Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  238.Life Before Man. Toronto: McClelland-Bantam; London: Virago Press, 1989 ©1979.

  239.“The Man from Mars.” Between Worlds. Ed. Maggie Goh and Craig Stephenson. Oakville, ON: Rubicon Publishing, 1989. 64-84. Also in: New Worlds of Literature. Ed. Jerome Beaty and J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton, 1989. 651-667. Includes study questions: 667-668. Reprinted from Dancing Girls and Other Stories, ©1977-1982.

  240.Meng Duan Chang Ye. Taipei: Huang guan chu ban she, 1989. Chinese translation of Bodily Harm by Zhang Huiqian Yi.

  241.Murder in the Dark. [Sound recording]. Read by Clare Coulter. Toronto: Coach House/Music Gallery, 1989. 1 sound cassette. (ca. 90 min.). [Side A]: “Autobiography,” “Making Poison,” “The Boys’ Own Annual,” “Before the War,” “Horror Comics,” “Boyfriends,” “The Victory Burlesque,” “Fainting,” “Raw Materials,” “Murder in the Dark,” “Simmering,” “Women’s Novels 1 & 2,” “[Side B]: Women’s Novels 3-7,” “Happy Endings,” “Bread,” “The Page,” “Mute,” “She,” “Worship,” “Iconography,” “Liking Men—Strawberries,” “Him,” “Hopeless,” “A Parable,” “Hand,” “Everlasting,” “Instructions for the Third Eye.”

  242.“My Brother.” Harper’s Magazine 278 (March 1989): 36, 38.

  243.“Note from an Italian Postcard Factory.” Canadian Travellers in Italy. Ed. Barry Callaghan. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1989. 146-47. Reprinted from Two-Headed Poems, ©1978-1980.

  244.“Noted with Pleasure.” New York Times Book Review 19 February 1989: 35. Short excerpt from Cat’s Eye.

  245.“Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written.” Poetry by Canadian Women. Ed. Rosemary Sullivan. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 158-160. Originally published 1981.

  246.“Nothing.” Poetry by Canadian Women. Ed. Rosemary Sullivan. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 161-162.

  247.O femeie obisnuit. Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1989. Romanian translation of The Edible Woman.

  248.O Lago Sagrado. São Paulo: Editora Globo, 1989. Portuguese translation of Surfacing by Cacilda Ferrante.

  249.Pani Wyrocznia. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawn, 1989. Polish translation of Lady Oracle by Zofia Uhrynowska-Hanasz.

  250.The Poetry of Margaret Atwood. [Sound recording]. Read by Pamela Rabe. Sydney: ABC Radio, 1989. 1 sound cassette.

  251.“Preface.” The Canadian Green Consumer Guide. Prepared by The Pollution Probe Foundation. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989. 2-3.

  252.Promotional blurb, front wrapper for Valerie Martin’s A Recent Martyr. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989 ©1987.

  253.“The Public Woman as Honorary Man.” Los Angeles Times Book Review 2 April 1989: 3. Review of The Warrior Queens by Antonia Fraser.

  254.“Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother.” Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters. Ed. Christine Park and Caroline Heaton. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989. 5-20. Reprinted from Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories, ©1986.

  255.“Siren Song.” The Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry. Ed. Fleur Ad-cock. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989. 272. Reprinted from You Are Happy, ©1974.

  256.“Snake Woman.” Till All the Stars Have Fallen: Canadian Poems for Children. Selected by David Booth. Toronto: Kids Can Press, 1989. 64. Reprinted from In-terlunar, ©1984.

  257.Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. [Sound recording]. Brantford, ON: W. Ross MacDonald School, 1989.

  258.“There Is Only One of Everything.” Poetry by Canadian Women. Ed. Rosemary Sullivan. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 154-155. Originally published 1974.

  259.“Time to Sink the Sub,” by Atwood and John Polanyi. Globe and Mail 8 February 1989: A7. Letter supporting review of military defense programs and cancellation of nuclear submarine proposal.

  260.“True North.” Travels in the Americas. Ed. Jack Newcombe. New York: Weiden-feld & Nicolson, 1989. 233-244. “Reproduced from Saturday Night magazine, January 1987.”

  261.“Two Poems.” Canadian Woman Studies 10.4 (Winter 1989): 9-10. Reprints “Last Day” from True Stories and Anna Akhmatova’s “Boris Pasternak,” with a preliminary essay.

  262.Ublízení na Tele. Prague [Czechoslovakia]: Odeon, 1989. Czech translation of Bodily Harm by Hana Zantovská.

