Page 2 of 7

European Journal of Business &

Social Sciences

Available at https://ejbss.org/

ISSN: 2235-767X

Volume 06 Issue 11

November 2018

Available online:https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 105

Later, when women slightly began to realize the gender politics, the awaking came to them due to

their internal urge to gain knowledge through education. There has also been a tradition of denying

education to women. Under this condition very few women secretly began to read books and they

realized the severity and intensity of this matter. Such women, who started to sense their overburdened

life, tried to give words to their condition.

FEMINISM AND MARGARET ATWOOD

Margaret Atwood is one who managed to realize the pathetic plight of women. She has now

become a legend being a female feministic author in Canada. It is said that the conscious efforts of

women empowerment started after the First World War during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Women were given rights to work and earn adequate salary. During 1960s and 1970s, the Women’s

Liberation Movement brought an unexpected change by providing freedom to women up to an extent.

It was a journey of women’s emancipation from exploitation which took almost a hundred years to

make women feel librated from institutional exploitation. Margaret Atwood also wrote her masterpiece

with such incidents and happenings which clearly show the path of women’s emancipation. She

depicted the early position of women living in ignorance of their exploitation and later their rejection of

it in order to live the life of freedom.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a renowned and honoured Canadian female novelist who is known

as a feminist critic and social activist. She had keen interest in reading literature since her childhood

and she considered literature her passion. Because of her inclination towards writing praiseworthy

literary pieces she has written more than thirty-five books including novels, short stories, poems,

literary critiques, social history and books for children. Her books have been translated into more than

twenty-two languages around the world.

Margaret Atwood is a ubiquitous presence in recent Canadian literature. Atwood made her

reputation as a poet during the 1960s and has since developed an avid following as a writer of fiction.

She is an international celebrity especially among feminists [1].

She gained reputation as a serious writer with tremendous potential. She exhibited a remarkable

insight into the workings of woman’s mind and earned a distinguished reputation among women

writers for her visionary interpretations of feminist thoughts. She explores the relationship between

humanity, nature and the human behaviour and power. She earned a good name while imparting

knowledge of literature to students of various reputed universities.

Margaret Atwood is often closely associated with feminism. She always tries to empower women

through her appealing novels. The terms ‘feminism’ or ‘feminist’ first appeared in France and then in

Netherlands in 1872 thereafter in Great Britain in 1890 and finally, in the United States in 1910. The

Oxford English Dictionary marks 1894 as the time for the first appearance of ‘feminist’ and 1895 for

‘feminism’.

Page 3 of 7

European Journal of Business &

Social Sciences

Available at https://ejbss.org/

ISSN: 2235-767X

Volume 06 Issue 11

November 2018

Available online:https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 106

Elaine Showalter narrates the development of Feminist theory passing through a number of

phases. In the first phase, which is called ‘feminist critique’, the readers examine the ideologies behind

written literary pieces in the world. The second is called ‘Gynocritics’, where the woman is the

producer of textual meaning and it becomes the path of the individual or collective female literary

career and literary history. The last phase of the development of feminist theory is considered as gender

theory where the ideological effects on people due to male dominant literature and the effects of the

gender system are examined [2].

FEMINISM IN CANADAIAN SOCIETY

Defining feminism exactly can be a challenging task but a broad understanding of it encircles the

speaking, writing and thus advocating on behalf of women and by identifying injustice to females in

the social status. Thus a new aspect has been explored these days in the 21st century which shows the

feminism and its politics in detail with great intensity [3]. Margaret Atwood’s novels examine these

issues with the portrayal of her subjugated female characters in her novels.

Feminist approach can be identified in fiction since Jane Austen had addressed the restricted lives

of women who faced such predicament in the early part of the century followed by Charlotte Bronte,

Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, who espoused the cause of women’s pathetic state. George Eliot also

depicted women's misery and oppression in her renowned autobiographical novel Ruth Hall

(1854).Moreover, an American journalist Fanny Fern revealed in public by writing her own struggle to

support her children as a newspaper journalist after her husband's premature death.

Louisa May Alcott, a staunch feminist, penned a strong feminist novel A Long Fatal Love Chase

(1866) which deals with a young woman's attempts to run away from her bigamist husband and

become independent. Surprisingly some male authors also recognized the injustice being done to

women [4]. The novels of George Meredith and George Gissing and the plays of Henrik Ibsen also

outlined the pathetic plight of women of the contemporary time.

Women’s experience of the power politics of gender and their problematic relation to patriarchal

traditions of authority has affinities with the Canadian attitudes to the cultural imperialism of the

United States as well as its ambivalence towards its European inheritors [5].

At the beginning of the Nineteenth century, individual women and some men were speaking

against male dominance where women were relegated to the margins of society and were provided low

status. Thus, awareness was rising among the people but still there was little sign of change in the

political or social order.

At the beginning of the 20th century, feminist science fiction emerged as a sub-genre of science

fiction that intends to deal with women's roles in society. Women writers in the literary movement of

the 19th century and early 20th century, was the first wave of feminism.