Female Images In Margaret Atwood Short Stories

Margaret Atwood is a writer with strong female consciousness. Her novels' main character are women, in which she observes women' survival predicament, explores the road of women' self. She tries to write in various performance practices constantly, for restoring women' voices. The paper focuses on the four collections of short stories, that is, Wilderness Survival, Bluebeard eggs, Good bones, Murder in darkness. Using Feminist criticism methods, to highlight the theme of a constantly growing female consciousness, which makes sense for fiction art.Chapter one analyzes the colonized female image from mental and physical in Atwood's works. Not only men but female themselves produce an effect on women body's disciplines. Then the author from mother-daughter relationship, friend relationship, man-woman relationship analyzes their spirit encounters. The damage from the oppression and hostility between woman and woman is more serious. That's because they accepted male consciousness and internalized it as self-awareness.Chapter two analyzes a series of rebels. Firstly, they use bodies as weapons to resist: pursuit to neutral beauty, grasp the initiative of sex, abandon the body in fantasies. And they purchase freedom at the expense of family and marriage. They work like a dog in order to obtain material goods. However, their endeavor never help them change their destiny. They model themselves after men, aiming to be a man. The way to build themselves, at the cost of female characteristics, sink themselves into emptiness spirit.Chapter three using ecological feminism and referring to Atwood's personal experience and Canada's unique geographical environment and it's cultural tradition analyzes ideals:wilderness women, exploring Atwood's building female themselves, to draw a conclusion that wilderness is the right approach to return to female themselves. The return to nature means women build true female themselves in the original life state which is away from male ideology. From the level of human's survival, the author discusses the importance of wildness women to save the morbid men The appearance of them means the theme of Atwood's female consciousness's growth evolve into the theme of human self-awareness growth, which achieves ideal distillation from feminism to humanism.Chapter four analyzes Atwood how build narrative of female subject. By using parody, Atwood criticize male-dominated culture. By using women-oriented narration, helping women have a voice and focusing female narrative perspective, Atwood builds the authority of female subject.Chapter five analyzes the reason of why Atwood builds this three kinds women; and the whole characteristics of short fiction novels. And it analyzes the meaning of wilderness female in Atwood novel creation and in Canadian culture.