Escaping the Labyrinth of Deception: A Postcolonial Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels Volume I

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UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES

FACULTE DE PHILOSOPHIE ET LETTRES

SECTION : LANGUES ET LITTERATURES MODERNES

Escaping the Labyrinth of Deception:

A Postcolonial Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels Volume I

Thèse présentée en vue de l’obtention du grade de Docteur en Philosophie et Lettres par Christel Kerskens.

Promoteur : Professeur M. Maufort

ANNEE ACADEMIQUE 2006-2007

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To Pascal.

To my parents and grandparents.

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I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Maufort for his enthusiasm, helpful corrections and constant support.

I would also like to thank Professor Bellarsi for her precious information on ecocriticism, as well as Professor Tabah and Professor Den Tandt for the interesting doctoral seminars on alterity, which I attended with great pleasure.

I also wish to express my gratitude to Professor Delbaere, for introducing me to Canadian Literature and especially to Margaret Atwood’s work during my undergraduate studies at the U.L.B.

My gratitude also goes to the U.L.B.

Centre for Canadian Studies, whose financial help contributed to my research stay in Toronto; to Professor Brydon;

whose friendly welcome and insightful comments on postcolonialism have helped me fulfil this project; to her colleagues and students from the University of Western Ontario, who welcomed me and encouraged me; and to Luba Frastacky and her colleagues from the Fischer Library of Rare Books in Toronto, who kindly assisted me in my research in the Atwood Papers.

Finally, I also wish to thank all my friends, especially Valérie Ledent, Cécile Maertens, and Evelyne Haberfeld, and colleagues, who made suggestions, encouraged me, or showed interest throughout my writing process.

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If you like, you can play games with this game. You can say: the murderer is the writer, the detective is the reader, the victim is the book. Or perhaps, the murderer is the writer, the detective is the critic and the victim is the reader. (…) Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie.

Now: do you believe me?

Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark, 49-50.

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INTRODUCTION:

DECEPTION AS A POSTCOLONIAL STRATEGY IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S NOVELS

A poet, novelist, short-story writer, and author of numerous reviews and critical essays, Margaret Atwood has become one of Canada’s major writers in recent decades. Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood spent her childhood in-between the city and the bush, where her father conducted scientific research. This might account for the deep respect for nature which pervades Atwood’s work. In the 1960s, as an undergraduate student at Victoria College, Toronto, Atwood witnessed a renewed interest in Canadian literature and culture. As a centre for poetry, the University of Toronto, with its major figures, such as Jay Macpherson, Northrop Frye, and E.J. Pratt operated a decisive influence on Atwood’s career. She started writing poems, parodies, and reviews for the college newspaper, while attending and giving readings at the local coffeehouses. She continued her studies at Harvard, devoting her interest to Victorian literature and early American literature. She also worked on a Ph.D. degree, but never completed her dissertation on H. Rider Haggard and the English metaphysical romance.

Atwood’s interest in the English tradition and the gothic romance, a genre she undeniably parodies in her early novel Lady Oracle, possibly derives from this failed academic endeavour. From her early poems and novels, Atwood’s career rapidly evolved towards international recognition in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Her work has become the subject of numerous academic publications and she has won several outstanding awards.

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However, one might wonder what draws so many readers, all over the world, to Atwood’s writings. I personally regard Atwood as an author who situates herself at the crossroad between various traditions: the feminist, the nationalist, the postmodern, and, one might argue, the postcolonial. Atwood’s repeated refusal to be classified as a member of a particular tradition might well be attributed to the fact that she actually draws elements from each of them. Indeed, whereas early novels such as The Edible Woman or Lady Oracle, and most of her poetry collections, among which the famous Power Politics, display overt feminist overtones, other works – Surfacing, to name but one – express Atwood’s defence of Canadian culture and nature. Most critics have offered postmodern readings of Atwood, focusing on her protagonists’ inner contradictions, as well as on her novels’ multiple layers and lack of closure. More recently, however, scholars have devoted their attention to the postcolonial implications of Atwood’s writings: preoccupied both by the situation of Canada as a colony and by women’s empowerment, Atwood often thematically associates these themes. She considers it the writer’s task to defend the colonised country’s cultural tradition.

Likewise, as a female writer, Atwood equally addresses the question of the female condition.

Other postcolonial themes often mentioned in relation to Atwood’s work comprise irony, voice, and marginality. Atwood’s production strikes the reader with a balanced mixture of parody and seriousness. She tackles difficult themes, such as war, often present in her protagonists’ childhood reminiscences, or the power relationships between men and women.

Her writings challenge the conventions of literary genres and social dichotomies, providing a rich intertextual layer of cross-cultural allusions.

In 1994, Atwood, on a lecture tour around the world, for the first time presented the writer as a trickster-figure (Stein, Margaret Atwood Revisited, 6), a character known for its tendency to cross boundaries and defy traditions. Atwood’s fondness for open endings, tricky

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language, dubious characters, and multiple interpretations, should therefore not surprise her readers. Her powerful stories have engaged several debates, demonstrating her concern for current world affairs. Atwood’s fictional universe is a cruel place, inhabited by duplicitous individuals and ordinary monsters. While definitely keeping up with the developments of contemporary society, Atwood continues to fascinate readers all over the world with her wit, her playfulness with language, her exploration of the individual’s dilemma’s and her open, yet somehow deceptive endings.

Deception can be regarded as a labyrinth created by the writer, in which the reader might easily get lost, precisely because of the characters’ multiple personalities and of Atwood’s own metafictional interventions. This study therefore concentrates on the postcolonial concept of hybridity/deception to function as Ariadne’s thread, helping us to escape the labyrinth, or, to a better, new understanding of Atwood’s fiction. I have chosen to rely on the image of the labyrinth because it often recurs in Atwood’s novels. In her first novel, The Edible Woman, Atwood makes use of this motif at significant moments. The heroine, Marian, evokes the labyrinth every time she feels compelled to conform to social norms. She mentions it when she visits her friend Clara – the embodiment of the perfect wife – to describe the hospital corridors (134-135). Further, she alludes to the maze motif when she escapes from Peter’s party, where she had to display the image of the happy bride-to-be (243).

