Atwood's first full-length critical work, Survival (1972), discusses four basic victim positions: denial, fatalistic acceptance, repudiation, and creative non- or ex-victim (Surv 36–9). She goes on to argue that these definitions provide a useful way of approaching Canadian literature, although she acknowledges that these ‘positions are the same whether you are a victimised country, a victimised minority group or a victimised individual’ (Surv 36). This chapter explores the way in which Atwood's theories of victimization and survival are central to her early works and are manifested particularly in the representation of women and of a Canada defined by its colonial roots and economic dependency upon the United States. Atwood neither ignores nor accepts national and gendered victimization (denial and fatalistic acceptance), but moves beyond these negative positions to challenge suppositions and engage in dynamic creative activity (repudiation and creative non- or ex-victim). The second part of this chapter interrogates the mechanisms for the creative activity Atwood uses in her early work, focusing on the themes of identity, geographical space and myth, as well as on genre, language and form.

Atwood is often thought of as a feminist author because the central characters of her novels are primarily women who question patriarchal discourses, although she disputes such ghettoization, preferring to define herself as a ‘citizen’ (Lang 22). Nevertheless, Atwood acknowledges that Survival has been interpreted as a feminist text,

These ‘cultural binds’ and the way in which female identity may be redefined by women themselves are also central concerns in the poetry and novels that Atwood wrote during the 1960s and 70s. Her concern with the victimization of women and the positions that are adopted in relation to that repression is particularly evident in her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969).