Linguistic style and key elements in Margaret Atwood's "Two-Headed Poems"

                                             

Abstract

 

This article summarizes the landmark elements and offers a broadly encompassing critical review of “Two-Headed Poems”, through a detailed analysis of the most touching and poignant Atwood’s verses editorially spanned by the author between 1976 and 1986[1], other than highlighting the main traits in common with other influential artists on the same issues she focused in this poem and she dealt with,  not only pointing out to lexical concerns but also by altogether rounding up the considerations about the alternation and identification of the main historical and political facts, impressively resounding in a nationalistic vein, involving both Canada and its contentious relations with its neighbour United States. All this is wittily mixed up to the original use of classical and indigenous mythology, re-elaborating the tragic culture that seizes the eternal suffering present in the world, not only in the creative moment but also in the prism of her life, straightly pointing at the challenge of the “impossible communication”, blending her geniality with her own pragmatism and understanding reality by the magic of imagination, her interest on personal and sexual sentiments, stressing out the particular role of the poet, and poetry in general, in contemporary society, not neglecting her intimate meditations about aging, the unavoidable destiny of human mortality and the precariousness of mankind’s life, looming as a subtle suspended thread over the ditch, without any sorts of circus net to perceive what you feel if the heart collapses, exploring the interior and exterior meaning of the world demeanour as half-winged angel people[2].

The main reasons why I have chosen the study of the lexicography of the multi-awarded Canadian icon Margaret Atwood, throughout her conspicuous and prolific literary production, are that she’s always caught her attention and curiosity, page after page, not only of focal contemporary social and political issues, such as feminism, environmentalism and abuses of political powers in undemocratic societies that she frown upon, she deeply investigates and brilliantly examines and exposes in her write-makings, but also of the emotions she sounds out in her poetries by the use of an original and highfalutin language in an always refined and sophisticated lexicon.  

The flow of her speeches is dynamic and eclectic, marked by inventiveness and creativity, expressed with lexical choices by which Atwood tries to make courtly and impactful futuristic images, even, often, recurring to borrowings and calques from other languages, such as French and Italian, other than being popular because of her puns.

She’s a symbol of an untamed spirit and her lexical choices still ignite souls in an immortal, unapologetic and energetic imprint that characterizes her personal artistic vein and that redefines and revolutionizes the Canadian writing standards.

She doesn’t restrain herself from describing stories, putting them in ground-breaking verses making them live, breathe and resonate, flaring readers’ sensations and pushing them to reflection (her finals are always open-ended, leaving space to imagination and different interpretations).

She’s elevated her books into the dignity of cinematographic and television grandeur (i.e., “The Handmaid’s Tale” television show and film, “Alias Grace” miniseries, “Surfacing” film, “The Atwood stories” television series, “Payback” documentary), proving to be epic, emotional and timeless. Every of her creations, in fact, expressed by an uncompromising authenticity, it’s a storm that leaves fans forever changed. With her talent and charisma, she’s never bent to trends or she searches for validation or compromises to her opinion: Margaret Atwood is a symbol of rebellion, resilience and transformative power unleashed through her creative writing. She gives voice to misfits, outsiders, dreamers and fighters, turning pain into poetry, visionary books and critical denunciation, keeping on inspiring and astonishingly getting stuck generations of passionate followers.

As Atwood observed:

Poetry is the heart of the language, the activity through which language is renewed and kept alive. I believe that fiction writing is the guardian of the moral and ethical sense of the community. Especially now that organized religion is scattered and in disarray, and politicians have, Lord knows, lost their credibility, fiction is one of the few forms left through which we may examine our society not in its particular but in its typical aspects; through which we can see ourselves and the ways in which we behave towards each other, through which we can see others and judge ourselves.[3]

 

Margaret Atwood’s popularity today comes from the fact that her thirty-five books of poetry explore some trendy minority psychology that informs her identity as a woman and her national identity, as she is a contemporary Canadian aware of belonging to a minority culture of the North American continent, recreating her pioneer ancestors’ encounter with the wilderness and with native people. Her poetic writing, in fact, is that of a psychic individual at sea in a materialist society. Her form of some kind of hysteria assumes feminine features and it lends certain affinities with that of “A room of one’s own” and “Mrs Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf.

Among the experiences of being an individual, a woman and a Canadian, Atwood feels a deeper connection between minority membership and her poetry, as a mathematical formula, involving images, motifs, subjects and dramatic situations concerning the self-inhabitation of spaces, forms, tropes and metamorphoses.

Her aesthetic and at the same time not conventional and impeaching writing style, by which she attempts to wander, saying words that would upset the reader, with her mental gymnastics between myth and reality, blows up the silent side of the inner humankind's beauty (“Tell ourselves the silence…it keeps and narrates/the voices of the sun, the sounds of the heart,/ the muscles of the hearth./ It’s sonority….emotional communication”[4]), not neglecting today's social and political burning topics. When the clock ticking rushes up, she freezes time and transcends the space to make room for meditation in the safe place of a Morrisonian Universal Mind[5] (whose meaning will be explored later on in the essay), “the freedom man…setting people free/ […] ” just looking for a home/ in every place I see”, in the quietness of a sparkling moonshine glaring our thoughts[6].

Role reversal and new beginnings are recurrent elements in Atwood's poetry narration, often introducing two voices, one male, one female, centred on the role of women in society, seeking their stance in the world, and the individuals surrounding and affecting them. She’s, in fact, an apolitical writer and a fearless witness of the world around her.

Being, loving, and leaving are the keywords that dominate and rage in all her poems. Atwood is, in fact, essentially an ‘itinerary spirit’: born in Ottawa, grown up in Toronto and in a continuous come-and-go from Quebec because of the entomologist’s profession of her father, she studied and taught at Harvard University and the fate of her life, studded with an incessant and clamorous success that has confirmed her and brought her to the fore as a giant of world’s literature, pushed her to undertake multiple travels to a lot of cities in Canada, US and Europe to hold international conferences and promotional presentations of her artistic masterpieces.

This vicissitude has allowed her to keep on observing, with always enlightened curiosity and attention, what is around her, putting in evidence the most suggestive locations that inspired her and the features of the imaginary characters that crowd her books, by her personal way to fine-tune her works, that she has for longtime described and made known by several interviews, her teaching and video courses of creative writing, other than by her last, recent book, Book of Lives- A memoir of sorts[7], that has pushed her, as testified, to jot down in, sometimes torn scraps of paper everywhere to create her novels and poetry, in the throes of her passionate and fervent passion, coming from her sharp prowess of observation.

Atwood focuses on the concept of writing itself, declaring that “any author is aware of who will read out her novels, today, tomorrow or in a hundred years. One of the characteristic of this art form is that there's always a temporal distance between the writer and his readership. It cannot be otherwise. Readers are not with the author when he writes and the author is not with the reader when he reads. Writing is a way to have a voice that travels throughout the time”.[8] 

As Atwood discovered her voice as a Canadian writer of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, she helped the country to find its own life as a literary landscape. “Everything was interesting”, she reflects, “but the important thing was discovering the fact of our own existence as Canadians”.[9]

Her literary creations present a profound dyscrasia between the hustle and bustle, frantic rhythms of life our society imposes on us, and her ability to stay still and to be present with herself in her intention to incardinate herself as an undoubted celebrity and to depict her emotions and sensations in her books. Her language, so “precise and secret”, “was not even/a code, it was snow,/there could be no translation. /To save this language/we needed echoes,/we need to push back/the other words, the coarse ones/spreading themselves everywhere/like thighs or starlings.”. as well as the core of her contents, denotes an arduous unpathomability for the literary critics, being her style cryptical and, at the same time, fabulous and mysterious, by the use of metaphors and wordplays that try to join the mere external material aspect with the rich and precious inner world observed through the lens of her “scandaleyes”. As I noted in my poetry, “You will recognize me/ mirroring your soul in mine/ embrace me in all my tiny wholeness/ drawing in the infinite sky,/ distant reminder of a cosmogonic universe/ vast enough to enclose us/ and small enough to fit inside our hearts, a crown of thorns”[10]. In fact, Atwood added: “To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly; she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice becomes her mirror”.[11] 

The recurrent theme of duality throughout Atwood's literary production is especially examined in Two-Headed Poems, like double ends in our scruffy hair, to explore the dark and bright side of our spirit, and its duality, flowing down in a pen or by hitting fire on the keys of a type-machine, mastering the gearing up of electronic devices, “other” than us, not properly an extension of what we are or chose to manage, but just an instrument that can strike or kill consciousness and its awareness, straightly sinking in our instinctive personal emotions, as a bursting sawn-off shotgun, or breaking the silence of resignation with the asperities and dryness that the sour pain of the world has been provoking in the drifting of our destiny, restlessly polluting the liquid drops of crystals whose are made up our intimate need of brotherhood and linking bounds of any sort of love.

The fear of the “duplicitous” heart becomes a wry acceptance of its quirks (“you’ve shoved me this far, / old pump, and we’re hooked / together like conspirators”), along with the fright of the emptiness of words (as, at the end of the “Five poems for Grandmothers”, “I make this charm / from nothing but paper; which is good/ for exactly nothing”), become the assertion of the claim of words upon the world, and the metaphor of twins and duplicity is nothing but the metonymy of woman’s experience transmitted through motherhood (“a long thread of red blood, not yet broken”) and of her kinship with the land.[12]

                Two voices

took turns using my eyes:

one had manners,

painted in watercolours,

used hushed tones when speaking…

The other voice

had other knowledge:

that men sweat

always and drink often,

that pigs are pigs

but must be eaten

anyway, that unborn babies

fester like wounds in the body,

that there is nothing to be done

about mosquitoes;

one saw through my

bleared and gradually

bleaching eyes, red leaves,

the rituals of seasons and rivers

the other found a dead dog

jubilant with maggots

half-buried among the sweet peas.

                                                            (“The double voice”[13])

 

The implication of juxtaposing “jubilant” with “maggots” and “babies” with “mosquitoes” is lucid and non-apologetic. Atwood neither judges herself nor apologizes, but almost flaunts the image of the double self, freeing herself and maybe all of us. Her capacity to name the maladies takes her poetry from its early passive hostility to involvement, movement, and finally identity.

Atwood takes a sidelong glance at the world from within the dark oval on the cover of Selected Poems[14]. She looks exactly as we might have pictured her: intelligent, forbearing, but, most of all, vulnerable. Hers is a face in a locket. The eyes won’t look directly at you, but they see. The mouth almost smiles, is almost sad, almost hard…a portrait of contradictions that only an enlightened soul could understand, sympathetically, in a freaking sound of emotions, raising up to the head and making the impossible finally possible, and transforming the indecipherable way of saying into something stronger and as ever real, planting a flag by the simple use of words, punctuations, and suspense[15]. 

In this collection of poems, Atwood questions what is lost by becoming part of a pair. Siamese twins often share body parts, organs that neither twin could live without. She’s reluctant to lose herself in another person, as evident in “Two Miles Away”:

Night rises from their bodies

and spreads over the hills

musty, smelling of thunder;

the air around their heads

thickens with ancestors.

 

Atwood portrays an interest in the self versus relationship, whether that relationship is to a lover, a daughter, or nature. In “Two miles away,” the author imagines a place away from home, which creates a distance from normal life, that is described as “the land of hope/fulfilled”, a place where questionable situations end positively.

Although the imagined place is a “desert”- a landscape which requires some kind of knowledge and skill to survive- there is some spiritual cleansing to be found. Atwood, aware of her surroundings, understands that she cannot successfully get through the desert alone, but she needs a partner for survival. This poem takes place at night, and the land smells of thunder, a promise of rain. Rainstorms are regenerative and, in the desert, they represent the link between the barren landscape and life.

Therefore, she perceives everything as an agent for connections and creates relationships by tying partners together in the world around her, such as ‘the hammock '[16], which “weaves one tree to another”. Instead of the trees serving the hammock, the author sees this last serving the trees by bringing them together, creating a partnership between two entities. Then, she notices the ‘sandbox in moonlight’ and ‘the green shovel’ within it. Similarly to the two trees and the hammock, the sandbox would be meaningless without a place to dig in. Atwood conceives everything as a liaison, and she deduces how mutual dependence is what keeps the world alive.

The author is not sure if she can envision herself in such a dependent relationship. She questions, “Is this where I want to be,/is this who I want to be with” because she’s unsure if she wants to continue proceeding in a relationship. Her fears of becoming “half of a pair/half of a custom” show her ruminating on the concept of losing herself in a binding relationship, as, along with a partner, she would no longer be whole. The custom of giving herself over to another to create something new, like the hammock and the trees, leaves her with the inability to be whole on her own.

