Body Politics and Embodied Subjectivity in Margaret Atwood's "The Man from Mars"

Published in Margaret Atwood's first short story collection Dancing Girls in 1977, "The Man from Mars" offers a fictional representation of body politics through Atwood's young protagonist, Christine, whose experience of her embodiment becomes a discursive agent through which various forms of displacement are foregrounded. Through a critical exploration of Christine's experience of her body in the private and public realms, this essay aims to offer a reading of the story in the context of the embodied self and subjectivity while examining how the acculturation of bodily consciousness and idealised body images are conducive to feelings of personal insecurity as well as social intolerance towards difference. By exploring Atwood's construction of her fat heroine in the light of body and embodiment theories and in dialogue with Atwood's other literary works, this essay thus seeks to look into the ways in which "The Man from Mars" casts a critical eye on body politics situating it side by side with identity politics through the art of the modern short story.