My Atwood Project, Part 12: The Penelopiad and The Tent

I have a degree in comparative literature, so you might think that I love retellings, as they permit the reader to compare the same story from different points of view, or in different time periods. But I honestly haven't found that many that I like. I couldn't even finish The Wide Sargasso Sea, about the mad woman in the attic from Jane Eyre. But perhaps my soft spot for Jane is too soft. I also love Pride and Prejudice too much to be interested in P & P & Zombies. Go ahead and call me a reactionary in the comments.

I did enjoy the retelling of The Iliad in The Song of Achilles (2011) by Madeline Miller, which recounts the siege of Troy from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles' closest friend and possible lover. Here in The Penelopiad (2005) we have another retelling of The Iliad, this time from the point of view of Penelope, left behind in Ithaca as her wily husband Odysseus goes to wage war in Troy for ten years, then spends ten more years coming home. Penelope as a young bride reminded me of Iris in the Blind Assassin: listening to her lover’s stories, and being bossed around by the actual woman of the house, with little to do but give birth, preferably to a son.

Atwood also calls attention to the maids that Odysseus and his son unjustly killed upon his return, when he also killed the suitors who were vying to claim Penelope. Why did he hang them? What had they done, besides sleep with or be raped by the suitors, which they had very little choice about? Atwood calls it at one point an “honor killing.” This focus on the treatment of servants, especially female ones, recalls Alias Grace, which also examines how servants are treated as disposable sex objects for the upper classes. 

Toward the end of the short novel, which consists mostly of Penelope’s first-person narration, interspersed with song and dance from the maids, is a chapter titled "An Anthropology Lecture," where the maids offer a metaphorical reading of the incident. The symbolism of twelve maidens, led by a thirteenth in the form of Penelope, could be argued to represent a formerly matriarchal culture, represented by the thirteen lunar cycles, being taken over by the patriarchy. Atwood is also careful to point out that Odysseus taking his young bride to his home was counter to the prevailing tradition of the husband moving in with the bride's family and contributing the bridal gifts to her household. 

Penelope alternates between telling the story of what happened in her lifetime, and relating encounters with other souls in the underworld. Most of them avoid her except the fatuous Helen. In the short fiction collection The Tent (2006), "It's Not Easy Being Half Divine" presents a short retelling of Helen's side of the story in a modern setting. "Salome Was a Dancer" does the same, portraying Salome in seven layers of cheesecloth rather than seven veils. In "The Nightingale," Philomena and her sister Procne speak of the horrifying husband who mistreated them both. The treatment of women in myth was definitely a topic preoccupying Atwood at the time.

The Tent begins with "Life Stories," a sort of anti-memoir about letting go of the past, “taking it apart,” to become only a whisper. This made me smile, as the whole reason I'm doing this project of rereading Atwood is because of her lengthy, detailed memoir. She claims in The Book of Lives that her publishers talked her into it. 

The title story is a metaphor for writing. The writer is compared to a refugee in a tent, who is compelled to write the story of the vast, cold world around her on the inside of her tent, even though she may attract the attention of those who wish to harm her. 

The pieces are short and experimental, often in the second person, often about writing, like the title story, and "Plots for Exotics," in which a character wants to audition for a protagonist role but is told she may not because she's an "exotic."

The collection has much more in common with Good Bones and Murder in the Dark than with her more traditional short stories, which make their return the same year, 2006, in Moral Disorder.

My Atwood Project, Part 11: The MaddAddam Trilogy

 (Just a reminder that these blog entries do not purport to be thorough analyses or even proper reviews. They are just my musings upon re-reading Margaret Atwood’s fiction after reading her memoir.) 

I again broke the rule of chronology by re-reading the MaddAddam trilogy together, though the three novels were spaced apart thusly: Oryx and Crake was published in 2003; The Year of the Flood in 2009; and MaddAddam in 2013. Still, nothing like the 34 years separating The Handmaid’s Tale from The Testaments. And, as she did in those two books, Atwood again takes pains to remind us that her fiction is based on events and ideas from the real world. 

Origin: Atwood began the book on a worldwide trip that started in Australia, after an observation that the Aborigines never changed because they had everything they needed. So could we use gene modifications to change what we need? She also chose to tell the first novel from a mainly male point of view, after being asked many times why she “always” wrote about women. 

