Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman

Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work - her own 'coming of age' fiction, including unpublished works as well as The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle - both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscripts in the Atwood Collection at the University of Toronto, McWilliams uncovers influences that shaped Atwood's fashioning of identity in her early novels, paying particular attention to Atwood's preoccupation with survival as a key symbol of Canadian literature, culture, and identity. She also considers the genre's afterlife on display in Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Moral Disorder, in which the formulations of selfhood and identity in Atwood's early fiction are revisited and developed. Atwood emerges as a writer who self-consciously invokes and then undercuts the traditions of the Bildungsroman, a turn that may be read as a means of at once interrogating and perpetuating the form. McWilliams's book furthers our understanding of subjectivity in Atwood's fiction and contributes to ongoing conversations about the role gender and cultural contexts play in reframing generic boundaries. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Dedication 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Abstract 8 A Note on the Text 10 Acknowledgements 12 Part 1 Margaret Atwood and the Canadian Female Bildungsroman 14 1 The Coming of Age of the Female Bildungsroman 20 2 Progress, Identity, and the Canadian Imaginative Landscape: Cultural and Critical Contexts 56 Part 2 A Canadian Literary Apprenticeship: Atwood's Early Fiction 74 3 The Canadian Bildungsroman: The “Birth of a Nation” in The Nature Hut and Surfacing 76 4 Digesting the Female Bildungsroman: Consuming Fictions in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle 90 Part 3 Towards Maturity: Atowwd's Later Novels 106 5 Canadian Afterlives: The Power and Pleasure of Storytelling in The Robber Bride and Alias Grace 108 6 Keeping Secrets, Telling Lies: Fictions of the Artist and Author in Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin 128 7 Full Circle: The Chaos of Living in Moral Disorder 142 Postscript: New Departures: The Life and Times of the Contemporary Canadian Female Bildungsroman 152 Conclusion 166 Works Cited 168 Index 178 Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the history of the Bildungsroman, the author explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the later 20th century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the "Bildungsroman", this title explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century