ATWOOD’S ART – EKPHRASIS AND FEMALE REPRESENTATION
Soloman Lam
In both her fiction and poetry, Margaret Atwood demonstrates a fascination with
visual art and particularly with how women are depicted in visual images. An amateur
painter and photographer herself (Wilson 206), Atwood often uses ekphrasis in her
writing as a means of exploring gender representation. James A.W. Heffernan describes
the ekphrastic process as a duel between the sexes, with “the voice of male speech
striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening, of male narrative
striving to overcome the fixating impact of beauty poised in space” (1). In Margaret
Atwood’s writing, however, the narrative originates from a distinctly female voice, one
that critiques how women have been visually interpreted from a male perspective. This
essay will argue that while Atwood’s ekphrastic poetry does exemplify what Heffernan
describes as the “struggle for dominance between the image and the word,” her poems
also expose image as a construct made for the male gaze; language is used to then counter
that gaze and ultimately overcome it. I will examine three poems spanning Atwood’s
career, exploring how each portrays visual representation as illusory and how the female
speaker in each piece persuades the viewer to question how that image is constructed.
Atwood shows an early interest in how word and image conflict with one another
in “This is a Photograph of Me,” the poem that opens her first published collection, The
Circle Game. The title of the poem clearly declares it as an ekphrastic work, and yet it
also expresses an ambiguity that permeates throughout the piece. Is the deictic “This” in
the title referring to a real, tangible photograph held up the speaker, or does it point to the
poem itself, implying that the photograph is a metaphor for the verse? Atwood plays
with this duality, encouraging the reader to “scan / it” as both a picture and a poem.
While it is eventually revealed that the poem’s ekphrasis is purely notional (Barry
161), the first three stanzas deceptively suggest the possibility of an actual ekphrasis by
focusing on the photograph’s surface details, with its “blurred lines and grey flecks /
blended with the paper”. There is a forensic quality to the speaker’s analysis, and “the
description incorporates terms such as ‘left-hand corner’, ‘to the right’, and
‘background’” that seem to place the print in a tangible reality (Barry 162). The
ordinariness of such lines as, “In the background there is a lake, / and beyond that, some
low hills,” make the photograph unremarkable. However, woven into the text are subtle
clues that something is amiss: as the speaker invites the reader to “scan” the picture, we
find that, “at first”, the print “seems to be […] smeared”; there is also “a thing that is like
a branch”, and “what ought to be a gentle slope”. The inexactitude of these descriptions
suggests that the visual image is inadequate at accurately representing the subject.
Indeed, the poem’s parenthesized latter half reveals the disturbing metaphysical
reality that exists underneath the visual surfaces described by the first half. It is beneath
these surfaces that the speaker’s ghostly “I” finally emerges. The bracketed verses act
much like a text caption to the photograph, explaining and contextualizing the picture.
Evidently, the first three stanzas only describe a plain exterior; the parenthesized portion
of the poem reveals a dark internal reality that the visual image only hints at and never
truly expresses without the caption.
The ekphrastic process therefore deteriorates, but not for the same reason it does
in Homer’s “Shield of Achilles,” where the described image is impossible to imagine. In
“This is a Photograph o Me,” it is all too easy to envision the grey country scene;
however, the visual representation is too limited and insufficient as it shows merely
facades. In the conflict between word and image, it is word that triumphs here, because it
is only through verbal language that the drowned speaker is manifested clearly. When
she says, “I am in the lake, in the center / of the picture, just under the surface,” she could
as easily be referring to surface of the lake as to surface of the photograph, for the
drowned subject is speaking from underneath or beyond the image. She remarks how
difficult it is for the photograph to capture her, saying, “It is difficult to say where /
precisely, or to say how large or small I am”; the image is an artificial “effect of water /
on light” that causes “a distortion” that hides or drowns the speaker. Language, by
contrast, allows her to be revealed.
Using rhetorical tricks that are intentionally confusing or paradoxical, Atwood
challenges the observer of the picture into questioning what is seen. The speaker says
that the lake is in “the background”, but also “in the center of the picture”; likewise, she
is “in the lake, in the center” and yet “It is difficult to say where / precisely”. As a result,
the visual cannot be depended upon, for the observer’s gaze is unreliable. The assurance
offered by last stanza (“but if you look long enough, / eventually / you will be able to see
me”) seems more seductive than actually possible. The mysterious, ghostly speaker
remains forever elusive, at least to the eye.
