Strange Things by Margaret Atwood

 

Strange Things was first presented as a series of four lectures at Oxford University in 1991 as part of the Clarendon Lecture Series in English Literature.  With her characteristic sense of humour, Margaret Atwood explores the The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature through three different themes: the mysterious, magnetic lure of the sinister North, the north as a place of renewal and the urge of non-Native peoples to connect with the aboriginal people and the land,  and the North as the home of the Wendigo, the snow monster. In her fourth lecture, these themes are re-examined through the women writers who have adapted them for their own purposes.


Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew

The first lecture tells the story of Sir John Franklin and his crew of 135 who left England on a polar expedition in 1845 in search of a pre-Panama Canal commercial trade route through the Arctic.  The mysterious disappearance of their ships the Terror, and the Erebus has long inspired artists and writers.  Margaret Atwood looks at work by E. J. Pratt, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Mordecai Richler and Robert W. Service, and how the lure of the north calls out to the "ancient hubris in the dreams of men".

...and my favourite: Stan Roger's Northwest Passage (link to Youtube video)


The Grey Owl Syndrome

After the death of naturalist, writer, lecturer Grey Owl, it was discovered that he was not in fact an Ojibwa, but an Englishman from Hastings named Archie Belaney.

Archibald Belaney

Margaret Atwood, refers to other white men who are aboriginal wannabes, and explores the ideas of "claiming kinship" with Native Canadians, the Woodcraft movement, the origins of the Boy Scouts, the "appropriation debate," and the complexity of defining, in Canada, who qualifies as native.

I enjoyed this lecture which gave me a new perspective on the summer camp tradition of encouraging children to become metaphorically Indian, which I certainly experienced both at school and camp, and can still sing all the words to "Land of the Silver Birch" (check out this Grade Five students' video).  This lecture also made me keen to read Grey Owl's writings, John Richardson's Wacousta, Robert Kroetsch's Gone Indian, and to find a biography of Ernest Thompson Seton.


Eyes of Blood, Heart of Ice: The Wendigo

The Wendigo, the legendary northern cannibalistic monster of the eastern boreal forest evokes fear, for along with the possibility of being eaten by one, it is possible also to become one.  It evokes fear in me because I'm not all that comfortable with the vampire/zombie kind of monsters who lack language and induce madness.  It's not really my thing, so I found this lecture the least interesting for me.  (Yes, I'm cowardly like that.)  It did make me slightly curious about Wayland Drew's novel The Wabeno Feast, but the creep-out factor is probably too high for me.


Linoleum Caves

Although CanLit is filled with wonderful women writers and has been since the earliest days of exploration and settlement (the records of the nuns of New France, the wives of British officers and settlers like Anna Jameson, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill...) the female voice has been excluded from the writing of the north.  Margaret Atwood's fourth lecture is about what happens when women writers incorporate these traditional literary motifs created by men into their own writing.  She also briefly touches on how she has used these themes in her own writing in Surfacing (1972, novel), The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970, poetry collection), and Wilderness Tips (1991, short fiction).

(photo credit: Jean Malek/Random House)

This is a captivating little book, and of special interest to anyone with a fascination with Canadian Literature.  She expands a few of the themes from her landmark 1972 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.  Margaret Atwood's unique sense of humour and wry wit is in evidence, and I found this work very readable and entertaining.  How wonderful it would have been to have been in attendance for the lectures!  I have now added quite a number of books to my To Read list.

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad is part of the Canongate Books series of top shelf authors retelling the greatest myths of the world.  This is an alternate look at the Odyssey in which Penelope, Odysseus' long-suffering wife tells her version of the twenty years while her husband was away fighting the Trojan War.  This novella deals with themes familiar in Margaret Atwood's writing such as gender stereotyping, the nature of storytelling and myth-making, and the exclusion of the female perspective and is told with her usual sardonic sense of humour.

Penelope and her maids are in Hades and in a sometimes whimsical, conversational tone they tell their story in prose and song.  This is their story, that which has been left unsaid in Homer's epic is now retold explaining the relevant exclusions from the accepted version.  Penelope was a pragmatist and her arch enemy was not Odysseus (who comes across as something of a jerk), but rather her cousin Helen of Troy, a conniving, catty, vixen who plays the role of the middle school bully. 

