Margaret Atwood’s work eloquently reflects how Canadian society operated from 1945 to 1980. Her published works, Siren Song, The Circle Game, and Nothing New Here accurately portray what the Canadian post-World War Two lifestyle was like. This is demonstrated through messages about oppression of women, self-reflection, and need for environmental awareness. To begin, the second women’s movement took place from 1960-1985. At this time women were finally starting to gain some independence, although they were continuing to fight for systemic equality and birth control, they were also focusing on peace and disarmament. Women simply wanted their voices to be heard and taken seriously, so groups were created such as The Voice of Women, and the Women’s …show more content…
Legal and Education Action Fund. Margaret Atwood’s poem, Siren Song depicts what it was like to be a woman: “will you get me / out of this bird suit?
/ I don't enjoy it here / squatting on this island / looking picturesque and mythical / with these two feathery maniacs, / I don't enjoy singing / this trio, fatal and valuable.” What is being described here is the struggle for women to act the way society wanted them to; to put themselves on display and smile for men. This is the ‘bird suit”, a costume that confound women to social boundaries. Atwood ends this poem with: “Come closer. This song / is a cry for help: Help me! / Only you, / only you can, / you are unique / at last. Alas / it is a boring song / but it works every time.” This stanza reflects that women (i.e. the siren depicted in this poem) never had to be rescued by men and neither needed them to survive. Since society was saying otherwise, they had to first conform to their stereotypes in order to break them. Women should not have to fight for control over their bodies- for things like birth control. However, they chose to fight for this because they deserved to thrive, and not merely survive. Margaret Atwood accurately reflects through the poem Siren Song, the struggle women faced for their voices to be truly heard and taken
seriously. Secondly, her poetry novel The Circle Game (1966) portrays society post-war, and highlights the dismissal of all things negative in an attempt to hold onto a perfect idea of oneself. Canada was still coping with witnessing the attempt of a mass genocide, “and we wondered how / [children] could remain / completely without fear / or even interest / as the final sword slid through / the dying hero.” Atwood creates this image of Canadian society; an unflinching child being read a story in which the hero dies. This is a metaphor possibly alluding to the Cold War. The Cold War was a very tense time, and people were growing weary of a third world war. With nuclear weapons being just introduced, “mutually assured destruction” was a very real and frightening possibility. Margaret Atwood demonstrates in The Circle Game how Canadian society was in need of a period of deep self-reflection. Lastly, Margaret Atwood’s work addresses the increased need for environmental awareness. Her poem, Nothing New Here (1978) points out this flaw within Canada: “Admit it, / this is what we have made, / this ragged place, an order / gone to seed, the battered plants slump in the tangled rows, / their stems and damp rope sagging.” These words were nothing out of the blue, as this very much reflects the hippie movement within Canada during the sixties and seventies. Environmental awareness was just one of the many hippie values, “(Though this is what we have / in common; this broken / garden, measure / of our neglect and failure, still / gives what we eat.)” Margaret Atwood demonstrates that the neglect of our planet is something that every person on this planet is responsible for, and no war or political act can dispute that. Her work also reflects a larger core value of hippie culture; peace. Especially after the Bomark dispute, disarmament became a highly discussed topic, and more people were viewing the arms races between russia and the threat of war as “a bad answer / to anything that gets in / your way.” Margaret Atwood beautifully showed how environmental awareness drastically increased in the sixties, and thus influenced the hippie movement. In conclusion, Margaret Atwood accurately reflects how society operated within the years of 1945 to 1982. This was demonstrated through her works Siren Song, The Circle Game, and Nothing New Here. With themes such as feminism, self-reflection and environmental awareness- Margaret Atwood’s work acts as timeline of Canada’s progression, and demonstrates how that influenced Canadian lifestyle and identity as a whole.
The story of Odysseus' encounter with the Sirens and their enchanting but deadly song appears in Greek epic poetry in Homers Odyssey. The Sirens in the ‘Siren Song’ by Margaret Atwood,are portrayed in a variety of ways. The Sirens are lethal,underprivileged and deluding.
1. The chosen book titled “Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women 's Right Movement” is written by Sally McMillen in 2008. It is a primary source, as long as its author for the first time opens the secrets of the revolutionary movement, which started in 1848 from the convention held by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Stanton. It is not a secondary source, as long as information from the book appears for the first time. Stanton did not reveal much in her memoirs, so the author had to work hard to bring this information on the surface. The convention changed the course of history by starting protecting women’s rights and enhancing overall gender equality. The book is a reflection of women’s activity in the name of their freedom and rights equality during fifty years. The book is significant both to the present and to the past time, as long as there are many issues in the society related to the women’s rights, and to the time studied in the class.
Sangster, J. (2010). Radical ruptures: Feminism, labor, and the left in the long sixties in Canada.
MacLean, Nancy. A. The American Women's Movement, 1945-2000. A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, a.k.a.
A large number of Margaret Atwood’s works convey images of women who are portrayed as inferior. Atwood specifically focused on images of women in terms of their relationships with men as well as their representation in the society. One of Atwood’s short stories, Lusus Naturae, one of nine tales in the collection The Stone Mattress, holds a stereotypical portrayal of women being rejected by their surrounding environment in addition to their inferiority in economical and societal matters. The main protagonist of Atwood’s Lusus Naturae clearly experiences the problem of gender inequality in both direct and indirect encounters.
