SOURCE: Howells, Coral Ann. “On Gender and Writing: Marian Engel's Bear and The Tattooed Woman.” In Narrative Strategies in Canadian Literature. Feminism and Postcolonialism, edited by Coral Ann Howells and Lynette Hunter, pp. 71-81. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Howells examines Engel's narrative shift between fantasy and realism in Bear and The Tattooed Woman, arguing that this shift speaks to Engel's position in feminist writing.

Ordinary reality keeps turning on me. What I have to deal with is super-reality, that element in everyday life where the surreal shows itself without turning French on us.

Introduction to The Tattooed Woman¹

In his preface to Marian Engel's posthumously published collection of short stories in The Tattooed Woman (1985) Timothy Findley describes them as having a kind of ‘collective oddness’. His remark not only underlines her own comments but is itself remarkably at odds with William French's assessment of...