“Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood (Biblical Intersections) 9781463241353, 1463241356

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"Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?"

Biblical Intersections

18 Series Editor Robert Seesengood

6HULHV(GLWRULDO%RDUG Robert Seesengood, Albright College (Chair) Katie Edwards, University of Sheffield Laura Copier, Universiteit Utrecht Jay Twomey, University of Cincinnati James Crossley, St. Mary’s University, London Jorunn Økland, University of Oslo Rhiannon Graybill, Rhodes College

Biblical Intersections explores various topics beyond theological or exclusively historical exegetical studies, including the relationship of Hebrew and Christian scripture to philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, cultural studies, intertextuality and literary studies. Biblical Intersections seeks to be the leading publishing outlet of scholarship combining Biblical Studies and other professional fields, attending to both the ancient and modern cultural contexts of the text.

"Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?"

The Bible and Margaret Atwood

Edited by

Rhiannon Graybill Peter J. Sabo

gp 2020

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2020 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܕ‬

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2020

ISBN 978-1-4632-4135-3

ISSN 1943-9377

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments .......................................................................... vii List of Works by Margaret Atwood ................................................. ix About the Contributors ................................................................. xiii Introduction: Getting our Hands on It ............................................. 1 Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo PART I. SURFACING .................................................................. 25 1. “Always a potent object”?: The Shifting Role of the Bible in Margaret Atwood’s Novels ..................................................... 27 Hannah M. Strømmen 2. Margaret Atwood’s Survival as Prophetic Canadian NationBuilding ................................................................................... 55 Sara Parks and Anna Cwikla 3. The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible, and the Canadian Residential School System: A Dystopian Warning ..................................... 83 Maryann Amor PART II. IN OTHER WORLDS .................................................. 109 4. Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Bibles: “First the Bad Things, Then the Story” ...................................................................... 111 Richard Walsh 5. Margaret Atwood’s Primordial Myth .......................................... 135 Jennifer L. Koosed 6. Eschatologically Expecting: Reading Apocalyptic Childbirth Through Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale .................... 157 Alexis Felder Boyer v

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PART III. DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GET YOU DOWN ............. 179 7. “You Should Not Take Baths Outside in the Garden”: Alias Grace, the Male Gaze, and Susanna and the Elders ................. 181 Peter J. Sabo 8. Writing Re-Vision: On Margaret Atwood’s Rewriting of Canon as Poststructuralist Midrash .................................................... 211 Robert Paul Seesengood 9. The Snake, The Poet: Art and Duplicity in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and the Hebrew Bible ................................................. 237 Sean Burt PART IV. SCALES AND TAILS ....................................................257 10. Queer Animalities in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and the Hebrew Bible ............................................... 259 Ken Stone 11. How To Live At the End of the World: The Bible and Theology in the Climate Dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler ..................................................................................... 285 Meredith Minister 12. Surfacing in the Wild: The Heroine’s Journey Through the Lens of the Biblical Midbar ...................................................307 Sarah E.G. Fein PART V. NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD ................................ 329 13. Grace Be to You in the Presence of the Past: Ghosts, Hauntings, and Traumatic Dissociations in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and the Gospel of John ................................................. 331 Sarah Emanuel 14. Mirrors of Grace: Undoing Paul in Atwood’s Alias Grace ....... 357 Jay Twomey 15. The LongPen, Future Library, and Biblical Prophecy: Thinking Writing with Margaret Atwood............................. 383 Rhiannon Graybill Arcane Energy: An Afterword on the Bible and The Testaments ... 409 Peter J. Sabo and Rhiannon Graybill

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book grew out of our love of Margaret Atwood, and so we want to begin by expressing our gratitude to the people who introduced us to Atwood: Peter’s sisters Ellen Sabo, Maria Sabo, and Annette Sabo, and Rhiannon’s mother Jessica Crist. In our own field of biblical studies, we were inspired to pursue this project by Richard Walsh and Jay Twomey’s volume on Borges and the Bible (Sheffield 2015). Our friends and colleagues in the Reading, Theory, and the Bible group encouraged us from the beginning; many thanks to Robert Paul Seesengood, Jay Twomey, Jennifer Koosed, Christopher Meredith, and Hannah Strømmen. Many of the papers included in this volume were first presented at a Reading, Theory, and the Bible session at the SBL Annual Meeting in 2018, and we are grateful to both the participants and the audience members for their engagement, and for encouraging this project. We also want to express special thanks to the team at Gorgias Press, for all their help throughout this process. Rhiannon would also like to thank Kurt Beals, Jessica Crist, Raphael Graybill, Turner Graybill, Judith Haas, Caki Wilkinson, and her wonderful colleagues in the Religious Studies Department and Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Rhodes College. Rhodes students have also been an encouragement and an inspiration throughout this process, with special thanks to my students in Feminist Biblical Interpretation, who engaged Atwood with enthusiasm and insight. Rhodes College and the Provost’s Office provided a sabbatical, which was immensely helpful in completing the volume. The W.J. Millard Professorship provided additional financial support. Peter would like to thank Ellen Sabo and Tegan Zimmerman for their editing help, as well as the many discussions shared about Atwood and her writings. Without Ellen, I could never finish a paper. vii

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Tegan helped organize a panel on intersectionality and feminist writers in which I participated that gave me much to think about concerning Atwood and issues of intersectionality. I also would like to thank Amir Khadem and Ian Wilson for their willingness to discuss anything related to the academic world, but especially their discussions about literature. My cousin Scott Sabo was also a valuable dialogue partner throughout this project and others. I am likewise grateful for the encouragement and help from Francis Landy (my Doktorvater). Finally, special thanks to the Religious Studies department at the University of Alberta, the financial help of the Belzberg Lecturer position, and all my students.

LIST OF WORKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD Note: This bibliography lists Atwood’s novels, short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction books. It is current as of 2019. Dates in parentheses refer to the initial date of publication; when there is variance across countries, the date refers to the Canadian publication. We have used standard abbreviations for Atwood’s works across the essays; however, contributors have used a range of editions (Canadian, American, British, etc.), reflecting the wide circulation of Atwood’s writing. For details on the specific editions consulted by contributors, please see the bibliography immediately following each essay. For a complete bibliography of Atwood’s works, including small press editions, children’s books, scripts, and edited volumes, see http://margaretatwood.ca/full-bibliography-2/ Novels EW Surf. LO LBM BH HT CE RB AG BA O&C P YF MA HGL HS Test.

The Edible Woman (1969) Surfacing (1972) Lady Oracle (1976) Life Before Man (1979) Bodily Harm (1981) The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Cat’s Eye (1988) The Robber Bride (1993) Alias Grace (1996) The Blind Assassin (2000) Oryx and Crake (2003) The Penelopiad (2005) Year of the Flood (2009) MaddAddam (2013) The Heart Goes Last (2015) Hag-Seed (2016) The Testaments (2019)

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Short Fiction DG Dancing Girls (1977) MD Murder in the Dark (1983) BE Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) WT Wilderness Tips (1991) GB Good Bones (1992) GBSM Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994) Tent The Tent (2006) MD Moral Disorder (2006) SM Stone Mattress (2014) Poetry CG ATC JSM PP YH SP SP, 65–75 THP TS I SP II SP 66–84 MAP MBH EF D

The Circle Game (1964) The Animals in that Country (1969) The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) Power Politics (1971) You Are Happy (1974) Selected Poems (1976) Selected Poems,1965–1975 (1976) Two-Headed Poems (1978) True Stories (1981) Interlunar (1984) Selected Poems I: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986 (1986) Selected Poems I: Poems Selected and New, 1966–1984 (1990) Margaret Atwood Poems 1976–1986 (1991) Morning in the Burned House (1995) Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965–1995 (1998) The Door (2007)

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Non-fiction Surv. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) SW Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982) ST Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995) ND Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (1995) MT Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982–2004 (2004) CP Curious Pursuit: Occasional Writing (2005) WWI Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005 (2005) PB Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) IOW In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011) Graphic Novel AC The Complete Angel Catbird (3 volumes published as of 2017)

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Maryann Amor holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from the University of British Columbia, a Master of Divinity and Master of Arts in Theological Studies (Biblical Studies) from the Vancouver School of Theology, and a Master of Theology (Biblical Studies) and a PhD (Hebrew and Old Testament Studies) from the University of Edinburgh. Currently, she is a Research Associate at the Vancouver School of Theology and a curate in the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton. Alexis Felder Boyer earned her PhD in Biblical History at Boston University. She is currently an assistant director at Northeastern University Employer Engagement and Career Design where she works with PhDs pursuing careers in academic and industry settings. Sean Burt is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and English at North Dakota State University and the author of The Courtier and the Governor: Transformations of Genre in the Nehemiah Memoir. Anna Cwikla is a PhD candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the narrative function of women in non-canonical early Christian texts. Her essay entitled “There’s Nothing about Mary: The Insignificance of Mary in the Gospel of Thomas 114” was published in the inaugural issue of the Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. Sarah Emanuel is Visiting Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Colby College in Waterville, ME. Her most recent publications include: Humor, Resistance, and Jewish Cultural Persistence on the Book of Revelation: Roasting Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2020); “Letting Judges Breathe: Queer Survivance in the Book of Judges and

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Gad Beck’s An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin” (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament); and “On the Eighth Day, God Laughed: ‘Jewing’ Humor and Self-Deprecation in the Gospel of Mark and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (Journal of Modern Jewish Studies). Sarah E.G. Fein is a PhD candidate in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. Her areas of interest include Hebrew Bible, Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity, and women and gender studies. Sarah’s dissertation is on the reception history of biblical mothers in early Jewish art and literature. She lives in Newton, MA with her husband and daughter. Jennifer L. Koosed is Professor of Religious Studies at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. She is the author of (Per)mutations of Qohelet: Reading the Body in the Book (Continuum, 2006); Jesse’s Lineage: The Legendary Lives of David, Jesus, and Jesse James (with Robert Paul Seesengood; Continuum 2013), Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical Heroine and Her Afterlives (University of South Carolina, 2011), and Reading the Bible as a Feminist (Brill, 2017). She is the editor of The Bible and Posthumanism (SBL, 2014), Affect Theory and the Bible (with Stephen D. Moore; Biblical Interpretation 2014), and Reading with Feeling: Affect Theory and the Bible (with Fiona C. Black; SBL 2019). Meredith Minister is Associate Professor of Religion and Affiliated Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Shenandoah University. She is the author of Rape Culture on Campus (Lexington, 2018) and Trinitarian Theology and Power Relations: God Embodied (Palgrave, 2014), the coeditor (with Sarah Bloesch) of Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Methods (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Bloomsbury Reader in Cultural Approaches to the Study of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2018), and the coeditor (with Rhiannon Graybill and Beatrice Lawrence) of Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington, 2019). She’s currently thinking about futurity, death, and what we can learn from aliens. Rhiannon Graybill is W.J. Millard Professor of Religion and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis,

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

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TN. She is the author of Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016) and co-editor (with Meredith Minister and Beatrice Lawrence of Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington, 2019). She is currently writing a book on sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible. Sara Parks is Assistant Professor in New Testament Studies at the University of Nottingham. She specialises in women in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, and has recently published her first book, Gender in the Rhetoric of Jesus: Women in Q (Lexington Fortress 2019), as well as an article on the gendered politics of citation (Bible & Critical Theory 2019). Sara has been a fan of Margaret Atwood since Mr. Turner’s Canadian Literature class at Moncton High School. Peter J. Sabo is Belzberg Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). He specializes in literary study of the Hebrew Bible, reception history of the Bible, and method and theory in the study of religion. He is co-editor of Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof: Poetry, Prophecy, and Justice in Hebrew Scripture (2017). Robert Paul Seesengood (Ph.D. Drew University) is Associate Dean of First-Year and General Education and professor of Religious Studies at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. His work explores the history of biblical interpretation and the intersection of bible and popular culture (particularly film and internet) and is frequently engaging critical theory. He is author, most recently, of Philemon (Blackwell, 2017). Ken Stone is Professor of Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books including Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies (2017) and Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex, and Bible in Queer Perspective (2005) and co-editor with Teresa Hornsby of Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (2011). Hannah M. Strømmen is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Chichester, UK. Her research is primarily situated in the field of biblical reception history. She has presented and published on the role of the Bible in literature and politics. Her monograph, Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida, was published in 2018.

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Jay Twomey is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of The Pastoral Epistles Through the Centuries (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) and 2 Corinthians: Crisis and Conflict (Bloomsbury 2017), and coeditor with Richard Walsh of Borges and the Bible (Sheffield Phoenix 2015). He has published on Paul in literary, pop-cultural, and political texts and is currently working on a book about Paul’s American career from 1970 on. Richard Walsh is codirector of the Honors Program and Womack Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Methodist University. His areas of interest include the gospels, the gospel’s cultural interpretations (including film), and theories of interpretation. His publications include Borges and the Bible (coedited with Jay Twomey, 2015), Three Versions of Judas (2010), Reading the Gospels in the Dark (2003), and Mapping Myths of Biblical Interpretation (2001).

INTRODUCTION: GETTING OUR HANDS ON IT RHIANNON GRAYBILL AND PETER J. SABO The work of Margaret Atwood is full of Bibles. In the nightstands of hotel rooms, kept under lock and key, in the poetry of a pre-apocalyptic environmental cult, and quoted by children, atheists, and murderers alike – the Bible is omnipresent in her literature. But not simply as an object – the Bible is also, for Atwood, filled with metaphors for the writing process itself. In Negotiating with the Dead (2002), Atwood likens writing to the story of Jacob wrestling in the night, “an act in which wounding, naming, and blessing all take place at once” (ND, p. xxiii). Writing is also an act of witness and survival, like the four messengers in Job who each proclaim: “I only am escaped to tell thee” (Job 1:15, 16, 17, 19; ND, p. 118). Every writer, moreover, suffers from a case of double identity – the hand that writes is a disembodied hand, like the left hand that doesn’t know what the right hand is doing (Matt 6:3–4; ND, p. 29). The writer, too, must decide if she is to serve the gods or mammon (Matt 6:24; ND, pp. 59–90), or to what extent he must be his brother’s keeper (Gen 4:9; ND, p. 102). Such diverse use of the Bible is displayed throughout Atwood’s novels, short stories, and poetry, as it ranges in function from a hegemonic text to a revolutionary one. Occasionally, it is a cause of comfort; sometimes, it signals knowledge or error. It may also be dangerous. In Atwood’s most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the Bible is literally kept under lock and key: “Who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it?” Offred, the narrator, reflects (HT, p. 108).

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The book you are holding borrows its name from Offred’s question. In it, we assemble literary and critical readings of Margaret Atwood and the Bible. The contributions travel broadly across Atwood’s canons, emphasizing her novels but also considering her poetry, her literary criticism, and her inventions. Taking as a model Atwood’s own playful dialogues with biblical texts and questions, the essays gathered here employ a variety of theoretical approaches (feminist, environmental, deconstructionist, animal studies, affect theory) to explore both the ancient and modern corpus of texts in dialogue with each other. This volume explores what happens when Atwood – and we as readers – take the Bible into our own hands.

T HE ROLE OF THE BIBLE FOR ATWOOD AND HER CHARACTERS There are many Bibles in Atwood’s work. But not all of them survive intact. Partway through The Blind Assassin (2000), Iris Chase, the narrator, has a memory of her sister Laura taking a pair of scissors to the Bible: Then I remembered coming upon her once, in Grandfather’s study, when she was ten or eleven. She’d had the family Bible spread out in front of her, a great leathery brute of a thing, and was snipping sections out of it with Mother’s old sewing scissors. “Laura, what are you doing?” I said. “That’s the Bible!” “I’m cutting out the parts I don’t like.” (BA, p. 450)

Iris retrieves what Laura has removed: Chronicles, Leviticus, Jesus cursing the blighted fig tree (Matt 21:18–22; Mark 11:12–14). Confronted by her sister, Laura is sanguine: “‘It’s only paper,’ said Laura, continuing to snip. ‘Paper isn’t important. It’s the words on them that are important’” (BA, p. 450). Laura is not the only Atwoodian character to take the Bible into her own hands. In Surfacing (1972), the unnamed protagonist rips a page from the Bible (along with pages from Boswell, Log Cabin Construction, and assorted other books) as part of a frenzy of destruction as her sense of self slips away while at a cabin in Canada’s far north (Surf., p. 230). In a similar scene from Alias Grace (1996), Grace Marks

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reflects on how the Governor’s wife wants her to read the Bible in order to cure her depraved nature. Grace, however, notes that it is “shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor’s wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook” (AG, p. 32). It seems as if Atwood’s characters like splicing the Bible as much as textual critics of the Bible do. If there are moments when Atwood’s characters take the Bible’s text into their own hands, there are other times when they cannot touch the book at all. Perhaps the most famous example, already mentioned, is in The Handmaid’s Tale, in which the Bible is kept away from women. Offred refers to the holy book as “an incendiary device,” pointing to its subversive potential (HT, p. 108). This contrasts with the time prior to Gilead, in which Offred notes the ubiquity of Bibles in hotel drawers, “though probably no one read them very much” (HT, p. 63): now, in Gilead, women cannot even read. Indeed, Atwood seems to enjoy the symbolism of the Bible as an unread and barely noticed text, despite its cultural pervasiveness. Bodily Harm (1981) mentions the Bible as one of several unremarkable objects in a hotel room (BH, p. 47), while in The Robber Bride (1993), these same hotel Bibles are used to press flowers (RB, p. 17). At other moments in Atwood’s work, the Bible is simultaneously both absent and omnipresent. In The Year of the Flood (2009), God’s Gardeners, a radical environmentalist religious group, learn to memorize biblical verses and phrases without reliance on the written text. Recounting her childhood teaching from the leaders of the group, Ren recalls their reasoning: “books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever” (YF, p. 6). Of course, this reasoning is itself allusively biblical (e.g. John 3.6; 6.63; see also AG, p. 103), and thus the written word is ironically cited as a prooftext for why memory trumps writing.1

In Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood observes that even while Jesus is a tale-teller, “he doesn’t write a word, because he himself is the Word, the Spirit the bloweth where it listeth” (p. 47), though she does also mention Jesus’ famous dirt writing in John 8:6–8. Indeed, among Jesus’ enemies are the Scribes and the Pharisees, groups obsessed with the law and written word – which is a bit ironic, Atwood notes, since “we learn about all of this out of a book” (p. 47). 1

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Ren’s childhood experience of the Bible as both absent and omnipresent mirrors that of Atwood’s. Even though her family did not go to church, the Bible was central to Atwood’s childhood in 1950s Canada. In Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008), she recalls: In my part of Canada at the time, there were two taxpayer funded school systems, the Catholic and the public. I was in the public one, which was interpreted to mean Protestant, so we did a certain amount of praying and Bible-reading right in the classroom, presided over by a portrait of the King and Queen of England and Canada in crowns and medals and jewellery, watching us benevolently from the back of the room. (PB, pp. 43–44)

In addition to this cultural dissemination of biblical knowledge, Atwood also received biblical education at United Church Sunday School – something that she insisted on attending even though her parents were not churchgoers. Her father, Carl Atwood, was a Darwinist and encouraged his children to question religious doctrine. 2 Atwood reworked her own experience in Cat’s Eye (1988), in a scene in which the narrator, Elaine, decides to go to church with her friend Grace Smeath and her family. Elaine’s father worries whether his daughter will adequately question what she hears in church, even as he concedes that “[e]very educated person should know the Bible” (CE, p. 128). Atwood seems to have taken the latter part of this advice to heart. In fact, she won a prize for memorizing Bible verses.3 This too is reflected in Cat’s Eye, as Elaine brags that after only a short time of attending Church, “I have memorized the names of all the books of the Bible, in order, and the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and most of the Beatitudes” (CE, p. 167).

2 Cook, Margaret

Atwood, p. 31.

3 See Payback, p. 44: “It will no doubt astonish you to learn that I won a prize

for memorizing Bible verses, but such was the case.” Apparently, moreover, she wrote an essay for Sunday School competition on the topic of temperance, an influential memory that is mentioned in both The Edible Woman (p. 15) and Cat’s Eye (p. 241).

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Despite her thorough biblical knowledge, however, Atwood maintained her father’s critical approach. She observes, for instance, that her Sunday School exposure to the Bible was purposefully selective: [T]he most interesting parts of the Bible, those dealing with sex, rape, child sacrifice, mutilations, massacres, the gathering up in baskets of the lopped-off heads of your enemy’s kids, and the cutting up of concubines’ bodies and sending them around as invitations-to-a-war were studiously avoided,4 though I did spend a lot of time colouring in angels and sheep and robes, and singing hymns about letting my little candle shine in my own small, dark corner. (PB, p. 44)

Accordingly, characters who know the Bible well but question and critique its message are found throughout Atwood’s work. The Handmaid’s Tale’s Offred is a good example of this. When she hears a sermon citing 1 Timothy 2.9–15 and its infamous passage about women being saved through childbearing, Offred wonders: “Saved by childbearing, I think. What did we suppose would save us, in the time before?” (HT, p. 277). The Commander who delivers the sermon is described as “balding and squarely built” such that he “looks like an aging football coach,” leading Offred to ponder, acidly: “When the Lord said be fruitful and multiply, did he mean this man?” (HT, p. 273).5 Offred also exemplifies another characteristic of many of Atwood’s characters in relation to the Bible: she is not just loosely familiar with the text, but highly biblically literate (though without being “religious” – not unlike Atwood herself). Offred comments several times on how the authorities in Gilead have selectively omitted, added to, or misconstrued the Bible. She knows, for example, that the version of the Beatitudes she hears at the Rachel and Leah Centre includes a false beatitude: blessed are the silent (HT, p. 110). Similarly, when Aunt Lydia says “All flesh is weak,” Offred recognizes it as a This is, of course, a reference to the story in Judges 19, a text that Atwood uses at length in The Testaments (e.g. pp. 78–80, 302). We discuss this story, and its function in the novel, in the afterword to this volume. 5 On biblical texts involving childbirth and The Handmaid’s Tale, see as well Boyer’s essay in this volume. 4

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biblical misquotation: “All flesh is grass, I corrected her in my head.” (HT, p. 56; see Isa 40:6). She notices, too, the irony that the only cushion in her room at the Commander’s house is the one that has “FAITH” embroidered on it: “I wonder what has become of the other two cushions. There must have been three, once. HOPE and CHARITY, where have they been stowed?” (HT, p. 136; see 1 Cor. 13:13). Indeed, Offred’s major criticism of Gilead, as she tells her Commander, is that while there is an abundance of faith, there is a lack of love (HT, p. 275). At the same time, she notes that pre-Gilead society had its own problems with love: “God is love, they once said, but we reversed that…We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh” (HT, p. 282). Thus even in her private reflections, Offred turns to biblical texts and models – even as this same Bible is the primary ideological instrument used to uphold the oppressive society of Gilead (see as well Amor’s essay in this volume). Another character who is both biblically literate and biblically critical is Grace Marks in Alias Grace. Like Elaine from Cat’s Eye, Grace brags about knowing the Bible “backwards and forwards” (AG, p. 266). In her first interaction with Dr. Jordan, Grace pretends not to know that his statement that he has “been going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it” (AG, p. 46) is a biblical allusion: “I know that it is the Book of Job, before Job gets the boils and running sores, and the whirlwinds. It’s what Satan says to God…But I don’t say this. I look at him stupidly. I have a good stupid look which I have practised” (AG, p. 46). She similarly feigns ignorance when Dr. Jordan asks Grace (in a discussion about apples) whether there is any kind of apple one should not eat: “The apple of the Tree of Knowledge, is what he means. Good and evil. Any child could guess it. But I will not oblige” (AG, p. 48).6 In the final scene of the book, Grace recalls her first visit with Dr. Jordan and his mention of apples, and thus reflects on the nature of the Bible: “The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the

As contributors in this volume observe, there is no mention that the fruit in Eden is an apple, though this is the common assumption in Western culture. In The Year of the Flood, Atwood playfully reflects on the issue of what the fruit actually might have been (p. 241).

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newspapers, they got the main story right, but some of the details wrong” (AG, p. 557). Many of the characters in the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake [2003], Year of the Flood [2009], and MaddAddam [2013]) act as biblical critics. Among them are Toby and Zeb, both ambivalent members of God’s Gardeners. Toby is a member only by chance, having been rescued by the group from an abusive boss. She was not raised religiously, but her family had gone to church “because the neighbours did and it would have been bad for business not to, but she’d heard her father say – privately, and after a couple of drinks – that there were too many crooks in the pulpit and too many dupes in the pew” (YF, p. 27). So when she ends up having to listen to theological discussions of biblical texts by the God’s Gardeners, it is with a mix of cynicism and bewilderment. She wonders why, for instance, anyone would debate over whether Adam had omnivorous teeth or not – an issue for the religious group, since it believes the first human was created a vegetarian (YF, p. 240). Even more cynical than Toby is Zeb, the son of “the Rev” of the Church of PetrOleum (another biblical joke of the sort that Atwood rarely resists in the MaddAddam books7) and, in proper biblical fashion, the brother of Adam One, the leader of God’s Gardeners.8 Zeb easily sees through the Rev’s theology as an example of corruption and the use of the biblical text for one’s own selfish gain; however, he is not entirely sure what to think about Adam One and his ecological reading of the Bible (MA, p. 228). Nevertheless, he does consistently poke fun at the beliefs of the God’s Gardeners and Adam One, as in his own use of the Bible to retort to Adam One’s statement that he only has ever sought the truth: “‘Yeah, right, I do know that…Seek and ye shall find, eventually’…And [Zeb’s] tone said, This is the way I am. You know that. Suck it up” (MA, p. 32). 7 The Rev’s theology is based on a reading of Matthew 16:18 (“Thou art Peter,

and upon this rock will I build my church”), arguing that “Peter” refers to petroleum, “oil from the rock” (oil comes from the Latin oleum and rock from petra), and thus the verse is a prophecy about the “Age of Oil” (MA, p. 112). 8 Zeb stands for Zebulon, a biblical name (one of the twelve tribes of Israel) that provides an alphabetical bookend to Adam. Zeb explains that the “cute A-Z name symmetry was the Rev’s idea: he liked to theme-park everything” (MA, p. 114).

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These examples display that the Bible is a particularly pervasive source of inspiration in Atwood’s work. We submit, moreover, that there is a bit of a Bible scholar in Atwood. At times, she teaches her readers about the etymological meaning of biblical characters’ names. In Life Before Man (1979), Nathan – who is a little depressed about his life situation – discusses the irony that his full name, Nathanael, means “Gift of God” (LM, p. 50). In MaddAddam, Zeb goes undercover with the name Seth to avoid the murderous intentions of his father. The name, which Zeb knows means “appointed,” is “a little biblical joke,” since Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve, the one who took the place of his murdered brother (MA, p. 193). And in Payback, Atwood describes her fascination with questions of biblical translation, stretching back to her youth, when she became preoccupied with the relationship between “debts” and “trespasses” in the various translations of the Lord’s Prayer (as in the line “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”). The young Atwood wondered why this was the case and pondered the differences each word could connote. Much later, when the search engine “providentially came into being,” Atwood returned to this question of translation, tracing “debts” to the Wycliffe and King James translations and “trespasses” to Tyndale’s (PB, pp. 44–45). From her childhood to her latest writings, the Bible has evidently fascinated Atwood.

ATWOOD’S CANONS In The Robber Bride, Charis learns bibliomancy from her grandmother. Her particular form of this art of divination requires closing one’s eyes and sticking a pin on a random Bible verse in order to receive guidance (RB, pp. 244–45). This randomized method is not reflective of Atwood’s own practice; she is more like Laura of The Blind Assassin, well-informed about the contents of her Bible and more than willing to cut the text up to remove what she dislikes. In other words, Atwood has her own preferred working canon of biblical texts. The book of Genesis, for example, appears frequently. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood draws from the Ancestral History (Gen 12–50) whereas the MaddAddam trilogy foregrounds the Primeval History (Gen 1–11). The Eden story stands out in this regard (especially its use throughout The Year of the Flood), and even more particular attention is paid to the figure of Eve (for her many references to the

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serpent in her poetry, see the essay by Burt). Eve’s story is symbolic of the problems Atwood’s female characters commonly face: blamed for men’s problems while simultaneously being placed on a level of power and authority below them. In Alias Grace, for instance, the “curse of Eve” is not just menstruation but “having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble blamed it all on her” (AG, p. 196; see also RB, p. 155 and CE, p. 123). Indeed, female biblical characters, as opposed to their male counterparts (for women in the Bible are almost always defined in relation to a man), are more common in Atwood’s work. In The Handmaid’s Tale alone, one learns of the stories of Bilhah, Zilpah, Rachel and Leah (Gen 29–30), Martha (Luke 10, John 11), Mary Magdalene (Matt 27, Mark 15, Luke 8, John 19–20), and Jezebel (1 Kgs 16–21; 2 Kgs 9; Rev 2). Cat’s Eye provides a meta-example of this proclivity for biblical women when Elaine decides to pray to the Virgin Mary instead of God the Father, as if the masculine deity cannot provide the feminine touch that Elaine seeks (CE, p. 246).9 Indeed, even as Elaine struggles with issues of femininity and gender in her interaction with her friends, it is the Virgin Mary who appears to her in a vision and helps her discover an inner power and strength that she did not previously possess (CE, pp. 248–61). In contrast to the solace the Virgin Mary offers in Cat’s Eye, Atwood is also drawn to stories of violence with biblical women. In The Robber Bride, Charis’s bibliomancy repeatedly lands on texts referring to Jezebel, specifically verses recounting her brutal death (RB, pp. 245, 250, 284; cf. 2 Kgs 9:30–37). The Jezebel figure in the novel is the malevolent Zenia, who in the end dies, like Jezebel, thrown from a building (RB, p. 442).10 “Jezebel” appears as well in The Handmaid’s Tale, as both a sex club and the name of the

9 In The Testaments, Agnes similarly experiments with praying to a female figure, Aunt Lydia (Test., p. 86). 10 Earlier in the novel, Charis speaks of giving up on Christianity because “the Bible is full of meat…And there’s too much blood: People in the Bible are always having their blood spilled, blood on their hands, their blood licked up by dogs” (RB, p. 63). The blood-licking dogs are another reference to Jezebel (2 Kgs 9:36).

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women who work there.11 Thus, Atwood adopts both the sexual symbolism of Jezebel and the violent themes associated with her (see also Rev. 2:20–23). 1 Corinthians 13 is another biblical text that Atwood repeatedly uses. We have mentioned above how Atwood uses the last verse in the chapter (about faith, hope, and love) in The Handmaid’s Tale. The verse also appears in The Robber Bride, when Charis reveals that her given name is Karen but she changed it in part due to inspiration from this verse, noting that “Charity is better than Faith and Hope” (RB, p. 261). Just as common is Atwood’s use of the penultimate verse of the chapter: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” – which is no surprise given her obsession with mirrors and gazes. It is one of the verses that Charis finds in her bibliomancy (RB, p. 44), and in Alias Grace the verse plays a central role (see the essays of Twomey and Sabo). The themes surrounding mirrors and gazes relate to Atwood’s use of eye symbolism. Take, for example, the Eyes of God in The Handmaid’s Tale, the state’s secret police whose name is inspired by 2 Chronicles 16:9: “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth.” There are also repeated references to the biblical concept of lex talionis (Exod 21:23–25; Lev 24:19–21; Matt 5:38–39). In The Edible Women (1969), the protagonist Marian wonders what good it does “to destroy someone else’s eye if you had lost your own?” (EW, p. 164). A similar reflection occurs in Cat’s Eye, when Elaine titles one of her paintings “AN EYE FOR AN EYE,” which presents a religious woman from her childhood in an unflattering light. This painting, Elaine notes, is a form of vengeance on the woman, even as Elaine concedes with the well-known platitude, “an eye for an eye only leads to more blindness” (CE, p. 546). The admission is poignant though, as it connects with the death of Elaine’s brother who died from a terrorist attack on a plane. Elaine describes the death as being motivated by an eye-for-an-eye logic, thereby highlighting the circularity of violence it promotes (CE, p. 523). Then again, Charis’s grandmother from The Robber Bride might retort: “I know Jesus said turn the other cheek,

11 The name apparently stems

from Jezebel’s use of makeup in 2 Kgs 9:30, as well as the contemporary usage of “Jezebel” to refer to a promiscuous woman.

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but God said an eye for an eye…If people start killing folks, you should fight back” (RB, p. 243). In addition to certain biblical texts repeatedly appearing in Atwood’s work, we may also note patterns and themes in how Atwood uses the Bible. It is no surprise, for instance, that the first appearance of the Bible in Atwood’s novels occurs in The Edible Woman (1969) when an elderly man warns a young woman, “Those who are not with me are against me, saith the Lord” (see Matt 12:30; Luke 11:23) (EW, p. 49). Indeed, because of the popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale especially, many readers know of Atwood’s utilization of the Bible’s patriarchal ideology. Just as central to Atwood’s use of the Bible, however, is the feature of humor (see as well Strømmen in this volume). This may take the form of Atwoodian puns, like Moira’s “There is a bomb in Gilead” (see Jer 8:22) in The Handmaid’s Tale (HT, p. 273), or Rennie’s magazine article that she titles “By their fats ye shall know them” (see Matt 7:16) in Bodily Harm (BH, p. 22). Sometimes Atwood even pokes fun at the history of biblical interpretation. In The Year of the Flood, we learn of two competing religious groups known as the Wolf Isaiahists and the Lion Isaiahists who argue over the correct interpretation of Isa 11:6: “both preached on street corners, battling when they met: they were at odds over whether it was the lion or the wolf that would lie down with the lamb once the Peaceable Kingdom had arrived” (YF, p. 39). Atwood is clearly playing here with the fact that the biblical text itself specifically says “wolf,” but later Christian tradition will depict the animal with the lamb as a lion (see also Walsh, Stone, and Koosed in this volume). There are other times though when Atwood couches her humor in a more serious reflection on the biblical text. In The Robber Bride, Roz offers the following interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan: What happened to the Good Samaritan afterwards? After he’d rescued the man fallen among the thieves, lugged him off the roadside, carted him home, fed him some soup, and tucked him into the guest room overnight? The poor sappy Samaritan woke up in the morning to find the safe cracked and the dog strangled and the wife raped and the gold candlesticks missing, and a big pile of shit on the carpet, because it was just stick-on wounds and fake blood in the first place. A put-up job. (RB, p. 96)

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This reflection mixes humor with a thought-provoking rumination on giving and gratitude (or the lack thereof). It asks the reader to ponder how differently the parable of the Good Samaritan would be understood if the victim not only showed no appreciation afterwards but repaid kindness with animosity and betrayal. The previous example also displays how Atwood’s characters are often concerned with the messier, more material sides of religion, with the bodies upon which theologies are built. In Cat’s Eye, Elaine wonders about the holy diaper and other excremental matters: “‘The other point is that Christ came to earth as a mammal,’ I say. ‘I wonder what Mary did for diapers? Now that would be a relic: the Sacred Diaper. How come there are no pictures of Christ on the potty? I know there’s a piece of the Holy Foreskin around, but what about the Holy Shit?’” (CE, p. 309). Iris in The Blind Assassin compares the writing on the wall in Daniel 6 to miscarrying women on a roller coaster writing in the sky with blood (BA, p. 325). And the protagonist of Surfacing is obsessed with a dead and decomposing heron she encounters in the wilderness, which she compares to the body of Christ (Surf. pp. 147– 8; 179). And in the short story “Uglypuss,” the characters plan a reenactment of the crucifixion, with all roles played by hosiery, including “Christ as a large knitted sock, in red and white stripes” (BE, pp. 84– 85).

REWRITING AND REVISIONING IN ATWOOD’S WORK Atwood reworks ideas, returns to themes, and retells stories in multiple ways. Sometimes, this reworking is of preexisting texts, myths, or fairytales. The Penelopiad (2005) retells the Odyssey from Persephone’s perspective (see Seesengood’s essay). Hag-Seed is a rewriting of Hamlet’s The Tempest.12 Atwood is remarkably enthusiastic to participate in such public projects. Another example is her involvement in

12 This is part of a series (Hogarth Shakespeare) where contemporary authors

retell Shakespeare. At the time of publication, there are six other entries in the series, including Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (Hogarth: 2015), a retelling of The Winter’s Tale, and Jø Nesbo’s Macbeth (Hogarth: 2018). See further “About – Hogarth Shakespeare” http://hogarthshakespeare.com/ about/ (accessed August 19, 2019).

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Future Library, discussed in Graybill’s essay. And in her poetry, Atwood explores Persephone, Daphne, Cressida, Helen of Troy, Sekmet, and a host of others. Atwood’s reimagining extends not just to myth, but also history. One figure who appears several times is “Half-hanged Mary” or Mary Webster, a Puritan woman who was hanged for witchcraft but survived when the noose failed to break her neck. Atwood’s poem, also entitled “Half-hanged Mary,” tracks Mary’s thoughts over the thirteen hours she spends hanging from a tree, while also offering reflections on womanhood, sexuality, and truth (MBH, pp. 58–69). Several years before the poem appeared in Morning in the Burned House (1995), Atwood dedicated The Handmaid’s Tale to Webster. The historical connection to Webster is also personal, as Atwood has claimed her as an ancestor. Atwood explores rewriting history elsewhere as well: Alias Grace is a literary account of a famous historical incident, Irish-Canadian teenager Grace Marks’ murder of her employer and his mistress. In (re)telling Grace’s story, Atwood draws on a number of historical documents, including the journals of Susanna Moodie, a famous Canadian diarist. But long before she wrote Alias Grace, Atwood had already written a book of poetry entitled The Journals of Susanna Moodie, where she treated Moodie much more sympathetically than in the later novel. The presence of myth in Atwood’s literature and her practice of rewriting influential ancient and historical material is often linked to Northrop Frye. Atwood attended Frye’s famous “Bible” course while she attended Victoria College. This course, and Frye’s book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, were another important stage in Atwood’s experience of the Bible.13 This was no longer United Church Sunday School but academic exploration of the Bible as not just a piece of literature but as the central text of Western literary tradition (for further exploration of this, see the essay by Parks and Cwikla). This leads us to fairytales, which hold a special place in Atwoodian intertexts. And like Atwood’s preferred biblical canon, there are a handful of fairytales that are particularly prominent. Almost all the fairytales that top this list contain themes of cannibalism and the 13 For further discussion on Frye’s influence on Atwood, see Cook, Margaret

Atwood, pp. 62–65.

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(potential) dismemberment of female bodies: “The Robber Bridegroom,” “Fitcher’s Bird,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella,” “The Girl Without Hands,” “Little Red-Cap,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Little Snow White” (and it should be remembered that these are the fairytale versions of the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, and thus do not shy away from violent imagery and themes). Let us take “The Robber Bridegroom” as an example, as it is perhaps the most frequently used of fairytales in Atwood’s work. It is a story about a robber who chops up and eats prospective spouses and a heroine who avoids this fate by learning of his lecherous ways beforehand (from the warning of an elderly woman). The most obvious use of this fairytale is found in The Robber Bride, whose very title alludes to the tale, but reverses the gender of the robber.14 The early parts of the novel reveal how the villain Zenia functions as a robber bride, stealing all the other female characters’ men and metaphorically cannibalizing them; however, by the end, all the characters could fit the bill as the Robber of life depicted in the Grimms’ fairytale. Marian of the Edible Women similarly occupies the positions of both consumed bride/fiancée in the earlier parts of the novel and of cannibalistic devourer by the end. This is symbolized by the cake she bakes in the shape of a woman, which she offers up to her fiancé as a substitute for herself (and then proceeds to eat). And in The Testaments (2019), a world supposedly without fairytales, Agnes eats men made of dough and Aunt Lydia contemplates Bluebeard’s chamber (Test., pp. 20, 349). Atwood’s persistent reworking and reimagining is not limited to fairytales, myth, or history: instead, she applies it to her own work.15 In addition to rewriting her own life in the lives of her characters (consider the example of the Bible-memorization contest, or the fact that many of her characters spend the summers in northern Canada with scientist parents), she reworks her own fictional inventions. Cat’s Eye covers much of the same terrain as the earlier Lady Oracle (1976), though in a less comic, more biting mode. The Blind Assassin repeats Within the novel, Tony reads the fairytale aloud to Roz’s children, who demand she switch the gender of the male characters, producing the robber bride (RB, pp. 292–293). 15 The adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale into popular television series (on Hulu) has added to the complexity of these negotiations, especially after the first season, as the television show moved beyond the events of the novel. 14

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other themes from Lady Oracle, first among them the relationship of truth and duplicity in the process of writing. The novel includes as repeated motif of disembodied hands, a theme that is central, as well, to the nonfiction study Negotiating with the Dead (published just a year after The Blind Assassin). The flying cats and rabbit-like animals that Atwood drew as a child return in her graphic novel Angel Catbird (2016), as well as both Negotiating with the Dead and In Other Worlds (2011).16 Indeed, no detail is too small to repurpose or reimagine. In The Robber Bride, we encounter a sweatshirt with the motto “Scales and Tails,” explained in an aside as “some organization devoted to the saving of amphibians and reptiles,” (RB, p. 9). Five novels later, in The Year of the Flood, “Scales and Tails” resurfaces, this time as a sex club specializing in cross-species fetishes. Everything, it seems, can be reused.

A NOTE ON OUR ATWOODIAN CANONS Just as Atwood has her working canon of biblical texts, so too does this volume incline toward a working canon of Atwood. At our time of publication (2020), Awood has published seventeen novels, seventeen books of poetry, ten nonfiction books, eight children’s books, and three graphic novels (collected in the omnibus Angel Catbird), as well as numerous small press editions of poetry and fiction, several television and radio scripts, various recordings, and a play.17 Her reach thus extends beyond the literary world, as she has emerged as a highly public figure with pop icon status. She is an enthusiastic adopter of many new technologies, including her popular Twitter account, her

16 Atwood offers varying accounts of these creatures in In Other Worlds (“my superheroes, who were flying rabbits” [IOW, p. 17]), Negotiating with the Dead (“an ignorant person might have mistaken these for rabbits, but they were ruthless carnivores and could fly through the air” [ND, p. 8]), and in her introduction to Angel Catbird (“two flying rabbit superheroes…Along with the superhero rabbits I drew flying cats, many with balloons attached to them” [AC, np]). 17 As reported on Atwood’s website. See margaretatwood.ca/full-bibliography-2/

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experiments in blogging, and her support for new literary tech platforms and modes of distribution, such as Byliner and Wattpad.18 In recent years, Atwood has reached a new level of literary celebrity around the globe, amplified by a distinct sense that the dire predictions of The Handmaid’s Tale, especially with respect to women’s reproductive rights, are closer than ever. The success of the television show, as well as the use of handmaid costumes in various protests, has added to her visibility. In crafting a volume on Atwood, we quickly realized that it would be impossible to do justice to all of her works and their afterlives. And so we decided, instead, to encourage our contributors to follow their own paths to and through “Atwood and the Bible.” Disproportionately, these paths led to novels, and to a handful of especially “biblical” novels (here we use the term biblical with all the flexibility and playfulness we have described in charting the Bibles in Atwood). Unsurprisingly, The Handmaid’s Tale, with its biblically-informed dystopia, appears in a number of essays, particularly the contributions of Amor, Boyer, Koosed, and Seesengood. Alias Grace, another novel rich in biblical imagery and references to truth and perception filtered “through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:13) is another area of recurring interest in the volume, as in works of Sabo, Twomey, and Emanuel. And the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam), filled with riffs on creation, religion, and environmental dystopia, is a focus for Walsh, Koosed, Stone, and Minister. Other contributors chart other paths through Atwood. Strømmen takes the long view, following the Bible across Atwood’s work. Parks and Cwikla consider Atwood in a specifically Canadian context. Fein is the sole contributor to offer a sustained examination of Atwood’s early work, in this case her second novel, Surfacing. And Burt is the only contributor to venture deeply into Atwood’s poetry. Graybill, meanwhile, explores Atwood’s engagements with technology, in a reading framed by The Blind Assassin.

18 The majority of Atwood’s novel The

Heart Goes Last (2015) was originally published in serialized form on Byliner. Atwood has also been a major advocate of the online writing platform Wattpad (Atwood 2012). On Atwood’s uses of technology, see York, Margaret Atwood and the Literary Labour of Celebrity.

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Like any edited volume, this one is incomplete. We wish that we had been able to address Atwood’s poetry and her short stories in greater detail. Similarly, while Atwood’s nonfiction works, especially her collection of essays Negotiating with the Dead, appear at several points, there is much more to say about her own theorizations of the writer and writing. Many of the essays contained in this volume address questions of gender, a persistent concern in Atwood’s writing. The environment, ecological disaster, and the question of the animal also appear at multiple points. Social class is addressed by several of the inquiries into Alias Grace; Amor’s reading of The Handmaid’s Tale considers race and ethnicity through the lens of the Canadian Residential School system. Of course, more could be said about race, class, sexuality, and other matters of intersectionality as they relate to Atwood and the Bible. For indeed, Atwood has been critiqued for being an insufficiently intersectional feminist; she has been accused of neglecting race and sexuality, and of perpetuating white feminism – or of failing to be a feminist at all. Much of this criticism, interestingly, relates to her public persona more than her work.19 Perhaps the most well-known example of this is Atwood’s signing of a letter calling for due process for the University of British Columbia professor Steven Galloway as Galloway was facing allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. Facing backlash on Twitter and other social media for this, Atwood penned an op-ed (2018) for the Globe and Mail titled “Am I a Bad Feminist?” attempting to explain and defend her position. To some, this response only further demonstrates Atwood’s issues with intersectionality. 20

ABOUT THE ESSAYS Taking as a model Atwood’s own playful dialogues with the Bible, the essays gathered here explore both the ancient and modern corpus of 19 Or, as in matters of Atwood and race, recent criticism has extended more, for example, to the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale rather than the novel itself. See Moffett, “Erasing Race in the Handmaid’s Tale.” 20 See, for example, Reid, Ifill, and Gee, “Well, Are You a Bad Feminist?”, a response to Atwood’s piece.

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texts in dialogue with each other. The contributions discuss both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as well as non-canonical texts such as Susannah and the Elders and 4 Ezra. Part I, “Surfacing,” offers a broad introduction to the terrain of Atwood’s work.21 In “‘Always a potent object’? The Shifting Role of the Bible in Margaret Atwood’s Novels” (chapter 1), Hannah M. Strømmen gathers together the many Bibles that fill Atwood’s fictions. Her reading leads us across Atwood’s body of work, from The Edible Woman (Atwood’s first novel, published in 1969) to the present. Sometimes the Bible in Atwood functions like an “impotent object,” a once powerful but now largely defunct text. Yet, as Strømmen shows, in certain Atwoodian works Bibles are not simply props, but “potent objects” and incendiary devices. The plasticity of Atwood’s use of the Bible can thus be seen as a reflection of the varying attitudes and approaches to the Bible in the modern world. Sara Parks and Anna Cwikla (chapter 2) offer an equally sweeping vision of Atwood as a specifically Canadian writer. Their essay, “Margaret Atwood’s Survival as Prophetic Canadian Nation-Building” focuses on Atwood’s ground-breaking work of Canadian literary criticism, published in 1972. Atwood charted a vision of Canadian literature that was both highly influential and, as Parks and Cwikla demonstrate, prophetic, in the biblical sense of the term. Reading Survival as prophecy allows Parks and Cwikla to open up from the specific work of literary criticism to the larger relationship of Atwood to her Canadian context, a context that is too-often overlooked in (non-Canadian) assessments of and responses to her work. Maryann Amor continues the focus on Canadian contexts, including one of the darkest moments in Canada’s modern history: the Residential School system. Amor’s essay, “The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible, and the Canadian Residential School System: A Dystopian Warning” (chapter 3) reads Atwood’s most famous novel against the legacy of the Residential Schools. As Amor emphasizes, both the architects of Gilead and the Residential School System used the Bible to justify their actions. Thus, her essay both analyzes the shared patterns and themes of biblically-inspired oppression and offers a warning that such use of the Bible will continue into the future if critical study of it is ignored. 21 The reader

will notice that each Part of the volume takes its name from an Atwood work or phrase.

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Part II, “In Other Worlds,” focuses on Atwood’s speculative fiction, the best-known subset of her extensive body of work. Richard Walsh’s contribution, “Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Bibles: ‘First the Bad Things, Then the Story’” (chapter 4), looks primarily at The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy. In exploring the multiple bibles that these works create, Walsh suggests that the common ground to them is the belief in the power (and magic) of Human Words/stories; for Atwood, literature is not canon but is sacred nonetheless. In Atwood’s bibles, therefore, Walsh sees a challenge that forces us to consider the ethics of our own biblical interpretation and the resulting stories we tell. Jennifer L. Koosed’s essay, “Margaret Atwood’s Primordial Myth” (chapter 5), similarly explores the power of narrative. Koosed traces the question of religion in the Maddaddam trilogy, analyzing how Atwood displays in these novels her adherence to the notion that humans are hard-wired for religion. Atwood’s phenomenological understanding of religion is revealed particularly in the story of the Crakers, a species meant to replace humans that is specifically created so as to be devoid of religion. Nevertheless, Koosed traces how the Crakers do indeed develop their own religious rituals, especially through storytelling and their primordial myths, and eventually discover the sacred power of writing as well. The third essay in this section, “Eschatologically Expecting: Reading Apocalyptic Childbirth Through Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale” (chapter 6), returns to The Handmaid’s Tale. Alexis Felder Boyer reads the coercive reproductive politics of Gilead with and through the accounts of childbirth in apocalyptic literature, focusing on Revelation and 4 Ezra. In both cases, pregnancy and childbearing are of utmost concern for the future of humanity, but the post-natal maternal body is curiously absent. Boyer’s essay bears witness to the erasure of the mother in both the biblical texts and Atwood’s novel, forcing us to take a closer look at both sexual politics and the ethics of representation. Part III, “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” considers questions of gender and resistance across Atwood’s work, including both fiction and poetry. Peter J. Sabo’s “‘You Should Not Take Baths Outside in the Garden’: Alias Grace, the Male Gaze, and Susanna and the Elders” (chapter 7) centers on a key scene in the novel, when Grace and Mr. Kinnear discuss a picture of Susanna and the Elders hanging

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in Mr. Kinnear’s bedroom. Sabo uses the scene to launch an exploration of representations of Susanna in art, which open new perspectives on the complicated politics of gender and representation in Atwood’s novel. In “Writing Re-Vision: On Margaret Atwood’s Rewriting of Canon as Poststructuralist Midrash” (chapter 8), Robert Paul Seesengood reads The Penelopiad and The Handmaid’s Tale as examples of a genre of literature called “minor character elaboration.” In both cases, the urtext is retold through the eyes of a female character in order to emphasize feminist and other concerns. Seesengood thus argues that both novels present a uniquely postmodernist spin on midrash. Sean Burt’s essay, “The Snake, The Poet: Art and Duplicity in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and the Hebrew Bible” (chapter 9), offers a nuanced consideration of Atwood’s poetry, emphasizing, in particular, the slipperiness, duality, and play with language that her later (post1980) poems demonstrate. Burt suggests that readers of biblical poetry – especially the poetry of the prophets – can learn much from reading Atwood. Poetry, like prophecy, is a duplicitous art, and yet its very artifice allows us glimpses beyond the mundane, while expanding the possibilities of what language itself can do. Part IV, “Scales and Tails,” brings us to animals, climate change, the Anthropocene, and the significance of the environment in Atwood’s work. Ken Stone’s “Queer Animalities in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and the Hebrew Bible” (chapter 10) directs our attention to the question of the animal in Atwood’s work, particularly the MaddAddam books. He displays how Atwood’s work is teeming with “queer animalities” that complicate any neat division between human/animal and other related binaries (such as homosexual/heterosexual). Meredith Minister continues the practice of reading Atwood with and through contemporary environmental concerns in “How To Live At the End of the World: The Bible and Theology in the Climate Dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler” (chapter 11). Bringing Atwood’s Year of the Flood together with Butler’s dystopian novels, including Parable of the Sower, Minister explores how literature might imagine a theological response to climate change. She likewise traces the biblical in both authors, including Atwood’s use of the flood story and Butler’s reimagining of Matthew’s parable, which gives her novel its title. Sarah E.G. Fein’s “Surfacing in the Wild: The

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Heroine’s Journey Through the Lens of the Biblical Midbar” (chapter 12) considers another of Atwood’s works that engages closely with questions of environment and self: her second novel, Surfacing. As Fein draws out, the wilderness (midbar in Hebrew) is a richly symbolic space, at once a menacing chaos and a divinely-ordained place of encounter. In Surfacing, the wilderness is similarly ambiguous. However, Atwood’s novel also pushes back against the patriarchal script of biblical wilderness narratives, opening an alternative, life-affirming space for female experience. Part V, “Negotiating with the Dead,” considers questions of representation, spectrality, haunting, and disembodied writing in Atwood. Two of the essays here, by Sarah Emanuel and Jay Twomey, focus on Alias Grace, a novel preoccupied with questions of memory, trauma, and historical truth, as well as at least one ghostly voice. In “Grace Be to You in the Presence of the Past: Ghosts, Hauntings, and Traumatic Dissociations in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and the Gospel of John,” (chapter 13), Emanuel foregrounds Grace’s trauma, urging readers to take seriously the hauntings of the novel, the suggestions of abuse and violence, and Grace’s own divided self. In an illuminating intertextual encounter, Emanuel’s essay reads Grace’s trauma against that of Jesus in the Gospel of John. While John’s Jesus is often neglected from a trauma or hauntological perspective, reading the gospel together with Atwood’s novel offers surprising new insights into both texts. Turning from the gospels to the epistles, Twomey reads Alias Grace with and through Paul. In “‘Mirrors of Grace: Undoing Paul in Atwood’s Alias Grace” (chapter 14), Twomey explores the nesting questions of truth and duplicity in the novel, often expressed through references to mirrors, eyes, and doubles. In 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul famously writes, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” This passage speaks to Grace, and to Alias Grace, in many ways, as the careful but playful reading Twomey offers draws out. Finally, Rhiannon Graybill turns to Atwood’s nonliterary engagements with writing in “The LongPen, Future Library, and Biblical Prophecy: Thinking Writing with Margaret Atwood” (chapter 15). As Graybill describes, Atwood is the inventor of the LongPen, a robotic writing hand used for writing at a distance

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(including, but not limited to, signing books). She also is the first author to participate in Future Library, an art project in Norway that involves archiving 100 stories, one a year, for 100 years, while a forest grows. When the hundred years are complete, the trees will be cut down, made into paper, and used to publish the previously secret literary works. Graybill reads these two experiments with writing against representations of writing in the biblical prophetic literature, where disembodied hands, secret books, and forbidden archives for the future also appear. After this volume was well underway, Atwood announced a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, entitled The Testaments. While most of the essays were completed before The Testaments, it nevertheless represents an important addition to Atwood’s work, especially from the perspective of her engagement with the biblical. Therefore, the volume concludes with an afterword on the role of the Bible in The Testaments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alter, Alexandra. 2019. “‘I’m Too Old to Be Scared by Much’: Margaret Atwood on Her ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Sequel,” The New York Times, September 5, 2019, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/books/handmaids-tale-sequel-testaments-margaret-atwood.html Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999 [First published 1996]. ―. “Am I a bad feminist?” The Globe and Mail, Jan. 15, 2018, sec. Opinion. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-abad-feminist/article37591823/ ―. The Blind Assassin. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. ―. Bluebeard’s Egg. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983. ―. Bodily Harm. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. ―. Cat’s Eye. Toronto: Seal Books, 1999 [First published 1988]. ―. The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994 [First published 1969]. ―. Hag-Seed. London: Vintage, 2016.

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―. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: Seal Books, 1998 [First published 1985]. ―. The Heart Goes Last. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2015. ―. Lady Oracle. New York: Anchor Books, 1998 [1976]. ―. Life Before Man. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1990 [1979]. ―. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. New York: Anchor Books 2012, [2011]. ―. The Journals of Susannah Moodie. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970. ―. MaddAddam. New York: Doubleday, 2013. ―. Morning in the Burned House. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. ―. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ―. Oryx and Crake. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. ―. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Toronto: Anansi Press, 2008. ―. The Penelopiad. Edinburgh, New York, Melbourne: Canongate, 2009. ―. The Robber Bride. New York: Anchor Books, 1998 [1993]. ―. Surfacing. New York: Virago, 2009 [1972]. ―. The Testaments. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2019. ―. “Why Wattpad Works.” The Guardian, July 6, 2012, sec. Books. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/06/margaretatwood-wattpad-online-writing ―. The Year of the Flood. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

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Atwood, Margaret, Johnnie Christmas, and Tamra Bonvillain. The Complete Angel Catbird. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2018. Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Biography. Toronto: ECW Press, 1998. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press, 1982. Moffett, Paul. “Erasing Race in the Handmaid’s Tale.” Pages 157–70 in The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders. Edited by Karen A, Ritzenhoff and Janis Goldie. New York: Lexington Books, 2019. Reid, Bailey, Erica Ifill, and Erin Gee. “Well, are you a bad feminist?” The Globe and Mail, Jan. 16 2018. Sec. opinion. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/well-are-you-abad-feminist/article37609948/ York, Lorraine. Margaret Atwood and the Literary Labour of Celebrity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

1. “ALWAYS A POTENT OBJECT”?: THE SHIFTING ROLE OF THE BIBLE IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S NOVELS HANNAH M. STRØMMEN The Bible appears regularly in Margaret Atwood’s novels, from The Edible Woman in 1969 to The Testaments in 2019. Atwood’s characters do not tend to be religious, but like most people in the Western world, they encounter the Bible in schools, at funerals, advertisements, and occasionally from religious people themselves. Atwood’s Bible is a Christian Bible, the references running from Genesis to Revelation. Most often it speaks in the words of the King James Version (KJV) from 1611. Frequently in Atwood’s novels, Bibles are present in ways that denote their impotency and incongruity in the modern world. The language of the KJV is archaic, its words obsolete. The Bible is still around but on hotel bedsides or in newspaper headlines, its verses converted into bad puns. At the same time, several of Atwood’s novels present a different picture, particularly The Handmaid’s Tale from 1985 and its sequel, The Testaments (2019), and The Year of the Flood from 2009. In The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments the Bible is an object kept from the eyes and hands of most women, used to justify their oppression and objectification. In The Year of the Flood – and the MaddAddam trilogy of which it is a part – the Bible is used to critique the capitalist, consumerist forces that have led to a natural disaster on a global scale (MA, pp. 386–387). These most ‘biblical’ of Atwood’s novels could be understood in line with a shift from the first generation of feminist biblical scholarship emerging in the 1970s to the renewed interest in religion and the ‘post-secular’ in the late 1990s. 27

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In this chapter I argue that Atwood demonstrates the potential powers of the Bible but she also sheds light on its lack of potency as a ‘sacred’ object. In demystified form, scripture has no special aura of its own from which it evokes awe and action, but rather it needs to be accompanied by ideologies and practices in order to be activated. Informal biblical canons form in conjunction with political practices and ideologies from totalitarianism and patriarchy to environmentalism. There are only ever words rather than the Word, scripts rather than Scripture. In this sense, Atwood can be seen as a secular author par excellence – but one who is ever-attentive to the inescapability and allure of classic canons. To demonstrate the way Atwood presents a demystified Bible, deprived of any sacred status it might have had in the past, I begin with a discussion of the impotency and incongruity of the Bible in the modern world of Atwood’s novels. I then go on to show the ways in which the Bible is not entirely defunct in the world Atwood’s characters inhabit, but can be activated in different circumstances through the formation of informal canons of biblical texts. The Bible is not set in stone for Atwood. Notions of creative agency and the non-canonical are embedded in her wider concern with narrative perspective and power.

IMPOTENT BIBLES? Atwood could be said to present the Bible as an impotent object, once powerful but now more or less defunct in the modern world of the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century. The prevalence but impotency of Bibles is explicitly commented on from the vantage point of a dystopian future in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), when Offred recalls the days when there were ‘Bibles in the dresser drawers, put there by some charitable society, though probably no one read them very much’ (HT, p. 61). In The Robber Bride (1994), the Bible is a useful object but more for its weight than its content or status. Tony presses ‘flowers between the pages of the Bibles left by proselytizing sects in the dresser drawers of the cheap hotels and pensions where she stays. If there’s no Bible she flattens them under ashtrays. There are always ashtrays’ (RB, p. 17). The fact that ashtrays are more predictably present than Bibles reveals the secularised modern life Atwood tends to describe, where smoking is a

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more common habit than scripture-reading. The Bible is listed as one of several humdrum objects contained in a mediocre hotel-room in Bodily Harm (1996): ‘a Bible, a mosquito coil in a saucer, a box of matches, Three Star, made in Sweden, and a lamp with a pleated paper shade’ (BH, p. 47). When it comes to more religious understandings of sacred scripture, the Bible is frequently portrayed as a relic of another age in Atwood’s novels, but with a judgemental edge. Scripture verses are accompanied by a seemingly necessary but nevertheless unintelligible solemnity at religious ceremonies during school, or seen as something to be memorized rather than discussed and analysed (LBM, p. 49, 79; CE, p. 101). Jesus is ‘draped in a bed sheet, tired-looking, surely incapable of miracles’, (Surf., p. 49) as if the very image of him gives away his incapacity to inspire or touch a modern audience. There is something faintly exotic about the Bible in its association with ‘dust and flies and camels and palm trees’, but at the same time it is equally associated with outdated and outrageous practices such as stoning (RB, p. 271). Atwood frequently puts to work her ‘witty ironic vision’1 in her portrayal of the Bible as still-present but absent. In Bodily Harm an agony-aunt-style newspaper column is described where a Christian girl anxiously worries about her boyfriend’s views on sexual permissiveness: ‘I have read that kissing before marriage is not right because it arouses passions that lead to sex. But he does not believe that sex before marriage is wrong. The Bible says fornication is wrong, but he says fornication is not sex. Please explain this in a clear way. Worried’ (BH, p. 139). The humour evoked from the bafflement over this ‘biblical’ word, fornication, is present also in Life Before Man, when Elizabeth muses over the line ‘forgive us our trespasses’ in the Lord’s Prayer. She reflects on the fact that she ‘used to think that meant walking on other people’s property. A thing she never did; therefore she did not need to be forgiven’ (LBM, p. 151). The strangeness of the Bible is only compounded in this scene as the priest who leads the prayer wishes it were still in Latin (LBM, p. 151), as if to say the Bible is not in fact sufficiently obscure in the modern world.

1 Howells, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

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In The Edible Woman (1969), the Bible is associated with judgement when the Parable of the Sower is cited (Mark 4:1–20; Matthew 13:1–23; Luke 8:4–15) to Marian: ‘Perhaps the seed will not fall by the wayside, nor yet on stony ground’ (EA, p. 46). The double meaning of the seed here works to suggest Marian needs to be saved from her lack of religiosity as well as her barrenness. Later in the same novel, an old woman is disturbed by Marian on the bus one Sunday, as Marian is on her way to the laundrette, ‘not only because I was breaking the fourth commandment, but also because of the impious way I had dressed in order to do it: Jesus, she implied, would never forgive my plaid running-shoes’ (EA, p. 92). The absurdity of the unforgivable running-shoes highlights the antiquated and faintly judgemental role of scripture in the modern world. In this novel – as well as in many other Atwood novels – women’s bodies are ‘fragmented, silenced, and trapped’ as they are conditioned to conform to ‘cultural and social expectations of the past, present, future, often by their internalization of popularized fairy tales and myths’,2 but also by the external imposition of expectations from scripture, as this example demonstrates. The judgement is juxtaposed with the quotidian innocence of Marian’s choice of foot-wear, effectively exposing the Bible as commandment and purveyor of Jesus as faintly ridiculous.3 When Charis of The Robber Bride tries to use her Grandmother’s Bible as a revelatory object, by closing her eyes and sticking a pin on whatever page the pin finds first, it is not a ‘whole lot of help’, (RB, p. 45)4 although it is declared ‘always a potent object’ (RB, p. 417). Her reflections on the

2 Wilson, Myths

and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, p. 13. Similarly, if more melodramatically, in Life Before Man, a church is cheerfully decorated with daffodils at Easter but the minister is intent on preaching judgement in the words of the Book of Revelation: ‘And the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, and the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together’. LBM, p. 79. 4 Although it should be noted that Charis’ Grandmother’s Bible does eventually provide a revelation in the form of Zenia’s character and her exposure as a Great Whore type from the Book of Revelation (RB, p. 420), a figure who has enjoyed a long history as an archetype of female evil and monstrosity. 3

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Bible sum up a larger sense in which scripture is no longer relevant or appealing. It is full of sacrifice and blood (RB, p. 63). Atwood derails the Bible of authority and solemnity through humour and critique (and sometimes humorous critique). Frequently her characters ask critical questions of the Bible and of theologies drawing on the Bible that point to its strangeness. In a bid to make money one of the characters in Surfacing sells Bibles door to door by advertising it as ‘a dirty book’ (Surf., p. 22). More theologically, dead ‘Christ-flesh’ is reflected on as ‘resurrecting inside us, granting us life’, but also as ‘[c]anned spam, canned Jesus’ (Surf., p. 134). In a similarly humorous but nonetheless serious theological reflection, Roz in The Robber Bride wonders as a child in a Catholic convent school, why ‘getting yourself crucified was such a favour to everyone but apparently it was… So if Jesus did it on purpose, why was it the fault of the Jews? Weren’t they helping him out?’ (RB, p. 326). At the same time the Bible is something one needs to know. As a child, the protagonist in Cat’s Eye, Elaine, experiences church for the first time as a strange thing her parents – as non-religious people – have deprived her of. The experience is baffling, with large imprints of biblical sayings plastered around the building: ‘THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU’; ‘SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN’ (CE, p. 98). The disconnect between what Elaine learns at church and her own family life are disconcerting. She is proud to have been given the task at church of memorising a psalm and comments that the word ‘psalm’ sounds like a secret password. It reflects a world she has not previously had access to: ‘I am a little resentful. There are things my parents have been keeping from me, things I need to know’ (CE, p. 101). The Bible is not simply defunct or a deadweight. It has cultural currency, and contains words and scripts that are embedded in the surroundings despite the secularising conditions that characterise Atwood’s Canada. This notion of a Bible one needs to know is Northrop Frye’s Bible as ‘Great Code’. As Frye famously argued, the texts of the Bible have become part of an imaginative framework, or ‘mythological universe’, which operates within Western literature, 5 and culture more broadly. This idea is affirmed in Surfacing where the Bible is listed as one of a ‘cache of serious books’, and the King James 5 Frye, The

Great Code, p. xi.

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Bible is lauded for its ‘literary qualities’ (Surf., p. 32). The Bible may appear incongruous but it is also, seemingly, inescapable as an artefact and a set of stories, myths and imagery.6 The Bible is not only, then, a large lumbering relic fit for museums or for pressing flowers for Atwood. There is, however, nothing especially sacred about scripture. Rather, an irreverence and demystification of the Bible is on display in many of her novels. In Atwood’s modern world, the Bible is in many ways impotent – its language baffling, its stories strange, its mysteries demystified through critique and humour. Being unfamiliar with its words, scripts, and imagery is not only a sign of increased secularisation and the archaic nature of the Bible, however. A lack of cognisance with scripture is to be in some sense culturally illiterate. The more significant point is, perhaps, that not knowing the Bible spells out a potential powerlessness in the face of its ongoing legacies in the hands of powerful people. It is this theme of power and powerlessness when it comes to the Bible that is played out in the more potent Bibles of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, and The Year of the Flood.

POTENT BIBLES? More potent Bibles come to the fore in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Year of the Flood (2009), and The Testaments (2019). As a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments presents a similar Bible to its prequel. Therefore, I discuss these two novels together, rather than chronologically. It is clear in these novels that the Bible can be put to use to very different ends, depending on which parts you select, combine, and emphasise. It is a matter of forming informal biblical canons by selecting and placing emphasis on particular passages. What I call the Patriarchal Bible of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments reflects the concerns and critical questions of the first generation of feminist criticism of the Bible, emerging in the 1970s and 80s, following wider feminist discourse in the 1960s. The Eco-Bible of The Year of the Flood, on the other hand, could be seen as a post-secular celebration of the possibilities of religion to inspire action and motivation for

6 Atwood was influenced by Frye’s views of the Bible from her time studying

under him at the University of Toronto.

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new, more sustainable ways of life. Both Bibles demonstrate the potential potency of this ancient archive to be activated in new settings. The Patriarchal Bible

The biblical references in The Handmaid’s Tale are multiple and striking, ranging from the satirical to the creatively recuperative.7 The novel presents a future dystopia in which a religiously inspired totalitarian regime is in charge of a place named, biblically, Gilead. Wars are taking place and infertility is a widespread problem. Handmaids are women who are forced to bear children for infertile, privileged couples; ‘vicarious reproduction’ as Reingard Nischik puts it, a practice which ‘goes all the way back to Genesis in the Old Testament’, as Offred also affirms in the novel.8 The narrative follows one un-named handmaid, known as Offred. The central idea of the ‘handmaid’ is biblical. Problems of reproduction are a key theme in the Hebrew Bible and the idea of one woman replacing another who cannot bear children is recurring. In Genesis 16, Hagar for instance is referred to as Sarah’s ‘handmaid’ in the King James Version. Mary is named a ‘handmaid of the Lord’ in Luke 1:38. The Handmaid’s Tale explicitly presents Genesis 30:1–3 as the story that legitimates the treatment of Handmaids in Gilead. The story of Jacob, Rachel and Bilhah is one in which Rachel cannot conceive and her servant Bilhah is put forward in her place. The story is cited as an opening quote to the novel and figures also in a scene when the Commander reads the Bible to the household of which Offred is a part (HT, p. 99). To signify its power, the Bible is kept locked up. Handmaids are not allowed to read it themselves. Offred calls the Bible ‘an incendiary device’ (HT, p. 26), denoting the way it has become a potent object. If it were to make its way out of the hands of its masters, it is implied, it could blow up the whole society and the constructed worldview of totalitarian Gilead. Such hints recur subtly throughout the novel, as for instance when Aunt Lydia cites the Beatitudes, ‘Blessed are the meek’, and Offred drily comments that she ‘didn’t go on to say anything about inheriting the earth’ (HT, p. 74). In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood explicitly draws attention to the way the powers of the 7 Larson, ‘Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophecy’, p. 35. 8 Nischik, Engendering

Genre, p. 164.

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Bible can be activated when taken into particular hands and filtered through patriarchal ideology, without any possibility of critique or access to its words. It is not just a matter of ‘the Bible’ at work then. Rather, it is a matter of a ‘Patriarchal Bible’ harnessed for oppressive ends through selective emphasis and through restricting access to biblical texts. In regard to the Bible being locked up and only accessible to the Commander, Offred remarks: ‘He has something we don’t have, he has the word. How we squandered it, once’ (HT, p. 99). Now that Handmaids are banned from reading, and the Bible is carefully safeguarded from general view there is a powerful acknowledgement of the power of acts of reading and interpretation. Leaving the Bible alone in desk drawers to gather dust, waiting for someone to pick it up and put it to use is dangerous. Not knowing what is in it is tantamount to choosing passivity in the face of its potential powers. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible is weaponised to make women’s bodies exploitable and controllable. Glen Willmott argues that the narrative displays the way ‘the body is taken apart into fragments according to fertility, sexuality, age, or whatever, and controlled and monitored in each fragment; a kind of categorical dismemberment’.9 In this sense, the character of Offred evokes not only ‘handmaids’ like Hagar and Bilhah, but also hints at the more graphic biblical stories of sexual violence against women such as the unnamed concubine in Judges 19, who is raped and dismembered. The Patriarchal Bible looms large with the potential for more violence and horror towards women’s bodies, in the stories and scripts that wound the lives of women like Offred – and that could brutalise their bodies further. The tragic fate of the concubine of Judges 19 comes up explicitly in The Testaments to emphasise not the fate of the woman who is so horrifically raped and cut up, but her willing sacrifice in her own death (Test., pp. 78–79). In this way Atwood demonstrates the way that the worst violence against women can be covered up as worthy with the Bible as a prop, as well as demonstrating victim-blaming. The Aunt who reads the story to the girls in a Gilead school comments: ‘“Well, she deserved it, don’t you think”’ (Test., p. 78) and adds that God will appropriately punish the deeds done (Test., p. 79). 9 Willmott, ‘O Say, Can You See: The

p. 175.

Handmaid’s Tale in Novel and Film’,

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As feminist biblical scholars have long shown, there is no shortage of material in the Bible to draw upon to use it as a weapon against women. In many ways, then, Atwood’s Bible in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments reflects the critiques of the Bible proffered by feminist biblical scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, and onwards. Atwood seems to confirm J. Cheryl Exum’s dictum that the ‘whole truth’ cannot be recovered; but the ‘relation of reading to truth involves the issue of interests’.10 These interests can – and need to – be laid bare. ‘The word kills’,11 as Exum puts it, but it does so when particular interests are at stake, when particular readings are rigidly put into practice, and when power hierarchies are established so as to mute critique. Alone ‘a text is mute and ineffectual’. 12 But these texts can become ‘tales of terror with women as victims’ when they are theologically justified as necessary, or when it is forgotten that stories of the past continue to inform stories in the present. 13 The ending of The Handmaid’s Tale shows with chilling effect how the horror of Offred’s story is treated as an academic topic to be discussed without judgement, rather than pointing us to the possibilities of misogyny recurring in ever-new forms. The concern about stories of women’s suffering being kept in an academic realm without connection to real women and their lives is one that has been emphasised by feminist biblical scholars. Beverly J. Stratton makes this point when she argues that encounters with the ancient texts of scripture are opportunities to reflect on ‘the Bible’s enduring cultural legacy’ when it comes to patriarchal oppression and violence.14 Opportunities sounds a little tame here. It is rather an acute ‘call’ to look at ‘our world’ as we deal with the on-going legacy of the biblical world.15 Butting against the idea of a neutral and disinterested perspective on texts (biblical or otherwise), reading suspiciously or ‘dissidently’ as Fiona 10 Exum, Fragmented

Women, p. 17.

11 Ibid., p. 28. 12 Trible, Texts

of Terror, p. 1.

13 Ibid., pp. 1–3. 14 Stratton, ‘Consider, Take Counsel, and Speak: Re(Membering) Women in the Books of Joshua and Judges’, p. 109. 15 Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

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Black has put it, 16 is necessary. The Testaments is a reminder of this necessity. The Bible of The Testaments is the same one as The Handmaid’s Tale, a Patriarchal Bible, as if not much has changed since 1985, or as if the potency of the Patriarchal Bible is such that it has a stubborn tendency to persist. The timing of The Testaments as a sequel published thirty-four years after The Handmaid’s Tale, and its timeliness, emphasises the recurrent realities of misogyny. As Atwood commented in an interview: ‘For a long time we were moving away from Gilead. Then we started going back towards it.’17 Similarly, the biblical corpus is not dead but only occasionally dormant: its unnamed women, its raped and murdered women, its sacrificial and slave women can return in new or not-so-new forms. Bibles that ‘brood in the darkness’ glow ‘with arcane energy’ (Test., p. 35). In light of the #MeToo debates around the exploitation and sexual harassment of women emerging in 2006 and taking off in 2017, the ever-haunting legacies of the Bible are brought centre-stage again with Atwood’s sequel about Gilead in 2019. If the world of Gilead can return in a hugely successful TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale since late 2016, and in book form at the close of the second decade of the twenty-first century, then so it would seem has the Patriarchal Bible. If it was ever gone. The Testaments highlights the power that comes from literacy and access to books, particularly the Bible as the ‘book of Books’. It is not simply fortuitous that the heroine from within Gilead helps topple the regime after increased knowledge of the Bible, as well as other written material, or that the heroine from outside Gilead quite literally embodies secret knowledge of Gilead in the microchip lodged in her arm. Being able to read, to access and disseminate texts brings precarity but also power. Unless we approach the Bible ‘as resistant readers, mistrustful of the dominant (male) voice, or phallogocentric ideology in the narratives’,18 we are potentially under its sway, wittingly

16 Black, ‘Looking in Through the Lattice: Feminist and Other Gender-Crit-

ical Readings of the Song of Songs’, p. 228. 17 Lisa Allardice, Interview in the Guardian 20 September, 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/20/margaret-atwood-moving-away-from-gilead-testaments. 18 Exum, Fragmented Women, p. 41.

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or unwittingly. Although the presentation of the Bible in The Handmaid’s Tale reflects key early feminist scholarly engagements with the Bible, The Testaments appears to show that these were not concerns that ended – or should have ended – after the 1980s. Of course, feminist biblical scholars would agree. The question for Atwood and for feminist biblical scholars is, then: what causes change and a challenge to the Patriarchal Bible? If anything is learnt from the example of Aunt Lydia in The Testaments it is the extent to which knowledge continues to be power (Test., p. 35). At least, and this is the crux of the novel, if this knowledge can be exposed in the public realm. One direction for feminist biblical scholarship has been to move scholarship from academic modes of interpretation to reading the Bible contextually with so-called ‘ordinary readers’, to explore and examine the continued legacy of such texts and the relationship between the female characters of the ancient texts and the contemporary lives of women.19 Such a direction arguably taps into Atwood’s own sense of the necessary accessibility to, and critical awareness of, the Bible. The themes of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are not (or not only) of the past but are peculiarly prescient. Although the Patriarchal Bible too appears to come in and out of focus in the public sphere, with varying ‘success’ as to its impact, what appears to be undeniable is the fact of its ongoing potential power. The Eco-Bible

The other potent Bible to be found in Atwood’s novels appears much later in her writing career than The Handmaid’s Tale, in The Year of the Flood (2009) – part of the MaddAddam trilogy. The trilogy can be seen ‘as a single grand narrative telling the story of the rapid decline and fall – the collapse – of contemporary industrial civilisation’. 20 There is no deity present in MaddAddam and The Year of the Flood, but the devastation of the world is explicitly likened by God’s Gardeners to a new flood akin to the biblical one as recounted in Genesis 6– 9, where the whole earth is destroyed except for Noah, his family, and the selection of animals he brings on his ark (YF, p. 7; MA, p. 26). 19 Stratton, ‘Consider, Take Counsel, and Speak: Re(Membering) Women in

the Books of Joshua and Judges’, p. 108. 20 Phillips, ‘Collapse, resilience, stability and sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy’, p. 146.

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Although it is a ‘waterless’ flood in Atwood’s novels, this idea of neartotal destruction and the survival of a few is the central narrative of the trilogy. Biblical imagery is used to comprehend and condemn the past: ‘The fate of Sodom is fast approaching’ and people are encouraged not to look back like Lot’s wife did (MA, p. 25). In these biblical allusions, the point is made, in the words of Genesis 6:5, that ‘the wickedness of humankind has been great’ (YF, p. 56; MA, p. 26). In the dystopian world of these novels, the Bible provides a framework for the alternative environmental groups that many of the key characters are affiliated with. God’s Gardeners are a communityoriented environmental group who have discarded the allure of commercialism and capitalism. As Slawomir Koziol argues, the instrumental treatment of animals ‘is contrasted in the trilogy with the attitude represented by the religious group of God’s Gardeners, who propose the idea of a human-animal continuum that is based on equal respect for all forms of life’.21 The life-style of God’s Gardeners is couched in biblical language. They live and grow food on a rooftop called Edencliff Garden, an obvious reference to the Garden of Eden in Genesis. The storage places they have built in case of a crisis are called ‘ararats’, alluding to Mount Ararat, where Noah arrived after the flood in Gen 8:4 (YF, p. 23). An Eco-Bible can be seen to emerge. The story of the Fall is one from vegetarianism to meat-eating (YF, p. 224). Psalm 91 teaches them not to fear pestilence or darkness (YF, p. 110). Job 12 is cited to encourage people to ask the beasts and be taught by them, as well as ‘the fowls of the air’ and ‘the fishes of the sea’ (YF, p. 110). Jesus is held up as ‘mindful of the Birds, the Animals, and the Plants’ (YF, p. 234). Serpent wisdom is promoted as in Matthew 10:16 (KJV): ‘Be ye therefore wise as Serpents, and harmless as Doves’ (YF, p. 277). God’s Gardeners accept the crisis in the words of Ecclesiastes: ‘to everything there is a season’ (YF, p. 195). What we might call an Eco-Bible thus emerges from selections and emphasis on particular biblical texts, put in conjunction with the challenges of environmental destruction. This Eco-Bible forms a critique against the collapsing capitalist, consumerist society as well as a way of life replete with its own songs, rituals and hierarchies. 21 Koziol, ‘From Sausages to Hoplites of Ham and Beyond: The Status of Ge-

netically Modified Pigs in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy’, p. 262.

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39

In addition to God’s Gardeners, there are other eco-fringegroups, also biblically based, with names like the ‘Wolf Isaiahists’ (YF, p. 43) and the ‘Lion Isaiahists’ (YF, p. 47, 112) referring to the famous image in Isaiah 11:6–7 where the wolf will lie down with the lamb and the lion will eat straw like the ox. But the Bible is not only used by the environmentalists. The father of Adam One and Zeb (also known as Mad Adam), the two brothers who found God’s Gardeners, exemplifies the way the Bible is also used to oppose an environmental agenda. Presented as a corrupt reverend, he cites Matthew 16:18 to promote and justify the oil business, and argues that ‘oil is holy throughout the Bible!’ (MA, 112). The focus, however, is on the Bible as a resource for ecological living. The God’s Gardeners, with their Eco-Bible, have been met with a variety of critical responses, not all positive in the reception of the book since its publication. It is not a simple matter of Atwood presenting their way as the solution to greed, exploitation, and the erosion of morality.22 But it is noteworthy, nonetheless, that they form a strong and committed counter-strategy to the scientific and consumer-capitalist way of life that has become the norm and normative in the world that collapses in the trilogy. Shannon Hengen argues that Atwood’s turn to religion ‘represents the greatest peculiarity, and the greatest contribution’ in her recent work.23 The decline of society is shown in part through the character who dominates Oryx and Crake, Jimmy (also known as Snowman). As Hengen sees it, Jimmy ‘has no access to the traditions of deep meaning encoded in religious belief’, and this makes him an exemplar of the loss of values typical of the age of consumer-capitalism, gene-manipulation, and where uncritical attitudes to science are dominant. Unregulated consumerism, pornography and genetic editing are held up as the unquestioned norm, and lead inexorably to disastrous results for humanity and the Earth.24 Atwood’s turn to religion, Hengen argues, is part of the attempt to ‘find the language to convince us to redeem our moral selves and to repay our ethical debt’. 25 22 See Koziol, ‘From Sausages to Hoplites of Ham and Beyond’. 23 Hengen, ‘Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake’, p.

129. 24Ibid., p. 130. 25 Ibid., p. 140.

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An important part of the storyline is the new species that the genius Crake, Jimmy’s best friend, designs and produces. The Crakers, as they become known, do not fully conform to his programming, however. One of the aspects Crake sought to eradicate in creating a superior species to humans is any form of ‘symbolic thinking’, which he associates with ‘idols, and funerals, and graven gods, and the afterlife, and sin’: in other words with a particular idea of religion (O&C, p. 419–420). This fails, however. In Oryx and Crake, Jimmy makes up a creation mythology for the Crakers, explaining their origins (O&C, p. 110). Crake – being absent – is deified, while Jimmy becomes his prophet (O&C, p. 120). As Macpherson puts it, the ‘urge to understand one’s beginnings, and to formulate images of one’s creator, cannot, it seems, be genetically wiped away’.26 Jimmy is cast as Moses in Exodus 3, when he goes on a trip ostensibly to visit Crake and tries to think up a way of explaining what Crake looks like. Tellingly, Jimmy opts for the explanation that Crake’s features were not clear because he was in a burning bush (O&C, p. 417). In MaddAddam, when Toby teaches one of the Crakers to write, she wonders: ‘What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?’ (MA, p. 204). Ultimately, Toby teaches the Craker children to write in a manner that strongly resembles the biblical tradition with its repetition and rhythm of ‘and’ clauses. Blackbeard, a Craker child writes: And Toby gave warnings about this Book that we wrote. She said that the paper must not get wet, or the Words would melt away and would be heard no longer, and mildew would grow on it, and it would turn black and crumble to nothing. And that another Book should be made, with the same writing as the first one. And each time a person came into the knowledge of the writing, and the paper, and the pen, and the ink, and the reading, that one also was to make the same Book, with the same writing in it. So it would always be there for us to read. And that at the end of the Book we should put some other pages, and attach them to the Book and write down the things that might happen after Toby 26 Macpherson, The

Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood, p. 78.

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was gone, so that we might know all of the Words about Crake, and Oryx, and our Defender, Zeb, and his brother, Adam, and Toby, and Pilar, and the three beloved Oryx mothers. And about ourselves also, and about the Egg, where we came from in the beginning. (MA, pp. 386–387)

The gathering of stories and witnessing as to what has taken place (‘The Book of Toby’) seems to imply a new sort of Bible coming into the world that has ended and may be starting anew. Jimmy implies this too when he cites the first phrase of the Bible in Genesis 1:1: ‘In the beginning…’ (O&C, 118). The new species resemble a new creation. Part of this transition into a new beginning and new creation is the writing down of characters, memories, stories, as if a Bible-like corpus is an inevitable part of creaturely existence. The implication is, that religion cannot be easily – if at all – eradicated, and nor can some version of a Bible containing memories, stories, myths, prophets and deities. To attribute a ‘sudden religious conversion to Atwood who has always declared herself agnostic, would be an error’,27 according to Gina Wisker. The ‘wry tone’ of the novel – which, as I discussed earlier, has often accompanied Atwood’s comments on the Bible – is also present in the trilogy.28 Although some of the ‘sermonising’ of God’s Gardeners may be ‘silly’, as Wisker states,29 I would argue that Atwood’s Eco-Bible could be more fruitfully understood within the turn to religion or the ‘post-secular’ turn, wherein religion is no longer seen as simply passed by in modernity or an incongruous spectre soon to be wholly exorcised. Secularization theory has long been critiqued either in part or fully, exemplified by for instance, Peter Berger’s changing views on religion. Previously a defender of secularisation theory, Berger went on to argue that ‘our world is anything but secular; it is as religious as ever, and in places more so’.30 For Berger, this does not mean secularisation theory was completely wrong, but that a different 27 Wisker, Margaret

Atwood, p. 178.

28 Ibid., pp. 178–179. 29 Ibid. 30 Berger, The

Many Altars of Modernity, p. x.

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paradigm is needed to describe the ‘co-existence of religious and secular discourses’.31 He calls it the ‘pluralist phenomenon’, where different religious options co-exist in the same society and secular discourses and religious discourses also co-exist in the same society.32 Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy fits into this pluralist paradigm, not so much demonstrating different religious discourses but certainly showing the secular and religious discourses vying for credibility in the modern dystopian world of the books. Theologians such as Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl argue for a renewed visibility of religion rather than a return of religion.33 Atwood’s more potent Bibles make visible the potential powers of religion in the modern world in very different contexts, thus underwriting the idea that if religion did ever disappear from the public stage it was only ever back-stage or in the wings. Religious motifs ‘do not always signal a belief in certain articles of faith, let alone obedience to some ecclesial or scriptural authority’, but are lodged in the very fabric of discourse and structures of politics, traditions, habits, and culture. 34 The ways in which religion is interwoven with the cultural and the political, and is embodied in material practices such as rituals, domestic habits, and culinary choices, is mirrored in the religiosity of God’s Gardeners. Their cooking, gardening, dressing, and singing is as much their religion as sermons and systems of belief. Such religious acts are cultural – or counter-cultural – and political. As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd puts it, religious sentiments, language-use and practice ‘unfold amid and are entangled in all domains of human life, forms of belonging, work, play, governance, violence, and exchange… Religion cannot be singled out from these other aspects of human experience, and yet also cannot simply be identified with these either’.35 31 Ibid., p. ix. Another critique of secularisation theory is that notions of secularity were always embedded in particular religious forms and structures, particularly Christianity. See for instance Graeme Smith, A Short History of Secularism. 32 Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity, p. 53. 33 Hoelzl and Ward, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–2. 34 De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, p. 5. 35 Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom, p. 7.

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When it comes to the cultural imaginary of religion in the modern world, Bryan Turner argues that biblical metaphors have become ‘increasingly remote from the modern imagination’. 36 ‘With industrialisation, there has been no significant evolution of a set of shared metaphors to express the human condition and the communal links that are important for the renewal of sociability.’37 Whether or not that is the case, Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy experiments in retrieving and uniting a set of biblical stories and mythologies around the natural world and the place of humanity in it. Although God’s Gardeners are by no means perfect or straightforwardly portrayed as heroic, the novel could be seen to promote their life-style and commitment in the face of environmental exploitation and destruction. Such a commitment appears to tally with Atwood’s comments that ‘unless environmentalism becomes a religion it’s not going to work’.38 Atheist philosophers such as Alain Badiou have turned to a similar tactic in reactivating Paul the Apostle to gain political momentum in contemporary life and counter the divisions that – as he sees it – identity politics has solidified.39 In the MaddAddam trilogy, the Bible is not a clunky, outdated artefact, but rather a counter-cultural corpus. Its plasticity makes it possible to adapt and be activated anew. Its status as a religious canon gives it a particular appeal. The biblical is celebrated for opening up possibilities of deep commitment to a cause and to faithfully practice a way of life. In a similar way to the philosophical ‘turn to religion’ which has gained speed since the 1990s, Atwood’s novels from the early 2000s seem to reflect a renewed interest and investment in the powers of religion.40 Although impotent for periods of time, the potency of Bibles is always a possibility, and one that can be mined for patriarchal, oppressive purposes, or for environmental, anti-capitalist purposes.

36 Turner, Religion

and Modern Society, p. 28.

