本論文旨在探究瑪格麗特．愛特伍之《強盜新娘》的重塑女性主體，透過琳達．賀欽恩的後現代主義研究，輔以瑪莉．戴力與伊
麗莎白．威爾森的女性主義觀點，探索愛特伍在本書中所呈現的
女性主體風貌，強調愛特伍塑造的女性主體，可以跳脫女性往往
被刻化為被動柔弱形象的迷思，進而成為加害者與受害者兼具的
角色，能夠主動並侵略他人。

首章以分析女性主體的重要性為起點，指出後現代主義與女性主
義的共通觀點在於對個人主體性的關注，以及反「一統」與「父權」界定的舊有主體性。次章提出《強盜新娘》中的後現代寫作
技巧，證明愛特伍善於以童話改寫、互文、拼貼敘事技巧及多寶
格的寫作架構，來闡述其重塑女性主體的企圖，尤其在本小說中
創造出一個兼備加害者與協助者特色的「女惡徒」角色，可以佐
證愛特伍運用後現代技巧，試圖突破既有女性形象的藩籬。

第三章以瑪莉．戴力的女性主義觀點出發，強調突破父權建構之
主體性的另一個可能，是對於既有的善與惡重新評價。此一重新
評價的定義，正符合後現代主義強調的質疑傳統，戴力提倡唯有
認清童話裡隱藏的父權意識與社會體制下的「偽女性特質」，才
能明白女性主體不再是柔弱無依，進而建構屬於自己的主體性。
戴力的觀點對照出《強盜新娘》裡三位女主角的心路歷程，藉由
對抗與仰賴一位「女惡徒」，主角最終能夠明白自我主體性何在。

第四章則藉由凸顯女性與城市之間矛盾的關係，探討愛特伍為何
將童話時空挪移至今日的後現代城市多倫多，並點出女性主體在
城市議題中的不可或缺性。透過主角身處城市不同空間的轉換，
引導出愛特伍企圖打破「公眾女人」與「私女人」壁壘分明的城
市位置。結論試圖導出「女惡徒」的存在，實際上是愛特伍致力
於創立多元化與異質性的女性主體，有別於傳統「非善即惡」的
觀點，愛特伍筆下的女性，不再只具備單一的善良無助特徵，而
是主動、積極、善惡兼具的女性。

This thesis endeavors to examine Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride with a view to illustrating how Atwood reinvents female subjectivity through the usage of postmodern writing skills in analyzing such a feminist issue. My purpose of this thesis is to argue that females in literature can no longer be as passive or angelic as ever. Females can be evil, and females can be active and aggressive.
Chapter One manifests a panoramic view of the notions of female subjectivity to foreground that the searching for subjectivity is a predominant issue in both postmodernism and feminism. I conclude that the impulse of postmodern and feminist arguments lies on their concerns about the individual subjectivity and their resistance against a unified and single subjectivity in conventional or masculine theories. Chapter Two unveils the postmodern strategies that Atwood has used in showing her preferring to renew and look back to other conventional works in order to create stories for women. The postmodern characteristics in this novel, such as intertexuality, pastiche narration, Chinese-box story structure and the rewritten of canonical works, reveals Atwood’s intention in using and abusing conventions in traditional and patriarchal literary works.
Chapter Three, with Mary Daly’s declaration of the importance of transvaluation, spotlights the complex relationship between the three protagonists and the evil antagonist. Mary Daly insists that, by breaking the code and seeing through the patriarchal ideology hidden in literature, women can
reject the false femininity, find their true selves, and construct their female subjectivity. In this



chapter, the protagonists reconstruct their subjectivity by fighting against and relying on the antagonist, Zenia, who plays both the victimizer and guider that helps the protagonists get rid of the false femininity and traumatic memories.
Chapter Four emphasizes the ambivalent relationship between women and the city. Different from the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale, Atwood chooses to tell a story that happens in contemporary Toronto. Her change of story background will not only deconstruct the original story background, but also reconstruct a postmodern feminist fairy tale in urban city. In this way, Atwood challenges the traditional distinction between good and evil women, and puts into question a fixed domestic space for women in urban city.
In Chapter Five, the conclusion reiterates, sums up the argument of this thesis, and integrates the foresaid statements into the construction of active and aggressive female subjectivity. Through the creation of an ambivalent femme fatale, Atwood reveals her subversion of the passive and imprisoned group of female characters in conventional literature, and shows her intention to reinvent the active and aggressive female subjectivity.

