SOURCE: “Atwood's Sacred Wells (Dancing Girls, poetry, and Surfacing),” in Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood, edited by Judith McCombs, G. K. Hall & Co., 1988, pp. 213–29.

In the following essay, Brown explores the recurring images in Atwood's work, focusing on how they function in her fiction and poetry.

“Think about pools.”

There is a Margaret Atwood story—“The Resplendent Quetzal”—which opens with a young Canadian woman in Mexico, sitting at the edge of a sacrificial well. The well is an unprepossessing relic of an ancient civilization, now reduced to an object at which tourists come to gaze, their attention superficial and brief. Sarah, the woman at this well, is herself a tourist, but unlike the ones she watches hurrying by, she has some time to spend and feels at least some sense of the symbolism of this once-sacred site. Still Sarah is also disappointed in the well, almost as...