Wilderness and the Natural Environment

The importance of wilderness and the natural environment in Margaret Atwood`s texts of the early 1970s, especially in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Surfacing (1972) and Survival (1972), has been widely acknowledged. What has passed unnoticed, however, is their reappearance as prominent literary spaces in her narrative texts of the late 1980s and early 1990s. While her representation of the natural environment in the early 1970s can largely be seen as a direct response to the Canadian debate on national and cultural identity and to contemporary feminist theories, Atwood`s later approach to wilderness and the natural environment is much broader and more sophisticated. This study examines how Atwood uses wilderness and natural environment in The Handmaid`s Tale (1986), Cat`s Eye (1988) and Wilderness Tips (1991) as fexible tools to explore and redefine the relationship between human subjects and their physical environment. The author shows how this allows Atwood to discuss aspects of post-colonial identity, to question traditional associations of gender with nature, and to subvert the pastoral, romance and gothic conventions of representing the land. This study also shows how Atwood`s more recent interest in the natural environment is related both to the Canadian literary tradition of representing wilderness and to her own earlier treatment of the theme. More-over, it examines how on a political level Atwood`s narratives treat the psychological conditions and consequences of the destruction of the natural environment by human interference.