Margaret Atwood The Female Body

Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s work, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, examines how American societal changes are reflected on the female body. Brumberg’s work draws primarily from the diaries of young American girls, giving intimate glimpses into the inner workings of their minds about how they relate to their bodies.

Both “homage to my hips” by Lucille Clifton and “Barbie doll” by Marge Piercy are free verse and deliver different perspectives on the significance of woman's power. Clifton's poem empowers women to never be controlled by another person. Whereas Piercy's poem is a cautionary tale about a female giving their power to others and allowing an idea of perfection to create a self-conscious prisoner that wears them down until they voluntarily sacrifice their life. From our text we know that “Piercy engages with social myths that she believes inform the behavior of women”. (Kelly 238) These poems were written respectively in 1973 and 1980 but continue to remain relevant 37+ years later or the equivalent of an entire generation.

In the fifth vignette of The Female Body, Atwood begins listing the uses of The Female Body such as describing it as, “…a door-knocker, a bottle-opener...” Her descriptions are not actual usages of the female body, but instead a literal portrayal of objectification. The Female Body is not an actual door-knocker, however there are door-knockers made to have the appearance of parts of The Female Body which is both sexualization and objectification of the Body. Society

Both metaphor and figurative speech are used to describe the ideal shape of a woman. The slender model of the princess beauty is described as both “anorexic [and] wasp-waisted“. Pairing the description wasp-waisted with anorexic makes it clear to the reader that having the figure of a wasp is not to be imagined as a good thing.The negative image is further reinforced with the picture of the wasp-waisted anorexic “flinging herself down the stairs“. The more rounded version of the ideal woman is described as having “a pillowed breast”, with “fingers plump as sausages“.

Launched on March 1959, the Barbie doll is a toy that was first put on display in New York. It quickly garnered a lot of attention with the target audience of the creators, young girls. This doll was different than its previous dolls because it was a doll that was an ideal representation of a woman. Thus allowing young girls to use their imagination to create and act-out what this doll’s life is like and what their future would potentially be. To successfully understand this toy, we must think like C Wright Mills, a sociologist who asks to use our sociological imagination, the intersection of one’s biography and history. This artifact reflects and perpetuates the dominant ideology of how to perform your gender the “right” way in the early 1960s. I will argue this demonstrates West and Zimmerman’s concept of “doing gender” which is clarified with Judith Butler’s concept of socialization of gender.

Why are women idealized only for their body? “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, by Joyce Carol Oates is a fictional short story. Through Oates’ display of feminism, a pedophile seduces a young female to come with him and use her for her body, which reveals society’s expectations of a woman in this time period.

The majority of males can relate to this short-story because Sammy uses language that most males converse in in order to appear well-liked or “cool.” As Sammy observes the girls, he notes that “She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn’t mind. ”(Updike, 2). The informal, possessive tone assists male readers to avoid what exactly is going on. The reality is that Sammy possessively illustrates how he wants a woman to look, act, or express themselves.

The trend nowadays is towards women writing and one of the most celebrated Canadian writers in the west to date is Margaret Eleanor Atwood. Atwood is not only a novelist and a poet but also a critic, an essayist, as well as a social activist. Atwood is one of Canada’s outstanding literary figures. She is identified among the talented and intelligent writers in the west today. According to S. Banurekaa and Abinaya, Atwood articulates the dilemmas, contradictions, and ambiguities of the late twentieth century with all its complexities and extremities (24). She is a prolific and honored Canadian writer who is widely recognized as a feminist, cultural activist and a social activist.

In today’s world, people are being manipulated into the social ideal of looking and behaving a specific way. In The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, Marian and the people who surround her show the truth about reaching social ideals for women and the struggle to reach those unrealistic expectations.

Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) have two very culturally and physically different women at their centres. From her diary entries, we can deduce that Bridget Jones is a middle class, white woman in her thirties, who is, despite her proclamations about her obesity, actually an average size. Smith’s third-person realist narrative allows her to construct a clearer picture of Kiki Belsey; she is an American black woman of fifty-two and ‘a solid two hundred and fifty pounds’. What both protagonists have in common, however, is their hyperawareness of their bodies being subject to various gazes. With particular focus on these two characters, this essay will argue that women in these novels are forced

Further more into Atwood’s book a big shift happens discussing when it comes to women's rights through the working Industry because this becomes a major issue when women are forced to now raise families on little to no income at all. On page 175 the seen inside of the store where Offered and the unusual man ringing her up for her supplies have a small confrontation about her card not working. The man begins by trying to nicely express how the card number isn’t working, despite her knowing she has money on that card everything begins to take a toll. A brief conversation with Moira explains it all “They’ve frozen them, she said. Any account with an F on it instead of an M. All they needed to do is push a few buttons. Women can’t hold property

Barry uses exaggeration to add a sesnse of humor to the essay. He exaggerates the Barbie doll proportions giving her a height of seven feet and eighty-one pounds with fifty-three of those pounds being bosoms. He also exaggerates mens complacency with their apperance even “if their faces cause heart failure in cattle at a range of 300 yards, and when their faces sag and their noses bloat to the size of eggplants and their eyebrows grow together to form what appears to be a giant forehead-dwelling tropical caterpillar.” With these exaggerations he shows how women are willing to try and be like something that is very hard to achieve, even though they have already achieved their goals in the eyes of men and others. He shows how men are careless about their appearance, even though they may look horrendous; they care more about manly activities.

The feminist movement, and by implication feminist theatre is a highly controversial and complex theory, filled with a variety of conflicting viewpoints. However, there are certain common characteristics that can be identified. This essay will discuss the most prominent themes of the body, heteroglossia, motherhood and the male gaze in feminist theatre with reference to “Boy gets girl” by Gilman (2000). As Kruger mentions various time throughout the Study Guide, the body is of great significance to feminist theatre (2011:130).

As you begin Beauty (Re) discovers the Male Body your read of author Susan Bordo spilling her morning coffee over a shockingly sexual advisement of a nude man. Initially, I rolled my eyes and settled in assuming, I was going to read about the tragedy of how men are now being objectified and exposed in adverting like women. As I flip through the pages looking at the scantily clad images I’m not really shocked; this essay was written fifteen years ago; I see these kinds of images going to the mall. What was shocking, however, was how Bordo a published, woman philosopher born in 1947 wrote about these images. I felt myself blush as I read “it seems slightly erect, or perhaps that’s his nonerect size, either way, there’s a substantial presence

The novel The Edible Woman written by Margaret Atwood explores the mental consequences of a relationship when men overpower women, including first, the dissociation with oneself, but later the quest to find one’s authentic self. To begin, there is a development of an inferiority complex. The protagonist, Marian, is evidently dependent on her fiancé, Peter. In this partnership, Marian believes that Peter is “a rescuer from chaos, a provider of stability” (Atwood 100). Whenever he asks Marian for her opinions on their wedding, sexual consent, and other issues that greatly influence her, she unconsciously begins to reply that “[she] [would] rather leave the big decisions up to [him]” (Atwood 101). Marian senses the pressure from her spouse to