Word: atwoods
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This is the new society that Margaret Atwood strives to find in Dancing Girls, her new collection of short stories. Her vision, however, lacks the optimism of Friedan's fostering nervousness instead. At times her characters catch glimpses of a freer society, but they cannot transcend their mundane and cruel provincialism...
...DANCING GIRLS does not depict a war between the sexes Atwood's theme is the breakdown of human communication, where men and women address each other like creatures from different planets. Atwood's characters bitterly avoid human contact, as if under some delusion of strength in solitude and weakness in numbers. This is the generation of impermanence--of childless marriages and unmarried couples who "live together" out of inertia. The threat of nuclear war hangs over them perennially. The men and women in Dancing Girls respond not to each other, but only to their inward selves and how they might...
...hand, Atwood's stories are feminist because the women she writes about are active, ambitious, and often independent. But her stories go beyond gender politics to the sadness and alienation that afflicts both sexes Ind criminately: women mistreat men as much as men mistreat women...
Sometimes the barriers to communication are simply those of nationality. Atwood's characters are often displaced: Americans lives in Canada, Canadians live in America. The first story. "The Man From Mars," follows the tale of a Vietnamese man seeking the companionship of a Canadian woman, Christine. Although bereft of friends herself. Christine is started by the refugee's language disability and threatened by his advances. Eventually, she has him deported to Vietnam, where war is unfolding and Atwood's ending suggests that he gets killed. Only when Christine notices the headlines of war in the newspaper does she begin...
...other stories, miscommunication takes place right at home, especially--where else--in bed. And this is where Atwood whips irony to a thick, using her acrid insight to turn human ambivalence on its back. In "The Grave of the Famous Poet" the narrator relates...