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Atwood Historicised: The Fiction of the Postfeminist Novelist

LITERARY critics fall into two camps: those who make value judgments, and those who don’t. For the most part, Fiona Tolan emerges from Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction as the latter kind. Defining her project as ‘largely historicist’, she views each Atwood novel as a kind of feminist fossil, an artefact commemorating the various ‘waves’ and subdivisions of a political and intellectual movement and their influence on the author. She takes this theoretical standpoint unapologetically, with the caveat that her analysis flouts documented evidence of authorial intention by rebutting Atwood’s much-publicised disavowal of any feminist message. Such historicist analysis is unobjectionable as far as it goes, but the problem is that it does not go far enough. In a world of chronic funding shortages where literary critics constantly have to justify their work, projects which spot trends in literature without speculating about the attendant political, ethical or aesthetic implications are fodder for the philistines. Following a short introduction, Tolan divides her work into eleven chapters. Each chapter discusses one of Atwood’s novels, arranged in chronological order from The Edible Woman (written 1965, published 1969), to Oryx and Crake (2003). The themes, structure and style of each novel are seen to develop in relation to feminism. This necessitates the explication of some familiar questions: Is the gendered self an essential reality or an inessential succession of constructs? Should feminism seek to level differences or reclaim ‘the feminine’ for women? Does the female body play a role in women’s personal, linguistic and psychological experience, or can it be considered merely a cultural symbol? Are we ‘postfeminist’ or has feminism entered a ‘Third Wave’? These are absorbing debates, and this reader was disappointed to find Tolan opting for a ‘potted history’ of each, rather than marking out a coherent position within them. Tolan’s determinedly objective stance creates two basic problems. The first is her apparently unselfconscious re-inscription of gendered dichotomies Fiona Tolan, Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction, Rodopi, 2007, t67 hardback. R E V I E W .