Finally, she utters her distress at being lost in a “labyrinth of words” (140), when she realises that her attitude is determined by other people’s demands. Likewise, in Lady Oracle, the labyrinthine setting becomes a metaphor for the heroine’s inner trouble. In a parody of gothic romance, Atwood narrates how the heroine’s double finds answers to her identity questions at the centre of the labyrinth (341). Surfacing presents the reader with another variation on the labyrinth. This time, Atwood associates the maze with the wilderness (31), a frightening,

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gothic presence, surrounding and gradually suffocating the village. The protagonist experiences her journey in the bush as a labyrinthine way to self-knowledge. While the image disappears from Atwood’s subsequent novels, it significantly resurfaces in her recent Oryx and Crake, to describe the compounds in which Snowman engages on his quest. The research centres resemble huge labyrinths with dead-ends and lethal traps (217). In Atwood’s latest novel, nature is no longer responsible for man’s entrapment. On the contrary, man has become the victim of his own technological development. As I have mentioned, the labyrinth motif pervades Atwood’s fiction in various disguises, endowed with different purposes. Yet, a constant attitude consists in the protagonist’s desire to escape that labyrinth. That obstinate wish for freedom echoes the writer’s attempt to elude any simple interpretation. Atwood often describes escapist protagonists who seek to avoid social constraints, be it by becoming marginal, ex-centric figure. I therefore consider the image of “escaping” the labyrinth as a powerful metaphor for Atwood’s postcolonial message. I intend to demonstrate how the deceptiveness of those characters gradually fades away in the course of the narrative, to reveal a hybrid personality, made of personal expectations and social compromises.

Drawing on postcolonial theory, I shall examine frequently addressed postcolonial themes in order to produce a new understanding of Margaret Atwood’s fiction. In relation to the protagonists’ often noticed deceptiveness, I shall decipher their mimicry strategies, thus examining how their deceptive attitude participates in the colonised subject’s struggle to find his place. I shall also devote particular attention to occurrences of magic realist moments, which, as I shall demonstrate, enable the character to briefly experience the coexistence of two antagonist states of being, a situation which echoes the postcolonial theme of hybridity.

Still regarding “in-betweenness,” I intend to examine the extent to which Atwood’s characters might be regarded as trickster-figures, i.e. messengers who can defy conventions and

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denounce empowerment. Finally, I shall also endeavour to prove that Atwood’s quest novels, which have often been studied in a postmodern light, can be read from a postcolonial point of view if one links the protagonists’ search for self-knowledge with an acknowledgement of hybridity.

Deception is a much more complex phenomenon than is generally thought, one that deserves to be examined in relation with recent developments in literary theory. I contend that Margaret Atwood’s fiction will be understood in a new light through a careful examination of her manipulative patterns of deception. Indeed, whereas deception has often been referred to as a common motif in Atwood’s fiction, it has never so far been the subject of a full-scale analysis throughout the author’s entire fictional output. Nor has it been studied in the light of postcolonial theories. I personally consider the protagonists’ predominant use of deception as a sign of their colonised state. Be it as a Canadian citizen suffering from an inferiority complex, as a writer forced to stick to a precise genre, or as a woman struggling to conform to social requirements, Atwood’s protagonist all undergo a form of disempowerment. I therefore suggest that a postcolonial approach to Atwood’s work might enrich our understanding of the author’s work. Indeed, it will bring to light several characteristics of Atwood’s fiction, which situate her within the current development of postcolonial theory.

In order to establish a frame of analysis, I shall first define the notion of deception, and second, determine which aspects of postmodernism and postcolonialism can be linked to this phenomenon. Once these premises have been established, I shall delineate the relevant aspects which my thesis will explore in depth. My study will involve a close reading of Atwood’s fiction in order to examine the conscious and unconscious modes of deception, the characters’

need to create a false self and to resort to all kinds of disguises, and the postmodern and/or

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postcolonial interpretations which can be attributed to these kinds of behaviour. This study will resort to character analysis, a form of literary criticism best suited to Atwood’s highly developed portrayals. It will also use a combination of close-reading and postcolonial theory, in the hope of achieving a different understanding of Atwood’s work. Indeed, in their focus on hybridity, postcolonial theories offer new light on Atwood’s intricate and contradictory characters. Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch sums up this complexity, linking it to deceptive strategies when he writes:

In recent years the tension between this appearance of being just like someone else and the demands of authenticity has become intolerable (…) In recent Canadian fiction the major writers resolve the paradox (…) they uninvent the world. The most conspicuous example is the novel Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood. (…) The heroine must remove the false names that adhere to her experience. (…) The terror resides not in her going insane, but in her going sane. (…) The truth is disguised, hidden.

(…) But underneath this layering, this concealing, is a woman that still recognizes that something doesn’t fit. (Kroetsch 394-395)

Kroetsch concludes his analysis of Surfacing in stating that the heroine “has reached a state wherein she might…give birth to her true identity” (Kroetsch 395). The presence of the modal

“might” leaves the ending of the novel open, as is often the case in postmodern fiction.

Further, it implies that the heroine will not necessarily find a compromise between her hybrid self and that requested by patriarchal society. In postcolonial terms, she may as well remain

“the Other”, with an awareness of her difference. This study takes into account several postcolonial notions such as mimicry, ambivalence, disavowal, subversion and hybridity, while siting the female body as an equivalent of the deceptive, trickster-like postcolonial

“Other.”

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This postcolonial view of Atwood’s work concurs with earlier critical considerations which generally identify Atwood as a feminist or typically Canadian writer. First, the female condition in a patriarchal society is here regarded as strongly similar to that of the colonised subject. Second, as a Canadian writer, albeit of European decent, Atwood has nevertheless been confronted to and influenced by the rising Canadian postcolonial awareness. Therefore, a postcolonial reading of Atwood’s work should not be considered a break away from critical tradition, but a logical expansion of earlier critical approaches to the writer’s production.

When one considers the whole of Atwood’s novelistic production, one immediately notices the discrepancies between her early novels and her recent, far more complex works.

Whereas Lady Oracle, for instance, reads as a highly comical and inspired comedy of manners, other works, such as Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the recent Oryx and Crake display innumerable layers of possible interpretations. However, all the novels studied in this work, present marked similarities: all their protagonists are liars; they engage on a journey for self-knowledge; they suffer from their “otherness,” or resent society’s normative tendencies. One might regard Atwood’s work as a constant reformulation of these themes.

Yet, as the writer grows in maturity, her work equally evolves towards a more complex rendition of these topics. The simple lies performed by Atwood’s early heroine’s to maintain a semblance of freedom give way to intricate, dark figures – such as Zenia, Cordelia, and Crake –, trickster narrators (Iris Chase), or multiples personalities (Grace Marks). A simple, cyclical, and open-ended quest pattern as in Surfacing develops into an intricate maze of intertwined quest journey. Atwood repeats and multiplies the pattern at will: a double quest in Cat’s Eye, a triple in The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin. Nevertheless, the outcome of the quest evolves too: Atwood’s early heroine’s Marian, the “Surfacer,” Joan, Lesje, Rennie, and even the “Handmaid” do not present the reader with a definite answer as to the result of their inner

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journey. Later novels, such as Alias Grace, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and finally Oryx and Crake, though remaining open-ended, offer a more positive and more definite outcome, which I choose to interpret as an acknowledgement of their hybridity. Moreover, the reader shall discover how Atwood’s tricksters also develop from sometimes caricatural secondary characters, into powerful, multi-layered individuals.

