Word: atwoods
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...Atwood's air of unflappability is exactly what one would expect from the assured, seamless flow of her prove and poetry. On one level her protagonists--especially Rennie Wilford, the young "life styles" journalist central to Bodily Harm--are smooth and sophisticated, gliding productively through life. It is this apparent power, most likely, that prompts so many feminists to claim her work as the ideological property of the women's movement, a tendency which leads naturally to the temptation to dismiss her male supporting characters as evil insensitive foils for the struggling females. The temptation is false, through: Atwood...
WHAT THE FEMINIST interpretation of Atwood's work ignores, though, is the texture and depth of even the most textbook "liberated" characters. In Life Before Man, the novel before Bodily Harm, for instance. Lesje, one of three narrators who form a triangle, holds a paleontology job at a Toronto museum. She works there passionately, betraying encyclopedic knowledge, weaving elaborate Cretaceous fantasies Atwood's twist makes the job consist in large measure of classifying, cleaning and filing innumerable Jurassic fish earbones...
Throughout, Atwood downplays the island's inflammatory politics, using Rennie's character and the stunning force of her own visual imagery to fuel tension. She disavows that any specific foreign incident inspired the setting, preferring to generalize: "I've been places like that, and you can think about what's happening to journalists in foreign countries these days...
...visible qualms about describing an uncannily similar "incident" that has since befallen a friend of hers who "writes about angora sweaters" for a Toronto lifestyles journal, one who, in fact, partly sparked her idea for Rennie's character. The coincidence apparently does not strain Atwood's credulity. "The normal thing about normal people is that strange things happen to them. Usually, you have to tone down reality to make it fictionally probable...
...affected" them, offering instead the anecdote of a farmer neighbor whose barn caught fire several years ago. The entire herd of cattle was brought out unharmed, suffering no visible effects; five months later, though, all the cows miscarried. Rather than assess and second-guess her own delayed shock values. Atwood states her preference for filling the months between novels--when the emotional and creative cycles don't overlap--with writing T.V. docudramas and adaptations, her mental equivalent of a jog around the block...