The female body and voice in Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Written on the Body’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Abstract

Very often, the female body is subject to scrutiny by masculine, patriarchal societies and this has been an object of interest for many theorists - particularly, second wave feminists. Breaking away from the traditional depictions, French theorists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray look towards the body as a source of inspiration for their writings and advocate for a feminine text - a text written by the woman, about the woman, for the woman. Ultimately, through their attempts at reclaiming the female body, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray propose the feminine text as écriture féminine or parler-femme. This dissertation seeks to explore and investigate the representation of the female body in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) in order to determine whether these works present a successful attempt at reclaiming the female body. This analysis will be carried out through the theories of Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) and ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ (1981) alongside Luce Irigaray’s in her volume This Sex Which Is Not One (1985).