My Atwood Project, Part 9: Alias Grace

 Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood's first novel-length foray into historical fiction. However, it has a lot in common with her first speculative novel, The Handmaid's Tale, since both are primarily about incarcerated women. Alias Grace is inspired by the true story of a 16-year-old housemaid, Grace Marks, accused of murdering the head housekeeper and their employer, with the help of another servant. There was much doubt about her guilt, raised in part by Grace's own conflicting accounts. While the male servant was found guilty and hanged for the murder of the employer, Grace's own death sentence was converted to life in prison, and she was pardoned much later.

**My thoughts on Alias Grace are primarily about an important plot twist, so just skip this post if you don't want to know the crucial reveal.**

First, the title is a spoiler once you reach this turning point. During a hypnosis session, Grace speaks with a different voice and claims to be her dead friend Mary Whitney. It would appear that Mary committed the murders, which would account for Grace's fainting fits and her claims to remember nothing of the crimes. So the title would mean that in addition to Grace using Mary's name as an alias during her brief time on the lam, Mary used Grace's body to commit the murder of housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. 

The slippery part that Atwood leaves unresolved is whether the hypnosis session is authentic. Is Grace actually suffering from dissociative identity disorder, formerly referred to as multiple personality disorder? Does she really harbor Mary Whitney as an alternate personality? This illness usually comes about after serious trauma. Was waking up with Mary dead next to her after her failed abortion sufficient trauma to cause Grace's personality to split? Charis in The Robber Bride also has a split personality, but hers is a reaction to incestuous rape, which is a more usual triggering factor. 

Another possibility is that Grace and Jeremiah the peddler aka Dr Jerome Dupont (another alias), the supposed hypnotist, cooked up this scheme together. He is an experienced mountebank. He knew Mary and much of what she and Grace went through, so he could have coached Grace to pretend to be Mary and lay the blame on her. He seems genuinely surprised and shaken during the session, but we know he is a good actor.

A third possibility is Reverend Verringer's immediate diagnosis, that Grace is possessed. In this case, the novel slides from historical fiction into supernatural fantasy. The explanation would be that when Mary died, Grace did not know about the superstition which says to open a window, and so Mary's soul was trapped in the room with Grace, and occupied her body. The novel is full of such superstitions and omens, as is often the case in Atwood's writing. For example, Cat's Eye brushes up against this type of religious fantasy, when Elaine believes that the Virgin Mary has rescued her from her bullies.

Atwood does not purport to resolve this historical mystery, but she does introduce a fascinating wrinkle: what if this famous case of amnesia was actually a case of dissociative identity disorder? This disorder was discussed at the time, as Atwood affirms in the afterword. She will go on to incorporate historical fiction into her next novel, and first Booker winner, The Blind Assassin. Stay tuned!

My Atwood Project, Part 8: The Robber Bride

Atwood says that the idea for The Robber Bride (1993) came from two chance remarks: one, that women can't be con artists (patently false); and two, a friend's little girls wanted all the characters in their bedtime stories to be female, even the villains. These ideas came together in the longest of Atwood’s rewritten folk tales, in this case, “The Robber Bridegroom.”

I suggest this further inspiration. What if Cordelia, the bully from Cat's Eye, based on Atwood’s lived experience, grew up and continued to torture her so-called friends? Each of the three main characters has a weakness that the fourth, Zenia, exploits. 

Tony is an orphan, abandoned by her mom and then later by her father's suicide. She studies war, perhaps in order to understand the war that brought her parents together and later pushed them apart.

Karen’s father was never in the picture and her mother also abandoned her, due to mental illness. She is raped by her uncle and disbelieved by her aunt (aunts rarely come off well). She becomes Charis, and pursues peace, but not the political kind, even though she harbors a draft dodger. 

Roz's father was absent for a long time but came back from the war suspiciously rich. 

