Literary Celebrity in Canada by Lorraine York

Author:Lorraine York [York, Lorraine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780802092823
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

3 Margaret Atwood’s ‘Uneasy Eminence’: Negotiating with the Famous

I’ve been described as the Barbra Streisand of Can Lit ... But I think of myself more as the Mary Pickford, spreading joy.

Margaret Atwood

Back in 1973, quite early in her celebrated career, Margaret Atwood offered the above tongue-in-cheek description of her public persona. Jocular though it was, it offers several points of entry into the topic of her celebrity status. Most superficially, it shows, though its awareness of the resemblance a younger Atwood bore to the then-popular American diva, Barbra Streisand, a corresponding awareness of the role that physical appearance plays in her celebrity; as numerous commentators have observed, Atwood’s features have become a trademark of sorts. And it also signals the uneasy relation between Atwood’s North American and nationally specific Canadian celebrity; her chosen celebrity persona, Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born star of the early screen who earned the title of America’s Sweetheart south of the border. As many observers of Atwood’s literary celebrity will attest, Atwood, too, has been appropriated as an American writer (Owens). As Caroline Rosenthal has discovered from surveying American teachers of Atwood, ‘Many ... responded that they have taught a variety of Atwood’s works, including her essays, but did not identify her as a Canadian’ (46). But more broadly, Atwood’s off-the-cuff comment is remarkable simply for its self-consciousness; even in 1973, just one year after Atwood came to national attention with the publication of Survival, she is offering a meta-commentary on her own celebrity.

This self-conscious awareness of the terms of her own celebrity is what sets Atwood apart from the other two contemporary Canadian literary stars I examine in this study. Among Canadian writers from the past five decades, Atwood offers the sort of clear-eyed analysis of the celebrity experience that L.M. Montgomery before her came closest to formulating. If Atwood is often thought of as the Canadian literary celebrity par excellence, she is no less a shrewd analyst of its terms and tendencies. On several occasions, she has even parodied her own star text – the conglomeration of her celebrity meanings – producing a list of quintessentially Atwoodian public personas: ‘Witch, man-hater, man-freezing Medusa, man-devouring monster. The Ice Goddess. The Snow Queen’ (Atwood, ‘If You Can’t’ 20); ‘Margaret the Monster and Margaret the Magician and Margaret the Mother’ (MacGregor 66). As Susanne Becker perceptively notes, such persona parodies serve both to describe but also to contain media representations (32); they are, in a sense, critical pre-emptive strikes of a particularly clever sort.

Of course, Atwood’s great measure of self-consciousness is partly a reflection of the extensive nature of the celebrity system that represents her to a broad audience. Graham Huggan, in his book The Postcolonial Exotic, devotes a full chapter to what he calls ‘Margaret Atwood, Inc.’ or the ‘Atwood industry.’ And Susanne Becker, a German scholar whose geographical placement evinces Atwood’s global appeal, has offered an academic reading of ‘Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Media.’ So Atwood’s own heightened

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