‘Barometer Couple’: balance and parallelism in Margaret Atwood’s Power Politics

Abstract

Feminist criticism has traditionally interpreted Margaret Atwood’s poetry collection Power Politics (1971) as an account of victimization of women by men, in spite of the author’s complaints about this limitation of the meaning of these texts. Rather than being victims, the subjects of these poems (‘you’/‘I’) constitute an inseparable dyad who inflict pain on each other while they are ineluctably dependent on each other. In this article I use terms from classical rhetoric (isocolon, chiasmus, anadiplosis and epanorthosis) in the analysis of the poems, with a view to explicating the nature of the relationship between their two subjects. I focus on the study of parallelism, which although it has been recognized as a feature of Margaret Atwood’s poetry, has not been studied systematically. The use of this rhetorical scheme in Power Politics is related to three main functions: definition, balance and reasoning. Through the rhetorical analysis of these functions, I argue that the poems are written with the persuasive intention of undermining certain destructive myths which have prevailed in the relationships between men and women.