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Kerskens, C. (2007). Escaping the labyrinth of deception: a postcolonial approach to Margaret Atwood's novels (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).

Université libre de Bruxelles, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres – Langues et Littératures, Bruxelles.

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UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES

FACULTE DE PHILOSOPHIE ET LETTRES SECTION : LANGUES ET LITTERATURES MODERNES

Escaping the Labyrinth of Déception:

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

UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES

FACULTE DE PHILOSOPHIE ET LETTRES SECTION : LANGUES ET LITTERATURES MODERNES

Escaping the Labyrinth of Déception:

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

T VI

ANNEE ACADEMIQUE 2006-2007

To Pascal.

To my parents and grandparents.

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

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

I also wish to express my gratitude to Professer 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 Professer Brydon;

whose friendly welcome and insightful comments on postcolonialism hâve 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 ail my

friends, especially Valérie Ledent, Cécile

Maertens, and Evelyne Haberfeld, and

colleagues, who made suggestions,

encouraged me, or showed interest

throughout my writing process.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: DECEPTION AS A POSTCOLONIAL

STRATEGY IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S NOVELS i

General Introduction i

1. Atwoodian Criticism, with a Spécial Focus on Déception 8 2. Déception : A Theoretical Framework 15

2.1. Historical and Cultural Background 15

2.2. Significant Postmodem Aspects of Déception 23 2.2.1. Historiographie Metafiction or Variations on the Concept of

Truth(s) 23

2.2.2. AUvood’s Metafictional Manipulation 26

2.3. Déception as a Postcolonial Process 28

2.3.1. Déception as Mimicry 28

2.3.2. Magic Realism and Déception 30

2.3.3. The Trickster Figure 33

2.3.4. Quest for Self / Quest for Hybridity? Getting Rid of One’s Masks 44

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

Déception ⁵¹

1. Metafictional Intertext and Irony 54

2. Marian’s Mimicry Mania 60

3. Making Sense of Magic Realist Moments 66

4. Mari an and Duncan as Tricksters ⁷⁵

5. Hints at Hybridity 85

6. Quest for a Lost Voice 87

Chapter 2. Surfacin ² : Déception as Survival Strategy 99

1. Parodie Rewriting loo

2. Deceptive Mimicry : A Case Study 106

3. Uncanny Apparitions ¹ 15

4. The Narrator and her Parents : Inherited Tricksterism 123

5. Animal Régression as Quest for Hybridity ¹³³

6. Surfacing or the Story of a Single Woman’s Alterity 136

Chapter 3. Lady Oracle: Joan Foster as Trickster 148

1. Atwood’s Sense of Parody: The Heroine as Writer 149

2. Variations on Mimicry 157

3. Grotesque and Gothic Magic Realism ¹⁷³

4. Parodies of Trickster Figures 185

5. From Multiple Personalities to Hybridity 195

6. Joan’s Personal and Professional Self-discovery 209

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

Taie: Atwood’s “Subversion” Trilogy ²²¹

1. Three Novels of Subversion 221

1.1. Bodily Harnv. Subversion on Foreign Ground 222 1.2. Life Before Man : Subversion and Ethnicity 224 1.3. The Handmaid’s Taie: Subversion vs. Propaganda 225

