Calling all non-Atwood fans
Margaret Atwood is the James Bond of feminist fiction (and my apologies to feminists everywhere for that comparison). After you’ve read a few of her novels, characters and plots run into one another, and unless you’re an obsessive fan, you can’t really keep them straight. And yet you keep going back because the formula is so good, and even the nth rendition of it still leaves you wondering what’ll happen next, and convince you to return for the n+1th version.
I’m not sure if “ The Robber Bride“, “Cat’s Eye” and “The Blind Assassin” are meant to be a trilogy, but I can’t help thinking of them that way. My most recent read was The Robber Bride. It has many of the elements that make up the Atwood formula – middle aged women with a delicious brand of caustic wisdom, estranged children, siblings and parents, sappy men, and the mandatory super bitch, all glued together with some superb writing. It lacks the attractive bad boy that one can’t stop oneself from falling for. But it more than makes up for that deficiency by offering one of the most evil women in literature.
The Robber Bride is the story of four women – three good girls, and the one super bad girl who screws them over. This novel is perhaps the most conventional of the “older / wiser” trilogy – here the good girls are, for the most part, actually good. This makes it easier to root for them. Usually Atwood’s leading women are only relatively good, and every time you want to wish them well, you’re remindedwomen.
Unlike typical Atwood novels, where women are lonely creatures, this novel offers them the comfort of company. Tony, Charis and Roz share a strong friendship, helping each other to pick up the pieces after Zenia’s wrecked one more life. But true to form, Atwood doesn’t let this “female bonding” go too far. There is no “united we conquer all” business here.
Let’s move on to the more delicious character – Zenia. She is easily the most evil of all of Atwood’s characters, if not on my personal list of top 5 all time villains in fiction. Cordelia (from Cat’s Eye) and Winifred (from The Blind Assassin) are to Zenia as Goneril or Regan are to Iago. Cordelia, Winifred and Zenia are all share an ability to induce a feeling of abject helplessness in their victims. Where Zenia rises above her evil sisters is because unlike the other two, she never gives her victims a chance to rebel. Even when you are determined to kill her, you’ll likely come away torn to shreds, while Zenia laughs on. Whether one or more of the good women take action against their common tormentor is left open to interpretation – mine was that it doesn’t matter. If you accept that evil doesn’t necessarily come with explanations, why then must good?
I call Atwood’s writing feminist, but perhaps that’s not the right term. They are more feminine than feminist - because I think I appreciate these novels more because I’m a woman, as opposed to referring to a body of work that adheres to a particular political agenda. Her characters’ observations on life, relationships, men, etc., are so often made from such quintessentially feminine perspectives, that I wonder what it must be like for a man to read these novels. Perhaps I’m more sensitive to female characters. After this book, I’ve promised myself that I’ll pay more attention to male characters, male villains in particular. Other than one or two exceptions, I can hardly think of any that come close to Atwood’s villains. Her women practice a villainy so raw and powerful that I end up looking with disdain at characters and stories that resort to physical violence as a means of hurting someone.
Love, professional success, happiness, men – these are all carrots that Atwood’s heroines spend a lifetime pursuing, only to find out that once achieved, only a fleeting sense of victory remains. As years pass, the women realize that nothing is permanent. They may be cynical, but these aren’t bitter women. Perhaps the reason I can’t get enough of them is because I secretly hope I’ll become one of them when am old and wrinkly myself.
I’m making Atwood sound miserable, but she’s anything but. I’ve always found it difficult to get non-Atwood fans to convert. If you ask me to give you a plot summary, then yes, Atwood often tells stories of sad women, but what of the biting sharpness? Time and again, in the middle of a seemingly trivial passage, something of surpassing clarity hits you between the eyes. Like the following sentence which appears out of nowhere in a paragraph about a woman walking in on her teenage daughters watching television:
But now they’ve hit the music channel, and there’s some man in a torn undershirt hopping up and down and wiggling his scrawny hips and sticking out his tongue in what he must assume is a sexual manner, although to Roz he just looks like a mouth-disease illustration…
The following passage is perhaps more applicable to our mothers’ generation than to ours, but it isn’t completely dated:
It’s complicated, being a woman boss. Women don’t look at you and think Boss. They look at you and think Woman, as in Just another one, like me, and where does she get off? None of their sexy little tricks work on you, and none of yours work on them; big blue eyes are no advantage. If you forget their birthdays your name is mud, if you bawl them out they cry, they don’t even do it in the washroom the way they would for a man but right out where you can see them, they hang their hard-luck stories on you and expect sympathy, and just try getting a cup of coffee out of them. Lick your own stamps, lady. They’ll bring it alright, but it’ll be cold and they’ll hate you forever.
Whereas the very same women would fetch and carry for a man boss, no question. Buy the wife’s birthday present, buy the mistress’s birthday present, make the coffee, bring his slippers in her mouth, overtime no problem.
These are just two bits I managed to hunt down from the book. Atwood fans know what am talking about. Non-Atwood fans, stop with the whining and get on board already!
PS: If you haven’t read any of these three books, and plan to read all of them, I’d start with Cat’s Eye, move to The Robber Bride and save The Blind Assassin for last. A gap of at least a few months between the books, if not longer will help.
Comments (2 comments)
I think you’re doing Atwood a serious disservice here.
While it’s true that Robber Bride and Blind Assassin have some similarities and Cat’s Eye reads like a bad rehearsal for either / both of them, there’s plenty of other stuff that Atwood’s written that bears little resemblance to these books. Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, The Edible Woman - these are not the works of a writer who works to a formula. They are exciting and original works by an author of considerable range. Then there are her short stories (Wilderness Tips, Moral Disorder), her retelling of the Penelope myth (Penelopiad), her really, really short fiction (The Tent) and her poetry (Power Politics, The Journals of Suzanne Moodie, Animals in that Country). It’s an incredible body of output and to focus on superficial similarities between a couple of books from an author this prolific is just petty.
Plus which, I suspect her claim to being a feminist writer rests more strongly on some of the work you don’t mention - Surfacing, Handmaid’s Tale, Penelopiad, Power Politics, etc. - than on the ones you do. I certainly don’t think it’s true that her writing is more feminine than feminist; I wouldn’t necessarily say her writing is feminine (whatever that means) at all.
Falstaff / March 30th, 2007, 4:34 pm / #
Comrade Doz, you are some book junkie aren’t you? Never read an Atwood myself, though have wanted to read one for a long long time now. Time I did, I guess. If I were to recommend… seeing your obession with the Iwo Jimas and Kikuchis, have you read a Murakami? A Sputnik Sweetheart or a Norwegian Wood?
Here’s another - by some one I knew once upon a time,
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2007/20070204/spectrum/book2.htm
-BBG[Bula-Bana-Gosh, The Big Chief who can hear even the fly clear its throat]
BBG / April 5th, 2007, 10:32 pm / #
Post a comment