1. Atwoodian Criticism, with a Special Focus on Deception

Due to the large amount of books and articles devoted to Margaret Atwood’s production since the beginning of her career, it would be impossible to offer an exhaustive account of Atwoodian criticism. Rather, I shall focus on some major trends, which have enriched my own perception of Atwood’s work. In order to clarify this large number of influential secondary sources, they will here be subdivided into categories: general collections of essays, feminist criticism, psychological and narrative studies. Finally, I shall examine works offering a postcolonial approach to Atwood’s work: first, a series of books and articles which directly address the theme of deception in a broad sense (masks, disguises, deceptive characters and author, dubious language, false selves, etc.), and second, those which opt for a specific postcolonial reading of Atwood’s work.

To begin with, the seminal collection of essays The Art of Margaret Atwood, published by Arnold and Cathy Davidson’s in 1981 contains Annis Pratt’s considerations on Surfacing as an example of a rebirth journey and of a transformation novel, an aspect which I associate to the heroine’s trickster-like qualities. Further, Atwood scholars will find a detailed account of the critical work on Atwood published between 1962 and 1988 in McCombs’s 1991 Margaret Atwood. A Reference Guide. Finally, Karen F. Stein’s monograph, entitled

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Margaret Atwood Revisited (1999) offers the reader a comprehensive scope of Atwoodian criticism up to its recent developments.

The feminist approaches to Atwood’s work have been numerous from the beginning of her career. Only the most prominent ones will be mentioned here, such as Frank Davey’s 1984 study of Atwood’s work, Margaret Atwood. A Feminist Poetics. This book clearly opts for a postmodern orientation, dealing with gender politics. This critical approach is interesting for this study because it largely refers to the mask motif and to the theme of concealment, which are both closely related to the deception phenomenon. Moreover, concerning Atwood’s heroines in her early novels, Davey writes: “All four comic protagonists are liars. They tell lies in their professional work, they lie and fantasize as narrators of the novels, they fictionalize (...) their own lives to themselves” (Davey 65-66). Margaret Atwood’s Power, published by Shannon Hengen in 1993, presents us with a daring feminist approach to Atwood’s work and examines power relationships in her novels. Its attention to mirror images in Atwood’s work is of great interest: given the heroines’ fragmented self, some of those reflections will probably be highly deceptive. In the same year, Bouson-Brooks focuses on the various aspects of Atwood’s rejection of patriarchy, in a collection entitled Brutal Choreographies. The theme of resistance to patriarchal values is interesting from a postcolonial point of view, because it is similar to the colonised subject’s resistance to the dominant culture. The same can be said concerning Eleonora Rao’s book, Strategies for Identity, which deals with generic boundaries, identity, interpretations of reality, and deception (in Bodily Harm and The Edible Woman). Still in the feminist trend, Coral Ann Howells’s book Margaret Atwood, in the “Modern Novelists Series,” is important as a whole because it adopts a feminist reading without oversimplifying Atwood’s work, i.e. without reducing it to a mere gender war. Moreover, it studies both early and later works, offering a

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detailed and yet very clear view of Atwood’s multiplicity, while demonstrating that feminist criticism is not necessarily limited to Atwood’s early work.

Other critics focus on the psychological interpretation of Atwood’s fiction. The earliest complete psychological study of Atwood is Sherrill Grace’s Violent Duality, published in 1980, of interest for this study because of its numerous references to the heroines’ duplicity, to the dubious aspect of language in her work and to Atwood’s frequent use of parody, satire and irony. The latter can undoubtedly be regarded as a part of the mimicry process in which Atwoodian heroines are involved. More recently, Sonia Mycak’s study, entitled In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood offers a useful reading of Atwood in terms of Lacanian theory and the mimetic construction of reality. Yet, it fails to include Surfacing and The Handmaid’s Tale.

However, I contend that considering Atwood’s work through the lens of deception will enable me to include the whole of her novelistic fiction.

Another critical option consists in analysing Margaret Atwood’s production in terms of narrative techniques. In 1983, Sherrill Grace and Lorraine Weir edited a collection of critical essays, Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System, of which the aim was to discover a typical Atwoodian narrative system. Among those contributions, Hutcheon examines the link between, on the one hand, the narrative structures of Atwood’s novels and, on the other hand, the dichotomy between active and passive behaviour on the part of the characters and readers. Another groundbreaking analysis of Atwood’s narrative technique is Hilde Staels’s Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse, which proves to be both postmodern in its interest for the characters’ multiplicity and postcolonial in its concern for irony and borderline situations, and will therefore influence this thesis.

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First, I wish to examine studies deeply with deception in a broad sense. In Beatrice Mendez-Egle’s Margaret Atwood. Reflection and Reality (1986), three articles can be related to this postcolonial study: first, Kathryn Van Spanckeren’s analysis of the role of magic in the heroines’ transformation in three of Margaret Atwood’s early novels, because the transformation theme relates to the trickster-motif; second, Susan Jaret McKinstry’s exploration of Joan Foster’s fictional selves in Lady Oracle, because this character features a whole range of deceptive alter-egos; and finally, Charlotte Walker Mendez’s study of the deceptive aspect of language in Surfacing, interesting for its metafictional content: indeed, one important theme in Surfacing is the unreliability of language, denounced through the narrator’s lack of clarity and through the secondary characters’ frequent language games.

Deception being often transmitted through language, this aspect will be carefully examined.

VanSpanckeren and Castro’s book, Margaret Atwood. Vision and Forms (1988) features several insightful articles, among which Arnold E. Davidson’s contribution on history in The Handmaid’s Tale, which supports my examination of metafiction as one of the author’s deceptive devices. Within Judith McCombs’s collection entitled Critical essays on Margaret Atwood (1988), several articles and reviews mention Atwood’s use of parody and irony. One might for instance consult Susan J. Rosowski’s “Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Fantasy and the Modern Gothic Novel” (McCombs, 197-207), which reads the novel’s gothic parody as a reversion of the traditional gothic romance. It situates the gothic “terror” in the heroine’s gradual compliance with our “social mythology” (McCombs, 13). Further, Lucy M. Freibert’s essay on “The Politics of Risks” in The Handmaid’s Tale reads the book as a multi-layered satire that deconstructs Western male dominance (McCombs, 280-292). In addition, some other articles – Josie P. Campbell’s, T.D. MacLulich’s, and Jane Lilienfeld’s – comment on mythical transformations.

