Once Upon A Time - Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood's Writings - Sarah A. Appleton
Once Upon A Time - Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood's Writings - Sarah A. Appleton
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Sarah A. Appleton
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Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Sarah A. Appleton
Chapter One................................................................................................. 9
Myths of Distinction; Myths of Extinction in Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake
Sarah A. Appleton
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 57
“We Can’t Help but Be Modern”: The Penelopiad
Coral Ann Howells
Contributors............................................................................................. 179
Index........................................................................................................ 183
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SARAH A. APPLETON
myths and fairy tales were derived from, or give symbolic interpretation to,
initiation rites or other rites de passage—such as a metaphoric death of an
old, inadequate self in order to be reborn on a higher plane of existence.
(35)
These rites of passage, while often equated with the maturation process of
a child, also invigorate passages in adulthood, providing models of
continuing development on levels ranging from spirituality to psychology.
The prevalence of myths, legends, and fairy tales in contemporary
women’s fiction, then, signals familiar territory for readers as
remembrances from childhood reading are re-infused with adult challenges
and choices, as well as old wisdom for a new world. As Sharon Rose
Wilson contends, “A re-visioned fairy-tale sexual politics underlies
Atwood’s aesthetics and is evident from her earliest to her most recent
work, including her fiction, poetry, essays, and visual art” (“Fairy-Tale”
2 Introduction
Myths mean stories, and traditional myths mean traditional stories that
have been repeated frequently. The term doesn’t pertain to Greek myths
alone. Grimm’s Fairy Tales are just as much myth or story as anything
else” (Hammond 114).
confessed that the book she read most frequently in her lifetime was
indeed Grimm’s’ Fairy Tales (Atwood “Most” 43) and that it was “the
most influential book” she ever read (Sandler 46). In these tales there are
bloody corpses, greed, abundant immorality, and very little sugar coating.
The stepsisters of Cinderella cut off pieces of their feet and have their eyes
pecked out by birds. In some versions, Sleeping Beauty does not awaken
until after she has had children, and, unlike the blissful ending of Disney’s
The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid does not marry
the prince. Instead, she dies a lonely, if sacrificial death. Fathers sell their
daughters, mothers attempt to murder their children, and siblings often
betray each other. Likewise, in myth, the age-old idea that good always
triumphs over evil is also rarely in evidence. Dido’s soul is only freed
from agony when the goddess Iris allows her to die. Penelope, the faithful
wife, is tortured by gossip of her husband’s infidelities. Nymphs are raped,
mortals are abused by gods and goddesses at their unfathomable whim,
and earthly freedoms are granted or denied at will.1
In Jungian archetypal theory, the archetype is often split into a
positive type and a negative type. Children’s versions of myths and tales
are notorious for their rigid adherence to these binary types. Virtuous
virgins, brave princes, wicked witches, and wise old men populate the
pages, with an occasional amoral trickster thrown in. However, adult
versions, as noted above, present much more complicated characters. For
example, wise old women can perform both good and evil. The witch in
“Rapunzel” can be seen as imprisoning a young woman; however, she
may be attempting to shelter her adopted child from the evils of the world.
The fool may be the wisest of them all; Jack, of the beanstalk, manages to
enrich himself and his mother, as well as outwit and slay a supernatural
being. In the “unexpurgated” versions, the characters rarely maintain static
dimensions; they are often “doubled,” that is, they are many-layered,
multi-dimensional beings who possess both positive and negative
qualities, both good and evil dimensions.
True to the theorized original purposes of the stories, Atwood’s
narratives often serve—at least partially—as cautionary tales; however,
Atwood’s tales do not succumb to the perhaps easy wisdom of one-
dimensional fables. For instance, in The Robber Bride, Zenia is both
wicked witch and fairy godmother.2 In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred is
both temptress and virginal, and in Cat’s Eye, Elaine is victim and
victimizer. In fact, not one of Atwood’s many, many protagonists can be
characterized as either wholly moral or irredeemably immoral. Likewise,
in the adult fairy tales, the protagonists are free characters as well. These
“sinister little stories,” as Sullivan contends, contain powerful ambiguities
4 Introduction
such a magic and fear, but also princesses with “intelligence, cleverness,
and perseverance” (35-36). Atwood recalls, “The women in these stories
are not the passive zombies they would later become in the sanitized
versions” (36). The tales are indeed laced with characters that overcome
the stereotypes and generally transform into better selves. The simpleton
son outwits the ogre or witch and ends up marrying the King’s daughter;
the clever maiden accomplishes her Herculean tasks; the child escapes
unspeakable evil.
Of importance, as Wilson contends, “in fairy tales, myths, and
Atwood’s texts, transformation is not always positive; generally, at the end
of an Atwood text, transformation has just begun” (Fairy-Tale 21). In
essence, in many of the female centered fairy tales, the transformation is a
journey to and beyond the maturation process; that is, many of the tales
relate the transformations to and between maiden, mother, and crone. The
maiden’s stories center on her purity and worthiness, the mother’s positive
stories—though rare—center on the protection of her child and the
fulfillment of her mate, and her jealousy and impediment to maturity if she
is negative; and the crone’s stories tend to focus on survival and wisdom if
she is a positive type, but her depravity if she is not. Not surprisingly, the
majority of the tales relate the transformation from childhood to adult.
Snow White transforms from little girl to marriageable maiden, though her
stepmother attempts to murder her with the very accoutrements of
feminine maturation: a corset, hair combs, and finally the biblical apple—
the fruit of the tree of knowledge, in this case, adult carnal knowledge.
Many of Atwood’s heroines have failed to undergo necessary
transformations. For example, the three middle-aged protagonists of The
Robber Bride—Tony, Charis, and Roz—have not succeeded in maturing.
Tony is a perpetual child, Charis is a dreamy teenager, and Roz—the most
motherly of them—cannot move beyond the young wife/mother mode.
Likewise, Atwood’s first male protagonist, Jimmy, in Oryx and Crake, has
failed to achieve maturity. In fact, Atwood’s frequent choice to portray
inadequately integrated adult individuals is underscored by her use of
transitional narrative types such as the fairy tales, myths, and legends.
*****
The essays in this volume have been written by some of the most
influential Atwood scholars internationally, each exploring Atwood’s use
of primal, indeed archetypal, narratives to illuminate her fiction and
poetry. These essays interact with all types of such narratives, from the
Sarah A. Appleton 5
through her magical realism and her embedded fairy tale and mythic
intertexts, Atwood’s novels thus record eras in meticulous detail, ironically
erasing an objective reality as it is posited, and create verbal “photographs”
all the more magical for calling attention to their subjective ‘tints.’
Through their emerging links with the green world of nature and the great
turning cycle of the year, the characters at least temporarily find hope,
experience positive emotions, and may grow closer toward their full stature
as whole, feeling persons.
Stein finds a cyclical structure that pervades the novel, one that relies on
ancient and native myths to explain time, fertility in relationships, and
regeneration.
Theodore Sheckels’ essay, No Princes Here: Male Characters in
Margaret Atwood’s Fiction, examines a multitude of male characters from
Atwood’s novels. He posits a pattern of failed princes in the texts, finding
that these characters “play the prince in counterpoint to the distressed
woman. Or they try to.” Unlike their fairy tale equivalents, however,
Atwood’s “princes” suffer from human tendencies that may dilute their
potential mythical aspirations.
In a nice inversion, Shuli Barzilai’s essay, instead of finding the myth
within the narrative, assesses the truth within Margaret Atwood’s short
fable, “Thylacine Ragout.” Minutely researching the fate of the thylacine,
or Tasmanian tiger as well as indigenous peoples, Barzilai notes that
Atwood’s fable is rooted more in the actual dangers of extinction, than in a
simple morality tale.
In this volume’s last essay, Kathryn VanSpanckeren examines an
Atwood poem, “Half-Hanged Mary,” through its many drafts and
revisions to uncover a poetic mythmaking process. She contends that the
Sarah A. Appleton 7
Notes
1
Rosemary Sullivan, Atwood’s biographer, relates the importance of mythology to
the fledgling writer and the questions Atwood may have had in regard to the
“muse” (106-110).
2
Likewise, Madeleine Davies states that in The Blind Assassin, “Iris’s aging body
allows her to indulge in one of her favorite identities as a sinister witch or
malevolent fairy godmother” (68).
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. 2000. New York: Nan A. Talese.
—. Grimms’ Remembered” in The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales:
Responses, Reactions, Revisions, 1993. Donald Haase, ed. Detroit:
Wayne State UP. 290-292.
—. “Most Influential Book.” 12 June 1983. New York Times Magazine.
43.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance of Fairy Tales. 1975. New York: Vintage Books.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. 2004.
Westport, CT: Greenwood P.
Davies, Madeleine. “Margaret Atwood’s Female Bodies” 2006. In The
Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Coral Ann Howells, ed.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 58-71.
Hammond, Karla. “Articulating the Mute” 1990. In Margaret Atwood:
Conversations Earl G. Ingersoll, ed. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review P,
109-120.
Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. 2nd ed. 2005. Hampshire: Palgrave
MacMillan.
8 Introduction
MYTHS OF DISTINCTION;
MYTHS OF EXTINCTION
IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S ORYX AND CRAKE
SARAH A. APPLETON
there and the nothing that is.” Although such a pronouncement may
contain connotations of the devastated life of post-Paradice, Jimmy may
also be cluing us into the possibility that the world he inhabits does not, in
fact, exist; this world may only dwell in his imagination: it is the nothing
that is.2 As countless references in the text to a myriad of dystopian fiction
attest, this post-world may have been conjured by Jimmy and composed of
fragments of films, books, and video game plots.3 Moreover, the
individuals he holds responsible—Crake and Oryx—may also be mere
“shadows,” figments of his tortured mind. Indeed, Crake and Oryx may
represent portions of his own psyche: superego and id, shadow and anima,
mind and soul, thanatos, and eros.
Thomas M. Disch explains the concept of a dystopian novel:
Dystopias are balancing acts. The best are usually applauded for being
‘savagely’ satiric, after the fashion of Swift, a novel in which the author
continues to pile horror on horror to preposterous and appalling heights.
Yet they should never be so preposterous and merely phantasmagoric as to
escape the quotidian, accepted awfulness of the here and now. For their
sting is in just how snugly the shoe fits. Huxley’s beehive of hedonists in
Brave New World is simply Jazz Age America unmasked, while 1984 is
famously 1948 in disguise. (BW03)
Atwood writes that the events of the novel are indeed spawned by ideas
that are already in progress in our contemporary world. She contends that
Oryx and Crake is not science fiction (“It contains no intergalactic space
travel, no teleportation, no Martians”); the novel is a work of “speculative
fiction”—“it invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to
invent” (“Writing”).
To offer but a small sampling of the dystopian allusions replete within
the narrative, Jimmy’s sense of being watched by the corporation/
government summons up George Orwell’s 1984, and Atwood’s “pigoons”
are infused with Orwellian imagery from Animal Farm. The sexual
complacency of women in Oryx and Crake harkens to Huxley’s Brave
New World, as do certain Freudian references, particularly about
motherhood. The scientific fabrication of a sentient being has its roots in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, and Phillip
Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Ideas about the
destruction of humanity can be found in On the Beach as well as Stephen
King’s The Stand, and it is the motif of dozens of popular films and video
games. Jimmy’s portrayal of two different versions of dystopia can be seen
in Marge Piercy’s Woman at the Edge of Time, contrasting the edenic and
Sarah A. Appleton 11
the cell doors and eat up the pigoons from the inside. Mummy’s job was to
make locks for the doors” (29). Every time in the novel Jimmy shuts a
door on a part of himself, the moment is signified by the sound “whuff”
that he associates with his mother and her slammed doors. As a critical
figure who has “shut the door” on him, Jimmy’s mother cannot function
properly as his anima; thus, without compensation, Jimmy’s psyche may
become damaged as he is unable to access, in effect, his soul.
According to Jungian archetypal theory, the mother represents the
anima—the female counterpart to his psyche—in a male, which functions
as his soul; the anima is at once both an archetype and a complex. The
anima is also responsible for projections and is associated with eros. Jung
discerned that the anima is an archetype that articulates the soul and it
“mythologizes all emotional relations with [man’s] work and with people
of both sexes.” In addition, Jung claimed that an overly “constellated”
anima makes man “unadjusted” (“Concerning” 144). The character of the
individual’s anima can be ascertained as the opposition of the persona; in
other words, the anima contains all the qualities that are missing from the
man’s exterior attitudes. Jung explains: “If the persona is intellectual, the
anima will certainly be sentimental” (“Definitions” 804). Jung warns,
however, if a man ignores his anima, “the anima is inevitably projected on
a real object, with which he gets into a relation of almost total
dependence” (“Definitions” 807). If the individual fails to integrate his
anima into his consciousness, Jung predicts he may develop “resignation,
weariness, sloppiness, irresponsibility, and finally a childish [petulance]
with a tendency to alcohol” (“Syzygy” 40), conditions that apply to
Jimmy. Successful integration allows the anima to “forfeit the daemonic
power of an autonomous complex; she can no longer exercise the power of
possession, since she is depotentiated. She is no longer the guardian of
treasures unknown…” (“Mana-Personality” 374). Yet Jimmy is unable to
integrate his anima as his mother has, he feels, rejected him.
Jimmy’s distant father is symbolized by the knife with tools and
scissors he had given Jimmy as a birthday present when Jimmy was nine, a
potent Freudian symbol. Jimmy is confused about what his father expects
of him, how he is to “measure up.” He worries in regard to his father,
“There was never any standard [to measure up to]; or there was one, but it
was so cloudy and immense that nobody could see it, especially not
Jimmy. Nothing he could achieve would ever be the right idea, or
enough.” He suspects that whatever praise his father extends is “secretly
disappointed praise” (50). He fears never being able to live up to his
father’s indiscernible expectations.5
Sarah A. Appleton 13
In the psyche the father plays a paradoxical role. On the one hand he is
the superego: a regulatory instructor representing rationality, such as the
male voices Jimmy hears in his head, urging forbearance and achievement.
On the other, he is the critic, judging inadequacies and disallowing
sentiment. The father figure is also represented in the image of the mind,
the intellect. In Jimmy’s case, his father is a brilliant genographer; his
father’s strength is his rational intelligence, while Jimmy’s intelligence is
manifested in his language. The father also can represent thanatos—the
specter of death—as he is not only responsible for triggering the Oedipal
complex, but also he serves as a symbol of mortality as in myths of
regeneration and rebirth. Jimmy dismisses his father, unable to identify
with him or enact rebellion; he forfeits his archetypal role as prince who
must succeed the dying king in order to regenerate the land.
Damaged by his inability to control or remedy the tragedies in his life,
such as his mother’s abandonment and his father’s aloofness, Jimmy
concocts an elaborate fantasy means of avoiding his existential dilemma.
At first he deflects his rage at abandonment into sorrow over the loss of his
pet rakunk, Killer, the only creature he claims to love other than his
mother. And while this deflection may assuage his childhood rage, his
adult self need stronger stuff. Therefore, like Palahniuk’s protagonist,
Jimmy utilizes his subconscious, separating himself into three divisions of
his self: Crake, Oryx, and ultimately, Snowman.6
Jimmy projects the father image onto Crake; likewise he projects his
mother image onto Oryx. Both creations are materialized from the
“shadow”: the “hidden or unconscious aspects of oneself, both good and
bad, which the ego has either repressed or never recognized” (“Excerpts”).
Jung explains:
Dependence on the shadow signifies the individual who has not been able
to integrate his unconscious and consciousness.
14 Chapter One
He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a
casketful14 of secrets. Any moment now she would open herself up, reveal
to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of her life, or of his
life—the thing he was longing to know. The thing he’d always wanted.
What would it be? (315).
16 Chapter One
and the Crakers” (327); he has locked everything else out. When Jimmy
confronts the Crakers he has decided to change his name because, he
concludes in acknowledging his purpose for all of the preceding events:
“He needed to forget the past—the distant past, the immediate past, the
past in any form. He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt,
without expectations. As the Crakers did” (348-49). He is hoping to
discard the guilt represented by Oryx/mother and the expectations
represented by Crake/father.
Shortly after Jimmy has been hired by Crake to write the hype for the
BlyssPluss pill, Jimmy discovers the presence of Oryx, an extraordinary
coincidence. Crake reveals that he had devised a vision of his perfect
woman, and Oryx was delivered by the obliging Student Services of his
university. The incongruence of Crake having a lover—especially this
lover—seems to appall Jimmy, as he has fantasized about Oryx for years
and feels she belongs to him. Thus, a battle ensues: which one will
triumph and win Jimmy’s allegiance? When Jimmy asks Oryx, “You
always do what he tells you to do?” Oryx responds, “He is my boss” (313),
an answer that is disturbing to Jimmy. Oryx is accommodating, dividing
her attentions between the two;17 yet Jimmy demands all of her, cajoling
her to leave Crake. The crisis occurs when Jimmy forces the issue and
Oryx attests, “But I would never leave Crake” (321-22). Because Crake
and Oryx exist in opposition to each other—that is they harbor the
opposing characteristics of Jimmy’s psyche, they cannot exist as powerful
entities independent of each other. If Jimmy abandons Crake for Oryx,
Crake will be destroyed, and the superego cannot allow its destruction, nor
will thanatos lessen its grip. Likewise, while Jimmy is in thrall of Crake,
he submerges his need for eros and Oryx fades into oblivion, although
Oryx is weaker than Crake and does not fight as stringently for her
existence. Thus, in the end, Jimmy must destroy both. He abandons their
bodies in the airlock and ventures out of Paradice with the Crakers.
Jimmy becomes a prophet to the Crakers; he is Moses leading his
people out of slavery. While he claims to dislike his role; the Crakers
provide him with what he believes he needs. Yet, perhaps Jimmy’s
subconscious is foiling his project as the Crakers act as Jimmy’s
therapists, constantly asking him for his stories and bringing artifacts to
him to identify. The stories and objects are the means to reconnection. And
although Jimmy tells lies to the Craker children, he is nevertheless drawn
into recognitions he had hoped to once and finally avoid. In particular, the
Crakers want to know about Crake, who they consider—because of
Jimmy’s lie—to be a God. Therefore, Jimmy finds himself in an
ambiguous position. He has killed Crake; he has attempted to permanently
18 Chapter One
to join with Oryx (id), Crake responded by killing Oryx and manipulating
Jimmy to kill him, yet both have forewarned Jimmy that they might not be
around to take care of the Crakers, a sign that Jimmy has already decided
to banish them. Tellingly, both Crake and Oryx were then entombed in the
glass air lock, capable of being seen but not touched, conjuring
associations to Snow White’s glass coffin. And as readers know, Snow
White is not really dead, just incapacitated. Snow White needs to “move”
forward in order to breathe again. And, Jimmy cannot survive missing
large portions of his psyche; he must return and reconnect his selves.
Jimmy’s return to Paradice reads like the plot of a video quest game of
his childhood, as well as a journey into his own mind: Jimmy must
traverse the “No Man’s Land”—a place where there is nowhere to hide,
and travel through the blasted wall, a reference to the walls that Jimmy has
erected around himself. He “rejuvenates” himself at a house that is
certainly symbolic of his childhood homes, and the psychological
connotations of this action are intensified as Jimmy feels as if “someone—
someone like him—is lying in wait, around some corner, behind some
half-opened door” (229). One of the vistas that awaits him is the remains
of the dead parents; another is a view of himself in a mirror where he sees
a “stranger.” He asks, finally, “Why does he have the feeling that it’s his
own house he has broken into? His own house from twenty-five years ago,
himself the missing child?” (233). Thus he indicates that he is in the initial
stages of reintegrating his psyche.
Threatened by the ferocious pigoons that, tellingly, contain human
DNA, Jimmy takes shelter from a tornado in the checkpoint gatehouse. A
psychological analysis of these circumstances might suggest that Jimmy,
on his was to recovering, finds several obstacles in his way, obstacles that
he most certainly has created. It is a test of Jimmy’s will, then, by the
strength of the obstacles and his own tenacity in overcoming them. In fact,
after Jimmy leaves the checkpoint onto the ramparts, the reader is
suddenly confronted with an inexplicable wound on Jimmy’s foot.
Remarkably, this cut has materialized just after Jimmy has heard voices on
a CB radio; a radio that Jimmy conveniently (to his state of reality) forgets
to bring along with him. The text implies that Jimmy has stepped on the
broken glass of a Bourbon bottle, but the incident itself is suspiciously
absent from the narrative. It may be that Jimmy, having overcome one
seemingly impossible hurdle by escaping the pigoons has found himself
dangerously close to success, as evidenced by his possibility of contact
with humans; thus, he needs a possible “out” in case he changes his
mind—say, a wounded foot.
20 Chapter One
Finally, at the heart of his quest lies the treasure he has been seeking,
the “vulturized” corpses of his psyche, entombed within the Paradice
dome. The dome itself resembles an egg that filters and breathes, a potent
Atwood symbol. Moreover, Jimmy has already offered a subliminal image
of the dome: “for every pair of lovers there was a dejected onlooker, the
one excluded. Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see
the two inside it, but you couldn’t get in there yourself” (165). From the
aspects of psychoanalysis, Jimmy’s return is the inverse of his escape from
Paradice and he, in fact, is able to “get in there.”
His return to the Crakers elicits revelations. The community, while it
still cares for him, no longer needs him; an effigy suffices in his absence.
The people have grown beyond their naiveté and are manifesting signs that
are distinctly human; for example, Abraham has assumed leadership
capabilities. Jimmy seems to have come to some conclusion as he
recognizes, when the Crakers dismantle the “idol” and return the pieces of
its construction to where they found them, “after a thing has been used, it
must be given back to its place of origin” (363). In conjunction, after
Jimmy has used these images and fantasies to sustain himself, he must
return them to their rightful place: his subconscious. Watching them return
the pieces, he feels “It’s as if he himself has been torn apart and scattered”
(363). The reader may surmise that the false Jimmy is being dismantled,
leaving the “real” man behind. It is possible that this action symbolizes the
death of “Snowman.”
That Jimmy also no longer needs the Crakers is evident in the “timely”
disclosure that other “humans” have been seen by the Crakers. Jimmy is
compelled to find these others, although he does not acknowledge—even
to himself—what he plans to do at this confrontation. Before he leaves the
Crakers, he tries to come up with “a few words to remember,” but nothing
practical will work, especially if he is planning on facing reality, which
entails consigning the race back to his psyche where it belongs. Jimmy
settles on “Crake is watching you” and “Oryx loves you,” a mantra to his
newly restored sensibility. This mantra serves to remind Jimmy of his need
to accept all that Crake and Oryx symbolize, as well as his acceptance of
himself, in the form of the Crakers. That he has resolved to become whole
again is evident after he plans what he will say to the Crakers: “Then his
eyes close and he feels himself being lifted gently, carried, lifted again,
carried again, held” (367).
The novel ends as he prepares his approach. The day of his new
journey begins with almost the same words of the novel’s opening chapter,
but the tone is changed. “He pees on the grasshoppers, watching with
nostalgia as they whirr away. Already this routine of his is entering the
Sarah A. Appleton 21
past, like a lover seen from a train window, waving goodbye, pulled
inexorably back, in space, in time, so quickly” (372). Yet he is also
anxious: “He is not ready for this. He’s not well. He’s frightened” (372).
