“The Old Maps Are Dissolving”: Intertextuality and Identity in Atwood’s The Robber Bride

Donna L. Potts, Kansas State University
Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1999), 281-298.

In consideration of the intersections between intertextuality and identity issues, this essay examines the ways in which Margaret Atwood’s intertextuality in The Robber Bride may be read both as a postcolonial attempt to devise a discourse that displaces the effects of the colonizing gaze while still under its influence and as a narrative that shows the effect of colonization on Canada to be inseparable from the effect of patriarchy on Canadian women. This essay argues for hybridization as a means of acknowledging and accepting multiplicity, which permits, indeed facilitates, political movement.

Mary Wollstonecraft Sojourner Truth Margaret Atwood Abigail Adams Amy Tan H.D. Simone de Beauvoir Zora Neale Hurston Frances Burney Virginia Woolf

"The white saxifrage with the indented leafe is moste commended for the breakinge of the Stone."

— Turner, Herbal, III, 68 [1568]