Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale

Biography of Margaret Atwood

by Lisa Jadwin, Karen Carmean, Karen F. Stein, Earl G. Ingersoll

Achievements

Early in her career, Margaret Atwood received critical recognition for her work. This is particularly true of her poetry, which has earned her numerous awards, including the E. J. Pratt Medal in 1961, the President’s Medal from the University of Western Ontario in 1965, and the Governor-General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary honor, for The Circle Game in 1966. Twenty years later, Atwood again won this prize for The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood won first prize in the Canadian Centennial Commission Poetry Competition in 1967 and won a prize for poetry from the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation in 1969. She has received honorary doctorates from Trent University and Queen’s University. Additional honors and awards she has received include the Bess Hoskins Prize for poetry (1974), the City of Toronto Award (1977), the Canadian Booksellers Association Award (1977), the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction (1978), the Canada Council Molson Prize (1980), and the Radcliffe Medal (1980). The Blind Assassin won the 2000 Booker Prize, and Atwood received Spain’s Prince of Asturias literary prize for 2008.

Biography

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on November 18, 1939, the second of Carl Edmund Atwood and Margaret Killam Atwood’s three children. At the age of six months, she was backpacked into the Quebec wilderness, where her father, an entomologist, pursued his special interests in bees, spruce budworms, and forest tent caterpillars. Throughout her childhood, Atwood’s family spent several months of the year in the bush of Quebec and northern Ontario. She did not attend school full-time until she was twelve.

Though often interrupted, Atwood’s education seems to have been more than adequate. She was encouraged by her parents to read and write at an early age, and her creative efforts started at five, when she wrote stories, poems, and plays. Her serious composition, however, did not begin until she was sixteen.

In 1961, Atwood earned her B.A. in the English honors program from the University of Toronto, where she studied with poets Jay Macpherson and Margaret Avison. Her M.A. from Radcliffe followed in 1962. Continuing graduate work at Harvard in 1963, Atwood interrupted her studies before reentering the program for two more years in 1965. While she found graduate studies interesting, Atwood directed her energies largely toward her creative efforts. For her, the Ph.D. program was chiefly a means of support while she wrote. Atwood left Harvard without writing her doctoral thesis.

Returning to Canada in 1967, Atwood accepted a position at Sir George Williams University in Montreal. By this time, her poetry was gaining recognition. With the publication of The Edible Woman and the sale of its film rights, Atwood was able to concentrate more fully on writing, though she taught at York University and was writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. In 1973, Atwood divorced her American husband of five years, James Polk. After the publication of Surfacing, she was able to support herself through her creative efforts. She moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, with Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson; the couple’s daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born in 1979. In 1980, Atwood and her family returned to Toronto, where Atwood and Gibson became active in the Writers’ Union of Canada, Amnesty International, and the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN).

Analysis

For Margaret Atwood, an unabashed Canadian, literature became a means to cultural and personal self-awareness. “To know ourselves,” she writes in Survival, “we must know our own literature; to know ourselves accurately, we need to know it as part of literature as a whole.” Thus, when she defines Canadian literary concerns she relates her own as well, for Atwood’s fiction grows out of this tradition. In her opinion, Canada’s central reality is the act of survival: Canadian life and culture are decisively shaped by the demands of a harsh environment. Closely related to this defining act of survival, in Atwood’s view, is the Canadian search for territorial identity—or, as literary theorist Northrop Frye put it, “Where is here?”

Atwood’s heroines invariably discover themselves to be emotional refugees, strangers in a territory they can accurately label but one in which they are unable to feel at home. They are alienated not only from their environment but also from language itself; for them, communication becomes a decoding process. To a great degree, their feelings of estrangement extend from a culture that, having reduced everything to products, threatens to consume them. Women are particularly singled out as products, items to be decorated and sold as commodities, though men are threatened as well. Indeed, Canadian identity as a whole is in danger of being engulfed by an acquisitive American culture, though Atwood’s “Americans” symbolize exploitation and often turn out to be Canadian nationals.

Reflective of their time and place, Atwood’s characters are appropriately ambivalent. Dead or dying traditions prevent their return to the past, a past most have rejected. Their present is ephemeral at best, and their future inconceivable. Emotionally maimed, her heroines plumb their conscious and unconscious impressions, searching for a return to feeling, a means of identification with the present.