  263.Upp till ytan. Stockholm: Litteraturframjandet, 1989. Swedish translation of Surfacing.

  264.“‘Waking at 3 A.M.’” Field 41 (1989): 29-33. About William Edgar Stafford’s poem “Waking at 3 A.M.”

  265.“Weight.” Chatelaine 62.11 (November 1989): 155-158, 160, 162.

  266.“When It Happens.” Finding Courage: Writings by Women. Ed. Irene Zahava. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1989. 9-17. Reprinted from Dancing Girls and Other Stories, 1982 ©1977.

  267.“Wilderness Tips.” Saturday Night 104.7 (July 1989): 46-53.

  268.“Woman Skating.” The Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry. Ed. Fleur Adcock. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989. 270-271. Reprinted from Procedures for Underground, ©1970.

  269.“The Woman Who Could Not Live with Her Faulty Heart.” Poetry by Canadian Women. Ed. Rosemary Sullivan. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 156-157. Originally published 1978.

  270.“Writing Utopia.” Unpublished speech, 1989. An answer to the question: How did The Handmaid’s Tale get written? [Ed. note: Reprinted in Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970-2005. London: Virago, 2005. 85-94.]

  271.“You Begin.” Poetry by Canadian Women. Ed. Rosemary Sullivan. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 155-156. Originally published 1978.

  Quotations

  272.“[Quote].” Los Angeles Times 9 April 1989: Section: Book Review: 12. One of the lines from Atwood’s review of The Warrior Queens by Antonia Fraser which appeared in the 2 April edition of the paper quoted under the heading “Critic’s Choice”: “A lore-packed historical essay. Fraser has assembled a remarkable group of women who displayed superior courage and outmanoeuvred the cream of the male crop. Fascinating to read.”

  273.“[Quote].” New York Times 12 March 1989: Section: 7: 1. Atwood joins 27 other writers born in 21 countries in encouraging Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses, then hiding in England with a price on his head having been accused by the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of slandering Islam in his novel. The Ayatollah called for his death. “You’re the one in trouble; tell us what we can do to best support you. It’s all too easy to pop off the handle and say what is on my mind without reflecting on your position. We feel deeply the horror of your position. And remember: You are worth a great deal more to the Ayatollah alive than dead, because dead you are no longer something to be waved around.”

  Interviews

  274.“The Handmaid’s Vision.” Journal (Providence) 12 March 1989. NewsBank 1989: 34: C9-11.

  275.The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour 7 July 1989, Friday, Transcript #3510. Available from Lexis-Nexis. On origins and meaning of Cat’s Eye. Excerpt: “My notes on this book date back to 1964. And I took a couple of tries at it over the years and it never really happened or got finished. So for me it’s partly here’s something I’ve been thinking about for all these years, and I finally managed to do it. What a relief.”

  What did she do? “I’ve written a novel that covers 50 years of time, which I never attempted before, and I’ve written a novel that deals with a somewhat neglected subject. And when I say neglected, I don’t mean only in literature but in life, because even psychoanalysts tended to tell us that the years up to 6 were very important and then the years of adolescence were very important, but that space in-between, particularly for little girls, between 8 and about 12, tended to be not dealt or not looked at and somewhat dismissed. But as anyone who’s ever been a little girl or had little girls will tell you, that is a very emotionally intense and important time. So I dealt with that. It’s usually only dealt with in juvenile fiction such as Anne of Green Gables or those novels about English boarding schools. And I attempted that in a novel for adults, risky business.”

  And, on the difference between writing poe
try and novels: “If you wired up the brain of a poet at the moment of composition, you would find that certain parts of the brain lit up. I was very intrigued by some wiring up of musicians that they did and they found that musicians’ brains lit up in quite different ways from the brains of ordinary people listening to music. So it would be fun to wire up a poet right at the instant of composing a poem and then wire up a novelist and monitor his brain while he was composing a novel. And I think you would find that different areas lit up. I think you would find that poetry is much more connected with the left-handed, right-sided part of the brain, and that the novel has more to do with the right hand and the left side.”

  276.“A Vampire by the Mausoleum: It Was Not Margaret Atwood.” Houston Chronicle 5 March 1989. NewsBank 1989: 34: C12-13.

  277.ANDERSON, Jon. “Margaret Atwood Reigns.” Chicago Tribune 19 March 1989: Section 6: 1, 6.

