The stylist language of Margaret Atwood
The stylist language of Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood in her novels, short stories and even poetry uses a similar style of writing. It is a style that is not only distinctive but also effective. Her sense of description is one of her best talents. It allows her to create pieces of work that constantly reinforce her themes of political chaos and the effect that a patriarchal society has on women. As a feminist writer, much of her work deals with how men not only empower women but how they manage to hurt each other. Using parallelism and symbolism as springboards, Margaret Atwood writes to inform and perhaps warn her reader of the exploitation of women and sometimes even helpless men who exist within a society.
In bodily harm, Atwood develops her thematic concerns in even more global dimensions, in both figurative and geographical senses. This piece of work at times tends to be a very political feminist novel, immediately concerned with such issues as body image, female sexuality, male-female relationships, and male brutality in a patriarchal society. Through her writing of this novel, Atwood seems to project her anger towards a patriarchal establishment and value system that continues to enforce it with excessive privileges and powers, both personal and political. The life of the main character, Rennie Wilcox, is illustrated in the book to demonstrate the victimization of woman. One type of victimization that Atwood explores is sexual. Rennie returns one afternoon to her apartment to find a broken door through which an intruder has crashed.
As she walks into the bedroom she sees, “there was a length of rope coiled neatly on the quilt”. The rope is also tied in with Rennie’s past as her ex-lover, Jake, preferred sex that includes bondage and sadism. Jake would sometimes arrive at Rennie’s apartment by surprise and enjoy overpowering Rennie sexually with such perceptions as “pretend you’re being raped.” (pg. 117) Atwood takes careful attempts and goes deep into the mind of men who find victimization of women sexually arousing. Two bullying policemen who appear in her apartment following the incident are another evidence of how the society perceives women,
especially single women. The breaking in of the apartment is automatically connected inside the policemen’s mind with her being a single woman. He questions her in such a way that is rather offensive, insinuating that...