瑪格麗特‧亞伍德與主體敘述

Other Sides of Silence: Margaret Atwood and Subjectivity

加拿大小說家瑪格麗特‧亞伍德，向以技巧圓熟、思慮慎密、深富智慧及原創性等質素，享譽當今英語文壇。她擅長運用性別與國族政治的弔詭，來探索小說語言的想像空間。本文針對她早期的三本小說〈可食的女人〉、〈表面〉和〈預言女子〉，討論她企圖用語言的主體敘述，包括暗喻、鏡化模擬和素材的互典，架構出受歐美強勢帝國殖民的加拿大和受男性父權中心壓抑的女性的相關性，進而突現出隱性的敘述空間和另一沉默的真實面。

Margaret Atwood is an original writer who employs the politics of gender and nationality t6 experiment her sense of the imaginative possibilities within fictional language. In her works like The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976) and others, Atwood systematically presents the individual quest for female integrity as inextricably involved in a communal quest for cultural identity. She infers, as revealed in the three novels, that sexual subordination and cultural colonization are parallel situations because women and Canadians have viewed themselves as victims of either masculine privilege or English/ American imperialism. Through political and philosophical ideas are relegated to the subterrain of the novel's predominantly social and psychological discourses, Atwood's language of subjectivity explores the unconscious of the other sides reflected in the given culture. Atwood is concerned with the restoration of the split subjects trapped with power politics and mirror images between lovers and nations. The Edible Woman, for example, retells the story of suppressed creativity and marital ennui from the silenced perspective of the female. Her second novel, Surfacing, locates the distinctive Canadian preoccupation in a unique and distinguished feminist fable. Atwood, in Lady Oracle, presents individual quest for a more harmonious relationship with the exterior world. These works attempt to provide what Atwood calls, in one book title, Procedures for Underground (1970), where the underground in understood as the unconscious or the other side of what has been normally defined as a cultural norm. The consequence of this dialogic interaction shall, therefore, help the reader as well as the writer and her characters build up the so-call 'the plot of subjectivity,' to amend the leaking blanks of reality. This revelation of analysis, Mikhail Bakhtin3 writes, 'is indeed the authentic sphere where language' and therefore the possibilities of self-expression 'live.' This paper, therefore, focuses on the question of subjectivity in relation to female narrative strategies of Margaret Atwood. Most of her works delineate the splitting up of the self as it does tricks with mirrors, or with the power politics between lovers, or with the need to revise mythic stories, like those of Homer's Odysseus, to tell them from the silenced perspective of the female who has been seduced and abandoned. In order to find out how the subjects are revealed through plot, this study contains an investigation of the unconscious on politics, gender, and history with an analysis of the narrative language through which the characters try to survive. A number of Atwood's characters are moving toward the conclusion of the heroine of Surfacing: 'This above all, to refuse to be a victim.' Atwood demonstrates that cultural colonization and sexual subordination are identical situations. Both the humor and the tenderness of her works indicate how writing continues to empower Atwood herself to defy colonization. In these three novels, she exploits fantastic, futuristic, and fairytale techniques to examine both ideology and women's biological, familial, and social experiences.