Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake 9781472542618, 9780826424372, 9780826430625

Citation preview

Series Editor’s Introduction

Each study in this series presents ten original essays by recognized subject specialists on the recent fiction of a significant author working in the United States or Canada. The aim of the series is to consider important novels published since 1990 either by established writers or by emerging talents. By setting 1990 as its general boundary, the series indicates its commitment to engaging with genuinely contemporary work, with the result that the series is often able to present the first detailed critical assessment of certain texts. In respect of authors who have already been recognized as essential to the canon of North American fiction, the series provides experts in their work with the opportunity to consider their latest novels in the dual context of the contemporary era and as part of a long career. For authors who have emerged more recently, the series offers critics the chance to assess the work that has brought authors to prominence, exploring novels that have garnered acclaim both because of their individual merits and because they are exemplary in their creative engagement with a complex period. Including both American and Canadian authors in the term “North American” is in no sense reductive: studies of Canadian writers in this series do not treat them as effectively American, and assessment of all the chosen authors in terms of their national and regional identity, as well as their race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion and political affiliation is essential in developing an understanding of each author’s particular contribution to the representation of contemporary North American society. The studies in this series make outstanding new contributions to the analysis of current fiction by presenting critical essays chosen for their originality, insight and skill. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction to the author by the study’s editor, which establishes the context for the chapters that will follow through a discussion of essential elements such as the writer’s career, characteristic narrative strategies, themes and preoccupations, making clear the author’s importance and the significance of the novels chosen for discussion. The studies

viii SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

are all comprised of three parts, each one presenting three original essays on three key recent works by the author, and every part is introduced by the volume’s editor, explaining how the chapters to follow engage with the fiction and respond to existing interpretations. Each individual chapter takes a critical approach that may develop existing perceptions or challenge them, but always expands the ways in which the author’s work may be read by offering a fresh approach. It is a principle of the series that all the studies are written in a style that will be engaging and clear however complex the subject, with the aim of fostering further debate about the work of writers who all exemplify what is most exciting and valuable in contemporary North American fiction. Sarah Graham

Acknowledgments

Atwood scholars, as I have discovered over the years, are not only lively company and generous colleagues but also extremely busy people. Indeed, during the duration of this project, the contributors to this volume published books and scholarly essays; gave conference papers in Greece, England, Spain, Canada, and the United States; taught courses in Paris and Rome; conducted research in South Africa; and took over teaching duties for sick colleagues. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the Atwood scholars who so graciously contributed to this volume despite their own busy schedules, and I would also like to thank Sarah Graham, the series editor of Continuum’s Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction, for her enthusiastic and generous support of this project and for her extreme patience and good humor in dealing with my various inquiries as I worked on this volume. I am grateful to Joyce Wexler, the Chair of Loyola’s English Department, and to Frank Fennell, the former chair of the department and the current Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for their collegial support of my work, and I also want to thank the administration of Loyola University for granting me a summer stipend while I was working on this project. And special thanks are due to Elizabeth Hanson, my graduate research assistant, for her expert help in proofreading the manuscript; to Emily O’Keefe, for her careful review of the page proofs and for preparing the index; and to Shuli Barzilai for her close reading of the Blind Assassin section of this volume.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Negotiating with Margaret Atwood J. Brooks Bouson

Described variously as “the public voice of Canadian letters,” as “Canada’s literary superstar,” and as “one of the most fascinating, versatile, and prolific authors of our time,” Canadian author Margaret Atwood, in the years since the publication of her first book of poetry, Double Persephone, in 1961, and her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969, has evolved from a Canadian cult figure and celebrity into an internationally acclaimed writer with a wide popular and academic following (Nischik, “Flagpoles” 2, 3, 1). The author of over forty works— including over a dozen novels and over a dozen books of poetry as well as collections of short stories and short fiction, works of literary criticism, and collections of essays and reviews—Atwood is an international best-selling author whose books have been translated into over thirtyfive languages, and she has been the recipient of an ever-multiplying number of honorary degrees and literary awards.1 Her works have also attracted intense academic interest, giving rise to a flourishing Atwood industry as literary critics from Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Israel, Italy, Spain, South Korea, India, China, and the United States have studied and restudied her writings. Canada’s best-known contemporary author and a writer who, because she is so well-known, is “sometimes mistaken for an American,” Atwood is the “most frequently studied Canadian writer at the university level,” and her works are taught all over the world in a variety of courses, including world and

2

MARGARET ATWOOD

comparative literature, humanities, women’s studies, and Canadian studies (Thomson ix; Nischik, “Flagpoles” 2; Wilson, Preface 1; see also Rosenthal 42). Often lauded for her anticipation of cultural trends, Atwood is a careful and often shrewd commentator on the fashions and obsessions of contemporary culture. Aptly described as “one of the most important literary chroniclers of our time” and an author with an “exceptional talent for combining intellectually challenging writing with a high readability” (Nischik, “Flagpoles” 1), Atwood has focused on core issues in her writing: on the social construction of female identity and the cultural denigration of the female body; on the power politics inherent not only in male-female relations but in mother-daughter relations and female friendships; on the desecration of the Canadian wilderness and the global environment; and on Canadian nationalism, Canadian identity, and Canadian-American relations. An author who is part trickster, illusionist, and con artist, as she has often described herself, and also an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility, Atwood sets out both to teach and delight in her accessible yet carefully crafted novels. “Art,” according to Atwood, “is what you can get away with,” and one thing Atwood has gotten away with over the years is what she calls “genre crossover[s],” in which she throws various fictional forms, such as detective stories, war stories, and ghost stories, into her “cauldron and stir[s]” (“Spotty-Handed Villainesses” 130, 131).2 “Once you start making lists or devising rules for stories, or for any other kind of writing,” she insists, “some writer will be sure to happen along and casually break every abstract rule you or anyone else has ever thought up, and take your breath away in the process. The word should is a dangerous one to use when speaking of writing. It’s a kind of challenge to the deviousness and inventiveness and audacity and perversity of the creative spirit” (“Reading Blind” 68). An author who delights in “genre crossovers,” Atwood has long taken her readers’ breath away with her own deviousness and inventiveness and audacity and yes, at times, perversity. In her characteristic voice, which ranges from the serious and poetic to the wryly ironic and deeply sardonic, Atwood self-consciously writes and rewrites—often with subversive, parodic intent—traditional and popular fictional forms and formulas: the wilderness quest novel; the female Gothic and harlequin romance; the Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman; the prison narrative; the detective novel and spy thriller; the dystopian novel; the feminist memoir; the incest survivor story; the historical novel; war, vampire, ghost, and science fiction stories. Atwood also weaves into her narratives the kinds of literary, popular, and historical intertexts and allusions that fascinate scholars, ranging from classic British literature to folk and

INTRODUCTION

3

fairy tales; from the popular culture of Hollywood movies and advertisements to Canadian political and historical figures and artists. Yet even as Atwood carefully designs her interwoven texts with a kind of irrepressible textual inventiveness, she also grounds her novels, including her historical and dystopian works, in the rich surfaces of everyday life. In her reflections on the novel, Atwood remarks that while novels are not sociology textbooks, “they may contain social comment and criticism”; while novels are not political treatises, “ ‘politics’—in the sense of human power structures—is inevitably one of their subjects”; and while novels are not moral handbooks, they are “linked with notions of morality, because they are about human beings.” Atwood also insists that the novel is not “merely a piece of Art for Art’s Sake, divorced from real life.” While the novel “cannot do without a conception of form and a structure, . . . its roots are in the mud; its flowers, if any, come out of the rawness of its raw materials.” Novels, she insists, “are ambiguous and multifaceted, not because they’re perverse, but because they attempt to grapple with what was once referred to as the human condition, and they do so using a medium that is notoriously slippery—language itself ” (“Spotty-Handed Villainesses” 128–29). If the Atwoodian novel has its roots in real life, it also is driven by the storytelling compulsion. To Atwood, story must have “the Ancient Mariner element, the Scheherazade element: a sense of urgency. This is the story I must tell; this is the story you must hear”; indeed, story “must be told with as much intentness as if the teller’s life depended on it” (“Reading Blind” 75). And story, Atwood insists, must also have “voice”— “a speaking voice, like the singing voice in music, that moves not across space, across the page, but through time.” As she remarks, “Surely every written story is, in the final analysis, a score for voice” (“Reading Blind” 71). “The Change from Docile Bank Clerk to Fanged Monster”: Atwood’s Origins as a Writer and Rise to a Global Literary Celebrity We can hear Atwood’s characteristic voice in the stories she tells and retells about her own origins as a writer. Born in 1939 in what she describes as a very unliterary Canadian culture, Atwood became intimately familiar with the Canadian wilderness—a landscape that haunts her imagination—during her childhood, when her father ran a forestinsect research station in northern Québec and the family spent every summer in the north woods of Canada. In 1946, when Atwood’s father became a member of the faculty at the University of Toronto, her family moved to the city, and two years later, just after she turned eight, they

4

MARGARET ATWOOD

moved into a postwar bungalow closer to the center of Toronto where she was suddenly faced “with real life, in the form of other little girls— their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip,” an experience that Atwood would later explore in her 1988 novel Cat’s Eye. Because Atwood’s primary playmate during her summers in the north woods was her brother, she was “more familiar with the forthright mindset of boys: the rope burn on the wrist and the dead-finger trick were familiar to me—but little girls were almost an alien species. I was very curious about them, and remain so” (Negotiating 10). Atwood, who grew up in the postwar era of the Baby Boom when marriage and motherhood were the approved ideal for women, started to become “corrupted by popular culture” by the age of ten, and her reading up to the age of sixteen, as she recalls, “was wide but indiscriminate—everything from Jane Austen to True Romance magazines to pulp science fiction to Moby-Dick” (Negotiating 11, 13). Providing a humorous account of how she “suddenly” became a writer in 1956 when she wrote a poem in her head as she walked across a football field, Atwood remarks that “it wasn’t the result but the experience that had hooked me: it was the electricity. My transition from not being a writer to being one was instantaneous, like the change from docile bank clerk to fanged monster in ‘B’ movies. Anyone looking might have thought I’d been exposed to some chemical or cosmic ray of the kind that causes rats to become gigantic or men to become invisible” (Negotiating 14). Using the feminist-dialogic speech and humor that pervade her fiction, Atwood, with open glee, recalls the socially constructed roles open to the female artist in the late 1950s and 1960s when she began to write. “Irrevocably doomed,” women writers were viewed as “stern and dedicated creatures” who were supposed to relinquish marriage and domestic home life “in favor of warped virginity or seedy loose living, or suicide—suffering of one kind or another” (Negotiating 15). For the aspiring female artist, the Red Shoes myth dictated that the female artist must sacrifice love and marriage for her art: a form of “demonic possession,” art would “dance” the female artist to “death” or “destroy” her as an “ordinary woman.” Equally troubling to the young Atwood was the view of women artists found in Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess (1948), in which Graves argued that women could not be “real poets unless they [took] on the role of the Nightmare Life-in-Death Triple Goddess, and, as her priestesses, crush[ed] men underfoot like bugs and [drank] their blood like wine” (Negotiating 85). And when female poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, in the role of the “doomed female artist,” committed suicide, Atwood found others asking her, after the publication of her first two volumes of poetry, not “whether” she was “going to commit suicide, but when,” making her wonder if the “priestess

INTRODUCTION

5

of the imagination” was somehow destined to end up “as a red puddle on the floor” (Negotiating 89). “Unless you were willing to put your life on the line—or rather, dispose of it altogether—you would not be taken quite seriously as a woman poet. Or so the mythology decreed. Luckily I wrote fiction as well as poetry. Though there are some suicidal novelists too, I did feel that prose had a balancing effect. More meat and potatoes on the plate, you could say, and fewer cut-off heads” (Negotiating 89–90). Atwood, who became “Canada’s most gossiped-about writer” by the mid-1970s, did not “particularly like being a public figure”—something she had not set out to do but instead “found happening to [her]” (Becker, “Celebrity” 28; Sandler 19). Becoming “a cult figure for a whole lot of strangers,” she was “amazed to find what powers and motives” other people attributed to her because of her growing star status (Sandler 18, 19). “I suppose Canada is hungry for a few visible ‘stars,’ having been without any for so long,” as Atwood speculated in an interview in 1978. “The danger to the writer is early stellification—one may become a vaporous ball of gas,” something Atwood found unlikely, given the Canadian tradition of cutting down people who got “too big for their boots” (Oates 50, 51). Subjected to “malicious personal attacks” from people she had never met, Atwood came to openly, and repeatedly, debunk the mythological versions of her invented by the media: “Margaret the Magician, Margaret the Medusa, Margaret the Man-eater, clawing her way to success over the corpses of many hapless men. Margaret the powerhungry Hitler, with her megalomaniac plans to take over the entire field of Canadian Literature” (Sandler 19; “Curse of Eve” 227). “I had an idea that Margaret Atwood would be large, big-framed, erudite and fierce,” confessed a journalist, who, when Atwood visited Australia in 1983, expected the diminutive author to be a “towering, fist-pounding man-hater” (Stanton 13). When Atwood became an international best-selling novelist in the 1980s with the 1985 publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, she confronted yet another disabling myth of the artist—the belief that “to write for money, or even to be thought to have done so, put you in the prostitute category” (Negotiating 68). “I can still hear the sneer in the tone of the Parisian intellectual who asked me, ‘Is it true you write the bestsellers?’” Atwood recalls. “ ‘Not on purpose,’ I replied somewhat coyly. Also somewhat defensively, for I knew these equations as well as he did, and was thoroughly acquainted with both kinds of snobbery: that which ascribes value to a book because it makes lots of money, and that which ascribes value to a book because it doesn’t” (Negotiating 68–69). Even as Atwood has been transformed into “the Canadian literary celebrity par excellence,” she has also been a “shrewd analyst” of her

6

MARGARET ATWOOD

celebrity experience (York 100). Aware of all the attention the media has directed over the years to her physical appearance, especially her hair— which has been described variously as Atwood’s “ ‘familiar wreath of disorganized hair,’” as her “ ‘nimbus of crinkled curls,’” or as the “ ‘kinky flyaway hairstyle that is her trademark’”—Atwood has acknowledged and mocked her “celebrity commodification” by presenting herself, in cartoon images on her website, as a “short woman with squiggles for hair” (York 101, 102, 103). If by the late 1990s, the “visual branding of Atwood” as a “continental phenomenon” became evident when the American bookseller Barnes and Noble reproduced, on its plastic bags, an image of “the curly-locked Atwood” (York 102), this has come with a cost. For not only has Atwood sometimes been assumed to be an American writer, but she has continued to confront Canadian “unease” with her literary fame and success by those who feel that the “fêting of Atwood” overshadows the “cultural achievements” of other Canadian writers (York 116, 117). “When writers have spoken consciously of their own double natures, they’re likely to say that one half does the living, the other half the writing,” Atwood remarks in Negotiating with the Dead as she describes the “two entities” within the writer: “the person who exists when no writing is going forward—the one who walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth—and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing” (Negotiating 37, 35). Conscious of her own double nature as Margaret Atwood the author and Peggy the person, she remarks that the Margaret Atwood who writes a “cold-blooded comment” is not Peggy, who is “a nice, cosy sort of person, a bit absentminded, a dab hand at cookies, beloved by domestic animals, and a knitter of sweaters with arms that are too long” (Negotiating 35). “The author is the name on the books. I’m the other one,” she insists, as she describes the split between her “writing” and “living” selves (Negotiating 37, 38). Responding to yet another classic myth of the writer—that it is necessary to suffer in order to write—Atwood comments that oftentimes suffering is not the cause of writing but its result. “Why? Because there are a lot of people out there who’ll be damned if they let you get away with it, you jumped-up smarty-pants. Publishing a book is often very much like being put on trial, for some offense which is quite other than the one you know in your heart you’ve committed” (Negotiating 108 ). But if Atwood feels at times that she has been attacked as a smartypants and put on trial, she has also been richly rewarded in her career and has achieved, in a few scant years, canonical status as she has garnered international accolades for her writing.

INTRODUCTION

7

“If You Can’t Say Something Nice”: Atwood and Feminism Just as Atwood offers a series of humorous stories about her origins as a writer and her rise to celebrity status, so she provides a richly comic account of feminism, the cultural movement that initially fed women writers from her generation but then, in Atwood’s view, turned into a voice-stifling ism that threatened, once again, to silence women’s voices. Acting as something of a cultural historian as she opens her essay “If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything at All,” Atwood weaves into her account, in her characteristic way, telling details from the everyday life of 1950s pre-feminist-movement women: Long ago, in the land of small metal curlers, of respectable white cotton garter-belts and panty-girdles with rubbery-smelling snap crotches, of stockings with seams, where condoms could not legally be displayed on pharmacy shelves, where we read Kotex ads to learn how to behave at proms and always wore our gloves when we went out . . . women were told many things. We were told: a happy marriage is the wife’s responsibility. We were told: learn to be a good listener. . . . We were told: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. (“If You Can’t” 15) In her role as both cultural historian and a representative woman of her time and place, Atwood makes pointedly feminist observations as she recalls the sexist insults women heard from men: “Put a paper bag over their heads and they’re all the same. She’s just mad because she’s a woman. Nothing wrong with her that a good screw won’t fix” (“If You Can’t” 15). When women of her generation went to the university, they continued to be assaulted by the sexism that permeated high and low culture not only as they read about “Eve’s Sin” in Milton’s Paradise Lost but also as they learned about D. H. Lawrence’s “nasty bloodsucking old spiderwomen, and his young girls melting like gelatin at the sight, thought or touch of a good man’s nicknamed appendage” or as they read “Norman Mailer, who detailed the orgasmic thrill of strangling a bitchy wife” (“If You Can’t” 16). Young aspiring writers like Atwood also read the works of women writers because they were “curious about the lives” of such women and wanted to know if a woman writer could succeed at marriage. Of course, what they learned was that, in all likelihood, “the husband’s demands and those of art would clash” and that the woman who chose to be a writer “would have to Suffer” (“If You Can’t” 17). Moreover, those women writers who got published were subjected to

8

MARGARET ATWOOD

a hostile and openly sexist male reviewing establishment that condemned women’s writings for being, variously, “weak, vapid and pastel,” or “too subjective, solipsistic, narcissistic, autobiographical and confessional,” or “limited in scope, petty, domestic and trivial.” Thus when Atwood began writing, she found it necessary to ignore not only the cultural dictate that women should please others by being nice but also the available theories about how she, as a woman, should write. “The alternative,” as Atwood recalls, “was silence” (“If You Can’t” 18). In the mid-1960s, when women of Atwood’s generation began to read two feminist books—Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949)—they read them in secret and behind closed doors. Atwood, who “first became aware of the constellation of attitudes or wave of energy loosely known as ‘The Women’s Movement’ in 1969,” recalls the heady times of the early and mid-1970s when there was a “grand fermentation of ideas, an exuberance in writing, a joy in uncovering taboos and in breaking them, a willingness to explore new channels of thought and feeling” (“If You Can’t” 19, 20). The women’s movement, which “affected ways of looking, ways of feeling, ways of saying,” also affected Atwood’s writing (“If You Can’t” 20). And yet, over the years, Atwood has looked on in dismay as feminism, like other isms, has solidified into an orthodoxy and there have been attempts “to dictate to women writers, on ideological grounds, various ‘acceptable’ modes of approach, style, form, language, subject or voice. Squeezing everyone into the same mould does not foster vitality, it merely discourages risks” (“If You Can’t” 22). Women from Atwood’s generation, who were repeatedly told “thou shalt not,” she insists, should not hear the same words today from other women or be silenced or told that there are some “ ‘right’ ways of being a woman writer, and that all other ways are wrong” (“If You Can’t” 24). Writing during the second-wave feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s, the conservative anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, and the third-wave power feminism that began in the 1990s, Atwood, who has been described as “probably the best known feminist novelist writing in English” (Howells 14), has reflected not only on feminist concerns but also on the evolving feminist movement in her fiction, beginning with the protofeminism of The Edible Woman (1969) and the cultural feminism of Surfacing (1972) to the postfeminist concerns of novels like Bodily Harm (1981) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) to the power feminism of works like The Robber Bride (1993). The women’s movement, as Atwood has commented, has benefited literature by expanding “the territory available to writers, both in character and in language” and by offering “a sharp-eyed examination of the way power works in gender

INTRODUCTION

9

relations” and exposing “much of this as socially constructed” (“SpottyHanded Villainesses” 132). Focusing on traditional female rites of passage—courtship and marriage—The Edible Woman is an anti-comedy, according to Atwood, in which Marian McAlpin suffers increasing paranoia and becomes anorexic when she gets engaged to the domineering Peter. After Marian, who fears that she has become an object of male consumption, creates a cake woman and offers it to Peter, not only is she cured of her eating disorder, but her engagement to Peter is broken, thus rescuing her from the traditional marriage plot, which insists that marriage is the proper outcome of the story of female maturation. Continuing her critique of the ideology of romantic fulfillment in Surfacing, which is part wilderness quest and part detective and ghost story, Atwood reveals the power politics governing male-female relations in the early 1970s, an era of the supposed sexual liberation of women, in telling the story of her unnamed narrator, the Surfacer. When the Surfacer journeys into the Canadian north to search for her missing father, she also goes on a journey into the self that takes her to the edge of madness. Even as she, in her return to nature, comes to fear the masculine ethos epitomized in the dehumanizing forces of Americanism that wantonly destroy the natural environment, she also recognizes that, in having an abortion, she too has succumbed to the killing forces of modern technology. Set in the postfeminist 1980s, Bodily Harm, like Atwood’s next novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, sounds a warning against the anti-feminist backlash that emerged in the decade. In Bodily Harm, Atwood’s character Rennie Wilford is a product of her postfeminist times. Rennie, who was a socially responsible idealist in 1970 when she was in college and wanted to expose political corruption in her journalism, becomes a 1980s Toronto lifestyles reporter and writes superficial articles on radical chic and even agrees to write a humorous piece on pornography as an art form in response to anti-pornography feminists. As Atwood, with didactic intent, exposes the dark underside of a contemporary culture that continues to transform women into sexual commodities and pornographic objects, she also sets out to educate her character, who unwittingly makes herself into a victim in her desire to please her lover, Jake, by taking part in his sadistic sexual games. After being diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoing a partial mastectomy and then discovering that an unknown intruder has left a coiled rope on her bed, Rennie attempts to escape her Toronto life by going to the Caribbean on assignment to write a travel piece. Part detective novel and spy thriller and also a prison narrative, Bodily Harm chronicles the rehabilitation of Rennie’s character. For after Rennie witnesses a brutal political coup in

10

MARGARET ATWOOD

the Caribbean and ends up in prison, she determines to become a morally responsible reporter once again, someone who is paying attention to the political oppression of others and thus has a real story to report. Like Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s Tale is addressed to postfeminist women. Exposing, like Bodily Harm, female anxieties about male domination and sexual exploitation, The Handmaid’s Tale is a feminist dystopia that grew out of an “if this, then that” hypothesis as Atwood responded to the conservative backlash against feminism in the 1980s by the Evangelical fundamentalist right. “If a woman’s place is in the home, then what? If you actually decide to enforce that, what follows?” she wondered (Rothstein). Delineating what might follow in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood lays bare the inherent misogyny of patriarchal culture as she tells the story of Offred, a thirty-three-year old Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy established in the United States by the New Right fundamentalists. In the Gilead regime, where women are consigned to various classes according to their functions, the Handmaids are fertile women in a world of mass sterility, who are used for breeding purposes. Even as the Handmaids are promised freedom from the sexual degradation and violence—the pornography and rape— that existed in the pre-Gilead world, they are forced to undergo the sexual humiliation of the monthly insemination ritual. Forced during the monthly ceremony to lie between the legs of the Commander’s wife while the Commander services her, Offred is utterly defined and confined by her reproductive role. Treated as the property of the male leaders, stripped of their individuality and turned into sexual commodities to be exploited by the state, the Handmaids, as Offred remarks, are “two-legged wombs” (176). Yet in Gilead, according to the Commander, women are “protected” so that they “can fulfill their biological destinies in peace” (284). The pre-Gilead years—that is, the era of women’s liberation—in the Commander’s view, “were just an anomaly, historically speaking. . . . All we’ve done is return things to Nature’s norm” (285). What lies behind the patriarchal ideal of protected womanhood, as Atwood’s novel insists, is a rigid belief in the male use and control of female sexuality. If in feminist works like The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood has, again and again, offered trenchant critiques of the power politics of gender relations, she has also long been leery of the tendency of feminism to place ideological constraints on contemporary women writers, either by dictating that women authors write in a particular style—such as the avant-garde écriture féminine or feminine writing favored by the French feminists—or that they create a particular type of female character, a heroine who is “essentially spotless of soul” as she struggles against, flees from, or is

INTRODUCTION

11

“done in by male oppression” or who, because of her natural egalitarianism, lacks the “will to power” (“Spotty-Handed Villainesses” 132, 133). Fascinated with female badness, Atwood, in works like Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), and Alias Grace (1996), critiques the feminist ideal of female goodness as she revives, in the characters of Cordelia, Zenia and Grace Marks, the female villain. Refusing to be silenced by those feminist critics who would dictate a specific kind of heroine, Atwood creates a series of deeply flawed but also deeply human women characters as she explores what first drew her to the study of women writers: the multiple and, to Atwood, forever-fascinating lives of women. “You’re so Cute When You’re Mad, Honey”: Atwood as a Canadian Nationalist and Global Citizen Just as Atwood, in her roles as feminist novelist and public intellectual, has consciously engaged with the power politics of gender relations, so she has long established herself as a self-consciously Canadian writer. “Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from,” as Atwood has remarked (Morris 140). In her comic account of her own complicated relationship with the United States and the development of her sense of her own Canadianness, Atwood recalls how, when she was a graduate student at Harvard University in the early 1960s, she “felt that nobody knew where Canada was,” an idea brought home to her when she was invited as a “foreign student” to an evening gathering and told to wear her “native costume.” “Unfortunately, I’d left my native costume at home and had no snowshoes,” she remarks in the deadpan voice she so often uses, a type of humor she links to her family’s Nova Scotian roots (Morris 139). When Atwood first taught a course in Canadian literature in 1971–72 at York University and discovered how little was known about the subject, she wrote her best-selling book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972). Survival, as Atwood recalls, “caused rather a furor” among critics who “continued to deny that there was any such thing as a ‘Canadian literature’” (Oates 54). “I’m not an academic, so I don’t have to worry about my colleagues saying, ‘Tut tut, this will not do. Why don’t you qualify all your statements and hedge all your bets?’ I can write what I believe to be true, and I don’t have to be plausible to professors,” Atwood remarked in 1976, a few years after the publication of Survival (Sandler 32). Describing authors as “transmitters of their culture” in Survival, Atwood locates “key patterns,” which she likens to “field markings in bird-books,” as she seeks to uncover a distinctly Canadian literature and with it “a national

12

MARGARET ATWOOD

habit of mind” (Survival 12, 13). In her work, which is “a cross between a personal statement . . . and a political manifesto,” Atwood investigates what she has called the “great Canadian victim complex” (Survival 13; Gibson in Ingersoll, Waltzing 11). “Stick a pin in Canadian literature at random, and nine times out of ten you’ll hit a victim,” she remarks. As Atwood, who finds a “superabundance of victims in Canadian literature” (Survival 39), develops her thematic study of victimhood and survival in Canadian fiction and poetry, she is also intent on showing, as she would later remark, that “Canadian literature is not the same as American or British literature,” something that was not “known” in 1972 when she wrote the book (Hancock 91). Even as the “iconoclasm of the ‘political manifesto’ of Survival has been enshrined and subsequently rendered iconic in the international canonization of Atwood as the figurehead of CanLit,” Survival, in Canada, has been critiqued on various grounds: that it presents a “negative image of Canada and its literary tradition”; that it reveals only a “limited” knowledge of FrenchCanadian culture and literature; and that it is a dated work which is no longer relevant in an age of multiculturalism (Moss 24; Goetsch 175). Despite the Canadian reception of her work, many twenty-first-century Canadian Studies courses begin with Survival, and even though “the nationalism of Atwood’s generation” does not speak to the contemporary “multiethnic reality” of Canadian cities, such nationalism “sometimes still holds sway abroad” (Moss 28). And as Atwood has become not just a “consecrated writer” but a “cultural celebrity,” her “national image as a no-holds-barred cultural commentator has been augmented by her international image as a translator and interpreter of Canadian culture” (Huggan 214). Atwood, who views “Canadian nationalism and the concern for women’s rights as part of a larger, non-exclusive picture” (Second Words 282), has also been a no-holds-barred commentator in her public remarks on the relations between Canada and the United States. “Canadian-American relations sounds like a dull subject, and it is, unless you’ve ever tried explaining them to an American. What you get in return is usually a version of ‘You’re so cute when you’re mad, honey’” (“Canadian-American Relations” 372). Deliberately provocative, Atwood likens Canada to the sexually dominated woman in an unequal heterosexual relationship by remarking that if there were a marriage between the two countries, “the States would proclaim, ‘with all my worldly goods I thee endow’ in exchange for Canada’s adopting the missionary position” (“Canadian-American Relations” 389). Repeating this barb, Atwood, in commenting on Canada’s assumption of the “missionary position,” describes a passive, feminized Canada being forced to lie still, keep its mouth shut, and to pretend it likes what is

INTRODUCTION

13

happening to it (cited by Becker 30). Canadians, according to Atwood, worry about the United States “from several different angles”: “What’s it going to do to us next? What’s it going to do next? If it falls down a hole, a whole lot of other people are going to go with it” (Hammond 366). In her celebrity role, Atwood, who has long railed against what she sees as the cultural imperialism of the United States, has become publicly identified not only as a Canadian nationalist and feminist but also as an environmentalist. Indeed, as Atwood’s “earlier focus on land, nature, and wildlife in Canada” has evolved, she has publicly spoken of the need for Canadians to adopt “a less exploitative” and “more traditionally Native” and “respectful” attitude toward the natural world if they are to “reverse the galloping environmental carnage” of our time and “salvage for themselves some of that wilderness they keep saying they identify with and need” (Moss 29; Strange Things 60). In her role as “an ambassador of Canada in the world” and a “Great Canadian global citizen” (Moss 28), Atwood continues to speak out not only on global feminist issues and human rights but also on the dangers of environmental degradation and global climate change, which, as she warns in her futuristic dystopian novels Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), threaten the survival of us all. “I’m Not Dead”: Atwood, the Academy, and Her Ideal Reader An author who has long felt that “fiction writing is the guardian of the moral and ethical sense of the community” (“End to Audience” 346), Atwood has looked on with her characteristic wry amusement at what she sees as some of the recent excesses of literary theorists, deflating the pretensions of academics who write jargon-laden prose and celebrate the “death of the author.”“I’m not dead. Neither is any other living author I know of,” Atwood retorts (Langer 135). In her well-known and oftquoted remark on deconstruction, Atwood, commenting that no one “was able to explain” deconstruction to her in a clear way, stated: “The best answer I got was from a writer who said, ‘Honey, it’s bad news for you and me’” (Huggan 215). Literary criticism, in her view, “ought to be graspable” and not “full of too many of those kinds of words which only the initiated can understand”—a theoretical ploy that allows the critic to “one-up people.” When told that her work was starting to be read through the lens of critical theory, Atwood expressed her frustration: “You can read any text any way. You can read it standing on your head. You can use it for toilet paper. It’s not a statement about the text. It’s a statement about the user” (Hancock 108). Critics “play games with one another and give papers and go to conferences. That’s what they do,”

14

MARGARET ATWOOD

Atwood insists (Langer 135). To Atwood, “when we get into the realm of obfuscation, jargon for its own sake, shibboleth fetishism, deliberate mystification, and sloppy logic, then surely social satire is not uncalled for. Not that all academics do these kinds of things” (Bader 188). Atwood has also expressed some reservations about the scholarly organization devoted to the study of her works—the Margaret Atwood Society. “I thought of sending them a T-shirt for their opening meeting with ‘Atwood Lives’ on it. The best thing that an academic ever said to me was, ‘You’ve written enough for us by now.’ In other words, drop dead and we can deal with your texts. Some critics prefer a writer to be dead, because then the writer can never write anything that will contradict what has been said by the critic” (Ritchie 98). If Atwood has sometimes had an uneasy relationship with critics who enact what she sees as a kind of critical “death of the author” by trying to force her texts into predetermined theoretical schemas, she does have an intense interest in her readers. “One of my university professors,” Atwood recalls, “used to say that there was only one real question to be asked about any work, and that was—is it alive, or is it dead?” For Atwood a text is “alive” if it can “grow and change” through its interactions with its readers (Negotiating 140). As the “original invisible man,” the writer is “not there at all but also very solidly there” when the reader is reading. “At least we have the impression that he or she is right here, in the same room with us—we can hear the voice. . . . Or we can hear a voice. Or so it seems” (Negotiating 148). Speculating that writing is “motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality,” Atwood insists that what survives in writing is a voice telling a story (Negotiating 156). Learning from the dead—from writers that preceded them and from their ancestors—writers must “negotiate with the dead”: All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending on how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more—which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change. (Negotiating 178–79) For Atwood, who has long insisted on the vital role of the reader, “the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist” (“End to

INTRODUCTION

15

Audience” 345). The “ideal reader,” in Atwood’s account, is “intelligent, capable of feeling, possessed of a moral sense, a lover of language, and very demanding” (“End to Audience” 345–46). When she writes, Atwood writes for “the Dear Reader” while fully aware that “this ideal reader may prove to be anyone at all—any one at all—because the act of reading is just as singular—always—as the act of writing” (Negotiating 151). Atwood as Historian, Satirist and Moralist: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake The three post-1990s novels selected for this volume—The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake—grow out of the thematic preoccupations that have long driven Atwood’s art even as they showcase her remarkable range and evolving complexity as novelist. Challenging works in which we hear Atwood’s distinctive voice, The Robber Bride provides shrewd commentary on the contemporary women’s culture; The Blind Assassin offers a social history of women in the twentieth century, especially the early to mid-twentieth century; and Oryx and Crake looks to the near future as it sounds a warning against the dangers of genetic engineering and global climate change. Not only are these novels gamelike works full of the kinds of Atwoodian textual clues and puzzles that entice reader curiosity and promote an active form of reading, but they also include a cast of memorable and mesmerizing storyteller-characters—The Robber Bride’s Zenia, The Blind Assassin’s Iris Chase Griffen, and Oryx and Crake’s Jimmy-Snowman. Set in the early 1990s and published in 1993, The Robber Bride uses a complex triple narration to weave together the stories of three middle-aged friends, the academic historian Tony, the New Ager Charis, and the successful businesswoman Roz, who have all been befriended and then betrayed by the mysterious and magnificent Zenia. As Atwood tells the stories of Tony’s encounters with Zenia in the 1960s, Charis’s in the 1970s, and Roz’s in the 1980s, she provides sardonic commentary on changing fashions and trends as she investigates, decade by decade, the cultural construction of a series of stylized feminist and postfeminist female identities. Not only are women fantasies for men, they are also “fantasies for other women,” The Robber Bride insists, and thus the “Zenias of this world” have “slipped sideways” into the “dreams of women” (388). The “incarnation of how plainer, more oblong women wish to look, and therefore to be” (132), Zenia is a seductress and sexual rival, who has threatened the happiness and security of Tony, Charis, and Roz by stealing their men, and one way she has accomplished this, ironically enough, is by presenting herself as a woman in need of rescue. Reviving in Zenia the villainess figure banned by the brand of feminism

16

MARGARET ATWOOD

that insists on the essential goodness of women and that celebrates the non-competitive ideal of female solidarity, The Robber Bride engages with feminism in complex ways. For while Zenia is depicted as the competitive “other woman” and sexual rival, she is also, in a classic Atwoodian twist, the psychic projection and double of the three characters—an embodiment of their outlawed emotions and an expression of their own desires for power and revenge. If, in The Robber Bride, Atwood invokes the power feminism of the 1990s in telling the story of Zenia, who slyly acts the female victim role to manipulate and con others, in her 2000 novel The Blind Assassin, she returns to an issue that has long troubled her—the victimization of women in a patriarchal system—as she examines the lives of women before the advent of second-wave feminism. Iris Chase Griffen, the eighty-two-year-old narrator of The Blind Assassin, dies in 1999 after writing her memoir. A masterful storyteller, Iris actively remembers the past in her memoir, incorporating into her account the history of early to mid-twentieth-century Canada. As Atwood pointedly connects the traumatic sexual sacrifice of Iris and her sister Laura to the sacrifice of the virgins in the embedded “Blind Assassin” science fiction tale, she probes the cultural—and historical—repetition of violence against women. She also emphasizes the damage that can result from the cultural and literary idealization of female self-sacrifice as she illustrates not only the historical oppression of women in a patriarchal system but also women’s blindness to—and thus collusion with—their own victimization as well as that of other women. As Atwood revisits in The Blind Assassin an idea that has long preoccupied her, she also provides a novelistic memorial to the lost voices and buried lives of earlier generations of women. Part of the attraction of the historical novel, according to Atwood, is “the lure of time travel, which appeals to the little cultural anthropologist in each of us. It’s such fun to snoop, as it were; to peek in the windows. What did they eat back then? What did they wear? . . . What did they think about? What lies did they tell, and why? Who were they, really?” (“In Search” 169). In her 2003 dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, which is set in an imagined future, Atwood similarly appeals to the “little cultural anthropologist in each of us” as she tells the story of Jimmy-Snowman. At once a deadly serious and darkly satiric novel, Oryx and Crake, like The Handmaid’s Tale, is described by Atwood as “speculative fiction” (“Writing Oryx and Crake” 285). A cautionary tale written to inform readers about the potentially dire consequences of genetic engineering, the novel, Atwood insists, begins from a “what if ”: “The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our

INTRODUCTION

17

saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?” (“Writing Oryx and Crake” 285–86). As Atwood’s survivor-character Jimmy-Snowman endures the horrors of daily life in the post-catastrophe twenty-first century world engineered by his genius-scientist friend Crake, he reconstructs the events leading up to the destruction of humanity. “Sitting in judgment on the world . . .; but why had that been his right?” (341), JimmySnowman asks of Crake who has used a hemorrhagic virus to destroy humanity and then replaced humans with his bioengineered hominids, the Crakers, who are adapted to, and not in competition with, the natural environment. Concerned in Oryx and Crake that we may be blindly entering a catastrophic posthuman future, Atwood urges us to wake up to the potential ethical and ecological consequences of our embrace of biotechnology in an era when, increasingly, our scientists sit in judgment on the world as they experiment with the genetic building blocks of life. If Atwood has sometimes had an uneasy relationship with the type of literary critic who tries to force her texts into predetermined theoretical molds, she does have an intense interest in her readers, for to Atwood a text is “alive” if it can not only “grow” but also “change” through its interactions with its readers. And, as she also insists, what survives in writing is a voice telling a story. Appealing to the “little cultural anthropologist in each of us” in her novels The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake, Atwood, in her dual roles as the artist-trickster and author-ethicist, sets out both to teach and delight. Just as Atwood is driven by the storytelling compulsion, so she seduces her readers—and her critics—not only with her irrepressible storytelling and textual inventiveness but also with the Atwoodian voice that we hear when we enter the mysterious yet oddly familiar world of her novels and have the impression that Atwood, slippery though she is, is somehow in the room with us.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 2

Magical Realism in The Robber Bride and Other Texts Sharon R. Wilson

Although much discussed in international literature, magical realism has been largely ignored in the works of Margaret Atwood.1 Magic or magical realism, which “may constitute the single most important trend in contemporary international fiction” (Faris 42), is the fusion of magic and realism. It “has become a common narrative mode for fictions written from the perspective of the politically and culturally disempowered,” including “women writing from a feminist perspective” (Bowers 33), and often includes neo-gothic texts and works embedding fairy tales and myths. “Magic realist novels and stories,” as Margaret Drabble explains, “have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic mingles with the unexpected and the inexplicable, and in which elements of dream, fairy-story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence” (606–07). Although a few scholars still insist that only Latin American writers can be magical realists and that this mode originated in the 1950s, these views are dated and factually inaccurate. There are several varieties of magical realism, and it differs from culture to culture and writer to writer, but generally critics agree that it began in the 1920s in Germany and was a term used by Franz Roh to describe German artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) movement who portrayed the imaginary, the improbable, or the fantastic in a realistic or rational manner (Drabble 607). Some feminist writers who use magical realism, such as Rosario Ferre, have been called magical feminists (Hart 98). Although not always recognized, magical realists include writers from Canada—such as Robert Kroetsch, Jack Hodgins, Jane Urquhart, Carol Shields, Thomas King, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Hebert, and Margaret

24

MARGARET ATWOOD

Atwood—as well as from the US and UK. Salman Rushdie (India), Ben Okri (Africa), Toni Morrison (US), John Fowles (UK), Sherman Alexie (US), Laura Esquivel (Mexico), and Keri Hulme (New Zealand) are well-known magical realists. Recent articles on magical realism discuss writing from Sweden, Scandinavia, Germany, Taiwan, Tibet, Africa, Israel, and Haiti. Magical Realism as a Technique, a Narrative Mode, and a Genre A few critics maintain that the term “magical realism” has been used too vaguely and that it must be precisely defined to be meaningful in critical discourse (Warnes 1). Although “the marvelous real” and the fantastic seem to be used synonymously with magical realism, magic or magical realism is not the same as fantasy and should be differentiated from techniques or genres that have influenced it, such as surrealism and expressionism. According to Kathryn Hume, fantasy is any departure from consensus reality (21). As opposed to magical realism, traditional definitions of fantasy suggest that events in these works are impossible or improbable (Searles, Meechum, and Franklin 208) and take place in an unreal or other world, and high fantasy consists of fairy tales and myth-based tales that have characters with supernatural or magical powers (Boyer and Zahorski 2). Particularly controversial is the question of whether events in either magical realist or fantasy works really happen or not. Tzvetan Todorov, perhaps the most cited critic on the fantastic despite his omission of elves and hobbits, may actually seem to be discussing what is now called magical realism in focusing on the reader’s, and sometimes a character’s, hesitation about whether the events are real or supernatural. Although Maggie Bowers favors Todorov’s definition of the fantastic to differentiate this genre from magical realism and feels that the latter depicts events that really happen while the fantastic does not (25), some readers would reverse the definitions. Wendy Faris’s and Linda Hutcheon’s definitions of magical realism as combining realism and the fantastic suggest that we no longer need to worry about untangling these strands (Faris 163; Hutcheon, “Circling” 169). Most recent critics refer to magical realism’s “in between” subversiveness and assault on rationalism and realism (Zamora and Faris 6) in works where extraordinary events are presented as ordinary. This does not mean, however, that magical realism necessarily incorporates the supernatural or the uncanny; it fuses magic and realism, but the particular aspect of “magic” varies with the culture. In brief, according to Wendy Faris, there are five characteristics of magical realism:

MAGICAL REALISM 25

first, the text contains an “irreducible element” of magic; second, the descriptions in magical realism detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world; third, the reader may experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events; fourth, the narrative merges different realms; and, finally, magical realism disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity. (7) As we shall see, Atwood’s texts demonstrate each of these characteristics. Magical realism is a technique, a narrative mode, and a genre: intertexts, characters, narrators, themes, motifs and images, setting, plot, and structure together determine the text’s magical realism. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings in the Gabriel Marquez story of this title (1968), the Devil in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967), Beloved in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and the Tiger’s Bride who discovers hair under her skin in Angela Carter’s story from The Bloody Chamber (1979) are magical realist characters. The house in Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits (1982), the house and fantastic geography of Gabriel Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and the garden in Jorges Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) show magical realist settings. The labyrinthine garden in the Borges story, the sugar beet in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen (1986), and the tree of life in Morrison’s Beloved also illustrate how a magically real image may affect every aspect of the story, including character, setting and theme. In Beloved, after Sethe has been severely beaten, the wounds on her back resemble a tree. Rather than showing the master’s power over Sethe, her “tree of life” links her to the Great Goddess and Christian and Islamic myth and it blooms as she does, symbolizing a “re-visioned myth of transformation, healing, and rebirth for Americans and everyone who can remember, truly see, and move on” (Wilson, Myths 80–82). These writers depict magical realist themes, such as the magic of the ordinary, and most of these writers, including Marquez, Morrison, and Carter, use myths, fairy tales, and folklore as intertexts (Wilson, Myths 6, 10). Like Carter, Atwood re-visions fairy-tale and vampire intertexts, including “Bluebeard” or “Fitcher’s Bird,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Little Red-Cap,” and “Snow White.” Magical Realism in the Works of Atwood Atwood’s major intertexts—fairy tales and myths—are the most common vehicles for the magical realism of her texts. Indeed, while Atwood

26

MARGARET ATWOOD

is known not only for her feminist parodies of the sexist beliefs embodied in classic western myths and stories but also for her use of ‘realistic’ settings, such as London or Toronto, “part of the unrecognized appeal of an Atwood text is that the images, characters, and structures are ‘magical,’” giving them “archetypal depth” (Wilson, Margaret 10). For example, in Atwood’s novel Surfacing (1972), the Surfacer’s mother seems to turn into a bird, and the Surfacer, after eating a magic mushroom, understands the language of animals; in Lady Oracle (1976), Joan Foster, who writes Gothic novels, becomes lost in the maze of her own fictional romance where she watches her fictional Gothic hero transform first into the various men in her life and then into a skeleton; in Cat’s Eye (1988), when Elaine Risley, as a girl, almost freezes to death in a creek at the bottom of a ravine, she is saved by the Virgin Mary who descends and ascends like the fairy godmother Glinda in The Wizard of Oz film. Joan Foster in Lady Oracle and Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) live out the separations of Cinderella, Rapunzel, and Persephone from their mothers and Great Mother, and Offred experiences Red-Cap’s timeless betrayal by the wolf (see Wilson, Margaret 10–11). Moreover, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Serena Joy’s subversive garden suggests not only “ancient female power” but also “Demeter’s dead world awakening” (Wilson, Margaret 284–85). Some of Atwood’s most striking magical realism is in the imagery of Cat’s Eye—the cat’s eye marble, the red plastic purse, the toaster, Elaine Risley’s paintings, “the friends’” burial of Elaine—and Elaine’s vision of the Virgin Mary at the ravine is associated with numerous myths and fairy tales including “The Snow Queen” in a powerful magical realist scene (see Wilson, Margaret 300–04). In Alias Grace (1996), the blood-red peonies that grow out of the prison yard and Grace’s cell and the questions of whether part of Grace is Mary and whether supernatural events occur are magical realist. It is Atwood’s recording of ordinary but magical objects and images—in the case of The Blind Assassin (2000), photographs of cutoff hands, the science fiction stories set on the planet Zycron and popular culture stories connected to them—that gives readers “a paradoxical sense of seeing, hearing, and even touching a point in time while [Atwood] simultaneously deconstructs any possibility of an objective context.” Although some readers may initially view the photographs in The Blind Assassin as realistic pictures of an objective reality, the “magic” photographs taken at the Button factory picnic and the fairy tale and mythic intertexts they evoke illuminate Iris’s mythic transformation from Blind Assassin into human being (Wilson, “Fairy Tales” 80–81). Although magical realism is rarely discussed in poetry, it is evident in Atwood’s poems too. The “violent duality” Sherrill Grace observed in early Atwood work may now be seen as one characteristic of magical

