Past and Present in Margaret Atwood’s "Wilderness Tips"

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s short story collection Wilderness Tips contains ten stories that, among other topics, deal with the way the past and the present overlap in human life. In most of them, middle-aged characters look back at the events from their childhood or adolescence that shaped them as human beings, changed their destiny, and affected their present life. These characters, at a safe distance from their past and with the benefit of hindsight, are finally able to understand these crucial events and, as a result of this, they revise their personal histories and retell their stories. This paper will explore how stories from this collection tackle the relationship between the past, tradition, and history on the one hand and the present time on the other. In order to analyze this relationship, the paper will survey some of the discoveries that postmodern literary theories, such as new historicism, made regarding the study and representation of history, the truthfulness of fiction, the selection and interpretation of facts, and the possibility of different perspectives, etc. The focus of the paper will be the story “The Age of Lead” since it presents both the personal (hi)stories of its characters and a true historical event connected to their lives.