The novel ends with Jimmy poised on the brink of his decision: will he
or won’t he rejoin humanity? This conundrum of the open ending of the
novel, however, is less of the “lady or the tiger?” dilemma than an
acknowledgment that Jimmy has reached crisis in his integration: Is
Jimmy ready for the real world? The answer appears to be “Yes,” in spite
of his worries; he has already placed his feet in the footprints of his own
kind.
Jimmy as Snowman asks himself,
When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks;
after having ditched its old traveling companions, the mind and the soul,
for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a
puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the
other two astray. It must have gotten tired of the soul’s constant nagging
and whining, and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind,
distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its
fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there
somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy
lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped
culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays.
Sublimation, all of it: nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why
not cut to the chase? (85)
Notes
1
Grace Marks from Alias Grace and Iris from The Blind Assassin are just two of
these narrators.
2
Yet Jimmy admits his ambivalence when, justifying his creation of a new
“orthodoxy” for the Crakers; he allows: “he couldn’t stand to be nothing, to know
himself to be nothing” (104).
3
Several times during his narration, Jimmy consciously revises his text. For
example, when attempting to identify one of the voices in his head, he concludes,
“Some tart he once bought. Revision, professional sex-skills expert” (11).
4
Jimmy is not completely blind to his damaged sense of reality. When
contemplating the voices in his head, he says, “He hates these echoes. Saints used
to hear them, crazed lice-infested hermits in their caves and deserts,” an apt
description of himself (11).
5
However, one of the objects Jimmy ultimately retrieves from the Paradice dome
is “one of those knives with the scissors,” a “lost” object (357).
22 Chapter One
6
In The Robber Bride, Zenia is also an entity that is conjured up out of the psyches
of the protagonist.
7
Crake has chosen his own name an extinct bird; Jimmy’s codename, also chosen
by Crake, is “Thickney,” another extinct bird that “used to hang around
cemeteries,” a reference to thanatos (81).
8
Yet Jimmy wonders when these “logical, adult conversations” could have taken
place as he never “witnessed the two of them having such a conversation” (69).
9
Jimmy, when asked by the Craker children to tell them about when Crake was
born, tellingly responds, “Crake was never born.” He adds, “He came down out of
the sky, like thunder” (104).
10
In fact, it is difficult to ascertain exactly whose voice is represented in the
italicized female voices. While some of it “sounds” like Oryx, some also sounds
like Ramona and Jimmy’s girlfriends and female teachers—or even Jimmy’s
mother. As the anima represents all females, however, the inability to authenticate
the voices as only the voice of Oryx makes sense.
11
Oryx echoes Jimmy’s mother in numerous places in the text. For example, when
she tells Jimmy that he doesn’t have “an elegant mind,” the reader is reminded of
Jimmy’s mother’s relaying that she believes that Crake is “intellectually
honourable,” and implication that Jimmy is not (142).
12
The words that Jimmy hears in his head from his father are always: “Joke! Joke!
Don’t kill me!” words that can be construed as Oedipal in nature (247).
13
Jimmy constantly probes Oryx’s past, attempting to dredge up her pain. He asks
himself, “Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do
to dig it up?” (142).
14
“Casketful” is an interesting choice of words if Jimmy’s mother is, in fact, dead
and in a casket.
15
It could be possible that Jimmy is actually in therapy and in an extreme state of
denial.
16
It is entirely possible that these are the words she had written to him when she
left home, words that Jimmy blocked out in his anger until later in his life.
17
She explains: “Crake lives in a higher world….He lives in a world of ideas. He is
doing important things. He has no time for play. Anyway, Crake is my boss. You
are for fun” (313).
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. 2003. New York: Doubleday.
Disch, Thomas M. “The Hot Zone.” 27 April 2003Washington Post 27,
BW3.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Collected Works. 1968. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. 20 vols.
Princeton: Princeton UP.
—. “Concerning the Archetypes and the Anima Concept,” Collected
Works 9i.
—. “Definitions,” Collected Works 6.
—. “The Mana-Personality,” Collected Works 7.
Sarah A. Appleton 23
CAROL OSBORNE
importantly, support for the behaviors and perspectives that she sees as
contemporary society’s “saving graces” (Atwood “Perfect” par. 7).
At the opening of the novel, Snowman has reluctantly assumed his
caretaking role by escorting the Crakers from the place of their “birth,” the
Paradice dome, to a more hospitable “home” (354), a location by the sea,
and he is planning a return trip to Crake’s compound to secure supplies.
As in earlier novels, in particular Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood structures
Oryx and Crake to accentuate the fluidity of time, the continual
convergence of the past and the present, and the influence of these
moments in shaping perspectives of the future. The chapters alternate
between the physical journey that Snowman takes to the Paradice dome
and his concurrent psychological journey as he pieces together fragments
of memory to form a chronological narrative of his life up to that point,
with the two time settings converging in the last few chapters. Through
these interlocking tales, Atwood explores the role of mythmaking on three
levels. First is Snowman’s therapeutic piecing together of his own story,
the classic imaginative return to the traumatic past in order to merge
conflicting parts of his psyche and move forward. On the second level,
Atwood is creating her own dystopian myth, containing both a warning
about current social trends in environmental policy, genetics, and social
programming and, through a blend of the fabulous and the realistic, a
validation of the values and customs that may be cause for optimism about
humanity’s future, even in the shadow of these threatening developments.
On the third level, as Atwood invites the reader to participate in the
storytelling process, Oryx and Crake offers an additional commentary on
the power of words, on the omnipresence of myths in our cultural mindset,
and on the inevitable pull of narrative in our desire to understand ourselves
and our world.
In the first chapter of the novel, Snowman, formerly known as Jimmy,
is depicted as living among the ruins, picking through not only the
physical fragments of an earlier time, but also recalling random quotations
from documents of the “old” world that has recently been destroyed. As a
writer, Jimmy is a lover of words, a natural storyteller, but he is also a
product of a society that has devalued the humanities and elevated the
sciences, a society in which words have lost their meaning, so he vacillates
throughout the narrative, as his impulse to relish the power of language
vies with his profound disillusionment and cynicism. In his foray to
Paradice, Crake’s compound, Snowman is intent on gathering physical
objects, the ruins of the old civilization, for his own survival, as he has
before, but more importantly, Atwood depicts this as Snowman’s
psychological journey in which he sorts through the fragments of
Carol Osborne 27
recollected lore, written materials, and past conversations; retells his own
story to himself, and consequently to the reader; and struggles to define
himself as storyteller, differentiating his role as mythmaker for the Crakers
from the role he performed as the BlyssPluss advertiser.
After the destruction of the world as he knew it, newly aware of his
own culpability in Crake’s scheme to eradicate humanity and replace
Homo sapiens with the carefully crafted Crakers, Snowman has sought to
numb himself through alcohol. He has superficially lived up to his
promise, made to both Oryx and Crake, to care for the Crakers (32-322),
but he is incapable, at the point when the narrative opens, of escaping the
prison of his own mind to interact with them significantly. The disjointed
voices from the past are distracting enough, but even more debilitating is
the perspective of the society that Snowman has internalized, the one that
cynically dismisses humanistic values. Snowman, caught between two
opposing myths, has submerged much of his own empathetic world view
and assumed society’s distrust of compassion and doubt about the benefit
or even the possibility of meaningful communion with another. Working
from this perspective, Snowman sees interactions with the Crakers, who
lack his linguistic sophistication and a common cultural frame of
reference, as more of a burden than a comfort. Snowman spends most of
his time avoiding contact, drinking to prevent himself from thinking about
the past and making decisions about the future. He finds, however, that he
cannot put a stop to the memories, nor can he release himself from the
guilt he feels for his own blind participation in Crake’s plan and the
despair he experiences in confronting his current situation. The trip to the
compound is designed, in part, to allow Snowman to continue the self-
medication, as he intends to restore his liquor supply, but it also represents
a more promising development. His desire to find a weapon to keep the
wolvogs and pigoons at bay shows that he has not succumbed totally to
despair, but is planning ahead for the protection of himself and his wards.
More importantly, the trip indicates Snowman’s willingness to confront
the past, a subconscious realization that he cannot move forward without
first dealing with the memories that plague him.
Atwood stresses Snowman’s psychological need for a narrative in
which to ground his new identity by ending the first section of the novel,
occurring in present time, with Snowman’s admonition to himself to “‘Get
a life’” (12) and beginning Chapter Two with the formula of the fairy tale:
“Once upon a time, Snowman wasn’t Snowman. Instead he was Jimmy.
He’d been a good boy then” (15). The encapsulation of Snowman’s life
story into this familiar format will allow him to establish his own personal
and cultural mythology, just as he is constructing a mythology for the
28 Chapter Two
Crakers. The end result of this constructed life story, for both the reader
and Snowman, is an increased understanding of the social forces that have
shaped him and evidence that he is beginning to emerge from his current
disillusionment, self-doubt, and resignation. Snowman’s return to the
traumatic scene in which he loses Oryx and Crake, a return that is both
physical and psychological, is the first step to his reconciling the
discordant elements that have vied within him from a young age.
In adopting the frame structure of the fairy tale, Snowman accentuates
the moral dichotomy he sees within himself. The opening statement “He
was a good boy then,” contrasts with his current perception of himself as
“abominable” (7-8), setting up what Sherrill Grace has identified as a
characteristic component of Atwood’s fiction: the protagonists’ “dynamic
process” of breaking down established polarities within society and the
self (Grace 7). It is useful to view Snowman’s tale in light of Grace’s
assertion, based on her reading of earlier texts, that
When we first view Snowman in Oryx and Crake, he is guilty of this kind
of polarized thinking, symbolized through the sunglasses he wears, in
which one lens is missing. Not only does he dwell on his own internal
division and the old society’s binary systems (science/humanities;
Compounds/pleeblands, etc.), but he also accentuates the divide between
himself and the Crakers, and suffers from the feelings of isolation and
despair that result.
The first scene of Snowman’s therapeutic narrative illustrates one
aspect of his internal divide and hints at its origin. Snowman recalls a
time, when he was five or six, that he accompanied his father to the
bonfire of diseased animals. The young Jimmy was “anxious about the
animals,” worried that their suffering was “his fault, because he’d done
nothing to rescue them” (18). Mixed with this empathetic concern for and
connection to other living creatures, though, is Jimmy’s fascination with
the spectacle, a distancing mechanism that allowed him to view the fire as
a “beautiful sight” and to wish for an explosion (18). The recollection of
the odor of burning fur causes a switch in the narrative focus, midway
through this scene, to a memory of Jimmy’s parents arguing over his
burning and cutting his own hair. Snowman notes the contrast in his
parents’ reactions, witnessing his father’s cool, rational response as he
explains to his son that the emotional vicissitudes of his mother are
characteristic of all women, who “‘always get hot under the collar’” (16).
Carol Osborne 29
Jimmy is encouraged to adopt the “tough guy” shell of his gender, but,
aware of his own internal emotions, he is left to wonder what happens
under the collars of men. This is the first of many recollected scenes from
his life in which Jimmy learns to hide his emotional sensitivity and
empathetic nature beneath a façade of cynical detachment.
Putting up walls as an emotional defense, Atwood suggests, is a
learned behavior, shaped by society and those who are given the
responsibility of communicating social expectations to children: their
parents. In the middle of his psychological journey through the past,
Snowman recognizes this defense mechanism in himself as he laments his
blindness to Crake’s plan:
There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not
willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he
had become one. He had shut things out. (184)
Long ago, in the days of knights and dragons, the kings and dukes had
lived in castles, with high walls and drawbridges and slots on the ramparts
so you could pour hot pitch on your enemies…and the Compounds were
the same idea. (28)
His mother brings the same metaphor to bear when explaining her
research, casting herself as the one who “‘makes locks for the doors,’” so
that the “‘bad microbes and viruses’” are not able to “‘eat up the pigoons
from the inside’” (29). The physical barriers represented by the walls of
the compound and the walls of the pigoons’ cells are echoed in the
psychological barriers Jimmy erects to deal with the pain of his mother’s
distance and his father’s neglect. Underneath, he is hurt by their
inattention, longing for the closeness that has been denied, but on the
surface, he uses humor and an ironic distancing to protect himself.
The patterns of behavior established in Jimmy’s interactions with his
parents are repeated in the subsequent relationships he forms during
30 Chapter Two
be this vulnerable: first, with his actual pet rakunk; second, with his
mother, whose last words, to “remember Killer” link her to this animal,
and finally with Oryx, who is holding a rakunk when Jimmy first sees her
in the flesh. Critic Stephen Dunning also notes the connection among these
relationships, arguing that the strength of Jimmy’s desire for Oryx derives
from the previous losses of his pet and his mother (97). Allowing himself
to become vulnerable by letting down his defenses with Oryx, Jimmy is
once again devastated when her death at the hands of Crake puts an end to
their intimate connection. As a result of this loss, Snowman has erected the
psychological barriers yet again, so that between the opening of the novel
and the time he begins his journey, he appears in full protective mode,
using cynical humor and word-play to distance himself emotionally from
the only beings he knows to be alive, the Crakers. He expresses the same
desire and fear he has shown previously in his relationships with women,
noting how he would like to be adored by these people, as Crake is, and
how touched he is by their generosity, but quickly covering this sensitivity
by cursing the absent Crake, containing his own emotional reaction in a
comic strip image, and admonishing himself with the internalized voice of
his father, who urges him to “stop sniveling” and be a man (161-2).
Snowman’s heightened defenses, in particular the self-deprecating
cynicism that erupts at times in response to the self-help platitudes that
play in his head, make his psychological growth during his journey to the
compound difficult to observe. For instance, his insistence that he has not
“grown as a person” from the challenging crisis he has faced, but instead
has “‘shrunk’” until his “‘brain is the size of a grape’” (237) seems to belie
the therapeutic value of his survey of the past. However, Atwood
establishes enough markers for a reader to see beyond these surface
comments and defensive gestures to witness slight, yet telling shifts in
Snowman’s thinking about himself and his role in relation to others.
A large part of Snowman’s “therapy” centers on his confronting and
coming to terms with key losses in his past. First comes the memory of
losing Killer, triggered by the “pointless repinings” (45) and inchoate
emotions he is feeling in the present. In his psychological condition at this
point, Snowman is not consciously aware of his defenses, not
understanding why he has the feeling of wanting to be let out, why he
reverts to a “sniveling child’s voice” (45) in begging for someone, anyone
to listen to him. Atwood uses the structure of her narrative, though, to
point to the connection between Snowman’s current emotions, presented
in “Downpour,” the last section of Chapter 3, and the first time he
experienced pain as a result of allowing himself to form attachments with
something outside himself, narrated in the story of Killer in Chapter 4. The
32 Chapter Two
protagonist as a result of his return to the scene he has fought the hardest
to repress. As the times of the concurrent narratives merge, we see the
stark contrast between the present-time Snowman who is willing to face
these memories and the Snowman who had introduced himself to the
Crakers following the apocalypse with a new name in an effort to “forget
the past—the distant past, the immediate past, the past in any form. . . to
exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation” (348-9).
More significantly, Snowman’s acceptance of the past enables him to
become more confident in his own strength, particularly as the caretaker of
the Crakers. He had already demonstrated notable growth between the
apocalypse and the beginning of his retrospective journey, as is clear from
the contrast between Snowman’s description of himself as the “improbable
shepherd,” leading the Crakers from the compound to the shore (353),
making up explanations along the way, and the Snowman of the present,
portrayed in the first seven chapters. In the first half of the novel, as
Snowman prepares the Crakers for his upcoming return to the Paradice
Compound, he demonstrates more foresight than he had in preparing for
their initial journey to the sea. Yet, even though he acknowledges the
protective impulses he feels toward the Crakers, worries about their
welfare while he is gone, and rehearses the story he will use to explain his
departure (153), he employs his well-honed ironic mode to keep himself at
a safe distance from the Crakers emotionally. He claims that “a day in
their company [were they to accompany him on the trip] would bore the
pants off him” and he reads their concern about his vulnerability, since he
lacks their capacity to produce urine that keeps wild animals at bay, as
“offensively smug” (160-1). His communication with the Crakers is
frequently interrupted by the internal voices that distract him, particularly
that of the small child who plays with language by deconstructing
idiomatic expressions and making puns.
When Snowman returns from the trip to the Compound, however, after
completing the mythic narrative of his life, we see him putting the needs of
the Crakers above his own, choosing to reassure them first before seeking
sleep. The undercurrent of sarcasm has diminished considerably, and when
those internal voices threaten his newly developed sense of identity and
purpose, he rejects their cynicism, proclaiming aloud, “‘I’m not just any
dead man’” (359). Snowman’s communication with the Crakers requires
the same intellectual effort as before, for he must use language and
cultural references that they will understand and he must remain somewhat
consistent in his construction of their myths, but notably absent are the
joking asides and the sarcastic quips. While distracted by the pain of his
injury and speculation about the future encounter he must make with the
Carol Osborne 35
notably absent are the emotional outbursts, the cynical dismissals, the
clever word play that marked his earlier internal dialogue. During
Snowman’s journey, the voices of Oryx and his mother, the voices that
have urged him throughout the narrative not to let them down, grow more
dominant as the voices of Crake and his father, which urge him to squelch
his sensitive nature, fade away. No longer is Snowman governed by a
culture that privileges analytical discourse over the humanistic arts; he has
the power to bring together his knowledge of the past, his empathetic
understanding, and his facility with words, to shape a new world.
The re-emergence of Snowman’s empathetic impulse, the one that
triggered his concern for the animals at the bonfire, that enabled his
attachment to Killer, and that finally led him to open up to Oryx, should
not be ignored. Critics have understandably focused on Atwood’s
dystopian myth as a critique of contemporary cultural trends: genetic
experimentation, the depletion of natural resources, overpopulation, and
the debasement of the arts.3 “What if we continue down the road we’re
already on?” is, after all, according to Atwood, one of the guiding
questions of the narrative. Yet another line of inquiry spurred by the novel,
Atwood points out, is “What are our saving graces?” (“Perfect Storms,”
par. 7). To identify these saving graces and thus recognize the full impact
of Atwood’s myth, we need to examine Snowman’s transformation, his
evolving relationship with the Crakers, and the mythology he creates for
them.
As has often been the case in Atwood’s fiction, the protagonist of Oryx
and Crake is a gifted storyteller, one who is not only able to recall a wide
range of cultural lore, but who is also creative, capable of inventing new
tales that prove both entertaining and instructive for the Crakers.4
Although discredited by Crake and the rest of society, Snowman’s natural
inclinations and his training at Martha Graham Academy have insured that
he is well-read and sensitive to the nuances of language. He is not able to
convince Crake of the necessity of the arts, but he does serve as Atwood’s
spokesperson in arguing for their importance within a civilization.
Compare Jimmy’s words, “‘When any civilization is dust and ashes, . . .
art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures.
Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them” (167) and
Atwood’s:
As William Blake noted long ago, the human imagination drives the world.
At first it drove only the human world, which was once very small in
comparison with the huge and powerful natural world around it. Now we
have our hand upon the throttle and our eye upon the rail, and we think
we’re in control of everything; but it’s still the human imagination, in all
Carol Osborne 37
Language itself had lost its solidity; it had become thin, contingent,
slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a
plate. An eyeball that could still see, however. That was the trouble. (260)
Watching old videos of Alex on the Net on the worst nights of that period,
Jimmy is saddened by the fact that Alex asks for an almond, but is given
corn. Witnessing this breakdown of communication between parrot and
handler, noting the misinterpretation of expressed desire, reminds Jimmy
of his own relationships with women, and he longs for the kind of
communion he has imagined he can have with Oryx, where the medium of
language does not interfere with another person knowing him and
ascertaining what he wants (261).
When Jimmy meets Oryx, he learns that his imagined relationship with
her is an idealized one. Unlike the other women in his life, Oryx cannot be
manipulated through his stories; she “refused to feel what he wanted her to
feel” (191). She is an elusive presence, in Stephen Dunning’s words “a site
of perpetual mystery, a space within which the narrator (and likely Crake
himself) ‘writes’ his own sense of the Other” (96). Oryx, in her refusal to
Carol Osborne 39
It flies in through the window, lands close to him on the pillow, bright
green this time with purple wings and a yellow beak, glowing like a
beacon, and Snowman is suffused with happiness and love. It cocks its
head, looks at him first with one eye, then the other. “The blue triangle,” it
says. Then it begins to flush, to turn red, beginning with the eye. This
change is frightening, as if it’s a parrot-shaped light bulb filling up with
blood. “I’m going away now,” it says.
“No, wait,” Snowman calls, or wants to call. His mouth won’t move.
“Don’t go yet! Tell me . . .” (336)
This final vision of Alex, coming where it does in the novel, seems an
important signpost. The image of Alex’s disintegration could be tied to the
memories Snowman has of the virus’s effects on the humans, and thus be a
symbol for the release of his entire past, childhood through the apocalypse.
What seems more important, however, is Snowman’s desire for Alex to
stay, to tell him something. He still longs for meaning to come from
outside himself; he desires the comfort of familiar stories and routines.
What he is coming to realize, however, is that he is the one who must
supply meaning. He cannot depend on the old narratives; it is not enough
to parrot what has come before. Instead, he must create the future through
telling his own stories, fashioning new myths to guide the Crakers.
Because they lack the cultural context of the old world, he must invent
40 Chapter Two
anew, gleaning from, but not repeating, the past. His audience is “plain
and blunt” and has not “been taught evasion, euphemism, lily-gilding”
(348) and other aspects of duplicitous language, so he must measure his
words carefully, gradually increasing their vocabulary as he had at one
timed desired to do for Alex (261).
The myths that Snowman constructs are, of course, complete
fabrications. Aside from the fact that Crake was their Creator, the rest is
embellishment, inspired by the “God of Bullshit” (102) and pieced
together from Snowman’s repertoire of lore. The key to understanding
these stories, though, is not in looking at their relation to fact; they
function as a mythology, not a history. Just as Snowman has had to rethink
the way he uses language in communicating with the Crakers, he is also
making a departure from the way he has used stories in the past. He is not
trying to exploit the Crakers, to use words for his own profit. Yes, he tells
stories in exchange for fish, but he has shown considerable restraint in his
demands on the Crakers, and his chief concern has been the impact the
stories will have on his wards. Already, the myths have established a
communal code that is radically different from the ideology governing
interactions in the old world. The Crakers recognize that the “bad things”
(103) that occurred in chaos, murder and the unnecessary taking of animal
life, are to be avoided. Through his presentation of Oryx and Crake as
deities, Snowman has established the primacy of love; building on the
qualities programmed into these beings and the lessons already given by
Oryx, Snowman’s stories reinforce the Crakers’ respect for all life and for
the natural environment.6 When they do kill a fish for Snowman to eat,
they act together so that no one person assumes all the guilt, thus
reinforcing their communal spirit. They have even been trained to recycle
the leftovers from Snowman’s meals. The myths of origin have set the
stage for the Crakers to reverence language, since words were created by
Oryx, and their curiosity, love of repetition, and eagerness for stories
suggest that they have the ability, with time, to expand their vocabularies
and become more proficient communicators. What seems the most
important aspect of the mythology Snowman has invented, however, is the
sense of community that results from the ritual telling of the stories, for it
sets a precedent for how stories may function when Snowman goes to
meet the humans. One of Snowman’s imagined scenarios, after all, the one
he does not dismiss, involves the trading of tales, and the mutual
understanding that may result from the survivors’ having shared the horror
of the apocalypse (374).7
The interactions Snowman has with the Crakers provide a barometer
that predicts how he will approach “his own kind” (372) in another
Carol Osborne 41
and most works of fiction begin this way, whether the writer is asleep or
awake. There’s a Middle English convention called the dream vision, and
I’d say most fiction writing has to have an element of dream vision twisted
into its roots. I began Oryx and Crake when I was in Australia, land of the
dreamtime; I “saw” the book as I was looking over a balcony at a rare red-
headed crake, during a birding expedition—and birding is a trance-
inducing activity if there ever was one. The details of the story got worked
out later, but without the vision there would have been no book. (“The
Handmaid’s Tale” 517)
Notes
1
I am admittedly using the term “myth” loosely, not wishing to enter the ongoing
definitional debates that span many disciplinary boundaries. In discussing the
cosmogony that Snowman invents for the Crakers, and which they, collectively,
believe, I am employing the most traditional sense of myth. However, I also read
Atwood’s novel as a prophetic myth for our time, an attempt on her part to make
our collective experience intelligible through a narrative that is a representation “of
truths or values that are sanctioned by general belief” (Douglas 121). Atwood’s
report that her novel began with a vision while she was in Australia (517) and the
connections she establishes with the Aboriginal concept of Dream Time add to the
44 Chapter Two
mythic quality of her text. While I recognize the basic distinctions that separate a
contemporary work of literature from a culture’s mythology, I also believe that
works of speculative fiction, such as Atwood’s, can function as a corollary to
myth, perhaps as a call for collective awareness and renewal of belief (in certain
values rather than in specific religious dogma) in an age where all established
master-narratives are suspect. In The Many Meanings of Myth, Martin S. Day
writes,
In secular guise, however, prophetic myth is rampant today as science
fiction, perhaps the strongest claimant to ‘myth of the 20th century.’
