Acknowledgements

I would like to express my most sincere thanks to those who contributed to the creation of this work.  Dr. Rota Lister, supervisor, gave a great deal of time and effort to opening new insights into feminism for me and to coordinating the project.  Dr. Neil Randall and Dr. Judy Segal, readers, provided many helpful comments through their criticism.  Mr. B.L. Culpeper and the Concepts Group of INCO Engineering kindly provided full print production services.



For Ruth Isobel Culpeper

Table of Contents

Introduction

Power Patterns, Rituals, and Values:  The Edible Woman and Surfacing

Creativity and Female Spirituality:  Lady Oracle

Urban Decay and Violence Against Women:  Life Before Man and Bodily Harm

Darkening Vision of a New World Dystopia:  The Handmaid’s Tale

Childhood’s Inescapable Underside:  Cat’s Eye

Conclusion

Works Consulted

Introduction

Margaret Atwood began to publish her fiction in the late 1960s, when ‘consciousness raising’ was at its height.  By the early 1970s, she had published her initial two novels and her critical manifesto, Survival.  For example, in 1972, when Atwood published Surfacing and Survival, Sheila Rowbotham published Women, Resistance and Revolution, a landmark feminist text.  Throughout her oeuvre, Atwood has tried to raise the public’s awareness of women’s position in society.  In all her novels, Atwood is concerned with women’s victimization.

Atwood’s novels are examined in a cultural context in this study, which explores the victimization of women.  Victimization includes anything that affects women’s survival, specifically, victimization through physical, psychological, and economic manipulation.  Survival is also taken in the broadest sense.  It includes both physical and spiritual survival "as anything more than a minimally human being" (Atwood Survival 33).  In Survival, Atwood presents four "Basic Victim Positions," which include denying victimization, acquiescing in victimization, repudiating victimization, and becoming a "creative non-victim" (36-39).  Recognition of victimization deals with Atwood’s initial two "positions," when a woman learns that she is a victim.  Rejection of victimization is concerned with Atwood’s final two "positions," when a victim learns to fight victimization, and perhaps, succeeds well enough to live as a fully functioning, "creative non-victim" (38).

Atwood’s novels show how society sustains victimization by holding power over women.  The protagonists of Atwood’s novels are not satisfied with their lives, and as they explore the reasons for their discontent, come to realize that they are victims of social, economic, and political discrimination.  Once they have recognized their victimization, they attempt to reject it.  No protagonist is able always to avoid being victimized, and two of them may actually die, but all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, fight against victimization.

Three elements of victimization, power patterns, rituals, and values, are discussed as a group in "Chapter Two" because they are inexorably intertwined.  The Edible Woman and Surfacing are used in the analysis because they both explore the interrelationships between forms and uses of power, conspicuous and subtle rituals, and decisions concerning personal values.

Recognition of victimization is present in all of Atwood’s novels, and is the subject of close focus in The Edible Woman.  The initial step toward recognizing victimization is understanding the imbalance of power in patriarchal society.  The recognition process in Atwood’s novels begins with the protagonists observing how women are systemically kept in positions in which they have little power over their own lives.  The primary constraints are economic and social, although political constraints are examined in Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, which are Atwood’s only novels set mostly outside of Canada.  The protagonists find themselves unable to free themselves from discomfiting situations in their lives.  Often their careers are severely limited because of their gender.  They are prompted to surrender whatever independence they have in order to gain some stability through marriage.  Marriage provides the economic security that they customarily cannot ensure for themselves by their own efforts.  They find themselves trapped in a cycle that compels them to surrender to male domination.  Patriarchal social, economic, and political systems prevent them from holding power, and especially from holding power over their own lives.  The protagonist of The Edible Woman exemplifies how patriarchal power patterns constrain women. 

Atwood’s protagonists also learn how they are controlled by rituals.  Both The Edible Woman and Surfacing centre on rituals.  Sometimes these rituals are formalized through ceremonies, such as marriage, but usually the rituals Atwood is concerned with are subtle and unspoken, such as courtship.  While Atwood’s protagonists may be able to survive economically long enough to postpone marriage indefinitely, they find themselves caught up in courtship rituals that subtly push them toward marriage.  The social pressure to observe rituals comes from all sides.  The protagonists are directed by their families and friends to accept social conventions, and additionally, they must consider both entreaties from their lovers and the foreseeable harsh economic conditions of prolonged ‘spinsterhood’.  They find that society has little tolerance for women who wish to remain self-sufficient.  When the protagonists try to reject victimization, they risk alienating themselves from society because they find themselves in conflict with many customs and mores that society endorses.  They distance themselves from their families and friends.

When rejection of victimization leads to social ostracism, the protagonists must balance the value that being non-victims has for them against the danger to survival that defying rituals may produce.  The Edible Woman and Surfacing are concerned with the way people must find a balance between surviving and upholding their own values.  When Atwood’s protagonists make their trade-offs, they must consider both the damage either action or inaction might cause them, as well as the harm they might do to others.  If they reject victimization and try to establish power over their own lives, they will certainly offend, and possibly hurt, some of the people with whom they are in contact.  Power has its price.  The protagonists are poorly equipped to make these value judgements because of their backgrounds as victims.

Creativity and female spirituality are examined in "Chapter Three," which explores Lady Oracle.  Surfacing deals with spirituality, but does not become too involved with creativity, whereas Lady Oracle does.  Atwood believes that creativity is necessary if a person is to prevail over victimization.  In Survival, she uses the term "creative non-victim" and jocosely suggests that a fifth position of victimization, beyond that of "creative non-victim," may exist "for mystics" (38-39).  Atwood also directly links spirituality with creativity by showing how spiritual experiences help women to find inner strength, which allows them to reject victimization and develop their creative powers.

Recognizing and then rejecting victimization requires creativity.  Understanding that victimization exists requires critical analysis of society’s values.  Atwood’s protagonists must distance themselves from the way they have traditionally thought about themselves and society, in order to apply their creative faculties fully.  This distancing is hard to accomplish.  Female spirituality is one way that Atwood suggests such distancing can be gained.  Female spirituality is depicted in Surfacing, Lady Oracle, and Cat’s Eye.  Atwood does not present any fixed system of spirituality, but she does provide examples of non-patriarchal spirituality that deeply affect the protagonists, who, due to spiritual experiences, find themselves sufficiently distanced from their previous environments to be able to think of society differently than they had previously done.  When they return to society after their spiritual experiences, they have greater abilities available to use in gaining some power over their own lives.  Spirituality helps them reject victimization, and once they do this, their creative powers are far less fettered.  They are better able to survive the struggles encountered when rejecting victimization.

Terms like ‘victimization’, ‘survival’, and ‘struggle’ seem to be politically biased, but Atwood masterfully shows how these terms are not hyperbolic.  She demonstrates that women are systemically victimized and must struggle to survive psychologically and even physically.

For example, Atwood presents many female characters who are devastated psychologically by urban living.  The urban decay they experience is not necessarily in the form of physical blight, although Atwood is very harsh in her descriptions of city streets.  The physical blight is seldom referred to, for it appears to be more a result than a cause of the social decay with which Atwood is concerned.  The stress caused by the social and economic decay that surrounds Atwood’s characters forces them to retreat into themselves or lash out at others.  Urban living offers these characters few escapes from lifestyles that force them into victim roles.

Some characters are so filled with self-doubt that they are willing to go along with whatever seems most expedient and socially acceptable.  Some exercise whatever power they have over others in a petty manner, which does them no good and spreads further frustration.  The term ‘urban decay’ sums up these psychological, physical, social, and economic stresses present in the urban environment that reinforce the victimization of women.  Life Before Man deals with this broad type of urban decay and its effects upon women.

"Chapter Four" examines urban decay and violence against women together because they are very closely related and are important topics in Atwood’s novels.  Atwood demonstrates how decayed social and economic conditions directly lead to frustration, which results in physical assaults on women, who are members of society who have few escape mechanisms and are inured to victimization.  Life Before Man is concerned more with urban decay, while Bodily Harm is concerned more with physical violence, but both novels complement each other well, so they are treated jointly in "Chapter Four."

Physical damage is done to women as well as psychological damage.  Psychological violence against women is presented continually in Atwood’s novels.  Extreme physical violence that is socially supported, and even state directed, against entire populations of women is presented only in the two novels that are set mostly outside of Canada, Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale.  In these two novels, Atwood illustrates what could happen if women were to stop struggling for survival and accept victimization.  When these extreme examples are considered, the small battles fought daily by the protagonists in all of Atwood’s novels seem wholly justified.

Physical violence in Bodily Harm is realistic, but the geographical setting outside of North America distances the novel’s impression on Canadian readers.  In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood brings her treatment of violence against women closer to Canada by using a setting in the northern United States.  The Handmaid’s Tale presents a dystopia in which women are absolutely subjugated to the men controlling a totalitarian fundamentalist state.  "Chapter Five" discusses how Atwood presents The Handmaid’s Tale’s dystopia as a warning against what could occur if women were to lose their struggle against victimization.  She shows how male envisioned utopias inevitably victimize women.  Atwood does not offer any universally applicable solutions to the world’s social ills.

"Chapter Six" studies Atwood’s concern about childhood socialization.  She believes that typical socialization in urban Canada encourages women to become victims from the time they are young children.  Atwood is deeply concerned about the compromises women must make in order to survive.  She supports continual struggle, but she realizes that sometimes this can be counterproductive.  Cat’s Eye recounts the childhood and adolescence of its protagonist, and re-evaluates the decisions the protagonist has made.  The protagonist has survived and has been reasonably successful in rejecting victimization as an adult.  The conclusions suggest that the daily compromises made to smooth social interactions can lead to further victimization, for compromise entails submitting to societal values which tend to force women into submissive roles, and that strength and creativity are required to decide whether compromise or conflict is best.

In all her novels, Atwood refuses to simplify her topics.  Every action a character takes has some sort of cost attached to it, psychologically, socially, economically, or even physically, and these costs are thoroughly examined.  The depth of Atwood’s presentation of the female condition through her novels is astounding.  As Atwood’s protagonists move toward recognizing and rejecting victimization, their perceptions and decision making processes are scrutinized.  Atwood’s position on victimization is so thoroughly discussed through its exposition in her novels that she is as unassailable as possible when she puts forth her platform, as she does in Survival.

Research for this project has included readings in seven broad categories:  ‘Margaret Atwood’s works’, ‘criticism of Margaret Atwood’s works’, ‘critical theory’, ‘women and literature’, ‘myth and religion’, ‘psychology and sociology’, and ‘Canadian culture’.  The divisions are fairly arbitrary, for many of the works could fit into more than one category.  However, the divisions do help to provide a background for examining the recognition and rejection of victimization in Atwood’s novels.

Over three dozen works that directly criticized Atwood’s novels have been reviewed, and two thirds of these were helpful enough to have been included in "Works Consulted."  Of particular interest were the comments by Ken Adachi, Carol P. Christ, Cathy N. Davidson, Barbara Godard, Sherrill Grace, and Barbara Hill Rigney.  Barbara Godard also has been included in the ‘critical theory’ category, along with Elizabeth Abel and Elaine Showalter.  Only one seventh of the authors reviewed in the ‘critical theory’ category have been included in "Works Consulted" because, although they offered valuable insights into critical theory, their material was not always directly applicable to the aspects of Atwood’s novels being studied.  For the same reason, only one fifth of the authors in the ‘women and literature’ category have been included in "Works Consulted."  The two most helpful in this respect were Cathy N. Davidson and Tania Modleski.  Notably, Davidson was also one of the more useful sources in the ‘criticism of Margaret Atwood’s works’ category.

