sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

something or someone from the dead.” 33 Perhaps, it is this universal preoccupation with mortality
which is the common faith of humankind that compels readers with various backgrounds to turn to
reading. As I have suggested earlier, Atwood sees reading as a meaning making activity that demands
active involvement on the part of the reader. The task of the writer, on the other hand, is to venture
into the darkness and bring back something which the reader could work on.
In her examination of the relationship between the “I” in the autobiography and the actual
personality of the author, Leigh Gilmore observes that
The relationship between truth telling and referentiality upon which traditional
autobiography studies depended can be seen as a discursive process rather than an
essential mirroring. The neglected aspect of this analysis is the writing self. While the
author as the person in the world and the author as the person in the text are the two
representations of identity adressed by both truth telling and referentiality, the author as
the person who writes (the I who writes I) is left precariously unadressed. 34
The autobiographical “I” is constructed discursively and cannot correspond directly to “the person
in the world.” As a result, there emerges an inevitable gap between the person and “the writing self.”
Two identities exist simultaneously in the text. Drawing attention to the same problem, Judith Butler
suggests that “my account of myself is never fully mine, and is never fully from me.” 35 By the same
token, the other remains outside full knowingness, and in that way also lives as the Other. “There is
never a fully satisfactory account, one which finally captures the subject.” 36 So the subject is doomed
to remain an elusive presence, escaping from the full grasp of the reader who can only articulate
his/her own perception of it in the process of reading.
Atwood also shares her views on the relationship between time and narration:
Narration‐storytelling‐ is the relation of events unfolding through time. You can’t hold
a mirror up to Nature unless there is a metronome ticking somewhere… And once you’ve
got clocks, you’ve got death and dead people, because time, as we know, runs on, and
then it runs out, and dead people are situated outside of time, whereas living people are
still immersed in it. 37
Thus the writer can only relate events and people in flux since she cannot freeze them in time.
The passage of time also brings with it the idea of mortality and death which cannot be evaded by
living things. Only dead people are situated outside time, the living can never be captured fully as
they are constantly changing.
From the female point of view the female autobiography is of major importance. “The self
discovery of female identity” is what unites the authors of autobiography such as Margaret
Cavendish, Margery Kempe and Ann Bradstreet. According to Laura Braza:
the feminist notion of truth being entirely subjective seems to fit directly into her line
of thinking […] we see another connection to her as a feminist writer who takes cultural
images and reshapes them, redefines them and changes the world around her. 38
In this respect, the foregrounding of the female voice in autobiographies written by female
writers entails within it a defiance of traditional, patriarchal values and norms that have shaped the
worldviews of many societies for a very long period of time. These autobiographies pose a direct
challenge to the male‐dominant status quos and offer alternative ways of looking at the world. The
subversion of dominant paradigms brings about a radical refashioning of cultural images and thus has
a direct impact on the world in which we live.
The third chapter of Atwood’s book is called “Dedication: the Great God Pen.” In this chapter
Atwood examines the authors’ relationship to the world of money. She claims that although many
authors feel that to be rich is not an ideal to be cherished for an author, still, there are others who