Traditionally the ‘dreamtime’ of myth has been the remote past; hosts of
modern myth-makers from Jules Verne to Ray Bradbury are projecting our
‘dreamtime’ of myth to the future. (25)
William G. Doty also suggests that there may be a “mythic dimension to such
speculative fictions” (19) and that the move away from mimetic realism in
contemporary literature may be “an attempt to point more vitally toward some
projected meanings of the world” (241). In explaining the value of mythography,
Doty provides an interesting parallel to what I feel Atwood is depicting in her
novel:
Mythography, critically pursued, may function as a curettage device,
scalpeling away debris (from our present perspective) that should have
been removed long ago. But it also may provide us with some of the tools
for making moral choices among the vast range of myths that are available
to us; it should provide us with a heightened dedication to forge the best
possible personal and cultural mythostories, the stories that can serve as
symbolic constructions of reality leading to individual freedom and social
growth rather than a retreat into an automatically repeated and uncritical
view of historical events that now may need to be drastically reshaped.
(19)
In her depiction of Snowman creating his life narrative, and in the writing of the
novel, Atwood represents this process, pulling together a wide array of “symbolic
constructions” from all different kinds of texts in an effort to promote “individual
freedom and social growth.”
2
Danette DiMarco notes this change, but her interpretation differs slightly from
the one offered here (192-3).
3
See Ingersoll, DiMarco, and Bouson for more in-depth discussion of these topics.
4
See Karen Stein for a full discussion of Atwood’s storytellers in The Blind
Assassin and earlier works.
5
Helen Mundler discusses Atwood’s treatment of language at length in “Heritage,
Pseudo-Heritage and Survival in a Spurious Wor(l)d,” offering a more pessimistic
interpretation of Snowman’s discourse after the apocalypse. She sees Snowman’s
listing of words as “free-floating signifiers without signifieds, referentless
language” (96), the history he tells as spurious, and his character as “a textual
construct held together only through a web of connection to other texts” (94).
Eleonora Rao writes of the relief that words and the act of storytelling afford
Snowman, but like Mundler, she focuses on the loss of his skills and the gaps in his
story (111).
Carol Osborne 45
6
DiMarco writes that by raising
Oryx to mythological status,” Snowman “constructs a vision of her that
sees her as an instrument to be used to sustain community and love. She is
reinvented as a goddess whose genuine concern for nature requires that its
people give attention to regenerative possibilities, like returning the bones
of the fish to the waters that have provided the food. (186)
7
Both Stephen Dunning and Dunja Mohr read Snowman’s capacity as a storyteller
as an optimistic sign for the future. Mohr writes, “narration, story-telling, and a
valorization of the multiplicity of language and words not only constitute forms of
survivalist defiance, but also hope for the persistence of creativity” (18), and
Dunning admits that “Although the novel is understandably coy about the status of
Snowman’s sacred stories, it clearly suggests that we cannot do without such tales”
(98).
8
Earl Ingersoll does not see the textual support for a hopeful outlook on
Snowman’s future. He writes, “it is troubling that the ending of Oryx and Crake
may be contaminated with a similar ‘optimism’ for which readers may have
difficulty finding any firm basis” (par. 28).
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in
Context.” PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America 119.3 (May 2004): 513-517.
—. Oryx and Crake: A Novel. 2003. New York, Anchor Books.
—. “Perfect Storms: Writing Oryx and Crake.” Book-Of-The-Month
Club/Bookspan. London: O.W. Toad Ltd, 2003. Margaret Atwood:
Oryx and Crake. 18 June 2008
<http://www.oryxandcrake.co.uk/perfectstorm.asp>
Bouson, J. Brooks. “‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of
a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of
Commonwealth Literature 39.3 (Sept. 2004): 139-156.
Day, Martin S. The Many Meanings of Myth. 1984. Lanham: University
Press of America.
DiMarco, Danette. “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: homo faber and the
Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake.” Papers on
Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of
Language and Literature 41.2 (Spring 2005): 170-95.
Doty, William G. Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals. 1986.
University: The University of Alabama Press.
“Dreaming, The.” The Encyclopedia of Religion. 1987. Ed. Mircea Eliade.
Vol. 4. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company. 479-481.
Dunning, Stephen. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of
the Therapeutic.” Canadian Literature 186 (Autumn 2005): 86-101.
46 Chapter Two
SHANNON HENGEN
What has occurred with great success in more recent years has been the
adaptation of her fiction to the large stage. In 2004 the Canadian Opera
Company mounted the opera version of The Handmaid’s Tale to
appreciative audiences at Toronto’s Hummingbird Centre with a seating
capacity of 3,200. And in 2007, in an unprecedented collaboration with the
UK’s Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Arts Centre based in
Ottawa, Canada, produced the well received cabaret rendering of
Atwood’s 2005 novella, The Penelopiad.
My paper will address the possibility that this movement of Margaret
Atwood’s work from page to stage—that is, the large stage of the
Hummingbird Centre for the Performing Arts and, especially, the National
Arts Centre in the Canadian national capital —deepens the place of her
work in the national cultural imagination. How it does so can be described
at least in part by reference to the art of oral story telling.
Atwood explained to radio journalist Carol Off in a CBC interview
about the staged rendering of The Penelopiad that the origins of myth are
always both oral and local, that myth is shaped from the beginning by its
method of delivery and by the time and place in which it is told. Oral
delivery in preliterate cultures implied a somatic or physical connection
with words that we in literate cultures can only sense, according to Walter
Ong in his influential study, Orality and Literacy. In preliterate cultures
where words travel exclusively via the speech of human beings, “Words
acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat”
(47); furthermore, “Spoken words are always modifications of a total,
existential situation, which always engages the body” (67). In the oral-
formulaic tradition that Ong studies over time, tellers of tales and their
listeners feel viscerally the values implied in the tales. Exchanging
experiences to arrive at communal identification with local knowledge
describes the ancient art of oral storytelling. Ong concludes that “For an
oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic,
communal identification with the known” (45).
While we do not, naturally, enter a preliterate state when we view
Classical myth in a theatre, we may reconstruct to a degree the experience
of its original audience, an experience of unmediated identification that is
unique to the stage. After a recent production of selections from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses at a theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was able to
correspond with the play’s director, Carmel O’Reilly, who is also artistic
director of Súgán Theatre in Boston and Visiting Director at Harvard
University. When asked to comment on the return of Classical tales to
their original oral format through live theatre, O’Reilly wrote:
Shannon Hengen 49
Distilling them [the tales] into drama allows us to access and acknowledge
our own feelings to life around us. They are not about rational notions but
reflect some deep part of our emotional being. . . . As creatures with
imagination we may need this moment of escape not just into a kind of
dreamworld but into our own often ignored feelings. It fulfills our need for
union in some holy way.
My claim is that when Atwood’s Penelope opens the play with the
words “Don’t follow my example,” a warning that she would scream at us
if she could scream, she is beckoning us to relive experientially and
individually Penelope’s neglect of her disadvantaged maids and then as an
audience to discern the instances and effects of similar neglect in our time.
Considering the networks of powerful and talented women who
collaborated to make this co-production possible, we might conclude that
the myth of Penelope holds unique appeal, and that appeal may lie in the
myth’s exposing the effects of the failures of our collaboration in support
of vulnerable women.
About the opera version of The Handmaid’s Tale, reviewer Tamara
Bernstein of Canada’s The National Post newspaper wrote:
A man carries the most conviction when he is able to seize his audience,
rock them, as a mother rocks her child. We are essentially balancing,
undulating beings. (xx)
The hanging of these maids bothered me when I first read The Odyssey as
a teenager, and it bothers me still, as it is so excessive in relation to
anything they actually did. (vi)
Her chosen topic, although originating in the ancient world, might remind
us of similar contemporary Atwoodian topoi: dangerous, unpredictable
men; powerful, vulnerable, flawed women; powerless, vulnerable, flawed
women; troubled liaisons between them; disastrous political situations in
which all are implicated. In two obvious examples, the handmaids of that
tale and their male and female owners come to mind, as do Grace Marks
and her companion domestics in their subservient roles in the novel Alias
Grace.
We learn through recent media accounts of the collaboration between
two powerful women that initiated The Penelopiad as opera and as co-
production: the meeting between Phyllida Lloyd, British director of the
opera version of The Handmaid’s Tale, and Margaret Atwood, during
Lloyd’s stay in Toronto for the opera. Richard Ouzounian writing for the
Toronto Star newspaper states that “Atwood let Lloyd read the still-
unpublished novel. The director shared her sense of the work’s dramatic
possibilities, and they began working on it together” (“The Penelopiad”).
We are sent both in the Ouzounian piece and in the playbill for the
Canadian premiere to a blog by one of the actors, Canadian Kate Hennig
(Eurycleia), where we learn of the routine standing ovations that the work
received in Ottawa. For example, see this entry posted on 22 September
2007, the day after opening:
creative teams of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Arts
Centre resulted in successful runs at both the Swan Theatre in Stratford-
upon-Avon, UK, in the summer of 2007 and in Ottawa, Canada that fall.
Furthermore, an unusual connection developed between nine wealthy
and influential Canadian women and the play’s creative team, we learn
from the Canadian playbill and from Hennig’s blog. The playbill reads as
follows:
In her blog of 30 September 2007, Hennig writes that she’s off to the
Governor General’s place to participate in a panel discussion entitled:
save her life, ending not in a reward but rather in their senseless slaughter,
we might think that Penelope is cautioning us, as women, not to allow
mutual betrayal. Indeed her suffering in Hades seems to arise specifically
from regrets over her neglect of her maids’ safety. About their nightly
unweaving of her father-in-law’s death shroud with her, we hear her say of
them: “we shared riddles; we made jokes. We became like sisters” (54).
Then immediately after she comments that “In retrospect, I can see that
my actions were ill-considered, and caused harm.”(54). Her failure to
protect her maids results not just in their deaths but also in her unrelieved
torment. Director Josette Bushell-Mingo explains starkly that
Odysseus was knackered and said to his son, take them [the maids] out and
murder them. They were getting hoisted up—can you see it?—and slowly
dying. Penelope could have said something. She didn’t. We need to capture
that” (qtd. in Taylor 92).
we had no voice
we had no name
we had no choice
we had one face
one face the same
Penelope responds: “They never talk to me, down here. They never stay. I
hold out my arms to them, my doves, my loveliest ones. But they only run
away” (82).
54 Chapter Three
Works Cited
Al-Solaylee, Kamal. 24 Sept. 2007. “A hit, but not a home run.” Rev. of
The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood. National Arts Centre English
Theatre Company in Association with the Royal Shakespeare
Company. The National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Canada. The Globe and
Mail (Toronto) R1.
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad: The Play. 2007. London, UK: Faber
and Faber.
—. You Are Happy. 1974. Toronto: Oxford UP.
Bernstein, Tamara. “Handmaid opera perfectly tailored.” Rev. of The
Handmaid’s Tale. Canadian Opera Company. Hummingbird Centre
for the Performing Arts. The National Post 27 Sept. 2004. Accessed
through National Post librarian, Scott Maniquet
([email protected]). 26 Oct. 2007.
Carley, David. The Edible Woman. 2002. Scirocco Drama/J. Gordon
Shillingford: Winnipeg, MB.
Hennig, Kate. thepenelopiad.wordpress.com. 27 Oct. 2007.
Howells, Coral Ann. “Five Ways of Looking at The Penelopiad.” Sydney
Studies in English 32 (2006): 1-18.
Jousse, Marcel. The Oral Style [1924]. Trans. Edgard Sienaert and Richard
Whitaker. New York: Garland, 1990.
Mallick, Heather. “Margaret Atwood.” Chatelaine October 2007: 37-38.
Marmion, Patrick. “Don’t swap this wife.” Rev. of The Penelopiad, by
Margaret Atwood. Royal Shakespeare Company. Swan Theatre,
Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK. Mail on Sunday (London) 5 Aug. 2007:
FB64.
Shannon Hengen 55
There is darkness all around and the sound of a howling wind. Where
are we? We are not in Margaret Atwood’s graphomanic tent (The Tent,
2006) this time, but in Hades. Or rather, we are in two places at once, for
we are sitting in the Swan Theatre at Stratford- on-Avon watching a
performance of The Penelopiad, where the theatrical space represents the
Underworld, the place of forbidden knowledge: “There is something down
there, and you want it told” (Negotiating with the Dead, 177). Under a
single spotlight a heavily veiled figure appears on stage, then throwing off
the veil, she begins to speak: “Now that I’m dead I know everything” (The
Penelopiad: The Play, 3). Here is Penelope the icon of wifely fidelity
celebrated in Homer’s Odyssey, but should this “edifying legend” now
unveiled be wearing a clinging ruby red dress and complaining about her
mythic status, “Don’t follow my example” ? (The Penelopiad: The Play,
4) Our unease increases when her twelve maids appear, accusing Penelope
as they sing their edgy little lyric:
Not only does Atwood locate her writing within a long literary tradition,
but she also engages with the resurrection of some of the female ghosts out
of that tradition, giving them a voice to speak directly to us in the present
time.
Her legendary women lead duplicitous lives, always shadowed by their
mythic identities but vigorously resisting their entrapment as they reinvent
themselves in a contemporary idiom, giving very different emphases to the
classical tales. Indeed, such transformations characterize Atwood’s
postmodern approach to mythography in general:
Strong myths never die. Sometimes they die down, but they don’t die out.
They double back in the dark, they re-embody themselves, they change
costumes, they change key. They speak in new languages, they take on
other meanings. (“The Myths,” 35)
Atwood has used mythology in much the same way she has used other
intertexts …Whether explicitly named or simply implied, Atwood’s varied
mythological intertexts are central to her images, characterization, and
themes. (Wilson, 215)2
Helen sells herself a male fantasy, knowing that the power of a sex
goddess resides in her unattainability and the threat of female sexuality, a
piquant combination which she laconically exploits in her final challenge
to her audience:
Says it wasn’t easy when she was growing up, being half-divine and all,
but now she’s come to terms with it and she’s looking at a career in the
movies. (The Tent, 49)
men, though Penelope is inclined to remind her that she is really only just
a myth - to which Atwood might reply, “Every myth is a version of the
truth” (Lady Oracle, 92). The Sybil, another of Atwood’s favourite mythic
women from Lady Oracle onwards, has become a fortuneteller, sounding
grumpy and out of sorts in “Another Visit to the Oracle”:
However, the Sybil still retains her gift for prophecy, though in a
characteristic Atwoodian twist she no longer looks to the gods for
revelation but at human beings and the world around her, warning against
disaster to the planet:
This is the same crone voice that has always been associated with the
Oracle, and it sounds remarkably like the voice of old Iris Chase Griffen in
The Blind Assassin, reminding us again of the pervasiveness of mythic
subtexts in all of Atwood’s writing.
In The Penelopiad Atwood returns to the classical Greek Underworld
where her playful reinvention of women’s voices and feminine cultural
history works to counterbalance Homeric narratives of male heroism and
adventure. Like Virginia Woolf eighty years before, Atwood is irked by
the masculine values that prevail … This is an important book, the critic
assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it
deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room” (Woolf, 96).
Atwood asks two main questions: “what led to the hanging of the
maids, and what was Penelope really up to?”(The Penelopiad xv). Homer
does not tell us, but Robert Graves does—or at least he gives some partial
answers in The Greek Myths as he repeats ancient slanderous tales about
Penelope, suggesting that she slept with her suitors—perhaps with all of
them—and that she gave birth to the Great God Pan during Odysseus’s
twenty-year long absence at the Trojan War followed by his long journey
home to Ithaca. However, like any good gossip Graves cannot vouch for
the truth of these rumors, but merely circulates them: “Some say … others
say …But, according to a third” (Graves, 646). Atwood appropriates these
non-Homeric materials and changes a few episodes in The Odyssey, but
her crucial addition is one which is not mentioned in the Notes (though
references to it are embedded in the text), and that is Aeschylus’s The
Oresteia. The burlesque scene of Odysseus’s trial and his subsequent
persecution by the twelve hanged maids blurs the borders between him
and Orestes, who was tried for the murder of his mother, and then like
Odysseus was acquitted, only to be pursued by the Erinyes (who also
appear briefly at Odysseus’s trial in Atwood’s version though not in
Homer’s). By conflating these figures Atwood not only constructs a
parallel between two instances of male violence against women but she
also writes beyond the ending of The Odyssey, deftly switching the plot by
reversing traditional sexual power relations as Odysseus is stalked for all
eternity by the vengeful hanged maids: “We’ll never leave you, we’ll stick
to you like your shadow, soft and relentless as glue. Pretty maids, all in a
row” (The Penelopiad, 193).
Both Penelope and her maids offer their own versions of events, for
though Penelope’s monologue is the dominant narrative, her tale is
frequently interrupted and challenged by the stories of her maids, those
nameless slave girls who have practically nothing to say in The Odyssey
and whose hanging is a minor element in the story of Odysseus’s
homecoming. Yet, as Atwood remarks, “I’ve always been haunted by the
hanged maids, and in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself” (The
Penelopiad xv). While Homer does not even bother to comment on the
relation between Penelope and her maids, leaving their fates to Eurycleia
and Telemachus who hangs them, Atwood’s feminist critique of Homer
makes the relationship between these women the centre of The
Penelopiad, and Penelope’s implication in their deaths is the unsolved
mystery at the heart of the narrative. Her story is paralleled and shadowed
by the maids’ stories, who like the Handmaids of Gilead, have been
relegated to the margins of epic narrative: “From the point of view of
future history …we’ll be invisible” (The Handmaid’s Tale, 240). Writing
Coral Ann Howells 63
All writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated,
deep down, by a fear and fascination with mortality – by a desire to make
64 Chapter Four
the risky trip to the Underworld and to bring something or someone back
from the dead” (Negotiating, 140).
In The Penelopiad traffic goes both ways, shifting from high seriousness
to comedy as Atwood’s ghosts find way of crossing the threshold, blurring
the mythic and the contemporary by mixing ancient rituals, spiritualism
and high tech. Penelope herself manages to escape the claustrophobic
Underworld which is so like her domestic spaces in Ithaca by travelling
about to look in on the world of the living via the internet, so becoming in
her afterlife a fabulous voyager like her husband and more like the gods
themselves who “must have had something like that at their disposal” (The
Penelopiad, 19).
Her confession has the parodic quality of Atwood’s earlier short
dramatic monologues in Murder in the Dark (1983) or Good Bones
(1992). In fact, Penelope sounds a lot like that other queen in “Gertrude
Talks Back,” where Atwood irreverently applies what Reingard Nischik
calls “her technique of gender-oriented revisioning … to one of the
greatest works of world literature, Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (Nischik, 156).
Homer’s Penelope was praised as the model of wifely loyalty and virtue,
as being skilled in handicraft (and incidentally as having “an excellent
brain”); it is only the jealous suitor Antinous who dares to criticize her in
her lifetime as “that incomparable schemer” (Odyssey, Book 1, 39), but
Atwood’s Penelope knows that she has been the butt of dirty jokes and
scandalous tales. So, three thousand years after The Odyssey, she asserts
her right to tell a different story, being of a “determined nature” but
refusing to have her identity determined for her by others. She says she is
offering us “the plain truth,” but how true is it? Atwood is playing with
two different levels of myth here, on the one hand is the Homeric myth of
feminine virtue and on the other are popular myths about the female sex as
either submissive and silent or as duplicitous schemers–and which is
Penelope? Atwood highlights the contradictions posed by these gender
stereotypes as she peers into some of the dark alleyways in Homer’s
narrative, using similar techniques as a mythographer to the ones she used
as a historical novelist in Alias Grace, digging below official versions of
history to unearth “the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded,
the taboo” (“In Search,” 218). However, buried under centuries of
accumulated gossip and speculation, Penelope like Grace remains an
enigma, so that Atwood is free to reinvent her in a modern idiom. As she
commented when writing Alias Grace, “Whatever we write will be
contemporary, even if we attempt a novel set in a past age”(“In Search,”
210).
Coral Ann Howells 65
young bride to find her voice on their wedding night in order to get rid of
the listeners outside the bedroom door: “Do you think you could manage a
few screams?” (The Penelopiad, 44) And of course Penelope obliges.
From the beginning they are fellow conspirators and tricksters, and if
Penelope is charmed by Odysseus’s storytelling it is because she can spin
a good yarn herself as she weaves her web of words as deftly as she wove
her father-in-law’s shroud. But Penelope is also adept at unpicking, and
unlike her husband she uses very feminine rhetorical strategy which
Nathalie Cooke has described as “The Powerful Voice That Asserts Its
Own Powerlessness” (Cook, 212).3 She even confesses her own
unreliability as a narrator (“Perhaps I have only invented it in order to
make myself feel better,” The Penelopiad, 8), or else she draws attention
to her own innocent duplicities when she has to appear to be surprised by
her son or her husband, notably on Odysseus’ return disguised as a beggar.
