![]() While attending Victoria College, University of Toronto, from 1957 to 1961, she wrote for the newspaper and the dramatic society. She wrote prose and poetry for her high school’s literary magazine. These early experiences away from urban society encouraged Atwood to read and develop her imagination.Īs a child, Atwood composed and illustrated poems, which she collected into small books. Her family spent the school year in Ottawa and Toronto, where her father taught entomology or worked for government agencies, and summers in northern Quebec and Ontario where her father conducted research. Her childhood was divided between the city and the country. Margaret Atwood was born on November 18,1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. At the same time, she challenges other writers to more closely examine typical literary convention. She defined the artist, in part, as “the guardian of the moral and ethical sense of the community.” In “Happy Endings,” Atwood fulfills this role with a challenge that she throws out to those writers who rely on the stereotypical characterization of men and women and to the reader who accepts such gender typing. In earlier works, including the novel Bodily Harm, as well as speeches, Atwood discusses the writer’s relationship to society. In several thumbnail sketches of different marriages, all of which achieve a traditional “happy ending,” Atwood references both the mechanics of writing, most particularly plot, and the effects of gender stereotyping. “Happy Endings,” which is essentially a self-referential story framework, falls into the third category. Subtitled “Short Fiction and Prose Poems,” Murder in the Dark featured four types of works: autobiographical sketches, travel notes, experimental pieces addressing the nature of writing, and short pieces dealing with typical Atwood themes, notably the relationship between the sexes. In the last analysis, ‘Happy Endings’ is a kind of postmodern story about stories: postmodern because it freely and self-consciously announces itself as metafiction, as being more interested in how stories work than in telling a story itself.īut within the narratives Atwood presents to us, she also addresses some of the inequalities between men and women, and exposes how relationships are rarely a level playing field for the two sexes.Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” first appeared in the 1983 Canadian collection, Murder in the Dark, and it was published in 1994 for American audiences in Good Bones and Simple Murders. ![]() A woman motorcycling across America on her own would not feel as safe, for one, as a man doing so.) (It is not that she isn’t free herself – she is, after all, carrying on an affair with a married, older man even though society wouldn’t exactly view that kindly – but her freedoms are of a different kind. Relationships are not equal in a society where men have things easier than women, and the third of Atwood’s six scenarios, in which Mary is the key player, makes this point plainly.įreedom, Atwood tells us, isn’t the same for girls as it is for boys, and while James is off on his motorcycle, she is forced by societal expectations to do other things. ![]() Of course, as so often in Margaret Atwood’s fiction, there’s a feminist angle to all this. Character motivation is more important than what they do or what is done to them. After all, do they? Perhaps the more important details are, as the closing paragraphs of ‘Happy Endings’ have it, not What but How and Why. By the time we get to the fifth plot, ‘E’, the narrator is happily encouraging us to view the plot details as interchangeable between Fred and Madge, as if they don’t really matter. Boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, and after various rocky patches they end up living, in the immortal words, ‘happily ever after’.Ītwood wants to put such plot lines under the microscope, as it were, and subject them to closer scrutiny. ![]() It’s a commonplace that happy endings in romantic novels ‘sell’: it gives readers what they want. Why does Atwood do this? Partly, one suspects, because she wishes to interrogate both the nature of romantic plots in fiction and readers’ attitudes towards them. But as the story develops, the author breaks in on her characters more and more, ‘breaking the fourth wall’ to remind us that they are mere ciphers and that the things being described do not exist outside of the author’s own head (and the reader’s: Atwood’s fiction, and especially the short pieces contained in Murder in the Dark, are about how we as readers imagine those words on the page and make them come alive, too). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |