UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES FACULTE DE PHILOSOPHIE ET LETTRES SECTION : LANGUES ET LITTERATURES MODERNES
Escaping the Labyrinth of Deception: A Postcolonial Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels
Volume I
Thèse présentée en vue de l’obtention du grade de Docteur en Philosophie et Lettres par Christel Kerskens.
Promoteur : Professeur M. Maufort
ANNEE ACADEMIQUE 2006-2007
To Pascal. To my parents and grandparents.
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Maufort for his enthusiasm, helpful corrections and constant support.
I would also like to thank Professor Bellarsi for her precious information on ecocriticism, as well as Professor Tabah and Professor Den Tandt for the interesting doctoral seminars on alterity, which I attended with great pleasure.
I also wish to express my gratitude to Professor Delbaere, for introducing me to Canadian Literature and especially to Margaret Atwood’s work during my undergraduate studies at the U.L.B.
My gratitude also goes to the U.L.B. Centre for Canadian Studies, whose financial help contributed to my research stay in Toronto; to Professor Brydon; whose friendly welcome and insightful comments on postcolonialism have helped me fulfil this project; to her colleagues and students from the University of Western Ontario, who welcomed me and encouraged me; and to Luba Frastacky and her colleagues from the Fischer Library of Rare Books in Toronto, who kindly assisted me in my research in the Atwood Papers.
Finally, I also wish to thank all my friends, especially Valérie Ledent, Cécile Maertens, and Evelyne Haberfeld, and colleagues, who made suggestions, encouraged me, or showed interest throughout my writing process.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: DECEPTION AS A POSTCOLONIAL
STRATEGY IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S NOVELS 1
General Introduction 1
1. Atwoodian Criticism, with a Special Focus on Deception 8
2. Deception : A Theoretical Framework 15
2.1. Historical and Cultural Background 15 2.2. Significant Postmodern Aspects of Deception 23 2.2.1. Historiographic Metafiction or Variations on the Concept of Truth(s) 23 2.2.2. Atwood’s Metafictional Manipulation 26 2.3. Deception as a Postcolonial Process 28 2.3.1. Deception as Mimicry 28 2.3.2. Magic Realism and Deception 30 2.3.3. The Trickster Figure 33 2.3.4. Quest for Self / Quest for Hybridity? Getting Rid of One’s Masks 44
Chapter 1. The Edible Woman: A Case of Socially Induced
Deception 51
1. Metafictional Intertext and Irony 54
2. Marian’s Mimicry Mania 60
3. Making Sense of Magic Realist Moments 66
4. Marian and Duncan as Tricksters 75
5. Hints at Hybridity 85
6. Quest for a Lost Voice 87
Chapter 2. Surfacing : Deception as Survival Strategy 99
1. Parodic Rewriting 100
2. Deceptive Mimicry : A Case Study 106
3. Uncanny Apparitions 115
4. The Narrator and her Parents : Inherited Tricksterism 123
5. Animal Regression as Quest for Hybridity 133
6. Surfacing or the Story of a Single Woman’s Alterity 136
Chapter 3. Lady Oracle: Joan Foster as Trickster 148
1. Atwood’s Sense of Parody: The Heroine as Writer 149
2. Variations on Mimicry 157
3. Grotesque and Gothic Magic Realism 173
4. Parodies of Trickster Figures 185
5. From Multiple Personalities to Hybridity 195
6. Joan’s Personal and Professional Self-discovery 209
Chapter 4. Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid’s
Tale: Atwood’s “Subversion” Trilogy 221
1. Three Novels of Subversion 221 1.1. Bodily Harm: Subversion on Foreign Ground 222 1.2. Life Before Man : Subversion and Ethnicity 224 1.3. The Handmaid’s Tale: Subversion vs. Propaganda 225 2. Subversion through Parody 226 2.1. Along the Yellow Brick Road: Atwood’s Parody of The Wizard of Oz. 227 2.2. Life as a Game Parody 230 2.3. Metafictional Comments and Parodic Reflections on Art and Reality 233 3. Three Forms of Subversive Deception 235
4. When Reality Verges on the Unreal 262
5. The Trickster as Embodiment of Subversion 271 6. Forms of Hybridity: The Ethnic, the Pathological, and the
Survivor 276 7. Atwood’s Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Quest
Pattern 286
Chapter 5. Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride : Female Tricksters at
Work 294
1. Parodic Twin Sisters and Fairy-Tale Deconstruction 296
2. Deception as a Means of Defence 304
3. Magic Realist Dreams and Incantations 314
4. Mature Tricksters 326
5. Hybridity of the Trickster Figure 334
6. Double Quests: Between Failure and Resurrection 345
Chapter 6. Deceptive Patterns in Alias Grace or the
Narrator as Quilter 354
1. Fictionalising Historical Documents 356
2. Grace’s Deceptive Mimicry 365
3. Deceptive Magic Realism 371
4. Two Trickster Figures: Grace Marks and Jeremiah the Peddler 376
5. Grace’s Quest for Hybridity 387
6. Quilting One’s Way Towards Self-Knowledge 397
Chapter 7. The Blind Assassin’s Criminal Deception 402
1. Atwood’s Metafictional Reflections 403
2. Three-Tiered Deception 408
3. Iris’s Disruptions of Reality 415
4. Are All Tricksters “Blind Assassins?” 418
5. Hybrid Sisters 425
6. A Three-Tiered Variation on the Quest Pattern 429
Chapter 8. Oryx and Crake: Hybridisation and Colonisation 435 1. Snowman: An Inverted Frankenstein or an Apocalyptic
Caliban? 437
2. The Dangers of Mimicry 444
3. Snowman’s Magic Realist Fantasies 451
4. Oryx, Crake, and Snowman: Three Aspects of Tricksterism 454
5. The Hybridity of the Colonised Subject 457
6. Atwood’s Ecological Stance 462
7. Snowman’s Quest for Humanity 465
CONCLUSION: EXPLORING THE LABYRINTH 473
BIBLIOGRAPHY 484
Appendix I 524
Appendix II 525
Appendix III 526
Appendix IV 527 If you like, you can play games with this game. You can say: the murderer is the writer, the detective is the reader, the victim is the book. Or perhaps, the murderer is the writer, the detective is the critic and the victim is the reader. (…) Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie. Now: do you believe me?
Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark, 49-50.
INTRODUCTION:
DECEPTION AS A POSTCOLONIAL STRATEGY IN
MARGARET ATWOOD’S NOVELS
A poet, novelist, short-story writer, and author of numerous reviews and critical essays, Margaret Atwood has become one of Canada’s major writers in recent decades. Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood spent her childhood in-between the city and the bush, where her father conducted scientific research. This might account for the deep respect for nature which pervades Atwood’s work. In the 1960s, as an undergraduate student at Victoria College,
Toronto, Atwood witnessed a renewed interest in Canadian literature and culture. As a centre for poetry, the University of Toronto, with its major figures, such as Jay Macpherson,
Northrop Frye, and E.J. Pratt operated a decisive influence on Atwood’s career. She started writing poems, parodies, and reviews for the college newspaper, while attending and giving readings at the local coffeehouses. She continued her studies at Harvard, devoting her interest to Victorian literature and early American literature. She also worked on a Ph.D. degree, but never completed her dissertation on H. Rider Haggard and the English metaphysical romance.
Atwood’s interest in the English tradition and the gothic romance, a genre she undeniably parodies in her early novel Lady Oracle, possibly derives from this failed academic endeavour. From her early poems and novels, Atwood’s career rapidly evolved towards international recognition in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Her work has become the subject of numerous academic publications and she has won several outstanding awards.
1 However, one might wonder what draws so many readers, all over the world, to
Atwood’s writings. I personally regard Atwood as an author who situates herself at the crossroad between various traditions: the feminist, the nationalist, the postmodern, and, one might argue, the postcolonial. Atwood’s repeated refusal to be classified as a member of a particular tradition might well be attributed to the fact that she actually draws elements from each of them. Indeed, whereas early novels such as The Edible Woman or Lady Oracle, and most of her poetry collections, among which the famous Power Politics, display overt feminist overtones, other works – Surfacing, to name but one – express Atwood’s defence of
Canadian culture and nature. Most critics have offered postmodern readings of Atwood, focusing on her protagonists’ inner contradictions, as well as on her novels’ multiple layers and lack of closure. More recently, however, scholars have devoted their attention to the postcolonial implications of Atwood’s writings: preoccupied both by the situation of Canada as a colony and by women’s empowerment, Atwood often thematically associates these themes. She considers it the writer’s task to defend the colonised country’s cultural tradition.
Likewise, as a female writer, Atwood equally addresses the question of the female condition.
Other postcolonial themes often mentioned in relation to Atwood’s work comprise irony, voice, and marginality. Atwood’s production strikes the reader with a balanced mixture of parody and seriousness. She tackles difficult themes, such as war, often present in her protagonists’ childhood reminiscences, or the power relationships between men and women.
Her writings challenge the conventions of literary genres and social dichotomies, providing a rich intertextual layer of cross-cultural allusions.
In 1994, Atwood, on a lecture tour around the world, for the first time presented the writer as a trickster-figure (Stein, Margaret Atwood Revisited, 6), a character known for its tendency to cross boundaries and defy traditions. Atwood’s fondness for open endings, tricky
2 language, dubious characters, and multiple interpretations, should therefore not surprise her readers. Her powerful stories have engaged several debates, demonstrating her concern for current world affairs. Atwood’s fictional universe is a cruel place, inhabited by duplicitous individuals and ordinary monsters. While definitely keeping up with the developments of contemporary society, Atwood continues to fascinate readers all over the world with her wit, her playfulness with language, her exploration of the individual’s dilemma’s and her open, yet somehow deceptive endings.
Deception can be regarded as a labyrinth created by the writer, in which the reader might easily get lost, precisely because of the characters’ multiple personalities and of
Atwood’s own metafictional interventions. This study therefore concentrates on the postcolonial concept of hybridity/deception to function as Ariadne’s thread, helping us to escape the labyrinth, or, to a better, new understanding of Atwood’s fiction. I have chosen to rely on the image of the labyrinth because it often recurs in Atwood’s novels. In her first novel, The Edible Woman, Atwood makes use of this motif at significant moments. The heroine, Marian, evokes the labyrinth every time she feels compelled to conform to social norms. She mentions it when she visits her friend Clara – the embodiment of the perfect wife
– to describe the hospital corridors (134-135). Further, she alludes to the maze motif when she escapes from Peter’s party, where she had to display the image of the happy bride-to-be (243).
Finally, she utters her distress at being lost in a “labyrinth of words” (140), when she realises that her attitude is determined by other people’s demands. Likewise, in Lady Oracle, the labyrinthine setting becomes a metaphor for the heroine’s inner trouble. In a parody of gothic romance, Atwood narrates how the heroine’s double finds answers to her identity questions at the centre of the labyrinth (341). Surfacing presents the reader with another variation on the labyrinth. This time, Atwood associates the maze with the wilderness (31), a frightening,
3 gothic presence, surrounding and gradually suffocating the village. The protagonist experiences her journey in the bush as a labyrinthine way to self-knowledge. While the image disappears from Atwood’s subsequent novels, it significantly resurfaces in her recent Oryx and Crake, to describe the compounds in which Snowman engages on his quest. The research centres resemble huge labyrinths with dead-ends and lethal traps (217). In Atwood’s latest novel, nature is no longer responsible for man’s entrapment. On the contrary, man has become the victim of his own technological development. As I have mentioned, the labyrinth motif pervades Atwood’s fiction in various disguises, endowed with different purposes. Yet, a constant attitude consists in the protagonist’s desire to escape that labyrinth. That obstinate wish for freedom echoes the writer’s attempt to elude any simple interpretation. Atwood often describes escapist protagonists who seek to avoid social constraints, be it by becoming marginal, ex-centric figure. I therefore consider the image of “escaping” the labyrinth as a powerful metaphor for Atwood’s postcolonial message. I intend to demonstrate how the deceptiveness of those characters gradually fades away in the course of the narrative, to reveal a hybrid personality, made of personal expectations and social compromises.
Drawing on postcolonial theory, I shall examine frequently addressed postcolonial themes in order to produce a new understanding of Margaret Atwood’s fiction. In relation to the protagonists’ often noticed deceptiveness, I shall decipher their mimicry strategies, thus examining how their deceptive attitude participates in the colonised subject’s struggle to find his place. I shall also devote particular attention to occurrences of magic realist moments, which, as I shall demonstrate, enable the character to briefly experience the coexistence of two antagonist states of being, a situation which echoes the postcolonial theme of hybridity.
Still regarding “in-betweenness,” I intend to examine the extent to which Atwood’s characters might be regarded as trickster-figures, i.e. messengers who can defy conventions and
4 denounce empowerment. Finally, I shall also endeavour to prove that Atwood’s quest novels, which have often been studied in a postmodern light, can be read from a postcolonial point of view if one links the protagonists’ search for self-knowledge with an acknowledgement of hybridity.
Deception is a much more complex phenomenon than is generally thought, one that deserves to be examined in relation with recent developments in literary theory. I contend that
Margaret Atwood’s fiction will be understood in a new light through a careful examination of her manipulative patterns of deception. Indeed, whereas deception has often been referred to as a common motif in Atwood’s fiction, it has never so far been the subject of a full-scale analysis throughout the author’s entire fictional output. Nor has it been studied in the light of postcolonial theories. I personally consider the protagonists’ predominant use of deception as a sign of their colonised state. Be it as a Canadian citizen suffering from an inferiority complex, as a writer forced to stick to a precise genre, or as a woman struggling to conform to social requirements, Atwood’s protagonist all undergo a form of disempowerment. I therefore suggest that a postcolonial approach to Atwood’s work might enrich our understanding of the author’s work. Indeed, it will bring to light several characteristics of Atwood’s fiction, which situate her within the current development of postcolonial theory.
In order to establish a frame of analysis, I shall first define the notion of deception, and second, determine which aspects of postmodernism and postcolonialism can be linked to this phenomenon. Once these premises have been established, I shall delineate the relevant aspects which my thesis will explore in depth. My study will involve a close reading of Atwood’s fiction in order to examine the conscious and unconscious modes of deception, the characters’ need to create a false self and to resort to all kinds of disguises, and the postmodern and/or
5 postcolonial interpretations which can be attributed to these kinds of behaviour. This study will resort to character analysis, a form of literary criticism best suited to Atwood’s highly developed portrayals. It will also use a combination of close-reading and postcolonial theory, in the hope of achieving a different understanding of Atwood’s work. Indeed, in their focus on hybridity, postcolonial theories offer new light on Atwood’s intricate and contradictory characters. Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch sums up this complexity, linking it to deceptive strategies when he writes:
In recent years the tension between this appearance of being just like someone else and the demands of authenticity has become intolerable (…) In recent Canadian fiction the major writers resolve the paradox (…) they uninvent the world. The most conspicuous example is the novel Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood. (…) The heroine must remove the false names that adhere to her experience. (…) The terror resides not in her going insane, but in her going sane. (…) The truth is disguised, hidden. (…) But underneath this layering, this concealing, is a woman that still recognizes that something doesn’t fit. (Kroetsch 394-395)
Kroetsch concludes his analysis of Surfacing in stating that the heroine “has reached a state wherein she might…give birth to her true identity” (Kroetsch 395). The presence of the modal
“might” leaves the ending of the novel open, as is often the case in postmodern fiction.
Further, it implies that the heroine will not necessarily find a compromise between her hybrid self and that requested by patriarchal society. In postcolonial terms, she may as well remain
“the Other”, with an awareness of her difference. This study takes into account several postcolonial notions such as mimicry, ambivalence, disavowal, subversion and hybridity, while siting the female body as an equivalent of the deceptive, trickster-like postcolonial
“Other.”
6 This postcolonial view of Atwood’s work concurs with earlier critical considerations which generally identify Atwood as a feminist or typically Canadian writer. First, the female condition in a patriarchal society is here regarded as strongly similar to that of the colonised subject. Second, as a Canadian writer, albeit of European decent, Atwood has nevertheless been confronted to and influenced by the rising Canadian postcolonial awareness. Therefore, a postcolonial reading of Atwood’s work should not be considered a break away from critical tradition, but a logical expansion of earlier critical approaches to the writer’s production.
When one considers the whole of Atwood’s novelistic production, one immediately notices the discrepancies between her early novels and her recent, far more complex works.
Whereas Lady Oracle, for instance, reads as a highly comical and inspired comedy of manners, other works, such as Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the recent Oryx and
Crake display innumerable layers of possible interpretations. However, all the novels studied in this work, present marked similarities: all their protagonists are liars; they engage on a journey for self-knowledge; they suffer from their “otherness,” or resent society’s normative tendencies. One might regard Atwood’s work as a constant reformulation of these themes.
Yet, as the writer grows in maturity, her work equally evolves towards a more complex rendition of these topics. The simple lies performed by Atwood’s early heroine’s to maintain a semblance of freedom give way to intricate, dark figures – such as Zenia, Cordelia, and Crake
–, trickster narrators (Iris Chase), or multiples personalities (Grace Marks). A simple, cyclical, and open-ended quest pattern as in Surfacing develops into an intricate maze of intertwined quest journey. Atwood repeats and multiplies the pattern at will: a double quest in Cat’s Eye, a triple in The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin. Nevertheless, the outcome of the quest evolves too: Atwood’s early heroine’s Marian, the “Surfacer,” Joan, Lesje, Rennie, and even the “Handmaid” do not present the reader with a definite answer as to the result of their inner
7 journey. Later novels, such as Alias Grace, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and finally
Oryx and Crake, though remaining open-ended, offer a more positive and more definite outcome, which I choose to interpret as an acknowledgement of their hybridity. Moreover, the reader shall discover how Atwood’s tricksters also develop from sometimes caricatural secondary characters, into powerful, multi-layered individuals.
1. Atwoodian Criticism, with a Special Focus on Deception
Due to the large amount of books and articles devoted to Margaret Atwood’s production since the beginning of her career, it would be impossible to offer an exhaustive account of
Atwoodian criticism. Rather, I shall focus on some major trends, which have enriched my own perception of Atwood’s work. In order to clarify this large number of influential secondary sources, they will here be subdivided into categories: general collections of essays, feminist criticism, psychological and narrative studies. Finally, I shall examine works offering a postcolonial approach to Atwood’s work: first, a series of books and articles which directly address the theme of deception in a broad sense (masks, disguises, deceptive characters and author, dubious language, false selves, etc.), and second, those which opt for a specific postcolonial reading of Atwood’s work.
To begin with, the seminal collection of essays The Art of Margaret Atwood, published by Arnold and Cathy Davidson’s in 1981 contains Annis Pratt’s considerations on
Surfacing as an example of a rebirth journey and of a transformation novel, an aspect which I associate to the heroine’s trickster-like qualities. Further, Atwood scholars will find a detailed account of the critical work on Atwood published between 1962 and 1988 in McCombs’s
1991 Margaret Atwood. A Reference Guide. Finally, Karen F. Stein’s monograph, entitled
8 Margaret Atwood Revisited (1999) offers the reader a comprehensive scope of Atwoodian criticism up to its recent developments.
The feminist approaches to Atwood’s work have been numerous from the beginning of her career. Only the most prominent ones will be mentioned here, such as Frank Davey’s
1984 study of Atwood’s work, Margaret Atwood. A Feminist Poetics. This book clearly opts for a postmodern orientation, dealing with gender politics. This critical approach is interesting for this study because it largely refers to the mask motif and to the theme of concealment, which are both closely related to the deception phenomenon. Moreover, concerning Atwood’s heroines in her early novels, Davey writes: “All four comic protagonists are liars. They tell lies in their professional work, they lie and fantasize as narrators of the novels, they fictionalize (...) their own lives to themselves” (Davey 65-66). Margaret Atwood’s Power, published by Shannon Hengen in 1993, presents us with a daring feminist approach to
Atwood’s work and examines power relationships in her novels. Its attention to mirror images in Atwood’s work is of great interest: given the heroines’ fragmented self, some of those reflections will probably be highly deceptive. In the same year, Bouson-Brooks focuses on the various aspects of Atwood’s rejection of patriarchy, in a collection entitled Brutal
Choreographies. The theme of resistance to patriarchal values is interesting from a postcolonial point of view, because it is similar to the colonised subject’s resistance to the dominant culture. The same can be said concerning Eleonora Rao’s book, Strategies for
Identity, which deals with generic boundaries, identity, interpretations of reality, and deception (in Bodily Harm and The Edible Woman). Still in the feminist trend, Coral Ann
Howells’s book Margaret Atwood, in the “Modern Novelists Series,” is important as a whole because it adopts a feminist reading without oversimplifying Atwood’s work, i.e. without reducing it to a mere gender war. Moreover, it studies both early and later works, offering a
9 detailed and yet very clear view of Atwood’s multiplicity, while demonstrating that feminist criticism is not necessarily limited to Atwood’s early work.
Other critics focus on the psychological interpretation of Atwood’s fiction. The earliest complete psychological study of Atwood is Sherrill Grace’s Violent Duality, published in 1980, of interest for this study because of its numerous references to the heroines’ duplicity, to the dubious aspect of language in her work and to Atwood’s frequent use of parody, satire and irony. The latter can undoubtedly be regarded as a part of the mimicry process in which Atwoodian heroines are involved. More recently, Sonia Mycak’s study, entitled In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood offers a useful reading of Atwood in terms of Lacanian theory and the mimetic construction of reality. Yet, it fails to include Surfacing and The Handmaid’s Tale.
However, I contend that considering Atwood’s work through the lens of deception will enable me to include the whole of her novelistic fiction.
Another critical option consists in analysing Margaret Atwood’s production in terms of narrative techniques. In 1983, Sherrill Grace and Lorraine Weir edited a collection of critical essays, Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System, of which the aim was to discover a typical Atwoodian narrative system. Among those contributions, Hutcheon examines the link between, on the one hand, the narrative structures of Atwood’s novels and, on the other hand, the dichotomy between active and passive behaviour on the part of the characters and readers. Another groundbreaking analysis of Atwood’s narrative technique is
Hilde Staels’s Margaret Atwood’s Novels: A Study of Narrative Discourse, which proves to be both postmodern in its interest for the characters’ multiplicity and postcolonial in its concern for irony and borderline situations, and will therefore influence this thesis.
10
First, I wish to examine studies deeply with deception in a broad sense. In Beatrice
Mendez-Egle’s Margaret Atwood. Reflection and Reality (1986), three articles can be related to this postcolonial study: first, Kathryn Van Spanckeren’s analysis of the role of magic in the heroines’ transformation in three of Margaret Atwood’s early novels, because the transformation theme relates to the trickster-motif; second, Susan Jaret McKinstry’s exploration of Joan Foster’s fictional selves in Lady Oracle, because this character features a whole range of deceptive alter-egos; and finally, Charlotte Walker Mendez’s study of the deceptive aspect of language in Surfacing, interesting for its metafictional content: indeed, one important theme in Surfacing is the unreliability of language, denounced through the narrator’s lack of clarity and through the secondary characters’ frequent language games.
Deception being often transmitted through language, this aspect will be carefully examined.
VanSpanckeren and Castro’s book, Margaret Atwood. Vision and Forms (1988) features several insightful articles, among which Arnold E. Davidson’s contribution on history in The
Handmaid’s Tale, which supports my examination of metafiction as one of the author’s deceptive devices. Within Judith McCombs’s collection entitled Critical essays on Margaret
Atwood (1988), several articles and reviews mention Atwood’s use of parody and irony. One might for instance consult Susan J. Rosowski’s “Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Fantasy and the Modern Gothic Novel” (McCombs, 197-207), which reads the novel’s gothic parody as a reversion of the traditional gothic romance. It situates the gothic “terror” in the heroine’s gradual compliance with our “social mythology” (McCombs, 13). Further, Lucy M. Freibert’s essay on “The Politics of Risks” in The Handmaid’s Tale reads the book as a multi-layered satire that deconstructs Western male dominance (McCombs, 280-292). In addition, some other articles – Josie P. Campbell’s, T.D. MacLulich’s, and Jane Lilienfeld’s – comment on mythical transformations.
11
Among the critics sustaining a postcolonial analysis of Atwood, Colin Nicholson’s
Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity, published in 1994, deserves special notice: for the first time, a collection includes essays which explicitly offer postcolonial readings of
Atwood’s work. Several examples should be mentioned: Nicholson’s study of postcolonial subjectivity in Atwood’s early poetry, which addresses themes such as ethnicity and the opposition between political subordination and cultural survival; or McCombs’s analysis of the theme of metamorphoses in The Circle Game. The collection further features Rao’s essay on irony and contradictions in Lady Oracle and Evans’s comment on the different versions of history in The Handmaid’s Tale, which should be related to historiographic metafiction. In the same trend, Lorraine York’s collection of critical essays, Various Atwoods, contains Diana
Brydon’s brilliant postcolonial reading of Bodily Harm, which focuses on the protagonist’s role as a tourist and on the parallel drawn between the Canadian situation and the situation of the Caribbean islands which serve as a background to the novel. In the same collection,
Shannon Hengen’s analysis of Zenia’s foreignness in The Robber Bride hints at the ethnic undertones of the novel. Wilson, Friedman and Hengen’s pedagogical approach to Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale and other works shows some common points with this study. Indeed, they deal with Atwood’s role as trickster, with her use of intertextuality, and with possible psychoanalytical or postcolonial readings of her work. Yet, their approach remains limited to a few novels, while this study intends to use deception as a pervasive feature, present in all of
Atwood’s novels. Reingard Nischik’s recent book, Margaret Atwood. Works and Impact contains several essays which also use this new way of reading Atwood’s work, with peculiar attention to gender transgression (Coral Ann Howells), narrative games (Barbara Rigney
Hill), intertext (Sharon R. Wilson), and reality reconstructions (Klaus Peter Müller).
Howells’s article deals with the way in which Atwood continuously experiments with gender
12 boundaries and their ideological significance. Focusing on The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber
Bride, Cat’s Eye, and Alias Grace, Howells shows how Atwood succeeds in recreating various genres by means of duplicitous narrators, constantly challenging notions such as femininity, identity, and gender. Barbara Rigney-Hill’s “Alias Atwood: Narrative Games and
Gender Politics,” addresses the latter theme, showing the complexity of Atwood’s construction of the female character. She examines how language and narration determine female stereotypes and how Atwood manages to move beyond those. Klaus Peter Müller’s article deals with language and postcolonialism. He provides an approach to Atwood’s work which focuses on the writer’s methodology and on notions such as truth and reality. Sharon R.
Wilson studies the mythic intertext in Atwood’s work, analysing mythological structures in
The Robber Bride and Alias Grace.
Recently, several articles devoted to the postcolonial aspects of Margaret Atwood’s work have been published, of which three deserve particular attention. The first is Carol
Beran’s “The Canadian Mosaic: Functional Ethnicity in Margaret Atwood's Life before Man,” which claims that a reading in terms of the characters’ ethnicity provides new insights into the interpretation of the novel. Providing a close reading of the novel, Beran highlights significant moments which identify the three protagonists as the embodiment of the “Other”, the alienated individual. She further proves Atwood’s deliberate choice of expressing her characters’ ethnicity, giving details on the novel’s manuscripts and on the writer’s preliminary documentation.
Hilde Staels’s “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through
Narrating” further focuses on the heroine’s re-telling of her story as a form of resistance to patriarchal values and on the irony of the ‘Historical Notes’. This study seeks to reinterpret
13 the novel in the light of Hutcheon’ s theory of historiographic metafiction, which gives a very important role to deceptive discourses of both the heroine and the Gileadean regime.
The third article, Margaret Rogerson’s “Reading the Patchworks in Alias Grace,” examines the value of the novel’s quilt metaphor as an expression of the heroine’s denied voice, which reminds us of the question inherent in postcolonial theory: “can the subaltern speak?” In this novel, Grace’s expression takes place within a maze of deception and secrets.
Grace’s hybridity might well function as Ariadne’s thread, showing her the way out of this labyrinth of lies.
Sharon R. Wilson’s Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations, the latest book to date about Margaret Atwood’s work (2003) will be used as a reference in this study because it offers the latest analysis of the trickster motif in her output. The collection comprises, among other articles, Reingard M. Nischik’s examination of intertextual and parodic elements in
Murder in the Dark. Nischik chooses to analyse some of Atwood’s cartoons, focusing on the theme of “size.” She then studies the mechanics of satire and parody in terms of inversion of conventional thought-patterns. Sharon R. Wilson offers a detailed analysis of the postmodern and postcolonial aspects of Good Bones, including her insights into the trickster and survival motifs. Wilson contends that Atwood uses goddess and trickster motifs in a consistent way throughout her career, i.e. the Snake goddess or the Medusa, for instance. In a second, equally interesting essay on Alias Grace, Wilson provides her interpretation of the novel’s quilting metaphor. She argues that it is a feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial novel. She examines the readers’ involvement in the construction of the narrative. Moreover, she produces details which illustrate Atwood’s concern for class and genre. Mary Kirtz examines the link between
Cat’s Eye and Atwood’s comments on postcolonial Canadian identity. She also deals with
14 Atwood’s reflections on the myth of the malevolent north (the Clarendon lectures) as a key to the interpretation of Cat’s Eye. Coral Ann Howells provides us with a postcolonial reading of
The Robber Bride. She situates the novel within Atwood’s constant search for a “Canadian identity.” Kathryn VanSpanckeren studies the trickster motif in Atwood’s recent poetry. She examines the theme of death in Atwood’s recent Morning in the Burned House. Finally,
Karen Stein offers us a Gothic reading of The Blind Assassin, based on the central theme of hiding and revealing. Stein explains how the narrator Iris Chase manages to resist gothic codes and to escape passivity.
As can easily be concluded, each of these articles develops points which will be further explored in my project. Yet, my perspective differs in its examination of both
Atwood’s earlier and later production. I shall draw conclusions on the theme of deception based on a series of significant case studies, spanning Atwood’s entire career.
2. Deception: A Theoretical Framework
2.1. Historical and Cultural Background
In order to establish a theoretical model for the study of deception in a literary context, this work will first examine some general definitions of deception, the way in which it is perceived in society and its cultural connotations. Dariusz Galasinski’s The Language of
Deception (2000) provides interesting insights into the subject of deception. The author first underlines the fact that deception is part of human communication and defines it as “a type of manipulation (…) of truth and falsity utterances” (Galasinski ix). Yet, he admits that defining
15 deception has always been a problematic issue. Galasinski regards deception as intentional.
He defines a lie as an intentionally misleading statement. Yet, many utterances may be deceptive, without the intervention of the criterion of truth or falsity. When deception takes the form of omission, for instance, the deceiver does not say anything, but nevertheless produces effective deceptive communication. Therefore, a more accurate definition of deception is that based on the notion of false belief. Deception then takes place when the speaker produces a message which intends to create a false belief. Galasinski’s definition of deception reads as follows: “a communicative act that is intended to induce in the addressee a particular belief by manipulating the truth and falsity of the information” (Galasinski 20).
While this definition of deception remains neutral, the most popular definition of this phenomenon usually involves a series of negative connotations, such as an intentionally dishonest purpose.1 However, an analysis of deceptive behaviour in a literary context should remain free of any pejorative judgement. Deception will here be analysed from a psychological, social and literary point of view, not from an ethical point of view.
Writers often present us with characters who have always lived surrounded by lies, because truth was simply too hard to bear for them. In the course of the story, these characters often start out on a painful though fulfilling quest for truth. This quest constitutes the subject of many a novel and has been examined by numerous philosophers, among whom the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics, who says that what is convincing though impossible in the drama must always be preferred to what is possible but unconvincing (Campbell 71).
Lying may thus be allowed, and even recommended, in literary creation. Modern writing has
1 For a more common definition of deception, I turned to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, which produces the following definitions : “Deception: the act of deceiving; something that deceives, a trick.” “To deceive: to cause (someone) to accept as true or good what is false or bad, usu. for a dishonest purpose” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 265).
16 often chosen to support this idea, though it has also learned to play with the notion of truth in a more subtle way. As mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers puts it: “Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself” (Campbell 71). Moreover, French philosopher Descartes considered that “Truth is obtained at the cost of a sacrifice. (…) The search for Truth is a lonely enterprise, a solitary mission. It requires the exclusion of possibilities, because the more possibilities there are, the less truth there is. Falsehood, error, uncertainty, arise because the will is free” (Campbell 97), which implies that the notion of truth and deception is relevant in a study dealing with quest novels, to which Atwood’s undeniably belong.
Jeremy Campbell’s book The Liar’s Tale offers interesting insights into the history of falsehood and into the significance of deception from a philosophical, psychological and literary point of view. In his introduction, Campbell states the importance of deception in psychoanalysis as follows: “Psychoanalysis was based on the idea that falsehood and illusion are useful clues to understanding the mystery of human personality. Freud took with (…) a pinch of salt what his patients told him under the heading of unvarnished fact, but he held the view that lies are often more informative than literal truths. In an odd way, they are privileged information” (Campbell 13). Hence the interest of a study of deception in character analysis.
Indeed, if falsehood and illusion are thought to reveal a lot about someone’s personality, it justifies the critic’s interest for such a behaviour among literary characters.
Further, Campbell assesses the value of deception in a very similar way to that adopted in this work. He defines the theme of his book as such: “for better or worse, lying, untruth, is not an artificial, deviant, or dispensable feature of life. Nature engages in it,
17 sometimes with remarkable ingenuity (…) life may be understood truthfully only in aesthetic terms” (Campbell 14-15). Campbell thus regards deception as an everyday phenomenon. He also stresses the fact that deception has not always suffered the bad repute which it enjoys today and takes as an example Homer’s Odysseus, who uses many tricks and ruses in order to defy death and fate. Campbell concludes on the Greek hero’s use of lies and disguises as follows: “Lying suggests the liar has a superior intelligence, is a practical and ingenious person, creating alternative versions of reality, as the poets do” (Campbell 44), confirming the positive connotations of deception in Ancient Greece. Such positive interpretations should be kept in mind when studying deception in relation to Atwood’s heroines, especially when those make use of tricks, lies and disguises in order to insure their survival. Indeed, this illustrates the concept of µητις, a well-known notion in Ancient Greek philosophy, which stands for the
Greek hero’s ability to use deception and cunning in order to survive. Reading Campbell’s description of the concept, i.e. “the type of intelligence that is cunning and devious and shrewd, that is adapted to the perilous jockeying for success in a highly competitive society, using wiles and ruses when sheer brute force is on the other side” (Campbell 53), and further:
“Metis connotes flair, wisdom, subtlety, deception, resourcefulness, opportunism. (…) The point is to be effective, and untruth can be of great assistance in this task, as also can magic, hallucinogenics, frauds, feints, and illusions” (Campbell 53), one cannot help noticing the similarities between the Greek hero’s behaviour and that of a trickster and of a twentieth- century hero or heroine. Indeed, many of those have to resort to a series of deceptive tricks in order to survive in a society in which they feel alienated. This comparison leads us to another aspect of this study: regarding deception as a form of mimicry, i.e. as a subversive strategy in a postcolonial context. This is the case, when, for instance, a character indulges in disguise or concealment of his difference in order to fit in colonial or patriarchal society. Campbell equally alludes to the hardships of social life and the necessity of deception when he writes:
18 “the petty falsehoods people tell themselves and others every day fulfil a more mundane purpose: to provide a buffer against the cruelties of existence which arise in even the most democratic and enlightened societies” (Campbell 186). This study will thus subsequently analyse the characters’ deceptive attitude towards society, and in some cases the manipulation inherent in society itself. Yet there is more to the Greek concept of µητις , as Campbell further mentions: “Most important, Odysseus is a master of tricky language, like Hermes the trickster god linked to deceitful communication. He is an expert in the use of words to veil, inveigle, and test. His disguises are accomplished, not only with costumes, but with language; he weaves fictional biographies of himself as a protective maneuver” (Campbell 45). These fictional biographies, invented by protagonists to protect themselves, are a trope in twentieth- century fiction. Postmodern theory addresses the characters’ conscious use of language and the author’s metafictional interventions. Moreover, we must not forget that deception, as
Margaret Atwood skilfully intimates in this work’s motto, has always been part of literary production. As Campbell explains:
In the modernist novel, lies and liars proliferate, reflecting a deep suspicion of the value of truth in its literal, public form. Obscurity becomes a trademark of modernist writing, a device that obliterates the easy attunement between the mind of the author and that of the reader and renders suspect the notion that truth is single or simple, that it can be communicated at all through the suspect vehicle of language, or even that it is desirable to do so (Campbell 13).
However, my study would rather link this notion to the postmodern idea that there is not one single truth but many. Indeed, postmodern theory claims that there is not only one Truth, but a multiplicity of voices and points of view which account for an equally multiple conception of truth.
19 When examining deception from a psychoanalytical point of view, the most obvious instance that comes to mind is the false-self system as described by psychoanalyst Ronald D.
Laing in the 1960’s. In his book, The Divided Self, Laing claims that when faced with a society in which he feels estranged, the individual’s only sane response is madness and the creation of a false-self which aims at making normal life possible. A similar idea occurs in social scientist Ervin Goffman’s theory that “in social situations the individual is a performer, an actor playing a role in which he or she may or may not believe. The very word ‘person’ once meant a mask” (Campbell 265). Deception appears once again as a common phenomenon. For the literary critic, it will be interesting to wonder how much the character indulges into the creation of a false self, to notice all the different disguises, masks or false identities he resorts to, and to pay special attention to the description of the character’s dreams as revelations of his inner truths. Indeed, the part played by the unconscious in these kinds of deception is most important, and though we cannot pretend that we know the inner thoughts of a fictitious character, we can significantly study the way in which the author chooses to give us hints about the character’s inner life, through descriptions of his or her thoughts and behaviour. Earlier in the history of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud identified a series of deceptive kinds of behaviour which enable the unconscious to express itself. Among those, the types of behaviour which we immediately regard as deceptive are lying, wearing disguises or using false names or identities. Yet, other kinds of behaviour may also prove to play a part in the deceptive process, in as much as they reveal the fact that deception has taken place: dreams, for instance, often express inner feelings which must remain hidden, as do slips of the tongue, errors, or bungled actions. Lapses of memory too can mean that the person has invented a different, socially more acceptable version of his/her life.
20 Moreover, Freud’s theories are not the only ones which can help us understanding a literary character. Jung, in his analysis of the trickster figure, offers us interesting insight into the phenomenon of deception, as will be explained in a following section. Later, Jacques
Lacan equally professed the dubious value of truth in the treatment of the disordered psyche.
As Campbell states, Lacan “insists that truth discloses itself, not in plain propositions, but in lies, mistakes, trickery, and tall stories” (Campbell 200). As far as the trickster character is concerned, it has been associated with Lacan’s mirror stage, which recalls Mycak’s analysis of Atwood’s work in Lacanian terms.
Finally, this section on the cultural value of deception can be concluded by examining
Atwood’s own comment on the subject and interest in deceptive games. Indeed, Atwood has expressed her opinions on the subject of deception, and she sometimes plays games with her readers which make her resemble a trickster figure.
In the passage from Murder in the Dark which has been chosen as a motto for this study, Atwood concludes her description of the game which gives its title to the volume as follows: “Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always lie” (Atwood, Murder in the Dark 49-50). In that short prose piece, Atwood attributes the murderer’s role to the writer and thus highlights the writer’s tendency to tell lies. The quotation can be interpreted as Atwood’s acknowledgement of her own trickster-like qualities. Indeed, this aspect of her literary personality is often reflected on by critics, who have called her a gorgon or a magician in turns, often highlighting the trickery aspect of Atwood’s plots.
21 The following quote is another significant example of Atwood’s deceptive nature.
Answering Geoff Handcock’s question on the truth-value of interviews, Atwood says that she regards interviews as an art in themselves. She calls them fictitious and fictional. She then adds that writers sometimes make up answers and emphasises the unreliability of memory.
Indeed, she says: “Any memory you have of writing is just that, a memory. Like all memories, it’s usually a revision, not the unadulterated experience itself” (Handcock 113-
144). This quote is particularly relevant if we consider it in the light of historiographic metafiction. Indeed, Atwood’s novels can be regarded as her way of making the readers aware of a different aspect of reality.
In the interview with Handcock, Atwood goes even further, stating that writers frequently conceal things to preserve their privacy, to keep their trade secrets or to fit literary theories. Indeed, from what we read in Atwood’s numerous interviews, this can be interpreted as the echo of Atwood’s vision of deception as being part of the writer’s work. Atwood’s comments on writing in Negotiating with the Dead, her recent non-fiction book, reinforce this idea. She discloses an episode from her childhood: “Around the age of seven I wrote a play.
The protagonist was a giant; the theme was crime and punishment; the crime was lying, as befits a future novelist” (Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead 9). Such a comment from a writer who is already well-known for playing tricks on her readers emphasises the deliberate quality of Atwood’s deception.
I would even go further in emphasising Atwood’s own hybrid nature, which she presents as characteristic of her role as a writer. In Negotiating with the Dead, she writes:
“Who was I then? My evil twin or slippery double, perhaps. I am after all a writer, so it would follow as the day the night that I must have a slippery double (…) this other person – the one
22 credited with authorship – is certainly not me. (…) I was endowed at birth with a double identity” (Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead 36). Atwood’s description of her own double nature reminds us of her heroines’ struggle with identity, which often causes them to act deceptively. This double nature should therefore be regarded as a significant element in
Atwood’s characterisation and as a relevant sign of the heroine’s hybrid nature. These quotations clearly demonstrate Atwood’s concern for deception, her belief that it is intrinsically linked to her being a writer, and her acknowledgement that she would quite readily deceive us as readers.
2.2. Significant Postmodern Aspects of Deception
2.2.1. Historiographic Metafiction or Variations on the Concept of Truth(s)
This analysis of deception in Atwood’s work relies on Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern concept of the historiographic metafiction for several reasons. First of all, because this novelistic form is particularly likely to present deceptive authorial intervention. Moreover, as a Canadian,
Hutcheon has logically devoted much of her attention to Canadian writers, and has applied her theories to Margaret Atwood’s writings (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 138-159). In A
Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon describes historiographic metafiction as follows: “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensively self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism 5). This very concept aptly describes one of Atwood’s most popular novels, i.e. Alias Grace, which is based on a true story and contains numerous references to historical facts and documents, while presenting these in quite a singular way.
23 Hutcheon distinguishes several typical traits of historiographic metafiction. First of all, historiographic metafiction is obsessed with “the linking of ‘fictitious’ to ‘mendacious’ stories
(or histories)” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 108): fact and fiction are often intertwined. Second, it shows a typical postmodern interest for the multiplicity of truth: truth is a very relative concept, which largely depends on place and culture; it is therefore diverse and elusive (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 108). Historiographic metafiction consequently “plays upon the truth and lies of the historical record” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism 114). This implies that the author of a historiographic metafictional novel deliberately falsifies or omits some historical facts in order to compensate for historical forgetfulness or errors. Historical facts are incorporated, but not necessarily assimilated.
Rather, they appear as seen through the lens of parody or irony, which Hutcheon identifies in
The Canadian Postmodern as forms of “formal and ideological critique in feminism and
Canadian fiction alike” (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 7). Hutcheon significantly chooses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a typical example of parody. Umberto
Eco expresses the same idea : “The postmodern reply to the modern consists in recognising that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, (…) must be revisited, but with irony, not innocently” (quoted in : Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism 90). Moreover, parody functions as an important element of postcolonial writing as well. In my analysis, I shall therefore devote much attention to the study of the intertextuality which characterises many of Atwood’s works. Third, historiographic metafiction confronts the literary to the historical, featuring the encounter of fictitious and historical characters or resorting to intertextuality (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism
108), which enables the writer to rewrite the past in a new context (Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism 118). The idea particularly fits my postcolonial claim, since this rewriting can be regarded as a way of giving the colonised subject his own voice, enabling him to give
24 his own version of the facts. Fourth, historiographic metafiction “espouses a postmodern ideology of plurality and recognition of difference” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism
114). In this, it echoes the postcolonial concern for the ex-centric position of the “Other”.
Indeed, as Hutcheon states, postmodern narratives often equally adhere “not to what fits the master narrative, but instead, to the ex—centric, the marginal, the borderline – all those things that threaten the (illusory but comforting) security of the centered, totalizing, masterly discourses of our culture” (Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism 86). As far as narrative techniques are concerned, Hutcheon distinguishes two modes of narration which characterise historiographic metafiction, i.e. either multiple points of view or an overtly controlling narrator who, nevertheless, lacks any clear vision of the past (Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism 117). Indeed, these novels often feature an obvious instability of point of view, because of a deliberately manipulative, deceptive narrator or a story narrated by multiple voices (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 160). Finally, historiographic metafiction shows “overt (and political) concern for its reception, for its reader” (Hutcheon, A
Poetics of Postmodernism 115), an interest which may be rooted in its desire to make readers aware of the existence of received versions of historical facts.
The relation of historiographic metafiction to the notion of multiple truth is of primary interest because the multifaceted postmodern conception of truth enables the writer to introduce the Other’s version of truth as a valid alternative to the coloniser’s view. Indeed, those in power generally dismiss the Other’s view of history.
25 2.2.2. Atwood’s Metafictional Manipulation
To Linda Hutcheon, metafiction is characterised by its “subversion of the stability of point of view” (Hutcheon, “Subject in/of/to History and His Story” 80). She further links this subversion to the disintegration of patriarchal hierarchies (Hutcheon, “Subject in/of/to History and His Story” 83), an aspect which makes the notion interesting in this postcolonial-oriented analysis.
In the chapter entitled “Process, Product, and Politics: The Postmodernism of
Margaret Atwood,” Linda Hutcheon, in The Canadian Postmodern, focuses on postmodern aspects of Atwood’s early production. In Atwood’s work, Hutcheon situates the postmodern paradox in the vision of art as, on the one hand, a dynamic creative process, and, on the other hand, a static product (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 138). Hutcheon then produces an analysis of Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, which illustrates this aspect, i.e. she offers a metafictional reading of the novel, which she sums up by drawing a parallel between the tensions between mind and body in The Edible Woman and the postmodern contradictions between the written product and the act of writing (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern
143). Concerning Surfacing, Hutcheon emphasises the “illusionist’s ability” of language to indicate process within product, which she exemplifies by means of the novel’s title, with its dynamic present-participle. Atwood’s next novel, Lady Oracle, epitomises the concept of self-reflexive metafiction. Indeed, if we consider the novel as self-parodic, we can regard Joan
Foster’s multiple identities as an ironic inversion of Surfacing’s nameless narrator and the
Royal Porcupine’s liking for dead animals as a parody of the chapter on animals in Survival
(Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 145). All the same, in Life Before Man, which, at first reading, seems to be a realistic novel, metafictional comment is introduced in Lesje’s desire to
26 be pregnant, which parallels the dynamic creative process of writing (Hutcheon, The
Canadian Postmodern 148). Hutcheon concludes her analysis of Atwood’s early novels by stressing the imaginative quality of her characters (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern
152), a necessary quality to become an effective deceiver. The characters’ various versions of reality and their role in a postcolonial interpretation of Margaret Atwood’s fiction will thus constitute the main concern of this study.
Beside establishing the metafictional quality of Atwood’s work, my study also closely links the notion of fantasy to the idea of deception. Still following Hutcheon’s thought, the reader must keep in mind that fantasy, a necessary quality to being an effective deceiver, involves responsibility for what has been created. This awareness of responsibility can then be interpreted as an important step in the Other’s discovery of his own voice.
As to the link between metafiction and deception, it will be established by focusing on three aspects of Atwood’s metafiction : first, Atwood’s comments on or hints at the narrator’s unreliability, second, Atwood’s sequences on the nature of the writing process, which often draw our attention to the fictional and/or tricky aspect of fiction, and third, Atwood’s parodic intent, aiming at illustrating her function as a writer, which involves creating a world that appears realistic, and yet, functions as a fictional product.
27 2.3. Deception as a Postcolonial Process
2.3.1. Deception as Mimicry
One cannot deny the feminist overtones of Atwood’s novels, which often present us with a heroine’s process of individuation, or, in other words, with her quest for selfhood. These novels logically allude to patriarchal domination and social oppression. My point here is to establish a parallel between feminism and postcolonialism and to examine Atwood’s work on these premises, as well as in the light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Indeed, both patriarchy and colonialism can be regarded as the exertion of power, of domination imposed on subjects who are then regarded as subordinate. Patriarchal society imposes on women the same submissive role as that inflicted by colonisers on colonised subjects. Therefore, the parallel between feminism and postcolonialism will be emphasised, considering them ways of opposing similar kinds of dominant behaviour, as is stated in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s
Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (101). Since Atwood has often been regarded as a
“feminist” writer, this study will demonstrate that the feminist overtones in her work function as a metaphor for the Canadian subject’s subaltern position.
Further drawing on postcolonialism, this study will show that deception can be regarded as a form of mimicry. Indeed, the concept of mimicry is based on the colonised subject’s ambivalent attempt at resembling the coloniser, without ever succeeding to do so.
Adopting colonial cultural values then results in a mere reproduction, which proves deceptive and dangerous because of its lack of a core (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Key Concepts in
Post-Colonial Studies 139): the colonised subject cannot exist as a copy of the coloniser. The female character in Atwood’s fiction remains equally trapped in an ambivalent position: in
28 order to find her place in patriarchal society, she resorts to several modes of deception to produce a copy of what society wishes her to be. The failure of this kind of socially induced behaviour then leads to her introspective quest towards her hybrid self, which she must eventually acknowledge as the only viable version of herself.
Homi K. Bhabha’s refers to Lacan when he defines mimicry as a form of camouflage
(Bhabha 90), which can be regarded as a deceptive strategy. Bhabha symptomatically mentions ‘camouflage’, a word which Atwood often uses in her descriptions of deceptive characters. Moreover, by referring to Lacan, Bhabha clearly emphasises the link between his theory and psychoanalysis. Like Bhabha, my notion of mimicry clearly involves a deceptive aspect, which basically requires from a colonial subject that he/she resemble someone he/she is not and will never be. This notion is based on a paradox, for, as Jenny Sharpe puts it: “The mimic man is a contradictory figure who simultaneously reinforces colonial authority and disturbs it” (Sharpe 99). Mimicry is thus deceptive by nature, since it merely produces a resemblance, a copy. Moreover, it does not result in a discovery of harmony, rather in an ever elusive, unbalanced, conflictual position vis-à-vis the patriarchal or colonised society. This strategy is thus very close to that of female characters who adopt a false personality in order to survive in a world based on the patriarchal values which they do not share: in adopting society’s values, even within a process of deception, they somehow become what society wants them to be, while they secretly and sometimes unconsciously keep longing to reveal their hybrid nature.
Indeed, in such male-oriented societies, female heroines display the quality of
“otherness”. Women often occupy a marginal, ex-centric position, once they refuse to comply with patriarchal values commonly agreed on in society. Women are often relegated to the
29 position of “Other” and experience trouble in finding their own voice. This concept of voice is a common point between feminist and postcolonial studies, a theory which is also alluded to by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (174-175).
In Atwood’s fiction, independent single women thus function as “the Other,” with all its stereotypical connotations. Their only way to fit into that society is to pretend to adopt its values. Yet, they soon come to realise that this deceptive way of life cannot last and a traumatic experience often brings them to engage on a quest for their hybrid identity. Indeed, the heroine’s recurrent deceptive behaviour at the beginning of the story commonly evolves into a search for selfhood, made necessary because, as is the case for mimicry, while a fragmented hybrid female character may temporarily display a false-self system, it eventually turns out to be not quite the same as acknowledging her hybridity and its consequences.
Referring to the title of my thesis, I would conclude in asserting the existence of a parallel between the workings of mimicry in a colonial subject and the deceptive process experienced by female heroines in patriarchal cultures, both of these processes leading to an awareness of the heroine’s hybridity. The acknowledging of her hybrid quality would then function as
Ariadne’s thread and enable the heroine to escape her labyrinth of deception.
2.3.2. Magic Realism and Deception
Magic realism particularly helps to clarify Atwood’s work, because of this aesthetic mode’s reliance on the motif of the double. Indeed, Margaret Atwood’s work swarms with images of doubles and twins, which give it a definite postmodern quality by virtue of the multiplicity of voices which the doubles bring forth. This analysis echoes Wendy B. Faris’s theories on magic realism (Faris 163-164). Faris explains the various characteristics of magic realism and
30 its postmodern aspect, of which the metafictional aspect (Faris 175) proves of great interest.
She then mentions the postmodern recurrence of the metamorphosis motif (Faris 178), which can easily be associated to deceptive characters’ frequent use of disguises of various kinds.
Indeed, characters often resort to disguise when they opt for a personality or physical appearance which is tolerated by society. In using disguise, the ex-centric character mimics the aspect of the dominant class without ever becoming part of it. When this disguise turns out to create a grotesque, unreal kind of character, it acquires a magic realist quality, one of the utmost interest for this study.
Further, magic realism is interesting from a postcolonial point of view because of its
“in-between” quality: magic realist moments take place on the edge of reality, when among realistic events a supernatural, inexplicable phenomenon suddenly occurs. Reality turns out to be deceptive as the reader gets a glimpse of its hidden aspects. In Faris and Zamora’s collection of essays on magic realism, Rawdon Wilson highlights the hybrid quality of magic realism and clearly links it to the idea of deception when he writes: “one world may lie hidden within another. (…) The hybrid construction emerges from a secret, always already contained within, forming an occulted and latent dimension of the surface world” (Faris 225). Magic realism thus encourages deception on the writer’s part, and provides the characters with a typically postcolonial hybridity.
The most interesting aspect of magic realism lies in its subversive potential. Indeed, by allowing the supernatural to enter the real, magic realism simultaneously calls for an acceptance of what is “other” or “marginal”. Hence Jeanne Delbaere-Garant’s conclusion in her article “Variations on Magic Realism”, in which she writes that one of the functions of magic realism may be “to destabilise culturally constructed notions of identity and gender by
31 showing that, like all human constructs, they are, in fact, projections of individual fantasies”
(Delbaere-Garant 260). Delbaere coins the terms “psychic,” “mythic,” and “grotesque realism” in order to help situate magic realist moments (250). She defines these categories as follows: she calls “psychic realism” that “particular sort of magic realism generated from inside the psyche” (251). Further, she identifies “mythic realism” as magic images “borrowed from the physical environment itself, instead of being projected from the characters’ psyches”
(253). Delbaere proposes to call “grotesque realism” “a combination of North American tall tale, Latin American baroque, and Bakhtinian ‘carnivalesque’” (256). She suggests using the term “grotesque realism” for “any sort of hyperbolic distortion that creates a sense of strangeness through the confusion or interpenetration of different realms like animate/inanimate or human/animal” (256). I regard this latter definition as highly relevant in relation to this study’s development of the theme of hybridity. Moreover, one should keep in mind that scholars often describe the trickster-figure itself as a character in between the human and the animal worlds (256). This definition introduces distorted elements which parody reality and denounce the norms commonly accepted by society. As such, these grotesque, deceptive elements acquire a postcolonial value which is of primary interest for the interpretation of Atwood’s novels. These grotesque events further possess a deceptive quality because the reader experiences them as unexpected and tricky. Therefore, Delbaere identifies another function of magic realism, i.e. “to stress the distinction between trickery and reality, invention and creation” (260). Potentially subversive and/or deceptive qualities of magic realist moments should therefore receive particular attention. For the sake of convenience, I shall borrow Delbaere’s classification, using the terms “psychic,” “mythic,” and “grotesque” magic realism, adding the word “magic” to refer to surreal moments within Atwood’s realist narratives. In the course of my analysis, I shall also introduce a new notion, that of “gothic
32 magic realism,” which, in my view, is more appropriate to Atwood’s fiction. One might regard it as a combination of two forms of the previously cited forms of realism.
Richard Todd’s contribution to Faris and Zamora’s collection goes even further, starting with: “Narrators of magic realism play confidence tricks on their readers. (…) An exemplary expression of the confidence trick leading to the subversion of the natural order of things is to be found in the alternative historiography that in various ways outrageously transgresses the ‘given facts’ of history” (Todd 305). Indeed, the tricks which authors can play with history are also part of a deceptive process, which should be analysed in relation with the above described concept of “historiographic metafiction.” Stephen Slemon expresses the same idea: he examines magic realism in a postcolonial perspective, emphasising its re- visioning process and its reconstruction of history (Slemon 415). As Brydon and Tiffin claim in Decolonizing Fiction, “postcolonial texts have always been ‘conscious’ of their own fictionality” (Brydon, Tiffin 147). The author’s metafictional comments on history and potential deception should therefore be taken into account. In his conclusion, Richard Todd first alludes to the narrator “as the trickster or the tricked” (Todd 325), a topic which will be dealt with in the next section.
2.3.3. The Trickster Figure
The figure of the trickster can be studied in relation to Bakhtin’s definition of three trickster- like characters which populate literature from very early on, namely, the rogue, the clown and the fool. In his essay entitled “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel”, Bakhtin examines the functions of these popular figures. The common point between them is that each of them creates his own special world, his chronotope. Their other characteristic is that they
33 must be grasped in terms of their metaphorical significance. Indeed, as Bakhtin writes, “one cannot take them literally, because they are not what they seem (…) Essential to these three figures is a distinctive feature that is as well a privilege – the right to be ‘other’ in this world”
(Bakhtin 158). Bakhtin thus clearly links the deceptive aspect to the quality of otherness. He further identifies these characters as those who will expose social conventions, hypocrisy and falsehood. They all three bear an inner contradiction: they both create and denounce deceptions, the latter thanks to their mask, which allows them to express themselves freely.
They somehow make way for a double-voiced discourse, i.e. for the introduction of the author’s intention within novelistic discourse. The fool’s function, for instance, is to highlight the world’s falsity by demonstrating his own incomprehension of it. The rogue inflicts deception upon liars. Finally, the clown turns out to be a mixture of both : he is a rogue who wears the mask of a fool in order to be able to distort and unmask social conventions (Bakhtin
404-405). Bakhtin then alludes to the symbolical and parodic value of these characters and mentions the cyclical pattern of these narratives, another common point with traditional trickster stories.
In order to be able to recognise trickster figures when they appear in Atwood’s fiction, one can first examine some of the numerous definitions of the trickster figure. The trickster has been described by Carl Jung in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious as a transforming character, as a shape-shifter. Jung identifies the trickster as an archetype, i.e. an archaic, primordial type. Indeed, archetypes are “universal images that have existed since the remotest times” (Jung 5) and which are part of our collective unconscious. In his essay
“On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure”, he defines the trickster as follows : “a
‘psychogolem’, an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity (…) a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has
34 hardly left the animal level” (Jung 260). If the trickster constitutes such a basic element of human consciousness, it must be present in many literary works, and even more so in
Canadian works, since the trickster figure has remained very popular among the Native population of Canada. Northrop Frye, Atwood’s renowned professor, supports this idea when he defines the trickster as “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as a whole” (Frye 365).
The trickster must therefore be regarded as one of the literary embodiments of deception to be looked for in Atwood’s novels.
Jung further identifies several other characteristics of the trickster figure. The first distinguishing quality consists in the trickster’s talent as a shape-shifter. Significantly, many of Atwood’s characters are famous for transforming at will and featuring different selves.
Jung further mentions the trickster’s fondness for sly jokes, and his dual nature, half animal, half divine, a comment which stresses the trickster’s marginal, liminal quality and makes it an interesting figure in a postcolonial context as representation of the “Other”.
When emphasising the trickster’s archaic quality and his animal-like stage of psychological development, Jung associates the American Indian trickster figure with several other occurrences in Europe: the medieval devil, the alchemical figure of Mercurius, fairy-tale characters, witches, the folkloric simpleton or a carnival figure. He even links the trickster’s traditional bawdy jokes and rogueries to current student folklore. To Jung, Trickster is a phantom who haunts medieval theatrical farces, carnival feasts and magic rites. It is a memory-image, which finds its roots in man’s primitive and barbarous consciousness. Jung compares the trickster phenomenon to that of the split personality, and sees the trickster as an emanation, not on the individual level, but rather on the collective one: it can bring out the
35 best or the worst in a human being. Jung sums this up as follows: “The trickster is a primitive
‘cosmic’ being of divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness” (Jung 264). He then explains the persistence of the trickster in modern times by its being a parallel to the individual shadow, referring to an earlier, darker, more primitive stage of consciousness. Tricksters’ occurrences in Atwood’s work therefore constitute significant moments, revealing important elements for the interpretation of the novels.
Other writers have highlighted the trickster’s multiple identities. The religious historian Mircea Eliade gives a rather similar description of the trickster, focusing on its deceitful nature, and drawing largely on the North American Indian Coyote stories. For
Eliade, Coyote is the prototype of the trickster and he describes him as follows:
His personality is ambivalent and his role equivocal. (…) he is also a transformer and a culture hero. (…) he succeeds not heroically, but by cunning or fraud. And it is always by stratagem or dissimulation that he delivers mankind from his monstrous cannibal adversaries. He parodies and caricatures shamanistic or priestly rituals. (…) he proves to be a personage difficult to define, both intelligent and stupid, near the gods by his ‘primordiality’ and his powers, but even nearer men by his gluttonous hunger, his exorbitant sexuality, and his amorality (Eliade 190)
Eliade’s emphasis on the trickster’s sense of parody reminds us of the postmodern parodic undertones of historiographic metafiction, and is directly connected with the subversive postcolonial notion of mimicry.
For Jeanne Rosier Smith, author of a study of tricksters in American ethnic literature, the trickster once again appears as a transformer: “Tricksters – the ubiquitous shape-shifters
36 who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds – are the world’s oldest, and newest, creations” (Rosier Smith 1). She further underlines the multicultural aspect of the trickster figure, a trait which makes it an interesting character in a postcolonial-oriented analysis. She calls the trickster an “interpreter”, a “master of border and exchange” (Rosier Smith xiii).
Indeed, in a postcolonial perspective, this character challenges the ideas commonly prescribed by society. He is a paradoxical character who allows different voices to express themselves at a time, and in so doing, he creates a space of expression for the Other, the ex-centric, the hybrid self. Rosier-Smith further sees the trickster as a symbol of survival, a folk hero and a creator of new worlds. As such, the character appeals to women writers because it challenges existing patriarchal values. For Rosier Smith, the world’s interest in the trickster comes from his role as survivor and transformer (Rosier Smith 3). He establishes the connection between self and culture (Rosier Smith 4). She then chooses to underline some aspects of the trickster, such as its liminality and its “ ‘betwixt and between’ state of transition and change that is a source of myth in all cultures” (Rosier Smith 7). This, of course, reminds us of Bhabha’s notion of “in-betweenness”. Tricksters are constantly on the threshold of culture. They are free to break taboos and show a fabulous talent for escape and survival. They sometimes shock us because Western thought does not usually associate goodness and deception, but it is by transgressing such boundaries that the trickster becomes able to define culture. Rosier
Smith also symptomatically notices that “Tricksters appear at moments of identity crisis”
(Rosier Smith 9), a phenomenon which is of primary interest for my study, which will precisely focus on a heroine’s identity crises. It would then be interesting to determine, whether at one point of those crises, a trickster-like figure is present to assist the heroine in her quest or to show her the way. Moreover, Rosier Smith also mentions the trickster’s influence on narrative techniques. Indeed, of trickster figures she says: “They reinvent narrative form. (…) A parodist, joker, liar, con-artist, and storyteller, the trickster fabricates
37 believable illusions with words.” And further: “The narrative forms share certain distinctive features : breaks, disruptions, loose ends, and multiple voices or perspectives” (Rosier Smith
11). Special attention should therefore be devoted to that kind of formal details because these could be clues to the possible presence of a trickster-like narrator. As has been done at the beginning of this section, Rosier Smith connects the trickster to Bakhtin’s parodic roles of fool, clown and rogue. She also quotes Diane Price Herndl who notices the “striking similarities between Bakhtin’s theories of novelistic discourse and theories of a feminine language (…). Both describe a multivoiced or polyphonic resistance to hierarchies and laughter at authority” (Rosier Smith 13). Atwood having often been called a feminist writer, this study will logically pay attention to her characters who defy patriarchal authority by means of deceptive strategies. Additionally, Jeanne Rosier-Smith emphasises the postmodern quality of the trickster figure, alluding to its multiple aspect of identity (Rosier Smith 17).
Finally, the author highlights the fact that writers can become tricksters themselves (Rosier
Smith 21), an affirmation used by several critics concerning Margaret Atwood, as will be explained below.
Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist equally takes Jung’s transformation archetype and turns the trickster into an important figure in the process of individuation (Lundquist). Her dissertation on the academic impact of trickster studies offers a slightly different insight. She analyses the significance of the trickster as Jungian archetype, as explained previously, the mythic undertones of the trickster in Native American narratives and its value as a life symbol
(Lundquist). She also develops the deconstructing aspect of trickster as the one who “exposes what has been marginalized in Western thought. (…) Trickster is continually deconstructing ideologies and calling attention to foolish human behavior” (Lundquist), a characteristic which makes the trickster an all the more interesting figure in postcolonial theory. To express
38 it in Lundquist’s words: the trickster element “is deconstructive in purpose and healing in effect” (Lundquist). The figure reveals what has been concealed and therefore functions as an important element of the initiation process, such as that undergone by Atwood’s heroines.
Landay mentions the origin of the term trickster used by Daniel Brinton in a 1868 study of “the contradictory figure in Native American tales and myth, who is both fooler and fooled, heroic and base” (Landay 2). And she adds: “In general trickster figures are representations of liminality, duality, subversions, and irony”, a definition which perfectly fits postcolonial thought, because it emphasises the ex-centric position of the colonised subject, as well as the parodic and subversive intent of the mimicry process. Lori Landay’s work on twentieth-century popular female trickster figures in the United States casts yet another light on the subject. Landay starts out from the character of Sheherazade, whom she identifies as the prototype of the specific female trickster, “a tightrope walker, poised ironically in the liminal space ‘betwixt and between’ night and day, life and death, victim and survivor, concubine and wife” (Landay 1). From the start she also makes a distinction between male and female trickster, contrary to most authors, who recognise in the trickster an ambivalent creature, now male, now female. According to Landay, female tricksters either resort to covert strategies of influence (like Sheherazade telling her various tales to stay alive) or to overt strategies of action (like Batman’s Catwoman who acquires revenge and justice through transformation). Both characters demonstrate their ability to survive in a hostile patriarchal world. Moreover, women in mainstream American culture are often evaluated in terms of appearance, costume, and behaviour and are attributed a series of typically female roles, all of them being potentially mere deceptions. Landay further alludes to the duality of the female trickster, as a character whose duality is reflected in her split consciousness. This aspect of the trickster theory is very important as regards the numerous articles devoted to doubles, twins
39 and split personalities in Atwood’s fiction. Indeed, the frequent occurrences of doubles and twins is an important component of Atwood’s deception process and the presence of an alter- ego for the heroine or the heroine’s allusion to her split personality will therefore be studied at length. Lori Landay also mentions the role of women in advertising which makes frequent use of trickster tactics such as “deception, impersonation, disguise, duplicity, and subversion”
(Landay 11). Like the other writers, she points to the trickster’s transgression of social conventions when she writes: “Often, female tricksters behave as shadow figures who break the rules and call attention to possibilities outside gender roles and ideals” (Landay 12). Yet she places this subversive attitude within the context of cultural definitions of femininity. She then goes on examining the different kinds of trickster figures before starting out on her own evaluation of the female trickster figure in twentieth-century America, identifying three major types of female trickster. The first one is the madcap, a funny, unconventional, eccentric and individual figure who takes part in the world but does not follow the dominant ideology
(Landay 37). Landay significantly mentions that this kind of woman is neither a victim nor a passive outsider. The second type is the con woman, not a comic character this time, but one who can manipulate her appearance to grant her confidence. The third type, the screwball, lies between the manipulative con-woman and the impulsive madcap, in that she recognises her ex-centric position, refuses marginalisation and manipulates social conventions. These three types significantly remind us of Bakhtin’s previously mentioned analysis of three trickster- like characters, namely, the fool (the comic one), the rogue (the evil deceiver), and the clown, which features characteristics of both types. Landay’s conclusion is of particular interest because it draws on Margaret Atwood’s theory of the Four Basic Victim Positions, as exposed in her critical work Survival, to explain the female trickster’s function, i.e. to allow the heroine to become a creative non-victim (Landay 218).
40 Among the numerous articles and books about trickster figures, the article entitled
“Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trickster” by C.W. Spinks Jr. provides interesting insights into the trickster’s marginal condition. Spinks first establishes the trickster’s ancient presence and mythic value. He further regards the trickster as being partly a culture hero, partly a shaman. As a culture hero, he takes risks and brings about social and psychological development. As a shaman, he acts as a visionary character who has access to wisdom and to other states of consciousness. Most appealing is Spinks’s idea of the trickster as “pure ambivalence; he is always the border creature who plays at the margins of self, symbol and culture.” He “allows the very process of transformation (…), as the basic driver of cultural change” (Spinks 177). The portrait of the trickster as a marginal character allows us to associate the naturally deceptive trickster figure with the marginal, decentered aspect of postcolonial writing. Trickster, the deceiver, the marginal, the ex-centric thus functions as an ideal postcolonial hero, a marginal joker, who challenges the boundaries established by culture. “He both exercises and exorcises the negation of the Cultural Other” (Spinks 178).
This last sentence brings Trickster very close to the definition of hybridity, a concept which will be explained in the next section of this study. Indeed, the trickster personality most likely appears in situations when the heroine is about to discover her hybrid quality. Spinks concludes: “So Trickster is also a constant reminder of the marginality and liminality of our personal experience” (Spinks 179). Spinks also relates the trickster’s function to the Jungian process of individuation when he writes : “He allows one to meet, understand, grapple with and control the Shadow and unthought of the culture” (Spinks 178). Indeed, the only way of dealing with one’s limitations involves becoming conscious of them and exploring them in a counter-discourse, a reversal of hierarchies, as Spinks states (Spinks 183). Trickster then functions as the spirit of disorder, as a paradoxical figure because he both embodies the Other and the human being in general. As a narrative element, the trickster belongs to the realm of
41 the picaresque, resorting to comic inversion or evolutionary literary patterns (quest novels,
Bildungsroman, or transformation novels) (Spinks 185). But through their emphasis on
‘otherness’, trickster narratives also denounce the power exerted by dominant societies. They further show a self-reflexiveness which connects them to the postmodern and to Lacanian psychology, as Spinks explains:
The mirror stage of Lacan is parallel to the self-reflexiveness of both Trickster and his narratives. Also the Lacanian self in the mirror stage is a great deal like the Idiot Savant of Trickster; his ability to con and manipulate both animals and fellow human beings, in a way that is so transparent to the audience, is a kind of rhetorical genius which is parallel to the discovery processes of Trickster (Spinks 194).
This aspect of the trickster will receive prominent attention in this study. Indeed, the occurrence of the trickster figure in Atwood’s fictional worlds could be regarded as a necessary stage in the heroine’s awareness of her hybrid self. Indeed, this study proposes to interpret the familiar concept of Lacanian mirror stage as the moment when the “Other” becomes aware of his mimicry, of the way in which he diverges from the dominant model and of the necessity for him to admit his hybridity.
As to the meaning of the trickster figure in anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss provides an interpretation of the trickster as mediator between opposites (Lévi-Strauss 248-
250). Lévi-Strauss regards the trickster as a character of the utmost importance in myth because its function is to reconcile opposites, to resolve the insoluble conflict between life and death. His double nature – half human half divine – reconciles heaven and earth. A similar idea has been expressed by Lacan who equates the trickster with a saviour figure. Lévi-
Strauss thus emphasises the trickster’s hybrid nature: in Amerindian stories, the trickster is originally a carrion eater, halfway between the herbivore and the predator, mediating between
42 life and death. The trickster is therefore an ambiguous character, featuring a double form in some myths. This latter characteristic should dominate a study devoted to Margaret Atwood, because the double recurs as a motif in her work.
Finally, after having examined various definitions of the trickster, I choose to draw on
Lewis Hyde’s book, entitled Trickster Makes This World, in order to clarify my depiction of the Atwoodian trickster. Among the numerous characteristics of the trickster-figure as described in Hyde’s work, I personally focus on seven features which are common to all
Atwoodian tricksters: a voracious appetite, a need to travel, a talent for creative lying, a liking for disguise, a carnivalesque spirit of exuberance, a social position as outsider, and a role of cultural mediation. In each of Atwood’s novels, the reader encounters a figure who epitomises one or several of those features. Zenia, in The Robber Bride, for instance, possesses all these qualities: she displays a voracious sexual appetite which leads her to steal her friends’ husbands; her past – be it true or not – is made of errands in several countries; she deceives the other women with astonishing ease, changing identity and appearance at will; she is an ex- centric character who both shocks society and remains on the edge of it; yet, she is also the catalyst who brings about the other characters’ reflection on their own life. Other convincing trickster characters are Joan Foster in Lady Oracle, Grace Marks, Cordelia and Elaine in Cat’s
Eye, or Laura Chase in The Blind Assassin. Atwood’s own review of Hyde’s book2 provides us with an explanation for the importance of the trickster in her own work. Atwood calls the trickster an “ambiguous” character. She quotes Hyde who says that “trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world,” which, Atwood adds, is “the
2 Atwood “Masterpiece Theater” (Atwood Papers, Collection 335, Box 123, File 11:5).
43 underworld or the world of the imagination, or – in real-life terms – the unobtainable, the denied, the forbidden: other cultures, other nations, other forms of sexuality, other classes and races.” I contend that the importance of the trickster-figure in Atwood’s fiction lies in its propensity to open horizons, to transgress boundaries. Atwood calls the trickster “the opener of dreams, of roads, and of new possibilities” (Masterpiece Theater). As such, the trickster- character creates a world in which the hybrid colonial subject might find his place. Atwood’s heroines are mostly women in search of their place in society, women whose desires and hopes counteract patriarchal values. The sudden appearance of the trickster in their life, or the gradual discovery of their own trickster-like qualities, enables them to acknowledge their hybrid self, to find, at least for a moment, their place in society, while preserving their singularities.
2.3.4. Quest for Self / Quest for Hybridity? Getting Rid of One’s Masks
The concept of the heroine’s journey towards self-discovery is a trope in Atwoodian criticism.
While many studies of Atwood’s fiction have examined the various stages of the protagonist’s progress towards selfhood, none has devoted attention to the role of deception in this process.
Studies so far handle the protagonist’s severe fragmentation,3 her alter-egos,4 the way she deals with parental figures,5 or her epiphanies.6 Some, as mentioned before, deal with the heroine’s deceptive strategies, but none regard this deception as an integrated part of the quest
3 For an analysis of the protagonists’ fragmentation, see Sonia Mycak’s phenomenological interpretation of Atwood’s novels in In Search of the Split Subject : Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and the Novels of Margaret Atwood. 4 See Nora Foster-Stovel’s ECW essay “Reflections on Mirror Images : Double and Identity in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” and Shannon Hengen’s book, Margaret Atwood’s Power. 5 See Sherrill Grace’s article “In Search of Demeter : The Lost Silent Mother in Surfacing.” in VanSpanckeren and Castro’s Margaret Atwood : Vision and Forms. See also Shannon Hengen’s article in Literature and Psychology, “ ‘Your Father the Thunder, Your Mother the Rain’ : Lacan and Atwood.” and Sue Thomas’ article in ARIEL, “Mythic Reconception and the Mother/Daughter Relationship in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Surfacing’.” 6 See Ildiko de Papp-Carrington’s ECW essay, “Another Symbolic Descent.” and Carol Christ’s book Diving Deep and Surfacing : Women Writers on Spiritual Quest.
44 process. This study argues that deceptive behaviour constitutes a necessary stage in the heroine’s journey towards a discovery of her hybrid self.
This analysis of the quest pattern in Atwood’s fiction will be based on Annis Pratt’s study of the quest pattern in Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fictions. Indeed, Pratt develops a quest pattern which is exclusively female and which is considered in accordance with the long tradition situating Atwood in feminist criticism. She clearly identifies a series of novels as dealing with transformation, a category of primary importance in this study, transformation ability being one of the most largely acknowledged qualities of the trickster figure. Since an aspect of my thesis clearly involves the identification of trickster figures among Atwood’s heroines and secondary characters, this analysis chooses to rely on the theory about quest patterns which defines the novels as the expressions of a transformation archetype.
In her chapter entitled, “Novels of Rebirth and Transformation,” Pratt distinguishes five stages in the woman’s journey : first, splitting off from family, husbands, lovers, i.e. from society; second, the green world guide or token, where the heroine is helped to cross a threshold by an ordinary event, object or person, that is suddenly given epiphanic significance. It is at this point in the story that this study will examine the intervention of trickster-like secondary characters, who will function as guides or catalysts in the heroine’s search for her inner self. The third stage introduces the green-world lover, who may also be a trickster figure. He often features animal-like qualities and helps the heroine at a difficult stage of her discovery journey without imposing social constraints on her. In the fourth stage, the heroine confronts parental figures, often in the form of memories. And finally, the fifth stage brings about the heroine’s plunge into the unconscious. Concerning this last stage, while this study agrees with Pratt’s identification of woman as Other, it is not satisfied with her
45 description of the result of the journey for self-knowledge as one creating “transformed, androgynous, powerful human personalities out of socially devalued beings” (Pratt 137-143).
This analysis rather considers the quest as a confirmation of the heroine’s otherness, not as a resolution of her conflictual relationship with society.
Yet, another critical approach appeared to me as being of great importance to my topic, i.e. Molly Hite’s study of feminist narrative strategies in her book The Other Side of the
Story. When reading the title, we can already notice that Hite establishes the link between female narratives and the quality of “otherness”, a theme clearly articulated by Hite in her introduction. She considers female violations of conventions deliberate experiments designed to “articulate an ‘other side’ to the dominant stories of a given culture” (Hite 3). Hite thus states that the issue of “otherness” and its relation to the existing culture has been central in the works of many twentieth-century female writers. As an illustration of this concept, Hite proceeds by analysing several works by female writers, among which Margaret Atwood’s
Lady Oracle (Hite 127-167). Analysing the novel, Hite highlights the heroine’s inability to distinguish between dream, fantasy, fiction, hallucination, on the one hand, and reality, on the other, thereby emphasising the negative influence of male characters who “ignore, reduce, or rewrite her life to fit more socially sanctioned stories” (Hite 129). This seems to me one of the main reasons why Joan Foster is such an effective liar: fantasy dominates her construction of self so that she cannot live without it. This clearly establishes the link between the heroine’s almost pathological need to deceive, and her social position as “Other”. As to narrative techniques, Hite highlights the writer’s wish to make a parallel between the heroine’s false selves and the narrative structure, underlining the novel’s metafictional character when she writes:
46 This construction of the story requires the reader to pull the novel together by identifying and separating out the false portions : by assigning parts of the narrative to the ‘real’ fictional world, parts to the ‘fictions’ imbedded within the fiction, and parts to uncontrolled aspects of Joan’s imagination – as Joan’s dreams, hallucinations, or fantasies-out-of-control (Hite 130).
This clearly introduces Atwood’s own quality as a deceiver who tricks her readers into reconstructing the story as she wants. Hite further establishes the link with postcolonial theories, by concluding that contemporary feminist narratives are experimental and political, and that they are characterised by parodies, mimicries, and subversions (Hite 167), but she fails to explore these theories fully.
As to the link between the quest for selfhood and deception, we come to realise that each of Atwood’s heroines starts out as a deceiver who will progressively have to remove her disguises and put off her masks to be able to discover her hybrid quality. Deception, in this case, can be viewed as the protagonist’s protection against social constraints. Feeling unable to cope with social demands, the character’s solution is to pretend that she fits in, until her situation becomes totally uncontrollable. She then has to abandon her deceiver’s personality and engage on a quest for selfhood. The heroine is a character looking for a version of herself, which incorporates part of the requirements of life in a patriarchal society, in a word, a hybrid self, i.e., neither her former deceptive personality, nor the totally socially adapted self, because this latter remains impossible to obtain, considering the heroine’s state of ‘otherness’.
Yet, hybridity does not solve the character’s identity crisis by creating a mixture of what the woman was before and what she wishes to become. Being a hybrid, the individual remains
47 split, torn between two visions of life.7 As such, hybridity is thus not the aim of the individual’s process of individuation, but a significant moment, when the person’s difference, dislocation, alienation is recognised and may – or not – be built upon. Hybridity is also defined by Bhabha as “the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority)” (Bhabha 112). This notion of disavowal also encourages us to keep in mind that deception may also be exerted by society itself, and not necessarily by the Other. The author’s portrayal of deceptive social behaviour therefore also deserves careful analysis, because the individual is not the only one involved in deception, which makes deception and hybridity both appear as paradoxical phenomena. Indeed, hybridity is intrinsically paradoxical too: it is impossible for a character to display a hybrid quality at every moment of his life, because his “otherness” is pervasive and tends to show when he least expects it. Yet, at times, the character equally features a strong though momentary feeling of balance, which results from the temporary acknowledgement of his hybridity. The elusiveness of hybridity hampers the positive outcome of Atwood’s quests. Moreover, these quests must neither be oriented towards a discovery of Truth, because as I have shown in the part devoted to postmodernism, there is no single Truth, rather fleeting, temporary moments of in-betweenness. This reminds us of Jeanne Delbaere-Garant’s comment on the epiphanic value of magic realist moments. Indeed, she defines those events as: “a postmodernist equivalent to the epiphanic moments of the modernists” (Delbaere 261). Such magic realist
7 Or as Homi K. Bhabha puts it : “Hybridity has no such perspective of depth or truth to provide: it is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures, (…), in a dialectical play of ‘recognition’. The displacement from symbol to sign creates a crisis for any concept of authority based on a system of recognition: colonial specularity, doubly inscribed, does not produce a mirror where the self apprehends itself; it is always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the hybrid” (Bhabha, Location, 113-114).
48 moments can be regarded as hybrid because they happen when reality and fantasy momentarily merge. Indeed, magic realism consists in the coexistence of otherwise irreconcilable elements and is by definition momentary: suddenly two elements which in reality cannot possibly exist at the same time are put together, creating a moment of fantasy, during which everything is possible, including the reconciliation of opposites. Those hybrid moments of magic realism then allow the character to have some insight into his/her own hybridity and to survive (one of Atwood’s major recurring themes), at least for a while. These moments often provide readers with uncertainties, multi-layered plots, open endings and sometimes, but not always, temporary positive outcomes.
This study thus proposes to determine the importance of deception in the psychological portrayal of Atwood’s characters, while examining the postcolonial implications of the narrator’s unreliability. In the same context, it will also mention any metafictional intervention which denounces the characters’ deception or indicates that the writer herself is deceiving her readers. This aspect will be dealt with in close relation to the trickster motif, which, as will be demonstrated, pervades Atwood’s works I have chosen as case studies.
Through establishing a link between the condition of “Otherness” and the need to deceive in order to fit in or simply to survive, my thesis will show the postcolonial significance of the deception motif, on the one hand, by underlining all the instances when deception is only one of the necessary steps in a quest for a hybrid state, and, on the other hand, by showing that deception is often closely linked to parody and irony, and is, as such, part of a process of mimicry within the context of postcolonial resistance to patriarchal authority.
49
For this study, I have chosen to analyse the eleven novels published by Atwood at the time when I began working on my project. I consider novels as longer narratives, better suited for the study of the characters’ evolution and of the quest pattern. Within this corpus, I shall subsequently examine the topics mentioned above: metafictional comment and parodic intent, deception and mimicry strategies, moments of magic realism and its categories, trickster figures, questions of “otherness” and hybridity. I shall also observe how these issues influence the development of the quest pattern. In the course of my analysis, I shall also devote my attention to Atwood’s concern for ecology, in relation to the concept of hybridity, especially.
The study will deal with the novels in a chronological order, so as to bring to light the evolution that takes place in Atwood’s fiction. My analysis of Surfacing will examine deception in the novel as a survival strategy. Another early novel, Lady Oracle, will be studied with a special focus on the trickster, since this narrative displays Atwood’s first fully developed trickster figure. Subsequently, I shall argue that Atwood’s next novel, Life Before
Man, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid’s Tale should be studied together, because the three of them illustrate how to use deception in a subversive way. Further, I regard Atwood’s Cat’s
Eye and The Robber Bride as variations on the quest pattern. Both multiply the quest in order to underline the similarities in their various characters’ experiences. They also display
Atwood’s first truly dark trickster figures, Cordelia and Zenia. Then, I shall proceed with the analysis of Alias Grace, which I consider Atwood’s first positive vision of hybridity. In the section devoted to The Blind Assassin, I shall focus on the various levels of deception, whereas the last chapter of this study will address the themes of hybridisation and colonisation in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. But first, I intent to demonstrate the socially induced mimicry strategies and the traces of hybridity detectable in Atwood’s first novel, The
Edible Woman.
50 Chapter 1. The Edible Woman :
A Case of Socially Induced Deception.
“Perhaps this was another labyrinth of words, and if she said the wrong thing, took the wrong turning, she would suddenly find herself face to face with something she could not cope with” (140).
In my analysis of The Edible Woman, Atwood’s first novel written in 1969, I would like to highlight the role of deception as a socially induced phenomenon, i.e. as a necessary strategy for the heroine in order to be accepted as a member of Canadian society. Indeed, I regard the protagonist’s frequent use of deceptive utterances and action as a way of mimicking an ideal female personality, a woman who, both as a wife and a housewife, would correspond to society’s demands. Another interesting figure is Duncan, the young literary student, who eventually becomes her lover. This secondary character accompanies the heroine throughout her crisis and leads her on the way to selfhood. He does so by resorting to humour and by constantly lying, which also identifies him as a trickster figure, as does his clear connection with the realm of death. As such, this character also functions as a prominent figure in a postcolonial study of Atwood’s work, because, as a trickster figure, a marginal creature, he can reveal the hidden aspects of postcolonial society. He can draw the heroine’s attention to the role imposed on her by this society.
The young heroine, Marian McAlpin, works for a market-research company, shares a room with another girl called Ainsley, and is currently engaged to Peter, a successful lawyer.
As a job assignment, she must conduct some interviews for a beer survey and thus meets
51 Duncan, an eccentric graduate student. At the beginning, Marian clearly mimics the typical role of the dynamic working girl who will later settle down as a married woman, as society expects her to do. Yet, several episodes underline Marian’s rising discomfort and her need to escape from Peter’s paternalistic hold. Her behaviour becomes all the more irrational as Peter decides to propose to her. The prospect of being married causes Marian to become anorexic.
The reader then follows Marian through the streets of Toronto, in her desperate quest for selfhood. Duncan accompanies her as a kind of guide, although he remains quite distant and cynical in his comments on Marian’s escape. She eventually finds a cure to her illness: after her descent into the dark streets of the city and into her own personality, Marian decides to bake a cake made in her own image, which she offers Peter to eat, as a symbol for his wish to assimilate her. Recognising the symbolic meaning of the act, Peter refuses to get involved and leaves without touching the cake. Having found an answer to her dilemma, Marian eats part of the cake herself and offers what remains of it to Duncan, thus finding a compromise to these conflicting demands.
Marian, as Atwood’s first novelistic heroine, already turns out to be a gifted deceiver, since she is constantly forced to justify her strange behaviour and since these weird actions are nothing else than a concealed way of uttering her feeling of “otherness”. Moreover, throughout the novel, Marian seems to be constantly lying to herself, by resorting to a series of convenient lapses of memory. These lies deserve careful study from a psychological and social point of view. They can demonstrate that Marian’s quest for a status outside patriarchal values can be equalled with the colonised subject’s acknowledgement of his or her hybridity.
Marian constantly acts as a trickster, deceiving the other characters, but also herself.
52 Several critics have alluded to Marian’s deceptive behaviour, yet, none so far has linked this concept to those of mimicry and hybridity. Elspeth Cameron, for instance, has identified the symptoms of anorexia nervosa in the novel and states, as far as the character of
Marian is concerned: “she commences what will become a pattern of deceptive behaviour typical of anorexic patients” (Cameron “Faminity” 56). This study will further demonstrate that deception functions as a pattern in all Atwoodian novels, which serves to highlight the heroine’s hybridity. Still according to Cameron, “The Edible Woman is a psychodrama about autonomy: the difficulty of attaining it and the dire consequences of not assuming it”
(Cameron “Faminity” 67). However, this study also focuses on the reason why Marian shows so many difficulties in acquiring autonomy when contending that Marian’s passivity and subaltern position results from the colonised role into which consumption society imprisons her. Closer to the focus of this study, is Coral Ann Howells’ feminist reading of The Edible
Woman in relation to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Howells’ interpretation of the novel relies on the idea that Marian inflicts anorexia upon herself because “the female body becomes the site of victimisation, internal conflict and rebellion” (Howells, Margaret Atwood,
42). Such an interpretation relies on Friedan’s theories about “women suffering from fatigue, heart attacks and psychotic breakdowns, a catalogue of female hysterical illness induced by women’s attempts to conform to the (impossible and undesirable) codes of the feminine mystique” (Howells, Margaret Atwood, 42). This interpretation corroborates this study’s claim that Marian’s behaviour is part of a deceptive mimicry process exerted in order to adjust to social demands, and with its conclusion that such behaviour is doomed to failure because of woman’s hybrid position in modern society.
53
1. Metafictional Intertext and Irony
The Edible Woman contains numerous authorial interventions: indeed, Atwood often expresses her opinions through the words of her heroines or depicts secondary characters in a way which includes comment on social constraints. Authorial comment can assume various shapes: an indirect statement on secondary characters, who bear no name and represent social values; further, ironical mention of overtly patriarchal slogans and types of behaviour; and, most importantly, numerous literary allusions.
In the first chapter, for instance, the writer introduces “the lady down below” (13).
This secondary character significantly does not have a name of her own. Marian conveniently claims that she cannot remember her name, confessing that she must have a mental block about this person (13). This attitude is understandable, since the lady represents the voice of narrow-minded, bourgeois society. One should notice the difference which this lady establishes between Marian and Ainsley. Ainsley is clearly identified as the embodiment of evil, while Marian receives all the complaints because she has been judged as acceptable.
Marian expresses the belief that her clothes make all the difference, which implies that they function as a disguise – “a camouflage or protective colouration” (14), Atwood writes – which allows Marian to give society an appropriate image of herself, while her roommate Ainsley simply does not care. The discrepancy in the behaviour of the two women allows Atwood to induce comment on Marian’s relation to society and to achieve a more accurate characterisation.
54 Similarly, the characters of the “Office Virgins”, with their interchangeable names, aspirations and look, function as yet another criticism of society. They represent what Marian could become, were she to follow the indictments of society: a girl who desperately fears what people might say, a hypochondriac, or someone who rules out anything which might make her life slightly more complicated and interesting (22). These characteristics are all present in Marian in lesser proportions, and the reader will somehow witness Marian’s flirtation with and gradual moving away from them. Marian’s uneasiness at dealing with the
“Office Virgins” transpires at the end of chapter three when she confesses her reluctance to volunteer information to them about her private life (29).
The questionnaire, which Marian works on in chapter three, ironically conveys all the stereotypes of manly superiority. Atwood indubitably chose the type of questionnaire – listening to a beer commercial – and its target – male subjects as an eyewink to the reader, this category of macho beer drinkers constituting a far from ideal image of patriarchal power. The name of the beer – Moose – gives it a definite Canadian character, while several words in the commercial – “a real man’s holiday,” “manly flavour,” “hunting,” fishing” – establish it as a product exclusively designed for male consumers (26). Once again, the exaggerated manliness of the commercial functions as an ironical authorial comment on patriarchal values.
Metafictionality also characterizes Canada’s vision of the wilderness, which is repeatedly mentioned in an ironical tone. For example, when hearing the words “Tang of the wilderness” in the beer commercial (53), Duncan immediately embarks on the story of a dog, white hunters, Indians and a cruel trapper, clearly an Atwoodian allusion to the traditional stories associated with Canada. Indeed, one should keep in mind that three years after writing The
Edible Woman Atwood published her controversial book of criticism Survival, which precisely analyses this stereotyped vision of typically Canadian concepts such as the
55 Wilderness.1 Indeed, Duncan ends his description of Canadian wilderness with a dog buried in the snow (54), which Atwood identifies in Survival as one of the most common ways of dying in Canadian Literature.2
Chapter eleven features several ironic comments on Marian’s part, such as: “I’ve chopped Peter up into little bits. I’m camouflaging him as laundry and taking him down to bury him in the ravine” (92). These sentences, addressed to Ainsley, symptomatically allude to Marian’s quality as a trickster (camouflage), as well as to her wish to descent in to a ravine
(introspection). Moreover, the ironic statement also metaphorically expresses what constitutes the core of Marian’s problem: how to get rid of Peter, and of the false self which he forces her to endorse.
The novel can further be regarded as metafictional in its numerous allusions to other works of fiction. The writer here adopts a trickster-like attitude, indicating through a series of literary quotes that this novel might be more than the simple story of a working girl and inducing the reader to discover the subversive aspect of the novel. When involved in the free- association game of the beer questionnaire, Duncan interprets one of the words as alluding to
1 For interesting insight on the wilderness theme in Canadian literature, one might read the second chapter of Atwood’s book of criticism, Survival. In this second chapter entitled “Nature the Monster,” Atwood reflects on nature’s frequent use as a reflection of the protagonist interior landscape. Canadian wilderness is often depicted as dead, indifferent or frankly hostile and is almost always described as “winter landscape.” This constitutes the canon of nature as a distrusted element, one which did not live up to our expectations. Nature as divine or sublime entity can indeed never be achieved because of the existence of bugs, roots, swamps, dead or aggressive animals. The image of nature in Canadian literature constantly oscillates between an ideal and a horrific vision, an alternation which definitely results in a split, an alienated attitude towards wilderness. See Margaret Atwood’s Margaret, Survival (45-67). Atwood herself largely draws on Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden. 2 Similarly, in the second chapter of Survival, Atwood refers to death by nature, identifying drowning and freezing as the most common causes of death in Canadian literature. She stresses the omnipresence of snow in the Canadian landscape and explains its recurrence as a lethal weapon by the absence of other lethal elements. Yet, in her conclusion to the chapter, Atwood emphasises that nature appears as a monster if you fail to accept it as it is. As she concludes: “Snow isn’t necessarily something you die in or hate. You can also make houses in it”. (Atwood, Survival, 66).
56 cannibal stories, an ironical reference to the end of the novel and to its very title. The reader here senses the presence of authorial irony. The fact that Duncan is an undergraduate student in literature allows Atwood to quote through his words several works which share common themes with the novel, in this case, Boccaccio’s Decameron,3 Grimm’s tales4 and
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus5 (53). Indeed, these works all contain one or more allusions to form of cannibalism.
Irony and metafictional comment are equally present when Duncan describes his roommate Fish. Indeed, Fish wanted to write a thesis on womb symbols in D.H. Lawrence’s work (97). Yet, he seems to fail to produce any valid work and is himself sterile, both in his attitude to life and in his academic production. This is obviously Atwood’s own tongue-in- cheek comment on the academic world to which she belonged at the time. Moreover, the theme of sterility due to inappropriate social behaviour is one of those addressed throughout the novel.
Yet, the most obvious case of metafictional intervention in the novel takes place in chapter twenty-two, which features Marian’s dinner with Duncan and his roommates. During this dinner, the reader discovers Fish’s theories on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland,
3 The ninth story of The Decameron’s fourth day, entitled “The Eaten Heart,” once again alludes to cannibalism, in the form of a betrayed husband who feed his wife with her lover’s heart. 4 For an outlined discussion of the relationship between Grimm’s fairy tales and The Edible Woman, see Sharon Wilson’s analysis of the novel in chapter three of Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Wilson establishes the link between the novel and Grimm’s The Robber Bridegroom and Fitcher’s Bird. Both tales feature a groom who kills and eats his brides. Wilson analyses the novel’s food metaphors and its fabulation tone. She also mentions the importance of the disguise motif and the heroine’s trickster-like qualities, which characterise both the novel and the tales. (Wilson, Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, 82-96). 5 The quotation from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is undoubtedly a reference to the end of the novel. The symbolical cake at the end of The Edible Woman may indeed be regarded as a metafictional echo of the dish eaten by the Queen of Goths and in which Titus has cooked her son’s limbs. The dish as an instrument of revenge works as a powerful symbol in both works. (Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Act V, Scene 3).
57 which here functions as a metaphor for Marian and for the novel as a whole.6 The passage reads as follows:
Of course everybody knows Alice is a sexual-identity-crisis book (…) What we have here, if you only look at it closely, this is the little girl descending into the very suggestive rabbit-burrow, becoming as it were pre-natal, trying to find her role (…) as a Woman. (…) Patterns emerge. One sexual role after another is presented to her but she seems unable to accept any of them, I mean she’s really blocked. She rejects Maternity when the baby she’s been nursing turns into a pig, nor does she respond positively to the dominating-female role of the Queen and her castration cries of “Off with his head!” (…), you’ll recall she goes to talk with the Mock-Turtle, enclosed in his shell and his self-pity, a definitely pre-adolescent character (…) she is accused of being a serpent, hostile to eggs, you’ll remember, a rather destructively-phallic identity she indignantly reject; and her negative reaction to the dictatorial Caterpillar, just six inches high, importantly perched on the all-to-female mushroom which is perfectly round but which has the power to make you either smaller or larger than normal, I find that particularly interesting. (…) So anyway she makes a lot of attempts but she refuses to commit herself, you can’t say that by the end of the book she has reached anything that can be definitely called maturity (193- 194).
Atwood once again reveals a trickster-like attitude: she overtly alludes to Alice in
Wonderland, in order to bring her readers to draw a parallel between, Marian, her protagonist, and Carroll’s Alice. When reading Fish’s analysis of Alice in Wonderland, one cannot help making a parallel with Marian. First presented as an immature girl, Marian is shown oscillating between different sexual roles such as future bride and old maid. Her rejection of maternity pervades the book, and Clara’s nursed infant Arthur might here easily function as the baby turning into a pig. Indeed, as he is often referred to as hiding excrement around the house. The dominating female role reminds us of Mrs Bogue who heartlessly manages the department. Even the Mock-Turtle, with his tendency towards self-pity appears as a plausible
6 For a full analysis of the Carrollian intertext in The Edible Woman, see David L. Harkness’ article “Alice in Toronto: The Carrollian intertext in The Edible Woman” (Harkness, 103-111). Harkness associates Duncan both to the Mock Turtle for his mournful state of mind and to the White Rabbit for his role as a leader in Marian’s descent.
58 equivalent of Duncan, while the Caterpillar, as a phallic symbol, would here represent Peter.
The serpent’s hostility towards eggs is a clear allusion to Len Slank’s disgust for them, immediately followed by Marian’s refusal to eat them. Moreover, Fish’s conclusions about the novel, namely that the heroine fails to acquire maturity, are also highly applicable to
Marian at the end of The Edible Woman. The whole passage should therefore be read both as a key for the interpretation of the novel and its ending, and as Atwood’s ironical comment on literary criticism.
Yet, there is more to the relationship between Alice and Marian: Alice in Wonderland offers an image of a binary society divided between the strong and the weak,7 or in
Atwoodian terms, the victors and the victims. Marian definitely shows the attitude of a person who seeks to escape victimhood, a position which is very similar for the colonial subject’s need to have a voice of his own. While Marian desperately tries to belong to the stronger social group by controlling her eating habits, one cannot help noticing that she is literally devoured by Peter.
Apart from all the possible interpretations in relation to the Carrollian intertext, one should also keep in mind that Atwood here plays with the reader. This becomes obvious when she subsequently dismisses this passage of literary criticism through the words of Duncan’s other roommate, who comments: “I don’t approve of that kind of criticism myself (…) The
7 For a complete analysis of the food metaphor in relation to the Carrollian intertext, see Mervyn Nicholson’s 1987 article in Mosaic: “Food and Power: Homer, Carroll, Atwood and Others.” When alluding to Marian’s position in Canadian society, Nicholson clearly identifies her as “one who is eaten”, in opposition to Peter, her patriarchal fiancé, to whom she literally offers herself in the form of a perfectly edible cake at the end of the novel (Nicholson M. 48).
59 very latest approach to Alice is just to dismiss it as a rather charming children’s book” (194-
195). Fish’s later choice of a thesis topic which deals with poetry regarded as a form of pregnancy (198), ironically restates one of the novel’s main theme, namely women’s role in society. Once again, Atwood skilfully makes use of metafictional comment to highlight the novel’s predicaments. Metafiction is thus largely exploited in this novel in order to provide authorial intervention and irony8: Atwood’s trickster-like voice can indeed be recognised in her tongue-in-cheek description of so-called respectable women as secondary characters, in her ironical choice of over-patriarchal details, such as beer commercials and in her literary allusions, which all draw the reader’s attention to the protagonist subaltern position in postcolonial society.
