My Atwood Project, Part 8: The Robber Bride

Atwood says that the idea for The Robber Bride (1993) came from two chance remarks: one, that women can't be con artists (patently false); and two, a friend's little girls wanted all the characters in their bedtime stories to be female, even the villains. These ideas came together in the longest of Atwood’s rewritten folk tales, in this case, “The Robber Bridegroom.”

I suggest this further inspiration. What if Cordelia, the bully from Cat's Eye, based on Atwood’s lived experience, grew up and continued to torture her so-called friends? Each of the three main characters has a weakness that the fourth, Zenia, exploits. 

Tony is an orphan, abandoned by her mom and then later by her father's suicide. She studies war, perhaps in order to understand the war that brought her parents together and later pushed them apart.

Karen’s father was never in the picture and her mother also abandoned her, due to mental illness. She is raped by her uncle and disbelieved by her aunt (aunts rarely come off well). She becomes Charis, and pursues peace, but not the political kind, even though she harbors a draft dodger. 

Roz's father was absent for a long time but came back from the war suspiciously rich. 

The four women meet in college, where Zenia steals West from Tony. Later she steals Billy from Charis, and finally steals Mitch from Roz. (I’m not sure why Atwood says that Zenia steals two of the three men; though Tony gets West back, he’s still been stolen.)

Hence the length of this book; it really could be three novels. So why group them together? To show how the three victims unite in their hatred of the manhunter, and their care for each other? To show three facets of Atwood herself, and maybe a fourth?

She claimed she wanted to show female friendship, and she does. But what she also shows is that every woman is at least two women. She starts the memoir with this idea and calls it The Book of Lives, plural, for that reason. Tony is a mild-mannered academic but she is also her mirror left-hand self, a fierce warrior. Charis appears to be a New Age yoga teacher but under her flaky facade is the violent Karen, seeking revenge on her uncle. And Roz has been both Catholic and Jewish, both poor and rich, a chameleon shifting between worlds. And all of them harbor at one time or another the desire to murder Zenia. It’s a fascinating read, watching each character in turn give in to Zenia’s charms, then get wise. 

But what’s missing is Zenia’s point of view. In Cat’s Eye, the balance of power is reversed: bullied Elaine later befriends Cordelia, and watches her deteriorate. Elaine realizes that Cordelia bullied because she herself was a victim of her oldest sister. No such compassion or even explanation is forthcoming in Zenia’s case. All we have is her multiple origin stories, which can’t all be true. Is she a straw woman, just plain evil through and through, for our three heroines to knock down? Atwood does hint at redemption later, in a 2012 story called “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth.” Stay tuned! 

My Atwood Project, Part 7B: Murder in the Dark + Good Bones

I was going to include Good Bones, Murder in the Dark, and the combination volume, Good Bones and Simple Murders, with Wilderness Tips, but they deserve their own post, as they contain a very different type of short fiction. Murder in the Dark came out in Canada in 1983, then some pieces from it were combined with most of Good Bones (1992) and reissued as Good Bones and Simple Murders in 1994. 

Murder in the Dark contains several short pieces -- not traditional short stories -- that seem to be autobiographical and focus on the present or recent past, as is typical for Atwood’s work from that pre-Handmaid’s Tale era. It also includes some feminist pieces, such as “Simmering,” in which men take over all cooking, and some writing experiments, such as “Happy Endings,” which briefly explores several ways a relationship might play out.

Good Bones, on the other hand, focuses more on retelling and perspective changes, such as retelling the story of the Little Red Hen to highlight her passivity, or Queen Gertrude's reaction to her son's harangue in Hamlet, which portrays her as the opposite of passive. Atwood went on to pursue this method in longer works, The Penelopiad and Hag-Seed, the first a retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view and the second a retelling of The Tempest from Caliban's. Another type of perspective change is strange making, where something known is described in a new way to make it unrecognizable at first. For example, in the story titled “The Adventure,” we might first assume some people are on a trip, but it turns out to be a description of sperm implanting an egg. 

The pieces I like most focus on humanity's problematic future, because as you might know, I'm a big sci-fi fan. In “Epaulettes,” war is replaced by a sort of beauty pageant for men. They don fancy uniforms and speak about their wishes for “the good of humanity,” just like female pageant participants. The winner rules the world, but only for a year.

In other short pieces, such as “Hardball” and “We Want It All,” Atwood takes on pollution and climate change. She was well informed before many of us because her father was a scientist who studied insect infestations in the forests of northern Canada, and shared his opinions on the disappearing wilderness with his family at the dinner table. 

Murder in the Dark and Good Bones each contain 27 stories -- coincidence? Eleven pieces, less than half, from Murder in the Dark made the move into the combined book, whereas almost every piece from Good Bones, all but four, made the cut. I’m curious why neither “Epaulettes” nor “The Adventure” was included. Both “Simmering” (included) and “Epaulettes” (not) place men in traditionally female roles; perhaps they were considered too similar. 