The four women meet in college, where Zenia steals West from Tony. Later she steals Billy from Charis, and finally steals Mitch from Roz. (I’m not sure why Atwood says that Zenia steals two of the three men; though Tony gets West back, he’s still been stolen.)

Hence the length of this book; it really could be three novels. So why group them together? To show how the three victims unite in their hatred of the manhunter, and their care for each other? To show three facets of Atwood herself, and maybe a fourth?

She claimed she wanted to show female friendship, and she does. But what she also shows is that every woman is at least two women. She starts the memoir with this idea and calls it The Book of Lives, plural, for that reason. Tony is a mild-mannered academic but she is also her mirror left-hand self, a fierce warrior. Charis appears to be a New Age yoga teacher but under her flaky facade is the violent Karen, seeking revenge on her uncle. And Roz has been both Catholic and Jewish, both poor and rich, a chameleon shifting between worlds. And all of them harbor at one time or another the desire to murder Zenia. It’s a fascinating read, watching each character in turn give in to Zenia’s charms, then get wise. 

But what’s missing is Zenia’s point of view. In Cat’s Eye, the balance of power is reversed: bullied Elaine later befriends Cordelia, and watches her deteriorate. Elaine realizes that Cordelia bullied because she herself was a victim of her oldest sister. No such compassion or even explanation is forthcoming in Zenia’s case. All we have is her multiple origin stories, which can’t all be true. Is she a straw woman, just plain evil through and through, for our three heroines to knock down? Atwood does hint at redemption later, in a 2012 story called “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth.” Stay tuned! 

My Atwood Project, Part 7B: Murder in the Dark + Good Bones

I was going to include Good Bones, Murder in the Dark, and the combination volume, Good Bones and Simple Murders, with Wilderness Tips, but they deserve their own post, as they contain a very different type of short fiction. Murder in the Dark came out in Canada in 1983, then some pieces from it were combined with most of Good Bones (1992) and reissued as Good Bones and Simple Murders in 1994. 

Murder in the Dark contains several short pieces -- not traditional short stories -- that seem to be autobiographical and focus on the present or recent past, as is typical for Atwood’s work from that pre-Handmaid’s Tale era. It also includes some feminist pieces, such as “Simmering,” in which men take over all cooking, and some writing experiments, such as “Happy Endings,” which briefly explores several ways a relationship might play out.

Good Bones, on the other hand, focuses more on retelling and perspective changes, such as retelling the story of the Little Red Hen to highlight her passivity, or Queen Gertrude's reaction to her son's harangue in Hamlet, which portrays her as the opposite of passive. Atwood went on to pursue this method in longer works, The Penelopiad and Hag-Seed, the first a retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view and the second a retelling of The Tempest from Caliban's. Another type of perspective change is strange making, where something known is described in a new way to make it unrecognizable at first. For example, in the story titled “The Adventure,” we might first assume some people are on a trip, but it turns out to be a description of sperm implanting an egg. 

The pieces I like most focus on humanity's problematic future, because as you might know, I'm a big sci-fi fan. In “Epaulettes,” war is replaced by a sort of beauty pageant for men. They don fancy uniforms and speak about their wishes for “the good of humanity,” just like female pageant participants. The winner rules the world, but only for a year.

In other short pieces, such as “Hardball” and “We Want It All,” Atwood takes on pollution and climate change. She was well informed before many of us because her father was a scientist who studied insect infestations in the forests of northern Canada, and shared his opinions on the disappearing wilderness with his family at the dinner table. 

Murder in the Dark and Good Bones each contain 27 stories -- coincidence? Eleven pieces, less than half, from Murder in the Dark made the move into the combined book, whereas almost every piece from Good Bones, all but four, made the cut. I’m curious why neither “Epaulettes” nor “The Adventure” was included. Both “Simmering” (included) and “Epaulettes” (not) place men in traditionally female roles; perhaps they were considered too similar. 

