Representation of Women in the Work of Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a standout amongst the most talented, powerful and intelligent authors in the west today. She articulates the situations, contradictions and ambiguities of the late twentieth century with every one of its complexities and extremities. Throwing her vision of life in heap frames her systems and themes know no restriction. Referred to generally as an artist and an author, Atwood is likewise a faultfinder, a short story author, a writer, a caricaturist and an essayist of kids' books. An adaptable virtuoso, Atwood through her novel explores the different between related social, physical and psychological nerves of the general population. In the depiction of the quest of the hero, the concerns of Atwood with respect to different humanitarian issues could be seen. Obviously, she isn't a special case in voicing such concerns. Essayists of each age and each foundation have been and are engaged setting right the uncalled for tendencies that are pervasive in the general public. Every one of the essayists endeavor to express their musings different modes. Hence, it could be attested that each one of those essayists have had humanitarian concerns with various perspectives. Atwood is just a piece of this super casing work. Still she is viewed as an extraordinary and unmistakable author in light of the fact that obviously Atwood is an all-around balanced essayist. This examination overviews the female hero's manner by which their dread, blame, outrage, and constraint of individuality is enhanced inside the story. As a matter of fact, Atwood attempts to remind us ladies' regular occupations and depicts the ladies' victimization through silence they must have because of the political circumstance. Gradually as the novels elucidate, female characters go over the span of a system of introversion, self-analysis and self-knowledge. At last, they appear to be more imagined, more in constrained without anyone else's input, and increasingly helpful. The body in female characters isn't disconnected from their psyche and Atwood has laid weight on it all the time so as to interrupt awareness with body. For this situation, bodies become strange and awful enemies even to their occupants. Body in Atwood's chosen novels is the wellspring of illnesses. It is additionally the wellspring of political power which cruelty is connected and practiced. As Dorothy Jones contends, Atwood's accounts are constantly identified with ladies who are "powerless individuals got in devices conceived by the powerful": here, "power" associate with the individuals who traps either at the large scale level (The Handmaid's Tale) or at the miniaturized scale level (Cat's Eye and The Blind Assassin) (Cambridge Companion p.61). In The Handmaid's Tale, Bodily Harm, The Edible Woman, The Blind Assassin and Cat's Eye, I look at women's activist perspective identified with politics Ladies have ever been abused in numerous ways by the alleged supernatural Man. It is a confusion to give more significance to men over ladies. We should state this ideology has left the gender politics. Man is considered as an image of power and thriving. It is a stale set guideline on the planet that just men should work and earn cash. Ladies are denied to go outside the four dividers of their homes. Ladies just speak to an object for sexual delight and for doing tedious unimportant works like washing garments, cleaning utensils and preparing nourishment. It is strange to see such an absurd gender one-sided politics against ladies. It is incredible for individuals to see spouses or young ladies denying the family unit obligations and men or husbands are made to do these insignificant works. Afterward, when ladies somewhat started to understand the gender politics, the awaking came to them because of their inside inclination to pick up learning through instruction. There has likewise been a tradition of denying training to ladies. Under this condition not many ladies covertly started to peruse books and they understood the seriousness and power of this issue. Such ladies, who began to detect their overburdened life, endeavored to offer words to their condition. Atwood‘s novels show how everyday life step by step wears ladies out. The little fights won or lost decrease the flexibility of ladies. Urban decay assumes an imperative role in Cat's Eye where a difference among Toronto and northern bramble is brought out. Most protagonists endure in light of the distorted mentality of the Urbanites. Moms are compulsive, fathers are dreaded, and kids are cruel. Urban decay is an inevitable piece of urban life. Urban living and its decay lead to physical and psychological viciousness against ladies. The housewives in Cat's Eye should love out their relational unions where separate from is conceivable however disliked prompting impoverishment. The hero in Cat's Eye thinks about her youth in Toronto that isn't charming. She experienced issues in learning to associate with other youngsters who were not vulnerable as her. By learning to manage her youth, the hero learns to enjoy the present. She accepts the awful things that have happened to her and accepts terrible things she has done to other people. Comprehension of these activities causes her to dismiss victimization. Atwood demonstrates the rejection of victimization by splitting far from the general public. Atwood‘s fascination with mortality is common in every last bit of her novels. She admits to this enthrallment in her section titled" Negotiations with the Dead" from her work by a similar name. She expresses "All composing is roused, where it counts, by a bear of and a fascination with mortality....to bring a person or thing resurrected" (NWD 156). Atwood‘s whole protagonists it might be said experience this adventure to the black market. They ladies are remorselessly misled in countless ways. A standout amongst the best methods for these ladies endure is through finding their voice recorded as a hard copy, similarly as Atwood has. By composing, her protagonists can desert something to be recollected by; something lasting. Atwood has expressed that the idea of composing is "its perpetual quality, the quick that it survives its own execution" (NWD 158). Thus, similarly as Atwood exists through her very own composition, her protagonists get by through theirs. They beat responsibility for it. They set out on many adventure and can achieve the destiny "Position Four: To be an inventive non-injured individual" (SF 38). The usable word being "innovative" for it is just through imagination that they can discover their voices and genuine survival. As Atwood has expressed, "Other fine arts can last yet they don't get by as voice" (NWD 159). Luckily for Atwood's protagonists, the rediscovery of their voice empowers their survival. The specific manner by which they endure is critical. They don't just keep on living. They are for the most part ready to recoup a lost or persecuted bit of themselves and can in this way reconnect to turn out to be entire once more. These four protagonists at last recognize their own responsibility for their victimization and that rearrangement causes them locate their own once and recapture a political cognizance. Through a nearby examination of Atwood's protagonists, obviously these characters prevail with regards to getting "learning of their place". By picking up ownership of this information and by recognizing responsibility for their victimization these characters can turn out to be "entire" once more. They can endure. It further lights up the unfortunate casualty that victimizes division; while reiterative the plenty of reasons that Atwood's hero ought to be considered survivors. So as to comprehend Atwood's female characters, it is important to look at specific generalities that can be found in Atwood's works, explicitly her contemplations on women's liberation and survival. Apparently, she is a standout amongst the most prolific Canadian journalists. Her works have been altogether contemplated and inspected. Atwood is difficult to bind, in spite of the fact that critics demand attempting to categorize her.