Table of Contents


Chapter One
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1


Chapter Two
A Postmodern Feminist Fairy Tale: The Robber Bride…………………………..16


Chapter Three
Beyond Good and Evil: Transvaluation of Female Subjectivity…………………..39


Chapter Four
Women in the City: Female Flauneur, Housewives, and Toronto………………..67


Chapter Five
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..98


Works Cited………………………………………………………………………..108

Works Cited
Primary Source
Atwood, Margaret. The Robber Bride. New York: Bantam, 1993.

Secondary source
Atwood, Margaret. Alice Grace. London, United Kingdom: Virago Press Ltd, 1997.
---. Bodily Harm. London:Virago Press, 1981.
---. Cat’s Eye. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989
---. Double Persephone , Toronto : Piv. Print. 1961
---. Life Before Men Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, 1979
---. Surfacing. Toronto : Markam , Ont.: Paperjacks, 1972
---. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Ontario: Anansi, 1972.
---. The Blind Assassin. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000.
---. The Journals of Susanna Moodie , Toronto : Oxford U.P., 1970
---. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: Seal. 1985.
---. “What’s So funny? Notes on Canadian Humor.” Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. 181.

Bacchilega, Cristina. The Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction, trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Port in the Era of High Capitalism, Lodnon: New Left Books, 1973.

Bondi, Liz. “Other figures in other places: On feminism, postmodernism and geography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992): 199-213.

Bouson, J Brooks. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret
Atwood. Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1993.

Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering." New German Critique 39 (1986).

Caufield, Jon. City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto’s Gentrification and Critical Social Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1994

Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night A Traveler. New York: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich,1979.

Cranny-Francis, Ann. Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press/ Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

de Certeau, Michel. , The Practice of Everyday Life . University of California Press, 1984.

Dentith, Simon. Parody. London: Routledge, 2000

Gibson- Graham, JK. “Postmodern Becomings : From the space of form to the space of potentiality. In, Georges Benko & Ulf Strohmayer (eds.), Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. pp. 306-23.

Howells, Carol Ann. Margaret Atwood. London: Macmillan Press, 1996.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fictions. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988.
---. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London and New York, 1988.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Caroly Burk. Ithca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Postmodern Culture. London: Verso, 1985. pp13-29.

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. Hildesheim, 1755.

Ingersoll, Eatl G. Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Ontario: Firefly Books, 1990.

Kuester, Martin. Framing Truths: Parodic Structures in Contemporary English-Canadian Historical Novels. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.

Marcus, Sharon. “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A theory and Politics of Rape and Prevention.” Feminists Theorize the Political. Eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in
Mid-Nineteenth Century England, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary theory. New York:Methuen,
1985.

Nicholson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Niehael, Magali Cornier. Feminism and the Postmodernism Impulse. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Palumbo, Alice A. “On the Border: Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” Margaret Atwood: Work and Impact, ed. Reingard M
Nischik. Suffolk: Canden House, 2000.

Rose, Margaret A. Parody: Ancient, Modern and Postmodern. Cambridge, 1993.

Roth, Verena Buhler. Wilderness and the Natural environment: Margaret Atwood’s Recyling of a Canadian Novel: A Search for Identity. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1993.

Roudiez, Leon s. Introduction, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, by Julia Kristeva, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Robinson, Sally. “The ''Anti-logos weapon'': Multiplicity in Women''s Texts.” Contemporary Literature 29. No.1 Spring (1988): 105-124.

Rowe, Karen E. “Feminism and Fairy Tales.” Women Studies 6, Toronto Press,1979. pp325-45.

Sage, Lorna. The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990

Squier, Susan Merrill, eds. Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,1984.

Staels, Hilde. ‘Atwoodian Gothic: From Lady Oracle to The Robber Bride,’ Modern Critical Views: Margaret Atwood. Ed, Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.

Stein, Karen F. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999.

Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction. London: Unwin Hyman Ltd,1997.

Walkowitz, Judith. “Contest Terrain: New social Actor.” Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, Cambridge 1980

Wekerle. Gerda R. "A Woman’s Place is in the City," Antipode: A Radical Journal
of Geography, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 11-20

Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Invisible Flaneur.” New Left Review, no. 191 (1992), pp.90-110
---. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and women. Oxyford: University of California Press, 1991.

Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993
---. “Mythological Intertext in Margaret Atwood’s Works.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Eds. Reigard M. Nischik. New York: Camden House, 2000.

Worton, Michael and Judith Still, Eds. Intertexuality: Theories and Practices. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990.

Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. London: Heinemann, 1979
---. Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993