Returning the Gaze: “Cinderella” as Intertext in Margaret Atwood's <em>Oryx and Crake</em>

The story of Cinderella overtly has little in common with Atwood’s dystopian postapocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake (2003). But reading the novel’s female protagonist, Oryx, through the lens of Atwood’s recurring Cinderella motif, a two-pronged overlap between fairy tale and novel emerges: one through Atwood’s allusions to the classic tale throughout the novel by means of plot, characterization, and the folklorization of Oryx’s character, and the other through the traditional cultural equation of women with spectacle, especially as framed by the scopophilic male gaze, that both texts invoke.