37 Ibid. 38 Macpherson, The

Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood, p. 86. Paul. 40 For a discussion of this philosophical turn to religion see, de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion; Alcoff and Caputo, eds, St. Paul Among the Philosophers; Blanton and de Vries, eds, Paul and the Philosophers. 39 Badiou, Saint

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N EW BIBLICAL PATTERNS As I have shown with the Patriarchal Bible and the Eco-Bible, scripture can be a plastic and potent device in Atwood’s fictional worlds when it is put to work along with particular ideologies, practices, and social formations. This attention to the variability of Bibles and its potential powers is also emphasised through characters’ taking the Bible into their own hands and forming it in their own image. In the same way Wisker points to Atwood’s rewriting of fairy-tales and myths as a mode of engaging with politics and feminism,41 her rewriting of biblical texts is embedded in questions of women’s power – or the lack of it. In Wisker’s words, ‘Atwood takes cultural myths and investigates their roots, reverses, exposes and undercuts them’.42 Like Atwood’s more general interest in narrative construction and questions of perspective, such interactions with the Bible are acts of power. Repeatedly interested in the way lives are ‘scripted and constrained’, Atwood’s engagement with the Bible is part of her exposure of ‘the power structures which control language, sexuality and identity’, 43 but also with how scripts and scriptures provide opportunities for escaping constraints through rewriting and remaking authoritative canons such as the Bible. J. Brooks Bouson has pointed out that ‘Atwood selfconsciously writes and re-writes… traditional and popular fictional forms and formulas’ from the wilderness quest novel and the Gothic to the detective novel and the dystopian novel.44 What is less often remarked on in Atwood scholarship is the way Atwood’s characters rewrite the Bible. Several of Atwood’s characters re-form parts of the Bible through their own creative rewriting of its words. Notions of the Bible as ‘the Word’ are destabilised, in favour of Bible as words; again, not scripture but scripts. Eager to poke and prod at ‘colonialist, nationalistic, classist, sexist, racist, and literary biases’,45 Atwood toys with fairy 41 Wisker, Margaret

Atwood, p. 11.

42 Ibid., p. 94. 43 Ibid.,

p. 9.

44 Bouson, ‘Introduction: Negotiating with Margaret Atwood’, p. 2. 45 Wilson, Myths

and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, p. 21.

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tales, myths, and biblical stories to show their power in the cultural imaginary but also the creative possibilities of grappling with such stories and myths.46 Such words and scripts can be dislodged from their canonical locations and reworked. This can be seen particularly clearly in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments as well as in Alias Grace (1996). The Handmaid’s Tale toys with the idea of different versions of stories and scriptures. Janet Larson suggests that the novel itself is ‘structured as a set of scriptures’ that testify to ‘the provisional nature of all human testimony’.47 As already discussed, the Bible in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments is an oppressive device used to subjugate and control women. It is firmly in the hands of powerful, privileged men rather than the general populous. It is, however, also implied that the Patriarchal Bible is provisional. In one scene Offred prays the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer she knows by heart but reworks to suit her context, understanding of God, and the situation she finds herself in. Her version of the prayer is an example of a rewritten biblical text, familiar enough to be recognisable as the Lord’s Prayer but creatively and critically remade. Offred’s prayer demonstrates dismayed confusion at what is going on and God’s part in it: ‘I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please’ (HT, pp. 204–205). At the same time, she recognises the way God is utilised for political and patriarchal ends: ‘I don’t believe for an instant that what’s going on out there is what You meant’ (HT, pp. 204–205). There is a dark humour to her comments on bread: ‘I have enough daily bread, so I won’t waste time on that. It isn’t the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it’ (HT, pp. 204–205). Offred’s comments on her situation are interwoven with the familiar form and lines of the Lord’s Prayer, and in this sense reforms the pattern to theologically tweak its meaning. Praying for forgiveness is regarded as not important, more important is a prayer of safe-keeping for those she loves, or a quick death if they cannot be kept safe (HT, pp. 204–205). The reference to temptation in the prayer creates a juxtaposition between what she is taught is temptation – knowledge and ‘anything 46 Wisker, Margaret

Atwood, p. 35.

47 Larson, ‘Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophecy’, p. 38.

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much more than eating and sleeping’ – and her thoughts of suicide (HT, pp. 204–205). The questioning of the Patriarchal Bible occurs also in The Testaments. The story of the unnamed concubine of Judges 19–21 is used to show the way biblical stories are selectively told in Gilead (Test., pp. 302–303). The moment when Agnes Jemima, one of the protagonists who has grown up in Gilead, gleans the power to read the Bible herself and reads the full story of Judges 19 is a crucial turning point in her relationship with the Gilead regime: ‘Up until that time I had not seriously doubted the rightness and especially the truthfulness of Gilead’s theology…. But as I discovered what had been changed by Gilead, what had been added, and what had been omitted, I feared I might lose my faith’ (Test., p. 303). As her friend Becka states of ‘this most forbidden of books’ (Test., p. 302), ‘“It doesn’t say what they say it says”’ (Test., p. 302). Becka represents the possibility of a different theology and a different Bible to the official one sanctioned by Gilead. For her, rather than Gilead being the earthly embodiment of God, belief in Gilead and belief in God are mutually exclusive (Test., p. 304). Atwood’s female characters are ‘in the process of becoming… through masquerade, role-play and experimentation’,48 and part of this experimentation is with the dominant discourse these women find themselves in, of which the Bible forms a part in its embeddedness in Western culture and history. One powerful example of the Bible as dominant discourse and the female experimentation with its language and stories is Atwood’s 1996 historical novel, Alias Grace, now also a miniseries on CBC Television and Netflix. Grace’s story of her life is littered with biblical allusions, as if she was reared exclusively on a diet of Bible during her Irish Protestant childhood. The novel is oriented around the question of stories and information given or withheld, and elucidates Grace’s power to tell and not tell her version,49 while shedding light on her powerlessness to societal prejudice when it comes to poor immigrant women. As discussed earlier, many of Atwood’s characters provoke notions of ‘proper’ or ‘approved’ readings of the Bible, also probing notions of the canon. The story of Grace draws attention to those figures and stories – often women’s 48 Macpherson, 49 Macpherson,

The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood, p. 30. The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood, p. 71.

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perspectives – that are left out of the canon, while also exemplifying the power of her voice as ‘apocryphal’ throughout the novel. Grace is shocked to learn of the story of Susanna and the Elders and that for some, namely non-Protestants, is in the Bible. The story of Susanna in many ways mirrors the story of Grace and Mary Whitney, young women who are vulnerable to men in powerful positions whose voices are more likely to be trusted over their own. In this sense Grace’s narrative is a new version of the apocryphal story. Part of the power of Grace’s narrative as an ‘apocryphal’ story is that it destabilises notions of a closed canon through its insistent demonstration of narrative fallibility and plurality. Encountering the dominant voices of the criminal justice system and the upper echelons of society, Grace – particularly as a young immigrant servant-woman – is at the mercy of more ‘canonical’ authorities. At the same time, she wields power in gaining an audience for her alternative and ambiguous story. Throughout her literary work, Atwood is interested in ‘who tells what stories when, and to what effect’.50 Later on in the novel, Grace makes a quilt with biblical patterns but changes the patterns to suit her own ideas (AG, p. 533). She comments on the way the biblical stories were themselves subject to human error (AG, p. 533), thus derailing notions of unquestioned authority attached to the Bible, and making room for her own creative rewriting/remaking. One response to uses of the Bible – particularly for violent ends – is to rail against the selective use of biblical verses and texts, as well as the removal of a text from its context. Atwood’s Bibles are certainly guilty of both these acts. But arguably, Atwood is deftly displaying the inevitable. The Bible is not only an archive of ancient texts that are locked into their past contexts. Its texts are readable and re-tellable in a variety of contexts, and continue to live on in multiple tongues, making it into a multiplicity of hands and voices. The idea that the Bible can only be properly appreciated when its full message is taken into account belies the fact that there are different canons, different ideas about where to place theological emphasis, and the impossibility of holding all the texts of the Bible in mind – if we could agree on one version – at the same time.

50 Macpherson, The

Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood, p. 49.

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Atwood’s novels demonstrate the importance of questioning canons and canonicity as acts of power that necessarily shut out some voices and perspectives. She could be aligned with Regina Schwartz’s critique of canon-formation as ‘forging identity agonistically, against Others’ memories and other memories’,51 an othering that is for Schwartz an original cause of violence.52 The ‘multiple and conflicting versions of memories’ that can be found in biblical canons, however, ‘mock the notion of a single authoritative one’. 53 Schwartz calls for a reopening and rewriting of the biblical narrative.54 Stories ‘illuminate and enrich each other with their variety and multiplicity rather than being partial instalments on the one true story’. 55 Ultimately, Schwartz calls for an opening of the biblical canon, ‘a genuine rewriting of traditions: new creation stories, new exoduses, new losses, and new recoveries of what is lost’.56 This alternative Bible celebrates plenitude, polyvocality and pluriformity. In some ways this is a Bible that Atwood could be said to get behind in her own narrative emphasis on multiple perspectives, partial truths, and the power-dynamics at play in imposing particular versions of a story as paramount. At the same time, Atwood does not go as far as Schwartz may want. Coral Ann Howells comments that Atwood’s attitude to genre represents ‘a balance between respect for generic traditions and an insistent challenge to traditional limits’,57 also holds true for her attitude to the Bible as a canon. The canon cannot, perhaps, be unmade but it can be tugged and pulled at, to show its exclusions and other possibilities. This is a sign of what Lorraine York has discussed as Atwood’s scepticism towards ‘the efficacy of iconoclasm’.58 It is necessary to always also acknowledge one’s complicity in acts of iconization,59 and 51 Schwartz, The

Curse of Cain, p. 146.

52 Ibid., p. 5. 53 Ibid., p. 148. 54 Ibid., p. 158. 55 Ibid., p. 173. 56 Ibid., p. 175.

Howells, ‘Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels’, p. 139. 58 York, ‘“Over All I Place a Glass Bell”: The Meta-Iconography of Margaret Atwood’, p. 239. 59 Ibid. 57

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the impossibility of being entirely free from icons, classics, canons. Instead of breaking, there are, however, possibilities of re-making. Grace’s story is one such possibility, where biblical – and ‘apocryphal’ – stories are interpreted ‘improperly’ and woven into her life-story in a way that spells out a form of agency in creative power. Offred’s rewriting of the Lord’s Prayer is a similar micro-act of power in jutting against the theological powers that insist on her subjugation. The reworked prayer may not change the grotesque living conditions the Handmaids find themselves in, but it does embody a form of agency that resists being fully constrained by the scripts and scriptures used to control Offred’s body and curtail her freedom.

AN INCENDIARY DEVICE The Bible is not ‘always a potent object’ in Atwood’s novels. It is subject to the secularizing processes that mark much of the modern Canadian landscape Atwood describes. But the Bible can be potent and powerful when put to work along with ideologies and practices, ranging from patriarchal, misogynistic totalitarian regimes to ecologicallyminded activist groups countering capitalist consumer-culture. Scripture can also be potent on a more individual level when it comes to the theme of agency and the lack of it. As Atwood’s characters find themselves constrained by different scripts – sexist, classist, nationalist, religious – their fictional lives demonstrate the possibilities of resisting and rewriting these scripts, sometimes through a rewriting of scripture itself. From the late 1960s to the early 2000s, Atwood’s novels show a trajectory from feminist critiques of the Bible, secularization theory, to a post-secular turn to religion. Although my intention is not to align Atwood with any of these movements, her novels can be seen to chart a particular historical trajectory regarding attitudes to the Bible in the modern world. Thematically, Bibles are reminders of scripts that constrain people’s – particularly women’s – lives, but they are also resources to be recrafted in one’s own image. The Word is not singular but plural; it is not transparent but ‘seen through a glass darkly’ (1 Corinthians

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13:2)60 and is therefore open to multiple incarnations in the world. Ultimately, Atwood appears to imply that the Bible is embedded in Western culture and is perilously ignored. While it could be simply a heavy object ideal for pressing flowers (RB, p. 17) it could in the next moment be an ‘incendiary device’ (HT, p. 26). Who knows what could happen depending on who gets their hands on it?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alcoff, Linda, and John Caputo, eds. St. Paul Among the Philosophers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969. ―. Surfacing. London: Virago, 1979. ―. Cat’s Eye. London: Virago, 1990. ―. The Robber Bride. London: Virago, 1994. ―. Bodily Harm. London: Vintage, 1996. ―. Life Before Man. London: Vintage, 1996. ―. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Vintage, 1996. ―. Oryx and Crake. London: Virago, 2003. ―. The Year of the Flood. London: Virago, 2009. ―. MaddAddam. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ―. The Testaments. London: Chatto & Windus, 2019. Black, Fiona C. ‘Looking in Through the Lattice: Feminist and Other Gender-Critical Readings of the Song of Songs’. In Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect, Volume 1: Biblical Books, 211–229, edited by Susanne Scholz. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2017. Blanton, Ward, and Hent de Vries, eds. Paul and the Philosophers. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 60 A biblical line that is a recurring motif throughout Atwood’s novels, in for

instance AG, pp. 442, 502; RB, p. 45; YF, p. 201

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Berger, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity: Towards a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age. Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. Bouson, J. Brooks. ‘Introduction: Negotiating with Margaret Atwood’. In Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, 1–17, edited by J. Brooks Bouson. New York: Continuum, 2010. De Vries, Hent. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1999. Exum, Cheryl J. Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narrative. Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 1993. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Hengen, Shannon. ‘Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake’. In Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, 129–140, edited by J. Brooks Bouson. New York: Continuum, 2010. Hoelzl, Michael and Graham Ward. ‘Introduction’. In The New Visibility of Religion: Studies in Religion and Cultural Hermeneutics, 1–11, edited by Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward. New York: Continuum, 2008 Howells, Coral Ann. ‘Introduction’. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, 1–11, edited by Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ―. ‘Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels’. In Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, 139– 156, edited by Reingard Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman. Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Koziol, Slawomir. ‘From Sausages to Hoplites of Ham and Beyond: The Status of Genetically Modified Pigs in Margaret Atwood’s

52

HANNAH M. STRØMMEN MaddAddam Trilogy’. Papers on Language &Literature 3 (2018): 261–295.

Larson, Janet L. ‘Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophecy’, Religion & Literature, 21:1 (1989), 27–61. Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Nischik, Reingard M. ed. Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009. Phillips, Dana. ‘Collapse, resilience, stability and sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy’. In Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture, 139–158, edited by Adeline Johns-Putra, John Parham, and Louise Squire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Schwartz, Regina. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Smith, Graeme. A Short History of Secularism. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Stratton, Beverly J. ‘Consider, Take Counsel, and Speak: Re(Membering) Women in the Books of Joshua and Judges’. In Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect, Volume 1: Biblical Books, 80–109, edited by Susanne Scholz. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2017. Trible, Phyllis. Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Turner, Bryan S. Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularisation and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Willmott, Glen. ‘O Say, Can You See: The Handmaid’s Tale in Novel and Film’. In Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels, 167–190, edited by Lorraine York. Ontario: Anansi, 1995.

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Wilson, Sharon Rose. Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Wisker, Gina. Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. York, Lorraine M. ‘“Over All I Place a Glass Bell”: The Meta-Iconography of Margaret Atwood’. In Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels, 229–252, edited by Lorraine York. Ontario: Anansi, 1995.

2. MARGARET ATWOOD’S SURVIVAL AS PROPHETIC CANADIAN NATION-BUILDING SARA PARKS AND ANNA CWIKLA Margaret Atwood’s fictional dystopias like The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy resonate with audiences worldwide. Atwood’s contributions to poetry and literature have won her more than 20 honorary doctorates, along with a wide array of the world’s most prestigious national and international literary awards.1 As this volume goes to press, Atwood has just been presented with the Order of the Companions of Honour by Queen Elizabeth – typically reserved for extraordinary artistic, literary, scientific, or political achievements by British citizens. 2 However, despite her wide international appeal, Atwood will attest that her thought and work are distinctly Canadian. Atwood, as a student of Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto

Just as this chapter was being written, Atwood received another medal for “a lifetime of ingenious and visionary fiction”: J. van Koeverden, “Margaret Atwood to Receive Hay Festival Medal for ‘lifetime of ingenious and visionary fiction,’” CBC, April 30, 2018: https://www.cbc.ca/books/margaret-atwood-to-receive-hay-festival-medal-for-lifetime-of-ingenious-and-visionaryfiction-1.4641438. Her own professional website lists hundreds of honours here: http://margaretatwood.ca/awards-recognitions/. 2 Denise DuVernay, “Atwood Receives Order of the Companions of Honour,” Margaret Atwood Society, Oct. 25, 2019: https://atwoodsociety.org/atwood-receives-order-of-the-companions-of-honour/. 1

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in the early 1960s,3 was part of the movement begun by Frye,4 Hugh McLennan, Marshall McLuhan, Carl Klinck, R. E. Watters, and other Canadian writers and critics who had set to work to articulate (and help construct) for the first time a national Canadian identity that emerged explicitly over and against both the parent lands of Europe and the “huge, aggressive neighbour to the south,” (Surv., p. 7) the United States of America. In Survival, one of the first works devoted specifically to Canadian literary criticism, Atwood furthered and widely popularised the efforts of such writers and thinkers and added lasting contributions of her own. Survival pulled together a representative collection of English and French literature written in Canada in order to demonstrate a recurring pattern: an obsession with “survival” – whether in the face of the harsh northern wilderness or the Others of the US and Europe. The book’s unexpected success5 helped propel Atwood into the Canadian public imagination as one of the first Canadian literary critics who studied literature from Canada (as opposed to a literary critic who lived in Canada but analysed the literature of other nations). In this chapter, we argue that Atwood was so influential during this nation-building period precisely because she, whether deliberately or inadvertently, repurposed both themes and strategies from the longstanding traditions of biblical prophecy.6 Margaret Atwood came of age in the 1950s and 1960s – known as the period of a shift toward a “belief in Canada.” In the lead-up to Survival, Atwood was not well known. Yet, despite her then-humble 3 Frye taught at Victoria College, where Atwood received her BA in English (class of 1961). Mount, “Elephants are Not Giraffes,” p. 60. 4 See St. Andrews, “The Canadian Connection: Frye/Atwood”; see also Frye, “Margaret Eleanor Atwood.” 5 At a time when “in 1961, there was a total of 5 Canadian novels published […] for the entire year,” Survival sold 30,000 copies in its first year, and is still selling (Atwood, “Survival Then,” p. 49). See Cormier, The Canadianization Movement. 6 Of course, biblical prophecy eludes easy definition, so by it this chapter loosely refers to the texts of the major and minor books of prophecy as found in the Hebrew Bible, as well as to the individuals and scribes who may have authored and compiled them. For a discussion of the complexity of defining prophecy, see Nissinen, Ancient Prophecy, pp. 19–21.

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station as an aspiring young woman writer in a nation not known for writing, Atwood begged to differ with those who believed that Canada had no literature.7 While examining the work of Canadian authors in preparation of the manuscript for Survival, Atwood perceived that almost everything produced in Canada, in both English and French, shared certain themes – as well as tones – that simply did not fall neatly into the rubric of English literature nor under the umbrella of American literature (Surv., pp. 6–7). Atwood’s articulation of specifically Canadian literary patterns in Survival shares several intertwined commonalities with the nation-building prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Bible: self-definition over and against other (and Othered) nations, national narratives of victimhood, subversive resistance to domination, and description of the wrongs of the present in the guise of warnings about the future. Furthermore, much like with the prophets, the nation-building process for Atwood occurs not only within the confines of the actual text of Survival but also in the long reception of and ongoing discourse around the book. Just as many of the biblical prophets were self-critical in their nation-building work, and just as they spoke at least as much to their presents as their futures, the garrisoned,8 besieged, white settler literature described by Atwood in Survival was not only descriptive but self-critical, challenging, visionary, and worked very deliberately at the construction of boundaries around a set-apart Canadian identity. It is undoubtedly a measure of Survival’s success that its work in proving the existence of Canadian literature 7 Atwood writes, “many people at the time of [Survival’s] publication denied

that there was any such thing as Canadian literature.” Atwood, “Survival Then,” p. 48. 8 The “Garrison Mentality” is a term coined by Frye to describe a key difference between Canadian and American attitudes to their environment and to others. Frye writes: “The physical forts of the seventeenth century had changed by the nineteenth into the cultural attitudes that I call the ‘garrison mentality.’ The garrison mentality is defensive and separatist. Each group walls itself off and huddles inside, taking warmth and reassurance from numbers, but keeping its eyes fixed apprehensively on what’s outside.” Frye, “View of Canada,” p. 470.

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and culture would be wholly unnecessary today. However, Atwood’s then-necessary demonstration that Canadian literature existed was already accompanied by prophetic warnings that it was in danger; this particular call to action seems to Atwood and to many Canadians as timely now as ever.9

“DRY BONES”10: BEFORE CANADIAN LITERATURE WAS It is important to state at the outset that, as a “settler nation,”11 the concept of Canada as an entity was built primarily from the perspective (and for the purposes) of its European merchants, traders, military, and colonists. That construct of Canada is distinct from the Land’s much longer cultural, geographical, and political history; many of its original, marginalised peoples use different boundaries, symbolsets, and narratives.12 Because international perceptions of Canada often ignore those peoples’ lengthy (pre-) existence,13 and because Canada only celebrated its 150th “birthday” in 2017, it is often thought of 9 Survival takes its name from the thread running throughout the work that “the Americans are taking over” (Surv., p. 41), and – from The Handmaid’s Tale in the 1980s to its sequel The Testaments (2019) – it is clear that this danger of being culturally subsumed has not diminished for Atwood. To be frank, Canadians perpetually face “near total domination of the cultural industries by foreign ownership.” Berland, “Marginal Notes,” p. 524. 10 All headers are taken from the Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37. Ezekiel’s exilic context forms an apt prophetic backdrop for a chapter on “Canadian prophecy,” as early Canadian settler-consciousness often portrayed itself in terms of exile to a foreign land. For a discussion of the date and authorship of Ezekiel, see Lapsley, “Ezekiel,” p. 435. 11 Mackey, “‘Death by Landscape’,” p. 125. 12 For instance, some members of the Iroquois nation eschew obtaining Canadian or US passports as those are national boundaries they consider to be illegal; they choose instead to use their self-issued Haudenosaunee passports. These are not accepted as legal travel documents in Canada or most other nations, but have been in use and sometimes accepted (e.g., to Geneva) since the 1970s. See Greg Horn, “Canada prevents Mohawks from returning home on Haudenosaunee passports,” Kahnawake News, June 1, 2010. 13 In 2017, Alisha Gauvreau, a PhD researcher at the University of Victoria, discovered a trove of human artefacts from fish hooks to other tools dating back

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as a “young” nation.14 As such, the notion of Canada having its own literature or national identity/ies is quite recent. As Frye puts it, “it took Canadians a long time to get imaginative possession of their own space.”15 The notion of a Canadian identity beyond “just a feeble version of English or American, or in the case of francophone books, of French literature” (Surv. pp. 6–7) does not enter the public imagination until the so-called CanLit boom of the 1960s that immediately preceded Survival;16 literary critics in Canada turned for the first time to literature actually written within Canada and found themselves having to argue that such a thing was even possible, let alone worthwhile.17 “We have never had a study of ourselves,”18 wrote Carl Klinck in the mid 1950s; he, along with Northrop Frye, R. E. Watters, and a few others made enormous strides in gathering and cataloguing the first collections of Canadian Literature qua Canadian Literature, expressing trepidation as to whether their attempts would be accepted

14,000 years, which confirm materially the oral history of the Heiltsuk Nation. These findings are not yet published, but an early recorded interview with Gauvreau exists: Christie Taylor, “A 14,000 Year-Old History Emerges from Oral History,” Science Friday, April 14, 2017: https://www.sciencefriday. com/ segments/a-14000–year-old-discovery-emerges-from-oral-history/ 14 This perception of Canada as very “young” persists despite inroads made in favour of recognising the antiquity of Canada’s First Nations, who until recently have had little or no pride of place in Canadian national narratives and public culture. 15 Frye, “View of Canada,” p. 470. 16 CanLit is the shorthand now used in academia and popular culture to refer to Canadian literature – something that would have been unheard of before the success of Atwood’s Survival. The reference to the “CanLit boom” is from Mount, “Elephants are Not Giraffes,” p. 60. 17 It should be noted that “CanLit,” as Canadian institutions affectionately call it, has traditionally often neglected to include non-settler literature, until very recently. We recognise that so much is excluded by the subject of Canadian literature and by the very notion of Canada. 18 Klinck, “A Literary History of Canada,” n.p.

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or fruitful.19 Atwood, a student of Frye while these efforts were underway, made in Survival a significant contribution to the “vast job”20 of the construction of the concept of CanLit, using, whether consciously or unconsciously, some of the same nation-building tactics found in the biblical prophets.

“I WILL PLACE YOU IN YOUR OWN LAND”: N ATION-BUILDING OVER AND AGAINST One of the recurring Canadian themes Atwood uncovers in Survival is a constant positioning of Canada in relation to the UK and/or the US. In order to establish the notion of a distinct Canadian literature, she builds on this theme, reinforcing monolithic constructions of these two nations. In the first chapter of the book, she bluntly admits to making a “sweeping generalization” in arguing that “every country or culture has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core” (Surv., p. 31). She gives England the symbol of “The Island” and US “The Frontier” (Surv., pp. 32–33). Upon Canada, she bestows the symbol of “Survival,” which she argues takes shape in its literature and imagination not only as a survival of violent crisis or natural disaster but equally as cultural survival. She writes that French-Canadian literature sees itself as surviving “after the English took over” whereas EnglishCanadian literature must survive against the (ongoing) American (cultural) takeover (Surv., p. 32). Atwood makes use of an essentialised ancestor (England) and antagonist (America), which she construes as the double threats to a unified Canada – a Canada whose literature evidences at every turn this struggle to survive, despite the various types of encroachments made by the neglectful parent or the abusive sibling.

“[A study of Canada’s literature] would be worthy of the best efforts of our scholars. It could be solidly based on a substantial body of Canadian writing, much of which would thus receive its first critical examination. Even if the works written in this country had no other value, they would still serve to reveal the Canadian mind.” Klinck, “A Literary History of Canada,” n.p. 20 “The whole of Canadian writing needs to be re-assessed and a decent History of the subject written. But that’s a vast job.” R. E. Watters, quoted in Klinck, Giving Canada a Literary History, p. 92. 19

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Atwood is not only aware that England and America are framed in CanLit as the nations that are constantly undermining the possibility of a flourishing Canada, she also readily makes use of the narratives of their dominance in the construction of a Canadian identity throughout the work. In so doing, Atwood is drawing from ancient prophetic streams which employed neighbouring or dominant nations in a similar manner. John Hayes writes that “every prophetical book in the OT, with the exception of Hosea, contains oracles against non-Israelite nations (e.g., Amos 1:2–3; Isa 13–23; Jer 46–51; Ezek 25– 31). These speeches against foreign powers […] were not primarily spoken or written to be heard or acted upon by the nations mentioned in the texts.”21 Similarly, Atwood was not expecting that that Europeans and Americans would read Survival and repent; rather, she hoped that her insider audience would better see itself by being reminded of what it was not. Identities, in antiquity and today, are constructed and reinforced as much by what they are not as by what they are; the reinforcing of boundary lines between “us” and an Other from which “we” stand out is known to sociologists as an important part of community identity-formation. Just as the Israelite nation was constructed over and against Others,22 sometimes via self-criticism and warnings,23 and sometimes via oracles against Others that were really destined for the ears of insiders,24 so was Canada constructed over and against the United States in Survival. The final chapter of the book reiterates that Canada exists “over-and-against” when it concludes that “Canadian writers have not been trying to write American or English literature and failing; they’ve been writing Canadian literature” (Surv., p. 281). Jeremiah exemplifies a prophet focused on outsiders, with a message for insiders; an enemy “from the north” is a constant threat (Jer 1:15; 4:6, 10:22, 13:20, 25:9, 47:2, 50:41). While it is uncertain if “the north” refers to Babylon or another foe,25 the apparent geographical proximity of this enemy is what frequently fuels the angst in the book

21 Hayes, “Usage of Oracles,” p. 81. 22 Kratz, Die

Propheten Israels, p. 26. Propheten Israels, p. 30. 24 E.g., Amos 1:2–3; Isa 13–23; Ezek 25–31. 25 Murphy, “Jeremiah,” p. 728. 23 Kratz, Die

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of Jeremiah. Babylon itself – when it is explicitly mentioned in Jeremiah – serves as a recurring threat and is frequently associated with violence (e.g., Jer 20:4–5, 21:4, 25:11). In fact, Babylon pervades the prophetic literature as a reminder of trauma: “for thus says the Lord God: The sword of the king of Babylon shall come against you. I will cause your hordes to fall by the swords of mighty ones, all of them most terrible among the nations” (Ezek 32:11). Various enemy nations in this literature unify the insider group through the threat of an Other, but the specific use of Babylon evokes the particular idea of exile and captivity. As we will see further on, Atwood identifies exile as a widespread trope in both Canadian literature and identity-formation. Part of why this notion of exile could take hold easily in the Canadian imagination is due to Canada’s status as a colony of a greater power. Atwood writes that Canada is “a place from which a profit is made, but not by the people who live there: the major profit from a colony is made in the centre of the empire. That’s what colonies are for, to make money for the ‘mother’ country,” making Canada a “collective victim” (Surv., p. 45). It is the sense of being exiled from a homeland that causes Canadian literature, according to Atwood, to avoid more typical American literary themes of frontier and discovery and be drawn instead to themes of wandering lost in wilderness. The very structure of Survival is a division between the first section, describing “what white people found when they arrived” and the latter section, “what Canadian literature has made of its ‘ancestor’ figures,” anchoring the whole book and thus the whole argument for Canadian identity firmly in the relationship to Europe and the encounter with a foreign “wilderness” – a concept which, according to Surv., chapter 4, decidedly encompasses the First Nations (Surv., 53). We will return to wilderness and exile themes below, but at this point we mention it to emphasize the point that the Canadian identity that began to emerge in the literature drawn together and highlighted in Survival was rolled inextricably into relationships over and against others.

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“OUR BONES ARE DRIED UP”: CANADA AS VICTIM The distinct pattern that emerged, when Atwood surveyed emerging Canadian literature (and found, to her surprise, that there was one26) was Canada’s “now famous victim mentality.”27 Atwood picked up on the fact that Canadians, in their literature, their public imagination, and perhaps their reality, felt forced to hunker down and defend themselves against these twofold threats: the “menacing wilderness”28 of their frigid Northern environment, where indifferent death lurked at every turn, 29 and the encroachment of their southern neighbor – exponentially more populous, more powerful, and more self-asserting. Above all, as the title suggests, the collective Canadian cultural output was described by Atwood as a literature of struggle. Canadians had indeed tended to portray themselves in their literature and other cultural artefacts as Frye and Atwood described them – as the un-heroic underdogs fighting not to flourish but just to survive against a harsh natural environment and a domineering frenemy.30 Atwood notes that “Canadian authors spend a disproportionate amount of time making sure that their heroes die or fail” (Surv., p. 44). The tendencies toward a victim mentality that Atwood had aggregated in Survival were not necessarily unfounded. The situation (in the 1960s and now) where most of the film, publications, recordings, and broadcast media that Canadians have access to and consume is American supports this Canadian self-depiction as “economically dis-

She writes that the “shock” from this discovery was “partly a kind of outraged surprise: why hadn’t I been told?” (Surv., p. 281). 27 Fiamengo, “Has Survival Survived?,” p. 191. 28 Fiamengo, “Has Survival Survived?,” p. 191. 29 See the chapter entitled “Nature the Monster” in Survival as well as Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. 30 For a succinct summary of Frye’s life’s work, including his connection of a hostile environment with the Canadian poetic imagination, see John Ayre, “Northrop Frye,” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published April 10, 2008; last modified July 27, 2017. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/northrop-frye. 26

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empowered and culturally uncertain (if implicitly morally superior).”31 In Survival, Atwood captures the anxieties around this with her typical dry wit: “Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well, but simply whether he will live at all” (Surv., pp. 41–42). One of the ways in which the literature of Canada and the literature of certain Hebrew prophets manages to accomplish its victim narrative is through symbolism, particularly through imagery that is gendered and violent. Even in its name, Survival paints a “very negative image of Canada and its literary tradition.”32 It is a picture of a Canada holding on by its fingertips, about to succumb to indifferent destruction at the hands of either the environment or the Americans. Mackey points out that “symbols of nationhood are used flexibly to differentiate and define the boundaries of the imagined nation, often switching between defining […] the nation as male or female, depending on the needs of nation-building.”33 Just as with so many of the metaphors for nationhood utilized in Hebrew prophecy, Canadian national victimhood is often gendered violently. For example, the unequal power relationship between the US and Canada has frequently been described by a metaphor of sexual assault. Tropes of Canadian nationalism often paint the nation as a violated female victim. Berland speaks of the “metaphor of the woman seeking to protect a fertile but vulnerable body from the imperialist ravages of a powerful neighbour” as a long-time “staple of Canadian culture.”34 Atwood argues that this selfimage can explain the proliferation of Canadian female heroines and the triumph of underdogs (whether feminine or of alternative masculinities) against ignorant or evil traditionally masculine powers,35 and an overall “feminization of Canada’s literature and popular culture.”36 The feminine victim image also manifests in the feminization of the 31 Berland, “Marginal Notes,” p. 518. 32 Goetsch, “Margaret Atwood,” p. 175. 33 Mackey, “Death by Landscape,” p. 125. 34 Berland, “Marginal Notes,” p. 522. 35 See Berland, “Marginal Notes,” pp. 522–23 for a wonderful collection of examples from Canadian television, film, sketch comedy, and fiction. 36 Berland, “Marginal Notes,” p. 522.

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nation itself in public discourses; in Canadian national rhetoric, “the metaphor of a masculine America’s penetration of feminine Canada has been frequently evoked.”37 Manning provides an example of Atwood’s testimony before the Parliamentary Committee on Free Trade: Canada as a separate but dominated country has done about as well under the U.S. as women, worldwide, have done under men; about the only position they’ve ever adopted toward us, country to country, has been the missionary position, and we’re not on top. […] The national wisdom vis-à-vis Them has so often taken the form of lying still, keeping your mouth shut, and pretending you like it.38

Manning takes issue with Atwood’s analysis because of its reliance on Canada’s passivity and acceptance of its fate as victim, as survivor. He laments that the metaphor is “consistent with (Atwood’s) general position as an interpreter of Canadian literature and society. Canadians, she has argued, are survivors, not winners. Passive endurance is the best that can be achieved.”39 Atwood’s feminized Canada evokes her familiar depiction of a powerless yet persisting nation. The representation of Canada as a penetrated woman mimics the violent and gendered language found in much of the prophetic literature. Often, the insider nation (e.g., Israel or Judah) is depicted as the penetrated female, while the powerful outsider/enemy nation or God is gendered as the active penetrating male.40 Depicting a land or nation as feminine is by no means unique to the Hebrew Bible.41 As Gail Yee

37 Manning, “Reversible Resistance,” p. 4. 38 Atwood, from her 1987 testimony before the Parliamentary Committee on

Free Trade, cited in Manning, “Reversible Resistance,” p. 4. 39 Manning, “Reversible Resistance,” p. 4. 40 Although cf. the Humiliation of Babylon in Isaiah 47, where Babylon, envisioned as a woman, will have her “nakedness … uncovered.” On the rape metaphor in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, see Scholz, Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible. 41 Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, p. 118, p. 211 n. 51.

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explains, “because they demarcate national differences among nations, women literally and symbolically designate the ‘porous frontiers’ through which nation, ethnicity, and culture can be penetrated.”42 In this context, nations that have fallen victim to colonisation are often depicted as a woman who has been penetrated or raped by a man who represents the coloniser.43 The trope of feminine nation penetrated by foreign masculine nation occurs in Ezekiel 23 when the Babylonians (colonisers) “possess” Oholah and Oholibah, two “whoring” sisters who represent Israel and Judah respectively.44 Another occurrence of this trope appears in the book of Jeremiah where God rapes the “Daughter of Zion,” a personification of Jerusalem/Judah, declaring: “I myself will lift up your skirts over your face and your shame will be seen” (Jer 13:26). According to Kathleen O’Connor, the fact that it is God and not an enemy nation who is the sexual assailant in Jeremiah is “outrageous, unbearable, and unspeakable” imagery because “to be invaded by another country, to be victims of attack, occupation, and dislocation is outrageous, unbearable, and unspeakable.”45 On the other hand, it is “the Lord” who decrees the rape of Jerusalem, decreeing that God “will not pity or spare or have compassion when I destroy” the inhabitants of the land (Jer. 13:14). In either case, when prophetic literature depicts its insider nation as violated, whether by an outsider nation or by God, the violent and gendered imagery often work to make meaning out of traumatic events experienced in the past as though taking place in the future.46 As L. Juliana

42 Yee, Poor

Banished Children of Eve, p. 181 For instance, the “notorious Judea Capta coin” which depicts “a male Roman soldier standing over a defeated female representing Judea” was minted by Vespasian in 71 to celebrate the crushed Jewish revolt. Marshall, “Gender and Empire,” p. 28 n. 37. 44 For an extensive analysis of this imagery in Ezekiel 23, see Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, pp. 111–34. 45 O’Connor, Jeremiah: Pain and Promise, p. 55. Emphasis original. 46 On violence in prophetic literature as making meaning out of traumatic memories, see Claassens, “God and Violence in the Prophets,” pp. 337–38; 43

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Claassens suggests, “The prophet portrays Israel as a female because after the humiliating attacks by the Babylonian invaders, the people of Israel feel quite similar to a violated woman.”47 The nation as a porous woman subject to invasion/penetration by outsider nations or God is a symbol frequently used by prophetic literature to put into words the violence the prophets themselves have experienced. The image of the penetrated woman shared by Atwood’s Survival and prophetic literature not only depicts the dread of past or potential victimhood, the literature describing this angst is a form of survival in and of itself: these wrongdoings happened or will happen but the prophets live(d) to recall them. In showcasing a Canadian literature focused on victimhood and threat, Survival also subtly aimed to ensure that that literature not only survived, but grew, in all senses of the word.48 Atwood writes about Canadian passivity precisely to elicit its opposite. When she asks, “Could it be that Canadians have a will to lose which is as strong and pervasive as the Americans’ will to win?” (Surv., p. 35), it is not an honest question but a prophetic challenge. Atwood’s description is simultaneously critique. As one who sat under a teacher who saw words as power,49 and wrote in a time when Canadian thinkers were striking back against the dictum that “there is no Canadian culture,” we can be sure that Atwood is aware of the power of repeatedly showing Canadians that they are writing themselves as being violently disrespected, plundered, and underestimated. Just as the prophet Hosea was forced to marry a cheating spouse to demonstrate the dysfunctional relationship between Yahweh and the

O’Connor, “Reclaiming Jeremiah’s Violence.” On violence in prophetic literature in general, see O’Brien and Franke, Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets. 47 Claassens, “God and Violence in the Prophets,” p. 342. 48 See Atwood’s discussion of a victim’s possibility to either accept the role as inevitable or push back against it (Surv., pp. 37–38). 49 See, for example, Frye’s arguments throughout The Great Code, esp. chapter 1, where “there may be a potential magic in any use of words” (p. 6) and “the operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power” (p. 7). See also his Words With Power.

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Israelites,50 Atwood’s is a prophetic call against what she is describing. While her literary criticism defines Canadian literature and discourse about it as the story of penetrated victims, she does not imply matters should stay that way. Paul Goetsch suggests that Atwood is “more concerned with questioning the concept of a monolithic, stable identity than some of her pronouncements on […] national identity might warrant.”51 Similarly, much of the prophetic literature is not content with its audience remaining defeated or colonized (at least not forever). The negative imagery in both Atwood and prophetic literature can be seen “as a means to resist injustice.”52 To be sure, Atwood has never written for “entertainment only.” She writes the literary critic’s and novelist’s versions of the painful genre of Hebrew prophecy; in the biblical tradition, prophecy is often not so much a matter of fortune-telling about the future as a matter of showing the people the wrongs of the present. As such, prophets frequently sound a call to action. Atwood herself says as much: The tradition identified in Survival was not a bundle of uplifting Pollyanna cheer: quite the reverse. (…) Some critics who couldn’t read (…) thought I was somehow advocating this state of affairs. Au contraire: if my book has attitude, it’s more like: You are here, you really do exist, and this is where, so pull up your socks and quit whining.53

It is understandable that not everyone who reads Survival takes this additional interpretive step, but if any trait can be identified as Canadian it is this very ability to subvert from underneath, to damn with faint praise, and to leave humour unexplained (especially vis-à-vis Americans).54 Given Survival’s enduring resonance, Atwood’s tactic

50 Hosea 3:1: “And the Lord said to me, ‘Go again, love a woman who is loved

by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods.” See also Hos. 1:2. 51 Goetsch, “Margaret Atwood,” p. 175. 52 Claassens, “God and Violence in the Prophets,” p. 344. 53 Atwood, “Survival Then,” p. 53 (emphasis hers). 54 See Gilbert, “Mounties, Muggings, and Moose.”

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worked. Paul Rutherford recognises her depiction of Canada as victim/survivor for the work it tries to accomplish; identifying Survival as a “call to arms, a demand that Canadians resist a culture made in America.”55

“IN THE MIDDLE OF A VALLEY”: WILDERNESS AND EXILE IN CANLIT As her seminal work of literary criticism, some of Survival’s best descriptive and constructive work toward Canadian cultural identity is its success in convincingly drawing together recurring patterns of wilderness and exile motifs. In addition to finding these patterns within Canadian writers from sea to sea, though, to prove that the themes are found within Canadian literature, Survival goes a step further; it also describes Canada itself as “an unknown territory for the people that live in it” and its inhabitants as “lost” (Surv., p. 26). The proffered solution is for Canadians to discover that they have a literature, and, by doing so discover “Canada as a state of mind” (Surv., p. 26). Atwood expresses a sense of urgency in this quest for a national literature and therefore a national identity. Echoing the nation-building work of the biblical prophets, she too conceives of the situation as “desperate” and writes that, “for the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive” (Surv., p. 27). Much ink has been spilled around the biblical imagery of exile and wilderness as it has been taken up and appropriated in Canadian poetry and fiction, and also in Canadian self-identity.56 Frye’s “garrison mentality” and Atwood’s metaphor of “survival” have been called “the major preoccupations of Canadian literary critics” and are “closely associated” with a focus on the relationship between a settler and their natural environment, “often portrayed as hostile.”57 This

55 Rutherford, “Made in America,” p. 279. 56 See, for instance Dahlie, Varieties of Exile; Grace, Canada and the Idea of North; den Otter, Civilizing the Wilderness; Gray, Sisters in the Wilderness; and, of course, Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” 57 Verduyn, “Reconstructing Canadian Literature,” p. 103.

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connection between protagonist and a hostile unknown “home” is important in Atwood’s thought. There are unquestionably biblical themes of exile and wilderness in Atwood’s fiction and poetry as well as in her literary criticism. Ronald Hatch writes that “as Atwood portrays the wilderness, it is something that people fear because it seems to deny the importance of their own existence.”58 The Canadian notion of a nation as wilderness comes distinctly from a settler perspective rather than an Indigenous one; wilderness in the Frygean sense is a place one sojourns through and struggles against, rather than a place one is rooted to as a home, which reflects Canadian settler experience.59 However, it is not only the wilderness we wish to explore but also the voice crying in the wilderness. Namely, we wish to attribute a prophetic role to Atwood’s work in Survival, in terms of its nationbuilding aims, its self-critical insider stance over and against powerful Others, and its description of the present as a catalyst for an improved future.

“PROPHESY TO T HESE BONES”: ATWOOD AS PROPHET Over the decades, Margaret Atwood has been given the title of “prophet” quite regularly, especially in the context of her dystopian fiction. The New Yorker has called her “The Prophet of Dystopia.”60 Her consistent refusals of the title actually disguise a coy acceptance of the term – on her own terms. When heralded as a prophet,61 she displays her knowledge of biblical prophecy by deflecting the conversation away from the idea of predicting the future, in favour of more truth-telling and calls to action: “I’m not a prophet. […] Let’s get rid 58 Hatch, “Margaret Atwood, the Land, and Ecology,” p. 184.

Note: on performing biblical and literary studies ethically when one is a settler or settler-descendant, see Anderson, “‘Aware-Settler’ Biblical Studies,” pp. 42–68. 60 Rebecca Mead, “Margaret Atwood, The Prophet of Dystopia,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/ margaret-atwood-the-prophet-of-dystopia. 61 This happens to Atwood quite frequently, perhaps most recently on the cover of Time magazine as “Margaret Atwood, the Reluctant Prophet” (Sept. 16 2019). 59

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of that idea right now. Prophecies are really about now. In science fiction it’s always about now.”62 In effect, she is saying, “I am not the incorrect stereotype of a prophet, who guesses at the future and is sometimes accidentally or astutely correct; I am the biblical type of prophet who is really holding up a mirror (Surv., pp. 216–217) to what is already happening in the present.” In terms of fictional work such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood adheres to a “rule of not including anything that hasn’t happened somewhere in the world already.”63 This is why she calls her dystopias “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction, and writes that “it invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.”64 Israelite prophetic literature “knew how to imaginatively and effectively communicate messages of woe and visions of hope.”65 While fortune-telling can certainly be an element of various prophetic traditions, including some of the Hebrew Bible’s prophecy, it is not the main point of the biblical prophets. Lester Grabbe points out that while there are many overlaps between Israelite prophets and other ancient Near Eastern figures, including some forecasting of likely future events unless people or kings mended their ways, one of the features that makes biblical prophecy distinctive is its self-criticism.66 Julia O’Brien notes that “the biblical portrait of prophets diverges from ancient Near Eastern models” in that several of them are “much less supportive of sitting kings.”67 Atwood, not only in her fiction, but also in holding up to Canadians their reflection as bleakness-obsessed victims in Survival’s mirror, performs a work of national self-criticism. Just as biblical prophets do not speak their warnings of woe and visions of justice to just anyone who would listen, but specifically to 62 (Emphasis mine.) Lisa Allardice, “Margaret Atwood: ‘I am Not

a Prophet: Science Fiction is Really about Now,’” The Guardian, UK, Jan. 20, 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/margaret-atwood-i-amnot-a-prophet-science-fiction-is-about-now. 63 Allardice, “Margaret Atwood: ‘I am Not a Prophet,” n.p. 64 Atwood, “Perfect Storms,” n.p. 65 Dempsey, “Themes and Perspectives,” p. 649. 66 Grabbe, Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages, p. 103. 67 O’Brien, “Introduction to the Prophetic Books,” p. 972.

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their own people (who may or may not listen), Atwood’s Survival was by no means written to tell the world, or even the US, that Canadian literature and identity existed. Rather, it was to show Canadians that their literature existed (and, moreover, that it could stand to pull up its socks and exist a bit more enthusiastically). The stream of biblical prophecy that issues warnings “accomplishes its goals rhetorically by a process leading [hearers] to view themselves as a chosen people confronted with a timely if not urgent warning that unless a certain course of atoning action is followed, dire consequences will ensue.”68 The urgent warning in Survival was that Canadians were selling themselves short by not imagining that they had a national literature, that the US would be more than happy to corner their cultural market if they weren’t going to bother to do it themselves, but also that the national literature that Canadians did have was rather neurotic69 and that they could stand to ask themselves why. Her task sounds like one scholarly definition of Israelite prophecy: “a sort of propagandistic discourse the function of which was to shore up structures of political collectivity.”70

“I WILL MAKE THEM ONE NATION IN THE LAND”: RESPONSES TO CRITIQUES A prophetic message, although often well nuanced, is less often wellfootnoted. Atwood’s early works of Canadian literary criticism have been criticized on similar grounds, for overgeneralisations and inattention to complications and diversity.71 Fiamengo gathers several points in Atwood’s defense, including that Atwood “had made it clear that […] she did not want readers to take her ‘oversimplifications as articles of dogma’,” and that Survival “was not a comprehensive survey or even an original interpretation. She was a writer producing a

68 Carpenter, “The Historical Jeremiad as Rhetorical Genre,” p. 104. 69 Atwood exclaims about the presence of “so many writers in such a small country, and all with the same neurosis.” Cited in Fiamengo, “Has Survival Survived?,” p. 192. 70 Silver, “Performing Domination/Theorizing Power,” p. 191. 71 See, e.g., Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada.

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practical guide for non-specialists.”72 Goetsch, who himself offers a summary of various critiques of Survival, most importantly its lack of diversity, concludes: “In hindsight it is clear that Survival is nevertheless a crucial book which fulfilled important functions in the 1970s and met needs of the time. Its array of themes and comparisons of various works remain fascinating, even if the book instigated […] debate on the deficiencies of thematic studies.”73 Atwood, in fact, has agreed that Survival would neither be necessary nor accurate today: “People often ask me what I would change about Survival if I were writing it today. The obvious answer is that I wouldn’t write it today because I wouldn’t need to. The thing I set out to prove has been proven beyond a doubt.”74 Atwood has indeed been vindicated against the old concerns that there was really no such thing as Canadian literature. Beyond Atwood’s success in convincing a nation that its literature existed is the fact that CanLit continued to develop, and has now broken out of the white settler authors anthologised between Survival’s covers. Those prophetic urges upon which Atwood acted in Survival – identifying and promoting a literature of Canada through warnings about its failings, and through the consolidation of other nations into monolithic dangers – have proven useful far beyond the Anglophone and Francophone settler culture identified by Atwood and others during the CanLit boom of the 1960s. Now, similar writings of prophetic resistance are unfolding for newcomer and Indigenous literatures and cultures.75 Berland recounts some of the ways in which Francophone, newcomer, and Indigenous groups have appropriated Atwood’s methods for treating the existence of one’s literature as a matter of dire import: 72 Fiamengo, “Has Survival Survived?,” p. 191. 73 Goetsch, “Margaret Atwood,” p. 175. 74 Atwood, “Survival Then,” p. 53. 75 The recent CBC article “14 Books to Read for Indigenous History Month” would have been impossible to scrape together in 1972. See CBC Books, “14 Books to Read for Indigenous History Month,” June 12, 2019: https://www.cbc.ca/books/14–books-to-read-for-indigenous-history-month1.5164877.

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While the contents of Survival included only English and French authors, the message of Survival – that describing a group’s literature and forcing it to be a worthy subject of critical analysis is a means of effective resistance against cultural domination – translates readily across additional groups. Almost as soon as the nation was convinced that CanLit existed, its subcategories began to be fruitful and multiply. What would have been extremely difficult for Atwood to include even if she had wanted in the 1970s was no longer scarce at the turn of the 21st century; now, acclaimed Indigenous authors fill special issues in the key journal for Canadian literature,77 and a recent CBC reading list of Indigenous books contains over 100 bestselling entries.78 As Canadian literary critic William New put it, “the time is not so distant when the ‘Native’ was a conventional figure in Canadian literature – but not a voice (or a figure allowed separate voices).”79 It will certainly be a long time, if ever, before Indigenous voices in Canada are no longer held down by systemic inequality, longstanding economic and cultural injustices, and colonial histories and mindsets. But if Atwood is right, the presence of flourishing Indigenous literatures is both a sign of – and an action toward – cultural survival.

76 Berland, “Marginal Notes,” p. 517.

The turning point for this was the 1990 double issue Native Writers and Canadian Writing: Canadian Literature 124/125 (Spring/Summer 1990). 78 CBC Books, “108 Indigenous Writers to Read, As Recommended by You,” July 10, 2017: https://www.cbc.ca/books/108–indigenous-writers-to-read-asrecommended-by-you-1.4197475. 79 New, “Learning to Listen,” p. 4. 77

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“T HERE WERE VERY MANY LYING IN THE VALLEY”: PROPHETIC MULTIVALENCE The last commonality we will mention between Survival and biblical prophecy is its seeming availability for ongoing application down through history. The work of the original Hebrew prophets was to both reinforce and challenge the nations of Israel and Judah and to encourage the nation in a place of exile. Since antiquity, however, those prophetic words have been recycled and reinterpreted, and have gained almost infinite multivalence. Prophetic utterance is both inspiration and medium for the struggles of a host of religious and nonreligious groups and ideologies, from postcolonial theorists80 to Christian womanists81 to American civil rights activists.82 Between the 1970s and the present, the concept of survival in Canadian literature has also experienced a multiplication of applications and meanings. The vision of Canada that Atwood mirrored to the nation in 1972 may have ignored regionalisms and additional nations within the nation,83 but that has changed. The Canadian cultural landscape has shifted toward one in which regional microcosms are encouraged to preserve local flavours and accents, and voices from groups who identify with ancestral cultures – whether Indigenous to the Land or newcomer – are beginning to be supported, without being expected to write exclusively about bleak winters on the Prairies. This pluralistic and pluriform culture is not an accident of the evolution of Canadian literature; rather, it is the way that Canadian literature will continue to exist. Wilderness may no longer be the literary “death at the doorstep” of Canada that Atwood described (although winter, wild animals, and extreme weather have not disappeared, especially for rural Canadians). And almost-total American domination of Canadian airwaves and bookstores remains as much a threat as the 80 E.g., Coomber, Re-Reading

the Prophets.

81 See Bridgeman, “Womanist Approaches to the Prophets.” 82 Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speeches both quoted Hebrew prophets, including Amos and Isaiah but also referred to the Hebrew prophets as models for the movement; see Miller, “Second Isaiah Lands in Washington, DC,” pp. 405–24. 83 So says Davey, Margaret Atwood, pp. 153–60.

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nationalist authors of the 1960s and 1970s insisted it was, with Canada fighting bitterly in each and every round of trade talks, to keep its protective “CanCon”84 percentages and be allowed to promote its own authors and artists nationally. 85 Manning asserts that Canada’s cultural survival actually “depends on the vitality of ethnic and regional cultures,” and that it is these very pluralities that “distinguish and protect Canadians from the homogenizing effects of American mass culture.”86 Post-exilic Judaism survived by entering one of the most flourishing times of textual production from a wild diversity of genres and identities.87 To continue our analogy with biblical Israel, perhaps Canada too will now resist and survive thanks not to the over-and-against of its early prophets but to its robust internal diversity of nations.

“WON’T YOU T ELL US WHAT YOU MEAN BY T HIS?”: CONCLUSIONS Despite various criticisms of Survival, it is clear that Atwood played a prophetic role in the construction of a nation, in recognising the Canadian-ness of Canadian literature, and in challenging it to emerge 84 CanCon, short for “Canadian Content” refers to requirements that a certain percentage of the offerings of radio and television broadcasts must be partly written by or otherwise collaborated on by Canadians. Many people believe that without such legislations, which are unpopular with Canada’s trade partners, Canadian music, public intellectuals, and film could never compete with big-budget foreign offerings. See Edwardson, Canadian Content. 85 On the importance of a well-funded national broadcaster to the preservation of Indigenous cultures, see Potvin, “The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Canadian Folk Cultures.” 86 Manning, “Reversible Resistance,” p. 5. 87 The Second-Temple period of Judaism is characterised as a period of astonishing textual and interpretive diversity and flourishing of pluriform manifestations of Jewish thought and practice. See Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Second Temple Judaism: Introduction,” in Oxford Bibliographies: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780195393361/obo-9780195393361–0087.xml (accessed 6 Nov. 2019).

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from under the yoke of oppressors and take ownership of its own fate. This development was true even while an initially settler-focused construction of identity was itself evolving toward greater reflection on the plurality of Canadian experience. Among other authors and other factors, Atwood played a key role not only in launching Canadian literature as its own field but in challenging Canadians to see themselves as a distinct set of peoples with a Canadian imagination capable of moving beyond mere survival. The narrowness of those first definitions have appropriately widened to encompass plural Canadian literatures and plural Canadian identities. In Berland’s words, “the discourse of Canadianness speaks increasingly of itself as a multiple subject.”88 Put differently, plurality itself has become an important defining aspect of Canadian identity. The message behind Survival – seen in dry comments such as one of the only paths to success for Canadian authors is to become “fake Americans,” as well as in Atwood’s systematic description of “basic victim positions” (Surv., pp. 46–49), where she advocates for resistance over passivity – is that protections of, and incentives for, Canadian artists, musicians, and authors remain both necessary and in danger. If Survival is a work of the biblical sort of prophecy that holds a mirror to current circumstances as a guide to hopeful futures, and in doing so, demands change from the people and the powers that be, then the question of whether it succeeded in that task for 1970s Canada is inarguable, a conclusion to which even its critics generally assent. The question is whether there is a similarly unifying voice – or a multitude of voices – that will be able to do the same in our twenty-firstcentury landscape. But if the unflagging resonance of The Handmaid’s Tale and its new sequel The Testaments is any indication, it would seem that at least one of Canada’s current prophetic voices is still Margaret Atwood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Matthew. “‘Aware-Settler’ Biblical Studies: Breaking Claims of Textual Ownership.” Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 1/1 (2019): 42–68.

88 Berland, “Marginal Notes,” p. 524.

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Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ―. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. ―. “Survival Then and Now.” Pages 47–55 in The Canadian Distinctiveness into the XXIst Century. Edited by Chad Gaffield and Karen L. Gould. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2003. ―. “Perfect Storms: Writing Oryx and Crake.” Book of the Month Club. London: O. W. Toad, 2003. Berland, Jody. “Marginal Notes on Cultural Studies in Canada.” University of Toronto Quarterly 64 (1995): 514–25. Bridgeman, Valerie. “Womanist Approaches to the Prophets.” Pages 483–90 in The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets. Edited by Carolyn J. Sharp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Carpenter, Ronald H. “The Historical Jeremiad as Rhetorical Genre.” Pages 103–17 in Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action. Edited by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Falls Church: The Speech Communication Association, 1978. Claassens, L. Juliana. “God and Violence in the Prophets.” Pages 334– 50 in The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets. Edited by Carolyn J. Sharp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2006. Coomber, Matthew. Re-Reading the Prophets Through Corporate Globalization: A Cultural-Evolutionary Approach to Economic Injustice in the Hebrew Bible. Piscataway: Gorgias, 2010. Cormier, Jeffrey. The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival, and Success. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Dahlie, Hallvard. Varieties of Exile: The Canadian Experience. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986. Davey, Frank. Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984.

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Dempsey, Carol J. “Themes and Perspectives in the Prophets: Truth, Tragedy, Trauma.” Pages 649–71 in Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha. Edited by Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page Jr., and Matthew J. M. Coomber. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014. Den Otter, A. A. Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert’s Land. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2012. Edwardson, Ryan. Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Fiamengo, Janice. “Has Survival Survived?” Canadian Literature 183 (2004): 191–94. Frye, Northrop. “Margaret Eleanor Atwood.” Pages 611–13 in Northrop Frye on Canada: Volume 12. Edited by Jean (Mary) O’Grady and David Staines. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. ―. “View of Canada.” Pages 466–71 in Northrop Frye on Canada: Volume 12. Edited by Jean (Mary) O’Grady and David Staines. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. ―. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” Pages 212–250 in Literary History of Canada. Edited by Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1945–1965. ―. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. ―. Words With Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Gilbert, Reid. “Mounties, Muggings, and Moose: Canadian Icons in a Landscape of American Violence.” Pages 178–96 in The Beaver Bites Back? American Popular Culture in Canada. Edited by David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1993. Goetsch, Paul. “Margaret Atwood: A Canadian Nationalist.” Pages 166–79 in Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Edited by Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2000.

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Grabbe, Lester. Priests, Prophets, Diviners, Sages: A Socio-Historical Study of Religious Specialists in Ancient Israel. Valley Forge: Trinity, 1995. Grace, Sherrill E. Canada and the Idea of North. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001. Gray, Charlotte. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives Of Susanna Moodie And Catharine Parr Traill. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2000. Hatch, Ronald B. “Margaret Atwood, the Land, and Ecology.” Pages 180–201 in Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Edited by Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Hayes, John H. “The Usage of Oracles against Foreign Nations in Ancient Israel.” Journal of Biblical Literature 87 (1968): 81–92. Klinck, Carl F. Giving Canada a Literary History: A Memoir. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. ―. “A Literary History of Canada. Handwritten notes, 1st draft. Autumn 1956.” Carl F. Klinck Papers, JJ. Talman Regional Collection, The D.B. Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario. Kratz, R. G. Die Propheten Israels. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003. Lapsley, Jacqueline E. “Ezekiel.” Pages 435–48 in The Women’s Bible Commentary: Revised and Expanded Edition. Edited by Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley. London: SPCK, 2014. Mackey, Eva. “‘Death by Landscape’: Race, Nature, and Gender in Canadian Nationalist Mythology.” Canadian Woman Studies 20 (2000): 125–30. Manning, Frank E. “Reversible Resistance: Canadian Popular Culture and the American Other.” Pages 3–28 in The Beaver Bites Back? American Popular Culture in Canada. Edited by David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993.

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Marshall, John W. “Gender and Empire: Sexualized Violence in John’s Anti-Imperial Apocalypse.” Pages 17–32 in A Feminist Companion to the Apocalypse of John. Edited by Amy-Jill Levine with Maria Mayo Robbins. London: T&T Clark, 2009. Miller, Keith D. “Second Isaiah Lands in Washington, DC: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ as Biblical Narrative and Biblical Hermeneutic.” Rhetoric Review 26 (2007): 405–24. Mount, Nick. “Elephants are Not Giraffes: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood, More or Less about Northrop Frye.” University of Toronto Quarterly 81/1 (2012): 60–70. Murphy, Kelly J. “Jeremiah.” Pages 725–66 in Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha. Edited by Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page, and Matthew J. M. Coomber. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014. New, W. H. “Learning to Listen.” Native Writers and Canadian Writing: Canadian Literature 124–25 (Spring/Summer 1990): 4–8. Nissinen, Martti. Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. O’Brien, Julia M. “Introduction to the Prophetic Books.” Pages 971– 75 in New Oxford Annotated Bible: NRSV with the Apocrypha. Edited by M. D. Coogan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. O’Brien, Julia M., and Chris Franke, editors. The Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets. LHBOTS 517. New York: T&T Clark, 2010. O’Connor, Kathleen M. Jeremiah: Pain and Promise. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011. ―. “Reclaiming Jeremiah’s Violence.” Pages 37–49 in The Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets. Edited by Julia M. O’Brien and Chris Franke. LHBOTS 517. New York: T&T Clark, 2010. Potvin, Gilles. “The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Canadian Folk Cultures: The Preservation of Ethnic Identity.” Ethnomusicology 16 (1972): 512–15.

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Rutherford, Paul. “Made in America: The Problem of Mass Culture in Canada.” Pages 260–80 in The Beaver Bites Back? American Popular Culture in Canada. Edited by David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Scholz, Susanne. Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010. Silver, Edward. “Performing Domination/Theorizing Power: Israelite Prophecy as a Political Discourse beyond the Conflict Model.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 14 (2014): 186–216. St. Andrews, B. A. “The Canadian Connection: Frye/Atwood.” World Literature Today 60 (1986): 47–49. Verduyn, Cristl. “Reconstructing Canadian Literature: The Role of Race and Gender.” Pages 100–112 in Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada. Edited by Veronica Strong-Boag, Sherrill Grace, Avigail Eisenberg, and Joan Anderson. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998. Yee, Gale A. Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003.

3. THE HANDMAID’S TALE, THE BIBLE, AND THE CANADIAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL SYSTEM: A DYSTOPIAN WARNING MARYANN AMOR The Handmaid’s Tale is terrifying because it feels so familiar. Even if readers have never been oppressed or had to live with the threat of a violent death, they can still understand Offred’s story because it is the story of so many people both past and present. With history telling of women struggling for rights equal to those of men, of people being killed simply because those in power marked them as ‘different’, of groups being forced to migrate as they face the terror of totalitarian regimes, echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale ring throughout history. Thus, anyone who has encountered these kinds of stories while reading the newspaper, watching television, or surfing the internet will be able to visualise Offred’s experience in Gilead, sharing the fear and restrictions that shape her daily life. Margaret Atwood’s novel is able to cause this kind of experience in its readers because it is a dystopia, a genre that portrays ‘bad place[s]’, where humanity is damned to live in ‘an unjust society [as] a degraded mob ruled by a power-crazed elite’. 1 Although these novels can be satirical,2 their goal is to ‘offer advanced warning of what could

Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial, p. 3. 2 Sisk, Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias, p. 7. 1

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happen should present trends continue unchecked’.3 Key for a dystopia is the author’s identification of destructive aspects in the world, which he/she weaves through his/her narrative to warn readers that unless things change, the fictional account will become a reality. Following the definition of a dystopia, Atwood has infused her novel with historical truths that not only draw readers into the narrative, but also add to its warning. As Atwood explains, she has borrowed many of the elements found in her novel from historical events, ‘The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have – as noted in the Historical Notes at the end – been done before, more than once […] History proves that what we have been in the past we could be again’.4 By adopting a narrative technique that depends on creating echoes with history, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale warns readers of what could happen if the world does not change and it continues to allow the powerful to terrorise and marginalise the less powerful—the fictional Gilead will be realised on earth. While The Handmaid’s Tale is replete with historical references that inform its dystopian warning, in this essay, I will focus on the Bible’s oppressive role in Gilead and this theme’s connection with history. As readers encounter Offred’s story, it becomes clear that underlying her many losses is the Bible. This use of the Bible reflects elements present both in Atwood’s context and in contexts throughout history, which adds a sense of terrifying truth to the narrative. Reading The Handmaid’s Tale as a Canadian Anglican, I feel its terror when I reflect on how my denomination and others used the Bible to 3 Similarly, Manuel Benjamin Becker argues that dystopias ‘point to the factors [in society] which are problematic […] Though dystopia pictures an upcoming nightmare, it wants to avoid this nightmare […] Thus dystopian writing asks for a responsible understanding of the individual within society where progress towards a better life is still possible’ (Becker, Forms and Functions of Dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s Novels: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, p. 12). 4 Atwood as quoted in Jadwin, “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985): Cultural and Historical Context,” p. 21.

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support their approach to Canada’s Indigenous population.5 With interpretations of the Bible as a guide, churches participated in a nationwide process aimed at removing Indigenous children from their families and placing them in Residential Schools that would westernize them by stripping them of their culture and language. Just as the Bible played a part in robbing Offred of her freedom, it also played a part in robbing many of Canada’s Indigenous children of their freedoms. It is this point of contact between the narrative and history that allows The Handmaid’s Tale to offer a poignant warning, especially for those of us who belong to any of the Christian denominations that participated in the Canadian Residential School system.6 In this essay, my goal is to compare the role of the Bible in The Handmaid’s Tale with the role of the Bible in the Canadian Residential School system to explore the warning this theme offers. I begin by discussing the Bible’s place in the oppressive system that shapes the Handmaids’ experience in Gilead. Then, I consider the historical situations that influenced Atwood’s presentation of the Bible in her novel. Finally, I review how Christian missionaries used the Bible in a similar way to how it was used in The Handmaid’s Tale as they attempted to eradicate the culture of Canada’s Indigenous peoples through application of a Residential School system. I demonstrate that in both the novel and in the Canadian Residential School system, the Bible informed how those in power treated either women (The Handmaid’s Tale) or Indigenous children (Residential School) and was instrumental in the similar losses experienced by both groups. On this basis, I raise the possibility that the many connections between The Handmaid’s Tale and the Residential School system are warning When I use the phrase “Canadian Christians” in this paper, I am referring to those denominations that played a role in the Residential School System. As discussed later, these denominations include the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the United Church. 6 It is important to note that the Residential School system also operated in the United States. In this paper, my focus is on Canada, because I am Canadian and this is my context; however, a great deal of what I am proposing could also speak to the American context. For more on this topic see DunbarOrtiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. 5

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Canadian Christians (and others) of the destructive potential of noncritical interpretations of the Bible. Thus, The Handmaid’s Tale is not a simple piece of fiction, but its dystopian genre gives it the power to provide both a framework for understanding the church’s past and a warning for the church as it looks to its future.

T HE BIBLE IN T HE HANDMAID’S T ALE The Handmaid’s Tale presents a portrait of the United States as it struggles to deal with a severe decrease in birth rates,7 due to male infertility caused by ‘disease, pollution, [and] war’.8 In response to this disaster, the government segregates women into various groups based on their ability to give birth. Those who have viable ovaries are cast in the role of Handmaids – they act as concubines for Commanders, men who belong to the ‘upper echelons’ of society and who have intercourse with the Handmaids in an attempt to impregnate them (HT, pp. 349–352). The main character in Atwood’s novel, Offred, is a Handmaid and her life in Gilead is not hers anymore. To ensure that she submits to society’s norms, the government takes Offred’s most basic rights away from her, including the right to speak, work, read, and love. If she resists, if she tries to do anything that is not condoned by the world around her, she would face brutal punishment and, eventually, death. Offred’s experience in Gilead is shaped by a complex political system that is informed by an appeal to the Bible. Although Offred’s position in society does not give her direct access to the inner-workings of the government and how it is using the Bible, readers can discern the Bible’s role in Gilead by examining the information that she provides concerning her experience as a Handmaid. What her story suggests is that the Bible underlies Gilead’s androcentric political system and, in this way, it is implicated in Offred’s social losses.

7 In

Atwood’s novel, Gilead is imagined as a Caucasian society. In the television adaptation of the novel this is not as apparent, because the Handmaids are ethnically diverse. 8 Deer, Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority, p. 125. For a more detailed discussion of the possible causes of the drop in birth rates see Atwood, HT, 349–350. All further references to the novel will be given as parenthetical citations.

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Throughout her story, Offred recalls her time at the ‘Rachel and Leah Centre’, where she and other women were trained to become Handmaids. All of the words and actions central to Offred’s position as a Handmaid were engrained in her during this time, the Bible playing a key role. For example, she describes how excerpts from Genesis 30 were ‘read to [her and the other women] every breakfast, as [they] sat in the high-school cafeteria, eating porridge with cream and brown sugar’ (HT, p. 101). It is while she is at the Centre that Offred’s aural world is saturated with biblical phrases, such as ‘Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her’ (HT, p. 101; cf. Genesis 30:3, NRSV). In Genesis 30, Rachel speaks these words as she deals with her inability to bear a child for Jacob by giving her maid Bilhah to him, as something of a surrogate womb. With Bilhah not speaking in response to Rachel’s actions and with Jacob having intercourse with and impregnating her (Genesis 30:1–7), Bilhah’s function is as a ‘two-legged womb’ (HT, p. 157) for the propagation of Jacob’s line. By repeating passages associated with this biblical scene to the Handmaids, Gilead establishes that their role in society is to serve as Bilhahs for Commanders, who represent Jacob, allowing these men to enter into them and impregnate them for the continuation of their own lines.9 Offred also notes how the Beatitudes were played to her at the Centre: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven […] blessed are the meek. Blessed are the silent’ (HT, p. 101; cf. Matthew 5:3–5). By choosing to repeat these ‘biblical’ words to the Handmaids, those holding power in society (certain groups of men10) manipulate them to adopt a submissive stance that would accompany their submissive bodies. To be blessed, the Handmaids must be poor in spirit, meek, and silent; in other words, they must not fight against the system. By using the Beatitudes in this way, Gilead has shifted their focus – these words no longer offer reassurance to those who are 9 For a detailed discussion of the use of specific biblical passages in The Hand-

maid’s Tale, including the reference to Gilead, see Dorota Filipczak, “Is there no Balm in Gilead? – Biblical Intertext in The Handmaid’s Tale,” pp. 171– 185. 10 Not all men had power in and would benefit from the system. For example, Offred describes Nick as being “Low status: he hasn’t been issued a women, not even one. He doesn’t rate: some defect, lack of connections” (HT, p. 20).

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needy or poor in spirit, but they now reinforce the Handmaids’ subjugation. In response to the Beatitudes’ reading, Offred thinks, ‘I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out too, but there was no way of checking’ (HT, p. 101). This detail reveals that Gilead keeps the Bible out of the hands of women; as Offred notes, the Beatitudes were played to her, being recited by a male voice ‘so not even an Aunt would be guilty of the sin of reading’ (HT, p. 101). She also describes how she cannot read the Bible because, ‘who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it? We can be read to from it by him, but we cannot read’ (HT, p. 99). Offred’s words suggest that Gilead might be restricting the Bible so that women do not realize that they were getting more than the Bible in the daily readings, which might prompt a rebellion (although, given the other violent means by which society enforces its norms, this is not very likely). It is by keeping the Bible away from women that Gilead can attribute biblical authority to any non-biblical passage, such as ‘Blessed are the silent’, thus allowing it to prescribe exactly how it would like women to act in society. Additionally, by not allowing women to access the Bible, they are prevented from engaging with the many stories of biblical women who had power in their respective worlds – Deborah, a prophetess and judge of Israel (Judges 4:4); Huldah, a prophetess (2 Kings 22:14); Lydia, a dealer of purple cloth (Acts 16:14); Phoebe, a leader in the early church (Romans 16:1). This selectivity is also noted in that Gilead repeats to the Handmaids only the story of Rachel giving Bilhah to Jacob, but it does not emphasize the fact that Rachel is the one who is taking the lead to secure progeny for her husband or that Rachel and Leah are very active characters elsewhere in the narrative (for example, Rachel stealing the household gods, Genesis 31:34–35). Handmaids would only see biblical women as objects of male authority, which would suggest that they must also adopt static, submissive roles in relation to the men in their world. Overall, Gilead controls which biblical and non-biblical passages to present to the Handmaids, which allows for the establishment of a specific image of how women must submit themselves to the men who hold power in society; this image is given authority because it is linked to the Bible. For the Handmaids, the story of Rachel, Jacob and

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Bilhah, in particular, determines that they are to act as wombs for their Commanders, passively allowing these men to have intercourse with them as Bilhah allowed Jacob to have intercourse with her. In order to protect the biblically sanctioned status quo, Gilead restricts access to the Bible; the texts are not open for critical engagement, which means that social norms can never be challenged. In Gilead the Bible is deemed ‘highly dangerous’,11 being kept ‘locked up, the way people once kept tea locked up, so the servants wouldn’t steal it. It is an incendiary device’ (HT, p. 99). As noted, in Gilead Offred’s primary function is to carry and bear children, a function supported by reference to the Bible. To reinforce this role, Gilead has structures in place that are aimed at removing all vestiges of who Offred was in the time before Gilead existed. By working to erase key aspects of Offred’s identity, Gilead emphasises its desires over Offred’s. With words and images associated with the Bible central to Gilead’s mission, the texts are implicated in each of the losses that Offred experiences. Although the majority of Offred’s losses are not explicitly connected to the Bible, it directly informs her loss of identity incurred during the monthly procreation ceremony. According to Professor Piexioto, whose lecture appears in the ‘Historical Notes’ at the end of the novel, Gilead has adopted ‘biblical precedents’ of ‘simultaneous polygamy practiced…in early Old Testament times’ (HT, p. 350). As noted above, in the story of Rachel, Jacob, and Bilhah, Rachel wanted to give children to Jacob but was prevented because of her physical condition, which caused her to give Bilhah to him as a substitute womb (Genesis 30:1–4). In Gilead, the focus is placed on Bilhah’s functional role alone, which becomes the paradigm for the Handmaids. On this basis, all Handmaids must participate in a ‘biblical’ ceremony that both supports the roles of the family vis-à-vis the biblical precedent and visually strips the Handmaids of their identity, establishing that they are important not because of who they are, but because of what they are able to do. First, the Commander reads select parts of the Bible from the creation narrative to the story of Rachel, Jacob, and Bilhah to his family unit, which includes his wife, Handmaid, and other household staff members, (HT, p. 101). After he has 11 Booker, Dystopian, p. 81.

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finished, the Commander, his wife, and his Handmaid begin the ceremony in private. The Handmaid ‘lie[s] on [her] back fully clothed’ with her head in the lap of her Commander’s wife, the women clasping each others’ hands during intercourse (HT, p. 106). All the Commander can see is the red bulge of the Handmaid with his wife’s head and blue clothes above it (HT, pp. 106–109). The ceremony’s structure is aimed at erasing the Handmaid from the scene, turning her into nothing more than an extension of her Commander’s wife. With the emphasis placed on the functional and passive image of women, derived from biblical and non-biblical texts, Gilead does not value Offred’s individuality, which also compels it to strip Offred of her name. Offred’s name before the rise of Gilead is never revealed to readers, but she does describe the impact of the loss of her name: ‘My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter’ (HT, p. 95). Offred’s real name has been replaced with her Commander’s ‘first name, “Fred”, and a prefix denoting “belonging to”’.12 She also speaks about ‘the small tattoo on [her] ankle. Four digits and an eye, a passport in reverse’ (HT, p. 73). Offred is identified not only by her relationship with her Commander, but also by a number, chosen by the state – she is both the Commander’s and Gilead’s possession, their vessel that is waiting to be filled. Additionally, while Offred had a life, a child, a husband, and a job before Gilead, in Gilead she has none of these things (HT, pp. 197– 210). Not only her name, but also her freedom was taken away from her when she was captured and placed in the Centre, an educational context that she was forced to attend and that promulgated a set of beliefs to which she did not subscribe. For example, while Offred could do whatever she wanted before Gilead, attending university and spending time with Moira, her best friend (HT, pp. 41–42), in Gilead her life is regimentally structured. Both at the Centre and when her training is complete, Offred lives according to ‘[t]he bell that 12 Atwood, ‘Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in an

Age of Trump.” See also, Atwood, HT, p. 351.

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measures time […] Time here is measured by bells, as once in nunneries’ (HT, p. 8).13 This control is further exerted by the barbed wire that surrounds the Centre and turns even her time outside into an experience of confinement, making it clear that society sees her as having more in common with animals than with human beings, ‘except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire’ (HT, p. 4). Similarly, while in the Commander’s home, she goes out at specific times and always with a partner, walking in the same ‘twos’ as she did at the Centre, like the animals boarding Noah’s ark (HT, p. 21; Genesis 6:19–20; 7:9, 15). With bells to structure her life and her caged existence, Gilead makes it clear that Offred does not have to think or make her own decisions – society will do all of this for her. The loss of Offred’s freedom stretches beyond what she can do to what she can wear and what she can speak. Offred describes how the government requires that she, as a Handmaid, wears a red dress and white head covering, with blinkers to control her vision, effectively removing her freedom of expression and communication (HT, pp. 8–9),14 a stark contrast to the clothing she describes her friend Moira wearing before the inception of Gilead, ‘purple overalls, one dangly earring, the gold fingernail she wore to be eccentric’ (HT, p. 41). As Nathalie Cooke notes, the fact that the Handmaids and all other ranks of women – Marthas, Aunts, Commander’s Wives and Econowives – must wear specific colours points to how ‘colour is a primary instrument of oppression, cuing roles of dominance and submission and making the escape of the brightly coloured handmaids difficult’.15 Additionally, prescribed greetings such as ‘Blessed be the fruit’ and ‘May the Lord open’ (HT, pp. 21, 49), highlight the fact that the women have to maintain their enforced identity, even as they communicate in public. 16 They must speak phrases focused on fertility and

For the use of bells to structure Offred’s life after she leaves the Centre see HT, p. 91. 14 See also chapter 10 (pp. 271–294) in Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, which looks at the use of the red clothing imagery, making comparisons between this novel and myths/fairy tales. 15 Nathalie Cooke as cited in Becker, Forms and Functions, p. 46. 16 Becker, Forms and Functions, pp. 44–45. 13

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couched in biblical sounding language, which reminds them of their biblical function in society. In order to ensure compliance, Gileadean government policies have measures in place to prevent the Handmaids from challenging the rules. The women know that their every move is potentially followed by Eyes (HT, pp. 223–224). Furthermore, whenever the women go out walking or shopping, Guardians are always present carrying various instruments of torture to punish anyone who does not comply (HT, pp. 22–23).17 The threat of punishment is one of the most violent and effective ways in which Gilead ensures that Handmaids submit to the regulations of the new world order. Margaret R. Miles argues, ‘[b]iblical imagery and language […] are simply a framework for [Gilead’s] agenda’.18 Whether explicitly (for example, in the impregnation ceremony) or more subtly, Gilead relies on the Bible to shape its treatment of the Handmaids, and, for this reason, the Bible is implicated in all of their losses. Offred’s repressive experience in Gilead is due to the fact that she lives in a world where she is understood to be a vessel, as Bilhah was, someone without any identity or value (other than her ability to procreate).

T HE BIBLE IN ATWOOD’S CONTEXT Returning to the definition of a dystopia, a key aspect of this genre is that it offers a warning that if aspects of society do not change, the

17 There are points in the novel when Offred is given a taste of freedom, when

she plays Scrabble or goes to Jezebel’s; however, Atwood reiterates the fact that Offred is still living under the control of the regime, as all her ‘free’ interactions are only granted to her by someone in authority. To go to Jezebel’s, for instance, ‘the Commander […] provides the appropriate clothes and a forged passport. Thus these things represent aspects of control’, as opposed to freedom (Becker, Forms and Function, pp. 48–49). 18 Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies, p. 103. In this quote Miles is referring to the Foucauldian notions of weak vs. strong power. Weak power is a coercive power, a power that, unlike strong power, does not encourage people to follow rules because they see them as a benefit to society.

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terror of the fictional narrative could become reality. Atwood’s application of the Bible in Gilead is not something that she invented for the novel, but it comes directly out of the world in which she was living; as already noted, many of the details in the novel are taken from history. As I will demonstrate below, the fact that Atwood has used the Bible in a way that connects with historical truths allows The Handmaid’s Tale to speak to other situations, including the Canadian Residential School system. The Handmaid’s Tale took shape in the 1980s, with Atwood beginning it in 1984. Although, in general, ‘the world […] looked to be getting better and better for women’, their ‘newly acquired rights and equalities’ remained fragile. 19 Many were opposed to women’s rights and, in some places, their gains ‘were threatened or actively eroded’.20 According to Lisa Jadwin, Atwood was aware of the fact that ‘religious fundamentalism – at home and abroad – was a threat to [women’s freedom]’.21 In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini had come to power, which resulted in a significant loss of women’s rights. Women were ‘forced […] out of Iranian universities, out of their jobs, and back into their burqas and their homes’.22 Important was Atwood’s experience of wearing a chador, a full-length covering worn by Muslim women and associated with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. She writes: ‘Once I put it on, I had an odd sense of having been turned into negative space, a blank in the visual field, a sort of antimatter – both there and not there. Such a space has power of a sort, but it is a passive power, the power of taboo’.23 While religion played a role in the loss of women’s rights in Iran, the Bible had a particular impact on the place of women in American society. As a Canadian who ‘expressed a strong sense of Canadian identity’,24 Atwood was not immune to what was taking place in the 19 Neuman, “‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale,’ p. 858. 20 Neuman, “‘Just a Backlash,’” p. 859. 21 Jadwin, “Cultural and Historical Context,” p. 23. 22 Neuman, “‘Just a Backlash,’” p. 859. 23 Jadwin, “Cultural and Historical Context,” pp. 23–24. 24 Jadwin, “Cultural and Historical Context,” p. 27.

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United States (Atwood studied at Harvard, so had spent time living in the United States). Atwood was aware of American politics, especially the rise of the Moral Majority, which pitted itself against the women’s rights movement.25 Ronald Reagan advanced an agenda that was informed by his belief that ‘the time ha[d] come to turn to God and reassert our trust in Him for our great nation’s healing’.26 This would entail both a promise to ban abortion, which he viewed as a ‘means of taking a human life,’ and his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, ‘which aimed at inscribing gender equality in the Constitution’.27 This conservative Christian position was often supported by turning to the Bible, especially passages such as 1 Timothy 2:12. With the Bible as a foundation, women’s rights were viewed as ‘a threat to “traditional” cultural values and especially to the “Christian” family’.28 Women were to remain in the home where they could care for children, while men went to work. Those women who had jobs ‘made up an increasing percentage of those in lowest-paid occupations, and they made no gains or lost ground in the better-paid trades and professions’.29 In addition, ‘government support for rape crisis workers, victim advocacy, and battered women’s shelters declined’, which suggested that women and their safety were of little importance.30 25 Jadwin, “Cultural and Historical Context,” p. 28. 26 Coste, “‘Women, Ladies, Girls, Gals…’: Ronald Reagan and the Evolution

of Gender Roles in the United States,” p. 2. 27 Coste, “‘Women, Ladies, Girls, Gals,’” p. 3. 28 Jadwin, “Cultural and Historical Context,” p. 29. Furthermore, ‘M.G. “Pat” Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, has described feminism as a threat to society’ (Jadwin, “Cultural and Historical Context,” p. 29). In The Handmaid’s Tale, a Commander quotes from the Letter to Timothy during the women’s Prayvaganza, “The Commander continues with the service: ‘I will that women adorn themselves in modest apparel,’ he says, ‘with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; ‘But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection’” (HT, p. 255). 29 Neuman, ‘‘Just a Backlash,’’ p. 859. 30 Jadwin, ‘Cultural and Historical Context,’ p. 29. As noted in an interview with the CBC, The Handmaid’s Tale was also influenced by Atwood’s Puritan roots (“How Margaret Atwood’s Puritan Ancestors Inspired The Handmaid’s Tale,” CBC Radio, [August 26, 2018]).

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In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood draws on this conservative Christian approach to women’s rights that was ripe in her context to create Gilead, a world where the social application of the Bible is taken to the dystopian extreme. This novel warns its readers of what could happen if the Bible were to be used, as it was beginning to be used in the 1980s, to justify the removal of women’s rights – Gilead would not be an imaginative construction any longer.

T HE BIBLE AND THE CANADIAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL SYSTEM The use of the Bible in The Handmaid’s Tale was informed by Atwood’s experience in the early 1980s, in which she observed a direct threat to women’s rights that was supported by an appeal to the biblical texts. However, this context does not limit the power of the novel to speak to other historical situations in which similar trends are noted. Encountering how the Bible oppresses the Handmaids prompts me to think of the history of my denomination, the Anglican Church of Canada, which was one of many Christian denominations that turned to the Bible to support its approach to Canada’s Indigenous people. In fact, the many resonances between Offred’s experience in Gilead and the experience of the children in the Residential Schools are not only terrifying but also the key to uncovering the novel’s warning for Canadian Christians today. From the 1880s until the last few decades of the twentieth century, Canada adopted a Residential School system for its Indigenous people. During this period, Indigenous children were removed from their families and placed in Residential Schools, the goal being to ‘civiliz[e] and Christianiz[e] the “savages of the new world”’.31 Regularly, children faced harsh abuse at the hands of both their teachers and clergy, losing their culture, language, and their childhood in the process. It is this loss that has contributed to Indigenous people suffering greater amounts of poverty and other psychological issues in Canadian society.32 31 Diewert, “White Christian Settlers, the Bible, and (De)colonization,” p. 127.

For a discussion of the long term impact of Residential Schools on both survivors and their descendants, see Rabson, “Residential schools have negative health impacts on descendants of survivors: survey,” The Globe and Mail, (March 14, 2018). 32

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While the Canadian government supported the Residential Schools, Christian churches played a pivotal role in their operation by taking on the task of building and running the schools. According to John S. Milloy, ‘Government departments lived, of course, within the world of politics in which the church was a determined and notable player. The pulpit was a power in the home and thus in politics’.33 It was because of a desire to see Indigenous people ‘embrace Western values’, which were understood to be inseparable from Christianity, that churches were understood to be the only agent that would be able to accomplish this goal quickly.34 A number of Christian denominations participated, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the United Church, and the Presbyterian Church,35 being driven by a missionary desire to civilize Indigenous children by having them adopt Christian morality, which required that they be inculcated into the Christian faith.36 At the heart of the Christian mission was the Bible, its passages calling churches to ‘make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28:19). Christian missionaries ‘believed that God ha[d] commanded the clergy to save the souls of the heathen savages, so that conversion resulting in cultural genocide was regarded as a Christian service […] the greater the sacrifice they made, the greater the glory to God’.37 The image of Christ followers going to foreign lands, taking the Gospel

33 Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential

School System, 1879–1986, p. 57. Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools, p. 124. 35 According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, ‘before 1925, the Methodist Church also operated residential schools; however, when the United Church of Canada was formed in 1925, most of the Presbyterian and all the Methodist schools because United Church schools’ (J.R. Miller, “Residential Schools in Canada”). See also, “A History of Residential Schools in Canada,” CBC News (March 21, 2016). 36 Milloy, National Crime, pp. 27–29. 37 Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, p. 31. 34 Eshet, Stolen

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and the Christian message with them, shaped the identities and goals of Christians throughout the colonial period and beyond. L. Daniel Hawk writes that the Christian missionary response to Indigenous peoples during the 1800s was also shaped by ‘the idea that indigenous peoples have no place in the new nation, thus justifying their erasure’.38 The Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua were seen as providing the ‘divine legitimacy for the occupation of other people’s land and the virtual annihilation of indigenes’.39 In these books, the Canaanites are portrayed as people whom the Israelites could justifiably murder, because they stood in the way of them occupying the God-given land of Canaan; they were, ‘so great a threat to Israel’s existence that the land must be wiped clean [of them, they] must be annihilated and their sacred places pulverized’. 40 For example, in Joshua 6:21–27, the Israelites destroy Jericho, following God’s command, ‘they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys’ (Joshua 6:21). On the basis of passages such as this, the church and white settlers saw themselves as Israel and the Indigenous people were the Canaanites, savage people who were preventing the establishment of a holy nation. However, rather than physically murdering them, as per Joshua, missionaries murdered their culture, replacing it with Christian ideals.41 38 Hawk, “The Myth of the Emptied Land: Biblical Conquest and American Nationalism,” p. 253. For an Indigenous perspective on this issue see, Warrior, “A Native American Perspective: Canaanite, Cowboys, and Indians,” pp. 277–285. 39 Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique, p. 34. 40 Hawk, “Myth of the Emptied Land,” p. 253. 41 This approach to Canada’s Indigenous peoples is best termed “settler colonialism,” which is a phrase that “focuses on [those] autonomous collectives that claim both a special sovereign charge and a regenerative capacity. Settlers, unlike other migrants, ‘remove’ to establish better polity, either by setting up an ideal social body or by constituting an exemplary model of social organization” (Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, pp. 3–4). Underlying the settler colonial mentality is the desire to remove Indigenous ways of being, so that they might be replaced with the settlers’ ways of being.

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Dave Diewert, writing on the use of the Bible by Christian missionaries, argues that it has been interpreted as ‘fundamentally buttressing the authority and control of the ruling class […it functions] as a bulwark in rationalizing colonial and imperial projects, serving to fuse religious orthodoxy with political mastery’.42 The echoes with Atwood’s Gilead are evident. It was by an appeal to the Bible that Gilead developed a society where it was legitimate to mistreat the Handmaids, who were nothing more than empty vessels waiting to be filled with a man’s seed. So, too, Christian missionaries used the Bible to develop an approach to Indigenous people that accepted that they could eradicate them to create a new Christian world that aligned with the will of God. In Canada, this use of the Bible is noted in the Residential School system where, acting as Israel, Christian churches did everything they could to wipe out the culture of the Indigenous, Canaanite, people, by taking away and suppressing their children. What is most terrifying is that the losses experienced by the children in these schools closely mirror those of Offred; these connections clearly demonstrate how the Bible, both in Gilead and in Canada, was ‘enlisted into the service of death-dealing power.’43 With the Bible central to the goals of the Residential Schools, the result was, echoing Gilead, a direct attack against the children’s freedom and identity, both of which were replaced by norms dictated by those holding power in society.44 First, the children were taken away from their homes, being placed in an educational system that forced them into a foreign routine and way of life. In 1879, MP Nicholas Flood Davin wrote a report documenting his observations of how the United States was dealing with its Indigenous population. He noted 42 Diewert, “White Christian Settlers,” p. 130. 43 Diewert, “White Christian Settlers,” p. 130.