2. Marian’s Mimicry Mania
Marian’s position as a woman, and therefore as a subaltern person in patriarchal society induces her to adopt mimicry as a general way of governing her in everyday life. This results in her obvious attempts to control every element of her life, including her food consumption, and to display a personal image which might correspond to what society wishes her to become, i.e. a respectable wife. Marian’s situation is further echoed by two other characters,
Ainsley and Duncan, who both resort to deception to conceal their ex-centric position in society.
A series of episodes underline Marian’s attempt to show that she keeps her life under control, a situation which causes her to resort to numerous deceptive strategies. From
8 Pamela S. Bromberg, in VanSpanckeren’s book, also briefly alludes to the satiric intent in Atwood’s depiction of literary discourse (Bromberg 13).
60 Marian’s first comment in the novel, “I know I was all right on Friday when I got up” (11), the reader easily understands that the heroine wishes to have complete control over her life, and therefore already suspects that this first assertion might be nothing more than a façade.
This impression is later reinforced by the numerous allusions to camouflage whenever
Marian’s clothes and make-up are referred to: in the first chapter, Ainsley says that Marian chooses her clothes as “camouflage or protective colouration” (14). Indeed, they allow Marian to be accepted by the landlady as a respectable girl.
The reader also learns that Marian conveniently uses deception at several times in the novel: she mentions that she was the one that managed to get the flat while Ainsley affected an innocent look (15). This demonstrates that both characters easily indulge in deception in order to obtain something that society would otherwise refuse them. Likewise, when it comes to introducing alcohol in the flat, Marian once again confesses disguising the bottles as groceries in order not to get into trouble (15). While she admits that nothing is clearly forbidden, she consequently feels as though everything she does will be criticised (16), a clear way of expressing her uneasiness about society’s demands and expectations.
Peter’s proposal to Marian will result in another kind of deceptive behaviour on her part. Indeed, while trying to meet society’s requirements in accepting to become a married woman, Marian still features a feeling of “otherness,” which she attempts to reduce to silence.
Therefore, Marian extensively resorts to self-deception, pretending to act as she wants to. The author draws our attention to the fact that Marian acts against her own will by emphasising the distance between mind and body. Indeed, the reader has the feeling that someone else has taken over Marian’s body and that she is watching the scene from a remote place, without any personal involvement. When Peter, for example, asks her to set a date for their marriage,
61 Marian thinks: “My first impulse was to answer (…) “What about Groundhog Day?” But instead I heard a soft flanelly voice I barely recognized, saying, “I’d rather have you decide that. I’d rather leave the big decisions up to you.” (…) The funny thing was I really meant it”
(90). The episode stresses Marian’s self-deception, as well as her attempt to endorse a role imposed on her by patriarchal society, that of the obedient wife. Marian goes on deceiving herself in the next chapter when she pretends that her decision to marry Peter was guided by an unconscious desire (101). She consequently refuses to acknowledge what happened at the laundromat – kissing Duncan – as the expression of her own wishes. She rejects the whole scene as “a kind of lapse, a blank in the ego, like amnesia” (103), and totally dismisses
Duncan – whose name she does not even know at the time.
Later, while getting ready for the party which takes place at Peter’s, Marian stresses the disguise-like quality of her clothing and make-up. Of the latter, one reads : “Marian had always thought that on her own body these things looked extra, stuck to her surface like patches and posters” (209). Similarly, when she has her hair done, she looks at the mirror and says: “it’s a little – um – extreme for me”, thinking that it makes her look like a call-girl
(210). When looking at herself in Ainsley’s hand-mirror later at the party, her total estrangement from herself is once again stated: “Marian stared into the egyptian-lidded and outlined and thickly-fringed eyes of a person she had never seen before. She was afraid even to blink, for fear that this applied face would crack and flake with the strain” (222). Even when fleeing from the party, Marian counts “on her dress to act as a protective camouflage”
(245).
These examples indicate that Marian resorts to mimicry to resemble what society – here Peter – wants her to be, i.e. a flamboyant, sexually self-assertive woman. She repeatedly
62 states that her appearance is fake, yet Peter symptomatically expresses his wish to see Marian dressed like that everyday (228-229). Only Duncan, when he arrives at the party, reacts in a way that confirms Marian’s feelings and comments: “You didn’t tell me it was a masquerade9
(…) Who the hell are you supposed to be?” (239), stressing at once Marian’s deceptive attitude and her complicity in what is taking place at the party. Symptomatically, Duncan asks
Marian to take off her make-up before having sexual intercourse with her (253). When he further offers her to escape, Marian has “a vision of the red dress disintegrating in mid-air, falling in little scraps behind her” (260) – which indicates that this kind of clothing does not correspond to Marian’s inner nature. Indeed, this is one more example of Marian’s recurring attempts to comply with society’s desires.
Marian moves a step further into her mimicry strategy when she resorts to all kinds of lies to convince both the other characters and herself of her willingness to satisfy social requirements. This is made apparent in several episodes alluding to Marian’s relationships with her family. Marian’s reaches the top of her mimicry process in chapter twenty, when she visits her family to prepare for the wedding: she then mentions their satisfaction at the idea of her wedding, while alluding to her remoteness from them. Indeed, Marian’s comment on her family’s reaction is both highly comic and a clear expression of the deception she is inflicting upon herself:
9 In her book Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, Eleonora Rao provides an interesting interpretation of the party in terms of Irigaray’s psychoanalytical theories. Quoting Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One, she comments: “The masquerade represents the moment in which women try to ‘recuperate some elements of desire, to participate in man’s desire, but at the price of renouncing their own. In the masquerade, they submit to the dominant economy of desire in an attempt to remain ‘on the market’ in spite of everything.’ For a woman this movement signifies the “entry into a system of values which is not hers, and in which she can ‘appear’ and circulate only when enveloped in the needs/desires/fantasies of others, namely, men’ ” (Rao, Strategies, 136).
63
Their reaction though, as far as she could estimate the reactions of people who were now so remote from her, was less elated glee than a quiet, rather smug satisfaction, as though their fears about the effects of her university education, never stated but always apparent, had been calmed at last. They had probably been worried she would turn into a high-school teacher or a maiden aunt or a dope addict or a female executive, or that she would undergo some shocking transformation, like developing muscles and a deep voice or growing moss. She could picture the anxious consultations over cups of tea. But now, their approving eyes said, she was turning out all right after all (174).
Apart from its comic enumeration of old maid stereotypes, which, as is often the case with
Atwood, are exaggerated to the point of becoming grotesque, the passage equally makes clear that Marian’s role as a bride-to-be, is utterly remote from her real aspirations and can be regarded as a mere attempt to mimic what society expects her to become. Therefore, her behaviour can also be regarded as a good example of self-deception. Significant is also the fact that Marian mentions her difficulty to remember the wedding arrangements chosen by her family members (174).
Secondary characters are equally used by the author in order to echo Marian’s difficulty to fit in. Marian’s roommate, Ainsley, for example, equally displays deceptive attitudes in order to correspond to what society – and men – wish her to be. From the very start, Ainsley is shown lying to one of her dates: she confesses to Marian that she had to undergo a boring dinner with a dentist and that she did not let him know that she was working in the same business, in order not to intimidate him (12). Marian further suspects Ainsley of lying when she narrates the story of a woman who tried to murder her husband by short- circuiting his electric toothbrush (23). Apart from the comical effect of the anecdote, this element of the story contains deeper meaning since it suggests the elimination of patriarchal power. Ainsley will further resort to deception in her multiple attempts to seduce Len Slank:
64 indeed, she will make him believe in her innocence (67), while she voluntarily tries to become pregnant. Yet, in chapter fourteen, Ainsley, now eager to become pregnant, feels trapped in her role of a naive young girl (119). Marian equally has to keep silent. Indeed, she fears that if she tells Peter about Ainsley’s plan, he will side with Len out of male solidarity (120).
Deception may thus prove dangerous to play with. Indeed, Marian is well aware of her own complicity as regards Ainsley’s trap : she has repeatedly served as an alibi to make Ainsley’s
“innocent girl” image more credible, remaining silent, for instance, when Ainsley claims that the bottle of alcohol found in the apartment belongs to Marian (121).
Duncan also uses deception: indeed, another form of mimicry shows up when Duncan and Marian are depicted together trying to conceal the real nature of their relationship. Once they decide to become lovers, they must find a place to meet and contemplate the idea of renting a hotel room, deceiving people in pretending that they are a married couple. Duncan highlights the ludicrous nature of this lie: “They’d never believe it (…) I don’t look married.
They’re still asking me in bars whether I’m sixteen yet” (202). Such a comment, further echoed in the novel (202, 248), clearly serves to emphasise the ridicule of the situation and of social convention as a whole.
This desperate situation also stresses the difficulty facing the hybrid subject who is forced to resort to mimicry strategies in order to fit in. After being confronted to this problem,
Marian undergoes a change in her general attitude and starts wondering whether her situation will ever improve. This radical change can be spotted at the beginning of chapter twenty-two, which reads : “Ever since this thing had started she had been trying to pretend there was nothing really wrong with her, it was a superficial ailment, like a rash; it would go away. But now she had to face up to it; she had wondered whether she ought to talk to someone about it”
65 (203). This passage indicates both that Marian is tired of being engaged in a mimicry strategy, and that she is ready to proceed in her quest. She thus can examine the unconscious processes behind her strange behaviour. She then starts examining some of the female role which society might offer her, and discovers that she is deeply afraid of changing without being conscious of it (206). When she later tries to test her normality by trying to eat half of Peter’s cake (207-208) – a symbol of their future situation as a married couple – the failure of the test confirms her ‘abnormality’ and stresses the need for her to face her problem.
These examples demonstrate that Marian, in her relationships to her fiancé, to her family, to her friends, such as Ainsley, or to strangers – after all, she barely knows Duncan and his roommates – displays a whole range of deceptive strategies indicating she is engaged in a mimicry process. This technique enables her to provide the outside world with an acceptable image of her, although it does not function as a reflection of her alienated inner self. It therefore causes her environment to acquire a fantastic, grotesque quality, which will be discussed in the next section.
3. Making Sense of Magic Realist Moments
The Edible Woman is primarily articulated as a realistic plot. Yet, some elements of magic realism are introduced through the heroine’s consciousness. They serve to convey her feeling of “otherness”, her pervasive and devastating sensation of not fitting in. Magic realist elements are indeed of the utmost importance in a postcolonial work, because they enable marginality to find its place among a perfectly articulated set of patriarchal rules. They constitute an opportunity for the heroine to become aware of her ex-centric position and, as
66 such, they represent a possible twist in the story, a moment of revelation, of epiphany, which makes a different outcome possible and offers the heroine an escape from social constraints.
Magic realist moments are often characterised by their grotesque quality,10 which stresses the discrepancy between the heroine’s inner vision of herself and society’s expectations. Their first appearance in the book highlights Marian’s marginality, drawing a parallel with the character of Leonard Slank, also immediately recognisable as an outsider. They further stress
Marian’s growing feelings of discomfort by attributing a grotesque quality to everyday objects, such as bathtubs, tears, dolls, razorblades; ordinary people, such as a pregnant woman, or usually safe places, such as hospitals wards, parties, bedrooms or bathrooms. Such occurrences of magic realist moments become more frequent as the heroine acquires understanding of her inner conflicts: from disparate moments in Part One, they become utterly pervasive in the second section of the novel. Yet, contrary to what has often been written about the novel, I contend that such elements of magic realism perfectly make sense from the point of view of the alienated “Other.”
The first element of magic realism occurs when Marian is requested to sign the company’s Pension Plan. This compulsory step causes Marian’s feeling of panic: she immediately fantasises on the magic value of her signature, which will bind her for the future and transform her into a pre-formed self, which will work for Seymour Surveys ever after. A simple signature here functions as a lethal trap (21). The grotesque quality of this daydreaming sequence emphasises Marian’s rising discomfort with her job and with her position as a female worker within the patriarchal business world. While the Pension Plan constitutes a real problem for Marian, she remains unable to mention it to Ainsley because she would not understand Marian’s distress (30), a sign that Marian, though giving the appearance of a well-balanced girl, feels ill-at-ease and marginal.
10 See Delbaere’s definition of grotesque magic realism (Delbaere, Magic Realism, 256).
67
In chapter five, Ainsley express her wish to become a mother, as a way of reaching
“wholeness” (41). From then on, the novel will be punctuated by Ainsley’s desperate attempts at finding a father for her baby in the person of Len Slank. The grotesque character of
Ainsley’s search for a male and the implausibility of her courtship and seduction tactics give the novel a fantastic atmosphere which renders Marian’s quest more plausible. In Atwood’s plots, the function of such farcical and grotesque elements is to make other, more profound moments of consciousness possible. As such, Ainsley’s quest for a genitor parallels and works as a foil to Marian’s quest for selfhood. The grotesque character of Ainsley’s action therefore remains acceptable in a realistic plot development. Moreover, I agree with Coral Ann
Howells’ interpretation of the relationship between Len and Ainsley (Howells, Margaret
Atwood, 45): Ainsley’s duplicity in her attempts to seduce Leonard Slank, himself well- known for seducing too young girls, enables Atwood to expose the dynamics of sexual politics while giving the whole plot a comic aspect through its reversal of a traditional situation. The surreal elements in Ainsley and Len’s relationship can thus be regarded as a denunciation of the deceptive aspect of sexual power politics.
Magic realism also serves another purpose: it stresses the parallel between Marian and
Len who both are unable to cope with the demands of society. Len vehemently expresses his refusal to become a father in a grotesque magic realist scene in which eggs turn out to be unborn little chicken (160). The reader then comes to understand that the character of Len, with his sudden inability to eat eggs, functions as a caricature of Marian and of her social inadequacy.
68 Several scenes bring together apparently unrelated elements. These kinds of free associations give these scenes a magic realist quality: an element is suddenly retrieved from its ordinary context, and given a different, epiphanic value. Often, the association of singular elements seems so unexpected that it acquires a grotesque quality, which is also typical of magic realism. A typically grotesque moment features Marian’s thoughts when having sexual intercourse with Peter in the bathtub. Being confronted to Peter’s totally unexpected desire,
Marian lets her imagination run free and soon associates the bathtub to a coffin, imagining the lovers’ tragic death by drowning (60). The whole scene, set in an unreal atmosphere typical of magic realism, is significantly followed by a moment of lucidity. Marian suddenly wonders what she actually represents for Peter (62). This interpretation of the event throws light on what bothers Marian most in her relationship with Peter, namely that he could actually take over her personality and make all important decisions for her.
Marian’s loss of control and growing alienation are further alluded to in the episode of the dinner with Len, during which Marian’s rising discomfort causes her to start crying. The description of her breakdown shows once again a truly magic realist character, since the teardrop is first identified as an external object, which has nothing to do with Marian’s body.
Here then, magic realism is resorted to in order to stress Marian’s instability and self- rejection. The passage reads as follows: “After a while I noticed with mild curiosity that a large drop of something wet had materialized on the table near my hand. I poked it with my finger and smudged it around a little before I realized with horror that it was a tear. I must be crying then!” (70). Marian feels clearly estranged from her own body, since she initially fails to recognise the teardrops as her own. The bizarre quality of such an acknowledgement gives the whole dinner scene an unreal, magic realist atmosphere which underlines Marian’s hybrid position.
69
The same unreal atmosphere can be noticed during Marian’s escape, which the author chooses to describe as a chase (72-74) and to her ultimate attempt to hide from Peter’s threatening proposal. After Marian sedately followed Peter to Len’s apartment, she suddenly decides to hide under the bed. This place functions both as a site of regression and reflection.
Indeed, Marian first alludes to the isolation and safety of her hiding place: “the semi-darkness, tinted orange by the filter of the bedspread that curtained me on all four sides, and the coolness and the solitude were pleasant (…) I felt I was underground, I had dug myself a private burrow. I felt smug” (76). The description of the party from under the bed, gives it an unreal atmosphere, since all lights and sounds are faded. Yet, the hiding place turns out to be not so comfortable since Marian comes to realise that she is stuck underneath that bed. First happy to be concealed from everyone, she gradually feels ridiculous and resents being left alone, which brings her to reflect on her relationship with Peter and on the necessity to make a decision. The way in which Marian remains stuck under the bed and must be helped by her friends to come out appears ludicrous. It simultaneously allows the author to mention Peter’s superior attitude to Marian and his complete misunderstanding of her discomfort. The whole scene can therefore be regarded as one more allusion to Marian’s inadequacy. While the reader then expects Marian to reject Peter’s proposal, she surprisingly accepts to marry him.
Marian thinks that marriage will bring a solution to her problems. However, her discomfort will from then on become greater and her rising awareness of her hybridity will be made visible through the numerous incursions of magic realist moments in the second part of the novel.
While magic realism is present in Part One in the form of some unexpected, disparate episodes, it becomes more pervasive in the second part of the novel. Chapter thirteen
70 significantly starts with Marian’s elaborate fantasies to retrieve the customers’ used razorblades. Marian’s plot about a miraculous razorblade (107) might well be an indication to the reader that, from now on, other bizarre event will punctuate the story, mainly because of
Marian’s hybrid state. Symptomatically, the passage is immediately followed by an allusion to Duncan, who, if we indeed regard him as a trickster figure, quite logically appears during moments of revelation, i.e. moments of magic realism.
When confronted to situations which utterly frighten her, such as Clara’s pregnancy,
Marian reacts by letting her imagination dominate, which results in magic realist descriptions of otherwise totally realistic characters. Such is the case when Clara’s delivery is mentioned:
Marian suddenly indulges in fantasies, viewing Clara as a gigantic queen-ant (115), another instance of grotesque magic realism here caused by Marian’s colourful imagination. This episode clearly indicates both Marian’s estrangement from the idea of pregnancy, as well as her rejection of the role imposed on women by society. It is therefore symptomatic of
Marian’s hybrid position.
Marian’s fantasies about the “horrible Underwear Man” who bothers some of the company’s interviewees also possess this grotesque, unreal and unexpected quality. They are aimed at denouncing the danger of society’s demands and excesses (117). Marian even imagines that the Underwear Man is no else than Peter, whose personality she fails to understand (118). Once again, all this takes place in the realm of fantasy rather than reality, which indicates that Marian does not totally fit in reality.
71 Magic realism becomes ever more prevailing when Marian leaves the hospital where she visits Clara to go to Duncan’s. The setting – hospital and city – is described as a labyrinth, from which Marian finds it difficult to escape. This frightening experience sounds as follows:
By the time she had got matters straightened out with Peter she had felt as though she had been trying to unsnarl herself from all the telephone lines in the city. They were prehensile, they were like snakes, they had a way of coiling back on you and getting you all wrapped up (…) She stopped and looked around. Wherever else she was going it was not towards the main exit. She had been so involved in the threads of her own plans and reflections that she must have got off the elevator on the wrong floor. She was in a corridor exactly the similar to the one she had just come from, except that all the room-doors were closed (134- 135).
This description of Marian’s progress through the hospital takes on all its magic realist quality because it echoes her own state of mind: she is utterly confused and does not know what to make of her life; all doors, all opportunities seem unattainable to her; ordinary elements taken from her usual environment are therefore given a grotesque, aggressive attitude. Thus, they make Marian aware of what goes wrong with her, to bring her perceive and understand her own hybrid state.
From all the examples above, it is clear that magic realism is symptomatic of Marian’s growing awareness. It indicates that she is about to take a step which will bring her a little further on her quest. The most obvious example of this takes place when Marian takes a bath while getting prepared for Peter’s party, which constitutes the novel’s climax. Watching the silvery taps, Marian suddenly notices “a curiously-sprawling pink thing” (218), which she symptomatically does not recognise at once as her own body. This, of course, indicates her ever growing feeling of alienation. Indeed, when she is described getting out of her bath, her feelings read as follows : “Looking down, she became aware of the water, (…) and of the
72 body that was sitting in it, somehow no longer quite her own. All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle”
(218). While this passage expresses the heroine’s fear, it does not sound purely magic realist.
Yet, the bath scene develops into a typically magic realist moment when the heroine watches her childhood dolls reveal their malevolent nature: “The two dolls which she had never thrown out after all were staring blankly back at her from the top of the dresser. As she looked at them their faces blurred, then re-formed, faintly malevolent (…) But now that she examined their faces more closely she could see that it was only the dark one, the one wit the peeling paint, that was definitely watching her” (219). And further:
She saw herself in the mirror between them for an instant as though she was inside them, inside both of them at once, looking out: herself, a vague damp form in a rumpled dressing- gown, not quite focussed, the blonde eyes noting the arrangement of her hair, her bitten fingernails, the dark one looking deeper, at something she could not quite see, the two overlapping images drawing further and further away from each other; the centre, whatever it was in the glass, the thing that held them together, would soon be quite empty. By the strength of their separate visions they were trying to pull her apart (219).
Such passage emphasises the heroine’s growing alienation, as well as the sufferings caused to her by social constraints, here symbolised by the discrepancies in the dolls’ visions, which literally tear the heroine apart. Attributing to objects the deeds and feelings of human beings, and, in this case, supernatural powers which they can exert on the heroine, once again constitutes an example of grotesque magic realism. It is designed to emphasise the protagonist’s growing awareness of her split condition as a woman trying to satisfy paternalistic claims.
Marian’s feelings of alienation resulting from her hybrid nature are equally emphasised in a magic realist moment of epiphany taking place at Peter’s party, right before
73 her flight. Indeed, Marian first imagines herself wandering through endless corridors – a labyrinthine image, once again – in search for the real Peter. When she seems to be convinced of his harmless nature, she decides to turn back to the party, but experiences a strange feeling:
She was back in Peter’s living room with the people and the noise, leaning against the doorframe holding her drink. Except that the people seemed even clearer now, more sharply focussed, further away, and they were moving faster and faster, they were all going home, a file of soapwomen emerged from the bedroom, coats on, they teetered jerkily out the door trailing husbands, chirping goodnights, and who was that tiny two-dimensional figure in a red dress, posed like a paper woman in a mail-order catalogue, turning and smiling, fluttering in the white empty space… This couldn’t be it; there had to be something more. She ran for the next door, yanked it open (243).
This passage masterly expresses Marian’s utter feeling of despair. Indeed, the mimicry process in which she is engaged has clearly transformed her into a voiceless, isolated, alienated individual, echoing the fate of the colonised subject as well. Marian’s situation echoes the colonised subject’s lack of dimension in a society in which he cannot find his place, due to his hybrid nature. The passage therefore results in Marian’s ultimate flight, as a symbol of the hybrid subject’s search for an acceptable place in society. Indeed, Peter’s subsequent act of taking a photograph of her echoes the coloniser’s wish to take possession of the colonised subject, and is as such unbearable to Marian.
The notion of nonsense has frequently been associated to The Edible Woman. Glenys
Stow claims that the novel’s nonsensical environment serves to undermine the destructive potentialities of traditional female roles (Stow 90). Of the novel, Stow writes: “The lens of apparent distortion gives an unfocussed dreamlike effect to many of its hilarious but menacing events” (Stow 91). In contrast, I interpret those elements regarded by Stow as nonsensical, as ingredients of grotesque magic realism. As such, they perfectly make sense in relation to the novel’s themes. Indeed, I assert that the dreamlike atmosphere of magic realist moments is
74 precisely used by Atwood to highlight the discrepancies between Marian’s hybrid notion of woman’s place on the one hand, and social demands on the other. As such, magic realism thus plays a major part in staging the novel’s power politics: every time an element seems unexpected or incongruous amid a description, a more thorough examination of its symbolic implications or of the feelings which it generates in the protagonist’s minds generally brings the reader to the conclusion that this element is not nonsensical at all. This is especially true if we consider it from the point of view of the character’s ex-centric position, i.e. if we make the effort of acknowledging the voice of the “Other.” Yet, one must keep in mind that the heroine might be unable to reach this awareness on her own, and needs the help of a trickster figure to do so.
4. Marian and Duncan as Tricksters
Throughout the novel, Atwood regularly points at Marian’s need to trick and deceive her environment. The possibility of interpreting Marian as a trickster figure is briefly hinted at by
Sharon Wilson in Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, when she compares Marian to the fairy-tale character of Gretel (Wilson 95). Yet, Wilson fails to produce a thorough analysis of this contention.
In the first chapter, she is described as wearing clothes as camouflage (14), and lying to “the lady down below” in order to rent the flat (16). Marian will not hesitate to lie to “the lady down below” to cover up for Ainsley who brought Len into their flat (126). These first elements are reinforced in chapter two, set in Marian’s office. There, the reader gets acquainted with Marian’s job and soon comes to understand that part of this job involves deception and concealment. Indeed, Marian’s function is to design questionnaires to test the
75 consumers’ reactions to products. This kind of work clearly establishes Marian’s desire to fit in society, since she is complicit with society’s consumption ethics. The company functions as a microcosm of society: it expresses a desire to make people adapt to social requirements.
Through her position in the company, Marian is described as naturally involved in a process which maintains these social prerogatives and makes them powerful.11 Yet, Marian soon comes to question her role at Seymour Surveys: realising that her position as a woman prevents her from obtaining a better, more interesting and creative job within the company
(17), she understands that this job will never totally satisfy her, worse, when the accountant urges her to submit to the Pension Plan and stresses the compulsory character of this step,
Marian becomes clearly reluctant to spend her whole career in this company (18).
Another episode at the beginning of the novel reveals Marian’s trickster-like attitude.
At the end of chapter three, Marian must answer a letter from an angry consumer who found a fly in her cereal. The exaggerated way in which Marian flatters the client in her reply as well as her deliberate avoidance of the word “fly” indicate that deception is actually part of her job and that, as such, she must have learned to master the process. After writing her draft, Marian symptomatically comments: “The main thing, I knew, was to avoid calling the housefly by its actual name” (28). Marian makes further use of deception when looking for interviewees.
When confronted to a man who advocates tolerance and blames her for drinking alcohol, she answers that her company does not sell the product (46). Although this is true, she fails to admit that the use of her questionnaire is to make the beer commercial more effective: as such her work clearly participates in the selling process and even constitutes a main component of it. Similarly, when confronted to the problem of a sanitary napkin survey, one of her colleagues argues that they must convince the interviewer to do her best “to better the lot of
11 As Elspeth Cameron claims in her article on anorexia nervosa in The Edible Woman: “Pressures to conform are implied by the manipulative techniques of Seymour surveys” (Cameron, “Faminity,” 48).
76 Womankind” (109), in order to have the survey done. Once again, this attitude indicates that deception lies at the core of Marian’s job, and is therefore fully integrated in her personality.
The narrator significantly concludes that Marian is “tired, tired, tired of being a manipulator of words” (110)!
She once again tricks people when she convinces her colleagues, the “Office Virgins”, to attend Peter’s party, pretending that there will be several handsome bachelors present
(220). She subsequently contemplates the idea of not informing Peter about the presence of supplementary guests, but refrains from deceiving him again (226). Peter nevertheless resents the presence of these unknown guests as a sign of Marian’s unconfessed secrets. He feels she is not entirely devoted to him.
Marian further functions as a deceiver in her relationship to others. When Len Slank informs about the nature of her relationship with Peter, she says that it is not serious (39), lying to Len, but also to herself, as she refuses to admit the coming development: Peter’s proposal. She further works as an accomplice when Ainsley wants to give Len the impression that she is a very young girl, whom he could easily seduce. Indeed, Marian comments : “I was furious with Ainsley. She had put me in an awkward position. I could either give the game away by revealing she had been to college and was in fact several months older than me, or I could keep silent and participate in what amounted to a fraud” (67). Although Marian expresses her anger at the situation, she will nevertheless keep the same attitude throughout the novel and indeed take part in Len’s downfall. Apart from showing Marian’s willingness to resort to deception, the episode further entails that Marian will choose female solidarity.
Moreover, Ainsley’s deception, with Marian’s complicity, can be regarded as yet another criticism of women’s stereotyped images in patriarchal society: indeed, Ainsley is reluctant to
77 reveal her image of an independent working girl and rather appears as a young innocent prey in order to seduce Len.
Much later, when Marian indulges in her strange love-affair with Duncan, the reader repeatedly watches her as she tries to make up stories which she could tell Peter, in case he caught her with Duncan: she imagines presenting Duncan as an old friend from college (185), and stages imaginary conversations with Peter about the innocent character of her relationship with Duncan (189). She further becomes Duncan’s accomplice when she takes off her engagement ring in order not to reveal her situation to his roommates (192). Moreover, one must admit that Marian remains a deceptive character throughout the whole novel. Indeed, when she turns back to normal life after her introspective crisis, she considers telling Peter the whole truth about her flight (266), but eventually fails to see the point of it. Marian thus recurrently acts as a trickster, who plays with other characters in order to produce a suitable image of herself.
Yet, Marian is not the only trickster-figure in the book. From chapter six onwards, the reader discovers another prominent deceiver, namely Duncan, the young student whom
Marian interviews for her job. Duncan soon appears as a professional liar, who constantly changes information about himself and his roommates. He clearly enjoys lying and delights in examining Marian’s perplexity when she is faced with his tall tales. Moreover, he displays a corrosive sense of humour and a liking for morbid situations, which give him both a clown- like and an ex-centric quality. Like Marian, he feels remote from the outside world and repeatedly mentions his difficulties to cope with everyday life. He is a marginal character,
78 who embodies the “Other.”12 I shall therefore examine in detail the elements of description and plot development which make it possible to identify Duncan as a trickster figure, i.e. an archetypal character, with recognisable traits, such as his qualities as a deceiver and a shape- shifter, his fondness of bawdy jokes and his close relationship with death.13
From the start, Duncan deceives Marian through his appearance. Indeed, he looks very young and Marian assumes that he must be fifteen years old, an assumption soon corrected by
Duncan who says that he is twenty-six (49). Duncan is further described as “emaciated”,
“cadaverously thin” (48), which brings him in relation to death. This feature identifies Duncan as a trickster figure, the trickster being a deceptive character, who exists between two realms, that of the living and that of the dead. Further, Duncan, when he first meets Marian, is barefoot, an image commonly associated with death in Indian culture (48). The encounter proceeds with Duncan’s evasive and tricky answers to Marian’s questions (50-51). Marian still has doubts about Duncan’s age, as she does about the existence of his roommates.
Duncan further states that his chair is the green one (50), which symbolically indicates his kinship to nature. While searching for a place to perform the interview, Marian hints at the presence of numerous garbage bags (51), which can be interpreted as an allusion to Duncan’s trickster-like nature, the trickster being originally associated with scavenging, a characteristic which stresses his link to death. Duncan fully reveals his deceptiveness when he tells Marian
12 Several critics have interpreted the character of Duncan as a potential trickster figure. Glenys Stow, for instance, writes the following: “Like a clown he watches the world from a distance, melancholy and mocking (…) In folklore terms, he is a trickster, always unpredictable, narcissistic, a teller of lies, a shape-changer” (Stow 99). Stow further stresses Duncan’s function as Marian’s doppelgänger, her dark twin (Stow 100), implicitly identifying her as a trickster too. Rao identifies Duncan as Marian’s alter-ego, who “will have a crucial role in her process of self-understanding” (Rao, Strategies, 46). Yet, the only critic who textually highlights Duncan’s deceptiveness is T.D. MacLulich. In an article dating from 1978, MacLulich regards Duncan as “the incarnation of the trickster figure” (MacLulich 183). He further emphasises the parallel between Duncan and the fox, as a figure from the fairy-tale “The Gingerbread Man.” He equally mentions that Marian’s relation to the world is based on the dualistic opposition between exploiter and exploited, resulting in either deception or destruction” (MacLulich 184). However, while mentioning the social implications of the novel, MacLulich fails to introduce the postcolonial aspect. 13 For a full definition of the trickster figure, see the introductory section entitled “The Trickster Figure.”
79 first that he never drinks beer, second, that he said this in order not to fill in the questionnaire in full because he found it boring (55). However, his last remark to Marian, asking her why she has such a “crummy job” (55), highlights Duncan’s function in the novel, i.e. to bring
Marian to ask herself questions about her life.
Marian’s second encounter with the trickster symptomatically takes place immediately after Peter’s marriage proposal. Marian feels the need to go to the laundromat and meets a man whom she does not immediately identify as one of her interviewees (93). This alludes to the trickster’s ability to take on different disguises. Duncan’s allusion to the presence of pubic hair in the washing machine (94) equally qualifies him as a trickster, a figure often associated to bawdy sexual jokes and renowned for its sexual appetite. Similarly, he tells Marian that he is working on a paper on pornography (97). He further talks about his research as an undergraduate student and compares it with a search for truth (96), which indicates that he might be able to assist Marian in her own quest for identity, as the trickster figure often does.
As a true agent of disorder, Duncan also disturbs routine for Marian, as well as for his roommates. For instance, he confesses having set fire to the apartment, “partly on purpose”
(98). Yet, at this point, Marian claims recognition of Duncan’s duplicity and of his fondness of making up stories. She slowly starts not to take everything he says for granted (99). She further alludes to the possibility for Duncan of possessing powers when she wonders: “He must be equipped with a kind of science-fiction extra-sense, a third eye14 or an antenna”
(100). This quote can clearly be interpreted as an allusion to the trickster’s supernatural powers. Marian concludes her meeting with the trickster figure with a kiss, which symbolises the pact which she agrees to conclude with him and her acceptance to go on with her quest.
14 This allusion to the “third eye” frequently recurs in Atwood’s work. See for instance the short-story “Instructions for the Third Eye” in the collection Murder in the Dark, or the marble symbolism in Cat’s Eye.
80 The chapter symptomatically ends on the words “give the gift of life” (101), which is what the trickster proposes to offer the protagonist.
Marian’s third encounter with Duncan takes place at the cinema (124). This haphazard meeting occurs at the same time as Ainsley’s successful attempt to get pregnant. The sterility of Marian’s encounter with the trickster stands in sharp contrast with the prospects of
Ainsley’s plans. Duncan is once again identified from the start as a trickster figure, i.e. a figure related to death and endowed with supernatural powers: described as “shadowed,”
“darkness,” and “emptiness” (125), he is several times referred to as materialising, disappearing and reappearing, so much so that Marian eventually believes that she has been hallucinating. He is chewing pumpkin seeds, which can be regarded as a symbol of life;
Marian considers them a “primitive signal” (126), which at this stage of her quest she feels unable to decipher. Further, Marian also wishes to have physical contact with him, even if this desire is restricted to her left hand, which she feels severed from her body – a typical sign of the growing alienation and fragmentation from which she suffers.
Subsequently, Duncan phones Marian and disturbs her with a strange request: he wants her to bring him some of her laundry because he suffers from a compulsive need to iron. Metaphorically, this urge can be interpreted as the trickster’s wish to solve Marian’s troubles. This proposal to iron Marian’s laundry therefore functions as the trickster’s offer to help Marian in her personal development. During this phone call, Duncan mentions his habit of chewing pumpkin seeds. He associates this action with oral satisfaction (133), a comment which befits the idea of the trickster as a primitive, archaic figure in an early, animal-like stage of its development, as described by Jung.
81 Marian truly enters the realm of the trickster at the beginning of chapter sixteen, where she is symptomatically described as an animal: “she was trailing somebody by an instinct that was connected not with sight or smell but with a vaguer sense that had to do with locations”
(135). This sense of location should be linked with the concept of sacred sites often mentioned in “primitive” religions. The intervention of the trickster therefore allows the individual to enter the realm of the sacred. This is what happens to Marian when she enters
Duncan’s flat. Several elements allude to Duncan’s trickster-like qualities: he first alludes to the fact that he cannot see his reflection in the mirror (139), a statement which highlights both his supernatural nature and his deceptiveness: even his own image cannot be trusted. Yet, he immediately dismisses this explanation as another of his tricks. The whole scene causes
Marian to get a glimpse of her own situation when she thinks: “Perhaps this was another labyrinth of words, and if she said the wrong thing, took the wrong turning, she would suddenly find herself face to face with something she could not cope with” (140). This sentence undeniably demonstrates that Marian feels utterly lost in a labyrinth of deception.
Duncan subsequently confesses his identity as a trickster in a series of other fantasies about himself: “I’m a changeling. I got switched for a real baby when young and my parents never discovered the fraud (…) I’m not human at all, I come from the underground…” (141). He then explains his function when describing his current ironing activity: “you straighten things out and get them flat” (142), which he later symbolically performs for Marian. He further hints at one of the topics which unconsciously bother Marian most at the moment:
“Production-consumption” (143). Indeed, even if she is still unable to express this in words,
Marian’s trouble is mainly caused by her relationship to Peter and her being considered as a product of consumption because of her wedding prospects. Conversely, she enjoys the neutrality and lack of involvement of her relationship with Duncan. Marian further alludes to
82 Duncan’s extreme thinness and wonders how he manages to stay alive (144). Duncan then acknowledges her as a fellow-trickster, saying “you look sort of like me” (144).
Once their fellowship is established, Marian frequently meets Duncan, in what appears to be an uninvolved love-affair. Their next meeting takes place at the museum. Duncan’s choice fits his trickster-like nature: as a shadowy figure, he logically is fascinated by death, which he regards as a thoroughly natural phenomenon (187). He then introduces Marian to his womb-symbol: a mummy in a foetal position (188). Once again, Marian’s visit to the museum symbolises an escape through a desert-like labyrinth: “The labyrinthine corridors and large halls and turnings had confused her sense of direction. There seemed to be no one else in this part of the Museum” (186).
Duncan remains a mysterious character until the end of the novel. Indeed, even after having had sex with him, Marian fails to understand him and reasserts his trickster-like qualities: “he was smiling in the darkness, but with what expression, sarcasm, malevolence, or even kindness, she could not guess,” and further, “she could feel his breath (…) his face pressing against her (…) like the muzzle of an animal, curious, and only slightly friendly”
(254). Duncan thus shows his trickster-like nature throughout the novel.
His penultimate intervention consists in leading Marian into a ravine, which helps her to become conscious of her hybrid nature. On this occasion, Marian comments: “He seemed to know where he was going (…) He was leading her. He was in control” (259). Yet, several words punctuate Marian’s progress to indicate the pitfalls of this enterprise: “danger,”
“afraid,” “falling off cliffs,” “an unofficial path” (260). The ravine is deep and narrow, totally unknown to Marian (260). She eventually finds herself standing on the edge of a cliff,
83 frightened, while Duncan, featuring his usual familiarity with death, dangles “his legs nonchalantly” (262). There, Duncan explains Marian how he deals with his hybridity, acknowledging his marginal condition, when he says: “They tell me I live in a world of fantasies. But at least mine are more or less my own, I choose them and I sort of like them, some of the time. But you don’t seem too happy with yours” (263). This excerpt shows both that Duncan, conscious of his marginal place in society, acknowledges his hybridity as a temporary moment of balance. Marian, on the contrary, assesses her desire to conform to society’s demands when she cries: “But I want to be adjusted” (263), not understanding yet the impossibility of his wish. Their subsequent discussion undermines a series of stereotypes: indeed, Duncan once again fulfils his role as a trickster when it becomes clear that he lied to
Marian about his sexual experience (264); yet, this deception demonstrates that Marian herself has developed a tendency to think in terms of stereotypes, while for her part she refuses to be classified as a typical female cliché. Duncan then encourages Marian to find a solution to her problem: “It does look as though you ought to do something: self-laceration in a vacuum eventually gets rather boring. But it’s your own personal cul-de-sac, you invented it, you’ll have to think of your own way out” (264). Duncan thus convinces Marian to turn back to her life and leave him behind, his role having been fulfilled. Indeed, the trickster is a solitary figure, “a dark shape against the snow, crouching on the edge and gazing into the empty pit”
(265). When Duncan eventually shows up at the end of the novel, he remains mysterious, providing Marian with yet another interpretation of the cake’s symbolism and devouring it, greediness (both sexual and alimentary) being another well-known feature of trickster-like characters (Eliade 190).
Both Duncan and Marian clearly feature characteristics of the trickster figure. Yet, it stands out that these traits particularly point to the characters’ inability to fit in Canadian
84 patriarchal society. Therefore, I would interpret the characters’ resemblance with trickster figures as a sign of their ex-centricity, of their marginality. In other words, being a trickster, equates “Otherness.” As such, it implies a growing awareness of one’s hybrid nature.
5. Hints at Hybridity
Having identified Marian as a trickster, partly through an examination of her own behaviour and partly from her resemblance with Duncan, I shall now determine in which sense these characteristics identify Marian as a hybrid person. From the very beginning of the novel,
Marian McAlpin’s loneliness cannot fail to strike the reader. Marian shares her flat with a roommate, although they definitely have nothing in common. Her boyfriend abandons her because of his best friend’s marriage; she finds no comfort at work, where her relationships with her colleagues remain distant and superficial. Even her best friend Clara is unable to help her because her pregnancy. Marian’s feeling of “otherness” surfaces when she confesses feeling nervous at the idea of revealing her private life to her colleagues (29). Her “otherness” grows further when Clara tells her not to feel so concerned about her (30): indeed, her tragic interpretation of Clara’s condition points to her own helplessness at dealing with the idea of maternity.
Chapter four also introduces the character of Len Slank, Clara and Marian’s old friend who equally seems to suffer from an inability to fit it: he has apparently moved from Canada to England and back due to his difficult relationships with women. The reader will subsequently observe Len’s growing inadequacy in his way of dealing with Ainsley’s
85 courtship and his ultimate breakdown, as a symbol of what could have overcome Marian, had she failed to acknowledge her own nature.
The reaction of Clara’s husband, Joe, here symbolises as the voice of society: he clearly disapproves of Len’s behaviour as “not ethical” and advises Ainsley not to get mixed up with him. As Marian comments, his attitude is definitely paternalistic (35). And neither
Marian nor Ainsley appreciate this aspect of Joe, as revealed by Ainsley’s reaction: she immediately asks for Len’s phone number and will from then on consider him a prospective father for her future baby.
Part two presents Marian as a future wife. Soon after this announcement, Marian shows the first signs of her growing discomfort with food: “Marian was surprised at herself.
She had been dying to go for lunch, she had been starving, and now she wasn’t even hungry”
(112). Marian’s lack of appetite relates to her decision to comply with society’s demands by becoming a future wife. Her eating disorders will therefore evolve for the worst as the wedding approaches. This problem can be interpreted as an utterance of Marian’s hybrid condition and of her hesitation to acknowledge this hybridity. Joe Bates’ subsequent phone call inviting Marian to come and visit Clara at the hospital (114) causes another fit of anguish, clearly brought about by what Clara represents, i.e. childbearing as the logical consequence of her marital status. Marian nevertheless manages to welcome this visit as a rediscovery of the real Clara, deflated and therefore less frightening (115).
Marian really manages to face her hybridity in the last four chapters of the novel. After trying to adjust to social requirements, symbolised by Peter’s party, for which she used a red dress and outrageous make-up in order to fit in, Marian suddenly realises that she is totally out
86 of place. He runs away, and after a brief and deceptive sexual encounter with the ever present trickster-figure Duncan, she follows him down a ravine, when she is forced to face her problem. Understanding that she must solve her problems through self-knowledge, Marian turns back to “normality”, not without acting like a trickster one last time: indeed, she decides to bake a cake which she offers to the two men who equally tried to use and consume her:
Peter and Duncan. They react differently : while Peter, as a true product of society; fails to understand the metaphorical value of such a deed, Duncan, as befits a trickster, once again produces a different interpretation of the facts : “Peter wasn’t trying to destroy you. That’s just something you made up. Actually you were trying to destroy him” (280), and further:
“But the real truth is that it wasn’t Peter at all. It was me. I was trying to destroy you” (281), a statement which leaves Marian without a settled solution. However, it offers her a temporary assistance, curing her from her anorexia.
In The Edible Woman, hybridity remains a vague concept, which is difficult to identify, because Atwood’s first heroine acquires but a limited awareness of it. Yet, as will be demonstrated in my analysis of Atwood’s subsequent production, the heroine’s understanding of her hybrid nature remains but a fleeting, temporary state, only briefly alluded to in this debut novel. As Atwood’s novels develop, hybridity becomes an increasingly pervasive motif, which warrants a postcolonial reading of her work.
6. Quest for a Lost Voice
As Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman features a rather simple, chronological development. In Atwood’s later work, the plot often incorporates large flashback episodes which either develop a first failed quest, re-enacted by the protagonist in the present. In other
87 cases, it contains the first stages of a quest, which the heroine tries to bring to its conclusion in the present. In the case of Atwood’s first novel, the woman’s quest shows a simple pattern and develops chronologically. I shall therefore examine the novel’s structure, i.e. its five introductory chapters, the five stages of the actual quest, and its symbolic conclusion in the last two chapters.15
As all Atwoodian novels, The Edible Woman clearly displays the structure of a quest novel. Many critics have alluded to this aspect of the novel, often emphasising the descent movement inherent in Marian’s self discovery. Such is the case with Catherine McLay’s analysis of the novel as romance, in which one reads: “Marian is, in a sense, the romantic hero/heroine who searches for her identity through a quest which takes her on a dark voyage into the underworld and back” (McLay, “The Dark Voyage,” 125). This analysis focuses on the novel’s traditional quest structure, while situating the aim of the quest at the level of the subject’s hybrid self.
The first five chapters of The Edible Woman situate the protagonist in time and space, to provide the reader with a general overview of the heroine’s personality and to introduce two elements at the core of the heroine’s trouble: her position as a woman at work and in society. Chapter one introduces the main characters, situating them in place and time: Marian shares a room with Ainsley in the Toronto of the 1960’s. Both have a job and are unmarried, though Marian seems to have a boyfriend called Peter. The action takes place at Marian and
Ainsley’s flat, thus revealing the heroine’s private life. Chapter two focuses on Marian’s job
15 In her chapter entitled, “Novels of Rebirth and Transformation,” Pratt distinguishes five stages in the woman’s journey : first, splitting off from family, husbands, lovers, i.e. from society; second, the green world guide or token, where the heroine is helped to cross a threshold by an ordinary event, object or person, that is suddenly given epiphanic significance. The third stage introduces the green-world lover. He often features animal-like qualities and helps the heroine at a difficult stage of her discovery journey without imposing social constraints on her. In the fourth stage, the heroine confronts parental figures, often in the form of memories. And finally, the fifth stage brings about the heroine’s plunge into the unconscious (Pratt, Archetypal Patterns, 137-143).
88 in a food test company, stigmatising her ambivalent position as to what is expected from her as a model employee and what she actually ambitions – i.e. a more fulfilling job. The chapter contains some striking examples of what Marian might become, were she to work for
Seymour Survey all her life: either heartless Mrs Bogue, or one of the desperate Office
Virgins. It offers a general view of a woman’s position as an office worker in the late sixties.
Chapter three draws our attention to the peculiarities of Marian’s job. It already introduces the element which forces Marian to engage on her quest, namely the questionnaire, which she ironically accepts to complete, although she should actually be enjoying a free weekend. After carefully examining the questionnaire, Marian symptomatically receives a phone call from her boyfriend Peter to cancel their dinner. In so doing, Peter leaves Marian free to engage on her quest. Peter also introduces the topic which induces the highest fear in both of them, namely marriage, in the form of the tragic announcement of the imminent marriage of his best friend and alter-ego, Trigger. Chapter four and five offer a transition before the quest can actually begin. They confront Marian with another possible solution to her questions: pregnancy and maternity. Chapter four focuses on the theme of pregancy by introducing the character of
Clara, Marian’s best friend and a seven-month-pregnant woman. Clara’s portrayal immediately strikes the reader as negative: Clara is the example of what Marian most emphatically refuses to become. This episode consistently establishes pregnancy as an unsuitable solution to Marian’s identity problem. She therefore has to look into herself to discover her own desires. Chapter four eliminates another of Marian’s options. However, the negative view of maternity introduced in this chapter is immediately contradicted in chapter five by Ainsley’s wish to become a single mother, a decision which, in Marian’s eyes, proves totally foolish and irresponsible. However, the reader cannot help wondering Marian’s own lack of foolishness and spontaneity does not constitute her real problem.
89 Having been confronted to questions threatening her comfortable life, Marian then engages on a quest, which consists of five stages: isolation, meeting the green world guide, entering the trickster’s world, confronting one’s parents, and exploring one’s unconscious.
Chapter six constitutes the beginning of Marian’s quest, i.e. the first stage of the quest, which always starts with an isolation of the protagonist from her usual environment. It significantly starts with Marian’s recollection of a dream in which she is gradually dissolving. This may be interpreted as her wish to get rid of a false self made of appearances. Symptomatically,
Marian cannot see herself in the mirror, indicating that she has not acknowledged her hybrid self yet and will have to engage on a quest to find it (43). Searching for men to answer her questionnaire on beer consumption, Marian decides to leave her neighbourhood and takes a bus. The first stage of the quest pattern – the separation from the usual environment is thus accomplished. Several details hint at Marian’s discomfort, gradually emphasised by climatic conditions: an oppressive day, an unclear sky, heavy air and a blurred vision (44). In other words, Marian may now explore this unknown environment – and her self. She mentions feeling intimidated by the idea of meeting closed doors (45), an effective metaphor for her fear at discovering her hybrid self, which has so far not been disclosed to her.
Chapter six also features the second stage of the female quest, i.e. the encounter with the “green world guide,” i.e. Duncan, who will help the heroine cross a threshold. The importance of Marian’s meeting with Duncan is echoed in the way in which she describes the event: “The questionnaires I was carrying had suddenly become unrelated to anything at all, and at the same time obscurely threatening” (49). She further confesses: “the contrast with the heat outside had made me dizzy. Time seemed to have shifted into slow motion; there seemed to be nothing to say; but I couldn’t leave or move” (49). Marian then concludes about her first meeting with Duncan: “I felt a slight sensation of alarm as I stepped over the threshold and
90 the door closed woodenly behind me (49).” Clearly, Marian has entered the realm of the trickster and her quest has truly begun. Indeed, she displays anguish as to what will become of her in this unknown world, and even though she does not realise the significance of this encounter in her life, she nevertheless has an ominous feeling that her life is about to change.
Once inside the house, Marian reacts very negatively at the idea of conducting the interview in the bedroom (51), which may indicate her fear of involvement and intimacy. The following sequence of the interview, based on free associations, should be regarded as a dive into
Duncan’s unconscious. The originality and the surprising character of his answers make
Marian feel uncomfortable. While Duncan claims that “this is just like those word-game tests the shrink gives you” (52), and seems to enjoy himself a lot, Marian watches the situation getting out of hand. She begins to fear for the outcome, namely that she will not be the same when leaving Duncan’s house. She concludes: “By this time I was convinced that he was a compulsive neurotic of some sort and that I’d better remain calm and not display any fear”
(53). This shows that, at this stage of her quest, she is totally unable to recognise the cathartic value of Duncan’s dive into his unconscious and regards the phenomenon as a form of madness.
Marian’s meeting with her guide forces her to question the foundation of women’s social position. Therefore, in the subsequent nine chapters, she explores various stereotypes offered to women to help them conform to society’s demands. The stereotypes comprise: the typical male figures, man being either the perfect boyfriend (Peter) or the womaniser (Len); the importance of engagement; the different kinds of couples; and finally the marriage proposal. Chapter seven stands in sharp contrast with the preceding episode in that it introduces Peter, who is exactly Duncan’s opposite. In order to visit Peter, who lives in the suburbs, Marian has to resort to public transportation, a symbol of her continued journey.
91 Moreover, the unfinished character of Peter’s apartment, still in construction, mirrors
Marian’s own engagement in the process of building her personality and her relationship with
Peter. Although he represents the perfect boyfriend, Marian remains hesitant as to her involvement with Peter. The next chapter focuses on a different male character: it introduces
Len Slank, Marian’s friend, who had already been mentioned previously as a seducer of women. The plot really becomes comical when Marian realises Ainsley’s plan to seduce Len as a possible father for her baby. Peter further comments on the unhappy fate of his best friend Trigger, who has recently announced his intention to get married. The chapter thus addresses one of the novel’s main themes, i.e. interpersonal relationships between men and women, here in the form of the official commitment of marriage. It therefore logically ends with Marian’s decision to run away, which symbolises her utter fear of further involvement with Peter. Chapter nine focuses on Marian’s fear of engagement. It narrates Marian’s escape, which is described as a chase, Peter playing the role of the hunter. It then logically ends with
Marian’s capture. Another significant event happens at Len’s place, where Marian, feeling more and more alienated from the group, crawls under the bed to find a safe place. Yet, the chapter demonstrates that hiding provides no solution either, since, after expressing his anger at Marian’s ludicrous behaviour, Peter finally proposes to her. The next stereotype, examined in chapter eight, focuses on life within a couple. The chapter illustrates the relationships within the three couples of the novel: Marian and Peter, Ainsley and Len, and Clara and Joe, identifying each couple as a distinct way of behaving. Indeed, Marian and Peter seem to get married in order to conform to society’s demand; Ainsley plans to be a single mother, and in so doing expresses her desire to challenge social pressure, whereas Clara and Joe turn out to represent society’s voice. Indeed, they express their concern for Marian’s situation as a single woman, as their happiness at the announcement of her engagement indicates. Chapter eleven constitutes an ironic counterpart to the preceding chapters. It shows Marian in a lonely
92 situation, when she can actually be herself. Significantly, the chapter allows her to meet the trickster figure once again, in the unbelievable setting of the laundromat. Chapter twelve, the last chapter of part one, faces the reader with Marian’s conclusion on her situation as a future wife. Indeed, Marian claims having made the right choice and dismisses her encounter with
Duncan as a phenomenon of amnesia, an attitude which will bring about her personal collapse and eating disorder in Part Two. The second part of the novel is marked by a change of point of view, which indicates the heroine’s growing trouble. The first-person narration of Part One abruptly changes into a third-person narration. The presence of an omniscient external narrator in this part of the story constitutes a clear sign of Marian’s alienation. It indicates that she has lost her voice because of social pressure. Part Two also corresponds to Marian’s examination of a last stereotype, marriage. It also coincides with the beginning of Marian’s eating problems, as a sign of her rising psychological trouble: Marian’s refusal to eat epitomises her inability to have a voice of her own.16 Chapter thirteen symptomatically evokes the moment when Marian decides to announce her marriage plans to her colleagues.
The next two chapters provide a transition towards the third stage of Marian’s quest, i.e. her discovery of the trickster’s world. The reader attends to the conclusion of Ainsley’s seduction strategy concerning Len: Ainsley finally succeeds in getting Len so drunk that he agrees to accompany her to her apartment, leaving Marian with no other choice than going to the movie. Significantly, this evening, which will result in Ainsley’s pregnancy, also brings about Marian’s third encounter with the trickster figure. Marian clearly finds it difficult to deal with the question of women’s social role as mothers: it leads her to meet the character who will accompany her through her quest. Marian’s visit to Clara at the hospital, providing a direct confrontation with maternity, and the ever pervasive intrusion of the trickster in her life,
16 A similar idea is expressed in Sharon Wilson’s analysis of fairy-tale motifs in the novel in Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (Wilson 84).
93 here in the form of Duncan’s first phone call, conclude stage two of Marian’s quest. This climax comprises a frightening magic realist flight into the hospital labyrinth-like corridors, which forebodes the beginning of stage three.
In chapters sixteen to nineteen, Marian is finally ready to face the third stage of her quest: she enters the realm of the trickster, when she decides to answer Duncan’s invitation positively: in stage three, Marian experiences the trickster’s help to evade her deception-clad life. The next chapter describes Marian’s dinner with Peter. Marian’s passivity strikes the reader: Peter is making all the decisions, drawing conclusions on Marian, while she suffers from a rising discomfort, mainly expressed through her growing difficulty to eat. Marian’s problem with food becomes even worse in the next chapter, when Ainsley announces her pregnancy. The office Christmas party gives Marian another occasion to face the different kinds of women into whom she might one day turn: an office virgin or a ripe housewife.
Symptomatically, this prospect causes Marian to flee to the park and encounter Duncan again.
Duncan has now become a dominant feature in Marian’s life. He influences her in all important decisions and guides her towards knowledge of her inner self and discovery of her own hybridity. When she gives in to Duncan’s wish to iron her clothes (136), Marian clearly agrees to acknowledge him as the one who detains knowledge and might provide help, even though his behaviour might be ludicrous or incomprehensible. Facing Duncan’s repeated deceptions, Marian comes to a conclusion which reveals her hybridity : “Perhaps this was another labyrinth of words, and if she said the wrong thing, took the wrong turning, she would suddenly find herself face to face with something she could not cope with” (140). From this moment onwards, Marian consciously realises that she is engaged on a quest and must absolutely proceed with it.
94 Yet, in order to discover her hybrid personality, Marian must first face the past in the next stage of her quest: the confrontation with parental figures, which takes the form of a
Christmas visit and of several allusions to parenthood in relation to Duncan and his roommates and to Clara. Indeed, chapter nineteen already briefly alludes to Marian’s two-day visit to her parents to prepare for the wedding. Moreover, the chapter contains an allusion to a girl who suddenly decided not to wash anymore. This rejection of personal hygiene ironically echoes Marian’s refusal to eat and might be interpreted as a kind of regression, which Marian will later experience as well. After a brief encounter with the trickster, which indicates that her quest is moving forward, Marian engages in the fourth stage, which consists in a confrontation with parental figures. It here takes the form of a trip back home in order to prepare for the wedding. The reader notices Marian’s sudden discovery of her vegetarianism, which can be regarded as a sign of her growing estrangement from social conventions.
Symptomatic is also the fact that Marian mentions all the decisions for the wedding as not being her own. From then on, Marian’s quest, punctuated with frequent encounters with
Duncan, will proceed at an accelerated rhythm. In chapter twenty-one, they meet at the museum, Duncan fantasising over mummies and death, as befits a trickster. Two elements in chapter twenty-two indicate that we are now getting closer to the novel’s climax. The first of these elements is the allusion to a cake, a foreboding of the making of the cake in the shape of a woman giving the novel its title. The second consists in Marian’s thought that she might not be able ever to return to “normality” – i.e. a normal eating behaviour – a concern which will force her to take action. The chapter further contains the well-known parody of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and thus functions as a key to the interpretation of the novel as a tale of discovery of the unconscious. The next two chapters narrate Marian’s preparation for Peter’s party – the novel’s climax – as well as Len’s decision to run away, which provides a caricature-like foreboding of Marian’s own behaviour at the party. Similarly, Ainsley’s overt
95 confrontation with the “Lady down below” alludes to what can happen when one refuses to conform to social constraints. These chapters provide a transition towards the fifth and last stage of Marian’s quest, namely her dive into her unconscious.
Peter’s party constitutes a climax in the novel, in that it illustrates the ultimate rise of
Marian’s discomfort, resulting in her flight. As is often the case, an introspective moment of regression precedes this climax. Marian ritualistically takes a bath and gets ready for Peter’s party, putting on exaggerated make-up and a stupendous red dress, which turns her into a stereotyped object of lust. Yet, at the party, Marian discovers that she cannot deal with all the requirements of the perfect bride-to-be. She panics and decides to run away. Marian then accompanies Duncan to a hotel: she gets more thoroughly involved with the trickster figure in order to be able to face the last stage of her quest: questioning her unconscious motivations.
Duncan then takes Marian into a ravine, where she finally faces her inner conflicts, a confrontation which causes her to turn back to normal life with a better understanding of her hybridity. Indeed, on Marian’s return from the ravine, one reads: “Now she knew where she was” (265).
When returning back to normal life, Marian performs one last trick, which illustrates her new understanding and serves as a conclusion to the novel: she decides to bake a woman- shaped cake, which she offers both Peter and Duncan, so as to exorcise their wish, as male characters, i.e. as colonisers, to exert their power on her, and, in a way, consume her.
Marian’s recovery of her voice as a woman is here alluded to when the novel’s point of view shifts back to a first-person narrative. She has literally and narratively regained her right to speak as an individual.
96 ***
One might wonder whether Marian has really integrated her hybrid personality after her introspective crisis. While some critics, such as John Lauber, claim that the end of the novel provides a resolution of Marian’s crisis and that “there are no more false identities left”
(Lauber 28), this analysis contends that Marian has not made any progress yet: her recovery from eating disorders is but a first step and she must try and rebuild a self, integrating its hybrid qualities. This study equally confirms that Marian’s quest takes a circular form and never produces a clear positive outcome,17 apart from Marian’s resolution of her eating problems. Indeed, one cannot help noticing that, at the end of the novel, Marian is left in the same state as in the beginning, and, whereas she has already had a glimpse of what her hybrid nature may be, she still has to explore it further, and to learn to deal with it in everyday life.
However, this thesis could not be confined to the analysis of a single work, as my point is to demonstrate the omnipresence of postcolonial issues in selected novels of Margaret
Atwood. As her first novel, The Edible Woman, already contains all the elements which, in my view, constitute a postcolonial novel, i.e. deceptive characters, metafictional comment, cases of mimicry, magic realist moments, trickster figures, and a quest pattern moving towards an acknowledgement of hybridity. The novel clearly shows how the heroine is progressively compelled to abandon her lies, deceptive strategies, and false images of
17 In that, I agree with Hilde Staels’ interpretation of the novel: “Whereas threshold imagery does appear in the narrative text, a moment of spiritual renewal remains absent, as Marian dare not move beyond any threshold. She never takes any important decisions that radically change her familiarized patterns of action or perception” (Staels, Margarat Atwood’s Novels, 29).
97 womanhood as she reaches a better understanding of the woman’s position as “Other” in paternalistic society. All these elements will become ever clearer as we proceed to examine
Atwood’s subsequent production. Atwood’s next novel, Surfacing, introduces the reader to a more marginalised woman, confronted with the past and present prejudices of the region where she grew up.
98 Chapter 2. Surfacing: Deception as Survival Strategy
“It’s too late, I no longer have a name. I tried for all those years to be civilized but I’m not and I’m through pretending” (Surfacing, 168).
Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing, deals with a woman in her late twenties, who returns to
Northern Quebec, the place where she grew up, to search for her father. She is accompanied by her lover, Joe, and friends, Anna, and David. The heroine engages on a quest for her father through a series of remembrances from the past. These memories bring the reader to realise that several elements in the story have gone wrong, that the anecdotes somehow do not correspond to the weird images which they conjure up, and thus that the narrator must be lying. After a traumatic but healing experience at the bottom of the lake, the narrator eventually surfaces and acknowledges her real past. She then undergoes animal regression and eventually re-enters society. This novel therefore offers an ideal vantage point from which to study unconscious deception processes.
The novel contains numerous reflections on the dubious nature of language, which I choose to examine from a metafictional point of view. Moreover, I shall study the protagonist’s tendency to indulge in deception as a strategy for survival in the face of the conventions imposed by a patriarchal society, based on values such as marriage and forcing the “Other”, i.e. the single woman eventually opting for abortion, to mimic the personality of a dutifully married mother. The novel also features several remarkable instances of magic realist moments, which often coincide with the heroine’s discovery of a crucial aspect of her personality. Most significant are the protagonist’s trickster-like qualities, which turn out to be a positive gift inherited from both her parents. While the narrator herself definitely endorses
99 the role of a trickster figure, the missing father, leaves behind clues for his daughter to interpret on her discovery journey. In a truly grotesque magic realist moment, the disappeared father eventually shows up in an animal form, may also figure as a trickster. The same can be said of the heroine’s mother, who functions as a guide, indicating her how to act. The protagonist needs to acknowledge this innate trickster talent in order to develop another, more efficient survival strategy. She does so by undergoing a stage of animal regression, which enables her to accept her “otherness,” the animal aspect of her personality, as well as the idea of the existence of evil. Surfacing further presents the reader with an interesting variation on
Annis Pratt’s archetypal rebirth journey (Pratt 137-143), in which the last three stages of the quest are mixed up, in order to highlight phase three – the encounter with the green-world lover – as a (temporary) solution to the heroine’s quest.
1. Parodic Rewriting
Surfacing can be read at different metafictional levels.1 I here choose to focus on the author’s statement concerning the unreliability of language, because this metafictional comment closely reflects plot development, especially if we take into account the heroine’s own propensity to lead her friends – and the reader – astray. In order to demonstrate Atwood’s parodic intent, I shall also examine her allusions to other books.
1 Critics’ essays have also regarded Surfacing as a re-writing of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Brydon, Tiffin 89-104), which makes it doubly interesting within the context of postcolonial studies. Indeed, we can consider the marginality of Atwood’s surfacer as an ironical echo of the coloniser’s situation of loneliness, which eventually drives him mad. Both novels take place at a level which lies beyond reality: indeed, Conrad’s narration sounds removed from reality by the use of an unknown narrator who retells Marlowe’s story, while Atwood’s story immediately strikes the reader as unreal through its numerous gaps and inconsistencies, linked to the narrator’s construction of a self-deceptive identity, a construction which this study proposes to examine.
100 Surfacing contains some overt literary echoes, all deserving careful study. In chapter four, the narrator turns back to the log cabin where she lived as a child and reflects on her father’s books: reference books on plants and animals, some DIY books and some works by eighteenth-century rationalists. The allusion to these books and to her father’s confidence in reason and good will are immediately contradicted by the narrator’s reference to her husband’s opinion on this belief in reason. This man destroyed the image of these writers as paragons of virtue, thereby destabilising the heroine’s values. Suddenly, people whom she were brought up to admire, appear as drunkards or madmen (38). This subtle metafictional allusion helps the reader understand that the narrator, brought up in the bush, i.e. far away from evil, in a sheltered environment, felt as a hybrid person when confronted to life in the city, a feeling which might account for her past failures. The “husband’s” subsequent comment that women cannot be real artists (52) is of the same nature, considering its negative influence on the heroine. Indeed, this constitutes an example of Atwood at her best, providing at once effective characterisation of her heroine and an interesting insight into one of her main themes, namely the role of women in modern society, compounded, as always, with numerous ironical touches.
Atwood conveys metafictional commentary in several ways throughout the novel. One of those consists in echoing her heroine’s reflections on the dubiousness of language, an aspect which should induce distrust in the reader and should warn him not to take the narrator’s story for granted. Indeed, the book contains numerous allusions to the dangers and inadequacies of language and to the difficulties of communicating accurately. The narrator constantly quotes David’s use of slang, though he happens to be a specialist in communication. For example, David constantly uses phrases such as “bloody fascist pig
Yanks” (9), “rotten capitalist bastards” (12). He comes to use them so often that they become
101 devoid of any meaning. Towards the end of the book, when she has achieved a more complete knowledge of herself, the narrator comments on David as follows: “I could see into him, he was an imposter, a pastiche, layers of political handbills, pages from magazines, affiches, verbs and nouns glued on to him and shredding away (…) he didn’t know what language to use, he’d forgotten his own, he had to copy” (152). I personally regard this description of
David as highly parodic because it conveys an image of what the narrator might have become, had she maintained her former deceptive behaviour. This passage can thus be regarded as
Atwood’s hidden comment on the necessity for the protagonist to attain personal truth and knowledge.
Indeed, making sense of what you say, hear or read constitutes one of the main issues of the book. The complexity of this task is rendered through the narrator’s difficulties to understand the language of her childhood, i.e. French. From the very beginning of the book, she refers to posters with French words (14-15), which she can hardly make sense of. Her later dialogue with her father’s neighbours emphasises this problem of communication (20-
21), as does her visit to the butcher’s, where people ironically allude to her language mistakes
(26).
The novel also contains several allusions to the power of language. In one of the most striking examples, the narrator recalls a childhood episode, which highlights the power of words and the fear which they can create. Indeed, she describes her first encounter with religion as follows:
I learned about religion the way most children then learned about sex, not in the gutter but in the gravel and cement schoolyard, during the winter months of real school. They would cluster in groups, holding each others’ mittened hands and whispering. They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky
102 watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn’t believe me but I believed them (45).
Such an excerpt clearly demonstrates the importance of words as well as the traumatic impact which they can have. In the introductory part of the same chapter, the narrator therefore comments that she should have become a linguist instead of an artist (41), wishing for a better way of assessing her territory. The passage further draws our attention to the narrator’s wish to understand, hence to control language, and is thus linked to her capacity to lure the reader into believing her.
For the narrator, language equally functions as a cause of alienation and fragmentation.2 Indeed, she mentions the separation between head and body as a primarily linguistic split (76). Significantly, the narrator becomes conscious of that split after diving into the lake, i.e. after her first moment of introspection. She then shows herself able to acknowledge that her vision was blurred, saying: “I was seeing poorly, translating badly, a dialect problem” (76), a sentence which demonstrates the heroine’s difficulty with words.
Simultaneously, it hints at her deceptiveness.
A subsequent evocation of high school life again focuses on her problematic relationship with language. It contains intricate vocabulary which she fails to understand and which ironically alludes to notions of power and limitation. Indeed, the words “demarcation” and “sovereignty”, which bothered the heroine in high school (97), both suggest the idea of borders, of limits and of power politics. As such, they admirably support the novel’s thematic
2 In Strategies for Identity, Eleonora Rao presents us with a Kristevan reading of Surfacing. Indeed, she interprets the heroine’s progressive move away from language as a gradual access to semiotics, a process which she identifies as a form of rejection of patriarchy and as an experience of a different sense of self (60-64).
103 development and can be regarded as another instance of Atwood’s use of irony. Moreover, the passage precedes Anna’s confession of her husband’s infidelity (98-99), which brings us back to the theme of power politics within a married couple.
The narrator’s discovery of her inner self does not enhance her ability to communicate.
On the contrary, as she turns back from her dive into the lake and begins her regression to animal life, several episodes underline her difficulty to communicate with the other members of the group, especially males. She obviously fears getting involved in lies again. When talking to David, who tries to seduce her, she comments: “I had to concentrate in order to talk to him, the English words seemed imported, foreign; it was like trying to listen to two separate conversations, each interrupting the other (…) His fingers were squeezing, he was drawing away some of the power, I would lose it and come apart again, the lies would recapture” (150-151). These words clearly indicate that the protagonist has gained wholeness from her descent into the lake, but that this experience is only temporary. The fragility of that moment of balance symbolises the protagonist’s hybrid state, as does her distrust of language.
Indeed, her hybridity deprives her of the linguistic freedom of her friends, which makes it difficult for her to adjust to life in patriarchal society. Indeed, appropriate deceptive communication is one of the main weapons allowing the individual – more precisely the woman – to exist and survive within patriarchal society. At that point, the narrator immediately identifies David as a liar (153), a capacity she lacked before, which caused her to believe everything her former lover told her. Because, she has clearly lost her gullibility, she handles human communicative relationships in a different way. Still involved in a stage of animal regression, she adds “he was lying about me, the animals don’t lie” (153), a comment which clearly establishes the difference between her own hybrid self and that of her fellow human beings. She still regards him as a liar when he informs her of the details of her father’s
104 death (157). Her inability to acknowledge this death indicates that her quest for a means of survival is not quite finished.
Finally, one should keep in mind that the reader’s task of discovering the truth about the heroine parallels the latter’s own search for her father. The ironic aspect of this search becomes even more obvious when the reader realises that Atwood is playing tricks on him/her. Indeed, she allows her protagonist to lead the reader astray by means of numerous lies, omissions and vague allusions. The heroine’s propensity to deceive herself, her entourage, and the reader thus admirably functions as a metaphor for Atwood’s own tendency to manipulate her audience.3
References to literary works embodying the voice of reason, allusions to the practical aspects of life and to the dangers and limitations of communication draw the reader’s attention to the fact that this novel is also a construction of the mind. As such, it might contain a series of deceptive elements. Indeed, a literary work might function as a puzzle, which the reader is left to solve, in the same way as the narrator must face the mystery of her father’s death. If one opts for a postcolonial reading of the novel, one should of course mention the importance of the power relationships involved in language. Indeed, the official story is generally the one imposed by the coloniser. As a woman, in a male-dominated world,
Atwood’s heroine has no other choice than using the coloniser’s vocabulary to express
3 As an example of Atwood’s narrative tricks, one can read Shuli Barzilai’s article entitled “Who Is He? The Missing Persons Behind the Pronoun in Atwood’s Surfacing.” The author mentions the heroine’s “aptitude for defensive revisions” and her “selective omissions of antecedents” (64). Barzilai also claims that the pronoun “he” in Surfacing deliberately remains vague, alluding at times to the father, the lover or the lost child, and at times missing clear reference. The author identifies this technique as part of the Freudian processes of repression and disavowal. He adds: “Atwood’s unreliable narratorial agent deceives not only the reader but also herself. She is lying and truth-telling simultaneously. The reality of her past experience may be glimpsed at times through the pseudo-past she invents to cover it up. One of the textual strategies enabling this tour de force is the pronoun without nominal precedent” (Barzilai, “Who Is He?” 64).
105 herself;4 a strategy which may go as far as the creation of an “official version” of her past, one that echoes patriarchal values. In a word, she comes to develop an unsuspected and highly efficient deceptive strategy.
2. Deceptive Mimicry: A Case Study
In order to determine the various elements of the heroine’s deceptive process, this section will be focused on the heroine’s attitude with her friends, her revelations about herself, her own thoughts and comments, her deceptive strategies, often developed in relation to the theme of evil, and the numerous gaps and inconsistencies which pervade her narration. These features help us delineating the protagonist’s overwhelming feeling of “otherness” and the resulting compulsive need to mimic received behaviour in order to comply with society’s demands.
Observing the heroine’s attitude when returning to her childhood environment, the reader cannot help noticing her efforts to produce an image of herself which fits social requirements. Indeed, from the start, the narrator clearly wishes to appear as an average woman, endowed with a partner and friends. Yet, this self-image soon becomes deceptive.
Friendships and love relationships are truncated, empty of any real feelings. About her friend
Anna, the narrator comments: “She’s my best friend, my best woman friend; I’ve known her two months” (10). Such a sentence reveals the necessity for the heroine to be regarded as
4 In the section of her book dealing with “Denial and Assertion of the True Romance Code,” Hilde Staels equally emphasises the heroine’s involvement in patriarchal society when she writes: “Margaret Atwood borrows elements from cautionary tales, true romance magazines, fashion magazines, fairy tales and folk tales (…) they are neither innocent nor a valueless world of disbelief. The narrator does not yet realize that the apparently innocent texts, which mass culture spreads, are ideologically oppressive texts” (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels, 54). I totally agree with this interpretation of what I here identify as yet another of Margaret Atwood’s metafictional interventions, aiming at drawing the reader’s attention to the novel’s subversive content. Very interesting also is Ronald Granofsky’s study of fairy-tale morphology in Surfacing, based on Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. This study uncovers the patriarchal structure at work in fairy-tale narratives (Granofsky 51-64).
106 “normal.” However, it also implies her problematic relationship to other people: is it “normal” for someone to consider “her best friend” someone whom she only met two months ago?
What event caused her to break away from her former life and friends? Or else, has she always been a loner, an alienated being, a hybrid person? The reader soon discovers that the heroine has indeed abandoned her former life, where, as a hybrid person, she lived torn between her parents’ and society’s definition of a decent woman and her actual life as the mistress of a married man. This break caused her to invent a new self, more suited to society’s requirements. At the beginning of the novel, she has already become so involved in this false self that she feels unable to acknowledge its deceptiveness. She has moved beyond the realm of reality. She is currently engaged in a process of mimicry, which prompts her to constantly re-invent her past life. This introduces a series of discordant elements, which gradually lead the reader to the discovery of the heroine’s self-deceptive nature. This behaviour is confirmed at the end of chapter two, when she intimates that her father will have returned and will be waiting for her in his cabin (24), a totally false assumption.
The setting itself contains a series of details, which create a deceptive atmosphere: the
“welcome” sign at the border, featuring bullet holes (11), the imitation cherub (12), the heroine’s own voice, which sounds odd (13), as if she were lying; the bar too is an imitation of a more southern place (27); even her drawings as a child mimic a glamour world, very different from her log cabin (42). Later, when the protagonist becomes an illustrator, her comments on her work also give the reader the impression that her job is “fake”. Indeed, she mentions: “This is the fifth book I’ve done (…) Quebec Folk Tales, it’s a translation. It isn’t my territory but I needed and money” (52). Further, when she meets her editor, she confesses:
“He said one of my drawings was too frightening and I said children liked being frightened.
‘It isn’t the children who buy the book,’ he said, ‘it’s their parents.’ So I compromised; now I
107 compromise before I take the work in, it saves time (…) I can imitate anything” (53). This statement once again stresses the character’s propensity to mimic a certain kind of behaviour to conform to society’s expectations. The heroine’s submissiveness is further presented as an old habit of her, which finds its roots in her early childhood: when the heroine discovers the scrapbooks in which she drew as a child, she recalls her wish to become what society wants her to be, i.e. a lady or a mother. She then adds that “it wasn’t a lie” (91), thus stressing the possible deceptive quality of the rest of her story. Her scrapbook, made of images cut out of magazines, stands in sharp contrast with her brother’s numerous drawings of explosions and war scenes, which indicate that her brother, unlike herself, has been able to acknowledge the existence of evil. The narrator, on the contrary, remains in the idealised world of girlhood, a position which paternalistic society expects her to occupy.
She also practises self-deception when she recalls her fishing trips with her brother.
Indeed, she pretends that the fish which she caught were willing, thereby diminishing her feelings of guilt (64). Self-deception in Surfacing often occurs when the heroine tries to mimic other people’s behaviour while refusing any responsibility for it: for instance, she accepts to kill the fish, but refuses to acknowledge the evil which this action entails.
Therefore, deception here functions as a crucial element in the illustration of one of the novel’s main theme, namely the existence of evil, which the heroine definitely cannot easily accept. The protagonist also shows difficulties to face the fact of death, when her parents are concerned, especially in relation to her father’s disappearance: in chapter eleven, she obviously refuses to admit that her father might have died, claiming that he is merely gone on a trip and will eventually come back (95).
108 The novel is further pervaded with the heroine’s references to mysterious and often discordant past events5: at the beginning of part two, the birth of her child is referred to as an inhuman and violent act. The passage strikes the reader as inappropriate to describe child birth. We definitely suspect that something may have gone terribly wrong in the heroine’s past. This birth happened as follows:
After the first I didn’t ever want to have another child, it was too much to go through for nothing, they shut you into the hospital, they shave your hair off you and tie your hands down and they don’t let you see, they don’t want you to understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not yours. They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you might as well be a dead big, your legs are up in a metal frame, they bend over you, technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or sniggering practising on your body, they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar. After that they fill your veins up with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube. I won’t let them do that to me ever again. He wasn’t there with me, I couldn’t remember why; he should have been, since it was his idea, his fault. But he brought his car to collect me afterwards, I didn’t have to take a taxi (80).
The quotation conveys a particularly negative view of birth. Some elements are totally incongruous: the shaven hair, the heroine being tied onto her bed, the depiction of doctors as butchers and the baby as a pickle in a jar. The end of this excerpt confirms our idea that this passage might not refer to a normal birth, but rather to a miscarriage or an abortion. Yet, the narrator’s vagueness and her inability to remember her husband’s role in the episode prevents the reader from knowing with certainty what actually happened to her. At this stage of the story, however, we know for sure that the narrator is concealing things from the reader and from herself. Her experience obviously strikes us as both negative and deceptive. The passage
5 Discordant notes and contradictions literally pervade the novel. Coral Ann Howells provides us with interesting insight on the subject in her article “Worlds Alongside: Contradictory Discourses in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.” The article draws the reader’s attention to the oscillation between realism and fantasy in Atwood’s (and Munro’s) work, a commentary, which in my view must be linked to the frequent incursions of magic realism in Atwood’s work (Howells, “Worlds Alongside,” 121-135).
109 also contains hints about the woman’s inferior position in society, those in power being representatives of paternalistic society. Chapter ten indeed tackles the problem of the position of woman in society: it shows the heroine’s negative reaction to her boyfriend’s marriage proposal. She seems to resent his desire to possess her and tries to find an escape (87). She describes her relationship in terms of defeat or victory, thereby emphasising the power politics involved. She then tries to convince Joe of renouncing to marry her by telling him about the fiasco of her first marriage. Again, her unconvincing story contains unexpected elements, such as the smell of antiseptic, a broken cherub, an ache, an invalid bride, and the heroine’s feeling of utter despair (87-88). Significantly, right after acknowledging her inability to express real emotions in chapter sixteen, the narrator briefly mentions her husband with a negative event, which he referred to as an “accident” (138). Atwood gradually prepares the reader for the revelation about the heroine’s real past. The whole scene is set against the context of sexual power politics as subtly indicated at the end of the chapter, which reiterates the now well-known image of the barometer couple (138). This image functions as a clear allusion to socially acceptable sex roles.
The reader finally learns the truth after the protagonist’s dive into the lake and her frightful confrontation with her father’s body, which brings back in her the memory of what happened:
He hadn’t gone with me to the place where they did it; his own children, the real ones, were having a birthday party. But he came afterwards to collect me (…) It wasn’t a wedding (…) “It’s over,” he said, “feel better?” I was emptied, amputated (…) (144).
110 The passage reveals the full length of the narrator’s deceptive strategy. It also highlights the cruelty of the treatment which she underwent and, as such, provides the reader with an explanation for the character’s need to resort to deception. From then on, the narrator reveals the real nature of her former relationship with that married man who made her pregnant. For instance, she mentions that she was wearing a wedding ring because it facilitated the renting of motel rooms (148).
Besides, the heroine herself sometimes mentions the deceptive quality of her own discourse. When she refers to her family as “they”, distancing herself from them, she immediately corrects this deceptive utterance saying: “That won’t work, I can’t call them
“they” as if they were somebody else’s family: I have to keep myself from telling that story”
(14).
At times, she also proves conscious of her alienated attitude. Referring to her return to her childhood place to look for her father, she realises the oddity of her behaviour. Indeed, the other characters have all rejected their parents long ago and are embarrassed by her quest (16-
17). She also intimates that she grew up in an atmosphere of lies, unaware of the war (18) until her brother himself found out about evil and violence and initiated her into it. This idea is reiterated when she mentions that her mother, dying from cancer, must have concealed the pain for months (21, 35), another remark which stresses the heroine’s lack of communication within family structures. This deficiency also distorts her relationship to her so-called friends: the lack of communication prevents her from knowing anything about their past (30).
In chapter four, the narrator also first alludes to Anna and David’s marriage, mentioning her own “marriage” in parallel (40), which indicates her desire to be like
111 conventional Anna. She then feebly utters her own lack of interest in marriage, suggesting that her husband started expecting a certain attitude from her. This can be interpreted as a weak, though legitimate plea for the right to counter social conventions, thus demonstrating the narrator’s unwillingness to adjust to them. When she later watches Anna putting on make- up, she cannot help reflecting on the unnecessary quality of such behaviour in the bush (43-
44), a tendency which becomes increasingly manifest as the novel progresses. Indeed, when forgetting her make-up on a fishing trip, Anna exclaims in a panic: “he’ll kill me” (122), talking of her boyfriend David. Yet, one might also interpret the narrator’s rejection of this common form of camouflage as a sign of her inadequacy to city life: she does not need make up because her deception devices are far more developed; she has already moved beyond such a simple process. Yet, at the end of the book, when Anna again uses make up, one notices that the protagonist’s view has not changed: she still regards Anna as an artificial girl, “an imitation,” “a paper doll” (165). This final negative comment on make up indicates the narrator’s choice not to comply with patriarchal values, which require women to look like magazine models. The different possible interpretations of the narrator’s rejection of make up should draw the reader’s attention to the often multiple meanings of Margaret Atwood’s use of symbolism.
The narrator’s hybrid state is further referred to when she alludes to her lack of religious knowledge as a child. Indeed, she clearly comes from a family of atheistic scientists, as demonstrated when she recalls an episode from her childhood: at recess, she was frightened by the other children’s tales about religion. She tried to impress them by revealing to them how babies were made, causing the other children’s parents to intervene (45). This passage indicates once again that the narrator, even as a child, could not adjust to social conventions.
When she later decides to go to church out of curiosity, she has to face both her father and
112 brother’s incomprehension and the villagers’ amusement (55-56). Her feeling of “otherness” at that time highlights her hybrid nature. Several other episodes from her childhood underline the heroine’s early feelings of “otherness,” as appears in the quotation below:
The only city place I can remember hiding is behind open doors at birthday parties. I despised them, the pew-purple velvet dresses with anti-macassar lace collars and the presents, voices going Oooo with envy when they were open, and the pointless games, finding a thimble or memorizing clutter on a tray. There were only two things you could be, a winner or a loser; the mothers tried to rig it so everyone got a prize, but they couldn’t figure out what to do about me since I wouldn’t play. At first I ran away, but after that my mother said I had to go, I had to learn to be polite; “civilized” she called it. So I watched from behind the door (…) they found me amusing in general. Each year it was a different school, in October or November when the first snow hit the lake, and I was the one who didn’t know the local customs, like a person from another culture: on me they could try out the tricks and minor tortures they’d already used up on each other. When the boys chased and captured the girls after school and tied them up with their own skipping ropes, I was the one they would forget on purpose to untie (71-72).
This excerpt clearly demonstrates the heroine’s sensation of “otherness,” due to her experience of isolation in the bush: totally unable to play the requested part in children’s games, she becomes the target of the other children’s wicked proceedings. One of the strategies which she developed as an adult in order to be accepted is the creation of a deceptive false-self. The heroine further comments on her state of “otherness” in these words:
“Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform” (72). Hence the protagonist’s need to use mimicry in order to escape such torments.
One of the heroine’s tactics to refrain from admitting her hybridity consists in pretending that she truly belongs to the world of nature, of the bush. Such is the case in chapter seven when she reflects: “How have I been able to live so long in the city, it isn’t safe.
113 I always felt safer here, even at night” (73). Yet, she immediately contradicts herself saying:
“That’s a lie.” She then reveals how the forest used to terrify her during her childhood. Such passage demonstrates that the heroine suffers from harbouring a fake vision of herself and of her past. Even her childhood memories have been reconstructed to fit the new self which she wants to make credible for the outside world.
Concealment is another defensive strategy, which the narrator chooses to practice while facing her father’s disappearance. Indeed, she mentions the necessity for her to hide her fear and maintain a semblance of order, especially as she thinks her father has gone crazy, and will inevitably sense her fear (78). Hiding and lying to oneself and others has thus become a survival technique. The narrator therefore uses the same tactics when she realises that she has to organise a search trip for her father, about which she says: “I could disguise it as a fishing trip” (105), once again resorting to her well-known deceptive tricks. When she later tries to discuss her relationship with Joe, she once again pretends to tell the truth, while thinking:
“The voice wasn’t mine, it came from someone dressed as me, imitating me” (107). This quote clearly draws the reader’s attention to the mimicry process which the narrator undergoes. Significantly, she immediately mentions her fear of feeling dead, frozen (107), alluding to the “missing part” of herself (108). She further adds that she cannot remember any photographs being taken at her wedding, once again, a weird element (108).
Chapter twelve plays a pivotal part in the development of the novel’s theme of alienation and fragmentation, because it closes on the heroine’s recognition of her hybrid state, using the oft-quoted phrase in Atwoodian criticism, in which the heroine plays “tricks with mirrors” (108). The whole passage works as a very effective presentation of the dilemma
114 facing all Atwoodian heroines: becoming an outcast, or deciding to integrate society by mimicking an acceptable kind of behaviour:
No hints or facts, I didn’t know when it had happened. I must have been all right then; but after that I’d allowed myself to be cut in two. Woman sawn apart in a wooden crate, wearing a bathing suit, smiling, a trick done with mirror, I read it in a comic book; only with me there had been an accident and I came apart. The other one, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal. I was nothing but a head, or no, something minor like a severed thumb; numb (108).
Apart from expressing the heroine’s state of deep suffering, the passage also intimates that the narrator has been presenting us with a truncated aspect of herself. Indeed, she realises that the only chance for her to achieve wholeness is to reveal her hidden part, thereby pointing to the novel’s outcome.
All these examples indicate the heroine’s propensity to make use of deceptive strategies so as to mimic another, more acceptable image of herself, in which she eventually comes to believe. However incongruous the details given by the heroine about herself may be, they still belong to the realist level of narration. On the contrary, when the character has to face the truth about herself and her past, this confrontation often takes place in a blurred, dreamy, magic realist atmosphere, which reflects her utter confusion.
3. Uncanny Apparitions
Surfacing is undeniably a novel of visions: it contains several moments of epiphany, from the heroine’s encounter with the murdered blue heron to her discovery of her father’s body in the
115 lake and her subsequent encounter with her parents’ ghosts.6 I contend that those epiphanies often take place in a magic realist atmosphere. Uncanny descriptions and metaphors literally pervade the novel from the first pages onward, creating a providential atmosphere for self- discovery. Magic realism is omnipresent throughout the book, in the form of an improbable collusion of animate and inanimate elements. A first example occurs when the heroine briefly mentions her feeling of remoteness concerning her parents, identifying them as “mammoths frozen in a glacier” (9), one of the numerous awe-inspiring metaphors of the novel. Indeed, such images help creating a mysterious, uncanny atmosphere, typical of magic realism.
As in many of Atwood’s novels, the uncanny and frightening image of the maze7 (31) often appears, made even scarier because it refers to the wilderness, an unknown and mysterious entity, literally surrounding and suffocating the village. Nature, i.e. the bush and the lake, reveal themselves as tricky and sometimes lethal. Atwood, in her book of literary criticism Survival, often refers to what she calls “death by landscape,” i.e. drowning or getting lost in the woods, for instance, a phenomenon which she clearly singles out as typical of
Canadian literature.8 As a magic realist phenomenon endowed with the power of killing, nature is thus often omnipresent in the novel. This fear of the wilderness also emerges when,
6 Atwood herself has called Surfacing a ghost story in her interview with Graeme Gibson (Gibson 20). 7 Peter Klovan examines the maze motif in Surfacing. He mentions that the word “labyrinth” appears five times in the novel and interprets it in terms of Jackson Knight’s definition in Virgil: Epic and Anthropology. He regards the maze as a boundary between without and within, a place of obstruction and simultaneously a gate, a place of entrance (Klovan 8). 8 Chapter Two of Atwood’s book of criticism Survival indeed tackles the issue of “Death by Nature,” considering several ways for the hero to die, from drowning to freezing, with perhaps as the most stunning case, the famous “death by bushing” in which the character literally goes crazy because of his isolation. About this last possibility, Atwood writes: “Legends of the Wendigo get connected with this one – the character sees too much of the wilderness, and in a sense becomes it, leaving his humanity behind” (55). For a thorough description of death by nature in Canadian Literature, see Survival, 54-58. For a complete analysis of the concept of wilderness in Atwood’s work, please consult chapter two of Coral Ann Howells’s book on Margaret Atwood. The chapter, entitled “Atwood’s Canadian Signature: From Surfacing and Survival to Wilderness Tips,” describes Atwood’s fiction as abounding in references to the Canadian literary tradition of explorers’ and animal stories (Howells, Margaret Atwood, 22). Howells identifies the wilderness as a significant decor for the woman’s quest for identity (24). She explains that “there is the outer world of landscape and society and there is the inner world of the narrator’s own mind, where borders blur between realism and fantasy (25). The border-blur takes place in wilderness territory which functions as an ideal site for dynamic transformations (25). The article thus clearly refers to the link which exists between the wilderness setting and the narrator’s confused state of mind. Howells develops a similar point in her contribution to Lorraine York’s book Various Atwoods (Howells, “It All Depends,” 47-69). See also Verena Bühler Roth’s Wilderness and the Natural Environment. Margaret Atwood’s Recycling of a Canadian Theme.
116 at the end of chapter five, the narrator recalls the games which she played with her brother and father as a child. Indeed, looking for her father in the forest, she comments:
It’s like the times he used to play hide and seek with us in the semi-dark after
supper, it was different from playing in a house, the space to hide in was endless;
even when we knew which tree he had gone behind there was the fear that what
would come out when you called would be someone else (50).
This innocent childhood recollection may in fact be interpreted as an intimation of the narrator’s fears as she engages on the quest for her father: indeed, this time, it is no longer a game, and she really fear what she might discover in the wilderness concerning her father and her own identity. Once again, the use of an uncanny, magic realist moment, here significantly located at the end of the chapter, highlights one of the novel’s main themes: the existence of evil within man and nature, and the possibility for the narrator to acknowledge this evil part of herself, or, in other words, to accept her own hybrid self.
The bush repeatedly works as a magic realist presence, a living threat surrounded by an aura of mystery. The heroine’s description of her childhood experience of the forest seems at once frightening and surreal: “sometimes I was terrified, I would shine the flashlight ahead of me on the path, I would hear a rustling in the forest and know it was hunting me, a bear, a wolf or some indefinite thing with no name, that was worse” (73). Such terrifying vision of the place receives a magic realist touch through its last allusion to something unknown, which the narrator, now having reached adulthood, somehow fears all the more. The sentence creates a mysterious, uncanny atmosphere, suitable to a quest pattern.
117 Equally impressive is the narrator’s progressive realisation of her father’s death. The heroine starts having doubts about her father’s sanity, a thought which perfectly fits the gradual development of the novel’s mysterious, uncanny atmosphere. Indeed, the heroine discovers clues to her father’s progressive loss of sanity, which she interprets as a kind of metamorphosis: she believes that her father has disappeared in the forest and has gradually become a half-human, half-animal monster. The occurrences of the father will therefore take place in a magic realist context, which prompts us to relay the father to a trickster-figure. The narrator first mentions the possibility of her father’s transformation when faced with his incomprehensible drawings. The eerie nature of these drawings contributes to the magic realist quality of her father’s presence. For instance, the narrator describes one of his drawings as follows: “The drawing was something he saw, a hallucination; or it might have been himself, what he thought he was turning into” (101). This quotation underlines the narrator’s state of doubt as to what happened to her father. This atmosphere of mystery, typical of magic realism, makes the novel’s outcome even more powerful, a sign of stylistic effectiveness.
Magic realism literally pervades the end of the book, which contains numerous allusions to the presence of the narrator’s dead parents. This mode of writing enables the author to create an atmosphere of terror, in which the supernatural finds a doorway to reality. One of the most obvious examples is the evocation of the protagonist’s fear when she suspects that her metamorphosed parents try and enter the house at night:
In the middle of the night silence wakes me, the rain has stopped. Blank dark, I can see nothing, I try to move my hands but I can’t. The fear arrives like waves, like footfalls, it has no center; it encloses me like armour, it’s my skin that is afraid, rigid. They want to get in, they want me to open the windows, the door, they can’t do it by themselves. I’m the only one, they are depending on me but I don’t know any longer who they are; however they come back they won’t be the same, they will have changed. I willed it, I called to them, that they should arrive is logical; but logic is a wall, I built it, on the other side is terror.
118 Above on the roof is the finger-tapping of water dripping from the trees. I hear breathing, withheld, observant, not in the house but all around it (174).
This passage features an obvious magic realist quality in its allusions to ghostly presences, its personification of the rain and its gradual insistence on the protagonist’s fear. Yet the supernatural presence of the parents’ ghosts is still counterbalanced by the narrator’s comment at the beginning at the next chapter, which intimates that the whole frightening scene might be just a dream. This statement, however, does not undermine the magic realist character of the scene, a dream-like atmosphere being one of the often cited components of a magic realist mood. The scene further features a definite in-betweenness of mood – another magic realist component – in which the everyday becomes alien (Delbaere, “Magic Realism,”
256).
Further, essential magic realist moments take place when the heroine last sees her parents’ ghosts.9 The first of those ghostly presences are her mother’s:
Then I see her. She is standing in front of the cabin, her hand stretched out, she is wearing her grey leather jacket; her hair is long, down to her shoulders in the style of thirty years ago, before I was born; she is turned half away from me, I can see only the side of her face. She doesn’t move, she is feeding them: one perches on her wrist, another on her shoulder. (…) I’m afraid, I’m cold with fear, I’m afraid it isn’t real, paper doll cut by my eyes, burnt picture, if I blink she will vanish. (182).
9 In her book entitled Strategies for Identity, Eleonora Rao points to the link between those ghostly presences and the heroine’s sense of otherness: “Unlike the Gothic tradition of the divided self where union between ‘self’ and ‘other’ hardly ever takes place, in Surfacing there occurs an assimilation of the ‘other’ self, which is part of the regenerating process that reveals to the protagonist the possibility of a different modality of being, of a different life” (Rao, Strategies, 27). Rao further qualifies the end of the novel as “a literature of the ‘supernatural,’ which focuses on extra-sensory perceptions, delusions and hallucinations” (28). These comments are in keeping with my own theory on the importance of deception in Atwood’s novels and on the significance of magic realist moments of epiphany. Yet, I would like to highlight the fleetingness of such strategies, as well as their failure to resolve the character’s quest permanently. They merely provide temporary glimpses of awareness. Howells also offers interesting insights when she states that Atwood’s gothic, on a psychological level, provokes the “erosion of boundaries between the self and the monstrous Other” (Howells, Margaret Atwood, 63).
119 This passage once again contains references to the protagonist’s sensation of fear, but for different reasons. The heroine does not fear the ghost. On the contrary, she tries not to lose contact with it. In addition, the ghost takes the form of her mother at her own age, feeding animals, another hint at the heroine’s difficult acknowledgement of her connection with nature. The change in the heroine’s attitude towards the ghost, which similarly outstretches its hand and turns to the protagonist, highlights the connection between them. The scene thus marvellously demonstrates how the use of a magic realist moment can enhance the significance of a scene and transform it into a fleeting moment of vision.
Even more impressive is the heroine’s contact with her father’s ghost, which characteristically takes place near the lake:
He is standing near the fence with his back to me, looking in at the garden. (…) He has realized he was an intruder; the cabin, the fences, the fires and paths were violations; now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love. He wants it ended, the borders abolished, he wants the forest to flow back into the places his mind cleared: reparation. I say Father. He turns towards me and it’s not my father. It is what my father saw, the thing you meet when you’ve stayed here too long alone. (…) It does nor approve of me or disapprove of me, it tells me it has nothing to tell me, only the fact of itself. (…) I see now that although it isn’t my father it is what my father has become. I knew he wasn’t dead (186-187).
The passage clearly conveys the same message as the one involving the mother: it highlights the father’s connection with nature – often equating him with an animal – as a significant element of the heroine’s own personality. As such, the excerpt can be read as a variant on the
120 well-known Wendigo myth. Indeed, in Survival, Atwood mentions the famous “death by bushing” in which the character’s loneliness causes him to become crazy.10 About this type of
“death by nature,” Atwood writes: “Legends of the Wendigo get connected with this one – the character sees too much of the wilderness, and in a sense becomes it, leaving his humanity behind” (55). This is exactly the kind of experience alluded to in Surfacing. Moreover, it turns out to be of great interest for a postcolonial reading of Atwood’s work, because she here alludes to a native myth often used by First Nation writers as well.
Further, the father also turns towards his daughter, but the meaning of that gesture has different implications. Indeed, the heroine soon realises that her presence does not interest her father and that – most importantly – he does not judge her. Although it is not transmitted linguistically, this comment constitutes the core of her father’s message to her, i.e. that she must live without paying attention to people’s judgement. There lies the true meaning of her quest for the acknowledgement of her hybrid self. Quite logically, this crucial element once again shows up in a scene featuring obvious magic realist qualities, which make it recognisable for the reader as a moment of vision. Symptomatically, at the end of the scene, the heroine recognises footsteps as her own and turns back to normal life, now that she has learned how to handle her hybridity with the help of two predominant trickster-like characters, her mother and her father.
10 A larger account of the Wendigo and its occurrences in Canadian Literature can be found in the Clarendon Lectures, collected and published under the title Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature In the third lecture, Atwood addresses the theme of the Wendigo as depicted by male Canadian writers (Atwood, Strange Things, 77-103). In the fourth, she examines the presence of the Wendigo myth in the writings of female authors (107-140). In her conclusion, she quotes Surfacing as her own example of “woman-in-the-woods novel” (139).
121 All these instances of magic realism form a distinguishable kind of magic realism, which I would call “gothic magic realism.” This type of magic realism features elements of both mythic and grotesque realism, as described in Jeanne Delbaere’s article (Delbaere 256).
On the one hand, it is clearly connected with the character’s overwhelming experience of nature. Her gradual awareness of the natural world brings her to a better understanding of herself, when she eventually recovers her past by diving into the lake. This moment of epiphany functions as an example of mythic magic realism, i.e. a form of magic realism which borrows its images from the environment. On the other hand, the description of the father’s corpse, as well as the narrator’s subsequent encounters with her parents’ ghost, rather qualify as examples of grotesque magic realism, defined by Delbaere as the feeling of strangeness that emerges from the interpenetration of different realms of reality. I would add that Atwood’s combination of these two kinds of magic realism, together with her frequent use of the supernatural can be interpreted as a different form of magic realism, which I call
“gothic magic realism,” due to the frequent presence of supernatural elements drawn from gothic literature, such as ghosts, apparitions, monstrous creatures, old manors, labyrinthine settings and to the ever present gloomy atmosphere. “Gothic” is indeed a frequent word in
Atwoodian criticism.11 Again, this aspect of Atwood’s work can also be assessed in a postcolonial way if we consider the use of gothic elements as a form of parody, enabling the author to utter criticism about patriarchal values as often celebrated in the gothic tradition.
