The Conception of Women’s Identity and Subjectivity in Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Feminist Perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1610.21Keywords:
feminism, gynocriticism, women’s identity, subjectivity, Margaret AtwoodAbstract
This article aims at revealing the women’s identity and subjectivity being represented in Margaret Atwood’s selected novels. This study employed the qualitative descriptive method. Data were collected from four of Atwood’s novels: The Edible Woman (1969), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, 2017), The Blind Assassin (2000), and The Testaments (2019). The analysis was conducted using the feminist literary criticism, particularly gynocriticism. The research result indicates that, by considering several factors such as Atwood’s background as the Canadian writer who emphasizes the themes of the victimization and survival and her position as the realist writer, Atwood constructs the women’s identity and subjectivity based on the women’s personalities shaped by the concrete social realities. From the perspective of the feminist thought, Atwood’s novels portray the female’s characters through various paradigms, particularly those associated with the second-wave and third-wave feminisms. In the context of the second-wave feminism, Atwood emphasizes the women’s effort to discover the “true” identity and subjectivity. Meanwhile, from the third-wave feminist perspective, she depicts the women’s identity and subjectivity in terms of the social discourse formation.
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