In The Handmaid’s Tale the Handmaids are infantilized in a way that makes the parallel with the children in the Residential Schools even more profound. For example, in the text quoted above, Offred describes how she is being “read to”, while she is “eating porridge with cream and brown sugar” (HT, p. 101). While adults can read on their own and are able to eat foods that require chewing, the Handmaids are treated as if they are small children, who cannot read and cannot chew. 44

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that in the United States, ‘the day school did not work because the influence of the wigwam was stronger than the influence of the school. Industrial Boarding Schools were established, and these are now numerous and will soon be universal’.45 On this basis, Davin would recommend that Canada adopt a similar policy.46 With the government supporting Davin’s Report, it began to remove Indigenous children from their families, placing them in Residential Schools, many of which were run by churches. For the children, being taken from their families and placed into a strange environment was a shock. In survivor47 accounts, collected in Behind Closed Doors: Stories from Kamloops Indian Residential School, survivors speak of their experience in the Residential Schools. One survivor notes, ‘We were just playing around outside and they came along and we got called back to our house and we got packed up and hauled away from there down to here’.48 Another survivor comments, ‘I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t understand what was going on…they walked us in, and she just said, “You have to go,” […] at the residential school, I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand what was happening’.49 This sense of confusion and being taken, against one’s will into a strange world, echoes Offred’s experience being captured, removed from her normal and free life, and placed in the Centre (HT, pp. 85–86). The restrictions in the Centre were reinforced by the use of bells that marked the times and structured Offred’s life, a stark contrast to 45 Davin, Report

on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds), p. 1.

46 Davin, Report, p. 10. 47 ‘Survivor’ is the term most often used for those who endured and survived

the Residential Schools. See, for example, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. For an extended discussion of the use of ‘survivor’ in discussions of the Residential School system see Ronald Niezen, Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, pp. 18–19. 48 Jack (editor), Behind Closed Doors: Stories from Kamloops Indian Residential School, p. 54. 49 Jack, Behind Closed Doors, p. 47.

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her life prior to Gilead. Before going to the Residential Schools, the children could go hunting and fishing, run around in gardens, and just be happy children;50 however, in Residential Schools, they had to live in a world in which bells enforced the structure common to Western society: The bell rings at 6 o’clock in the morning […] everyone washes, gets dressed, and [the] business of the day begins. The boys go out to do chores […] While they are engaged at this, the girls are getting breakfast […] At 7:30 all gather for prayers […] It is close to 8 o’clock and the boys line up to receive instructions for the day’s work […] The girls get at their housework […] at 8:45 the boys and girls get in line for inspection and march into school. School dismisses for dinner at 11:45. […] At 4 o’clock school lets out for the day and there is another playtime. Supper is at 5:30 and then, while the girls clear away, the boys do the evening chores. High school and entrance students study until 9 o’clock. The little children go to bed immediately after evening prayers. In the winter they are tucked away about 7 and in the summer at dark.51

Residential Schools forced children within a framework that countered their way of life; as Milloy states, ‘the children’s lives were to be meticulously arranged in a disciplined regimen of rising, working, learning, and resting, the ebb and flow of a ceaseless tide of industriousness’.52 This approach functioned within ‘the strategy of civilization by a movement from circle to square: from a world to be navigated by belief, dreams and spirit guidance to one of secular logic and reasoning’.53 As noted, Gilead not only removed the freedom of Offred’s preGilead life, but also it took away from her both her clothing and her name, thus, establishing her status as a non-person in society. Similarly, as those running the Residential Schools worked towards enforc-

50 Jack, Behind

Closed Doors, p. 74. Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools, p. 151. 52 Milloy, National Crime, p. 137. 53 Milloy, National Crime, p. 136. 51 Miller, Shingwauk’s

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ing the western identities that they wanted Indigenous children to embody, they prevented them from wearing their own clothes, putting them into western clothes, including uniforms. Milloy argues, European clothes were the outward manifestation of the transformation from the ‘savage’ to the ‘civilized’ state […] For school administrators, school uniforms were especially significant. They would counter what had always been seen by Europeans as the dangerous, excessive individuality of Aboriginal society. Unbridled individualism, manifest in boisterous, decorative display, which broke the bounds of decorum and thus signalled the potentiality of lawlessness, was the core of savagery. In the schools, this boundless liberty could be moderated by uniforms, which reduced the children to sameness, to regularity, to order. Uniforms were, therefore, agents of discipline and thus of civilization and modernity.54

Echoing The Handmaid’s Tale, in the Residential Schools clothing both restricted and enforced society’s norms, resulting in a loss of individuality and a severing of the connection students had with their pre-Residential School life. In a survivor account, the change of appearance forced upon students in the Residential Schools is described: ‘When we reached school, the worst part, was they took away our clothing. The clothes were the closest thing to us, from Mom, and we had to take all that off. That was very hard’.55 Those in charge of the Residential Schools also believed that ‘it was through language that the child gained its ontological inheritance from its parents and communities’.56 In order to increase the distance between the children and their families, in the Residential Schools they had to abandon their Indigenous languages and speak in English alone: ‘Of course we were told not to speak our language, not even one word, I couldn’t say one word in our Shuswap language’. 57

54 Milloy, National

Crime, p. 124. Closed Doors, p. 13. 56 Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision, p. 59. 57 Jack, Behind Closed Doors, p. 68. 55 Jack, Behind

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Speech, as it was in Gilead, was controlled by those in power as a way of removing freedom of expression, ensuring conformity, and imposing the now dominant culture. Survivors often refer to the fact that in Residential Schools they were given ‘numbers […] as they gave us our uniforms’.58 One survivor similarly describes, ‘[the] lady bathed me, and they told me my number was thirteen. That’s when they gave me my number and my clothes. It was their clothes and we all had numbers’.59 This reference to being given a number connects with the tattooed number on Offred’s ankle that was part of her Gilead-enforced identity – like Offred, the children were not valued for who they were, but they were simply numbers to those in power. Another survivor speaks about how her ‘Native name […was] replaced […] with ‘Mary,’ a name from their Bible’.60 Similar to Offred’s loss of her name and its being replaced with a name that associated her with her Commander, in the Residential Schools, the change in the children’s names associated them with the Bible and, in a subtle way, could have been aimed at leading them to be what they were now called – they had Christian names, holy and biblical, they were now closer to embodying the ideals of their namers. If the children did not conform to the norms of the Residential Schools, they faced a threat of punishment, not at the hand of Eyes and Aunts, but at the hands of nuns, clergy, and teachers: ‘The consequence of not listening, of deviance, of “insubordination,” as it was normally termed, was more immediate than some future hell. It was earthly punishment’.61 As a survivor describes, not knowing a specific word in English, but knowing it in an Indigenous tongue, resulted in corporal punishment: ‘I remember I knew a bit of Indian and I only knew it in Indian, these certain words. I said it and they hit me’.62 The threat of punishment was aimed at both preventing the children from 58 Jack, Behind

Closed Doors, p. 13. Closed Doors, p. 47. 60 Carpenter, “Lost Generations: An Inuk Artist Reflects on the Legacy of the Residential Schools in the Far North.” 61 Milloy, National Crime, p. 138. 62 Jack, Behind Closed Doors, p. 74. 59 Jack, Behind

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reverting back to their Indigenous ways and forcing them to submit. It was, as one survivor notes, ‘like a jail, because I saw kids my age lined up, I think it was the principal’s office. My friend was in front of my and he was crying, because he didn’t want to get strapped’.63 The goal of the Residential Schools was to change Indigenous children, turning them into cultured, civilized, Christian people. In this setting, ‘[d]iscipline, regimentation, and punishment in the service of cultural change, was the context of the children’s lives.’64 With the Bible compelling them, Christian missionaries from a range of denominations saw themselves as Israel, a people whom God had called to address the problem of the Indigenous, Canaanite children. Because the churches were using the Bible as the authoritative guide for how to interact with Canada’s Indigenous people, forcing them to be what they were not by taking away key aspects of their identity, the texts are implicated in the children’s losses. It was by using the Bible in this way that Christian missionaries turned Canada into Gilead, submitting innocent children to the same oppression that Offred had faced.

A DYSTOPIAN WARNING In The Handmaid’s Tale, interpretations of the Bible are vehicles of dystopian terror, being foundational to Gilead’s ‘barbaric’65 social rules. Atwood’s depiction of the Bible as a tool for advocating the mistreatment of women in Gilead was influenced by her experiences in the 1980s, from which she drew to create a potential future reality that was filled with terror and truth. When considering the use of the Bible in Canada’s Residential School system, the texts were central for many Christian denominations, who saw themselves as Israel, called by God to kill the culture of Indigenous, Canaanite, children. This goal resulted in the children losing much of what Offred lost in Gilead – the freedom to live as they pleased, to wear their own clothes, to speak their own words, to be called by their own names.

63 Jack, Behind

Closed Doors, p. 67. Crime, p. 138. 65 Gottlieb, Dystopian, p. 107. 64 Milloy, National

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As a member of the Anglican Church of Canada, I cannot ignore the fact that I belong to a denomination that, in a Gilead-esque way, turned to the Bible and used it to tear children away from their families, stripping these children of their identity, and enforcing Christian norms on them in an attempt to make them conform to a specific cultural ideal. However, today, not only the Anglican Church of Canada, but also other denominations, have offered apologies and other statements aimed at taking responsibility for their role in the brutal treatment of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.66 This point raises the question: does the above interpretation of The Handmaid’s Tale alongside the Residential School system have any bearing? Is it important at all? The reality is, as Atwood’s quote at the start of this paper suggests, history does repeat itself and the possibility remains that the Bible will, at some point, be used again to support an approach to the ‘other’ that is more violent and repressive than loving and accepting. In my denomination, we have been wrestling with whether the marriage canon should be adjusted to allow for marriages between those who do not identify as heterosexual. The debates that have emerged because of this issue have created deep fractures in the denomination, dioceses, and even parishes.67 Underlying the majority of them is the Bible and the question of whether it does or does not condone the inclusion of people who are not heterosexual, the supposed norm, within the church. As the church moves forward with this issue and with others that we might not see now, but are on the horizon, we have to ask ourselves: how are we interpreting the Bible, literally or critically? How are these ancient texts informing how we treat other human beings? Reading the Bible as if it corresponds directly to our current contexts and using these interpretations to construct an ‘us and them’ view of the world that justifies treating some people in a

66 See, for example, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, et al., “Response of the Churches

to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” 67 See, for example, Douglas Todd’s article about the dispute over same-sex blessings at St. John’s Shaughnessy (Vancouver). In this example, the issue led to a court case over ownership of the building, creating a divide in the parish (Todd, “Anglican Diocese Retains Ownership of Four Disputed Church Properties”). See also, Matt Gardner, “Marriage Canon Amendment Fails to Pass at General Synod.”

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hurtful way simply because of who they are, are the first steps towards becoming Gilead. Let us heed the warning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Howard. Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View. Saskatoon, SK: Fifth House Publishers, 1989. “A History of Residential Schools in Canada.” CBC News. March 21, 2016. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/a-history-of-residentialschools-in-canada-1.702280. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: Emblem, 2011. ―. “Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in an Age of Trump.” The New York Times. March 10, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html. Becker, Manuel Benjamin. Forms and Functions of Dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s Novels: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. Saarbrücken, DE: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008. Booker, M. Keith. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Chrisjohn, Roland and Sherri Young with Michael Maraun. The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada. Revised edition. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 2006. Coste, Françoise. “‘Women, Ladies, Girls, Gals…’: Ronald Reagan and the Evolution of Gender Roles in the United States.” Miranda 12 (2016). doi: 10.4000/miranda.8602. Davin, Nicholas Flood. Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds. Ottawa, ON: [s.n.], 1879. http://bcmetis.com/wpcontent/uploads/IndustrialSchoolsReport.pdf. Deer, Glenn. Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority. Quebec, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994.

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Diewert, Dave. “White Christian Settlers, the Bible, and (De)colonization.” Pages 127–137 in Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together. Kitchener, ON: Herald Press, 2013. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014. Eshet, Dan. Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools. Toronto, ON: Facing History and Ourselves, 2015. Filipczak, Dorota. “Is there no Balm in Gilead? – Biblical Intertext in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Literature and Theology 7 (1993): 171– 185. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23924862. Gardner, Matt. “Marriage Canon Amendment Fails to Pass at General Synod.” The Anglican Journal. July 13, 2019. https://www.anglicanjournal.com/marriage-canon-amendment-fails-to-pass/. Gottlieb, Erika. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Quebec, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Hawk, L. Daniel. “The Myth of the Emptied Land: Biblical Conquest and American Nationalism.” Word and World 37 (2017): 252–262. https://wordandworld.luthersem.edu/issues.aspx?article_id=4003. Hiltz, Fred, et al. “Response of the Churches to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” The Anglican Church of Canada. June 2, 2015. https://www.anglican.ca/tr/response-of-thechurches-to-the-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-of-canada/. Hinkle, Lawrence E., and Harold G. Wolff. “Communist Interrogation and Indoctrination of Enemies of the States: Analysis of Methods Used by the Communist State Police (A Special Report).” AMA Archives of Neurology & Psychiatry 76 (1956): 115–174. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC180 6200/pdf/bullnyacadmed00378–0030.pdf. “How Margaret Atwood’s Puritan Ancestors Inspired The Handmaid’s Tale.” CBC Radio. August 26, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/ra-

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dio/tapestry/religion-utopia-or-dystopia-1.4143654/how-margaret-atwood-s-puritan-ancestors-inspired-the-handmaid-s-tale1.4143718. Jack, Agnes, ed. Behind Closed Doors: Stories from Kamloops Indian Residential School. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 2006. Jadwin, Lisa. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985): Cultural and Historical Context.” Pages 21–41 in Critical Insights: The Handmaid’s Tale, ed. J. Brooks Bouson. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2010. Ladner, Kiera L. “Visions of Neo-Colonialism? Renewing the Relationship with Aboriginal Peoples.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 21 (2001): 105–135.http://www3.brandonu.ca/ cjns/21.1/cjnsv21no1_pg105–135.pdf. Miles, Margaret R. Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996. Miller, J.R. “Residential Schools in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. (June 14, 2018). https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools. ―. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press, 2003. Neuman, Shirley. ‘‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 75 (2006): 857–868. doi:10.1353/utq.2006.0260. Niezen, Ronald. Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Prior, Michael. The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Rabson, Mia. “Residential Schools Have Negative Health Impacts on Descendants of Survivors: Survey.” The Globe and Mail. March

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Sisk, David W. Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Stein, Karen. “Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal: The Handmaid’s Tale.” Pages 191–204 in Margaret Atwood. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000. Tipton, Steven M. “Religion and the Moral Rhetoric of Presidential Politics.” The Christian Century 101 (1984): 1010–1013. https://www.religion-online.org/article/religion-and-the-moralrhetoric-of-presidential-politics/. Todd, Douglas. “Anglican Diocese Retains Ownership of Four Disputed Church Properties.” The Vancouver Sun. November 25, 2009. http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Anglican+diocese+ retains+ownership+four+disputed+church+properties/2266487/ story.html. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Winnipeg, MB: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015. Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Warrior, Robert Allen. “A Native American Perspective: Canaanite, Cowboys, and Indians.” Pages 277–285 in Voices from the Margins: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995. Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

4. MARGARET ATWOOD’S SPECULATIVE BIBLES: “FIRST THE BAD THINGS, THEN THE STORY” RICHARD WALSH Several of Margaret Atwood’s novels depict harrowingly dystopic futures (e.g., The Handmaid’s Tale; the MaddAddam trilogy; The Heart Goes Last). They horrify because they speculate about a possible, near future in light of present (social, political, scientific) situations. Because they could happen, Atwood calls her dystopias speculative fiction, rather than science fiction, which she sees as about things that could not possibly happen (IOW, pp. 6–7).1 Plausibility is everything. Some theorists, however, point to that “effect” as necessary not only for science fiction but also for fantasy. W. R. Irwin, for example, says that successful fantasy posits a central impossibility, treated in as realistic a manner as possible.2 Even Tzvetan Todorov’s understanding of the “fantastic” as the reader’s hesitation before an impossible choice in a narrative between the genres of the uncanny and the marvelous relies on the reader’s sense of the real or on a sense of what is possible in a given world/story. For Todorov, however, developments in psychology

Atwood makes her distinction vis-à-vis Ursula Le Guin’s distinction between fantasy (see Atwood’s science fiction) and science fiction (see Atwood’s speculative fiction). Atwood does admit that all these stories imagine “other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one” (IOW, p. 8). 2 Irwin, The Game of the Impossible, pp. 9, 57–76. 1

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have effectively ended the fantastic, rendering everything uncanny, that is, explicable in terms of individual (or collective) psychology.3 If Atwood bristles at the notion that her fiction is science fiction, I suppose she would be apoplectic to see her fiction considered in the larger context of fantasy, and she would be right if one has Todorov’s fantastic in mind. At least, her dystopic futures never make me pause and wonder about the nature of the real in their worlds.4 They are all uncanny, in Todorov’s sense, to the extent that they all seem explicable in terms of present “reals.” They are not, however, explicable merely in terms of psychology,5 even though deceptive, self-serving narration is often in play in Atwood. Instead, they are “realistic” futures in terms of politics – in terms of the allocation of power and resources. Accordingly, her dystopias are even less connected to the Freudian uncanny. They do not represent remnants of pre-rational thought arising from the depths of the unconscious to challenge scientific rationality.6 Instead, their horror is Frankensteinian.7 They are about rationalized pol-

3 Todorov, The

Fantastic, pp. 25–43.

4 The dueling epigraphs that begin Oryx and

Crake may suggest otherwise. The first, from Gulliver’s Travels, misleadingly or, rather, satirically claims the story is factual (realistic). The second, from To the Lighthouse, claims that the ways of the world are indiscernibly miraculous, that all is a leaping into the air. This juxtaposition recalls Todorov’s pause between the uncanny and the marvelous. 5 Alias Grace is another matter. Even though it invites a psychological (uncanny) reading, it is, to my knowledge, the Atwood novel that might be most susceptible to a Todorovian discussion. To the extent that Atwood’s works subvert genre – a common critical assessment – they might also repay attention in light of Eric S. Rabkin’s notion of fantasy (The Fantastic in Literature). 6 In Survival, Atwood considers the propensity to victims, disaster, and failure in Canadian literature and the recurring symbol there of (mere) survival as compared to the different tropes of U.S. and British literature (Surv., pp. 30–35). She also notes that Canadian literature differs from the Bible because a delivering god never arrives (ibid., p. 168). Nonetheless, the supernatural does appear in Atwood fiction in “witches” as well as in the importance of dreams, visions, and hallucinations and in the magic of words/story. 7 On biblical texts and such horror, see Beal, Religion and Its Monsters, pp. 9–10.

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itics (bureaucracies) run amok and what might resist such horror, a matter that comes down to telling a story.8 As Atwood’s Blackbeard says, “First the bad things, then the story” (MA, p. 358). For me, it is at this point that Atwood’s dystopias and her resistant readers intersect with biblical interpretation. Over thirty years ago, in her 1987 SBL presidential address, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza insisted on biblical interpretation’s need for ethical resistance: The rhetorical character of biblical interpretations and historical reconstructions, moreover, requires, an ethics of accountability that stands responsible not only for the choice of theoretical interpretive models but also for the ethical consequences of the biblical text and its meanings. If scriptural texts have served not only noble causes but also to legitimate war, to nurture anti-Judaism and misogynism, to justify the exploitation of slavery, and to promote colonial dehumanization, then biblical scholarship must take the responsibility …to evaluate the construction of their historical worlds and symbolic universes in terms of a religious scale of values…. What does the language of a biblical text “do” to a reader who submits to its world of vision?9

Atwood’s essays pose and her stories imply just these kinds of questions. This challenge to consider the ethics of our stories/interpretations is still pertinent. At least, Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood have recently argued that much of modern biblical scholarship has sidelined the ethical quandaries with which it began (vis-à-vis certain biblical texts) in favor of more comfortable historical research questions.10

8 In addition to the telling reference to Scheherazade in Alias Grace (p. 376), consider also this Atwoodian description of story: “Story-telling at its most drastic is the story of the disaster which is the world; it is done by Job’s messengers, whom God saved alive because someone had to tell the story. I only am escaped alone to tell thee: When a story, “true” or not, begins like this, we must listen” (SW, p. 350 [italics in source]). 9 Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation,” p. 15 (italics in source). 10 Moore and Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar, pp. 47–59.

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In addition to this fundamental connection, Atwood’s dystopias do, in fact, speculate on both dominant and resisting bibles. Such bibles are part of both the horror and the hope of her tales. The horror lies in a dominant bible’s integral place in a future’s inherent rationality. The hope lies in resisting bibles, but that hope seems little more than an engraving on an entire world’s tombstone.11 The interplay of bibles provides further hope, however, as it reminds us that there are always bibles, not the Bible, and additional warning as it reminds us again that we must answer with our lives for the interpretations/stories we choose.

BIBLICAL GILEAD AND THE H ANDMAID’S RESISTANT TALE The post-apocalyptic Republic of Gilead is literally biblical. An unabashedly patriarchal reading of selected biblical passages12 justifies a society promoting progeny for its male elite.13 In Gilead, there are no sterile elite men. There are only fruitful or barren women. If these men’s wives do not bear “fruit,” the Rachel and Leah Center provides handmaids. Genesis 30:1–3, one of the novel’s epigraphs, is the law of Gilead: And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.

11 See Offred’s puzzled reflections on such engravings in HT, p. 135. 12 No one mentions, e.g., Hos 6:8 (NRSV): “Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked

with blood”; or Hos 12:11: “In Gilead there is iniquity, they shall surely come to nothing.” One can imagine a rather different tale emerging from a realization of Jer 8:22 (RSV): “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored”? Offred’s commander does self-servingly claim that Gilead has improved the place of women (HT, pp. 273–74, 283–86). 13 Gilead resembles biblical patriarchy, Puritan society, nineteenth-century Latter Day Saints, and the implications of right-wing politics in the USA in the 1980s.

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During monthly ceremonies, these handmaids become receptacles for elite male seed, lying back “upon the knees” of the elite wives. The ritualized, dutiful sex takes place only after prayer and appropriate biblical readings. 14 If the handmaid does not become pregnant after an interval of time, another handmaid is assigned. If the handmaid fails to be fruitful in various postings, then “give me children, or else I die” is a quite literal possibility (HT, p. 79). The handmaids are truly saved through child-bearing (HT, p. 256; 1 Tim 2:15). In Gilead, this bible is the landscape. Women are this bible’s abject, reduced to little more than (a few elite) male futures. Handmaids have no names, only some “Of…” epithet, naming the elite male to whom they belong.15 (Offred’s predecessor was also Offred.) The Gilead Bible structures the entire society, suggests its important rituals, is present even in phatic communication,16 as well as in the names of functionaries, shops, cars, houses of ill repute, and so forth. God (or the Gilead Bible) and Gilead are virtually synonymous. As a banner proclaims, “[The] God (of this bible) is a national resource” (HT, pp. 276–77).17 The eyes of God – both as symbols on banners and security vehicles and in the person of spies – are everywhere: “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to know himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect towards him” (HT, p. 119; citing 2 Chron 16:9). The handmaids wear white “wings” (headdresses) to keep them from being seen, and Aunt Lydia observes that being seen is being penetrated (HT, p. 38). Heartlessly, the citation of

14 The readings include “be fruitful and multiply” passages, as well as the Rachel and Leah handmaid stories (HT, p. 114), and, most importantly, 1 Tim 2:9–15 (HT, p. 286). 15 Even Rachel’s handmaid had a name (Bilhah), but the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale is anonymous until p. 108 when the reader learns her “Offred” name. Later, the narrator admits she longs to be held and “told her name” (HT, p. 125). The narrator tells Nick her “real” name, but never the reader (HT, p. 347). 16 Even greetings in Gilead have a biblical, sexual aura: Blessed be the fruit. May the Lord open. Under his eye. See Deut 28:4; Luke 1:42; 11:27–28; 2 Chron 16:9. 17 No one seems to notice the limitation this imposes upon the notion of god.

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2 Chron. 16:9 ends the master’s prayer preceding the sexual (penetration) ceremony. Hauntingly, Offred sees the eye even in her private room in the white plaster circle left when a light fixture, used to commit suicide by a previous handmaid, was removed. Accordingly, Gilead, as Aunt Lydia says, is even “within you” (HT, p. 31). The Gilead Bible is the constantly taught wisdom of the realm, inculcated by all parts of society. It is read to the handmaids during their meals in the Rachel and Leah Centers in the voice of a man, so that no woman might commit the sin of reading (HT, pp. 114–15).18 Offred’s commander keeps his bible in a locked box, for, as Offred observes, “who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it? We can be read to from it, by him, but we cannot read” (HT, p. 112). “He has something we don’t have, he has the word. How we squandered it, once” (HT, p. 114). This “word,” however, is lower case. There is something debased, exhausted about it. Offred’s commander does not read the biblical stories well. He is reluctant, perhaps bored. When he finishes the ceremonial reading, he lets the book fall closed: “It makes an exhausted sound, like a padded door shutting, by itself, at a distance: a puff of air” (HT, p. 116). The Soul Scrolls are emblematic of this bible’s domestication. In Soul Scroll stores, Holy Roller machines, bearing an eye flanked by wings, print and read prayers endlessly. People order prayers to publicize their faithfulness. One can go inside to hear the toneless, metallic voices, but outside there are only murmurings. Humanity is gone, and Offred knows that God does not listen (HT, pp. 215–17). Offred also knows the Gilead Bible revises previous bibles. An aunt intones that the meek are blessed but says nothing about them inheriting the earth (HT, p. 84). Blessed are the silent is brand new. Those who mourn will be comforted, but no one says when (HT, p. 115). Emboldened by such variance, Offred rewrites the Lord’s Prayer for her own use: I wish you would tell me Your Name …. But You will do…. I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get

Like antebellum slaves in the U.S., the handmaids are denied literacy. Another connection between U.S. slavery and the handmaids’ condition is the reference to their escape route as the Underground Femaleroad (HT, pp. 320–22). 18

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through it, please. Though maybe it’s not Your doing; I don’t believe for an instant that what’s going on out there is what You meant. I have enough daily bread…. The problem is getting it down without choking on it…. Don’t worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe….You might even provide a Heaven for them…. Hell we can make for ourselves…. [Forgiving] isn’t easy…. Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you, Aunt Lydia used to say…. I think about [suicide] too much…. Deliver us from evil…. It takes a lot to believe in those [kingdom, power, and glory] right now…. I feel as if I’m talking to a wall. I wish You’d answer. I feel so alone…. Oh God. It’s no joke…. How can I keep on living? (HT, pp. 252–53 [italics in source; ellipses added])

Apparently, by resistant prayers like this. Offred’s bible/God is a strikingly personal “You,” compared to the God of Gilead. Her God not a national resource, not an object at all, not a toneless, mechanical murmur. But, her God guarantees no future.19 Offred also resists with small defiances (HT, pp. 28–30) and with fantasies of using her body to improve her situation – a fantasy partly realized with her commander and with Nick. She also resists with her fragile memories of another time/place/life, of her lover and later husband Luke and her daughter. Her most important rebellion, however, is the simple act of telling her story, of taping (we later learn) her tale upon old music tapes – although only after her “escape” from Gilead.20 Her “tellings” create other story possibilities, a story that is not Gilead. Even as she describes Gilead in the depths of the Ceremony, she finds “detachment” (HT, p. 123). Ironically, she wishes she believed she were merely in a story but, at least, telling this story creates 19 The novel’s ambiguous end (sans the historicizing prologue) coheres with this lack of guarantee nicely. 20 By creating another space/place, the resistant story has a magical, religious, or even biblical character. See Offred’s reflections on Moira’s profanity: “There’s something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power…. It’s like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with” (HT, pp. 287–88).

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a “someone,” as personal and mysterious as her God, to listen to her. “I tell, therefore you are” (HT, pp. 52–53, 344).21 Nonetheless, fatigue sets in at the end. “Faith is only a word, embroidered” (HT, p. 375).22 She tries not to tell her story (HT, pp. 291, 351). She wishes it did not have so much pain, was not such a “limping and mutilated” thing. She wishes it – at least, the part about Nick – could have been about love and not reckless betrayal. Telling the story hurts her like a body being pulled apart (HT, pp. 343–44). Offred’s central scripture is the writing on her cupboard wall: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” (HT, p. 69). While she cannot translate the words, they are her talisman and a basis for a community of sufferers (HT, pp. 69, 117–18.) When the commander tells her the schoolboy Latin means, “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” he adds that their author hanged herself in Offred’s room (hence the ceiling eye) (HT, pp. 242–43). Even though the phrase obviously did the original author little good, Offred continues to hold onto it, knowing it conveys nothing and one might as well say “don’t be” (HT, p. 373). “In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things” (HT, p. 134).23 Although Offred does not remark upon it, the writing recalls the famous, unreadable writing on Belshazzar’s palace wall (Dan 5). Where that writing spelled the end of Belshazzar’s kingdom, Offred’s writing is her hope.24 To resist Gilead, Offred, knowingly or not, reverses the biblical allusion. 25 Offred reverses biblical precursors more When she becomes too tired of the story of Gilead, she tells the story of Moira’s escape (HT, pp. 166–72) or finds promises of transformation/rejuvenation in the taboo women’s magazines her commander provides for her (HT, pp. 200–201). 22 Offred’s last prayer reflects this fatigue, repeating abjectly all she learned in the Red Center and relinquishing Nick (ibid., pp. 367–68). Embroidered faith recalls engraved hope (see HT, p. 135). 23 She often talks about believing contradictory things. 24 In another place, she observes that her hope lies in a message (from Luke) that may never arrive (HT, 135), like the God she does not know and the reader her tale creates. 25 Of course, apocalyptic is resistant literature and the readers of Daniel would take hope in the ominous words that spelled the evil empire’s end. Atwood 21

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knowingly when God is love becomes love is God: “The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh” (HT, p. 292). The tale ends with the pregnant narrator stepping up into the Eyes’ black van, without knowing what will come. An epilogue about a scholarly convention devoted to the study of Gilead indicates that she escaped and made the tapes, which two male scholars have edited, published, and researched and which the reader has read. Not surprisingly, critics lament Offred’s continuing entombment in this patriarchal finale, but, perhaps beside themselves, the epilogue’s literary historians continue her story “in memory of her” (Mark 14:9). Ironically, Offred has become Gilead’s principal historian26 just as Mark’s anonymous anointer is Jesus’ “true disciple.”27

T HE CHURCH OF PETR OLEUM AND THE GARDENER BIBLE Offred’s bible is minimalist. It is resistance, rewriting, reversals – it is the refusal to be silent. It takes place against the Gilead Bible landscape, which Offred describes at greater length. By contrast, in the MaddAddam trilogy, the resistant bible, the Gardener Bible, is enacted at length. References to its saints and religious calendar, lengthy citations of its hymns, and its founder’s (Adam) unending sermons create a Gardener Bible backbone for The Year of the Flood.28 The trilogy describes the oppressive Big Pharma/Bioengineering Corporation(s) Bible only briefly and that most fully only when Zeb finally tells Toby about the creation of the Church of PetrOleum by his and Adam’s reverend father. The “Rev” created his cult solely to reverses a biblical allusion in Alias Grace, pp. 221–23, as well: An engraving of Susanna bathing hangs on the wall of Grace’s master’s bedroom, but Susanna’s deliverance from preying men parodies Grace’s hopeless situation. 26 See Howells, “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions,” p. 165. 27 See Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, pp. xiii-xv, 315–23. Schüssler Fiorenza does not suggest, however, that this woman is the author of Mark (see ibid., p. 340n111). 28 The Gardener Bible is oral as the Gardeners reject the use of paper as sinfully made from the flesh of trees (YF, pp. 56, 60).

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coin “megabucks” by reading Matt 16:18 as referring to “rock” or, rather, to the (petr)oleum/oil that comes from that rock. His followers prayed for and worshipped that oil, the foundation of “our Dominion” over the earth (MA, pp. 111–13). Their PetrOleum Bible unabashedly supported big business and consumer capitalism, reducing the ecology minded to “freaks.”29 Despite Atwood’s humorous caricature, the PetrOleum Bible is hardly novel.30 Given the PetrOleum Bible’s rather sadistic theology, it hardly surprises that the Rev thinks pain is good for children and frequents snuff porn sites (MA, pp. 108, 118–19).31 Adam knows his father would gladly repeat the sacrifice of Isaac, sans ram, if he knew his sons were crossing him (MA, p. 125). Of course, his sons are crossing him. Zeb uses his computer skills to steal money from the Rev, and both Zeb and Adam flee, with Adam ultimately founding God’s Gardeners, whom Zeb describes as ecofreaks (MA, pp. 182–83). After God “lightning-bolt[s]” him a message, “save my beloved Species in whom I am well pleased” (MA, p. 300), Adam uses his college training in PetrTheology, Homiletics, and PetrBiology (MA, p. 121) to rewrite the PetrOleum Bible (or the Human Words of God), particularly Genesis, apocalyptically. 32 For Adam, the bible is the “Hu-

PetrOleum’s opposition to the ecology movement is evident in various hate slogans: “Solar Panels Are Satan’s Work,” “Eco Equals FreakO,” etc. (MA, p. 117). 30 Stephen D. Moore’s recent work on of the gospels deliberately refutes such bibles by reading the gospels in terms of Jesus animals and Jesus plants. See Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans. 31 For another look at connections between patriarchal sadism against women and (Mother) earth, see Aronofsky’s mother! (2017). The Gilead Republic also followed some apocalyptic devastation that made human fertility a chancy business as well as destroying much of the world’s animal life. 32 The rewriting is both revelatory (as in the meaning of the Greek for “apocalypse”) and apocalyptic (as in the popular sense of a global catastrophe). Hereafter, I use “apocalyptic” most often in this popular sense. On Atwood and apocalyptic, see Waltonen, ed., Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses. Atwood 29

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man Words of God” and must be interpreted in harmony with (evolutionary) science and to engender love for all fellow creatures (YF, pp. 11–13).33 Using the Rev’s money, he creates the Edencliff Rooftop Garden community in the pleeblands (the dangerous, disenfranchised territory outside the elite corporation compounds), and Zeb ultimately joins him there. They practice a limited-footprint lifestyle, avoiding meat and greed. These true believers prophesy humanity’s coming destruction in a waterless flood (YF, pp. 20, 91). Creating arks/Ararats (storing food and water), they hope to survive, as new Noahs, along with the animals – or, at least, to say the animal’s names (YF, p. 47).34 This naming does not assert mastery over the animals, but, in a Levinas fashion, evokes trust and community (YF, pp. 12–13). But, humans have repeatedly disobeyed this commandment, so their fall is ongoing and progressive (YF, pp. 52–53, 188). After the Corporation outlaws the Gardeners, killing some of them and forcing the rest into exile, the Gardener Bible becomes more apocalyptic. The Exfernal World of non-Gardener humanity will be left to the fowls and beast (Isa 18:6).35 Humans are mice before a wild

disdains the category apocalypse in favor of (similarities to ancient flood) survivor stories (IOW, p. 93) as one might expect given Atwood, Survival, pp. 33–38. Hence, her Gardeners imagine the coming apocalypse as a “waterless flood.” She also thinks of her tales as dystopias or “ustopias,” a word she coins to point to the inseparable intertwining of utopia and dystopia (ibid., 66– 96). As she traces both back to the Bible, particularly Revelation, we eventually return to apocalyptic (see WWI], 93–94). 33 This is the Gardeners’ basic exegetical rule, but Adam has no monopoly on the Gardener Bible. The community has long exegetical debates. See, e.g., YF, pp. 240–42. 34 The book of Genesis, read apocalyptically, is arguably the most important biblical material for Atwood’s dystopic fictions. Her readings resemble those of recent Darren Aronofsky films, and he was briefly attached to a project planning to film the MaddAddam trilogy. In fact, one could argue that Aronofsky has already filmed “Atwood” given the ecological concerns of his Noah (2014) and the destructive divine patriarchy of mother! (2017). 35 See YF, p. 312. This transformation resembles that of the hypothetical Q community from counter-cultural wisdom to apocalyptic damnation of the

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Alpha Predator God (YF, pp. 345–47). After the waterless flood occurs, Adam rejoices that the world is renewing itself and that the birds will possess human civilization (YF, pp. 371–72; Isa 34:11). Adam and the Gardeners will inevitably die, but that will simply make them part of something else. Accordingly, they can even forgive the humans who destroyed the earth and civilization (YF, pp. 423–25). Presently, like Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (in the ecologically driven film of the same name), some of the Gardeners, and other humans, live on to care for the animals, forging an alliance with the Crakers and the pigoons (intelligent, genetically altered pigs).

ERASING THE BIBLE, OR , IS THAT A PALIMPSEST I SEE? WHAT ARE OUR SAVING GRACES?36 The Bible becomes bibles in Atwood’s fiction, and these bibles contest each other (although the dominant bible may not know it). The resistant bibles sometimes reverse previous bibles significantly. Offred’s bible, for example, turns the writing on the wall into hope. In the MaddAddam trilogy, the resistant bible transforms the dominant bible into the Human Words of God read in harmony with ecologicallydriven science.37 The trilogy’s truly interesting bibles, however, go beyond reversal to erasure or overwriting, to palimpsest bibles. surrounding culture after facing increasing opposition from that culture. See Mack, Mark and Christian Origins, pp. 84–87. 36 On Oryx and Crake as a reflection on humanity’s “saving graces,” see Atwood, Writing with Intent, p. 286. 37 For reasons of space, the discussion of the Gardener Bible here is incomplete, as it focuses on that bible as a politico-theological response to the PetrOleum Bible – as a call, like that in Aronofsky’s Noah, to a “limited footprint,” vegetarian lifestyle. What the discussion does not capture is (1) the lived, liturgical quality of the Gardener Bible; and (2) the significance of that bible in the trilogy as a whole. With respect to the first issue, Adam’s sermons and the God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook structure The Year of the Flood. Further, most chapters bear titles conjuring up the Gardeners’ saints and liturgical calendar. Adam’s sermons frequently exegete this calendar, even as both sermons and hymns reprise ecologically-read passages from Genesis, the prophets, and Psalms. Most importantly, all the novel’s action takes place within this lived liturgy. Most concisely, one might

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The first such bible is a series of biblical echoes or allusions (many of them also reversals). Oryx and Crake starts with Snowman, a postapocalypse Adam, alone on a beach naming detritus from another world for the Crakers who see him as a semi-divine messenger from another place/time.38 Snowman himself laments he has no helpmeet (or Bride of Frankenstein) (O&C, p. 169).39 He has fled Paradice,40 a say that this bible is like the one Hans W. Frei imagines lost forever in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. Second, this lived, liturgical bible serves not only as the skeleton for The Year of the Flood but also as the trilogy’s spine. The Year of the Flood and, thus, the Gardener Bible, is the trilogy’s center. This lived, liturgical bible is also the “deus ex machina” (the unexpected, motivating spiritual force) which enables Toby (and Blackbeard) to create her own new bible in the trilogy’s finale. Finally, that new bible is itself also a lived, liturgical creation. See below. 38 Moving from apocalypse to creation reverses the narrative pattern of the Christian Bible, if not the ancient creation-through-conflict mythology upon which it relies. This post-apocalyptic Genesis threatens to undo linear history, as does Aronofsky’s post-apocalyptic Noah. That (the Abominable) Snowman is a monstrous other may also be a biblical reversal as the trilogy sides with this “monster,” rather than a creator of order. For biblical gods both of order and of monstrous chaos, see Beal, Religion and Its Monsters, pp. 1–10, 173–92. One might restore “biblical” order if one envisioned Snowman as Eden’s snake, but, if so, this story is told from the snake’s POV (although Snowman is not technically the narrator). 39 Echoes of Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein are evident in this beginning. Bioengineering makes you feel like God (ibid., p. 51), and Frankensteinian Crake wants to improve upon God’s creation (Atwood, YF, 147). Zeb is MaddAddam and runs the Extinctathon website helping Crake’s plans: Adam named the living; MaddAddam names the dead (O&C, pp. 80–81, 214–16; YF, p. 268). A later Frankensteinian slogan is that MaddAddam customizes the animals (O&C, p. 216). Snowman, by contrast, laments that some taboo line has been crossed (O&C, pp. 206, 216–17). Such fears belong not only to some modern horror but also to ancient (creation) mythology like that of Gen 1–11, the Ten Commandments, etc. I have not pursued the possibilities of a horror/Frankensteinian bible here. 40 The cover of some editions of Oryx and Crake contains a portion of the left panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. The cover of other editions contains a modified portion of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Fall.

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laboratory where the crazed Frankensteinian god Crake/Glenn created humanity’s destruction and its replacement in the Crakers.41 Beyond the death of this god and of “man,” Snowman has pursued the mission, left him by this departing deity, to care for the Crakers. To that end, Snowman, has Moses-like, led them from Paradice to another garden (a park) by the sea, installing himself as their reluctant prophet, lawgiver, and myth-maker, effectively creating a new order out of chaos (O&C, pp. 348–54). When Snowman returns to Paradice seeking food and news (if not human companionship),42 the Crakers think that their apocalyptic visionary has gone on a spirit quest into the sky to visit Crake and Oryx, their founding deities. While he is gone, they make a totem of Snowman and sing to him (as if partially reenacting Freud’s notions about Moses). For Snowman, the singing stems from a God (religion) gene that Crake could not eliminate (O&C, pp. 311, 352–53).43 When Snowman returns, he reports that Crake visited him in a (not so Jobian) whirlwind and has become a tree in Paradice (O&C, pp. 361– 62).44 What is important, of course, is that the Crakers know that Crake and Oryx love them (O&C, p. 366–67).45

41 In another biblical reversal, Paradice is (not once, but twice) a place of death

one must flee if one wishes to live. The good life is in the wilderness, a rather apocalyptic twist to the biblical paradise motif. 42 In a delirious state during this journey, Snowman briefly hears someone speaking a foreign language on a radio and cries out for human companionship (O&C, pp. 273–74). Compare Offred’s fetishizing of the writing on the wall (and its author) or Grace’s conversations with various dead people in Alias Grace. Snowman both pretends to talk to Crake (O&C, pp. 9, 362) and does talk to Crake and Oryx (or simply the air) as if in prayer (O&C, pp. 11– 12, 107, 113–14, 169, 374). 43 Glenn/Crake believes God is a result of a brain mutation allowing grammar or a sense of the past, which one pursues until one gets to “I don’t know” (i.e., God). This same gene allows birds (and Crakers?) to sing (YF, p. 316). 44 Ironically (?), Crake is a tree (from which) you cannot eat. 45 The constant references to Crake’s love and generosity echo the frequent biblical references to God’s loving-kindness (e.g., Exod 34:5–7). The eulogy

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The Year of the Flood offers another loss of Eden story when the Corporation outlaws the Gardeners and destroys the Edencliff Rooftop. This loss is so great that one might better describe it as exile. The Gardeners are dead or scattered in an apocalyptic wilderness, without benefit of a Snowman prophet.46 When Toby and Ren join Snowman on his post-apocalyptic beach, the not-quite-believing Toby begins to reflect Job-like (or Snowman or Offred-like) on God’s purposes.47 The Crakers come toward them singing, and Snowman opines that you cannot kill the music (that God gene) (YF, p. 431). MaddAddam might be read as a return to Paradice (or the establishment of the AnooYoo Fortress48) and thus another dim echo of earlier bibles. Most of MaddAddam, however, concerns a second, more innovative, palimpsest bible: Toby and Blackbeard’s new Craker Bible (mythology). Here, the focus is less on “biblical” content and more on the process of “scripturizing.” Snowman began this scripturizing on his post-apocalyptic beach in order to establish his place as prophet (and to induce the Crakers to bring him a fish weekly). Like Moses or Jesus, he alone knew the god Crake face to face, and he pretends to talk to Crake and Oryx. Snowman soon foists a past girlfriend’s “drivel” about the Moon-Goddess

irritates Snowman whose revenge is his amusement in having, with the Crakers’ help, turned the atheistic Crake into a deity (O&C, pp. 103–104). 46 Adam is with a few of these exiles, but his message has no hope left. 47 The story repeatedly notes Toby’s difficulty with the Gardener faith (YF, pp. 97, 168–69, 265). Her final prayer in The Year of the Flood asks God, if he exists, if the Crakers are what Adam was supposed to be and whether God has replaced humanity or intends to carry on with them (YF, p. 414). In a private conversation, Peter Sabo has pointed out to me that this areligious prayer resembles the function of Offred’s revised Lord’s Prayer. Despite her doubts, Toby is Adam’s best disciple. Adam is both a true believer and a noble liar. He thinks belief in God an evolutionary advantage, because it leads away from nihilism. People prefer a penalizer to meaninglessness (YF, p. 241). 48 AnooYoo is a spa for elite women in Oryx and Crake. Toby survives the waterless flood there, and it becomes a “fortress” for Gardener survivors and the Crakers in MaddAddam.

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Oestre onto the Crakers (O&C, p. 168):49 Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake from coral and their flesh out of mango. The Children of Oryx, birds and animals, hatched out of an egg. Another egg gave words. It hatched first, and the Children of Crake ate it, so animals cannot talk (O&C, p. 96). The chaos people killed many and ate the Children of Oryx, so Crake decided to get rid of chaos with the Great Rearrangement and Great Emptiness, which cleared room for the Children of Crake and Oryx (O&C, pp. 102–104). Snowman tells this story ritualistically, after eating the eucharistic fish and wearing a red hat, so that he can hear Crake. Unlike most prophets, however, Snowman knows he lies.50 He does strive for internal consistency, the all-important factor in lying (O&C, p. 96). He also knows he created the myth simply because he needed someone to listen to him and give him, at least, the illusion of being understood (O&C, p. 104).51 Unfortunately, some of the Crakers have become dogmatic about the myth, trapping Snowman in the bible of his own making (O&C, pp. 104–106). In MaddAddam, the Crakers insist that Toby take the injured Snowman’s place as the prophet/storyteller while the injured Snowman travels from (the dead) Crake and Oryx with more story. They demand repeated retellings (MA, pp. 45–46), a story every night, although Toby sometimes begs off for tiredness or by claiming she cannot hear Crake for their singing. Toby retells Snowman’s cosmogonic myth – in the red hat – but with her own revisions and additions, like the story of Snowman’s hurt foot and tales about Zeb, whom the Crakers eventually see as an all-powerful fixer. The Crakers also add material, ask questions, make revisions, and sing. As Toby says, they cross-examine like lawyers (MA, p. 106). Humorously, when Snowman wakes, his first word is “fuck,” and Toby is forced, with the help of the Crakers, to invent a new deity, to whom one prays in time of need (MA, pp. 146–48, 163–65). Such falsehood and invention bother her more than they did Snowman. As she wishes to skirt the darker edges of reality, however, such difficult 49 Significantly, there is no original bible; this myth/bible is a rewrite.

Lies, deception, and prophets do appear together biblically. Consider, for example, 1 Kgs 22 as well as numerous other passages where prophets speak in order to blind (for example, Isa 6:9–10; Mark 4:1–12). 51 Offred has similar reasons for relating her tale. 50

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devices are necessary: “People need such stories [reassuring messages from the dead] … because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void” (MA, p. 154). Further the whole story can never be told: “There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too” (MA, p. 56). When Snowman recovers, he concurs. He defends his own scriptural inventions by claiming that the Crakers wanted basic answers about their origin and the state of the world and he could hardly tell the truth. Toby understands this compulsion, but she needs help with carrying on with the story. She wants to get it “right.” She has been flying in the dark. Snowman knows, however, that there is “Nowhere else to fly on the subject of Crake. Welcome to my whirlwind” (MA, p. 265). Despite her Gardener teaching about writing’s sinfulness, Toby begins to write down Gardener lore and Craker mythology. Like Offred and Snowman, she writes to find a reader and so she can remember (MA, pp. 135–36, 201–204, 282–83). She also begins to teach the Craker Blackbeard to write, although she worries that writing will ruin the Crakers: “What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?” (MA, p. 204). The Craker Blackbeard is the answer. One evening when Toby begins to invent the story of Crake’s birth, Blackbeard demurs: Crake was not born; he just got inside the skin of a person (MA, p. 229).52 Then, Toby begins to move away from Crake’s absolute authority: Crake is not always right; he said animals cannot talk but the pigoons can; he did not like singing, but Oryx gave it to you (MA, pp. 290– 91). After the deadly assault on Paradice, Toby likes to say that the pigoon carrying Snowman flew, because both died “for us,” even though no one flew (MA, p. 350). Similarly, both she and Blackbeard refuse to depict the dead bodies of Crake and Oryx as smelly bones. Instead, they “must be beautiful. Like the stories!” Only story can comfort the “terminal sorrow” brought on by the creators’ smelly bones (MA, p. 356). 52 Out of fear, however, he refuses to wear the red hat.

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When Toby is overcome by sadness, Blackbeard dons the red hat, eats the fish, and tells the story of the battle at Paradice, of the new beautiful forms of Oryx and Crake, “the way we know from the stories” (MA, p. 360), and of Snowman who has now traveled to be with Oryx and Crake (MA, pp. 357–64). Eventually, Blackbeard begins to write so that the Crakers can hear his voice inside their head (MA, pp. 373–76). After Toby’s departure, Blackbeard hears her voice when he reads her book: And in the book she put the Words of Crake, and the Words of Oryx as well, and of how together they made us, and made also this safe and beautiful World for us. And in the Book too are the Words of Zeb … and how he became our Defender against the bad men … and the Words of Snowman-the-Jimmy, who was there in the beginning, when Crake made us, and who led our people out of the Egg to this better place. And the Words of Fuck, though these Words are not very long …” (MA, p. 385)

Blackbeard also tells the Crakers about the care of the Book and how it should be remade “each time a person came into the knowledge of the writing.” Accordingly, blank pages leave room for new scriptures (MA, pp. 386–87). In the last storytelling, Blackbeard reads the Story of Toby, who walked in the forest and did not return: Where she went I cannot write in this Book, because I do not know. Some say that she died by herself, and was eaten by vultures. The Pig Ones say that. Others say she was taken away by Oryx, and is now flying in the forest, at night, in the form of an Owl. Others said that she went to join Pilar, and that her Spirit is in the elderberry bush. Yet others say that she went to find Zeb, and that he is in the form of a Bear, and that she too is in the form of a Bear, and is with him today. That is the best answer, because it is the happiest; and I have written it down. I have written down the other answers too. But I made them in smaller writing. (MA, p. 390).

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Sorrow. Hope. Death. Mating and children. Blackbeard: “Now we will sing” (MA, p. 390).53

ATWOOD’S SPECULATIVE BIBLES: “FIRST THE BAD T HINGS, T HEN THE STORY” Atwood’s speculative, fictional bibles extend recent bibles of domination and of resistance. Atwood bibles reverse well-known biblical stories (e.g., the writing on the wall) and even rewrite divine texts as “the Human Words of God.” The narrative of the MaddAddam trilogy echoes biblical patterns distantly enough that the trilogy becomes a palimpsest of biblical stories of (self-expulsion) from Paradice, of exile, of wilderness wanderings, of prophet-led exoduses, and of the storming of Paradice. The last cited indicates that biblical reversals are often in view here as well.54 The more innovative biblical palimpsest in the MaddAddam trilogy, however, is the report of the scripturizing that leads to the Book of Toby (AKA: the MaddAddam trilogy itself). That process reveals Atwood’s most basic bible, the one that makes her competing bibles possible – her belief in the magic of Human Words/stories. Inspiration, or imagination, is crucial. Snowman, Toby, and Blackbeard, with varying degrees of faith, hear their dead, created gods when they wear the red hat to tell the story. Pain is equally important, as Blackbeard says, “First the bad things, then the story” (MA, p. 358, see also 313; SW, p. 350).55 The unbeliever Snowman also knows that all story also comes from the god of bullshit (O&C, p. 102).56 For Atwood, story then is essentially a theodicy that enables one to carry on.57 Thus, Toby describes Snowman’s invented 53 Blackbeard has fathered his first child and will name it Toby if it is a girl. 54 This omits many other biblical echoes in the trilogy, the most obvious of which is Crake’s Frankenstein/Horror Bible. 55 In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, she observes similarly, “Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light” (ND, p. xxiv). 56 “Snowman” should also be an ample reminder of this “creativity.” 57 In Survival (pp. 33–42), Atwood offers a taxonomy of basic “victim positions” that ascends to “creative, non-victim.” While a book may be about any

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stories as “justifying the ways of Crake towards men, or semi-men” (MA, p. 101). In the scripturizing that drives the trilogy, story grows out of communal curiosity, wonder, a quest for meaning, and, of course, the ritual of storytelling. Story grows out of narrative, exegesis, and legal dispute. Atwood’s “story” is similar then to Jonathan Z. Smith’s “religion,” which also arises from theodicy, the response to incongruity. For Smith, religion/myth does not trade in experiences of harmony/order but in the incongruity between “story” and “world.” Map is not territory.58 Atwood’s word is literature, not canon, but literature is sacred to Atwood. In “Spelling,” the narrator depicts her daughter playing with alphabet blocks on the floor and learning to spell, learning “how to make spells.” “A word after a word/after a word is power.”59 This language, like the scripturizing process in MaddAddam and Offred’s use of her unreadable talisman, imagines the word itself as mysterium tremendum et fascinans. This sacred word is decidedly polytheistic. There are always words; competitive, contradictory stories.60 And Atwood’s preferred victim position, Atwood claims authors (story-tellers?) are necessarily at this last position. 58 Smith, Map is not Territory, pp. 291–94. Atwood discusses the “religious” content/function of (speculative) fiction in In Other Words, pp. 38–55. She discusses the “religious” character of writing itself in ibid., pp. 66–96; Second Words, pp. 334–57; and throughout Negotiating with the Dead. 59 Margaret Atwood, “Spelling,” Poem Hunter, 3 January 2003, https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/spelling/. 60 Atwood’s protagonists have multiple selves and believe contradictory things. Thus, Atwood often chooses to tell more than one story at a time, frequently using extensive flashbacks: Offred’s description of her Gilead life is punctuated with her memories of Luke and her child and how she became a handmaid; Snowman’s return to Paradice is combined with flashbacks about his childhood and his relationships with Glenn/Crake and Oryx (or with the backstory that brought him to this story); Toby and Ren’s journey to Snowman’s beach is combined with flashbacks about the Gardeners and the loss of Edencliff Rooftop; the attempt to defeat evil Painballers and forge

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bible is vibrant, living, transformative – not institutional, fixed, dogmatic scripture nor the dry historical reflections of the Gilead Symposium. Atwood’s bible is a thing of near belief (to return to Todorov) and Toby is its true near-believing prophet, caught midway between Snowman’s skepticism/cynicism and Blackbeard’s credulity.61 Ultimately, one is responsible for the stories one chooses to tell. And, that observation returns us from “Spelling” and Blackbeard’s Book of Toby to Schüssler Fiorenza’s challenge to consider the ethical consequences of our interpretations. Toby and Blackbeard know one must choose the beautiful. 62 One must still be wary, however, because one’s stories invariably entrap – as they do Offred, Snowman, and Toby. One can only tremble at this magical, powerful word (see Isa 66:2). As the narrator of Blind Assassin knows, “Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning” (BA, p. 41).63

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aichele, George. The Limits of Story. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Anchor, 1997. ―. Blind Assassin. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2000. ―. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1987. ―. In Other Words: SF and the Human Imagination. New York: Anchor, 2011. ―. MaddAddam. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2013.

a continuing human community is joined with the backstory of Adam and Zeb as well as with the scripturizing of the Book of Toby. This duality creates a decentering of the story present or the creation of an alternative time/space, a mechanism that some associate with religion and its practices. 61 Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 31. For discussion, see Aichele, The Limits of Story, pp. 92, 100–101, 122, 137. 62 The choice of beauty brings one perilously close to hagiography. 63 While self-deceptive narration is often at work in Atwood, one might see this novel as Atwood’s premiere exploration of the tremendum-quality of human words, of such words’ frightful power to betray and destroy. See, for example, the reversals enacted on John’s prologue in BA, p. 490, as well as the narrator’s “reduction” to the tale (BA, pp. 520–21).

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―. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ―. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2003. ―. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. ―. “Spelling.” Poem Hunter, 3 January 2003. https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/spelling/ ―. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. ―. The Year of the Flood. New York: Anchor, 2010. ―. Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983–2005. New York: Carol & Graf, 2005. Beal, Timothy K. Religion and Its Monsters. New York/London: Routledge, 2002. Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Howells, Coral Ann. “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.” Pages 161–75 in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Edited Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Irwin, W. R. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976. Mack, Burton L. Mark and Christian Origins: A Myth of Innocence. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. Moore, Stephen D. Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans: Biblical Criticism Post-poststructuralism. Atlanta: SBL, 2017. Moore, Stephen D. and Yvonne Sherwood. The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011. Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.

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Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship.” Journal of Biblical Literature 107.1 (1988): 3–17. ―. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroads, 1987. Smith, Jonathan Z. Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1973. Waltonen, Karen, ed. Margaret Atwood Apocalypses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.

5. MARGARET ATWOOD’S PRIMORDIAL MYTH JENNIFER L. KOOSED Margaret Atwood has spent a lot of time reading Genesis. Famously, The Handmaid’s Tale employs the first biblical book to create a dystopic society of patriarchal rule, slavery and surrogacy. Equally replete with biblical citation and allusion are the books of the MaddAddam trilogy. Whereas The Handmaid’s Tale focuses on the ancestor stories (Gen 12–50), the MaddAddam trilogy interacts most intensely with Genesis’s primordial history (Gen 1–11). As described by Chien-Hung Chen, the trilogy “is meant to mock (up) the Biblical myth of origin through a pseudo-diluvial clean-up of digital annihilation.”1 Also a future dystopia, the story of the MaddAddam trilogy unfolds across three novels (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam) and describes a world teetering on the edge of ecological disaster due to over-population and over-consumption, corporate power run amok, and scientific innovation in pursuit of little more than monetary gain. The title character Crake, using the most advanced gene splicing technologies of his era, creates a new species of humanoids (the Crakers or Children of Crake) designed to replace homo sapiens. He next manufacturers a virus and hides it in a sex pill marketed and distributed all over the world, thereby unleashing the “waterless flood” – a rapidly moving pandemic that destroys almost all human life on the planet. In his plan, only one person is permitted to live – Snowman (his best friend Jimmy), prophet to and protector of the Chen, “Subjectal Scale and Micro-Biopolitics at the End of the Anthropocene,” p. 189.

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Crakers. However, like in Genesis, the creator is not in complete control of his creation. Other people survive the “flood”; and the Crakers develop in ways unanticipated and unwanted. Through it all, there is a dance between science and religion – two approaches to knowledge that pull apart and come together in a variety of unexpected ways. Where does the sacred lie? One scientist denies its existence altogether. One popular televangelist finds the sacred in fossil fuels; one renegade preacher in all plant and animal life. Meanwhile incipient religion keeps emerging – among the Crakers, among the pigoons, and among the motley castaways at the end of the world, most powerfully seen in the stories they tell each other. As sharply critical of religion (especially Christianity) as Atwood’s fiction can be, it also resounds with religious sensibilities. Atwood believes that human beings are “hard-wired for religion,”2 and her writing explores the different courses religious orientations can take, for both good and ill. “Religion” is notoriously difficult to define. Atwood seems to be working with an understanding of religion that focuses on the questions, feelings, actions, and motivations that arise naturally and without prompting simply from the experience of being alive. Religion, for Atwood, emerges outside of social structures or historical forces, and perhaps even outside of the strictly biological; religion retains its mystery and is not reducible to any single material cause. In this sense, Atwood’s understanding of religion is primarily phenomenological. Phenomenological approaches use a kind of “informed empathy” to study religion, focusing on how the religious is experienced and described by those who are practitioners.3 I too am taking a phenomenological stance, attempting to describe “religion” as it emerges in this trilogy. In the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood maintains the inevitability of religion and then builds a vision of an end-time religion. Through it all, she riffs on Genesis’s primordial myth, reenacting it but also re-envisioning it. The MaddAddam trilogy, like Genesis 1–11, cycles through cosmogonies and eschatons. It employs the primordial themes of naming and language multiplication. Words matter in these new manifestations of the religious, not

2 Bowen, “Atwood Believes,” p. 59.

“Informed empathy” is a common way to describe the phenomenological approach. See for example Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred, p. 2. 3

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as fixed and authoritative canon but as fluid and flexible threads that can be woven and re-woven to bind and sustain communities. In the MaddAddam trilogy, the sacred is forged through storytelling.

IN THE BEGINNING: CRAKE AS CREATOR The first book of the trilogy, Oryx and Crake, begins just before the sun rises on an already post-apocalyptic world.4 Snowman wakes and goes about his morning routine – checks his non-functioning watch out of habit, scans for wildlife, descends from the tree, wraps a sheet around himself, flicks a spider out of his hat and puts it on, urinates, eats a mango. As the reader discovers through flashback, Snowman had once been a boy named Jimmy whose father was a scientist in one of the Compounds (walled communities that encompass labs, offices, homes, stores, and schools in order to isolate the scientists from the mayhem in the rest of the world); his mother was a former scientist turned disgruntled housewife turned renegade revolutionary. She disappears one day, taking a hammer to her husband’s computer and “liberating” Jimmy’s pet rakunk (a gene-splice between a skunk and a raccoon). Jimmy’s father soon begins another romantic relationship and the child is left pretty much on his own. He falls under the spell of Crake – a boy his age, brilliant, charismatic, enigmatic, known by his code name from the on-line game Extinctathon.

Although widely called an apocalypse, the MaddAddam trilogy is not, of course, an apocalypse as the genre is delineated in biblical studies. Although featuring the end of one world and the beginning of another, the trilogy lacks the essential component of apocolupsis (“unveiling”). In other words, there is no alternative and ultimate reality revealed through visions and/or the aid of a heavenly mediator. In the literary critical writing on Atwood, “apocalypse” is a general term that names an end-of-the-world scenario, sometimes called a “secular apocalypse.” The MaddAddam trilogy has also been labeled an “eco-apocalypse”; see, for example, Bouson, “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ Through End Times,” who uses this later term. Atwood herself calls the trilogy “speculative fiction” (Atwood, “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context,” p. 515). See Bosco, “The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake” for a longer discussion of genre. See also Carey, Ultimate Things: An Introduction to Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature, pp. 4–11 for a fuller definition of “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic” in biblical studies.

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Extinctathon is not a mere game in Atwood’s dystopia. It is an acerbic comment on life in the Anthropocene and a perverse inversion of Genesis 2:19–20, when God creates the animals and the first man names them. Later, the reader discovers that Extinctathon is also a front for the resistance. The game is monitored by an anonymous master known only as “MaddAddam”, a name paradigmatic of Atwood’s language play where compound words work audibly and visually to evoke multiple images and various meanings. When a player logs on he or she is greeted by the tagline, “Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?” (O&C, p. 80). The first man has turned into a depraved madman – is he angry? is he crazy? – overseeing the annihilation of the created world, making a game out of the devastation, reversing Eden. All the players chose codenames from among the ever-growing list of bioforms (animal and vegetable) that had gone extinct in the last fifty years (Crake takes his name from the red-necked crake). Once logged on, players pair up in challenges that test their knowledge of extinct species – phylum, class, order, family, genus, habitat, last seen, cause of extinction. As an aid, MaddAddam supplies the player with a printout of the list of recently extinct bioforms, a couple of hundred pages long in fine print. It was young Crake’s favorite game. At the same time that people are accelerating species extinction through pollution, climate change, habitat destruction, over-killing for sport or food or “medicine,” they are also creating new species through technology. The most prominent and important of these new species is the pigoon. Pigoons are introduced early in the first novel for they dominate the landscape of the post-apocalyptic world; they are the primary threat with which Jimmy must contend (O&C, p. 10).5 Ironically, it was Jimmy’s father who was “one of the foremost architects of the pigoon project” (O&C, p. 22) while he worked for OrganInc Farms (a biotech company whose name evokes the words “organ,” “organic,” and “Inc” in an Orwellian wordplay). The pigoon is a genetically modified pig that can grow multiple human-tissue organs for use in transplants. Originally designed to grow kidneys, livers, and hearts, a pigoon is bigger and fatter than a normal pig; hence its When Jimmy journeys away from the seashore for supplies, he is nearly killed by them (O&C, pp. 265–80).

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name, which is a combination of pig and balloon. Later, after Jimmy’s parents move to a new company called NooSkins, a subsidiary of HelthWyzer, Jimmy’s father helps develop a procedure for growing human neo-cortex tissue in the brains of the pigoons. Ostensibly, this research will contribute to the development of new therapies for stroke victims. However, the altruistic motive is immediately called into question by Jimmy’s mother, who calls HelthWyzer a “moral cesspool”. She continues: “You hype your wares and take all their money and then they run out of cash, and it’s no more treatments for them… What you’re doing – this pig brain thing. You’re interfering with the building blocks of life. It’s immoral. It’s … sacrilegious.” Jimmy’s father bangs on the table. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this! Who’ve you been listening to? You’re an educated person, you did this stuff yourself! It’s just proteins, you know that! There’s nothing sacred about cells and tissue, it’s just…” (O&C, p. 57, ellipses original). This heated exchange between Jimmy’s parents touches on the corruption of the Compounds – as is later more fully revealed, observing that curing medical conditions is not a profitable business model, the pharmaceutical companies maximize profit by creating diseases for which they then sell medicines to treat, making people sick and then exploiting (even extorting) them for money. Yet this is not just a critique of corporate greed; even though Jimmy’s mother struggles to find the right word (as the ellipses indicate), only “sacrilegious” is strong enough to capture the depth of the depravity she sees. Altering a creature’s genetic structures raises some of the most profound questions of identity and existence, questions that pertain to the sacred. The scientists in their Compounds don’t just create new species as part of their work of curing disease or developing new beauty treatments. Off hours, the scientists in the biolab create and destroy a myriad of new animals for entertainment and out of curiosity. Some of the splices need to be destroyed immediately like the snat, which is a splice between a snake and a rat. Others, like Jimmy’s rakunk, are cute and clean and become popular options for pets. Splicing together animals was ‘so much fun, said the guys doing it; it made you feel like God’ (O&C, p. 51). The contrast is stark: the scientists blissfully create new animals inside their Compounds, while outside, animals are dying in an unprecedented mass extinction event threatening to wipe

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out all life on the planet. The scientists are not so much playing God as replacing God along with all of God’s creatures. Crake grows up with Jimmy in these Compounds, brilliant and similarly neglected by the adults around him (Crake’s father had died of an apparent suicide). He spends his adolescence in a haze of drugs, alcohol, pornography, and online gaming. Yet, Crake is also observing the world as it hurtles towards disaster, uncovering the crimes of the Compounds, and (as we learn in the subsequent novels of the trilogy) connecting with activists on the outside. The adult Crake continues to live a double life. He graduates from the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute and takes a job among the most elite scientists in the world. No longer a perverse inverse of Adam, playing Extinctathon in his bedroom, he has become a perverse inverse of God, creating new bioforms for play and profit. All the while, Crake is slowly implementing his plan to save the world. Supposedly working on creating “designer babies” for wealthy clientele, Crake engineers his improved version of and replacement species for homo sapiens in a lab appropriately called Paradice. Crake’s goal is to eliminate the aspects of human nature that, in his eyes, contributed to the current state of his world. For example, the Crakers eat only leaves, grass, and the occasional berry, thus eliminating food scarcity and territoriality. The Crakers “were perfectly adjusted to their habitat, so they would never have to create houses or tools or weapons, or, for that matter, clothing. They would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money” (O&C, p. 305). Yet, symbolic systems are more difficult to excise from the humanoid brain than anticipated; religion especially will not be denied. Even Crake (and later Oryx and Snowman) can’t seem to shake the stories and the structures of religion. From naming his lab “Paradice,” to the ways in which the world is explained to the Children of Crake, this creation bares many of the hallmarks of a religious one. Crake avoids all direct contact with his creatures. Mimicking the way a distant creator sends intermediaries into the world, Crake sends a woman known only by her code-name Oryx to teach them useful information like the names of animals and how to make fire. Stephen Dunning suggests that Crake is the Father God and Oryx functions as

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his Spirit, his “omnipresent, ‘feminine’ Paraclete,”6 bringer of both love and knowledge, although in a sardonic way. Instead of representing any traditional notion of goodness or holiness, Oryx had been a sex worker (perhaps sold into sex slavery as a child) who is both an employee of Crake and his girlfriend. She also initiates a sexual relationship with Jimmy (perhaps under Crake’s direction).7 Although sent into Paradice to teach the Crakers the information they will need to survive outside of the lab, the new creatures do not confine their questions to the practical script that Oryx has been given. Instead, the Crakers have the sorts of questions that religions arise to explore. “Do they ever ask where they came from?” said Jimmy. “What they are doing here?” … “You don’t get it,” said Crake, in his you-are-a-moron voice. “That stuff’s been edited out.” “Well, actually, they did ask,” said Oryx. “Today they asked who made them.” “And?” “And I told them the truth. I said it was Crake.” (O&C, p. 311)

Ironically, almost from the beginning, the Children of Crake believe in the goodness and the omnipotence of their invisible creator, affirming that Crake watches over them and cares for them. Jimmy, as Crake’s prophet, continues to affirm this care, but it also becomes an

6 Dunning, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx

and Crake,” p. 95. He also sees Snowman as the Christ, as does Chen, who emphasizes the satirical elements of this identification in “Subjectal Scale and Micro-Biopolitics at the End of the Anthropocene,” p. 187. 7 Both Crake and Jimmy seem to love her (as much as they are capable of loving) and she holds out the possibility of transformation and communion through that love. However, Crake will murder her in front of Jimmy, prompting him, in rage and pain, to kill Crake, in turn. The erstwhile Trinity collapses, its promise unfulfilled (Dunning, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” pp. 97–99).

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extended sick joke between him and the reader, both of whom know that the image of loving creator could not be further from the truth.8 Crake does function like a God in several ways, not just through creating new species. He has superior intelligence and maturity, evidenced from the time he was a child. His intelligence does not just manifest in scientific and technological virtuosity, but also in a remarkable ability to understand (and therefore manipulate) other people. He has an uncanny ability to see into the future – like a chess player who understands each move and its consequences by just looking at the board.9 Crake also has a moral compass that is on a divine not a human scale. The murder of billions of people – a species-cide – clearly violates all earthly moral mandates and legal codes. However, Gods are generally permitted their own moral calculations. In Genesis, when God decides to kill almost all life on the planet because of “the wickedness of humankind” (Gen 6:5), God receives no censure. When God chooses one man to save along with his immediate family and a handful of animals, God’s choices are not subject to the reproach of others. The reader may react with horror to Crake’s plans, and Snowman especially wrestles with the ethical implications of what Crake has accomplished, but Crake’s response to ecological degradation has a certain logic and his plans are more rational than those of God’s in Genesis 6, where neither “righteousness” nor “wickedness” is ever defined or explained. How was Noah a “righteous man” (Gen 6:9); how was all of humankind (even the babies?) “evil continually” (Gen 6:5)? How will killing everyone but Noah and the people in his family bring about a better world? In Crake’s world, human beings are destroying the planet and causing mass extinctions. Eventually, humanity will be the cause of its own extinction, since we cannot live without a planet and all of the variegated life it supports. From Crake’s perspective, there are only two choices: let human shortsightedness, arrogance, and greed continue to the inevitable destruction of all life on the planet, or There are multiple examples throughout the trilogy. See, for examples, O&C, pp. 157 and 161. 9 Crake was an avid chess player as a child and first makes contact with Zeb, the brother of Adam One and a radical environmental activist (a MaddAddam), over a chess game at a Compound picnic. Atwood, MaddAddam, p. 234. 8

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kill off the species responsible for the destruction and allow all other lifeforms to rebound and recover. Crake choses the most utilitarian path, calculating the greatest good for the greatest number, not encumbered by a speciesism that would place human life above all else (O&C, p. 295). In an ultimate act of de-centering, he does not even value his own life but also arranges for his death during the period of the “waterless flood” (O&C, p. 329). In the article “Problematic Paradice,” Karen Stein argues that Crake lacks empathy and that his Paradice project is “misguided.”10 One of the problems that the narrative uncovers, then, is the imbalance and therefore danger of a world governed by scientific logic and reason without attention to emotion, arts and the humanities.11 It is true that Crake lacks empathy, an ability to understand and feel the emotions of other people. Yet, it is not true that Crake lacks the ability to care; he is profoundly concerned for the well-being of others. Instead of empathy for individuals, he embodies a kind of deep ecological altruism.12 His entire project is designed to create a better world where all life can flourish and ecosystems rebound, where there will be no more hunger or illness or violence, where life will be protected rather than exploited. Crake had been dreaming about such a world since his youth. He believed that he could create such a world, better than the one God had created (YF, p. 147). Crake certainly is hubristic but he is not uncaring. What is present from the beginning of the Crakers’ existence – an acknowledgment that Crake is their benevolent and omniscient creator and that Oryx has an almost co-equal power and goodness – continues to develop as the Crakers take their place in the world. Once the pandemic nears its end, Snowman moves the Crakers out of Paradice and to the seashore. From the moment they meet him, from the 10 Stein, “Problematic Paradice,” pp. 143, 148. She compares Crake to Victor Frankenstein in this essay. 11 Stein, “Problematic Paradice,” pp. 145–146. Stein’s critique of Crake and science is common, especially in analyses written before the entire trilogy was published. Dunning, for example, shares much of Stein’s understanding (“Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” pp. 95–96 for example). 12 Bouson, “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ Through End Times,” pp. 348–349.

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moment they are introduced to the larger world, they are filled with questions. Snowman, a man seeped in the humanities as Crake was in the sciences,13 tells the Children of Crake etiological tales: Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by then, and they’d eaten up all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched out. And that is why the animals can’t talk. (YF, p. 147, italics original)

Like all people, the Children of Crake seek to understand themselves and their relationship to other creatures; like the biblical myths witness, the first and most powerful way to understand is through stories.14 The Children of Crake are not just passive recipients of these stories; they begin to create their own religious practices. Crake and Oryx may no longer be present, but they continue to talk with them; the women in particular commune with Oryx on a regular basis. About this ritual in particular, Snowman muses: He’s never seen the women do this – this communion with Oryx – although they refer to it frequently. What form does it take? They must perform some kind of prayer or invocation, since they can hardly believe that Oryx appears to them in person. Maybe they go into trances. 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’d maintained. It has been a difficult problem,

13 Although, unlike Crake, Jimmy was a lackluster student and attended a run-

down university. 14 Not only biblical myth, but Oryx and Crake also makes extensive use of fairy tale intertexts. See Sharon Rose Wilson, Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison, pp. 35–52. Wilson also argues that Atwood’s “absurd irony language and cultural myths” in Oryx and Crake underscore the importance of language and stories (p. 37).

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though: take out too much in that area and you got a zombie or a psychopath. But these people are neither. They’re up to something though, something Crake didn’t anticipate: they’re conversing with the invisible, they’ve developed reverence. (O&C, p. 157)

Later, the Crakers go even further. When Snowman journeys back to the Compounds for supplies, he is delayed by a pigoon attack and a serious cut on his foot. While away, the Crakers build a human figure, sit around it with percussive instruments (a hubcap struck with a metal rod) and intone: “Ohhhh-Mun.” When Snowman returns, he is shocked: “Is that Amen? Surely not! Not after Crake’s precautions, his insistence on keeping these people pure, free of all contamination of that kind. … It can’t have happened” (O&C, p. 360). The Crakers see Snowman and jump up from their ritual chanting – they were not, in fact, chanting ‘amen’, but instead calling Snowman’s name. The effigy was a “picture” of him to help them send out their voices (O&C, p. 361), making the ritual singing of the name a powerful summoning prayer. Despite all attempts to prevent it, symbolic thinking, figurative representation, and ritual acting have all emerged, concentrated especially in story-telling and naming; in other words, the Crakers are in the process of creating religion.15

ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST: PIGOON BURIALS The emergence of reverence and ritual amidst the newly created Crakers is not the most astounding site of incipient religion. Religion emerges among the pigoons too. In the first book, the intelligence of the pigoons is evident as they strategize in an attack against Jimmy while he is foraging in the Compounds (O&C, p. 235). It is in the second and third books that the full extent of pigoon religiosity is revealed. Smart constructs a helpful taxonomy for both comparing religions crossculturally and accounting for diversity within religions. In his work Dimensions of the Sacred, he identifies seven dimensions through which the religious emerges: 1) philosophical or doctrinal; 2) ritual; 3) mythic or narrative; 4) experiential and emotional; 5) ethical and legal; 6) social; and 7) material. In Atwood’s world, the ritual, mythic, ethical, and experiential dimensions are the most prominent. 15

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The Year of the Flood begins at roughly the same time as Oryx and Crake – immediately after the devastation of the “waterless flood”. Instead of focalizing around the character Jimmy, The Year of the Flood moves back and forth between Toby and Ren, both accidental survivors of the pandemic. Their stories are also told through flashback and the reader learns that both Toby and Ren had been among the adherents of the radical environmentalist religious sect called God’s Gardeners.16 Their paths having long since deviated, after the flood Ren is trapped in a quarantine chamber at a sex club (more on Ren in the next section) and Toby is ensconced in the spa where she worked. Drawing on her experiences among God’s Gardeners, Toby plants a garden to supplement her food supply. In protecting her garden from animals (and counter to the Gardener’s ethic), Toby shoots and kills a boar, one of the male pigoons (O&C, p. 18). The pigoons retaliate by systematically destroying her entire garden and then standing by to watch her reaction just out of firing range (YF, pp. 319–20). Toward the end of the novel, when Toby leaves the spa she must pass close to the carcass of the boar. What she finds surprises and confuses her: There are fronds scattered about, on top of the boar’s carcass and beside it. Fern fronds. Such ferns don’t grow in the meadow. Some are old and dry and brown, some quite fresh. Also flowers. Are those rose petals, from the roses by the driveway? She’d heard of something like this; no, she read it as a child, in a kid’s book about elephants. The elephants would stand around their dead ones, somberly, as if meditating. Then they’d scatter branches and earth. But pigs? Usually they’d just eat a dead pig, the same way they’d eat anything else. But they haven’t been eating this one. Could the pigs have been having a funeral? Could they be bringing memorial bouquets? (YF, p. 328)

Lest the reader attribute the development of pigoon funeral practices to the human neocortex in the pigoons’ brains, every time the burial 16 Atwood modeled God’s Gardeners according to the principles of deep ecol-

ogy, especially as manifest in the activist group Earth First! Bouson, “A ‘JokeFilled’ Romp Through End Times,” pp. 346–348.

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rituals are noted, the pigoons are compared not to people but to elephants (YF, p. 328; MA, p. 269). It is as if the human brain tissue only serves to activate or enhance a potentiality already present in the nonhuman animal. Funeral rites are only the first sign that the pigoons have developed laws, rituals, and stories – in other words, that the pigoons have developed something that could be called “religion.” In this way, Atwood’s pigoons draw us into Donovan Schaefer’s theory of religion, an understanding of religious phenomenon that locates it not in language, understood as the exclusive domain of homo sapiens, but in the body, which all sentient beings share together. 17 Schaefer begins with the waterfall dances performed by chimpanzees, asking his readers to consider, “what would it mean for animals to have religion”? He continues, “What would happen if we subtracted the framework of human exceptionalism from religion… What if religion is not only about language, books, or belief?”18 Atwood also asks her readers to consider the possibility of animal religion. Even so, Atwood does not abandon language as an important marker for religion; rather, she expands the boundaries of what is considered language and who or what has access to it. Not just the people and the Crakers, the pigoons also have a language and participate in the two aspects of language that are crucial to Atwood’s understanding of religiosity: naming and storytelling.19

17 Schaefer offers an understanding of religion that brings together affect the-

ory, phenomenology, materialism, and animal studies. He names his approach a materialist phenomenology. See Schaefer, Religious Affects, pp. 4– 10 for Schaefer’s critique of both classical phenomenology and the linguistic turn that challenged the phenomenology of religion. 18 Schaefer, Religious Affects, p. 3. 19 The bees are also involved in inter-species communication, even in mythmaking. See Chen, “Subjectal Scale and Micro-biopolitics at the End of the Anthropocene,” pp. 192–193.

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AND IT WAS CALLED BABEL: T HE MULTIPLICITY OF WORDS Before the flood, Ren and Toby were both members of a new religious movement called God’s Gardeners, founded by Adam One.20 The Gardeners did not eschew scientific knowledge, but rather merged it with eco-spirituality and biblical texts. For example, Genesis’s “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3) is understood as a biblical account of the Big Bang (YF, p. 12). Thus informed by the Bible, science, and environmentalism, the Gardeners form a religious community deeply committed to fostering life and creating community based on the interdependence of all living beings. Each section of The Year of the Flood is introduced with a sermon by Adam One and a hymn from The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook. Scriptures, sermons, and songs are all central to the religion created by Adam One – yet, nothing is written. Writing is avoided, even forbidden. Trapped in the sex club where she worked, Ren remembers: Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails. This is what the gardeners taught us, when I was a child among them. They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. … As for writing, it was dangerous said the Adams and the Eves… But now the Waterless Flood has swept over us, any writing I might do is safe enough, because those who would have used it against me are most likely dead. So I can write down anything I want. What I write is my name, Ren… (YF, p. 6, italics original)

She writes her name, over and over again on the wall, with an eyebrow pencil. In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, isolated and unsure how long she will survived, Ren asserts her individual identity. Ren is alive. Ren has a name.21 20 Adam is his given name. He is the son of a popular and wealthy televange-

list who had “nailed together a theology to help him rake in the cash” (MA, p. 112), one that preached a prosperity gospel centered in fossil fuels. 21 Snowman had a similar impulse to write during the time he was locked into Paradice as the pandemic rages (O&C, pp. 346–47).

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For God’s Gardeners, the most sacred moment in Eden was Adam’s naming of the animals, a naming that they understood as an act of joyous communion as Adam called each animal in the animal’s own language. ‘To Name is – we hope – to greet; to draw another towards one’s self’ (YF, p. 12). Such a reading of Genesis celebrates the sacred heterogeneity of all life.22 Yet, ironically, as one moved into leadership positions in the religious sect, one gave up one’s name and became either an Adam or an Eve distinguished only by a unique number (i.e. Toby had been Eve Six). The sect’s eco-spirituality and ethic of stewardship is presented as an alternative to the dominant ideology of corporate greed and environmental destruction; yet, there are also aspects of the sect that are troubling: giving up one’s name, eschewing all writing, living by a strict code mandated by Adam One, submitting to his authority. As an organization opposed to the current political and economic order and therefore living under the threat of state violence, there is practical necessity to some of these regulations. At the same time, ultimately God’s Gardeners are not the world’s future hope in Atwood’s vision of the end-time. While Toby and Ren have been deeply influenced by the Gardener’s ethic and worldview, neither came to the community at Edencliff voluntarily. Toby had been rescued by the Gardeners from her sadistic boss who had turned her into his sex slave, and Ren was brought to the community as a child. Neither Toby nor Ren were “true believers”; each had her own complicated relationship to Gardener theology and ritual, accepting and questioning at the same time. Instead of reproducing God’s Gardeners after the “waterless flood”, they offer a different way forward, one rooted in a communitarian ethic but more pragmatic and less pure than Adam One’s vision. Writing becomes crucial in the constitution of this community post-pandemic. While Ren is still trapped, writing her name on the walls, Toby begins a kind of Gardener’s journal: “At the top of each fresh page she prints the Gardener Feast Day or Saint’s Day. She can still recite the entire list off by heart: … Under each Saint’s Day name she writes her gardening notes: what was planted, what was harvested, what phase At several points in Schaefer’s work, he draws upon Jacques Derrida’s insistence that “animals” represent a vast array of difference, obscured by the use of the single word “animal” to describe them all. See, for example, Religious Affects, pp. 153–155, 209–210.

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of the moon, what insect guests” (YF, p. 163). Soon she begins to add notes about her feelings and experiences. The journal takes on even greater significance when Toby leaves the spa and joins with other homo sapiens who have survived and now live on the seashore near the Crakers. Her storytelling especially is central to the emergence of the sacred among the survivors at the end of the world. The final book MaddAddam opens with Toby telling the Crakers a full-blown myth of origin, rooted in Snowman’s original myth but greatly expanded: “In the beginning you lived inside the Egg. That is where Crake made you” (MA, p. 3). Toby tells the story of how the world had been filled with violence and wickedness, but Crake has cleared the chaos to make Oryx happy and to provide a safe home for the Crakers. Despite Crake’s plan, some of the chaos remained: two bad men who hurt others (MA, p. 4). Like the God of Genesis whose plans go awry (Adam and Eve’s disobedience, Cain’s murder of Abel, Noah’s indiscretion, Ham’s curse), Crake is not in full control: more people survive his “waterless flood” than he had planned. These people include some of the other scientists who had worked on the Paradice project, some of God’s Gardeners, and several dangerous and sadistic criminals called Painballers. In the final analysis, neither God nor Crake can eliminate wickedness and violence from the world. In the wake of both floods, it emerges quickly once again. The final novel in Atwood’s trilogy tells the stories of these survivors – how they build a new life, how they finally stop the criminals, how the new species learn to cooperate. All along, Toby forms the moral center of the novel, the community’s healer, the recorder of its history, and the creator of its myth.23 Eventually, Toby’s writing attracts the attention of one of the Craker children, a boy named Blackbeard. He asks, “What are you making, Oh Toby?” (MA, p. 202). She explains the paper and the letters and the words. She explains reading. She begins with his name: “It means you. Your name.” (MA, p. 202). Later, she finds him in the Anna Lindhé argues that Toby represents a new kind of heroine in Atwood’s oeuvre, one who has an inner transformation and then rises up to redeem the Other. Lindhé, “Restoring the Divine Within,” pp. 48–49.

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sandbox writing his name in the sand with a stick, teaching the other children.24 Toby is ambivalent. “Now what have I done? She thinks. … What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?” (MA, p. 204). The danger of writing, especially as it is merged with religion, lingers. And yet, Toby continues to write – not just a log of days and moons and weather but also the stories of how they all ended up there beside the ocean, the stories of their lives – and she continues to teach this writing to Blackbeard. Toby’s stories do not just tell of origins; Toby’s writing becomes the vehicle for forging the relationships between individuals and between the communities. One day, Blackbeard excitedly announces that the “Pig Ones” are coming with “a dead” (MA, p. 266). It has already been hinted that the pigoons and the Crakers can communicate in some way (MA, p. 264) but here the full extent of their shared languages emerge. Through the Crakers, the people learn that the Painballers have been killing piglets, slitting their throats and hanging them for display. The pigoons want to form an alliance. They want the people to kill the Painballers with their “sticks” (their guns). The pigoons also want the other group of survivors to stop killing them; in exchange, they will stop foraging in the gardens and among the bees; in addition, they agree not to kill any people (MA, pp. 269–71). An interspecies alliance is formed between the people and the pigoons, brokered by the Crakers who are like Adam in Adam One’s interpretation of Genesis 2 – able to speak to each animal, in each animal’s language, calling each animal’s name. Now that the pigoons have joined the community, Toby rewrites the Crakers’ myth of origins. The story of the egg, out of which they hatched, becomes the story of two eggs: The other egg she laid [Oryx] was full of words. But that egg hatched first, before the one with the animals in it, and you ate up many of the words, because you were hungry; which is why you have words inside you. And Crake thought that you had eaten all the words, so there were none left over for the animals, After mastering his own name, he circulates around the community, collecting everyone else’s in his notebook (MA, p. 262).

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JENNIFER L. KOOSED and that was why they could not speak. But he was wrong about that. Crake was not always right about everything. Because when he was not looking, some of the words fell out of the egg onto the ground, and some fell into the water, and some blew away in the air. And none of the people saw them. But the animals and the birds and the fish did see them, and ate them up. They were a different kind of word, so it was sometimes hard for people to understand the animals. They had chewed the words up too small. And the Pigoons – the Pig Ones – ate up more of the words than any of the other animals did. You know how they love to eat. So the Pig Ones can think very well. (MA, p. 290)

All sentient beings have language even though people cannot always understand. Toby’s words are threads that bind the humans and the Crakers and the pigoons together in an interspecies community of cooperation. Dunning writes that Atwood’s work “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.”25 Snowman-Jimmy is a word man – a graduate of a humanities program, a writer of advertising, a preserver of words. Yet, Jimmy struggles to say the right thing, to answer the Crakers’ questions, to lament. He lacks the words for the deeper values and meanings encoded in religious language.26 He begins the storytelling but later he transfers the story to Toby – a writer and recorder but also a conduit for a story she feels moves through her more than is created by her (MA, p. 256). The story gains sacred momentum. When Toby is unable to continue the story – “too sad, because of the dead ones” – Blackbeard picks up the mantel to tell the story of the climatic battle between the interspecies alliance and the Painballers (MA, p. 357). By 25 Dunning, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” p. 87. Dunning is discussing Oryx and Crake but his comment describes all three novels in the trilogy. 26 Hengen, “Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake,” p. 130; and Stein, “Problematic Paradice,” p. 154.

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the end, Toby disappears altogether and the story, both its telling and its writing, is transferred completely to Blackbeard. Sacred narrative does not just define our humanity but changes the very notion of what humanity is. As Donna Haraway reminds us, when species meet, neither remain unchanged; species co-shape “one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down.”27 The story is not just for us.28 The final section of the novel is simply called “Book.” Blackbeard is the storyteller now and he tells the story of Toby: “This is the end of the Story of Toby. I have written it in this Book. And I have put my name here – Blackbeard – the way Toby first showed me when I was a child. It says that I was the one who set down these words” (MA, p. 390). Toby’s fear that Blackbeard would write a Testament of Crake is unfounded. There is no testament, firm and foundational; there is only a story, fluid and flexible. The story is not anonymously presented as if divinely inspired; the storytellers speak their names. It does not belong to Crake but to Toby and Blackbeard and all of the survivors. After all, as Toby says in her myth of the two eggs, Crake was not always right. Excising religion is not as easy as removing a particular cluster of neurons in the brain. In a short time, the Crakers have moved from imagining invisible beings upon which they project feelings of love and care, to the forming of an image and a ritual of naming, to Blackbeard’s mythmaking. Excising religion is not as easy as destroying homo sapiens (not that species-cide is ever easy). In a short time, the pigoons develop a culture that includes burial practices and ethical mandates; the pigoons have names and stories of their own. Together, they form an interdependent, interspecies community, grounded in an ethic of care, constituted by stories. Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy is an eschatology that is not for us. The post-apocalyptic worlds of Daniel and Revelation are utterly devoid of animals – these tales are not just anthropocentric, they are anthropo-exclusive.29 Crake’s vision is the photographic negative – a post-apocalyptic vision utterly devoid of the human. Yet, the best laid plans of mice and men, even god-like men, often go awry. Despite 27 Haraway, When

Species Meet, p. 42.

