Bluebeard's Egg

By Margaret Atwod

Houghton Mifflin; 281 pages.

Saints and Strangers

By Angela Carter

Viking; 126 pages.

WOMEN WRITERS have certainly done well for themselves since the days of the 19th century novel. Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters worked their own powerful personalities into their fiction. But they struggled against a male-dominated society that saw writing as a recreation for women only if they were recognizable freaks like the Brontes, spinsters like Austen or "immoral" rebels like Eliot, who shocked London society by living with a man who was not her husband.

Even after those novelists had made a name for themselves in the genre, their writing continued to be preoccupied with the society-imposed issue of marriage--seen as a sort of economic transaction and always, especially for the female protagonists, a survival tactic.

Today women writers have broken free and are describing relationships between the sexes on their own terms. Often their writing involves complaints about the constraints of these relationships and about the history of sexual serfdom that may not have ended.

Critics charge that this complaining has become complaisant, excessively feminist, predictable. Bluebeard's Egg, the most recent collection of fiction by the Canadian, Margaret Atwood, may be a case in point.

Best known for The Handmaid's Tale--her best-selling "visionary" novel in the style of 1984 and Brave New World--Atwood always writes about women struggling against or attempting to survive the oppression of men. The titles of her novels, The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, bear this out.

A story like "The Sunrise" typifies the problem with all the stories in Bluebeard's Egg. The women all, somehow, behave with condescension. The men all, somehow, are satisfied with these truncated relationships. After a while the women meld together into one composite character; you forget all her temporary names as soon as you've finished the last story. She is simply the Atwood bitch.

ATWOOD'S WRITING was much vaunted 15 years ago when her novel Surfacing was hailed as one of the best books of the '70s. One of the deficiencies of The Handmaid's Tale--and maybe the Atwood genre in general--is that its prediction of a society where a woman's best function is to reproduce is quite unbelievable.

Atwood derives the notion of the "handmaid" from the passage in Genesis where Rachel--in order to compensate for her sterility--gives Jacob her handmaid to bear him children. Atwood's notions need updating. Biblical times have passed and so have the outraged '70s.

Men were weak, she says of the past. They will be weak, she predicts of the future. Her blurred view is a symptom of her pessimism. However, it not only weakens her credibility as a chronicler of our times; it tires her readers.