Turning the Pages: Rereading Atwood’s Novels

Abstract

DESCRIBING A BOOK AS A PAGE TURNER is often taken as an insult: a dismissal of the book on the grounds that its primary, and possibly only appeal is at the level of plot. But all fiction attempts to appeal to its readers, and those readers should be tempted to turn the pages. In the case of Margaret Atwood's fiction, however, readers are tempted to turn the pages both ways. Her fiction urges first-time readers forward, forward toward richly satisfying, if not entirely conclusive, moments of closure. But her fiction also demands readers to turn backwards, to turn the pages in the other direction as well: to go back to read again and reassess in light of the new insights they have gleaned as they have read forward. Think, for instance, of the difference between a reader's first encounter with Offred in The Handmaid's Tale and that same reader's return to the novel once s/he understands that Offred's story has been pieced together by the insidious Pieixoto. Similarly with each new addition to the oeuvre of this prolific author, while readers find themselves moving on to meet new fictional characters and landscapes, they also find themselves returning, turning back as it were, to earlier Atwood works in order to read those works through a new lens and with new insights. Take, for example, Blind Assassin, which, upon first reading, appears to be a character study of a woman's journey through life to age, occupying thereby a similar position to The Stone Angel in the oeuvre of Margaret Laurence or The Stone Diaries in that of Carol Shields. As readers reach the concluding pages, however, they recognize that the is one of the titular blind assassins;' as she confesses both her crime and the complex nature of her culpability This is a novel-length version of Robert Browning's My Last Duchess; a poem that becomes the focus of explication in Atwood's 2007 short story of the same name, where the central characters disagree to such an extent on the nature of the Duke's that it contributes to a growing distance in their relationship to one another (Moral Disorder, 63-95). In Margaret Atwood, A Critical Companion, I argue that Blind Assassin is the third of Atwood's villainess novels, the first two being The Robber Bride and Alias Grace. As such, it differs in kind from the old lady novels of Laurence and Atwood, and its protagonist more closely resembles Alice Munro's crafty Et, who confesses both her crime and exposes her cunning to the reader in Something I Have Been Meaning to Tell You:' Compared with these other heroines of the Canadian canon, The Blind Assassin's Iris scales greater heights of villainy (Cooke, 155), but also wins greater sympathy than the other villainess, Munro's Et. I suggest that, with more time and critical distance, Iris of The Blind Assassin will come to be compared at greater length with the villainesses of Roman and Greek antiquity The figure of Ismene in Sophocles' Antigone strikes me as one fruitful avenue of critical inquiry for future scholars (Cooke, 153-54). The recent stripping away of veils from Atwood's fictional villainesses has also invited us to recognize acts of violence in some of her earlier works. In this issue of English Studies in Canada, for example, Kiley Kapuscinski holds up to scrutiny both the national myth casting Canadians as pacifists, as nonviolent victims rather than victimizers, and the very binary structures upon which such meta-narratives are based: pacifism and violence, victim and victimizer, Canadian its seeming antithesis (as articulated in Surfacing at least), American. Kapuscinski locates violence in the acts of Atwood's female characters--the titular protagonists of the villainess novels, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin, and the antagonist of Cat's Eye--and ascribes to them the role of challenging myths of vulnerability and other narratives central to the Canadian imaginary:' The specific focus in Kapuscinski's article, however, is on the unnamed protagonist of Surfacing: on her growing awareness of her own complicity in acts of violence, on the inaccuracies of equating the Canadian imaginary only with pacifism, and on the surfacing more generally of her awareness that the binaries of victim and victimizer, Canadian and American, no longer hold. …