2. Subversion through Parody ²²⁶

2.1. Along the Yellow Brick Road: Atwood’s Parody of The Wizard of Oz. 227

2.2. Life as a Game Parody 230

2.3. IMetafictional Comments and Parodie Reflections on Art and Reality 233

3. Three Forms of Subversive Déception ²³⁵

4. When Reality Verges on the Unreal 262

5. The Trickster as Embodiment of Subversion ²⁷¹ 6. Forms of Hybridity: The Ethnie, the Pathological, and the

Survivor 276

7. Atwood’s Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Quest

Pattern ²⁸⁶

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

Work 294

1. Parodie Twin Sisters and Fairy-Tale Deconstruction 296

2. Déception as a Means of Defence ³⁰⁴

3. Magic Realist Dreams and Incantations ³¹⁴

4. Mature Tricksters 326

5. Hybridity of the Trickster Figure 334

6. Double Quests: Between Failure and Résurrection 345

Chapter 6. Deceptive Patterns in Alias Grâce or the

Narrator as Ouilter 354

1. Fictionalising Historical Documents 356

2. Grâce’s Deceptive Mimicry 365

3. Deceptive Magic Realism 37 ¹

4. Two Trickster Figures: Grâce Marks and Jeremiah the Peddler 376

5. Grâce’s Quest for Hybridity 387

6. Quilting One’s Way Towards Self-Knowledge 397

Chapter 7. The Blind Assassines Criminal Déception 402

1. Atwood’s Metafictional Reflections ⁴⁰³

2. Three-Tiered Déception 408

3. Iris’ s Disruptions of Reality 415

4. Are Ail Tricksters “Blind Assassins?” 4i8

5. Hybrid Sisters 425

6. A Three-Tiered Variation on the Quest Pattern 429

Chapter 8. Orvx and Crake: Hybridisation and Colonisation 435 1. Snowman: An Inverted Frankenstein or an Apocalyptic

Caliban? 437

2. The Dangers ofMimicry 444

3. Snowman’s Magic Realist Fantasies 45i

4. Oryx, Crake, and Snowman: Three Aspects of Tricksterism ⁴⁵⁴ 5. The Hybridity of the Colonised Subject ⁴⁵⁷

6. Atwood’s Ecological Stance 462

7. Snowman’s Quest for Humanity 465

CONCLUSION: EXPLORING THE LABYRINTH 473

BIBLIOGRAPHY 484

Appendix I ⁵²⁴

Appendix II 525

Appendix III 526

Appendix IV 527

If you like, you can play games with this game. You can say: the murderer is the writer, the détective is the reader, the victim is the book. Or perhaps, the murderer is the writer, the détective 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.

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 décades. Bom in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood spent her childhood in-between the city and the bush, where ber 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 décisive 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 dérivés ffom this failed academie endeavour. From her early poems and novels, Atwood’s career rapidly evolved towards international récognition in the last three décades of the twentieth century. Her work has become the subject of numerous academie publications and she has won several outstanding awards.

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However, one might wonder what draws so many readers, ail over the world, to Atwood’s writings. I personally regard Atwood as an author who situâtes herself at the crossroad between various traditions: the feminist, the nationalist, the postmodem, and, one might argue, the postcolonial. Atwood’s repeated refusai to be classified as a member of a particular tradition might well be attributed to the fact that she actually draws éléments 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 PoUtics, display overt feminist overtones, other works - Surfacing, to name but one - express Atwood’s defence of Canadian culture and nature. Most critics hâve offered postmodem 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 hâve 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 associâtes these thèmes. 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 thèmes 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 thèmes, such as war, often présent in her protagonists’ childhood réminiscences, 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

language, dubious characters, and multiple interprétations, should therefore not surprise her readers. Her powerfiil stories hâve engaged several debates, demonstrating her concem for current world affairs. Atwood’s fictional universe is a cruel place, inhabited by duplicitous individuals and ordinary monsters. While defmitely keeping up with the developments of contemporary society, Atwood continues to fascinate readers ail 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.

Déception 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 concentrâtes 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 hâve 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 ffiend 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 réalisés 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 narrâtes how the heroine’s double finds answers to her identity questions at the centre of the labyrinth (341). Surfacing présents the reader with another variation on the labyrinth. This time, Atwood associâtes the maze with the wildemess (31), a frightening.