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Among the critics sustaining a postcolonial analysis of Atwood, Colin Nicholson’s Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, published in 1994, deserves special notice: for the first time, a collection includes essays which explicitly offer postcolonial readings of Atwood’s work. Several examples should be mentioned: Nicholson’s study of postcolonial subjectivity in Atwood’s early poetry, which addresses themes such as ethnicity and the opposition between political subordination and cultural survival; or McCombs’s analysis of the theme of metamorphoses in The Circle Game. The collection further features Rao’s essay on irony and contradictions in Lady Oracle and Evans’s comment on the different versions of history in The Handmaid’s Tale, which should be related to historiographic metafiction. In the same trend, Lorraine York’s collection of critical essays, Various Atwoods, contains Diana Brydon’s brilliant postcolonial reading of Bodily Harm, which focuses on the protagonist’s role as a tourist and on the parallel drawn between the Canadian situation and the situation of the Caribbean islands which serve as a background to the novel. In the same collection, Shannon Hengen’s analysis of Zenia’s foreignness in The Robber Bride hints at the ethnic undertones of the novel. Wilson, Friedman and Hengen’s pedagogical approach to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and other works shows some common points with this study. Indeed, they deal with Atwood’s role as trickster, with her use of intertextuality, and with possible psychoanalytical or postcolonial readings of her work. Yet, their approach remains limited to a few novels, while this study intends to use deception as a pervasive feature, present in all of Atwood’s novels. Reingard Nischik’s recent book, Margaret Atwood. Works and Impact contains several essays which also use this new way of reading Atwood’s work, with peculiar attention to gender transgression (Coral Ann Howells), narrative games (Barbara Rigney Hill), intertext (Sharon R. Wilson), and reality reconstructions (Klaus Peter Müller).

Howells’s article deals with the way in which Atwood continuously experiments with gender

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boundaries and their ideological significance. Focusing on The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, and Alias Grace, Howells shows how Atwood succeeds in recreating various genres by means of duplicitous narrators, constantly challenging notions such as femininity, identity, and gender. Barbara Rigney-Hill’s “Alias Atwood: Narrative Games and Gender Politics,” addresses the latter theme, showing the complexity of Atwood’s construction of the female character. She examines how language and narration determine female stereotypes and how Atwood manages to move beyond those. Klaus Peter Müller’s article deals with language and postcolonialism. He provides an approach to Atwood’s work which focuses on the writer’s methodology and on notions such as truth and reality. Sharon R.

Wilson studies the mythic intertext in Atwood’s work, analysing mythological structures in The Robber Bride and Alias Grace.

Recently, several articles devoted to the postcolonial aspects of Margaret Atwood’s work have been published, of which three deserve particular attention. The first is Carol Beran’s “The Canadian Mosaic: Functional Ethnicity in Margaret Atwood's Life before Man,”

which claims that a reading in terms of the characters’ ethnicity provides new insights into the interpretation of the novel. Providing a close reading of the novel, Beran highlights significant moments which identify the three protagonists as the embodiment of the “Other”, the alienated individual. She further proves Atwood’s deliberate choice of expressing her characters’ ethnicity, giving details on the novel’s manuscripts and on the writer’s preliminary documentation.

Hilde Staels’s “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through Narrating” further focuses on the heroine’s re-telling of her story as a form of resistance to patriarchal values and on the irony of the ‘Historical Notes’. This study seeks to reinterpret

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the novel in the light of Hutcheon’ s theory of historiographic metafiction, which gives a very important role to deceptive discourses of both the heroine and the Gileadean regime.

The third article, Margaret Rogerson’s “Reading the Patchworks in Alias Grace,”

examines the value of the novel’s quilt metaphor as an expression of the heroine’s denied voice, which reminds us of the question inherent in postcolonial theory: “can the subaltern speak?” In this novel, Grace’s expression takes place within a maze of deception and secrets.

Grace’s hybridity might well function as Ariadne’s thread, showing her the way out of this labyrinth of lies.

Sharon R. Wilson’s Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations, the latest book to date about Margaret Atwood’s work (2003) will be used as a reference in this study because it offers the latest analysis of the trickster motif in her output. The collection comprises, among other articles, Reingard M. Nischik’s examination of intertextual and parodic elements in Murder in the Dark. Nischik chooses to analyse some of Atwood’s cartoons, focusing on the theme of “size.” She then studies the mechanics of satire and parody in terms of inversion of conventional thought-patterns. Sharon R. Wilson offers a detailed analysis of the postmodern and postcolonial aspects of Good Bones, including her insights into the trickster and survival motifs. Wilson contends that Atwood uses goddess and trickster motifs in a consistent way throughout her career, i.e. the Snake goddess or the Medusa, for instance. In a second, equally interesting essay on Alias Grace, Wilson provides her interpretation of the novel’s quilting metaphor. She argues that it is a feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial novel. She examines the readers’ involvement in the construction of the narrative. Moreover, she produces details which illustrate Atwood’s concern for class and genre. Mary Kirtz examines the link between Cat’s Eye and Atwood’s comments on postcolonial Canadian identity. She also deals with

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Atwood’s reflections on the myth of the malevolent north (the Clarendon lectures) as a key to the interpretation of Cat’s Eye. Coral Ann Howells provides us with a postcolonial reading of The Robber Bride. She situates the novel within Atwood’s constant search for a “Canadian identity.” Kathryn VanSpanckeren studies the trickster motif in Atwood’s recent poetry. She examines the theme of death in Atwood’s recent Morning in the Burned House. Finally, Karen Stein offers us a Gothic reading of The Blind Assassin, based on the central theme of hiding and revealing. Stein explains how the narrator Iris Chase manages to resist gothic codes and to escape passivity.

As can easily be concluded, each of these articles develops points which will be further explored in my project. Yet, my perspective differs in its examination of both Atwood’s earlier and later production. I shall draw conclusions on the theme of deception based on a series of significant case studies, spanning Atwood’s entire career.

2. Deception: A Theoretical Framework

2.1. Historical and Cultural Background

In order to establish a theoretical model for the study of deception in a literary context, this work will first examine some general definitions of deception, the way in which it is perceived in society and its cultural connotations. Dariusz Galasinski’s The Language of Deception (2000) provides interesting insights into the subject of deception. The author first underlines the fact that deception is part of human communication and defines it as “a type of manipulation (…) of truth and falsity utterances” (Galasinski ix). Yet, he admits that defining

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deception has always been a problematic issue. Galasinski regards deception as intentional.

He defines a lie as an intentionally misleading statement. Yet, many utterances may be deceptive, without the intervention of the criterion of truth or falsity. When deception takes the form of omission, for instance, the deceiver does not say anything, but nevertheless produces effective deceptive communication. Therefore, a more accurate definition of deception is that based on the notion of false belief. Deception then takes place when the speaker produces a message which intends to create a false belief. Galasinski’s definition of deception reads as follows: “a communicative act that is intended to induce in the addressee a particular belief by manipulating the truth and falsity of the information” (Galasinski 20).