Atwood's novels manage the covered up oppressed universe of ladies where bad form in the public arena pushes them towards murkiness. Margaret Atwood additionally depicts the inner desire of ladies to break every single conventional personality so as to live with freedom. Margaret likewise indicates numerous models where a victim in the novel adopts the way of survival and later empowers her personality or self-free from any kind of conventional

sexual pleasure or for doing dull house hold works of washing garments or clearing floors. The paper follows the woman's survival that characterizes her place as a woman in this world through the novels of Margaret Atwood. Her novels manage the topic of survival as projected by the female protagonists of her novels. The significant themes of her novels are failure and fertility, gentle enemy of Americanism, multiculturalism, nature versus human, hunt of self-personality, Southern Ontario Gothic, longshot legends, urban versus rustic and ladies empowerment. As she is asserted as a women's activist author of nineteen sixties, she has endeavored to encompass all encounters as a woman, as a female and as an essayist. Atwood is under solid influence of patriotism. Her feminism is additionally related to her feeling of feminism, patriotism and both the Canadian and female character. Her basic compositions demonstrate her quest for survival and gender cognizance. In her novels, she has diverted out delightful gives in behind her character and their personalities, and hence takes the peruser to the past memory through which the present is focused and lived. In her novels, Atwood manages ladies' cozy and credible encounters and she draws a self – representation of woman as the craftsman and legend who is dependable to her own inward directions. She makes a picture of a legend whose character does not need profundity or sensitivity. An extraordinary connection between the protagonists and the novels records their feelings and dreams. Atwood has created saints who satisfy their vision of character and destiny. In these novels; the hero turns into a one of a kind individual meaning a female. They all set out on voyages trying to rediscover lost pieces of themselves. As indicated by Atwood, recognizing one's very own culpability is the main way a victim can really survive. All ladies in her novels prevail in their undertakings and must be genuine survivors. The paper manages ladies' involvement in male commanded culture. The themes of novels present ladies got in harsh generalizations from which a few ladies battle to make a female space for themselves. This might be done through self-rule of thought, self-definition and self-reproduction of one's own history, through creative arrangement, oral or composed and holding among ladies through a refusal to take up the victim's position or the role of subjugation. Hence, the paper center around the gender politics which is being fixed by birth that parts her separated with the implemented gender. All through her reality, she is never treated as a total individual and she can't find herself as a person. Atwood offers discourse to her life and power to her insignificant nearness in the general public. The silent woman winds up mindful of her individuality and powers her in the realm of man from where she is removed as a futile product.

In Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, there is a long silence that embraced ladies' protagonists, their recollections and their reality which she attempts to show and break it. This tale illustrates the females' requirement for voice and words in which they are constrained by government. Female hero in this novel lives in a society where silence has been constrained on ladies and features a masculine society for perusers. In actuality, it depicts a "victimized and persecuted female gender" (Soofastaei and Mirenayat). The Handmaid's Tale is about Offred, the principle female character, in Republic of Gilead community. Handmaids ought to bring kids for favored families, who have issue. Offred is chosen for the authority and his significant other. She isn't her real name in the story. Truth be told, the handmaids' names trailed by "of" which is toward the start of each worker. Offred says, "My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which no one uses now since it's illegal" (37). Ladies' concealment and underestimation is evident in Atwood's patriarchal society. Anyway, a voice is given to Offred by Atwood. She states in a fierceness and finds a path for evolving circumstance. Margaret Atwood's conflict in her novel, then again, isn't just to depict woman's inclusion in the techniques that lead to her victimization yet she needs to examine the conceivable ties of battling patriarchal structures to power and supremacy that rejects female's equivalent asserts as a person in society. In Bodily Harm, other story of Atwood, female characters are appeared imperfect animals. Lora and Rennie, who have shared a little room, went for a sort of relationship by power. The fundamental character, Rennie, who experiences bosom malignancy, saw herself as a harmed sex machine. Lora's accounts are interwoven with Rennie. While Lora is recounting about her accounts, Rennie doesn't focus on her and just take a gander at Lora's opening and shutting mouth. Rennie disdains Lora when she discovers that Lora is undermining herself to get a few extravagances from the jail protects. Rennie declines her empathy from Lora like society until Lora rebels against their captors. Lora originates from common laborers with improper acts and practices. She lives in a social and sexual repression not the same as Rennie's. Ladies' voices like her don't hear in a patriarchal society. At last, she is sexually assaulted by guard. Ladies in Atwood's accounts are victims because of their sex to such a degree this issue makes them to wind up unfeeling somehow or another. Thus, this issue makes a society in which female characters are finally the silenced and victimized gender in there. undertaking however a wide comprehension of it encloses the talking, composing and along these lines upholding for ladies and by recognizing foul play to females in the economic wellbeing. In this way another perspective has been investigated nowadays in the 21st century which demonstrates the feminism and its politics in detail with extraordinary force. Margaret Atwood's novels look at these issues with the depiction of her enslaved female characters in her novels. Women's activist methodology can be recognized in fiction since Jane Austen had tended to the confined existences of ladies who faced such predicament in the early piece of the century pursued by Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, who embraced the reason for ladies' regrettable state. George Eliot likewise depicted ladies' misery and abuse in her famous personal novel Ruth Hall (1854).Moreover, an American writer Fanny Fern uncovered openly by keeping in touch with her own battle to help her kids as a paper columnist after her better half's unexpected passing. Louisa May Alcott, a staunch women's activist, wrote a solid women's activist novel A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866) which manages a young lady's endeavors to flee from her polygamist spouse and become autonomous. Shockingly some male creators likewise perceived the bad form being done to ladies [4]. The novels of George Meredith and George Gissing and the plays of Henrik Ibsen likewise sketched out the pitiful situation of ladies of the contemporary time. Ladies' involvement of the power politics of gender and their problematic connection to patriarchal traditions of power has affinities with the Canadian demeanors to the social dominion of the United States just as its irresoluteness towards its European inheritors. Toward the start of the Nineteenth century, singular ladies and a few men were criticizing male predominance where ladies were consigned to the edges of society and were given low status. Along these lines, mindfulness was ascending among the general population yet at the same time there was minimal indication of progress in the political or social request. Toward the start of the twentieth century, women's activist sci-fi rose as a sub-kind of sci-fi that means to manage ladies' roles in society. Ladies scholars in the literary development of the nineteenth century and mid twentieth century, was the main flood of feminism. Amid the 1920s journalists, for example, Clare Winger Harris and Gertrude Barrows Bennett distributed sci-fi stories composed from female points of view and once in a while dealt with gender and sexuality-based subjects to indicate guys mishandling females with their severity. They portrayed how men dealt with ladies as objects to give them compelling sexual pleasure. By the 1960s sci-fi brought emotionalism with political and innovative criticism of society.

The anonymous hero finds her very own impression disaster in the Quebec's landscape. She communicates a profound worry for nature and presents the perusers the association between ladies nature. The epic unmistakably displays parallelism between the abuse of woman and of nature by man. Over the span of her voyage she finds that "nothing is the equivalent. I wear' t know the way any longer." (Atwood, 2009: 10) Therefore, the biological devastation plagues the setting whether it is to control the nature or the obliteration of more seasoned trees: "the trees will never be permitted to develop tall again, they're murdered when they' re profitable, huge trees are rare as whale." (Atwood, 2009:55) Similarly, the demonstration of angling in the lake is a fantastical allegory, which recommends entrapment. Before long, the hero realizes that in her ability for malice, she herself has not been unique in relation to them. The fantasy of her youth blamelessness breaks and she reviews a youth diversion - the wounding of the

