by John Updike
Miss Murdoch has long been trying to rescue religion from an intellectually embarrassing theism. A headless chicken may flap about for a while, but it does not lay eggs; a Godless Christianity is scarcely more viable. Yet she continues to give us atheistic priests and nuns and patiently to record the subtle shades of disbelief and lapsedness—John Robert Rozanov is an unrepentedly lapsed Methodist, Diane Sedleigh a churchgoing but incredulous Anglican, Brian McCaffrey a Quaker in the same condition, Emma an Irish Anglican a bit envious of Catholicism, and so on. There is something dilute and wavering and flirtatious in all this that has enraged stout post-Christian critics like George Stade. But her rendering of these dim religious halftones is realistic, it seems to me, and for a literary artist very much to the point well put nearly forty years ago by Graham Greene:
After the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the English novel.… For with the death of James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act.… Even in one of the most materialistic of our great novelists—in Trollope—we are aware of another world against which the actions of the characters are thrown into relief. The ungainly clergyman picking his black-booted way through the mud, handling so awkwardly his umbrella, speaking of his miserable income and stumbling through a proposal of marriage, exists in a way that Mrs. Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay never does, because we are aware that he exists not only to the woman he is addressing but also in a God’s eye. His unimportance in the world of the senses is only matched by his enormous importance in another world.
The Philosopher’s Pupil considerably resembles an early Murdoch novel, The Flight from the Enchanter. There the philosopher is in the dedication (to Elias Canetti) rather than the title; but both deal with teen-age females awakening to love and with the spell exerted upon a circle of characters by a charismatic shaman- or father-figure. The plots share small things in common: gypsies, carved netsukes, foxes—the Enchanter is named Mischa Fox, and Alexandra McCaffrey’s grounds are haunted by a beautifully actualized family of foxes. Reading these two books with their affinities, one is struck by the glittering edge possessed by the younger writer, a jaunty farcicalness reminding us that Miss Murdoch came of age in the days of Waugh and Huxley and Rose Macaulay and Nancy Mitford, that she cut her teeth on a novelistic style of savage brightness and superior, heedless romp. One misses, in the later Murdoch, that unbaggy feminine sharpness—feminist, indeed; The Flight from the Enchanter is really about female uprisings—and the non-theoretical, “palpable present” bite to the heroines’ amours. Hattie Meynell, in The Philosopher’s Pupil, is vivid in quarrel but almost wordless in love, the inert object of a quest rather than a quester herself. Men have taken over the center of Miss Murdoch’s novels—the opposite of what happened in the oeuvre of Henry James—and a certain heavy scent of last night’s after-dinner cigars flavors the less dazzling pages. But all in all the earlier novel is greatly surpassed by the later, a book that seems as large as life, so large and various that no two people will read the same story in it. Omnis mundi creatura, quasi liber et scriptura: a book as replete as this one reverses the equation.
Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard
THE HANDMAID’S TALE, by Margaret Atwood. 311 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
THE GOOD APPRENTICE, by Iris Murdoch. 522 pp. Viking, 1986.
