Paper Title
The Female Mnemonic Burden of the Remembered Body and its Literary Representation: a Study of Select Margaret at Wood Novels.

Abstract
Abstract – As the need to understand and perceive the variegated female experience in an increasingly globalized world becomes ever more prescient, the novels of the celebrated Canadian author Margaret Atwood keep manifesting themselves as the equivalent literary persona of an enquiry into the mnemonic burden of a the “remembered body”. The phrase “remembered body” signifies the uniquely female experience of accumulated trauma, deprivation and second-guessing oneself in brutally capitalistic societies. This facets can be observed in the theme of separation in her Surfacing (1972), in the paranoia filled lovemaking in the novel Bodily Harm (1981), in the stifling marriage and subsequent adultery of Life Before Man (1979), in the frightening dystopian anarchy and commodification of the female womb of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and in the disruptive dark humour of the short story Rape Fantasies (1977), that features the protagonist’s imagined evaluation of a gruesome violence and how she eventually thwarts it. These texts give us ample opportunities to concentrate on the issue the female mnemonic burden, a phrase that is being employed to understand the many ways in which women of various persuasions, internalize and recollect their lived experiences. The theoretical focus of this paper would be on understanding the themes of female subjectivity, bodily empowerment, gynocritical aspects of the protagonists of these novels; who are brilliant representatives of the oeuvre of Atwood. Memory and the resultant impact of harbouring its various facets will be taken up for close analysis in this paper. Keywords – Female Subjectivity, Libidinal Impulses, Mnemonic Burden, Dystopian Despondency, Dispassionate Separation.