Here Penelope contradicts The Odyssey, for Homer gives the recognition
scene to Eurycleia, asserting that Penelope did not recognize her husband a
she was distracted at the critical moment by the goddess Athena—to
which Atwood’s Penelope make the tart comment: “If you believe that,
you’ll believe all sorts of nonsense” (P, 140). However it is in the climax
of their blissful reunion that Atwood’s version differs most substantially
from Homer’s in Book 23. In The Odyssey husband and wife lie in bed
talking till dawn, though there is no suggestion that Penelope is anything
other than loyal and true as she listens “spellbound” to Odysseus’ tales,
whereas in The Penelopiad Penelope herself tells it differently:
vicious
and multiple and untrue
Coral Ann Howells 67
always been intensely aware of the cultural meanings of the female body
as a concept as well as of “the sexual politics which are played out on
female bodies” (Davies), explored here in the contrasting experiences of
Penelope or Helen and the maids. Penelope knows that she herself is an
object of male desire for the acquisition of her body in marriage represents
the acquisition of wealth, and that when she marries Odysseus she is the
object of male exchange, likening herself to a “package of meat” handed
over by her father to her husband, but “a package of meat in a wrapping of
gold, mind you” (The Penelopiad, 39). Helen’s aura of glamour evidently
survives even death, demonstrating once again the power of fantasies of
femininity. She is still being pursued, much to Penelope’s disapproval and
chagrin, by hordes of eager male spirits: “Desire does not die with the
body,’ said Helen, ‘only the ability to satisfy it’ “(The Penelopiad, 155).
By contrast with these royal ladies, the female slaves’ bodies have no
value; they are there to work or as objects to be played with or raped and
abused by any male guest who chooses. In The Odyssey they have almost
nothing to say, though Odysseus does overhear them slandering himself on
his return home as they go out to meet their lovers among the suitors, at
which Homer tells us, “Odysseus’ gorge rose within him” (Odyssey, Book
20, 304)). The next day by his orders Telemachus hangs twelve of those
maids for dishonoring his household, and apparently they maids go to their
deaths in silence, as meekly as thrushes or doves caught in a snare. In the
prose translation of The Odyssey this event merits only a single paragraph,
though Atwood lifts that paragraph out of context, using it as the second
epigraph to her book in order to highlight its significance to her argument.
Here it functions as emblem of male violence and when juxtaposed against
the first epigraph (Agamemnon’s eulogy to “the constant Penelope”) the
two together signal Atwood’s double focus on the condition of queens and
slave girls in her revisionary reading of Homeric myth.
Unlike Penelope’s carefully crafted monologue, the maids’ stories are
multivoiced and fragmentary as Atwood reimagines their lives through a
dazzling variety of narrative forms., alternating between poetry and song,
prose, and burlesque drama. There are sinister little lyrics like the opening
“Rope-Jumping Rhyme,” and the insinuations in these songs become
increasingly threatening as the story progresses. The prose poem at the
end, “We’re Walking Behind You, A Love Song” may be read (as it is
here) as a stalker’s song addressed to Odysseus, with its distorted echoes
of phrases from the 1950s popular song of the same name: “Look over
your shoulder! Here we are, walking behind you, close, close by; close as
a kiss, close as your own skin”(The Penelopiad, 192). Odysseus is their
main target but Penelope does not escape; after death they are free to defy
Coral Ann Howells 69
her as they never could in life. Immediately following her vigorous denial
of slanderous gossip about her, the maids stage their comic verse drama,
“The Perils of Penelope” accusing her of multiple infidelities and of being
an accessory to their deaths, where their rhyming couplets offer an ironic
counterpoint to high seriousness:
They also stage an anthropology lecture which parodies both the cult
of the Great Mother Goddess and the mythologizing process itself: “You
don’t have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real
injustice. That might be too upsetting. .. Consider us as pure symbol” (The
Penelopiad, 168). It establishes an interesting parallel with the male
historian’s lecture at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, for in both instances
the particularity of women’s oppression is hidden beneath the
generalizations of academic discourse. However, Atwood’s most ferocious
satirical thrust against patriarchal values occurs in the replay of
Odysseus’s trial (videotaped by the maids), where myth and modernity
overlap in a twenty-first century criminal court. Faithful to Homer’s
account, Odysseus is on trial for the slaughter of the suitors, but the script
changes when the murdered maids cry out for justice. The presiding judge
even consults The Odyssey, but finding no evidence there against
Odysseus (though there is evidence of the suitors’ rape of the slave girls)
he throws out their case as belonging to a long vanished past where social
values were different. But how different are they really? Once again the
maids’ deaths are marginalized, and even when they transgress The
Odyssey by invoking the Furies, “the serpent-haired, dog-headed, bat-
winged Erinyes” (Graves, 426), the judge reprimands these terrible female
figures of vengeance with the curt words: “You there, get down from the
ceiling! Stop that barking and hissing!” (The Penelopiad, 184). He even
dismisses the powerful goddess Athena into the bargain, for feminine
principles evidently have no place whatsoever in his court. The riddle of
the maids’ hanging is never solved and their stories persist, for their fates
represents the dark underside of heroic epic and their voices celebrate the
return of the repressed.
Unlike The Odyssey, or even The Oresteia, where a point of
reconciliation is achieved by the gods’ intervention, there is no sense of an
ending in The Penelopiad. Atwood’s Underworld despite its classical
trappings is the Gothic territory of the Uncanny, filled with echoes and
repetitions as the maids continue to pursue Odysseus and he leaves
Penelope again and again to escape them. (There is however an ironic
70 Chapter Four
Notes
An abridged earlier version using some of this material appeared in "Five
Ways of Looking at The Penelopiad," Sydney Studies in English 32(2006):
5-18.
1
This edition of Open Letter contains 16 essays by international scholars on
contemporary myth revisioning in Canadian literature, though none on Atwood.
For Atwood’s treatment of the Isis and Osiris myth see Heliane Ventura, “The
Invention of the Self: Margaret Atwood’s ‘Isis in Darkness’,” RANAM 30 (1997):
1-13.
2
For analysis of the mythic subtexts in The Blind Assassin see also Fiona Tolan,
Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
2007), 261-3.
3
Nathalie Cooke’s essay usefully analyses the power dynamics of the confessional
form in a wide variety of examples from Atwood’s poetry and fiction. The
Penelopiad displays many of Atwood’s characteristic strategies.
Coral Ann Howells 71
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—. “The Myths and Me,” 2005. Read: Life with Books (Random House)
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Davies, Madeleine. “Margaret Atwood’s Female Bodies.” The Cambridge
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Cooke, Nathalie. “The Politics of Ventriloquism: Margaret Atwood’s
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Dixon, Guy. “A Desperate Housewife in Ancient Greece: Interview with
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to Margaret Atwood. 114-129.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination.
1971. Toronto: Anansi.
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. London: Penguin, 1992.
Homer. The Odyssey. 1970. Trans.E.V.Rieu. Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin Classics.
Meletinsky, E.M. The Poetics of Myth. 1998. Trans. G. Laroue and
A.Sadetsky. New York and London: Garland.
Nischik, Reingard. “Margaret Atwood’s Short Stories and Shorter
Fictions.” The Cambridge Companion to Margaet Atwood. 145-160.
72 Chapter Four
SHARON WILSON
the love affair of Alex Thomas and Laura Chase, Iris’s sister. The third is
an unfinished science fiction pulp“ magazine” or novel, including a “Blind
Assassin” story, that the “he” and “she” appear to compose together within
this novel.3 It is set on the planets Zycron, Xenor, and Aa’A with
tongueless sacrificial maidens and blind assassins, lizard men wearing
flammable shorts, and luscious peach women who ripen on trees. As
Atwood says, the male lover uses Zycron “as many science fiction writers
used the genre before him—as an oblique critique of his own society, in
which there is child labour, exploitation and different classes” (Sylge).
The novel as a whole interlaces allusions to fairy tales with the Bible,
The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses, Tristan and Isolde, stories of
Persephone, Leda, Europa, Danae, Medusa,4 Medea, Circe, Helen, Arthur,
and the Queen of Sheeba and the poems of Tennyson, Keats, Coleridge,
Fitzgerald, and E. Pauline Johnson, among many others, to explore the
ways that we all blindly “assassinate” in personal and political wars.
Alternately playing a dragon, a troll, a sibyl, Ariadne trying to solve the
puzzle of the labyrinth, Rapunzel captive in a tower and brushing her hair,
Scheherazade, a mouse in a castle of tigers, a Little Red Riding Hood who
contains both grandma and the wolf, a Fate spinner (283), both the
Grimms’ Cinderella and the Girl Without Hands, both Fitcher or the
Robber Bridegroom and the Robber Bride or Fitcher’s Bird, Sleeping
Beauty and her godmother witch, and, especially, the mythic Iris, Iris both
doubles and foils Laura and the other characters. Not only Iris, but Laura,
Aimee, Winifred, and Sabrina are connected to the “Sleeping Beauty”
fairy tale. Early in the book, the beautiful Iris, bewitched by Winifred’s
pose as a parody fairy godmother (318), passively marries Richard to save
the family business. Iris, later a fairy godmother, too, has a daydream
about Winifred and her friends, with wreaths of money on their heads,
gathered around Sabrina’s bed bestowing their godmother gifts. “I appear
in a flash of sulphurous light and a puff of smoke and a flapping of sooty
leather wings, the uninvited black-sheep godmother.” Rather than a prince,
it is Laura’s notebooks and finally Iris’s own regained feelings that
awaken Iris. Her gift is the truth (439). Laura, far more questioning than
Iris, is also still blind or asleep. Angry at Laura’s ability to “subtract
herself,” Mr. Erskine yells, “You’re not the Sleeping Beauty” as he throws
her against the wall. Associating the pool at Avilion with the bridge Laura
drives off, Iris realizes that she should have kept her mouth shut and not
interrupted “a sleepwalker” with the news that Alex was dead. She
“pushed [Laura] off” (164, 488). On the other hand, Laura would also be
an uninvited fairy at Aimee’s christening if she said that Aimee wasn’t
Richard’s child (432). Laura, like Iris both victim and victimizer, is
76 Chapter Five
which does not, of course, have a Button Factory picnic. On each side of
Alex, “like bookends” (192), are the two sisters who grow to love him,
Laura to the right and Iris to the left, what has been called the book’s
“spiritual” narrator and its main one, the person we eventually discover is
the actual writer of the embedded novel, “The Blind Assassin.” But this
photograph for the Herald and Banner, significantly captioned “Miss
Chase and Miss Laura Chase Entertain an Out-of-Town Visitor,” depicts
also Port Ticonderoga’s class, gender, and political divisions, the violence
submerged under the surface of both city and era. Rennie thinks that Alex,
a union organizer who puts his hand partly in front of his face as gangland
criminals do, looks like “an Indian--or, worse, a Jew” or even a
Communist and that Laura and Iris, who shouldn’t be “rolling around on
the lawn in full view of everyone,” look like “lovelorn geese” (192).
Because Iris, who at least has her skirt tucked in, is smoking, Rennie,
repository of Port Ticonderoga standards, thinks that she looks like a
tramp. When the Laura of the memoir hand-tints pictures, choosing colors
to match people’s souls, the pictures become misty and ultrareal. When
she colors this fourth photo for Iris, she cuts herself out of it except for her
hand, which she colors pale yellow and which seems to creep across the
grass toward Alex “like an incandescent crab” (220).
Laura has the fifth “mutilated picture” that the Iris of the memoir finds
glued into the history notebook in her stocking drawer after Laura is dead.
It shows what Laura wants to remember, Alex and her colored light yellow
with all of Iris except for her disembodied blue hand cut out (500).
Although it’s hard to tell whether it is Iris’s right hand in this picture and
Laura’s left hand in hers, or vice versa, the scissored off hand in the left
corner appears to be Laura’s. Since Iris was to the left of Alex in the
Button Picnic photo, presumably it is her right hand in Laura’s photo and
Laura’s left hand in hers. On the cover Atwood commissioned for The
Robber Bride, the cut-off hand is also the left one. But is Iris to Alex’s left
or on the left as we look at the photo? Or are we attempting to get our
bearings from within the photo? In a postmodern world, from a different
point of view, what was right becomes left. Much more deceptively,
however, the inner novel has only one “actual” photograph--”Iris’s”--and
it is black-and-white, apparently without the tinting Laura uses in the
frame narrative. Thus, the photo that fascinates us from the beginning of
the novel we read appears to be a print of the one at the Button Factory
picnic but, although it suggests and may be based upon this photo, it is not
one of the two tinted prints; and the picnic in the inner novel’s “The Hard-
boiled Egg” chapter is not actually photographed. If this is so, then “Iris,”
and “Alex” are possibly not the same characters as in the memoir either.
82 Chapter Five
Atwood deliberately uses different time sequences for the frame and
“Blind Assassin” narratives and alternates inner and outer narratives so
that readers, still expecting realism and wanting to believe in the illusion
of reality tradition, have difficulty separating narratives and remembering
the sequence of events in each. Ironically, they are even encouraged to
construct their own master narratives, flawed by associating the many
mirroring but slightly differing details, including those concerning
photographs and picnics, in the different strands. Despite its “blind
assassins” and sacrificial victims that mirror those in the other two
narratives, “Alex”’s story is admittedly science fiction and is, of course,
written by Iris. Trapped in the novel’s Palace of Knossos maze, readers
desire the Truth, but this desire “blinds” us, too, putting us in the path of
the Minotaur. “The Blind Assassin” inner novel does not reliably reflect
events of Iris’s life, but, of course, neither does her memoir, as she admits.
We read the narratives as we read our lives. Iris is an unreliable narrator,12
as we all would be if contained in fiction. Like any author, she selects and
orders what she will include. Nevertheless, in the frame narrative, the
reality of the novel we read, each sister functions as the other sister’s extra
“left” hand, the disobedient, unclean, morally questionable, anarchistic,
but creative hand.
In the caption accompanying the newspaper photograph, Laura’s
personal name but only Iris’s family name are given, enforcing Iris’s
subservient identities first as daughter and then as wife of the book’s
primary “blind assassins.” Both Iris and Laura suggest the dutiful daughter
of the Grimms’ “The Girl Without Hands.” In the novel’s incest story in
which both sisters are abused, Iris, unlike Fitcher’s “Bird,” is unable to
revive her sister. Unlike The Girl Without Hands, since there is also no
angel to restore Iris’s hands, Iris seems to count on those of her
granddaughter, Sabrina, or friend and caretaker, Myra, to open the trunk,
this book’s forbidden room of secrets, to disclose the manuscript in which
she finally speaks. Alex is the unnamed stranger, an alien matching the
aliens of his science fiction stories. In the unseen background are Richard
Griffen and Norval Chase exchanging Iris and Laura for what proves to be
all of the button factory business, leading to Laura’s later similar “bargain”
with God to preserve Alex’s life. Richard Griffen is the “devil” of new
money, mythologically the Griffin monster with the head and wings of an
eagle, the body of a lion, and sometimes the tail of a serpent, that guards
treasure (Leach, 467). He is also a fairy-tale wolf and ogre. In The Blind
Assassin, after Laura and Alex have died, the three characters momentarily
live again within this Button Factory picnic photograph reproduced in
three variations, and, in a sense, the entire novel lives within it as well.
Sharon Wilson 83
Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs
peeing on fire hydrants. We
put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our
silver-plated cups; we monogram
our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom
walls. It’s all the same impulse.
What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of
any kind we can get?
At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own
voices falling silent finally,
like a radio running down (The Blind Assassin 95).
Thus, it is hardly surprising that Iris and her narrator in the second
narrative, “Iris,” both writers, analyze and create verbal photographs. The
evil fairy godmother’s husband, Mr. Prior, who is thought to be stuffed,
exists only in photographs. Other photos in The Blind Assassin, including
those of various ancestors, the Button Factory blow-ups from the town
archives, Iris and Laura’s mother, the sisters in their velvet dresses, Laura
on the inside jacket flap of “The Blind Assassin” novel, Iris’s wedding,
and Iris’s daughter Aimee, also depict the dismembering violence under
the surface of life, illustrating the atmosphere of control and repression
that Iris accepts as “reality.” After Laura learns how to make and tint
photographic prints from Elwood Murray, Iris discovers that Laura has
had the nerve to tint the framed photographs of ancestors in the library,
including the prime ministers with which they are sometimes posed,
making their faces mauve, green, pale orange, and light crimson and
giving them a misty look. She had planned to color Grandmother Adelia
steel grey and the dead uncles gold for glory, in each case revealing the
colors of their souls.13 In an early Atwood manuscript, the Iris character
calls these photos her household gods, and the place they are stored, her
altar to household spirits (Atwood Papers). The Button Factory, on the east
bank of the river Louveteau, displays archival blow-ups of grandfather
Benjamin and dignitaries, father Norval in his eye patch, with a wreath in
front of the War Memorial, looking “as if he’s facing a firing squad” (50-
51), and the briefly prosperous factory itself. In “The Trousseau” chapter,
a snapshot of the self-sacrificing, short-sighted woman named “our
mother” shows her as “a boyish buccaneer” in a sealskin coat, laughing
with friends. Iris “picture[s]” the time of her parents’ pre-WWI
84 Chapter Five
understand. After Rennie tells Iris that Laura left her a clue, one Iris again
withholds from readers until shortly before she lets us know about the
notebooks, Iris remembers Laura’s excision of the family Bible, deleting
parts she didn’t like. In the group shot of the bridesmaids and groomsmen,
the figures are entirely obliterated by a coat of indigo, leaving only
Richard, Iris, Winifred, and Laura. Laura tints Winifred and Richard
green--suggesting greed--Iris is again blue, and Laura is radiant in brilliant
yellow. Significantly, in the formal shot of Richard and Iris, Iris’s face is
bleached out, “so that the eyes and the nose and mouth looked fogged
over,” signifying her erasure from their marriage (Bouson, 25) and Iris’s
life as an unaware Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard’s or Fitcher’s victim.
McCombs suggests that Iris’s bleached-out face in the wedding portrait
recalls the decorated skull bride in the “Fitcher’s Bird” fairy tale, in
Atwood’s 1970 watercolor, Fitcher’s Bride (Plate 3, Wilson, Margaret
Atwood’s), and in Josef Scharl’s illustration for this fairy tale (219, Hunt
and Stern). Richard is “on the verge of a smile, as if at some secret,
dubious joke” (239). Richard’s face is dark gray, with flames shooting up
from inside his head, “as if the skull itself were burning.” His hands are
also red. He is the burning man, “a Bluebeard on fire” (McCombs; see my
f. n. 13), emblem of lust, greed, and hidden violence. Because the
background is blacked out, the two figures appear to be floating in a dark
night (451). In “Old Notes” for the manuscript, Iris is wearing a “Brides of
Dracula” veil for her wedding to Richard Waterford (Atwood Papers).
In a narrative photo, Laura also sees her father, Norval Chase, as a
burning man. As a child, when her father appeared in an improvised Santa
Claus suit, with burning candles on his head, presumably in celebration of
winter solstice and the return of spirits of the dead (Leach and Fried 230),
his head appeared to be on fire. She had thought that “this was what he
was really like. . . That underneath, he was burning up. All the time,” and
only pretending otherwise (Atwood, Blind 385). Since Laura always
associates particular colors with people, it is possible that this very
sensitive child sees auras, and red auras may resemble flames. As a child,
Iris also sees her father as a man with his head on fire. She reads aloud
from her alphabet book to her parents and imagines that her father, a
symbolic werewolf and ogre (82,165), who was supposed to be fighting
for a boring “fireside idyll,” is watching houses, towns, and people go up
in smoke:
F is for Fire,
Good servant, bad master
When left to itself
It burns faster and faster. (81)
86 Chapter Five
keys, guarding the dungeon in which the starved Laura is chained to the
wall” (286), leaves a steamer trunk of words. Near the end of the novel
after Iris tells Laura that she and Alex were lovers and that he is dead, Iris
feels “angry and thwarted and also helpless.” She resembles the June bug
that she sees “blundering against the window. . .like a blind thumb” (489).
But she and her protagonist, “Iris,” are no longer mute, sacrificial virgins
or Blind Assassins of the science fiction story or handless, helpless
females. As in “The Girl Without Hands” fairy tale, Iris’s cut-off hand
symbolically grows back; as in the “Fitcher’s Bird” fairy tale, Iris is able
to reassemble the dismembered pieces of herself. White-gloved Laura
takes Iris’s car keys to drive off the bridge only in the frame narrative, but
“Iris” of the inner novel also gains vision: she recognizes that everything
in the photograph with which she began her inner novel is drowned and
that the
Having taken her hand out of the trunk, presumably the right one cut-
off in Laura’s photograph, and also using Laura’s amputated left hand, this
time deceptively referred to as the “hand that will set things down” (517-
18), the author Iris writes the story of the story and the story within the
story with both restored hands. Suitably in this postmodern trickster
narrative, her death notice in the Herald and Banner is sandwiched
between the conclusion of the inner novel and the ending of the frame
story, which shifts into future tense. Since all of the clippings except the
article about the Queen Mary are made up (Atwood Papers), this
verification of Iris’s death is as fictional as everything else. Seeming to
depict the modernist theme of the eternity of art against time (Ingersoll,
“Waiting” 551), The Blind Assassin again blurs any distinction between
reality and fiction or art and renders absurd questions about who actually
assembles the novel’s many pieces and whether Iris dies before or after
finishing her manuscript. Seeming to pinpoint time and to verify her
fiction as history with newspaper clippings and references to well-known
historical events, this metafiction rearranges time according to the
aesthetic goals of its narrator-inside-narrator-inside frame narrator-inside-
author. Despite our dated but lingering desires to make fiction
autobiography and history—parodied here and elsewhere in Atwood’s
texts—and to create Truth out of stories, we are left, finally, only with
fiction, but glorious fiction nevertheless.14
Sharon Wilson 89
Notes
I’d like to thank Margaret Atwood and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at
the University of Toronto for the use of the Margaret Atwood Papers.
1
This article is based on a brief paper delivered at the Popular Culture Conference,
Toronto, 14-16 March, 2002, and published in "Margaret Atwood and Popular
Culture: The Blind Assassin and Other Novels." Journal of American and
Comparative Culture. 25:3-4 (Dec. 2002): 270-75.
2
Motifs important in both Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, and even The
Robber Bride, emerge from this manuscript. Frances teaches History of Textiles at
Amity College (alternatively, runs Amity Museum of Daily Life), has done a book
called “Buttons and Bows: Trims and Accessories in the Age of Victoria”
(alternatively, “Dress Fabrics and Daily Costume in the Nineteenth Century”), and
is invited to fill the Penelope Loomis Chair for Domestic History in the University
of Toronto Modern History Department. In constructing Grace and the characters
of her story, she begins with a “road, with a young woman walking along it” to
Nancy’s house. Although Frances doesn’t trust newspapers, she finds herself
believing when there are photographs: “The mere existence of a photograph, in a
newspaper, leads credibility to everything that’s printed underneath it. But for the
Kinnear murder there are no photos, only two smudgy line drawings.” She dreams
that she is bargaining for one of her hands with a man in a homespun cloak or
cowl, whose face she cannot see, and he is dangling its wrist, like a glove. When
she sees that she does have two hands, she thinks “So this third hand must belong
to some other woman. It must have been cut off (Atwood Papers).
3
Although several critics still parallel the love story in “Lizard Men of Zenor” to
the supposed romance of Alex and Iris in the frame story, the published magazine
version mockingly removes the romance (401).
4
Iris imagines Sabrina as a Medusa, “her long dark hair coiled like sleeping
serpents.” Unlike many of Avilion’s residents, Sabrina is more than a marble
fireplace ornament and, at least in Iris’s vision, is able to meet a patriarchal gaze
(288, 58).
5
Earl Ingersoll questions whether the manuscript ever gets into the trunk since Iris
dies in the garden where she has been writing, possibly with the manuscript by her
(553). But the novel, deliberately confusing time sequence, is far from this simple.
Ending the book in future tense, like Bodily Harm, the “Threshold” chapter, where
Iris says she will put the manuscript in the trunk, is placed after Iris’s obituary and
90 Chapter Five
could be prior in time to the “The Golden Lock” chapter. See also n. 7.