MAGICAL REALISM 27

realism. The tension of contradictions and constructed polarities is everywhere evident. In “Against Still Life” in The Circle Game (1964), the persona wants to peel the skin off the silent orange on the table in the same way that she would like to look inside the man, both “still life” portraits against which she is posed (Eating 20–22). Power Politics (1971) portrays the ordinary politics of love relationships, with female as well as male caught in comic book, fairy tale, mythic, and biblical roles. In such poems as “Siren Song” (Eating 151) and the “Circe/ Mud Poems” section of You Are Happy (1974), the mythological characters, such as Circe and Odysseus, are both magical and ordinary, with the passions and character flaws of real people. In “Morning in the Burned House” and other poems in the volume of the same name, the beautifully depicted house is and is not there, while the present and past, which are meticulously described, somehow coexist (Eating 367–68). The detailed presentation of an ordinary but magical physical world is evident in “Dreams of the Animals” in Procedures for Underground (1970), which details animals, such as frogs, who “dream of green and golden/ frogs/ sparkling like wet suns/ among the lilies” (Eating 90–91), and especially in “There is Only One of Everything” in You Are Happy: “Not a tree/ we saw, it will never exist, split by the wind/ and bending down like that again” (Eating 190). Although largely ignored by critics, magical realism permeates Atwood’s works. Indeed, Atwood’s texts illustrate each of Faris’s five characteristics of magical realism. First, features like the cake woman in The Edible Woman (1969), the flowers in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the cat’s eye marble in Cat’s Eye (1988), the red peonies in Alias Grace (1996), the character of Zenia in The Robber Bride (1993), and the photographs in The Blind Assassin (2000) contain “an ‘irreducible element’ of magic.” Second, while usually magical on one level, the descriptions in virtually every Atwood text, such as the poem “Bread” and Charis’s “miraculous” chickens in The Robber Bride (236), also “detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world.” Third, as in the different narrators’ views in Life Before Man (1979) and The Robber Bride, readers “may experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events.” Fourth, the narrative “merges different realms” in each text with strong fairy-tale and/or mythic intertexts, as in Surfacing (1972) where Atwood uses two tales—“The Golden Phoenix” and “The Juniper Tree” (see Wilson, Margaret 97–119)—and in The Robber Bride, where she uses Great Goddess images. Fifth, as perhaps most evident in Cat’s Eye, Bodily Harm, and The Robber Bride, the magical realist text disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity. For example, in Elaine Risley’s reflections at the beginning of Cat’s Eye, readers are given a key to Atwood’s magical realist narrative

28

MARGARET ATWOOD

strategy, which intentionally complicates our ideas of time-space and personal memory and identity: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once. . . . I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. (3) By the end of Cat’s Eye, when Elaine initially fears that Cordelia could be trapped in the wrong time at the snowy ravine because she has been so obsessed with her, she recognizes that she fills the landscape and present time with her own internal images. Rennie, in Bodily Harm, tells her story in present time, shifts to the past, then moves into the future (“the plane will take off ”) (264), and finally offers a combination of future, past, and present tense: “She will never be rescued. She has already been rescued. She is not exempt. Instead she is lucky, suddenly, finally, she’s overflowing with luck, it’s this luck holding her up” (266). In Bodily Harm and Cat’s Eye, Atwood’s deliberate disruption of linear, chronological time, which is so puzzling to some readers, displays characteristic magical realist form. Magical Realism in The Robber Bride Again embedding fairy tales,2 myths, legends, historical and biblical stories,3 and popular literature and songs, Atwood’s The Robber Bride presents magically real characters, narration, images and motifs, settings and scenes, plots and events, themes, and particularly the memorable Zenia, the Robber Bride who betrays the friendship of Tony, Charis, and Roz and steals their men. The main intertext of The Robber Bride is the Grimms’ fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom,” which is about a band of robbers who lure prospective brides to their house in the forest and then chop them up and eat them. When an old woman in the cellar warns the Robber Bride, however, the maiden is clever enough to keep a victim’s finger and present it when first the groom and then she tell a story, which leads to the punishment of the Robber and his group. In her use of the Grimms’ fairy tale, Atwood reverses the gender of the Robber by making Zenia a female villain who victimizes the three friends, Tony, Charis, and Roz. In addition to making the novel’s

MAGICAL REALISM 29

magical realism possible, not only Grimms’ “The Robber Bridegroom” but also other fairy tales penetrate every aspect of Atwood’s narrative and are far more important to our understanding of the novel than has been recognized by other critics (see Wilson, Myths 24). When we first see Zenia, she is reflected in a smoky mirror at the Toxique restaurant and has supposedly returned from the dead, which presents a magical realist image, setting, scene, event, plot, and narration, as well as character: She looks, as always, like a photo, a high-fashion photo done with hot light so that all freckles and wrinkles are bleached out and only the basic features remain: in her case, the full red-purple mouth, disdainful and sad; the huge deep eyes. The finely arched eyebrows, the high cheekbones tinged with terracotta. And her hair, a dense cloud of it, blown around her head by the imperceptible wind that accompanies her everywhere, molding her clothes against her body, fitfully moving the dark tendrils around her forehead, filling the air near her with the sound of rustling. In the midst of this unseen commotion she sits unmoving, as if she were carved. Waves of ill will flow out of her like cosmic radiation. Or this is what Tony sees. It’s an exaggeration, of course; it’s overdone. But these are the emotions that Zenia mostly inspires: overdone emotions. (38–39) Although readers often see Atwood as a realistic writer (see, for example, Prabhakar 154), clearly what Tony, one of Zenia’s victims, sees is neither realistic nor realism, nor is the rest of the novel realism. Like other modernists and postmodernists, Atwood rejects nineteenthcentury techniques such as realism and reliable, privileged, and omniscient narration in order to present subjective experience through magical realism. In this novel with its three different narrators—Tony, Charis, and Roz—Atwood uses third-person centers of consciousness in which the narration is centered and filtered through the minds of the three women: the novel, thus, never allows us an objective view of Zenia nor lets us see how Zenia views her own reality. While Atwood operates in the familiar Toronto setting and mentions real restaurants and other landmarks, and while, on an ordinary level, Zenia inflicts harm mostly through the psychological and emotional games she plays with the three women, as long as Zenia is alive, she seems magical in her beauty and ability to ensnare both women and men. When the multiple views of her are combined, Zenia is a female monster, a cannibalistic Robber and, ironically, a Robber Bride—that is, a female version of the destructive male figure in “The Robber Bridegroom” and in some versions of

30

MARGARET ATWOOD

the Bluebeard cycle—and, like the old moon aspect of the Great Goddess, she is darkly powerful. Ironically, what mainly makes Zenia monstrous is her ability to appropriate and hold onto men who “belong” to someone else, making her a sexual colonizer. Tony’s—and also Roz’s— perception of Zenia, as Atwood discusses in two interviews, is an advertising illusion based on the fashion-beauty industry’s construction of an idealized—and eroticized—notion of femininity (“Margaret Atwood,” Ovation). Thus, Zenia is (or seems to be) the debased, ironic goddess of consumerism as well as the Great Goddess.4 As Atwood explains: If you look at the pictures of women that you get in women’s magazines, these are obviously dream figures. They are presented as archetypes. . . . [Zenia] is a shadow for the women and an anima for the men. So, she is an aspect of each of the three women. . . . There are three women and each of the women has at least one other self. . . . Zenia has three manifestations. So, that all adds up to nine and nine is the Great Goddess number. . . . You could say that Shanita, the grandmother,and Zenia form another triad. (Staels, “You Can’t Do Without” 208–10) Like Jimmy and Crake of Oryx and Crake (see Wilson, Myths 43–51), Zenia is both Frankenstein and the monster (RB 111; Staels, “You Can’t Do Without” 211). Also presented as a symbolic and parodic Dracula vampire (14), illustrated in the cannibalistic passages suggesting the Grimms’ Robber Bride and Robber Bridegroom, Zenia possesses the potential for resurrection, which is another Goddess attribute (see Atwood and Beaulieu 96). Zenia can be seen to represent many other things, such as Fitcher and Fitcher’s Bride in the Grimms’ “Fitcher’s Bird” (Perrault’s “Blue Beard”) fairy tale; the wolf of “The Three Pigs”; the wicked godmother of “Sleeping Beauty”; a witch, Medusa, a femme fatale,5 a mummy, trickster, magician, messenger of the gods, story or myth (Wilson, Myths 26–33); the double and the shadow-self (Zimmerman 70); postfeminism and the other (Tolan, “Sucking” 45); Canadian imperialism in a country often viewed as a neutral victim (Wilson, Myths 21, 24); “the Demonic Woman” (Howells, “Figure” 133–41); biblical and historical figures, such as Jezebel and Judas, Theophano and Dame Geraude, and even the devil (Heilmann 171–82); “the evil eye” (364); and a puzzle or knot (4). Zenia thus takes on multiple meanings in the narrative and, indeed, the technique of magical realism incorporates these and other possibilities. And as Atwood also insists, Zenia is part of the reader: “She’s the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekylls” (Graeber 22).

MAGICAL REALISM 31

A shapeshifting character who takes on multiple identities and meanings in the narrative, Zenia seems to have an irreducible element of magic about her. But even the three narrators—Tony, Charis, and Roz—are magical realist characters who not only view “reality” through a magical realist lens based on stories but who also demonstrate violent contradictions, which is particularly evident in the scenes in which each visits Zenia before her death. The historian Tony, who comically carries both drill and gun to this meeting, which is characteristic of her left-handed reversed Tnomerf Ynot personality, has also reversed her husband’s name from “Stew” to “West.” Charis, who is Scottish, English, and Mennonite, with a previous abused self named Karen, envisions pushing Zenia off the balcony and thus resembles her dead grandmother, who was both a killer and a healer. Waxing and waning like the moon, the wealthy businesswoman Roz plans the manufacture of lipsticks with names based on historic and mythological rivers, such as the Rubicon and the Styx, that are crossed fatefully. Although Roz is aware that Zenia, like Roz, is manufactured, she still prepares for war (92, 116–17). Both Jewish and Catholic and a “downmarket Cinderella” hoping to be a Snow White (84, 454), Roz feels like a DP—that is, a displaced person—and a devouring mother when she imagines bopping Zenia on the head and arranging the scene to resemble a sex murder in a trashy novel (508–09). Each of the narrators recognizes that Zenia is ordinary as well as magical. Zenia the trickster even shows men “how the magic trick is worked, and that it is after all nothing more than a trick. Only by that time they refuse to see; they think ‘The Water of Youth’ [a FrenchCanadian fairy tale] is real, even though she empties the bottle and fills it again from the tap, right before their very eyes” (440). Other magical realist characters include Charis’s daughter August, who is “like a butterfly hardened into an enamelled lapel pin while still half out of the chrysalis” (47), and Tony’s mother Anthea, a “raw bride” (167) whose “story,” like that of her husband Griff and, for a time, her daughter, is determined by World War II. Unlike the three middle-aged narrators, Roz’s twin daughters Paula and Erin, who call themselves “Erla,” insist on controlling traditional stories themselves. They decide, for example, that every character in Grimms’ “The Robber Bridegroom” has to be female, and thus in their “Robber Bride,” women can play any role without being fated by gender to be victims. The twins’ brother Larry, a homosexual, and his partner Boyce also choose their own roles outside of conditioned “gender corrals” (525). Although Shanita, Charis’s boss, is continually asked where she is from, Charis sees her as a hybrid explorer who can be whatever she wishes. Just as Roz, who is both mother hen and executive, later uses a “magic chequebook” (429), so

32

MARGARET ATWOOD

Roz’s father, who was both a hero and an unscrupulous crook, got money by magic (395). Like his associates, “Uncle” Joe and “Uncle” George, he helped the Nazis as well as the Jews. Roz sees Mitch as seeking the Holy Grail and Helen of Troy (439), but he becomes an ordinary philandering wolf eventually turned “inside out” like Rumpelstiltskin, who still blows down Roz’s house of straw (338, 439–40). Charis’s Aunt Vi poses as holy, only pretends to care about her sister, and will not hear Charis-Karen’s report of abuse. Even Charis’s humdrum lover Billy is her “very own mythological creature, odd as unicorns” (241). Just as Atwood’s characters demonstrate contradictions and splits between the ordinary and the mythological or magical, so they all have magical Robber Bridegroom sides, doubling as well as foiling Zenia. The novel’s gothic images, often cannibalistic and parodic and inseparable from the other elements, are not only characteristic of magical realism but also the main vehicles for communicating Robber characteristics. As a trickster magician with secrets, Zenia, whose face seems “like a tentacle” (226), holds others “in thrall” (187) and, acting as a Dracula as well as Robber and Fitcher, literally robs the women of both men and illusions. Tony, who worries that West prefers Zenia’s raw sex to Tony’s cooked kind (468), is afraid that Zenia will leave her as useless as an amputated hand and thinks she might be appeased with Fitcher’s bowl of blood (199, 15). While Charis feels as if Zenia has “taken a chunk of Charis’s own body and sucked it into herself ” (78), Roz speaks of Zenia taking only one bite out of West before she throws him away (215). When Zenia tells Roz that she did not own Mitch and that he was not Roz’s “God-given property,” Roz replies: “But that doesn’t alter the fact that you ate him for breakfast” (510; see Wilson, Myths 26–33). Indeed, a good man is hard to find, Roz thinks, because so many have been eaten (452). Each of the book’s narrators talks about Zenia in magical terms, drawing from myth, fairy tales, and other folklore. But other characters also use cannibalistic or “Robber Bridegroom” images to characterize relationships. Although Tony recognizes that Zenia is “hungry for [her] blood,” she thinks that West would be gone with one sip of Zenia (218–19). Billy begins by “eating off ” Charis (493), but he and Zenia enjoy “chewing each other over. Each liked the querulous taste of the other’s name, the flavor of accusation, the bad taste” (314). Although Roz enjoys Mitch passionately biting her (424), she imagines Mitch’s women as victims of a bear or shark attack. Once he sinks his teeth into them, he spits them out, and his new woman is left “with the pieces of love bitten out of her” (343–45). Gloria, Karen/Charis’s mother, a war non-bride who is mentally ill and seems to Karen to have “the texture of luncheon meat” (293), plays a Robber Bridegroom victim but still abuses

MAGICAL REALISM 33

Karen by beating her with a pancake flipper. Uncle Vern, whose face seems like uncooked beef and who gives off a brown-green light, is a dark mass when he rapes Karen/Charis, “worrying at her, like an animal eating another animal” (300). Although a healer, Charis’s grandmother plays the witch of “Hansel and Gretel” in telling Karen that she is not going to eat her—she would have to fatten her up first (271). Even Mrs. Morley appears to be a man-eater (390). These recurrent cannibalistic images not only present these characters as magical realist Robbers but also, as we shall see, emphasize the book’s power politics theme. As is now evident, the narration of the book is magical realist. None of the descriptions or characterizations is objective or reliable. Roz sees Zenia as an “incandescent Venus, ascending not from a seashell but from a seething cauldron” (122). She recognizes that Zenia has no heart and probably not even blood (120). Charis sees auras, knows Zenia is sick, believes that everything is alive and aware (231), and that we are all part of everything. She wants to cure Zenia but fears that Zenia may already be inside her (308). When Zenia dies, Tony sees her as the Snake Goddess, as Roz had earlier: “She’s like an ancient statuette dug up from a Minoan palace: there are the large breasts, the tiny waist, the dark eyes, the snaky hair” (541). The book ends with Tony suspecting that Zenia may have been like them and they like her. We never hear Zenia’s point of view because she is muse, story, and history and the object of the others’ gaze (see Wilson, Myths 31). If we were to hear what she feels and not just what she says, however, hers would be a different story, the story not only of the Robber Bride victor but of the Robber Bridegroom victim. In Atwood’s re-visioning of the fairy tale, the archetypal roles of Robber and Robber Bride are interchangeable: Zenia, like Tony, Roz, and Charis, plays both. In addition to magic and in keeping with Faris’s five characteristics of magical realism, especially its contradictory nature, images and scenes of ordinariness also create the book’s magical realism and many of its themes. Tiny Tony buys her clothes in the children’s section of Eaton’s and, as an academic historian, she investigates how clothing, such as men’s underwear, could have affected who won particular wars. From the beginning of the novel, the setting is not only gothic but ordinary, everyday. As Tony says, “It’s the mix of domestic image and mass bloodshed” that fascinates, and the story of Zenia is “ordinary but horrifying,” a violent contradiction that Zenia both enjoys and creates (3). The scene in which Tony stages Otto the Red’s tenth-century battle with tweezers, hairspray, kitchen spices, swizzle sticks, and Monopoly pieces is particularly characteristic of magical realism, and it also demonstrates the violence and dismemberment of ordinary life. Some of the soldiers are ordinary cloves and peppercorns, and Tony absent-mindedly eats

34

MARGARET ATWOOD

parts of the armies. “But the dead soldiers would have been eaten too, one way or another; or at least dismembered,” she reflects (131–32). The scene of Zenia’s entrance at the Toxique restaurant, a setting modeled on real Queen Street Toronto restaurants now given a poisonous name, also underlines ominous ordinariness. We are told that it is a warm Tuesday, October 23, 1990—the cusp of Scorpio—and with reference to the crumbling Soviet bloc, the large hole in the ozone layer, and the crashing real estate market, this date is situated in history. Before seeing Zenia, Charis sells a book with the domestic name Pot Luck in Radiance, a shop that will become ordinary Scrimpers, while she ponders a Tarot reading apparently about Zenia. After the three women discuss the current Gulf war, Zenia seems to resurrect and emerge like Alice from the looking glass. According to Charis, “A dark aura swirls out from around her, like the corona of the sun in eclipse, only negative; a corona of darkness rather than of light” (76). Tony generally finds the daily world “tenuous,” and after seeing Zenia, she recognizes that “underneath is darkness. Menace, chaos, cities aflame, towers crashing down, the anarchy of deep water”; even the street is a “facade” (40). The melting sorbets from the women’s lunch look like “the evidence of a shark attack” (37). An earlier scene in which Roz introduced Zenia to Mitch is also ordinary in one sense even though it precipitates part of the book’s carnage. Set in a done-over house on Queen Street East, the Nereids restaurant has mythical associations with Venus, goddess of the sea, Proteus, mermaids, and other nude women and men (351). While Zenia appears as the Snake Goddess and Roz has premonitions of disaster, she still falls for Zenia’s prosaic claim that she knew Roz’s father (364). Again, magic mixes with realism. The Robber Bride’s plot, which features what may or may not be a murder mystery, power politics, seductions, betrayals, infidelity, cannibalism, war, one person’s double death, transformation, and friendship, is also enlivened with magical realism, since the characters, narration, scenes, settings, images, and themes are all symbolic and often parodic, signifying witches, vampires, monsters, dismemberment, and cannibalism. Indeed, what happens in The Robber Bride can hardly be understood without interpreting and understanding the sometimes melodramatic plots of the intertexts, which are largely responsible for its magical realism. As we have seen, many of the characters, including Roz, feel trapped in a story plot and seek to discover what the story is and whether there is a way out of it. Roz feels that because Zenia has changed the plot, Roz must change the ending (442–43). When she tells Boyce a “Once Upon a Time” story about Zenia’s stealing Mitch, Boyce recognizes the plot (501). For most of the book, the main characters

MAGICAL REALISM 35

view life as a story in which their roles are dictated rather than created, thus colluding in their own victimization. Themes of The Robber Bride also demonstrate the book’s magical realism. As we have seen, the re-visioning of “The Robber Bridegroom” fairy tale so that Robbers are also Robber Bride victims and Robber Brides play Robber victors critiques patriarchal power and sexual politics. Power games occur not only between males and females (sexual politics) but here especially between females who are as much Cinderella’s evil stepsisters as believable people like ourselves. Other major themes are the ideas of Zenia, reality, and life as stories. In the book’s retrospective beginning, Tony is aware of Zenia as a story she is telling and she knows that, like life and history, her story of Zenia is a construct and is subjective rather than an attempt to present objective reality (realism). By the end of the novel, the characters have rejected playing a role in Zenia’s plot and will finally get together to tell their own open-ended rather than fated stories. War, gender roles, friendship, alienation, lack of personal and national identity, and the struggle for survival are also themes here (see Wilson, Myths, 25–33), as in most Atwood texts, but in The Robber Bride they all are given a magical aura by the fairy-tale and mythic intertexts. Since magical realist texts contain an “irreducible element” of magic, most, including The Robber Bride, suggest a magical aspect of reality, and since scenes vividly detail the phenomenal world, they characteristically celebrate life and its beauty while also demonstrating its horror. In The Robber Bride, Charis especially appreciates and cultivates the natural world, including gardens, and Atwood’s descriptions may be beautifully poetic or comically gothic. Again experiencing magical realism in the book, readers may have trouble reconciling contradictory understandings of events, as in the scene in which each of the narrators visits Zenia in the Arnold Garden Hotel and describes her room very differently. As we have seen, the narrative of The Robber Bride also merges different realms, including the magic, the ordinary, the gothic, and the parodic. As a magical realist text, The Robber Bride disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity. Like Elaine in Cat’s Eye and Rennie in Bodily Harm, Tony, Charis, and Roz exist simultaneously in past and present and “write beyond the ending” (DuPlessis) in the sense that they seem to have uncluttered futures. Only Zenia has a resolved conclusion, and even with her, mysteries abound. As one of the characteristics of postmodernism, magical realism offers readers fresh perspectives on old stories and the assurance that even the most ordinary event may have its magical side.

CHAPTER 3

Parodic Border Crossings in The Robber Bride Hilde Staels

Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride1 displays the generically hybrid and paradoxical identity that typifies contemporary parodic fiction. Indeed, a close investigation of the parodic practice in Atwood’s novel, more specifically the inscription and subversion of gender and genre conventions, reveals that Atwood’s parodic mode of writing is interrelated with the parodying function performed by Zenia, the boundary crosser in the novel, whose identity is as hybrid and paradoxical as that of Atwood’s postmodern literary text itself. A complex parody in practice, The Robber Bride not only makes complicated use of framing and frame-breaking devices in the structural organization of the novel, but it also inscribes and transforms the conventions of traditional Gothic literature. In her critical reworking of the Grimms’ fairy tale The Robber Bridegroom—a story about a maiden-devouring thief—Atwood offers a female counterpart in the trickster figure Zenia. A shapeshifter and boundary crosser who not only steals the men of the three women characters—Tony, Charis, and Roz—but also robs them of their illusory coherent identities, Zenia is the archetypal trickster who surfaces from the unconscious of the three protagonists, acting as both an antagonist and a catalyst for change. In a classic Atwoodian ploy, Zenia is also a figure of the trickster-artist, Atwood herself, who, in her parodic art of trickery in The Robber Bride, dares to subvert the gender limits set by

PARODIC BORDER CROSSINGS

37

the dominant culture and to liberate literary genres from outworn and ossified conventions. Postmodern Parody The Canadian literary and cultural theorist Linda Hutcheon is wellknown for her influential writings on the form and function of contemporary parodic art. In A Theory of Parody (1985), Hutcheon deals with the definitions and confusions in literary theory and criticism concerning the notion of parody, and she formulates a theory of her own, which is based on her study of twentieth-century art forms. She defines parody in postmodern fiction as “repetition with difference” whereby a text or genre convention from the past is imitated and critically transformed by means of ironic inversion (32). Parody relies on intertextuality in that the literary text “echoes, or is inescapably linked to, other texts, whether by overt or covert citations and allusions, or by the assimilation of the features of an earlier text by a later text, or simply by participation in a stock of literary codes and conventions” (Abrams, A Glossary 200). According to Hutcheon, postmodern parodic intertextuality is paradoxical, because it both incorporates past conventions of writing and lays bare their limitations. It underlines the inbuilt historical character of modes of writing in terms of form, style and subject matter. In defining postmodern parody as “repetition with critical distance,” Hutcheon emphasizes its serious intent (Theory of Parody 6). Hutcheon argues in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) that since the 1960s Canadian fiction has been concerned with the critical reworking of literary genres that were formerly marginalized. Postmodern literature parodically revalues “low” literary genres and questions the hierarchy between élite and popular literature by blurring the borders between “high” and “low” literature. Thus postmodern fiction often blurs the conventions of realism with those of the detective story, the Gothic tale, ancient myth and the fairy- or folk tale. The revaluation of popular literary forms since the 1960s has occurred alongside the counter-culture’s determination to value previously marginalized groups within the dominant bourgeois society. These ex-centric groups have dared to challenge the dominant ideology and transgress the boundaries of bourgeois social and moral conventions. For artists writing in the 1990s, the revolutionary 1960s initiated the current valuing of difference in terms of class, gender, race, and sexual preference. Hutcheon claims that parody has become “a most popular and effective strategy of . . . black, ethnic, gay, and feminist artists—trying to come to terms with and to respond, critically and creatively, to the still predominantly white,

38

MARGARET ATWOOD

heterosexual, male culture in which they find themselves” (Poetics of Postmodernism 35). Susanne Becker draws on Hutcheon’s theory of postmodern parodic art in her discussion of the neo-Gothic feminine fiction of the 1990s and shows how these works paradoxically inscribe and transform social anxieties regarding transgressive otherness in terms of gender. In a similar way, Rosemary Jackson observes that fear of disruptions in the stable categories of gender, race and class are typical of the traditional Gothic. In her view, while the Gothic is preoccupied with the fear of alterity within a particular culture, “fantasy throws back on to the dominant culture a constant reminder of something ‘other’. . . . It is opposed to institutional order” (Fantasy 70). The classical Gothic mixes realism and the fantastic, whereby the “real” is what is seen and known and the unseen and unknown is the “other,” or everything that threatens the boundaries of the “real,” familiar bourgeois world. Because fantasy proposes other realities and meanings behind the known cultural order, it “opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems” (Fantasy 4). For Becker, much contemporary Gothic fiction paradoxically inscribes and transforms social anxieties regarding difference in order ultimately to celebrate a healing and liberating encounter with otherness (Gothic Forms 253).2 Similarly, in Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Tony, Charis, and Roz come to encounter, in the lawless and radically “other” but ultimately liberating Zenia, the unseen and unknown other that threatens the boundaries of the familiar bourgeois world—an encounter presaged by the novelist’s inscription and transgression of narrative boundaries in the organization of the novel. Framing and Metafictional Self-reflexivity in The Robber Bride The Robber Bride structurally imitates a fairy tale in its beginning and ending, with the “Onset” and “Outcome” chapters functioning as frame texts to the embedded story worlds. In the “Onset” chapter, Tony Fremont metafictionally reflects on history and story as human constructs. An academic historian, she realizes that history is a narrative reconstruction, a product of a perspective imposed on events. The significance of Zenia, who is presented as a real/ghostly character in the embedded story worlds, similarly depends on the distinct perspectives imposed on her by Tony and her friends, Charis and Roz. In the embedded narratives, Zenia is the messenger who, in crossing the threshold between the past and the present, confronts the characters with silenced “facts” about their past lives. The “Onset” frame text self-reflexively

PARODIC BORDER CROSSINGS

39

foregrounds the novel’s preoccupation with the characters’ painful recollections of their traumatic life histories. It starts with Tony’s awareness of a traumatized person’s need to resurrect the past through storytelling—“The story of Zenia ought to begin when Zenia began,” as Tony remarks (3)—and the novel ends in the “Outcome” frame chapter with Tony’s thoughts about the characters’ desire for storytelling as a necessary precondition to pacify the ghosts that haunt them: “That’s what they will do increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia” (470). Tony also realizes at the end that, whereas she used to like final explanations and “clear outcomes,” the truth about Zenia and the characters’ past histories “lies out of reach” (4, 461). In the complex design of Atwood’s novel, the “Onset” and “Outcome” frame texts embed two narratives, entitled “The Toxique.” The latter deal with the characters’ initial encounters and final confrontations with Zenia upon her reappearance in October 1990, five years after her burial, and they also frame and throw an important light on the three embedded narratives treating the characters’ earlier interactions with the alien “monster,” Zenia. The three third-person narratives—entitled “Black Enamel,” “Weasel Nights,” and “The Robber Bride”—present the limited perspective of the internal focalizers, Tony, Charis and Roz, who create their own versions of the past. The boundaries between the three story worlds—Tony’s “Black Enamel,” Charis’s “Weasel Nights,” and Roz’s “The Robber Bride”—are transgressed by the literary recurrence of elements, not on a hierarchically lower or higher level, but on the same textual level (Wolf, “Framing Fiction” 104). In the embedded third-person narratives, in which we largely hear the voices of the characters and see the events through their eyes, we learn that Tony, Charis and Roz are middle-aged women who have cut themselves off from their former “weak” selves, the memories of which fill them with shame. Their low self-images and insecurity as adults stem from unresolved traumatic events which they experienced during early childhood and adolescence. Each suffers from bottled-up negative emotions not only because of their abandoning or abusive mothers, but also because they grew up as victims of familial power games and witnessed and experienced battles of dominance and submission within their families. Moreover, each still struggles against conventional expectations imposed on women that are based on inherited ideals of “true” femininity. Tony, Charis, and Roz, who are in their early fifties, desire to protect their newly discovered stable identities against the burden of their destabilizing pasts. Yet in each story world, Zenia crosses the border from the other side to confront the protagonists with repressed fragments of

40

MARGARET ATWOOD

the past. The confrontation between the main characters and the fantastic Zenia, who is perceived as the unknown and inexplicable other, unsettles the comforting and reassuring everyday lives of the protagonists and their illusory solid identities, as will become clear in an analysis of the Gothic conventions in the novel. The Challenge to Genre and Gender Boundaries The Robber Bride parodically uses and critically reworks the conventions of traditional Gothic fiction. Not only is Gothic fiction preoccupied with dualisms between mind and body, the conscious and the unconscious, and the self and the other, but it also insistently investigates the transgression of boundaries and limits—that is, behavior that goes against culturally prescribed codes of morality and proper social conduct. In the traditional Gothic, wrongdoing is ultimately exposed, leading to the reconstitution of the social order and the restoration of conventionally accepted human behavior. In contrast to traditional Gothic fiction, in which the monstrous other is ideally destroyed and stability restored, postmodern Gothic novels such as The Robber Bride emphasize the need to welcome the transgressive other as a part of the self. Crucial insight into the Gothic mode is found in Sigmund Freud’s famous essay “The Uncanny” (1919), which argues that Gothic literature is preoccupied with unconscious fears and forbidden desires. Freud introduces the uncanny as a special kind of anxiety, in real life or in literature, caused by the return of a repressed otherness within the self. He defines the uncanny as those archaic and yet long-familiar aspects of the self from which the individual has become alienated through the process of repression. The literature of the uncanny is transgressive in that it brings to light things which should remain obscure in individuals. For Freud, “What is encountered in this uncanny realm, whether it is termed spirit, angel, devil, ghost, or monster, is nothing but an unconscious projection, projections being those ‘qualities, feelings, wishes, objects, which the subject refuses to recognize in himself [and which] are expelled from the self and located in another person or thing’” (Jackson, Fantasy 66). In The Robber Bride, the revenant Zenia says to Charis, “I’m a total stranger, you hardly know me” (227). Zenia’s name, Tony thinks, may be derived from the Greek word xenos, which means stranger (461), and interestingly, xenos is included in Freud’s list of foreign words for the uncanny as a disquieting strangeness. Eleonora Rao points out that the orphaned and nationless Zenia is a “homeless wanderer” who “shatters the sense of comfort, safety and sanctuary attained by Roz, Charis, and

PARODIC BORDER CROSSINGS

41

Tony in their homes” (“Home” 103). The homes of the characters, which metaphorically represent the illusory solid borders of their identities, provide only a precarious and “provisional” sense of stability and safety and offer no protection against the psychic—and home—invader Zenia (37). As the alienated other, or the repressed stranger within the self, Zenia is the main characters’ Doppelgänger or double, which is a motif from folklore that Freud considers to be crucial to the experience of the uncanny in literature. Various images in the novel indicate that Zenia is, indeed, the double of the protagonists, for she appears as a reflection in a mirror (32, 46, 222), as an angry spirit that returns on earth in human form to take revenge on those who suppress the pain and loss suffered in the past (66, 383, 467), as a twin sister (137, 191), and as a dark shadow (267, 280)—an image especially selected by Atwood, since Zenia will confront the characters with the shadowy unconscious aspects of themselves which they have tried to reject or ignore. In the archetypal psychology of Freud’s disciple Carl Gustav Jung, the individual, if she is to develop, must face and incorporate the shadow instead of projecting shadow qualities onto others. According to Jung, the positive shadow is what one desires to be, whereas the negative shadow refers to what one fears to be, or the inferior traits of character that one refuses to acknowledge about oneself. Atwood, whose writing is informed by Jungian archetypal theory in her use of conventions from the Gothic, ancient myth, and fairy tales, gave a speech not long after the publication of The Robber Bride in which she commented on the Jungian shadow: “If you are a man, the bad female character in a novel may be—in Jungian terms—your anima; but if you’re a woman, the bad female character is your shadow; and as we know from the Offenbach opera Tales of Hoffman, she who loses her shadow also loses her soul” (Moving Targets 171–72). Thus, as the novel unfolds and each character confronts Zenia, she also confronts her shadow—that is, what she most fears or refuses to acknowledge about herself. Phyllis Perrakis states that “Tony’s fortress-style tower reflects her need for strong intellectual defenses to protect her from invasion by appropriating (m)others . . .” (“Atwood’s The Robber Bride” 162). Tony, the military historian, has indeed been waging a war since adolescence against her mother, a British war bride who ended up unhappily married to a Canadian. When her mother was still alive, Tony never dared to openly defy her mother’s bourgeois codes of morality. Instead, she had fantasies about herself as a Gothic barbarian warrior who transgressed the laws of an imperial force while using a secret reverse language (148). Tony’s toxic emotions became worse when her mother finally abandoned her family to start a relationship with another man, and Tony felt that everything that had happened was “her own fault,

42

MARGARET ATWOOD

somehow,” making her feel “lost” (151). Even as a middle-aged woman, Tony’s self-destructive emotions, especially shame and guilt for being the wrong person in the eyes of the (m)other, symptomatically surface in anxiety dreams (188). When Tony meets Zenia for the first time in the 1960s, she perceives the latter as her positive shadow. Zenia appears as the other—as a strong, powerful woman who openly resists the social and moral constraints imposed on her and who dares to liberate herself from governing images of ideal femininity. When Zenia tells Tony that she does not have to “live up to anyone else’s good opinion” of her but can “be whoever” she likes, she feels liberated. Looking into Zenia’s eyes, “Tony sees her own reflection: herself as she would like to be. Tnomerf Ynot. Herself turned inside out” (167). Without her positive shadow, that is, her buried rebellious and subversive side, Tony feels almost non-existent: tiny, “diminutive” (177) and powerless. The New Ager Charis, who is obsessed with spiritual control, aims at spiritual health by detaching her mind from the “malign contagion” of her material self (200), the sexually abused Karen. She has long incarcerated the nine-year-old girl who was physically abused by her mentally unstable mother and raped by her uncle. Charis’s dissociated other, the little girl who was overwhelmed by shame and guilt, has been exiled to “the other side,” a metaphor for the unconscious. When Zenia crosses Charis’s threshold in the 1970s, she appears in the flesh as the ghost of banished Karen, Charis’s muted and mutilated other, for Zenia seems “cowed somehow, beaten, defeated” (220). For Charis, it is the negative shadow, the unbearable raw reality of her physically and sexually abused body-self, that needs to be accepted and redeemed. Rosalind Greenwood, the successful businesswoman and company director, has long denied her Jewish roots as reflected in her former name, Roz Grunwald. Her mother was an Irish Catholic Canadian who married a Jewish “shady trader” with “dirty” money (316, 349). Though as a girl she admired her largely absent war hero father and hated her mother for always wanting her to be a dutiful daughter and “good girl,” the adult Roz is filled with shame and guilt at the memory of her discovery of her father’s illegal war activities. Deep down, Roz is ashamed of her hybrid Catholic-Jewish identity. Entering Roz’s house in the 1980s, the foreigner Zenia confronts her with the otherness that she has long denied in herself. When Zenia enters the lives of Tony, Charis, and Roz, they become reacquainted with the excluded psychological dimensions of themselves. The reappearance of the supposedly dead Zenia in the lives of the three protagonists is announced three times in the embedded “The Toxique” narratives in terms of someone crossing the Rubicon

PARODIC BORDER CROSSINGS

43

(30, 65, 100), which implies a subversive action or the unlawful crossing of a boundary. Appearing as a Gothic female monster, a hybrid or in-between creature, Zenia returns from the past as the monstrous other, who is excessively enraged, vengeful and toxic as a result of longterm denial. From the point of view of civilized society, Zenia is a “bad girl” who subverts culturally prescribed codes of morality and propriety. Her law-defying discourse crosses the boundaries of middle-class civilized behavior and speech and displays a fearless freedom from presupposed values. Her vulgar, transgressive language gives expression to female rage and rebellion against social and moral constraints and culturally imposed images of ideal femininity. Her female defiance opposes the self-suppressive, and thus self-destructive, forces in the three characters, and Zenia teaches them that anger has a transgressive energy and may have a liberating potential: “Sometimes Roz gets herself down. It’s her own worthiness that does it, the pressure on her to be nice, to be ethical, to behave well; it’s the rays of good behavior, of good nature.” Wanting to “cut loose” and commit a “great whopping thoroughly despicable sin,” Roz “would like to be Zenia” (392–93). Similarly, Tony “would like to participate in [Zenia’s] daring, her contempt for almost everything, her rapacity and lawlessness” (185), and during her final confrontation with Zenia, something inside Charis breaks and “Rage takes her over,” whereby Karen becomes “irresistibly strong” (429). In a speech entitled “Spotty-Handed Villainesses,” Atwood states that bad female characters can “act as keys to doors we need to open, and as mirrors in which we can see more than just a pretty face,” and they also can be “explorations of moral freedom— because everyone’s choices are limited, and women’s choices have been more limited than men’s, but that doesn’t mean women can’t make choices.” Thus, for Atwood, “Such characters can pose the question of responsibility, because if you want power you have to accept responsibility, and actions produce consequences” (in Moving Targets 168–69). The robber bridegroom in the Grimms’ Gothic fairy tale is a villain who needs to be defeated in order to save his female victims from being literally dismembered. By contrast, the robber bride in Atwood’s revisionary Gothic tale is the villainess Zenia, who counters the protagonists’ defeatism by urging each woman to remember her personal history of figurative dismemberment. The three protagonists each have an anxiety dream in which the image of a disintegrating house foreshadows the terrifying dissolution of their solid identities (397–400). Soon after, during their final confrontation with Zenia in the Arnold Garden Hotel room, Tony, Charis, and Roz are forced to recognize the Zenia-like foreigner—the not-me in

44

MARGARET ATWOOD

me—inside themselves. The setting is aptly chosen, because a hotel room is a transitional space, a traveler’s place away from the safety and stability of home. In the room, the protagonists undergo a terrifying crisis of identity as they watch Zenia’s “freewheeling malevolence” being released (414). Tony is “disoriented” after what appears to have been a journey into the underworld, that is, the unconscious, for she “goes down in the elevator with the odd sensation that she’s going up. . . . It’s as if she’s been asleep” (415). Charis walks “unsteadily across the lobby” (430), and Roz “feels ill” (442). During the final stage of their search for identity, they will evolve from projecting strangeness onto Zenia and repudiating the other as separate and alien to accommodating otherness as part of the self. Ultimately, Zenia will help them reconnect with the regenerative powers inside themselves. In Susanne Becker’s view “the ‘monsters’ of the feminine gothic are among the most powerful female figures of literary history,” displaying an in-betweenness that challenges society’s sex-gender system (Gothic Forms 56). Becker discerns in much neo-Gothic fiction by women writers a celebration of female monstrousness or hybridity. Justin Edwards, who treats the neo-Gothic trend in recent Canadian fiction more generally, detects a preference for “paradoxical space, the liminal site—that is present in the hybrid bodies found in these texts” (Gothic Canada 164). In The Robber Bride, Zenia inhabits a paradoxical and liminal space (the word liminal is from the Latin word limen, which means threshold); indeed, she is a hybrid figure whose name also alludes to the Greek philosopher Zeno, the father of paradoxes. The Trickster Goddess Zenia: A Passenger of Thresholds Zenia crosses the various thresholds of the characters in November, “the month of the dead, and also of regeneration” (201). Like the trickster who crosses thresholds in ancient mythology, Zenia is said to be a messenger (59, 413), a teacher (219), a fox (368, 432, 456) who possesses wit (366) and cunning (191, 409, 414). As a smiling trickster, she is associated with Mercury/Hermes, the angelic messenger of the Greek gods (461), and Hermes’ female counterpart Iris, the goddess of the rainbow (445). According to Carl Gustav Jung, who believes that myths and fairy tales are the symbolic expression of archetypes stored within the collective unconscious, “the so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster” (Four Archetypes 147). The trickster is part of the collective shadow that contains what is repressed by the system, and whatever is repressed refuses to be cast out and will inevitably return. The trickster figure, in Jung’s view, acts as a catalyst for change by helping us confront our

PARODIC BORDER CROSSINGS

45

individual shadows, which is a necessary step on the road to individuation or transformation. Thus, the trickster is connected with the art of healing: “The trickster brings liberation from imprisonment in unconsciousness, and is therefore a bringer of light as well as of healing” (Four Archetypes 152). But the trickster figure is also associated with duplicity and paradox. In Trickster Makes This World (1998), a book which Atwood praises as “a masterpiece” (Moving Targets 218), Lewis Hyde remarks that the trickster “is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox” (Trickster 7). The chief quality of the trickster is said to be his trickery with language. As a god of eloquence, “Hermes of the Dark is the weaver of dreams, the charmer who spins a compelling tale, the orator who speaks your mother tongue with fluid conviction. . . . Hermes of the Light is the disenchanter or awakening angel who leads you out of the cave” (Trickster 209). As the patron of thieves, the trickster lies and steals “to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds” (Trickster 13). In The Robber Bride, Zenia is a female trickster who steals the partners of the three protagonists and who robs them of their illusory coherent identities. Like the trickster, who is a shapeshifter without “a real self behind the shifting masks” (Hyde, Trickster 54), Zenia herself has a Protean identity. Indeed, Zenia cannot be defined or possessed by the other characters, for she is in a state of flux, constantly changing outwardly and creating fictions about her inner life. She is always in between boundaries, both real and imagined, both destructive and creative. Like the archetypal trickster who surfaces from the unconscious and who appears “in the flesh” (101), Zenia is both an antagonist to the three protagonists and a helper or catalyst for change. Like some of Atwood’s other trickster figures, Zenia helps the protagonists achieve deeper knowledge about their shadow selves. In a similar way in The Blind Assassin, the trickster Alex is a storyteller (a liar) and an unmasker. Both Alex and Zenia, as artist-magicians, first build up an illusion and subsequently destroy it, so as to bring light and healing into the lives of the main characters. In The Blind Assassin, Alex calls upon his lover Iris Chase to stop detaching the other from the self and to take the risk of liberating herself from the constraints of bourgeois society. As he guides Iris towards inner vision, he urges her to refuse to be a powerless victim of abuse and a slave to convention. The same holds true for Zenia in her relationships with Tony, Charis, and Roz. Zenia mediates between the past and the present in fictionalizing the characters’ repressed raw material with a view to bringing about change.

46

MARGARET ATWOOD

As a magician-illusionist who “did it with mirrors” (461), she concocts stories that are strangely familiar to the three protagonists. These stories, which bear an uncanny resemblance to the characters’ painful, unacknowledged personal histories, aim at provoking recognition in the listeners. With her stories, Zenia calls upon the main characters to gather the strength to fight back, express anger at wrongdoing, and defy the social order. As “a messenger” who brings “news from that distant country, the country of the past, the country of the war” (317), Zenia inserts her knowledge about the repressed personal pasts of the three characters into an alien context, thereby blending fact and fiction. She creates scenes in which she parodically reproduces familiar events from the past while putting them in a new context. In other words, the familiar events are repeated with a difference, if not with a vengeance. Ultimately, as Zenia helps the three characters gain insight, she also instigates the dissolution of their fixed identities. She exploits the negative shadows of the characters—their powerless, self-effacing victim positions—in order to win confidence through identification. As J. Brooks Bouson says, “Zenia assumes the role and appropriates the speech of the female victim in order to manipulate and assert power over others” (“Slipping Sideways” 150). Like a patient who tells her life story to an analyst in a psychoanalytic session, Zenia confesses to having been a victim of abuse. Her confessions, which are meant as gifts to her empathic listeners, grotesquely exaggerate the personal pasts of the three characters. Thus, Zenia lures the three women into recognizing their repressed pasts by holding an enlarged mirror up to their weak childhood selves, which are still at war with powerful, abusive parental figures. As a result, Tony thinks that her “own little history has dwindled considerably” (166) and Roz believes that her “own battles have been so minor” (364). Yet after Zenia has presented herself as a victorious survivor of abuse and has succeeded in having the protagonists project their desired selfimages onto her—that is, when she affirms the positive shadow of each woman—she deliberately misuses the power she has been given. For instance, she cunningly lures Tony back into the pattern displayed by her weak self by reappearing as the dreaded spirit of Tony’s “bad” mother, who totally controlled and erased her daughter: “Stripped of her intellectual honesty, her reputation, her integrity, she’ll be exiled” (172–73). As part of her power game, Zenia also assumes the shape of a femme fatale archetype, for she appears sensuous and bold, self-confident and self-assertive. She thereby arouses ambivalent feelings of attraction and repulsion in Tony and Roz, whose looks do not coincide with the dream image of ideal femininity. When Zenia, as the robber bride, seduces both Tony’s husband West and Roz’s husband Mitch, she challenges the

PARODIC BORDER CROSSINGS

47

“good wife” façade of the two women. In her power game with Charis, Zenia creates a disturbing story in which Billy, Charis’s lover, “can hardly keep his hands off ” her (230), thereby holding up a mirror to Charis/ Karen’s unspeakable trauma. Again, as soon as she has been given too much power, Zenia abuses it, whereupon Charis becomes overwhelmed by self-destructive emotions and a death wish: “She is dumb, she is a failure, she is an idiot . . . she might as well give up” (279). As J. Brooks Bouson remarks, “To Charis, who has weak self-other boundaries, Zenia is a particularly dangerous figure who has the power to take over and even psychically obliterate her” (“Slipping Sideways” 154). Yet it is the memory of her grandmother’s “healing light” (280), or inner strength, that keeps Charis from committing suicide. The grandmother, an archetypal figure that appears in many of Atwood’s writings, symbolizes the Great Mother, who is as ambivalent as the trickster according to Jung. Both archetypal figures bring about transformation through knowledge and wisdom and both possess destructive and creative powers, for, as Jung says, “these symbols can have a positive, favorable meaning, or a negative, evil meaning” (Four Archetypes 15–16). Jung discusses the fairy-tale grandmother in terms of the Great Mother archetype: “as the mother of the mother, she is greater than the latter; she is in truth the ‘grand’ or ‘Great Mother.’ Not infrequently she assumes the attributes of wisdom as well as those of a witch” (Four Archetypes 36). When Zenia returns on earth as the dead soul of Charis’s grandmother, she assumes the shape of Hecate, who is a phase of the Triple Goddess. Zenia is regularly associated with the number nine, the Great Goddess number, and the moon (60, 126, 232, 244, 470). As a goddess of the underworld, she confronts the characters with repressed knowledge about themselves. She is not only the goddess of death and oracular power, but also the source of regeneration and visionary power as she, with her ruse of creative destruction as part of her healing practice, exposes the repressed other of the three characters. Zenia’s funeral service on Lake Ontario, after her mysterious death in the Arnold Garden Hotel, involves a resolution scene.3 Charis, who is most closely in contact with the dimension that generates Zenia, realizes that the latter needs to return to “the Light” (451). Charis is the one who perceives Zenia as the lost, “banished” soul of Karen that demands to be remembered (232, 399), and she throws Zenia’s ashes into the lake, a metaphor for the unconscious, for Charis realizes that the dead need to be properly buried so as to stop haunting the living. The lake is the realm in which Charis had previously imprisoned Karen like an “evil treasure” (216) and in which Tony had improperly buried her mother (159). When the vase with Zenia’s ashes splits during the funeral service,

48

MARGARET ATWOOD

a flickering blue light fills Charis’s hands. Thus Charis is shown to undergo a “magical” spiritual transformation, for she is able to integrate her repudiated other—the “weak” Karen with her pent-up rage—thanks to the gift of regenerative strength which her grandmother has passed on to her with her healing hands that contained a blue light or life force (249, 263, 429). The Robber Bride significantly ends with Tony’s awareness of (literary) history’s symbols of transformation. Rather than trying to explain Zenia from a rational point of view, which is impossible as Zenia lies beyond the bounds of human reason, Tony admits to Zenia’s “magic” and “bag of tricks,” and she likens Zenia to an “ancient statuette dug up from a Minoan palace” (470) in a telling allusion to the Minoan civilization of Crete with its matriarchal culture, which featured the Great Mother in a female-centered religion. At the end of the novel, Tony “join[s] the others” (470) to create stories about Zenia, whose difference they will never be able to grasp completely. This implies that, instead of silencing the ghosts of the past, the characters now realize the necessity of remembering and reconnecting with the past. Even though they have desired the death of Zenia, which is a desire for stability and stable meaning, they also know that the Zenia within them must be remembered and acknowledged. Thus, Tony’s final question—“Are we in any way like her?” (470)—points to the need to join with the otherness within the self. By the end of the novel, as Donna Potts states, the protagonists are awakened to the potential of an alternative “hybridized self ” (“The Old Maps” 294). To Phyllis Perrakis, Atwood’s tale of vampiric power “extends the possibilities of the female gothic to represent the growth of female subjectivity,” and the characters’ telling stories about Zenia suggests “re-entering the shadowy transitional realm in which they imaginatively recreate their relationships with the (m)other” (“Atwood’s The Robber Bride” 166). Thus, The Robber Bride celebrates a “monstrous” mixture as a human condition or, to quote Andrew Gibson, who analyzes monstrosity in contemporary fiction: “the thought of monstrosity is a liberating thought: it affirms the right to difference and variation, the possibility of becoming other” (Towards a Postmodern Theory 271). Atwood’s Parodic Art of Trickery The fact that the trickster is the novel’s main symbol of transformation underscores Atwood’s parodic transgressions of genre and gender conventions. In ancient Greek culture, the winged trickster god Hermes, with whom Zenia is compared, was conceived to be an artist. In addition to the various angles from which she is perceived, Zenia may,

PARODIC BORDER CROSSINGS

49

indeed, be interpreted as an artist surrogate. Regarding metafictional narratives, Linda Hutcheon significantly says, “The laying bare of the mechanism of fiction-making—the element of the trickster, the charlatan, the magus—has always existed in the novelist’s role” (Narcissistic Narrative 63). For Lewis Hyde, moreover, “the trickster in the narrative is the narrative itself ” (Trickster 267). The device of depicting the artist as a trickster is especially prominent in postmodern self-reflexive fiction. In The Robber Bride, the parodist Zenia conjures up tales of (self-) victimization and criticizes them. In a similar vein, Atwood as a cunning female artist both weaves genre and gender conventions into the novel and ironically subverts them. Thus Zenia not only is Tony Fremont’s left hand, her “unborn twin, taller, stronger, more daring” (137), but also is the novelist’s metaphorical left hand. She is the “other hand,” or what Atwood calls the Hyde hand of Jekyll, the biographical author (Negotiating with the Dead 35). With her parodic art of trickery in The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood, as storyteller, dares to subvert the gender limits set by the dominant social and moral order and to liberate literary genres from rigidified conventions.