This aspect will however become more obvious in our analysis of Atwood’s next novel, Lady
Oracle. Moreover, the gothic element enables Atwood to introduce the uncanny into an otherwise realistic plot. This introduction of the strangely monstrous into everyday reality is
11 For analyses of Atwood’s use of gothic, please read Ann McMillan’s article on Lady Oracle in VanSpanckeren and Castro’s book on Atwood (McMillan 48-67). See also Alice Marie Palumbo’s dissertation on the gothic in Atwood’s novels (Palumbo, The Recasting of Female Gothic). More recent is Verena Bühler Roth’s analysis of the wilderness theme in Atwood’s work, which significantly identifies the gothic element as part of Atwood’s postcolonial concern for the environment (Bühler 53-54).
122 one of the techniques used by postcolonial writers. Indeed, the uncanniness consists in a specific combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar,12 and as such, perfectly refers to the postcolonial concept of “otherness”. Keith Garebian, in his 1976 article on Surfacing, already identified the narrator as different from other human beings and possessing the power “to operate in several worlds simultaneously” (Garebian 8). Similarly, I contend that a magic realist reading of the novel’s climactic scenes similarly emphasises the heroine’s “otherness” in a postcolonial context. This gothic form of magic realism is characterised by an overwhelming sense of the environment, be it urban or wild. It also features a quality of strangeness of otherness and a propensity to resort to supernatural events. About these three characteristics, one should of course mention the postcolonial implications of both the environmental concern and the allusions to “otherness.” As to the supernatural aspect, it has often been mentioned by critics as a fundamental element of Atwood’s writing.
4. The Narrator and her Parents: Inherited Tricksterism
While the narrator of Surfacing makes clear from the start that she chooses to appear as a married woman in order not to subvert the social conventions of her childhood place, the reader soon comes to realise that there is more to the heroine’s strange behaviour and that he/she might also be the victim of her deception. As such, the narrator of Surfacing can be regarded as an instance of a narrator as a trickster,13 as will be demonstrated by means of
12 For a postcolonial analysis of the concept of uncanniness, please read Gerry Turcotte’s paper on the uncanny in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. Turcotte identifies the Freudian notion of uncanniness as “a central feature of Gothic narratives in Canada and Australia” and as an essential element of postcolonial theory (Turcotte 123-5). 13 Although the concept of narrator as trickster is relatively recent in Atwoodian criticism, Keith Garebian, as early as in 1976, alludes to the heroine’s trickster-like qualities when he writes : “The heroine is different in degree and kind from other humans and this distinctiveness consists of a power to operate in several worlds simultaneously” (Garebian 8). This interpretation also supports the theory of the significance of magic realism which I have developed above.
123 several elements from the novel. Other minor characters, related to the protagonist, also exhibit trickster-like characteristics.
The narrator’s unreliable comment on her marital situation in chapter two reads as follows:
“Your husband here too?” he asks irrelevantly. “Yes, he’s here,” I say, skipping over the lie even in my own mind. (…) Joe will do as a stand-in. My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my ring, I never through it out, it’s useful for landladies. I sent my parents a postcard after the wedding, they must have mentioned it to Paul; but not the divorce. It isn’t part of the vocabulary here, there’s no reason to upset them. I’m waiting for Madame to ask about the baby, I’m prepared, alerted, I’ll tell her I left him in the city, he’s better off with my husband, former husband (23).
From this first passage about her former “husband”, the reader infers that the narrator here resorts to deception, in order not to shock people. Yet, the unnatural, unemotional way in which she alludes to her child, which she presumably left with her husband, already indicates that some details in her assertions may be wrong. The subsequent reference to the barometer, with its stereotyped woman with long skirt and apron and man with an axe (24), here ironically refers to the heroine’s necessity to conform to socially imposed patterns. The narrator’s allusion to her first encounter with her former “husband” equally strikes the reader as totally emotionless (28). So is her account of how she ran away from her husband, abandoning her child in the city (29). This lack of emotion in the narrator’s stream of consciousness is a first indication that she might be leading the reader astray, instead of revealing the truth about her situation. She later comments that she does not feel as homesick as she anticipated (30), which again demonstrates her lack of emotional response. In the next chapter, the narrator goes on mentioning her child in quite a peculiar way, emphasising her
124 total refusal to get emotionally involved with the baby. For instance, she refused to try and find names for it before it was born and felt like an “incubator” (34). From these comments, the reader suspects that there was more to this pregnancy than what the narrator now confesses to say. Once again, one wonders what he/she will discover about the narrator’s real past and already feels deceived by her tale. In the next chapter, she mentions her divorce, which she regards as an amputation (42). After that separation, she never felt whole again, which suggests that she actually felt even more hybrid because of the failure of her love relationship. Later on, when Joe tells her that she was talking in her sleep, she says that she no longer dreams (43). This can be interpreted as follows: while it is clear from Joe’s sentence that the heroine still dreams, she may also be so inhibited that her unconscious prevents her from remembering these dreams. This interpretation corroborates the reader’s already strong feeling that the heroine does not tell the truth about her past life, and that more will come to light as the novel proceeds. Later, on the trail in the forest, she again recalls her husband, confessing her lack of emotional commitment since the failure of her “marriage” (47). She then reveals that Anna, her so-called close friend, and Joe, her lover, do not know about her past and her baby. She says that they will never find out because she has no picture of the baby, which seems odd. Of her child, she further adds: “I have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t, it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh cancelled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget” (48). This quote clearly indicates that while definitely deceiving the reader, the narrator also tries to deceive herself and to forget about her painful past. The narrator goes even further, overtly alluding to the unreliability of her memories when she reflects:
I look around at the walls, the window; it’s the same, it hasn’t changed, but the shapes are inaccurate as though everything has warped slightly. I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they’re my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are
125 wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I’ll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone. I run quickly over my version of it, my life, checking it as an alibi; it fits, it’s all there till the time I left. Then, static, like a jumped track, for a moment I’ve lost it, wiped clean; my exact age even, I shut my eyes, what is it? To have the past but not the present, that means you’re going senile (73).
Such quote clearly demonstrates the narrator’s unreliability: indeed, she has reconstructed her past life as a kind of alibi for what she has become, while her present version of herself is blurred, even in her own mind.
Furthermore, the narrator often lies to other characters, especially as her quest has actually begun. In chapter seven, for instance, when the characters organise a fishing trip, she deliberately lies to Anna, telling her that she needs her in the boat for extra weight. In fact, she is afraid of leaving her alone in the cabin, thinking that her mad father might reappear (62). In the next chapter, she wonders what she will tell her friends in order to be left alone and thinks:
“I can’t tell them about my father, betray him; anyway they might think I was making it up
(…) I could tell them there isn’t enough food. But they’d spot that as a lie, there’s the garden and the rows of cans on the shelves” (70). Once again, lying has become the heroine’s natural behaviour.
The narrator’s first evocation of her trickster-like personality takes place at the end of chapter three when she recounts the episode of her brother’s drowning, which occurred before she was born. Yet, she claims having been the witness of this event (32), thus alluding to some kind of supernatural powers. The narrator’s trickster-like nature becomes ever more manifest as the second part of the novel unfolds. Indeed, right after her dive into the lake, the narrator comments:
126
I’m not sure when I began to suspect the truth, about myself and about them, what I was and what they were turning into. Part of it arrived swift as flags, as mushrooms, unfurling and sudden growth, but it was there is me, the evidence, only needing to be deciphered. From where I am now, it seems as if I’ve always known, everything, time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee in the darkening bedroom, I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do (76).
This passage first refers to the heroine’s gradual understanding of her evil role, the acknowledgement of the existence of evil in herself and others being one of the novel’s main themes. Yet, if we regard Surfacing as a novel belonging to the tradition of trickster narratives, this passage can also be decoded as the heroine’s recognition of her trickster-like behaviour and thus as an acceptance of her own and her parents’ hybridity. The interpretation of the heroine as a trickster is supported by her reference to the possession of superior knowledge. This feeling of omniscience eventually brings her to reveal the hidden version of her past to the reader. It is confirmed in the next chapter, which starts with the narrator’s prophecies concerning the weather, and subsequently foregrounds the absence of borders.
This draws the reader’s attention to the narrator’s capacity to transgress categories and pass from the human realm into the animal world (83). The allusion to a folk tale, in which a king displays the capacity to talk with animals (84), further reinforces this motif. The text also refers to a heron colony, another important element regarding the subsequent role of the dead bird in the heroine’s epiphany (85). The beginning of chapter eleven contains another allusion to the heroine’s role as a trickster. Indeed, it suggests that the borders have been restored to where they had been (92), thus indicating that everything is now ready for the heroine to proceed on her quest.
The narrator’s first allusion to her father’s possible role as a trickster occurs early in the novel, at the end of the third chapter, when she stresses her father’s fondness for
127 camouflage (32), a typical characteristic of Atwood’s tricksters. The reader also suspects the father’s trickster-like role in chapter six, when the narrator, thinking that her father is now dead, starts examining what he left for her. Amongst his notes, she notices “a stiff childish figure, faceless and minus the hands and feet, and on the next page a similar creature with two things like tree branches or antlers protruding from its head” (59). Such description reminds us of drawings representing Amerindian gods, which might indicate that the narrator’s father has been in contact with such figures and might have acquired special knowledge, which qualifies him as a trickster. When examining his notes, the heroine further comments: “I can’t make sense out of them. The handwriting is my father’s, but changed, more hasty or careless”
(59). The fact that the narrator fails to understand those notes precisely causes her to proceed on her quest. This “trickster text” left by the father thus constitutes a most important plot element. Moreover, her subsequent remark about the change in her father’s writing might well be a hint: if the father’s writing has changed so much, it may be due to a major transformation in his personality, one caused by his contact with a higher level of knowledge as a trickster figure. Indeed, the narrator then comes to think that her father might not be dead but insane because of his staying too long alone in the bush (60). Since he might still be alive, it becomes her duty to search for him and, though reluctantly, to continue her quest.
The father’s tricksterish-like features fully come to the fore in chapter twelve, when his daughter discovers additional notes and drawings. The latter show descriptions of half- human, half-animal creatures which can unmistakably be associated with Amerindian spirits.
The pictographs, which play a pivotal role in the heroine's spiritual progress, recall Algonkian rock art. Interestingly, this archaic art form is linked to shamanic practices and dreams.14
14 See Marie-Françoise Guédon, “Surfacing: Amerindian Themes and Shamanism,” 94. Also see Kathryn VanSpanckeren’s article “Shamanism in the Works of Margaret Atwood.”
128 Atwood's petroglyphs15 refer to two main characters in Ojibwa-Cree mythology: May-may- gway-shi, the rock spirit, and Mis-shi-pi-zhiw, the Great Snake, of which the narrator gives an accurate description: “The body was long, a snake or a fish; it had four limbs or arms and a tail and on the head were two branched horns. Lengthwise it was like an animal, an alligator; upright it was more human, but only in the positions of the arms and the front-facing eyes”
(101). When associated with this divinity, the father clearly appropriates its supernatural powers and reveals himself as the trickster-shaman, who accompanies his daughter on her quest. An article found among her father’s notes further establishes those entities as “powerful or protective spirits” (102). This motif is reinforced by the predominance of the red colour
(103), traditionally associated with the flesh, as is the trickster, famous for its sensuousness and its sexual appetite. Those drawings contribute to the plot development as they reveal a topographic name, “White Birch Lake” (104). The latter shows the heroine how to proceed with her quest. The narrator significantly uses the word “portage” (104) to refer to the connection to the main lake, a word choice which again draws the reader’s attention to the advancement of the quest. After passing the second portage, the narrator makes a second allusion to a fish, which clearly represents the non-fragmented animal stage to which she longs to return. This fish, a symbol of the narrator’s desire to experience an animal state of being is literally sacrificed and symbolically alludes to the Christian values of non-violence and self-renunciation. Moreover, it also contributes to the heroine’s gradual acknowledgement of the existence of evil in mankind, as is mentioned in this crucial passage:
Thud of metal on fishbone, skull, neckless headbody, the fish is whole, I couldn’t any more, I had no right to. We didn’t need it, our proper food was tin cans. We
15 Diana Brydon provides an interesting postcolonial explanation for the presence of those petroglyphs in the novel: from a postcolonial point of view, she regards the novel as a recognition of the genocide perpetrated on First Nations peoples. The petroglyphs here function as a hint to interpret the narrator’s guilt as metaphoric of Canada’s (Brydon, “Beyond Violent Dualities,” 52).
129 were committing this act, violation, for sport or amusement or pleasure, recreation they call it, these were no longer the right reasons (120).
These words clearly indicate that the novel represents more than a woman’s discovery of her inner self and of her past. It addresses the theme of the existence of evil and of our responsibility in senseless violence and destruction of our natural environment. The heroine’s awareness of evil functions as a condition for her to fulfil her quest, as a necessary stage of her psychological development. This particular epiphany enables her to acknowledge her hybrid nature: half-human/half-animal, half-innocent/half guilty. It culminates in chapter fifteen when she realises that the hunters, whom she mistook for Americans, are in fact
Canadians like herself. She then thinks: “I was furious with them, they’d disguised themselves” (128). The chapter then goes on with references to Hitler as the embodiment of evil and episodes from the woman’s childhood, in which she cruelly tore apart one of her dolls. Atwood’s treatment of the theme of evil culminates in the protagonist’s intimation that evil resides in our heart:
It wasn’t the city that was wrong, the inquisitors in the schoolyard, we weren’t better than they were; we just had different victims. To become like a little child again, a barbarian, a vandal: it was in us too, it was innate (132).
In addition to mentioning the heroine’s awareness of her own dark side, this passage clearly refers to the need for her to undergo a regression to a barbarian, animal, childish developmental stage which enables her to acknowledge her own hybridity.
Subsequently, the narrator follows the trail of her father as she attempts to understand the meaning of a trickster’s jokes. Chapter fifteen shows the heroine’s discovery of her father’s numerous hints: “he had been here” (126), “he hadn’t followed the rules, he’s
130 cheated, I wanted to confront him” (127). About his trickster-like behaviour, she reflects: “I’d reasoned it out, unravelled the clues in his puzzle the way he taught us and they’d led nowhere. I felt as though he’d lied to me” (127). All these quotes reveal the deceptive character of the father’s intervention in his daughter’s quest. Yet, the last sentence also emphasises his role in the heroine’s decision to continue on her journey: he clearly acts as a catalyst, who, by forcing the protagonist to discover what has happened to him, also induces her to question what she has become. She then comes to realise that this discovery will necessarily take place in the water and that she has to dive into the lake (133). Yet, her encounter with her father’s dead body at the bottom of the lake does not deprive her from his trickster-like features: she remains hybrid. Indeed, when returning to the shore, the heroine displays a need to perform a series of rituals which rather confirm her belief in supernatural, trickster-like entities: “These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten, were the only ones who had ever given me anything I needed; and freely” (145).
This sentence clearly states the benevolent attitude of the novel’s trickster figures.
Furthermore, it demonstrates the role which they play in the heroine’s quest for self- knowledge.
The portrait of the narrator’s mother is also highly relevant. This woman seems endowed with magic knowledge, with supernatural powers. A childhood episode where the mother confronts a bear demonstrates her exceptional abilities:
it materialized on the path, snuffling along bulky and flat-footed, an enormous fanged rug, returning for more. My mother stood up and walked towards it; it hesitated and grunted. She yelled a word at it that sounded like “Scat!” and waved her arms, and it turned around and thudded off into the forest. That was the picture I kept, my mother seen from the back, arms upraised as though she was flying, and the bear terrified. When she told the story later she said she’d been scared to death but I couldn’t believe that, she had been so positive, assured, as
131 if she knew a foolproof magic formula: gesture and word. She was wearing her leather jacket (79).
The narrator strongly believes in her mother’s trickster-like nature. She attributes to her mother the magic of the trickster: she is able to frighten the bear with a single word and gesture. Moreover, the mother is wearing a leather jacket, in other words an animal skin, in order to underline her connection to the realm of nature. The mother is further associated to forebodings in one of the heroine’s childhood memories: she forces her children to watch the birds from indoors in order not to frighten them (93), an attitude which both stresses the mother’s connection with nature and her supernatural powers. Symptomatically, the narrator’s encounter with her dead father is not sufficient to guarantee her survival once she returns to society. She still needs to face her mother’s ghost in order to receive a hidden message or gift:
More than ever I needed to find it, the thing she had hidden; the power from my father’s intercession wasn’t enough to protect me, it gave only knowledge and there were more gods than his, his were the gods of the head, antlers rooted in the brain. Not only how to see but how to act (153).
The difference between the father’s and the mother’s inheritances comes to the fore in this passage. The father’s legacy concerns knowledge. Having learned more about herself, the narrator still needs to find out how to act in society, a gift which can only be contributed by a fellow female trickster-like figure, namely her dead mother. She eventually finds her mother’s gift in the form of one of her own scrapbooks, which contains a very important drawing:
On the left was a woman with a round moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside her gazing out. Opposite her was a man with horns on his head like cow horns and a barbed tail. The picture was mine, I had made it. The baby was myself before I was born, the man was God, I’d drown him when my brother learned in the winter about the Devil
132 and God: if the Devil was allowed a tail and horns, God needed them also, they were advantages. That was what the pictures had meant then but their first meaning was lost now like the meanings of the rock paintings. They were my guides, she had saved them for me, pictographs, I had to read their new meaning with the help of the power. The gods, their likenesses: to see them in their true shape is fatal. While you are human; but after the transformation they could be reached. First I had to immerse myself in the other language (158).
The importance of the mother as a trickster figure, and, on a more general level, of the female nature of the protagonist is manifest. Indeed, returning to her childhood drawings, the heroine grows aware of the importance of motherhood. Having integrated her painful past experience and the guilt caused by her abortion, she can now face a return to society. Before starting on her journey back to civilisation she eventually feels the need of conceiving a child – i.e. acknowledging her female and instinctive hybrid nature.
5. Animal Regression as Quest for Hybridity
In my interpretation of the last part of the novel, the importance given to the heroine’s regression to animal life highlights her struggle to be accepted as hybrid. The book features several characters who display difficulties to adjust to society. From the start, the protagonist is said to be alienated and gives the reader the impression that she has not found her place in society yet and longs for a certain kind of recognition. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, Anna practices palmistry and hints at the narrator’s alienation: indeed, when reading the narrator’s hand, Anna explains: “You had a good childhood, but then there’s this funny break” (8), which constitutes a first allusion to the heroine’s hybrid state. Further, the film made by the heroine’s fellow travellers functions as an effective metaphor for their fragmented identities: indeed, it consists of a series of bits and pieces, put together at random, and failing to achieve significance, thus comparable to the characters’ chaotic life. As the
133 narrator puts it at the very beginning of the book: “How can you tell what to put in if you don’t already know what it is about?” (10), a remark that shows her total incomprehension of the project. Further, it also applies to her own identity. Later, she comes closer to her moment of epiphany, to her acknowledgement of the existence of evil, to her understanding of animal cruelty even in herself. The narrator repeatedly stresses her feelings of numbness, her lack of sensitivity, which can be explained by her obvious reaction to the more instinctive aspect of her personality. She clearly expresses her fear of dying for displaying emotions which are not really hers:
I rehearsed emotions, naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate; what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorized it. But the only thing there was the fear that I wasn’t alive: a negative, the difference between the shadow of a pin and what it’s like when you stick it in your arm, in school caged in the desk I used to do that, with pen-nibs and compass points too, instruments of knowledge, English and Geometry, they’ve discovered rats prefer any sensation to none. The inside of my arms were stippled with tiny wounds, like an addict’s. They slipped the needle into the vein and I was falling down, it was like diving, sinking from one layer of darkness to a deeper, deepest; when I rose up through the aesthetic, pale green and then daylight, I could remember nothing (111).
The heroine’s state of numbness, together with her need to mimic emotions instead of really living them, come to the fore. Further, she inflicts pain on herself with the help of what she calls “instruments of knowledge”, thereby associating knowledge to guilt, a feeling she is incapable of experiencing. Moreover, Atwood’s dexterity shows in the image of the needle, associating a childhood episode with the heroine’s deeper secret, her abortion. At this stage, the association of compass needles with a totally different, surgical atmosphere intimates that there is more to the narrator’s numbness than the pain of mere childhood alienation. Indeed, the last lines of the quote definitely refer to a deeper, more tragic kind of trauma, which, as the narrator confesses, has caused a total loss of memory – or an irresistible need to deceive.
134 The narrator also constantly emphasises her own emotional emptiness, her inability to love and share feelings, a state which stands at the core of her desire to engage on her quest for self knowledge. Talking of David and herself, she observes: “we are the ones who don’t know how to love, there is something essential missing in us, we were born that way, Madame at the store with one hand, atrophy of the heart” (137). The heroine compares her state to a handicap, because it prevents her from living a normal life. Yet, she also mentions that she was born with it.
After her descent into the lake, the narrator acquires a different vision of herself, which forces her to acknowledge her hybridity. She then engages on an inward journey, which takes the form of a regression to animal behaviour, in the hope of gaining knowledge of how to behave in the patriarchal world. This phase of regression involves a series of rituals: feeding the dead (155), not being allowed in certain places (175-176, 178), washing her hands
(176), dropping her wedding ring into the fire (176), burning her father’s book (177), slashing a knife through her parents’ clothes (177), eating natural food, red one if possible (179). She believes that those rules will enable her to establish contact with her dead parents, who, through their own trickster-like hybrid nature, might function as guides towards a more spiritual way of life. The whole scene naturally involves a last dive into the lake (178), as a ritual of purification which enables the protagonist to achieve vision. The heroine’s understanding of her dead parents’ message contains clear hints at an acceptance of hybridity.
It works as a plea for open-mindedness:
Now I understand the rule. They can’t be anywhere that’s marked out, enclosed: even if I opened the doors and fences they could not pass in, to houses and cages, they can move only in the spaces between them, they are against borders. To talk with them I must approach the condition they themselves have entered; in spite of my hunger I must resist the fence, I’m too close now to turn back (180).
135
This allusion to the border echoes the heroine’s perpetual feeling of “otherness.” Moreover, the protagonist eventually accepts her difference – as this is probably the substance of her parents’ message to her. This acceptance of her “otherness,” described as a difficult, painful process, involves the heroine’s literal starvation. It symbolises her struggle to achieve self- knowledge. The feeling of communion with nature which she then experiences makes her call out “I am a tree”, “I am a place” (181). Evidently, she has accepted her animal component, as a first step towards her integration into society.
Finally, the heroine’s most vivid realisation of her hybridity occurs when she decides to return to normal life. Watching her reflection in the mirror, she thinks:
In it there’s a creature neither animal nor human, furless, only a dirty blanket, shoulders huddled over into a crouch, eyes staring blur as eyes from the deep sockets; the lips move by themselves. This was the stereotype, straws of hair, talking nonsense or not talking at all. To have someone to speak to and words that can be understood: their definition of sanity (190).
The heroine is thus faced with her own in-betweenness, whereby she gains an awareness of the dangers of her regressive attitude. She understands that her quest for hybridity, far from being limited to the discovery of her animal side, also includes the acceptance of social conventions in order to evade insanity. This constitutes a crucial moment in the heroine’s psychological development, since it initiates her return to society – be it successful or not.
6. Surfacing or the Story of a Single Woman’s Alterity
Numerous critics have thoroughly analysed Surfacing as a female quest novel. Personally, I contend that the quest pattern followed by the heroine should be given a postcolonial
136 interpretation. This section studies the development of the plot, emphasising the distinctive elements which point to the heroine’s progress in her quest, referring to Annis Pratt’s theory16 of the female quest pattern. She identifies the five stages of such a journey: a splitting off from the familiar environment, an encounter with the green world guide, then with the green-world lover, a confrontation with the parental figures and a dive into the unconscious.
As I shall demonstrate, these last three stages have been inverted in Surfacing, thus laying emphasis on the protagonist’s search for hybridity and on a typically postcolonial concern for the environment.
The heroine’s quest begins in the initial moments of the novel, with this oft-quoted sentence: “Now we’re on my home ground, foreign territory. My throat constricts, as it learned to do when I discovered people could say words that would go into my ears meaning nothing. To be deaf and dumb would be easier” (11). Such an introduction undeniably draws the reader’s attention to the heroine’s anxiety when facing the discoveries to be made.
Moreover, it alludes to the heroine’s alienation when mentioning her inability to understand words spoken in another language. This can be regarded as an allusion to the heroine’s early sense of hybridity as a child, an English speaking person living on a French speaking territory where she never thoroughly felt at home. The heroine’s growing feeling of alienation as an adult is further demonstrated by her saying that she cannot find her way anymore (12): she
16 In Davidson’s The Art of Margaret Atwood, Pratt provides us with another analysis of Surfacing, featuring seven distinctive stages (Pratt, “Surfacing and the Rebirth Journey,” 139-157). I personally prefer to rely on the more basic five-stage quest pattern, because it turns out to be applicable, with a few nuances, to all of Atwood’s novels. Another interesting development of the quest theory in Atwood’s Surfacing can be found in Arnold and Cathy Davidson’s article “The Anatomy of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing,” which analyses the book in reference to Northrop Frye’s notion of romance quest in his book Anatomy of Criticism. Frye distinguishes between three stages: the perilous journey, the struggle, and the exaltation of the hero (Frye, Anatomy, 187). Bouson-Brooks develops the same argument in her book Brutal Choreographies, in which she describes Surfacing as a subversive rewriting of traditional romance plots. So does Josie Campbell in her article “The Woman as Hero in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.” While those three stages are undeniably present in Surfacing, I find Pratt’s pattern, with its connection to nature, more in keeping with postcolonial and hybridity theories.
137 has become totally estranged from the place where she grew up, its conventions and its traditions, to which she actually never really belonged, as is revealed later in the novel.
Another element indicates that the heroine engages on a quest: at the end of the first chapter, she comments “I feel deprived of something, as though I can’t really get here unless I’ve suffered” (15), which implies that her journey will necessarily be a painful one.
Chapter two further highlights the heroine’s hybrid nature, mentioning her lack of knowledge of French, a language which surrounded her throughout her childhood (19). This and the following chapter further describe the narrow-mindedness of the social conventions which dominated the heroine’s childhood (18, 25). In this small French-speaking village, lost in the wilderness, the heroine’s family definitely stood out as different, as emblematic of the
“other.” As she puts it: “my family was, by reputation, peculiar as well as anglais” (20). The heroine’s “otherness” is thus regarded as inherited from her parents, even more deeply-rooted than when it results from a personal choice. Language is further identified as one of the distinctive features of the heroine’s hybrid nature: it allows the narrator to be deceptive and prevents the heroine from relating to her environment. The description of her mother’s visits to Madame (21), which are characterised by a lack of communication, once again stresses the
“otherness” of the heroine’s family. Moreover, the heroine’s fascination, as a child, for
Madame’s amputated arm, metaphorically alludes to her own feeling of fragmentation.
Further, in the next chapter, the description of the place as “border country” (26) also metaphorically alludes to the heroine’s hybridity: she was brought up there, while really belonging somewhere else. Chapter three brings the narrator closer to the place where she lived as a child and offers more details about her father’s disappearance. The apparent reason for the quest is thus established: the narrator needs to find her lost father. The end of the
138 chapter significantly contains allusions to the possibility for both father and daughter to function as the novel’s trickster figures. Chapter four confirms the father’s absence and features the narrator’s presence in the log cabin with her friends, before embarking on a more thorough exploration of the place. The chapter further contains more strange allusions to the heroine’s past and to the nature of evil, two elements which constitute the core of the heroine’s social inadequacy. Chapter five follows the four characters in search for the heroine’s father in the forest. The heroine’s actual quest has not begun yet: it is by definition a solitary, introspective experience, which only takes place when she leaves her friends behind.
Indeed, while the next chapter starts with the heroine’s satisfaction and her wish to return to the city, she soon changes her mind and goes on with her exploration.
The next chapter is crucial in the novel’s development because the discovery of her father’s notes makes the narrator suspect his insanity. He might still be alive, which prompts her to start her actual quest: the narrator both hopes and fears discovering more about her father. The next chapter significantly contains the first appearance of the blue heron (63), a symbol of the heroine’s self-induced victimisation, here described as flying away, while the heroine embarks on her quest. In chapter eight, she expresses her wish to be left alone (70), but does not know how to get rid of her three friends. At the end of the chapter, the narrator leaves her friends behind and dives into the lake (75). The first step of her quest – isolation from the group to explore further her own personality – has taken place. Indeed, just before diving, she recalls an episode from her childhood where her brother almost drowned. She believes that such an incident endows someone with special knowledge. The diver necessarily comes back with secrets, which she now wishes to apprehend for herself.
139 From chapter ten onwards, the quest proceeds towards its second stage, namely the encounter with what Pratt calls “the green world guide or token.” In this case, it takes the form of the encounter with a dead heron, which epitomises the narrator’s guilt and her need to face the existence of evil. Several elements, immediately preceding this event, indicate its importance in the quest development: a number of allusions are made to the passing of portages and the departure on a fishing trip. In chapter thirteen, the narrator mentions being at
“the beginning of the path” (113). The numerous fish images eventually lead to the epiphanic vision of the dead heron:
It was behind me, I smelled it before I saw it; then I heard the flies. The smell was like decaying fish. I turned around and it was hanging upside down by a thin blue nylon rope tied round its feet and looped over a tree branch, its wings fallen open. It looked at me with its mashed eye (115).
The narrator first becomes conscious of the heron’s presence because of its smell, a sign that she is ready to let her animal instincts take the lead. Moreover, the dead heron also gains its significance as epiphanic presence through its Christ-like position, its function as a redeemer for the narrator’s crime and as a symbol for her growing sense of guilt. The bird’s eye, focussed on the narrator, highlights the fact that faking innocence is no longer possible for the protagonist, and that she must explore the depth of her guilt. The importance of the heroine’s gradual reconnection with nature is emphasised as she passes the second portage, which brings her closer to self knowledge. She describes it as “shorter but more thickly overgrown: leaves brushed, branches pushed into the corridor of air over the trail as though preventing”
(117). Nature’s hostile attitude constitutes one of the obstacles facing the protagonist, from whom the lake, at this stage of her quest, still remains hidden.
140 As they finally get closer to the water, its description strikes the reader as unfathomable. When dipping her face into it, the narrator thinks: “This water was not clear like the water in the main lake: it was brownish, complicated by more kinds of life crowded more closely together, and it was colder” (125). This coldness, combined with the presence of various life forms, indicates the narrator’s growing feeling of discomfort in the face or her experience of self-discovery and her gradual awareness of nature’s life force. As a consequence, a quest journey necessarily involves an acknowledgement of the supremacy of nature and an acceptance of physical and psychological pain. The heroine’s dive into the lake represents the third stage of the quest pattern, namely the exploration of her unconscious. It begins with a reference to the sacrificed heron, treated as a Christ-like figure (140). It both represents man’s tendency towards evil and the narrator’s desperate need for redemption. The introduction to the chapter also emphasises the dangerous character of the dive, referred to as
“hazardous” (140). The reader soon realises the importance of the event for the heroine: “My other shape was in the water, not my reflection but my shadow, foreshortened, outline blurred, rays streaming out from around the head” (141). The scene clearly expresses the importance of the moment in terms of psychological knowledge: the reference to the shadow is highly efficient, both as a symbol of the heroine’s hidden past and, on a larger scale, as a sign of her awareness of a collective unconscious in the Jungian sense of the word. The narrator expects an encounter with her father in trickster-like form, whom she imagines as a “lizard body with horns and tail and front-facing head” (141), a description which once again stresses her need for a communion with nature. The narrator further encounters a shadow hidden in the lake, probably the body of her dead father, which reminds her of her aborted baby:
It was there but it wasn’t a painting, it wasn’t on the rock. It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead (142).
141
Although the identification of this dark figure with the lost father is never made explicit, the reader understands that the narrator has reached stage four of her quest – i.e. the confrontation with parental figures – a stage which is developed further on in the remaining chapters. One should also notice that Atwood here chooses to postpone traditional stage three – the intervention of the green-world lover – to a later phase of the heroine’s coming to awareness.
Indeed, at the end of the novel, Joe, in the role of the green-world lover, initiates the heroine’s return to civilisation and forces her to acknowledge her hybridity. The heroine’s dive into her unconscious, into her deeply buried past reveals her abortion to the reader:
At first I thought it was my drowned brother, hair floating around the face, image I’d kept from before I was born; but it couldn’t be him, he had not drowned after all, he was elsewhere. Then I recognized it: it wasn’t ever my brother I’d been remembering, that had been a disguise. I knew when it was, it was in a bottle curled up, staring out at me like a cat pickled; it had huge jelly eyes and fins instead of hands, fish gills, I couldn’t let it out, it was dead already, it had drowned in air. It was there when I woke up, suspended in the air above me like a chalice, an evil grail and I thought, Whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn’t a child but it could have been one, I didn’t allow it (143).
This awe-inspiring passage strikes the reader both through its magic realist quality and through its importance in the plot development. Indeed, the heroine’s child has become an in- between creature: he is at once a highly realistic corpse and a living, monstrous fish. The grotesque character of the figure’s huge eyes and the fish-like characteristics of its body contribute to the magic realist atmosphere of the epiphanic scene, because it juxtaposes human and animal beings in one and the same creature. Moreover, the quotation takes its whole meaning in the light of the narrator’s own interpretation of it, while she simultaneously confesses her deceptive forgeries:
142 That was wrong, I never saw it. They scraped it into a bucket and threw it wherever they throw them, it was travelling through the sewers by the time I woke, back to the sea (…) Not even a hospital, not even that sanction of legality, official procedures. A house it was, shabby front room with magazines, (…) furtive doors and whispers, they wanted you out fast. Pretence of the non-nurse (…) her criminal hand on my elbow (…) Ring on my finger. It was all real enough, it was enough reality for ever, I couldn’t accept it, that mutilation, ruin I’d made, I needed a different version. I pieced it together the best way I could, flattening it, scrapbook, collage, pasting over the front parts. A faked album, the memories fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could almost live in it, I’d lived in it until now (143-144).
This highly significant passage fully reveals the delusion of which the reader has been the victim: there was no wedding, no husband, just a clandestine abortion in a sordid place, without any consideration for the woman who underwent it. Words such as “different version,” “pieced together,” “faked,” and “fraudulent” all refer to the deceptive aspect of the heroine’s narrative. Moreover, they emphasise the painfulness of her situation and her reluctance to face it. Indeed, the narrator goes on describing how she felt incapable of revealing the truth to her parents (144). She further acknowledges her guilt in what happened when she finally concludes “I could have said no but I didn’t; that made me one of them too, a killer” (145), a sentence which sounds like the confession of a crime.
When she then returns to the other characters, she enters yet another phase of her quest, which traditionally takes place earlier and consists of the heroine’s encounter with a green-world lover, who usually helps her proceed on her quest. In this case, Joe helps the protagonist return to social life by assisting her through her regressive animal stage. One significant point here is that the heroine has now learned to tell the truth: indeed, she immediately tells Joe that she does not love him (146), a statement which totally changes the sexual power politics of their relationship. Their relationship is from now on free from patriarchal empowerment and becomes different from the one she had with her former lover.
143
Chapter twenty signals a major episode in the character’s quest for hybridity. Indeed, this chapter describes the protagonist’s ultimate stage of animal regression, which culminates in conceiving a child with her animal-lover Joe. Several elements underline the lover’s animal-like nature: he “unzips his human skin” (160), the importance of smells (160), the heroine’s claim that he must learn “to see in the dark” and “grow more fur” (161). The animal aspect of the lover is praised by the protagonist, as a necessary component of her quest for her hybrid self. She comments: “he’s given me the part of himself I needed” (162). This acceptance of her pregnancy demonstrates the heroine’s new ability to acknowledge her femininity. It also hints at a different attitude towards evil. Indeed, whereas she now fully accepts evil as a natural component of a human being. She can resist and refuse to be a victim.
This attitude will certainly be of the utmost importance for her return to patriarchal society.
Her subsequent description of the dead heron as “the creature in me” (168) echoes this acceptance of evil.
The heroine’s tears, her sudden anger at her parents for dying and leaving her behind, her outcry “Here I am (…) I’m here!” (172) express her new willingness to voice her feelings and to take her place in society. She eventually concludes her quest with a final meeting with her parents’ ghosts. This encounter shows her how to behave when she returns to society with her new understanding of her hybridity. Her father teaches her how to think, while her mother shows her how to act. Endowed with this new knowledge, she comes out of her quest with an acknowledgement of her otherness, symbolised by her future baby – a
“time-traveller,” “the first true human” (191). This description of her potential child sounds as a glorification of her hybrid condition, which she – at least temporarily – integrates through maternity.
144
***
As Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing clearly contains the five elements which I have previously identified as postcolonial traits, i.e. metafictional comment, mimicking behaviour on the protagonist’s part, magic realist epiphanies, trickster-like figures and a quest pattern oriented towards an acknowledgement of the heroine’s hybridity.
As always in Atwood’s work, the novel literally abounds in literary allusions, which have formed the subject of numerous critical interpretations. I personally have chosen to highlight Atwood’s metafictional and parodic intent concerning language, which pervades the novel. Indeed, I believe that a subversion of the patriarchal order necessarily involves a questioning of language, because the discourse imposed on and used by the heroine always echoes the values of the dominant class. The heroine’s gradual rejection of language should therefore be interpreted as a subversive strategy.
The same can be said of her propensity to project an image of herself that fits the expectations of the dominant class. Indeed, the protagonist has created a false-self system: she wants people to believe that she is married and had a child. Even as an artist, she submits to the patriarchal claim that women cannot be real artists by, once again, mimicking other people’s art. Mimicry has become the heroine’s most effective survival strategy in a world which wants to impose a certain kind on behaviour on her. The heroine clearly tries to resist the process of self-discovery and desperately holds on to logic and realism, while she at times experiences moments of vision, which are set in a magic realist atmosphere. In Kristevan
145 terms, she briefly abandons the realm of the Symbolic to turn to the Semiotic and to acknowledge a more instinctive aspect of her personality (Rao, Strategies, 60-64).
The heroine acquires a similar awareness when she unravels her trickster powers and gradually discovers that she has inherited them from her parents, who both accompany her as awe-inspiring, yet benevolent figures throughout her quest. Both parents display trickster-like qualities and serve as guides for the heroine. The father clearly represents the mind, the
Symbolic, who leaves behind seemingly illogical clues for the heroine to follow, while the mother, associated to nature and pregnancy, teaches her daughter how to act as a woman in society.
However, the heroine’s return to that society necessitates a profound understanding of her otherness, of her hybridity, which she can only experience through a complete regression to a natural way of life. Atwood has here significantly chosen to differ from the common quest pattern by postponing the animal phase, to emphasise the importance of the heroine’s struggle to acknowledge her hybrid self. Whereas some critics read the outcome of Surfacing as the resolution of the heroine’s trauma, I would rather conclude that the protagonist turns back to society having gained some insights on how to apprehend her role as a woman in a male-dominated milieu.
In the famous episode of the dive into the lake, Margaret Atwood develops a powerful metaphor of postcolonial acknowledgement of identity: the heroine decides to discover her spiritual in-betweenness under the guise of a search for her lost father. Atwood shows us how the fragmented, self-victimised individual, so ill at ease within patriarchal culture penetrates a totally different realm thanks to the acceptance of her own “otherness.” The narrator achieves
146 a magic realist fusion with the wilderness. She then embraces nature’s modes of communication when regressing to an animal stage and confronting her parents’ ghosts. This exploration of an unknown territory is another characteristic of postcolonial writing (Brydon;
Tiffin, “The Thematic Ancestor,” 89-93).
Hybridity itself has proved a useful concept in order to analyse the protagonist’s response to the wilderness. My conclusion points to the importance of nature in the heroine’s quest for her hybrid self. In many instances, the heroine’s feeling of “otherness” and inadequacy is amplified and distorted by her immersion in wilderness. The outcome of the heroine’s quest therefore eludes any simple conclusion. Nature reverberates her progressive disintegration of the self, a process which forces her to question her identity. To this dramatic disintegration corresponds a growing awareness of the wilderness, a closer connection with trickster’s spirit, and a rising concern for the environment. All those features are subtly intermingled in Surfacing, a novel which, although it was published as early as 1972 by a so- called “mainstream” writer, can be read from a postcolonial point of view. Atwood’s next novel, Lady Oracle, offers the reader another aspect of the writer’s talent. In a highly comical mode, it challenges the stereotypes of femininity, thus addressing in yet another way the theme of empowerment.
147 Chapter 3. Lady Oracle: Joan Foster as Trickster
“But it wasn’t more honesty that would have saved me, I thought; it was more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead to only one thing. Disaster” (Lady Oracle, 37).
Joan Foster, Lady Oracle’s protagonist, is Atwood’s first fully conscious liar. As such, she deserves a thorough analysis. The plot starts with Joan simulating her own death to escape from a dull, unsatisfying life. As a child, she became conscious of her parents’ indifference and unhappiness and tried to cope with this situation by developing a double personality: at home, she was deliberately quiet and “comatose,” while outside her family circle, her enthusiasm made her very popular among her friends. She later completely denies her childhood, panicking each time she meets someone who might recognise her. When she leaves home, she constructs a new self by losing weight and concealing her former life, even to her husband. Joan masters disguise and camouflage. As a writer of Gothic romances, an acknowledged poet or even as the lover of the ex-centric Royal Porcupine, she develops a different self each time. The character of Joan Foster, with her fancy for disguises and make- up and her multiple false selves, provides an ideal case-study of trickster figures. Moreover, the Royal Porcupine, one of her lovers, with his exuberant clothes, harsh humour and borderline behaviour, can also be considered a parody of the trickster figure, as he features all of the trickster’s most excessive and grotesque aspects. Joan’s father and her Aunt Lou also display several tricksters’ characteristics.
Yet, apart from its deception motif and its multi-faceted trickster figures, the novel also features other elements which I have identified as significant aspects of postcolonial
148 fiction, namely metafictional commentary, here facilitated by the heroine’s own work as a writer; parodies of well-known films or tales – The Red Shoe and The Little Mermaid - ; postcolonial rewriting of novels such as Austen’s Northanger Abbey or Brontë’s Jane Eyre; the presence of magic realist moments, which in this novel feature a grotesque quality which befits both a comedy and a quest process. Passages quoted from Joan’s Costume Gothics1 provide examples of what I have identified as gothic magic realism, i.e. a mixture of mythic and grotesque magic realism, as defined by Delbaere (“Magic Realism,” 249-263). Indeed, those passages integrate both the mythic, uncanny place – the labyrinth – with a grotesque quality inherent in gothic romances. The utmost importance of such fictional excerpts transpires as they become the site of the quest’s outcome. In this case, the quest brings the heroine to leave behind her numerous mimicking strategies to acknowledge her hybridity, represented by her need to assume different personalities as a writer. She remains, however, unable to quit writing – i.e. the world of fantasy – altogether and to integrate her hybridity into everyday life.
1. Atwood’s Sense of Parody: The Heroine as Writer
Lady Oracle contains numerous allusions to popular culture. In the first pages of the novel, the heroine compares her daydreaming about the meaning of her life with a Disney film entitled The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met (9), a title which by and large sums up the heroine’s own struggle to be appreciated despite her rather dull physique and her passive attitude to life. The allusion is immediately followed by the heroine’s confession of her inability to cry in a delicate way, one of the features distinguishing her from the romantic heroine she would like to resemble. The author’s repeated use of elements borrowed from
1 A collection of cheap, over-romantic thrillers in paperback.
149 popular culture, i.e. fairy tales, films, popular literature, comics, explores the heroine’s feeling of inadequacy in strikingly innovative ways. In this work, the heroine’s “otherness” is parodied in modes comparable to those articulated by postcolonial or ethnic writers. Indeed, this comedy, although mainstream, ventures into the realm of marginality due to the heroine’s struggle for self-affirmation and to Atwood’s way of reinterpreting familiar images. Atwood’s treatment of the labyrinth motif,2 for instance, deserves thorough consideration. In this novel, the maze functions as an insightful image of the heroine’s own state of mind: “in any labyrinth I would have let go of the thread in order to follow a wandering light, a fleeting voice” (152), Joan says. Likewise, fairy tales reflect her constant inadequacy: “In a fairy tale I would be one of the two stupid sisters who open the forbidden door and are shocked by the murdered wives, not the third, clever one who keeps to the essentials: presence of mind, foresight, the telling of watertight lies. I told lies but they were not watertight.” (152).
Atwood’s use of popular culture reflects her constant search for powerful modes of expression capable of visualising the heroine’s inner trouble, of dramatising her sense of “otherness.” For instance, when the heroine climbs into bed with a “fotoromanzo,” she significantly mentions a series of words and phrases. Those perfectly describe her own confused state of mind: “there were a lot of words and phrases I already knew. I am not afraid of you. I don’t trust you. You know that I love you. You must tell me the truth. He looked so strange. Is something the matter? Our love is impossible. I will be yours forever. I am afraid.” (189). The fairy-tale and film motifs embedded in Atwood’s fiction, and particularly in Lady Oracle, have fascinated critics3 and readers alike. They manifest themselves in moments of epiphany, inducing the character’s awareness of herself as “Other”:
2 Several critics have noticed that Atwood’s tendency to conceive her novels as labyrinths. Among them, Hilde Staels writes about Lady Oracle: “The text is a funhouse that multiplies reflections to infinity, a side show in which characters are enlarged or shrink to absurdities. It is a distorting mirror-maze, a narrative labyrinth, in which diverse tales mirror one another, effecting a self-reflection in perpetuum.” (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels, 69). 3 For a thorough analysis of fairy tale motifs, read Sharon Wilson’s chapter on Lady Oracle in her book, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (120-136).
150
I began to feel something was missing. Perhaps, I thought, I had no soul; I just
drifted around, singing vaguely, like the Little Mermaid in the Andersen fairy tale.
In order to get a soul you had to suffer, you had to give something up; or was that to
get legs and feet? (…) Then there was Moira Shearer, in The Red Shoes. (…) I was
doing fairly well by comparison. Their mistake had been to go public, whereas I did
my dancing behind closed doors. It was safer, but… (216).
The combined allusions to The Little Mermaid and The Red Shoe’s ballerina4 express the heroine’s psychological dilemma. Her inadequacy can be associated with these characters’ sufferings. Their tragic fate constitutes an oblique revelation of Joan own buried pain; moreover, they give her an opportunity to unleash her deceptive attitude – “behind closed doors” – without really naming it.
The novel also portrays the heroine as a writer, albeit in a parodic way. Joan Foster makes several comments on her career as a writer of Costume Gothics, and later, on her sudden fame as a poetess. Her highly comical view of the literary world denotes Atwood’s parodic intent. An autobiographic element, for instance, can be found in the description of the protagonist’s hair as an important element of her personality as a writer. Atwood here makes fun of the newspapers, for devoting more attention to her physical appearance than to her writings:
hair in the female was regarded as more important than either talent or the lack of it.
Joan Foster, celebrated author of Lady Oracle, looking like a lush Rossetti portrait,
radiating intensity, hypnotized the audience with her unearthly … (The Toronto
Star). Prose-poetess Joan Foster looked impressively Junoesque in her flowing red
4 Eleonora Rao provides full analysis of both intertexts in “Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle” (145).
151 hair and green robe; unfortunately she was largely inaudible … (The Globe and
Mail) (14).
She also briefly alludes to the futility of fame, through the image of the ants spelling the heroine’s initials in sugary water, thus making her “a living legend” (21). This tendency towards self-parody confirms Atwood’s own role as a trickster, fooling readers5 and critics.
For the one who can read between the lines, the novel reveals her personal opinion on the writer’s craft.
Joan further illustrates several aspects of her work as a writer, such as finding an effective title (33) or consulting sources - samples of historical romances, the local library, a book on costume design through the ages, the costume room of the Victoria and Albert
Museum (156) – and tackles the financial aspect of the job: “I got less for it than usual, partly because of the length – Columbine paid by the word – and partly because the bastards knew I needed the money. ‘The conclusion is a little unresolved,’ said the letter. But it was enough for a one-way airplane ticket.” (176). Likewise, editors6 become the victims of Atwood’s parody of the writer’s craft. She thoroughly mocks them as she writes: “‘We thought it was – ah – reminiscent – of a mixture of Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen,’ said Colin Harper unhappily. (…) ‘I thought we might do you as a sort of female Leonard Cohen,’ said Sturgess.
The other two were slightly embarrassed by this.” (225).
5 Robert Lecker in “Janus through the Looking Glass” notes that “the reader must deal with the realization that the story forces him to participate in the duplicity and become a sympathetic imposter” (194-195). 6 Susan Maclean’s article on Lady Oracle briefly analyses Atwood’s parody of the Canadian literary establishment, concluding that “the whole literary scene is depicted as a farcical sham” (181).
152 Most importantly, all these allusions to the writer’s task parodically assert the heroine’s own psychological difficulties. When confronted to dramatic events, she expresses her insecurity through her literary career: for example, when her mother dies, she first feels incapable of writing and her attempts turn out to be both ludicrous and ineffective: “I did try –
I started a novel called Storm over Castleford – but the hero played billiards all the time and the heroine sat on the edge of her bed, alone at night, doing nothing. That was probably the closest to social realism I ever came” (181). Despite its comic tone, such a sentence mainly conveys the heroine’s utter state of confusion and despair. Significantly, when she later mentions the newspaper clippings welcoming her arrival on the literary scene, she also alludes to the possibility of a disaster:
UNKNOWN BURSTS ON LITERARY SCENE LIKE COMET, said the first review, in the
Toronto Star. The Globe review called it ‘gnomic’ and ‘chthonic,’ (…) Maybe it
wasn’t too bad, after all. (But I didn’t stop to reflect on the nature of comets. Lumps
of cosmic debris with long red hair and spectacular tails, discovered by astronomers,
who named them after themselves. Harbingers of disaster. Portents of war.) (234).
“Disaster” is indeed an appropriate term to describe the heroine’s life, an entanglement of lies and deception, intended at others but eventually affecting her own vision of herself. However, at the end of the novel, the character becomes aware of the intricate network of lies which she has built around her life: “I was waiting for something to happen, the next turn of events (a circle? A spiral?). All my life I’d been hooked on plots” (310). Ironically, the heroine functions as a parody of herself, using her own fiction to build up a false biography and a romanticised personality.
153 Lady Oracle should be read as a parody7 of the genre of gothic romance. Eleonora Rao has examined the novel’s similarities with Jane Austen’s parody of Gothic fiction in
Northanger Abbey.8 Without undermining her analysis, I contend that Atwood intended the novel as a rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.9 Rao briefly alludes to Jane Eyre, when she identifies the shift to Felicia’s perspective as “reminiscent of Jean Rhys’ novel Wide
Sargasso Sea” (Rao: 34). She further interprets the novel as the “setting up of two contrasting and irreconcilable versions of femininity centred on the polarities of innocence and experience” (Rao: 34). Evidence found in the Atwood Papers at the Fisher Library of Rare
Books demonstrates that Atwood used Jane Eyre as a preliminary reading, before writing
Lady Oracle. Indeed, in a letter to her secretary, she asks her to purchase a copy of that book, and mentions it as the most urgent of all her requests (see Appendix I).10 On reading Jane
Eyre, one cannot help noticing similar elements in Lady Oracle. First of all, young Jane is accused of being a liar (Jane Eyre, 98). She also fights social conventions and strives for independence, as Joan Foster does. Jane Eyre further contains numerous allusions to the uncanny, from mysterious whispers to Bertha’s frightful laughter (Jane Eyre, 138). The same kind of laughter is heard by Joan’s heroine’s when they come near the maze. Moreover, both
7 Several critics have studied the concept of parody in Lady Oracle. In her article “George, Leda, and a Poured Concrete Balcony,” Carol L. Beran, for instance, identifies the novel as a parody of two kinds of writing: the autobiographical form used by celebrities and the fictional spiritual autobiography. She concludes: “Partaking of two conventions yet failing to fulfil the expectations generated by either form, Lady Oracle calls into question generic expectations in such a way as to make us question not merely what is a novel, but also what is the relation of a novel which purports to be autobiography to autobiography – specifically to a form of autobiography that often impresses readers as distinctly fictional” (Beran, “George, Leda,” 19). I find such analysis particularly interesting in the light of the narrator’s frequent use of deceptive practices. I agree with Beran’s idea that Atwood in Lady Oracle makes her readers question the relationship between fiction and reality (22). Staels, for her part, examines Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” as another of the novel’s intertexts (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels, 86). She also mentions Joan’s use of “other gothic conventions such as suicide; melodrama; the fear of traces of past selves; concealment of past acts; of past passions; fear that hidden evidence of some unspeakable transgression will be traced down; a general sense of guilty secrecy; a pervasively ominous atmosphere…” (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels, 91). 8 RAO, Eleonora, “Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle,” 136-137. Ann McMillan provides a similar analysis in VanSpanckeren and Castro’s book on Atwood (McMillan 56-57). See also Rao’s book, Strategies for Identity, 28, 30-31. 9 John Thieme briefly mentions the correlation with Jane Eyre, when he compares the foreign Countess with Rochester’s wife and notices the similarities between Castle DeVere and Thornfield Hall (Thieme 76). Coral Ann Howells equally mentions Jane Eyre in her analysis of Atwoodian Gothic (Howells, Margaret Atwood, 71). 10 Atwood Papers, Collection 200, Box 27, File 27:1, p.4.
154 novels contain examples of premonitory dreams: Joan’s dreams are visited by her mother and her Aunt Lou before they die, in the same way as Jane dreams of a child (Jane Eyre, 249) before being informed of the death of her cousin and former tormentor Mr. John and before
Bertha enters her room (Jane Eyre, 310). Leda Sprott’s séances remind us of Mr. Rochester’s disguise as a fortune teller (Jane Eyre, 225). Joan’s mother strongly resembles Jane’s heartless aunt, Mrs. Reed. Atwood also added a hint in the name of one of Joan’s characters.
Indeed, when reading both novels carefully, one notices that Edmund DeVere (162), one of her novels’ villains shows striking similarities with the name of Charlotte Brontë’s Lord
Edwin Vere (Jane Eyre, 265), one of Georgiana’s fiancés, evicted by her jealous sister. As to the general structure of the book, Jane is forced to run away after the failure of her wedding
(Jane Eyre, 347) and introduces herself to the Rivers using an alias (Jane Eyre, 363), a tactic often resorted to by Joan. All these examples, together with the clues found in the Atwood
Papers, establish the fact that Atwood used Jane Eyre as one of her models for writing Lady
Oracle. I contend that Atwood’s choice of Jane Eyre as one of Lady Oracle’s intertext is of great significance in the prospect of a postcolonial reading of the author’s early work. Indeed, one should keep in mind that Jane Eyre embodies as the prototype of the subversive heroine, rejecting the role ascribed to women in her time. Therefore, the novel’s recurrent allusions to
Jane Eyre remind the reader of the rebellious aspect of Joan’s personality and of her repeated pleas for women’s freedom.
The novel uses elements drawn from the genre of gothic romance, such as the idealised female heroine as a victim and the supernatural. The unrealistic atmosphere of such passages, their nightmarish and simultaneously grotesque quality parody the protagonist’s state of mind and psychological development. Joan’s gothic romances are metafictional in the sense that they parallel her own state of mind. At the beginning of the novel, Charlotte, Joan’s
155 fictional heroine, foregrounds Joan’s inability to deal with men, as she calls them “Liars and hypocrites, all of them!”(30). The fact that Joan repeatedly has to follow the routes taken by her heroines (162) emphasises the parallel between them. It offers a deconstruction of Joan’s stereotypical identity formation process as a female victim. Indeed, her second heroine,
Samantha Deane, is emblematic of women’s position as victims within patriarchal society.
When Joan reproduces Samantha’s gestures in her writing process, the similarities in their experiences of empowerment becomes striking: “There were footsteps behind her (…) there was a hand on her arm, and a voice, hoarse with passion, breathed her name… At this point in my rehearsal I felt something on my arm (…) there was a hand on it. I screamed, quite loudly, and the next thing I knew I was lying on top of a skinny, confused-looking young man.” (164). At this point, fiction and reality intertwine, as they often do in Joan’s life.
Significantly, this scene also describes her first meeting with Arthur. This man later becomes her husband, and therefore one of the main causes of her current distress and alienation. As the novel proceeds towards the final conclusion, Joan gradually engages in another kind of relationship with her heroines. She breaks away from the codes of gothic romance to question the woman’s role as a victim: “she had to die. In my books all wives were eventually mad or dead, or both. But what had she ever done to deserve it?” (319). This questioning brings about a different kind of denouement in her fiction, forcing her to side with the female villain, thus reconciling the two antithetical sides of her identity. At the beginning of her literary career,
Joan could only think of women in binary terms: in gothic romances, the virginal victim usually falls in love with a brooding hero while his wife, often a cunning villain, deserves to die. When she eventually expresses her sympathy for Felicia, the villain (319-320), Joan points the way to a third possibility, a hybrid space that would accommodate both aspects of her own female personality.
156 2. Variations on Mimicry
From the very first page of the novel, the reader discovers the heroine’s ability to lie and deceive.11 Indeed, the novel starts with the heroine’s avowal of one of her biggest lies: she has faked her own death, and mentions that this imaginary episode of her life is quite distinct from what happened to her earlier: it has been planned carefully. This episode thus stresses the fact that the heroine wishes to exert control over her life (7). One might as well say that the heroine has spent the whole of her life in disguise. Quite logically then, Atwood chooses to introduce to the reader a heroine who definitely wishes to remain unknown and unrecognised in her new environment. This choice might not be so easy to live with. Indeed, by the end of the first chapter, the protagonist utters her fear at being recognised (12), a feeling which recurs in the first part of the novel. Her numerous descriptions of her subterfuges point to her inability to free herself completely from her former self: “I’d taken precautions, of course. I was using my other name, (…) I’d worn my sunglasses and covered my head with the scarf
I’d bought at the Toronto airport” (13). In the following scene, Joan expresses her inability to create a truly effective disguise, i.e. to conceal her “otherness:” “the old man had caught me without my disguise, and, worse still, with my hair showing. Waist-length red hair was very noticeable in that part of the country” (13). The subsequent depiction of her wet clothes, as the remains of her fake suicide, evokes a kind of rebirth, though an unsuccessful one:
The suitcase was under a big fake-baroque chest of drawers with peeling veneer and
an inlaid seashell design. I pulled it out and opened it; inside were my wet clothes, in
11 In her article “The Self-Inventing Self: Women Who Lie and Pose in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood,” Ann Parsons examines the uses of deception in both Lady Oracle and The Edible Woman. Interesting is Parsons’ assertion that “the two novels join much serious modern fiction by women, in asking whether women are coerced or conditioned into deceitful behaviour, and if so, by what forces” (Parsons 98). Parsons thus establishes the link between female subversion and deception, a concept largely equivalent to my theory of deception as a mimicry strategy. Clara Thomas equally denounces the heroine’s self-delusion and unreliability in the Davidsons’ The Art of Margaret Atwood (Thomas “Lady Oracle,” 168).
157 a green plastic Glad Bag. They smelled of my death, of Lake Ontario, spilled oil,
dead gulls, tiny silver fish cast up on the beach and rotting. Jeans and a navy-blue T-
shirt, my funerary costume, my former self, damp and collapsed, from which the
many-colored souls had flown (19).
The negative undertones of this description are reiterated when the heroine decides to get rid of her clothes: “I decided to bury them. (…) I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I still felt although I was getting rid of a body, the corpse of someone I’d killed” (20). This sentence reflects the protagonist’s feelings of guilt and uneasiness, mainly due to her repetitive unsuccessful attempts to conceal her “otherness.”
The novel further revolves around the relationships between deceptive Joan and her overpowering environment. The action takes place in Toronto, London and in the Italian town of Terremotto where the heroine seeks refuge after her last and biggest lie. The conflicts between Joan, her mother, her lovers and her husband are often dramatised humorously.
Joan’s multiple personalities and deceptive behaviour complicate matters. The way she interacts with the male characters symbolically illustrates the clash between her own self and patriarchal demands. Thus, Joan comes to embody the “Other,” the alienated female individual at a loss with patriarchal values. Even the messages sent to her friend and accomplice Sam, to tell him that their plan succeeded, show traces of patriarchal empowerment. Indeed, the heroine feels safer signing the postcard as a couple, and not as a single woman: “Postcard to Sam (…) HAVING A SUPER TIME. ST. PETER’S IS WONDERFUL. SEE
YOU SOON, LOVE, MITZI AND FRED. That would tell him I’d arrived safely. If there had been complications, I would have written: WEATHER COOL AND FRED HAS DISENTERY. THANK GOD
FOR ENTEROVIOFORM! LOVE, MITZI AND FRED” (25-26).
158 However, such a small, harmless lie does not destabilise the heroine, who has been lying all her life. Her literary career, especially, reflects her careless attitude towards deception. Throughout the novel, the heroine frequently alludes to her various identities: she is at once Joan Foster, Arthur’s wife, a celebrated poetess, and Louisa K. Delacourt, the author of numerous gothic romance books. Even after faking her suicide, Joan succeeds in maintaining her double identity. Indeed, she goes on writing costume gothics to earn a living and therefore comments:
I could fill in the opening pages, write another eight or nine chapters, and send them
to Hermes Books with a covering letter explaining that I’d moved to Italy on
account of my health. They’d never seen me, they knew me only by my other name.
They thought I was a middle-aged ex-librarian, overweight and shy. Practically a
recluse, in fact, and allergic to dust, wool, fish, cigarette smoke and alcohol, as I’d
explained to them when declining lunches. I’d always tried to keep my two names
and identities as separate as possible (33).
She later explains the origin of her literary alter-ego:
of course I used Aunt Lou’s name; it was a kind of memorial to her. Several years
later, when I’d switched to a North American publisher, I was asked for a
photograph. (…) so I sent them the shot of Aunt Lou at the Ex, with me standing
beside her. This picture was never used. The women who wrote my kind of book
were supposed to look trim and healthy, with tastefully grayed hair (157).
Far from merely denoting the heroine’s ability to lie, the excerpt, in its last sentence, also exemplifies the complicity of the literary world with her construction of a false self. Indeed, the narrator implies that the editors also impose an image of the female writer corresponding to patriarchal configuration. Repeated allusions to delusion – “New articles were appearing
159 every week, (…) ‘Lady Oracle: Hoax or Delusion?’” (250) – along with the heroine’s shameless use of deception – “I told Sturgess my mother was dying of cancer and I had to go to Saskatchewan to look after her.” (252) – express the protagonist’s anxiety about
“otherness” in a comical mode. Her repeated distortion of reality constitutes a mimicry strategy aiming at giving others the impression that she has reached social assimilation. Even in the climactic/epiphanic scene at the end of the novel, when the heroine becomes aware of her hybridity, it remains unclear whether she will be able to renounce deception altogether.
Indeed, imagining her readers’ reaction to the announcement that her suicide was a fake, she concludes: “If I rose from the dead, waltzed back and announced that it was all a deception, what were they supposed to do? (…) they’d hate me forever and make my life a nightmare.”
(314), a sentence which casts doubt on the successful outcome of her whole adventure.
Examining the content of the narrator’s long flashback about her childhood, one notices the protagonist’s propensity to lie from very early on. The various episodes deal with the subject’s necessity to lie about everyday facts in order to fit in. For instance, recalling a song she learnt at the Brownies – “Here you see the laughing Gnomes, Helping mothers in our homes” (55) – the heroine immediately corrects the recollection as follows: “This was not strictly true: I didn’t help my mother. I wasn’t allowed to. On the few occasions I’d attempted it, the results had not pleased her” (55). A subsequent scene satirises the Brownies’ necessity to mimic socially accepted behaviour,12 an often difficult task for Joan, who, as a child, already suffered from a deep feeling of inadequacy and alienation:
‘Now, now, Joan, we don’t like to see unhappy faces at the Brownies;’ (…) I had to
be secluded in the cloakroom so as not to embarrass everyone until I had, as Brown
12 Staels significantly notices that “gnomic” also means “a collective, anonymous and authoritative voice which speaks for and about what it aims to establish as ‘accepted’ knowledge or wisdom. (…) Girls who do not coincide with the image in the mirror are doomed to be failures.” (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels, 75).
160 Owl put it, got my Brownie smile back again. ‘You must learn to control yourself,’
she said kindly. (…) She didn’t know what a lot of territory this covered (58).
Indeed, Joan often cries for being the scapegoat of other children. The older girls quickly become aware of her credulity, despising her because it is so easy to make her cry. Yet, instead of deriving comfort from an adult such as Brown Owl, she only experiences more shame at being different. “Learning to control oneself”, as Brown Owl puts it, is yet another form of mimicry, aiming to prove that Joan is not different from the other children. From then on, mimicry becomes the main strategy adopted by Joan in order to be socially accepted.
While she remains the other children’s scapegoat, she must endure it, for even her mother would not help her: “I couldn’t tell my mother about any of this because I felt that whatever she would say, underneath it her sympathies would lie with them. ‘Stand up for yourself,’ she would exhort” (59). Consequently, the girl resorts to deception whenever she feels threatened as “other” by social constraints. In one of her recollections, she evokes how Aunt Lou once asked her not to reveal her adulterous life, thus indicating the strength of social prejudices: “I found out even later that Aunt Lou had a boyfriend of sorts. His name was Robert, he was an accountant, he had a wife and children, and he came to her apartment on Sunday evenings for dinner. ‘Don’t tell your mother, dear,’ Aunt Lou, said. ‘I’m not sure she’d understand’” (84).
As an adult, she uses the same kind of deceptive behaviour. After a violent quarrel with her mother, Joan decides to leave, stealing money from her mother’s purse and assuming from then on her Aunt Lou’s identity:
I’d never stayed in a hotel before in my life. I used Aunt Lou’s name, as I didn’t
want my mother to trace me. That was stupid, she would have recognized Aunt
Lou’s name at once, but I didn’t think of that. Instead I was prepared to be
challenged by the desk clerk for being underage, and I would then have been able to
161 whip out Aunt Lou’s birth certificate and demonstrate that I was forty-nine. (135-
136).
Joan clearly wants to affirm her maturity and independence. The white gloves she decides to wear function as a symbol of “adulthood and social status” (136). In order to find a room, she has to resort to deception again:
In the morning I bought a paper and went through the want ads, looking for a room.
I found one (…) and represented myself over the phone as a twenty-five-year-old
office girl, non-drinking and non-smoking. I pinned my hair back, put on my white
gloves and went off to inspect it. I gave my name as Miss L. Delacourt, and I used
this name also when I opened a new bank account later in the day. I withdrew all my
money from my other account and closed it; I didn’t want my mother tracking me
down. This was the formal beginning of my second self. I was amazed at how easily
everyone believed me, but then, why should they suspect? (137).
She gradually gets involved in more lies to preserve that fake identity, which makes it more and more difficult for her to reveal the truth both to others and to herself. She thus logically concludes that “hidden depths should remain hidden; façades were at least as truthful” (197), a sentence which indicates that deception has become Joan’s sole strategy in order to survive.
From the start, the heroine also displays a tendency to uphold a blurred or erroneous vision of herself. After mentioning her faked suicide, she confesses, for instance, seeing herself as “a Mediterranean splendor” (7), a description immediately contradicted by her urgent need to find suntan lotion. Her interest in advertisement – “I was a sucker for ads, especially those that promised happiness” (29) – suggests both her gullibility and her inability to resist self-deception. The reader soon realises that this behaviour was established from very
162 early on: as she recalls her childhood experience in the ballet class, Joan comments on the necessity for her to correspond to the socially accepted image of the thin ballerina. A fat and ugly child, she is totally out of place in the role of an aerial butterfly. The description of the making of her costume bespeaks her attempts to fit in and to conceal her hybrid nature.
Indeed, at this early stage of her development, she remains totally incapable of conceiving that she might be different: “My mother struggled with the costume, lengthening it, adding another layer of gauze to conceal the outlines, padding the bodice; it was no use. (…) I did not look like a butterfly. But I knew the addition of the wings would make all the difference. I was hoping for magic transformations, even then” (46). Joan clearly deceives herself when she thinks that the wings will significantly modify her costume or when she regards her mother as the cause of her misfortune: “I always felt that if my mother hadn’t interfered Miss
Flegg would have noticed nothing, but this is probably not true” (47). Definitely unhappy with her life, yet unable to grasp the significance of her “otherness,” Joan remains an apathetic, obese adolescent who deceptively claims: “‘I like being fat,’” and bursts into tears
(83). Totally dissatisfied with her life, she finds no comfort in her mother’s attitude. Indeed, the woman keeps pointing to her insufficiencies and inadequacy, so much so that the heroine indulges in yet another form of delusion: “In one of my daydreams I used to pretend Aunt Lou was my real mother” (88). The choice of her friendly, benevolent aunt as a role model in womanhood helps the protagonist move away from her overpowering mother, who also turns out to be deceptive. Although the narrator never confesses this element, the reader soon guesses that her mother considers Joan the cause of her unhappiness. The birth of this unwanted child and the departure of the father apparently caused her mother to conceive feelings of hatred for Joan. Through Joan’s fragmented memories, the reader gets a glimpse of her mother’s drama:
163 There were no pictures of her as a girl though, none of her parents, none of the two
brothers and the sister I later found out she had. She almost never talked about her
family or her early life (…) Her parents had both been very strict, very religious.
(…) She’d done something that offended them (…) and she’d run away from home
at the age of sixteen and never gone back (68).
One easily understands that the mother’s pregnancy was the cause of her flight, a fact which explains her resentful attitude to Joan. Strangely, Joan never seems to be able to understand fully what happened to her mother, in the same way that she cannot acknowledge her hybridity. However, she is aware of her mother’s deceptive strategies – “My father didn’t come back until I was five, and before that he was only a name, a story which my mother would tell me and which varied considerably” (68-69) – and one wonders whether she did not actually copy her mother’s behaviour when constantly resorting to lies. Indeed, in the narrative of her adolescence, she frequently mentions her mother’s propensity to lie for matters of social and private concerns: “My mother was having a dinner party, entertaining two couples whom she claimed privately to dislike” (73) or “my mother was on the chesterfield, pretending to read a book on child psychology (…) but actually reading The Fox, a historical novel about the Borgias. I had already finished it, in secret” (70). This sentence highlights the similarity between the two characters. It demonstrates that Joan, though she dislikes her mother, actually resembles her in many ways, a fact which she is not ready to acknowledge yet.
While recalling her childhood and adolescence, Joan further emphasises her feeling of inadequacy, which is in fact the conscious part of her hidden hybridity. She repeatedly mentions her inability to express herself properly or to understand other people, as in the following examples: “I could never manage the right emotions at the right times, anger when I
164 should have been angry, tears when I should have cried; everything was mismatched” (15) or
“what did they want? The question I could never answer” (15). Her contacts with Mr. Vitroni, her Italian landlord, dramatise her alienation: “I was a foreigner, this was the sort of thing I was supposed to like and he’d brought them as a gift, to please me. Dutifully I was pleased; I couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings” (17). She confesses that she often feels at a loss when it comes to understanding the innuendoes constituting social interactions: “The language was only one problem; there was also that other language, what is done and what isn’t done. If I accepted a picture, would I have to become his mistress?” (17); “I had the feeling that much more had happened in the conversation than I’d been able to understand, which wouldn’t have been unusual. Arthur used to tell me I was obtuse” (18). Joan’s lack of understanding of her own hybrid self causes her to display very different kinds of behaviour in order to fulfil people’s expectations: “At home I was sullen or comatose, at the movies I wept with Aunt
Lou, but at school I was doggedly friendly and outgoing” (93). In her desire to adopt an acceptable behaviour, she comes to symbolise the difficulties of acknowledging “otherness.”
Far from resolving her problem, losing weight only increases her inadequacy, as she discovers that her trouble might involve more than matters of physical appearance: “I felt very lonely; I also longed to be fat again. It would be an insulation, a cocoon. Also it would be a disguise. I could be merely an onlooker again, with nothing too much expected of me. Without my magic cloak or blubber and invisibility I felt naked, pruned, as though some essential covering was missing.” (141). She then resorts to self-deception again, thinking that her new physique makes her a different, more socially adjusted person:
Suddenly I was down to the required weight, and I was face to face with the rest of
my life. I was now a different person, and it was like being born fully grown at the
age of nineteen: I was the right shape, but I had the wrong past. I’d have to get rid of
it entirely and construct a different one for myself, a more agreeable one (141).
165
This passage dramatises the irreconcilable character of Joan’s artificially constructed personality. She confesses she elaborated a totally new self. Yet, it remains an unsatisfactory solution, partly because of the discrepancies between this new self and her hidden past, partly because she fails to address her real problem: society’s patriarchal demands.
The first chapter conjures up the figure of the absent husband in Mr. Vitroni’s not so innocent question: “Your husband will come soon also?” (18), an early sign of Joan’s inability to conceive a life without the approval of a protective male presence. After leaving home,
Joan leads a solitary life soon interrupted by her meeting with a Polish Count, Paul. From the start, Paul displays all the characteristics of the paternalistic, older male figure. Several sentences hint at his superior attitude towards Joan. He treats her as a child – “His manner was warm but patronizing -, as if I were an unusually inept child” (146). Moreover, he makes decisions for her and does not care about her own opinion: “‘We will go in a taxi, and by boat.’ He had not asked me, he had told me, so I didn’t think of saying no.” (147). This part of the novel concentrates on the formation of Joan’s false self in an attempt to conceal her hybridity. “Otherness” might well be what attracted her to Paul. Indeed, she recognises him as one of her kind, as a person who needs to lie to be accepted. When he tells her the story of his adventurous arrival in Canada, she comments: “My first reaction to this story was that I had met a liar as compulsive and romantic as myself.” (148). As an immigrant, the Polish Count foreshadows what might happen to Joan if she persists in living a deceptive life. The scene implies the Count’s alienation within a Canadian background. It suggests, somewhat pessimistically, that finding one’s place in Canadian society can only be achieved in delusion, through the use of mimicry strategies. Those are exactly the techniques used by Paul when he writes under the improbable name of Mavis Quilp, his WASP alter-ego (153). Joan intuitively
166 grasps the in-betweenness of her lover’s situation when she comments on the style of his nurse novels: “There was something odd about the language, the clichés were a little off, distorted just slightly.” (153). This distortion is emblematic of the Polish Count’s “otherness” and echoes the heroine’s own feelings of alienation. No wonder then that she feels attracted to
Paul’s job and becomes quite successful as a writer. Paul’s attitude towards her gradually changes to reveal his mimicked paternalistic attitude: he resents her earning more money than he does (157) and starts denigrating her work (159, 160). This reaction shows that Paul has to some extent accepted society’s patriarchal view and takes delight in victimising Joan. He thus symbolises the typical attitude of the subordinate subject mimicking the attitude of those in power.
In her second lover and future husband, Arthur, Joan encounters the same overpowering attitude. She describes him as a man incapable of knowing her personality, preferences or feelings: “Arthur wouldn’t have liked the picture. It wasn’t the sort of thing he liked, though it was the sort of thing he believed I liked” (18-19). He likes to influence her choice of clothes (22-23) and, like the Polish Count, treats her as a child: “‘You’re an intelligent woman,’ Arthur would have said. He always said this before an exposition of some failing of mine, but also he really believed it. His exasperation with me was like that of a father with smart kids who got bad report cards” (34). Logically, when Joan decides to stage her own death in the hope of escaping Arthur’s judgement, she expresses her joy: she thinks she will finally achieve self-expression:
emotion, fear, anger, laughter and tears, a performance on which the crowd feeds.
This, I suspected, was his view of my inner life. And where was he in the midst of
all the uproar? Sitting in the front row center, not moving, barely smiling, it took a
lot to satisfy him; and, from time to time, making a slight gesture that would
167 preserve or destroy: thumbs up or thumbs down. You’ll have to run your own show
now, I thought, have your own emotions. I’m through acting it out, the blood got too
real (19).
Yet, as one gets accustomed to Joan’s deceptive twists, one wonders whether this utterance contains any sincerity. Indeed, while she wishes to achieve freedom from the domination of her husband, Joan simultaneously acts as an accomplice, accepting the role of the feeble, endangered female, as in this example: “noticing just in time the small brown scorpion concealed in the folds. It was hard getting used to these ambushes. If Arthur had been there I would have screamed” (24-25). Part of her acceptance of hybridity implies the avowal of her duplicitous nature. The first sign of this process of avowal appears as early as in the third chapter, when the heroine, seeking refuge in Italy, longs to let Arthur know how she so cleverly deceived him:
It was a good plan, I thought; I was pleased with myself for having arranged it. And
suddenly I wanted Arthur to know how clever I’d been. He always thought I was too
disorganized to plot my way across the floor and out the door, much less out of the
country. (…) I would love him to know I’d done something complicated and
dangerous without making a single mistake. I’d always wanted to do something he
would admire (27).
However, the last sentence indicates that, at this stage, she wishes to do so in order to conquer the admiration of the patriarchal power, and not as a truly subversive gesture of self- empowerment.
168 The heroine then engages in a description of the extent of her deceptive power. She reveals that she decided to conceal her identity as a writer of costume gothics mainly out of fear:
When I first met him he talked a lot about wanting a woman whose mind he could
respect, and I knew that if he found I’d written The Secret of Morgrave Manor he
wouldn’t respect mine (…) These books (…) would be considered trash of the
lowest order. Worse than trash, for didn’t they exploit the masses, corrupt by
distracting, and perpetuate degrading stereotypes of women as helpless and
persecuted? They did and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop (33-34).
This passage shows how much she values the opinion of the dominating male figure and of a society of left-wing intellectuals. Never in the course of her narration does she express regret for her deceptive behaviour; on the contrary, she prides herself on her ability to deceive and praises dishonesty as an effective survival strategy13:
I should have been honest from the beginning, expressed my feelings, told him
everything. (But if he’d known what I was really like, would he still have loved
me?) The trouble was that I wanted to maintain his illusions for him intact, and it
was easy to do, all it needed was a little restraint: I simply never told him anything
important. But it wasn’t more honesty that would have saved me, I thought; it was
more dishonesty. In my experience, honesty and expressing your feelings could lead
to only one thing. Disaster (36-37).
13 Eleonora Rao equally points to the effectiveness of fantasy as a survival device when she writes: “If Joan then does reveal a quixotic and capricious aspect, her inclination to live partly in a fantasy romance world acquires the positive significance of a strategic defensive and survival device” (Rao, “Writing Against Notions of Unity,” 147).
169
The reason why honesty seems so disastrous to the heroine is that she cannot cope with her hybrid self, let any alone simple social judgement about it. She goes on lying about her past, her family: “I invented a mother for his benefit, a kind, placid woman who died of a rare disease – lupus, I think it was – shortly after I met him. Luckily he was never very curious about my past: he was too busy telling me about his” (41). Most significantly, when Arthur discovers a picture of Joan as a teenager, she dismisses herself as an imaginary despicable aunt.
For a moment I hesitate, on the verge of telling the truth. ‘That’s my other Aunt,’ I
said, ‘My Aunt Deirdre. Aunt Lou was wonderful, but Aunt Deirdre was a bitch.’
(…) What lies I told him, and it wasn’t just in self-defense: already I’d devised an
entire spurious past for this shadow on a piece of paper. (…) ‘She looks a bit like
you,’ he said. ‘A bit,’ I admitted. ‘I didn’t like her. She was always trying to tell me
how to run my life.’ (91-92).
The excerpt discloses Joan’s negative vision of her alienated self. This imaginary aunt, “a bitch,” telling her “how to run her life” epitomises the social constraints imposed on Joan, first by her mother, then by her lovers. Moreover, the passage suggests that her use of deception is not just a matter of self-defence. At that point, she starts enjoying it, multiplying the lies and making them gradually more ludicrous, as for example, in the story of how she lost her virginity: “The story I told Arthur later, about being seduced under a pine tree at the age of sixteen, by a summer camp sailing instructor from Montreal, was a lie. I was not seduced at all. I was a victim of the Miss Flegg syndrome: if you find yourself trapped in a situation you can’t get out of gracefully, you might as well pretend you chose it. Otherwise
170 you will look ridiculous.” (149). Deception definitely functions as an appropriate means of avoiding ridicule, i.e. of behaving as society dictates.
Even Joan’s first encounter with Arthur is marked by deception as she pretends to be
“at least semi-informed” (165) of his political activism. Her attitude becomes highly comical once the other members of the group entrust her with explosives to be used in subversive attacks. Joan brilliantly feigns political interest to seduce Arthur, as in the following passage:
“He seemed to enjoy discussing the philosophy of civil disobedience with me, or rather telling me about it, for I was wise enough not to reveal my ignorance and mostly nodded.” (168). She also uses politics as an alibi in order not to mention the existence of the Polish Count. This enables her to become ever more deceptive, a situation she enjoys fully: “‘I’ve been evicted,’
I told him. (…) ‘Because of my political sympathies. The landlord found some of those leaflets… he’s violently right-wing, you know. There was a terrible row.’ (This was a version of the truth, I felt. Paul was the landlord, sort of, and he was right-wing. Nevertheless I was an impostor, and I felt like one.)” (170). As she grows more entangled in her relationship with
Arthur, Joan expresses her desire to move away from deception and to reveal the hybrid character of her personality: “I longed to marry Arthur, but I couldn’t do it unless he knew the truth about me and accepted me as I was, past and present. He’d have to be told I’d lied to him, that I’d never been a cheerleader, that I myself was the fat lady in the picture.” (197-
198). Yet, because she has not internalised her own hybridity, she utterly fears disclosure – “I was terrified that I’d be exposed at the last minute as a fraud, liar and impostor.” (199). The climactic scene of Joan’s flashback about her life with Arthur takes place during the wedding ceremony when she realises that Arthur takes her back to the place where she grew up. She becomes highly afraid of being recognised (200). As usual, she reacts with an attempt at escaping reality, this time not by lying, but by fainting (201). Confronting Leda Sprott as the
171 minister in charge of the ceremony, she realises that she does not want Arthur to know the truth (215) and that deception functions as an effective mimicry strategy. Having rejected
Leda Sprott’s suggestion to tell the truth, Joan has no other choice than to become even more entangled in her numerous selves (286). She would have continued in this way forever, were it not for the godlike intervention of a nosy journalist, attracted by her sudden fame. He blackmails her. This incident, in which Joan resorts to deception once again to trick the journalist, eventually brings about a state of mental confusion: Joan no longer knows how many lies she has been telling for all these years. She reflects: “He’s discovered at least two of my secret identities, and I was so confused at that point I couldn’t remember whether I had any more” (286), an attitude which suggests the only possible outcome for her, escape. It also accounts for the novel’s cyclical pattern, which echoes Joan’s imprisonment in her lies and the hopelessness of her situation.
Joan Foster’s creation of multiple identities, her propensity to resort to deception in everyday life circumstances, her tendency to regard herself as an inferior person, a victim or an outcast, demonstrate that Atwood uses deception in order to underline her heroine’s subaltern position within Canadian society. All the men in Joan’s life try at one point or another to make her endorse the role of an obedient wife: the Polish Count resents her success as a writer; Arthur never gives her the opportunity to express opinions different from his, and the Royal Porcupine, after indulging in all kinds of fantasies, finally turns out to be an ordinary man, another symbol of social constraints. In her relationships with those three male characters, Joan is forced to develop highly efficient mimicry strategies based on deception in order to satisfy their patriarchal demands.
172 3. Grotesque and Gothic Magic Realism
Lady Oracle is a novel which constantly oscillates between reality and fantasy. Indeed, as a reader, one often wonders to what extent Joan has made up the world which she describes. A first example of this characteristic can be found in her daydreaming about her own fake suicide. In this episode, she imagines her friends and relatives waiting for her on the other side of the water (8). All characters are smiling and waving to her, except one, her Aunt Lou, who later appears as the person who most wants the heroine to be herself. She therefore turns away from Joan, as if she resented her deceptive disappearance. This attitude should be analysed in relation to the meaning of the novel’s quest, which I consider unfulfilled. The passage also contains the heroine’s leitmotif “it wasn’t fair” (9), which perfectly sums up her own opinion about her life. It expresses her passivity in dealing with all its events. When making this comment, the protagonist realises that the friends and family members of her dream are not interested in her fate. It functions as a typical example of psychic magic realism, in which the uncanny is conjured up in the character’s mind. The novel contains several instances of that subcategory of magic realism (Delbaere “Magic Realism” 249-263).
The protagonist’s feeling of panic when being alone in Italy provides yet another instance of this narrative mode: “The panic I hadn’t allowed myself to feel for the past week rolled in an ice-gray wave back over my head, carrying with it the shapes of my fear, a dead animal, the telephone breathing menace, killer’s notes cut from the Yellow Pages, a revolver, anger…
Faces formed and disintegrated in my head” (15). Although beneficial in her writing career,
Joan’s powers of imagination prevent her from accepting reality.
Joan’s state of in-betweenness, her oscillation between reality and fantasy best comes to light in her mental description of her former trip to Rome with Arthur:
173
Had it happened or was I making it up? Had we really walked through the maze of
Roman streets together, did we meander in a rented Fiat, did we drive along the
Appian Way with its tombs and rumored ghosts, did we descend into the
Catacombs, stuffed with the dried shells of Christians, were we guided by a short
Bulgarian priest, did we rise again after thirty minutes? Did we go round and round
the Colosseum, unable to find the right exit while thunderous trucks swayed past on
either side, loaded with metal and cement, pillars, lions for the games, loot, slaves?
(133).
Deeply impressed by the historical significance of the place, she mixes up past and present, visualising slaves and lions as she visits the ruins of the Colosseum. Once again, her imagination takes the lead and reveals to her a totally unknown realm of significant connotations. The same occurs when she meditates on her fake suicide. Allowing her imagination to wander so freely, she can no longer clearly distinguish the difference between reality and fantasy:
Maybe I really did drown, I thought, and this whole thing (…) was a kind of joke
perpetrated by the afterlife. The soul sticks around the body for a while after death
because it’s confused, or that’s what the Spiritualists said. In that case I should’ve
been hovering somewhere near the oily surface of Lake Ontario (…) Or they’d
fished me out, I was unidentified, I was lying on a public slab; or I’d been cut up for
spare parts and this panorama was going on because some other body got my eyes
(309).
All these unconscious journeys blur the reader’s vision, enabling him/her to experience Joan’s confusion, to sympathise with her, and to become the accomplice of her fantasies. Among those, one of the most impressive takes place near the end of the book, when Joan, now totally
174 obsessed with the consequences of her fake death, believes her clothes have a life of their own:
Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I’d buried there
growing themselves a body. It was almost completed; it was digging itself out, like a
huge blind mole, slowly and painfully shambling up the hill to the balcony… a
creature composed of all the flesh that used to be mine and which must have gone
somewhere. It would have no features, it would be smooth as a potato, pale as
starch, it would look like a big thigh, it would have a face like a breast minus the
nipple. It was the Fat Lady. (…) my ghost, my angel (…) I was absorbed into her.
Within my former body, I gasped for air. Disguised, concealed, white fur choking
my nose and mouth. Obliterated (320-321).
The magic realist passage epitomises Joan’s feelings of guilt for disappearing without any explanation. It also hints at the uselessness of her deception strategies, which have accomplished nothing except “obliterating” her. Moreover, the description mentions once again the Fat Lady, as a symbol of the hybrid part of herself.14 Thus, the excerpt suggests that
Joan still has to integrate – “absorb” – that aspect of herself before she can resume her ordinary life.
The novel also features several hilarious instances of grotesque magic realism, which often serve to express Joan’s frustration and her difficulties to cope with her “otherness.” One of the best examples is her reaction when her obesity forces her to embody a mothball at the dance recital: “I threw myself into the part, it was a dance of rage and destruction, tears rolled
14 Staels confirms this when she writes: “The Fat Lady is a freak, the other reduced to a comic spectacle set against the antithetical “normality” of the spectator.” (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels, 71).
175 down my cheeks behind the fur, the butterflies would die; my feet hurt for days afterwards.
‘This isn’t me,’ I kept saying to myself, ‘they’re making me to it’; (…) I felt naked and exposed, as if this ridiculous dance was the truth about me and everyone could see it.” (50).
Once again, the scene displays the unexpected combination of two separate realms, the human and the animal, a characteristic of grotesque magic realism. The passage denotes Joan’s anger and humiliation when she first experiences her otherness as a child. It also underlines her rejection of hybridity when she thinks “This isn’t me.”
Further, the grotesque description of her rescuer down in the ravine also incorporates magic realist qualities. Joan’s boundless imagination pictures the man “sending out menacing tentacles of flesh and knotted rope, forming again as a joyful sunburst of yellow flowers”
(64). The ambiguity of this description of a male figure reflects Joan’s perpetual ambivalence towards men, as she simultaneously wants to escape and to embody patriarchal values. As is often the case, the magic realist moments contain the key to Joan’s discovery of her hybridity.
However, at this point, she is still too immature to grasp their epiphanic meaning.
Moreover, Joan’s descriptions of her mother can be regarded as instances of magic realism. From the start, Joan presents her mother as a heartless monster, who feels neither pity nor sympathy for her daughter’s distress and would rather side with her tormentors. In a dream, Joan recalls her mother’s make up sessions and suddenly becomes aware of her mother’s monstrousness as well as of her god-like superiority:
my mother always had a triple mirror, so she could see both sides as well as the front
of her head. In the dream, as I watched, I suddenly realized that instead of three
reflections she had three actual heads, which rose from her toweled shoulders on
three separate necks. This didn’t frighten me, as it seemed merely a confirmation of
176 something I’d always known; but outside the door there was a man, a man who was
about to open the door and come in. If he saw, if he found out the truth about my
mother, something terrible would happen, not only to my mother but to me (65-67).
The research I conducted in the Atwood Papers at the Fischer Library of Rare Books in
Toronto demonstrates that Atwood intended the mother as a representation of the Greek goddess Hecate Trivia.15 Atwood notes “goddess of 3 ways – crossroads belong to her – 3 bodies and 3 heads” (see Appendix II). She also mentions the crossing of the Styx and its consequence, forgetfulness. The whole passage with the three heads might thus point to the fact that Joan has reached a crossroad, that her life might change totally and that she might therefore have to forget part of it. Moreover, the fact that the goddess possesses three heads may also be interpreted as a justification of Joan’s multiplicity. The three-fold goddess then implies that the acceptance of hybridity may be the right solution for the heroine. Indeed, social constraints are so diverse that a woman cannot possibly satisfy social demands and lead a satisfying life, unless she grasps that concept of hybridity. The man threatening the mother’s secret represents either Joan’s absent father figure, with whom she longs to get better acquainted, or men in general, i.e. patriarchal disapproval of the mother’s unwanted pregnancy. Joan’s later change of attitude towards that man indicates her willingness to surrender to patriarchal demands in order to conform to social requirements: “As I grew older, this dream changed. Instead of wanting to stop the mysterious man, I would sit there wishing for him to enter. I wanted him to find out her secret, the secret that I alone knew: my mother was a monster” (67). What Joan remains unable to accept, at that moment, is that the monster
15 Atwood Papers, collection 200, Box 27, File 27:1, p. 6. In Survival, Atwood mentions the triple goddess as representative of the three-fold aspect of women: Diana, the virgin ; Venus, goddess of sex, love and fertility, and Hecate, goddess of the underworld, possessing oracular power (Atwood, Survival, 199). Roberta Sciff-Zamaro mentions this interpretation of the three-fold goddess in her article “The Re/membering of Female Power in ‘Lady Oracle’” (Sciff-Zamaro, “The Re/membering,” 35- 37).
177 exists within herself as well. Hybridity, repressed and concealed, has turned Joan into a heartless monster, who uses deception without heeding the consequences.
Finally, Joan’s last confrontation with her mother becomes both dramatic and grotesque: incapable of accepting her daughter’s otherness, the mother stabs her in the arm.
The whole incident takes on a grotesque, unreal quality due to Joan’s lack of reaction. Not showing the slightest evidence of pain, Joan merely dismisses the wound and resumes her activities, making a cup of tea for herself and her aggressor (124), thus proving how mimicry has turned her into an insensitive being.
The novel’s most grotesque magic realist moments take place when Joan comes in contact with the spiritualists, a congregation frequented by her Aunt Lou. The passages possess the magic realist quality of uniting two otherwise separate realms, reality and the supernatural, life and death. The spiritualists believe in an afterlife and summon the dead to secure messages for the living. As an adolescent, Joan attends these séances in her usual placid way, until one of the forebodings turns out to be addressed to her:
‘I have an urgent message,’ she said, ‘for someone without a number.’ She was
looking straight at me. ‘There’s a woman standing behind your chair. She’s about
thirty, with dark hair, wearing a navy-blue suit with a white collar and a pair of
white gloves. She’s telling you… what? She’s very unhappy about something… I
get the name Joan. I’m sorry, I can’t hear…’ (…) ‘That’s my mother!’ I said to Aunt
Lou in a piercing whisper. ‘She’s not even dead yet!’ I was frightened, but I was
also outraged: my mother had broken the rules of the game. Either that or Leda
Sprott was a fraud (110-111).
178 Such an apparition becomes a leitmotiv in the novel. Indeed, Joan’s mother keeps appearing each time Joan is about to make a decision concerning her attitude towards patriarchal authority. Such is the case, for instance, just before Joan gets informed of her mother’s death, an event which forces her to break off her relationship with Arthur and to return to Canada.
The depiction of the mother’s spectral apparition constitutes a clear instance of grotesque magic realism:
How had she found me? She was standing, very upright, on the clay-colored rug,
dressed in her navy-blue suit with the white collar; her white gloves, hat and shoes
were immaculate, and she was clutching her purse under her arm. Her face was
made up, she’d drawn a bigger mouth around her mouth with lipstick, but the shape
of her own mouth showed through. Then I saw that she was crying, soundlessly,
horribly; mascara was running from her eyes in black tears. Through her back I
could see the dilapidated sofa; it looked as though the stuffing was coming out of
her. (…) It was her astral body, I thought, remembering what Leda Sprott had told
me. Why couldn’t she keep the goddamned thing at home where it belonged? (173).
The mother’s face with her large made-up mouth and her running black mascara resembles a clown’s face. This magic realist carnivalesque distortion of the mother figure, its conflation of simple reality and supernatural apparition, draws the reader’s attention to her misunderstanding of motherhood and to the suffering it induced on Joan’ part. It also hints at the importance of this particular moment for Joan. She is about to be freed both from motherly authority and from her lover’s oppression and to proceed with her quest for self- understanding.
The mother’s ghostly presence is further alluded to during Joan’s wedding ceremony
(205). Yet, the apparition is immediately discarded as unimportant. It could be interpreted as
179 the mother’s warning to Joan not to fall into the trap of paternalistic power again. Indeed, each time her mother’s spectre appears, Joan is confronted to a decision which either positively or negatively influences the progress of her quest for hybridity. Significantly, Joan resents being faced with that impressive mother figure, who implacably points to her inadequacies: “I particularly didn’t like the thought of my mother, in the form of some kind of spiritual jello, drifting around after me from place to place, wearing (apparently) her navy- blue suit from 1949. Nor did I want to know that she was concerned about me: her concern always meant pain, and I refused to believe in it” (111-112). The reader then comes to realise that Joan’s mother initially felt concern for her daughter’s distress, though her own alienation prevented her from helping the girl efficiently.
The mother’s last appearance in the novel foreshadows the protagonist’s descent into her unconscious and her discovery of hybridity. Now accustomed to her mother’s spectre,
Joan agrees to follow her and discover what she wants to tell her:
By the light of the moon I could see who it was, and I relaxed. It was only my
mother. (…) ‘What do you want?’ I said, but she didn’t answer. She stretched out
her arms to me, she wanted me to come with her; she wanted us to be together. I
began to walk towards the door. She was smiling at me now, with her smudged face,
could she see I loved her? I loved her but the glass was between us, I would have to
go through it. I longed to console her. Together we would go down the corridor into
the darkness (329).
The mother’s attitude differs significantly: she no longer cries but smiles and stretches out her arms towards Joan, thus indicating her wish to help her. Only then is Joan capable of listening to her mother. She decides to follow her down along the dark corridor, in search for the key to her spiritual in-betweenness.
180
Further, the passage resembles one of Joan’s numerous attempts at automatic writing.
The uncanny nature of that activity provides the novel with several magic realist moments, in which Joan mixes reality, personal fantasies, and literary creation. Her first attempt seems rather discouraging, for it only results in some burnt hair and a single red line on her notepad
(113-114). However, Joan’s second experience immediately strikes the reader as more impressive and undeniably uncanny:
The room seemed very dark, darker than it had before; the candle was very bright, I
was holding it in my hand and walking along a corridor, I was descending, I turned a
corner. I was going to find someone. I needed to find someone. There was
movement at the edge of the mirror. I gasped and turned around. Surely there had
been a figure, standing behind me (220).
The scene indubitably hints at Joan’s eventual descent into her subconscious. The first word she actually produces explains the significance of the experience for Joan: “I looked down at the piece of paper. There, in a scrawly handwriting that was certainly not my own, was a single word: Bow (…) I got out the paperback Roget’s Thesaurus (…) cringe, stoop, kneel
(SLAVERY); submit, yield, defer (SUBMISSION)” (220). The word “bow” indicts Joan’s submissive attitude, constituting an unconscious rejection of patriarchal power. Deeply impressed by this first result, Joan decides to explore the dark corridor. She then provides the reader with uncanny descriptions of her wanderings (220-221). The experience becomes increasingly threatening as Joan discovers an enigmatic female figure, the embodiment of another hybrid aspect of herself: “However, the words I collected in this way became increasingly bizarre and even threatening: “iron,” “throat,” “knife,” “heart.” At first the sentences centered around the same figure, the same woman. After a while I could almost see
181 her: she lived under the earth somewhere, or inside something, a cave or a huge building; sometimes she was on a boat.” (222). The discovery of that “Lady Oracle,” who strikingly resembles the Greek Pythia,16 displays an epiphanic quality triggered by Joan’s journey to success as a famous poetess. As such, it also alludes to her current quest for self-knowledge.
Interesting here is Atwood’s use of Greek myth as a means of introducing fantasy in an otherwise highly realistic plot. However, it may become dangerous if the subject is not ready to confront reality, as is the case for Joan. The revelation of hybridity may then seem overwhelming, threatening to suffocate the individual:
“I don’t know what would have happened if I’d kept on, but I was forced to stop. I
went into the mirror one evening and I couldn’t get out again. I was going along the
corridor, with the candle in my hand as usual, and the candle went out. I think the
candle really did go out. I think the candle really did go out and that was why I was
stuck there, in the midst of darkness, unable to move. I’d lost all sense of directions;
I was afraid to turn around even, in case I ended up going farther in. I felt as though
I was suffocating.” (223).
The passage clearly indicates that Joan refuses to face her unconscious, preferring to go on living in her self-reassuring world of fantasies.
16 Box 27 in the Atwood Papers shows the chapter about oracles in Robert Graves, The Greek Myths; the definition of Pythia and Diana in J. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary; three pages of W.H. Roscher’s Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, giving a full description of the goddess Hecate; the Aeneid’s description of the oracle’s (book VI, l. 70-293), and other allusions to the oracle in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book XIV, l. 101-159) and Plutarch’s Morals. See Atwood Papers, Collection 200, Box 27, File 27:10. Marilyn Patton’s article “‘Lady Oracle’: The Politics of the Body” provides extensive description of these sources (Patton “Lady Oracle” 39-41). It mentions entries from encyclopaedia and dictionaries about the “Sybil,” excerpts fromVirgil’s Aeneid and from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The article also describes the content of Box 13, which contains additional material on various Greek and Latin earth goddesses (Proserpine, Hecate, Cybele) and xeroxed references from Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, which Atwood mentions as a source for her last book to date The Penelopiad.
182 Ironically, her fiction forces Joan to come to terms with her hybridity. Exiled in Italy, supposedly dead, Joan must absolutely finish her last costume gothic because she needs money. The image of the maze, which recurs in her fiction, functions as a threatening and uncanny reminder of her own confused state of mind. The maze intrigues Joan’s innocent heroines from the first pages of the novel (30). It soon becomes identified as a place where several women – i.e. the different components of Joan’s fragmented hybrid self – have disappeared:
‘It’s not a good place, the maze, especially for young girls. (…) The Master won’t
talk of it, ever since the first Lady Redmond was lost there, and the second one too,
in broad daylight it was. Some say the Little Folk dance there and they don’t like
intruders, but that’s just superstition. The first Lady Redmond (…) went into it just
to prove it was harmless, but she never did come out. (…) The second one (…) got
so curious about what happened to the first, she went in as well. That time they
heard her screaming (…) Some say as how there’s no center to the maze and that’s
how they get lost (…) Some say as how the first Lady Redmond and the second one
are still in there.’ (186-187).