At any rate, for the full Atwood experience, you would have to read both the earlier collections, because neither is fully represented in the combined volume. 

My Atwood Project, Part 7: Wilderness Tips

Wilderness Tips (1991) does not merit a chapter or even an index entry in Atwood’s memoir, The Book of Lives, but it’s another great collection of her short gems.

(Up to now, I've been choosing a cover that I have or remember, but I could not resist this cover featuring a Frida Kahlo painting.)

The title story features George, a Hungarian immigrant whose real name has been deemed unpronounceable by girlfriend Prue. She takes him to her parents' lodge in the north country. He falls in love with the aristocratic setting and vows to marry one of the three daughters so he can return. I hear echoes of the Polish count from Lady Oracle; both are post-war characters soothing their scars with the balm of naive young lovers.

In the same theme of the northern wilderness, some of the stories take place in summer camp. In first story, “True Trash,” named for the type of magazine the camp’s waitresses read on their breaks, one of them gets pregnant by an unlikely candidate. In “Landscapes,” an unhappy camper disappears during a canoe trip. Her friend later becomes a connoisseur of landscape paintings, but not for their aesthetics or investment value: she imagines she sees the lost girl looking out.

Other tropes appear more than once, such as the ambitious woman working for a magazine, only to be overthrown by a more ambitious man. In my favorite of these, “Hairball,” revenge is served cold in a luxury chocolate box. 

Another recurring figure is the male best friend who never quite makes it to the status of lover, such as Vincent in “The Age of Lead.” Percy Mallow in “Uncles” occupies the role of both friend and traitor. In this story, Susanna grows up under the loving gaze of her uncles, but later comes to understand the perspective of her jealous disapproving aunts. As usual, aunts do not come off well.

As is often the case in Atwood, visual artists stand in for the writer. Atwood was herself interested in the visual arts, drawing cartoons and designing posters. Next: more short fiction but of a distinctly different flavor.

My Atwood Project, Part 6: Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye (1988) is the book I was most looking forward to rereading for this project, and it turns out it may well be Atwood's most autobiographical novel. Almost every piece of the plot can be traced back to her own life as she presents it in the memoir, except that the protagonist Elaine is a painter rather than a writer. There is the girlhood spent frequently in the northern wilderness with her parents, her older brother who shares his comic books, the early failed marriage. But most important, the bullying that happened when Atwood was in grade school. She avoided naming names when the book came out, because the perpetrator was still alive. Now she is dead. The ringleader of the bullies, Cordelia, was a girl named Sandra, and her second, Grace, was actually named Muriel. I too was bullied, but in a far less systematic way, and sympathize painfully with the 9-year-old girl bullied by her only friends.

According to the memoir, just about everything that the girls do to Elaine was really done to young Margaret, including many terrifying walks on a weak wood bridge over a threatening ravine. Her coping mechanisms came from her real life as well: peeling the skin from her feet, and finally just ignoring her tormentors. After that “Alice in Wonderland moment” -- “Why, they’re only a pack of cards after all” -- the protagonist seems to block out the memory of this bullying and actually becomes friends again with the main perpetrator in high school. Years later, adult Elaine is helping her mother clean out the basement and finds the cat's eye marble that was her protective talisman during that time and all the memories come rushing back. 

The pretext for the flashbacks is Elaine’s return to Toronto, where the harassment happened, for a retrospective exhibit of her art. I love the descriptions of all the paintings, many of which feature the horrible mother of one of the girls. I also love Elaine’s refusal to be pigeonholed by the young interviewer, resulting in the headline “Crotchety Artist Still Has Power to Disturb.”

All in all it’s one of my favorite Atwood books, and now that I’ve read the memoir, perhaps it is because so much of it is true, or just because I can relate.

Next up, more short fiction: Wilderness Tips and Good Bones. 

My Atwood Project, Part 5: The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

I’ve read Atwood’s most famous novel several times. I can’t remember the first, but it made such an impression on me that I insisted on teaching it in a novel-reading elective at an Episcopalian school in the early 2000s. What better place? Show young people from religious families the unethical lengths to which religion can be pushed. Then I reread it at least once again, before the long-awaited sequel The Testaments came out, in 2019. 

I view The Handmaid’s Tale as a breakout for Atwood because of her world-building. The previous novels, set in contemporary times, focused on characters, primarily women, and their relationships, primarily to men. The cities fade into the background. Here, Handmaid Offred is a rat in a maze, so the maze becomes very important. Where are the exits? Where are the traps? This novel takes on an extra dimension as the new rules of the new society render the protagonist’s every interaction fraught. We see this world-building again most clearly in the speculative MaddAdam series, but also in her Booker Prize-winning Blind Assassin. In all of these, Atwood steps out of the genre of “women’s fiction” and incorporates the influence of the comic books and pulp novels she and her brother read as children. This hybridization makes these novels truly original. 