Atwood would become, in a sense, a Siamese twin, so that her life would be dependent on the life of another human. The author considers all possibilities within the realm of her existence, instead of settling for what has been provided to her. Though being aware of the softness of a ‘nose against neck’ and ‘knee thrown/over the soft groin’, she cannot give herself completely over to the custom, but she ‘dreams of separation’, highlighting the dichotomous nature of everything.

The notion of dreaming drives the poems in this collection: in the title poem, Atwood’s dreams are ‘of freedom, a hunger/for verbs, a song/which rises liquid and effortless’. The author likens freedom to ‘a hunger/of verbs’, a metaphor that shows a deeper appreciation not only for the action, but also for language. The action of the verbs is not as important as the words used to symbolize it; the words create ‘a song/which rises liquid and effortless’. Atwood believes the hunger she feels is natural, and it rises as easily as a ‘double/gliding beside [her]’. She completely discloses her obsession with the nature of duality. She explains that there are two selves: a self and a double, that, perhaps, ventures away from the self, as in a dream, and lives the life the individual creates.

Atwood explores yet another duality of human nature in naming ‘our other dream to be mute’. According to the title poem, we all dream of silence, of an inability to voice our emotions. Atwood, aware of her duplicity, investigates how simple life could be without the capability to be self-aware. However, this dream of silence will never be realized, at least for the speaker of these poems, who, by undertaking opposing viewpoints, creates a constant dialogue where the speaker is always in conversation with herself.

Atwood realizes that her dreams ‘are not bargains’: we humans can’t trade our dreams for comprehension or singularity in our emotions: ‘Often [our dreams] settle nothing’ because they are not equal to any currency of understanding. The dialogue is a symbol of survival, of life, and without conversation, no discoveries can be made.

‘You begin’, the final poem of this collection, is presented in second-person, a craft choice most poets would shy away from. In fact, writing in third-person removes agency from the speaker and directly addresses the reader. In this poem, it’s set out, ‘this is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world’. By pointing out what is tangible, what can be seen, felt, and heard, the author is letting go of her uncertainty and turning to things that cannot be or be wrongly interpreted.

Moreover, Atwood directs the reader’s attention to the outside world. She writes down that ‘outside the window is the rain, green/because it’s summer’. This line harkens back to the desert in the previously cited ‘Two Miles Away’, where a rainstorm approaches the barren land. Now, at the end of the collection, the rain, the fruition of life, has come (the world is green “because it is summer”). Beyond the window there is the world, ‘which is round’. The author brings our attention to the simple facts that we take for granted. She understands that things are sometimes different from what they appear: the same world is fuller/and more difficult to learn than I have said”. This line is a plea for the reader to see beyond the obvious, to imagine beyond binary thinking.

The obsession with duality becomes an understanding of the circumspective nature of the world, that not only is round but it’s ‘not flat’, unfolding the meaning that ‘it begins, it has an end’ and that it ‘is what you will / come back to’. Using sparse language and short line length, Atwood creates a voice that examines the nature of the world, being the dialogue with the self and the world necessary if we are to understand this latter, whose duality surpasses black and white, extending itself to an unrealizable spectrum of shades. In fact, there are ‘more colours/ that we can see’. She urges the reader to consider all the possibilities that may not be obvious at first, both in the outside world and within the realm of the self. The author continues to assume the role of a teacher by explaining to the reader that ‘once you have learned these words/you will learn that there are more/ worlds that you can ever learn’, by completing, in this way, the narrative arc of Two Headed Poems, and acknowledging that she has grown, as, how it’s said at the beginning of the book, she didn’t know how much anyone can learn everything.

The poems, in this recollection, constantly depend on one another to survive in the world of dualities. Like the poems, people must not only depend on one another, but also be depended upon.

In tone, the narration is at once coolly documentary and hotly magically maternal: the narrator’s stark details make the human side of the event even more emphatic, much like T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”. This is the rendering of the momentous and inhuman occasion juxtaposed with the bare, earth-smelling bones of human grief.

Furthermore, scrolling down through the scale of questions, it’s been suggested that her way of working by the use of different “voices” in her poetry evokes a somewhat different “personality,” and she has always readily affirmed to get a totally different one. Through readers and critics make connections because the same name appears on those different forms, she bets that she could invent a pseudonym for a reviewer and that no one would guess it was her.

For Atwood, poetry is the most joyful form of writing, and she doesn’t like being in the position of pontificating about the truth. As usual for North Americans, more than for English people, she has often been mistakenly misunderstood because of her use of the first-person form, and she was interpreted as an autobiographical author. She rebutted that the central character of her writing was not her. Furthermore, she added that she found it necessary, in order to write about a place, to have actually been there. She can invent characters, but she’s absolutely dependent on the details of the material world to make a space for them to move around in. From this perspective, duality could be enlarged in the analysis of the macrocosm, seen through the lens of a sharp and careful humanistic outline of the realm of the psyche. Sounding out the origins of the world itself, she undertakes a relentless soul-searching to understand where the world will go and the fate of mankind.

In ‘Margaret Atwood’s humor’, Marta Dvorak depicts Atwood’s main postmodern techniques and textual practices, using a Bakthinian approach, also owing much to Linda Hutcheon. Dvorak traces the prominence of the satiric pulse in the writer’s multi-generic work. The carnivalesque drive takes on different strategies, among which Dvorak describes with precision the presence of multivoicedness and orality, the strong dialogue that characterises much of Atwood’s output, and her intertextual and parodic games. Atwood’s whole palette of comicity, from benevolent irony to ridicule and absurd via more aggressive parody and satire, is disclosed in all her writings. Branko Gorjup’s ‘Margaret Atwood’s poetry and poetics’ (130-44) tackles the difficult task of widely describing over thirty years of poetic output, so far published in eleven collections. The essay describes them in chronological order, briefly stopping in some of Atwood’s most celebrated poems, like ‘This is a Photograph of Me’ or the ‘Circe/Mud Poems’, and her long-established critical notion of dualities and metamorphosis in her poetics. Reingard M. Nischik’s ‘Margaret Atwood’s short stories and shorter fictions’ (145-60) faces another difficult common topic in the various narrative strategies: their open-endedness and their Canadianness,,to which is to be underlined a postmodern rendering of the Baudelairean prose poem[17].

Neology is an outstanding feature to be analyzed in Atwood’s texts that portray worlds which are mimetic to the reader’s world. In these texts, we are likely to find new characters, new places, and a host of new objects. Concerning neologisms and nonce formations, there is general agreement among linguists as to the difference between the terms, as well as to the fact that both types of coinages are linked by a process of progression or development that encompasses institutionalization, i.e. the integration of an item into the lexical stock of a language, which goes hand in hand with its listing in reference dictionaries.

Neologisms are words that represent an advanced state of ad-hoc formation in terms of higher frequency, tentative familiarity among the speakers of the language community, and stronger context-independence. Also, they seem to be coined to refer to new objects, events or ideas. By contrast, nonce formations are context-dependent, not coined for permanence, not stored in the lexicon, non-institutionalized, and only with repeated occurrences in different contexts may we begin to consider them neologisms. Kerremans rightly qualifies his description of neologisms by adding that they are «form-meaning» pairings (lexical units) that have been manifested in use. Thus are no longer nonce-formations, but have not yet occurred frequently and are not widespread enough in a given period to have become part of the lexicon of the speech community and the majority of its members. In this way, she takes into account the fact that, when a neologism is fully institutionalized, it is technically no longer a neologism. Adopting a Saussurean perspective, Kerremans considers form-meaning pairings and describes as neologisms combinations of a new form and a new meaning, a new form and an existing meaning, and an old form and a new meaning, the last combination being «new to the speakers and therefore a neologism». This classification is actually based on Tournier’s proposal of macro-mechanisms by means of which new words are coined in English. These processes comprise the coinage of «morpho-semantic», «morphological» and «semantic» neologisms. Mattiello notes that some coinages are borderline cases between «nonce formation and true neologisms», and she mentions ad-hoc formations occurring in poetic language as examples. Even though these items are attested «only once» and «not recorded in lexicographic works», they belong to the «literary heritage of a language», and they may even be «reused» by other authors using «poetic licence».

As regards neosemy, Munat describes neosemes as «new meanings attributed to already existing words», and Kerremans talks about semantic changes (an existing form with a new meaning) as a type of neologisms.  Along similar lines, Tournier and Lipka agree that semantic neologisms can be coined by means of metaphor (semantic transfer based on similarity) and metonymy (semantic transfer based on contiguity).

When decoding neologisms, nonce forms or neosemes, the readers may not grasp the exact meaning, but «they are familiar with the word-formation process by means of which the word has been assembled and can infer general semantic characteristics from this process. Besides, the writer will aid the interpretation of the coinage in various ways, i.e., by assuring morphological transparency or by resorting to a supportive context. The process of context-dependent selection is also noted by Cruse and is of particular importance in the interpretation of neosemes.

It must be considered that, from the point of view of the reader, Atwood’s new coinages could be regarded as nonce forms: they can only be interpreted in the light of the context of the novel and they do not occur outside that context, they are not stored in the lexicon and they are not institutionalized by their presence in reference works. However, they can also be regarded as borderline cases how explained by Mattiello: they deserve attention because they belong to the literary heritage of a language and they can be used again by other authors. These items turn out to be actual neologisms: they are created to refer to new objects, events or ideas, they are frequently used, and the speech community is familiar with them. Concerning neosemes, and following Kerremans, they will be regarded as a type of neologisms in which an already existing form is paired with a new meaning.

Lastly, a few lines should be devoted to the difference between creativity and productivity concerning the lexicon. When analysing morphological productivity, Bauer suggests treating productivity and creativity as hyponyms of innovation, and distinguishing them by means of

rule-governedness: productivity is rule-governed whereas creativity is non-productive, unpredictable and rule-changing. He eventually puts forward that both productivity and creativity could be regarded as prototypical categories along a cline, with clear cases at either end but «no valid way of drawing a clear distinction between what is creative and what is productive». In her discussion on lexical productivity and creativity, Munat draws on Bauer’s work and concludes that creative coinages «change the rules» while productive coinages «exploit the rules». Keeping this distinction in mind, the morphological coinages analysed here are basically the result of productivity, since they are the rule-governed outcome of current word-formation devices.

Formulaic expressions are, instead, semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices» and «must be understood holistically. In her study on formulaic patterns as a means of lexical expansion, Filatkina suggests that «in the lexicon of a given language, preconstructed conventionalised items seem to be as productive as free word combinations». Although formulaic language is described as being basically fixed, it is quite a multifarious phenomenon, as shown by Schmitt and Carter: formulaic sequences can be long or short, or anything in between. They are commonly used for different purposes. These sequences can be totally fixed (Ladies and Gentlemen) or have a number of ‘slots’ which can be filled with appropriate words or strings of words. Schmitt lists the following functions of formulaic language in language use: «discourse organization», «precise information transfer», «functional use» and «social interaction». As for these last two, the functional use refers to «such (speech) acts as apologizing, making requests, giving directions, and complaining. These functions have conventionalized language attached to them». Concerning social interaction, Schmitt affirms that sometimes «social solidarity» may be the aim of a conversation. Therefore, «people rely on non-threatening phrases to keep the conversation flowing, including comments about the weather, agreeing with your interlocutor, or providing backchannels and positive feedback to another speaker». There are different reasons for coining previously non-existent words: as Kerremans notes, words formations occurs because «the correct word does not automatically spring to mind» or because «existing words are not adequate to capture a particular concept or message». Coinages also arise due to «humorous, stylistic or creative reasons». However, they commonly respond to pragmatic needs, since they «accurately name and refer to non-existing objects and ideas». Furthermore, the reasons for neology are often euphemistic (exerting subtle control and hiding inconvenient connotations), social (they enhance power relations and gender inequality), and ideological.[18]

Atwood's eighth book of poetry, Two-Headed Poems, published in 1978, is, as noted by the author, “not a debate/but a duet/with two deft singers”. Deaf singers because of a distinctive element: the openness from oneself to “the other”, that “has the same words that you don’t say and this scares us”.