28 Lindhé, “Restoring the Divine Within,” p. 42.

To underscore the exclusion of animals, dogs are explicitly cast out of the new Jerusalem along with murderers, sorcerers, and idolaters (Rev 22:15).

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Crake’s best efforts, a motley assortment of humans do survive the “waterless flood” – but they are de-centered, their survival not guaranteed. It turns out that survival may not be for us either. Roman Bartosh notes that Atwood’s trilogy asks, “What sort of literature remains possible if we relinquish the myth of human apartness?”30 Atwood’s trilogy also asks, “What sort of religion?” For the MaddAddam trilogy suggests that religion is not just the domain of the human but is also an integral aspect of both the humanoid and the animal – the boundaries of which become increasingly more blurred through communication, communion, and cooperation. Moreover, the trilogy suggests that this religion emerges through an embodied ethic, attuned to both individual and communal bodies, their lived experiences and material needs, along with a fluid ritual of storytelling. Both the ethic and the ritual rely on naming, and the “micro-biopolitics” that naming represents. The emphasis on naming that appears throughout the new community (even the pigoons have individual names that the humans can’t pronounce) underscore the utter irreducibility of the individual whether it be human, humanoid, or other animal and contrasts with the “macro-politics of globalization” and commodification that was the reigning ethic of the world before the flood.31 Like Genesis, Atwood’s primordial myth contains multiple creations and various falls; her myth includes a devastating flood. Like Genesis, Atwood’s myth builds toward Babel – but the multiplication of languages, stories, and names is not a punishment, a cautionary tale about human hubris. Rather, Atwood’s Babel is a place of hope, a future of irreducible difference bound together through sacred interspecies stories.

30 As quoted in Bouson, “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ Through End Times,” p. 352.

Chen notes the contrast between the macro- and micro-biopolitics in the trilogy, although focuses more on the temporal dimensions of the novels than on ethics. Chen, “Subjectal Scale and Micro-Biopolitics at the End of the Anthropocene,” p. 180. See also Anna Bedford who sees in the trilogy a posthuman, communal vision of survival. Bedford, “Survival in the Post-Apocalypse,” p. 88.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Random House, 2003. ―. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context.” PMLA 119 (2004): 513–517. ―. The Year of the Flood. New York: Doubleday, 2009. ―. MaddAddam. New York: Doubleday, 2013. Bedford, Anna. “Survival in the Post-Apocalypse: Ecofeminism in MaddAddam.” Pages 71–92 in Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses. Edited by Karma Waltonen. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Bosco, Mark, S.J. “The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake.” Pages 156–171 in Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. Edited by J. Brooks Bouson. New York: Continuum, 2010. Bouson, J. Brooks. “A ‘Joke-Filled Romp’ Through End Times: Radical Environmentalism, Deep Ecology, and Human Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s Eco-Apocalyptic MaddAddam Trilogy.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51 (2016): 341–357. Bowen, Deborah. “Atwood Believes.” Alternatives Journal 42 (2016): 58–63. Carey, Greg. Ultimate Things: An Introduction to Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2005. Chen, Chien-Hung. “Subjective Scale and Micro-Biopolitics at the End of the Anthropocene: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 51 (2018): 179–198. Dunning, Stephen. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic.” Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 86–101. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008.

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Hengen, Shannon. “Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake.” Pages 129–140 in Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. Edited by J. Brooks Bouson. New York: Continuum, 2010. Lindhé, Anna. “Restoring the Divine Within: The Inner Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.” Pages 41–56 in Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses. Edited by Karma Waltonen. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Schaefer, Donovan O. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2015. Smart, Ninian. Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs. Berkeley: University of California, 1996. Stein, Karen. “Problematic Paradice in Oryx and Crake.” Pages 141– 155 in Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. Edited by J. Brooks Bouson. New York: Continuum, 2010. Wilson, Sharon Rose. Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

6. ESCHATOLOGICALLY EXPECTING: READING APOCALYPTIC CHILDBIRTH THROUGH MARGARET ATWOOD’S HANDMAID’S TALE ALEXIS FELDER BOYER INTRODUCTION In her 2017 introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes, “If I was to create an imaginary garden, I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened…” (HT, p. xiv). Whether or not Atwood was directly inspired by Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, this literature prefigures the fictional world she creates. In Atwood’s dystopian world, ancient apocalyptic fantasies of parturient women materialize as characters within an updated modern context. The female characters who give birth to the future in apocalyptic narratives and Atwood’s “Handmaids” who give birth for the elite in Gilead are each valued for their reproductive potential. After they give birth, however, these women never participate in the futures they carry and deliver.1

1 Many of the ideas in this essay are based on my Boston University Disserta-

tion. See, Alexis L. Felder, “Birthing the Apocalypse: Images Of Pregnancy And Childbirth In Apocalyptic Literature of The First Century” PhD diss., Boston University, 2018. I am grateful to Jennifer Knust and David Frank-

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In Atwood’s novel, humankind’s ability to reproduce has dramatically diminished. In response to this crisis, a theocratic regime called Gilead overthrows the United States government, seizes command, and restructures elite families to accommodate a “Handmaid” explicitly for the purpose of ensuring the country’s future through childbearing.2 Readers follow along in shock as the story unfolds through the narration of one of these Handmaids, Offred. In Gilead, Handmaids are forced to have sex with elite men, become pregnant, and give birth to future generations of elite citizens, but the Handmaids have no part in the lives of their offspring or the future they ensure through the labor of their bodies. Instead of rearing their children, Handmaids are moved into the homes of other elite families to have children for them. The elite raise the children of Handmaids as their own, and the children become heirs to power in Gilead. The elite of Gilead succeed in outsourcing the production of children, and yet they continue to value maternity and nuclear family structures and work to maintain them using the bodies of Handmaids like broodmares. The Handmaids lead paradoxical lives of isolation and constant visibility; they’re frequently alone but always being watched. Their lives are monotonous, but their circumstances could change dramatically at any moment with no explanation. Atwood’s fiction creates a terrifying environment of constant anxiety and horror that the reader accesses through Offred’s firsthand account. Offred describes her life as a working Handmaid, and she painstakingly contrasts the way life was before Gilead with her position under this new world order that values her only for her body and its reproductive capacities.3

furter for offering generous feedback on this manuscript and Diana Swancutt for insightful conversations after my dissertation defense that helped me refine these arguments. 2 The position of “Handmaid” in Atwood’s novel is modeled after the biblical characters Bilhah and Zilpah – slaves of Rachel and Leah – who have sex with Jacob and give birth to children when his wives cannot (Genesis 30:1– 13). All biblical references correspond to the NRSV. 3 “I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely” (HT, p. 63).

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Through Offred’s narration, it becomes clear that the physical and social limits on the Handmaids have been designed to maintain their submission and inhibit the development of attachments to each other, the families they “serve,” and any children they bear. Handmaids are valuable because they can produce children, but after having served that purpose, they are detached and removed from the child they carried and the family for whom they delivered it (HT, p. 127). The government of Gilead knows Offred can carry children and successfully give birth because she had a daughter of her own with her husband in the time before Gilead. Her daughter was taken from her when her family tried to escape, and after she was imprisoned, she was told she was unfit to raise her daughter on the grounds that her husband was married once before he married her (HT, pp. 39, 50, 74, 228, 304). In Gilead, a Handmaid’s ability to carry and give birth to a child is her most valuable characteristic. It defines her role, but a Handmaid is further defined by her unfitness as a mother. The unfitness is unquestionable, and it serves to justify the Gileadean system that removes children from their biological mothers. This situation, though described within a twentieth-century fictional account, bears a striking resemblance to narrative scenes of pregnancy and parturition in first-century apocalyptic literature. In The Handmaid’s Tale and in examples from apocalyptic literature, discourses concerning pregnancy and childbearing are focused squarely on the future of humanity, but the post-natal maternal body seems curiously absent from that future. In what follows, I will consider two examples of apocalyptic eschatology from Revelation and 4 Ezra, arguing that the women envisioned by these authors function narratively as “Handmaids.” Reading these examples through The Handmaid’s Tale calls attention to narrative dynamics present in apocalyptic literature. The authors of each work use the bodies of women and images of childbirth to advance their stories, but once each character delivers her child, she has no place in the future her body carried and delivered. These narratives seem to recognize the importance of maternity and childbirth for their present times, but the futures they envision erase the maternal body, suggesting that it will no longer be necessary and implying it was never intended or ideal.

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MATERNAL ERASURE In Revelation 12:1–6, the woman clothed with the sun endures childbirth while hovering over the gaping mouth of a dragon who waits to devour her newborn son. The child is rescued and whisked away from the jaws of the monster, but the post-natal woman (no longer clothed with the sun) flees alone to the wilderness, pursued by the dragon never to be seen again. Similarly, in one of the visions given to Ezra, a distraught woman shrieks in pain as she gives birth to a beautiful city (4 Ezra 10:22–27a). Ezra admires the fruit of her labor, but the woman disappears as if she was utterly obliterated by the ordeal. In these apocalyptic visions and in Atwood’s fictional Gilead, the parturient body ensures the future, but the post-natal maternal body never participates in that future. In addition to this exclusion, the maternal body itself and the discourses that concern it occupy a tense space in the present. Sidestepping these images avoids the discomfort of addressing them and owning up to the post-natal erasure of the maternal body. One example of this sidestepping can be seen at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale in an appendix titled “Historical Notes.” There, Offred’s narrative is subjected to questions of veracity, obfuscating the horror of her experience and mitigating its impact (HT, p. 299–311). In short, affective narratives – particularly those concerning the maternal body – are not always taken seriously in and of themselves. They are often viewed as a small, inconsequential part of a much larger and more important rhetorical or historical objective. The lack of recognition afforded to accounts and images of parturition pairs well with a distinct ambivalence toward the reproductive female body. Atwood presents Offred narrating her own extensive abuse and suffering as a Handmaid. She conveys Offred’s realization that many of the characters surrounding her view her exclusively in terms of her potentially pregnant body, seeing within her humanity’s only hope for the future. Atwood’s Offred is simultaneously reviled and revered for her body’s reproductive capacities. In one striking scene, Offred describes her relationship with the commander’s Wife saying, “I am a reproach to her; and a necessity” (HT, p. 13). Atwood’s depiction of Gilead shares a great deal in common with the way that bodies of childbearing women are described in ancient apoc-

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alyptic literature. On the one hand, ancient writers represent the pregnant woman as embodying the flaws, anxiety, and suffering of the present age, and, on the other, they portray the child within that woman in terms of their wildly optimistic hope for the future. The paradox of the maternal body, in both cases, is that the mother is firmly rooted in a painful and corrupt present, but hope for the future can only be produced from within. These conceptions of the female body were not unique to apocalyptic literature; they were also part of a broader body of ancient literature in which discourses of gender and pregnancy were inextricably bound to discourses of power and futurity. Ancient medical literature is an interesting point of comparison as it depicts pregnancy as the key to women’s health, a measure that is intensified in Atwood’s Gilead.

ANCIENT MEDICAL LITERATURE In ancient medical literature, as in Gilead, motherhood was valorized, but the female body was subject to ambivalent criticism for its hollowness and excessive tendencies. These were the same characteristics that were known to capacitate pregnancy and engender motherhood. According to Hippocratic philosophers and Galen, women’s bodies were designed to take in excesses, and pregnancy made proper use of those excesses making women’s bodies healthy. These writers forged connections between women’s anatomy, their social roles as wives and mothers, and their purpose as part of humanity. These connections animated philosophical theories of health and how best to achieve it, but there was never monolithic consensus. Each author nuanced their argument in different ways and came to their own distinct conclusions about the female body, pregnancy, and the role of women within humanity. Hippocrates’ Diseases of Women argued that women had a distinct physiology that differed from male physiology.4 The womb was the distinguishing anatomical characteristic of women, and its hollow, receptive qualities were associated, in general terms, with the feminine See Flemming, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women, p. 116; Hanson, “Hippocrates: Diseases of Women 1,” 582, Hippocrates, DW 1.62.

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gender, passivity, and the penetrated role in coitus.5 Another anatomical difference between men and women was their flesh. Women were “naturally” wetter and softer or spongier than men, who were known to be dry and firm. The opening discussion of the Diseases of Women in the Hippocratic Corpus noted that, “…the woman’s body draws moisture both with more speed and in greater quantity from the belly than does the body of a man.”6 Many scholars have noted that because women were understood as absorbing and retaining more material from their food and environment, they were viewed, physiologically speaking, as creatures of excess. The female body was considered insatiable, and this concept of unlimited capacity extended beyond physiology into the social realm where excessive passion and sexual desires threatened the masculine virtue of self-control.7 The insatiable bodily appetites of women were a liability, but they were also necessary for pregnancy.8 Galen implicitly agreed with much of the Hippocratic material on women, but he relied on heat as the differentiating characteristic. Men, he argued, were warmer than women.9 Galen explained that a lack of innate heat prevented women’s organs from developing externally, which made them less perfect, but suitable for reproduction. He wrote, “Indeed, you ought not to think that our Creator would purposefully make half the whole race imperfect and, as it were, mutilated, unless there was some great advantage in such a mutilation.”10 He implied that a woman living according to Nature was a woman who became pregnant and gave birth to children. Medical philosophers braided their ideas of feminine anatomy together with social ex-

5 King, Hippocrates’

Woman, p. 29. Ann Ellis Hanson, “Hippocrates: ‘Diseases of Women 1,’” p. 572; Hippocrates, DW, 1.1. 7 Knust, Abandoned to Lust, 47; Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place,” p. 142. 8 Carson’s article makes the connection via heat and wetness using the poets as examples. See Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place.” See also Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies, p. 134. 9 Galen follows Aristotle on these arguments. See Aristotle, GA, IV.765b, IV.766b.25–27. 10 Galen, UP, 14.6; For translation see Galen, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, vol. 2, pp. 628–630. 6

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pectations and overarching theories of cosmic organization. They nuanced the association between bodily health and pregnancy noting that the anatomical mechanisms and processes that enabled pregnancy also rendered women’s bodies inherently flawed in comparison to the male body. Women’s bodies soaked up excess, required regulation through menstruation, and were prone to dysfunction, but pregnancy used up the excesses, stopped menstruation, and was useful for humanity in general making it an essential part of a healthy woman’s life. Having served a purpose for the good of humanity, the flaws of the female body could be forgiven. Atwood did not explicitly employ ancient medical theories when developing her portrait of the fictional Gilead. Still, in the novel, Gilead also produces a paradoxical tension between the imperfect female body and pregnancy for the production of children. On one hand, the Wives who are unable to become pregnant are acknowledged to be imperfect and unhealthy (HT, p. 117). Aunt Lydia at the Red Center refers to the Wives as “defeated women” and encourages the Handmaids to have compassion for them (HT, p. 46). Their inability to conceive and carry children is the primary reason the role of Handmaid was created, and the presence of the Handmaid in the home is a constant reminder of the Wife’s bodily deficiency. On the other hand, male bodies suffer no criticism, though their lack of fertility may contribute to their enduring failure to procreate. In fact, “sterile” is a forbidden word. Offred makes note of this when she is visiting a doctor who uses the word rather casually; she says, “There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law” (HT, p. 61).11 Adding another layer to this already fraught situation, the Wives resent the Handmaids and sometimes refer to them as “whores” referring directly to their status as unfit to be a wife and/or mother (HT, p. 115). Offred notes Serena Joy’s attitude toward her after “the ceremony” takes place. She coldly commands her to get up and get out, and Offred explains, “There is loathing in her voice, as if the touch of While ancient medical philosophers acknowledge the possibility that men could be at fault for failure to conceive, the treatment suggested in their texts is squarely focused women and their bodies. See Rebecca Flemming, “The invention of infertility in the classical Greek world: medicine, divinity, and gender,” pp. 565–90. 11

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my flesh sickens and contaminates her” (HT, p. 95). Even the Handmaids are taught to maintain a low or negative opinion of themselves at the Red Center. Offred illustrates the internalization of this teaching when she recalls the process of testifying. In one particularly disturbing instance, one of the Handmaids, Janine, testifies about being gang raped at fourteen and having an abortion. The first time she tells the story, Aunt Helena cues the Handmaids to chant in unison that it was “her fault,” that “she” led them on, and that it happened to teach her a “lesson” (HT, p. 72, emphasis in original). She cries, and the Handmaids continue to taunt her.12 The second time, Janine does not need any prompting: “It was my fault, she says. It was my own fault. I led them on. I deserved the pain” (HT, p. 72). The negative valuation of the female body coupled with the merit attributed to the pregnant body and the production of children creates deep-seated tension between Atwood’s characters, within individual characters themselves, and throughout the social structure of Gilead. The underlying conflict between women’s imperfect bodies and the absolute requirement that women seek pregnancy and childbirth permeates Atwood’s narrative.

GILEAD’S IMPENETRABLE FAMILY AND REVELATION Reading Atwood with John of Patmos’ Revelation offers an example of a text that promotes presuppositions that are in fact realized in Gilead. John’s Revelation speaks to the hope of the elite, and the woman clothed with the sun can be compared to a Handmaid accomplishing her purpose. Of course, it bears mentioning that not all wives in Gilead are barren; some have biological children, and it is likely that they are expected to continue to try to conceive. What barren Wives do sexually with their elite husbands in Gilead is not addressed. It is possible that some continue to have fruitless sexual relationships, but another option for those women is celibacy. Barren Wives with Handmaids (like Serena Joy) are the only ones capable of achieving celibacy if they so choose; it is a special privilege. In this way, Gilead can work to create elite families of chaste (but barren) women and impenetrable men. Similarly, John of Patmos seeks to demonstrate the impenetrability of Offred notes that she feels bad about jeering at Janine, but that she meant it. That note seems to emphasize the effectiveness of the brainwashing process (HT, p. 72).

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God and God’s people by contrasting them against the parturient woman clothed with the sun (Rev. 12), who serves a specific purpose in the narrative. The woman clothed with the sun, like a Handmaid in Gilead, is useful solely for her procreative capacities. She is protected from some dangers while she is being made use of by God. Once procreation is accomplished, however, she is no longer necessary, and she disappears. In Revelation 12, the resplendent woman clothed with the sun appears above in the heavens, pregnant and in labor. She gives birth while squatting over the gaping mouth of a dragon that waits to devour her newborn son, but at the moment of birth, the child is whisked away from the jaws of the monster and the body of his mother and brought to God. This scene – albeit without a dragon – is eerily similar to the only birth scene described in The Handmaid’s Tale. Janine (Ofwarren) gives birth, and Aunt Elizabeth immediately hands the baby over to Warren’s Wife after a quick inspection (HT, p. 126). Here, the elite family of Gilead takes the place of God, and the adopted child becomes an elite heir. The child of the woman clothed with the sun is taken into God’s “family,” and the woman clothed with the sun, like a Handmaid, is connected to that family but not a full member. Revelation creates clear boundaries (above and below) and the woman clothed with the sun moves between those spaces depending on her purpose in the narrative. Revelation 12:1–2 reads, “A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth.” When she is pregnant and giving birth, she is above with God, but the post-natal woman finds herself below threatened by the dragon that seemed sure to devour her and her child (Revelation 12:13). Gilead creates similar divisions in status between protected and vulnerable, and Handmaids seem to straddle the line occupying both states of being at once. A Handmaid’s role is exclusively to bear a child, and while attempting to serve that purpose she remains protected from life in the Colonies (HT, pp. 10, 61). Nevertheless, a Handmaid is always vulnerable to this threat. A Handmaid is meant to be grateful for her status among, yet apart from, the elite. A Handmaid also makes it possible to maintain virtuous families of barren women and

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virile men who also produce children. The virile and impenetrable Commander oversees his devoted Wife who is chaste or potentially celibate, but also maternal.13 The maternity of the elite barren Wife depends on the Handmaid. The woman clothed with the sun in John’s narrative contributes to the “family” of God through the child to whom she gives birth. Nevertheless, after birth the woman clothed with the sun sinks into the background as God, God’s angels, and the child battle to save the righteous people of God and take rightful control over God’s creation. If a barren Wife were to choose to remain celibate, the Handmaid supports her celibacy by providing a penetrated procreative party to relieve the Wife of that duty. The Wife, then, can be celibate while she maintains her role as Wife and mother. Another element of the penetrated/impenetrable dichotomy is demonstrated through the secret meetings and Scrabble games that the Commander persuades or orders Offred to play with him.14 Women in Gilead are forbidden to read, and thus Scrabble takes on new meaning: “Now it’s dangerous. Now it’s indecent. Now it’s something he can’t do with his Wife” (HT, pp. 138–139). Offred’s role as penetrated Handmaid makes her vulnerable to these and other indecencies that would fail to uphold the decorum of a Gileadean Wife. The Commander also gives Offred a copy of an old Vogue magazine. She asks him why he showed it to her and not to his Wife; he responds by saying, “She wouldn’t understand” (HT, p. 158). Offred’s role as penetrated Handmaid deprives her of the decorum of a Wife. Of course, the level of decency Serena Joy is forced to maintain has its own difficulties – perhaps she would have enjoyed the Vogue magazine or playing Scrabble with her husband – but her status must remain intact. The Handmaid’s role is to be penetrated, and this role brings with it an inherent sense of immorality that stands in direct contrast to her chaste and potentially celibate counterpart, the elite Wife. Another fascinating commonality between a Handmaid and the woman clothed with the sun is their carefully designed attire. Their The Handmaid’s Tale never addresses the sexual relationship between the commander and his Wife (though it implies that there isn’t one). 14 It is clear in this situation that she really can’t refuse to see him or refuse to break the rules: “There’s no doubt about who holds the real power” (HT, p. 136). 13

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clothing demonstrates their status and it is meant to protect them, but their costumes are simultaneously provocative. Offred and the other Handmaids wear red cloaks and white wings to cover their faces (HT, pp. 21–22). They are taught to maintain their modesty at the Red Center. Aunt Lydia explains, “To be seen – to be seen – is to be – her voice trembled – penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable” (HT, p. 28). Of course, what she means is to be seen in public – to be seen by anyone but their Commander and his Wife. Nevertheless, the red color of their robes stands out; it draws the gaze. Handmaids are instantly identifiable by what they wear. The red invites people to look and recognize their role as a Handmaid. Their costume is as provocative as it is protective; the red stands out against the other colorcoded women in Gilead – Wives wear blue, Marthas wear green, Econowives wear stripes (HT, pp. 9, 24). When the Handmaids are seen in public on their walks to and from the market, the gazer instantly knows their role and is able to envision the Handmaid as part of the “ceremony” in as much detail as their mind can conjure.15 The cloak is protective in that upon recognition of their role as Handmaids the gazer knows that all interaction is off limits; Offred explains, “no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles” (HT, p. 24). The woman clothed with the sun has a similar costume that simultaneously provokes and prohibits. The parturient woman clothed with the sun is vulnerable and threatened by a dragon, but also by the gaze of John and his reader/hearers. 16 She is penetrable and/or vulnerable on two different levels: first, as a woman expected to exhibit sexual passivity (and thus be penetrated), and second, as the object of the gaze of John and his narrative audience. Frillingos uses a “penetration grid,” to explain “a basic principle of Roman hierarchy: at the top of the social ladder stood the impenetrable penetrator.”17 The woman clothed with the sun is already passive, she’s pregnant, and twice penetrated – first from

In one situation, a group of Japanese tourists and their guide approaches Offred and her shopping partner in the street having identified them according to their role wanting a picture and to ask them if they are happy in their position (HT, pp. 27–29). 16 Frilingos, Spectacle, p. 9. 17 Frilingos, Spectacle, p. 71. 15

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without at conception and again from within at birth. John, by watching her give birth, and narrating it for his audience is another penetration. The fact that she is the object of the gaze adds to her vulnerability, but even as she gives birth over the gaping mouth of a dragon, the woman clothed with the sun remains at least somewhat protected from the gaze of John and his readers/hearers. It is easy to forget that the woman in Revelation 12 is somewhat clothed while she is giving birth. She is clothed with the sun (perhaps only with the sun) – a very clever means of gaze deflection and invitation. The woman is saved from John’s penetrating gaze, but her experience of childbirth remains oddly sexualized as she is still exposed to the imaginative gaze of readers/hearers.18 One cannot look too closely and intently at the sun, and so the woman clothed with it transcends the spectacle by God’s refusal to let John and his audience see her exposed body giving birth. She escapes complete objectification, even as John’s audience is invited to imagine her nudity, her exposure, and the infant crowning between her legs. This birth elicits sympathy for the woman enduring it, but it is also titillating and provocative drawing the gaze of the audience and the dragon. The femininity of the woman makes her vulnerable and her body is being penetrated from the inside out in childbirth which alludes to a previous penetration at conception, but she at least somewhat overcomes her vulnerability with the help of God’s costume design. This costume design also clearly delineates her participation in each of the two spheres she occupies (heaven and earth). The woman clothed with the sun and Handmaids alike live in two worlds. The woman clothed with the sun exists in heaven and later on earth as she is pursued by the dragon, and Handmaids live in the homes of elite members of society while being enslaved to them. The ambiguity of these women, demonstrated through the way they both attract and deflect the gaze, is essential to their intermediate state.

I should say that she is mostly protected as she is presumably only clothed with the sun inviting the reader to gaze through the sun or to picture her naked and in childbirth in their minds. Perpetua and Felicitas are clothed in nets, but these do nothing to deflect the gaze. See David Frankfurter, “Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze,” p. 221. 18

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The gaze is a destructive force with the power to objectify, but the female body in Revelation and in Gilead is also a threat to the viewer’s self-control.19 God’s power to shield the woman clothed with the sun from view even in her vulnerable state shows God’s complete masculine control over the dramatic situation. The Handmaids’ cloaks convey their role in society, while simultaneously communicating their “protected” status and denoting their subjugation. While Gilead maintains strict control over its Handmaids (how they dress and what they do), it is the things that the government cannot control – the things that must be left in God’s hands – that seem to pose the biggest threat.

UNBABIES, 4 EZRA, AND THE SPECTER OF DEATH When there is a birth in Gilead, it is cause for celebration. The Handmaids gather together around the parturient woman and chant instructively as she labors. An Aunt is also present acting as midwife, and after birth, the Aunt will examine the infant for visible defects. In Offred’s account, she explains that pollution in the air and water caused birth defects and stillbirths (HT, pp. 112–114). Offred envisions her own body as polluted saying, “Who knows, your very flesh may be polluted, dirty as an oily beach, sure death to shore birds and unborn babies… A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass” (HT, p. 112). Even once a Handmaid is pregnant, there is no telling to what she will give birth.20 Offred wonders to herself, “What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, as we all hope? Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog’s, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart with no arms, or webbed hands and feet?” (HT, p. 112). Alongside pregnancy and childbirth, 4 Ezra also appeals to images involving birth defects in order to highlight the degradation of the present as time itself comes to an end. The health and well-being of children are not, however, the only things at stake. The life of the mother can also be at risk. A concern for full term pregnancies and healthy children comes to light in

19 See also David Frankfurter, “Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze,” p. 217. 20 She notes that the technology that allowed people to know beforehand ex-

ists, but it is outlawed. Abortion is also forbidden; all pregnancies must be carried to term (HT, p. 112).

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the apocalypse of 4 Ezra, and in one particular vision, it becomes clear that concern for the fate of the child supersedes that of the mother, who is expendable as long as the child has been born. In 4 Ezra 3:1–4:43, an angel, Uriel, mediates and narrates visions for Ezra, the visionary. He explains that the impatient souls of the righteous are housed in the womb of creation, and labor pains and other signs of imminent parturition are good news for them, even though the people (righteous or not) still living on earth may see the manifestation of these “labor pains” as frightening phenomena. Uriel’s narrations of apocalyptic pregnancy and childbirth create contradictory expectations for the end times. On earth, signs of the end include premature birth (4 Ezra 6:21) and monstrous birth (4 Ezra 5:8) along with a variety of other terrible signs; these signs oppose the positive expectations Uriel associates with eschatological pregnancy and birth. The negative signs foreshadow Ezra’s vision of an anguished woman in a field (4 Ezra 9:38–10:59) later revealed to be mother Zion mourning the death of one son while simultaneously giving birth to the glorious future. These visions are complicated and nonsensical at times, and they rely heavily on images of parturition and women’s bodies to communicate the end of life on earth and the collapse of linear time. To this end, they describe women’s bodies with their natural capacity to carry children and give birth working erratically and out of order. In Gilead, the unpredictable nature of pregnancy and childbirth drive the narrative. Offred, however, is not concerned with the end of the world like the visionary Ezra. Her world has already ended several times. She remembers a time before Gilead, but that world ended slowly and gradually evolved into what it is now. She was forcibly separated from her husband and her daughter, abruptly marking a distinct break with the world she knew. As a Handmaid, Offred’s life seems to hang in the balance; she can be killed if she commits the smallest infraction against the rules of Gilead. At the end of Atwood’s book, Offred’s world comes to an end again as she is abruptly removed from the Commander’s home not knowing what is to become of her (HT, pp. 293–295). These experiences are painful and frightening, but Offred is powerless to stop it from happening. Uriel’s signs of the end provide no avenue for redress as they signify the final component of God’s plan for creation and humanity – the eschaton. In both cases,

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childbirth is an apt metaphor as the end times are painful and chaotic. Pregnant women face an unstoppable and unknowable future while the specter of death looms around them. Within 4 Ezra’s first vision (4 Ezra 3:1–5:20), Uriel instructs Ezra to ask a woman who is pregnant if she can keep the fetus within her longer than is necessary. The answer is decidedly no, and Uriel explains that the eschaton also has a definitive and predetermined end like pregnancy (4:40–42). The experience of the end times for those still living on earth, however, will not be orderly and expected; instead, it will throw humanity’s sense of time into chaos. The angel tells Ezra that “there shall be chaos also in many places, and fire shall often break out, and the wild beasts shall roam beyond their haunts, and menstruous women shall bring forth monsters…” (4 Ezra 5:8). These signs typify the chaos anticipated at the end, and these examples show clearly that the portents occurring just before the end will consist of various transgressions of boundaries. Uriel’s description of monstrous birth fits this category in two ways: first, birth must always violate the boundaries of the female body to allow the fetus to exit the womb and separate the body mother from the body of the child; and second, “monstrosity” violates the culturally constructed boundaries of normalcy. According to descriptions of birth omens in Livy and Julius Obsequens, “monsters” born to human women were often intersex children (incertus infans; duplici obsceno), but examples of other abnormalities including extra limbs and interspecies combinations (a child born with the head of an elephant or a lamb with a pigs head) are also described.21 It is difficult to know exactly what Uriel means by the term monsters (monstura) because he does not elaborate.22 Etymologically, Garland and Engles note that the term (monstrum) comes from the Latin

See Livy, History of Rome, 27.11.1–6; 31.12.6–8. Julius Obsequens, A Book of Prodigies, p. 25. 22 See David Engels, “Monstrum, Greek and Roman,” pp. 4584–85; Bert Gevaert and Christian Laes, “What’s in a Monster? Pliny the Elder, Teratology and Bodily Disability”, pp. 212–17. 21

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verb monere meaning to warn, referring to their use as a type of prodigy.23 These strange births were viewed as indications that the entire order and organization of the world was going wrong. Monstrous birth exploits the already penetrable and violable bodies of women and emphasizes their striking lack of control over both the mysterious process of generation happening within their bodies and the results. As creation comes to an end, women’s bodies will be sites of violation and transgression in that they will be more boundless than is already considered typical. Monstrous births, and other signs involving human births are an indication that the typical notions of time, space, and family that form the boundaries of everyday life will begin to dissolve into chaos at the end of the age.24 The bonds between mother and child become meaningless. While birth defects are a concern in Gilead, Janine’s child appears to be healthy.25 As soon as Janine (Ofwarren) gives birth, her child is “ceremoniously” placed in the arms of the commander’s Wife. Offred elaborates on the scene, “The wives from downstairs are crowding in now, pushing among us, pushing us aside… they cluster around the bed, the mother and child, cooing and congratulating” (HT, p. 126). The Handmaids, now pushed to the perimeter of the room block Janine’s view of her baby as she continues to labor for the after birth. Janine’s story here is a rather sad one; she, the biological mother, finds herself cast off and pushed to the side in favor of the child she bore. It’s the first of many symbolic gestures that signal her imminent removal from the house and from the life of her baby. In apocalyptic tales of childbirth, the mothers are similarly pushed to the perimeters of the narrative after they give birth, and their fate sometimes remains untold as in Revelation, but in 4 Ezra, the fate of the mother is death. 23 David Engels, “Monstrum, Greek and Roman,” pp. 4584–85; Garland, Eye

of the Beholder, p. 67; Raphael, “Monsters and the Crippled Cosmos,” pp. 285–86, 285 n. 27. See also Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, p. 2, and Stone, Fourth Ezra, p. 112. 24 The boundaries of women’s bodies seem to have dissolved, and they menstruate, conceive, and give birth to monsters that require no period of gestation all at once. See Iricinschi, “Interroga,” p. 758. 25 Later, Offred learns from her shopping partner Ofglen that, “It was no good you know… it was a shredder after all. She means Janine’s baby, the baby that passed through Janine on its way to somewhere else” (HT, p. 214).

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Atwood seems to acknowledge the looming specter of death the Handmaids face in various ways. Offred makes casual references to Janine’s pregnancy saying, “Now that she’s the carrier of life, she is closer to death” (HT, p. 26). Offred notes the siren on the vehicle that comes to pick her up when Janine goes into labor. She writes, “The siren goes on and on. That used to be the sound of death, for ambulances or fires. Possibly it will be the sound of death today also. We will soon know” (HT, p. 112). She never mentions whose life is at stake; it could be the mother, the child, or both, but it is also the life of humanity in general as reproduction fails to maintain the population. In Ezra’s fourth vision (4 Ezra 9:38–10:59), Ezra meets a distraught woman mourning the death of her newly married son in a field just outside the city where she lived. Ezra berates the woman for her excessive mourning, and eventually the bereaved woman screams and the earth shakes around her as she miraculously transforms into a city. This vision is a firsthand view of the transformative effects of the eschaton, and while it bewilders the character Ezra, this apocalyptic vision also convinces him that God has not abandoned Israel and God will eventually intervene on behalf of God’s people.26 Frances Flannery interprets this vision as a birth event, and Ezra’s position as witness to the transformation of the woman in the field finally provides him with some hope after Uriel comes to his aid and interprets it. This vision uses childbearing imagery to portray destruction in terms of painful labor and birth and redemption in terms of the newborn child, but the maternal body seems fully destroyed in the process. The text reads: While I was talking to her, behold, her face suddenly shone exceedingly and her countenance flashed like lightening, so that I was too frightened to approach her, and my heart was terrified. While I was wondering what this meant, behold, she suddenly uttered a loud and fearful cry, so that the earth shook at the sound. And I looked, and behold, the woman was no longer visible to

See Stone, Fourth Ezra, pp. 31–33 and pp. 326–327; Hogan, Theologies in Conflict, pp. 40, 161.

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ALEXIS FELDER BOYER me, but there was an established city, and a place of huge foundations showed itself (4 Ezra 10:22–27a).

He watches as, “this marvelous City comes from, and indeed is borne from, Mother Earth fairly literally (10.7, 25).”27 Reading from the Syriac version, Flannery translates this verse in such a way that it even more clearly connects to images of childbirth. She translates verse 26 to say, “She screamed in a high voice, and there was immense writhing/pain [as in childbirth], and all of the earth was quaking.”28 This birth/transformation moves beyond the pain and anguish of childbirth with a vision of a beautiful, renewed city as the child. The body of the mourning woman forms an apocalyptic bridge that connects the emotionally and physically painful human experiences of loss and labor with the heavily anticipated cosmic parturition that will bring about redemption. This vision puts on vivid display a physical post-natal redemption for Israel. The bodily form of the mourning woman and the concerns she expresses locate her firmly within the realm of humanity, but her transformative childbirth experience connects her to Uriel’s eschatological timeline. Like the woman clothed with the sun in Revelation 12, this vision-woman is in two places at once. The renewed city she gives birth to indicates that there is a future for Israel, though the fact that this birth produced a city implies that the future is not exactly in line with Ezra’s expectations. The apocalyptic birth produces something wholly new and different completely separated from the bodily realm of the earthly maternal figure. For Ezra, witnessing the birth is too much to bear, and he passes out. The earth or creation accepts the transformation (she has no choice), and while the loud cry and writhing/shaking indicate that she is experiencing pain, the experience of the earth is left mostly to the

27 See Flannery, “Go, Ask,” 249. The emphasis implied by the italics is original to Flannery’s article. See also Luiza Sutter Rehmann, Geh, Frage die Gebärerin, pp. 187–188. 28 Flannery, “Go, Ask,” p. 251.

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imagination.29 Unlike the woman clothed with the sun, however, nothing comes to her rescue, and her body fails. She does not survive the ordeal. The effect of the birth event on Ezra and Uriel is hope and joy; the only perspective left out of the narrative is that of the woman who seems to have been completely obliterated, leaving only the city/child to be viewed and admired in her place. This vision woman, like Janine, experiences a painful and complicated childbirth only to find herself pushed aside to the margins of the narrative. The child takes center stage, but the mother is not acknowledged. The maternal body carries the promise of the future, but she bears the burden of destruction and does not live to see the future she created in her body.

CONCLUSION These brief examples draw out distinct points of connection between the world Atwood creates in The Handmaid’s Tale and images of and concepts concerning pregnant and parturient women in biblical and extra-biblical apocalyptic narratives. The examples from Revelation and 4 Ezra considered here suggest that the fantasy women envisioned by male apocalyptic authors were treated as detached and disposable characters. These characters are important only when pregnant or giving birth, and even then the child is the focal point of the story and the locus of hope. The authors of eschatological apocalyptic literature, like the Gilead elite, used the reproductive bodies of women to create a future for themselves and their followers, but the pregnant and parturient bodies of the women they described have no future of their own. The images and characters these authors conjure are more than tropes and narrative tools; they are realistic, unlike the apocalyptic and dystopian worlds they occupy. Reproductive bodies are the meaningful and culturally fraught foundations upon which both Atwood and authors of apocalyptic eschatology built their alternative worlds. Pregnant bodies provide the familiar entry point into unbelievable scenes filled with red cloaks and elite Commanders, or dragons and clothing made of sunlight. The pregnant bodies of women make these stories

These imaginative gaps, however, have already been filled in elsewhere in the text through the dialogues where Ezra and Uriel addressed and describe the anxiety of waiting for labor to begin, the pain of childbirth, and the potential danger for mother and child.

29

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compelling, but the worlds built around them are unlikely enough to allow readers to feel safe and distanced from the violence and the pain of those worlds. This critical distance does not force the unwilling reader to interact with these images or characters in a meaningful way if they find them uncomfortable or unrelatable. At the end of Offred’s account, Atwood flashes forward to a scholastic conference where the authenticity and veracity of Offred’s account is called into question. Her account is contextualized; her identity and the identities of the people in her story are subjected to rigorous scrutiny in effort to either confirm or deny the “truth” of her experiences. These probing questions have been asked of biblical texts for centuries, and they can offer worthwhile insight into the world in which the text was produced. In the case of the woman clothed with the sun, however, efforts to confirm her identity and contextualize her character within the larger narrative structure seem to undermine her harrowing experiences and diminish their affective potential. It is disappointing, but there is no redemption for Offred or for the women in these examples of apocalyptic literature. Their stories are present but too often ignored. We never find out what really happens to Offred, to the woman clothed with the sun, and to Ezra’s mourning woman in the field. We never even get to know their names, but even if there is no future for these characters perhaps we can open ourselves to the horror of their stories and finally offer them some recognition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. Loeb Classical Library 366. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 2017. Carson, Anne. “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire.” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, 137–143. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Dean-Jones, Lesley. Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Flannery, Frances. “‘Go, Ask a Woman’s Womb’: Birth and the Maternal Body as Sources of Revelation and Wisdom in 4 Ezra.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 21, no. 3 (2012): 243– 258. Engels, David. “Monstrum, Greek and Roman.” In The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, edited by Roger Bagnall, et al., 4584–4585. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Flemming, Rebecca. Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ―. “The invention of infertility in the classical Greek world: medicine, divinity, and gender.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87 no. 4 (2013): 565–90. Frankfurter, David. “Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 17, no. 2 (2009): 215–245. Frilingos, Christopher. Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Galen, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, vol. 2, trans. Margaret Tallmadge May. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968. Garland, Robert. The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Gevaert, Bert and Christian Laes. “What’s in a Monster? Pliny the Elder, Teratology and Bodily Disability.” In Disabilities in Roman Antiquity: Disparate Bodies, a Capite Ad Calcem, edited by C. F. Goodey Christian, and Martha L. Rose, 211–230. Boston: Brill, 2013. Hanson, Ann Ellis. “Hippocrates: ‘Diseases of Women 1,’” Signs 1, no. 2 (1975): 567–584. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

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Hippocrates. Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrates. Edited and Translated by Emile Littré. Paris: Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine, 2003. Hogan, Karina. Theologies in Conflict in 4 Ezra: Wisdom, Debate, and Apocalyptic Solution. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Iricinschi, Eduard. “Interroga Matricem Mulieris: The Secret Life of the Womb in 4 Ezra and Sethian Cosmology.” In Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Peter Schäfer, Raʻanan S. Boustan, and Alex Ramos, 751–770. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013. King, Helen. Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. London: Routledge, 1998. Knust, Jennifer. Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Livy. History of Rome, Volume VII: Books 26–27. Translated by Frank Gardner Moore. Loeb Classical Library 367. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. Livy, Julius Obsequens. History of Rome, Volume XIV: Summaries. Fragments. Julius Obsequens. General Index. Translated by Alfred C. Schlesinger. Index by Russel M. Geer. Loeb Classical Library 404. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Raphael, Rebecca. “Monsters and the Crippled Cosmos: Construction of the Other in Fourth Ezra.” In The “Other” in Second Temple Judaism: Essays in Honor of John J. Collins, edited by John J. Collins, and Daniel C. Harlow, 279–301. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2011. Rehmann, Luzia Sutter. Geh, frage die Gebärerin! Feministich-befreiungstheologische Untersuchungen des Gebärmotivs in der Apokalyptik. Gütersloh: Gutersloher Verlagshaus, 1995. Stone, Michael E. Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1990.

7. “YOU SHOULD NOT TAKE BATHS OUTSIDE IN THE GARDEN”: ALIAS GRACE, THE MALE GAZE, AND SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS PETER J. SABO A nude woman lying on a bed as she disdainfully ignores the flowers presented to her by a black servant – this describes Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863) (Fig. 1). Its exhibition in 1865 caused public controversy – not because of the nudity, nor the presence of the maid, but because of the woman’s confrontational gaze and her presentation as a prostitute.1 The subject looks directly at her viewers, defiantly making them conscious of their own gaze and their imaginative presence in the room. Margaret Atwood shows interest in such gazes in her work. The gaze is the focus, for instance, of her appropriately titled Bildgedicht (poem on a painting) “Manet’s Olympia.”2 Atwood begins by drawing attention to the “hardly languor” position of the woman and her body that is on offer, but then ends – just like Olympia – by directly addressing the viewer: There’s someone else in this room. You, Monsieur Voyeur. As for that object of yours 1 For

a brief overview of the controversy surrounding the painting, see Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, pp. 168–72. 2 Atwood, Morning in the Burned House, pp. 24–25.

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The poem thus makes explicit what the viewer actually is: a voyeur. The title of “Monsieur,” moreover, points to the male-oriented perspective of the painting, something that is further highlighted by the euphemistically mentioned “object of yours.” Atwood is playing with the tension between the male gaze4 of the painting, which encourages the voyeuristic viewpoint (and presents the feminine as a passive object of male fantasy), and the confrontational gaze of the subject, which potentially disturbs the pleasure of the male gaze (and presents the subject as an active woman in control of her sexuality). This suggests that even within the frame of a male dominated perspective, there is the potential for defiance and opposition.5

3 Ibid., p. 25.

The term “male gaze” entered into the academic lexicon from Laura Mulvey’s seminal article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” From Mulvey’s basic premise, scholars have considered several other factors – such as racial, queer perspectives, or the like (see the footnote below) – that problematize any monolithic understanding of the male gaze. For further reading, see Bloom, Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture: Studies in Erotic Epistemology. 5 Of course, there is another perspective in this painting that Atwood interestingly does not discuss in the poem: the gaze of the black woman. Scholars have pointed out the irony that while the white woman’s gaze is often viewed as a pinnacle of defiance toward patriarchy, the oppositional gaze of the maid is ignored. Lorraine O’Grady thus speaks of how the black servant almost disappears into the background, thereby functioning within the West’s construction of not-white women as not-to-be-seen. Only the white body is presented as an object of voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze, and this is highlighted by the black woman’s gaze also being directed toward that of the white woman (see O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity”). Indeed, Manet’s painting, and interpretations of it, are evidence of how no gaze is singular in perspective and the female body is not a unitary sign. See also the important work of bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze”. 4

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It is in this scene, moreover, that Atwood offers a deeply layered ekphrasis of a painting of Susanna and the elders.6 This ekphrasis relates to how the salacious voyeurism of the biblical story provides a transition to its pornographic presentations in painterly tradition. I will similarly transition from intertextuality to intermediality,7 examining how certain paintings of the Susanna story (since the novel does not make clear exactly which painting it is) connect to Alias Grace. Each painting tells a different story, presents a different Susanna, and this corresponds to the patchwork narrative of Alias Grace and the different presentations of Grace within the novel. The first two paintings I analyze, by Ludovico Carracci and Tintoretto, portray Susanna in an explicitly sensual way; they thus elicit discussion of how the male gaze not only presents Susanna and Grace as “sights” of visual pleasure but also makes them into active seductresses to be blamed for the temptation they pose. The next two paintings, by Rembrandt and Artemisia Gentileschi, similarly depict a nude Susanna but unsettle the voyeuristic theme and call into question what and how the viewer sees. The order of paintings I have chosen, therefore, offers a progressive resistance to the dominance of the male gaze. Gentileschi’s painting is of particular importance in this regard, given its relation to tragic events in her own life. These tragic events relate to the final painting I will analyze: a work by the modern artist Kathleen Gilje that underpaints Gentileschi’s piece in order to highlight further the anguish and struggle of Susanna. The paintings of Gentileschi and Gilje thus draw attention to the way that Atwood confronts the male gaze in Alias Grace. Narrated primarily by Grace herself, Alias Grace offers a voice and perspective to a character subject to voyeurism that Susanna is denied in both the biblical story and most of her presentations in painting.

For a general survey of the importance of painting in Atwood’s work, see Cooke, The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje, pp. 145–75. 7 Intermediality refers to the relations between two media, in this case between writing and image, textual and visual representation. 6

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KNOWING THE BIBLE BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS: SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS IN ALIAS GRACE The central scene in Alias Grace in which the story of Susanna and the Elders appears is set in the bedroom of Thomas Kinnear, Grace’s master. Nancy Montgomery, Grace’s fellow servant and (as Grace comes to realize) Mr. Kinnear’s paramour, is condescendingly explaining how to tidy up things, and to take Nancy’s mind off her fidgeting, Grace inquires about the picture on the wall “of a young lady taking a bath, in a garden…and several old men with beards peering at her from behind the bushes” (AG, p. 266). Nancy replies that the painting is about the biblical story of Susanna, but Grace, an Irish Protestant, claims: “I knew my Bible backwards and forwards – which was not far from the truth – and…this was not one of the stories in it” (AG, p. 266). Mr. Kinnear enters the room in the middle of this debate and is interested to be a part of this “theological” discussion between his two house maids. He explains that the story is from the Apocrypha, “a book where they’d put all the stories from Biblical times that they decided should not go into the Bible” (AG, p. 267). Grace is then perplexed as to why, if the Bible were written by God, certain books would be included and others would not. Mr. Kinnear remarks that though perhaps the Bible was written by God, “it was written down by men; which was a little different” (AG, p. 267), leading Grace to interpret God’s speaking to the biblical writers in light of her own experiencing of hearing voices. After this, Mr. Kinnear proceeds to summarize the story of Susanna to Grace: He asked if I knew the story of Susannah, and I said no; and he said she was a young lady who had been falsely accused of sinning with a young man, by some old men, because she refused to commit the very same sin with them; and she would have been executed and stoned to death; but luckily she had a clever lawyer, who was able to prove that the old men had been lying, by inducing them to give contradictory evidence. Then he said what did I think the moral of it was? And I said that the moral was, that you should not take baths outside in the garden; and he laughed, and said that he thought the moral was that you needed a clever lawyer. And he said to Nancy, This girl is no simpleton after all; by which I guessed she had been telling him that I was one. And Nancy looked daggers at me. (AG, p. 268)

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Mr. Kinnear gets the main story right but leaves out some important details. The “sin” of which Susanna is accused, for instance, is fornication (Sus 1:34–41), and what the two old men (commonly referred to as the “elders”) threaten Susanna with is rape and extortion. This threat originates in their lecherous spying on Susanna during her daily walks in the garden (Sus 7–14). One day, when Susanna intends to bathe outside, the elders come out from their hiding and demand that she satisfy their lust, threatening to accuse her of betraying her husband with a younger lover (Sus 19–21). Susanna refuses to comply and the elders bring her to trial. This is when the “clever lawyer,” a young Daniel, comes to the rescue. He separates the two elders, and during the interrogation shows that they give contradictory evidence (Sus 44–59). Susanna is saved and the elders are put to death (Sus 60–64). One can easily see parallels in this story with that of Grace. Like Susanna, Grace is accused of a crime and brought to trial; moreover, both women have lawyers (of a sort) who save them from the punishment of death (in Grace’s case, however, the question of her innocence is never resolved). What the stories also share is the pervasive power of the male gaze; Grace’s and Susanna’s stories are dictated by the patriarchal systems to which they are subjected. In the biblical story, Susanna’s daily garden walks only become relevant to the plot when she becomes an object of the elders’ surveillance. The reiteration of verbs of perception throughout the opening scene – as in the comment that the elders “day after day…watched eagerly to see her” (Sus 12)8 – points to the centrality of their gaze in the progression of the story. Even when Susanna appears on trial with a veil, “the scoundrels ordered her to be unveiled, so that they might feast their eyes on her beauty” (Sus 32). As Jennifer Glancy observes, “the story is focused on the mechanics of the gaze: who sees whom, who controls the gaze, determines the outcome of the story. The consistent and exclusive object of the gaze is Susanna, thereby representing femininity as ‘to-be-looked-atness.’”9 In contrast, the elders seek to keep themselves hidden. They want to see but not be seen. The text highlights this by twice stating their attempts to remain hidden (Sus 16, 18) and by noting their shame

Unless otherwise noted, biblical translations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). 9 Glancy, “The Accused: Susanna and her Readers,” p. 293. 8

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to disclose their lustful desire to each other when they were separately watching Susanna earlier in the story (Sus 10–12). In this way, they display the link between the male gaze and voyeurism, as they reveal the desire to gaze upon the object as if invisible, without intrusion or consequence.10 The parallels between these two stories add more depth to the way that Grace, Nancy, and Mr. Kinnear discuss the story. There is important metacommentary in the ekphrasis of the painting that Atwood offers. Consider, for example, the different interpretations of the story by Mr. Kinnear and Grace. Mr. Kinnear focuses on the deliverance of Daniel, the male hero so to speak, and pays little attention to the plight of Susanna. Even his euphemistic mention of the action of the elders as a “sin” could be interpreted as evidence of his androcentric (and misogynistic) perspective, given that he follows a long line of (male) scholarship that softens the elders’ actions as “attempted seduction” (or something of the like) instead of “rape attempt.”11 Grace, on the other hand, focuses on the voyeuristic aspect of the story, the unsettling idea of being secretly watched. Mr. Kinnear’s cavalier response of laughter is thus further telling, as he does not seriously consider things from Grace’s perspective – just as nobody asks Susanna (when she is on trial) to give her own version of what happened in the garden (see Sus 34–41). Another aspect of the scene’s metacommentary, as Sandra Carroll observes, is how “the engraving engenders subconscious reactions 10 Mieke Bal nicely summarizes this connection: “The position of the outsider

who can look without being seen himself, turns looking into spying. The position has the comfort of invulnerability” (“The Elders and Susanna,” 5–6). 11 See Glancy, “The Accused,” pp. 297–99. For Glancy, this is the inevitable result when readers adopt the masculine viewpoint in which the story is framed. Noting how the elders’ gaze persistently shapes the story’s perspective, she writes: “The story’s emphasis on masculine perception of feminine beauty as a device to explain motivation and plot remains a successful storytelling convention because modern readers still recognize the codes that posit looking and being looked at as gendered activities” (p. 297). It is rather telling, therefore, when scholars refer to the elders as failed “suitors,” or their coercion as simply an “offer” (p. 298).

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from the on-lookers…that tell us something about the states of mind and the secret thoughts of the novel’s characters.”12 There is a sting to Grace’s interpretation of the painting behind the mask of humor and politeness. She is condemning, after all, the actions of those like the elders who prey on women taking baths outside. It speaks to the duplicity of Grace, how she often speaks one thing but means another (or has layers of meaning to what she says). Mr. Kinnear’s laughter is more ambiguous when considered in this light (perhaps it is a nervous laughter), for he certainly senses that Grace is more intelligent than she is letting on. The play with secrecy in this scene relates to the declared status of the Susanna story as apocryphal. This is a story that Grace should know, but she does not – true to the etymology of the term apocrypha, therefore, it is a story that is “secret” or “hidden away.”13 The construction of the Bible – with its gaps, multi-layered narrative, and secret books – thus becomes a metaphor to the way that Grace carefully constructs her own apocryphal story in Alias Grace. Indeed, Grace’s reflection at the very end of the novel, in which she echoes this scene and reminisces on the nature of storytelling, makes this connection more explicit: “the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like all things men write down, such as the newspaper, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong” (AG, p. 557). It is interesting though that Grace blames the wrong details on men in particular, as she is selective in her own narration (to both Dr. Jordan and the reader). Right after this, in fact, she admits that what she offers is “not the approved reading” (AG, p. 12 Carroll, “Natural Born Quilter: Framing Grace Marks in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” p. 217. 13 There is perhaps then an interesting connection between the story’s apocryphal status and the major theme of God’s pervasive sight contained within it. For the entire story rests on the idea that God does in fact see the hidden/apocryphal deeds of humans and (if called by prayer) may distribute justice accordingly. During her trial, Susanna prays: “O eternal God, you know what is secret and are aware of all things before they come to be” (Sus 42). Her prayer relies on the idea of bringing secrecy to light, exposing the actions of those who attempt to hide their sin like the elders.

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557).14 Thus, just as Mr. Kinnear notes the wisdom of the biblical authors to follow God’s voice and omit certain books from the canon, so does Grace refrain from freely expressing all her thoughts, or even revealing whether she speaks in her own voice or the voices she hears in her head.

VOYEURISM AND T HE PORNOGRAPHIC FLAVOR : ALIAS GRACE AND PAINTINGS OF SUSANNA Paintings of Susanna, certainly those from the time of the Italian Renaissance onward, focus almost exclusively on the moment of her bathing while the elders watch.15 Readers of the biblical text may point out a notable contrast with this, however: Susanna never actually ends up bathing, but only speaks of her intention to do so. It is thus apparent that painters who depict Susanna in this way have something else in mind besides the moral and theological aims of the biblical text (or are at least following a tradition that deviates from the source material). The ironic result is that Susanna, the model of chastity in her own story, has become a sexualized object in painting, at times even a

14 It is often observed how Alias Grace is a patchwork narrative based on the quilting metaphor that structures the book (see Wilson, “Quilting as Narrative Art: Metafictional Construction in Alias Grace”). Playing on this is the theme of weaving as a feminine art (whether it be threads or words). In a passage in which Dr. Jordan and Reverend Verringer are discussing Susan Moodie’s portrayal of Grace the following comment is made: “…Mrs. Moodie is a literary lady, and like all such, and indeed like the sex in general, she is inclined to –” “Embroider” says Simon (AG, p. 229). 15 Early portrayals of Susanna, by contrast, presented her as a model of female virtue, often choosing her appearance in court as the moment to depict. See Smith, “Inventing Marital Chastity: The Iconography of Susanna and the Elders in Early Christian Art”; Bohn, “Rape and the Gendered Gaze: Susanna and the Elders in Early Modern Bologna.” These early references, moreover, either explicitly or implicitly depicted Daniel, whereas most Renaissance paintings, by contrast, completely omit Daniel by focusing on the scene of voyeurism in which he is not yet present. See Clanton, The Good, the Bold, and the Beautiful: The Story of Susanna and Its Renaissance Interpretations.

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willing participant in the voyeuristic act. Nevertheless, I would agree with Mieke Bal that “the Susanna story holds the germs of the pornographic flavor which later became its sole motivation in the painterly tradition.”16 The allure of Susanna’s beauty and the thrill of voyeurism in the biblical story thus offer an entryway into the obsession over these things in the visual medium. Grace’s interpretation of the story (that one should not take baths outside), likewise speaks to its sensual and scopophilic aspects. And this is a fair reading, given that everything she knows about the story is from Mr. Kinnear’s summary and the painting in his bedroom. It is thus worthwhile to discuss exactly which, or whose, painting of Susanna and the Elders is on Mr. Kinnear’s wall. The problem with this, however, is that the description in the novel is too sparse in detail to determine a particular painting or painter (and perhaps Atwood is being purposefully ambiguous).17 In what follows, I take advantage of this lack of definiteness to explore several different famous paintings of Susanna. I look at the different perspectives of each painting as imaginative lenses that help one reflect on the multiple perspectives on Grace and her respective scopohilic gazers. Let us suppose, for example, that the painting in Mr. Kinnear’s bedroom is Ludovico Carracci’s c.1598 Susanna and the Elders (Fig. 2). It depicts a vividly tense moment in which Susanna is being attacked by the two elders. One of the men leans over her body and grasps her thigh while the other pulls her hand away, as if to prevent her resistance. Susanna’s twisted posture expresses struggle against the elders’ aggression. Furthering this interpretation is Susanna’s upward gaze. This references the prayer that she offers during her trial – “through her tears she looked up toward Heaven, for her heart trusted in the Lord” (Sus 35) – and thereby emphasizes her piety. Moreover, it explicitly contrasts with the elders, who spy on Susanna and thus

16 Bal, “The Elders and Susanna,” p. 9. 17 Carroll asserts that the closest painting to the one described in Alias

Grace is Leandro Bassano’s Susanna and the Two Elders (c. 1590–1600), though even Bassano’s painting does not contain all the details of Atwood’s ekphrasis (“Natural Born Quilter,” p. 216, n.25).

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tradition of Renaissance paintings of Susanna, one should remember that there is nothing binding the painter to present her in this way (particularly since she is never described as being nude or as actually bathing in the biblical text).19 Susanna’s nudity, moreover, is emphasized by the chiaroscuro of the painting. Her body is illuminated and in a central position, contrasted with the fully garbed elders and the darkness extending outward from her body. Babette Bohn further notes that Susanna’s pose in this painting is a quotation of Michelangelo’s Eve in the famous Temptation and Expulsion (1508–12) scenes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.20 On the one hand, this parallel could emphasize Susanna’s piety, for whereas the serpent was able to “seduce” Eve in the garden, the elders were unsuccessful in their “seduction” of Susanna in her garden. 21 On the other hand, the association with Eve implicitly presents Susanna as a seductress. Echoing the reclined with bent legs posture of Michelangelo’s Eve – a position considered erotic since antiquity – Susanna tempts with her suggestive sexuality. Carracci’s painting, therefore, presents a duplicitous Susanna, simultaneously pious and teasingly seductive. It thus speaks to the similarly duplicitous presentation of Grace in Alias Grace. She oscillates between being an innocent victim (as in Revered Verringer’s 19 David Gunn notes how the shift to a nude Susanna contrasts with the evo-

lution of depictions of Bathsheba in the sixteenth century. That is, while Susanna starts losing her clothes, Bathsheba starts putting hers on. See Gunn, “Bathsheba Goes Bathing in Hollywood,” pp. 81–83. On one level, therefore, Carracci is simply adhering to the tradition of a nude Susanna that he has inherited, and, as scholars like Bohn point out, Carracci’s painting actually departs from the more erotic depictions of Susanna (“Rape and the Gendered Gaze,” pp. 268–70). Nevertheless, there is obvious tension in the painting between Susanna’s piety and her provocative posture. 20 Bohn, “Rape and the Gendered Gaze,” pp. 270–71. 21 For further elaboration on reading Susanna and Eve together, see Brooke, “Susanna and Paradise Regained.” For further discussion of Susanna being depicted like Eve in paintings, see Bohn, “Rape and the Gendered Gaze,” p. 272. Mary Garrard, however, rightly observes that there is an extraordinary underlying assumption in presenting Susanna as a second Eve. The assumption is that Susanna’s issue was not extortion and the threat of rape, but temptation, as if she “should have found the pair of old lechers as tempting as they found her!” (“Artemisia and Susanna,” p. 152).

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view), guilty as sin (as in her lawyer Kenneth MacKenzie’s view), or impenetrably mysterious and sexually alluring (as in Dr. Jordan’s view). In the climactic hypnotism scene near the end of the novel, moreover, Grace is revealed to be potentially double herself. That is, the spirit of Mary Whitney may possess her – or, as Dr. Jordan sees it, Grace may suffer from a case of “dédoublement” in which the subject contains two personality halves that have no knowledge of each other (AG, p. 490). The multiple versions of Grace thus correspond to the multiple perceptions and projections of those around her. She is constantly under surveillance and observation, whether it be from the journalists and lawyers at her trial, the guards at the prison, the various members on the committee to pardon her (such as Reverend Verringer and the Governor’s wife), or her many doctors. Dr. Jordan is the most significant of these characters who observe and seek to understand Grace. He is described as someone who has “dissected a good many women” while a medical student (AG, p. 89); “[h]e has been where they could never go, seen what they could never see; has opened up women’s bodies, and peered inside” (AG, p. 99). There is thus a voyeuristic aspect to Dr. Jordan, and he exploits this with his female clients. In one scene, for instance, he echoes the elders in the Susanna story, as he discreetly watches Grace while she is sewing and is drawn to the smell of her skin, leading him to wonder “how often the female prisoners are allowed to bathe” (AG, p. 109).22 And as she wets the end of the needle with her mouth, Dr. Jordan is drawn further into his fantasy, “feeling as if he was watching her undress through a chink in the wall; as if she was washing herself with her tongue, like a cat” (AG, p. 110).23 In a separate passage, Grace complains about bath day in the prison and how “there is some talk of making us bathe naked…but I think it an immodest idea” (AG, p. 460). And as if the baths themselves are not bad enough, “there’s always a Matron watching” (AG, p. 460). 23 Dr. Jordan’s voyeurism is not limited to his interactions with Grace. Disturbingly, he often plays a “private mental game with various women he encounters,” by imagining them as prostitutes (AG, p. 69). And like Grace, the Governor’s daughter Lydia is a constant object of his sexual fantasies. While at the Governor’s house, he notices how Lydia’s body “has burst into spring 22

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Like Susanna and Eve, therefore, Grace becomes a sexualized object, a primary focus of the male gaze. Part of the fascination she holds for men is her ambiguous position, as she is either a wronged innocent (who needs to be rescued) or a manipulative deceiver (from whom men need to be rescued). Thus, in Dr. Jordan’s research, he discovers that almost all the men around Grace accuse her of using her feminine charms against them. Dr. Bannerling, for instance, warns him that “many older and wiser heads have been enmeshed in her toils, and you would do well to stop your ears with wax, as Ulysses made his soldiers do, to escape the sirens” (AG, p. 86). It seems the advice was, however, ineffective, for as the novel unfolds Grace becomes the object of Dr. Jordan’s own fantasies. These fantasies lead him to ignite a sexual relationship with his landlady, Mrs. Rachel Humphrey, who functions as a type of surrogate for Grace (AG, p. 424–26). Grace recognizes both the vulnerability and the power that her sexualisation brings. The death of her fellow servant-friend Mary Whitney brings her firsthand knowledge of this predicament for women. Mary’s botched abortion is the result of an affair with, and later betrayal by, the son of the household for which they both work. Mary’s death is called the “curse of Eve” (AG, p. 213), a phrase which she herself had earlier defined not to be menstruation but “having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble blamed it all on her” (AG, p. 196). Indeed, just as Susanna is compared to Eve, so does the Bible’s first woman stand as an archetype for the problems that face women, and Grace in particular, in Alias Grace. This relates not just to Grace’s sexualisation but also to her wavering status as both victim and murderer, for “as a woman, she is paradoxically bound to be both the author of original sin, like Eve, and also too delicate to have committed sin.”24 The symbol of the apple,

bloom” and thus “[he] occupies himself with undressing and then garnishing Lydia” (AG, p. 231). Such potentially sexually illicit behavior extends back to his childhood experience of being caught fondling his servant girl’s undergarments (AG, p. 224). 24 Wisker, Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction, p. 124.

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the forbidden fruit, thus frames Grace’s story.25 It begins with Grace pretending not to know that the apple is a symbol of knowledge in her first interaction with Dr. Jordan (AG, pp. 48–50) and ends with her rewriting of the biblical tale in her quilt (AG, pp. 556–58). In Grace’s interpretation, there is only one tree in the Garden of Eden and thus Eve did not bring death into the world, since people would die either way, but did remove ignorance by bringing knowledge. Grace’s association with Eve, sex, and knowledge brings us to Tintoretto’s most well-known painting of Susanna and the Elders (c.1557) (Fig. 3). 26 What is immediately striking about this work is how far it deviates from the biblical text. More so than in Carracci’s painting, Susanna dominates the frame. This time she does not gaze upward; instead, she is gazing at herself in a mirror. The elders are split up. Both spy on Susanna, but they are not as foregrounded or aggressive as they are in Carracci’s work. The arrangement of the painting thus fashions the viewer of it into a voyeuristic gaze analogous to that of the elders. All viewing lenses draw attention to Susanna’s naked (but jewelry adorned) body and the sexual temptation she exhibits. 27

25 Of course,

the Hebrew Bible does not specify what the fruit of the tree of knowledge is; however, it is most commonly imagined as an apple in the Western imagination and this is what Atwood works with here. 26 Tintoretto depicted Susanna in no less than five paintings and always highlighted the sensual possibilities of the story. Clanton thus remarks that for Tintoretto, the Susanna story appears to function simply as “a vehicle for the pornographic display of the female nude, and an increased opportunity for biblically sanctioned voyeurism” (The Good, The Bold, and The Beautiful, p. 129). 27 The jewelry and the mirror are symbols traditionally associated with depictions of Venus. Indeed, one of the reasons for the heightened sense of eroticism in Renaissance paintings of Susanna was that many artists used Venus as a model for rendering her (see Clanton, The Good, the Bold, and the Beautiful, p. 125). Note, however, that in this painting Susanna is not in the classical Venus pudica pose (in which an unclothed female keeps one hand covering her private parts) but has her hands draped over her leg.

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There is an interesting transference here, therefore, in that the painting expresses erotic attraction not primarily through the elders’ gaze but through Susanna’s body and her own erotic gaze. Her body is the cause of male desire, but she is presented as having encouraged this; and furthermore, she too partakes in the pleasurable viewing of her body. Thus, her “innocence is implicitly transformed into guilt; and she, like Eve, is fashioned into a temptress who is responsible for sin.”29 Grace too is often viewed as a temptress. Men either directly accuse her of seducing and manipulating them or they fantasize about it. Accordingly, they blame Grace for this desire, as if she is a siren luring them to their doom. Grace’s magnetism, in fact, increases with the potential danger associated with her, as evidenced by one of Dr. Jordan’s fantasies: “Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost…He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace towards him, pressing his mouth against her. Murderess. He applies it to her throat like a brand” (AG, p. 471). Grace is painfully aware of the multiple projections applied to her. She knows what Dr. Jordan “doesn’t understand yet,” namely, that “guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things others have done to you” (AG, p. 459). Two key scenes in Alias Grace that center on mirror imagery emphasize this very point.30 Near the beginning of the novel, Grace notes that she sometimes looks in the mirror when she is dusting. She admits there is a level of narcissism to this – “I look at myself in it, although I know it is vanity” (AG, p. 27) – even as the image she sees is not as flattering as she would like. The gap between her physical body and the reflection of it causes Grace to reflect on the gap between what people have written about her and who she feels herself to be. She notes that she has been described as an “inhuman female demon” but also an “innocent victim,” as “cunning and devious” but also “a good girl with a pliable nature,” as having both blue and green eyes and both auburn and brown hair, as tall but also not above average height – and she pointedly wonders how she can be all these different things at once (AG, pp. 27–28). The

29 Bohn, “Rape and the Gendered Gaze,” p. 265.

For a more thorough analysis of mirrors in Alias Grace, see Twomey’s chapter in this volume: “Mirrors of Grace: Undoing Paul in Atwood’s Alias Grace.”

30

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unspoken conclusion is that there is no consistent image of who Grace is; she is a myriad of projections. This connects to a later scene in the book in which Grace ponders why she was given her name. She supposes that it must have been after the hymn “Amazing Grace,” and recites the famous first verse about the phrase’s sweet sound, the singer’s deliverance from wretchedness, and the transition from blindness to sight. Her commentary on the song focuses on the sight imagery: I hope I was named after it. I would like to be found. I would like to see. Or to be seen. I wonder if, in the eye of God, it amounts to the same thing. As it says in the Bible, For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face. If it is face to face, there must be two looking (AG, p. 460).

Despite being the object of incessant surveillance and observation, Grace laments that she is still not seen. The biblical quote (from 1 Cor 13.2) gets it right, according to her, for there must be “two looking” in order for there to be true sight and insight. Voyeurism, by contrast, entails only one looking, as the faces of the seer and the seen do not meet. Consider again Tintoretto’s painting as an intermediality here. There is nothing but reflections and one way looking. The elders each look at Susanna from separate positions, above and below, but both gazes are unreturned as Susanna gazes at herself in the mirror. And her gaze into the mirror stands as a potent reminder of how the male gaze can be projected onto women. In another of Atwood’s works, The Robber Bride, a reflective aside from one of the female characters encompasses this idea: Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy…Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life on your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur. (RB, p. 388)

The quote echoes Berger, who speaks of the “surveyed female,” a term used to refer to how women are presented as having turned themselves

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into objects of sight.31 In these cases, the blurring between looking and being looked at reaches its peak, as there is no discernable difference between them. Rembrandt’s c.1636 painting of Susanna (Fig. 4) offers a stark contrast to Tintoretto’s, and perhaps offers a way to confront the ubiquity of the male gaze, or at least unsettle the voyeur’s unchecked pleasure. It is notable, above all, for Susanna’s direct gaze out of the frame (like Manet’s Olympia). Eric Sluijter imagines that this Susanna looks as if she has just heard a twig snap. She starts in fear and begins to rise from a sitting position. Her weight is already on her feet, which emphasizes the agitated suddenness of her reaction and gives a suggestion of wavering unbalance… In the process she steps on her slipper; thus Rembrandt stressed the abrupt clumsiness of her spontaneous movement, which is at the same time brilliantly used as a metaphoric motif referring to her chasteness. Slightly turning away her upper body from the onlooker, trying to hide her secret parts, her large dark eyes look intensely at the viewer. It is the viewer she confronts as the intruder who made her start in fear.32

This connects to the second notable feature of the painting: the nearly complete absence of the elders. There is only one elder in the painting, and he is almost completely camouflaged into the foliage behind Susanna. The viewer of the work fills this absence, as if to function as the second elder. And it is the viewer’s gaze – that of the “Monsieur Voyeur” as Atwood would say – to which Susanna reacts and from which she attempts to conceal her body. It is as if she calls for you to turn away, perhaps even to help. To take pleasure in this voyeuristic gaze would thus entail a level of sadism, as the viewer would have to enjoy terror, confusion, and domination in order to find this Susanna sexually appealing. 33

31 Berger, Ways

of Seeing, p. 47. Sluijter, “Rembrandt’s Early Paintings of the Female Nude: Andromeda and Susanna” pp. 41–2. 33 See Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, pp. 167–71. 32

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a picture of a woman without any clothes on, on a sofa, seen from the back and looking over her shoulder, with a sort of turban on her head and holding a peacock-feather fan. Peacock feathers inside the house are bad luck, as everyone knows. These were only in a picture, but I would never have allowed them in any house of mine. There was another picture, also of a naked woman taking a bath, but I did not have the chance to examine it. I was a little taken aback at Mr. Kinnear having two naked women in his bedchamber, as at Mrs. Alderman Parkinson’s it was mostly landscapes or flowers (AG, p. 256).

As with Grace’s interpretation of the Susanna painting, this passage provides another richly significant ekphrasis. Her particular concern is the peacock-feather fan, given the feather’s association with bad luck when in the home. Grace does not elaborate on any specific type of bad luck; however, it is interesting to note that a common aspect of this bad luck is the superstition that peacock-feathers brought indoors will result in any unmarried female in the home ending up as an “old maid.”34 If so, perhaps this is meant to hint at Grace’s anxiety over remaining unmarried or her potential jealousy of Nancy (as Mr. Kinnear’s paramour). The next assertion – that she would have never allowed such a picture in any house of hers – would support this. For behind this statement of proprietorship, there may be a subtle revelation of “Grace’s “most private feelings…that she would like to be in Nancy Montgomery’s place and be Mr. Kinnear’s wife or lover.”35 Indeed, the very title and theme of the painting would be significant in this respect, for the odalisque is a woman in a harem. The painting could thus be a further allusion to the complex love-triangles (whether real or imagined) of the Kinnear household.

Oliver, Black Cats & Four-Leaf Clovers: The Origins of Old Wives’ Tales and Superstitions in Our Everyday Lives, p. 60. 35 Carroll, “Natural Born Quilter,” p. 215. 34

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of landscapes or flowers, Mr. Kinnear looks at paintings of naked women. Both paintings play to the male gaze, presenting their female subject as an object of sexual desire.38 In this sense, Grace does allude to the theme of voyeurism, and subtly characterizes Mr. Kinnear while doing so. He is like the elders of the Susanna story, and evidently takes pleasure in displaying and viewing paintings of nude women in the most private room in his house, as if to see without being seen. In a separate scene, in which Grace and Nancy are sleeping in Mr. Kinnear’s bed while he is away, Grace makes another comment on both paintings. As Nancy falls asleep, Grace stays awake, “brushing out my own hair, in the light of a single candle, with the naked woman in the picture looking out at me, the one who was taking the bath outdoors, and the other one with peacock feather; and they were both smiling at me, in a way I did not like” (AG, p. 376). In Grace’s mind, the voyeurism subjected to the women of the paintings is transferred onto her, as they spy on her in the dim light. Indeed, her uneasiness reflects her intuitive sense that these paintings are about voyeurism. Thus, Grace’s comments on both paintings in Mr. Kinnear’s bedroom draw attention to a certain level of resistance. In the case of La Grande Odalisque, she slyly lets Dr. Jordan know what type of a character Mr. Kinnear is. At the same time, she makes a larger point about voyeurism in general, something that might also strike at Dr. Jordan’s own voyeuristic tendencies. Similarly, the painting of Susanna causes Grace to conclude that one should not take baths outside. In other words, the story of Susanna is a precautionary tale, raising awareness of the fact that one should avoid situations in which one could be taken advantage of by the many lecherous male elders in the world. This theme of resistance is central to Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1610 painting of Susanna (Fig. 6). In this work, the sexually allusive garden setting, often accompanied by spurting fountains and lush foliage, has

38 It is interesting that the superstition around peacock feathers in the home has another possibility, one that centres around the distinctive “eyes” on a peacock’s plumage. In this variation, the feathers are ominous because they act as eyes, invading the privacy of the home. See Oliver, Black Cats & FourLeaf Clovers, p. 60.

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Garrard’s analysis of the painting also famously suggests that the reason the painting diverges so forcefully from previous depictions of Susanna is that there was a level of transference between the life of the painter and the painting. Artemisia was sexually assaulted by her tutor Agostino Tassi during the time she was working on this painting, and then eventually raped by him as well.41 Thus, Artemisia’s own story mirrors that of her chosen subject; though it is even more tragic, since Tassi’s gaze turned into not just threat and extortion, but rape. Further parallels between Susanna and Artemisia occurred in the ensuing public trial, with its conflicting testimonies and Tassi’s constant slandering of Artemisia’s character. Just as the elders projected their lust for Susanna into their accusation that she committed adultery with a young man, Tassi asserted Artemisia was sexually promiscuous and had already been raped and “deflowered” by other men. So, even though Artemisia “won” the trial in the sense that Tassi was exiled from Rome, her reputation as a potential willing participant and as a sexual libertine persisted. Even during her trial, moreover, there was no prophetic Daniel figure to save her from her from torture with thumbscrews (done in order to verify the truth of her testimony).42 41 See Garrard, “Artemisia and Susanna,” pp. 162–67. Garrard also argues that

Artemisia’s painting diverges from her inherited tradition because she was a woman: “The simple fact that Artemisia Gentileschi was female is enough to explain her uniquely sympathetic treatment of the Susanna theme” (p. 162). In reaction to this assertion, there are some worthwhile criticisms of Garrard’s argument that I should briefly mention. The issues revolve around a few central questions. Is Artemisia’s art (or any painter’s) to be interpreted as autobiographical expression? (If so, to what extent?) Is there an unchanging woman’s perspective that Artemisia displays? Has Garrard adopted too celebratory a view of Artemisia, heroizing her as an inversion of the masculinist model? For an elaboration of some of these criticisms, see Grisdela Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. For Garrard’s reaction to these criticisms, see Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity. 42 Garrard, “Artemisia and Susanna,” pp. 163–64. Garrard argues that Artemisia’s paintings on Judith beheading Holofernes (c.1610 and c.1621) – given that they were painted after the trial when she moved to Florence – reflect a

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Viewed from this lens, the focus in the painting on Susanna’s sense of despair, her defiant and pleading gesture, and the lack of erotization or innocence, all read more deeply. Kathleen Gilje’s “Susanna and the Elders, Restored, X-ray” (1998) is inspired by the shared aspects of the Susanna story and the events of Gentileschi’s life.43 Gilje added an under-layer of painting to a copy of Gentileschi’s 1610 Susanna – the effect being that the painting looks exactly like Gentileschi’s when viewed in normal light but reveals a different story when viewed in X-ray. It thus presents itself as a “restoration” piece, revealing an “original” copy underneath the final product. The X-ray image is black and white, and has another Susanna emerging, like a white specter, out of Gentileschi’s Susanna. Gilje’s Susanna screams in anguish, and holds a knife in one of her hands that is being readied to use against the attacking elders. This parallels the account that the court-reported weapon of self-defence that Gentileschi tried to use against Tassi was a knife. Susanna is thereby transformed into a violent and angry avenger, encouraging the viewer to contemplate multiple perspectives at once. The elders, too, undergo a change in Gilje’s restoration. Their violence is foregrounded, as instead of merely conspiring they are physically attacking Susanna. One pulls her head back by her hair while the other presses down on her. The result, as Bal asserts, is that Gilje’s piece “represents the violence in its actuality, proposes its revenge by putting a dagger into this woman’s hand, and raises the dilemma of repetition versus actualization, instead of resolving it in one direction or another.”44 Gentileschi’s and Gilje’s works are thus thought-provoking intermedialities on the multiple roles that Grace plays in Alias Grace. Both paintings, for instance, draw attention away from the male gaze, no longer highlighting the themes of sexuality and temptation, but fo-

less filtered response to her rape (and one could add her painting of Jael and Sisera [1620] to this as well). The knife-wielding Judith of Artemisia’s paintings, moreover, provides an interesting comparison to Kathleen Gilje’s “restoration” of Artemisia’s Susanna discussed below. 43 For an image of this painting, see Kathleen Gilje’s website: https://kathleengilje.com/artwork/321721_Susanna_and_the_Elders_Restored_X_Ray.html. See also Bal, “Grounds of Comparison,” p. 164. 44 Bal, “Grounds of Comparison,” p. 163.

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cus on the disturbing aspects of voyeurism and dominating patriarchy. Similarly, Alias Grace is an attempt to give Grace her own voice and perspective, even as it is a patchwork narrative that deconstructs any idea of an overarching master viewpoint. Thus, the novel is not just about the ways that women are misrepresented but also about how all methods of retelling history are fictive and constructed. Grace herself is split and multiple, something that adds to her sense of agency and complexity, as the novel makes the reader ask: Who is Grace? Which alias is real? Indeed, I see the “dédoublement” of Grace when I look at Gilje’s painting. That is, I see the voice and persona of Mary Whitney as the knife-wielding Susanna (paralleling Gilje’s Susanna); she is the specter emerging out of the seated Grace (paralleling Gentileschi’s Susanna). For regardless of whether Grace was pretending in the climactic hypnosis scene – that is, regardless of whether Mary Whitney’s spirit possesses her or not – it is clear that Mary Whitney is a (spectral) part of her. Gilje’s painting also recalls the debate between Nancy and Grace about whether the story of Susanna is in the Bible or not and Mr. Kinnear’s explanation that it is part of the Apocrypha. As discussed above, Atwood is not simply giving her reader a lesson on biblical canons here, but is playing with the concept of what is hidden, what lies beneath the surface of things (like the stories that Grace tells). Similarly, Gilje’s painting tells an apocryphal story, a story about what is omitted and hidden. One needs a shift of perspective, X-Ray lighting, to see the layers of revelation. And indeed, one undeniable aspect of what both the biblical story of Susanna and the majority of Renaissance paintings omit, is sustained attention paid to Susanna’s own perspective, voice, and anguish. She is also denied any confrontational gaze, any method of self-defence beyond passive resistance. The power lies with the painter, the writer, the reader, the viewer to restore it, to confront and oppose the male gaze, and to bring the elders out of the bushes and expose them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996. ―. Morning in the Burned House. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995.

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―. The Robber Bride. New York: Doubleday, 1993. Bal, Mieke. “The Elders and Susanna.” Biblical Interpretation 1.1 (1993): 1–19. ―. “Grounds of Comparison.” Pages 129–67 in The Artemisia Files. Edited by Mieke Bal. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ―. Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Belting, Hans. The Invisible Masterpiece. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Bloom, James D. Reading the Male Gaze in Literature and Culture: Studies in Erotic Epistemology. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Bohn, Babette. “Rape and the Gendered Gaze: Susanna and the Elders in Early Modern Bologna.” Biblical Interpretation 9.3 (2001): 259–86. Brooke, George J. “Susanna and Paradise Regained.” Pages 92–111 in Women in the Biblical Tradition. Edited by George J. Brooke. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1992. Carroll, Sandra. “Natural Born Quilter: Framing Grace Marks in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Pages 207–32 in Framing Women: Changing Frames of Representation from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism. Edited by Sandra Carroll et al. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003. Clanton, Dan W. The Good, the Bold, and the Beautiful: The Story of Susanna and Its Renaissance Interpretations. London: T & T Clark, 2006. Cooke, John. The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje. Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.

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Garrard, Mary. “Artemisia and Susanna.” Pages 146–71 in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. Edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. ―. Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Glancy, Jennifer. “The Accused: Susanna and her Readers.” Pages 288–302 in A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna. Edited by Athalya Brenner. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Gunn, David. “Bathsheba Goes Bathing in Hollywood: Words, Images, and Social Locations.” Pages 75–101 in Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. Edited by Alice Bach. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996. Hooks, Bell. “The Oppositional Gaze.” Pages 94–105 in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Edited by Amelia Jones. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. O’Grady, Lorraine. “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.” Pages 174–87 in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Edited by Amelia Jones. New York: Routledge, 2003. Oliver, Harry. Black Cats & Four-Leaf Clovers: The Origins of Old Wives’ Tales and Superstitions in Our Everyday Lives. New York: Penguin, 2006. Pollock, Grisdela. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999. Sluijter, Eric J. “Rembrandt’s Early Paintings of the Female Nude: Andromeda and Susanna.” Pages 31–54 in Rembrandt and His Pupils. Edited by Corel Cavalli-Bjorkman. Uddevalla, Sweden: Risbergs Tryckeri, 1993.

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Smith, Kathryn A. “Inventing Marital Chastity: The Iconography of Susanna and the Elders in Early Christian Art.” Oxford Journal of Art 16 (1993): 3–24. Wilson, Sharon Rose. “Quilting as Narrative Art: Metafictional Construction in Alias Grace.” Pages 121–34 in. Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction. Edited by Sharon Rose Wilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Wisker, Gina. Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ―. Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.

8. WRITING RE-VISION: ON MARGARET ATWOOD’S REWRITING OF CANON AS POSTSTRUCTURALIST MIDRASH ROBERT PAUL SEESENGOOD This paper will begin with Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (a re-telling of Homer’s Odyssey through the eyes of Penelope), then move toward her Handmaid’s Tale, reading both as examples of a contemporary (poststructuralist) genre Jeremy Rosen has called “minor character elaboration.”1 Both of these narratives retell myth through the eyes of women characters; the shift in protagonist reveals the ways that the mythic narratives bury women’s concerns or experiences, often using women’s bodies incidentally (via locations for sexual desire or for violence) or to advance male-centered agendas and plots. The retellings by Atwood and others both expose and invert those agendas. As they do so, contemporary “minor character elaboration” novels are telos to a long tradition of western art, literature and midrash that re-casts (literally) biblical and classical myth, a tradition, we will see, that was reinvigorated among second wave feminist critics. Often seen as a type of midrash, I argue, in the end, these novels, particularly when read as a set (where Penelopiad expands on techniques and strategies implicit in Handmaid), are better understood as a uniquely poststructuralist spin on midrash, writing that both is and is not midrashic, deconstructing both biblical text and the traditions and systems of interpretation and appropriation which surround it.

1 In Rosen, “Minor Characters Have Their Day.” Discussed further below.

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MORNING MIDRASH My nine-year-old son admires Bityah immensely. He chatters about her non-stop over breakfast as he stretches his arm across the table for the cereal, comparing her to Elasta-girl from the superhero cartoon The Incredibles and telling me stories he’s learned from other cartoons from his Hebrew school. He is a great admirer of her. Bityah is the daughter of Pharaoh, he chatters.2 Her name, he says, means “God’s Daughter” (he’s right). Bityah is the rabbis’s name for the daughter of Pharaoh who in Exodus 2:5–10 finds baby Moses in his reed basket floating in the Nile, and she adopts and raises him as if he were her own. Though she is a critical character in biblical text, very little is actually ever said about Pharaoh’s daughter, prompting the rabbis over the centuries to spin out midrashim about her. She is linked with Bithiah of 1 Chron 4:18 (itself a tricky text to interpret). In rabbinic tradition, Bityah was disgusted by her father’s idolatry (BT Megilah 13a). Seeking purification, she went to the Nile to immerse herself and wash off the stench of her family’s sin. As she did, her handmaidens remained on the riverbank, teasing her. Gabriel crushes them (BT Sotah 12b). Bityah, relieved, looks up to see a basket in the Nile. In Exodus 2:5 she sends her amatah to get the basket, a word most translate “handmaid,” yet (given that Gabriel has crushed the help) rabbinic tradition translates “her hand.” In one tradition, Bityah’s arms elongate up to sixty cubits to reach Moses (Sekhel Tov [ed. Buber], Ex. 2:46). Bityah immediately loves the child, recognizing the presence of the Shekinah resting on his face (Ex. Rabbah 1:24). She names him for his “drawing out” from the river. 3 God rewards her, 2 On Bityah in Midrash, note Franklin “Midrash on Bityah Daughter of Pharaoh” or Kadori, “Daughter of Pharaoh: Midrash and Aggadah.” 3 There are elaborate midrashim about Moses being floated in the river to thwart Pharaoh’s royal astrologers. According to one variation, Pharaoh’s soothsayers have pronounced that a great deliverer was to be born to the Jews. Seeking to stop this, Pharaoh consigned the baby boys to death by drowning in the Nile. Moses’s mother and sister float Moses in the Nile so that the stars will tell Pharaoh’s astrologers that the baby has, indeed, been cast into the river, leading them to advise Pharaoh to stop his campaign against the children (BT Sotah Ex. 1:22).

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declaring that since she has adopted another’s child as her own, God will adopt her as God’s own, fulfilling her destiny inscribed in her name (Vayikra Rabbah 1:3). In later years, Moses intervenes on Bityah’s behalf with God, sparing her from the Angel of Death in the tenth plague (Ex. Rabbah 18:3). Bityah, a convert, marries and bears Jewish sons. She is spared death and allowed, like Enoch, to enter the Garden of Eden directly (Midrash Eshet Hayil 31:15). Bityah’s stories flesh out a critical, but under-developed, character from biblical text. Exodus leaves much unclear, interested as it is with the male child (rather than with his adopted mother). But more than simply speaking to a gap in biblical narrative, Bityah’s story explores the tensions of living in-and-among non-Jews. For Medieval European Jews, exiled from Jerusalem, forced to live in ghettos, restricted from legal and economic opportunity, forbidden to intermarry, certainly, more than a few gentiles around them were anti-Jewish, Pharaoh-like, oppressing and tormenting the community. But there were others. Bityah gives a place for their stories. Like Ruth the Moabite, Rahab the Canaanite (Josh 2:1–24), Jael (Judg 4;1–5:26) and others, Bityah is a compassionate non-Jewish woman who eschews idolatry and protects and loves Jews. Her stories provide not only an element of grandeur for Moses (even a pagan can see his gifts), but speak independently to her own piety and experience. She becomes, at least from within the ideological agendas represented by-and-in the biblical text, a magical being, a tool of God, a seeker after truth who is uniquely rewarded. Her midrashim depict her as protagonist and, so,

The Midrash go on with stories of the beautiful baby Moses, hidden from court by Bityah because of his intense beauty. An overwhelmed Pharaoh can’t resist hugging the baby who exploits the intimacy to steal the crown from Pharaoh’s head and place it on his own. Pharaoh’s soothsayers are shocked and set up a test to see if the baby merely grabbed bright things or was seeking the crown; they put both hot coals and the crown before the infant. Gabriel intervenes and invisibly guides Moses’s hands to the brazier. As Moses puts the coal to his mouth, he burns both his hands and his tongue (creating his famous “slowness of speech.” Ex. Rabbah 1:26)

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transform the story of Moses’s childhood to one that speaks to the experience of marginal (for Torah-observant communities) but righteous figures.

