Gender and madness in selected novels of Margaret Atwood
Date
2008-06-24T12:26:56Z
Authors
Guthrie, Sandi
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Abstract
Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, explores representations
of gender and madness through her male as well as her female characters. Through
the use of a psychological and postcolonial framework – specifically based on the
works of Melanie Klein, Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin – Atwood’s
representations come to signify the relationship between self and society in such a
way as to show the connection between identity, power, powerless and the definition
of madness in society. While many critics have explored Atwood’s representation of
identity in relation to gender, an exploration of representations of gender in relation to
madness has been mostly overlooked. Atwood explicitly links the concept of
‘powerlessness’ to madness; madness can be seen (by Foucault and other members of
the antipsychiatric tradition) as being essentially constructed and controlled by the
intellectual and cultural forces that operate within society, connecting one who is
‘powerless’ to one who is ‘mad’. As well as this relationship, the connection between
postcolonial theory and psychology that suggests that Western psychology,
specifically psychoanalysis, in its denial of the political influence on the psyche,
denies the postcolonial subject the space in which to identify with his or her
community. While Atwood’s novels show an interest in human curiosity, they also
represent notions of control and power in a way that makes the reader appreciate the
relationship between self and society and how this relationship is related to identity
formation.
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Keywords
Gender, Madness, Identity, Feminism, Power, Control