A twood, M argaret

Abstract

The Gothic dimensions of the work of Margaret Atwood (1939–) are most visible in her interrogation of fictions of femininity, in her treatment of the figure of the woman writer, and in the recurring interest in the possibilities of dual or multiple identities in her writing (see doubles ). In her early novel Lady Oracle (1976), a Gothic parody in the tradition of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey , the main character, Joan Foster, writes Gothic romances for the popular fiction market but also imagines herself as the heroine of her own life. Atwood responds to the sacrificial virgin of seminal Gothic texts such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis' The Monk by charting her protagonist's quest for agency and self‐determination through a maze of Gothic conventions (see lewis, matthew ; walpole, horace ). Sections of Joan's Gothic romances are interpolated into the main body of the novel and serve as all‐important ancillary texts to the story of her coming of age in Canada and her later escape to Europe (see canadian gothic ). Joan Foster is a typical Atwoodian protagonist in that she leads more than one literary life; as well as writing popular romances (published under a pseudonym), she is also the author of an acclaimed collection of poetry that shares its name with the title of Atwood's novel and is marketed as literary Gothic by her publishers. The numerous strands of Joan's Gothic writing overlap and interact with the plot of Joan's life; for example, the men in her life are imagined as villains or as rescuer figures at different points in the text. In determining to take control of the fictions that have come to impinge upon her life story, in the final pages of the novel she abandons the fantasy of Gothic Romance for science fiction. While Lady Oracle is perhaps Atwood's most striking engagement with the Gothic, a number of her short fiction works, in particular the title story of her collection Bluebeard's Egg (1983), are explicit in reworking fairytales and folktales with a distinctly Gothic aspect to them (see folklore ). In these shorter works, as in her novels, Atwood's revision of Gothic motifs is driven by a feminist interest in unraveling the original texts and generating new meanings from them that force a reconsideration of the roles historically assigned to women in the Gothic tradition.