The absence of a centre in the maze may be regarded as a metaphor for Joan’s inner feeling of marginality, in other words, for her ex-centric position as an individual. Joan’s heroines feel irresistibly drawn to that mysterious place (187), as Joan herself becomes aware of the necessity of her quest for self-knowledge.
As the conclusion of the novel – and simultaneously of Joan’s last book – draws nearer, she suddenly blurs several kinds of fictions, adopting a narrative technique reminiscent of magic realism, which characteristically entangles different kinds of realities:
“Strange that they never recovered Felicia’s body, though he had had the riverbed dragged.
183 The shrubberies stirred and a figure stepped out from them, blocking his path. It was an enormously fat woman dressed in a sopping-wet blue velvet gown” (332). Having expressed her sympathies for Felicia, the novel’s villain, Joan has acknowledged the existence of evil within her own personality. Significantly, she then confronts the Fat Lady, as another concealed aspect of herself, i.e. her past as an obese adolescent, which she refuses to reveal to her husband. This issue is subsequently dramatised in a highly unrealistic scene, in which
Joan’s fictional characters encounter her real-life husband:
‘You didn’t want me to come back at all,’ she wept. ‘You’re happier without me…
and it was such an effort, Arthur, to get out of that water and come all this way, just
to be with you again…’ Redmond drew back, puzzled. ‘Who is Arthur?’ he asked.
The woman began to fade, like mist, like invisible ink, like melting snow... (323).
The whole scene displays undeniably grotesque magic realist features: it superbly blends reality and fiction, mixing real and imaginary characters, transforming a human being into a natural element. The allusions to her disappearance in water and to her husband have an epiphanic value, for it embodies Joan’s fear of being rejected because of her “otherness.”
In an ultimate climactic scene, Joan eventually grasps the epiphanic meaning of her writing process. As her heroine reaches the centre of the maze, Joan becomes aware of the hybrid character of her personality:
A stone bench ran long one side, and on it were seated four woman. Two of them
looked a lot like her, with red hair and green eyes and small white teeth. The third
was middle-aged, (…) with a ratty piece of fur around her neck. The last was
enormously fat. She was wearing a pair of pink tights and a short pink skirt covered
184 with spangles. From her head sprouted two antennae, like a butterfly’s, and a pair
of obviously false wings was pinned to her back. (341).
In the maze, Felicia/Joan encounters four women, two of whom resemble Joan. They embody the two aspects of her personality as a writer, the writer of cheap romances and the acclaimed poetess. Further, she meets a figure representing Aunt Lou, someone she admired and imitated. Though she represents Joan’s attempts to resist patriarchy, Aunt Lou appears as a slightly old-fashioned marginal figure, whom Joan would no longer want to resemble. The last woman, the fat ballerina, strikes the reader by the fake quality of her attributes, thus indicating the deceptive aspect of that figure as well. Indeed, this epiphanic encounter makes
Joan grasp that she is not one of these women. Each of them are only parts of her hybrid personality. Nevertheless, I doubt that Joan, by the end of the novel, has fully come to terms with her hybrid identity. Indeed, like Felicia, who is “too well bred” to show her surprise,
Joan decides to turn to yet another aspect of her fragmented self. Everything seems to indicate that she intends to return to her husband, thus submitting again to the rules of patriarchy.
Further, she mentions that she has decided to become a science-fiction writer, a decision, which, once again, draws her closer to the world of fantasy than to reality. In this case, magic realism, though undeniably endowed with epiphanic qualities, thus fails to bring about the heroine’s recognition of hybridity.
4. Parodies of Trickster Figures
From the very first pages of the novel, the heroine uncovers her trickster-like personality.
Indeed, she identifies her faked suicide as “a trick” (7). Moreover, she mentions that this technique allows her to disappear altogether, becoming a corpse, a shadow, as befits a
185 trickster. She then goes through the details of her disguise process, explaining the necessity to dye her too recognisable red hair (14). She notices that this transformation also induces another change: “My face looked quite different, though: I could pass for a secretary on vacation” (14). The description of her transfiguration acquires a ritualistic value as she equates it with a form of sacrifice through burning: “I began to sacrifice my hair. It shrivelled, blackened, writhed like a handful of pinworms, melted and finally burned, sputtering like a fuse” (14-15). The whole scene resembles a purification ritual preceding the heroine’s actual metamorphosis into a more powerful individual, belonging to the realm of the dead and therefore endowed with superior knowledge. Joan precisely hints at that power when she describes her relationship with her fictional heroines:
Now I could play fairy godmother to them (…) I had the power to turn them from
pumpkins into pure gold (…) Why refuse them their castles, their persecutors and
their princes, and come to think of it, who the hell was Arthur to talk about social
relevance? Sometimes his goddamned theories and ideologies made me puke. The
truth was that I dealt in hope, I offered a vision of a better world, however
preposterous (35).
Far from simply alluding to her power, Joan’s reflection also underlines her decision to give fellow women some hope in a society mainly run by paternalistic male subjects like her husband, Arthur.
Early on, Joan realises that people show more sympathy for girls who correspond to a socially accepted image, that of the charming, skinny ballerina (52). She simultaneously understands the necessity for her to use cunning in order to mimic social integration.
Incapable of transforming into the cherished ballerina, she decides to become, at least at
186 school, a joyful and friendly confidante, while remaining jealous of the other girls’ life:
“Everyone trusted me, no one was afraid of me, though they should have been. I knew everything about my friends. (…) But they guessed nothing about me; I was a sponge, I drank it all in but gave nothing out, despite the temptation to tell everything, all my hatred and jealousy, to reveal myself as the duplicitous monster I knew myself to be.” (94-95). For a while, she succeeds in tricking her classmates to believe in her qualities. Yet, when moving over to higher education, Joan resists, feeling unable to play the part of the fat good friend any longer (95). However, she simply abandons one kind of tricksterism for another, a more professional one. She confesses her attraction to the figure of Mercury, “the god of thieves and trickery as well as speed” (97), before engaging in yet another form of transformation.
Indeed, Joan decides to lose weight – the condition for inheriting money from Aunt Lou – and thus gain her independence. The whole process can be interpreted as a metamorphosis into a trickster figure.17 Once again, Atwood here resorts to a trickster figure originating in the Latin background. One of the first sign of this mutation is Joan’s sudden clarity of vision: “I developed some peculiar side effects: (…) an alarming clarity of vision. The world, which I’d seen for so long as a blur, with the huge but ill-defined figure of my mother blocking the foreground, came sharply into focus. Sunshine and brilliant colors hurt my eyes.” (122).
Another symptom is her unsuspected nastiness: “I became listless and crabby; I snapped at my friends, I told them I didn’t want to hear anymore about their stupid boyfriends, I turned down requests to help with the decorations for the Senior Formal” (122). Her mother
17 Identifying Lady Oracle as a form of the picaresque novel, Lucy M. Freibert writes: “In order to survive within the master-slave relationship, the character learns to live by his or her wits and gradually develops into a picaro, or rogue – a protean figure who repeatedly changes forms and disguises to suit the occasion. The picaro consorts with rogues of all classes and from them learns the fine points of deception (Freibert “The Artist as Picaro” 23),” which is precisely what happens to Joan as she comes in contact with a series of secondary trickster-like figures. To her definition of the picaro, Freibert adds: “Having given Joan this apprenticeship in roguery, Atwood turns her into a Protean picaro, who assumes many roles and guises, either successively or simultaneously, and who eventually becomes an expert escape artist” (26). Yet, I disagree with Freibert when she interprets Joan’s new interest in science fiction as a radical change of attitude (31). On the contrary, it suggests the narrator’s inability to move away from her fantasies and to enter real life.
187 underlines another characteristic feature of the trickster when she reproaches Joan to “go to extremes with everything” (123). Similarly, the Polish Count mentions her goddess-like quality as he admires her body (142). However, the reader realises that Joan remains reluctant to transform. When she discovers the nature of the oracle in her poems, she comments: “She was enormously powerful, almost like a goddess, but it was an unhappy power. This woman puzzled me. (…) she had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t at all like that, I was happy. Happy and inept.” (222). In her successful book of poetry, she describes her trickster-like alter-ego in these words:
She sits on the iron throne
She is one and three
The dark lady the redgold lady
the blank lady oracle
of blood, she who must be
obeyed forever
Her glass wings are gone
She floats down the river
singing her last song (226).
Metaphorically, the poem, with its three ladies forming one, assesses the heroine’s hybridity as a powerful state, nevertheless involving suffering, here represented by blood. It hints at the protagonist’s difficulty to integrate her hybrid components into a unified person, one capable of behaving creatively.
After that climactic awareness, Joan’s trickster-like features are again mentioned in relation to her fake suicide. She finds accomplices in her friends Sam and Marlene, whom she tricks into believing that she will be arrested by the police for having concealed dynamite
188 (294-6). She takes great care in conceiving a credible story documented with photographs of her before the alleged accident (299-301). Joan eventually reveals her true nature as she imagines her readers’ reactions: “They’ll probably say my disappearance was some kind of stunt, a trick…” (345). She regards her fake suicide as a trick, another of her numerous instances of deceptive behaviour.
While Joan indubitably constitutes the novel’s most elaborate trickster-figure, the plot equally features other, either incomplete or parodic versions of the trickster. To begin with, the heroine might have inherited her trickster’s talent from her enigmatic father figure. An anaesthetist at the Toronto General Hospital, he seems capable of bringing people back to life.
The heroine soon becomes aware of this power, which fascinates her: “My father was an anaesthetist at the Toronto General Hospital. (…) I thought all my father did was put people to sleep before operations. I didn’t know about this resurrectionist side of his personality.
‘Why do people try to kill themselves?’ I asked. ‘How do you bring them to life again?’ ” (72-
73). During a conversation at the dinner table, she also gathers that her father worked in intelligence during the war, which gave him the power to deal with people’s life and death:
“He was in Intelligence. (…) You wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you? (…) You wouldn’t ever hear it from him, but he can speak French like a native (…) His job was to kill people they thought were fakes” (75). The father’s ability to speak a foreign language undeniably reminds us of his daughter’s talent to be someone else. Moreover, the father clearly belongs to the realm of nature: one of the activities which bring him closer to his daughter consists in taking care of plants, a wordless activity, belonging to the world of instincts (76). The heroine remembers him as a powerful man, endowed with sacred knowledge: “He was a conjuror of spirits, a shaman with the voice of a dry, detached old
189 opera commentator in a tuxedo” (76). Naturally, she expects him to give an answer to existential problems, that her mother could not help her to solve:
“I wanted him to tell me the truth about life, which my mother would not tell me and
which he must have known something about, as he was a doctor and had been in the
war, he’d killed people and raised the dead. I kept waiting for him to give me some
advice, warn me, instruct me, but he never did any of these things. Perhaps he felt as
if I weren’t really his daughter (…) he treated me more like a colleague than a
daughter, more like an accomplice. But what was our conspiracy?” (77).
As the words “what was our conspiracy?” suggest, the father’s contribution remains unsatisfactory. Indeed, his daughter keeps expecting existential clues from him, while he regards her as an accomplice in his role as a trickster. The passage clearly evokes the bond existing between the two characters. Yet, it also stresses the frustrating aspect of their relationship. The male figure seems unable to provide the desired answer; he merely displays his own power and leaves the protagonist at a loss for a suitable outcome. Even when she later turns to him for answers concerning her mother’s death, the father strikes us as a distant, disguised and powerful figure: “I went to the hospital to see my father. (…) I’d never seen him dressed in his official uniform: he had a white cap on and a gown, and a mask over the lower half of his face, which he was in the act of pulling down. He looked much more impressive than he ever had at home, he looked like someone with power.” (137). The heroine then discovers another, more heartless and dubious aspect of his personality:
He’d already given my mother’s clothes to the Crippled Civilians, (…) he was
systematically violating all the rules. (…) His eyes pleaded with me to believe him,
join the conspiracy, keep my mouth shut. I had a sudden image of him sneaking out
of the hospital, wearing his white mask so he would not be recognized, driving back
190 to the house, (…) creeping up behind her. He was a doctor, (…) he’d killed people
before, he would know how to break her neck and make it look like an accident.
(178-179).
Joan clearly suspects her father of having killed her mother. She emphasises his acquaintance with death and interprets his snug attitude as a form of conspiracy: they both hated her mother.
A more friendly trickster figure can be found in Aunt Lou, a jovial and exuberant person, who obviously enjoys life and defies conventions. Recalling a childhood episode, the narrator focuses the reader’s attention on Aunt Lou’s magic token: a fur fox, which she uses as a ventriloquist to reveal secrets: “This was a real fox (…) though underneath its nose, instead of a lower jaw, it had a clamp by which it held its tail in place. Aunt Lou would open and shut the clamp and pretend that the fox was talking. It often revealed secrets, such as where Aunt Lou had hidden the gumdrops she had brought me, and it asked important questions also, like what I wanted for Christmas” (81). Aunt Lou further plays an important part in the heroine’s development: she forces her to lose weight in order to inherit her wealth.
Her will forces the heroine to ask herself questions: did her aunt want her to lose weight because, like everybody else, she resented Joan’s obesity? Or did she want to help Joan to become independent? While the question remains, I would rather favour the second interpretation, regarding Aunt Lou as a benevolent helper in the heroine’s quest journey. Her symbol, the fox, functions as a leitmotiv throughout the book. It is mentioned every time an important change takes place in the heroine’s life, such as, for instance, when Aunt Lou dies and Joan has to empty her apartment (119). It is also present in the epiphanic conclusion of her latest gothic romance (341). Aunt Lou further brings Joan in contact with another
191 trickster, Leda Sprott. A faith healer and spiritualist, Sprott reveals to Joan her possibilities as a trickster:
Then, to my embarrassment, she took hold of my hand. ‘You have great gifts,’ she
said, looking into my eyes. ‘Great powers. You should develop them. You should
try the Automatic Writing, on Wednesdays. I can’t tell whether you’re a sender or a
receiver… a receiver, I think. I’d be glad to help you train; you could be better than
any of us, but it would take hard work, and I must warn you, without supervision
there’s some danger. Not all the spirits are friendly, you know.’ (112).
Joan naturally discards these powers as embarrassing. While she briefly contemplates herself as a powerful psychic, she soon decides she would rather remain insignificant because failure frightens her too much (112). When Joan meets her again years later, for her wedding, Sprott bears the significant name of E.P. Revele (202), thus alluding to her ability to reveal things to the heroine.18 She agrees to become Joan’s accomplice by not unveiling her past to her future husband. Yet, she also gives Joan the following piece of advice: “Avoid deception and falsehood; treat your lives as a diary you are writing and that you know your loved one will someday read” (202). She further warns her about the dangers of denying one’s gifts – i.e. one’s hybrid nature:
18 Carol L. Beran identifies Leda Sprott as a character who “carries the potential of producing the cognitio or anagnorisis that Frye sees as central to the comic and tragic mode (…): she could unmask villains and reveal heroines or produce in Joan a recognition of who she is and her relation to the universe” (Beran, “George, Leda” 23). Personally, I interpret this description as befitting a trickster, especially if one simultaneously considers Leda Sprott’s alleged spiritual power. Thieme also mentions Leda Sprott’s trickster-like features when he writes: “She may be viewed as part con-woman, part-magician; her picaroon manipulations of people’s fantasies make her a shaman-like figure, a creature whose trickster strategies have the effect of breaking down barriers between areas of experience (…) but also through her androgynous identity (Joan thinks ‘E.P.Revele’ is going to be a man until they meet her) collapsing traditional notions of gender roles” (Thieme 77). Thieme adds: “through her multiplicity of roles and her work as an unintentionally subversive woman writer comes to be a similar creative trickster, a Houdini who offers genuine possibilities of escape for the female subject” (Thieme 77-78). I consider the character of Leda Sprott as an important trickster figure in the novel. By displaying the image of a powerful woman, who also possesses several identities, she simultaneously guides Joan in her quest and warns her against the dangers of her situation.
192 ‘You do not choose a gift, it chooses you, and if you deny it it will make use of you
in any case, though perhaps in a less desirable way. I used my own gift, as long as I
had it. You may think I’m a stupid old woman or a charlatan, I’m used to that. But
sometimes I had the truth to tell; there’s no mistaking it when you do. When I had
no truth to tell, I told them what they wanted to hear. I shouldn’t have done that.
You may think it’s harmless, but it isn’t.’ (…) Suddenly I believed in her. I wanted
to ask her all the questions I’d saved up for her: she could tell me about my
mother… But my belief faded: hadn’t she just hinted that the Jordan Chapel was
fraudulent and her revelations guesswork and playacting? ‘People have faith in you,’
Leda said. ‘They trust you. That can be dangerous, especially if you take advantage
of it. Everything catches up to you sooner or later. You should stop feeling so sorry
for yourself. (…) ‘Don’t say what you don’t mean,’ she said irritably. ‘You do
enough of that already.’ (206).
The passage clearly denotes the need for Joan to accept herself as she is, i.e. as a hybrid person, with the capacity for vision and knowledge it entails. Leda Sprott further denounces
Joan’s attitude as a writer of romances, abusing her readers’ credulity in a fraudulent way. She also hints at Joan’s propensity to lie and deceive her friends and relatives. Having proceeded with Joan and Arthur’s wedding, Leda Sprott bids Joan farewell, asking her not to reveal her false identity (207). In doing so, she recognises Joan as a fellow trickster.
The last trickster-like secondary character, the Royal Porcupine, presents the reader with a parody of a trickster figure. Joan’s ex-centric lover displays the trickster’s typical exuberance, a desire to shock, and a rejection of social convention. His first encounter with
Joan, on the release of her book of poetry, shows his intention to provoke her: “‘What’s it like to be a successful bad writer?’ I was beginning to feel angry. ‘Why don’t you publish and find out?’ I said. ‘Hey,’ he said, grinning, ‘temper. You’ve got fantastic hair, anyway. Don’t ever cut it off.’ This time I looked at him. He too had red hair, (…) and a top hat embroidered with
193 porcupine quills.” (239). Atwood immediately alludes to their similar nature by stressing their identical hair colour. She further identifies him as a trickster by associating him with death and nature: indeed, the Royal Porcupine is an artist who collects frozen dead animals (240), which he transforms into works of art. He mocks the monarchy (244), as befits a tricksterish character rejecting authority. Moreover, he forces the heroine to acknowledge her own trickster-like nature: “I was more than double, I was triple, multiple, and now I could see that there was more than one life to come, there were many. The Royal Porcupine had opened a time-space door to the fifth dimension; cleverly disguised as a freight elevator, and one of my selves plunged recklessly through.” (246). However, one should notice that only one of Joan’s multiple identities gets truly involved with the Royal Porcupine, the others remaining safely hidden. Joan, the famous poetess, is indeed repeatedly identified with that ex-centric companion, “dressed up in middle-aged tourist outfits, bought at the Crippled Civilians, and registered under assumed names.” (257). Nevertheless, the reader should not underestimate the importance of the Royal Porcupine in Joan’s quest for self-knowledge. Indeed, he allows her to become aware of her ex-centric, marginal component. As such, he functions as a key element in the heroine’s discovery of her hybridity. Atwood gives us a clue as to the importance of that character when Joan offers him a highly important and symbolic token: “I even gave him my fox, the one that had been Aunt Lou’s. This was a real gift: I valued it.”
(270). This gift denotes Joan’s recognition of the similarities between the Royal Porcupine and herself. It also indicates that she is now ready to leave Aunt Lou behind as a guide and proceed alone on her quest for her hybrid self.
The novel contains several trickster figures, of whom Joan is undeniably the most gifted one. Indeed, none of the secondary tricksters – her weak father, her cherished Aunt
Lou, and the exuberant Royal Porcupine – succeeds in helping her significantly in her quest
194 for hybridity. Joan totally fails to grasp the significance of her silent complicity with her father. The financial security provided by her Aunt Lou’s inheritance only helps her to escape from her problems, not to save them, as she decides to endorse yet a different identity.
Finally, her tumultuous affair with the Royal Porcupine, who eventually chooses to become an ordinary man, only provides Joan another means of escape. The protagonist herself uses a variety of tricks in order to fool other characters and to safeguard her artificially constructed lives. Although she possesses the trickster’s power of transformation, she remains unable to use such energy in order to come to terms with her hybrid self.
5. From Multiple Personalities to Hybridity
This section examines how the novel may be interpreted as Joan’s quest for hybridity.
Therefore, it focuses on the protagonist’s feelings of alienation, on her sense of marginality, and on the strategies she uses to simultaneously comply to and fight against patriarchal empowerment. At the beginning of the novel, Atwood presents us with a heroine who has clearly chosen escape as the solution to her problem:
“I burst into tears and shoved my head under the pillow. Then I decided it would
have to stop. I couldn’t let Arthur go on controlling my life, especially at such a
distance. I was someone else now, I was almost someone else. People used to say to
me, ‘You don’t look at all like your photographs,’ and it was true; so with a few
adjustments I’d be able to pass him on the street one day and he wouldn’t even
recognize me” (24).
The passage proves highly significant through the simultaneous allusions to Arthur’s control over the heroine’s life and her wish to be someone else. Even in her remote Italian town, the
195 protagonist still bothers about patriarchal demands: she worries about the reaction of people when they realise that she travels without her husband: “What else was there to know about a foreigner? The only thing that might bother them was that I lived alone: it wouldn’t seem natural to them. But it didn’t seem natural to me, either” (26). The end of this quote confesses her own usual acceptance of those social rules. She then frequently alludes to her need to escape, a desire she shares with the readers of her cheap books (34).
Atwood then deftly introduces the theme of otherness, as an explanation for the heroine’s wish to escape reality. The first occurrence of the heroine’s sense of marginality takes place when, as a child, she has to perform a dance disguised as a mothball. Joan’s physical difference – she is obviously much fatter than the other little girls of the dance class
– makes it impossible for her to play the part of a light butterfly. Therefore, the dance teacher decides to assign an altogether different role to her:
‘Joan, dear,’ she said, ‘how would you like to be something special?”
I smiled at her uncertainly. (…)
‘What am I going to be?’ I asked as she led me away.
‘A mothball, dear,’ she answered serenely, as if this were the most natural thing in
the world. (…) I was wounded, desolated in fact (…) She also wanted me to hang
around my neck a large sign that said MOTHBALL (…) I had to stand in the mothball
suit with Miss Flegg’s hand on my shoulder while she explained to the other
Teenies, sylphlike in their wispy skirts and shining wings, about the change in plans
and my new, starring role. They looked at me, scorn on their painted lips; they were
not taken in (48-49).
Joan consequently has to deal both with the sorrow she feels for being singled out as different and with the other girls’ anger and incomprehension. At this point, she has not the slightest
196 idea of why she is set apart. She only utters the pain she feels: “What was the matter with me?
It wasn’t that I couldn’t dance. (…) The worst thing was that I still didn’t understand quite why this was being done to me, this humiliation disguised as a privilege” (50). Recalling the episode, she soon associates it with a more general inadequacy to meet social requirements:
“It’s true I had received more individual attention than the others, but I wasn’t sure it was a kind I liked. Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms” (51). Indeed, the situation worsens as Joan gets older, partly because of her credulity. The mother’s desire to send her to a better group of Brownies, in a remote neighbourhood (52-53), reinforces Joan’s isolation even more. Joan comments on her situation: “at the Brownies itself I was an alien from beyond the borders” (53). In fact, the
Brownies is situated far away (53) and forces Joan to get acquainted with older girls who take advantage of her credulity (54). However, Joan remembers the Brownies as a happy period of her life. It provided her with a motto which, she thought, might help her to solve her problem:
“at Brownies you were supposed to try to be the same, and I was beginning to find this idea quite attractive” (54). Yet, she soon discovers that the other girls only tolerate her (56), and later use her as a scapegoat (57). Symptomatically, a childish game in which one discovers one’s own image in a mirror, turns into a disaster when the other girls abandon Joan in a ravine, at the mercy of strangers (61). Both Joan’s failure in this test of self-recognition and her mother’s subsequent reproaches – “you were stupid to let the other girls fool you like that” (63) – hint at her alienation and “otherness.”
Atwood further stresses her heroine’s “otherness” through a series of short episodes: for instance, as a child, she covers her entire face with eye shadow to become blue (66). Later, when she has become an obese teenager, Joan delights in showing up in rooms where her mother is making a show of her obesity (71). The reader soon learns that Joan’s trouble in part
197 finds its source in her knowledge of being an unwanted child, a situation which she unconsciously identifies as the cause of her eating disorder: “I ate to defy her, but I also ate from panic. Sometimes I was afraid I wasn’t really there, I was an accident; I’d heard her call me an accident. Did I want to become solid, solid as a stone so she wouldn’t be able to get rid of me?” (78). She then recalls another childhood episode, which once again stresses her
“otherness:” when a girl at school offers her a kitten, she significantly chooses one with seven toes on each foot (79), a symbol of her own difference. Even her clothes gradually become a way of asserting this difference: “I sought out clothes of a peculiar and offensive hideousness, violently colored, horizontally striped (…) The brighter the colors, the more rotund the effect, the more certain I was to buy. I wasn’t going to let myself be diminished, neutralized” (88).
Aunt Lou’s friendliness provides Joan with one way of dealing with otherness when she tells her: “‘That’s just the way I am,’ Aunt Lou said once. ‘If other people can’t handle it, that’s their problem. Remember that, dear. You can’t always choose your life, but you can learn to accept it.’” (88). Sensitive to other people’s distress, Aunt Lou refuses to let Joan visit the
Freak Show. The site therefore becomes a mystery, a mythical place for Joan. Identifying with the freaks, Joan somehow integrates one of them – the Fat Lady – as a symbol of her otherness19:
19 Enoch Padolsky’s article, which studies the ethnic minority/majority binary in Lady Oracle, also interprets the Fat Lady image as a commentary on patriarchal values. According to Padolsky, Atwood explores “the consequences, social and psychological, of this cultural non-conformity, and uses the presence of the ‘fat woman’ in the novel as a site of commentary on Canadian patriarchal culture” (Padolsky 264).
198 “‘It’s wrong to laugh at other people’s misfortunes,’ she said, sterner than usual. I
found this unfair: other people laughed at mine, I should get a chance too. But then,
nobody regarded being fat as a misfortune; it was viewed simply as a disgusting
failure of will. It wasn’t fated and therefore glamorous, like being a Siamese twin or
living in an iron lung. Nevertheless, the Fat Lady was in that tent and I wanted to see
her; but I never did. What I couldn’t remember was this: were there two tents, or
was there only one?” (90).
Significantly, Joan feels unable to remember whether the Fat Lady was part of the freak show or not, in the same way as she finds it difficult to assess the importance of her otherness.
From then on, the Fat Lady reappears whenever Joan faces an identity crisis.
Paradoxically, that ludicrous character therefore possesses epiphanic qualities: the Fat Lady points to Joan’s growing awareness of her hybridity. For instance, when Joan thinks of a fellow schoolmate equally bullied for her “otherness,” the Fat Lady suddenly shows up: the schoolgirl reality is suddenly interrupted by the apparition of a surreal character, who reminds
Joan of her own inadequacies:
I was sitting in a circus tent (…) Suddenly a spotlight cut through the blackness and
focused on a tiny platform at the top of the tent. Upon it stood the Fat Lady from the
freak show at the Canadian National Exhibition (…) She carried a diminutive pink
umbrella; this was a substitute for the wings I longed to pin on her. (…) You’d think
I would have given this Fat Lady my own face, but it wasn’t so simple. Instead she
had the face of Theresa, my despised fellow-sufferer. At school I avoided her, but I
wasn’t altogether a heartless monster, I wished to make reparation, I had good
intentions. (102-103).
199 The Fat Lady, whom Joan recognises as her alter-ego, significantly displays the face of another girl, Theresa. This other fat girl in Joan’s school year has few friends. She represents the other option for an outsider, i.e. becoming invisible. Joan, on the contrary, has opted for another strategy: being a best friend and confidante. Yet, she remains deprived of the other girls’ privileges – having boyfriends, going to parties – precisely because of her “otherness.”
Joan strangely resembles the Fat Lady when she gets an arrow in her buttock at the fair. She then becomes the object of people’s laughter (116). She eventually questions her physical appearance realising that Aunt Lou wanted her to lose weight as well (121). Thinking about her situation, Joan understands that Aunt Lou wanted to offer her the possibility to escape from her mother. At that time, she does not know that her physique may not constitute the core of her problem. Indeed, she definitely finds it more difficult to accept her inner hybridity than her physical difference. When she later manages to lose weight, she becomes aware of another aspect of her alienation:
I was on these bus trips that I first discovered there was something missing in me.
This lack came from having been fat; it was like being without a sense of pain, and
pain and fear are protective, up to a point. I’d never developed the usual female
fears: fear of intruders, fear of the dark, fear of gasping noises over the phone, fear
of bus stops and slowing cars, fear of anyone or anything outside whatever magic
circle defines safety. I wasn’t whistled at or pinched on elevators, I was never
followed down lonely streets. (…) So when I shrank to normal size I had none of
these fears, and I had to develop them artificially. I had to keep reminding myself:
Don’t go there alone. Don’t go out at night (140).
Joan here confesses that her former fatness preserved her from some aspects of womanhood: she has never been attractive and consequently does not know how to cope with men’s desire.
200
This kind of innocence turns Joan into an easy victim of patriarchy. Willing to please men at all costs, she decides to have “more than one life” (141), in order to fulfil patriarchal demands, while safeguarding her personal choices. However, the multiplicity of her inner selves soon becomes a burden to Joan, who comments: “I wasn’t adjusted. I’d spent all my life learning to be one person and now I was a different one. I had been an exception, with the limitations that imposed; now I was average, and I was far from used to it.” (144). Her first attempt at living a normal life brings her to England, where she feels even more alien than in
Toronto: “I began to feel that England was a message in code which I didn’t know how to decipher.” (145). Her encounter with her first lover, the Polish Count, epitomises this feeling of “otherness.” Indeed, Paul hints at his own hybrid character, defining himself as “the last
(…) of a dying race. The last of the Mohicans” (148), a feeling Joan understands all too well.
Like her, he desperately tries to be assimilated as an English citizen, despite his inadequacies.
Joan provides an explanation for his pseudonym as a writer: “He had chosen his pseudonym because he found the name Mavis to be archetypically English. As for Quilp… (…) ‘This is a character from Dickens, it is a deformed, malicious dwarf. This is what I see myself to be, in this country; I have been deprived of my stature, and I am filled with bitter thoughts.’” (155).
Although the Count’s hot temper and excessive jealousy provoke the end of their relationship,
Joan undoubtedly feels attracted to his foreignness. A proof of this lies in her negative reaction when she discovers her new lover’s Canadian identity: “I would’ve preferred it if he’d had a British accent; unfortunately, he was only a Canadian, like me, but I overlooked this defect.” (165). However, this new relationship soon comes to an end with the death of
Joan’s mother and her sudden return to Canada. Back at her parents’ home, Joan attempts to catch up with the past. She thus becomes aware of her mother’s contained anger, when she discovers the family photograph album, in which all the men’s faces have been cut out (179-
201 180). Joan experiences this episode of her life as a personal failure: she never lived up to her mother’s expectation and, worse, she found no other solution than running away, instead of facing her problem. However, she fails to understand the importance of the moment and does not in the least question the necessity for her to meet other people’s expectations. She therefore builds her subsequent relationship with Arthur on a mistake, which she formulates as follows: “For years I wanted to turn into what Arthur thought I was, or what he thought I should be” (210). She repeatedly addresses the question of her multiplicity. She then gradually discovers that other people can also be multiple, though not exactly in the same way: “I soon discovered there were as many of Arthur as there were of me. The difference was that I was simultaneous, whereas Arthur was a sequence.” (211). In this excerpt, Joan clearly expresses her sense of hybridity: she constantly regards herself as multiple, while other people display such feelings only occasionally. Having realised the nature of her
“otherness,” Joan unconsciously expresses her helplessness in her dreams. She obviously does not know how to cope with her hybrid nature. She fears people’s reaction to it:
In the worst dream I couldn’t see her at all. I would be hiding behind a door. (…) I’d
been locked in, or out, but on the other side of the door I could hear voices.
Sometimes there were a lot of voices, sometimes only two; they were talking about
me, discussing me, and as I listened I would realize that something very bad was
going to happen. I felt helpless, there was nothing I could do (214).
Joan’s rejection of her hybrid self takes the form of her mother’s absence. Unable to accept
Joan as she is, the mother figure thus becomes a member of an ominous plot against her desperate and helpless daughter. Joan’s distress is worsened by her difficulty to accept her new, slim figure – a problem highly related to her rejection of her hybridity: “When I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t see what Arthur saw. The outline of my former body still
202 surrounded me, like a mist, like a phantom moon, like the image of Dumbo the Flying
Elephant superimposed on my own. I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me” (214). The essential feature of her fatness resides in its link with Joan’s experience of “otherness.” This alienation frequently haunts her dreams.
Indeed, if Joan has succeeded in eliminating her physical difference, she remains incapable of annihilating her inner hybridity.
As the plot unfolds, the heroine gradually becomes awareness of her life’s emptiness and comments:
“It was true I had two lives, but on off days I felt that neither of them was
completely real. With Arthur I was merely playing house, I wasn’t really working at
it. And my Costume Gothics were only paper; paper castles, paper costumes, paper
dolls, as inert and lifeless finally as those unsatisfactory blank-eyed dolls I’d dressed
and undressed in my mother’s house.” (216-217).
This last allusion to her childhood dolls demonstrates that, although she has changed physically, this woman has not grown psychologically. She has simply shifted her inability to deal with hybridity into another environment. In addition, she evokes the danger of her quest for self-acceptance for the first time: “Now I wanted to be acknowledged, but I feared it. If I brought the separate parts of my life together (like uranium, like plutonium, harmless to the naked eye, but charged with lethal energies) surely there would be an explosion.” (217). The past further catches up with Joan when Arthur introduces her to a friend of his, Marlene, who also happens to be one of Joan’s former tormentors at the Brownies. Anticipating Marlene’s reaction, Joan panics because she does not understand why she feels guilty. She hates Marlene as a symbol of her own inadequacy and failure (229). When they receive Chinese fortune
203 cookies at the end of the meal, Joan realises that Marlene’s message “It is often best to be oneself” should become hers. She therefore ponders: “It is often best to be oneself, whispered the small, crumby voice, like a conscience. But which one, which one?” (231), thus once more hinting at her hybridity.
Writing provides a solution to Joan’s psychological trauma – albeit an elusive and temporary one. Her book of poetry, Lady Oracle, contains a message for herself:
On reading, the book seemed quite peculiar. In fact, except for the diction, it seemed
a lot like one of my standard Costume Gothics, but a Gothic gone wrong. It was
upside down somehow. There were the sufferings, the hero in the mask of a villain,
the villain in the mask of a hero, the flights, the looming death, the sense of being
imprisoned, but there was no happy ending, no true love. The recognition of this
half-likeness made me uncomfortable. Perhaps I should have taken it to a
psychiatrist instead of a publisher (233).
First of all, Joan notices that the book reads like the opposite of her traditional Costume
Gothics. This implies that she might wish to leave behind her fanciful imagination to turn to real life. It also features the inversion of the role of hero and villain, thus showing that one might have to integrate the evil part of oneself to reach self-completion. Finally, Joan’s last remark – “I should have taken it to a psychiatrist” – on the book’s therapeutic value may be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the necessity for her to further explore her
204 unconscious and to find the key to her own personality.20 From then on, Joan gets a more lucid understanding of herself, identifying her psychological problems as follows: “That was the beginning of my double life. But hadn’t my life always been double? There was always that shadowy twin, thin when I was fat, fat when I was thin, myself in silvery negative, with dark teeth and shining white pupils glowing in the black sunlight of that other world.” (246).
Her success as a poetess makes her situation even more dangerous. Indeed, she fears being recognised as a writer of cheap romances and losing all credibility as a poet. She symptomatically dreams of the Fat Lady falling from her tightrope (251), an unmistakable sign of her fear of failure. Desperately, Joan concludes: “I was inept, I was slovenly and hollow, a hoax, a delusion.” (251).
On a trip to Italy with Arthur, Joan suddenly becomes aware of her own desires as she faces the statue of Diana of Ephesus in Tivoli:
One day we went to Tivoli. (…) we came to Diana of Ephesus (…) She had a serene
face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. (…) I stood licking
my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly. Once I would have seen her as an
image of myself, but not any more. My ability to give was limited, I was not
inexhaustible. I was not serene, not really. I wanted things, for myself (253).
20 In relation to the present excerpt, Parsons also notes that Joan “does not recognize, but we do, the half-likeness of all this to her own life: the masks; the flights into fantasy and deception; the love-affair with the fantastically self-creating Royal Porcupine (…); the imprisonment in insecurity; the looming death. The important point about this tripled identity and its paralleled experiences is that Joan’s writing is created out of the same feelings and experiences that also produce her fantasies and subterfuge” (Parsons “The Self-Inventing Self” 105). I favour this interpretation of Joan’s relationship to her own fiction. However, contrary to Parsons, who claims that Joan has learnt the difference between “lies which entrap and lies which empower” (108), I would express a more pessimistic view of the outcome of the novel, regarding it as another of the heroine’s numerous escape tricks.
205 The statue of Diana, famous for its numerous breasts, symbolises Joan’s misplaced wish to please everybody in order to offer a satisfying image of herself. She suddenly realises the need to do things for herself. Atwood mentions this statue of Diana of Ephesus in the Atwood
Papers as one of the first sources of Lady Oracle21 (see Appendix III), thus demonstrating the importance of this image as a symbol of the heroine’s difficulties to deal with her hybridity.
Once again, Atwood uses Greek mythology to underline the heroine’s growing awareness.
The heroine repeatedly alludes to her deficiency in offering what people want from her (269).
The attitude of her lover, the Royal Porcupine, equally shocks her. She resents his sudden attempt to look like a normal man, while she formerly appreciated his fantasy and his exuberance (271). Eventually, all those drawbacks suggest that she is a hybrid, a mutant, as she herself says: “I only wanted to be loved. I only wanted some human consideration. Was that so terrible, was that so impossible, was I some kind of mutation?” (272). When Joan eventually decides to tell Arthur the truth about herself, she conjures up the Fat Lady, who prevents her from doing so:
The Fat Lady skated out onto the ice. I couldn’t help myself. It was one of the most
important moments in my life, I should have been able to keep her away, but out she
came in a pink skating costume, her head ornamented with swan’s-down. With her
was the thinnest man in the world. (…) then the thin man lifted her and threw her
and she floated up, up (…) her secret was that although she was so large, she was
very light, she was hollow (273).
The Fat Lady’s hollowness symbolises Joan’s attitude of self-loathing when trying to erase her hybridity, even to herself. However, Joan fails to understand the inadequacy of such a behaviour, in the same way as she later misinterprets the Italian villagers’ hostility: “I was
21 Atwood Papers, Collection 200, Box 27, File 27:1, p. 5.
206 outside it though, I was a foreigner, and there was something beyond that, something wrong. I was passing through a corridor of hostile eyes (…) What had I done, what taboo had I violated?” (312). Mr. Vitroni, her landlord, then explains what she has done wrong: “‘They do not understand why you have put your clothes beneath the house. (…) They do not know why you have cut off your so beautiful hair (…) you wear always the dark glasses, like a bat, and you have taken another name. These are things nobody understands.’” (325). Progressively,
Joan comes to question the necessity for her to deceive. She concludes that she has to do so in order to get control over her life (314, 315, 320). She identifies deception as a mimicry strategy, first enabling her to conceal her “otherness,” later forcing her to acknowledge it. Her unconscious questioning remains linked to the figure of her mother, the person who most wanted her to change. As we progressively reach the end of the book, Joan achieves this understanding: “Why did I have to dream about my mother, have nightmares about her, sleepwalk out to meet her? My mother was a vortex, a dark vacuum, I would never be able to make her happy. Or anyone else. Maybe it was time for me to stop trying.” (330). She then decides, in a last act of deception, to disappear altogether (333). She simultaneously grasps the uselessness of her desire to escape:
Somehow this was not convincing. Why did every one of my fantasies turn into a
trap? (…) I might as well face it, I thought, I was an artist, an escape artist. I’d
sometimes talked about love and commitment, but the real romance of my life was
that between Houdini and his ropes and locked trunk; entering the embrace of
bondage, slithering out again. What else had I ever done? (334).
207 Escape does not turn out as an ideal solution. Joan’s utter inadequacy to meet social and patriarchal requirements is summed up in the image of the red shoes22:
“The real red shoes, the feet punished for dancing. You could dance, or you could
have the love of a good man. But you were afraid to dance, because you had this
unnatural fear that if you danced they’d cut your feet off so you wouldn’t be able to
dance. Finally you overcame your fear and danced, and they cut your feet off. The
good man went away too, because you danced. But I chose the love, I wanted the
good man; Why wasn’t that the right choice?” (335).
The Red Shoes, a film whose influence proves of utmost importance in Atwood’s work,23 illustrates the heroine’s dilemma: she has to choose between two imperatives: being true to herself or conforming to social norms.
In her Gothic romances, Joan further questions men’s illusions about women: “But every man has more than one wife. Sometimes all at once, sometimes one at a time, sometimes ones he doesn’t even know about.” (341). Soon after that, she intimates that men can be equally duplicitous. Indeed, her heroine recognises the hero as a women’s murderer (342), a reference to men’s patriarchal oppression of women. In an epiphanic fictional conclusion,
Joan, now in the shape of her heroine, enters the labyrinth of her own unconscious. At the
22 For a complete analysis of The Red Shoes motif in Lady Oracle, the reader can turn to Emily Jensen’s brilliant article on Atwood’s literary and other forms of parables in Lady Oracle (Jensen, 29-49). See also Rao’s book, Strategies for Identity, 70-71. 23 Sullivan’s biography of Margaret Atwood, precisely entitled The Red Shoes, gives a full account of the importance of the film in Atwood’s early development as a woman artist. Atwood was indeed deeply impressed by the film’s claim that one cannot have a successful career as a woman artist and be happy in one’s private life at the same time (Sullivan, The Red Shoes, 3-6).
208 centre of the maze she encounters the various constituents of her hybridity24: Aunt Lou’s influence, herself as a writer of cheap novels, her other self as a poetess, and, of course, the
Fat Lady, as a symbol of her concealed past.
Yet, I contend that this unconscious acknowledgement of hybridity does not induce a fundamental change in the heroine’s personality. At the end of the novel, she decides to become a science fiction writer (345), thus seeking refuge in the world of fantasy again. Her quest remains neither completed nor successful, though she has found another, less painful way of surviving.
6. Joan’s Personal and Professional Self-discovery
Lady Oracle is the first of a series of novels featuring the same structure: a quest pattern dealt with in the present, but which forces the reader to look back at past events.25 The heroine symptomatically utters her desire to interpret her past differently when she starts her story as follows: “You can’t change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do” (10). This sentence clearly indicates that the narrator’s quest consists in a revision of her past, as well as a decision to become more active in her future.
24 Hilde Staels expresses this hybridity in terms of “here or now” and “there or then”: “‘Here’ is Joan (subject) and ‘there’ is everyone who is hostile to her, but on whom she depends for recognition (object). ‘Here’ and ‘now’ is Joan as a new self without past whereas ‘there’ and ‘then’ are Joan’s experiences of the past and the past ‘selves’ which she keeps covered up. ‘Here’ is Joan as facade, ‘there’ is Joan’s realm of potential renewal from which she repeatedly runs away. ‘Here’ is the reality of existential doom and gloom, whereas ‘there’ is the fantasy of lost opportunities in the past and an unattainable happiness in the future.” (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels, 85). I personally prefer to define Joan’s hybridity within the frame of postcolonial resistance to patriarchy. However, I completely agree with Staels’s pessimistic interpretation of Joan’s reiterated escapes from potentialities. 25 Susan MacLean provides an interesting comment on the novel’s intricate structure when she compares it to a maze, in which the reader must fit the pieces of the puzzle together (MacLean 187). This interpretation is in accordance with my own view of Atwood as trickster writer. Moreover, it is applicable to several of her novels which resort to the use of long flashbacks to develop the heroines’ past trauma.
209 Indeed, the first part of the novel presents us with a heroine who has voluntarily faked her suicide in order to start anew, but also to be given a chance to tell her story in her own voice.
The first stage of the quest pattern takes place early in the novel as the heroine moves away from family and friends by means of her false suicide. Part one describes the conditions in which that pseudo-death occurred. It also establishes the narrator as a professional deceiver.
The reader discovers the protagonist’s disguise strategies, of which the most impressive is certainly the change in the heroine’s hair colour: “I decided I’d have to do something about my hair. It was evidence, its length and color had been a sort of trademark. Every newspaper clipping, friendly or hostile, had mentioned it, (…) They could trace my hair much more easily than they could ever trace me. I would have to cut it off and dye the rest” (14). This first part of the novel also mentions Arthur, the heroine’s husband, thus identifying him as the cause of the woman’s need to escape. Indeed, Arthur exhibits a clearly paternalistic attitude towards the heroine, deciding what she ought to like or not on her behalf (18-19). Joan further describes her occupation as a writer as another cause of her current distress, since her writing career brought about her multiple personality. The fourth chapter briefly mentions how the protagonist came to know her readers’ wishes:
The heroines of my books were mere stand-ins: their features were never clearly
defined, (…) these hidden selves rose at night from the mundane beds of their
owners to go forth on adventures so complicated and enticing that they couldn’t be
confessed to anyone, least of all to the husbands who lay snoring (…). I knew my
readers well, I went to school with them, I was the good sport, I volunteered for
committees, I decorated the high school gym (…) and then went home and ate
peanut butter sandwiches and read paperback novels while everyone else was
dancing. I was Miss Personality, confidante and true friend. They told me all (35).
210 The half bitter tone of this confession indicates that the heroine had to face unhappiness in the past. It also entails that this past experience influenced her adult life.
The second part of the book thus engages in a long flashback recalling the heroine’s – mostly negative – former adventures. It starts with a recollection of the ballet school. Joan, as a child, with her genuine innocence and her overweight body, definitely fails to correspond to her mother’s and society’s definition of a beautiful little girl. Nevertheless, her mother absolutely wants Joan to attend ballet classes, thus making her ridiculous. Indeed, her mother named her after a famous Hollywood actress:
my mother named me after Joan Crawford. This is one of the things that always
puzzled me about her. Did she name me after Joan Crawford because she wanted me
to be like the screen characters she played (…) or because she wanted me to be
successful? (…) Did she give me someone else’s name because she wanted me
never to have a name of my own? Come to think of it, Joan Crawford didn’t have a
name of her own either. Her real name was Lucille LeSueur, which would have
suited me much better. Lucy the Sweat. (…) There’s more than one side to Joan
Crawford though. In fact, there was something tragic about Joan Crawford (…)
unfortunate things happened to her. Perhaps that was it. Or, and this is important:
Joan Crawford was thin. I was not (42-43).
The passage epitomises Joan’s difficulty to deal with her obesity and her desperate wish to understand her mother’s attitude.26 At the Brownies Joan once again experiences the other girls’ rejection, which climaxes as they abandon her, tied to a tree, in a ravine. A recurring image in Atwood’s work, the ravine functions as a powerful symbol of natural evil, which the
26 John Thieme interprets this passage as a realisation of the ambivalent and multiple aspect of identity, which leads to Joan’s subsequent schizophrenic existence through a series of female roles (72).
211 narrator describes as follows: “To cross the ravine you had to walk down a long gravelled hill, then across a wooden bridge, which was quite old. It slanted, and some of the planks had rotted away completely so you could see the ground a long way beneath. Then you had to go up a path on the other side, with the leaves and branches almost touching you, like evil vegetable fingers” (53-54). The ravine thus symbolises the child’s loss of innocence. She is symptomatically rescued by a man, who might be decoded as a saviour or a molester.
Part Two further explores the relationship of the heroine with her parents. Her mother displays a particularly hostile attitude to her – unwanted – child. She often appears in the heroine’s dreams, where, even as Joan becomes an adult, she still threatens her with her hostility and domineering behaviour. Joan recalls one of these dreams as follows:
One of the bad dreams I used to have about my mother was this. I would be walking
across the bridge and she would be standing in the sunlight on the other side of it,
talking to someone else, a man whose face I couldn’t see. When I was halfway
across, the bridge would start to collapse, as I’d always feared it would. (…) I would
try to run but it would be too late, I would throw myself down and grab onto the far
edge as it rose up, trying to slide me off. I called out to my mother, who could still
have saved me, she could have run across quickly and reached out her hand, she
could have pulled me back with her to firm ground – But she didn’t do this, she went
on with her conversation, she didn’t notice anything unusual was happening. She
didn’t even hear me (65).
The mother’s attitude is clearly indifferent, even threatening towards Joan. This expression of the mother’s refusal to help suggests Joan’s desperate situation at that point.
212 In her long flashback, Joan recalls the constitutive elements of her quest. Though she only found the courage to escape later in her adult life, she obviously went through some important stages of the quest pattern before this point. Her relationship with Aunt Lou, first mentioned in chapter eight, can indeed be interpreted as the anticipated second stage of her quest, in which Aunt Lou plays the role of the green world guide.27 An exuberant and ex- centric character, Aunt Lou brings some entertainment (90) to Joan’s so far dull life. In doing so, she encourages the adolescent’s rising subversion. She also introduces the teenager to the
Spiritualists – a group of people coming together to summon up the dead and to deliver their messages to the living. They indirectly play an important part in the girl’s self-discovery. One of their parables undoubtedly parodies Joan’s own wish to become someone else:
‘If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars (…) which reminds me of a little story I
heard the other day (…) There were once two caterpillars, walking side by side
down a road. The pessimistic caterpillar said he’d heard that soon they would have
to go into a dark narrow place, that they would stop moving and be silent. ‘That will
be the end of us,’ he said. But the optimistic caterpillar said, ‘That dark place is only
a cocoon; we will rest there for a time, and after that we will emerge with beautiful
wings; we will be butterflies, and fly up toward the sun.’ Now, my friends, that road
was the Road of Life, and it’s up to each of us which we will choose to be’ (107).
If we read this passage in parallel with the description of Joan’s wish to be a butterfly at the dance, we come to understand that the image relates to Joan’s own strategy of creating multiple personalities, each fitting the image requested by her mother, her fellow students, men, society, other women, or whatever form of authority she encounters.
27 See introductory section of this work: the green-world guide is a friendly figure associated with nature and helping the character during his/her quest. It may be either a person or an object endowed with symbolic meaning.
213 The next stage of Joan’s development therefore implies a rejection of authority, in the form of a confrontation with parental figures. Contrary to everybody’s expectations, Joan decides to lose weight, a process which irritates her mother even more than her obesity. The climactic mother-daughter confrontation takes place as Joan’s mother stabs her daughter in the arm in a fit of anger. This event leads Joan to run away from home and to start a new life, with an altogether new identity.
After a brief allusion to Joan’s current work as a writer of romances, Part Three focuses again on Joan’s past and on her emigration to England. As a foreigner in an unknown country, Joan, for the first time, consciously expresses a feeling of alienation and hybridity:
“In my own country I would have known, but here I was deaf and dumb” (133). She also mentions the hybrid’s subject deep and abiding desire to become almost invisible: “I was searching for a city I could move to, where I would be free not to be myself. I didn’t want anything too different or startling, I just wanted to fit in without being known.” (139).
However, Joan must admit that she is not invisible to everybody: despite her obesity, an
Italian or Greek immigrant, who does not judge her according to Canadian cultural and aesthetic canons,28 wishes to marry her in Toronto, an offer she immediately rejects (99-101).
Her subsequent encounter with a Polish Count – another form of hybridity – forces her to resort to more deceptive strategies, as she explains: “anything I could have said would have been implausible. This was the reason I fabricated my life, time after time: the truth was not convincing.” (150). When she later meets her future husband, Arthur, she becomes even
28 Padolsky analyses the episode as “one of Joan’s first insights about the cultural limits of her own identity is to discover that these assumptions about female appearance are not universal”. However, Padolsky notices that Atwood’s interest for the immigrant remains external and belonging to the majority perspective (Padolsky 265). This might be true as far as the present novel is concerned. Yet, I contend that it is not always so, as can easily be demonstrated if we examine novels such as Life Before Man – with the character of Lesje – and The Robber Bride, in which we can focus our reading on Zenia’s foreignness.
214 more entangled in her numerous lies and romanticised vision of life: “That was the difference between us: for Arthur there were true paths, several of them perhaps, but only one at a time.
For me there were no paths at all. Thickets, ditches, ponds, labyrinths, morasses, but no paths.” (169). The last sentence reminds us of the setting of Joan’s own gothic romances, which function as unrealistic parodies of her life and of her wish to conform to paternalistic requirements. Having not yet come to terms with authority, Joan faces another parental confrontation when her mother suddenly dies. The event forces her to return to Canada, as if she wished to acknowledge her hybridity in her native country. Ironically, Atwood depicts
Joan as a makeup saleswoman, trying on the shop’s wigs in her free time (182), thus alluding to her later necessity to disguise. This period of her life also brings Joan to discover the tricksterish nature of her father, who she strongly suspects killed her mother.
Switching back to Joan’s present in Italy, the plot mentions her wish to send a postcard revealing the whole plan to Arthur. This action is highly subversive: it makes Arthur aware of the trick he has been the victim of. Joan is shown celebrating her new identity (184). In order to do this, she buys a fotoromanzo, a trashy romantic story in pictures, reminding us of her own romances, of her life, which she fantasises at will.
The fourth part of the novel turns to more serious matters as it deals with Joan’s wedding. It also features another trickster figure in the person of the reverend. Indeed, Joan immediately recognises Leda Sprott, the leader of the Spiritualists. Leda Sprott draws Joan’s attention to the necessity for her to reveal the truth, an idea which gradually becomes an obsession for Joan. Indeed, during her account of her married life, Joan repeatedly alludes to her growing uneasiness, while she nevertheless keeps deceiving her husband, having a hidden second identity (213). Joan subsequently narrates her attempts at automatic writing, which
215 eventually result in the publication of her first book of poetry. Now an acclaimed writer, Joan encounters Arthur’s friends, among whom Marlene: “Marlene my tormentor, who’s roped me to a bridge and left me there, a living sacrifice, for the monster of the ravine; Marlene the ingenious inquisitor. I was trapped again in the nightmare of my childhood, where I ran eternally after the others, the oblivious and scornful ones, hands outstretched, begging for a word of praise.” (229). Far from being a mere childhood anecdote, the recollection forces
Joan to confront her past and to question her inadequacies.
Having realised how much Marlene dismisses this childhood traumatic episode, Joan decides to deal with her present state of “otherness” by entering the fourth stage of her quest, that of the green world lover, embodied by the fantastic character of the Royal Porcupine. His ex-centricity forces Joan to recognise him as one of her kind. His “otherness” is summed up in the Porcupine’s explanation of his name: “The porcupine though, it does what it likes, it’s covered with prickles so nobody messes with it. Also it has strange tastes” (240). The quotation draws the reader’s attention to the character’s marginality. Joan enjoys his ex- centric behaviour; it gives her the opportunity to express her hybrid personality in the open.
She simultaneously gets involved in Arthur’s political activism: she helps Arthur and his friends to elaborate a bomb attack. However, this event never takes place: Joan blows up the dynamite in a park as one of the Porcupine’s numerous ex-centricities. When the Porcupine, having fallen in love with Joan, gives up his marginal identity to become plain Chuck Brewer,
Joan reacts very negatively, aware as she is of the pathetic aspect of such transformation. On the Royal Porcupine, she concludes: “He’d always lived in his own unwritten biography, but now he started seeing the present as though it was already the past, bandaged in gauzy nostalgia.” (267). Once she is liberated from him, Joan starts writing again. Yet, she remains incapable of acknowledging her hybridity, let alone to confess it to Arthur.
216
The plot speeds up when a blackmailer, journalist Fraser Buchanan, threatens to reveal
Joan’s fake identities to her husband. She then sees no other solution than to fake her own death in order to disappear completely. She also gradually becomes aware of the existence of hybridity in other characters, which she formulates as follows: “Every man I’d ever been involved with, I realized, had had two selves: my father, healer and killer; the man in the tweed coat, my rescuer and possibly also a pervert; the Royal Porcupine and his double,
Chuck Brewer; even Paul, who I’d always believed had a sinister other life I couldn’t penetrate. Why should Arthur be any exception?” (292). Part five examines the consequences of Joan’s mock suicide. It equally features the fifth stage of Joan’s quest, namely the dive into her unconscious. The plot therefore focuses on Joan’s last gothic romance manuscript. As she ponders the demands of her career as a writer, Joan briefly envisages the possibility for her to turn to a more realistic kind of writing (320). In so doing, she would deny her preference for fantasy, which constitutes her hybridity. Yet, she immediately dismisses this solution to her psychological malaise and starts writing an ever more romantic ending to her latest romance.
The magic realist conclusion of the book is set in the maze – Atwood’s metaphor for the heroine’s unconscious.29 Joan allows her heroine to penetrate into the maze in order to discover more about herself and writes: “It was noon when she entered the maze. She was determined to penetrate its secret at last.” (341). Inside the labyrinth, she encounters the various aspects of her hybridity. She thus becomes capable of accepting the multiple facets of her self. Yet, the outcome of Joan’s quest is all but positive. She remains trapped in fantasy, as shown in her desire to become a science-fiction writer. Moreover, telling her story to a journalist, she once again alludes to escape as a possible ending: “I guess it will make a pretty
29 Susan MacLean analyses the maze’s various symbolic meanings as (1) a standard Gothic device, (2) Joan’s life, (3) a descent into the underworld as in Virgil’s Aeneid, (4) an equivalent of the ravine from Joan’s childhood, (5) the heroine’s search for identity (MacLean 193-4). I find more interesting in the context of this analysis to regard the maze as a magic realist place of revelation, a site of epiphany.
217 weird story, once he’s written it; and the odd thing is that I didn’t tell any lies. Well, not very many. Some of the names and a few other things, but nothing major. I suppose I could still have gotten out of it. I could have said I had amnesia or something… Or I could have escaped” (344). The plot clearly displays a circularity30 – we leave the heroine where we first encountered her, in Italy.31 This exile becomes symptomatic of the novel’s lack of resolution.
Indeed, the heroine has simply displaced her fantasy from one period of time – romantic plots located in the past – to another – science-fiction narrative set in the future. However, she remains stuck in fantasy, unable to integrate her marginality into her everyday life.32
***
As Joan enters the maze, Atwood develops a powerful metaphor of the character’s hybridity.
We witness how an apparently successful writer, largely praised for her poems, enters an entirely different realm of experience as she becomes engaged in the writing process. Through her writing of gothic romances, Joan achieves an epiphanic vision of her hybrid self. Her exploration of her inner territory echoes Atwood’s growing concern for the theme of
“otherness.”
30 I here agree with Lecker’s idea of the circular plot as a sign that reality and fantasy are one. “To believe that it is possible to escape from either is the greatest delusion” (Lecker “Janus” 198). 31 I completely agree with Enoch Padolsky, who stresses the importance of the novel’s Italian setting from a postcolonial point of view: she associates Joan’s encounters with immigrants and her Italian exile to Atwood’s wish to introduce cultural alternatives and to redefine the boundaries of the dominant culture (Padolsky 264). 32 I agree with Hilde Staels, who, contrary to many critics, points to the self-destructiveness of Joan’s process of self-discovery. (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels, 102-103). I believe that, by the end of the novel, the heroine only succeeds in repeating her story once again, unable either to break the cycle of her multiple reinventions of her self, or to acknowledge this multiplicity in a positive or creative way.
218 In the six sections of this chapter, I have shown how the feeling of “otherness” pervades Atwood’s conception of the heroine, who alternatively displays a wish to conform to social demands and a desire to subvert them. My analysis has brought together several postcolonial themes and modes of writing, such as parody, mimicry, magic realism, tricksters, and hybridity. It has used these features as keys to the discovery of an aesthetic of “otherness” in the work of a mainstream writer. In particular, this chapter has investigated Atwood’s parodic intent, studying her allusions to popular culture, her depiction of the writer’s trade, and her quotations from the heroine’s gothic romances. Deception has proved multi-faceted, as the protagonist resorts to it both as a child and as an adult. She lies to her mother, to her husband, to her lovers, to her editors, and, worst of all, to herself in her desperate attempts at mimicking what society wants her to be. Her recurrent use of deception is a mere sign of her inadequacy to deal with inner feelings of “otherness.” In many instances, whether in her dreams, fantasies or novels, magic realist moments express this feeling of hybridity in a gothic and grotesque way. In this disintegration of her deceptive personality, Joan is helped by a series of brief apparitions of trickster figures: her father, her aunt, a psychic, her ex- centric lover, herself. The diversity of such trickster characters in the novel shows the complexity of the heroine’s psyche as well as her reluctance to achieve awareness.
Blending postmodern and postcolonial subversive elements, the novel displays a circular quest pattern often present in Atwood’s work. Nevertheless, it still fails to produce a positive outcome. The heroine has reached neither affirmation, nor reconstruction; she merely hints at another form of escape. Atwood’s re-visioning of gothic romances consists of a mix of magic realism and postmodern parody enabling her to convey the heroine’s sense of
“otherness.” While grotesque magic realism characterises Joan’s fantasies about her obesity, in the form of the Fat Lady, gothic magic realism, embodied by the ominous presence of the
219 maze, constitutes an essential aspect of Joan’s cheap novels. In gothic magic realism, the maze plays an important role as the heroine’s site of epiphany. Closely related to these magic realist passages is Atwood’s parody of a dance show in which Joan performs the role of a mothball emblematic of her marginalised position.
More characteristically Atwoodian is the constant presence of trickster figures, often accompanying the heroine’s development. However, one should notice that the presence of these tricksters often tends to marginalise the subject even more; Aunt Lou encourages Joan to be herself, the Royal Porcupine temporarily brings out Joan’s ex-centric character.
Tricksters point to the heroine’s acceptance of marginality. Yet, they fail to bring about a total acceptance of hybridity. They represent possibilities along the heroine’s initiation journey.
They do therefore suggest a coming to awareness, while simultaneously stressing the limitation of the heroine’s development. While the heroine’s numerous identities demonstrate her difficulty to belong and her lack of any real identity, they also reflect Atwood’s stammering with the notion of “otherness,” a concept which will receive a fuller analysis in her subsequent novels. The following chapter examines together three more realist novels, in which Atwood clearly deconstructs the protagonist’s quest for hybridity. The three novels represent a transitional stage in Atwood’s novelistic production.
220 Chapter 4. Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, and The
Handmaid’s Tale: Atwood’s “Subversion” Trilogy
“In this way, as in many others, she
cannot seem to avoid being
inappropriate.” (Life Before Man,
239)
“What can she say? I’m not all
here? There’s part of me missing?”
(Bodily Harm, 203)
“Still, I can’t bear it, to have been
erased like that.” (The Handmaid’s
Tale, 240)
1. Three Novels of Subversion
This chapter examines the postcolonial undertones in Atwood’s fiction of the eighties. A number of critics, while analysing postmodern issues of those works, have pointed to the possibility of viewing them as part of a trilogy, as Atwood herself has explained.1 In addition, this vision highlights the common points between the novels. The subversive attitude of their heroines happens to be one of the obvious similarities. This inherent subversion serves to express the female resistance against the patriarchal demands of the society of the eighties.
1 In an interview with Gregory Fitz Gerald and Kathryn Crabbe, Atwood says: “The first three novels comprise a unit, and Life Before Man is the first of another unit of three” (Ingersoll, 136).
221 1.1. Life Before Man : Subversion and Ethnicity
Life Before Man is certainly the least critically discussed of Atwood’s novels. Following the hilarious Lady Oracle, this novel develops the theme of human relationships in an oppressive atmosphere, in which almost nothing happens. Through a multiplicity of points of view, the novel narrates the uneventful lives of its three main characters: Elizabeth, her husband Nate, who plans to leave her, and Lesje, Nate’s mistress. Those three characters often allude to secondary figures, whose presence renders their relationships even more complex: Chris,
Elizabeth’s lover, who has recently committed suicide; Martha, Nate’s former mistress;
William, Lesje’s former lover; and the scary Auntie Muriel, who educated Elizabeth. In addition, she reminds the reader of the heartless Mrs. Smeath in Cat’s Eye.2
Despite its display of highly interesting narrative techniques – the narration takes the form of the characters’ successive confessions as if in a diary – the novel has nevertheless been regarded as problematic. Carol Beran writes that this novel “fascinates, challenges, and repels.”3 Indeed, one wonders what makes the dull life of this love triangle so fascinating.
Atwood herself gives us some clues as to the significance of the work. First of all, she identifies Life Before Man as the first part of a trilogy, of which her subsequent novels, Bodily
Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, constitute the sequels. This perfectly makes sense if we contrast Life Before Man with Atwood’s previous novels, two comedies, The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, and a novel Atwood qualifies as a ghost story, Surfacing. One easily notices that Life Before Man significantly differs from those novels through its highly realistic plot
2 A comparison made by Sharon Wilson in her analysis of fairy-tale motives in Life Before Man in Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (178). 3 Beran, Carol, Living over the Abyss, Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man (16).
222 and its passivity. Some critics have described the novel as Atwood’s successful attempt at building up a perfect modernist plot relying exclusively on the characters’ stream of consciousness. I would disagree with those who consider Life Before Man as a straightforward realist novel. Indeed, I contend that the plot contains elements of magic realism, mostly in connection with the character of Elizabeth. This brings me to my second point, i.e. to the significance of Atwood’s characterisation in relation to the novel’s tragic mode. Most critics have analysed Life Before Man in terms of the love relationships between characters.4 Atwood, in this and in the following two novels, focuses her attention on break- ups rather than on the feelings involved in any relationship. Indeed, a colonial perspective of
Life Before Man reveals that a character stands out as “other.” In this light, secondary figures such as Chris, Martha, and Auntie Muriel become highly significant, as all of them are somehow discarded from the protagonists’ life. Moreover, novels such as Bodily Harm and
The Handmaid’s Tale can both be read from a similar point of view: Bodily Harm clearly deals with the heroine’s difficulties to come to terms with her breast cancer operation which has led to her lover’s departure. Further, The Handmaid’s Tale is haunted with the presence of the narrator’s companion, from whom she violently got separated while trying to escape the
Gileadean regime. My analysis of Life Before Man therefore underlines the elements which reveal the characters’ otherness and the splits it generates: Atwood’s use of parody, the characters’ deception and mimicry strategies, Elizabeth flight into dream-like states of consciousness, the characters’ trickster-like qualities, and their hybridisation. The development of the quest pattern also indicates that the novel mainly deals with the characters’ acceptance of their otherness in order to pursue their lives.
4 See the analyses of Paul Goetsch (“Life Before Man as a novel of manners”), Rosenberg, Greene (“Life Before Man Can Anything Be Saved?”) among others.
223
1.2. Bodily Harm: Subversion on Foreign Ground
While Life Before Man deals with a variety of ordinary characters in usual circumstances,
Bodily Harm presents the reader with an ordinary heroine, facing unusual events: she has to cope with the fact that she might die of cancer and must similarly complete her journalistic mission on a far-off island on the verge of a civil war. When referring to Rennie, the heroine of Bodily Harm, the term “hybrid” is considered in its broadest sense: Rennie feels hybrid, because her illness and its concomitant amputation prevent her from ever feeling like other people again. Her situation on the island, as a tourist watching events from the outside, echoes her own inner situation: she feels as though she had lost control over her own life and had become a spectator to it. Similarly, her irresistible tendency to get involved in the local political situation might be regarded metaphorically as an effort to regain control over her own body. In order to do so, Rennie exhibits a subversive behaviour: one never really knows what she actually thinks of the local politics; yet, it is clear from the outcome of events, that she has to adopt a subversive, duplicitous behaviour in order to – at least for a while – save her own life.
A postcolonial reading of Bodily Harm requires careful analysis of the heroine’s deceptive strategies, especially those entailing a subversive attitude. It also forces one to pay attention to any part of the novel which might deviate from its otherwise realistic development, for instance in the form of the intervention of trickster-like figures as role models in the context of the heroine’s apprenticeship of subversion. Further, this chapter also examines the heroine’s feelings of hybridity, as the cause of her subversive and deceptive
224 stance. Indeed, I consider hybridity as a key concept in the heroine’s personal quest for inner knowledge, i.e. as part of her process of acceptance of her illness and of its consequences.
1.3. The Handmaid’s Tale: Subversion vs. Propaganda
Although it confronts the reader with an altogether different world, The Handmaid’s Tale can be regarded as highly similar to Bodily Harm, in that it also presents us with an ordinary woman, forced to face highly unusual circumstances. This time, however, the heroine’s alienation from “normal” life is not caused by her illness. On the contrary, her good health and her capacity to bear a child – a rare quality in the highly polluted world of Gilead – have transformed her into a valued prisoner within Gileadean society. Indeed, women like her, who are still able to procreate and were not officially married at the time of the putsch, have become servants of a peculiar kind: every three months such fertile women are transferred from one household to another in the hope of giving a baby to a so-far sterile couple. After three fruitless attempts they are sent to the Colonies to clear up toxic waste and endure a long and painful agony. Atwood’s highly pessimistic dystopia provides the reader with yet another depiction of the process of subversion. From the heroine’s description of her coercion, the reader soon understands the necessity for her to make use of deception and resort to a strategy of mimicry in order to display a suitable image of herself. The Gileadean regime is based on religiously and morally repressive propaganda, to which the only possible response consists in the choice of a personal subversive attitude and the faith in the existence of an underground resistance. The latter is confirmed in the story’s appended “Historical Notes,” which establish the subversive character of the writing itself: they reveal the existence of audio cassettes, which allowed this story to be transcribed, and insists on the clandestine character of such methods.
225
My postcolonial reading analyses the heroine’s feelings of hybridity due to her condition, her possible means of evasion through daydreaming or transformation of reality, and the intervention of trickster-like characters who help the heroine on her way out of
Gilead.
2. Subversion through Parody
Parody definitely applies as a means of expressing critique on one’s current life circumstances. Unsurprisingly, Atwood makes judicious use of parody in these three novels in order to denounce the restricted situations her heroines have to deal with. Life Before Man, for instance, is constructed on a parody of The Wizard of Oz, which enables the reader to understand the role models involved in Elizabeth’s development as a woman. Bodily Harm, on the other hand, is built on a metaphor equating life with a clue game: indeed, in a life where people constantly risk to become victims of their own bodily dysfunction or of others’ aggressions, the only resort is to regard life as a game, something Rennie, the heroine, has not yet learned to do as the narrative begins. Finally, The Handmaid’s Tale, with its numerous allusions to works of art, presents the reader with a parody of Puritan America, in which the dichotomy between art and reality has been so submerged by religious fanaticism that it has resulted into a heartless, dehumanised society, comparable to that of Huxley’s Brave New
World or Orwell’s 1984.
226 2.1. Along the Yellow Brick Road: Atwood’s Parody of The Wizard of Oz.
The very concept of parody has proved central to Atwood’s vision of her fiction. Aware of this importance, many critics have provided us with analyses of Atwood’s parodic allusions in
Life Before Man. I have chosen to rely on Sharon R. Wilson’s work on fairy-tale motives in
Atwood’s fiction in order to examine the postcolonial intent behind the novelist’s use of parody. In contemporary literatures in English, parody is often used by postcolonial or minority writers to criticise hegemonic society.5 Although Atwood qualifies as a mainstream writer, she somehow adopts a postcolonial perspective in her interest in her characters’ sense of otherness. In other words, Atwood’s characters in Life Before Man, with their dull life and their common expectations, demonstrate that otherness, and its consequence – empowerment
– is present not only in marginalised or so-called “ethnic” characters, but in all of us. They parodically emphasise the universality of the postcolonial stance.
A first instance of parodic allusion is detectable in Elisabeth’s quotation of a poem she had to memorise at school. Elizabeth recalls:
In Flanders Fields. A Canadian wrote that. We are the Dead. A morbid nation. In
school they had to memorize it two years in a row, back when memorizing was still
in fashion. She’d been chosen to recite it, once. She was good at memorizing; they
called it being good at poetry. She was good at poetry, before she left school (58).
5 See, for instance, the shift of point of view in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, as a rewriting of Jane Eyre’s plot.
227 One may wonder why Canada is here described as a dead nation. One can interpret this quote as an expression of Elizabeth’s feeling of sterility, here extended to the situation of Canada itself – as befits a colony, still under the rule of another country. Elizabeth’s subsequent remark about the uselessness of memorizing poems by heart hints at the mimicry process at work here. Indeed, the child memorising the poem without any personal creative input utterly resembles the colonial subject forced to submit to colonial demands.
In Life Before Man, Atwood uses intertextual references to voice the characters’ troubles in dealing with alterity. Literary references are numerous, from Ovid and Virgil to
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (Wilson, Fairy-Tale, 167-168). Yet, one reference in particular significantly influences the novel’s characterisation, structure, setting, and imagery: The
Wizard of Oz, both in its written and its filmed version (Wilson, Fairy-Tale, 176-184).
Atwood’s overt allusions to The Wizard of Oz establish Elizabeth as the central character, the alter-ego of Dorothy. Elizabeth, giving each character hyperbolic value, casts her Aunt Muriel as the Wicked Witch of the West and her lost mother as Glinda the Good. Both visions are highly exaggerated and unrealistic. Nevertheless, they represent the core of Elizabeth’s psychological dilemma, of her hybridity: does she belong to the world of her unreliable mother who abandoned her or is she the mere product of her aunt’s rigid education? Hence the importance of the following scene in the novel’s characterisation:
For months Elizabeth put herself to sleep with a scene from The Wizard of Oz. The
book itself had been left behind, it was part of the old life before Auntie Muriel’s,
but she could remember it. It was the part where Dorothy throws a bucket of water
over the Wicked Witch of the West and melts her. Auntie Muriel was the Witch, of
course. Elizabeth’s mother was Glinda the Good. One day she would reappear and
kneel down to kiss Elizabeth on the forehead. (139)
228
Reinvention of a realistic plot as a fairy-tale marks Atwood’s use of intertextual references.
The best instance of this technique can be found when Elizabeth describes her dying aunt:
“She’s falling in on herself, she’s melting, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and seeing it
Elizabeth remembers: Dorothy was not jubilant when the witch turned into a puddle of brown sugar. She was terrified.” (279) This scene epitomises the tension between Elizabeth’s joy and fear. Indeed, on the one hand, Elizabeth enjoys the power she now exerts on her aunt: she wonders whether she should tell her the truth about her health. The roles have now been inverted: Elizabeth is now invested with power. On the other hand, like Dorothy, that newly acquired power terrifies her, as she does not know how to use it.
Wilson further establishes other correspondences between Life Before Man and The
Wizard of Oz. The dull world, in which Atwood’s characters evolve, evokes the black and white setting of the beginning of The Wizard. The scene in which Dorothy is caught in the middle of a cyclone echoes the first scene in the novel where Elizabeth lies on her bed as in a void (11). Further, Wilson casts Nate as a combination of the Scarecrow – because of his inefficiency at work – and the Tin Woodman – because he gradually gets rid of his identity.
Lesje, in the guise of the Cowardly Lion, lacks both roots and identity, whereas Chris functions as an inverted wizard, who, instead of dispensing of his body, commits suicide by blowing his head off. Wilson concludes her comparison by saying that all characters in Life
Before Man, like those of The Wizard of Oz, characteristically lack something. I would go further, adding that what they miss is a sense of their own difference, an acknowledgement of their otherness: Elizabeth does not know how to handle the fact that she is gradually becoming the “ex-wife;” Lesje fails to understand that she cannot possibly spend the rest of her life as an extinct species; Nate finds it difficult to choose between his double occupation
229 as a lawyer and as an artist. Quite logically then, one may conclude that all characters in the novel, as in The Wizard of Oz, embark on a quest for self-confidence and self-knowledge.
The novel further contains a reflection casting doubts on the value of human categories and constructions. As such, we can interpret it as Atwood’s intervention, inviting the reader to question the notion of reality and fictional constructs. Evading reality into the prehistoric world, Lesje – answering a young visitor’s question – reflects:
But does the Mesozoic exist? When it did it was called nothing. The dinosaurs
didn’t know they were in the Mesozoic. They didn’t know they were only in the
middle. They didn’t intend to become extinct; as far as they knew they would live
forever. Perhaps she should write the truth: The Mesozoic isn’t real. It’s only a word
for a place you can’t go to any more because it isn’t there. It’s called the Mesozoic
because we call it that. (290)
Like the dinosaurs in the quote, the characters in the novel fail to understand their situation: they do not realise that the limitations of their life leads them to extinction. Rather, they refuse to face reality, tending to hide their inadequacy both from themselves and others.
2.2. Life as a Game Parody
Bodily Harm deals with the theme of internal and external forms of aggression. At the beginning of the novel, Rennie, the heroine, regards her cancer as she does external assaults: she refuses to face them. Indeed, she seems more willing to accept the fact that she might die than to fight in order to stay alive. Likewise, she conceals her provincial origins rather than displaying them to the outside world. Meanwhile, she secretly worships people such as her
230 friend Jocasta or her exotic lover Paul, who embody good taste and an adventurous attitude towards life. However, when she, on a trip to a foreign island, suddenly discovers that someone has invaded her intimacy by breaking into her hotel room, Rennie is also forced to admit that cancer might not be the only threat to her life. Indeed, what prevents a perfect stranger from entering her room at night and assassinating her without any warning or real motive?
Rennie’s experience in the Caribbean Islands shows how she faces an unknown menace. It illustrates how she gradually comes to accept risk as a component of human life.
The whole novel is therefore structured as a clue game,6 in which the reader is implicitly requested to discover who plays the roles of victim and victor and what the outcome really means. Atwood hints at the significance of the clue game as a metaphor for the plot’s development, mentioning it at regular intervals. Rennie introduces the idea of this game at the beginning of the novel, when she discovers the intrusion into her room: “All I could think of was a game we used to play. Detective or Clue, something like that. You had to guess three things: Mr. Green, in the conservatory, with a knife. Only I couldn’t remember whether the name in the envelope was supposed to be the murderer’s or the victim’s. Miss Wilford, in the bedroom, with a rope.” (13-14). Significantly, Rennie does not remember the role played by the person whose name can be found in the envelope. It indicates that she too reluctantly assesses her responsibilities and her own role in what happens to her. When she later reflects on the clue game again, Rennie thinks: “Mr. X., in the bedroom, with a rope. And when you pulled on the rope, which after all reached down into darkness, what would come up? What
6 Lorna Irvine’s analysis of Bodily Harm in Collecting Clues offers a full exegesis of the clue metaphor in the novel (Irvine Collecting Clues 94-96). While I totally adhere to this interpretation, I do not follow Irvine in her intimation that the whole novel occurs on the operation table (96). If we take into account Atwood’s comment to Irvine that the novel takes place in a few hours, I would rather adopt the common critical attitude of assuming that the whole plot takes the form of a flashback within Rennie’s thoughts as she hopes for escape in her Caribbean prison.
231 was at the end, the end? A hand, then an arm, a shoulder, and finally a face. At the end of the rope there was someone. Everyone had a face, there was no such thing as a faceless stranger”
(41). Once again, she fails to understand the significance of the game, focussing desperately on the outcome, which is in keeping with her own obsession with death. Yet, the existence of this faceless menace allows her to take a risk and get involved with local politics. When she dangerously accepts to fetch a box at the airport for the mistress of a local politician, she accepts to risk her own security and to get involved for the first time. Atwood mentions the clue game several times in relation with the mysterious content of the box (159) and with the presence of an unknown menace (220).
The way the heroine later reads a detective story reveals a lot about her attitude to life:
“The pages are yellowed and watermarked and smell of mould. Rennie reads the casts of characters and tries to guess who gets murdered. Then she reads up to the murder and tries to guess who did it, and then she turns to the back of the book to see if she’s right. She doesn’t have much patience for the intricacies of clues and deductions” (245-247). The reader understands that Rennie is more concerned about the roles people embody and about the possible outcome of their actions than with the intricacies of social relationships. This explains her feeling of inadequacy: she does not know the real functioning of social relationships; she only knows how to mimic it. However, Rennie slowly comes to admit her reluctance to play the role ascribed to her as a woman. She sums it up as follows: “Rennie can see what she is now: she is an object of negotiation. The truth about knights comes suddenly clear: the maidens were only an excuse. The dragon was the real business. So much for vacation romances, she thinks” (258). Suddenly confronted with the politics of male-female relationships, Rennie understands the need for her to fight back, to earn her own survival, to find her place in society. When she finally faces even worse circumstances, held captive in a
232 local prison and suspected of spying, she is forced to cling desperately to her once so dull life and claims: “ ‘I’m writing a travel piece. You can phone the magazine and check,’ she adds.
‘In Toronto, when they’re open. It’s called Visor.’ This sounds improbable even to her. Does
Toronto exist? They won’t be the first to wonder. She thinks of her blank notebook, no validation there” (262). The clue game metaphor is here no longer necessary, since the danger of Rennie’s situation has become all but too real.
2.3. Metafictional Comments and Parodic Reflections on Art and Reality
In The Handmaid’s Tale, art and fiction have definitely been banished, as the embodiment of imagination, a perverse deviation of the human mind. Wishing to annihilate man’s ability to love, to dream, and to hope, the creators of this world have also banished mirrors, as tokens of women’s futility. Yet, it is through an image in a mirror that the reader discovers the silhouette of the Handmaid: “There remains a mirror (…) I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, a fairytale figure in a red cloak,7 descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood” (19). The fact that the owners of the house have forgotten to remove the mirror may be interpreted as a sign that hope still exists. It also allows the heroine to reflect upon her “distorted,” unnatural position in that household. As she tells us, she feels like a character in a fairy-tale, in a story that – as the blood denotes – has gone terribly wrong. She then provides her reader with her own reflections on storytelling:
7 The novel can also be read as a parody of Little Red Riding Hood (See Wilson’s analysis of the novel in Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, 271-294). It further displays elements from Gothic fiction, as it features a helpless female figure in a hostile environment.
233 I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe
it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If
it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an
ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. It
isn’t a story I’m telling. It’s also a story I’m telling in my head as I go along. Tell,
rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case
forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You
don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is
no one. (49)
In her presentation of her story, the Handmaid desperately wishes it to be a fictional creation, because the situation seems utterly unbearable to her. She also hopes to gain control over the story, i.e. to determine its ending. Moreover, telling that story to someone is highly important to the heroine, isolation being one of her sufferings. From then on, the plot alternates between episodes true to reality and the heroine’s wishful thinking, which she repeatedly denounces as such.8 The narrator insists on the dubious aspect of fiction to draw the reader’s attention to her high level of unreliability. She induces him/her to be cautious. Her frequent allusions to the value of works of art of different kinds remind the reader of the existence of the dichotomy between reality and fiction throughout the whole story.
However, art is also regarded as one of the components sustaining the new regime: the
Handmaid notices the regime’s preference for folk art, as a way of occupying women’s spare time (17); she also alludes to religious art and its puritanical undertones (41, 89-90). She draws a parallel between her life and that of the characters in nineteenth-century paintings, depicting life in harems (79). The picture – containing all those naked women – might not be
8 Howells alludes to the novel’s “double-voiced discourse so characteristic of women,” constantly oscillating between nature and culture (Howells, Margaret Atwood, 144), or, as I imply here, between reality and fiction, between life and art.
234 the same, but the result – women in captivity – clearly is. All these examples show how art can be used in order to justify social and political choices. Their parodic presence in the novel also points to the archaic nature of Gileadean society, and are, as such, part of the metafictional critique of that regime.
3. Three Forms of Subversive Deception
Life Before Man chronicles the moments of crisis in the relationships of dying and forming couples in the Toronto of the 1970’s. It focuses on three characters who fail to acknowledge their otherness. While the title clearly alludes to Lesje’s job as a paleontologist – more interested in dinosaurs than in human beings – and to pre-conscious understanding, it also hints, as stated by Carol Beran (Beran, “Functional Ethnicity,” 59), at the time which lies ahead of man, at what these characters decide to make of their life and at the possible extinction of the human race. Atwood once again invites the reader to embrace multiple interpretations of her title and of her characters’ inner life. Likewise, the three protagonists constantly challenge the realistic plot, resorting to deceptive strategies or indulging in self- deception. All are involved in a love triangle, which causes them to develop a treacherous behaviour.
Like Nate and Lesje, Elizabeth is characterised by her capacity to lie and to mimic any type of required social behaviour. She is also the protagonist who, in the course of the novel, evolves most clearly towards self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Focussing on her role as a wife and a mother, she exerts her deceptive strategies on her husband. Similarly, she unconsciously applies the same strategies to her children. From the very beginning of the novel, their propensity to use disguises of all kinds demonstrates her children’s comparable
235 tendency to mimic. Since the novel’s opening takes place during the Halloween season, it features frequent allusions to the children’s disguises (13). Significantly, Elizabeth comments on her children’s behaviour, saying that “they act as though everything is normal” (13). This sentence indicates that the children already have learnt the art of mimicry. This is confirmed by Elizabeth’s subsequent judgment on her children’s costume choice: “Nancy has made yet another variation of her favorite costume. She calls it a monster, every year. (…) Janet makes a prim entrance. Last year she was a ghost, the year before that she was a cat, both standard.
She tends to play it safe; to be too original is to be laughed at, as Nancy sometimes is” (37-38)
The passage clearly differentiates the children, showing that the eldest has already chosen to compromise in order to conform, while Nancy’s disguises may cause mockery, making her stand out as ex-centric. The episode further indicates that the elder child has already mastered social rituals when she explains to her mother what her costume represents, saving her “the embarrassment of asking,” (38) as Atwood puts it. Ironically, Janet is disguised as a caricature gypsy (38), providing the same image as that used by Lesje to describe her otherness (30).
The deceptive resonances in Elizabeth’s stream of consciousness slowly become obvious. She often makes a mental note betraying the erroneousness of her previous comments (58). The same process recurs frequently as one reads Elizabeth’s entries (102).
The most striking example of this technique can be detected in Elizabeth’s relation of her visit to William, to whom she wants to disclose Lesje’s infidelity:
Under ordinary circumstances she would have reserved in advance, but she needed
to seem impromptu. She happened to be passing by the Ministry of the Environment
on her way to do some shopping (false; she never shops at Yonge and St. Clair) and
remembered their recent conversation (also false). She thought how fascinating it
would be to pop in on William and hear a little more about the work he was doing
236 (totally false), and if William wasn’t busy for lunch, she’d love to have him join her
(true, but not for the reasons William may have suspected). (176)
The passage clearly underscores Elizabeth’s deceptive strategies by showing how she elaborates the scenario of her so-called haphazard visit to William. Atwood’s narrative technique – based on a stream of consciousness – prompts the reader to become aware of
Elizabeth’s deceptive skills.
Elizabeth further encourages the reader’s disbelief in her allegedly exaggerated description of her wicked aunt: “Elizabeth knows her view of Auntie Muriel is exaggerated”
(119). Her subsequent portrayings of her aunt epitomise not only Elizabeth’s tendency to exaggerate features of her aunt’s personality, hinting at the problematic relationship between the two women. Auntie Muriel constitutes an element in Elizabeth’s life that leads her to the development of mimicry strategies in order to conform to social demands. Elizabeth’s comatose sister, Caroline, represents what might happen when one either totally accepts those norms or rejects them altogether: one then indulges in a self-annihilating process resulting in death. Throughout the novel, Elizabeth’s feelings towards her aunt slowly evolve: from simple hatred, she soon acquires a position that allows her to exert her power on her now ill and weak aunt. After her aunt’s death, she fully understands how much she actually resembles that woman. Hints at this outcome punctuate the novel, as in the following quote: “Auntie
Muriel worked at developing those parts of Elizabeth that most resembled Auntie Muriel and suppressing or punishing the other parts” (137). The character of Aunt Muriel allows Atwood to criticise, through Elizabeth’s comments, the values imposed by patriarchal society. Such is the case, for instance, when Elizabeth humorously explains Aunt’s Muriel’s vision of society:
237 She’s quite certain of her own place, however. First comes God. Then comes Auntie
Muriel and the Queen, with Auntie Muriel having a slight edge. Then come about
five members of the Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, which Auntie Muriel attends.
After this there is a large gap. Then white, non-Jewish Canadians, Englishmen, and
white, non-Jewish Americans, in that order. Then there’s another large gap,
followed by all other human beings on a descending scale, graded according to skin
color and religion. Then cockroaches, clothes moths, silverfish and germs, which are
about the only forms of animal life with which Auntie Muriel has ever had any
contact. Then all sexual organs, except those of flowers. This is how Elizabeth puts
it for the amusement of others when she’s telling Auntie Muriel stories. (137-138)
This scene, though hilarious, counterpoints Elizabeth’s earlier vision of Aunt Muriel, when she desperately feared her as a child. Its humorous tone echoes Elizabeth’s gradual rejection of the paternalistic values which turned her in what she has become: a seemingly snobbish
Wasp lady.9 Elizabeth is now capable of ridiculing Aunt Muriel’s vision of the world. She accepts responsibility for her own place in this society and gradually acquires self-knowledge.
Yet, at this stage of the plot development, Elizabeth has not fully integrated her belonging to
Wasp society. She still positions herself as other, i.e. as not fulfilling Aunt Muriel’s expectations. In other words, she still considers Aunt Muriel a malignant, evil relative and herself as a cockroach or silverfish (138). She then narrates the story of her mother’s disappearance, as seen through Aunt Muriel’s eyes:
Elizabeth’s mother deserted the family out of innate depravity – ran off with the son
of her own father’s lawyer – which Auntie Muriel saw as a kind of incest and which
luckily didn’t last long. She, Auntie Muriel, had rescued the deserted children and
9 In Brutal Choreographies Bouson-Brooks highlights the dialogic strategy used by Elizabeth to “unmask and dethrone the disciplinary, judgmental speech of her aunt” (92). To me, the strategy has further implications; if we regard the aunt as the embodiment of paternalistic claims, Elizabeth clearly becomes an ex-centric, revolutionary figure.
238 had begun immediately stuffing them with all the advantages. Elizabeth, even as a
child, did not fully accept this story (138).
The negative connotations of this description strike the reader: words such as “deserted,”
“depravity,” or “incest,” echo the judgement of patriarchal society concerning the behaviour of Elizabeth’s mother. Yet, the last sentence of this quotation implies that Elizabeth has never fully accepted this version of her life. Such comment might be regarded as a clue to
Elizabeth’s hybridisation. Although she was brought up according to Aunt Muriel’s patriarchal values, she does not seem to have fully integrated such values, and traces of a less rigid form of education dispensed by her mother somehow subsist.
Elizabeth’s double nature constitutes an essential aspect of her personality. It best comes to light through confrontations with simple, honest characters, such as Nate’s mistress,
Martha, or her imaginary image of Nate’s mother. When Elizabeth imagines an encounter with Nate’s mother, she emphasises her otherness, drawing on the discrepancy between city and country. Yet, she immediately adds that such confrontation springs from her own imagination and has never actually occurred: “The mother: You a friend of his? From the city, eh? Then, as she’d feared, throwing back the veil, the bad teeth showing, pushing her dark face towards Elizabeth, her hair turning to snakes: You killed him. (…) As far as she knows, his parents, if they still exist, have never heard of her. And her images are all wrong, too”
(160). Elizabeth’s feeling of “having the wrong images” expresses the inadequacy of the role ascribed to her. Her otherness takes its roots in the demands imposed on her by her Aunt
Muriel, after her mother abandoned her. Indeed, Auntie Muriel, as a responsible tutor, wanted
Elizabeth to receive a proper education at Trinity College. She also wanted her to remain at home for the sake of her autistic sister Caroline. However, Elizabeth identifies such choices as
“a ruse to trap her” and claims that “she wants only one thing: escape” (177). What follows is
239 a series of episodes from Elizabeth’s youth, in which she deliberately challenges Auntie
Muriel’s credulity, deceiving her with small lies and angelic images of herself. After going out with her boyfriend, Elizabeth comes back home excited at the thought of Auntie Muriel
“standing on the bottom step of the staircase in her powder blue dressing gown, accusing, malignant, triumphant. Elizabeth has fed her a story about evening choir practice, which, unbelievably, has worked several times before. But she’s never stayed out so late” (179). The duplicitous nature of Elizabeth’s behaviour prompts her to discovery. She begins to treasure defiance. Her deception therefore displays a subversive quality characterising the oppressed subject.
Being an expert at deception from an early age, Elizabeth logically turns out to have a gift for spotting the same technique in others. Such is the case for Nate’s lies, which she often refers to as obvious (203-204). By showing off her knowledge, Elizabeth displays her superiority towards her husband. Realising that he plans to leave the house, she urges him to do so to be able “to repeat this conversation to her friends, communicating her joy at this solution to all her problems, radiating quiet confidence and control” (204). Such reaction evidently constitutes yet another form of deception. Indeed, as a deserted wife, Elizabeth understands that “she’s being manipulated into this position, by Nate” (204). She therefore decides to lie to herself and others, displaying the image of a confident woman (205). Her tendency to disguise her distress finds its roots in the education she received as a child.
Indeed, although she radically rejects her aunt’s ethical principles, she has undeniably been influenced by her idea that “mothers of young children do not break up families for their own selfish gratification” and that “there is such a thing as immoral behavior and such a thing as common decency” (215). Caught between two images of herself – the triumphant, independent woman and the miserable, deserted wife – Elizabeth reluctantly admits the failure
240 of her marital relationship. Her education somehow convinced her that: “If she says, ‘Nate left me,’ she’ll hear that it was her fault. Husbands do not leave wives who behave properly”
(215). Aunt Muriel’s tendency towards self-mortification has clearly caused her niece to feel submerged in guilt.
Further, Elizabeth methodically deconstructs the behaviour of people around her, revealing the multiplicity of mimicry strategies used in order to satisfy social requirements.
She is also perfectly conscious of her own strategies to please patriarchal norms:
With everyone else she can depend on some difference between surface and interior.
Most people do imitations; she herself has been doing imitations for years. If there is
some reason for it she can imitate a wife, a mother, an employee, a dutiful relative.
The secret is to discover what the others are trying to imitate and then support them
in their belief that they’ve done it well. Or the opposite: I can see through you. But
Auntie Muriel doesn’t do imitations; either that or she is so completely an imitation
that she has become genuine. She is her surface. Elizabeth can’t see through her
because there is nothing and nowhere to see. She is opaque as a rock. (216-217)
The passage underlines Elizabeth’s belonging to patriarchal society as well as her inner rejection of its values. Behind her façade, she loathes imitations. Moreover, she secretly envies her Aunt Muriel for having integrated those values so well. She admires her power, as much as she hates being subjected it. Moreover, she fears that her respect of social conventions might someday transform her into a mere copy of her dreadful relative. Indeed, she can understand her aunt’s behaviour so well, that she even guesses what Aunt Muriel might do concerning her marriage – “going to go to Nate and offer to pay him (…) for an appearance of standard family life” (217). Through these reiterated allusions to Aunt Muriel’s
241 middle-class ideals, Atwood not only illustrates Elizabeth’s powerful feelings towards her aunt; she also stresses the resemblance between the two women.10
Highly interesting then is Elizabeth’s attitude when she becomes aware of her aunt’s illness and considerable loss of power. Through a series of small details, Atwood intimates that Elizabeth searches to gain power over her aunt, i.e. that she passes from the state of colonised victim to that of heartless coloniser. For instance, Elizabeth reveals that she brings her aunt chrysanthemums out of pure mischief: indeed, Aunt Muriel cannot stand the smell of them, and Elizabeth perfectly knows that; she just “conveniently forgot” (278). Further, she cherishes the idea of revealing to her aunt the seriousness of her health condition (279).
Finally, she admits that she plainly wants her aunt to suffer (280), as a revenge for all the pain she inflicted on her. She blames Aunt Muriel for the negative image of her mother, whom she wishes to regard as a saint or as a victim (281).
Aunt Muriel’s death represents a turning point in Elizabeth’s life. It foregrounds an ultimate confrontation with parental figures, forcing the heroine to wander further into the meanders of her own unconscious. Nevertheless, at the funeral, Elizabeth, still under the influence of her aunt’s education, remains unable to display any behaviour other than the prescribed one: she represses laughter, hoping it will be “mistaken for grief” (298). A short sentence alluding to one of her daughters – “Janet is weeping decorously; she knows this is what you do at funerals” (299) intimates that she has already taught her daughters how to act as society requires. Further, she admits that she will go on retelling reality as she pleases when she confesses: “Now that Auntie Muriel is actually dead, she is free to restructure her
10 Hilde Staels identifies Aunt Muriel as “Elizabeth’s shadow self, (…) the negative qualities that Elizabeth refuses to acknowledge as part of herself” (Staels, A Study of Narrative Discourse, 109). Hence my interpretation of the novel as Elizabeth’s quest for her hybridity.
242 closer to her own requirements; also, she would like to find something in her to approve”
(299). This observation divulges one of Elizabeth’s strategies – turning an object of fear into a joke. For the first time in the novel, it also intimates that Elizabeth wishes to understand her aunt better, as an important aspect of her own personality. The distance between her and her aunt enables Elizabeth to question her own vision of reality, and in so doing, to get a glimpse of her hybridity. She ponders: “She’s finding it difficult to believe that Auntie Muriel, now shriveled, boxed, dirted over and done with, actually did all the harmful, even devastating things she remembers her doing. Possibly Elizabeth had exaggerated, invented; but why would she invent Auntie Muriel?” (300). The question is symptomatic of Elizabeth’s quest for self-knowledge. Its answer lies in her acknowledgement of her hybrid nature.
In Life Before Man, deception, which enables the character to look like an average person, assumes a prominent role. Lesje also tries to display a deceptive image of herself.
Several comments indicate that she wishes to control her physical appearance: the way she dresses (26), or her jewellery (26). Episodes from her childhood explain why physical appearance is so important to Lesje. She recalls seeing an Indian museum employee on one of her visits to the museum with her grandmother: “They’d seen an Indian woman, wearing a beautiful red sari with a gold band at the hem. Over the top of the sari was a white lab coat, and with the woman were two little girls, obviously her daughters, wearing Scottish kilts.
‘Gevalt,’ her grandmother said, frowning, but not with fear. Lesje stared at them, entranced.
This, then, was her own nationality” (96). Seeing little Indian girls dressed in a Western way,
Lesje’s grandmother clearly expresses her disapproval. As a child, Lesje undoubtedly experienced this rejection as a personal one, because, like the Indian girls, she felt torn apart between two different traditions. The way Lesje dresses expresses her hybridity, as shown in another childhood reminiscence. Lesje describes her father’s company in the following terms:
243 “He owned a dress business, true, but reluctantly: his mother almost forced him into it after his father died. Little Nell Dresses, it’s now called; once it was called Tinker Bell. Lesje grew up wearing them and resenting them. For her; luxury was not the piqué and lace collars of the
Little Nell line, but the jeans and T-shirts the other girls wore” (113). Clearly, Lesje’s familial inheritance prevented her from resembling the other girls of her age. Discrepancies between
Lesje’s actual life and her family’s expectations recur throughout the novel, as they gradually destroy the character’s life. One example of this is her inability to disclose to her family her affair with William:
Lesje’s mother, in the kitchen putting hard sauce on the slabs of mince pie, sniffled
with quiet stoicism. This too happened every year. She could never ask William to
this meal or even to this house. Don’t irritate your father, her mother said. I know
young people are different now but he still thinks of you as his little girl. You think
he doesn’t know you’re living with someone? He knows. He just doesn’t want to
know. (114)
Lesje lies to her parents as much as they choose not to face the truth. The deceptive strategy used by the heroine is particularly effective: her immediate environment encourages her to act in this way. Lesje’s family becomes the accomplice of her mimicry process11 because, on the one hand, they want her to find her place within Canadian society, but on the other, they also want her to respect their own social values. As the direct product of such education, Lesje could not become anything else than a hybrid. She constantly feels torn between her actual
11 Paul Goetsch’s article “Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man as a Novel of Manners” provides us with an interesting analysis of the characters’ attempts to comply with social conventions. However, I do not agree with his interpretation of Lesje’s behaviour in the following quotation: “Usually, Lesje of course knows how to behave in harmony with the code” (140). Personally, I think Lesje does not know the code well enough to integrate it in everyday behaviour. Therefore, she constantly resorts to mimicry strategies or to escapist fantasies into the prehistorical world.