While this definition of deception remains neutral, the most popular definition of this phenomenon usually involves a series of negative connotations, such as an intentionally dishonest purpose.¹ However, an analysis of deceptive behaviour in a literary context should remain free of any pejorative judgement. Deception will here be analysed from a psychological, social and literary point of view, not from an ethical point of view.

Writers often present us with characters who have always lived surrounded by lies, because truth was simply too hard to bear for them. In the course of the story, these characters often start out on a painful though fulfilling quest for truth. This quest constitutes the subject of many a novel and has been examined by numerous philosophers, among whom the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics, who says that what is convincing though impossible in the drama must always be preferred to what is possible but unconvincing (Campbell 71).

Lying may thus be allowed, and even recommended, in literary creation. Modern writing has

1 For a more common definition of deception, I turned to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, which produces the following definitions : “Deception: the act of deceiving; something that deceives, a trick.”

“To deceive: to cause (someone) to accept as true or good what is false or bad, usu. for a dishonest purpose”

(Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 265).

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often chosen to support this idea, though it has also learned to play with the notion of truth in a more subtle way. As mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers puts it: “Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself” (Campbell 71). Moreover, French philosopher Descartes considered that “Truth is obtained at the cost of a sacrifice. (…) The search for Truth is a lonely enterprise, a solitary mission. It requires the exclusion of possibilities, because the more possibilities there are, the less truth there is. Falsehood, error, uncertainty, arise because the will is free” (Campbell 97), which implies that the notion of truth and deception is relevant in a study dealing with quest novels, to which Atwood’s undeniably belong.

Jeremy Campbell’s book The Liar’s Tale offers interesting insights into the history of falsehood and into the significance of deception from a philosophical, psychological and literary point of view. In his introduction, Campbell states the importance of deception in psychoanalysis as follows: “Psychoanalysis was based on the idea that falsehood and illusion are useful clues to understanding the mystery of human personality. Freud took with (…) a pinch of salt what his patients told him under the heading of unvarnished fact, but he held the view that lies are often more informative than literal truths. In an odd way, they are privileged information” (Campbell 13). Hence the interest of a study of deception in character analysis.

Indeed, if falsehood and illusion are thought to reveal a lot about someone’s personality, it justifies the critic’s interest for such a behaviour among literary characters.

Further, Campbell assesses the value of deception in a very similar way to that adopted in this work. He defines the theme of his book as such: “for better or worse, lying, untruth, is not an artificial, deviant, or dispensable feature of life. Nature engages in it,

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sometimes with remarkable ingenuity (…) life may be understood truthfully only in aesthetic terms” (Campbell 14-15). Campbell thus regards deception as an everyday phenomenon. He also stresses the fact that deception has not always suffered the bad repute which it enjoys today and takes as an example Homer’s Odysseus, who uses many tricks and ruses in order to defy death and fate. Campbell concludes on the Greek hero’s use of lies and disguises as follows: “Lying suggests the liar has a superior intelligence, is a practical and ingenious person, creating alternative versions of reality, as the poets do” (Campbell 44), confirming the positive connotations of deception in Ancient Greece. Such positive interpretations should be kept in mind when studying deception in relation to Atwood’s heroines, especially when those make use of tricks, lies and disguises in order to insure their survival. Indeed, this illustrates the concept of µητις, a well-known notion in Ancient Greek philosophy, which stands for the Greek hero’s ability to use deception and cunning in order to survive. Reading Campbell’s description of the concept, i.e. “the type of intelligence that is cunning and devious and shrewd, that is adapted to the perilous jockeying for success in a highly competitive society, using wiles and ruses when sheer brute force is on the other side” (Campbell 53), and further:

“Metis connotes flair, wisdom, subtlety, deception, resourcefulness, opportunism. (…) The point is to be effective, and untruth can be of great assistance in this task, as also can magic, hallucinogenics, frauds, feints, and illusions” (Campbell 53), one cannot help noticing the similarities between the Greek hero’s behaviour and that of a trickster and of a twentieth- century hero or heroine. Indeed, many of those have to resort to a series of deceptive tricks in order to survive in a society in which they feel alienated. This comparison leads us to another aspect of this study: regarding deception as a form of mimicry, i.e. as a subversive strategy in a postcolonial context. This is the case, when, for instance, a character indulges in disguise or concealment of his difference in order to fit in colonial or patriarchal society. Campbell equally alludes to the hardships of social life and the necessity of deception when he writes:

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“the petty falsehoods people tell themselves and others every day fulfil a more mundane purpose: to provide a buffer against the cruelties of existence which arise in even the most democratic and enlightened societies” (Campbell 186). This study will thus subsequently analyse the characters’ deceptive attitude towards society, and in some cases the manipulation inherent in society itself. Yet there is more to the Greek concept of µητις , as Campbell further mentions: “Most important, Odysseus is a master of tricky language, like Hermes the trickster god linked to deceitful communication. He is an expert in the use of words to veil, inveigle, and test. His disguises are accomplished, not only with costumes, but with language;

he weaves fictional biographies of himself as a protective maneuver” (Campbell 45). These fictional biographies, invented by protagonists to protect themselves, are a trope in twentieth- century fiction. Postmodern theory addresses the characters’ conscious use of language and the author’s metafictional interventions. Moreover, we must not forget that deception, as Margaret Atwood skilfully intimates in this work’s motto, has always been part of literary production. As Campbell explains:

In the modernist novel, lies and liars proliferate, reflecting a deep suspicion of the value of truth in its literal, public form. Obscurity becomes a trademark of modernist writing, a device that obliterates the easy attunement between the mind of the author and that of the reader and renders suspect the notion that truth is single or simple, that it can be communicated at all through the suspect vehicle of language, or even that it is desirable to do so (Campbell 13).

However, my study would rather link this notion to the postmodern idea that there is not one single truth but many. Indeed, postmodern theory claims that there is not only one Truth, but a multiplicity of voices and points of view which account for an equally multiple conception of truth.

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When examining deception from a psychoanalytical point of view, the most obvious instance that comes to mind is the false-self system as described by psychoanalyst Ronald D.

