My Atwood Project, Part 3: Bodily Harm

Atwood’s fifth published novel, Bodily Harm, returns to the formula? pattern? established in the first three. A woman, Rennie, is torn between two men: boyfriend Jake, similar to the bland and egotistical Peter of The Edible Woman, and Daniel, the doctor who operated on her breast cancer. While her relationship with Jake focuses on the physical, with dark allusions to the violent options that men have over women, her relationship with Daniel is chaste. The good doctor is married, and won’t have the affair Rennie desperately wants. 

I want to dispel the notion that this is a “romance” novel, or at least not as I understand the genre, though that’s the genre insisted upon by the cover and blurb on my mass market paperback copy. Rennie has had part of a breast removed. Boyfriend Jake makes a valiant effort to continue to want her, but fails. Dr. Daniel is unwilling to provide physical connection. Finally Jake leaves and a stalker leaves a coiled rope on Rennie’s bed. Rennie, a freelance writer, proposes a low-cost working escape: an article about (fictional) Caribbean island St. Antoine. There, she does indeed have a fling, and finds physical connection -- but also much more that no one really wants to find on vacation, or in a romance novel.

(As usual, SPOILERS AHEAD)

Rennie makes her first connection on the plane, to another good doctor, Dr. Minnow. She soons learns that “They’re having an election, the first since the British pulled out,” and the local doctor is running for office. Rennie’s hopeful jaunt becomes a menacing trip to an impoverished island divided over politics, and it gets worse. I won’t try to sum up the details of the election, but suffice it to say that nearly everyone is playing Pin the Tail on the CIA.  

Rennie does hook up, with Paul, a drug runner. Then the election happens, and the post-election mob, and Rennie is thrown in prison with Paul’s accomplice and former lover, Lora. Rennie is in shock and denial at first: this can’t be happening! To a Canadian journalist! But it is. And now the portions of Lora’s backstory scattered throughout the narration make sense: these are stories that Lora shares with Rennie in prison. 

Perspective shifts. The vague political unrest of the first three novels now takes center stage. Two white women become cellmates; Lora is raped and beaten. Rennie’s man problems and breast problem shrink in the shadow of her “am I going to get out of this prison alive” problem. Atwood visited the Caribbean island of St. Vincent many times, and based this novel on stories she was told by a man who became Prime Minister. Rennie is lucky to get out alive. 

This novel, to me, is a precursor to The Handmaid’s Tale. Not only are the women imprisoned and abused by the “natives,” but even “good guy” Jake makes a joke of how vulnerable women are. The women must create their own solidarity, sharing their stories and caring for each other. Both are stories of government gone wrong, both inspired by real-life events.

Next up, the early short stories. 

My Atwood Project, Part 2: Life With Man

 At first read, Life Before Man (1979) appears to be a  devastating indictment of open marriage. 

*Spoilers ahead* 

At the center of the novel are Elizabeth and Nate, who are married, have two children, and also each have a lover. As the book begins, we learn that Elizabeth's lover Chris has committed suicide, and we later find out it's because she won't leave Nate for him. Nate's relationship with Martha has fizzled out and he starts a new liaison with Lesje (pronounced Lashia). Things go downhill from there. When Nate moves in with his new girlfriend, Elizabeth begins to manipulate the situation: dropping off the children without warning, demanding money that she knows Nate does not have, etc. While Nate and Lesje are living in poverty, Elizabeth is not exactly happy either. In fact, no one is, and the message seems to be that open marriage is a bust.

When I read Atwood's memoir, I learned that this is a fictional version of her real experience with Graeme Gibson. Graeme was married to Shirley, and they had two boys. And Shirley actually did these, and other, manipulative, narcissistic things to Atwood and Gibson. I wonder how Gibson, a novelist, felt when he saw himself portrayed as Nate, the former lawyer who becomes a toy maker, then must return to law to support himself and Elizabeth and Lesje. In real life Shirley eventually granted a divorce, but Gibson never married Atwood, claiming that he did not want to add “another Mrs. Gibson” to his life. They did have one child together, though Atwood would have liked a second. 

This novel is a departure from the previous three novels. Though it does contain the motif of a woman between two men, Elizabeth does not have a magical moment of madness and recover her pre-man identity: she is pure, cold calculation throughout. If we consider Lesje the central figure, because of the title (she's a paleontologist) and the parallel of her story to Atwood’s, her moment of madness resembles the one in Surfacing: pregnancy out of spite. She is so frustrated with her situation that she decides to get pregnant behind Nate’s back, in order to wrench his attention away from Elizabeth and back to her. Quebecois separatism lurks in the background as in Surfacing, as well. The title might imply that Lesje's (Atwood’s?) life was better before she got involved with Nate. At any rate, Atwood and Gibson remained a loving couple for many years until he passed away.

