Procrastinating, Plunging Into Work in Mid-Afternoon. Once Her Daughter Was Born in 1976

Title: Words and Their Glories: A Profile of Margaret Atwood
Source: World & I
Publication Date: Jan. 2003
Page Number: n.p.
Database: SIRS Renaissance
WORLD & I
Jan. 2003, n.p.
"This article appeared in the January 2003 issue and is reprinted with permission from the World & I, a publication of the Washington Times Corporation, Copyright © 2003."
Words and Their Glories: A Profile of Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's journey from a childhood in the Canadian forests to the challenges of a prolific author.
By Linda Simon
About ten years ago,Margaret Atwood was asked to respond to a question many writers try to evade: Why do you write? She titled her response "Nine Beginnings" and in it described nine efforts to pin down her motivation, her satisfaction, the meaning of writing in her own life. "There's the blank page," she wrote as her ninth try, "and the thing that obsesses you. There's the story that wants to take you over and there's your resistance to it. There's you longing to get out of this, this servitude, to play hooky, to do anything else: wash the laundry, see a movie. There are words and their inertias, their biases, their insufficiencies, their glories. There are the risks you take and your loss of nerve, and the help that comes when you're least expecting it. There's the laborious revision, the scrawled-over, crumpled-up pages that drift across the floor like spilled litter. There's the one sentence you know you will save.
"Next day there's the blank page. You give yourself up to it like a sleepwalker. Something goes on that you can't remember afterwards. You look at what you've done. It's hopeless.
"You begin again. It never gets any easier."
Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, the second child of Carl Edmund Atwood, a forest entomologist, and Margaret Killam Atwood, whose undergraduate degree in home economics belied her complete lack of interest in housekeeping. Atwood's parents first met in Truro, Nova Scotia, where they were attending normal school, preparing to become teachers. In "Unearthing Suite," one of Atwood's most overtly autobiographical stories, the narrator portrays her mother, tomboyish and energetic, as "much sought after. Possibly men saw her as a challenge: it would be an accomplishment to get her to pause long enough to pay even a fleeting amount of attention to them." Carl Atwood took up the challenge: when he saw nineteen-year-old Margaret Killam sliding down a banister, he decided immediately that she was the woman he would marry.
But times were hard: the Depression, deepening their families' impoverishment, delayed their plans. They finally married after a courtship of eight years and first settled in Montreal, where Carl enrolled in graduate studies, specializing in insects that caused deforestation. After he earned his degree, the family spent much of the year in northern Quebec, in a cabin on a lake, where Margaret grew up in the company of her brother, Harold. "In our little house," she recalled in "Earth Suites," "there was no electricity or running water. We used a hand pump, kerosene lamps, and candles. All the cooking was done on a wood stove." Across the lake, they could see a village--five or six houses, a tiny church, a general store--to which, occasionally, they would paddle in their canoe.
Atwood's parents nurtured her independence, self-reliance, and unconventionality. "My parents do not have houses, like other people," she wrote in "Unearthing Suite." "Instead they have earths. These look like houses but are not thought of as houses, exactly. Instead they are more like stopping places, seasonal dens, watering holes on some caravan route which my nomadic parents are always following, or about to follow, or have just come back from following. Much of my mother's time is spent packing and unpacking." Packing, in any case, was more interesting than housework, which her mother considered a waste of time. "All her favorite recipes begin with the word quick....She has never been interested, luckily, in the house beautiful, but she does insist on the house convenient."
Trained as a teacher, Atwood's mother took charge of her children's education. An early reader, Atwood found her house filled with a range of interesting books, including Greek and Celtic mythology and, notably, an unexpurgated version of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Enticed by the violence and gore, she became interested in themes of metamorphosis, a concept that she was learning from her father, as well, as she observed stunning and mysterious transformations from larva to insect. Around the age of six, she also began to write and illustrate her own poetry and, with her brother, comic books. Being female had no effect on how she was raised: she took part fully--as fully as her brother did--in her parents' projects. "Paddling a canoe, building things, using tools, I did all that just like a boy."
