"Atwood deconstructs such dualities as culture/nature and male/female, as she searches for “a third way of being outside of the either/or alternatives which her system resists." "This scholarly analysis pays attention to the high degree of intertextuality and generic hybridity in these short prose pieces, while at the same time it takes up Atwood’s feminist focus on the theme of gender relations, playing variations on the same themes explored in her novels and poetry," Nischik commented when analyzing Atwood's early works.