Kim Wright, LCSW

02/01/2026

01/26/2026

01/05/2026

Margaret Atwood’s line comes from The Robber Bride, a novel that looks closely at how women learn to see themselves through someone else’s eyes. The book follows three women whose lives are disrupted by a charismatic, predatory figure named Zenia, but beneath the plot is something quieter and more unsettling: the realization that long before anyone else is watching, many women have learned to do the watching themselves.

What Atwood is naming here is not vanity or narcissism. It’s the internalization of observation. A split consciousness where part of you lives your life, while another part stands slightly apart, evaluating how it all looks. Am I desirable? Am I behaving correctly? Am I too much or not enough? The watcher is not neutral. It carries cultural expectations about femininity, beauty, restraint, sexuality, and worth. Over time, that gaze becomes so familiar it can feel like your own voice.

Margaret Atwood has spent her career dissecting these quiet forms of power. Long before the language of the male gaze entered everyday conversation, she was writing fiction that showed how surveillance does not always need a guard tower. Sometimes it lives inside the mind. In The Robber Bride, the characters are educated, capable women, yet they struggle with self-doubt that has less to do with individual weakness than with cultural training. They have learned to see themselves as objects in a story written by someone else.

This idea connects to Atwood’s broader preoccupation with control and autonomy. From The Handmaid’s Tale to her essays on politics and gender, she has been interested in how systems reproduce themselves not just through force, but through habit and belief. She has often resisted being labeled simply a feminist writer, insisting instead that she writes about human behavior under pressure. Still, her work has become foundational to feminist thought precisely because it captures how oppression seeps into everyday life, shaping desire, self-perception, and even imagination.

Psychologically, the image Atwood offers is striking because it describes a divided self. There is the living body and there is the internal spectator. That split can lead to constant self-monitoring, which research now links to anxiety, shame, and a diminished sense of presence. You are never fully in the moment because part of you is busy evaluating the moment. It also explains why external validation can feel so powerful and so empty at the same time. When the watcher inside is never satisfied, no amount of approval lasts very long.

Culturally, the line still resonates because the conditions that produced it have not disappeared. They have simply evolved. Advertising, film, and even supposedly empowering narratives often reinforce the idea that a woman’s value is something to be assessed. Second wave feminists like Laura Mulvey helped articulate this dynamic decades ago, and more recent writers such as Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Wolf have explored how it persists under new disguises. What Atwood adds is a literary intimacy. She shows how these forces feel from the inside, how they shape friendships, rivalries, and private thoughts.

There is also something compassionate in her observation. She does not blame women for this internal division. She understands it as adaptation. If you grow up in a world that constantly watches you, it makes sense to learn how to watch yourself. The tragedy is not the adaptation itself, but how difficult it becomes to unlearn it. Freedom is not just about removing external constraints. It is about quieting the internal commentary long enough to hear your own instincts again.

Atwood herself has navigated controversy with a similar insistence on complexity. She has been criticized at times for resisting simplified narratives about gender politics, and praised for the same reason. Her refusal to offer easy moral positions mirrors the discomfort of the quote. It does not flatter the reader. It asks for honesty.

What makes the line endure is that it invites reflection rather than accusation. Once you notice the watcher, you can start to question it. Whose standards is it enforcing? When did it arrive? What would it mean to live without performing for it? These are not questions with neat answers, but they open a door.

Ultimately, Margaret Atwood is pointing to a subtle kind of liberation. Not the dramatic overthrow of an external tyrant, but the slow, awkward process of reclaiming attention. Of learning, even briefly, to inhabit your life without standing outside it.

© Echoes of Women — Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved