negotiating with the dead a writer on writing

They have traveled, bringing back a sundial from England and a domestic servant from theWest Indies. The story is rich in comedy and in social satire, much of it directed against attitudes that make “a person from another culture” as alien as a “man from Mars.” Christine’s affluent parents think of themselves as liberal and progressive. Christine stops looking at pictures, gives away her television set, and does nothing except read nineteenth century novels.

She becomes obsessed with worry, studying maps, poring over photographs of soldiers and photographs of the wounded and the dead in newspapers and magazines, compulsively searching the television screen for even a brief glimpse of his face. His country is the scene of fighting, but Christine cannot remember the name of his city. A war breaks out somewhere in the Far East and vividly revives thoughts of the foreigner. She graduates and settles into a drab government job and a sterile existence. Is he perhaps a sex maniac, a murderer? Eventually, through the overreactions and interventions of others, complaints are made to the police, and the inscrutable foreigner is deported, leaving Christine with mingled feelings of relief and regret. As months pass, however, Christine begins to fantasize about this strange man about whom she knows nothing. She begins to feel and actually to be more attractive. They begin to ask her out, curious as to the mysterious sources of her charm. The daily chases of a bizarre, small, Asian man in hot pursuit of a rather large Christine (a mouse chasing an elephant, as Atwood describes it) attract the attention of other students and make Christine interesting to her male acquaintances for the first time. In Dancing Girls, a gift for comic and satiric invention is evident from the first story, “The Man from Mars.” Christine, an unattractive undergraduate at a Canadian university, is literally pursued by an odd-looking, desperately poor exchange student. Wilderness Tips centers on the explanatory fiction people tell themselves and one another, on the need to order experience through such fiction, and on the ways in which humans are posing threats to the wilderness, the forests, and open space. The title story explores Sally’s excessive concern with her husband and lack of awareness of herself. Bluebeard’s Egg revolves around a favorite theme of Atwood’s, the Bluebeard tale of a dangerous suitor or husband.

Dancing Girls is primarily concerned with otherness, alienation, and the ways in which people estrange themselves from one another. The short-story collections each focus on key issues. One of Margaret Atwood’s (born November 18, 1939) central themes is storytelling itself, and most of her fiction relates to that theme in some way.

Negotiating with the dead a writer on writing