ABSTRACT
During the early 1960s, the contemporary Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood (b. 1939), decided to specialize in Victorian literature and pursue her graduate studies at Radcliffe. With references in hand from Northrop Frye, one of her teachers in the English Department of Victoria College at the University of Toronto, she came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to study under Jerome Buckley, a distinguished Victorian scholar, who had also been an undergraduate student at Victoria College (Cooke 87; Sullivan 121). Her immersion in Victorian literature as a graduate student may be one reason why the Bluebeard motif came “naturally” to her. Like Dickens and Thackeray before her, Atwood has repeatedly and variously evoked the tale of Bluebeard and his wives throughout her prolifi c career.1
