The Oppression Of And Resistance To Patriarchy In The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood is a prestigious contemporary Canadian woman writer with international celebrity. Acclaimed as "the Queen of Canadian Literature", she has created a great quantity of literary productions, including poems, short stories, novels and literary criticisms. The central themes of her works are mainly environmental awareness, Canadian nationalism and feminism. And her works on feminism are concerned with the women's condition of entrapment inside their bodies and social myths of femininity. Naturally, she is also regarded as a feminist writer.This thesis explores the issues of sexual oppression and women's resistance to sexism in Atwood's tenth novel The Blind Assassin from the feminist perspective. It is composed of three chapters. Chapter one just probes the direct and tangible male oppression of females. The oppression the females suffer is just manifested in three aspects:paternal system, marital system and the clan system by males in different forms. Chapter two is designated to investigate the indirect and intangible male oppression of women, that is, the women's internalization of the patriarchal values in the patriarchal society. For a long time, the women have been oppressed deeply by the men and the patriarchal values, and the women themselves have internalized the patriarchal values unconsciously. Thus, the women themselves oppress their fellows. In other words, the men finish their indirect oppression of women with the help of women themselves. Chapter three unveils the female resistance to the oppression conducted by males in the patriarchal society. Women express their discontentment with and resistance to the male oppression in the patriarchal society through different modes such as writing, suicide and betrayal.In conclusion, the exploration of the male oppression of and female resistance to the patriarchal society from the perspective of feminist criticism will be very meaningful. Although Margaret Atwood herself has never admitted that she is a feminist, her thought of feminism has been manifested fully in this novel. The study of this novel from the feminist perspective has been scarcely done; this thesis will undoubtedly enrich the female study of this novel.