Readings in the ‘myth and religion’ category were fascinating.  A high proportion, almost half, of the works reviewed have been included in "Works Consulted."  The cliché ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ applies to Atwood’s writings, for there are a great many parallels between her works and myths and religions that have long existed or still exist.  Mark P.O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, and Sir William Smith and G.E. Marindin were useful in providing background on classical mythology and religion.  Sir Thomas Malory and Lord Alfred Tennyson offered examples of different phases of Arthurian legend.  Mary Daly, Robert Graves, and Ruth Murray Underhill put myth and religion into context with the condition of women in many societies.

Approximately one third of the works reviewed in the ‘psychology and sociology’ category have been included in "Works Consulted."  Bruno Bettelheim, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, and Sheila Rowbotham were very useful when studying power patterns within society.  Bettelheim and Rosaldo often appeared in the bibliographies of other psychological and sociological works that have not been included in "Works Consulted."  Hannah Arendt, Joachim Fest, William Kornhauser, and the arch-patriarch of the utopian/dystopian totalitarian state, Plato, were helpful when exploring mass society.

Only approximately one seventh of the works reviewed in the ‘Canadian culture’ category have been included in "Works Consulted."  Similar to works in the ‘critical theory’ category, many of these works were too broad to be directly applicable to the aspects of Atwood being studied.  Instead of having them illuminate Atwood, Atwood might be reduced to confirming their theses.  Works by Marshall McLuhan and Rick Salutin have been included in "Works Consulted," for they offered insights on the Canadian cultural mainstream that were often paralleled by Atwood.

The works reviewed came from the Toronto, Waterloo, and Laurentian university libraries, the Sudbury and Parry Sound public libraries, and my personal collection.  In all, over one hundred works were reviewed, and half of these were helpful enough to have been included in "Works Consulted."  So much engrossing reading served to illustrate how perceptive and penetrating Atwood’s novels are.

Power Patterns, Rituals, and Values:  The Edible Woman and Surfacing

Atwood’s initial two novels, The Edible Woman (EW) and Surfacing (S), deal with narrators who are being devoured by their friends and society.  In this chapter, these novels are examined in a combined analysis of fundamental patterns common to them.  Marian McAlpin, the narrator of The Edible Woman, is a university graduate who faces the choice of becoming a baby factory married to a dull lawyer, or a spinster trapped in the lower half of the social and economic spectrums.  The unnamed narrator of Surfacing gradually realizes that her friends and society are holding power over her.  In both novels, the narrators avoid being consumed after they experience visions, which help them understand the degree to which they are being victimized.  The narrators then fight against what they believe to be happening to them.

This chapter explores three aspects in detail while discussing the recognition of victimization in The Edible Woman and Surfacing:  power patterns, ritual behaviour, and values.  These aspects are explored because they run strongly through Atwood’s novels, and are central to these two, her earliest.  The protagonists of Atwood’s novels struggle to gain power over their own lives, but often they are frustrated by societal norms that coerce them into following established, although usually unspoken, rituals.  The protagonists must re-examine their personal values if they are to decide to take a stand against victimization, for struggle often results in social ostracism.

In The Edible Woman, patterns of power are discussed through the presentation of institutions as means of consolidating power for those members of society who already hold power.  Atwood uses the protagonist as an example of a person who has little power in this type of society.  As a young woman, Marian holds little power; she is forced to play at sexual politics and to fit into patriarchal hierarchal structures both in and out of the office.  Marian works for Seymour Surveys.  At the beginning of the novel she hopes for promotion within the organization, but she does not know exactly how this will come about or where it will lead her.  She believes she is "being groomed for something," but for what she has "no idea" (EW 19).  She describes a very segregated working environment:  "On the floor above are the executives and the psychologists--referred to as the men upstairs, since they are all men..." (EW 19).  These men have very comfortable offices and deal with people from outside the office.  On the floor below Marian are the office machines "where the operatives seem frayed and overworked" (EW 19).  Marian describes her department as "the link between the two:  we are supposed to take care of the human element, the interviewers themselves" (EW 19).

Marian describes her working environment and fellow employees with phrases that make the office seem like a children’s school.  She uses phrases such as these:  "opaque glassed cubicle," "motherly-looking women," "coloured crayons," "scissors and glue and stacks of paper," "superannuated kindergarten class," "chintz-curtained lunchroom," and "pink washroom" (EW 20).  These descriptions imply that Marian believes that in the office she is considered to be a child rather than a responsible adult.  During this description, Marian also points out that except for the "unfortunate office-boy" (EW 20), all the people in her office are women, including the department head, Mrs. Bogue.  Marian then asks:

Atwood shows how success is not defined in the same terms for men and women in Marian’s society.  A man in Marian’s position--although this is not possible in her department--would know what he was being groomed for:  executive level.  Because she is the ‘wrong’ gender, Marian is excluded from promotion, and therefore, precluded from succeeding in the same ways that men may succeed.  She is prevented from enjoying significant gains in several of the more important job satisfaction areas:  pay, status, and working conditions.  In as far as this would be typical of most businesses for which Marian might work, she is forced to accept the status quo.  Knowing that she could get another job "does not help" (EW 21).

Marian may find job satisfaction within a limited sphere.  Atwood explores this sphere to illustrate why women may not easily recognize that they are being victimized.  She uses Marian as an example of a woman who finds that perquisites are not sufficient compensation.  Marian has some flexibility to decide when she must accomplish her tasks, although this is not always possible.  For example, her supervisor ‘volunteers’ her to work over a long-weekend (EW 25).  Marian is able to enrich herself by learning about the survey products, such as vanilla pudding, which she tastes (EW 18), and laxatives (EW 23).  Although the pudding might literally fatten her up for consumption--the title of the novel being The Edible Woman--the little perquisites are ineffective.  Marian is dissatisfied with her job and cannot see leaving the company as an effective escape, but she believes that she will not be permitted to rise to the executive level because of her gender.  Marian is a go-between, linking the executives and psychologists with the housewives.  She has little status in her own right.  Marian believes that if she dedicates her life to a career at Seymour Surveys, she will receive a poor pension as her reward, and that in her retirement years she will be able to afford only a "bleak room with a plug-in electric heater" (EW 21).

Status from office and marital titles is significant because the titles reinforce a social and economic hierarchy.  The titles "Mrs." and "Miss" label the women according to their relationships with men.  As Marian describes her office, she mentions "Mrs. Bogue, the head of the department," "Mrs. Grot of Accounting," and herself, "Miss McAlpin"  (EW 20).  Mrs. Bogue is in a line management position while Mrs. Grot is in a staff support position; therefore, Mrs. Bogue is given the title "head of" while Mrs. Grot is simply "of"; Marian does not have a business title, she is simply one of "the rest" (EW 20).

Patriarchal hierarchies are shown by Atwood to exist throughout society, not only in the workplace.  Marian’s home is dominated by paternalism, just as her office is.  Marian lives in a flat, with Ainsley Tewce, above their landlady, who supports the structure of society as it stands and forces her views on those around her.  Although the landlady insinuates herself into her tenants’ lives, she tries to remain formally distant by attempting dignity and stressing that she wishes to avoid unpleasantness (EW 223).  This supports her wish for a social hierarchy in which she can avoid taking responsibility for conflict by blaming others.  The landlady says "the child" tells her what Marian and Ainsley have been doing (EW 13).  She chastises Marian, and especially, Ainsley for their lifestyles on the pretence that they set bad examples for "the child" (EW 223).  The landlady blames her current financial problems on her having been left to care for her child by a husband who died without leaving her as much money as she requires (EW 15, 25).  Rather than questioning the social structure that reinforces her role as a relatively impoverished widow, the landlady accepts her role and criticizes others with whom she has relationships that she can exploit.

Unfortunately, the landlady dominates every aspect of her daughter’s life:  "And I tell the child exactly which streets she can walk on and which she can’t" (EW 15).  Childhood socialization, which is so important to Atwood’s later novels, especially Cat’s Eye, is initially explored here.  The landlady does everything she can to make "the child" accept the existing social hierarchy.  She makes "the child"’s life miserable and does not prepare her to face the world outside her door.

The landlady’s idiosyncratic attitude about social hierarchies affects her judgement.  She let the flat out to Marian and Ainsley under assumptions that were based on the women’s physical appearances.  Marian and Ainsley expected this when they went to arrange the lease, so they were careful in how they dressed and spoke.  Ainsley notes that usually Marian chooses "clothes as though they’re camouflage or a protective colouration" (EW 13-14).  When the two of them went to rent the flat, they both dressed to appease the landlady.  Ainsley, in particular, dressed on this occasion to look "innocent."  Her clothes accentuated her face:  "a pink-and-white blunt baby’s face, a bump for a nose, and large blue eyes she can make as round as ping-pong balls" (EW 15).  The landlady’s prejudices, combined with the economic power she holds over Marian and Ainsley, force the two room-mates to play these stereotypical roles.

The landlady’s attitudes and behaviour affect Marian’s and Ainsley’s actions significantly.  Marian and Ainsley are made to feel guilty because they must sneak in alcohol and overnight lovers, and fail to keep their flat neat.  "’That old bitch,’ said Ainsley, ‘Why can’t she mind her own business?’"  (EW 14).  Rejecting victimization by the landlady causes conflict; eventually it leads to Ainsley being evicted (EW 224).  Unlike Ainsley, Marian accepts the landlady’s behaviour, and modifies her own behaviour to help smooth the relationship.  Marian has been raised in a small town in which there are consequences to be feared if a person does not fit comfortably into society (EW 14).  For Marian and Ainsley, part of surviving includes not being evicted.  Marian’s social camouflage is far superior to Ainsley’s, but ultimately, both must either accept the patriarchal, hierarchal power patterns or lessen their ability to survive physically.  Finding a balance between the risks and benefits of rejecting victimization is central to Atwood’s novels.

Even between office and home, Marian must fight to avoid being victimized.  When she works on a long weekend conducting a door-to-door beer survey, she is unable to go about her job without being harassed.  At the first house on which she calls, she is invited inside by the wife and then berated by the husband, a temperance man, while the wife watches with "frugal satisfaction."  In his self-righteous lecture, the husband uses patronizing terms when he speaks to Marian:  "young lady," "nice girl," and "innocent" (EW 46).  The husband attempts to dominate Marian by placing himself in a position of moral and spiritual authority.  Marian’s social conditioning maintains her camouflage; she says "Thank you" while "resisting the reflex urge to shake both of them by the hand as though I was coming out of church" (EW 46).  Shortly later, a married man invites Marian into his home.  After answering her questions, he attempts to assault her sexually.  He also uses patronizing terms such as "nice little girl" in speaking to Marian, and tries to force himself in a physically and emotionally dominant position by describing himself as a "big strong man" who can "take care" of her (EW 48).  Wherever she is, Marian must face a society that labels her by her gender and age and treats her accordingly.  Unfortunately, she has been raised to deal with social problems by being passive and camouflaged, at best, or by running from or agreeing with her opponents, at worst.  Marian does not know how to avoid being a victim; she only knows how to lessen the damage that being a victim causes her.