CHAPTER 4

You’re History: Living with Trauma in The Robber Bride Laurie Vickroy

In Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride,1 three women friends, Tony, Charis, and Roz, survive brutal assaults on their lives by a fourth woman, Zenia, the robber bride who betrays their friendship and steals their men. More a symbolic challenge to the others’ endurance and selfregard than a fully developed character, Zenia both reflects and extends the traumas of the three women, who struggle to overcome the effects of lingering childhood traumas on their lives and to become fully functional and insightful people. Closely examining the powerful, formative influence of parental abuse and neglect as well as the World War II context that shapes this behavior, Atwood’s novel shows how the childhood traumas of the three characters establish patterns of thought and action that make them vulnerable to further abuse and cause them to forge troubled connections with others. But as Tony, Charis, and Roz, in their encounters with Zenia, re-experience their past traumas, they are ultimately able to confront their pain and work through the urge for vengeance and destructive power. Trauma Defined Trauma is defined as a response to events that are so overwhelmingly intense that they impair an individual’s normal emotional or cognitive functions and can bring lasting psychological and behavioral disruption.

LIVING WITH TRAUMA 51

Researchers and clinicians investigating traumatic reactions agree that “a feeling of helplessness, of physical or emotional paralysis, is fundamental to making an experience traumatic: the individual was unable to take any action that could affect the outcome of events” (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, “Intrusive” 175). Traumatic experience can distort the nature and range of the victim’s memory; it can taint her self-concept; and it may jeopardize her ability to connect fully with others. Despite most people’s capacities to survive and adapt, traumatic experiences can alter the victim’s sense of psychological, biological and social stability to the extent that traumatic events can prevail over all other experiences and compromise the individual’s relationship to present life (Van der Kolk and McFarlane, “Black Hole” 4). Kai Erikson emphasizes that trauma can result “from a constellation of life’s experiences as well as from a discrete event . . . from a continuing pattern of abuse as well as from a single assault” (185). Symptoms of trauma include intrusive and disturbing reminders of traumatic incidents, anxiety, “periods of nervous, restless activity—scanning the surrounding world for signs of danger, breaking into explosive rages, reacting with a start to everyday sights and sounds—against a numbed, gray background of depression, feelings of helplessness, and a general closing off of the spirit as the mind tries to insulate itself from further harm” (Erickson 184). These symptoms all reflect a propensity to revisit trauma; subsequent stress can reactivate the experience of the original stressors and repeat selfprotecting defenses (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, “Intrusive” 173). The circumstances of trauma and the way individuals respond to it differ widely. Even the worst stressors, like combat or rape, will produce severe post-traumatic stress in a minority of survivors, but exposure to some traumatic stress in the general population is common (see McFarlane and Girolamo). Most individuals learn to cope with their difficulties and recover to some extent, but this depends on factors such as the developmental stage of individuals when the trauma occurs, their relationship to the abuser, their temperament, gender, culture, and social supports. A distinction must also be made between survivors of traumatic experience and the most severe cases, who develop full-blown Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a serious psychological diagnosis that affects most aspects of a person’s life (McFarlane and Yehuda 170). Childhood trauma can be very severe and produce psychiatric disorders. Survivors “organize . . . their lives around repetitive patterns of reliving and warding off traumatic memories, reminders and affects” (Van der Kolk, “Complexity” 183). Children find several means to cope with traumatic stress in their family life, including crying, withdrawal, fantasy, sublimation, regression, and denial, among others (Figley 126–29). Several of these coping mechanisms are relevant to Atwood’s characters

52

MARGARET ATWOOD

and give readers a sense of the severity of their situations. Adults and children who experience trauma may have similar symptoms, but the effects on children can be more severe, affecting not only their sense of safety, but also their ability to concentrate, to discriminate between what is harmful and what is not, and to modulate their emotional responses. By distancing themselves from potential dangers, they may also distance themselves from potential sources of pleasure or connection with others (Van der Kolk, “Complexity” 184). In Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Tony, Charis, and Roz endure a variety of trauma-inducing events in their lives, some of which are secondhand traumas from their parents and some of which they personally experience in childhood and in adulthood. Atwood’s characters also experience times of no trauma, and despite their continued vulnerability, additional life events and emotional connections take hold and make them better able to develop coping mechanisms, self-protective behaviors, and somewhat steady lives that fit with their unique situations and personalities. Yet the layers of traumas that linger below the surface may emerge in times of stress and emotional upheaval, and, indeed, Zenia becomes the catalyst for new and re-emergent traumas in the lives of the three women. Like the adult trauma survivors described by trauma investigators, Atwood’s middle-aged protagonists continue to have problems with trust, independence, and initiative, and so, in effect, they remain partial prisoners of their troubled childhoods (Herman 110). Trauma in The Robber Bride Atwood is one of many contemporary writers who have created trauma narratives, or personalized responses to the emerging awareness during the past century of the damaging effects of stressful events, such as wars and domestic abuse, on the individual psyche. These texts suggest the potentially ethical function of literature and its capacity to raise thoughtprovoking questions about identity, how we relate to others, and what contingencies determine how or if individuals survive the devastating effects of traumatic events (Vickroy, Trauma ix, x). Atwood incorporates trauma regularly as an important component in creating her characters, recognizing that trauma is an inescapable fact of human life. She explores childhood trauma and its effects on an artist’s imagination in Cat’s Eye (see Vickroy, “Seeking”) and the complexities of traumatic memory in a historical murder case in Alias Grace. The Robber Bride demonstrates how child abuse and neglect shape the development of personality and self-concept. Survivors’ defenses against such trauma—the splitting of the self, self-protective distancing or avoidance, sublimation,

LIVING WITH TRAUMA 53

and hypersensitivity—become patterns that help Atwood’s characters cope, but that they must also overcome to attain a full life. Her protagonists endure traumatic stressors but fall short of exhibiting full-blown Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They do not manifest the worst symptoms, like feeling responsible for their victimization, or amnesia, or social isolation, though Tony and Charis are loners who have complicated issues with intimacy, especially as young women. Atwood creates colorful and quirky patterns of thought and behavior in Tony’s obsession with war and Charis’s New Age rituals, ways of coping that make them interesting, endearing characters and that make readers want to cheer them on in their attempts to survive. The first indirect cause of stress for Atwood’s characters is World War II. Atwood links larger historical traumas to personal ones by showing the disastrous effects of war on parenting in the novel. The war brings Tony’s and Charis’s parents together, though temporarily. Some of the parents suffer war traumas as soldiers and civilians. Charis’s father dies in the war, leaving her at the mercy of an emotionally disturbed and violent mother who cannot cope alone with a child and who tries to commit suicide several times, eventually succeeding. Tony’s parents, who meet during the war in England, are in a loveless marriage that leaves her Canadian father numb and her British mother, Anthea, exiled from home. The loss of Anthea’s family in the bombing of their London home, where she finds her mother’s foot still in its shoe in the ruins, perhaps explains how distracted, distanced and irrational she is as a mother, alternately neglecting Tony or trying to force perilous or tedious tasks on her. Anthea abandons her daughter and the husband who reminds her of war and whose suffering she feels was far less than her own. In having an affair during her marriage and then a series of relationships with other men after leaving him, she may be attempting to fill the void created by her losses. Tony’s father commits suicide when Tony finishes high school; this act and his alcoholism imply a series of traumas, including war and abandonment. The war is less traumatizing for Roz’s family. Though separated during the war, her parents are reunited and remain together. Her father, a Jew, has risked much but has earned a fortune by looting and has developed a taste for vulnerable women who are not as devout as Roz’s Catholic mother. The effects of these war years on her parents will have a profound impact on Roz’s self-concept and marriage. The key cause of stress for Tony and Charis is the abuse they endure in their damaged families. Atwood’s depictions exemplify how in abusive families parental control is “arbitrary, capricious and absolute” and rules are “erratic, inconsistent, or patently unfair” (Herman 98). Children of such parents become supersensitive to their abusers’

54

MARGARET ATWOOD

emotional states, constantly monitoring “changes in facial expression, voice, and body language as signals of arousal, intoxication, or dissociation” (Herman 99). Children try to avoid or placate abusive parents by attempting to be good, and they engage in “doublethink,” that is, they try to develop another sense of self apart from the one that must comply with people who endanger them, are “untrustworthy or unsafe,” or are “helpless, uncaring or cruel.” They must regulate their own bodies when they are being used by others, or soothe themselves when there is no comfort. They have to try to develop a will of their own when they have only been expected to submit (Herman 100–01). Tony learns to evade her erratic mother and drunken father when possible, and she redirects her energy from trying to please them to imagining herself as a heroic alter-ego. Some children try to convince themselves that their parents are not to blame because they need to believe in their parents, or they repress, rationalize, or minimize their parents’ abusive behavior (Herman 101). Charis, who keeps the secret of her mother’s frustrated violence, attempts to ignore the pain of her beatings and not make her mother angry. While she tries to but cannot fathom her mother’s problems, she also comes to believe that “if someone loved you that made it [the punishment] all right” (264). Such children may also deny, suppress, or dissociate—that is, separate themselves emotionally—from disturbing events. Dissociation can take the form of induced trances or states of depersonalization or other ways “to alter [the] sense of time, place, or person, and to induce hallucinations or possession states” (Herman 102). Because Charis is in the more horrific situation, she must split off the part of herself that can feel in order to survive psychologically. Tony Tony, a history professor and the central character of The Robber Bride, is the most articulate and thoughtful of the three protagonists. Her perspective frames the novel’s discussion of the effects of trauma, with its compelling pull of the past. Her worldview, as readers eventually learn, has been shaped by her difficult childhood. “All history is written backwards,” she asserts. Much like the mysteries of trauma, the story of the past is hampered by faulty or subjective memories, conflicting views, and unavailable information. Yet if historians’ accounts are “at the best just patchy waxworks,” to know everything would be “too demoralizing” (123). Like many trauma victims, Tony wants to know the truth of the past but resists it as well (Laub and Auerhahn 288). Thus she tries to contain the horrors of life through her scholarly explorations of war and her humorous approaches to her subject matter in lectures like

LIVING WITH TRAUMA 55

“Tender Buttons,” which details the inconveniences of fly buttons on men’s trousers on the battlefield. Tony feels more comfortable with the long-dead: “That way there was no painful suspense, no disappointment. Nothing to lose” (131). Remarkably intelligent from childhood, Tony learns when she is growing up that it is almost impossible to please her unpredictable mother, Anthea, who has moved to Canada with Tony’s father as a war bride. Anthea dislikes her marriage and the whole culture of Canada, even the flat accents of her husband and daughter. From her erratic behavior, her distanced attitude toward her husband and daughter, and her sexual infidelity, readers can surmise that the losses of the war have landed her in an unsatisfactory situation and that the emptiness left by her lost family has not been filled by her current one. Thus, she is ready to look elsewhere—to men and sex—for comfort. Anthea’s parenting is sporadic, inconsistent, and even dangerous at times, as when she tries to persuade the 5-year-old Tony to toboggan down a steep hill where other children have been injured. Living in punishing environments at home and school, Tony is “hardened off early” (153), like a seedling that is neglected to make it stronger. Tony tries at least to placate her mother; like many abused or neglected children, she tries to be good in typical ways, by making her mother tea, cleaning up, and doing well academically. Learning early that crying does not make her mother more sympathetic to her, she tries different approaches but to no avail. Growing up in a home full of marital conflict and neglect, Tony tries very hard not to feel helpless or to be overwhelmed by her parents’ anger. When her parents argue, she comforts herself by imagining or creating scenarios where she is the powerful Tnomerf Ynot, a female barbarian warrior, whose name is the reverse lettering of her own name. This reversal serves different functions: it positively foregrounds her different perspective as a left-handed person (which is punished in school), makes her feel powerful and in charge when her classmates cannot understand her, and shows off her intellectual abilities. When Anthea suddenly disappears one day, no one comforts the 5-year-old Tony, who is left alone to absorb shame, silence, and suffering: “What had happened was so momentous and so unheard of, that it could not yet be mentioned.” Tony’s private backwards language provides a means of self-expression and offers her a less distressing way of reframing her mother’s absence: “If you said a word backwards, the meaning emptied out and then the word was vacant. Ready for a new meaning to flow in. Anthea. Aehtna. Like dead, it was almost the same thing, backwards or forwards” (173). Tony’s equation of mother and death also reveals her continuing, perhaps subconscious, pain about being abandoned by her mother.

56

MARGARET ATWOOD

Feeling empty because of the loss of her mother, who remains a haunting unknown, Tony fills her inner “vacancy” with “knowledge, with facts, more and more of them, pouring them into her head to silence the echoes” that her mother’s absence leaves in her life (173–74), and academic life becomes a refuge for her in college after her father commits suicide. Eventually, Tony becomes a scholar specializing in war in an attempt to gain some mastery over her past. As a vulnerable child, she had to listen to her parents’ conflicts; feeling powerless, she tried to imagine herself as a heroic warrior. As an adult, she builds a successful career as a historian who unflinchingly investigates the atrocities and cruelties of history. This is a relatively safe space for her, while the world is less so. That her life becomes a series of “safe, well-worn runways” as she “plodded on, nose to the ground, wrapped in a protective numbness” (129–30) illustrates how Tony, like the individuals described by trauma specialists, restricts her life in order “to create some sense of safety” and to gain control over her “pervasive fear” (Herman 47). As a middle-aged woman, Tony takes some comfort in living in a house that resembles a “bastion, a keep,” thinking she would not mind a moat for further protection. Nervously negotiating the panhandlers on the streets of Toronto, she thinks that “desperate people alarm her, she grew up with two of them” (28). The middle-aged Tony is able in some ways to relate her studies back to her family situation and thus gain some perspective. She becomes interested in war’s effects on ordinary people and the misery it brings. Just as she did not take sides in her parents’ conflicts when she was growing up, so as a historian she does not take sides in her study of historical battles. No longer trying to fill the void left by her dead parents with facts, Tony accepts the contingencies and imperfections of historical knowledge, and her acceptance of the limited nature of historical knowledge leads her from self-protective patterns into a wider view. And yet, just as abused children believe that rules are made by the powerful and have nothing to do with social order or fairness, so Tony retains a deep sense of cynicism from her days of living under a despotic and dysfunctional parental rule, and the realities of geopolitics and imminent conflict in 1991 seem to bear her out. While Charis hopes for a world without war, Tony accepts it as inevitable. When Roz asks Tony about the “thing with Iraq” happening in the Middle East, Tony insists that there will be a war. “The lust for power will prevail. Thousands will die needlessly. Corpses will rot. Plagues will rage,” as she puts it (33). When the supposedly dead Zenia suddenly reappears at the Toxique restaurant, Tony, who feels threatened by her old nemesis, recalls her troubled history with Zenia. When Zenia enters Tony’s life in the 1960s,

LIVING WITH TRAUMA 57

she takes advantage of Tony’s need to tell someone her story, and Zenia draws Tony in with even more colorful and horrifying tales of her own traumatic childhood by claiming that, after the war, her destitute White Russian mother prostituted her to make money. Seeing Zenia as a motherless war baby who is, like Tony, making her own way in the world, Tony identifies with her. As she looks into Zenia’s eyes, she “sees her own reflection: herself, as she would like to be Tnomerf Ynot. Herself turned inside out” (188). When Zenia subsequently asks Tony to write a term paper for her, Tony obliges, only to be blackmailed by Zenia. In this way, Zenia acts as a further traumatic stressor, breaking Tony’s trust and sinking her back into the bleak emotional hole of her family history. Zenia’s daring and sexual freedom, like Anthea’s, highlights Tony’s sense of inadequacy, her doubt that she could ever be desirable or give herself intimately to another. Zenia’s similarities to Tony’s mother indicate some repetition of trauma but also threaten the defenses that Tony has built up toward her past. Tony is small, appears childlike, and is socially and sexually undeveloped, whereas Zenia seems sexy and sophisticated to Tony. Zenia challenges all of Tony’s emotional resources, but also makes Tony confront the reality of her relationship with West. When Tony first meets Zenia, she is living with West, the man Tony has fallen in love with. After Zenia leaves West, Tony, at Roz’s prodding, finally becomes intimate with him, and they get married. But then when Zenia reclaims West, Tony survives this new crisis with her friend Roz’s support. After Zenia has dumped West yet again, Tony takes him back, but she is stronger emotionally and more realistic about the man she loves. Interpreting Tony’s character through the perspective of trauma theory makes clear the effects of her neglectful parents and their untimely deaths on Tony as she deals with the loss by narrowing her emotional life to a defensive and self-containing intellectual path. Traumatic repetition explains Tony’s attraction to Zenia, who is as exploitative and manipulative as Tony’s mother, and when Zenia also betrays and abandons Tony, Tony re-descends into a bleak and depressive existence. Roz’s loving friendship and Tony’s love for West make her work through some of the behavior patterns she has adopted to survive trauma and become conscious of her life instead of repeating traumatic patterns. Charis Of the three women, Charis is the most damaged and haunted by her past, for she must cope with memories of being beaten by her mother as a child and sexually abused by the uncle who raised her after her

58

MARGARET ATWOOD

mother died. The adult Charis endures the “bad vibes” of the world through self-soothing practices and a New Age philosophy. If Tony is confirmed in her pessimism by her study of war, Charis tries to distance herself from such things. For example, she avoids the news about the impending Gulf War, and she embraces New Age spiritual beliefs of peace and harmony, easing the trials of life by mitigating the idea of death, which she sees as a “transition” and “a learning experience” (53). Charis, like many survivors, sometimes engages in superstitious and magical thinking and limits her life to create a “sense of safety” and control her “pervasive fear” (Herman 47). Part of her struggle to fight off emotional pain involves trying in small ways to expect and endure some physical pain, like stepping on thumb tacks or imagining herself on a bed of nails. It is important for her to believe that everyone can control his or her feelings and not be ruled by them. Charis, or Karen, her birth name, has experienced a horrendous childhood, and there are many clues throughout the book about how much Charis’s family traumas lay the foundation for her character development and self-concept. Indeed, she is typical of abused children who, feeling that their lives and actions are out of their control, end up with a disturbed sense of self as separate and helpless, with a bad body image, and with difficulty feeling trust or intimacy (Van der Kolk, “Complexity” 195). When Charis’s mentally unbalanced mother beats her, Charis endures and excuses the abuse and tries to behave well. Colluding with her mother by hiding her injuries from others, she concludes “that people who love you can do painful things to you” (292). For Charis, the only respite from the abuse she experiences at the hands of her mother occurs during the summer she spends with her grandmother, a strong, self-sufficient woman with healing powers—indeed, she seems to make Charis’s wounds magically disappear and stops the bleeding of a badly injured farmer. While her great powers may be a child’s imaginative impressions of competent nursing, Charis’s memories of her grandmother help her to survive her brutal treatment. After Charis’s mother dies and her aunt and uncle take her in, her uncle sexually molests and then rapes her, and this abuse goes on until she reaches puberty. When Charis tells her aunt about the abuse, her aunt denies it and accuses her niece of being crazy like her mother. Not only does the sexually abused Charis experience one of the most destructive traumas for females, but, in an additional blow, no one believes or protects her. For victims, as trauma specialists have shown, being deprived of acknowledgment or corroboration of the truth of their painful experiences is one of the worst aspects of traumatic experience and jeopardizes recovery (Benjamin 58; Herman 67). Family members will deny abuse and make the victim choose between the

LIVING WITH TRAUMA 59

truth and connections to others, either because events are shameful or because they blame the victim (Herman 67–68). Charis, who feels powerless to fight off her uncle’s embraces, dissociates when he begins to rape her—that is, she preserves herself psychologically by splitting off her thoughts from her physical self: “He splits her in two right up the middle and her skin comes open like the dry skin of a cocoon and Charis flies out. Her new body is light as a feather, light as air. There’s no pain in it at all” (294). To Charis, it seems as if she is watching herself being brutalized while she remains apart from it: “What she sees is a small pale girl, her face contorted and streaming, nose and eyes wet as if she’s drowning—gasping for air, going under again, gasping. On top of her is a dark mass, worrying at her, like an animal eating another animal” (294). Dissociation is a typical defensive mode for victims of chronic abuse; through dissociation they can suppress bad memories of themselves in a helpless and painful position. Charis eventually builds up this split-off self into an alternative identity that is not as wounded and is more functional than Karen, the damaged child within, and when she completes the process, she renames the less damaged version of herself Charis. Thus she can compartmentalize the worst pain by assigning it to Karen, the earlier version of her abused child self. She continues to use this defense of self-separation in her adult life. Only in times of extreme stress will the most wounded part of herself, Karen, emerge. Charis’s hypersensitivity as an adult comes directly out of her traumatic childhood experiences and the means she adopted as a child to protect herself. Abused by her unpredictable mother as a girl, she became attuned to the moods of her mother: “she heard pain gathering in her mother’s hands” (264). As an adult, she retains this defensive posture and so is good at “picturing” how other people will react: “She’s too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone—other people’s reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands—but somehow they don’t reciprocate” (61). Another way she reads the moods of others is to see auras around them: while her grandmother’s was blue and calming, her uncle’s was a disgusting “greeny-brown,” and Zenia’s is “a muddy green, shot through with lines of blood red and grayish black— the worst, the most destructive colors, a deadly aureole, a visible infection” (74). Because her sensitivity makes the boundaries between herself and others porous, Charis is able to absorb her dead grandmother’s spirit during the worst abuse in her life, imagining she can take some of her grandmother’s healing power for herself: “Not enough to get Karen out of the trap, but enough to keep her alive” (296). The auras of her uncle and Zenia, in contrast, invade and sully her. After high school, Charis gets away from her aunt and uncle and, more optimistically, she makes a home and raises chickens just as her

60

MARGARET ATWOOD

grandmother did on her farm. But in her submissive sexual relationship with Billy, an American draft dodger from the Vietnam War, she, in part, replays her painful past. With Billy, Charis lives out the patterns of a victim who has been made helpless and who, consequently, feels that her viewpoint is worthless, thus making it difficult for her to assert herself (Herman 53). Nurturing but passive in her relationship, she constructs a romanticized view of Billy and not only ignores his failure to contribute money to the running of the household but also accepts his selfish lust and general lack of consideration. Charis continues to have a difficult relationship with her physically and sexually abused body in adulthood. While she attempts to cleanse and heal her body with natural food, yoga, meditation, and forms of soothing, she still feels “penetrable” and she “bruises easily” and is “covered all over with feelers like the feelers on ants: they wave, they test the air, they touch and recoil, they warn her” away from the pain of the world (239). She sees her body as the “home of the soul . . . but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world” (224). During sex with Billy, which involves pleasing him more than herself, she dissociates and feels detached from her body: it is like “a rubber suit . . . with a grid of tiny electric wires running through it” (235). Her acceptance of Billy’s self-centeredness and rough treatment repeats in some fashion the treatment of her body as an object by her abusive mother and uncle. Although the middle-aged Charis sustains a loving relationship with her daughter and friends, she has not fully healed because she still cannot bring herself to have a relationship with another man after Billy. Indeed, “because men and sex are too difficult for her, they are too snarled up with rage and shame and hatred and loss” (321). In the 1970s, almost a decade after Zenia’s exploitation of Tony, Zenia arrives at Charis’s door looking bruised and ill and claiming that she has cancer and that she was beaten by Tony’s gentle and unassuming husband West, which is an immediate clue for readers to doubt her. Zenia’s situation makes Charis identify with her completely—she has experienced such wounds and also has the sense of wanting to expel something bad that lurks inside. Zenia’s excessive neediness also appeals to Charis, who wants to overcome her own past by healing others and by recreating the healing magic of her grandmother. As she did with Tony, Zenia trades on a supposedly shared traumatic past, mirroring Charis’s experience of being a childhood victim who allows herself to be re-victimized as an adult in her relationship with Billy. After Zenia moves in, she disrupts, and then completely ruptures, Charis’s life with Billy. But Charis denies what is going on under her nose: that Zenia, pretending to be ill, is having sex with Billy and that his

LIVING WITH TRAUMA 61

seeming hostility toward Zenia is actually a sign of the sexual tension between them. Charis’s denials follow logically from her defenses, for she wants to avoid what is bad, and when she discovers that she is pregnant, her pregnancy becomes her focus. As Zenia, in her continuing role as the robber bride, reveals the truth, she also seems to steal Billy from Charis. For the morning that Charis discovers that someone has slaughtered her beloved chickens, she runs to the dock to find Zenia and Billy riding off on the ferry. Charis never sees Billy again and is left with the haunting image of him leaving with Zenia and with a lingering sense of traumatic loss, for she does not know what has happened to him: if he has run away with Zenia or if Zenia has turned him in to the authorities. Her loss of Billy is uncertain, unresolved, and never properly mourned; as a traumatic memory it is not affected by subsequent experience, so it recurs unchanged (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, “Intrusive” 160–63). Charis can still “see” the moment of losing Billy, and the pain of his loss hits her suddenly when she sees Zenia again years later at the Toxique restaurant. Thus Zenia becomes a trigger or reminder of Charis’s earlier traumas. Charis has never been a match for Zenia’s deceit and manipulations, so when she first realizes that Zenia has returned, seemingly from the dead, the words that fill her mind are those of her abusive uncle from childhood: “You can’t win this fight.” The sight of Zenia places Charis within her earlier, defiled self-concept: “Shaken and feeling sick, Charis closes her eyes, struggling to regain her body. My body, mine, she repeats. I am a good person. I exist” (75). She must recover herself once again to do battle with Zenia. As Tony finds shelter in charting history, Charis finds a safe haven from a traumatic childhood in New Age spirituality and her need to nurture, a defensive compensation she has adopted against the horrendous sexual abuse she experienced as a girl and the largely missing comforts available then. Zenia’s exploitation and cruelty create another repetition of trauma, re-immersing Charis into the helpless and violated self she once was and fears becoming again as she dreads another emotional assault from Zenia. Roz While Roz does not suffer the severe abuse experienced by her friends Tony and Charis, the stressors she does experience as a child affect her sense of self and make her vulnerable to more severe trauma later in life when she loses her husband Mitch to Zenia and then to suicide after Zenia fakes her own death. Roz has a conflicted early history, for not only is she is torn between her Catholic mother and Jewish father but

62

MARGARET ATWOOD

she also is troubled by the ways others try to define her on the basis of these identities, neither of which feels comfortable to her. Her family disguises their Jewish identity during the war by adopting the anglicized name Greenwood instead of their real name, Grunwald, which they reclaim after the war. Roz’s Catholic religious training blames the Jews for Jesus’s death, so she feels split, like the displaced immigrants she identifies with because they also have trouble adjusting. She is encouraged to embrace her Jewish heritage after the war, but she does not fulfill these expectations either. Some of Roz’s identity problems have to do with gender roles and the conflicted relationship between her parents. A good woman and a Catholic martyr, her mother skillfully runs a rooming house while Roz’s father is absent during the war, only to become more passive and defer to him once he returns. He is the more lively and charming character; a little shady, he profiteers from war booty and pursues other women. Although Roz realizes that her mother’s anger at her father’s infidelities is justified, she still resents her mother’s passive acceptance of the domestic role and loves her father more, developing an unrealistic and overly-forgiving view of his—and later Mitch’s—bad behavior. She sees her mother’s domestic capitulation as a betrayal, and this makes Roz anxious about being a strong, powerful woman herself. Roz has always been a tall, full-figured woman, loud and self-confident in her intelligence. Though attractive, she does not fit the standards of womanly beauty as Zenia does and so she feels physically inadequate when she is courted by the man of her dreams, the good-looking, upperclass Mitch, who turns out to be as much of a womanizer as her father. Married to Mitch, Roz survives all the heartaches that his constant infidelities cause, taking comfort in her children, for whom she provides a loving and safe home, and in her very successful business career, built on the seed money from her father’s war dealings. She is emotionally devastated, though, when Mitch leaves her for Zenia. Though Roz has challenged stereotypes of women through her involvement with feminist groups and her own career, she gets pulled back into her childhood insecurities over gender roles and class identity by both Mitch and Zenia. Mitch unconsciously reminds her of her father but also lends her social status, which she wants because her father’s fortune is illegal and tainted. Zenia seems to be everything Roz wants to be: not only smart but beautiful, and equally successful with men and in business. While Roz is “forewarned” and “forearmed” when she gets entangled with Zenia in the 1980s (399), for she is aware of what Zenia has done to Tony and Charis, Zenia, nevertheless, is able to con Roz the same way she did Tony and Charis by making Roz think that she and Zenia have stories in common, by making Roz feel needed, and by embodying the

LIVING WITH TRAUMA 63

qualities that Roz admires, such as boldness and seductiveness. In yet another questionable tale, Zenia claims that Roz’s father saved her, a Jewish child, from the Nazis during the war, a claim that fulfills Roz’s need to think that her father lived up to the billing of a sometime hero that his co-conspirators gave him. Roz admires that Zenia has been a journalist in dangerous places in the Middle East and that she seems to have business savvy and powers of persuasion. When Roz gives Zenia a job at her women’s magazine, Zenia makes the magazine more financially successful by replacing the more empowering women’s stories and feminist influence that Roz has cultivated in founding the magazine with stories that focus on women’s fashion and sex appeal. Roz gets caught up in Zenia’s ideas because she also buys into the idea that women must play up to men to be successful. But while Zenia, as she did with Tony and Charis, steals Roz’s man, Roz also secretly admires the robber bride and man-eater, Zenia. For while Roz tries “to be nice, to be ethical, to behave well,” there are times, she admits, that “she would like to be Zenia” (442–43). After Mitch has left, Roz begins to analyze his attempts to control her and enforce sex role stereotypes on her, and she also admits that she has been complicit in condoning his affairs. Ultimately she decides that her need for him no longer outweighs the pain he has inflicted on her and their children, and so she refuses to take him back. Like Tony, Roz becomes stronger emotionally as a result of her encounters with Zenia. Roz also manifests traumatic symptoms of repetition and defensiveness in conflicts with her identity as a woman and in a self-defeating conception of relationships learned in childhood. Her choice of Mitch represents an attempt to climb out of her rejected emigrant Jewish identity and a means to unconsciously replay the serial infidelities of her father. Her mother’s capitulation to her father after the war, having once been capable and independent, prevails upon Roz, to the point of splitting her adult identity between worldly achievement and womanly submission. It takes a crisis in her marriage and a threat to her children to make her truly conscious of how she has automatically accepted and invited Mitch’s destructive behavior. Witnessing and Healing Psychotherapists recognize that trauma cannot be faced alone and that recovery is possible only in relation to others. If a survivor is encouraged to narrate his or her experience and emotionally relive it in a safe context with an empathic listener, such as a therapist, this can help the individual integrate traumatic events into normal memory and relieve many of the major trauma symptoms (Herman 133; Felman

64

MARGARET ATWOOD

and Laub 57–58). The three protagonists go through two stages of telling their painful histories to a sympathetic witness. It is Zenia who first shows interest in their troubled childhoods, reciprocating with harrowing stories of her own. Unfortunately, she wants to know these personal things so she can manipulate each woman. Before Zenia’s lies and betrayals are known, however, the three women gain some comfort and a sense of camaraderie from telling Zenia their stories, which makes it easier when they finally commiserate with each other over Zenia’s betrayals. Their lives are also enlarged in some ways by their temporary friendships with Zenia: Tony becomes more outgoing and sexually mature; Charis is allowed to nurture someone, which may help prepare her to have a child; and Roz learns some lessons in self-respect. Zenia reminds Charis and Roz that the men she “took” were abusive and uncaring toward them. Zenia has been a key part of their lives even if she has also been a destructive force. While Zenia’s actions compound the other traumas of the three women, their experiences with her are also analogous to the difficult process of recovery, which involves facing painful realities so one can survive them without turning to defenses that make one more vulnerable to being re-victimized. As the three women become aware that Zenia has manipulated them by exploiting their defenses, they are able to work through their conflicts and past traumas. In their final confrontations with Zenia, her verbal attacks on their weaknesses contain emotional truth even if her versions of the past are questionable. Each woman sees something different in Zenia according to her own needs, thus Zenia embodies their traumatic, but not entirely knowable, pasts. When they discover that she is not what she seems on the surface, they understand that they have all viewed her as a mirror of their own lingering pain. Since she is unknowable, their desire to kill her is really the need to kill the weaknesses and flaws that she has brought out in them and that hold them back from fully living. Zenia has also revealed to them their own complicity as adults in their victimization: that Tony could not open up to or demand more from West; that Charis kept acting as a victim; and that Roz rationalized and enabled Mitch’s affairs. This is a common Atwoodian theme: her women characters are often faced with and must resist injuring themselves and other women by realizing the extent to which they have become instruments in and victims of their own self-defeating behavior. Ultimately, the three women resist Zenia’s attempts to belittle them. They do not help her flee from her pursuers—possible drug or arms dealers—and they refuse to give in to her demands or threats and to their impulses to punish her. Yet despite all the pain she has caused them, they admire her ability to take risks and realize that she has taught them to face their situations

LIVING WITH TRAUMA 65

more directly. Scattering her ashes at sea, they honor her death, which remains mysterious—a possible murder or suicide. They have admired Zenia’s ability to take what she wants freely, fulfilling their own wishes to feel powerful in the face of past helplessness. Now they harbor no ill will, and the surest sign of their healing is that, along with Zenia, they can now cast overboard the need to avenge past wrongs or exert power over others.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 5

“Was I My Sister’s Keeper?”: The Blind Assassin and Problematic Feminisms Fiona Tolan

Margaret Atwood’s multifaceted and intricately woven novel The Blind Assassin1 opens with a curiously blunt statement: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge” (3). It subsequently takes more than five hundred pages for the narrator Iris to finally approach the centre of her labyrinthine story and reveal the part she played in her sister’s suicide. Reaching back into her family history, Iris recounts the treacherous moment—precipitous of the pivotal betrayal still to come—when she allowed her husband Richard to commit Laura to a mental institution. Entangled at the time in multiple competing relations—wife, lover, expectant mother—and increasingly exasperated by Laura’s eccentricities, Iris acknowledges her failure to act, but not her guilt: “Was I my sister’s keeper?” (522) she demands. Later, justifications fall away. Recalling in old age the moment, years before, when she divulged the secret that she knew would devastate her younger sister, Iris can no longer pretend ignorance of the potential impact of her revelations. Finally, she admits: “My fingers itched with spite. I knew what had happened next. I’d pushed her off ” (595). After years of being exhorted to “be a good sister to Laura” (116), Iris enacts the betrayal that will finally release her from sisterly responsibility. While doubles and doppelgangers may haunt the pages of Atwood’s novels—revealing to the protagonist “the other half of herself, her dark mad twin” (Howells, Margaret Atwood 65)—literal depictions of sisterhood are relatively rare. This lack is exemplified by Elaine in Cat’s Eye (1988). “Sisterhood is a difficult concept,” Elaine remarks, “because

74

MARGARET ATWOOD

I never had a sister. Brotherhood is not” (345). Where sisterhood is not absent, it is typically problematic. In Life Before Man (1979), Elizabeth’s thirteen-year-old sister Caroline suffers a breakdown, is institutionalized and later drowns in the bathtub. Visiting her before her death, Elizabeth angrily diagnoses her sister’s chronic immobility as a willful retreat from the world: “Damn you Caroline, she whispered. I know you’re in there” (80). In Alias Grace (1996), little brothers and sisters are largely indistinguishable in Grace’s memory. Recalling childhood poverty in Ireland, she describes how, when she saw her siblings sitting on the sea dock, she thought she “might just push one or two of them over, and then there would not be so many to feed” (124). Grace’s thoughts of drowning her siblings later resonate with Iris’s actions in The Blind Assassin. Angry with six-year-old Laura, Iris remembers: “I pushed her off the ledge. Not into the pond though—I did have some sense” (121). This sisterly restraint, however, foreshadows Laura’s subsequent plunge into the river and Iris’s rescue of her sister from the water. “How hard it had been to hold on to her. How close I had come to letting go,” Iris ambiguously recalls (183). Indeed, images of drowning and depictions of sisterhood seem oddly entwined in Atwood’s work, as though the water offers a seductive promise of blotting out difficult sisterly relations.2 Thus for many of Atwood’s protagonists, as it is for Elaine in Cat’s Eye, “Sisterhood”—the rallying cry of second-wave feminism—is an alien and troubling proposition. A (Post) Feminist Novel? The Blind Assassin, as I have noted elsewhere (Tolan, Margaret Atwood 251), functions knowingly as a milestone in Atwood’s canon. Her tenth novel, it was published in 2000, on the cusp of the new millennium, when Atwood was sixty years old. The portentousness of these numbers is realized in a novel that spans the twentieth century and is selfconsciously reflective of the passing of time. Two world wars and the Great Depression provide an epic backdrop to an intimate tale of two wealthy sisters growing up in Ontario, Canada, in the 1930s and 1940s. Iris’s memoir, written in the final year of her life from May 1998 to May 1999, is accompanied by excerpts from “The Blind Assassin,” Laura’s iconic, posthumous novella, and both are framed by Iris’s present-day narrative; recognizing that her time is running out, the eighty-two-yearold Iris races to record and complete her autobiographical family saga before her heart gives way. Repeatedly, Iris’s text is tied to her aging body, each measuring out the limits of the other. In this, the novel recalls Hélène Cixous’s essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), in which she exhorts women: “Write your self. Your body must be heard” (245).

PROBLEMATIC FEMINISMS 75

For Cixous, the repression of the desires and needs of the female body is intimately bound up with the repression of female speech. In The Blind Assassin, Iris commences her history with a visceral image of blood-as-ink. Prompted to write by a recent memorial to her sister, she declares that “the old wound has split open, the invisible blood pours forth. Soon I’ll be emptied” (51). Authorship and the body provide two of the novel’s most persistently recurring motifs, and each draws the novel towards an explication of female power and self-sacrifice. With its elevated situation at the pinnacle of the twentieth century, The Blind Assassin provides a useful platform from which to look back over Atwood’s work, and in particular, to examine her sometimes fractious relationship with feminism. Since the publication of The Edible Woman in 1969, Atwood’s writing has invited feminist analyses. Her subsequent career provides a neat companion to a study of second-wave feminism, paralleling its rise and echoing its interests. Her defining preoccupations with the body, the gothic, and “power politics” have cemented her reputation as a feminist-engaged writer. As J. Brooks Bouson points out, “Because Atwood is an author who self-consciously challenges the ideology of romantic love . . . her woman-centered fiction has a strong oppositional appeal” (Brutal 6). Atwood’s relationship with feminism has not always been easy, however. Atwood notably described The Edible Woman as “protofeminist” rather than feminist (see “Introduction” to The Edible Woman), and has stated rather guardedly: “ ‘Feminist’ is to me an adjective that does not enclose one. . . . There are many other interests of mine that I wouldn’t want the adjective to exclude” (Fitz Gerald 139). Various characters in Atwood’s novels have also voiced concerns about feminism. In Bodily Harm (1981), Paul declares: “When you’ve spent years watching people dying, women, kids, men, everyone, because they’re starving or because someone kills them for complaining about it, you don’t have time for a lot of healthy women sitting around arguing whether or not they should shave their legs” (240). Paul’s words are not Atwood’s, of course, but they describe a certain resonant unease around the ethical position of a rights-based movement taken up by predominantly affluent white women. In The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Offred recalls a fraught relationship with her radical feminist mother: “She expected too much from me . . . . I didn’t want to live my life on her terms . . . [or be] the incarnation of her ideas” (132). Later, in Cat’s Eye, when artist Elaine is asked by a younger female journalist to comment on the influence of feminism on her work, she retorts irritably: “I’m too old to have invented it and you’re too young to understand it, so what’s the point of discussing it at all?” (90). In The Blind Assassin, Iris is similarly disengaged from second-wave feminist

76

MARGARET ATWOOD

politics, which did not exist during her formative years in the 1930s and 1940s. But while Atwood proves cautious of an essentialist and monovocal feminist politics, feminism’s diffusive and pervasive influence nevertheless remains inextricable from her work. Liberal feminism’s traditional preoccupation with “liberty, rights and legal equality” (Whelehan 29) underpins Atwood’s politics, and feminism remains part of the vocabulary of her characters. While much recent criticism has responded to Atwood’s expanding canon by moving beyond purely feminist analyses of her work,3 gender remains one of the most persistent points of reference for critics. This similarly extends to reviews of her work. Discussing The Blind Assassin in The New Yorker, John Updike, noting the common description of Atwood as a “feminist” writer, remarks that “insofar as she favors female heroines and shows her women at a societal disadvantage this seems just; but her viewpoint has not been unilateral or cramped by doctrine. She aspires to see genderized humanity whole.” Updike goes on to suggest that Atwood achieves balance in her feminist-inflected works by always betraying some sympathy for her male characters; even Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, he points out, says that the Commander “is not a monster.” And yet to Updike, the male characters in The Blind Assassin are “pretty monstrous.” The unrelenting inhumanity of each of the male protagonists, including Iris’s war-torn father, her “reflexively fascist” husband Richard, and even Alex “the unnamed hero,” means that, for Updike “the novel is less moving than it might be” (145). In another notable review of The Blind Assassin, Elaine Showalter, who refers explicitly to Updike’s essay, notes not only that “Atwood’s tone of hostility towards men and marriage” has irritated some of her critics, but also that Atwood’s feminist sympathies have unnerved her male readers. Showalter’s review is useful for its summation of a number of key feminist concerns, all quite familiar to Atwood’s readers, which she identifies as recurring in The Blind Assassin. Contemplating the theme of sacrificial virgins, present in each of the three interconnecting novels that comprise Atwood’s encompassing text, Showalter points to the novel’s fascination with female silence, male brutality and the gothic— which are all part of “the violent dangers awaiting young maidens”—as well as “the state of female erotic thraldom, traditional in both fairytale and pornography.” To the irritation of some,4 Showalter continues to place Atwood’s writings firmly within a feminist camp, and she concludes her review with the provocative observation that “The Blind Assassin may indeed prove to be that most elusive of literary unicorns: the woman’s novel.” What Showalter’s review exposes is the extent to which

PROBLEMATIC FEMINISMS 77

feminist thematic concerns recur across Atwood’s canon, even in the later novels. The Blind Assassin can also be contextualized by concurrent developments in the feminist movement, in particular, the rise of postfeminism.5 By the time Atwood’s novel was published in 2000, the second wave of feminism had subsided. In her 1991 study, Backlash, Susan Faludi argues that its demise was precipitated by a conservative anti-feminist campaign in which “the media declared that feminism was the flavour of the seventies and that ‘post-feminism’ was the new story—complete with a younger generation who supposedly reviled the women’s movement” (14). In The Whole Woman—published in 1999 to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of her seminal second-wave polemic, The Female Eunuch—Germaine Greer succinctly paraphrases the contemporary view that “[f]eminism has served its purpose and should now eff off ” (4). Inarguably, since the 1970s a generational shift has occurred and a number of younger critics have increasingly denounced second-wave feminism as anachronistic. Writing in The New Victorians in 1995, Rene Denfeld, for example, remarks that “notions of sisterhood seldom appeal” to women of her generation and that attempts to unite “all women under one ideology seem pointless” (263–64). Other critics of second-wave feminism, such as Rebecca Walker, prefer the term third-wave feminism, emphasizing evolution rather than postfeminist opposition. Walker, however, echoes Denfeld in arguing that second-wave feminism “doesn’t allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories” (xxxi–xxxii). It is this assertion of individualism over collectivism that best characterizes recent debates about contemporary feminist politics. The Blind Assassin echoes some of postfeminism’s anxieties around second-wave feminism’s assertion of collective values and shared demands (exemplified in the title of a 1970 anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful). In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir diagnosed the fact that “women do not say ‘We’” (19) as contributory to their subjection; over forty years later, Denfeld paradoxically responds for postfeminism: “We are not apathetic but we are often resistant to organizing . . . [because] we value our individuality” (263–64). Similarly, throughout Atwood’s novel, Iris struggles for individuation from her sister. Repeatedly exhorted “to look after Laura” (124), even as a child, Iris feels the loss of her self-identity. Learning to read, Laura favours the letter L, but Iris bemoans the universalism of her initial: “I was everybody’s letter” (110). Like “bookends” (234), Iris and Laura twin and reflect each other. As each significant other in the sisters’ lives is held in common—mother, father, Richard, and Alex—the narrative becomes

