Review: Marina Warner on Margaret Atwood

(This is a reprise of a post first published in 2019. Subscribe for more!)

Twisting fairy stories has been a feminist stratagem ever since Anne Sexton wrote her sequence of barbed, hurt poems, Transformations, back in 1971; Margaret Atwood, both in her fiction and poetry, has likewise mined myth and fairy tale, mostly in a parodic and contrary spirit. The Penelopiad reworked the closing books of the Odyssey, while before that, in The Robber Bride, Atwood repossessed one of the Grimm’s cruelest and most satisfactory stories of a woman’s revenge. The merciless tone of many fairy stories suits her voice. “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” she likes to quote, and in her 2019 book The Testaments, she spreads a lavish feast of cold cuts, served up by a marvelous monster, Aunt Lydia. Whereas in classic fairy tales, the characters have no depth, The Testaments, like its predecessor The Handmaid’s Tale, takes the form of witness statements, making us privy to the thoughts of its three narrators: Lydia, and two younger women, Agnes Jemina and Daisy, who, like lost princesses in Shakespeare’s romances, will discover they are not who they thought they were.