Margaret Atwood's gendered pasts in "Moral Disorder"

Abstract

"As Nancy Forestell, Kathryn McPherson, and Cecylia Morgan claim in their introduction to the collection Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada, the social history of Canada needs to be viewed from perspectives different from the conventional masculinist ones and “gendered dimensions of […] twentieth‑century Canadian history” should be explored (7). They argue that not only women’s history, but also men’s alternative histories need to be discovered. In her collection of interrelated short stories Gendered Pasts, Margaret Atwood studies the changing history of Canadian women from the 1950s onwards. She intricately relates the ideas of tidiness and order to her plot, which should not surprise the reader familiar with her theory of novel writing and reading as a labyrinthine process (Howells 1). Her central character, whose name in the later stories turns out to be Nell, is a young teenager in the 50s. From that period onwards her life and opinions change in the way expectations towards women evolved in the Canadian society. Transformations in thinking and social norms are presented on her example, even though when she is in her thirties and she is the mistress of a married man called Tig she is not very representative of all women in general".