Atwood often couches their struggle in terms of a journey, which serves as a controlling metaphor for inner explorations: The unnamed heroine of Surfacing returns to the wilderness of Quebec, Lesje Green of Life Before Man wanders through imagined Mesozoic jungles, Rennie Wilford of Bodily Harm flies to the insurgent islands of Ste. Agathe and St. Antoine. By setting contemporary culture in relief, these primitive sites define the difference between nature and culture and allow Atwood’s heroines to gain new perspectives on their own realities. They can see people and places in relation to each other, not as isolated entities. Ultimately, however, this resolves little, for Atwood’s novels end on a tenuous note. Although her heroines come to terms with themselves, they remain estranged.

Supporting her characters’ ambivalence is Atwood’s versatile narrative technique. Her astringent prose reflects their emotional numbness; its ironic restraint reveals their wariness. Frequent contradictions suggest not only the complexity of her characters but also the antagonistic times they must survive. By skillful juxtaposition of past and present through the use of flashbacks, Atwood evokes compelling fictional landscapes that ironically comment on the untenable state of modern men and women. Still, there remains some hope, for her characters survive with increased understanding of their world. Despite everything, life does go on.

Source

From Critical Survey of Long Fiction (3d Rev. Ed.). Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Salem Press, Inc.

Bibliography

1 

Bloom, Harold, ed. Margaret Atwood. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Collection of essays by literary critics provides analyses of Atwood’s major novels. Includes brief biography, chronology of Atwood’s life, and an informative editor’s introduction.

2 

Brown, Jane W. “Constructing the Narrative of Women’s Friendship: Margaret Atwood’s Reflexive Fiction.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6 (1995): 197-212. Argues that Atwood’s narrative reflects the struggle of women to attain friendship and asserts that Atwood achieves this with such reflexive devices as embedded discourse, narrative fragmentation, and doubling.

3 

Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto: ECW Press, 1998. Although this is not an authorized biography, Atwood answered Cooke’s questions and allowed her access, albeit limited, to materials for her research. A more substantive work than Sullivan’s biography The Red Shoes (cited below).

4 

Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Lively critical and biographical study elucidates issues that have energized all of Atwood’s fiction: feminist issues, literary genres, and her own identity as a Canadian, a woman, and a writer.

5 

____________, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Collection of twelve excellent essays provides critical examination of Atwood’s novels as well as a concise biography of the author.

6 

McCombs, Judith, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Indispensable volume comprises thirty-two essays, including assessments of patterns and themes in Atwood’s poetry and prose. Discusses her primary works in chronological order, beginning with The Circle Game and ending with The Handmaid’s Tale. An editor’s introduction provides an illuminating overview of Atwood’s writing career. Includes a primary bibliography to 1986 and a thorough index.

7 

Stein, Karen F. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Presents a thorough overview of Atwood’s writings in all genres. Includes references and a selected bibliography.

8 

Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Toronto: HarperFlamingo Canada, 1998. Biography focuses on Atwood’s early life, until the end of the 1970’s. Attempts to answer the question of how Atwood became a writer and to describe the unfolding of her career.

9 

Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. One of the most extensive and thorough investigations available of Atwood’s use of fairy-tale elements in her graphic art as well as her writing. Covers her novels up to Cat’s Eye.

10 

____________, ed. Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Collection of scholarly essays examines Atwood’s work, with a focus on her writings published since the late 1980’s. Includes discussion of the novels Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Jadwin, Lisa, and Karen Carmean, and Karen F. Stein, and Earl G. Ingersoll. "Biography Of Margaret Atwood." Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale, edited by J. Brooks Bouson, Salem Press, 2009. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CIW_Handmaids_1002.
APA 7th
Jadwin, L., & Carmean, K., & Stein, K. F., & Ingersoll, E. G. (2009). Biography of Margaret Atwood. In J. B. Bouson (Ed.), Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Jadwin, Lisa and Carmean, Karen and Stein, Karen F. and Ingersoll, Earl G. "Biography Of Margaret Atwood." Edited by J. Brooks Bouson. Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2009. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.