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian, a poet, and a woman; all three identities have contributed to her quizzical, delicate, and ultimately moving anti-Utopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. It takes place, my best estimate is, some time just before the year 2000, in what is unambiguously Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has become the capital of a totalitarian, troubled, theocratic state named Gilead. Our heroine is known as Offred, because she is a Handmaid, a sort of combination nun and concubine, assigned to a Commander, that is, a government higher-up, named Fred. The principal duty of the Handmaid is to submit to a once-a-month shot at impregnation by the Commander, while she is being sacramentally clasped from behind by his post-menopausal Wife. Wives, with a capital “W,” wear blue; Handmaids wear red habits that completely cover their bodies, and white-winged headdresses that restrict their vision as they, always in pairs, shop and stroll the streets. If they do not conceive after three “postings” of two years each, they are declared Unwomen and shipped off to the dreaded Colonies, where the main and fatal pastime seems to be cleaning up toxic wastes. Other well-defined castes in the new, cartoon-medieval society are Marthas (housekeepers, who wear habits of dull green), Aunts (female enforcers and instructors, who wear paramilitary khaki), Econowives (women who belong to the poorer men; in signification of their multiple roles they wear striped dresses, “red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy”), Angels of Light (soldiers), and Eyes (the secret police). The details of the brave new world, as they drift in through Offred’s offhand, dreamlike monologue, often seem droll: stores called Soul Scrolls sell computerized prayers, printed on machines called Holy Rollers, and prostitutes wear the ragtag leftovers of the pre-Gilead days—not only risqué bathing suits and nighties but cheerleader outfits and exercise costumes. Serious enough, however, are the claustrophobia and outrage of Miss Atwood’s visionary future; its features constitute a living checklist of a feminist liberal’s bugaboos—rampant pollution, the Christian fundamentalist New Right, sexism, and racism (the “Children of Ham” have been resettled in North Dakota, and the “Sons of Jacob” turned into disenfranchised “boat people”). The contemporary allusions worked into the texture of Gilead range from the CIA to Romania’s anti-birth-control policies, from the Vietnam aftermath to the Ayatollah’s Iran, from “Think Tanks” to the “privatizing” of government operations. Historical allusions include “early Earth-goddess cults,” “an English village custom of the seventeenth century,” and this country’s pre–Civil War Underground Railroad—which ended, of course, in Canada.
To Canadians we must seem a violent and somewhat sinister nation. It is a long way, atmospherically, from Toronto to Detroit. Though sharing a continent, an accent of spoken English, and many assumptions with the United States, and afflicted with its own domestic divisions and violence, our friendly northern neighbor stands above, as it were, much of our moral strenuousness, our noisy determination to combine virtue and power, and our occasional vast miscarriages of missionary intention. With some bemusement, no doubt, Canada let its Scotch be smuggled across the border during Prohibition, and over the same border received our Vietnam draft evaders fifty years later. Bemusement, mixed with dread, detachment, and a sense of superiority, animates Miss Atwood’s spirited caricature of conditions south of the forty-ninth parallel. Her attitude has softened since her novel Surfacing (1972), wherein “the Americans” are the enemy, a malevolent force-field, a veritable plague of crassness and greed—“the pervasive menace, the Americans.” She took her master’s degree at Radcliffe, and, we are told on the dust jacket, finished The Handmaid’s Tale in Alabama; like most of her countrymen, she knows the United States better than we know Canada. But what native of this republic, however politically thin-skinned, takes the New Right seriously enough to conceive of it rising up and machine-gunning the President and the Congress? Or would imagine the various contemporary “pro-life,” anti-abortion, anti-pornography protests finding their logical conclusion in a murderous patriarchy wherein women are reduced to the status of slaves? Or would be so tactless as to make a major point of the low birthrates among Caucasians as opposed to those among non-Caucasians? Or so perverse as to locate “the heart of Gilead” in Cambridge, that present-day capital of liberal thinking, and to hang the bodies of executed political criminals from hooks embedded in the barb-wired brick walls of Harvard Yard? Or so careless as to propose a fundamentalist ruling elite that yet openly drinks and smokes? These strange notes add a charming dissonance to Miss Atwood’s bravura improvisation upon observable trends in these United States. To the females of Gilead as to the fugitive slaves of the Old South, Canada is s
afe haven, the blameless north. Offred and her husband, Luke, and their five-year-old daughter almost make it over the border, when Gilead’s monstrous reforms are still new. But the three are captured, and Luke and the girl are taken away, never to be seen again, and Offred is made into a woman in red, a Handmaid.
