Margaret Atwood's Spotty-Handed Villainesses

Renowned and engaging speakers have the ability to connect their values and ideas to greater causes and principles, leaving an enduring impact on the audience. You may be questioning what makes a great speaker? And what qualities and features contribute to the formation of a powerful speech? It is understood that a great speaker has the ability to communicate to larger truths and carve those truths on the audience’s hearts and minds as they surpass the context, place and time of the deliverance of the speech, and focus on conveying their ideas and values.

Good Morning teachers and students. Margaret Atwood’s ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses’ along with Doris Lessing’s speech ‘On not winning the Nobel Prize’, are two of many persuasive and insightful speeches, which successfully communicate to the larger truths and incorporate common themes and principles, which continue to be of great relevance within the current social landscape of society through the engagement of rhetoric.

Margaret Atwood’s speech ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses’ is an epideictic text, which explores the significance of having a multi-faceted depiction of female characters within literature as a means of achieving gender equity, centring on the fictional presentation of women as either virtuous or villainess. The title of the speech

alone is a clever textual reference, which highlights the purpose of the speech, as the term “Spotty-Handed” is used as an intertextuality and literary allusion to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who was depicted as a flawed and evil character. The use of this reference illustrates the notion that women are capable of evil, and outlines the highly effective point that they are flawed beings just like men, which persuades the audience to dismiss societal presumptions in relation to the characterisation of females within literature. Atwood reinforces her viewpoint that it should be acceptable to portray women as evil characters and emphasizes her argument by noting the plethora of maliciously characterised women that exist within society, which comprise of “the murderers, the seducers, the espionage agents, the cheats, the bad mothers and the stepmothers” thus, she contends that they deserve a position within literature as their characters should be an accurate representation of society. Atwood’s argument conveys a feminist tone to her speech, which could have been drawn from her practice as an acclaimed academic literary composer, and could also be associated to Lessing’s speech as she also campaigns for equality in regards to literature from a different perspective.

Correspondingly, Doris Lessing’s speech focuses on the overwhelming disparity in the appreciation for literature between the different regions of the world and draws attention to her values of access to literature and equality, much like Atwood’s. Lessing’s speech focuses on the dispossessed of society, particularly those within the third world developing nations; she uses personal anecdotes and allusions to create a vivid image within audience’s minds, stating, “everybody I met, everyone, begged for books” which serves as a reflection of the experiences she’s faced, witnessing the clear distinction between the two different worlds; one in a country like London that is privileged and the other in Zimbabwe, where young people struggle to gain access to books, an education and their basic human rights. Lessing initiates her speech with a personal story, which is communicated through the use of present tense, used as a powerful mean in creating imagery within the audience’s minds, allowing her to strengthen her argument in relation to the economic and cultural disparity, which exists within society, this interesting method of introduction to her speech explores her personal context in relation to her experience as an author, which shaped her appreciation for words and the power of narratives.

The ideals and concepts that are held close to Lessing’s heart are integrated throughout the speech, as her value for equality is conveyed through her argument, as she discusses the contrast in terms of the world we live in now and the clear diversity in relation to the appreciation for the access to education and resources.

She challenges the audience’s intellectual capacity through the use of rhetorical questions, inquiring, “is it really impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?” which fortifies her argument and provokes the audience’s thoughts, persuading them to take action to transform the current social issues present within

society.

Teacher and students, to sum up this talk, both Lessing and Atwood’s speeches are highly valued texts due to their exploration of issues and values which are relevant to todays social context. Atwood’s examination of the dichotomy of good and bad women in literature allowed her to challenge the views and attitude of the audience and speak to the larger truths, in order to convey her feminist approach towards the inequality in literature in terms of the depiction of flawed women within literature. Atwood’s argument similarly links to Lessing’s as she connects her values and ideas to the issue of inequality in relation to the diversity in the appreciation of education and resources among the different countries. Both these renowned speeches effectively speak to the larger truths as their purpose transcends the context, place and time of the deliverance and links to the social and political issues, which are pertinent within society today.