Anecdote as Escape from Reality in the Short Fiction of Margaret Atwood

Readers familiar with the fiction of Margaret Atwood recognize that a good deal of her work portrays various attempts, on the part of her protagonists, either to flee or to achieve a genuine subjectivity. Surfacing, arguably Atwood’s most famous work, traces the journey of a nameless protagonist out of the city into the wilderness where she sheds the psychological and spiritual trappings of modernity and achieves a porous subjectivity that straddles the borders of the living and the dead. In this questioning of the subjectivity of the individual Atwood’s work is not unlike that of David Henry Hwang, who, working in a different medium, also opens the gates meant to keep the dead in their “rightful place,” thus rejecting the watertight subjectivities of modernity. In a persuasive article (2008) on the ethical connections of the “subjectivity of the real” in Atwood’s fiction, Simone Drichel shows how protagonists in Atwood’s travel fiction―particularly Bodily Harm (1981)―resist the subjectivity of the real―proffered in ecounters with the Other―by escaping into what Said calls “texts” of familiarity, often the set travel pieces of glossy magazines which encapsulate the “gaze” of the concupiscent first world towards the negotiable pleasures of developing