She doesn’t make speeches any more. She’s become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.
She’s looking at the tulips. Her cane is beside her, on the grass. Her profile is towards me…It’s no longer a flawless, cut-paper profile, her face is sinking in upon itself.
Atwood’s greatest challenge in The Handmaid’s Tale is to make the ritual-copulation Ceremony something other than comical, if not slapstick, as the Handmaid lies, mostly clothed, between the spread legs of the Wife, fully clothed, to be subjected to sexual intercourse as performed by the Commander, also mostly clothed. Granted the absurdity of the physical situation, and the improbability of a middle-aged man’s sexual potency in such a situation, very likely this is how it might be:
Serena Joy grips my hands as if it is she, not I, who’s being fucked, as if she finds it pleasurable or painful, and the Commander fucks, with a regular two-four marching stroke, on and on and on like a tap dripping…It’s as if he’s somewhere else, waiting for himself to come, drumming his fingers on the table while he waits…
Why does he have to wear that stupid uniform? But would I like his white, tufted raw body any better?
Given that Gilead is run by men, one would suppose that Alpha males like the Commander could rationalize more comfortable ways of reproducing their precious DNA, as Mormon men seem to have done in their early, polygamous Protestant-Christian church. And given the fact of plummeting birth rates attributed to disease, nuclear-plant accidents, leakages from chemical-and biological-warfare stockpiles and toxic-waste disposal sites, it would seem likely that the Handmaids as a class would have been forcibly subjected to artificial insemination.
Yet how eerily prescient, that the Republic of Gilead was established by a coup when Christian fundamentalists, revulsed by an overly liberal, godless and promiscuous society, assassinated the President, machine-gunned Congress, declared a national state of emergency, and laid blame to “Islamic fanatics” as in Orwell’s 1984, the Republic consolidates its strength by maintaining continual wars against demonized “enemies.”
Among its other features, The Handmaid’s Tale is a treasure trove of feminist/gender studies issues. Here, as elsewhere, Atwood examines sexual politics from numerous angles. Is there a basic, essential difference between the sexes, and is this difference biological, or culturally determined? Women can’t add, says the Commander, for women “one and one and one and one don’t make four” only just “one and one and one and one,” and this Offred concedes:
What the Commander said is true. One and one and one and one don’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.
Yet women beware women!—for the patriarchy has shrewdly conscripted categories of women to control and exploit other women: in the Gilead social hierarchy there are Wives, Aunts, Marthas with grim, obligatory duties to perform. If they fail to bear children, or when they’re beyond the age of childbearing, Handmaids are likely to be shipped off to the dread Colonies with other rebellious, useless or elderly women, where their fate is to clear away corpses after battles, to prevent the outbreak of plague, and to clean up toxic dumps and radiation spills: “They figure you’ve got three years maximum, before your nose falls off and your skin peels away like rubber gloves.” As in pre-Gilead America, or Victorian En gland, men of the privileged class have access to brothels, in which, in secret, the hypocritical “family values” of their society are cheerfully flouted; the Commander takes Offred, in ludicrous sex-pot costume, to Jezebel’s, a Playboy-fantasy bordello exclusively for the use of officers and “trade delegations, of course.” And, as in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” ordinary, repressed individuals in Gilead, in this case women, are regularly forced to, or allowed to, participate in bloody Dionysian murders called Participutations, in which a man, said to be a “rapist,” is literally torn into pieces: “The air is bright with adrenaline, we are permitted anything and this is freedom.” Offred, who has no wish to participate in such bloodshed, finds herself ravenously hungry after the ceremony: “This is monstrous, but nonetheless it’s true. Death makes me hungry.”
Like other Atwood fictions, The Handmaid’s Tale is not a simple narrative. As she tells her story Offred frequently remarks that it’s a “reconstruction” and that, at crucial times, she is not telling the truth, or offering variants of the truth, in her description of her furtive love affair with the Commander’s chauffeur Nick, for instance:
It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
In the startling appendix to the novel titled “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale,” we learn that Offred has not been writing her story but recording it in a sequence of secret tapes, to be discovered long after her death in the ruins of what was once the city of Bangor, Maine. Abruptly the reader is catapulted into a more conventionally science-fiction future, provided with a “partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195” our narrator Offred has long since vanished, like the nightmare Republic of Gilead, preserved two hundred years later in historical archives under the supervision of pompous (male) academics like Professor Pieixoto, Director, Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Archives, Cambridge University, England. (Reassuring to know that, though the United States is no more, there yet remains not only England, but a university protective of “liberal arts.”) As the Handmaid’s Tale is an urgent, personal, “female” document, so the academics’ “male” commentary on it is glib, condescending, fatuous, and self-serving. Atwood has said in interviews that she wanted to end The Handmaid’s Tale on an optimistic note3 to indicate that the Republic of Gilead did not last forever, and to provide the reader with “historical” information unavailable to Offred, yet how deflating is this heavily ironic coda, how much more appropriate to that most perishable of literary genres, the academic satire, than to a work of such raw, urgent power as the Handmaid’s Tale within The Handmaid’s Tale. The appendix makes of the novel an astute, provocative social commentary, where its absence would have made the novel an abiding work of art ending with Offred’s hopeful voice (“And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light”).
