Aging and Subjectivity in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction

Abstract

In “The Victory Burlesk,” a short story from Margaret Atwood’s 1983 collection, Murder in the Dark, the unnamed young female narrator recalls attending, in a spirit of arch irony, a burlesque show. She particularly enjoys the theatricality of the spectacle – the lights, colors, and the skill of the performers. A dancer commences a strip tease. With her back to the audience, the woman’s undulating body promises titillation and display, “but when she finally turned around, she was old”; her face is powdered, her lips are painted, “but she was old” (24). The narrator’s immediate reaction is one of shame: an internalized, rather than externalized expression of horror: “I felt that I, not the woman on the stage, was being exposed and humiliated” (24). In this short story – just a couple of pages long – the aging body is entirely grotesque, and made more so for its incongruous and indecorous manifestation within an erotic context. It is, furthermore, an explicitly female aging body, and inarguably, this gendered element draws from the narrator the unwanted identification with the dancer. In this moment, the distance between self and other collapses, as the narrator is compelled to imagine her own future body, aged and decrepit, exposed to ridicule and disgust. “The Victory Burlesk” is a succinct exposition of Atwood’s ready and longstanding cognizance of the overlapping concerns with power and subjectivity that mark both female experience and the alterity of old age. It prefigures later texts such as The Blind Assassin (2000) and Moral Disorder (2006), in which aging and its relation to selfhood – specifically, the phenomenological conundrum of what Erik Erikson calls “one’s selfsameness and continuity in time” (Identity 22) – increasingly come to the fore in Atwood’s work.

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