A Study Of Feminist Narrative In Margaret Atwood’s Eating Fire

Like her fiction,Margaret Atwood’s poetry implements feminist themes.Her poetry collection,Eating Fire,encompasses the majority of Atwood’s poetry written from 1965 to 1995.This paper examines the feminist narrative of Atwood’s poetry through feminist narrative,body narrative,spatial narrative and other related criticism or methods.By analyzing Eating Fire,this paper sorts out the narrative strategies of Atwood’s poetry and further explores the specific paths through which female subjectivity is constructed and female discourse is gained.The paper intends to illustrate that Atwood’s poetry makes the authorial voices retreat and diversifies personal voices,which is Atwood’s macro narrative strategy.Through female voices observe and narrate women’s bodies,Atwood’s poetry accomplishes the construction of female subjectivity.And the participation of female subjects in space and time perspective shows the typical way for female voices to gain discourse power.The thesis contains three parts:introduction,body and conclusion,of which the body has three chapters.The first chapter focuses on the characteristics of the narrative voice in Atwood’s poetry by using Susan Lancer’s feminist narrative theory.In Atwood’s poetry,the authorial voice and the personal voice provide a comprehensive and detailed picture of the female condition together.The female voice takes its own position through the narrative techniques like narrative intervention and discursive intrusion.In the discursive field of both genders,male voices are able to potentially control female voices despite making fewer voices.The discursive inequality between two genders shows the strength of male discourse and the situation that women are forced to lose their voices.The second chapter explores the construction of the female subject in poetry through body narrative and Foucault’s power discourse theory.Atwood’s poetry restores the female body’s existence as a reproductive machine and sexual object.Thereby women are in a state of physical and mind separation.The female narrators find a unique female discourse from the perspective of self-caring.In this way,the female body,which has been available for desire and gazed at in the patriarchal culture,is able to recover the female subjectivity through counter-gaze.The third chapter from the perspective of space and time analyzes how the female subject in Atwood’s poetry gains gender power and regains discourse by a collective voice.Space is an important component of Atwood’s poetry,and the spatial progression of women’s voices from the home to the wilderness reflects the process that women move from the private space to public area.The isomorphism between the wilderness and female has a foundational significance for women’s discourse.In the time dimension,Atwood’s poetry connects the historical genealogy of women’s collectivity by exploring the symbolic meaning of the individual,and empowers discourse to women’s collectivity.Conclusion reviews the feminist narrative of Atwood’s poetry as a whole and refers to the intertextuality of Atwood’s fiction and poetry.In her poetry,Atwood outlines the situation of female voices,points out the becoming of female subjectivity,marks the location of collective female discourse.Ultimately,she builds a picture of individual female histories.The perceptions present in her poetry can also be traced in her fiction,so studying Atwood’s poetry is also helpful for understanding her fiction.Regarding her works as a whole,one can see that Atwood’s depiction of social darkness points to ultimate concerns for people and the world,which is the value of her works.