17 pages • 34 minutes read
Margaret AtwoodThis Is a Photograph of Me
Margaret AtwoodFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Hidden Subjectivity of Objective Truth
“This is a Photograph of Me” shows that a seemingly factual piece of evidence may not tell the entirety of a story. The poem questions who records history and the accuracy of any one perspective, juxtaposing the speaker’s description of a photo that the speaker claims depicts “me” with what the reader/viewer can actually see.
Immediately there is tension between the ostensible objectivity of the photograph and the potential subjectivity of the speaker’s thoughts and revelations. The photo is framed as a historical document, “taken some time ago” (Line 1). This is confirmed by the fact that the photograph was taken on black and white film. However, we also see that this document is flawed. It shows “flecks of gray / blended with the paper” (Lines 4-5), reflecting photographer, developer, or storage error. Moreover, the photograph’s details are blurred into “a smeared / print” (Lines 3-4).
In contrast, the speaker confidently and unhesitatingly explains what the photograph shows to a reader/viewer who may be confused by its haziness: “In the background there is a lake, / and beyond that, some low hills” (Lines 13-14). The speaker’s assured statements about the landscape seem to confirm the photograph’s truthful and accurate rendering of that particular environment.
However, the speaker’s parenthetical interjection shows how in incomplete any piece of objective evidence is. There is more to the story of the photograph than meets the eye: A new history is revealed when the speaker reveals that their dead body, drowned earlier that day, is in “the center / of the picture, just under the surface” (Lines 17-18). This causes viewers to reassess the photograph, now asking about power dynamics between the speaker and whoever took the photograph, changing perspective to consider the survivor of whatever event killed the speaker. What the poem is asking us to do is look for those who exist beyond the obvious spaces, to find the hidden truth.
Entrapment
In 1963, the year before Atwood wrote “This is a Photograph of Me,” Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book about the limitations of relegating women to the role of wife and mother (See: Background). Many critics trace similar second-wave feminist themes in “This is a Photograph of Me.”
In this reading, the landscape represents a woman speaker’s subservient position, which leads to her spiritual and literal death. The landscape is fraught with gendered tension: The fir tree symbolizes a strong male figure “emerging” (Line 9) from “the left-hand corner” (Line 7) to dominate the foreground. For the female speaker, the “small frame house” (Line 12) is not a safe haven, but confinement: It does not offer the comfort typically associated with home because “what ought to be a gentle / slope” (Lines 11-12) is the opposite. This depiction of the bleak and oppressive landscape offers ominous foreboding about the speaker’s domestic life.
In the second half of the poem, the speaker reveals that her body is “in the lake, in the center / of the picture” (Lines 17-18). The lake is bordered by upright elements that comprise a kind of fence: the tree on the “left” (Line 7), the house on the “right” (Line 10), and “low hills” (Line 13) on the other side of the water. The female speaker has been overwhelmed and drowned—asphyxiated by the water. Whether by murder or suicide, domestic life has destroyed her; it is impossible to “say where / precisely” (Lines 19-20) her body is. She is not “large or small” (Line 21) enough to escape the trap of the lake.
The overexposure of light is no longer capable of illuminating her condition; rather, it creates only “distortion” (Line 23) and erases the speaker’s former identity—just as the photograph does not show her corpse. She offers up the photograph as a metaphor to her desire to be seen and understood. As Cruz puts it in The Atlantic, “She introduces herself in parentheses as if whispering for someone to witness, if not the fullness of her life, then at least the fact of her death” (Cruz, Lenika. “The Subtle Horror of Margaret Atwood’s ‘This Is a Photograph of Me.’” The Atlantic, 2017).
A Warning for Other Women
“This is a Photograph of Me” is written as a direct address to a reader/viewer who is not identified. While some critics interpret the reader as someone complicit in the destruction of the woman speaker whose body is in the lake, it is also possible to see the “you” being shown the photograph as another potential female victim being warned about the future by a predecessor.
This connects thematically to Atwood’s interest in Charles Perrault’s famous 1697 fairy tale “Bluebeard,” which she has revisited in the short story collection Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), the poem “The Robber Bridegroom” (1984), and the novel The Robber Bride (1993). Perrault’s tale is dark. The wealthy Bluebeard marries several women who suddenly go missing after arriving at his impressive castle. His latest bride soon discovers that Bluebeard is a murderer who keeps the corpses of his previous wives. She almost becomes the next victim, but is saved by her wits and outside help. The fairy tale is thus a warning about power, the victimization of women, and the need for skepticism about privilege.
The poem addresses similar ideas. The landscape in the photograph—trees, slope, house, lake, and hills—at first appears benign. While there is no evidence that the speaker is female, the speaker’s association with the house suggests that we are hearing from a woman. In some variants of the fairy tale, the bones of Bluebeard’s previous wives magically speak to the new bride of his crimes. The narrator of the poem also speaks from beyond the grave, pointing out the hiding place of her body. The revelation is a warning: Although the viewer cannot at first discern that this peaceful landscape is dangerous, “if you look long enough, / eventually / you will be able to see me” (Lines 24-26). The victim speaker hides her warning inside parentheses, available only to the reader who takes the necessary time to understand and heed the message. The lake is a reflective surface. Encouraging “you” to “look long enough” (Line 24) into the water transforms the dead body into the viewer’s mirror image. In other words, “you” could be the next body “under the surface” (Line 18), if the speaker’s warning goes unheeded.
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