Her Body Islanded” Corporeal Resistance in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman

2021 ◽  
Vol 2/2021 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Anna Kisiel
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
As If

Marian MacAlpin, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, is a “marvellously normal” (Atwood 207) young woman. However, at one point—coinciding with the acceptance of her partner’s marriage proposal—something goes utterly wrong. Her body, in an act of revolt, refuses to accept more and more food; it becomes an increasingly independent, as if exterior entity. While trying to fight off this impenetrable rebellion, Marian comes to face social norms she is supposed to comply with as a woman, finding them indeed indigestible. Written in 1965 and published in 1969, The Edible Woman touches upon issues that are still relevant for the contemporary reader. This article examines Margaret Atwood’s novel within the framework indebted to the recent shift of feminist studies towards fragility: a notion that no longer has to entail mere passivity or surrender. Aiming at an exploration of the theme of a fragile corporeal protest, this article juxtaposes the revolt of Marian’s body with such tropes and categories as fluidity and containment, abjection, agency, and becoming in order to trace the dual nature of corporeal resistance presented in the novel.

any real doubt about the ending. Heliodoros redirected curiosity from outcome to explanation. The second problem is lack of direc­ tion and unity: romance was prone to fall apart into a series of exciting but only loosely connected adventures, at the end of which the protagonists recovered their lost happiness and simply lived out the rest of their lives as if nothing had happened. By leaving central questions unanswered Heliodoros is able to hold large spans of text together, and the most important answers, when they do arrive, involve decisive change for the protagonists. Both these strategies imply an interpretatively active reader. The opening of the novel is deservedly famous.11 A gang of bandits come across a beached ship, surrounded by twitching corpses and the wreckage of a banquet. Through their eyes, and with their ignorance of what has taken place, the reader is made to assimilate the scene in obsessive but unexplained visual detail. In the midst of the carnage sits a fabulously beautiful young woman, nursing a fabulously handsome young man. It does not take long to identify them as the hero and heroine of the novel, and learn that their names are Theagenes and Charikleia, but Heliodoros tantalizes us over further details. Thus at the very beginning of the novel two riddles are established: what has hap­ pened on the beach? and who exactly are the hero and heroine? Heliodoros prolongs the reader’s ignorance by his characteristic use of partial viewpoint. Sometimes, as with the bandits, there is a fictional audience whose specific perceptions act as a channel of partial information to the reader, but elsewhere Heliodoros as narrator simply relates what an uninformed witness of the events would have seen or heard. For example, we are only allowed to find out about the hero and heroine as they speak to others r are spoken about: Heliodoros as author knows all about them but keeps quiet in favour of his recording but not explaining narrative voice. The opening scene is eventually disambiguated by Kalasiris, an Egyptian priest. He regales Knemon, a surrogate reader within the text who shares the real reader’s curiosity about the protagonists, with a long story, beginning in Book 2, of how he met Charikleia at Delphi, witnessed the birth of her love for Theagenes and helped the lovers to elope. He chronicles their subsequent experiences, until at the end of Book 5, half-way through the novel, the story circles back to its own beginning and at last resolves the mystery of the scene on the beach.

2014 ◽  
pp. 327-327
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Partial Information ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
The Real ◽  
Opening Scene ◽  
Visual Detail ◽  
As If

Dmenisions of Human Behavior in The Novel “The Foreigner” By Arun Joshi

IJOHMN ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Abhishek Verma
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Poor People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
As If ◽  
Available Resources

In the modern age of globalization and modernization, people have become selfish and self-centered.  Feeling of sympathy and kindness towards poor people have almost bolted from the hearts of those who have richly available resources.  They leave needy people running behind their luxurious chauffer-driven cars.  Poor and marginalized people keep shouting for help for their dear ones but upper class people trying to show as if they did not hear any long distant sound crept into their eardrums.  This trauma, agony, pain and sufferings is explored in the novel, The Foreigner.

Exploring normative perceptions and misperceptions of private, environmentally impactful behaviours

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Gallagher ◽  
Bas Verplanken ◽  
Ian Walker
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Behaviour Change ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Normative Influence ◽  
Change Mechanism ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
Referent Group

Social norms have been shown to be an effective behaviour change mechanism across diverse behaviours, demonstrated from classical studies to more recent behaviour change research. Much of this research has focused on environmentally impactful actions. Social norms are typically utilised for behaviour change in social contexts, which facilitates the important element of the behaviour being visible to the referent group. This ensures that behaviours can be learned through observation and that deviations from the acceptable behaviour can be easily sanctioned or approved by the referent group. There has been little focus on how effective social norms are in private or non-social contexts, despite a multitude of environmentally impactful behaviours occurring in the home, for example. The current study took the novel approach to explore if private behaviours are important in the context of normative influence, and if the lack of a referent groups results in inaccurate normative perceptions and misguided behaviours. Findings demonstrated variance in normative perceptions of private behaviours, and that these misperceptions may influence behaviour. These behaviours are deemed to be more environmentally harmful, and respondents are less comfortable with these behaviours being visible to others, than non-private behaviours. The research reveals the importance of focusing on private behaviours, which have been largely overlooked in the normative influence literature.

On Antigone’s Suffering

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-231
Author(s):  
Ankhi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Personal Loss ◽  
The Relationship

Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.

Divi pirmās personas stāstījumi Osvalda Zebra romānā „Māra”

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
Daiga Zirnīte
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Growth Path ◽  
Dramatic Structure

The aim of the study is to define how and to what effect the first-person narrative form is used in Oswald Zebris’s novel “Māra” (2019) and how the other elements of the narrative support it. The analysis of the novel employs both semiotic and narratological ideas, paying in-depth attention to those elements of the novel’s structure that can help the reader understand the growth path and power of the heroine Māra, a 16-year-old young woman entangled in external and internal conflict. As the novel is predominantly written from the title character’s point of view, as she is the first-person narrator in 12 of the 16 chapters of the novel, the article reveals the principle of chapter arrangement, the meaning of the second first-person narrator (in four novel chapters) and the main points of the dramatic structure of the story. Although in interviews after the publication of the novel, the author Zebris has emphasised that he has written the novel about a brave girl who at her 16 years is ready to make the decisions necessary for her personal growth, her open, candid, and emotionally narrated narrative creates inner resistance in readers, especially the heroine’s peers, and therefore makes it difficult to observe and appreciate her courage and the positive metamorphosis in the dense narrative of the heroine’s feelings, impressions, memories, imaginary scenes, various impulses and comments on the action. It can be explained by the form of narration that requires the reader to identify with the narrator; however, it is cumbersome if the narrator’s motives, details, and emotions, expressed openly and honestly, are unacceptable, incomprehensible, or somehow exaggerated.

scholarly journals Displaced sentential complements to nouns in German

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-547
Author(s):  
Andreas Blümel
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Complement Clause ◽  
Internal Gap ◽  
As If ◽  
Lexical Factors

AbstractThis article makes the novel observation that in German, CPs functioning as complements to nouns can appear to the left of their associated DP-internal gap position. It surveys the phenomenon and, based on a number of diagnostics, argues that the noun complement clause exhibits properties as if its surface position is movement-derived. Based on parallel observations in PP-extraction from DP, I show that the same constraints on movement apply modulo construction-specific properties of DPs with a noun complement clause. The findings buttress previous approaches to extraction from DPs that highlight differentiating and controlling lexical factors. Given the delicacy of the judgments involved in this phenomenon, the article is mostly devoted to laying out its descriptive properties. Tentative suggestions as to an analysis are offered in the end.

Author in the Classroom: An Interview with Orhan Pamuk

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-15
Author(s):  
Pınar Batur
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Private Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Turkish Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Media ◽  
Orhan Pamuk ◽  
As If

While I was editing this interview with Orhan Pamuk in the Spring 2007, the media exploded with him: “Pamuk Wins the Nobel Prize!” It was not surprising, because for sometime now Orhan Pamuk has been known the world over as the “super hero” of Turkish literature. In Turkey, once again, the media turned its gaze away from Iraq, EU, unemployment, and questions of accountability in government, to contemplate why, how and what Pamuk had won, and the question of who is Orhan Pamuk? As the intensity of the debate increased, I began to wonder if Orhan Pamuk himself would be following it as if it was about somebody else. It certainly did not sound like the dissonance could be about one person, as the public contemplated him, unfolding multiple layers of his political convictions, his nationalism, his character, family, marriage, and private life. As the attention to his work disappeared, he was processed and reproduced by the media, with an effort that surpassed the media frenzy regarding his trial for his statements on genocide. Pamuk the author was replaced by Pamuk the image on the pages of tabloids. A year ago, when I asked if she had read Orhan Pamuk, a young woman in Istanbul had inquired, “Is he somebody?” Oh! Yes!, he is somebody, actually he has become more than that.

scholarly journals ‘Something happened, something bad’: Blackouts, uncertainties and event construal in The Girl on the Train

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Giovanelli
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Anterograde Amnesia ◽  
Cognitive Grammar ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
World Theory ◽  
Event Construal

This article examines the representation of mind style in Paula Hawkins’ (2015) best-selling novel The Girl on the Train. It examines how Hawkins presents the fictional mind of Rachel, a character who is affected by anterograde amnesia as a result of alcoholic blackouts. Rachel’s narrative voice drives the novel, and its retelling of events is characterised by her inability to recall important information related to the night that a young woman disappeared and was murdered. This article specifically draws on the Cognitive Grammar notion of construal to explore the presentation of Rachel’s mind style and its affordances and limitations. In doing so, it builds on developing scholarship that has identified the potential for Cognitive Grammar to provide a richly nuanced account of the representation of a fictional mind. The analysis specifically examines two ways in which event construal is presented: nominal grounding strategies and reference point relationships. For the latter, the article also develops emerging work that has sought to make a connection between Cognitive Grammar and Text World Theory in terms of how mental representations are projected by the text.

First Study

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Nikhil Govind
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Television Media ◽  
Cultural Historian

The first chapter discusses the path-breaking contemporary novel Hangwoman (2016) written by K. R. Meera, and translated by cultural historian J. Devika. The novel focalizes the ethical dilemmas of capital punishment through the perspective of a young woman, Chetna. Chetna inherits the gruesome profession—however, the new factor is the presence of a sensationalist television media, which reduces what should have been a moment of crime and pathos to a lurid search for commercial visibility. The chapter allows the book to foreground the questions of injustice and ethics as they interact with the gendered perspective of a subaltern young woman. The notion of subjectivity finds an opening and horizon within these difficult questions of private shame and a determination to make one’s way in a hard and unforgiving world.

Preparing the Novel: Spiralling Back

Paragraph ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-120
Author(s):  
JONATHAN CULLER
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Change Of Life ◽  
As If

La Préparation du roman, Barthes's course at the Collège de France which was interrupted by his death in 1980, announces a change of life: not giving up analysing literature and culture to write a novel but `preparing the novel', working as if he were going to write a novel. Barthes's approach to the novel is quite singular. With no interest in narrative, nor in extracting the meaning from experience, he treats the novel as a sort of notation, and perversely takes Haiku as a model. This new project constitutes in many respects a regression to literary and cultural ideas Barthes had previously rejected. Most seriously, it involves a turn away from reflection on language, which had been crucial to Barthes's work. But there are other ways in which the change in approach brings new insights to a thinking of the novel and of literature.

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