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The Unremitting Women Fighters in Their Non-physical Resistance

Author: NaRenTuYa
Tutor: YuanFang
School: Inner Mongolia University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Margaret Atwood Victim Position Three resistance Surfacing The Handmaid’s Tale The Edible woman
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2009
Downloads: 83
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Abstract

The woman protagonists in Atwood’s works are all suffered from some kinds of victimizations. But they are all not depicted as passive victims, on the contrary, they are all involved in active resistance towards the victimization forced upon them. In Surfacing, the unnamed protagonist suffered a lot in life. Later she refused to passively accept these unfair conditions and practices society and medical system forced upon her. Instead of suffering from the pain of birth-giving passively leaving decisions to the professionals who help them, the protagonist actively get involved in decision making both mentally and physically. She found out "the alternatives available and making change happens" (Shelia Kitzinger 13). Her behavior shifted from one of passivity to being in control.In The Edible Woman. The protagonist takes various weapons to try to take some control of her life, including control of her body. She is actually using disordered eating, abnormal behaviors and baking of the cake-woman as forms of non-physical protest against the limited roles available to her in society.In The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood explores the problems of infertility and reproductive technologies. She disproves the notion that woman are passive victims in the republic of Gilead through depicting both individual and collective forms of resistance of women.As a literary critic, Atwood categorizes victimhood into four basic victim positions. Position One is to "deny the fact that you are a victim" and involves spending "much time explaining away the obvious, suppressing anger, and pretending that certain visible facts do not exist"(Survival 36). Position Two is to "acknowledge the fact that you are a victim, but to explain this as an act of Fate, the Will of God, the dictates of Biology, the necessity decreed by history, or Economics, or the Unconscious, or any other large general powerful idea" (37). Position Three is to "acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable" (37) Position Four is to "be a creative non-victim" (38).After a detailed analysis, it is obviously discerned that almost all the female characters in Atwood’s works are literally involved in acts of active resistance. They are all portrayed as unremitting women fighters always fighting against the unacceptable conditions and practices society forced upon them and they all fit into the stereotypical Victim Position Three depicted by Atwood in her work Survival.

The Unremitting Women Fighters in Their Non-physical Resistance

Abstract

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