Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
In Rough Country (22 page)
The release of this blocked memory empowers the narrator to resist her lover's crude demands for quick sex:
I didn't want him in me, sacrilege, he was one of the killers, the clay victims damaged and strewn behind him, and he hadn't seen, he didn't know about himself, his own capacity for death.
What is most compelling about
Surfacing
isn't the self-absorbed, rather generic young-woman narrator but the
wilderness setting Atwood so vividly evokes, clearly a memorialization of the wilderness site to which her entomologist father took her and his family while Atwood was growing up: the small, simply constructed cabin where “there were always books,”
2
the nearby lake, the endless, intriguing and unfathomable forest in which one could become hopelessly lost. It's a setting that reverberates in Atwood's fiction, with the power of recalled emotion, in stories like “Hurricane Hazel” and “In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain” (
Bluebeard's Egg
, 1983), and the spooky “Death by Landscape” (
Wilderness Tips
, 1991) in which the wilderness setting is a girls' camp that provides the background for an unnerving episode in a young girl's life, from which she never fully recovers.
Where nature is sacred, the violation and exploitation of nature are sacrilege.
Surfacing
casts a cold, furious eye upon star-spangled intruders from south of the Canadian border: “Bloody fascist pig Yanks.” The pristine wilderness is vulnerable to invasion by American appropriationâ“Rotten capitalist bastards”âand by direct assault, as in this encounter with American fishermen:
American flag at the front and another at the back, two irritated-looking businessmen with pug-dog faces and nifty outfits and a thin shabby man from the village, guidingâ¦
“Getting any?” one of the Americans yells, teeth bared, friendly as a sharkâ¦
The other American throws his cigar over the side. “This don't look like much of a place,” he says.
As Atwood's narrator ruefully recalls: “We used to think that [Americans] were harmless and funny and inept and faintly lovable, like President Eisenhower.” Now, American crassness conjoined with American ingenuity inspires paranoia in the Canadian male:
“They're running out of water, clean water, they're dirtying up all of theirs, right? Which is what we have a lot of, this country is almost all water if you look at a map. So in a while, I give it ten years, they'll be up against the wall. They'll try to swing a deal with the government, get us to give them the water cheap or for nothingâ¦and the government will give in, they'll be a bunch of puppets as usual. But by then the Nationalist Movement will be strong enough so they'll force the government to back down; riots or kidnappings or something. Then the Yank pigs will send in the Marines.”
Atwood's narrator would seem to speak for Atwood herself in such melancholy observations:
In the bay the felled trees and numbered posts showed where the surveyors had been, power company. My country, sold or drowned, a reservoir; the people were sold along with the land and the animals, a bargain, sale,
solde
. Les soldes they called them, selloutsâ¦
So virulent is Canadian outrage against imperialist America, even those rapacious individuals who are in fact Canadians, not Americans, are Americans:
But they'd killed the heronâ¦It doesn't matter what country they're from, my head said, they're still Americans, they're what's in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can't tell the differenceâ¦If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do.
It's significant that Atwood's two most bleakly pessimistic novels, the dystopias
The Handmaid's Tale
and
Oryx and Crake
, are set on American soil, if not precisely in the “United States” by the time of
Oryx and Crake
, set sometime in the near future, the rapacious Americans of
Surfacing
have morphed into an entire race:
Human societyâ¦was a sort of monster, its main byproducts being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.
Surfacing
, published more than thirty years before
Oryx and Crake
, ends with a mystical immersion of its heroine in nature, and an ecstatic revelation of the primacy of her female,
daughterly identity. Having hidden from her friends to remain alone at the lake, the narrator experiences a derangement of the senses of a benign, Jungian sort: she “sees” the ghost of her dead mother, as her mother would have been “thirty years ago, before I was born,” and imagines her mother as one of several blue jays; yet more dramatically, she “sees” her mysteriously missing father, and understands what has become of him:
His job was wrong, he was really a surveyor, he learned the trees, naming and counting them so the others could level and excavateâ¦He is standing near the fence with his back to me, looking in at the gardenâ¦He has realized that he was an intruder; the cabin, the fences, the fires and paths were violations; now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes loveâ¦I see now that although it isn't my father it is what my father has become. I knew he wasn't dead.
Set in the near future, in a fundamentalist-Christian totalitarian state called the Republic of Gilead,
The Handmaid's Tale
retains the ease and intimacy of the first-person narration of
Surfacing
but is far more ambitious and provocative in scope. Originally published in 1986,
The Handmaid's Tale
is now, appropriately for our times, reissued, with a thoughtful introduction by Valerie Martin that notes that the novel was conceived out of Atwood's alarm at the frequency with which she heard, from her American friends, the facile expression “It can't happen here” in response to Atwood's accounts of “excursions into the darker side of religious fanaticism in Iran and Afghanistan.” Atwood's ongoing views of the cultural
contrasts between her native Canada and its “starspangled” neighbor underlie the grim, punitive puritanism of the Republic of Gilead:
The founding Puritans had wanted their society to be a theocratic utopia, a city upon a hill, to be a model and a shining example to all nations. The split between the dream and the reality is an old one and it has not gone away.
Canada suffers from no such split, since it was founded not by idealists but by people who'd been kicked out of other places. Canada was not a city upon a hill, it was what you had to put up with.
