Margaret Atwood

Some years ago now, Margaret Atwood observed that the American poet Robert Frost’s famous line, “The land was ours before we were the land’s” would never have been written by a Canadian. “The land was never ours,” Atwood said. “Our relationship to the land is that of creatures who have to struggle to survive.” From her childhood, Atwood always had a physical relationship with her land. She spent her early years following in the footsteps of her father, an entomologist, who scoured the forests of northern Quebec and Ontario in search of specimens to study. From her experience of the wilderness, and from her early reading of fairy tales and detective novels, Atwood built the landscape of what would become the geography of her imagination. She wrote her first poems when she was not yet six years old; she did not attend school full time until the age of twelve, and then, as a teenager, she began to distinguish herself as a poet with a sharp, ironic and unmistakably personal voice.

The question of identity is central to Atwood’s work. Who am I and Who are we pop up in her writing over and over, under a hundred different guises. A short poem written when Atwood was turning 30, published in the collection Power Politics, says this:

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye  

This unflinching identity, ths first-person “I”, will shift throughout the next half century, from her poems to her first novel, The Edible Woman, from The Edible Woman to Surfacing, from Surfacing to Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace, The Robber Bride and The Penelopiad. At each turn, in this game of shifting mirrors, a deeper, more complex, more intriguing identity emerges. It is never a question of checking identity papers with the traits of her fictional characters in a tedious academic whodunit. Rather, it is the cartography of personal experience transmuted into story, the author transmigrated into “Once Upon A Time.”

The identity of the author is, in the beginning at least, interwoven with the identity of the country. The old joke about Canada –“A country with too much geography and too little history”—is taken up as a challenge in Survival, a culture primer written in 1972, the year following Power Politics. Simone Weil defined culture as “the formation of attention.” Atwood demands that the curious reader pay “attention” to the survival strategies that Canada demanded (and still demands) from its people. In this context, it might be useful to note that Canada is the only country in the Americas whose identity stems not from a revolution but from a counter-revolution. Canadians define themselves by not wanting be fenced-in by conventional chauvinism. A competition set up by Canada’s broadcasting system, the CBC, to find a Canadian equivalent of “As American as apple pie” in the United States, rewarded the following entry: “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.” This is not unwillingness to take a stand, but the contrary: a willingness to remain open.

A nation’s identity is reflected less in its politics than in the stories it tells. With this conviction, Margaret Atwood set out, more than fifty years ago, to build for Canada a cultural conscience. In Survival, revolutionary in its time and now a classic, Atwood defined Canada’s culture in terms of its relationship to nature, and through the constant presence of the protagonist-victim-heroine that Atwood sees as characteristic of national identity. The survival strategies of her characters (mostly women) are in many ways similar to those of her predecessors, the Victorian novelists that Atwood admires or the women novelists of eighteenth-century France. These new Princesses de Clèves and Jane Eyres find themselves in antagonistic environments such as the ever-menacing wilderness or the ever-present patriarchal society.

A good example of this is Alias Grace, published in 1996. On 23 July 1843, Thomas Kinnear, a young gentleman of Richmond Hill, Ontario, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, were found murdered on Kinnear’s estate. The authorities had no difficulty in identifying the murderers: two servants in Kinnear’s employ, James McDermott and Grace Marks, had escaped to the United States under false names. A few months later, they were tracked down, brought back to Canada, tried and found guilty. McDermott was condemned to be hanged; Grace Marks’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in Kingston Penitentiary. The melodramatic gossip surrounding the case –that Kinnear and his housekeeper had been lovers; that Grace, jealous of Nancy, had driven McDermott to the bloody deed– turned Grace into a freak celebrity, visited in her cell by members of the best society, including the nineteenth-century Canadian diarist Susanna Moodie.

It was in Moodie’s Life in the Clearings that Margaret Atwood first came across Grace’s story. Offred the Handmaid and Grace are sisters, one in the future, the other in the past. Both locked up in small rooms where they spin out their lives, both defined –or rather labeled– by the male world that has imprisoned them, both cut and fashioned to a shape determined by society, both molded through systems of exclusion, both these women hold up a mirror to their captors, a convex mirror in which they can see the reverse of their own selves. Grace in particular is the inverted image of the men in power: condemned by her sex, her poverty, her Irish blood in the days just before the Great Famine, she comes to Upper Canada to discover that the only weapon she possesses to escape life’s drudgery is her passion, and she wields it like a small knife. Passion, in the Canadian society of the 1840s, is the ultimate transgression: against stays and corsets, against conventions of quiet voices and female meekness, against “knowing one’s place”. And to preserve it –and herself– from the world, Grace will keep her passion secret.