Although the gazer challenged by the poem is not explicitly male as it is in her
later ekphrastic work, Atwood still displays a concern with how women are depicted in
visual art. Despite there being no mention of the speaker’s gender, the voice is
unmistakably female, especially considering how Atwood chooses to use the word “Me”
in the poem’s title. The image of the drowned woman lying “just under the surface”
alludes to the many visual illustrations of Ophelia, particularly the famous painting by
John Everett Millais, which features Ophelia’s corpse floating in a quiet river or lake,
hands poised upwards like a saint. Many male artists have similarly tried to turn Ophelia
into a visual icon, usually to represent woman sufferance or the tragic virgin, drowning in
her own sorrow.
In much of her work, Atwood evokes mythologized woman figures in order to
challenge how those myths are traditionally interpreted. Here, she places the drowned
Ophelia figure in a photograph. Sharon R. Wilson notes that “Atwood is interested in a
photograph’s ability […] to freeze characters in roles that are socially conditioned,
desired, or feared” (206). Keeping Wilson’s view in mind, one can surmise that, as the
Ophelia-speaker is trapped in the photographic image, she is drowned in a position that
obliterates her to the point of not even being visible. Yet, “[water and mirrors] in
John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1852)
Atwood’s writing provide an image of the way her writing works, as a medium that can
reflect, or reflect upon, the world before it” (Cooke 97). In contrast to the well-known
images of dead, drowned Ophelias, Atwood empowers her Ophelia figure by allowing
her to speak from the depths of the lake and challenge our perception of the image
reflected before us.
Atwood more explicitly explores how women are emblematized in her 1983 prose
poem, “Iconography.” Lorraine M. York writes, “in all her work to date, Atwood has
undertaken a critique of iconization, that powerful aesthetic and emotional desire to reify.
Indeed, icons, by definition, consist of constructed cultural power” (233). In
“Iconography,” Atwood explores how these imposing visual representations of women
are made, almost sadistically, by men.
The opening lines instantly point to the construction of icons and female images:
“He wants her arranged just so. He wants her, arranged. He arranges to want her.” Like
still life paintings of “furniture, flowers,” and other assembled objects, the visual
depiction of women are artificially put together by men “to compose a unified and
aesthetic whole.” Atwood’s play on words – how “he wants her arranged” and also
“arranges to want her” – connects the male gaze to desire and ownership: making,
looking at and having the woman in the picture all become synonymous.
Yet the male gaze and icon-construction does more than just objectify women.
Atwood expresses the power imbalance and act of physical and mental control that both
the artist and gazer have on the female subject: “to have her in a position she didn’t like,
that was power. […] The greatest power of all is when she doesn’t really like it but she’s
supposed to like it, so she has to pretend.” The image forces the female subject into a
disturbingly sadistic subjugation. “The most important thing is making her,” Atwood
writes, expressing the kind of fetishizing and power exertion involved in such image
construction.
Like in “This is a Photograph of Me,” the visual representation turns out to be
hollow. “By this time she doesn’t know herself,” Atwood writes. “All you see is the
skin, that smile of hers, flat but indelible.” The female subject is merely a “flat” surface,
disappeared and absent from her own image. Her smile is “like a tattoo,” emphasizing
the artifice of this constructed representation. Atwood differs from Heffernan’s view
that, in regards to ekphrasis, “the voice of male speech striving to control a female image
that is both alluring and threatening.” Here, the female image seems to already be under
male control.