The ability of rituals to strengthen existing power patterns in society is put forth in The Edible Woman.  Marian’s behaviour, as well as the rest of society’s behaviour, is reinforced by the repetition of rituals.  Marian is about to be devoured by her fiance.  The discrimination Marian faces, and the social conditioning of which she herself is a victim, is gender-biased and gender-based.  One topic that is central to both gender and social convention is courtship rituals.  Marian works and lunches with three women who are close to her age and whom Ainsley calls the "office virgins" (EW 22).  The virgins have stereotypical attitudes toward sex before marriage; they avoid it, for practical, societal, and hypochondriacal reasons.  They also have stereotypical attitudes toward marriage; after they have travelled, they want to marry and settle down (EW 22-23).

The three co-workers, Millie, Lucy, and Emmy, expect to keep their treasured virginity until they are married.  When compared to these flat characters, Marian is a sexually liberated woman because she is not unduly concerned about either the state of her virginity or her ability to ‘catch’ a husband, but she accidentally falls into the trap of using courtship rituals just as the husband hunting virgins do.  Atwood uses fishing imagery extensively in a passage that describes one of the virgins as she fishes for a husband in a restaurant.  Atwood uses terms such as:  "fish-lure," "weed-beds," "pike," "bait," "minnow," and "guppies" (EW 112).

In Peter, Marian has her ‘catch’, or from his point of view, she has already been caught.  She does not dress to bait because her man is already on the hook, whether she consciously wants to marry him or not.  In "Chapter Nine," Marian’s actions--fleeing and going to ground--are shown to attract Peter to her, and lead him to propose.  "Chapter Eight" closes as Marian runs from the elevator of the Park Plaza (EW 71).  "Chapter Nine" opens:  "I was running along the sidewalk" (EW 72).  Peter yells at Marian, half-questioning, half-commanding, and gives chase with Ainsley’s ‘catch’, Len.  Len is on foot, while Ainsley and Peter are in Peter’s car.  "It was threatening that Peter had not given chase on foot but had enclosed himself in the armour of the car" (EW 73).  Peter has protected himself physically by wrapping himself in technology, and has protected himself socially by enjoining Len and Ainsley to his side.

When Peter finally hounds Marian down, she is relieved at being caught, for this places her back into the normal world with which she knows how to deal, and allows her to use one of her customary defense mechanisms:  passivity.  She enjoys the "relief of being stopped and held" by Peter (EW 74).  Marian is taken to Len’s apartment, in which Peter, Len, and Ainsley continue their party.  Marian’s social conditioning comes through again; she feels as though she has committed a sin and needs to be forgiven by her lord, Peter:  "I was filled with penitence, but there was no outlet for it.  If I could be alone with Peter it would be different, I thought:  he could forgive me" (EW 75).

Having fled and been captured, Marian now goes to ground.  She burrows under Len’s bed when the others are not looking.  She then feels angry because she is not hunted.  She wishes they would search for her, and feels resentful toward Peter because he is above in the open air and not trapped underneath the bed as she is (EW 77).

In Atwood’s novels, male domination is supported by control over technological resources.  Once again, Peter is associated with technology.  Initially, he and Len play with cameras (EW 75), and then, after learning where Marian is, have their effort at freeing Marian described as "a major feat of engineering skill" (EW 77-78).  Also, just as he did in the chase from the Park Plaza, Peter has enjoined the others to support him and directed their efforts (EW 77-78).  By establishing himself as a group leader with technological know-how backing him, Peter forces Marian to question her own worth when they come into conflict.  Women’s collaboration in their own destruction concerns Atwood greatly.

After she is rescued, Marian’s rage surfaces.  "I had realized by this time what my prevailing emotion was:  it was rage" (EW 78).  Her anger is against Peter, yet she is conditioned to vent it on herself by going to ground and feeling guilty.  As her anger grows, she begins to realize it is directed at Peter, rather than herself, although her flight mechanism remains active--she flees again (EW 78).  Marian interprets her fleeing as a positive act.  Her running is an initial step toward independence from Peter, although she still is constrained by her social conditioning, which would have her feel guilty for her actions.  She thinks:  "Though I wasn’t at all certain why I had been acting this way, I had at least acted.  Some kind of decision had been made, something had been finished" (EW 78-79).  The initial step toward rejection of victimization has been taken.  Victimization has been recognized and opposed.

Marian notes that she and Peter have never fought.  There has been nothing to fight about because Marian’s social conditioning has helped her to accept the victim role.  Marian’s normal behaviour has been to shun conflict or to feel guilty for her socially unacceptable actions.  She does not understand her feelings initially because, according to the way she has been conditioned, she should not have these feelings.  Her anger is so foreign to her nature that it forces her to think about her feelings, and to begin to realize that Peter is not good for her.  As the novel progresses, Marian gradually falls apart, but the result is that she strips away enough of her social conditioning to reject the victim role and to reject being consumed by Peter.

Unfortunately for Marian, she cannot strip away immediately her outer layer of socially constructed sensibility.  In the meantime, she accepts Peter’s marriage proposal.  The urge to complete the courtship ritual is too strong to be refused.  After Marian flees from Len’s apartment, Peter tracks her in his car a second time.  Within his machine, Peter is able to play the role of protector.  Marian is pressured into accepting a ride home with him because it is a long walk, it is raining, and she is dressed in light summer clothes (EW 79-81).  Once she is in his power, inside the car, Peter immediately puts on a juvenile display of force.  He slams the door, speaks harshly to Marian, drives too fast, and skids out on a residential lawn--about which he laughs.  He finishes his display by verbally cowing Marian:  "’It’s a good thing I didn’t let you walk home,’ Peter said in the tone of a man who has made a firm and proper decision," to which Marian responds:  "I could only agree....’  I don’t know what I was doing tonight,’ I murmured" (EW 82).

Peter then provides the forgiveness for which Marian had wished after she fled from the Park Plaza; he satisfies her need for absolution from guilt.  Immediately before proposing marriage, Peter offers a similar forgiveness and reaffirmation ritual:  "He stroked my hair, forgiving, understanding, a little patronizing" (EW 82).  Peter’s ritual is similar to a Christian ritual in which children are blessed.  When a young child goes to be blessed while the adults are receiving communion at an older Christian church, such as a Roman Catholic or Anglican church, the child murmurs a confession, and the priest touches the supplicant on the head while speaking on behalf of the Lord.  Marian is again being treated as a child.

Marian is bred to accept displays of force and to give way to them, so she is deferential to Peter after his tantrum.  Marian is used to agreeing with adversaries in order to defuse tense moments, as she does with the temperance couple during the beer survey, so she allows herself to go along with Peter’s comments.  Finally, Marian lives in a society in which Peter, a young lawyer, would be a valuable ‘catch’, so she unknowingly plays out the courtship ritual to its ‘proper’ conclusion.  Marian does not realize that her flight is part of a ritual, and that it raises Peter’s hunter and paternal instincts, leading him to complete the ritual by giving chase, displaying force (or strength), and proposing.  Marian, similar to all of Atwood’s protagonists, has no simple way out.

The courtship ritual between Marian and Peter is very complex, but it is paralleled in a simplified manner by Ainsley and Len.  Ainsley consciously sets out to trap Len, who hankers toward young girls (EW 83).  The morning after Ainsley meets Len, Marian describes Ainsley as a siren:  "From the back she looked like a mermaid perched on a rock:  a mermaid in a grubby green terry-cloth robe" (EW 83).  As Ainsley plots how she will lure Len, Marian notes that "She bore a chilling resemblance to a general plotting a major campaign" (EW 85).  Although Ainsley is contemptuous of the office virgins--she gave them their name--her luring of Len is every bit as calculating as their actions; she is simply more aware of what she is doing.  The rituals of dressing for pursuit and lying in wait are treated similarly.  Marian’s fleeing is paralleled by Ainsley’s playing hard-to-get, which, unlike Marian’s subconscious actions, is very conscious.  "It’s all got to seem accidental.  A moment of passion.  My resistance overcome, swept off my feet and so forth" (EW 86).  One difference between Marian and Ainsley is that Marian does not understand how flight is part of the courtship ritual.  For Marian, flight is real, but it only serves to put her under Peter’s power even more.

When searching for theoretical principles underlying social behaviours, a useful work is  Red Man’s Religion:  Beliefs and Practices of the Indians North of Mexico, a study of native North American religious foundations in which Ruth M. Underhill examines rituals in tribal societies, particularly rituals and taboos that affect the power that women might hold.  In The Edible Woman, the conflict about power and the necessity of challenging many rituals leads directly to the questioning of underlying values.  The values that Len holds are shown through his actions toward Ainsley.  Len criticizes Ainsley when he learns that she is not very young and uneducated, and he expresses revulsion toward her when he learns that she is pregnant.

Len demonstrates a hatred for women, and berates Ainsley for being educated, which he considers a male domain.  He uses terms such as:  "slut," "nauseating," "sick," and "unclean" (EW 157-160).  Although Len seems to be a psychologically disturbed person, as shown by his vicious attitude toward women and sexual attraction to children, he represents an unacknowledged attitude that supports society’s devaluation of women by placing unspoken taboos on them, or making specific actions taboo for them.  In this case, a pregnant woman, Ainsley, is taboo for a man, Len, because she is "sick" and "unclean."  In the same example, a man, Len, wishes that a taboo had been placed on education for women because it gives them "ridiculous ideas" (EW 157).  While Len’s seemingly psychological problems, such as his vicious attitude toward women, are not representative of normally adjusted persons, pregnancy and menstrual taboos on women are common in many cultures, including those that have directly contributed to Canadian culture.  In Survival, Atwood juxtaposes Amerind spirituality with Greek myths and the Bible (102-103).  There is a dialogue in Atwood’s novels between Amerind spirituality and Judeo-Christian patriarchy.  Underhill provides details about the ubiquity of pregnancy and menstrual taboos:  "Restrictions for women during her [sic] reproductive life are known--or they once were known--throughout the world" (53).  Underhill discusses how these taboos occurred in Amerind cultures and were paralleled by Judeo-Christian practices, specifically, taboos related to the "uncleanness" of women who have menstruated or given birth (53).  Separate from Underhill’s Amerind societies, are the civilizations that created the foundations of Judeo-Christian culture.  Religious/literary remnants that have had tremendous influence include Leviticus, in which menstruation and pregnancy taboos are fundamental.  When Len cries out that the pregnant Ainsley is "unclean" and will make him "sick," he gives voice to ancient beliefs that still affect current cultures as a kind of unacknowledged ‘subtext’.

Underhill explains that these types of taboos originate in the belief that the power that allows women to give birth is "so different from man’s power to hunt and kill that the two must be kept apart" (51), and that "men have been routed and frustrated by this power unattainable to them" (52).  She then explains that the transition from ‘taboo’ to ‘unclean’ "is a well-known historical process...objects and persons once untouchable because they were sacred continued to be untouchable after the reason for their sacredness was forgotten.  The explanation then accepted was that they were unclean"  (53).  If Underhill’s explanation of the origin of taboos is accepted, then Len seems to reflect an ancient prejudice when he condemns Ainsley, and this prejudice illustrates the difference between women’s power to create and men’s power to destroy.  In Underhill’s example, male power is used to destroy respect by forgetting sacredness and retaining only ritual taboos.  This use of power is present in The Edible Woman, in which it is used to devalue women.  Celebration of a unique power, reproduction, has been turned into contempt, which Len vociferously illustrates.

