Atwood's "Hair Jewellery" has come unstuck in time. Despite obvious clues like airports and parking lots, I wasn't sure if it was an American Gothic tale with fears of consumption or a bleak future. The narrator makes repeated references to herself or others being scholars or writers in the vein of Poe, Hawthorne or Tennyson. Atwood's writing style also leaves us with impressions of grey clothes and dismal air; she is constantly clutching at historical references that lend uncertainty as to when we are.
The narrator says "I resurrect myself through clothes," but being poor, like the rest of us, she gets her clothes from Filene's Basement, a squalid, second-hand store where nothing fits. She notes that "No one went there who did not aspire to a shape-change, a transformation, a new life" (p. 29) and her despair about the future is palpable: "Our problem, I thought, was that neither the world around us nor the future stretching before us contained any image of what we might conceivably become" (p. 31). The sense of melancholy continues: "alone I could wallow uninterrupted in romantic doom" (p. 34). Even as she notes that 'banality is after all the magic antidote for unrequited love" (p. 38), this doesn't seem to cure her of her melancholy, even after she has a new career, a husband, and children.
No comments:
Post a Comment