LeCren 1
Carole LeCren
Ms. Combs
Writer’s Workshop
21 December 2007
“Goldilocks Makes Excuses” and Margaret Atwood: An Analysis of Style
Acclaimed Canadian poet and novelist, Margaret Atwood, has also written some very
clever short stories. Her three short stories introduced in class: “Simple Murders,” “Gertrude
Talks Back,” and “The Little Red Hen Tells All” feature tight diction, a conversational tone from
insightful literary-based characters who make philosophical comments (usually from a feminist
point of view), italicized dialogue, and in the case of the first story, internal rhyme and
paragraphs using catalogs. In my attempt to capture Atwood’s style in my short story
“Goldilocks Makes Excuses,” I tried to use all of these stylistic features.
Atwood’s use of simple nouns and verbs, short syllables, and expressive exclamations
make her diction tight. For example, in the opening of “The Little Red Hen Tells All” she starts:
“Everyone wants in on it. Everyone!” (Atwood 13). Even “Simple Murders,” the wordiest of the
three short stories, starts with a relatively simple sentence: “He had a thin rapacious mustache
and very pointed shoes” (90). Although Atwood doesn’t shy away from polysyllabic words
(“rapacious,” “disheveled,” “bejeweled”), she does use them sparingly. In my “Goldilocks
Makes Excuses” I tried to imitate Atwood’s tight diction in my opening line: “What no one ever
asks is why I was out in the damn woods in the first place” (LeCren 1). The longest words I use
are “pedophiles,” “Barcalounger,” and “adrenaline,” all of which are important to the plot. Most
of my sentences imitate Atwood’s briefer style. Compare this line from “Gertrude Talks Back”
with a line from my story: “I am not wringing my hands. I’m drying my nails” (Atwood 16) and
LeCren 2
“I may be blonde, but I’m not stupid” (LeCren 1). The syntax and structure are quite similar,
showing that I made a deliberate decision to imitate Atwood’s diction and sentence structure.
Another element of style that Atwood uses is to give her characters a conversational tone
and first person point of view. In “Simple Murders,” the only story of the three without a first
person narrator, she still manages to insert a conversational style when, after two paragraphs of
descriptions of people who are murdered, the entire third paragraph consists of: “No. Let’s start
again” (Atwood 91). The omniscient narrator manages to sound like he or she is talking
informally with the reader. In Atwood’s other two stories, the first person narrators are even
more friendly with the reader. The Little Red Hen tells the reader, “You know my story” (13)
and later, “Don’t believe a word of it” (15). This direct address to the reader is something that I
had Goldilocks say in my story when I used Little Red Hen’s line. Goldilocks say, “You know
the story” (LeCren 2). Goldilocks then explains to the reader what she was doing in those “damn
woods” (1) and the circumstances about where she lives. In the same way, Atwood has Gertrude
use direct address to explain a few things to her son, Hamlet. Atwood successfully captures the
conversational tone of a mother speaking to her son: “By the way, darling, I wish you wouldn’t
call your stepdad the bloat king…it hurts his feelings” (Atwood 17). Direct address and
conversational tone are evident in Atwood’s stories and in my imitation.
The choice of character is a particularly clever device that Atwood uses. She appears to
enjoy choosing familiar stories and reinvestigating them from a particular character’s point of
view. The Little Red Hen, in her story, explains that she didn’t really tell everyone to “kiss off”
(15) after she did all the work and they wanted the bread. Instead, she apologized and said,
“Have some more. Have mine” (15). Atwood uses the Little Red Hen as a satirical account of a
woman who is embarrassed that the real story had been turned into feminist propaganda. “I’m a
LeCren 3
hen, not a rooster,” (15) she explains to the reader, implying that if a man had done the work, he
would have claimed it for his own, no questions asked, and he wouldn’t have shared. In
“Gertrude Talks Back” Atwood takes a rather wimpy character from a Shakespeare play and
turns her into a feminist giant. (Gertrude is Hamlet’s mother, and he spends the entire play
resenting her because after Hamlet’s father’s death, she remarries.) “You have no idea what I
used to put up with,” (18) she explains to Hamlet, after telling him that his father was “very hard
to live with,” “wasn’t a whole lot of fun” and was a little “holier-than-thou” (17-18). Her
implication is that she had a right to a good sex life, and so she reveals the kicker at the end: she
was the one who killed Hamlet’s father/ her husband. In both these stories, the main female
character does something that does not follow the original source material. I tried the same thing
in my story when Goldilocks explains why she went into the woods, urged by an officious Child
Protective Services worker that she could do better than live with an alcoholic father under
substandard conditions. But she doesn’t get the happy ending. Although my story follows the
original ending, (Goldilocks runs away from the bears), she doesn’t learn what the CPS worker
wants her to learn. Instead, she comes to the conclusion that where she is living now is just as
good as any of the other possibilities out there. By twisting the ending a little, and having
Goldilocks stand up for her rights, I was attempting to imitate the two characters that Atwood
used: strong female characters with attitude. I also chose to use an already established character
from a fairy tale, as Atwood did when she took characters from a nursery rhyme and a
Shakespeare play. Atwood, according to her biography in Grolier’s Multimedia Encyclopedia,
evidently enjoys taking characters from literature; she has written a full-length novel featuring an
“irreverent” Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, called The Penelopiad (2005).
LeCren 4
Atwood also likes to use italicized dialogue, internal rhyme, and catalogs. Although the
italicized dialogue is used in all three stories, only “Simple Murders” contains samples of all
three techniques.
It was because of the chocolate bars. It was because of the stars. It was because of
a life behind bars. It was her hormones. It was the radiation from the wires and
phones. It was his mother saying, You’ll never amount to a hill of beans. It was
because he was so all-fired mean. It was the sleeping pills. It was the frills, on the
blouse, under the jacket, over the breasts. It was the blood tests. It was the sigh,
the cry, the hand on the thigh. It was the hunger, it was the rage, it was the spirit
of the age (Atwood 91-92).
Her repetition of ending words that rhyme: “chocolate bars,” “stars,” “a life behind bars” is
clever and drags the reader into the catalog of murderous reasons. The example also includes the
italicized quote “You’ll never amount to a hill of beans” which functions as a voice that adds
another dimension to the narrator’s rant. In an attempt to capture all of these stylistic elements, I
wrote in “Goldilocks Makes Excuses:”
It was because of my innocence, they say. It was because of the stars, the all night
bars. It was because of my father saying, You’re too stupid to know what’s good
for you! (LeCren 1).
Although I could not maintain the extensive cataloging that Atwood does, I worked in one set of
rhymes (“stars,” “all night bars”) to imply that Goldilocks blames fate or her father’s alcoholism
for her adventure. I also created the italicized dialogue from her father, another incentive for her
escape. The internal rhyme, italicized dialogue, and catalog of reasons were interesting stylistic
features.
My story successfully imitates Margaret Atwood’s writing style because in two short
pages (the length of each of the three stories in the class packet) I use several of Atwood’s
writing techniques, including tight diction, female characters from literature who present
LeCren 5
attitudes from first person points of view, italicized dialogue, internal rhyme, and catalogs of
excuses. In fact, that’s why I call it “Goldilocks Makes Excuses.”
LeCren 6
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Good Bones and Simple Murders. New York, Random House, 2001.
"Atwood, Margaret." Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. 2007. Grolier Online. 26 Oct. 2007
<http://gme.grolier.com/cgi-bin/article?assetid=0020030-0>.
LeCren, Carole. “Goldilocks Makes Excuses.” Unpublished manuscript. 2007.