6
When asked how she would describe The Blind Assassin, Atwood says that “A
novel is a very very capacious container” (Gussow).
7
Although she says that she puts the notebooks into the drawer on the day that
Laura dies, in “The Golden Lock” chapter of her memoir, Iris assures us that the
notebooks are in the trunk, “along with everything else” (497-98). In the following
chapter, “Victory Comes and Goes,” however, she says that she has put the
notebooks back into the stocking drawer. Since her memoir sometimes takes time
leaps backwards and forwards, some details seem contradictory.
8
Other magic hands in Atwood’s work are those of the grandmothers in Bodily
Harm and The Robber Bride.
9
In addition to this photograph’s being deceptive because it is not tinted, as we
may expect, the Prologue says the cut-off hand is “[over to one side,” but the
Epilogue says it is to the left. Since readers have just discovered that Laura’s copy
of the Button Factory Picnic photo was in one of the hidden notebooks, and since
the Epilogue photo is in a chapter titled “The Other Hand,” they may
inappropriately read the picnic photograph into the inner narrative. Iris is to the left
of Alex in the Button Factory picnic photo, and the cut-off hand in Iris’s copy of
that photo is Laura’s. If Laura’s hand is the cut-off one in the Epilogue photo, “The
Other Hand,” “The hand that will set things down” appears to be Laura’s. At the
end of the preceding chapter, however, Iris admits, “As for the book, Laura didn’t
write a word of it.” As previously mentioned, she adds, “Laura was my left hand,
and I was hers. We wrote the book together“(512-13, 517). If so, that paradox is
the explanation for how the book can be written metaphorically with two “left
hands.”
10
A brown envelope also appears in the “Attic Windows” chapter for “Grace”
from the Ur-Manuscript. Flora (earlier Frances) Mabee, is married to Richard and
has an affair with Alex. She finds a photocopy of James McDermott’s execution in
a brown manila envelope hidden in her grandmother’s hat box (Atwood Papers).
Atwood says that when she was writing Alias Grace, Iris, under a different name,
“’had something in a box. Originally it was a hatbox. It turned into a steamer trunk.
Things transmute in alarming ways when you’re writing a book.’ Having
discovered the trunk, [Atwood] ‘looked’ inside and found a manuscript and other
material” (Gussow).
11
It is, of course, quite possible that, like any author, Iris might make up an affair
between characters who have only slight correspondence to people in her life.
12
Although Earl Ingersoll sees an unreliable narrator as evidence of The Blind
Assassins’s and other novels’ “modernist faith in a truth outside the narrator’s
storytelling” (“Modernism” 9), neither modernist nor especially postmodernist
fiction characteristically demonstrates faith in any external truth, and, if anything,
an unreliable narrator is virtually a requirement in postmodern narratives.
13
“The Angel of Bad Judgment” manuscript for The Blind Assassin provides
background about tinting and evidence of fairy-tale intertexts. Geraldine, who has
a “bad leg” from polio, like Flora Mabee in the early “Grace” manuscript, has a
mother who colors photographs. “The colouring does not make them look more
real: rather, ultra-real, citizens of a lurid, shadowy half-country where realism is
Sharon Wilson 91
beside the point” (Atwood Papers, “Grace,” ch. 6, 5). Geraldine’s mother hand
tints photographs and keeps hers locked in a trunk. As in The Blind Assassin, her
father, this time supposedly missing in the war, once took her to Betty’s
Luncheonette. In a chapter titled “The Man with a Burning Head,” her Aunt Iris
finds the trunk with altered photographs of the family and says that her sister
created the dragon wings, tails, blue teeth, and other effects, for revenge. Father
Clyde’s head appears to be on fire in her parents’ wedding photos, and in one, his
hands are red, flames shoot up from his head, and the bride’s face is bleached.
Atwood has a handwritten note on the back of this sheet saying “Cinderella, fairy
godmother.” In “Old Notes,” the dossier of tinted photos is described as “like the
pictures in fairy-tale books, vivid and fantastic.” The Geraldine (Jeraldini)
character describes the war as “a huge fire” and feels trapped in a fairy tale,
without evil sisters, a fairy godmother or handsome prince—only a mother,
Sleeping Beauty, who drinks. She (later Myra, as in the published novel) runs an
antique shop named The Gingerbread House (alternatively, Seraphim) and,
characterizing herself as a witch and addressing a “you,” says that “you would be
wise to distrust the story because the old like to eat the young up and remain
immortal.” Her grandfather had married into a button factory and her mother, at
one point named Laurel, drives off a bridge when she is 13 (“The Angel of Bad
Judgment," Atwood Papers).
14
Bouson assumes that Sabrina finds and assembles the novel we read. Myra
would not necessarily, of course, set fire to it. And, since Iris’s death is every bit as
fictional as her life, she is very likely to have “assembled” pieces that are as “real,”
but no more real, than the photographs, the trunk, or the written words.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. 1996. New York: Nan A. Talese
Doubleday.
—. The Blind Assassin. 2000. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
—. Bodily Harm. 1982. New York: Simon and Schuster.
—. Cat's Eye. 1988. McClelland and Stewart: Toronto.
—. The Edible Woman. 1976. New York: Popular Library.
—. “Essay.” http:// www.randomhouse.com/features/atwood/essay.html.
—. The Handmaid's Tale. 1986. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
—. Lady Oracle. 1976. New York: Avon.
—. Life Before Man. 1979. New York: Simon and Schuster.
—. Papers. “The Blind Assassin” Manuscripts, 2001. Gift. Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library. University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
—. The Robber Bride.1993. McClelland and Stewart: Toronto.
—. Surfacing. 1976. New York: Popular Library.
—. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. 1972. Toronto:
Anansi.
Barnes and Noble Chats and Events. Interview of Margaret Atwood by
92 Chapter Five
has more affinities with modernist than with realist fiction: the structure
problematizes time and reality ... and Atwood’s lyrically and imaginatively
textured style draws attention to itself rather than offering a transparent
medium on a knowable reality” (Greene 1988,66).
Sharon Wilson has done extensive research on the fairy tale intertexts that
underlie Atwood’s novels. According to Wilson, there is usually a mythic
intertext that promises hope, rebirth, or restoration in Atwood’s novels.
Her analysis of Life Before Man finds references to many fairy-tale and
mythic intertexts, and primarily to L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz in
which the main characters search for and ultimately find the qualities they
were previously lacking (Wilson 1993). Following Atwood’s promise of
hope, and the leads of these critics, especially Greene, Beran, and Wilson,
I set out to find both the sources of hope and a critique of realism in
Atwood’s use of mythic intertexts underlying this work.
I suggest that the novel juxtaposes two contrasting narratives, a mythic
and a realist one. The surface narrative is the realist fiction in which time
drags on and the characters are bored and disillusioned. The other
narrative is a mythic subtext in which the characters act out a cyclic
pattern of birth, death, and rebirth, following the cycle of the year. The
novel sets a gray world of contemporary urban culture in contrast to a
green world of nature. The gray world is the world of realism and linear
time, the boring existence of the novel’s characters, who experience their
lives in a black, white and gray world, drained of color and vibrancy.3
Nevertheless, the characters are linked to the green world of nature
through their fantasies and through a pattern of dates that evoke mythic
and naturist/neo-Pagan rituals and ceremonies. Subtle clues to the
characters’ possible transformations recur throughout the text in language
that alludes (although sometimes parodically) to the sacral and heroic.
Images of the green world achieve weight and symbolic power by their
repetition, their psychological value, and their placement in the text. The
urban and natural images resonate against each other, suggesting the
conflict humans face in searching for the places where they are most
comfortable, most at home. I would like to explore here the idea that the
novel’s relation to realism holds a clue to its apparent pessimism, and its
mythic intertexts open the possibility of hope.
But in Life Before Man the use of three centers of consciousness disrupts
the reader’s expectations of a consistent and objective point of view. In her
study of realism in the English novel Elizabeth Ermarth analyzes the
implications of the lack of an objective narrator: “there is no stable
narrator standing safely outside the frame and implying the possibility of
connections without having to draw any in particular” (Ermarth 1983, 51).
Additionally, the present tense narration
brackets out the future and the past, in other words it brackets out the linear
coordinates that make possible relative measurements in a stable world,
and the continuous present thus destroys the continuity of time and
democratizes all moments and all viewpoints” (Ermarth 51).
The setting of the natural history museum, the Royal Ontario Museum,
amplifies the perspective of scientific observation, and one of the central
characters is a paleontologist who classifies fossils. The museum, a
collection of animal and fossil remains, reminds us that humans have lost
the immediacy of their relationship to the natural world, and that
institutions such as museums and zoos came into being to simulate those
now unattainable relationships. The collection of animals and fossils for
human observation sets up a system in which human observers obtain
gratification, a feeling of power gained from understanding and from sheer
longevity: the dinosaurs have become extinct, but we are here now (Berger
1980). Yet, as Grace reminds us, the human characters who populate the
novel are the ones being observed. To help us account for the observing
eye of the viewer and reader film and narrative theory may offer useful
insights.
Film theory analyzes the scopic intrusiveness of films, and critics have
extended this analysis to narrative, analyzing the ways that realism re-
presents its characters as subjects of observation. John Bender, for
example, argues that Jeremy Bentham’s model of a penitentiary, the
Panopticon, is “the ultimate in realism—the ultimate representational
system” (Bender 1987, 40). The invisible narrating observer is emphasized
in Life, carrying the pretext of scientific observation to an extreme.
Through its technique of free indirect discourse the novel reveals the
characters’ thoughts and emotions—not from within as in first person
narration, but from the perspective of a distanced observer. In its choice of
viewpoints, the novel exaggerates the intrusiveness of the observing
narrator. Thus the reader also becomes a voyeur, intruding into the
characters’ consciousness.
The characters here are especially vulnerable to judgmental
surveillance. It is instructive to note that Atwood wrote Life as the first of
a group of three novels in all of which the observer’s gaze is powerful and
destructive. In the second novel of this sequence, Bodily Harm (Atwood
1981), violence against women escalates from the scopic violence of
pornography to rape and brutal beating. The third novel, The Handmaid’s
Tale (Atwood 1985), explicitly equates surveillance with power and
violence: the handmaids are warned “to be seen is to be penetrated,” and
the secret police force of the totalitarian state Gilead is known as Eyes. In
Life the violence of observation is psychological rather than political. The
characters are self-conscious in the face of observation, fearing that they
are inadequate. Nate is uncomfortable when Elizabeth watches him in the
bathtub. In public, Lesje hides her mouth with her hand, afraid that her
teeth are too large. Elizabeth, on the other hand, derives her power from
100 Chapter Six
careful observation; she watches her colleagues at work and learns their
jobs better than they do. She makes sure to become friends with her
husband’s lovers so as to monitor the progress of the affairs. After Nate
has left her and moved in with Lesje, Elizabeth walks by their house in
order “to see it, that’s all.” She wants to be seen as well: “look at me, I’m
here, you can’t get rid of me that easily” (291).
They’ve been here two hours and she still has all her clothes on. . . . He
kisses her again, tentatively, lingering. Then he asks what time it is. He
himself has no watch. Lesje tells him it’s five-thirty. [He has to take his
children to dinner at his mother’s at six.]. . . ‘There’s lots of time, love,’ he
says. ‘Next time will be better.’ . . . She doesn’t believe there is lots of
time. There is no time. (143-44)
1978 (with two brief flashbacks to a time several months before the action
starts). Atwood has written that she wanted the book to have a tight
triangular structure, three characters who each believe that their position is
correct and the others are wrong. In fact, it has an almost circular temporal
structure: it begins and ends at the harvest season.
****
time and space only came to be invested with new meaning in the
Newtonian age, during and after the eighteenth century. Newton, and
others like him saw time and space as absolutes in themselves. . . . at this
point the human lifespan came to be construed within time” (Kellahar
1994,2).
to regain a sacred time that, from one point of view, can be homologized to
eternity (Eliade 1987, 70).
and quite likely to the species. Bakhtin conjectures that this sense of time
as an absolute end derives from the separation of the individual from the
community.
The new concept of time pervaded all domains of social thought, even
religion. The Deistic concept of creation employed a new and rather
strange, analogy: the Creator of the universe became conceptualized as a
cosmic clockmaker, the first cause that set the universal clock ticking.
Thus the universe was construed as a smoothly functioning machine,
operating within time. Similarly, the machine analogy became a way to
describe increasingly alienated human behavior. Interestingly, in an early
draft of Life, Elizabeth Schoenhof thinks that she used to function well,
like an automaton; set her in motion and she will keep going. This
scientific, mechanical, time bound worldview contrasts dramatically with
the naturistic concept of time as cyclical, and divinity as immanent in an
organic universe created from nothing or from natural materials such as
mud and water. Whereas agrarian people may have measured events
according to natural cycles such as movement of the moon, the stars and
the seasons, we now measure time in ever decreasing intervals: years,
months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds and nanoseconds. The
speed-up locks us into linear rhythms and removes us from the natural
world. This disjunction between a time-bound urban world and the
cyclical world of natural plenitude resonates throughout Life to critique
the realist narrative and to develop a mythic intertext.
*****
the year approaches its end, he kills himself, symbolically enacting the
death of the fertility god who dies at harvest time so that new life may
grow in the following season. His job as a taxidermist at the museum
points to his connection with the world of animals, and suggests the figure
that the neo-Pagan theorist Starhawk has described as “the Dying God
[who] puts on horns and becomes the Hunter” (Starhawk 1989, 113).
According to Starhawk, the Hunter
*****
At the start of the novel, the characters are looking backward, thinking
of the ends of romantic relationships: Elizabeth mourns the death of her
lover Chris; Nate laments the loss of love in his marriage to Elizabeth, and
pays a disappointing visit to his former lover Martha; Lesje “wanders in
prehistory,” since her relationship to William in current time is
unrewarding and uninteresting. In her fantasies, life before man refers to
the eras when dinosaurs roamed the earth. She looks mostly toward the
past, yet her actions eventually propel her into the future.
Part One of the novel takes place in autumn and devotes fifty-five
pages to this occasion, taking place over a three-day span October 29-
October 31,1976 leading up to and including Hallowe’en. The novel draws
upon the religious significance of the holiday, and utilizes themes of neo-
106 Chapter Six
Pagan rituals connected with its celebration. At the time that Atwood
wrote this novel, neo-Paganism, or recovery of pagan naturist religions
and rituals, including wicca or witchcraft, was spreading in the US, Europe
and Canada. Because of her interest in spiritual practices such as the tarot,
and in myth and folklore, Atwood may well have known about this
naturist revival. Interestingly, in 1979, the year that Life was published,
two major books about neo-Paganism were also published, the first edition
of Starhawk’s Spiral Dance and Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon.
Thus, these ideas were circulating in North American culture when the
book was being written.
The motifs of part one, like those of All Hallows Eve, or the neo-Pagan
Samhain, are death, mourning and children. There are eleven entries in
Part One; three are from Lesje’s point of view, four from Nate’s and five
from Elizabeth’s. The language, as Carol Beran and others have pointed
out is a mixture of realism and fantasy. But the more fanciful language
often hints at the supernatural, the mythic, or at the possibility of
transformation. For example, Elizabeth will later hear voices she calls
“angel voices” (64). Discussing these mysterious sounds Beran explains
“the world beyond physical reality is making itself felt again, and Atwood
is emphasizing it by repetition” (40).
Initially, each character thinks of him or herself negatively: Elizabeth
is “like a peeled snail;” Nate is a “feeble minded creep,” and Lesje a
lonely observer hiding in trees to watch the dinosaurs. The characters are
passive and inactive. Elizabeth is depressed, and lies in bed wondering: “I
don’t know how I should live” (3). This backward looking and mourning
is congruent with the rituals of Samhain (related to the Christian All
Hallows Eve, celebrated as the secular children’s holiday of Hallowe’en),
the solemn Sabbat that both ends and starts the neo-Pagan calendar. On
this occasion people celebrate their ties to their beloved dead who have
recently died.” The ceremonial rituals include the possibility of speaking
with these souls, for at this time the veils separating life and death are thin.
Candles, darkness, gifts of shared food, bowls, all are part of the
celebration.
At Samhain [the god] arrives at the Land of Youth, the Shining Land in
which the souls of the dead grow young again, as they wait to be reborn.
He opens the gates that they may return and visit their loved ones
(Starhawk 1989, 193-4; 218-19).
“meant to hold offerings. Right now they hold their own space, their own
beautifully shaped absence” (Atwood 1979, 20). Another set of bowls
holds the “offerings” that will be distributed to the children who come
trick-or-treating. Elizabeth makes explicit connections to the holiday’s
spiritual overtones: she thinks the children do not know “what night this is
or what, with their small decorated bodies, they truly represent” (54).
Answering the door to the trick-or-treaters, she makes the connection to
the Pagan holiday:
All Souls. Not just friendly souls but all souls. They are souls, come back,
come back, crying at the door, hungry, mourning their lost lives. You give
them food, money, anything to substitute for your love and blood, hoping it
will be enough, waiting for them to go away. (34-35)
Elizabeth spends most of her entries in this section remembering her dead
lover Chris. Distraught at his recent suicide, she laments “I don’t know
how I should live. I live like a peeled snail” (3). She wants to have her
shell back, to feel less vulnerable. Her ties to life are her children, but they
seem remote and distant from her now, just as her husband Nate seems
remote.
Lesje’s section starts with her fantasy of “wandering in prehistory”
because she finds her present life unsatisfying (12). Her thoughts about the
dinosaurs raises concerns that humans may become extinct as well.
Perhaps, just as there has been life before man evolved, there may also be
life after man has become extinct. Lesje realizes that in her fantasies
“she’s regressing. She’s been doing that a lot lately” (13). As a teenager
she fantasized about dinosaurs, and then about men. But thinking about
men now is “unrewarding.” She does not fantasize about her lover,
William, although perhaps she did previously. The Samhain rituals include
a turning, a time to think of new birth. Thus, while Elizabeth laments
Chris’s death, Lesje thinks about her own desire for children. She would
like a child, but her partner William would not.
Nate also has a mourning ritual in this part of the novel. His section
starts “he doesn’t know what ‘love’ means between them any more” (7).
He mourns the end of the love he and Elizabeth once shared. He
previously thought of her romantically as a “Madonna in a shrine,
shedding a quiet light... holding a lamp in her hand like Florence
Nightingale” (50). He visits Martha, his former lover, and feels defeated in
the face of her anger at him for breaking off the affair. Yet he experiences
a turning and new beginning as well. There are hints that he will next
begin a relationship with Lesje, whom he is now romanticizing. He places
a call to her from a pay phone, and thinks of her as “his one hope of
108 Chapter Six
early February, a holiday that Starhawk calls the “feast of the waxing
light,” a time when seeds that will later grow first begin to sprout (186),
Lesje and Nate first make love. After this Nate imagines a future with
Lesje.
In a parodic inversion of the romantic myths of Valentine’s Day,
February 16 has two entries describing unromantic sexual intercourse.
Elizabeth remembers seducing a boy she picked up when she was a
teenager. She thinks of their sexual urgency as “time squeezed together”
(204). In the narrative present Elizabeth has manipulated William, hoping
to force a confrontation between William and Lesje that would lead to a
reconciliation and end Lesje’s affair with Nate. But Elizabeth’s plan
backfires: William attempts to rape Lesje, who escapes him by locking
herself in the bathroom.
Part Four takes place in spring, over a period of four months, from
Wednesday, March 9 through Saturday, July 9, 1977. This is the season of
spring, the time of new growth, the season of rising desire, proceeding
through the balance of the equinox, and the triumph of light at the summer
solstice. In keeping with the motif of growth and fertility, this section is
built around growing sexual desire, rape, and seduction, much of it darkly
comic. Lesje leaves William and moves into a rented house, expecting
Nate to join her. But even though he tells her he will, and says he’d like
them to have a baby, he delays. Meanwhile Elizabeth seduces William.
And, on May 14, Elizabeth arranges to meet a man who tried to pick her
up. In a parody of her first sexual encounter in her teens, he attempts to
seduce her in his car, but she fends him off.
Images of fertility and sterility characterize Lesje’s thoughts on April
29, the day before May Day, the pagan holiday of Beltane, the day that
celebrates the marriage of the god and maiden. Nate’s children are coming
to spend the weekend with Lesje and Nate. Lesje dreads their arrival, and
feels barren, “in the desert without, isolated, single, childless” (259),
excluded from the “verdant little oasis” of Nate, Elizabeth and the children
(259).
June 22 is the summer solstice, the time when light triumphs and then
immediately begins to decline; the Sun King embraces the Queen of
Summer and their marriage is consummated. The entry for this day is
Lesje’s. Although Lesje (now the supposedly triumphant Queen of
Summer) has won Nate (the new Sun King) from Elizabeth, her mood is
unhappy. She thinks “Elizabeth should have felt deserted and betrayed and
she herself should have felt, if not victorious, at least conventionally smug.
Instead, it seems to be the other way around” (276). However, Elizabeth is
not happy either. On her 39th birthday, she begins to feel old. She resents
110 Chapter Six
Nate’s freedom and feels herself “locked into this house while the roof
leaks and the foundation crumbles and the earth revolves and leaves fall
from the calendars like snow” (290).
Part Five covers almost a full year, from September 3, 1977 through
August 18, 1978. Although it begins with entries in which all three
protagonists are unhappy and dissatisfied, it ends with at least a temporary
resolution of their concerns. In contrast to its elegiac start the novel ends in
muted celebration, although characteristically for Atwood, the conclusion
is somewhat ambiguous. Its concluding sections, set on August 18, 1978,
are a time of fruition presented in images of harvest, fertility, pregnancy,
renewed desire, and utopian yearnings. Each character experiences a
connection to the green world and new hope. Notably, there are fewer
references to clock time.
Part Five ends on Friday, August 18, 1978, almost 2 years from the
start. Late August begins the harvest season, and each entry on this day
suggests harvest, fertility. Lesje is now identified with summer. She tries
to enter her familiar fantasy of the living dinosaurs, but “she can’t do it,”
perhaps because she is too tired, or perhaps because she is more firmly
attached to her own present life (361). No longer afraid of Elizabeth, she
believes they ought to make peace with each other (359). At the end of
May she threw away her birth control pills in a fit of anger, and, having
missed two menstrual cycles, she believes she is pregnant. Thus she will
take Elizabeth’s place to continue the cycle of generation. She thinks
getting pregnant may be a “stupid thing . . . or she may have done a wise
thing for a stupid reason” (361). She is unused to thinking of herself as
having power of agency, but now affirms her place in the museum as a
“guardian” of the past with its “whole chunks of time, . . . golden and
frozen” (357). Although she worries that her child may have horns, the
impregnation with a horned baby suggests the mythic horned god, who
will continue the cycle of death and rebirth (341). The horned baby also
reminds us of the conclusion of Atwood’s novel Surfacing when the
unnamed narrator engages in a ritual outdoor mating and believes she may
be giving birth to a horned, godlike, new kind of being.
Nate thinks of going “out into the country” with Lesje to “make love,
slowly and gently, under some trees or in a field” (363). He goes to meet
her at the Museum, uncertain of her response to his unexpected arrival and
thinks “In any case, they will go home” (365). Thus in his section, the man
who felt displaced from his wife and bed now feels he has a love and a
home they share.