78

MARGARET ATWOOD

increasingly claustrophobic. Indeed, it is part of the novel’s central premise that the subject of the pronoun “she” is frequently unstable, possibly referring to either sister, with the result that the distinctions between Iris’s and Laura’s narratives all but collapse. For Iris, sisterhood makes constant demands with little reward: “I felt I was the victim of an injustice: why was it always me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other way around?” (116). The Blind Assassin traces a five-generation matrilineage through Adelia, Liliana, Iris, Aimee and Sabrina. It constructs a notably female history and resonates with a feminist discourse of successive waves and generational progression. At the same time, Iris’s narratives—both her interwar memoir and its late-1990s frame—notably circumvent second-wave feminism, leaving Iris stranded in either a prefeminist past or a postfeminist present. If, as Atwood would have it, The Edible Woman was indeed too early to be read in terms of second-wave feminism, then it seems that, conversely, The Blind Assassin is too late. Victims and Villainesses While The Blind Assassin, unlike Atwood’s earlier novels, may be located outside the parameters of second-wave feminism, this does not preclude a gendered analysis of the novel, which is profoundly concerned with representations of the female body, female victimization, and female power. Madeleine Davies, analyzing constructions of the body in Atwood’s work, identifies recurring corporeal tropes of incarceration, disembodiment, alienation, disease and abuse (58), which are all found in The Blind Assassin. To Iris, who is a product of the patriarchal culture dominant in the first half of the twentieth century in Canada, the female body is a male possession with clear economic worth to be bartered, purchased and consumed. Consenting to a paternally arranged marriage, Iris sacrifices herself to Richard to stave off her father’s bankruptcy, but only some years later does she realize the full extent of the transaction: “I suppose when he married me he figured he’d got a bargain—two for the price of one. He picked us up for a song” (617). Just as the bourgeois home is characteristically a site of danger in the Gothic novel, so Iris, married to Richard, is subject to his violence. As Iris notes, “increasingly, as time went by—there were bruises, purple, then blue, then yellow” (454). The world of the Gothic, as Juliann Fleenor observes, “is one of nightmare, and that nightmare is created by the individual in conflict with the values of her society and her prescribed role” (10). When Iris marries Richard, she enters a nightmarish world of barely concealed gothic terror, male violence, and female impotence. Her life with Richard is one of “Placidity and order and everything in its

PROBLEMATIC FEMINISMS 79

place, with a decorous and sanctioned violence going on underneath everything” (454). Iris succumbs to Richard’s violence, and accepts her role as a powerless female victim. As the revealed heroine of Laura’s novella, she demands: “What do you want me to do? What do you want me to do? Do you seriously think I have any power?” (418). The Blind Assassin increasingly becomes “a trauma narrative focusing on the sexual selfsacrifice of women under a patriarchal system” (Bouson, “Commemoration” 255). Raised to be dutiful and self-sacrificing, Iris knows what is expected of her: “neatness, obedience, silence, and no evident sexuality” (193). Thus, as her bruised body becomes “a kind of code” under Richard’s abuse, as it is “written on, rewritten, smoothed over” (455), she fails to protest, and only later realizes that she “should have screamed” (105). This opposition of silence and speech is at the heart of the novel’s feminist concerns. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous declares a manifesto for female self-representation: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. . . . Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history— by her own movement” (245). Cixous’s conflation of body and text is realized in Atwood’s novel, in which the failure to speak has a direct impact on the body, facilitating not only the physical abuse of Iris but also the sexual abuse of Laura. For both sisters, the acceptance of both pain and silence is expressed as an almost masochistic passivity. Just as for Freud female masochism exists in opposition to the “element of aggressiveness—a desire to subjugate” that typifies heteronormative male sexuality (“Three Essays” 252–53), so in The Blind Assassin, violence is frequently masochistic, with the female characters seeming to invite aggression. As the male hero of “The Blind Assassin” novella notes: “Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead” (336). Both Iris and Laura are stoical in the face of violence. When the girls’ tutor Mr. Erskine abuses Laura, she reacts passively: “physical pain—her own pain, that is—did not have much of a hold over her” (200). The sisters’ experiences find parallels in the science-fiction tales told within “The Blind Assassin” novella. Describing “The Peach Women of Aa’A,” the male narrator explains: “When you hit the women, no blood came out, only juice. When you hit them harder, they dissolved into sweet mushy pulp” (435). Passivity seems to incite violence, just as Laura’s submission to Mr. Erskine “incensed him further” (200). In his review of the novel, Updike rather problematically echoes this sentiment when he says of Iris’s relationship with Richard: “She evidently was never, not for a moment, responsive to him sexually, or interested in anything he said. . . . Her indifference is

80

MARGARET ATWOOD

almost an invitation to abuse” (145). Violence and silence intersect in the novel, each sustaining the other. Iris believes that Mr. Erskine has taught the sisters “silent resistance” (203) but Cixous rejects the efficacy of such a strategy. “Women should break out of the snare of silence,” according to Cixous, and “shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem.” Only by “taking up the challenge of speech” will women escape the role allocated to them by the patriarchal order (Cixous 251). Like the “[n]oble gestures of self-sacrifice” (386) that attract Laura, silent resistance is ineffective in the novel, ultimately enabling the abuses that characterize female experience. Female sacrifice informs each narrative layer of The Blind Assassin, but at the same time, Atwood has proven notably skeptical of the victim position. In an interview from 1972, she states: If you define yourself as innocent then nothing is ever your fault—it is always somebody else doing it to you, and until you stop defining yourself as a victim that will always be true. It will always be somebody else’s fault, and you will always be the object of that rather than somebody who has any choices or takes responsibility for their life. (Gibson in Ingersoll, Margaret Atwood 13) Atwood returns to the question of agency in a 1993 lecture in which she discusses female villainy in literature and suggests that bad female characters “can pose the question of responsibility, because if you want power you have to accept responsibility” (“Spotty-Handed Villainesses” 135). Such statements point to Atwood’s instinctual liberalism, and also invite comparisons with a similar emphasis on individual responsibility in the discourse of postfeminism. For example, in the 1993 book Fire With Fire, Naomi Wolf distinguishes between two traditions of feminism. The first, which she terms “victim feminism,” “[p]rojects aggression, competitiveness and violence on to ‘men’ or ‘patriarchy,’ while its devotees are blind to those qualities in themselves.” “Power feminism,” in contrast, “[e]ncourages a woman to claim her individual voice rather than merging her voice in a collective identity, for only strong individuals can create a just community” (149). While postfeminists like Wolf charge women to overthrow their own subordinate status, postfeminism’s focus on personal responsibility can have unexpectedly regressive consequences. For as Imelda Whelehan states: “To exonerate men from blame is to blame women totally for their current material and ideological position” (219). Wolf criticizes second-wave feminism for encouraging women to identify as passive victims of patriarchal aggression. Atwood demonstrates some sympathy with this postfeminist stance, and she also

PROBLEMATIC FEMINISMS 81

opposes what she identifies as a feminist pressure towards female moral perfection, or what Wolf describes as a depiction of women as “beleaguered, fragile, intuitive angels” (147). Discussing feminist women’s writing from the early second wave, Atwood asks: “Were all heroines to be essentially spotless of soul—struggling against, fleeing from or done in by male oppression? . . . Did suffering prove you were good?” (“Spotty-Handed Villainesses” 132–33). For Atwood, innocence and self-determination are largely incompatible; to declare oneself innocent is to be absent from power negotiations. This assertion resonates with de Beauvoir’s analysis in The Second Sex. Grounded in existentialist philosophy and profoundly influenced by Hegel, de Beauvoir argues that woman “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other” (16). According to Hegelian philosophy, this opposition of self and other is universal: “the subject can be posed only in being opposed.” De Beauvoir, however, asks why women have failed to make a “reciprocal claim” on subjectivity (17). Her analysis examines historical, biological, social and cultural reasons for the relegation of women to a second, lesser sex, but ultimately, she points towards self-determination, and concludes that “the more women assert themselves as human beings, the more the marvellous quality of the Other will die out in them” (174). In What is a Woman?, published in 1999 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of The Second Sex, Toril Moi notes that de Beauvoir’s existentialist declaration of freedom and agency is a potentially conservative or apolitical stance—because “all human beings are not equally free.” Moi, however, points out that de Beauvoir differentiates between two types of freedom: “transcendence (as the existential condition of human beings, this is in principle the same for everyone) and concrete freedom (the social, political, material conditions in which each human being finds herself, and which clearly vary immensely)” (229). The same division is partially acknowledged by Atwood in The Blind Assassin. Iris is clearly embedded in the socio-political structures of her time, which limit and proscribe her freedoms. Ultimately, however, Atwood returns to a principled belief in agency: what de Beauvoir terms “the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his own subjective existence” (21). If Atwood’s fiction “indicts” predatory males, it also “castigates passivity” in females (Sceats 94), and, indeed, in The Blind Assassin, Iris, “an unaware Sleeping Beauty” (Wilson, “Blindness” 185), is deemed culpable for refusing to see what is going on around her. Atwood’s response to the perceived feminist imposition of innate female virtue is formulated and exemplified in The Robber Bride, in which Zenia’s shape-shifting malevolence is of gothic and gleeful proportions.

82

MARGARET ATWOOD

In The Blind Assassin, Richard’s sister Winifred takes the villainess role, functioning as a kind of vampire feeding on young girls. Looking back at Winifred’s arrangements for the marriage of her thirty-five-year-old brother to an eighteen-year-old girl, Iris thinks: “Really she was a sort of madame. Really she was a pimp” (286). In “The Blind Assassin” novella, Winifred reappears as villainous High Priestess who sells sacrificial virgins to the highest bidder: “the recipient of the payoffs is the High Priestess, who is as venal as they come, and [is] known to be partial to sapphires” (143). In contrast to Winifred’s gothic display of wickedness, both Iris and Laura are seduced by the myth of female goodness. When Iris marries Richard for her father’s sake, she tells Laura, “I’m doing what I think is right.” As she recalls: “I felt so virtuous, and at the same time so hard done by, I almost wept” (290). Iris’s sacrifice is great but remains a poor shadow of Laura’s sustained and ecstatic self-immolation. Also surrendering herself to Richard (to preserve Alex), Laura tints a photograph of Iris blue— “Because you’re asleep” (238)—but colors her own image yellow, giving it a “radiance,” as if she were “glowing from within” (551). When Iris sees her sister for the last time, she appears “translucent—as if little spikes of light were being nailed out through her skin from the inside, as if thorns of light were shooting out from her” (590). Indeed, Laura displays a persistent compulsion towards sainthood. When the two sisters hide Alex from the police, Iris envisions them as Martha and Mary: “[Laura] was to be Mary, laying pure devotion at Alex’s feet” (261). As Bouson notes, Laura can be read as an updated “saintly woman stereotype,” while Alex is “a kind of political prophet” (“Commemoration” 263). In life Laura is a “saint in training” (258), and after death, people come to pay homage at her grave. Atwood, however, notes that depictions of female goodness can be “sticks to beat other women.” Valorizing martyrdom, she warns, can lead to dangerous conclusions: “the only really good woman is a dead woman, so if you’re so good why aren’t you dead?” (“SpottyHanded Villainesses” 135). In fact, this is the very question that seems to permeate Iris’s present-day narrative. In a novel in which four of the main protagonists are pronounced dead within the first thirty pages, there is the persistent suspicion that Iris, in Tomoko Kuribayashi’s words, “must be somewhat less than innocent and good not to have gone under like the others” (24). Carnivore Stories Oppositions of guilt and innocence inform the moral topography of The Blind Assassin, but Atwood characteristically resists reductive definitions, drawing on the notions of moral complexity that she outlines in

PROBLEMATIC FEMINISMS 83

a 1994 essay on Angela Carter entitled “Running with the Tigers.” Atwood prefaces her essay with a quotation from Carter’s 1979 study of the Marquis de Sade, The Sadeian Woman: “The strong abuse, exploit and meatify the weak, says Sade. They must and will devour their natural prey. The primal condition of man cannot be modified in any way; it is eat or be eaten” (Carter 140). In both Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, and her short story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), Atwood identifies a recurring conceptual division between “ ‘tigers’ and ‘lambs,’ carnivores and herbivores, those who are preyed upon and those who do the preying” (118). If, according to Carter, de Sade’s female characters are naturally “lambs” or victims, like Justine, who by throwing off their femininity, can become “tigers”—victimizers like Juliette, Atwood suggests that for Carter both “lambhood and tigerishness” can be found within either gender and within individuals (121). Analyzing the stories in The Bloody Chamber, Atwood further suggests that for Carter “a certain amount of tigerishness may be necessary if women are to achieve an independent as opposed to a dependent existence; if they are to avoid—at the extreme end of passivity—becoming meat” (121). In The Blind Assassin, Atwood constructs a similar opposition between carnivores and herbivores, victimizers and victims, and at one point she even seems to echo Carter’s description of women as tigers. Reflecting on her marriage, Iris states: “I thought I could live like a mouse in the castle of the tigers . . . I didn’t see the danger. I didn’t even know they were tigers. Worse: I didn’t know I might become a tiger myself. I didn’t know Laura might become one, given the proper circumstances. Anyone might, for that matter” (403). Like Carter, Atwood does not see aggression as an essential male characteristic, and her assertion that Carter celebrates “relativity and metamorphosis and ‘the complexity of human relations’” (“Running” 122) is equally applicable to her own work, for the refusal of moral fixity or essential feminine virtue is symptomatic of Atwood’s writing. In her essay on Carter, Atwood repeats her condemnation of second-wave feminism’s view that women are “essentially other, but better” (“Running” 121), once again according with Wolf ’s claim that “victim feminism” asserts that women are “naturally non-competitive, co-operative and peace-loving” (148). In The Blind Assassin, Iris is burdened by her self-abnegating mother’s expectations—by “her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge” (117)—and much of Iris’s adult life is subsequently spent trying to resist becoming “the traditional-role female victim” (“Running” 118) that others have encouraged her to be. As in Carter’s writing, lambhood and tigerishness—that is, renunciation and consumption—are in frequent tension in The Blind Assassin, revealing Atwood’s continuing interest in “the politics of appetite”

84

MARGARET ATWOOD

(Sceats 94), which she explored in earlier novels such as The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle. Discussing Atwood’s “coded” female bodies, Madeleine Davies describes them as existing “within a political economy that seeks to consume them, convert them into consumers in turn, shrink them, neutralize them, silence them, and contain them physically or metaphorically” (60). In a novel full of images of hunger and greed, Iris is indoctrinated in the repression of feminine appetites. Her grandmother Adelia—embodying both feminine perfection and female dissatisfaction—hosts elaborate dinner parties but does not eat, and Iris suspects that afterwards, “she had a tray sent up to her room. Ate with ten fingers” (76). Similarly, despite her frequently lamblike behaviour, Iris is by instinct one of Carter’s carnivores. In defiance of Winifred’s ladylike refusal of food, Iris states: “I was determined to eat up everything, even the bones” (227). Upon her marriage to Richard, however, Iris experiences a sharp curtailment of her appetites; as he orders steak, she eats “mostly the salad” (295). Accepting the role of sacrificial lamb in their sexual relationship, Iris becomes an involuntary herbivore. “My job,” as she comments, “was to open my legs and shut my mouth” (407). As a kind of de Sadeian tiger, Richard clearly believes that “pleasure belongs to the eater, not to the eaten” (“Running” 120). Female consumption—correlative of physical appetite, sexual desire, and emotional greed—proves so socially unacceptable, raising so many attendant anxieties, that it mutates in Iris’s narrative into an even greater taboo, manifest in the persistent trope of cannibalism. Discussing the recurrence of this image in contemporary women’s writing, Sarah Sceats argues that “these monstrous appetites . . . suggest an inner emptiness, fantasies of omnipotence or unfulfillable yearning” (6). Atwood’s female protagonists, she notes, frequently must withstand social and familial oppression as they resist the victim position “through political engagement of the most basic (and food-related) kind” (7). For Sceats, female hunger—particularly the “predatory, vampiric paradigm” of cannibalistic hunger (45)—is indicative of both frustrated desires and a refusal of social fragmentation; thus, it represents a desire for wholeness, or in de Beauvoir’s terms, for subjectivity. In The Blind Assassin, this hunger is apparent in both Iris and Laura from childhood. In language reminiscent of the striking cake-woman scene in The Edible Woman,6 the two sisters, greedy for affection, imagine their mother’s love as “solid and tangible, like a cake. The only question was which of us was going to get the bigger slice” (116). After their mother dies, however, Laura renounces worldly appetites. Refusing to eat rabbit, she declares: “They looked like skinned babies . . . . You’d have to be a cannibal to eat them” (204). With each sacrifice she makes, Laura seems to get thinner. “She was not eating enough,” as Iris recalls, and later, remembering the maternal comfort her sister once craved, she concludes, “I felt she could use some cake”

PROBLEMATIC FEMINISMS 85

(406, 591). In contrast, Iris’s hunger resists the pressure towards selfdenial, and her frustrated appetites eventually find release in her affair with Alex. Exhorting her to be selfish rather than kind, he tells her, “I prefer you greedy” (130). In a chapter in the “Blind Assassin” novella entitled “Carnivore Stories,” Iris’s heroine feeds her fugitive lover segments of apple and jokes, “I’m fattening you up to eat you later” (419). Leaving Richard, Iris finally shucks off her previous lamblike passivity: “She’s determined now, she’ll sacrifice everything and everyone. Nothing and nobody will stand in her way” (566). Envisioning the “modern” woman, de Beauvoir similarly couches her notion of female subjectivity in terms of consumption rather than renunciation. At the end of The Second Sex, she states: “The emancipated woman . . . wants to be active, a taker, and refuses . . . passivity” (727, my italics). Throughout The Blind Assassin, and in defiance of female self-negation, Iris articulates her needs and desires. Even in old age she remains unsatisfied. To the still hungry Iris, while the old “wish the young well,” they also “wish them ill” for they “would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality” (511). A Left-handed Book In a novel full of myths and fairytales, Iris and Laura are repeatedly coded by mythic structures, variously imagined as Martha and Mary, Iris and Dido, Philomela and Procne. Each of these associations works to limit and define the sisters, for as de Beauvoir says of mythic femininities: “The myth is so various, so contradictory, that at first its unity is not discerned . . . woman is at once Eve and the Virgin Mary” (175). Like Carter, who, according to Atwood, “combat[s] traditional myths about the nature of woman” by constructing “other, more subversive ones” (“Running” 43), so, in The Blind Assassin, Atwood engages in a similarly revisionist project. In “The Blind Assassin” novella, the hero tells his lover: “All stories are about wolves . . . escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves . . . . Turning into a wolf ” (424). The elder Iris, however, explodes the limits of this reductive assessment when she imagines herself as “Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny’s house via the underworld. Except that I myself am Granny, and I contain my own bad wolf. Gnawing away, gnawing away” (449). As she writes her memoirs, Iris deliberately appropriates the roles of both tiger and lamb, predator and victim, and in her written account attempts to reconcile these two aspects of her identity. But Iris’s reclamation of her history remains morally ambiguous. Iris’s memoir is a postmodern, oppositional, “ex-centric” (Hutcheon, Poetics 12) account that challenges and destabilizes the authorized and patriarchal Chase and Griffen family narratives and lays claim to an

86

MARGARET ATWOOD

alternative, marginalized history of herself and her sister. At the same time as it evinces a postmodern aesthetic, however, there also remains a truth to be revealed. Anxiety that this truth will remain hidden—that she herself will remain a construction of the stories of others—drives Iris’s narrative forward.7 The novel’s recurring tropes of blindness and muteness serve to prioritize sight and speech, both of which relate to the imperative to bear witness. Unlike the mutilated handmaid in “The Blind Assassin” science fiction story, who is “tongueless, and swollen with words she could never again pronounce” (37), Iris reclaims her voice and her right to self-representation. And if the heroine in Iris’s “Blind Assassin” novella is the passive recipient of the male hero’s tales of female objectification, Iris, as the author of the novella, asserts an articulate subject position as she encompasses the male hero’s tales within the limits of her narrative. In authoring her own text, she achieves Cixous’s vision of the writing woman who, in “seizing the occasion to speak,” makes her “shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression” (250). Throwing off the pseudonymous masquerade of Laura’s name, Iris’s handwritten account becomes “an attempt to emboss her own signature” on “The Blind Assassin” novella (Ridout 16). By revealing the truth of her own authorship, Iris realizes her potential as both the iris of the eye that sees and the I that speaks. The elderly Iris’s completed narrative forms a kind of confession not only of her failure to protect Laura from Richard, but also of her part in Laura’s death. In an analysis of feminist confessional literature, which The Blind Assassin in some ways mimics, Rita Felski suggests that it “seeks to disclose the most intimate and often traumatic details of the author’s life and to elucidate their broader implications.” Influenced by the rhetoric of feminist consciousness-raising, it rejects the “filtering mechanisms of objectivity and detachment in its pursuit of the truth of subjective experience” (83). Iris’s narrative is concerned with truth, but it remains her truth. Abandoning the “filtering mechanism” of Laura’s persona, Iris reclaims her subjectivity—her I—from her sister’s text. But in doing so—in obeying the feminist instruction to “put herself into the text” (Cixous 245) —Iris also necessarily relegates Laura to her previous role of silent object, able to speak only in the inarticulate code of “X. X. X. X.” (611). Determined to speak and to be heard, the elderly Iris sacrifices her sister once again. This act of treachery signifies the danger of women’s writing, which Cixous acknowledges when she describes the return of repressed female expression as “explosive, utterly destructive, staggering” (256). Iris is similarly aware of the violent potential of women’s writing; presenting an award to a young student, she whispers: “Bless you. Be Careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning” (51). Iris eventually speaks the truth, and asserts

PROBLEMATIC FEMINISMS 87

her subjectivity, but in doing so, Laura remains what she always was: “A tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on” (57). In wresting the narrative “I” from Laura, Iris both creates and destroys her sister. Eventually, in expiation, Iris reclaims the sister she previously rejected, and declares: “Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together” (627). Whether or not this act of atonement is sufficient remains uncertain, but eventually, the fates of the two sisters are once again entwined as Iris recognizes that for her, as for her sister, the book is the “only” thing that “makes her memorable now” (57).

CHAPTER 6

Narrative Multiplicity and the Multi-layered Self in The Blind Assassin Magali Cornier Michael

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin offers a central character who finds it necessary to utilize a number of different kinds of narratives to represent, understand, and, in some sense, justify her life. That Iris (Chase) Griffen must resort to dividing her story between diverse narratives engages the novel in an exploration of both the function and limits of particular types of narratives. Furthermore, an elusive editor orchestrates the various narratives—some of which are directly attributed to Iris and some not—to reveal not only how narratives work but also how they can be manipulated to subvert their limits.1 More specifically, Atwood’s novel subtly discloses the ways in which narrative conventions are linked to existing power relations within the culture in which these narratives have been shaped into acceptable forms. Having internalized the strictures marked in her case by both the class and gender expectations that dominated during her formative years in the 1930s and 1940s in Canada, Iris can only represent her life in a fractured way; no single narrative exists that can include all the crucial aspects of her life. Indeed, the novel illustrates what Martha Watson describes as “the impact of social mores and practices on the form, substance, and style that one adopts in writing a life story” (19). Not only do the established narrative forms that Iris uses each have limits—particularly

NARRATIVE MULTIPLICITY AND THE MULTI-LAYERED SELF 89

in terms of what can and cannot be included in them—that curtail her ability to represent certain aspects of her life, but some established narratives remain unavailable to Iris because of her position as an upper-class woman. Atwood’s novel demonstrates how access to and knowledge of particular narrative forms are interconnected to cultural hierarchies based on class and gender. At times, Iris must publicly deny her own authorship when the narrative forms that allow her to broach certain topics are forbidden to her and would have detrimental effects on her life. In other words, the novel reveals the ways in which cultural norms and power relations shape narratives both internally, in the form of narrative conventions, and externally, in the unwritten but nevertheless powerful social strictures as to who can write or read particular narrative forms. But, as Iris self-consciously uses multiple narrative forms to tell her life story, her careful orchestration of the different narratives she uses also underscores how narratives can be manipulated to subvert their limits, thus linking Iris to a whole history of women writers who, in their engagement with established narrative practices, are able to rework them to make them their own. Iris must construct an other way of telling her story that both makes use of and subverts the narratives available to her as well as those off limits to her, given that all narratives limit to a certain extent what can be told as a consequence of both the spoken and often unspoken cultural rules that accompany them.2 Because of the rules that govern particular narrative forms, no one narrative form allows for all that Iris’s life has encompassed; her response to that lack is to tell different aspects of her life using distinct narratives that she co-opts for her own purposes. Atwood’s novel presents a juxtaposition of a variety of narratives, few of which are directly attributed to Iris until the novel’s final pages but which together construct a textual version of Iris that she hopes will survive her death and “be” (521)3 the multi-layered self she can offer her only surviving relative, her granddaughter Sabrina, and the world in general. Iris’s multiple “self-representation[s]” thus function “as a site of identity production” (Gilmore, “The Mark” 4). These narratives include a first-person present narrative in the voice of the elderly Iris during the last year of her life from May 1998 to May 1999; an autobiographical narrative, addressed to Sabrina, which Iris writes during her final year and in which she tells the story of her life in a conventional way and chronological order; a novella entitled “The Blind Assassin,” which is initially attributed to Iris’s deceased sister Laura; science fiction stories that appear within “The Blind Assassin” novella and are attributed to its male protagonist; and newspaper columns that are sprinkled throughout the text.4

90

MARGARET ATWOOD

Iris’s First-Person and Autobiographical Narratives A sharp contrast emerges between the novel’s presentation of Iris through a first-person narrative that flirts with stream of consciousness and through Iris’s self-described autobiographical narrative directed at Sabrina. The former has neither a clear writer nor a clear addressee in the beginning and as such seems not to be as bounded by narrative prescriptions as the novel’s other narratives. This outermost narrative, which is set near the end of the twentieth century, focuses on Iris’s daily life in the present as a Canadian woman in her early eighties who is sifting through a difficult past that keeps intruding into her present. These passages weave together Iris’s physical struggles with an aging body that limits what she can do and her psychological struggles with a past that imposed many limits on her life and has left her with an edge of bitterness. Iris’s thoughts, however, remain relatively unconstrained in these sections, emerging as sharp and critical of the 1930s and 1940s Canadian culture that has framed her existence. Although she understands what is expected of her—like “keeping my mouth shut” (38)—the narrative makes clear the contrast between her outward conformist behavior and her thoughts by interweaving them. For example, when the local high school invites her to come award the literary prize named for her sister, Iris’s actions comply with what is “expected” (30) of her; but, when her husband’s sister is praised for contributing the money for the award, Iris pictures her as “the old bitch” and exclaims to herself, “How everyone fibs when it’s a question of money!” (39). Moreover, even her outward behavior at times takes on assertive characteristics, albeit in a limited fashion, as she finds a certain joy in saying or doing things that run counter to the expectations of Myra, the woman who watches over her. Often, however, Iris must abort her attempts at outward rebellion as a function of both her aging body and what she understands to have been a “choice” she made “long ago” to opt for “classicism” over “romanticism” (43). By offering the elderly Iris’s thought processes as she acts in the world, these passages reveal the price Iris has had to pay for that choice. Standing always “upright and contained” (43) has resulted in a deep split between her inner and outer life that has left her with a precarious sense of identity. Consequently, Iris feels a need in her final year to provide some tangible form of her self by writing her life story for posterity. As she muses about the act of writing her story, of leaving “evidence” about her life for others to find, Iris asks whether it is not a “simple claim to existence, like scribbling your initials on a washroom wall?” (494). As Martha Watson argues, “Women do not so much record their lives as write themselves into existence” with their autobiographies (1). At the

NARRATIVE MULTIPLICITY AND THE MULTI-LAYERED SELF 91

end of her life, Iris chooses to complicate the social identity that has been determined for her throughout her life by presenting herself as a complex of multiple identities and thus as more multi-dimensional than her culture has assumed.5 Although initially unsure “For whom” she is “writing” (43), Iris gradually comes to understand that her addressee and “witness” (95) is her only granddaughter. As her sole surviving relative—“the last of us” (47)—Sabrina is Iris’s only physical or biological tie to the future and the only person who stands to gain some understanding from certain revelations about her family heritage. Indeed, Iris muses that learning “[t]here’s not a speck of Griffen” in her might allow Sabrina the freedom “to reinvent” herself “at will” (513) and thus imagines her autobiography as potentially allowing the creation of two new, more fully multi-dimensional identities—her own and that of Sabrina.6 In other words, by asserting control over the writing of her life, Iris assumes power within the culture that has silenced her and manipulated her social identity.7 As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson note, “women’s autobiography” often makes “visible formerly invisible subjects” (5). The novel thus presents Iris’s decision to write her story as one that involves a risk she is finally ready to take at the end of a life during which she has steadily avoided that risk: “Do I have some notion of leaving a signature, after all? After all I’ve done to avoid it, Iris, her mark . . .” (95). While survival in her culture has entailed the dissimulation of her signature during the course of her life, Iris recognizes that the survival of her “existence” (95) after her death depends on an assertion of her signature. Presented explicitly as an account of her life, the narrative that the elderly Iris sits down to write is written in the first person and yet differs drastically from the other first-person narrative focusing on the last year of her life and within which the autobiography is embedded. To write her life story, Iris turns to traditional autobiography, to a chronological, linear, cause-and-effect, realist narrative of concrete events, in which retrospection has imposed a clear pattern on earlier events and the persons involved. As Sidonie Smith notes, choosing to position oneself “as the subject of traditional autobiography” may be a wise “strategic move” for women writers in that “speaking from this position [of ‘universal man’] proffers authority, legitimacy, and readability” (“Autobiographical Manifestos” 433). However, from the beginning, Iris also reveals her awareness of the constructed quality of her narrative and its inevitable dependence on biased information and omissions.8 For example, Iris prefaces the presentation of her family history by acknowledging it as a “reconstruction” that “must have borne as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would to the original,” given that it is based on “fragments” of information gathered from

92

MARGARET ATWOOD

Reenie, the family servant who raised Iris and Laura (67), and from “The Chase Industries: A History, a book my [Iris’s] grandfather commissioned in 1903” (54). Moreover, Iris intersperses her account of persons and events of the past with chatty commentary that jerks the reader out of a lulled acceptance of the story as true, like the comments about her father’s marriage proposal: “I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then” (69). Iris’s autobiography thus makes clear that any reconstructions of the past will necessarily be tenuous at best, since processes of reconstruction are shaped by factors such as individual and cultural perspective, available data, gaps in the data, political exigencies, and accepted narrative forms.9 Indeed, Iris’s writing acknowledges “autobiographies as rhetorical artifacts” (Watson 30), as “narrative artifice” (Smith, A Poetics 5), as “never neutral” (Mumby 4).10 However, such artifacts have power, as demonstrated by Iris’s understanding that “Colonel Parkman” now “looks like” his statue regardless of what he “really looked like” since “he left no pictorial evidence of himself ” (145). That the past thus becomes its representations is exactly why Iris wants and needs to write—and thus control—her own story, her own identity. While the chattiness of Iris’s autobiographical “I” creates a sense of openness, that openness is nevertheless constrained. Not only is the narrative clearly selective, but some of the selection process increasingly involves deliberate omission. Indeed, in the outermost narrative within which the autobiography appears, Iris eventually admits that what she has written is “wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted” (395). One explanation for these omissions rests in her division of her inner and outer life, which results both from cultural constraints and choices Iris has made that in themselves are products of her socio-cultural environment. Consequently, it becomes extremely difficult for her to break down the habit ingrained for over eighty years of silencing her inner self and life whenever she speaks or presents herself to others. As J. Brooks Bouson notes, “Iris’s memoir . . . provides a kind of fictional documentation of the ways in which gender and class expectation shaped and confined women’s lives in the first half of the twentieth century” (“Commemoration” 252). Moreover, because her culture has certain definite rules about the acceptable behavior and lives of its upper-class women, inevitably Iris’s “self-representation is controlled by the images from popular culture” of such women (Gilmore, “The Mark” 11). Thus, as Sidonie Smith argues, the autobiographer is always involved “in a kind of masquerade” (A Poetics 47); indeed, Iris masquerades in her autobiography as in her life as a genteel woman who plays by the social rules imposed on her. Although her marriage to Richard is one of convenience, for example,

NARRATIVE MULTIPLICITY AND THE MULTI-LAYERED SELF 93

Iris internalizes and follows the popular cultural scripts handed to her. From the start, she plays impeccably the part of the fiancée at all the “cocktail parties, teas, bridal showers” (234) associated with the coming wedding and then the part of the “Beautiful Bride” (239) pictured in newspaper society pages. Even when Iris’s retrospective narrating “I” becomes more critical of the life she was forced to lead, as when she asserts that as Richard’s wife “my job was to open my legs and shut my mouth” (332), she continues to present herself in her narrative as a respectable upper-class woman. Having learned early on that she was expected to remain “sedate in bearing, unapproachable” (181), Iris has difficulty not representing herself in that image. Indeed, her repeated public performances of the cultural scripts prescribed to her have had a shaping influence on her identity, thus making it impossible for her to completely shed ingrained aspects of herself even as she becomes increasingly critical of her marriage and her life as a society wife. Breaking Sexual and Class Taboos: Iris’s “Blind Assassin” Romance Novella What are explicitly forbidden in Iris’s autobiography of her life as a genteel woman are representations not only of her torrid extramarital affair with the lower class fugitive Alex (who, unbeknownst to all, fathered her daughter Aimee, Sabrina’s mother) but also of the sexual and class exploitation that mark the upper-class culture she inhabits. That Iris chooses to engage such forbidden topics in the face of societal strictures against doing so demonstrates her willingness to subvert, albeit covertly, the norms that circumscribe her. To address these topics, she engages narrative forms ostensibly unavailable to her; indeed, romance fiction that dwells on women’s sexual desire and pulp science fiction are, for different reasons, forbidden to Iris as an upper-class woman within the context of 1930s and 1940s Western culture. While Iris defies her culture, the power of prevalent social strictures also compels her to cover herself by attributing the authorship of these pieces to others. This displacement of authorship functions as a form of “silent resistance,” an alternative form of power she perfects throughout her life; indeed, from an early age, Iris learns how to lie and cheat and “not to get caught” (167)—skills that point to her imprisoned and subjugated status. For the narrative of her affair with Alex, a previously silenced part of her life, Iris offers a novella carved out of pieces she wrote while waiting for him to return from the Spanish Civil War and then World War II (the latter from which he never returned). While she dares to write of her passionate sexual affair with the lower-class

94

MARGARET ATWOOD

fugitive Alex, she publishes her novella, entitled “The Blind Assassin,” in 1947 under the shield of her dead sister’s name, Laura Chase. Moreover, Iris reveals neither her authorship of the novella nor its autobiographical elements until the final pages of her memoir, which appear close to the end of Atwood’s lengthy novel. Although veiled clues of Iris’s love affair with Alex litter segments of her autobiography (especially on subsequent readings of the novel), only when her death becomes imminent does the elderly Iris break her silence and admit to the affair and to her authorship. Iris anticipates her reader’s reaction to this major revelation by suggesting that her decision to publish the story of her love affair as fiction and to attribute it to Laura derived from either “cowardice,” “a failure of nerve,” or “simple prudence” (512). All three of these possible reasons behind Iris’s decision to affix the label of fiction and a pseudonym to her writings about her illicit love affair lead back to the restrictive social roles that circumscribed upper-class women’s lives in the first half of the twentieth century. To begin with, fictional romance values love in a way that Iris’s class-bound culture did not. Although both Iris and Laura fall in love with Alex, they are condemned for even being seen with him because he is “darkish” (176) and of the wrong class and he holds the wrong political views: “Don’t you know any better?” as Reenie says to the two sisters (178). An orphan whose parents were killed in Eastern Europe during World War I, Alex is a union organizer and communist sympathizer. While Alex refers to Iris’s industrialist husband as “the sweatshop tycoon,” Richard calls Alex “an armchair pinko” (177, 188). Alex is demonized because he represents a threat to the dominance of the white male moneyed class, and when he becomes a fugitive—for he is suspected of setting fire to the Chase factory and causing the death of the night watchman—Iris and Laura hide him in the attic of their house for a time. While both girls are attracted to the fugitive, they cannot admit to each other or even to themselves their attraction to him. Indeed, love has little place in Iris’s social class, and sexual desire is swept under the carpet, especially with regards to respectable girls: “sexuality, although it was never spoken of, was to be nipped in the bud” (159). When Iris’s marriage to the new-money man Richard is arranged by her father as part of a business deal to rescue the old-money Chase family from financial ruin, Iris feels that she has no alternative but to do “the responsible thing” (227). Despite the power of the personal and cultural pressures placed upon her, Iris’s agreement to this marriage of convenience points to her complicity with a class for which money rules. Dismayed at Iris’s decision to marry Richard, Laura tells Iris that she could break off her engagement and that the two of them could get jobs as waitresses. When Iris, in dismissing Laura’s objections to her marriage,

NARRATIVE MULTIPLICITY AND THE MULTI-LAYERED SELF 95

remarks that waitresses “make next to nothing,” Laura lashes out that at least Iris will “have nice clothes,” highlighting her assessment that Iris is allowing money to seduce her, and, indeed, Iris acknowledges that having nice clothes is her “secret consolation” in marrying Richard (237). At the close of her life, Iris admits that, although she had longed “to get away” from her upper-class moneyed life, she had never sought its “destruction” and in fact had wanted it “to stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will” (217). Unlike Iris, the unnamed female protagonist of the “Blind Assassin” novella achieves heroic stature as a direct consequence of the risks she takes for love. The conventions of fictional romance allow love to explain and excuse everything, whereas Iris would have been outcast and disowned for the same behavior as her fictional romance heroine. Indeed, after her husband Richard’s death, Iris’s daughter is legally taken from her when Richard’s vindictive sister offers proof that Iris has had a dalliance with a man. Veiling her story under the guise of fiction is thus not enough of a shield for Iris; she must also deny her authorship. As a respected upper-class woman and a proper society wife, Iris is expected not to know about and certainly not to acknowledge the realm of female sexual passion that the novella depicts. In her autobiography, Iris accounts for Richard’s apparent acceptance of her “lack of enjoyment” during sex as not only “normal” but “even desirable” (241). As Carol Thurston notes, “the feminine virtues associated with being a good wife and mother did not include a sexuality that speaks to either self-awareness or self-expression” (36). But in her romance novel, Iris is able to represent her sexual passion through the female protagonist’s affair and to describe the “extreme pleasure” she experiences and the other, less bounded sense of self she derives from it: “There’s no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries” (261). This craving for life outside boundaries indicates the degree to which Iris is and feels constrained by her culture’s regulation of women’s sexuality and identity. The novella thus functions, at least in part, as an assertion of a more open, free identity. As Thurston notes, “writing these [romance] novels was, and continues to be, a way for women to rebel against their domestic imprisonment” (35). But Iris’s act of assertion is constrained, for she can only represent her desires under the double shield of romance fiction and displaced authorship. Indeed, Iris’s instinct for self-preservation, which makes her publish the novella under her sister’s name, proves prescient. Although published as fiction, the novella immediately engenders suspicion as to the morals of its named author because of its inclusion of “carnality,” “sex,”

96

MARGARET ATWOOD

and “foul language” (39), and, since little distinction is made between author and character, Laura’s “actuality [is] taken for granted” (40) within the book’s pages. Following the book’s publication, ministers in the town’s churches denounce the book “as obscene,” the public library is compelled to remove the book from its shelves, the town’s one bookstore refuses to sell it, and Iris herself is condemned for allowing the publication of the novel, a “piece of filth” that dishonors not only the “well respected” Chase family but the “entire town” (39, 40). Moreover, the novella’s “aura of brimstone and taboo” (39) casts doubt as to its literariness, given that historically romance novels have been treated as “inferior or weak fiction for the weaker sex” (Thurston 34).11 As an upper-class woman with a reputation to ensure, Iris cannot admit that she is the author of the kind of romance fiction that, since the “1921 publication of Edith Hull’s The Sheik,” emphasized “physical” love and passion (Thurston 38–39) and came to be associated with the massproduced pulp romance fiction consumed by working class women such as Reenie, the servant who raised Iris and who, as Iris remembers, “devoured” romance stories.12 Indeed, Reenie provides Iris with a connection to the lower class throughout her life, thus offering a glimpse of a broader world than the upper-class one in which Iris has been contained. One might ask, however, why Iris chooses to publish her writings on her love affair at all. To begin with, even under the cover of fiction and anonymity, the novella’s publication validates for Iris a part of her life that she has had to silence; seeing it in print makes it real. Indeed, when she finally admits her authorship of the “Blind Assassin” novella, Iris notes that an autobiographical impulse guided its writing, that the “writing” was “a writing down,” a “recording” of what she “remembered” and also what she “imagined, which is also the truth,” and that she also wrote because she wanted “a memorial,” not only for Alex but also for herself (512). This emphasis on writing for her self supports Linda Coleman’s notion that women’s autobiographical writing often functions as a “strategy” not only “for coming to a meaningful understanding of the self ” but also “for establishing the needed authority and strength to negotiate or even to subvert external or internalized norms that might silence the self ” (1). Another aim underlying Iris’s publication of the novella emerges from her rather cryptic statement that “naming Laura as the author . . . was only doing justice” and that in “the spiritual sense” Laura was her “collaborator” (512–13). This comment suggests that publishing the book also functions as a subversive means for the otherwise powerless Iris and Laura to get back at Richard, who so thoroughly dominated and abused, at times violently, both women.

NARRATIVE MULTIPLICITY AND THE MULTI-LAYERED SELF 97

Indeed, Iris points out the disturbing gap between appearance and reality within her outwardly perfect marriage to Richard, making clear that “appearances are deceptive” (80). Iris notes the “placidity and order” that characterized their life as seen by others even though “decorous and sanctioned violence [was] going on underneath everything,” including “bruises, purple, then blue, then yellow” that “increasingly” marked her “thighs, where it wouldn’t show” (371). The magnitude of these accusations takes on added weight when linked to her earlier assertion that “people believed, then [in her grandmother’s day], that Culture would make you better—a better person” but that the people who believed this “hadn’t yet seen Hitler at the opera house” (59). Iris’s late twentieth-century cynicism toward the role of culture in assuring human progress implicitly links the violence in her personal life to that of the Holocaust and links Richard to Hitler in a scathing critique of the ways in which domestic violence has often been sanctioned in a modern Western culture that otherwise presents itself as progressive. Iris’s narrative also hints at abuses perpetrated by Richard against Laura, although Iris cannot substantiate the particulars until she finds the coded notebooks Laura leaves for her in a drawer before committing suicide. Indeed, Laura had no narratives available to reveal the sexual exploitation she endured. Guilt racks Iris when she understands that the evidence “had been there all along, right before my very own eyes” (500) and that, after impregnating Laura, Richard had her institutionalized to force an abortion on her. This double recognition functions as a turning point, and Iris begins to act strategically to assert herself and to subvert Richard’s power: she leaves Richard and tells him, point-blank, that he “as good as raped” Laura (511), and she publishes the novella under Laura’s name. Because of the public scandal caused by the book’s publication, Richard is forced to retire from politics—he claims that Iris has deliberately “sabotaged” his political career—and Richard is also tormented by the love affair described in the book, which he suspects is a fictionalization of an affair Laura had with Alex at the same time he was “besotted” with her (510). Iris thus recognizes the power that she can yield through her writing, which she manipulates to exact as much power over and punishment of Richard as possible. Lastly, Iris’s attribution of the novella to Laura functions not only as a tribute to Laura’s pure love for Alex, which Iris comes to understand “belonged, for Laura, in another dimension of space” (500), but also as a means by which Iris works through her own role in Laura’s death. Iris’s jealous possessiveness over her love for Alex and infuriation at Laura’s “iron-clad confidence of the true believer” (487) that Alex would come back for her makes Iris tell Laura, in a scene “that still haunts her,” not

98

MARGARET ATWOOD

only that Alex has been “killed in the war” but also that she and Alex had “been lovers . . . in secret, for quite a long time” (488). In retrospect, Iris understands that she had been utterly “blind” (500) to both Laura’s idealistic love for the fugitive Alex and the way in which Richard had used that love, making a “bargain” (487) with Laura that Alex would be kept safe if she had sex with him (Richard). Consequently, Iris must acknowledge her own culpability in Laura’s suicide, her own role as a blind assassin of sorts; indeed, Iris realizes that the last “look” she saw on Laura’s face—a look that was “terrified, cold, [and] rapturous”—was the same look Laura had the day she “almost drowned” as a child. While Iris had saved her sister when the two were girls, this time Iris pushes Laura “off ” the edge (488). After Laura’s suicide, Iris rejects her earlier “ignorance” and silence, and thus her collusion in the death of her sister, and instead chooses “knowledge” (494) and action. Iris changes course to make up for her part in Laura’s death by keeping her from being “papered over . . . as if she’d never existed” (508); instead, Iris seeks revenge on Richard and gives Laura an existence as the author of the “Blind Assassin” novella. These actions allow Iris—“Better late than never”—to “take care of ” her sister as she “had solemnly promised to do” (368) on her mother’s deathbed. The “Blind Assassin” novella thus serves multiple functions: as a memorial to the love affair and sexual passion between Iris and Alex; as an act of revenge against Richard and the cultural constraints and violence he represents; as a memorial to Laura and her idealism; and as a means for Iris to assuage her guilty conscience about Laura’s death. Science Fiction as “Political Cryptogram” Another kind of narrative that remains unavailable to Iris but that she nevertheless incorporates into her “Blind Assassin” novella is the science fiction genre. Iris embeds science fiction stories within her novella by presenting her male protagonist as a man who makes a living writing pulp science fiction stories and who narrates some of these stories to his lover. Atwood’s depiction of a leftist fugitive as a writer of pulp science fiction fits the historical context of the 1930s, given that these stories often contained embedded “social and political comment” (Pohl 14) and that magazines paid relatively well for them. These stories function as a great screen for Iris, since science fiction historically was written by and aimed at men and most often appeared as stories published either singly or in serial form within garish pulp magazines with “brightly-coloured, crudely realized cover art” (Roberts 69).13 Furthermore, readers of science fiction “were rarely highly educated members of the executive or leisure class” (Broderick 23), since pulp magazines

NARRATIVE MULTIPLICITY AND THE MULTI-LAYERED SELF 99

“had a bad reputation among readers who considered themselves people of good taste” (Lester del Rey 198). Iris’s first-hand knowledge of science fiction derives from Reenie, her link to the lower classes when she was growing up, for when Reenie’s brother gave her copies of “cheap magazines, the pulpy trashy kind,” Iris and Laura would secretly read them (152). When the novella’s male protagonist seduces his lover by telling her his science fiction story about the devastated planet Zycron and its destroyed city Sakiel-Norn, he can overtly engage issues of violence and of sexual and class exploitation—issues intricately interwoven in Iris’s life—that other narrative forms could not address mid-century when such concerns were being doggedly swept under the carpet.14 The only other narrative form contained within Atwood’s novel that can address the riots at Iris’s father’s factory, for example, is the newspaper column; but the brief newspaper columns that sprinkle the novel appear so pared down and safe as to offer little insight into the socio-political problems of the day. In contrast, science fiction, as Donald Hassler and Clyde Wilcox note, “frequently includes a sophisticated depiction of political interactions” in its exploration of questions about “the role of various social elements such as class and gender” (1). And science fiction, as Frederik Pohl explains, can also serve as a “political cryptogram,” as a means to “say things in hint and metaphor” that the writer dares not say openly or explicitly (10)—even in the case of “the pulpy adventure stories of the 1920s and 1930s” (14).15 For example, the narrative conventions of pulp science fiction allow for full and intricate depictions of alien races as violent and exploitative. Regardless of the parallels implicitly drawn between the present state of culture and the alien culture being represented, displacing the target of social critique to an alien race provides the writer with great leeway. Thus, Iris’s incorporation of the science fiction story and its male narrator into her “Blind Assassin” novella gives her the freedom to critique the culture that has imprisoned and silenced her throughout most of her life. As Jane Donawerth notes, “Historically, women who adopted the male voice of science fiction, who cross-dressed as the male narrator, gained a kind of freedom” (112). The male protagonist’s story about the city of Sakiel-Norn describes in detail the class and gender inequities that structure the existence of its populace. A barely veiled critique of capitalism emerges from the description of a city in which “everything” is “for sale” (116) and in which money is intricately tied to power and violence. Like the decadent class to which Iris belongs, the aristocrats of this imagined city dress “luxuriously,” enjoy “magnificent feasts,” and fall “elaborately in love” with each other’s wives while, at the same time, they “ruthlessly” suppress any attempts by the lower class to “revolt” (16).

