SOURCE: “Minuets and Madness: Margaret Atwood's ‘Dancing Girls,’” in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, edited by Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson, Anansi, 1981, pp. 107–22.

In the following essay, Thompson offers a detailed survey of the stories in Dancing Girls.

Two-headed poems; polarities, mythic reversals: it may be from Margaret Atwood's own delight in oppositions and strong contradictions that critics often take their cue. One notices, at any rate, a tendency for commentators to deplore or dwell exclusively upon the clinical chill, the frightening detachment in Atwood's poetry, at the same time as they often criticize her fiction, particularly The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, as shallow, flippant, frivolous, with silly protagonists, in a phrase, “not the essential Atwood.”¹ The poetry is seen as cold, strange, mythical, ritualistic, while the prose is considered comparatively warm, full of common touches and ordinary bumblers; one intense and...