For her part, Elizabeth has come to revel in her strength and her
survival. She is glad that “she has built a dwelling” even if it is “over the
Karen Stein 111
abyss” (352). At the museum, she looks at the Chinese Peasant painting
exhibit she has arranged. Able now to think of others and to enjoy a more
technicolor world than her previously black and white world of
depression, she is unexpectedly moved by pictures of women harvesting
glowing purple eggplants and ripe orange persimmons. The Chinese
paintings represent a utopian state of agrarian community and connection
to a fertile, blossoming nature. Elizabeth is aware of the contradictions of
Communist China. The utopian China of the paintings “does not exist.
Nevertheless she longs to be there” (368). Newly able to experience deep
emotion, she plans a front porch picnic for her daughters, a connection to
the green world she has until now rejected.
*****
Notes
1
Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man 1979. (New York: Ballantine,). All references
to this novel are taken from this edition. This essay is a revised and expanded
version of my chapter on Life Before Man in Margaret Atwood Revisited, 1999,
Twayne, and appears here with permission of Gale, a part of Cengage Learning,
Inc.
2
For one recent example, Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion, devotes two
paragraphs to the novel in a book of 155 pages.
3
See, for example, Elizabeth’s view of food as the black and white magazine
diagrams of its fat content, Life Before Man 6.
4
Atwood chooses characters’ names carefully, and her choices suggest mythic
possibilities. Lesje is Ukranian for Alice (99) which means “truthful one” and hints
at Alice in Wonderland, the girl who enters a strange universe; Elizabeth means
“dedicated to God;” and Nate (Nathanael) means “a gift of God” as his mother
explains to Elizabeth (51). Chris comes from Christian or Christopher which
means “follower or believer in Christ.” Green refers to the green world; Schoenhof
112 Chapter Six
is “beautiful place,” and Beecham is beech trees, woods. William, Lesje’s lover’s
name comes from the old German meaning strong protector. Auntie Muriel’s name
derives from the Greek for myrrh, bitter, and Wilson postulates that she is linked
with the Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz. Martha comes from the Aramaic for
lady, mistress, and is connected with the Biblical Martha, sister of Lazarus and
Mary. The name choices here suggest alternative worlds, the inverted realities of
Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, and the spiritual possibilities conveyed
by the Biblical and naturist allusions.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Life Before Man. 1979. New York: Ballantine.
—. Bodily Harm. 1981. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
—. The Handmaid's Tale. 1985.Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Forms of Time and Chronotype in the Novel,” in
The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas
Press, 184-258.
Bender, John. 1987. Imagining the Penitentiary. Chicago: U Chicago P.
Beran, Carol. 1993. Living Over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood’s LifeBefore
Man. Toronto: ECW Press.
Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals,”1980. About Looking. NY:
Pantheon, 1-26.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. 2004.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Davidson, Arnold E. and Cathy N. Davidson. “Prospects and Retrospects
in Life Before Man.”1981. The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in
Criticism. Toronto: Anansi. 205-221.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion.
1959. Trans. Willard R. Trask. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1987.
Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel.
1983. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Freedman, Adele. “Happy Heroine and ‘Freak’ of Can Lit.” 1980. Globe
and Mail (Toronto), 5 October, E1.
Grace, Sherrill. “ 'Time Present and Time Past': Life Before Man." (Winter
1980-81). Essays in Canadian Writing 20 165-70.
—. iolent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood. 1980. Montreal: Vehicule
Press.
Greene, Gayle. “Life Before Man: Can Anything Be Saved?” 1988.
Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Eds. Kathryn VanSpanckeren and
Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University
Press, 65-84.
Karen Stein 113
THEODORE F. SHECKELS
Atwood’s fiction has some comic princes, like the ones Sondheim has
singing before us: the Polish Count and “The Royal Porcupine” in Lady
Oracle (1976) come to mind. But, what seems to unite Atwood’s would-be
princes is that they are not really princes. They sometimes lack the
goodness, and they sometimes lack the power. Either way, they afford
Atwood’s heroines with little by the way of rescue.
These would-be “princes,” I would suggest, fall into four categories.
There are those who pretend to offer rescue but are actually quite
dangerous; there are those who pretend to offer rescue and seem genuine
but, ultimately, prove less than noble. Then, there are those who are good,
but comically ineffective; and there are those who are good, but sadly
impotent. And there is a fifth group: the would-be princes the status of
which Atwood leaves ambiguous. For no other purpose than clarity in this
essay, I will call the four types “dark princes,” “shadowy princes,” “comic
princes,” and “sad princes.” The fifth group, “unfinished princes.”
Dark Princes
Peter in The Edible Woman (1969) very much reflects the traditional
assumptions about male and female roles that characterized Canada during
the transitional 1960s. A young lawyer aspiring to climb higher in his
firm, he desires the proper wife, for whom he has certain expectations. She
will dress a certain way; she will act a certain way; and she certainly will
not work. Within the novel’s consumer culture context, Peter seems to be
engaged in wise consumer behavior as he surveys the available goods and
selects Marian. It is no wonder then that she feels she is a product, a
foodstuff about to be consumed. Peter, the wise consumer, is disturbing to
Atwood’s early 1970s readers with proto-feminist ideas. But Peter is a
darker character. He has two hobbies: collecting cameras and collecting
guns. Both, of course, are objects to shoot with, and they become quickly
synonymous. So, when Peter wants to shoot Marian in her to-order sexy
red dress, the reader quickly jumps from photography to pornography to
murderous predation. The three possibilities blur.
But how is Peter a rescuer, a prince in the archetypal sense? One only
has to reflect on the world of “the office virgins” in the novel. They—and
women like them—are waiting to be saved from prospective spinsterhood
by a marriage proposal. It is into this world that Marian has gone upon
graduation from college. One does not detect in the novel a strong
emotional bond between Marian and Peter. He is handsome; he has fine
prospects; he is acceptable to her parents. He will do as a rescuer from the
world Emmy, Lucy, and Millie are settling into. So, Peter occupies a
Theodore F. Scheckels 117
extracted from the child pornography and prostitution she was entrapped
in. In reality, Crake is amoral, intent on using science for ends that seem
god-like and demon-like. He and Oryx will create a new Eden, as well as a
new, better race of humanoid creatures; but they will also play a role in the
pharmaceutical plot to infect the developing world before saving the
developed and making a huge profit. When the latter plans runs horribly
amok, Crake ends up not a rescuer of humankind but as its destroyer.
All of these dark princes, it should be noted, possess power. Atwood’s
males are sometimes critiqued as powerless, but that critique certainly
does not apply to these five. Although the kind of power they primarily
possess varies from social (Peter) to psychological (David) to political (the
Commander) to economic (Richard Griffen) to scientific (Crake), it is
power nonetheless that they wield. Atwood furthermore establishes that
one kind of power often entails others, so Griffen, for example, uses his
economic power to gain social and political. All of these men victimize the
less powerful, and the less powerful are most often gendered female.
Shadowy Princes
Not all of Atwood’s males are, however, so obviously powerful and so
obviously evil. Like the “Dark Princes,” they occupy a rescuing place
within the novel’s stuctures. They, thus, seem to be rescuers, but the
reality is rather different.
Duncan in The Edible Woman is a counterpoint to Peter. Whereas Peter
is the well-dressed establishment male with his very male cameras and
guns, Duncan is the pathetically thin, scruffy graduate student in English
with an obsession with therapeutic ironing. Marian meets him at the
laundromat, and she gradually falls into a rebellious relationship with him.
The reader undoubtedly finds little long-term hope in a Duncan-Marian
relationship: they are, after all, so very different. Nonetheless, the reader
does hope that Duncan might rescue Marian from Peter. All along, Duncan
makes his selfishness clear. However, it seems benign, especially because
he presents himself as somewhat sexually naïve—not necessarily virginal
but, nonetheless, not predatory. The truth, we discover after he beds
Marian, is that he is accustomed to sexual conquest and that his pose is a
part of the disarming charm he uses to gain sexual advantage.
Billy in The Robber Bride (1993) is also deceptive. We, of course, see
him entirely through Karen/Charis’s eyes, eyes that perceive him as needy.
He is the American draft dodger she adopts, like an orphaned puppy. The
reader is pleased at her generous spirit, and, given how wounded
Karen/Charis is because of her traumatic adolescence, the reader is
Theodore F. Scheckels 119
probably glad that a love relationship seems to develop between the two.
Billy might rescue her from the after effects of that trauma. When we
discover that sex with Billy is a dreaded ordeal and, in addition, is
sometimes violent, we become uncomfortable with this supposed prince.
When we realize that he not only slept with Zenia but (probably) killed
Karen/Charis’s beloved chickens before abandoning her for Zenia, we see
his potentially nefarious side. I say “potentially” because we have only
Zenia’s version of Billy to set against Charis’s perception, and Zenia is
notoriously unreliable.
Much the same analysis might be offered of Mitch in The Robber
Bride. Roz certainly seems less in need of rescue than Charis, but , despite
her strong personality, she feels weakened by her ethnicity and by the
shadowy ways in which her family escaped off society’s margins and
insinuated itself into the economic elite. Mitch, with the “right” ethnicity
and “old money,” rescues Roz from her nagging sense of inferiority.
Princely, he might appear, but we discover rather soon that his behavior is
far from such. He proves to be quite the womanizer until he meets the
woman, Zenia, who throws him for a suicidal loop. Roz tolerates his
indiscretions; she even, in a perverse way, thinks she gains power in the
relationship by being able, almost on cue, to rescue him from the flings by
throwing a tantrum. In the end, however, Roz realizes how the social
respectability Mitch had offered her just was not worth the indignities that
went along with it.
Neither Duncan nor Billy nor Mitch is quite what he initially seems to
be. The same is true of Jimmy (a.k.a. Snowman) in Oryx and Crake. He is
Crake’s co-conspirator as a young adolescent, but, lacking Crake’s
mathematical, scientific aptitude, he is relegated to a lesser educational
path in the arts. He creeps back on the scene, but he is clearly kept at a
distance from where the true action is. In fact, inaction becomes
characteristic of him, as he shies away from any involvement with his
mother’s rebellion against the economic/political “system” that seems to
be calling the shots in the future world Atwood has created. But what if
Jimmy had had Crake’s “smarts” and a bit more assertiveness? Is Jimmy
nothing more the Crake’s weak reflection? His willingness to have sex
with Oryx allies him with those who had sexually exploited her earlier in
her life. In addition, it has him perhaps betraying his friendship with
Crake, since it is unclear whether Crakes has assented to their liaisons or
not. Furthermore, once the novel’s apocalypse has passed and he becomes
the teacher of the new breed Crakers, he feeds them repeated lies about
past, present, and future. He, perhaps, feels the princely need to rescue
them, but his actions belie that need.
120 Chapter Seven
Comic Princes
There is little that is amusing about Jimmy, Mitch, or Billy, despite
Atwood’s tendency to inject comic notes—dark ones—even at some of her
more serious moments. Duncan, on the other hand, is comic for a good bit
of The Edible Woman. His ironing is funny, and so is his graduate student
lifestyle, along with those of roommates Trevor and Fish.1 Ultimately,
however, Duncan, like the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” reveals his
what big teeth he has. Two other Atwood males, however, remain always
comic.
The Polish Count in Lady Oracle, although he does take sexual
advantage of young Joan Foster, proves benign. She is able to leave him
and, later, laugh at the situation she had naively stumbled into. The Count
becomes almost a caricature of old royalty, now down on its luck. He,
therefore, offered her no real rescue from the economic hardship she had
fallen into after she rebelled and left home. At best, in his appreciation of
her fuller figure, he may have rescued her a tad from her self-image
problems but from little else.
Also comic is Joan’s relationship with The Royal Porcupine, a.k.a.
Chuck Brewer, in Lady Oracle. It also takes a sexual turn. However, older,
Joan is more in command of this relationship. He was, perhaps, looking
for the moment to seduce her, but it is quite likely that she was looking for
a way out of the life she had thus far crafted when she had sex with him.
But the sex leads to nothing, no relationship and no rescue. In fact, post-
sex, he becomes much more Chuck Brewer to her than “The Royal
Porcupine.” The suggestion of prince-ness in his silly nom de plume
vanishes once the deed is done. He offers no way out and, therefore, she
concocts her plan to fake her death and flee to Italy.
Sad Princes
Lady Oracle is probably Atwood’s most comic novel. Thus, it is not
surprising that we find the comic princes within it. Most of her fiction is
either frightening or depressing or both. And within these novels, in
addition to the dark and shadowy princes, we find many sad ones.
Life Before Man (1979) is probably Atwood’s saddest book insofar as
there is very little that is uplifting in the lives of any of the characters,
male or female. The latter, then, certainly need rescuing; the former,
caught in the same ennui, are scarcely able to be rescuing princes.
There is Chris, not a major character in the novel because he’s dead
before it begins. He was the lover who was supposed to have rescued
Theodore F. Scheckels 121
Elizabeth from her emotionally dead life. But Chris had troubles of his
own, troubles that led to his suicide. Elizabeth’s husband, Nate, was, of
course, part of her troubles, so it is ironic when he becomes the would-be
rescuer of Lesje, who is in a dead-end relationship with William. Nate’s
sensitivity nonetheless causes us to hope that he will indeed be able to play
the role of Lesje’s prince. He has renounced his potentially lucrative career
as a corporate lawyer and has turned craftsman, creating children’s toys
out of wood. Both the law and the corporate dissatisfied him, and his
crafting represents his way of enacting his anti-establishment rebellion. He
is not, however, much of a rebel.
Lesje waits to be rescued, as Nate wavers between her apartment and
Elizabeth’s house, not fully living in either. Finally, she acts to force the
issue by discarding her birth control pills and, then, becoming pregnant.
Maybe now, she seems to think, Nate will fully choose her and rescue her
from the limbo she is living. We never know if he does, for the scene in
which Lesje tells Nate she is pregnant with his child is not in the novel: it
is set to occur after the novel ends. This sad prince may run away, or he
may rescue her. Or, perhaps, “rescue” is the wrong term, for, given all of
the novel’s failed couples, why should we think Lesje and Nate will prove
to be any happier (for the moment or ever after) than Elizabeth and Nate or
Lesje and William or Elizabeth and Chris.2
After Life Before Man, Atwood’s fiction takes a pronounced political
turn. The situations that the characters, the female characters, need to be
rescued from therefore shift from ennui and emptiness to third-world
prisons and right-wing republics. In the first of the two overtly political
novels, Bodily Harm (1981), “soft” Canadian journalist Rennie Wilford
finds herself on a Caribbean island that is slowly dissolving into civil war.
Unfortunately, Rennie has unwittingly involved herself in the conflict. As
a result, although innocent of political intent, she finds herself at-risk if the
chaos takes the wrong turn. And, as it turns out, she ends up in a gruesome
prison.
As the novel moves toward its in-prison finale, the island nation and
she are both depicted as looking for rescue from the potentially oppressive
forces. The island (personified female) looks to the political figure known
simply as “Prince” to save it. “Prince” fails. Rennie looks to Paul, a
politicized figure whose allegiances are not entirely easy to figure out, to
save her. He becomes a romantic interest, and he eventually becomes her
lover. Although he may help Rennie overcome her self-consciousness over
her recent partial mastectomy and resulting poor body image by making
love with her, Paul cannot help her escape the political chaos. He can
barely help himself. So, he proves no rescuing prince, and the novel’s use
122 Chapter Seven
Unfinished Princes
All then seems rather bleak for would-be princes in Atwood’s fictive
world. They are dark or shadowy and threaten rather than help. Or they are
comically or sadly ineffective. However, there are a handful of male
characters who come closer to playing the archetypal prince’s role.
Theodore F. Scheckels 123
from the forces outside the tower (including Zenia) that might threaten
him. So, Tony is as much West’s prince as West is hers.
Atwood offers one last unfinished prince in the title character in The
Blind Assassin. The literal title character is curiously minor. He is buried
in the interpolated tale Alex tells Iris during the course of their love affair.
The tale takes us to a remote kingdom where things have gone wrong.
Rugs are made by young male slaves. They are, along the way, sexually
abused, and, when they have outlived their productivity, blinded so that
they can practice the carpet-making art (for others) no more. Many of
these blinded carpet weavers have joined a guild of for-hire assassins. At
the same time, the ritual sacrifice of young virgins continues although no
one believes in the theology the sacrifices were based on any longer. In
addition, because the young virgins can bring a price, they are routinely
raped by the highest bidder the night before their execution. Also, the girls
no longer hail from the kingdom’s noble families; rather, they are
underclass surrogates for the once-required well-born girls. The ritual is
then, in a number of ways, corrupt. The girls, through the years, realized
its corruption and ceased going quietly to their rape and death. So, they are
now muted by having their tongues excised. In the tale Alex tells, a blind
assassin rescues a muted young virgin before her rape and murder.
Bravely, using his deft sense of touch and her vision, they escape the
kingdom together.
The escape leaves them in the wilderness, and we are not told,
definitively, what fate befalls them there; we are, instead, given three
versions: the pessimistic one offered by Alex; the optimistic one offered
by Iris; and a published one that erases the blind assassin and the muted
young virgin entirely from the story. Given this deliberate refusal on
Atwood’s part to commit to a happy ending and given all we are told about
this wilderness and given the escaping couple’s disabilities, we must be
dubious about their fate. However, they have escaped: the blind assassin
did, prince-like, rescue the sacrificial virgin. The “happily-ever-after” part
is the part that is in doubt. Of course, if this story is intended to mirror that
of Alex and Iris, then we know that there will be no “happily-ever-after.”)
Conclusion
Wilson and others have made the argument that fairy tale motifs
inform Atwood’s fiction. Atwood’s own comments on her novels suggest
as much. So, it should not be surprising that a pattern as fundamental as
that found in tales such as “Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,” “Sleeping Beauty,”
and “Snow White” informs her work. Atwood specifically draws attention
Theodore F. Scheckels 125
Notes
1
The Edible Woman, written when Atwood was a graduate student in English,
contains much humor that an academic audience especially appreciates. Many who
pursued graduate work in English can attest to the Trevors, Fishes, and Duncans
they knew.
2
There is even a moment in the novel when a relationship between Elizabeth and
William, an unhappy one, seems in the offing, turning the plot into something of a
relationship merry-go-round.
3
Rennie seems, in the end, to be rescued by a male official representing the
Canadian government. However, Atwood’s verb tenses as well as the manner in
which Atwood begins the novel have suggested to many that this rescue is but her
in-prison fantasy.
126 Chapter Seven
4
The motion picture version of the novel gives us a more definitive sense of
rescue. We know what Nick’s role is, and we see Kate (She has a name in the
movie!) after she has escaped. But, even in the feature film, there is ambiguity
about the lead character’s ultimate fate.
5
Many have suggested—and Atwood confirmed the idea to a point when she
addressed a large group at the MLA conference in Toronto—that Tony is as close
as Atwood has come to putting herself in one of her novels. That she and Graeme
Gibson present a tall-and-short picture much like Tony and West gives additional
credibility to this notion. The mutuality in the Tony-West relationship, then, may
be Atwood’s veiled way of suggesting that she and Gibson have come closer to
getting “it” right than any of the couples in her novels.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. 1972. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Literature. Toronto: Anansi.
Heinimann, David. Autumn 1997. “Ironized Man: A Jest of God and Life
Before Man.” Canadian Literature 154. 52-67.
Hudgens, Brenda. 1997. “Faded Photographs: The Elusive Male in
Margaret Atwood’s Fiction.” Publications of the Missouri Philological
Association 22. 47-56.
Rigney, Barbara. 1987. Margaret Atwood. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble.
Wilson, Sharon Rose. 1993. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual
Politics. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHULI BARZILAI
...like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, [Aesop] made use of
humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he
added to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it.
—Flavius Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Book 5:14
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow
in Australia.
—Charles M. Schulz
First Impressions
That myths, folktales, and fairy tales abound in Margaret Atwood’s
writings is, by now, a critical commonplace. From brief but pointed
allusions to full-scale revisions, Atwood frequently draws on these
venerable genres and recasts familiar motifs and stories into contemporary
forms. On occasion, however, Atwood does something else. She tells a
story that only appears to belong to one or more of these categories. Rather
than a reinterpretation and rewriting of an earlier tale, it becomes clear on
closer examination that the tale is her own invention. She is not pouring
old wine into a new bottle. The text may look like a folktale or fable, may
even have the characteristic markers of the genre but, in fact, it’s all fact.
The question of why Atwood uses this narrative strategy is one to which I
shall return in the course of this discussion. However, as a preliminary
hypothesis, I would propose that her mode of storytelling in such instances
has a calculated two-pronged effect: while it initially defuses or de-
intensifies (and sometimes temporarily masks) her social, political, and
128 Chapter Eight
They cloned the Thylacine. They got some DNA out of a bone and they
emptied the nucleus out of the egg of a Tasmanian devil and they put the
Thylacine bone DNA into the egg, and it grew, and they implanted it, and
Shuli Barzilai 129
it didn’t work, and they did it again, and it didn’t work, and they did it
again, again, again, and they tried it a little differently, and they tweaked it
this way and that, and finally they cloned the Thylacine. (73)
Much depends upon whether or not the reader has encountered the
word “thylacine” before reading the story. To the uninitiated, the word
may sound, as it did to me, like one of those neologisms that Atwood is so
adept at inventing. The thylacine, I thought, is probably an offshoot of her
contemporary “fabulist” imagination—except for the fact that mention is
soon made of a silent film, which could imply a preexistent referent,
something actually there in the real world:
Out it came, the baby Thylacine, and they nurtured it tenderly and with
great interest and there it was, running around with stripes on, frantic, as in
the only remaining film of it, where it runs and paces and utters silent yelps
because the film is a silent film, and it stops to gaze into the camera with
an expression both poignant and severe. (73-74)
The event made the headlines...and they named the Thylacine Trugannini,
a name you see on restaurant menus in that part of the world, as a gesture
130 Chapter Eight
Recall the nimble fox who dragged the fawn away to its den. Atwood
gives a distinctly postmodern edge to the institutionalized literary model
associated with Aesop. On the one hand, it is impossible to miss the tone
of irony and critique of modern technology, of human greed and ruthless
egotism, informing her text; on the other, with no supplementary
information, “Thylacine Ragout” presents itself as a cautionary fable for
adults, loosely based on current technological advances and premised on a
future-oriented possibilities.
But the sad fact, as already indicated, is that almost nothing in this
story is untrue. Everything it describes has already happened or could be
happening right now. “Thylacine Ragout” is a transposition of real
animals, people, and events into a form of narrative fiction. Thus the
disparity between an uninformed reading of Atwood’s story and an
informed one corresponds to two general types of information gap. Unlike
a murder mystery, for instance, in which the gap (“who did it?”) lies in the
text itself, “Thylacine Ragout” immediately identifies the perpetrators and
their motives. Its moralité, although unstated, is also unambiguous.
Atwood holds a mirror up to a brave new world in which laboratories and
ledgers are the governing principles: the scientist who sold the thylacine
and the person who ate it epitomize the cannibal commercialism of the age
Shuli Barzilai 131
that bred them. Information gaps, however, are sometimes located not in
the text but rather, and for a variety of reasons, in its audience. “Thylacine
Ragout” makes sense, albeit incomplete sense, and its moral lesson
remains the same even to an imperfect and naïve (or, perhaps, ideal) reader
such as I was, still uncontaminated by facts and contexts. An informed
reading not only changes the generic identification of “Thylacine Ragout”
but also enables the critical perception that the “fabulous”—in the dual
sense of fable-related and remarkable—aspect of this story is not the
animal after which it is named.