Margaret Atwood

This is a fun book to read.  It is playful and enjoyable.  The voice of Penelope is rendered with exquisite realism.  It is not surprising that it was adapted into a play; Penelope rises from the pages as a real woman and begs to be portrayed on stage.  This is no two-dimensional image of the devoted wife, the faithful helpmeet.  Penelope has foibles and faults a-plenty, but they never distract from her likeablility.  I didn't realise until I'd almost finished the novella that I'd actually read it before.  That I had forgotten it is surprising in one way - I have a very good memory, if not for the content, at least for the titles of books I've read.  On the other hand, it wasn't a book that deeply resonated with me this time either.  It was a fun exercise in revisionist mythology and story crafting, but not one of my favourite of Margaret Atwood's books.

Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

Surfacing by Margaret Atwood is a deeply satisfying book.  This is the kind of book that I can (and did!) turn from the last page back to the first and start over again immediately.  It captivated me in a way I love to be drawn in to a story.  I knew that I had to dig deeper, think more, and revisit it until all the divergent threads formed a clear (er) picture.  Margaret Atwood tackles some big themes in this novel: life and death, guilt, personal and national identity, feminism, the limits of language, power hierarchies...  This is a novel, like all of Margaret Atwood's, that rewards repeated investigation.

The theme I found most interesting in this novel is the struggle to create wholeness from separation and division, and the access to true identity by casting off the superficial.  This theme is explored through the main character's psyche and her interpersonal relationships, and is reflected as well through the exploration of the forging of a Canadian national identity.

A young unnamed woman, daughter of unnamed parents, sister of an unnamed brother, and the main character of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, travels with three friends to her father's island home in the northern bush of Québec after she learns that he has disappeared.  Although on the surface it is an ordinary weekend-at-the-cottage excursion for the visitors, there is an undercurrent of tension for the main character as she becomes increasingly emotionally separated from her friends: the jovial but deeply misogynistic David, his emotionally fragile and submissive wife Anna, and her own boyfriend Joe, a silent, brooding, unreadable force.  Her friends never see the depth of her feelings as she slowly and silently comes to terms with her past.  The story is told in the first person, and almost exclusively seen through the eyes of the main character.  We are privy to her experiences, her memories and her thoughts.  There is no omniscient narrative voice.

The true self is deeper than surface appearance: clothes, cosmetics, the physical body, language, gender, and even nationality are just insignificant coverings of the true self - the deepest part of our subconscious.  All the divisions in the world are irrelevant to this inner truth.  The main character must merge all these superficial divisions that have been imposed on her, and must also confront the lies she has told herself which have split her in two before she can achieve healing and wholeness. 

When we accept these divisions rather than challenge them, the divisions do not go away but become engrained into our identity, further separating us from our humanity.  We tell ourselves lies that become truths.  By nature, our very humanness means that we embody a destructive force within.   We cannot escape this conflict.  We must resolve it, and we cannot resolve it if we do not know what we stand for.  Before we can challenge the oppression from without, we must resolve the oppression from within in order to be whole.

The novel is rife with divisions.  The main character has experienced an internal separation in her psyche that is manifest in the doubling of the life lines on her palm.  She spent her childhood moving back and forth between the northern bush and the urban south, where even language and clothing create divisions.  She has broken off communication with her parents.  Divisions are also central to the national identity in Surfacing.

Surfacing was published in 1972, the same year Margaret Atwood's seminal work of Canlit: Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature was released.  These two books share more than just a publication date, for they are both concerned with defining Canada's true national identity.  This identity does not rest solely on the post-colonial separation from its "parents" England and France, nor does it rest on its differences with America.  For, one's identity cannot rightly said to be whole when it is only defined by what it is not.  For a true identity of nationhood, we must look much further below the surface. When we look below the surface we see the experiences that we share, that bring us together, that have nothing to do with superficial divisions of language and appearance.

photo credit: John Reeve

This is a novel that has rewarded me with insights about myself and about the big themes in life: power, the subconscious, self-healing, the importance of history, feminism, innocence and guilt, independence, and the nature of good and evil, and the redemptive force of nature.  There are so many avenues to explore and question, so many connections to make.  Whenever I read Margaret Atwood's work I always marvel at her ability to weave a tale.