At any rate, for the full Atwood experience, you would have to read both the earlier collections, because neither is fully represented in the combined volume. 

My Atwood Project, Part 7: Wilderness Tips

Wilderness Tips (1991) does not merit a chapter or even an index entry in Atwood’s memoir, The Book of Lives, but it’s another great collection of her short gems.

(Up to now, I've been choosing a cover that I have or remember, but I could not resist this cover featuring a Frida Kahlo painting.)

The title story features George, a Hungarian immigrant whose real name has been deemed unpronounceable by girlfriend Prue. She takes him to her parents' lodge in the north country. He falls in love with the aristocratic setting and vows to marry one of the three daughters so he can return. I hear echoes of the Polish count from Lady Oracle; both are post-war characters soothing their scars with the balm of naive young lovers.

In the same theme of the northern wilderness, some of the stories take place in summer camp. In first story, “True Trash,” named for the type of magazine the camp’s waitresses read on their breaks, one of them gets pregnant by an unlikely candidate. In “Landscapes,” an unhappy camper disappears during a canoe trip. Her friend later becomes a connoisseur of landscape paintings, but not for their aesthetics or investment value: she imagines she sees the lost girl looking out.

Other tropes appear more than once, such as the ambitious woman working for a magazine, only to be overthrown by a more ambitious man. In my favorite of these, “Hairball,” revenge is served cold in a luxury chocolate box. 

Another recurring figure is the male best friend who never quite makes it to the status of lover, such as Vincent in “The Age of Lead.” Percy Mallow in “Uncles” occupies the role of both friend and traitor. In this story, Susanna grows up under the loving gaze of her uncles, but later comes to understand the perspective of her jealous disapproving aunts. As usual, aunts do not come off well.

As is often the case in Atwood, visual artists stand in for the writer. Atwood was herself interested in the visual arts, drawing cartoons and designing posters. Next: more short fiction but of a distinctly different flavor.

My Atwood Project, Part 6: Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye (1988) is the book I was most looking forward to rereading for this project, and it turns out it may well be Atwood's most autobiographical novel. Almost every piece of the plot can be traced back to her own life as she presents it in the memoir, except that the protagonist Elaine is a painter rather than a writer. There is the girlhood spent frequently in the northern wilderness with her parents, her older brother who shares his comic books, the early failed marriage. But most important, the bullying that happened when Atwood was in grade school. She avoided naming names when the book came out, because the perpetrator was still alive. Now she is dead. The ringleader of the bullies, Cordelia, was a girl named Sandra, and her second, Grace, was actually named Muriel. I too was bullied, but in a far less systematic way, and sympathize painfully with the 9-year-old girl bullied by her only friends.

According to the memoir, just about everything that the girls do to Elaine was really done to young Margaret, including many terrifying walks on a weak wood bridge over a threatening ravine. Her coping mechanisms came from her real life as well: peeling the skin from her feet, and finally just ignoring her tormentors. After that “Alice in Wonderland moment” -- “Why, they’re only a pack of cards after all” -- the protagonist seems to block out the memory of this bullying and actually becomes friends again with the main perpetrator in high school. Years later, adult Elaine is helping her mother clean out the basement and finds the cat's eye marble that was her protective talisman during that time and all the memories come rushing back. 

The pretext for the flashbacks is Elaine’s return to Toronto, where the harassment happened, for a retrospective exhibit of her art. I love the descriptions of all the paintings, many of which feature the horrible mother of one of the girls. I also love Elaine’s refusal to be pigeonholed by the young interviewer, resulting in the headline “Crotchety Artist Still Has Power to Disturb.”

All in all it’s one of my favorite Atwood books, and now that I’ve read the memoir, perhaps it is because so much of it is true, or just because I can relate.

Next up, more short fiction: Wilderness Tips and Good Bones. 