Another element that struck me this time through was the transactionality: in a society based on removal of choice, very little can be freely given, but there is a lot of trade. The Commander’s Wife, Serena Joy, tells Offred from the outset that she views their relationship as a “business transaction.” Offred sees in small infractions of the rules the hopeful existence of a black market and opportunities for trade. When the Commander summons her for an off-the-script meeting, she immediately wonders both what he wants, and what she can get. This tit-for-tat mentality is strongly tied to the strict pecking order. Everyone’s status is obvious thanks to their prescribed clothing color, which reminded me of Brave New World. Seeing everyone’s value at a glance is also so helpful in maintaining order. 

[Spoilers! Beware!]

Another motif that I noticed was how haunted Offred is by the suicide of her predecessor, and how strongly her own will to live prevails, driving her to have an affair with chauffeur Nick despite the danger involved. 

I realized at the end that my perception of the book’s ending had been clouded by the 1990 movie adaptation, in which Offred kills the Commander before escaping to a trailer in parts unknown to record her memoir. The novel actually ends with Offred simply being picked up by a black van, for unclear reasons, urged on by her lover Nick, who assures her it’s safe. We can assume the van was operated by the Mayday resistance, as Nick said, not the all-seeing Eyes, because the next chapter takes the form of an academic conference examining the memoir which Offred must have written outside of Gilead. 

This frame story element returns in The Testaments, which consists of the confessions of Aunt Lydia, and of Offred’s two children, one liberated with her and raised in Canada, the other raised in Gilead. I’m deviating from the chronological aspect of my project here, because these two books came out over 30 years apart, but I could not resist reading them "in order” again. 

When I first read The Testaments, I was not thrilled with the idea that Aunt Lydia was a secret rebel (click link for my first review). How could she have filled her role so convincingly, when she never truly believed? How could she lie so low, so long? It seemed like a cop out to redeem someone who seemed such a total villain.

This second time, though, I paid closer attention to Aunt Lydia’s backstory, as a judge, an ambitious single woman who was given the opportunity to pursue that ambition right to the top of a new society. She had the patience and cunning to wait to bring the whole of Gilead down, rather than ruin her chance too early in a weak, partial rebellion. I am more willing to buy into Aunt Lydia’s character now. 

And I am still convinced of the plausibility of Gilead. It is far too easy to imagine those with the “they’re gonna take our guns” mentality turning those guns on others. Atwood takes great pains at the end of The Testaments to show the archives of articles she collected in researching the first book: everything she wrote, including the crazed “Particicution,” was based in reality. Let it not become so.

My Atwood Project, Part 4: The Early Short Fiction

Part 4: The Early Short Fiction

Dancing Girls and Other Stories was published in 1977, Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories in 1982, and Murder in the Dark in 1983. Many of these stories appeared in small literary magazines, others in publications as well known as Ms. or Harper’s. Rereading these stories showed me how much Atwood was inspired by real-life events from her past, and gave me tantalizing glimpses forward into her more future-oriented speculative fiction.

Strangely, Dancing Girls has no entry in the index to the memoir, though Atwood does describe the antics of a resident of a boarding house in which she lived, on whom she based the title story (p. 225, Book of Lives). In the story, the nosy owner of the boarding house is intensely curious about a foreign male student. One night, he invites “dancing girls” to his room, and she chases them all out, including the boarder. Also set in the starving-student milieu is “The Man from Mars,” about another foreigner, a Vietnamese man who begins stalking a female student. These stories illustrate Canada’s uneasy attitude toward immigrants, as people to be officially welcomed, but who'd better fit in quickly or be ousted.

Other stories in this collection hark back to Atwood’s rural childhood, such as “Betty,” about a woman in a failed marriage, and young Margaret’s incomplete comprehension of the situation. “When it Happens,” while also set in a self-sufficient rural household straight out of Atwood’s childhood, is a precursor to her imminent dystopias and speculative works. A woman canning the harvest envisions a future wartime in which her husband disappears and she must survive on her own. 

Bluebeard’s Egg is bookended by more stories inspired by Atwood’s and her parents’ lives: the first two, “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” and “Hurricane Hazel,” about an early boyfriend of Atwood’s; and among the final three, “In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain” and the “Unearthing Suite” are both about her parents’ approaching the end of life.  

“Bluebeard’s Egg” is about a woman of leisure who is obsessed with her husband Ed, and what she calls his “stupidity,” or seeming obliviousness to other women. The title comes from an evening writing class she is taking (taught by a woman who could be Atwood herself): the students must rewrite a classic folktale from a different point of view, and she chooses the egg that the heroine must not let out of her sight, equating it with Ed. In fact, it is the wife, not the husband, who has been oblivious.

Murder in the Dark is a whole other genre: ultra short fiction that resembles prose poems, and meta-musings on writing. The title piece, for example, is about a game that becomes a metaphor: is the writer the murderer, or the detective? Who is the victim, book or reader? See my entry here for more detail on other pieces.

Whether you prefer the more conventional stories of the first two collections, or the experiments of the third, Atwood stories are always polished gems. 

Next up, I re-read her most famous novel, The Handmaid's Tale.