Two-Headed Poem concerns the issue of being a Canadian neighbor to a world power whose corrupt values are expressed in this “duet”. Like the brilliantly conceived metaphor of the Siamese twins, described as “joined head to head, and still alive”…whose “heads speak sometimes singly, sometimes/together, sometimes alternately within a poem./ like all Siamese twins, they dream of separation.”, the fate of Canada and US is inevitably interconnected. In this poetry, in fact, are showcased moments where the voices of the two countries overlap and diverge. At times, it’s evident which one speaks, but not always, mainly because the two countries share a lot of common characteristics:

“ As for us, we are neighbors,/ we’re the folks whose taste/ in fences and pink iron lawn flamingos/ you don’t admire. All neighbours are barbarians, / that goes without saying,/ though you too have a trashcan.) We make too much noise,/ you know nothing about us, / you would like to move away. Come to our backyard, we say, friendly and envious, but you don’t come.”

For this purpose, it must be stressed another duality: the significance of emotional attachment and conflicting neighbourhood, as historically shown by many psychologists in the study of human relationships.  

Atwood strives to find a common ground:

As for us, we're neighbors,

we're the folks whose taste

in fences and pink iron lawn flamingos

you don't admire.

 

(All neighbors are barbarians,

that goes without saying,

though you too have a trashcan.)

 

We make too much noise,

you know nothing about us,

you would like us to move away.

 

Come to our backyard, we say,

friendly and envious,

but you don't come.

 

Instead your quarrel

among yourselves, discussing

genealogies and the mortgage,

while the smoke from our tireless barbecues

blacken the roses[19].

 

All this, opening at the same time, to the notion and meaning of being a foreigner, -“Our leader/ is a man of water/ with a tinfoil skin. He has two voices,/ therefore two heads, fours eyes, (see the metaphor of the “prism” and the role of the “mirrors”)/two sets of genitals, eight/ arms and legs and forty/toes and fingers./ Our leader is a spider, / he traps words. / they shrivel in his mouth, /he leaves the skins. /Most leaders speak/ for themselves, then/ for the people./Who does ourleader speak for?/How can you use two languages/and mean what you say in both?/No wonder our leader skuttles/sideways, melts in hot weather,/ corrodes in the sea, reflects/light like a mirror,/splits our faces, our wishes/is bitter.”  - and, consequently, the fickle balance between the previous cited sense of attachment and the self.

Is it so wrong a bond of close relationship and this sense of attachment? This should be the final outcome that Atwood longs for, as demonstrated in all her writing career. It should never be, by respecting the right boundary and the need of a reciprocal space, that’s to be oneself, as, unfortunately, if you don’t exist there could never be a room for coexistence and team-playing.

“If I were a foreigner as you say, /instead of your second head,/ you would be more polite./ Foreigner are not there:/ they pass and repass through the air/ like angels, invisible/ except for their cameras, and the rustle/ of their strange fragrance/ but we are not foreigners/ to each other, we are the pressure/ on the inside of the skull, the struggle/among the rocks for more room,/ the shove and giveway, the grudging love,/the old hatreds. / Why fear the knife/ that could sever us, unless/ it could cut not skin but brain?"

Soon after what she reckons about the foreigners’ language:

“You can’t live here without breathing / someone else’s air,/ air that has been used to shape / these hidden words that are not yours./ This word was shut / in the mouth of a small man / choked off by the rope and gold/ red drumroll./ This word was deported. /This word was guttural, / buried wrapped in a leather throat/ wrapped in a wolfskin./ This word lies/ at the bottom of a lake/ with a coral bead and a kettle./ This word was scrawny, / denied itself from year/ to year, ate potatoes, / got drunk when possible. / This word died of bad weather. Nothing stays under/ forever, everyone/ wants to fly, whose language/ is this anyway?/ This words are yours,/ through you never said them,/ you never heard them, history/ breeds death but if you kill/ it you kill yourself. What is the traitor?”

 

Another sticking point of these poems is the role of the leaders and their use of language and she wonders if it would be better to talk about US or U.S. and if it’s really implemented the constitutional preamble proclaiming the celebre ‘ We, the people’?

It wasn't you crippled rhythm

I could not forgive, or your dark red

skinless head of a vulture

 

but the things you hid:

five words and my lost

gold ring, the fine blue cup

you said was broken,

that stack of faces, gray

and folded, you claimed

we'd both forgotten,

the other hearts you ate,

and all that discarded time you hid

from me, saying it never happened.

 

There was that, and the way

you would not be captured,

sly featherless bird, fat raptor

singing your raucous punctured song

with your talons and your greedy eye

lurking high in the molten sunset

sky behind my left cloth breast

to pounce on strangers.

 

How many times have I told you:

the civilized world is a zoo,

not a jungle, stay in your cage.

And then the shouts

of blood, the rage as you threw yourself

against my ribs.

 

As for me, I would have strangled you

gladly with both hands,

squeezed you closed, also

your yelps of joy.

Life goes more smoothly without a heart,

without that flyblown lion, magpie, cannibal

eagle, scorpion with its metallic tricks

of hate, that vulgar magic,

that organ the size and color

of a scalded rat,

That singed phoenix.

 

But you've shoved me this far,

old pump, and we're hooked

together like conspirators, which

we are, and just as distrustful.

We know that, barring accidents,

one of us will finally

betray the other, when that happens,

it's me for the urn, you for the jar.

Until then, it's an uneasy truce,

and honor between criminals.[20]

 

In all her poems are essential themes such as invasion, displacement, evolution, and reversion. The self, in fact, is constantly split in its attitude to the forms and spaces it inhabits: spaces in time become forms and forms become spaces, as demonstrated by the Canadian’s encounter with landscape and with the past, preserved in part by nature, that is to say, with its pioneer ancestors, with native people and with his own primordiality. We can also note its pertinence with the current re-definition of femininity, and behind the feminine and the Canadian, the individual.

Atwood's spaces are rooms, houses, even human bodies. How these spaces were created, inhabited, and sometimes abandoned is recorded in the journals and letters of the pioneers, which provide an enlightened background to her poetry. They always concern some kind of journey: the journals and guide are the archetypal Canadian literary forms and function in the Canadian literary imagination.

In Atwood’s poetry are recurrent reflective surfaces (mirrors, eyes, glass, photographs) that rarely allow one to penetrate behind or below. In “Tricks with Mirrors”, for example, the loved one is forever trapped behind the narcissistic reflection of the lover. The subjects in “This is a photograph of me” and “Girls and Horse,1928” are similarly trapped behind the photograph, which is a sheer surface representation of an instant. They are part of a solid world only in the sense of being dead and no longer selves. The solidity of unstructured space is usually represented in Atwood’s poetry, befitting the Canadian landscape, as green. Susanna Moodie is “crept in/upon by green” in “Departure from the Bush”; water is a “green violence” in “River”; a “green vision” invades the progressively insane pioneer; and those charting the land in “The surveyors” find themselves “changed/by the gradual pressures of endless/green on eyes”. We can’t inhabit this green unstructured space even if we discover it: the most we can do, and the most that Atwood and other pioneers do, is to wrest a living-space from the wilderness. Otherwise, we become an undistinguishable part of the landscape, retreat to the animal and primitive recesses of our being. What this means emotionally and sexually is that we can’t gratify our desires fully, truly inhabit the other person.

Her journeys go back, instead of forward, in recognition of the fact that metamorphosis is not just spatial but temporal, because these metamorphoses can be replayed by vestigiality, by re-enactment, by dream, by racial memory that is imagination. We can only be one with the past. The traumatic feeling of being cut off from it is assuaged by this, above all, by the life-forms and culture-forms that have long since vacated their temporal substance but can be inhabited by a protean poetic imagination.

At this point and on this issue, one can refer to another of Atwood's masterpieces that presents several analogies with “Two Headed Pomes”: Surfacing, a poetic novel focused on a woman's spiritual quest as its protagonist looks for redemption. Its powerful religious vision deserves special attention of feminist critics, both in religion and literature.

Surfacing was to be a ghost story, set in the haunting landscape of northwestern Quebec and it was also familiar with stories of people going mad in the woods, written while Atwood was working on poems called Poems for Voices, published in 1970.

The protagonist of this novel under examination is an unnamed, unsuccessful commercial artist in “the city” (Toronto), who left her isolated in a rural background and family nine years earlier and entered into an empty marriage. Following an emotion-numbing abortion and divorce, she returns to her “home territory” with three companions – Anna, Anna’s puerile husband David, and Joe, David’s friend and the narrator’s lover. The object of the narrator’s return is to find her father, a voluntary recluse reported missing by one of the few people who kept in contact with him in his isolated lake preserve in the backwoods of Quebec[21].

Because certain features of Atwood’s protagonist's vision come from her experience as a twentieth-century woman, the interpretation of Surfacing as a spiritual quest leads to distinguishing between the spiritual and social fields. The social quest is a search for self in which the protagonist begins in alienation and seeks integration into a human community where she develops herself more fully, trying to discover or create a different sort of society.

The distinction between spiritual and social quests underlines this important dilemma of feminist criticism. If feminism is primarily defined in social terms, this novel would have to be conceived as proto-feminist or transitional. 

The spiritual quest of the protagonist begins with a return to the Canadian wilderness where she lived as a child, in search of her missing father, who is presumed dead. The external detective story of the narrator-protagonist's manhunt is paralleled by an internal search to discover how she lost the ability to feel, while the readers struggle to make sense of the inconsistencies in her story about her marriage, husband, and child. The unravelling of her father’s mystery brings her to the powers which enlighten her as they had possibly enlightened him, but the unfolding of her own mystery is the key to the redemption she seeks. The two mysteries intersect when she recognizes “it was no longer his death but my own that concerned me”.  First, like her three friends, she’s completely cut off from her past. Second, she has lost the ability to experience normal feelings. She recalls that her current manfriend Joe was impressed by her coolness the first time they made love, but she found her behaviour unremarkable because she didn’t feel anything. She’s tortured by Joe’s demand whether she loves him, because she doesn’t believe this word has any meaning. The protagonist's alienation from her feelings is reflected in her dispassionate voice: everything is seen, nothing is felt.

The reader is also alerted by her record of how she copes with pain: “I bite down hard into the cone and I can’t feel anything for a minute but the knife-hard pain up the side of my face. Anesthesia, that’s one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.”  The protagonist's inability to feel is paralleled by an inability to act. Her selective vision holds fast to the illusion that she’s helpless and “they” do things to her. Angry over the loss of her parents, she accuses them of having hurt her. 

Always conscious of how she might be hurt, she remains oblivious to her power to hurt others. As the reader later discovers, she avoids confronting the centre of her pain, the place where she lost the ability to feel and to act – her betrayal by the first man she loved. Unable to come to terms with his violation of herself and of her body, she focuses her attention on the violation of the Canadian wilderness by the men she calls “Americans”. The conflict between technology and nature, Americans in powerboats and Canadian in canoes, refracts the protagonist’s pain: she experiences herself as the wilderness violated by nameless and destructive men. Her illusion that this last has no power to recover from American violation prevents her from realizing her power to overcome this frustration. Though the wilderness initially deflects her vision, in the end, it will provide the key, the revelation, which releases her power. At first, she seeks her lost power in the wrong places. Realizing that she lost her ability to feel somewhere in the past, she imagines that a simple return to childhood would have provided the answer for her. Searching through old scrapbooks kept by her mother, she discovers that she looked normal in all the pictures, but she didn’t find any clues there. She could find them, instead, in her drawings from her childhood or in surfaces from the garden. She remembers that once she thought a certain purple bean on a high pole was a sort of power. She says she’s glad the bean didn’t give it to her because “if I turned out like the others with power, I would have been evil”. Her association of power with evil and her dissociation of herself from both reserve a typical female delusion of interest, which conceals her complicity in evil and feeds her false belief that she can do nothing but witness her victimization. In order to regain her power, the protagonist must realize that she doesn’t live in a world where only others have power or do evil.

On the return track, the heron mediates the knowledge the protagonist needs to escape her passive scene of victimization, the delusion of her childhood innocence. For her, the heron is a sacred object, a mediator like Christ to the Christians. Reflecting on it again, she realizes that her passivity is not innocence, and memories of her active participation in acts of cruelty, equally senseless, surface in her as she remembers how she and her brother used to throw the “bad kind” of leeches into the fire.  Though she feels trapped, recognition of her guilt and responsibility is a step toward claiming her power to refuse to be a victim.