244 life and her family’s expectations, which she sums up as follows: “Her Ukranian grandmother had wanted her to be an airline stewardess. Her Jewish grandmother had wanted her to be a lawyer and also to marry, another lawyer if possible. Her father wanted her to make the most of herself. Her mother wanted her to be happy” (114). Torn between those conflicting desires,
Lesje eventually becomes an incomplete individual, a pale reflection of other people’s wishes.
Lesje’s relationships with the other characters clearly highlight her inability to integrate social demands. Elizabeth’s pedantic Wasp attitude and William’s snobbishness generate a feeling of uneasiness in her; she thinks “she’ll never be able to master nuances like these. William with his wines: full-bodied, bouquet. It all tastes like wine to her” (96-97).
Symptomatically, when William attempts to rape her, she realises her helplessness and her lack of understanding of the situation:
She’s always thought of rape as something the Russians did to the Ukrainians,
something the Germans did, more furtively to the Jews, something blacks did in
Detroit, in dark alleys. But not something William Wasp, from a good family in
London, Ontario, would ever do to her. They’re friends, they discuss extinction and
pollution, they’ve known each other for years. They live together! (186)
After that episode, William and Lesje’s relationship becomes totally different. While he acts as though nothing has happened (193), she suddenly understands their actual relationship:
William appreciates her as a form of exotic entertainment. However, he would never introduce her to his parents or consider her a proper mother for his children. At that moment,
Lesje clearly positions herself as a victim of William’s deception. As she puts it, “she trusted him like a sidewalk, she trusted him to be what he seemed to be, and she will never be able to do that with anyone again. It isn’t the violence but the betrayal of this innocent surface that is
245 so painful; though possibly there was no innocence, possibly she made it up” (196). This suffering is made worse by the impossibility for Lesje to confide in anyone. Her parents would clearly not understand her situation (192, 194). Moreover, Lesje’s relationship to them involves a form of mimicry of happiness: “Lesje’s mother wants Lesje to be happy, and if
Lesje isn’t happy she wants her to appear to be happy. Lesje’s happiness is her mother’s justification. Lesje has known this forever and is well practiced at appearing, if not happy, at least stolidly content. Busy, gainfully employed” (195). Lesje has obviously learned to display the image her parents want her to project: that of a happy, busy girl. The whole process has destroyed the child-parents relationship in such a way that Lesje is incapable of confessing her sorrow to either her mother or her father. Yet, for the first time, she thinks she might not be able to keep up appearances and “wants her mother to put her arms around her and console her” (195). Such an unexpected expression of feelings indicates that Lesje is gradually moving towards an acknowledgement of her hybridity, which implies an acceptance of her parents’ cultural inheritance. William’s attitude also causes Lesje’s distrust of other men.
When she later gets involved with Nate, she becomes less naive and suspects him of seeing
Elizabeth in secret (210). Her experience with William, though violent and traumatic, has enabled her to tackle other relationships. She is less fragile, having reached a less innocent vision of the other sex.
Lesje’s interest for the world of dinosaurs, as a child and later as an adult, is symptomatic of her deep feeling of inadequacy: unable to find her place in Canadian society, she feels more comfortable with prehistoric animals, which are, like herself, condemned to extinction. Several details point to Lesje’s over-emphasised interest for archaic creatures. She confesses her liking for a book entitled The Lost World and comments: “She still has this book. She didn’t exactly steal it, she just forgot several times to renew it and then was so
246 embarrassed by the librarian’s sarcasm that she lied. Lost, she said. The Lost World is lost”
(45). Another detail indicates Lesje’s wish to hide among the dinosaurs. Indeed, she mentions that her office has a door camouflaged to look like a rock (208-209). This detail alludes to
Lesje’s wish to remain hidden. It also implies that she feels more at ease in the museum than in the outer, everyday world. Denying her roots, she has somehow become as extinct as the animals she studies.
Lesje’s affair with Nate marks a turning point in the young woman’s development.
Indeed, in the course of their relationship, Lesje goes through a series of situations which force her to acknowledge her difference and to integrate it. She comes to realise the difference between William and Nate: while the first one kept her prisoner in a relationship of empowerment, the second treats her as an equal, not as an exotic life form. Lesje also comes to realise her mixed feelings towards her own hybridity. On the one hand, she “wants to belong, to be seen to belong; she wants to be classifiable, a member of a group” (267). On the other hand, Lesje also understands that her ethnic background makes her different from people like Elizabeth. She also learns to make concessions, which shows that she is capable of accepting her hybridity. While she remains afraid of becoming too much like Elizabeth, she also feels ready for motherhood (308), a decision which might, or not, help her escape her prehistoric refuge.
Bodily Harm is extremely interesting from the point of view of deception. It presents the reader with a heroine who simultaneously functions as a victim of deception and as someone forced to acquire techniques of deception in order to survive. Rennie repeatedly uses trivial tricks in order to deceive people surrounding her. She is described as a character who wears discreet make-up so as to become “invisible” (15). The reader also understands that her
247 relationship with her partner is strongly affected by her illness. They both behave as though they were still close to one another, which they are not (20). Indeed, Rennie absolutely wants to maintain “the illusion that nothing bad had happened to her or was going to happen” (20).
She is thus willing to deceive both herself and others in order to forget the potentially dreadful consequences of her illness. Similarly, she does not really believe she will be fine, although she says so (31). Jake, her boyfriend, frequently shows up in flashbacks, in which Rennie insists on the importance of deception and pretence within their relationship. She recalls:
“what she couldn’t bear was the effort he was making to pretend nothing was different, the effort she was making to help him pretend. She wanted to say, I’m dying, but that would be melodrama, and anyway she probably wasn’t” (200). As the end of the quote implies, Rennie mainly suffers from the uncertainties caused by her illness: she does not know whether she is dying or not, feeling therefore condemned to adopt a deceptive attitude.
Further, she is often depicted as a character who invents trivial lies: for instance, she sends a postcard to her mother, omitting to mention that her boyfriend left her (81). Through her comments, she discloses she inherited deception childhood, like many Atwoodian characters. Atwood writes: “Rennie hasn’t told her mother about the operation, either. She stopped telling her mother bad news a long time ago. As a child she learned to conceal cuts and scrapes, since her mother seemed to regard such things not as accidents but as acts Rennie committed on purpose to complicate her mother’s life. (…) The operation, too, she would see as Rennie’s fault” (82). From such a quotation, the reader understands the perverted aspect of
Rennie’s misplaced guilt: how could she possibly be held responsible for her illness? Yet, she implies that whatever she does has generated reproach, from her childhood onwards. Even though she has become an adult, Rennie still suffers from the guilt she felt as a child. She derives her willingness to deceive out of such guilt, as a way of projecting an acceptable
248 image of herself. Guilt also pervades her as a child when she discovers her father’s defection from home. Gossip and secrecy constitute the atmosphere in which she grew up (109-110), first believing that her father would take her with him, then gradually accepting people’s sideway looks and gossips.
She also lies in an attempt to seduce her doctor (237), a strategy which lamentably fails, Daniel being more interested in his family than in a relationship with one of his patients.
When meeting him for medical tests, she displays a flamboyant red blouse in order to show off her confidence. Yet, the effect proves of short duration: Rennie ends up crying in despair
(83). She ultimately decides to trust mimicry in order to lead a normal life again: “It was important to keep your balance, it was important to behave normally. If you did that enough,
Daniel said, sooner or later you would begin to feel normal” (163). Looking normal soon becomes an obsession (164): Rennie increasingly resorts to delusion and self-deception in order to provide the illusion of normality. Even her work as a journalist forms part of her attempt at preserving normality. She makes a decision: “to act like a journalist, for the benefit of anyone watching but also for her own. If she goes through the motions, takes a few pictures, a few notes, maybe she’ll convince herself” (175). However, this strategy only works up to a point: the suspicions she becomes the victim of in the Caribbeans only serve to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of her mimicry strategies.
Conscious of her power as a journalist, Rennie sometimes deceives her readers by writing about trends that do not exist (25). She is not yet aware of the subversive power of her position as a journalist. Her work necessitates such harmless lies every once in a while: for instance, when she writes a travel piece, she always suggests that she is not travelling alone,
249 because it would be interpreted negatively by her audience (42-43). She even fantasises on the possibility of making up whole articles without even visiting the places (63).
Similarly, she feels deeply convinced of the benefits of mimicry. In her provincial hometown, people get severely punished for departing from established norms.12 As Rennie puts it: “In Griswold everyone gets what they deserve. In Griswold everyone deserves the worst” (18). She therefore admires her friend Joanne, who changed her name into Jocasta (24) and always tries to be daring enough to create the latest fashion.
When visiting the Caribbeans as a journalist, Rennie discovers the hidden aspect of deception. While she often uses deception herself, she understands that she can also become the victim of deception. At first, such an expression remains vague. She feels she “has been either duped or used” (120), as she puts it. She soon realises that people think of her as a deceiver too. Most people on the island refuse to believe that she is a journalist (149). The local characters explain to her how deception works on the islands: “almost nobody here is who they say they are at first. They aren’t even who somebody else thinks they are. In this place you get at least three versions of everything, and if you’re lucky one of them is true.
That’s if you’re lucky” (150). They mention the existence of CIA agents, a couple of so-called retired bankers, who receive only the information the islanders want them to have (181). The whole system thus relies on deception as does Rennie’s own life. The islanders are deeply aware of this: they provide an accurate portrait of her, when they describe her as follows:
12 Coral Ann Howells emphasises that Rennie is a pure product of what she calls “a Griswoldian concept of femininity,” meaning that Rennie’s vision of herself is determined by “conventional discourses of beauty and romance” (Howells, Margaret Atwood, 113). Indeed, by conforming to such images Rennie becomes complicit of her own victimisation: she is willing to play the role of victim within the metaphorical clue-game.
250
“You’d rather not be, you’d rather be something else, tough or sharp or something
like that, but you’re nice, you can’t help it. Naïve. But you think you have to prove
you’re not merely nice, so you get into things you shouldn’t. You want to know
more than other people, am I right?” “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re
talking about,” says Rennie, who feels seen through. (150)
The description proves accurate: Rennie would like to display a different image of herself.
She has been trying to do so all her life and had almost succeeded when her illness shatters her efforts to nothing. Flirting with danger, Rennie accepts to fetch a mysterious box from the customs for one of the locals. When she discovers that the box contains a gun, she acts as though she had not looked inside (173, 176).
When one of the tourists hurts her foot, she is attended to by one of the local faith- healers. Once again, deception reigns over the scene and Lora, the inhabitant of the island, comments: “‘The old fake,’ says Lora. ‘Give her a tourist and she’s happy as a pig in shit.
Even if they don’t believe her they have to act like they do. There’s no doctor around here anyway, so they don’t have a whole lot of choice; if you sprain your ankle it’s her or nothing’” (193). Such quotation contributes to establish deception as one of the main strategies used by the inhabitants of the island to impress tourists. It also underlines the parallel between Rennie and the colony. Indeed, Rennie frequently resorts to the same strategy in order to give surrounding people the illusion that she lives according to their paternalistic values.
251 Later, when Rennie is confronted to a local exhibition on pornography, sex and death, she turns to deception again to put her mind at ease, thinking that “it couldn’t possibly be real, it was all done with ketchup” (210). The passage reveals how the heroine wishes to protect herself from whatever might hurt or shock her by seeking refuge in deceptive strategies.13 She concludes “that there were some things it was better not to know any more about than you had to. Surfaces, in many cases, were preferable to depths” (211). Having made that decision, she becomes even more daring in her lies to Lora (220), or to Dr. Minnow
(227, 248). She gradually realises that they are using her to serve their political purposes. She reflects: “Things are coming clear. They picked her up almost as soon as she was off the plane. First Paul in the hotel dining room; so much for eye contact. Then Lora, the next day on the reef boat. Between the two of them they’d hardly let her out of their sight” (243).
Rennie’s growing awareness of her victimhood culminates when she is captured by the local authorities and suspected of spying. For a while, she indulges in self-deception, hoping for a highly improbable rescue (280). She then reflects on the absurdity of a place where everything turns out to be deceptive. Atwood brings us back to the clue game as metaphor for Rennie’s life. She writes:
Rennie is dreaming about the man with the rope, again, again. He is the only man
who is with her now, he’s followed her, he was here all along, he was waiting for
her. Sometimes she thinks it’s Jake, climbing in the window with a stocking over his
face, for fun, as he once did; sometimes she thinks it’s Daniel, that’s why he has a
knife. But it’s not either of them, it’s not Paul, it’s not anyone she’s ever seen
13 The insertion of pornography in the novel constitutes one more allusion to the power politics involved. Rennie’s patriarchal education in Griswold has made her unable to deal with pornography. Yet, the reader also comes to understand that pornography never considers woman as a subject, and therefore serves as a powerful illustration of Rennie’s alienation. For interesting insights on pornography in Bodily Harm, the reader is invited to consult Howells’ analysis of the novel in her book entitled Margaret Atwood (119-121). Also interesting is Atwood’s own condemnation of hard-core pornography in Chatelaine, September 1983, (61, 118, 126-128) (Atwood Papers, Coll. 200, Box 90, 90:25). Rao stresses the significance of pornography in the novel as she equates it with an expression of an “obsession with the otherness of femininity” (Rao, Strategies, 143), in my view a significant theme within a postcolonial framework.
252 before. The face keeps changing, eluding her, he might as well be invisible, she
can’t see him, this is what is so terrifying, he isn’t really there, he’s only a shadow,
anonymous, familiar, with silver eyes that twin and reflect her own. (287)
While it clearly suggests the idea of empowerment, here represented by the assault of a faceless opponent, the quotation also implies that Rennie is an accomplice in that dark plot.
The faceless stranger somehow turns into a familiar figure, even into a reflection, a twin of the heroine herself. Atwood implies that Rennie has chosen to take part in the deceptive processes typical of the book, that she has become an accomplice in the paternalistic scheme.14 The political situation in the Caribbean islands echoes the heroine’s mode of functioning. Like her, the local politicians have indulged in a series of deceptive strategies which have transformed the democratic system into a farce.
Even the form she signs when leaving the prison is deceptive since it claims that she has not witnessed any form of violence (293). At the end, Rennie learns they mistook her for
“an agent. Of a foreign government. A subversive” (295). Somehow, she displays all the characteristics of such an agent through her tendency to lie and to create a false image of herself. Rennie thus comes to the following conclusion: “she could pose as a tourist but she chooses not to. Working, she says. She has no intention of telling the truth, she knows when she will not be believed. In any case she is a subversive. She was not one once but now she is.
A reporter” (300-301). The conclusion of the book implies that Rennie has understood the purpose
14 In her remarkable article “Atwood’s Postcolonial Imagination: Rereading Bodily Harm,” Diana Brydon offers us a postcolonial analysis of the book. She contends that the novel deals with the representation of otherness. It also questions the notion of “travel” as acceptance and encouragement of imperialist and capitalist domination, as illustrated by the novel’s protagonist. The novel then functions as Atwood’s indictment of that “touristic,” colonial attitude: Rennie does not take the local revolution seriously and realises that she made a mistake when she ends up in jail (Brydon, “Atwood’s Postcolonial Imagination,” 89-113). Like Brydon, I think the novel skilfully questions Rennie’s fear of the “faceless stranger” as other.
253 of deception. Perhaps she will be able, in the future, to use deceptive strategies to confront paternalistic views instead of providing an image of herself promoting the status quo.
The world of Gilead, depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale, is a place of whispers, silences and lies (279). Deception constitutes, as it were, the only way for all the characters of that dystopian society to survive. None of the social categories described enjoys an enviable fate:
Handmaids are used as objects, Marthas, dismissed as human beings, Wives suffer from jealousy, and Commanders witness the failure of their idealistic views in their practical realisations on a daily basis. Deception therefore remains ubiquitous in that dystopian world which, through its totalitarianism, fails to bring to life a new form of civilisation. A thorough analysis of the phenomenon of deception in The Handmaid’s Tale would exceed the limits of this chapter. I here choose to focus only on the forms of deception which stress the heroine’s growing awareness of her subversive power.
First of all, whispers and gossips15 prove of the utmost importance in Gilead: characters repeatedly indulge in secret exchanges of information, which give them a brief illusion of power (14, 20, 21, 139). The handmaids always go out by two, one being the other’s spy (29), a strategy which undoubtedly enforces deception. Given the situation, it becomes very difficult for Offred to know whether her partner belongs to the resistance or to the true believers. Every confession entails a risk of being denounced. Offred makes a wise decision: “I won’t give anything away” (43). Indeed, at this stage, she cannot tell whether the woman beside her is a friend or an enemy (81).
15 A very interesting article by Brian Johnson examines the importance of gossip in The Handmaid’s Tale. It identifies gossip both as a female and subversive means of self-preservation and as a means of empowerment through the appropriation of other people’s life as story (pp. 39-55).
254 Disinformation characterises Gileadean society. Yet, handmaids remain in such desperate situations that they hunger for information of any kind (92). As Offred puts it: “I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it’s false news, it must mean something” (30). In such circumstances, deception becomes easy on the part of the authorities. Nevertheless, when the Handmaid gains access to any information, she experiences it as a form of victory and as a sign of hope (31). Throughout the novel, Offred remains aware of the fact that news might be manipulated. Watching the news on television, she comments:
They show us only victories, never defeats. Who wants bad news? Possibly he’s an
actor. (…) What he’s telling us, his level smile implies, is for our own good.
Everything will be all right soon. I promise. There will be peace. You must trust.
You must go to sleep, like good children. He tells us what we long to believe. He’s
very convincing. I struggle against him. (…) If only it were true. I f only I could
believe. (93)
Indeed, one should also keep in mind that deception functions as a weapon used by the authorities. The character of Aunt Lydia is repeatedly shown uttering slogans (23, 28, 33, 34,
35, 39, 43, 56, 122-124) and quotations from the Bible16 (74, 99), sometimes slightly modified for the purpose, as Offred notices (100, 127). She seeks to lure the handmaids into believing that they were made for the purpose society assigned them to. In other words, the
Aunts proceed to an effective operation of brainwashing with slogans such as: “Yours is a position of honour” (23), “Gilead is within you” (33), “there is more than one kind of freedom” (34), “we were a society dying (…) of too much choice” (35), “modesty is invisibility” (39), “we are secret, forbidden” (39), “it will become ordinary” (43), “the future is in your hands” (56), etc. Quotations of that kind abound. Aunt Lydia further describes
16 The name “Gilead” itself comes from the Bible. Mentioned in Jeremiah 8:22, Gilead is the most fertile area of the Promised Land, about to be destroyed by God’s ire.
255 tanned bodies as sinful (65); she regards pornography as the only existing kind of sexuality in the former world (128); she castigates unemployed women as sinful (129).
In the midst of those uncertainties, Offred must try not to indulge into self-deception as an escape. Her story is so unbelievable that she might get irremediably lost, if she let her imagination wander. She says to herself: “I am trying not to tell stories” (60). Such a comment points to her distress. It also functions as an indication of her unreliability as a narrator. Indeed, the reader follows Offred in her quest for self-preservation. As such, he or she might also become the victim of her/his illusions and deceptive strategies for survival.
Aware of her limited knowledge, Offred describes herself as a child, arguing that there are some things she must not be told (63). Further, she frequently changes her story, indicating so to the reader (115, 116, 273, 275, 279). She therefore qualifies as one of Atwood’s less reliable characters. Her unreliability comes to light in the following passage as well:
This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It’s a reconstruction now, in my
head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn’t have said,
what I should or shouldn’t have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out
of here – (…)
When I get out of here (…) it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another
remove. It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say
can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many
parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or
that (…) (144)
The word “reconstruction” is often repeated by the heroine (150, 275): it concerns her past, of which some elements remain vague, her present uncertainties, and a hypothetical future escape. Moreover, the passage offers a metafictional comment on the difficulty of voicing the
256 complexity of human experience. Another kind of metafictional intervention takes place when the narrator compares the evil of the Gileadean dictators with the horrors perpetrated by the nazis during World War II. The author introduces the allusion subtly: the heroine recalls a televised interview in which the secretary of a prominent nazi denies knowing about the extermination of the Jews during the war (155). Implicitly, Offred compares her society to the totalitarian German state.17 Later, she suggests that any weak or unproductive person might be eliminated, as was the case in extermination camps. She mentions that older women are no longer seen in the street. She does not know what might become of her in case she fell ill
(162-163). As far as self-deception is concerned, the protagonist often resorts to daydreaming: she imagines herself in the past, with her mother, her boyfriend or her child (73). This attitude can be called subversive: the protagonist does not accept her fate and refuses to forget her previous freedom. Likewise, she remembers her former name as a precious gift: “I keep the knowledge of this name as something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day.
I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that’s survived from an unimaginably distant past” (94). The value attributed to that name is highly symbolical and subversive: to the character, remembering her former name means that she still clings to her identity.18
17 In the Atwood Papers preserved at the Fischer Library of Rare Books in Toronto, one can examine the newspaper articles which Atwood used as an inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale. Several articles deal with Nazi experiments to create a “super race.” They allude to the existence of so-called “lebensborn babies” or children corresponding to Hitler’s racial standards. The parallel with Gilead becomes clear when one reads that young girls were selected to fufil this scheme. The articles also explain that childless married couples were encouraged to seek other sexual partners to procreate. I think such articles clearly illustrate that Atwood took her inspiration in the Nazi regime to create the Gileadean dictatorship (Atwood Papers, Coll. 200, Box 96, File 96:3). In an interview with Cathy Davidson, Atwood states that all the practices described in the novel have already taken place or are still happening somewhere in the world. Nothing is invented. (Davidson, C., “A Feminist ‘1984’”, 24-26). In Nicholson’s book on Atwood, Mark Evans examines the similarities between behaviours in The Handmaid’s Tale and in the Puritanical New England of the seventeenth century (Evans 177- 187). 18 Several critics claim having identified the name of The Handmaid’s Tale’s anonymous narrator. From a quotation of several characters’ names, they deduce that ‘June’ is the only name which does not belong to the other female characters. It might therefore be the protagonist’s name. However, Atwood has always rejected this interpretation. Personally, I think that the absence of the name is far more powerful given the theme of the novel: this woman has been deprived of her name, as she has been of her freedom, her identity, and her voice.
257 At first sight, Offred looks like any other handmaid. Looking beyond suspicion has become a matter of survival in this totalitarian regime where the enemy could be the woman next to you. Therefore, the handmaids have to develop a mimicry process close to perfection: they all look like true believers (177). Offred describes the working of her mimicry strategies:
“I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech.
What I must present is a made thing, not something born” (76). Offred insists on the artificiality of the whole process: the result is something facturated, not something innate, which leads the reader to the conclusion that this attitude constitutes a betrayal of womanhood. The role Offred is playing in Gileadean society equates a form of acting, which she must unfortunately perform against her will in order to survive.
A first subversive outcome takes place when a doctor mentions the possibility of impregnating Offred, a proposal she politely declines, fearing the doctor’s revenge (70-71). At this stage, Offred’s freedom of choice is so annihilated that she cannot face the temptation of indulging in subversion. As she puts it: “I’ve crossed no boundaries, I’ve given no trust, taken no risk, all is safe. It’s the choice that terrifies me. A way out, a salvation” (71) However, her attitude evolves as she discovers the existence of an underground world of prostitution and resistance. She then slowly remembers how she tried to escape with her partner and her young daughter: the fake visas, the forged passports, the sleeping pills she gave to her child (94, 95).
She gradually dreams of escaping again. She thus starts examining her options. She wishes
Luke were still alive, but soon dismisses him: he cannot possibly show up and save her (114).
She feels at a loss for a solution and expresses her despair as follows: “Maybe the life I think
I’m living is a paranoid delusion” (119). The sentence sounds gloomy; yet, it also, at this stage, functions as an excuse not to act.
258 A second subversive opportunity takes place when the Commander seems to develop an interest in her, inviting her to his office at night. He offers her a taste of the forbidden: playing Scrabble, reading old magazines, going to an underground party. Offred does not really know whether he acts out of fancy or boredom. She even suspects him of being in collusion with his wife, of laughing at her expense (177).
The Handmaid gets even more involved in subversive activities when she discovers that her shopping partner, Ofglen, belongs to an underground resistance network. She identifies Ofglen’s subversive behaviour: “In the past this would have been a trivial enough remark, a kind of scholarly speculation. Right now it’s treason. (…) Subversion, sedition, blasphemy, heresy, all rolled into one” (177). Through her contact with Ofglen, Offred starts reflecting on how the new regime emerged. She alludes to the gradual loss of freedom: suspension of the Constitution, censored newspapers, identity controls, exclusions of female workers (183). The absurdity of the change comes to light, while Offred, as an unmarried woman, appears to be one of the numerous victims of the newly established system. She then decides to perform a fourth subversive act. One day, as she walks in the garden, Serena Joy offers her to become the chauffeur’s mistress, in order to get pregnant. What Offred obtains in exchange is a brief glimpse at a photograph of her young daughter (216).
The Handmaid becomes even more subversive when she accompanies her Commander to an underground club. She emphasises the need for her to enter the place in disguise (243) and describes the event as a “masquerade party” (247). This episode is of the utmost importance in the protagonist’s development because it indicates the possibility of a choice, the existence of a parallel, illegal world, to which she might belong too. Moreover, in this place, the heroine meets again her childhood friend Moira, who has deliberately chosen to
259 lead a subversive existence on the edge of society. Offred expresses her admiration for Moira throughout the novel. Moira functions as a role model who performs all the deeds the heroine herself fears to imagine. So much becomes clear from the following excerpt:
Here is what I’d like to tell. I’d like to tell a story about how Moira escaped, for
good this time. Or if I couldn’t tell that, I’d like to say she blew up Jezebel’s, with
fifty Commanders inside it. I’d like her to end with something daring and
spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that
didn’t happen. I don’t know how she ended, or even if she did, because I never saw
her again. (262)
Far from simply expressing the narrator’s admiration for her friend, the passage also conveys the narrator’s wish to invent part of the story. As such, it reminds us of the heroine’s unreliability, of her tendency to tell stories and lies to herself and others.
However, Offred’s most subversive action consists in her position itself as the narrator of this story. Indeed, she comes to the following conclusion:
But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated
story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get a
chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in Heaven or in prison or
underground, some other place. What they have in common is that they’re not here.
By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I
believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell
therefore you are. (279)
The idea of the actual story as the embodiment of the character’s hope is extremely powerful.
By inviting the reader to become the accomplice of Offred’s self-deception, Atwood
260 integrates him or her within the story, as a sign of hope for the heroine. The existence of a hypothetical reader confers authenticity to the story, despite all its deceptive elements.
The final section of the book, which consists in the introduction to a seminar devoted to Gileadean society, casts doubts on the authenticity of the handmaid’s story, as if Atwood wanted to perform a last trick on her readers, showing that she herself can be deceptive. The passage reveals that the story was found on audio tapes, camouflaged inbetween old songs
(314). It insists on the existence of forgeries of that kind (314) and points to the impossibility for historians to identify the characters with any certainty (321). Gileadean society remains deceptive for the reader to the very last page of the novel.
The three novels analysed above, though they can simply be read as factual reports, possess a symbolic dimension. If we consider the three books as a trilogy, as Atwood herself claims they are, we notice that all three contain a certain amount of subversion that spreads from a narrow target – triangular love relationships – to a very large one – a whole social order.
Indeed, in Life Before Man, the reader witnesses how the three main characters challenge the boundaries of marital and interpersonal relationships. In the course of the novel, the three protagonists move – willingly or not – from a relationship to another, thus examining what is socially acceptable. In Bodily Harm, Atwood goes a step further, confronting her provincial heroine to a world where social rituals differ from those she learned in childhood. She has to adapt to the ever changing, deceiving appearances around her. Finally, in The Handmaid’s
Tale, Atwood provides us with an apocalyptic vision of the future: in Gilead, social conventions have become laws; trespassing is punished by death. Subversion as a survival strategy then represents the heroine’s last hope.
261 4. When Reality Verges on the Unreal
At first, one would not expect a seemingly realist novel such as Life Before Man to display any trace of magic realism. Yet, the novel contains several passages in which the characters’ imagination transcends reality and introduces a more elusive form of narration. Reality seems blurred; characters become larger than life; their anguish takes the lead and summons up frightful images. Such passages are present in the novel, mostly in relation to the character of
Elizabeth. Indeed, several critics have identified Elizabeth as the central protagonist of Life
Before Man. I personally endorse this interpretation, Elizabeth being the most fully developed character from a psychological point of view. Moreover, Elizabeth’s inner conflicts – her guilt vis-a-vis her dead lover and her mixed feelings towards her husband on the leave – structure the interventions of other characters. While all three protagonists are described in equal proportions, Elizabeth soon appears as the centre of this love triangle. Quite logically then, she displays the most complex psychological depth and her sometimes lyrical reflections on her life possess a thoroughly magic realist quality.
Elizabeth’s recurrent allusions to her children’s preparation for Halloween take on a different meaning when set in the light of Chris’ suicide and Elizabeth’s feelings of guilt towards him.19 Elizabeth reflects on Halloween as follows: “All Souls. Not just friendly souls but all souls. They are souls, come back, crying at the door, hungry, mourning their lost lives.
You give them food, money, anything to substitute for your love and blood, hoping it will be enough, waiting for them to go away” (53). Through this statement, one cannot help thinking that the image of Chris’ violent suicide keeps haunting her. Later, Elizabeth deliberately
19 Hilde Staels points to the presence of the dead from the very first pages of the novel, as Atwood in the epigraph quotes Andrei Sinyavsky’s “The Icicle” (A Study of Narrative Discourse, 116). The epigraph clearly points to the growing presence of the voices of the dead in Elizabeth’s life.
262 refuses to involve Chris’ name in her divorce procedure because “to have his name uttered in that ritual way might cause him to materialize in the witness box, pale and accusing or – worse – fragmented, his head watching her with a Cheshire grin, his body still contorted in agony. She’s got him safely buried, she wants no resurrection” (261). This construction of
Elizabeth’s vision clearly qualifies as a example of magic realism, through its surreal and uncanny character. It displays a blend of two different states, i.e. life and death.
Further on, Elizabeth mentions hearing voices (60), a feeling that recurs throughout the book, and which she tries to dismiss as the vibration of water pipes (88-89). Whatever
Elizabeth’s interpretation of them may be, such passages clearly indicate that Elizabeth lives a situation of crisis which might bring her to the verge of madness. Those magic realist moments suggest that a seemingly balanced individual such as Elizabeth might conceal an inner division. Magic realism culminates as Elizabeth realises the pointlessness of her attitude or power: pondering on Nate’s decision to leave her and admiring one of her daughter’s drawings, she suddenly feels dangerously attracted to its optimistic blue sky. She describes her experience as follows:
The blue of the sky too is an illusion, the sun is blackening, its tentacles curl like
burning paper. Behind the blue sky is not white enamel but the dark of outer space,
blackness shot with fiery bubbles. Somewhere out there the collapsed body floats,
no bigger than a fist, tugging at her with immense gravity. Irresistible. She falls
towards it, space filling her ears. (205)
263 The magic realist quality of the passage is undeniable: the heroine suddenly feels overwhelmed by the blue sky of the drawing, the symbol of a cloudless marital life, which suddenly turns into a nightmare and literally swallows the protagonist.20
Magic realist moments equally crop up when Elizabeth is confronted with her awesome Auntie Muriel. Identifying her aunt as the cause of her troubles, Elizabeth cannot help reacting like a little girl everytime she faces her aunt in reality or in imagination. Aunt
Muriel becomes the living symbol of patriarchy and empowerment. As such, she turns into a kind of ominous monster. Even as an adult, Elizabeth imagines the most horrible stories about her aunt: “Elizabeth isn’t even all that sure Uncle Teddy is really dead. Auntie Muriel probably has him in a trunk somewhere in the attic, webbed in old écru lace tablecloths, paralyzed but still alive. She goes up there for a little nip now and then” (119). The grotesque quality of the comparison, which identifies the aunt with a spider, qualifies as an example of magic realism. Such is also the case when Elizabeth attributes herself the quality of materialising instantly into her aunt’s home every time she visits her (214-215). The whole passage implies that Elizabeth is incapable of running a decent house, and therefore is regarded by her aunt as a homeless woman. Utterly fascinated by her aunt’s strong personality, the adult Elizabeth still fears to conjure up her image. As she puts it:
“Superstition holds her back. If she pronounces that ultimate magic word, surely Auntie
Muriel will change into something else; will swell, blacken, bubble like burnt sugar, giving off deadly fumes” (218). Her aunt, and the fear she provokes, immediately turn into a magic realist element. Utterly grotesque also, is Elizabeth’s fantasy on what she will do with her
20 In Margaret Atwood, Coral Ann Howells describes related passages in a similar way. Emphasising the postcolonial undertones of this “multivoiced novel” (92), she writes: “Elizabeth’s state of suspension is close to that form of day-dreaming which Homi Bhabha describes not as an ‘alternative’ to the real world but as a ‘supplement’ to it, occupying a problematical space on the borders of a rational, contiguous with perceptual reality but also discontinuous with it, ‘near but different’ ” (94). Although it primarily looks like a realist novel, Life Before Man also evokes a parallel, far less realist realm of experience.
264 aunt’s ashes (279-280), which, despite its highly comical character, subtly alludes to
Elizabeth’s desire to get control over her aunt.
Finally, Lesje’s quest is punctuated with instances of magic realism, particularly at the end of the narrative, when she achieves a better knowledge of herself. She then becomes able to identify her fondness of dinosaurs as an escapist fantasy. The museum transforms into a magic realist place where illusion and reality collide. Lesje expresses her attachment to the museum as a hiding place. She confesses:
Whole chunks of time lie here, golden and frozen; she is one of the guardians, the
only guardian, without her the whole edifice would melt like a jellyfish on the
beach, there would be no past. She knows it’s really the other way around, that
without the past she would not exist. Still, she must hold on somehow to her own
importance. She’s threatened, she’s greedy. If she has to she’ll lock herself into one
of these cases, hairy masks on her face, she’ll stow away, they’ll never get her out.
(308)
Far from merely explaining the significance of the museum in Lesje’s life, the quotation also expresses the necessity for the character to acknowledge her roots. Lesje subsequently confesses her attraction, as a child, for the hidden creatures in the museum, whose alienation and eventual extinction relates them to her. She recalls: “when she was much younger she used to believe, or try hard to believe, that at night when the museum was closed the things inside it carried on a hidden life of their own; if she could only find her way inside she would be able to watch”. (310) The idea of the gigantic dinosaurs suddenly coming to life can also be regarded as a magic realist image. In a subsequent scene, Lesje imagines herself as part of this resurrected prehistoric world, providing us with an example of what Delbaere classifies as psychic realism, a variant of magic realism. The passage qualifies as an example of psychic
265 magic realism, as Lesje’s incongruous presence in the prehistoric world springs from her own psychological desire to escape from everyday life:
She’d like to. She’d like to sit here for an hour and do nothing else. She’d close her
eyes and one after another the fossils would lift their ponderous feet, moving off
along the grove of resurrected trees, flesh coalescing like ice or mist around them.
They’d dance stumpily down the stairs of the Museum and out the front door. Eight-
foot horsetails would sprout in Queen’s Park, the sun would turn orange. She’d
throw in some giant dragonflies, some white and yellow flowers, a lake. She’d move
along the foliage, at home, an expedition of one. (310)
However, despite her enthusiasm for prehistoric times, the passage closes on a vision of a single-out individual, the last of her kind, doomed to extinction. Such magic realist visions of prehistoric eras coming to life thus foreground the sterility of Lesje’s life.
In Bodily Harm, which likewise displays a highly realist plot, ephemeral moments of magic realism emerge whenever the heroine is confronted to her anxiety in the face of illness and death. In one of her dreams, for instance, she imagines herself as a child locked up in the cellar (53). She expresses her fear at being devoured by tiny animals, which can be read as a metaphor: what she actually fears most is the illness devouring her in the present. When she later mentions other dreams, the meaning of those becomes clear when interpreted in relation to her disease. She thinks: “I don’t feel human anymore (…) I feel infested. I have bad dreams, I dream I’m full of white maggots eating away at me from the inside” (83). This dream functions as a clear expression of Rennie’s anguish. She claims not to be human anymore because illness has turned her into a hybrid creature. Her difference, her “otherness,” constantly bothers her. It somehow prevents her from leading a normal life. Her insistence on her disease through the words “infested” and “eating away” explains how cancer has become
266 a catalyst for her otherness. Being ill makes her different, even more than before, when she already resented being a provincial girl in downtown Toronto.
From then on, magic realist moments focus on Rennie’s perceptions of what is taking place in her body. Whenever she finds some time to rest, her mind wanders, examining her physical changes:
She lies down on the bed again, hearing the blood running through her body, which
is still alive. She thinks of the cells, whispering, dividing in darkness, replacing each
other one at a time; and of the other cells, the evil ones which may or may not be
there, working away in her with furious energy, like yeast. They would show up hot
orange under one kind of light, hot blue under another, like the negative print of the
sun when you close your eyes. Beautiful colours (100).
The passage describes the development of malign cells as an uncanny and unrealistic war occurring within the protagonist’s body and within her mind. The uncanny quality of the description resides in an invisible battle within the heroine’s body, in the shape of a colourful, kaleidoscopic exchange. However, the beauty of those moving colours cannot conceal the fact that Rennie’s life is at stake.
Further, Rennie comes to terms with her disease by associating it to her grandmother’s increasing senility. Several passages allude to the grandmother (115, 274), as a senile old lady who cannot remember where her hands are. The lost hands symbolise Rennie’s own
267 feelings of powerlessness in the face of her illness.21 This becomes clear when Rennie herself searches for her hands in one of her dreams:
There’s something she has to find. She stands up, in her bare feet, she’s wearing a
long white cotton gown, it ties at the back, but this is not a hospital. She gets to the
other side of the room and pulls open her bureau drawers, one after another,
rummaging through her slips, scarves, sweaters with their arms tucked carefully
behind them. It’s her hands she’s looking for, she knows she left them here
somewhere, folded neatly in a drawer, like gloves. (116)
The passage draws a parallel between Rennie and her dead grandmother, thus separating her even more from living human beings. One then wonders whether Rennie’s awareness of death might function as the cause of her feelings of hybridity. In another moment of epiphany, she confesses having more and more difficulties distinguishing waking from sleeping: “There’s a line between being asleep and being awake which Rennie is finding harder and harder to cross” (172). Equally uncanny is her description of sedation, which she experiences as a separation between body and mind: “Possibly her life is being saved, but who can tell what they’re doing, she doesn’t trust them, she wants to rejoin her body but she can’t get down. She crawls through the grey folds of netting as if through a burrow, sand in her eyes, blinking in the light, disoriented” (173). This magic realist description of a highly concrete event, such as an operation, points to Rennie’s feelings of uncertainties as to her fate. Her constant fear of dying results in a series of frightening visions, which culminate in her imprisonment in the
Caribbean jail. Those passages express both her fear of death and her misunderstanding of her condition (286). As such, they epitomise Rennie’s behaviour throughout her life, even when
21 For a full analysis of the “lost hands motif” in Bodily Harm, one might read Sharon R. Wilson’s chapter on the novel in Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Wilson identifies “The Girl Without Hands” as a fairy- tale intertext in the novel (198-228).
268 facing trivial problems. At that point of the story, Atwood again resorts to the image of the powerless grandmother:
Her grandmother comes through the doorway between the diningroom and the
kitchen. She’s wearing a black dress printed with white flowers. I can’t find my
hands, she says. She holds out her arms to Rennie, helplessly, her hands hanging
loose at the ends of them. Rennie cannot bear to be touched by those groping hands,
which seem to her like the hands of a blind person, a half-wit, a leper. (297)
The grandmother’s loss of her hands is associated with various kinds of handicap: blindness, leprosy, mental deficiency. Such comparison implies that Rennie’s powerlessness – in other words her fear of death – functions as the cause of her “otherness.” Moreover, it suggests
Rennie has inherited this powerlessness from her family education, which somehow caused her hybridity.22
The Handmaid’s Tale functions as an exception within Atwood’s use of magic realism.
Indeed, in order to transform Gilead into a credible society, the author had to stick to pure realism. The novel therefore contains no noticeable example of magic realism. However, if we consider the novel as a whole, its uncanny character is undeniable: Gilead’s eerie world, in which the Handmaids’ ghostly figures wander helplessly, strikes us as a surrealist setting. The handmaid’s unnatural relationship with her Commander, the Wife’s hidden mischief, the haunting presence of the protagonist’s past all provide the novel with a magic realist background. Moreover, one passage can be read as a magic realist moment of epiphany.
Indeed, in this climactic scene, the heroine suddenly realises the lack of humanity and the
22 Howells further argues that the whole narrative oscillates between fantasy and reality, identifying it as an uncanny reconstruction from within the prison cell (Howells, Margaret Atwood, p. 124). This interpretation accounts for the novel’s incoherences, if taken from a strictly realistic point of view.
269 hopelessness of her situation. She reflects:
I stand up, in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something, inside my body.
I’ve broken, something has cracked, that must be it. Noise is coming up, coming out,
of the broken place, in my face. Without warning: I wasn’t thinking about here or
there or anything. If I let the noise get out into the air it will be laughter, too loud,
too much of it, someone is bound to hear, and then there will be hurrying footsteps
and commands and who knows? (156)
Unrealistic as it is, the crack heard by the protagonist echoes the unbearable character of her situation. The passage uncannily reveals that she has reached a point of no return, feeling ready to proceed on her quest even at the cost of endangering her life.
Atwood resorts to magic realism as a technique to intimate the presence of a climax scene with epiphanic content even in novels which, at first glance, qualify as realistic. In this case,
The Handmaid’s Tale constitutes an exception: the dystopian content of the novel generates a departure from realism. The world depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale is too frightening to be real. The realism of the situations endured by its uncanny characters frightens the reader who wonders what part of the story could actually take place. This hesitation on the part of the reader, this constant questioning of our own social values – could this happen in our world? – determines the magic realist quality of the narrative. The metafictional aspect of the novel, i.e. its constant comment on our social prejudices, provides the narrative with an undeniable uncanny atmosphere typical of Atwood’s gothic magic realism. Life Before Man and Bodily
Harm, which are both set in the present and narrate the stories of ordinary people, magic realism emerges whenever the characters are about to grasp some crucial details about their own development.
270 5. The Trickster as Embodiment of Subversion
Now I have identified subversion as a main theme providing a link between the three novels, I wish to examine which characters are most likely to embody the subversive spirit. According to the many descriptions of trickster figures I have examined in my introduction, the trickster qualifies as a truly subversive character: he lives on the edge of society, occupying an ex- centric position and constantly challenging conventions and good manners. I therefore choose to focus my analysis on the characters who defy patriarchal values in the three novels:
Elizabeth and Lesje in Life Before Man, Lora in Bodily Harm, Moira and – surprisingly – the
Commander in The Handmaid’s Tale.
In Life Before Man, I regard Elizabeth as the character who challenges conventions.
Indeed, from the first pages of the novel, she is presented as an openly adulterous woman. As the story unfolds, the reader also discovers how she had to struggle to free herself from the world of conventions imposed upon her by her Aunt Muriel. Elizabeth strikes the reader with her cruelty, her savageness. She almost reacts like an animal, instinctively protecting her territory (13). Death accompanies her along the way: at the beginning of the novel she loses her lover, who commits suicide. Later she narrates the loss of her mother, and of her surrogate, Aunt Muriel. Elizabeth repeatedly alludes to her own death as well: she enjoys the thought of it; it fascinates her, as in a passage where she recalls a children’s book offered by
Nate, which contains a riddle about a coffin. Although she disapproves of telling children stories about death, she clearly fantasises about it in the following considerations: “Sand runs through her glass body, from her head down to her feet. When it’s all gone she’ll be dead.
Why wait?” (89). This urge to be confronted with death shows up when she refers to her mother’s death (177). Elizabeth also likes rituals (151, 218) and exaggerations of all kinds.
271 She is larger than life and capable of extreme behaviour, as she confesses in the following excerpt: “Auntie Muriel terrifies her because she doesn’t know where to stop. Other people have lines they won’t step over, but for Auntie Muriel such lines do not exist. Elizabeth’s other fear is that these lines do not exist in herself, either” (180). Indeed, the reader understands why Aunt Muriel scares Elizabeth so deeply: she feels afraid of resembling her, i.e. of being an ex-centric creature like all tricksters. She only discovers her aunt’s trickster- like qualities when faced with the farcical aspect of her burial (299). She also claims to be manipulative in order to obtain what she wants (260). As a conclusion, I would say that
Elizabeth presents the reader with several characteristics endowing her with a trickster-like feature. However, one has the impression that those features are never fully developed in the course of the novel, working as mere keys for interpretation., This prompts one to consider
Elizabeth as a trickster in the making, a prototype of Atwood’s later highly efficient trickster figures, such as, for instance, Cordelia in Cat’s Eye or Xenia in The Robber Bride.
Bodily Harm contains a much clearer example of trickster in the character of Lora.
Rennie encounters this young girl during her trip to the Caribbean Islands. From the start, the reader has the impression that this meeting is not a coincidence. Indeed, one quickly guesses that Lora uses Rennie’s freedom as a tourist to import guns within the country. Lora displays a capacity to fool Rennie very easily. Moreover, she does not feel guilty about her behaviour and acts constantly as though life were a game. Numerous examples prove that Lora becomes the master of the game: she offers Rennie soft drugs (91, 97, 100), which shows that she is not afraid of doing illegal things; she then lies shamelessly when she tells Rennie that the box she must fetch at the airport contains medicine for her grandmother (96). She repeatedly points to
Rennie’s ignorance of local habits (96) and reveals secrets to her, the identity of the CIA agents, for instance (181). Throughout this process of revelation, Lora is constantly described
272 as a joking person. She also brings Rennie in contact with Elva, the local faith healer, thus showing her under a less rational lens. Deeply impressed, Rennie wishes to believe in the trickster’s magic: “She wants to know what it feels like, she wants to put herself into the care of those magic hands. She wants to be cured, miraculously, of everything, of anything at all”
(194). Rennie also notices Lora’s pleasure in shocking people. She thinks: “She’s enjoying the reaction; it’s as if she’s displaying something, an attribute somewhere a skill and a deformity, like double-jointedness; or a mark of courage, a war wound or a duelling scar. The pride of the survivor” (271). Indeed, this last sentence hints at the main theme of the novel – a particularly Atwoodian one – survival. What Rennie wants to learn from the trickster is how to go on living in the face of adversity, when one feels threatened by a severe kind of illness, or, metaphorically, when one feels trapped in a jail on foreign ground. Rennie’s trip to the
Caribbean Islands likens a journey within herself, a quest for survival. Facing dangers she had not imagined, Rennie must get rid of her role as a tourist to become “involved” in local events. Her position as a tourist echoes her attitude towards her illness, namely a kind of paralysis, a comfortable passivity. Lora, as a trickster figure, forces Rennie to become one of the characters in the clue game: through her painful sojourn in the local prison, Rennie realises that she is still alive.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Moira, the handmaid’s extravagant lesbian friend embodies the trickster spirit. Every apparition of Moira reveals her extreme behaviour. To the narrator, she symbolises irreverence and freedom. The reader first encounters her when she arrives at the Centre. Already, the narrator comments: “she’d defied fashion as usual” (80-81). She also is the only woman at the Centre who tries to escape, though unsuccessfully (101), thus showing that she dares to defy authority: she attacks one of the Aunts in the toilets, stealing her clothes to run away in disguise (138-142). Such violence and irreverence undeniably
273 befits a trickster. She turns into a heroic figure who represents hope for fellow women. Offred imagines: “At any moment there might be a shattering explosion, the glass of the windows would fall inwards, the doors would swing open... Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman” (143); “the thought of what she would do expanded till it filled the room. Moira was our fantasy (…) She was with us in secret, a giggle (…) In the light of Moira, the Aunts were less fearsome and more absurd.
Their power had a flaw to it” (143). Clearly, the trickster figure possesses power. However, it is also condemned to live at the edge of society. The narrative often refers to Moira later on: she transforms domestic objects into deadly weapons (180); she remains lucid when other girls lose their mind (228); she parodies the Aunts’ slogans (230). Not surprisingly, when
Offred meets her again, Moira has become a prostitute in the underground network. She is in disguise, in an outrageous bunny outfit, which looks totally out of place (251). She also reveals to the narrator that she has seen her mother in a film about the Colonies (263-264), bringing her, as it were, news from the dead, since people all know what the fate of women in those Colonies entails. One may conclude that Moira displays several characteristics of the trickster: irreverence, disguises, a sense of joke and parody, a preference for extremes and a definite acquaintance with death.
One may even venture to regard the Commander as a trickster-like figure. Indeed, as a character who, by definition, represents authority, a trickster-like quality remains unexpected.
However, the reader soon understands that the Commander feels bored and is desperately looking for some forbidden activities to spice up his monotonous life. The Handmaid then realises that he violates laws, providing some change in the routine (59). When the
Commander offers her to play a game of Scrabble, she ponders: “Now of course it’s something different. Now it’s forbidden, for us. Now it’s dangerous. Now it’s indecent. Now
274 it’s something he can’t do with his Wife. Now he’s compromised himself. It’s as if he’s offered me drugs” (149). The duplicity of the Commander develops further, as does the manipulative power of the handmaid; she confesses that she lets him win the game (149), thus revealing that she has taken control of the situation.
She calls the situation a “conspiracy” (149), which shows that she feels as an accomplice to it. When she later mentions their rendez-vous, she defines them as an arrangement, as though they were equals. She even contemplates the idea of murdering the
Commander (150), thus challenging the limits of her newly acquired power. He brings Offred to break a series of taboos (165). She obtains small privileges from him: reading magazines, using hand lotion… (166). She also notices that he watches her with sexual innuendo, another frequent characteristics of trickster-figures (194). The Commander ultimately reveals his power as a joker: he explains to Offred that the sentence she mistook for a secret code is merely fake Latin, which he probably taught to the former handmaid (196-197). He even goes so far as to take Offred to an underground party. She analyses his behaviour as follows:
He is showing off to me. He is demonstrating, to me, his mastery of the world. He’s
breaking the rules, under their noses, thumbing his nose at them, getting away with
it. Perhaps he’s reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the
state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything,
absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all. Twice, when he thinks no one is
looking, he winks at me. It’s a juvenile display, the whole act, and pathetic; but it’s
something I understand. (248)
The passage is highly interesting because, as suggested later, the trickster goes too far in a pathetic attempt to achieve power. However, this power can only be acquired in extreme situations or in ex-centric, underground places. The trickster’s jokes remain dubious, while his
275 power looks limited. Indeed, when the handmaid is arrested at the end of the novel, her trickster-like Commander becomes utterly powerless (306).
From the above comments, the incompleteness of the trickster figures present in the three novels becomes obvious. Less impressive than the father figure in Surfacing, less colourful than Joan Foster and her ex-centric lover in Lady Oracle, these trickster figures look like mere prototypes, focussing on a limited amount of trickster-like characteristics. Elizabeth in Life
Before Man remains too conventional to be truly effective as a trickster. Lora never moves beyond the state of a secondary figure in Bodily Harm; as do Moira and the Commander, who present the reader with quasi-caricatural portraits of the trickster. Atwood has not yet reached her full development of this figure, who becomes a main character in her next two novels.
6. Forms of Hybridity: The Ethnic, the Pathological, and the Survivor.
Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid’s Tale examine the problem of hybridisation from three different points of view. In Life Before Man, Lesje appears as the most hybrid character, though her fellow protagonists Nate and Elizabeth have mixed origins.
Lesje, with her Lithuanian background, expresses many difficulties in dealing with her otherness. She represents the ethnic aspect of hybridity. In Bodily Harm, the reader encounters another form of hybridity, which has nothing to do with the geographic origin of the heroine. Rennie becomes hybrid through the way in which she deals with her illness. In this sense, we can all become hybrid – i.e. “other” – through the circumstances of life; we can all acquire the feeling of being different, of wandering away from the norm. Illness being the cause of Rennie’s hybridisation, I have decided to refer to is as a pathological type of
276 hybridity. Offred, in The Handmaid’s Tale, represents yet another form of hybridity. In this case, becoming hybrid constitutes a matter of survival. Offred realises that her position as an unmarried woman can no longer be accepted in the light of the social rules imposed by the
Gileadean regime. Forced to enter into a sectarian role, she must act convincingly in order to stay alive. Her status as a survivor turns her into a hybrid character.
In Life Before Man, Lesje is characterised by her passion for prehistory. The motif of prehistoric life forms (dinosaurs, fossils, etc.) runs throughout the book, so that the reader soon comes to the conclusion that Lesje feels better among dinosaurs than among human beings. In her museum, she feels invisible (18), an attitude often typical of hybrid subjects.
Lesje indicates that she often does not know how to act in society; as though she lacked essential knowledge of social behaviour (22, 62-63, 195, 239, 240, 266). The best example of this takes place at a party when people play a game in which they must replace a word by
“moose” in the titles of famous Canadian novels. Lesje proves incapable of participating due to her limited knowledge of Canadian culture and her lack of assurance (152). In the next game, being on a lifeboat and pleading for people not to throw her overboard, she feels confused and unable to justify her presence among a social group (155); ill-at-ease when people fail to pronounce her name correctly (112). She remembers how children made fun of her otherness at school (211). The remarks and comments of her lover, whom she nicknames
“William Wasp” (28) emphasise this aspect of her personality. William, as the embodiment of
Canadian white bourgeoisie, often makes fun of her ethnicity. He finds her highly exotic and sexually attractive (29), yet he refrains from introducing her to his parents and refuses to marry her or have children with her (29). Nevertheless, he displays her as a proof of his own open-mindedness (30). Lesje imagines how she would have to disguise herself to meet his family’s expectations: “She’d paint her teeth gold and come in jingling a tambourine and
277 stamping her feet, her head covered with fringed shawls. Living up to their horrified expectations” (30). She projects a caricatural image of Lithuanian folklore, which somehow shows that she has not altogether accepted her Lithuanian identity. The image she wants to give to William’s parents works as an echo of her own limited knowledge of her origins.
Lesje evokes the same caricatural ethnicity when faced with Elizabeth’s judgement (211).
Even with her family members she feels awkward and reserved: her parents would not understand her relationship with William, marriage being the only acceptable kind of relationship. Thus, Lesje chooses never to mention William (192). Moreover, the distance between her and her family makes it impossible for her to trust anybody (195).
Lesje’s double hybridity renders her case more complicated: born in Lithuania, she simultaneously has Ukrainian and Jewish origins, a doubleness funnily illustrated in the endless fights between her two grandmothers. Apart from their comic aspect, these scenes highlight the distress of the child who constantly feels torn between these two elder figures.
She comments: “As for her, they’d both loved her, she supposes; and both had mourned over her as if she were in some way dead. It was her damaged gene pool. Impure, impure. Each thought she should scrap half her chromosomes, repair herself, by some miracle” (64-66). The little girl’s distress becomes clear to the reader who realises that she does not even understand the languages used by her grandmothers. She remembers receiving a decorated egg from her
Ukrainian grandmother, a gift immediately destroyed with violence by the Jewish one (66).
After such traumatic events, no wonder Lesje still feels uncomfortable about her identity as an adult. Her encounter with Nate’s children, though they remain very kind and polite to her, provides an example of her awkwardness: Lesje immediately thinks of herself as deformed: a disarticulated doll with large teeth and a flat chest (79). The doubleness of her identity troubles Lesje’s most. She calls it “her own hybrid state” (91), in opposition to her friend
278 Marian’s blatant Jewishness. Marian is straightforward about her Jewish origins, whereas
Lesje feels that she only partly belongs to the Jewish community (91). Lesje discusses the advantages and disadvantages of her multicultural origins with Marian:
“Why would you worry? Ethnic is big these days. Change your last name and you’ll
get a Multiculturalism grant.”
Lesje smiles at these jokes, but weakly. She’s multicultural all right, but not in the
way the grant-givers want. And her father’s family has already changed its name at
least once, though not to get a grant. They did it in the late thirties: who could tell,
Hitler might invade, and even if he didn’t there were enough anti-Semites in the
country already. (…) Which is how Lesje has ended up with the unlikely name of
Lesje Green, though she has to admit that Lesje Etlin wouldn’t have been anymore
probable. For two years, when she was nine and ten, she told the teachers at school
that her name was Alice. Lesje meant Alice, her mother said, and it was a perfectly
good name, the name of a famous Ukrainian poet. Whose poems Lesje would never
be able to read. (91)
Lesje clearly suffers from this multiculturalism as if it were imposed on her: she does not benefit from the fashionable aspect of ethnicity. On the contrary, she ends up with a name which sounds incongruous and a first name in a language she does not understand. Hence the total alienation caused by her ethnic background. Feeling better at ease within the world of fossils and dinosaurs, Lesje fantasises on the discovery of a lost world called “Lesjeland,” where she would finally feel at home (92), or of a new kind of dinosaur, the “Aliceosaurus”
(194). This fantasy serves to stress Lesje’s inability to find her place in society. Further, she explains that she developed her passion for prehistory as a form of language allowing her to communicate with others (94). On the contrary, she fails to understand the language of her grandmothers.
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Other details emphasise her search for roots: she tries to discover Lithuanian food specialties, attends traditional dance shows, and feels as “an outsider looking in,” “excluded as if she’d been surrounded by a crowd of her own cousins” (92-93). Indeed, all that ethnic background remains totally alien to her, since her two grandmothers did not allow her to attend summer camps or religious ceremonies (93). Many episodes humorously refer to her hybrid situation: she imagines her own conception as a copulation act between the two grandmothers (93); she recalls her grandmothers’ limited knowledge of English, their hilarious use of scatological curses (93, 292), and their funny performances of traditional dances (269). More seriously, she remembers her grandmother’s stories about the past: “I was the first one to work in Eaton’s, the rest was all English. They didn’t like it. I just didn’t say nothing when they said what kind of a name is that. I kept my mouth shut and I got along good enough that way. What we had back then, we had the flowers on our head, and the dancing. They try to do it now but it’s not the same” (268-269, italics in the text). Despite her poor knowledge of English, her grandmother seems to have achieved a balance between integration – as the first foreign worker at Eaton’s – and conservation of her ethnic background. She insists on the fact that ethnicity, as regarded in the present, is no longer genuine.
Many critics have interpreted Lesje’s pregnancy as a resolution of her identity problem. For my part, I would rather regard it as yet another attempt at finding some balance.
Far from providing a solution to Lesje’s interrogations about her roots, a child conceived in the midst of such an intricate love triangle might, on the contrary, worsen her alienation.
Lesje herself expresses her fear as follows: “Surely no child conceived in such rage could come to much good. She would have a throwback, a reptile, a mutant of some kind with
280 scales and a little horn on the snout” (293). Excessive as it may be, the quotation nevertheless emphasises the hybrid quality of that pregnancy. Indeed, the end of the book seems to indicate that Lesje chooses to remain locked up in the ivory tower of science (307), instead of making a hazardous step into the real world of human relationships.23
Rennie’s hybridity is of a totally different nature: it consists of a long suffered inferiority complex, aggravated by the heroine’s current illness. From the beginning of the book onwards, Rennie frequently insists on her provincial origins. Atwood writes: “Rennie is from Griswold, Ontario. (…) something that can’t be seen but is nevertheless there” (18).
Rennie reacts to this in different ways. In conversations, she often makes jokes about her hometown, emphasising its propensity to judge people (18). At other times, she notices that
Griswold still influences the way in which she apprehends people and events. Somehow, she is still highly prejudiced (39). For instance, while she clearly admires her friend Jocasta, she simultaneously finds her too extravagant (25). She describes her education at length, insisting on the conventions and silent agreements. She recalls: “As a child I learned three things well: how to be quiet, what not to say, and how to look at things without touching them. (…) I learned to listen for what wasn’t being said, because it was usually more important than what was” (54). Such an education undeniably determines the way in which she acts in her adult life. She also realises that she feels “off to the side” (26), “peripheral” (226), “superfluous”
(233), although other people regard her as a fashionable person (26). She finds it difficult to
23 While many critics have regarded Lesje’s decision to have a child as a positive outcome, as a way of taking control of her life (Frank Davey, Gayle Greene, Catherine McLay, Carol Beran, and Linda Hutcheon) (Bouson- Brooks, Strategies 106-107). I regard this ending as Atwood’s ironic condemnation of the traditional happy ending. Indeed, if we read Atwood’s opinion on literary pregnancies – which she calls the Baby Ex Machina – in Survival (207), one cannot believe that Atwood views this ending as an entirely idyllic one. I agree with Ildiko de Papp Carrington who writes that Life Before Man “is not about the discovery of identity as a permanently defined construct, but about the characters’ daily, existential experiencing of identity as a constantly shifting pattern of alteration, attrition, and inevitable loss” (Carrington “Demons, Doubles” 242). This comment echoes my own theory that hybridity is an ephemeral feeling, not a permanent condition obtained at the outcome of the heroine’s quest.
281 be really funny and feels highly influenced by gossip (65-66). She resents other people’s success (66). She often mentions feeling singled out, uncomfortable (36). Her illness, which, she thinks, everyone notices, worsens this impression of uneasiness (37). Moreover she constantly feels as though her life were in danger: she feels like a “moving target in someone else’s binoculars” (40). Truly, she thinks there is “someone in the bed with her”
(40). Paul says that she suffers from “alien reaction paranoia,” detecting danger everywhere
(76, 294). In the midst of such a psychological turmoil, she desperately tries to look normal
(59). Her illness gives her the feeling of being “one of those odd wanderers, the desperate ones” (59-60). This sentence indicates that her illness has caused Rennie to feel even more singled out, i.e. more hybrid.
Her exile on a Caribbean island brings her one step further on her quest for hybridity.
There she feels isolated as a tourist (78, 125, 203, 227, 231), a situation which prevents her from tackling her identity problem. Receiving an ascribed role – in this case, that of the tourist
– she no longer focuses on the discovery of her own identity and its prejudices. Only a traumatic shock such as her sudden arrest and imprisonment can lead her to introspection and self discovery. This is why Rennie’s progressive involvement in local politics can be regarded as a quest for self knowledge and a gradual discovery of her own hybridity. Throughout her stay on the island, she remembers her illness and operation, focussing on their introspective value. She realises that her passion for Daniel comes from the fact that “he knows what she’s like inside” (80-81). The metaphor of the surgeon examining the inside of her body expresses
Rennie’s deep wish for self discovery. She gradually comes to understand that, even as a tourist, she is observed and judged: people wonder why she does not stay at the right hotel
(148), why she travels on her own (148-149), the local people regard her as a foreigner (192), she feels incapable of naming things she has never seen before (194, 196). In short, she feels
282 alienated. Unsurprisingly, this feeling brings about her flashback on her life with Jake. She remembers how he jokingly reproached her not to be Jewish (199-200) and remembers the same feeling of not fitting in. She also comes to realise that, as a child, she already adopted the attitude of the distant foreigner, even in her hometown. Her situation as a tourist in the
Caribbeans symbolises of her attitude to life: one of non-involvement.24 Her alienation overwhelms her so deeply that she feels as though someone else used her voice (200, 299).
Once again, she interprets this paralysis in relation with her illness, thinking “there’s part of me missing” (203). She mentions feeling “insubstantial” (…) “exempt” (203), a position she readily accepts as a comfortable one. Indeed, she clearly prefers being an uninvolved tourist to partaking in events. Her brief love affair with Paul, a local businessman, makes her aware of her own “fragmentation, dismemberment” (258). Yet, she can only realise this through the look of the other and has not yet accepted this idea. She will remain hybrid as long as she does not accept her illness as part of herself. Her imprisonment in the Caribbean jails provides a moment of introspection during which Rennie realises that she is still alive. Yet, as always in Atwood’s work, the end of the novel does not offer a clear-cut interpretation of Rennie’s experience. One does not know which use she will make of her newly acquired self knowledge, nor whether that knowledge will prove accurate or sufficient.25
Offred, in The Handmaid’s Tale, is immediately identifiable as a hybrid character.
Indeed, she has known the freedom of women in the former regime and – as most women of
24 In her postcolonial analysis of Bodily Harm, Diana Brydon underlines the parallel between Rennie’s attitude in her youth and her way of dealing with local events in the Caribbeans (Brydon, “Caribbean Revolution and Literary Convention,” 182). In both cases, Rennie tries to create an illusion of safety, which turns out to be highly delusive. 25 Critics have extensively discussed the possibility of Rennie’s escape from her Caribbean jail. Some claim that Rennie escapes at the end of the novel; others contend that she only dreams her own escape. As to Atwood, she has mentioned that the use of the future tense at the end of the novel keeps the ending open (Castro, “An Interview,” 221). I contend that the outcome itself matters less. Far more interesting is the presence of Atwood’s open ending, which, once again, questions the usual pattern of the quest novel and disclaims the traditional happy ending of the detective novel, which Bodily Harm parodies.
283 her class – shows troubles adapting to her new condition as a biological conception unit. Aunt
Lydia, in her sermon to the handmaids, insists on their hybridity as well. She calls them a
“transitional generation” (127). Offred often mentions the fact that women have been deprived of their voice26 (56) or have forgotten their former language (164). She also insists on the normality of her former life (66-67), as opposed to her current situation. Like many people who cannot face their hybridity, she stresses her own invisibility: she feels
“transparent,” “made of smoke” (95), “a missing person” (113).
For a moment, Offred tries to obliterate her past life. She reflects: “Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it. I must forget about my secret name and all ways back. My name is Offred now, and here is where I live. (…) I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I stand five seven without shoes. I have trouble remembering what I used to look like. I have viable ovaries. I have one more chance” (153). This quotation represents a mere factual summary of Offred’s position. Offred deliberately chooses to negate the individuality of her former life, its freedom. As she becomes more consciously aware of her hybridity and tackles the problem of one’s personal understanding, she defines herself as “a mutant, a creature from outer space”
(237). One of her attempts at defining herself strikes one as particularly poignant; she addresses the reader as follows:
You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go
over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and
it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a
White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander
back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. (239)
26 Staels regards the novel as “a tale of silenced voices,” the underground being the only place where women are able to express their creativity. Indeed, the Handmaid’s discourse is doubly disavowed: first by the Gileadean regime, but also by the academics’ discourse which trivialises Offred’s testimony (Staels, “Resistance Through Narrating,” 458-459).
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She concludes: “I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people” (240). Those two quotations express the character’s hopelessness within her closed world. She moans on as she remembers her lost daughter, seeing herself as “a woman of sand” (…), “obliterated” (…),
“a shadow of a shadow” (240). All these words express Offred’s rising feeling of nothingness so characteristic of hybrid individuals.
Yet, one must keep in mind that her hybridity – her knowledge of women’s past freedom – also works as a formidable weapon. It first enables her to rediscover womanhood through her desperate love affair with Nick and eventually brings about what looks like an escape. Indeed, the outcome of Offred’s story remains unknown; the postscript’s allusion to the tapescripts implies that she might have escaped. Personally, I interpret this possibility of escape as a claim for the right to be hybrid. Still remembering and worshipping her past freedom, the handmaid gradually became unable to perform the function ascribed to her by the Gileadean regime. She consequently had to find a way to escape. Offred expresses her gradual awareness of her hybridity as follows: “Behind me I feel her presence, my ancestress, my double (…) a woman made into an angel, waiting to be found. By me this time. How could I have believed I was alone in here? There were always two of us” (305). Those are among the last words left by Offred to the readers. She symptomatically accepts her hybridity as a means of survival. Unsurprisingly, the postscript similarly acknowledges the possibility of an escape for her (322).
My conclusion points to the evolution of the concept of hybridity from the first to the last novel of the trilogy. The first novel – Life Before Man – presents us with a traditional view of the hybrid subject torn apart between its foreign origins and its mimicry of local customs.
285 Bodily Harm examines an individual struggle against illness set against the exotic decor of the
Caribbean Islands. The contrast between the highly personal trauma of the heroine and her neutrality in relation to the local events sheds light on the hardships of a self-discovery quest.
Finally, the extreme situation in which the handmaid finds herself provides a setting for the triumph of hybridity, not as a destructuring agent, but, on the contrary, as a life-creating momentum. This last book establishes hybridity as a key-concept in Atwood’s description of her heroine’s struggle for self-knowledge.
7. Atwood’s Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Quest Pattern
Atwood’s Life Before Man presents us with a deconstruction of the quest pattern. Instead of focussing on one main character who undergoes a series of ordeals – as is classical in quest novels – Atwood chooses to distribute significant moments of the quest among various characters. The first stage, estrangement from one’s usual environment, affects the three characters: Lesje, Nate, and Elizabeth are all involved in a sentimental break. Yet, the character most affected by this event is Elizabeth, because of the dramatic circumstances of her lover’s departure. Indeed, Chris chooses to commit suicide. The novel opens on that character’s recent death, thus identifying Elizabeth as the central protagonist of the novel. The rest of the novel’s first part reveals more about the three characters’ background. In the second part, Lesje takes the lead. Indeed, this section of the novel focuses on Lesje’s otherness, locating its origins in her childhood. It simultaneously identifies Nate as her guide in her quest for self-knowledge. Part Two thus constitutes the second stage of the quest pattern, that of the green-world guide, helping the protagonist to proceed on her quest. The next section switches back to Elizabeth. It deals with the third important stage of the quest pattern, i.e. the confrontation with parental figures. Through a series of short flashbacks, the
286 reader reconstructs Elizabeth’s past: her mother’s escape from responsibilities and her Aunt
Muriel’s rising power. While the novel also addresses Nate’s relationships with his mother and Lesje’s growing distance with her parents, only Elizabeth acquires a profound knowledge of how her mother’s attitude determined her future. The next stage, the encounter with the trickster, in the form of Aunt Muriel’s malevolence, forces her to struggle back and take power over her life. The last important moment, however, focuses again on the character of
Lesje. Discovering her pregnancy, Lesje is forced to face her unconscious self. She then realises the contradiction that exists between her sheltered life as a paleontologist and the risk of living fully and creating life (308). She becomes aware of the intricacy of her hybridity, which consists in the simultaneous existence in her of a desire for nothingness and of a creative impulse. Yet, the result of that discovery remains unclear: Lesje’s quest is neither complete nor satisfactory.27 In a sense, Elizabeth’s confrontation of her demons (Chris, her mother, Nate, Aunt Muriel) works far better and results in her higher understanding of her condition as a human being (316-317). As a conclusion, I would say that both female characters are involved in a journey towards self-knowledge, though in various ways and for diverse reasons. The results of this double quest differ enormously: Lesje’s turns out to be a superficial quest, while Elizabeth’s more mature reflection brings about a more pessimistic yet more accurate vision of herself.
Rennie’s quest proves of a more intimate kind. However, she proceeds through the five stages of the quest pattern in a traditional way. She first travels away from her usual background. Indeed, the first stage of the quest often involves a trip to a far-away place, in
27 In her article “The Canadian Mosaic: Functional Ethnicity in Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man,” Carol Beran draws the readers’ attention to Atwood’s deliberate choice of an “ethnic” character as Lesje. While I agree with Beran about the fact that ethnicity functions as a crucial aspect in Life Before Man, I do not, on the contrary, think that Lesje’s quest necessarily results in social integration. Her sudden and unexpected decision to become pregnant is yet another, probably failed, attempt to find a place in society. In my view, this purely selfish act of will does not guarantee the success of the heroine’s social integration.
287 this case the Caribbean Islands. Rennie gives her impressions as follows: “She discovers that she’s truly no longer at home. She is away, she is out, which is what she wanted. The difference between this and home isn’t so much that she knows nobody as that nobody knows her. In a way she’s invisible. In a way she’s safe” (39). The association of the estrangement with a feeling of invisibility reminds us of the hybrid subject’s attempt to remain invisible in a prejudiced environment. Her surgeon, Daniel, functions as a first potential green-world lover.
However, Rennie soon dismisses him as an excessively well-behaved married man. After confronting her parents in the third part of her novel – she confesses concealing aspects of her life to her mother: her illness, the end of her affair with Jake – Rennie proceeds on her quest as she meets Lora, the trickster figure. The latter forces her to become involved in local politics. She also meets her real green-lover guide, Paul. About him, she comments: “She owes him something: he was the one who gave her back her body” (248). In the course of her reflection, Rennie comes to realise that her fear of death and of aggression is an expression of her fear of men. She also understands that the education she received partly accounts for this attitude. She comes to grasp the deeper meaning of her experience in the Caribbeans. She confesses:
Once she would have thought about her illness: her scar, her disability, her nibbled
flesh, the little teethmarks on her? Now this seems of minor interest, even to her.
The main thing is that nothing has happened to her yet, nobody has done anything to
her, she is unharmed. She may be dying, true, but if so she’s doing it slowly,
relatively speaking. Other people are doing it faster: at night there are screams. (284)
The passage highlights Rennie’s main problem: focussing on her illness and on the possibility of her death, she lives in a constant state of inertia. By the end of the book, she is surrounded
288 by dying people and, trapped in her dark cell, she meditates on the sterility of her attitude, while understanding that one cannot go through life as an unaffected tourist:
She’s afraid of men and it’s simple, it’s rational, she’s afraid of men because men
are frightening. She’s seen the man with the rope, now she knows what he looks
like. She has been turned inside out, there’s no longer a here and a there. Rennie
understand for the first time that this is not necessarily a place she will get out of,
ever. She is not exempt. Nobody is exempt from anything. (290)
For the first time, the heroine is capable of distinguishing between real and imaginary danger.
By the end of the novel, Rennie becomes aware of the peculiarity of her experience in the
Caribbean Islands. She concludes: “What she sees has not altered; only the way she sees it.
It’s all exactly the same. Nothing is the same. She feels as if she’s returning after a space trip, a trip into the future; it’s her that’s been changed but it will seem as if everyone else has, there’s been a warp. They’ve been living in a different time” (300). This constitutes one of
Atwood’s most optimistic ending. However, it has been interpreted differently. Some critics claim that the whole novel takes place on an operation table, as Rennie, under sedation, imagines the whole action. Others imply that she never gets out of her Caribbean prison. My examination of the phenomenon of hybridity prompts me to opt for the second interpretation, as this novel works perfectly as a quest novel. For the inner journey to be effective, the heroine must travel to another place, go through traumatic experiences and benefit from a moment of introspection. This is clearly the case in Bodily Harm, which demonstrates that a realistic setting does not prevent the novel from conveying a highly symbolic meaning.
Whether Rennie returns to Canada or not remains unclear, although this uncertainty does not alter the symbolic significance of the novel.
289 In The Handmaid’s Tale, structure proves of the utmost importance. The distribution of chapters echoes the alternation of night and day sequences. During the day, the heroine mostly describes her routine, whereas the night sequences leave more space for flashbacks, introspection and metafictional reflections on the necessities of storytelling. The novel further presents a traditional quest pattern. The isolation characteristic of the first stage of the quest takes the form of Offred’s arrival in the new home where she serves as a handmaid (24). In the fourth section, Offred recalls a character who – through her subversive attitude – guides her in her own quest for freedom. Indeed, Moira symbolises the ex-centricity, the audacious behaviour of one who dares defy authority. The heroine wishes to resemble her. Moira’s repeated apparitions punctuate the novel and indicate that the author is about to progress towards freedom. The eighth section – significantly entitled “Birth Day” – contains the heroine’s confrontation with the mother figure. Faced with the imminent birth of a child within the Gileadean society, Offred recalls an episode of her education at the Centre. She suddenly remembers the projection of a propaganda film showing her mother in the midst of a pro-abortion demonstration (chapter 20). Such an episode, especially in the context of the
Gileadean birth scene, draws the reader’s attention to one of the novel’s main themes: female identity. In this passage, the heroine comes to understand the importance of her mother’s fight for female rights. She gains a deeper understanding of such matters, which she expresses in these words: “No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. (…) I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this” (190).
Moreover, she acquires the strength to develop subversive behaviour. Consequently, she is ready to meet the trickster, in the form of the Commander. Those encounters take place from chapters twenty-three to twenty-nine. Through her successive visits to the Commander,
290 she gradually realises that subversive behaviour is everywhere, even among those who usually embody authority. She then starts defying rules and conventions. Her affair with Nick constitutes the most evident example of her rejection of taboos. It liberates her and enables her to rediscover her womanhood. She thinks: “I’m alive in my skin, again” (273).
Significantly, this fifth stage is the only step in the quest pattern which takes place at night.
First of all, because it must take place in secret, and second, because it corresponds to the heroine’s unconscious rediscovery of her own self. On the whole, the novel presents the reader with a highly traditional quest pattern, of which the significance is heightened by the alternation between day- and night-sequences. It also strikes the reader as the most convincing of the three novels as far as hybridity is concerned. Indeed, the quest pattern here consists in a subversive act of acceptance of one’s hybridity as a means of survival.
***
Once again, the three novels examined in this section contain the elements I have identified as facets of typically postcolonial works. Of course, in this case, some characteristics – such as the use of magic realism, for instance – are more subdued due to the high degree of realism of the works concerned. Yet, one should remember that they remain present. Particularly striking is the recurrence of powerful trickster figures within the three novels. Elizabeth, in Life Before
Man, learns the trickster’s skills from her Aunt Muriel; Rennie, in Bodily Harm, becomes the victim of Lora’s trickster power; finally, Offred, in The Handmaid’s Tale confronts the reader with two powerful figures: Moira who represents the ex-centric position of the trickster and the Commander who embodies its rejection of established rules as well as its affinity for sexual innuendoes. In this trilogy, Atwood, as always, resorts to parody: she constructs Life
Before Man as a rewriting of The Wizard of Oz; she transposes Rennie’s fear within the limits
291 of a clue game; she allows Offred to become self-conscious in the act of telling a story, to explore the possibilities and limitations of her narration. Each novel also contains a character who finds it difficult to deal with a fragmented, hybrid personality: Lesje and Rennie.
Offred’s case is slightly different: she recalls her former life as a free woman. In this case, her hybridity enables her to escape from her desperate situation: hybridity becomes a concept of the utmost importance, for it allows the protagonist to survive.
Further, The Handmaid’s Tale develops a theme which will become increasingly important in Atwood’s work: that of the environment. The narrative often alludes to the circumstances which have brought about the Gileadean regime: one of those is pollution and its resulting infertility. Offred recalls a film about the reproduction instincts of animals. It claims that atomic radiations perturbed the animals so much that they became incapable of procreating (156). Further, she also identifies pollution as the cause of women’s growing infertility. She says: “The chances are one in four, we learned that at the Centre. The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation. The water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your body, camp out in your fatty cells” (122). In environmental matters, Atwood’s position is clear. I would therefore read the novel’s postscript – entitled “Historical Notes” – in the light of the author’s ecological concern. In the future described in this addendum, several details point to a change in the new society’s attitude towards the environment. The new society has undoubtedly learned its lesson and shows greater respect for nature. Along with the seminar on Gileadean society, the university organises a fishing expedition and a nature walk (311), which demonstrates that unpolluted natural land still exists. One must notice that this seminar ironically takes place in
Nunavit. One possibility is that nature has regained its rights: pollution has disappeared and man shows a renewed interest to discover natural resources. However, another possible
292 interpretation is to regard the “Historical Notes” as Atwood’s ironical comment on how those natural trips are organised, as well as her intimation that Nunavit might be the last piece of our world still unpolluted. Atwood’s tone is equally tongue-in-cheek when she mentions the native population: she chooses to give her eminent university professors First-Nation names, for instance Professor Running Dog (311). The seminar’s introductory speaker describes at length the environmental disasters which brought about the Gileadean regime: the nuclear incidents, the leakages from chemical and biological warfare weapons, the illegal dumping of toxic waste, and the uses of insecticides of all kinds (317). Reading such passages, one logically links them to the pleas for the environment uttered by Elaine’s father in Cat’s Eye, to
Charis’ respect for nature in The Robber Bride, and, naturally, to the end-of-the-world atmosphere in Oryx and Crake. Indeed, many postcolonial works express a growing concern for environmental matters. This brings me to the idea of also showing this aspect of Atwood’s work in her subsequent production. Moreover, one should notice that Atwood herself, in a conversation with Alan Twigg has insisted on Life Before Man’s intuition that human life might become extinct (Howells, Margaret Atwood, 103), a concern which will become ever more present in her subsequent novelistic production.
293 UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES FACULTE DE PHILOSOPHIE ET LETTRES SECTION : LANGUES ET LITTERATURES MODERNES
Escaping the Labyrinth of Deception: A Postcolonial Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels
Volume II
Thèse présentée en vue de l’obtention du grade de Docteur en Philosophie et Lettres par Christel Kerskens.
Promoteur : Professeur M. Maufort
ANNEE ACADEMIQUE 2006-2007
Chapter 5. Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride : Female
Tricksters at Work
“I am not normal, I am not like
other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but
she will help me. Grace and Carol will
help me too. It will take hard work
and a long time.” (125)
Tony herself, lacking strength, will
have to rely on cunning. In order to
defeat Zenia she will have to
become Zenia (191).
Both Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride narrate their heroines’ confrontation with an utterly evil form of female power. In the first novel, Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto for a retrospective exhibition of her work. While preparing for the opening, she gradually remembers her tormented childhood. A shy girl, Elaine became the victim of three classmates:
Carol, Grace, and Cordelia. The latter, a particularly cruel child, constantly mimicking adult behaviour, paralysed Elaine by making her aware of her “otherness.” Back in Toronto years later, Elaine examines the major influence Cordelia still exerts on her life. She eventually comes to terms with her feelings of inadequacy, seeking to understand how they came into being. Similarly, The Robber Bride focuses on the destructive schemes of a female character,
Zenia. Successively finding her place in the lives of the three protagonists, she uses their weaknesses to wreck their marriage or relationship. Like Elaine Risley in Cat’s Eye, the three heroines of The Robber Bride suffer from a deeply-rooted inadequacy, an “otherness,” which
294 facilitates Zenia’s incursion into their private life. Tony, a university academic specialised in historical warfare, lacks confidence in her womanhood. She therefore easily welcomes Zenia, a “femme fatale,” who becomes an example for Tony, until she runs away with her husband.
Similarly, Zenia carves her way through Charis’s life, taking advantage of the latter’s pity.
Charis, who was abused by her uncle during her childhood, has chosen to become the incarnation of goodness: she has turned into a New-Age yoga teacher, who practises aura reading and cultivates her own vegetables in a small garden on the Toronto Islands. Mistaking
Zenia’s evil nature for a form of illness, she watches helplessly as Zenia steals her boyfriend and kills her chicken. Finally, Roz, a practical business woman, who deeply loves her children, also loses her husband – and a considerable amount of money – to Zenia, who then seems to disappear forever. As the novel opens, the three female protagonists, who remember having attended Zenia’s funeral, face the astonishing and devastating news: Zenia has returned.
Both novels display a series of characteristics illustrating my theory. First of all, they both show a tendency towards parody and metafiction: in Cat’s Eye, a parodic intent can be attributed to many of Elaine Risley’s paintings. In The Robber Bride, the title itself points to the novel’s parody of Grimm’s fairy tale. Moreover, a close reading of the narratives reveals that all female protagonists make use of effective mimicry and deception strategies. Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride also qualify as Atwood’s most magic realist novels: in the first,
Elaine’s mystic visions dwell on the limit between reality and fantasy; in the second, Charis’s belief in the supernatural and the power it bestows on her provide the novel with an equally uncanny atmosphere. Both novels also possess powerful trickster figures in the characters of
Cordelia and Zenia. Yet, one should bear in mind that this representation of the trickster as a totally evil character is incomplete. Rather, the protagonists, as they gradually learn how to
295 defeat the trickster, playing by its own rules, become much more convincing as embodiments of the trickster’s spirit. Further, the heroines’ feeling of inadequacy can be interpreted as a proof of their hybrid nature. Indeed, the four heroines engage on a journey of self-discovery: they want to know why they have become insecure individuals struggling daily to conceal their “otherness.”
1. Parodic Twin Sisters and Fairy-Tale Deconstruction
While some readers might mistake Cat’s Eye for a realistic, autobiographical novel, I favour another, far more ironic and parodic reading of the novel. First of all, the character of Elaine
Risley repeatedly utters her rejection of any kind of classification: she refuses to be called a feminist, as she resents being regarded as a precursor. Her interview with a young – slightly clumsy – female journalist, who constantly alludes to the longevity of Elaine’s career, allows
Atwood to voice an ironic critique of academics’ tendency to classify artists in terms of movements and theories. When asked about her attitude towards feminism, painter Risley reacts as follows: “I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway, I’m too old to have invented it and you’re too young to understand it, so what’s the point of discussing it at all?” (94). This metafictional message warns the reader against any simplistic interpretation of a work of art.
Although critics consider Elaine a feminist painter, she rejects such a simplification of her work, as Atwood would herself. The same tongue-in-cheek comment recurs when Risley discovers her name in the papers: she takes offence when the journalist calls her an “eminent artist” (242). Moreover, the negative comment on her clothes – “a powder-blue jogging suit that’s seen better days” (242) – disappoints her. She daydreams about adopting a deliberately provocative outfit for the opening: “I could strap on some of Jon’s axmurder special effects, the burnt face with its one peeled bloodshot eye, the plastic blood-squirting arm. Or slip my
296 feet into the hollow casts of feet and lurch in like something from a mad scientist movie”
(242). Elaine confesses her attitude of mockery towards such events (242), though she remains too insecure of herself to adopt the scandalous behaviour she dreams of.
As always in Atwood’s work, the novels contain a certain amount of intertext. An obvious allusion in Cat’s Eye can be found in the name of Cordelia. By alluding to
Shakespeare’s King Lear, Atwood gives us a hint as to how to interpret this enigmatic figure.
Indeed, Elaine repeatedly mentions Cordelia’s name as an origin of her misfortune. She first points to the originality of that name: “none of the girls at school have names like that” (77).
Later, when the reader comes to know what has become of the once so self-assured girl,
Elaine reflects:
Cordelia drifts past; then melts and reassembles, changing into someone else.
Another mistaken identity. Why did they name her that? Hang that weight around
her neck. Heart of the moon, jewel of the sea, depending on which foreign language
you’re using. The third sister, the only honest one. The stubborn one, the rejected
one, the one who was not heard. If she’d been called Jane, would things have been
different? (281).
The quotation clearly interprets Cordelia differently from Elaine. Indeed, as a child, Elaine provided a portrait of her friend as the embodiment of evil. Through this passage, one slowly comes to understand that Cordelia’s behaviour was actually that of a desperate child, who sought to attract attention. Feeling rejected by her father, Cordelia turned to mimicking adult behaviour in order to fit in. Her use of Elaine as a scapegoat is only an expression of her own misery. In that sense, Cordelia represents Elaine’s twin sister, because they suffer from the same rejection. Atwood expresses this similarity by means of several allusions to the girls’
297 sisterhood. At one point, “Cordelia reads a story about two sisters, a pretty one and one who has a burn covering half her face” (225). Once home, Elaine responds to that image as follows: “I’m afraid I’ll find out that there’s someone else trapped inside my body; I’ll look into the bathroom mirror and see the face of another girl, someone who looks like me but has half of her face darkened, the skin burned away” (227). This double with a burned face – be it
Cordelia or Elaine, as one is free to interpret – represents both girls’ sense of deficiency.
Moreover, from the point of view of intertextuality, the image of the girl with the burned face evokes an Algonquian tale entitled “The Rough-Face Girl.”1 This Native American fairy-tale, located in Ontario, tells the story of a Cinderella-like heroine falling in love with an invisible spirit. In this case, the female character is rejected because of her physical appearance, while
Cinderella’s exclusion, in our Western version, is due to her ragged clothes. Both versions narrate the story of an outcast, as does the novel too.
A closer look at Risley’s paintings reveals their high degree of parody.2 Her representation of Mrs. Smeath, the embodiment of Puritanism, as a nude odalisque can be interpreted as the protagonist’s rejection of the hypocrisy of Puritan society. Elaine’s work contains several of those naked figures (90, 241-242). One is called “Rubber Plant: The
Ascencion” (90). This title points to the artificiality of Mrs. Smeath’s life. It also suggests
Mrs. Smeath’s unaltered faith: despite her lack of compassion for Elaine as a child and her hostility towards her, she remains convinced of having gained her place in heaven. Equally
1 Martin, Rafe, “The Rough-Face Girl.” 2 For a detailed analysis of the symbolical meaning of Atwood’s references to European master paintings of women, the reader is invited to consult Michelle Gadpaille’s article “Odalisques in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.” Written from a postcolonial viewpoint, the article examines how Risley’s art challenges conventions of representations based on paternalistic assumptions. For instance, Gadpaille examines how Atwood deconstructs Ingres’s paintings by substituting highly symbolical objects such as the fan and introducing other details that invert the paintings’ eroticism. Once they are decontextualised, objects lose their power and become icons of bourgeois society (Gadpaille, 221, 225, 226).
298 ironic is Elaine’s version of the biblical annunciation, pictured in the form of Mr. and Mrs.
Smeath as two gigantic insects copulating in flight (241-242). The painting is deliberately shocking and controversial: it should be read as another expression of the artist’s rejection of patriarchal authority. “Empire Bloomers,” another of Risley’s works showing Mrs. Smeath naked, functions as a further allusion to the Puritanism endured by Elaine as a child. Indeed, the title refers to an episode of her childhood, in which her teacher’s underwear, associated to that expression, was elevated to the rank of myth among the children. It contains a clear allusion to Canada’s colonial state and to the impossibility for children to discuss such matters because of their Puritanical education. The artist further deconstructs traditional iconography, representing the Virgin Mary as a lionness (365). However, Elaine warns us: this desecration entails more than mere mockery. It also expresses the artist’s awareness of her power, as well as her refusal to accept victimhood. She addresses a message to society:” I have said, look. I have said, I see” (427). Indeed, the acquisition of vision strikes us as a recurring question in
Atwood’s work.
In another series of paintings, Elaine depicts her mother, gradually dissolving and rematerialising in her kitchen of the 1940’s. Interesting is the artist’s comment on the various interpretations of this work of art. She comments:
Because of when it was done and what was going on in those years, some people
thought it was about the Earth Goddess, which I found hilarious in view of my
mother’s dislike of housework. Other people thought it was about female slavery,
others that it was a stereotyping of women in negative and trivial domestic roles. But
it was only my mother cooking (160-161).
299 Risley clearly rejects any interpretation other than her own. She manages to remain on the surface of meaning, refusing to examine the symbolic implications of her art. Yet, the title of the painting, “Pressure Cooker,” implies that her mother learned how to deal with social pressure, with patriarchal constraints, while Elaine herself still has not.
An important moment takes place when Elaine becomes of aware of the role of the mirror – a crucial motif in Atwood’s work – in her life. Once again, she relies on a painting,
Van Eyck’s world-famous “Arnolfini Marriage”3 to express her inner feelings:
I become fascinated with the effects of glass, and of other light-reflecting surfaces. I
study paintings in which there are pearls, crystals, mirrors, shiny details of brass. I
spend a long time over Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage, going over the
inadequate color print of it in my textbook with a magnifying glass; what fascinates
me is not the two delicate, pallid, shoulderless hand-holding figures, but the pier
glass on the wall behind them, which reflects in its convex surface not only their
backs but two other people who aren’t in the main picture at all. These figures
reflected in the mirror are slightly askew, as if a different law of gravity, a different
arrangement of space, exists inside, locked in, sealed up in the glass as if in a
paperweight. This round mirror is like an eye that sees more than anyone else
looking: over this mirror is written, Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. 1434. It’s
disconcertingly like a washroom scribble, something you’d write with spray paint on
a wall. (347)
I suspect that Elaine’s fascination for the artist’s discrete presence in the painting reveals her existential problem: she adopts the same position in life, that of an outsider who rather watches events rather than participating in them. This detachment accounts for her
3 See Jessie Givner’s article “Names, Faces and Signatures in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale.”
300 disinterested attitude. While the event highlights Elaine’s ageing process, it also illustrates her refusal to become the centre of attention, fearing everyone would focus on her shortcomings.
The Robber Bride offers the reader a rich fairy-tale intertext, as is often the case in Atwood’s narratives. First of all, Roz, who suffers from not fulfilling social beauty standards, often parodies the queen in Snow White, asking her mirror: who is the fairest of all? (290, 393).
Such ludicrous passages generate the following imaginary dialogues:
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most beautiful of us all? Depends, says the
mirror. Beauty is only skin deep. Right you are, says Roz, I’ll take some anyway.
Now answer my question. I think you’re a really terrific person, says the mirror.
You’re warm and generous. You should have no difficulty at all finding some other
man. I don’t want some other man, says Roz, trying not to cry. I want Mitch. Sorry,
says the mirror. Can’t be done. It always ends like that. (290)
Life is obviously no fairy-tale. But the quote also points to Roz’s other qualities beyond outer beauty: it stresses her warmth and generosity, i.e. precisely those character traits which brought about the end of Roz’s marriage. Indeed, Roz’s motherly attitude to Zenia has given the latter the possibility of seducing Mitch and of running away with him.
Another interesting parodic modification of fairy-tale stories consists in the feminisation of all tales by Roz’s twins. In their version of The Three Little Pigs, all characters are female: the three pigs and the wolf (94). The fairy-tale then becomes the echo of the novel itself, with a bad female wolf – i.e. Zenia – and three female victims. Yet, when
Roz attempts to suppress the violence inherent in the tale to offer a happy ending, her daughters feel disappointed. Contrary to Roz, who still wishes for a happy ending, her
301 children refuse this sentimentalised version of life. When Tony later tells “The Robber
Bridegroom” to the twins, they want it to become “The Robber Bride” (294). Yet, they still choose the victim to be female, reminding us again of Atwood’s plot. However, this time, Roz seems to get the point, commenting:
The Robber Bride, thinks Roz. Well, why not? Let the grooms take it in the neck for
once. The Robber Bride, lurking in her mansion in the dark forest, preying upon the
innocent, enticing youths to their doom in her evil cauldron. Like Zenia. (…) Tony
and the twins were right: no matter what you do, somebody always gets boiled.
(295)
Both novels question the nature of reality. Elaine changes the meaning of well-known brand pictures from her childhood: “a red rose, a maple leaf, a shell. They are in fact the logos from old gas pumps of the forties” (428). She integrates them in her paintings, because “by their obvious artificiality, they call into question the reality of landscape and figures alike”
(428). Tony, in The Robber Bride, likewise meditates on the value of historical reference points. She thinks: “Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. History is a construct, she tells her students. Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary” (4). Such a statement raises the question of the value of history, of reality, and of the facts as related in the novel. Tony constantly reminds us of the arbitrary character of any relation of facts. Indeed, when the reader compares the three heroines’ visions of Zenia, details do not correspond: Zenia remains an enigma until her last encounter with the three protagonists.
302 Moreover, Tony’s ability to write backwards is precisely what endows her with power.
Indeed, she claims that “All history is written backwards” (109, Italics in the text), accounting for the upside-down structure of the novel itself. Throughout the novel, Tony echoes this narrative technique, frequently resorting to her own secret inverted speech, a barbarian,
“archaic” and powerful language, which she claims she could speak “in her sleep” (19). No wonder then that Atwood, in the guise of Tony, attracts the reader’s attention to the arbitrariness of the ending as well:
Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The End. A period, a
dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye
to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as
Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or
the wind. It doesn’t come neatly cut into even-sized lengths, into decades and
centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any
history is a lie which we all agree to conspire. (465)
As a historian facing the lack of certainties in her discipline, Tony gives us an indication as to how to read The Robber Bride. Indeed, the novel is certainly no realistic narrative. Tony hints at the problematic notion of truth, thus underlining Zenia’s evasive nature: “But why bother, in this day and age – Zenia herself would say – with such a quixotic notion as the truth? Every sober-sided history is at least half sleight-of-hand (…) Tony is daunted by the impossibility of accurate reconstruction” (461). Indeed, Zenia remains a mystery to all: by the end of the novel, the three heroines – and the reader – still do not know her real name, her origins, the reason for her evil deeds, and the cause of her death.
303 2. Deception as a Means of Defence
Against the evil of a character such as Cordelia, Elaine Risley uses deception as a defence strategy. As a child, she enjoys using codes to communicate with her brother (108). This fondness for secrecy plays an insidious role in the novel: it allows her tormentors to continue to pester Elaine without any adult intervention, their evil deeds being hardly apparent. Elaine accepts such conditions of secrecy because she desperately wishes to belong to the girls’ group. She explains: “whatever is going on is going on in secret, among the four of us only.
Secrecy is important, I know that: to violate it would be the greatest, the irreparable sin. If I tell I will be cast out forever” (127). Elaine’s intense desire to fit in, as well as her inner uncertainties prevent her from obtaining any help from the adults around her. Similarly, when
Cordelia pushes her over the bridge down the ravine, Elaine tells her mother that she fell, adding to herself: “Telling the truth about Cordelia is still unthinkable for me” (205). She also adds that “a lady” helped her on her way home, knowing that her mother would not believe in any kind of divine intervention (205). Cordelia turns out to have told a story to conceal what really happened too (206).
However, deception also serves as an ally to Elaine: she gradually gains the psychological strength to perform small lies on her so-called friends in order to get rid of them for a while: she claims she has to help her mother, for instance (128). She also refrains from telling her friends that she got more Valentine cards than them, so as not to provoke their jealousy and anger (175). She laughs unnaturally, on command (198, 200).
Elaine repeatedly mentions her being in disguise: she does not feel like an adult (14); she wears a jogging suit not to be considered as an artist (19); she pretends to be “a
304 housewife, a tourist” (19-20). She longs for transformation (46), as indicated in her admiration for comics' heroes “with secret identities,” “who can stretch their faces into any shape at all” (59). As a young adult, Elaine often uses deception: for instance, to conceal her affair with Josef from her naive friend Lucy (316) or from her parents (321). She hides her liaison with Jon (336, 338, 342). Eventually, she disguises her suicide attempt as an accident
(395). She produces a portrait of herself as an utterly deceptive person. She says: “My heart is a dubious object at best, blotchy and treacherous” (401), thus admitting her unreliability.
In her adult life, Elaine resorts to self-deception because some elements from her childhood are too unbearable to her. She confesses: “I can remember my other birthdays, later and earlier ones, but not this one. (…) These things must have occurred, but the only trace they’ve left on me has been a vague horror of birthday parties, not other people’s, my own. I think of pastel icing, pink candles burning in the pale November afternoon light, and there is a sense of shame and failure” (113). The same feelings turn up when she recalls the visit of
Princess Elizabeth, whom she identified at the time with a possible saviour (214). Elaine sums up her convenient strategy in the following terms:
I’ve forgotten things, I’ve forgotten that I’ve forgotten them. (…) I know I don’t like
the thought of Mrs. Smeath, but I’ve forgotten why. I’ve forgotten about fainting
and about the stacks of plates, and about falling into the creek and also about seeing
the Virgin Mary. I’ve forgotten all of the bad things that happened. (…) Time is
missing. (215)
Indeed, Elaine’s childhood remembrances remain incomplete. They force her to engage on an inner journey of self-discovery. This journey takes the form of an unsatisfying quest for the lost Cordelia. Logically, she claims not to recall Grace Smeath, one of her tormentors (246)
305 and the holes in which the other girls buried her (271). She eventually utters her wish not to remember anything, in order to protect herself (277). This deliberate oblivion is yet another form of self-defence. When Cordelia later asks for her help to get out of the asylum, Elaine lies again and abandons her (278, 432). When she returns to Toronto as a recognised artist, who has, apparently, achieved balance, Elaine feels she has erased a good deal of her past.
She considers:
There are several diseases of the memory. Forgetfulness of nouns, for instance, or of
numbers. Or there are more complex amnesias. With one, you can lose your entire
past; you start afresh, learning how to tie your shoelaces, how to eat with a fork,
how to read and sing. You are introduced to your relatives, your oldest friends, as if
you’ve never met them before; you get a second chance with them, better than
forgiveness because you can begin innocent. With another form, you keep the
distant past but lose the present. (…) I sometimes wonder which of these will afflict
me, later; because I know one of them will. (281)
Elaine is thus unconsciously aware of having discarded the most disturbing episodes of her life. She regularly alludes to her desire for forgetfulness (322). Due to a conversation with her dying mother, who wants to apologise for not having helped her at the time, she suddenly recalls the three little girls and their evil intentions towards her: “I am growing confused myself. My memory is tremulous, like water breathed on. For an instant I see Cordelia and
Grace, and Carol, walking toward me through the astonishing whiteness of the snow, their faces in shadow” (417). Yet, she only remembers them “for an instant,” immediately rejecting this reminiscence. Pretence is still at work later on, when Elaine imagines a hypothetical meeting with the grown-up Cordelia. She thinks: “If I were to meet Cordelia again, what would I tell her about myself? The truth, or whatever would make me look good? Probably
306 the latter. I still have that need” (6). The protagonist thus admits that she still suffers from psychological wounds, making it necessary for her to confront her past once again.