The only comic relief in this sad tale is Elizabeth's evil Aunt Muriel. As I mentioned in my last blog post, you could write a thesis on the aunts in Atwood's work. The next novel, Bodily Harm, returns to the model of the first three novels, and introduces elements that would evolve in Atwood’s next and most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale. Stay tuned!

My Atwood Project, Part 1: Before The Handmaid’s Tale

My Atwood Project, Part 1: Before The Handmaid’s Tale

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s delightful Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. (Thanks, hubby, for the holiday gift!) Delightful, because it’s a balanced mix of her real life mixed with the lives of her novels. Also, because she takes a light and playful approach to her enemies: there are more “You know who you are’s” than names. 

The whole experience inspired me to re-read Atwood’s fiction oeuvre in chronological order, which I have never done. I’ve lined up the novels and short story collections on my shelf; there is only one I don’t have, a serially published e-book co-authored with her mentee Naomi Alderman, The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home. I may pursue the poetry and non-fiction later, but this is a pretty hefty project as it is, 18 novels and 12 novellas or collections of short stories.

BEWARE, SPOILERS AHEAD.

Let’s begin with the first three novels, of which I had only the vaguest memories. I started noticing some patterns right off. The Edible Woman (1969) is the story of Marian, who ever since she became engaged to her conventional boyfriend Peter, is able to eat less and less, while she spends more and more time with hapless graduate student Duncan. Tellingly, Peter lives in the model apartment of an unfinished building, signifying perhaps the incomplete and superficial nature of their relationship. 

The most interesting technique to me here is the shifting perspective: not between characters, as Atwood experiments with later, but from first to third and back again. In the first part of the book, Marian speaks confidently enough from the “I” perspective. In the middle of the book, where she becomes Peter’s almost accidental fiancée, she becomes a passive “she,” acting by turns like a future Stepford wife and like a woman on the edge. In the final section, she reclaims her identity by seizing the “I” again, and also by the memorable baking of a woman-shaped cake, which she offers Peter in place of herself. I feel I hardly need to explain, but I will: to me, this scene means that Peter was basically consuming her like food, not engaging (haha) with her as a person, so he might as well eat her in effigy. Whether he understands the significance of the cake or not, Peter freaks out and flees the scene. Duncan, on the other hand, eats some of the cake, and pronounces it delicious. Their future is ambiguous.

The motif of a woman discovering herself between two men recurs in Surfacing and Lady Oracle as well, where the territory gets more exotic: the northern Canadian wilderness of Atwood’s childhood in Surfacing, and a small town in Italy in Lady Oracle. Also, the idea of political unrest, connecting the personal and the political, is introduced. 

In Surfacing (1972), the unnamed protagonist is seeking her father, who’s gone missing, at their summer home in the Canadian wilderness. She gets a ride there with her boyfriend Joe and another couple, Anna and David. She is as ambivalent about Joe as Marian was about Peter. In addition, David treats Anna abusively and tries to sleep with the protagonist. So again, we see a woman between two men, and again, she claims her own identity after a brief bout of mad-looking behavior.

The title refers, I think, mostly to the return of a suppressed or reframed memory: the heroine has referred to an ex and a baby, and implied that the two are together, away from her. In fact, he coerced her into an abortion. During her brief feral episode, she has sex with Joe and plans to raise the eventual baby on her own. The political issue lurking in the background is Quebecois separatism, echoing the woman’s desire for independence. However, by the end, her relationship with Joe, while still unclear, appears more optimistic than that with Duncan at the end of The Edible Woman.

Finally, Lady Oracle is the most enjoyable of the three, for me. Joan Foster is a woman of many identities: formerly obese, now thin; a romance writer using her late aunt’s name to publish -- and now to hide. She’s gotten herself into quite a predicament, between her depressed husband Arthur, and her eccentric lover Chuck, aka The Royal Porcupine, harking back to Peter and Duncan of The Edible Woman, and presaging Nate and Chris of Life Before Man. 

(Please don’t think that Atwood’s love triangles are easy plot devices. Each book is so rich with subplot and backstory, I’m sure theses have been written just about the aunts.)

At any rate, political unrest becomes a device that allows Joan to fake her death -- perhaps as the father in Surfacing may have done? We also have the strongest, so far, story within a story, as Joan’s latest romance novel turns into a way for her multiple selves to meet. This device recurs in The Blind Assassin, and perhaps I’ll rediscover others as I reread.

Again, these are complex novels, and I’m only pointing out some of the more obvious trends. I enjoyed them all more this second time around, with the background of Atwood’s life shedding light here and there. Stay tuned for my take on the painfully autobiographical Life Before Man.