Margaret
Atwood
Early life and education
Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the second of three children
of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy (née Killam),
a former dietician and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia.Because of
her father's research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her
childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec, and travelling back and
forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. She did not attend
school full-time until she was 12 years old. She became a voracious reader
of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Canadian
animal stories, and comic books. She attended Leaside High School in
Leaside, Toronto, and graduated in 1957.Atwood began writing plays and
poems at the age of 6.As a child, she also participated in the Brownie
program of Girl Guides of Canada. Atwood has written about her experiences
in Girl Guides in several of her publications.Atwood realized she wanted
to write professionally when she was 16.In 1957, she began studying at
Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she published poems
and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal, and
participated in the sophomore theatrical tradition of The Bob Comedy
Revue.Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She
graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors
in philosophy and French.In 1961, Atwood began graduate studies at
Radcliffe College of Harvard University, with a Woodrow Wilson
fellowship.She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and
pursued doctoral studies for two years, but did not finish her
dissertation, The English Metaphysical Romance.
Personal Life
Atwood married Jim Polk, an American writer, in 1968, but later divorced
in 1973. She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon
afterward and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, where their
daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born in 1976.The family returned
to Toronto in 1980. Atwood and Gibson were together until September 18,
2019, when Gibson died after suffering from dementia.[18] She wrote about
Gibson in the poem Dearly and in an accompanying essay on grief and poetry
published in The Guardian in 2020.Although she is an accomplished writer,
Atwood claims to be a terrible speller. She also has a sister, Ruth
Atwood, born in 1951, and a brother who is two years older, Harold Leslie
Atwood. Atwood claimed 17th century witchcraft-lynching survivor Mary
Webster to be her ancestor and made Webster the subject of her poem
"Half-Hanged Mary", and dedicated her novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) to
her.
Source
In her early poetry collections, Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game
(1964, revised in 1966), and The Animals in That Country (1968), Atwood
ponders human behaviour, celebrates the natural world, and condemns
materialism. Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent themes in her
novels, all of them centred on women seeking their relationship to the
world and the individuals around them. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; film
1990; opera 2000) is constructed around the written record of a woman
living in sexual slavery in a repressive Christian theocracy of the future
that has seized power in the wake of an ecological upheaval; a TV series
based on the novel premiered in 2017 and was cowritten by Atwood. The
Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin (2000) is an intricately
constructed narrative centring on the memoir of an elderly Canadian woman
ostensibly writing in order to dispel confusion about both her sister’s
suicide and her own role in the posthumous publication of a novel
supposedly written by her sister.
Other novels by Atwood included the surreal The Edible Woman (1969);
Surfacing (1972; film 1981), an exploration of the relationship between
nature and culture that centres on a woman’s return to her childhood home
in the northern wilderness of Quebec; Lady Oracle (1976); Cat’s Eye
(1988); The Robber Bride (1993; television film 2007); and Alias Grace
(1996), a fictionalized account of a real-life Canadian girl who was
convicted of two murders in a sensationalist 1843 trial; a TV miniseries
based on the latter work aired in 2017, written by Atwood and Sarah
Polley. Atwood’s 2005 novel, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and
Odysseus, was inspired by Homer’s Odyssey.
In Oryx and Crake (2003), Atwood described a plague-induced apocalypse in
the near future through the observations and flashbacks of a protagonist
who is possibly the event’s sole survivor. Minor characters from that book
retell the dystopian tale from their perspectives in The Year of the Flood
(2009). MaddAddam (2013), which continues to pluck at the biblical,
eschatological, and anticorporate threads running through the previous
novels, brings the satirical trilogy to a denouement. The novel The Heart
Goes Last (2015), originally published as a serial e-book (2012–13),
imagines a dystopian America in which a couple is compelled to join a
community that functions like a prison. Hag-Seed (2016), a retelling of
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was written for the Hogarth Shakespeare
series. In 2019 The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was
published to critical acclaim and was a cowinner (with Bernardine
Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other) of the Booker Prize.