The historical time of
The Handmaid's Tale
would seem to be 2005, no longer our uneasily shared “future.” The novel in no way resembles science fiction but rather “speculative fiction”: a psychologically “realistic” and persuasive exploration of a counterworld bearing a significant if surreal relationship to reality. In essence a Gothic tale of a young woman's cruel imprisonment, her shifting relationship with her captors and her eventual escape,
The Handmaid's Tale
differs from its classic dystopian predecessors in the intimacy of the protagonist's voice and in the convincing domestic background Atwood has established for her. The ominously named “Offred” (so named by her captors, who seem to have appropriated an entire caste of fertile, breeding-age females to become impregnated by the Gilead commanders whose wives are infertile) is rendered with the admirable attentiveness to detail and psychological nuance that is the province of the realistic novel, not the fable. Where
the mostly male characters of H. G. Wells's prophetic novels, Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
, and George Orwell's
1984
are primarily functions of plot, Atwood's character is distinct and individual, with sharp, painful memories of what she has lost (husband, daughter, radical-feminist mother, college roommate). Narrated in the breathless present-tense, like
Surfacing
, much of
Alias Grace
(another captive-female novel) and
The Blind Assassin
as well as numerous short stories by Atwood,
The Handmaid's Tale
achieves the feat of rendering the bizarre, the ludicrous, and the improbable a new sort of quotidian as Offred moves through the prescribed routine of her essentially dull, housewifely day of shopping for household items (“Our first stop is at a store with another wooden sign: three eggs, a bee, a cow. Milk and Honey. There's a line, and we wait our turn, two by two.”), a stroll to the Wall, formerly the Harvard Wall, now appropriated by the Republic of Gilead for the displaying of executed enemies of the state (“Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men's Salvaging early this morning”), and a sly, catty peek at her sexual rival in the Commander's household, the Commander's middle-aged wife Serena Joy who'd been a Christian-family-values stump-speaker before the Gilead overthrow of the federal government:
She doesn't make speeches any more. She's become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to agree with
her. How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.
She's looking at the tulips. Her cane is beside her, on the grass. Her profile is towards meâ¦It's no longer a flawless, cut-paper profile, her face is sinking in upon itself.
Atwood's greatest challenge in
The Handmaid's Tale
is to make the ritual-copulation Ceremony something other than comical, if not slapstick, as the Handmaid lies, mostly clothed, between the spread legs of the Wife, fully clothed, to be subjected to sexual intercourse as performed by the Commander, also mostly clothed. Granted the absurdity of the physical situation, and the improbability of a middle-aged man's sexual potency in such a situation, very likely this is how it might be:
Serena Joy grips my hands as if it is she, not I, who's being fucked, as if she finds it pleasurable or painful, and the Commander fucks, with a regular two-four marching stroke, on and on and on like a tap drippingâ¦It's as if he's somewhere else, waiting for himself to come, drumming his fingers on the table while he waitsâ¦
Why does he have to wear that stupid uniform? But would I like his white, tufted raw body any better?
Given that Gilead is run by men, one would suppose that Alpha males like the Commander could rationalize more comfortable ways of reproducing their precious DNA, as Mormon men seem to have done in their early, polygamous Protestant-
Christian church. And given the fact of plummeting birth rates attributed to disease, nuclear-plant accidents, leakages from chemical-and biological-warfare stockpiles and toxic-waste disposal sites, it would seem likely that the Handmaids as a class would have been forcibly subjected to artificial insemination.
Yet how eerily prescient, that the Republic of Gilead was established by a coup when Christian fundamentalists, revulsed by an overly liberal, godless and promiscuous society, assassinated the President, machine-gunned Congress, declared a national state of emergency, and laid blame to “Islamic fanatics” as in Orwell's
1984
, the Republic consolidates its strength by maintaining continual wars against demonized “enemies.”
Among its other features,
The Handmaid's Tale
is a treasure trove of feminist/gender studies issues. Here, as elsewhere, Atwood examines sexual politics from numerous angles. Is there a basic, essential difference between the sexes, and is this difference biological, or culturally determined? Women can't add, says the Commander, for women “one and one and one and one don't make four” only just “one and one and one and one,” and this Offred concedes:
What the Commander said is true. One and one and one and one don't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.
Yet women beware women!âfor the patriarchy has shrewdly conscripted categories of women to control and exploit other
women: in the Gilead social hierarchy there are Wives, Aunts, Marthas with grim, obligatory duties to perform. If they fail to bear children, or when they're beyond the age of childbearing, Handmaids are likely to be shipped off to the dread Colonies with other rebellious, useless or elderly women, where their fate is to clear away corpses after battles, to prevent the outbreak of plague, and to clean up toxic dumps and radiation spills: “They figure you've got three years maximum, before your nose falls off and your skin peels away like rubber gloves.” As in pre-Gilead America, or Victorian En gland, men of the privileged class have access to brothels, in which, in secret, the hypocritical “family values” of their society are cheerfully flouted; the Commander takes Offred, in ludicrous sex-pot costume, to Jezebel's, a
Playboy
-fantasy bordello exclusively for the use of officers and “trade delegations, of course.” And, as in Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery,” ordinary, repressed individuals in Gilead, in this case women, are regularly forced to, or allowed to, participate in bloody Dionysian murders called Participutations, in which a man, said to be a “rapist,” is literally torn into pieces: “The air is bright with adrenaline, we are permitted anything and this is freedom.” Offred, who has no wish to participate in such bloodshed, finds herself ravenously hungry after the ceremony: “This is monstrous, but nonetheless it's true. Death makes me hungry.”