3

gothic presence, surrounding and gradually suffocating the village. The protagonist expériences her joumey in the bush as a labyrinthine way to self-knowledge. While the image disappears from Atwood’s subséquent 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 léthal 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 hâve mentioned, the labyrinth motif pervades Atwood’s fiction in varions 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 éludé any simple interprétation. 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 ffequently addressed postcolonial thèmes 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 participâtes 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 expérience 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

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

Déception 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 déception. Indeed, whereas déception has often been referred to as a common motif in Atwood’s fiction, it has never so far been the subject of a fiill-scale analysis throughout the author’s entire fictional output. Nor has it been studied in the light of postcolonial théories. I personally consider the protagonists’ prédominant use of déception as a sign of their colonised State. Be it as a Canadian citizen suffering from an inferiority complex, as a wrifer forced to stick to a précisé genre, or as a woman stmggling to conform to social requirements, Atwood’s protagonist ail 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 déception, and second, détermine which aspects of postmodemism and postcolonialism can be linked to this phenomenon. Once these promises hâve been established, 1 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 déception, the characters’

need to croate a false self and to resort to ail kinds of disguises, and the postmodem and/or

5

postcolonial interprétations 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 théories 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 demanda of authenticity has become intolérable (...) In recent Canadian fiction the major writers résolve 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 adhéré to her expérience. (...) The terror résides not in her going insane, but in her going sane. (...) The truth is disguised, hidden.

(...) But undemeath 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 postmodem fiction.

Further, it implies that the heroine will not necessarily fmd 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 différence. This study takes into account several postcolonial notions such as mimicry, ambivalence, disavowal, subversion and hybridity, while siting the female body as an équivalent of the deceptive, trickster-like postcolonial

“Other.”

This postcolonial view of Atwood’s work concurs with earlier critical considérations which generally identify Atwood as a feminist or typically Canadiari 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 conffonted 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 Grâce, The Blind Assassin, and the recent Oryx and Crake display innumerable layers of possible interprétations. However, ail the novels studied

in this work, présent marked similarities: ail their protagonists are liars; they engage on a joumey for self-knowledge; they suffer from their “othemess,” or resent society’s normative tendencies. One might regard Atwood’s work as a constant reformulation of these thèmes.

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 (Grâce Marks). A simple, cyclical, and open-ended quest pattern as in Surfacing develops into an intricate maze of intertwined quest joumey. 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 présent the reader with a definite answer as to the resuit of their inner

7

joumey. Later novels, such as Alias Grâce, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and finally Oryx and Crake, though remaining open-ended, offer a more positive and more defmite

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 Spécial Focus on Déception

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 hâve 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 sériés of books and articles which directly address the theme of déception in a broad sense (masks, disguises, deceptive characters and author, dubious language, false selves, etc.), and second, those which opt for a spécifie postcolonial reading of Atwood’s work.

To begin with, the séminal collection of essays The Art of Margaret Atwood, published by Arnold and Cathy Davidson’s in 1981 contains Annis Pratt’s considérations on Surfacing as an example of a rebirth joumey 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

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 hâve 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 postmodem 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 déception phenomenon. Moreover, conceming Atwood’s heroines in her early novels, Davey writes; “AU 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, présents 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 varions aspects of Atwood’s rejection of patriarchy, in a collection entitled Brutal Choreographies. The theme of résistance to patriarchal values is interesting from a

postcolonial point of view, because it is similar to the colonised subject’s résistance to the dominant culture. The same can be said conceming Eleonora Rao’s book. Strategies for Identity, which deals with generic boundaries, identity, interprétations of reality, and

déception (in Bodily Harm and The Edible Woman). Still in the feminist trend, Coral Ann Howells’s book Margaret Atwood, in the “Modem Novelists Sériés,” 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

9

detailed and yet very ciear 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 interprétation of Atwood’s fiction. The earliest complété 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 usefiil reading of Atwood in terms of Lacanian theory and the

mimetic construction of reality. Yet, it fails to include Surfacing and The Handmaid's Taie.

However, I contend that considering Atwood’s work through the lens of déception 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 Grâce 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 postmodem in its interest for the characters’ multiplicity and postcolonial in its

concem for irony and borderline situations, and will therefore influence this thesis.

First, I wish to examine studies deeply with déception in a broad sense. In Béatrice 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 rôle 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.

