Margaret Atwood examines the meaning of time and space for the female Canadian artist coming of age in postwar suburbia in her Künstlerromane, Lady Oracle (1977) and Cat’s Eye (1989). Set in Toronto, both texts foreground the epistemological instability of the wilderness/urban binary through the trope of the ravine. They posit ravines as dark, hidden, repressed spaces associated with the unconscious and with the liminal space of childhood and adolescence. In their representation of young female artist characters, the novels contest the denigration of the autobiographical as they suggest the creative potential of a space most often associated, socially and culturally, with sterility. Both texts articulate a political vision in which young women refuse to be confined to spaces of domesticity, reflecting the “outsider-within stance” described by Gillian Rose in her understanding of feminist politics as paradoxical space.