This paper explores Margaret Atwood’s interest in boundaries or duality that challenges binary forces in existing social realities. While using polar opposites that express duality, Atwood often invites blurring boundaries between them. In her poetry particularly boundaries and borders are represented in fluid and provisional imagery that transcends rigid boundaries, opening up a passage to renewal. Being located in such a borderline setting, space, self, language and death enable new possibilities for existence. It is this temporary positionality that allows for possible changes in both sides. Atwood’s interrogation of postionality can be considered within the context of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic that reconstitutes the symbolic. Kristeva argues that the abject or poetic language is a precondition of the symbolic, yet it is only through the presence of the symbolic that its heterogeneous, subversive forces begin to become evident. This model is comparable to Atwood’s definition of a poet’s role, which challenges binary oppositions by negotiating the gap while inscribing duality.
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