Further, the reader gets hints of Cordelia’s similarly deceptive behaviour. Indeed, one gradually becomes aware of Cordelia’s feeling of inadequacy. As suggested by the choice of her name – that of King Lear’s rejected daughter,4 Cordelia suffers from a deep desire to please her father. She never succeeds in satisfying him, which eventually causes her to perform small thefts and lies in a misguided attempt to attract his attention. She is expelled from several schools (219). Her elaborate letters to Elaine become less and less convincing
(236). Her attitude with boys likewise appears artificial: she shows too much interest in them and her laughs sound too high (261, 262, 275). She feigns illness in order to skip school
(271). Eventually, Elaine concludes that Cordelia has become a wreck (275). When she later incorporates her victimiser in her artistic production, Elaine highlights Cordelia’s doubleness:
This is the only picture I ever did of Cordelia, Cordelia by herself. Half a Face, it’s
called: an odd title, because Cordelia’s entire face is visible. But behind her, hanging
on the wall, like emblems in the Renaissance, or those heads of animals, moose or
bear, you used to find in northern bars, is another face, covered with a white cloth.
The effect is of a theatrical mask. Perhaps. (243)
The comparison with the theatrical mask alludes both to Cordelia’s high school attempts at artistic creation and to her artificial behaviour, which Elaine, as an adult, immediately recognises. Cordelia’s former threats and orders sound pathetic.
4 Jessie Givner examines the implications of the choice of Cordelia’s name in an article entitled “Names, Faces and Signatures in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale.” The article further examines the motif of the “half face” in relation to Risley’s paintings and the recurring mirror images as associated to Van Eyck’s masterpiece “The Arnolfini Marriage.”
307 The reason why Cordelia loses her mind lies in her attempts to build her personality in relation to other people’s wishes. Cordelia, as a child, develops a strategy of mimicry: she tries to act and talk as an adult does, because she does not know how to please her parents, particularly her father. When she recalls her first encounter with Cordelia, Elaine stresses the artificiality of the girl’s behaviour. She remembers: “She has a smile like a grown-up’s, as if she’s learned it and is doing it out of politeness” (74). Her “voice for adults” and good manners charm Elaine’s parents (124). Growing up, Cordelia adopts the same kind of behaviour when she pretends to be an actress. All this “mise-en-scène” eventually brings her to the asylum, where Elaine witnesses what she might have become too.
Indeed, a closer look at Elaine’s behaviour as a child and as an adult reveals her frequent use of mimicry strategies. The pictures she collects in her scrapbook as a child depict traditional girl images (30). Yet, Elaine repeatedly confesses finding it difficult to adopt the conventional feminine behaviour. She concedes: “Playing with girls is different and at first I feel strange as I do it, self-conscious, as if I’m only doing an imitation of a girl” (55). Elaine only manages to mimic the behaviour of girls around her.5 Like her friends, she uses the
Eaton catalogues (56) to build up a collection of paper objects a “lady” ought to have in her house. She learns to become hypocritical and to fish for compliments (57). She asks for
Christmas presents that befit a girl, although she has no interest in them (136).
Moreover, wearing skirts feels unnatural to her (81). Similarly, she does not know how to dress to go to church and resents her parents’ inability to teach her what is appropriate
(106). Under the influence of her three tormentors, who incessantly keep an eye on her (124,
5 In her article on girls’ relationships in Cat’s Eye, Lyn Mikel Brown identifies this stage as a process of acculturation, a normal stage in the socialisation of girls, largely recognised among psychologists. (Brown, L.M., “The Dangers of Time Travel,” 39).
308 127, 128), Elaine soon becomes conscious of the shortcomings of her mimicry. As she puts it:
“I worry about what I’ve said today, the expression on my face, how I walk, what I wear, because all of these things need improvement” (125). This constant failure to please her friends eventually causes her to rebel and turn her back on them (200). Elaine finds the strength to do so when she realises that Cordelia’s attitude is a form of mimicry as well:
I can hear this for what it is. It’s an imitation, it’s acting. It’s an impersonation, of
someone much older. It’s a game. There was never anything about me that needed to
be improved. It was always a game, and I have been fooled. I have been stupid.
(207).
Having become aware of the other girls’ strategy, Elaine forgets about their tortures and moves on with her studies. She adopts the clothing expected from art students (294), then that of a respectable advertising designer (349). She has chosen to give her daughters ordinary first names in order to avoid what happened to Cordelia (15); on important occasions, she dresses the way her daughter wishes (17). All such reactions show that Elaine still resorts to mimicry to conform to social requirements, having thus accepted part of her experience in childhood.
Likewise, deception is detectable in The Robber Bride. Zenia enjoys displaying a treacherous behaviour at all times, while the other three protagonists use deception to defend themselves against Zenia’s evil. One of the motto’s of the book, Oscar Wilde’s “Illusion is the first of all pleasures,” indicates the importance of this feature.
Zenia, of course, strikes the reader as a professional deceiver. Tony remembers having been the victim of Zenia’s lies. She recalls: “She would lie earnestly, with a catch in her voice, a quaver of suppressed grief, or she would lie haltingly, as if confessing; or she would
309 lie with a cool, defiant anger, and Tony would believe her” (3), and further, “Zenia has never been almost, even at her most fraudulent. Her fakery was deeply assumed, and even her most superficial disguises were total” (36-37). Zenia might have inherited her ability to deceive from her mother, who produced several versions of Zenia’s father (166). When confronted to the implausibility of her statements, Zenia becomes highly evasive: “she laughs, and says she has a short attention span” (182). She uses false names (408) and presents each of her victims with a different version of herself (363, 406), as in the following excerpt: ““her mother was stoned to death by Roumanians, for being a gypsy,” says Charis. “What?” says Tony. “No, she wasn’t! She was a White Russian in exile! She died in Paris, of tuberculosis!” Then Tony begins to laugh. She laughs and laughs” (282); or later, when Roz confronts her: ““Tony told me you were a White Russian,” she says. “A child prostitute, in Paris. And Charis says your mother was a gypsy, and was stoned to death by Roumanian peasants.” (…) “You told her you had cancer”” (363). Zenia is all deception: even her burial proves a fake (410). Each time, she manages to know more about her victims’ private life. She then invents similarities with them so as to appeal to their compassion: to Tony, she claims having had a heartless mother; she appeals to Charis’s power to heal, hinting at severe illness; finally, she deeply moves Roz, pretending that this latter’s rogue father was a real hero who saved her life during the war
(316).6
Yet, the other female characters resort to treacherous behaviour too. Tony, in the first place, hides things from her partner, West. She does not tell him about Zenia’s funerals (13), nor does she later tell him that Zenia is still alive (39). She wants him to “think of her as kind and beneficient. And forgiving, of course” (14). She thinks that when you love someone, you
6 Leclaire underlines the deconstruction operated by Atwood on her heroines’ biographies. The multiplicity and fluidity of those biographies echo Zenia’s own function in the novel, that of a multiple, overpowerful, ghostly and almost mythical creature, who provides the reader with a potent embodiment of the woman as phantasy (Leclaire “La Déconstruction de la biographie” 148-149).
310 sometimes have to cheat a little (14). Similarly, she does not mention her appointment with
Roz and Charis to West (15). Tony is a discrete person, who likes “camouflage” (17), who enjoys hiding in her office (22), who manages, as a historian, to avoid any confrontation with the present (29). She also lies to herself, trying to believe that her marriage is solid (35). She often alludes to the possibility of disguising herself to confront Zenia (110, 122, 125). Finally, she goes as far as to forge a term paper to help Zenia, thus endangering her future academic career (172, 177). The reader also realises that Tony’s account of her mother highlights her similarities with Zenia: Tony’s mother exhibited the same propensity to lie (147, 150), the same theatricality (140).
Though she appears as the embodiment of honesty and goodness, the character of
Charis is based on deception as well. Indeed, Karen changed her name into Charis (41), in an attempt to discard the years of abuse endured at her uncle’s house. Charis claims to be pleased with her new self, but she also “wonders if that’s altogether true” (44). She is aware of the deceptiveness of language (62), of the treacherous desires of her body (69). Further, she hides an illegal worker – Billy, her boyfriend – in her house and is regularly in contact with his fellow illegal comrades (215, 216). As a child, Charis – then named Karen – concealed the bruises caused by her mother’s ill treatments from her loving grandmother (240). When she later tells her aunt that her uncle regularly abuses her, she is blamed for lying (261). Further,
Charis lies whenever she thinks it appropriate. For instance, she lies to her daughter, telling her that her father died as a hero in the Vietnam War (285). She also lies in order to obtain what she wants, though she resents doing so: she deceives Larry to find out where Zenia resides (422). Eventually, as she faces Zenia one last time, Charis has become less naive: she is ready to admit that Zenia might be lying, while she formerly took all she said for granted
311 (430). Charis has thus changed her attitude towards deception: she has learned to use it when necessary; she also manages to recognise it in others.
Roz admits to be hiding her real face (73). She is aware that she, like Zenia, might suffer from physical delusions: she does not regard those as illusions, but as transformations
(102). She also describes herself as the victim of her husband’s deceptions: he regularly proves unfaithful to her, being particularly careless about clues (299). Roz too changed her name during the war, because of its Jewish resonances (343). She presents her father as a hero, though she ignores what he actually accomplished during the war (355). However, like her friends, Roz learns to recognise deception. She hears “the voice of Tony. Zenia lies, it says” (362). She also realises that she reproduces her mother’s behaviour when she tends to forgive Mitch every time he cheats on her (383).
When Zenia eventually dies by jumping out of the window of her hotel room, the three protagonist have to resort to deception again in order to conceal Charis’s possible involvement: they tell the police they came back because Roz dropped her gloves in the fountain, not because Charis had a vision of Zenia’s death (447).
The three women also use mimicry in order to hide their social inadequacies. Tony realises the role of her clothes in her credibility as an academic: she gets dismissed because she is a woman in a men’s world (109). She refrains from mentioning her interest in warfare to other girls: those who already find her strange might consider her pathological (117). She observes other women, learning how to dismiss insulting remarks (128). She hides her left- handedness (138). Moreover, Tony gradually recognises the mimicry used by her mother: she notices the falseness in her voice when she mimics happiness in front of her father (141, 149);
312 she identifies the same awkwardness in her mother’s failed attempts to look like other mothers (144). Also, Tony mentions the impossibility for her to use her mother as a model: she is conscious that the other children at school would laugh at her (145).
Charis suffers from another problem: a deep awareness of people’s demands on her and an inability to respond to them. As a child, she undergoes her mother’s violence and soon learns to conceal her suffering behind the smile usually requested from a little girl (234).
Similarly, she feigns missing a father she has never known, because that is the expected reaction (234). When her mother hits her, Karen cries because she thinks she ought to (235).
One may conclude that Karen’s childhood displays so many mimicry strategies that she eventually decides to get rid of all of them, allowing Charis to appear. Charis no longer needs to mimic anything. She lives on the edge of society and does not care about social demands.
Yet, she does not realise that Zenia’s presence in her life appeals to concepts such as compassion and pity, which are also imposed on her by society. She then learns the danger of accepting such values at her own expense.
Roz witnesses mimicry on the part of her children, who tease her with their imitations
(76, 78). Her husband also provides her with a perfect imitation of a father, though she somehow senses his uneasiness (83). Roz constantly plays a part as well: that of the woman who ignores her husband’s unfaithfulness (84), that of the older woman who treats her young colleagues as equals (89). She has learned how to maintain her grin in public in order to preserve her dignity (373). She mimics the strong woman, who remains unaffected by her husband’s treachery and Zenia’ attacks on her son. Yet, such mimicry is a mere façade: Roz ultimately faces the truth when she questions her son and discovers his homosexuality. She
313 then, once again, adopts mimicry: in order not to disappoint Larry, she seems to accept the situation.
3. Magic Realist Dreams and Incantations
Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride provide us with the best examples of magic realism in
Atwood’s production. Both novels present the reader with a mixture of facts and imagination.
Magic realism in Cat’s Eye has already been discussed by several authors, among whom
Sharon Wilson in her analysis of the fairy-tale intertext in Atwood’s novels. Wilson states that
“the main technique of presenting the book’s intertexts is magic realism” (Wilson, Margaret
Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, 296). Wilson then provides a definition of magic realism as “portraying ‘the imaginary, the improbable, or the fantastic in a realistic or rational manner.’” She locates its presence in Elaine Risley’s paintings and in the novel’s fairy-tale intertext. However, the heroine’s dreams and visions offer a better view of the scope of magic realism in this work.
Throughout her memory quest, Elaine gradually discovers a series of elements from her past, which resurface by means of a smell, a picture, a word. The heroine realises that her past might not be as untormented as she thinks. Such epiphanic moments mostly take place in a surreal atmosphere. Such is the case, for instance, when Elaine suddenly remembers the word “nightshade,” and associates it with an indefinable feeling of uneasiness:
I close my eyes, wait for pictures. (…) At first there’s nothing; just a receding
darkness, like a tunnel. But after a while something begins to form: a thicket of
dark-green leaves with purple blossoms, dark purple, a sad rich color, and clusters of
red berries, translucent as water. The vines are intergrown, so tangled over the other
314 plants they’re like a hedge. A smell of loam and another, pungent scent rises from
among the leaves, smell of old things, dense and heavy, forgotten. There’s no wind
but the leaves are in motion, there’s a ripple, as of unseen cats, or as if the leaves are
moving by themselves. Nightshade, I think. It’s a dark word. (113)
Elaine remains unable to define the nature of this recollection: she does not understand its sadness. Yet, she calls it a “wrong memory” (114), probably because she refuses to remember the torments it evokes. She experiences the same reluctance to understand when she suddenly becomes aware of the beating of her own heart (183). This feeling is associated with the moments when Elaine managed to exit her own body in order to avoid sufferings. The protagonist’s subsequent description of this experience constitutes another example of the novel’s numerous uncanny moments. She narrates:
The sky closes to a pinpoint and a wave of dry leaves sweeps over my head. Then I
can see my own body lying on the ground, just lying there. I can see the girls
pointing and gathering, I can see Miss Lumley stalking over, bending with difficulty
to look at me. But I’m seeing all this from above, as if I’m in the air, somewhere
near the GIRLS sign over the door, looking down like a bird. (184)
Once she understands that she can escape reality by fainting, Elaine frequently resorts to this technique, which she thoroughly learns to control. She eventually enjoys spending time outside her body (185).
Her distress finds a powerful expression in wild desires for revenge, which take on a highly grotesque quality, as in the following passage:
315 I have a brief, intense image of Mrs. Smeath going through the flesh-colored
wringer of my mother’s washing machine, legs first, bones cracking and flattening,
skin and flesh squeezing up toward her head, which will pop in a minute like a huge
balloon of blood. If my eyes could shoot out fatal rays like the ones in comic books I
would incinerate her on the spot. She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive. (193)
The presence of magic realism manifests itself in the absurdity and the hyperbolic quality of the scene, associating the animate and the inanimate in one and the same image.
Simultaneously, Mrs. Smeath’s evil nature, symbolised by a dark beating heart, recurs as a motif (194). It becomes linked to a certain mysticism on Elaine’s part: indeed, the girl desperately believes that the Virgin Mary will help her out of her despair. Symptomatically,
Elaine’s avid prayers only produce one more vision of the ominous heart (197).
However, when the girls push her over the bridge, thereby endangering her life, Elaine eventually experiences a moment of epiphany. A woman dressed in a blue cloak appears and tells her: “You can go home now, she says. It will be all right. Go home” (202-203, Italics in the text). This episode constitutes a major discovery for Elaine: she turns back home with the strength to fight back. Yet, as indicated by the fact that she confesses searching for that woman in all of her subsequent journeys, the vision only provides a temporary soothing. It does not offer any explanation for Elaine’s strange feeling of inadequacy as an adult.
Therefore, Elaine’s real quest, in order to understand the reason for Cordelia’s tortures, becomes a necessity upon her return to Toronto.
Obviously, the heroine uses her art to exorcise her past failures. She recalls the state of nervousness and disgust in which she painted Mrs. Smeath’s portraits:
316 Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my
fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life. My body is a
separate thing. It ticks like a clock; time is inside it. It has betrayed me, and I am
disgusted with it. I paint Mrs. Smeath. She floats up without warning, like a dead
fish, materializing on a sofa I am drawing: first her white, sparsely haired legs
without ankles, then her thick waist and potato face, her eyes in their steel rims. (…)
She looks out at me from the flat surface of paint, three-dimensional now, smiling
her closed half-smile, smug and accusing. (…) Sometimes I turn her faces to the
wall. (358)
The ominous presence of evil Mrs. Smeath terrorises Risley. By painting the woman, she has somehow given her real life. Hence her feelings of being watched by her paintings (372). The canvasses representing Mrs. Smeath are endowed with magic realist overtones, because inanimate objects suddenly come to life. Quite logically, Elaine’s fear of them culminates on the day of the opening of the exhibition, when a woman resembling Mrs. Smeath enters the gallery. This woman, embodying Puritanism, vandalises one of the paintings. Under great pressure, Elaine fails to make the difference between the Mrs. Smeath from the forties, her school friend Grace, and a perfect stranger, symbolising the values of the Smeath family. She expresses her confusion as such:
I look away from Mrs. Smeath, and there is another Mrs. Smeath, only this one is
moving. She’s just inside the door and heading toward me. She’s the same age as
she was. It’s as if she’s stepped down off the wall, the walls: the same round raw
potato face, the hulky big-boned frame, the glittering spectacles and hairpin crown.
My gut clenches in fear; then there’s that rancid hate, flashing up in an instant. But
of course this can’t be Mrs. Smeath, who must be much older by now. And it isn’t.
The hairpin crown was an optical illusion: it’s just hair, graying and cropped short.
It’s Grace Smeath (372-373)
317
The passage displays a clear example of Delbaere’s psychic realism. Indeed, the whole scene is bathed in a fantastic atmosphere because of what takes place in Elaine’s mind.
Overwhelmed with Mrs. Smeath highly realistic presence in her paintings, Elaine suddenly associates one of the visitors with that presence. An unknown lady becomes the embodiment of the loathed Mrs. Smeath. The whole vision takes place in Elaine’s mind, while the rest of the public remains unaware of her deep trouble. Yet, Elaine soon regains consciousness and reflects: “But I look again, more closely: this woman is not Grace. She doesn’t even look like
Grace. Grace is my age, she would not be this old. There’s a generic resemblance, that’s all.
This woman is a stranger” (373-374). The whole passage derives its magic realist quality from the fact that the protagonist gets carried away by her imagination to the point of no longer separating fact from fiction. The magic realist presence of Mrs. Smeath throughout the narrative renders her sudden apparition totally plausible.
Magic realism also pervades the heroine’s numerous dreams involving the object of her present quest, i.e. Cordelia, whom she sees falling from a bridge, floating in the air (381), or beheaded (382). Such visions function as expressions of Elaine’s guilt for abandoning
Cordelia when she most needed her. They bring Elaine on the verge of madness. Worse,
Cordelia’s imaginary childish voice eventually causes her to attempt suicide (395). Elaine’s wish for self-destruction gloomily echoes Cordelia’s own downfall. The presence of
Cordelia’s voice possesses an uncanny quality: it is a mere product of Elaine’s imagination, and yet so convincing. She ponders: “I know it wasn’t really there. Also I know I heard it. It wasn’t a frightening voice, in itself. Not menacing but excited, as if proposing an escapade, a prank, a treat. Something treasured, and secret. The voice of a nine-year-old child” (396).
318 That voice works as a leitmotiv indicating that Elaine has not yet resolved her identity problem (397, 399).
In a final moment of epiphany, Elaine eventually decides to face Cordelia one last time:
I know that if I turn, right now, and look ahead of me along the path, someone will
be standing there. At first I think it will be myself, in my old jacket, my blue knitted
hat. But then I see that it’s Cordelia. She’s standing halfway up the hill, gazing back
over her shoulder. (…) I know she’s looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a
little, the face closed and defiant. (…) I am the older one now, I’m the stronger. If
she stays here any longer she will freeze to death; she will be left behind, in the
wrong time. It’s almost too late. I reach out my arms to her, bend down, hands open
to show I have no weapon. It’s all right, I say to her. You can go home now. (443)
The magic realist aspect of this imaginary encounter lies in the fact that the girls have become interchangeable. For a brief moment, Elaine gets a glimpse of Cordelia’s distress and realises that the little girl probably suffered as much as she did. This last encounter allows Elaine to cope with her feelings of guilt. She also comes to grasp that “otherness” might be present in others as well, though, like her, they seek to conceal it.
Likewise, The Robber Bride displays numerous magic realist scenes. Although Tony qualifies as a rational person, she is not totally immune to visions of that kind. For instance, Zenia’s return in the middle of the night terrifies her so much that she confuses her with her mother.
The description of the apparition strikes the reader with its uncanniness. It possesses an undeniable gothic quality, expressed through Zenia’s ghostly presence and the terror it induces. It starts as follows: “There’s a woman standing in the darkness of the room, her head
319 outlined against the yellow-grey oblong of the window. In the instant of waking Tony thinks it’s her mother” (171) Yet, Tony soon realises that this strange woman is not her mother, but
Zenia. This scene provides us with an example of gothic magic realism as I have defined it in my analysis of Surfacing,7 with its overwhelming atmosphere of terror and its fondness for the supernatural. Roz experiences similar visions of Zenia appearing magically in a corner of her bedroom, “reassembling herself from the fragments of her own body after the bomb explosion: a hand, a led, an eye” (72). Further, Tony’s dream exhibits psychic magic realistic features, betraying an undeniable epiphanic quality:
She is having a dream, a recurring one; she has the feeling that this dream has been
waiting for her a long time, waiting for her to enter it, re-enter it; or that it has been
waiting to re-enter her. This dream is underwater. (…) She comes to an edge, a
chasm. Like going down a hill she drops over it, slides diagonally through the
increasing darkness. (…) Suddenly she knows she isn’t in the sea at all but
miniaturized, inside her own brain. (…) If so, then what is that, on the dim level
white sand at the bottom? Not a ganglion. Someone walking away from her. She
swims faster, but it’s no use, she’s held in place, an aquarium goldfish bumping its
nose against glass. Reverof, she hears. The backwards dream language. She opens
her mouth to call, but there is no air to call with and water rushes in. She wakes up
gasping and choking, her throat constricted, her face streaming with tears. (188-189)
This uncanny dream clearly warns Tony: the figure walking away from her might be West, whom she might well lose to Zenia. Moreover, her realisation that the whole scene takes place within her own brain, might constitute an indication that the solution to her problem – a deep inferiority complex – can be found within herself.
7 See chapter two of the present study.
320 Roz’s account, on the other hand, constitutes a clear example of grotesque magic realism. Indeed, in one of her numerous imaginary fights with Zenia, Roz envisions the effects of the battle on Zenia’s body, undoubtedly improved by means of plastic surgery:
Still, Roz can picture the stitch marks, the needle tracks, where the Frankenstein
doctors have been at work. She knows the fault lines where Zenia might crack open.
She would like to be able to say a magic word – Sahzam! – that would cause time to
run backward, make the caps on Zenia’s teeth pop off to reveal the dead stumps
underneath, melt her ceramic glaze, whiten her hair, shrivel her amino-acid-fed
estrogen-replacement skin, pop her breasts open like grapes so that their silicone
bulges would whiz across the room and splat against the wall. (102)
The violence of the scene, combined to its gory physical details, endow it with a grotesque quality. Moreover, the vision allows Roz to express her anger at Zenia, without confronting her physically. In a second instance, Roz experiences what we might consider as an example of psychic magic realism when she realises that Charis succeeds in bringing her back to rationality, by means of her psychic power (386-387).
However, Charis’s extreme sensitivity makes her the centre of magic realist manifestations in the novel. Charis deeply believes in the supernatural: knowing secrets about the afterlife, she explains them to the other characters (49); she experiences premonitions (50-
51) – among which an accurate vision of Zenia’s death (444); objects move around in her house (51); she is aware of the presence of entities around her (203). She actually believes that Zenia has returned from the dead and wonders: “why did Zenia bother opening the door?
She could have walked right through it” (66). Charis qualifies as an altogether uncanny character who “gives Roz the creeps because she knows things she has no way of knowing”
(103). From the very beginning of the story, the vision of something falling from a tall
321 building (67) recurs as a foreboding of Zenia’s fateful future. Due to the character’s knowledge of the supernatural, Charis’s confrontation with Zenia symbolises a battle between
Good and Evil. Charis does not attend this fight; rather she lets her aura get rid of Zenia (200).
Moreover, Charis possesses an uncanny hidden side, that of Karen, the sad abused girl she was as a youth. Zenia’s aggression causes Karen to show up again. Her return into
Charis’s life takes place in yet another magic realist scene. The excerpt shows a conflation of two totally different personality: Charis as a middle-aged woman and her long-silent double, the abused Karen. Indeed, magic realism lies in the coexistence of usually incongruous elements, such as the two versions of Charis’s personality in this particular instance, which cannot possibly reside in the same body:
Someone is coming towards her across the lake, her bare feet touching the tops of
the waves, her nightgown tattered by the years of weathering, her colourless hair
floating. Charis closes her eyes, focusing on the inner picture, trying to see who it is.
Inside her head there’s a moonlight, obscurred by scudding clouds; but now the sky
lightens and she can see the face. It’s Karen, it’s banished Karen (…) demanding to
enter her, to join her, to share in her body once again. Charis is not Karen. She has
not been Karen for a long time, and she never wants to be Karen again. She pushes
away with all her strength, pushes down towards the water, but this time Karen will
not go under. She drifts closer and closer, and her mouth opens. She wants to speak.
(231-232)
The passage clearly indicates that Karen, the repressed aspect of Charis’s personality, seeks to regain her voice. She has been shut out for such a long time, that she has become overpowerful, as indicated by her ability to walk on water. From then on, Charis recalls
Karen’s ghost-like life. From a very early age, she was gifted with a deeper sensibility, which
322 distinguished her from other people. For example, when her mother gives Karen an egg, she can feel the life inside. She quickly feels overwhelmed by that presence, as she explains: “The egg is soft in her hands, like a beating heart with a rubber shell around it. It’s growing, swelling up, and as they walk back past the garden through the sun’s glare and the vibration of the bees it gets so large and hot that Karen has to drop it” (244). Likewise, she remembers feeling her mother’s illness (256). She recalls seeing her grandmother’s ghost in the garden, entering the house, then dissolving in front of her (263, 276); she also feels the evil presence of Zenia in the background (276). Karen soon becomes all powerful: Charis can no longer control her. Karen’s need to express herself has transformed her into an altogether uncanny figure:
Karen is coming back, Charis can’t keep her away any more. She’s torn away the
rotting leather, she’s come to the surface, she’s walked through the bedroom wall,
she’s standing in the room right now. But she is no longer a nine-year-old girl. She
has grown up, she has grown tall and thin and straggly, like a plant in a cellar,
starved for light. And her hair isn’t pale anymore, but dark. The sockets of her eyes
are dark too, dark bruises. She no longer looks like Karen. She looks like Zenia.
(266)
Charis confuses Karen with Zenia, which points to Charis’s identity problem. By creating the character of Charis, and simultaneously eradicating Karen, Charis has silenced one aspect of her personality. She has tried to obliterate the darker side of her self, unable to accept her hybrid state, her inner oscillation between good and evil.
The description of Charis’s ultimate confrontation with Zenia undeniably conveys magic realist overtones. Zenia is shown “shooting out blood-red sparks of energy; her black hair would be crackling like burning fat” (417), “crimson around the edges, with scintillations
323 of diamond-hard light” (420); “black lines are radiating out from her, like the filaments of a spider web. No. Black lines are converging on her, targeting her; soon she will be ensnarled”
(429-430). Charis, on the other hand, displays an obvious superiority as the embodiment of
Good, “invoking the sky” (417). Charis’s identity as a rather inoffensive middle-aged eccentric suddenly dissolves. Her transformation into a powerful entity definitely belongs to the magic realist realm, because it results from the implausible coexistence of two utterly different characters: Charis and Karen. Ultimately, a helpless Charis watches how Karen defeats Zenia:
she is over behind the flowered drapes, near the door to the balcony, outside her own
body, watching. The body stands there. Someone else is in charge of it now. It’s
Karen. Charis can see her, a dark core, a shadow, with long raggedy hair, grown big
now, grown huge. She’s been waiting all the time, all these years, for a moment like
this, a moment when she could get back into Charis’s body and use it to murder. She
moves Charis’s hands towards Zenia, her hands that flicker with a blue light; she is
irresistibly strong, she rushes at Zenia like a silent wind; she pushes her backwards,
right through the balcony door, and broken glass scatters like ice. Zenia is purple
and red and flashing like jewels but she is no match for shadowy Karen. (429)
Charis’s long frustrations eventually culminate in Karen’s murder of Zenia. The novel’s magic realist atmosphere allows the two sides of Charis’s psyche to inhabit her body, though not simultaneously. Charis insists on the fact that she leaves her own body before Karen takes control of it and lets her dark side express itself. Charis feels guilty for Zenia’s death, thinking that it is her fault “for holding Karen away, separate from herself, for trying to keep her outside, for not taking her in” (445). She experiences this awareness as a loss of innocence.
324 Finally, Atwood’s use of magic realism in chapter fifty of The Robber Bride offers a striking rendering of the protagonists’ moment of epiphany. Indeed, the chapter takes place in a dream-like atmosphere. It recounts a moment of vision for each heroine, revealing the heroine’s inner problem. Tony’s dream transports her back to her childhood where she faces the ominous presence of her heartless mother. It directly points to Tony’s inferiority complex, constantly reminding her of the fact that she is too small. Zenia is present in the dream in the form of a fire devastating the whole house. Tony finds herself unable to stop that fire: because of her deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy, she desperately attends the destruction of her universe. Likewise, Charis’s dream points to her shortcomings. When looking in the mirror,
Charis realises that she and Zenia are interchangeable: through this dream, she becomes aware of the darkness hidden within her own soul. She still must learn to acknowledge that her evil resides within her deepest soul. Roz’s dream, which takes on more grotesque overtones, is equally significant. Walking through a forest, she encounters a house which obviously belongs to her. Yet, she notices that intruders have penetrated the house. When she wants to enter it to find her husband and children, she realises that a man is blocking the entrance.
Though he does not in the least look like her, Roz feels that the man resembles a disguised
Zenia. The dream definitely identifies Zenia as a threat to Roz’s marriage, thus pointing to her weakness – her love for Mitch and for her children. Each of these dreams also contains a passive figure in the background, that of the women’s partner. (397-400).
The oddity of chapter fifty prepares the reader for the surprising ending. As they confront their stories, the three women soon realise that Zenia has come back for each of them, though in different ways (402-403). Some meet Zenia in a tidy hotel room, while the others remember her hotel room as a mess. They also understand that each of them conceived a different version of Zenia, one which would undeniably attract their sympathy. The three
325 women decide to get rid of Zenia by performing a magic ritual, which succeeds, as Zenia dies in the end. Eventually, they must admit that Zenia remains a mystery to them beyond her death, which the police fail to explain. Zenia, as a person, transgresses the boundaries between reality and imagination to become a magic realist figure.
4. Mature Tricksters
While Cordelia and Zenia appear as manifest trickster-figures in these two narratives, one should not disregard elements of the trickster spirit in the other protagonists. Elaine, for instance, displays several characteristics of the trickster. Atwood repeatedly alludes to
Elaine’s propensity to live in chaos and disorder (16), especially in relation to her first husband Jon (19, 337, 338). Her brother teaches her to see in the dark, like an animal (27).
She compares herself to a scavenger (29, 189). Elaine gains secret power through the acquisition of a marble, a cat’s eye, whose magic she describes in the following terms:
She doesn’t know what power this cat’s eye has, to protect me. Sometimes when I
have it with me I can see the way it sees. I can see people moving like bright
animated dolls, their mouths opening and closing but no real words coming out. I
can look at their shapes and sizes, their colors, without feeling anything else about
them. I am alive in my eyes only. (151)
The magic force of the cat’s eye enables Elaine to distance herself from people’s gaze.
Suddenly, her friends’ judgements become unimportant. The cat’s eye allows Elaine to contemplate the world from a distance, thus relativising her distress. It makes her stronger, insensitive. The object becomes the symbol of the heroine’s quest for inner knowledge: Elaine therefore makes frequent allusions to it (166).
326
Cordelia’s fascination with death brings Elaine to examine it closely: when she finds a dead raven in the forest, curiosity draws her nearer. The maggots and the smell of rot do not repel her. They attract her like some sort of food she has already eaten before (154). The passage clearly forebodes Elaine’s discovery of her trickster power, a long forgotten strength which helps her overpower Cordelia. Moreover, death fascinates Elaine because of its numbness, its insensitiveness. She longs to be as invulnerable as the dead raven (154). This experience restores her ability to dream: visions about the dead raven and the cat’s eye regularly haunt Elaine’s nights. They are associated with the bridge and the ravine – places of power and vision, with the helplessness of Elaine’s mother, and with poisonous substances such as the deadly nightshades (155). Elaine gradually reveals her “vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly” (164) nature. She slowly acquires vision (208); and she retreats in her brother’s room, fascinated by the power of his comic book heroes (208). Moreover, her brother, another alien trickster-like figure, introduces her to his multi-dimensional universe
(234-235). All these elements bring Elaine to the following conclusion: “Cordelia is afraid of me in this picture. I am afraid of Cordelia. I’m not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when” (243). At this point, Elaine has become the trickster, witnessing Cordelia’s desperate attempts to regain power. (247). When the two girls return to the cemetery, the novel again displays a gothic quality as Elaine playfully frightens her friend with grotesque stories of vampires and evil twins sisters. She comments: “I’m surprised at how much pleasure this gives me, to know she’s so uneasy, to know I have this much power over her” (249). At school, Elaine becomes known for her nastiness, for her “mean mouth” (251, 264, 303, 322, 341). As befits a trickster-figure, she becomes associated with darkness, with the night, claiming: “My other, my real life, takes place at night” (303). Thus, Elaine has definitely endorsed the role of the
327 trickster. She has replaced Cordelia, as appears from the novel’s final imaginary dialogue:
“You’re dead Cordelia. No I’m not. Yes you are. You’re dead. Lie down” (437). In this fake burial, Cordelia plays the role of the dead person.
However, Cordelia remains the most prominent trickster figure in Cat’s Eye, though she ultimately loses her trickster power to her victim. Elaine often describes her joking or teasing (76). While she frequently disguises herself (78, 322), Cordelia also pretends she can create poison with the deadly nightshades (79). Indeed, death figures prominently in Elaine’s conversations with Cordelia. The latter tries to frighten her gullible friend: she tells her that the stream which flows along the cemetery contains dissolved dead people (79). Young
Elaine, deeply impressed, strongly believes in this fiction. She feels attracted to death because of its peacefulness (201). For a young girl, Cordelia strikes us as being strangely interested in sexual matters. She somehow initiates Elaine into sexuality, explaining to her how babies are made (98) and how boys kiss girls (99). Breasts fascinate her, as does menstrual blood (96,
97). Cordelia clearly enjoys possessing such knowledge, which gives her power over her naïve friend. Slowly, Cordelia becomes attracted to the forbidden: she steals (224) and invents elaborate swearwords (233, 244). From then on, a slow decline awaits Cordelia, which will eventually bring her to the asylum. However, when Elaine comes to visit her, she notices that some weak traces of Cordelia’s tricksterism still remain: “‘I can fool them any day,’ Cordelia says, with a flicker of her old cunning. Of course, I think, she’s an actress. She can counterfeit anything” (380). Yet, Elaine’s last meeting with Cordelia in the flesh offers us a picture of the latter’s downfall.
One of the mottoes of The Robber Bride – “A rattlesnake that doesn’t bite teaches you nothing” – draws the reader’s attention to the necessity of suffering in order to progress. Such
328 is precisely the function of the trickster figure. By teasing the other characters, the trickster makes them aware of their shortcomings. Similarly, by stealing each heroine’s male partner,
Zenia forces the three protagonists to face their weaknesses in order to start anew. Zenia displays the characteristics of the trickster8: She enjoys chaos, disorder, turbulences, exaggerations (3, 133), as, for example, when she takes revenge on her landlord by practically destroying her flat (127). Other women regard her as a puzzle (3). From the beginning,
Atwood connects Zenia with the underworld, writing: “Zenia returns from the dead” (4). She often wears disguises (411); she becomes the embodiment of “malign vitality” (10). She seems capable of appearing and disappearing at will, as when she suddenly returns to the
Toxique (32). Tony, Charis, and Roz experience this event as a resurrection (37, 101). The other characters consider her other than human (13) or regard her as a banshee (193), as a predator (279, 286, 282), who likes hunting (37) – especially when it comes to other women’s husbands. Tony considers Zenia as a vampire, since she mentions that Zenia cannot enter her home unless invited (116); Charis treats her as a ghost, for the same reason (50). She enjoys frightening people as well (189). At university, Zenia effortlessly obtains high grades. She is
“brilliant, and also fearsome. Wolfish, feral, beyond the pale” (132-133). A master of illusions, Zenia succeeds in making men blind to her flaws (183, 380). She convinces Roz’s husband to become her accomplice in stealing money from the firm (376). She also tricks
Charis, making her think she is dying of cancer, while she has simply cut out vitamins to suffer from scurvy (426). Finally, she proves a marginal character, who lives “on the edges”
(182) and possessing numerous secrets (161-162). She calls herself a fox (368): she is proud
8 Hilde Staels already pointed out Zenia’s trickster qualities in her 1998 article “Metaphor and the Unconscious in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride” (8-9). So did Ann Heilmann in her article “The Devil Herself? Fantasy, Female Identity and the Villainess Fatale in The Robber Bride.” (181). See also Hilde Staels’s book on Atwood: Margaret Atwood’s Novels. A Study of Narrative Discourse. (200-201). However, none of those studies provide a full analysis of Atwood’s trickster figures, as I intend to produce in the present study.
329 of her slyness, thus acknowledging her trickster-nature. Logically, she uses various identities
(455), as Roz’s detective soon discovers (372-373).
Through their contacts with Zenia, the three other female characters discover part of their own trickster qualities. For instance, Tony’s ability to write backwards singles her out
(116). It bestows a certain power on her: “Which was the magic word, raw or war? Probably it was the two of them together; the doubleness. That would have had high appeal, for Zenia”
(130). The passage clearly emphasises the similarities between Tony and Zenia. Indeed, Tony too acts like a predator: as a historian, she knows the techniques of warfare and mentally enjoys replaying battles (117). Tony loves her subject matter, because it involves “sheer mischief,” “perverse joy,” “outrageousness” (170). This otherwise reserved academic displays a cruel, animal-like quality. Whereas Tony Fremont behaves as an example of morality, her inverted double, Tnomerf Ynot, enjoys swearwords: “They make her feel powerful, in charge of something” (138-139). Similarly, like a real trickster, Tony favours darkness, imagining she can “see things other people can’t see, witness nocturnal events, gain rare insights” (192).
She thus possesses some vision, which, combined with her friends’ trickster talent might enable her to fight Zenia.
Likewise, Charis can be regarded as a trickster. Her intuitive knowledge enables her to communicate with the afterworld (53, 263) and with the cycles of nature (201). She also knows how to perform magical rituals (70, 263, 285, 286) and how to foresee the future (258,
272). For instance, she predicts her grandmother’s death (263); whose ghost she repeatedly sees. Likewise, she prophesises Zenia’s death: she depicts Zenia as Jezebel falling from the tower (286). Relying on her grandmother’s Bible as a guide. Haphazardly, Charis chooses a
330 sentence, whose recurrence clearly alludes to a woman falling from a tall building – thus foreboding Zenia’s fate.
One should keep in mind that Charis has inherited her power from her grandmother, the only benevolent female character in her childhood. Charis’s grandmother embodies the positive power of the trickster. As from the beginning of the novel, the reader understands the strength of the bond between that woman and her granddaughter. Charis does not need words to enlist her grandmother’s help (249), as this relative possesses the power to heal people from a distance (249). Charis realises that this gift scares most people. She has inherited this knowledge, though she temporarily dismisses it by getting rid of her alter-ego, Karen. Her grandmother also teaches Charis not to fear death. Like Zenia, she is a hunter. However, she kills chicken to eat them, not out of pure cruelty (251-252). Further, the grandmother also knows how to predict the future with her Bible, a talent she teaches Charis as well (253). All these details indicate that Charis has been partly educated by a trickster. Some elements of this apprenticeship resurge in her, however hard she tries to repress them.
Even Roz, the most down-to-earth of the three women, behaves like a trickster. She strikes the reader with her potential for violence and rage (73). Yet, Roz also puts on several disguises. She intimates that her ever smiling face merely constitutes a mask (318). Knowing that she lacks beauty, Roz decides to be smarter and funnier than the other girls. She becomes a joker, who resorts to rudeness in order to attract attention (345-346, 394).
Like Charis, Roz has inherited tricksterism from her father, a mysterious figure, always on the edge of legality; a shadow (320), a man with nine lives (318), “doing important secret things” (320). His companions describe him as such:
331
“The best horse thieves,” says Uncle Joe. “No. Your father, he was the best. He
could steal a horse…” “He could steal a horse from right between your legs, you
wouldn’t notice,” says Uncle George. “He could lie…” “He could lie like God
himself.” (…) “He could walk through a border like it wasn’t there,” says Uncle Joe.
(…) He shows Roz his passport, with his picture in it. Then he shows her another,
with the same picture but a different name. He has three of them (…) Uncle George
has four. (…) “Your father, he has more passports than anyone.” (331)
Roz’s father, a thief, a liar, a man with several identities, entertains numerous mistresses
(339), a feature illustrating the trickster’s avid sexual appetite. Among other achievements, he teaches Roz to play poker (342). Like the trickster, who is both an unethical and a likeable character, Roz’s father at once appears as a crook and a hero (348, 354). Despite his dishonesty, Roz obviously loves her father: “She remembers her father, the old rascal; she’s glad to know that his dubious talents were of service, because he’s still her favourite parent and she welcomes the chance to think well of him” (362). However, when one examines
Roz’s character, she seems to have inherited the trickster’s positive traits rather than the negative ones. This makes her unable to fight Zenia on her own: she lacks the cruelty and voracity of a real predator.
At the end of The Robber Bride, Atwood alludes to the fascination induced by Zenia.
She identifies her as a “male fantasy.” Moreover, she intimates that Zenia has been transformed through society’s expectations:
The Zenias of this world have studied this situation and turned it to their own
advantage; they haven’t let themselves be moulded into male fantasies, they’ve done
it themselves. They’ve slipped sideways into dreams; the dreams of women too,
332 because women are fantasies for other women, just as they are for men. But
fantasies of a different kind. (392)
In this passage, Atwood clearly expresses the function of tricksters – and more precisely of female tricksters – in a male-dominated world. In her view, becoming a trickster constitutes yet another way of reacting against patriarchy. The woman turns into a “femme fatale,” not to satisfy male desires, but to overpower them. Moreover, women themselves are conniving in these sexual power politics.
As to the character of Zenia, it provides us with Atwood’s definition of the trickster.
She identifies Zenia as an “insubstantial” character, a “rumour” (461). Zenia, the magician, performs tricks with mirrors – like Atwood herself – to make people see what they want to see. Thanks to Tony’s search for an etymological explanation of Zenia, one learns that she is at once a god’s daughter, a martyr, a shadow, a warrior, a queen, a stranger, a heretic, a harem. However, Atwood’s last words remind us of the elusiveness of the trickster figure. She concludes: “As for the truth about her, it lies out of reach, because – according to the records, at any rate – she was never even born” (461). Through this analysis of the origins of Zenia’s name, Atwood conveys the elusiveness of the trickster’s nature. The trickster constantly wavers on the border between reality and imagination. It can exist only in that in-between state, where human beings suspend their disbelief so much that they accept the possibility of crossing the border between life and death. Therefore, the ancestral trickster figure embodies the multiplicity and the hybridity of our postcolonial present.
333 5. Hybridity of the Trickster Figure
All the protagonists of Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride exhibit a powerful feeling of inadequacy. All of them, to different degrees, meet social demands, while remaining unsatisfied on a personal level. In this sense, Elaine and Cordelia, on the one hand, Tony,
Charis, Roz, and Zenia, on the other, can be regarded as twin sisters. However, some of them have decided to become marginal, ex-centric characters, while others rather disguise their
“otherness” by resorting to deception and mimicry strategies.
At a very early age, Elaine realises that she radically differs from other little girls.
Watching old photographs, she compares herself with an immigrant (28), thereby emphasising her “otherness.” She equally describes her brother as an alien individual (22-23, 308, 351).
For a while, Elaine shares his mysterious world, grasping its cryptic language (49). She further intimates that the life of scientific research imposed on her by her father prevents her from meeting other girls and thus from learning their pattern of behaviour. She recalls: “I’ve never had any girl friends because I’ve never been in one place long enough” (29); and further: “We’ve never gone to school for more than three or four months at a time anyway. I was in school the last time eight months ago and have only dim and temporary ideas of what it was like” (30). Elaine therefore experiences her family’s settlement in Toronto as a claustrophobic shock which makes her feel “trapped” (33). Among her new school friends,
Elaine feels terrified to adopt the wrong kind of behaviour. She explains: “I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder” (50, 254). Later, Elaine experiences the same discomfort when becoming member of a feminist group (365, 371).
334
Cordelia, Grace, and Carol soon become aware of Elaine’s weakness: they take advantage of it with a refined cruelty. Elaine thus becomes an object of mockery for her fellow pupils. Her friend Carol, for instance, immediately categorises her as an odd one:
“Carol tells everyone at school that our family sleeps on the floor. (…) She puts it around that
I don’t know what church I go to, and that we eat off a card table. She doesn’t repeat these items with scorn, but as exotic specialties” (52). Elaine clearly qualifies as an “exotic,” a mark of her difference. Her entrance into the world of school girls changes Elaine’s desires: she starts wanting typically female objects that never interested her before. Simultaneously, she believes the universe of girls less competitive than that of boys: there is no need to run fast or climb high, she agrees (57). At this stage, though, she has not yet grasped the hypocrisies of girls. Her father’s wish to return to the bush in the summer draws Elaine away from this new environment (68, 71). When she comes back to Toronto in the winter, Elaine meets Cordelia, who immediately treats her as one of her kind (75). From then on, Cordelia, Grace, and Carol pester Elaine every day. They treat her as a person who needs to learn how to behave properly
(123). The whole process brings Elaine to the following conclusion: “I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me. Grace and Carol will help me too. It will take hard work and a long time” (125) – which induces her to accept victimisation as a possible solution to her growing alienation. Her deepest fear consists in not knowing how to behave or what to say (133, 148-149, 174). At that time, Elaine pities another character, who, like her, feels socially ill-at-ease, namely her father’s student, Mr. Banerji. This young man from India obliquely highlights Elaine’s hybridity. Like him, she does not know how to handle social contacts, behaving as though she came from a far away country. Therefore, she understands Mr. Banerji’s distress (169-170), providing the following explanation for their similarity: “He’s a creature more like myself: alien and apprehensive. He’s afraid of us. He
335 has no idea what we will do next, what impossibilities we will expect of him, what we will make him eat. No wonder he bites his fingers”(138). Yet, there is more: Elaine attributes such inadequacy to their “wildness” – which can be linked with her trickster-like nature:
Wild things are smarter than tame ones, that much is clear. Wild things are elusive and
wily and look out for themselves. I divide the people I know into tame and wild. My
mother, wild. My father and brother, also wild; Mr. Banerji, wild also, but in a more
skittish way. Carol, tame. Grace, tame as well, though with sneaky vestiges of wild.
Cordelia, wild, pure and simple. (138-139)
Quite logically, Elaine associates Cordelia and herself to wild animals, thereby acknowledging the bond between them. She also stresses the similarities between her and the rest of her family, thus regarding her “otherness” as an inherited feature. Atwood repeatedly underlines Mr. Banerji’s hybridity by means of details: for instance, she mentions his wife’s sari, showing under her dark Canadian wintercoat (266). Elaine dreams that Mr. Banerji and
Mrs. Finestein, her Jewish neighbour, are her real parents (178), thus once again revealing her hybridity. Simultaneously, Atwood introduces the twin motif (179, 181), thereby hinting at the connection between Elaine and Cordelia. By the end of the novel, Atwood summons the characters who helped Elaine acknowledge her hybridity. Having become an adult, Elaine remembers them with tenderness:
Mrs. Finestein, Miss Stuart from school, Mr. Banerji. Not as they were, to
themselves: God knows what they really saw in their own lives, or thought about.
Who knows what death camp ashes blew daily through the head of Mrs. Finestein,
in those years right after the war? Mr. Banerji probably could not walk down a street
here without dread, of a shove or some word whispered or shouted. Miss Stuart was
in exile, from plundered Scotland still declining, three thousand miles away. To
336 them I was incidental, their kindness to me casual and minor; I’m sure they didn’t
give it a second thought, or have any idea of what it meant. (429)
By linking those three characters, who share different – Indian, Jewish, and Scottish – origins
Atwood underlines their importance in Elaine’s development. Each in their own way, these protagonists provide Elaine with answers as to how to negotiate one’s “otherness.”
Like many hybrid individuals, Elaine suffers from a general feeling of unworthiness, feeling she is “nothing,” as she puts it (43, 213). Cordelia’s constant nasty remarks aggravate this all the more. Elaine finds a way of becoming insensitive, acquiring the habit of peeling the skin off her feet at night (120). The pain caused by such compulsive mutilation allows her to focus her attention on something else than the bullying of other children. Elaine’s pain becomes so heavy that the protagonist experiences fragmentation: she often alludes to parts of her body as though they did not really belong to her (125). She feels invisible (166), going as far as to consider suicide (166).
At school, Elaine also discovers another kind of “otherness.” Her teacher explains that they are both Britons and Canadians, with the insinuation that Canadians are not real Britons
(84). Likewise, her friend Grace Smeath implies that her church – the one Elaine does not belong to – surpasses all others (101). Later on, Mrs. Smeath openly criticises Elaine for her lack of religious education, which she attributes to her parents (192, 193). However, Elaine comes to realise that Mrs. Smeath was only another displaced person, like herself, who tried to claim her place within Canadian society through religious fanaticism (427).
As a young adult, Elaine continues to flirt with hybridity, her first lover, Mr. Hrbik, hailing from Eastern Europe (291, 299). She resents the mockery of other students, because
337 they point to Hrbik’s “otherness:” “They call him a D.P., which means displaced person, an old insult I remember from high school. It was what you called refugees from Europe, and those who were stupid and uncough and did not fit in. They mimic his accent, and the way he talks about the body” (299). Such treatment probably unconsciously reminds Elaine of the pesterings she underwent as a child. Hrbik sums up the complexity of hybridisation when he tells Elaine: “I come from a country that no longer exists, (…) and you come from a country that does not yet exist” (324). Though overtly romanticised, Hrbik’s statement points to his own and Elaine’s difficulties to find their place in society. Hrbik also offers Elaine a chance to discover the liminal world of artists: Elaine enjoys her evening classes with Hrbik. She feels ill-at-ease among university students: indeed, she intuitively senses that she belongs to the world of art students, of marginality (294). Being a woman artist makes her even more eccentric (366, 367).
Even later, as a mature artist, she still calls herself “transitional” (5), as if not being able to determine her real personality. Moreover, the very thought of becoming an eccentric or slightly crazy old lady scares her (6, 408). Returning to Toronto, a city she has lived in for years, Elaine admits feeling lost (14). All those reflections, situated at the beginning of the narrative, suggest Elaine’s discomfort with the adult she has become. Her awkwardness justifies the journey for self-knowledge she is about to engage on. Even at the gallery, among women who admire her, she feels as if belonging to another species (92). She describes herself as “peripheral” (371), “not totally glued together” (380), “watching from the sidelines”
(401), “disembodied” (436) in a word, “Other.”
In addition, one should bear in mind the symbolic value of names in Atwood’s work.
As mentioned above, “Cordelia” refers to the third, rejected daughter in Shakespeare’s King
338 Lear. Therefore, Cordelia should also be considered in terms of “otherness.” She is, after all, the despised, younger sister, who fails to give her father the expected answer. Far from the image she wants to give to other children – that of a self-confident, well-mannered little girl –
Cordelia directly counters her father’s expectations. One might therefore regard her cruel behaviour to Elaine and her subsequent breakdown as symptoms of her inner trouble. Elaine gives us a clue as to the interpretation of Cordelia, when she says: “there is never only one, of anyone” (6). The novel ends on a note which underlines the highly personal dimension of hybridity. Indeed, thinking of Cordelia, Elaine reflects: “She will have her own version. I am not the center of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is the part of herself I could give back to her. We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key” (434). With this comment, Elaine implies that each individual must pursue a personal quest for their hybridity. As examined in the previous chapters, such a quest, though it involves similar stages, may present variations due to the personal features of each character. However, Elaine also suggests that the quest must not necessarily be performed in isolation. Indeed, she believes that one also reaches self-knowledge through the other’s gaze.
Likewise, The Robber Bride develops the theme of “otherness,” although it offers an altogether different outcome. A closer look at the main characters soon enables one to identify them as hybrid individuals. Tony’s ambidextrous talent (8) and cryptic inverted language (19) make her stand out as “other.” So do her physical appearance – she is petite – and her position as a woman among her male colleagues (22). Tony explains how her ability to write backwards relates to her feeling of “otherness” in the following terms:
339 TNOMERF YNOT. This name had a Russian or Martian sound to it, which pleased
her. It was the name of an alien, or a spy. Sometimes it was the name of a twin, an
invisible twin; and when Tony grew up and learned more about left-handedness she
was faced with the possibility that she might in fact have been a twin, the left-
handed half of a divided egg, the other half of which had died. But when she was
little her twin was merely an invention, the incarnation of her sense that part of her
was missing. (137)
Once again, Atwood resorts to the twin’s leitmotiv to indicate her heroine’s incompleteness
(191, 405). Tony strikes people with her physical oddity: “Her face doesn’t go with the outfit.
(…) Her eyes, intelligent, compassionate, and bleak, seem to belong to some other face” (28).
The author stresses her character’s “otherness,” by associating her to a foreign nationality:
“They tell her she is almost Chinese. Only almost, though. Almost is what she has always felt; approximate” (36). In this passage, Tony clearly expresses her lack of self-confidence. Later, she adds that she feels “like a Martian on a time-travel holiday” (62), i.e. totally out of place, disorientated. As a historian, Tony often alludes to the mixtures of people and territories she explores in her field of study (111, 112). Yet, she herself remains isolated (115), feeling like the protagonist of Cat’s Eye, uncomfortable among other girls (115). Tony partly derives her difference from her rather peculiar mother. Indeed, Anthea resembles a “femme fatale” like
Zenia rather than a benevolent mother (136). Like Cordelia’s father, she also makes it clear to
Tony that she is not satisfied with her (138). Hence Tony’s perennial inferiority complex. Her father too looks down on Tony because she is not a boy (145). Her parents’ feelings towards her cause Tony to feel alienated in her own house: “So Tony is a foreigner, to her own mother; and to her father also, because, although she talks the same way he does, she is – and he has made this clear – not a boy. Like a foreigner, she listens carefully, interpreting. Like a foreigner she keeps an eye out for sudden hostile gestures. Like a foreigner she makes mistakes” (145). One senses the same fear of misbehaving that characterizes the heroine of
340 Cat’s Eye. Her mother eventually runs away, leaving Tony alone with her feelings of anxiety and emptiness (154).
Charis suffers from another kind of hybridity. A victim of sexual abuse in her youth, she has managed to live on, obliterating completely that aspect of her life (263, 264). She has focused all her energy on becoming a positive person, who lives a healthy life. To get rid of her bad memories definitively, Charis decides to create a mental picture of herself throwing her double away in Lake Ontario (265). However, Zenia’s violent attack will cause Charis’s dark side, the silent Karen, to resurface. Symptomatically, Karen remains speechless, as
Charis has deprived her of her voice (263).
Charis also addresses the problem of hybridity in her relationship with her boss,
Shanita, a minor character allowing Atwood to introduce comments on racialism. Charis recalls this episode:
People coming into the store frequently ask Shanita where she’s from. “Right here,”
she says, smiling her ultra-bright smile. “I was born right in this very city!” She’s
nice about it to their faces, but it’s a question that bothers her a lot. “I think they
mean where were your parents from,” says Charis, because that’s what Canadians
usually mean when they ask that question. “That’s not what they mean,” says
Shanita. “What they mean is, when am I leaving.” (57)
In this short passage, Atwood addresses a topic that lies at the core of postcolonial studies, namely the notion of the difference between “them” and “us” (Bhabha, Location, 103, 117;
Brydon, “Atwood’s Global Ethic”). Although she was born in Toronto, Shanita strikes people as being physically different. Her visible “otherness” attracts people’s curiosity. Nevertheless,
341 Shanita’s reaction indicates that she resents their questions as racial aggressions. However,
Shanita often lies about her roots, teasing Charis by changing them at will: Chinese, black,
West Indian, American, Canadian, Pakistani, Ojibway, Mayan, Tibetan, or even Scottish (57).
Charis does not know which story she must believe.
Charis’s own hybridity extends beyond the purely racial. It consists in a sort of clumsiness, a difficulty to determine the boundary between herself and the outer world (63).
Charis calls herself “slippery and translucent,” though also “contagious and better left alone”
(119), not knowing what normality means (208). At school, she manages to become invisible, like many Atwoodian heroines (256), often failing to understand what people tell her. She suffers from somnambulism, like her grandmother (235, 245). Moreover, like many of
Atwood’s “Others,” Charis believes she was “born to the wrong parents” (119). Her grandmother, who intuitively understands such matters, tells her that “such people have to look for a long time, they have to search out and identify their right parents. Or else they have to go through life without” (233). Therefore, Charis feels like an orphan without actually being one (234). Her grandmother explains her hybrid origins to Charis: “Part Scotch, part
English, part Mennonite, and part of whatever her father was” (250).
Quite logically, Charis falls in love with Billy, a stranger, like her – more precisely a draft dodger in exile in Canada (209, 210). Through him, Charis comes into contact with the underground world of marginals and illegal workers (213, 215). When she discovers her pregnancy, she knows for sure who the father is. Yet, she has other doubts: is she, Karen or else Zenia the baby’s mother (266)?
342 Roz presents the reader with yet another form of hybridity. Atwood often uses the words “Immigrant,” or “refugee” to characterise her. Once again, the problem of the difference between “them” and “us” plagues Atwood’s heroine. She ponders:
But things are getting more confusing: for instance, how many immigrants can you
fit in? How many of them can you handle, realistically, and who is them, and where
do you draw the line? The mere fact that Roz is thinking this way shows the extent
of the problem, because Roz knows very well what it’s like to be them. By now,
however, she is us. It makes a difference. (100)
Indeed, though Roz claims to have become a real Canadian, she also recalls her parents’ arrival in the New World, by boat (305). This memory of her origins causes her to develop an inferiority complex, fostered by her parents, who treat her like a cripple (313). She remembers the other name she adopted during the war to hide her Jewish origins (318). Like Elaine in
Cat’s Eye, she mentions DP children, feeling somehow related to them (324). Such a comparison leads her to try to define her “otherness.” She recalls:
There was something about her that set her apart, an invisible barrier, faint and hardly
there, like the surface of water, but strong nevertheless. Roz didn’t know what it was
but she could feel it. She wasn’t like the others, she was among them but she wasn’t
part of them. So she would push and shove, trying to break her way in. (325)
Though this description remains vague, it reminds us of the feeling of inadequacy experienced by other Atwoodian characters. At that time, the young Roz cannot yet grasp the causes of her alterity. She gradually comes to understand her difference, when other children voice nasty remarks on her religion and on her father’s origins (329). This latter’s sudden return changes
Roz’s vision of herself altogether: indeed, she is the daughter of a DP (332). Roz’s experience
343 at the nuns' school has an unexpected effect: when she eventually enters a Jewish school at last, the other children regard her as odd again because of her Catholic background:
There are a lot of Jewish kids at Roz’s new school; in fact at this school Jewish is
the thing to be. But whereas once Roz was not Catholic enough, now she isn’t
Jewish enough. She’s an oddity, a hybrid, a strange half-person. Her clothes,
although expensive, are subtly not right. Her accent is not right either. Her
enthusiams are not right, nor her skills (…) she’s too big; also too loud, too clumsy,
too eager to please. (…) She finds herself in a foreign country. She’s an immigrant,
a displaced person (344).
Once again, the protagonist’s main trouble relates to “otherness.” She cannot compete with other girls, because this time, she is not Jewish enough (344-345). In the midst of such distress, one understands how easily Roz becomes the prey of Zenia. The latter tricks her by making her believe that she knew her father and considered him a hero.
Despite the deceptiveness of her stories, Zenia provides the reader a background which clearly points to her hybridity.9 To Tony, she pretends to be a White Russian refugee who grew up in Paris (163-164), appealing to Tony’s passion for historical facts. To Charis, she presents herself as a Romanian gypsy (227, 271), playing on Charis’s own ex-centric social position and on her belief in superstitions. In order to flatter Roz, she claims her mother had
Jewish grandparents (360, 361). Finally, she seduces West imitating the exoticism of a Greek immigrant (406).
9 Staels states that Zenia embodies her victims’ “otherness,” the rejected aspect of their personality. She illustrates this through Charis’s gradual understanding that Zenia embodies Karen, her repressed side. I would add that, though the process takes place at an unconscious level, Zenia produces the same effects on her two other victims: to Tony, she is the equivalent of the little abandoned girl of her childhood; to Roz, she represents the half-Jewish girl regarded as other by both the Jewish and the Catholic community. (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels. 198.)
344 Far from simply demonstrating Zenia’s talent for deception, such elements prove that hybridity functions as a key-concept in Atwood’s work. Yet, one would be wrong to reduce this hybridity to mere racial concerns. Besides proclaiming her hybrid origins, Zenia particularly fools her three victims by pretending to have endured the very same hardship that brought about their hybridisation. Indeed, Zenia above all tells Tony that her mother abandoned her too (163). She appeals to Charis’s compassion, inventing that her mother was stoned to death for witchcraft, thus reminding Charis of her own grandmother’s powers.
Finally, she provides Roz with the only thing she has always been looking for, i.e. a positive image of her father as a war hero. Zenia’s tactics therefore show us that hybridity does not necessarily refer to the heroines’ cultural background. Rather, hybridity can be found further away, in childhood, at the time when the heroines had to construct their personality in spite of their parents’ shortcomings. Most importantly, Zenia proves that “otherness” can be a positive force, one that enables the protagonist to move on.10
6. Double Quests: Between Failure and Resurrection
One of the reasons why I decided to deal with Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride in the same chapter lies in their structural similarities. Indeed, in both narratives, the protagonists engage on a first quest which results in failure because they somehow refuse to face their real
10 Shannon Hengen expresses the same idea when she writes: “Zenia’s foreignness, her difference, is precisely what each of the other three main characters must come to understand, and that difference is as powerful as any other force in their lives.” (Hengen “Zenia’s Foreignness” 278). However, Hengen highlights Zenia’s racial foreignness, whereas my point is that “otherness” might also be found elsewhere in the protagonists’ background, for instance, in the traumas they experienced in their early formative years. As far as the question of nationality is concerned, I favour Coral Ann Howells’s view of The Robber Bride as Atwood’s redefinition of Canadianness in the postcolonial era (Howells “The Robber Bride; or, Who Is a True Canadian?” 100).
345 problem. The reader then catches up with them years later, when events force them to begin another, more successful journey towards self-knowledge. In this section, I shall briefly examine the various stages of what I refer to as “a double quest.”
The opening lines of Cat’s Eye suggest the importance of time in the heroine’s development, as well as the necessity to re-access one’s past in order to evolve. Atwood introduces the idea of time travel, thus echoing the structure of the novel itself, which relies on Elaine’s reminiscences of her childhood. To explain the process undergone by the heroine,
Atwood writes: “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once” (3). The latter exactly happens to Elaine as she returns to Toronto and simultaneously rediscovers her long silenced memories. As before in Atwood’s work, “surfacing” constitutes the key term. Once she has started on her journey, the protagonist allows her memories to come to the surface (3), as in a dream. She remembers her friend Cordelia, imagining what she might have become thirty years later. Such thoughts prompt old compulsive habits to resurge: Elaine starts chewing her fingers again (9). Elaine Risley’s return to Toronto constitutes the first stage of her quest. She realises that she has reached the middle of her life. Although she should therefore feel more confident, she does not. On the contrary, she considers herself insubstantial, about to dissolve and to descend into the layers of her own self (13). She also mentions the reason of her stay in
Toronto: a retrospective exhibition (15, 16), i.e. another sort of flashback. Elaine then begins a long parenthesis, in which she narrates her first, unsuccessful quest. Its aim was to acquire the right to exist in the society of the time, despite her “otherness.” As in the present, Elaine started her first quest by arriving in Toronto. There, she is confronted to the evil of other girls, who take advantage of her ignorance of female relationships. Elaine’s brother plays the role of
346 her green guide, initiating her to the mysteries of modern physics. He leads her through the second stage of her quest, until, after a return from the summer vacations, Elaine meets
Cordelia, thus entering stage three, that of the encounter with the trickster. From then on,
Elaine silently endures Cordelia’s pesterings. Elaine’s sufferings culminate in two scenes. The first one is a ritual scene of pseudo burial orchestrated by Cordelia in her backyard. The protagonist experiences what might have been a moment of epiphany as the evidence of her loss of power (112-113). Later on, her friends’ attempt to abandon her, tied to a tree, down in the ravine, causes her to go through an almost mystic experience: a vision of the Holy Virgin.
Elaine obviously fails to achieve a more adequate inner knowledge, looking once again for help from outside instead of relying on her own strength. Yet, the shock enables her to set aside her victim status and to regain some strength in order to go on with her life. Though
Elaine has tried to live a normal life, the reader understands that her childhood experiences still bother her. Her dreams, for instance, offer a clear expression of her general feeling of helplessness. She confides: “I dream that I can’t move. I can’t talk, I can’t even breathe. I’m in an iron lung” (268). Elaine evidently needs to find how to escape inertia.
Back in Toronto years later, Elaine restarts her quest from the beginning. Her cat’s eye serves her as a token of power along her journey. Simultaneously, the ghostly presence of the ten-year-old Cordelia and of her imaginary adult version compels her to tackle the problem of her social inadequacies. Elaine remembers how she gradually traded places with Cordelia.11
While she gained power and naughtiness, Cordelia slowly declined until she almost lost her mind. However, Elaine’s quest remains incomplete, until she eventually realises her own mother’s helplessness in the face of those childish tortures. In a moving scene, Elaine’s
11 Judith McCombs examines the politics of the relationships between self and other in Cat’s Eye, focussing on the mirroring effect that takes place between Elaine and Cordelia (McCombs “Contrary Re-Memberings” 16). Staels also analyses Elaine and Cordelia’s relationships in terms of sisterhood (twins) and mirror images. (Staels “Metaphor and the Unconscious in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride” 10-11).
347 mother, aware of her approaching death, empties the cellar with her daughter while remembering her youth. She then confesses her former knowledge of the hardships Elaine endured and apologises for her inability to help her at the time (417). At the end of the scene,
Elaine retrieves her marble. She says: “I look into it, and see my life entire” (420), indicating that she has made a major step towards wholeness. However, her quest is not yet completed.
As she revisits her former school, Elaine exclaims: “Get me out of this, Cordelia. I’m locked in. I don’t want to be nine years old forever” (422). She experiences her real moment of epiphany at the art gallery. Facing one of her paintings, Elaine suddenly acquires knowledge.
She explains: “she is the Virgin of Lost Things. Between her hands, at the level of her heart, she holds a glass object: an oversized cat’s eye marble, with a blue center” (430). She understands that the loss of her alter-ego Cordelia pains her deeply. She secretly wishes to see her enter the gallery on the opening night. She considers her absence as a loss. Later on, she acknowledges that the Holy Virgin she has been searching for in all her trips abroad was a construction of her own mind:
There was no voice. No one came walking on air down from the bridge, there was
no lady in a dark cloak bending over me. Although she has come back to me now in
absolute clarity, acute in every detail, the outline of her hooded shape against the
lights from the bridge, the red of her heart from within the cloak, I know this didn’t
happen. There was only darkness and silence. Nobody and nothing. (442)
In the last sentences of the novel, Elaine admits the sorrow caused by the failure of her friendship with Cordelia: “This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea” (445). Elaine’s quest thus ends on a mitigated note: on the one hand, she now knows the cause of her distress, i.e. her difficulty to acknowledge the aggressive, wild aspect of her own personality,
348 symbolised by her enigmatic doppelgänger Cordelia. Moreover, one senses that this discovery will enable her to become a more serene individual. On the other hand, Cordelia remains missing.
The Robber Bride exhibits an identical pattern of “double quest”. The difference lies in the novel’s variations on the quest motif along three distinct lines. Indeed, three highly different characters become united in a resolute fight against their common enemy, Zenia. These three women have experienced a traumatic moment in their youth: Tony was abandoned by her mother; Charis was abused by her uncle; and Roz was exposed to the other children’s mockery because of her immigrant father. The women managed to obliterate their early traumas: Tony became a brilliant academic; Charis turned to new age philosophy; whereas
Roz ended up as a wealthy and efficient business woman and a loving mother. In their attempt to be appreciated, they all lost a man to Zenia, a multi-faceted “femme fatale.” As the novel begins, the three protagonists meet at the Toxique to discuss a great disaster, Zenia’s return from the afterworld. Indeed, they recall having attended Zenia’s burial. Zenia’s sudden apparition surprises them in the extreme. Moreover, it forces them to reconsider the nature of their relationship with her. Each then engages on a journey in the past in order to understand why they were so easily fooled by Zenia. In the second stage of their quest, each of them recalls a happy time in the company of their embodiment of the green-world lover (West,
Billie, and Mitch). They subsequently remember the third stage, namely their encounter with the trickster, Zenia. The latter presented each of them with a different version of herself, most likely to appeal to their weakness. Simultaneously an orphan, a severely ill gypsy, and a girl persecuted on false pretences, she manages to steal each woman’s husband. The heroines therefore examine their past more closely, searching for the reasons of their weaknesses.
Rediscovering their own hidden demons, in an epiphanic dream (chapter fifty), they come to
349 grasp that their social shortcomings should be examined in relation to childhood events and to their parents. This traditionally constitutes the fourth stage of the quest pattern, namely the confrontation with parental figures, which, in this case, undoubtedly possesses an epiphanic quality. They eventually find the strength to confront Zenia, thereby eliminating her definitively. Although the character of Zenia eventually remains an enigma, one might conclude that The Robber Bride offers a much more definite ending than Cat’s Eye, of which the outcome remains uncertain. The Robber Bride thus constitutes an exception among
Atwood’s often open-ended narratives.
***
As I already mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, I regard Cat’s Eye and The Robber
Bride as the most representative illustrations of my theory concerning Atwood’s postcolonial stance. Indeed, several elements require an examination from this point of view. The fact, for instance, that Elaine Risley appropriates the work of European masters to produce her own parodic reinterpretations provides us with one of the most convincing examples of postcolonial rewriting of the cultural past.12 Likewise, the twins’ feminisation of fairy-tales in
The Robber Bride strikes the reader as a highly effective and original way of introducing a subversion of patriarchal values into the novel.
Likewise, both novels confirm my theory that deception plays a crucial role in
Atwood’s work. All main characters in both narratives rely on deceptive strategies, either to conceal their “otherness,” or to denounce other people’s shortcomings. Moreover, they also make extensive use of mimicry strategies in order to satisfy patriarchal demands. Even so-
12 See Brydon “The Thematic Ancestor.”
350 called eccentric characters, such as Cordelia and Zenia, do not escape mimicry processes:
Cordelia does her best to please her particularly demanding father, whereas Zenia endeavours to produce an image of herself that corresponds to male and female fantasies.
Magic realism pervades the two narratives, providing the heroine with an in-between space of introspection. Elaine experiences several moments of epiphany: in the impressive burial scene, where she becomes aware of her apathy; later in the ravine, where she finds a way of returning to life, and ultimately, at the art gallery, where past and present merge in the hysterical apparition of a Mrs. Smeath-like figure. Similarly, the heroines of The Robber
Bride eventually face their personal failures in dreams, before confronting the uncanny character of Zenia. Throughout the novel, the latter succeeds in preserving her aura of mystery. Regarded in turn as a ghost, a victim, an evil force, and an enigma, Zenia definitely qualifies as a magic realist apparition, capable of crossing the boundary between life and death.
Among their multiple personalities, Cordelia and Zenia easily identify as highly powerful tricksters. For Cordelia, such a definition mostly applies in the first part of the novel.
Later on, she trades places with Elaine, who acquires part of her power. In The Robber Bride,
Zenia apparently remains powerful throughout. Further, one might conveniently interpret
Zenia as an embodiment of Evil. Yet, one must keep in mind that Atwood herself regards the trickster figure as a potentially positive force which causes characters to evolve. Indeed, in an interview with Hilde Staels about The Robber Bride, Atwood explains:
As we all know from watching the opera Tales of Hoffmann, you can’t do without
your shadow. We also know that trickster gods are the gods of thievery, the gods of
deception and they are also the gods of communication and for that reason the
351 trickster is the messenger of the gods. Zenia is a shape changer, a protean character
as trickster figures are. Mercury is the fastest planet. People wonder why it is the
trickster god who is the messenger of the gods. Well, probably because the messages
are ambiguous. But such figures are also catalysts for change: they get the plot
going. Without Mercury there is no movement.13
Thereby, Atwood considers Zenia – and the trickster figure in general – as essential elements of her novels. Besides, the other three main characters of the novel embody various aspects of the trickster: Tony displays its slyness; Charis, its knowledge of the supernatural; and Roz, its sense of humour. Moreover, they were all confronted in their youth to a negative feature of the trickster: Tony suffered from her mother’s deception; Charis endured her uncle’s sexual appetite, whereas Roz had to cope with her father’s marginality.
Once again, most of the characters suffer from an undefined feeling of “otherness:”
Elaine’s early childhood in the bush alienates her from the world of little girls; Tony feels too small and lacks femininity; Charis has completely silenced her alter-ego Karen; Roz shows difficulties to adjust either to a Jewish or to a Catholic school. Zenia too astonishes the readers with her assumed marginality. They all express their difficulty to cope with their difference, because they refuse to acknowledge the hidden, hybrid part of themselves.
Therefore, both narratives are structured as a double quest: after a first failed quest started years ago, the protagonists eventually come to face their real inner trouble in a present-day search for explanations.
13 Atwood in an interview with Hilde Staels. (Staels, Margaret Atwood’s Novels. 210).
352 Cat’s Eye further offers us another example of Atwood’s ecological concern, expressed through the voice of Elaine’s father. Because Atwood regards the novel as a fictitious autobiography,14 she was certainly inspired by her own father’s personality when portraying Elaine’s father. Both Elaine’s and Atwood’s fathers are scientists, who spend half of the year in the bush conducting research. The father figure shows a great respect for nature, which he tries to inculcate in his children at a very early age (23). His passion for the world of insects leads him to condemn the harmful effects of insecticides. His admiration for nature also turns him into a pessimist, who considers that mankind will cause its own destruction in an atomic holocaust (70-71) or because of pollution (231, 307, 350, 418). The novel further contains brief and ludicrous allusions to the dangers of cloning. Elaine’s father mentions, for instance, the possibility of creating turkeys with four drumsticks, square tomatoes, or naked chicken (139). He also regularly expresses his concern regarding the extinction of various animal species and his fear of a new world epidemic (266). Though such comments in Cat’s
Eye constitute no more than a means of characterising Elaine’s father as a scientist and ex- centric, these ideas nonetheless matter to Atwood. Indeed, in Atwood’s 2003 Oryx and Crake, they constitute the main theme: this novel takes place against the background of the destruction of the human kind by a megalomaniac scientist. Though it remains more embryonic, one might consider Charis’s deep respect for nature in The Robber Bride as another variation on this theme. Atwood’s subsequent novel, Alias Grace, abandons the ecological theme to develop even further the theme of the supernatural, thereby allowing the trickster figure to reach its full power.
14 Atwood scholar Nathalie Cooke has examined the implications of what she calls the “autobiographical illusion” in Cat’s Eye (Cooke, “Reading Reflections: The Autobiographical Illusion in Cat’s Eye,” 162, 164). I totally agree with her idea that Atwood fools readers, making them believe that Cat’s Eye gives an account of her own childhood. Rather, Atwood presents us with a novel in which she challenges the traditional conventions of autobiography. Simultaneously, she draws the reader’s attention to the status of the novel as a fictional construct.
353 Chapter 6. Deceptive Patterns in Alias Grace or the
Narrator as Quilter
“I was shut up inside that doll of
myself, and my true voice could not
get out” (295).
Alias Grace is of paramount importance to this study as a work of fiction which contains elements drawn from historical reality. Indeed, it relies on the true story of Grace Marks, a young servant who was judged for murder in nineteenth-century Canada. The novel addresses various themes, such as class, gender, psychoanalysis, duplicity, history, and ethnicity. Alias
Grace constitutes an ideal subject for the study of deception in Margaret Atwood’s work, because it features the series of five elements which have been identified above as constitutive characteristics of my theoretical framework on deception: metafictional and parodic elements, mimicry, magic realism, trickster figures, and hybrid characters. Some of these elements have already been mentioned by other critics in relation to the novel. Sharon Wilson, for instance, describes Alias Grace as follows: “a feminist, postmodern and postcolonial metafiction”
(Wilson, “Quilting” 122). Wilson further alludes to the existence of magic realism in the novel. She also states that the novel criticises colonial attitudes in nineteenth-century Canada.
By using the quilting metaphor, Atwood draws our attention to the construction of a story, which involves “sewing” together different pieces or versions of the facts. The quilting metaphor thus proves highly metafictional as well. Wilson describes it as follows: “Atwood uses the unique image of quilting to represent the piecing together of different stories into a new pattern, in this case a pattern that questions master patterns and, by implication, all patterns” (Wilson, “Quilting” 123). This quote introduces the idea that the narrative also
354 functions as a criticism of patriarchy. Moreover, both Wilson and Rogerson point to the fact that quilting constitutes a typically female activity and, traditionally, an occasion for women to meet and exchange ideas, among which their frustrations in relation to a male dominated society (Wilson, “Quilting” 125; Rogerson 11). Readers are equally expected to move through the novel “quilting” their own interpretation of the story, a real challenge indeed. One could regard the quilting metaphor as a unique expression of the female voice. Rogerson further draws a link between this female voice and deceptiveness when she describes quilting as “a language in which women’s secrets can be shared with other women but concealed from men” (Rogerson 11). Quilting thus relates to deception and concealment. Rogerson further mentions that Dr. Jordan, as a man, significantly fails to interpret these patterns (Rogerson
15). Further, quilting features a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations which makes it a truly postmodern motif. As to the presence of trickster figures in the novel, Wilson mentions that Jeremiah the Peddler’s intervention may be a mere trick (Wilson, “Quilting” 132); yet, she does not analyse the character’s potentialities as a trickster figure. Part of my own study of the novel will examine this feature, as well as Grace’s potential role as a trickster. These aspects will be examined in the light of Linda Hutcheon’s previously mentioned concept of historiographic metafiction, focusing on Grace’s duplicitous behaviour and on her trickster- like qualities. Grace constantly plays on her duplicitous personality. Her behaviour is encouraged by her doctor’s readiness to believe her, and by society, which has already judged her. She thus constitutes an ideal trickster figure, her personality constantly verging on the dividing line between reality and fantasy and featuring clear magic realist characteristics.
Another character should also be taken into account: Jeremiah the peddler, a fooler, who accompanies Grace at significant moments of her life. This character could also be regarded as a trickster. Further, I intend to provide a reading of the novel which draws attention to the
355 underlying quest pattern undergone by the heroine, viewing it as a mode of expression of the character’s hybridity.
1. Fictionalising Historical Documents
Alias Grace is indubitably Atwood’s most metafictional novel. Indeed, the author’s manipulation of historical data appears quite logical, since the story contains numerous gaps and possibilities for misinterpretation. The novel being no history book, Atwood, on the one hand, naturally made use of a series of available documents about the person of Grace Marks and about her history, but, on the other hand, she also had to invent a whole range of details, which cannot be deduced from historical accounts, and, most significantly, she provides the reader with her personal interpretation of the facts.
In her afterword to the story, Atwood situates her production as a work of fiction, nevertheless based on reality. She underlines the sensational and scandalous character of the murders, implying that much that was written on Grace Marks at the time of the facts was biased information because of the popularity of the events and of Grace’s female condition.
For instance, Atwood alludes to Susanna Moodie’s portrayal of Marks and qualifies it as
“melodramatic”, erroneous and influenced by literary works. Of Moodie’s account, Atwood writes: “Moodie can’t resist the potential for literary melodrama, and the cutting of Nancy’s body into four quarters is not only pure invention but pure Harrison Ainsworth. The influence of Dickens’ Oliver Twist – a favourite of Moodie’s – is evident in the tale of the bloodshot eyes that were said to be haunting Grace Marks” (464). This quotation indicates Atwood’s critical approach to historical documents.
356 Yet, the author readily admits having “fictionalized historical events” (466). She explains this by alluding to the contradictory character of the information available. Indeed,
Atwood mentions that many commentators of the time obviously indulged in the temptation to fictionalise Grace’s story, and that, therefore, very few facts about Grace Marks are known for sure (466-467). The writer claims having searched for the most likely course of events every time this was possible, feeling free to invent each time she found gaps in the historical records (467). Starting from this explanation by the author herself, the novel consists of a mixture of historical documents and fictional events, which makes it very interesting to study in relation to the notion of historiographic metafiction mentioned above. Yet, in examining this blend of facts and fiction, this analysis will try to highlight that the author’s choice of historical documents clearly aims at developing her own vision of Grace Marks as a female marginal subject in a male-dominated society, thus revealing a feminist and postcolonial interpretation of historical data. Therefore, Atwood’s depiction of Grace Marks remains above all a literary production which illustrates the author’s personal thesis. Looking objectively, it deceives the reader into adopting Atwood’s own opinion on Grace.
The first historical document used by Atwood in the novel is one of Susanna Moodie’s accounts of Grace Marks, which serves as an introduction to the first chapter. Quotes of
Moodie’s work recur in the novel, Moodie representing the voice of society. This first account strikes the reader because it emphasises Marks’ female condition, the notoriety of her case, as well as the notion of guilt and of society’s established values such as morality. Moodie’s comment clearly reflects society’s idea of Grace Marks. The next quote, a haiku
357 poem by Basho,1 alludes to the painfulness of the world. The flowers mentioned here can be interpreted as a metaphor for Grace, since the chapter narrates her life in prison. Yet, the pain alluded to should not be regarded as an expression of Grace’s feelings as a prisoner. Indeed, according to one of the essential teachings of Buddhism, one should become free of human desires in order to escape from pain and sufferings.2 Therefore, Grace’s condition, which keeps her away from human contact, should eventually induce the disappearance of pain. By relating these two aspects so closely, Atwood indicates that the official version of the facts is necessarily a biased one.
Two historical documents introduce the second chapter of the book: a newspaper clipping commenting on McDermott’s execution and a list of punishments inflicted on the prisoners of Kingston Penitentiary in the nineteenth century. Both documents reveal the violence and cruelty of which women – both respectable and convicted ones – can be capable.
Indeed, the reader easily establishes a parallel between respectable women’s cruel attitude at
McDermott’s execution and convicted women’s violence. Further, the second document highlights the hardships of life in prison by mentioning the severe punishment undergone by women convicts. Finally, both documents, though highly different in kind, express that nineteenth-century society’s common view of women might be erroneous: the bourgeois women attending the execution lack delicacy and refinement. So does the convict’s offence of
“threatening to knock convict’s brains out” (9). Both documents convey an image of women differing from the traditional nineteenth-century romantic vision of the “weaker” sex, and in so doing, allude to the fact that this traditional conception might play a part in Grace’s difficulties to fit in this world. The novel contains other allusions to the violence and cruelty
1 Matsuo Munefusa or Basho (1644-1694): seventeenth-century Japanese poet. 2 See definition of Buddhism in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (124-125).
358 of women, for instance, the Governor’s wife’s scrapbook, which comprises a collection of articles about murders and crimes of all sorts (24, 26).
The romantic portrayal of the heroine continues with the subsequent presentation of
Grace and McDermott’s portraits, which once again, might not correspond to reality. The beginning of the chapter consists in a popular ballad narrating the scandalous murders, the trial and its outcome. The tone of the song sounds overtly melodramatic: Grace becomes a romantic heroine and the true initiator of the murders.
Reading the third series of quotations at the beginning of chapter three, one comes to the idea that Atwood will systematically contrast excerpts of historical documents with literary ones. Moodie’s account of her encounter with Marks provides the reader, once again, with a biased, romanticised view of the character. Grace appears as simultaneously transfigured by hopelessness and melancholy and as a deceptive person whose “eye never meets yours” (19). Atwood intervenes from a metafictional point of view to distort alleged facts and re-establish balance: her quote of Emily Brontë’s The Prisoner, although being clearly romantic too, presents the heroine as an untouchable saint. In this case, Atwood is leading the reader astray into believing in Grace’s sainthood.
The same contrast between historical and fictional documents introduces chapter four.
It features two historical quotations of Moodie and of the superintendent of the asylum, and a poem by Emily Dickinson. The three quotes focus on the problem of sanity and provide the reader with three different points of view on the subject: the first presents the over- romanticised vision of madness, with its hysterical crises; the second the more objective, medical point of view; and the last the poet’s introspective interrogations on the secrets of the
359 human brain. The difference between these quotations is a means of showing that reality may be multifaceted. No single version of the facts exists, which makes deception even more problematic to detect. This last quote significantly refers to the notion of concealment, which lies at the heart of Grace’s relationship with Dr. Jordan.
In this section, Atwood introduces a new technique, which confers some authenticity upon the story. She imagines the possible written exchanges between Dr. Jordan and his over- affectionate mother, and also his correspondence with fellow doctors. This technique allows
Atwood, on the one hand, to provide her readers with information on Dr. Jordan’s familial and social situation as well as on his inner thoughts, and, on the other hand, to make us acquainted with the scientific theories of the time. The letters feature a mixture of information on the fictional characters of the novel and of allusions to real scientific experiments. This mixture typifies historiographic metafiction. Moreover, the technique allows Atwood to present us once again with various opinions on the same theory and thus to demonstrate the multiple aspect of reality. Indeed, the reader is faced with Dr. Watson’s objective account of
Grace’s imprisonment (48), with Dr. Jordan’s feelings that Grace will be a difficult case to resolve (54), and with bourgeois society’s view of asylums through the voice of Dr. Jordan’s mother (50), i.e. three very different standpoints. The chapter further mentions the pamphlet and portraits of chapter two, highlighting their sentimentalism (58), and shows how Dr.
Jordan’s first encounter with Grace was actually prejudiced because of such documents (59).
Moreover, the chapter contains allusions to Canada’s condition as a colony in the shape of an introduction of Reverend Verringer and his English background (73), as well as references to theories of the time such as Mesmerism (83). It also mentions the political climate of the time, presenting Dr. Jordan as an Abolitionist (84).
360 Chapter five consists in a flashback about Grace’s former life and logically starts with a more intimate document referring to her family. The document once again relies on a historical source, namely a newspaper transcription of Grace’s confession (95). Important is the presentation of Grace as an Irish immigrant. The second quotation, a poem by Robert
Browning, echoes this theme in its description of the strange impression of “feeling different”: “How very different a lot is mine / From any other woman’s in the world” (95) offers a beautiful and effective way of drawing the reader’s attention to Grace’s condition of exile.
The beginning of chapter six features the same contrast between a historical document, here an excerpt from a book on household management, and a poem. The two quotes introduce the main ideas dealt with in this chapter, namely madness and death. Indeed, this section narrates Grace’s happy years in the company of Mary Whitney, which abruptly come to an end with Mary’s death and Grace’s first fit. The contrast between the matter-of-fact and lyrical tones of these two quotes once again serves to emphasise the discrepancies between the romantic image of women at the time and the dreadful reality to which they were confronted. The first section of this chapter further contains metafictional allusions to existing theories of the time about amnesia (140-141), which aim at helping the reader understand the way in which Grace’s case was studied. It also features Dr. Jordan’s reflections on the notions of sanity and madness and on the difficulty of defining those unequivocally. The second section of the chapter contains the first allusion to the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, which will be developed later in the novel. Grace, acquainted with the expression, can provide a simple explanation of its meaning. Significantly, Pandora promised not to look inside the box, and all evil was originally caused by her act of deception.
361 Quotations in chapter seven show a significant difference: they undoubtedly express understanding for Grace’s situation and sympathy for her predicament. This change may indicate that the quest has now thoroughly begun and that important events will take place.
The first section of chapter seven can be regarded as highly metafictional as it introduces the real character of Susanna Moodie and discusses the value of her judgement of Grace, another character taken from reality (190-191). The passage proves highly ironical, since two fictional characters criticise the account of the facts provided by a real character. Indeed, Reverend
Verringer stresses the fact that Moodie’s description of Grace largely draws on Charles
Dickens and Walter Scott. Through the words of this fictional character, Atwood thus warns the reader to question the validity of historical documents, which may be influenced by the literature and philosophy of the time, thus proving highly unreliable.
Grace herself, in the next chapter, questions the value of documents when she tells Dr.
Jordan about McDermott’s confession: “Just because a thing has been written down, Sir, does not mean it is God’s truth” (257). This comment on Grace’s part sounds highly ironical:
Grace’s words echo Atwood’s opinion, who, by presenting us with several sorts of documents, makes us aware of the incredible diversity of truth, in the postmodern sense of the word. Further, Atwood, through Grace’s words, denounces the injustice of the time and the colonised situation of women, who entirely depended on men’s good will to insure their position in society. Grace stigmatises the unfair character of what happened to her friend
Mary, when she compares Mary to Nancy, both being pregnant and unmarried: “Mary
Whitney had done the same as her, and had gone to her death. Why should the one be rewarded and the other punished, for the same sin?” (276). The subsequent allusion to The
Lady of the Lake provides a romantic vision of female despair which stands in sharp contrast
362 to Grace’s plain cry for justice. The fact that Mr Kinnear reacts ironically to the story adds to the cruelty of the statement.
Chapter nine, devoted to Grace’s reminiscences of the murders, starts with two contradictory quotes revealing McDermott and Grace’s opposite versions of the facts. The following literary quote from Edgar Allan Poe should be regarded as the author’s ironical comment on the romantic character often deceptively attributed to death. Section thirty-three in this chapter ends on an interesting metafictional comment on the value of stories, significantly located right after Grace’s recollections of the murders, in which the author reflects on the notion of the story as a reconstruction of events, rather than the ultimate truth.
The passage reads as follows:
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else (298).
This quotation, which strikes the reader by its factual tone, can be interpreted as a form of metafictional authorial comment. The reader is further impressed by the violence of its images, which presents Grace’s story as a painful, destructive one, which will be hard to tell.
Section thirty-four provides us with an account of Dr. Jordan’s lecture in the Governor’s wife’s salon, which allows Atwood to inform her readers about the ideas of the time concerning amnesia, alterations of personality, and hallucinations. The passage further contains allusions to well-known figures in the history of psychiatry, such as French specialist
Charcot (300). Ironical metafictional comment resurges through French philosopher’s Maine de Biran’s quote, which refers to the unconscious as to a new world, supposedly waiting to be
363 colonised (300)! Dr. Jordan’s later allusion to Bellini’s Sonnambula (321) constitutes another metafictional allusion to Grace and to her own interpretation of events. Indeed, the opera recounts the story of a simple girl denounced as a whore, but who in fact walks in her sleep.
The happy outcome of the opera echoes Dr. Jordan’s rising hope to save Grace and prove her innocence, while he readily admits his doubts as regards the somnambulistic explanation. In this passage, Jordan acknowledges the fact that he might have been tricked from the start.
The next chapter is introduced by a newspaper article on the trial, by Moodie’s account of Grace Marks’ feelings of guilt, and by a quotation of Nathaniel Hawthorne on love and horror. Moodie’s words strike the reader most as dubious, a feeling which will be confirmed by the lawyer’s denial of Moodie’s description later in the novel. Once again, this indicates that historical documents lack trustworthiness.
The end of the novel features a subplot which functions remarkably as an ironical and inverted version of Grace’s story. Indeed, it repeatedly refers to Dr. Jordan’s liaison with his housekeeper, who eventually thinks of murdering her husband in order to live with Jordan.
Simon then tries to imagine the various ways in which he could get rid of the embarrassing husband (410), without ever intending to do so. The grotesque character of the whole scene belongs to Atwood’s ironical comment on Grace’s situation. Jordan runs away at once, because, as a gentleman, he cannot afford to spoil his future for such a woman. The situation becomes really farcical when the housekeeper, trying to contact Jordan, receives his mother’s cold and definite denial. Jordan himself, having fought in the American Civil War, comes back having lost part of his memory, as Grace pretended to. Ironically, he calls his respectable fiancée Grace, because he cannot even remember her name (430-431). All these elements
364 indicate that the novel contains authorial comment criticising nineteenth-century Canada and its bourgeois, narrow-minded, hypocritical, male-dominated society.
If we look at the quotes introducing the last chapter of the novel, we understand that opinions about Grace still diverge and that no resolution of her mystery will be offered. The first historical document remains negative towards Grace, the second being more neutral. As to the poem, it does not mention the possibility of Grace’s innocence, but emphasises the notion of forgiveness (439), as do the last pages of the novel. The latter do not solve the question of Grace’s guilt, but leave us instead with a character who has come to terms with her own complexity.
2. Grace’s Deceptive Mimicry
Much has been written on the mysterious character of Grace Marks. She has been described as a heartless murderess, a lunatic, a simple girl, and conversely as a beautiful, literate one, a victim, a cunning and manipulative person. Atwood herself, in her afterword to the novel, writes that “the true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma” (465). The character’s multiplicity makes her an interesting heroine in a postcolonial context. Indeed, I contend that the character’s inherent ambiguity allows the writer to use her as an illustration of the Other’s strategy of mimicry. Grace, in her fictional Atwoodian version, constantly resorts to deception in order to survive amid the social patriarchal conventions imposed on her, facing society’s negative opinion of her. Grace must use deception in order to produce an image of her which society will accept. In other words, she constantly mimics what society wants her to be: either a deeply repentant murderess or an infuriated lunatic. Between these two extremes, Grace has no voice of her own; she simply does not exist. Being regarded
365 either as a model prisoner, who dutifully sews for the Governor’s wife, or as an unbalanced individual, who could at any time indulge in a fit of madness, Grace has been denied any capacity to think for herself. Atwood’s depiction of the character underlines her cunning, deceptive attitude in order to prove that Grace is a person. She is allowed to develop her own voice. As such, the novel also functions as a postcolonial claim of the subaltern’s need to express him/herself. Indeed, Grace symbolises the inferior, victimised, colonised subject, searching for her place in society. She is engaged in a process in which she deceives her environment (the Governor’s wife, Doctor Jordan, the guards in the asylum, the people who come to see her in prison) into thinking that she belongs to one of the categories which they want her to fit in. Grace’s quest to be accepted will nevertheless evolve into a quest for her own acceptance of her hybrid nature, as will be demonstrated in the analysis of the novel’s quest pattern. Given her situation, Grace indulges in two modes of deception: a conscious one, which tends to deceive anyone who might endanger her survival, and an unconscious process of self-deception, which has caused the erasure of (part of) her memory.
The very title of the novel already alludes to Grace’s deceptiveness. Indeed, the word
“alias” commonly refers to the idea of taking a false name or a false identity and clearly warns the reader: Grace may not be who we think she is. Deception further resurges in the novel’s first motto by William Morris, which reads as: “God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie.”
This second allusion to deception indicates again that the facts narrated in it should not be taken at face value.
The novel starts with Grace’s poetic reminiscences of Nancy and with a factual description of herself in the first person. Grace introduces herself saying:
366 I’m a model prisoner, and give no trouble. That’s what the Governor’s wife says, I have overheard her saying it. I’m skilled at overhearing. If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving , just dangling them, and yet it is taking all your strength (5).
This quotation contains several interesting elements. First of all, Grace presents us with the image of herself that society most wants her to conform to: that of an obedient prisoner. Yet,
Grace’s overhearing skills undermine this role. This quality already reveals part of her deceptive character: her lack of obedience. Even more so, she adds that she is being quiet and obedient in order to be set free, which differs from our image of the repentant prisoner.
Indeed, from the very first page of the novel, Grace displays a quality to mimic what society expects her to be. Moreover, the end of the quote underlines the instability of her condition: she strives to appear different. She wants to give the impression that she is still hanging on to the bridge – to society – while in fact, she has already fallen over – lost her place.
Grace goes on describing her memories of – or daydreaming about – Nancy’s murder, of which she presents an altered version, which focuses on her wish for a different outcome
(6). At this point, the reader starts believing in Grace’s feelings of guilt; yet, the chapter’s last sentence generates a totally different impression: “This is what I told Dr. Jordan, when we came to that part of the story” (6). Through this last comment, Atwood skilfully introduces into the reader’s mind the idea that Grace’s version of the facts might as well prove but another fictive, manipulative account, due to her alienated condition.
In the second chapter, Grace is further presented as a deceiver, having tried to escape under the name of Mary Whitney (13). She further denies any implication in the murders (14), while wearing the victim’s dress (15). Chapter three, written in the first person again, provides
367 the reader with a more thorough depiction of Grace’s character. Grace takes pride of her notoriety as a murderess. She stands out as a sensitive, educated person whose reflection on her condition defies simplistic definitions (22). Grace, dusting the mirror, suddenly observes her reflection. Apart from the Lacanian implications of the passage, Grace’s thoughts offer a summary of the diverse opinions about Atwood’s protagonist: Grace is at once a demon, a victim, an ignorant girl, an animal-lover, a handsome woman, a thief, a smart person, a quarrelsome being, and so on. This multiplicity of characteristics makes it difficult for Grace
– and for the reader – to know who she really is. As she says: “I am cunning and devious, (…)
I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?” (23). She further adds that making her appear as an idiot, her lawyer’s idea, saved her life. Deception has contributed to Grace’s survival. Yet, she will have to get rid of her deceptive strategies in order to become aware of her own hybridity.
Grace further demonstrates her intelligence by showing a critical attitude towards her lawyer’s tactics. She ironically concludes: “I wonder if he ever believed a word he said” (23).
Grace further reports the ladies’ comments on her: she appears as “a wonderful seamstress, quite deft and accomplished,” yet, as someone who “talks to herself and sings out loud in a most peculiar manner” (24). This description befits the two main kinds of behaviour enacted by Grace in her mimicry process. Grace’s rendering of her conversation with the Governor’s two young daughters further bears this out:
Miss Lydia tells me I am a romantic figure; but then, the two of them are so young they hardly know what they are saying. Sometimes they pry and tease; they say, Grace, why don’t you ever smile or laugh (…) But if I laughed out loud I might not be able to stop; and also it would spoil their romantic notion of me (25).
Clearly Grace consciously projects a certain image of herself, concealing the aspect of her personality which would not be accepted by society. She restates this opinion in another
368 darker, more frightening remark: “There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again” (26).
Grace’s deceptive behaviour further develops in relation to the Governor’s wife’s scrapbook. While having publicly repented, Grace admits her interest in newspaper articles directly concerning her deeds. She claims that these articles lie when they refer to her as illiterate. On the contrary, she argues she has a clear understanding of society’s real concern: discovering the truth about her relationship with McDermott (27). This shows that Grace, far from being an idiot, is conscious of society’s manipulation of truth and would be ready to resort to the same kind of strategies. Further, she understands the stereotypes of her time, reflecting on the difference between man and woman as far as age is concerned: while Dr.
Jordan and herself are approximately the same age, she regards him as a young man, whereas she already considers herself an old woman (37).