RETHINKING HOMER Like the Rabbinic midrashim that retell the story of Moses’s childhood via attention to Bityah, a (female) protagonist who is a very secondary character in canonical text, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey that takes as its heroine and first-person narrator Homer’s wife Penelope.4 Penelope is central to Homer’s narrative, serving as a foil to other wives within Homer’s saga in particular (Helen) and the nostoi traditions in general (Clytemnestra).5 Despite this important role, however, she remains an under-developed character in Homer whose larger narrative takes a decidedly masculine perspective. In The Odyssey, attention is, throughout, upon male honor and male conflict. Penelope, in Homer, is most notable for how she has resisted infringement of Odysseus’s honor (by resisting the suitors); her own fears, feelings, and needs are undiscussed. Atwood’s retelling, with its shift in protagonist, begins with those left behind, traces the inner chambers of the house, maps the threats posed by the suitors (and also by negligent husbands). Atwood is candid about her interests and motives. In Book 23 of the Odyssey, Odysseus, now returned home to Ithaca and having slain the suitors of Penelope who were filling his house, consuming his goods, and threatening his son, orders a dozen maids from the house to be brought out - those who “consorted” with the suitors, an act Odysseus sees as unforgivably disloyal. The maids are forced to clean the gore and blood of the slain suitors from the main dining hall. Odysseus then orders his son Telemachos to have the women beheaded. Telemachos has them, instead, hung from the yard arm of the ships. Atwood, in her introduction, discusses how, reading the Odyssey, she has, for years, been haunted by these twelve maids and by the 4 I am assuming readers will be more familiar with Handmaid’s

Tale (which I discuss below) than with this work; accordingly, my survey here is more in depth. 5 The Nostoi were a series of traditional myths about the homecomings of various heroes within the Trojan War saga. Only a very few (such as Odysseus or Agamemnon) are preserved.

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silence of subsequent reception of the Odyssey about Odysseus’s terrible act. Atwood chooses to retell the Odyssey, following the tradition of myth (the oral tradition, where story tellers intentionally embellished their stories and found new traditions), focusing on Penelope and draws “on material other than The Odyssey, especially for the details of Penelope’s parentage, her early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumors circulating about her” (P, p. xiv). As to her narrative’s voice, Atwood writes: I’ve chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The maids form a chanting and singing Chorus which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of The Odyssey: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids; and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself. (P, p. xv)

Penelope is, indeed, haunted and accused by the maids. She, like them, resides in the underworld. The maids remain there with her in a group together as shades. Like harpies, they torment Penelope, dancing at the edge of her perception (their feet don’t touch the ground but remain dangling, as they did in death). If she tries to approach or speak to them, the maids run away (P, p. 15).6 The maids sing songs, tell stories or perform plays that interrupt Penelope. They are critical of Odysseus: “with every goddess, queen, and bitch / from there to here /you scratched your itch / we did much less / than what you did . . . you had the spear / you had the word . . . we danced on air / the ones you failed / the ones you killed.” (P, pp. 5–6) The story opens in Penelope’s voice from the underworld, a less than perfectly omniscient narrator. “Now that I am dead I know everything. This is what I wished would happen, but like so many of my wishes it failed to come true. I know only a few factoids that I didn’t know before. It’s much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say” (P, p. 1). Penelope is dead, a “state of bone-

Penelope herself uses the darkness of the underworld to her advantage. “If you see someone you’d rather not speak to you can always pretend you haven’t recognized them” (P, p. 15). 6

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lessness, liplessness, breathlessness,” a place of “pure voice and consciousness” (P, p. 4). Her bodilessness is both liberating and traumatic (and an ironic commentary on how, within the myth itself, she is partially erased). Even in her own retelling, the tradition’s effects are too strong; she remains disembodied (P, p. 4). Penelope is left with memory and words. “Down here everyone arrives with a sack, like the sacks used to keep the winds in, but each of these sacks is full of words – words you’ve spoken, words you’ve heard, words that have been said about you”( P, p. 1). Penelope has heard the words and traditions about her, most of them integrated into the stories of Odysseus and his epic adventure. She does not, however, assert that in “setting the record straight” she is speaking Truth. Penelope is aware of her own hunger for justification, of her own skewed perspective, of her own tendency to memory: “Perhaps I have only invented (this oracle) in order to make myself feel better. So much whispering goes on, in the dark caverns, in the meadows, that sometimes it’s hard to know whether the whispering is coming from others or from the inside of your own head”( P, pp. 8–9). As she proceeds with her story, Penelope describes her husband’s allure and Ithaca’s bleakness. Married by arrangement, she still comes to admire (if not passionately love) her husband. She finds herself, again and again, his accomplice (P, p. 45). Penelope describes Odysseus’s reluctant compliance with his oath to Tendarius, and her lonely years as he was away at war. She describes hearing his escapades and adventures during the war, the glad days of the war’s end, and her growing tensions as hero after hero returned, while Odysseus didn’t. Penelope heard stories, but also remembered the storyteller about whom they circulated. Odysseus had been to the Land of the Dead to consult the spirits, said some. No, he’d merely spent the night in a gloomy old cave full of bats, said others. He’d made his men put wax in their ears, said one, while sailing past the alluring Sirens . . . No, said another, it was a high-class Sicilian knocking shop – the courtesans there were known for their musical talents and their fancy feathered outfits. It was hard to know what to believe. (P, pp. 90–91)

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Slowly suitors began to arrive, and Penelope became hemmed within her own house. “What wise counsellors did I have? Who could I depend on, really, except myself?” (P, p. 90). Suitors began to abuse the privilege of the house, consuming feasts but also forcing themselves upon the maids. Penelope laments: “What could I do to stop these aristocratic young thugs?” who could “turn really ugly and go on the rampage and snatch by force” whatever might be denied. (P, pp. 107– 108) Penelope first devised the famous delaying tactic of weaving then, at night, unweaving, the burial shroud of Odysseus’s father Laertes: To help me in this laborious task I chose twelve of my maidservants – the youngest ones, because these had been with me all their lives. . . . [T]hey were a little loud and giggly sometimes, as all maids are in youth, but it cheered me up to hear them chattering away, and to listen to their singing. . . . . They were my most trusted eyes and ears in the palace, and it was they who helped me to pick away at my weaving, behind locked doors, at dead of night, and by torchlight, for more than three years. Though we had to do it carefully, and talk in whispers, these nights had a touch of festivity about them, a touch – even – of hilarity. Melantho of the Pretty Cheeks smuggled in treats for us to nibble on … We told stories as we worked away at our task of destruction; we shared riddles; we made jokes. In the flickering light of the torches our daylight faces were softened and changed, and our daylight manners. We were almost like sisters. In the mornings, our eyes darkened by lack of sleep, we’d exchange smiles of complicity, and here and there a quick squeeze of the hand. Their ‘Yes ma’ams’ and ‘No ma’ams’ hovered on the edge of laughter, as if neither they nor I could take their servile behaviour seriously. (P, pp. 113–114)

Penelope chose, however, to keep her own counsel and not share her plans with any other household staff or Telemachos, a dangerous, and ultimately disastrous, choice. Worse, “Several of the girls were unfortunately raped, others were seduced, or were hard pressed and decided that it was better to give in than to resist” (P, p. 115) Penelope notes the

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helplessness of the maids. Of course, raped slaves were hardly a risk unique to her present dilemma. Still, without the permission of the master of the house . . . such an act amounted to thievery. However, there was no master of the house. So the Suitors helped themselves to the maids in the same way they helped themselves to the sheep and pigs and goats and cows. They probably thought nothing of it. … “Never mind,” I said to them. “You must pretend to be in love with these men. If they think you have taken their side, they’ll confide in you and we’ll know their plans.” … I even instructed them to say rude and disrespectful things about me and Telemachus, and about Odysseus as well, in order to further the illusion. They threw themselves into this project with a will. (P, pp. 116–118)

Yet, in the end, Penelope notes, this strategy proved deadly. As Odysseus arrives, Penelope immediately recognizes him: “I didn’t let on I knew. It would have been dangerous for him. Also, if a man takes pride in his disguising skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognize him: it’s always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness” (P, p. 136). Penelope devises the archery contest and orchestrates his discovery by his former wet-nurse Eurycleia (P, p. 137). She ultimately fails, however, to anticipate Odysseus’s rage – or Telemachos’s compliance – and her lovely maids are murdered. Indeed, after the slaughter of the suitors, Odysseus turns to Eurycleia to point out the “disloyal” maids; not privy to Penelope’s plan, she names the twelve, aware that if she does not, Odysseus will kill every maid in the house. Penelope denies the “slanderous gossip” that she slept with any of the suitors.7 Yet the maids challenge her forceful denials, singing (in Penelope’s voice) the mocking “Word has it that Penelope the Prissy / was – when it came to sex – no shrinking sissy” (P, p. 147), and later “He’ll chop me up for tending my desire! / While he was pleasuring every nymph and beauty, Did he think I’d do nothing but my duty? / While every girl and goddess he was praising, / Did he assume I’d dry 7 P, pp.

143–145, a response to various mythic traditions and later interpretive traditions surrounding Penelope’s sexuality.

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up like a raisin?” (P, p. 148). The maids may be both bawdy and intellectual, and frequently comment on history of interpretation and reception theories of Homeric myth. For example, recalling 19th and 20th century structuralists, the maids stage a mock anthropology conference where they interpret their and Penelope’s myths as a mythic articulation of Indo-European patriarchal culture conquering and subduing indigenous matriarchy, a connection apparent in the numbers twelve and thirteen, which, they assert, reflect ancient lunar worship (P, pp. 163–168). Elsewhere, they stage a mock trial and hearing, attempting to assert their own innocence (P, pp. 175–184).8 As to her own afterlive(s), Penelope observes: I suppose you know the rules. If we wish to, we can get ourselves reborn, and have another try at life; but first we have to drink from the Waters of Forgetfulness, so our past lives will be wiped from our memories. Such is the theory; but, like all theories, it’s only a theory. (P, p. 186)

Of her cousin, Penelope notes: Helen has had more than a few excursions. That’s what she calls them – ‘my little excursions’. ‘I’ve been having such fun,’ she’ll begin. Then she’ll detail her latest conquests and fill me in on the changes in fashion. … Then she’ll make a speech about how naughty she’s been… Empires have fallen because of her, she’s fond of saying. “I understand the interpretation of the whole Trojan War episode has changed,” I tell her, to take some of the wind out of her sails. “Now they think you were just a myth. It was all about trade routes. That’s what the scholars are saying.” (P, p. 187)

But Penelope, herself, does not transmigrate. Instead, she, like the maids, remains in the underworld. “I can’t see the point of it. … As for human nature, it’s as tawdry as ever.” (P, p. 188) The Penelopiad ends with a song by the maids: we had no voice we had no name They, in turn, are charged for having sex without their owner, Odysseus’s, permission (P, p. 178). 8

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The hanged maidens represent the limits of power Penelope (or any woman) encounters within the world of The Odyssey, yet their anger at Penelope is also an indictment of her silence, of her return to the bed of a murderer. Penelope’s voice has been a voice silenced by the narrative in which she inhabits, a silence made even more pronounced by the reception and scholarship on that narrative. She is given voice in the underworld. But her story, itself, is haunted by the maids, perhaps even more suppressed in/by the narrative and it’s tradition. Atwood’s re-writing and re-vision of The Odyssey becomes less an attempt to re-voice Penelope and correct the record, to fill in the gaps, to enflesh a neglected character; it is a narrative that demonstrates, in itself, the (violent) silencing and disembodiment that masks Penelope and the maids themselves and, complexly, notes Penelope is both victim and participant in those oppressive systems.

ON HANDMAID’S REWRITING OF ZILPAH AND BILHAH In The Penelopiad, Atwood re-reads Homer via a shifted protagonist. The shift, anticipated in part by ancient traditions of canonical reimagination such as rabbinic midrash (such as Bityah’s), demonstrates her implicit argument: that myth is political narrative, reflecting (reinforcing, creating) particular locations, identities and commitments. In a way, these retellings of mythic texts are perpetuations of the inherent instability and plasticity of myth itself. When the protagonist shifts, the reader’s affective connection shifts and exposes otherwise hidden feelings and motivations, while it also exposes the mechanisms that inhibit or augment them. It changes the affective identification and loyalty of the reader who engages dynamically (in sympathy or in resistance) with the new protagonist. It merges the cognitive,

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ideational strength inherent in scholarship and reception with the affects of narrative. While not as directly as Penelopiad, Atwood also negotiates protagonist transition and narrative revision effectively in her earlier 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.9 Handmaid is set in a dystopic near-future of the United States. Post-war fascist forces ruling a territory now called Gilead (Gen. 31:47–48) have created a Christian theocracy.10 Infertile women are assigned a “handmaid” who has sex with the male head of house once per month (literally resting against the knees of the matron); her sole purpose is impregnation.11 Numerous biblical and cultural critics (indeed, even Offred herself) have observed that the story is a dystopian “speculative fiction”12 reworking a motif found in in the characters of Hagar, Zilpah and Bilhah (Genesis 16, 21, 25, 29– 30) with a shift to the handmaiden as protagonist. 13 Atwood not only

I presume below that readers will be more generally familiar with Handmaid given that it is not only the older of the two Atwood compositions discussed in this essay, but that it has been, overwhelmingly, her most popular (a past nominee of the Booker Prize, appearing in 2016 in a serialized television version released by Hulu), and a particular favorite for religion and biblical studies scholars. Atwood incorporates classical and mythic themes throughout her work, and also returns very often to themes enacted or intersecting with women’s bodies. Note, for example, Wilson, “Mythological Intertexts in Margaret Atwood’s Works”; Davies, “Margaret Atwood’s Female Bodies.” 10 On its theocratic contours and interpretation of biblical law, note Atmajian, “Totalitarianism & Personhood: A Reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” 11 Mogford, “The Murder of the Goddess in Everywoman,” pp. 139–141. 12 Atwood’s preferred term for her work (as opposed to “science fiction”). She argues that not only are all the technologies and potentialities in her work already present in the world, indeed, many have happened. Her fiction is not a reimagining of reality or technology or cultural trend; it is a reassembly of existing realities. 13 The reinterpretation is, of course, widely noted. As two (of a plethora of) examples, see Joseph, “The Handmaid’s Tale as a Legitimate Reading of Genesis?” Filipczak, “‘Is there no Balm in Gilead?’: Biblical Intertext in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,” pp. 171–185. Note also Tan, “Textual Hijacks.” 9

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examines what trajectories lie in American (Puritan) ideology (if under enough duress), but also reinterprets biblical myth from Genesis, demonstrating the way the text and its interpretive community create structures of patriarchy and are, in effect, at bottom of dangerous cultural trajectories. Though the title invokes Chaucer, the story of Offred is clearly a re-animation of Genesis and the stories of Abraham and Hagar (the handmaid to Abraham’s wife Sara and mother of Ishmael) in Genesis 16 and 21, and the story of Jacob, Zilpah (the handmaid of Jacob’s wife Leah and mother of Jacob’s sons Gad and Asher) and Bilhah (the handmaid of Jacob’s other wife, Rachel, and the mother of his sons Dan and Naphtali) from Genesis 29 and 35. Atwood, as she later will do with Penelope, concentrates on the experience of these female slaves who are minor characters in a larger, more famous saga; her novel explores the handmaids’ perspective and experience as a sexual slave in an authoritarian, misogynistic culture. The Handmaid’s Tale, a reassessment of ancient myth, also disrupts time in its very narrative. To begin, it is the first-person voice of its central character Offred, presented as the transcript of recently discovered cassette recorded diaries found centuries in the future. The book has an epilogue that is a scholarly discussion from an academic conference set far in the future (June 21, 2195), offering a quick analysis of the main narrative. As a diary (recorded on magnetic tape) of a woman imprisoned, permeated by religious themes, and culminating in the sudden rupture of the narrative suggesting her end, one is readily reminded of the Diary of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas and other martyr texts and of the fraught question of “voice.” Can women such as Offred (or Hagar or Zilpah or Bilhah) speak for themselves? In the Republic of Gilead, the State is maintained by secret police (the Eyes of God) who monitor the population and imprison (eventually to torture and murder) political and religious dissidents. The society is strictly regulated, in general, but particularly toward women. Women are forced to be under male authority and to wear a “uniform” of status as well. Handmaids are kept in isolation, not allowed to read or write, not allowed to communicate in any way with others outside the house. Offred (Of-Fred: She belongs to her Commander husband’s house and is given a generic name, erasing her own identity) must participate monthly in a ritual where sections of the book of

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Genesis are read aloud, and then she is made to lie against the Commander’s wife while having sex with the Commander. Offred is now assigned to her third home; she has yet to conceive. Offred’s commander makes additional sexual advances toward her and they eventually begin an affair. Offred, herself, begins sleeping with Commander Waterford’s driver, Nick. Both relationships are strictly forbidden and highly dangerous. As the diary ends, Offred is being taken by the Eye. We do not know if she escapes or dies.14 Handmaid’s Tale is a commentary in narrative form on the role of the Handmaid in Genesis, a character who is essential to the narrative’s plot, but whose experience was of very little interest to the narrative’s creators. Offred’s story is commentary that reveals how women within these narratives, and almost certainly within the cultures which created, canonized and live them out. It is commentary on both text and tradition, while also a cautionary speculation on where we might yet go if we do not attend to the questions Atwood is raising.

ON MIDRASH AND THE GENRE OF “MINOR CHARACTER ELABORATION” Writing on the Hulu television adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale, Jeffrey Salkin describes his realization that the work is “a dark midrash (or commentary) on the patriarchal tales of Genesis.”15 He notes that “[s]ometimes, Genesis is clear about the pain and humiliation this system could produce. … But sometimes the Bible is a little more reticent about how the participants in this domestic drama must have felt.”16 Salkin goes on to consider, through a lens informed by feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, how Atwood’s novel not only draws from biblical themes, but expands them to explore deeper meanings in the experience of the characters. Though he (somewhat mysteriously) frames his realization as unique and epiphanic, Salkin is certainly not at all first, or alone, to 14 At least we didn’t, until the publication of the sequel, The Testaments, in fall of 2019. We learn, there, she lived. 15 Salkin, “‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ re-spins Genesis. And That’s Scary.” 16 Idem.

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use “midrash” for Atwood’s work. Indeed, a Google search of “Margaret Atwood midrash” done September 2019 (the release of Atwood’s follow-up to Handmaid, The Testaments) returns with over 28,000 results. The trend is not just found in popular-audience internet criticism. Handmaid has been likened to midrash from its earliest moments of serious scholarly engagement.17 Readers of Handmaid have persistently found its obvious biblical allegory and allusion to be midrashic. But is it? Midrash (from darash or “to search”) is a form of rabbinic literature distinct from either oral or written Torah. It is, in fact, commentary on both.18 Biblically, the word occurs only in the late Kethuvim, or Writings, and there only twice in 2 Chron 13:22 and 24:27 (translated in the LXX as biblos and graphē respectively), but is a form readily found in Qumranic literature, suggesting it was an emerging type of scholarly engagement in the late second Temple period, arising roughly concurrent with the beginning phases of canonization (specifically, canon closure). Midrash operates as commentary on both ritual law (and oral Torah – the halakah) and upon narrative or story, the aggadah. It includes “all non-legal material in rabbinic literature, including legendary expansions of biblical stories, allusion to popular folklore, personal and historical anecdotes, and homiletical and ethical teachings;” it is “expansion and elaboration of canonized Hebrew scriptures.”19 Appearing at the closing of canon, midrash becomes a way for the continuation of a sacred narrative alongside the, now fixed, official literature, preserving both stability (respect for canon) and innovation (midrash). Midrash is more popularly (and less expansively) thought of stories serving as interpretation by elaboration, expansion or clarification of (stories about or around) biblical stories. It certainly includes this, but is actually much more; Jacob Neusner observes “People may say ‘it’s a midrash,’ to imply ‘it’s a fanciful meaning imputed to a simple verse’ or just to refer to a story.”20 Midrash is the collection of rabbinic 17 See, for example, Larson, “Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophecy,”

p. 54. 18 In general, note Neusner, The Midrash, but also, given this essay’s focus, Baskin, Midrashic Women, esp. pp. 2–6. 19 Baskin, Midrashic Women, p. 4. 20 Neusner, The Midrash, p. ix.

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interpretation on a specific passage in Torah or upon a particular halachic decision. It is, effectively, homiletic expansion on Jewish literature – but also a way of reading and absorbing obscure, difficult or threatening texts. Midrash is a way of creating resonance out of the Bible’s chaos, of reclaiming the text and tradition, of filling in the holes. It is a way of creating new texts but also a scabbing over of wounded ones, a way to continue to write myth while affirming canon. Midrashic engagement of Bible has a venerable history in (particularly Jewish) feminist critique. Readers perhaps think of Judith Plaskow’s reimagination of traditions surrounding Lilith.21 Plaskow advocated midrash as a potential feminist alternative to androcentric biblical texts and traditional interpretation.22 It was a ready tool for second wave feminist resistance of patriarchy which was still resonant with Jewish tradition and text. It was a reading method “simultaneously serious and playful, imaginative, metaphoric” that “easily lent itself to feminist use”23: [Midrash] stands on the insistence that the Bible can be made to speak to the present day. If it is our text, it can and must answer our questions and share our values; if we wrestle with it, it will yield up meaning. Listening to the traditional sources, we wait for the words of the women “to rise out of the white spaces between

Originally published in 1972, but collected, along with an array of other writings on Jewish feminist biblical and cultural critique, in Plaskow The Coming of Lilith, pp., 23–34. Plaskow was far from alone as advocate/author of feminist midrashim, among such contemporaries as Ellen Umansky, Lynn Gottlieb, and Chava Weissler. Note, for example(s): Weissler, “Standing at Sinai,” pp. 91–92; Gottleib, “The Secret Jew,” pp. 273–277 or the anthology by Zones, ed., Taking the Fruit. Plaskow reflects on her retelling of Lilith and on similar work by Umansky and Gottlieb, in Standing Again at Sinai, pp. 54–55. 22 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, p. 17. 23 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, pp. 53–54. 21

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The reclamation of midrash as a form of second wave feminist re-vision of scripture predates Atwood’s fiction, and also continues in contemporary feminist and womanist biblical critique. Wilda Gafney uses “womanist midrash” to explore several moments of Hebrew Bible.25 Describing her approach, she writes: [W]omanist midrash is a set of interpretive practices, including translation, exegesis and biblical interpretation, that attends to marginalized characters in biblical narratives, especially women and girls, and intentionally including and centering on non-Israelite peoples and enslaved persons. … Womanist midrash listens to and for their voices in and through the Hebrew Bible, while acknowledging that often the text does not speak, or even attempt to speak, to or for them, let alone hear them.”26

She reads, for example, the story of Bityah (whom she opts to name Sheshan, Egyptian for “lotus”) as “an ally of the Hebrew people. … who uses … her privilege to work for justice on behalf of oppressed people.”27 Sheshan brings Moses “into the world of her privilege.28 Indulged by her father, Sheshan uses Moses to try to expand her father’s vision of inclusion. It is a plan, however, “doomed to fail – Moses would always be ‘other.’”29 Gafney, then, uses a midrashic reading of Exodus three that takes a new protagonist to comment upon contemporary context(s) of allyship and social justice, understanding midrash

24 Plaskow, Standing

Again at Sinai, p. 55. She is quoting Gottlieb. Womanist Midrash. Gafney’s framing of her Womanist midrash in many ways overtly alludes to Trible’s feminist critique, notably her Texts of Terror. 26 Gafney, Womanist Midrash, p. 3. 27 Ibid., 99. 28 Ibid., 100. 29 Ibid., 100. 25 Gafney,

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as “the basic literary method of the rabbinic enterprise” and “an expansion and elaboration of the canonized Hebrew scriptures.”30 From Plaskow to Gafney, feminist midrashic re-reading is an act of re-visioning and re-writing. As Adrienne Rich writes: Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.31

Atwood’s Penelopiad and Handmaid’s Tale, are certainly similar, in many ways, to rabbinic and modern (feminist and womanist) use of midrashim. When Atwood shifts protagonist, whether to Bilhah and Zilpah or Penelope, she augments the story by interweaving additional tradition, creating new narrative, and expanding in creative ways the story’s content through focus on character motive and interest. The result isn’t just a tale retold, but also an entirely new tale that intersects with the old and that draws directly from broader tradition, scholarship, and Atwood’s own imagination. Her stories explore the negative space within the tradition and, in so doing, are also exploring the biblical text and the cultural systems and structures which emerge from its history of interpretation and appropriation. Atwood is drawing from a long tradition of midrash and counter-narrative to biblical text that takes, as its focus, a reinterpretation of characters.32 But her work sits, as well, alongside broader trends in literature and critical theory.

30 Ibid., p. 3. Judith Baskin delves into the way midrashic tradition, itself, pre-

sents women, as well. 31 Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" p. 18.

For (just one) example, renaissance artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi painted the face of her rapist into her depiction of Judith beheading Holofernes, which itself parallels similar appropriation of the character of Jael. Note Conway’s Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael.

32

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Writing in 2013, Rosen notes that “over the last several decades, a vibrant transnational genre – a genre constituted by the conversion of minor characters from canonical works into protagonists – has been simultaneously flourishing and hiding in plain sight.”33 It is a genre he calls “minor-character elaboration” and is work that is “often seeking to critique the ideologies underlying the manner in which those works represent minor characters – or their failure to represent socially marginal figures at all.”34 Rosen notes, however, that while the intent of the genre is to give voice to the marginalized, it is subject to the critique that it is, as the product of later tradition, still not fully attuned to the abject powerlessness of the voices and characters it seeks to rediscover.35 Often first-person narratives written, of course, by later (and often much more socially privileged) authors, the genre easily becomes (albeit well-intended) further appropriation of the marginalized, an act that foregrounds an overlooked, minority character, but simultaneously, with its dialect of privilege and distance, strips her of her voice. He argues: Although minor-character elaborations have in individual instances been received in terms of their participation in a purportedly subversive feminist and multicultural project, to consider this flourishing genre as a whole makes legible its actual significance: the genre articulates a broad contemporary commitment

33 Rosen, “Minor Characters Have their Day,” p. 138.

Rosen, “Minor Characters Have their Day,” p. 138. He cites, as example, everything from Gardner’s Grendel to Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. The Penelopiad is Atwood’s contribution to Canongate Publishing House’s intention to publish reinterpretations of over 100 myths, reinterpretations that are inevitably hybrid and parodic (See further Staels, “The Penelopiad and Weight”). Atwood also has contributed to the Hogarth Shakespeare series which reimagines Shakespeare plays and criticism with her 2016 Hag-Seed (a reinterpretation of The Tempest). 35 Note, however, Suzuki, “Rewriting the ‘Odyssey’ in the Twenty-First Century,” who argues that Atwood is actually uncovering an implicit argument within Homer, as exemplified by characters such as Athena or Penelope, the creative process is essentially a feminine one. 34

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to a subjectivist perspectivism compatible with the tenets of liberal pluralism.36

Tracing the genre’s emergence in the late 1960s, he shows “how the minor-character elaborations that appeared at the moment of high postmodernism do not cultivate a straightforward, sympathetic identification with the minor characters they appropriate” but reassert “the autonomous subject in the face of its poststructuralist critique and insists on a pluralist, perspectival notion of truth, in place of a postmodern understanding of narrative and the self as constituted by discourse.”37

T HE IN-VERSION OF STORY: ATWOOD AS THE RETHINKING OF BOTH T EXT AND MIDRASH It is tempting, indeed, to refer to Atwood (particularly Handmaid) as a form of midrash, but, again, is Atwood really a midrashic reader? Certainly, she offers a re-thinking of canonical tales and an enfleshment of secondary or tertiary characters, and, certainly this reimagination draws heavily from scholarly tradition and becomes, itself, a form of critical commentary. Atwood is rethinking the whole of The Odyssey in Penelopiad; she is rethinking and critiquing Genesis in Handmaid’s Tale (and other “docile, domestic women” traditions, such as her use of “Marthas” as a term to describe domestic helpers, which draws from Luke 10:38–42). Atwood is, throughout, clearly interested in telling stories that are, themselves, forms of commentary on canonical, formative stories of the west as a means of critiquing not just text but larger cultural ideologies which intersect with that text. Midrash, at least in traditional forms, is a specific genre of generative commentary, however, and Atwood’s work in Penelopiad, a novel which makes many of the structures, themes and techniques of Handmaid’s Tale more explicit, suggests she may be doing something in both that is more akin to Rosen’s description of our postmodern (and poststructuralist) literary moment. Midrash is an embodiment of text, a filling out its corners and pockets. It is addition to the world created by the text, an expansion of text (specifically, of Torah) and tradition, arising from a desire to play alongside the text, to participate 36 Rosen, “Minor Characters Have their Day,” p. 133. 37 Rosen, “Minor Characters Have their Day,” pp. 133–134.

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in its narrative making and its political nature. To return, for example to Bityah, is to note how her midrashim, really, is theodicy (and rooted within the implicit political assumptions of the myth itself): she resolves the difficulty in the text in a way that preserves the text’s ideology by rejecting idolatry and conversion to Judaism. Atwood, however, is not just reinterpreting or telling story as a means of theodicy or commentary; she is intentionally re-telling her stories as affective, poststructuralist inversion. She is rewriting myth, using myth as a means to refute ideologies inherent in the myth, to resurface the erased character(s) and to expose the patriarchal agendas inherent within, and cause of, that erasure. The re-readings of Atwood are commentary as re-readings; they are re-tellings that unmask inherent contradictions, that deconstruct. They are entering the text and playing with themes like midrash, but they are doing so by way of unwriting then rewriting the text. They are alike as a means of collapsing binary, difference and distance in order to undermine the myth itself. Modern scholarship, like myth upon which it comments, is less a process of clarifying inherent “meanings” than it is, fundamentally, a means of expanding meaning within systemic structures (and structures which trade upon “logic” or analytic reason rather than affective, intuitive engagement). Scholars do less to uncover meanings “in there,” inside of a text or myth; more, they use elements within a text to generate new systems of meaning and sense. Midrash is a way of expanding meaning which is not rooted in the same authoritarian and privileged structures (not limited to those deemed “good readers” or well trained by gate-keepers). But poststructuralist, deconstruction subverts the structures themselves via the dissolution of binaries and the demonstration that the ideology “inherent” within the text sits alongside elements of its own disruption. Atwood’s retelling of Homer and Genesis not only reveal and critique ideology within the works (and tradition and commentary upon it), but, by re-orientation of minor character to protagonist (and reinvocation of themes and motifs), both produce new affective connection and demonstrate the tradition’s own conflicted interests. It is revision of the Bible in both possible senses of that word. Writing about midrash and/as contemporary bible reading, Daniel Boyarin describes some conventional arguments that midrash

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is engaged, emotive criticism as a form of poetics or play – quite a different form of reading and interpretation than reasoned, scientific and objective. Boyarin writes to “discredit” any sense of “reading which is value-free.”38 “[A]ll interpretation and historiography,” he writes “is representation of the past by the present. … [Readings] are always filtered through the cultural, socio-ideological matrix.”39 Midrash is, for Boyarin, a struggle by readers who are devoted to a presumed divine text; it is invested. It is also creative, expansive and elaborative. Yet, Boyarin argues, this is true of all forms of interpretation, particularly of interpretations of an inherently intertextual bible: Rather than seeing midrashic departures from what appears to be the “simple” meaning of the local text, as being determined by the needs of rhetoric and propaganda and rooted in the extratextual reality of the rabbinic period, or as being the product of the creative genius of individual rabbis wholly above time and social circumstance, I suggest that the intertextual reading practice of the midrash is a development … of the intratextual interpretive strategies which the Bible itself manifests. Moreover, the very fractured and unsystematic surface of the biblical text is an encoding of its own intertextuality, and it is precisely this which the midrash interprets…The intertextuality of midrash is thus an outgrowth of intertextuality within the Bible itself. 40

For Boyarin, midrash is (Irigarayan) intertextuality. It builds out from the Bible’s own inherent intertextuality and complex text, through the reader (and her various needs, locations and commitments) and into a multiform genre of critical discourse – some of it halachic code, some of it story, some of it conventional lexico-grammatic, all of it engaged, intertextual Bible reading. It is tempting to assert from Boyarin’s argument that midrash is post-modern criticism avant la lettre. It isn’t. To say that it is (and, to be completely fair, Boyarin himself never quite, simplistically, says that it is) is to fall prey to the myopic urge to impose one’s present intellectual context onto the past. Midrash plays in similar fields and tensions as postmodernity, but it remains, of course, unique. It is 38 Boyarin, Intertextuality

and the Reading of Midrash, p. 5. and the Reading of Midrash, p. 12. 40 Boyarin, Intertextuality, p. 15. 39 Boyarin, Intertextuality

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equally tempting to equate Handmaid’s Tale to midrash, particularly to (Jewish) womanist and second wave feminist criticism of the Bible. Again: it isn’t. And, again, the temptation arises from intellectual myopia imposing intellectual forms from one field too broadly. Reading Penelopiad as a technical expansion on Handmaid’s Tale reveals Atwood as interested in rebuilding the meaning of the myths themselves, using the myth’s own structures to expose its limits. Atwood’s “midrash” is, at best, a hybrid form of deconstructive midrash, finding within the story the characters, threads and subplots that deviate and even dismantle the ideology of the master-narrative (including traditions of midrash). It is midrashic, in some ways, but not midrash. Atwood’s shifts of protagonist are, even more, an affective (re)appropriation of canonical and mythic archive. They reverse the character of interest in the story, revealing hidden texts, power networks, agendas and suppressed memories, probing the trauma of the text through the machinery of its archives, culling its substance for fodder of its resistance and revealing its inherent instability, using the product of past traumas to heal present ones. Writing of Handmaid’s use of biblical text and models, Janet Larson argues the book becomes a form of (quasi-apocalyptic) prophecy, making its narrative exegesis more explicit as it also mimics biblical voices and tropes of inspiration and prophecy. She observes that in Handmaid that “the Bible is indeed a bomb in Gilead. But, in a frequent biblical metaphor in this novel, the Word is also sweet or bitter food for life that men and women have found in history by breaking open the master’s Book.”41 Atwood’s work is certainly not not-midrashic, though, looking at the pattern (and development) of her use of the technique of re-writing and re-visioning, it’s clear that there are other themes, influences, and needs at play. Also, it becomes clear: Atwood, in Handmaid as in Penelopiad, is re-writing in multiple senses: writing over, writing again, writing backward, writing anew. Atwood is developing an ongoing narratival, archival rethinking canonical text, while reimagining (midrashic, mythic and other forms of) Western myth and its interpretation as well as the cultures and structures that

41 Larson, “Margaret Atwood,” p. 41.

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emerge from it. We would do well to attend to the myths she re-visions, as well as to her re-visioning itself, each on its own terms, hearing the intertextual and intercritical complexity they inhabit.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atmajian, Rita Grace, “Totalitarianism & NewPersonhood: A Reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Crux 33.4 (1997): 16–27. Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1986. ―. The Penelopiad. New York: Canongate, 2005. Atmajian, Rita Grace. “Totalitarianism and Personhood: A Reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Crux 33.4 (1997): 16–27. Baskin, Judith R. Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002. Boyarin, Daniel. Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash. Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Davies, Madeleine. “Margaret Atwood’s Female Bodies.” Pages 58–71 in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Edited by Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Erick Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Filipezak, Dorota. “‘Is there no Balm in Gilead?’: Biblical Intertext in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Literature and Theology 7.2 (1993): 171–185. Franklin, Josh. “Midrash on Bityah Daughter of Pharaoh.” Sefaria.org. www.sefaria.org/sheets/73682?lang=bi. 2019. Gafney, Wilda C. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and The Throne. Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox, 2017.

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Gottleib, Lynne. “The Secret Jew: An Oral Tradition of Women.” Pages 273–277 in On Being a Jewish Feminist. Ed. Susannah Heschel. New York: Shocken, 1983. Hales, Leslie-Ann. “Genesis Revisited: The Darkening Vision of Margaret Atwood.” The Month (July 1987): 257–267. Joseph, Alison. “The Handmaid’s Tale as a Legitimate Reading of Genesis?” Shiloah Project (9 July 2017). Shiloah-project.group.shef.ac.uk/the-handmaids-tale-as-a-legitimate-reading-of-genesis/. Kadari, Jamar. “Daughters of Pharaoh: Midrash and Aggadah.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 27 February 2019. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/daughter-of-pharaoh-midrash-and-aggadah. Larson, Janet L. “Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophecy.” Religion & Literature 21.1 (1989): 27–61. Mogford, Shellagh A. “The Murder of the Goddess in Everywoman and Mary Daly’s Sado-Ritual Syndrome and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Pages 132–163 In Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly. Edited by Sarah Lucia Hogland, Marilyn Frye. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Neusner, Jacob. 1990. The Midrash: An Introduction. Northdale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1990. Plaskow, Judith. The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism & Social Ethics, 1972–2003. Edited with Donna Berman. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. ―. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken.” College English 34.1 (1972): 18–30. Rosen, Jeremy M. “Minor Characters Have their Day: The Imaginary and Actual Politics of a Contemporary Genre.” Contemporary Literature 54.1 (2013): 139–147.

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Salkia, Jeffrey. “The Handmaid’s Tale’ re-spins Genesis. And That’s Scary.” Religious News Service. May 4, 2017. Religionnews.com. Staels, Hilde. “The Penelopiad and Weight: Contemporary Parodic and Burlesque Transformations of Classical Myths.” College Literature 36.4 (2009): 110–118. Suzuki, Mihoko. “Rewriting the ‘Odyssey’ in the Twenty-First Century. Mary Zimmerman’s ‘Odyssey’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘Penelopiad.’” College Literature 34.2 (2007): 263–278. Tan, Qiuyi. “Textual Hijacks: Between the Book of Isaiah and The Handmaid’s Tale.” Pages 95–107 in Subverting the Scriptures: Critical Reflections on the Use of the Bible. Edited by Beth Hawkins Benedix. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Trible, Phillis. Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narrative. Louisville, KY: Fortress, 1984. Weissler, Chava. “Standing at Sinai.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1.2 (1985): 91–92. Wilson, Sharon R. “Mythological Intertexts in Margaret Atwood’s Works.” Pages 215–228 in Margaret Atwood: Works & Impact. Edited by Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. Zones, Jane Sprague, ed. Taking the Fruit: Modern Women’s Tales of the Bible. Sand Diego: Women’s Institute for Continuing Jewish Education, 1981.

9. THE SNAKE, THE POET: ART AND DUPLICITY IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S POETRY AND THE HEBREW BIBLE SEAN BURT ‘The poet has come back to being a poet / after decades of being virtuous instead’. So opens Margaret Atwood’s poem ‘The poet has come back …’, from 2007’s The Door, her first book of original poems in over a decade. (D, p. 23) It remains her most recent poetry collection and one of only two books of verse poetry (excepting collected volumes) to appear since 1984’s Interlunar. Early in Atwood’s career, she made her literary mark on the strength of her bracing poetic work of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as Power Politics, The Circle Game, and Journals of Susanna Moodie. But while Atwood did not quit poetry entirely in the late 20th century, the period starting with the 1980s saw a run of mid-career novels (The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, the booker-winning The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake) that shifted both writerly and critical attention toward her fiction.1 One can hardly deny that these novels have had a vast and ‘virtuous’ impact on North American letters on a literary, cultural, and even political level. This present volume of essays likely wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for her novels. And then there are the poems, the striking, slippery poems. The poem quoted above invites return to poetry, away from virtue. Yet, as the poet interrogates herself in the subsequent couplet: ‘Can’t you be 1 Atwood does say that ‘I don’t work on poetry when I’m writing novels.’ Atwood, interview by Karla Hammond, in Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, pp. 66–78 (quote on p. 63).

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both? / No. Not in public.’ Can the poet’s performance be trusted? Atwood’s later poetry suggests that the performative work of the poet invites suspicion in a way that the novelist’s does not. Atwood’s imagery in ‘The poet has come back …’ certainly reflects this notion: poetry belongs to a lost world that’s mythological, even primal, (‘back when God was still thundering vengeance’ … ‘you could scatter incense and praise, / and wear your snake necklace’). This vivid, violent mythology contrasts sharply with the mundanity of the flesh-andblood poet’s life: the poet of yore offered ‘No deferential smiling, no baking of cookies, / no I’m a nice person really.’ Though these wellmeaning pleasantries of the writer’s life would seem light years away from the cartoonish scene of divine ‘thundering vengeance’ and ‘scent of blood’, this poem closes by leaving the door open (quite literally) to invite the poet to descend back to their true realm:2 Welcome back, my dear Time to resume our vigil, time to unlock the cellar door, time to remind ourselves that the god of poets has two hands: the dextrous, the sinister. (‘The poet has come back …’; D, p. 23)

The twin nature of ‘the god of the poets’, with its right and left hands, suggests that some kind of fundamental duality lies at the heart of the poet’s work. Even the use of voice in this poem is twinned: a dialogue of sorts appears early in the poem (‘Can’t you be both? / No. Not in public’), that ultimately merges into a plural voice (‘time to remind ourselves’). In this poem, the duality primarily manifests itself as a simultaneity of inviting and being invited, of performing and observing. The realm of poetry is not fully accessible to those of us stuck in the mundane world. The very form of this poem, which unfolds as a set of couplets – quite rare among Atwood’s body of free verse poetry – that are nonetheless irregular in length gestures toward a performance of poetic tradition, but ultimately departs from it. And yet, while its imagery evokes a tension between poetic presence and absence, the phrase ‘the 2 Atwood also uses imagery of subterranean descent to evoke the creative act

in her earlier poem ‘Procedures for Underground’ (SP, p. 122).

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dextrous, the sinister’ hints that something subtler, more devious, is taking place. The skull crusher with her snake necklace may stride over the poetic landscape of mythology, but it’s the everyday poem of the cookie-wielding nice person that the reader actually encounters. Twinning and duality have been a focus of much Atwood scholarship,3 but the particular species of twins that I would like to focus on in this essay is the paradox presented when unmediated attunement and artifice each make equal claims on poetic creativity. Every poem is a work of artifice, even – or especially – those that display their spontaneity. Similarly, the constructed work yet has power. In this essay, I would like to think through this poetic duality as it emerges in Atwood’s later (post-1980) poetry. This poem in The Door links motifs that had previously appeared other collections. ‘The poet has come back …’ places an image, the poet’s ‘snake necklace,’ that calls back her use of serpentine imagery in the ‘Snake Poems’ collection, found in 1984’s Interlunar.4 Further, this poem juxtaposes the snake with the image of the ‘aging poet’ that also emerges in the poems of this period. In my reading of Atwood’s ‘return’ to poetry, I also would like to identify a perhaps surprising connection with the literature of the Hebrew Bible. I’m struck not so much by the evocation of the proverbial ‘Old Testament’ God, nor even fully by the mythological power of the image of the snake. This essay is not so much a study of how Atwood reads or uses the Bible so much as an exploration of what a reader of biblical literature, particularly biblical poetry, can learn from Atwood’s work. In other words, while a number of biblically-informed images and themes wind through her poetic corpus,5 I wish to dwell on a convergence between it and the work of the Hebrew prophets, whose own poetic encounter is simultaneously caught up between the otherworldly power and human artifice of poetry. Particularly, in a number of Atwood’s poems, the snake image points to the generativity, even divine origin, of poetic language. Also, in a number of poems, the poet shows herself to be grappling with the alltoo-human and pathetic nature of artistic creativity. This notion of 3 Most notably in Sherril E. Grace and Ken Norris, Violent

Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood. 4 Many of the ‘Snake Poems’ also appear in SP II, pp. 87–96. 5 See Sandra Djwa, ‘Back to the Primal: The Apprenticeship of Margaret Atwood,’ pp. 13–46.

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poetry as a divine failure makes for a suggestive connection between Atwood and the Hebrew prophets, both of whom assert the power of poetic art and embarrassedly disavow their use of it. This essay traces the intertwined images of snake and aging poet in Atwood’s poetry insofar as they help to uncover her reflections on the nature of poetic language. Unsurprisingly, she presents that nature as twofold: to create poetry is simultaneously to access the inaccessible that lies beyond the limits of language and to cover one’s tracks when one necessarily fails to do so. The poetic performance can become most authentically powerful when it successfully denies its own constructedness.6

‘PROPHET UNDER A STONE’: T HE SNAKE In interviews, Atwood speaks of her process of creating poetry as quite different from writing fiction. When writing novels, she says that she is ‘better organized, more methodical’; with poetry, by contrast, Atwood writes ‘in a state of free float’.7 The work of the poet is defined by ‘empty space’ and ‘listening’, even as a ‘shamanistic technique … [w]ell known to the prophets’. This view of poetry is echoed in a passage in her novel The Year of the Flood, in which the leader of the religious sect God’s Gardeners, Adam One, gives a sermon in which he speaks of this kind of attunement as ‘Serpent Wisdom’, or ‘the wisdom of feeling directly, as the Serpent feels vibrations in the Earth’ (YOTF, p. 234). This image of the serpent as vehicle through which one discerns divine truth of course has roots in Genesis’s Edenic serpent – but it also derives from Atwood’s own poetry, particularly in her ‘Snake Poems’ collection. A number of these poems associate the 6 I thank my colleague Kelvin Monroe for this insight.

Atwood, interview with Mary Morris, in Waltzing Again, pp. 139–152 (quote is from p. 143). Additionally, as Kathyrn VanSpanckeren argues, Atwood ‘experiences her personality as poet as free and playful, and ‘almost totally different’ from her novel-writing self. See VanSpanckeren, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Poetry: Voice and Vision,’ pp. 125–152. VanSpanckeren cites an interview of Atwood by Joyce Carol Oates, which can be found in Waltzing Again, pp. 43–54. Atwood portrays this process in her fiction in Joan Foster’s process of automatic writing in Lady Oracle, in which she goes into a “trance, as I supposed it could be called’ (LO, p. 220).

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image of the snake with the source of language and the emergence of poetry and language from and within the liminal area between linguistic and non-linguistic communication.8 In one such poem, ‘Psalm to Snake’, Atwood refers to this snake as a ‘long word, cold-blooded and perfect’. Yet, while the very title links poetry and the snake and the opening uses an apostrophic address (‘O snake’), the snake in this poem is no muse, but rather an ‘argument for poetry’. Specifically, notice the indirection and muteness, the creative absence: ‘a shift among dry leaves … A movement / from left to right, / a vanishing. Prophet under a stone.’ (‘Psalm to Snake’; SP II, p. 92; I, p. 17) The snake in this poem evokes a presence discernable yet not fully visible, akin to what Moses perceived while under the rock (Exod 33:17–23). The snake bears some relationship with language, and with poetic language in particular. The connection is not direct, though – the snake does not communicate. Other poems in the collection use this image to linger in the wilderness zone of poetry that lies between language’s ability to communicate and its use of sheer sound: ‘nor is it transparent. Nothing / could be more opaque’ (‘Lies about Snakes’; I, p. 10). In another poem, the snake is ‘mute / except for the sound like steam / escaping from a radiator’ (‘Lesson on Snakes,’ underlining added; I, p. 9). This line makes use of repeated hissing ‘s’ sounds9 – while Atwood does not use fixed poetic forms, sound is important to many of her poems – to conjure the sub-linguistic language of the serpent. Similarly, ‘The Blue Snake’ both speaks and withholds: You are surprised to hear it speak It has the voice of the flute when you first blow into it, long and breathless; it has an old voice, like the blue stars, like the unborn,

8 I thank Jennifer L. Koosed for this idea. 9 See also, from ‘Snake Woman’ (underlining again added): ‘I could follow them by their odour, / a sick smell, acid and glandular, / part skunk, part inside / of a torn stomach, / the smell of their fear’.

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Like Adrienne Rich’s ‘The Stranger’, (‘the lost noun, the verb surviving / only in the infinitive’),10 this snake creates poetics of pure potential, a voice always in the process of becoming. The poetic utterance gestures toward the protean nature of language, the ability to create newness, but it does so by pointing back to the not-yet, to the horizon of language’s emergence. Poetry may be created by means of a ‘Serpent Wisdom,’ an attunement accessed by what Atwood refers to as ‘shamanistic’ means. Crucially, though, the snake in ‘Snake Poems’ remains fundamentally non-human: ‘Between us there is no fellow feeling’ (‘Bad Mouth’; SP II, p. 88; I, p. 11). Not unlike Wisdom in Job 28, the snake cannot be accessed by human experience. In ‘The White Snake’, it is found ‘at the dark of the moon, / by the forks of the roads, under three-leaved trees, / at the bottoms of unsounded lakes’ (I, p. 15). Elsewhere, in the poem ‘Bad Mouth,’ it is noncommunicative: ‘Alone among the animals / the snake does not sing’. It’s even alien: it has ‘chainmail skin, straight out / of science fiction, pure / shiver, pure saturn’ (‘Bad Mouth’; SP II, p. 88; I, p. 11). This image, in its various manifestations in ‘Snake Poems’, sketches out the boundaries of human language and understanding and locates poetry in the emergence from beyond that boundary. As an alien presence ‘straight out of science fiction’, then, the snake also becomes a source of both attraction and revulsion. The poem ‘Eating Snake’, shows the poet to be fascinated by the serpent, not merely so as to communicate with it, but also to go the point of wishing to consume and become transformed by it. Atwood here speaks of the encounter with the snake as a desire to consume ‘a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness, / the lust to feel what it does to you’ (‘Eating Snake’; SP II, p. 90; I, p. 13). This snake appears as an agent of seduction. In ‘Lies about Snakes’ we ‘Watch it / there as it undulates over the sand, / a movement of hips in a tight skirt’, but later in the poem Atwood complicates, even rejects, the fabled link between the snake and feminine seduction, referring to ‘legends / of snakes which were changed to women / and vice versa. Another lie’ (I, 10 Adrienne Rich, Diving

into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972, p. 19.

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p. 10). Further, Atwood resists cruder metaphors: two different poems also explicitly reject the idea that the snake represents a phallus (‘Eating Snake’; also ‘She’ in SP II, p. 133). Though Atwood works with an image that bears mythological resonance, her poems also take care to distance themselves from hoary interpretations of this image that draw on a male gaze. Similarly, the ‘Snake Poems’ resist integration into a dualistic theological register. These snakes are not a satanic presence: ‘It’s hardly / the devil in your garden’ insists ‘Lesson on Snakes’ (I, p. 9). But, as the poem continues, ‘and yet you’d batter it / with that hoe or crowbar’, while another line from ‘After Heraclitus’ reads ‘You do not pray, but go for the shovel’ (SP II, p. 95; I, p. 20). Though not directly a source of evil, humans distrust and even wish to destroy it. If these poems push back against all-too-familiar post-biblical myths of the sexualized seducer, they nonetheless ground the source of poetic language in a kind of Edenic experience in which humans approach the divine.11 ‘After Heraclitus’ baldly states ‘The snake is one name of God’, and, later in the poem, ‘This is the nameless one / giving itself a name’ (SP II, p. 95; I, p. 20). Yet further, this encounter is not envisioned as a meeting with a separate entity, as in the fashion of a poet’s discourse with a muse, but as a transfiguration: the snake stands in not for the art, but for the maker. In ‘Eating Snake’, the poet consumes and is transformed by it: ‘when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh, / when you swallow it down / and you can see with its own cold eyes’ (SP II, p. 90; I, p. 13). Similarly, another poem notes that ‘The kingdom of god is within you / because you ate it’ (‘Quattrocento’; SP II, p. 93; I, p. 18). Another poem, ‘Metempsychosis’, as its title suggests, speaks of repeated transformations back and forth between poet and her serpentine self – the snake is the poet is the snake (SP II, p. 91; I, p. 14). Or, the snake is God, and the creator of poetry becomes the divine snake at that moment of creation.

Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson argues that Atwood also uses her fiction to explore the nature of art and the artist. See Macpherson, ‘On Being a Woman Writer: Atwood’s Canadian and Feminist Contexts’, pp. 35–73. 11

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‘YOUNG BEAUTIFUL WOMAN POETS’: THE AGING POET To be sure, more could be said beyond this brief tour about the rich imagery of the ‘Snake Poems’. I’d like to think through, though, how Atwood gets from the bold, thundering ‘Snake Poems’ to ‘I’m a nice person really’ in The Door. It would seem, on first glance, that reducing the snake to a trinket around the neck of the imagined poet of old in ‘The poet has come back …’ signifies a shift in her poetic mode. What strikes me is this idea that the poet in this latter text is a latecomer, less effective and more pathetic than the unmediated prophetic poets of old: ‘you could, once’. The theme of the poet in decline appears frequently in The Door, but also emerges already just three years after ‘Snake Poems’ in a handful of poems newly published in Selected Poems II: Poems Selected & New 1976–1986., the ‘Aging Female Poet’ poems (‘Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony’, ‘Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day’, and ‘Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines’). The latter speaks wistfully of ‘young beautiful woman poets’: they write poems like blood in a dead person that comes out black, or at least deep purple, like smashed grapes. Perhaps I was one of them once. Too late to remember the details, the veils. (‘Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines’; SP II, p. 127)

In this text, the poet laments her distance from what appears to be the vibrant source of poetry, the black blooded poems, the work that tramples the vintage. This ‘real’ poetry is lost to the ‘Aging Poet’, and available only to youth, an idea that would seem to affirm the ‘shamanistic’ or prophetic mode of the ‘Snake Poems’.12 And yet again, the only actual poem any reader encounters remains the one produced by the ‘Aging Female Poet’ – as J. Z. Smith famously noted, ‘there is no pristine myth; there is only application’. 13 ‘The poet has come back …’ alludes to the snake as an icon of a more

12 See also the poem ‘Another visit to the Oracle’ (D, pp. 91–98).

J. Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions, p. 299. See also Richard Walsh’s “Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Bibles: ‘First the Bad Thing, Then the Story,’” in this volume. 13

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elemental source of poetry, a break between the authentic acts of the poet and the weak efforts of the latecomer. A closer look at Atwood’s explorations of this image in ‘Snake Poems’ shows this chronological contrast also to be yet another slight-of-hand. The very first line in the first poem in the collection, ‘Snake Woman’, already undercuts the idea that poetry is ever found in unmediated contact: ‘I was once the Snake Woman’ (SP II, p. 87; I, p. 8).14 The poet lives in the space of simultaneous presence with and distance from the poetic word. Part of what it means to be a poet in Atwood’s work is to be always both a success and a failure, to be a creator and a charlatan. In ‘The poets hang on’, from The Door, the poet is an object of derision who can’t give the audience what it wants: ‘Spit it out, we hiss at them. / Say it plain!’ (D, p. 35) (More serpentine imagery!) And, later: ‘If you try for a simple answer, / that’s when they pretend to be crazy’ (D, p. 35). These poets, too are aging poets: ‘They could use some dental work’ (D, p. 35). But, as this poem continues, ‘the poets hang on’ – they know something (‘They do know something. / Something they’re whispering, / something we can’t quite hear.’ [D, p. 37])

T HE TWO-HANDED PROPHETIC PERFORMANCE; OR : WHAT HAS TORONTO TO DO WITH JERUSALEM? Thus far, I’ve been making the case that, by intertwining the images of snake and aging poet through her later work, Atwood characterizes poetry as that which is vital, transformative, divine … but also always beyond reach. Even if poetry emerges from a ‘shamanistic’ experience, the poet’s work yet must necessarily be a performance, an act of deception wherein the poet herself is responsible for her own creation. The poet is two-handed: one hand dextrous, one hand sinister.15 The skill lies both in the poetic production and in the act that disguises that production. While Atwood’s work contains a number of themes and images drawn from the biblical tradition, it’s her particular expression of the nature of poetry and poetic performance that this essay seeks to explore. The notion that the genesis of poetry lies perpetually absent

14 Italics mine 15 See also Rhiannon

Graybill’s “The LongPen, Future Library, and Biblical Prophecy: Thinking Writing with Margaret” in this volume.

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from the poet may seem to mark a departure from the biblical Prophets’ encounters with the divine, from the cries of an Amos or a Jeremiah, the victory song of a Deborah (Judges 5) – though perhaps somewhat closer to Elijah’s voice of sheer silence (1 Kgs 19). Surely, if anyone does, the prophets themselves come from the time ‘back when God was till thundering vengeance’ (D, p. 23). In actuality, though, Atwood’s ‘aging’ embarrassment with poetic production is present in the Prophets, too. The Hebrew prophetic writers were great practitioners of the art of poetry who also simply didn’t trust poetry very much. Indeed, the very notion that a prophet might be a poet has long been a source of dispute. The Masoretes, of course, do not include any prophetic works among their poetic passages and, even to this day, readers are hesitant to work out the implications of reading prophets as poets. As literary critic Stephen Geller writes, ‘Were Israel’s prophets also poets? This question resolves itself into two others: can they be poets and, if so, may they be?’16 It’s one thing to say that parts of prophetic literature are legible as poetry – the story of the reception of biblical literature shows that it undeniably is so. Gellar’s second question, though, raises a thornier problem about the nature of poetry and its relationship to prophetic communication. The fundamental shape of this problem was already laid out by the 12th century scholar Moses ibn Ezra. Ibn Ezra grappled with this issue: the most notable aspects of poetry – the effects of image, sound, wordplay – are precisely those aspects that are most ‘false,’ or most the product of human creativity. They are both essential to poetry and gratuitous to the prophetic ‘message’.17 So, if the ‘best of poetry is its falseness’, as a maxim repeated my many medieval commentators goes,18 how can it therefore be a true prophecy? Could it even be possible that a prophet, too, is twohanded?

16 Stephen A. Geller, ‘Were the Prophets Poets?’ pp. 211–221. 17 See Mordechai Z. Cohen, ‘Hebrew Aesthetics and Jewish Biblical Exegesis’ pp. 24–41; see also Cohen, ‘The Aesthetic Exegesis of Moses ibn Ezra,’ pp. 282–301. 18 See Adele Berlin, Biblical Poetry through Medieval Eyes, p. 26.

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And indeed, a handful of passages in prophetic literature reveal a deep discomfort with the act of poetic creativity.19 For instance, Jeremiah 23 contains a series of oracular charges against ‘the prophets’ who, among other transgressions, ‘use their own tongues and oracle an oracle’ (Jer. 23:31). Most startlingly, Jeremiah’s accusation is not simply that they employ their own human creativity, but also that they ‘steal my [YHWH’s] words from one another’ (Jer. 23:30). That is, Jeremiah critiques these prophets not for invention per se. The idea that false prophets could have possession of divine words suggests that a clear division between the (false) human word and the (true) divine word is impossible to make.20 The very idea that prophets express a divine message through poetry, a medium whose hallmark is human creativity, blurs the line between divine and human. This discomfort with poetry’s duplicitous side, hinted at in Jeremiah 23,21 is confronted head-on in the book of Ezekiel. On the one hand, Ezekiel is a prophetic book that revels in poetry. Its notoriously fractured and startling metaphors show a willingness to engage playfully with image.22 It also self-consciously engages with poetic form, using and adapting genre labels such as ‘lamentation’, ‘parable’, and ‘riddle’.23 Despite this deep engagement with poetry – or more likely because of it – Ezekiel shows itself to be deeply embarrassed by it. Ezekiel is mocked as a ‘maker of metaphors’ or ‘parable peddler’ in Ezek 21:5, all while creating a vivid metaphor that likens Jerusalem’s enemies to a sword in the very same chapter. Even more, chapter 33 notes derisively that, to his audience, Ezekiel is ‘like a singer of love songs (kəšîrʿagābîm), one who has a beautiful voice and is a skilled musician. They hear your words, but they do not act upon them’ (Ezek. 33:32). As Atwood writes in ‘The poets hang on’, the poets know ‘Something The following section draws on Elaine T. James and Sean Burt, ‘“What Kind of Likeness?”: The Aesthetic Impulse in Biblical Poetry.’ Prooftexts (forthcoming). 20 See James L. Crenshaw’s devastating critique of proposed scholarly criteria for distinguishing between ‘true’ and ‘false’ prophecy in Prophetic Conflict: Its Effect Upon Israelite Religion, pp. 49–62. 21 Compare also Micah 2; see James and Burt, ‘What Kind of Likeness?’ 22 See Michael A. Lyons, Introduction to the Study of Ezekiel. 23 See Sean Burt, ‘“It Is a Lamentation – It Has Become a Lamentation!”: Subverting Genre in Ezekiel 19’, pp. 199–215. 19

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we can’t quite hear’. Even more, the term Ezekiel uses to modify ‘songs’ (kəšîrʿagābîm), may more properly be translated ‘erotic’ or ‘seductive’ – and, even more, it is translated as ‘lie’ (ψευδος) in Ezek 33:31 by the LXX. The poetic performance is the unreliable lie that is simultaneously the prophet’s essential tool. The aesthetic nature of poetic language inescapably reveals itself, no matter what other rhetorical or theological content the poet may wish to express. Any ‘prophetic’ or ‘shamanistic’ (to use Atwood’s term) encounter with the ‘coldblooded and perfect’ word is ultimately indistinguishable from the artists’ tricks of skill. The artist is always present. While some scholars of Ezekiel insist that Ezek 33 levels a condemnation of the audience, 24 the audience discerns the truth of the matter. A poem is always a work of human creativity. Ezekiel is a prime example of a poet who, like the snake eaters in Atwood’s poems, consumes the encounter with the divine (in the scroll he swallows; Ezek 3:1–3) and then is consumed by it. Ezekiel’s body is transformed, made embarrassing, unmanned by this encounter.25 As a result of his dramatic, even traumatic, transformative meeting with the divine, Ezekiel ends up as … a sordid entertainer who impresses with his craft, but does not sway their minds (Ezek 33:31–32). 26 A powerful parallel with Ezekiel can be found in Atwood’s ‘The White Snake’: ‘There was a man who tried it … cut into it, swallowed’, and then ‘Human speech left him. / For the rest of his life, emptied and mute / he could do nothing but listen / to the words, words around him everywhere like rain falling’ (I, pp. 15, 16). Atwood’s poetry names a split within the poet between the ‘shaman’ and the ‘aging poet’ that is not necessarily chronological, but rather constitutive of poetry itself. Further, while this split is not expressly articulated in the prophets to the degree it is in Atwood’s work, the prophetic dislike of poetry reveals a nascent awareness of this problem, as Moses ibn Ezra observed. To that end, one last poem by Atwood makes for a fruitful parallel to Ezekiel’s embarrassed poet. See, for example, Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, p. 687. 25 See Rhiannon Graybill, Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets, pp. 97–120. 26 For an exploration of Ezekiel’s persona as a performance artist, see Teresa Hornsby, ‘Ezekiel Off-Broadway.’ 24

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‘Poetry reading’, from The Door, narrates the experience of watching a poet perform their craft. In this poem, Atwood’s lyric voice observes a poet – this time a male poet – from the outside performing selfabasements: ‘ransacking his innards’, displaying his ‘shamefaced lusts’, and ‘doing our confessions for us’ (D, p. 38). Yet, along with all this turmoil, the poet also strikes a pathetic figure, presenting a milquetoast, infantilized persona, He’s encased in a soft pullover, defiantly not black, but pale yellow like a cream sorbet, the colour you buy for toddlers when you don’t wish to look sexist (D, p. 38)

Later, the speaker takes pity on the poet, even imagining to offer to sleep with him, and reassuring herself (‘You’ve vowed never to do that, / so you’re making a big exception here’). Yet, the male poet declines this advance, continuing to wallow in pity: ‘I’ve told you about my scabs and compulsions, / my grubby torments, my lack of dignity – / I’d just get you dirty. / Why bother with me?’ (D, p. 39; italics in original). The speaker replies: No one made you do this, this fooling with syllables, this rolling naked in thistles … You could have been a bricklayer. You could have been a dentist. Hard-shelled. Impervious. (D, p. 39; italics in original)

It’s difficult for a reader of the Bible to encounter this passage and not see some resemblances with the Hebrew prophets, even the lament psalmists. Jeremiah famously laments his life and experience as a divine intermediary (for example, Jer 20). Ezekiel’s vulnerability is even more extreme. Though YHWH promises to make him hard-shelled (‘Like the hardest diamond, harder than flint, I have made your forehead’, Ezek 3:9), he nonetheless has his fragile body exposed27 – and is

27 Graybill, Are

We Not Men?, pp. 97–120.

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wounded by bad reviews of his poetry (see the discussion of Ezek 21 and 33 above). Additionally, though not technically prophetic literature, Lamentations generates the poetic utterance from a place of total devastation. But Lamentations also makes use of that debasement as a piece of the poetic performance. For example, Lam 2:13 bewails the helplessness of poetry: “What can I witness for you? / What can I liken to you, / Daughter Jerusalem? / What can I compare to you / That I might comfort you / Maiden Daughter Zion?” This passage may discuss the failures of language, but it nevertheless presents us with a striking example of poetry.28 Even more, arguably no other book in the Bible is so thoroughgoingly characterized as an exercise of poetic skill.29 Lamentations, in other words, offers a kind of anti-performance, an affecting poem that lingers in the space of artistic failure. So, too, does Atwood’s ‘Poetry reading’, which concludes: So you keep on watching, as he flays himself in an ecstasy of self-reproach; he’s down to his underwear now, the hair shirt, the chains – N.B., these are metaphors – and you see that after all there’s a cold craft to it, as with beadwork or gutting a mackerel. There are techniques, or gimmicks. But just as you’re feeling tricked his voice cuts abruptly. There’s a small nod, and a smile, and a pause, and you feel your own intake of breath

For more on the limitations and promise offered by the poetic act in Lamentations, see Peter Sabo, ‘Poetry amid Ruins’, pp. 141–157. 29 See Kathleen M. O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World; F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, ‘The Enjambing Line in Lamentations: A Taxonomy (Part I),’ pp. 219–239 and ‘The Effects of Enjambment in Lamentations (Part 2)’ pp. 370–383; For more on Lam 2, see also James and Burt, ‘What Kind of Likeness?’ 28

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like a fist of air slamming into you, and you join the applause. (‘Poetry reading’, D., pp. 39–40)

The broken-down aging poet, transformed and weakened, shows their work to be an act: ‘There’s a cold craft to it, as with beadwork / or gutting a mackerel. / There are techniques, or gimmicks.’ The audience themselves recognizes that it is an artifice, a performance – even aware of the ‘cold craft,’ the viewer cannot but be moved, even physically, by this art. In fact, in retrospect, the speaker’s offer to sleep with the poet – against her better judgment – also turns out to have been possibly moved by the poet’s disarming anti-seduction. There may be a failure to capture the otherworldly divine essence of poetry, but it is a very successful failure indeed. Similarly, does Ezekiel, in his self-portrayal as a parable-peddling singer of love songs, protest too much? Is the self-undermining persona itself a literary fiction? To my knowledge, commentators on Ezekiel have consistently read Ezek 21 and 33 as straightforward failures on the part of Ezekiel, or more commonly, the people of Jerusalem. I suspect, though, that Ezekiel’s poetic anti-performance allows this book to have its cake and eat it too, to be two-handed by displaying literary artistic skill but simultaneously also disavowing that skill. In her book of lectures, Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood develops the idea found in the closing line of ‘The poet has come back…’, the claim ‘that the god of the poets has two hands: / the dextrous, the sinister’. There, she argues that for the artist, the writer, ‘the mere act of writing splits the self into two’, between the person and the persona (ND, p. 32). In other words, where the poet is most skilled at presenting a singular voice is also where she is most duplicitous. Atwood’s reflections in ‘Poetry reading’ on the trickery, the ‘cold craft’ of the artist, draw a parallel between poetic art and the craft of the material arts (‘beadwork’, ‘gutting a mackerel’). As such, one hears an echo of the Hebrew Bible’s perhaps most sustained treatment of the work of the artist, the polemic against the idol maker in Isaiah 44. For a poem supposedly critical of the human arts, the text of Isa 44 actually unfolds as a loving, densely crafted poetic account of the act of artistic creation:30 ‘The carpenter stretches a line, marks it out with a stylus, fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he makes it in 30 See Nathaniel B. Levtow, Images

of Others, pp. 60–66.

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human form, with human beauty, to be set up in a shrine.’ Even more, this creative act is literally two-handed: ‘Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it.’ The idol maker is always and obviously a human, one who uses the materials of the world; he is also an artist, one who transforms that raw material into an artifact that shows forth an undeniable – and threatening – power. The polemic poem of Isa 44 concludes by demanding that the reader imagine that this artist is too blind to be able to ask ‘Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?’ Does the artist know that the creative act is also an act of duplicity? Margaret Atwood’s poetry tells us that the answer is: yes, yes she certainly does. And yet, she also knows that, when you’ve seen what she’s produced, you’ll ‘join the applause’.

CODA: ON HUMAN AND DIVINE CREATIVITY I, too, should admit to playing a crude sleight-of-hand trick in this essay. While it may not rise to the level of the literary deception at the heart of The Blind Assassin, I have been eliding the fact that the couplet that closes ‘The poet has come back …’ does not state that the poet has two hands, but that ‘the god of the poets has two hands’.31 However, just as Atwood herself speaks of the poet as two-handed in Negotiating with the Dead and suggests in ‘Snake Poems’ that the snake is at the same time divine and another incarnation of the poet, this elision seems appropriate. As mentioned above, Atwood turns to Edenic imagery in a number of her works, both poetry and fiction. Eden forms a site not just of a primal human-divine contact, but also of the act of naming and creation. The encounter at the boundary of language – the ‘shamanistic’ moment, in Atwood’s terms – is where poetry writ large emerges. The poet’s task, in a sense, is to name what she encounters. But this task, as we have seen, is one that is destined to fall short. The poet, in other words, is both human and divine; using Atwood’s terms, she is both the ‘aging female poet’ and the ‘snake woman.’ The prophetic poets also practice their arts with these two hands. Tasked with the impossible, to express an insight that lies at the edge 31 Italics mine.

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of what can be expressed, the prophetic poet reaches for the tool best served for this task, poetry. Yet, poetry, as the form of language that is the quintessential expression of human creativity, cannot but fail at its own aim. Returning to Gellar’s second question – may the prophets be poets? – one may wonder if the prophets strain under the double burden of both bearing the divine word and obscuring their own role in its production. Put another way, fidelity to their role necessitates duplicity, perhaps not unlike Eden’s serpent, who in the drama of Genesis 3 plays a double role of instigator and truth-teller. That being said, an irony for this essay is that, while the snake image is central to expressing this idea in Atwood’s poetry, the Edenic serpent is not as directly relevant to the matter of the biblical poet’s two-handedness. That serpent’s words raise the very idea of duplicity in divine language (‘Did God say …?’ in Gen 3:1), but a different biblical serpent puts a finer point on the problem faced by the artist: Nehushtan. The ‘bronze serpent’ makes two appearances in the Hebrew Bible, one at its creation by Moses (Num 21) and one at its destruction by Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18). In both stories, Nehushtan is an object that marks a meeting point between human and divine. One could read Hezekiah’s move to demolish this serpent as an attempt to tame the cultic excesses of the Judahite people. More striking, though, is the fact that Numbers preserves a tradition in which an artifact made by human hands was clearly efficacious. The bronze serpent seems to have become intolerable in ancient Judah not just because it was a dumb idol, but because it clearly communicated something numinous. The act of creativity – in poetry, the act of naming, of conjuring language – is always a divine act. As both Atwood’s later poetry and the work of biblical poets suggest, though, this divine act remains inexorably pathetic. These two literary corpora are productive cases for reflecting on the fact that the poet creates, as novelist and critic Zadie Smith writes, ‘through language and through lies, the twin engines at the embarrassing heart of literature’. 32

32 Zadie Smith, ‘Philip Roth, a Writer All the Way Down’ New

23, 2018).

Yorker (May

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, Margaret. Interlunar. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1984. ―. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ―. Selected Poems 1965–1975. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. ―. Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. ―. The Year of the Flood. New York: Anchor, 2010. Berlin, Adele. Biblical Poetry through Medieval Eyes. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. Atwood, Margaret. The Door: Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Burt, Sean. ‘“It Is a Lamentation – It Has Become a Lamentation!”: Subverting Genre in Ezekiel 19’. Pages 199–215 in Biblical Poetry and Art of Close Reading. Edited by J. Blake Couey and Elaine T. James. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Cohen, Mordechai Z. ‘The Aesthetic Exegesis of Moses ibn Ezra’. Pages 282–301 in The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: History of Interpretation. Vol. I/2. Edited by Magne Sæbø, ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. ―. ‘Hebrew Aesthetics and Jewish Biblical Exegesis’. Pages 24–41 in The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts. Edited by Stephen Prickett. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Crenshaw, James L. Prophetic Conflict: Its Effect Upon Israelite Religion. BZAW 124. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. Djwa, Sandra. ‘Back to the Primal: The Apprenticeship of Margaret Atwood’. Pages 13–46 in Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Edited by Lorraine Mary York. Concord, ON: Anansi, 1995. Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W. ‘The Effects of Enjambment in Lamentations (Part 2)’. ZAW 113 (2001): 370–383

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―. ‘The Enjambing Line in Lamentations: A Taxonomy (Part I)’. ZAW 113 (2001): 219–239. Geller, Stephen A. ‘Were the Prophets Poets?’. Prooftexts 3 (1983): 211– 221. Grace, Sherril E. and Ken Norris, eds. Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1980. Graybill, Rhiannon. Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Greenberg, Moshe. Ezekiel 21–37: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. AB 22A (Garden City, NY: 1997. Hornsby, Teresa. ‘Ezekiel Off-Broadway’. The Bible and Critical Theory 2 (2006): 2.1–2.8. Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 2006. James, Elaine T. and Sean Burt, ‘“What Kind of Likeness?”: The Aesthetic Impulse in Biblical Poetry’. Prooftexts (forthcoming). Levtow, Nathaniel B. Images of Others: Iconic Politics in Ancient Israel. BJS 11. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008. Lyons, Michael A. An Introduction to the Study of Ezekiel. T&T Clark Approaches to Biblical Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. O’Connor, Kathleen M. Lamentations and the Tears of the World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002. Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl, ‘On Being a Woman Writer: Atwood’s Canadian and Feminist Contexts’. Pages 35–73 in Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood. Edited by J. Brooks Bouson. Ipswitch, MA: Salem Press, 2013. Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973. Peter Sabo, ‘Poetry amid Ruins’. Pages 141–157 in Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play: Studies in Biblical Poetry and Prophecy in Honour

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Smith, J. Z. Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Leiden: Brill, 1978. Smith, Zadie. ‘Philip Roth, a Writer All the Way Down’ New Yorker. May 23, 2018. VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. ‘Margaret Atwood’s Poetry: Voice and Vision’. Pages 125–152 in Critical Insights: Margaret Atwood. Edited by J. Brooks Bouson. Ipswitch, MA: Salem Press, 2013.

10. QUEER ANIMALITIES IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S MADDADDAM TRILOGY AND THE HEBREW BIBLE KEN STONE In 2001, on a bird watching trip in Australia, Margaret Atwood encountered a red-necked crake. ‘We were in the land of the cassowary’, Atwood later recalled, referring to another bird that is threatened in its Australian range, ‘so the question was how long is the cassowary going to be able to hold out, despite its habit of stealing pies off window sills and eating bananas’. 1 From her balcony, Atwood spotted the crake. And according to her own testimony, this sighting was one inspiration for Oryx and Crake, the first volume of the Maddaddam trilogy: ‘“I saw a red-necked crake,” she said, “and I saw the shape of a book. There was the book shining in the distance, as a goal”’.2 Given this inspiration for Oryx and Crake, it is hardly surprising that animal references and animal characters appear throughout the Maddaddam trilogy. Yet many of these references are unusual. Indeed, all three books are teeming with what I will call ‘queer animalities,’ a phrase I discuss briefly below. I then turn to the appearance of such animalities throughout Atwood’s trilogy, providing an overview, a bestiary of sorts, of some of the queer animalities one can find there. Finally I bring that discussion into closer dialogue with the Hebrew Bible and its own queer animalities. In staging this dialogue between

1 Maunder, ‘Dangerous Mind’. 2 Gussow, ‘Atwood’s Dystopian Warning’. See also Atwood, ‘Writing Oryx and Crake’.

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the Maddaddam books and the Bible, I am inspired by the trilogy itself. For some of the trilogy’s characters, especially in The Year of the Flood, develop their own interpretations of a series of biblical texts, including texts that refer to animals. My goal here is not to interpret all of the biblical passages that the MaddAddam trilogy alludes to, though that would be an interesting project. Rather I want to suggest that Atwood, by bringing queer animalities and the Hebrew Bible together in her trilogy and inspiring us to follow her lead, allows us to see details of the biblical texts that are often overlooked. The MaddAddam books might seem like a strange partner for the Hebrew Bible. But queer reading has always been about strange couplings and unconventional mixing.

QUEER ANIMALITIES My notion of “queer animalities” is inspired in part by a chapter on ‘Queer Animality’ in Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Chen discusses ‘animality’ as ‘the “stuff” of animal nature that sometimes sticks to animals’ but also ‘sometimes bleeds back onto textures of humanness.’3 Animality blurs, rather than solidifying, the line between humans and other species. Chen, who is especially interested in what they call ‘racialized animality’,4 insists upon the need ‘to take intersectionality seriously, even when work seems to go far afield into the realm of the animal’. Chen recognizes, however, that the dynamics of animality are complex, sometimes contradictory, and even queer. By ‘queer’ here, Chen does not refer ‘merely’ to ‘embodied sexual contact among subjects identified as gay and lesbian’. Rather they are interested in a broader set of phenomena, including ‘improper affiliation’ associated with ‘an array of subjectivities, intimacies, beings, and spaces located outside of the heteronormative’.5 ‘Animal figures’, Chen argues, ‘whether fic-

3 Chen, Animacies, p. 89. 4 Ibid., p. 90. 5 Ibid., p. 104.

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tional or actual … are themselves animate, mobile’, and sometimes difficult to pin down.6 Animals themselves can have an ‘ambivalently sexualized quality’. 7 Queer animalities can involve eroticism, but they also involve matters of kinship, ‘affinity, affection, or some other affective order’. 8 Because ‘the queer human-animal blend’ can be ‘undone and redone in every successive representation’, it “offers no easy roadmap’ for analysis. On the one hand, animalization often involves stigmatization and justifications for the suffering of humans and nonhumans alike. On the other hand, Chen suggests in a discussion of representations of Fu Manchu that in some cases animalized figures ‘might be thought of as claiming animality, rightfully claiming animality, the animality that we all have and that some of us hide’, in order to challenge ‘Western orders of rule and knowledge’.9 Reflection on animality today, moreover, requires us to acknowledge that nonhuman animals ‘share with humans certain territories of sense, percept, cognition, feeling, and, indeed, language’, as well as ‘sentience’, ‘transposable, consubstantial matter’, and ‘consanguinity’. 10 While Chen’s discussion of queer animality contributes to their larger arguments about animacies, it also alerts us to dynamics we may explore in other contexts. Thus, in the remainder of this chapter, I want to consider both Atwood’s trilogy and certain biblical texts as sites for the appearance of a range of queer animalities. The queerness of these animalities does not always reside in matters of sexuality, gender, or kinship. As Jay Emerson Johnson suggests, since the ‘ubiquitous human/animal divide operates … in much the same way that the homosexual/heterosexual bifurcation operates at nearly every level of Western cultural discourse’, the ‘critical and deconstructive posture’ that queer theory takes toward categories of gender and sexuality can also be brought to bear on species boundaries, especially that boundary dividing humans from other animals.11 As we will see, animalities

6 Ibid., p. 106. 7 Ibid., p. 120. 8 Ibid., p. 119. 9 Ibid., p. 121. 10 Ibid., pp. 124–125. 11 Johnson, ‘Liberating Compassion’, p. 82.

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in the MaddAddam trilogy, and to a lesser extent in the Hebrew Bible, complicate, or ‘queer’, the boundaries of species, human and nonhuman alike; but they do so in a range of unpredictable ways.

ATWOOD’S QUEER BESTIARY The chronological structure of Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy is complex. All three volumes open after a great disaster, which has wiped out nearly all humans. The narrative in each volume moves back and forth between the period after this disaster and the period prior to it. In The Year of the Flood, a small eco-religious group known as God’s Gardeners predicts the coming disaster as a ‘Waterless Flood’, associating it explicitly with the Genesis flood story while recognizing that God already promises there not to destroy the earth again with water. The Gardeners, however, ‘intended to float above the Waterless Flood, with the aid of the food they were stashing away in hidden storeplaces they called Ararats’ (YOTF, p. 47). We learn in Oryx and Crake that this ‘flood’ is actually a global pandemic caused by a hemorrhagic virus that has spread in a pill known as BlyssPluss. The pill, which promises libido, youthfulness, and protection against sexually transmitted diseases, is understandably popular. Unfortunately it also contains the deadly virus that, once disseminated throughout the world, literally dissolves most of humanity. But the period before the pandemic, referred to several times in MaddAddam as ‘the chaos’, is already frightening. This chaos is represented in ways that are recognizably related to threats we face in our own time. Climate change has continued apace, resulting in warmer temperatures, droughts and storms, rising seas and flooded coasts, and disruption of agriculture and the food industry. Prior to the appearance of the virus that leads to final collapse, diseases have already spread among both humans and livestock: An early scene in Oryx and Crake involves a ‘bonfire’ made from the bodies of cows, sheep, and pigs that have been stricken with some disease, apparently Foot and Mouth disease (O&C, pp. 15–21). Corporations rather than governments or democracies control society. An upper class of corporation employees resides in secure community compounds, while the rest of the populace inhabits the ‘pleeblands’, represented in various states of havoc and turmoil. The corporations, as well as the elite educational institutions where corporation employees send their children, are devoted to developing and

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marketing new products, including animal products. As Gerry Canavan notes, we see in this pre-flood period ‘a hyper-exaggerated version of our present’, ‘our mad world, gone even madder’.12 The creatures who appear throughout Atwood’s trilogy thus fall into several different categories, divided not only by species but also by the time periods in which they live and the nature of their interactions with humans. There are, for example, animals familiar to us now that are still present after the flood. Thus we find various species of insects (spiders, grasshoppers, ants, flies, caterpillars, moths, beetles, cockroaches, crickets, and unspecified biting bugs), fish, frogs, slugs, snails, snakes, crocodiles, squirrels, mice, rats, and crabs. Fewer species of larger mammals are present, but deer and some bears remain. Fittingly enough for a story inspired by a crake, there are also birds, including cormorants, gulls, egrets, herons, ibises, sparrows, robins, jays, crows, ravens, and vultures. Some of these birds live on the towers of old buildings that are now offshore, swamped by risen seas. Unfortunately, Atwood’s crake is not among these surviving birds. In Oryx and Crake, Jimmy (who later becomes Snowman) and Glenn (who later becomes Crake) play several online games prior to the waterless flood, including one called ‘Extinctathon’. The game requires identifying species of animals and plants that have gone extinct ‘within the past fifty years’ of the time of the players by trying to answer a series of clues, including ‘the habitat and when last seen, and what had snuffed it. (Pollution, habitat destruction, credulous morons who thought that eating its horn would give them a boner.)’ The reference to the horn refers to the rhinoceros, which also appears on a list of the animals that Extinctathon players can choose as codenames (‘Komodo, Rhino, Manatee, Hippocampus Ramulosus’). The codenames, in other words, refer to animals still alive in our time as readers that have gone extinct by the narrative period preceding the waterless flood. Thus when Glenn gives Jimmy the codename ‘Thickney, after a defunct Australian double-jointed bird that used to hang around in cemeteries’, and then takes for himself the codename ‘Crake, after the Red-necked Crake, another Australian bird – never, said Crake, very numerous’ (O&C, pp. 80–81), we realize that the crake, which inspired Atwood to write her book, is extinct by the time it begins, and 12 Canavan, ‘Hope, But Not for Us’, p. 140.

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before the flood wipes out most of humanity. So too the East African Oryx, from which the title character Oryx takes her name. Later in the book, Jimmy refers to a time ‘back when there were lions’ and, later still, to extinct bonobos and the ‘long, lost list’ of animals that have gone extinct, including ‘the polar bear, the beluga whale, the onager, the burrowing owl’ (O&C, pp. 101, 344). Such references recur across all three volumes of the trilogy, sometimes through the attribution to characters of the names of species that have become extinct (Black Rhino, Swift Fox, Ivory Bill, Tamaraw, Manatee, Beluga) and sometimes through attribution of the demise of animal species to human activities (for example, lions, tigers, and whales). The world before the flood is already an extension, or outcome, of the decline of species in our own time that some scientists associate with a ‘sixth mass extinction’.13 Atwood invites her reader to imagine a time just a little bit down the road, when animal species that we already know as threatened have in fact disappeared. Species known to us have either survived or been eliminated prior to the waterless flood, and the trilogy becomes something like an extinction game of its own, where one can discern which species have been wiped out and which species have managed to survive the chaos. But there are other creatures throughout the trilogy who disrupt our understanding of species in a number of ways. Dogs as we know them have been replaced by wolvogs, descendants of domesticated dogs who are specially bred at the request of security corps prior to the flood. Wolvogs look like dogs (‘many different breeds and sizes’) but are too aggressive to be tamed (O&C, p. 205). Having become widespread after the pandemic wipes out their creators, they kill and eat the remaining domesticated dogs, who come up to the wolvogs eagerly and unsuspectingly. Ominously, wolvogs stalk other creatures as well, including the surviving humans. The wolvogs are only one example of strange creatures whose origins lie with animal species known to us as readers but who have been given new forms by humans before the flood, forms they retain after 13 Kolbert, The Sixth

Extinction; Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies, pp. 164–169.

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the flood. There are rabbits that glow green at night from the genetic material of jellyfish, not unlike the actual glowing rabbit created for artist Eduardo Kac in our own time.14 There are bobkittens, ‘smaller than bobcats, less aggressive’, who were supposed to eliminate feral cats (thereby ‘improving the almost non-existent songbird population’) but who turn out to be equally willing to prey on other animals including small humans (O&C, p. 163). There are also rakunks, who originate as experiments in crossspecies gene splicing, experiments that have become quite common in the period before the flood. Some such experiments are unsuccessful (splices of cane toads and chameleons, for example, or of snakes and rats), but rakunks, ‘cute’ animals who combine features of raccoons and skunks but without a skunk’s smell or a raccoon’s ‘crabby’ tendency ‘to tear your house apart’, turn out to be good pets. Jimmy, as a boy in one of the corporate compounds that is carrying out genetic experiments, is given a rakunk after asking his parents unsuccessfully for a cat, a dog, or a parrot. The rakunks queer species boundaries by combining two species in one strange new creature, but Jimmy’s relationship to his rakunk queers species boundaries in other ways. Although he names his rakunk Killer, Jimmy ‘fell in love with it’ after it ‘licked Jimmy’s fingers’ (O&C, p. 51). Killer is female, and Jimmy’s cross-species, affectionate relationship with her continues: she sleeps in his bed, tickling him by ‘licking his feet to get the salt off’; she becomes ‘his secret best friend…the only person he could really talk to’; she ‘would lick his nose’ and ‘always forgave him’ (O&C, pp. 58–60). Jimmy’s mother takes Killer with her when she abandons the family, telling Jimmy in a note that she will set Killer loose. Jimmy worries that a tame rakunk won’t be able to survive, but he notes later that wild rakunks have become common after the pandemic. When he mourns his mother’s departure, he wonders ‘which one of them he was mourning the most? His mother or an altered skunk?’ (O&C, p. 60) Later, ‘in secret, in the night, he yearned for Killer’ and for his mother too (O&C, p 67). The intimacy of these moments becomes more striking when Jimmy first meets Oryx, the human object of his desire, in person, as she is carrying a rakunk (O&C, pp. 308–309).

14 See Cohen, ‘Afterword’.

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While rakunks might have affectionate relations with humans, other creatures result from genetic modifications that are intended for more corporate or commercial purposes. A splice of goats and spiders, for example, produces a strong fiber useful for bulletproof vests worn by corporate security forces. Mo’Hair sheep have been bred to grow human hair, in various colors, curly or straight, that can be transplanted to, or otherwise used by, humans: ‘Onscreen, in advertisements … you’d see the sheep tossing its hair, then a beautiful girl tossing a mane of the same hair. More hair with Mo’Hair!’ (YOTF, p. 238, emphasis original). Mo’Hair sheep at least resemble the sheep that we know, and graze together with them in The Year of the Flood, where they also live alongside humans in shepherding relations after the flood. Far more horrifying are the ‘chickens’ with mouths but no heads, from whom humans have removed ‘all the brain functions’ except those involving ‘digestion, assimilation, and growth’ (‘Picture the sea-anemone body plan’, Crake tells Jimmy, ‘sort of like a chicken hookworm’ [O&C, pp. 202–203]). Such creatures, which are eaten as ‘ChickieNobs’, take to new extremes the modifications made to chickens and other edible birds in our own time. The assumption that they don’t suffer is intended to defuse arguments made by animal rights activists against the industrial raising of chickens. This strategy seems to work. In The Year of the Flood one character persuades the first person narrator Ren, who ‘couldn’t deal with meat’ after her life with God’s Gardeners, that ‘ChickieNobs were really vegetables because they grew on stems and didn’t have faces. So I ate half of them’ (YOTF, p. 130). Characters who are more comfortable eating meat can go to SecretBurgers, which advertises under the branding slogan ‘SecretBurgers! Because Everyone Loves a Secret!’ The secret is ‘that no one knew what sort of animal protein was actually in them’. Some secrets are hard to keep, however: ‘The meat grinders weren’t 100 per cent efficient; you might find a swatch of cat fur in your burger or a fragment of mouse tail. Was there a fingernail, once?’ (YOTF, p. 33) Indeed, a few human corpses are occasionally added to the protein mix. But ‘who could say no to a business with so few supply-side costs?’ (YOTF, p. 34) Not all the animal innovations found in the trilogy are products of commercial enterprises. Some animals may serve ornamental purposes, such as peagrets, which splice peacocks and egrets. But there are

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also liobams, which have a biblical connection. Liobams resulted from a ‘lion-sheep splice’ commissioned by a religious group known as the Lion Isaiahists who hoped ‘to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom’ (YOTF, p. 94). While the liobams were intended by the Lion Isaiahists to embody Isaiah’s prediction that lions would lie peacefully with lambs (in contrast to the belief, held by the more militant Wolf Isaiahists, that wolves rather than lions would lie with lambs), the liobams fall short of the biblical ideal. They hunt Mo’Hair sheep, and need to be avoided by the trilogy’s human characters. One group of genetically modified animals who become more significant to the trilogy’s plot are the pigoons. Pigoons are developed from pigs who have been modified to serve as hosts for ‘human-tissue organs’ that can be transplanted into humans. They are therefore good examples of Atwood’s claim that Oryx and Crake ‘invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent’ (WWI, p. 285). Far from serving only as food sources, pigs already in our time have been ‘bred to provide “spare parts” for humans’ precisely because, as Brett Mizelle notes, ‘there are numerous similarities between human and pig physiology’.15 Humans and pigs, in other words, share ‘transposable, consubstantial matter’, to recall Chen’s phrase.16 This ‘spare parts’ relationship is taken further in the trilogy. Organs grow quickly in the pigoons thanks to ‘a rapid-maturity gene’; and a single pigoon can grow several organs simultaneously, ‘five or six kidneys at a time’, even re-growing additional organs after the initial ones are transplanted (O&C, p. 22). Thus pigoons are larger than regular pigs (hence the combination of ‘pigs’ and ‘balloons’). Eventually, scientists working on pigoons are able to grow human neocortex tissue inside them, ostensibly to help victims of stroke or other brain injuries. As a consequence, pigoons become even more intelligent than the remarkable creatures that pigs already are. 17 In the first two volumes of the

15 Mizelle, Pig, p. 8. 16 Chen, Animacies, p. 125. 17 On the characteristics of pigs, see King, Personalities on the Plate, pp. 143– 152.

