Narrativas sobre vivências : vozes femininas em A mulher comestível, O lago sagrado e O conto da aia, de Margaret Atwood

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the novels The edible woman (1969), Surfacing (1972) and The handmaid’s tale (1985), by Margaret Atwood, through a perspective that takes into account three related aspects. The first, which considers Atwood’s position as a female writer, studies the degree that the authour’s gender influences her work, observing that it has unique characteristics of the female authorship. The second part investigates the narrator of the novels, regarding that the choice of a narrative voice shows ideology, in this case, of women’s lives in specific contexts. Finally, it is examined how the atmosphere of every narrative has points in common with Survival, Atwood’s non-fictional work published in 1972, whose main objective was to demonstrate the peculiarity of the Canadian Literature written in English. According to the author, it is always “surviving” to external factors, as the female characters do in the novels. The results show that, in the terms of Genette’s narrative theory, most of the narrators are autodiegetic, in other words, protagonists that tell their own stories. We conclude that the female characters’ survival is connected with their narrative voices and also with Margaret Atwood’s voice, that survives by her creations whose themes continue important through the time.