Title characters: Oryx and Crake is named for two would-be architects of a new world. Crake, once known as Glenn, is a gene-splicing genius who wants to create the ideal human: immune to war and overpopulation, among other improvements borrowed from existing species. Oryx is Crake’s lover and accomplice, and the center of a love triangle with Crake’s comparatively dimmer friend, Jimmy. 

Plot: The book begins at what seems like the end of the world. Jimmy, now calling himself Snowman, thinks he may well be the last human, or at least the last Human, version 1.0. The only other…people he’s aware of are Crake’s creations, Humans 2.0, whom he calls Crakers. They have no possessions, not even clothes; they eat leaves, so they don’t have herds or crops or territory; and they only have sex when the female is in “season” -- once every three years. 

AS USUAL: SPOILERS AHEAD!!

We learn that as Crake was developing his new race, he was also sending Oryx around the world to give out samples of a fun new drug, BlyssPluss. What we don’t learn until much later is that Oryx was also spreading a plague engineered to destroy the OG humans and clear the playing field for the new team. Crake and Oryx die together, and Jimmy is left holding the bag…of new people. 

The world building is good and thorough, but not entirely original. The Corporations and their live-in campuses are strongly reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s Enclaves, which appear in several of his novels, such as Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995). The idea is that corporations will need to secure themselves and their employees from headhunting and secret-stealing, so gated communities evolve into their own self-sufficient mini-cities. 

The spread of an engineered virus to wipe out humanity harkens back to the movie “12 Monkeys” (1995), though I’m sure it’s appeared elsewhere. 

Predictions: Atwood foresaw technology being used in many ways that it is being used today, such as “digital genalteration” (deep fakes). However, she has college kids staying in touch via email, not knowing about texting yet. It will show up in the other two books. 

Parallels: Atwood’s favorite plot devices, love triangles and abandoning parents, make their appearances here. Jimmy sees the mother who abandoned him for her ethical beliefs on a TV news segment, much as Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale saw her mother in a documentary about a pro-choice rally, during her re-education. 

While the first novel sets up the end of one race and the birth of another, from the point of view primarily of the scientists and corporate employees, The Year of the Flood takes place for the most part in the “pleeblands,” where everyone who is not part of a Corporation lives. Here we meet my favorite characters, Toby and Zeb, who are important members of God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious group preparing for the “Waterless Flood.” 

The God’s Gardeners seem oddly prescient regarding the coming plague, until we understand that they have become a haven for apostates from the Corporations. Toby, though, is just an ordinary pleebrat, rescued from an abusive boss. Zeb, on the other hand, has an extremely interesting past (magician’s assistant! eater of a bear!), which is recounted in great detail in MaddAddam. 

When the plague hits, Toby is in hiding from that abusive boss again, and is able to quarantine safely: much of The Year of the Flood takes place in the AnooYoo spa (I love Atwood’s brand names), where Toby is holed up eating things like Lemon Meringue Facial. Another important character is Ren, who was already in quarantine in the strip club where she works, Scales and Tails, due to a torn “biofilm.” 

In MaddAddam, pleebs and scientists must work together. They discover that the scientists that Crake “recruited” to create his perfect humans were actually “scooped” against their will. We get Zeb’s amazing backstory, and the genesis (haha) of God’s Gardeners. It is the least satisfying book to me, though, because the big plot points are past and this third part feels like tying up loose ends. 

However, I love the series as a whole, especially the first two books. They tackle the big questions: what does it mean to be human? How would you re-design humanity, if you had the chance? And finally, will Crakers and OG humans be able to hybridize? I can’t spoil that one for you, because it’s left unclear…perhaps a fourth book is in order, Ms Atwood? 

My Atwood Project, Part 10: The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin is Atwood's second novel-length foray into historical fiction, after Alias Grace. The historical part of this novel stretches back into World War I, through the Depression, then winds up with World War II, for which Atwood was alive.  

Here is my post from reading this novel during my project of reading all the Booker prize winners. 

It's a difficult book to sum up. The skillfully woven strands are these:

• the point of view of older sister Iris, chronicling her family's secret-filled past 
• a novel by the more idealist younger sister Laura, revealing those secrets to the world after her death by suicide
• Laura's novel includes a science-fiction saga imagined by young leftist Alex Thomas
• and newspaper articles about events at large, and the family's involvement

I can't say much more without SPOILERS, so BE WARNED.