The details which Grace provides about her captivity indicate that she quickly learnt how to mimic certain kinds of behaviour, more likely to keep her out of trouble. For instance, she comments: “You can have your own thoughts then, but if you laugh you must pretend you are coughing or choking; choking is better, if choking they hit you on the back, but if coughing they have the doctor” (62). This example clearly demonstrates that deception determines Grace’s survival strategy. The sections of chapter five devoted to Grace’s arrival in Canada also mention the necessity for her to lie in order to survive: from the very start,
Grace had to lie about her age in order to get a job (127). Much later in the novel, when Grace must narrate the murders to Dr. Jordan, she seems to remember the events accurately and to keep some of them to herself:
369 What should I tell Dr. Jordan about this day? Because now we are almost there. I can remember what I said when arrested, and what Mr. MacKenzie the lawyer said I should say, and what I did not say even to him; and what I said at the trial, and what I said afterwards, which was different as well. And what McDermott said I said, and what the others said I must have said (…) (295)
This quote indicates that Grace has been highly influenced by people around her, be it her lawyer or public opinion. To a large extent, she said what people expected or wanted her to say. Once again, such a behaviour deceives those in power by providing them with a satisfying, acceptable version of reality. The deceptive strategy constitutes the heroine’s way of survival in a society in which she cannot find her place. After that quotation, the reader discovers the essential part of Grace’s story in lyrical, dream-like passages. Such episodes reflect the multiplicity of truth and tend to give credence to Grace’s version: she claims she fell unconscious because someone else had taken possession of her (297). Grace sticks to that version of the facts, which the subsequent session of hypnotism somehow confirms. Of this episode, one does not know whether it belongs to the realm of fantasy or to reality. Yet, Grace herself, in the last chapter, comments on the Spiritualists, uttering her own scepticism on the subject: “I fear there is a great deal of cheating and deception” (455). The presence of
Jeremiah the Peddler as the hypnotist should also induce the reader to regard the whole scene as an example of Grace’s deceptive talents.
At the very end of the novel, Grace is still involved in a mimicry process, because she mentions the fact that she and her husband had to make up a story about their marriage and could not, of course, tell people the truth about Grace’s past. Yet, the final image of the quilt uniting pieces of cloth from important moments and people in her life also suggests that Grace has acknowledged her past – be it that of an innocent victim, or that of a heartless murderess.
370 3. Deceptive Magic Realism
Grace is at times so much taken in by her deceptive attitude that she no longer clearly knows who she is. These moments of delirium display a grotesque quality, typical of the magic realist atmosphere, in which fantasy and reality coexist for a moment. Indeed, when in a fit of madness, the unbearable character of Grace’s situation most strikingly comes to light. These moments of grotesque magic realism emphasise the impossibility for Grace to conform to social demands and point to the necessity for her to develop a position of her own, as a hybrid person. The uncanniness of these moments undoubtedly demonstrates the impossibility for
Grace, as a colonised subject, to develop an independent personality. Thereby, such moments help convey the postcolonial implications of Atwood’s Alias Grace.
The grotesque, the supernatural, the uncanny clearly appear every time Grace lets her imagination run free. The first of these moments takes place when Grace recalls Nancy just after the murder. In this daydreaming, Grace imagines Nancy smiling, her face hidden in blood and hair (6). The grotesque character of this vision – mixing the images of the dead and the living Nancy – as well as the abrupt transition to the description of the prison cell with its threatening male figure, produce a mixture of imagination and reality, symptomatic of
Grace’s instability, of her hybrid condition.
Magic further interferes in the ballad narrating the murders and their consequences.
This overtly melodramatic and romantic retelling of the facts contains the following allusion to Nancy and Kinnear’s everlasting love: “From Nancy’s grave there grew a rose,/ And from
Thomas Kinnear’s a vine,/ They grew so high they intertwined,/ And thus these two were joined” (15). The grotesque romantic character of the quote alludes to the social conventions
371 rejected by Grace. The end of the song, further emphasising this aspect, describes innocent
Grace admitted to paradise, because she agreed to repent and live up to society’s expectations.
Chapter three contains Atwood’s first comment on the Spiritualist Circle, who converses with the dead (22). The writer introduces this information, because it establishes the atmosphere of the time, such meetings being very popular among the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Further, it enables the supernatural to enter an until now mostly realistic depiction of Grace’s world.
The scenes involving doctors constitute particularly uncanny moments. Indeed, Grace has an extreme fear of doctors, which makes the reader believe that she might have been abused by one of them during her prison years (29). This might account for the way in which she likes to fool Dr. Jordan, who, after all, as a doctor of the mind, does not appear particularly threatening. Apart from Simon Jordan, Grace often mentions doctors with full bags of shining knives and needles (29). This frightening, surreal vision of doctors, which literally pervades the novel, recurs in section number four, when Grace admits having been abused by Dr. Bannerling (34).
Grace’s description of her life at the asylum provides us with more uncanny descriptions of madwomen calling the names of dead family members, seeing the ghosts of their dead children, or becoming religious fanatics (31). Such episodes clearly establish the atmosphere of distress in which those women have to survive. In relation to this context,
Grace experiences her first fit in which she claims that someone else committed the murder:
“I did nothing! It was her, it was her fault!” (32). Grace’s explanation for madness makes way for frightening scenes in which she might claim a double personality. Indeed she says: “when
372 you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in” (33). She later comments that her fit made the Governor’s wife afraid of her (64), which can be interpreted as one more survival strategy.
Grace’s belief in superstition tends to stress her innocence and naive character. This allows the fantastic to enter the novel at several moments, such as the description of Grace and Mary’s game on All Hallows Eve, when the girls indulge in superstition. They throw the peel of their apple to discover the initial of the man whom they will marry. The episode assumes all its uncanny dimension later in the novel, when we discover that Grace will eventually marry Jamie Walsh, and that Mary will never find a husband since she will suffer a tragic death (166). Moreover, it emphasises the unusual destinies of the two girls and the frightful notion that these destinies may be written and impossible to alter. Right after this passage the reader is confronted to one of Grace’s dreams, in which she claims to see an unknown woman (167). This woman functions as a symbol of Grace’s hybridity: she represents Grace’s desperate quest for self-discovery. Grace expresses this desire to find her hybrid self soon after the magic realist moment devoted to superstition, as if this occurrence of magic in reality allowed her to perceive herself more fully.
Similarly, the events following Mary Whitney’s tragic death present this intrusion of magic into reality. Indeed, for the first time, Grace recalls having heard a strange voice, supposedly that of Mary, asking her to let her in. Grace wrongly interprets this utterance as the soul’s wish to exit the room, while later events rather suggest another interpretation: that of Mary Whitney taking possession of Grace. The crisis ends with Grace fainting and remaining unconscious for ten hours. When she finally wakes up, Grace significantly questions her own identity, another way of showing that she rejects her hybrid nature (178-
373 180). The episode of the voice and the fainting acquire a capital role in the plot: the heroine actually claims that someone took possession of her soul when committing the murders. This would explain why she cannot remember anything. Once again, magic enters the plot at a crucial time of the heroine’s development, i.e. when circumstances bring Grace to make a decision, leave her situation, and continue on her quest. Magic recurs in the next chapter, when Jeremiah confides in Grace that “he’d seen death in Mary’s face” (197), yet another uncanny moment when superstition enters the realm of reality.
Another episode during which Grace hears voices happens some time before the murder. During a storm – which adds to the gloomy character of the event – Grace suddenly hears a voice whispering “it cannot be” (279), referring to the possibility of a marriage between Nancy and Mr Kinnear due to Nancy’s pregnancy. As usual, the fit ends with
Grace’s fainting. The atmosphere of magic realism lingers on in the next sequence which describes one of Grace’s dreams: Grace lies in a man’s arms and seems to enjoy this closeness, when she suddenly becomes aware of the presence of Death, in the form of a rider
(280). The reader will later understand that the man is McDermott and that the dream functions as a warning addressed to Grace. The whole dream seems to happen on the edge of reality and once again, this magic realist moment draws the reader’s attention to a major event in the novel, i.e. the murders and their consequence (Grace’s flight with McDermott).
Furthermore, magic realism pervades one of the most significant episodes of the novel.
In order to discover the truth about the murders, Dr. DuPont wants Grace to attend a session of hypnotism. When introduced to the assembly, Grace recognises DuPont as Jeremiah the
Peddler and agrees to be hypnotised, in spite of Dr. Jordan’s reluctance. From then on, the novel will constantly oscillate between factual accounts and uncanny descriptions of Grace’s
374 dreams and hallucinations, such as Mary Whitney’s last visit (312) and the recurrent image of
Nancy with blood running down her face and hair (313-314). The magic realist quality of these moments constitutes the very enigma of Grace: she claims having committed the murders in a dream, while the dream actually turned out to be true (314). Indeed, magic realist moments occur when two irreconcilable events temporarily coexist, as do Grace’s guilt and claims of innocence.
Grace’s ominous vision of a dark, empty sky, soon after the murders, also bears magic realist undertones (335). It suggests the impossibility for Grace to be forgiven and stresses the horrible nature of her deed. Grace’s account of her flight with McDermott records several moments at which Grace does not seem to remember what she had previously said or promised. Doubts subsist because of McDermott’s own reputation as a liar; yet, he repeatedly pretends that Grace intended to have sexual intercourse with him, while she seems to regard him as a madman (335). Indeed, such an episode comforts the reader in thinking that Grace might possess a double personality.
As to the climax of the novel, which consists in Grace being hypnotised, it is equally pervaded by a magic realist atmosphere. The vision of Grace, walking as a sleepwalker – “as if blind, but her eyes are wide open” (396) deeply impresses Dr. Jordan, who expected trickery and deception (395). The frequent comparison between Grace’s head, covered with a light grey veil, and a shroud adds to the uncanny character of the scene. Dr. DuPont – whose name means “bridge” and refers to the crossing between different realms of reality – then offers Grace to travel back into the past. The scene becomes utterly grotesque, i.e. unbelievably overdone, interrupted by heavy knocks, suggesting the intervention of a spirit.
At this point, Dr. Jordan, totally taken aback by Grace’s behaviour, still thinks he is being
375 deceived. Grace becomes ironical, insulting even, and displays an unknown crude voice. She then confesses the murders in cold blood and with appalling cruelty, before claiming not to be
Grace, but Mary Whitney’s spirit. She adds that Grace was not conscious at the time of the murders, which totally convinces Dr. Jordan of Grace’s innocence and of the existence of another personality within her (398-403). The voice further admits having driven Grace mad in the asylum. When awakening, Grace declares having no recollection of the events: she feels as if she had been sleeping and dreaming of her mother, who is finally at peace. This dream could be interpreted as a sign that the session of hypnotism has had a soothing, cathartic effect on Grace, because unconsciously, she was brought to face her own hybridity.
The passage is followed by the expression of different, diverging opinions on the nature of the events, some characters interpreting them as a clear case of possession (Reverend Verringer), others as a form of psychological illness (DuPont and Jordan), and others still as a perfect case of deception (Bannerling in chapter fourteen). Truth will, in fact, never be revealed.
4. Two Trickster Figures: Grace Marks and Jeremiah the Peddler
Two characters in particular, namely Grace Marks herself and Jeremiah the Peddler, function as alter-egos and alternatively embody the trickster figure in the novel. Grace is constantly tricking people around her, that she has built up a false self in order to find an – albeit temporary and unbalanced – place in patriarchal nineteenth-century Canadian society. I also contend, from their first encounter onwards, that Grace acknowledges Jeremiah as “one of her kind”, an equally deceptive character who functions as an alter-ego for her, as a secondary trickster figure who will help her progress on her quest for hybridity.
376 A first look at chapter titles reveals striking elements which can be associated to the trickster figure : first of all, the fact that the first title contains the word “edge”, the trickster having often been described as a character on the edge, on the margin of society. Such is equally the case for Grace as a convicted murderess and for Jeremiah as a homeless vagabond. Some other titles significantly refer to secret, even esoteric knowledge (“Secret
Drawer”, “Pandora’s Box”, for instance). The titles also contain the names of animals which, like the trickster, are reputed to be cunning, such as the fox or the snake. Finally, the last title
“The Tree of Paradise,” can be regarded as an allusion to the trickster’s half human, half divine nature, a hybrid nature which parallels Grace’s situation as well.
Apart from the many instances in which Grace’s tricks the world into believing that she is either a repentant convict or a potential lunatic, Grace fully functions as a trickster in her relationship with Dr. Simon Jordan. Throughout the novel, the reader often has the impression that she is fooling him. Dr. Jordan first appears in chapter three, at the end of section three (29). The feelings of fear which he arouses in Grace account for her subsequent use of her most efficient tricks. Moreover, Dr. Jordan first appears just after an allusion to
Jeremiah the Peddler, which shows that Atwood has literally surrounded her major male character with trickster figures.
From the very beginning of his visits to her, Grace tricks Jordan: she does not trust him and decides to act as an idiot, as shown in the examples below:
And he looks at me, to see if I understand. I know it is the Book of Job, before Job gets the boils and running sores, and the whirlwinds. It’s what Satan says to God. He must mean that he has come to test me. (…)
377 But I don’t say this. I look at him stupidly. I have a good stupid look which I have practised (38).
I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. (…) Aren’t you going to eat it, he says. No, not yet, I say. Why not, he says. Because then it would be gone, I say. The truth is I don’t want him watching me while I eat. I don’t want him to see my hunger. (…) He gives his one laugh. Can you tell me what it is, he says. (…) An apple, I say. He must think I am simple; or else it’s a trick of some sort; or else he is mad and that is why they locked the door – they’ve locked me into this room with a madman. (…) What does Apple make you think of? he says. (…) I give my stupid look. Apple pie, I say. (…) And is there any kind of apple you should not eat? he says. A rotten one, I suppose, I say. (…) The apple of the Tree of Knowledge, is what he means. Good and evil. Any child could guess it. But I will not oblige. I go back to my stupid look (39-40).
Many elements can be inferred from these two excerpts. From the first one, we can say that
Grace refuses to take part in Dr. Jordan’s game. She deliberately adopts the attitude of an illiterate woman, so as to reveal as little as possible about herself. She has often used this strategy, probably with other doctors, because she adds that she has practised that stupid look of hers. The second example is even more blatant: throughout the whole dialogue, Grace voluntarily negates the symbolic content of the discussion and takes everything at its face value. She also mentions that she refuses to show the doctor her weaknesses, namely that she is hungry and thirsty, and demonstrates that she controls the situation. The dialogue becomes thoroughly ironic when she assumes that this doctor conceals either a trickster or a madman, attributing her own roles to him. This comment functions as an ironic metafictional intervention on Atwood’s part. Further, both excerpts are concerned with the problem of good
378 and evil. In the first one, Dr. Jordan clearly embodies Satan, while Grace would metaphorically play the part of God. In this respect, we should keep in mind that the trickster figure has often been associated with the divine. The second part alludes to the Tree of
Paradise. Here again, Dr. Jordan offers Grace the apple, which turns Grace into a victim,
Jordan being the embodiment of evil. This inversion clearly reveals Atwood’s scheme: the author wants us to feel sympathy for Grace and presents her as an intelligent woman, threatened by yet another doctor. Once again, Grace’s deception finds a parallel in Atwood’s manipulation of the reader. It should also be mentioned that Jeremiah the Peddler makes a brief apparition between these two excerpts, indicating that we are once again in the realm of the trickster.
Regarding the murders themselves, Grace uses a well-known trick, frequently observed among Atwoodian heroines, namely the loss of memory. After giving stupid answers to Jordan’s questions, Grace simply tells him to look for more information in the newspapers, because she herself has forgotten all about the events (41). Another sentence in the dialogue implies that Grace enjoys tricking Dr. Jordan. Indeed, she even goes so far as mentioning that she might be lying:
Perhaps I will tell you lies, I say. He doesn’t say, Grace what a wicked suggestion, you have a sinful imagination. He says, Perhaps you will tell lies without meaning to, and perhaps you will tell them deliberately. Perhaps you are a liar. I look at him. There are those who have said I am one, I say. We will just have to take that chance, he says (41).
At this point, Dr. Jordan explicitly agrees to play by Grace’s rules. Indeed, he clearly states that he is ready to work with Grace in spite of her deceptive behaviour. This attitude will certainly influence Grace positively, although she only begins her quest and fails to admit
379 this. She then goes on dispensing as little information as possible. Indeed, she describes her subsequent sessions with Dr. Jordan as follows: “at the beginning of each talk he asks me what I think about this thing he has brought, and I say something about it just to keep him happy, and he writes it down” (66). Yet, the interviews gradually take on a more intimate tone when both characters mention their mother (68). Right after this passage, Grace indicates her growing trust in Jordan when she admits feeling as if he were “drawing on her skin” (69).
Still, she remains a trickster because she stresses the importance for her to avoid being “torn open” (69): she remains on the defensive. On several occasions, she restates her refusal to reveal all about herself, such as in chapter six: “I should not speak to him so freely, and decide I will not” (161). In chapter seven, she pretends not to remember where she stopped telling her story, in order to check on Jordan’s attention and interest (197). And further: “But I do not say any of this to Dr. Jordan. And so forth, I say firmly, because And so forth is all he is entitled to. Just because he pesters me to know everything is no reason for me to tell him”
(216), which clearly shows that Grace may at times be intentionally mischievous. However, she can also prove benevolent, although still deceiving, when she decides to give information out of pity for her “forlorn” doctor: “as I suspected that not all was going well with him, I did not say that I could not remember. Instead I said that I had indeed had a dream” (242). Yet, in her subsequent description of the so-called dream, Grace confides in the reader that she does not reveal the whole truth, and that the flowers which she describes were nothing else than patches of blood on Nancy’s dress! Later in the chapter, she adds that she will try to make her story interesting and rich in incidents (247), which completely differs from Dr. Jordan’s expectations. There, the reader cannot help thinking that Grace (and Atwood) must be fooling everybody, including himself, in pretending to act that way innocently. Indeed, at this point,
Grace comes to lose her innocence, realising that Nancy is no less than Kinnear’s mistress.
Grace admits being ashamed of her innocence, of having been blind and foolish (255), which
380 brings the reader to the conclusion that she has lost her innocence when she tells Dr. Jordan the “whole” story.
Jordan, for his part, realises Grace’s unreliability, for instance when he mentions to
Reverend Verringer, who believes in her innocence: “Grace appears to have told one story at the inquest, another one at the trial, and after her death sentence had been commuted, yet a third” (78). Verringer emphasises her loss of memory. Jordan eventually comes to the conclusion that it will be necessary to try and restore Grace’s missing memory through suggestion (84). Grace, for her part, will voluntarily resist the process and try to preserve some of her secrets. This is the case for her dreams, of which she says: “I have little enough of my own, no belongings, no possessions, no privacy to speak of, and I need to keep something for myself” (101). She then indulges in telling Dr. Jordan about her life, specifying that the lawyers and journalists all too gladly distorted it. She feels particularly reluctant to talk about her only friend Mary Whitney, whose name she usurped during her escape with McDermott.
Grace is further depicted as a trickster in prison when, faced with doctors, she experiences a fit. The keepers then say to her: “That’s enough of your tricks Grace, you just wanted the attention” (30). Following this, Grace comments on how easy it is to trick people in order to be regarded as mad: for instance, she mentions the case of a woman who pretends to be mad to remain in the asylum, far away from her husband’s abuse, and of another who feigns madness in order to have a home in winter times (31). Moreover, at the asylum, Grace decides to opt for a deceptive attitude. When she realises that people come to look at her as if she were an animal in a zoo, she says: “At last I stopped talking altogether” (32), and comments ironically on the gentlemen and doctors who made a mistake in judging her mad.
381 Dr. Bannerling insists on Grace’s deceptiveness too, when he calls her “a devious dissembler” (34) and further, in his letter to Dr. Jordan, “a sham”, “attempting to pull the wool over my eyes”, “an accomplished actress and a most practised liar”, who “managed to deceive not only the worthy Mrs. Moodie, (…) but also several of my own colleagues” (71).
Bannerling will stick to this opinion until the end, since he restates it in reply to Reverend
Verringer’s request for Grace’s pardon. Bannerling then calls Grace a “cunning woman”, violently criticises hypnotic trance, and qualifies Moodie’s testimonies as fairy tales (434-
435).
Later in the story, when she is living at Mr. Kinnear’s, Grace comments on her freedom to use her imagination as she pleases and refers to a biblical episode to account for her tendency to lie. She talks of “the deceptions and disguises that were practised, which God did not mind at all but the contrary” (238). Clearly, Grace’s life at Kinnear’s residence has brought about a change in her character which causes her to resort to deception in order to survive. Grace is gradually moving away from reality, indulging in fantasies that make life bearable and concealing things in order not to get in trouble with Nancy. As a reader, we are of course impressed by Grace’s growing unreliability and do not know whether we can still give credence to her allegations. Indeed, the very structure of the novel is based on Grace’s unreliability, on her numerous discordant versions of what happened at Mr Kinnear’s, and on her misleading attempts at a reconstruction of reality.
In order to discover the truth about Grace’s story, Dr. Jordan promises to believe whatever she will tell him (307), which causes Grace to give him a detailed account of what happened on the day of the event. She narrates the dream which she had that night about Mary
Whitney letting a firefly escape from a tumbler (312). Grace interpreted this as Mary’s soul
382 finding its way to heaven; yet, we immediately suspect another alteration of Grace’s own personality and are strengthened in our suspicions in the next passage, which echoes the magic realist description of a blood-stained Nancy in the first pages of the novel (313). Grace eventually gives Dr. Jordan her own interpretation of the facts: she believes that the murders belonged to a dream, later turning into reality. On this subject, Grace comments: “I know these are odd thoughts to confess to, Sir, but I will not lie and conceal them, as I could easily do, having never told this to anyone before” (315). In this excerpt, Grace clearly admits her ability to deceive people and commits herself to stop tricking Dr. Jordan. Whether she may be trusted or not remains for the reader to decide. Grace’s subsequent recollection of the facts remains fragmented and incomplete (317). Later on, Dr. Jordan doubts to be able to discover the truth. For the first time, he acknowledges the fact that Grace may be a trickster and may deliberately conceal things. As he puts it : “She’s told him a great deal; but she’s told him only what she’s chosen to tell. What he wants is what she refuses to tell; what she chooses perhaps not even to know. Knowledge of guilt, or else of innocence: either could be concealed” (322). Indeed, Grace could be amnesiac, guilty, or simply insane. In chapter eleven, Dr. Jordan comes to the conclusion that his whole analysis consists in a battle of will between Grace and himself, and that she, consciously or not, is using all her strength to resist his intrusion (362). Later, when Grace is about to be hypnotised, she even confesses, as regards her memory: “I was not at all sure I wanted to have it back” (382). She reflects that one should not only remember the good things in life, otherwise this would be a form of deception too (382).
When visiting places mentioned by Grace about her past, when facing the grave of
Mary Whitney (387), Dr. Jordan for a second feels convinced of Grace’s innocence. Yet, he readily discards this thought and has to admit that Grace keeps her secret. He also gradually
383 realises that he is under her spell (389). From the comments of her lawyer to Dr. Jordan, we soon come to understand that the former did not believe in Grace’s innocence – “she was guilty as sin” (378), he says – she simply tricked the audience. Indeed, the lawyer also mentions interesting thoughts about the value of Grace’s testimony. He claims that deception constitutes a strategy, not an aim and compares Grace to Sheherazade. He then concludes that
Grace tells what she needs to tell in order to reach her goal (377). Indeed, Grace’s main goal is not to lead Dr. Jordan astray, but to tell her story to someone who will accept it as a hybrid story, on the edge between reality and fantasy. This story constitutes all that Grace has to offer, considering her reluctance to admit what hides behind the story, namely her own hybrid nature.
Finally, the end of the novel acknowledges Grace’s deceptive character. When sewing her own quilt, Grace mentions that she is “changing the pattern a little” to suit her own ideas
(459), as she has been doing during the whole story. The end suggests that Grace has integrated the evil part of her personality, which confirms that she had been acting as a deceiver from the start.
The character of Jeremiah the Peddler first appears in the ballad retelling the murders and their consequences. The peddler significantly appears right after Thomas Kinnear’s assassination and is chased away by Grace, a metaphorical way of expressing that Grace, at this stage of the life, cannot face her hybrid condition yet. In the next chapter, Jeremiah recurs in relation to the murders. Indeed, Grace says that McDermott was arrested wearing a shirt bought from the peddler. She adds: “Jeremiah always wished me luck, but he did not wish any to James McDermott” (28). Thereby Grace acknowledges her kinship to the peddler and his benevolence towards her. Each time, Jeremiah will be referred to as a friendly character who
384 accompanies Grace on her journey. Grace narrates her first encounter with Jeremiah in chapter six. The emphasis lies on Jeremiah’s hybrid nature, “a Yankee with an Italian father”
(154), and on his seduction tricks, which remind us of the traditional characteristics of the trickster as a character endowed with a huge sexual appetite. Jeremiah further imitates someone, which constitutes another form of deception. Likewise, he tells fortunes (155), which has to do with the Devil, a figure traditional tricksters supposedly embody. Most importantly, before leaving, the peddler strangely certifies to Grace: “You are one of us”
(155), which, according to Grace, means that she is equally homeless, although this can also be an acknowledgement of her trickster-like qualities. Jeremiah, in chapter seven, alludes to his connection with the supernatural when he tells Grace that he might have predicted Mary’s death (197). Yet, at that time, Grace does not believe him. The trickster figure will from then on be more and more present. Indeed, Grace meets him on her way to the Kinnear residence.
On this occasion, Jeremiah once again proves to be of salutary help for Grace by delivering her from nasty company (206-207). When Grace later meets him at Mr. Kinnear’s, Jeremiah strikes the reader with his supernatural divining powers: he seems to know all that happened to Mary Whitney and to be able to read Grace’s thoughts. When Grace tells him the whole truth about Mary’s death, he seems to know about it too. Atwood once again stresses
Jeremiah’s capacity to literally cross boundaries (he refers to a recent trip to the States) and to his living on the edge of society and its legal system (“Laws are made to be broken”). He then advises Grace to follow him and leave this dangerous place. He offers to teach her medical clairvoyance, i.e. acknowledges her as a fellow trickster. When Grace argues that this would be a form of deception, he replies that deception out of human kindness is totally acceptable, avowing his trickster-like nature. Grace feels truly tempted to follow Jeremiah, but the influence of patriarchal values still dominates her, since she cannot accept to do so without
385 being his wife. Marriage, of course, looks completely impossible given Jeremiah’s marginal social position (265-268).
When she later recognises Jeremiah under the guise of hypnosis specialist Dr. DuPont,
Grace admires Jeremiah for his capacity to perform “a conjuring trick” (306) and agrees to collaborate with him and be hypnotised. This confirms that the figure of Jeremiah the Peddler appears each time that major information is released or whenever Grace needs genuine help.
When Grace’s trial begins, she regrets Jeremiah’s absence (360).
Some years after Dr. Jordan’s departure, Grace addresses Jeremiah a letter, in which she expresses her genuine feeling of friendship for him and her desire to see him again. She claims to have recognised him in spite of his disguise on a poster for a divining show. She further mentions that no one wants to reveal to her what happened during the session of hypnotism, so that she still does not know anything about her condition (425). She wishes to know whether he told her the truth when he read her future in her hand, which stresses her naive character, but may also be ironical, knowing that a trickster as Jeremiah would never disclose the truth, and neither would she. The character of Jeremiah further remains mysterious because Grace mentions having received a bone button from him, but without any signature to confirm that. This object functions as a sign to tell Grace that the trickster is still present, and, as a result, that her quest has not come to an end yet. Grace herself alludes to the double meaning of the button: it both serves to close or to open something – her memory perhaps – but she remains at a loss as to what to do. Ironically, she also mentions Dr. Jordan’s habit of bringing her objects to help recover her memory, which clearly establishes the link with the button (428).
386 In the last chapter of the book, after a clear allusion to the deceptiveness of mediums of all sorts, Grace mentions her last encounter with Jeremiah the Peddler. She confesses concealing the meeting to her husband, in order not to upset him. Yet, we soon understand that she has now settled in her marital life and no longer wishes to run away. However, when
Jeremiah recognises her and makes a sign to her, it reassesses their kinship. It identifies them both as similar trickster figures, as deceivers.
5. Grace’s Quest for Hybridity
The titles of the chapters in Alias Grace require careful analysis in relation to the development of the quest pattern in the novel. Indeed, by entitling her first chapter “Jagged Edge”,
Atwood’s intention was to highlight her heroine’s marginal condition in society, a position which causes Grace to undertake a quest for her place as a hybrid self in society. This quest will not necessarily find its conclusion in Canadian society, since, at the end of the story, the protagonist suffers another exile and starts out on a new life in the United States. In this first chapter, the reader already encounters Grace and notices her instability: standing on the edge of a bridge, apparently about to fall over, Grace tells us she already fell over a long time ago.
The second chapter, entitled “Rocky Road”, suggests the beginning of Grace’s journey, which might be rendered difficult by the presence of numerous obstacles. The graphic representation of the quilt pattern, namely a cross, can be regarded as an allusion to
Grace’s own hybrid situation, at the crossroads between two realms. Chapter three introduces an important element of the quest pattern: it places emphasis on the heroine’s isolation, a necessary condition for her to engage on her quest. Indeed, she must be free from familial or social influences. The title of the chapter, “Puss in the Corner,” stresses this isolation, while
387 simultaneously introducing an ambivalent image of the heroine: hiding in a corner, either out of fear, or as an animal waiting for its prey. The immediately following quotation from
Moodie, which depicts Grace both as a hopeless figure and as a cunning, furtive creature (19), confirms this interpretation. The first section of this chapter (section 3) contains the first allusion to Grace’s state of exile. Indeed, Grace mentions “the long sad journey across the ocean” (21-22). In so doing, she reveals that she emigrated to Canada, i.e. the exiled condition which she suffers from: the journey is univocally qualified as “sad”, negative. This absence of roots leading to Grace’s feeling of alienation functions as the trigger of her quest. Chapter three, in alluding for the first time to Grace’s “otherness”, confirms the necessity of the quest.
Grace further states that she has been suffering from her condition for a long time: “When I was younger I used to think that if I could hug myself enough I could make myself smaller, because there was never enough room for me, at home or anywhere, but if I was smaller then
I would fit in” (33). This passage perfectly conveys Grace’s feelings of uneasiness and inadequacy, which constitute the departure point of her quest. The image of the corner is echoed further in the novel in section four, when Grace imagines that she has been forgotten in her cell, will starve to death. Years later, someone will find her bones and sweep them into the corner of the room (35), another image symbolising Grace’s utter feeling of isolation and loneliness.
Chapter four, “Young Man’s Fancy,” clearly moves on to the second stage of Grace’s quest in focusing on Dr. Jordan, who will serve as a kind of guide on her journey. The title of the chapter refers to Dr. Jordan himself and to his sentimental adventures, as well as to his growing interest in Grace’s case. Chapter five and the following chapters constitute a flashback retelling Grace’s life before the murders. It depicts Grace’s fragmentation, referred to in the title, “Broken Dishes.” Moreover, it contains the first full description of the activity
388 of quilting, presented as a female occupation of primary importance. Atwood makes use of this passage to emphasise the symbolic function of quilting and its significance in female life.
Grace also mentions her own favourite quilt: the Tree of Paradise, which functions as the aim of her quest. Indeed, paradise can be regarded as a symbol of harmony, a feeling which hybrid
Grace is desperately lacking. I therefore chose to devote peculiar attention to the titles of the chapters, which all refer to quilting patterns, as indications of Grace’s progress in her quest.
The excerpt about quilts further alludes to Grace’s hybrid nature, when she claims that her own quilt will be different because made of contrasting colours : “mine would be an intertwined border, one light colour, one dark, the vine border they call it, vines twisted together” (98). The whole passage reveals highly symbolic significance. Grace equally mentions the existence of other, different patterns. Yet, when Dr. Jordan takes that opportunity to question Grace, about other, underground, uncanny facts she might mention, she once again refuses to take part in his game. In a later reference to quilts, Grace confuses the pattern “Attic Windows” with the words “Attic Widows” (162). This can be regarded as one more reference to the condition of women in the Canadian society of the time: indeed, the expression implies that women, once they have lost their husband, are relegated to the attic, i.e. lose their social status.
Another interesting aspect of the novel consists in Grace’s dreams, which are but another symbolic representation of her hybridity: Grace meets a peddler, i.e. a trickster figure who wants to sell her something, which means that he wishes to make her discover something about herself. Yet, such a discovery is not given for free, and Grace cannot afford it at the time. When she finally agrees to deal with him, she realises that she possesses a third hand, a symbol of her difference, of her hybrid nature (100-101). Further, frequent allusions to her
Irish origins, presented as a crime (103), refer to Grace’s hybridity. In section thirteen, Grace
389 describes her poor childhood in Ireland. The section ends on the family’s decision to emigrate to Canada, where free land is distributed (110). Grace expresses extreme unhappiness about this decision. She further recalls the voyage as the most awful event of her early life, which climaxes with the death of her mother. Grace’s first reaction to this death reads as follows: “it was not really my mother under there, it was another woman” (121), which demonstrates
Grace’s tendency to indulge in self-deception whenever events become too hard for her to bear. A recurring motif in relation to death is the image of the soul of the deceased which wants to escape through the open window, a motif linked to the character of Mary Whitney as well. The story goes on mentioning Grace’s settlement in Canada and emphasising the multicultural aspect of the place (124).
The next chapter, “Secret Drawer”, carries on with the flashback to Grace’s life before the murders. It concerns her time as a servant in Toronto and introduces the character of Mary
Whitney, Grace’s only friend. The word “secret” in the title could refer to Grace’s concealment of the truth in her discussions with Dr. Jordan, to Simon’s dream about his childhood, during which the secrets of adulthood were kept away from him, or to Mary
Whitney’s dreadful secret about her pregnancy. Grace’s admiration for her friend’s ideas and boldness can soon be noticed. Mary Whitney, a native-born Canadian, is clearly the kind of girl that Grace would like to become. This explains why the dreadfulness of Mary’s death shocks Grace so much. Mary was herself a hybrid person: “She claimed that her grandmother had been a Red Indian” (150), which means to Grace a fun-loving individual, who enjoys life.
Yet, Mary’s tragic death brings Grace to the conclusion that a happy life is not possible for those of her kind, for hybrid individuals. Therefore, the image of Mary Whitney’s soul will stick with Grace as long as her quest needs to be fulfilled. Chapter six further narrates Grace’s first encounter with Jeremiah the Peddler, which indicates that the quest has entered its third
390 stage, that of the trickster who will help the heroine on her quest. Chapter six ends on Grace’s thought: “And so the happiest time of my life was over and gone” (180), which indicates that the quest has become inevitable and that Grace must move on.
Chapter seven, “Snake Fence”, contains in its title both the idea of danger and evil, and that of an obstacle, which confirms that Grace’s quest is now moving forward. The quotes introducing the chapter cast a new light on Grace: the historical document for the first time focuses on the heroine’s innocence, while the poem by Christina Rossetti alludes to sad remembrances. This change of atmosphere in the style of quotation indicates that the quest is now evolving quickly. At the beginning of the chapter, Dr. Jordan provides a realistic explanation, giving his interpretation of Grace’s fainting as a fit of hysterics. He then meets
Reverend Verringer, one of Grace’s partisans, to discuss the value of fits, fainting, amnesia, superstition, somnambulism and haunting, which creates a distance between the present situation and the previous narration of the dramatic event of Mary’s death. It allows the reader to have another, more rational vision of the facts. Chapter seven further briefly alludes to
Mary’s burial, which however contains an interesting element: indeed, Grace mentions that she could not stop crying because this burial reminded her of her mother’s death. This moment constitutes the stage in the quest when the heroine has to confront parental figures. It announces the quest’s climax. Significantly, chapter seven contains another allusion to
Jeremiah the Peddler, who tells Grace that he could have predicted Mary’s death (197). Grace further struggles to find a stable job, a situation which echoes the hybrid subject’s difficulty to find its place in society. Moreover, the chapter contains several allusions to Grace’s naive character and to her innocence : indeed, she repeats that she would like, one day, to be able to sew quilts for herself and get married (218), and mentions that she could not bear killing an
391 animal (219). This emphasis on Grace’s innocence can be regarded as a hint to the reader that the murders may have another, more symbolic significance.
The next chapter, with the title “Fox and Geese”, stresses the possibility of a confrontation with enemies. In this chapter, Grace will have to face the malevolence of both
Nancy and McDermott. The fox, which is an animal renowned for its slyness, may be yet another embodiment of the trickster figure. The poem by Robert Browning as an introductory quote significantly features the words “mischief” and “trick”. Yet, at this point, the reader does not know whether evil is meant to allude to Grace or to her enemies. The end of the chapter alludes to the eminent character of the climax with the appearance of Jeremiah the
Peddler, who, though he remains benevolent to Grace, warns her against the danger of the place.
Chapter nine constitutes the climax of the novel, i.e. the murders themselves, as they are narrated by Grace to Dr. Jordan. The title, once again, can be regarded as a clear allusion to the main events in the chapter, the heart and the gizzard being both parts from animals associated with blood. The reader’s feeling of getting closer to the climax of Grace’s story is confirmed in a third person narration focusing on the character of Dr. Jordan: “at last they are approaching together the centre of Grace’s narrative. The are nearing the blank mystery, the area of erasure; they are entering the forest of amnesia, where things have lost their names”
(291). Indeed, Dr. Jordan thinks that he is about to discover Grace’s secret by forcing her to dive into her unconscious. As Atwood sums it up: “She may not know that she knows, but buried deep within her, the knowledge is there” (291). Yet, Dr. Jordan remains lost in the labyrinth of Grace’s deceptions. “He has been travelling blindly, whether forward he cannot say, without learning anything except that he has not yet learned anything, unless he counts
392 the extent of his own ignorance” (293). When Grace later wonders what she should actually tell Dr. Jordan about the facts, she remembers her trial as a moment when she was not allowed to speak. This reflection should be regarded as an expression of the colonial subject’s need for a voice, as such the aim of Grace’s quest. Indeed, Grace expresses her painful situation as follows: “I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out” (295).
These words express Grace’s wish to be able to give a voice to her hybrid self. Grace subsequently reveals her own version of the facts to Dr. Jordan. This constitutes a major step in her quest. However, the fact that she claims not to possess the truth about the events indicates that the quest still has to be completed, that the dive into the unconscious has not taken place yet. Indeed, Grace readily admits that the person she sees in the mirror does not resemble her at all, which shows that she gradually becomes aware of her hybrid nature.
Nevertheless, she immediately adds that she does not fancy that face, which indicates that she has not accepted the notion of hybridity.
Chapter ten, with its overtly romantic title, “The Lady of the Lake”, focuses on Grace and McDermott’s escape. Yet, we soon discover that the occasion is devoid of any romanticism. The title refers to a quilt pattern (340). Simultaneously, we witness Grace’s understanding of the pattern, which functions as a metaphor for her growing awareness of the necessity of her quest. Another detail signifies that Grace’s quest progresses: the passage in which she burns her clothes (333) functions as a purification symbol, which indicates that a crucial metamorphosis will take place. The same idea recurs when Grace mentions Jeremiah, who explains to her how to cross borders (341), what she is about to do physically and psychologically. At the end of section thirty-nine, Grace metaphorically expresses the same idea when she says:
393 And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind me, the footsteps I’d made as a child on the beaches and pathways of the land I’d left, and the footsteps I’d made on this side of the ocean, since coming here; all the traces of me, smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the black tarnish from the silver, or drawing your hand across dry sand (342).
This poetic description of Grace’s situation may be interpreted in different ways. The image of the erased footstep might infer that Grace will become someone else. However, the clear allusion to her native country and to her crossing of the ocean might as well refer to her state of exile, to her hybridity and to the negative way in which she has been experiencing it so far: indeed, Grace resembles the tarnish on silver, something one wishes to get rid of, or as dry sand, i.e. sterile material.
The chapter ends on a dream expressing Grace’s wish to find a home, while the next chapter, “Falling Timbers,” contradictorily alludes to the collapse of a construction. The chapter is devoted to the trial and the way in which it destroyed Grace’s confidence in justice
(354). Indeed, Grace feels shocked by the journalists’ distortion of the story (355), by people’s testimonies against her (356), by her lawyer’s decision to make up a more plausible story than that which she at first came up with (357), and by Moodie’s fictionalised vision of the murders (359).
The following pattern referred to, Solomon’s Temple, strikes us by its design: it looks like a series of interwoven squares. Apart from narrating the conclusion of the trial, it also mentions Dr. Jordan’s visit to the place of the murders. The pattern therefore indicates that there is more to the story than the reader may think, or that a square may be hiding another square, as Grace may be concealing another, altogether different personality. Moreover, a temple traditionally conceals knowledge and secrets of divine nature. The following mottoes
394 refer to Grace as a devilish woman and allude to the exploration of the unconscious. We thus experience the feeling of approaching Grace’s secret. This idea is reinforced by section forty- six, with its explanation of the choice of Grace’s first name, it being a reference to the well- known hymn Amazing Grace (379). Apart from the fact that the name itself alludes to salvation, it also mentions that someone blind finally sees, which brings Grace to comment that she would like to see – i.e. to discover the truth about herself. Further, it contains the word “maze”, undoubtedly alluding both to Grace’s abilities as a deceiver and to her confused state of mind.
The next chapter, entitled “Pandora’s Box”, clearly indicates that the reader has reached the moment when Grace might reveal her secret. Yet, one should keep in mind that the opening caused much misery, and that Grace’s dive into her unconscious might as well bring about more sufferings instead of a clear resolution. Indeed, Grace will remember nothing about that session of hypnotism, while Dr. Jordan will be so shaken that he decides to flee to Europe and abandon the case altogether, because it could bring his career to an end
(412). The first two quotes which introduce the chapter refer to communication with the spirits, which add even more mystery to the story (393). The third one, a poem by Emily
Dickinson, directly alludes to Grace’s alleged multiple personality, or, from a postcolonial point of view, to her hybridity (394).
The last chapter but one features a series of letters by different characters, meant to point to the multiplicity of possible interpretations of reality. The title of the chapter itself –
“The Letter X” – traditionally refers to the unknown, meaning that Grace’s mystery will not be solved. The quotations introducing the chapter illustrate the same idea: the first one, dating from 1863, refers to her condemnation, the second, from 1908, to her pardon. Finally, the
395 quote from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem suggests that the letters which we will read may contain some elements of proof.
“The Tree of Paradise,” the title of the last chapter, suggests that Grace discovers some elements of truth after all, or that she might at least find some sort of harmony. The last of the four introductory quotations proves the most important in this respect because it unexpectedly associates paradise with the imperfect (440), which would sustain our idea of a temporary state of harmony, brought about by Grace’s acknowledgement of her hybridity. In this chapter, Grace learns that her pardon has come through. She will be able to live freely in the
United States, where some unknown man will provide her with a home. She soon discovers this man to be Jamie Walsh, who wants to be forgiven for having sent her to jail. She agrees to marry him, aware of the limitation of her choices.
The end of the novel features the central metaphor of quilting. Grace mentions having two quilts in the house: a wheel of mystery, which can be understood as a reference to the mystery of her own life and being, and a Log Cabin, a symbol of her having found a home at last. Significantly, she adds that she has bought them from people moving West, i.e. from immigrants like herself (454). The very last section of the novel shows Grace sewing her own quilt. This part features three elements which should be carefully examined. The first is the quilt pattern, called the Tree of Paradise, which suggests that Grace might have found some harmony at last. She further reflects that the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life may be one and the same, such as good and evil, which might imply that she has accepted the hybridity of her own nature: she can be at once a simple girl and a cunning murderess. The second element consists in the differences that Grace voluntarily introduces in that quilt: the vines form a clear allusion to the victims’ graves, while the snakes function as a common
396 symbol for evil. Both details can therefore be interpreted as acknowledgements of guilt.
Third, Grace also chose to include pieces of cloth that symbolise important parts of her life and of her self: a piece of Mary Whitney’s petticoat, of her prison nightdress, and of Nancy’s floral dress. These can be interpreted as a sign that Grace has finally integrated the various aspects of her life: the murders which her unconscious allowed her to commit as Mary
Whitney, the fact that she was convicted and that she is a murderess, and her feelings of injustice towards society, epitomised in the character of Nancy. Each piece of cloth will be sewn to the other with red stitches referring to blood (459-460).
6. Quilting One’s Way Towards Self-Knowledge
In order to present my interpretation of the novel’s quest pattern in an even clearer way, this section will feature a graphic representation of the different chapters and of their meaning within the context of the quest novel.
397 Structure of the Quest Pattern in Alias Grace
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4
STAGE STAGE 1 2
marginality hybridity isolation guide journey F L Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 A S H STAGE STAGE B 3 4 A C exile – quilting danger confrontation ANTI-CLIMAX CLIMAX flight trial K trickster Mary’s death with mother trickster’s warning murders wish for a home collapse
Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15
STAGE 5
end of trial secret – hypnosis mystery hybridity Jordan’s quest CLIMAX
The scheme indicates that the novel starts on the usual first stage of a quest, which is the isolation process. Indeed, Grace is depicted from the start as a marginal being and allusions are made to the beginning of a journey. Chapter four introduces the second stage, i.e. the intervention of a guide, who will help the heroine during her quest, namely here Dr. Jordan.
Grace is then able to proceed on her quest, which subsequently takes the form of a long flashback, from her arrival in Canada as a child to her trial for murder. This flashback contains several important stages of the quest pattern: chapter five restates Grace’s hybrid nature as an unwilling immigrant and introduces the metaphor of quilting. It also features
Grace’s first encounter with the trickster figure, i.e. the third stage of the quest pattern as developed by Pratt. Later, right after Mary’s death, Grace reaches stage four, that of the confrontation with parental figures, in the form of her memories of her mother’s burial, which deeply moves her. From then on, Grace loses control on the events. In chapter eight, before the murders take place, she encounters the trickster again, who, in an anti-climactic scene, warns her against the dangers and offers her to escape. Grace refuses and consequently gets involved in the murders. The flashback then ends on her flight with McDermott, her wishes to have a home of her own, and her collapse after the trial. In chapter twelve, past and present intertwine since it narrates the end of the trial as well as Dr. Jordan’s investigation, introducing the idea that we might discover more about Grace. Stage five is reached when
Grace participates in a hypnotism session which, supposedly, causes her to dive into her unconscious and to reveal her secret. However, the result of this session is disappointing, because both the characters and the readers end up with the feeling that they have once again been deceived by Grace. Chapter fourteen expresses the fact that Grace remains a mystery.
This does not prevent the novel from ending on a positive note, Grace being presented as a free woman, who seems to have, albeit for a moment, accepted her hybridity.
***
399 A close look at the title of the chapters and their symbolic value of the previous analysis.
Indeed, each chapter bears the name of a quilt pattern, which evokes an aspect of the heroine’s quest. One might for instance recognise the various steps of the heroine’s inner journey in her needle work: the second chapter entitled “Rocky Road” aptly alludes to the obstacles the protagonist encounters when engaging on her quest. Chapter four, ‘Young
Man’s Fancy” directly points to Grace’s encounter with the doctor, who serves as a guide during part of her self-discovery. He therefore represents the second stage of the traditional quest pattern developed by Pratt, namely the “green-world guide or token.” In chapter six, the heroine is confronted to danger as her best friend Mary tragically loses her life. From then on,
Grace exhibits a double, treacherous nature, of which Mary embodies the dark side. The chapter entitled “Secret Fence,” symbolises Grace’s secret deviousness and her dangerous flirtations with the afterworld. This part of the book clearly examines Grace’s qualities as a trickster figure. In chapter seven, the heroine remembers her mother, thus accessing the fourth stage of the quest pattern, i.e. the confrontation with parental figures. Of utmost importance, this stage leads to the novel’s climactic murder scenes. For this reason, chapter seven and the following sections display titles alluding to Grace’s trickster nature: the titles of the subsequent chapters mention a snake and a fox – both famous for their slyness. Finally, chapter thirteen, which initiates the heroine’s acceptance of her hybrid nature, is symptomatically entitled “Pandora’s Box,” thus alluding to the heroine’s moment of epiphany.
Further, the titles of the chapters point to the main theme of the heroine’s quest, namely the discovery of hybridity. Indeed, a title such as “Jagged Edge,” for the first chapter clearly points to the marginality of Atwood’s heroine. “Puss in The Corner,” as name for the third section alludes to Grace’s alienation, as she stands in a corner of her cell. Finally, the
400 last chapter, “The Tree of Paradise,” aptly conveys the idea that the protagonist has reached – though only temporarily – a certain balance by accepting her “otherness.” She mentions possessing two quilts: a “Wheel of Mystery,” symbol of her strange destiny, and a “Log
Cabin,” (454) representing the quiet home she has found. Her last creative quilt and her deviation from the classical pattern indicate that Grace is now ready to be openly different.
Indeed, she confesses to the reader that her own “Tree of Paradise” is slightly different because she has included small snakes in the pattern. She then adds: “without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing” (460), a sentence which might be interpreted both an acknowledgement of guilt and as a disclosure of her trickster-like nature.
Grace Marks strikes the reader as one of Atwood’s most fully accomplished deceiver.
Apart from The Robber Bride, in which Zenia’s death provided a sense of closure, most
Atwoodian novels end on an ambivalent notes casting doubts on the heroine’s ability to benefit from her experience. Alias Grace introduces a change in that pattern. Indeed, whereas the novel starts in a gloomy, depressing atmosphere, it closes on a more positive note, suggesting that the protagonist has discovered a way of surviving. Grace’s act of sewing a new, hybrid quilt, points to a clear acknowledgement of her hybrid self. Further, her last, friendly allusion to Jeremiah the Peddler, implies that Grace has also accepted the evil that lies in each of us. For the first time, Atwood presents us with a fully developed, mature trickster character, who does not only – as do Cordelia and Zenia – embody evil. Iris Chase, the narrator of Atwood’s next novel, The Blind Assassin, also displays this mixture of positive and negative trickster-like qualities.
401 Chapter 7. The Blind Assassin’s Criminal Deception
And when did the one become the
other? Where was the threshold,
between the inner world and the
outer one? We each move
unthinkingly through this gateway
every day, we use the passwords of
grammar – I say, you say, he and she
say, it, on the other hand, does not
say – paying for the privilege of
sanity with common coin, with
meanings we’ve agreed on. (537)
The Blind Assassin certainly qualifies as one of Atwood’s most complex novels. Its length and intricate structure forces the reader to experience it as a puzzle which slowly takes shape, to reveal the existence of not one, but several “blind assassins.” At a first level, the novel primarily deals with the life story of an old woman, Iris Chase. Desperately hoping to re- establish contact with her granddaughter, Sabrina, Iris writes the story of her life.
Simultaneously, she portrays her fragile and eccentric sister, Laura, whom she presents as the author of the novel entitled “The Blind Assassin,” hereafter referred to in inverted commas for the sake of convenience in order to distinguish it from Atwood’s published novel. The narrative is regularly interrupted by passages of this work of fiction. It also contains newspaper clippings which provide the reader with an external view of Iris’s social life. At one point, facts and fiction intertwine, as the reader comes to understand that “The Blind
Assassin” was not written by Laura, but by Iris herself. The scandalous love affair depicted in
402 the book also turns out to be that of Iris. Finally, within the fictional structure of “The Blind
Assassin,” another work of fiction is mentioned. Indeed, as she narrates her encounters with her mysterious lover, Iris retells her lover’s science fiction story. This tale, which takes place on a far away planet, echoes Iris’s desires for a romantic plot. Yet, when she discovers her lover’s final published work, she notices that the romantic episodes have intentionally been removed from the final draft.
As to Iris and Laura’s story, it starts with the girls’ golden childhood. However, as their father gradually loses his wealth, the family runs into difficulties. Both girls fall in love with the same mysterious, handsome stranger, Alex Thomas, who causes their father’s downfall. While Laura entertains a platonic relationship with the young man, Iris, who suffers from a violent and unhappy marriage, engages in a passionate love affair with the same man.
When she eventually reveals her liaison to her weak sister, it causes the latter to break down totally and commit suicide by riding over the railing of a bridge.
1. Atwood’s Metafictional Reflections
The Blind Assassin’s peculiarity lies in its description of writers’ figures. Indeed, the novel contains several fictitious writers: Alex Thomas, who entertains Iris with his science-fiction story; Laura, who embodies the young tormented artist and eventually turns out not to be a writer at all; and Iris whom the reader gradually identifies as the author of the scandalous novel entitled “The Blind Assassin.” This title thus simultaneously refers to Atwood’s work and to her narrator’s production. This allows Atwood to supply interesting comment on the writer’s trade. She regularly mentions the importance of using accurate sources, even in the case of a totally imaginary story. For instance, Alex Thomas explains that the behaviour of his
403 science-fiction characters finds its inspiration in Ancient Mesopotamia, among the Hittites
(21, 37). Alex further draws the reader’s attention to other ingredients of a novel: he insists on the importance of writing a story that sells well and mentions some of the necessary elements: death, violence, women, aliens (305, 337). He alludes to the numerous clichés of science fiction stories: the monosyllabic hero, the endangered blonde, the frightening alien (305, 337).
As the narrator of the novel, Iris regularly comments on the necessity of writing. She often wonders for whom she writes – for herself, a stranger, no one at all (53)… Likewise, she frequently reflects on the necessity of writing, in order to bear witness. She thinks: “We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down” (118). This may be why Iris feels such an urge to write down her story: getting older and weak, she absolutely wants to confess what really happened in the love triangle involving herself, her sister and Alex. While telling her story, she regularly highlights the writer’s tricks: she is
“thickening the plot” (147); she deliberately leaves her male character unnamed, as if to symbolise any man at all (146). She points to several quotations from famous authors: Ovid
(153), Fitzgerald (190). She also draws parallels between her story and that of famous fictional characters: Helen of Troy, Circe, Medea, the Queen of Sheba (221).1 Among such allusions, I regard Atwood’s recurring allusions to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” as crucial to the novel’s interpretation. Indeed, one should pay particular attention to Iris’s commentary on the poem:
1 Cooke provides a range of possibilities of intertextual readings of The Blind Assassin. Among other literary allusions, she mentions Ovid, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Virgil, Sophocles. She analyses the references to the Arthurian legends in relation to the name of the family home, Avilion. Cooke also compares the novel with the work of other Canadian women writers: Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, and Alice Munro’s short-story “Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You” (Cooke, 151-155). I prefer to focus on the allusions to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” as a possible clue as to the interpretation of Iris’s quest.
404 What was a demon-lover, she wanted to know? Why was the sea sunless, why was
the ocean lifeless? Why did the sunny pleasure-dome have caves of ice? What was
Mount Abora, and why was the Abyssinian maid singing about it? Why were the
ancestral voices prophesying war? I didn’t know the answers to any of these
questions. I know all of them now. Not the answers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge –
I’m not sure he had any answers, since he was hopped up on drugs at the time – but
my own answers. Here they are, for what they’re worth. The sacred river is alive. It
flows to the lifeless ocean, because that’s where all things that are alive end up. The
lover is a demon-lover because he isn’t there. The sunny pleasure-dome has caves of
ice because that’s what pleasure-domes have – after a while they become very cold,
and after that they melt, and then where are you? All wet. Mount Abora was the
Abyssinian maid’s home, and she was singing about it because she couldn’t get back
to it. The ancestral voices were prophesying war because ancestral voices never shut
up, and they hate to be wrong, and war is a sure thing, sooner or later. Correct me if
I’m wrong. (410)
While Laura’s innocence is underlined by her numerous questions to her elder sister, the latter’s final answer to them can be read as a metaphor of her life. The sacred river symbolises
Iris’s life,2 from which the “demon-lover” remains significantly absent, as does Alex Thomas.
The pleasure-dome represents the life of wealth and opulence Iris has chosen by marrying
Richard Griffin. Its icy caves, on the contrary, refer to the unhappiness of Iris’s marriage.
Mount Abora stands for Iris’s childhood house, Avilion, which she longs to return to. The parallel is stressed all the more as Iris dresses as an Abyssinian maid (404) at one of Richard’s parties. However, one should be careful in interpreting this literary allusion.
2 One should keep in mind that the common interpretation of the River Alph is the embodiment of a destructive force. Indeed, Coleridge’s dream vision in “Kubla Khan” is never far remote from a nightmare. The same can be said of Iris’s life as a married woman: on the surface, her marriage looks like a life of luxury and entertainment, while it turns out to be a painful relationship of violence and abuse.
405 Indeed, Atwood has repeatedly revealed her own deceptive way of writing. The overt allusion to Coleridge might be a trap, compelling the reader to view Iris as the female victim of her demon-lover. Personally, I would rather regard the presence of this far too obvious literary interpretation as one more instance of Atwood’s ironic intent, denouncing Iris’s complicity with her victimiser.
Iris realises the power of the writer who can make time stand still or move forward, as in this excerpt: “Where was I? I turn back the page: the war is still raging. Raging is what they used to say, for wars; still do, for all I know. But on this page, a fresh, clean page, I will cause the war to end – I alone, with a stroke of my black plastic pen. All I have to do is write: 1918.
November 11. Armistice Day” (93). This passage points to the artificiality of the written work.
Moreover, like many of Atwood’s narrators, Iris highlights the illusion of truth achieved in literature. Indeed, she comments: “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself” (345). Later, Iris underlines that she has chosen knowledge over ignorance in her decision to write down her story (602). Yet, she also emphasises the elusiveness of the concept of truth. Indeed, according to Iris, what she imagines becomes her truth: it has the value of truth itself, because it expresses her own version of her story (626). In fact, when Iris writes “I think the story about you telling me the story about wolves isn’t about wolves” (424), Atwood implies that the book itself is not about
“assassins.” Rather, it illustrates Iris’s process of self-discovery.
Further, the narrator examines the question of the author’s fame every time she is confronted with the public’s admiration for Laura (57). She mentions Laura’s novel as a separate object which has a life of its own: it now belongs to the public domain (345). As
406 such, it can be published by anyone. The implications of this are enormous, as the reader learns that Iris actually wrote the book. Indeed, her deceptive attitude has caused Iris to lose control over her own work. Similarly, she denounces the intervention of critics who classify
Laura as a “modernist.” They imply that the author of “The Blind Assassin” underwent the influence of several other writers, whereas Iris, as the real author of the book, knows for a fact that she never read their work (345-346). The ironic and condescending tone prevails in Iris’s answer to an academic who wishes to write Laura’s biography. She replies:
Dear Professor Z., I have noted your opinion that a biography of Laura Chase is long
overdue. She may well be, as you say, ‘among our most important female mid-
century writers.’ I wouldn’t know. But my co-operation in what you call ‘your
project’ is out of the question. I have no wish to satisfy your lust for phials of dried
blood and the severed fingers of saints. Laura Chase is not ‘your project.’ She was
my sister. She would not have wished to be pawed over after her death, whatever
that pawing over might euphemistically be termed. Things written down can cause a
great deal of harm. All too often, people don’t consider that. (350)
This ultimate sentence echoes the harm caused to Iris by the novel she wrote. Indeed, because of that novel, her daughter turned away from her. It also prevented her from raising her granddaughter. Moreover, the fact that Richard committed suicide with a copy of the novel in his hands, implies that he was driven to it by the thought that Laura – the alleged author – was in love with the mysterious Alex Thomas. Written words can indeed cause a great deal of harm.
Finally, The Blind Assassin, like all Atwoodian narratives, contains fairy-tale motives.
The most obvious one is the inverted Little Red Riding Hood intertext which parallels Iris’s
407 search for her granddaughter. Iris’s writing process echoes Little Red Riding Hood’s trip to her grandmother – i.e. her symbolic discovery of the male. The same process takes place as the reader witnesses Iris’s exploration of male-female relationships. Alluding to the famous tale, Iris thinks: “And off I set, step by step, sideways down the stairs, like Little Red Riding
Hood on her way to Granny’s house via the underworld. Except that I myself am Granny, and
I contain my own bad wolf. Gnawing away, gnawing away” (449). The quotation clearly inverts the roles. On her way to self-discovery, Iris realises that every human being possesses a dark side.
2. Three-Tiered Deception
In The Blind Assassin, deception develops itself on three levels. First, Iris, and, to a lesser extent, her sister Laura, both regularly resort to deceptive strategies. Second, in Iris’s novel, both protagonists use treachery as well: the woman uses a series of disguises to hide her adultery, while her lover displays an aura of mystery. Finally, within the novel imagined by the male character, deception appears as a quality rather than a flaw.
Iris strikes the reader as a highly effective liar. Indeed, she succeeds in concealing for years that she is the real author of “The Blind Assassin.” She often lies to avoid scandals: for instance, when she claims that her sister’s death was an accident instead of a suicide (4). She even pretends that her sister suffered from “severe headaches affecting her vision” (6).
Previously, she already fantasised that her sister had made holiday arrangements, while Laura actually ran away and remained missing for days (314, 405). In doing so, she becomes an accomplice in her husband’s lies. Concealing discreditable behaviour is a tradition in her family. Even her grandmother Adelia had a “secret life” (613). Iris alludes to rumours
408 concerning her uncles and their unwanted children (79). She gets to know those episodes through the gossiping of her governess. She notices that the versions of her family history vary according to her age and to her governess’s state of mind. She concludes: “in this way I collected enough fragments of the past to make a reconstruction of it, which must have born as much relation to the real thing as a mosaic portrait would do the original” (83). Indeed,
Reenie’s stories about Iris’s family and the Griffins lack credibility (214, 217).
Iris starts lying at an early age. When Laura throws herself voluntarily into the lake,
Iris covers up for her, telling Reenie, the governess, that it was an accident (184). Both sisters fool their authoritarian teacher, pretending to be stupid (185, 196). Iris uses the same technique much later when she displays a blank look to conceal her irritation and anger from her sister-in-law, Winifred. Further, both little girls enjoy wearing hats, in order to be
“invisible” (187). Pretending even constitutes an aspect of their education: their idealistic female teacher encourages them to think they are “lowering trees, butterflies, the gentle breezes” (189). They learn how to cheat: they spend hours in the library, writing down Latin translations, making them look like their own, by adding some sensible mistakes (199). She then comments: “We didn’t learn very much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery.
We also learned how to make our faces blank and stiff” (200). Later, she adds: “In addition to lying and cheating, I’d learned half-concealed insolence and silent resistance. I’d learned that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I’d learned not to get caught” (203). Iris therefore qualifies as a highly gifted and efficient liar.
As she becomes accustomed to the politics of social relationships, Iris learns deception even more skilfully. She realises that she must answer questions in a satisfactory way. She invents a hobby – gardening (47). She learns how to evade questions or render them foolish
409 (317). She also succeeds in concealing her growing fear of her husband’s violence (366). She gradually starts to behave as expected from the wife of an influential businessman (372, 454,
499). Further, she stresses the importance of disguise in this artificial social circle, describing at length the sumptuous balls organised by her husband. She explains: “It was a costume ball
– such functions mostly were, because people at that time liked costumes. They liked them almost as much as they liked uniforms. Both served the same end: to avoid being who you were, you could pretend to be someone else. You could become bigger and more powerful, or more alluring and mysterious, just by putting on exotic clothes” (408). Indeed, the ball functions as an ideal place to either reveal or conceal oneself (409), depending on the kind of disguise people choose. Further, she often alludes to the necessity of hiding one’s emotions
(409), which is echoed in Alex’s science-fiction narrative. In a harsh discussion with her sister-in-law, Winifred, Iris explains how she learned to adopt the requested behaviour. She tells Winifred: “I did what you wanted. I kept my mouth shut. I smiled. I was the window- dressing. But Laura was going too far. He should have left Laura out of it” (453). Indeed, Iris agrees to play the role imposed on her as long as Laura remains unharmed. When she realises that her sister has become the victim of Richard’s lust, she decides to publish her novel. The scandal caused by this publication ruins Richard’s hopes for a political career. Moreover, Iris frequently professes her distrust of her husband. She hesitates before telling him about her pregnancy (520). She feigns sickness, so as to escape his sexual lust (538). She insists on his cunning (538). She also lies to him when she needs to find Laura, who has run away. She then pretends that Reenie is severely ill and wants to see her (541). She realises that Richard prevented her from receiving Laura’s letters (543). On her way back, she invents other lies: an old lady needed rescue; she brought her to the hospital (562, 565). She also lies to Richard when she gets the news of her lover’s death and acts as though she does not know him (570).
Finally, she once again invents a story to explain why Laura committed suicide with her car:
410 she tells Richard she left her car at the garage and Laura came to pick it up (596). She tells her daughter it was an accident (602).
As a narrator too, Iris often alludes to her own unreliability. She considers that her version of the facts has become the truth because she is the last witness (266). She thinks: “I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light”
(484). Indeed, Iris’s version of her life is only one aspect of the events. When the reader reconstitutes the puzzle by adding the information contained in her published novel and the metaphorical content of the science-fiction story, he gets a fuller – though still incomplete – picture of the protagonist. Iris meditates on the human being’s need for deception and secrecy:
I wonder which is preferable – to walk around all your life swollen up with your
own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of
you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re
depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as
your skin – everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that
made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone – and
must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind with a
bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be
inside you? (547)
From this passage, the reader understands the importance of secrecy in the character’s life.
Deception is an everyday process which takes place in the smallest and most trivial of deeds.
Both sisters are secretive (285); they often hide under pieces of furniture (73). Though she remains less deceptive than her elder sister, Laura frequently uses lies as well. She says
411 she wants to learn photography in order to steal the negative of a picture of Iris and herself with Alex Thomas (225). She often takes on a “virtuous expression” to secure what she wants
(243). Similarly, when she decides to hide Alex in the attic, she pretends not to be hungry, in order to save food for him (254, 261). Iris soon becomes her accomplice in this deceptive plan
(260). Laura gives Alex her father’s coat, then pretends to have given it to a tramp (267).
When Laura gets involved with charity missions, Iris suspects her of being somewhere else
(272). Laura often makes use of treachery to escape a situation that has become unbearable.
For instance, she forges letters and imitates her sister’s signature in order to get out of school
(460). When she tells Iris that she saw her shopping during one of her escapades, the reader, intrigued by Iris’s sense of panic, comes to understand that she is the mysterious woman involved in an extra-marital love affair (462). Deception can therefore be regarded as a crucial element of plot development. Iris’s daughter, Aimee, deeply resents the family’s attitude, which consists in hiding the truth from her: she believes Laura to be her real, secret mother
(531). Indeed, deception pervades the book so much that it deeply affects all characters, including minor ones.
In Iris’s novel, the female protagonist invents a series of excuses to conceal her love affair. She pretends to go shopping, for instance, in order to find the time to meet her lover.
The latter encourages her to adopt a dog, so as to have a reason to sneak out of the house (22).
She often changes appearances: she covers her hair with a scarf (130, 417), she steals a coat in a restaurant and frumps up her hair, to “emerge as a different woman” (317). She speaks of camouflage (561). She also lies to her lover: when he notices the traces of her husband’s abuse, she claims she bumped into a door (335). She describes her love affair as both an act of treachery and one of courage (393). The male protagonist is even more deceptive. He possesses several names, displaying various identities (309). Yet, the woman unconsciously
412 enjoys this atmosphere of secrecy. As Iris writes: “She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion.
(…) To exist without boundaries” (319). Therefore, I regard deception as a crucial component of the novel’s main love affair.
In Alex’s science-fiction story, cities possess a mythology based on acts of “deliberate forgetting” (14). City names are purposefully erased by conquerors; each tribe pretends to have won the war (14). Even destroyed cities are said to be preserved by magic charms elsewhere (15). The inhabitants of this strange world value the art of deception as a virtue. For example, the aristocrats, called the Snilfards, constantly wear masks. The laws require them to conceal their emotions at all times (158). They also pretend not to know about extra-marital relationships (20). The poorer social class, the Ygnirods, use deception too: their resent their lower condition and pretend to be stupid (21). This civilisation derives its wealth from the hard work of child slaves, a fact kept secret as well (33). Further, deception is ubiquitous in this world: mothers dress their boys as girls so as to avoid jealousy; prostitutes imitate the distinctive body marks of nobility; rich families offer foundlings instead of their own children to ritual sacrifices (35). They wrap slave girls in veils (37) Their religious rituals are pervaded with lies: for example, the feared Lord of the Underworld happens to be a mere nobleman in disguise (143); neither do people really believe in their popular “Broken God” (158). Sakiel
North’s blind assassin uses deception to accomplish his plan: dressed as the sacrificed girl, he must kill the King (147). The “blind assassin” himself confesses that “he’s learned how to flatter, how to lie plausibly, how to ingratiate himself” (311). He performs his worst treachery when he decides to modify the plan: he refuses to kill the victim, runs away with her (326), and becomes a traitor to his own country (422). The high degree of deception described in the science-fiction interlude clearly functions as a metaphor for the large amount of social lies used by the novel’s protagonists.
413
However, the novel written by Iris and attributed to Laura shocks respectable society in that it fails to comply with the usual processes of deception and secrecy. In a world where people attempt to conceal their otherness by resorting to constant mimicry processes, Laura and “her” novel represent a form of escape, a rejection of commonly accepted social practices. Iris recalls: “What people remember isn’t the book itself, so much as the furor: ministers in church denounced it as obscene, not only here; the public library was forced to remove it from the shelves, the one bookstore in town refused to stock it. There was word of censoring it” (48). Indeed, the scandalous book reveals a love affair otherwise kept secret. Iris suggests that many things remain “unsaid” (86). Iris and Laura were educated in an atmosphere of secrecy. Several examples testify to this: their mother wants their father to
“keep his atheism to himself” (96); she does not want people to know about his scandalous mistresses (98). Iris also intimates that Laura’s so-called difference lies in her inability to keep things hidden. She thinks: “perhaps Laura wasn’t very different from other people after all.
Perhaps she was the same – the same as some odd, skewed element in them that most people keep hidden but that Laura did not, and this was why she frightened them” (110-111). Iris resents her mother’s idea of herself. Indeed, the mother wants her eldest daughter to be the wise one who looks after her younger sister (117): Iris feels unable to mimic the behaviour requested from her - a feeling she will often experience in her future life (126). When she later enters the social world after marrying Richard, she often daydreams about her grandmother Adelia. She idealises her unknown ancestor, believing she would have taught her how to behave in society (205). This desire to fit in, this urge to display an accepted behaviour subsequently dominates Iris’s marital life. Yet, she secretly hates that attitude. She comments:
“We shouldn’t have to lay ourselves out for people, court them with coaxings and wheedlings and eye-battling displays” (285). In order to become a perfect lady, Iris has to master several
414 disciplines: she must learn how to dance, how to invent acceptable excuses, how to look bored or hide one’s fear, how to ignore insults (287-288), what to wear (367). Yet, throughout her mimicry process, Iris – more than any Atwoodian heroine – remains aware of the sacrifices she makes. Thinking of her granddaughter and her friends she says: “Already they were making attempts to alter themselves, to improve and distort and diminish, to cram themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. I didn’t blame them, having done the same once myself” (359). In The Blind Assassin, mimicry had clearly become a conscious process, one of the heroine’s personal choices.
3. Iris’s Disruptions of Reality
Although The Blind Assassin strikes the reader as a highly realistic novel, it also contains brief moments where reality and fantasy interact. Such moments usually point to the character’s inner trouble. Iris frequently alludes to sudden impressions of not being in the right place. She has the feeling that another woman will come in and claim the territory for her own. This feeling of “trespassing” (70) in her own environment indicates the artificiality of her behaviour. Indeed, instead of acting naturally, she constantly tries to correspond to the image of a respectable lady. Conscious of the dishonest nature of her commitment to Richard,
Iris experiences an almost mystic vision. Left alone in a magnificent hotel, she suddenly feels observed by God himself. The whole scene exhibits an uncanny atmosphere. Iris describes her experience as follows: “There was no floor to my room: I was suspended in the air, about to plummet. My fall would be endless – endlessly down” (279). The passage focuses on Iris’s combined feelings of guilt and failure, which both indicate that she is dissatisfied with what she has become. Further, the novel contains several examples of strange dreams. Their strangeness lies in their temporal irregularities. In one of those, Iris first believes that she is at
415 her husband’s ball. Yet, she soon realises that she stands in the ruined glass conservatory at
Avilion. She focuses on details that denote desolation: the stone sphinx, the hole in the glass roof, and darkness (404). In comparison with those gloomy details, Iris’s fancy dress suddenly looks grotesque and terribly out of place, which echoes the heroine’s own feeling in society.
The scene unsurprisingly calls up Laura, who, unlike her sister, definitely belongs to that deserted place. The desolate nightly setting strikes the reader with its undeniable gothic quality.
Particularly uncanny is the scene of the miscarriage – a frequent episode in Atwood’s fiction. Iris and Laura witness their mother’s miscarriage from a distance, wishing to find out about what happened. What they first mistake for a kitten, turns out to be the unborn foetus.
Laura’s reaction to this sight, her instinctive understanding of the foetus’s condition, makes the scene even more uncanny. It endows Laura with a knowledge of nature that stands in sharp contrast with her innocence. Looking at the unborn baby, she exclaims: “It’s a baby,”
(…) ‘It’s not finished.” (…) “The poor thing. It didn’t want to get itself born.” (113-114).
Laura’s reaction denotes a highly sensitive response to natural events. It points to her fragility: her ability to react in such an unexpected way makes her stand out as “other.” The passage displays an undeniable gothic quality.
Further, Iris’s old age causes her to become insecure in her own house. The treachery of that once familiar place is described in an utterly uncanny way. The house suddenly appears as a trap, which Iris experiences as a void:
On the floor at the bottom there was a pool of darkness, deep and shimmering and
wet as a real pool. Perhaps it was a real pool; perhaps the river was welling up
through the floor, as I have seen happen on the weather channel. Any of the four
416 elements may become displaced at any time: fire may break from the earth, earth
liquefy and tumble around your ears, air beat against you like a rock, dashing the
roof from over your head. Why not then a flood? (449)
The overwhelming character of Iris’s fear indicates that she has reached a point where she can no longer escape the feeling of growing older. It climaxes when Iris almost falls down the stairs, then decides to turn back upstairs (450). Old age has definitely won the race.
Moreover, Iris describes a dream, which regularly haunts her: she stands outside her house, with a mysterious stranger approaching her. Once again, the uncanniness of the scene lies in its inconsistencies. This time, spatial elements do not correspond. Iris notices: “I was aware that there shouldn’t be a chestnut tree there: that tree belonged elsewhere, a hundred miles away, outside the house where I had once lived with Richard. Yet there it was, the tree”
(484-485). The same scene recurs later on, albeit with some variations. This time, dream and reality intertwine, as Iris mentions actually getting out of her bed and watching racoons she mistook for her mysterious stranger (485-486). When a similar scene eventually takes place in the mind of the female protagonist in Iris’s book, the reader definitely identifies Iris with the mysterious heroine, and simultaneously understands that she is the author of the scandalous work (572). In the subsequent scene, Iris lives an ultimate fictional encounter with her lover.
Once again, fiction and reality are mixed up, as they simultaneously witness the burning of a city – probably caused by the war – associating it with the destruction of planet Zycron (573).
This brief encounter allows Iris to leave behind the remembrances of her love affair and acknowledge her lover’s death (574). Further, she identifies the war as a circumstance which transcends reality and accounts for a sudden disruption of the ordinary (583).
417 In addition, The Blind Assassin contains an example of grotesque magic realism in a scene which brings together human and alien elements. In the science-fiction story written by
Alex, the encounter between the heroine and the extra-terrestrial displays a ludicrous and fantastic character. The heroine herself claims to have an “uncanny feeling.” She feels in a
“drowsy state,” when the alien slowly escapes from his icy prison and captures her (338-339).
The scene appears as both eerie and grotesque, through its emphasis on the clichés of the genre – the at once frightening and seducing alien, the pulpous heroine, the nightly attack, the glowing, melting ice, etc. Nevertheless, this example of grotesque magic realism remains an exception in The Blind Assassin, which is largely imprinted with a gothic quality.3
4. Are All Tricksters “Blind Assassins?”
Although none of them commits a murder as such, all characters in the book can be regarded as the “blind assassin” mentioned in its title. Iris, though she first presents herself as a victim, is largely responsible for her husband’s and her sister’s suicides. Richard’s attitude towards
Laura, equally encourages her to kill herself, as does Alex Thomas’s ambivalent attitude. All those characters possess characteristics of the trickster figure. Yet, I contend that Laura, presented by many critics as the most innocent protagonist, functions as a trickster as well.
The most obvious trickster figures in the novel are Richard and Alex, who trifle with the feelings of both Laura and Iris. Alex strikes the reader with his independent spirit and his
3 Karen F. Stein explains that Atwood’s use of gothic elements should be studied in the light of feminist criticism, which regards gothic literature as a stereotyping of the female role. (Stein “A Left-Handed Story” 136- 138). Personally, I consider Atwood’s use of gothic imagery as another postcolonial element which allows the writer to utter a critique of patriarchy.
418 attraction for the forbidden. While narrating his science-fiction story to Iris, he repeatedly indicates that he sides with the assassin. He says, for instance: “I’m on the side of the throat- cutters. If you had to cut throats or starve, which would you do?” (29). The story further stresses the connection between life and death (34). It contains numerous examples of ritual sacrifices (34). In the science-fiction story, the blind assassin presents several characteristics of Alex Thomas himself: a traveller, “rumoured to be a thief,” a foreigner, a beggar (144-
145). In Iris’s novel, the woman describes her lover – whom we later identify as Alex – as a bandit (323). Alex confesses living “by his wits” (229), as befits a trickster. The story further contains the following advice: “If they turn out to be divine emissaries, it’s best to give them food and wine and the use of a woman if required, to listen respectfully to their messages, and then to let them go on their way” (145). In relation to this passage, one must keep in mind that
Laura and Iris hide the stranger in the cellar and feed him, until he eventually wanders away too. Both girls also fall in love with him. The way Alex is treated by the two sisters indicates his role as a “divine emissary.” As to the message he conveys, it undoubtedly concerns Iris’s mistake in committing herself to Richard’s life style. The list of words abandoned by him in the cellar, looks like a mysterious, foreign language to Iris (268), a cryptic message again. He is presented as a scavenger, more precisely a “corpse fly” (229), and later as a hyena, a jackal, a raven (351). He confesses: “I have a wolf side to me” (424). All those quotations confirm
Alex’s animal nature and his role as a predator.
Alex shows a deep connection with death, as tricksters often do. As a child, he was found in the middle of a burned house, among dead people (231). Iris further evokes his divine character when she describes her encounter with him on a street: “He was illuminated, as if a shaft of light were falling on him from some invisible source, rendering him frighteningly visible” (393). Alex thus knows the underground world, the spiritual, the
419 invisible. Moreover, Alex Thomas tricks Iris in making her believe that he constitutes a real escape for her. His science-fiction story echoes the young girl’s distress: trapped in a marriage contracted for money, she resembles the story’s innocent maid. In his first version of the narrative, Alex gets carried away by his lover’s romanticism: he thus imagines the blind assassin’s flight with his victim, whom he refrained from killing. In the published version, though, Iris desperately looks for romantic elements. She then realises that they have been omitted altogether and feels that Alex has somehow fooled her (326, 330, 331). Alex himself alludes to the presence of tricksters in his stories and in real life, as he explains the following to Iris: “I like my stories to be true to life, which means there have to be wolves in them.
Wolves in one form or another” (423). He performs a last joke on Iris when she receives the news of his death in the presence of her husband and is therefore forced to conceal her grief
(570).
Iris’s husband, Richard, also strikes the reader as a potential trickster. Iris’s first description of Richard, on their wedding photograph, reveals his deceptiveness: “He looks substantial, but at the same time quizzical: one eyebrow cocked, lower lip thrust a little out, mouth on the verge of a smile, as if at some secret, dubious joke” (292). The defiant, joking aspect of the trickster dominates the character. Later on, Richard becomes less appealing, as he repeatedly lies to his wife: during their honeymoon, he hushes up her father’s death, preventing her from receiving any phone call (376); he also conceals Laura’s letters. Laura immediately recognises Richard’s dubious nature. She calls him “a lying, treacherous slave- trader, and a degenerate Mammon-worshipping monster” (524). In her ultimate allusion to her husband, Iris compares him with a “large rodent,” connected with the underground world. He destroys people by “chewing off their roots” (585). In the science-fiction story, Richard takes the form of the Lord of the Underworld, a sinful nobleman, who deprives the innocent maid
420 from her virginity (142). Yet, his ultimate victim is not his own wife, but Laura. Indeed, Iris considers Richard responsible for her sister’s death, thus obliterating her own feeling of guilt.
Iris, too, functions as a highly effective trickster. As a child, she already describes herself as “a renegade, and a bit of a fool” (99), two qualities she claims having inherited from her father. She further displays a sixth sense as far as danger is concerned. She remembers having a premonition of her mother’s illness and subsequent death (108-109). She insists on her ability to see in the dark (138). Repeatedly, Iris also intimates that she is not a likable person: to Laura, she does not act as a caring elder sister (116): for instance, she tries to keep
Laura away from Alex Thomas, although she knows her sister loves the boy (223). Iris also feels connected with death, first because of her old age, second, because of her numerous rituals in relation with her dead sister, Laura: she visits her sibling’s funeral monument (233).
She also frequently hints at her own animal nature: in a dream, she imagines her legs are covered with fur; she will soon hibernate. Iris experiences the whole dream as something she has already known before, bathed in a déjà-vu feeling (271). Her dreamlike descent into the cellar conveys the same underground atmosphere (323). During her marriage, Iris hides her duplicity by adopting stupidity as a disguise. Years later, her sister-in-law Winifred comes to realise Iris’s mischief, as appears from the following excerpt: “Winifred thought I was innocuous. Put another way, she thought I was a fool. Later – ten years into the future – she was to say, over the phone because we no long met in person, ‘I used to think you were stupid, but really you’re evil’” (452). Indeed, Iris’s trickster-like nature reveals itself in her sudden need to tell the truth. The trickster’s ex-centric position in society allows him or her to reveal the truth about the society. Iris concludes: “I offer the truth, (…) I’m the last one who can. It’s the only thing in this room that will still be here in the morning. (536). In the last pages of her confessions, Iris leaves no doubt about her trickster identity. She claims:
421
Wolves, I invoke you! Dead women with azure hair and eyes like snake-filled pits, I
summon you! Stand by me now, as we near the end! Guide my shaking arthritic
fingers, my tacky black ballpoint pen; keep my leaking heart aflow for just a few
more days, until I can set things in order. Be my companions, my helpers and my
friends; once more, I add, for haven’t we been well-acquainted in the past? (607)
Through these words, Iris confesses her kinship with the world of animals and spiritual forces.
She also implies that this power gives her the strength to write her confession.
Finally, I regard Laura as the novel’s most developed trickster entity, though her power remains hidden under the mask of innocence. Iris gives us a clue as to her sister’s nature, when she remembers a picture in a book she read right before Laura’s birth. This powerful image consists in a werewolf covered in fire. Iris remembers how the character’s power, mischief, and apparent invincibility impressed her. She intuitively connects it with the imminent birth of her sister (101-102). She mentions that Laura took a long time to be born, as if she did not really want to come into this world (104). Such a comment reinforces Laura’s connection with the world of death, which is established from the beginning of the novel: indeed, the narrative starts with an allusion to Laura’s suicide, thus identifying her at once as a shadowy character. As a child already, she deliberately tried to drown into the lake: death does not frighten her; on the contrary, she seems willing to negotiate her own death in exchange for her mother’s return (183). Iris describes at length how Laura differs from other children. She has “unaccountable crises” and an “uncanny resistance to physical pain” (106).
Everything she does is carried “to extremes” (106), as befits a trickster: for instance, she steals tints from the photographer she works with. Subsequently, she colours family portraits with them, in order to show the real hues of people’s souls (237). After her mother’s death, Laura
422 takes on the habit of hiding into her mother’s fur coat, thus acknowledging her animal side
(167). At school, she shocks her teachers with her blasphemous attitude: she overtly regards
God as a liar (459-460). When Iris informs Richard of Laura’s conduct, he admires her rebellious reactions, stressing the correlation between them: he too hated school (461).
Subsequently, Iris insists on Laura’s need to defy people, to denounce their hypocrisy (517).
In reviews of the book, Laura is often regarded as an innocent creature.4 Yet, Iris frequently hints at her sister’s well-concealed treachery. For instance, she ponders: “Laura had such a direct gaze, such blankly open eyes, such a pure, rounded forehead, that few ever suspected her of duplicity” (239); or “I came to feel that Laura was making a fool of me, though I couldn’t specify how, exactly. I didn’t think she was lying as such, but neither was she telling the entire truth” (244). Laura’s attitude at Iris’s wedding reveals the trickster side of her personality, as she manages to ruin all the wedding pictures (293). On one of them, Iris gets an indication of Laura’s hidden power. She recalls: “there must have been a defect in the film, because there’s an effect of dappled light, falling not down on her but up, as if she’s standing on the edge of an illuminated swimming pool, at night” (293). Iris describes her sister as “sly,” “brittle,” “insouciant,” “reckless” (519), “old,” “knowing” (520). She adds:
“Laura had always had one enormous power: the power to break things without meaning to.
Nor had she ever been a respecter of territories. What was mine was her” (538). Iris clearly implies that Laura is a “crosser of boundaries,” a character who does not respect limits. This
4 Nathalie Cooke, among other, after mentioning Myra, the housekeeper, as a truly benevolent character, describes Laura as “the only other character untainted by deception” (Cooke, Critical Companion, 142). Evidently, I totally disagree with this assessment of the character. Indeed, in my view, Laura’s otherness sets her apart in various ways. Yet, as far as deception and tricksterism are concerned, she displays such types of behaviour as much as any other Atwoodian figure.
423 also applies to men: Laura has a relationship with Alex, her sister’s lover, and an unwanted sexual intercourse with Richard, Iris’s husband. The messages she leaves to her elder sister are cryptic, yet perfectly understandable to someone who shares her trickster nature. In order to denounce Richard’s mischief, Laura colours a series of wedding photographs, thus revealing to her sister the nature of people’s intentions. Winifred’s lurid green colour exposes her mischief, whereas Richard’s dark grey face and red hands symbolise his evil nature and his attempts at abusing Laura (550-551). Using colour symbolism, Laura illustrates the trickster’s ability to denounce social and personal abuse. Indeed, Winifred and
Richard represent social constraints as well as sexual ones. They limit Iris’s personal development. Worse, they destroy Laura’s life, because they resent her refusal to obey their laws.
Alex, Richard, Iris and Laura reflect different aspects of the trickster. Alex possesses the sexual attraction of the trickster. He appears as a joker; an ex-centric character who manages to remain on the edge of society. Richard, for his part, functions as evil incarnate. He does not hesitate to lie and act violently. He abuses Laura sexually. He harasses his wife morally and physically. A sly businessman, he continually flirts with evil, entertaining commercial relationships with nazi Germany. Iris becomes a trickster because her position as Richard’s wife compels her to do so. Unable to develop a personality of her own, she is condemned to use deception as a survival strategy. Yet, she also intimates that tricksterism is one of her innate qualities. She repeatedly points to her animal nature and to her inner mischief. Laura, her sister, though she may appear as an innocent victim, has also inherited trickster features: she displays an animal sensuousness, an extraordinary intuition, as well as an ability to deceive even those who are close to her. She possesses a power of vision, a connection with death, a willingness to position herself as an outsider. As such, she becomes an observer of
424 society, as well as someone who can denounce its shortcomings. Therefore, I consider Laura as the most gifted trickster of the book, though she is not one of its “blind assassins.” The assassins are Richard, who destroys Laura’s life; Alex, who ruins Iris’s belief in love; and Iris.
The latter both causes her husband’s suicide – because of the book she publishes under
Laura’s name – and Laura’s death – after Iris reveals her personal love affair with Alex. One could read the following excerpt as Iris’s conclusion about her own and the other protagonists’ tricksterism: “I didn’t see the danger. I didn’t even see they were tigers. Worse:
I didn’t know I might become a tiger myself. I didn’t know Laura might become one, given the proper circumstances. Anyone might, for that matter” (403). Indeed, throughout the novel,
Iris changes her opinion about herself and other characters. She comes to realise that both
Alex and Richard harmed her, though differently. Likewise, she must admit that neither herself, nor Laura are totally innocent.
5. Hybrid Sisters
Several characters strike the reader with their “otherness:” Iris and her younger sister, Laura, undoubtedly constitutes the most obvious examples of this. Iris often claims that she does not recognise her own voice (32, 100). She sees her possessions as belonging to someone else
(70-71). As a child, Iris felt happy not to go to school. Yet, she also mentions that she felt excluded and different from the other children (187). As a married woman, she feels erased and featureless (288), because her social position compels her to conceal the violence she endures. Symptomatically, her marriage feels like an “empty space” (291). The following excerpt describes Iris’s growing sense of alienation:
425 I say “her,” because I don’t recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense
of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her
outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be
said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view – I
can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can’t
see me at all (292).
The quotation definitely expresses the split that takes place within Iris’s personality. On the one hand, she becomes the perfectly well-behaved wife, on the other, a concealed part of herself remains conscious of how desperate her life is. This split causes Iris to seek happiness elsewhere, in an extra-marital relationship. Her portrait of this love affair in her scandalous novel puts the stress on the transgression of boundaries which takes place during those discrete, elusive encounters (308). Yet, in this context too, the woman protagonist still feels she is wrongly dressed (316). Her relationship with Alex does not bring her satisfaction. Iris constantly refers to the feeling of emptiness that obsesses her in her role as a respectable wife.
She thinks: “She’s the round O, the zero at the bone. A space that defines itself by not being there at all. That’s why they can’t reach her, lay a finger on her. That’s why they can’t pin anything on her. She has such a good smile, but she doesn’t stand behind it” (501). She also realises that her lover offers her only escape from the “sheltered life” he accuses her of living
(501). Iris’s fundamental trouble lies in her inner feeling of “otherness.” She repeatedly points to her homelessness (546), and her foreignness (588). Even motherhood fails to reconcile her with herself: she regards her baby as a changeling, a gypsy baby, exchanged for her more smiling true daughter (539). She explains how Winifred gradually succeeds in keeping her away from her daughter, portraying her as “a lush, a tramp, a slut, a bad mother” (625). Once again, she feels excluded, not worthy of finding her place within society.
426 Laura is the most obvious illustration of “otherness” in the novel. Iris notices: “As for Laura, she was not selfless, not at all. Instead she was skinless, which is a different thing” (91). The word “skinless” points out that Laura lacks protection against society’s attacks. As a child, already, Laura seems different, i.e. strange (110). As already mentioned, she proves to provide the requested answers (537). She colours her photographs according to what she thinks of the people in them. Iris adds: “The colours never came out clear, the way they would on a piece of white paper: there was a misty look to them, as if they were seen through cheesecloth. They didn’t make the people seem more real; rather they became ultra-real: citizens of an odd half- country, lurid yet muted, where realism was beside the point” (236). Iris makes a direct allusion to hybridity. Indeed, she implies that Laura’s choice of colours transforms real people into hybrids. Laura harbours strange and definite ideas about colours: trees are blue or red, the sky pink or green (191). This indicates that Laura allows her imagination to dominate her vision of reality. This aspect of her personality can sometimes cause Laura to face dangerous situations. She ignores limits: she might enter someone’s car or house. Iris explains: “she didn’t draw lines, or not where other people drew them, and you couldn’t warn her because she didn’t understand such warnings. It wasn’t that she flouted rules: she simply forgot about them” (211). Throughout her life, Laura repeatedly expresses her solidarity with marginalised people: unemployed workers (240), sick people – “derelicts: old women with dementia, impecunious veterans down on their luck, noseless men with tertiary syphilis and the like”
(514) – what Iris calls “hopeless cases” (515). Winifred regards this tendency as another proof of the fact that Laura looks “bizarre” (515) or “more than a little odd” (516). Eccentricity often qualifies Laura (381): she goes barefooted (381); some pupils find her “funny” or
“odd;” others describe her as “a Bolshevik (460); she is “singled out” (509). The headmaster of her school sums it up as follows: “In any case, she attracts the wrong kind of attention”
(460). Laura even goes so far as to literally express her desire to be “other” (401-402) –
427 something she never totally succeeds in. She looks “incongruous,” “surreal” in the surroundings created by Winifred (521). She becomes “unknown,’ even to her own sister.
Moreover, she often utters sentences that take on a strange significance. For instance, when
Iris wants to talk to her about future prospects, she dismisses her saying: “If you were a blindfolded tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, what would you pay more attention to – the crowds on the far shore, or your own feet?” (519) Laura thus expresses how her vision of life differs from that of other people. Yet, the two sisters are not so different from one another. They simply have chosen to negotiate their otherness differently. When she comments “And when did the one become the other? Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one?” (537), Iris underlines the similarities that exist between herself and her sister.
Iris’s conclusion about the novel she wrote under the name of her sister gives us a clue as to how to interpret their “otherness.” Indeed, Iris emphasises the fact that neither of them has authored the book. As she puts it: “a fist is more than the sum of its fingers” (626). She goes on claiming: “Laura was my left hand, and I was hers. We wrote the book together. It’s a left- handed book. That’s why one of us is always out of sight, whichever way you look at it”
(627). This quote indicates how much the sisters share this hybridity. The frequent allusions to the picnic photograph on which the hand of the missing one of them remains visible (631) echo the bond between Iris and Laura. Hybridity, a quality that seems to have embarrassed
Iris and Laura throughout their lives, though in very different ways, suddenly becomes an advantage as Iris decides to pass on her story to her granddaughter. She then writes:
Since Laura is no longer who you think she was, you’re no longer who you think
you are, either. That can be a shock, but it can also be a relief. For instance, you’re
no relation at all to Winifred, and none to Richard. (…) Your real grandfather was
428 Alex Thomas, and as to who is own father was, well, the sky’s the limit. Rich man,
poor man, beggarman, saint, a score of countries of origin, a dozen cancelled maps,
a hundred levelled villages – take your pick. Your legacy from him is the realm of
infinite speculation. You’re free to reinvent yourself at will. (627)
When reading this excerpt, one clearly understands that hybridity might be interpreted as a quality, as an opportunity. Iris hopes that her granddaughter, liberated from the constraints of bourgeois society, will be able to transform her hybrid origin into an asset rather than a flaw.
6. A Three-Tiered Variation on the Quest Pattern
The three-fold structure of the novel presents the reader with an interesting variation on the quest pattern. Within the novel, Iris’s desire for truth, the unknown heroine’s search for love, and the blind assassin’s quest for freedom are strongly related. They constantly intertwine as passages of the three narrative levels succeed one another. The blind assassin decides to go against society’s ritual by saving the maid and running away with her, thus endangering a whole civilisation. This decision echoes that of the woman in Iris’s novel, who abandons herself to the love of a heartless stranger. Similarly, Iris’s role as the narrator of the book forces her to engage on a quest. In a long narrative process, she eventually comes to acknowledge her guilt – for the loss of her sister, for the broken contact with her granddaughter. Furthermore, she learns to accept that her sister was not so different from her.
Indeed, they both suffered from a similar inability to integrate their “otherness” into their personality. Iris chose to play the role of the dignified wife, whereas Laura, refusing to fit into any of the social roles provided to her, was soon regarded as crazy, as unable to care for herself.
429 Several details in the narrative indicate that the quest takes place on three levels. The woman in Iris’s novel claims to be “peering into a well or pool – searching beyond her own reflection for something else, something she must have dropped or lost, out of reach but still visible, shimmering like a jewel on sand” (8). This quotation poetically points to the fact that the character stands at the beginning of a quest. Further, she evokes “a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they’d always longed for but couldn’t ever grasp” (49). Iris herself claims to be desperately looking for her lost granddaughter (50, 58, 351), though this obvious search might conceal another, more secret kind of quest. Indeed, Iris simultaneously engages on a journey for self-knowledge: while telling her story, she examines why so many people were hurt. Also, she tries to determine her own degree of guilt and involvement. Now that she has abandoned her long lasting role of bourgeois wife, she can see her past as it really was, i.e. as a desperate journey to be accepted with her differences. One should notice that each important event in Iris’s life, each stage of her quest is underlined by the presence of a newspaper article relating the facts in an objective and mundane tone. Similarly, minor episodes in Iris’s novel and in her lover’s science-fiction narrative echo situations in Iris’s life. Iris often emphasises the fact that she lives in darkness
(51). She also adds that an “old wound has split open” (51), thus indicating the necessity for her to act. Avilion, the place where she spent her childhood, recurs as a leitmotiv, punctuating
Iris’s journey in her past (71-72). Her mother’s death marks a turning point in Iris’s life. This event constitutes the departure point of Iris’s alienation – or the first stage of her quest. She comments: “This event changed everything” (107). When her mother asks her to care for her younger sister, Iris suddenly feels herself endowed with a role she cannot assume. This will be the case for the rest of her life. Within this sad context of her mother’s death, Iris’s meeting with the mysterious Alex functions as the traditional second stage of the novel, i.e. the encounter with the green-world lover. Her marriage constitutes her entrance into the
430 trickster’s world (stage 3): indeed, Richard represents a strong evil figure, whom Iris eventually challenges and defeats by writing her scandalous novel. Along the way, Iris has to face her father’s death (stage 4). When the reader discovers the protagonist, she is already engaged in the last stage of her quest. As the narrator of The Blind Assassin, Iris experiences a moment of deep introspection. Telling her story enables her to distance herself from it. By the end of the narrative, she has reached a fuller understanding of her own behaviour.
***
The Blind Assassin clearly constitutes Atwood’s most metafictional novel. Far from simply containing various allusions to famous literary works – Ovid’s work and Coleridge’s “Kubla
Khan,” among the most famous ones, it also highlights the mechanics of the writing process.
Indeed, the novel significantly narrates a writer’s experience: it explores her reasons for writing; it comments on the elusiveness of truth and on the writer’s loss of control over her creation. Further, it examines the politics of the relationship between reality and fictions as it mentions the numerous implications “The Blind Assassin” bears on the characters’ lives.
Deception once again stands at the centre of such relationships. Indeed, the reader gradually comes to understand that Iris has lied to all: she is the actual author of “The Blind
Assassin,” a narrative which reveals her scandalous love affair with the mysterious Alex
Thomas. By lying about the identity of the writer, Iris has caused much harm to occur: her daughter believes Laura to be her real mother; her granddaughter has chosen to avoid contact with the family altogether; her husband has committed suicide because he assumed Laura to be the heroine of the book and could not bear the thought of her liaison. What matters most is
The Blind Assassin’s process of conscious deception. Indeed, the ageing protagonist strikes
431 the reader as being perfectly aware of the sacrifices she had to make to be socially accepted: deception fully becomes part of the heroine’s process of mimicry. It influences even her most futile actions. In a word, it dominates social relationships both in real life – in Iris’s biographical account – and in fiction – in Iris’s scandalous novel and in her lover’s science- fiction narrative. Deception functions as a crucial process at all levels of narration.5
Further, the novel exhibits an undeniably gothic quality which best comes to light in its magic realist disruptions. Indeed, Iris’s narrative is punctuated with flagrant disruptions of the space-time continuity: events then seem to take place in a surreal, slow-motioned, dream- like atmosphere. Such moments point to the narrator’s unreliability, thus allowing the reader to understand what lies behind the surface. Indeed, such temporal and/or spatial disruptions reveal the connection between reality and fiction. They enable the reader to realise that Iris and the scandalous woman in “The Blind Assassin” are in fact one and the same person.
Although all protagonists display trickster qualities, contrary to many critics, I regard
Laura as the most treacherous character for two reasons. First, her innocent look enables her to hide her trickster qualities better than any other person in the narrative. Second, Laura possesses a highly intuitive approach of the world, which sets her apart from other people.
Throughout Iris’s descriptions of her younger sister, the reader comes to grasp Laura’s rebellious attitude: realising that her high degree of sensibility makes her stand out as “other,”
Laura chooses to deliberately endorse the role of trickster. She voluntarily shocks people through her weird behaviour. Similarly, she enjoys occupying an ex-centric position in society, which enables her to express sharp comments about it.
5 Stein’s article on Atwood recent fiction provides interesting comments on the characters’ and the writer’s deceptive strategies in The Blind Assassin (Stein “A Left-Handed Story” 145-153).
432 Both female protagonists share a hybrid quality. While they make a very different use of it throughout their life, Laura and Iris both display an “otherness” which influences the way in which they deal with social relationships. Iris chooses to conceal her otherness, mimicking the social behaviour expected from her. On the contrary, Laura remains unable to comply with social demands: rather, she chooses to adopt a weird behaviour. She stands out as an ex- centric character who lives on the edge of the social world. Apparently, hybridity seems to have ruined the life of these two women. However, Atwood suggests that the integration of one’s hybridity is a process that might develop in the course of several generations. Indeed, the novel ends on a positive note, implying that Iris’s granddaughter might be able to deal with her hybridity in a better way than her mother and her aunt. From this point of view, Iris and Laura’s sacrifice of their own life might enable Sabrina to grasp the dangers of social requirements. She then might become able to free herself from them.
While the reader immediately notices the extreme complexity of the plot of The Blind
Assassin’s plot, he or she also perceives the link between all events and levels of narrations.