100

MARGARET ATWOOD

Moreover, tradition impels the aristocratic families of Sakiel-Norn to “sacrifice at least one of their daughters,” although they often cheat by offering instead an adopted “offspring of female slaves and their masters . . . to replace their legitimate daughters.” Much like Iris and Laura, these young girls are kept “shut up” and “fed the best of everything to keep them sleek and healthy” so that they can “fulfill their duties with decorum, and without quailing” (28). The story also depicts in a slightly exaggerated fashion the kind of silencing that Iris and Laura endure, in that the Sakiel-Norn girls who are pegged for sacrifice have their “tongues” literally “cut out” to avoid “outbursts” of “shrieking” that would “spoil the festivities” that accompany the ritual “sacrifices” of these girls (29). As the narrator adds in one of his most direct critiques of Iris’s Canadian high society, each “tongueless” girl is “swollen with words she could never again pronounce” and “wrapped in veils and garlanded with flowers” so that she looks “like a pampered society bride” (29). Moreover, the King of Sakiel-Norn, much like Iris’s husband Richard, has great power over the lives of those around him. Because his position is secured through both money and the threat of violence, he can choose to “ruin” people “financially,” to sell them into “slavery,” or to “resort to torture and executions” (130). The science fiction genre thus provides Iris the leeway to address “with a fierce directness . . . the forbidden” (Broderick 74) and thus to unleash a sharp critique of the upper-class Canadian culture that has so severely constrained her life. However, given that as a woman of the upper class Iris has no legitimate access to science fiction, the science fiction stories remain the most embedded narratives within the novel and thus the most distanced from Iris as author. Newspaper Stories as Constructs The final form of narrative included within the full text of The Blind Assassin is the newspaper column. Newspaper stories appear for the most part non-chronologically with respect to one another and to the pieces of narratives beside which they are placed and with which they necessarily enter into dialogue based on proximity. The newspaper stories include both what would be considered hard news, such as an account of “the closure, strike and lockout” at Iris’s father’s button factory (122), and soft news in the form of society pages, such as reports on who attended “the season’s third charity costume ball” and what costumes they wore (273). The novel thus highlights, in Marta Dvorak’s words, “the different sub-genres of journalistic writing” (66). The inclusion of such different kinds of stories under similar official headings— which include the name of the newspaper and the full date to provide

NARRATIVE MULTIPLICITY AND THE MULTI-LAYERED SELF 101

an aura of authenticity—implicitly calls into question the objectivity and truth value of both kinds of stories. Like all the narratives contained in the novel, the newspaper stories emerge as necessarily mediated. Indeed, the novel makes clear that newspaper articles, and especially society news articles, uphold the ruling class and the societal scripts it champions. As Hilde Staels argues, the various newspaper clippings are in essence “pseudo-documents, which offer a pastiche of the style and content of various Canadian newspapers, whereby narrative is shown to be an instrument of [the] dominant ideology” (“Atwood’s Specular Narratives” 151). Indeed, while newspaper stories present themselves as objective published documents, all “ ‘documents’ are themselves texts that ‘process’ or rework ‘reality’” (LaCapra 19). Given all the details that Iris provides in her various narratives about her experiences and the people that dominate them, the newspaper stories appear anemic, devoid of any awareness about the real motives, personalities, and lives of the people they mention and quote, and sometimes these accounts are completely wrong. For example, the newspaper’s description of Laura’s “accidental death” (3) is preceded by Iris’s recollection of the “two witnesses” who reported that “Laura had turned the car sharply and deliberately, and had plunged off the bridge” (1). Because of their social prominence, the Griffens are able to make sure that suspicions of suicide are silenced in official representations of Laura’s death. Thus, as Atwood’s novel unfolds, the large gap between the information provided in the newspaper articles and that offered up by other narratives functions as a means of further legitimizing Iris’s own project to tell her life story and bring to light all that has been left out of socially sanctioned representations. Leaving a Message for Sabrina Through its complex, strategically crafted and layered narrative structure, The Blind Assassin explores both the limits and potentials of the various kinds of narratives available to tell stories. Because, when she writes “The Blind Assassin” novella, Iris is an upper-class woman bound by the gender and class rules of 1930s and 1940s Canadian society, certain narratives are off limits to her; yet, she manages to use some of these anyway by manipulating attributions of authorship. Moreover, as she approaches death near the end of the twentieth century, the sociocultural strictures that to a large extent silenced Iris during most of her life begin to fade in importance for her and instead a desire to tell her story in full erupts. By writing her life story, she seeks to assert a more fully multi-dimensional identity that includes much more than what her society has previously allowed. Telling her story functions as an act

102

MARGARET ATWOOD

of assertion and agency and as a means of making up for past “failures,” particularly in terms of her now deceased daughter Aimee and sister Laura. Indeed, Iris wishes she had “sat down with her [Aimee] and told her this story I’m now telling you [Sabrina]. But I didn’t do that. I missed the chance, and I regret it bitterly” (437). Iris’s goal in the last year of her life is not to miss that chance again and instead “to leave a message” for Sabrina “that has an effect” and “cannot be cancelled out” (420). Choosing to speak out through her writing, Iris makes use of “self-representation and its constitutive possibilities for agency and subjectivity” (Gilmore, “Autobiographics” 183). Even as Iris seeks in Sabrina “a listener . . . someone who will see” her and thus provide her with an identity of her own making, she also wants to provide for Sabrina “the story of how you [Sabrina] came to be” (521) so that Sabrina can construct her own identity—since, for both women, the production of a more liberating and multifaceted identity requires the unearthing of aspects of their lives silenced by socially sanctioned representations of them. As the novel moves towards its conclusion and as Iris begins to care less and less about what society has to say, all the various narratives with which she had so neatly separated distinct aspects of her life begin to merge. Eventually, the distinctions between the first-person-present narrative, the autobiography, the novella, and even the science fiction stories blur as echoes of key experiences in Iris’s life appear in all of them more and more recognizably. The combination of the narratives form a textual version of Iris that will survive her death and “be” the multi-layered self she can offer her granddaughter and the world.

CHAPTER 7

“If You Look Long Enough”: Photography, Memory, and Mourning in The Blind Assassin Shuli Barzilai

Phototexts Photographic ekphrasis is a recurrent feature of Margaret Atwood’s writings. In James Heffernan’s succinct definition, ekphrasis is “the verbal representation of visual representation” (3).1 The objects represented in ekphrastic writing may range from artworks (usually paintings) to utilitarian artifacts. W. J. T. Mitchell lists “[g]oblets, urns, vases, chests, cloaks . . . and statues” among the first objects of ekphrastic description (165). Since the nineteenth-century invention of photography, the object remodeled in prose has occasionally been a photograph. Atwood uses two distinct types of photographic ekphrasis in her poetry and prose fiction. Some photographs are invented and exist only through their verbal representation. Since they have no actual existence except for the words used to describe them, they belong to the category of fictional ekphrasis.2 Atwood’s well-known poem “This Is a Photograph of Me,” which opens her first collection of poetry, The Circle Game (1966), exemplifies fictional ekphrasis.3 The poem conjures up an invented and, as it turns out, impossible image: “The photograph was taken/ the day after I drowned” (11). As Peter Barry writes, the photograph “not only

104

MARGARET ATWOOD

doesn’t, but also couldn’t exist” (156). Moreover, it refuses to allow “you,” the viewer-reader invited to scan the picture, to pinpoint “me” with any certainty. The exactitude of “I am in the lake, in the center/ of the picture, just under the surface” is directly countermanded by the lines: “It is difficult to say where/ precisely, or to say/ how large or small I am” (11). The speaker seems to confirm what “you” may have suspected all along—namely, that meaning is ultimately indeterminate, that belief in the truth of an interpretation is a mirage or wishful thinking. The final lines, however, undermine the case for radical indeterminacy. In due course, with proper effort, you may get it right: “but if you look long enough,/ eventually/ you will be able to see me” (11). This eventuality, as will be seen, is relevant to Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin (2000). Unlike the open-endedness of Surfacing (1972), Bodily Harm (1981), and Alias Grace (1996), among others, The Blind Assassin holds out the possibility that the protagonist-narrator (and the reader) finally will see the truth. Other photographs have an independent existence, a “real life” apart from their verbal representation. These belong to the category of actual ekphrasis. “War Photo,” published in Atwood’s recent collection The Door (2007), exemplifies this category. The poem describes a real image, possibly a press photo; that is, although no corroborating evidence, such as an actual photograph, appears alongside “War Photo,” its content points to a referent in the outside world. The speaker anatomizes the pictorial object— “The dead woman thrown down on the dusty road/ is very beautiful./ One leg extended, the other flexed”—and then notes the aesthetic incongruity of the lifeless hand, “relaxed into a lovely gesture/ a dancer might well study for years/ and never attain” (61). The description invokes several conventions at once, including the danse macabre (dance of death) and the timeworn trope of the beautiful dead woman.4 However, the poem’s focus, as signposted by its title, lies in the devastation and futility of war: “There are other dead people scattered around/ . . . left in the wake of frightened men/ battering their way to some huge purpose/ they can’t now exactly remember” (61). Although these poems differ in type and content, both bring out the spectral dimension of photography, its ineluctable linkage to death and mourning, that is central to The Blind Assassin. This connection is not news. In Susan Sontag’s often-quoted statement, “All photographs are memento mori . . . all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” (15); in Roland Barthes’s meditation on the winter-garden photograph of his mother as a child, he recognizes that “she is going to die. . . . Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (96). By shifting the viewer from the present moment to the past, to the

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 105

“that-has-been,” the picture intimates the disappearance of its referent: “With the Photograph, we enter into flat death” (94, 92). Barthes’s allusion to the two-dimensionality of photographs, the metaphor of flat death, may be extended to the historical reality that “many people were photographed for the first time ‘in their lives’ in their coffin,” literally supine or flat on their backs; in fact, early commercial photography, as Corey Creekmur notes, was a “postmortem” and “memorial” genre that depended on “the stillness of its corpse-subjects” (74). And yet photographs and their transposition into language also constitute an act of resistance against death, against effacement and forgetting. Marianne Hirsch articulates this duality as “the photograph’s capacity to signal absence and loss and, at the same time, to make present, rebuild, reconnect, bring back to life” (243). Photography, Barthes acknowledges, “has something to do with resurrection” (82). Atwood’s “War Photo,” a dirge or elegiac song for all the casualties of war—even though the speaker is intimately, directly drawn to a particular victim, the “beautiful woman who holds me” (61)—epitomizes commemoration, signaling absence as well as resurrection, making present through photographic ekphrasis. Confronting negation, the speaker affirms, “I’ll make for you/ the only thing I can.” The closing lines figuratively merge the actual ground seen in the photo with the paper on which the poem is composed and, likewise, connect a traditional funerary gesture with the weight of that paper, or the paperweight, offered up instead of a stone: Look: on the dusty ground under my hand, on this cheap grey paper, I’m placing a small stone, here: o (61–2) The bearings of this gesture on the photographs that the narratorial “I,” appropriately named “Iris,” scrutinizes throughout The Blind Assassin emerge in what follows. For the economy of this analysis, I propose to call the verbal representation of a photograph a “phototext.” 5 My primary focus is the varied purposes of phototextuality in Atwood’s novel: how phototexts express or reinforce certain themes and issues; how they advance the plot even while seeming to retard or delay it through a series of “static” descriptions; what they reveal about the people described and the character who describes them, and other functions. Initially, however, it was the very insistence of photographs that elicited my interest: why are there so many in The Blind Assassin? Although other possible answers will

106

MARGARET ATWOOD

become evident, I want to posit here that photographs are uniquely positioned to bridge the two literary traditions that constitute the “building blocks” of this complex narrative. On the one hand, The Blind Assassin has strong generic ties to the “whodunit” or detective novel with a mystery and obscurity at its core. The story “erupts into motion,” as Earl Ingersoll writes, with its opening announcement of a fatality—a car driven by Iris’s sister plunges off a bridge and bursts into flames: “Was it a suicide or an accident? Why did it happen? Is there a culprit who triggered this apparent suicide?” (“Narrating” 543). On the other, The Blind Assassin is an elegiac memoir, an extended dirge for the long-departed, in which clarity has come to Iris in the twilight of her life. For the mystery, a resolution is required; for the elegy, remembrance and resistance against annulment.6 Photographs serve the whodunit as clues and evidence and, concurrently, serve the elegy as what Hirsch calls “media of mourning” (256). This serviceability largely accounts for the proliferation of phototexts in the novel. They are made to do a lot of work. Phototextualities in The Blind Assassin The Grandparents All of the photographs in The Blind Assassin, like the picture in “This Is a Photograph of Me,” are fictional constructs, but unlike that picture, they are presented in realistic terms. They do nothing their counterparts in reality do not do.7 Almost all of the photographs (with one notable exception examined later) appear only in the main narrative: the memoir written by Iris in her eighty-second year. Unsurprisingly, then, the people she describes have ceased to possess a three-dimensionality or life outside of their pictures. In other words, flat death prevails. Many of her phototexts involve studio portraits of family members, formally posed, and displayed in silver or gilded frames. The portrait of Adelia and Benjamin Chase, Iris’s grandparents, is emblematic of such photographs. The background and placement of the Chases indicate the studio setting in which this prosperous couple had their picture taken in the late 1800s: [I]t’s set in a silver frame, with convolvulus blossoms, and was taken soon after their wedding. In the background are a fringed velvet curtain and two ferns on stands. Grandmother Adelia reclines on a chaise, a heavy-lidded, handsome woman, in many draperies and a long string of pearls . . ., her white forearms boneless as rolled chicken. Grandfather Benjamin sits behind her in

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 107

formal kit, substantial but embarrassed, as if he’s been tarted up for the occasion. They both look corseted. (59)8 This phototext typically characterizes both the people observed, their social and material status, and the observer herself. Iris’s ironic, precise, dissecting depiction of her “corseted” grandparents conveys her late-twentieth-century distance from the time and place they once inhabited. “The signifying system of photography,” as Victor Burgin writes, “at once depicts a scene and the gaze of the spectator, an object and a viewing subject” (146). The more than a dozen other phototexts in The Blind Assassin, like Iris’s verbal picture of her grandparents’ “real” picture, have complex narrative functions. In addition to their implication of character-traits and their commemorative role—a reconstruction of the past in general and a family history in particular—these ekphrastic moments often provide an occasion for ideological critique. The target is a culture of consumption, of pretension and ostentation: all the pomp and circumstance accompanying the relatively recent fortune amassed by Benjamin Chase. Thus, directly after describing her grandparents’ portrait, Iris lists the food offered during the twelve-course dinners at Avilion (“a merchant’s palace” [58]) and the dignitaries who came to visit: Consommé, rissoles, timbales, the fish, the roast, the cheese, the fruit, hothouse grapes draped over the etched-glass epergne. Railway-hotel food, I think of it now; ocean-liner food. Prime ministers came to Port Ticonderoga . . . and Avilion was where they stayed. There were photographs of Grandfather Benjamin with three prime ministers in turn, framed in gold and hung in the library—Sir John Sparrow Thompson, Sir Mackenzie Bowell, Sir Charles Tupper. They must have preferred the food there to anything else on offer. (60) The boundaries between actual and fictional photographic ekphrasis break down in this passage, for the notables successively named were, in fact, the fourth, fifth, and sixth prime ministers of Canada.9 By inserting a hybrid ekphrastic description of trophy photographs into Iris’s satiric account of the elaborate food eaten at Avilion during its heyday, Atwood also pointedly conflates consumption, in the literal sense, with conspicuous and crass display. Nevertheless, while destabilizing some conventional borders, Atwood maintains others. The specification of Iris’s temporal position (as in “I think of it now”) clearly demarcates two perspectives: the one belongs to the past, to the way she was, and the other to the present in which she composes her memoir.

108

MARGARET ATWOOD

This split subjectivity marks many of Iris’s phototexts. She thus recalls her former self, at age sixteen, idealizing the grandmother whose death in 1913 preceded her own birth by three years. Several glamorous portraits of Adelia in the library elicited her romantic veneration. Probably chosen by Adelia herself, these images included “gilt-framed black-and-white photographs, showing her in picture hats, or with ostrich feathers, or in evening gowns with tiaras and white kid gloves, alone or with various now-forgotten dignitaries” (168). By contrast, for the eighty-two-year-old memoirist, the same photographs denote her grandmother’s conspicuous (self-)exhibition, her display of wealth and influence precariously poised at the verge of vulgarity. It is an irony currently savored by Iris that when Adelia Montfort, daughter of an established but insolvent Montreal family, married Benjamin Chase and his “crude money, button money,” it was expected of her “to refine this money, like oil” (59). In effect, Adelia did exactly what was wanted in her time. But Iris, even as she retrieves the past, no longer yearns for Avilion: “Ambition’s mausoleum, I think of it now” (58). Along with Iris’s critique of the social milieu into which she was born in these passages, the photographs of Adelia have another implicit function. They serve not only to illustrate and comment on bygone days of dynastic glory—for the fall of the house of Chase repeats the Montfort family history—but also to provide an explanatory precedent for the importance that things, particularly fashionable clothing, acquired for Iris. Growing up in a material world, surrounded by images of a role model clad in gowns and crowned by tiaras, she became a material girl.10 Gilt-framed photographs partly motivate Iris’s decision, at age eighteen, to do as Adelia did before her and accept the proposal of a recently rich older man. “Well, you’ll have nice clothes,” her sister Laura says, after failing to persuade Iris to cancel the wedding. “I could have hit her. It was, of course, my secret consolation,” Iris remembers (237). The name of Iris’s bridegroom, Richard Griffen, is telling. Both “Rich-” and “Griffen” seem intended to signify his appeal to the impoverished Iris and, most decisively, to her father, who urges the match in an attempt to save his factories and workers. The legendary griffen (also spelled griffin, gryphon or griffon) is known for guarding treasure. More pertinent here, however, the creature is often represented as a monster and, at times, equated with evil or Satan himself.11 Two Sisters Throughout The Blind Assassin, at its various levels of narration, Atwood holds up to critical inspection the strict codes of conduct, the disciplinary and sacrificial practices, and the male-privileged systems that govern the lives of girls and women. Photographic ekphrasis

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 109

serves to transpose this critique into narrative fiction. Thus, as Iris re-views a studio portrait of Laura and herself taken in 1929—that is, four years after the death of Liliana, their careworn mother12— she dwells in detail on the girls, ages thirteen and nine, captured by the camera’s gaze: I am wearing the regulation dark velvet dress, a style too young for me. . . . Laura sits beside me, in an identical dress. We both have white knee socks, patent-leather Mary Janes; our legs are crossed decorously at the ankle, right over left, as instructed. I have my arm around Laura, but tentatively, as if ordered to place it there. Laura on her part has her hands folded in her lap. Each of us has her light hair . . . pulled back tightly from her face. Both of us are smiling, in that apprehensive way children have when told they must be good and smile . . .; it’s a smile imposed by the threat of disapproval. The threat and the disapproval would have been Father’s. (159–60) Everything about this passage denotes the symbolic paternal order that keeps the sisters in place. However unique and privileged in their upbringing, they are typically “instructed,” “ordered,” “folded,” and “pulled back.” Father’s presence hovers over all, invisibly but palpably beyond the picture frame. He is both the biological Father and the symbolic Father, the locus of agency and control, whose censure they greatly fear “but [do] not know how to avoid,” because they are always found lacking and held accountable for something—mainly, for not being sons (160). If we step back for a moment to survey the picture gallery assembled thus far, a motivational network may be discerned among the images. To the extent that the enigma of “who killed Laura Chase?” or “what caused her fatal crash?” structures her retrospective narrative, Iris looks back to this photograph and others for clues with which to address her riddling question. Iris’s position vis à vis this death is, to say the least, complex: she is not only the sole surviving witness and investigating judge but also an accused party and principal defendant. For over fifty years, she has retained the memory of words exchanged and avowals made, swiftly followed by news of her sister’s officially-declared “accidental death” (3). In other words, Iris has been privately on trial for most of her life and repeatedly returned a verdict of guilty. Now in 1998, although her voice is restrained, almost reportorial, as she describes the 1929 portrait, Iris seems to allow herself a measure of sympathy and perhaps even pity for that intimidated, constricted, and wing-clipped version of her girlhood self.

110

MARGARET ATWOOD

It is another photograph, taken several years later yet invoked earlier in the memoir, which encapsulates the motif of female regulation and oppression, while advancing the “retrial” of Iris. On this occasion, the image re-viewed both records a segment of past time and has a history of its own. Ostensibly a formal portrait of Laura dating from the 1930s, it was featured on a book cover in 1947 and, after many printings, reappears as a press photo in the spring of 1998. But since Iris chose the photograph of the book’s author, and since the young woman in the picture is unnamed throughout its detailed description, an ambiguity accrues to this ekphrastic passage: who is the object of the viewer’s gaze—Laura or Iris? That is, whose photograph did Iris give the publisher so long ago? And even if it was Laura’s then, which sister is she describing now? Alternatively, rather than an exposition of either one or the other, Iris’s phototext may be read as a kind of double exposure, as a portrait of her sister and herself that encompasses, at a certain point, an entire generation of young women. I quote the passage at length, however, mainly because it contains clues to a family secret: There was a picture of her in the local paper last week . . . the one from the book jacket, the only one that ever got printed because it’s the only one I gave them. It’s a studio portrait, the upper body turned away from the photographer, then the head turned back to give a graceful curve to the neck. A little more, now look up, toward me, that’s my girl, now let’s see that smile. Her long hair is blonde, as mine was then. . . . A tinge of stubbornness in the jaw, but you wouldn’t see it unless you knew. No makeup to speak of, which gives the face an oddly naked appearance: when you look at the mouth, you’re aware that you’re looking at flesh. Pretty; beautiful even; touchingly untouched. An advertisement for soap, all natural ingredients. The face looks deaf: it has that vacant, posed imperviousness of all well-brought-up girls of the time. A tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on. (45–6) Accentuated by italic letters, the voice of the photographer who issues orders is assuredly gendered masculine. As Iris recollects, the object of his instructions and, more broadly, of the discursive ordinances of the symbolic Father was obedient and accommodating. Even her fair-haired beauty—and Iris’s turn of phrase, “blonde, as mine was then,” may reflect (on) not only her sister but also her former self—complied with occidental standards. But the Chase sisters’ pale hair, which looked “as if the red undertones . . . the iron, the copper, all the hard metals” had been

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 111

eliminated (46), is not the only family resemblance brought out in this passage. Quite different and, in some respects, opposite in character, Laura and Iris share more than a “tinge” or trace of stubbornness. While appearing as if the “hard metals” have been washed out of them, they possess an obduracy, a strength of mind and will, which is utterly belied (as some discover, to their cost) by their downy, soft appearance. In a later instance, Iris has recourse to an imaginary photograph in order to represent the discrepancy: “As usual, I was struck by the relationship between her surroundings . . . and Laura herself. A photograph would have revealed only harmony. Yet to me the incongruity was intense, almost surreal. Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown. I say flint, not stone: a flint has a heart of fire” (427). Iris’s metaphors for Laura are again suggestively self-reflexive, for her emphasis on “flint,” in conjunction with “a heart of fire,” points to the passions ignited—and not just in Laura—by the man named Alex Thomas. It is a general rule of narrative fictions in which a crime or mystery plays a major role that they necessitate a distinction between first- and second-time readings. The Blind Assassin is no exception. If Iris’s representation of the studio portrait/book jacket/press photo seems complicated on a first reading, it becomes even more fraught with implications on subsequent readings. The returning reader thus finds herself in a position analogous to that of Iris. Like the novel’s private eye, the reader reexamines the evidence and, while not annulling previous conclusions, arrives at a better understanding of the case. For instance, the “oddly naked” aspect of the face, augmented by the wordplay of “touchingly untouched,” at first conveys an image of unravished beauty, pristine and clean, as in a soap commercial. On a second reading, however, the overall portrayal, and the mouth in particular, bring to mind what happened next. Although this photograph appears to date from the time before the systematic, brutal raping of Laura began, Iris sees now what she did not (or chose not to) see then. Thus the look of “posed imperviousness” noted in Iris’s phototext becomes rife with inferences and ironies. The “naked” face without makeup may have already been a mask, the “untouched” beauty already sullied, violated by Richard Griffen, the predator who presented himself as a solicitous protector. In short, the photograph may date from after Iris’s wedding. If so, then each sister had reasons to adopt, assume, or feign a closed-off attitude toward her surroundings. Each one had reasons to display a kind of deafness, of impermeability, which was also dumb, in the dual sense of unspeaking and unwise. Just as Laura could not tell, that is, reveal the secret of her sexual abuse, so Iris could not tell,

112

MARGARET ATWOOD

that is, recognize her sister’s secret. Nor could she reveal the agonies of her abusive marriage. Her memoir is a belated telling of their stories. And so I would formulate the closing irony of this ekphrastic episode as follows: Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl who, like all wellinstructed girls, waited to be written on and, then, indeed was written many times over: by the father who signed her away to a Griffen; by the husband who bruised her body-soul in many dark ways; by the lover who inscribed her in his sci-fi fantasies even while giving her great pleasure and grief. Now she holds the pen and pins them down one-by-one. The occasion on which Iris compares her sister/her self to a “tabula rasa” is not just revoked but reversed on second reading. Three Brothers To recapitulate, in the present time of telling, Iris is disabused and Laura is dead. But by whose hand? Neither Iris nor Richard alone did it. For a more informed answer, it is therefore necessary to look at additional pictures. World War I, also known as the Great War, is the theme of three photographs taken in 1914, 1918, and 1928. The Chase family tragedy in the first half of the twentieth century converges with other tragic events on the global stage. When the war begins in August 1914, shortly after Iris’s parents marry, Benjamin Chase’s sons enlist unhesitatingly: “There’s a photo of them, a fine trio in their uniforms, with grave, naive foreheads, . . . their smiles nonchalant, their eyes resolute, posing as the soldiers they had not yet become. Father is the tallest.” Then Iris adds, “He always kept this photo on his desk” (70). Her postscript marks a shift from ekphrastic representation to elegiac remembrance. The portrait of three brothers became a memento mori sooner than most family photographs acquire that inescapable function. In June 1916, one brother is killed at the Ypres Salient and, in July, the other dies at the Somme. In August 1916, Benjamin suffers “a devastating stroke,” affecting his speech and memory, and his life of profit-making triumph ends with inconsolable loss (73). Iris is born a scant few weeks before her uncles are killed in battle. As supported by the silent testimony of other photos, she and Laura, born three years later, bear the stamp of these events for the duration of their lives. Norval Chase, unlike his brothers, returns home from the front, with “one good eye and one good leg” and a ravaged face, “gaunt, seamed, fanatical.” Iris describes her parents’ reunion on a railway platform as

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 113

celebrated by a newspaper photo whose caption declares: “Chase Heir Hero Returns” (76). While a brass band plays on and a camera flashes, two strangers meet and awkwardly embrace. Iris closely studies the picture for what it presages about the divisions that will henceforth separate her parents under one roof and mold the destinies of their daughters. The 1914 portrait of three gallant soldiers functions as the ghostly other scene of the 1918 press shot: “He’s in his uniform; his medals are like holes shot in the cloth, through which the dull gleam of his real, metal body can be seen. Beside him, invisible, are his brothers— the two lost boys, the ones he feels he has lost.” Her mother, smiling “tremulously,” wears her best dress and a fresh ribbon in her hat to meet the occasion (76). But as the candid camera reveals, the deferential young man she knew and the sweet young woman he knew have vanished without a trace. The war years have irreversibly transformed this couple, still in their twenties, who can no longer reach out to each other and love as they once loved: “It was as if they’d drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house” (78). No deus ex machina ever lifts the bad spell that settles on the house of Chase after the Great War. The last of the photographs related to World War I is the first presented in the memoir. In the summer of 1998, Iris walks through the Button Factory—the Chase family factory that has been converted into a shopping center—and looks at blown-up photos from the town archives that decorate the brick walls. After giving a cursory glance at her top-hatted, frock-coated grandfather, “waiting with a clutch of similarly glossy dignitaries to welcome the Duke of York” in 1901, she pauses before a photograph of her father at the dedication of the town’s War Memorial (51). Among the several photographs she mentions, this is the only one not assigned a specific year. Later, however, Iris will elaborate on the dedication ceremony and mark the date: “The memorial was unveiled in the November of 1928, on Remembrance Day” (148). Accordingly, the unveiling took place three years after her mother died in trying to give her husband the male heir he so desired, ten years after her father’s return from the war, and twelve years after her uncles died in battle and her grandfather, of grief. Nevertheless, as rendered during Iris’s Button Factory excursion, the photograph is dateless: Then my father with a wreath . . . a tall man, solemn-faced, with a moustache and an eye-patch; up close, a collection of black dots. I back away from him to see if he’ll come into focus—I try to catch his good eye—but he’s not looking at me; he’s looking towards the horizon . . . his shoulders back, as if he’s facing a firing squad. (51)

114

MARGARET ATWOOD

The ex-temporal dimension of this phototext emblematizes the permanently war-cast place of the father. Always holding a wreath, and always grieving for the spectral boys beside him, he lives in guilt for those whom he allegedly lost. Hence his daughter interpolates a firing squad into the picture. The Weary Soldier atop the War Memorial, which he commissioned despite the protests of the townspeople who found the figure “too dejected-looking” and “too slovenly,” denotes him truly. “Father refused to back down on the sculpture,” as Iris recalls, “saying they could consider themselves lucky the Weary Soldier had two arms and two legs,” because had he insisted on “bare-naked” realism, the statue would have shown “rotting body fragments, of which he stepped on a good many in his day” (148). While Iris clearly admires the unyielding honesty of her father, her phototext mirrors more than his general way of being in a postwar world. She tries to catch his good eye, but he does not see her; he sees many things, but not those closest to him. This disability may be counted among the factors leading to the closure with which the novel opens: “Laura drove a car off a bridge” (1). If it is accurate to rephrase this statement as “Laura was driven off a bridge,” and Iris seems to think so, then the father may be lined up with the other suspects. Put another way, Norval Chase is a strong candidate for nomination as the blind assassin. Ironically, self-condemned for having survived his brothers at arms, he is genuinely accountable for the sacrifice of his wife and daughters. He mourns for the dead but does not care for or look after the living. Nonetheless, I suggest that Iris’s retrospective observation about her parents’ estrangement, as prefigured in the 1918 press photo, is also relevant to the wreath-bearing figure in the 1928 archival photo described at present: “there was nobody to blame, or nobody you could put your finger on. The war was not a person. Why blame a hurricane?” (76). So who killed Laura Chase? Another viable answer is: the war did it. Bride and Groom Most of the photographs in The Blind Assassin represent what Tamar Yacobi identifies as the “one-to-one relation” of ekphrasis: one picture source is rendered in words on one occasion (24). The war photos just discussed belong to this type. The only photo classifiable in the “one-to-many” category listed in Yacobi’s table of ekphrastic relations is a picture taken at a picnic (25). It is reset within a verbal frame on multiple occasions. But before looking closely at the picnic photo, I would add another type to the list: the one-to-two relation. In several instances in The Blind Assassin, a single photograph receives two renditions in prose.13

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 115

The year is 1934. Shortly after the sisters meet Alex Thomas at the “Chase and Sons Labour Day Celebration,” commonly known as the Button Factory picnic, Laura decides to learn how to hand-tint photographs from Elwood Murray, the town’s reporter and photographer (170). Hand-tinting is the technique of embellishing black-and-white prints by the addition of colors.14 “Enhance Your Memories” reads the advertisement in Elwood’s newspaper office window (193). Some memories indeed undergo enhancement after Laura begins to practice hand-tinting at home. In the Avilion library, for instance, she reworks the portraits of Benjamin Chase with three prime ministers, turning one prime minister’s face a “delicate mauve,” the second a “bilious green,” and the third a “pale orange.” Iris, appalled, protests to Laura: “Father will be livid,” and furthermore, “They look bizarre. . . . Nobody’s face is green! Or mauve.” Laura claims fidelity to another kind of verisimilitude. “It’s the colours of their souls. . . . It’s the colours they ought to have been,” she explains (194). Making the latent manifest, Laura allows the unseen to be seen. When Iris catches her in the act, she is handtinting the portrait of them in velvet dresses previously described. “Why am I blue?” Iris asks. “Because you’re asleep,” Laura answers (195). In the intricate mind-scheme of this narrative, intratextuality supplements intertextuality. The motif of “Sleeping Beauty” occurs earlier when Iris records an episode dating, like the sisters’ portrait, from 1929. Using a “cheap” ballpoint pen, she recollects at age eightytwo the “sleek” fountain pen she received at age thirteen, a pen borrowed without permission and then broken by Laura: “I forgave her, of course. . . . I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue” (42–3). Thorny brambles surround the enchanted castle in which Beauty sleeps for one hundred years until her Prince arrives. The allusion becomes explicit when Iris recounts how their nasty tutor, Mr. Erskine, used to shake Laura while yelling, “You’re not the Sleeping Beauty.” Laura had developed by then a near-paranormal ability to “subtract herself,” effectively dismissing or negating people, “as if she’d waved an invisible wand” (164). A sad irony of Iris’s history is that, in retrospect, Mr. Erskine’s shrill objection proved correct. Laura was not the Sleeping Beauty. Iris, for many years, was the blue girl in the picture. Hand-tinting people in their true colors is Laura’s version of the “bare-naked” realism that distinguishes the Weary Soldier from other memorial art. Seeing beyond or through the persona, the public façade, Laura conveys her uncanny vision of soul-scapes. Her revisions not only express a receptivity to what is unseen by others but also constitute a form of resistance and subversive activism within the rigid sociocultural parameters of the 1930s. However, when she alters two of Iris’s

116

MARGARET ATWOOD

wedding album pictures in 1935, hand-tinting takes on further crucial roles. Iris describes these prints before and after her sister applies paint to them (239–40 and 451). Due to the fragmented temporality of her memoir, the description of her altered wedding photos has triply overlapping or convergent layers of meaning. All at once Iris is constrained to remember how they served first as a revealing but unheeded message from Laura after the marriage; and then as self-incriminating evidence after her sister’s death a decade later; and lastly as more comprehensive evidence pointing at diverse factors when she reopens the case over fifty years later. It is the story encrypted in these photographs that most directly concerns the riddle of Laura and its eventual resolution. Summarily retold: just as the mythic Philomela is left speechless after she is raped and has her tongue cut out by her brother-in-law, so Laura cannot speak about her sexual abuse at the hands of Richard. Likewise, just as Philomela weaves a tell-tale tapestry, so Laura hand-tints two pictures to tell the tale in her stead. However, unlike Procne—wife of Tereus and, above all, sister of Philomela—who immediately understands the coded message, Iris is unable to decipher the signals she finds prior to the car crash until after it is too late to change Laura’s fatal course. In the first picture, a group portrait of the wedding party, Laura obliterates all the people with a coat of indigo, except for the groom and his sister colored “lurid green,” the bride washed over in “aqua blue,” and Laura herself completely covered in “brilliant yellow . . . like a glass lamp” (451). But the radiance emanating from Laura is not bright (or glaring) enough, initially at least, to awaken Iris. In generic terms, it is as if the sisters dwell in different stories, for a time. Whereas Laura finds herself cast into a Greek tragedy, Iris makes believe, for as long as she can, that she is a fairy-tale heroine, certain to be rescued at the happy end. The other picture, a portrait of bride and groom before a church, is more explicit. Richard’s handsome features are nearly effaced with dark grey paint, while his hands are painted red, like the flames shooting up “from around and somehow from inside the head.” Laura does not bother to change her sister’s bridal finery: “She’d dealt with my face, however—bleached it so that the eyes and the nose and the mouth looked fogged over.” The perspectives of Iris, past and present, coalesce as she represents the newlyweds against a blacked-out background, “as if in mid-air, in the deepest and darkest of nights” (451). The writing was on the wall, as they say, but Iris was tragically eyeless in relation to what she saw. Had she read aright then, had she looked long and close

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 117

enough, the loss of Laura would not have haunted her for years and years. In Iris’s present state of clarity, however, the re-transcription of these mute yet telling images is not just a repetition or compulsion to return to scenes from the dark past, nor is it merely part of the general mea culpa or confessional impulse that drives her narrative. Rather, the confrontation with the wedding pictures embroidered, as it were, by her violated sister may also be read, in the psychoanalytic sense, as part of a working-through. As Freud observes, only by the “awakening of the memories,” and by “living them through,” can great changes be effected in mental processes and, in some cases, can self-reconciliation and self-tolerance be achieved (Standard Edition 12: 154–6). The Lover No gilded or silver borders ever delimit the Button Factory picnic photo. In the fictional world, it remains factually unframed. Its borderless state is appropriate for several reasons: because of the photo’s inaugural appearance as a press shot in Elwood’s account of the picnic (“The caption was, ‘Miss Chase and Miss Laura Chase Entertain an Out-of-Town-Visitor’” [192]); because of its next public appearance in the post office and elsewhere around town, with the Misses Chase cut out (“the police had printed a Wanted poster of Alex” [215]); and diversely, because it is the only picture not restricted to the main story. Moving between narrative levels, it recurs in both Iris’s memoir and the romance novel “The Blind Assassin. By Laura Chase,” episodically inserted into the memoir (4). These are just preliminary complications. On one level, the frameless photo itself provides a frame for “The Blind Assassin.” The prologue of the novel-within-the-novel represents the photo in great detail, while the epilogue reiterates parts of this description but also elaborates on it (4–5; 517–18). On the level “above” or “superior” to the embedded story, Iris evokes the picnic photo on several occasions, contextualizing the moment of its production and afterlife in her own story. The only narrative level at which it has no existence is the third: the science-fiction story told by an unnamed lover in “The Blind Assassin” in order to seduce and hold in thrall a beautiful, blonde, unhappily married woman.15 But although it is absent from the novel-within-the-novel-within-the-novel, this photo is constantly reworked in the stories in which it does appear. Iris’s numerous phototexts constitute an integral part of the familial and social contexts that frame the instant when Elwood’s camera flashes and records the triangulated constellation of Iris-Alex-Laura (177). Through such contextualization in the memoir (and in the preceding

118

MARGARET ATWOOD

sections of my discussion), the picnic photo is circumscribed or, figuratively speaking, framed. In turn, the picture and the memories it preserves give a decisive orientation to the lives of the young people caught by the camera and, consequently, to the lives of others left outside the visual image. Unframed, framing, and framed in these various ways, it encapsulates the structural and relational complexities of The Blind Assassin. Additional factors contribute to the singularity of this image. Of all the photographs represented, it is the only one to undergo repeated metamorphoses. The unaltered image appears just once, after Labor Day 1934, in the Herald and Banner: “the picture was of Alex Thomas, with the two of us—me to the left of him, Laura to the right, like bookends. Both of us were looking at him and smiling.” Alex, smiling too, shields his face from the camera with one hand: “He’d only managed to blot out half of his face, however” (192). As a labor-union organizer during a highly conservative capitalist era in Canada, Alex has good reason to ward off the flash of Elwood’s intrusive camera. When reprinted as a Wanted poster, the “bookends” at Alex’s sides are cropped. “Luckily it wasn’t a very clear picture of him,” Iris observes (215). His precaution makes it easier for him to avoid arrest when suspected of complicity in a labor strike that causes rioting in the town, arson at the Button Factory, and the death of a night watchman on the factory grounds. Thus transformed from a threesome under a fruit tree into a mug shot used by the police, the photograph undergoes further changes. Laura converts it into the equal but different images of an Edenic couple that become the treasured possession of each sister: namely, a picture of Alex Thomas “with [one] of us” at his side. Although absent-minded, idealistic and, in certain respects, even autistic in her behavior, Laura has a stunningly focused and go-getting side to her. It would never occur to the more cautious (albeit no less love-struck) Iris to seek out Elwood after the picnic, insinuate herself into his good graces, learn to operate independently in his darkroom, and steal the negative after making two prints of it. Echoing the audible-absent voice of her sister, Iris now upholds Laura’s actions: “Elwood had stolen the picture in the first place by not asking permission of us, and she was only taking away from him something that had never really belonged to him anyway” (195). Laura does not immediately share her spoils, the purloined prints, with Iris. Perhaps she originally meant to keep them for herself, a souvenir and a spare. Be that as it may, during the manhunt for Alex, Laura tries to hide and care for him at Avilion on her own, “living on her nerves,” until Iris finds out. She helps to conceal him and thereby eases

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 119

the “immense weight” on Laura: “Was it my belief that I was doing this only to spare her . . . to take care of her, as I had always done? Yes. That is what I did believe” (211). Her soul-seeing sister already knows better. Accordingly, a week after Alex departs, and there is no reason to believe they will see him again, Laura presents one of the prints to Iris, saying simply, “Because that’s what you want to remember.” Iris, taken aback, instantly perceives that Laura has cut herself out of the picture. Her hand alone remains at the edge, for it could not be eliminated “without making a wobbly margin” in pre-digital days. Although Laura leaves the couple uncolored, she tints her hand, the irremovable mark of her presence, a pale yellow: “The sight of Laura’s light-yellow hand, creeping towards Alex across the grass like an incandescent crab, gave me a chill down the back of my spine” (220). Only then, or also now? The ambiguity of such ekphrastic moments derives from Iris’s composite perspectives. Both in the story and beyond it, she relives the past with the merciless lucidity of hindsight and the resounding decibels of words once spoken but unheard. Iris now sees and hears all too well what Laura was saying through the “mutilated” picture: “I have another one, for me.” “And I’m not in yours?” “No,” she said. “You’re not. None of you but your hand.” This was the closest she ever came . . . to a confession of love for Alex Thomas. Except for the day before her death, that is. Not that she used the word love, even then. (220) In Atwood’s variation on the eternal triangle, the passion of two sisters for one man, the man precisely between them in the picture, unalterably conjoins and disjoins them. Even in this cropped version, something is always there to remind the one of the other. The photo turns up twice more in Iris’s increasingly bleak memoir: when Laura briefly mentions it—“Do you still have your picture?” (393)—after Iris returns from her honeymoon in 1935, and when Iris opens the notebook labeled History from their schooldays and discovers the picture of Laura and Alex, without Iris, on the day of her sister’s death in 1945. I want first to pause over this last phototext in the memoir. More straightforward than Laura’s elliptic reference, the description of how she altered her copy helps to situate her question. In Laura’s print, Iris sees an asymmetrical reflection of her own. “History was blank,” she recalls, “except for the photograph Laura had glued into it—herself and Alex Thomas.” The cut-off hand is painted the color of the blue-souled sister whose eyes stayed shut until a car

120

MARGARET ATWOOD

crash awoke her. More pointedly, Alex and Laura are united by an aura of incandescence: “both of them now coloured light yellow” (500). Whether Laura tinted the figures then, in the mid-1930s, or “now,” just before her death a decade later, remains an open question. But the image is unequivocally “a confession of love,” a revelation of what Iris had ignored for years. Moreover, together with other signs interwoven into the notebooks, it reveals that Laura’s passion was never consummated. As the other-worldly radiance emanating from the couple in her cherished icon bears witness: “Alex belonged, for Laura, in another dimension of space” (500). Corroboration, and the starkest revelation of all, appears in the notebook labeled Mathematics. The words opposite a long column of dates disclose the abortion that Laura, at age fifteen or sixteen, was made to undergo. The father was not the man whom Iris jealously suspected, “Not ever Alex,” but rather the man to whom she was (l)awfully married: “How could I have been so blind?” (500). Richard began trying to force himself on Laura soon after the honeymoon: “The first date coincided with my return from Europe.” Laura resisted, fought him off time after time, as her coded lists divulge: “Avilion, no. No. No. . . . New York, no.” However, Laura had reason to fear that if she spoke out, she would not be believed, exactly as Iris had not believed her when their pedophilic tutor, a precursor of Richard, subjected Laura to his perverse attentions years earlier. Thus Richard was finally able to find a hook, a way into Laura, via Alex. She became convinced that Alex’s fate was in her, that is to say, in Richard’s, hands. As she tells the uncomprehending Iris on May 17, 1945, the day before her death, “It was horrible, but I had to do it. I had to make the sacrifice. . . . That’s what I promised God. I knew if I did that, it would save Alex” (487). Laura made an unholy bargain in the name of her holy cause. Mathematics records the recurrence of her “sacrifice” with the mark X opposite the dates. Returning to Laura’s question in context, “Do you still have your picture?” is directly preceded by another critical question whose implications become evident only on second reading: “You never really believed me, about Mr. Erskine. . . . Did you?” Iris realizes, too late, “I should have lied outright.” In the later stages of Iris’s story, the phrase “should have” relentlessly returns as an expression of moral obligation or necessity. At the time, however, instead of affirming her faith in Laura’s schoolroom abuse, even if she had her doubts, she equivocates: “I didn’t like him. He was horrible” (393). Sidestepping this question is a fatal misstep. Iris bungles her last chance to listen and forestall the ensuing events, for the conversation takes place at a turning point; as Laura’s notebook reveals, it occurs just before this special “project of Richard’s” succeeds (394). Taken together, Laura’s two

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 121

questions belatedly address a third: the question of why she capitulated to her sister’s monster-groom. Still blind to what she knows, still unknowing of what she sees, Iris fails to recognize the ethical necessity of lying once more. Laura comes back to Toronto after many years’ absence, in mid-May of 1945, because World War II has ended. She truly believes with “infuriating iron-clad confidence,” from Iris’s viewpoint, that Alex will return for her. “The only address he’ll have for me is yours,” Laura explains at the café ever so ironically named “Diana’s Sweets,” where the sisters meet for the last time (487). Iris has her scars, her open wounds, but they do not exculpate her from the three blows she delivers in quick succession: “I should have bitten my tongue . . . I should have kept my mouth shut. Out of love I should have lied.” First, she informs Laura that Alex was killed six months before the war ended, and next, that she received the army telegram because he had listed her as next of kin. “Even then I could have changed course,” Iris is compelled to remember, for she could have, should have said that the telegram was misdirected and meant for her sister, but instead she confers the coup de grâce: “we’d been lovers, you see—in secret, for quite a long time—and who else did he have?” (488). Laura quickly leans over the table, takes Iris’s purse with the car keys, and drives off a bridge the next day. The rest is represented in History. In Memoriam: “He” and “She” The picnic photo, as already noted, frames “The Blind Assassin” from start to finish: “She has a single photograph of him. . . . The photo is of the two of them together, her and this man, on a picnic. Picnic is written on the back . . . just picnic. She knows the names, she doesn’t need to write them down” (4; 517). The referents of “she” and “he,” the illicit lovers, are omitted throughout the embedded novel. Perhaps not since Surfacing has Atwood deployed pronouns with such suggestive deliberation in her fiction.16 Moreover, despite the photo’s comprehensive description, its coloration remains unmarked: what colors tint the lone hand and the couple on the grass? In sum, whose photo is it? “She” doesn’t say. Nevertheless, because the titular heading of the romance identifies Laura Chase as its author, and because of the abrupt shift from the homo-intradiegetic (or first-person) narration of “my sister drove off a bridge” in the memoir’s first pages to the hetero-extradiegetic (or omniscient) narration of “she has a single photograph of him,” the reader may plausibly assume that the couple in the picnic photo is as radiant as a holy relic. The hand, then, must be tinted blue. The ambiguity

122

MARGARET ATWOOD

surrounding this text seems not to involve the identity of “she” and “he” but, rather, its truth status: is the novel-within-the-novel the actual or fantasized account of Laura’s passionate affair with Alex? At the close of The Blind Assassin, this question is resolved—if an answer that ultimately determines neither this nor that may be deemed a resolution. “Laura didn’t write a word of it,” Iris initially discloses. She composed it herself during the lonely evenings while she waited for Alex’s return and, subsequently, when she learned he was not coming back: “I wanted a memorial. That was how it began. For Alex, but also for myself ” (512). Her motive for writing, however, evolved beyond the wish to commemorate her lost lover and, by attributing authorship to Laura, the sister she had lost. The book also (and maybe more so) became an act of revenge directed against her abusive, perfidious, and perverted husband. Iris’s private war memorial included a remembrance of wounds not merely “endured” but “resented”: “Without memory, there can be no revenge” (508). Hence the novel is published in the name of, and for the sake of, Laura Chase. Procne-like but very clever, Iris serves up a small book to her husband. The torrid affair described in its scandalous, best-selling pages effectively destroys his precious political career as well as his delusory, ego-maniacal belief in his sexual attractiveness to Laura. Richard and Iris have one last phone clash after his forced retirement from politics. When Richard adamantly rejects the option that “Laura wrote . . . that piece of garbage,” Iris provides a complementary offering: “You can’t face the possibility that all the time you were having your squalid little fling with her, she must have been in and out of bed with another man.” For a just desert, she puts in, “one she loved, unlike you” (510). This time around, Iris knows what she is doing when she delivers a mortal blow. Richard apparently commits suicide aboard the boat where he first raped his wife’s sister (“Water Nixie, X.” as documented in Mathematics) and is found with the book at his elbow (500, 511). So the reader may presume to know the color of the cut-off hand in the embedded novel. Since in the fictional world Iris is the real author of “The Blind Assassin,” she represents her copy of the picnic photo. In brief, the hand must be yellow. But Iris has had both copies in her keeping from Laura’s death in May 1945 until her own death is announced by the Herald and Banner in May 1999: “IRIS CHASE GRIFFEN, A MEMORABLE LADY” (519). Moreover, although in the strict sense Iris wrote the love story resurrected within her posthumous memoir, in “the spiritual sense,” as Laura would have said, the story was a collaborative enterprise (512).