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trilogy, this intelligence intensifies an ‘ambivalence about the similarities of pigs and humans’ that, Mizelle reminds us, goes back to the ancient world.18 As a boy, Jimmy enjoys visiting the pigoons but is disturbed by jokes about eating them, since ‘he thought of pigoons as creatures much like himself’ (O&C, p. 24). He considers himself to be their ‘friend’ (O&C, p. 26). After the pandemic, when he believes himself to be the last human, he is worried about their proximity to him: ‘who could tell what they might do the next time they came around?’ (O&C, p. 38). He understands them to be potential enemies, like wolvogs. On a trek he believes the pigoons are plotting against him, and shoots one: ‘it was just having a good stare, but he was certain it was a scout, it would have told the others’ (O&C, p. 358). Toby, one of two primary female characters in The Year of the Flood, develops an antagonistic relationship to pigoons who want to eat her vegetables, and shoots a boar. Later, when she observes pigoons observing her after destroying her garden, she attempts to discern their intentions: ‘it’s as if they want to witness her dismay’, or draw her out of her sanctuary so they can kill her (YOTF, p. 320). In the last third of MaddAddam, however, the pigoons assume a different narrative role, starting from a kind of spiritual interaction between Toby and a female pigoon with piglets. Toby becomes convinced that the sow is trying to communicate with her, and the possibility is raised that another, deceased character with whom Toby is trying to communicate, Pilar, has come to her ‘in the skin of a pig’ (MA, p. 228). A remarkable, but surprisingly moving, series of interactions between pigoons and humans follow, including a sort of pig funeral that reminds Toby of elephants (among the animal species known to ‘grieve’19), and that may resonate with the arguments of those scholars who are willing to speak of ‘animal religion’.20 The funeral marks an alliance between humans and pigoons against a group of human ex-convicts who have terrorized both groups. This alliance, which includes quasi-covenantal agreements (humans will no longer

18 Mizelle, Pig, p. 33. 19 See King, How

Animals Grieve, pp. 52–63. See especially Schaefer, Religious Affects; and see also Gross, The Question of the Animal and Religion; Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies, pp. 140–163. 20

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kill pigoons as food, pigoons will no longer destroy human food), culminates in a ‘battle’ in which pigoons serve as ‘scouts’, ‘outriders’, and ‘soldiers’ (MA, p. 346). One sow, who carries Jimmy, is killed during the battle. When the human casualties are carried away from the battle, the pigoon casualty is carried as well; and the pigoons subsequently participate with the humans in a ‘trial’ of the killers (MA, pp. 367– 371). These interspecies activities rely upon the mediating participation of other, even stranger, creatures. The Crakers are a group of humanoids created by Crake, who observes that they are ‘the result of a logical chain of progression’ of genetic technologies and bioengineering. The ability to manipulate genes and create new forms of life has led finally to the production of what Crake considers a better form of hominid life. The Crakers are diverse in skin color, beautiful, and immune to many pathogens. By manipulating our ‘ancient primate brain’, Crake and his fellow scientists attempt to eliminate many of its ‘destructive features’ that are considered ‘responsible for the world’s current illnesses’. Thus, the Crakers lack a susceptibility to racism, hierarchy, or territoriality. The ‘hard-wiring that had plagued humanity had, in them, been unwired’. They are, moreover, not simply vegetarians, who might be tempted to reproduce agricultural societies and the hierarchies that followed from them. The Crakers rather live on ‘nothing but leaves and grass and roots and a berry or two; thus their foods were plentiful and always available’ (O&C, p. 305). The queerest modification of human life embodied in the Crakers is their sexuality. Crake wants to eliminate the ‘constant torment’ of ‘turbulent hormones’ and competitive conflict that he believes characterizes human sexuality. Thus the Crakers ‘came into heat at regular intervals, as did most mammals other than man’. When a female Craker is in season, portions of her abdomen turn blue, as a consequence of the incorporation of genetic material from other primates (another example of Chen’s ‘transposable, consubstantial matter’). This change is noticed, visually and by smell, by the male Crakers, whose own genitals turn blue in response. Multiple males then present themselves to the female, who chooses to mate with four of them. No single male knows whether the child who is born is his child. But this will not matter, since ‘there would never be anything for these people to inherit, there would be no family trees, no marriages, and

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no divorces’ (O&C, p. 305). The sexuality and kinship of the Crakers is created to be more animal-like than human (recalling for example those primate species with blue genitalia21 and non-monogamous social structures); but, ironically, this makes their lives less chaotic than the lives of humans. In several respects, then, the Crakers provide an appealing, utopian, queer alternative to the dynamics of human life that degrade the world of the MaddAddam trilogy prior to the waterless flood, and that are currently degrading our own. As Pramod Nayar observes, they are examples of a kind of ‘moral transhumanism’, in which a desired ‘moral improvement of humans’ is achieved by the emergence of creatures who ‘may not be humans in the biological sense but are human (or more human, and humane) in the moral sense’.22 Canavan articulates their role in a more biblical fashion, noting that the Crakers represent ‘an over-the-top return to Edenic perfection’ inside the ‘Paradice Project dome’ where they are created. 23 Moreover, they turn out to have some characteristics unplanned by Crake that make them even more appealing within the trilogy’s story world. As a side effect of one necessary genetic modification, they practice a kind of singing that annoys human characters but allows them to communicate with other animals. This ability enables their role as translators between humans and pigoons in MaddAddam. The Crakers are too peaceful to participate in the ‘battle’ that takes place there, but they facilitate the crossspecies coordination necessary for it. They also acknowledge more fully than humans do the subjectivity of the animals. Blackbeard, the child Craker who plays a significant role in MaddAddam, repeatedly refers to the pigoons as the ‘Pig Ones’. Crake had intended for the Crakers to have ‘no need to invent any harmful symbolisms’ (O&C, p. 305), such as religion; and it is assumed that they will have no reason to read or write. Already in Oryx and Crake, however, the stories told to them by Jimmy produce a kind of mythology, in which they were created by Crake while the other animals were created by Oryx. By the 21 See Langley, ‘Some Monkeys Have Blue Testicles’. 22 Nayar, Posthumanism, p. 143. 23 Canavan, ‘Hope, But Not for Us’, p. 152.

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end of MaddAddam, Blackbeard reads, writes, and thus transmits not only the myths about Oryx and Crake but also new narrative traditions concerning Toby and other significant characters.24 Other unanticipated activities of the Crakers follow from their queer sexuality, however, and raise more difficult problems. Crake, who disseminates the virus that wipes out most of humanity, apparently believes that Jimmy will be the only surviving human. For some time after the pandemic, Jimmy also believes that this is the case. But in fact, a number of humans have survived. In MaddAddam, a group of humans live together with the Crakers, including several young women. Although the Crakers receive ‘visual and olfactory’ signals when Craker women are sexually, and seasonally, receptive, young human women apparently ‘register to them as in heat all the time’ (MA, p. 208). The Craker men therefore assume that young human women are sexually receptive, or, in their terminology, ‘blue’. Thus the Craker men have sexual intercourse with at least three human women as they would with Craker women. This is one of the most provocative components of Atwood’s story. Should we call this rape? Atwood never raises the question explicitly. In at least two cases the word would seem applicable, at least from the point of view of characters Amanda and Ren, since they do not give their consent. The Craker men, on the other hand, assume that they are doing what the women want, and they have to be taught otherwise. They have been created entirely outside norms of human sexuality, and intentionally so. These unions create additional complications when the young women become pregnant. The pregnancies raise fraught questions of species: Since definitions of species partly revolve around abilities to have sexual relations that produce young who can themselves reproduce, what are the implications of these pregnancies? The questions are raised again, but not resolved, when all the women successfully give birth. Thus Atwood’s story once again queers the notion of species. In fact, all of the strange, hybrid creatures in Atwood’s queer bestiary raise questions about notions of species in one way or another.

See Richard Walsh’s contribution within this volume: “Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Bibles: ‘First the Bad Thing, Then the Story.’”

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But does this mean that the human characters do not raise such questions? Quite the contrary, the human characters in Atwood’s trilogy are often associated, in one way or another, with animals. They embody their own queer animalities. This is more apparent in the cases of some characters than others. When Ren works for Scales and Tails, the trilogy’s version of an exotic dancer bar, she and other women performers wear outfits designed to resemble reptiles and birds. These women become objects of the male gaze, and sometimes of their sexual activity. Their animalization appears to confirm the arguments made by such feminist scholars as Kelly Oliver, who points out that ‘animal difference and sexual difference are intimately associated from the beginning of time’.25 Scales and Tales does, however, provide a safe location – an accidental ‘Ararat’, in the imagery of God’s Gardeners – for Ren, one of the trilogy’s few focalizing characters; and it allows her to survive the pandemic. Yet she is still wearing a bird costume with feathers when she is attacked by surviving convicts, and so embodies a patriarchal tendency to associate sexual violence against women with violence against animals.26 Another exotic dancer whose association with animals goes even further is Katrina Wu. Katrina appears only in MaddAddam, and is always focalized through the male, and somewhat macho, character Zeb as he recounts his experiences to Toby. Zeb’s descriptions of Wu recall Chen’s concerns about the animalization of Asians; for he nicknames the ‘lynx-eyed’ Wu ‘Katrina WooWoo’ and pursues her sexually. She has both a bird outfit and a snake outfit, performing in the latter with a real snake. ‘“What is it about snakes and women?”’ Toby asks Zeb while he describes Katrina. ‘“We like to think you’re wild animals,” says Zeb. “Underneath the decorations”’ (MA, p. 171). Yet Katrina ‘was having none of it’ and consistently turns away Zeb’s advances. Katrina subsequently manages a Scales and Tails establishment, where Zeb hides with ‘the snake women’; and she skillfully handles a significant crisis in the plot that requires her to mislead several members of the corporations’ powerful security corps. When she is

25 Oliver, Animal

Lessons, p. 143. On this tendency see Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat; Adams, Neither Man nor Beast; Stone, ‘Animal Difference, Sexual Difference, and the Daughter of Jephthah’.

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later killed (along with her snake), it is due to her continued independence from regulations put in place by the security corps. Only late in Zeb’s story do we learn that Katrina was loved by Zeb’s brother, the significant leader and interpreter of biblical texts, Adam One. Indeed, Katrina turns out to be Eve One, whose absence is mysterious in The Year of the Flood. In spite of what seems initially like a minor, sexualized role, then, Katrina may instead be an example of those animalized figures that Chen, in their discussion of Fu Manchu, describes ‘as claiming animality, rightfully claiming animality, the animality that we all have and that some of us hide’ in order to challenge dominant orders as she challenges the corporations’ security corps.27 The other significant Asian woman character in the MaddAddam trilogy plays a more ambiguous role. Oryx first appears in Jimmy’s life as an object in online child pornography, and an object of Jimmy’s voyeuristic desire. From the beginning, she fails to conform completely to scenarios of victimhood that we might expect. She turns and looks directly into the camera, but not with fear: ‘She’d been so contemptuous of him’ (O&C, p. 91). Later, when an older Jimmy is ‘outraged’ over her treatment, Oryx seems to view him almost as a naïve child, who doesn’t understand the ways of the world (O&C, p. 119). Even before she becomes Oryx, she is already animalized. In her pornographic scene, she and two other girls are ‘going over the guy with their kittenish tongues’ (O&C, p. 90). When he meets her as Oryx, Jimmy observes that she has ‘a Hymenoptera face, a mantid face, the face of a Siamese cat’ (O&C, p. 115). As she eats, Jimmy notices ‘her pink cat’s tongue as she licked her fingers’ (O&C, p. 119). When they have sex, he feels ‘joy, crushing his whole body in its boa-constrictor grip’ (O&C, p. 123). She tells Jimmy how, during her childhood, she was comforted by birdcalls; and refers often to the proximity of other animals such as pigs and dogs. She and other children sold to an urban trafficker are treated ‘as if they were cats’ (O&C, p. 127). As Oryx Beisa, she plays an important role in teaching the Crakers in Paradice; and she assumes a significant role in their later mythology as creator of animals, the ‘Children of Oryx’. But in spite of her worldliness, Oryx is manipulated by Crake to spread the pandemic virus un-

27 Chen, Animacies, p. 121.

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knowingly. Her life ends when Crake slits her throat. Thus she underscores the potential risks of animalization, not only with respect to race but also gender and sexuality. Other women in the trilogy are also associated with animals in various ways. Toby, for example, who arguably plays the most significant role in the second and third volumes of the trilogy, works with and speaks to bees (like the character Pilar who taught her) and has spiritual experiences involving a liobam in The Year of the Flood and the pigoon in MaddAddam. During the period when she lives alone, her own habits became quasi-animalistic: ‘Even when she sleeps, she’s listening, as animals do’ (YOTF, p. 5). But it is not only women characters who are associated with animals in the trilogy. I have already noted Jimmy’s boyhood identification with the pigoons, his concerns about burning livestock, and his intimate relationship with a female rakunk. Later, when he first encounters the image of child pornography that will continue to haunt him, he feels that it is ‘wrong’ but at the same time is ‘hooked by the gills’ (O&C, p. 91). When he visits the educational institution where Crake is studying, he imagines that Crake and Crake’s fellow students would soon ‘be putting him in a cage, feeding him bananas, and poking him with electroprods’ (O&C, p. 203). He thinks or dreams about Alex, the famous talking parrot.28 His post-pandemic life as Snowman reduces him to an even more animalistic state. Indeed, the moniker ‘Snowman’ abbreviates the ‘Abominable Snowman’, ‘apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing footprints. Mountain tribes were said to have chased it down and killed it … to have boiled it, roasted it, held special feasts; all the more exciting, he supposes, for bordering on cannibalism’ (O&C, p. 8). He refers to his facial hair as feathers, and compares himself to ‘some caged, wired up lab animal’ (O&C, p.45). In distinction from the Crakers, he is a carnivore with ‘beastly appetites’ (O&C, p 101). When he further injures a bad foot, he resorts to ‘making speared animal noises’ (O&C, p. 334). He stinks, and is tormented by biting bugs like any mammal. Zeb, too, shares some characteristics with animals. After surviving an air crash in the wilderness, he throws up: ‘“A lot of animals will 28 See Pepperberg, Alex

and Me.

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do that,” he says. “Under stress. Means you don’t have to put the energy into digesting. Lightens the load”’ (MA, p. 68). To survive, he eats parts of another man’s body like a carnivorous animal, remembering how as a boy his father had punished him: ‘“You’re a dog, eat your own vomit,”’ his father demands (MA, p. 77), recalling perhaps the saying in Proverbs 26:11 about the ‘dog who returns to its vomit’. He subsequently kills a bear, eats it, and wears its skin. When he attacks a cyclist while wearing this skin, he is mistaken for a Bigfoot. Zeb’s animalization, however, does not characterize him negatively. To the contrary, it underscores his status as a manly man, with proper survival skills. As Chen notes, the dynamics of animality are complex.

QUEER ANIMALITIES AND ‘T HE HUMAN WORDS OF GOD’ By now my stroll through Atwood’s bestiary may seem to have taken me quite far from the Hebrew Bible – or, as God’s Gardeners refer to it, ‘The Human Words of God’. The distance may not be as far as it seems, however. It is true that the Hebrew Bible knows nothing about biotechnologies or gene splicing. Yet there are ways in which its own animalities are more unusual than many readers recognize. Here I can give only a sketch of the Hebrew Bible’s own queer bestiary, starting from texts the trilogy itself alludes to or refers to explicitly. The trilogy directs our attention to the story of the Garden of Eden, starting already from the ‘Paradice Project’ in Oryx and Crake. The name ‘God’s Gardeners” is clearly a play on the Garden of Eden, though the Gardeners also believe that ‘the Earth’ is ‘God’s Garden’ (YOTF, p. 51). The Gardeners, whose leaders are called Adams and Eves, have their own ‘Edencliff Rooftop’ in The Year of the Flood. When Adam One speaks about the Eden story, he emphasizes the biblical Adam’s naming of the animals as an act ‘of loving-kindness and kinship’, and rightly notes that humans were not yet carnivores (YOTF, p. 13). We can go further than Adam One however and recall that Adam and the animals are all made from the same substance (or ‘consubstantial matter’, in Chen’s phrasing), the adamah (Gen. 2:7, 19), or ‘arable soil’.29 After determining that Adam should not be alone (Gen. 2:18), God first creates the animals and brings them to the

29 For ‘arable soil’ see Hiebert, Yahwist’s

Landscape, pp. 32–41.

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human (2:19), presumably to see whether they will suffice as companions for the creature who, like them, was created from the ground. Moreover, the story famously includes among its characters a talking snake, who surely is as strange, and as queer, as any of Atwood’s creatures. Like the humans, the snake can speak, an ability replicated later in the Torah by Balaam’s she-ass.30 The line between humans and animals in the Garden is thus far from secure. To Adam One’s just complaint that ‘God’s commandment to “replenish the Earth” did not mean we should fill it to overflowing with ourselves, thus wiping out everything else’ (YOTF, p. 53), we might add the observation that God also tells fish and birds to ‘increase and multiply’ in Genesis 1:22. To Adam One’s warning not to imagine that humans are ‘alone in all Creation in having Souls’ (YOTF, p. 53), we might add that the Hebrew word most often translated in the past as ‘soul’, nephesh, is already applied to animals in Genesis 1, where humans are created on the same day as the ‘living nephesh of every kind, animals and creeping things and living creatures of the earth of every kind’ (1:24). The word nephesh is applied not only to non-human creatures here and in 1:20–21, but to both humans and animals a few verses later when the narrator refers to plants given as food to humans and to animals, birds, and creeping things, everything ‘which has in it living nephesh’ (1:30). Animals have, or are, a nephesh in many other texts as well (for example, Gen. 9:10, 12, 15–16; Lev. 11:10, 46; Ezek. 47:9; Job 12:10, and more). Like words derived from the root chayah, ‘live’ or ‘living’ (as in ‘living creatures’), with which it is often associated, nephesh is applied to both humans and animals often enough in the Bible that we, like Adam One, may be as impressed by the biblical writers’ perception of similarities between humans and animals as by their perception of differences.31 The texts that speak of animal nephesh include the biblical flood traditions, which obviously have influenced Atwood. The period immediately preceding the biblical flood, like the period immediately 30 See further

Stone, ‘Wittgenstein’s Lion and Balaam’s Ass’; Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies, pp. 91–115. 31 On the Hebrew Bible’s construal of similarities and differences between humans and other animals, see further Gross, The Question of the Animal and Religion, pp. 154–161; Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies; Stone, ‘All These Look to You’.

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preceding the Gardeners’ waterless flood, is represented as a time of chaos. In the biblical traditions, this chaos is represented by the queer sexual unions between ‘the sons of God’, who are apparently divine or semi-divine legendary figures, and ‘the daughters of humans’ (Gen. 6:1–4). ‘The daughters of humans’ bear hybrid children to ‘the Sons of God’, not altogether unlike the hybrid offspring born to human women from their intercourse with Craker men at the end of MaddAddam. Other strange creatures, the Nephilim, also are there and are possibly the offspring of the divine/human pairings. Although the biblical references are oblique, the tale is expanded by later Jewish texts such as I Enoch and Jubilees, which seem no more hesitant about reinterpreting biblical traditions than the Gardeners. Many of the points made about the flood traditions by Adam One or other MaddAddam characters also emerge among scholars. When Adam One mourns the land animals who lost their lives in Noah’s flood, he makes a gesture with parallels in ecological biblical scholarship, such as Norman Habel’s An Inconvenient Text.32 His view of Noah as a preserver of species echoes the description of environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III, who once referred to Noah’s story as ‘the first Endangered Species Project’.33 Although Richard Alan Northover suggests that God’s Gardeners ‘revise God’s covenant with His Creation to include not just humans but all other animals too’,34 this ‘revision’ is arguably the most straightforward reading of Genesis 9:9–17, where God explicitly establishes a ‘covenant’ not only with humanity but also ‘with every living thing that is with you, with the birds, with the animals, and with all the living creatures of the earth’ (Gen. 9:10). Hannah Strømmen emphasizes the ‘tension’ that this covenant with animals creates in relation to God’s permission in the same chapter for humans, previously vegetarian, to

32 Habel, An

Inconvenient Text, pp. 11–16, 79–84. Rolston, ‘Creation’, p. 48. See further Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies, pp. 164–181. 34 Northover, ‘Ecological Apocalypse’, p. 88, my emphasis. 33

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eat animals.35 The use of the word ‘flesh’ to include humans and animals (Gen. 9:11, 15–17) within God’s covenant also undermines any substantive distinction between humans and animals. This shared covenant between humans and animals after the flood is often forgotten by readers of the Bible, but it resonates with a range of other biblical texts which indicate that the God of the Hebrew Bible establishes covenantal and other relations with animals, and not only with humans.36 From the inclusion of animals in the fates of the Egyptians and the Israelites in the Exodus story, to the assertion of a text such as Psalm 36:6 (Hebrew 36:7) that God ‘saves human and animal’, to related prophetic texts that speak of the judgment or salvation of ‘human and animal’ (Jer. 7:20; 21:6; 36:29; 50:3; 51:62; Ezek. 14:13, 17, 19, 21; 25:13; 29:8, 11; 36:11; Hag. 1:11), to the startling picture in Jonah of animals fasting, wearing sackcloth, and crying to God who shows mercy on all of them (3:7–8; 4:11), numerous texts indicate that biblical religion is not simply a matter between God and humans but also between God and animals. Taken together, all of these texts indicate that God’s covenant with animals after the flood is no anomaly, but rather coheres with other traditions within the biblical corpus. They also lend some plausibility to the overall approach that Adam One takes to animals and ‘The Human Words of God’. God’s relationship with both humans and animals blurs the line between them. Strømmen points out, however, that issues of animality in Genesis 9 are not limited to the covenant made with animals and the edibility of animals, both of which are mentioned in the chapter’s first half. They are also raised by the second section of the chapter, Genesis 9:18–29, which is usually interpreted apart from Genesis 9:1–17. Here we find a story in which Noah becomes drunk and is seen lying naked in his tent by his son Ham. As Strømmen notes in passing, this obscure passage is sometimes given a sexual interpretation, according to which Ham has incestuous relations with either his father or his mother: yet another queer sexual combination. Strømmen, placing 35 Strømmen, Biblical

Animality after Jacques Derrida, pp. 42–45. Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies, pp. 130–147, 154– 163. 36

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more emphasis on the shame of nakedness, argues that ‘Noah, the patriarch, is exposed for what he is: naked as a beast, unconscious of his nakedness as if there were no difference between himself and an animal’.37 Although Strømmen develops this point in dialogue with Jacques Derrida, here we might note that the figure of a naked, animalized man resonates with Atwood’s representation of the Jimmy/Snowman character. In the biblical text, Noah responds to Ham by cursing the descendants of Ham’s son Canaan, who will be a slave to Noah’s other son, Shem. As Strømmen emphasizes, this passage has served to justify slavery far beyond the ancient world, most notoriously with respect to the Euro-American enslavement of Africans. Such justification relies in part on a representation of Africans as bestial, monstrous – animal. Thus we come back to Chen’s concern about the persistent use of rhetoric or images of animality in the dynamics of racialization. This intersection of species boundaries and the rhetoric of racial or ethnic polemic is not limited to the Noah text. A shocking example appears in Ezekiel 23, where a condemnation of Jerusalem represents the city as a whore named Oholibah. Ezekiel’s description of Oholibah’s lust for the Egyptians includes the assertion that ‘she lusted after her lovers whose male organs were like the organs of donkeys and whose emissions were like the emissions of horses’ (23:20). This image of cross-species lust animalizes the Egyptians, but its reliance upon negative representations of female sexuality may remind us that women, too, are animalized in certain biblical texts, most horrifically perhaps when Jephthah’s daughter is turned into a burnt offering (Judg. 11:30–31, 34–40) and a woman in Gibeah is cut into twelve pieces as a message (Judg. 19:29–30), much like Saul’s cattle in 1 Samuel 11:5–7.38 So too, Bathsheba is animalized when she is represented in 2 Samuel 12:1–4 as a ewe lamb. Like Jimmy’s rakunk, however, this ewe lamb has close, affectionate relations with her human: ‘it would eat from his morsel of bread and drink from his cup and lie on his bosom. It was like a daughter to him’ (2 Sam. 12:3).

37 Strømmen, Biblical

Animality after Jacques Derrida, p. 54. See further Stone, ‘Animal Difference, Sexual Difference, and the Daughter of Jephthah’. 38

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And what of that vision of the peaceable kingdom in Isaiah 11:6– 9, which motivates the Lion Isaiahists in Atwood’s trilogy to requisition a gene-spliced liobam? As inspiring as the text has been for generations of readers, an ecologically minded biblical scholar such as Habel would caution that any attempt to understand it literally is as likely to encourage disaster as the production of liobams. To be sure, the text is a queer one, with its modification of predator-prey relationships. Yet by anticipating ‘God’s transformation or recreation of nature, and eliminating many of the domains and ecosystems that are vital to life as we know it,’ the text may very well ‘render this present world obsolete’.39 It would represent another form of ecocide, another chaos, another flood. Perhaps it is better, then, to follow the homily for Predator Day in The Year of the Flood. There, Adam One emphasizes what he calls ‘God the Predator’, for example, ‘God the Lion’ (YOTF, p. 346). This image has significant resonance in the Hebrew Bible. As Brent Strawn has shown in a massive study, the Bible’s frequent representation of God as a lion provides us with a picture of God ‘that is not often heard within the walls of a church or synagogue … the violence and wrath of God, God’s destruction, even God’s terror’. 40 This is a queer notion indeed; for the boundaries queered here are not simply those between human and animal (though humans may be animalized as prey), but also those between animal and God. By focusing on God and lions, moreover, we may find ourselves meditating on the line from Psalm 104 that Adam One refers to in his sermon, in which ‘the young lions roar for prey, seeking from God their food’ (104:21). For this striking psalm does include humans, but simply places us alongside other creatures with whom God forms non-anthropocentric relationships.41 Along with Job 38–41, it suggests that God is independently involved with animals, caring about their food, their habitats, their lifeways

39 Habel, An

Inconvenient Text, p. 33. Is Stronger than a Lion?, p. 286. 41 See further Stone, ‘All These Look to You’. 40 Strawn, What

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whether carnivorous or herbivorous, and their survival.42 Perhaps greater attention to texts such as these will still allow us to avoid our own waterless flood.43

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1991. ―. Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. New York: Continuum, 1995, Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Random House, 2003. ―. ‘Writing Oryx and Crake’. In Margaret Atwood, Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. ―. The Year of the Flood. New York: Random House, 2009. ―. MaddAddam. New York: Random House, 2013. Canavan, Gerry. ‘Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood’. Literature Interpretation Theory 23 (2012): pp. 138–159. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Cohen, Jeffrey J. ‘Afterword: An Unfinished Conversation About Glowing Green Bunnies’. In Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, eds, Queering the Non/Human. New York and London: Routlege, 2016 [2008]. Gross, Aaron S. The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 42 See further Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies, pp. 130–

139, 161–163, 174–175. 43 Thank you to Rhiannon Graybill and Peter Sabo for comments on an ear-

lier version of this essay that led to several improvements.

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Gussow, Mel. ‘Atwood’s Dystopian Warning; Hand-Wringer’s Tale of Tomorrow’. The New York Times. June 24, 2003. Online at https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/books/atwood-s-dystopian-warning-hand-wringer-s-tale-of-tomorrow.html. Habel, Norman. An Inconvenient Text. Adelaide: ATF Press, 2009. Hiebert, Theodore. The Yahwist’s Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009 [1996]). Johnson, Jay Emerson. ‘Liberating Compassion: A Queerly Theological Anthropology of Enchanting Animals’. Pp. 81–102 in Whitney Bauman, ed., Meaningful Flesh: Reflections on Religion and Nature for a Queer Planet. Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2018. King, Barbara J. How Animals Grieve. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ―. Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Holt, 2014. Langley, Liz. ‘Some Monkeys Have Blue Testicles – Here’s Why’. National Geographic. September 24, 2016. Online at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/09/primatesmonkeys-blue-scrota-genitalia/. Maunder, Patricia. ‘Dangerous Mind: The Formidable Margaret Atwood’. The Sydney Morning Herald. August 3, 2013. Online at https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/dangerousmind-the-formidable-margaret-atwood-20130801–2r03c.html. Mizelle, Brett. Pig. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Nayar, Pramod. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Northover, Richard Alan. ‘Ecological Apocalypse in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy’. Studia Neophilologica 88, Supplement 1 (2016): pp. 81–95. Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

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Pepperberg, Irene M. Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence – and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Rolston, Holmes III. ‘Creation: God and Endangered Species’. Pp. 47–60 in Ke Chung Kim and Robert D. Weaver, eds., Biodiversity and Landscapes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Schaefer, Donovan O. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. Stone, Ken. ‘Wittgenstein’s Lion and Balaam’s Ass’. Pp. 75–102 in Jennifer L. Koosed, ed., The Bible and Posthumanism. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014. ―. ‘Animal Difference, Sexual Difference, and the Daughter of Jephthah’. Biblical Interpretation 24 (2016): pp. 1–16. ―. Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. ―. ‘“All These Look to You”: Reading Psalm 104 with Animals in the Anthropocene Epoch’. Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 73/3 (2019): pp. 236–247. Strawn, Brent. What Is Stronger than a Lion? Leonine Image and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Strømmen, Hannah. Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018.

11. HOW TO LIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD: THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY IN THE CLIMATE DYSTOPIAS OF MARGARET ATWOOD AND OCTAVIA BUTLER MEREDITH MINISTER Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) are narratives of survival.1 Unlike narratives of survival that emphasize rugged individualism or isolationism, Atwood and Butler create communities of people who survive because they are connected, even when they are isolated and appear alone. While television shows like Survivor emphasize the individualistic nature of survival, these novels suggest that survival depends on being connected to other people. Rather than hide behind the walls that have been built for protection against the destructiveness of the increasingly stratified lower classes, the communities described by Atwood and Butler carefully incorporate new members. Both novels are described as climate dystopias, novels that project climate disaster into a not-so-distant future, often with the hopes of fomenting a nonfictional movement to avoid impending apocalyptic doom.2 Setting their stories in the future, Atwood and Butler reach into the past through the use of overt and covert biblical and theological references.

1 Butler’s novel will be abbreviated PS

in this essay.

2 See, for example, Schneider-Mayerson, “Climate Change Fiction,” pp. 309–

21.

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This chapter draws on crip theory in order to explore the biblical and theological commitments that animate the anti-technological impulses of both novels and offer a form of what I have elsewhere called a survival without optimism.3 I begin by exploring crip theory applied in an ecological context, an application which asks us to question the technological drive toward a cure for climate change. I then turn to an analysis of both novels and how each remakes biblical stories in order to challenge this technological drive. Rather than accepting a narrative of technological cure, Atwood and Butler describe the frail connections that offer a specter of, if not fully realized, hope for the future. The conclusion suggests several resources these novels offer toward surviving without optimism. Atwood and Butler offer fictional resources that can help us live at the end of the world as we know it.

CRIPPING SUSTAINABILITY Much ecological theory uses crisis narratives to provoke a change of current behaviors with the hope of averting crisis. Titles such as Climate Change: The Earth is Dying and You Can Help To Save It (2018) suggest an apocalyptic future that can be averted by human intervention. Moreover, they draw on plotlines common in stories about illness. As a doctor intervenes into a diseased human body, titles like these suppose, humans who have caused climate change can intervene to make the sick earth well again. Forgetting that humans are part of the earth and not just actors upon it, whether positive or negative, these narratives suggest that humans have disabled the earth and that treating the earth requires intervention in the form of changed practices (reducing emissions, recycling, etc.). These interventions are supposed to prevent ecological doom. In addition to treating humans as if we are not part of the earth, narratives about a sick or dying earth make use of our assumptions about cure (if something is sick, it should 3 For the phrase survival without optimism, see Minister, “Fuck the Survivor: Refusing the Future Promised by the Sanctified Cancer Patient”, forthcoming. ‘Crip’ reflects the political and theoretical reclaiming of the derogatory term ‘cripple.’ See McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, 40.

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be cured) to create the desire for more sustainable practices. In this way, calls to cure the diseased earth operate on curative assumptions about disability. Yet, what if not curing things creates space for the change that all life undergoes? What if challenging assumptions about cure is part of creating a more sustainable future? Following similar lines of questioning, crip and disability theorists including Kim Hall and Eli Clare draw on the insights of disability studies in order to challenge narratives of cure in ecological movements.4 Movements to cure the earth often assume that there is a natural or non-diseased state to which the earth should return. One response to this set of assumption is a practice of cripping sustainability. In a chapter titled “Cripping Sustainability, Realizing Food Justice,” Kim Hall writes, “To crip sustainability means valuing disability as a source of insight about how the border between the natural and the unnatural is maintained and for whose benefit. It means understanding a sustainable world as a world that has disability in it, a perspective that recognizes the instabilities, vulnerabilities, and dynamism that are part of naturecultures.”5 With the term naturecultures, which hearkens to the fluid boundary between nature and culture, Hall asks readers to reconsider the border between natural and unnatural and rejects attempts to return to a disease-free nature. Through this process, Hall suggests that we may develop a sustainable world that includes disability and death. In this world, cure is not the only response to ecological crisis and death is understood to be a necessary and inevitable part of life. Clare argues that this same border between natural and unnatural, paralleled by the border between normal and abnormal, undergirds restoration projects, including attempts to restore midwestern prairie lands. Attending to these binaries, Clare argues, “Sometimes viable restoration is not possible. Sometimes restoration is a bandage trying to mend a gaping wound. Sometimes restoration is an ungrounded hope motivated by the shadows of natural and normal. Hall, “Cripping Sustainability, Realizing Food Justice”; Clare, “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure.” 5 Hall, “Cripping Sustainability, Realizing Food Justice,” p. 438. 4

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Sometimes restoration is pure social control.”6As a practice, restoration is a consideration of time that reaches into the past and projects that past into a future. Attempts to reproduce the past also come in the form of biblical hermeneutics that read biblical texts as literal maps that should be faithfully reproduced. 7 Attempts to restore an idealized biblical past bear resemblance to attempts to restore prairie lands insofar as both attempt to problem-solve the present by reproducing the past. Rather than attending to present realities of loss and grief as a means of survival, restoration attempts to make loss and grief disappear through the reproduction of the past. While Clare does not suggest that there should be no attempt to restore prairie lands, he draws bodily and ecological imperfection together in order to challenge easy ideas of restoration and develop a politics of cure that rejects the choice between stances that are anti- and procure. As an alternative, Clare asks, “How can bodily and ecological loss become an integral conundrum of both the human and nonhuman world, accepted in a variety of ways, cure and restoration only a single response among many?”8 Rather than seeking to cure the earth in an attempt to restore loss and return to a natural or normal state, Clare argues that we attend to loss, both in human bodies and in ecological bodies. For Clare, this means attending to a statement made by someone poisoned and disabled by military pollution, “I hate the military and I love my body.”9 It means attending to the complexity of an encounter like the one described by the narrator interacting with the character named Borne in Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, “‘It’s beautiful,’ [Borne] exclaimed. ‘It’s beautiful beautiful beautiful…’ … The killing thing, the 6 Clare, “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure,”

p. 255. See Wayne Grudem and John Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism for an example of a text that uses a literal hermeneutic that attempts to reproduce the biblical past to solve what the authors understand to be a present problem. 8 Clare, “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure,” p. 255. 9 Clare, “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure,” p. 252. 7

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thing I couldn’t ever get over, is that it was beautiful. It was so incredibly beautiful, and I’d never seen that before. In the strange dark sea-blue of late afternoon, the river below splashing in lavender, gold, and orange up against the numerous rock islands and their outcroppings of trees … the river looked amazing … Borne didn’t know it was all deadly, poisonous, truly disgusting.”10 In this exchange, the narrator allows their perception of a world ruined by toxic waste to be challenged by Borne, an often child-like character who is not-quite-simply-human and notquite-simply-technology. These kinds of attention to which Clare calls us challenge simple distinctions between what is natural or normal and what is not, making it possible to revalue bodies deemed abnormal and environments considered unnatural. In reconsidering the borders between natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal, Hall, Clare, and VanderMeer refuse associations of disability as unnatural or abnormal and able-bodiedness as natural or normal. Moreover, both promote a version of sustainability that does not write disability out of the future. As their analyses suggest, crip theory applied in an ecological context asks us to attend to what kinds and ways of life benefit from restoration approaches to ecological crisis. Moreover, they ask us to question cures for climate change as well as the technologies that purport to secure those cures.

T HE BIBLICAL ADAPTATIONS OF ATWOOD AND BUTLER The fictional worlds of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler offer possibilities for imagining futures that do not depend on restorative hopes. In Parable of the Sower, Butler imagines southern California in the not-too-distant future as a near-lawless near-dessert. Centered on Lauren Olimina, a teenager who lives in a gated community near Los Angeles, Parable of the Sower describes the destruction of Lauren’s community and how she develops the survival skills to lead a steadily growing group of refugees north through the chaos and violence produced by resource scarcity. Among the survival skills that Lauren develops is the belief system Earthseed, which considers change as a force that should be encountered and explored and not resisted. The end of Earthseed, Lauren believes, is to prepare humans to leave Earth behind to fulfill their destiny in life on other planets. By sharing this belief 10 VanderMeer, Borne, p. 56.

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system with others, Lauren creates a community of people capable of surviving the difficult trek north through their care for each other. Atwood’s Year of the Flood is also set in a not-too-distant future but it is a not-too-distant future set after a pandemic that has destroyed human civilization. Following the first novel in the trilogy, Oryx and Crake, and told alternatingly through the perspectives of Toby and Ren, two peripheral members of The Gods Gardeners, The Year of the Flood explores the events that preceded the apocalyptic pandemic and their aftermath. Although both Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Atwood’s The Year of the Flood may be interpreted as cautionary tales and, thus, as books that attempt to prevent a certain future by projecting it, neither is simply an anticipation of an undesirable future.11 Rather than merely offering pictures of undesirable worlds, Butler and Atwood reveal how to live at the end of the world as we know it. These novels can, therefore, help provide an answer to Clare’s question, “How can bodily and ecological loss become an integral conundrum of both the human and nonhuman world, accepted in a variety of ways, cure and restoration only a single response among many?”12 They achieve this, in part, through biblical adaptation practices including creating new theological structures that draw on without replicating the past, developing a future-oriented hermeneutic that rejects biblical literalism, and by rewriting of popular Bible stories. In the following sections, I develop these common themes toward what I have elsewhere called a survival without optimism.13

N EW T HEOLOGIES One way Atwood and Butler adapt the Bible is through the creation of characters and communities with new and distinctive theologies that both anticipate and respond to ecological crisis. The alternative religious communities at the center of both novels offer robust ideologies carefully designed to help people navigate, rather than prevent, 11 Kakutani,

“Battle for the Soul of the Earth in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Year of the Flood.’” 12 Clare, “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure,” p. 255. 13 Minister, “Fuck the Survivor: Refusing the Future Promised by the Sanctified Cancer Patient,” forthcoming.

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apocalypse and its aftermath. Moreover, they do not rely on the recreation of the past, but offer radical ideas for survival in the future. In writing, both Butler and Atwood were aware that these new theologies might have a life outside of the fictional contexts they built. In her acknowledgements, Atwood notes, “Anyone who wishes to use any of these hymns for amateur devotional or environmental purposes is more than welcome to do so” (YOTF, p. 433).14 Likewise, Butler’s Earthseed has gathered a following, as their website describes, “Earthseed is a real religion inspired by the science fiction of Octavia Butler, specifically her books, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).”15 Both the invitation to use Atwood’s hymns and the Earthseed community reveal how texts (even fictional ones) can become source materials around which people gather. In this way, the texts become, in a sense, sacred. Moreover, the new theologies Butler and Atwood offer may not only help the novel’s characters survive but may also work outside of the fictional contexts of the novels. Atwood’s God’s Gardeners have a corpus of sermons and hymns, a pantheon of saints, including recognizable saints like Julian of Norwich and Francis of Assisi as well as Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs, and a calendar of feasts and festivals, the celebration of which orients both their time and the time of Atwood’s novel. These materials contain an affirmation of the pleasures of creation, “‘Twas once the finest Garden, That ever has been seen”; a condemnation of corporate greed that has resulted in ecological destruction, “But then came the greedy Spoilers, And killed them all [God’s dear Creatures] away”; mourning for the present, “Oh Garden, oh my Garden, I’ll mourn forevermore”; and hope for the future, “Until the Gardeners arise, And you to Life restore” (YOTF, preface [np]). While the language of restoration appears at the end of this Gardeners’ song, the aftermath of the flood that Atwood describes later in the novel and in the other books in the trilogy makes it clear that the restoration mentioned in the Gardeners’ song is nothing like the restoration attempts to preserve the past such as the prairie grass project described by Clare. The restoration promised by the Gardeners does not produce a world

14 See Rhiannon Graybill’s essay in this volume for more analysis of this.

“Earthseed,” God is Change, accessed September 1, 2019, www.godischange.org/about.

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that looks like what came before but, rather, sustains new forms of life. The narrative of creation, destruction, and recreation contained in the song frames the narrative of the novel, but, unlike many theological readings of the biblical narrative as a whole, it is not necessarily a linear narrative. Rather, Atwood vacillates back and forth between pre-flood and post-flood events. The non-linear timeline of The Year of the Flood confounds the simplistic linear narrative of the Gardeners’ song and indicates how trauma confuses time. The new theologies adopted by the Gardeners adapt to this trauma rather than attempting to fix or prevent it. In this way, The Year of the Flood bears some resemblance to what Maia Kostrosits observes about the Gospel of Mark, namely that it is a story told in the midst of trauma and that its narrative refuses easy solutions and remains perpetually unresolved.16 In Parable of the Sower, Butler describes the theological development of what will eventually become the community of Earthseed by the main character Lauren Olamina. Olamina’s theological development is, in many ways, a rejection of the Christian heritage passed down from her father, who pastors the church in the walled compound where her family resides. Lauren uses the book of Job to explain her father’s religion, “I think it says more about my father’s God in particular and gods in general than anything else I’ve ever read. In the book of Job, God says he made everything so no one has any right to question what he does with any of it. … Maybe God is a kind of big kid, playing with his toys. … But what if all that is wrong? What if God is something else altogether?” (PS, p. 19). Earthseed is Lauren’s attempt to explore the something else that God might be. Rather than accept the image of God offered by Job and her father, Lauren suggests three principles that guide Earthseed: 1) everything changes, 2) we can participate in and shape the change, resist the change, or submit to the change, and 3) our ultimate destiny is to live among the stars. According to Earthseed, All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Kotrosits and Taussig, Re-Reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma, p. 3. 16

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Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change. (PS, p. 3)

When Olamina’s community is destroyed and she immigrates north, she gathers a group of people that become the core of Earthseed. Like God’s Gardeners, Earthseed understands itself to be adapting to the change that is occurring as a result of climate change. The new theologies of God’s Gardeners and Earthseed intentionally adapt and play on biblical themes without recreating them or simply applying biblical ideas to contemporary contexts. While God’s Gardeners emphasize the continuity of life in spite of catastrophe, Earthseed focuses on adapting to constant change. These new theologies adapt the past in order to create an aspiration constellation for survival.

CREATIVE H ERMENEUTICS A second way that Atwood and Butler adapt the Bible is by developing a future-oriented hermeneutic that rejects biblical literalism. This hermeneutic reads the Bible not as a simple guide to be uncompromisingly applied to the present, but rather as something that must be changed and adapted in order to continue to be useful. Moreover, Atwood and Butler play with biblical texts without needing to rely on the methods of contemporary Bible scholars. More than just retelling popular biblical stories or doing historical and literary criticism, their adaptations offer a way of reading biblical texts outside of the frames of biblical literalism and contemporary critical modes. Both novels are set in the near future: 2025 in The Year of the Flood and 2024–2027 in Parable of the Sower. These near future settings suggest the imminence of the crises they depict. The anticipation for and the survival in these futures takes the form of an adaptation of the past. This past, however, cannot be uncompromisingly applied in the present and this is where Atwood and Butler’s biblical hermeneutics anticipate the future in a way quite distinct from both the literalist hermeneutics of evangelical Christians and the critical frameworks of academics.

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In Parable of the Sower, Lauren’s father, who is both a pastor and an academic, does not believe that the climate change on which the novel is premised is the result of humans. A friend of Lauren describes Lauren’s father’s beliefs, “He says only God could change the world in such an important way” (PS, p. 57). While Lauren’s father continues to rely on understandings of the Bible and theology that worked in the past, Lauren attempts to develop new theological understandings that will prepare the community for the changes to come. Her hermeneutic does not reject the Bible as much as adapt it for the changes she is observing in the world around her. This adaptation is reflected most clearly in the development of a new sacred text, the Books of Earthseed, which are collections of Lauren’s writing. Atwood’s The Year of the Flood also creates a new sacred text. Both Butler and Atwood, therefore, draw on the biblical tradition of sacred texts around which a community gathers. They are attentive to how sacred texts function both as objects and ideas around which a community forms. While the Earthseed texts in Butler’s Parables have clear origins (they were written by Lauren) and become objects of discussion and debate, The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook in Atwood’s The Year of the Flood offers a more established sacred text, the origins of which are less clear, and which functions with more authority in the more established Gardener community. These new texts reveal how the fictional worlds Atwood and Butler create draw on the same kinds of textual authority as biblical texts while offering new ways of being with, in, and around those textual authorities. In these alternatives, there is little place for biblical literalism. Butler’s follow up to Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, demonstrates the failures of the pursuit of stability through literal interpretation practices as the community built on biblical adaptation in Parable of the Sower is enslaved by a group that demands biblical fidelity.17 Lauren’s compound, Acorn, is targeted because the Crusaders, a biblical militia with the goal of reeducating wayward citizens, understands the people living there to be heathens requiring reeducation and reform. The reeducation takes the form of biblical indoctrination in addition to forced labor and overt violence. The compound is even renamed Camp Christian. The Crusaders are linked to the 17 Butler, Parable

of the Talents (2000).

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novel’s President Jarrett, who ran under a campaign to “make America great again.” Butler’s futuristic vision, thus, turned out to be quite prophetic.”18 As the Crusaders attempt to restore Christian beliefs and values in the members of Acorn, they demonstrate the conservative tendencies of attempts at restoration. Again, we must ask who benefits from attempts to restore or “cure” the past and consider alternative ways of responding to ecological crisis. Similarly, Atwood’s reading of the biblical flood story adapts the past without rigidly recreating it. In contrast, attempting to recreate the past through a literal interpretation of the Bible, uses of the flood story such as the Ark Encounter in Kentucky attempt to mine the biblical text in order to recreate it. According to their website, “Ark Encounter features a full-size Noah’s Ark, built according to the dimensions given in the Bible. Spanning 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high, this modern engineering marvel amazes visitors young and old.”19 Visitors can come see the ark and, through this encounter, they are challenged to “think differently about the biblical account of Noah’s ark.”20 The designers of the Ark Encounter intend to show the immensity of the Ark, to immerse attendees in the vastness of it, creating an affective response hearkening to the power of God not unlike medieval churches, which were designed with an explicit attempt to humble anyone walking through their doors. Unlike medieval churches, however, the Ark Encounter draws explicitly on measurements contained in the biblical narrative, purporting to offer attendees an experience like one Noah would have had. The power of God is supposed to be revealed not only through the immensity of the ark but also through attendees’ abilities to see something like what Noah would have seen. This is extreme biblical literalism. Using a different approach from these contemporary attempts to retell the story of the watery biblical flood, the flood in The Year of the Flood is described as a “Waterless Flood” and comes about not because of divine intervention but because of technological excess. As Atwood, in the voice of Ren, describes, “The Compounds were where the Corps people lived – all those scientists and business people Adam Aguirre, “Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to ‘Make America Great Again.’” 19 “About the Life-Size Noah’s Ark,” Ark. 20 “Exhibits,” Ark. 18

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One said were destroying old Species and making new ones and ruining the world” (YOTF, p. 146). In the end, the Corps does destroy the earth, unleashing a pandemic in the form of a pill (BlyssPluss) that is supposed to increase sexual satisfaction. The Waterless Flood in the form of a pandemic destroys humanity much more haphazardly than the biblical flood and the remnants are much more dangerous. The biblical flood is not recreated but adapted. This adaptation creates an affect constellation for survival. Atwood’s fiction, thus, also works by creating an affective response to climate change. Rather than telling us that we will die if we fail to change, Atwood weaves a story that will allow her readers to feel that. Butler’s hermeneutic allows her to read the past and to anticipate the future rise of Trump. As Butler uses the retrogressive Crusaders to suggest, the Bible may be helpful in anticipating a future but only when we are open to its changes, as Acorn was, and not when we impose literal interpretations, as the Crusaders do. Atwood, likewise, reads the story of the flood to anticipate global destruction brought about by corporate greed. Atwood does not interpret the flood story literally but, rather, explores its clues of survival. While the Bible may not be able to prevent ecological destruction, both Atwood and Butler develop adaptive hermeneutics that refuse to deal in hopes of restoration. Butler and Atwood’s retellings of biblical stories, thus, adapt the past in order to survive in a new context.

REWRITING POPULAR BIBLE STORIES Both novels remake biblical stories in order to challenge uses of these stories that romanticize or try to recreate the past. In refusing to romanticize the past, both Atwood and Butler refuse to accept the technological advances that are supposed to cure the earth as progress. Rather than accept the relevance of biblical stories as written and attempt to recreate them in a new context, Atwood and Butler rewrite the stories to put them to use in alternative futures. Atwood titles her novel The Year of the Flood in an overt reference to the flood described in Genesis 6–8. In these chapters, God decides that humans have filled the earth with violence and determines to unmake them (Gen. 6:13), saving only Noah and his family as a result of Noah’s righteousness (Gen. 7:1). The text also describes how

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animals were saved from the flood in pairs for the purposes of recreation, weaving together two flood stories that describe how animals are taken into the ark (Gen. 7). According to these chapters, God wants to undo the work of creation, but not entirely. Noah saves what is supposed to be salvageable. In Atwood’s novel, the Waterless Flood is foretold by God’s Gardeners who predict and prepare for a crisis that will be brought about as a result of corporate greed and disconnection from the rhythms of the earth. The plotline of the novel moves back and forth between before the flood and after the flood, highlighting the differences of these worlds. Before the flood, the Gardeners instruct their members on how to survive the flood when it comes, including how to build and maintain foodstuffs and repurpose trash for clothing. Through the voice of Toby, a woman receiving the hospitality of the Gardeners without necessarily accepting their beliefs, Atwood describes: A massive die-off of the human race was impending, due to overpopulation and wickedness, but the Gardeners exempted themselves: they intended to float above the Waterless Flood, with the aid of the food they were stashing away in the hidden storeplaces they called Ararats. As for the flotation devices in which they would ride out this flood, they themselves would be their own Arks, stored with their own collections of inner animals, or at least the names of those animals. Thus they would survive to replenish the Earth. Or something like that. (YOTF, p. 47)

The Gardeners see themselves as a collective new Noah, called to survive in the midst of destruction, and their Ararats that will maintain them are a reference to the mountain on which Noah’s ark comes to rest when the flood waters begin receding in Genesis 8:4. After the flood, former Gardeners remember the instructions as a means of survival. Toby, for example, remembers the warning, “An Ararat without a wall isn’t an Ararat at all … A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended” (YOTF, p. 19). The postflood earth in The Year of the Flood is not an earth that is renewed and ready to be repopulated, as God instructs Noah and his sons to do in Genesis 9:7, “Be fruitful and multiply.” The post-flood earth in The Year of the Flood is hot and populated with genetically engineered pests, a new humanoid species called the Crakers, and sexual predators

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who did not die in the flood. This earth is frequently deadly and often unbearable. The earth is not cleansed or cured as in the Genesis story. Rather, Atwood incorporates loss into the post-flood earth without letting loss dictate the narrative. Grief, thus, becomes a central part of the story but it is twinned with survival. Atwood writes the melding of grief and survival into the songs that permeate the novel right up until the end. These songs and the way the characters use the songs to grieve and survive reveal how to prepare for and live in the wake of destruction. The hymn, “The Water-Shrew that Rends Its Prey” offers an example of a Gardener hymn that becomes a tool of grief and survival as it offers the possibility that the vegetarian gardeners may have to eat flesh in order to survive famine, But we are not as Animals – We cherish other Creatures’ lives; And so we do not eat their flesh Unless dread Famine drives. (YOTF, p. 348)

These words recognize the possibility that survival comes at a cost and that the Gardeners’ ideals such as vegetarianism may have to adapt to new circumstances. But the hymn does not end with survival as the final section grieves the adaptation that was required in order to survive: And if dread Famine drives us on, And if we yield to tempting Meat, May God forgive our broken Vows, And bless the Life we eat. (YOTF, p. 348)

In these final words of this hymn, the Gardeners acknowledge the change that survival has required and ask God for a continued blessing in the wake of that change. Adaptation in The Year of the Flood does not come without loss and its accompanying grief. In this, Atwood alludes to the prophetic tradition, which both hearkens destruction and offers a roadmap for grieving the change that will ensue in the wake of destruction. Jeremiah 8, for example, offers an image of destruction in which the leadership of Judah’s bones are dug up and laid upon the earth “like dung” (Jer. 8:2) to the point that “death shall be

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preferred to life” (Jer. 8:3), but the prophet then grieves this destruction, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick” (Jer. 8:18), setting up the hope to come in Jeremiah 9, “I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord.” (Jer. 9:24) Like Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, these chapters contain destruction, grief, and hope simultaneously. Butler’s title is, likewise, an overt rewriting of the so-called Parable of the Sower in Mark 4 and Matthew 13, a parable Jesus tells from a boat to a crowd gathered on the beach and later explains to the disciples. In the parable, a sower sows seed that come to various fates: some fall on a path and are eaten by birds, others fall on rocks and grow quickly but are scorched when the sun comes because of their lack of roots, others fall among thorns that grow up and choke them, and others fall on good soil where they produce grain. While initially confusing as told in both Mark and Matthew, according to the explanation Jesus gives the disciples, the parable is about different responses to hearing the word of God. The seed that gets snatched by birds is like people who hear the word and then the evil one snatches the words away. The seed that grows quickly is like people who quickly accept the word but fall away when things get difficult. The seed that is choked by thorns is like people who grow but are ultimately choked by pursuit of wealth and other worldly things. Finally, the seed that grows on good soil is like people who hear the word, grow, and bear fruit (Mark 4:13–20; Matt. 13:18–23). In Butler, the seeds that are sown in the parable become the stuff of Earthseed, the new religious movement founded by the novel’s central character, Lauren Olamina. Like the seeds in the parable of the sower, these seeds are received in different ways. Early in the novel, Lauren opens up to a friend about her concern for learning how to survive and adapt in the midst of change. Her friend responds by telling her mother, who tells her friend’s father, who tells Lauren’s father. In response, Lauren’s father instructs her to stop using scare tactics and to start teaching survival skills. Although the exchange with her father turns out to be useful, Lauren is left to wonder about her friend, “What if I’d been more open. What if I’d talked religion with her? I’d wanted to. How will I ever be able to talk to anyone about that?” (PS, pp. 61–62). This exchange is like the seed from the parable that never even takes root.

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After her neighborhood is destroyed and she travels north relying on the survival skills she learned, Lauren’s travel companions request that she show them what she is writing. This is another opportunity to plant the seeds of Lauren’s new religion. She shows her companions who had known her in her neighborhood first, “My Earthseed verses had surprised [Harry] and, I think, pleased him a little. I wasn’t sure whether he liked the writing or the reasoning, but he liked having something to read and talk about” (PS, p. 199). Obliging these requests, she begins to share, explain, and defend her ideas and develops a confidence to keep risking the sharing of more and more of her ideas. As Lauren travels and takes on more traveling companions, she slowly opens up about her ideas. She explains, “I took a chance. I told Travis [one of her traveling companions on the journey north] about the Destiny” (PS, p. 221). Up to this point, she had focused on sharing about change and how God is change but sharing the Destiny of Earthseed meant explaining that she believed that the goal of Earthseed was for people to leave the Earth and take root among the stars. Travis is skeptical but does not dismiss her ideas outright and they begin a series of conversations about Earthseed that draw in the others traveling with them. Finally, Lauren declares Travis as her first convert (PS, p. 223). Travis’s skepticism and need for further discussion, as opposed to quick acceptance, reveal the path for an ideal convert to Earthseed. In this way, Lauren distinguishes Earthseed from the lack of skepticism she observed in her father’s church. While the outright dismissal of her friend was like the seed falling on barren land, the questions her later converts bring give the seed time to develop solid roots prior to growing. Both God’s Gardeners and Earthseed call their followers to action in the midst of loss. Unlike climate change calls to action that operate on the hope of preventing apocalypse, the calls to action of both God’s Gardeners and Earthseed pull together threads in the wake of destruction, weaving a tapestry for survival. These are not passive faiths focused on accepting what comes. Rather, they ask their followers to actively shape the world around them, even when that world appears to be resistant to shaping.

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Modeling this shaping and finding threads for survival, Atwood and Butler mold biblical texts in service of ideas for surviving undesirable futures. These shifts in the biblical stories reach into the past in order to challenge the linear narrative in which large-scale technologies are supposed to provide solutions to impending ecological doom. Rather than accepting this narrative of technological cure, Atwood and Butler rewrite biblical stories in order to challenge interpretation practices that would leave us stuck in the past and unable to survive. These rewritings describe the frail connections that offer a specter, if not fully realized hope for the future.

SURVIVAL WITHOUT OPTIMISM Both Atwood and Butler burrow into the past in order to survive the future. Their burrowing, in part, revolves around adaptations of biblical stories. By setting these adaptations of the past within dystopias, Atwood and Butler anticipate that past resources will help cope with the crises of our future. We might read these anticipations as paranoid attempts to redirect our nonfictional trajectory but, in doing so, we overlook the ways in which Butler and Atwood show us how to adapt in the midst of change, even crisis. The worlds of Butler and Atwood are not simply to be avoided. Rather, they offer possibilities for adaptation within the midst of undesirable worlds. Atwood and Butler are not alone adapting the past in order to anticipate a future, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claims that anticipating a future often takes the form of an adaptation of the past. Where pain collapses time, anticipation expands it, even when that anticipation is for something negative. Sedgwick explains, “The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward.”21 In this burrowing, paranoia (which might be described as the anticipation for something undesirable) expands time. Dystopias like those of Atwood and Butler, too, are anticipations of something undesirable. This anticipatory state reaches or “burrows,” to use Sedgwick’s language, into the past. Much like the prophetic traditions contained in the Hebrew Bible, reading the past becomes a way of navigating the future. In at least this way, Atwood and Butler’s biblical hermeneutics 21 Sedgwick, Touching

Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, p. 130.

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are more like the hermeneutical practices of evangelical Christians and feminist and queer theologians than of the historical-literary critics of the academy. While the hermeneutics developed by Atwood and Butler, evangelicals, and feminist and queer theologians share a direction toward forging contemporary ways of life together, Atwood and Butler (like feminist and queer theologians) reject evangelical impulses to treat the text as absolute truth that reveals a world that must be recreated. Rather than operate on the preventative timelines of climate change apocalypticists, Atwood’s and Butler’s novels depict available futures. While some interpret these available futures as dystopias intended to foment present change, it is possible to read these novels as examples of survival without an optimistic hope for preventing ecological doom or curing a diseased earth. Instead, Butler and Atwood ask us to question the value of technologies of cure. Kevin Minister refers to this type of questioning as “sustainability without a future.” (Kevin Minister, “Interreligious Approaches to Sustainability without a Future”, presentation at the American Academy of Religion, 2018.) According to Minister, “Embracing sustainability without a future uncouples ecological movements from the unsustainable desires for a heteronormative, capitalist future of working for a living and empowers us to live in the present at the end of the world. Sustainability without a future opens up the present for the critique, cultivation, and pursuit of desires foreclosed by either the need for or the fear of a future.” We might read Atwood and Butler’s narratives as stories that unlink ecological movements from unsustainable desires, thus creating the affects necessary to produce something like Minister’s “sustainability without a future,” perhaps a survival without a future. Following this trajectory, I read Atwood and Butler toward a survival without optimism. Developed for a healthcare context, two key components of survival without optimism are to accept the limitations of treatment and hold death in our midst without turning away. (Minister, “Fuck the Survivor”) In these movements, survival without optimism offers a path that answers Clare’s question about how to incorporate and accept loss without necessarily reaching for restoration or a cure and help describe why Butler and Atwood’s projects successfully resist hopeful futures.

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Neither Atwood nor Butler place hope in treating the earth. Instead of offering us the hope of an earth restored or cured, Atwood offers the hope of an earth adapted. The gardeners use anything and nearly everything, recycling the things thrown off both by those supported and rejected by the corporations. And, after the flood, the earth is left with ruins and still operative and adaptable technologies from the corporate past. These ruins suggest the limitations of restoration as an ideal. Butler, on the other hand, adapts in order to leave the earth behind. Earthseed learns both how to survive in the ruins of a collapsing Earth as well as to ultimately leave a dying planet behind. Where we might find a trace of earth romanticism in Atwood, where some might read the Waterless Flood as a force of renewal, even possibly restoration, Butler forecloses this possibility through Earthseed’s commitment to take root among the stars. In rejecting hope for treating the Earth, both Atwood and Butler reject technology and the optimism it promises. Rather than relying on optimistic technologies of hope, cure, and restoration, Atwood and Butler’s communities promote alternative ways of knowing including how to live with the cycles of nature, planting and foraging. Likewise, both communities hold death in their midst without turning away. Both groups organize funerals and burials when key members die. Moreover, knowledge of death and grief permeates the existence of both communities. Atwood describes Toby remembering the words of AdamOne after the flood, “Just remember, dear Friends: What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question” (YOTF, p. 326). Toby goes on to refuse to contemplate that question right at the moment she remembers it, but her memory of it reveals how her survival is, in some ways, dependent upon a kind of reckoning with the possibility of death. Surviving without optimism becomes a way of living in the midst of the grief that accompanies ecological destruction. Hope Jennings describes the question of survival as one of the central tensions in Atwood’s work: “If one of the primary tensions in Margaret Atwood’s work is between survival (for the individual or humanity as a whole) and ‘the question of whether survival is even merited,’ exemplified by the author’s recurring interest in exploring the end of the world, then Atwood has become one of contemporary literature’s

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most rigorous demythologizers of Apocalypse, while at the same contributing to its tradition of prophetic warning.”22 While Jennings focuses on the tension between survival and questioning the merits of survival in Atwood, the same tension is present in Butler. And while both have certainly demythologized the Apocalypse, I read their literary interventions into climate change discourses as doing so much more than demythologizing Apocalypse insofar as they show us how to incorporate loss and grief into our lives as a mechanism not of cure or restoration but of survival. Recognizing that life will change beyond recognition and it will also go on, both God’s Gardeners and Earthseed have given up a stable sense of the future and begin to adapt in the midst of and to prepare for change. Butler and Atwood embrace loss and grief as a means to survive the future. Reading the Bible adaptively is one strategy both Butler and Atwood offer to embrace loss as a means for survival.

BIBLIOGRAPHY “About the Life-Size Noah’s Ark.” Ark Encounter. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://arkencounter.com/about/. Aguirre, Abby. “Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to ‘Make America Great Again,’” July 26, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/octavia-butlersprescient-vision-of-a-zealot-elected-to-make-america-great-again. Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009. Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 2000. ―. Parable of the Talents. Grand Central Publishing, 2000.

Hope Jennings, “The Comic Apocalypse of The Year of the Flood” Margaret Atwood Studies,” pp. 11–18. https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/english/192. Also see Sharon R. Wilson, “Blindness and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Major Novels,” in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, ed. Coral Ann Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 22

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Clare, Eli. “Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure.” Pages 242–265 in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2017. Dalton, Laura. Climate Change: The Earth Is Dying and You Can Help To Save It. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018. “Exhibits.” Ark Encounter. Accessed April 22, 2019. https://arkencounter.com/exhibits/. Grudem, Wayne and John Piper. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1991. Hall, Kim. “Cripping Sustainability, Realizing Food Justice.” Pages 422–446 in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, edited by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2017. Jansma, Kristopher. “Now More than Ever, We Wish We Had These Lost Octavia Butler Novels.” Electric Literature, August 10, 2017. https://electricliterature.com/now-more-than-ever-we-wish-wehad-these-lost-octavia-butler-novels-659f0b2e5d36. Jennings, Hope. “The Comic Apocalypse of The Year of the Flood” Margaret Atwood Studies.” (2010) 3.2, 11–18. https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/english/192 Kakutani, Michiko. “Battle for the Soul of the Earth in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Year of the Flood.’” The New York Times, September 14, 2009, sec. Books. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/ books/15kaku.html. Kotrosits, Maia, and Hal Taussig. Re-Reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma. 2013 edition. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006.

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Minister, Kevin. “Interreligious Approaches to Sustainability without a Future.” Paper Presentation, American Academy of Religion, Denver, CO, November 18, 2018. Minister, Meredith. “Fuck the Survivor: Refusing the Future Promised by the Sanctified Cancer Patient” in Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion. Edited by Kent Brintnall, Rhiannon Graybill, and Linn Tonstad. New York: Routledge, forthcoming. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “Climate Change Fiction.” Pages 309–321 in American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010, Edited by Rachel Greenwald Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. VanderMeer, Jeff. Borne. New York: MCD, 2017. Wilson, Sharon R. “Blindness and Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Major Novels.” Pages 176–190 in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

12. SURFACING IN THE WILD: THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE LENS OF THE BIBLICAL MIDBAR SARAH E.G. FEIN INTRODUCTION In Margaret Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing, the unnamed narrator muses on the possibility that her father, who has disappeared while living alone on a remote island in the northern Canadian woods, might have lost his mind. ‘Crazy, loony. Bushed, the trappers call it when you stay in the forest by yourself too long’ (Surf., p. 57). This quote captures a powerful tension that runs through the veins of the novel: the promise, and the concomitant danger, of the wilderness. The Hebrew Bible similarly constructs an image of wilderness, or midbar, as a place tenuously balanced between two extremes.1 On the one While Surfacing does contain Christian and New Testament imagery and motifs, for the purposes of this essay I will be focusing on the more often overlooked imagery and motifs from the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. In the Hebrew Bible, midbar is generally conceived of as ‘the sparsely populated open spaces adjacent to settlements of a temporary or more permanent nature’, Leal, Wilderness in the Bible, p. 37. It may also refer to the ‘devastation of war’ (Leal, 38). Talmon notes that ‘midbar can be subdivided into two major classes of connotations, one basic, the other derivative, which again fall into several subgroups: The (1) spatial connotation, in references to geophysical phenomena (2) The temporal connotation, in the references to a 1

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hand, it is a site of chaos and disorder, as poetically expressed in texts such as Deuteronomy 32:10: ‘[God] sustained [Israel] in a desert land [ʾerets midbar], in a howling wilderness waste’.2 On the other hand, the midbar provides opportunity for transformative experiences, such as encounters with the divine. In addition to the Hebrew God YHWH, demons and minor deities also make the midbar their home, including the female goddess/demon lilitu, or Lilith. Reading Atwood’s narrative of a young woman’s quest in the Canadian woods through the lens of the biblical midbar illuminates how her journey parallels many of the experiences of the ancient Israelites as described in the books of the Hebrew Bible.3 Surfacing, however, challenges the patriarchal biblical perspective of the wilderness primarily as a site of danger and death that must be controlled by a male God. The narrator’s position as a woman opens up the possibility of experiencing the wilderness as a positive, life-affirming space which exists outside the confines of the patriarchal social structure of ‘civilization’. Surfacing is Margaret Atwood’s second novel. It is narrated by a young woman, never named throughout the book, who returns to her hometown in the Canadian wilderness with her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David. They are on a quest to find her father, who has disappeared, presumably into the island’s bush. The setting of Surfacing is fundamental to the unfolding of its plot; many critics have remarked upon the themes of Canadian nationalism and specific historic situation’. Talmon, ‘The “Desert Motif” in the Bible and Qumran Literature’, p. 40. 2 Unless otherwise noted, I will use the New Revised Standard Version for all biblical quotations. 3 Midbar appears in every section of the Hebrew Bible. According to a search of Accordance Bible Software v. 11.2.4, Hebrew Bible (Biblia Hebraica) Tagged, v. 4.20, 2016, it occurs 270 times, dispersed amongst the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. In these books, there is no one, unified, biblical attitude towards the midbar. Instead, there is an ‘ambivalence and diversity of Hebrew attitudes toward wilderness’ (Leal, Wilderness in the Bible, p. 55). In order to highlight this ‘ambivalence and diversity’, I will consider texts from the entire corpus of the Hebrew Bible in my ensuing discussion of the biblical representations of the midbar.

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environmentalism that run throughout the novel.4 The four young people journey from ‘the city’5 and return to the narrator’s childhood home, which is located on a remote island in the middle of a lake only accessible by boat.6 The narrator describes the desolate scene as they make their way island-wards: Forty miles from here there’s another village, in between there’s nothing but a tangled maze, low hills curving out of the water, bays branching in, peninsulas which turn into islands, islands, necks of land leading to other lakes…Because of the convolutions it’s easy to lose the way if you haven’t memorized the landmarks (Surf., p. 7).

Once on the island, it becomes clear how starkly different life is compared to the ‘civilized’ life they have temporarily left behind. Food must be gathered from the garden or fished from the lake; the only light is provided by lanterns; and instead of indoor plumbing, there is an outhouse that must be accessed via a walking path. In this primitive setting, the narrator spends several days searching for her father with no success; she realizes the ‘impossibility’ of finding him even with a team of ‘twenty or thirty men’ – especially if he did not want to be 4 ‘Surfacing…introduces the theme of Canadian nationalism and correspond-

ing concerns about the preservation of the Canadian wilderness, together with a very accurate depiction of Canadian regional geography’ (Cooke, Margaret Atwood, p. 53); ‘Surfacing has been read as an ecological, feminist, Canadian work and concerned with exploring a quest for identity’ (Wisker, Margaret Atwood, p. 19). 5 The narrator uses this term several times as an antonym for the wilderness in which her story takes place, for example: she mentions the baby that she has left in the city in order to journey up north to find her father (p. 19); she wishes to return to the city and ‘the present tense’ (implying perhaps that the wilderness exists in another time) (p. 48); she refers to the ‘two anonymities’ in which she grew up, the bush and the city (p. 56); she considers that she doesn’t feel safe living in the city (though upon further reflection, realizes she doesn’t feel safe in the wilderness, either) (p. 70); she implores Joe to ‘go back to the city…the way it was before’ when their relationship hits a rocky spot in the wilderness (p. 106). 6 Atwood herself spent summers in a similar location: Her father built a vacation home for their family on an uninhabited island in the middle of a lake in Nova Scotia. Mead, ‘Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia’.

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found (Surf., p. 46). Eventually, however, she discovers a map marked with an ‘X’ he has left behind in his cabin. In search of the spot he has marked, she journeys even deeper into the wilderness, and ultimately discovers the body of her father, ‘a dark oval trailing limbs’, deep at the bottom of the lake (Surf., p. 143). This revelation solves the mystery of her father, but the narrator still anticipates a gift from her mother, who had died several years previously: ‘It would be right for my mother to have left something for me, also, a legacy’ (Surf., p. 150). She finds this gift in the form of a drawing she had made as a child, of a baby (herself) staring out of the pregnant belly of a woman (her mother) at a man she identifies as God. Moved by this revelation, she is compelled to make love with Joe that very night, under the light of the moon, in order to conceive a child with him. The next morning, the narrator lets Joe, David, and Anna leave the island without her, so that she remains alone in the wilderness. This solitude allows her to descend into a trance-like state, in which she experiences oneness with the animals and plants that surround her in the wilderness. As part of this visionary experience, she ritually destroys all markers of civilization in her family’s home, and fully enters the animal world by casting aside her clothes, sleeping and relieving herself outdoors, and only consuming raw food. The novel concludes with Joe’s return to the island in search of her, but it ends on a note of ambiguity. As he calls for her, ‘balancing on the dock which is neither land nor water’ (Surf., pp. 298–299), she pauses and does not answer, and readers are left to wonder if the narrator will remain in the wilderness or return to human civilization. This ambivalent conclusion is a fitting end to a text in which the boundaries between animal and human, life and death, and spirit and mortal are continually blurred and never fully resolved.

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE WILDERNESS The narrator’s descent deep into the physical wilderness of northern Canada is illuminated by a comparison with the midbar of the Hebrew Bible. There is no one unified view of midbar in the biblical texts; but rather, an attitude of ‘ambivalence and diversity’ to the wilderness.7 Several biblical texts attest that the wilderness is a place of 7 Leal, Wilderness

in the Bible, p. 55.

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chaos, akin to the tohu vavohu out of which God creates the world in Genesis 1: ‘In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void [tohu vavohu] and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters’ (Gen. 1:1–2).8 Walter Brueggemann describes the wilderness as ‘Israel’s historical entry into the arena of chaos which, like the darkness before creation, is “formless and void”…Wilderness is formless and therefore lifeless’.9 This chaotic, lifeless space is contrasted in the biblical literature to the ‘city’, or ‘ir. Indeed, George H. Williams argues that ‘the whole of biblical history has, in fact, been interpreted in terms of the wilderness motif; of the struggle between the religion of the desert and the religion of the city’.10 In Surfacing, Atwood describes a wilderness which similarly is free from the structures of civilization found in the city the characters have left behind. This freedom teeters on the brink of the same kind of chaos described in the biblical texts. The narrator describes the eerie silence that descends once they arrive on the island: ‘It’s the first time all day (and for a long time, for years) we have been out of reach of motors’ (Surf., p. 29). Replacing the motors is birdsong, a ‘jumble of sound’ that wakes the narrator in the morning (Surf., p. 38). Accustomed to the orderly, mechanical sound of car motors, the natural sounds of the wilderness are unintelligible to her ‘rusty’ ears. The rhythms of civilized life by which the characters usually live begin to disintegrate in the wilderness. With no electricity or indoor plumbing, they revert to seeking out food from the garden or the lake, and to building fires to cook and warm themselves. While her companions enjoy this experience as an adventure, a temporary respite from their ‘real’ lives, the narrator knows that these disruptions have much more serious, potentially dangerous, implications. When David and Joe decide to extend their stay on the island to do ‘more fishing’ (despite Anna’s protests that she will run out of cigarettes), the narrator is ‘uneasy’: 8 NRSV translation. The KJV translates tohu vavohu as ‘formless and empty’,

the JPS as ‘unformed and void’, and the Message, strikingly, as ‘a soup of nothingness’. 9 Brueggemann, The Land, p. 29. 10 Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought, p. 10. See also Nystrom, Beduinentum und Jaluvismus.

312

SARAH E.G. FEIN The island wasn’t safe, we were trapped on it…I was trying to think of ways to keep them out of danger; they would be all right as long as they didn’t go anywhere alone. [My father] might be harmless but I couldn’t be sure…I wanted to keep busy, preserve at least the signs of order, conceal my fear, both from the others and from him (Surf., pp. 76–77).

This shift from civilized city life into chaotic wilderness is mirrored in the psychological experiences of the characters, especially the narrator. Carol Christ observes that ‘the external detective story of the protagonist’s search for her father is paralleled by an internal search, half-obscured by her obsession with her father, to discover how she lost the ability to feel’.11 Throughout the novel, the narrator drops tantalizing hints about the cause of her emotional detachment, most poignantly from her boyfriend, Joe. She flashes back to memories of a husband and child she once had and lost. While she had led the readers to think she had been a married woman and a mother, declaring at the outset of the novel and her journey into the wilderness ‘I sent my parents a postcard after the wedding, they must have mentioned it to Paul; that, but not the divorce….I’m waiting for Madame to ask about the baby…he’s better off with my husband, former husband’ (Surf., p. 19), our narrator is, in fact, unreliable. It is only after she immerses deep into the lake in the wilderness and re-surfaces that she is reborn into understanding, and the reader with her: ‘The childbirth was an abortion; the wedding day, the day of the abortion; the husband, the lover who told her to have the abortion’.12 It was only the physical immersion into the depths of the wild water that allowed the narrator to come to this revelation and begin to heal.13 11 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 319. 12 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 321. 13 Cooke notes the depiction of the narrator’s inner journey ‘resonate[s] with

well-known feminist texts of the twentieth century that describe women temporarily shedding the constraints imposed upon them by society and coming to terms with their own inner selves through a journey into the self that can be read either as a nervous breakdown or a period of rejuvenation and catharsis’. Cooke, Margaret Atwood, p. 66.

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In Surfacing, by providing a space where the narrator can solve both the mystery of her father and the mystery of her own emotional self, the wilderness becomes the platform for the narrator to become truly alive. In this way, the novel challenges the biblical framework that associates the midbar with death. For the biblical authors, ‘[the wilderness] crystallizes abject fear, destruction, and isolation, which the Israelite perceived in desert reality’. 14 In Genesis, God’s primordial curse upon humankind is that rather than yielding its life-giving produce with ease, the land will give only ‘thorns and thistles’, and only by ‘the sweat of your face’ will humans be able to bring forth food from the ground (Gen. 3:18–19). Jeremiah 2:6 similarly describes the midbar as uninhabitable, and not conducive to human life: ‘[God] led us in the wilderness, in a land of deserts and pits, in a land of drought and deep darkness, in a land that no one passes through, where no one lives’. In other texts, God’s only purpose for the midbar seems to be as a site of devastation. In Isaiah 64:10, the speaker reminds God of the terrible destruction that has occurred as punishment for the people’s sin: ‘Your holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation’. In Surfacing, the narrator begins her journey with the same association of wilderness and death. Indeed, she enters the wilderness anticipating that her father may have died precisely because of the wilderness, whether as a result of the physical hazards (blizzards, black flies), or having gone mad from the isolation. Returning to her childhood home also allows memories of death to resurface: the near-drowning of her brother, which she claims to have witnessed through her mother, pregnant with her at the time; the small animals her ‘death-bringer’ brother kept in jars until they died; 15 the illness and death of her mother. For the narrator, at least at the outset of her wilderness journey, the wilderness is a place of death that is inhospitable to human life, as it was for the biblical authors. The narrator’s transformation, however, allows her to experience the life-giving powers of the wilderness. Ironically, it is two en-

14 Talmon, ‘The “Desert Motif” in the Bible and Qumran Literature’, p. 45. 15 Rubenstein, ‘Surfacing’, p. 393.

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counters with death which trigger this transformation: first, stumbling upon the mutilated body of a heron killed and strung up by the ‘Americans’ (other tourists also staying on the lake), and then discovery of the drowned body of her father deep in the lake.16 These images are, in Christ’s analysis, ‘revelations which…provide her with the knowledge that unlocks her past’.17 Freed from the association of wilderness with death, the narrator can now see how ‘nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive’ (Surf., p. 160). The wilderness now becomes a site of life, unlike in the Bible, where it is almost exclusively conceived of as a site of death. The narrator, post-revelation, experiences a vision brought on by simply being in the wilderness. Lying in the bottom of a canoe as it floats on the lake, she envisions what Christ calls ‘the transformative energy of life into death and death into life’18: Through the trees the sun glances; the swamp around me smolders, energy of decay turning into growth, green fire. I remember the heron, by now it will be insects, frogs, fish, other herons. My body also changes, the creature in me, plant-animal, sends out filaments in me; I ferry it secure between life and death, I multiply (Surf., p. 172).

In Surfacing, the narrator ultimately comes to the realization that the wilderness is bursting with life and even has the potential to give life to those who ‘become one’ with it. Death, as it turns out, is only a temporary pause before the transition to life.19

16 The image of the heron’s mutilated body is a clear allusion to crucifixion, evoking Christ on the cross (or, more precisely – since the heron is strung up upside-down – evoking Peter on the cross). The narrator herself recognizes this allusion: ‘Whether [the heron] died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ, if they didn’t kill birds and fish they would have killed us’. (Surf., p. 141.) 17 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 322. 18 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 323. 19 Though my focus in this essay is on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the implicitly Christian imagery of resurrection is noteworthy here.

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There is no such realization in the Hebrew Bible, in which biblical authors express anxiety about the chaos and death in the wilderness that threatens to overwhelm civilization. It is only God’s imposition of order and law upon the wilderness that keeps the chaos at bay, and it is God’s prerogative to remove that control and allow destruction to run its natural course. Leal notes that in Isaiah 34 God’s anger allows ‘chaos and confusion’ to prevail during the destruction of Edom: ‘But the hawk and the hedgehog shall possess it; the owl and the raven shall live in it. He shall stretch the line of confusion [tohu] over it, and the plummet of chaos [vohu] over its nobles’ (34:11).20 Conversely, in Surfacing, it is civilization that the narrator fears will overtake the wilderness. Atwood uses the ‘Americans’ as a metonym for modern civilization that is slowly creeping its way north and threatening to destroy the Canadian wilderness. David is especially hostile towards the Americans, calling them ‘fascist pig Yanks’ and convinced that they’ll march north and take over when they run out of clean water (Surf., pp. 196– 197). The narrator’s anger at the Americans balloons only after she discovers the body of the heron, for whose death she blames the ‘happy killers’ (Surf., p. 129). Christ observes that ‘The conflict between technology and nature, Americans in powerboats and Canadians in canoes, refracts the protagonist’s own pain: she experiences herself as the wilderness innocent and virgin, violated by nameless and destructive men.’21 The narrator describes the ‘Americans’ they encounter as a ‘virulent disease,’22 slowly but surely infecting the pristine wilderness: They’re what’s in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference…they weren’t an invasion from another planet, they were terrestrial. (Surf., p. 130)

20 Leal, Wilderness

in the Bible, pp. 74–75.

21 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 320.

Rubenstein, ‘Surfacing’, p. 388. The irony of the narrator’s antipathy towards the Americans is that they are later revealed to be Canadian, just like the narrator and her friends. For the narrator, the opposite of being an ‘American’ seems to signify ‘someone who is conscious of the natural world and his or her place in it’. Cooke, Margaret Atwood, p. 61. 22

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In Surfacing, it is the wilderness, not civilization, that is vulnerable and in need of protection, not from ‘chaos and confusion’, but from modernity itself. The Americans, symbolizing civilization, bring with them new technology and with it, death. Surfacing offers an alternative vision of the wilderness as a site in which life-force, not death and destruction, can be found. The danger of the wilderness is made manifest, for the biblical authors, in the wild animals that lurk in its shadows. The prophet Isaiah describes a litany of wild animals that will descend upon the wilderness after God’s destruction of Babylon: ‘But wild animals [tsiyyim]23 will lie down there, and its houses will be full of howling creatures; there ostriches will live, and there goat-demons24 will dance. Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces; its time is close at hand, and its days will not be prolonged’ (Is. 13:21–22). Jer. 50:39 similarly prophesies concerning Babylon: ‘Therefore wild animals [tsiyyim] shall live with hyenas in Babylon, and ostriches shall inhabit her; she shall never again be peopled, or inhabited for all generations’. It was a ‘standard curse in antiquity’ that wild beasts and birds would come to inhabit ruined cities. 25 The wilderness that remained after destruction, teeming with hostile and feral creatures, was in no way fit for human life. For the biblical authors, the presence of wild beasts in the midbar signaled, at best, the absence of God’s lifegiving order, and at worst, God’s wrathful vengeance. At the beginning of her journey into the wilderness, the narrator of Surfacing appears to share the same fear of the wild animals as did the biblical authors. She has an antagonistic relationship with the creatures of the wilderness: mosquitoes swarm her and her friends as they search for her father; she hooks worms and frogs for fishing and eventually kills the fish they catch by crushing it with her own foot; she remembers her terror walking to the outhouse alone at night as a child: ‘I would hear a rustling in the forest and know it was hunting me, a bear, a wolf, or some indefinite thing with no name, that was worse’ (Surf., pp. 59–62, 70). It is only after her transformation in the lake 23 From ‫‘ ציה‬desert-dweller,’ as opposed to ‫בהמה‬, ‘domestic animal’.

Blenkinsopp notes that these ‫ שעירים‬are creatures of ‘corrupt intelligence and malevolent will who haunt the wild places of the earth’. Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1–39, p. 280. 25 Lundbom, Jeremiah 37–52, p. 425. 24

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when she realizes ‘everything is waiting to become alive’ that the narrator’s relationship to the wilderness’ creatures shifts, challenging the Bible’s framework of the midbar as a place overrun with fierce, untamed beasts. The narrator begins to recognize the animal both within herself and all around her. During her visionary experience, to fully enter the animal world, the narrator ‘ritually breaks her connections to the human world, burning or purifying clothing, books, one of everything in the cabin’.26 Like an animal, she casts off her clothing, eats only raw vegetables she pulls from the garden, defecates on the earth, and builds a ‘lair’ in which to sleep (Surf., p. 46).27 Rather than fear the animals of the wilderness, she instead becomes one of them. This transformation allows her to become open to the revelation the wilderness has to offer her.

REVELATION IN THE WILDERNESS An almost overwhelming number of texts in the Hebrew Bible describe it as a site of death and destruction.28 An important countertradition exists, however, that locates in it significant encounters between humans and the divine. Leal calls the midbar in the Hebrew Bible a ‘privileged site’ in which ‘God confronts the Hebrew people or their representatives at times of crisis in their lives…the wilderness becomes the site of numerous theophanies, which bring with them significant revelations and gifts, as well as judgment and periodic punishments’.29 It is perhaps precisely because of the wilderness’ nature as uncontrolled and chaotic that these divine encounters can occur. God’s intervention is necessary to impose order and offer guidance in 26 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, pp. 323–324.

A productive comparison can be made between the protagonist in Atwood’s first book, The Edible Woman (1969) and the narrator in this text, who both reject food as a sign of their increasing disconnect with society. I am grateful to Peter Sabo for initially pointing out this comparison to me. 28 Scholars are divided on how greatly this negative attitude permeates the Bible; however, ‘almost without exception, scholars acknowledge the presence in the Hebrew Bible, and particularly in sections of the Pentateuch, of clear negativity towards the wilderness’. Leal, Wilderness in the Bible, p. 67. 29 Leal, Wilderness in the Bible, p. 97. 27

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order that human beings can survive the midbar. The so-called ‘Song of Moses’ declares that ‘[God] sustained30 [Israel] in a desert land [ʾerets midbar], in a howling wilderness waste’ (Deut. 32:10); it is only because of God’s sustenance that the people Israel survived wandering in the wilderness for forty years, and it is because of their survival that Israel can fully recognize God’s power.31 Indeed, the midbar seems to be God’s preferred location for revealing God’s self. The midbar offers a space in which ‘there was nothing that could create a barrier between the people and its Lord’.32 An extraordinarily rich example of this phenomenon is the life of Moses, to which unfortunately we do not have the space to dedicate a full analysis. Suffice it to say that scholars have posited that the ‘wilderness tradition’ in the book of Exodus, in which Moses was a central figure, originally represented a tradition about the people of Israel completely independent from the ‘patriarchal traditions’. 33 The most significant event of the wilderness tradition is the theophany on Mt. Sinai in midbar Sinai, in which God reveals God’s self to Moses and hands down the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments (Ex. 19–24) and instructs Moses on how to build the Tabernacle, God’s dwelling-place in the wilderness (Ex. 25–40). The importance of this critical encounter between Moses and the divine, both for the overall scope and sequence of the Hebrew Bible and the ensuing thousands of years of Jewish tradition, cannot be overstated. Many have noted the parallels found between Moses’ story and the story of Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian The word which the NRSV translates ‘sustained’ is ‫ימצאהוּ‬, from ‫מצא‬, which can also mean ‘find,’ or ‘meet, encounter’. The polysemy of this word simultaneously suggests a providential meeting between humans and the divine, as well as God’s protection of Israel. 31 See for example, God’s provision of manna in Ex. 16, Num. 11, and Deut. 8; and God turning the bitter waters sweet at Meribah in Ex. 17 and Num. 20. 32 von Rad, Moses, p. 72. 33 See Finkelstein, ‘The Wilderness Narrative and Itineraries and Evolution of the Exodus Tradition’. Scholars are divided in opinion as to whether the wilderness texts reflect realities of the time they describe (i.e. the Late Bronze Age) e.g. Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai, or the time in which the texts were compiled e.g. Van Seters, ‘The Geography of the Exodus’. 30

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handmaid (see Gen. 16 and 21) especially as regards the role of the midbar.34 The midbar is a place of transformation for both Moses and Hagar, playing a significant role in the story of the latter, despite its relatively low profile in the book of Genesis.35 It is in the midbar where Hagar, like Moses, encounters God after fleeing from the harsh treatment of her mistress Sarai. Through Hagar’s encounter, we learn of another name for the deity – though while God reveals the divine name to Moses in the wilderness (‘I am who I am’, Ex. 3:14), it is Hagar, a woman, slave, and Egyptian, who herself gives the Lord a name in Gen. 16:13 (‘El-roi’, the ‘God of Seeing’)! As God charged Moses to return to Egypt as ‘Hebrew liberator’, God commands Hagar to return to Sarai, but with the promise that she will bear a son, Ishmael; she thus returns as a ‘mother of sons’.36 Hagar’s stay with Sarai is short lived, however, and she is cast out once again after Sarai witnesses Ishmael ‘playing’ with her son, Isaac. This time, God speaks to Hagar after she and Ishmael have exhausted their water supply and Hagar has resigned themselves to death. God promises Hagar that Ishmael will become ‘a great nation’, effectively transforming Hagar from slave woman on the brink of death to the mother of a nation, or, as Pigott calls her, a ‘Mother Patriarch’.37 34 Dozeman summarizes others’ findings of the parallels between Hagar and the Exodus: ‫( ענה‬oppression) of Hagar and the Israelite slaves, ‫( גרש‬driving out) by Sarah and Pharaoh, themes of slavery and abuse, and ‫( ברח‬flight) of Hagar and the Israelites into the wilderness. Dozeman, ‘The Wilderness and Salvation in the Hagar Story’, p. 28. 35 The term midbar occurs just seven times in Genesis, but four of them are in the story of Hagar: Gen. 16:7, 21:14, 20, 21. Dozeman, ‘Wilderness and Salvation in the Hagar Story’, p. 24, n. 4. 36 Dozeman, ‘Wilderness and Salvation in the Hagar Story’, p. 30. Though, of course, her return is also a return to enslavement. 37 ‘I call her a “Mother Patriarch,” because God promises her multiplied seed (Gen 16:10), a promise given elsewhere only to patriarchs. Hagar is “other” first because she is the only major matriarch who is a non-Hebrew. But I also call her the “Other Patriarch” because, as we will see, her story parallels Abraham’s in numerous ways. Hagar even performs roles that ordinarily a patriarch would have performed, such as giving a place its name (Gen 16) and

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If the midbar in the Hebrew Bible is a space where the veil lifts between the divine and human realms, so too is the wilderness in Surfacing. Indeed, Carol Christ characterizes the narrator’s journey in Atwood’s novel as a ‘spiritual quest’. It is in the wilderness where the narrator transcends the human realm and becomes part of the animal world. Here she is more fully aware of the supernatural powers that pervade the wood, powers that are potentially lethal (‘It was dangerous for them to go [to the cliff where the gods lived] without knowing about the power’ (Surf., p. 150), says the narrator of her companions) but who also provide insight and guidance (‘I’ll have to listen carefully, if I trust them they will tell me what is allowed’ [Surf., p. 181]). Atwood frames this experience using theistic language, as the narrator reflects: ‘The gods, their likenesses; to see them in their true shape is fatal. While you are human; but after the transformation they can be reached’ (Surf., p. 159). The spirits she encounters on her quest include those of her parents; her father appears to her as a wolf-like creature and she sees a vision of her mother, feeding the birds. Christ calls this sort of religious experience a ‘transpersonal experience of mystical identification because she experiences unity with a nonpersonal energy, not with a personal god or power’.38 This, Christ argues, is more characteristic of women’s religious experiences than men’s: ‘Confrontation or encounter with a personal other characteristic of biblical religion would be the expected primary form of religious knowledge for males. Atwood’s protagonist’s experience fits this model and suggests its possible usefulness for the study of women’s religious experience’.39 Women’s spiritual experiences, Christ seems to suggest, are more likely to occur outside of the institutions of organized religion. In providing her son a wife (Gen 21). Hagar is, therefore, the “Mother Patriarch” and “Other Patriarch.” She should be accorded her place as the progenitor of a nation and, indeed, should be viewed as a patriarch in her own right’. Pigott, ‘Hagar: The M/Other Patriarch’, p. 514. Our narrator, too, will return from the wilderness a mother – see next section. 38 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 326, emphasis mine. 39 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 327. Judith Plaskow critiques Atwood, and Atwood as viewed through Christ, as uncritically accepting of the ‘special connection’ between woman and nature. She notes that this connection can be a source of power, but it is potentially problematic and harmful to women. See Judith Plaskow, ‘On Carol Christ and Margaret Atwood’.

