#516 words

I finally got back around to working on my Bagginshield fic beyond outlining. I’m going to be making a whole bunch of stuff up and it should be fun. For me.

In the second section of her novel, Atwood gives the reader a glimpse into another section of the character’s life. She goes on to describe her teen years and how she matured during them. Her language and overall stories of this time are very relatable to me, being I am a teenager. She goes on to explain certain situations such as her and her boyfriend, Bill, and how “no one understands her”…especially her “outdated” parents. At the beginning of her story “My Last Duchess” she tells about her school. She goes on to write about the serious test anxiety that her and her classmates have, again very relatable to teenagers. On pages 58-59 she indirectly characterizes herself as a middle class girl in society and school. She is not so poor that she has to drop out and work, but also she is not wealthy enough to have a place in college selected and paid for her. This is very relatable to me because it is sort of the situation that I am in. Atwood uses repetition again about her “monstrousness” (48). She believed, sometimes, that it caused her little sister to have emotional problems. This was repeated in this story and more frequently throughout her previous short stories in the novel. Atwood's incredible detail paints a very vivid picture in the reader's mind. Her attention to it really makes the reader picture and feel what is happening. However, at times I thinks she goes a little to far into detail. For instance, "twenty-five adolescent bodies stewing gently in the humid springtime air" (51). Atwood shows the character's maturity in the short story "My Last Duchess" by one of her class assignments. Her class read a poem that is told from a Duke's point of view after he killed his wife. The character's own diction changed as she marked out more deroggatory terms and replaced them with more understanding terms such as "stuck up" with "proud", and "stupid" with "inexperienced" (67). Her doing this really shows a sign of maturity how she understood the Duke's point of view after really delving into his thought process. Atwood then writes about the more typical side of a teenager when the character's boyfriend and her had a fight. "Bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad" (73). All I could think of when I read this was Taylor Swift songs and how every broken-hearted girl thinks the world is over after one little fight with their significant other. Like teenagers' feelings, Atwood writes about the many experiences of life, as I have come to find out. She writes about the differences in children and how they affect their own childhood. She writes about teenagers and how their are many different personalities, but they all fit together to form out society and our world. A strange thing about the novel is that I have not noticed the name of the character yet. This leads me to believe that maybe Atwood is writing an adapted novel about her life. The short stories could possibly be her own.