A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

herself ‘moaning’ (BH 299). Rennie does it with the faith that something will move and live
again, “something will get born” and “this is the hardest thing she has ever done”. (BH 299)
According to Lorna Irvine Bodily Harm illustrates “inscription of the female body, and
by the connecting hospital room and jail cell, dramatically presents the injury to the female body
that results from its confinement (96), The abuse of female body in confinement is depicted in
Atwoods’ later novel, Alias Grace also. Grace, a servant girl and prison inmate witnesses the
sexual mutilation of women prisoners by the prison guards and the authorities.
Rennie is freed when a diplomat sent by the Canadian government talks to the prison
authorities. But before being released, she is made to sign that she has neither witnessed nor
experienced any type of Bodily Harm. Rennie leaves the prison as a totally transformed person.
She stops being submissive and decides to wield the pen to fight against injustice. She
understands that suffering is common to all and nobody is exempt from anything (BH 290).
Hereafter, she cannot ignore the faceless strangers of the world. Lora herself had once suggested
to Rennie: “The story of my life […] you could put it in a book”. (BH 270) Rennie writes a
travelogue titled ‘Bodily Harm’ narrating the various harms done to the female body. As
Howells comments, Rennie’s effort to tell the story is, like her effort to save Lora, “an exercise
of moral imagination’. She reports the incidents in Canada and Trinidad with an edge of moral
engagement” (BH 125). Rennie intends to awaken the society to fight against such injustice and
to prevent it in future.
Rennie uses the pen as a weapon to expose the injuries done to women in different
patriarchal institutions. Like Rennie, the female protagonist in Cat’s eye and Lady Oracle also
attempt to protest against male authority through art. Elaine in Cat’s eye, through her painting
titled, “Falling Women”, depicts the patriarchal traps set for woman, as also her vulnerability. It
depicts three women falling from a bridge onto sharp rocks which represent dangerous men. Joan
Foster in Lady Oracle, a writer of gothic romances, attempts to subvert the patriarchal systems
by exposing gender politics through her writings.
In Bodily Harm, Atwood uses the term cancer in the literal as well as figurative sense.
As Annette kolodny states, it is “a metaphor for a malignant world.” (39). Rennie realizes that
cancer which has infected her body is only a minor accident in her life. The cancer which has to
be feared lies in the mind of man in the capacity to take pleasure in another’s suffering. Rennie
assess human malignancy as more dangerous than cancer. It is significant that the word