picturesque and mythical”, the siren asks the addressee to help her get “out of this bird suit” (195). But it soon becomes clear that the siren's attempt to be pitied is a manipulative tactic through which she aims to draw the listener in. With the promise to share the secret of the power of the song, she orders the addressee to “come closer” (196). Trying to make the listener feel special, claiming that “only you, only you can” help because “you are unique”, the siren succeeds in seducing them. At the end, she concludes, “[a]las / it is a boring song / but it works every time” (196).
Like the female speaker in Power Politics, the deceitful siren attempts to overcome her victimization by using language as a source of domination and manipulation. However, in this
attempt, she merely moves into an oppressive position and fails to change her own situation. Believing that “it works every time”, the siren remains trapped in her traditional and deceptive role and is unable to get out of the bird suit.
Atwood's concern with revision is continued in the “Circe/Mud” section, one of the most discussed sections of the collection. Here, Atwood focuses on Homer's The Odyssey and Odysseus' arrival on Aeaea, where the sorceress Circe resides. In Homer's version, Circe is best known for her ability to transform men into animals. Atwood, in her retelling of the story, captures Circe's struggle within a male narrative and thereby aims to share her side of the story or, as Circe herself remarks, “the story that counts” (221). However, as Nicola Leporini points out, Atwood's revision of Circe “is at best fluctuating” (Leporini 39) because she neither strongly rejects the traditional story nor insist upon the revised version of character. At times, even, Circe seems to be turned into a character that is more fragile than she seems to be in Homer's version.
In the Homer narrative, Circe is described from a male point of view and is known for luring Odysseus's men into her house by “singing most beautifully” (Homer 450). When they go inside, “thinking no evil”, Circe makes them “a mess with cheese, honey, meal, and Pramnian” but drugs it “with wicked poisons to make them forget their homes, and when they had drunk she turned them into pigs by a stroke of her wand” (451). Odysseus, when learning about Circe's deeds, goes to save his men and is given an herb that will protect him from Circe's magic and that will cause her to “be frightened” and “desire you to go to bed with her” (451). Odysseus is able to convince Circe to transform the pigs back into men, and, after doing so, the two pursue a (sexual) relationship. When the men wish to return home after a year, Circe, who by now has become more of a servant to them, reassures Odysseus that “you shall none of you stay here any longer if you do not want to” (456).
In the opening sections of Atwood's retelling, she depicts Circe's defense against accusations that she transformed travelers into animals. Circe claims that “it was not my fault” (203), refusing to be defined by the traditional story any longer. She continues, “I did not add the shaggy rugs / the tusked masks, / they happened” (203). But Atwood soon illustrates her hesitance to transform Circe
entirely. Immediately after her initial defense, Circe questions her own innocence and blames herself for having failed to intervene: “I did not say anything, I sat / and watched, they happened / because I did not say anything” (203), thereby explaining her position through her silence and a failure to speak up.
As in Power Politics, parts of the collection reinforce the entrapment and victimization of the female speaker in a male-dominated world. When Atwood describes Circe as offering
everything to Odysseus in an attempt to create a life for them together, stating that “there are so many things I want / you to have” (209), Odysseus takes everything without any sign of gratitude as though he has always been entitled to it: “I watch you, you claim / without noticing it, / you know how to take” (209). But his tendency to claim does not stop there. Soon, his mouth is “gouging my face / and neck”, his “fingers groping into my flesh”, which suggests a shift from his domination of the island to the domination of Circe's body. Interesting is Atwood's description of Circe's
consciousness:
(Let go, this is extortion, you force my body to confess too fast and
incompletely, its words tongueless and broken)
(Selected Poems 1965-1975, 210)
Acknowledging Odysseus's violation as an act of “extortion” in which he takes her words from her, forcing “my body to confess / too fast and / incompletely”, Circe recognizes the thin line between love and its evil opposite: “If I stopped believing you / this would be hate” (210). Although at times, Circe is portrayed as a strong character, someone who makes remarks such as “you are not my cure, / nobody has that / power” (224), Atwood simultaneously places her female speaker in a world that is still caught within patterns of victimization.
As the “Circe/Mud” section progresses, Atwood continues building on Circe's consciousness of the male-dominated world that determines her narrative. Expressing a fear of not knowing what is coming, Circe confesses: “I worry about the future” (221). Circe shows a remarkable awareness of the patriarchal conventions into which she was born and the cycle in which her inescapable fate turns. As she bitterly tells Odysseus, “don't pretend you won't leave after all: you leave in the story and the story is ruthless” (221). Similar to how she “decided nothing” (205) when Odysseus's men became animals, she has no say in Odysseus's departure. But Odysseus, too, is trapped in the patterns of myth. Circe asks him: “Don't you get tired of wanting / to live forever? / Don't you get tired of saying Onward?” (206).
Following this moment, the expression of anger becomes most valuable in the story. As it becomes clear in the poem “Is/Not”, Circe's anger about being entrapped in mythic patterns may be transformed into something positive when it is permitted: “permit yourself anger / and permit me mine” (224). Anger, which is “not against a disease / but against you”, “does not need to be understood” but needs “to be said and said” (224). Rather than in Power Politics, in which the destructive expression of anger can always expect a violent response, Circe suggests that the solution might be found in admitting and allowing its existence. As Circe acknowledges her
entrapment in the mythic model, she realizes that they have to find “our way / not out but through” (225).
Ultimately, Atwood depicts a transitional phase as Circe describes the existence of “at least” two islands, in contrast to only one, and acknowledges that they “do not exclude each other” (222). As Gordon Johnson points out, “the present, which up until now (except for the introductory poem) has been a means of feeding or sustaining the mythic pattern, now offers rescue from the tyranny of the mind and its constructs” (Johnston 175). Indeed, although Atwood does not erase Circe's history on the island, she uses the opportunity to add an alternative. Circe acknowledges:
The second I know nothing about because it has never happened this land is not finished, this body is not reversible.
