On The Intertextuality In Atwood’s The Edible Woman

As the nominee of the British Booker Prize for four times, winner of2000, known as the Canadian Literature Queen, Margaret Atwood reveals her skill control over narrative and genre, her focus on the intersection of three distinct while related literary traditions:feminist, nationalist and postmodernist, which expose the fractured lives of women, and the pain they both endure and pass on to others in the modern society.The thesis attempts to reinterpret Atwood’s first novel The Edible Woman from the perspective of intertextuality, which displays a synchronic way of reinterpreting the text and emphasizes the interplay between the content and the form. Intertextuality liberates texts from unitary reading context, scrutinizes the texts by placing them in the broad, profound literary background, and meanwhile it indicates that the novel’s significance derives from the interrelation and interweaving of multi-texts. The thesis reinterprets the inter-reference and meaning relevance between The Edible Woman and its pre-existent texts——the scapegoat stories, the fairy tales, the Gothic novels, and the traditional female ending through the co-present intertextuality (allusion) and the derivative intertextuality (parody) contained in the narrow intertextuality categorized by Gerard Genette, and anticipates that it would shed some lights in providing new insights to interpret The Edible Woman.The thesis is comprised of five chapters. The first chapter introduces Margaret Atwood’s growing background, literary status and achievement, reviews on her both at home and abroad, as well as the research significance of the thesis. The second chapter introduces intertextuality’s naissance, development and evolution, from Saussure’s and linguistic sign theory and Bakhtin’s textual dialogism and polyphony theory, to the birth of the terminology put forward by French literary critic and feminist Julia Kristeva, and then to the broad intertextuality represented by Roland Barthes and narrow intertextuality represented by Genette. It explores the relevance of feasible narrow intertextuality and the research. Chapter Three analyzes allusions in The Edible Woman to the implicit scapegoat stories and fairy tales whose influence correlates with Atwoodian texts based on the co-present intertextuality (allusion), and therefore concludes the deep-seated reasons of female characters’ hardships and oppression. Chapter Four demonstrates the intertextual relation between the novel and the Gothic novels and the female ending in the traditional novels based on the derivative intertextuality (parody), which aims at highlighting the transformation and subversion made by Atwood to the traditional literary genres and styles, as well as excavates the multi-themes in The Edible Woman. The last chapter makes a brief summary of the main points in the full text and exposes the limitation of the thesis.