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Margaret Atwood's attempt to define 'What's Canadian about Canadian Literature' in Survival is a helpful starting point for considering the way the stories in Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard's Egg (1983), and Wilderness Tips (1992) relate to the short story genre and Canadian literature as broad, limiting categories. Atwood herself recognizes the personal nature of Survival, defining it as 'a cross between a personal manifesto' and 'a political manifesto' (Survival, 13). She also acknowledges that 'several though by no means all of the patterns I've found myself dealing with here were first brought to my attention by my own work' (14). As the title suggests, Atwood's main thesis is that the recurring theme of Canadian literature is survival. Although Atwood identifies different types of survival (such as Canada's cultural survival despite the influence of the United States), she believes that the most prevalent type of survival in 'Canlit' is simply that of 'hanging on, staying alive' (33). Survival was a difficult challenge for early settlers, and Atwood certainly seems correct in identifying it as a formative experience for early writers:
Bare Survival isn't a central theme by accident, and neither is the victim motif; the land was hard, and we have been (and are) an exploited colony; our literature is rooted in those facts. (41)
However, Atwood is not at the 'root' of Canadian literature, and her 'Canadian experience' has not been that of the early pioneer encountering the hostile wilderness. Atwood's rewriting of that early Canadian experience in 'The Journals of Susanna Moodie' implies a certain nostalgia for the pioneering experience and a desire to write in that tradition of Canadian literature. Although Linda Hutcheon's labelling of Atwood as 'postmodern' has been challenged,(1) it does point to the important fact of Atwood's belatedness in the Canadian tradition.
Atwood notes in Survival that the replacement of wilderness with cities alters and complicates the theme of 'bare survival in the face of "hostile" elements and/or natives: carving out a place and a way of keeping alive' (32). Toronto, with its maze of underground shopping malls, is an image of how late twentieth-century Canadians already have carved 'out a place and a way of keeping alive.' It is important to note the prevalence of Toronto as the...