LeCren 1

Carole LeCren

Teacher’s Name

Writer’s Workshop

26 November 2012

Style Summary Paragraphs

Margaret Atwood’ s three short stories introduced in class: “Simple Murders,” “Gertrude

Talks Back,” and “The Little Red Hen Tells All” feature tight diction, a conversational tone, italicized dialogue, and in the case of the first story, internal rhyme and paragraphs using catalogs.

Tight Diction

Atwood’s use of simple nouns and verbs, short syllables, and expressive exclamations make her diction tight. For example, in the opening of “The Little Red Hen Tells All” she starts:

“Everyone wants in on it. Everyone!” (13). Even “Simple Murders,” the wordiest of the three short stories, starts with a relatively simple sentence: “He had a thin rapacious mustache and very pointed shoes” (90). Although Atwood doesn’t shy away from polysyllabic words (“rapacious,”

“disheveled,” “bejeweled”), she does use them sparingly. One line from “Gertrude Talks Back” is a good example of her short and sweet style: “I am not wringing my hands. I’m drying my nails” (16).

Conversational Tone and First Person Point of View

Another element of style that Atwood uses is to give her characters a conversational tone and first person point of view. In “Simple Murders,” the only story of the three without a first person narrator, she still manages to insert a conversational style when, after two paragraphs of LeCren 2 descriptions of people who are murdered, the entire third paragraph consists of: “No. Let’s start again” (91). The omniscient narrator manages to sound like he or she is talking informally with the reader. In Atwood’s other two stories, the first person narrators are even more friendly with the reader. The Little Red Hen tells the reader, “You know my story” (13) and later, “Don’t believe a word of it” (15). In the same way, Atwood has Gertrude use direct address to explain a few things to her son, Hamlet. Atwood successfully captures the conversational tone of a mother speaking to her son: “By the way, darling, I wish you wouldn’t call your stepdad the bloat king…it hurts his feelings” (17). Direct address and conversational tone are evident in Atwood’s stories.

Choice of Character

The choice of character is a particularly clever device that Atwood uses. She appears to enjoy choosing familiar stories and reinvestigating them from a particular character’s point of view. The Little Red Hen, in her story, explains that she didn’t really tell everyone to “kiss off”

(15) after she did all the work and they wanted the bread. Instead, she apologized and said,

“Have some more. Have mine” (15). Atwood uses the Little Red Hen as a satirical account of a woman who is embarrassed that the real story had been turned into feminist propaganda. “I’m a hen, not a rooster,” (15) she explains to the reader, implying that if a man had done the work, he would have claimed it for his own, no questions asked, and he wouldn’t have shared. In

“Gertrude Talks Back” Atwood takes a rather wimpy character from a Shakespeare play and turns her into a feminist giant. (Gertrude is Hamlet’s mother, and he spends the entire play resenting her because after Hamlet’s father’s death, she remarries.) “You have no idea what I used to put up with,” (18) she explains to Hamlet, after telling him that his father was “very hard to live with,” “wasn’t a whole lot of fun” and was a little “holier-than-thou” (17-18). Her LeCren 3 implication is that she had a right to a good sex life, and so she reveals the kicker at the end: she was the one who killed Hamlet’s father and her husband. In both these stories, the main female character does something that does not follow the original source material. Atwood, according to her biography in Grolier’s Multimedia Encyclopedia, evidently enjoys taking characters from literature; she has written a full-length novel featuring an “irreverent” Penelope, the wife of

Odysseus, called The Penelopiad (2005).

Italicized Dialogue, Internal Rhyme, Catalogs

Atwood also likes to use italicized dialogue, internal rhyme, and catalogs. Although the italicized dialogue is used in all three stories, only “Simple Murders” contains samples of all three techniques.

It was because of the chocolate bars. It was because of the stars. It was because of a life behind bars. It was her hormones. It was the radiation from the wires and phones. It was his mother saying, You’ll never amount to a hill of beans. It was because he was so all-fired mean. It was the sleeping pills. It was the frills, on the blouse, under the jacket, over the breasts. It was the blood tests. It was the sigh, the cry, the hand on the thigh. It was the hunger, it was the rage, it was the spirit of the age (91-92).

Her repetition of ending words that rhyme: “chocolate bars,” “stars,” “a life behind bars” is clever and drags the reader into the catalog of murderous reasons. The example also includes the italicized quote “You’ll never amount to a hill of beans” which functions as a voice that adds another dimension to the narrator’s rant. The internal rhyme, italicized dialogue, and catalog of reasons are interesting stylistic features.