In Atwood’s novels, the recognition of the value of women in patriarchal societies is strictly limited.  The housewives who go out and conduct the surveys for Seymour Surveys are undervalued.  Marian notes:  "They don’t make much, but they like to get out of the house" (EW 19).  As long as women are subject to the power ploys in the workplace that Marian experiences, and as long as they are induced to marry, as Marian is through courtship rituals, there are bound to be many housewives who forgo careers.  The women who conduct the surveys are paid very little and are considered expendable.  This devaluing is brought to the foreground when a weather front turns into a battle front as the housewives are sent out into a storm to complete work that would otherwise infringe on the celebration of Christmas, a patriarchal ritual that must be celebrated.  "So Mrs. Bogue’s flock had been driven, bleating faintly, out into the storm" (EW 164).  "For the rest of the morning the office had resembled the base of a mercy-mission in a disaster area" (EW 164).  The housewives are no more than economic ‘cannon-fodder’.  As a group they are valued because the company cannot function without them, but as individuals they are not valued highly.  Seymour Surveys is not concerned if the women resign after being misused because others can be found to replace them.  If the women do not help the men upstairs create the survey results, they are slowly destroyed by being forced into very restrictive housewife roles; if they try to escape their housewife roles temporarily by working for Seymour Surveys, they are destroyed by the men upstairs as part of the process of creating survey results.  Either way, the devaluing of women leads to their destruction, their treatment as `edible women’.

The concerns about power patterns, rituals, and values are continued in Surfacing.  An investigation of power patterns leads to exploring the domains of power between female and male.  Atwood develops the basic power theme explored in The Edible Woman by forcing conflict among holders of power in Surfacing.  The unnamed narrator brings her lover, Joe, and their friends, husband and wife David and Anna, to her father’s camp near the northern Ontario/Québec border, where they vacation while the narrator searches for her missing father.  The narrator’s quest is more in search of herself than it is in search of her father.  Joe is "half-formed" (S 207).  Anna is dominated by David, and David attempts to control others.  Within this framework, the characters struggle against each other to survive.

The greatest conflict among partners is between Anna and David.  They are married to each other and are in a cycle of deprecation.  Anna teases David "a lot" (S 31), but this is only a small defence against the terror in which he holds her:  "`Sometimes I think he’d like me to die,’ Anna said, `I have dreams about it’"  (S 132).  The only power Anna appears to hold is that of her body, for she seems quite dull-witted, as noted by her husband, and is never shown by the narrator to have much common sense in her ability to adapt to life in the woods.  David says:

Anna knows that her body is attractive to David, so she is terrified that her body might lose its hold over him, leaving her without protection in a society in which women are expected to be dependent financially upon men.  To avoid losing him, she is willing to accept a good deal of abuse.

David does take out his anger on Anna; she is correct in her perceptions of him.  The narrator describes watching David, half-heartedly assisted by Joe, verbally and physically force Anna to undress on camera.  David’s verbal abuse is revolting.

The assault is all the worse because it is directed against the Anna’s body, the source of her power.  Her body is associated with something dead and non-human.  It is called "too fat."  Through the term "twatface," Anna’s body is figuratively separated into pieces and reassembled when its face is described as a mons.  The power of Anna’s body is ripped away as David forces her to strip.  Her self is fragmented, so that her body becomes something apart from her:  an `it’.

In less dramatic moments, Anna is shown to be distant from her body already.  She is addicted to cigarettes, enjoys complaining about her ailments, as do the hospitalized women in The Edible Woman, and is annoyed by the nurturing of the sun and the soil (S 83-86).  Anna is so dissociated from her body that she has little ability to enjoy the physical pleasure of rooting outside in a garden along with the narrator.  Anna views the activity as an interruption of a more important pastime: smoking.  Instead of enriching herself through a vision quest, like the narrator, she engorges herself on a murder mystery, like a reader of the novels of Joan Foster, Lady Oracle’s narrator.  Without initially appreciating herself, Anna cannot win power struggles with others.  The best she can do is rudely gesture at her tormentors, David and Joe, as she runs naked off the dock, or refuse to go back on the birth control pill in defiance of David’s wishes (S 85).  Anna’s control over her body is very limited, and she sees her behaviour as a reaction against men, rather than a proactive endeavour for herself.  She is forced to struggle with David about who controls how her metabolism functions.

David shows that his power struggle with Anna is an example of a patriarch dominating his wife; he falls back on stale arguments based on defensive patriarchal beliefs:

Anna may have manipulated David into marriage.  However, marriage and courtship rituals seem to be two-way streets, if one considers the treatment of these rituals shown in Atwood’s previous novel, The Edible Woman.  David overstates his case when he blames his being married on Anna.  He believes Anna is stealing him away from the ministry, which is a bastion of patriarchal hierarchal power.  David claims that Anna is weakening him physically, by castrating him, but what he is concerned with is his spiritual power.  David is afraid that Anna has weakened his spiritual power, and he uses his distancing from God and his church as proof.  David refuses to consider that he might be an immature bully, that his troubles are mostly of his own making, and that the only power he is losing is the power over Anna that he never should have gained.  The only limit on David’s power over Anna is her will to survive, which is restricted because she accepts being a victim too easily.

Rituals in Surfacing are used by the narrator to help her gain power.  Surfacing’s narrator, unlike Anna, has strong willpower, so she is able to push herself hard enough to try to find a way to survive.  The narrator’s will to survive drives her on a ritual vision quest.  She is aided by the spirits of her father and mother and by `magic mushrooms’.  The result is that after searching the depths of her soul, she surfaces as a stronger person who has the strength to fight for survival.

Underhill is helpful in illuminating the vision quest aspect of native religious practices.  She opens her chapter on vision quests with a passage that puts Surfacing’s narrator’s vision quest in perspective:
       

Surfacing’s narrator’s breakdown is simply part of her quest.  Her seeking absolute seclusion, rejecting man-made goods, and partly freezing and starving herself are all parts of what Underhill describes as a ritual vision quest (96-105).  This might seem extreme, but it is necessary if the narrator is to decide to bring her foetus to term or to abort it, and to decide if she will marry Joe.  The ritual helps her make these difficult decisions.

The narrator had aborted a previous pregnancy.  The abortion haunts her.  Her experience in the hospital was dehumanizing.  She remembers the abortion as something that was forced on her, rather than something that she wanted.  Her imagery is filled with violence, and she is determined never to let this violence be done to her again.

From the moment of conception, the narrator identifies her present pregnancy with her previous aborted one:  "He trembles and then I can feel my lost child surfacing" (S 173).  If her child is to survive, the narrator must survive.  In addition to giving her greater inner strength, the successful ritual vision quest allows the narrator to help another:  her child.  The narrator remarks that, when going inside the cabin for the first time in days, "I re-enter on my own time" (S 206).  She is re-entering the civilization she left; now she can be a productive/reproductive member of society.  After struggling through the ritual, the narrator is strong enough to bring to the surface her power to create.

In Surfacing, there is a constant readjusting of personal values.  The narrator uses her vision quest to explore how she perceives and relates to society.  As her vision becomes more clear, the narrator realizes that she no longer holds the same values as she did when she left the city.  A good example of this readjustment is a hasty conclusion which the narrator makes when she blames Americans--who are actually Canadians--for the death of a heron.  At the transition between chapters "Fourteen" and "Fifteen," the narrator and her companions come upon a dead heron strung up by its feet.  The narrator believes that it was killed by Americans (S 124-126).  When the people who strung it up greet her the next morning, the narrator thinks that they are ignorant, happy killers who mainline straight power and slaughter innocents (S 137-138).  The narrator is so distraught that she wishes she could murder these "killers" (S 138).  Her passion is strong, but it is improperly focused.  The narrator values Canadians differently from Americans, as though the Canadians were all like herself and the Americans were all "ugly Americans" (S 138).  Her values quickly readjust when she learns that the heron killers are not Americans, but are Canadians from Toronto and Sarnia.  The narrator realizes that their actions were reprehensible, not their nationality, and that these Canadian actions have been, and would be in the future, influenced by American culture.

The shift in values is subtle, but reflects the narrator’s deepening awareness of the society around her.  Her critical awareness of societal forces helps her understand how she has been influenced.  The greater the narrator’s awareness of her society, the more easily she can understand herself and readjust her values, as she does when she struggles with her decisions on abortion and marriage.  Immediately after noticing her shift in values, the narrator remembers how, when she was a child, she had been told that evil originated with Hitler (S 139).  The narrator continues on the Nazi theme when she wonders why she does not always speak up.  She chastises herself because she did not say anything about the heron when the Americanized Canadians who killed it came to say hello (S 140-141).  Despite her feelings of guilt, the narrator does not speak out because she believes it would offend others, and if she offends others, the conflict might harm her.  The narrator’s fear of speaking out is identical to Marian’s in The Edible Woman.

A theoretical exploration of destructive violence is found in Bruno Bettelheim’s text The Informed Heart:  Autonomy in a Mass Age, which is a broadly based exploration of extreme cases of domination.  Bettelheim discusses survival in Nazi concentration camps.  One of the topics he examines is the need to be inconspicuous.  In Surfacing, the narrator holds to her values; she believes she should speak out, but she prefers to avoid conflict:  "...I wanted everyone to be happy" (S 141).  The narrator feels guilty in taking actions that help her to survive in the short term.  Similarly, Bettelheim notes:

The narrator of Surfacing faces just such a conflict of values.  The narrator can ease her soul by speaking up, but if she speaks up she will become different from those around her.  This difference will cause her trouble.  For example, Joe’s involvement in the forced stripping of Anna causes the narrator to cool toward him.  Instead of supporting the narrator, Anna turns against her and joins David and Joe as they torment the narrator for shunning Joe.

The narrator hurts herself through her stand against tyranny and does not help Anna at all; if anything, she makes matters worse for Anna because she momentarily upsets "the balance of power" (S 164) that holds Anna and David together.

While the narrator is being dissected by the "tribunal," she thinks of how this reflects on how she values others, particularly, Americans and Americanized people:  "...it was time for me to choose sides" (S 165).  The narrator’s values shift, from feeling guilty for surviving by not speaking, to surviving by acting against the norm.  The morning after Anna was forced to strip in front of the camera, the narrator takes a bold course of action against David and Joe, instead of continuing as though nothing had happened.  She destroys the film that recorded Anna’s humiliation (S 178).  The narrator has not lost her humanity.  She has balanced her values, which allows her to survive through anonymity and non-confrontation, but still to act decisively when necessary.  In Bettelheim’s equation, Surfacing’s narrator is learning to save both her body and her humanity.  She realizes that her actions are significant, that she can hurt others, and that she must not accept being victimized (S 206).

The narrator of Surfacing progresses further in rejecting victimization than the protagonist of The Edible Woman.  At the close of both novels, Atwood leaves the reader wondering if these characters will survive to become non-victims.  Atwood leaves open the possibility that these characters will fall back because they are unable to fight continually for power in societies in which rituals and values tend to victimize women.

