'To be and not to be': The politics of parody in Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing (Zimbabwe)

Parody enables these writers to position themselves simultaneously inside and outside discourse, a position Carolyn Heilbrun identifies particularly with women and captures in the image of the threshold. Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing are all on the threshold or margin of their national cultures. For different reasons, these writers share a similar goal: to contribute to their national literary canon while critiquing the national values installed in that canon. Parody is an appropriate strategy by which to achieve this goal.; Parody functions in different ways, of course, in these authors' various texts. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses parody to interrogate how race is learnt and to challenge the position of African-American literature in relation to the American canon. Margaret Atwood uses parody to negotiate contradictory contemporary models of subjectivity. In Lady Oracle , Joan succeeds in telling her life story through self-parody. She constantly reveals to the reader that she is and is not what she writes. Parody emphasizes process as it takes finished texts and turns them into part of the process of creating a new text. Atwood and Lessing's highly self-reflexive novels The Blind Assassin and The Golden Notebook exploit this aspect of parody to reflect the incessant process of writing a woman's life. Lessing's parody of the terrorist group in The Good Terrorist and of Comrade Johnny in The Sweetest Dream enact a critique of Communism's limited focus on class as the primary explanatory foundation of social structures.; Despite significant differences between these women's political use of parody, they all turn to parody as an alternative to what they perceive as the very real threat of silence. Parody emerges as a strategy that enables these women writers to acknowledge that they are writing in a "man made language," to borrow Dale Spender's phrase, but to critique that language from within. They use parody to link the literary to the political and material.