My new face in the mirror' : Margaret Atwood's slippery female doubles

Abstract

Margaret Atwood's female double is a powerful figure capable of superseding narrative boundaries. While doubling has been noted in select texts by Atwood, the sheer presence and significance of the double across her oeuvre has barely been explored.1 This thesis traces the development of Atwood's double from Lady Oracle (1976), to The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and its recent sequel The Testaments (2019). These texts have strong gothic undertones. They are narrated by women trapped within masculine literary forms that threaten to reshape their bodies and lives. The double - an entity capable of 'slipping' into and out of different literary modes, genres and intertexts - allows the narrator to navigate the novel and to evade the text's attempts to pin her down. The double rewrites and revises the masculine narrative forms that encase her by ballooning beyond the walls of the text and chasing alternate visions or narratives that better suit her. Through the endless exploration of alternate selves and stories, the double explores what it means to write authentically as a woman and attempts to reclaim the novel as a feminine space.

Date of Award	2023
Original language	English