  278.BENATAR, Giselle. “Under the Spell of the ‘Cat’s Eye.’” Los Angeles Herald Examiner 7 March 1989. NewsBank 1989: 34:C4-5.

  279.BRAMPTON, Sally. “The Credible Woman.” The Guardian (Manchester) 26 October 1989:17.

  280.CHRISTY, Marian. “Conversations: The Mean Games Girls Play.” Boston Globe 15 March 1989: Section: Living: 45. Atwood interviewed when in town to promote Cat’s Eye.

  281.COLTRERA, Francesca. “Atwood Has ‘Eye’ for a Best-Seller.” Boston Herald 12 March 1989. NewsBank 1989: 34:C8.

  282.FORSBERG, M[yra]. “Journey to the Screen.” New York Times 2 April 1989: Section 2: 13. Brief comments on Natasha Richardson as Offred and Harold Pinter’s screenplay of The Handmaid’s Tale.

  283.GERACIMOS, Ann. “Margaret Atwood’s Tale: Literary Feminism.” Washington (DC) Times 27 February 1989. NewsBank 1989: 34:C14.

  284.HUBBARD, Kim. “Reflected in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, Girlhood Looms as a Time of Cruelty and Terror.” People Weekly 31.9 (8 March 1989): 205-206.

  285.LEE, Hermione. Margaret Atwood: Writers Talk Ideas of Our Time. [Video-recording] Northbrook, IL; Peasmarsh, Near Rye, East Sussex, UK: The Roland Collection, 1989. 1 videocassette (52 min.). Atwood talks about themes of women “breaking out,” literature informed by fairy tales, visual imagery as inspiration, mythology in contemporary literature, comparing the short story with the novel, autobiography as source material, writing as a woman from the male point of view, and using humor.

  286.MANSNERUS, Laura. “Different Brands of Meanness.” New York Times Book Review 5 February 1989: 35.

  287.PERI, Camille. “Witchcraft.” Mother Jones 14.3 (April 1989): 28, 30-31, 44-45.

  288.PULLINGER, Kate. “An Archaeology of Sisterhood.” Independent (London) 2 January 1989: 15.

  289.SANDS, Melissa. “Hindsight.” Châtelaine 62 (February 1989): 61, 63.

  290.STREITFELD, David. “Neighbors to the North.” Washington Post Book Review 12 March 1989: 15. Atwood reflects on being a “Canadian writer.” Interview includes the first Canadian joke she ever heard: The road to Heaven forks. The right branch has a sign that says: To Heaven. The sign on the left branch: Panel discussion on Heaven. All the Canadians go to the left.

  Scholarly Resources

  291.“Margaret (Eleanor) Atwood.” Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Work of Short Fiction Writers. Ed. Sheila Fitzgerald. Vol. 2. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1989. 1-23. An anonymous biocritical essay, accompanied by excerpts from On-ley, Hofsess, Hill, Cameron, Woodcock, Grace, Thompson, Tyler, Flower, Mezei, Abley, Carrington, Davey, with a bibliography of additional works.

  292.ADAMS, Carol J. “Feminism, the Great War, and Modern Vegetarianism.” Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation. Ed. Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier. Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. 244-267. Women share oppression with animals; giving up meat is also giving up male dominance. The Edible Woman illustrates these themes in Marian’s choice of food.

  293.AUGIER, Valérie. “An Analysis of Surfacing by Margaret Atwood.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 11.2 (Spring 1989): 11-17.

  294.BACHINGER, Katrina. “Gender Positions: The Intertextuality of Gender Difference in Margaret Atwood, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce Carol Oates, Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Philip Sidney and others.” Habilitationsschrift [i.e., PhD thesis]. University of Salzburg, 1989.

  295.BARTKOWSKI, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. See especially “No Shadows without Light: Louky Bersianik’s The Euguelionne and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” 133-158. This final chapter pairs Atwood’s anglophone and Bersianik’s francophone texts to demonstrate a synthesis of feminist fiction and theory; discusses geopolitical questions, the power of language, marginality, identity, and difference.

  296.BERGMANN, Harriet F. “‘Teaching Them to Read’: A Fishing Expedition in The Handmaid’s Tale.” College English 51.8 (December 1989): 847-854. The Handmaid’s Tale’s statements on authorship, reading, and patriarchal language are revealed through Offred, who learns to “read the world,” and by the “Historical Notes,” where women’s history is misread.

  297.BILLI, Mirella. “Margaret Atwood.” Belfagor (Florence) 44.4 (July 1989): 417-435. Discusses Atwood’s career, poetry, and novels through The Handmaid’s Tale.