occurrence is a tragic notice of the contrasts between natural predation and the chasing done by the man, which is accomplished for the energy of slaughtering. As Shiva calls attention to, it isn't chasing which prompts a rough relationship with nature: "it is the rise of chasing to the dimension of ideology which does as such" (Shiva, 1988: 50) She is appalled by her companions' recording of the fish's home. She wouldn't like to kill the fish herself, the second time: "I couldn' t any longer, I reserved no option to, we wear' t need it, our appropriate nourishment was tin jars. We were submitting this demonstration, this demonstration. Infringement, for pleasure, amusement they call it." (Atwood, 2009: 153). The storyteller' s mental self portrait of creature victim is first shown when the young men attach her to the tree in school and neglect to discharge her. She believes she turns into "a person who can get out of a tight spot sorts, master at fixing hitches" (Atwood, 2009: 88). As a person who can get out of anything escape course lies in considering herself a victim and to take plan of action to separation and flight. She searches for her freedom through a relapse to crudeness, which includes absolute inundation in condition to the degree of living like a wild creature. In her vision fundamentally, her mom transforms into a jay and her dad into a fish-like animal. The eco-feminism's part of the novel turns out to be increasingly clear in the novel by her arrival to the natural world. Eco-feminism contends that this framework and the individuals who are powerful inside it don't add to nature itself but instead adventure it as much as they can. Before her "surfacing" happens, she experiences a broad change in discernment and in the long run learns to grasp the natural world, recuperating herself all the while. She encounters the mistreatment of male world coming up short on the solidarity to battle for her survival and inactively agrees to prematurely end her kid. The unnatural demonstration of her abortion and the persistent battle for her to feel great with words and language represent the degree to which society or man mistreated and devoured the surface. Both empowering and commanding nature of her ex darling shows: "it was my husband's, he forced it on me, all the time it was developing in me I felt like a hatchery. He gauged all that he would give me a chance to eat, he was encouraging it to me, he needed a copy of himself."(Atwood, 2009: 39) Eco-feminism hypothesis questions the science, which is a noteworthy tool to colonize woman and nature. Mies states: ' For biotechnologists, individuals are simply loads of natural issue, DNA, crude material, which can be dismembered and reassembled into new bio-machines. Science should be without esteem, spurred just by unadulterated quest for information, not by intrigue or aspiration. (Mies and Shiva, 1993: 192). The cutting edge systems, in the appearance of helping woman, deny her of the capacity to detect her bodily rhythms. taken out with a fork, "similar to a pickle out of a pickle container" (Atwood, 2009: 101). The impact of the birth controlling pills in her eyes, that is, of obscuring her vision, additionally turns into a noteworthy advance towards her self-awakening. She confines herself from everything that has a place with her previous life and city, and is an untouchable. In spite of the fact that this isn't a role allotted to the storyteller by men, it is of extraordinary significance as she, not the male characters, is the one to escape into nature. Since she can't fit in the society or be the individual she is required to move toward becoming, she finds the comfort by segregating herself from a wide range of fake relationships. She realizes that no person can help her in finding her real self and, in this manner, she swings to nature. Amusingly enough it is just when she distinguishes herself with the harmed nature that she finds herself. She turns out to be a piece of the nature however preceding this, she disposes of her marriage ring, her name and her appearing personality. Prior to the storyteller‘s experience with the dead heron, David outlines the obstruction of the Americans in Canadian nature and colonization of nature through annihilation. He comments ' Do you realize that this nation is established on the collections of dead creatures? Dead fish, dead seals, the beaver is to this nation what the dark man is to the United States.' (Atwood, 2009: 45). His allusion to dark individuals being oppressed and exploited by white man in the past for free enterprise shows itself as creatures and land in Surfacing. The storyteller expresses "My nation sold or suffocated, a supply; the general population were sold alongside the land and the creatures, a deal, deal, sold. Les soldes they called them, sellouts, the flood would extend on who got chose, not here but rather elsewhere" (Atwood, 2009: 145). Eco-feminism hypothesis contradicts the colonization of land. Property proprietorship turns into a privilege exercised by denying 'other' of their natural rights, either tangibly or psychologically.