Laing in the 1960’s. In his book, The Divided Self, Laing claims that when faced with a society in which he feels estranged, the individual’s only sane response is madness and the creation of a false-self which aims at making normal life possible. A similar idea occurs in social scientist Ervin Goffman’s theory that “in social situations the individual is a performer, an actor playing a role in which he or she may or may not believe. The very word ‘person’

once meant a mask” (Campbell 265). Deception appears once again as a common phenomenon. For the literary critic, it will be interesting to wonder how much the character indulges into the creation of a false self, to notice all the different disguises, masks or false identities he resorts to, and to pay special attention to the description of the character’s dreams as revelations of his inner truths. Indeed, the part played by the unconscious in these kinds of deception is most important, and though we cannot pretend that we know the inner thoughts of a fictitious character, we can significantly study the way in which the author chooses to give us hints about the character’s inner life, through descriptions of his or her thoughts and behaviour. Earlier in the history of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud identified a series of deceptive kinds of behaviour which enable the unconscious to express itself. Among those, the types of behaviour which we immediately regard as deceptive are lying, wearing disguises or using false names or identities. Yet, other kinds of behaviour may also prove to play a part in the deceptive process, in as much as they reveal the fact that deception has taken place:

dreams, for instance, often express inner feelings which must remain hidden, as do slips of the tongue, errors, or bungled actions. Lapses of memory too can mean that the person has invented a different, socially more acceptable version of his/her life.

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Moreover, Freud’s theories are not the only ones which can help us understanding a literary character. Jung, in his analysis of the trickster figure, offers us interesting insight into the phenomenon of deception, as will be explained in a following section. Later, Jacques Lacan equally professed the dubious value of truth in the treatment of the disordered psyche.

As Campbell states, Lacan “insists that truth discloses itself, not in plain propositions, but in lies, mistakes, trickery, and tall stories” (Campbell 200). As far as the trickster character is concerned, it has been associated with Lacan’s mirror stage, which recalls Mycak’s analysis of Atwood’s work in Lacanian terms.

Finally, this section on the cultural value of deception can be concluded by examining Atwood’s own comment on the subject and interest in deceptive games. Indeed, Atwood has expressed her opinions on the subject of deception, and she sometimes plays games with her readers which make her resemble a trickster figure.

In the passage from Murder in the Dark which has been chosen as a motto for this study, Atwood concludes her description of the game which gives its title to the volume as follows: “Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie” (Atwood, Murder in the Dark 49-50). In that short prose piece, Atwood attributes the murderer’s role to the writer and thus highlights the writer’s tendency to tell lies. The quotation can be interpreted as Atwood’s acknowledgement of her own trickster-like qualities. Indeed, this aspect of her literary personality is often reflected on by critics, who have called her a gorgon or a magician in turns, often highlighting the trickery aspect of Atwood’s plots.

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The following quote is another significant example of Atwood’s deceptive nature.

Answering Geoff Handcock’s question on the truth-value of interviews, Atwood says that she regards interviews as an art in themselves. She calls them fictitious and fictional. She then adds that writers sometimes make up answers and emphasises the unreliability of memory.

Indeed, she says: “Any memory you have of writing is just that, a memory. Like all memories, it’s usually a revision, not the unadulterated experience itself” (Handcock 113- 144). This quote is particularly relevant if we consider it in the light of historiographic metafiction. Indeed, Atwood’s novels can be regarded as her way of making the readers aware of a different aspect of reality.

In the interview with Handcock, Atwood goes even further, stating that writers frequently conceal things to preserve their privacy, to keep their trade secrets or to fit literary theories. Indeed, from what we read in Atwood’s numerous interviews, this can be interpreted as the echo of Atwood’s vision of deception as being part of the writer’s work. Atwood’s comments on writing in Negotiating with the Dead, her recent non-fiction book, reinforce this idea. She discloses an episode from her childhood: “Around the age of seven I wrote a play.

The protagonist was a giant; the theme was crime and punishment; the crime was lying, as befits a future novelist” (Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead 9). Such a comment from a writer who is already well-known for playing tricks on her readers emphasises the deliberate quality of Atwood’s deception.

I would even go further in emphasising Atwood’s own hybrid nature, which she presents as characteristic of her role as a writer. In Negotiating with the Dead, she writes:

“Who was I then? My evil twin or slippery double, perhaps. I am after all a writer, so it would follow as the day the night that I must have a slippery double (…) this other person – the one

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credited with authorship – is certainly not me. (…) I was endowed at birth with a double identity” (Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead 36). Atwood’s description of her own double nature reminds us of her heroines’ struggle with identity, which often causes them to act deceptively. This double nature should therefore be regarded as a significant element in Atwood’s characterisation and as a relevant sign of the heroine’s hybrid nature. These quotations clearly demonstrate Atwood’s concern for deception, her belief that it is intrinsically linked to her being a writer, and her acknowledgement that she would quite readily deceive us as readers.

2.2. Significant Postmodern Aspects of Deception

2.2.1. Historiographic Metafiction or Variations on the Concept of Truth(s)

This analysis of deception in Atwood’s work relies on Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern concept of the historiographic metafiction for several reasons. First of all, because this novelistic form is particularly likely to present deceptive authorial intervention. Moreover, as a Canadian, Hutcheon has logically devoted much of her attention to Canadian writers, and has applied her theories to Margaret Atwood’s writings (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 138-159). In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon describes historiographic metafiction as follows: “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensively self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 5). This very concept aptly describes one of Atwood’s most popular novels, i.e. Alias Grace, which is based on a true story and contains numerous references to historical facts and documents, while presenting these in quite a singular way.

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Hutcheon distinguishes several typical traits of historiographic metafiction. First of all, historiographic metafiction is obsessed with “the linking of ‘fictitious’ to ‘mendacious’ stories (or histories)” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 108): fact and fiction are often intertwined. Second, it shows a typical postmodern interest for the multiplicity of truth: truth is a very relative concept, which largely depends on place and culture; it is therefore diverse and elusive (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 108). Historiographic metafiction consequently “plays upon the truth and lies of the historical record” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 114). This implies that the author of a historiographic metafictional novel deliberately falsifies or omits some historical facts in order to compensate for historical forgetfulness or errors. Historical facts are incorporated, but not necessarily assimilated.

Rather, they appear as seen through the lens of parody or irony, which Hutcheon identifies in The Canadian Postmodern as forms of “formal and ideological critique in feminism and Canadian fiction alike” (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 7). Hutcheon significantly chooses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a typical example of parody. Umberto Eco expresses the same idea : “The postmodern reply to the modern consists in recognising that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, (…) must be revisited, but with irony, not innocently” (quoted in : Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 90). Moreover, parody functions as an important element of postcolonial writing as well. In my analysis, I shall therefore devote much attention to the study of the intertextuality which characterises many of Atwood’s works. Third, historiographic metafiction confronts the literary to the historical, featuring the encounter of fictitious and historical characters or resorting to intertextuality (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 108), which enables the writer to rewrite the past in a new context (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 118). The idea particularly fits my postcolonial claim, since this rewriting can be regarded as a way of giving the colonised subject his own voice, enabling him to give

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his own version of the facts. Fourth, historiographic metafiction “espouses a postmodern ideology of plurality and recognition of difference” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 114). In this, it echoes the postcolonial concern for the ex-centric position of the “Other”.