My Atwood Project, Part 5: The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

I’ve read Atwood’s most famous novel several times. I can’t remember the first, but it made such an impression on me that I insisted on teaching it in a novel-reading elective at an Episcopalian school in the early 2000s. What better place? Show young people from religious families the unethical lengths to which religion can be pushed. Then I reread it at least once again, before the long-awaited sequel The Testaments came out, in 2019. 

I view The Handmaid’s Tale as a breakout for Atwood because of her world-building. The previous novels, set in contemporary times, focused on characters, primarily women, and their relationships, primarily to men. The cities fade into the background. Here, Handmaid Offred is a rat in a maze, so the maze becomes very important. Where are the exits? Where are the traps? This novel takes on an extra dimension as the new rules of the new society render the protagonist’s every interaction fraught. We see this world-building again most clearly in the speculative MaddAdam series, but also in her Booker Prize-winning Blind Assassin. In all of these, Atwood steps out of the genre of “women’s fiction” and incorporates the influence of the comic books and pulp novels she and her brother read as children. This hybridization makes these novels truly original. 

Another element that struck me this time through was the transactionality: in a society based on removal of choice, very little can be freely given, but there is a lot of trade. The Commander’s Wife, Serena Joy, tells Offred from the outset that she views their relationship as a “business transaction.” Offred sees in small infractions of the rules the hopeful existence of a black market and opportunities for trade. When the Commander summons her for an off-the-script meeting, she immediately wonders both what he wants, and what she can get. This tit-for-tat mentality is strongly tied to the strict pecking order. Everyone’s status is obvious thanks to their prescribed clothing color, which reminded me of Brave New World. Seeing everyone’s value at a glance is also so helpful in maintaining order. 

[Spoilers! Beware!]

Another motif that I noticed was how haunted Offred is by the suicide of her predecessor, and how strongly her own will to live prevails, driving her to have an affair with chauffeur Nick despite the danger involved. 

I realized at the end that my perception of the book’s ending had been clouded by the 1990 movie adaptation, in which Offred kills the Commander before escaping to a trailer in parts unknown to record her memoir. The novel actually ends with Offred simply being picked up by a black van, for unclear reasons, urged on by her lover Nick, who assures her it’s safe. We can assume the van was operated by the Mayday resistance, as Nick said, not the all-seeing Eyes, because the next chapter takes the form of an academic conference examining the memoir which Offred must have written outside of Gilead. 

This frame story element returns in The Testaments, which consists of the confessions of Aunt Lydia, and of Offred’s two children, one liberated with her and raised in Canada, the other raised in Gilead. I’m deviating from the chronological aspect of my project here, because these two books came out over 30 years apart, but I could not resist reading them "in order” again. 

When I first read The Testaments, I was not thrilled with the idea that Aunt Lydia was a secret rebel (click link for my first review). How could she have filled her role so convincingly, when she never truly believed? How could she lie so low, so long? It seemed like a cop out to redeem someone who seemed such a total villain.

This second time, though, I paid closer attention to Aunt Lydia’s backstory, as a judge, an ambitious single woman who was given the opportunity to pursue that ambition right to the top of a new society. She had the patience and cunning to wait to bring the whole of Gilead down, rather than ruin her chance too early in a weak, partial rebellion. I am more willing to buy into Aunt Lydia’s character now. 

And I am still convinced of the plausibility of Gilead. It is far too easy to imagine those with the “they’re gonna take our guns” mentality turning those guns on others. Atwood takes great pains at the end of The Testaments to show the archives of articles she collected in researching the first book: everything she wrote, including the crazed “Particicution,” was based in reality. Let it not become so.

My Atwood Project, Part 4: The Early Short Fiction

Part 4: The Early Short Fiction

Dancing Girls and Other Stories was published in 1977, Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories in 1982, and Murder in the Dark in 1983. Many of these stories appeared in small literary magazines, others in publications as well known as Ms. or Harper’s. Rereading these stories showed me how much Atwood was inspired by real-life events from her past, and gave me tantalizing glimpses forward into her more future-oriented speculative fiction.

