Margaret Atwood's Feminist Ethics of Gracious Housewifery

Margaret Atwood’s Feminist Ethics of Gracious Housewifery Tammy Amiel Houser The Open University, Israel Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre has often been acclaimed for its complex representation of social, political, national, and environmental issues. Critics have frequently commented on Atwood’s engagement, in her genre-crossing and multilayered writing, with power relations, mainly those that establish sexual and gender hierarchies and trap women in victimizing practices.1 However, some of Atwood’s fictional texts suggest more than just a critical reflection on the negative aspects of such contemporary power relations. In this essay I argue that a positive ethical vision of hospitality emerges in recent Atwood texts. Focusing on her novel The Blind Assassin (2000) and her short story “The Art of Cooking and Serving” (2006), I point to a dialogue between Atwood’s literary treatment of hospitality and the philosophical idea of hospitality suggested by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. This correlation need not indicate a di- rect influence, but Levinas’s and Derrida’s works offer a theoretical way for exploring Atwood’s complex ethical vision of gracious hospitality. Atwood, however, deals with the ethics of hospitality from a feminist perspective and through female protagonists, in narratives that contest women’s role as hostesses and critique the self-sacrifice that women’s caretaking obligations entail. Therefore, Atwood’s fiction may also pro- vide an indirect comment on Levinas’s and Derrida’s ideas of radical hospitality. Atwood rewrites the feminine myth of gracious housewifery in sev- eral ways, both disrupting the stereotypical association between women and selfless giving and signifying an ethics of nurturance and generos- ity. The dual movement, a critique of women’s domestic servitude along with an ethical endorsement of the idea of generous hospitality, estab- lishes fascinating tensions in Atwood’s fiction. 1 Reingard M. Nischik, for example, stresses “Atwood’s involvement with gender in all genres” (3). Fiona Tolan’s reading of Atwood’s fiction also focuses on Atwood’s feminist politics. On sexual politics in Atwood’s work, see Wilson 2003: xi–xv; see also Howells 1987: 53–56. PARTIAL ANSWERS 11/1: 109–132 © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press 110 TAMMY AMIEL HOUSER “The Art of Cooking and Serving” is a story of female initiation, the second in the segmented journey-through-life that Moral Disorder (2006) constructs in its eleven interconnected tales. The story portrays the growth and transformation of its unnamed narrator, probably the young Nell of the following stories, after her sister’s birth. As the story reaches its end, the fourteen-year-old protagonist works up the courage to refuse her mother’s request to calm her baby sister, after many days of soothing and rocking her and otherwise helping with household chores. Finally, the protagonist demands bluntly “Why should I?” — consequently feel- ing “as if released from an enchantment” and “no longer compelled to do service” (23). This ending is pitted against the narrator’s earlier enchantment with an old cookbook bearing the eponymous title The Art of Cooking and Serving. This cookbook, by Sarah Field Splint, becomes the narrator’s “favorite book” (17) in the anxious days before her baby sister is born. The cookbook glorifies the same homemaking servitude against which the narrator eventually rebels. In the beginning of the story she obses- sively knits a layette for the new baby, sweeps the floor exhaustively, and absorbs Splint’s traditional feminine knowledge. What is it that the young protagonist, eleven years old when told about her mother’s unplanned pregnancy, finds in this obsolete cookbook to which she is “entirely” devoted (17)? Why does she turn to it repeatedly, in her desperate moments of loneliness, in her apprehension about her mother’s “dangerous condition” (12)? The answer is found in the first chapters of the cookbook, which deal with “the proper conduct of life” (18) and offer strict advice on perfect housewifery. This meticu- lous advice, “from the olden days” (17), suggests a clear organization of the domestic sphere, precisely what the narrator needs in these times of dramatic change, confusion, and dread. Furthermore, the young narrator links the elegant hospitality preached in the cookbook to the entertain- ment of dream guests: “How I longed for a breakfast tray with a couple of daffodils in a bud vase, as pictured, or a tea table at which to entertain ‘a few choice friends’ — who would these friends be?” (18). The new- born about to arrive is a contrast to this dream: an uninvited arrival, trail- ing danger and trouble rather than a prospect of peaceful times, elegance, and choice company. The baby is the unknown, the crisis that lies