Margaret Atwood’s Feminist Ethics of Gracious Housewifery

What is it about?

This article argues that Atwood’s late fiction develops an ethical vision which is best understood in light of the philosophical ideas of radical hospitality suggested by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, but with an important feminist revision. The article addresses the tensions linked to Atwood's complex combination of a feminist criticism of women's imposed hospitality together with an ethical view of the subject's un-chosen and absolute responsibility to another.

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