  298.BOUSON, J. Brooks. The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. See especially chapter entitled “Comic Storytelling as Escape and Narcissistic Self-Expression in Atwood’s Lady Oracle.” 154-168. Follows Joan’s comic experiences of self-creation and self-annihilation in a psychoanalytic approach to the mother-daughter relationship in Lady Oracle.

  299.BURACK, Cynthia. “Bringing Women’s Studies to Political Science: The Handmaid in the Classroom.” NWSA Journal 1.2 (Winter 1988-89): 274-283. Uses The Handmaid’s Tale to teach political concepts and to overcome the “pedagogical orthodoxy” of the classroom.

  300.BUSS, Helen. “Maternality and Narrative Strategies in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” Atlantis 15.1 (Fall 1989): 76-83. Explores the ethics of mothering in Atwood’s novels, finding The Handmaid’s Tale the most politically and aesthetically developed and Cat’s Eye the most optimistic.

  301.CAMPBELL, Elizabeth A. “The Woman Artist as Sibyl: Sappho, George Eliot, and Margaret Atwood.” Nassau Review 5.5 (1989): 6-14.

  302.CARRERA SUAREZ, Isabel. “Metalinguistic Features in Short Fiction by Lessing and Atwood: From Sign and Subversion to Symbol and Deconstruction.” Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English: Proceedings of the Nice Conference of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. Ed. Jacqueline Bardolph. Nice: Fac. des Lettres & Sciences Humaines de Nice, 1989. 159-164.

  303.COWART, David. History and the Contemporary Novel. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques/Third Series. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. See especially “The Way It Will Be: Puritanism and Patriarchy: The Handmaid’s Tale.” 105-119. Sees The Handmaid’s Tale as a “complex historical meditation” that mirrors the Old Testament and the Puritan age. Identifies illusions to the Bible, Little Red Riding Hood, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, and The Waste Land.

  304.CULPEPER, Richard. “Recognition and Rejection of Victimization in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” MA thesis. University of Waterloo, 1989. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1992).

  305.DELBAERE-GARANT, Jeanne. “Surfacing: Retracing the Boundaries.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 11.2 (Spring 1989): 1-10.

  306.DETWEILER, Robert. Breaking the Fall: Religious Readings of Contemporary Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1989. See especially Chapter 6: “Scheherazade’s Fellowship: Telling against the End.” 159-191. This chapter contains an extensive discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale.

  307.DIVASSON, Lourdes. “The Short Stories of Margaret Atwood: A Visible Link between Her Poetry and Longer Fiction.” Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English: Proceedings of the Nice Conference of th
e European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. Ed. Jacqueline Bardolph. Nice: Fac. des Lettres & Sciences Humaines de Nice, 1989. 153-157.

  308.DIVASSON CILVETI, Lourdes. “The Handmaid’s Tale: Una Forma de supervi-vencia.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 19-20 (1989): 211-220.

  309.DOBRIS, Catherine Aileen. “Weaving the Utopian Vision: A Rhetorical Analysis of Feminist Utopian Fiction.” PhD thesis. Indiana University, 1989. 256 pp. An analysis of 9 novels, includes The Handmaid’s Tale and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as the “female” perspective. For more see DAI-A 50.07 (January 1990): 1846.

  310.EDWARDS, Jannie. “Margaret Atwood and the Politics of Consumption.” MA thesis. University of Alberta, 1989. 100 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1990). Focus on The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, and Surfacing.

  311.ENS, Kelly Linda. “Writing the Female Body in Three Canadian Women’s Novels.” MA thesis. McMaster University, 1989. 68 pp. Atwood’s Bodily Harm, Marian Engel’s The Honeyman Festival, and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel.

  312.FERNS, Chris. “The Value/s of Dystopia: The Handmaid’s Tale and the Anti-Utopian Tradition.” Dalhousie Review 69.3 (Fall 1989): 373-382. The Handmaid’s Tale possesses significant differences from Zamyatin’s, Huxley’s, and Orwell’s dystopias; for example, The Handmaid’s Tale relies on more subversive tactics.

  313.FITTING, Peter. “Recent Feminist Utopias: World Building and Strategies for Social Change.” Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds. Ed. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. passim. The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the novels that “mark an end to the feminist utopianism of the 1970s.”

  314.FOLEY, Michael. “Satiric Intent in the ‘Historical Notes’ Epilogue of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 11.2 (Spring 1989): 44-52.