This novel could have been a humorless, strident tract; but the poet in the author renders it quite otherwise. The narrative is light-handed, fitful, and gradually compelling; it assembles its horrid world with a casual meditative motion, and saves most of its action for the last few pages. Certain small things remain unchanged and unpoisoned in Gilead. “Dishtowels are the same as they always were,” and buttons with smiling faces on them are still being manufactured, and flowers still bloom: “Tulips are opening their cups, spilling out color. The tulips are red, a darker crimson towards the stem, as if they have been cut and are beginning to heal there.” Even the pervasive pollution is described with a certain poetry: “The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your body, camp out in your fatty cells. Who knows, your very flesh may be polluted, dirty as an oily beach, sure death to shore birds and unborn babies.” When a baby is born, there is celebration and holiday. Wives and Handmaids together gather in the birthing room, with its ancient smells: “The smell is of our own flesh, an organic smell, sweat and a tinge of iron, from the blood on the sheet, and another smell, more animal, that’s coming, it must be, from Janine: a smell of dens, of inhabited caves, the smell of the plaid blanket on the bed when the cat gave birth on it, once, before she was spayed. Smell of matrix.” And, amid the grim deprivations of Gilead, the small details of ordinary free life as it once was rise up in memory: “It’s almost like June, when we would get out our sundresses and our sandals and go for an ice cream cone.” Deprivation has turned tiny black-marketed items from those luxurious olden days into potent talismans: perfume, cigarettes, hand lotion, even a single kitchen match. When Offred becomes the Commander’s mistress, they play Scrabble and he lets her look at illegally preserved copies of fashion magazines:
Staring at the magazine, as he dangled it before me like fish bait, I wanted it. I wanted it with a force that made the ends of my fingers ache. At the same time I saw this longing of mine as trivial and absurd, because I’d taken such magazines lightly enough once. I’d read them in dentists’ offices, and sometimes on planes; I’d bought them to take to hotel rooms, a device to fill in empty time while I was waiting for Luke. After I’d leafed through them I would throw them away, for they were infinitely discardable, and a day or two later I wouldn’t be able to remember what had been in them.
Though I remembered now. What was in them was promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing one another, stretching on, replica after replica, to the vanishing point. They suggested one adventure after another, one wardrobe after another, one improvement after another, one man after another. They suggested rejuvenation, pain overcome and transcended, endless love. The real promise in them was immortality.
Any futuristic novel, of course, is about the present: what has struck the writer as significant and ominous in the world now. Such an enlargement of topical issues and phenomena tends to date faster than a novel, incidentally contemporary, that describes more or less perennial human adventures. What saves The Handmaid’s Tale from a timely datedness is that, among its cautionary and indignant messages, Miss Atwood has threaded a poem to the female condition. Offred’s life of daily waiting and shopping, of cautious strategizing and sudden bursts of daring, forms an intensified and darkened version of a woman’s customary existence, a kind of begrimed window through which glimpses of Offred’s old, pre-Gilead life—its work and laughter and minor dissipations, its female friends and husband and child, its costumes and options—flicker with the light of paradise. The phrase “woman’s novel” is not a happy one—better, surely, for a writer male or female to attempt a “person’s novel.” But The Handmaid’s Tale does feel purposefully feminine, and beneath the grim but also transparently playful details of its dystopia glows the vivid and intimate reality of its heroine.
Not until halfway through her tale do we learn that Offred is thirty-three years old, with brown hair, and stands five seven without shoes. We never do learn her pre-Gilead name. She is an American. Scattered clues tell us that she was raised by her mother, was a child in the Seventies, and went to college in the Eighties. After graduation, she lived in a run-down apartment near the Charles River, “worked a computer in an insurance company,” and began an affair with a married man called Luke. By this time, the world has taken on a futuristic tint; her second job is that of “discer” for a library—transferring books to computer discs and then shredding the books. Paper money, also, is being phased out, in favor of accounts kept in a Compubank. The Gilead revolution occurs, and its first acts are not especially threatening: Pornomarts are shut down, and Bun-Dle Buggies and Feels on Wheels vans no longer shamelessly circle Harvard Square. Identipasses are issued. It has taken Luke two years “to pry himself loose,” and the lovers are already married and their daughter is “three or four, in daycare,” when Offred, stopping at the corner store for a pack of cigarettes, is told that her credit card is no longer valid. The credit cards of all females, it turns out, have been invalidated, and the money in their accounts has been turned over to their husbands or male next of kin. That same day, she and all other women are fired from their jobs. Luke, informed of these disasters, tells her he will always take care of her and wants, that night, to make love.
