Margaret Atwood - Atwood and Animals

Atwood and Animals

Margaret Atwood has repeatedly made observations about our relationships to animals in her works. Atwood offers this observation about eating animals: "The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people...And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life." Characters in her books link sexual oppression to meat-eating and consequently give up meat-eating. In The Edible Woman, Atwood's character Marian identifies with hunted animals and cries after hearing her fiancé's experience of hunting and eviscerating a rabbit. Marian stops eating meat but then later returns to it.

In Cat's Eye, the narrator recognizes the similarity between a turkey and a baby. She looks at "the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird." In Atwood's Surfacing, a dead heron represents purposeless killing and prompts thoughts about other senseless deaths.

Read more about this topic:  Margaret Atwood

Famous quotes containing the words atwood and/or animals:

    I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.
    —Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)

    It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
    Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936)