Déception 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 Taie, 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 Modem Gothic Novel” (McCombs, 197-207), which reads the novel’s gothic parody as a reversion of the traditional gothic romance. It situâtes the gothic “terror” in the heroine’s graduai compliance with our “social mythology” (McCombs, 13). Further, Lucy M. Freibert’s essay on “The Politics of Risks” in The Handmaid’s Taie 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 spécial notice; for

the fïrst 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 thèmes such as ethnicity and the opposition between political subordination and cultural survival; or McCombs’s analysis of the theme of métamorphosés 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 Taie, which should be related to historiographie metafiction. In the same trend. Lorraine York’s collection of critical essays, Varions Atwoods, contains Diana Brydon’s brilliant postcolonial reading of Bodily Harm, which focuses on the protagonist’s rôle 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 ethnie undertones of the novel. Wilson, Friedman and Hengen’s pedagogical approach to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Taie and other Works shows some common points with this study. Indeed,

they deal with Atwood’s rôle 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 déception as a pervasive feature, présent in ail 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

boundaries and their ideological significance. Focusing on The Handmaid’s Taie, The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, and Alias Grâce, Howells shows how Atwood succeeds in recreating

varions 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 déterminé female stéréotypés 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 Grâce.

Recently, several articles devoted to the postcolonial aspects of Margaret Atwood’s work hâve 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 daims that a reading in terms of the characters’ ethnicity provides new insights into the interprétation 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 fiirther 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\ Résistance Through Narrating” fùrther focuses on the heroine’s re-telling of her story as a form of résistance 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 historiographie metafiction, which gives a very important rôle to deceptive discourses of both the heroine and the Gileadean régime.

The third article, Margaret Rogerson’s “Reading the Patchworks in Alias Grâce,"

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

Grace’s hybridity might well fimetion 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 parodie éléments 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 tenus of inversion of

conventional thought-pattems. Sharon R. Wilson offers a detailed analysis of the postmodem

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 Médusa, for instance. In a second, equally

interesting essay on Alias Grâce, Wilson provides her interprétation of the novel’s quilting

metaphor. She argues that it is a feminist, postmodem, and postcolonial novel. She examines

the readers’ involvement in the constmetion of the narrative. Moreover, she produces details

which illustrate Atwood’s concem 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

Atwood’s reflections on the myth of the malevolent north (the Clarendon lectures) as a key to the interprétation of Cat’s Eye. Coral Ann Howells provides us with a postcolonial reading of The Robber Bride. She situâtes 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 fiirther 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 déception based on a sériés of significant case studies, spanning Atwood’s entire career.

2. Déception: A Theoretical Framework

2.1. Historical and Cultural Background

In order to establish a theoretical model for the study of déception in a literary context, this Work will first examine some general définitions of déception, the way in which it is perceived in society and its cultural connotations. Dariusz Galasinski’s The Language of Déception (2000) provides interesting insights into the subject of déception. The author first

underlines the fact that déception 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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déception has always been a problematic issue. Galasinski regards déception 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 déception takes the form of omission, for instance, the deceiver does not say anything, but nevertheless produces effective deceptive communication. Therefore, a more accurate définition of déception is that based on the notion of false belief Déception then takes place when the speaker produces a message which intends to create a false belief. Galasinski’s définition of déception 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 définition of déception remains neutral, the most popular définition of this phenomenon usually involves a sériés of négative connotations, such as an intentionally dishonest purpose.' However, an analysis of deceptive behaviour in a literary context should remain free of any péjorative judgement. Déception will here be analysed from a psychological, social and literary point of view, not from an ethical point of view.

Writers often présent us with characters who hâve 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 painfùl 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 création. Modem writing has

' For a more common definilion of déception, 1 lumed to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, which produces the following définitions ; “Déception: 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).

often chosen to support this idea, though it has also leamed 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 déception is relevant in a study dealing with quest novels, to which Atwood’s undeniably belong.