With the path to redemption through childhood closed, the protagonist decides the clue to her redemption lies in deciphering her father’s final obsession, a series of unintelligible drawings or marks on maps. At first, she fears he had gone mad, but then she discovers he was copying Indian paintings and marking their locations on maps. She goes in search of the paintings to verify his sanity and her own. Deciding that one painting is submerged underwater, she dives deep into the lake to look for it. Instead of a painting, she discovers an image from her past: “it was there but it wasn’t a painting, it wasn’t on the rock. It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead”. The image of her dead father forces her to acknowledge both his sanity and his death. With the mystery of her father’s death solved, the image becomes a clue to her own mystery and death. The open eyes recall the bizarre image of her brother’s drowning, but with a shock, she recognizes, “it wasn’t ever my brother I’d been remembering”. The things approaching become the image of her aborted fetus “drowned in air”. This revelation unlocks the mystery of the confusing stories of the lover who told her to have an abortion. The protagonist sees the fetus as a living thing, not yet a child, but an animal deserving protection like the heron. “He said it wasn’t a person, only an animal; I should have seen that he was no different, it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let them catch it”. Her abortion is nothing but a crime as the murder of the heron, but her guilt is more direct, because the creature was in her body. In such a way, she realizes why she hid her past in false memories. “It was all real enough, it was reality enough forever, I couldn’t accept it, that mutilation, ruin I’d made, I needed a different version”. She understands that the anesthesia of false memory has no escape, but rather the beginning of a fatal disease. The protagonist sees this new self-knowledge for what it is: a revelation from great powers. “These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten, were the only ones who had never given me anything I needed…the Indians did not own salvation but they had once known where it lived”.

In the presence of great powers, she feels the need to worship, to give a thank offering, so she places her sweatshirt on a ledge for the gods whose names she doesn’t know but whose power she has felt.

She correctly understands that her redemption derives from facing the truth and accepting the pain. Even more, the feminist critics note that the protagonist is divorcing herself from the interpretation men use to justify their crimes. She no longer believes killing can be justified, and she rejects her brother’s distinction between good leeches, which deserve to live, and bad leeches, which deserve to die. She rejects her lover’s distinction between good or legitimate fetuses, and bad or illegitimate fetuses, which must be killed. The feminist critic notes that the protagonist is allowing her own feelings, not male morality.

The revelations which come to the protagonist through the heron and the underwater image of death provide her with the knowledge that unlocks her past, but she finds the revelation incomplete. She believes a gift from her mother must complement her father’s gift. Searching again for something out of the ordinary to provide guidance, she senses power in one of the scrapbooks. It opens to her mother’s gift: a picture she had drawn as a child of “a woman with a round moon stomach: baby sitting up inside her gazing out”. That night, she conceives a child by Joe on damp leaves with the moon on her left. In a heightened state of awareness, she feels “my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been imprisoned for so long…it buds, it sends out fronds”. As she conceives, the protagonist resembles the virgin Mother goddesses of old times: at one with her sexual power, she is complete in herself, and the man is incidental. The protagonist’s extraordinary insight and awareness of her power alienate her from her friends. She realizes that if she wishes to pursue the revelations, she must choose the isolation of the visionary quest. Lying alone at the bottom of her canoe, she has a vision of the universe's great powers: the goats who have guided her journey: “Through the trees the sun glances; the swamp around me smoulders, energy of decay turning to growth, green fire. I remember the heron; by now it will be insects, frogs, fish, other herons”. The great powers of the universe transform the swamp; they transform the heron from death to life. This is the meaning of the incredible words she had spoken earlier, “nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive”.

The protagonist recognizes her body as both a revelation and an incarnation of these great powers of life and death through the female experience of the transformations of parts of her body into plant, animal, and infant.

 

“My body also changes, the creature in me, plant-animal, sends out filaments in me; I ferry it secure between death and life, I multiply.”

 

 The protagonist’s vision of this transformative energy is reflected in her characteristic perception of fluidity of the boundaries between objects, plants, animals, and humans. After her vision, she realizes that she can approach her parents, and perhaps the gods themselves, if she follows the path she has undertaken. “The gods, their likenesses; to see them in their true shape is fatal. While you are a woman, but after the transformation they can be reached”. Her transformation is frightening. Though she knows it’s “beyond any rational point of view”, it’s neither mad nor illogical.

She ritually breaks her connections to the human world, burning or purifying clothing, books, and everything in the cabin. She’s purified and transformed by immersion in the lake. Like the fetus in her womb, she changes in water. “The earth rotates, holding my body down as it holds the moon; the sun pounds in the sky, red flames pulsing from it, searing away the wrong form that encases me”. The powers guide her away from the garden, the house, into the woods. She becomes wild. She’s an animal. Having transformed, she experiences mystical identification with all forms of life, and she becomes the transformative energy: “I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning…I’m not an animal or a tree, I’m the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow”. Later, she sees a vision of her mother feeding the birds; then her mother disappears, birds remain: she’s translated. The next day, she sees what her father has become, “it gazes at me with its yellow eyes, wolf’s eyes, depthless but lambent as the eyes of animals seen at night in the car headlights”. Complete in itself, the vision neither approves nor disapproves of her. The protagonist is terrified as she realizes that in the state of transformation, individual human identity has no meaning. Having given her a vision of their great power, the gods retreat into “the earth, the air, the water, wherever they were when I summoned them”. The protagonist returns to the cabin and opens a can of beans, symbolizing her coming back to modern human life.

“Awakening” or “surfacing” seem to be better metaphors for describing her spiritual experience. A second stage of the female quest is moving from victimhood to power. The female nature of the religious experience represented in Surfacing is also reflected in all the forms and the content of the spiritual vision. The transformative energy of life to death and death to life, which is the great power in Surfacing, and which is the great power worshipped by the Canadian Indians of the area where she sets the novel, is celebrated in myths and symbols. The traditional values derived from body and nature are identified primarily with women, both because of women’s close relation to them, especially in their traditional roles of childbearing and nurturing of the young, and because the culture-created males identify the traditional values their culture has transcended with the other, woman. This development translates the paradox that the surfacing of female values in alienated urban cultures may also be a return to some of the values of the traditional tribal or less urbanized civilizations.

Women experience close contact with nature because of the biological events of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, while men tend to lose it in urbanized cultures. The form in which Atwood’s protagonist sounds out the transformative powers of nature could be defined as a transpersonal manner of mystical identification, exploring unity with a nonpersonal energy. According to psychological theories, the primary form of knowing for females is by participation and identification. Women don’t radically differentiate self and other or develop a strong sense of individual personal identity as men do, and, in religious terms, it could be expected a participation and union of a nonpersonal core of the self with the whole.

Tribal and ancient peoples who worshipped natural powers, such as those represented in Surfacing, knew that the close connection of life and death in the hunting and agriculture cycles and in the birth were a reflection of their interpretation in all natural processes.

In Christianity, the transformative mysteries of birth and the earth were spiritualized. While tribal and ancient peoples knew the hunted or domesticated animal and the wild plant or crop as sacred sacrifices of human life, Christianity limited the understanding of sacrificial death to the sins of humankind.

Atwood suggested a direction for the transformation of modern religious consciousness, which might lead to a de-spiritualization of Western religious traditions, or to the development of new female-centred religious forms. Therefore, a recognition of the inevitability of death would be a reminder of the limitations of technological control, and it would provide a firm basis for the ecological ethic. Surfacing doesn’t fall into a sentimental naturism. The protagonist requires that some things must die so that others may live. The heron, symbol of integration with the environment, was seen in the process of killing a fish. Atwood’s novel's ethical vision doesn’t prohibit killing, but it restores a sense of worship, which recognizes that one sacrifices other beings to one’s need, but only if these sacrifices are truly necessary.

Women’s right to abortion has been a major issue in the feminist movement. In the novel, abortion is viewed as killing, and the protagonist feels guilt about having one. This book compares the fetus in the womb to an animal in a burrow, suggesting that the killing of a fetus is a crime to be compared with the killing of an animal.[22]

Surfacing synthesizes several topics that have always dominated her consciousness: the variety of language; the continuum between human and animal, human being and nature; the significance of one’s heritage, including not only personal ancestors but the gods and totemic figures of primitive cultures; the search for a location; a brutalization and victimization of love; drowning and surviving.   

The narrator is physically mutilated, amputated, frigid and paralysed. She feels herself “cut in two” by her past experiences, while “the other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal”. Like Dante in the Dark Wood before his spiritual journey, the narrator no longer knows the way.  Similarly, the narrator passes through hell and purgatory before reaching her destination, and the reader learns that hell is behind her and that the assimilation and acceptance of her previous suffering is the sacred path towards wholeness. As the second child of an English-speaking family in a Catholic and French-Canadian area, the protagonist had been exposed to a distorted alliance of religion and sex, both of which were viewed as obscene.

The narrator’s companions of her search for her father are symbolic extensions of her own personality. Her failure of maternity exacerbates her self-alienation. The flatness and one-dimensionality of her companions reflect her inability to relate to others and experience them on a more meaningful level. Later, as she gradually regains access to her deeper self, the others drop away, having served their purpose as escorts to the path, and she ultimately travels alone.

Submersion is one of the persisting images in Atwood’s writings, from Surfacing to The Circle Games, from The Journals of Susanna Moodie to Power Politics.

The themes and images, thus, acquire increasing poetic and mythic intensity in the middle and final sections of Surfacing.

She doesn’t find the rock drawings in the first trip: symbolically, this implies that she must penetrate the heart of darkness more deeply and alone.

On her second trip along the lake, without her companions, she reflects further on her ambivalent religious beliefs, attempting to sort out her present incomprehension:

 

Overhead a plane, so far up I could hardly hear it, threading the cities together with its trail of smoke; an X in the sky, unsacred crucifix. The shape of the heron flying above us the first evening we fished, legs and neck stretched, wings outspread, a blue-grey cross, and the other heron or was it the same one, hanging wrecked from the tree. Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; […]  the body worships with the blood and muscle but the thing in the knob head will not, wills not to, the head is greedy, it consumes but doesn’t give thanks.

 

After her effort to see the natural cycle of regeneration and redemption, she dives underwater in search of the rock drawings and, insofar as she immerses herself in her unconsciousness, she finds during her plunge that there is not the pictographs but the body of her father dead.

Whereas language has been the backbone to unlocking her past self, the narrator realizes she must transcend it to complete her quest, for “language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole”. Through this journey, Atwood describes the broader paradox of the writer, who uses language to signal what is ineffable, shifting to mythic images and suggesting the collective unconscious as proposed by Jung.

On the metaphysical level, the protagonist returns to the primeval knowledge of good and evil, when man was undifferentiated from god, unconscious of his separate and divided self. On the psychological level, establishing identification between both feminine (maternal, generative) and masculine (knowledge, wisdom) principles, she generates her own creative potentiality through rejoining the severed halves of her being. “The national mental illness” of Canada and illness itself is a metaphor of the human condition, and the only cure is a journey to self-discovery.

In Surfacing, the narrator has learned from the spirits that salvation and redemption are never complete; they must constantly be renewed in the present, and she also realizes she can refuse to be a victim or to play word games that in their falsification of reality, are a form of death[23].

In this poetic novel, Atwood's concern with the power of language on our relationship with nature, ourselves and other human beings is particularly trenchant. Surfacing couples the issue of language with the quest of self-knowledge. By her female protagonist, she identifies the search for wholeness with the rediscovery of the feminine, so long suppressed in Western consciousness. For the narrator of Surfacing, language has always been a problem: nameless in the novel and not given too much speech herself, she finds linguistic communication perplexing. Early in the narrative, she “discovered people could say words that would go into my ears meaning nothing”. Brought up in English-speaking near a French-speaking village in Quebec, she learns the terrifying likelihood of sound without scene and she’s equally puzzled to discover the arbitrary distinction language creates, which she deems neutral. Her linguistic innovations are tied to fantastic transfigurations, a sort of literary expressionism.

Unable to understand fully the way language can be separate from meaning, she remains vulnerable to such discrepancies. In Atwood’s thinking, Canadians and Americans, males and females, are, based on their conduct, identical – us and not them. Like the word neck, which divides the body from the head, “the language is wrong,” creating “the illusion” that two things are separate.[24]

While Surfacing has elicited a sizable body of scholarship dealing with the theme of self-discovery, the divided self and journey to the interior, nowhere can we focus on Atwood’s view of language, as she displays her profound distrust in this as a means of communication, proposing a non-verbal or meta-language as superior. She constructs this fiction by stripping away from her vocabulary all words that are expressive of emotion. She’s careful merely to state empirical facts: as she takes the reader along with her in her quest, she records with detachment all that she observes on the wayside. The book opens with a sentence which, on the surface, has all the detachment of a naturalist’s outlook:

 

 “I can believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading from the South, and I notice they have sea planes for hire”.

