Spotty-Handed Villainesses

Through a wide-ranging exploration of feminism, literature, writing, and personal experience, Atwood examines the representations of women in literature, and its underlying paradigms, and ultimately advocates for women to reflect the spectrum of human nature. Atwood’s case studies throughout this speech are primarily from literature, as is her title, as she explains it comes from Macbeth as ‘it recalls that most famous of spots, the invisible but indelible one on the hand of wicked Lady Macbeth. Spot as in guilt, spot as in blood, spot as in “out, damned”.’ This intertextuality evokes a physical blemish representative of Lady Macbeth’s guilt, which mirrors the form of gender representation that Atwood aims for.

Throughout, Atwood engages with literary conventions and structures, such as in ‘It cannot do without a conception of form and a structure, true, but its roots are in the mud; its flowers, if any, come out of the rawness of its raw materials.’ In metaphorically imagining the novel as flora, Atwood exposes the impurities of literary inspiration, regardless of gender. Atwood conveys the opportunities provided by a variety of female figures in literature, illuminated in ‘But female bad characters can also act as keys to doors we need to open, and as mirrors in which we can see more than just a pretty face.’ By positioning these characters as ‘keys’ through a simile, combined with the visual imagery conjuring conventional ideals of femininity, Atwood highlights the ways literature can depict more than beauty and extend to ideas of human nature and feminism.