REVIEWS Shaxon Rose Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993). 430. Illustrated. $45.00 cloth. This is a solid and serious book, packed with useful information, and with the sense, rare among critiques of Atwood, that its writer not only knows Atwood but has found out a fair amount of what Atwood knows. The reproductions of Atwood’s own art work, along with a canny assessment of how it complements and reinforces the themes and goals of her prose fiction, takes up the longest single chapter; along with Wilson’s copious use of Atwood papers in the Robarts archives and of information gleaned from Atwood herself, it shows how research in Canadian sources can counteract the cultural vacuum, the non-contextualization of Atwood found in much American commentary. While her “take” on Atwood’s “sexual politics” holds few surprises, the fairy-tale material so prominent in the title is indeed central in the text; for Atwood “treat[s] fairy-tales much like other intertexts (including mythical, biblical, Gothic, historic, and popular stories)” (123). The fairy-tale references involve, inevitably, a lot of repetition; the same three or four stories keep turning up as Wilson moves from one Atwood novel to the next. Her argument is not always equal to Atwood’s mischievous permutations, for Atwood can gracefully “fly past the nets” of any some what schematic intertextuality. Her Protean irony is not to be caught by the term “ironic,” used of her perhaps a hundred times in this book, in a hundred different, essentially undiscriminated, senses, or by “paradoxically” and “symbolically” (or even “parodically” and “literally” ), used in much the same way, as all-purpose qualifiers and connectives. Occasionally Wil son uses “jokes” as an Atwoodian verb of saying, reminding us how much Atwood teases her critics and reviewers and how her jokes can ricochet in unexpected directions. Wilson is somewhat uncritically overdependent on such mythographic and feminist reference works as Walker, Graves, and Leach and Fried: little is gained by equating Orpheus with Dionysus (245), while what is lost are the Orphic particularities that Atwood is presumably aiming at. Where Atwood establishes an Orphic persona for a Chilean resistance poet, “Praise E n g l is h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , 2 2 , 3, S ep tem b er 1996 is defiance” (249), Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus is probably a more useful intertext than the potted mythographies of the Woman’s Encyclopedia, and Jay Macpherson, as so often in Atwood’s poetry (but so infrequently noted), likewise, for the “Snake Poems.” But Wilson has problems making, and limiting, comparisons. Her use ful emphasis on Québec fairy-tales is, for instance, somewhat undercut: “Like typical Québec tales, Surfacing features significant triple repetitions” (107). “[QJuests, ritual eating and transformation” are said to mark specific fairy-tales, but they (and others) are staples of all narrative forms whatso ever. Multiple identifications of characters with every possible archetype or avatar form huge undiscriminated catalogues of overlapping, even contradic tory, allusive possibility. In Life Before Man, for example, “Elizabeth, ill and thirty-nine, is Venus verging on Hecate ... orphan, daughter, ‘whore,’ ... Ironically and parodically, she is the Girl Without Hands ... Florence Nightingale ... and not only Cinderella and the prince but the stepmother ... . Duchamp’s fragmented nude, Persephone as Snow Queen... ” (174), and another twenty identifications from all over the cultural map. She also writes, “Tied together with a rope resembling that between Lucky and Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, Atwood’s Orpheus and Eurydice... ” (247). Like many of Wilson’s intertextual comparisons, this gives us too little to go on: it’s far from self-evident in what ways, apart from ropiness, this rope resembles that one. Comparisons that sweep too broadly are self-defeating: Woolf, Kogawa, Tan, Erdrich, Byatt, are all seen as exemplars of the self-reflexive (31), suggesting a tendency to compare loosely, perhaps ominously foreboded in Wilson’s opening words, “Like Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood... ” (xi). Wilson is better when she dives into the intertextualities that count for each book, like The Wizard of Oz, itself at one or two intertextual removes from being...