PHOTOGRAPHY, MEMORY, AND MOURNING 123

“Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together,” Iris ultimately discloses. That is why the lovers’ names and the colors of the picnic photo are unspecified. That is also why the girl pictured on the book jacket is Laura and (or) Iris: “The real author was neither one of us” (513). This declaration may be read as a straightforward reassertion—“We wrote the book together”; however, it may also be read otherwise—“Neither one of us authored this story.” Without exonerating herself or pleading not guilty, Iris’s elegiac memoir records her gradual recognition that multiple familial, societal, and historical circumstances engendered the moment her sister died in flames. Perhaps there is only cold comfort in being able to say, “They did it, too. It wasn’t only me.” But it is true to the narrative, and to the protagonist’s progress, to conclude that there were many murderers of Laura Chase. May both sisters rest in peace.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 8

Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake Shannon Hengen

The odd conflation of terms in my analysis of Margaret Atwood’s notion of moral and environmental debt points toward the peculiarity of the voice that I discern in her recent work, a voice that resembles what might emerge from a document produced by a group of thinkers from the disciplines of biology, economics, religious studies, and literature. The addition of thought from the discipline of religious studies represents the greatest peculiarity, and the greatest contribution, of her recent work. To have a concept of moral and environmental debt, humankind must have a sense of responsible behaviour, a sense that acknowledges and accepts our dependence upon one another—our vulnerability— and the interconnection of ourselves with nature. But where does such acknowledgement arise from? Where is the discourse in our current affluent culture that articulates such responsibility? Atwood looks for it in ancient, enduring spiritual belief. The nearly insurmountable debt to nature that humankind has accumulated through rampant greed can perhaps be repaid if we return to and renew a durable moral code. In her recent work, especially Oryx and Crake and its companion novel The Year of the Flood,1 Atwood points towards a notion of God as humankind’s essential reason for pursuing the good, the true, and the just. God has come to represent, for her, the core of meaning itself. Describing in an interview on Oryx and Crake the “God-stuff ” that comprises the universe, she comments that because “each new combination of atoms, molecules, amino acids, and DNA is a different expression of ‘God,’ ” each extinction of a species means that “ ‘God’ has become more limited” (Reading group). But as is clear in Oryx and Crake, while

130

MARGARET ATWOOD

Jimmy, the protagonist, values and knows many words, he has no words for God, truth, goodness, or justice. Instead, he devotes his life’s work to developing a large vocabulary in the service of dubious persuasion: of women he hopes to seduce and then abandon, of consumers he intends to lure into buying ultimately useless or even harmful products. By contrast, in The Year of the Flood, Adam One, who is a leader of an unusual faith community, uses language that shocks readers familiar with Atwood’s earlier works because of its candour regarding human nature. “[S]cientific fools . . . say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’ These claim to prove the non-existence of God because they cannot put Him in a test tube and weigh and measure Him. But God is pure Spirit,” remarks Adam One (51). “In our efforts to rise above ourselves we have indeed fallen far, and are falling farther still; for, like the Creation, the Fall, too, is ongoing. Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us while in reality we belong to Everything?” (52–53). While Adam One condemns greed, Jimmy in Oryx and Crake has fallen into greed. As Atwood’s representative twentieth- and twenty-first-century man, Jimmy has no access to the traditions of deep meaning encoded in religious belief. Instead, he has been led by his culture to mistake consumerism for peace of mind, sexual vigour for wellness, denial of aging for intuition of the immortal human spirit, and the genetic editing-out of human failings for the work of redemption. In her indictment of Jimmy, Atwood, by extension, is condemning us for our fall into “greed” and for becoming, like Jimmy, “scientific fools.” “Where Are All the Souls?” In a piece called “Faster,” one of the short works in Atwood’s 2006 collection The Tent, a disembodied voice explains in an apparently indifferent tone that we have outrun our souls, the soul having been considered throughout most of human history to be an element of what Atwood calls in Payback “the elaborate imaginative construct that is human society” (203). No form of transportation has been fast enough for us, the voice states: “We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind” (125). They continue to try to follow us, but we are faster than they are because they “don’t weigh us down” (126). The sense of an approaching end also occurs in the title piece of The Tent in which a writer, attempting to survive the great howling outside the tent by writing, “must tell the truth about the howling,” but “this is difficult . . . because not all of them [the loved ones] can hear the howling in the same way you do, some of them think it sounds like a picnic out there in the wilderness,

MORAL/ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT 131

like a big band, like a hot beach party” (144, 144–45). Atwood’s writer admonishes all of us, and also “cities and landscapes, towns and lakes” (145), to hear what she does and so, ideally, to be protected. And yet she must also question the efficacy of what she is doing: “Why do you think this writing of yours, this graphomania in a flimsy cave, . . . is capable of protecting anyone at all?” (146). Despite her doubts, she feels that she must continue in her attempts to record what she hears around her. In the contemporary media, one can hear something of the language, like Atwood’s, of spiritual guilt and retribution concerning recent worldwide economic and environmental failures, language used not only figuratively but also literally. “Prophecy” might best describe the genre of this language, and those who draw on it come from various fields as they assert that we have, individually and collectively, caused the failure and that we can participate in the recovery only if we change our ways together. We can hear this prophetic language in the words of Timothy Garton Ash, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and professor of European Studies at Oxford University. In a recent Globe and Mail article entitled “From the Ashes, a New Capitalism,” Garton Ash advocates a renewed version of what has been called “the social market economy” in which a still free market economy is regulated by the state not only “to balance long- and short-term considerations in economic decision-making,” but also to offer “a national commitment to a social minimum for all citizens and a healthy moral ethos among those involved in business activity.” Linking this responsible economy specifically to ecological issues, Garton Ash concludes that “What you end up with is . . . a personal challenge to every one of us. The challenge is to find a new balance in our double lives as producers and consumers, while consciously contributing to a larger set of new international balances between economy and environment, oversaving east and overspending west, rich north and poor south.” Like Atwood, Garton Ash calls for “a healthy moral ethos” as he condemns the rampant greed of contemporary culture. Geophysiologist James Lovelock, in his Gaia theory of environmental decline, also uses the language of spiritual guilt and retribution in his 2009 book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, in which he argues that Gaia, or Earth, responds actively, not passively, to humanity’s treatment of it, attempting to survive despite overpopulation. We should, in turn, recognize what Gaia’s response will almost certainly be and should begin to prepare for it now in large concerted ways. Our global situation resembles Europe’s in 1939, he states, but “we continue our business and pleasure as usual and perhaps put a solar heating unit on the roof, just as we dug air-raid shelters in our gardens back then. . . . Just as in 1939 we had to give up on a massive scale the comfortable lifestyle of peacetime, so soon we may feel rich with only a quarter of

132

MARGARET ATWOOD

what we consume now. If we do it right and with enthusiasm it will not seem a depressing phase of denial but instead, as in 1940, a chance to redeem ourselves” (59–60). Indeed, “Our obligation as an intelligent species is to survive, and if we can evolve to become an integrated intelligence within Gaia, then together we could survive longer” (63). In Lovelock we hear an admonition to repent individually and also to demand broader corrections. “The synchronization of will we share with social insects and termites as well as with flocks of birds and fish . . . empowers us far beyond the possibilities of a single isolated intelligence,” as Lovelock states, but “we are quite unable to live with one another or with our living planet. Our inherited urge to be fruitful and multiply, and to ensure that our own tribe rules the Earth, thwarts our best intentions” (156). Yet we are Gaia’s triumph, Lovelock also claims: thinkers who communicate (Tremonti). Facing crises can, in fact, make the survivors even more intelligent. But Lovelock would also have us understand that we cannot presume to save the earth at this point, for Gaia is self-regulating and is engaging now in what he calls “positive feedback,” cooperating with us in our own destruction by, for example, responding to our over-production of carbon dioxide by producing even more of it (Tremonti). We know that Atwood has read Lovelock’s work, for she calls him “a prophet of the tipping point,” and we know that she views the thinking of biologist E. O. Wilson as an appropriate gloss on her novel Oryx and Crake (Payback 214; Solomon). Interestingly, Wilson’s book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge may provide the clearest explanation of why current writing on the economy and the environment has come to resemble prophecy. “We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust,” as Wilson claims, “and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation . . . to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large” (13–14). Wilson argues for a crucial interpenetration of the discourses of science and the humanities to preserve both human nature and the earth that humans have come to see as beautiful. His hope is that the discourses of the humanities will help prevent science from using “volitional evolution” (531)—or engineering of the genome—to destroy human nature. With ample reference to works of art that have told the story of human greed fed by infernal powers—that of Faust in particular—Wilson claims that we are now facing a large Faustian decision: “How much should people be allowed to mutate themselves and their descendants?” (536). Science can benefit humanity by being directed “to improve the quality of life

MORAL/ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT 133

for as many people as heedless population growth forces upon Earth, and to do it with minimal prosthetic dependence,” and for that we will need what Wilson calls a “covenant” to be secured by a “sacred oath” (564, 580). But he also concludes chillingly that “if we should surrender our ethics and art . . . to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress . . . we will become nothing” (581). “Earth Day Future” in Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth The rousing and purgative language we hear in the voices of Garton Ash, Lovelock, and Wilson is echoed in Atwood’s Payback, a collection of lectures and a work of literary criticism and cultural analysis that can be read as a companion text to her speculative novel Oryx and Crake. In its investigation of representations of debt in ancient sacred texts and then in the English novel over time, Payback returns often to the twin figures of Marlowe’s Faust and Dickens’s Scrooge, and its final lecture is a re-writing of Scrooge’s experience of visitation by ghost-like beings. In Payback, Atwood sees debt and its implications, especially payback, as central to the “elaborate imaginative construct that is human society,” both the impulse to accumulate as much for ourselves as we possibly can and also the impulse to repay—which she calls “our sense of fairness” (203, 12)—when in our acts of accumulation we have incurred debt. Recalling four thousand years of history in Payback, Atwood traces the concept of lex talionis—which translates as “ ‘the law of retribution in kind or suitability’ ” (14)—from the Code of Hammurabi through classical and biblical time to the present. When we offend against society’s basic sense of fairness, we become indebted—or so human history as recorded in sacred texts and in literature has witnessed—and we must repay in kind. “Among social animals that need to co-operate in order to achieve common goals,” Atwood explains, “there has to be a sharing-out of the results of group effort that is recognized as fair by the sharers. Fair is not the same as equal” (17). Instead, what is fair is what corresponds to a perception of balance: “This concept—that there is an underlying balancing principle in the universe, according to which we should act—appears to have been almost universal” (27). By way of illustration she recounts how, in ancient Egypt, the heart of a dead person was weighed on a two-armed scale during the soul’s journey to the underworld. Explaining why the feather of the goddess Máat was used as the counterweight to the human heart, Atwood states that Máat represented “truth, justice, balance, the governing principles of nature and the universe, . . . the right social order, . . . and moral

134

MARGARET ATWOOD

standards of behaviour, the way things are supposed to be. . . . Its opposite was physical chaos, selfishness, falsehood, evil behaviour—any sort of upset in the divinely ordained pattern of things.” In order not to upset the balance, not to outweigh a single feather, the ancient Egyptian heart needed to be almost perfectly enmeshed in that “divinely ordained pattern of things” (27). In Atwood’s rewriting in Payback of Scrooge’s experience in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), when her contemporary Scrooge is taken forward in time by the Spirit of Earth Day Future, he witnesses the “physical chaos” that results from human unfairness or imbalance: “What Scrooge sees as they fly above the city is . . . chaos, mass death, the breakdown of civic order” (201). The Spirit explains that “Mankind made a Faustian bargain as soon as he invented his first technologies,” which was when “human beings, instead of limiting their birth rate to keep their population in step with natural resources, decided instead to multiply unchecked” and so invented new technologies to increase the food supply (201). But now, as technology has proliferated and “no one knows how to turn it off,” humanity faces a bleak future: “The end result of a totally efficient technological exploitation of Nature would be a lifeless desert . . . and the resulting debt to Nature would be infinite. But long before then, payback time will come for Mankind” (202). Interestingly, Atwood describes the figures who appear to her presentday Scrooge as Spirits, not ghosts, as if to suggest their link to beings of retribution from the ancient world. Indeed, the Spirit of Earth Day Future invokes explicitly religious language in explaining the other future scene that would be possible should humans repent their injustices now: All religious leaders have realized that their mandate includes helping to preserve the Almighty’s gift of the Earth and have condoned birth control; there are no more noisy, polluting gaspowered leaf blowers or lawn mowers; and global warming has been dealt with at a summit during which world leaders gave up paranoia, envy, rivalry, power-hunger, greed, and the debate over who should start cutting down the carbon footprint first, and rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. (198–99) The Spirit shows that we ourselves have made this desirable future possible specifically by paying back, for the extravagantly wealthy Scrooge sees himself “signing several enormous cheques for conservation organizations.” “ ‘In this future,’ says the Spirit, ‘the albatross has been saved; largely—I must add—through your efforts. I ought to say also that a lot of these miraculous changes have been brought about by a Victory Bond drive, in which people lent to their governments

MORAL/ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT 135

to finance eco-repairs; and through microeconomics . . . ; and also through massive and voluntary debt cancellations on the part of the rich nations’ ” (199). In what is rare in Atwood’s work, the figure of Christ is referred to explicitly in Payback. “Christ is called the Redeemer, a term drawn directly from the language of debt and pawning or pledging, and thus also from that of substitute sacrifice,” as she states in “Debt and Sin,” the second lecture in the collection. “In fact, the whole theology of Christianity rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them, and how you can get out of paying them by having someone else pay instead” (67). “Don’t You Remember the Way We Used to Talk?”: The Soullessness of Consumer Culture in Oryx and Crake Just as Atwood’s voice has become admonitory rather than merely descriptive in Payback, where she reminds us to pay heed to our spiritual selves and not to depend on soulless technological marvels to save us, so she sounds a warning about our dangerous dependency on science and the loss of our humanity in Oryx and Crake. Stephen Dunning, in his astute reading of the novel’s three main characters, states that “the relationship between Crake, Snowman, and Oryx unmistakably suggests the Christian Trinity whose authority science has effectively displaced. Crake assumes the role of Father . . . ; Snowman, that of sacrificial Son and immanent Logos . . . ; and Oryx, that of Spirit” (95). In his interpretation of the novel in terms of its analysis of how “modernity’s essentially quantitative discourse” silences that which is qualitative, Dunning writes convincingly that the novel “insists that sacred narrative cannot be excised without the loss of our humanity, and that we will not recover ourselves until we recover the stories that tell us who we are” (87). Yet as other critics have shown, JimmySnowman is severely challenged to “recover the stories that tell us who we are” because he has little knowledge of them and only vague, unfamiliar language for them (Cooke, Wright). Though we know that he appreciates the books lying otherwise unread in his Academy’s library, we also know that they have provided him only with the insight that their wisdom is being universally ignored. His is a culture not of reflection but of consumption. In an oft-cited passage, Jimmy, who calls himself Snowman after he survives the catastrophic end of humanity engineered by Crake, reflects on the soullessness of his pre-catastrophe world: When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere

136

MARGARET ATWOOD

corrupt vessel . . . . It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made its beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them. (85) No wonder, then, that Snowman cries so often in the novel, for without thought, culture, or spiritual wisdom, he must nevertheless attempt to satisfy the increasing curiosity of the Crakers about those very phenomena. Yet as Jimmy-Snowman reflects on the past, he does realize that his scientist mother somehow managed to preserve the old words of spiritual wisdom, words that he overheard during one of his parents’ many quarrels. When her husband proudly announces that the bioengineers in his company have created human neocortex tissue in a pigoon—a genetically modified pig—his mother clarifies that they have simply found yet another way “to rip off a bunch of desperate people” (56). Describing the organization as a “moral cesspool,” she asks, “ ‘Don’t you remember the way we used to talk, everything we wanted to do? Making life better for people—not just people with money. . . . [Y]ou had ideals then. . . . What you’re doing—this pig brain thing. You’re interfering with the building blocks of life’ ” (56, 57). If to Jimmy’s mother such experiments are “immoral” and “sacrilegious,” to her husband there is “ ‘nothing sacred about cells and tissues’ ” (57). The futuristic world inhabited by Jimmy’s scientist-parents in Oryx and Crake resembles the time present of Atwood’s Scrooge in Payback when the prolongation of youthful sexual energy and the care and feeding of the appetites represent the highest human goals. Language to describe fairness or balance and retribution of any kind—what Jimmy’s mother describes as “the way we used to talk”—has disappeared. In Jimmy’s world, scientists act as God while “word people” like Jimmy act as their preachers. Consumers come to worship eternal health and vigour, which they believe they can achieve by buying the right products, just as humans once believed in eternal spiritual rewards for having lived balanced lives. Significantly, Snowman sees himself in relation to the innocent Crakers as having a “pustulant, cankered self and soul” (167), at least acknowledging that he still does have a soul. His only friend, Crake, the creator of the quasihumans meant to replace us on Earth, chooses Jimmy to lead his creatures to safety and protect them after the plague, specifically because Jimmy has a unique—and apparently rare—necessary attribute for those tasks: “empathy” (321). Subtle signs of this quality appear when, for example, Jimmy-Snowman feels a “surge of tenderness and joy” as he watches a caterpillar spiralling down on

MORAL/ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT 137

a thread and thinks that “there will never be a caterpillar just like this one” or when he attempts to apologize to a banana slug he accidentally steps on and kills in the post-catastrophe world he inhabits (42, 334). And at dawn on the novel’s last morning, when looking at the horizon, Snowman feels “rapture; there is no other word for it. Rapture. The heart seized, carried away. . . . After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is” (371). Using the language of religious fervour, Snowman points here toward a kind of speaking that, if he survives, he might be called upon to develop. We witness Jimmy-Snowman’s difficult relationship with words throughout the novel as he rethinks his entire life experience in an effort to discover where and how he has failed, seeking not only to articulate that failure but also to find ways to describe what we might call his redemption. Jimmy has attended schools that are run not by states or churches but rather by corporations. In grade school, tellingly, he takes a class called “Religion of the Week,” in which spiritual belief is reduced to fashion. And when he attends the Martha Graham Academy—the equivalent, for him, of university—his studies in the arts and humanities are considered “an archaic waste of time” (195). At Martha Graham, the language “arts” have become pragmatic tools for manipulating people into buying what in fact cannot be bought—an end to physical decline, an absence of imperfection. Learning in the humanities now has explicitly “utilitarian aims,” as shown in such course titles as Advanced Mischaracterization, Problematics (whose nickname among students is Spin and Grin), Image Presentation, and Webgame Dynamics. Jimmy is aware of the future open to him with his “risible degree”: “Windowdressing was what he’d be doing, at best—decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2-D verbiage” (188). Nevertheless, we see ample evidence of Jimmy’s dedication to words. When most desolate, he speaks lists of beautiful archaic words— words “of precision and suggestiveness” (195)—to bring him comfort, which suggests that some part of his mind still cherishes the timeless thought contained in those words. But these words also seem somehow to be antidotes to his increasing boredom, dissatisfaction, and selfcontempt. In the corporate culture in which he has matured, where profit alone represents the highest “good” regardless of any harm to humans, animals, and the environment that is caused by the relentless pursuit of profit, Jimmy has been paid to abuse and degrade language. Jimmy describes himself explicitly as a spin doctor, a “wordserf ” who creates ad copy for a group selling “improvement items” of highly questionable worth (253, 245). His then-lover, the artist Amanda Payne, is accurate when she says that the purpose of Jimmy’s occupation is to “prey on the phobias and void the bank accounts of the anxious and the

138

MARGARET ATWOOD

gullible” (247). As his father once explained to the young Jimmy, “What well-to-do and once-young, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormonal supplements and shot full of vitamins but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn’t sell their house, their gated retirement villa, their kids, and their soul to get a second kick at the sexual can?” (55; emphasis added). Ultimately, the word man Jimmy helps to convince “anxious” and “gullible” people around the world to try the BlyssPluss pills which cause the unstoppable global plague that destroys humankind. Growing up in a soulless, materialistic world that is cut off from the spiritual wisdom of the past, Jimmy, like the rest of his generation, is left with the body and its demands. Thus as a young man, Jimmy insists that he wants only “to be himself, alone . . . self-created and selfsufficient” with ties to no one (176). As he later realizes, he existed in his pre-catastrophe life in an “ignorance” that was deliberately “structured”: “He had shut things out” (184). A product of his hedonistic consumer culture, Jimmy feeds his body’s appetites with sex, pornography, booze, drugs and, as his income rises, new amusements in the form of electronic toys. He cautions the many women with whom he has sex that being loved by him would be “spiritually toxic” (190). But at the same time something of a soul persists in Jimmy, which suggests that the human desire for connection and meaning cannot be repressed. His earliest childhood memory is of the bonfire of cows, sheep, and pigs infected with a fatal virus smuggled into the Compound by a rival company to “Drive up the prices.” Jimmy’s inner response, revealingly, is that “In some way all of this—the . . . suffering of animals—was his fault, because he’d done nothing to rescue them” (18). As an adult, Jimmy’s attachment to animals persists, and his concern for the Crakers seems to derive from a similar enduring impulse. The same conceptual artist who tells him bluntly that he preys on the “anxious and gullible” in his work also tells him that he has “a good heart” (247, 242). In fact, it is because of that vestige of a human heart that Crake calls Jimmy a “romantic optimist” (346) and that Jimmy is commanded by two of the women for whom he has felt the greatest inklings of love, his mother and Oryx, not to let them down, a demand that recurs—as if for emphasis—in the final sentences of the novel. It is also telling that the Crakers begin to express a desire for connection and meaning when, having lost sight of Snowman for several days, they chant and drum before a crude effigy of him to attempt to make supplications. “[T]hey’ve developed reverence,” Snowman observes, even though “Crake thought he’d . . . eliminated what he called the G[od]-spot in the brain” (157).

MORAL/ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT 139

“What Could He Have Said Differently?” Snowman, who lacks ethical vocabulary, asks himself late in the novel, “What could he have said . . . differently?” and, later, “Oh, how to lament?” (318; 334). Just as nature persists, refreshes, and renews itself in Oryx and Crake, what ethicists Lawrence E. Schmidt and Scott Marratto call natural law—or an evolved form of that concept—might also persist, and might indeed provide Snowman with the vocabulary he needs. In The End of Ethics in a Technological Society, Schmidt and Marratto argue that our faith in and our reliance on technologies have replaced our belief in a transcendent code of human conduct. With no clear, consistent ethical guidelines by which to judge technological innovation, we are left with “the implicit nihilism at the heart of the modern project,” which leads us to conclude that “it does not matter what we do” (164). In direct contrast to the heedless experimentation we see in Oryx and Crake, they argue instead, urgently, for an “ethic of responsibility” and insist that “whenever we cannot know with certainty what the consequences of a technological innovation will be, caution is in order” (174). Referring specifically to a soulless vocabulary, Schmidt and Marratto claim that “We lack a language by which to discern, in ethical terms, the right relationship of human beings to themselves, to one another, and to the natural order. . . . If the attempt to discern a proper relationship to the natural order (including the order of human nature) is at least in part constitutive of who we are, then it is not surprising that in ignoring the crucial question of who we are, we have put nature itself in the balance” (176–77). A belief in natural order has been supplanted by faith in technology: “human desire or human will was to be regulated by and attuned to both the natural order and to the supernatural good. This ordering was achieved through the personal development of virtue. . . . Modern ethics, on the other hand, tends to assume that the emancipation of the passions (or the satisfaction of immediate and immanent desires) is the goal of human striving . . . and that nature . . . is malleable and manipulable in the service of the realization of human desire” (165–66). Without ethical guidelines, we—like JimmySnowman—have no story to tell about ourselves except that we are driven to consume. In Jimmy-Snowman’s world, in which even basic consumption has become threatened and technology rendered defunct, he is in fact No Man. An author with a deep moral sense, Atwood has consistently recorded, as in The Tent, how badly we behave and how harshly the gods treat us through time. In Payback and Oryx and Crake, her voice has become admonitory as she uses her writings to urge us to curb the

140

MARGARET ATWOOD

godlike power of science before it is too late. The tipping point regarding the disintegration of the physical environment appears to have been reached in what she calls our souls. Prophets are needed now to find the language to convince us to redeem our moral selves and to repay our ethical debts, she says. Her strange new mix of discourses—from environmental science, myth and religious belief, literature, and economics—in turn challenges her readers anew. For like E. O. Wilson, and indeed like Adam One—a central figure in her novel The Year of the Flood—Margaret Atwood demands an interpenetration of the languages of traditional wisdom and ever-changing technology, an interpenetration best achieved by those of us who, like Jimmy-Snowman, value the power of words.

CHAPTER 9

Problematic Paradice in Oryx and Crake Karen F. Stein

What kind of fiction is Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake? Since defining a book’s genre provides a framework for interpretation, reviewers and critics often ask such a question. Genre conventions, although they may be flexible, help to shape works of literature (Abrams and Harpham 115–17). Because Atwood weaves together numerous themes and draws upon different literary traditions in this book—combining, expanding, or even parodying different literary genres—answers to the question of its genre vary. Reviewing Oryx and Crake in the New York Times Sven Birkerts asks if Atwood’s work is science fiction. He concludes that it is, because it “is set in the indeterminate future . . . [and] its premise [arises] from scientific initiative gone awry” (12). J. Brooks Bouson points to some of the genres Atwood both employs and parodies in the narrative: detective-thriller, dystopia, castaway survivor, and romance (“It’s Game Over” 141). Sharon Wilson finds a range of creation myths in the novel, including the Frankenstein story (Myths). Shuli Barzilai acknowledges “the many literary traditions Margaret Atwood explores and subverts in Oryx and Crake,” and then proposes an unusual perspective arguing that the novel’s “crucial genre form . . . [is] the revenge tragedy” (“Tell My Story” 87). Interestingly, Atwood herself has weighed in on the question of genre. She insists that Oryx and Crake is not science fiction, because it has no interplanetary travel or space aliens; nor is it a true novel because novels are realistic and must remain true to “daily life”; nor is it a “classic dystopia” because,

142

MARGARET ATWOOD

despite its dystopian elements, it lacks “an overview of the structure of the society” it describes. Instead, the novel, according to Atwood, is “speculative fiction” (“Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context” 517).1 Speculative fiction, as Atwood explains, asks “what if,” and opens up explorations not possible in realist novels since speculative fiction can explore in graphic ways concepts that novels—which stay true to the real world—cannot. Speculative fiction, for example, may explore “the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways, by showing them fully up and running”; it may investigate “the nature and limits of what it means to be human in graphic ways, by pushing the envelope as far as it will go”; it may examine “the relations of humanity to the universe” or explore “proposed changes in social organization” by showing what it might be like to live in a utopia or dystopia. While “it can speak of what is past and passing,” speculative fiction speaks “especially of what’s to come,” and it explores the “realms of the imagination” (“Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context” 515). As Atwood examines what might come in her futuristic speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake, she offers a compelling—and graphic—exploration of the consequences of the misuse of biotechnology and genetic engineering on human nature and the human imagination. Following in the tradition of the trickster-scientist introduced into English literature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Atwood, through her tricksterscientist character Crake, warns twenty-first-century society about the dangers it faces, using satire and creation myths to formulate critiques of misguided scientific pursuits and the fragmented thinking of some scientists. Also incorporating psychological insights into her narrative, Atwood examines issues of friendship and family and argues for the necessity of finding a balance between emotion and reason. At the heart of Oryx and Crake is a compelling and urgent question that guides Atwood’s speculative fiction: what does it mean to be human in an era of biotechnology and genetic engineering? The Trickster-Scientist Mary Shelley intended her novel to be one “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (22). To evoke these fears and horror, she seized upon the topic of the power and danger of science and technology. She began to write Frankenstein in 1816, when the Industrial Revolution was creating social and economic upheavals in England, and when new scientific advances seemed on the verge of bringing the

PROBLEMATIC PARADICE

143

dead back to life. Shelley’s novel fulfilled her aims; and, indeed, versions of the Frankenstein story in both fiction and film have continued to produce fear and horror in readers and spectators. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, written when contemporary scientific advances in bioengineering are on the brink of creating new life forms, participates in the tradition that Shelley began, reminding us again of the power and danger of science and technology, “speak[ing] to the mysterious fears of our nature . . . and quicken[ing] the beatings of the heart.” Asking us to be aware of the path on which we are heading, Atwood questions, “Our tools have become very powerful. . . . Do we as a species have the emotional maturity and wisdom to use our powerful tools well?” (Random House Interview). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Atwood’s Crake are classic examples of the trickster-scientist.2 The trickster figure in literature and legend, usually a male, crosses boundaries, disrupts the social order, and embodies contradictions. He is a shape-changer and a liar. In many traditions tricksters—such as the African Anansi and the Greek Prometheus—are the creators of human life, and Frankenstein and Crake participate in that tradition.3 Both Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Atwood’s Crake are brilliant and ambitious young men who are guilty of pride and of dangerously misguided thinking, a split between reason or abstract thinking and emotion. In each case the tricksterscientist creates a new being (or beings) designed to be the start of a new race of beings superior to humans. In each case disaster follows. The trickster-scientists’ utilization of new technologies in Frankenstein and Oryx and Crake raises the question of what it means to be human and of how society is organized, which are the kinds of issues, according to Atwood, addressed by speculative fiction. Both Frankenstein and Crake employ the cutting-edge technologies of their time periods to create new humanoid creatures, but the technology available to Frankenstein is more limited than that available to Crake. Frankenstein’s unnamed creature is very large, strong, and ugly, but he has the emotions, needs and vulnerabilities of a human. Crake’s creatures, known as the Paradice models or the Crakers, are beautiful, but they have been engineered to possess unusual genetic features and to lack the emotional complexities of humans. Both of these narratives critique the misuse of science and expose the arrogance of Promethean scientists who not only seek to manipulate and control nature, but who also separate themselves from their communities and set themselves above ordinary people. Pride and rigidly narrow thinking lead both Frankenstein and Crake to pursue their misguided projects.

144

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Misuse of Science: Frankenstein and His Creature Shelley subtitled her narrative “A Modern Prometheus,” placing it in the tradition of stories about tricksters who create humans or humanoids. She based her tale of the misuse of science by a hyperrational tricksterscientist on technology that was new in her time, Luigi Galvani’s and Luigi Aldini’s experiments with electric current that appeared to animate dead animals or humans (Mellor 104–07). Most of us are familiar with at least part of the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young man in his second year of college who obsessively spends hours secluded in a laboratory, collects the body parts of cadavers, and produces a being larger than life. He hopes to create “a new species” that will “bless [him] as its creator and source” (58). Yet, the creature, who never gets a name, seems so horrifying to his maker that Frankenstein runs away from him in terror. What does it mean, Shelley asks as the narrative unfolds, to be human physically, emotionally, and morally? Frankenstein’s creature is built of human parts. Although eight feet tall and adult in form, he is childlike, innocent, and full of good will. He secretly gathers firewood for a family near whose house he finds shelter, and he rescues a girl who falls into a pond. He seeks human companionship, but his enormous size and ugly appearance—think of Boris Karloff in the James Whale Frankenstein film—frighten away all the people he approaches. Indeed, people often attack him in the mistaken belief that he wishes to harm them. The creature is well-intentioned, but constant rejection turns him from kindness to evil, so that he seeks revenge by murdering Frankenstein’s friends and family. Many scholars note that Frankenstein and his creation are parts of a divided self (see Levine and Knoepflmacher 14–16). For while Frankenstein never directly expresses his resentment toward his family and his fears of marriage and sexuality, his creature acts in his place by killing Frankenstein’s family members and his bride. As parts of a divided self, Frankenstein is the obsessive intellect, and the creature is the feeling, emotive, vulnerable self who craves human connection but is also capable of violence. Frankenstein’s Lack of Empathy Victor Frankenstein, as the scientist-creator, is also a failed father. Initially, he uses the metaphor of loving fatherhood to describe his plans for creating new creatures: “No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (58). Yet he fails to provide any parental care for his creature. Frankenstein remembers himself when young as an “innocent and helpless creature bestowed

PROBLEMATIC PARADICE

145

upon [his parents] by Heaven” as he basked in their affectionate care (42). In contrast, he recoils in horror from the “innocent and helpless creature” he creates, and refuses to care for or even acknowledge him. Other people similarly fear and flee from the unloved and unprotected creature. Thus, as scholars Anne K. Mellor and Kate Ellis argue, Shelley shows the limitations of Victorian family ideals in her novel. The women in the book are passive, obedient, and emotional. They serve the men, and make their homes comfortable havens, sometimes sacrificing their health and even their lives as they minister to the sick. Although Frankenstein extols the virtues of these caring women, he removes himself from his companions and family in order to work obsessively in his laboratory. Moreover, he fails to offer his creature the nurturance, education, support, and companionship that the women in his family provided for him. By presenting Frankenstein as a failed father, Shelley’s story critiques the social conditions that separated the domains of men and women in British culture during her lifetime, allotting emotion and nurturance to women and instrumentality to men.4 As a result of Frankenstein’s neglect as a father, the creature suffers from cold and hunger. He begs Frankenstein to make a mate for him and promises to live in tranquility apart from humans: “my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded” (130). Tellingly, he longs for the kind of intimacy and companionship that Frankenstein gave up to work on his project. Frankenstein initially agrees to make a female creature, but then reneges on his promise, fearing that a pair of similar creatures would produce dangerous offspring. When the spurned and disconsolate creature murders Frankenstein’s bride, Frankenstein determines to kill his creature, but instead he wastes away from fatigue and illness as he chases him toward the North Pole. Through the story of the creature’s turn from gentleness to hostility, Shelley’s narrative raises questions. Would the creature have remained peaceful and gentle if Frankenstein had protected him and others had treated him well? Is morality a function of nature or nurture? Is it innate or learned? On his deathbed Frankenstein reviews his life and reflects on his own lack of empathy: “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections . . . then that study is certainly . . . not befitting the human mind” (59). The Misuse of Science in Oryx and Crake Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is concerned with the misuse of science, but Atwood also cautions that Oryx and

146

MARGARET ATWOOD

Crake is not anti-science, for science, in her view, is a neutral tool. “The driving force in the world today is the human heart—that is, human emotions,” as she comments (Random House Interview). In Oryx and Crake, Atwood satirizes the excesses of the near future society in which Crake and his best friend Jimmy grow up. Danette DiMarco aptly describes this dystopian society as one based on instrumentalism and the pursuit of profit at the expense of empathy and caring for others. The focalizing character, Jimmy, remembers a culture much like our society, rife with greed, violence, sexual exploitation and great disparities of wealth. Pharmaceutical companies hire scientists to develop new drugs and genetically engineered animals such as the pigoons that grow multiple organs to be transplanted into humans. Jimmy’s and Crake’s families belong to a cadre of the scientific elite who live in Compounds that are like small cities owned and maintained by the companies that employ them. Unlike the pleeblands—the slums where the less affluent masses live—these luxurious gated communities provide their residents with numerous amenities. But while they may seem utopian, they are strictly regulated and ideologically stagnant, patrolled by the CorSeCor, the highly effective security system that is on the lookout for ideological dissidents as well as biological terrorists.5 The critique of scientific arrogance appears early in Oryx and Crake when Jimmy’s mother points out that sophisticated medical technologies, such as xeno-transplantation and genetic engineering, are being used to enhance the appearance and prolong the lives of the wealthy at great profit to the drug companies, while the majority of less affluent people are impoverished by exorbitantly expensive medical care. Worse, as Crake’s father discovers, the pharmaceutical companies are producing new diseases so that they can profit from marketing the cures. Crake’s father is killed because he was planning to be a whistleblower exposing this practice to the public. Crake and his Creatures Crake, Atwood’s trickster-scientist and postmodern Prometheus, has access to new technologies that extend his scientific capabilities far beyond the possibilities open to Shelley’s Frankenstein. Crake employs sophisticated scientific tools such as genetic engineering; he has talented helpers and the resources of an affluent pharmaceutical company, RejoovenEsense, which encourages him to work on his own projects. The context in which he works differs from Frankenstein’s. Shelley’s scientist must work alone; his project is an anomaly. In contrast, Crake’s project is an extension of the kinds of technological innovation, such as gene splicing and xeno-transplantation, used by the top scientists of

PROBLEMATIC PARADICE

147

his society, who are well paid to conduct such research. Furthermore, his amorality and his purported focus on products for profit are commensurate with the amoral profit-driven ethos of the pharmaceutical companies that control a large segment of his society’s economy. The fact that Crake uses genetic technology to re-engineer humans recalls Atwood’s description of speculative fiction’s exploration not only of the consequences of new technologies but also its investigation of the nature and limits of what it means to be human. In his pursuit of genetic modification, Crake engineers a race of humanoids, the Paradice models, who do not have the “destructive features” of the “ancient primate brain” (305). When Crake shows Jimmy the models in their climate-controlled bubble dome, he explains that they are samples of new “products”—that is, children—that will eventually be offered for sale: Very soon, RejoovenEsense hoped to hit the market with the various blends on offer. They’d be able to create totally chosen babies that would incorporate any feature, physical or mental or spiritual, that the buyer might wish to select. The present methods on offer were very hit-or-miss, said Crake: certain hereditary diseases could be screened out, true, but apart from that there was a lot of spoilage, a lot of waste. The customers never knew whether they’d get exactly what they’d paid for; . . . there were too many unintended consequences. (304) Crake’s explanation, loaded with irony, points to his society’s commodification of people and its focus on marketing. Through catalogs listing the optional features, RejoovenEsense will offer buyers—that is, prospective parents—a range of choices for their genetically modified children. When Jimmy questions some of the features, such as the diet of leaves and grass, Crake explains that he has test-marketed the products and found that vegetarians would like this trait. But, of course, Crake’s explanation is a cover story that conceals his true intent to replace the current race of humans with his superior, re-engineered, and environmentally friendly “product.” Crake has designed his Paradice models—who are called the Crakers—without racism or emotions such as jealousy. Because they will not own private property, they will have no hierarchy. They are designed to come into heat briefly every three years, at which time mating will take place between one woman and four men in a joyful frolic. As a result, sexuality will become more efficient and less prone to emotional upsets, and because fatherhood will be uncertain, they will treat all the children well. Because the Crakers will be simple and nonacquisitive

148

MARGARET ATWOOD

creatures, there will be no more divisiveness, conflicts, tensions, and wars. They will have no sense of humor because for jokes “you need a certain edge, a little malice,” according to Crake (306). Because they will be “perfectly adjusted” to their habitats, they will “never have to create houses or tools or weapons,” and they will have “no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money” (305). And because they are programmed to die suddenly and painlessly at age thirty, they will have no fear of death. As Crake propounds his vision of a new society, he tells Jimmy that entire populations can be created that will have “pre-selected characteristics,” such as “beauty” and “docility” and “immunity from microbes” (304). Genetically engineered to fit the post-apocalypse environment they will inhabit, the Crakers have built-in sunscreen and bug repellent. For nutritional efficiency, they are designed to eat their own excrement because “for animals with a diet consisting largely of unrefined plant materials, such a mechanism was necessary to break down the cellulose” (159). When Jimmy objects, Crake dismisses his concerns as aesthetic and, therefore, irrelevant. “As a species we’re in deep trouble. . . . [W]e’re running out of spacetime,” Crake tells Jimmy as he plans the creation of his creatures, who are designed to live in perfect harmony, not in competition with, the natural environment (295). But, of course, in order to eliminate the negative “primate brain” traits, Crake must eliminate the people who possess them—the entire human race. In order that his creations may flourish and replace humanity, Crake splices together a new virus, encysts it in the BlyssPluss pills, and hires Jimmy to create an advertising campaign to sell the pills as wonder drugs that are supposed to guarantee sexual vigor, prolong youth, and provide immunity to sexually transmitted diseases. Crake does reveal one secret to Jimmy: that the pills will also cause sterility. But he does not divulge his more ominous secret: that the pills contain a lethal hemorrhagic virus that will cause a global pandemic and kill off humankind. Crake’s Lack of Empathy Like Frankenstein, Oryx and Crake critiques the dangers of binary thinking, the split between reason and emotion. Frankenstein relegates emotionality and nurturance to women, while he is absorbed with scientific thought and neglects his creature. Crake’s adherence to reason and denial of emotion enables him to eliminate the human race in furtherance of his supposedly rational ideal. Crake, the logical, egotistical Frankenstein figure, is enormously successful in the upper strata of his pre-apocalypse society. Like those suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, Crake has an above average

PROBLEMATIC PARADICE

149

intelligence, an intense or obsessive focus on a particular area, low social skills, and a lack of empathy (see Bouson, “It’s Game Over” 145). Crake attends the most prestigious school, the scientific Watson-Crick Institute, the Harvard of the future, which, tellingly, is known as Asperger’s U. Provided with cutting-edge technology, the Watson-Crick students are encouraged to invent marketable products, and they are treated well, eating real shrimp and real chocolate while the less fortunate who live in the pleeblands outside of the gated cities make do with ersatz versions. Hired by the high-status pharmaceutical company RejoovenEsense upon graduation, Crake lives in its luxurious gated community and is given free rein to carry out his chosen projects. Thus Crake is able to keep most of his project secret even from the members of his scientific team who work on it, and not even his best friend Jimmy is aware of his true intentions. When we learn about Crake’s childhood and adolescence, we discover the cultural origins of his obsession with death and destruction, as Atwood openly satirizes our culture’s glamorization of violence, its exploitative sexuality, and its disregard for the natural environment. Crake also has an unnerving fascination with endangered and extinct species. He drops his given name, Glenn, and renames himself after an extinct Australian bird, the red-necked crake. He likes to play virtual games such as Extinctathon or Blood and Roses that usually end with acts of war and destruction that wipe out plants, animals, and civilizations and, as Bouson remarks, “turn mass destruction into an enjoyable spectacle” (“It’s Game Over” 143). He is so skilled a player that he achieves the status of Extinctathon Grandmaster in the virtual game, and, of course, as we learn in his bioterrorist plot, he is the Grandmaster who brings about a massive extinction himself. Jimmy later wonders about Crake’s sanity: “Had he been a lunatic or an intellectually honorable man who’d thought things through to their logical conclusion? And was there any difference?” (343). Crake and Jimmy are opposites. Their reactions to the deaths of their mothers reveal this opposition dramatically. Crake watches his mother die of a virus that dissolves her, and seems interested rather than upset; as he reports to Jimmy, “it was impressive” (176–77). In fact, as JimmySnowman realizes later, Crake most likely produced the virus that killed his mother as a “trial run” for the BlyssPluss virus (343). On the other hand, when the CorSeCor men show Jimmy a video of what appears to be his mother’s execution, he is unnerved and depressed for weeks (258–59). Crake is the cynical, unsentimental, hyperrational, brilliant scientist; Jimmy is the humanist who loves language and art. When the two play Blood and Roses, the game that pits human destruction against works of art and literature, Jimmy complains that

150

MARGARET ATWOOD

“the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland.” When Crake responds that this is “the point of the game,” Jimmy finds that pointless (80). Unlike Crake, Jimmy values music, art and literature. “When any civilization is dust and ashes, art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning— human meaning, that is—is defined by them,” Jimmy tells Crake. But to Crake, art is not “all that’s left over”: “The archeologists are just as interested in gnawed bones and old bricks and ossified shit. . . . They think human meaning is defined by those things too” (167). When Jimmy remembers these words later, he sees that they provided a clue to Crake’s dangerous thinking. Parental deficiencies like Frankenstein’s are important in Oryx and Crake as well. The nuclear families in which Jimmy and Crake grow up do not support and nurture their members. We learn that Oryx’s mother, herself a victim of poverty and neglect, sells her young daughter so that she can provide for her remaining children. Young Jimmy deals with the stress of his dysfunctional family by turning his parents’ arguments into entertainment as he regales his friends with stories of “Evil Dad/ Righteous Mom” (60). His father is preoccupied with his work and uncomfortable with the parental role. He forgets birthdays and belatedly gives presents that make Jimmy anxious, as they seem intended to help him “measure up” to some undefined standard (50). And after his severely depressed mother leaves the family to join a resistance movement that opposes the greed and genetic tinkering practiced by the drug companies, Jimmy wonders if she loved him. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a maternal bond?” he asks (61). Crake’s mother is also hurtful, for she is either “behind the scenes” or she “took no measures to prevent” the assassination of Crake’s father (Barzilai, “Tell My Story” 96). While Crake is a nonempathic loner, the society of his creatures, the Crakers, is a communal one in which the members care for each other, but it also is a society in which, tellingly, the nuclear family has been abolished. Jimmy’s Empathy Even though Crake says that Jimmy “does not have an elegant mind” (142), he chooses Jimmy to become the guardian of the Crakers because his friend has the empathy to be a good parent, a trait lacking in the other members of Crake’s team. A representative humanist, Jimmy attends the lower-status liberal arts college, the Martha Graham Academy. The refuge of the arts students, it is under-funded and in disrepair because the humanities and arts have lost value in his society. “A lot of what went on . . . was like studying Latin, or book-binding:

PROBLEMATIC PARADICE

151

pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything” (187). The Academy’s motto—“Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills”— replaces the original Latin motto, a celebration of art, Ars Longa Vita Brevis. The new motto, as it downplays the value of art, reflects society’s materialism and pragmatism (188). Jimmy, who has a “risible degree” and has been “filed . . . among the rejects” by his society, spends long hours in the library stacks, determined to “pursue the superfluous as an end in itself ” and to be “its champion, its defender and preserver” (188, 195). When the Martha Graham Academy hires him to destroy the hard-bound books that are now digitized, he has trouble because he “can’t bear to throw anything out” (241). After graduation, Jimmy, who is a “word man,” gets a low-status job writing advertising copy for self-help products, until Crake hires him to promote the BlyssPluss pills. “Watch out for art,” Crake used to say, as Jimmy-Snowman recalls when he finds himself the surviving human in the posthuman world engineered by Crake (361). The lover of art and words and the empathetic humanist, Jimmy becomes the teacher of the Crakers and his messages to them are usually ones of love. When he leads them through the rubble and chaos of the post-holocaust world on their dangerous journey out of the Paradice bubble dome to the park where they can live and graze, they are curious about the unfamiliar sights and smells. He tells them that this is chaos. “Oryx and Crake are clearing away the chaos for you—because they love you—but they haven’t quite finished yet” (352). At the conclusion he thinks about delivering a message to the Crakers, in case he does not return from his encounter with the three other human survivors he has discovered. His first idea is that he should warn them about possibly being subjected to violence, rape or slavery, but then he realizes that, in their innocence, they will not understand any of these terms. “Crake is watching over you . . . Oryx loves you,” he decides to tell them instead of offering warnings (367). But while this is a comforting message, will it suffice? Reclaiming Paradise / Paradice Both Frankenstein and Oryx and Crake allude to the originating myth of paradise. In Frankenstein, despite the creature’s disadvantages, he manages to teach himself how to read and he even reads Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, the story of God’s creation of humans and their rebellion and exile from Paradise. Speaking to his maker, Frankenstein’s creature compares himself to Adam. But, while Adam is “guarded by the especial care of his Creator,” Frankenstein’s creature is “wretched, helpless and alone” (116).

