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    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Half Hanged Mary"
    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Half Hanged Mary"
    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Half Hanged Mary"
    Ebook33 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Half Hanged Mary"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Half Hanged Mary," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535824408
    A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Half Hanged Mary"

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      A Study Guide for Margaret Atwood's "Half Hanged Mary" - Gale

      14

      Half-Hanged Mary

      Margaret Atwood

      1995

      Introduction

      Half-hanged Mary is a poem by Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood. It was published in Atwood's poetry collection Morning in the Burning House in 1995. The poem is based on a real incident that took place in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1684. The previous year, a local woman, Mary Webster, had been charged with being a witch. In June, she was tried in Boston and acquitted. Her neighbors, however, appear to have been unconvinced by the verdict, and about eighteen months later, Webster was again accused of witchcraft. Some of the men from Hadley hanged her from a tree, but she managed to survive the ordeal. When townspeople came in the morning to cut her down, she was still alive. (There are other versions of this incident in the historical records.) She lived another eleven years, until her death in 1696. Atwood believed that Webster was her ancestor, and she dedicated her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale to her. The poem Half-hanged Mary is a dramatic monologue in ten sections that correspond to specific times, from 7 p.m. when Mary was hanged, until 8 a.m. the following morning, with a concluding section about her life in the years following the hanging. The poem, which exhibits Atwood's typical wit, subtlety, and sharp images, shines a light on a dark period in American history when irrationalism and fear led to persecution of the innocent.

      Author Biography

      Poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and literary critic Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Canada. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood, was a forest entomologist; her mother, Margaret Dorothy (Killam), was a graduate in home economics from the University of Toronto. Atwood spent her earliest years in Ottawa during the winters and the rest of the year in northern Quebec and Ontario. In 1946, her father

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