Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies”: A Dissimulated Confession of a Rape Survivor

Abstract

Park, Jai Young. “Margaret Atwood’s ‘Rape Fantasies’: A Dissimulated Confession of a Rape Survivor.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 41.1 (2015): 67-84. Traditionally Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” was construed as a story of irony. Critics had not been affirmative whether the narrator put herself in danger by telling her enticing scenarios of rape to a strange man. Later Nancy Workman uncovered the possibility of rape with the taciturn character Sondra, but her interpretation based on one paragraph out of forty-four seemed too farfetched. Actually Workman overlooked the main body of the story—the protagonist Estelle’s six fantasies. One of them is rather noticeable than the others because it includes a specific place, her mother’s house, which must be familiar to Estelle. It can be inferred that that scenario is based on her real experience. There Estelle is obsessed with the coal chute in the cellar, a tempting place for a rapist. Mysteriously she remembers only the shoes, but it is common for rape survivors not to see the attacker’s full countenance but only the lower part of the body, more likely the shoes. In addition, there are more pieces of evidence that Estelle is recuperating from a past trauma and simultaneously attempting to reestablish herself as an agent of power. In fact retelling the stories in a way that she desires demonstrates a process of “talking cure.” Scrutinizing Estelle’s fantasies and the process of empowering herself as an autonomous subject, this paper explicates a dissimulated confession of a rape survivor. (Chonbuk National University)