The strikingly titled Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s other notable work of speculative fiction, is a yet more ambitious and darkly prophetic work than The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic terrain that is reverting to wilderness after a plague deliberately induced by the deranged scientist-genius Crake has wiped out most of mankind. (The madman/idealist Crake, self-named for the red-necked crake, a rare Australian bird extinct by the era of Oryx and Crake, is a credible descendent of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein and a younger variant of the genocidal-minded idealist of “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” by James Tiptree, Jr.) Narrated from the perspective of Jimmy, or Snowman as he calls himself, but not in Jimmy’s first-person voice, Oryx and Crake is a highly conceptual, skillfully executed performance by a writer clearly impassioned by her subject: our endangered environment, and our endangered species. By turns tragic, serio-comic, farcical and blackly satiric, the novel suggests such classic films as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and the Australian-set Mad Max films of George Miller; its literary predecessors include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (“The Voyage to Laputa”), Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Huxley’s Brave New World. Atwood’s epigraph from Swift, a typically Swiftian double entendre, is instructive:
I could perhaps like others have astonished you with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and style; because my principal design was to infor
m you, and not to amuse you.
In the nightmare world recalled by Jimmy, before Crake’s plague-apocalypse, as in a parody of Marxist expectation the repressive nation-states of such dystopias as 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale seem to have withered away, replaced by gigantic global corporations (“HelthWyzer,” “CorpSetCorps”) whose control over individuals is invisible and near absolute; and whose financing of science is chillingly utilitarian and unprincipled. In this all-too-credible variant of Huxley’s narcotized utopia, “demi-autistic” young scientists like Jimmy’s school friend Crake of the Watson-Crick Institute are developing drugs like BlyssPluss, a super-Viagra with, as Crake says enthusiastically, the power to “protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases” as well as simultaneously “provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess, coupled with a generalized sense of energy and well-being”—all this, and it prolongs youth. A fourth capability, Crake says, would not be advertised:
The BlyssPluss Pill would also act as a sure-fire one-time-does-it-all-birth-control pill, for male and female alike, thus automatically lowering the population level…
“So basically you’re going to sterilize people without them knowing it under the guise of giving them the ultra in orgies,” [Jimmy said].
“That’s a crude way of putting it,” said Crake.
Yet more diabolically, pharmaceutical companies are researching new diseases for which new, expensive medical technologies and drugs will be required: “The best diseases,” said Crake, “would be those that cause lingering illnesses.”
Both Jimmy and Crake are the offspring of scientists in the hire of giant corporations; both Jimmy’s (fugitive) mother and Crake’s (murdered) father were rebels. Jimmy is a feckless arts major who must attend the under-funded, falling-down Martha Graham Academy surrounded by slummy “pleeb-lands” while the science-prodigy Crake attends the prestigious, lavishly funded Watson-Crick Institute fondly known as “Asperger’s U.” Like one of Swift’s enthusiastic Laputians, Crake takes Jimmy on a guided tour through the research center whose grotesque mascot is a “spoat-gider” (“one of the first successful splices…goat crossed with spider”) and where highly specialized young scientists are working in such fields as “NeoAgriculture” (their project is a rapidly growing, seemingly headless chicken to be marketed as “Chickie Nobs”) and “BioDefences” (“wolvogs”—wolf-dogs). Inevitably, some of these exotic new transgenic species have slipped out of Watson-Crick laboratories to reproduce their kind in nature—or what remains of nature: “snats,” “cane toads,” “rakunks.” In his trek in the jungle-terrain (somewhere in what was once the United States, in approximately 2025), Jimmy encounters such cinematic creatures as a rabbit that glows in the dusk, “a greenish glow filched from the iridicytes of a deep-sea jellyfish in some long-ago experiment.” (Lest one think that the fiction-writer is inventing such transgenic wonders, see Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin’s appallingly fascinating The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age where on page 94 an identical rabbit by the bio-artist Eduardo Kac, “GFP Bunny,” appears as “art.”)4
Crake is the deranged idealist who would rid the world of human cruelty and destructiveness, though he doesn’t himself believe in either God or Nature and would appear to be wholly amoral. In place of Homo sapiens Crake has created a new species of humanity: simple, placid, dull-normal creatures lacking any sense of ego, or humor, for whom sex is a routine physiological function and who are programmed by their creator to die suddenly at the age of thirty, in the prime of life. The Children of Crake, as Jimmy calls them, are physically beautiful, perfectly proportioned, of no more human interest than “animated statues.” For these child-like creatures, the world’s civilizations have been wiped out. New birth myths must be created for them by Snowman, who ironically finds himself revered by the Children of Crake as their savior, after Crake’s death.