152

MARGARET ATWOOD

In Oryx and Crake the Paradice models represent the state of innocence Crake seeks, for he has programmed them to be free of the negative traits that he deplores in present-day humans. They live communally and respect the environment. Crake designs them to lack technology and to have simple vocabularies, with no written language. They are adapted to the post-plague world, a world with few humanoid inhabitants, without functioning machines, viable buildings, or written language. This is a world where the remaining traces of human civilization have become, as predicted, “gnawed bones and old bricks and ossified shit,” like the wasteland left by players at the end of the computer game of Blood and Roses (167). Crake’s Paradice project is an off-kilter version of one of the central stories of Western civilization, the reclamation of paradise. In Reinventing Eden, Carolyn Merchant describes this grand narrative as a two-part story. The first part is declension: we have lost Eden, the golden age, the time of innocence, peace and plenty, and environmental purity. The second part of the narrative is the reclamation story. If in its first biblical iterations the story argued that through religion people could ascend to a Heaven—that is, a better Eden of everlasting life—the story eventually changed to argue that science and technology would lead to the reclamation of the lost Eden. In contemporary society, the debate continues: is genetic modification the snake that is destroying what is left of Eden, or is it the tool that will lead to improved agriculture, longer life, and peace and plenty for all the creatures of planet earth? Merchant argues that traditional narratives of restoration all posit an ethic of domination and mastery in which humans assume control of nature. She asks for an alternative narrative, one of partnership among people and with nature. But tellingly, Crake’s reclamation project is one of egocentric domination and mastery, since Crake, as Bouson points out, “uses science not to conquer the natural world, but to control human nature” (“It’s Game Over” 141). Crake, in his arrogant attempt to control human nature, envisions a future paradise on earth—a utopia. Yet utopia is an ambiguous concept, as scholars have long observed. The word itself comes from a Greek word meaning both “good place” and the closely related “no place.” Utopian stories depict ideal places, paradises without the evils and problems that exist in our world. But if there were really such a place, if perfection had already been achieved, any change would introduce imperfection; therefore, utopia is also a “u-chronia,” a no time, a place where time has stopped, a place of stagnation. Utopias may cross the line and become dystopias (for example in Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise), the bad places.6 As John Huntington points out, utopias and dystopias, while apparently opposites, have a great deal in common.

PROBLEMATIC PARADICE

153

He explains that “the utopian-dystopian form tends to construct single, fool-proof structures which solve social dilemmas.” On the other hand, “the anti-utopian form . . . is a mode of relentless inquisition, of restless skeptical exploration of the very articles of faith on which utopias themselves are built, . . . a criticism of human desire and expectation” (142). Atwood’s narrative is such a skeptical anti-utopia: Crake’s Paradice project illustrates the dangers of utopian thinking. In both Frankenstein and Oryx and Crake, the creatures do not turn out as their makers expect they will. Frankenstein believes he is creating a race of wonderful beings who will praise him. Instead, he is horrified by the ugliness of his creation. Crake believes he is producing simple beings who will permanently lack the symbolism and mythologies that lead to religion and its ensuing divisiveness. “God is a cluster of neurons,” as Crake used to say to Jimmy; in creating the Crakers, he attempted to eliminate the “G-spot in the brain” (157). But the Crakers ask for origin stories, and believe the myths that Jimmy—who calls himself Snowman in the post-apocalyptic world—tells them about Oryx and Crake. They create a symbolic effigy of Snowman when he is away, in hopes of speeding his return (360–61). Thus the Crakers are developing in ways that Crake never anticipated. “They’re conversing with the invisible, they’ve developed reverence,” Jimmy realizes, thus proving Crake “wrong” (157). Atwood’s novel, like Shelley’s, is meant as a warning. We may be on the path to extinction, doomed to self-destruction through the abuse of scientific technologies. The tragedies in both of these books stem from the scientist-characters’ lack of balance, their neglect of emotion and their over-reliance on reason and science. Ideally, they would combine reason and emotion, respect for and enjoyment of both art and science, with a bit of humility added into the mix. And yet, it is their imbalance and imperfection that makes the characters human, like us. If they did maintain a perfect balance there would be no stories. And, furthermore, we would then be in the realm of utopia, which is also an untenable imbalance. The Realms of the Imagination “Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime or even a duty but a necessity, because increasingly, if we can imagine something, we’ll be able to do it,” Atwood insists in her discussion of speculative fiction (“The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake” 517). For Atwood, not only is storytelling a central act of the imagination, but storytelling is one of the traits that make us human. As Atwood writes, “the love of language, which has been with us for at least 35,000 years . . . helped to make us

154

MARGARET ATWOOD

human in the first place” (“Not Just a Pretty Face” 7). Storytelling is central to Atwood’s narratives because it is “a way to explore alternatives, to discover how to live, to bear . . . witness . . . [and to reveal] the extraordinary implications of our world” (Stein, Margaret Atwood 7). Like Atwood’s Jimmy, Oryx and Crake are both storytellers. Jimmy suspects that Oryx makes up stories about her life just to humor him (316). Crake’s stories are more devious. His narrative of the Paradice project as a profit-making scheme for providing custom-made children hides his real aims and casts his story in terms that appeal to greedy investors, the scientific community, and prospective parents seeking perfect progeny. However, because Snowman, the post-apocalypse identity Jimmy assumes, narrates Oryx and Crake, both Oryx’s and Crake’s stories are filtered through Snowman’s perspective. His narrative, like Frankenstein’s, points to the dangers of pride, of valuing reason at the expense of emotion and empathy. The Crakers have limited vocabularies and are not sophisticated storytellers. They do not tell lies, and they think in terms of the “real” rather than abstractions. However, there is evidence that they have imaginations. They retain some human traits, especially singing and dreaming, that could not be eradicated by Crake. They ask Snowman for stories about Oryx and Crake, which they repeat. They have started to develop symbols and rituals, and they will likely start to tell stories themselves. Snowman is a “word man,” the storyteller who remains alive to tell the tale. After the global pandemic has wiped out humanity, Snowman recites words to himself, relishing the sounds. He sees himself as a kind of human lexicon, the last repository of a language that will vanish when he dies. Just as, when he was young Jimmy, he turned his unhappy family life into material for the stories he told friends, he now turns his pre- and post-catastrophe experiences into stories for himself, for the Crakers, and now for the three other humans he is about to encounter. At the book’s end, Snowman is poised to confront a small group of human survivors who are camped near the Crakers’ enclave. Because he is aware of a plenitude of possibilities in the encounter, he is almost paralyzed with indecision. Should he shoot them? Should he wave a white flag as a sign of truce? And what will their response be? As he ponders what he should do, he finds it “hard to know” how to act (374). His options include telling his story in order to communicate and share his experience with other humans. Considering his choices, he thinks “he has nothing to trade with them, nor they with him. Nothing except themselves. They could listen to him, they could hear his tale, he could hear theirs” (374). In contrast to the monomaniacal Crake, Snowman knows that the future is completely uncertain and uncontrollable. But as

PROBLEMATIC PARADICE

155

he considers his range of alternatives, he also thinks that perhaps he can build connections with the other survivors. “Sitting in judgment on the world . . . but why had that been his right?” as Snowman asks of Crake (341). Snowman’s story is a cautionary tale, warning us that we are on a slippery slope, playing a dangerous game of Extinctathon, increasing the population, and using up the planet’s available natural resources. Atwood’s anti-utopian speculative fiction-adventure romance-Menippean satire raises important questions. Can we control our destructive impulses and imagine other futures so as to ensure our own survival? Will we listen to Atwood’s warning about the potential abuses of science or will we continue to let our scientists sit “in judgment on the world” and interfere “with the building blocks of life”?

CHAPTER 10

The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake Mark Bosco, S.J.

“Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, what if we continue down the road we’re already on?” Margaret Atwood has remarked of her dystopian and futuristic novel (“Writing Oryx and Crake” 285–86). Explicit in Atwood’s comment on the origins of Oryx and Crake1 is an eschatological question about endings: Given what we know, and what we can scientifically accomplish today at the beginning of the third millennium, what will be humanity’s end? Calling her novel a work of “speculative fiction,” as opposed to science fiction because it “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent,” Atwood creates a story about humanity’s end that stems from global concerns regarding life on earth in the early twenty-first century (“Writing Oryx and Crake” 284). The novel weds the real decadence of contemporary consumer and corporate culture to the unchecked advances in genetic engineering that frequent today’s headlines. This apocalyptic tale is focalized through the character JimmySnowman, the sole human survivor of a bioterrorist act perpetrated by his boyhood friend, the scientific genius, Crake. Jimmy has been saved from the viral apocalypse so that he can help care for the humanoid creatures that Crake secretly has bred in the confines of his opulent corporate compound. Calling the humanoids the “Children of Crake” and himself “Snowman,” Jimmy guides them out of the Paradice

THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION 157

compound into a brave new world unfit for humans but perfect for their evolutionary-enhanced successors. Shifting between the fictive present of Jimmy’s post-apocalyptic existence and his memories prior to the catastrophe, Atwood invites the reader into a cautionary vision of the “road we’re already on.” Oryx and Crake is one of Atwood’s most apocalyptic novels, placing it in a long line of oracular literary texts in Western culture, reaching back to the book of Daniel in Hebrew scripture (165 BC) and the book of Revelation in the Christian New Testament (late first century AD). Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts express the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God will destroy the ruling powers of evil and raise the righteous to life in a new messianic kingdom. Usually the work’s pseudonymous narrator offers a dire warning about the current situation and a prophetic revelation of an impending future. The language of apocalypse is designed primarily to elicit fear and resentment concerning this cataclysmic prospect but at the same time to offer encouragement and comfort as the elect await the new world that will come into being. Atwood’s novel grows out of this tradition, but it is ingeniously embodied in the more secularized genres of popular, contemporary literature. J. Brooks Bouson lists an array of popular fictional genres found in the novel: the castaway-narrative (in presenting the recollections of JimmySnowman, who divides his identity into his pre-catastrophe past as Jimmy and his post-catastrophe present as Snowman); the detective and action-thriller novel (as readers unravel and piece together the details of Crake’s bioterrorist plot to commit mass murder and destroy humanity, which in part, is based on the doomsday computer games Crake and Jimmy play as adolescents); and the romance story (as the Jimmy-Crake-Oryx love triangle is ultimately shown to have a direct bearing on the final catastrophe). (“It’s Game Over” 141) To Bouson’s inventory might be added not only the gothic sensibility of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) evident in Crake’s development of genetically engineered humanoids, but also the journey motif that signifies Jimmy-Snowman’s inner transformation as he confronts his post-catastrophe world and remembers his pre-catastrophe past. Atwood’s approach combines her scientific, environmental, and humanist concerns, shaping them into what she calls the genre of “speculative fiction.” When read against the Western development of apocalyptic literature, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake both represents and transcends the genre. Indeed, Atwood’s apocalyptic imagination finds its most

158

MARGARET ATWOOD

profound expression in the growth and development of JimmySnowman, who becomes the reader’s reluctant pilgrim prophet. The Apocalyptic Imagination in Literature Many contemporary literary theorists have discussed the eschatological project at the heart of literature. In The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (2000), Paul Fiddes suggests that the main concern of literature has been “about endings, about the nature of ‘the last things’—the eschata—of narrative” (1). He investigates how “the end” organizes the human story in life and literature by using such diverse texts as William Shakespeare’s plays, T. S. Eliot’s poems, Virginia Woolf ’s modernist novels, and Ursula LeGuin’s fantasies. Literature is inherently apocalyptic because stories defer the final unveiling of their meaning forward. Because texts are future-oriented, Fiddes maintains that “in their very meaning, in their sense (structure) and reference (creating a new world) they present a hope by which human beings can live” (45). The end of a story reveals expectation in a future possibility. And yet much twentieth- and twenty-first-century apocalyptic literature has increasingly lost the sense of meaningful historical endings in favor of personal endings in death and of cultural endings marked by transitions. Indeed, Fiddes charts how the contemporary apocalyptic imagination takes as its premise the conviction that time has reached a critical juncture—that there is a unique importance to the present moment, for the nature of things is being transformed into something vastly different. The apocalyptic orientation of contemporary literature thus impels the reader to act, to direct the future by transforming the here and now. If literature is, of itself, concerned with endings, then the drama of apocalypse has taken on various connotations in popular culture since the end of World War II—from the biting satire of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); to the violent conclusions in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now (1979); to the war between machines and humans in the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix films (1999–2003). Apocalyptic tropes in texts as disparate as Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) and Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) build upon the struggle between good and evil forces (often personified in a human-versus-machines battle) and the desire for an ultimate paradise that often parallels some version of the Garden of Eden. Some of the most important North American fiction of the past fifty years, by writers like John Updike (Toward the End of Time [1997]), Walker Percy (Love in the Ruins [1971]), Bernard Malamud (God’s Grace [1982]),

THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION 159

Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49 [1965]), Don DeLillo (White Noise [1985]), and Paul Auster (In the Country of Last Things [1987]), has focused on some revelatory catastrophe whose traumatic force reshapes all that precedes and succeeds it. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake reflects this preoccupation with catastrophe and hope by envisioning a bleak future in which science and global capitalism have displaced any sense of moral agency in daily life and yet, in a surprise turn at the novel’s conclusion, she also hints at new and hopeful possibilities of existence. Historically, most apocalyptic texts prior to the eighteenth century either dealt directly with literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation or offered reinterpretations of the end time that attempted to interiorize or spiritualize it for an audience. Instead of a literal, imminent cosmic day of reckoning to which the individual had to respond to gain salvation, there was a turn toward an inner journey for the person who struggled for insight and moral certitude. The imminence of the end time became increasingly the immanence of the individual’s understanding of his end’s significance. Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, with its epic journey through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, evoked the interior spiritual struggles of moral development and the fear of eternal punishment that came as a consequence of following one’s own self-interested choices. Dante built his apocalyptic vision around the soul’s ascent to the celestial lights of heaven. Perhaps the most influential medieval understanding of apocalypse was the Doomsday mystery play, produced in England and on the Continent for close to three hundred years, which captured the popular imaginations of everyone from kings to peasant-serfs. David Leigh asserts that these plays differed between countries, but all “enact[ed] in imaginative form events that unite past, present, and future in an apocalyptic allegory” (12). As such, the Doomsday play grounded medieval morality and polity in direct relation to the biblical Last Judgment and the Second Coming of Christ by showing that how the individual behaved in the present would affect where he would be at the end of time. During the seventeenth-century Protestant reformation, the most famous apocalyptic text—and certainly the most widely read—was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which allegorized the advances and missteps made by a pilgrim named “Christian” in moving toward his heavenly reward. Awakened to the arduous road of salvation through a terrifying dream, he had to pass through a land of temptation— “Vanity Fair,” the “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” the “Doubting Castle,” the “River of Death”—to arrive at the New Jerusalem. The anthropomorphized enticements of greed, pleasure, sloth, and despair that he

160

MARGARET ATWOOD

met along the way transformed the abstract world of cosmic apocalypse into a personal journey of Christian righteousness. With the rise of eighteenth-century Enlightenment categories came two new—and sometimes competing—modes of apocalyptic literature: the rationalist utopia and the rationalist satire. No longer was the end of the human enterprise a religious vision of the future. Instead, it was a rational description of the present as the supernatural apocalypse of divine power shifted to secular progress through a transformation of the self by science or, for the nineteenth-century Romantics that followed, by the creative imagination expressed in poetry. At the same time, a skeptical approach appeared in the rationalist satires of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728), and Voltaire’s Candide (1759). All three works subverted the new faith in science and rationality by depicting fantastical events and cataclysmic contradictions that defied utopian hopes. In both the apocalyptic utopias of progress and their ironic counterparts, the shift away from an explicit religious discourse of an end time continued unabated in literary production. The secular displaced the sacred. M. H. Abrams notes that from the Romantic period on, “Faith in an apocalypse by revelation had been replaced by faith in apocalypse by revolution, and this now gave way to faith in an apocalypse by imagination or cognition” (Natural Supernaturalism 334). Thus, in the modern era, the human mind possessed the power to create a new heaven and a new earth and was only in need of the human will to do so. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new modes of apocalyptic literature found expression. If Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) offered the myth of the scientifically created monster, then her novel The Last Man (1826) provided the first mythic representation of the final survivors of a terrestrial calamity wrought by war and plague. Likewise, H. G. Wells, founding author of the science fiction genre, produced catastrophic tales for an increasingly secular, Western culture enthralled with technology, in works such as The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898). The dystopian novels that proliferated in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), imagined a dangerous and alienating future society controlled by the State or by self-interested elites within that network. Contemporary dystopian fiction is a variation of apocalyptic literature, for it serves to critique actual cultural trends—political, economic, or social—observable in some form in the present situation of an author’s life. Indeed, as Coral Ann Howells remarks, “The primary function of a dystopia is to send out danger signals to its readers” (“Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions” 161). Through a doomsday

THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION 161

scenario, the writer attempts to awaken in the public the need for personal vigilance and engagement in a contemporary world that has become unmoored from moral categories and in which our very humanity is under threat. Atwood, who is acutely aware of this utopian and dystopian trajectory in Western culture, has commented on the unique place that monotheistic civilizations hold in constructing apocalyptic tales: The Utopia-Dystopia form tends to be produced only by cultures based on monotheism—or like Plato’s system, on a single idea of the Good—and that postulate also a single goal-oriented timeline. . . . Judeo Christianity, being a linear monotheism—one God and one plotline, from Genesis to Revelation—has generated many fictional Utopias, and a good many attempts to create the real thing right here on earth, the venture of the Pilgrim Fathers being one of them—“We shall be as a city upon a hill, a light to all nations.” . . . In the background of every modern Utopia lurk Plato’s Republic and the Book of Revelation, and modern Dystopias have not been uninfluenced by various versions of Hell, especially those of Dante and Milton, which in their turn go right back to the Bible, that indispensable sourcebook for Western literature. (“Writing Utopia” 93–94) Atwood’s observations illustrate how attuned she is to the historical and critical contours of apocalyptic literature. The dystopian vision of Oryx and Crake grows out of this tradition, even as Atwood conceals it beneath more secular genres in her critique of contemporary culture’s violence and consumerism and in her environmental and biotechnological doomsday scenario. Oryx and Crake falls into the general category, then, of a dystopian novel, mixing multiple genres but ultimately presenting a world that has been shaped by the revolutionary technological developments of the last decades. Atwood places the contests of power in the self-interested corporations of global capitalism rather than in the political systems of nation-states. Instead of displacing the theological considerations of apocalypse onto totalitarian constructions of the state, as Orwell does in 1984, she presents a world of conspicuous consumers chasing the pleasure and comfort sold as remedies for feelings of inadequacy or existential alienation. Closer to the satiric elements of Huxley in Brave New World and Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, Atwood fills her narrative with corporate neologisms that play on the dubious efficacy of new consumer goods. The veneer of altruism is exposed in such businesses as OrganInc Farms (where pigs are re-engineered as hosts to regenerate human organs) or

162

MARGARET ATWOOD

in hyping such discoveries as BlyssPluss (a pill that provides libidinous enjoyment and protects against sexually transmitted diseases but causes sterility). Even as Atwood satirizes the excesses of the contemporary consumer culture, she also portrays the corrosive effects of such corporate marketing on the individual’s moral development. JimmySnowman admits as much, for his crass desires, born of living comfortably inside the elite corporate compounds and devising their commercial advertising campaigns, have dulled his conscience. He feels guilty for not perceiving the full consequences of Crake’s Paradice Dome project until it was too late: “There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out” (184). One hears in these reflections the religious echo of the medieval doomsday dramas, for apathy and greed, two of the Seven Deadly Sins of Christian catechesis, are certainly the context in which JimmySnowman matures and a mad scientist like Crake prospers. Eschaton and Apocalypse in Oryx and Crake Atwood introduces the reader to eschatological time from the novel’s first page. Jimmy-Snowman, waking from a dream, looks at the “zero hour” of his wristwatch, which causes “a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is” (3). The past, present, and future have literally merged into two dimensions—a time-before and a time-after the cataclysm. Snowman’s temporal displacement between these two moments helps the reader reconstruct the narrative of the apocalypse. As he descends from his forest shelter to survey another day, he struggles to clear his mind of the erotic whispers of women impinging upon his morning consciousness. He wonders if this is how the hermits of early Christianity were tempted by the devil: “Saints used to hear them, crazed lice-infested hermits in the caves and deserts. Pretty soon he’ll be seeing beautiful demons, beckoning to him, licking their lips and flickering pink tongues. . . . Creatures with the heads and breasts of women and the talons of eagles will swoop down on him, and he’ll open his arms to them, and that will be the end” (11). The imagery of the desert as a crucible of faith is a deeply religious and biblical metaphor, suggesting that JimmySnowman’s predicament is as much spiritual as psychological. During his pre-catastrophe life, Jimmy was essentially without belief in God, but he nonetheless appreciated the humanizing role of art and culture. “When any civilization is dust and ashes,” Jimmy recalls saying to Crake, “art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures” (167). Now, as an inhabitant of the post-catastrophe world

THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION 163

engineered by Crake, he is surprised to discover that he relies on religious phrases and metaphors to make sense of his condition and to communicate with his charges. He is keenly aware that he plays the unwilling priest and prophet for the Crakers, who are developing rapidly outside the compound’s Paradice Dome. When he speaks to them, “He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between pedagogue, soothsayer, and benevolent uncle—that should be his tone” (7). The tension between science and religion was clear in Crake’s attitude, when he told Jimmy he had tried to breed out any sense of religion in the species. Crake “thought he’d done away with all that, eliminated what he called the G-spot in the brain. God is a cluster of neurons he maintained.” And yet he has failed in this, for Snowman, during his daily visits to the Crakers, observes them “conversing with the invisible, they’ve developed reverence” (157). They continually ask him questions about their origins and the reason for their existence. Even their weekly service of killing a fish for Snowman to eat takes on the aura of a noble ceremony. There is a ritual exchange of fish for a story about their birth. Snowman observes that “It’s becoming a liturgy” (103). And Snowman has created a religious mythology to mollify the constant questions of the Crakers, telling them that they are the “Children of Crake” who live in harmony with the plants and the animals, whom he has named the “Children of Oryx.” Echoing the words of the Genesis story of creation, Snowman tells them, “In the beginning, there was chaos.” He even uses the hortatory subjunctive of Hebrew scripture in his mythmaking: “And then Oryx said to Crake, Let us get rid of the chaos. And so Crake took the chaos, and he poured it away” (102–03). Snowman has turned Crake and Oryx into benevolent gods whose apocalyptic command has accommodated their “children.” “We seem to be hard-wired to have a belief system of some kind,” as Atwood has remarked. “Art and religion—and particularly narrative— are wired in” as “evolved adaptations” in her view (McKay). The connection of a nascent faith with the development of art is made clear in Oryx and Crake. By the time Jimmy-Snowman returns to the Crakers from his trip to the Paradice Dome, he sees that they have progressed even further in their capacities for symbolic thinking. As he approaches their camp, he hears percussion and mantra-like chanting. He realizes they are singing his name and have made an effigy of him: “We made a picture of you,” they tell him, “to help us send out our voices to you,” prompting Snowman to recall, “Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view” (361). The novel suggests that rather than the philosopher’s definition of the human being as animal rationale, it is more accurate to say animal symbolicum—that is,

164

MARGARET ATWOOD

symbol-making being—to convey the centrality of the creation of symbols and metaphors to our humanity, which first find expression in questions about our origins and our end. Even as Atwood’s novel explores the apocalyptic imagination in terms of beginnings and endings, it also takes on the issue of “free will,” which defines humans as a unique species with moral responsibilities to one another. Contemporary philosophers and scientists continue to ask if our actions are determined by biology and environment or if, instead, we possess the capacity to make choices and control our actions and thus act as free agents in the world. According to the Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition, following Plato and Aristotle, to be human is to be a free agent and thus to have the ability to choose how to act. Because humans can recognize and desire what is good, free will makes them moral agents, responsible for their actions. Thus, acts of kindness or violence are “owned” by individuals, for without free will, people are not morally responsible for their actions. On the other side of the argument, philosophers and scientists argue that humans do not have free will per se but are determined by the conjunction of their social location, pasts, and the laws of nature. Biologically speaking, as Crake suggests to Jimmy, human beings are no more than their genetic makeup and human desire is simply triggered by the body’s chemical reactions. Control the genes and the chemicals and one controls the desires, or so the argument goes. Free will, in turn, is merely a cultural construct, a perhaps-necessary illusion for peaceful social interaction among humans. Morality, ethics, the common good are all relative terms. Sexual desire, violence, neurosis are, in a sense, merely imperfections in the species, associated with our biological ancestors’ instincts for survival. Indeed, desire can be manufactured and manipulated, and Atwood envisions this process with all its monstrous implications. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood interrogates this controversy over free will by describing the genius-scientist Crake’s abuse of scientific knowledge through bioengineering. The narrative shifts back and forth in time as Jimmy-Snowman pieces together a narrative of his past that helps him understand the post-apocalyptic repercussions of his present. Jimmy remembers how, when he is a boy, he overhears his mother berate his scientist father for successfully putting human neocortex tissue into a new transgenic species, the pigoons. Calling the research “wrong” and the biotechnological company where her husband works a “moral cesspool,” she pleads with her husband to see the moral implications of his work. “You’re interfering with the building blocks of life. It’s immoral. It’s . . . sacrilegious,” she tells him, to which her husband replies, “It’s just proteins, you know that! There’s nothing sacred about cells and tissue . . .” (56–57). Later, when Jimmy visits Crake’s elite university,

THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION 165

Watson-Crick, he sees the latest generation of bioengineered creatures being perfected—headless chickens that grow up to twelve breasts in order to make “ChickieNobs.” While Crake takes a scientific interest in the project, Jimmy thinks “this thing was going too far. At least the pigoons of his childhood hadn’t lacked heads” (202). The proprietary claims of corporations and the profit motive fuel scientific advancement. As Crake tells Jimmy, the Watson-Crick student inventors of the headless chickens will “clean up” financially since investors are already “lining up around the block” for the new ChickieNobs product, which will “undercut the price of everyone else” (203). In Jimmy’s world, moral questions about the use and abuse of biotechnology have been sidelined by corporate profit margins. The question of free will is, of course, implicit in the discussion around the genetic improvements that Crake has crafted in his humanoid creatures, the Crakers. In his quest to advance the species, Crake has bred out attributes commonly associated with humanity—love, ambition, reverence—and replaced them with genetic traits borrowed from animals. When, for example, Crake splices in a baboon’s genetic makeup to make the female Craker’s buttocks change color when she is in heat, he is intent on reducing sexual craving to a purely biological mechanism. Asserting that courtship and desire are central to being human, Jimmy objects to this maneuver. When Jimmy asserts that in Crake’s plan “we’d just be a bunch of hormone robots” and there would be “no free choice,” Crake replies, tellingly, “We’re hormone robots anyway, only we’re faulty ones” (166). Though Crake’s intentions are more sinister—indeed, he keeps from Jimmy his true plan to wipe out the human race and replace it with Crakers—he initially leads Jimmy to believe that his humanoids could become a hot commodity, since they have been bred not only for beauty and docility, but also for versatility in the searing climate of global warming with their UV-resistant skin and built-in bodily insect repellant. Bragging about this scientific feat, Crake explains that his genetically modified creatures do not exhibit the destructive features of hierarchy and territoriality, for he has deprogrammed “the king-of-the-castle hard-wiring” that has long “plagued humanity,” and their sexuality will not be “a constant torment to them” since they will regularly come into heat. Not only will the Crakers “never have to create houses or tools or weapons, or, for that matter, clothing,” they also will “have no need to invent any harmful symbolism, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money” (305). Jimmy senses the utopian dream in Crake’s logic without fully seeing its consequences. Only afterward does he grasp that what has been bred out of the Crakers are the very features that define our humanity, the attributes that create culture and religion and, consequently, a meaningful history. Thus Snowman

166

MARGARET ATWOOD

realizes with some sense of relief that the Crakers are not satisfied being what their creator had imagined. They want to become something more. As a Species We’re Doomed by Hope, Then? The desire to become something more refers not only to the evolutionary development of the Crakers but to Jimmy-Snowman as well. Atwood’s apocalyptic imagination is most profoundly expressed in Jimmy’s growing self-awareness and insight into the relationships that form between past memories and present responsibilities. Jimmy’s pilgrimage suggests the genre of the Bildungsroman, a chronicle of the protagonist’s ongoing maturation from childhood to adulthood in which the social order’s prevalent values help construct the individual’s place in society. By parodying this quest in often satiric descriptions of contemporary life, Atwood allows the reader to participate in Jimmy’s own self-assessment. As Jimmy regains some moral vision, the reader is invited to make an ethical claim upon the future as well. Jimmy grows up in a dystopian world devoid of any moral framework, a world of rampant consumerism, pervasive violence, and impoverished humanity. Jimmy’s memories reveal his isolation and emptiness as a misfit in the world of the corporate compounds. Because he shows sympathy for others and also for animals, he is an embarrassment to his scientist-father who genetically alters lab animals in his experiments. In one of Jimmy’s seminal memories, he recalls a large number of slaughtered cows, pigs and sheep being burned in a huge bonfire because of a bio-hazardous attack launched by a competing corporation. Jimmy remembers feeling guilty about the plight of the creatures: “In some way all of this—the bonfire, the charred smell, but most of all the lit-up, suffering animals—was his fault, because he’d done nothing to rescue them” (18). Unlike Crake, Jimmy is “not the brightest star in the universe, not a numbers person” (58). As a “word person,” Jimmy is aware at an early age that language has the power to reassure him of his own existence and connect him to a larger world. He disappoints his father by not getting into an elite scientific institute; instead, Jimmy attends a rundown liberal arts college, the Martha Graham Academy, where his love of literature can be nurtured, even if his market-driven society considers it an “archaic waste of time” (195). Yet living in the aftermath of the deadly plague, he relies on words to link him to his past. “Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. “The odd words, the old words, the rare ones” (68). Jimmy’s sensitivity to animals and his love of the aesthetic pleasures of language reveal that he is an individual out of step with

THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION 167

the corporate world he inhabits, which is obsessed with statistics and profits. Jimmy’s conscience also is formed by his mother. She undergoes the first moral conversion of the text when she questions the ethics of wedding science to consumerism. She feels suffocated by the protective walls of the compound, raising the existential question to her husband and son about the meaning of their gated lives. Arguing with Jimmy’s father, she pleads, “Don’t you remember the way we used to talk, everything we wanted to do? Make life better for people—not just people with money. You used to be so . . . you had ideals, then” (56–57). Jimmy’s mother escapes from the compound to live in the Pleeblands. Although he feels angry and abandoned, Jimmy secretly delights in her rebellious nature and tries to protect her whenever the compound security— the CorpsSeCorps—questions him concerning her whereabouts. Many years later when Jimmy sees his mother on television at a violent rally protesting against a coffee conglomerate, he responds viscerally: “Love jolted through him, abrupt and painful, followed by anger. It was like being kicked” (181). The final words of Jimmy’s mother, who is eventually caught and executed on television for high treason, are directed to Jimmy: “I love you. Don’t let me down” (258). Jimmy’s memory of his mother’s resistance and death remains fixed in his consciousness. Her resistance to the status quo evokes a lost ethics and a courage born of spiritual resistance that Jimmy desperately wishes he could access. Jimmy’s conscience is stirred again when he meets Oryx, the woman that he and Crake believe was the young girl they saw as teenagers on a child pornography website. Jimmy remembers the first moment he saw her perform sexual acts when she was only eight years old. As she turned her face toward the video camera and seemed to stare straight at him, Jimmy felt guilty as he looked at her innocent face, ashamed of his voyeuristic excitement as he watched the sexually dehumanizing acts she was forced to perform: “For the first time he’d felt that what they’d been doing was wrong. Before, it had always been entertainment, or else far beyond his control, but now he felt culpable” (91). Years later, after Crake has rescued Oryx from her life of sexual slavery to work with his genetically engineered creatures, Jimmy quickly understands that Oryx is Crake’s lover, yet he secretly becomes physically intimate with her. He is obsessed with her account of her past bondage and prostitution, and yearns for her to confide in him about her terrible ordeal as a third-world child who was sold by her impoverished mother to help the family survive financially and who consequently ended up in pornographic films and the sex trade. Although Jimmy wants Oryx to fit nicely into his romantic idea that she is a woman who has been saved from the evils of the world, Oryx thwarts his desire to rewrite her past as the story

168

MARGARET ATWOOD

of lost innocence and colonial victimization. Oryx’s account of her childhood reveals the debased conditions of her life, but she has learned society’s commodified value system and uses it to her advantage: “Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love . . . but love was undependable, it came and then it went, so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you would make sure you were fed enough and not damaged too much” (126). Long treated as a sexual commodity, Oryx has learned that every person and action has a price. Oryx piques Jimmy’s conscience, for her casual acceptance of the immoral, decadent society that has victimized her becomes a terrifying indictment of Jimmy’s affluent and sexually debased world of web entertainment, which dehumanizes women like Oryx, turning them into eroticized commodities. If Oryx and his mother set the emotional tone of Jimmy’s moral development, Crake sets an intellectual challenge before him. Jimmy and Crake meet in high school during a crucial time for both of them, for when Jimmy’s mother leaves him, she is under a cloud of suspicion, and Crake’s father has apparently just committed suicide. The two teens spend their afternoons smoking marijuana, watching web-based pornography and live-feed public executions, and playing video games. Atwood hints at the coming apocalypse in the appalling games they play. In the Monopoly-like trading game called Blood and Roses, the Blood side plays “with human atrocities” while the Roses side plays “with human achievements” (78). The game’s competitive maneuvers equate historical massacres with artistic creation, wherein “one Mona Lisa equaled Bergen-Belsen, one Armenian genocide equaled the Ninth Symphony plus three Great Pyramids” (79). When Jimmy says to Crake that although the Blood player usually wins, winning means that the player has “inherited a wasteland,” Crake chillingly replies that this outcome is the “point of the game” (80). Crake takes even more pleasure in the “interactive biofreak masterlore game” he discovers on the web: “EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones” (80). The introduction of the EXTINCTATHON game heightens the apocalyptic tenor of Atwood’s narrative, for Adam, the first human being, is now the crazed, mad Adam of the end of time. The game is a battle of wits between the novice player and the Grandmasters—nihilistic scientists bent on subverting the corporate compounds—as each tries to best the other’s knowledge of the long devolution of extinct plants and animals. The Grandmasters of Extinctathon help inspire Crake’s later viral decimation of the human species.

THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION 169

The moral conflict between Jimmy and Crake surfaces more fully in their adult years, drawing out the novel’s central oppositions and ironies. On a college visit to Crake at the Watson-Crick Institute, Jimmy sees the genetically spliced plants and animals that the student scientists are creating in their labs, from mood-changing wallpaper to the headless chickens. Even as Atwood satirizes this brave new world of genetic invention, it is telling that everything Jimmy is shown on his tour seems freakish and that the menagerie before him recalls the biblical account in the Book of Revelation of the end of time in which grotesque beasts rise out of the sea to wage war on the earth (Rev. 13). Jimmy questions Crake’s easy acceptance of all the genetic mutations created by the student scientists at Watson-Crick. When Crake shows Jimmy animals created at the behest of the CorpSeCorp security force, the Wolvogs—vicious wolves deceptively bred to look like domesticated dogs—Jimmy wonders if “some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?” “Nature is to zoos as God is to churches,” Crake says to Jimmy, asserting that he does not believe in God or in nature “with a capital N” (206). After Jimmy graduates from the Martha Graham Academy, his facility with words leads him to an advertising job at AnooYoo, a company that preys on people’s insecurities about their appearances. Feeling like a sell-out, which is much the way his mother felt at OrganInc Farms, he becomes dejected and cynical, and Crake seemingly rescues him from his depressing situation by inviting him to generate advertising for his Paradice unit. As the genius-scientist who does not believe in Nature or in God, Crake also sees humanity as doomed. In a key exchange with Jimmy, Crake describes humans as “one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources,” and the reason for this behavior is the human imagination. “Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac,” Crake tells Jimmy. “Human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.” When Jimmy, in response, asks if that means that humans, as a species, are “doomed by hope,” Crake replies, “You could call it hope. That or desperation” (120). Crake’s dismissal of hope as a mere psychological act of desperation places him squarely in the lineage of apocalyptic prophets of doom. “As a species we’re in deep trouble, worse than anyone’s saying,” Crake says to Jimmy when he tells him about his scheme for lowering the population. “Demand for resources has exceeded supply for decades in marginal geopolitical areas, hence the famines and droughts; but very soon, demand is going to exceed supply for everyone.” But with his

170

MARGARET ATWOOD

BlyssPluss pill, he insists, “the human race will have a better chance of swimming.” While Crake claims that the pill will lower the population by sterilizing people even while promising them enhanced sexual libido, the pill, in fact, carries the hemorrhagic virus Crake has created to destroy humanity. When Jimmy asks what will happen if the remaining people are “greedy and wasteful,” Crake remarks, “They won’t be” (295). Acting as divine judge, Crake, who does not trust the human species to prosper on its present course, decides that the only way to improve the human race is to end it and start over with his own genetically engineered humanoids. And yet these evolutionary improvements on the species are, to Jimmy, a devolutionary regression, for the Crakers lack the very qualities that make us distinctly human. Just as Jimmy argues that art is a necessity, the novel pushes this position even further, suggesting that belief in a god is not merely a cultural construct but a deep-seated biological drive that cannot be bred out of humanity. It is finally Jimmy-Snowman’s commitment to the Crakers that offers some sense of his own hope for the future. Both Oryx and Crake have asked him to take care of the Paradice models in the event of their absence. Jimmy, as Snowman, takes this charge seriously when he leads the Crakers out of the Paradice compound, but he openly rebels against Crake by trying to make the creatures more human. Crake tried to eliminate the dissemination of the human narrative, but Jimmy’s act of storytelling becomes a means not only for his personal survival but a revival of a human narrative in the Craker community. As they begin to raise questions about their beginnings—where they came from and why they have come into being—Jimmy turns to mythic, religious language to construct a metaphysical world of meaning as he tells them a Genesis-like story of their creation, explaining how Crake “did the Great Rearrangement” for his children, the “Children of Crake” (103). “Sitting in judgment on the world . . . but why had that been his right?” Snowman asks of Crake (341). Snowman needs to remember the past, but he must also tell a future story, even if his role in this story is as Crake’s prophet. His memories of what has happened enable a catharsis, a clarification of his own moral complicity in Crake’s genocidal scheme, while his commitment to the Crakers signifies a possible future for both himself and his wards. He has grown a moral imagination by the novel’s end when he is about to confront the three other human survivors he has discovered. As Coral Ann Howells maintains, Snowman “emerges as a morally responsible man and the novel’s unlikely hero, who regards the prospect of entering again into human relationships with a kind of fearful excitement. ‘What do you want me to do’ are his last words which leaves [some room] for optimism in an open-ended situation” (“Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions” 169). Jimmy whispers his

THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION 171

question to the open air, but the text offers two voices in response— Oryx (Oh Jimmy, you were so funny) and Jimmy’s mother (Don’t let me down). It is a new beginning—the “zero hour” on his faceless wristwatch—and he is ready to start over. Even as Atwood asks readers of Oryx and Crake to speculate about the disastrous prospects that may confront humanity in the not-so-distant future, she also, in a gesture true to most apocalyptic fiction, offers in the closure of her novel a surprising revelation of belief in a future of humankind. In her speculative and apocalyptic fiction, Atwood is intent on warning us about continuing on the “road we’re already on” in our contemporary consumer and corporate culture, where scientists are playing God with the “building blocks of life” and where material strategies for fulfillment prevail, whether from the market value placed on human life or the unfettered presumptions of scientific progress. Atwood fears that “if nothing changes and we keep doing what we’re doing, we are heading for the perfect storm” (Halliwell 260). However, just as Dickens’s Scrooge has a dreadful experience but wakes up the next morning, so readers of Oryx and Crake, as Atwood has remarked, can “wake up” after reading her book and say “It hasn’t happened yet, I can still mend my ways” (Halliwell 253, 260). Because humanity is “doomed to hope,” Atwood’s “perfect storm” of global catastrophe still holds out the tenuous possibility of a new beginning, as Snowman, at the end of the novel, is about to encounter three other human survivors. Readers of Oryx and Crake are also “doomed to hope,” for Atwood wants her readers to envision an outcome divergent from the text and imagine a different future. In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood offers a sober ending to our present human folly, but proposes a possible new beginning for her readers, here, now, and on the horizon.

Notes on Chapters

1. Introduction: Negotiating with Margaret Atwood by J. Brooks Bouson 1. Atwood’s novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian, Estonian, Farsi, Turkish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, among other languages; she has garnered numerous honorary degrees—from Oxford University, Cambridge University, Université de Montréal, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, and Harvard University; and she has been the recipient of an ever-multiplying number of literary awards, including the Governor-General’s Award, the Toronto Arts Award, the Government of France’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts and des Lettres, the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit, the Welsh Arts Council International Writer’s Prize, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters, the Giller Prize, the London Literature Award, and the Booker Prize. 2. In this chapter, I used the following editions of Atwood’s works: The Handmaid’s Tale (New York: Fawcett Crest-Ballantine, 1985, 1987); Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Oryx and Crake (New York: Doubleday-Random House, 2003); The Robber Bride (New York: Doubleday, 1993); Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1972); Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983–2005 (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005).

THE ROBBER BRIDE 2. Magical Realism in The Robber Bride and Other Texts by Sharon R. Wilson 1. An exception is Wilson’s Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics 3, 296, published in 1993. In this chapter, I have used the McClelland and Stewart

NOTES ON CHAPTERS 173

2.

3.

4.

5.

editions of Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Robber Bride; the Simon and Schuster edition of Bodily Harm; the Oxford edition of The Journals of Susanna Moodie; and the Virago edition of Eating Fire. In addition to the main intertext, the Grimms’ “The Robber Bridegroom,” some fairy-tale intertexts Atwood has frequently used in other works recur in The Robber Bride: the Grimms’ “Cinderella” (Ashputtle), “The Girl Without Hands,” “Little Briar Rose” (Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Woods”), “Little Snow White,” “Little Red-Cap,” and Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” and “The Ice Maiden.” The Robber Girl of Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” who sets her reindeer free so that they can carry Gerda to Lapland to rescue Kay (Zipes, Complete 67–69), is probably also an inspiration for the gender reversal in Atwood’s book. “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Humpty Dumpty,” Dodgson’s Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland, Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Shelley’s Frankenstein are also important. Historical intertexts include stories of Dame Giraude, the Empress Theophano, Otto the Red, Genghis Khan, Project Babylon, and Saddam Hussein. Jezebel, the Whore of Babylon, the Good Samaritan, and Judas are biblical ones. The Great Goddess myth includes the three moon phases corresponding to Diana, Venus, and Hecate, the Minoan snake goddess, Medusa, and Lamia. The Great Goddess Isis, the Isis-Osiris-Horus, the servant Kharis, Mnemosyne, Euridice and Orpheus, Helen of Troy, Proteus, and the Golden Apples mythic intertexts are also important (Wilson, Myths 23). Once called Zilla (Atwood papers, RB Holograph, Box 131), Zenia is a classic femme fatale, of the Lilith, Delilah, Salome, Siren, Medusa, and Morgan le Fay variety. Listing literary parallels in French, Atwood associates Zenia with Lady MacBeth, Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and “Lamia,” Coleridge’s Geraldine, Tennyson’s Vivian, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, Stoker’s Lucy, Wilde’s Salome, and Pater’s descriptions of the Mona Lisa (Atwood Papers, Collection 335, Box 2 RB Notes).

3. Parodic Border Crossings in The Robber Bride by Hilde Staels 1. The following editions of Atwood’s works have been used in this chapter: The Robber Bride (London: Bloomsbury, 1993); Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Moving Targets: Writing With Intent, 1982–2004 (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004). 2. Reflecting on the popularity of the Gothic mode in fiction of the 1990s, Susanne Becker remarks, “Ex-centric voices from women, from the postcolonial world and those marginalized due to race or ethnic or class politics; ex-centric genres from related oral cultures or Western popular and entertainment culture: the 1990s cultural appropriation of these voices and genres is linked to the increasing globalisation of thought and communication” (Gothic Forms 253). The Robber Bride has been interpreted as a postcolonial

174

NOTES ON CHAPTERS

novel about the Canadian myth of white Anglophone superiority and the intolerance towards, as well as the irrational anxiety about, immigrants of various ethnic origins in the multicultural Toronto of the 1990s. Coral Ann Howells reads the novel as “a ghost story, or rather a story about exorcizing ghosts, in an attempt at a realistic reappraisal of Canadianness in the 1990s and a more honest recognition of the differences concealed within constructions of personal and national identity” (“The Robber Bride” 100). In my analysis, I will focus on the recovery of the “otherness” within the personal identities of the three characters. 3. In an interview, Atwood comments on the resolution scene: “The fact that the three women do a funeral service for Zenia off the back of the boat is an acceptance. You could also say that they have absorbed the elements of themselves that they projected onto her back into themselves, as it were” (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels 208–09).

4. You’re History: Living with Trauma in The Robber Bride by Laurie Vickroy 1. In this chapter I use the US edition of Atwood’s novel: The Robber Bride (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).

THE BLIND ASSASSIN 5. “Was I My Sister’s Keeper?”: The Blind Assassin and Problematic Feminisms by Fiona Tolan 1. This chapter refers to the following editions of Atwood’s novels: Alias Grace (London: Virago, 1997); Bodily Harm (London: Vintage, 1996); Cat’s Eye (London: Virago, 1990); Life Before Man (London: Vintage, 1996); The Blind Assassin (London, Virago, 2001); The Edible Woman (London: Virago, 1980); The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 1996); The Robber Bride (London: Virago, 1994). 2. In another related example from Alias Grace, Grace’s Aunt Pauline rescinds her sisterly responsibilities by funding Grace’s family’s emigration to Canada. She and Grace’s mother part sadly—“they were sisters and had been through thick and thin” (128)—but never reunite, as Grace’s mother dies and is buried at sea. 3. A notable number of articles on The Blind Assassin, for example, address the novel’s engagement with narrative strategy and historiography, including: Barbara Dancygier’s “Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction: The Case of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin,” Style 41.2 (2007): 133–52; Alan Robinson’s “Alias Laura: Representations of the Past in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin,” Modern Language Review 101.2 (April 2006): 347–59; and James Harold’s “Narrative Engagement with

NOTES ON CHAPTERS 175

4.

5. 6. 7.

Atonement and The Blind Assassin,” Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (April 2005): 130–45. Earl G. Ingersoll, for example, discusses Showalter’s London Review of Books review of Oryx and Crake and accuses her of “project[ing] her own feminist views on Atwood” (“Survival” 175). This is discussed in more detail in Tolan, Margaret Atwood 251–72. At the conclusion of The Edible Woman, Marian breaks off her engagement and bakes her fiancé Peter a cake woman, to be consumed in her place. Discussing the manner in which The Blind Assassin “engages its readers in the pursuit of a truth to which its central consciousness has access and a truth she will eventually reveal,” Ingersoll describes the novel as a primarily modernist, rather than a postmodernist text (“Modernism” 5).