Power patterns, rituals, and values continue to be vital issues in Atwood’s later novels.  Although this study will explore other aspects, the conclusions made in this chapter hold just as well for Atwood’s later novels.  All of Atwood’s protagonists struggle against power and rituals in patriarchal society, and must make difficult decisions when they are forced to re-examine their values.

This chapter’s examination of Surfacing introduces Atwood’s use of female spirituality, but is not intended to present a full discussion.  Spirituality is treated in greater depth in "Chapter Three," in which the relationship between creativity and female spirituality is explored in Lady Oracle.

Creativity and Female Spirituality:  Lady Oracle

Lady Oracle (LO) examines gothic romance fiction in a cultural context.  A very useful study is Loving with a Vengeance:  Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, in which Tania Modleski discusses romance and gothic novels and soap operas.  Modleski provides a framework for the study of Lady Oracle as a portrait of the artist as a young woman.  She states:  "At the end of a majority of popular narratives the woman is disfigured, dead, or at the very least, domesticated" (12).  In Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood’s narrator, Joan Foster, writes costume gothics in which the female characters are often left disfigured, dead, or domesticated.  Joan’s life parallels the lives of the characters she creates.  She creates novels that allow women to escape from daily pressures into fantasy worlds.  At the same time, Joan tries to escape from her own problems.

This chapter investigates entrapment and escape in Lady Oracle, which leads to further investigation of two subjects:  patterns in popular gothic romance fiction and one’s vision of one’s self.  The creativity used to write costume gothics is shown to be reinforced by power gained through female spirituality.  Thus, creativity ultimately reflects how one perceives one’s self.

In this study, the terms ‘gothic’ and ‘romance’ refer to dime-store novels.  These are contextualized by Mary Eagleton in her anthology Feminist Literary Theory, which includes essays on literature read by women.  Eagleton tries to bring together theoreticians and a wide audience of fiction readers (x).  Consequently, she provides a useful definition of formulaic pulp romance fiction:
        The one-dimensional characters, the predictable plots, the purple prose ensured that all the books [pulp romance fiction] ‘failed’ on literary grounds.  At the same time, the reactionary values--the double standard, passive heroines and masterful heroes, the triumph of heterosexual, marital bliss--made them politically unacceptable [to feminists]." (91)

In her essay "Mass Market Romance," which is included in Eagleton’s anthology, Ann Barr Snitow develops a theoretical structure with which she examines gothic romances.  Snitow says that for protagonists of gothics, "it is good to nurture, good to observe every change in expression of the people around you, important to worry about how you look," and that "both [gothics and romances] pretend that nothing has happened to unsettle the old, conventional bargain between the sexes....  plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose" (139).  These insights by Eagleton and Snitow provide a good starting point for the discussion of gothic romance influences in Lady Oracle.

Concerns in Lady Oracle include the heroine’s attraction to Byronic men, enjoyment of romance fiction and daydream fantasies, and need for psychological and/or physical escape.  Patterns of romance fiction that are stressed in the novels written by Joan include fatalistic ambiences, stereotypes, and happy endings.  Joan’s vision of herself is shown to be affected by interaction with others and by introspection.

Atwood shows how Joan uses her creativity to invent attributes that her lovers do not have.  Instead of accepting her male companions as they are, Joan insists on romanticizing them.  This helps her ignore their less savoury aspects.  If they are romantic heroes, then she must be their heroine.  Joan avoids the real world this way.  She prefers to create her own world with her imagination.

Joan’s European lover, Paul, the Polish Count, describes himself as what Joan interprets to be a romantic figure:  "’I am the last,’ he said, ‘of a dying race.  The last of the Mohicans’" (LO 148).  Joan notes that when she initially met him she "felt sorry for the sufferings he had undergone" (LO 148) and that "He seemed to belong to a vanished and preferable era, when courage was possible" (LO 148).  Through these statements, Joan describes a Byronic figure:  a person who does not fit into society and becomes an outcast or even an expatriate, and who is persecuted but constantly fights against persecution.  Of course, Paul is not such a wonderful, romantic hero, but initially Joan perceives him this way.  Later, however, she begins to realize that he is not as wonderful, romantic, and heroic as she had originally believed him to be.

Joan’s initial sexual experience with Paul, her first lover, is not romantic.  She says it "was not at all erotic" and that "...he looked weird without his spectacles" (LO 150).  Clearly, Paul is not the Byronic figure that Joan would have him be.  The reality with which Joan is faced does not match the fantasy that she based on Paul’s mysterious past as an expatriate count.

Joan’s initial meeting with Arthur, her future husband, is similar to her initial meeting with Paul.  Joan tries to make Arthur into a Byronic figure just as she tried to make Paul into one.  She falls in love with Arthur immediately, and describes him as "A melancholy fighter for almost-lost causes, idealistic and doomed, sort of like Lord Byron" (LO 165).  Arthur’s Maritime accent seems "exotic" to Joan (LO 168).  He is hastily classified because Joan identifies all people with causes as romantics, although he only was handing out ban-the-bomb leaflets.  She even perceives the eccentric soap-box speakers as romantic:  "saintly refined old men with pale-blue Ancient Mariner eyes" (LO 164).

When Joan initially meets the Royal Porcupine, her lover after she marries Arthur, she describes him in romantic terms as well; first his body, "He too had red hair, and he had an elegant moustache and beard..." (LO 240-241), then his clothes, "...long black coat and spats...gold-headed cane...white gloves...top hat..." (LO 241).  Later, she notes that "there was something Byronic about him" (LO 256).  The Royal Porcupine tries to be a romantic figure.  In addition to his odd dress, he creates deliberately revolting art that sets him apart from society.  He "recycles" (LO 243) road kills--animals that have been run over by automobiles--into artwork, with titles such as "RACOON AND YOUNG, DON MILLS AND 401, BROKEN SPINE, INTERNAL HEMORRHAGE" (LO 242).

Atwood closely ties Joan’s creativity in inventing Byronesque attributes for her lovers to her creativity in writing gothic novels.  Joan’s attraction to Byronic figures is similar to her attraction to romance fiction and daydream fantasies.  Joan is a costume gothic author under one name and a poet under another.  The Royal Porcupine describes her as a "cult figure" (LO 246).  As an author of romances, Joan is "Miss Personality, confidante and true friend" (LO 31) to her audience.  Joan notes:  "Now I could play fairy godmother to them....  to turn them from pumpkins to pure gold" (LO 31-32).  Joan creates characters for her romances the same way that she creates Byronic figures out of her lovers.  The way Joan envisions her lovers is not realistic, and her novels deliberately steer away from "social realism" (LO 182).  Society, including its victimization of women, is too painful for Joan to face.  Instead, she creates her own world.  Joan’s reality is entwined with her romances.  She notes that the Royal Porcupine is a Heathcliff who is a Linton in disguise (LO 272).  Underneath the Royal Porcupine’s persona is Chuck Brewer, a part-time commercial artist (LO 266).  Joan believes that "For him reality and fantasy were the same thing..." (LO 272).  The Royal Porcupine is used by Atwood to play off against Joan, for this juxtaposition illustrates Joan’s double life.

Joan believes that she has always led hidden lives:  "But hadn’t my life always been double?...But not even twin for I was more than double, I was triple, multiple..." (LO 247).  Joan has combined the identities of a fat, unpopular child, a lover to Paul and the Royal Porcupine, a wife to Arthur, a housewife/student, a costume gothic author, a poet, and a terrorist, but she tries to separate each part of her life into entirely self-contained lives.  Joan’s compartmentalization is so complete that she leaves herself open to blackmail by Fraser Buchanan, a journalist/extortionist who traces Joan’s different selves to one person.  Joan weaves her lives the way she writes her novels, with great complexity and emotional turmoil.  To some degree, Joan’s stories are her own fantasies, and her fantasies are reflections of her personal difficulties.

Eventually, reality, and its inherent victimization, catches up with Joan.  None of Atwood’s protagonists are able to avoid victimization entirely.  With Joan, her difficulty in dealing with reality is paralleled by her difficulty in completing one of her costume gothics.  Joan’s titles include The Turrets of Tantripp; The Secret of Morgrave Manor; The Lord of Chesney Chase; Escape from Love; Storm Over Castleford (which was not completed); Stalked by Love; Love, My Ransom; and Love Defied.  Usually, Joan has no difficulty writing novels, but she has trouble closing Love Defied.  When reviewing the ending of Love Defied, she notes:  "That was the way it was supposed to go, that was the way it had always gone before, but somehow it no longer felt right" (LO 334).

Joan’s customary way of writing, transcribing her thoughts as she daydreams, is so closely linked to her own life that she dreams that any ending in the novel may in actuality be her end.  At one point, Joan even catches herself introducing characters from her life directly into the plot of Love Defied as she dreams while napping in Italy.  The mix of reality and fantasy is confusing.  In her real life, Joan was a fat child, had lovers, almost drowned in a staged suicide, and married Arthur.  In Love Defied, the hero--or villain, as he is by this point--is Redmond, and his first wife is Felicia, who drowned after being caught in adultery.  In Joan’s dream, a very fat and dripping wet ghost of Felicia says to Redmond, "...it was such an effort, Arthur, to get out of that water," which puzzles Redmond, who asks, "Who is Arthur?" (LO 324).  Later, when Joan dreams that Felicia refuses to be doomed (LO 342), and while still confusing Redmond with Arthur (LO 243), Joan is awakened by footsteps outside just as she envisions Redmond murdering Felicia.  Joan takes a bottle and bashes it on the head of the person she has heard.  The fantasy world that Joan taps to create her novels is closely, and often confusingly, tied to her own life.

The connections between Joan’s life and her imaginary worlds are evident in her poetry.  Joan wrote a book of poetry, Lady Oracle, by means of automatic writing.  There are many allusions to myth and legend.  This is the title work:
        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  (LO 228)
A notable phrase is "the death you fear/Under the water," for drowning figures prominently in both Joan’s life and her novels.  Another line might refer to the triple goddess:  "She is one and three" (a thorough examination of the triple goddess can be found in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, which Atwood discusses in Survival (199-200)).  Specifically, the triple might be Diana/Luna/Hecate, who was a triple goddess of the moon, and among many other attributes, had power over the sea and the dead (brief comparisons between these three goddesses can be found in Smith and Marindin’s Classical Dictionary), or the triple might refer to passengers on King Arthur’s funeral ship:  Queen Morgan Le Fay, the Queen of North Galis and the Queen of Waste Londis (Thomas Malory’s Morte Arthur is a good example of Arthurian legend).  Both possibilities are compatible and are supported by the final line of verse, which is taken directly from Tennyson’s "The Lady of Shalott," which deals with the triple goddess and Arthurian legend (29).

Joan’s poetry is not simply mindless scribbling, as automatic writing might be perceived.  It is steeped in myth and romance.  Joan’s poetry is not as popular as dime-store gothic romance fiction, but in her awareness of literary history there is common ground between her poetry and her costume gothics.  When Joan expresses herself through automatic writing, her thoughts rise from the same depths from which her fantasies and fictions emerge, for both make discussions of unpalatable reality possible through the use of escapism.