The constraining mantle of post-apocalyptic genre is borne lightly by Atwood in Oryx and Crake, but such cautionary fantasies have become so popular in recent decades that revitalizing the form is a considerable challenge. Where there is an apocalypse, there must be an apocalypse-catalyst, or causer: the monomaniac Mad Scientist. Where there is such a villain, there must be a foil: the sensitive witness, the survivor who, like Ishmael, lives to tell the tale. There may even be a third person, a love object, for whom the two contend, in this case the former prostitute Oryx, whom Crake hires to educate the new breed of humans. She becomes for the Children of Crake the truly female figure. How to humanly register, still more feel any emotional involvement with characters like Jimmy/Snowman and the elusive Oryx when, as the novel hopes to persuade us, the earth’s entire population, billions of men, women, children, are dying? Such vast cataclysms leave us unmoved no matter how skillfully rendered by so trenchant and committed a writer as Atwood, though visual dramatizations, as in Steven Spielberg’s recent remake of The War of the Worlds, can rouse the viewer to a visceral horror that might seem to substitute for an emotional engagement. With its plethora of freaky forms, Oryx and Crake suggests one of those unnerving Saul Steinberg drawings in which recognizable human figures are surrounded by bizarre cartoon characters, human and animal and geometrical, some of them here stick figures.
Like The Handmaid’s Tale and Surfacing, Oryx and Crake is tantalizingly open-ended. Jimmy/Snowman discovers that he isn’t the last specimen of Homo sapiens left on earth after all—but will he, can he, dare he approach the other survivors? In a moment that replicates that of Atwood’s unnamed protagonist in Surfacing, who contemplates her lover at a distance, undecided whether to answer his calls to her, Jimmy/Snowman contemplates his fellow human beings at a similar distance and withdraws: “Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go.”
Where Atwood’s recent novels Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, like Oryx and Crake, have been ambitiously high-concept fiction buttressed by a considerable amount of research, Moral Disorder, Atwood’s newest gathering of short stories, is domestic realism at its most compelling: eleven sharply focused, intensely personal stories that function like chapters in an elliptical memoirist novel. In the seemingly artless, anecdotal prose of such previous stories of Atwood’s as “Rape Fantasies,” “Hair Jewellery,” and “Giving Birth” (Dancing Girls, 1982) and the beautifully rendered “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” (Bluebeard’s Egg, 1986), Atwood takes us through the life of her protagonist Nell from the age of eleven, when her sister is born, to late middle age when Nell’s children are grown and gone and she and her husband Tig are living in an age of “bad news”: “We don’t like bad news, but we need it. We need to know about it in case it’s coming our way.” As Nell’s life is inextricably entwined with the lives of others—family, friends, lovers, her husband and his family, even an assortment of wonderfully individualized farm animals—we come to know her small, narrowly focused world as if it were our own. Moral Disorder is likely to be read, perhaps misread, as Margaret Atwood’s most explicitly autobiographical fiction though Nell is not a writer, nor even a creative artist, but, simply, a decent, morally responsible and astute individual upon whom nothing is lost. As Nell thinks at the end of the funny, heartrending title story:
Maybe she would grow cunning, up here on the farm. Maybe she would absorb some of the darkness, which might not be darkness at all but knowledge. She would turn into a woman others came to for advice. She would be called in emergencies. She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.
Early in Moral Disorder, in the ironically titled “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” we return another time to the wilderness setting of Surfacing, except that the focus isn’t now on an adult daughter who has lost both her parents but on an eleven-year-old girl anxiously caught up in the mystery and dread of her middle-aged mother’s pregnancy: “I couldn’t understand why [my mother] had chosen to do what she’d done—why she’d turned herself i
nto this listless, bloated version of herself, thus changing the future—my future—into something shadow-filled and uncertain. I thought she’d done it on purpose. It didn’t occur to me that she might have been ambushed.” Warned by her father that her mother could become “very ill” unless the daughter takes over the most strenuous household tasks, the girl thinks: “He always thought I knew more than I knew, and that I was bigger than I was, and older, and hardier. What he mistook for calmness and competence was actually fright.” Only after the baby’s birth, when the family has returned to the city, and the girl is older, does she become empowered, impulsively, to rebel against her mother and the household duties that have shadowed her; at the cusp of adolescence, Atwood’s yet-unnamed narrator is alert to “seductive and tawdry and frightening pleasures” of her own.
Subsequent linked stories—“The Headless Horseman,” “My Last Duchess”—take the girl through a relatively conventional middle-class adolescence, distinguished by an uncommon interior life:
I hadn’t yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was a lot smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.
In flash-forwards we learn that the younger sister, imagined as a “menace” before her birth, has turned out to be in fact a menace of a kind: she is an emotionally unstable, chronically depressed individual for whom Atwood’s narrator feels a helpless sort of sisterly responsibility. The depressed sister speaks obsessively of “leaving”: “I should just check out. I’m useless here. It’s too much effort,” which the narrator interprets as:
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