Atwood’s attitude in the poem is very demanding and unknowing. She is a woman who wants answers about a man.
‘’The woman thing’’ by Audre Lorde reflects more on her life as a woman, this poem relates to the writers work and also has the theme of feminism attached it. The writers role in this poem is to help the women in discovering their womanhood just as the title say’s ‘’the woman thing.’’ The poem is free verse and doesn’t have a rhyme to it and has twenty-five lines.
Margaret Atwood's renowned science fiction novel, The Handmaid's Tale, was written in 1986 during the rise of the opposition to the feminist movement. Atwood, a Native American, was a vigorous supporter of this movement. The battle that existed between both sides of the women's rights issue inspired her to write this work. Because it was not clear just what the end result of the feminist movement would be, the author begins at the outset to prod her reader to consider where the story will end. Her purpose in writing this serious satire is to warn women of what the female gender stands to lose if the feminist movement were to fail. Atwood envisions a society of extreme changes in governmental, social, and mental oppression to make her point.
Throughout her many years as a poet, Margaret Atwood has dealt with a variety of subjects within the spectrum of relationship dynamics and the way men and women behave in romantic association. In much of her poetry, Atwood has addressed the topics of female subjugation in correlation with male domination, individual dynamics, and even female domination over males within the invisible boundaries of romantic relationships. With every poem written, Atwood's method for conveying the message of the poem has remained cryptic. She uses a variety of poetic devices - sometimes layered quite thickly - to communicate those themes dealing with human emotion. In the poem, Siren Song, Margaret Atwood employs such devices as imagery and tone to express and comment on the role of the dominating "siren" that some women choose to play in their relationships.
The song of the sirens is a fatal song, but one man out of all the men in existence heard it and lived to tell the story. Odyssey’s story is told in many versions, a poem by Margaret Atwood, and a video called O Brother Where Art Thou? They can all be compared and contrasted based on what they emphasize, what is absent in each, and what is different in each.
Margaret Atwood was born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Canada. She is known as a poet, novelist, story writer, essayist, and environmental activist. Her books have received critical acclaim in the United States, Europe, and her native Canada, and she has received numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Governor General’s Award, twice. Atwood’s critical popularity is matched by her popularity with readers; her books are regularly bestsellers. Some of Atwood’s award winning poetry, short stories and novels includes The Circle Game (1966), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Snowbird (1981), The Blind Assassin (2000), The Tent (2006) and more. Suffering is common for the female characters in Atwood’s poems, although they are never passive victims. In the clever and humorous poem “Siren Song”, Margaret Atwood uses the speaker, allusion, and repetition to convey the true meaning of the poem, which is that women have the ability to manipulate and flatter a man to get whatever they desire.
Both “Siren Song” and “Barbie Doll” deal with the relationship between the individual human being and a society that imposes a dehumanizing conformity. Both poems also use their use of irony conveying between the human being and society, for example “Siren Song” has some use of verbal irony and situational irony in the sense that if the reader knew what a siren was, then they would know that it’s a warning and them being lured into this siren’s song would only result in death. “Barbie Doll” also uses verbal irony and situational irony when the poem speaks that the effort of making oneself look pretty and conform to society’s expectations only results in making oneself look worse and lose humanity.
Margaret Atwood’s science fiction novel, Oryx and Crake, can more accurately be referred to as “speculative fiction.” Dystopian speculative fiction “takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions” (Snyder). Atwood utilizes her novels in order to share her views on politics, feminist and modern society. She creates these dystopias to distinctly mirror aspects of modern society that are threatening to women. Consumerism within the modern world diminishes the possibility of gender equality, when society degrades and exploits women. By creating characters such as Oryx, Atwood emphasizes how easily women
In the Siren Song by Margaret Atwood, the author uses the verbal irony to bring a short message about trust to the reader. Don’t believe whatever you hear because the sounds can fool, but your eyes will tell you truth. Siren Song is a mystery poem. Sirens are similar to the mermaids, but instead they are evil. They use their beauty and the song to fool humans. In the poem, the siren wants to trap us by saying, “ Shall I tell you the secret/ and if I do, will you get me / out of this bird suit?” (10,11,12). As a human, whenever another person wants to tell another person about a secret, they will feel curious and special. Everyone wants a secret. Similarly, the siren tells us to help her get out of her “bird suit”. It makes
The costumers that come into this bar are men. Therefore, the women are literally there to serve men. As a result, it seems as though they have no agency. The third and final thing that Joyce does to dupe the reader is hiding the true intentions of the chapter within the structure of the first page and a half. The beginning of the chapter is structured like a song or a poem with many short lines, line breaks and fragments. It has many nonsensical lines, such as "imperthnthn thnthnthn" (XI. 2) and “Goodgod heven erheard inall” (XI. 29). Joyce structures the beginning of the chapter like a poem and tries to confuse the reader about who has the agency because it mirrors the myth of the sirens that the women are supposed to embody. In Greek mythology, the sirens are human-like creatures, who lure sailors onto their island with their beautiful singing voice, and kill them when they got on their shores: “Their song, though irresistibly