Margaret Atwood

Her work deals (among much else) with the everyday terrors of internalised, socially embedded fascistic gender oppression, the insidious dangers of fundamentalism and other politically and psychologically reinforced forms of life denying bullying, as seen in Lady Oracle (1976), The Edible Woman (1969), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments (2019). It questions the trustworthiness of both received and silenced cultural and personal histories, revealing each to be versions of legitimated or unsanctioned fictions – for example, in Cat’s Eye (1988) and Alias Grace (1996). An active voice for sustainability, ecological and human diversity, and for feminism, creativity and the worldviews of Indigenous people, she is rarely hectoring, always wise, wry and well-informed. Margaret Atwood puts her extraordinary imagination to work through the Gothic (The Robber Bride 1993), dystopian science fiction (The MaddAddam trilogy 2003–2013) (though she denied the definition for a while), short fiction/in memoir form (Moral Disorder 2006), the comic and much else in long and short fiction. Her early recognition came for her poetry and, after eighteen volumes, her most recent, Dearly (2020), enables a familiar, tightly controlled, personal, mythical, politically engaged voice that has as much space for family losses, gaps, hauntings, the beloved cat with dementia wondering what to do part way up the stairs at night, as for the daily escalating threats to the planet.

This book is a new Companion to Margaret Atwood’s work, which does not intend to merely replicate the rich array of publications critically appraising her writing that is already available. Rather, it aims to do two things: to lay down critical engagements with her varied output, which offer sound yet new and updated discussions on those fundamental concerns of her work, on the major texts, and to explore relatively less visited, and/or now highly topical issues and texts, and/or utterly new perspectives for 2025 and beyond. We always live in interesting times, and as we began this book, the apposite, all-seeing, ironic, satiric, critical and imaginatively constructive vision of Atwood’s works, and of her interviews and public statements, felt like a report from a rebuilding moment, where irony and satire – specifically the forms and expression of liberated views in her books, TV series and films – could be rewarded with insightful responses, perhaps fewer school shootings, fewer toxic, misogynistic power games and even ways of tackling climate change. But continuing through 2025, it feels much darker again, which is when we need the outspoken, creative and critical voice of Atwood even more. Writing this, I sought an analogy for the moment and remember Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918), thinking, first that the enemy the speaker killed, who now talks to the speaker as a ghost, could have been a friend under other circumstances, but more, the terrible predictiveness of the line ‘when nations trek from progress’. I then discovered Jennifer Senior’s interview with Atwood in The Atlantic (February 18, 2022) even a couple of years before the rapid slide backwards into another era of violence, divisiveness and misogyny in the US. They are talking here about Wilfrid Owen’s poem, ’Strange Meeting’, where Atwood notes the line ‘I am the enemy you killed (my friend)’, while the line I have in mind comes just a little earlier, noting the awareness of the poisoned future – the poisoned wells that the lies and hostilities will leave even when they might seem at least to cease, which damage will be difficult to resist and reject: ‘none will break ranks, though nations trek from progress’ (Owen 1918).

It is the role of the writer to expose such problematic behaviours even as they also, as Atwood can, write about the domestic version of facing the messy past and intending to do something more recuperative, filled with new life, and comparing the first steps to cleaning out the fridge, with multiple jars leaking in the domestic fridge:

Why are these jars still here?

They’re full of old tom, green, brown and yellow and red, long overdue for the tossout time going stale, tired, growing

Tiny gray spores, tiny poisons.

The little words of ‘sadness and of tears’, are discovered, are being cleared out. (Atwood ‘Cleaning out the fridge’ Paper Boat, 2023)

Atwood is aware of the constraints and possibilities for women under everyday misogynist and strong regimes – The Handmaid’s Tale never ages and is always pertinent. Second-wave feminism is not only in her background but also a part of her DNA. She is remarkably both of the moment and, beyond that, worryingly prescient – she is personal and she is political, and all of this combines in her wry, absolutely accurate perspective on the world and on the individual life. Her presence, sensitivity and vast expert creative range is celebrated in the essays in this volume. As we were completing the volume, Margaret Atwood’s collection Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems 1961–2023 (2023) came out, which contained messages and fine writing that could not be overlooked.

Contributors in this collection write about her novels, short stories, her illustrated stories for children and the films and TV series that have developed from, and further develop, her work and arguments. There are discussions of her poetry and her engagements with music, and throughout the book, there is attention to the many ways in which, through her troubling, entertaining, thought-provoking writing, Margaret Atwood makes us see differently and question embedded power and urges us to act in a courageous and creative manner.

Speaking truth to power is one of Margaret Atwood’s great consistent achievements, whether she is writing strongly worded letters about not polluting lakes and waterways; whimsically yet respectfully mourning and celebrating the fading and the favoured dead; or reprising and exposing stark, dystopian, misogynistic threats to the future of humanity. Given the terrifying and bizarre politics of 2024 onwards, both globally and in North America, we should expect she will have little rest and much to say to help her readership think through and articulate our own responses.

There is a great deal of critical work on Margaret Atwood, as indeed there should be, and although the call for contributions to this volume made suggestions about what could be covered, our contributors focused on both consistent and new issues in her work and chose to do so by concentrating less on the earlier than on the later work, which explains the brevity of the first part.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part, ‘Early Work’, looks at two of her novels, The Edible Woman and Alias Grace, each dealing with ways in which women are socially constructed yet can avoid, or challenge these constructions.

In her chapter, ‘You look delicious’, Lorna Piatti Farnell focuses on the gender politics, alimentary disturbances and consumerist media in The Edible Woman, especially where Marion (who, significantly, works in marketing and advertising) realises that marrying Peter would cause her to lose her identity. Her mental health declines, charted symptomatically through her relationship with eating, which becomes increasingly difficult. At one moment, she refuses to eat a juicy steak, horrified to realise this was a living being. The possibility of eating it reminds her of cannibalism and causes her to problematise her own body, but her response goes beyond a form of anorexia. It is a reaction against being consumed. When a self-silenced Marion suddenly realises that in constantly passing even simple choices and responsibilities on to Peter, she is losing her identity and power, she bakes a cake, an image, an effigy of herself, which Lorna Piatti-Farnell points out echoes ancient mythic rituals of sacrifice and power. And Marion is taking the power here. No longer the hunted or human consumable in this highly materialistic marketing world, where body image is aligned with selling and consuming goods and the married woman is a silenced, consumed item, she offers up the cake to be consumed instead of herself, a freeing, celebratory move and a revolt against both ‘patriarchal and capitalist oppression in the Western societies of the Cold War era’.