Jeremy Campbell’s book The Liar's Taie offers interesting insights into the history of falsehood and into the significance of déception from a philosophical, psychological and literary point of view. In his introduction, Campbell States the importance of déception in psychoanalysis as follows: “Psychoanalysis was based on the idea that falsehood and illusion are usefül dues to understanding the mystery of human personality. Freud took with (...) a pinch of sait what his patients told him under the heading of unvamished 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 déception 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 déception 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, déviant, or dispensable feature of life. Nature engages in it.

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sometimes with remarkable ingenuity (...) life may be understood truthfiilly only in aesthetic tenus” (Campbell 14-15). Campbell thus regards déception as an everyday phenomenon. He also stresses the fact that déception bas 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 ingénions person, creating alternative versions of reality, as the poets do” (Campbell 44), confirming the positive connotations of déception in Ancient Greece. Such positive interprétations should be kept in mind when studying déception in relation to Atwood’s heroines, especially when those make use of tricks, lies and disguises in order to insure their survival. Indeed, this illustrâtes the concept of pT]Tiç, a well-known notion in Ancient Greek philosophy, which stands for the Greek hero’s ability to use déception and cunning in order to survive. Reading Campbell’s description of the concept, i.e. “the type of intelligence that is cunning and devions and shrewd, that is adapted to the perilous jockeying for success in a highly compétitive society, using wiles and ruses when sheer brute force is on the other side” (Campbell 53), and further:

“Métis connotes flair, wisdom, subtlety, déception, 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 hâve to resort to a sériés 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 déception 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 différence in order to fit in colonial or patriarchal society. Campbell

equally alludes to the hardships of social life and the necessity of déception when he writes;

“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 démocratie and enlightened societies” (Campbell 186). This study will thus subsequently analyse the characters’ deceptive attitude towards society, and in some cases the manipulation inhérent in society itself. Yet there is more to the Greek concept of piiTiç , as Campbell further mentions: “Most important, Odysseus is a master of tricky language, like Hermes the trickster god linked to deceitfül 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. Postmodem theory addresses the characters’ conscious use of language and the author’s metafictional interventions. Moreover, we must not forget that déception, as Margaret Atwood skilfully intimâtes 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 oblitérâtes 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 ail through the suspect vehicle of language, or even that it is désirable to do so (Campbell 13).

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

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When examining déception from a psychoanalytical point of view, the most obvions instance that cornes 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 daims that when faced with a society in which he feels estranged, the individual’s only sane response is madness and the création 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 perfoimer, an actor playing a rôle in which he or she may or may not believe. The very word ‘person’

once meant a mask” (Campbell 265). Déception appears once again as a common phenomenon. For the literary critic, it will be interesting to wonder how much the character indulges into the création of a false self, to notice ail the different disguises, masks or false identities he resorts to, and to pay spécial attention to the description of the character’s dreams as révélations of his inner truths. Indeed, the part played by the unconscious in these kinds of déception is most important, and though we cannot prétend 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 sériés 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 déception 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.

Moreover, Freud’s théories 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 déception, as will be explained in a following section. Later, Jacques Lacan equally professed the dubious value of truth in the treatment of the disordered psyché.

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 concemed, it has been associated with Lacan’s mirror stage, which recalls Mycak’s analysis of Atwood’s Work in Lacanian tenus.

Finally, this section on the cultural value of déception 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 déception, 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 tumed 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 rôle 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 hâve called her a gorgon or a magician in tums, 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 hâve of writing is just that, a memory. Like ail memories, it’s usually a révision, not the unadulterated expérience itself’ (Handcock 113- 144). This quote is particularly relevant if we consider it in the light of historiographie 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 théories. Indeed, ffom what we read in Atwood’s numerous interviews, this can be interpreted as the écho of Atwood’s vision of déception 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 épisode from her childhood: “Around the âge 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 déception.

