Margaret Atwood
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Claims by Margaret Atwood (20 of 30)
The Tempest evolved through performance history
The Tempest underwent major transformations after Shakespeare: when theaters reopened after Cromwell the original staging tradition was lost, so in the 18th century it became an opera with added characters like Dorinda, and in the 19th century Caliban was reinterpreted as a romantic Byronic hero because audiences had by then become aware of slavery and the noble savage idea.
Quebec separation triggers nested separations
Quebec separating from Canada would trigger cascading conflicts: the indigenous peoples north of Quebec, who control the hydroelectric power, would separate from Quebec on the same logic, and their treaty with Canada obligates Canada to defend them against invasion, while a Quebec-France nuclear alliance would alarm the US—making separation geopolitically unstable.
Readers' interpretations can validly add to a text
Readers worked out Offred's name through reasoning about which first-chapter name is never mentioned again, even though Atwood didn't consciously intend it; she accepts their verdict because it adds something without contradicting the text, illustrating that valid meaning can be supplied by readers rather than the author.
People silenced Rushdie defenders out of fear
During the Rushdie fatwa affair, governments, churches, and unions privately praised PEN Canada's Graham Gibson for speaking out but said nothing publicly because they were frightened—an unprecedented situation in which the Norwegian publisher was shot and the Japanese translator killed.
Atwood's productivity driven by needing a living
Atwood attributes her prodigious output to needing to make a living from it, having no pension or university teaching post, and she deliberately avoided university teaching partly because of gender issues and because writers who actually published were viewed askance before institutions recognized creative writing courses as a cash cow.
Books move between gift and commodity spheres
Following Lewis Hyde's distinction between gifts and commodities, books that aren't mere formula originate in the gift sphere, must pass through the valley of the shadow of the commodity, and then return to a gift when they reach someone who loves them—an instructive frame for how artists relate to money in a society where most things are judged by money.
The Handmaid's Tale costume as protest symbol
The Hulu series gave rise to an international protest symbol in which people wear the handmaid outfit—brilliant because you cannot be removed for dressing immodestly or for causing a disturbance since you say nothing, yet everyone recognizes its meaning.
Canadian literature developed slowly due to frontier distance
Canadian literature developed later than the American tradition because Canada itself developed slowly—after Quebec fell in 1760 it took a long time for the population to settle far enough from the frontier to concern itself with literature.
Historical fiction reflects its time of writing
Historical fiction is always a product of the time in which it is written rather than the period it depicts—Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, though set in the Middle Ages, is a 19th-century novel because a writer has no choice but to write from their own era.
Ghost experience is real even if ghosts aren't
People genuinely have experiences of ghosts and this is well attested, which is distinct from saying there are objectively measurable ghosts; whether an external thing exists doesn't matter because the experience is real, and in the world of Shakespeare's plays ghosts therefore exist.
Daoud succeeded by playing powers off each other
In pre-war Afghanistan, Daoud was doing well by playing China, the USSR, and the US against each other and extracting resources from each, because Afghanistan has always been a desirable crossroads; the West should have stuck with him, but it has been chaos ever since his assassination.
Censorship will eventually target its own advocates
Censorship and the shutting down of people are always carried out under banners of virtue, as both Stalin's and Hitler's regimes did while presenting themselves as utopias; people have forgotten the 1940s and what this looks like, so the lesson is that if you go in for censorship, the next person it happens to will be you.
Cultural exception means controlling means of production
When Canadians speak of protecting Canadian culture through measures like the NAFTA cultural exception, they only mean controlling the means of production—who gets to decide what is published—not dictating content; the historical motivation came from the 1960s when there were few publishing outlets and writers were told to leave the country.
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