“Always a potent object”? The Shifting Role of the Bible in Margaret Atwood’s Novels

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Abstract

The Bible appears regularly in Margaret Atwood’s novels, from The Edible Woman in 1969 to The Testaments in 2019. Atwood’s characters do not tend to be religious, but like most people in the Western world, they encounter the Bible in schools, at funerals, in headlines, advertisements, and occasionally from religious people themselves. Atwood’s Bible is a Christian Bible, the references running from Genesis to Revelation. Most often it speaks in the words of the King James Version (KJV) from 1611. Frequently in Atwood’s novels, Bibles are present in ways that denote their impotency and incongruity in the modern world. The language of the KJV is archaic, its words obsolete. The Bible is still around but in hotel bed-sides, its verses converted into bad puns. At the same time, several of Atwood’s novels present a different picture, particularly The Handmaid’s Tale from 1985 and its sequel, The Testaments (2019), and The Year of the Flood from 2009. In The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments the Bible is an object kept from the eyes and hands of women, used to justify their oppression and objectification. In The Year of the Flood – and the trilogy of which it is a part – the Bible is used to critique the capitalist, consumerist forces that have led to a natural disaster on a global scale. These most ‘biblical’ of Atwood’s novels could be understood in line with a shift from the first generation of feminist biblical scholarship emerging in the 1970s to the renewed interest in religion and the ‘post-secular’ in the late 1990s.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication"Who Knows What We’d Ever Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?"
Subtitle of host publicationThe Bible and Margaret Atwood
EditorsRhiannon Graybill, Peter Sabo
Place of PublicationNew Jersey
PublisherGorgias Press
Chapter1
Pages27-53
Number of pages26
ISBN (Electronic)9781463241360
ISBN (Print)9781463241353
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

Name Biblical Intersections
PublisherGorgias Press
Volume18

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Religious Studies
  • General Literature Studies

Free keywords

  • Margaret Atwood
  • the Bible and literature
  • secularization
  • feminism
  • gender
  • environmentalism
  • Bible
  • biblical reception
  • apocalyptic

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