In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood

Examining a striking and recurrent aspect of her work—the divided self—this study focuses on the work of Margaret Atwood, offering detailed readings of six of her novels. Through a critical method that borrows freely from both psychoanalytic and phenomenological theorists, chapters on each novel place distinct emphasis on the concepts of each theory, covering such complex topics as secularization, oedipal relations and connections with the maternal, aggressive relativity, the Imaginary, the symbolic, mimesis, space and the dynamics of location, signification, and enunciative positioning. The result is an examination of the ways in which the identity of each protagonist is dislocated, alienated, splintered, and split according to the divisions that mark the subject, and new interpretations of each novel that take into account its characterization, narrative development, thematic content, and setting. An appendix serves to show how Atwood’s remaining two novels could be best accounted for by other approaches, making the book a complete account of Atwood’s novels to date.