6. Narrative Multiplicity and the Multi-layered Self in The Blind Assassin by Magali Cornier Michael 1. As many critics have noted, the editor-arranger of the multiple texts presented by the novel could be Myra, Reenie’s daughter who takes care of Iris, or Iris’s granddaughter Sabrina, after she finds the various pieces of writing after Iris’s death. Indeed, a newspaper column included near the novel’s conclusion reports that Sabrina returned “from abroad . . . to see to her grandmother’s affairs” (519). However, the text also points to the editor as an extra-textual figure, given that it remains unclear whether or not Iris writes down the present narrative of her last year of life or whether an editorauthor creates those sections based on the personae that Iris creates within her autobiography. 2. Like many of her female “literary precursors,” as Ellen McWilliams similarly notes, Iris, “whose literary alter ego is also borne out of necessity . . . turns it to her advantage by indulging in elaborate narrative game playing” (32). 3. Page references to Atwood’s The Blind Assassin will appear parenthetically in the text. The edition used in this chapter is the Random House-Doubleday edition published in 2000. 4. I make a distinction between the outermost layer of narrative (the first person narrative of Iris in her last year of life) and the autobiography she writes, although most critics fail to differentiate the two narratives. Moreover, I use the more inclusive term autobiography here, although some critics prefer to use the more specific term memoir, simply because much theoretical work on women’s autobiographical writing nicely supports and frames my discussion. 5. As Sharon Wilson notes, Iris “reshapes her life as she shapes her memoirs” (“Through the Wall” 92). 6. Many critics have made similar points about Iris opening up possibilities for Sabrina. For example, see Raschke and Appleton (136) and Stein (“Left-Handed Story” 150). 7. Karen Stein similarly notes that, for Iris, “storytelling” is in part a way “to gain power” (“Left-Handed Story” 135).

176

NOTES ON CHAPTERS

8. Many critics have noted Iris’s awareness of the constructed quality of her narrative. For example, see Ingersoll (“Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin” 111) and Economou (145). 9. See the work of scholars such as Michel Foucault, Dominick LaCapra, Joan Scott, and Hayden White, who examine how history is conceptualized and written, for more complete discussions of the variables that affect reconstructions of the past. 10. Martha Watson further notes that “An autobiography is, then, an at least partially fictionalized account of a life because looking back in retrospect the author imposes a meaning and coherence on events she did not possess at the moment they occurred” (4), although other factors are involved as I have already noted. 11. Tania Modleski argues that “popular feminine narratives” historically have not been taken “seriously” (11) and have tended to be treated as “sentimental (feminine) ‘drivel’” (14). 12. David Konstan places the general emergence of “carnal passion” and not just “love” as a motive for romance (214) as early as the eighteenth century with the novels of “Richardson” (11); and Carol Thurston locates the shift by women writers to more sexually frank romance fiction in the period “after the end of World War I and the extension of suffrage by women” (17). See Hapke for a discussion of how working class women readers of the 1930s were drawn to fiction of “romantic thralldom” (xviii) and “feminine romantic devotion and suffering” (117). 13. David Ketterer notes that “Pulp SF and modern fantasy were born and came to fruition in the years between the two world wars” (13). 14. A number of critics note the parallels between the cultures represented in the science fiction story and in Iris’s autobiography/memoir. For example, see Bouson (“Commemoration” 259) and Stein (“Left-Handed Story” 148). 15. Similarly, Adam Roberts notes that science fiction typically “encodes issues relevant to the present” (36), and Basil Davenport asserts that “science fiction contains a high percentage of explicit and implicit social criticism” (52).

7. “If You Look Long Enough”: Photography, Memory, and Mourning in The Blind Assassin by Shuli Barzilai 1. The word “ekphrasis” or “ecphrasis” (from the Greek ek out and phrazien to tell, describe, explain) originally meant “speaking out” or “telling in full.” Many studies have been devoted to the definition, usage, and history of ekphrasis. For a useful overview, see Welsh. 2. I prefer the immediacy of “fictional ekphrasis” to Hollander’s “notional ekphrasis,” a term also used to designate “the verbal representation of a purely fictional work of art”; however, I retain his term “actual ekphrasis” for descriptions involving an “actual object . . . available for our own consideration” (4).

NOTES ON CHAPTERS 177 3. This baffling and elusive poem has been variously interpreted. See especially Barry’s and Nischik and Breitbach’s finely-honed analyses. 4. See, e. g., Poe’s (in)famous dictum: “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (19). 5. “Phototext” derives from Mitchell’s coinage of “imagetext” to designate “a double-coded system of mental storage and retrieval” that combines visual and verbal media (192). 6. Bouson identifies additional genres in The Blind Assassin, specifically, “the historical novel, the Künstlerroman, the female Gothic and romance novel, and pulp science fiction” (“Commemoration” 252). These genres complement, in my view, the structural and thematic centrality of the detective novel and elegiac memoir. 7. To avoid possible confusion, I would note that Wilson’s references to “actual,” “figurative,” “narrative,” and “magic” photographs in The Blind Assassin differ from the terminology used in this essay (see Wilson, “Fairy Tales, Myths, and Magic Photographs”). 8. All citations are from the Doubleday (New York) edition of The Blind Assassin. 9. Thompson held the office from 1892–1894, Bowell from 1894–1896, and Tupper for only 69 days in 1896. On the postmodernist interweaving of geopolitical facts with fictional history in this novel, see Dvorak; on Atwood’s “experimentation across genre boundaries” in her fiction since the mid–1980s, see Howells (“Transgressing Genre” 139). 10. As Parkin-Gounelas persuasively shows, the novel abounds in “sharply visualized things with color and texture splashed over the pages, often in a gratuitous, wasteful way” (685). This abundance or excess may be considered a function of Iris’s perspectival orientation toward the world: her ways of seeing determine the entire narrative. 11. See, e. g., the treasure-hoarding “Gryfon” cognate with Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book II, ll. 943–50. 12. The mother’s name, by indirection, anticipates her death, as does the winter-scene snapshot taken before her marriage (Blind Assassin 68). As Stein observes, despite Liliana’s “jaunty, adventuresome” appearance, the picture associates her with “whiteness and cold” (“Left-Handed Story” 140). 13. Although a photograph of Aimee, the child born of Iris’s union with Alex, is mentioned twice in her memoir, it eludes classification among her phototexts because she never describes it (444, 446). After serving a limited actional function, the picture disappears from view, which may in itself be attributed a significance. 14. Information about hand-tinting appears in a folder titled “New Novel Research: Photography,” in The Blind Assassin manuscript materials at the Fisher Rare Book Library (Atwood papers, Manuscript Collection 335, Box 66). Pages photocopied from Langford’s The Darkroom Handbook include the following: “In the 19th century handcoloring or ‘tinting’ was the only way to obtain a colored photograph. Today you can use this technique

178

NOTES ON CHAPTERS

to gain complete control over the color of each element in your picture— isolating details or creating realistic or bizarre effects” (280). See also Atwood on her employment of researchers: “Sometimes I send them off and say, ‘Tell me how you color-tinted black and white photos’” (Heilman and Taylor 240). 15. For especially helpful guidance through the mirror-maze of narrative layers and other reflexive devices in the novel, see Staels. My interpretive direction, however, differs from Staels’s conclusion that the embedding of these stories “call[s] into doubt our ability to ever know reality and represent it truthfully” (“Atwood’s Specular Narrative”160). 16. See my essay “Who Is He?” on the motives for “free-floating” pronouns, without apparent referents, in Surfacing.

ORYX AND CRAKE 8. Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake by Shannon Hengen 1. All editions of Atwood’s texts are the original Canadian editions. Oryx and Crake (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003); Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Toronto: Anansi, 2008); The Tent (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006); The Year of the Flood (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009).

9. Problematic Paradice in Oryx and Crake by Karen F. Stein My thanks to J. Brooks Bouson for insightful editing and to Linda Shamoon for helpful comments on an early draft and suggestions that helped shape the last section. In this chapter I use the Canadian edition of Oryx and Crake (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003). 1. Within the genre of speculative fiction, Atwood calls the book both “an adventure romance” (as distinguished from a novel or a love romance), and “a Menippean satire, the literary form that deals in intellectual obsession” (“The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context” 515). 2. Oryx, the other namesake of Atwood’s book, embodies the whore/ Madonna dichotomy. She is a victim, sold into slavery when she is a girl by her impoverished mother in an unnamed third-world country. She has been in porn films, and becomes a sex worker. She becomes a medium of exchange between Jimmy and Crake. Both she and Jimmy are unwitting participants in Crake’s plot. She travels globally promoting the BlyssPluss pills, and she becomes the instructor who teaches the Crakers the skills they will need when they leave the enclosed bubble dome of the Paradice

NOTES ON CHAPTERS 179

3.

4.

5.

6.

project to enter the post-apocalypse world. However, her story is beyond the scope of this essay. Prometheus was one of the early deities of Greek mythology, a Titan, who created the first man and stole fire from Olympus. But his theft of fire, along with other tricks Prometheus played on the younger gods of Olympus, angered Zeus who punished him by chaining him to a rock, and setting an eagle to eat his liver that regenerated daily. (We may interpret this metaphorically as Prometheus experiencing guilt that eats away at him.) The original Prometheus story explores several of the themes Atwood discusses in her remarks on speculative fiction in “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context,” in which she states that speculative fiction may focus on what it means to be human and the relation of humanity to the universe. Mary Shelley’s family is reflected in her book. She dedicated the book to her father, William Godwin, author of Political Justice and Caleb Williams. Godwin was an advocate of rationality, and confessed himself a poor father. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an ardent radical and advocate for free love and women’s rights. Because Wollstonecraft died from complications of her pregnancy, Mary Shelley never knew her mother. But she repeatedly read her mother’s book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which argues for educating women and seeks to establish their equality with men (see Mellor 10–16; Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters”). Atwood voices her distrust of carefully planned and controlled communities in early poems such as “The City Planners,” which points to the “bland madness” of a suburbia laid out in grids. Writing about the close relationship of utopias to dystopias in her essay “Writing Utopia,” Atwood warns: “But should we try too hard to enforce Utopia, Dystopia rapidly follows; because if enough people disagree with us we’ll have to eliminate or suppress or terrorize or manipulate them, and then we’ve got 1984” [George Orwell’s dystopia] (95).

10. The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake by Mark Bosco, S.J. 1. In this chapter, I use the following editions of Atwood’s works: Oryx and Crake (New York: Anchor, 2004), and Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983–2005 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).

Works Cited

Primary Sources Atwood’s Works Alias Grace. 1996. London: Virago, 1997. The Blind Assassin. 2000. London: Virago, 2001. The Blind Assassin. New York: Random House-Doubleday, 2000. Bodily Harm. 1981. London: Vintage, 1996. Bodily Harm. 1981. New York: Bantam, 1996. Bodily Harm. 1981. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. “Canadian-American Relations: Surviving the Eighties.” Second Words 371–92. Cat’s Eye. 1988. London: Virago, 1990. Cat’s Eye. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988. “The City Planners.” The Circle Game. Toronto: Anansi, 1978. 36–37. “The Curse of Eve—Or, What I Learned in School.” Second Words 215–28. Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965–1995. London: Virago, 1999. The Edible Woman. 1969. London: Virago, 1980. “An End to Audience?” Second Words 334–57. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1985. London: Vintage, 1996. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context.” PMLA 119.3 (2004): 513–17. “If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything at All.” Language in Her Eye: Views on Writing and Gender by Canadian Women Writing in English. Ed. Libby Scheier, Sarah Sheard, and Eleanor Wachtel. Toronto: Coach House, 1990. 15–25. “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction.” Writing with Intent 158–76. Introduction. The Edible Woman. 1969. London: Virago, 1980. 7–8. The Journals of Susanna Moodie: Poems by Margaret Atwood. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970. Life Before Man. 1979. London: Vintage, 1996. Moving Targets: Writing With Intent, 1982–2004. Toronto: Anansi, 2004.

WORKS CITED 181 Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. “Not Just a Pretty Face.” The Women’s Review of Books 11.4 (1994): 6–7. Oryx and Crake. 2003. New York: Anchor, 2004. Oryx and Crake. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Toronto: Anansi, 2008. “Reading Blind: The Best American Short Stories 1989.” Writing with Intent 68–79. The Robber Bride. London: Bloomsbury, 1993; London: Virago, 1994. The Robber Bride. New York: Bantam, 1993. The Robber Bride. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. “Running with the Tigers.” Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. Ed. Lorna Sage. London: Virago, 1994. 117–35. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. 1982. Boston: Beacon, 1984. “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behaviour in the Creation of Literature.” Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983–2005. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. 125–38. “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad Behaviour in the Creation of Literature.” Moving Targets: Writing With Intent, 1982–2004. Toronto: Anansi, 2004. 157–72. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1972. The Tent. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006. “This Is a Photograph of Me.” The Circle Game. Toronto: Anansi, 1966. 11. “War Photo.” The Door. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 61–62. “Writing Utopia.” Writing with Intent 92–100. “Writing Oryx and Crake.” Writing with Intent 284–86. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983–2005. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. The Year of the Flood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009.

Atwood’s Interviews “Margaret Atwood.” Video. Ovation Arts Network. Toronto, 1999. Atwood, Margaret, and Victor-Levy Beaulieu. Two Solicitudes: Conversations. Trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998. Bader, Rudolf. “To Write Is to Wrestle with an Angel in the Mud.” 1995. Ingersoll, Waltzing 186–99. Fitz Gerald, Gregory and Kathryn Crabbe. “Evading the Pigeonholers.” 1987. Ingersoll, Margaret Atwood: Conversations 131–39. Gibson, Graeme. “Dissecting the Way a Writer Works.” 1973. Ingersoll, Waltzing 1–17; Ingersoll, Margaret Atwood: Conversations 3–19. Halliwell, Martin. “Awaiting the Perfect Storm.” 2003. Ingersoll, Waltzing 253–65.

182

WORKS CITED

Hammond, Margo. “The Joys of Small.” St. Petersburg Times [St. Petersburg, FL] 30 Jan 2005: 4P. Rpt. in Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988–2005. Ed. Shannon Hengen and Ashley Thomson. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. 365–66. Hancock, Geoff. “Tightrope-Walking over Niagara Falls.” 1987. Ingersoll, Waltzing 90–118. Heilman, Ann and Debbie Taylor. “Fifty-Two Ways of Making Butter.” 2001. Ingersoll, Waltzing 236–52. Ingersoll, Earl, ed. Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990. Ingersoll, Earl, ed. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 2006. Langer, Beryl. “There Are No Texts without Life.” 1988. Ingersoll, Waltzing 125–38. McKay, Sinclair. “Margaret Atwood: The Canadian Novelist Talks to Sinclair McKay about Books and Bees.” 20 Aug. 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/books/6061404/Margaret-Atwood. html. 12 Dec. 2009. Morris, Mary. “Opening a Door onto a Completely Unknown Space.” 1990. Ingersoll, Waltzing 139–52. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Dancing on the Edge of the Precipice.” 1978. Ingersoll, Waltzing 43–54. Random House. Interview with Atwood on Oryx and Crake. http://www. randomhouse.com/features/atwood/interview.html. 2 July 2009. Reading group guide. Interview with Margaret Atwood on Oryx and Crake. http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/oryx_and_crake1.asp. 9 Oct 2009. Ritchie, Harry. “Come into the Garden.” Sunday Times Books 10 Oct 1993: sec. 6: 8–9. Interview excerpted in Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide: 1988–2005. Ed. Shannon Hengen and Ashley Thomson. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. 98. Sandler, Linda. “A Question of Metamorphosis.” 1977. Ingersoll, Waltzing 18–36. Solomon, Evan. Interview with Margaret Atwood. Hot Type. CBC Television. 12 Oct. 2003. Staels, Hilde. “ ‘You Can’t Do Without Your Shadow’: An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” In Hilde Staels’s Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse. Tübingen, Germany: A. Francke Verlag, 1995. 207–14.

Secondary Sources Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981. ——. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971. Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th ed. Boston: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2005. Barry, Peter. “Contemporary Poetry and Ekphrasis.” Cambridge Quarterly 31 (2002): 155–65.

WORKS CITED 183 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Barzilai, Shuli. “ ‘Tell My Story’: Remembrance and Revenge in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Critique 50.1 (2008): 87–110. ——. “Who Is He? The Missing Persons Behind the Pronoun in Atwood’s Surfacing.” Canadian Literature 164 (2000): 57–79. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley. London: Vintage, 1997. Becker, Susanne. “Celebrity, or Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Media.” Nischik, Margaret Atwood 28–40. ——. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Birkerts, Sven. “Present at the Re-Creation.” New York Times 18 May 2003, late ed., sec. 7: 12+. Bouson, J. Brooks. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. ——. “ ‘A Commemoration of Wounds Endured and Resented’: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir.” Critique 44.3 (2003): 251–69. ——. “ ‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3 (2004): 139–56. ——. “Slipping Sideways into the Dreams of Women: The Female Dream Work of Power Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6 (1995): 149–66. Bowers, Maggie. Magic(al) Realism: A New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Boyer, Robert H., and Kenneth J. Zahorski, eds. The Fantastic Imagination: An Anthology of High Fantasy. New York: Avon, 1977. Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1995. Burgin, Victor. “Looking at Photographs.” Thinking Photography. Ed. Victor Burgin. London: Macmillan, 1982. 142–53. Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. London: Gollancz, 1979. ——. The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. London: Virago, 1979. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations of Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Brighton, Sussex, UK: Harvester Press, 1981. 245–64. Coleman, Linda S. Introduction. Women’s Life-Writing: Finding Voice/Building Community. Ed. Linda S. Coleman. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1997. 1–7.

184

WORKS CITED

Cooke, Grayson. “Technics and the Human at Zero-Hour: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in Canadian Literature 31.2 (2006): 105–25. Creekmur, Corey K. “Lost Objects: Photography, Fiction, and Mourning.” Photo-Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature. Ed. Marsha Bryant. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996. 73–82. Davenport, Basil et. al. The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism. Chicago: Advent, 1959. Davies, Madeleine. “Margaret Atwood’s Female Bodies.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 58–71. Denfeld, Rene. The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order. New York: Warner, 1995. DiMarco, Danette. “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: Homo Faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake.” Papers on Language and Literature 41.2 (2005): 170–95. del Rey, Lester. The World of Science Fiction, 1926–1976: The History of a Subculture. New York: Garland, 1980. Donawerth, Jane. Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Dunning, Stephen. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic.” Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 86–101. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Dvorak, Marta. “The Right Hand Writing and the Left Hand Erasing in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Commonwealth 25.1 (2002): 59–68. Economou, Mary G. “Weaving Women: Confessions and Identity in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin.” Cultures de la Confession: Formes de l’Aveu dans le Monde Anglophone. Ed. Sylvie Mathé and Gilles Teulié. Aix-en-Provence, France: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2006. 143–58. Edwards, Justin. Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature. Edmonton, CA: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Ellis, Kate. “Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the Bourgeois Family.” Levine and Knoepflmacher 123–42. Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” Caruth 183–99. Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991. Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. Felman, Shoshona, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Felski, Rita. “On Confession.” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 83–95.

WORKS CITED 185 Fiddes, Paul S. The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Figley, Charles. Helping Traumatized Families. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1989. Fleenor, Juliann E. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden, 1983. Freud, Sigmund. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. London: Vintage, 1995. 239–93. ——. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74. ——. “The Uncanny.” Writings on Art and Literature. Ed. Neil Hertz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 193–233. Garton Ash, Timothy. “From the Ashes, a New Capitalism.” The Globe and Mail [Toronto] 8 May 2009: A15. Gibson, Andrew. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Gilmore, Leigh. “The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre.” Autobiography & Postmodernism. Ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 3–18. ——. “Autobiographics.” Smith and Watson 183–89. Goetsch, Paul. “Margaret Atwood: A Canadian Nationalist.” Nischik, Margaret Atwood 166–79. Grace, Sherrill. Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood. Ed. Ken Norris. Montreal: Véhicule, 1980. Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Doubleday, 1999. Graeber, Laurel. “Zenia is sort of like Madonna.” New York Times Book Review 31 Oct. 1993: 22. Hapke, Laura. Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Hart, Patricia. “Rosario Ferre’s The Youngest Doll.” Studies in Honor of Maria A. Salgado. Ed. Millicent A. Bolden and Luis A. Jimenez. Hispanic Monographs 10. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1995. Hassler, Donald M., and Clyde Wilcox, ed. Political Science Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. ——. “Introduction: Politics, Art, Collaboration.” Hassler and Wilcox 1–6. Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Heilmann, Ann. “The Devil Herself?: Fantasy, Female Identity and the Villainess Fatale in The Robber Bride.” The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction. Ed. Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. 171–82. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic, 1992. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hollander, John. The Grazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

186

WORKS CITED

Howells, Coral Ann. “The Figure of the Demonic Woman in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Postmodernism and Feminism: Canadian Contexts. Ed. Shirin Kuchedkar. Delhi: Pencraft, 1995. 133–41. ——. Margaret Atwood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996; Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1996. ——. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 161–75. ——. “The Robber Bride, or, Who is a True Canadian?” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon Rose Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. 88–101. ——. “Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Camden House, 2000. 139–56. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. New York: Methuen, 1984. Huntington, John. The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Hutcheon, Linda. “Circling the Downspout of Empire: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism.” Ariel 20.4 (1989): 149–75. ——. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York and London, 1984. ——. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. ——. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985. Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: North Point, 1998. Ingersoll, Earl G. “Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Spiritual Adventure.” Perrakis, Adventures 105–25. ——. “Modernism/Postmodernism: Subverting Binaries in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin.” Margaret Atwood Studies 1.1 (2007): 4–16. ——. “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake.” Extrapolation 45.2 (2004): 162–75. ——. “Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Studies in the Novel 35 (2003): 543–58. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Methuen, 1981. Jung, Carl G. Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster. London: Routledge, 1972. Ketterer, David. “ ‘Another Dimension of Space’: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy and Atwood’s Blind Assassin.” Worlds of Wonder: Readings in Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. Ed. Jean-François Leroux and Camille R. La Bossière. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004. 7–34.

WORKS CITED 187 Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters.” Levine and Knoepflmacher 88–119. Konstan, David. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Kuribayashi, Tomoko. “ ‘A mouse in the castle of tigers . . . might become a tiger’: Victims, Survivors, and Narratives in Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin.” Margaret Atwood Studies 1.1 (2007): 16–27. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Langford, Michael John. The Darkroom Handbook. New York: Knopf, 1981. Laub, Dori, and Nanette C. Auerhahn. “Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma: Forms of Traumatic Memory.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74.2 (1993): 287–302. Leigh, David J. Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. London: Allen Lane, 2009. McFarlane, Alexander C., and Giovanni de Girolamo. “The Nature of Traumatic Stressors and the Epidemiology of Posttraumatic Reactions.” Van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth 129–54. McFarlane, Alexander C., and Rachel Yehuda. “Resilience, Vulnerability, and the Course of Posttraumatic Reactions.” Van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth 155–81. McWilliams, Ellen. “Keeping Secrets, Telling Lies: Fictions of the Artist and Author in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” Atlantis 32.1 (2007): 25–33. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen, 1988. Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. Milton, John. 1667. Paradise Lost. Ed. Alastair Fowler. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1998. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Methuen, 1982. Moi, Toril. What Is A Woman? and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Morgan, Robin, ed. Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Vintage, 1970. Moss, Laura. “Margaret Atwood: Branding an Icon Abroad.” Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye. Ed. John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006. 19–33. Mumby, Dennis K. “Introduction: Narrative and Social Control.” Narrative and Social Control: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Dennis Mumby. London: Sage, 1993. 1–12.

188

WORKS CITED

Nischik, Reingard, ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. ——. “ ‘Flagpoles and Entrance Doors’: Introduction.” Nischik, Margaret Atwood 1–12. Nischik, Reingard M., and Julia Breitbach. “Eye-Openers: Photography in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry.” Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye. Ed. John Moss and Tobi Kozkewich. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006. 331–46. Orbach, Susie. Fat is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss. New York: Paddington, 1978. Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth. “ ‘What Isn’t There’ in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: The Psychoanalysis of Duplicity.” Modern Fiction Studies 50 (2004): 681–700. Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg, ed. Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Writers. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. ——.“Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Vampire as Intersubjective Catalyst.” Mosaic: A Journal for The Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30.3 (1997): 151–68. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” Essays and Reviews. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984. 13–45. Pohl, Frederik. “The Politics of Prophecy.” Hassler and Wilcox 7–17. Potts, Donna L. “ ‘The Old Maps are Dissolving’: Intertextuality and Identity in Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18.2 (1999): 281–98. Prabhakar, M. Feminism/Postmodernism: Margaret Atwood’s Fiction. New Delhi: Creative Books, 1999. Rao, Eleonora. “Home and Nation in Margaret Atwood’s Later Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge University Press, 2006. 100–13. Raschke, Debrah, and Sarah Appleton. “ ‘And They Went to Bury Her’: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and The Robber Bride.” Perrakis, Adventures 126–52. Ridout, Alice.“ ‘Without Memory, There Can Be No Revenge’: Iris Chase Griffen’s Textual Revenge in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Margaret Atwood Studies 2.2 (2008): 14–25. Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2000. Rosenthal, Caroline. “Canonizing Atwood: Her Impact on Teaching in the US, Canada, and Europe.” Nischik, Margaret Atwood 41–56. Rothstein, Mervyn. “No Balm in Gilead for Margaret Atwood.” New York Times 17 Feb. 1986. C11. Sceats, Sarah. Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Schmidt, Lawrence E., and Scott Marratto. The End of Ethics in a Technological Society. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. Searles, Baird, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin. A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy. New York: Avon, 1982.

WORKS CITED 189 Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Ed. Joanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2000. Showalter, Elaine. “Virgin Suicide.” The New Statesman. 2 October 2000. 12 June 2009. . Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. ——. “Autobiographical Manifestos.” Smith and Watson 433–40. ——. “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices.” Smith and Watson 3–52. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1977. Staels, Hilde. “Atwood’s Specular Narrative: The Blind Assassin.” English Studies 85.2 (2004): 147–60. ——. Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1995. Stanton, Susan. “Margaret Atwood in Australia.” Cross-Canadian Writers’ Quarterly 5.2/3 (1983): 13–14. Stein, Karen F. “A Left-Handed Story: The Blind Assassin.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon Rose Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. 135–53. ——. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Thomson, Ashley. Introduction. Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988–2005. Ed. Shannon Hengen and Ashley Thomson. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007. ix–xi. Thurston, Carol. The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Tolan, Fiona. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. ——. “Sucking the Blood Out of Second Wave Feminism: Postfeminist Vampirism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Gothic Studies 9.2 (2007): 45–57. Tremonti, Anna Maria. Interview with James Lovelock. The Current. CBC Radio. 27 May 2009. Updike, John. “Love and Loss on Zycron.” New Yorker 18 September 2000: 142–45. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. “The Complexity of Adaptation to Trauma: SelfRegulation, Stimulus Discrimination, and Characterological Development.” Van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth 182–213. Van der Kolk, Bessel, and Alexander C. McFarlane. “The Black Hole of Trauma.” Van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth 3–23. Van der Kolk, Bessel, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, eds. Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society. New York: Guilford, 1996.

190

WORKS CITED

Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno Van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” Caruth 158–82. Vickroy, Laurie. “Seeking Symbolic Immortality: Visualizing Trauma in Cat’s Eye.” Mosaic 38.2 (2005): 129–43. ——. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2002. Walker, Rebecca, ed. To be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. New York: Anchor, 1995. Warnes, Christopher. “The Hermeneutics of Vagueness.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41.1 (2005): 1–13. Watson, Martha. Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Welsh, Ryan. “Ekphrasis.” 2007. The University of Chicago: Theories of Media: Keyword Glossary. 26 September 2009. . Whelehan, Imelda. Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to ‘Post-Feminism.’ Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Thorndike, ME: Thorndike, 1998. Wilson, Sharon Rose. “Blindness and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Major Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 176–90. ——.“Fairy Tales, Myths, and Magic Photographs in Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Once Upon a Time: Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends in Atwood’s Writings. Ed. Sarah A. Appleton. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 73–93. ——. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. ——. Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008. ——. Preface. Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon Wilson, Thomas Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: MLA, 1996. 1–2. ——. “Through the ‘Wall’: Crone Journeys of Enlightenment and Creativity in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Keri Hulme, and Other Women Writers.” Perrakis, Adventures 83–102. Wolf, Naomi. Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Wolf, Werner. “Framing Fiction. Reflections on a Narratological Concept and an Example: Bradbury, Mensonge.” Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context. Ed. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solback. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999. Wright, Laura. “Orwellian Animals in Postcolonial Contexts: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Margaret Atwood Studies 2.1 (2008): 3–13. Yacobi, Tamar. “The Ekphrastic Model: Forms and Functions.” Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis. Ed. Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998. 21–34.

WORKS CITED 191 York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Zimmerman, Barbara. “Shadow Play: Zenia, the Archetypal Feminine Shadow in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Pleiades 15.2 (1995): 70–82. Zipes, Jack, ed. and trans. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. New York: Bantam, 1987.

Further Reading

As the “Further Reading” list reveals, there has been an intense and ongoing scholarly interest in Atwood over the years. For a detailed and exhaustive bibliography of works by and about Atwood, see Shannon Hengen and Ashley Thomson’s Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988–2005 (pub. in 2007), which includes references to Atwood’s interviews, reviews of Atwood’s works, and scholarly works on Atwood. In addition to providing annotations for many of the interviews and scholarly works, the Reference Guide contains references to Atwood’s novels, poetry, short stories, and articles, and it also includes a useful section on “Margaret Atwood on the Web” (378–86). For bibliographic information since 2005, see Hengen and Thomson’s annual Atwood checklist published in Margaret Atwood Studies (formerly the Newsletter of the Margaret Atwood Society). For representative collections of Atwood’s interviews, see Earl Ingersoll’s Margaret Atwood: Conversations (1990) and Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood (2006) and also see Ingersoll’s “Introduction” to Waltzing Again (vii–xiv) for an interesting discussion of Atwood’s relationship with her interviewers. For biographical information on Atwood, see Nathalie Cooke’s Margaret Atwood: A Biography (1998) and Rosemary Sullivan’s The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out (1998). For comprehensive introductions to Atwood’s novels, see J. Brooks Bouson’s Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood (1993); Coral Ann Howells’s Margaret Atwood (2005); and Karen Stein’s Margaret Atwood Revisited (1999). For a discussion of narrative discourse in Atwood’s novels, see Hilde Staels’s Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse (1995). For a discussion of the feminist politics of Atwood’s novels, see Fiona Tolan’s Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (2007). For an in-depth analysis of Atwood’s use of myth and fairy tales, see Sharon Rose Wilson’s Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics

FURTHER READING

193

(1993) and Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison (2008). For critical collections on Atwood’s works, see Sarah Appleton’s Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales, and Legends in Margaret Atwood’s Writings (2008); Harold Bloom’s Margaret Atwood (2009); Coral Ann Howells’s The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (2006); John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich’s Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye (2006); Colin Nicholson’s Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays (1994); Reingard Nischik’s Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact (2000); Sharon Rose Wilson’s Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction (2003); and Lorraine York’s Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels (1995). Books and Critical Essays on Atwood Appleton, Sarah A., ed. Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood’s Writings. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Barzilai, Shuli. “Of Stumps and Other Vanquished Things: Emily Carr, Margaret Atwood and Landscape as Archive.” Word & Image 23.3 (2007): 253–69. ——. “ ‘Tell My Story’: Remembrance and Revenge in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Critique 50.1 (Fall 2008): 87–110. Bloom, Harold, ed. Margaret Atwood. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009. Bouson, J. Brooks. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. ——.“ ‘A Commemoration of Wounds Endured and Resented’: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir.” Critique 44.3 (2003): 251–69. ——. “ ‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.3 (2004): 139–56. ——. “Slipping Sideways into the Dreams of Women: The Female Dream Work of Power Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 6.3–4 (1995): 149–66. Cooke, Grayson. “Technics and the Human at Zero-Hour: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en Littérature Canadienne 31.2 (2006): 105–25. Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto: ECW Press, 1998. Dancygier, Barbara. “Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction: The Case of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Style 41.2 (2007): 133–52. Davies, Madeleine. “Margaret Atwood’s Female Bodies.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 58–71.

194

FURTHER READING

Davis, Roger. “ ‘A White Illusion of a Man’: Snowman, Survival and Speculation in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Hosting the Monster. Ed. Holly Lynn Baumgartner and Roger Davis. At the Interface/ Probing the Boundaries 52. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 237–58. DiMarco, Danette. “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: Homo Faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 41.2 (2005): 170–95. Dunning, Stephen. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic.” Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 86–101. Dvorak, Marta. “The Right Hand Writing and the Left Hand Erasing in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 25.1 (Autumn 2002): 59–68. Fand, Roxanne J. “Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Dialogic Moral of a Nietzschean Fairy Tale.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45.1 (Fall 2003): 65–81. Hengen, Shannon. Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors, Reflections, and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry. Toronto: Second Story Press, 1993. Hengen, Shannon, and Ashley Thomson. Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988–2005. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2007. Howells, Coral Ann, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006 ——. Margaret Atwood. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005. ——. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Ed. Coral Ann Howells. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 161–75. ——. “The Robber Bride; or, Who Is a True Canadian?” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon Rose Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. 88–101. Ingersoll, Earl, ed. Margaret Atwood: Conversations. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1990. ——. “Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Spiritual Adventure.” Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women Writers. Ed. Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. 105–25. ——. “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 45.2 (2004): 162–75. ——, ed. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 2006. McWilliams, Ellen. Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Farnham, Eng.; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Moss, John, and Tobi Kozakewich, eds. Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006. Murray, Jennifer. “Questioning the Triple Goddess: Myth and Meaning in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Canadian Literature 173 (2002): 72–90.

FURTHER READING

195

Nicholson, Colin, ed. Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. Nischik, Reingard M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. Osborne, Carol. “Mythmaking in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood’s Writings. Ed. Sarah A. Appleton. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 25–46. Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg, ed. Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Writers. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. ——. “Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Vampire as Intersubjective Catalyst.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 30.3 (1997): 151–68. Potts, Donna L. “ ‘The Old Maps Are Dissolving’: Intertextuality and Identity in Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18.2 (1999): 281–98. Raschke, Debrah, and Sarah Appleton. “ ‘And They Went to Bury Her’: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin and The Robber Bride.” Adventures of the Spirit: The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary Women Writers. Ed. Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. 126–52. Rao, Eleonora. Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1993. Staels, Hilde. “Atwood’s Specular Narrative: The Blind Assassin.” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 85.2 (2004): 147–60. ——. Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse. Tübingen, Germany: Francke Verlag, 1995. Stein, Karen F. “A Left-Handed Story: The Blind Assassin.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Sharon Rose Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. 135–53. ——. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. Toronto: HarperCollinsCanada, 1998. Tolan, Fiona. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. ——. “Situating Canada: The Shifting Perspective of the Post-Colonial Other in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” American Review of Canadian Studies 35.3 (2005): 453–70. ——.“Sucking the Blood Out of Second Wave Feminism: Postfeminist Vampirism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Gothic Studies 9.2 (2007): 45–57. Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. ——, ed. Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003.

196

FURTHER READING

——. Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Wyatt, Jean. “I Want to Be You: Envy, the Lacanian Double, and Feminist Community in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17.1 (1998): 37–64. York, Lorraine M., ed. Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Concord, CA: Anansi, 1995. Zimmerman, Barbara. “Shadow Play: Zenia, the Archetypal Feminine Shadow in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Pleiades 15.2 (1995): 70–82.

Notes on Contributors

Volume Editor J. Brooks Bouson is a Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She has published essays and book chapters on a variety of authors (including Dorothy Allison, Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, Franz Kafka, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Edwin Muir, George Orwell, Richard Russo, and Christa Wolf) and she is the author of Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings (SUNY Press, 2009); Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the Mother (SUNY Press, 2005); Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (SUNY Press, 2000); Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), and The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self (University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). In addition, she is the editor of critical collections on Margaret Atwood and Emily Dickinson: Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Salem Press, 2009) and Critical Insights: Emily Dickinson (Salem Press, 2010) Contributors Shuli Barzilai is a Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author of Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford University Press, 1999) and Tales of Bluebeard and His Wives from Late Antiquity to Postmodern Times (Routledge, 2009), she has published articles in Canadian Literature, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Marvels & Tales, PMLA, and Signs, among other journals. She has been the recipient of the Canadian Government Faculty Research Award for “Of Stumps and Other Vanquished Things: Emily Carr,

198

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Margaret Atwood, and Landscape as Archive” (Word & Image, 2007) and of the Canadian Government Faculty Enrichment Award for her course “Margaret Atwood: Literature and Ideology.” Mark Bosco, S.J., holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor of English and Theology at Loyola University Chicago and serves as the director of its Catholic Studies program. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of Catholic theology, aesthetics, and literature. His book publications include Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2005) and two edited volumes, Academic Novels as Satire: Critical Studies of an Emerging Genre (Edwin Mellen, 2007) and Finding God in All Things: Celebrating Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner (Fordham University Press, 2007). He has published in such journals as The Southern Review, The Flannery O’Connor Review, and LOGOS: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. His most recent publication is the 2008 Penguin Classics introduction to Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul. He is presently at work on a book concerning post-Vatican II expressions of the American Catholic literary imagination. Shannon Hengen is Professor of English at Laurentian University, Canada. She has published articles on Atwood, Canadian theater, and comedy and is the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power (Second Story Press, 1993); the editor of Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts, Contexts, 2 vols. (Gordon and Breach, 1998); and the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works (MLA, 1996). She has also co-published a comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Atwood, entitled Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide (Scarecrow Press, 2007). In addition to her work on Atwood, she also specializes in dramatic comedy, aboriginal theatre, and contemporary feminist writing. From 1999 to 2000, she was president of the Margaret Atwood Society. Magali Cornier Michael, English Department Professor and Chair at Duquesne University, specializes in post-1945 British and American literature and feminist studies. She has authored two books, New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Fiction: Tan, Kingsolver, Castillo, Morrison (University of Iowa Press, 2006) and Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction (SUNY Press, 1996). In addition, she has published numerous articles on authors such as John Fowles, Don DeLillo, Angela Carter, D. M. Thomas, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Grace Nichols, and Ian McEwan. Her current work focuses on history and narrative form in contemporary fiction.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 199

Hilde Staels is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Leuven in Belgium. She is the author of Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse (Francke Verlag, 1995) and numerous articles on the novels of Margaret Atwood, including “Oryx and Crake: Atwood’s Ironic Inversion of Frankenstein,” “Atwood’s Specular Narrative: The Blind Assassin,” “Intertexts of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” “The Social Construction of Identity and the Lost Female Imaginary in Atwood’s Surfacing,” and “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through Narrating.” In addition to her articles on Atwood, she has published articles on Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, and Ann-Marie MacDonald. Karen F. Stein is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on contemporary North American women writers, especially Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She is especially interested in the ways that contemporary women writers inflect Gothic themes and motifs. She was honored with the Woman of the Year award from the URI Association of Professional and Academic Women in 1993 and from the Rhode Island Commission on Women in 2007. She is the author of Margaret Atwood Revisited (Twayne, 1999) and of articles about Atwood and other North American women writers. Her most recent article is “It’s About Time: Temporal Dimensions in Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man” in Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood’s Writings, edited by Sarah Appleton (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). She received a sabbatical and a Humanities Faculty Fellowship from URI in 2008–2009, during which she wrote Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison (Peter Lang, 2009). Fiona Tolan is a Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She is the author of Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (Rodopi, 2007) and articles on Atwood, including “Feminist Utopia and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second Wave Feminism” and “Situating Canada: The Shifting Perspective of the Post-Colonial Other in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” She is also the co-editor of Writer’s Talk: Conversations with Contemporary British Novelists (Continuum, 2008), which includes her interviews with Graham Swift, Kate Atkinson, Pat Barker, and Toby Litt, and she has published on the fiction of Zadie Smith and Alice Munro. Laurie Vickroy is a Professor of English at Bradley University. Her scholarship and teaching have focused on trauma studies, particularly

200

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

the interrelationship of trauma, culture and women’s identity. She is the author of Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2002) and co-editor of Critical Essays on the Works of Dorothy Allison with Christine Blouch (Edwin Mellen, 2005). She has written on a number of contemporary authors including Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, Jeanette Winterson, Pat Barker, Marguerite Duras, Reinaldo Arenas, and Larry Heinemann, among others. Her work has appeared in the following journals: Mosaic, The Comparatist, MELUS, Modern Language Studies, Women and Language, Obsidian II, and CEA Critic. Sharon R. Wilson is Professor of English and Women’s Studies and teaches twentieth-century literature and other English, MIND, and Women’s Studies classes at the University of Northern Colorado. She has published two books: Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (University Press of Mississippi and ECW, 1994) and Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and edited two books on Atwood: Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations (Ohio State University Press, 2003) and, with Thomas B. Friedman and Shannon Hengen, Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works (MLA, 1996). She has also published articles and book chapters on Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Rosario Ferre, Jean Rhys, Samuel Beckett, E. R. Eddison, and the film Citizen Kane. She was Founding President of the Margaret Atwood Society and President of the Doris Lessing Society.

Index

Abrams, M. H. 37, 141, 160 Atwood, Margaret, and the academy 13–15 and Canada 11–13 and feminism 7–11 and religion 129–30 childhood 3–4 Works: Alias Grace 11, 26, 27, 52, 74, 104, 174 n. 2 The Blind Assassin 16, 26, 27, 45, 67–123 Bodily Harm 8, 9, 27, 28, 35, 75, 104 Cat’s Eye 4, 11, 26, 27, 28, 35, 52, 73–74, 75 The Circle Game 27, 103, 105, 106 The Door 104–05 Eating Fire 27 The Edible Woman 8, 9, 27, 75, 78, 84, 175 n. 6 The Handmaid’s Tale 5, 8, 9, 10, 16, 26, 27, 75, 76 “If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything at All” 7 Lady Oracle 26, 84 Life Before Man 27, 74 Negotiating with the Dead 4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 49 Oryx and Crake 13, 15, 16–17, 30, 125–71

Payback 126, 130, 132, 133–35, 136, 139 “Reading Blind” 2, 3 The Robber Bride 8, 11, 15–16, 17, 19–65, 67, 68, 81 “Spotty-Handed Villainesses” 2, 3, 9, 11, 43, 80, 81, 82 Surfacing 8, 9, 10, 26, 27, 104, 121, 178 n. 16 Survival 11, 12 The Tent 130, 139 The Year of the Flood 13, 129, 130, 140 You Are Happy 27 Auerhahn, Nanette 54 Autobiography 90–93 Barry, Peter 103 Barthes, Roland 104–05 Barzilai, Shuli 103–23, 141, 150 Beauvoir, Simone de 8, 77, 81, 84, 85 Becker, Suzanne 5, 38, 44, 173 n. 2 Benjamin, Jessica 58 Bildungsroman, The 2, 166 Birkerts, Sven 141 Bosco, Mark 156–71 Bouson, J. Brooks 1–17, 46, 47, 75, 92, 141, 149, 152, 157, 192 Bowers, Maggie 23, 24 Bradbury, Ray 160 Broderick, Damien 98, 100 Bunyan, John 159 Burgin,Victor 107

202

INDEX

Cixous, Hélène 74, 75, 79, 80, 86 Coleman, Linda 96 Cooke, Grayson 135 Creekmur, Corey 105 Dante 159, 161 Del Rey, Lester 99 Detective Fiction 106, 141, 157 Dickens, Charles 126, 133, 134, 171 DiMarco, Danette 146 Donawerth, Jane 99 Double, The 16, 20, 30, 32, 41–44, 73 See also Shadow, The Dunning, Stephen 135 Dvorak, Marta 100, 187 n. 9 Dystopias 146, 152–53, 156, 160–62, 166, 179 n. 6 See also Utopias Edwards, Justin 44 Ekphrasis 103–04, 107, 114 Ellis, Kate 145 Erickson, Kai 51 Eschatology 156, 158, 162–66 Ethics in Literature 13, 16–17, 82–85, 98–100, 129–40 passim 144–55, 160–71 Fairy Tales 3, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28–30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 41, 43, 44, 47, 76, 85, 115, 116, 173 n. 2, 192–93 Faris, Wendy 23, 24, 27, 33 Felman, Shoshana 73 Feminism 4, 7–11, 13, 15–16, 23, 26, 37, 62, 63, 73–87, 192 See also Beauvoir, Simone de; Cixous, Hélène; Friedan, Betty; Greer, Germaine Fiddes, Paul 158 Figley, Charles 51 Freud, Sigmund 40, 41, 79, 117 See also Uncanny, The; Unconscious, The Friedan, Betty 8 Garton Ash, Timothy 131, 133 Gibson, Andrew 48

Gilmore, Leigh 89, 92, 102 Gothic, The 2, 23, 26, 32, 33, 35, 36–38, 40–44, 48, 75, 76, 78, 81, 82, 157 Graves, Robert 4 Greer, Germaine 77 Hassler, Donald 99 Heffernan, James 103 Hengen, Shannon 129–40, 192 Herman, Judith 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 60, 63 Hirsch, Marianne 105, 106 Howells, Coral Ann 8, 30, 73, 160, 170, 192, 193 Hull, Edith 96 Hume, Kathryn 24 Huntington, John 152 Hutcheon, Linda 24, 37–38, 49, 85 Huxley, Aldous 160, 161 Hyde, Lewis 45, 49 Ingersoll, Earl 106, 192 Jackson, Rosemary 38, 40 Jung, Carl 20–21, 41, 44–45, 47 See also Shadow, The Knoepflmacher, U.C. 144 LaCapra, Dominick 101, 176 n. 9 Laub, Dori 54, 63–64 Lawrence, D. H. 7 Leigh, David 159 Levine, George 144 Lovelock, James 131, 132, 133 Magical Realism 23–35 Mailer, Norman 7 Marlowe, Christopher 133 Marratto, Scott 139 McFarlane, Alexander C. 51 Mellor, Anne K. 144, 145, 179 n. 4 Merchant, Carolyn 152 Michael, Magali Cornier 88–102 Milton, John 7, 151, 161, 177 n. 11 Mitchell, W.J.T. 103, 177 n. 5

INDEX Monsters and the Monstrous 3, 4, 29, 30, 34, 39, 40, 43, 44, 48, 108, 121, 160, 164 Morrison, Toni 24, 25, 152 Mumby, Dennis K. 92 Orwell, George 160, 161, 179 n. 6 Parody 2, 26, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36–49 passim 128, 141, 166 Perrakis, Phyllis 41, 48 Photography 103–23 passim Plath, Sylvia 4 Pohl, Frederik 98, 99 Pope, Alexander 160 Postmodernism 29, 35–38, 40, 49, 85, 86, 146, 175 n. 7, 177 n. 9 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 51, 53 See also Trauma Potts, Donna 48 Prometheus 143, 146, 179 n. 3 Rao, Eleonora 40 Roberts, Adam 98, 176 n. 15 Schmidt, Lawrence E. 139 Science Fiction 2, 4, 69, 79, 93, 98–100, 141, 156, 160, 176 n. 15, 177 n. 6 Sexton, Anne 4 Shadow, The 30, 41–42, 44–46, 82 See also Double, The; Jung, Carl Shelley, Mary 142–45, 146, 157, 160 Smith, Sidonie 91, 92 Solomon, Evan 132 Sontag, Susan 104 Staels, Hilde 30, 36–49, 101, 178 n. 15, 192 Stein, Karen F. 141–55, 176 n. 14, 177 n. 12, 192 Storytelling 13–15, 31–33, 38–40, 45–46, 48–49, 85–87,

203

88–102 passim 141–42, 154–55, 170 See also Autobiography; Fairy Tales Swift, Jonathan 160, 161 Thurston, Carol 95, 96, 176 n. 12 Todorov, Tzvetan 24 Tolan, Fiona 30, 73–87, 192 Trauma 16, 29, 47, 50–65 passim children and trauma 51–56, 58, 59, 62 trauma and defenses 55, 56, 61 trauma and identity 52, 56 trauma and recovery 63–65 traumatic memory 53, 54 Tremonti, Anna Maria 32 Trickster Figure, The 2, 17, 30–32, 36, 44–49, 142–46 Uncanny, The 24, 40–41 See also Freud, Sigmund Unconscious, The 36, 40–42, 44–45, 47, 63 See also Freud, Sigmund Utopias 142, 146, 152–53, 155, 160–61, 165, 179 n. 6 See also Dystopias Van der Hart, Onno 51, 61 Van der Kolk, Bessel A. 51, 52, 58, 61 Vickroy, Laurie 50–65 Voltaire 160 Watson, Julia 91, 92 Watson, Martha 88, 90, 176 n. 10 Wells, H.G. 160 Wilcox, Clyde 99 Wilson, E.O. 132, 133, 140 Wilson, Sharon R. 2, 23–35, 81, 141 Wright, Laura 135 Yacobi, Tamar 114