Neatly Severing The Body From The Head:” Female Abjection In Margaret Atwood’S The Edible Woman

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Ulla Kriebernegg

Abstract

In Margaret Atwood’s fiction and poetry, wounded female bodies are a frequently used metaphor for the central characters’ severe identity crises. Atwood’s female protagonists or lyric personae fight marginalization and victimization and often struggle to position themselves in patriarchal society. In order to maintain the illusion of a stable identity, the characters often disavow parts of themselves and surrender to a subversive memory that plays all sorts of tricks on them. However, these “abject” aspects (J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror) cannot be repressed and keep returning, threatening the women’s only seemingly unified selves: In Surfacing, for example, the protagonist suffers from emotional numbness after an abortion. In The Edible Woman, the protagonist’s crisis results in severe eating disorders and in Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride the central characters’ conflicts are externalized and projected onto haunting ghost-like trickster figures.

In this paper, I will look at various representations of “wounded bodies and wounded minds” in samples of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, focusing on the intersection of memory and identity and analyzing the strategies for healing that Margaret Atwood offers.

Article Details

How to Cite
Kriebernegg, U. “Neatly Severing The Body From The Head:” Female Abjection In Margaret Atwood’S The Edible Woman”. Linguaculture, vol. 3, no. 1, May 2012, pp. 53-64, doi:10.2478/v10318-012-0020-8.
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Articles
Author Biography

Ulla Kriebernegg, University of Graz, Austria

Ulla Kriebernegg is Assistant Professor at the Center for Inter-American Studies (C.IAS) at the University of Graz, Austria. She holds a master's and a doctoral degree from the University of Graz, where she studied English and American Studies and German Philology. Her fields of interest include the cultural representation of aging and old age, literary gerontology, (Inter)American Studies, intercultural studies and the transatlantic dialogue on higher education. Her publications include The Transatlantic Dialogue on Higher Education: An Analysis of Cultural Narratives (Berlin: Logos 2011) and Nach Amerika naemlich!” Juedische Migrationen in die Amerikas im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Goettingen: Wallstein 2012), which she co-edited with Gerald Lamprecht, Roberta Maierhofer, and Andrea Strutz. Currently, she is writing a monograph with the working title “Locating Life: Intersections of Age and Space” in which she analyzes the representation of space, aging, old age and identity in Canadian and US American literature and film.

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