A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

‘malignant’ is used many times in the novel. When the police arrest Rennie at her hotel, she finds
on the face of the hotel manager, a malignant enjoyment. The prison guard who hurts the
prisoners with his bayonet enjoys his act and Rennie feels that it is malignant. Thus, “she has
been turned inside out, there’s no longer a here and there” (BH 290). She finds the world more
diseased than her own body. She begins to see life from a new perspective. She forgets about her
illness, “her scar, her disability, her nibbled flesh, and the little teeth mark on her” (BH 284). She
realizes that others are suffering more than her; they are dying faster than her. Rennie realizes
that, though she cannot be saved from her physical illness, she is free from mental malignancy.
She considers herself to be lucky, “she is overflowing with luck” (BH 301) as she is able to feel
and to share the suffering of all women.
In Bodily Harm, animal imagery is used to suggest cancer or cannibalism. Sharon
Wilson points out that the presence of rats in the female body, Lora’s apartment, in the prison,
maggots, fleas, other insects, crabs and snails symbolically suggest cannibalism (Fairy tale 213).
Rennie’s lover Jake, who is malicious and predatory, is described as “grinning like a fox” (BH
103). Rennie feels insecure in his presence; she often feels “cornered and mean” (BH 199).
In Bodily Harm, as in the other novels of Atwood, the female victimization is equated to
the Canadian experience. The land, like the woman, is depicted as vulnerable, consumable, and
oppressed. In Survival, Atwood states that “Canada as a whole is a victim” (35) and the central
symbol for Canada is survival. There are many relations between Rennie and her country. Rennie
finds in Canada, the ever-present feeling of menace’ from “everything surrounding it”. Survival
30) She fears herself to be “a moving target in someone else’s binoculars”. (BH 40) Rennie’s
fear of men and of everything around her is a personalization of the fear of the Canadians
towards American aggression.
In this novel, Atwood uses images of the body to exemplify the reduction of the female
body to raw material. Rennie’s amputated body, the mannequin’s Toronto Policemen’s
Pornography Museum, the picture of rat in vagina and Lora’s bruised face are powerful images
of female brutalization. St. Agatha, a Caribbean island which Rennie visits, is named after a saint
whose breasts had been chopped off. Thus the territory is personified as a woman who has
suffered castration. Images of body parts are also metaphorically used to represent compassion.
Rennie wishes to be a tourist in life and learns to look at things without ‘touching’ them. In
prison, when she feels Lora’s arm against her own for the first time, she feels that “it’s