Indeed, as Hutcheon states, postmodern narratives often equally adhere “not to what fits the master narrative, but instead, to the ex—centric, the marginal, the borderline – all those things that threaten the (illusory but comforting) security of the centered, totalizing, masterly discourses of our culture” (Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism 86). As far as narrative techniques are concerned, Hutcheon distinguishes two modes of narration which characterise historiographic metafiction, i.e. either multiple points of view or an overtly controlling narrator who, nevertheless, lacks any clear vision of the past (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 117). Indeed, these novels often feature an obvious instability of point of view, because of a deliberately manipulative, deceptive narrator or a story narrated by multiple voices (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 160). Finally, historiographic metafiction shows “overt (and political) concern for its reception, for its reader” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 115), an interest which may be rooted in its desire to make readers aware of the existence of received versions of historical facts.

The relation of historiographic metafiction to the notion of multiple truth is of primary interest because the multifaceted postmodern conception of truth enables the writer to introduce the Other’s version of truth as a valid alternative to the coloniser’s view. Indeed, those in power generally dismiss the Other’s view of history.

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2.2.2. Atwood’s Metafictional Manipulation

To Linda Hutcheon, metafiction is characterised by its “subversion of the stability of point of view” (Hutcheon, “Subject in/of/to History and His Story” 80). She further links this subversion to the disintegration of patriarchal hierarchies (Hutcheon, “Subject in/of/to History and His Story” 83), an aspect which makes the notion interesting in this postcolonial-oriented analysis.

In the chapter entitled “Process, Product, and Politics: The Postmodernism of Margaret Atwood,” Linda Hutcheon, in The Canadian Postmodern, focuses on postmodern aspects of Atwood’s early production. In Atwood’s work, Hutcheon situates the postmodern paradox in the vision of art as, on the one hand, a dynamic creative process, and, on the other hand, a static product (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 138). Hutcheon then produces an analysis of Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, which illustrates this aspect, i.e. she offers a metafictional reading of the novel, which she sums up by drawing a parallel between the tensions between mind and body in The Edible Woman and the postmodern contradictions between the written product and the act of writing (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 143). Concerning Surfacing, Hutcheon emphasises the “illusionist’s ability” of language to indicate process within product, which she exemplifies by means of the novel’s title, with its dynamic present-participle. Atwood’s next novel, Lady Oracle, epitomises the concept of self-reflexive metafiction. Indeed, if we consider the novel as self-parodic, we can regard Joan Foster’s multiple identities as an ironic inversion of Surfacing’s nameless narrator and the Royal Porcupine’s liking for dead animals as a parody of the chapter on animals in Survival (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 145). All the same, in Life Before Man, which, at first reading, seems to be a realistic novel, metafictional comment is introduced in Lesje’s desire to

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be pregnant, which parallels the dynamic creative process of writing (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 148). Hutcheon concludes her analysis of Atwood’s early novels by stressing the imaginative quality of her characters (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 152), a necessary quality to become an effective deceiver. The characters’ various versions of reality and their role in a postcolonial interpretation of Margaret Atwood’s fiction will thus constitute the main concern of this study.

Beside establishing the metafictional quality of Atwood’s work, my study also closely links the notion of fantasy to the idea of deception. Still following Hutcheon’s thought, the reader must keep in mind that fantasy, a necessary quality to being an effective deceiver, involves responsibility for what has been created. This awareness of responsibility can then be interpreted as an important step in the Other’s discovery of his own voice.

As to the link between metafiction and deception, it will be established by focusing on three aspects of Atwood’s metafiction : first, Atwood’s comments on or hints at the narrator’s unreliability, second, Atwood’s sequences on the nature of the writing process, which often draw our attention to the fictional and/or tricky aspect of fiction, and third, Atwood’s parodic intent, aiming at illustrating her function as a writer, which involves creating a world that appears realistic, and yet, functions as a fictional product.

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2.3. Deception as a Postcolonial Process

2.3.1. Deception as Mimicry

One cannot deny the feminist overtones of Atwood’s novels, which often present us with a heroine’s process of individuation, or, in other words, with her quest for selfhood. These novels logically allude to patriarchal domination and social oppression. My point here is to establish a parallel between feminism and postcolonialism and to examine Atwood’s work on these premises, as well as in the light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Indeed, both patriarchy and colonialism can be regarded as the exertion of power, of domination imposed on subjects who are then regarded as subordinate. Patriarchal society imposes on women the same submissive role as that inflicted by colonisers on colonised subjects. Therefore, the parallel between feminism and postcolonialism will be emphasised, considering them ways of opposing similar kinds of dominant behaviour, as is stated in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (101). Since Atwood has often been regarded as a

“feminist” writer, this study will demonstrate that the feminist overtones in her work function as a metaphor for the Canadian subject’s subaltern position.

Further drawing on postcolonialism, this study will show that deception can be regarded as a form of mimicry. Indeed, the concept of mimicry is based on the colonised subject’s ambivalent attempt at resembling the coloniser, without ever succeeding to do so.

Adopting colonial cultural values then results in a mere reproduction, which proves deceptive and dangerous because of its lack of a core (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies 139): the colonised subject cannot exist as a copy of the coloniser. The female character in Atwood’s fiction remains equally trapped in an ambivalent position: in

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order to find her place in patriarchal society, she resorts to several modes of deception to produce a copy of what society wishes her to be. The failure of this kind of socially induced behaviour then leads to her introspective quest towards her hybrid self, which she must eventually acknowledge as the only viable version of herself.

Homi K. Bhabha’s refers to Lacan when he defines mimicry as a form of camouflage (Bhabha 90), which can be regarded as a deceptive strategy. Bhabha symptomatically mentions ‘camouflage’, a word which Atwood often uses in her descriptions of deceptive characters. Moreover, by referring to Lacan, Bhabha clearly emphasises the link between his theory and psychoanalysis. Like Bhabha, my notion of mimicry clearly involves a deceptive aspect, which basically requires from a colonial subject that he/she resemble someone he/she is not and will never be. This notion is based on a paradox, for, as Jenny Sharpe puts it: “The mimic man is a contradictory figure who simultaneously reinforces colonial authority and disturbs it” (Sharpe 99). Mimicry is thus deceptive by nature, since it merely produces a resemblance, a copy. Moreover, it does not result in a discovery of harmony, rather in an ever elusive, unbalanced, conflictual position vis-à-vis the patriarchal or colonised society. This strategy is thus very close to that of female characters who adopt a false personality in order to survive in a world based on the patriarchal values which they do not share: in adopting society’s values, even within a process of deception, they somehow become what society wants them to be, while they secretly and sometimes unconsciously keep longing to reveal their hybrid nature.

