"Here's a man and woman sitting on a rock": Joni Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, and irritable feminism

This chapter charts multiple connections between Joni Mitchell and Margaret Atwood, as brilliant, angry, self-conscious, Canadian women artists of a similar generation. It explores the crossovers between Mitchell’s songs (focusing on “Come in from the Cold,” “Song for Sharon,” and “Refuge of the Roads”) and Atwood’s writings (focusing on the quasi-autobiographical novel, Cat’s Eye) to uncover a shared sensibility as well as a shared history and sense of place. Mitchell’s and Atwood’s works speak to each other through a similar affective landscape--simultaneously tough, vulnerable, and imbued with a desire for freedom that merges with a deep sense of loneliness. A critique of patriarchy, via a feminism that I want to call irritable, is a central plank of both authors’ techniques and sensibilities.