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Margaret Atwood's Feminist Ethics of Gracious Housewifery

Date Published:

7 Jan, 2013

Abstract:

The article explores Margaret Atwood's engagement with the ethics of hospitality as manifested in her novel The Blind Assassin (2000) and the short story "The Art of Cooking and Serving" (2006). It claims that these works point to an ethical vision which is best understood in light of the philosophical ideas of radical hospitality suggested by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida but with an important feminist revision. Focusing on allusions to an inspiring cookbook, prominent in the two works by Atwood, the article analyzes the works' appropriation and reformulation of the feminine myth of gracious housewifery for signifying both the subject's obligation to the other and the ideal of generous giving and attentive care. It addresses the conflict that Atwood stages between a feminist critique of the duty of hospitality imposed on women and the ethical view of the subject's un-chosen and absolute responsibility to another. 

 

January 2013: Dr. Tammy Amiel Houser is a lecturer at the Department of Literature, Language, and the Arts of the Open University of Israel. Her research is in Comparative Literature and its intersection with feminist theories, political conflicts, and ethical perspectives. She has written on Ian McEwan’s fiction, (Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate). Her book, Feminist Perspectives on the Coming-of-Age Novel (Hebrew), which deals with George Eliot’s reshaping of the Bildungsroman, is forthcoming from the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics (Tel Aviv University) in cooperation with Hakibbuz Hameuchad Press.

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 11, Issue 1 Literature and Ethics
Last updated on 04/15/2020