Abstract
In her œuvre, Margaret Atwood takes objectification of one's body in the strictest sense of the word. While she is known to thematize various types of communities, the body in her poems remains the most impenetrable border.
Typically, the speaker intensely peruses her reflection in the mirror and conveys an image close to a dismembered body. The detached gaze, predominantly thematized in the situation of "face to glass face" through a recurring motif of a mirror, focuses on the individual parts of the body, often heavily imbued with mythical or symbolic value; their shapes, and their metamorphoses simultaneously associated with natural imagery.
The body is the object (of the poem), it is the objectified, it is the objectifying. She uses structure very similar to Rilke's poems that came to represent what we today associate with the concept of Dinggedicht: through a detached image of an object, in this case a body, and an epiphany that ensues the reflection of this estranged, alienated thing.
By addressing self and, most importantly, self-knowledge, which comes to light during the epiphanic moment, she pays homage and at the same time surpasses the given literary tradition and vice versa. This paper therefore focuses on how an impenetrable border ends up connecting the two worlds of classical and postmodern literature.