Indeed, the reader discovers a three-tiered quest pattern. Iris’s quest for her lost granddaughter clearly conceals another important process. As she remembers the past, Iris clearly endeavours to acknowledge her responsibility for the main tragic events of her life. The reader notices the classical stages of the quest process – separation, encounter with a helper, discovery of the trickster, confrontation with parental figures, epiphanic moments of introspection – present in Iris’s narrative, and echoed by more romanticised versions in the novel she writes and burlesque inversions in her lover’s narrative. In this way, Atwood succeeds in intricately linking the disparate elements of her plot. She also enlarges the scope of the quest, pointing to the flaws in Iris’s reasoning. Indeed, the reader should keep in mind that Iris, as any of Atwood’s narrators, is a manipulator of facts. As such, she might not be
433 sincere in her description of her experience. Nevertheless, as Iris repeatedly mentions, she is, after all, the only remaining witness, which allows her to modify her story at will. The last novel in this study presents the reader with a protagonist that, like Iris, is the last witness of the facts he narrates, since he claims to be the last human being on earth. In Oryx and Crake,
Atwood develops the fascinating story of an average individual, forced to accept hybridity as the only way to survive.
434 Chapter 8. Oryx and Crake: Hybridisation and
Colonisation
From tree to tree he limps, elusive,
white, a rumour. In search of his
own kind. (372)
Oryx and Crake tells the story of the last human being alive on earth. “Snowman,” as he deliberately calls himself, first appears to the reader as a dirty, dishevelled, lonely man hiding away in the trees. Snowman tells his life story, as he engages on a dangerous quest for food and other necessities. He explains that he once was Jimmy, the son of two scientists. As such, he lived in a sterilised compound, protected and supervised by the company of genetic engineering for which his parents worked. Revolted by the kind of research she became involved in, Jimmy’s mother soon ran away, leaving him with a hard-working and uncaring father. At school, Jimmy meets another boy of his age, Crake. The latter turns out to be a genius, who initiates Jimmy into the world of computer games and porn sites. Later, Crake’s talent for genetics turns him into a top scientist. Crake hires Jimmy as his assistant, who gradually discovers Crake’s awesome project: the creation of a new human race. In his ambition he is seconded by Oryx, a woman Jimmy recognises from one of the child abuse sites. In the most secret quarter of the compound, Jimmy first encounters the result of this experiment: the Crakers or Children of Crake. Those naked individuals singularly differ from human beings: their skin reflects various, stunning colours; they possess the power to heal one another through purring; they are strictly vegetarian; and they perform strange territorial and mating rituals. Jimmy soon understands that Crake’s genetic research is part of a larger, far more dangerous project. By disseminating a so-called pleasure pill – the “BlyssPluss pill” –
435 all over the world, Crake wishes to eradicate the human race and replace it with his “perfect” creatures. However, Oryx and Crake die in the middle of that enterprise, leaving
Jimmy/Snowman as the only human being in charge of the Crakers. In search of food,
Snowman revisits the compound. He then remembers his past, reflecting on how he came to be the last of his kind.
This novel, which Atwood calls a “speculative fiction,”1 to distinguish it from science- fiction, primarily presents us with the writer’s interrogation about the future of our world.
Worried about our continuous experiments with genetics, as well as with our tendency to destroy the natural environment with our intensive pollution, Atwood warns about the future of the human race in a frightful, yet highly plausible “what if” scenario. The postcolonial concern for ecology lies at the core of this narrative. However, postmodern aspects are also discernible: for instance, the novel contains a high amount of intertextual references. First of all, Atwood has clearly made use of scientific writings such as Janine M. Benuys’s
Biomimicry as a source. Yet, Oryx and Crake can further be read as an inverted Frankenstein story. Moreover, Snowman definitely resembles Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest, a character which undeniably enriches the postcolonial significance of the novel. Indeed, lost as he is in an apocalyptic no man’s land, the way Snowman’s blames Crake reminds the reader of Caliban’s rejection of Prospero as a master. Both are cursing creatures, unable to handle their future, which has inevitably been altered by the intervention of a powerful, dominant figure. Further, one soon understands that deception and mimicry strategies once again pervade Atwood’s work: in this case, Jimmy’s need for mimicry can be read as one of the causes of the human race’s downfall. Magic realism appears in Jimmy’s numerous soliloquies
1 See website http://www.oryxandcrake.co.uk, consulted on 19 October 2006.
436 and reminiscences: in moments of deep introspection, the protagonist mixes fantasy and reality, past and present, in an attempt to avoid taking responsibilities for his deeds. Oryx and
Crake turn out to be highly powerful characters: Oryx’s simple knowledge of the world, her intuitive connection with nature, allows us to regard her as a positive trickster figure, whereas
Crake, with his hubris and longing for death, embodies the dark side of the trickster. Finally, the novel tackles the topic of hybridisation on two levels: on a literal level, it contains numerous allusions to various cloning experiments, of which the Crakers themselves are the most manifest examples. The Crakers’ natural candour, their state of dependence, turns them into a powerful metaphor of the colonised subject. From a symbolic point of view, Snowman, the last of his kind, also resembles a hybrid creature who does not know where he belongs.
Snowman’s practical quest for food can thus metaphorically be interpreted as a quest for the survival of the human race: returning to the site of the catastrophe, Snowman seeks to understand how humanity came to an end. Moreover, the novel’s ending, as Snowman is watching a fire on the beach, leaves the possibility of a positive outcome. After all, humanity might survive.
1. Snowman: An Inverted Frankenstein or an Apocalyptic Caliban?
As in many other Atwoodian novels, Oryx and Crake displays numerous intertextual overtones. If one carefully reads Snowman’s inner thoughts, allusions to colonialism abound.
In his attempt to grasp his new condition as a singled out individual, Snowman recalls some former readings, among which an obsolete work teaching European colonials how to run plantations (4). The condescending tone and strict morality of those reminiscences echo the way Jimmy was treated as a child in the compounds, thus establishing a link between the early colonisers and the scientists of the twenty-first century. In one of his explanations, Jimmy’s
437 father completes this parallel, comparing the scientists’ position with that of dukes or knights.
He regards the scientific complex as a castle to be defended (28). The comparison immediately establishes scientists as the new rulers of a world in which progress and production have become the dominant mottoes. In this world of numbers, statistics, and experiments, Jimmy appears as a rarity. His love of words – most of them obsolete – makes him stand out as odd. He is aware of his “otherness,” when he reflects: “When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been”
(68). Indeed, in the twenty-first century, science has overcome all other disciplines. Without
Crake’s intervention, Jimmy’s studies in the literary field would have excluded him from a successful career. However, Crake’s wish to hire Jimmy as his assistant is far from disinterested. Indeed, Crake needs to be aided by someone he thinks he can dominate. This control over his collaborator finds its roots in Jimmy’s adolescence. Through the depiction of various computer games performed by the boys, Atwood establishes the superiority of Crake over his friend. The games themselves are highly metaphorical. “Barbarian Stomp,” for instance, opposes wealth and poverty (77). Once again, colonial overtones abound. The game’s motto – “See If You Can Change History!” – denotes the contempt of the twenty-first century for historical development. As such, it also forebodes this civilisation’s disastrous ending. “Blood and Roses,” a trading game based on Monopoly, displays a similar lack of respect for human history: in this game, players exchange atrocities (massacres, genocides, murders, etc.) for human achievements (artworks, scientific discoveries, inventions, etc.) (78).
Once again, human history resembles a video game, in which the victory of the negative side is nothing more than a possible outcome. Crake’s amusing idea of naming his creatures after historical figures – Abraham Lincoln, Madame Curie, Benjamin Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, etc – reveals the same parodic attitude towards human history (100, 160-161). Jimmy’s wish to defend humanity against all odds makes him stand out as “other.” Crake intentionally
438 teases him, questioning the value of art (166-167). Jimmy answers quoting Byron: “‘When every civilization is dust and ashes,’ he said, ‘art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music.
Imaginative structures. Meaning – human meaning, that is – is defined by them. You have to admit that.’” (167) Jimmy’s choice to defend art against destruction strongly contradicts society’s belief in science as the only value. In the world of the compounds, art has no place of its own. Likewise, in this heartless universe, Jimmy is deprived of his voice.
A close analysis of Atwood’s documents reveals how much the novel is based on current scientific developments and on social matters. Among Atwood’s manuscripts preserved at the Fischer Library of Rare Books in Toronto, one finds a series of books and newspaper articles used by the author as a resource for writing Oryx and Crake.2 Janine M.
Benuys’s Biomimicry, for instance, demonstrates the current reality of some of the novel’s experiments in cloning. In her introduction, Benuys blames human beings for their hubris: constantly trying to produce more, they come to forget natural laws, thereby endangering man’s future (Benuys, 16-17). The book reads as a plea for a more respectful treatment of natural resources. Moreover, Atwood has used some of its described experiments in cloning in
Oryx and Crake: the hard-to-imagine goat/spider hybrid frequently mentioned in the novel, certainly finds its origins in Benuys’ description of the scientists’ attempt to recreate spider silk in order to exploit its natural strength (Benuys, 129-139). Further, Atwood made use of several newspaper clippings providing a scientific analysis of the consequences of computer games on the psychological development of the individual.3 A particularly important source is
Time’s interactive supplement of June 4, 20014: it explores the latest technological developments and their dangers for human beings. The file mentions several topics which
2 Collection 335, Box 111. 3 Collection 335, Box 111, File 14:9. 4 Collection 335, Box 11, File 14:16.
439 recur in the novel: computer games, porn on the net, and interactivity. In a note to her assistant Phoebe Larmore, Atwood points to the article on a South Korean on-line game, comparing it to her own Extinctathon. She further states the parallel between her virtual
MaddAddam character and its Korean real-life alter-ego Choi Jae Sum, a computer game grandmaster (See Appendix IV).5 Atwood’s apocalyptic vision of our close future is therefore deeply rooted in current scientific development.
Some of the novel’s literary allusions underline the decline of human civilisation. For instance, Jimmy mentions discovering Shakespeare through Anna K.’s rendition of Macbeth.
He recalls: “Anna K. was a self-styled installation artist with big boobs who’d wired up her apartment so that every moment of her life was sent out live to millions of voyeurs” (84).
Other literary references crop up in Jimmy’s description of porn sites. He compares paedophiles and their little victims with Gulliver and Lilliputians (90). If we consider this comparison in the light of the novel’s motto,6 also taken from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,
Atwood’s intention immediately becomes clear. Indeed, the motto insists on the fact that though the author might have created an imaginary world, he rather chose to depict reality as it is. If one applies such a statement to Oryx and Crake, it entails that Atwood regards the facts narrated in the novel as a possible result of our current attitude towards nature. Indeed, the novel reads as a warning against genetic manipulations for medical or nutritional purposes. Moreover, it pleads for a more respectful attitude towards the environment. As
Atwood explains, the novel is not science-fiction; she calls it speculative, and therefore
5 Collection 335, Box 11, File 14:16. Typed introductory note by Atwood. Also read Michelle Levander’s article “Where Does Fantasy End? as a source for the Extinctathon game in the novel (Time, June 4, 2001, 78-80). 6 “I could perhaps like others have astonished you with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and style; because my principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you.”
440 plausible. The Crakers themselves question the value of reality, as they learn how to deal with images. According to Snowman, their simple minds experience difficulties to understand the difference between an image and a real object. Echoing the Crakers’ questions, Snowman ponders: “Not real can tell us about real. And so forth” (102). This exactly takes place in the novel: this fictional piece focuses on a situation that is not real, but might become our future.
Further, the novel’s setting directly alludes to Milton’s Paradise Lost. In his megalomaniac vision of a new human race, Crake decides to name the experimental complex
“Paradice,” punning on his god-like ability to create human life and on the role of hazard in this new race’s future development (151). The little voice in Jimmy’s head, saying “Paradice is lost, but you have a Paradice within you, happier far” (308), reiterates Jimmy’s involvement in the catastrophe, while stressing his ability to find comfort within himself.
The novel includes puns and parodic quotations alluding to the novel’s dichotomy between science and conscience, such as, for instance, “Siliconsciousness” or “Little spoat/gider, who made thee?” (209). The latter, parodying William Blake’s The Lamb,7 once again questions the responsibility of those scientists, who, through their experiments in the cloning of new animal species, attribute themselves god-like powers.
More than once, Snowman refers to himself as Frankenstein (169, 257). His very name, “Snowman,” points to a mythical monster, the abominable snowman. In this case, the snowman, far from being abominable, strikes the reader as a lonesome, pathetic creature.
Therefore, the novel could be regarded as an inverted Frankenstein story. The scientist has
7 William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 8. John Beer’s book, entitled Blake’s Humanism, points to the poet’s celebration of human virtues such as mercy, pity, peace, and love in the Songs of Innocence (Beer, 71). The allusion to Blake’s Lamb can therefore be regarded as highly ironic because Atwood precisely denounces the gradual disappearance on those virtues in the scientifically ruled world of Oryx and Crake.
441 become his own creature. Jimmy, far from being scary, has simply become a poor, desolate, marginalised human being. The mythical figure of the monster is of paramount importance in this story. Marina Warner’s analysis of the Frankenstein myth in Managing Monsters provides us with an interesting insight (Warner, 20-21). After presenting the Frankenstein story as one of the major myths of our times, which has undergone numerous parodies of all kinds, Warner draws the reader’s attention towards Mary Shelley’s dominant message. Far from being a mere condemnation of the perversion of science, the novel suggests that the monster resides within ourselves. Jimmy must accept a similar message: by positioning himself as Snowman, he temporarily eludes taking responsibilities for his deeds. However, a closer look at the novel’s development proves Jimmy’s degree of involvement in the catastrophe. His boundless admiration for Crake’s charismatic personality, as well as his own passivity, has simply caused humanity’s downfall. In this sense, I definitely agree with
Warner’s conclusion that “monsters are made, not given” (31). Snowman is the product of a society, which has ignored its limits. Society’s lack of respect for nature, its boundless experiments, made the catastrophe possible. Moreover, it has shaped Jimmy’s personality in such a way that he became unable to sense impending danger. Atwood suggests that our
Western civilisation bears the embryonic potential of a similar outcome.
Snowman can also be regarded as a reincarnation of Shakespeare’s Caliban in The
Tempest. Indeed, this monstrous figure has become a key symbol, a mythic creature in the discussion of colonialism.8 Several recent critiques offer a postcolonial reading of The
Tempest, in which Caliban is regarded as a symbol of intercultural mixings (Retamar, 9-11;
8 In Managing Monsters, Marina Warner briefly summarises the postcolonial interpretation of the Caliban- figure, dating it from Mannoni’s 1950 interpretation (Warner, 75-76). This postcolonial discussion of a character is in similar ways applicable to Atwood’s Snowman. For other postcolonial interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the reader may consult Paul Brown’s article, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine,” or Barker and Hulme’s critical essay, ‘ “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish”: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest.’
442 Loomba & Orkin, 8), “an allegory of colonial relations (Hawkes, 171) or “the emblem of morphological ambivalence” (Brown, 61). Beyond the everlasting debates about his origins –
African, Amerindian, Asian, or even Irish9 – Caliban simply constitutes a symbol of otherness. Critics usually decode Caliban as a product of colonisation. Jimmy’s unconditional admiration for Crake echoes the monster’s submission to Prospero. Similarities between the two figures abound: both live in the midst of wild nature. Moreover, Caliban’s poetic and musical sensibility finds its parallel in Jimmy’s fascination with language. For the colonised subject, the dichotomy between the native tongue and the coloniser’s language becomes a symbol of fragmentation. Snowman’s refusal to admit his responsibilities for the destruction of the human kind resembles Caliban’s challenge against Prospero when he cries “The red plague rid you for learning me your language!” (Act I, Scene 2). Snowman significantly uses the same words when he discovers the consequences of Crake’s experiments. On the phone with Crake, he shouts: “It’s a worldwide plague! It’s the Red Death!” (326). The similarities between the two characters are numerous: in the second scene of Act Two of The Tempest,
Caliban utters his rage at Prospero for teaching him the aspects of his culture that turned him into a slave. In Act Two, Scene Two, Caliban repeatedly curses Prospero. Snowman shows the same attitude, regularly cursing and insulting Crake (10-12). Further, when Jimmy becomes Snowman, he simultaneously turns into a monster, who displays an earthly physique comparable to Caliban’s. Atwood repeatedly insists on his dirtiness, thereby identifying him as an animal-like figure. Like Caliban, who would reveal the secrets of his island to Stephano for some more alcohol, Snowman expresses his need to drink. Both characters are tormented by voices: Prospero controls Caliban’s spirit, whereas Snowman constantly hears echoes from the past (10-12), which remind him both of happy moments and of his guilt.
9 John Gillies’s book, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference explores at length the issue of Caliban’s origins (39-69, 99-155).
443 In Atwood’s work, the critique of colonialism often takes the form of the individual’s state of exile, as for her latest hero, Snowman, singled out as the last human being. In Oryx and Crake, the traditional colonial dichotomy between “here” and “there” expresses itself through the opposition between nature and culture. Jimmy, who simultaneously respects nature and brought about the destruction of mankind, appears as a hybrid creature, who lives in-between these two spheres. So does Caliban, at once the son of a powerful witch and a naïve savage. In the third Act, Caliban deeply wishes to kill Prospero. Jimmy literally performs this deed when he refuses to let Crake enter the sealed area. However, Snowman clearly remains in a Caliban-like situation. Despite Crake’s death, Snowman remains in his control, as indicated by his need to present Crake to his innocent creations as a god-like figure. Snowman therefore reflects: “Crake, King of the Crakery, because Crake is still there, still in possession, still the ruler of his own domain, however dark that bubble of light has now become. Darker than dark, and some of that darkness is Snowman’s. He helped with it”(333). Snowman thus remains a Caliban-like figure, a dispossessed, exiled individual, deprived of voice, yet perpetually raging against the coloniser. Moreover, he also reminds the reader of a trope-like figure, namely that of the false messiah, who despite his charismatic aura and his convincing discourse, fails to offer redemption.
2. The Dangers of Mimicry
In Atwood’s novels, characters regularly use deception and mimicry as defence strategies.
Oryx and Crake forms no exception to this pattern. However, it contains a further dimension: in this case, deception may have lethal consequences. By mimicking Crake’s self-assured behaviour and deceiving other characters, Snowman reveals himself as a danger for humanity
444 at large. When Jimmy introduces himself to the reader, he deliberately calls himself
Snowman, leaving out the adjective “abominable” (8). Yet, as the reader discovers his responsibility in the recent events, which caused the destruction of the human race, he readily admits that Snowman deserves this qualification. Likewise, Snowman uses deception to introduce himself to the Crakers, in a way understandable to them: he calls himself a bird which has lost all its feathers. Therefore, he must cover himself with a cloth. (8-9). While he presents Crake as a god-like figure, he pretends to be able to communicate with him, listening to his broken watch (9, 97). As he proceeds on his mythological creation, Snowman stresses the gullibility of his audience (96): he gives them a series of orders, supposedly emanating from Crake (156, 160, 359, 362). His way of dealing with the Crakers is inspired from an old book on colonialism, from which Snowman regularly quotes (97). A sentence such as “When dealing with indigenous people, (…) you must attempt to respect their traditions and confine your explanations to simple concepts that can be understood within the contexts of their belief systems” (97), both denigrates the Children of Crake, and endows the book with clear colonial implications: Crake’s, and later Snowman’s attitude to the new race, is unacceptable because of its paternalistic, condescending discourse. Refusing to answer all of the Crakers’ numerous questions, Snowman prefers to keep them in a state of semi-ignorance that allows him to keep them in control. He often invents fake definitions to explain words they do not understand
(98). Among his mythological tales, he persuades the innocent creatures to offer him a fish once a week, and to clean the place after he has eaten (101-102). He presents the whole process as an order emanating from Oryx, the Crakers’ female instructor, whom he has elevated to the rank of natural goddess. Snowman sums up his talent at inventing tales as follows: “The Crake they’re praising is his fabrication” (103-104). Snowman realises that his need to be listened to has turned him into a fake prophet of the Crakers’ new religion.
445 Like many Atwoodian characters, Jimmy had to mimic a requested behaviour at an early age. He repeatedly utters his mother’s dissatisfaction with him, explaining the various strategies he uses to please her: acting stupid (21), inventing funny anecdotes to make her laugh (31). He soon realises that his mother’s attitude proves fake too: she constantly tries to mimic what she believes to be the perfect motherly tone (30). Her sudden attempts to cook a real lunch frighten him, resulting in fake, over-enthusiastic reactions on his part (32). Jimmy’s father displays a similarly artificial attitude, which Jimmy describes as a “hearty way of talking (…) as if his father were auditioning for the role of Dad, but without much hope” (52).
Jimmy’s father subsequently tries several strategies with his son: treating him like an adult, for instance (55). Jimmy further comments that he “had done enough faking himself so he could spot it in others, most of the time” (52). Imitation becomes a skill for which Jimmy is praised by his schoolmates: he mimics chimpanzees; he simulates vomiting, chocking, etc
(54); he even goes so far as to produce a hand-puppet comedy featuring Evil Dad and
Righteous Mom (60), as a way of expressing his unhappiness at home. School further encourages this form of deception: like Iris in The Blind Assassin, the narrator of Oryx and
Crake mentions that his teachers taught him how to pretend (39-40). Several comments suggest that other characters use similar patterns of mimicry. For instance, one of his father’s collaborators, a highly gifted woman, talks like a model in a shower-gel advertisement (25);
Jimmy’s girl-friend Barb Jones constantly reinvents herself in an attempt to subvert her parents’ expectations (241). Numerous things are kept secret: suicides among top scientists, for instance, as happened to Crake’s father (183); subversives, like Jimmy’s mother (284); or the inhabitants of the pleeblands (the non-sterilised suburbs) regarded as mentally deficient people (288). Jimmy feels out of place in this highly scientific environment. He makes it clear that words interest him more than science, simultaneously intimating that this fondness for words is regarded as a flaw: his studies in communication do not guarantee any interesting
446 job. To fit into a highly technocratic world, Jimmy, as a communication expert, sometimes invents new words, which sound convincing through their scientific tone (248-249).
Mimicry constitutes a key concept in Jimmy’s civilisation. Even the characters’ houses imitate past architectural styles (26, 53). Deception also stands at the core of scientific research: the top scientists in the compounds constantly feel afraid of industrial espionage that might ruin their efforts (27). This fact causes Jimmy’s mother to become paranoid: he thinks that the family’s phone and e-mail are controlled and imagines housecleaners to be spies (54).
Interesting is Atwood’s introduction of Alex the parrot. This subject of behavioural experiments functions as a powerful metaphor for the characters’ mimicry. Alex’s ultimate reaction, as he turns away from the experiment, utterly moves Jimmy (54). From then on,
Alex the parrot, with its famous sentence “I’m going away now” serves as a leitmotiv in the novel. It frequently recurs in Jimmy’s dreams, moving him to tears. This inordinate reaction can be interpreted as a clue to Jimmy’s guilt. Indeed, Jimmy himself has proved incapable of moving away from Crake’s freaky world. It also reminds us of the stunning disappearance of
Jimmy’s mother.
Jimmy’s mother gives him a practical example of how deception works. Succeeding in running away from the compound, she manages to fool all the guards: she pretends she is going to a dental appointment (62). Jimmy even suspects her of concealing a whole secret life
(64, 216). He feels cheated because his mother, who promised to keep in touch with him, only sends him a few trivial postcards. Lying again, so as not to be identified by the authorities, she signs those cards as “Aunt Monica” (67). Jimmy mistrusts her so much that he believes she asks other people to mail those cards for her so as not to be traceable (68). Clearly, Jimmy’s mother is referred to as a professional liar. She eventually teaches Jimmy how to lie
447 effectively. Indeed, since his mother’s disappearance, the secret police regularly interrogates
Jimmy in order to find her. They hope she will somehow try to enter in contact with him.
When Jimmy helplessly watches her execution on a video tape, he has become so good at deception that he manages not to react at all (258). In the highly deceptive context of life in the compound, Jimmy imagines that his mother’s execution might be faked as well (259).
As a skilled liar, Jimmy’s mother immediately notices Crake’s own mimicry techniques. She claims to appreciate him much because he is “more adult than a lot of adults”
(69), thereby pointing to one of Crake’s ways to exert power on Jimmy. Yet, Jimmy constantly remains aware of Crake’s unreliability: he mentions his doubts about “Crake’s honourableness, intellectual or otherwise” (70). The reader then learns about Crake’s real name, Glenn (70). Crake becomes Jimmy’s best friend: together they play computer chess instead of doing their homework (77). On these occasions, Crake introduces Jimmy to different kinds of digital fallacies visible on the internet (82): false incidents, fake suicides or rehearsed executions (83). This tendency to display rehearsed or fake events has a definitely postmodern undertone, in that it somehow parodies a real situation. Crake concludes that one never knows what reality is (83), a theory which allows him to become insensitive to all forms of violence (86). When the same question turns up again in relation with cloning (200),
Jimmy refuses to discuss it with Crake, due to the latter’s megalomaniac attitude. Indeed, science has likewise become highly deceptive: scientists have created animals that look like dogs, but attack like wolves (205); they disguise hostile viruses as vitamins (211); the inside of the Paradice Dome displays a fake sky with imitation rain or a false moon (302, 326);
Crake himself has offered his scientists a new identity, to hide their involvement in the forbidden Extinctathon game (299). The structure of the highly guarded compounds themselves is deceptive: the research centres look like gigantic labyrinth with lethal dead-ends
448 to trap subversive individuals (217). Jimmy becomes an accomplice in this impressive deception process, when he accepts Crake’s offer to design the advertisement campaign for a new medicine, the BlyssPluss pill. The medicine lends people an impressive libido, while protecting them from any known sort of sexual disease. However, it also secretly causes sterility, while propagating a deadly virus (294). In accepting to promote this medicine,
Jimmy unconsciously becomes guilty of the extermination of the human race. Such is the consequence of his deceptive attitude.
The boys also watch porn shows, which they regard as the happy counterparts of violent television programmes (85). In order to access the most forbidden sites, Crake uses his stepfather’s code and a complicated method he calls the “lily-pad labyrinth” (85-86). It consists in the creation of a series of false tracks which make it impossible to identify an internet user. Once again, Crake thus uses deception, in this particular instance to satisfy his instincts. In this context, Crake reveals to Jimmy his personal situation: being under the authority of his stepfather, Uncle Pete, a man he secretly loathes, Crake has learned how to mimic the attitude of the perfectly respectful adolescent so as to keep out of trouble (89).
However, when Crake later mentions his stepfather’s unexplained death, the reader soon comes to the conclusion that Crake killed him (253). In contact with Crake, Jimmy gradually understands the fake quality of porn sites. He notices that the giggles must be recorded, because the little girls are not smiling at all (90). He becomes highly interested in the false messages conveyed by porn images. He comments: “There were at least three layers of contradictory make-believe, one on top of the other” (90). This sentence can be applied to the novel as well, which presents us with Snowman’s partial version of the events.
449 Oryx herself lies when Jimmy believes he recognises her on one of those shows (91).
Snowman later insists on the unreliability of Oryx’s biography which consists of fragmentary episodes told by several protagonists (114). Significant, however, is that deception once again presides over that character’s life. Though she was extremely young when a foreigner bought her from her village, Oryx recalls that man’s fake smiles and deceptive discourse: he claimed everyone would be happy; the children would sell flowers to the tourists; they would be well treated; they would be fed and kept in a safe place (118). Mothers participated in the deception process, affirming that the children could come back after they had worked enough
(121). However, no child ever came back. Oryx confesses she cannot fully remember her trip to the city (122). Yet, she recalls some of the details: for instance, how the authorities were involved in the treachery: police officers knew very well that those children were not the man’s nieces and nephews. However, they chose not to intervene (125). She remembers how that man manipulated her: he gave the children a new name and told them how to act with tourists (129); so as to be regarded as a protective father figure. Likewise, the older girls were kept hidden in garages: when discovered, they frenetically stand up for their kidnapper, presenting him as their benefactor (254). Oryx, who developed her adult personality in this context, thus cannot help being a liar: Jimmy defines her as “the best poker-faced liar of the world” (314). However, Oryx has been fooled as well: when the epidemic starts spreading, she realises that the virus was hidden in the pills Crake asked her to disseminate around the world (325). Like most Atwoodian characters, Oryx thus functions simultaneously as a deceiver and as a victim of deception. Jimmy too becomes the victim of Crake’s numerous lies. However, his own capacity to lie serves him as an ally in his fight for survival: subsequently lying to guards and to the security man, he manages to remain alone in an uninfected area (327). In his eventual message to posterity, he omits to mention his own role, blaming Crake instead. The graphic presentation of this message, in which words are literally
450 crossed out (346), points to the manipulation of truth performed by Jimmy throughout the story in order to minimise his own involvement.
The end of the novel highlights the contrast between Snowman, the last human being, and the Crakers. As the former presents himself to the latter, he insists on the need for him to create a new identity – that of “Snowman” – to forget the past, to lose his sense of guilt (349).
At the same time, he mentions the Crakers’ total ignorance of deception. He thus reflects: “No point in telling them not to lie, steal, commit adultery, or covet. They wouldn’t grasp the concepts” (366). As Snowman takes on his role of leader of this incongruous people, he marvels at his own talent: he describes himself “dancing gracefully around the truth, light- footed, light-fingered” (350). Indeed, even as the last human being on earth, Snowman prefers to lie rather than to face his responsibilities.
3. Snowman’s Magic Realist Fantasies
Left alone as the last human being, Snowman often dreams away, imagining the presence of benevolent female creatures or frightful hybrid animals. Snowman repeatedly alludes to the voices he often hears. Those voices generate a series of fantastic dreams, as in this episode:
Pretty soon he’ll be seeing beautiful demons, beckoning to him, licking their lips,
with red-hot nipples and flickering pink tongues. Mermaids will rise from the waves,
out there beyond the crumbling towers, and he’ll hear their lovely singing and swim
out to them and be eaten by sharks. Creatures with the heads and breasts of women
and the talons of eagles will swoop down on him, and he’ll open his arms to them,
and that will be the end. (11)
451 The eerie quality of Snowman’s visions endows them with an undeniable gothic character. In his dreams, imagination takes over reality. However, one must admit that his current situation appears as a nightmare too. In other awesome visions, Oryx visits Snowman. Her presence overwhelms him with a terrible fear: he knows that they are both in great danger (43).
Most of Snowman’s dreams convey a sense of fear: something seems terribly wrong
(265); a threatening presence is constantly watching him (261). Such feelings can be interpreted as a sign of Snowman’s remorse – often associated with the character of Oryx, as a metaphor for the victim condition (113). Refusing to admit his implication in the catastrophe,
Snowman is regularly bothered by dreams, in which fiction has become reality. Oryx herself believes in people’s ability to communicate through dreams. In her village, she mentions, some people learn how to leave their body and let their spirit wander. She describes this talent to Jimmy:
The birdcalls were familiar, they were part of what she knew. She imagined that one
of them – the one like a bell – was her mother’s spirit, sent out in the shape of a bird
to keep watch over her, and that it was saying You will come back. In that village,
she told him, some of the people could send their spirits out like that even before
they were dead. It was well known. You could learn how to do it, the old women
could teach you, and that way you could fly everywhere, you could see what was
coming in the future, and send messages, and appear in other people’s dreams. (124)
Oryx’s analysis of her own dreams invites the reader to pay careful attention to them. Indeed, these dreams, as formulated, resemble psychic magic realist moments of revelation. Reality and fiction interact, making it possible for the protagonist to become conscious of impenetrable aspects of reality.
452 Similarly, the narrator regularly points to scientific developments which seem unreal to us, yet are definitely grounded in current research. The scientific background of the novel allows for fictional elements to be mixed with real scientific breakthroughs. For each of those examples, Atwood starts out from an existing scientific discovery. However, she carries its applications to extremes, thus introducing fictional elements. This blend of reality and imagination also bears marked affinities to magic realism. It results in the creation of all kinds of hybrid animals: pigoons, rakunks, wolvogs, bobcats, etc (51, 55). These hybrid species, which turn out to be far more dangerous than the scientists think, possess a grotesque magic realist quality: they consist in the association of otherwise incongruous elements. For instance, animals which look like harmless puppies in fact prove voracious beasts, capable of attacking a young child. The discrepancy between the animal’s friendly appearance and its aggressiveness introduces magic realist overtones.
However, the animal undeniably embodying Snowman’s guilt, is Alex the Parrot. In a certain way, Alex too possesses a hybrid quality. As a subject of scientific experiment, he has acquired a human behaviour (336). Alex frequently appears in Snowman’s dreams, in association with the figure of his mother. The parrot’s decision to move away from the place where experiments are conducted deeply moves Snowman because it reminds him of his mother’s sudden escape (84). The aesthetics in which the parrot fits therefore possesses a psychic magic realist quality: in Snowman’s mind, it symbolises far more than experimentation with animals, it rather embodies his attempts to justify his mother’s departure.
453 4. Oryx, Crake, and Snowman: Three Aspects of Tricksterism
The very title of the novel mentions two characters that the protagonist decides to transform into gods. Through their unconventional life style and their assimilation as godlike creatures,
Oryx and Crake both can be regarded as impressive trickster figures. However, they embody different aspects of the trickster character. Crake strikes the reader as an ex-centric being, singled out because of his genius. He is a cold-hearted joker who plays with the fate of humanity as with a computer game. Crake embodies the ex-centric dimension of the trickster, his scientific ability making him an almost divine outcast. Oryx, on the contrary, reflects a more human aspect of the trickster figure. She represents the trickster’s connection with nature, becoming the embodiment of a nature goddess in the Crakers’ mythology.
A closer look at the text clearly establishes those characters’ above-mentioned qualities. In Jimmy’s first description of him, Crake appears as a dubious figure: Jimmy identifies him at once as “a master of the sideways leap” (40). When first encountering his new schoolmates, Crake acts in a secretive way: he volunteers “no information about himself”
(72). Moreover, his potential energy impresses the other children (72, 76). Later, Crake’s attitude when playing computer games with Jimmy foreshadows his megalomaniac ambitions: indeed, Jimmy suspects him of wanting to become a grandmaster at their favourite game,
Extinctathon (81). Crake eventually makes his wish come true: in association with most of the
Extinctathon grandmasters, whom he recruits to form his lab team, he causes humanity’s downfall. Further, Crake is a joker, as reflected in the numerous parodic quotations glued on his fridge. His fridge magnets allude to several of his trickster qualities: they refer to his divine position, his secrecy – “there are two moons, the one you can see and the one you can’t” –, his wish for change, his rejection of limits, his animality, and the power of his
454 thoughts (301). He insists on the value of breaking rules when necessary (310), thereby revealing his subversive attitude. Oryx confirms Crake’s divinity when she tells Jimmy:
“Crake lives in a higher world, Jimmy (…) He lives in a world of ideas. He is doing important things” (313). Crake therefore represents the trickster as voicing socially unacceptable ideas.
Indeed, experimenting with human genetic potential has become common place in recent scientific development. Crake’s story therefore expresses Atwood’s concern for our future.
Jimmy’s virtual first encounter with Oryx equally impresses the reader. As a child on a porn show Jimmy watches on the internet, Oryx intensely looks at him in the eye, thus revealing her ability to transcend virtuality (91). She deeply moves Jimmy, hinting at the perversity of his frequent porn watching activity. Therefore, Oryx functions as a kind of moral agent, denouncing our society’s decline. After the catastrophe, when Snowman wishes to eat more fish, she maliciously laughs at his despair (96). She often humours him, playing on her different versions of her past (316), thus bringing about confusion in his mind. Jimmy mentions her fondness for disguises of all kinds, as befits a trickster. He recalls: “She liked to dress up, change her appearance, pretend to be a different woman” (231). Jimmy calls her “a casketful of secrets” (314). He insists on her power of revelation: “Any moment now she would open herself up, reveal to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of life, or of her life – the thing he was longing to know. The thing he’d always wanted. What would it be?” (314). A survivor of child abuse, Oryx conveys another of Atwood’s messages to her readers. Oryx represents the perversity of our modern society. The Crakers’ innocence stands in sharp contrast to her childhood. Once again, the character is used as a messenger to the reader, denouncing another potential danger of technological progress.
455 Finally, the reader notices that Snowman regularly alludes to both characters as though they were divinities. His vocabulary abounds in religious or ritualistic words. This characteristic of Snowman’s personality proves highly ironic: indeed, one of Crake’s aims in giving birth to a new human race was to eradicate some aspect of the human civilisation he disapproved of. Religion belonged to those characteristics. The Crakers’ tendency to regard
Crake, their creator, and Oryx, his assistant, as godlike figures, therefore functions as an ironic counterpoint to Crake’s original idea. Religious and ritual allusions voice Atwood’s own concern about the consequences of this mad scientist’s experiments. Snowman regularly mentions his broken watch, which he allegedly uses to communicate with Crake. He regards this watch as a talisman (3), enabling him to maintain his social position as an emissary of the gods. This function both causes him to be included in the Crakers’ world as a necessary element – he teaches them stories about their gods – and to remain on the edge of society, precisely because of his role. He therefore describes himself as a “creature of dimness, of the dusk” (6). He is a “weird” person, feeling “deformed” (42). He regularly utters his impression of being “out” (45). At school, his habit of imitating teachers places him in the same intermediate position between the instructors and his fellow pupils (74, 75). Snowman constitutes essentially an in-between character. Even concerning his love life, he regards himself as a joker among his girlfriends’ other, more serious lovers (251). We might therefore regard Jimmy/Snowman as another version of the trickster figure: that of the ex-centric outcast, whose position allows him to express social criticism. Several elements point to
Jimmy’s potential tricksterism: one of his girlfriends, Amanda Payne, brings him closer to the world of death. As an artist, Amanda practices what she calls “vulturizing,” i.e. arranging dead-animal parts, waiting for vultures to come and feast on them, and filming or photographing the whole scene (244). Jimmy insists on the fact that this form of art is a life creation and destruction process, thus a sort of divine power. Once again, Jimmy appears
456 closely related to that power (245). Further, he frequently hints at his own animality. He thinks that he might be a “danger, a fanged animal gazing out from the shadowy cave of the space inside his own skull” (261). When he later becomes Crake’s assistant, he describes his function as “the jackal position” (300), once again adopting the in-between position of the helper of those in power. Jimmy’s relations to Oryx and Crake give him an impression of helplessness. He wonders: “Had he only been some sort of toy-boy for Oryx, a court jester for
Crake?” (322). This reaction perfectly illustrates one of the most important contradictions of the trickster: to others – here, the Crakers – he appears as a powerful creature, whereas from the inside, he remains at a loss, constantly looking for some balance. Snowman realises this when he returns from his expedition. He then faces the Crakers’ representation of himself: “a grotesque-looking figure, a scarecrowlike effigy” (360). As he eventually abandons the
Crakers to their fate in his attempt to find other people of his kind, Snowman leaves them this laconic message: “Crake is watching over you (…) Oryx loves you” (367). Regarding the
Crakers as children, Snowman leaves them with two principles to guide them: Crake’s vigilance, preventing them from performing evil and Oryx’s love of nature. However,
Snowman himself remains a hybrid creature, who refused to accept Crake’s authority – the reign of science – yet cannot stand the idea of becoming fully integrated into nature.
5. The Hybridity of the Colonised Subject
Oryx and Crake equally reads as an enlightening fable about colonisation. Indeed, Oryx, as a victim of pornography, embodies the woman as a colonised subject within patriarchal society.
Similarly, the Crakers’ gradual discovery of their creator, their tendency to regard him as a god, metaphorically suggests issues of colonialism. Among those characters, Snowman can be
457 considered a hybrid: indeed, for a while, he abandoned himself to Crake’s power, thereby causing the human race to disappear. However, his desire to help the Crakers survive shows that he respects life.
Jimmy’s first description of the Crakers highlights their “otherness.” He mentions their stunning green eyes and the different skin colours that make them so attractive (8). As the story develops, the readers discover the characteristics distinguishing the Crakers from human beings: male Crakers have no beard (9); it only takes them four years to become adolescents
(158); they have a strange vegetarian diet (158-159), as well as weird mating rituals (164).
Moreover, several references to cloning experiments prompt the readers to admit the possibility of creating a new human race. Snowman iteratively mentions the pigoons – or pigs used to store transplantation organs (22, 25). In addition, he compares himself with the pigoons: like them, he has nothing to say about what is going on (24). As he discovers
Crake’s college, he also mentions the goat-spider, a hybrid which produces milk containing silk filaments (199), particularly useful to produce bulletproof vests. Further allusions to the dangers of extinction occur in the names of the Extinctathon grandmasters: they bear the names of extinct animals (298). As Snowman proceeds to explain the creation of hybrids
(302-303), one is reminded of the novel’s main concern: the destruction of the human race.
Interestingly, Atwood uses Oryx as the symbol of female empowerment. Oryx’s first occurrence in the novel consists in an image on a screen:
This was how the two of them first saw Oryx. She was only about eight, or she
looked eight. They could never find out for certain how old she’d been then. Her
name wasn’t Oryx, she didn’t have a name. She was just another little girl on a
porno site. None of those little girls had ever seemed real to Jimmy – they’d always
458 struck him as digital clones – but for some reason Oryx was three-dimensional from
the start. (90)
At that crucial moment, Jimmy becomes aware of the individuality of the little girls he stupidly watches on porn sites. Atwood’s message, her condemnation of sexual empowerment can hardly be missed. Oryx’s possesses dubious memories of that period of her life. She has been deprived of a voice for so long, that she talks about the past with difficulty. She suffers from an obvious alienation too: she cannot remember the language she spoke as a child (115).
She cannot express herself easily. She comments: “She did remember that: the clumsiness of the words in her mouth, the feeling of being struck dumb” (115).
Atwood frequently draws the readers’ attention to Snowman’s difference. At the beginning, the reader does not know who the Crakers are. He believes them to be children or the members of an isolated tribe. Yet, they are well aware of Snowman’s “otherness,” of his
“monstrousness” (101): he belongs to “a separate order of being” (101); he is “so unlike them” (7) that they constantly want to look at him. They ask him to remove his glasses to show them that he has two eyes, like them (7). Snowman’s choice of his name similarly underlines his alterity. According to Crake’s rule, taking over the name of a mythic creature without physical equivalent is forbidden. However, after Crake’s death, Jimmy subversively opts for a mythical name:
It’s given Snowman a bitter pleasure to adopt this dubious label. The Abominable
Snowman – existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike
man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its
backward-pointing footprints. Mountain tribes were said to have chased it down and
killed it when they had the chance. (7-8)
459 Snowman’s new patronymic stresses his in-betweenness, while metaphorically alluding to another of the novel’s main themes: extinction. Later, as he reflects on the Abominable
Snowman’s comic potential, Snowman comes to the following conclusion: “Maybe that’s the real him, the last Homo sapiens – a white illusion of a man, here today, gone tomorrow, so easily shoved over, left to melt in the sun, getting thinner and thinner until he liquefies and trickles away” (224). Allusions to Snowman’s loneliness are numerous (10). Even the Crakers realise his sadness. They comment: “Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over the sea, and now he is all alone” (9). Because of his “otherness”, they do not fully understand him (9). Snowman regards himself as a “castaway” (41). He explains that, as the last man alive, he cannot even possibly leave an account of what happened, because none of the Crakers can read (41). The disappearance of his fellow human beings has deprived him of his voice. Snowman sums up his “otherness” in the following passage:
He feels excluded, as if from a party to which he will never be invited. All he’d have
to do is step forward into the firelight and there’d be a ring of suddenly blank faces
turned towards him. Silence would fall, as in tragic plays of long ago when the
doomed protagonist made an entrance, enveloped in his cloak of contagious bad
news. On some non-conscious level Snowman must serve as a reminder to these
people, and not a pleasant one: he’s what they may have been once. I’m your past,
he might intone. I’m your ancestor, come from the land of the dead. Now, I’m lost, I
can’t get back, I’m stranded here, I’m all alone. Let me in! (105-106)
The words “excluded,” “doomed,” “contagious” aptly describe Snowman’s situation among the Crakers. He no longer finds his place in the present: he lives only as an ancestor. He further compares himself with an infectious leper (153), a hairy animal (169), and a mutant
(174). Despite his desperate situation, Snowman still hopes to discover other survivors of his kind (222).
460
Yet, Snowman already feels as an outcast when he is young: no one is aware of the secret person within him (58). As an adolescent, he avoids any contact with his parents and has only one friend, his pet rakunk Killer (59). He feels invisible (66), unable to please his mother (68, 69); he wants to be someone else (109); he sometimes totally avoids human relationships (284). His fondness for obsolete words emphasises his oddity: he fancies words as “awesome,” “bogus” (83, 261). Moreover, his mother’s sudden disappearance makes him suspect (182): he constitutes a security risk. This prevents him from getting an interesting job, as no company wishes to hire him. From then on, he feels like a rejected individual, whose field of study is devoid of interest (195). His sentimental life proves a failure as well: he soon notices that his successive girlfriends try to cure him from his obvious state of alienation
(190). Also, Jimmy feels attracted to the world of the pleeblands – the unprotected suburbs – peopled with social outcasts (196). As a student, he is often seen in the company of students from those neighbourhoods (242). He frequently visits public places to give himself the illusion that he belongs to a group (253). However, what characterises Snowman is his loneliness. He ponders: “He’s humanoid, he’s hominid, he’s an aberration, he’s abominable; he’d be legendary, if there were anyone left to relate legends” (307). When he eventually learns that there might be other human beings still alive, Snowman feels frightened (372): once again, he fears being unable to meet those people’s expectations.
The novel thus presents us with three situations illustrating the consequences of colonialism. In a first episode, the Crakers, as a new race, experience the world with innocence. Their gullibility enables Snowman to exert power over them, presenting them with an invented mythology of his own. In his tales, Snowman functions as the emissary of the creator, Crake. As such, he is respected, yet singled out. Through his position as the only
461 human being left on earth, he influences the Crakers’ development with his tales: though they were basically intended as non religious people, Snowman’s disappearance creates in them the desire to build a kind of idol representing him. Through his mystic tales, Snowman forces the Crakers to bring him a fish a week. This trivial deed may be interpreted as a form of empowerment, especially as Snowman considers asking for more. Patriarchal society is another form of supremacy criticised in the novel. As a victim of child abuse, Oryx qualifies as an example of the damage caused by patriarchal empowerment. When the reader discovers
Oryx as an adult, he immediately realises that her submission to Crake echoes her obedience to the author of porn movies as a child. While she has become a superb woman, Oryx still behaves as a little girl, obeying Crake, the dominant male figure. The strength of the pattern imposed on her as a child, makes her blind to the dangers of Crake’s megalomaniac projects.
In a sense, Jimmy suffers from the same kind of behaviour. Realising his position as an outcast, he would endure anything to fit in. Thus, when Crake asks him to become part of his team, he feels flattered, failing to grasp the danger of the situation. He constantly oscillates between his commitment to Crake and the necessary acknowledgement of his responsibilities in the destruction of the human kind.
6. Atwood’s Ecological Stance
Atwood’s concern for nature, ecological matters, should undeniably be related to her fascination for the trickster spirit. Indeed, the trickster commonly embodies nature, the animal, instinctive aspect of human psychology. The trickster’s wolfish appetite and sensuousness proves his connection with nature. It also connects him to another of Atwood’s major themes, survival. Atwood’s plea to preserve our natural environment should therefore be regarded as another aspect of Atwood, the trickster-writer. Survival once again occupies a
462 central position in Atwood’s novel. This time, the narrative deals with no less than the survival of the human race as a whole. Atwood repeatedly voices her concern for our future through the description of stunning yet totally plausible scientific developments. As she explains on the internet site about the novel,10 those scientific breakthroughs already exist nowadays. Transplants, genetic researches, artificial nutrients can be found in current scientific research. The novel abounds in descriptions of current deteriorations of those resources. For instance, several passages allude to the dangers of global warming. The narrator claims that severe droughts brought about a lack of meat affecting humankind as a whole (24). He mentions the climatic changes which caused the destruction of the crops (118,
173, 253). Further, he makes recurring allusions to dangerous viruses, which might kill people in only a few hours (176, 216, 253, 324, 325); to the destruction of forests (179); to the pollution of the air (287); to the increasing lack of food supplies (295) to extinct species (293,
311), among which mankind (344).
Similarly, the boys’ computer games echo this destruction of our planet: after a game of “Blood and Roses” – in which competitors exchange human achievements for atrocities –
Crake concludes that “winning meant you inherited a wasteland” (80). Likewise, the boys’ favourite game, Extinctathon, offers its participants the privilege of discovering extinct species (80). The message is that those species have become so numerous that they make the
10 See http://www.randomhouse.com/features/atwood/interview.html. Atwood says: “Like The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians. As with The Handmaid's Tale, it invents nothing we haven't already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?” See also Catherine Keenan’s internet article, entitled “She Who Laughs Last.” Keenan mentions that Atwood’s fiction is deeply rooted in reality. For instance, when Atwood checked the names she uses in the novel on the internet, she found out that several among them already existed. Moreover, at the same time, scientists announced the threat of anthrax contagion and the outbreak of the SARS. I therefore think that Oryx and Crake should be read as a realistic speculative fiction, rather than a pure fantasy on recent environmental issues. (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/02/1051382088211.html).
463 game extremely difficult. Yet, the novel contains other, less obvious details pointing to the destruction of our natural and food resources. Jimmy, for example, mentions a TV game, the
“Queek Geek Show, which had contests featuring the eating of live animals and birds, timed by stopwatches, with prizes of hard-to-come-by foods” (85). He then comments: “It was amazing what people would do for a couple of lamb chops or a chunk of genuine brie” (85), implying that such kinds of food have become precious. Likewise, he mentions a series of genetically modified substitution products, such as the Happicuppa Coffee, “designed so that all of its beans would ripen simultaneously” (179). Later, as Snowman, he eats the fish offered to him by the Crakers, commenting on its lack of taste and on the toxins it possibly carries (100). Moreover, Jimmy repeatedly hints at the dangers of genetic manipulations: he mentions the “luminous green rabbits,” which slip out of their cages and eventually become a nuisance (96); the ChickieNobs, organisms meant to produce more than the normal amount of chicken parts; the wolvogs, cute yet highly aggressive dog-wolf crossings (206); snats – a crossing between snakes and rats (229). Crake expresses how easy it would be to destroy life on earth. He remarks: “All it takes (…) is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever” (223). Jimmy’s fellow students display an analogous, highly pessimistic view of humanity: they regard human society as a monster, mainly producing corpses and rubble, as a self-consuming, disgusting life form doomed to extinction (243). They envision the future of mankind in the following terms: “Soon (…) there would be nothing left but a series of long subterranean tubes covering the surface of the planet. The air and light inside them would be artificial, the ozone and oxygen layers of Planet Earth having been totally destroyed” (243).
464 Finally, Snowman’s mythological narrative, addressed to the Crakers, metaphorically hints at the current disrespect for nature. Snowman invents:
The people in the chaos were full of chaos themselves, and the chaos made them do
bad things. They were killing other people all the time. And they were eating up all
the Children of Oryx, against the wishes of Oryx and Crake. Every day they were
eating them up. They were killing them and killing them, and eating them and eating
them. They ate them even when they weren’t hungry. (103)
Though this depiction of our future sounds apocalyptic, the novel still ends on a positive note.
Indeed, Atwood writes; “After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is” (371). One should also keep in mind that the trickster has a peculiar connection with nature, that allows him to act as a messenger in-between life and death. The novel can thus be regarded as the message of the trickster-author to an audience that seems to have forgotten the importance of nature. Therefore, the novel remains open-ended:
Snowman’s eventual discovery of footsteps in the sand implies that mankind might have survived. At the end of the book, everything remains possible.
7. Snowman’s Quest for Humanity
Like most of Atwood’s narratives, Oryx and Crake can be read as a quest novel. Stuck in the midst of a hostile environment, Snowman engages on a quest for rudimentary means of survival (149-151). As he engages on this quest, Snowman gradually remembers his past, thereby experiencing the five stages of the quest pattern, as mentioned in the previous chapters. The narrative constantly alternates between Snowman’s current desperate situation and Jimmy’s unsatisfactory adolescence. From then on, Snowman’s reminiscences of his life
465 as a boy and adolescent parallels the Crakers’ gradual discovery of their environment. The reader notices that they ask more and more questions, while slowly creating the basis of a new mythology. Their religious development echoes Jimmy’s rising admiration for Crake, which eventually causes him to support his apocalyptic design. After a section describing
Snowman’s relationship with the Crakers, the narrative logically mentions Jimmy in relation to his parents. In the fourth section, devoted to the description of genetically engineered animals, a sentence points to the fact that this novel can be read as a quest: “Each one of us must tread the path laid out before him, or her, says the voice in his head, a man’s this time, the style bogus guru, and each path is unique. It is not the nature of the path itself that should concern the seeker, but the grace and strength and patience with which each and every one of us follows the sometimes challenging…” (23). Indeed, Snowman engages on a unique, challenging path, trying to cope with his guilt, while understanding how his current disastrous situation came about. Listening to the various voices that regularly pester the protagonist, the reader becomes aware of Snowman’s deep distress. This state of mind is highlighted by his subsequent allusions to his mother’s depression when she decided to leave her job. When
Snowman remembers her as a “strange, insufficient, miserable mother” (67), one realises that those adjectives can be applied to himself. Like the leader of a cult, Crake appears to Jimmy at the time when the latter is the most vulnerable. He soon becomes Jimmy’s friend. Together, they discover Oryx as a child on a porn site. Oryx can be regarded as the green guide – traditionally the second stage of the quest: she helps Jimmy find his place among the scientists of the inhuman Paradice Dome. On the contrary, Crake’s influence on Jimmy represents the third stage of the quest – that of the trickster figure. In this novel, stages two and three are deliberately inverted because of Crake’s importance in the narrative development. The novel then switches back to Snowman’s recent experiences with the Crakers: how he convinces them to offer him a fish once a week, and how, on the other hand, he drinks up his last supply
466 of alcohol, thus attempting to forget his dreadful situation. As if to draw the reader’s attention to the subject of human misery, Atwood chooses to focus on the character of Oryx: she depicts Oryx’s youth, her departure for the city, and, eventually, Jimmy and Crake’s discovery of her on their computer screen. This aspect of the story subtly introduces the theme of guilt, of responsibility for one’s deeds, which pervades the novel. Soon after that,
Snowman expresses his need to start out on a quest for food – a seemingly practical journey – which, however, also has a highly symbolical value. As Snowman gradually acknowledges his guilt, at the same time, the Crakers innocently discover religion. They associate the character of Oryx – who taught them simple things in Paradice – to a nature goddess. Quite naturally, when one of their infants gets bitten by a wild animal – the Crakers perform their healing rituals, turning to Oryx in search of divine support (157). Snowman secretly enjoys their devotion as the proof that Crake, who wanted to annihilate religious belief, might sometimes be wrong. Subsequently, he quickly disappears on his quest journey. To the
Crakers, he explains that he needs to ask things to Crake in person (159). Once again, the author emphasises Snowman’s vulnerability: “He’s barefoot (…) he walks cautiously” (163).
During his journey, Snowman reminisces his teenage years. This sequence may also be regarded as the fourth stage of the traditional quest pattern. Indeed, it mainly deals with
Jimmy and Crake’s relationships with their parents. For years, Jimmy remained in need of this mother who ran away from him. Singularly, Crake’s father escaped to the pleeblands too
(182). Several details regularly point to this lack: Jimmy spots his mother in a crowd demonstrating against transgenic coffee beans (181). He eventually regards her as a sort of
“mythical being” (191). His mother’s violent reaction against scientific misuse of all kinds reminds Jimmy of his own passivity: faced with Crake’s harmful inventions, he fails to thwart his projects. He thinks: “There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one.
467 He had shut things out” (184). This isolation, voluntarily created by Crake through the regular practice of computer games such as “Extinctathon” allows him to empower Jimmy. The control Crake exerts on Jimmy is prolonged, even after Crake’s death. Jimmy sums up this feeling:
So Crake never remembered his dreams. It’s Snowman that remembers them
instead. Worse than remembers: he’s immersed in them, he’s wading through them,
he’s stuck in them. Every moment he’s lived in the past few months was dreamed
first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much. (218)
Indeed, Snowman’s life among the Crakers involves all kinds of perils: wild animals might attack him; the Crakers might reject him if they came to suspect his lies; and he desperately lacks food supplies. He therefore points to the danger of his quest. During his expedition, he must cross open spaces without shelter and face terrible heat (225). He overcomes several obstacles: barricades, checkpoints (225), formerly electrified walls, a rampart, numerous, gates, sentry boxes, watchtowers (227, 279, 280), doorways (267), locked doors, flights of stairs (269); he creeps into an emergency air vent (279). These obstacles emphasise the difficulty of Snowman’s endeavour. On his way, he comes across objects dropped by the people in panic after the outburst of the epidemic (226). He visits an abandoned house, where his image in the mirror deeply shocks him: “A stranger stares back at him, bleary-eyed, hollow-cheeked, pocked with bug-bite scabs. He looks twenty years older than he is. He winks, grins at himself, sticks out his tongue: the effect is truly sinister” (231). Among a series of utilitarian objects, he finds a flashlight, candles, matches (233). All those instruments metaphorically indicate that he is searching for a better understanding of himself: they might throw some light on the darker sides of his personality. Symptomatically, this house suddenly brings his memory back to “his own house from twenty-five years ago, himself the missing
468 child” (233), indicating that there is more to his quest than a simple material lack: Snowman obviously remains incomplete from a psychological point of view. His subsequent assumption
“I haven’t grown as a person” (237) confirms this. This conclusion brings him back to his life after graduation, when he accumulates unsatisfactory love relationships, simultaneously accompanying Crake in his perverse virtual hobbies. Jimmy confronts his mother one last time when the security guards make him watch the video of her execution (258). Yet,
Jimmy’s reaction once again points to his inability to face reality: he refuses to accept his mother’s death, implying that the images might have been faked. The sudden discovery of a radio offers a possibility of a positive outcome: other human beings might have survived
(272). First, he hears a very distant Russian voice, then, at last, an English one (273). As he settles down for the night, Snowman finally reflects on his own responsibility:
Night falls. He lies down on one of the cots in the bedroom, the bed that’s made.
Where I’m lying now, a dead man used to sleep, he thinks. He never saw it coming.
He had no clue. Unlike Jimmy, who’d had clues, who ought to have seen but didn’t.
If I’d killed Crake earlier, thinks Snowman, would it have made any difference?
(276)
One might go as far as to regard Snowman’s sudden realisation as Atwood’s message to her readers. Indeed, if one considers the current concern about global warming, one might also read Oryx and Crake as a metaphor for our own predicament. As polluters and consumers, we resemble Snowman, who refuses to face the consequences of his actions. Snowman then proceeds to explain how he started to work for Crake. He wonders: “What the fuck did he need me for? (…) Why didn’t he leave me alone?” (283). He describes the creation process of the pill that brought about the destruction of the human race – the BlyssPluss pill – generated by the Extinctathon grandmasters (298). He mentions his first glimpse at the Crakers, whom
469 he calls “Crake’s life’s work” (302): “They were naked (…) they were so beautiful. Black, yellow, white, brown, all available skin colours. Each individual was exquisite. ‘Are they robots, or what?’ he said” (302). At first sight, Crake’s invention looks like a total success.
However, the reader feels the apocalyptic end approaching, as Snowman reiterates the expressions of his guilt: “If only haunts him. But if only what? What could he have said or done differently? What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much” (318). For the first time, Snowman admits that he might have changed the course of events. However, he never goes as far as to imagine what he might have done to stop Crake. Instead, he narrates the outburst of the plague, with Oryx’s and Crake’s subsequent deaths. Meditating on Crake’s “achievement,” Snowman concludes:
“Crake’s emergency storeroom. Crake’s wonderful plan. Crake’s cutting-edge ideas. Crake,
King of the Crakery, because Crake is still there, still in possession, still the ruler of his own domain, however dark that bubble of light has now become. Darker than dark, and some of that darkness is Snowman’s. He helped with it” (333). Snowman’s climactic arrival at the core of Crake’s kingdom forces him to face his responsibilities once again. Inside, he sees the scattered bones of Oryx and Crake (335), then heads for the storeroom. One can regard this sudden consciousness as the fifth stage of Snowman’s quest. Confronted to the remains of
Oryx and Crake, Snowman has to acknowledge his guilt. In a moment of introspection, he realises that he might have changed the course of history, had he been less passive and more courageous. He then remembers the events following Crake’s death: how he shut himself up, then waited for the death of all the other inhabitants of the compound. He then took it as his mission to lead the Crakers to a safe place along the sea shore (350-353). After his expedition to Paradice, Snowman turns back to the Crakers. They cure the cut in his feet. He then realises that the fire comes from the shore, simultaneously understanding the necessity for him to join
470 his own species. Then, after a last message to the Crakers – “Crake is watching over you (…)
Oryx loves you” (367) – he sets out to the seashore.
***
Oryx and Crake symptomatically differs from Atwood’s earlier production. For the first time,
Atwood depicts a male protagonist. So far, all the main characters of Atwood’s novels were intricate, tortured female figures. Thus, the presence of a male protagonist in this last novel indicates the amplification of Atwood’s discourse. The writer here shows how humanity as a whole becomes paralysed by environmental decadence.
Further, like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake presents us with an apocalyptic vision of our near future. However, events in The Handmaid’s Tale were inspired by abuses during World War Two, or current abuses of women in distant countries. In Oryx and Crake,
Atwood finds her inspiration in already existing scientific developments that gradually shape our Western world in the present. The dangers described in the novel are therefore far closer to us than in The Handmaid’s Tale. However, the narrative also offers an optimistic note. Like many Atwoodian novels, it presents the reader with an open ending: Snowman decides to join his fellow human beings, not knowing their intentions. However, while the many of the previous novels presented the quest pattern as a circular one, Snowman, in Oryx and Crake, definitely makes a step forward. While the other Atwoodian heroines remained in an elusive state of balance, Snowman both has acknowledged his guilt and made the decision to return towards humankind. Therefore, I regard the novel as a positive message to the reader: although our civilisation clearly moves towards a self-destruction process, we might still, as
Snowman does, choose to alter this by changing our own behaviour. However, if we go on
471 letting things happen, as Snowman did with Crake, we might end up with destroying our own life resources. In this world, we play the part of the colonisers, exploiting natural resources.
At the same time, we also position ourselves as the victims of an empowerment performed by the worlds of science and consumption. We must therefore both resist this hegemony and behave as responsible inhabitants of the planet Earth. As human beings living in the world of technology and internet communication, we have become hybrids: we desperately long to preserve nature, while continuing to consume its resources. Hence the message of respect for nature conveyed by a trickster-writer.
472 Conclusion : Exploring the Labyrinth.
The true story lies among the other stories,
a mess of colors, like jumbled clothing thrown off or away
like hearts on marble, like syllables, like butchers’ discards.
The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue
after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever
ask for the true story. Poems 1976-1986. p. 58.
As a conclusion to this study, one might wonder whether Atwoodian protagonists experience the labyrinth in the same way. In Lady Oracle, Joan exclaims: “in any labyrinth I would have let go of the thread in order to follow a wandering light, a fleeting voice” (152).
Keeping in mind that the maze, the central metaphor of this thesis, represents the heroine’s inner confusion, one might interpret this quotation as an utterance of complete helplessness.
Joan feels lost: unable to encompass the diversity of her own personality, she fails to acknowledge her hybrid self. Consequently, by the end of the novel, she resorts to another form of escapism, becoming a science-fiction writer instead of an author of gothic romances.
She no longer wishes to defy men’s expectations or to be acclaimed as a poetess. When examining Oryx and Crake, one notices that the protagonist’s situation has become totally different. After having wandered through the desolate compounds in search for food,
Snowman comes to face the consequences of his attitude. He realises his responsibilities for the almost total destruction of mankind. Simultaneously, he understands the necessity for him
473 to survive. Emerging slowly from a maze of ruins, Snowman, takes the risk of joining other human beings and start anew.
One might therefore argue that the recurring themes in Atwood’s work have evolved throughout her career. Deception, for instance, reveals highly diverse forms. In the early narratives, heroines use deception to convey the requested image of themselves: Marian wants to be regarded as a perfect wife; the “Surfacer” uses deception as a strategy to hide her
“otherness.” Surfacing also introduces the notion of the deceptiveness of language, a concept which runs through Atwood’s entire fictional work, up to Oryx and Crake, in which Jimmy invents new words. In Lady Oracle, deception already adopts a more complex form. It expresses Joan’s artificially constructed personality, which gives birth to different selves. Joan constantly mimics female stereotypes, thus underlining their grotesque character. Yet, these early narratives confront the reader with rather innocuous lies. While the heroines fail to evolve in a positive way, they neither cause much harm to their fellow human beings.
Inversely, Atwood’s subsequent novels display a rising awareness of the dangers of deception strategies. In Life Before Man, Lesje’s extensive use of mimicry almost causes her to commit suicide. The protagonist of Bodily Harm risks losing her life in a Caribbean jail. Finally, in
The Handmaid’s Tale, every single character resorts to deception as a survival strategy, which means that a slip of the tongue might condemn a character to death. Deception also plays a prominent role in Cat’s Eye: having spent her whole childhood deceiving relatives and friends, Elaine Risley indulges in self-deception as well. She refuses to admit the consequences of childhood events upon her present life. The same can be said of the three heroines of The Robber Bride, whose ultimate confrontation with Zenia, reveals their weakness inherited from childhood: Tony remembers her heartless mother; Charis faces her forgotten double, Karen, left behind with her memories of child abuse; whereas Roz finally
474 succeeds in integrating her mixed origins. The consequences of deception evolve towards a more dangerous outcome: Cordelia’s growing insanity and Zenia’s eventual death attribute to deception far more harmful connotations than the trivial lies in Atwood’s earlier novels.
Grace Marks’s use of deception functions as one more example of a survival strategy. Grace effectively mimics a rather simple, slightly insane girl, in order to avoid capital punishment.
The strategy obviously pays off, as the story gradually evolves towards a positive outcome.
Finally, The Blind Assassin and, above all, Oryx and Crake also indicate that Atwood’s deceivers provoke more and more dramatic events: Laura’s suicide, in the first novel, and the destruction of mankind, in the latter, are the ominous consequences of Iris’s and Snowman’s deceptive tricks. In The Blind Assassin, Atwood’s most convincing variation on deception, the reader identifies three levels of treachery: Laura and Iris’s lies; the deception taking place in the power politics between the sexes in Iris’s scandalous novel; and inverted deception, regarded as a quality rather than a flaw in the science-fiction story. Atwood thus reveals the multiplicity of the concept of deception. Oryx and Crake explores yet another aspect of the phenomenon: it confronts the reader with Jimmy, a character who desperately seeks to mimic dominant behaviour: Jimmy associates with Crake, a megalomaniac genius, and comes to play an active role in the destruction of mankind. The reader easily understands that Atwood here describes the most lethal consequence of deception, the theme having clearly undergone a serious evolution throughout her work.
Atwood also produces interesting variations on the quest pattern. While her first novels again display a rather simple quest pattern, consisting of five stages, Atwood, from
Life Before Man onwards, explores the possibilities of deconstructing and multiplying the quest pattern. In The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle, the five-sequence quest goes through the following stages: separation from the usual environment, help received from
475 a guide or magic token, encounter with the trickster, confrontation with parental figures, moment of introspection. Sometimes, as in Surfacing, the order of some of these elements may vary to emphasise some aspects of the heroine’s development. However, the outcome remains similar: by the end of the narrative, one doubts that the heroine might change or evolve in more than a temporary way. In Life Before Man, Atwood starts experimenting with the quest process. Splitting the narrative between her three protagonists in the form of diary entries, she deconstructs the various stages of the quest pattern, taking advantage of the discrepancies between the characters’ background to hint at the possible variety of experiences: Lesje’s inability to communicate with her parents differs widely from
Elizabeth’s idealisation of her lost mother and rejection of her caricatural Aunt Muriel. The quest pattern plays the role of a kaleidoscope, enabling the reader to discover the multiple facets of the characters’ psychology. The more intimate quest in Bodily Harm parallels
Rennie’s struggle against cancer. As in many of Atwood’s early narratives, it evolves towards an elusive outcome: one even wonders whether Rennie actually escaped from the jail and from her inner torments. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood provides us with an interesting alternation of night and day sequences, which enrich the traditional five-stage quest. While
Cat’s Eye evolves towards an open ending – the so-deeply wished confrontation with Cordelia never takes place –, it also marks Atwood’s first attempt at multiplying and superimposing quest patterns. Elaine abandons her first childhood journey towards self-knowledge for years, before starting out on a new quest. Longing to encounter the adult Cordelia, she recalls her childhood experience and slowly comes to understand that evil resides in all human beings, including herself. The same awareness strikes the protagonists of The Robber Bride, as they confront Zenia, the embodiment of evil. Tony realises the sadism of her passion for great historical battles; Charis helplessly attends the resurfacing of her long repressed evil double
Karen; and Roz comes to terms with her gender prejudices. The three protagonists experience
476 common moments of self-discovery, which the three-fold structure of the quest pattern clearly highlights. While the novel seems to reach closure with Zenia’s death, it also remains open as to the way in which the other three women will benefit from their experience. Alias Grace constitutes an exception in Atwood’s treatment of the quest motif. Indeed, Grace’s quest, carefully structured along the central metaphor of quilting evolves towards a positive outcome. In continuing to sew her quilts, adding slight personal adaptations of the pattern,
Grace hints at the acknowledgement of her hybrid self. Though it eventually results in its narrator’s death, one might regard The Blind Assassin as another example of positive outcome. This time, the writer intertwines three different stories, to underline Iris’s desperate need for self-knowledge. By the end of the narrative, old Iris leaves a message to her lost granddaughter, suggesting that her grandfather was not Richard, but the enigmatic Alex
Thomas. In so doing, she acknowledges hybridity as a force, which her granddaughter might inherit. Likewise, in Oryx and Crake, Snowman, the last of his kind, lost in the forest with the members of a new cloned race, becomes aware of his hybridity, as he realises his responsibilities for mankind’s evolution. After a long introspective journey, the quest concludes on Snowman’s return towards mankind, once again an open yet potentially positive outcome. Atwood’s experiments with the quest motif have consequently led to a difference in vision. She first presents us with simple quest patterns evolving towards a negative or rather vague ending. Later, after several attempts at deconstructing and multiplying the quest motif,
Atwood opts for a still open, but more positive kind of resolution.
In the course of Atwood’s writing career, the figure of the trickster has also undergone major alterations. From a simple, almost caricatural, secondary figure, it has developed into a fully-developed character. Duncan, the ghostly father figure in Surfacing, the Royal
Porcupine in Lady Oracle, the frightful Aunt Muriel in Life Before Man, the enigmatic Lora in
477 Bodily Harm, and the borderline Moira in The Handmaid’s Tale strike the reader with their one-dimensionality. Each of them illustrates one aspect of tricksterism: knowledge, the supernatural, ex-centricity, villainy, mysteriousness, and sensuality. Cat’s Eye marks the occurrence of more fully-developed trickster figures, which become main characters. Cordelia and Zenia function as two brilliant examples of the “villainess fatale” – to borrow Heilmann’s terminology. Although Atwood presents Grace as a likeable character, one might also qualify her as a “villainess fatale,” both a seducer and a murderess. The less engaging Iris Chase and
Snowman can both be regarded as tricksters, although they do not play the major trickster part in their respective narrative: I personally find Iris’s sister Laura, and the frightening Crake, far more effective tricksters. Indeed, their determinacy and ex-centricity provides them with an aura of mystery that befits a trickster figure. I would like to add that Atwood’s later tricksters, though more impressive and more fully developed, fail to achieve stability: Cordelia becomes insane; Zenia dies, as do Laura, and Crake, all in an extremely violent way. Atwood’s later tricksters undoubtedly strike the reader because they appear larger than life. However, their function remains the same, i.e. leading the protagonist in his journey for self-discovery. Their death or progressive madness does not impede the development of the quest. On the contrary, it even pushes the protagonist further along by prompting his/her reflection. I regard the character of Grace Marks as the only multi-dimensional trickster figure managing to survive.
Grace is also the only Atwoodian heroine who achieves some balance, probably because she succeeds in integrating the trickster’s characteristics while remaining within society.
However, one should also mention the peculiarity of Oryx and Crake, which for the first time in Atwood’s production, introduces a discussion of the trickster figure in relation to religion.
Snowman’s elaboration of Craker’s mythology as he narrates it to the new race provides the
Atwoodian trickster with an added sacred dimension that previous Atwoodian tricksters lack.
478 A common point between Atwoodian heroes and heroines lies in their sense of being different from other people. This “otherness” expresses itself in various ways. Marian, in The
Edible Woman, finds it difficult to accept an boring job and an ordinary social position as
Peter’s wife. She struggles against society’s conventions, rejecting marriage and empowerment, but eventually gains only a limited awareness of her “otherness.” The
“Surfacer” regularly reminds the reader of how she felt as a stranger in the French speaking village of her childhood. Joan Foster’s obesity caused her to be rejected as a child. Lesje, in
Life Before Man, constantly wonders whether she acts as requested because of her Lithuanian origins. Rennie, in Bodily Harm, feels different because of her illness. In The Handmaid’s
Tale, unmarried women like Offred are voluntarily singled out and selected for procreative purposes. Atwood’s later heroines suffer from other forms of alterity. In Cat’s Eye, Elaine
Risley remembers how other girls rejected her as a child, because of her ignorance of social games and religious practices. In The Robber Bride, the three female friends feel “other”:
Tony mentions being of a particularly small size; Charis appears as a highly absent-minded girl, while, in fact, she experiences a difficulty to feel the boundaries of her own self. As to
Roz, she resents being called a “displaced person” like her father, while feeling equally out of place among the Jewish community of her mother. Grace Marks’s Irish origins and murderous deeds classify her as a marginal character. Laura Chase, in The Blind Assassin, suffers from a state which reminds the reader of Charis in The Robber Bride: her extreme sensitivity makes her vulnerable to common social practices, which she violently resists. Finally, Atwood’s last hero, Jimmy/Snowman remains an outsider during his whole life. As a young boy, he lacks the talent for science required by the highly technological world he lives in. Later, as a survivor of a chemical poisoning, he realises how ex-centric he has become. Atwood’s numerous ways of expressing “otherness,” transcend traditional visions of alterity as an equivalent of ethnicity or marginality. While some of Atwood’s characters clearly represent
479 marginality (Zenia, the Royal Porcupine, Laura Chase), others derive their differences from their mixed origins (Lesje, Roz, and Zenia again). Nevertheless, Atwood’s most convincing
“others” are ordinary people confronted to empowering circumstances: the villagers’ prejudices in Surfacing, children’s bullying in Cat’s Eye, jealousy among servants in Alias
Grace, the social conventions of the bourgeoisie in The Blind Assassin, a competition between boys in Oryx and Crake. My analysis of the concept of “otherness” in Atwood’s work highlights the way in which the author broadens the scope of postcolonial theory. Otherness no longer limits itself to matters of nationality or gender. It concerns any individual in a society that exerts a form of empowerment. When Bhabha develops the concept of
“otherness,” he mainly stresses the racial, sexual, and cultural aspects of such difference. I contend that “otherness” in Atwood’s fiction constitutes a social phenomenon, siting hybridity in the discrepancy between the individual’s personal aspirations and social requirements.
However, in Atwood’s novels, the protagonists’ feeling of inadequacy makes their status as colonised individuals undeniable. One might thus infer that a postcolonial reading of a mainstream writer such as Atwood enriches postcolonial debates by transforming “otherness” into a concept applicable to all disenfranchised subjects, and not only to the racially, sexually, or culturally different.
Atwood’s novels have clearly undergone an evolution from simple comedies and drama’s towards highly intricate puzzle narratives. Early works, either comical, like The
Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, or darker and dramatic – Surfacing, Life Before Man, Bodily
Harm, and The Handmaid’s Tale – present the heroines’ timid attempts at coping with their
“otherness.” From Cat’s Eye onwards, narratives become more intricate, intertwining numerous intertextual allusions, metafictional comments, rich symbolism, and multi-layered quest processes. Progressively, Atwood approaches a more intuitive, nuanced vision of her
480 heroines’ hybridity. For the first time, in The Robber Bride, the writer identifies hybridity as a positive force, gradually integrated by the protagonists. Atwood suggests a similar resolution when she depicts Grace Marks sewing a “hybrid” quilt, or when Iris reveals her “hybrid” origins to her grand-daughter, thus offering her the possibility of free choice. Finally, Oryx and Crake strikes the reader as different from Atwood’s previous work. Its futuristic setting, its highly imaginative creation of new species, its technologically controlled world offers us a gloomy incarnation of the near future. Yet, despite Atwood’s sometimes comical inventions, the plot appears as frightening but plausible. It demonstrates that Atwood, who draws on existing scientific developments, bases her writings on current concerns. The author has obviously moved from an interest in women’s condition and victim/victor relationships towards a more global perspective. Significantly, the young female heroine of her early narratives has therefore made way for an average man, an “everyman,” representing humanity faced with current preoccupations such as global warming, species extinction, or the excessive exploitation of natural resources.
Postcolonial theory offers a link between the various issues examined in this study.
Hybridity, tricksterism, magic realism, and Atwood’s plea for nature share a common concern for the individual’s place in our modern world. In her depiction of the trickster figure, Atwood repeatedly insists on its hybrid nature, in-between life and death, occupying a liminal space between the animal and the human realm. Atwood supplies numerous examples pointing to the trickster’s semi-animal nature: the fish-like appearance of the father’s corpse in Surfacing,
Aunt Lou’s talking fox fur and the Royal Porcupine in Lady Oracle, Zenia’s wolfish nature, the fox’s quilt pattern in Alias Grace. Similarly, the author often creates grotesque magic realist scenes. In these episodes, antagonist worlds such as the human and the animal, the animate and the inanimate collide for a brief instant. One recalls, for instance, the hilarious
481 “mothball” scene in Lady Oracle, Mrs. Smeath’s portrait coming to life in Cat’s Eye, or the parrot, in Oryx and Crake, as embodiment of Jimmy’s lost mother. These fleeting moments represent the protagonists’ growing awareness of their hybridity. Atwood’s books illustrate
Delbaere’s three distinctive notions of magic realism as a “hyperbolic distortion” of reality due to the confrontation and “interpenetration of different realms” (Delbaere, “Magic
Realism” 256). Personally, I interpret Atwood’s recurrent use of grotesque realism in association with gloomy details borrowing on the gothic tradition yet another maze of magic realism, which I identify as “gothic magic realism.” Significantly, gothic magic realist moments often coincide with the protagonist’s understanding of the trickster’s message or with a growing awareness of his/her hybridity.
Atwood’s growing concern for ecology should be read in the context of hybridity as well. Indeed, man’s increasingly more tenuous link with nature enables him to remain aware of the artificiality of social rules. Through their connection with the natural world, through their wish to let the trickster alter their life, Atwoodian characters allow liminality to become part of their everyday experience. Average characters suddenly become confronted with frightening marginalising experiences. They discover what it means to be “other,” or eventually recognise as theirs a long latent feeling of inadequacy. As a mainstream writer,
Atwood’s complex statement in terms of postcolonial theory sounds as follows: hybridity does not concern only the racially or culturally “other.” “Otherness” lies in each of us. It constitutes a force, a subversive power that ensures the individual’s survival and leads him on towards self-knowledge.
As to Atwood herself, she continues to write in a trickster’s way. Playing with language, presenting her readers with multi-layered characters, enriching her novels with
482 highly meaningful intertext, and allowing reality and fantasy to coexist briefly, she surprises and fascinates her readers with each new work. Atwood’s last novel to date, The Penelopiad, a reinterpretation of Odysseus’s adventures, narrated by his wife Penelope, offers Atwood’s audience another example of postcolonial rewriting of a male myth from a female point of view. Once again, the narrative reads as a “trickster text,” presenting Odysseus as the embodiment of tricksterism. This might be the reason for Atwood’s ever growing success among readers: they enjoy the complexity of Atwood’s novels, willingly taking part in the trickster-writer’s game. Penelope herself describes her relationship with Odysseus as follows:
The two of us were – by our own admission – proficient and shameless liars of long
standing. It’s a wonder either one of us believed a word the other said. But we did.
Or so we told each other. (173)
Likewise, Atwood and her readers become accomplices in the process of deception. Atwood carries us along in a maze of intricate literary allusions and multiple selves, as we, readers, accept, for a moment, to suspend our disbelief.
483 Bibliography
This bibliography contains both the works which have been quoted in this thesis and those which have enriched my reflection during my research. However, due to the ever expanding amount of essays and books devoted to Margaret Atwood’s writings, this bibliography cannot achieve exhaustiveness; rather it offers the reader a selection of interesting and multi-faceted points of view on the writer’s production, thus suggesting further clues for its interpretation. It also includes the files I was able to consult at the Fischer Library of Rare Books in Toronto.
Ahern, Stephen. “ ‘Meat Like You Like It’: The Production of Identity in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.” Canadian
Literature 137 (1993 Summer): 8-17.
Anderson, Michele E. “Two Cultures, One Consciousness: A Comparative Study of Canadian Women’s
Literature in French and in English.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51(10) (1991 Apr): 3415A.
Anonymous, http://www.randomhouse.com/features/atwood/interview.html, consulted on September 1, 2006.
______. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/02/1051382088211.html, consulted on September 1,
2006.
______. http://www.oryxandcrake.co.uk, consulted on October 19, 2006.
______. “Hand-and-I Co-ordination: Review of The Blind Assassin.” The Economist (2000, 23 Sept.):
125-126.
______.“Interactive Special” Time Magazine (2001, June 4): 51-95.
Ashcroft, Bill. “Excess. Post-Colonialism and the Verandahs of Meaning.” De-scribing Empire. Post-
Colonialism and Textuality. Chris Tiffin & Alan Lawson, Eds. London: Routledge, 1994. 33-44.
Ashcroft, Bill; Griffiths, Gareth; Tiffin, Helen. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge, 1989.
______. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London : Routledge, 1995.
______. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998.
Atwood, Margaret, Double Persephone. Toronto: Hawkshead Press, 1961.
______. The Circle Game.1966. Toronto: Anansi, 1969.
______. The Animals in That Country. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968.
484 ______. The Edible Woman. 1969. London: Virago Press, 1990.
______. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970.
______. Procedures for Underground. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970.
______. Power Politics. Toronto: Anansi, 1971.
______. Surfacing. 1972. London: Virago Press, 1988.
______. Survival. 1972. McLelland and Steward, 1996.
______. You Are Happy. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974.
______. Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976.
______. Poems 1965-1975. 1976. London: Virago Press, 1991.
______. Lady Oracle. 1976. London: Virago Press, 1990.
______. Up in the Tree. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978.
______. Two-Headed Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978.
______. Dancing Girls. 1978. London: Virago Press, 1989.
______. Grace. A Play in Two Acts. Unpublished.
______. Life Before Man. 1980. London: Virago Press, 1989.
______. True Stories. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981.
______. Bodily Harm. 1982. London : Virago Press, 1989.
______. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi, 1982.
______. Interlunar. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1984.
______. Murder in the Dark. 1984. London: Virago Press, 1994.
______. The Handmaid's Tale. 1985. London: Virago Press, 1995.
______. Bluebeard’s Egg. 1987. London: Virago Press, 1989.
______. Poems 1976-1986. 1987. London: Virago Press, 1994.
______. Cat's Eye. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.
______. Wilderness Tips. 1991. New York: Bantam, 1993.
______. Good Bones. 1992. London: Virago Press, 1993.
______. The Robber Bride. 1993. London : Bloomsbury, 1994.
______. Bones and Murder. 1994. London: Virago Press, 1995.
______. Strange Things. The Malevolent North Canadian Literature. 1995. London: Virago Press,
2004.
485 ______. Morning in the Burned House. 1995. London: Virago Press, 1995.
______. Alias Grace. London : Bloomsbury, 1996.
______. The Blind Assassin. 2000. London : Virago Press, 2002.
______. Negotiating with the Dead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
______. Oryx and Crake. London : Bloomsbury, 2003.
______. Bottle. Toronto: Hay Festival Press, 2004.
______. The Penelopiad. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005.
______. The Tent. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
______. “Canadian Monsters. Some Aspects of the Supernatural in Canadian Fiction.” The Canadian
Imagination. Ed. David Staines. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. 97-122.
______. “Atwood on Pornography.” Chatelaine (September 1983): 61, 118, 126-128.
New York : G.K. Hall & Co, 1988. 251-253.
______. “Masterpiece Theater.” Los Angeles Times (January 25, 1998): 2.
Atwood, Margaret; Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy. Two Solicitudes. Conversations. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,
1998.
Atwood, Margaret; Barkhouse, Joyce. Anna’s Pet. Toronto: James Lorimer & Co, 1980.
Augier, Valérie. “An Analysis of Surfacing by Margaret Atwood.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 11(2)
(1989 Spring): 11-17.
Baer, Elizabeth R. “ ‘The Pilgrimage Inward’: The Quest Motif in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood, Doris
Lessing, and Jean Rhys.” Dissertation Abstracts International 42(8) (1982 Feb): 3606A.
______. “Pilgrimage Inward: Quest and Fairy Tale Motifs in Surfacing.” Margaret Atwood: Vision and
Forms. Eds. Kathryn VanSpanckeren & Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale : So. Illinois UP, 1998. xxxi, 24-34.
Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1981.
Banerjee, Chinmoy. “Alice in Disneyland: Criticism as Commodity in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Essays on
Canadian Writing 41 (1990 Summer): 74-92.
______. “Atwood’s Time: Hiding Art in Cat’s Eye.” Modern Fiction Studies 36(4) (1990 Winter): 513-
522.
Barbour, Douglas. [“Review of Two-Headed Poems.”] Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Ed. Judith
McCombs. New York : G.K. Hall & Co, 1988. 208-212.
Bardolph, Jacqueline, ed. Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.
486 Barzilai, Shuli. “Atwood’s Female Quest-Romance: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Surfacing.” Approaches to
Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Eds. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman &
Shannon Hengen. NewYork: MLA, 1996. 161-166.
______. “Who Is He? The Missing Person Behind the Pronoun in Atwood’s Surfacing” Canadian
Literature 164 (2000 Spring): 57-79.
Baughman, Cynthia. “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The Pinter Review (1990): 92-96.
Becker, Susanne. “Celebrity, or a Disneyland of the Soul: Margaret Atwood and the Media.” Margaret Atwood.
Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. 28-40.
Beer, John. Blake’s Humanism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968.
Bennett, David, Ed. Multicultural States. Rethinking Difference and Identity. London: Routledge, 1998.
Bennett, David; Bhabha, Homi K. “Liberalism and Minority Culture: Reflections on Culture’s in Between.”
Multicultural States. Rethinking Difference and Identity. Ed. David Bennett. London: Routledge, 1998. 37-47.
Bennett, Donna; Cooke, Nathalie. “A Feminist by Another Name: Atwood and the Canadian Canon.”
Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Eds. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas
B.Friedman, & Shannon Hengen. New York: MLA, 1996. 33-42.
Benton, Carol L. “The Comic Impulse in the Poetry of Margaret Atwood.” Dissertation Abstracts International
50(10) (1990 Apr): 3105A.
______. “Reading as Rehearsal in a Communication Class: Comic Voicings in Atwood’s Poetry.”
Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Eds. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B.
Friedman & Shannon Hengen. New York : MLA, 1996. 84-89.
Benuys, Janine M. Biomimicry. Innovation Inspired by Nature. NewYork: HarperCollins, 2002.
Beran, Carol L. “The Canadian Mosaic: Functional Ethnicity in Margaret Atwood's Life before Man.” Essays-
on-Canadian-Writing 41 (1990 Summer): 59-73.
______. “George, Leda, and a Poured Concrete Balcony: a Study of Three Aspects of the Evolution of
Lady Oracle.” Canadian Literature 112 (1987 Spring): 18-28.
______. “Images of Women’s Power in Contemporary Canadian Fiction by Women.” Studies in
Canadian Literature 15(2) (1990): 55-76.
______. Living over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993. 16.
487 ______. “The End of the World and Other Things: Life Before Man and The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Eds. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B.
Friedman & Shannon Hengen. New York : MLA, 1996. 128-134.
______. “Strangers within the Gates: Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual
Assassinations. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson. Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, 2003. 74-87.
Besner, Neil. “Beyond Two Solitudes, After Survival: Postmodern Fiction in Canada.” Postmodern Fiction in
Canada. Eds. Theo D’haen & Hans Bertens. Amsterdam: Rodopi/Antwerpen: Restant, 1992. 9-25.
Beyer, Charlotte. “From Violent Duality to Multi-Culturalism: Margaret Atwood’s Post-Colonial Cultural and
Sexual Politics.” O Canada: Essays on Canadian Literature and Culture. Ed. Jorn Carlsen. Aarhus: Aarhus
UP, 1995. 97-108.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London : Routledge, 1994.
______. “Culture’s in Between.” Multicultural States. Rethinking Difference and Identity. Ed. David
Bennett. London: Routledge, 1998. 29-36.
Blake, William, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. London: Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd., 1967.
Blakely, Barbara. “The Pronunciation of Flesh: A Feminist Reading of Atwood’s Poetry.” Margaret Atwood :
Language, Text and System. Eds. Sherrill E. Grace & Lorraine Weir. Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 1983. 33-52.
Bloom, Lynn Z.; Makowsky, Veronica. “Zenia’s Paradoxes.” Litterature 6(3-4) (1995): 167-179.
Bloom, Lynn Z.; Makowsky, Veronica; Hollenberg, Donna Krolik. “Reading Together and Apart: Feminism
and/versus Ethnicity in Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood.” American Review of Canadian Studies
29(1) (1999 Spring): 165-180.
Blott, Ann. “Journey to Light.” Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Ed. Judith McCombs. New York : G.K.
Hall & Co, 1988. 275-279.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. London: Everyman’s Library, 1930.
Bök, Christian. “Sibyls: Echoes of French Feminism in The Diviners and Lady Oracle.” Canadian Literature
135 (1992 Winter): 80-93.
Bontatibus, Donna. “Reconnecting with the Past: Personal Hauntings in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.”
Papers on Language and Literature 34(4) (1998 Fall): 358-371.
Bouson-Brooks, J. Brutal Choreographies. Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of
Margaret Atwood. Amherst : The University of Massachusets Press, 1993.
488 ______. “Slipping Sideways into the Dreams of Women: the Female Dream Work of Power Feminism
in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Litterature 6(3-4) (1995 Dec): 149-166.
______. “A Feminist and Psychoanalytic Approach in a Women’s College.” Approaches to Teaching
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Eds. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman & Shannon
Hengen. New York : MLA, 1996. 122-127.
Boutelle, Ann Edwards. “Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Their Nineteenth-Century Forerunners.”
Faith of a (Woman) Writer. Eds. Alice Kessler-Harris & William McBrien. Westport: Greenwood, 1988. 41-
47.
Brain, Tracy. “Figuring Anorexia: Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.” Litterature 6(3-4) (1995 Dec): 299-
311.
Brans, Jo. “Using What You’re Given: An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Southwest Review 68(4) (1983):
301-315.
Brewster, Elizabeth. “Powerful Poetry.” Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Ed. Judith McCombs. New York :
G.K. Hall & Co, 1988. 35-36.
Broege, Valerie. “Margaret Atwood’s American and Canadians.” Essays on Canadian Writing 22 (1981
Summer): 111-130.
Bromberg, Pamela S. “The Two Faces of the Mirror in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle.” Margaret Atwood.
Vision and Forms. Eds. Kathryn VanSpanckeren & Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1988. 12-23.
Brönte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1986.
Brown, Jane W. “Constructing the Narratives of Women’s Friendship: Margaret Atwood’s Reflexive Fictions.”
Litterature 6(3-4) (1995 Dec): 197-212.
Brown, Lyn Mikel. “The Dangers of Time Travel: Revisioning the Landscape of Girls’ Relationships in
Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.” Analyzing the Different Voice. Feminist Psychological Theory and Literary
Texts. Eds. Jerilyn Fischer & Ellen S. Silber. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998. 27-43.
Brown, Paul. “ ‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine.’ ” Political Shakespeare. New Essays in Cultural
Materialism. Eds. Jonathan Dollimore & Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. 48-
71.
Brown, Russel. “Atwood’s Sacred Wells.” Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Ed. Judith McCombs. New
York : G.K. Hall & Co, 1988. 213-228.
489 Browne, Pat, (ed.) Heroines of Popular Culture. Bowling Green: Popular, 1987.
Brydon, Diana. “Caribbean Revolution and Literary Convention.” Canadian Literature 95 (1982 Winter): 181-
185.
______. “ ‘The Thematic Ancestor’: Joseph Conrad, Patrick White and Margaret Atwood.” World
Literature Written in English 24(2) (1984 Autumn): 386-397.
______. “Atwood’s Postcolonial Imagination: Rereading Bodily Harm.” Various Atwoods. Essays on
the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Ed. Lorraine M. York. Toronto: Anansi, 1995. 89-116.
______. “Beyond Violent Dualities: Atwood in Postcolonial Contexts.” Approaches to Teaching
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Eds. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman & Shannon
Hengen. New York : MLA, 1996. 49-54.
______. “Atwood’s Global Ethic: The Open Eye, The Blinded Eye.” Unpublished.
Brydon, Diana; Tiffin, Helen. Decolonizing Fiction. Sydney : Dangaroo Press, 1993.
Bryson, Scott J. (ed.) Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002.
Buchbinder, David. “Weaving Her Version: The Homeric Model and Gender Politics in Selected Poems.”
Margaret Atwood. Vision and Forms. Eds. Kathryn VanSpanckeren & Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 122-141.
Bühler Roth, Verena. Wilderness and the Natural Environment. Margaret Atwood’s Recycling of a
Canadian Theme. Tübingen; Basel: Francke, 1998. 53-54.
Cameron, Elspeth. “Famininity, or Parody of Autonomy: Anorexia Nervosa and The Edible Woman.”
Joumal of Canadian Studies 20(2) (1985 Summer): 45-69.
______. “In Darkest Atwood.” Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Ed. Judith McCombs. New York :
G.K. Hall & Co, 1988. 254-255.
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Moving Beyond ‘The Blank White Spaces’: Atwood’s Gilead, Postmodernism,
and Strategic Resistance.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en littérature canadienne 19(1) (1994): 20-
41.
Campbell, Jeremy. The Liar’s Tale. London : W.W.Norton & Cie, 2000.
Campbell, Josie P. “The Woman as Hero in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing” Mosaic 11(3) (1978): 17-28.
Carlsen, Jorn, ed. O Canada: Essays on Canadian Literature and Culture.Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1995. 97-108.
490 Carrera-Suarez, Isabel. “ ‘Yet I Speak, Yet I Exist’: Affirmation of the Subject in Atwood’s Short Stories.”
Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity. Ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 230-
247.
Carrington, Ildiko de Papp. “ ‘I’m Stuck’: The Secret Sharers in The Edible Woman.” Essays on Canadian
Writing 23 (1982 Spring): 68-87.
______. “Another Symbolic Descent.” Essays on Canadian Writing 26 (1983 Summer): 45-63.
______. “Demons, Doubles, and Dinosaurs: Life Before Man, The Origins of Consciousness, and ‘The
Icicle.’” Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Ed. Judith McCombs. New York : G.K. Hall & Co, 1988. 229-
244.
______. “Definitions of a Fool: Alice Munro’s ‘Walking on Water’ and Margaret Atwood’s Two
Stories about Emma: “The Whirlpool Rapids” and “Walking on Water.” Studies in Short Fiction 28(2) (1991
Spring): 135-149.
Castro, Jan Garden. “An Interview with Margaret Atwood. 20 April 1983.” Margaret Atwood. Vision and
Forms. Eds. Kathryn VanSpanckeren & Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1988. 215-232.
Chen, Zhongming. “Theorising about New Modes of Representation and Ideology in the Postmodern Age: The
Practice of Margaret Atwood and Li Ang.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue canadienne de
littérature comparée 21(3) (1994 Sept.) : 341-354.
Christ, Carol P. Diving Deep and Surfacing : Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston : Beacon Press, 1980.
41-53, 119-131.
Christen, Kimberly A. Clowns and Tricksters: An Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture. Santa Barbara: Abc-
Clio, 1998.
Cluett, Robert. “Surface Structures: The Syntactic Profile of Surfacing.” Margaret Atwood : Language, Text and
System. Eds. Sherrill E. Grace & Lorraine Weir. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983. 67-
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514 ______. “Pandora’s Box and Female Survival: Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm.” Critical Essays on
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515 Singley, Carol J.; Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth; (eds.) Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in
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516 ______. “The Social Construction of Identity and the Lost Female Imaginary in M. Atwood’s
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1994.
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518 Tuttle-Hansen, Elaine. “Fiction and (Post)Feminism in Atwood’s Bodily Harm.” Novel 19(1) (1985 Fall): 5-21.
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Reality. Living Author Series n°6. Ed. Beatrice Mendez-Egle. Edinburg, Texas: Pan American University,
1986. 1-13.
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Illinois University Press, 1988.
Verduyn, Christl. “No Tongue in Cheek: Recent Work by English Canadian Poets Daphne Marlatt, Lola Lemire
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Forms. Eds. Kathryn VanSpanckeren & Jan Garden Castro. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
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519 Wall, Kathleen. “Representing the Other Body: Frame Narratives in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Giving Birth’ and
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______. From the Beast to the Blonde. London: Random House, 1994.
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Whitlark, James; Aycock, Wendell, (eds.) The Literature of Emigration and Exile. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP,
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Textual Assassinations. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2003. 121-133.
______. “Fiction Flashes: Genre and Intertexts in Good Bones.” Margaret Atwood’s Textual
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229-252.
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University Press, 1995.
Zimmerman, Barbara. “Shadow Play: Zenia, the Archetypal Feminine Shadow in Margaret Atwood’s The
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Research Material
Atwood Papers, Thomas Fischer Library of Rare Books, Toronto.
Consulted files:
Collection 200:
Box 10: File 10.14: Double Persephone.
Box 16: Drafts of Atwood’s first, unpublished novel Up in the Air So Blue.
Boxes 18-19: Drafts of The Edible Woman.
Box 21: File 21.1: early drafts of Surfacing.
Box 22: Drafts of Surfacing.
Box 23: File 23.12: early drafts of Lady Oracle.
522 Boxes 24-26: Drafts of Lady Oracle.
Box 27: File 27.1: Atwood’s handwritten notes on Lady Oracle. File 27.9: literary sources for
Lady Oracle. File 27.10: map and photographs of the Villa d’Este.
Boxes 30-31: Drafts of Life Before Man.
Box 32: File 32.6: concerns Life Before Man and the question of Lesje’s foreignness. File
32.7: on the literary and real sources of Life Before Man (The Wizard of Oz and newspaper articles on the history of Ukraine and Lithuania); on the origin of Lesje’s name.
Boxes 33-39: Bodily Harm: Drafts and research material.
Boxes 72-73: Drafts of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Box 86: File 86.2: Atwood’s unpublished play on Grace Marks.
Box 90: File 90.25: Atwood’s article “Atwood on Pornography,” related to Bodily Harm.
Boxes 90-91: Atwood’s Speeches.
Box 92: Correspondence 1965-1985.
Boxes 93, 125: Critical works.
Box 96: File 96.3: material for The Handmaid’s Tale: newspaper articles on Nazism
Box 99: Files 99.1, 99.4, 99.5, 99.6: early material for Cat’s Eye.
Boxes 100-104: Drafts of Cat’s Eye.
Box 125: File 125.9: on hybridity.
Boxes 131-140: Drafts of The Robber Bride.
Box 153: File 153.25: critical work on Bodily Harm.
Box 166: Files 166.13, 166.14, 166.16: research material for The Robber Bride. File 166.15:
The Robber Bride. Articles on stereotypes and left-handedness.
Box 169: File 169.17: explanations concerning Zenia in The Robber Bride.
Box 180: File 180.5: sources for Alias Grace. References of books on quilting, possession,
Mesmerism and the Spiritualists.
523 Boxes 181-191: drafts of Alias Grace.
Collection 335:
Box 26: Files 26.1, 26.2: material for Bodily Harm: Documents about St. Vincent and the
Grenadines. File 26.8 establishes the link between True Stories and Bodily Harm. Contains sources for Bodily Harm.
Box 33: File 5.3: contains the text of Atwood’s speech “Spotty-Handed Villainesses”: on evil female characters; File 5.22: Atwood’s review of Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the
Blonde.
Boxes 58-70: Drafts of TheBlind Assassin.
Box 90: contains a satirical cartoon by Atwood on her course “Southern Ontario Gothic.”
Boxes 98-111: Drafts of Oryx and Crake.
Box 108: File 11.21: sources for Oryx and Crake.
Box 111: Files 3, 14.8, 14.9, 14.10, 14.14, 14.15, 14.16: sources for Oryx and Crake.
Box 118: File 6.2: contains the notes concerning Atwood’s course on “Southern Ontario
Gothic.”
Box 123: File 11.5: Atwood’s review of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World.
524