Response #4 "Bodily Harm."

I... am... stupid.
Wow, I really had myself going. And my other blog posts about this book seem very dumb to me now, as I was looking so hard for that thrilling part of the book, or that physical moment when something big would happen and make it awesome and exciting, but it never came, and was never going to come in the first place. I read in a mini biography of Atwood that she wanted to write a novel that was anti thrilling, and I think I picked up that book.

The plot has all of the elements to a good thriller, the mysterious opening of the rope coiled on the unsuspecting and fragile Rennie's bed, the drama of the vile ex boyfriend, the vacation to a shabby hotel on some unknown island of the Caribbean, weird characters with secrets, and what I think was some sort of political time of hardship for the people of St Antoine and Ste Agathe. It sets the stage perfectly for something to happen, and though there are some chases with Paul and Rennie, and there is blood and murder in the secret basements of the Island, it's not about the thrills. This novel is purely about the mental struggles of one female, and her challenges to over come life's difficulties, like any female can. I see now how Atwood displays her radical feminism, and she does a good job of it, but that doesn't mean I liked the novel.
Every character Atwood used was like a stretch of the average human nature, real men aren't all sneaky and deceiving pigs like in the novel, and the only two types of men on this planet are not at polar ends of the decency spectrum, perfect and trash. She must use the characters as a way of progressing her point about the way females have to live, and over come men as a daily problem too.
Rennie Wilford is like any normal woman, perfectly average, and used to deal with life in a normal way. The way Atwood makes her story special is by putting the average character through hardships only the strongest of women can face, and that average quality helps the readers to connect, and sympathize. Rennie, before her surgery, was a normal journalist who covered average stories, and loved men and physical relationships. She has a boyfriend who admires her body and uses her for it, and she is proud of her appearances, she relies on them for a security blanket because she is shy and passive. Coming from her past, the little town of Griswold, every girl is Christian and bears little skin, and they live by a moral code. Rennie had lived like that for a long time, taking on the traits of her mother and grandmother before her, but then Rennie had her pride. Jake, her boyfriend, helped that pig along in piggish ways, and that was why she loved him so much. Then, it all went downhill, Rennie gets breast cancer, Jake leaves her, she becomes insecure about her body because of the surgical differences, and now she is alone and broken, in mental distress.

Though many women have felt at times in their lives like they aren't worth it, or that they aren't beautiful, Atwood shows us through Rennie that even the most dire situations in life can be mental, and they are certainly worth over coming. This is the classic story of female struggles, with herself and with the others around her, embodied in a normal woman who represents them all. She did a fabulous job of creating Rennie, she is not fantastic or unrealistic, and she is not super human in strength, she is like every one. Every woman in the world has been like Rennie at some point, and this story is the struggle to mentally over come doubt and fear. She even reaches the point in the novel where she clearly states that women don't need men to survive, for when Daniel, he doctor lover, wouldn't go to bed with her, she thinks "(I) no longer expected Daniel to save (my) life... maybe that was the right way to do it, to never expect anything."
The way Rennie always describes herself, as "damaged, broken and amputated," reflects the way many women feel after a surgery, a break up, and job loss, anything. Atwood does an amazing, and I mean AMAZING job of reflecting the same mutual feelings every woman has in this one character, outstanding.
It is also apparent that Atwood views on sexual activity states that men shouldn't touch females, and females should want to touch the men that they want most. Rennie writes a review on this concept, called "creative celibacy," I had to laugh at that.
Near the end, one of the girls from Ste. Agathe island, Elva, is beaten and bleeding from a revolution fight in the town, and Rennie and Lora clean her up and talk to her to calm her down. This point happens after some long decision making Rennie had had about not needed men, and maybe this point in the story was trying to say that your girlfriends are the ones to help you through, not the men.... maybe, that's what I got from it. Men seem all the same in this novel, and Rennie makes that perfectly clear. She asks every man she sleeps with, Daniel, Paul and Jake, what they dream about, and each answer with the same boring statement, to which she counters, "and then what?" and they all answer, and then I wake up.
This happens a lot in the book, small instances, like the dreams and the meetings with Paul and Daniel, and even the sexual evenings with Jake, all of the men speak with the same voices, except for Daniel, who is good.

At the end of the novel, I was not wowed, and in reality I did spend the first 210 pages of the novel wondering and wishing for the thrills that were never to come. I don't even think that had I knew the real message behind the plot, I would have enjoyed it. I respect Margaret Atwood's style of writing, and her way of fitting different pieces to the puzzle together with hidden meanings and a writer's deception, but it was a bit of a dry read. It felt more like a documentary of a sad female to be honest, without the adventure and glory ending where everything suddenly comes together and the sun shines from behind the storm clouds. I value the message that every female has the strength to over come life's worst challenges, but I would have preferred a bit more action and thrills to fill in the bare spots, and make the book that much better.