 

One of Atwood's ideas was that the conflict between the benevolent Wordsworthian idea of Nature – “Nature never did betray/the heart that loved her” – and the Darwininan one – “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, as Tennyson put it – was acted out in the fantasies she was studying through female figures who were, in part, Nature Goddesses[25]

Her search for her missing father also becomes a search for the lost gods of a tribe more ancient than either the French or the British. The Indians belong to the land, were autochthonous, in a way that none of the settlers could ever hope to be. Following the clues to the rock carvings, she confronts death in the unplumbed depths of the lake: “it was blurred, but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead”.  As she dives and dives again into the lake, she at last finds what she has come to find: the powers of the gods which resides with the dead, and the power which resides in the unconscious.

After having railed against the language and having destroyed its logic, after breaking its rules, she arrives at the possibility of a new language. With the realization that words can be invented, she wakes from death into a new life. Accepting responsibility to invent words could also mean accepting responsibility to create out of nothing an ideal by the power of imagination.

Therefore, Surfacing becomes an artful demonstration of the capacity inherent in language to both destroy external reality and to create a new reality, perhaps more valid and truthful to inner experience.[26]

Her priority is with the way that structure has contributed to the female self-image that nineteenth-century women writers have called “mirror madness”. On one hand, the structure of Surfacing conforms to fairy-tale morphology; on the other hand, it functions to subvert that form, as both morphology and imagery create the complex web of subtextual meaning.[27]  

Like the hero of the mythological quest, the narrator-protagonist must translate reality into the language of sanity. In keeping with this realization, she “surfaces”, she comes out as an actor on the stage, firmly believing that, according with what has been declared by Oscar Wild, Pirandello and Jim Morrison, donning a mask is the best way to profess the truth in a sort of experiential journey, going beyond the notions of pathos, death and mystery[28], choosing to return to Joe. Having recovered the capacity of love and faith, she has no one else with whom she can live out of her self-discovering, and, in conclusion, we can set out that this novel imaginatively extends the unity of theme and image of her previous work in order to achieve an original vision. Atwood brilliantly reveals through the structure of Surfacing how the process of myth, used in spinning out this ghost story, becomes a critical tool toward self-awareness, while at the same time the form of the novel also acts as a poetic meta-criticism of the mythic process[29].

Feelings of being marooned, beached, and stranded pervade Atwood’s poetry; wreckage and relics of relationships are strewn on her shores. Often, these feelings come from Atwood’s sense of being a woman in a man-dominated world. It is as if women have suddenly surfaced; forms, spaces, and roles are inescapable. In fact, form, as Bachelard said, is the habitat of life and identity[30].

However, examining the role of Margaret Atwood as a sharp poet of contemporary Canadian literature, her experience spanning across five decades, we must point out to a spiking interview with the critic Joyce Carol Oates[31]. As an answer to the question about her influence on the wide array of writers globally spread, and whether hers was an experiment of “music” poetry or “statement” poetry, she replied that Poe had a hold over her back in high school, when she began writing. In fact, she doesn’t conceive poetry as a “rational” activity but as an aural one. Her verses usually have a kick-start with appealing words or sentences because of their enchanting sound rather than their mere meaning, and a shaking movement or phrasing of a poem is fundamental to her, but, like many modern poets, she tends to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later on. In Atwood’s opinion, every poem has a texture of fizzy musicality which is as important as the argument. After a previous period of time in which she was concerned about the relationships between men and women, followed a phase in which she preferred to examine those among women themselves (grandmother, mother, daughter, sisters) and between cultures.

Two-Headed Poems reach a maturity that realizes the limitations of the self. Atwood begins to know and to insist on what she can hopelessly do or describe externally or in her interior world, as a melty-twisted-spring that doesn’t know who is or what she would be, maybe reaching out his expectations of an uncompromised, isolated, virgin of feelings, that he could ever imagine in his troubling head looking for peace or realize in his depictions in a mayhem of a surreal purity or something averaging more sacred than us, or nihilistically[pc1]  absent:, in outer space dwelling or inhabiting in this world or other imaginary ones.

The pioneers’ physical journey was also a psychic one, during which the haughty Old War assumption that the self existed independently of its chosen habitats was progressively broken down. In Atwood’s opinion, the pioneer journey is an extended metaphor for her own journey through the emotional landscape of everyday life. It can no longer be literal because, although Canadians still traverse a vast terrain, they cannot recapture the settlers’ imperious feeling that they had discovered the land. That Indians had pre-empted the settlers didn’t diminish that feeling (the Indians were not really people, and when deceased cannot qualify even as ghosts). The pioneer journey is metaphorically presented in “Journey to the Interior” from The Circle Games. The similarities Atwood notices at the opening of the poem are not between coastal and interior topography, but between the real Canadian landscape and that psychic one Atwood inhabits. The coast and the interior are, in fact, radically different and offer a variation on the distinction between outside and inside. The wilderness outside the clearing represented danger and unfamiliarity, and the clearing's safety represents the security of daily life and the interior, the unknown, where there’s a lack of reliable charts. Atwood’s poetry, in fact, is a path into the interior landscape between insight and hysteria. Her very poetic voice, slightly paranoid, suits her theme of the metaphorical and divided self.

By analyzing the troubled neighbour relationships between the U.S.A. and Canada that shake nowadays global economy, nothing but a projection of the self in the other in a game of ostracized assimilations, is hinted in Two-Headed Poems, in which the double edge of everything is marked and faced, and more broadly enlarged to the conflict occurring between Gaza and Israel, staunch  US ally, marked by continuous but unsuccessful diplomatic peaceful sit-downs, characteristic of the second Trump's mandate, the President that hasn't “said any promise” and that has lost his swagger, offering olive branches dodging the bullet of the beast of terror and the roughness of poverty and starvation perpetrated in name of heinous monotheistic ideologies that degrade any basic human rights, especially the conditions of women, towards a moral reasonable standard of financial and gender equality and prosperous democracies with an overlook on nowadays events, notwithstanding the volatile, toxic, and emotional wrecking  TV broadcasting fentanyl. It's crystal clear how religions fuelled up fire on wars, catastrophes, and destruction under the sun and choking sultriness of the Middle East, over the land of Mother Earth, smeared by blood and violence (Hamas still remains in Gaza and Lebanon), unbalancing fickle equilibria, putting into place the most fierce and diabolic injustices.

 All this is happening in the name of which worshipped God? For sure, this is  not an Indian Summer.[32] Does faith presume credibility? For this purpose, it could be interesting to make a distinction between the concepts of faith and faithfulness, but bombing and hoping could never be a strategy, and faith is always a hope.

The exacerbated hegemonic ambition of global dominance of Trump's “America first”, always going the extra mile, and his war of tariffs makes Atwood wonder what art could exist under Trump in a 2017 piece republished in her latest collection of non-fiction Burning Questions: Essays &Occasional Pieces 2004-2021[33] . ‘Of what use is art?’, she asks herself, reflecting on art, political agendas, economic pressures, due to her moral obligations vs. the risks of propagandistic opportunism. “It’s tricky telling creative people what to create or demanding that their art serve a high-minded agenda crafted by others”, arguing that it is instead art’s privilege to “create alternate worlds that offer both temporary escapes and moments of insight; to open windows in the given world that allow us to see outside it” and reminding us of the multiplicity of choices.

For Atwood, politics and art inherently belong together, not believing that “art is over here and politics is over there, that it’s not two boxes”, as she has pointed out in an interview. In her pioneering poetry collection Power Politics[34], she addresses the intertwining of the personal and the political: “Power is our environment. We live surrounded by it: it pervades everything we are and do, invisible and soundless, like air”. For decades, Atwood’s work has resonated as tales of and testaments to political, socio-economic, and (bio)technological concerns of contemporaneous times. Atwood has been vocal about politics, engaged as an environmental activist, and she is involved with the PEN association. Moreover, her writings have recently acquired not only a new international artistic impact that underlines the fusion of politics and aesthetics her work stands for, but her fictional work has spilled over into real-life politics, inspiring feminist activism in particular with her classic female dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale and the publication of her Booker Prize-winning The Testaments[35], a revisiting of The Handmaid’s Tale, that came along with a global fanfare, live readings, and a “Margaret Atwood Live” broadcast to cinemas around the world.

If literature is a socially symbolic act, then Atwood’s works are paradigmatic cases in point how writing has political and transformative potential beyond the limits of the page. The Handmaid’s Tale and its transmedial adaptations in particular has extended beyond its textual limits. The Handmaiden gowns, originally a symbol of female subservience in the oppressive Gilead system, have been repurposed to symbolize female agency, resistance, and protest against the curbing of women’s rights, particularly under Trump’s first presidency and its conservative backlash agenda. In 2019, in fact, the signature Handmaid uniform — (predominantly white) women dressed in red robes and white bonnets, a practice that has not gone unchallenged by activists—that marks fertile women as reproductive slaves in Atwood's dystopia has become a viral visual feminist symbol of collective resistance against female oppression — women have been globally marching against right wing gender politics, e.g. in Poland, Argentina, Israel, or Iran — capitalizing on the effective and entertaining visual message imagery.

From her early publications, including The Edible Woman, Power Politics, or Surfacing, to her most recent literary works up to date, the handmaid outfits were, for instance, banned from the Women’s March for Abortion Rights in Washington, D.C., in 2021, because these risked obliterating historical and present oppressions of reproductive rights control, erasing the fact that Black women, undocumented women, incarcerated women, poor women and disabled women have always had their reproduction freedom controlled in this country.

Atwood’s most popular dystopian or speculative fictions, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, and the MaddAddam trilogy, stress the political power of storytelling, its ustopian capacity, its use of language and power, and its innate hope for a future dialogue.

Probably the most striking example of the power of language in Atwood’s work is the patrilinear renaming of fertile women, the so-called handmaids, after the Commanders in whose house they live and whose children they are to bear in The Handmaid’s Tale. Each handmaid’s original name is obliterated along with her individuality, taking on her predecessor’s name, composed of the Commander’s name and the preposition “of.” Thus, the protagonist June — Offred or “Of Fred” — literally becomes part of Commander Fred’s household commodities. Language here becomes the “law of the Father” in a Lacanian sense. Similarly, “Praise Be” or “Blessed be the Fruit” or “Under His Eyes” are formulaic phrases, emptied of all meaning, in Gilead that have lost almost all communication potential. Their main function is to maintain the system of power that is in place and prevent individualized communication, a deprivation of liberty through language control in Orwell's sense.

Anyhow, language can also be a tool of resistance. Storytelling allows Offred to distrust words for their multiple meanings. Her secret tale witnesses Gilead’s system; her personal story becomes a political story of defiance that contests Gilead’s official patriarchal discourse. Offred’s very story, her playful, ambiguous use of words, her questioning of meanings and explorations of ambivalences contradict Gilead’s monolithic linguistic regime. Atwood’s politics of literature draw our attention to multiplicity, polyperspectives, doubling, multiple versions of reality, unreliability, and fallibility.

While The Testaments, as a complementary text, adds Aunt Lydia’s reflections on her ambivalent role of both officially upholding and privately working towards overthrowing the Gilead regime in her secret Ardua Hall Holograph Records, an analysis of fairy-tale elements in The Heart Goes Last underscores how intertextuality functions as both a strategy to explore the politics of literary form and a meta-commentary on the role of language and literature. Storytelling and art are never without an inherent agenda. Instead, all storytelling, all art, is informed by politics and vice versa.

Crispin Sartwell reminds us, however, that power and politics always have an “artpolitical” dimension that inevitably draws on and makes use of specific “aesthetic systems” and “multimedia artistic environments”. As he succinctly puts it, “[n]ot all art is political, but all politics is aesthetic” (1). This artpolitical dimension likewise defines Atwood’s Penelopiad and the politics of resistance. Like power, resistance always inheres in social interactions and relationships. The periods of childhood, marriage, and motherhood in Penelope’s life point us to the central social and spatial domains and “low” art media environments in which she stages her politics of resistance in the form of a “little story-making” namely such domestic spaces as the king’s marital bed chamber or the royal nursery. These private spaces are marked by their everyday use, on the one hand, and their sexual intimacy with Odysseus and the center of supreme state political rule, on the other hand. In contrast, the twelve slave girls occupy the lowest social rank and are relegated to marginal spaces associated with “dirt”. Finally, it must be noted how Penelope and the slave girls undercut ideals and conventions of beauty respectively, joining the scholarly discussion of Atwood’s postmodern deconstruction and revisionism of classical and sociocultural myths about women in The Penelopiad[36].

Coming back to the troubled relationship between Canada and the USA, faced in Two-Headed Poems, Atwood jots down as follows:

In the evenings the news seeps in

from foreign countries,

those places with unsafe water.

We listen to the war, the wars,

any old war.