If Alias Grace is a crime story, it is one in which the whodunit is –thankfully– never utterly resolved. What matters is the slow growth of Grace’s consciousness, the construction of her person from inside, which is also true for Offred and for the haunting, terrifying, memorable Aunt Lydia of The Testaments. During her first employment, Grace has been guided by an older, more experienced servant girl, Mary Whitney, perhaps the only person truly to love her, certainly the only one to help her recognize herself. It is Mary’s name Grace takes when she escapes to the States in the hopes of becoming her own person, since Grace is a creature the world has imagined to keep her in submission, while Mary is self-created, autobiographical in the fullest sense. A touch of the fantastic glows through the novel: a mysterious peddler who reads Grace’s palm and declares her “one of us”; ghosts who come and stand by her side; the dead who call to her in distinguishable voices. These too, like the assumption of Mary’s name, are Grace’s reality, at long last unbound by man’s rules and expectations.

Like most crime stories, Alias Grace is the account of a search and, because it is Canadian story, it also the description of a strategy of survival. In the case of Grace, it is the description of the long and arduous process of a woman finding who or what she is, learning to recognize in the changing shapes of her tanglewood mind a name she can call her own, unearthing an unfamiliar face beyond the face in the mirror. There can be no happy conclusion to the story: since Grace’s quest (and our quest for Grace) is for something continually changing, it must continue beyond the book’s final page.

The documentary chronicle that feeds on the tenants of fiction (or the novel that feeds on documentary chronicles) has a venerable tradition in the literature in English, at least as old as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Year of the Plague which pretends to be a blow-by-blow account of the London epidemic and is in fact an imaginary reconstruction by a master storyteller. Atwood knows that the documents in Grace’s case are not enough to flesh out the bare bones of her story: to understand it, we must rely on fiction, on the revelations of “what if” and “imagine that”. Since Alias Grace partakes of both literary fields, Atwood has adroitly included documents that have the quality of stories and dreams that seem as true as documents, rich with the poet’s touch, and powerfully haunting.

Hidden in the folds of Grace’s story, is the story of Susannah in the bath and the elders who spy on her, one of the earliest detective stories of all time. Accused of lewdness by two old men whose advances she has refused, the virtuous Susannah is exonerated by the intervention of Daniel who proves her innocence by exposing the elders’ contradictory testimonies. For Grace, the moral of her trial is simple: “you should not take baths outside in the garden.” Nakedness, the baring of one’s flesh or soul, invites danger in a world that demands honesty only from its victims. Survival (the word that has now become Atwood’s property) lies in concealment, in timing your appearance, in telling, in your own way, your own story.

In Atwood’s writings, it is never a naive opposition between victims and victimizers: in all cases, Atwood probes with surgical precision the bonds created between women, men and the suffering world around us. The starting point  of Survival was a reflection by her literature professor, the great critic Northrop Frye. “In every culture,” Frye wrote, “there is a structure of ideas, images, and beliefs which express, at a certain point in time, a general view of the human situation and its destiny.” For Atwood that imaginary whole could be summed up to the idea of survival. Haunted by the specters of colonialism, stunned by the enormous landscape, exiled in their own land by a hostile nature, aware of their nakedness like Adam and Eve in the Garden, Canadians narrate the opposite of desire: that which is feared, that which is fought in order to survive.

From Survival until today, Atwood’s work redeems and perfects this obsession. In her literature, the characters struggle to save themselves from themselves and their ghosts (as in Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride), or from the ghosts of the natural world (Surfacing) or from the monstrous society that tries to destroy them (The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments) or even from the ravages of a science gone mad (the Maddaddam trilogy). Atwood refuses to define these later novels, including the Maddaddam trilogy, as works of science-fiction. According to Atwood, science fiction literature invents fantastic worlds and creatures, while her novels seek simply to expand or exacerbate what already exists in our reality. “For every detail that readers might suppose fantastic,” Atwood says, “I have evidence of its existence in embryonic form here and now.”

