Brutal choreographies: oppositional strategies and narrative design in the novels of Margaret Atwood

Abstract

Brutal Choreographies investigates the novels of Margaret Atwood, focusing on their psychological and political concerns. Drawing on recent feminist and psychoanalytic theory, J. Brooks Bouson examines Atwood's recurring self, family, and romantic dramas, her novelistic subversion of romance ideology, and her critique of gender and power politics. Bouson also considers the oppositional strategies used in Atwood's novels: their punitive plotting and retaliatory rhetoric, their enactments of female revenge fantasies, and their self-conscious manipulation and sabotage of romance and other traditional plot lines and conventions. From the proto-feminism of The Edible Woman the cultural feminism of Surfacing and the examination of the perils of Gothic thinking in Lady Oracle to the domestic and sexual warfare of Life Before Man, the anti-feminist backlash terrors of Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale and the power politics of female relationships in Cat's Eye, Atwood's women-centred fiction has strong oppositional appeal. Because Atwood does not shun what she calls the story of the disaster which is the world her tales are often brutal, portraying female victimisation at the hands of the husband or male lover, the mother, or the femle friend. But if the Atwood novel has the power to disturb, compel and at times brutalise its reader, it is also carefully choreographed, using form and design to contain and control the female fears, anxieties, and anger that drive the narrative.