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

Rewriting Canonical Portrayals of WomenIn her collection of short stories, Good Bones (O. W. Toad, 1992), Marg aret Atwood (1939 - ) has included Gertrude Talks Back, a piece that rewrites the famous closet scene in Shakespeares small town. The quality of Hamlets mother has posed problems of interpretation to readers, critics and performers, past and present, and has been diversely or simultaneosly appraised as a symbol of female wantonness, the object of Hamlets Oedipus complex, and an example of female submissiveness to the male principle (Hamlets as much as Claudiuss). Like other revisionist rewritings produced by women writers in the uttermost few decades, Margaret Atwoods short story challenges received concepts of the female, and particularly the Frailty, thy invoke is woman nonion that has marked so much regulationical literature. new developments in the humanities, usually grouped under the common label of post-structuralist theory, concur contributed to making us s ensitive to the politics of culture, in general, and of literature, in particular. frequently 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 say reminds us that the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very burning(prenominal) to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them (xiii). Here as in other respects, the political agendas of feminism 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 serve that purpose I need not mention the by now many rewritings of such canonical texts as The Tempest or Robinson Crusoe. As regards the author I am have-to doe with with here, Marg aret Atwood, extensive attention has been paid to a recurrent feature of her fiction her repeated reworking of fairy tales, most importantly the different versions of Bluebeards Egg, a re-shaping which culminates in her novel The Robber Bride (1993). I would also point go forth how what is perhaps her most popular novel to date, The Handmaids narration (1985), thematizes the politics of reading and writing or, as Hutcheon has aptly put it, the antagonist between product and process (139).Similar concerns are apparent in the compilation of her short stories under the title Good Bones (1992). If the constructions of adult female and manhood occupy her in The Female Body and Making a Man, in other stories (There Was Once, Unpopular Gals, etc) it is the literary construction of womanhood that is foregrounded.