Sunday, December 27, 2015

How would you psychoanalyze Margaret Atwood's poem "It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers"?

Margaret Atwood's "It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers" is an examination of the contrast between the speaker's everyday life and the atrocities reported in newspapers each day. 
Early in the poem, the speaker juxtaposes her innocent quotidian actions as a child with horrific events taking place in the surrounding world. 

While I was building neatcastles in the sandbox,the hasty pits werefilling with bulldozed corpses
and as I walked to the schoolwashed and combed, my feetstepping on the cracks in the cementdetonated red bombs. (1-8)

When the speaker was a child, she built sandcastles and went to school, while in other places, people were dying and bombs were exploding. She also connects those experiences to her own by suggesting that her actions caused the horrific tragedies to occur (lines 6-8).
In the next couple of stanzas, the speaker talks about how circumstances have developed as she has become older and has learned to read. She writes,

Now I am grownupand literate, and I sit in my chairas quietly as a fuse
and the jungles are flaming, the under-brush is charged with soldiers,the names on the difficultmaps go up in smoke. (9-15)

The oxymoronic phrase "quietly as a fuse" connects to the sentiment in lines 6-8, implying that the speaker's mere existence is potentially dangerous. Meanwhile, elsewhere, "jungles are flaming" as wars rage on.
The next stanza makes the connection between the speaker and tragic current events even clearer:

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemicaltoys, my bodyis a deadly gadget,I reach out in love, my hands are guns,my good intentions are completely lethal. (16-20)

The speaker labels herself as "the cause" of the tragedies. Even though she "reach[es] out in love," her "good intentions are completely lethal." This strange juxtaposition of innocent actions and evil outcomes is characterstic of the speaker's style throughout the poem. If you want to psychoanalyze the speaker, you might say she feels guilty that she lives such an ordinary life and carries on each day even though catastrophic events are happening all around the world. 
The speaker continues by writing,

Even mypassive eyes transmuteeverything I look at to the pockedblack and white of a war photo,howcan I stop myself
It is dangerous to read newspapers. (21-27)

She describes looking at a newspaper and being instinctively or unwittingly drawn to war photos. Her eyes may be "passive," not actively looking for evidence of tragedy, but she is drawn to it nonetheless. This is why reading the papers is "dangerous." 
The final stanza elaborates on why newspapers are dangerous:

Each time I hit a keyon my electric typewriter,speaking of peaceful trees
another village explodes. (28-31)

As the speaker writes "peaceful" poems, "another village explodes." The tragic events happen despite her attempts to work against them through loving and peaceful acts. She again seems to feel like she causes the explosion. The speaker may be projecting her guilt outward. She may feel like her writing about "peaceful trees" shields her from reality; she is also not doing anything active to stop the catastrophes from occurring. Ultimately, the speaker may, like many people who hear about and read about tragedies on a daily basis, that she is lucky to not have experienced those events herself but to also feel guilty that she can live her ordinary life while the world burns around her. 
 

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