Written by a former principal of a Government Girls? College in Shimla, this book analyses psychologically all the characters of the world-acclaimed contemporary Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, who detested being called a Canadian as it meant for her an ?oxymoron?.
In 1964, the term ?third force psychology? came into focus when B.J. Paris, an exponent in the field, started analysing literary characters with the help of psychological theories of Abraham Maslow. This ?third force? was made up of ?splinter groups? who coalesced and formed it. According to these psychologists, man is not a tension-reducing machine, nor is he a conditional animal; man has in him a third force, an ?evolutionary constructive? force which inspires him to strive for self-realisation. All third-force psychologists see self-realisation as the highest value for a human being.
Margaret Atwood'scharacters have often been called neurotics, but it would be unjust to put them all under one category. The author says that after all, they are human beings whom you cannot ignore. So she discusses the characters from six novels written by Atwood by studying the intra-psychic and interpersonal problems of these not-so-lucky human beings.
In Margaret Atwood'sfirst novel The Edible Woman, Mariam MacAlpin, the protagonist of the novel becomes obsessed with the fear that she is being used by the men in her life and discusses her subsequent entry into many relationships to break off one by one. The author feels that Mariam was obsessed that her relationship with the first male, Peter by name, was wrong and so she becomes aggressive and vindictive. After a period of tormenting self-doubt, she shows signs of self-assertion and gets over her fear.
In another story, a commercial artist enters into a relationship with her art teacher. Soon her father dies and meanwhile she tells her mother that she had married, and divorced and lost her child. The protagonist suffers from a very strong guilt complex which is intensified by her feeling that even unborn babies have eyes and she identifies herself with the baby as she says, the baby was ?myself before I was born?. Actually Margaret Atwood calls her stories ?ghost stories? because in almost all of them it is the ghost of the protagonist'spsyche that keeps coming and tormenting her.
Still another story entitled Bodily Harm, is about a female journalist who is recovering from partial mastectomy. She goes to the Caribbean islands for solace though ostensibly to write a travel piece for her magazine. In reality she is seeking escape from the ordinariness of everyday life and she is afraid of the approaching death, with which mastectomy threatens her. She falls in love with Jake but he rejects her saying she is of no use to him. She becomes despondent, desperate and anxious. The author Rama Gupta says the she fantasises about her release from the prison (her terminal illness) but in fantasy she is thinking of the reality. She will repent if she survives: ?the way she sees it?. Ultimately she emerges ?unharmed? and suffers from no fear of death or mortality.
The author says that the Margaret'smain concern is that of portraying the troubled psyche which is perfectly geared to depict the conflicts, dependence, aggression, withdrawal and alienation of her protagonists. She creates a picture world in which her characters live, struggle in life and try to come to grips with the lived reality. Her characters are not devoid of human weaknesses and her main concern is to portray their psyche.
The book is interesting but unless and until one has read Margaret Atwood'sstories in full, one cannot appreciate the labour put in by the author Rama Gupta to psychoanalyse what lies behind the protagonist'sbehaviour in each story.
(New Dawn Press Group, A-59, Okhla Industrial Area, Phase II, New Delhi-110020.)