This poem describes a state of domination, where the female subject has lost
ownership not only of her image, but of language: “he has the last word. He has the
word.” Word and image become aligned as one, both seemingly owned here by the male
“he.” There are, however, three individuals in the poem: the third-person “he” and “she,”
as well as the speaker. As in “This is a Photograph of Me,” the speaker has a distinctly
female voice; she demonstrates an impressive verbal dexterity and wordplay that calls
into question whether the “he” of the poem really “has the word.” The speaker uses
language to challenge the male gaze when she says, “watch yourself.” This is both a
warning and a literal order: the gazer is told to proceed carefully, but also be selfanalytical and self-critical. After all, “that’s what the mirrors are for.” Once again the
mirror motif is employed. Nathalie Cooke writes, “peculiar to Atwood’s use of the
mirror in her work is the way she empowers the mirror, often giving it a voice” (98). The
speaker of this “mirror story” warns the reader of the trappings of male-constructed
iconography of women, where the male gaze vanquishes the female subject.
York writes that, despite Atwood’s criticism of “the breezy destructiveness of the
icon,” her writing still exhibits “a profound skepticism about the efficacy of iconoclasm.
[…] Ironically, it is the iconoclastic artist who ends up drawing lines around the icon,
reinscribing its halo” (York 239). Indeed, Atwood acknowledges how easily “we fall
back into these rhythms as if into safe hands,” and how difficult it is to break away from
the culture of images surrounding women. Still, much of has to do with how willingly
men and women are to accept these destructive icons: “this is the arrangement they have
made,” she writes. The speaker thus encourages the gazer to question how these visual
representations of women are constructed and to break free from the cycle of creating
them.
In “Iconography” and “This is a Photograph of Me,” visual representation acts
against the female subject. However, in “Manet’s Olympia,” from Atwood’s 1995
collection of poetry, Morning in the Burned House, the envoiced female subject takes
control of the image and throws the male gaze right back at the viewer, turning the
observer into the observed.
The poem features an actual ekphrasis, describing (and giving voice to) Edouard
Manet’s famous nude. The painting was controversial in its time for illustrating a
prostitute in harsh studio lighting rather than an idealized female body. In the first
stanza, Atwood deconstructs the way the model Olympia is illustrated in the picture.
“Try that posture, it’s hardly languor”, she writes, also observing that the nude woman
wears “Shoes but not stockings”. She does not make clear whether it is “sinister” that the
artist paints no stockings or that Olympia chooses to not wearing any, but the remark
seems to be a simultaneous judgment on them both. Language leaps from the painting:
“Above the head of the (clothed) maid is an invisible voice balloon: Slut.” This
humorous comment, imposed upon the wide-eyed maid by the speaker, undercuts the
image and dismisses it as a construct designed for the male gaze. After all, Olympia,
positioned high on pillows with the flower in her hair matching the colour of the sofa
drapery’s floral print, looks as if she is poised on a platter, ready for consumption.
The second stanza, however, re-evaluates the painting. The first word, “But”, acts
as a turning point as the illustration is reconsidered and then celebrated: “Consider the
body, / unfragile, defiant, the pale nipples / staring you right in the bull’s eye.” Despite
her nudity, the black ribbon around Olympia’s neck conveys a disconnect between head
and body, respectively representing language and image. Although “The body’s on
Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863)
offer” to the viewer, the head resists possession (“the neck’s as far as it goes”).
This simultaneous conflict between head and body and between word and image
manifests into the gendered struggle between the female subject and “Monsieur Voyeur.”
Atwood, placing both Olympia and her male observer in the same room, turns the table
on him. The female subject now becomes the gazer: “As for that object of yours / she’s
seen those before, and better.” Language, as embodied by the head, turns the male
viewer into an image that Olympia, in turn, dismisses: “I, the head, am the only subject /
of this picture. / You, Sir, are furniture. / Get stuffed.” What Olympia says is humorous,
but her lines, which privilege the communicating head over the more alluring image of
the body, also emphasize the larger purpose of language in this poem. By using language
to reverse the positions of gazer and gazed, Atwood encourages the male observer to be
critical of his own voyeurism and its effects.
This fascination with who does the looking has occupied much of Atwood’s
work. Christina Ljungberg writes about Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye that “the question of
who sees and who is seen or, in [other] words, who is ‘the surveyor’ and who is
‘surveyed,’ […] exposes the extent to which social ideologies influence our perception of
ourselves and of others” (75). Atwood challenges these ideologies in her ekphrastic
poetry, by finding the language hidden “under the surface” of visual depictions of women
and confronting the gaze that purports to understand the female subject.