A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

than chop” (BH 225-26). When Rennie hears of chopping women, she thinks of “cook books”
(BH 216) and meat.
Male aggression and female passivity is suggested by Atwood’s epigraph to Bodily
Harm, which is a quotation from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. The epigraph states that a
man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to others, whereas a woman’s presence
suggests what can and cannot be done to her. Thus, in a patriarchal sexist society, man occupies
the subject position and woman the object position. Jocasta, a feminist activist, directs Rennie’s
thoughts towards taking up women’s issues through her writings. Jocasta says: “it would be a
great idea if all the men were changed into women and all the women were changed into men for
a week. Then they would each know to treat the other ones when they got changed back […]”
(BH 156). Rennie takes up writing as a serious occupation. She works for ‘Pandora’, a woman
oriented magazine and ‘Visor’ – a male oriented magazine which helps her to analyse the male
and female points of view. Rennie writes an article entitled “Burned out”, which discusses the
failure of women’s movement.
Bodily Harm can be considered to be an anti- pornography treatise as Atwood exposes
the perverse and debased notions of sex, propagated thorough pornographic representations. In
writing this novel, Atwood seems to have been influenced by some anti-pornography feminist
works like Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men possessing Women (1979), Susan griffin’s
Pornography and Silence: Culture’s revenge against nature (1981) and Laura lederer’s collection
of essays entitled ‘Take back the night: Women on Pornography (1980). Rennie is commissioned
to write about pornography as an art form from a woman’s angle, for Visor. The editor wants to
publish this article, not for raising the social consciousness against it, but to provide “a sort of
fun” (BH 207). This takes Rennie to the studio of a male-porn artist named Frank who justifies
his craft saying that, “Art is for contemplation, what art does is, it takes what society deals out
and makes it visible” (BH 208). She sees life sized mannequin tables and chairs depicting
women in demeaning postures: “One of the chairs was a woman on her knees, her back arched,
her wrists tied to her thighs. The ropes and arms were the arms of the chair, her bum was the
seat”. (BH 209)
Rennies’ assignment takes her to Toronto policemen’s pornography museum where she
visualizes the male fantasies of domination over women. She sees the film clips of a woman
copulating with a dog, a woman with a pig, a woman with a donkey, woman being strangled or