The contrast between "wealthy reasoning and the ruthless reality of power and sexual politics" will be considered in these accounts (The London School of Journalism). Atwood's chosen novels depict her inward torment, upset adolescence, relation with men, and a cruel society when all is said in done. In The Edible Woman, Atwood deconstructs Maria's imaginary excursion from an embraced position of self-refutation and self-destruction towards self-certitude and self-statement. As Alan Dawe says, Marian can either be the "plotting excessively female" like Anisley or she can be like Clara, "the earth mother" and like the "workplace virgins" , yet these choices are then again not satisfactory to Marian. Aalan Dawe says: "The Edible Woman is a dramatization and identity emergency in the Marian's spirit. Marian is colossally mindful of male controlled society powers upon her body. J.Brooks Bouson states, "Atwood conveys her female hero, Marian MacAlpin, to uncover and subvert the ideological builds that have since quite a while ago characterized and bound ladies." In this story, Peter is a therapeutic specialist who checks Marian's body. His vision changes subsequent to having intercourse with her. His feelings show it through touching his hand "delicately over her skin, without enthusiasm, clinically, as though he could learn by contact whatever it was that had escaped the testing of his eyes"(63). Portraying of Marian as debilitated and upset individual on a specialist's check table unmistakably illustrates a sort of sexual politics at work. The hero's body turns into a touchable space for external and recognizable variables which are presented to medicinal impression that inspect her body with the reason for estimating her mentality so as to control her subjectivity. Atwood's composition related to power and sexual politics is unmistakably depicted in her other novel called The Blind Assassin. Iris Chase in this novel for instance, discusses the contuses left on her body by her sexually cruel spouse in expressions of "a sort of code, which bloomed, at that point blurred, as undetectable ink held to a light. In any case, in the event that they were a code, who expected the way to remember?" Here the tissue is literally influenced word as the injuries to turn into a sort of composing that recommends an allegorical confirmation. Iris at that point recounts the sentiment of annihilation she encountered as a result of her significant other's cruelty: "I was sand, I was snow – composed on, changed, covered up" (BA, p. 271). Iris shows up from her sexual and literary cruelty "covered up" and in this manner proficiently removed: she is the disempowered victim of more extensive powers and it is imperative that the methods through which she expresses her sentiment of basic disempowerment incorporates a picture that positions the body as allegorical content. Pictures of expulsion litter Atwood's invented collections of memoirs of ladies struggling to compose their stories of frail lives.

Margaret Atwood is clearly related to the coalition of power that applies physical, political, financial and social control over woman to fragment her. In her works she affirms, the things that man do, woman can improve. They are neither inadequate physically nor rationally. They grasp the harnesses of power firmly. In her women's activist works development of her hero isn't delicate all things considered they conquest in the long run through many calculated retreats. It turns out to be steadily increasingly evident that man's powerful position has been works concentrate on woman's acknowledgment of power control and mindfulness. The way that her victimized protagonists all experience the ill effects of explicitly female issues must be recognized too. A significant number of the battles that they are compelled to manage are carefully ladylike battles; the anonymous hero from Surfacing is spooky by her abortion. Elaine Risley is tormented by her longing to be acknowledged in women‟s society. Rennie Wilford has had a mastectomy and Offred is objectified by the unimportant certainty that she has "viable ovaries." These ladies battle since they are ladies. So as to survive, they have to address the inequalities of their social orders and recreate themselves. They are in this manner the developing ladies and they in the long run can assume more noteworthy responsibility for their lives by opposing society's desires for ladies and making their own. Atwood begins it by depicting her little girl on the floor, learning how to spell out of the blue and after that drives the peruser through a background marked by aggrieved powerless ladies. Atwood depicts the woman got in a war and her thighs are integrated by the enemies, so she couldn't conceive an offspring. Such exasperating depictions of ladies have earned Atwood the notoriety of a challenging women's activist. One scarcely needs to allude to the utilization of a woman's picture as a sex symbol that is being used for selling nearly all things everywhere. Atwood knows about the difficulties that ladies face and she isn't living in a silly situation with a conviction that ladies have conclusively achieved the objective of balance with men or they have attested their identity at a dimension where they can guarantee it to be simply the affirmation of their unmistakable.

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feminism and fiction, Costerus (Atlantic Highlands); Rodopi, Volume 170, 2007. 6. Carol Ann Howell (2005). Margaret Atwood; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p.213. 7. Atwood, M. (2009). Surfacing. London: Virago Press. Print. 8. Hart, Joyce (2001). ―Themes of the Search for Self and Gender Roles in Atwood‘s Novel; Critical Essay on The Edible Woman‖, in Novels for Students, the Gale Group, p.3. 9. The London School of Journalism. (2002, May). Retrieved May 28, 2015, from http://www.Isj.org/web/literature/margaret_atwood.php 10. Hanţiu, Ecaterina (2002). Women as Survivors in Margaret Atwood‘s Novels. Analele Universităţii din Oradea, Editura Universităţii din Oradea.

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