Joan’s novels and poems reflect her attraction to romance.  She enjoys romance because it offers escape from reality.  Joan is not very different from the women for whom she writes her costume gothics.  Joan states that great escapes, such as adventures or sports, are denied to women (LO 32) and believes that she offers her readers an alternative.  Her creativity may not advance the cause of women, but it does offer relief.  Her argumentum ad populum et verecundiam is very persuasive, for in regard to her friends’ radical political magazine, Resurgence, Joan says:

Joan is influential because she is widely read, although her novels are pulp fiction.  Similarly, Atwood’s novels are well-liked.  If Atwood’s novels were too radical, they would not be as popular, and influential, as they are.

Escape is attempted both psychologically and physically in Lady Oracle.  When Joan writes or a member of her audience reads a romance, an effective psychological escape mechanism is created.  In a typical gothic or romance novel, when a relatively impoverished, innocent, and young woman becomes involved with an older, richer, and much more powerful male hero, there is struggle between the two, but ultimately a happy ending.  The ‘beast’ in the man is tamed by the woman, yet the woman does not have to surrender the role she is used to playing.  She does not have to lose too much of her naivete.  The reader sees a familiar pattern, and consequently, can take satisfaction in predicting what must be done to accomplish a happy ending.  Essentially, if a heroine plays by the rules, she will eventually triumph.  This offers the reader an escape, for it reinforces her faith in the social fabric.  The chase and male juvenile display in The Edible Woman is a good example, although Atwood turns it around on itself by not allowing the protagonist to be happy with the outcome.  The reader of Joan’s gothics may find that playing by the rules and surviving, let alone triumphing, are mutually exclusive, and that breaking the rules seldom leads to success, but usually leads to social approbation.  When the reader escapes into Joan’s novels, she may find satisfaction by vicariously gaining the rewards that she finds so hard to gain in daily life.

Modleski provides another useful perspective when she makes an astute point concerning romances, gothics, and soap operas when she explores patriarchal mythology:

Thus, Joan’s novels are no more than traps.  Joan needs to escape from them, although they help her escape from daily frustrations and provide a livelihood that is reasonably satisfying.  Initially, she consciously seeks to expand her repertoire by experimenting, very successfully, with poetry that has nothing to do with the formula she uses in her gothics.  Then, she changes the gothic formula as she dreams.  For example, the hero finds himself unable to dispose easily of his previous wife, which is a reduction of his power that does not reinforce the gender stereotypes of gothics.

Finally, Joan escapes physically.  As a child, Joan was fat.  She escaped the problems this entailed by losing weight.  Joan left home, and even the country, to escape her mother.  Later, she fled from Paul to Arthur.  She performed her greatest escape, leaving her family, friends, and the databases of the nation, by staging a suicide and flying to a small village in Italy, although she was eventually found out.  No single escape solves Joan’s problems, but each helps her to improve her situation significantly.  In this respect, Atwood’s Lady Oracle follows a gothic pattern, for Joan must try to predict what others’ actions will be, and finds that flight is her most effective survival mechanism.  However, Lady Oracle is an anti-gothic, for while anticipation and flight are extensively used by Joan, the underlying acceptance of paternal attitudes that is common to gothics and romances is not present.  There is no resolution that brings heroine and hero together in wedded bliss, and there is no hint of naivete or submissiveness as feminine virtues.

In writing her novels, Joan Foster’s creativity is constrained by the established form that gothics must take.  Joan’s works must include fatalistic structures, stereotyping, and happy endings.  The equation is simple; if Joan does not follow an appropriate formula when writing, she will not sell her novels.  When trying to direct her own life, Joan parallels her gothic novels, which greatly affects her perceptions of herself and the world around her.

Modleski notes that in both gothics and Harlequins, men learn to devalue women, and that in gothics, the heroine’s love is transformed into fear.  Also, she notes that while Harlequins correspond to courtship, gothics correspond to marriage (60-61).  Joan’s gothics follow this format.  For example, Joan describes the formula she uses as "the old sequence of chase and flight, from rape or murder," and spices up her works by trying to include "a ritual, a ceremony, something sinister but decorative" (LO 219).  The direct connection between love and fear is brought out in a line from Joan’s Love Defied:  "She [Felicia] was afraid of death.  All she wanted was happiness with the man she loved" (LO 321).  The death Felicia fears is to be caused by her husband, Redmond.  Joan notes that "sympathy for Felicia was out of the question, it was against the rules," because Felicia was a wife rather than a mistress.  Joan says:  "In my books all wives were eventually either mad or dead or both" (LO 321).

There are similarities between Joan’s life and the lives of her novels’ heroines.  By the end of Lady Oracle, Joan is nearly both mad and dead.  She is driven to distraction by the thought of her past lives catching up to her.  After running from Paul to Arthur, Joan runs from Arthur to the Royal Porcupine, and finally runs from both Arthur and the Royal Porcupine by pretending to commit suicide.  Joan is emotionally tortured by Fraser Buchanan, who blackmails her by threatening to reveal her past lives.  Joan’s life is one of flight through a complex maze of social requirements.  Complex social requirements that must be accepted to avoid suffering is a topic Atwood later treats extensively in The Handmaid’s Tale.  In Lady Oracle, the consequences are not nearly as severe.  If Joan does not respond ‘appropriately’ to the men around her, she will suffer, but will not die.  Unfortunately, there is no appropriate action for Joan to take when she finds that she must leave a man.  Literally, Joan runs away from Paul’s home out into the streets of London.  Joan is terrified by the Royal Porcupine’s aggressiveness after she breaks off with him, and she does not know what to do about Arthur, her husband, when she pretends to commit suicide.

Joan’s life is guided by the same rules that guide her gothics.  Joan is fatalistic.  She would rather be considered dead than have anyone find out about her different lives.  When Joan tries to add excitement to her life--adding something sinister but decorative--she begins a relationship with the Royal Porcupine, a person who centres his life around road kills.  After Joan’s mock suicide, her friend Sam writes her, saying:  "Congratulations.  You’ve become a death cult," and including newspaper clippings that describe Joan as a person with "morbid intensity...doomed eyes...fits of depression..." (LO 315).  As previously noted, Joan is attracted to Byronesque men, but she seems to be a stereotypical, Byronesque figure.

Joan tends to describe her life in stereotypical terms.  This is unique in Atwood’s novels, for usually Atwood does not use the narrator to parody the protagonist or the protagonist to parody herself.  Joan finds the most romantic figure possible, a self-exiled count, for her first lover.  For her second lover, and later husband, she finds a rabble rouser who is trying to ban the bomb.  For her third lover, she finds a radical artist.  Even her friends are rebels who would like to be urban terrorists.  Each of these characters is larger than life in at least one aspect.  Instead of developing the secondary characters more fully, Atwood keeps them in the background, so that the reader focuses on Joan and sees the other characters only as ‘props’ which support her.  Paul is reduced to the mysterious count, Arthur is reduced to the ineffectual liberal, the Royal Porcupine is reduced to the rebellious fringe artist, and the would-be urban terrorists are reduced to anti-establishment Keystone Cops.  When these characters do emerge from their stereotypes, such as when Paul writes his novels, insights into them only serve to provide further insights into Joan.  This compensates for Atwood’s comical treatment of Joan.

Joan’s gothics have happy endings for the mistresses, although not for the wives, who die.  These happy endings are overshadowed with dread, for once a mistress becomes a wife, a new mistress may be found, and the gothic cycle may be repeated.  Similarly, Joan’s escapes are overshadowed with dread.  In Atwood’s novels, the protagonists must look over their shoulders, for victimization is continual.  Joan happily escapes obesity, but risks having her past exposed when she is married by a person who knew her when she was fat.  Joan escapes the drudgery of writing formula gothics by writing Lady Oracle, but risks being revealed to be a trash writer.  Joan continues to escape because she refuses to accept being unhappy.  Thus, at the end of the novel, Joan is left with a happy ending--she has learned to face up to her past lives--but this happy ending is overshadowed by the need for further escapes.  Joan still has to face or flee from Arthur, her friends, and her public.  The reader can hope only that she has truly learned to face up to her past lives.

The similarity between Joan and her heroines leads to the possibility that Joan thinks of her own life as a gothic novel.  Joan behaves as though she were a character in a gothic novel.  Of course, this raises the point that Atwood includes gothic attributes in Lady Oracle because they make the novel more enjoyable.  In this respect, Joan is a gothic heroine who writes gothic romances, thereby managing to defer both the catastrophe and the happy ending.  She keeps resurrecting herself for another adventure.

Joan learns to value herself with the help of spiritual experiences.  These spiritual experiences begin with her relationship with Leda Sprott, the mystic whom Joan and her Aunt Lou visited when Joan was young, and whom Joan and Arthur inadvertently approach when they wish to be married.  When Joan was a child, she was taken to church by Aunt Lou.  However, this was no typical Toronto church (such as the Anglican church into which Arthur had been baptised).  It was a spiritualist church, and it was led by the Reverend Leda Sprott.  Weekday services included "the Healing Hands session on Tuesday, the Automatic Writing on Wednesday, and the Private Sittings on Thursday" (LO 107).  The main Sunday service focused on speaking with the dead.  Atwood does not explicitly point out a connection between spirituality and creativity in Lady Oracle, but she does place such a connection there to be discovered.  In "Chapter Ten," Joan goes with Lou to the spiritualism gathering, and later in the chapter Joan tries automatic writing.  In "Chapter Eleven," Lou dies, leaving money for Joan on condition that Joan lose weight.  This climaxes "Part Two" of Lady Oracle.  Later, Joan composes her collection of poems, Lady Oracle, by using automatic writing.

The connection between creativity and spirituality is strong.  Lou’s legacy effectively lets her reach out from the grave to change Joan.  Joan creates a new body and modifies her self-image thanks to the freedom that the bequest allows her.  The automatic writing, about which Joan learns from the spiritualists, is the same method of writing that allows her to create the poetry that separates her from other pulp novelists like Paul.  The spiritualist world is moderated by Leda when contact is attempted between the living and the dead.  This places Leda in a position of great power.  Aside from Lou, Leda is extraordinary in Joan’s life because she is not dependent on a man to support her.  Even if the world Leda speaks to is not real, she still holds real power because the people who follow her believe that this other world is real.  Either way, Leda creates an environment that places her in control of her life as much as possible.

In fact, Leda is simultaneously a spiritual leader and a fraud.  Leda says that she tries to tell the truth, but when she has nothing to say, she keeps her followers interested by telling them what they want to hear (LO 207).  Leda believes that Lou’s spirit can communicate with Joan, and that Joan has great talent (LO 206-207).  Thus, when Leda says:  "I specialize in mixed marriages.  I can do Jewish, Hindu, Catholic, five kinds of Protestant, Buddhist, Christian Scientist, agnostic, Supreme Being, any combination of these, or my own speciality" (LO 203), she may well be serious, for although she is not committed to any one faith, she seems to know something about marriage.  Leda puts marriage between two people before religion, rather than as a part of religion.  Leda’s distortion of religion is similar to Joan’s distortion of gothic novels.  Both women twist socially acceptable forms to help individuals.  Leda manipulates religion to bring people together, and Joan manipulates gothic formulae to keep her heroine/wife alive.  Leda’s spiritualism leads her and Joan to be more creative in their professions, although they meet with only limited success.  Leda’s congregation slips away until only a few of the faithful are left, and Joan is unable to save her heroine/wife.

