Help re: Margaret Atwood?

[foxinthestars]

The mention of Vonnegut last time got me thinking about writers (specifically writers I was made to read in my Creative Writing course in college), and I wonder if anybody could help me out here because I'm not quite sure what to think about Margaret Atwood.

It doesn't help for her that the TA made me read The Handmaid's Tale instead of Woman On The Edge of Time (because I had wanted to read WOTEOT anyway --- I did read it after and still treasure it --- and maybe he didn't realize that it wasn't my usual fare or that Marge Piercy had "literary" stature or something), and that was a long time ago, before my feminist awakening no less, but thinking back on it, I feel like Atwood's work shows actual misandry that plays into a patriarchal notion of what "feminist literature" is supposed to look like, and she is thus embraced and promoted above someone like Piercy because she can serve as a literary strawfeminist.

Or I might totally be selling her short. Help me out, anyone?

Comments

[branchandroot]

*thoughtful* She's very much a product of her time, which was the heart of the Second Wave. One of the great weaknesses of the second wave was an extremely dualistic and even essentialist approach to femininity and masculinity, and I think that shows. It also wasn't just men she was aiming at, it was, very explicitly, the Religious Right, and that was the age of Pat Robertson. It... actually wasn't all the much of an exaggeration, if you think of her dystopian country as led by a bunch of Robertsons. And that aspect /was/ extremely hostile. Justifiably, I tend to think.

[foxinthestars]

::nod:: I can see that, and I think I do understand Pat Robertson types better than I did at the time. (Beneath the righteous rhetoric, a crude sexual user? The evidence just keeps piling up...) I seem to recall male characters who shouldn't have fit into that mold getting pretty short shrift, too, though.

And I realize that even if my complaint were valid, it's really not about anything Atwood did, but a (perhaps erroneous) impression that she has more mainstream fame than other feminist writers, and a "why pick her and ignore others?" issue.

[branchandroot]

*nodnod* I /do/ think that both Atwood and the other writers who might be read/reviewed/assigned instead suffer from what I tend to call LeGuin Syndrome. One of the lot gets picked out and held up over and over and over as Exemplary, as though she were the only good one out there. It definitely obscures the great variety of other feminist authors/women sf writers/whathaveyou available. It's total tokenism, and there's no excuse for it.