In what follows I propose to retrace a passage or, more precisely, an
expulsion from ignorance to knowledge that entails, ironically enough, a
considerable reliance on twentieth- and twenty-first century information
technologies whose profit motives and ambitions have also supported the
actual project to recreate the vanished thylacine. First, you snuff it out and,
then, you try to resurrect it. In describing how Atwood’s supposed fable
became unfabulated for me and how my generic “coping mechanisms”
were undone, I shall also provide a more detailed account of the three
histories packed into her very short text.
The last known animal died in captivity, at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania,
on 7 September 1936.3
One of the earliest thylacine photographs known to exist, dating from
1869, is entitled “Mr. Weaver Bags a Tiger” (figure 8.1).4 In stark contrast
to the official Coat of Arms with its representation of proud, upright tigers
supporting the state shield of Tasmania, the 1869 photograph shows a stiff,
dead animal hanging upside down from an invisible ceiling beam or hook,
its legs tightly trussed together with rope. Mr. Weaver, seated opposite the
cadaver, gazes straight ahead, expressionless but presumably satisfied. He
is dressed in full hunter’s regalia with a long rifle resting against the arm
closest to the camera. It is a classic “trophy shot” of a by-gone era.
The same image of Mr. Weaver and his kill features at the end of an
incisive magazine article on the thylacine, Leigh Dayton’s “Rough
Justice,” published in the May 2001 issue of New Scientist. It was while
browsing through Atwood’s extensive research files for Oryx and Crake,
Shuli Barzilai 133
Figure 8.1 “Mr. Weaver Bags a Tiger.” Collection: Tasmanian Museum and Art
Gallery.
located at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, that I came
across Dayton’s article inside a folder labeled “Threatened Species, 2000-
2003.”5 In a statement reiterated in bold-caption lettering, Dayton remarks,
“Native fauna was of little consequence to colonists who were bent on
recreating England in the Antipodes” (Dayton 46). In this context, the
word “bent” may have a double valence for the reader: in addition to the
standard meanings of determined and resolved, it also suggests something
warped or perverse. Since Atwood probably read “Rough Justice” before
134 Chapter Eight
filing it away, the word “bent” may have been reapplied to the scientist,
the one bent on retiring to Bermuda through the thylacine sale, in the final
paragraph of “Thylacine Ragout.” But whether or not her “bent” takes off
from Dayton’s, what his article does provide is another good reason for
Mr. Weaver’s satisfaction at bagging a tiger:
For years Tasmania’s thylacines thrived, safe on their island refuge. Then
in 1830, six years after the arrival of the island’s first sheep, things
changed. A bounty was placed on the tiger, supposedly to protect flocks
from hungry thylacines. Between 1888 and 1909, the Tasmanian
government paid over two thousand bounties for thylacine scalps. (Dayton
46)
Selling out the thylacine was as openly lucrative in the late nineteenth
century as it turned out to be for the “bent scientist” in Atwood’s
contemporary account.
It is apparently difficult to accept the fact that the unique Tasmanian
tiger has gone the way of the mammoth and the dodo, an extinction
predicted and preventable up to a point in time. This difficulty, as my
further explorations showed, has had two creatively inventive—or, you
might also say, hallucinatory—consequences. First, although following the
death of the thylacine at the Hobart Zoo, no decisive evidence confirming
the animal’s continued existence has been found, reports of sightings
persist to the present day. According to the Parks and Wildlife Service of
Tasmania, “There have been hundreds of sightings since 1936….
Nonetheless, all sightings have remained inconclusive.”6 Put another way,
the thylacine has entered into the annals of local folklore. There alone it
continues to flourish. As Eric Guiler writes, “no other species in the
Australian fauna…has aroused so many stories and even created its own
legends in the short space of years since white settlement” (2).7 In re-
visioning the fate of the species in “Thylacine Ragout,” Atwood may be
said to carry on this tradition—but without a hope for actual recovery in
her heart.
Second, whereas sightings are one mode of recreative effort motivated
by a wish for the return of the dead, at the turn of the twenty-first century,
Michael Archer, a professor of paleontology and then director of the
Australian Museum in Sydney, made international headlines when he
announced that the DNA extracted from a tiger pup sample preserved in
ethanol was good enough to clone. Additional DNA from the specimens of
two other tiger pups included bone, tooth, bone marrow and dried muscle.
In May 2000, News in Science carried a report with the optimistic banner,
“Bringing the Tasmanian Tiger Back to Life,” that added a competitive
Shuli Barzilai 135
edge to this bold venture: “‘While there are similar extinct animal cloning
projects elsewhere in the world,’” Archer was quoted as saying, “‘the
Australian Museum's project is the first to find good quality DNA’”
(Salleh).
Work to recover DNA from museum specimens of the thylacine
continued. Two years later, in May 2002, Archer was quoted in the
Environment News Service describing these extractions as “an extremely
critical step in producing sufficient amounts of Tasmanian tiger DNA to
proceed with the research and extremely good news for future steps in
accomplishing this project (Salleh). The Environment News Service also
reported that “the story of the Museum’s ongoing effort to clone an extinct
species have been exclusively documented by the Discovery Channel in
‘End of Extinction: Cloning the Tasmanian Tiger.” The program, which
was broadcast in 155 countries worldwide on July7, 2002, included
“footage of the extraction of Tasmanian tiger tissue, the processing of the
DNA and the next steps of genetic engineering which could make cloning
the Tasmanian tiger a reality” (Anon.). Indeed, the “end of extinction”
seemed to be in sight.
Simultaneously, doubts were being raised not only about the technical
and financial feasibility of such projects but also about their ethical
implications. In a folder marked “Cloning” in Atwood’s research files for
Oryx and Crake, I found a contemporaneous article by Arthur Caplan, a
professor of bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the
University of Pennsylvania. Caplan’s title, “Much Ado About Cloning:
Why Two Is Not Better Than One,” bespeaks his central argument:
again…and they tweaked it this way and that” (73). And finally someone
came along and ate it. By adopting the satiric stance of a fabulator, of a
folkloristic commentator on human foibles, Atwood avoids explicit
attitudes of moralizing, headshaking, or dire forewarning. “Thylacine
Ragout,” she may well assume, requires no epimythium or moral for its
application to be understood.
Before turning to the Tasmanian devil, an update may be in order. Six
years after the widely publicized attempt to clone the thylacine was
launched, and a year after the first publication of “Thylacine Ragout” in
Bottle, the February 2005 issue of News in Science carried a story whose
headline unceremoniously announced: “Thylacine Cloning Project
Dumped.” The Australian Museum’s new management team, appointed in
2004, reevaluated the ambitious project and decided not to proceed with it.
“In fact,” museum officials said, “further investigation has now revealed
that the thylacine DNA is far too degraded to even construct a DNA
library. Given this the project cannot proceed to the next stage”
(Skatssoon).
It was a Thylacine all right, or it looked like one, or it looked like our idea
of one, because it was an animal no one still alive had ever actually seen—
anyway, what they got was close enough. Why quibble? (74)
The word “extinct” and its derivatives appear nowhere in Atwood’s text. It
is an avoidance that may be intended to reflect and mock the persistent
refusal, in some parts, to recognize the annihilation of the species. The
Shuli Barzilai 137
other reason for using a devil to make a tiger entails the kinship factor.
Even though they do not look alike at all, both animals belong to the group
known as marsupial mammals, a group including koalas, kangaroos, and
wombats, whose young develop inside their mother’s pouch--unless there
is (and could be) no mother to offer the nurturing safety and warmth of her
pouch to her newborn offspring.
In searching for the cloned thylacine’s living parent, I returned to the
Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania, which opens its website for the
Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) with a dramatic, red-letter
announcement: “A devastating disease is sweeping the Tasmania’s devil
population, killing more than 90% of adults in high density areas and 40-
50% in medium-low density areas.” Directly after this alarming update,
the Parks and Wildlife Service explains how the devil got its bad name
over two centuries ago:
Its spine-chilling screeches, black colour, and reputed bad-temper, led the
early European settlers to call it The Devil. Although only the size of a
small dog, it can sound and look incredibly fierce. (“Tasmanian Devil”)
[I]t is the lack of genetic diversity among Tasmanian devils that is a key
factor in the transmission of DFTD. Devils don’t produce immune
responses to DFTD because the diseased cells are too similar to their own
cells. (“Save”)
In other words, the manner of the devil’s present-day downfall mirrors its
very nature as perceived by European colonists in the early nineteenth
century.
Shuli Barzilai 139
May it all be true and the devil get well soon. After the obliteration of the
Tasmanian tiger by poison, entrapment, and bounty-hunting throughout
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is indeed unlikely, and
intolerable, to allow that the Tasmanian devil may also become extinct
during the twenty-first century due to further human interference with the
native fauna of the island.
Trugannini’s Story
“There is no frigate like a book” wrote my second-grade teacher on
the blackboard early one morning in Hartford, Connecticut. (It was many
years before I learned that the line belonged to a famously reclusive,
white-clad lady of New England.) The unknown word “frigate” fired my
seven-year-old imagination and, in the mysterious way poetry sometimes
works, may have set me in the direction of my professional formation. In
any case, although Atwood’s text now led me to venture down under and
far out, I did avoid seeking Trugannini for a time. “Thylacine Ragout,”
whatever its generic category, provides a clear-enough indication of what
such a voyage into darkness would entail.
140 Chapter Eight
Anyway, they named it [the thylacine clone] Trugannini, after the last fully
Aboriginal inhabitant of that island, who was raped, or that is the story,
whose sisters were killed, or that is the story, whose mother was killed,
whose husband was killed in front of her eyes, whose father died of grief,
who lived in solitude, solitude of a kind that would kill most people, whose
bones were dug up and put on display for a hundred years, against her will,
but she was dead so what will did she have, what right do the dead have to
a will, they are dead after all, they are not present except in bone form, in a
glass case, for people to stare at. (74)
Not, perhaps before has a race of men been utterly destroyed within
seventy-five years. This is the story of a race which was so destroyed, that
of the aborigines of Tasmania—destroyed not only by a different manner
of life but by the ill-will of the usurpers of the race's land. When that ill-
will was active it found expression in brutality. When passive it deplored
extermination while condoning, and participating in the rewards of, a
system which made extermination inevitable. In this remote island was the
opportunity for the indulgence of those passions upon which an organized
society imposes its most severe restraints. With no defenses but cunning
and the most primitive weapons, the natives were no match for the
sophisticated individualists of knife and gun. By 1876 the last of them was
dead. So perished a whole people. (Turnbull 1)
Her mother was stabbed to death by a European. Her sister was carried off
by sealers. In her girlhood, accompanied by her intended husband,
Paraweena, and another native man, she was once on the mainland of Van
Diemen’s Land. (Turnbull 100)
Two convict woodcutters agreed to row the party of three to the nearby
settlement on Bruny Island where natives were expected to take up
permanent, isolated residence:
In mid-channel the white men threw the [male] natives overboard. As they
struggled to the boat and grasped the gunwale Lowe and Newell chopped
off their hands with hatchets. The mutilated aborigines were left to drown
142 Chapter Eight
and the Europeans were free to do as they pleased with the girl. (Turnbull
100)
Figure 8.2 “John Woodcock Graves the younger [with] Truganinni.” Collection:
Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania.
144 Chapter Eight
The ordeals of Trugannini did not end with her life. As Atwood’s text
synoptically indicates, the despoliation even intensified after her death in
1876. Although different accounts have been composed, with varying
degrees of reliability, it is indisputable that Trugannini had good reason
to fear what would be done with her remains after she died. The gruesome
desecration of her native compatriot, William Lanney, because of rivalry
between the Royal College of Surgeons in England and the Royal Society
in Tasmania over the possession of his corpse apparently gave rise to her
urgent last wishes.14 She asked to be wrapped in a rock-weighted bag and
dropped into the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, according to one report, or to
be buried behind the mountains, according to another. What happened
next, just as “Thylacine Ragout” records, confirmed Trugannini’s worst
fears. Disregarding her dying request, the Tasmanian government arranged
for Trugannini to be interred, within easy reach, in a vault of the chapel
that was part of the Hobart Penitentiary. Andrys Onsman sums up the
ascertainable events:
In 1878 she was exhumed and what was left of the flesh on her bones was
removed, so that they could be boiled clean…. Some time later the bones
were strung together and mounted in a glass case and put on display. In
1947 public sentiment caused the Museum to take her skeleton down and
store it in the basement, where it stayed until 1976, a century after her
death. (Onsman)
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery finally returned the skeleton to
the Aboriginal community in 1976 and, later the same year, her bones
were cremated and the ashes scattered on the D'Entrecasteaux Channel.
After one hundred years, it seemed that the rites of mourning were
accomplished and Trugannini laid to rest at last. In 2001, however, the
British College of Surgeons revealed that it held samples of Trugannini's
skin and hair in its collection of Aboriginal specimens for study. These
remains have now been repatriated and given back to the Aboriginal
community of Tasmania. As Onsman writes in his 2004 essay on
Trugannini's burial, “She had the longest funeral in the history of the
world.”
The story of Trugannini may seem far removed from the districts that
Atwood usually inhabits in her fiction. But it has an analogue in the
history of the First Nations of Canada. Atwood’s critical engagement with
the indigenous peoples of her birth country is already evident in her
second novel, Surfacing (1972), long before post-colonialism became an
academic buzz word. The central protagonist, a woman in her late
twenties, and her friends visit an island in northern Ontario where
Shuli Barzilai 145
There weren’t many of them on the lake even then, the government had put
them somewhere else, corralled them, but there was one family left. Every
year they would appear on the lake in blueberry season and visit the good
places the same way we did, condensing as though from the air, five or six
of them in a weatherbeaten canoe…. faces neutral and distanced, but when
they saw that we were picking they would move on, gliding
unhurried…and then disappearing around a point or into a bay as though
they had never been there…. It never occurred to me till now that they
must have hated us. (Surfacing 36)
“How would you like it if I cooked porcupine tonight?” our cook asks
hopefully. After four weeks in Central Africa, I had become accustomed to
eyebrow-raising questions. “How about fish?’ I suggest”. (24D)
Hearn goes on to report that all across tropical Africa, “where timeless
village ways are meeting the cash economy,” the trade in bushmeat is
threatening, and even eradicating, wildlife populations “According to the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the
146 Chapter Eight
Notes
1
For the fantastic yet actual account of how a multinational U.S.-based company
came to “own” this iconic marsupial of Tasmania, see Owen and Pemberton,
Tasmanian Devil, 145-69. Warner Bros. has trademarked the character of Taz,
registered “Tasmanian Devil” as a brand name for goods, and zealously polices the
copyright: “Wigston’s Lures, a small Hobart fishing lure company, spent eight
years battling for the right to use the name Tasmanian Devil for one of its lures”
and eventually reached a “one-off agreement” with the entertainment conglomerate
(Owen and Pemberton 162).
2
Qtd. also in “Thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger,” Wildlife of Tasmania: Tasmanian
Mammals.
3
Chapter eight of Paddle’s The Last Tasmanian Tiger gives a detailed, harrowing
account of the fate of the last tiger and other animals at the Hobart Zoo:
It could easily have lived much longer, but it did not, and the reason for its
failure to survive lies in a series of insensitive and offensive administrative
decisions made by a bureaucratic management structure with no
representation from keeper or curatorial staff. (184)
Among the offensive decisions referred to here was the refusal to allow Alison
Reid, the daughter of the zoo’s curator and an animal expert in her own right, to
carry on caring for the animals after her father’s death:
Despite the fact that…Alison Reid had been effectively acting as curator
for the previous twelve months, the Reserves Department would not
countenance the idea of appointing a female, even in an acting capacity, to
the vacant curatorial post. (189)
Locked out of their sheltered sleeping quarters at night, left on open display
twenty-four hours a day in extreme temperatures, and indifferently fed, the animals
at the zoo died off one by one. Paddle’s account concludes, “Thus, unprotected and
exposed, the last known thylacine whimpered away during the night of 7
Shuli Barzilai 147
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Skin or Sinew, Human Bone or Skin, Shell, Feather, Apple Seed and
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Large African Mammals.” June 1991. Scientific American. 24D, 26.
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Marks, Kathy. “Taz: How a Cartoon Character Has Come to the Rescue of
a Threatened Species. The Plight of the Tasmanian Devil.” 27 June
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405664.html>.
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Threatened Animal. 2005. London: Natural History Museum.
Paddle, Robert. The Last Tasmanian Tiger: The History and Extinction of
the Thylacine. 2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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2002. “Black War: The Destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines.”
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<http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s123723.htm>.
“Save the Tasmanian Devil.” 6 May 2008. Department of Primary
Industries and Water.
<http://www.tassiedevil.com.au/disease.htm>.
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150 Chapter Eight
KATHRYN VANSPANCKEREN
Atwood has told several versions of this story. In the poem, Mary is
hanged in Massachusetts, but in a 1980 address Atwood said she was
hanged in Connecticut. In the poem, published in Morning in the Burned
House (1995), Mary is hanged for any of several possible reasons, but in
the earlier account she was hanged “for ‘causing an old man to become
extremely valetudinarious.’” In the poem, she survives by drawing on her
psychic strength as a woman and refusing to give in; in the address
Atwood puns that Mary survived because she had a “stiff neck (“Witches”
331). In yet another account, Atwood offers a scientific reason for Mary’s
strange survival — the hanging occurred “before they invented the drop
and therefore her neck was not broken” (“Witch Craft” 28). While
Atwood’s early accounts focus on legal and scientific aspects, the poem
teases out the feminist dimensions. The story’s outlines remain, but the
interpretation has evolved. The present essay explores this evolution.
From an early age Atwood was aware that one of her ancestors was
associated with witchcraft and rare powers of survival. Mary Webster
became a transgressive role model and Atwood’s favorite ancestor, beating
out “privateers and massacred French Protestants” (“Witches” 331).
152 Chapter Nine
Mary’s story may have influenced her early reading: she loved witches
and scary stories as a child, and had read all of Poe by 6th grade, as well as
the entire unexpurgated Grimm’s (“Margaret Atwood: Queen of Canlit”).
Such a family legend helps us understand the importance of witches and
uncanny women in Atwood’s writing.
In the brilliant satirical Lady Oracle, Atwood produces Gothic
conventions like candy from a Halloween bag: haunted dwelling, intricate
maze, mysterious stranger, endangered heroine. The Bluebeard figure’s
late wives provide Joan Foster with lurid examples of what happens to
women who aren’t uncannily clever. In Surfacing the unnamed narrator
had drawn talismanic pictures or magical beings as a child; Native
American pictographs help her recover her identity, and she engineers a
liaison with Joe under the moon where she may conceive a child with
magical powers. Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale is a walking Scarlet
Letter, “some fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment
of carelessness that is the same as danger. A sister, dipped in blood” (19).
In Atwood’s fiction, seemingly normal women harbor eerie powers. They
dominate The Robber Bride, Alias Grace and Oryx and Crake. Such a
woman appears as an artist in Cat’s Eye, and as a writer who weaves
family stories in The Blind Assassin. Good Bones and Simple Murders
offers a gallery of mystic women. In her poetry Atwood is even more in
tune with magic. Circe is Atwood’s mouthpiece in her long sequence in
You Are Happy. The “Snake Poems” from Interlunar revision the
Christian view of woman and serpent, while Morning in the Burned House
is structured around a female descent myth with roots in ancient ritual
(VanSpanckeren, “Atwood’s Space Crone”). Atwood’s recent works
continue the theme of women with special knowledge, which often entails
suffering. Penelope prevails but grieves, even in the underworld, over her
hanged maids in The Penelopiad (2005), while the short shorts of The Tent
(2006) concern spirits, gods, and unearthly figures. The autobiographical
stories of Moral Disorder (2006) begin with omens and barbarians
clamoring at the gates, and end with a mysterious stranger vanishing
among trees.
The present paper focuses on a single poem that is central to Atwood’s
writing and her feminist vision. This poem draws together crucial
recurring themes-—uncanny women, patriarchal violence against females,
female struggles for survival and autonomous identity—to construct a
mythical paradigm for women that may subtly interrogate the traditional
Christian message of sacrifice and forgiveness epitomized by Christ’s
passion and crucifixion. The poem suggests that Christ’s story of faith,
submission and forgiveness is a gendered account that may not work for
Kathryn VanSpanckeren 153
rely on herself. She prevails, but at a high cost: she becomes (like) the
witch figure that the men had feared and projected onto her.
The present essay considers Atwood’s poem as a feminist expression
of myth, beginning with its specific contexts, especially the place of the
poem in the volume in which it appeared. The body of the essay consists
of a close analysis of the drafts, which reveal Atwood’s artistry and
continual elaboration of a feminist mythic vision. The story’s historical
sources are then considered, and the poem is set in the larger context of
ongoing feminist calls for a revisioning of myth. The poem is postmodern
and open to several differing interpretations: Mary may represent a
triumph over the patriarchy, another story of victimization, a disturbingly
unstable post feminist Gothic witch tale interweaving both meanings, or
more.
“Half-Hanged Mary” appears exactly in the middle of Atwood’s
Morning in the Burned House, between the striking dramatic monologues
of women from myth and pop culture—Sekhmet, the Helen of Troy who
does Counter Dancing, Ava Gardner, Manet’s Olympia—and the moving
elegiac sequence recording her father’s passing. In the final organization
(which Atwood labored over) the sassy public figures balance the
inwardness of the dying father. It is not an accident that “Half-Hanged
Mary” occurs at the fulcrum of the book. Like a hinge, this poem is the no-
woman’s-land where personal and impersonal realms meet. Mary Webster
is a private woman thrust into history and legend. Possibly the poem
expresses the writer’s unconscious and vain hope that the father might not
die, but miraculously survive death’s visitation, as Mary Webster had done
some 300 years earlier.
Insofar as Atwood experienced the creative process of writing as
“negotiating with the dead,” she was familiar with entering uncanny states.
As she tells us in Negotiating with the Dead (2002), the artistic self is far
from the ordinary self who gets up and eats asparagus and remembers
babysitting as a child in part one of Mornings in the Burned House.
Bearing this distinction in mind, it is possible to see “Half-Hanged Mary”
as a quasi-autobiographical poem suggesting, in a distanced way made
possible by the change of time and place—Massachusetts 300 years ago—
the forging of Atwood the artist. Mary was (like the young Atwood) an
ordinary woman whose gender exposed her to victimization (marriage or
life in a boring job) by pre-feminist social structures; to preserve her
autonomy she was forced to access new sources of strength (in Atwood’s
case, writing). In the end, suffering forged a woman with exceptional
powers where none had been before. The patriarchy had created the
uncanny “other” it hated and feared. The role of artist is not easy: Mary’s
Kathryn VanSpanckeren 155
The first ink draft originally lacked a title; a provisional one was
added, probably not long after, in ink. Since there was no space to center
it, it appears at the upper right of the page: “(Twice) Half-Hanged Mary.”
Why did she imagine Mary as twice hanged? Was she thinking of her as
reborn at the end, and hence living twice? Possibly “witch” was the
original working title, since in the first line of the poem—“The word witch
was loose in the air —Atwood underlined “witch.” The importance of the
word “witch” is seen in the fact that this beginning line—“The word witch
was loose in the air”—continues throughout all three rough drafts, even
though there are many important changes made in the poem. The idea of
“witch” was the nucleus of this poem, present at its creation.
