Rewriting Canonical Portrayals of Women :: Good Bones Margaret Atwood Literature Essays

Re paper Canonical Portrayals of WomenIn her collection of bypass stories, untroubled Bones (O. W. Toad, 1992), Margaret Atwood (1939 - ) has included Gertrude Talks Back, a piece that rewrites the famous wardrobe scene in Shakespeares Hamlet. The character of Hamlets have has posed problems of interpretation to readers, critics and performers, past and present, and has been variously or simultaneosly appraised as a symbol of distaff wantonness, the object of Hamlets Oedipus complex, and an example of female submissiveness to the male principle (Hamlets as much as Claudiuss). the likes of other revisionist rewritings produced by women writers in the last few decades, Margaret Atwoods short story challenges received concepts of the female, and particularly the Frailty, thy name is woman notion that has attach so much approved literature. Recent developments in the humanities, usually group at a lower place the common label of post-structuralist theory, have contributed to ma king us clear to the politics of culture, in general, and of literature, in particular. Much thought has been given in the last few decades to how the literary canon emerges and holds its ground, and to the relations between canonical and non-canonical, between the centre and the margins. Post-colonial theorist Edward Said reminds us that the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the principal(prenominal) connections between them (xiii). Here as in other respects, the political agendas of womens liberation movement and post-colonialism overlap both aim at challenging the canon and at inscribing the experiences of the marginal subject (female and/or post-colonial).Revisionist rewritings are one of the strategies that can advert that purpose I need not mention the by at one time many rewritings of such canonical texts as The Tempest or Robinson Crusoe. As regards the author I a m concerned with here, Margaret Atwood, extensive attention has been give to a recurrent feature of her fiction her repeated reworking of fairy tales, well-nigh importantly the different versions of Bluebeards Egg, a re-shaping which culminates in her novel The pillager Bride (1993). I would also point out how what is perhaps her most customary novel to date, The Handmaids Tale (1985), thematizes the politics of reading and writing or, as Hutcheon has aptly put it, the opposition between product and accomplish (139).Similar concerns are apparent in the compilation of her short stories under the title Good Bones (1992). If the constructions of womanhood and manhood occupy her in The Female Body and Making a Man, in other stories (There Was Once, less-traveled Gals, etc) it is the literary construction of womanhood that is foregrounded.