ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals Atwood, as a relatively young writer, surveying the territory, one in which power is an important dimension. It explores the interior dimensions of power, exhibiting their operations among young girls in Cat's Eye and among middle-aged women in The Robber Bride. The answers Atwood arrives at in these two novels are not identical. In the first book, the young girls uncritically adopt the power dynamics of the world they are growing-up in; in the second, the older women develop new dynamics that may allow them to better survive in the world. Bouldings framework both separates political, economic, and social realms for discrete analyses and suggests how threat power and exchange power are not aberrations that readers should find disturbing but, rather, powers that do indeed normally dominate in the political and economic realms, respectively. The coincidence links Atwoods fictive creations to what seem to be larger sociopolitical patterns.