ahead. Splint’s cookbook offers the calming belief that proper housewifery can cope with anything, solve any problem, remove any stain, and transform even the untidiest house into a charming home, where amiable guests are kindly served. MARGARET ATWOOD’S FEMINIST ETHICS OF GRACIOUS HOUSEWIFERY 111 The promise of improvement and transformation is emphasized in the second chapter of the cookbook, which refers to “The House with a Servant” and explains how to transform an inexperienced maid into “a well-groomed, professional servant” (19). For the narrator, fascinated by the two images of the servant-girl, this promised transformation has the quality of a mythical metamorphosis. She confesses envy of the maid: “She was already transformed, and had no more decisions to make” (19). Thinking about her own growing up, she lingers on the issue of transformation: “Transform was the word I seized on. Did I want to transform, or to be transformed? Was I to be the kind homemaker, or the formerly un- tidy maid? I hardly knew” (19). The narrator seems to consider her own identity formation in terms of feminine subjection and class division: she sees but two options, the maid or the homemaker. This coincides with the maternal nurturing roles she is charged with. Thus, the story “renders traditional gender roles in problematic terms, showing these roles to work against the independence and freedom of choice particularly of women” (Nischik 86). At the end of the story, the protagonist seems to reject these limited options, never to return to them, as we see in the subsequent stories in the collection. Significantly, the movement towards the decision “I was no longer compelled to do service” (23) reappears in Atwood’s collection of poems The Door, but there it is combined with an opposite ethical claim of the subject’s inescapable obligation to the other. The poems “Duti- ful” (2009a) and “String Tail” (2009b) both offer quasi-autobiographical narratives of submissive helpfulness and ensuing struggles for freedom. “Dutiful” poignantly asks: “How did I get so dutiful?” and describes the narrator’s “slavery” of “sweeping up dirt [she] didn’t make.” The speaker admits, “I didn’t perform these duties willingly / I wanted to be on the river, or dancing,”2 and recounts her mature decision to change: “But I’ve resigned.” “I’ve decided to wear sunglasses, and a necklace / adorned with the gold word No” (111). Her feminine accessory represents the narrator’s new defiant self — striving for freedom, she says she wishes to “eat flowers I didn’t grow” (112). The speaking “I” of “String Tail” also puts forth a dramatic confession: “I used to have helpfulness tacked 2 A similar complaint is heard in an earlier poem, “In the Secular Night,” in Atwood’s poetry collection Morning in the Burned House (1995). In that poem, the narrator describes a sixteen-year-old girl who wishes to go out and dance, but knows that “you had to baby-sit” (6). 112 TAMMY AMIEL HOUSER onto me like a fake string tail on a mangled dog” (113); eventually she announces her revolt: “Take everything and then I’m free” (114). The difference between Atwood’s recent portrayal of the feminist struggle for autonomy and her widespread critique of women’s oppres- sion in earlier works is most striking in the last stanza of “Dutiful.” The poem’s final lines point to the fundamental responsibility of the self in her relations with others, from which the speaker cannot resign. It comes as a surprise, expressed in a long and fragmented question (112): Still, why do I feel so responsible for the wailing from shattered houses, for birth defects and unjust wars, and the soft, unbearable sadness filtering down from distant stars? Atwood’s critical portrayal of women’s submission to the domestic roles of dutiful dirt-sweepers or obedient wagging dogs does not cancel her in- creased awareness of the essential human knot of responsibility towards others. The protesting speaker of “Dutiful,” who categorically decides to quit her feminine responsiveness to others, discovers, to her amazement, that she is doomed to acknowledge “the unbearable sadness” of distant others, without being able to dissociate herself from them. In “String Tail,” similarly, the speaker reveals that she is doomed to give absolutely everything she has to that other from whom she tries to disengage herself. Atwood’s view of irrefutable responsibility is also expressed, though less explicitly, in “The Art of Cooking and Serving.” While recounting how she rejected and escaped the feminine burden of providing for others and of being the hospitable domestic servant, the narrator is actually tell- ing a different story, that of her subjectivity as contingent on hospitality. Indeed, her story is caught between, on the one hand, her mutiny against the feminine role of caregiver and, on the other hand, the ethical idea of the self’s un-chosen responsibility for another.

Load more