"Their deaths are not elegant": Portrayals of Animals in Margaret Atwood's Writings

Margaret Atwood, as both an influential literary critic and a highly accomplished writer of poetry, short stories and novels, concentrates in much of her writings on the lives of animals – in the wilderness, as domesticated pets or as laboratory objects. Whereas especially in Atwood’s earlier texts, animals frequently function as symbols of Canadian identity (or the lack thereof), Atwood starts focusing on the plight of animals apart from any notion of a Canadian identity crisis in her later writings at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Instead, she employs the fates of both humans and animals to demonstrate our mutual dependencies. By focusing on the formative roles played by animals in Atwood’s writings, I will analyse this development in three of her fictional texts which employ animals: her early novel, Surfacing (1972); the dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake (2003) and the title story of her collection of short stories, Moral Disorder (2006).