Margaret Atwood and Monstrous Vegan Words

Abstract

Chapter 3 positions Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003‒13) as the culmination of the trajectory built across the previous two chapters, drawing directly on the monstrous vegans of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. The chapter argues that Atwood’s vegan monsters are presented as overdetermined literary constructions and signal the impossibility of connecting to a ‘pure’ or inherent vegan identity. Unpacking allusions to a wide body of vegetarian and vegan philosophy and thought within the texts, this chapter re-thinks ideas about narrative transmission and the reproduction of literary veganisms. The chapter ultimately argues that the recognition of historic vegan words, in the service of greater visibility and recognition, risks circumventing the complications and contradictions inherent to their transmission.