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What's The Meaning of The Egg in Margaret Atwood Bluebeards Egg

The story follows Sally, the wife of a surgeon, who is taking night classes where she learns the story of Bluebeard. In the fairy tale, Bluebeard gives his wives an egg to test their self-control by not entering a forbidden room. For Sally, the glowing egg she envisions represents her husband and her fear that his seemingly innocent persona will crack to reveal his unfaithfulness, like an egg hatching. She suspects he is cheating with her friend but most fears confirming that he has never been truly naive about other women's advances and has likely been unfaithful before. The glowing egg is a symbol of her fear of what may be revealed about the imperfections in her marriage if her husband's real nature

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Luis Eduardo Marcano
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268 views2 pages

What's The Meaning of The Egg in Margaret Atwood Bluebeards Egg

The story follows Sally, the wife of a surgeon, who is taking night classes where she learns the story of Bluebeard. In the fairy tale, Bluebeard gives his wives an egg to test their self-control by not entering a forbidden room. For Sally, the glowing egg she envisions represents her husband and her fear that his seemingly innocent persona will crack to reveal his unfaithfulness, like an egg hatching. She suspects he is cheating with her friend but most fears confirming that he has never been truly naive about other women's advances and has likely been unfaithful before. The glowing egg is a symbol of her fear of what may be revealed about the imperfections in her marriage if her husband's real nature

Uploaded by

Luis Eduardo Marcano
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Whats the meaning of the egg in Margaret Atwood Bluebeards egg

By: Luis Eduardo Marcano Anaya


07-41152
Bluebeards egg is a short story written by Margaret Atwood that tells the
story of Sally, the wife of a surgeon who has a series of problems in her marriage.
The story is narrated strictly from sallys perspective and its common that she
retracts herself in her own thoughts taking us with her.
At the end of this story sally sees an egg, a golden pink huge egg that glows
like if it has something red hot inside, but Whats the meaning of these egg? Well
first of all we must analize the reason the egg is appearing in her thoughts. Sally is
taking classes at night and they are reading a story, a fairytale that tells the story of
a wizard looking for a wife, he would prove them by giving them an egg and a set
of keys to every room in the house, he instructed them that they may enter every
room in the house but the little room on the upper floor. This was a test on their
self-control if the woman entered the room he would know because the egg would
be tainted at the end he marries the one girl who was strong enough to keep
herself out of the room.
So, this egg represents self-control in the story but for sally it means
something else entirely. She sees the egg as an innocent bringer of misfortune as
she says in page 176 and also she things the egg has a lot in common with ed, her
husband. Sally often describes her husband as stupid and innocent but, how stupid
is he really? We may never know because the story is told entirely from sallys
perspective. What we do know is that her husband is a heart surgeon what means
that he cannot be that stupid, after all not everyone can be a doctor. I believe that
sally has convinced herself that her husband is stupid in order to forgive him for the

fact that he doesnt do anything about all the women that throw their selves at him,
but deep down she knows that he is not what he seems, he is conscious of whats
happening, he is not that innocent after all.
This brings us back to the egg at the end of the story, she is afraid of the
egg, she knows its alive and one day it will hatch and she wonders what may
come out of it. Well at this point its obvious to me that the eggs represents her
husband and that what she fears is that when the egg hatches it will reveal what
she already knows but doesnt want to admit, that her husband is unfaithful and her
marriage is not as perfect as she tries to make it seem. sally already suspects that
his husband is cheating on her with her friend marylin but thats not whats scares
her the most, thats just one part of the thing growing inside the egg, what she truly
is afraid of is the fact that her husband has never been stupid, that he knows why
his previous marriages ended, that he knew that all those woman were throwing
their selves at him and that he took advantage of it and cheated on her. She is
afraid of the egg, of her husband, of the possibility that the perfect life she tries to
believe she has is nothing but a lie.

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