Civilization

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself
—Friedrich Nietzsche

The Female Body,” by Margaret Atwood is a prose fiction. Atwood’s language has visible denotation and hidden connotation. She utilizes language to show that society subjugates the female body when she uses words such as “the female body”, “my topic feels like hell”, “a renewable one luckily”, and “made of transparent plastics”.
Atwood constantly pits civilization against the wilderness surrounding it and society against the savagery from which it arose. She considers these oppositions to be some of the defining principles of Canadian literature. They also provide a metaphor for the divisions within the human personality. Society, civilization, and culture represent the rational, contained side of humanity, while the wild forest represents the very opposite: the irrational, primeval, and carnal impulses that exist in every living being. Usually landscapes in Atwood’s poems are harsh and brutal, wild and unconquerable, like the heart of darkness within all humans unlike the description made in the “Female body”. A critic once observed that Atwood's poetry concerns "modern woman's anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of the sex role power structure."
The female body represents servitude and entrapment, victimization and imprisonment — otherness as defined by a men. It is a battlefield of violence in which the speaker describes a woman’s body as a “mute symbol” of grotesque weakness. A woman’s body is the theatre on which men’s brutal rituals are enacted, as they vie for supremacy.
The female body in Atwood’s work also demonstrates the unbreakable connection between the Earth and women, proof of a woman’s vulnerability and mortality. While the female body can represent continuity, sensual pleasure, and self-reliance, in most of Atwood’s work, there is some disjunction between substance and spirit, between flesh and essence.
Atwood’s sculptures do not convey an attitude of female passivity. While the pieces invite the viewer to look closely, they modestly don't allow one to look inside. They coyly resist revealing all their secrets. At the same time, an ineffable joy in celebrating the body, and the inner life that it carries, emanates from the pieces. Atwood reimagines the idea of the female body, allowing the viewer to be a participant in a woman’s experience of her own body, an experience that is delicate, peculiar, comic, charming, romantic, and demanding. The pieces provoke delight, introspection, awe, and sometimes discomfort as opposed to gawking or self-satisfaction. And the fact that the figures are abstract reduces the potential for gaping.
“Female body” is two words that play an important part in Atwood’s argument that society has domination of the female gender. The denotations of female are simply the characteristic of or appropriate to this certain sex and body is the entire material or physical structure of an organism. Yet in Atwood’s essay these two words are not that simple they carry with them much more meaning and profundity. Atwood uses the words female body to describe all female bodies; she uses singular form when she could have used plural form. One can see that Atwood chooses the singular path because society views females not as individuals but as one whole. Atwood is being ironic by writing about the female body as if there were only one female body, which all females can associate with.
The range for the interpretation of the words “female body” is vast; it goes beyond merely the organs and the physical state. The female body can be: political when it goes on strike for its rights, it can be social when going on a job interview, it can be nurturing when it feeds its offspring, and it can be an object when used to sell products for companies. Atwood does not use any type of these female body images yet she chooses to group them all as one “the female body”. Atwood opts for the singular form of the female body because society makes it that way. Society views a female body as being typical and all female body coincide with each other. The female body in society is comparable to hell.
Atwood uses her body in her work to show the audience that “my topic feels like hell”(409). Atwood uses the word topic in place of body. She uses her body assuming that all other female’s body resembles her and can associate with her because of society’s view. The explanation for the word topic is a subject of discussion or conversation, and hell is a place of eternal punishment for the wicked after death, presided over by Satan. These negative words are used to describe a female’s body. The gist of the words when using it to describe the female body should be disapproving. How is it that a female body can be a subject and feels like an eternal punishment?
Atwood uses words that she believes society would use to describe the female body. In society the female body is viewed as a topic because they are continuously being talked about. They are talked about sexually, mentally, physically, mothers, lovers, and children. Inexorably the female body is constantly a hot topic of the day. Beyond calling a female’s body a topic, Atwood also says the female body feels like hell. The female’s body feels like hell because metaphorically it is worn out from being talked about frequently. The nuance for the word hell is more than just a place of eternal chastisement for the wicked. In this case Atwood uses the word hell as a sensation, a pessimistic sensation that a female body gets from being talked about over and over again without a break. One example of how a woman is always being talked about it through advertisements. The appearance of the perfect woman appears everywhere. When you turn on the television you see her face, when you look at a magazine you see her face and when you drive or walk you see her face on billboards. After having seen these pictures of the beautiful women there is immediate talk about it. There could be talk ranging from the way she looked to the mole on her face. Will the talk be able to continue because a newer, more youthful looking one can simply replace these women when they have become undesirable?
Atwood goes on to exploit the female body as “a renewable one luckily”(411). The female body will not always be desired by society. Once young and nourished the female body dries up like a raisin and is no longer enviable. The essence for the word renewable is replaceable by new growth. For the word luckily it is by good fortune. Therefore when interpreted literally the sentence is implying that the female body is replaceable by new growth because of good fortune. Looking into a deeper level these words hold more than their simple definition. At first glance it may appear that females are lucky that they have the opportunity to replace the unattractive part of their female bodies with what they feel is more attractive, basically something that pleases the public eye.
The public eye holds a superficial image of the perfect woman. When most women do not satisfy the public’s expectation they go in search of a new look or more exact “a renewable one luckily”. These females can go out and get plastic surgery to enhance their beauty, they can put on a layer of makeup to hide their old wrinkle identity, receive face-lifts to get rid of the sagging skin and liposuction to lose the fat that they have gain through child birth or the weight just accumulated through the years. When Atwood suggests that the female body is renewable she blamed society for making it that way. Society holds high expectancy for the perfect female. Most women fall into the trap of pleasing society and go through the trouble of changing their identity by any means. It becomes an issue when the women suffer physically from these transformations such as half of a face becoming paralyzed, completely destroyed or even death. Society makes women an object where they can be completely distorted.