Automatic writing allows Joan to create in a new manner, as though she were seeing things differently than she had previously done.  This is paralleled by Leda’s perceiving Joan differently than Joan perceives herself.  Joan describes herself as having been very fat as a child:  "I swelled visibly, relentlessly, before her [Joan’s mother’s] eyes, I rose like dough, my body advanced inch by inch towards her across the dining-room table..." (LO 67).  Leda does not see Joan in the same way.  When Joan asks Leda if she remembers her being a fat child, Leda answers:  "Is that all?...To my mind it’s a perfectly proper shape....  I must say there are worse tragedies in life than being a little overweight" (LO 208).  Leda’s perception of Joan does not match Joan’s perception of herself because Joan’s attitude is influenced by her war with her mother, whom she tried to annoy by gaining weight and becoming an ugly fixture in their show-piece home.

Leda’s spiritualism provides the spark of spirituality that allows Joan to break out of the mold of her past experience.  Joan develops creative powers that help her to conceive of herself escaping, and to modify her environment effectively.  After encountering the spiritualists through Aunt Lou, Joan progresses by stopping the futile fight with her mother, learning to support herself without becoming a second-class employee (such as Marian of The Edible Woman), learning to express herself and ultimately triumph in the literary world through her poetry, finding the courage to pretend to commit suicide, and learning, one hopes, to accept her past.

In Lady Oracle, spirituality helps the protagonist to use what power she holds to fight against victimization.  Instead of physically destroying herself through self-imposed obesity, Joan uses spirituality to channel her power into creativity.  Thus, she only figuratively destroys herself by pretending to commit suicide.  Her powers of creativity allow her to make her way in the world.

Lady Oracle’s protagonist lives in cities.  However, in Lady Oracle, Atwood does not explore how urban living may harm people.  For example, urban terrorism is treated jocosely.  Problems arising from social, economic, and physical decay in urban areas are not examined; they are treated in depth in Atwood’s next two novels, Life Before Man and Bodily Harm.  Creativity and female spirituality will come to the foreground again in Cat’s Eye.

Urban Decay and Violence Against Women:  Life Before Man and Bodily Harm

Atwood’s exploration of urban decay is topical because the stresses of urban living often result in the victimization of women.  Life Before Man (LBM) and Bodily Harm (BH) are examined together in this chapter, because both deal with societal decay and its effects on women.  Life Before Man examines urban decay in Toronto, and Bodily Harm examines violence against women in a small pair of Caribbean islands, St. Antoine and Ste. Agathe.  In each society, women are forced into roles that they find unacceptable.  Elizabeth, in Life Before Man, survives by concentrating on raising her children.  Lesje, also from Life Before Man, uses her career as a refuge from the world.  Rennie, the protagonist of Bodily Harm, directly experiences the horrendous physical and emotional violence directed against women in an impoverished Caribbean nation.  While the societies portrayed in Life Before Man and Bodily Harm are very different from each other, they both provide examples of how societal decay forces women to become victims.

Atwood’s novels prior to Life Before Man and Bodily Harm made some reference to urban decay and violence against women, but they never focused directly upon these issues for long.  However, these topics are important to Atwood’s oeuvre.  Violence against women is central to The Handmaid’s Tale, and both urban decay and violence against women are treated thoroughly in Cat’s Eye.  Urban decay, in its broadest sense, and violence against women are discussed together in this chapter because they are closely related.  Atwood shows how psychological stress from urban living causes violence against women because often women are inured to being victims and are not able to defend themselves in patriarchal society when men lash out in frustration.

A "Lesje" chapter of Life Before Man (chapters are not numbered, and titles repeat themselves) begins with:  "Organisms adapt to their environments.  Of necessity, most of the time.  They also adapt to their own needs, often with a certain whimsy, you could almost say perversity" (LBM 125).  Elizabeth is one of the organisms.  She has had to adapt in order to survive, but the process of adapting has left her miserable.  Elizabeth’s condition is best brought out through Atwood’s use of extremely short chapters that usually start with a description of either how the character for whom the chapter is named feels, or what the character is doing.  The novel opens with an "Elizabeth" chapter, in which Elizabeth thinks:  "I don’t know how I should live" (LBM 3).  In the second "Elizabeth" chapter, the narrator says:  "She [Elizabeth] doesn’t want anything else she will have to take care of" (LBM 15).  In the third "Elizabeth" chapter, the narrator describes Elizabeth as being unnaturally distant from her children:  "Her remoteness from them [is visible], she wants to be able to touch them, hold them, but she can’t" (LBM 28).

This pattern continues in the novel.  For example, each section’s initial "Elizabeth" chapter presents a very sad portrait of Elizabeth.  In part two, Elizabeth asks:  "What is it they peddle for the mentally disturbed?"  (LBM 49).  In part three, Elizabeth notes how her Auntie Muriel takes in  "every disreputable detail of her own [Elizabeth’s] appearance" (LBM 105).  In part four, Elizabeth’s body’s position is described tersely as:  "Straightjacket" (LBM 186).  In part five:  "...she [Elizabeth] wishes to be serene" (LBM 240).  The slow and constant building of patterns is common in Atwood’s novels.  Consequently, her protagonists are very well rounded characters.  In Life Before Man, Elizabeth can be easily accepted as a real character with real problems.  Elizabeth is established as someone who is trying to survive by adapting to her environment.  To those around her, Elizabeth may seem perverse, but she has little choice.  When Elizabeth thinks that she does not know how to live, that she does not want to take care of anything, and that she is distant from her children, she is exploring her environment and finding that there is no place in it for her.

Elizabeth, in a stereotypical role, is expected to be a provider of loving care to those around her.  She does not meet her own expectations because her marriage is a failure; her lawyer husband, Nate, has become a toymaker, and her lover, Chris, has killed himself.  Elizabeth finds caring for her juvenile husband stressful, and wonders what her contribution was to her lover’s death.  She has been compelled to take a good deal of responsibility for these two persons.  Now, Elizabeth is reluctant to take any further responsibility for other persons; she does not want to take care of anyone or anything else.  Because of her wish to reject this type of responsibility, Elizabeth thinks she is rejecting her responsibility for her children.  A small example of this occurs when one of Elizabeth’s daughters models a Halloween costume:  "’You didn’t scream.’  Nancy says reproachfully, and Elizabeth realizes she’s forgotten this.  An error, a failure" (LBM 29).  Thinking of this as an error or failure is undue, for forgetting to scream with surprise at a costume will not ruin a child’s life.  The guilt Elizabeth feels about this minor omission indicates underlying doubts which she has concerning her maternal performance.

This small example is magnified later in the novel when Elizabeth has a bad dream.  "The children are lost....  through carelessness, a moment of inattention, she’s misplaced them" (LBM 171).  Elizabeth’s doubts about herself show clearly here, yet they cannot be blamed on the shock of Chris’s recent suicide.  The dream has recurred since her daughter, Nancy, was born (LBM 171).  Elizabeth’s belief that she is incapable of being responsible for others is seated deeply.

By having Elizabeth describe her own parents’ failure to treat her appropriately, Atwood suggests that perhaps Elizabeth’s difficulties began in her childhood.  Elizabeth’s father, who eventually abandoned the family, was a bullying drunk.  When Elizabeth was a child, she called him "a turd" to his face in front of his friends (LBM 133).  He seems to have deserved this derogation.  Elizabeth thinks to herself:  "It was after this that space became discontinuous" (LBM 133).

A theoretical perspective upon these urban problems is provided by Sheila Rowbotham, while discussing Marxist analyses of women in society in Women, Resistance and Revolution:  "Increasingly, from the mid-nineteenth century the family becomes the last refuge of all those human qualities unable to survive in the outside world of capitalism" (70).  Rowbotham presents nineteenth-century capitalism as a root of urban decay, which, in turn, harmed the institution of the family.  In Life Before Man, Elizabeth’s troubles can be directly linked to urban decay.  While Elizabeth’s father did not succumb in a Victorian gin parlour, as did many of the people living in decayed urban areas in the last century, his alcoholism, physical and verbal abuse of his wife, and sexual game playing with his daughter (LBM 133) point to a society that has decayed to the point in which the last bastion of social stability, the family, is failing.  Elizabeth’s mother, who was a drunkard, also indicates a decayed society.  Both parents struggled with problems that are common in densely populated and economically impoverished areas.  Rowbotham describes the family as a "refuge," but for Elizabeth there is no refuge. 

Elizabeth was adopted by Auntie Muriel and Uncle Teddy.  Her mother was "glad of the chance to get rid of the responsibility" and was paid to give up her children (LBM 200).  The narrator’s tone in this passage is hostile:  "Elizabeth can’t remember how she responded to the news that her real mother had sold her to Auntie Muriel" (LBM 200).  Elizabeth’s childhood seems rather Dickensian; however, while there are clear parallels with women’s status in the previous century, there are also reflections of current conditions, especially those in poor urban black communities.

Some additional theoretical understanding is provided by two feminist anthropologists, Michelle Zimbalest Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, in their study of cross-cultural pressures on women, Woman, Culture, and Society.  An insightful essay by Carol B. Stack is particularly useful:  "Sex Roles and Survival Strategies in an Urban Black Community."  Stack demonstrates how in black ghettos extended families develop to take the place of traditional nuclear families that have fallen apart.  Stack examines "the inexorable unemployment of black males and the ensuing control of economic resources by females" (113).  Elizabeth is not black, but colour is irrelevant when discussing the effects of urban decay.  Elizabeth’s childhood is typical of children in the communities Rosaldo and Stack examine.  When Elizabeth’s father abandons the family, an economically powerful matriarch, Auntie Muriel, assumes control, suggesting similarities to matriarch-led black families.  Elizabeth’s childhood is typical of inner-city life in an era of urban decay, and her Aunt’s concern about property and propriety are typical of a matriarch who is the only member of an extended family who has economic power.

Elizabeth is constrained by the social decay that has surrounded her since childhood.  When Elizabeth was young, the urban decay was very evident.  Her aunt rescued her from it, and gave her a chance to rise above her conditions.  Although Auntie Muriel was not a nice person, and although Elizabeth "hates" (LBM 260) her for doing "harmful, even devastating things" (LBM 276), the matriarch’s economic stability helped Elizabeth survive her childhood.  Nevertheless, the fear of taking responsibility remains with Elizabeth.  She has seen how parents can fail, and she is terrified that she might do the same.  While the urban decay of Elizabeth’s childhood is not physically present in her life any more, it still haunts her, for she constantly sees its reflection in the decay that surrounds her, such as her husband’s retreat from the real world and her lover’s suicide.

Elizabeth’s alcoholic father abandoned her, her derelict alcoholic mother gave her up to her aunt and eventually burned to death while smoking in bed, she perceives her aunt to be a horrid person, her sister became autistic and eventually drowned when left unattended in a bath, her husband withdrew from his career and from her, her lover killed himself, and she is often propositioned and assaulted by perverts.  Out of this configuration of disasters, which are characteristic of inner-city life, Elizabeth adapts to survive and to raise a family.  "I live my life despite you [Auntie Muriel] and I will continue to live it.  And see, these are my children.  Look how beautiful, how intelligent, how normal they are" (LBM 109).

