Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Various Atwoods is made up of 12 essays—11 by women, one by a
male—devoted primarily to Margaret Atwood’s writings of the 1980s
and 1990s. The feminist ambience is therefore prominent. Its title,
appropriating a phrase from Robert Fulford, was chosen, the editor tells
us, for two reasons: “there is the protean, endlessly inventive
Atwood, and there are the ‘various Atwoods’ that readers and critics
continue to construct.”

Maybe so, though the Atwood who emerged for me was academically
constructed and oppressively homogeneous: hard, politically committed,
sometimes cynical, serious to the point of solemnity. Notably absent are
the wickedly funny Atwood, the witty Atwood, the Atwood who writes with
such elegance and poise. What the book really provides is various
theoretical approaches to Atwood. Lorraine York duly lists them: “In
the present volume, Atwood meets parodic intertextuality, postmodernity,
postcolonialism, deconstruction, semiotics, Foucauldian theory,
dialogism, confessional theory, cultural criticism, and theories of
canon formation.” Depressing.

Clearly, Various Atwoods is not geared toward the numerous general
readers of Atwood, who put even her poetry on bestseller lists. One
contributor, Linda Wagner-Martin, even tells us, apparently blending a
sense of discovery with one of bemusement, that Atwood has realized
“that many who read her probably do so for pleasure.” If so, they
will find little to attract them here. Another, Molly Hite, blandly
admits in a note that her essay on Cat’s Eye is “woefully
inadequate” as a reading but apparently justified as theory. Such
callous use of literature for nonliterary purposes seems to me a kind of
academic prostitution. Another, Shannon Hengen, registers unease because
“readers cannot discover anything of substance about Canadian racism
by studying The Robber Bride”! Words fail me.

A few rays of light penetrate the encircling gloom. Sandra Djwa
combines scholarship and sensitivity to provide genuine literary
criticism documenting (unfashionably) Atwood’s debt to T.S. Eliot, and
Glen Wilmott is thoughtfully original on The Handmaid’s Tale as novel
and film (he banishes theory to the notes). Too much of the rest, alas,
is ideological shadow-boxing in wordy jargon.