Strangely, Dancing Girls has no entry in the index to the memoir, though Atwood does describe the antics of a resident of a boarding house in which she lived, on whom she based the title story (p. 225, Book of Lives). In the story, the nosy owner of the boarding house is intensely curious about a foreign male student. One night, he invites “dancing girls” to his room, and she chases them all out, including the boarder. Also set in the starving-student milieu is “The Man from Mars,” about another foreigner, a Vietnamese man who begins stalking a female student. These stories illustrate Canada’s uneasy attitude toward immigrants, as people to be officially welcomed, but who'd better fit in quickly or be ousted.

Other stories in this collection hark back to Atwood’s rural childhood, such as “Betty,” about a woman in a failed marriage, and young Margaret’s incomplete comprehension of the situation. “When it Happens,” while also set in a self-sufficient rural household straight out of Atwood’s childhood, is a precursor to her imminent dystopias and speculative works. A woman canning the harvest envisions a future wartime in which her husband disappears and she must survive on her own. 

Bluebeard’s Egg is bookended by more stories inspired by Atwood’s and her parents’ lives: the first two, “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” and “Hurricane Hazel,” about an early boyfriend of Atwood’s; and among the final three, “In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain” and the “Unearthing Suite” are both about her parents’ approaching the end of life.  

“Bluebeard’s Egg” is about a woman of leisure who is obsessed with her husband Ed, and what she calls his “stupidity,” or seeming obliviousness to other women. The title comes from an evening writing class she is taking (taught by a woman who could be Atwood herself): the students must rewrite a classic folktale from a different point of view, and she chooses the egg that the heroine must not let out of her sight, equating it with Ed. In fact, it is the wife, not the husband, who has been oblivious.

Murder in the Dark is a whole other genre: ultra short fiction that resembles prose poems, and meta-musings on writing. The title piece, for example, is about a game that becomes a metaphor: is the writer the murderer, or the detective? Who is the victim, book or reader? See my entry here for more detail on other pieces.

Whether you prefer the more conventional stories of the first two collections, or the experiments of the third, Atwood stories are always polished gems. 

Next up, I re-read her most famous novel, The Handmaid's Tale.

My Atwood Project, Part 3: Bodily Harm

Atwood’s fifth published novel, Bodily Harm, returns to the formula? pattern? established in the first three. A woman, Rennie, is torn between two men: boyfriend Jake, similar to the bland and egotistical Peter of The Edible Woman, and Daniel, the doctor who operated on her breast cancer. While her relationship with Jake focuses on the physical, with dark allusions to the violent options that men have over women, her relationship with Daniel is chaste. The good doctor is married, and won’t have the affair Rennie desperately wants. 

I want to dispel the notion that this is a “romance” novel, or at least not as I understand the genre, though that’s the genre insisted upon by the cover and blurb on my mass market paperback copy. Rennie has had part of a breast removed. Boyfriend Jake makes a valiant effort to continue to want her, but fails. Dr. Daniel is unwilling to provide physical connection. Finally Jake leaves and a stalker leaves a coiled rope on Rennie’s bed. Rennie, a freelance writer, proposes a low-cost working escape: an article about (fictional) Caribbean island St. Antoine. There, she does indeed have a fling, and finds physical connection -- but also much more that no one really wants to find on vacation, or in a romance novel.

(As usual, SPOILERS AHEAD)

Rennie makes her first connection on the plane, to another good doctor, Dr. Minnow. She soons learns that “They’re having an election, the first since the British pulled out,” and the local doctor is running for office. Rennie’s hopeful jaunt becomes a menacing trip to an impoverished island divided over politics, and it gets worse. I won’t try to sum up the details of the election, but suffice it to say that nearly everyone is playing Pin the Tail on the CIA.  