The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood

Already well established as a poet by 1969 having won the Governor General's Award for The Circle Game and published several other poetry collections, Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman was her first published novel. I first read it in the last years of secondary school - I was perhaps 18 at the time, and as one might expect, a great deal of it went flying straight over my head. Hopefully, my experiences in the intervening years have helped in my appreciation and understanding.

An office worker newly graduated from university, Marian McAlpin, the protagonist, works for Seymour Surveys, assessing the appeal of various consumer products on the public. She shares living quarters with her friend Ainsley, a free-spirited girl, and is engaged to Peter, a lawyer. Marian, although an intelligent and likeable person, is put upon by everyone in her life; her boyfriend takes advantage of her emotionally, her roommate takes advantage financially, her employer takes advantage of her by forcing her to work during her off-hours, and her married friend Clara just takes her for granted. Marian is drifting through her life without clearly delineated desires or goals and so is easily manipulated and imposed upon by those around her.

It is such a shock to encounter some of the thinking that went on without question before the arrival of Second Wave Feminism. There are little hints that this was a different world from today; a world in which it is just assumed a woman will relinquish her employment when she got married, or in which higher education for woman was still treated with suspicion. The infantilising nature of the treatment of women in the novel (especially by Marian's landlady and boyfriend) was striking, and (fortunately!) dated. Reading The Edible Woman felt less like a treatise on the state of women's issues, and more a reminder of how much the position of women in (Canadian) society has changed in forty years.

Marian is something of an Alice in Wonderland character. Just as Alice falls down the rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world where nothing makes any sense, Marian is a sane woman living in an upside down world where an educated, intelligent woman must find her place in a society that is incapable of seeing women like Marian as individuals. Marian must forge a path for herself through the maze of confusing messages and examples before her.

One of my very favourite sections of the novel is the Mad Hatter's Tea Party-like episode in which Marian eats dinner at her friend Duncan's house. He and his roommates are graduate students in English Literature, and the way they look at the world made me laugh with remembrance about my own university years. Trevor says [sorry, it's a long quote, but so central to the core message of the book, I think]:

Of course everyone knows Alice is a sexual-identity-crisis book, that’s old stuff, it's been around for a long time, I'd like to go into it a little deeper though. What we have here, if you only look at it closely, this is the little girl descending into the very suggestive rabbit-barrow, becoming as it were prenatal, trying to find her role, [...] her role as a Woman. Yes, well that's clear enough. These patterns emerge.[...] One sexual role after another is presented to her but she seems unable to accept any of them, I mean she’s really blocked. She rejects Maternity when the baby she’s been nursing turns into a pig, nor does she respond positively to the dominating-female role of the Queen and her castration cries of ‘Off with his head!’ And when the Duchess makes a cleverly concealed lesbian pass at her, sometimes you wonder how conscious old Lewis was, anyway she's neither aware nor interested; and right after you’ll recall she goes to talk with the Mock-Turtle, enclosed in his shell and his self-pity, a definitely pre-adolescent character; then there are those most suggestive scenes, most suggestive, the one where her neck becomes elongated and she is accused of being a serpent, hostile to eggs, you'll remember, a rather destructively-phallic identity she indignantly rejects; and her negative reaction to the dictatorial Caterpillar, just six inches high, importantly perched on the all-too-female mushroom which is perfectly round but which has the power to make you either smaller or larger than normal, I find that particularly interesting. And of course there's the obsession with time, clearly a cyclical rather than a linear obsession. So anyway she makes a lot of attempts but she refuses to commit herself, you can’t say that by the end of the book she has reached anything that can be definitely called maturity.

Trevor's interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland gives us a hint about how to interpret Marian's adventures in her own story which is The Edible Woman.  Clever, non?  Marian even states, in a very Alice-like manner, '"So I'm finally going mad," she thought, "like everybody else. What a nuisance. Though I suppose it will be a change."'

There is all of Margaret Atwood's distinct cleverness and wordplay in abundance here, and although there is evidence that this is an early work compared to her more mature novels, this is a masterful creation.  Her ability to interweave so many threads to deftly produce the final product always leaves me marvelling at her skill.  I highly recommend The Edible Woman. 

