Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls, “Dancing Girls” #MARM2024

Happy 85^th birthday to Margaret Atwood!

I wonder what she thought being 85 would be like when she wrote the title story of her first collection, Dancing Girls (1977).

The original publications for each of the stories are listed in my 1978 paperback, indicating that only three stories were not previously published: “Training”, this story, and the next (final) story.

And, so, I suspect that these were the stories written later. (A quick search online didn’t reveal the answer, but I did find this peek into her juvenilia.)

Partly this is based in a vague memory of a broadcast interview I watched last year about the collection, wherein she talks about how long ago she wrote some of the stories included in the 1977 collection. But, then, I also wonder at the fact that this story taking place in a rooming house; the landlady reminds me of the woman in her 1969 novel, The Edible Woman, so maybe it was actually an earlier story.

Regardless, the story fits, thematically, with works earlier in this collection—like “The War in the Bathroom” and “The Man from Mars”, about how well we know people even when we share close quarters with them, about how easily difference becomes intertwined with disdain.

(I actually reread “The War in the Bathroom” because I thought it might have been set in the same rooming house, but if it’s connected, it’s via the fact that its narrator has moved to a new boarding house, so perhaps it’s one of the vacated neighbours alluded to in this story, one of the those who have inhabited the room at the heart of this story, with such high turnover.)

MARM 2024 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Training” (November 5)
Old Babes in the Wood, “My Evil Mother” (November 7)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 10)
Dancing Girls, “Lives of the Poets” (November 12)
Old Babes in the Wood, “The Dead Interview” (November 14)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 16)
Margaret Atwood’s 85^th Birthday (November 18)
Dancing Girls, “Dancing Girls” (November 19)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Impatient Griselda” (November 21)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 24)
Dancing Girls, “Giving Birth” (November 26)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Bad Teeth” (November 28)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

The story opens with Ann overhearing the landlady’s request of Ann’s neighbour, asking him to don his “native costume and come downstairs to model for her two young sons. The phrase isn’t set apart from the story in quotation marks for emphasis in the story, but the commentary in the following paragraphs (indeed, the rest of the story) makes that clear. You can hear the bunny quotes.

Ann, herself a Canadian, is rooming there to study urban design at the American university (Atwood, too, left Toronto behind to study at Harvard for a time) and she considers how her landlady has said that Ann’s not foreign: nobody perceives a Canadian like her in America as being “foreign”. These presumptions and judgements are important, but so is the topic of Ann’s studies, because she is constantly engaged in imagining how she will plan cities and spaces for people to inhabit and share, and she plans to apply what she learns to Toronto.

While Ann’s imagining various possibilities for her urban spaces, particularly green spaces, one matter emerges as significant: her imagined spaces are unpopulated. She cannot imagine people gathering there.

The story feels all-a-pulse with characters, some dialogue with individuals (like Jetske, another student in urban design, and Lelah, who used to have the room next door) and some vivid scenes (like the mathematicians in the kitchen and the scene which inspires the title—which is also what’s inspired my counting this story for my “Flight” square in my Bingo card, whereas I had imagined it might be bird-related).

Any one of those characters or scenes could be unravelled and explored, but my attention snags on this question of these barren, uninhabited spaces. These green spaces that the narrator cannot imagine populated by all the people who live in the surrounding blocks.

This rooming-house story, written more than four decades ago, remains relevant because it still seems impossible (sometimes? enduringly?) to imagine a neutral place where people can all spend time together when some of those people don’t consider some of the others to be fully human.

Reading this story this week made me exceptionally sad, because the reader is right there with Ann, who despite her youth and inexperience of the world can clearly see her landlady’s ordinary (and extraordinary) biases.

Right there, with Ann, who eventually betrays the limits of her own compassion and understanding. Not because of what she recognises as a “silly” thought, and chides herself for, but because of the nasty thing she says next—quietly, to herself—that she leaves unquestioned and unexamined.

I probably would have enjoyed the story without that development, that single revealing sentence, but Ann’s culpability serves as a reminder that it’s always simpler to scrutinise other people than ourselves.

And the final paragraph could be read as a celebration of sorts, but in the context of that single sentence, it feels undeniably sinister.