How Does Atwood Use Imagery To Show Nell's Readiness For Motherhood?

In” Moral Disorder”, Atwood employs animal imagery to show the consequence of human and animal bonds while conveying Nell’s readiness for motherhood. The first animal that Nell had contact with are “barred owl [teaching] her young to hunt” and “twelve ducklings” (115). The relationship between the animals and the humans is that Tig and Nell are the ones that present the ducklings to the owl particularly Tig. While these events might at first sight be considered normal occurrences in a natural environment, they are not. While the owl’s behaviour is certainly natural, it is not natural for ducklings to be motherless. Tig’s reaction at the end of twelve days was “such grace” (146) is breaking the natural By buying motherless and helpless ducklings,
The rule of the farmers’ coffee group was men only. This was not stated, it was a given” (153). Instead, Nell increasingly drifts off into a “vegetable” world all her own: “She wanted generosity, abundance, an overflowing of fecundity, as in Renaissance paintings of fruitful goddesses – Demeter, Pomona – in flowing robes with one breast bare and glowing edibles tumbling out of their baskets” (157). When one February the recently added ewe population had babies, one mother rejects the smallest one of three lambs, and Nell takes it into the house: “Day by day the lamb grew stronger. Nell cradled it in her arms while feeding it; she was embarrassed to find herself rocking it and singing to it.” However, she “wasn’t going to fall into the trap of naming it” (170). Nevertheless, the lamb attaches itself to Nell, and while this attachment grows, the lamb gets increasingly hostile towards Tig. At one point, the now fully grown lamb attacks him: “’He thinks it’s a contest,’ said Nell. ‘He’s in love with you,’ said Tig. ‘I’m glad somebody is,’ said Nell”
Instead, Tig and Nell tie up the lamb, put him into the trunk of their car, and drive the badly bleating animal towards Anderson’s Custom Slaughtering. He’s doomed, Nell thinks, “for no crime except the crime of being himself” (174). A few days later, the lamb is delivered “in a white oblong cardboard box.” Beside the “tender pink chops” Nell also discovers “two little kidneys, and a delicate heart” (177). Nell now knows that in order to maintain her relationship with Tig she will need to pay a price. She will need to become cunning, she will need to roll up “her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done.” She will have to become “adept with axes” (177). In the story, there seems to be only one being – four-legged and woolly – who instinctively feels Nell’s dilemma and tries to protect her, thereby conclusively proving both the limitations of the human and the humanity of the