Imprisoned Body And Escaping Spirit

Margaret Atwood's novels are rich in themes and of great artistic value. They often involve common themes and writing styles, and therefore should be studied as a whole. The themes I explore in this study include the "prison of the body" and "escape of the spirit". I will present a critical overview of Atwood's novels, while at the same time relating them to Western contemporary philosophies (including that of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Maurece Merleau-Ponty) as well as post-modern theories (especially feminist theory). My intent is to reach deep into Atwood's repeating themes of "body", "imprisonment" and "escape" in order to illustrate both the context and purpose of her work. The thesis comprises the following four parts:"imprisonment of the body", "physical confinement", "escape of the spirit" and "body and mind".The first chapter concerns "Imprisonment of the Body" and explores the use of metaphors related to the female body, a hallmark of Margaret Atwood's novels. Hair in Margaret Atwood's novel resembles the image found in the fairy tale Rapunzel. The heroine's beautiful long hair extends and entangles her world both inside and outside of the room that imprisons her. Similarly the "left hand" symbolizes the feminine contours of the tale since women typically use their left hand for writing in contrast to men who rely on their right. The second part of this thesis is mainly about man's intrusion into the mysterious female reproductive system. Here, the use of modern scientific and medical instruments is depicted as a brutal infringement on the feminine domain and a challenge to natural forces. The telescopes, cameras and video cameras, along with other technical tools allow man to expand their supervision of women as they place the women under the surveillance of his watchful eye. Even more frightening for Atwood is that women accept and even embrace the "other's" evaluation as standard by which to judge and value themselves. Not only are the bodies of Atwood's heroines physically imprisoned, they are also imprisoned by their own bodies. Atwood portrays the female bodies as cocoons and the uses metaphors such as "Pandora Box" to depict the female body as a container of mysterious energy. Here I argue that Atwood's portrayal resembles that of most contemporary French philosophers in opposing Descartes'rationalist depiction of the relationship between consciousness and the body as being that between "active" and "passive" components. Instead, for Atwood the body is represents a spiritual core containing a multitude of rebellious elements.Chapter II, "Physical Confinement" concerns the theme of imprisonment in Atwood's novels. This chapter analyzes how Atwood uses the prototypical themes of fairy tales and myths, such as Grimms'Rapunzel and Bluebeard's Egg, Tennyson's Lady of Shallot etc. All these tales contain a common theme:imprisonment of female. Especially in Bluebeard's Egg, the Bluebeard's Castle appears in various forms throughout most of Atwood's novels symbolizing the male power space within which women are confined and controlled. Atwood's "prison" not only refers to physical space and time of the heroine's captivity, it extends to all women prisoners, past and present. For example, the protagonist in The Maidhand's Tale, Offred, was imprisoned in the present, she can only hope that in the future someone will listen to her tape and free her from her "present state". In the Cat's Eye, Cordelia was confined in the "past" and Elaine, who returns to her hometown in order to meet Cordelia, discovers that Cordelia had been locked in a space of the "past" that she cannot enter. This special relationship between body and space is similar to Merleau-Ponty's "schema of the body" which explains that the body, space, and time form a special relationship of mutual containment; only together do they produce a unified existence.Chapter?"Escape of the Spirit" first discusses how the protagonists of the three earlier Atwood novels The Edible Woman, Surfacing and Bodily Harm escape from "victimhood". This part of the analysis will combine Atwood's thoughts on victimhood explained in Survival:A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature with Arnold van Gennep's Rite of Passage. In both works, the protagonists realize they are victims only by witnessing other victims (such as animals, the disabled); and finally through the symbolical "escape into the underground" they achieve self-awareness. Although Atwood's protagonists try various ways to escape from themselves and their female identity, but they cannot escape the source of their nightmares and fears.The last of this chapter is about the "Third Person" and the male savior. Duncan in The Edible Woman is the "third sex" between male and female while Joe in Surfacing is being between civilization and nature. The "third person" is portrayed by Atwood as a kind of person who is neither a "male victimizer" nor a "female victim". But the "third person" does not really act as a savior of women. What Atwood wants to say is: while man can change himself from being a victimizer to being a third person, women also must stop playing the victim role and become "the third person". A "male savior" is like a prince in a fairy tale saving the princess from danger. Atwood, however, as a radical feminist declares that in real life, these male saviors cannot save women from their confinement. The princess who is to be rescued by the prince from their evil stepmother will only find themselves imprisoned yet again in the prince's castle.Chapter IV "Body and Mind" is slightly different from the first three chapters which place more emphasis on text. This chapter takes a more abstract and theoretic standpoint to study Atwood's works. Here, the conflict between mind and body will be discussed in greater detail so as to fully understand Atwood's attitude towards the problems of contemporary Canadian women as well as towards postmodern ideas about writing.Section one of this chapter, titled "Self Division and Combination", is a discussion of women's self division into both subject and object. A split in the female root causes the female object to be seen, killed, eaten, consumed, and then materialized into the subject of the performance, a subject dominated by "objectivity". With the development of society, they themselves are beginning to see some of those who became victimizers eat, consume, and reconstruct the performers. This will result in a woman's self-division, after which she is both subject and the object.The second section "The Embodiment of Alienation and Integration", I focus on The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace and The Robber Bride to discuss Atwood's use of the "avatar" (double) theme. The analysis shows that, Laura to Alice, Mary to Grace, Zenia to Tony, Charis and Roz, the formers are the depressed dark selves of the latters.In section?"Of Death and Resurrection," I study Margaret Atwood's keen interest in the separation of writers from their works. Atwood agrees with Roland Barthes that the text, once formed, will be rid of the hand of the author and become self-sufficient and independent. The writer's life and work's own existence are that of individuals. But for Atwood the "death of position is contradictory one. On the one hand, she hoped to remove the human restrictions of literary works by separating them from their authors and thereby imbuing them with universal significance. On the other hand, she is not willing to cast herself as simply another Canadian feminist writer drowning in Barthes's "sea of anonymous texts".