Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939 and grew up in Toronto. Her father was an entomologist, and during her childhood, she thought that she, too, would become a biologist. But she was more drawn to writing. She contributed poetry, short stories and cartoons to her high school newspaper. Her first volume of poetry, Double Persephone, was published in 1961, when she was 22, and won the E.J. Pratt medal. In 1966, her second book of poetry, The Circle Game, received one of Canada's most prestigious literary prizes, the Governor-General's Award. She won again in 1985, for her novel, The Handmaid's Tale.
As a child, Atwood spent many summers with her father while he conducted research in the northern Ontario and Quebec bush. She came to have a deep appreciation of the history of the area, and many of her poems and novels reflect this interest: The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) and Surfacing (1972), to name just two examples.
She attended Victoria College and graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. She earned an M.A. in English from Radcliffe College in 1962, and then began working on a Ph.D. at Harvard. She left Harvard before finishing the degree and has been a professional writer ever since, writing poetry, fiction, literary criticism, children's literature, nonfiction, and television scripts. She won the Booker Prize, an award given to the best novel written by a citizen of Great Britain or one of the Commonwealth countries, in 2000, for The Blind Assassin; she was also shortlisted for the prize in 1986, for The Handmaid's Tale; in 1989, for Cat's Eye, in 1996, for Alias Grace, and in 2003, for Oryx and Crake. She has written more than 50 books and won numerous other prizes and honorary degrees.
To put it simply, she's good.
The main characters of Atwood's novels are almost all women. Thus, literary critics have often categorized Atwood as a feminist writer. She objects to that label, saying that some critics consider any novel whose main character is female a "feminist novel." She says that a "feminist novel" is one which is written with that specific political agenda, but when she writes, politics are not a consideration. In an interview with Mother Jones, she says,
One works by simple observation, looking into things. It's usually called insight and out of that comes your view -- not that you have the view first and then squash everything to make it fit. I'm talking about staying out of the Procrustean bed. You know the myth: Everybody had to fit into Procrustes' bed and if they didn't, he either stretched them or cut off their feet. I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view...As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
Atwood is interested in the female experience, among many other themes: the role of words and language, the power and danger of knowledge, the unknowability of "the truth," the role of perspective, and the effects of power and oppression, to name a few. But she objects to the idea that certain characteristics are "female" while others are "male":
Women are human beings, and human beings are a very mixed lot. I've always been against the idea that women were Victorian angels, that they could do no wrong. I've always thought it was horseshit and does nobody any good. Remember, Lizzie Borden got off largely because the cultural agenda had convinced people that women were morally superior to men, so Lizzie Borden was "incapable" of taking the ax and giving her mother 40 whacks...In the early fight for women's rights, the point was not that women were morally superior or better. The conversation was about the difference between men and women -- power, privilege, voting rights, etc. Unfortunately, it quickly moved to the "women are better" argument. If this were true in life or in fiction, we wouldn't have any dark or deep characters. We wouldn't have any Salomes, Carmens, Ophelias. We wouldn't have any jealousy or passion.
Alias Grace is based on a real series of events which took place in Ontario in 1843. This allows Atwood to explore a theme which recurs often in her work: the relationship between "truth" and "history." In an interview with Mother Jones, she says,When I was young I believed that "nonfiction" meant "true." But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they're very different. There may not be one Truth -- there may be several truths -- but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
When I wrote Alias Grace, for example, about Canada's famous 19th-century convicted murderer Grace Marks, I knew there were some things that weren't true about this historical figure. After all my research, I still do not know who killed Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Someone killed them. To say that we don't know exactly who did it is not to say that nobody killed them. There is a truth in their deaths, but some other truths -- such as who really did the killing -- are not knowable....
One other theme of the novel is the cultural effect of contradictory attitudes toward women. In an interview with Doubleday, Atwood was asked what she meant by her statement in the Afterword of Alias Grace that the attitudes people had towards Grace "reflected contemporary ambiguity about the nature of woman." Her response:
One group felt that women were feeble and incapable of definite action; that is, that Grace must have been compelled by force to run away with McDermott and that she was a victim. Other people took the view that women, when they got going, were inherently more evil than men, and that it was therefore Grace who had instigated the crime and led McDermott on. So you had a real split between woman as demon and woman as pathetic.