Search results for "Margaret Atwood. Kate Atkinson. Myth. Fairy tales."

Myths of Violence and Female Storytelling in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet

2016

Stories of violence and oppression from classical mythology and fairy tales are redeployed in two novels by Atwood (1985) and Atkinson (1997) as archetypal pre-texts that impact on plot and narrative process. Although they are very different in genre and theme, both novels present first-person female narrators who are trapped in a claustrophobic present, and pose the question of the extent to which a story can be told from within the boundaries traced by myth, fairy tales and quasi-mythical literary texts. Clearly indebted to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a dystopian world where women live segregated by a male regime. References to the tale of Little Red Cap, cl…