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

“Who was I then? My evil twin or slippery double, perhaps. I am after ail a writer, so it would

follow as the day the night that I must hâve a slippery double (...) this other person — the one

créditée! 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 concem for déception, 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 Postmodem Aspects of Déception

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

This analysis of déception in Atwood’s work relies on Linda Hutcheon’s postmodem concept of the historiographie metafiction for several reasons. First of ail, because this novelistic form is particularly likely to présent deceptive authorial intervention. Moreover, as a Canadian, Hutcheon has logically devoted much of her attention to Canadian writers, and has applied her théories to Margaret Atwood’s writings (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 138-159). In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon describes historiographie metafiction as follows: “those

well-known and popular novels which are both intensively self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay daim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 5). This very concept aptiy describes one of Atwood’s most popular novels,

i.e. Alias Grâce, which is based on a true story and contains numerous référencés to historical facts and documents, while presenting these in quite a singular way.

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Hutcheon distinguishes several typical traits of historiographie metafiction. First of ail, historiographie metafietion is obsessed with “the linking of‘fietitious’ to ‘mendacious’ stories (or historiés)” (Huteheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 108): faet and fïetion are often intertwined. Seeond, it shows a typieal postmodem interest for the multiplieity of truth: tmth is a very relative eoneept, whieh largely dépends on place and culture; it is therefore diverse and elusive (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 108). Historiographie metafiction consequently “plays upon the tmth and lies of the historical record” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 114). This implies that the author of a historiographie metafictional novel

deliberately falsifies or omits some historical facts in order to compensate for historical forgetfülness 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 “formai and ideological critique in feminism and

Canadian fiction alike” (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 7). Hutcheon significantly chooses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Taie as a typical example of parody. Umberto Eco expresses the same idea : “The postmodem reply to the modem consists in recognising that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destmetion leads to silence, (...) must be revisited, but with irony, not innocently” (quoted in : Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 90). Moreover, parody fiinctions 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, historiographie metafiction confronts the literary to the historical, featuring the encounter of fietitious 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 daim, since this rewriting

can be regarded as a way of giving the colonised subject his own voice, enabling him to give

his own version of the facts. Fourth, historiographie metafiction “espouses a postmodem ideology of plurality and récognition of différence” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 114). In this, it echoes the postcolonial concem for the ex-centric position of the “Other”.

Indeed, as Hutcheon States, postmodera narratives often equally adhéré “not to what fits the master narrative, but instead, to the ex—centric, the marginal, the borderline - ail 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 concemed, Hutcheon distinguishes two modes of narration which characterise historiographie 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 obvions 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, historiographie metafiction shows “overt (and political) concem for its réception, 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 historiographie metafiction to the notion of multiple truth is of primary interest because the multifaceted postmodem conception of tmth enables the writer to introduce the Other’s version of tmth 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. AtwoocTs 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 hiérarchies (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 Postmodemism of

Margaret Atwood,” Linda Hutcheon, in The Canadian Postmodern, focuses on postmodem

aspects of Atwood’s early production. In Atwood’s work, Hutcheon situâtes the postmodem

Paradox in the vision of art as, on the one hand, a dynamic créative 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 illustrâtes 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 postmodem contradictions

between the written product and the act of writing (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern

143). Conceming 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-parodie, we can regard Joan

Foster’s multiple identities as an ironie inversion of Surfacing's nameless narrator and the

Royal Porcupine’s liking for dead animais as a parody of the chapter on animais in Survival

(Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 145). Ail 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

be prégnant, which parallels the dynamic Creative process of writing (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 148). Hutcheon condudes 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’ varions versions of reality and their rôle in a postcolonial interprétation of Margaret Atwood’s fiction will thus constitute the main concem 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 déception. 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 déception, 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 parodie intent, aiming at illustrating her fiinction as a writer, which involves creating a world that appears realistic, and yet, fimetions as a fictional product.

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2,3. Déception as a Postcolonial Process

2.3.1. Déception as Mimicry

One cannot deny the feminist overtones of Atwood’s novels, which often présent 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 rôle 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 subaltem position.

Further drawing on postcolonialism, this study will show that déception 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

order to find her place in patriarchal society, she resorts to several modes of déception 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 foirn 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 resuit 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 déception, 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

“othemess”. 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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