Theme Of The Landlady By Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood: A Lyrical Libber Margaret Atwood is considered to be one of the greatest living writers to hail from Canada. While she is a critically acclaimed novelist, Atwood is also celebrated for her influential and empowering poetry and can also be regarded as the Canadian literary poster child for feminist-themed writing. Feminist literature, Atwood’s included, gears towards characterising and constituting equality between men and women. A number of Atwood’s poems encompass similar motifs that link together her feminist expressions. The represented themes of “the search for identity” and societal exploitation of women provide readers with true and poignant expressions of women’s internal struggles while they are also externally judged. …show more content…

This poem is laid out in such a way wherein detailed sections come together to describe the female influence over men. The poem begins by describing the unpleasant tendencies of the landlady, for example, invading the tenants space and mind. Goutam Karmakar comments on Atwood’s intended symbolism behind the landlady’s negative portrayal. “Here she also plays with words like the bossy landlady’s slamming the doors about the house which tantamount to slamming the lodger’s [tenant’s] days, the days she would have spent in productive work.” Here, Karmakar theorizes Atwood’s premeditated motivation of female repression. Additionally, the narrator’s words are then directed towards describing the landlady’s jurisdiction over his own life. The above nuisances symbolize how the female influence on men, need them be described as monsters for an effective meaning, is becoming stronger. The poem then gears towards the tenant’s inability to escape his landlady’s overpowering control. This inability to escape symbolizes that the fearful female power symbolized here, as well as seen in todays society, is here to stay regardless of any male opposition. In this poem, Atwood thematically describes an innovative, compelling, and empowering attitude towards strengthening the female identity of

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