For much of her childhood, Atwood was isolated from a larger community and from what other children knew as civilization; the woods were both playground and laboratory. When she returned to Ottawa for winters, conventional school--compared with the depth and spontaneity of her education at home--seemed boring, and the city seemed frightening. "As a child," she remembered in "Earth Suites," "I was scared of flush toilets; they made an incredible noise! They terrified me!" Yet she was aware, too, that the natural landscape could be just as threatening. Her father, after all, devoted himself to exploring "things that are invisible to others but which he knows all too well are lurking up there in the innocent-looking leaves...a miraculous beetle that eats wood," for example, or "a two-sexed worm, a fungus that crawls. No freak show can hold a candle to my father expounding Nature." Her father, she added, "is not a sentimentalist," and neither is Atwood. "You can see a tree as the embodiment of natural beauty," she once explained to an interviewer, "or you can see it as something menacing that's going to get you and that depends partly on your realistic position toward it; what you were doing with the tree, admiring it or cutting it down; but it's also a matter of your symbolic orientation toward everything." In her fiction and poetry, the natural landscape is replete with metaphorical implications. "I have," she says, "a very topographic imagination."
Atwood at first thought she would become a biologist, then a home economist; in college, she took on philosophy but found the ideas she wanted to grapple with were more likely to be encountered in literature. She was an honors student at Victoria College, University of Toronto, where she took classes with eminent critic Northrop Frye ("He recommended at some point that I not run away to England and become a waitress," she remembered). Atwood won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to support her graduate studies at Harvard, where she concentrated on Victorian literature. She studied with noted scholars Jerome Buckley, a Canadian who had been forced to migrate to the States for work, and Perry Miller, whose courses on Puritans laid the groundwork, years later, for TheHandmaid's Tale.
Harvard, she once said, "is sort of like anchovies. An acquired taste." Although she remembers fine lectures and the riches of Widener Library, Atwood never quite acquired a taste for feeling marginalized by the male-dominated university. "The most important things about the experience for me were: it was the place where I first learned urban fear....And, for various reasons, it was the place where I started thinking seriously about Canada as having a shape and culture of its own."
In 1963, Atwood set her graduate work aside and moved to Toronto where she worked for a market research company and wrote a novel that still is unpublished. The following year, she taught English literature at the University of British Columbia before returning to Harvard. Although she completed her course requirements, she never wrote her dissertation on the English metaphysical romance, distracted, she says, by ideas for poems and stories.
Atwood's first publications were poetry,The Circle Game, which won a Governor General's Award in 1967, and The Animals in That Country (1968). Her first published novel,The Edible Woman, written in 1965--on examination booklets from the University of British Columbia--was published four years later, to immediate acclaim. "I was writing about an object of consumption (namely, my bright but otherwise ordinary girl) in consumer society," Atwood explained. The novel was her attempt at social realism; in 1965, women were expected "to take a crummy job and then marry to get away from it."
By 1969,The Edible Woman was taken as a bold feminist statement. Marian, the central character, does the kind of market research with which Atwood was personally familiar and comes to identify with the objects of consumption she investigates, most significantly, food. Seeing herself as the consumed rather than the consumer, she stops eating. Yet exploring the social causes of anorexia was not Atwood's aim; instead, she saw the novel as an anti-comedy. "In your standard eighteenth century comedy you have a young couple faced with difficulty in the form of somebody who embodies the restrictive forces of society, and they trick or overcome this difficulty and end up getting married," she explained. InThe Edible Woman, though, "the person who embodies the restrictive forces of society is in fact the person Marian gets engaged to...and the comedy solution would be a tragic solution for Marian."
Although Atwood objects to being seen as a feminist writer, her fiction focuses, again and again, on women and the forces that shape them: family, men, social expectations, access to power, love, ambition--and, not least, the natural landscape. But she explores these forces less in their connection to gender than, simply, to being human. Creating and preserving one's independence; finding one's place within a community; nurturing and resisting solitude; seeking and breaking away from attachments; grasping for authority, yet at the same time yearning for protection; aspiring to make a mark in the world: for Atwood, these needs are shared by men and women alike. In Cat's Eye (1988), for example, the narrator and her husband, both artists, silently consider each other's career. "There's not much time left," the narrator thinks, "for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it's not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf life." This shelf life ignores gender.
So does victimization: Atwood's women are as likely to be treated cruelly by women (as inCat's EyeorThe Robber Bride(1993)) as by men, and they are as likely to be circumscribed by their own limitations--of imagination or assertiveness--as by social constraints. Atwood's second novel,Surfacing(1972), follows a young artist to northern Canada, where she is searching for her father, who has mysteriously disappeared. During the week of her search, accompanied by two friends and a former lover, she unearths clues to her past and identity and comes to question how memory shapes our construction of reality. Both Marian inThe Edible Womanand the narrator ofSurfacing"are creating the world which they inhabit," Atwood explained, "and I think we all do that to a certain extent, or we certainly do a lot of rearranging." Besides her memories, the narrator also discovers a ghost, a phenomenon that interested Atwood as much for its psychological implications as its literary possibilities. Her ghost story, she said, was "the Henry James kind, in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one's own self which has split off."
