ENGL 1F95 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Thicket, Hawser, Margaret Atwood
26 Apr 2016
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Engl 1f95 literature in english: forms, themes, approaches. We"ve been talking about margaret atwood"s unusual method of storytelling in this novel. Let"s review: her narrator begins the book dead, and we"re not really interested in finding out who the killer is. We discussed how she develops an ironic perspective on the source text: because the setting of the narrative is actually in hades, we get all sorts of details about the underworld and the afterlife. This shifts the story from what happened to what happened after. Penelope"s voice was lost, the power of the greek gods has been lost and the original context of the story has been lost. Atwood writes about that loss, rather than try and pretend that it has not been lost: other voices are allowed to speak, most poignantly, the maids. They are the twelve women who were murdered by odysseus upon his return.