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both Surfacing and some biblical texts, these spiritual experiences go so far as to challenge the very foundations of male-dominated social structures.

WOMAN IN THE WILDERNESS As discussed above, the wilderness is conceived in many biblical texts as a dangerous and potentially life-threatening place. In this worldview, the chaotic expanse of the wilderness particularly threatened the patriarchal social order of civilization. This threat was nowhere more vividly imagined than in the figure of Lilith. Lilith makes just one appearance in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah 34:11, as the prophet describes what shall happen to the destroyed city of Edom: ‘Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat-demons shall call to each other; there too Lilith [lilit] shall repose, and find a place to rest’. While Isaiah does not describe the figure of Lilith in detail, ancient audiences would have been all too familiar with this female demon. The lilit of Isaiah 34 derives from the Sumerian40 lilitu, who endangers pregnant women, women in childbirth, and infants; and the related ardat lili, a sexually aggressive but infertile demon who preys on men.41 The earliest mention of Lilith occurs in the epic poem Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree from c. 2000 BCE, in which the warrior Gilgamesh drives Lilith out of the tree she is inhabiting and she flees ‘to the desert’. This association of Lilith with the ‘desert’ is consistent with Isaiah’s association of Lilith and the wasteland that was formerly Edom. One example of the lilitu-type demon is the individual Lamaštu. In the second millennium BCE, Lamaštu quickly became the most (in)famous of the Mesopotamian demons, and with good reason: ‘Her main goal on earth was to snatch and eat newly-born babies, which she accomplished either by trickery, posing as a midwife or a physician, or by sheer force, attacking her victims like a wolf or a

40 For etymological analysis, see Wiggerman, ‘Lamaštu Daughter of Anu: A Profile’, p. 217. 41 Gaines, ‘Lilith’, para. 4.

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lion’.42 As a lilitu, her preferred habitation is the wilderness: ‘Like demons, ghosts, and anti-social elements in general, Lamaštu seeks refuge beyond the edges of the oikumene, in the deserts, swamps and mountains where she makes home with the animals’.43 As a destroyer of the basic building blocks of the patriarchal social structure, the home and family, Lilith/Lamaštu represents the chaos of the wilderness personified, who threatens to wreak havoc upon civilized space unless it is defended with amulets, incantations, and the like.44 In Surfacing, Atwood’s narrator functions as a sort of modern Lilith. The narrator begins her journey into the wilderness emotionally deadened and unable to connect with the people who surround her. This pathological detachment is perhaps caused by the traumatic events she experienced prior to her trip: an affair with a married man which culminated in his forcing her to have an abortion. Lilith’s reputation as a killer of babies led James Joyce to call her the ‘patron of abortions’;45 she is the antithesis of maternity and family life. The novel does seem to condemn abortion, at least in these particular circumstances, in which the mother does not wish for one. While her lover had tried to convince her that her child was nothing, ‘only an animal’, the narrator feels deeply guilty: ‘I should have seen that it was no different, it was hiding in me as if in a burrow and instead of granting it sanctuary I let them catch it. I could have said No but I didn’t; that made me one of them, too, a killer’ (Surf., pp. 145–146). Even if the reality of her situation is not exactly the same, the narrator imagines herself as a Lilith – one who takes the life of the innocent rather than one who gives it. Unlike Lilith in the midbar, however, the narrator’s visionary experience in the wilderness enables her to become an agent of life, rather than death. When the narrator begins to transition from the human to the animal world, she is compelled to make love to Joe, her boyfriend – but not inside the house, with its smells of ‘the sheets, wool and soap, chemically treated hides’, but rather outdoors, in the wilderness (Surf., p. 164). In that space the narrator is attuned Farber, Lamaštu, p. 3. See also Wiggerman ‘Lamaštu Daughter of Anu: A Profile’, pp. 230–231. 43 Wiggerman, ‘Lamaštu Daughter of Anu’, p. 230. 44 See Farber, Lamaštu, for images and transcriptions of some of these amulets and incantations. 45 Joyce, Ulysses, 274. 42

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to the powers that surround her. She notices that ‘there is something outside which I have protection against but he doesn’t’ (Surf., p. 164). Her sexual encounter with Joe has but one purpose; not pleasure, for ‘the animals don’t have pleasure,’ but to conceive a child (Surf., p. 165). She knows it is ‘the right season’, and she needs Joe ‘to give [her] the part of himself [she needs]’ (Surf., p. 165). This encounter, which she is certain results in conception, serves as a sort of redemption for her abortion. It is in every way opposed to her last experience of pregnancy, which ended when she was ‘[strapped] to the death machine, emptiness machine, legs in the metal framework, secret knives’ (Surf., p. 165). This time, she vows to give birth far from the machinery and technology inherent in human civilization: Squatting on old newspapers in a corner alone, or on leaves, dry leaves, a heap of them, that’s cleaner. The baby will slip out as easily as an egg, a kitten, and I’ll lick it off and bite the cord, the blood returning to the ground where it belongs; the moon will be full, pulling (Surf., p. 165).

By seducing Joe in order to conceive a child, the narrator acts as the Lilith of later Jewish tradition, who ‘wanders about at night time, vexing the sons of men and causing them to defile themselves [emit seed]’ (Zohar 1:19b), and then uses those emissions to become pregnant.46 Yet unlike the Lilith who takes children’s lives, the narrator is using Joe in order to give life to a child. As they make love, she imagines that she feels ‘my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been prisoned for so long…it buds, it sends out fronds’ (Surf., p. 165). By dwelling in the wilderness, outside of the confines of civilization and the patriarchal social structure that goes with it, the narrator, like Lilith, has the opportunity to take control of her sexuality and reproductive life. Like the child within her body, the narrator in Surfacing will rise out of the lake, reborn into new life. This use of water as a motif is worth special consideration. Until this point, we have discussed the

46 Translation from Sperling and Simon, The

Zohar.

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midbar/wilderness in terms of land. The concept of the ‘wet wilderness’, however, was an equally powerful concept in the biblical worldview.47 In the biblical texts, it is the sea which is most often conceived of as a watery counterpart to the midbar. The ‘waters’ are an integral part of the tohu vavohu, the ‘formless void’ of primordial chaos, in Genesis 1. The book of Job keenly expresses a fear of returning to this chaos when it describes the sea as a chaotic force which needs to be contained by divine power lest it burst forth and overwhelm all else.48 God asks Job, rhetorically, ‘Or who shut in the sea with doors, when it burst out from the womb? When I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped?”’ (Job 38:8–11). Of course, water can be a source of life as well as a source of death, if it is contained in its place and its power is limited by God. God not infrequently provides life-giving springs to biblical figures who are on the brink of death in the dry wilderness (see Hagar’s story above in Gen. 21, also Judges 15 and 1 Kings 3). For a people living in a climate in which survival was dependent on the seasonal rainfall, the deity quickly became associated with water (rain or otherwise), and thus fertility – of the land, and by extension, of the animal and human life upon it. 49 Verses describing return from exile often employ the motif of water returning to the midbar, as in Isaiah 35:6b7: ‘For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes’. Like the dry wilderness, the wet wilderness in the Bible could be a source of both death and life. In Surfacing, the water of the lake which surrounds the island on which the novel is set occupies a similarly ambiguous space between threatening death and enabling life.50 The lake is the site of two major scenes of death, or near-death, in the narrator’s life. Throughout the novel, the narrator repeatedly refers to a vision she claims to have had 47 The credit for the term ‘wet wilderness’ belongs to Leal, Wilderness

Bible. 48 Leal, Wilderness in the Bible, p. 83. 49 See Propp, Water in the Wilderness, pp. 10–13. 50 See Potocco, ‘Water in English Canadian Literature’, pp. 19–30.

in the

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while a fetus in her mother’s womb: her brother falling into the lake, nearly drowning, and her mother pulling him out of the lake and ‘pour[ing] the water out of him’ (Surf., 71). The lake, of course, is also where she finds her father’s drowned body. This sight taints the narrator’s panicked thoughts as she attempts to swim away from his corpse: ‘The lake was horrible, it was filled with death, it was touching me’ (Surf., 143). Just as her brother did not fully drown, however, but was brought back to life by their mother, so too the lake enables the rebirth of the narrator. The sight of her father drowned in the lake horrifies the narrator at first, but ultimately it allows her to realize that the memory of her brother’s near-drowning was actually the fetus she aborted, ‘drowned in air’ (Surf., 144). This realization ‘unlocks the mystery’ of the vision she has been having of ‘husband, child, marriage. The childbirth was an abortion; the wedding day, the day of the abortion; the husband, the lover who told her to have the abortion’. 51 With this revelation the narrator sets off on her visionary quest. After purifying the house of its markers of civilization, by burning her papers, smashing dishware, and slashing the bed linens and clothing, the narrator purifies herself by means of the lake. She immerses herself, fully nude, and ‘like the fetus in her womb, she changes in water’. 52 Fully leaving the human realm, she becomes one with the wilderness: ‘my head rests against the rock, innocent as plankton…the earth rotates, holding my body down to it as it does the moon…[a loon] sees me but it ignores me, accepts me as part of the land’ (Surf., 183). The narrator is brought back to life, albeit a different kind of life, after her encounter with the water. No personal god gave her this gift, as in the biblical narratives, but water in Atwood’s Surfacing is no less a divinely-bestowed miracle of life.

OUT OF THE WILDERNESS The book of Genesis tells us that ‘an angel of the Lord found [Hagar] by a spring of water in the wilderness, a spring on the way to Shur’ (Gen. 16:7). Alone, pregnant, Hagar has fled from the harsh treatment of her mistress Sarai into the midbar and away from any semblance of civilization. This snippet of the story of Hagar captures the tensions 51 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 321. 52 Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood’, p. 324.

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and contradictions that characterize the biblical presentation of the midbar: it is a lonely, desolate place fit only for the truly desperate, yet it is possible to be revivified there through encounters with the divine. In Genesis 16, Hagar ultimately returns to Sarai, outwardly still enslaved, but having been inwardly transformed after the angel calls her and promises she will bear a son. In Surfacing, Margaret Atwood’s unnamed narrator similarly flees to the wilderness on a ‘spiritual quest’. At the beginning of her journey, she shares with the biblical authors the view that the wilderness is a place of danger and chaos, filled with wild animals and malevolent demons. Her visionary experience, triggered by her encounter with the bodies of a dead heron and her father, drowned in the depths of the lake, results in a transformation in which she becomes part of the wilderness itself – at once animal, plant, and land. In her transformed state, she recognizes that the wilderness is not a site of death at all, but is instead pulsing with life. She participates in the wilderness’ creation of life by conceiving a child with Joe by the light of the moon. Through this act she flips on its head the biblical and ancient Near Eastern idea of Lilith/Lamaštu, a wilderness-dwelling female demon who causes men’s nocturnal emissions and kills mothers and babies. The wilderness makes it possible for the narrator to encounter her own spiritual powers and harness her sexuality in order to free herself from her past traumas. Though it may have been impossible to imagine for the ancient authors of biblical texts, operating within a patriarchal social structure, for women like the narrator of Surfacing, the wilderness can be a life-affirming space where ‘everything is waiting to become alive’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. First published 1972 by Simon and Schuster (New York). Blenkinsopp, Joseph. Isaiah 1–39: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Vol. 19 of The Anchor Bible, edited by William Foxwell Albright and David Noel Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Bruegemann, Walter. The Land. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977. Christ, Carol P. ‘Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and Vision’. Signs 2, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 316–330.

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Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion, Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Dozeman, Thomas B. ‘The Wilderness and Salvation in the Hagar Story’. Journal of Biblical Literature 117, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 23–43. Hoffmeier, James Karl. Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Farber, Walter. Lamaštu: An Edition of the Canonical Series of Lamaštu Incantations and Rituals and Related Texts from the Second and First Millennia B.C. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014. Finkelstein, Israel. ‘The Wilderness Narrative and Itineraries and Evolution of the Exodus Tradition’. In Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience, edited by T.E. Levy et. al., 39–53. New York: Springer, 2015. Gaines, Janet Howe. ‘Lilith’. Bible Review 17, no. 5 (October 2001). Joyce, James. Ulysses. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publishing Group, 2016. First published 1922 by Shakespeare and Company (Paris). ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/ lib/brandeis-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5444999. Leal, Robert Barry. Wilderness in the Bible: Toward a Theology of Wilderness. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004. Lundbom, Jack R. Jeremiah 37–52: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Vol. 21C of The Anchor Bible, edited by William Foxwell Albright and David Noel Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Mead, Rebecca. ‘Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia’. The New Yorker, April 17, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/margaret-atwood-the-prophet-of-dystopia. Nystrom, Samuel. Beduinentum und Jaluvismus: Eine Soziologische Religiongeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Alten Testament. Lund: Gleerup, 1946.

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Pigott, Susan M. ‘Hagar: The M/Other Patriarch’ Review & Expositor 115, no. 4 (November 2018): 513–528. Plaskow, Judith. ‘On Carol Christ and Margaret Atwood: Some Theological Considerations’. Signs 2, no. 2 (Winter 1976): 331–339. Potocco, Marcello. ‘Water in English Canadian Literature: Imagery and Appropriations’. Annals for Istrian and Mediterranean Studies: Series Historia et Sociologia 21, no. 1 (2011): 19–30. Propp, W.H. Water in the Wilderness: A Biblical Motif and Its Mythological Background. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987. Rubenstein, Roberta. ‘“Surfacing”: Margaret Atwood’s Journey to the Interior’. Modern Fiction Studies 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1976): 387–399. Sperling, Harry and Maurice Simon, trans. Vol. 1 of The Zohar. 2nd ed. London: Soncino, 1984. Talmon, Shemaryahu. ‘The “Desert Motif” in the Bible and Qumran Literature’. In Biblical Motifs: Origins and Transformations, edited by Alexander Altmann, 31–63. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. Williams, George H. Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1962. Wisker, Gina. Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Van Seters, ‘The Geography of the Exodus’. In The Land that I Will Show You: Essays on the History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East in Honor of J. Maxwell Miller, edited by J.A. Dearman and M.P. Graham, 255–276. Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. von Rad, Gerhard. Moses. Translated by Stephen Neill and edited by K.C. Hanson. Cambridge: James Clarke Company, 2012. First published in 1940 in German. Wiggerman, F.A.M. ‘Lamaštu Daughter of Anu: A Profile’. In Birth in Babylonia and the Bible: Its Mediterranean Setting, 217–252. Groningen: Styx, 2000.

13. GRACE BE TO YOU IN THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST: GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS, AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S ALIAS GRACE AND THE GOSPEL OF JOHN1 SARAH EMANUEL One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House – The Brain has Corridors – surpassing – Material Place – … Ourself behind ourself, concealed – Should startle most – Assassin hid in our Apartment Be Horror’s least….2 - Emily Dickinson

1I

am indebted to Colby College’s 2018 Center for the Arts and Humanities theme, “Presence of the Past,” for this essay’s title and content inspiration. I also express profound gratitude to Sarah M. Nichols for her careful feedback on multiple drafts, and to Jordan Lawlor, my student research assistant at Colby College, for her exquisite proofreading. 2 Dickinson, “One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted.” Quoted also in Atwood, Alias Grace, p. 46.

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On the writing of past and people, and in recalling her novel Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood asserts, “I don’t think anyone is a reliable narrator – in real life or anywhere else…The interesting thing is the way everybody projects their ideas onto [their subjects].”3 Throughout the novel, Atwood fictionalizes the life of the historical Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant of nineteenth century Canada, who was convicted of a murder she said she could not remember. Grace’s past soon becomes present, and therefore haunting, as she begins to piece together the story of her life, including the days and self-states leading up to the crime. Throughout the narrative, Atwood explores the ways death and trauma impact social and psychic life; Grace becomes a catalyst for contemplating the multiplicity of the mind, including how the un-reckoned – ghosts – can demand attention through the crevices of one’s posttraumatic, non-integrated states of self. The Gospel of John, too, focuses on death and how it impacts social and psychic life. Like Atwood, John fictionalizes the life of a historical figure – in this case, Jesus of Nazareth – while also outlining the days and self-states leading up to Jesus’ death.4 However, while Atwood’s novel is often read with a view to posttraumatic hauntings – to a past that begs for reckoning from within the book’s narrativized present (despite, as we will see, the potentiality of Grace controlling her fate more than one might realize) – John is typically read as uninterested in such negotiations.5 John, many commentators assert, seeks

3 Dowling, “Margaret Atwood on ‘Alias Grace.’”

This is not to say that fiction is not real. Stories, including those based in fiction, reflect real worlds and also create real worlds. Additionally, a starting point for New Testament studies is that Gospel literature focuses more on “what must have happened, rather than an attempt to discover what actually did happen.” Carr and Conway, An Introduction to the Bible, p. 311. Emphasis original. 5 According to my research, Shelly Rambo remains the only scholar to at fulllength discuss John’s characterization of Jesus in relation to trauma and haunting, although she focuses more specifically on the resurrection narrative and Jesus’ encounter with Thomas therein. See Rambo, “Haunted (by the) Gospel.” Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds. John’s relationship with “the 4

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 333 discretion; his protagonist is not filled with the same “inexpressible anguish” of Atwood’s Grace or, in all likelihood, the historical Jesus.6 Many even assert that John’s Gospel is the most “triumphant”7 of the New Testament Gospels, arguing that it is a purposefully “anti-tragic evangel.”8 As Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. contends, the Johannine text is not haunted by the human despair of the historical Jesus.9 The historical Jesus’ humanity and suffering are intentionally “muted” so as to make way for the otherworldly Jesus – the Jesus reflecting John’s own interpretive projections and needs.10 While I do not discount the interpretive projections of John in the making of his Gospel, I do question whether such overarching analysis of Jesus’ character overlooks too quickly the spectrum of possibilities. As we will also see, posttraumatic dissociations and ghostly hauntings are not univocal; while trauma can express itself through external affect (e.g., running, screaming, crying) it can also, in many instances, be an affective “inexpression” that bears witness to traumatic and posttraumatic hauntings. This essay explores the multiplicity of trauma hauntings, including the affects therein. With a view to contemporary critical lenses such as hauntology, trauma studies, and affect theory, it cross-reads John’s Gospel and Alias Grace in order to show that John, like Atwood, offers a representation of the haunted, traumatized, and dissociated mind. But this essay also, in doing so, experiences its own performative splits – its own haunting disruptions that spotlight the demands of ghosts and, with it, the projections embedded within human narration and interpretation. 11 Readers at times Jews,” however, has been read more consistently with a view to trauma. For more on this, see Reinhartz, “Incarnation and Covenant.” 6 Bruner, The Gospel of John, p. 1102. 7 Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 1994, pp. 34–35. 8 Ruprecht, Jr., This Tragic Gospel, p. 101. 9 Or, for instance, the despair of the Markan Jesus. See more in the body of this essay below. 10 Ruprecht, This Tragic Gospel, p. 101. 11 Perhaps Jessica Stern says it best when she writes that traumas, including trauma hauntings, “interrupt the plot. It just happens, and then life [and essays] g[o] on. No one prepares you for it.” See Stern, Denial. Also quoted by

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may find themselves asking which interpretations matter most – which analyses are more or less “real.” As Atwood herself heeds, when it comes to truth and reliability, multiplicity abounds, and it is up to us as readers “take [our] pick.”12 I will begin by unpacking the relationship between hauntology and trauma studies. I will then use these theories to unveil the ghosts and posttraumatic hauntings circulating between Alias Grace and the Gospel of John. Philosophies of the psyche, after all, transfer well onto literary analysis, including the hauntings therein; “Literature enjoys its own internal hauntology…in the multi-faceted capacity of language to carry a multitude of meanings, the power of intertextuality to communicate from beyond the confines of the immediate text and in the power of literary testimony to communicate unheard voices and unspoken perspectives.”13 In the analytical section, I will move from text to text in a way that highlights the ghostly exchange between Alias Grace and John. As alluded to above, however, the unheard voices do not come solely from the texts themselves but also from their readers. Literary testimony is always already bound up in the psycho-social experiences of the interpreter. Authors create stories and stories create worlds, but readers – in bringing to life those stories – become creators too. The intertextual exchange between Alias Grace and John in the essay will, first and foremost, bring to light the ghosts within each text, and in turn the unspoken perspectives of John’s Gospel. But it will also, in doing so, bring to light the ghosts that haunt this essay’s own interpretive makings. All stories are ghost stories. This essay is no exception.

Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, p. 7. 12 See Mead, “Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia,” April 10, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/margaret-atwood-theprophet-of-dystopia. 13 Shaw, Hauntology, p. 15.

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H AUNTOLOGY, T RAUMA, AND POSTTRAUMATIC AFFECT Hauntology refers to the study of the ghostly return. Ghostly returns – or hauntings – can take a variety of forms. In a figurative model, ghosts are more than just souls of the dead. They are ungraspable forces – “abstract collective cognitive familiarit[ies],” as Avery Gordon has written it, that beg to be named but can’t quite.14 Hauntings also, by and large, take form in an active in-between of experience and expression.15 The spectre is there yet also not there. It is visible yet also invisible. It occupies a space of being and also of un-being. It is the unresolved past seeping into the present, the marginal creeping into the center, an uninvited memory or reflex or rupture demanding an invitation. Even when ghosts are avoided by the conscious mind, spectral agents lurk; they are amongst the everyday, lingering as un-reckoned ambiguities in the neither-here-nor-there.16 Their unwavering amorphosity signals to theorists that spectres escape the bounds of conceptualization; they, in the words of Jacques Derrida, are “heterogeneous to the philosophical concept of the concept.”17 Such views to the in-between work well with trauma theory, in that trauma is often defined as that which escapes the bounds of signification. Trauma is “unspeakable,” notes psychiatrist Judith Herman, incomprehensible to one’s previous understanding of the world.18 Such shattering effects of trauma, however, including speech, do not end with the total, immutable deconstruction of one’s personal 14 E.g., feelings of the uncanny. For more, see Blanco et al., “Introduction,” p. xv. See also Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 37. In the naming process, we stop short. Signification escapes us, leaving emotion to often fill the void: “I feel like I know this.” “I feel like I’ve seen this.” “This feeling feels odd.” 15 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 46. 16 Thus, writes, Robert Hamilton, “[H]auntology can, on a literal level, account for the presence of actual ghost stories within literary works; on a broader plane, though, it can also comprehend the unreal or hyper-real effects of ideas, linguistic styles, ethical systems, and theological propositions that continue to control…from ‘beyond the grave.’” See Hamilton, “The Spectral Narrative.” 17 Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 118. 18 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 1.

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or collective consciousness. “[Such] atrocities refuse to be buried,” Herman adds.19 The brain becomes haunted – possessed, even – by flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations, numbness, physical ailments, and/or other disruptive experiences. Dissociation is a common part of this experience. Survivors often detach from their sense of a coherent self, both consciously and nonconsciously (that is, in noncognitive affective states; see below) in the wake of traumatic events. Dissociation is so common, in fact, that psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk calls it “the essence of trauma. The overwhelming experience [of trauma] is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts, and physical sensations related to the trauma take on a life of their own.”20 Such traumatic after-effects are also affects in that they are not only generated by the mind but also felt firmly by the body in its materiality. While conscious thought is sometimes present, posttraumatic signifiers can also often be unstructured, unanchored, pre-conscious emotions (i.e., affects).21 They, to use the words of Eric Shouse, can be “nonconscious experiences of intensity…[that] prepar[e themselves] for action” and, like the trauma from which they came, “cannot be fully captured in language.”22 Or, as the title of Van der Kolk’s work suggests, it is often “the body [that] keeps the score” over and against the conscious mind.23 Hauntings, too, can spotlight traumatic effects and, in so doing, demand that the trauma be interrogated in one’s posttraumatic present.24 The ghostly return of the un-reckoned can find voice through posttraumatic traits manifested in the traumatized. For example, outbursts of anger, sadness, and dissociative splits are not necessarily indicative of baseline personality but can rather be ghosts of one’s past 19 Ibid., p. 2. 20 Van der Kolk, The Body

Keeps the Score, p. 66. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association named this array of disruptive responses to trauma “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” otherwise known as PTSD. 21 For an overview on affect and its relations to the preverbal and noncognitive realm, see Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): pp. 434–72. 22 Quoted by Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” p. 442. 23 Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body, p. 246. 24 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. xvi.

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 337 begging for voice within one’s present. Outbursts can also appear to the conscious mind as if they come out of nowhere. Ghosts demand attention. They provoke an urge to do something. They remain until they are reckoned with – until they are seen. Until they can speak. Until they are heard. That is their work. The work of trauma tracks similarly. For while trauma theorists define trauma as that which is unnarratable, they also define recovery from trauma as the process whereby survivors learn to narrate the unnarratable – to voice the unvoiceable – including the unanchored affects therein.25 Because, in the words of Herman, “[t]he core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection…[r]ecovery…is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections.”26 Trauma recovery, in other words, demands a coming face-to-face with posttraumatic hauntings, including posttraumatic affect. Perhaps it is for these reasons Derrida heeds that existing means learning to exist amongst the undead.27 If ghosts are remnants of trauma, then to exorcise is to verbalize, and to verbalize is to learn to live. Informed by this theoretical framing, the following section crossreads the Alias Grace and the Gospel of John to show how ghosts linger within and between these two texts. The purpose is to vocalize the multivocality of trauma hauntings within each work – a pursuit that currently fits within the grain of Alias Grace analyses but not yet with traditional interpretations of John. In doing so, however, I will also show how the ghosts within them can impact – and be impacted by – the un-reckoned within ourselves. As noted above, this essay experiences its own performative splits. It brings to light the demands of ghosts, including how they are embedded within our own interpretive practices. We, too, need to be open to our own hauntings and in-betweens, even as we reach for triumph.

25 Thereby turning affects into emotions. 26 Herman, Trauma

and Recovery, p. 133. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, pp. xvii–xviii.

27

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T HE PRESENCE OF THE PAST IN ALIAS GRACE, THE GOSPEL OF JOHN , AND OURSELVES The theme of the in-between runs deep in Atwood’s Alias Grace. Convicted of the murder of her employer and her employer’s housekeeper at the age of sixteen, Alias Grace charts the psychic journey of Grace Marks from childhood through post-trial. In this process, we learn that Grace experiences post-traumatic hauntings that then trigger dissociations and violent enactments. Past becomes present. Inside becomes outside. Spectral agents lurk. At one doctor’s visit, for instance, Grace shares with the reader: I see his hand, his glove, a glove stuffed with raw meat….and I know I have seen a hand like that before; and then I lift my head and stare him straight in the eye, and my heart clenches and kicks out inside me, and then I begin to scream. Because it’s the same doctor, the same one, the very same black-coated doctor with his bagful of shining knives (AG, p. 29).

Given Grace’s drive to suppress emotions and affect, which was appropriate to an Irish immigrant in nineteenth century Canada’s “emotionally repressive British-dominant culture,”28 her lack of psychic stability comes off as striking. We know that Grace seeks control and emotional groundedness – to “keep [her] face [and affects] still” (AG, p. 26) – but even she observes that in this case she cannot. The firstperson narration adds to the dissociative reality of the scene; she knows she is dissociating. She knows she is being pulled into the inbetween. It is as if Grace is hovering above it all – looking down and narrating what she sees – while her body experiences material lack (lack of grounding; lack of Grace within herself) upon the uncanny ghostly contact. Grace is not the only one who experiences run-ins with the inbetween. Dr. Simon Jordan, an aspiring psychiatrist, embraces an intellectualized attempt to understand – and thus to do something about – haunted self-states. Simon, we learn, is captivated by the in-between spaces of the mind. We see this in his efforts to track the trajectories of his own thinking. “The association of ideas is truly remarkable, he thinks….In order to get from the first [idea] to the third, the second 28 Vickroy, Reading

Trauma Narratives, p. 51.

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 339 [idea] is essential; though from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, is no great leap” (AG, p. 60). It is these very explorations into the psyche that inspire Simon in his work with Grace: “I am attempting,” he explains, “gently and by degrees, to reestablish the chain of thought, which was broke, perhaps, by the shock of the violent events in which she was involved” (AG, pp. 84–85). He is attempting, by and large, to have a reckoning with ghosts. And then it happens. As if out of nowhere. From the first. To the second. To the third –

Why, I ask myself, do I so vividly envision Grace hovering above, looking down upon her body in a dissociative split as she begins to scream? Yes, the scream indicates a psychic split. And yes, there is reason for this; Grace, as we will see, experienced the traumatic death of a friend and co-worker who died from an abortion performed by a doctor with similar tools to the black-coated doctor. The familiarity triggers the split. Still, I know there is more. Both literary and psychological analyses tell us that the associations we make are often predicated on our pasts and understandings of them. Associations in this case are of my own dissociations. I know the feeling of the split – the split that takes you both back in time and out of body to an incorporeal corporeality. Slipping further into my own first-person narrative, I read the lines and I can see myself from above. I am ten and he is there. He is there, with his own flesh-toned knife, ready to grab it with his hand and place it upon me. To a fourth, I beg. To a fourth. Where else can the incorporeal corporeality land? The Gospel of John certainly seems to be fertile soil for such an analysis. At the outset, God splits. God is both Theos and Logos; while the Theos remains solely incorporeal, the Logos incarnates into the corporeality of the human Jesus. As the fourth evangelist recites: “And the Logos altered into flesh and lived among us” (1:14). According to John’s theology, however, Jesus in John is not only living as flesh among flesh; he maintains incorporeal status at one and the same time (“the Logos was also God”; 1:1). John, in short, begins by thrusting us into an in-between – a narrative in which characters are here, there, one, and the other, all at the same time. John, at the outset, casts us into a haunted space.

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“To live in flesh” takes me back to the body and “to live among us” takes me back to the first – that is, to Alias Grace. We have already seen how, through dissociative self-states, Grace’s past interrogates her present. Now, we in the present, interrogate the past, asking: what happened? As Simon’s work with Grace continues, we learn what sorts of ghosts have been living with our protagonist. Grace, we discover, has experienced multiple interrelated traumas: the death of her mother, the difficulties of being an Irish immigrant in colonial Canada, extreme poverty, the death of her friend and co-worker, Mary Whitney, and abuse from her father. The first impacts all those that follow. Grace’s mother died on the ship from Ireland to Canada when Grace was a child. As to what caused this, Grace tells Simon, is unclear, although “it was most likely a tumour, or a cyst, or else a burst appendix” (AG, p. 119). The story also highlights the traumatic impact of those assigned impoverished and/or immigrant status. Had Grace’s mother had greater access to medical services, or had her family not needed to seek economic opportunity in Canada, perhaps Grace’s mother would not have died in the way that she did. The lack of care Grace and her mother received from Grace’s father is also connected to this, at least in part. Grace’s father beat her mother regularly and drove his family into debt, thereby contributing to his family’s place and lowly status upon the ship. It is also hinted that Grace was sexually abused – by whom, we do not know. Grace does not remember such abuse, at least not consciously, but nevertheless alludes to being haunted by sexual trauma through the interpretation of a dream: “I felt it was…[a] man, someone I knew well and had long been familiar with, even as long ago as my childhood, but had since forgotten” (AG, p. 280).29 Or is there an allusion? I ask as I gag at the lines.

29 The colonial conditions of Upper Canada play a role in this.

According to Marlene Goldman, Grace’s dissociations and posttraumatic hauntings are impacted by her positionality as a disposed Irish female. The “haunting and hysteria” within Alias Grace, she writes, “locates Grace’s story within a vast wave of impoverished diasporic Irish women who were marginalized and dispossessed in the New World.” Grace, in other words, is disposed of by not only her father, but also by another man, and a more powerful one at that: the androcentric patriarchal State. See Goldman, DisPossession, p. 152.

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 341 The haunting of Grace’s past seems to beg for some reckoning here, but Atwood does have a tendency to play with questions of truth and reliability. As Atwood writes in a collection of poetry called “True Stories”: The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story. I gag again. Of course we need it.

Why, I ask further, must inclinations of abuse so often be discounted? But the implication is there; it’s right in the title: Alias Grace. Alongside her poetry, Atwood’s novel asks readers to question. What is truth? What is real? What is the truth within Grace Marks? What is the truth within our own interpretive choices? How do we interrogate our pasts and presents as they interrogate us? Even beyond the in-betweens and liminalities of self-states, truths remain haunted. Thus, as noted above, when realities are not fully graspable, Atwood writes that it is up to us to “take our pick.” While we may not be able to decipher whether the man from her dream is her father or whether the actions within it do indeed allude to sexual violence, we can unpack more readily her relationship with her mother – or, at least, her mother’s death. Interestingly, although Grace is able to narrate the trauma of her mother’s death, what she describes in doing so is still a dissociative episode. Grace remarks, for instance, that upon learning of her mother’s passing, she did not cry. Instead, she experienced the death of her own conscious emotions. She expressed that in her numbed state, she “felt as if it was [her] and not [her] mother that had died” (AG, p. 120). Soon after, when her aunt’s teapot fell off of the table and onto the floor, Grace believed that it was her mother’s ghost. “I thought it was my mother’s spirit, trapped in the bottom of the ship because we could not open a window, and angry at me for [covering her body with] the second-best sheet” (AG, p. 122).

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In reading these lines, I am confronted by my own in-between, keenly aware that the truth of Grace’s stories is being questioned by her maker. Alias Grace, the title screams, intruding upon readers as they decipher what to believe and what to not. Even Grace herself warns to be careful in arriving at firm conclusions: “A slip of the knife,” she heeds on the construction of human souls and bodies, “and you create an idiot” (AG, p. 186). But then an “abstract, cognitive familiarity” lingers between the crevices and forefront of my mind. I know the death of conscious emotions. I also know that sheet. My body was not covered by it, but I was forced lie on top of it. The familiarity begs for something to be done. It begs for verbalization. For narration. For reckoning. A ghost from within solicits me to speak: What is your pick? What do you name as truth? it demands, as I consider Grace’s retellings. Because I’ll tell you my fucking pick. Is not Grace’s dissociation upon the ship enough evidence for the fact that trauma did occur – whether solely in this moment or also accumulated from her experiences in Ireland? Believe. Her. Stories. Jesus, Sarah. Calm down, I plead, with the part of myself that has disconnected from the scholarly role. Do not cry. Breathe.

On the topic of Jesus, and on the topic of affect-impacted breath, Jesus in John does not cry, either – at least, not when we might expect it.30 While John 1 made it seem as if Jesus cannot be nailed down, at least not fully (recall the Logos), such lines get blurred by the time the Romans fix his body upon the cross at Golgotha: “There they crucif[y] him” (19:19). As the scene unfolds, Jesus, like Grace, remains virtually silent. We might even do well to insert the following Atwoodian lines

John’s Jesus does not cry on the cross, but does cry elsewhere, if only in brief. One of the shortest passages within the New Testament bears witness to such affect: “Jesus wept,” we read in John 11:35. As Stephen Moore has shown, this is because Lazarus’ tomb reeked of death (ozei, 11:39). See Moore, Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans, p. 41.

30

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 343 here, originally used to describe Mary Whitney’s response to her abortion, iterated by/to Grace: “[Jesus’] face [is] as white as a sheet….[His clothing is] all damp, and clinging to [him] like a wet bandage….there [is] pain and bleeding, and it last[s] some hours, but that after this [he will] be alright” (AG, pp. 175–176).31 Will he be alright?

To be crucified by Rome meant to be beaten, scorched, and nailed to a wooden beam. Death occurred after hours of exhaustion, lack of blood circulation, organ failure, and eventually asphyxiation (i.e., a loss of breath).32 The canonical Gospels offer collective retellings and reframings of such violence. In the words of David Carr, they “refram[e] and counte[r] the traumatic event of the cross, mostly by presenting a powerful Jesus who anticipate[s] and accept[s] his crucifixion.”33 It is Mark’s Jesus in particular, however, who is often offered nuance. Although aware of his upcoming death, Jesus in Mark, adds Carr, is “no hero.”34 When on the cross, the Markan Jesus cries out in agony (Mark 15:34). He questions his relationship with his God. He emits such a torturous “death scream” that audiences are bound to “shudder.”35 Jesus in John, however, shows fewer overt signs of physical and psychic distress. He does not scream or shout or cry as he does in the 31 The first half of the quote is narrated by Grace upon seeing Mary Whitney after her abortion. The latter half is what the doctor told Mary to expect during and after the operation (and that Mary then reiterated to Grace after the operation). 32 For more on Roman crucifixion, see Harley, “Crucifixion in Roman Antiquity.” 33 Carr, Holy Resilience, p. 230. 34 Ibid., p. 160. 35 Moore, Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans, 42. The earliest version of Mark’s Gospel also does not include a resurrection narrative. The Gospel simply ends with an empty tomb and confused onlookers, likely highlighting the confusion and trauma of early Jesus followers in the wake of their messiah’s death. The confusion and trauma surrounding Mark’s narrative, however, need not negate John’s.

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Synoptics.36 He simply speaks (eipen): “I am thirsty,” he says, and takes a sip of wine. “It is finished,” he says, and then dies (19:28–30). John’s Gospel also lacks other apocalyptic elements we see within the Synoptic crucifixions; in addition to the death scream, John dismisses the darkness, the earthquake, and the ripping of the sanctuary veil (Mark 15:38; Matthew 27:51; Luke 23:45). Scholars have noted Jesus’ lack of outward affect here, alongside the text’s lack of haunting details. In the words of Frederick Dale Bruner, John’s passion narrative “is described with remarkable understatement and absence of pathos….A crucifixion cannot be described less dramatically. No gory details, no screams, nor any emotive prose at all: just (in English) an adverb, a subject pronoun, a verb, and an object pronoun. The absence of histrionics impresses.”37 In response to this, and in thinking more broadly regarding comparison and contrast (that is, not just with Mark, but in reading John alongside Alias Grace), I ask: is John a text with amnesia? Is John forgetting, like Grace, the details of a traumatic (and murderous) past? Although we are told Jesus is “filled with grace and truth” (1:14), he – the one who is filled – seems more or less empty. He is mocked, flogged, and nailed to a wooden beam, yet says practically nothing throughout the entire ordeal. Something, I tell myself, must be missing. Commentators have suggested that rather than “missing something,” John is merely offering another reframing of Jesus’ ministry and death – this time, sans trauma. As Raymond Brown writes on the matter, especially when comparing John with Mark, “The sovereign affirmation [of death in John] is far from the cry of the Marcan Jesus….In his death on the cross the Johannine Jesus is already being

Cf., Mark 15:34, 47; Matthew 27:45; Luke 23:46. While Jesus’ death cry in Luke is certainly different from Mark’s and Matthew’s – it is filled with less anguish; Luke, too, is often read as constructing a more composed Jesus upon the cross – he still cries out (phōnē megalē) in the end for deliverance (cf., Ps 31:6). For more, see Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 1994, vol. 2: pp. 1043– 80. 37 Bruner, The Gospel of John, 1094, p. 1099. 36

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 345 ‘lifted up’ in triumph and drawing all men [sic] to himself.”38 Craig Keener contends similarly, writing that Jesus’ final moments on earth are indeed a “triumph.”39 John’s text overall, in fact, is often viewed as the “knowing” Gospel. John’s Jesus, many assert, is in complete control, embodying the emotional stability similarly admired by Grace’s culture and counterparts. John’s “I am” statements add particular weight to this. With seemingly all-encompassing authority and selfreflection, the Johannine Jesus proclaims things like: “I am the light of the world” (8:12). And: “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25). And: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (14:6).40 The notion that Jesus is both self-aware and authoritative carries into interpretations of the crucifixion. His final words, as we have seen, are also of the “I am” variety: “I am thirsty” and “I am finished.” Jesus, in short, knows he is dying. And, according to traditional interpretations, he is both ready for it and psychically okay.41 Ready for it, another ghost affirms. You were ready for it, the ghost continues. You knew the place. The days. The times. But were you psychically okay? What you didn’t know was how you managed to stay there. To be so still. To barely breathe. To not say a word in the moment – that is, in the torture of it all.

Perhaps the commentators are right. Perhaps there isn’t anything missing from the Johannine narrative, but rather a misguided analysis of what is in the text. Studies on traumatic hauntings, as we have learned, tell us that a lack of scream does not necessarily mean a lack of traumatic affect. As Onno van der Hart, Ellert Nijenhuis, and Kathy Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times, 119. As David Carr adds: the Johannine narrative, alongside Matthew and Luke, takes readers “farther and farther away from confrontation with the trauma of crucifixion.” Carr, Holy Resilience, pp. 231–32. 39 Keener, The Gospel of John, vol. 2, p. 1147. 40 See also John 18:4–9; and Keener, The Gospel of John, vol. 2, pp. 1081–1082. 41 See also Carr, Holy Resilience, pp. 231–32; Kotrosits and Taussig, Re-Reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma, p. 16. 38

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Steele show in The Haunted Self, “some of our most powerful motivations are emotions, which must also be bound together with actions.”42 Such actions can come out in the form of pre-conscious emotions. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich narrates this experience well when they write of their own traumatic recall: “I’d had no feelings – no fear or sadness or even consciousness of pain – just the shaking and a profound sense of absence, like the shaking was happening to someone who wasn’t me.”43 We saw this in Alias Grace. When Grace came in contact with the black-coated doctor (see above), she shook, screamed, and disconnected from her conscious self; likewise, we saw it when she exhibited her own “absence of histrionics” at the gruesome death of her mother. A lack of outward action, however, does not imply a lack of action. Action can also turn inward. When one dissociates, the body experiences a disconnect – a ghostly in-between of here and there – that can also result in a “flat or numb” affect.44 Post trauma, it is difficult to “bind together aspects of our internal and external experiences,”45 and without that binding, traumatized persons “often have difficulty generating enough mental energy and efficiency to act[.]”46 When Grace’s mother died, she did not shake or scream or cry, but rather dissociated quietly, without outward visible affect. She, like Marzano-Lesnevich, became a ghost of herself, yet with an inward, perhaps even non-conscious affective turn. All of this is to say: John’s Jesus may not scream. But that does not mean he is alright. John’s resurrection narrative is not necessarily void of trauma, either. In John’s version, Jesus comes back from the dead – becomes a ghost indeed, a past self returning to the present47 – and in doing so demands that the violence of that past be known: “Look at my hands,” he says to Thomas. “Place your finger into my side. Do not doubt that I have died and am here, but instead believe” (20:27–28; see also Luke 42 Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele, The

Haunted Self, p. 145. Fact of a Body, p. 246. 44 Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, and Steele, The Haunted Self, p. 145. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Or, in a sense, he becomes a new form of ghost, in that the Logos is already a spectral agent in its body-not-body status. 43 Marzano-Lesnevich, The

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 347 24:39–40). Unlike in the Synoptics, Jesus’ wounds – potentially still open, bloody, and infected48 – are at the center of the story, crying out for reckoning. In other words, if we actually pay attention to what is on the page, it is the trauma of Jesus’ death that refuses to remain buried.49 Jesus’ body has kept the score. The scene is also haunting. Even if not consciously, John has constructed a spectral Jesus who demands notice. In fact, not only does the ghostly Jesus beg for trauma recognition through the physical reminder of his traumatic death, but he also, in doing so, speaks. The unnarratable upon the cross has transformed into narrative from beyond the grave: “Look,” he urges. “Look at what has been done to me.” Wounds can live beyond forgetting50 – beyond the lack of memory, including in writing, if John has indeed forgotten the anguish in his description of the crucifixion – and the resurrected Jesus shows this by carrying with him an externalized and verbalized knowing. We might even say that John’s resurrection narrative is equally an exorcism narrative – one in which the ghost of Jesus’ traumatized self comes forward and actually speaks. Perhaps, if anything, this is the triumph of John’s Gospel. This, à la Derrida, is the point at which Jesus finally learns to live. Living beyond the grave takes us back to Alias Grace, as Grace’s mother is not bound by death either – not even by Grace’s account. As Rambo has shown, the text does not say whether Jesus’ wounds are healed or still open. See Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds, p. 18. 49 While Jesus’ wounds take center-stage, the focus for many readers, especially within the Christian tradition, has been on Thomas, who at first does not believe in Jesus as the resurrected Christ. After encountering Jesus’ wounds, Thomas exclaims that he believes (20:28). As Rambo notes, for Christian thinkers, the story goes: “Triumph. Truth. Certainty. Conclusion. It is as perfect ending to a case of mistaken identity. With Thomas’ words, the case is closed.” In Christian tradition, this episode “convey[s] the truth of the resurrection….an overcoming of doubt” and is in turn both the central theme of Jesus’ encounter with Thomas (i.e., not Jesus’ wounds) and a triumph. See Rambo, p. 18. 50 For a particularly affective example of this, see Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body, p. 246. Here, they write, “But: the scarring. Is the scarring evidence of what happened after the pain, after the black? What happened after my memory ends? What fact does my body hold? I don’t know. I will never know.” 48

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The ghost of Grace’s mother continues to haunt the living, especially Grace, as she creeps from the bowels of the vessel and into Grace’s own person. Years later, after being pardoned for her crimes, Grace narrates that the room and bed she was lying in was so large it was almost frightening…I pulled the sheet up over my head to make it darker; then I felt as if my face was dissolving and turning into someone else’s face, and I recalled my poor mother in her shroud, as they were sliding her into the sea, and how I thought that she had already changed inside the sheet, and was a different woman, and now the same thing was happening to me. Of course I wasn’t dying, but was in a way similar. (AG, pp. 442–443)

Grace’s experience with Mary Whitney’s death is also echoed in this. After Mary dies from the botched abortion, Grace is asked to get a clean sheet for the bed upon which Mary bled to death. Grace offers to dress Mary in her own nightgown, and then covers a quilt over Mary’s face (it was “pulled up over her” and Mary’s “eyes [were] closed” in darkness; AG, p. 178). While the reason for Grace offering her own attire is perhaps more obvious – Mary’s nightdress is in the wash; Grace also may be attempting to make amends for the “secondbest” covering for her mother – the move from sheet to quilt is more ambiguous. It is certainly possible that the quilt was already there, and that it was custom within the home for beds (and the bodies that lay in them) to be covered with quilts. But I also suggest that the quilt, a patchwork of color and blurred lines quite different from the stark finality of a sheet, demonstrates the in-between states of Grace’s mind. Grace, in fact, even names this relationship, sharing that some of her life story “is all jumbled in my mind, but I could pick out this or that for [Simon], some bits of whole cloth you might say, as when you go through the rag bag looking for something that will do, to supply a touch of colour” (AG, p. 353). A major jumble for Grace, of course, has to do with the night Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear were murdered. While Grace claims to remember many details of her past, she insists she cannot remember what happened on this night in particular. But as we also learn, there are periods of time following Mary’s death that Grace cannot recall either. What she does remember is having heard the

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 349 (un)dead Mary whisper, “Let me in” (AG, p. 178). Grace assumes that what Mary really said was “Let me out” (recall her mother’s death), and that she (Grace) responded by opening the window (AG, p. 179). Eventually, Simon decides to have Grace hypnotized, and in Grace’s state of hypnosis, we hear an alter51 reveal itself as a resurrected ghost living within Grace’s self: “I [Mary Whitney] only borrowed her clothing for a time…Her earthly shell. Her fleshly garment” (AG, pp. 402–403). The alter, it seems, was indeed “let in.” And the alter, we are told, is the one who killed Nancy and Thomas. In the end, Grace Marks is pardoned. Some scholars have rejected Grace’s hypnotic state as “real” – noting, for instance, that Grace is playing along with the hypnotist, and that Atwood, in constructing such a scene, plays with her readers too. Anne Geddes Bailey has gone as far as to say that Grace Marks and Mary Whitney are actually the same person from beginning to end: “Grace, as Mary, did not simply witness the effects of the abortion but actually had the abortion herself and during her recovery afterward reinvented herself as Grace.”52 Mary, she contends, is the one who actually lived “Grace’s” life, who then killed Thomas and Nancy (knowingly), and who then embodied an alias that would, for all intents and purposes, bring her some “grace.”53 Others, however, have asserted that we should take Atwood’s storied construction at face value. In Burkhard Niederhoff’s view, “[I]t is highly unlikely that Grace is putting on a performance. Her behaviour during the scene is not at all in her interest. The personality talking from her mouth insults the committee lobbying for Grace to be pardoned, and it more or less admits to taking part in the strangling of Nancy.”54 Niederhoff then asks: “Would a planned performance not be a little less self-damaging?”55 And why have we, in following Grace’s own behind-the51 I use “alter” as a noun here in reference to an “alternate” self. 52 Anne Geddes Bailey, “‘Sew and Nip, and Patch Together a Genius’: Quilting a Virginal Identity in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” p. 167. 53 Ibid., p. 166. 54 Burkhard Niederhoff, “The Return of the Dead in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Alias Grace,” pp. 76–77. 55 Ibid., 77.

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scenes narrations, not heard her admit, even to herself, anything of the sort? At the end of the day, of course, we cannot know. As Niederhoff continues, Alias Grace “is a work of historiographical metafiction.”56 It “emphasizes the unknowability of history,”57 and, as Margaret Rogerson adds, “challenges readers to come to conclusions but also problematizes whatever they invent.”58 Even Mary Whitney during hypnosis makes this issue known. “I am not lying!…I am beyond lying! I no longer need to lie!” (AG, p. 402) Anne Geddes Bailey writes on these lines: “[Mary] is quite right. She can be truthful or deceitful and we will not be able to know the difference.”59 Alongside Niederhoff, though, we could make sense of Grace’s traumatic past as that which has severed connectivity between selfstates and that the ghost of Mary Whitney, impacted by the ghost of Grace’s mother (and arguably those of Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear, the two Grace allegedly murdered), is what fills the void. In other words, perhaps Grace has indeed lost sight of reality, and her hypnotic state sheds light on the ghosts of her past – ones that take residency within her, begging to be confronted, named, and narrated without her even realizing it. Like John, perhaps the triumph here is in the narration – the exorcism of an internalized ghostly selfstate that then narrates outwardly its own haunting legacy. But then again, perhaps this is just “[my] pick.” Regardless of how we interpret the scene, what remains evident is that, even if Grace is aware of murder specifics, including her (possible) role in them, ghosts still beg for reckoning. The truth of the murder still seeks narration. The truth of Grace’s (or is it Mary’s?) past and how it impacts her present still yearns for further description. The 56 Niederhoff, “Ghosts, Knowledge and Truth in Atwood,” p. 127. 57 Ibid. 58 Rogerson, “Should We Believe Her? Margaret Atwood and Uncertainty: A Response to Burkard Niederhoff,” p. 90. Rogerson is responding to Niederhoff, “The Return of the Dead in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Alias Grace.” Niederhoff then responds to Rogerson in Burkhard Niederhoff, “Ghosts, Knowledge and Truth in Atwood.” 59 Bailey, “‘Sew and Nip, and Patch Together a Genius’: Quilting a Virginal Identity in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” p. 169.

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 351 truth of Grace’s life – that she endures poverty, that she endures the abuse of her father, that she endures the death of her mother, that she endures the death of her friend, that she endures the oppression from a patriarchal State, including the eyes of men watching her during hypnosis (i.e., the very ones “doing something” about her ghostly selfstates) – still haunts. 60 I thus agree with Laurie Vickroy when she writes that Alias Grace is a text that “counteracts simplistic views of human behavior” and demonstrates how pasts, interpretations of them, and the “emotional complexities” surrounding them “complicate.”61 Even as Grace seeks control – and even if she attains some control through the duping of those who have listened to her story – she does not maintain control in all ways. Grace’s story is not univocal triumph. Posttraumatic negotiations are still at play. Ghosts still haunt. The complexity of truth, control, and subjectivity brings us back to the beginning of John’s Gospel. The text sets us up to follow the ghostly in-betweens – to recognize the heres, theres, internals, externals, and multivocal haunting subjectivities through the invocation of the incorporeal corporeal Logos. In other words, while commentators have traditionally called John’s Gospel a univocal triumph – an allcontrolled, all-knowing, and all-triumphant narrative – I suggest we not lose sight of its complexity. As we have seen, not even the Logos is entirely otherworldly. Just as Jesus is God’s incorporeal Word, he is also God’s corporeal body – God’s alter indeed – and it is God’s bodyalter that we follow for most of the Gospel narrative. As Maia Kotrosits explains, John places “flesh – soft, solid skin and muscle – at the center of [its] transcendent imaginatio[n].”62 Or, as Mary Whitney would say, God “borrowed [his] clothing for a time…[his] earthly shell. [His] fleshly garment” (AG, pp. 402–403). But whereas Mary Whitney (allegedly) comes to kill, God’s alter comes to be killed. And what does God’s alter do? First, he goes numb, hiding within the 60 And, Vickroy adds, “raises the additional question of whether the precepts

of human learning, trauma, and mental illness preclude or at least complicate rigid notions of moral responsibility – that is, to what degree is Grace responsible?” Vickroy, Reading Trauma Narratives, p. 63. 61 Ibid., p. 37. 62 Kotrosits says the same for the Letter to the Hebrews. See Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging, p. 169.

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depths of a traumatized self. And then? Then he begs for us to see. To hear. To reckon. A ghost from within lets out its own death-like scream: Why, it yearns, does nobody seem to be doing anything?

CONCLUSION Atwood’s Alias Grace tackles a real-life murder case rife with inconsistencies and unknowabilities. Within the novel, Atwood spotlights hauntology and trauma’s shared urge to “do something” in the face of such inconsistencies and unknowabilities, particularly through the fictionalized Grace’s unsettling – or, more rightly, unsettled – posttraumatic hauntings. While the specifics concerning Grace’s truth might remain a mystery, readers are still aware of the demands Grace’s past makes on her present. Grace may be lying about her amnesia surrounding the death of Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear, but her lies do not discount her “terror and psychic breakdown[s],” including the multiple in-betweens of her dissociated mind.63 To a certain extent, this is the book’s entire point. Alias Grace seeks to discount the institutional systems that suppress the ghosts, dissociations, and posttraumatic hauntings of one’s self and world in favor of tidier, more triumphal solutions. 64 Readers are encouraged to leave Alias Grace knowing that multiplicity can be true, and that the in-betweens of one’s self and world can still be validated even when questioned. Alias Grace, in short, pushes against the grain of univocality and opens doors for ghosts – including those of one’s own past – to be seen, heard, and negotiated within one’s present. It also, in so doing, gives readers permission to have some interpretive grace for them along the way. I’m here, a ghost from within reminds me. I will always be here.

The Gospel of John, too, takes on the real-life death of the historical Jesus, despite similar unknowings and inconsistencies within the record. John’s Jesus, as we have seen, is the Logos; he floats in and out of time and space in an always already haunted realm. However, because 63 Vickroy, Reading

Trauma Narratives, p. 64.

64 See also Ibid., p. 63.

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 353 Jesus as Logos also presents himself as a self-aware God-alter who must die for the sake of his followers, interpreters have not left enough room for multivocality. John’s Gospel, according to many, leaves behind Jesus’ traumatic past in favor of a more controlled, knowing, and all-triumphant protagonist. My argument, however, is that we should consider a more expansive realm of possibilities. John’s Gospel, I contend, sets readers up to notice the ghostly ambiguities lingering throughout the narrative, including those that attach onto Jesus’ inward and outward traumatic dissociations. I also contend that reading John alongside Alias Grace – indeed, alongside our own trauma hauntings – highlights the in-betweens of John’s work, the work of ghosts, and the multiplicity of trauma hauntings. John’s text, I urge, is haunted. It also haunts. Perhaps it is time we discount the machinery of common interpretive practices and actually listen to – indeed, have some grace for – the ghosts speaking from within it, and from within us. There are ghosts haunting this piece. There are unruly projections. But nevertheless, to Atwood, I say: This is my pick. Let us look at Jesus’ hands. Let us look at our own hands. And let us not turn away.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Bailey, Anne Geddes. “‘Sew and Nip, and Patch Together a Genius’: Quilting a Virginal Identity in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” In Virginity Revisited: Configurations of the Unpossessed Body, edited by Judith Fletcher, 156–75. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Blanco, María del Pilar, Esther Peeren, María del Pilar Blanco, and Esther Peeren, eds. “Introduction.” In Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, ix–xxiv. New York: Continuum, 2010. Brown, Raymond E. The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.

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―. The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels. Vol. 1. New York: Doubleday, 1994. ―. The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave : A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels. Vol. 2. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Bruner, Frederick Dale. The Gospel of John: A Commentary. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2012. Carr, David M. Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Carr, David M., and Colleen M. Conway. An Introduction to the Bible: Sacred Texts and Imperial Contexts. 2010: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Translated by Samuel Weber. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. ―. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Dowling, Amber. “Margaret Atwood on ‘Alias Grace’: ‘If I Had Known the Truth, I Wouldn’t Have Written a Book.’” IndieWire (blog), September 15, 2017. https://www.indiewire.com/ 2017/09/alias-grace-netflix-margaret-atwood-tiff-1201876878/. Goldman, Marlene. DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hamilton, Robert. “The Spectral Narrative : Hauntology and the Meaning of the Sacred in Postmodern American Literature.” Thesis, 2013. https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/handle/2104/8832. Harley, Felicity. “Crucifixion in Roman Antiquity: The State of the Field.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 27, no. 2 (June 26, 2019): 303–23.

GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS AND TRAUMATIC DISSOCIATIONS 355 Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Keener, Craig S. The Gospel of John: A Commentary. Vol. 2. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012. Kotrosits, Maia. Rethinking Early Christian Identity: Affect, Violence, and Belonging. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Kotrosits, Maia, and Hal Taussig. Re-Reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–72. https://doi.org/10.1086/659353. Marzano-Lesnevich, Alexandria. The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir. New York: Flatiron Books, 2017. Moore, Stephen D. Gospel Jesuses and Other Nonhumans: Biblical Criticism Post-Poststructuralism. Semeia Studies 89. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017. Niederhoff, Burkhard. “Ghosts, Knowledge and Truth in Atwood: AA Reader’s Guide to Six Responses.” Connotations, January 1, 2009, 126–35. ―. “The Return of the Dead in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Alias Grace.” Connotations : A Journal for Critical Debate 16, no. 1–3 (2006): 60–91. Rambo, Shelly. “Haunted (by the) Gospel: Theology, Trauma, and Literary Theory in the Twenty-First Century.” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 936–41. ―. Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017. Reinhartz, Adele. “Incarnation and Covenant: The Fourth Gospel through the Lens of Trauma Theory.” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 69, no. 1 (2015): 35–48. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0020964314552628.

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Rogerson, Margaret. “Should We Believe Her? Margaret Atwood and Uncertainty: A Response to Burkard Niederhoff” 19, no. 1–3 (2009): 79–91. Ruprecht, Jr., Louis A. This Tragic Gospel: How John Corrupted the Heart of Christianity. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Shaw, Katy. Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Stern, Jessica. Denial: A Memoir of Terror. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. Van der Hart, Onno, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis, and Kathy Steele. The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Vickroy, Laurie. Reading Trauma Narratives: The Contemporary Novel and the Psychology of Oppression. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.

14. MIRRORS OF GRACE: UNDOING PAUL IN ATWOOD’S ALIAS GRACE JAY TWOMEY Grace Marks, the title character of Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel Alias Grace, is ‘the other side of a psyche,’ an ‘enchantment of the double.’1 Her mysteriousness is a central feature of the novel. Is she a brutal double-murder? A naïve victim of circumstance and conflicting desires? An innocent ecstatic with the spirit of a vengeful other? Is she ‘a sham,’ antic by design, ‘an accomplished actress and a most practiced liar?’ (AG, p. 71). Inasmuch as she is any or all or none of these, she is a mirror. And she sees herself strangely in mirrors, too. Just before the murders of the gentleman Thomas Kinnear and his servantlover Nancy Montgomery, for which she is serving her sentence at the penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, Grace catches her reflection: ‘Everything was the same but not the same … my own face in the mirror over the kitchen sink was not like my face at all. It looked rounder and whiter, with two great startled staring eyes’ (AG, p. 315). Those eyes, or their image, seeing and seen, are said to haunt Grace (AG, p. 347). They haunt Dr. Simon Jordan, the psychiatrist whose interviews with Grace constitute a significant portion of the novel, as well. Simon had been hired by a committee of supportive citizens to ascertain whether or not Grace might be innocent (legally, if not actually) of the murders. When he meets Grace for the first time, he too marvels at her eyes, ‘enormous in the pale face, and dilated with fear, or with mute pleading’ (AG, p. 59). She’s illuminated but obscurely by her cell’s Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 6–7, on the invisible painting-in-progress and the mirror in ‘Las Meninas.’

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high window at morning. Stepping forward, however, ‘out of the light,’ she is ‘no longer there,’ having become ‘a different woman’ (AG, p. 59). Her ‘unusually large eyes’ are different as well, not fearful but ‘frankly assessing him,’ placing him ‘under scrutiny’ (AG, p. 60). Simon never discerns Grace’s truth. Like Simon Peter, he writes to a friend, ‘I have cast my nets into deep waters; though unlike him, I may have drawn up a mermaid’ (AG, p. 423). In the turbulent waters of his nightmares, however, a tentacled sea creature (his father, Simon believes) forms from the scale-like surfaces of reflective objects – a snuffbox, a silver tray, a mirror (AG, p. 140). Water can also mirror, of course, depths masquerading as surface. When Grace flees the crime scene with her co-conspirator (or manipulative abuser) James McDermott, she has a sudden vision of emptiness: ‘And then I reflected that perhaps it was the outer darkness … . And as soon as I had this thought, the sky closed over again, like water after you have thrown a stone’ (AG, p. 335). She had buried her mother at sea when she and her family made the crossing from Ireland several years prior, and she thinks at times of her mother’s soul, locked in the hold of that ship, ‘sailing back and forth across the hideous dark ocean’ (AG, p. 122). Grace believed that the souls of those who die within rooms must escape by open window or forever haunt the scene of their passing.2 Her mother died, shut in that ship’s hold. And the spirit of her friend Mary Whitney, who died of a botched abortion, and who may eventually speak through Grace with ‘watery’ (AG, p. 399) voice, was forever trapped this side of eternity as well because the window in their shared room was closed. Grace dreams of Mary’s soul, a firefly glowing ‘cold with a greenish fire,’ seeking egress (AG, pp. 312–313). Its light flashing in the closed pane, perhaps, like the brighter of two troubled eyes. Grace weeps because ‘she cannot see’ Mary’s soul as it disappears. If, as the novel allows, Mary’s vengeful spirit entered Grace at that moment, it effected a split personality, a ‘dédoublement’ (AG, p. 464) of Grace that explains her inability to recall the killings. As he leaves Kingston, Simon dreams that he sees Grace, who is very much alive, back in the penitentiary, but also there, walking on 2 Other Atwood characters hold to a similar superstition. Lady

Oracle’s Joan Foster, for example, after being visited by the ghost of her mother, ‘check[ed her flat] for open windows, but there weren’t any. How had she gotten in?’ (LO, p. 173).

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water outside the window of his train compartment. The dream fades, but he leans forward to kiss her before she too disappears, and ‘presses his mouth to the glass’ (AG, p. 413). Does he see his own face as he kisses hers? Simon flees a compromising sexual affair with his landlady, Mrs. Rachel Humphry. But by the novel’s end we know he is also fleeing Grace, her irreducible if tantalizing complexities eluding him, dashing his professional hopes. Still, some nights her face ‘floats before me in the darkness, like some lovely and enigmatic mirage,’ as he tells a friend in a letter (AG, p. 425). And who knows, her face may appear to him even after his wound in the American Civil War deprives him of most other memories. Debilitated, he can still recall Grace (AG, p. 431). Mirrors. Reflective surfaces. Eyes seeing eyes. Faces floating before faces. Even the name of the chairman of the Committee to Pardon Grace Marks, Reverend Verringer, is reflective. Verre. Glass. Which might seem but a fanciful over-reading (enough with mirrors already!) were it not for the fact that Verringer cites one of the novel’s most important biblical intertexts, 1 Cor 13:12, ‘Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’ (KJV),3 as he considers the impossibility of understanding Grace in herself, or indeed any human soul. Given that Atwood’s novel concerns a mystery and a scientific attempt to resolve it, scholars have tended to emphasize both questions of knowing within the narrative and the narrative’s own epistemological aesthetics.4 Reverend Verringer thus announces a key theme, at least partially. In context, Paul is addressing the relative value of spiritual gifts in the community, but suggesting, here, the equalizing effect of his eschatological temporality: ‘For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we AG, p. 433. Later, Verringer touches upon the same theme in somewhat similar language. Wondering how to understand the possibility that Mary had just spoken through Grace, and what Grace’s ‘possession’ says about the soul and moral responsibility, Verringer defers to God, who ‘must have his reasons, obscure though they appear to mortal eyes’ (AG, pp. 405, 407). 4 See for example Peters, “Feminist Narratology,” O’Neill, “Dying in a State of Grace,” Michael, “Rethinking History.” 3

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will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.’ (1 Cor 13:9–13, NRSV). The parallelism makes this text all the more relevant for the novel since Grace was sixteen at the time of the murders, a child not fully responsible for her actions – at least according to her defenders (AG, p. 461). Moreover, Grace’s autobiographical reflections on her difficult childhood factor into Simon’s work on the development and operations of her psyche. ‘Let us begin at the beginning’ he urges her (AG, p. 101), and she obliges by recalling her parents’ own story, and the family’s general circumstances early on. She is nearly forty-six by the novel’s close, but hers is almost always a retrospective discursivity even if, in her narrative self-reconstruction, she is never actually childish. Verringer cites Paul in a letter petitioning Grace’s release, and closes with an allusion to the famous final verse of the passage from 1 Corinthians 13: ‘will you,’ he asks a medical official whose obstinacy stands between Grace and her freedom, ‘can you in the name of charity – still persist in refusing … [to support] her release’ (AG, p. 434). We cannot know Grace’s culpability, but we are obliged to prize charity over impossible knowledge, however vital that knowledge may appear. Set her free. But Verringer’s is not the only reference to this Pauline text. An epigraph from Dr. Joseph Workman, who practiced in the asylum in Toronto where Grace was housed before her transfer to the penitentiary, strikes a tone similar to Verringer’s. ‘It is of the greatest regret that we do not have the knowledge … [to] cure these unfortunate afflicted… . When a child, I have played games with a blindfold obscuring my vision. Now I am like that child. Blindfolded, groping my way … . Someday, someone will remove that blindfold’ (AG, p. 45, my italics).5 Darkness, immature or imperfect knowledge, and trust in a future illumination. In each, Paul’s obscure mirroring metaphor is subordinated to a desire for transparency. Not seeing in, that is, but seeing through. Only Grace takes the mirror seriously as mirror. And despite the fact that the section of the novel in which her own use of 1 Cor 13:12 appears is called ‘Solomon’s Temple,’ and so hints at knowledge, what matters to her is seeing not as knowing, but finding. ‘I would

Atwood draws from an actual letter by the historical Workman but leaves some room for her own creativity: “Most of the words in Dr. Workman’s letter are his own” AG, p. 463, my italics).

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like to be found,’ she says (AG, p. 379). Named, interestingly enough, by her mother and an Aunt Pauline, Grace wonders about her name. Perhaps the women had been thinking of the hymn, ‘Amazing Grace.’ She is, after all, now in wretched circumstances, and hopes for her salvation in the form of a release from prison. ‘I once was lost, but now I’m found, / Was blind but now I see’ (AG, p. 379). Just as she wants to be found, following the logic of the hymn’s parallelism, she ‘would like to see. Or to be seen. I wonder if, in the eye of God, it amounts to the same thing. As it says in the Bible, For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.’ She continues, extrapolating from Paul, that ‘If it is face to face, there must be two looking’ (AG, p. 379).6 What does one see reflected back at one in the mirror of God’s single and presumably convex eye? Oneself, or an Other? One, or two? Same, or different? And does God’s eye see as the faces face each other? Or does vision belong entirely to the eyes in the faces looking? Scholars generally agree that knowing and seeing in the passage from 1 Cor 13 ‘have God or the divine as their implicit object.’7 As Harm Hollander notes, Paul’s mirror imagery both evokes passages from the Hebrew scriptures (e.g., Num 12:8; Deut 34:10) and follows Hellenistic usage in imagining that God can be known, but indirectly, enigmatically, in the natural world. Now we can only ‘see’ God by means of his (imperfect) reflection in creation, but then, in the eschaton, we will, like Moses, know God directly, as God has always known us.8 Grace, Charis, a character in The Robber Bride, chooses her own new name when she stumbles upon 1 Cor 13:13 by bibliomancy (RB, p. 261). In that verse, charity is the King James rendering for ἀγάπη. But Pauline grace, of course, is χάρις. At another moment, when this avatar of grace randomly selects 1 Cor 13:12 as an answer to her question ‘will this be a good day,’ she thinks that ‘as a daily forecast [the verse is] not one whole lot of help’ (RB, pp.44–45). 7 Hollander, ‘Seeing God,’ p. 397. See also, for example, Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, p. 228; Orr and Walther, 1 Corinthians, p. 292; Gooch, Partial Knowledge, p. 148; and Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, p. 988. 8 See also David Litwa, ‘Transformation,’ p. 293, who traces Paul’s similar use of mirroring in 2 Corinthians 3:18 to exegetical reflections on transformative mirror vision, particularly in Philo who ‘shows us that the Sinai episode [e.g., Ex 33–34] was already exegetically linked with the vision of God through a 6

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who ‘knew [her] Bible backwards and forwards’ (AG, p. 222), likely understood how 1 Cor 13:12 is more typically read. 9 And her exegetical musing on ‘face to face’ works within that framework: the two looking can obviously include God. Yet Grace doesn’t seem to imagine God’s participation in this seeing as necessary (much less always-already implied). Instead she frames the possibility of seeing and being seen in the conditional, using an if-then clause to deduce the presence of a hoped-for other (‘there must be two looking,’ my emphasis) who might see her. She ‘would like … to be seen,’ she says, as though she, unlike her Pauline text, is not convinced that anyone has fully seen her yet. What’s more, Grace can readily imagine what it means to be seen by God-like eyes. Immediately after her citation of 1 Cor 13:12, she remarks upon the vulnerability she and other female prisoners feel on ‘Bath Day’ when ‘there’s always a Matron watching’ (AG, p. 280). And obviously she’s being seen by Simon Jordan. His examination calls to mind aspects of what Foucault called pastoral power, perhaps especially in his self-conscious desire to ‘retain his position of allknowing authority in her eyes’ (AG, p. 289), even if he thereby deludes himself, as Grace can easily expose his ignorance and conceal her own awareness of his all-too-obvious analytical devices.10 Should mirror in Num. 12.8.’ More germane for our purposes is Litwa’s literature review, which highlights an interest among recent interpreters of 2 Cor 3 in traditions about mirrors and magical rituals. Litwa, ‘Transformation,’ pp/ 286–288. Perhaps even Grace’s veiling under hypnosis, then, (AG, pp. 397– 403), carries some Pauline echoes. 9 Later in the novel Grace knows that hers ‘is not the approved reading’ of another biblical passage (AG, p. 459). 10 In an early scene, for instance, Simon presents Grace with an apple, hoping to jar her into remembering forbidden knowledge, her (possibly) repressed memories of the murder. But she toys with him, first saying that the apple reminds her of a sampler. Because he doesn’t know what that is she thinks ‘now it is his turn to know nothing.’ She also pretends not to understand the gist of his apple symbolism. ‘I will not oblige’ by following his logic, she tells us. ‘I go back to my stupid look’ (AG, p. 40). Pastoral power, which Foucault discusses as a key early moment in the development of modern biopolitics,

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Grace, then, desire more such surveillance?11 Theologically she seems to accept God’s omnipresence and omniscience, at least in moments of resentment. Attending church once with Nancy Montgomery, and recognizing the way her friend (at the time) was spurned by the congregants, Grace wonders if they feel they can hide their own hypocrisies from the God who looks ‘into the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts … [for] God is everywhere, and cannot be caged in, as men can’ (AG, p. 254). A bit further on, Grace wants to believe that ‘only a benevolent God, who had our good at heart, would have created so much [natural] beauty’ in the world, even if he still tested the faithful (AG, p. 261). But interestingly, in both contexts, Grace also complains that ‘thoughts about God often make me drowsy’ (AG, p. 261; see also p. 254). Perhaps God bores her? Or is somehow irrelevant? Listening to the minister preaching on divine grace, Grace thought that: if you could not get Divine Grace by praying for it, or any other way, or ever know you had it or not, you might as well forget about the whole matter, and go about your own business, because whether you would be damned or saved was no concern of yours. There is no use crying over spilt milk if you don’t know whether the milk is spilt or not, and if God alone knew, then God alone could tidy up if necessary. (AG, p. 254)

Grace, the theological concept, will become more complicated later in the novel, as we will see. But here I want to dwell on the possibility that Grace Marks’ understanding of 1 Cor 13:12 is rather non-standard, having little to do with knowing God perfectly in a future life.

entails a variety of factors, including total subordination to a spiritual mentor. Most relevant for my purposes, this form of power involves constant analysis and confession which have as their goal ‘the production of hidden truths’ and which become important for medicine. Indeed, ‘[w]e can say that medicine has been one of the great powers that have been heirs to the pastorate. And to that extent it too [like religious authority] has given rise to a whole series of revolts of conduct.’ Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 183, 199. 11 For a reading of 1 Cor 13:12 that evokes fantasies of divine and total selfknowledge as displaced forms of surveillance, see Runions “Theopolitics.”

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Atwood writes in her afterward that the historical Grace ‘remains an enigma’ (AG, p. 463). She means, of course, that the available documents shed little light on Grace’s actual guilt or innocence in the murders, can’t confirm whether or not she was James McDermott’s lover, and do not grant any certainty about her psychological condition. We cannot know Grace’s ‘true character’ (AG, p. 463). Given the significance of mirroring in the novel, however, and the relevance of 1 Cor 13:12 to Grace’s identity, Atwood’s statement about the historical record’s fundamental ignorance seems also curiously Pauline. The word ‘darkly’ in the King James Version is a rendering of ‘ἐν αἰνίγματι’ [or in Jerome’s Vulgate: [‘in enigmate’]. One sees in a mirror – δι’ ἐσόπτρου/per speculum – enigmatically, or even by means of a riddle. Grace is that enigma, the self-reflection of a riddling darkness. Elsewhere, Atwood has used the analogy of a mirror to describe ‘the construction of alternate worlds’ (ND, p. 56.) Her characters, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, do not reject the looking-glass image of themselves, their ‘art’ identities, in favor of ‘life.’ Rather, they go through the looking glass as Alice does, where ‘‘the real’ Alice merges with the other Alice – the imagined Alice, the dream Alice, the Alice who exists nowhere… [until] Alice is neither here nor there, neither art nor life, neither the one thing nor the other, though at the same time she is all of these at once’ (ND, p. 56–57). Atwood’s real focus in the essay in which she mentions Alice and mirrors, ‘Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double; Why there are always two,’ is the writer, not her characters. Atwood claims that ‘all writers are double’ (ND, p. 36) and that she in particular has an ‘evil twin or slippery double’ (ND, p. 35). There are differences (in time, in moral temperament) between the person who lives and the author who writes, even if both share the same name, address, and even body. Nevertheless, and especially since Grace is to some extent the author of her own narrative, 12 I would argue that Alice’s doubling is relevant to the discussion of 1 Cor 13:12 in Alias Grace. 12 Another of Atwood’s characters, Joan Foster in Lady Oracle, is a writer who encounters her writerly possibilities in part thanks to a mirror in which she senses another looking back at her in the reflection, as though standing

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Earlier I drew occasionally upon suggestive language from Foucault’s reading of ‘Las Meninas,’ and particularly the symbolic importance of Velasquez’s mirror. 13 In Atwood’s catoptric model of fictional invention, Alice’s reflection is ‘the anti-Alice,’ making her, like Grace, ‘the other side of a psyche.’14 But perhaps a more incisive analytical approach to Grace’s oblique Paulinism, and a better way of appropriating Atwood’s allusions to Through The Looking Glass in the last paragraph, can be found in Brian Massumi’s entertaining appropriation of an anecdote from Ronald Reagan’s 1965 campaign autobiography, Where’s The Rest of Me? Reagan, who recognized his weaknesses as an actor, nevertheless finds a useful analogy for his future life, and his dreams of achieving a kind of heroic transcendence in his political roles, in a single, brief performance. Normally as an actor, no matter how much he tried to imagine himself into the parts he played, he remained ‘just plain old everyday’ Ronald Reagan.15 But he was once somehow able to achieve believability by putting himself ‘in the body of another fellow’ for a single scene. Watching the rushes later, he wrote, ‘I could barely believe the colored shadow on the screen was myself.’16 Massumi redescribes Reagan’s various conscious and unconscious methods of preparation as dimensions of affect’s embodiments, and seizes especially on Reagan’s own suggestive contrast between seeing oneself in a mirror, and seeing oneself as others see one. ‘Mirrorvision,’ in Massumi, ‘is by definition partial’ and mostly excludes the behind her in the room. She becomes sure that the mirror will help her ‘find the thing, the truth or word or person that was mine’ (LO, p. 221). 13 My inspiration for this use of Foucault comes from Gregory Minissale’s citation of 1 Cor 13:12 in a reading of Foucault’s ‘Las Meninas.’ Minissale, noting Foucault’s recognition of the centrality of a child’s eyes to the painting – the eyes of Princess Margarita Maria, the painting’s central figure – suggests that the girl represents Paul’s childishness. ‘She may be looking at her parents through a child’s eye view (“through a glass darkly”) while we see, literally, through the glass darkly at the back of the room: both views are imperfect.’ Minissale, Framing Consciousness, p. 215. 14 Foucault, Order, p. 6. 15 Quoted in Massumi, Parables, p. 47. 16 Quoted in Massumi, Parables, p. 53.

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body’s movements, the full dimensionality of our experience in space. Looking in a mirror, a ‘single axis of vision stretches you between two surfaces recapitulating the same. On that axis, you resemble yourself perfectly. Stilted, static, a perfect picture. Change is excluded… rendered invisible.’17 Mirror-vision can also be understood socially, in terms of individuals’ relatively static mutual recognition of one another’s roles within ‘the same narrative’ – of family, say, or a job.18 Reagan really wants to see himself with what Massumi calls ‘movement-vision,’ not just the seeing of oneself the way others see one, but more: an understanding of how ‘[t]he objectness of the object [i.e., the body in motion] is attenuated as the subject, seeing itself as others see it, comes to occupy the object’s place as well as its own.’19 Movement-vision is a ‘space that opens an outside perspective on the self-other, subject-object axis.’20 Outside, but within, or more properly as the seeing self. In Parables of the Virtual, Massumi wants to undermine the critical tendency to see embodied identities somewhat statically in terms of ideological categories, social location. Focusing instead on notions such as ‘viscerality’ and ‘intensity,’ Massumi hopes to ‘rethink [or better: prioritize] body, subjectivity, and social change in terms of movement, affect, force, and violence – before

17 Massumi, Parables, p. 48. For a similar idea, albeit contextualized quite dif-

ferently, in Atwood, consider this passage from The Blind Assassin: ‘You can never see yourself [in a mirror] the way you are to someone else – to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don’t know – because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint – Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? [that a man says he finds appealing] can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?’’ (BA, p. 318). 18 Massumi, Parables, p. 49. 19 Massumi, Parables, p. 50. 20 Massumi, Parables, p. 51.

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code, text, and signification.’21 As he puts it in the introduction, drawing upon Bergson’s solution to Zeno’s paradox, ‘the emphasis’ ought to be ‘on process before [the] signification or coding’ associated with the stasis of location.22 When Zeno proposed that an arrow could never reach its target because first it must pass through the infinity of intervening points, Bergson had argued, he confused movement with trajectory, time with space. Movement is not a series of locations. It is ‘simple and … undivided’; yes, ‘we can divide at will the trajectory once created, [but] we cannot divide its creation, which is an act in progress and not a thing.’23 Movement-vision, then, is how Massumi (or Reagan in conversation with Bergson?) insists upon the originality of change to being in such a way as to recast identity, the more typically prized object of our theoretical analyses, as a somewhat arbitrarily and retroactively frozen moment. Grace thinks of mirrors and mirroring face-to-face encounters in citing 1 Cor 13:12, rather than movement. But as we’ve seen, her actual experience of mirrors is already somewhat more complicated than Massumi’s mirror-vision. In the parlor of the penitentiary governor’s house, where she works and eventually meets with Simon, as she dusts a mirror one day, she thinks … of all the things that have been written about me – that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that

21 Massumi, Parables, p. 66. 22 Massumi, Parables, p. 7. 23 Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 326. Or, as Massumi puts it, “[a] body does

not coincide with the discretely cognizable point of its here and now… . It coincides with the twisted continuity of its variations’ (Parables, pp. 200– 201).

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The inaccuracy of at least some of these media images could be offset by Grace’s own clear self-seeing. But even the contemporary, virtually modern mirror – not Paul’s obscuring polished metal – that she dusts, and into which she gazes during this scene, reflects her face quite strangely: ‘my skin is a pale mauve, like a faded bruise, and my teeth are greenish’ (AG, p. 23). Maybe, as Grace implies, it is the slant afternoon light that produces this new version of monstrosity. In any event, her reflection is not, as in Massumi, a recapitulation of the same at all but more like the ‘disjunctive encompassing’ of movement-vision.24 Grace, having read about herself in the press, can see herself as others see her, indeed as an other seeing herself as other, an unstable self-unknowing, an attenuation, as Massumi puts it, of the self-other axis. The parlor mirror is a visual analogue of this particular, popularly mediated discursive process. It presents her the way Reagan’s rushes reflected him upon his acting breakthrough – as a nearly unrecognizable ‘colored shadow’ – when he succeeded in attaining an identity that was also a ‘becoming-other.’25 And this is by design, for Atwood’s novel sustains the enigma of Grace Marks by refusing to offer a single, cohesive understanding of her character, the events of her life, her motivations or feelings. Not only do we never learn the truth about Grace’s role in the murders, but Grace herself feels unstable in any single identity. Just as the press can’t pin her down, so too she sometimes slips across the roles and places of her life (e.g., ‘I wake up at cock crow and know where I am. I’m in the parlor. I’m in the scullery. I’m in the cellar. I’m in my cell’) and feels that the story she is telling is really telling her, propelling her forward with a force of its own (AG, p. 298).26 24 Massumi, Parables, p. 51. 25 Massumi, Parables, p. 63.

Indeed, in this context Grace suggests both that one cannot know the events through which one lives at the time (one experiences only ‘confusion;

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Does Grace have an actual double? Is she possessed by Mary Whitney’s unquiet spirit? This possibility is also at play in her citation of 1 Cor 13:12. The ‘two looking’ (and, as in the second subtitle of Atwood’s ‘Duplicity,’ ‘there are always two’) may well be Grace and Mary, suggesting again some sort of conflation of mirror- and movement-vision. In the eye of God, Paul says by way of Grace, in this divine more-than-mirror, one sees with ‘the blind-sight of movementvision,’ and what one sees is ‘the body without an image.’27 Grace may well still see herself, her face’s own reflection, but viscerally, affectively, such that her face is no longer just her own, but is Mary – not Mary’s static face, but Mary. By which I mean to imply, Mary’s being within and as Grace. Seeing two in Paul’s mirror means seeing herself as someone else but in way that doesn’t disavow self-identity. 28 But that identity is not fixed. Grace Marks is not identifiable merely by means of her social or cultural positionalities. 29 Nor are any other of Atwood’s women characters. But as Joan Foster, from Lady Oracle, might have said: in the gender politics that partly define Atwood’s fictional contexts, ‘[o]ne could not, apparently, be both a respected female savant and a scullery maid’ at once (LO, p. 169). Massumi’s movement-vision helps to open up possibilities for reflection upon the way mirrors, and Paul’s mirror in particular, function in Alias Grace.

a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood’ like the smashing of Paul’s mirror) and that what one knows of them later is but a version, a story, and not just a narrative, but a narration (‘when you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.’ [AG, p. 298]). 27 Massumi, Parables, p. 57. 28 Massumi, Parables, p. 63. 29 Sandra Kumamoto Stanley makes this case somewhat differently, and interestingly in terms of identifiable social location, when she writes that Grace enters a ‘social unheimlich’ of complex and destabilizing desires by transforming her class status, eroticized and fixed by voyeuristic, bourgeois epistemologies, into her own ‘mysterious knowledge.’ Stanley, “The Eroticism of Class,” pp. 372–3.

