Visibility and Erasure: Identity in Margaret Atwood’s “This Is a Photograph of Me” (1966)

Abstract

Contemporary poetry frequently interrogates the relationship between representation and self-hood, questioning whether identity can be captured, communicated, or understood through conventional means. The present paper deals with the problem of understanding how Margaret Atwood explores the dialectic between visibility and erasure in the construction of identity in her poem “This Is a Photograph of Me,” published in The Circle Game (1966). The purpose of this study is to analyze how Atwood employs the photograph as a metaphor for the lim-itations of representation, presenting a speaker who exists beneath the visible surface of the image, simultaneously present and effaced. The research paper employs the research method of close textual analysis informed by feminist literary criticism and poststructuralist theory to interpret the poem’s treatment of female identity and the conditions of visibility. The research paper concludes that Atwood presents identity as existing in the tension between visibility and erasure rather than as stable presence, challenging both essentialist notions of self and nihilistic acceptance of complete effacement. The future perspective of research is to situate this poem within Atwood’s broader exploration of female identity across her poetry and fiction.