After the recent elections and Trudeau's resignation, Canada is on the verge of a dramatic escalation of conflict with the USA, imposing heavy levies on its exports and menacing an incorporation and agglomeration of its territory, considered as an indispensable appendix of their territory.

For this purpose, it must be vetted the relation between God and money must be vetted, overcoming a sense of measure, of what is limited, numbered, and finite, trying to surpass any limits, fact that is at the origin of wars. Mother Earth is the contact with reality, which makes us put our feet on the ground, being money, depending on its right management, the source of many meaningless schizophrenic games of power. 

Could businessmen, well aware of their financial oversight, but often oblivious of the societal mechanisms, made up also of 'humanity', lead to a solution, to that 'continuous deal' to reach the peace or a fluid equilibrium, balancing the forces between static and dynamic, and between a yin and a yang that seem to rule out the whole world and the real existence of each of us? This matter appears to be a very arduous task nowadays, in Atwood's conclusions. Sometimes it looks so utopian and unrealistic without a common human effort against the will to possess – the land belongs to everyone – rather than the wish of building private islands for luxury purposes. In fact, perhaps, we need, at a certain point in our life, even a physical oasis in order to preserve, symbolizing, not only metaphorically, what is really precious inside of us. That is the main reason for withdrawal and isolation, partitions and watersheds, in a world that goes off the rails.

As a matter of fact, we could ponder the behaviour of a more and more common “Palla's cat-man”, a stepper cat-man that with its sinuosity has chosen to conform itself to the desertification of human values and unbalanced resources to survive.  He has chosen to live in poverty, in a richer wild hermitage, to detach himself from the gearing up of machines and technologies, perfect engines, that then without fail break down (and when a vase breaks, it is useless to put the pieces together….it will never be the same), from the wars of power, from the hegemony of money, always a limit that all of us long for, a sense of protection and safety, as all of us, evidently, unconsciously look for an uterus.

Maybe, this is not a Nietzschean nihilistic concept (“Human, All Too Human”?). He’s probably a sceptical, disenchanted, surrendered symbol of that part of humankind that has decided not to take part in and to slip away from this controversial system of official government and to take a step back from it to confine himself in a more rewarding solitude. Money and the oasis - after all, a mirror of the same reality - spirit of adaptation, transformation, metamorphosis – to discover the essence, the 'everything', made of earth and spirit. At the end of the day, the “road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom“[37], topic resumed several times by Huxley and even obsessively by another Jim Morrison, another visionary poetic icon, educated to revolt, that has made of “The doors” of perceptions his battle cry and founded his career and personal lifestyle[38], to better explain, to reach a real awareness is needed, pushing ourselves beyond the limits imposed by cautiousness and orthodoxy, to explore deeply our passions and experiences, the law of life, with its asperities and contradictions, 'Two-Headed Poems'. The Earth is nothing but all what God, life's procreator, has given to us, and money, at the end of the games, is only scraps of paper, as those that we write down.

 

At this standpoint, we should wonder ourselves what does really mean ‘thinking out-of-the-box’, and where it will lead us to believe in some kind of saviour, other than us, our healthy interrelations, and sense of cooperation, meaning working together at the same time.

Where does is ended up our sense of sharing and solidarity, that furthermore is common to all the spiritualist thinkings and animistic religions, that's to say to soil ourselves of some kind of “sin” and that must be purified, letting us drift away by the tide of competition, from which remain just chipping debris of trees that have whatsoever dip their own roots in some strange spring of life?

In the realm of the confrontation with the U.S.A., who smear Canadian roses[39], and whose identity comes from “down there”, Americans are often associated with “nouns”, generally speaking, in a hostile way and as impatient to act on their own.  Quoting a paragraph of Two-Headed Poems:

 

These candy hearts we sent you

in the mail, a whole

bouquets of hearts, large as a country,

 

these hearts, like yours,

hold snipers.

 

A tiny sniper, one in each heart,

curled like a maggot, pallid

homunculus, pinhead, glass/eyed fanatic,

waiting to be given life.

 

Soon the snipers will bloom

in the summer trees, they will eat

their needle holes through your windows[40].

 

 In this context, Atwood’s proud patriotism is portrayed by a strong depiction of the important role of Canada and what exists “under the veil of the bride”, other than an advocacy, especially in relation to her country, for the feminine element residing inside of each of us and for women's issues and rights:

 

Our flag has been silence,

Which was mistaken for no flag,

Which was mistaken for peace[41].

 

And she added:

 

Our hearts are flags now,

they wave at the end of each

machine we can stick them on.

Anyone can understand them.

 

They inspire pride,

they inspire slogans and tunes

you can dance to, they are redder than ever[42].

 

In this poem, Atwood is also concerned about language as well as about actions, the non-verbal gestures. One head “asks”, “Whose language/is this anyway?” The corruption of Canadian English stems from the passive nature of a people glad to be Americanized, to shut down “the family business” that was “too small anyway/to be, as they say, viable”.

Two-Headed Poems presents a poignant commentary on the hurdles of communication and identity in a world marked by social and geopolitical proximity in an epoch approaching globalization, leaving the reader with a sense of the futility in the pursuit of a harmonious dialogue between the two nations.[43]

About the language of the leader, we should ask ourselves if it’s a matter of war or words, or war of words. As she sets out:

 

Surely in your language

no one can sing, he said, one hand

in the small-change pocket.

 

That is the language for ordering

the slaughter and gutting of hogs, for

counting stacks of cans. Groceries

are all you are good for. Leave

the soul to us. Eat shit.

 

In these cages, barred crates,

feet nailed to the floor, soft

funnel down the throat,

we are forced with nouns, nouns,

till our tongues are sullen and rubbery.

We see this language always

and merely as a disease

of the mouth. Also

as the hospital that will cure us,

distasteful but necessary.

 

These words slow us, stumble

in us, numb us, who

can say even Open

the door, without these different

smiles, apologies?

 

Our dreams though

are of freedom, a hunger for verbs, a song

which rises liquid and effortless,

our double, gliding beside us

over all these rivers, borders,

over ice or clouds[44].

 

Atwood is a fearless witness[45], a distant but never so closely, heartily involved bystander of the martyrdom of nowadays so-called civilization, mass-shooting by the use of a mouth that she could never shut: the pen, a, maybe, old instrument that could never be silent. It can bloody kill to death on the sly, you can consider who picks it up to be a sniper but it’s not, perhaps hidden but not so secret. It’s like embracing a gun, whose you can choose to polish the holster, that has the same, if not worse, firepower. In a world where denouncing can not be enough and everyone should be equal, it’s the only right balance, in the same comical and gruesome way Totò referred to us about a sullen level (la“livella”).

 

A similar problem arises after the third stanza of (“It is dangerous to read newspapers”):

 

Each time I hit a key

on my electric typewriter,

speaking on peaceful trees

another village explodes.

                                             

Atwood realizes that, although being highly literate, she’s just a chemical body keeping on hitting keys on her typewriting machine, trying to explore other horizons. She hasn’t simply prepared us for a kind of “liberal’s” guilt these poems bear, but these last begin so believably that their endings are anticlimactic and difficult to understand. She’s easily at her best on her own turf, with topics that feed and drive her personally.

Discussing about language, in Two-Headed Poems, she writes down:

 

We wanted to describe the snow,

the snow here, at the corner

of the house and orchard

in a language so precise

and secret it was not even

a code, it was snow,

there could be no translation.

 

To save this language

we needed echoes,

we needed to push back

the other words, the coarse ones

spreading themselves everywhere

like thighs or startlings.

[…]

Your language hangs around your neck,

a noose, a heavy necklace;

each word is empire,

each word is vampire and mother.[46]

 

This paragraph outlines a form of communication that is so specialized and inherent to its environment that it transcends standard translation or decoding. Key aspects of the poem’s exploration of language include the metaphor of snow, as Atwood suggests something natural, ephemeral, and impossible to capture or translate into coarse everyday words; the struggle of identity, as the poem often touches on the dualities of Canadian identity and the tension between different linguistic and cultural heritages; the physicality of language, as the text portrays language as a living entity, emphasizing that words carry the weight of history; finally, the exclusion of others, because the language is "secret," it functions as an internal bond that outsiders cannot access, serving as both a "heavy necklace" and a "noose" for those who speak it. 

Two-Headed Poems represent a significant development in Atwood’s stylistic and thematic use of her characteristic materials. The title poems – an exploration of political violence and duplicity associated with male leaders and executors, focusing on Canadian relations- carry a rationale. “Sons branch out, but / one woman leads to another”: the branching out of territorial expropriation, political oppression, and the institutionalization of love and sexuality. Within this frame, woman must operate, but she is – as Atwood stresses, echoing Simone de Beauvoir – always “other” in her language, her experience, the topography of her world. Living in a world not of her own design, Atwood creates her own oral history in bonds with other women, with her children, and becomes necessarily bilingual and bicultural in movement between worlds.

In “Marrying the Hangman” these themes are merged as two kinds of history: the official, written history of a woman who escaped a death sentence, by convincing a condemned man to accept his position of hangman and to marry her, and the oral history of a violent encounter, shared among other women: “These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe”. Only through the constant interpretation of destructive bloodshed, war, and verbal and military violence, it could be found the real meaning of the world. As Two Headed Poems, this writing artwork is one to make the reader think about the control they have over the story of their lives, curtailing details. This is how truth gets lost, when the true stories don’t make all parties happy, insofar as many people try to change them, overturning their fate[47]. Atwood often uses allegory and symbolism to show that people’s perception can be unreliable, because people often twist the details of true stories. In this poem, in which she declares that people “carry what [they are] sailing with…the tide”,[48] for example, “the tide” stands for a series of constant transformations and the rising and falling of a wave, that, for her, is nothing else but the good and bad happening in the real world, the up and down of daily run out activities.

In conclusion, I could say that, among the intricacies that characterise also many other poems, in this article I choose to hint at these extracts, the central topics faced by Awood, that’s to say all the elements, such as peace and war, the concept of foreigner and the powerful use of language, the fragility and often misunderstood intimate nature of women, that often frighten and, at the same time, entice and thrill the author, defying any kind of stereotypes and misjudgments, prompting questions to the reader, challenging him to open reflections.

In fact, actually, Atwood ponders human behaviours, celebrates the natural world and condemns the materialism, consumerism and capitalism overwhelming and characterising modern and post-modern societies and their complex “fights for survival” in an entangling, crushing, absorbent system of never-ending and never settled out battle of the sexes, between the feminine and masculine element, of predominance, quirky confusional mixes and disorders coming out from all the bloody courses of “War and Peace”, a book of Tolstoyan wisdom that probably we'll never end to read out and characterizing what is, after all, the history of humanity, in its infinite  cyclic nature and reality, surfaced in different forms, as highlighted and recriminated during the “hippies years” of the '­68 uprisings [49], finding out ourselves in yearning for desertic and tribal magic, in idolizing wildlife reserves and energies made of flows, in order to oxygenate the layers of our psyche and to updraft  prayers, made of tobacco and incense, in an unrestrained and unavoidable interstitial need in which nesting  the words, and, for a moment, stopping ourselves to reflect about the reason why not everyone succeeds in preserving his own inner angelicity and ability of spiritual abstraction, even just to remind ourselves the womb of this Grand Mother that has given birth to us all and only one,  in which we have forgotten the spirit of a common brotherhood that we have wanted  to dismantle, to hurt, to vilify at the mercy of our selfishness and blindness, clouded by a contingent that we can't decontextualize, prey of our mere animal and fierce impulses that often demean our human condition.

Atwood explains: God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind; at the last judgment, we will all be trees[50]. This Atwood's sentence suggests a vision of God not as a distant observer or voice talking behind the scenes, but as an active and overwhelming force incarnated in the turmoil itself of the world, similar to a hurricane or vortex that acts directly on reality and on human life. The “whirlwind” metaphor recalls biblical images, where God often seems to be a powerful and unrestrained natural force, but Atwood re-elaborates it in a poetic and modern key, emphasizing the idea of a dynamic and immanent presence.

The context of the quotation is poetic and reflective, in which Atwood explores topics such as judgment, transformation, and the connection between the human and the divine, arguing that divinity is not detached from the world but an integral and active part of it. She joins the idea of the powerful divinity with that of metamorphosis and entrenchment in nature. This quotation is often cited for its visual and conceptual impact, and it mirrors Atwood's style, which mixes mythology, symbolism and social observation.

 

This Atwood’s women’s survival guide[51]is also the pursuit of “self-definition”, that let her female characters fully express themselves. Being self-definition of utmost importance to this author, how she describes her writings is vital to understanding the intentions hidden by her poetry: acknowledging that the subject matter of much of her works revolves around feminist topics, Atwood wouldn’t outline herself as a feminist, as already broadly clarified in this dissertation, but as an author interested on discussing female and societal issues, as she believes that women should be allowed to do whatever they please and to act in the best way they express themselves. She could be defined as a proto-feminist writer.

Atwood’s works are renowned for their strong, debated post-feminist themes, exploring issues of gender, power, and oppression, in support of women’s rights. In fact, she depicts the challenges and struggles faced by women in patriarchal societies. Atwood’s female protagonists and characters are frequently complex and multifaceted and resist societal norms and conventions, subverting traditional gender roles and undermining power dynamics. Atwood’s exploration of gender's role presents a nuanced understanding of oppression.

In detail, this passage is pertinent to a proto-feminist, analytical perspective, developed throughout the years, on women and gender roles as they intersect with sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, and age, encompassing several fields of study in which Atwood’s works could be applied, such as, for instance, humanities, social science, environmental studies, fine arts and education.

Feminism (‘70s onwards) and post-feminism (‘80s onwards) are two ideological phenomena and movements that have affected the sorts of women’s rights until nowadays and seek to address and advocate issues of gender equality. While feminism focuses on dismantling traditional gender forms, structures, and institutionalised sexism, post-feminism takes a more individualistic approach, emphasizing personal empowerment. It critiques feminism for being too radical and outdated. Feminism has been criticized for its lack of intersectionality and inclusivity, as early feminist movements were primarily led by white, middle-class women. On the other hand, post-feminism has been demonized for its focus on individual empowerment and choice, which can overlook the systemic barriers that continue to oppress marginalized groups of women. Feminism has had a significant impact on media and popular culture, challenging the representation of women in films, television, and advertising. It has played a crucial role in challenging societal norms around sexuality and body image, supporting sexual autonomy and body positivity. Post-feminism, instead, has been stigmatised for prioritizing a narrow definition of beauty and sexuality that aligns with traditional gender forms.

According to certain critics, while feminism focuses on challenging patriarchal structures, post-feminism re-evaluates the goals and methods of traditional feminism. Both movements have made significant contributions to the fight for gender equality, but they also have their own limitations. Post-modernism emerged in the late twentieth century, combining post-modern philosophy with feminist thought. It focuses on how social and political factors influence perceptions of gender and identity. This branch of feminism emphasizes the diverse experiences of women, moving from the idea of a universal female experience. A key concept is the social construction of gender, suggesting that gender roles are shaped by societal norms rather than being innate. Post-modern feminism rejects essentialism, arguing that gender roles are fluid, not fixed. It critiques dominant societal narratives that uphold patriarchal norms. From a civil rights law perspective, post-modern feminism advocates for laws that recognize diverse experiences and intersectional discrimination. Understanding post-modern feminism can help read more inclusive and effective civil rights laws, catering to the needs of those seeking equality and justice[52].

For this purpose, Atwood affirmed that feminism and gender equality are just delicate issues that cannot be generalized, as “women are a bit more than 50% of the human population, and obviously each woman is different. There are also about 75 types of feminism, among which only some are at odds with each other, but this fact shouldn't make any surprise. What women have in common are, instead, some structural disadvantages, depending on the place where they live, the economic resources of their families, and the law of their Country.

Atwood has chosen to mainly focus on how strictly stereotypeḋ gender roles force girls to run their ḋaily activities with any sort of restraints, denying them to unfolḋ parts of themselves that don’t comply with the generally accepteḋ social standards.

In her dystopian novel and enchanting poems, she firmly sets out that female gender roles are enforced by a system of indoctrination, where girls are told what they can and can’t do, or what they should or shouldn’t be.

The vocation of womanhood, in fact, could be compared with a menstrual bleeding in a pad, as a repeating cycle of desperate call for peace and advancement in the progressive destiny to give to the Earth[53]

If there’s a constant in the writings of Margaret Atwood, it is the presence of strong and complex female characters and women’s issues. Her protagonists are not perfect heroines, but women who stay in close contact with their emotions: fears, contradictions, true feelings, mood swings and fights against much arduous conditions and events.

 

To stress out this concept, in “A Red Shirt”, Atwood explains:

i

My sister and I are sewing

a red shirt for my daughter.

She pins, I hem, we pass the scissors

back and forth across the table.

 

Children should not wear red,

a man once told me.

Young girls should not wear red.

 

In some countries it is the color

of death; in others passion,

in others war, in others anger,

in others sacrifice

of shed blood. A girl should be

a veil, a white shadow, bloodless

as a moon on water; not

dangerous; she should

 

keep silent and avoid

red shoes, red stockings, dancing.

Dancing in red shoes will kill you.

 

ii

But red is our color by birth-

 

right, the color of tense joy

& spilled pain that joins us

 

to each other. We stoop over

the table, the constant pull

 

of the earth’s gravity furrowing

our bodies, tugging us down .

 

The shirt we make is stained

with our words, our stories.

 

The shadows the light casts

on the wall behind us multiply:

this is the procession

of old leatherly mothers,

 

The moon’s last quarter

before the blank night,

 

others like worn gloves

wrinkled to the shapes of their lives,

 

passing the work from hand to hand,

mother to daughter,

 

a long thread of red blood, not yet broken.

 

iii

Let me tell you the story

about the Old Woman.

 

First: she weaves your body.

Second: she weaved your soul.

 

Third: she is hated & feared,

though not by those who know her.

 

She is the witch you burned

by daylight and crept from your home

 

to consult & bribe at night. The love

that tortured you you blamed on her.

 

She can change her form,

and like your mother she is covered with fur.

 

The black Madonna

studded with miniature

 

arms &legs, like tin stars,

to whom they offer agony

 

and red candles when there is no other

help or comfort, is also her.

 

iv

It is January, it’s raining, this gray

ordinary day. My

daughter, I would like

your shirt to be just a shirt,

no charms or fables. But fables

Aad charms swarm here

in this January world,

Entrenching us like snow, and few

are friendly to you; though

they are strong,

potent as viruses

or virginal angels dancing

on the heads of pins,

potent as the hearts

Of whores torn out

by the roots because they were thought

to be solid gold, or heavy

as the imaginary

jewels they used to split

the heads of Jews for.

 

It may not be true

that one myth cancels another.

Nevertheless, in a corner

of the hem, where it will not be seen,

where you will inherit

it, I make this tiny

stitch, my private magic.

 

V

The shirt is finished: red

with purple flowers and pearl

buttons. My daughter puts it on,

 

hugging the color

which means nothing to her

except that it is warm

and bright. In her bare

 

feet she runs across the floor,

escaping from us, her new game,

waving her red arms

 

in delight, and the air

explodes with banners.[54]

 

The poem’s speaker is a mother, recalling these statements by men as she sews a shirt for her daughter. Mother’s focus reveals that even things as simple as clothing and colors are weaponized to control girls, a practice that hinders them from exercising self-expression. To make sense of the controversy behind the red colour, the mother studies the meanings associated with it: death, passion, war, anger, and sacrifice of bloodshed. The imagery of these definitions shows off that red colour is associated with being bold, loud, messy, complicated, and unpredictable, everything a girl is forbidden to be.

Atwood's focal point on social expectations about girls highlights that these are just as confining as their counterparts. If girls are not to be what red represents, they ought to be the opposite of this meaning, ‘a moon on water’, quiet, simple, and controllable.

The contents of “A red shirt” evaluate the pressure of conformity for growing up as girls. This maternal narration showcases the general effects of societal expectations, as the mothers strive not to pass down oppressive ideas to her daughter. In doing so, the mother is recognizing that strict ideas of femininity force young girls to conform to idealized versions of themselves, neglecting their own wants and ambitions, in favor of meeting social standards, a fate she wants to prevent for her daughter.

The speaker of Two-Headed Poems introduces her concerns by asking,” How can I teach her/some way of human being/that won’t destroy her?” This question uses figurative language to acknowledge that the patriarchy demands that a girl submit to those in power.

This ambivalent artist emotes a great sorrow in this outcome, confiding:” I would like to tell her, Love/is enough I would like to say,/ find shelter in another skin./I would like to say Dance/ and be happy”. In these lines, Atwood expresses her wish to allow young girls to remain blissfully unaware of the dangers of their emerging womanhood.

She notes: “Instead I will say,/in my crone’s voice, Be ruthless, when you have to, tell/the truth when you can,/when you can see it.” These words function as Atwood’s guidance for the survival of womanhood, as she prompts girls to be honest about who they are, even if honesty is brutal, something that is characteristic of her work.

The young girls of Two-Headed Poems can be considered as victims, and through the mother of “A red shirt”, Atwood points out the value of female agency, highlighting that women are human beings, not objects to be subjected to control.

Atwood has made a career of exploring female hardships and self-discovery, with poetry full of a deep outlook that enlightens the female pressures, asserting that women deserve to truly define their personality.

Still today, Atwood, heartfully and unceasingly, acts for peace against the widespread barbarity afflicting the world, and she advocates for an essentially feminist pacifism, elevating the women's role as an heralder of diplomacy, prosperity and beauty, quest for love, other than the transcendental hope of a feasible Paradise, with the talent to prefigure colourful optical and visionary images of conceivable scenarios, preconized by prophetic tones and ways and far-sighted precognitions, by which she aims for “changing the world” – “beauty will change the world”[55], according with standards of beauty and aesthetics[56], in which Atwood merges art and literature, and the literature in the art[57], with a plea bargaining between realty and thought, according to which madness is mystery and mystery is madness.  

 

 

Conclusions

Margaret Atwood is not only one of the most eminent and versatile contemporary authors, but one of the most controversial Canadian writers, translated into forty languages or more, that has succeeded in standing out in her country and all around the word. Quoting Agostino Degas, Italian writer spotlighted even from Nobel Prize Rita Levi Montalcini, who, during her career has been able to paint of romance feminine universe, we can say about her:

“She was made of thoughts, dreams, numbs and poetry. She was made of somewhere else, of journeys without a destination and she lived in the lightness and detachment. When someone was believing to have conquered her, she was already gone, she was already somewhere else. She was one of those women who appeal and leave a sign because she loved to be free, scruffy and with the wind on her face. She lived as a wave of a stormy sea, as a white numb modelled and transported by the wind and in front of the boundaries, she breathes utopias, she always searched for new horizons. She lived of poetries, dislocations and enchantments”[58].

In fact, throughout her numerous works of creating writing, life’s experiences and “journeys of the soul”, in which she finds out an Elsewhere made of Eternity, Atwood sounds out and analyses apical topics in the aphorisms for which she’s acknowledged and globally appreciated: love for beauty and its perception, for the diversity and for the portraits of the shades of human soul, intended as a meeting point and salacious search for her own complex and divided self.

In this article, the main traits of Atwood’s minute lexical choices and the issue of duality recurrent in all writings are stressed and analysed, through quotations and references to her engaging and never taken for granted works that emphasize her ability to “voice the soul” taking inspiration from the daily reality with a forward-looking and visionary perspective of historical facts that occur in our post-modern society.

Atwood’s style secret resides in her extraordinary skill to catalyze attention with details and emotional strength. Anything is neglected: each word, each pause and each silence has a precise aim. Her creativity captures the reader, who is enticed and suspended, until he gets to open endings that entrust their ability to interpret and to reach their conclusions. The reader, in fact, is invited to wonder himself and reflect on burning aspects of socio-political matters, other than on the polyhedric, and never completely outframed, facets both of the psyche and human soul. 

Therefore, her ductile and original narration doesn’t represent just a stylistic composition. This poem is an act of denunciation and encourages the psycho-social analysis of the ambivalence characterizing our daily events, propelling a foresight and inventing thinking on the reader. Atwood doesn’t tell just a story, but she digs into it, revealing its raw, real, and material nerves.

Her pen goes straight to the heart of phenomena such as power games, the relation between men and women, freedom in all its aspects, feminism that has made her a  lighthouse in the field of contemporary genre studies, dealing with issues such as dictatorial and religious oppression, and social justice. “Two-Headed Poems” isn’t just to entertain but also to upset. Atwood, in fact, doesn’t try to comfort the reader, but also to trouble him, as each plot is a “patchworking” that generates deep deductions and questions. These poems, as all her literary works, are rooted in a lucid observation of the present and let us glimpse the likely future aftermaths.

The most proper adjective to describe Atwood’s style is certainly “sharp”, as a direct and precise blade. There’s nothing superfluous in her text: each word is parsed and deeply calibrated to render an undiscussed emotional and intellectual impact. It hasn’t got any frills, evoking powerful images with few strokes. The location and atmosphere are not meticulously explored in detail, but only for essential traits, letting the reader open his mind.

