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Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s short story “Gertrude Talks Back,” which appeared in her 1992 collection Good Bones and Simple Murders, is a radical feminist reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and, through intertextual resistance, essentially shatters the original text’s patriarchal the assumptions. This study provides a complete Bakhtinian two-way analysis of Atwood’s narrative techniques demonstrating how her incorporation of King’s Wife Gertrude’s voice intersects with Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia. In this paper, Joana has positioned Atwood’s text in dialogue with Shakespeare’s text to exemplify the intertwining processes of feminist literature and revisionist literature responding to dominant narratives. The analysis shows the use of irony, parody, polyphonic narration within the work to dismantle the gendered silences of Hamlet for the reclaiming of Gertrude’s voice, and in so doing construct her as a sovereign agent not merely a shadowed side character. Within dedicated chapters of ‘“Gertrude Talks Back’, Atwood and Bakhtin: Semiotics and the Unfinalized Novel”, “‘Unfinalized Novel’ and ‘Intertextual Studies’: A Division of Power,” and “Dislocated Feminism: Atwood and The Self-Exiled Inside”, this research builds a framework around Atwood’s short story exploring feminist Bakhtinian Intertextuality. It argues that a woman’s story becomes her own when placed within a network of other women’s stories. Close textual analysis combined with theoretical synthesis allows establishing Atwood’s place within contemporary feminist discourse while advancing Bakhtinian approaches to intertextuality.