Self-Fashioning in Margaret Atwood's Fiction: Dress, Culture, and Identity

by Cynthia Kuhn

This study examines the associations between dressing and storytelling in Margaret Atwood’s fiction. As cultural representations operating within a network of codes, clothed bodies are often discussed by theorists as constructed performances or as fabricated texts, inextricably bound up with ideology and power. The clothed body often becomes a battleground in Atwood’s fiction as female protagonists respond to divisive cultural scripts through self-fashioning. Furthermore, Atwood seems to collapse the opposition between the material and the spiritual through clothing, to consider dress a fitting metaphor for the space between the natural and the supernatural. While the connections among dress, body, and story are visible from Atwood’s earliest novel forward, they achieve their most unified and powerful effect in The Robber Bride (1993) and Alias Grace (1996). In these novels, Atwood draws upon the classical idea that the body clothes the soul to create a postmodern frame for the complex relationships among subjectivity, representation, voice, gender, and culture.

144 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2005

About the author

Cynthia Kuhn writes the Starlit Bookshop Mysteries and Lila Maclean Academic Mysteries. Her work has also appeared in Mystery Most Edible, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Literary Mama, Copper Nickel, Prick of the Spindle, Mama PhD, and other publications.

Reviews

[Roshanak · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent starting point for research into fashion and clothing in literature. I find the bibliography specifically useful.