CHAPTER XI
ORYX AND CRAKE: A POSTFEMINIST FUTURE
Published in 2003, Oryx and Crake is Atwood’s third twenty-first century fiction publication, and is only prevented from being her first novel of the new millennium by The Blind Assassin, which appeared in 2000.1 But in theme and focus, it is Oryx and Crake that more consciously embraces the possibilities of a twenty-first century world, whereas The Blind Assassin, in contrast, very deliberately looks backwards, reflecting on the gains and losses of the previous century. The Blind Assassin concludes with the death of its elderly narrator, and as Iris passes away, Atwood seems to deliberately terminate the development of her progressively ageing twentieth-century heroines, who first appeared in 1969 in the form of Marian in The Edible Woman. As if to underline this wilful cessation of what has come to be regarded as an Atwood trope – “her use of first-person narrative to explore female imagination, consciousness and creativity”,2 as Showalter describes it – Atwood’s eleventh novel is her first to employ a primary male protagonist. If The Blind Assassin can be understood to trace the development and decline of second-wave feminism and to anticipate the possible rise of a third wave, Oryx and Crake depicts a much more negative scenario for feminism, signalled by the loss of the female voice, in which Atwood’s protagonists inhabit a future that is not only postfeminist, but posthuman.
Early critics, early connections Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is a dystopian example of speculative fiction, and Atwood has described the novel as “a
1 Here I am following the common convention of designating the year 2000 as the first year of the twenty-first century, although it might be more accurately described as the last year of the twentieth century. 2 Elaine Showalter, “The Snowman Cometh”, London Review of Books, 24 July 2003, 35. 274 Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction bookend” to The Handmaid’s Tale.3 Consequently, it is largely from this perspective that it has been discussed by critics and reviewers. Robert Potts opens his profile and review for The Guardian by repeating Atwood’s description of Oryx and Crake as speculative fiction rather than science fiction, and notes that “it is a distinction she has also made about her earlier dystopian book, The Handmaid’s Tale”.4 Lisa Appignanesi, writing for The Independent, also prefaces her review with a preliminary discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale, stating:
Now, five major novels later, including the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin (which contains its own pastiche dystopia) Atwood has gone back to the future. It’s a future which has changed as much as our present has. Once again, it’s prescient. And it’s scary.5
Appignanesi’s reference to The Blind Assassin is also taken up and further developed by Ingersoll, who is one of the few early critics of the novel to consider it in terms of a text other than The Handmaid’s Tale. Referring to Atwood’s own comments on the shared generic conventions of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, he argues that:
Her encouragement of readers to connect these two examples of what she likes to term “speculative fiction” seems to provide a kind of carte blanche to read Oryx and Crake not only in connection with The Handmaid’s Tale but in the context of her other ventures into SF, most notably in the novel-within-a-novel of The Blind Assassin.6
Ingersoll goes on to list a number of other canonical texts that Oryx and Crake might be aligned with, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Aldous
3 Atwood quoted in Earl G. Ingersoll, “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake”, Extrapolation, XLV/2 (Summer 2004), 162. 4 Robert Potts, “Light in the Wilderness” The Guardian, 16 April 2003, 20. 5 Lisa Appignanesi, “Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood”, The Independent, 26 April 2003: