Madness is a recurrent aspect of Margaret Atwood's novels to date and represents perhaps her most discomforting challenge to the reader who is implicated as co-creator, interpreter, and participant of the fiction. Her novels question the binary of normality and madness by situating madness both in the margins and foreground, thereby exposing "normality" as a tendentious construct designed to obscure contemporary Western society's psychic imbalance caused by fear of the unknown within the self. This dissertation employs a psycho-social method of investigating madness with a concurrent assessment of reader-involvement strategies, mediated through a theoretical framework based on C. G. Jung, R. D. Laing, and Wolfgang Iser.
The particular areas of investigation include: Atwood's comical representation of psychology as a prominent undercurrent of popular culture in The Edible Woman, and her contrasting serious---even threatening---portrayal of normative limits as social constructs in Bodily Harm. With regard to the individual, Lady Oracle exhibits the role of fantasy in psychic balance and posits the protagonist as an unlikely manifestation of "normality." Although still focused on the individual, Life Before Man represents the converse: the capacity for fantasy is lost in the dissociated condition of "normalized" characters. The Jungian process of individuation is studied through the projection of one's shadow figure in The Robber Bride. Finally, Atwood's most direct and strategic implication of the reader in determining the variable boundaries of (in)sanity is examined in Alias Grace. Ultimately, Atwood's presentation of madness insists on the reader's involvement and situates her/him in a position of potential self-recognition.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/29039 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Trigg, Tina |
| Contributors | Lynch, Gerald, |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 432 p. |
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