Rennie does hook up, with Paul, a drug runner. Then the election happens, and the post-election mob, and Rennie is thrown in prison with Paul’s accomplice and former lover, Lora. Rennie is in shock and denial at first: this can’t be happening! To a Canadian journalist! But it is. And now the portions of Lora’s backstory scattered throughout the narration make sense: these are stories that Lora shares with Rennie in prison. 

Perspective shifts. The vague political unrest of the first three novels now takes center stage. Two white women become cellmates; Lora is raped and beaten. Rennie’s man problems and breast problem shrink in the shadow of her “am I going to get out of this prison alive” problem. Atwood visited the Caribbean island of St. Vincent many times, and based this novel on stories she was told by a man who became Prime Minister. Rennie is lucky to get out alive. 

This novel, to me, is a precursor to The Handmaid’s Tale. Not only are the women imprisoned and abused by the “natives,” but even “good guy” Jake makes a joke of how vulnerable women are. The women must create their own solidarity, sharing their stories and caring for each other. Both are stories of government gone wrong, both inspired by real-life events.

Next up, the early short stories. 

My Atwood Project, Part 2: Life With Men

 At first read, Life Before Man (1979) appears to be a  devastating indictment of open marriage. 

*Spoilers ahead* 

At the center of the novel are Elizabeth and Nate, who are married, have two children, and also each have a lover. As the book begins, we learn that Elizabeth's lover Chris has committed suicide, and we later find out it's because she won't leave Nate for him. Nate's relationship with Martha has fizzled out and he starts a new liaison with Lesje (pronounced Lashia). Things go downhill from there. When Nate moves in with his new girlfriend, Elizabeth begins to manipulate the situation: dropping off the children without warning, demanding money that she knows Nate does not have, etc. While Nate and Lesje are living in poverty, Elizabeth is not exactly happy either. In fact, no one is, and the message seems to be that open marriage is a bust.

When I read Atwood's memoir, I learned that this is a fictional version of her real experience with Graeme Gibson. Graeme was married to Shirley, and they had two boys. And Shirley actually did these, and other, manipulative, narcissistic things to Atwood and Gibson. I wonder how Gibson, a novelist, felt when he saw himself portrayed as Nate, the former lawyer who becomes a toy maker, then must return to law to support himself and Elizabeth and Lesje. In real life Shirley eventually granted a divorce, but Gibson never married Atwood, claiming that he did not want to add “another Mrs. Gibson” to his life. They did have one child together, though Atwood would have liked a second. 

This novel is a departure from the previous three novels. Though it does contain the motif of a woman between two men, Elizabeth does not have a magical moment of madness and recover her pre-man identity: she is pure, cold calculation throughout. If we consider Lesje the central figure, because of the title (she's a paleontologist) and the parallel of her story to Atwood’s, her moment of madness resembles the one in Surfacing: pregnancy out of spite. She is so frustrated with her situation that she decides to get pregnant behind Nate’s back, in order to wrench his attention away from Elizabeth and back to her. Quebecois separatism lurks in the background as in Surfacing, as well. The title might imply that Lesje's (Atwood’s?) life was better before she got involved with Nate. At any rate, Atwood and Gibson remained a loving couple for many years until he passed away.

The only comic relief in this sad tale is Elizabeth's evil Aunt Muriel. As I mentioned in my last blog post, you could write a thesis on the aunts in Atwood's work. The next novel, Bodily Harm, returns to the model of the first three novels, and introduces elements that would evolve in Atwood’s next and most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale. Stay tuned!

My Atwood Project, Part 1: Before The Handmaid’s Tale

My Atwood Project, Part 1: Before The Handmaid’s Tale

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s delightful Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. (Thanks, hubby, for the holiday gift!) Delightful, because it’s a balanced mix of her real life with the lives of her novels. Also, because she takes a light and playful approach to her enemies: there are more “You know who you are’s” than names. 

