Ghosts and Otherness in the Early Poetry of Margaret Atwood

This paper explores how ghosts in Margaret Atwood's early poetry represent otherness, specifically the division of the self or the repressed heterogeneous elements. Drawing on the similarity between Atwood's ghost imagery and the way hysteria and the unconscious enter the symbolic world of consciousness or language, this paper interprets ghosts as representing the other that exists either externally in nature or internally within the self, following Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject. In Atwood's poetry, white explorers, settlers, and Susanna Moodie as colonial pioneers are positioned as subjects, while the indigenous peoples, wilderness, and animals they displace occupy the position of the other. These others, as abject beings, experience death and resurrection, disturbing the settlers' identity by inhabiting their space as ghosts. This aligns with Kristeva's explanation of the abject as the essential precondition for the emergence of the self; the subject must continually expel the abject to establish its own identity, even as the abject remains a fundamental condition of existence. Atwood's ghosts, therefore, signify her unique sense of otherness, traversing the boundaries between human and animal, life and death, and seeking to dismantle otherness.