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But movement, as I’ve said, is perhaps not the most pertinent conceptual term for what and how Grace sees in the mirror.30 Seeing itself, when it also involves being seen, may well partly construct subjectivity. In a beautiful essay on Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Malbranche, Judith Butler explores the limits of what can be thought about subject formation with reference not explicitly to gender, but much more generally in terms of the senses, touch and sight. ‘Something sees through me as I see. I see with a seeing that is not mine alone. I see, and as I see, the I that I am is put at risk, discovers its derivation from what is permanently enigmatic to itself.’31 Malebranche understands grace as divine touch, the ‘animating exteriority,’ in Butler’s terms, constitutive of the subject.32 Like touching, seeing, Butler writes, is ‘in some fundamental way … made possible by – and [is] coextensive with – being seen.’33 Destabilizing any notion of priority, Butler here uses the senses, and touch especially,34 to argue ultimately for an ethics that insists upon a generous, humble ‘affirmation of involuntary exposure to otherness as the condition of relationality.’35 The ‘two looking’ is, from this perspective, the displacement of On the other hand, it is not irrelevant. Grace, when she goes back to the beginning in her conversations with Simon, describes how ‘all was set in motion’ when her family sailed to Canada from Ireland (AG, p. 111). Later, after Grace is hypnotized and speaks of the murders in Mary’s voice, Simon changes. ‘Throughout the evening he’s maintained a plausible self-control’ for the sake of appearances, ‘but now his brain feels like a roasting chestnut, or an animal on fire … there’s a confused and frenzied motion, a scrambling, a dashing to and fro.’ (AG, p. 407). Mary’s darting, firefly spirit may or may not actually move in Grace, may or may not be the face by means of which Grace hopes to be found, see/be seen, but Simon is undone, having come face to face with Grace, or if not with Grace (who is veiled in this scene) then with Grace’s enigmatic motions. 31 Butler, Senses, p. 60. 32 Butler, Senses, p. 47. 33 Butler, Senses, p. 52. 34 Since touching most helpfully figures inextricable mutuality. One cannot touch without simultaneously experiencing the touch of that which one touches. 35 Butler, Senses, p. 16. 30

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knowledge, of Paul’s fantastic theo-epistemology of the divine and human subjects, into a much less stable register of the senses. Grace longs for the affective intimacy of being found, while always, at the same time, frustrating any attempt to find her out. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred, like Grace, encounters a mirrored self/otherness. Her assigned partner for shopping and other activities outside the home, Ofglen, turns out like Mary Whitney to harbor revolutionary impulses. She is done in for aspiring to undo the rigid binaries of patriarchal theocracy.36 One on occasion, Offred watches Ofglen walk away from her down the street. They’re both dressed identically as handmaids and Offred thinks ‘she’s like my own reflection, in a mirror from which I am moving away’ (HT, p. 45). Later, just before Ofglen speaks to Offred of the resistance for the first time, the two women catch each other’s eyes in a window’s reflection. ‘We can see into each other’s eyes,’ Offred says. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen Ofglen’s eyes, directly, steadily, not aslant… . She holds my stare in the glass, level, unwavering. Now it’s hard to look away. There’s a shock in this seeing’ (HT, p. 167). But even before she learns for certain that she is not alone (‘there is an us then, there’s a we. I knew it’), Offred resists (HT, p. 169). Even in distracted moments. Entering the house after her movement-vision recognition of herself in Ofglen’s departure, Offred notices her ‘face, distant and white and distorted, framed in the hall mirror, which bulges outward like an eye under pressure’ (HT, p. 49). The handmaids have been trained to use ‘Under His Eye’ as a farewell, a rhetorical performance of their own oppression, but here, perhaps unconsciously, Offred considers both that the mirroring eye fails to recognize her, and that this failure is a

Mary sought out her fatal abortion after her lover, the son of the house in which she and Grace served, made clear he wasn’t about to marry her. Their union would have destabilized class boundaries, effecting a sort of revenge for the losses her ‘Radical’ family had suffered at the hands of the gentry. Atwood, Alias Grace, pp. 148–149. Ofglen hanged herself rather than suffer arrest and execution (or worse) for being part of a network of handmaids and others, including possibly some guardians, plotting against Gilead. Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale, pp. 169, 280, 285. Interestingly, Offred sings ‘Amazing Grace’ to herself earlier in the novel, a variant of the same stanza that interests Grace Marks but emphasizing freedom over seeing (HT, p. 54). 36

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function of its own pathology. ‘Under His Eye’ may well take on subversive qualities in her subsequent partings from Ofglen, too. At the very least, after Ofglen disappears and is replaced, Offred uses the farewell again with her new shopping partner, the new Ofglen, but suffers affective agonies in the process. She reads sincerity in the other’s delivery as treachery, and tries to recover the by now nearly-forgotten appropriate tone herself, minus the ironic inflection, in defensive reply (HT, p. 285). Grace is seen/sees ‘in the eye of God,’ not ‘Under His Eye,’ although as I hinted above surveillance is part of the cluster of problems associated with exposure to others’ vision in the novel. But as in The Handmaid’s Tale, so in Alias Grace, the seeing/being seen that destabilizes subject-object, self-other distinctions and enables ways of thinking identity in terms of affect and embodiment (rather than, or in addition to, stable social position) accompanies a subversive impulse. And in Grace’s case, as her adaptation of 1 Cor 13:12 shows, the subversion is often scriptural or theological. There God’s mirroring eye is apparently passive, without allusion to eschatological knowing. This reflecting (but not reflective?) divinity manifests itself also at the moment of the murders, in Grace’s retelling, but similarly without the promise of comprehension. Grace notices ‘a strange light in the kitchen, as if there was a film of silver over everything … then then my eyes were opened and I knew … God had come into the house’ (AG, p. 316). She pressed him to explain himself ‘but he did not answer, he just kept on being silver, so I went out to milk the cow; because the only thing to do about God is to go on with what you were doing anyway, since you can’t ever stop him or get any reasons out of him’ (AG, p. 316). Not just in this life. Never. Paul may have hoped that ‘when the complete [i.e., complete knowledge] comes, the partial will come to an end’ (1 Cor 13:10). But Grace knows better. After all, what valuable knowledge could Grace expect from the God who is in the kitchen, in the murder victims, in the murderer, and even in the murder weapon, all at once? (AG, p. 317). God may resemble a mirror, a silvery surface, but can one even see by the light of such pantheistic impassivity? The closest Grace comes to a theophany is precisely the moment that God ‘just kept on being silver’ while she herself sees nothing or, better, darkly: ‘[a]ll that time is dark to me’ (AG, p. 317).

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While the possibility of divine knowledge is all but foreclosed in Grace’s transformative exegesis of Paul’s mirror, and while the novel itself consistently forestalls any certainty about Grace’s actions and motivations, Grace herself, curiously, knows at least one thing for sure: ‘that guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you’ (AG, p. 379). She later develops this claim by remarking that ‘it is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble. If they were only less weak and careless, and more foresightful, and if they would keep from blundering into difficulties, think of all the sorry in the world that would be spared’ (AG, p. 457). Grace makes the first claim above in the same passage where she engages critically with 1 Corinthians 13:12. The references to culprits and victims, to the things that you do or have done to you, seem generic and potentially far-reaching, but Grace certainly has Nancy Montgomery and Mary Whitney quite specifically in mind. ‘For a long time,’ she says, ‘I could not find it in me to pardon them’ (AG, pp. 457–458, my italics). Why are they in need of forgiveness? ‘[F]or letting themselves be done to death in the way that they did, and leaving me behind with the full weight of it’ (AG, p. 457). There may be some ambiguity from a Pauline perspective about the state of these women’s souls. After all, ‘the fornicator sins against the body itself,’ which is ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’ and ‘from God’ (1 Cor 6:18–19). As Jennifer Glancy points out, this passage concerns male members of the Corinthian community who have sex with prostitutes, prostitutes who in most instances were probably slaves. The prostitutes themselves are, it would seem, entirely excluded from the community’s moral concern.37 Paul’s language in 6:18 might therefore pertain to Mr. Kinnear (who wanted ‘a bed fit for his wicked purposes’ [AG, p. 457]) and George Parkinson, Mary’s cruel lover, but

37 Glancy, Slavery

in Early Christianity, pp. 65–67.

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not to the women themselves, whose sinful bodies became mere ‘instruments of wickedness’ (Rom 6:13) for the men. The women, by this logic, are sin, and ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Rom 6:23).38 It is difficult, however, to imagine Grace condemning her friend Mary so completely for a sexual sin. 39 And her distaste for Nancy has as much to do with Nancy’s unpredictable and jealous temperament as with the fact that she slept with her employer. It seems, rather, that what they are most fundamentally guilty of, in Grace’s mind, is their own deaths. Victimized to death, they are guiltier than the culprits who do them in. Contrary to the author of 1 Timothy, the law is not laid down for the murderer, but the murdered (1:9; see also Romans 1:29–32). Even if Grace has in mind the whole constellation of life choices that lead to these women’s deaths, and not just their deaths alone, she still asserts that guilt inheres in ‘the things that others have done to you’ and not, as Paul would surely say, in ‘the things you’ve done.’40 If this amounts to blaming the victim, at least Grace is consistent, for she assumes guilt in her late marriage to Jamie Walsh. Jamie

38 Agnes, another servant, and a pious one at that, utters ‘the wages of sin is death’ when she learns how Mary died (AG, p. 177). Grace refers to Nancy’s beautiful earrings at one point as ‘the wages of sin’ and says later, under hypnosis – so perhaps it is Mary speaking here – that Nancy ‘had to die. The wages of sin is death.’ Atwood, Alias Grace, 255, 401. Grace herself even fears at one point that if she is raped by McDermott she will also receive the same wages (AG, p. 331). 39 Atwood certainly conveys a historically accurate disapprobation of sexual sins (e.g., when Grace recognizes that Mary and Nancy have committed the same ‘sin’ [AG, p. 276]). But she also toys satirically with one of Paul’s classic verses on sexual urgency, 1 Corinthians 7.9. Simon at one point, for instance, thinks that perhaps ‘he should marry. Marry or burn, as St. Paul says; or search out the usual remedies’ which, in his case, involve visiting prostitutes (AG, p. 289, my italics). And Grace tells Simon how she and Nancy, trying unsuccessfully one evening to smother their somewhat ‘thoughtless’ laughter after having joked about widows, ‘laughed so much I thought we should die. … [But] it is better to laugh than to burst’ (AG, p. 163). 40 See for instance Rom 13:4; 1 Cor 6:9, 13:6; 1 Thess 4:6; Col 3:25 on wrongdoing.

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had testified for the prosecution at her murder trial, and so was significantly responsible for everything Grace suffered in prison and at the asylum over the years. Now he asks her forgiveness, over and over again, which annoys her.41 ‘It would be much better,’ she writes to Simon, ‘if Mr. Walsh would forgive me, rather than being so stubborn about it and wanting to have it the wrong way around; but perhaps in time he will come to see things in a truer light’ (AG, pp. 457–458). Answering an interviewer’s question about her second novel, Surfacing, Atwood said: ‘It’s all very well to say I refuse to be a victim, but then you have to look at the context in which one is or isn’t a victim. You can’t simply refuse. You can refuse to define yourself that way, but it’s not quite as simple as that.’42 Characters in some of Atwood’s other works seem to want to acknowledge a similar complexity when it comes to guilt. Elaine Risley reflects, in Cat’s Eye, that ‘whatever has happened to me is my own fault, the fault of what is wrong with me’ (CE, p. 354).43 And Joan Foster’s first lover, in Lady Oracle, enrages her by suggesting that the Jews were responsible for the Holocaust. ‘That’s ridiculous… . [it’s] like saying a rape victim is responsible for being raped, or a murder victim …’ she sputters, before trailing off. But the man replies: ‘This is also true… . [t]hey have brought it upon themselves’ (LO, p. 158).44 Blind Assassin’s story-within-a-story imagines a slaughter of biblical proportions, when the People of Joy will bring doom upon a city known for ‘its luxury, its worship of false gods, and in especial its abhorrent child sacrifices’ (BA, p. 117). They 41 Jamie is also masochistically aroused by hearing her ‘stories of torment and

misery’ (AG, p. 457). What is more, Grace thinks that he is, at most, only partly responsible, whereas Jamie seems to think he is a kind of minor divinity of guilt: ‘the author of all’ her sufferings (AG, p. 456). 42 Castro, ‘Interview,’ p. 219. See also Survival for Atwood’s thoughts on the victim position, and how to avoid it. (Thanks to Rhiannon Graybill for this suggestion.) 43 This while looking at “An Eye for an Eye,” one of her paintings of Mrs. Smeath, the mother of one of her childhood tormenters, a girl named Grace. Mrs. Smeath, incidentally, is said to stare out at Elaine from the ‘flat surface of paint, three-dimensional now,’ like a face-to-face encounter in the mirror (CE, p. 354). Thanks to Peter Sabo for reminding me of the painting’s title. 44 Incidentally, the man, named Tadeo, prefers to go by ‘Paul, his third name, after Saint Paul, who was a systematic man, no loose ends’ (LO, p. 151).

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will kill everyone in the city, even the victims they’re ostensibly trying to save, because ‘for the People of Joy it isn’t guilt or innocence that determines such things, it’s whether or not you’ve been tainted, and … everyone in a tainted city is as tainted as everyone else’ (BA, p. 118). The inversion of moral responsibility that Grace articulates seems to be a theme in Atwood’s work. But everything depends upon narrative perspective. Victimization and guilt are central to the way authority functions in The Handmaid’s Tale, obviously, but readers embrace the perversion of justice in the works just mentioned no more readily than they accept Gilead’s perverse cruelties. Even Elaine Risley’s selfcritical remark in Cat’s Eye can be taken ironically as an assertion of her ethically qualitative difference from the characters she spends much of the novel recalling. And Atwood’s statement from the interview cited above may actually have more to do with her understanding of, and responses to, feminism, than with moral questions more generally.45 Grace’s claims about guilt, by contrast, seem to represent the genuine belief of an enormously sympathetic character. Readers cannot easily accept them as valid, not least because we want to reject Grace’s own self-incrimination vis-à-vis Jamie Walsh. And yet, she is adamant. Why? The answer, I think, has something to do with Paul, more precisely with grace in Paul. Grace’s appropriation of 1 Cor 13:12 undoes Paul’s eschatological knowing by means of a this-worldly encounter, an ethics grounded in the affective discovery of self as/in/and other. By the same logic perhaps Grace undoes Paul’s soteriological timeline this side of the eschaton too. Paul asserts that ‘while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.’ (Rom 5:6), giving us ‘access to … grace’ and enabling our reconciliation with God (Rom 5:2, 45 In a 2018 essay in the New York Times, for instance, Atwood – who recalls that ‘Offred’ was her working title for The Handmaid’s Tale, and says she chose that name for the way it evoked victimization (as in the offering up of sacrificial victims) – is clearly uncomfortable being called a feminist. In her view, feminist works can often be purely ideological, representations according to which ‘all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice.’ She, by contrast, writes books in which ‘women are human beings,’ as do most other good writers. Atwood, ‘Margaret Atwood.’

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10–11). Mary Whitney and Nancy Montgomery died because they were weak, Grace says. The weakness, carelessness, lack of foresight of the victims is what makes them victims, is what allows others to do things to them, is sin. And the sinful are surely in need of forgiveness.46 But the irony is that these characters’ access to Grace coincides with their deaths, despite the promise of life in Paul (e.g., Rom 5:17). And not just their deaths, but their sinful deaths, for both are understood to be fallen women. Ironic too is the way that throughout the novel others have always had ready access to Grace, but precisely because she is unfree. In Paul, the ‘free gift’ of Christ brings freedom (Rom 5:15–16, 8:2).47 Yet, even in her freedom, when Jamie Walsh, who had always wanted Grace, finally has access to her as well, Grace seems restricted. She would not have chosen Jamie for her husband, had she the freedom to choose (AG, pp. 452–453). What is more, Jamie’s financial well-being, his capacity to provide for Grace now, is ironic too since, as Grace says, ‘he got his start in life on account of me,’ that is, thanks to the way he was portrayed in the media reporting on Grace’s trial (AG, p. 451). He seemed ‘bright and up-and-coming’ when he helped condemn Grace to sin, imprisonment, and death (AG, p. 451).48 Finally, whereas in Paul the weak are redeemed by grace at the right time, in the novel the ‘full weight’ of the victims’ weakness falls on Grace in the form of unfreedom. After Mary dies, Grace, who had been happy working for Mrs. Alderman Parkinson, takes a series of unsatisfactory positions in other houses, until she meets Nancy, who hires her to work in Mr. Kinnear’s house. Nancy, pregnant with Kinnear’s child and facing likely rejection should he find out, becomes so intolerable that McDermott kills her and Kinnear, implicating Grace in the murders. Had they overcome their weaknesses ‘at the right time,’ Grace seems to feel, forgiveness wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. 46 Contrast, however, Paul’s active sympathy for the weak elsewhere (e.g., Rom 15:1; 1 Cor 1:25–27, 8:9–12, 9:22; 1 Thess 5:14). 47 Note the King James translation of χάρισμα in Romans 5:15–18 as ‘free gift’ (as in NRSV vv. 15–16). 48 Grace was originally sentenced to death, although that sentence was commuted to life in prison (AG, p. 28).

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It isn’t entirely clear if she ever does forgive them. Instead, the novel ends as she brings herself into communion with these women through her quilting. The pattern chosen is the Tree of Paradise, and although no mirrors are mentioned here at the end, Grace writes to Simon that her quilt will be bordered by twined snakes with tiny eyes (AG, pp. 459–460).49 Three triangles in quilt will be different from the rest, as Grace plans to use three pieces of cloth representing herself, Mary, and Nancy. These triangles, although each unique, will be ‘blend[ed] … in as part of the pattern. And so we will all be together’ (AG, p. 460). So perhaps seeing and reflecting return again at the close, albeit obliquely. For the quilts of the novel also mirror. As the principle structuring motif of Alias Grace, the one through which most readers approach Atwood’s kaleidoscopic narrative, quilt patterns double plot elements. But as Grace notes early on, they are optical illusions too, the play of repeated light and dark shapes that can be 49 Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) includes a poem called ‘Looking in a Mirror’ that combines ideas of mirroring with the transformation of the speaker into a tree: ‘my skin thickened / with bark and the white hairs of roots // Hands grown stiff, the fingers / brittle as twigs / eyes bewildered … // … buds, which can see / only the wind.’ (JSM, pp. 24–25). Susanna Moodie’s reports of her encounters with Grace are an important partial resource for Atwood, and excerpts from Moodie’s writings appear throughout the novel. In the poem, Atwood imagines Moodie recovering an old photograph of herself and feeling that its badly damaged surface eerily reflects her current appearance after years of hardship. The poem ends: ‘you find only / the shape you already are / but what / if you have forgotten that / or discover you / have never known’ (JSM, p. 25). Perhaps the mirror returns at the end of Grace’s autobiographical reflections by means of this allusion to Moodie’s arborescent self-imaging? Another poem, ‘Marrying the Hangman’ (1978), reads as though it could refer to Grace’s life with Jamie Walsh. A woman with two friends, who is condemned to death, marries her hangman and so saves herself. The hangman in this prose poem, however, is a prisoner in an adjacent cell. The speaker says: ‘To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through the darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror’ (SP II, p. 17).

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seen ‘two different ways’ (AG, p. 162).50 The Tree of Paradise, Grace notes, is singular in the pattern, but double in scripture: ‘the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge’ bearing, respectively ‘the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Good and Evil’ (AG, p. 459). As with her prior musings, Grace here accepts no theological truths that are not blended into surprising ambivalences. The Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Good and Evil both bring death; the only difference is that one death leaves you less ‘bone-ignorant’ than the other (AG, p. 459). Likewise, even as she wonders whether God has blessed her in her later years with a pregnancy ‘to make up a little for all I was put through at a younger age,’ she thinks that her symptoms might just as likely be caused by a fatal tumor (AG, p. 459). Where Paul sees stark dichotomies – ‘just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life’ (Rom 5:21) – Grace sees only a blending of equally probable possibilities. Pauline grace becomes an alias in Atwood’s novel, one of ‘a number of different combinations … that give equivalent outcomes.’51 What makes the difference is not the divine prerogative, Atwood concludes, but the way Grace ‘chang[es] the pattern a little to suit [her] own ideas’ (AG, p. 459). Maybe this is what happens when grace, the gift of the divine son, is named by an Aunt Pauline. Like Paul, Grace spends time in prison and dwells in narratives and correspondence about and by her. At the heart of her story is a traumatic event that might even be a conversion of sorts. The murders and her long imprisonment undoubtedly change Grace forever. But afterwards, Grace, in her self-consciousness and wit, reflects critically on the motivations of others who want to know her truth. She may fictionalize core elements of her story, not purely so as to deceive, but rather (or in addition) to provide herself some measure of security in a society that gives women few options outside of grace – one embodies or falls from it. In the process 50 Or, in this case, three. See Stanley, “The Eroticism of Class,” p. 373, on the collective identity Grace establishes with Nancy and Mary. 51 “alias, n. and adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/4975. Accessed 18 September 2019.

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she hints that our thinking about guilt, forgiveness, and the gift of grace reflect the ways in which victims, especially when they’re women and/or poor, are often blamed.52 If actual social politics echo the language of Pauline theological reflection uncomfortably, though, Grace also allows that a rereading of Paul can support affective ethical discovery. Mirroring Paul in these ways may sometimes distort, sometimes entirely undo the texts and traditions that adhere to his name. But to paraphrase a hymn Grace sings along with the tin-eared congregation of hypocrites eager to condemn Nancy despite ‘the doubleness of their [own] hearts’ (AG, p. 254): who, after all, but Grace can foil the temptations of power?53

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, Richard (ed.). English Hymns of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Doubleday, 1996. ―. The Blind Assassin. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. ―. Cat’s Eye. New York: Doubleday, 1989. ―. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.

Susanne Becker suggests that the contemporary fascination with Grace Marks that Atwood tracks in the novel ‘pointedly mirror[s] the workings of celebrity, sensationalism, and media hype in the late twentieth century.’ She references the Starr Report and, implicitly, the trashing of Monica Lewinsky. Becker, “Margaret Atwood and the Media,” pp. 37–38. We can, of course, add our own more recent, perhaps more notorious examples. 53 AG, p. 254. The hymn is ‘Abide with Me,’ and the verse I’ve modified reads in the original: ‘What but Thy grace can foil the Tempter’s power?’ Arnold, English Hymns, 60. Incidentally, this hymn by Henry Francis Lyte was composed in 1847, four years after the murders of Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear. Grace could not possibly have sung it at the service she attended with Nancy. Is this a simple anachronism on Atwood’s part, or forgetfulness on Grace’s? Is Grace deliberately seeding her account with errors to underscore the limits of Simon’s critical acumen? That we cannot tell the difference between any of these options is part of what makes Alias Grace so fascinating a book. 52

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―. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970. ―. Lady Oracle. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976. ―. ‘Margaret Atwood on What The Handmaid’s Tale Means in the Age of Trump.’ The New York Times, March 10, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaretatwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html ―. Negotiating with the Dead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ―. The Robber Bride. New York: Doubleday, 1993. ―. Selected Poems II: Poems, Selected and New 1976–1986. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Becker, Susanne. ‘Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Media.’ Pages 28–40 in Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Edited by Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. London: MacMillan, 1922. Butler, Judith. Senses of the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Castro, Jan Garden. ‘An Interview with Margaret Atwood: 20 April 1983.’ Pages 215–232 in Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Edited by Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Conzelmann, Hans. 1 Corinthians. Edited by George W. MacRae. Translated by James W. Leitch. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. ―. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2007.

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Glancy, Jennifer. Slavery in Early Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Gooch, Paul W. Partial Knowledge: Philosophical Studies in Paul. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987. Hollander, Harm W. ‘Seeing God “in a riddle” or “face to face”: An Analysis of 1 Corinthians 13:12.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32.4 (2010): 395–403. Litwa, Matthew David. ‘Transformation Through a Mirror: Moses in 2 Cor 3:18.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 34.3 (2012): 286–297. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Michael, Magali Cornier. ‘Rethinking History as Patchwork: The Case of Atwood’s Alias Grace.’ Modern Fiction Studies 47.2 (2001): 421–447. Minissale, Gregory. Framing Consciousness in Art: Transcultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. O’Neill, John. ‘Dying in a State of Grace: Memory, Duality, and Uncertainty in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.’ Textual Practice 27.4 (2013): 651–670. Orr, William F. and James Arthur Walther. 1 Corinthians. Garden City, NY: 1976. Peters, Joan Douglas. ‘Feminist Narratology Revisited: Dialogizing Gendered Rhetorics in Alias Grace.’ Style 49.3 (2015): 299–320. Runions, Erin. ‘The Theopolitics of Panoptic Murk: Scanner Darkly Cites 1 Corinthians.’ Pages 196–210 in Simulating Aichele: Essays in Bible, Film, Culture and Theory. Edited by Melissa C. Stewart. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015. Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. ‘The Eroticism of Class and the Enigma of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.’ Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22.2 (2003): 371–386. Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Book II, Parts III and IV. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.

15. THE LONGPEN, FUTURE LIBRARY, AND BIBLICAL PROPHECY: THINKING WRITING WITH MARGARET ATWOOD RHIANNON GRAYBILL The Blind Assassin is a novel filled with hands. The novel opens with a photograph, part of a scene from a picnic: a man, a woman, and “a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass” (BA, p. 4). The woman is Iris Chase; the disembodied hand belongs to her younger sister, Laura. The picture once contained both sisters; in this print, however, Laura has been cut out. All that remains is her hand. Laura, too, is missing, for much of the novel: she kills herself, driving off a bridge, when she and Iris are young women. The witnesses remember her hands on the steering wheel, demurely tucked into white gloves (BA, p. 2). As a child, Laura worried about the left hand of God (BA, p. 513). As an adult, Iris describes herself and her sister as like two hands (BA, p. 513). The question of whose hand wrote the novel-within-anovel is woven across the book, along with questions over Laura’s apparent suicide. It is perhaps not surprising that a photograph of a hand without a body should play a role in such a story. Atwood’s novel ends as it begins, with a picture of a man, a woman, and “a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass” (BA, p. 517). But like a mirror, this image reverses the first picture: here, it is Iris who has been cut out, Laura who remains. And, of course, a hand – “the other hand”; “the hand that will set things down” (BA, p. 517). And set things down she does – Iris is the novel’s narrator; as she reminds us more than once, we are reading the words of her pen. In the novel’s present, Iris is writing her life story, and she becomes preoccupied with her own hand writing on the page, reflecting 383

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“sometimes it seems to me that it’s only my hand writing, not the rest of me; that my hand has taken on a life of its own, and will keep on going even if severed from the rest of me” (BA, p. 373). Of another scene of writing, she notes, “I thought of myself as recording. A bodiless hand, scrawling across a wall” (BA, p. 512). This image of a disembodied hand, especially a disembodied hand that writes, is a biblical one, as Iris knows well.1 Looking over the jacket copy of the novelwithin-a-novel, also called The Blind Assassin and written by her sister Laura (though it is later revealed that Iris is herself the author), she reflects, She writes like an angel, it says of Laura, on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin…In point of fact, angels don’t write much. They record sins and the names of the damned and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing. Keeping all this in mind, yes: Laura wrote like an angel. In other words, not very much. But to the point. (BA, p. 498).

Iris is not wrong: the Bible is filled with scenes of ambivalent, dangerous, and duplicitous writing, as well as the occasional disembodied hand. At the same time, like Iris, secret author and narrator of The Blind Assassin, and like many of Atwood’s novels, the Bible is a book obsessed with its own writing. Iris’s acidic account of angelic writing is only the beginning: the Bible offers multiple stories and descriptions of its own composition (and, sometimes, destruction). Prophets write, scribes write, divine messengers write. Texts are made and then lost, destroyed and remade. This is especially the case in the prophetic literature, which contains a particular density of images of writing and un-writing. Though biblical prophecy is often imagined as an oral engagement – the prophet receiving and then speaking the word of God – the prophetic texts

1 Hands are also a recurrent

symbol across Atwood’s work. In particular, the Grimms’ fairy tale “The Girl without Hands” appears at multiple points, including in the novels Life Before Man and Bodily Harm, as well as The Blind Assassin. Atwood also named a poem “The Girl without Hands.” See further Wilson, “Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale,” p. 105.

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themselves are filled with books, pens, scrolls, styluses, words that appear in unexpected places, words that cannot be read or understood, and texts whose reading sets into motion violent destruction. Whether negotiating with the dead or with God, prophecy is a practice of dangerous and desirable writing. This essay undertakes a reading of writing in the Bible with and through Atwood, with a focus on writing in and around prophecy. In staging this encounter, I am less interested in Atwood’s writing about writing (whether in novels, short stories, nonfiction, or other written works) than I am in her other, more material engagements with writing. In addition to her novels, her poetry, her graphic novels, and her other writing, Atwood has undertaken two notable – and notably material – engagements with writing: inventing the LongPen and participating in the Future Library project. The LongPen is a writing instrument (really, more of a machine than a pen) that Atwood designed and trademarked. The LongPen can be used to write remotely, including at great distances, as when the writer and receiver are on different continents. It produces an ink signature and can be used for legal and business functions as well as more ordinary forms of writing, such as signing books. Future Library is an artwork created by Scottish artist Katie Paterson and based in Norway. It involves collecting texts for a hundred years and keeping them sequestered from the public; in the year 2114, the texts, including one by Atwood, will at last be released and published. Both the LongPen and Future Library tell us about Atwood’s relationship to writing and texts. They also offer a new way of thinking about writing and textuality in biblical prophecy.2 My goal in bringing Atwood and her inventions together with the Bible is to theorize prophetic writing in relation to the LongPen and prophetic text production in relation to Future Library. The LongPen and the Future Library, I argue, give material form to modes of writing, text production, and canonization that are already present in multiple ways in biblical texts. But the interpretation also goes both ways: reading the LongPen and the Future Library through the lens of biblical proph-

2 Phoebe Ann Wolframe persuasively argues for reading the LongPen as part

of Atwood’s oeuvre. See Wolframe, “Invented Interventions,” p. 15.

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ecy changes how we understand not just ancient texts, but also contemporary writing machines and practices. Prophetic writing replicates the LongPen’s writing-at-a-distance. The materiality of the word in prophecy – books, tablets, scrolls, archives – represents a Future Library, or libraries, of its own. The pleasure, danger, and play with writing are all crucial, to the modern author (and inventor and critic and dystopian “prophet”3) as they are to the writers of, and in, biblical texts.

ON PROPHETIC WRITING Before turning to Atwood, it is helpful to consider the complicated relationship between writing and prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. The Ur-scene of prophecy, the revelation at Sinai, is a theophany through speech; the people are unable to see what is happening, but only hear Yahweh’s words – at least until they retreat in terror, leaving only Moses to receive the message (Exod. 20:1–21). Furthermore, the oral is transformed into the materiality of the written, as Yahweh’s words are put into text. The revelation thus also produces physical textual artifacts, in the form of the tablets of the law (Exod. 24:12). Moses is likewise credited as the author of the Torah (also known as the “books of Moses”). Both the content and the materiality of the text become central to Israelite religious practice, as the people transport the tablets with them in the ark. The prophetic literature in the Hebrew Bible is likewise preoccupied with writing, though individual prophets engage with writing and literacy to varying degrees. Isaiah’s prophecies are mostly delivered orally, though sometimes with textual props, as in Isa. 8:1, where the prophet is commanded to “take a large tablet and write…”4). Isaiah also has a vision of Yahweh’s word as a sealed book, presented to those who cannot read: The vision of all this has become for you like the words of a sealed document. If it is given to those who can read, with the command, “Read this,” they say, “We cannot, for it is sealed.” And if

3 Mead, “Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia.”

Unless otherwise noted, biblical translations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

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it is given to those who cannot read, saying, “Read this,” they say, “We cannot read.” (Isa. 29:11–12)

Here the famous description of prophecy as a sealed book appears. This image has great currency in later interpretive history, figuring in the book of Daniel, Revelation, and other apocalyptic literature, and forward to sources as varied as Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and the Book of Mormon. Reading, writing, and texts play important roles in Jeremiah, a book that Pamela J. Scalise has aptly described as “interested in books.”5 The narrative portions of the text find Jeremiah repeatedly instructing his scribe, Baruch, to write texts (Jer. 36:28, “take another scroll and write…”); the text contains multiple scenes of writing and destruction, including the scroll of the law that Jeremiah dictates and sends to the king, which is then burned and replaced. Ezekiel opens with a scene in which the prophet literally consumes the divine word, in the form of a scroll that tastes of honey (Ezek. 3:1–3). The body becomes an inscriptive surface in Ezekiel’s vision of the temple, when a heavenly scribe marks the foreheads of those who are to be spared from the coming bloodshed (Ezek 9:1–5). The minor prophets also contain a range of relations to writing. Jonah, Obadiah, and Micah never speak about writing, for example, while Zechariah has a vision of a giant flying scroll (Zech. 5:1–3). In spite of the diversity of representations, it is possible to draw out a few key themes concerning writing and prophecy. First, writing indicates what is intended to last. Isaiah is instructed, “Go now, write it before them on a tablet, and inscribe it in a book, so that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever” (30:8). This is also reflected in Mal. 3:16, where Yahweh commands the writing of a “book of remembrance.” Shifting the metaphor from the text produced to the mode of textual production, Jeremiah describes the sin of Judah as written with a “pen of iron” and a “diamond point” (Jer. 17:1). In these examples (as in many others), writing signifies that which endures. Second, prophetic writing is not simply documentary or commemorative; it is effective, in the sense of causing effects in the world. Writing thus has a performative or even magical function. It is a part of the symbolic actions performed by Isaiah (8:1–2) and Ezekiel (37:15– 5 Scalise, “Scrolling through Jeremiah,” p. 201.

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28). Jeremiah writes the disasters that will befall Babylon in a scroll (51:60); in the vision of the cup of wrath, everything that is written against the nations will be done to them (25:13). In Daniel, the reading of the book brings about the action of judgment (7:10), an image that is picked up and expanded in the reading of the many scrolls in Revelation. Daniel also ends with a warning about the opening and the reading of the book as setting into effect its apocalyptic actions (Dan. 12:4–12) – a scene of reading worthy of Gustav Metzger’s notion of “auto-destructive art,” or of Banksy’s self-shredding artwork “Love is in the Bin.”6 Writing can also save one’s life: being marked by the man with the writing case allows the worthy people of Jerusalem to be spared in Ezekiel’s vision of the abominations in the Temple (Ezek. 9:3–6), just as the “writing” with blood over the lintel spares the Israelites in Egypt from the angel of Death.7 Third, writing is used to indicate what is secret or forbidden. The “sealed book” is a common image in prophetic literature. Isaiah has a vision of Yahweh’s word as a sealed book, presented to those who cannot read (29:11–12). In Hosea 8:12, Yahweh’s written instructions become a “strange thing” to the people. And Daniel contains a cryptic written message – mene mene tekel upsarin (Dan. 5:25) – that appears on the wall and can be read only by Daniel himself.8 Sometimes the work of the prophet is to read or translate the text; at other moments in the prophetic narrative, the writing remains unreadable or incomprehensible (Isa. 29:11–12, Hos. 8:12, cf. Rev. 5:1–8).

Metzger, Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive Art (London: Coracle @workfortheeyetodo, 1996). A Banksy piece, “Girl with Balloon,” recently sold for more than a million dollars at Sotheby’s; after the hammer fell to signal the sale, the artwork dropped into a shredder hidden in the frame and was partially shredded. The new (shredded) piece is titled “Love is in the Bin.’; the buyer chose to keep it. See Greenberger, “Sotheby’s: Self-Destructing Banksy Piece Officially Sold, Is Now a ‘Newly Completed Work.’” The buyer chose to keep the new shredded piece. 7 Iris also imagines writing in the sky with blood in The Blind Assassin (BA, p. 363). 8 On this inscription, see Broida, “Textualizing Divination: The Writing on the Wall in Daniel 5:25,” pp. 9–10. 6

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Fourth, writing implicates the body. As already mentioned, Ezekiel literally eats the divine word (Ezek. 3:1–3; cf. Rev. 10:9–10), adopting (and literalizing) a metaphor from Jeremiah, who feels the word of Yahweh in his bones (Jer. 20:9). Bodies do not just devour texts, but also become surfaces for them. Hands are written on in Isaiah as a way of expressing fidelity to Yahweh (Isa. 44:1); Yahweh himself writes on the hearts of the people in Jeremiah (Jer. 31:33). The people are marked by a man with a writing case in Ezekiel’s vision of abominations in the Temple in Ezek. 9:1–7. In Hosea 1 and Isaiah 8:1, the bodies of children become signs – a primitive sort of writing, not unlike the “large letters” that Isaiah sets on the tablets in 8:1. Just as bodies become texts or surfaces for texts, so too do texts become bodies: I have argued elsewhere that scrolls, such as the scroll that Jeremiah and Baruch produce in Jer. 36, can be read as a scroll-bodies.9 Emphasizing the body in another way, Habakkuk directs attention to the body of the reader and its limits of perception: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it” (Hab. 2:2). Fifth and finally, writing suggests the existence of a world other to our own. This is most dramatically enacted in Zechariah 5, with the vision of a flying scroll twenty cubits in length – a textual visitor from another sort of world (this otherworldliness is reinforced by the framing of the text as a vision). But even setting such supernatural scrolls aside, the Bible contains a remarkable number of references to nonexistent books (e.g. Num. 21:14, Josh. 10:13, 2 Sam. 1:18, 1 Kgs. 11:41, 14:19 and 22:39). While some of these references may be to texts that once existed and are now lost, there is also a strong suggestion of fictive textuality. 10 Writing and references to texts and textuality thus open the possibility of reading “in other worlds,” to borrow a phrase from Atwood (SF). Biblical prophecy produces a complex portrait of the written word and of practices of writing. Still, a few key trends may be discerned. Writing endures. Writing enacts. Writing is secret and performs secret labor. Writing implicates the body. Writing traffics in and with other worlds. And all of these features suggest connections

9 Graybill, “When Bodies Meet,” pp. 1046–1071. 10 Graybill, “The Eldritch Scroll,” pp. 45–47.

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to Atwood’s recent experiments with writing: the LongPen and the Future Library.

WRITING IN ATWOOD’S WRITINGS The image of writing and texts suggested by the LongPen and Future Library is somewhat different from that which Atwood sets forth in her own written (and, in contrast to Future Library, published) works. In her novels, questions of genre, narrative, and the relationship of writing to truth often become central; furthermore, it is often attended with skepticism. A few brief examples from her other works will serve to underscore this point. The Handmaid’s Tale, still her most famous novel, tells the story of Offred. The conceit of the novel’s composition is that the text the reader is reading is transcribed from tapes recorded by Offred during or after her escape from Gilead. This is a neat reversal of Offred’s career in the time before Gilead, when she worked in a library, digitizing books and destroying the originals (HT, p. 173).11 An afterward, set at an academic conference several hundred years after the fall of Gilead, includes further comments on genre and composition. This final scene also further complicates the text’s literary and historical imbrications: first, Atwood’s chapter is modeled on the final chapter of Orwell’s 1984, which provides a lexical analysis of “Newspeak.”12 In the 2013 audiobook of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood altered the novel’s original text, adding to it so it more closely resembled the recording’s political moment.13 Add to this the fact that Offred is forbidden to read or write, and we have a complex web of relations of writing: a novel narrated by a woman forbidden to write, 11 In Oryx

and Crake, Jimmy holds a similar job destroying old books, as Lorraine York notes. See York, Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity, pp. 186–187. 12 This is not unlike the critique of fascist language offered in Orwell’s essay politics and the English language. Language is rarely either good or untouched in dystopias; even utopias frequently contort themselves inventing new names for things. Atwood names this relationship in her book In Other Worlds (IOW, p. 147). See also Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” pp. 127–140. 13 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Audible Audio Edition); Mead, “Margaret Atwood’s Grimly Relevant Additions to the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Audiobook.”

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recorded on tapes, nested in a narrative of an academic conference, which itself alludes to another famous dystopia, where language is famously edited to modify its relationship to truth, a scene which is then rewritten by the novel’s author, Atwood, to align with the political moment when a new recording of the audiobook (no doubt determined to be highly marketable) was released, followed by the announcement of a new book. All this points to a certain skepticism around writing and its unvarnished relationship to truth. We find similar moments at other points in Atwood’s texts. Automatic writing – a form of composition said to channel the spirits – plays a key role in Lady Oracle. The novel’s heroine, Joan Foster, writes Costume Gothic novels under a false name. Attempting to resolve a difficulty in her latest novel, she lights a candle, gazes into a mirror, and produces an angry, passionate collection of poems that she has no memory of writing (LO, pp. 234–37; 253). Her editor christens it Lady Oracle (LO, p. 240). Interwoven in Jane’s narrative are snippets from her latest novel; details between the real and fictional worlds blur. The inclusion of automatic writing as a plot device highlights the untrustworthiness of the written word, as well as the possibility of writing to destabilize and breach even the most metaphysical boundaries. The writer knows not what she writes; this is, paradoxically, the source of her power. In Alias Grace; Grace’s words are recorded by Dr. Simon Jordan, an alternate record to the salacious and, according to Grace, false accounts of her that appeared in the newspapers.14 There are other languages and negotiations of truth in the texts as well: the quilt squares that introduce each chapter, the picture of Susanna and the Elders, the relationship between Atwood’s novel and the real Grace Marks. Truth shimmers beyond the horizon. Writing is likewise a matter of anxiety for the Gardeners in the MaddAddam trilogy.15 Adam One teaches that writing is dangerous. Ren, a young girl raised by the Gardeners, describes being fearful of writing (YF, 127). And yet the novels are also richly playful. The Year of the Flood intersperses sermons, hymns, and feast days from the Gardeners with a more conventional narrative, tracking several characters

14 Like Lady Oracle, Alias Grace also plays with questions of spirit possession

and the occult. 15 See also Koosed and Walsh in this volume.

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before and after the “waterless flood.” MaddAddam includes various myth-like stories told to the Crakers, as well as a more conventional narrative. The book ends with Toby teaching the young Craker child Blackbeard to write; his entry in Toby’s book forms the final chapter of MaddAddam (MA, p. 385–387). Yet this too is a cause of ambivalence, even as Blackbeard’s writing is filled with self-referential flourishes. The politics of authorship figure in the novels in another way as well; Atwood appends a note permitting the free use of the psalms and hymns that introduce each chapter.16 The questions of authorship, authority, and the appropriate use of writing that are present in the novel thus extend beyond it as well. The three novels, meanwhile, are filled with puns, wordplays, and linguistic jokes, Atwood herself seeming to delight in the possibilities of written language, even as her characters express skepticism toward it. I would suggest that even from this brief survey, it is safe to generalize that in Atwood’s fictions, language and writing are unstable, fraught, and, like The Robber Bride’s Zenia, not to be trusted (RB, pp. 3, 11, 40, 210). But the LongPen and the Future Library tell a different story about writing.

T HE LONGPEN I will turn now to Atwood’s distant writing invention, the LongPen.17 As the name is intended to suggest, the LongPen is a pen designed to write over great distances, using a robot arm that controls a remote real ink pen. 18 According to Atwood, the idea came to her as she sat, exhausted, in a hotel room in Denver during the grueling international book tour for Oryx and Crake (2004).19 If writing at a distance were possible, such grueling international travel would no longer be

16 In the acknowledgements to The

Year of the Flood, Atwood writes, “Anyone who wishes to use any of these hymns for amateur devotional or environmental purposes is more than welcome to do so” (YF, p. 517). 17 The most comprehensive study of this invention and its significance to Atwood’s body of work is Wolframe, “Invented Interventions.” 18 The emphasis on “wet ink” is one recurring feature of discussions surrounding the LongPen. Wet ink is required for certain forms of legal signature. 19 Wolframe, “Invented Interventions,” p. 13.

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necessary to promote and sign books. However, as science fiction aficionados are fond of pointing out, the idea of the LongPen predates Atwood; as similar device appears as early as 1911 in Hugo Gernsback’s serialized novel Ralph 124c 41+: She hesitated, and then, impulsively, “I wonder if it would be too much to ask you for your autograph?” Ralph then attached the Telautograph to his Telephot while the girl did the same. When both instruments were connected he signed his name and he saw his signature appear simultaneously on the machine in Switzerland.20

Other science fiction and fantasy literature includes similar examples.21 And in the second half of the nineteenth century, inventors toyed with the idea of a “writing telegraph,” which could transmit a reproduction of handwriting over a distance, though their efforts were largely unsuccessful.22 But it is Atwood who brought the LongPen from the realm of ideas to reality. Atwood founded a company, Unotchit (“you no touch it”) in 2004; the LongPen debuted in 2006.23 The company is now known as Syngrafii; Atwood remains the CEO. Syngrafii offers multiple LongPen products. These include the LongPen Business Writer (for legal and business documents), the LongPen Kiosk (for signing autographs and memorabilia) and the LongPen Signing Tablet (for individual signatures).24 Atwood and others have used it to sign books remotely.

Gernsback, Ralph 124c 41+, p. 28. See also Christensen, “Long-Distance Pen Devised by Author Margaret Atwood.” The Hugo award in science fiction is named after Gernsback. 21 One recent example is the spanreed device in in Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive series (2010–). I am grateful to Jennifer Lehmann for this reference. 22 See Beals, Wireless Dada, p. 32. 23 Wolframe, “Invented Interventions,” pp. 13–14. 24 Bloomburg, “Syngrafii Corp.: Private Company Information.” 20

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The LongPen may have been invented for authors, but it quickly found other uses. It has been used, for example, to circumvent the limitations of house arrest, as when Conrad Black used a LongPen to sign books in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. while banned from travel. 25 The LongPen is now also used in banking and as a form of legal signature.26 It is chiefly marked for business,27 though it is also framed as a way of managing literary and other celebrity. 28 Of course, to careful readers of the Bible, the LongPen will not seem so strange at all. How else to describe the scene in chapter 5 of the book of Daniel, when a hand appears and begins writing in Belshazzar’s court? “Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace, next to the lamp stand. The king was watching the hand as it wrote” (Dan. 5:5) Only Daniel can see past the shock of the apparatus and interpret the writing it has produced.29 The etching of the tablets of the law is another narrative built on the logic of the LongPen. Here, the writing instrument is Yahweh’s finger, which he uses to etch two tablets of the covenant (Exod. 31:8). The tablets are written “on both sides, written on the front and on the back” (32:15), pointing to the perfect verisimilitude of the transmission. Furthermore, after Moses destroys the tablets in anger, Yahweh creates two more tablets. How is such identical output possible, and at a distance? (Yahweh is ensconced in his cloud). The answer is the finger as LongPen. The LongPen responds to the problem of mediation with the promise of perfect replication, and it does so via identical writing. It 25 CTV.ca News Staff, “Black Uses Atwood’s LongPen at Virtual Book Sign-

ing”; Kaufman, “A Book Signing With the Author a World Away.” 26 Syngrafii Inc. “Syngrafii Digital PaperTM Transforms Remote Global Transactions”; Syngrafii Inc., “Emitac Enterprise Solutions Partners with Syngrafii Inc. – Syngrafii Inc.” 27 See the sample “use cases” on Syngrafii Inc., “Signature Use Cases – Syngrafii Inc.,” available at https://www.syngrafii.com/signature-use-cases/. 28 See discussion in York, Margaret Atwood and the Labor of Literary Celebrity, pp. 154–157. 29 As discussed in the Introduction, Atwood is obsessed with a handful of biblical passages that recur across her work; this passage in Daniel in one of them.

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also solves the possibility of a diversion or misdirection of meaning. There is always the threat that a message will be changed in the process of transmission, or misunderstood, or ignored. These anxieties figure repeatedly in the prophetic books: the prophet speaks but no one listens. The prophet prophesies that no one will be able to understand (Isa. 6:10, Ezek. 3:4–11). People mistake the prophet for a musician (Ezek. 33:32). False prophets get all the attention (Jer. 23:9; Ezek. 13:1– 3). When kings receive the prophetic word, they cut it up and burn it (Jer. 36:23–25). The LongPen solves these anxieties. There can be no purloined letter when the letter is written with a LongPen, because it is transmitted immediately, and in its fully intact original form, to the recipient. This is why Yahweh inscribes the tablets, rather than simply telling Moses the laws. Ideally, a prophet is also (like) a LongPen. A prophet transmits Yahweh’s message – not just its general content, but its precise details, its affect, and so on – to the people. Unfortunately, prophets are not in fact LongPens, and their messages are constantly being misdirected or misinterpreted or ridiculed or ignored. One way to understand the shift from oral to written prophecy is as an attempt to force prophecy in the direction of LongPen transcription, and away from oral summary. This is also why Job, like Jeremiah, wishes for a LongPen – or, as he calls it, a “pen of iron” – with which to communicate his complaint to Yahweh, as his present efforts are repeatedly lost in transmission: “O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever!” (Job 19:23–24). Of course, these biblical references I have gathered do not really refer to LongPens. The LongPen, after all, is a real writing instrument, available for purchase and able to produce legally binding signatures30. In the biblical text, we have, instead, magic hands and divine fingersas-styluses, iron pens and eternal books, pens with diamond points, prophets who act as imperfect transmitters, and a foolish audience of

For a forensic analysis see Kruger, “The LongPen™ – The World’s First Original Remote Signing Device,” pp. 795–800. The Syngrafii website contains multiple references to the use of the LongPen to produce legally binding signatures.

30

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readers who just can’t understand the writing on the wall. Still, reading these textual moments through the figure of the LongPen does several things. First, the LongPen directs attention to the technologies of writing. Even a brief survey of the prophetic texts about writing makes clear that writing is an embodied practice. Bodies write; bodies are written upon. What the LongPen adds is an invitation to think about the technologies of writing as they extend and interact with the body. It also suggests that bodies and technologies are not fully separable, but that it is more useful to think of technology as “the extensions of man,” in Marshall McLuhan’s phrase – or, as McLuhan also suggests, the other way around (that is, we are the sex organs of the machine world).31 The prophet is written by the prophetic book as much as the prophet writes the text. Brian Britt’s reading of David as techno-cyborg “Davidmachine,” in the model of Heiner Müller’s Hamlettmachine, thus offers a possibility for thinking the “Prophetmachine” as well.32 Along these lines, Wolframe reads the LongPen as a form of cyborg extension of the body: “Although it engages with the discourse of science fiction, it is also very tangibly in the ‘real world.’ It is controlled by a ‘real’ person, but it is made out of metal: is it a human arm or not?… The LongPen occupies a liminal space between fiction and non-fiction, presence and absences and past and present.”33 In this way, the LongPen offers a way to think of prophetic writing, and the writing prophet, as constructed, cyborg, multiple. Second, and relatedly, the LongPen – and especially some of its failures as a device – offers a way to theorize failure in prophecy. While the LongPen is designed to offer a perfect reproduction, extending a signature without requiring a body, it does not always succeed. In 2006, Atwood attempted to sign books in New York using a LongPen at the London Book Fair. The LongPen failed: according to the Guardian, “‘Something just happened of a technological nature,’ Ms

31 McLuhan, Understanding

Media.

32 Britt, “Davidmachine.” 33 Wolframe, “Inventing Interventions,” p. 18.

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Atwood explained cryptically via videoconference.”34 Later, this “something” was explained: “due to the extra heat added by people crowding around, the computer had balked.”35 The problem remained the bodies. As York writes in an analysis of the LongPen and Atwood’s attempts to negotiate literary celebrity, “the LongPen is haunted by the body.”36 Even this technological apparatus, which was invented to circumvent bodily presence, cannot escape it. As is the Bible. Returning to the biblical texts about writing and rewriting, we might consider just how frequently transmission fails. Even in Daniel 6, the clearest example of a divine LongPen transcribing a message, the scene of communication comes to an abrupt end when the king dies. The body stops the transmission of the message. In Ezekiel, the prophet’s body must be forcibly picked up and moved to perform its prophetic functions; it is not enough to receive the message at a distance; instead, Ezekiel must be supernaturally transported back to Jerusalem (Ezek. 8:1–3; 40:1–3). The LongPen’s promise of writing at a distance is a promise haunted by the possibility of failure, a failure that is bound up with the limitations and mutability of bodies. The body is a recurring obstacle to transmitting the message.

T HE FUTURE LIBRARY PROJECT Atwood’s second engagement with writing to explore alongside the Bible is her involvement in Future Library.37 Future Library is an art project conceived of by Scottish artist Katie Paterson and located in Norway, in the Nordmarka forest north of Oslo. The project, which begun in 2014, will last one hundred years. Every year, an author creates a new piece of written work, which is donated to the Library. The work is kept secret from the public, though names and titles of the texts are made public. The works themselves are stored in a special room in the New Public library in Oslo. Collectors can purchase a 34 Burkeman, “Atwood Sign of the Times Draws Blank.” 35 Atwood, “The Ballad of the LongPen (TM).” 36 York, Margaret

Atwood and the Labor of Literary Celebrity, p. 157. Library 2014–2114: Information, available at: https://www.futurelibrary.no/#/information. 37 See Future

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print, designed by Paterson, that doubles as a certificate entitling the owner to a full set of the 100 books, printed on trees from the library, when the project is complete in 2114. Atwood was the first author to participate in Future Library; she contributed a story entitled “Scribbler Moon.”38 Since then, other contributors have included David Mitchell (2015), Sjón (2016), Elif Shafak (2017), Han Kang (2018), and Karl Ove Knausgard (2019). The Future Library project is conceived as a project about imagination and time,39 one that riffs on questions of the archive, the library, and the canon. There are also clear parallels to biblical literature, where lost books and delayed and misdirected messages appear with some regularity. One obvious example is the book of the law discovered in the temple by Hilkiah the priest, during the reign of Josiah. Upon hearing of its discovery, Josiah tears his clothes and then sends the book, along with a bevy of secretaries, to the prophetess Huldah for interpretation (2 Kgs. 22:1–11). The message contained within them is nothing else but “the book of the law” (2 Kgs. 22:9) rediscovered just in time to usher in new religious reforms. The text can at last be read, the message interpreted. Elsewhere, I have argued that this story is about the danger that attends narratives of “found books” (in the Hebrew Bible as in the fictions of Lovecraft and Borges).40 Now I want to direct attention to the structure of delay – the crucial detail between the writing of the book and the reading and receiving of its message. Indeed, a similar structure of delay attends multiple scenes of prophecy and the transmission of prophetic messages. When Moses receives the Torah – the single most important scene of prophetic transmission in the Hebrew Bible – there is a temporal delay between Moses’ receipt of the message and his transmission of it to the people. Indeed, this delay is long enough that the people begin worshipping the golden calf (Exod. 32). The message transmitted to Moses likewise must be written twice, at least in case of the Ten Commandments, which are twice transcribed by the divine finger. So too with Atwood’s Future Library story: the

38 Flood, “Into the Woods.” 39 Flood, “Into the Woods.” 40 Graybill, The

Eldritch Scroll.

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text, once written, must be re-written (that is, reprinted) to be readable by the public. There is no LongPen style fidelity here, but rather a repetition stretched over a lengthy interval. For Atwood, this delay is understood positively, in several ways. First, it represents a faith in the future: When asked to participate, Atwood remarked to Paterson, “You, at least, believe that the human race will still be around in a hundred years!”41 In a piece reflecting on the project, she describes it as a sort of time travel: It is also a tribute to the written word, the material basis for the transmission of words through time – in this case, paper – and a proposal of writing itself as a time capsule, since the author who marks the words down and the receiver of those words – the reader – are always separated by time… I picture this encounter – between my text and the so-far non-existent reader – as being a little like the red-painted handprint I once saw on the wall of a Mexican cave that had been sealed for over three centuries. Who now can decipher its exact meaning? But its general meaning was universal: any human being could read it. It said: Greetings. I was here.42

This reflection points to the second cause of optimism that Atwood finds in Future Library: the way that it makes possible a kind of purified encounter between writer and reader, without the complicating factor of the writer’s existence beyond the text. Atwood’s reflections here echo her earlier discussion in Negotiating with the Dead of writing as the traces left by an invisible hand (consider, again, the LongPen): The writer communicates through the page. The reader also communicates with the page. The writer and the reader communicate only through the page… Pay no attention to the facsimiles of the

Margaret Atwood in Katie Paterson, Margaret Atwood, and Lars Bang Larsen in conversation, Copenhagen, August 2014, quoted in Larsen, “Astronomy Domine,” p. 3. 42 Atwood, “Future Library,” pp. 1–2. 41

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RHIANNON GRAYBILL writer that appear on talk shows… they ought not to have anything to do with what goes on between you, the reader, and the page you are reading, where an invisible hand has left you some marks to decipher (ND, pp. 125–36).43

Future Library makes possible an encounter between writer and reader that is not contaminated by the writer’s real life existence. In this way, the delay of Future Library offers a superior iteration of the fantasy of perfect transmission that the LongPen represents. While the LongPen seeks to transmit the message via an exact replica of what is written, Future Library uses time to ensure a transmission that is immune from the interfering effects of the body (whether of the writer, or of others). Even more than the LongPen, Future Library stages the fantasy of the invisible hand. The structure of delay that the Future Library project enforces has also attracted attention from theorists and critics. Lars Bang Larsen associates the project with Gustav Metzger’s notion of “autodestructive art,” that is, “an art work with built-in obsolescence [that] uncouples the art concept from eternity and makes space for future event.”44 Of Future Library artist Katie Paterson, he reflects, She is, after all, growing a forest with a view to chopping it down for the purpose of printing the future Future Library anthology. Apart from this long ecological feedback loop, Future Library’s chronopolitics of delay can be productively considered together with Metzger’s idea of auto-destructive art; its frustration of experience as a gap rather than a fullness, and in general the bestowing of a gift on the future as a kind of potlatch – a gift that cannot be equalled or reciprocated.45

A library of books that cannot be read (yet) presents an ongoing struggle between utopianism and frustration. In one sense, this is a literalization of the unreadable sealed book of Isaiah 29:11–12. Someone will be able to read the book – someone is indeed reading the words of Isaiah – but this space of meaning is deferred to a moment after prophecy. 43 See also discussion in Wolframe, “Inventing Interventions,” p. 25. 44 Metzger quoted in Larsen, “The Manuscripts Stored in Oslo,” p. 2. 45 Larsen, “The Manuscripts Stored in Oslo,” p. 3.

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Lisa Le Feuvre writes of time in relation to Future Library: “All artworks are events because they exist in time, but that time can contract and stretch in many ways. Once an event is over it becomes fiction, it becomes written into history. Before that it is resistant, it is unreasonable.”46 The chronopolitics of Future Library, I suggest, bear striking similarities to those of prophecy, and of writing in prophecy. Prophetic time contracts and stretches; it is of the moment and outside of it. Within this resistant, unreasonable time, books and texts have a peculiar status. They are sticky things, resisting even the refusal of knowledge. Like Atwood’s handprint in the cave, they offer a universal meaning that also resists any further specificity: “Greetings. I was here.” Future Library, and “Scribbler Moon” along with it, reveal the anti-apocalyptic counter-impulse of the apocalyptic books of prophecy. Future Library thus highlights the temporal delay of writing that surrounds so many books in biblical prophecy, as well as in the formation of those books. In doing so, it adds another dimension to the basic insight of books in the Hebrew prophetic texts: at least sometimes, writing endures. Closed books may someday be opened, even if the bodies that open these books are not our own (for, as Future Library also makes clear, writing is not just embodied, it is implicated in bodies beyond our own). The people of Isaiah 29 cannot read, or even open the book before them. But in Isa. 34:16, the book of Yahweh is read aloud. In Dan. 7:10, “The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened”; in Dan. 10:21, the “book of truth” is interpreted to Daniel. The book of Revelation is in many ways a book about opening books. If the Future Library project is an anti-apocalyptic prophecy for the Anthropocene, with Scribbler Moon as its first prophetic text, then prophecy is sometimes a Scribbler Moon of its own.

N EGOTIATING WRITING WITH ATWOOD This essay began with five features of writing in biblical prophecy: writing endures, writing enacts, writing is secret, writing is embodied, and writing traffics in and with other worlds. Returning to the scenes of prophecy and writing with the LongPen and Future Library, we

46 Le Feuvre, “The Time of an Artwork,” p. 6.

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find that these basic principles are pushed and transformed in multiple ways. In the Hebrew Bible, writing is often used to mark that which endures. Writing as a practice of endurance figures in different ways in the LongPen and Future Library. The LongPen produces a legally binding signature; like Yahweh’s finger etching the tablets, it collapses distance to create permanent covenants. In Future Library, the written word persists, but in secret. It is the endurance of the archive itself that is the most visible and significant gesture. The biblical parallel here is above all to the canon, the collection of texts that persists and, in persisting, serves as a practice of memory. Biblical writing also enacts and effects. Frequently in the Prophets, to write is to bring something into being. The world may be created by speech in Genesis 1; disaster, however, is also frequently written into existence, whether in the words on the scrolls in Ezekiel and Zechariah, the writing of texts of judgment, or the performative writing that forms a part of many prophetic sign acts. And when a sealed book is opened, trouble is likely to follow. The LongPen assumes a similar enacting function when the texts it writes are contractual – I can legally bind myself in all kinds of ways using a LongPen. But it also foregrounds writing as such as a technology with real-life effects. The LongPen thus connects a subset of biblical references from the much larger field of “writings about writing” by drawing attention to the technologies and ideologies of transmission they describe or assume. Second, thinking with the LongPen directs us to think about writing as a practice of transmission – not simply a practice of commemoration or effective magic, not simply a structure of knowledge or a trace of the body. Writing is also a technology. Biblical writing is likewise bound up with secrecy. Secret texts abound; unreadable words appear; meaning is promised and denied. We find a parallel to such secret writing not in the transparent-at-adistance LongPen, but in Future Library. The texts exist to be read, but not by us. As with the Bible’s many secret books, so too with the stories awaiting future readers in the Future Library. Writing also engages and implicates the body. As in Kafka’s punishment machine, bodies in the Bible present surfaces to be inscribed and written on; these practices of writing are also practices of truth. Bodies may even become signs, as with the symbolic children of the

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prophets, or the prophets themselves. At other points, the body is reduced to its most deictic appendage, the hand, whether the hand of heavenly messenger directing Ezekiel in which direction to look, or the hand of Yahweh itself appearing to write words and letters. The LongPen materializes this hand-at-a-distance, offering a technological extension of the body that is unhindered by space or distance. Atwood imagines a similar encounter with the hand in describing the Future Library, as we have seen. In the case of Future Library, the project also challenges us to think of bodies beyond our own – the bodies of trees, being grown to make into paper; the bodies of future humans, not yet born, that will someday read the stories that are forbidden to us. Finally, writing invents and opens other worlds. This is as true of biblical writing as it is of Atwood’s fiction and poetry – and, indeed, literature more broadly. And it is true of Atwood’s material engagements with writing as well. The LongPen is embodied; it is legally binding (and thus can perform action at a distance); it brings together distant worlds. Future Library is also a project about other worlds – including, but not exclusively the future. Its writing is secret; its writing will (we hope) endure a hundred years, until the time when it can at last be read. Atwood’s explorations in writing and futurity are beginning to look very biblically prophetic. And biblical prophecy is beginning to look rather Atwoodian – not The Handmaid’s Tale, not God’s Gardeners, but a hand writing at a distance, and young trees growing in a Norwegian wood. The LongPen and Future Library are also in important ways opposite to each other. Where the LongPen collapses distance by merging a single body with technology – the hand signing a distant book or writing on a distant wall – Future Library insists on distance both spatial and temporal. The books in the library will be read, but not by us. Atwood remarks, “Those who will read my work are a hundred years into the future. Their parents aren’t yet born, nor, in all likelihood, are their grandparents.” Where the LongPen creates immediacy, Future Library insists on distance. What the two projects share is a faith in writing, and the possibility of a true transmission. This is obvious in the case of the LongPen, which is designed to reproduce identically at a distance. But it is also a part of the Future Library project, at least for Atwood. In

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reflecting on the project, she writes, “all writing is a method of preserving and transmitting the human voice.” In contrast to the skepticism toward writing that figures in much of her fiction, both Future Library and the LongPen hold out the possibility that the message may be received. A message technologically mediated, deferred, delayed, and displaced – but a message nonetheless. To write is not just to negotiate with the dead, but with writing itself. And it is not we the living, but some future generation that may hope to read the sealed text: After all, the book is not for us; it is, instead, “for the time to come” (Isa. 30:8). And it is written by a disembodied hand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011. ―. “The Ballad of the LongPen (TM).” The Guardian, 29 September 2006, sec. Books. https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2006/sep/30/margaretatwood. ―. The Blind Assassin. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. ―. Cat’s Eye. New York: Little, Brown Book Group, 2009. ―. “Future Library.” Future Library: News and Media. 2014. https://assets.ctfassets.net/9sa97ciu3rb2/2hdAyLQYmESc0eYemIEcm2/09772ac1c62defc7ccf50fe6ea207a83/Margaret_Atwood.pdf Accessed May 3, 2019. ―. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. ―. The Handmaid’s Tale (Audible Audio Edition). Performed by Claire Danes. Audible Studios, 2013. ―. Lady Oracle. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. ―. MaddAddam. New York: Random House, 2013. ―. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ―. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. ―. The Robber Bride. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. ―. The Year of the Flood. New York: Anchor Book, 2010.

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Beals, Kurt. Wireless Dada: Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde. Northwestern University Press, 2019. Bloomberg. “Syngrafii Corp.: Private Company Information.” Accessed April 18, 2019. https://www.bloomberg.com/research/ stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=228772305. Britt, Brian. “Davidmachine.” The Bible and Critical Theory 6.2 (2011). Broida, Marian. “Textualizing Divination: The Writing on the Wall in Daniel 5:25.” Vetus Testamentum 62.1 (2012): 1–13. Burkeman, Oliver. “Atwood Sign of the Times Draws Blank.” The Guardian, March 6, 2006, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/06/topstories3.books. Christensen, Bill. “Long-Distance Pen Devised by Author Margaret Atwood,” Live Science, 21 February 2006, https://www.livescience.com/7046–long-distance-pen-devised-author-margaret-atwood.html. Accessed May 3, 2019. CTV.ca News Staff. “Black Uses Atwood’s LongPen at Virtual Book Signing.” CTV News, 15 October 2007. https://www.ctvnews. ca/black-uses-atwood-s-longpen-at-virtual-book-signing-1.260287. Accessed May 3, 2019. Davidson, Arnold E., and Cathy N. Davidson. “Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: The Artist as Escapist and Seer.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 3.2 (1978). Flood, Alison. “Into the Woods: Margaret Atwood Reveals Her Future Library Book, Scribbler Moon,” The Guardian, May 27, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/27/margaret-atwood-scribbler-moon-future-library-norway-katie-paterson. Gernsback, Hugo. Ralph 124c 41 +. Mansfield, CT: Marino Publishing, 2014 [1911]. Graybill, Rhiannon. “The Eldritch Scroll: Fantasies of the Found Book in Borges, Lovecraft, and 2 Kings.” Pages 38–53 in Borges and the Bible. Edited by Richard G. Walsh and Jay Twomey. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015.

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―. “When Bodies Meet: Fraught Companionship and Entangled Embodiment in Jeremiah 36.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 86.4 (2018): 1046–1071. Greenberger, Alex. “Sotheby’s: Self-Destructing Banksy Piece Officially Sold, Is Now a ‘Newly Completed Work.’” Art News, October 11, 2018. http://www.artnews.com/2018/10/11/sothebysself-destructing-banksy-piece-officially-sold-now-newly-completed-work/. Kaufman, Joanne. “A Book Signing With the Author a World Away.” The New York Times. New York, 17 December 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/business/media/17pen. html. Accessed May 3, 2019. Kruger, Diane M. “The LongPen™ – The World’s First Original Remote Signing Device*.” Journal of Forensic Sciences 55, no. 3 (2010): 795–800. Larsen, Lars Bang. “Astronomy Domine - Cosmological Squeeze in Katie Paterson’s Wwork.” 2016. Future Library: News and Media. https://assets.ctfassets.net/9sa97ciu3rb2/4172TGl3mMa6iEEuY2AcQQ/0980d11819a5ed432009d4d545942313/Lars_Bang _Larsen.pdf Accessed May 2, 2019. Larsen, Lars Bang. “The Manuscripts Stored in Oslo.” Future Library: News and Media. 2017. Accessed May 3, 2019. https://assets.ctfassets.net/9sa97ciu3rb2/taYrxz0CaGWkMuws2UEGs/ 11e3ffbb41faac94e6b4eeeda80a2967/Katie_Paterson_Lars_Bang _Larsen_essay2017.pdf Le Feuvre, Lisa. “The Time of an Artwork.” Future Library: News and Media. 2015. https://assets.ctfassets.net/9sa97ciu3rb2/3qVprLHsRWSsoUE4WEYIEu/15b83c56ba86c60a7bf2022a1bd5e445/Lisa_Le_Feuvre.pdf. Accessed May 3, 2019. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge, 2001. Mead, Rebecca. “Margaret Atwood’s Grimly Relevant Additions to the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Audiobook | The New Yorker.” The New Yorker, April 13, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-

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turner/margaret-atwoods-grimly-relevant-additions-to-the-handmaids-tale-audiobook. ―, “Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia | The New Yorker,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/17/margaret-atwood-the-prophetof-dystopia. Metzger, Gustav. Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive Art. London: Coracle @workfortheeyetodo, 1996. Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angos, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1968), 127–140 Scalise, Pamela J. “Scrolling through Jeremiah: Written Documents as a Reader’s Guide to the Book of Jeremiah,” Review & Expositor 101 (Spring 2004): 201–25. Syngrafii Inc. “Emitac Enterprise Solutions Partners with Syngrafii Inc. – Syngrafii Inc.,” 2019. https://www.syngrafii.com/news/ emitac-enterprise-solutions-partners-with-syngrafii-inc/. ―. “Signature Use Cases – Syngrafii Inc.,” n.d. https://www. syngrafii.com/signature-use-cases/. ―. “Syngrafii Digital PaperTM Transforms Remote Global Transactions,” 12 March 2014. https://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/ 03/prweb11658992.htm. Wilson, Sharon R. “Margaret Atwood and the Fairy Tale: Postmodern Revisioning through Recent Texts.” Pages 98–119 in Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale. Edited by Stephen Benson. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Wolframe, Phebe Ann. “Invented Interventions: Atwood’s Apparatuses of Self-Extension and Celebrity Control.” Margaret Atwood Studies 2, no. 1 (2008): 13–28, 15. York, Lorraine. Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

ARCANE ENERGY: AN AFTERWORD ON THE BIBLE AND THE TESTAMENTS PETER J. SABO AND RHIANNON GRAYBILL In The Testaments (2019), Margaret Atwood returns to Gilead, the dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale. It would be wrong to say she returns to the Bible for, as we have seen, she never really leaves it. Indeed, many of Atwood’s favorite biblical passages and images recur in The Testaments. Some of these biblical quotations and allusions are continuations of what is discussed in The Handmaid’s Tale; others are variations of what is discussed in other works. There are also a few new additions to the Atwoodian biblical canon, displaying how Atwood is still steeped in biblical study. Indeed, though it may “brood in the darkness,” the Bible is still glowing with “arcane energy” (Test., p. 35) in Atwood’s most recent work. The Testaments begins about fifteen years or so after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale and is narrated by three different characters: Aunt Lydia, a young woman raised in Gilead named Agnes, and a Canadian teenager named Nicole (also known as Daisy). Aunt Lydia is perhaps the most surprising of these narrators, as she is the infamous head of the Aunts in The Handmaid’s Tale who is particularly brutal in her treatment of the Handmaids and unrelenting in her attempts at indoctrination. The surprise twist is that Aunt Lydia is secretly writing an anti-Gilead manuscript and is seeking to bring down the republic. The other two narrators are young women, eventually revealed to be sisters. Raised in an upper-class Gilead household, Agnes attends a girls’ school and is being groomed for marriage to a Commander. 409

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Her narration, framed as “Transcript of Witness Testimony 369A” (Test., p. 9), provides a window into what it was like to grow up in Gilead, as she grew up in the theocratic republic and has no experience of what life was like before it. Agnes describes her experience by focusing on her relationship with two school friends, Becka and Shunammite. Agnes and Becka become Aunts in order to avoid marriage, while Shunammite ends up marrying the dreaded Commander Judd, whom Agnes was supposed to marry. “Transcript of Witness Testimony 369B” (Test., p. 39) comes from Daisy, who is living in Canada and attending high school at the beginning of the events of The Testaments. When her parents are murdered, she discovers they were not really her parents at all, and that her true identity is none other than the famous “Baby Nicole” – a Gilead baby smuggled into Canada by her Handmaid mother.1 She is recruited by Mayday (a secret resistance group) to infiltrate Gilead and bring back documents that will reveal what is truly happening there. The stories are slowly woven together, as it is revealed that Aunt Lydia is working with Mayday, and that Nicole and Agnes are integral parts of her plan. Nicole’s mission requires her to bring back the incriminating documents to Canada by posing as a “Pearl Girl” – the name given to Gilead’s female missionaries, after the Parable of the Pearl of Great Price (Matt 13:45–46).2 Agnes is her companion on this journey, specifically recruited by Aunt Lydia because she is the halfsister of Nicole. Unlike the ambiguous ending of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments concludes with both resolution and optimism, as Nicole and Agnes successfully bring back the documents to Canada. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments ends with an epilogue set at an academic conference for Gilead Studies. While this conclusion

Atwood adopts this plot point from the Hulu television series and its expansion on the original novel (the focus of season 1 of the series). 2 A related biblical reference in The Testaments is the “Rubies Premarital Preparatory School.” This school gets its name from the poem of the ideal woman/wife that ends the book of Proverbs: “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies” (Prov 31:10, KJV). In addition, the Pearl of Great Price is also the name of a canonical text for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1

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seemingly parallels The Handmaid’s Tale by casting doubt on the veracity and reliability of the three testaments, it remains distinctly more hopeful in the power of the word/Word. Given that it is based on the biblically inspired nightmare of The Handmaid’s Tale’s Gilead, The Testaments is full of scriptural references. Many of these references come from Atwood’s preferred biblical canon. Right away, for example, we find a comment on Eve: “Forbidden things are open to the imagination. That was why Eve ate the Apple of Knowledge…too much imagination” (Test., p. 15). Later in the book, Commander Judd expresses an alternative opinion about Eve as he warns Aunt Lydia of the perils of failure: “So many regimes have done things badly. So unpleasantly, so wastefully! If you fail, you will fail all women. As Eve did” (Test., p. 176). One might also have expected Atwood to reference “Eve’s curse” when Agnes discusses the experience of menstruation in adolescence (see, for instance, AG, p. 196; RB, p. 155, and CE, p. 123). But though Agnes does not explicitly make this connection – and simply speaks of the frustration that it is “God’s plan” that things are this way – she does offer a reflection on menstruation, blood and the Bible that parallels passages in Atwood’s other work: Why couldn’t God have arranged it otherwise? But he had a special interest in blood, which we knew about from Scripture verses that had been read out to us: blood, purification, more blood, more purification, blood shed to purify the impure, though you weren’t supposed to get it on your hands. Blood was polluting, especially when it came out of girls, but God once liked having it spilled on his altars. Though he had given that up – said Aunt Estée – in favour of fruits, vegetables, silent suffering, and good deeds. (Test., pp. 82–83)3

3 Compare to the following passage from The

Robber Bride:

[T]he Bible is full of meat: animals being sacrificed, lambs, bullocks, doves. Cain was right to offer up the vegetables, God was wrong to refuse them. And there’s too much blood: People in the Bible are always having their blood spilled, blood on their hands, their blood licked up by dogs. There are too many slaughters, too much suffering, too much tears. (p. 63)

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This quote demonstrates another common Atwoodian pattern of drawing attention to the patriarchal ideology of the Bible (not to mention biblical religions). Aunt Lydia exemplifies this with her rumination on how “the ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman” (Test., p. 173). Similarly, Agnes’s experiment of “praying to a woman” (here the woman is Aunt Lydia) instead of a male God (Test., p. 86) echoes Elaine’s decision in Cat’s Eye to pray to the Virgin Mary instead of God the father for feminine guidance (CE, p. 246). Many of the biblical allusions from The Handmaid’s Tale are further played upon in this sequel. 1 Corinthians 13:13 contains Paul’s famous praise of “faith, hope, and love,” which Offred contemplates as she considers the pillows in her small room, as well as the absence of “love” in Gilead. In The Testaments, this same verse is one of the passages that Agnes practices copying as she learns to write (Test., p. 298) – though Agnes learns the King James Version, where “love” is translated “charity.”4 Similarly, Nicole is given a tattoo that crosses “God” with “Love” (Test., p. 204), which recalls Offred’s rumination on “God is love” (1 Jhn 4:8,16) in The Handmaid’s Tale (HT, p. 282). One of the Aunts notices Nicole’s tattoo while she is in Gilead and comments, “Really! God and Love! As if we could be taken in by such a crude attempt to curry favour! And such heretical theology!” (Test., p. 314). The Testaments also literalizes one of the most famous (and oftquoted) lines from The Handmaid’s Tale: “The Bible is kept locked up, the way people once kept tea locked up, so the servants wouldn’t steal it. It is an incendiary device: who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it?” (HT, p. 87). In The Testaments, too, the Bible is kept under literal lock and key, in special Bible boxes. Early in the novel, Aunt Lydia talks about walking “through the Reading room, for which a higher authorization is required and where the Bibles brood in the darkness of their locked boxes, glowing with arcane energy” (Test., p. 35). That there seems to be a specific Bible reserved for each Aunt – rather than, for example, a single shared copy – points to the specialness of the book, as both text and object. But Atwood

As we have noted in the introduction, moreover, 1 Corinthians 13 is one of the most common biblical passages in Atwood’s work (it is, for example, of central importance in Alias Grace). 4

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does not stop there. Instead, it is “getting [their] hands on it” – in this case, the apprentice Aunts, Becka and Agnes, that leads to losing their faith in Gilead, and ultimately, to Gilead’s fall. Becka becomes an Aunt before Agnes, and is thus given access to the Bible before her as well. Consequently, she tries to warn Agnes that actually reading the Bible (as opposed to hearing from others what it says) will cause her to second guess what she has been taught in Gilead, cautioning Agnes about the horrors of one biblical text in particular: The day came when the locked wooden Bible box reserved for me would be brought out to the Reading Room and I would finally open this most forbidden of books. I was very excited about it, but that morning Becka said, “I need to warn you.” “Warn me?’ I said. ‘But it’s holy.” “It doesn’t say what they say it says.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “I don’t want you to be too disappointed. She paused. “I’m sure Aunt Estée meant well.” Then she said, “Judges 19 to 21.” (Test., p. 302)

This passage – a new addition to Atwood’s working canon of biblical texts in her novels – lies at the heart of The Testaments, and is crucial in Gilead’s fall. The story, well-known to biblical scholars but also often kept, discreetly, from “ordinary” Bible readers, involves the gangrape and dismemberment of an innocent woman, the unnamed concubine of a Levite man (Judg 19:10–30). The man and concubine are lodging overnight in Gibeah, in the land of Benjamin, with a hospitable old man when the “men of the city” demand to rape the visitors. The old man offers his daughter and the concubine; one of the men pushes the concubine out, and she is raped. In the morning, the Levite finds her, cuts her body into twelve pieces, and sends one to each of the twelve tribes, who declare war on Benjamin. This gruesome story figures in The Testaments in multiple ways. Agnes and Becka first encounter it as children while at school, where it is presented as an instructional story about appropriately constrained female sexuality. Becka finds it especially upsetting but is somewhat consoled when Aunt Estée explains it to her as the story of the concubine’s “sacrifice”: “The concubine was sorry for what she

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had done, and she wanted to make amends, so she sacrificed herself to keep the kind traveler from being killed by those wicked men” (Test., p. 79). Becka, who has been sexually abused by her father, subsequently tries to kill herself to avoid marriage; she is allowed to become an Aunt instead. Thus Becka’s early plot arc is an attempt to reenact the story in Judges, as focalized by Aunt Estée’s interpretation. Upon learning to read, however, Becka finds that this interpretation does not in fact accord with what the Bible actually says. This is the beginning of her – and then of Agnes’ – loss of faith in “the Gilead kind of God” (Test., p. 294) and the Gilead mode of Bible reading. Becka warns Agnes, “‘They want God to be only one thing,’ she said. ‘They leave things out. It says in the Bible, we’re in God’s image, male and female both. You’ll see, when the Aunts let you read it’” (Test., p. 295). Of course, the seeming “equality” of genders as presented in Gen 1:26– 27 is hardly the only detail that Gilead’s male authorities “leave out.” One of the foremost of these male authorities in Gilead is Commander Judd. He first appears in the epilogue of The Handmaid’s Tale as one of the possible Commanders in whose house Offred resided. Judd is credited with devising the idea of the Particicution ceremony, reasoning that the violence and scapegoating would have beneficial effects (HT, p. 383). He also argued from the outset that “the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves” (HT, p. 383) – that is, he was a primary architect behind the formation of the Aunts. In The Testaments, he has risen the ranks of Gilead’s hierarchy and is the leader of the Eyes. He meets frequently with Aunt Lydia to discuss security strategies and to gather information about the activities of the Aunts. His defining feature, however, is that he is a Bluebeard character, as he keeps killing off his wives.5 He is, as Aunt Lydia puts it, “a great believer in the restorative powers of young women, as were King David and assorted Central American drug lords” (Test., p. 63). The mention of King David points to another biblical allusion in that he eventually marries Shunammite, Agnes’s childhood friend. The name Shunammite, at first, Bluebeard is a recurrent figure across Atwood’s work, including her short story collection Bluebeard’s Egg (1983).

5

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seems enigmatic. It is biblical, but it is based on the name of a small village named Shunem that is rarely mentioned. One key individual from Shunem, however, is Abishag.6 She is a young woman brought into David’s bedchamber when he is a shivering old man (1 Kgs 1:1–4). Her purpose was to keep the old king “warm,” as his servants presumably reasoned that her youthful and feminine presence might get his blood coursing again. Shunammite from The Testaments plays an eerily similar role for Commander Judd. Unfortunately for Shunammite, Commander Judd takes things a step beyond the biblical King David and starts poisoning her in the hopes to get yet another new young bride.7 Shunammite’s is not the only biblical name worth commenting upon in The Testaments. Interestingly, many of the names of interest come from relatively minor biblical characters. Examples include “Huldah,” a childhood friend of Agnes’s (the name of a prophetess in 2 Kgs 22:14–20); “Zillah,” one of the Marthas of Agnes’s house (the name of one of the two wives of Lamech in Gen 4:19–24); and “Tirzah,” a character in Gileadite children’s books who gets into trouble by not following the rules (the name of one of the daughters of Zelophehad in Num 26:33). Many readers may not catch these biblically inspired names, or move beyond a vague sense of recognizing them as “biblical,” but it appears Atwood is playing on many levels. Tirzah, for instance, is a character that William Blake uses to represent worldly materialism (as in his poem “To Tirzah”); this is reflected in Tirzah’s role as a rebellious youth.8 One might also note, however, that Tirzah’s role in the biblical text is that she is a woman who inherits property – something of which the women of Gilead are deprived.9 Also from Shunem is the “great woman of Shunem” in 2 Kgs 4, who is acquainted with Elisha and whose son he brings back from the dead. 7 Such behaviors are not fully foreign to David himself, who frequently disposed of his rivals through less-than-scrupulous means, including commanding the murder of Uriah. 8 See Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (p. 127). Blake combines his interpretation of the five daughters of Zelophehad as representative of the five senses with the name of a Canaanite city named Tirzah that Joshua destroys (Josh 12:24). 9 To be fair, women are given property rights in the Bible as a temporary solution to the issue of men who have no sons but only daughters. The ideal is that the next generation returns to sons being the exclusive inheritors (see Numbers 36). 6

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Both the use of Blake and the topic of biblical female property inheritance are also found in Agnes’s full name: Agnes Jemima. Agnes is associated with lambs (as in the common depiction of Saint Agnes with a lamb) and thus her mother Tabitha (herself named after a biblical figure, Acts 9:36–42) frequently recites to her from Blake’s “The Lamb” (Test., p. 19). Jemima is one of the three daughters given to Job after God made him prosperous again. These daughters are described as exceedingly beautiful and are granted inheritance along with Job’s sons (Job 42:13–15). Agnes’s mother tells her the biblical story and assures her daughter that the name Jemima is indicative of good luck – God gives Job more daughters as a gift for enduring his divine test. But Agnes later reflects on the more disturbing aspects of what these replacement daughters represent: “how could Job have allowed God to fob off a batch of new children on him and expect him to pretend the dead ones no longer matter?” (Test., p. 20). The question relates to several major themes of The Testaments, such as whether Aunt Lydia’s plan to bring down Gilead justifies the means through which she did it, or more broadly how the effects of suffering linger even after it is over. Within Agnes’s story arc, moreover, the motif of replacement siblings echoes her relationship to Becka and Nicole. In order to avoid suspicion that Nicole has escaped with Agnes, Becka must conceal herself from the rest of the Aunts. She does so by hiding in the water cistern, a sacrificial suicide that contrasts with her earlier suicide attempt done in order to avoid marriage. Becka is thus the “sister” who gives up her life in order to help Agnes and Nicole (newly discovered to be Agnes’ true sister) escape Gilead. Becka’s self-sacrifice, which leads to the successful mission of Agnes and Nicole, points to an interesting aspect of The Testaments. Though it is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments represents a significant shift in how Atwood represents both the Bible and biblical interpretation. Prior to The Testaments, Atwood’s work emphasizes the duplicitous, irrational, and unstable side of biblical interpretation: thus, Charis’ bibliomancy in The Robber Bride (RB, pp. 244–45), the recurrent image of the hand writing on the wall (Daniel 5:) in The Blind Assassin (BA, p. 373) and Payback (PB, p. 166), and the unnamed narrator of Surfacing tearing a page from the Bible

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(Surf., p. 230). 10 Even Alias Grace’s Grace comments, “The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong” (AG, p. 459). So too does Atwood return, almost obsessively, to the unreliable narrator – Grace, Offred, The Blind Assassin’s Iris, the trifecta of Roz, Tony, and Charis in The Robber Bride (haunted, as well, by the eminently unreliable and possibly dead Zenia). The list goes on. The Testaments follows The Robber Bride in sharing three narrators (Anges, Aunt Lydia, and Nicole) and teases the unreliability of Aunt Lydia’s account, via a comment made by Gilead Studies professor Prof. James Darcy Pieixoto, in a repeat performance of the academic proceedings that conclude The Handmaid’s Tale. Pieixoto reflects, What if our manuscript were devised as a trap, meant to frame its object, like the Casket Letter used to bring about the Death of Mary, Queen of Scots? Could it be that one of “Aunt Lydia’s” suspected enemies, as detailed in the Holograph itself – Aunt Elizabeth, for instance, or Aunt Vidala – resentful of Lydia’s power, craving her position, and familiar with both her handwriting and her verbal style, set out to compose this incriminating document, hoping to have it discovered by the Eyes? (Test., p. 410)11

But these suggestions, while eminently Atwoodian, are not pursued by the narrative; even Pieixoto will only admit “it is remotely possible” (Test., p. 410). In The Testaments, writing has become truth, and as in John 8:32, “the truth shall make you free” – a passage not quoted in the text, but rather embodied by it. 12 In The Testaments, writing is no 10 These passages and their significance are discussed in our introduction to this volume. 11 Of course, The Testaments, including Aunt Lydia’s holograph, is in fact written by Margaret Atwood, who has a cameo as an aunt – though an unnamed one – in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. 12 As the biblical quotes in The Testaments come from the King James version, we quote from it throughout this essay. This quote does appear elsewhere in

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longer executed by a duplicitous hand; messages are no longer purloined. Gilead’s downfall is brought about by the written word, in the form of documents smuggled out of the Republic hidden in Nicole’s arm. What is remarkable here is not the transmogrification of text, body, and meaning (after all, the Levite’s concubine becomes a twelvepart message), but rather the fact that the message works. And it does more than simply communicate its own presence (much like the handprint announcing “I was here,” which Atwood describes in relation to Future Library13). Instead, the message transmits a truth (in this case, about moral corruption), that leads to the downfall of a corrupt republic. Having learned to read the Bible correctly, Atwood’s heroines now seem able to relay the truth, even if the truth itself remains partial, ambiguous, or incomplete. Atwood’s use of the Bible in The Testaments, therefore, reflects a more optimistic (and less ambiguous) outlook, one that is shared by the novel as a whole. The famous ending of The Handmaid’s Tale has Offred stepping into the van that will take her “into the darkness, within; or else the light” (HT, p. 368). In The Testaments, Atwood wants to show that there is more light than darkness. Some of the other new additions to the Atwoodian biblical canon demonstrate this. Twice Psalm 90 is quoted with its contrast between the brevity of human life with the eternal perspective of God: “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” (Ps 90:4; Test., p. 73, 270). The emphasis seems to be that the tyranny of Gilead, as oppressive as it might be, will eventually come to an end. The rule of Gilead might appear eternally long, the

Atwood’s work. In Alias Grace, Rev. Verringer quotes it to Simon: “As our Lord says, ‘The truth shall make you free’”; Simon’s reply is skeptical: “The truth may well turn out to be stranger than we think” (AG, p. 80). Iris expresses a similar view of the truth in The Blind Assassin: “You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones” (BA, p. 478). This skepticism is largely absent in The Testaments. 13 Atwood, “Future Library,” p. 2. See also Graybill’s essay in this volume.

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Eyes of Gilead might appear to be omnipresent, but in the long run this is a blip on the timeline of history. Two other texts also appeal to this sentiment. One is the wellknown statement from Song of Songs that “Love is strong as Death” (Sgs 8:6; Test., p. 298). In The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead is likened to a society full of faith but absent of love. In The Testaments, love makes its comeback, showing that not even death (and there is plenty of death in Gilead) can fully conquer it. To complete the triad, hope is also found in The Testaments. The very cover of the book prepares the reader for this, as it replaces the red-colored cloaks of the Handmaids with bright green – a spring green that evokes hope.14 The second biblical text is from Ecclesiastes: “A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter” (Eccl. 10:20b; Test., p. 298). Along with the verse from Song of Songs it is repeated at the end of the book (Test., p. 415). The verse symbolizes the successful mission of Nicole and Agnes, and is accordingly engraved in the statue that commemorates Becka’s sacrifice.15 And Atwood’s last published novel, at least for now, poetically ends by quoting the Bible. One wonders, though, if Atwood has considered the context of the line she quotes from Ecclesiastes – not a verse, but only half of a verse. Here is the verse in its entirety: “Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter” (Eccl 10:20). Even confidential and secret thoughts might become known to those in power, the text warns. Hope has been replaced by something darker, more urgent, more threatening. Into the light, or else, the darkness? Thus, the (too) tidy conclusion to The Testaments, which seeks to bring a greater sense of closure than that offered in The Handmaid’s Tale, might be misleading. This brings us back to Judges 19, for here too Atwood stops curiously short of the end of the Judges story that provides The Testaments much of its biblical heft. The narrative in Judges does not end with the concubine’s death (Judg. 19:26–29) which Becka imitates with her own self-sacrifice. Nor does it end with the war on Benjamin 14 On the use of color, see Feldman, “Let’s Break Down the Most Mysterious

Parts of The Testaments, With a Little Help from Margaret Atwood.” 15 Becka also refers to the passage from Ecclesiastes in her final conversation with Agnes (Test., p. 357)

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(Judg. 20:1–48), echoed in the novel by the fall of Gilead (“another story – one that is still being pieced together by military historians,” Pieixoto comments. [Test., p. 412]). Instead, after the war, the Benjaminites are left without wives, as the other tribes have vowed not to intermarry (Judg 21:1–7). Their solution is mass kidnapping and rape of young women, first at Jabesh-Gilead (Judg 21:8–14), then at Shiloh (Judg 21:19–24).16 Here, it is perhaps also worth noting that the Benjaminites are the tribe named for Benjamin, one of the twelve sons of Jacob in Genesis. In Gilead, of course, the establishment of the biblical theocracy in the former United States is the work of a secretive organization known as the “Sons of Jacob.” Perhaps, like the Benjaminites of Judges, these Sons of Jacob are not yet done. In the end, and for all its biblical references, the vision of The Testaments resembles not so much the Bible as another testament: Blackbeard’s testament from the end of MaddAddam. The vision is hopeful, of a new and better world. Like Ecclesiastes, which The Testaments quotes, there is an afterward to disaster. And as The Testaments has also shown us, sometimes sequels appear and unfold in the most unexpected of times and ways.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. ―. “Future Library.” Future Library: News and Media. 2014. https://assets.ctfassets.net/9sa97ciu3rb2/2hdAyLQYmESc0eYemIEcm2/09772ac1c62defc7ccf50fe6ea207a83/Margaret_Atwood.pdf. ―. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: Seal Books, 1998 [First published 1985]. ―. MaddAddam. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

16 Nor is this second half of the story unknown to the characters in the novel:

Agnes notes “I learned the rest of the story later” when describing her first encounter with the Judges 19 (Test., p. 79); Becka tells Agnes to read “Judges 19–21,” not simply Judges 19 (Test., p. 302).

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―. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ―. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Toronto: Anansi Press, 2008. ―. Surfacing. New York: Virago, 2009 [1972]. ―. The Testaments. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2019. Feldman, Lucy. “Let’s Break Down the Most Mysterious Parts of The Testaments, With a Little Help from Margaret Atwood.” Time. Sep. 10, 2019. https://time.com/5673535/the-testaments-plotquestions-margaret-atwood/ Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.