Atwood, Margaret Eleanor,--1939---Criticism and interpretation

The well-known Grimms' fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" forms the subtext of two recent literary works, Rosario Ferre's novella "La bella durmiente" (1976) and Margaret Atwood's short story "Bluebeard's Egg" (1983). Both contemporary authors suggest that certain negative aspects inherent in the Sleeping Beauty paradigm should not persist in women's literature, unless the texts lead to transformation and self-realization of the heroines. This study demonstrates how the authors expose the fallacy in the paradigm, depart from it, and refigure it by transforming their heroines into characters quite distinct from the Grimm prototype. This study also suggests that Ferre's and Atwood's works serve as prototypes for feminine texts. As the characters distance themselves from hegemonic patriarchal traditions, each author's work is also removed from the referent of masculine literary traditions and returned to its origins, the oral tale.

The major theme of Margaret Atwood's work is the transcendence of duality. Several critics, led by Cheryl Grace, have emphasized the duality only, yet there are many examples of wholeness in Atwood's early poems and novels as well as in her more recent fiction. The clearest examples of the reconciliation of opposites are in Atwood's late poems. The poetics of the romantics Blake and Coleridge, as discussed by the twentieth-century critics Northrop Frye and I. A. Richards, and underscored by new theories in physics, may be used to clarify how Atwood resolves dualities. The last five poems of "New Poems 1985-1986" from Selected Poems II demonstrate the blending of life/death, God/human, spiritual/material, body/nature, real/imaginary, male/female, subject/object into one through the use of paradox, poetic image, and remaking of myth, techniques of the imagination that Atwood shares with Blake and Coleridge.

The five novels of Margaret Atwood contain a pattern
borrowed from The Aeneid of Virgil, Aeneas , guided by the Cumaean
Sibyl, descends to the underworld to gain knowledge from his
father, then returns to earth, equipped to fulfill his destiny.
Atwood confronts her protagonists with similar tasks.
The presence of an effective guide and of a positive
parental influence contribute to the completion of each quest,
but the prime determiner of success is the nature of the journey
itself. Seen in her early novels as a source of growth and
enlightenment, the journey is a vehicle of personal development
and awakening. In later works, however, it becomes a snare of
delusion which entraps characters in fantasy, cynicism, madness,
despair and even death. Attwod unfolds a darkening vision of
reality by the manipulation of various elements within the frame-work of descent and return.