Sangeetha Puthiyedath | DUJES Volume 28 | 2020 Issue Exteriorizing the Interior – Diseased Minds, Diseased Bodies: Illness as a Trope in Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm Sangeetha Puthiyedath Dr. Sangeetha Puthiyedath is an Assistant Professor with the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. She is deeply interested in the question of education and has explored methods of alternate education for a number of years. Her Ph.D Dissertation was on Interiority and the Dialogic elements in the novels of Margaret Atwood. She has presented a number of papers both in India and outside India. Currently she is engaged in a research project involving language and religious studies. Her other interest are language and culture, religion and rituals, gender studies, and ecocriticism. Abstract The distance between the straightjacketing imposed on women by society and their aspirations is a recurring theme in Margaret Atwood. Her protagonists, alienated from themselves as well as society have a complex and troubled relationship with their own bodies. A woman’s body, is presented by Atwood as heavily inscribed by culture. Compelled to constantly measure and judge herself against the proscription that deny acceptance to a woman’s body if it does not conform to male determined precepts of beauty, the body becomes an important intermediary in a woman’s dialogue with society and a tool with which she negotiates her relationship with the outside society. In Atwood’s novel Bodily Harm the protagonist RennieWilford is diagnosed with cancer and has to undergo a mastectomy. Her cut off left breast questions her identity as a woman and forces a rethink about her subjectivity and her identity as a woman. The threat to her identity is not merely mounted by a society which insists on reducing women to erogenous zones. It is also because of the narrative that places specific diseases like tuberculosis, cancer and AIDS within the context of religious rhetoric of sin and punishment. However, Atwood refuses to lay the blame entirely on society and its patriarchal conventions. My thesis is that Rennie’s disease is in fact, as an exterior manifestation of an inner malady. Keywords: Atwood, identity, interiority, body, mastectomy, beauty myth, violence, gender.