(Selected Poems: 1965-1975, 223)
Although she expresses her unfamiliarity with the second island “because it has never happened”, it also provides a space of opportunity because it “is not finished”. As Sharon Rose Wilson points out, “unlike Homer's jerky repeating script, in which 'the events run themselves through / almost without us'”, Atwood creates the possibility of a world “outside of relentless time, but it is neither closed nor antithetical to becoming” (Wilson 161). In this approach, Atwood seems to be open the way to Victim Position Three. Although her female speaker is not yet outside of her victimization, Atwood shows her concern with developing new patterns that open up a possibility of wholeness.
The potential for transformation is well illustrated in the concluding poem of the collection, the “Book of Ancestors”. Here, Atwood emphasizes her goal of leaving behind the mythic models: “So much for the gods and their / static demands” (239), thereby responding to the supposed
invariability of myths. Finally, “history / is over”, erasing “necessities” that “hold us closed / distort us” (239). Remarkable in Atwood's retelling is that she does not offer a fixed solution or
reassurance of what happens after Odysseus's departure, nor does she depict a Circe that exists outside of the still existent gender struggles. Instead, without ignoring the history of female victimization that surrounds these myths, Atwood ends the collection by offering an alternative world view that has the potential for improvement and, as Wilson remarks, for becoming.
Conclusion
In both Power Politics and You Are Happy, Atwood illustrates how her female speakers shift between Victim Position Two and Victim Position Three by revealing a desire to transform their victimization and entrapment in traditional roles through a new expression of anger. At the same
time, however, Atwood captures the still existent patriarchal structures that continue to surround and restrict them, and thereby illustrates the difficulty in transitioning out of one's position. In Power Politics, the use of anger as a form of resistance is merely destructive and reinforces the woman's entrapment rather than liberating her. In You Are Happy, which starts from a similar expression of anger, the potential for positive transformation becomes more realizable. Without ignoring the still existent forms of victimization and the patterns from which the female subject is not yet completely able to break free, Atwood ultimately illustrates the need to create new patterns in order to go beyond victimhood, a journey that will be continued in the third and final chapter.
Chapter 3:
Female Transformation in Interlunar
Introduction
In her poetry collection Interlunar, published in 1984, Margaret Atwood continues to express her concern with female self-definition and the dismantling of female victimization. After discussing the speaker's aversion to the existent power structures in Power Politics and attempting to break mythic patterns in You Are Happy, the poems in Interlunar illustrate Atwood's attempt to redefine the patriarchal discourse in order to define a female-centered discourse.
As this chapter will argue, with Interlunar Atwood's speaker comes closest to reaching Victim Position Four of being an “ex-victim”, the position in which “creative activity of all kinds becomes possible” (Atwood 1972, 38). In the collection, such creative action takes place in the female subject's attempt to deconstruct and redefine the discourse by which she is defined.
In part one of the collection titled “Snake Poems”, Atwood illustrates her interest in the snake. This creature, a symbol of phallogocentric discourse, becomes the center of revision and is used to initiate a shift in the depiction of female agency. The second section of the collection
extends this discourse on transformation as Atwood rewrites the narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice. In both cases, Atwood illustrates the need to revisit and redefine symbols and myths that tend to project patriarchal values in her attempt to go beyond victimhood.
Rewriting the Snake
In “Snake Poems”, Atwood identifies different understandings of the snake by tracing the animal in the symbolism of Western culture and religion. Although the snake may represent a variety of things including wisdom, death and evilness, from a psychoanalytic perspective the snake is primarily a phallic symbol. As Dana Oswald points out, “the phallus is at once symbolic and literal […] it is a sign of authority, linked to both the male body (the penis) and the male position of social power (the
patriarchy)” (Oswald 170).
As mentioned in the introduction to the thesis, for Jacques Lacan, discourse is fundamentally phallogocentric; it is centered around the phallus. Although Lacan insists that the phallus and the penis are not the same, Jane Gallop challenges this supposed separation and points out that although “the signifier phallus functions in distinction from the signifier penis”, it “also always refers to penis” (Gallop 126). As a result, it remains fundamentally related to patriarchal structures of power.
In the “Snake Poems” section, Atwood engages with the snake symbol in an attempt to strip it of its phallogocentric connotations and redefine it as a symbol of female power. In this sense, Atwood's aim of transforming the snake's symbolism forms part of a larger project in women's writing as observed and defined by Suzanne Juhasz:
It means a texture that is consequently more complex, more subtle, more layered. Especially, it means language that is figurative, forming connections, interrelationships. Specifically, images that intertwine woman and nature, a traditional and archetypal body of associations are used in a new way to identify the source and setting for female wisdom and power.
(Juhasz 23)
According to Juhasz, “the two journeys of discourse – inward into the mind, outward into myth and history – turn out to be one”, a process that is “preparation for another transformation: past
description, past re-definition, re-interpretation, re-discovery, re-evaluation, towards creation of a viable present and a possible future” (23).
In a similar manner, Atwood's concern with the snake does not stand on its own but is influenced by the representations of the snake in history and patriarchal myths. In Genesis, for example, the serpent seduces Eve, convincing her to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. While Adam eats the fruit too, he blames Eve and, as a result, she is held responsible for the downfall of humanity. This act is often understood as inherently sexual and, as Mary Daly points out, illustrates “patriarchy's blaming women for evil” (Daly 47). By putting the snake at the center
