A Feminist by Another Name: Atwood and the Canadian Canon

Abstract

When Margaret Atwood, in 1970, re-created the experience and reinvented the voice of the nineteenth-century Canadian settler Susanna Moodie in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, she provided herself and Canadians with a literary foremother that they needed just then. In the opening of that collection of poems, Atwood imagines Moodie cutting the eyes out of her own picture as a way of seeing her relationship to her new world. This image also suggests to the reader the masks that Atwood and her contemporaries created, ways of seeing the present through what they took to be the empty eyes of the Canadian past. In what follows, we wish to hold up a series of verbal masks--that is, to present a collage of quotations from Atwood (especially from Atwood's Moodie poems) and from her Canadian contemporaries, as a way of locating some of the forces that initiated and have continued to shape Atwood's work.