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for a carefully measured subjectivity that foregrounds her worldview. Thinking about her first
feelings about deciding to become an author, Atwood observes:
It simply happened suddenly in 1956, while I was crossing the football field on the way
home from school, I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and often that
writing was the only thing I wanted to do. It wasn’t the result of experience that had
hooked me: it was the electricity… Anyone looking might have thought I’d been exposed
to some chemical or cosmic ray of the kind that caused rats to become gigantic or men to
become invisible. 15
Thus, Atwood is literally inspired to write and become a writer. She sees the source of this
aspiration to be something external to herself, something electric, even cosmic. Her parents believe
that this is a passing phase and bite their tongues and wait till it will be over. However, despite the
expectations of her traditional parents, Atwood perseveres. They occasionally suggest that it is
important for her to have a paying job. There were also some more cheerful friends of her mother’s
who suggest: “That’s nice dear but at least you will be able to do it at home.” 16
When the author looks back at her own life, she can find nothing in it more specific indicating that
she would be a writer in the future. She knew no novelists that she could converse with as a young
child. Meanwhile, Atwood also mentions in her autobiography the major political and social events
that occured during her years as an author.About the second world war she says: “I was five in 1945,
when the war ended and baloons and colored comics returned.” 17 When she was eight, they moved
to a center near Toronto where she experienced real life in a city of seven hundred thousand.
As I have mentioned, Atwood’s interest in story telling started very early. She mentions that her
primal story teller was her brother. They played a game of story telling during which, when one of
them ran out of ideas, he turned into a listener. Their main saga was a race of supernatural animals
that lived on a distant planet. 18 Around the age of eleven, she wrote her first play about a giant that
is punished in the end by the moon. This was a story of crime and punishment. Her brother’s friends
were her primary audience at the time and they all roared with laughter. This was Atwood’s first
experience of producing a play and her first experience of receiving literary criticism.
Atwood recounts that she was fifteen when Elvis Presley became popular. She observes that she
could both waltz and rock and roll, but missed the tango which was not fashionable. During her
adolescent years she read a lot of books including Romeoand Juliet, Mill on the Floss, Tess of
D’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, etc. There were also books that she read secretly in the
attic. So Atwood has been an avid reader all her life and her reading reflects her wide range of
interests.
When Atwood turned seventeen in 1957, she realized that “boys were headed for professions and
girls for futures as their wives.” 19 Growing up at a time when conventional gender norms were
dominant even in more developed societies, Atwood must have felt the pressure stemming from
social expectations. There were various groups of girls: the more conservative and the more liberal.
The more liberal group of girls who acted and dressed differently were called “artsy fartsies.” This
group to which Atwood later belonged read books by popular authors like Hemingway, Williams,
Eugene O’Neill, Steinbeck, Whitman and Dickens.
The author mentions that “There’s one characteristic that sets writing apart from most of the
other arts‐ its apparent democracy, by which I mean its availability to almost everyone as a medium
of expression.” 20 This particular feature of writing makes it possible for the writer to reach large
numbers of people and have a direct impact on the world. As a socially responsible intellectual who
has always seen writing as a vehicle for introducing constructive change in the world, Atwood
observes that