Margaret Atwood and Canadian Women’s Gothic—Spite, Lies, Split Selves and Self-Deception

Abstract

This chapter discusses two Canadian women Gothic writers, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood exposing how our own narratives and those of others control and misrepresent us. Munro’s Gothic tales are of vast open spaces and small constrained lives, escapes and performances which lead to dead ends. Gina Wisker explores how Margaret Atwood undercuts the tales by which people lead their lives, particularly, for Canadian women, that of Rapunzel, locked in her self-constructed tower, awaiting some kind of rescue from a prince. Atwood debunks traditional and popular Gothic romantic fictions in Lady Oracle and her short stories particularly those in Bluebeard’s Egg. She uses the Gothic to undercut dominating myths of gender and power, and in the high Gothic The Robber Bride dramatises female vampiric spite, mirroring and split selves.