The present thesis attempts to study Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Blind Assassin in terms of their mythological intertexts and aims to demonstrate that Atwood's objective for using these myths is to illustrate the state of contemporary woman. In these novels, Atwood has referred to various patriarchal myths such as the myth of Philomela and the myth of the Sirens and mythological archetypes such as the Great Mother. The main issue is to investigate Atwood’s objective of referring to these myths and to clarify in what manners she uses these myths to accomplish her objective which is depicting the state of the contemporary woman. Through the powerful tool of mythology, Atwood attempts to demonstrate that women’s position in our time is highly similar to these ancient myths and that even after several centuries, they still bear great resemblance to our contemporary world. Nonetheless, we must consider that there are several other myths that Atwood refers to which are not mentioned because of the subject of the thesis. One of Atwood’s most significant messages in these novels, is that these myths are a tool through which we are able to better observe our contemporary world and as a result, have a more obvious perception of it. In examining these novels, the theories of Erich Neumann who was a prominent Jungian psychiatrist and mythologist who studied the Jungian archetype of the Great Mother in his book entitled The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1955) and furthermore, the theories of Helen Cixous in his significant work entitled The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), have been used. Thus, in the first step, the two novels are examined according to the theories of Neumann and Cixous, and in the next step, the resemblance that these myths bear to the state of women in the contemporary world is discussed. Thus, it is suggested that through these mythological intertexts, Atwood attempts to depict the identity and position of women in the contemporary world and additionally, the manners in which Atwood has used the language of mythology to represent the incongruities in our contemporary world, specifically that of women.
