ABSTRACT
From an early stage in her writing career, Margaret Atwood shows a striking interest in the fate of the female artist and author in Canada. While evidence of this can be found throughout her work, her later fiction, most particularly Cat’s Eye (1988) and The Blind Assassin (2000), revisits and reformulates this interest in images of the female artist in especially innovative ways. A comparative reading of the novels proves particularly fruitful because both novels explore the distinctive aspects of female creativity and question myths of the female artist; both also present painting, writing, or telling a life story as a crucial medium of reading and rewriting the past. The novels share an interest in the challenges and paradoxes of “writing a life” and draw attention to the processes of evasion, subversion, and illusion that are at work in all narratives of selfhood, but are perhaps, necessarily, most dramatically manifested in narratives that are self-consciously committed to writing women’s lives. In this way, the artistically mature Atwood makes her most profound exploration of issues with which she and many other contemporary women writers have been perennially preoccupied.
