Atwood uses Gothic fiction to illuminate the contemporary realities of North American women's lives and thus invites readers familiar with either the traditional Gothic novel of past centuries or the modern day bodice-ripper to speculate about the uses to which she puts her own variation of the form. Many of Joan Foster's adult experiences seem cartoonish one minute but satirically incisive the next, and it would trigger a good deal of amused discussion to consider where Atwood's plotting goes deliberately over the top and where it only seems to do so, truth being stranger than fiction in such milieux as that of publishing or spiritualism. Readers might also devise their own theories about the imaginative purposes served by Gothic fiction and compare them to Atwood's theory regarding its popularity.
Beneath the comic facade of the.....
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