Figments of her characters' imaginations appear in other fictions. InCat's Eye, Elaine Risley, a fiftyish artist whose work is being celebrated in a retrospective, is haunted by the memory of cruelty inflicted by a childhood friend, Cordelia; in "Death by Landscape," from the collectionWilderness Tips (1991), Lois recalls a traumatic experience at summer camp, where her best friend suddenly and inexplicably disappears. Lois spends the rest of her life haunted by the memory, trying, without success, to reconstruct the moment and make sense of what happened--and make sense, also, of her possible responsibility for her friend. In "Hair Jewellery," fromDancing Girls(1977), the narrator, who feels always in the company of her graduate school lover, asks herself: "How do I know I'm not inventing both of us, and if I'm not inventing then it really is like conjuring the dead, a dangerous game."
Conjuring the dead is dangerous because of what the dead might tell the living about their moral and ethical failures. Guilt, responsibility, innocence, and evil are central themes in many of Atwood's fictions. "Ever since we all left the Roman Catholic Church we've defined ourselves as innocent in some way or another," she told an interviewer. As Atwood sees it, defining oneself as innocent suggests seeing oneself as a victim "rather than somebody who has any choice or takes responsibility for their life."
Taking responsibility is central to one of Atwood's most famous novels,The Handmaid's Tale(1985), a dark, deeply disturbing story of a woman in "altered circumstances." Those circumstances are a totalitarian and fundamentalist dystopia, where the protagonist, Offred, is exploited and "farmed" to reproduce. The roots of the book, Atwood maintains, came from her study of American Puritans, whose goal was to establish a theocracy in the New World. "I found myself increasingly alarmed by statements made frequently by religious leaders in the United States; and then a variety of events from around the world could not be ignored....The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted inThe Handmaid's Taleexcept the time and place....It is an imagined account of what happens when not uncommon pronouncements about women are taken to their logical conclusions." Although the novel emphasizes women's victimization, Atwood believes that the effects of a dictatorship affect men equally. "The story in my novel is told by a woman," she said, "but a man without power talking about the same society would describe the same suffering, the same absence of pleasure."
A prolific writer, Atwood has published a dozen poetry collections, essays, ten novels, and four volumes of short stories. During her thirty-five year career as a published author, she has written whenever she could eke out time: between classes when she was a student, at night when she taught; when she was able to devote all of her time to writing, she would spend the morning

procrastinating, plunging into work in mid-afternoon. Once her daughter was born in 1976, she condensed the period of procrastination, trying to use her free time more efficiently. "The fact is," she told Joyce Carol Oates in 1978, "that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?" Writing, she learned early, involved failure. "The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection....The gift she offers you is the freedom of the second chance."
Interviewed after the publication of her novelThe Blind Assassin (2000), Atwood was somewhat more laconic about her work. "Writing is not a necessity," she said. "It has been, but it need not continue to be....There's always this tug of war. If you're writing, you're not living, and if you're living you're not writing. So which are you going to do?" In her latest collection of essays,Negotiating with the Dead (2002), Atwood admits that the tug of war is a bit more complicated. For a writer, if you're not writing, you're not leaving "a trail, like a series of fossilized footprints" that may ensure your immortality--thwarting, in effect, the Muse Oblivion. Writers, she says, motivated, "deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality," accept a heritage from their predecessors, taking on the burdens of reclaiming the past, transforming it for the present, and creating the "once upon a time" in which literature endures. A cache of sentences worth saving, a trove of glorious words: these are a writer's bequest to the future. If writing is no longer a necessity for Atwood, the chance to create this legacy, clearly, is nothing less than a gift.
Additional Reading
Margaret Atwood,Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, Anansi, Toronto, 1982.
---, Negotiating with the Dead, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2002.
Coral Ann Howells,Margaret Atwood, Macmillan, London, 1996. Book?Article?
Earl G. Ingersoll.“Margaret Atwood, Conversations,”Ontario Review Press, Toronto, 1990.
Roberta White, "Margaret Atwood: Reflections in a Convex Mirror,"Canadian Women Writing Fiction, ed. Mickey Pearlman, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, 1993.
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College and a frequent contributor toThe World & I.
Simon, Linda. "Words and Their Glories: A Profile of Margaret Atwood." World & I. Jan. 2003: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 17 Oct. 2016.
Simon, L. (2003, 01).“Words and their glories: A profile of Margaret Atwood.”World & I, ,n.p. Retrieved from