Margaret Atwood

author image from here

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale begins in Margaret Atwood's typically understated style.  We begin in the middle, and slowly the past and the present unfold like the drawing back of curtain to reveal the complete diarama.

This is the story of one woman in a society that has recently transitioned very quickly from the contemporary American reality of 1985 (the publication year of the text) into a totalitarian regime now called Gilead.  The narrator, unnamed at the beginning of the story, has been forced into the role of handmaid, or surrogate child-bearer, for a high-ranking Commander and his wife.  The position of a handmaid in a household in Gilead is ambiguous.  For, although these women fill an essential role because of the declining fertility rates, they are scorned members of society.  The narrator cautiously makes her way through each day, attempting to remain below the radar, for there are spies everywhere in Gilead.  Fear is the method of ensuring complete obedience, and death or exile is the punishment.

The narrator's behaviour is guided by the dictates of the dystopian society, but her inner voice has a morality that fights everything she sees and does.  In her first person narration, she records her attempt to walk a fine line between staying out of trouble and following her conscience.  The repressive message of Gilead is to "blame the victim" and the indoctrination, isolation and lack of human connection allows the narrator to doubt herself even while feeling unsettled about what surrounds her. It is through her thoughts that she keeps alive her connection with the past, recalling the life she had before Gilead.

Gilead is a theocracy, but the religious dogma is hollow.  When religious rhetoric is used solely for political means, it loses its spiritual dimension and is just another empty tool of the powerful to gain more power.  The religious observances in The Handmaid's Tale are hollow words, spoken only out of fear and conformity, never reflecting any true Christian teaching of compassion and forgiveness.  So, Margaret Atwood is not condemning religion in this novel, but exploring how the rhetoric of religion can be used for the purpose of mass conformity.  She is making a distinction between, for instance, the Quakers and the Baptists and the others who do not identify themselves as Christian who risk their own lives to save others, and go to great lengths to sacrifice themselves for others.

The power in The Handmaid's Tale for me is in the exploration of the effects of the removal of all human interaction in a society.  Individuals in Gilead are forbidden to look one another in the eye, to touch one other (except in specially sanctioned impersonal "ceremonies"), or to interact with anyone else on a personal level.  What happens when this basic human need is denied?  In small ways, the narrator sees evidence of the break down of the society, of cracks in the very foundation because of this inhuman condition.  People are willing to take great risks to have these needs met.

I loved this book.  Every single time I read a book by Margaret Atwood I remember once again how much I enjoy her view of the world. Even when it is this dark and horrifying.

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood at the Canadian Encyclopedia (including video of her interview with Alan Gregg on the topic of her 2008 Massey Lecture entitled Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth)

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

My experience with all of Margaret Atwood's books has always been that they start off slowly, setting the scene in almost a plodding manner.  Like a snowball rolling downhill, page by page her genius becomes more and more evident until by the end of the book I am overwhelmed by her cleverness.  Every single time.  I now know that I need to stick with it, no matter my mood, because it will all come together and knock my socks off.  Her writing is like some kind of a puzzle photo; hundreds or thousands of tiny photos placed together and when you back up you realize that all together they have made one giant, miraculous, gorgeous photo of its own, nuanced and intricate and just plain clever.

I'm not going to summarise the story except to say that this is a novel set in the not too distant future at a time when the division between the corporate "haves" and the plebian "have-nots" is complete.  There is undercurrent of rebellion and sabotage, but the totalitarian society has virtually complete control.

Margaret Atwood's nuanced language always makes me want to turn back to the first page as I finish one of her novels just to fill in all the blank spaces.  Those blank spaces can be frustrating the first time through if you get too caught up on trying to know all, and asking too many questions as you go.  Margaret Atwood's writing definitely rewards close reading and re-reading (my favourite kind of books).

Although I found the stories of Oryx's childhood very tense reading (fearing I was going to be reading something I did not want to read), my delicate sensibilities were not offended in the least.  In fact, it just made me love this book even more.  I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and will be searching out The Year of the Flood, the sequel to Oryx and Crake.