SOURCE: “Representing the Other Body: Frame Narratives in Margaret Atwood's ‘Giving Birth’ and Alice Munro's ‘Meneseteung,’” in Canadian Literature, Vol. 154, Autumn, 1997, pp. 74–90.

In the following essay, Wall examines the portrayal of women as well as the narrative structures in Alice Munro's “Meneseteung” and Margaret Atwood's “Giving Birth.”

When I think of the framed depiction of women's bodies, I cannot help thinking of the nineteenth-century nude, those women depicted by Ingres, Bonnard, Courbet, and Manet in their baths, their beds, their dressing rooms. Those paintings might be said to represent an iconography of what Simone de Beauvoir identified as early as 1952 in The Second Sex as the woman as “other” in a culture where the masculine was the same, the norm. Additionally, paintings like Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe emphasize the extent to which the body that is the object of the male gaze is, in this iconography, reified...