Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in November 18, 1939 and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec. She has received a B.A. from the University of Ontario as well as an M.A. from Harvard.
"Margaret Atwood is one of the most significant voices in Canadian Literature." (The Reader's Advisor, 1994)
Atwood is a strongly feminist poet and novelist, and these themes appear throughout her works. The Handmaids Tale portrays a "feminist dystopia" much like Puritan America, Life Before Man is a novel featuring a female protagonist who comes face to face with having to reevaluate her life. The Edible Woman "seems to say that a woman is herself likely to become another 'edible' product, marketed for the male appetite that has been created (or, at least, organized) by the media." (Contemporary Literary Criticisms)Her novels and poems often contain cold, analytical criticisms of the relations between men and women. Her writings are very dark, and many times icy, as shown in the following poem.
Right now I am the flower girl.
I bring fresh flowers, dump out the old ones, the greenish water
that smell like dirty teeth
into the bathroom sink, snip off the stem ends
with surgical scissors I borrowed from the nursing station,
put them in a jar
I brought from home, because they don't have vases
in this hotel for the ill,
place them on the table beside my father
where he can't se them
becuase he won't open his eyes.
He lies flattened under the white sheet.
He says he is on a ship,
and I can see it-
the functional white walls, the minimal windows,
the little bells, the rubbery footsteps of strangers,
the whispering all around
of the air-conditioner, or else the ocean,
and he is on a ship;
he's giving us up, giving up everything
but the breath going in
and out of his diminished body;
minute by minute he's sailing slowly away,
away from us and our waving hands
that do not wave.
The women come in, two of them, in blue;
it's no use being kind, in here, if you don't have hands like theirs-
large and capable, the hands
of plump muscular angels,
the ones that blow trumpets and lift swords.
They shift him carefully, tuck in the corners.
It hurts, but as little as possible.
Pain is their lore. The rest of us
are helpless amateurs.
A suffering you can neither cure nor enter-
there are worse things, but not many.
After a while it makes us impatient.
Can't we do anything but feel sorry?
I sit there, watching the flowers in their pickle jar. He is asleep, or not.
I think; He looks like a turtle.
Or: He looks erased.
But somewhere in there, at the far end of the tunnel
of pain and forgetting he's trapped in
is the same father I knew before,
the one who carried the green canoe
over the portage, the painter trailing,
myself with the fishing rods, slipping on the wet boulders and slapping flies.
That was the last time we went there.
There will be a last time for this also,
bringing cut flowers to this white room.
Sooner or later I too
will have to give everything up,
even the sorrow that comes with these flowers,
even the anger,
even the memory of how I brought them
from a garden I will no longer have by then,
and put them beside my dying father,
hoping I could still save him.
The poem, about a dying father, lacks the insight into male/female relations that most of her works contain, but it shows quite well how she gets to the heart of the reader by making her poem so realistic. She doesn't glorify life or death, she allows the reader to feel the sorrow and sense of loss of the flower girl. Her writing is very gripping, and oftentimes, darkly accurate, leaving the reader with a somewhat sick feeling. Even in The Handmaid's Tale, where the ending is a happy one for the character, it definitely does not make you smile.
"Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of
human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For
instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not
accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the
Red Cross donor clinic."
-Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, "Significant Moments in the Life of my Mother" 1987. said of her mother's beliefs.
Atwood, Margaret, The Circle Game, Anansi, 1966.
Atwood, Margaret, The Journals of Susanna Moodie: Poems, OUP, 1970.
Atwood, Margaret, Power Politics, Anansi, 1971.
Atwood, Margaret, Selected Poems 1966-1984, OUP, 1990.
Novels:
Atwood, Margaret, Bodily Harm, Bantam, 1981.
Atwood, Margaret, Cat's Eye, Doubleday, 1988.
Atwood, Margaret, The Edible Woman, Warner Books, 1969.
Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaids Tale, Fawcett, 1986.
Atwood, Margaret, Lady Oracle, Fawcett, 1976.
Atwood, Margaret, Life Before Man, Fawcett, 1979.
Atwood, Margaret, Surfacing, Fawcett, 1972.