Envisioning alternative interiors: space and ecology in Margaret Atwood's short stories and Orys and Crake

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways Margaret Atwood represents, complicates,

and seeks for alternative visions to the seemingly inescapable confinement in

her four collections of short fiction published in different stages in her career

and her 2003 dystopian novel Oryx and Crake. The recurrent formal pattern of

the separation of the inside and the outside as well as the various ways offered

to assuage the sense of constraint in the stories are read metaphorically as the

author’s ways of dealing with confinement in general. The diversity of situations

unfolded under the general condition of entrapment in the stories question the

legitimacy of the crude division of duality, and the imaginative engagement with

the predicament offers a variety of possibilities of negotiation within frames. I

also discuss Atwood’s disfiguring of a specific conceptual frame that traps the

mind, the monolithic notion of “the human” that naturalizes humans as against

nature, in the particular literary situations in her short stories, such as how the

notion becomes confining, how to countervail its negative influence, and

whether we can discard it completely. The insistence on the importance of

specificity and the power of imagination unsettles the mechanistic ways of

thinking, hinders the absolute legitimation of the concept of “the human”, and

forces the reader to notice the particularity in different relationships humans

have with animals and nature as well as resist the tendency of generalization and

negation. The thesis further analyzes the author’s critical reflection on

imagination, the essential faculty we rely on to counter the confining reality and

make changes, as shown in Oryx and Crake. Showing the complex relationships

between imagination and reality, the author stresses their mutual influence and,

more importantly, warns against the danger of crossing the boundary between

the two. Further, building apparent connections between her dystopian society

and the present world, the author reminds us to be cautious with our imaginative

responses to the predicaments of the present society with regard to science,

capital, and humanity that she dramatized in her envisioned future.