In a recent interview, Atwood has said that “in science fiction, it’s always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future.” Indeed. There is today which (as the medieval writers knew) is already our past. Today, thanks to Atwood, Canadian literature has become part of a past that extends to the confines of the eighteenth century, and a present so rich and varied that it can no longer be limited to the borders of the country. Thanks to her efforts and those of her contemporary fellow-authors, thanks to the founding, in 1973, with her partner the novelist Graeme Gibson, the Writers Union of Canada, the Canadian writer is today able to work without feeling that he or she is writing in the vacuum of an almost non-existent country. But no literature, once affirmed, remains autochthonous. Atwood’s work, translated into dozens of languages, is not read as just “Canadian” but as the reflection of each of her readers who, throughout the world, feels that the fate of these characters, whatever their nationality, is not alien to him or her, and reveals mirrors for experiences the reader did not know to be common. Perhaps this is Atwood’s greatest attribute: to have recognized in the exploration and creation of local myths, something infinitely deeper, less circumspect and, above all, more universal.

When Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she hardly suspected that the signs of the abuse of power she glimpsed in U.S. society could have led to the election of Donald Trump and the questioning (once again) of the role of women whose rights we presumed we had acquired from the feminist movements of the twentieth century. Almost thirty-five years after its first publication, the novel acquired in the United States, but in other parts of the world as well, the status of a battle cry, a slightly exaggerated looking-glass of the injustices of today’s society. Women dressed in the iconic uniform of the maid in Gilead’s misogynistic society began appearing in anti-Trump demonstrations, and The Handmaid’s Tale, turned into the highly successful television series we have all watched, became a worldwide best-seller translated into more than forty languages. The sequel, The Testaments, whose plot was kept secret until the day of publication, gives another turn of the screw to the story: how does someone turn against one’s own and becomes a  victimizer? Atwood never leaves bad enough alone.

Homer was not be exempted. In 2005 Margaret Atwood took up Homer’s account of Ulysses’ return and re-imagined it from the point of view of Penelope and her maids. She called her version The Penelopiad. In Book XXII of the Odyssey, after Ulysses shoots Antinous, one of the two leading suitors, and reveals himself to the rest of the astonished men, he begins killing them one by one with the assistance of his son Telemachus, the swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius. Ulysses, having run out of arrows, puts on his armour and finishes off the suitors with his sword and spear, while the twelve maids who have slept with them are strung up by their necks with a ship’s cable. After the massacre, Ulysses purges his palace, halls and court, with cleansing fumes. Atwood found the story unsatisfactory. There are, says Atwood, “two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of the Odyssey: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn’t hold water: there are too many inconsistencies.” Once again, Atwood wants to probe more deeply and lend the silenced women a voice. There have been too many Philomelas in our histories.

While Atwood is known for her fiction and essays, it is her work as a poet that, I believe, best expresses her ethical and social philosophy. Her exploration of themes of injustice, repression, censorship and power, her inquiries into sexual, familial and civic identity, explicit in her prose, take on richly ambiguous and profound facets in her poetry. For Atwood, intelligence acquired through words can lead to a better world. And its opposite, “stupidity,” she wrote, “is the same as evil, if we judge by its fruits.” Her early poetry collections, such as the already mentioned Power Politics, as well as The Journals of Susanna Moodie and The Animals of this Country, to her later ones such as Morning in the Burned House, for example, show, with startling humor and poignant empathy, the intelligence of her thinking and her interest in our common human destiny.

Fame and a worldwide readership have made her the target of all manner of attacks, unfair and spiteful. Accused of being anything from “bad feminist” to “shitty white woman” Atwood preserved her dignity with humour and reason. Perhaps Atwood’s short fable, written in the early nineties, sums up the identity the older Atwood was forced to assume. It is a retelling of the story of the Little Red Hen who finds a grain of wheat, plants it, reaps the wheat, grinds it to make flour, makes a loaf of bread. And throughout the process, every time the Little Red Hen asks for help, the other animals all say “Not me, not me!”. Finally, when the bread is ready, she asks again: “Who will help me eat this loaf of bread?” And all the animals answer “I will, I will!”

Atwood ends her retelling with this:

«So then what? I know what the story says, what I’m supposed to have said: I’ll eat it myself, so kiss off. Don’t believe a word of it. As I’ve pointed out, I’m a hen, not a rooster.

Here, I said. I apologize for having the idea in the first place. I apologize for luck. I apologize for self-denial. I apologize for being a good cook. […] I apologize for smiling, in my smug hen apron, with my smug hen beak. I apologize for being a hen. Have some more. Have mine.»

Alberto Manguel

Lisbon, Easter 2022