Success Quote by Margaret Atwood

Popular art, for Atwood, isn’t mindless; it’s unconscious. Calling it “the dream of society” frames mass culture as a shared nighttime cinema where desires, fears, and taboos get staged with the logic of a dream: vivid, repetitive, emotionally true, and rarely accountable to daylight. Dreams don’t argue; they dramatize. They smuggle in what we can’t quite admit we want, and they translate dread into plot.

The bite lands in the second clause: “it does not examine itself.” Atwood isn’t condemning popularity so much as describing a structural feature of entertainment made to be consumed at scale. Popular art tends to reassure the audience that their instincts are normal, their enemies are obvious, their victories are deserved. Self-examination is slow, alienating, and expensive; it interrupts the trance. A blockbuster can flirt with critique, but it usually folds that critique back into catharsis, where even rebellion becomes a brand experience.

The subtext is political. Dreams reveal the dreamer. If society’s dominant stories avoid interrogating themselves, they protect the status quo by default, laundering ideology as “just storytelling.” This is Atwood’s novelist’s warning from inside the machinery: narratives shape what feels natural. When a culture’s most circulated fantasies refuse to look in the mirror, they don’t merely reflect the world; they help decide which parts of it remain unthinkable.

Context matters, too. Atwood’s career is built on taking familiar genres and making them self-aware, forcing readers to see the hidden wiring - gender, power, surveillance, consent. The line doubles as a manifesto: the writer’s job is to wake the dream up, or at least teach it to ask why it keeps recurring.