Goddess or Countertop Dancer: Mythological Female Figures in Margaret Atwood’s Morning In The Burned House

Abstract

Mythological figures are recurrent references in Margaret Atwood’s writing, and they frequently appear in a revisited way, questioning the canon, classical mythology itself, and functioning as complex metaphors of contemporary society. The present study analyzes, under the light of feminist literary criticism, the recurrence of three mythological figures in a poetry collection by Margaret Atwood entitled Morning in the Burned House (1995). The analysis aims at verifying if and how they can be taken as a self-reflexive parody of the paradoxical condition of women in contemporary Western society.