The whole experience inspired me to re-read Atwood’s fiction oeuvre in chronological order, which I have never done. I’ve lined up the novels and short story collections on my shelf; there is only one I don’t have, a serially published e-book co-authored with her mentee Naomi Alderman, The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home. I may pursue the poetry and non-fiction later, but this is a pretty hefty project as it is, 18 novels and 12 novellas or collections of short stories.

BEWARE, SPOILERS AHEAD.

Let’s begin with the first three novels, of which I had only the vaguest memories. I started noticing some patterns right off. The Edible Woman (1969) is the story of Marian, who ever since she became engaged to her conventional boyfriend Peter, is able to eat less and less, while she spends more and more time with hapless graduate student Duncan. Tellingly, Peter lives in the model apartment of an unfinished building, signifying perhaps the incomplete and superficial nature of their relationship. 

The most interesting technique to me here is the shifting perspective: not between characters, as Atwood experiments with later, but from first to third and back again. In the first part of the book, Marian speaks confidently enough from the “I” perspective. In the middle of the book, where she becomes Peter’s almost accidental fiancée, she becomes a passive “she,” acting by turns like a future Stepford wife and like a woman on the edge. In the final section, she reclaims her identity by seizing the “I” again, and also by the memorable baking of a woman-shaped cake, which she offers Peter in place of herself. I feel I hardly need to explain, but I will: to me, this scene means that Peter was basically consuming her like food, not engaging (haha) with her as a person, so he might as well eat her in effigy. Whether he understands the significance of the cake or not, Peter freaks out and flees the scene. Duncan, on the other hand, eats some of the cake, and pronounces it delicious. Their future is ambiguous.

The motif of a woman discovering herself between two men recurs in Surfacing and Lady Oracle as well, where the territory gets more exotic: the northern Canadian wilderness of Atwood’s childhood in Surfacing, and a small town in Italy in Lady Oracle. Also, the idea of political unrest, connecting the personal and the political, is introduced. 

In Surfacing (1972), the unnamed protagonist is seeking her father, who’s gone missing, at their summer home in the Canadian wilderness. She gets a ride there with her boyfriend Joe and another couple, Anna and David. She is as ambivalent about Joe as Marian was about Peter. In addition, David treats Anna abusively and tries to sleep with the protagonist. So again, we see a woman between two men, and again, she claims her own identity after a brief bout of mad-looking behavior.

The title refers, I think, mostly to the return of a suppressed or reframed memory: the heroine has referred to an ex and a baby, and implied that the two are together, away from her. In fact, he coerced her into an abortion. During her brief feral episode, she has sex with Joe and plans to raise the eventual baby on her own. The political issue lurking in the background is Quebecois separatism, echoing the woman’s desire for independence. However, by the end, her relationship with Joe, while still unclear, appears more optimistic than that with Duncan at the end of The Edible Woman.

Finally, Lady Oracle is the most enjoyable of the three, for me. Joan Foster is a woman of many identities: formerly obese, now thin; a romance writer using her late aunt’s name to publish -- and now to hide. She’s gotten herself into quite a predicament, between her depressed husband Arthur, and her eccentric lover Chuck, aka The Royal Porcupine, harking back to Peter and Duncan of The Edible Woman, and presaging Nate and Chris of Life Before Man. 

(Please don’t think that Atwood’s love triangles are easy plot devices. Each book is so rich with subplot and backstory, I’m sure theses have been written just about the aunts.)

At any rate, political unrest becomes a device that allows Joan to fake her death -- perhaps as the father in Surfacing may have done? We also have the strongest, so far, story within a story, as Joan’s latest romance novel turns into a way for her multiple selves to meet. This device recurs in The Blind Assassin, and perhaps I’ll rediscover others as I reread.

Again, these are complex novels, and I’m only pointing out some of the more obvious trends. I enjoyed them all more this second time around, with the background of Atwood’s life shedding light here and there. Stay tuned for my take on the painfully autobiographical Life Before Man.