Indeed, in such male-oriented societies, female heroines display the quality of

“otherness”. Women often occupy a marginal, ex-centric position, once they refuse to comply with patriarchal values commonly agreed on in society. Women are often relegated to the

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position of “Other” and experience trouble in finding their own voice. This concept of voice is a common point between feminist and postcolonial studies, a theory which is also alluded to by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (174-175).

In Atwood’s fiction, independent single women thus function as “the Other,” with all its stereotypical connotations. Their only way to fit into that society is to pretend to adopt its values. Yet, they soon come to realise that this deceptive way of life cannot last and a traumatic experience often brings them to engage on a quest for their hybrid identity. Indeed, the heroine’s recurrent deceptive behaviour at the beginning of the story commonly evolves into a search for selfhood, made necessary because, as is the case for mimicry, while a fragmented hybrid female character may temporarily display a false-self system, it eventually turns out to be not quite the same as acknowledging her hybridity and its consequences.

Referring to the title of my thesis, I would conclude in asserting the existence of a parallel between the workings of mimicry in a colonial subject and the deceptive process experienced by female heroines in patriarchal cultures, both of these processes leading to an awareness of the heroine’s hybridity. The acknowledging of her hybrid quality would then function as Ariadne’s thread and enable the heroine to escape her labyrinth of deception.

2.3.2. Magic Realism and Deception

Magic realism particularly helps to clarify Atwood’s work, because of this aesthetic mode’s reliance on the motif of the double. Indeed, Margaret Atwood’s work swarms with images of doubles and twins, which give it a definite postmodern quality by virtue of the multiplicity of voices which the doubles bring forth. This analysis echoes Wendy B. Faris’s theories on magic realism (Faris 163-164). Faris explains the various characteristics of magic realism and

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its postmodern aspect, of which the metafictional aspect (Faris 175) proves of great interest.

She then mentions the postmodern recurrence of the metamorphosis motif (Faris 178), which can easily be associated to deceptive characters’ frequent use of disguises of various kinds.

Indeed, characters often resort to disguise when they opt for a personality or physical appearance which is tolerated by society. In using disguise, the ex-centric character mimics the aspect of the dominant class without ever becoming part of it. When this disguise turns out to create a grotesque, unreal kind of character, it acquires a magic realist quality, one of the utmost interest for this study.

Further, magic realism is interesting from a postcolonial point of view because of its

“in-between” quality: magic realist moments take place on the edge of reality, when among realistic events a supernatural, inexplicable phenomenon suddenly occurs. Reality turns out to be deceptive as the reader gets a glimpse of its hidden aspects. In Faris and Zamora’s collection of essays on magic realism, Rawdon Wilson highlights the hybrid quality of magic realism and clearly links it to the idea of deception when he writes: “one world may lie hidden within another. (…) The hybrid construction emerges from a secret, always already contained within, forming an occulted and latent dimension of the surface world” (Faris 225). Magic realism thus encourages deception on the writer’s part, and provides the characters with a typically postcolonial hybridity.

The most interesting aspect of magic realism lies in its subversive potential. Indeed, by allowing the supernatural to enter the real, magic realism simultaneously calls for an acceptance of what is “other” or “marginal”. Hence Jeanne Delbaere-Garant’s conclusion in her article “Variations on Magic Realism”, in which she writes that one of the functions of magic realism may be “to destabilise culturally constructed notions of identity and gender by

Escaping the Labyrinth of Deception: A Postcolonial Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels Volume I

UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES

Escaping the Labyrinth of Deception:

A Postcolonial Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels Volume I

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: DECEPTION AS A POSTCOLONIAL

STRATEGY IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S NOVELS

General Introduction

1. Atwoodian Criticism, with a Special Focus on Deception

2. Deception : A Theoretical Framework

Chapter 1. The Edible Woman: A Case of Socially Induced

Deception

1. Metafictional Intertext and Irony

2. Marian’s Mimicry Mania

3. Making Sense of Magic Realist Moments

4. Marian and Duncan as Tricksters

5. Hints at Hybridity

6. Quest for a Lost Voice

Chapter 2. Surfacing : Deception as Survival Strategy

1. Parodic Rewriting

2. Deceptive Mimicry : A Case Study

3. Uncanny Apparitions

4. The Narrator and her Parents : Inherited Tricksterism

5. Animal Regression as Quest for Hybridity

6. Surfacing or the Story of a Single Woman’s Alterity

Chapter 3. Lady Oracle: Joan Foster as Trickster

1. Atwood’s Sense of Parody: The Heroine as Writer

2. Variations on Mimicry

3. Grotesque and Gothic Magic Realism

4. Parodies of Trickster Figures

5. From Multiple Personalities to Hybridity

6. Joan’s Personal and Professional Self-discovery

Chapter 4. Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid’s

Tale: Atwood’s “Subversion” Trilogy

1. Three Novels of Subversion

2. Subversion through Parody

3. Three Forms of Subversive Deception

4. When Reality Verges on the Unreal

5. The Trickster as Embodiment of Subversion

6. Forms of Hybridity: The Ethnic, the Pathological, and the

Survivor

7. Atwood’s Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Quest

Pattern

Chapter 5. Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride : Female Tricksters at

Work

1. Parodic Twin Sisters and Fairy-Tale Deconstruction

2. Deception as a Means of Defence

3. Magic Realist Dreams and Incantations

4. Mature Tricksters

5. Hybridity of the Trickster Figure

6. Double Quests: Between Failure and Resurrection

Chapter 6. Deceptive Patterns in Alias Grace or the

Narrator as Quilter

1. Fictionalising Historical Documents

2. Grace’s Deceptive Mimicry

3. Deceptive Magic Realism

4. Two Trickster Figures: Grace Marks and Jeremiah the Peddler

5. Grace’s Quest for Hybridity

6. Quilting One’s Way Towards Self-Knowledge

Chapter 7. The Blind Assassin’s Criminal Deception

1. Atwood’s Metafictional Reflections

2. Three-Tiered Deception

3. Iris’s Disruptions of Reality

4. Are All Tricksters “Blind Assassins?”

5. Hybrid Sisters

6. A Three-Tiered Variation on the Quest Pattern

Chapter 8. Oryx and Crake: Hybridisation and Colonisation

1. Snowman: An Inverted Frankenstein or an Apocalyptic

Caliban?

2. The Dangers of Mimicry

3. Snowman’s Magic Realist Fantasies

4. Oryx, Crake, and Snowman: Three Aspects of Tricksterism

5. The Hybridity of the Colonised Subject

6. Atwood’s Ecological Stance

7. Snowman’s Quest for Humanity

CONCLUSION: EXPLORING THE LABYRINTH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III