Fiction and (Post) Feminism in Atwood's "Bodily Harm"

Abstract

Margaret Atwood's fifth and latest novel, Bodily Harm, engages corrosive question of post-feminist 80s: Why would any woman today label herself a feminist?' The protagonist of book, a free-lance journalist named Rennie Wilford, is thought to be way out ahead of it by Canadians in know. Early in novel we learn that she has already written a well-received piece, entitled Burned Out, on alleged death of Women's Movement: interviews with eight women who'd explained why they'd gone into weaving placemats and painting miniature landscapes on bottles, instead.2 The present-tense action of book takes Rennie from Toronto, where she has recently had a mastectomy, to a little-known Caribbean island, where she meets among others a woman named Lora. Bored by stories that brash, uncultivated Lora tells, Rennie tunes out when she talks and condescendingly notes that the Women's Movement would have loved Lora, back in early seventies (87). But Rennie's breast cancer has come at an already painful period of self-doubt in her life as a woman and a writer, and when she subsequently steps unwittingly into center of a minor revolution and is imprisoned as a spy, she sees for herself oppression and brutality Lora has always lived with and recounted. The heroine of radical chic is finally radicalized; and by validating Lora's experience of female oppression, novel implies that only most naive and solipsistic (like its heroine, Rennie) can find grim premises of feminism boring, cliched, and outdated. In fact, Bodily Harm suggests, stories women told in 60s and 70s are still true, terrifying, and subversive, as Rennie in end admits.