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.