He kissed me then, as if now … things could get back to normal. But something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me.
He doesn’t mind this, I thought. He doesn’t mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other’s, anymore. Instead, I am his.
Offred’s stream of experience and reflection, as the next year or two takes her to the unsuccessful escape attempt and then three more bring her to her abject condition as Fred’s official Handmaid and unofficial Scrabble companion, is nowhere more interesting, at least to this male reader, than in how she sees men. The Commander at first is hardly seen: “I glimpse him only for an instant, foreshortened, walking to the car. He doesn’t have his hat on, so it’s not a formal event he’s going to. His hair is gray. Silver, you might call it if you were being kind. I don’t feel like being kind.” In slightly better focus, he becomes a composite, middle-aged man: “The Commander has on his black uniform, in which he looks like a museum guard. A semiretired man, genial but wary, killing time. But only at first glance. After that he looks like a midwestern bank president, with his straight neatly brushed silver hair, his sober posture, shoulders a little stooped. And after that there is his mustache, silver also, and after that his chin, which really you can’t miss. When you get down as far as the chin he looks like a vodka ad, in a glossy magazine, of times gone by.” As this generalized male makes his move and invites her to visit his room illicitly, his image complicates, becomes “daddyish”; at moments he looks “sheepish … the way men used to look once,” and when the time for their official monthly copulation comes “he was no longer a thing to me. That was the problem.”
All the subtleties of Fred’s and Offred’s involvement play about this central perception of hers, achieved at their first interview: “But there must be something he wants, from me. To want is to have a weakness. It’s this weakness, whatever it is, that entices me. It’s like a small crack in a wall, before now impenetrable. If I press my eye to it, this weakness of his, I may be able to see my way clear.” To want is to have a weakness, and by this weakness the powerless obtain a hook into the powerful. And by guilt, also; Offred learns that the Handmaid before her hung herself when the Commande
r’s Wife discovered their affair, and she calculates, “Things have changed. I have something on him, now. What I have on him is the possibility of my own death. What I have on him is his guilt.” Offred “goes along” with Fred in his whims—she learns a prostitute’s tolerance and detachment—but power, power that is the basis of freedom, is her only ardor. When he asks for more than submission she cannot respond; she lies there “like a dead bird”† and tries to stir herself with vain encouragements: “He is not a monster, I think. I can’t afford pride or aversion, there are all kinds of things that have to be discarded, under the circumstances.”
But there is yet more to the relations between the sexes than this squalor of mutual exploitation. Female heterosexual desire, a terrible be-clouder of pure feminist thinking, must be counted in; Offred, when she and we least expect it, falls in love (not with Fred). She becomes reckless and avid in the pursuit of lovemaking. “It wasn’t called for, there was no excuse. I did not do it for him, but for myself entirely.” And, in the plot’s last swift turns, this heedless abandon turns out to be the shrewdest, most self-saving thing she could have done. The reader, suddenly dropped out of her life and inner voice into a humorous lecture upon Gilead delivered in the year 2195, experiences that shocking sensation of time overwhelming life which the reader of The Age of Innocence feels when the young lovers are suddenly discovered as old, or that Marcel felt at the final party in Remembrance of Things Past, or that we feel when realizing that everybody in a photograph we have been admiring is now dead. The Handmaid’s Tale casts a chill, but is almost the reverse of the frozen blackness of Nineteen Eighty-four. Both books predict corrupt and claustrophobic totalitarianisms.‡ In Nineteen Eighty-four, however, the underground turns out to be the regime in disguise, and there is nowhere to escape; whereas in The Handmaid’s Tale the regime turns out to be pitifully human and escape is right around the corner. Orwell’s book is suffused with his awareness of his approaching death; Atwood’s, by life—the heroine’s irrepressible vitality and the author’s lovely subversive hymn to our ordinary life, as lived, amid perils and pollution, now.