A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Rape Fantasies" (Short Stories for Students)

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The only thing that saves this from the one-star category is the fact that I can imaging my creative writing professors at Rochester assigning these sorts of short stories, because they are right in line with all of the ones I read for class. I would read and become a bit excited near the end of the first third of the story, hoping with a bit of anticipation that now, after this confusion and meandering, everything will add up and lead to something beautiful or horrendous or at least meaningful. But after finishing the second third of the story, I finally realize that no, the first third was exactly what was going to happen throughout, and I would be destined to finish the story without finding any purpose to it at all, but I would finish it anyway, because I had already invested time and energy in the first two-thirds, and darn it, if there was some surprise at the end that made everything make sense, I didn't want to be such a lazy reader that I would miss it. Polarities" is intriguing. Again taking place on a college campus, it concerns an adjunct professor and his friendship with an eccentric female graduate student who gets more agitated and strange as the story progresses. She begins to think that the city's electricity is getting out of control, and needs to be re-routed on an east-west axis, with human agents acting as resistors to push it in the right direction. No longer is it a wonder how simple statements that don’t involve Estelle can all of the sudden lead to fiercely critical thoughts about her fellow bridge players; Estelle rarely stays to the point, and shifts from one thought to the next to keep herself from becoming too serious. She makes light of all of the possible rape scenarios in which she can imagine herself being involved; and she cannot, ironically, be too critical of theoretical rapists. To her rapists she is sympathetic, and her rapists are always receptive to this sympathy.

With her usual wit, Margaret Atwood uses elements of humor to lighten the mood of "Rape Fantasies" at the same time introducing the seriousness of the topic. The reader is introduced to the first person narrator, a young woman by the name of Estelle, who works in the filing department of her company. From the beginning of the story, Estelle shows the reader just how difficult it is for women to laugh at themselves when they have been conditioned by society and mass media to fit into certain perceived stereotypes. She points out tha... La inteligencia era un activo, sostenía Joseph. Solo teníamos que fijarnos en lo que les pasaba a las tontas. Estelle has a clouded vision of herself and how she appears to others; she seems unaware that the judgements she levies against her co-workers may be one reason she is friendless.”No lo imaginaba en el ejército, ni en ningún bando; no encajaba con él, y , hasta donde sabía no tenía ideología alguna. Debía de ser algo anodino, al margen, como ella; tal vez se había hecho intérprete. I prefer Atwood's novels to her short stories but I've had this book for eons and figured it was time to read it. And sure enough, I was nonplussed by most of the stories, hated a few, and enjoyed fewer still. Her character is developed richly and efficiently through the moments of humor that surround her absurd fantasies of rape; her voice and thought process is illustrated clearly through the transitions between serious concepts and silly ones; and it is these transitions that reveal the contradictions in her thinking that she is unable to recognize. Her disregard for dreadful concepts and her ability to make light of serious situations are the very character qualities that make believable her carelessness in the end. El interior desprendía ese olor dulce y tristón de las tiendas en las que se vende de todo, mezcla del aroma de los cucuruchos de helado, las galletas Oreo, los caramelos duros y las barritas de regaliz que se exponían en el mostrador, y eso otro olor, almizcleño y penetrante, a sudor y a rancio.

Written in 1977, "Rape Fantasies" appears to be a recap of a conversation among several women during their lunch hour, a few of them playing bridge, one--Chrissy the receptionist--reading aloud from a tabloid. When Chrissy asks the question, "How about it, girls, do you have rape fantasies?" the story unfolds with each woman’s response, all retold from the perspective of Estelle, who’s doing her best to deflect the entire conversation by concentrating on her bidding.

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Incluso quienes jamás irían a los lugares que ella describía, quienes no podrían permitírselo, no querían oír hablar de peligros, ni siquiera de incomodidades; era como si desearan creer que quedaba un lugar en el mundo donde todo iba bien, donde no ocurría nada desagradable. Many of the stories dealt with young women and their first jobs, first apartments, first lovers and first babies, which is to be expected given that this was one of her earliest books, comprised of stories originally printed in various magazines and periodicals at the start of her career. One can assume she was struggling to find her way as a young author in the midst of '70s feminism, with not much hope yet for a happy and balanced relationship. Another mark of Atwood’s fiction is her creation of landscapes, such as the horrendous futuristic milieu of Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) or the constricted, myopic anorexia of Marian in The Edible Woman (1969). The landscapes, although consciously penned, tend to register in the unconscious and, consequently, to haunt the reader long after her work is finished. The landscape in this story is not as vividly drawn as that in some others, but one gets an uneasy sense of the drab office, the dreary bar, and the hungry city eager to consume yet another witless victim. The anecdotes about each of the bridge players indicates the comfort Estelle finds in gossip, unfair criticism, and the sharing of the particulars of her own rape fantasies.