Feminism, Revisionism, and ‘Dethronement’ in Margaret Atwood’s Circe/Mud Poems

By Anna Jefferies

Author Biography:

Anna Jefferies is a first year English Literature and Fine Art student at the University of

Edinburgh. Primarily interested in the intersection of art and literature, she has a particular interest in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as modern and postmodern poetry, and contemporary literary fiction.

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Margaret Atwood’s Men with the Heads of Eagles, published in the 1974 poetry collection You Are Happy, is part of a feminist re-imagining of Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey. Engaging with the postmodern trend of feminist revisionism popularised in the 1970s, Atwood critiques the patriarchal frameworks of, and sexist assumptions found in, the mode of classical poetry. Despite seemingly belonging wholly to this trend, Atwood offers a careful subversion of literary convention, resisting a wry satirisation of its subject matter, and instead constructs a nuanced criticism of both gender and literary hierarchy. This article explores the formal and contextual elements of the poem, considering the ways in which it is both self-aware and subversive, and questions the notion of canonicity.