The final printed poem changes the first line to read “Rumour was
loose in the air,/ hunting for some neck to land on.” This change—from
“witch” to “rumor”—is important; Atwood clung to “witch,” only
relinquishing it at the very end of the revision process, after the third rough
draft, right before publication. Clearly she liked the implication that Mary
was a bit of a witch; that had been her idea of Mary since childhood.
Nevertheless, mention of “witch” in the first line implies that Mary
originally had special powers. These powers detract from the dynamic
transformation of the finished poem in which an ordinary woman actually
becomes a witch (as it were). In the final poem, cruel, inhuman authorities
create the very thing that they fear. This insight and its feminist
ramifications ultimately outweighed Mary’s bona fides as a witch. The
draft reveals a tension or confusion in the original idea of the poem: was
Mary a witch or an ordinary woman who turned into one? The first draft
has it both ways. On page four, after she survives, Mary sounds like a
witch, exulting:
The first four pages of rough draft dramatically recreate the urgency,
inhumanity, and suffering of Mary, and highlight her strong-willed refusal
to give in. Death visits but she says “NO” in this first draft. This image of
an ancestress speaking truth to power is what may have inspired the young
Kathryn VanSpanckeren 157
Atwood as a writer. Even though her “throat is taut against the rope” Mary
realizes “it’s the words they wanted to choke off/ the words bulging like
blood in my skull…” and she draws on language, her true power:
The third page, on lined paper in darker and thicker ink than that of the
first four pages, takes up a new theme, the nature of prayer and divine
visitation. Mary begins to speak, not in prayer but impelled by terror and
agony. The imagery recalls Pentecostal manifestations — tongues of fire
and speaking in tongues.3 Mary imagines these as horrible tortures similar
to her hanging. The section is a gothic parody of Puritan grace and
election, where crows substitute for angels. The section closely resembles
the 2 a.m. section of the final printed version:
The next section of the second draft, entitled “12 Midnight,” appears in
the first handwritten draft, but there a large arrow suggests Atwood had
cut it. It reappears, typed, in the second draft, so I discuss it here. It
appears in the third draft also, but is missing from the final poem. Atwood
may have wanted to keep it for its mysteriously rhyming, Frost-like
ending: “don’t provoke the tree./ Imitate ice/ in complete lucidity.”
However appealing they are in themselves, these lines depict a passive
Mary. Elsewhere Mary rages and questions, so the section is out of
character. Atwood “kills her darlings” in the parlance of MFA programs.
This section presents Mary as pretending to hang quietly to “counterfeit
death,” “a limp silhouette, hardly worth spitting at./ A woman in poor
clothing/depending by the neck from a tree.” The section emphasizes
Mary’s lower-class origins, and as scholars such as Steve Nissenbaum and
Paul Boyer (Salem Possessed) have shown, poor and marginalized women
were most likely to be accused as witches, though Carol Karlsen (Devil in
the Shape of a Woman) argues persuasively that women with inheritances
were especially at risk for witchcraft accusations. Atwood may have cut
the section because she wanted the poem to apply equally to all women.
162 Chapter Nine
The second draft is incomplete; the fourth typed page ends with a title,
“6 a.m.” but no subsequent typed 6 a.m. section. Instead we have two
handwritten pages of different, untitled material. The first of these is a
draft of the wry “bonnets” passage in which the fearful Puritan women
stare at Mary—depicted here as a midwife and healer—as she hangs.
Additions in the margins of the three draft stanzas result in the five-stanza
final published version, made more vivid through added detail and
imagery. The draft is enlivened by a small sketch of a plump, bundled-up
Puritan woman, nostrils flaring, craning her head to look up at the speaker.
This tiny Puritan woman is placed to the right of “You were my friend,
you too.” One senses how closely Atwood identified with Mary, not only
as ancestress with uncanny verbal powers, but perhaps also as someone
lonely and singular though “looked up to.”
6 a.m.
the moon goes down, the sun
rustles the morning birds before (light)
(it’s true) time is relative, let me tell you
I have lived a millennium (in a night)
of moonlight. I would like to say my hair
turned white, but this is not true.
It was my ordinary heart (bleached
that) bleached out.
(Don’t ask me any more
for dainty feelings.
No more tears in these)
like meat in water. Also
I’m about 3 inches taller.
This happens to you when you drift
in infinite space.
Listening to the gospel
of emptiness.
What I heard there is burned
into my (eyes, like some) skull, pinpoints
(pinpoints) of hot blue light riddle my brain
a revelation of (silence) deafness.
Sun comes up, a (blinding song) huge and blaring
song of mechanical grace which (deafens) flattens my eyes.
At the end of my rope
(I melt like thaw like a glacier)
I testify to silence.
Don’t say I’m not grateful
Most have only one death.
I will have 2.
The last page of the second draft ends with a short section entitled “8
a.m.” in which Mary is cut down. Atwood writes the section in a ghastly
nursery-rhyme fashion reminiscent of Plath, and allows Mary the last
word, “double jeopardy.” In the final version, this material appears as the
164 Chapter Nine
first half of the “8 a.m.” section, which goes on to describe her actual fall
(into clover), her grinning at the captors, and the fact that the Puritan men
“see their own ill will/ staring them in the forehead/ and turn tail.” It ends
with the transformation: “Before, I was not a witch./ But now I am one.”
Atwood’s revisions add wit and irony. She strengthens the first line,
highlighting death and rebirth. For “double jeopardy” she adopts the frothy
diction and domestic imagery of cooking, a gendered and devalued
occupation:
When they came (to cut me down/ my body /corpse) harvest my corpse
open your mouth, close your eyes
cut my body from the rope
surprise surprise
I was still alive.
Double jeopardy
it sounds like a (fancy dessert) company
dessert, (all) whipped cream and (chocolate) gelatin
The first of the two new sections was destined to be omitted from the
final printed version. In it Mary imagines her trying to go back to her
former life:
I am a practical person
I use the rope for a belt.
I milk the cow.
I have an infallible cure for warts
and for love too if you want one.
Rumour has it
I’ve got the town penises
threaded on a leather thong
I wear as a necklace.
I could, if I wanted.
This section might work in a novel such as Alias Grace, to give a sense
of alternative outcomes for a person accused of a crime that has not been
proven, but it is not dramatically satisfying in the poem. Despite bold
imagery—the penis necklace—Mary seems unchanged here. The last line
mentioning “crops and stars to attend to” is not enough to suggest new-
found powers.
The second section, entitled “Midnight” in this draft, begins with lines
imported from the first draft; it appears (with minor revisions) as the
ending of the published version, where it is simply entitled “Later.” In the
final published version, Atwood condensed the third draft’s 29 hours back
to a little more than 13 hours; that final ending establishes that Mary has
indeed been permanently altered by her experience. The transition from
chronological time to relative or mythic time (“later”) reinforces her
transformation into witch and leaves open the question of whether she has
suffered possible brain damage as well as traumatic stress. The ending
describes a woman beyond binaries, for whom flowers and dung are “two
forms of the same thing.” She could be mad, but also possibly a seer, or
166 Chapter Nine
both, when she asserts in the words that reflexively end the poem, “the
cosmos unravels from my mouth,/ all fullness, all vacancy.”
I call
on you as witness I did
no crime I was born I have borne I
bear I will be born this is
a crime I will not
acknowledge leaves and wind
hold on to me
I will not give in (65)
The power of this section lies partly in the subtle ways in which Mary
is aligned with forces of life and nature. Like all living things, animals as
Kathryn VanSpanckeren 167
well as plants such as the tree she hangs from, she resists death and fights
for life. In this section Mary becomes like the older Susanna Moodie; she
merges into the land, beyond human conditioning or victimization — a
lessen Atwood spells out in Survival. Mark Bruhn has noted Wordsworth’s
influence on Atwood, especially in his “Lucy” poems, which merge a
female figure into a numinous landscape. Atwood’s Mary Webster is
lustier than Wordsworth’s dying young Lucy, and more like the daring
Lucy of Atwood’s open-ended story “Death by Landscape.” Mary
Webster, like the Lucy of that story, is a rebellious and active agent, full of
lust for life.
Divine imagery sheds scalding radiance in this section. When she is
being drawn aloft, Mary recalls that the ancient moon goddess had exacted
blood sacrifices. In the conclusion, Mary becomes nature’s oracle or
perhaps a caricature of this, “mumbling to myself like crazy,/ mouth full of
juicy adjectives/ and purple berries.” Mary imagines herself as moon
goddess: “My body of skin waxes and wanes/ around my true body,/ a
tender nimbus…”. The word “nimbus,” suggestive of the halo around
saints’ heads, reappears in the next stanza, where her newfound power is
attributed to her death: “My first death orbits my head,/ an ambiguous
nimbus/ medallion of my ordeal.” The result is a magic circle around her
body, such as sorcerers drew to call up spirits: the stanza concludes “No
one crosses that circle.” Death gives her verbal power: “Having been
hanged for something/ I never said, I can now say anything I can say.”
Words have lost their meanings: blasphemies “gleam and burst in my
wake/ like lovely bubbles.” “I speak in tongues/ my audience is owls” (67-
69).
By owls, Mary means witches. Owls, who can see in the darkness, are
associated with the moon; the Greek moon goddess Selene shared
attributes with Hekate, the wise crone of the ghost world (Larrington 85).
In the next poem in Morning in the Burned House, “Owl Burning,” a
witch is burned alive. The man doing the burning explains that times are
hard: “Why should an old woman suck up the space,/ the black roots, red
juice that should be going/ instead into the children?” (70) Graphic
details—dense smoke from “thick fat on fire,” “grey screams,” the cutting
off of body parts — remind us that witchcraft was no mere philosophical
debate. The speaker points out “the fingers, those are the wings./ We
watched her smoulder and got drunk after.” His rationale is a favorite of
vigilantes: “Her heart was the ember/ we used to relight our stoves. This is
our culture.” As for those who disapprove, it’s “no business of yours,”
“You don’t know what it’s like,/ so close to bedrock” (70-71).
168 Chapter Nine
along with Mary Webster. Having studied the origins of American culture
at Harvard enabled her to kick start Canadian cultural awareness in
Survival—on one level, she was importing an American Studies approach
to Canadian literature.
In any event the Puritan obsession with witches would have fascinated
and disturbed this descendent of Mary Webster. She probably looked up
the sources of Mary’s stories at Widener Library when she was a graduate
student at Harvard in the mid 1960s (in her Radcliffe address, she
mentions spending time in the bowels of Widener and comments dryly
that Lamont Library was still off- limits to women students) (“Witches”
329).
Mather and Hutchinson’s accounts are complimentary. A local history,
Sylvester Judd’s History of Hadley (l905), quotes both of them and offers
passages from court transcripts as well as details of local geography.
Bridget Marshall, a scholar on New England witch trials, has condensed
them and noted current scholarship; her account is accessible on the
internet. According to Judd and Marshall, the historical Mary (Reeve)
Webster lived in a small house on the main road out of the village. She had
married William Webster, age 53, when she was probably somewhat
younger. They had become very poor, and she grew resentful and bitter.
She was abused by neighbors, and retaliated with her spiteful tongue;
eventually, stories that she was a witch began to circulate. She was said to
bewitch horses and cattle so that the beasts would refuse to pass by her
house until the drivers beat her. Once she was present in a house when a
hen fell down the chimney into a pot of boiling water; her scald-marks
were said to be like those of the hen, whose shape she was evidently
imagined to have assumed. The accusations were considered by a court at
Northampton in 1683, which sent the case to the Boston court. The Boston
grand jury indicted her “for that she…being instigated by the devil, hath
entered into covenant and had familiarity with him in the shape of a
warraneage [fisher or wild black cat of the woods] and had his imps
sucking her….” She pleaded not guilty. At length the Boston court, under
Governor Bradstreet, found her not guilty.
Sent back to Hadley, Mary ran afoul of one Lieutenant Philip Smith,
whom Mather identifies as an upstanding citizen and deacon of about 50.
Mather writes, “About the beginning of January, 1684-5, he began to be
very valetudinarious,” and he blamed Mary Webster. Mather paints him as
a paragon of “devotion, sanctity, gravity and all that was honest” and
enumerates the ghostly shapes, strange fires, scratchings, and moving
objects that haunted the sickroom, and the sensation of pins and needles
Smith suffered. Witch-beating was a common practice (described in the
170 Chapter Nine
Salem witch trials, for example), and Mather writes that Smith only found
relief from suffering when men from the town went to “disturb” Mary.
Mather goes into detail about strange wounds on Smith’s corpse, wounds
that may have inspired “Owl Burning.” Interestingly, Mather’s account
ends with Smith’s body remaining fresh and warm from his death on
Saturday morning till “Sabbath-day in the Afternoon” – this delayed time
taken in transit from life to death may have remained submerged in
Atwood’s memory, prompting her to play with extending the time of
Mary’s transformation in the third draft (70).
“Writing generations later, Hutchinson – no believer in witches, and
admittedly an American apologist – explains the Massachusetts witch
trials as a contagious panic, and puts them in perspective. He notes that
more people were executed “in a single county in England in a short space
of time, than have suffered in all New England until the present” (16).
While Mather’s lurid discussion blames the supposed witches,
Hutchinson, a man of the Enlightenment, sees them as unfortunate victims.
Like Mather, Hutchinson does not mention Mary Webster by name,
focusing on the man. Hutchinson describes Smith as a judge, military
officer, and town representative and “an hypocondriack person” who
“fancied himself under an evil hand” (18). Hutchinson’s account provides
detail about the “disturbing” of Mary: “a number of brisk lads tried an
experiment upon the old woman. Having dragged her out of the house,
they hung her up until she was dead, let her roll down, rolled her sometime
in the snow [this was in early January] and at last buried her in it, and
there left her; but it happened that she survived, and the melancholy man
died” (Hutchinson II,18, Mayo II 14). She lived for another eleven years
and was around seventy when she died peacefully in 1696, having come
unscathed through the tumultuous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 (Marshall
1-6).
reveals the fear of the women who watch, and implicates the reader in this
near-execution of everywoman. The third draft expands the story to two
days in almost novelistic fashion, giving alternative lives for Mary. In one,
she goes back home and resumes her life (Atwood rejected this idea), in
the other, which Atwood kept, she becomes a (possibly crazy) witch-like
seer. In the final version, we find the most complete and uncompromising
depiction, a fierce feminist gothic version of crucifixion.
Usually scholarly approaches to myth involve discussions of
archetypes in terms of long narratives, but when literary sources, drafts
and revisions are available, a fine-grained approach may shed light on the
myth-making imagination. It is likely that Mary Webster’s hanging came
to have the force of a vivid, recurring dream for Atwood. Jung has
demonstrated the riches of stories and myths that may be activated in a
person’s imaginative life, whether in fantasy, dream, or art. In cases where
an archetypal figure is activated, such as a witch, great power may be
released. Jung worked with over 80,000 dreams, and developed a nuanced
method of staying focused on the content of the dream; he used “direct
association” or amplification to assist the dreamer to explore all
associations with particular images of the dream, returning to the image
repeatedly (Craze 50-1). The image of Mary Webster as she hangs from
the tree was something that Atwood returned to over and over in her rough
drafts, in which she amplifies details and explores associations. Critics
have noted Atwood’s method of accretion which, like Jung’s dream-work,
gives us images and hints from the unconscious, the ultimate ground of
subjectivity. Isabel Carrara Suarez describes Atwood’s “gradual
amplifications of the subject, a self which survives (and communicates)
against all theoretical odds, against fragmentation, gaps and
deconstruction” (230) while Sherrill Grace stresses Atwood’s very gradual
creation of an increasingly strong “autobiographical ‘I’” out of multiplicity
(202). Gradually these associations led her to produce a poem that has the
force of a feminist archetype or myth.
Assuming it is artistically realized, an archetypal work of art usually
makes a strong impact on audiences, and “Half-Hanged Mary” has done
this. Like a rumor or witch, it has flown like an arrow into the wide-open
and echoing spaces of popular culture, and has taken new forms
unimagined by the author. Some readers respond to the political dimension
and see the poem as a parallel to Arthur Miller’s Crucible, possibly like
that drama encoding a critique of U.S.-sponsored torture under George W.
Bush. An example is the chamber opera by Seattle composer and musician
Tom Baker entitled The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars, which was
composed in 1999 and performed by the Seattle Experimental Opera
Kathryn VanSpanckeren 173
Notes
The author wishes to thank the University of Tampa for Dana and Delo grants that
supported research, as well as Margaret Atwood for permission to quote from the
drafts, and the helpful staff of the Thomas Fisher Library.
1
This and subsequent references to “Half-Hanged Mary” are taken from Margaret
Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1995) pp. 58-69.
2
The drafts in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library are from MS Coll 200, Box
163, Folder 8.
3
Pentecost was a holy Jewish mid-summer harvest festival. After Jesus ascends to
heaven, Peter and the other disciples return to Jerusalem. Devout Jewish pilgrims
from many nations have come to the city to celebrate Pentecost. Acts 2:2-4
describes “cloven tongues like as of fire” that sat on each disciple as, “filled with
the Holy Ghost,” they begin to “speak in tongues,” preaching in the languages of
these Jews, languages they themselves do not know (Holy Bible. King James
Version). Over 3,000 converts are made, and this episode begins the Christian
movement according to Stephen M. Miller 363.
4
Cotton Mather’s Book VI, entitled “Thaumatographia Pneumatica: Relating the
Wonders of the Invisible World in Preternatural Occurrences,” consists of fourteen
“examples” of witchcraft, culminating in the Salem witch trials. Mary Webster,
whose name Mather omits, is marginalized in this account, which Mather presents
as a story of the torments of witchcraft visited on the male victim. This is his usual
practice in this account of the colony, which includes biographies of notable
figures, most all of them male. No doubt he also did not want to reward witches by
naming them and thereby conferring fame on them. Cotton Mather, Magnalia
Christi Americana Book VI, Chapter VII. [No place: no date] 1702, p. 70
[pagination is irregular, and book pagination is not continuous; VI begins at page
one]. Facsimile of 1702 volume is available online through books.google.com.
5
The best source for Hutchinson’s history is the scholarly Arno Press facsimile
edition of 1972, clearly organized by date and preserving the original spelling and
diction. The Mayo edition, while more accessible and modernized, lacks the flavor
and omits some passages.
Works Cited
Acts. Holy Bible, King James Version. 1611. London.
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. 1996. New York: Bantam.
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—. Cat’s Eye. 1988. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
176 Chapter Nine
—. “Circe/Mud Poems.” You Are Happy. 1974. New York: Harper and
Row. 45-70.
—. “Death by Landscape.” 1991. Wilderness Tips. New York: Anchor.
—. Good Bones and Simple Murders. 1994. New York: Doubleday.
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Houghton Mifflin. 58-69.
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—. Interlunar. 1984. Toronto: Oxford UP.
—. Lady Oracle. 1976. New York: Simon and Schuster.
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—. Moral Disorder. 2006. New York: Doubleday.
—. Morning in the Burned House. 1995. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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—. Oryx and Crake. 2003. New York: Doubleday.
—. The Penelopiad. 2005. Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate.
—. The Robber Bride. 1993. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
—. Surfacing. New York: Popular Library, 1972.
—. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. 1972. Toronto:
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—. “Witch Craft.” Interview with Camille Peri, April 1989. Mother Jones.
28-33.
—. “Witches.” Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi,
1982. 329-333.
Baker, Tom. The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars. 1999. Chamber Opera.
Perf. Seattle Experimental Opera (SEXO), Seattle, April 2006.
Baker, Tom. The Gospel of the Red-Hot Stars. CD. Present Sounds
Recordings (www.presentsounds.com) PS0801, 2008. Clips at:
http://www.tombakercomposer.com/gospel.pdf.
Beyer, Charlotte. “Feminist Revisionist Mythology and Female Identity in
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14.3. 276-298.
Boyer, Paul and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social
Origins of Witchcraft. 1997. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
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Kathryn VanSpanckeren 177
INDEX
184 Index
Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood's Writings 185
mother, 3, 4, 10, 11-12, 13, 14, 15- Rich, Adrienne: On Lies, Secrets
17, 22nn., 28, 29, 30-31, 32-33, and Silence, 173
36, 38, 50, 62, 65, 69, 70, 77, Richard Griffen, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82,
105, 173 84-87, 90n., 117, 118, 122
Nate Schoenhof, 98, 99-100, 104- Robber Bridegroom, The, 75, 87
110, 111n., 115, 121, 122 Robinson Crusoe, 9
Nick (The Handmaid’s Tale), 123 Roz, 4, 119
Norval Chase, 80, 82, 83, 85, 117 Sabrina, 75, 77, 82, 89n., 91n.
Odysseus, 50, 51, 53, 59, 62, 65-70 Salem Witch Trials, 172
Odyssey, 1, 5-6, 51, 57-70 Samhain, 106-107, 173
Offred, 3, 63, 123, 152 Scheherazade, 75
Oresteia, The, 62, 69 shadow, 5, 10, 13, 14
Orestes, 69 Sheba, Queen of, 75
Orwell, George: Animal Farm, 10; Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 10,
1984, 5, 10 42-43, 76
Oryx, 5, 10, 13-21, 22nn., 30-36, Shute, Nevil: On the Beach, 10
38, 39-43, 45 n., 63, 117-118, Simon Jordan, 122
119 Sleeping Beauty, 3, 75, 84-85, 91,
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 48-49 115, 124
Snow White, 4, 9, 19, 116, 124
Palahniuk, Chuck: Fight Club, 11, Stevens, Wallace: “The Snow
13 Man,” 9-10
Panopticon, 99 Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll
Paris, 60 and Mr. Hyde, 42
patriarchy, 154, 173, 174 summer solstice, 109
Paul (Bodily Harm), 121-122 Sybil, 60, 61
Penelope, 3, 49-53, 57-70, 152 Tasmanian devil (see also:
The Penelopiad (play), 47-54 Thylacine), 128-129, 135-139,
Persephone, 59, 75, 76 146n., 147n.
Peter (The Edible Woman), 115, Telemachus, 62, 68
116-117, 118 Thylacine (see also: Tasmanian
phoenix, 86 devil), 6, 128, 139, 140, 145,
Piercy, Marge: He, She, and It, 10; 146-147nn.
Woman at the Edge of Time, 10 Tony, 4, 115, 123-124, 125, 126n.
Plath, Sylvia, 163 Toronto, 47, 48, 49, 51, 59, 74, 76,
Poe, Edgar, Allan, 168 123, 126n., 133, 145, 155
Polish Count, the, 115, 120 transformation, 4, 36, 58, 96, 103,
postmodern, 58, 60, 63, 65, 70, 73- 106, 111, 156, 164, 164-166,
74, 81, 88, 90nn., 130, 154 170, 171, 174
rape, 3, 68, 69, 74, 76, 99, 104, 109, Tristan and Isolde, 75
117, 124, 140, 141, 160 Trojan War, 59, 60, 62, 65
Rapunzel, 3, 75, 84, 116, 123, 124, Trugannini, 129-130, 139-142, 144-
125 146
Rapunzel Syndrome, 125 Valentine’s Day, 104, 108-109
Webster, Mary, 151, 154, 167, 168-
Rennie Wilford, 121-122, 125n. 170, 172, 174, 175n.
186 Index