In conclusion, in this article, more than a careful lexical and psychological analysis of the multilayered contents faced by Atwood in “Two-Headed Poems”, it’s added an overall description of its inherent sticking points contents contextualized in nowadays events in her main literary works, especially those remarking the relations between public and private events and between collective and personal memory, factors that influence the interrelation between past, present and future throughout and notwithstanding the run out of time, revealing her foresighting flare that reminds the proper attitudes of a prophet[59].

The current study looks at the rich language found in Margaret Atwood's Two-Headed Poems. Atwood's precise wording goes beyond style; it helps reshape reality. Each word, pause, and silence builds a carefully crafted poetic structure that encourages readers to find their own meanings. This connects with Coral Ann Howells' idea that Atwood transforms everyday experiences into ethical and political questions. Atwood's poetic language often conceals a complex network of symbols, ambiguities, and emotional conflicts. This creates open spaces for readers to explore unique viewpoints. In Two-Headed Poems, duality is not just a persistent theme but also the central point of Atwood's poetic vision. This paper argues that Atwood's poetry goes beyond artistic duty and takes on a significant ethical and political role. Two-Headed Poems should not be viewed simply as poetic experiments; they critique cultural systems that shape today's society. Themes like gender inequality, political oppression, religious extremism, environmental issues, and the fragility of personal freedom are present throughout her work. This interpretative approach closely connects to Atwood's portrayal of female subjectivity. Her characters represent contradictions, vulnerabilities, resilience, and moral complexities, reflecting the intricate psychological truths of real life. Therefore, Atwood's feminism does not rely on simple lines between victimhood and empowerment; it examines the nuanced ways through which identity is shaped and reshaped. Another key part of this study is the link between personal memory and shared history. Time, consisting of the past, present, and future, is presented in interconnected layers that simultaneously influence one another, creating a dynamic view of history. Atwood's literary success stems from her ability to blend precise language with deep philosophical insight. Her writing avoids unnecessary flourishes, focusing instead on clarity that uncovers the hidden cracks in everyday life. Margaret Atwood remains one of the most important voices in contemporary literature, since her poetry teaches readers how to interpret the world and be aware of the responsibilities of understanding it.

 

 

Main Internet Sources and Bibliography

 

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          [1] Atwood M., Poems, 1976-1986, Virago Press, 1992

         [2] https://lyrics.az/index.php/gerardina-trovato/non-e-un-film/angeli-a-meta.html 1994

[3] Stains D., Margaret Atwood in her Canadian context, Cambridge University Press, 2021, p. 25; https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108626651.003

[4] Canale, Paola, Life’s blooms…Illustrations in poetry. The silent side of beauty, ”Fata Morgana”, Barnes and Noble editions, 2021

https://barnesandnoble/w/files/life-blooms-paola-canale/1140141010

[5] The Doors - Universal Mind Lyrics & Meaning; Schivelbush W., Tastes of Paradise: a social history of spices, stimulants and intoxicants, Vintage Books, 1992

[6] See, Canale Paola, https://sparklingmoonshine.blogspot.com   

[7] Atwood M., Book of Lives - A memoir of sorts, Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2025

[8] Galeone Salvatore, Margaret Atwood, “La scrittura è una voce che viaggia nel tempo, 2021;  Margaret Atwood, “La scrittura è una voce che viaggia nel tempo”

[9] David Stains, Ibidem, p. 22

[10] Canale Paola, “Mirror” from Life's blooms. Illustrations in poetry…the silent side of beauty, Barnes and Noble editions, 2021; https://barnesandnoble.com/w/life-blooms-paola-canale/1140141010

 

[11] Atwood M., “Marrying the Hangman” in Poems 1976/1986, Virago Press, 1992, p. 17

[12] Weir Lorraine, Echo Poems, Canadian Literature, 1980, pp. 120-121

[13] Atwood M.,  “The double voice”, from The Journals of Susanne Moodie, OUP Canada, 1970

[14] Atwood M., Selected Poems II, 1976-1986, Hoepli, 1987

[15] Wood Gayle, On Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems,  The American Poetry Review, Vol. 8, No. 5, 1979, pp. 30-32

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27776274

[16] See Paola Canale, http://sparklingmoonshine.blogspot.com, Itinerary spirits, 2021, “Irreplaceable kindred soul, / familiar, sympathetic.../ who, like me, has known the tribulation, unforgetting the past instabilities,/ you will lead me offshore from this continent's appendix/ to let me go to the cadence of a new world./ Slowly I slip away from your strong hand, / to plunge with shy audacity in the crystal waters, trying to break the waves,/ warrior of life, for life! / hidden tornadoes, wombling in the mystery, we deserve some kind of solace. / Light and uncatchable, as a whispering whiff of wind, never absent, /throughout a summer Jamaican sultriness, / we are ambassadors,  we mold new global perspectives,/ on the brink of a coastal tidal flooding, /over the red line borders of visions,/ that we must change,/ nobody but us has inferred that each problem keeps in itself the solution. / Shelter from a relentless fight, / you guide me towards an undangerous and bristly reef, / fortress of a moment, / with you I can find myself again, / before continuing to leave, careless of what has been, / forgetful of our local burdens, huge, for another voyage. / Now the sky is finally clear over me, / so distant, / all of us will be, anyhow, dragged away from here... /  I soar beyond the natural scenery, not after all so much attractive, / I regenerate myself and reconnect / to dive again and to reach another strip of mainland. / I fancy to run, happy and free, / I glance a hammock suspended between two oaks / over which I lie down to restore myself from all my fatigues. / Now they seem so mild... / I can't feel the weariness anymore / lost in an intersideral space, / held by two doves with wings of an eagle, / strong enough to sustain in me the weight of the world, / in a rainfall of a multicolored rose petals, / that hangs me up to an infinite light blue / over everything. / I actually now the paradise:  my "liquid Ottawa"!!!

 

[17] Coral Ann Lowells, The Canadian Companions to Margaret Atwood, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 176-177

[18] Lopez Rua Paula, The subjugation of women through lexical innovation in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Feminismo/38, 2021, pp. 23-51

[19] Atwood M., Poems 1976-1986, Virago Press, 1992, p.26

[20] Atwood Margaret, “The woman makes peace with her faulty heart” from Poems 1976- 1986, Virago Press, 1992, pp. 38/39

[21] Rubenstein Roberta, "SURFACING": MARGARET ATWOOD'S JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: MODERN CANADIAN FICTION, 1976, p. 388; https://www.jstor.org/stable/26280240    

 

[22] Carol P. Christ, Margaret Atwood: the surfacing of women’s spiritual quest and vision, Signs, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1976, pp. 316-330

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173450

 

          [23] Ruben Roberta, Ibidem, pp. 387-399

[24] Ewell C. Barbara, The language of alienation in Margaret Atwood’s “Surfacing”, The Centennial Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1981, pp. 185-202

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23738844

 

[25] Atwood M., Book of lives: a memoir of sorts, Penguin Random House, 2025, p. 272

[26] Clark T. Meera, Margaret Atwood’s “Surfacing”: language, logic and the art of fiction, Modern Language Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1983, pp. 3-15

https://doi.org/10.2307/3194175; https://www.jstor.org/stable/319417

 

[27] Granofski Ronald, Fairy-tale morphology in Margaret Atwood’s “Surfacing”, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1990, pp. 51-65, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780545

[28] Hopkins Jerry, No One Here Gets Out Alive, Grand Central Publishing, 1980; Pirandello Luigi, Uno, nessuno, centomila, Bemporad, 1926

[29] Campbell P. Josie, The woman as hero in Margaret Atwood’s “Surfacing”, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3, Post-war Canadian Fiction, 1978, pp. 17-28;  https://www.jstor.org/stable/24777164 ; Paola Canale, The language of creativity: lexical choices in Margaret Atwood’s writings, Barnes and Noble editions https://barnesandnoble.com/w/the-language-of-creativity-paola-canale/1149600390 , pp. 88-95

[30] Foster Wilson John, The poetry of Margaret Atwood, University of British Columbia Press, 1977

[31] Oates Joice Carol, On being a poet: a conversation with Margaret Atwood, 1978; https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/97/09/21/reviews/oates-poet.html      

[32] The Doors - Indian Summer Lyrics | AZLyrics.com

[33] Atwood M., Burning Questions: Essays &Occasional Pieces 2004-2021, Random House USA, 2022

[34] Atwood M., Power Politics, House of Anansi Press, 1983

[35] Atwood M., The Testaments, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020

[36] Mohr, Sandock, The Politics of Literature in Margaret Atwood works, Margaret Atwood Studies, vol. 17, 2024, pp. 54-61

[37] Blake William, Proverbs of Hell from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Oxford University Press, 1793;  Schivelbusch Wolfgang, Tastes of Paradise, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1993 

[38] Caselli Roberto, Jim Morrison, “Il poeta caduto sulla terra”, La storia del rock, Hoepli, 2020, pp.112-130; Fowlie, Wallace, Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: Il poeta come ribelle, Duke University Press, 1994

[39] Atwood M., Two-Headed Poems

[40] Atwood M., Poems 1976-1986, Virago Press, 1992, p. 33

[41] Atwood M., Poems 1976-1986, Virago Press, 1992, p. 27

 

[42] Atwood M., Poems 1976-1986, Virago Press, 1992, p. 28

 

[43] Two-Headed Poems by Margaret Atwood | Research Starters | EBSCO Research

[44] Atwood M., Poems 1976-1986, Virago Press, 1992, pp. 34-35

[45] Atwood M., Book of lives / a memoir of sorts Penguin Random House LLC, 2025,

[46] Atwood M., Poems, 1976-1986, Virago Poetry, 1992, p.26-29

[47] Explication of “True Stories” by: Margaret Atwood | twonames15

[48] Atwood M., Poems, 1976-1986, Virago Poetry, 1992, p.57

[49] Morrison James, The American Night: the writing of Jim Morrison, Viking, 1991

[50] Atwood M., Selected Poems, 1965-1975, Cengage Learning, 2023

[51] Atwood M., Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, House of Anansi Pr, 1972

[52]What is postmodern feminism? Your Civil Rights Guide, Youtube.com, Avril 17, 2025 ; Canale Paola, The language of creativity: lexical choices in Margaret Atwood’s writings, Barnes and Noble editions, 2026, pp. 92-94

https://barnesandnoble.com/w/the-language-of-creativity-paola-canale/1149600390

 

 

[53] For this purpose and a specific insight into gender issues, we could look with particular attention at the matriarchal society structured on Iroquois culture in Canada. See,Canale, Paola Eternal feminine: an inspirational source of democracy -An insight on the Iroquois culture in USA and Canada, Barnes and Noble Editions, 2021

https://barnesandnoble.com/w/eternal-feminine-an-inspirational-source-of-democracy-paola-canale/1140423175 ; ““Eternal Feminine” aims to give an illustration of an alternative societal model, deepening and contributing to spread out the knowledge of Iroquois culture and its political structure, focused on women's pivotal role in every aspects of life. In the words of Faust by Goethe: "The Eternal feminine attracts us to the highest". […] The myth in question has assumed many faces: the sanctity of a mother, the purity of a virgin, the fecundity of the earth and the womb, and this wording, "eternal feminine" has been coined by Goethe to point out the timeless, unchangeable essence of feminine appeal, highly appealing because of her presumed divine origin, body and soul healing and her spiritual powers; Goethe, Faust, Oscar Mondadori, 2016 (fist publication in 1832).

[54] Atwood M., Poems, 1976-1986, Virago Poetry, 1992, pp. 47-51

[55] Dostoevskij Fӫdor, The Idiot, Penguin Classics, 2004

[56] Canale Paola, Life's blooms. Illustrations in poetry…the silent side of beauty, Barnes and Noble, 2021, https://barnesandnoble.com/w/life-blooms-paola-canale/1140141010

[57] See more on Sgarbi Vittorio, Viaggio Sentimentale nell'Italia dei desideri, Bompiani editore, 2010 “In the infinity of beauty[…]let you drive by the sense of incompleteness that every voyage of yours […] should deal with, such and many are its wonderful crafts. Just the feeling of a constant beauty could be your guide through what you couldn't wish to see in a lifetime”

 [58] Degas A., Donne come nuvole, 2017 (English translation);

https://ilgiardinodeilibri.it/autori/_agostino-degas.php   

 

[59] See also, Gibran, Kahlil, Il profeta - Il Giardino del profeta – Il vagabondo, Oscar Mondadori, 2017

 

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