Atwood also wrote short stories, collected in such volumes as Dancing
Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), Wilderness Tips (1991), Moral
Disorder (2006), and Stone Mattress (2014). Her nonfiction includes
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), which grew out of a
series of lectures she gave at the University of Cambridge; Payback (2008;
film 2012), an impassioned essay that treats debt—both personal and
governmental—as a cultural issue rather than as a political or economic
one; and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), in which
she illuminated her relationship to science fiction. Atwood wrote the
libretto for the opera Pauline, about Canadian Indian poet Pauline
Johnson; it premiered at the York Theatre in Vancouver in 2014.
In addition to writing, Atwood taught English literature at several
Canadian and American universities. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2016
for the spirit of political activism threading her life and works.
Source
Feminism
Atwood's work has been of interest to feminist literary critics, despite
Atwood's unwillingness at times to apply the label feminist to her
works.Starting with the publication of her first novel, The Edible Woman,
Atwood asserted, "I don't consider it feminism; I just consider it social
realism."Despite her rejection of the label at times, critics have
analyzed the sexual politics, use of myth and fairytale, and gendered
relationships in her work through the lens of feminism.She later clarified
her discomfort with the label feminism by stating, "I always want to know
what people mean by that word [feminism]. Some people mean it quite
negatively, other people mean it very positively, some people mean it in a
broad sense, other people mean it in a more specific sense. Therefore, in
order to answer the question, you have to ask the person what they mean."
Speaking to The Guardian, she said "For instance, some feminists have
historically been against lipstick and letting transgender women into
women's washrooms. Those are not positions I have agreed with", a position
she repeated to The Irish Times.[91][92] In an interview with Penguin
Books, Atwood stated that the driving question throughout her writing of
The Handmaid's Tale was "If you were going to shove women back into the
home and deprive them of all of these gains that they thought they had
made, how would you do it?", but related this question to totalitarianism,
not feminism.In January 2018, Atwood penned the op-ed "Am I A Bad
Feminist?" for The Globe and Mail.The piece was in response to social
media backlash related to Atwood's signature on a 2016 petition calling
for an independent investigation into the firing of Steven Galloway, a
former University of British Columbia professor accused of sexual
harassment and assault by a student. While feminist critics denounced
Atwood for her support of Galloway, Atwood asserts that her signature was
in support of due process in the legal system. She has been criticized for
her comments surrounding the #MeToo movement, particularly that it is a
"symptom of a broken legal system."
In 2018, following a partnership between Hulu's adaptation of The
Handmaid's Tale and women's rights organisation Equality Now, Atwood was
honored at their 2018 Make Equality Reality Gala.In her acceptance speech
she said:
"I am, of course, not a real activist—I'm simply a writer
without a job who is frequently asked to speak about subjects that would
get people with jobs fired if they themselves spoke. You, however, at
Equality Now are real activists. I hope people will give Equality Now lots
and lots of money, today, so they can write equal laws, enact equal laws
and see that equal laws are implemented. That way, in time, all girls may
be able to grow up believing that there are no avenues that are closed to
them simply because they are girls."
In 2019, Atwood partnered with
Equality Now for the release of The Testaments.
Animal Rights
Atwood repeatedly makes observations about the relationship of humans to
animals in her works.A large portion of the dystopia Atwood creates in
Oryx and Crake rests upon the genetic modification and alteration of
animals and humans, resulting in hybrids such as pigoons, rakunks,
wolvogs, and Crakers, which function to raise questions on the limits and
ethics of science and technology, as well as questions on what it means to
be human.
In Surfacing, one character remarks about eating animals: "The animals die
that we may live, they are substitute people ... And we eat them, out of
cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting
inside us, granting us life." Some characters in her books link sexual
oppression to meat-eating and consequently give up meat-eating. In The
Edible Woman, Atwood's character Marian identifies with hunted animals and
cries after hearing her fiancé's experience of hunting and eviscerating a
rabbit. Marian stops eating meat but then later returns to it.
In Cat's Eye, the narrator recognizes the similarity between a turkey and
a baby. She looks at "the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless
baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to
me for what it is, a large dead bird." In Atwood's Surfacing, a dead heron
represents purposeless killing and prompts thoughts about other senseless
deaths.Atwood is a pescetarian. In a 2009 interview she stated that
"I shouldn't use the term vegetarian because I'm allowing myself
gastropods, crustaceans and the occasional fish. Nothing with fur or
feathers though".
Source