Iris, writing from a bird's eye view in the present day, is similar to Aunt Lydia in The Testaments, filling in the history and explaining her own development from naive teen bride to cunning old woman (though Lydia seems to have never been very naive).

There are two secret cruxes: who is the unnamed young woman visiting Alex? Iris, or Laura? At first we think it's Laura; she's the one who skips school, who has a crush on Alex, who hides him when he is suspected of setting fire to her father's factory. But as the novel moves on, and Iris marries her father's rival Richard Griffen, our attention is drawn to the expensive wardrobe of the young woman, clothing that Laura would have scorned. Also, bruises that Iris's husband inflicted. We begin to suspect that Iris is Alex's lover; but is Laura also seeing him? Because Laura is pregnant, or claims to be. Then who is the father of Laura's baby? I'll leave that question unspoiled.

Another layered aspect to this story that I remarked more on this reading is the veiled meaning of the sci-fi story. It is actually an allegory for the love affair between Alex and the young woman. There is a secret plan for a palace coup, a group of rebels ready to invade (Alex's leftist buddies), and at the center of it the blind assassin (Alex) and the voiceless maiden (the young woman). The assassin is diverted from his mission by his love for the young maiden; the real life lovers propose their own solutions to the dilemma. Sadly, neither solution comes to pass.

It's a beautiful read, cunningly plotted, and a worthy winner of the Booker Prize - Atwood's first; The Testaments would be her second. Next comes the MaddAddam trilogy, starting with Oryx and Crake, another favorite of mine.

My Atwood Project, Part 9: Alias Grace

 Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood's first novel-length foray into historical fiction. However, it has a lot in common with her first speculative novel, The Handmaid's Tale, since both are primarily about incarcerated women. Alias Grace is inspired by the true story of a 16-year-old housemaid, Grace Marks, accused of murdering the head housekeeper and their employer, with the help of another servant. There was much doubt about her guilt, raised in part by Grace's own conflicting accounts. While the male servant was found guilty and hanged for the murder of the employer, Grace's own death sentence was converted to life in prison, and she was pardoned much later.

**My thoughts on Alias Grace are primarily about an important plot twist, so just skip this post if you don't want to know the crucial reveal.**

First, the title is a spoiler once you reach this turning point. During a hypnosis session, Grace speaks with a different voice and claims to be her dead friend Mary Whitney. It would appear that Mary committed the murders, which would account for Grace's fainting fits and her claims to remember nothing of the crimes. So the title would mean that in addition to Grace using Mary's name as an alias during her brief time on the lam, Mary used Grace's body to commit the murder of housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. 

The slippery part that Atwood leaves unresolved is whether the hypnosis session is authentic. Is Grace actually suffering from dissociative identity disorder, formerly referred to as multiple personality disorder? Does she really harbor Mary Whitney as an alternate personality? This illness usually comes about after serious trauma. Was waking up with Mary dead next to her after her failed abortion sufficient trauma to cause Grace's personality to split? Charis in The Robber Bride also has a split personality, but hers is a reaction to incestuous rape, which is a more usual triggering factor. 

Another possibility is that Grace and Jeremiah the peddler aka Dr Jerome Dupont (another alias), the supposed hypnotist, cooked up this scheme together. He is an experienced mountebank. He knew Mary and much of what she and Grace went through, so he could have coached Grace to pretend to be Mary and lay the blame on her. He seems genuinely surprised and shaken during the session, but we know he is a good actor.

A third possibility is Reverend Verringer's immediate diagnosis, that Grace is possessed. In this case, the novel slides from historical fiction into supernatural fantasy. The explanation would be that when Mary died, Grace did not know about the superstition which says to open a window, and so Mary's soul was trapped in the room with Grace, and occupied her body. The novel is full of such superstitions and omens, as is often the case in Atwood's writing. For example, Cat's Eye brushes up against this type of religious fantasy, when Elaine believes that the Virgin Mary has rescued her from her bullies.

Atwood does not purport to resolve this historical mystery, but she does introduce a fascinating wrinkle: what if this famous case of amnesia was actually a case of dissociative identity disorder? This disorder was discussed at the time, as Atwood affirms in the afterword. She will go on to incorporate historical fiction into her next novel, and first Booker winner, The Blind Assassin. Stay tuned!