CHAPTER V

BODILY HARM: THE IMPRISONING GAZE

The publication of Bodily Harm in 1981 signalled a return to what had already come to be recognised as Atwood’s more typical style. A single female protagonist indicated this return, whilst the novel’s title seemingly returned Atwood’s focus to the body after the temporary theoretical disruption of . Indeed, there is a comfortable familiarity about Bodily Harm, and it is knowingly created. Like before it, it contains a pastiche of genres and styles, and in a manner similar to Joan, Rennie the protagonist finds herself self-consciously drawn to the appropriation and parody of various generic traditions. Attracted by the surgeon who performs her mastectomy, she chides herself: “Falling in love with your doctor is something that middle-aged women did, women in the soaps, women in nurse novels and sex-and-scalpel epics with titles like Surgery and nurses with big tits and doctors who looked like Dr. Kildare on the covers.”1 From this gentle, if self-admittedly clichéd romance, Rennie escapes to a Caribbean island under the pretext of writing a travel piece, and is unwittingly entangled in a political thriller of imprisonment and rescue. One by one, the constructedness of these narratives is exposed as the mythic and gothic patterns behind them become increasingly evident to Rennie:

The truth about knights comes suddenly clear: the maidens were only an excuse. The dragon was the real business. So much for vacation romances, she thinks. (258)

Bodily Harm sets up a number of familiar narrative conventions, and by doing so, seemingly highlights the same postmodern textuality that Atwood had explored in Lady Oracle. One of these conventions being explored is the consciousness-raising feminist novel of the

1 , Bodily Harm (1981), London, 1996, 33. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Bodily Harm 119

1970s such as, for example, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. In an interview, Atwood recalls that “female fiction of the early ’70s was very ‘head of the brigade’ … there was a certain kind of plot that I remember … and the happy ending, which used to be marrying Prince Charming, is leaving your husband and getting a job”. Following the patterns of this early second-wave plot, Bodily Harm is, in many ways, about female victimisation and masculine aggression – which are familiar themes from – and Rennie’s understanding of this sexual dichotomy is as simple as that of the narrator of the earlier novel, leading her to conclude: “She’s afraid of men because men are frightening” (290). Atwood seemingly supports Rennie’s view; connections are quickly made between Jake’s sado-sexual games – “Pretend I just came through the window. Pretend you’re being raped” (117) – and the resonant threat of “a length of rope coiled neatly on the quilt” (13) left by an unknown intruder. When Jake protests at Rennie’s questions, prompted by her recent viewing of a police display of pornography, saying “Come on, don’t confuse me with that sick stuff. You think I’m some kind of a pervert? You think most men are like that?” (212), both she and the reader are understood to make their own conclusions. Policemen, lovers, politicians and doctors: all embody male agents of violence upon the female body. Like Rennie’s cancerous tumour, they insinuate themselves into her life and threaten her security. They are “her scar, her disability, her nibbled flesh, the little teethmarks on her” (284). Rennie’s task, it seems, will be to escape the various physical and psychological threats to her safety and find security. Atwood, however, distances herself from the tradition of the feminist novel, arguing: “I never wrote those, and I haven’t written them since”,2 but it remains an influential, if ambivalent, background to her work. This ambivalence is evident in interviews; asked if her writing is feminist, she responds: “I’m a fiction writer, you know, I’m not a propagandist.”3 But through Rennie, Atwood also articulates a nostalgia for the idealism of the early feminist movement and the accompanying political atmosphere, when Rennie “believed there was a real story, not several and not almost real. But that was 1970 and she

2 Beatrice Mendez-Egle, “Witness Is What You Must Bear”, in Margaret Atwood: Conversations, 162. 3 Kaminski, “Preserving Mythologies”, 27.