Canadian Female Gothic on the Foreign Border: Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm and Karen Connelly’s Burmese Lessons

My essay analyzes why and how Atwood’s Bodily Harm and Connelly’s Burmese Lessons forge an identification of female and Canadian identity with the heroine of the Female Gothic who is eternally in need of rescue. In both works, empathy for the ‘other’ is mediated by the narratives’ fidelity to the Female Gothic which informs their depictions of the male foreigner as the seductive, menacing other. Although Bodily Harm’s and Burmese Lessons’s construction of white female identity as traumatized and silenced is ultimately rejected, both narratives adhere to the Gothic’s emphasis on the heroines’ battles against victimization and patriarchal control. Whereas Bodily Harm follows the logic of the Gothic, Burmese Lessons outlines an alternative biopolitical engagement with the foreign based on a recognition rather than a disavowal of the nonhuman animal within the human – a recognition that, while grounded in the Gothic, exceeds its opposition between powerful men and helpless women.