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 both engages with and works against ideas of a unified identity associated with the Bildüngsroman, and argues that works such as The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, and Dancing Girls expose rather than uphold conventional models of growth and development, both artistic and personal. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscripts in the Atwood Collection at the University of Toronto, McWilliams uncovers influences that shaped Atwood's fashioning of identity in her early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, and The Blind Assassin, 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 Bildüngsroman, a turn that may be read as a means of at once interrogating and perpetuating the form. McWilliam'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.