Elizabeth has survived the obstacles that she faced as a child living in a decayed urban area.  Her aunt no longer holds matriarchal power over her.  Elizabeth was strong enough to break from the cycle of despair that her sister was trapped by, and when her sister withdrew from the world and eventually died, she became even more determined to survive.  When Elizabeth becomes estranged from her husband and when her lover kills himself, she becomes depressed, but instead of surrendering as her parents and sister did, she focuses her energy on raising her children so that they will not have to face some of the problems that she struggled to overcome.  Although her parents and sister were victims of urban decay, Elizabeth has survived and can reasonably expect her children to survive.

By the end of Life Before Man, Lesje decides to raise a child, although she has not had to go through a spiritual quest as did the narrator of Surfacing.  Prior to this, Lesje has adapted through avoiding the coarse aspects of society by withdrawing into the Royal Ontario Museum’s boneyard.  When considering her pregnancy, Lesje thinks:  "A pregnant paleontologist is surely a contradiction in terms" (LBM 284).  When she was a university student, Lesje was unable to sustain the level of personal interaction her peers expect of her.  Her roommate persuaded her to join a women’s group.  The group shared their personal experiences, which horrified Lesje, for she was unable to reconcile two aspects of her personality.  First, "She’s an appeaser and she knows it" (LBM 53), so she would have liked to have been able to share something personal with the group, and second, "She knew she couldn’t, she didn’t know the language" (LBM 53), so such communication in abstract ideas and personal feelings was foreign to her.  Lesje lived in a politically active environment because she was a University of Toronto graduate student with a social historian and feminist as a roommate.  Rather than engage in "meaningful dialogue while eating her cornflakes or drying her hair" (LBM 54), Lesje found it better to move out into a private apartment.

Atwood tells this story in the initial "Lesje" chapter.  It establishes Lesje as a character who adapts by disappearing.  Later in the same chapter, Atwood develops this trait, for when Lesje discusses the Parti Quebecois, the narrator notes:  "Lesje herself doesn’t know how she would vote.  She thinks she would probably move, instead" (LBM 56).  This is understandable, for her family are World War II Ukrainian-Jewish refugees.  Her life as a paleontologist allows her to hide from society by disappearing into a world of extinct animals that existed before mankind.

As a child, Lesje was fascinated by rocks and visited the museum with one of her grandmothers.  At the same time, through her grandmothers, she was exposed to her multi-cultural background.  Unfortunately, Lesje’s grandmothers hated "each other more than either hated the Germans"  and "fought over" Lesje (LBM 82).  Lesje learned to appease those around her.  If she had not adapted to their conflicts, she might have become very miserable.

When Lesje was twelve, these two elements of her life, preference for concrete things (LBM 54) and her family’s past, came together when she was visiting the museum.

The museum offers a refuge in which Lesje can work while not running much of a risk of offending anyone.  In the museum, there is little need for her to appease because it is impossible to have a disagreement with a fossil.

Lesje seldom has to deal with personal conflict in this environment, and when she does, she is in surroundings with which she feels comfortable.  Lesje finds the protection in her office that the narrator of Surfacing finds in the bush.  In the beginning of her confrontation with Elizabeth about Nate, Lesje emotionally protects herself by thinking of Elizabeth in terms of dinosaurs, with which she is comfortable:  "Dinosaurs, a hundred and twenty million years of tawny yellow; man, a speck of red.  She’s a fleck, a molecule, an ion lost in time.  But so is Elizabeth" (LBM 192).  In this confrontation, no harm comes to Lesje, and she does not have to appease anyone.  This differs significantly from her childhood experience:  "...she walked across the schoolyard.  Pee-ew, they said, holding their noses, while Lesje smiled weakly, appeasingly" (LBM 193).  Lesje has effectively adapted to living in a somewhat hostile society by her choice of career.

Lesje changes when she becomes interested in Nate.  When describing Lesje’s current lover, William, the narrator mentions these changes in Lesje:  "Lesje is his environment, and his environment has changed" (LBM 125), "Like a dog sniffing the air, he senses the difference in Lesje; he knows, but he doesn’t know that he knows" (LBM 126).  There is little tangible difference in Lesje at this time, but there is enough for William to become uneasy.  One comment from the narrator is significant, and is brought to the foreground by being presented as a paragraph, rather than as material within a larger paragraph:  "Lesje takes refuge in work.  Which once was the perfect escape" (LBM 127).  This is the first time there is a hint that there might be something outside of the ROM for Lesje.

Immediately following this short paragraph, Lesje thinks about reproduction:  "The love lives of stones, sex among the ossified" (LBM 128).  By the end of the novel, Lesje becomes pregnant by Nate.  The narrator presents her thinking:  "Still, this is the only place she wants to work.  Once there had been nothing equally important to her, but there is still nothing more important" (LBM 283).  "Her business is the naming of bones, not the creation of flesh" (LBM 284).  Lesje has had to lessen her psychological involvement in her career in order to become pregnant, which to her means risking her refuge.  She wonders:  "Will they ask her to leave?  Resign.  She doesn’t know" (LBM 284).

Lesje does not think about society and why she finds herself compelled to live as she does.  When Lesje contemplates her pregnancy, she does not think of what type of life her child will have, as Elizabeth does, or think of how the lives of her grandmothers, parents, herself, and her child hold a common thread of culture.  Instead, she thinks:

When Lesje was confronted by Elizabeth about Nate, she thought of herself as a molecule on her office wall’s geologic chart.  Now, when she has been impregnated by Nate, she thinks of herself as a dot on her office wall’s evolution chart.  Her charts are her sacraments.  They are outward and visible signs of how she perceives the world and her place in it.  Lesje surrounds herself with them by using them to decorate her office, the most inviolate area of her refuge.  Her inner sanctum permits her to shut out the world.

Lesje’s adaptation to urban life in Toronto is only partly similar to her family’s adaptation to World War II.  They fled to a safe environment.  Lesje takes a large step away from safety when she becomes pregnant.  She moves toward conflict, which is very unlike her mother, who "has cultivated serenity" (LBM 178), or Elizabeth, who "wishes to be serene" (LBM 240).  Lesje’s life pushes in at her "whether she wants it to or not" (LBM 286), and at the end of the novel she is willing to meet the challenge.  After generations of fearing society, Lesje is a product of her background to some degree, and adapts accordingly in a fairly anti-social manner, but she survives.  By surviving, she is able to continue to adapt and to lead a life that to her is rewarding, even if she does perceive having a child as "exfoliating."

In Bodily Harm, Atwood presents a society that is outwardly much more violent against women than the Toronto society of Life Before Man.  There is physical violence in Life Before Man, but it is not immediately life-threatening.  For example, Elizabeth accepts a ride home from a man who then sexually assaults her.  The narrator describes the scene in a comical manner:  "He’s having a heart attack.  She’ll be stuck here, under the body, until they hear her screams over the microphone and come to dig her out" (LBM 209).  "She feel’s as if she’s opened a serious-looking package and a wind-up snake has jumped out.  She’s never appreciated practical jokes" (LBM 210).  This attack is serious, but more resembles Elizabeth’s deliberate seducing of a young man in a car when she was an adolescent than it does the violence done against Lora of Bodily Harm.

When Lora, a political prisoner on St. Antoine, talks to her cell-mate, Rennie, a travel writer from Toronto, she treats being raped as a point of pride:  "...a mark of courage, a war wound or a duelling scar.  The pride of the survivor" (BH 271).  Rape is the least of Lora’s worries.  "’I’d rather be plain old raped," says Lora, ‘as long as there’s nothing violent’" (BH 270).  Of course, rape is violence against women.  Lora’s comment reflects how the violence against women on St. Antoine can include rape, but can also be far worse.  Tragically, later there is horrendous violence involved.  Although the reader is left in suspense at the end of the novel, it is possible that Lora and Rennie are beaten to death.

Elizabeth is seldom exposed to physical violence.  For example, her lover kills himself, not her.  Her mother gives Elizabeth to Auntie Muriel before drinking herself into skid row.  Her father pushes her mother, but leaves the family before turning to battering Elizabeth.  Even the sexual assault in the automobile is not very violent--what might have been a knife is a microphone:  "There’s something cold and metallic pressing against her throat and she realizes it’s the microphone" (LBM 209).  The closest Elizabeth comes to being battered by a family member is when Nate feels unable to handle his frustration.  "What power does he have?...He has a swift desire to stand up, lean over her, put his hands around her neck and squeeze" (LBM 236-238).  Fortunately, he does not act on his feelings.  Elizabeth lives a relatively safe life.

In contrast, Rennie, who comes from the same city as Elizabeth, is exposed to terrible violence in St. Antoine.  Rennie watches as Lora is beaten, perhaps to death, after trying to protect her.

Bodily Harm is Atwood’s only novel that presents such direct physical violence against women.  Whatever psychological, societal, and economic restrictions the characters in Atwood’s other novels face, they usually have some ability to escape physically when their immediate survival is threatened; the only question is how much they will have to sacrifice to effect their escape, and whether or not such a sacrifice is worth making.  The Handmaid’s Tale is Atwood’s only other novel in which women are systematically slaughtered, but even then, the descriptions are not as graphic.

There is no possibility of escape from the jail cell in St. Antoine.  The keepers are fanatics and sadists.  Beating women is socially acceptable in this society.  The political system of the nation is in shambles.  The rest of the world, including Canada, is not overly concerned with what is occurring there, as long as the Caribbean nation is controlled with an eye to the ease of shipping Venezuelan oil to the U.S. (BH 136).  There are no heroes who might come to the rescue.  There is nothing Rennie can say or do that will persuade her captors to release her.  Before she was arrested, she was naive when she thought:  "There’s nothing to worry about, nothing can touch her.  She’s a tourist.  She’s exempt" (BH 203).  She did not even come to this conclusion on her own.  She trusted an islander, Paul:  "No, you won’t get hurt.  You’re a tourist, you’re exempt" (BH 78).

The toleration of violence in St. Antoine and Ste. Agathe is typical of many emerging nations.  In St. Antoine and Ste. Agathe, economic difficulties combine with primitive social mores to make life extremely difficult, especially for women.  Thieves may be pounded to death unless they are lucky enough to be taken into police custody (BH 225).  There is "seventy percent unemployment" (BH 134).  The islands are reeling from a hurricane.  Many people live in tent camps:  "Even outside there’s a smell of bodies, of latrines and lime and decaying food....  The people here are mostly women and young children" (BH 125).  The painting on the wall of the Church of St. Antoine depicts a male saint, St. Anthony, and demons, "most of them...female" (BH 70).  When Rennie is surprised at how the islanders consider murder less serious than theft, she learns that wife beating, slashing, and killing are not considered to be offenses.

This acceptance of violence seems foreign to Toronto, until the incidence of wife and child abuse is considered.  In Bodily Harm, Rennie is shown several disgustingly violent pornographic films by the police.  The problem of violence, particularly violence against women, exists in both societies.  Presumably, violence against women is practised more openly on the impoverished islands, but this is only a matter of degree.  The abuses against women in Bodily Harm are a result of a society’s decay through economic stagnation combined with outdated social mores that traditionally place women on the bottom of the social-economic scale.

Atwood narrows the gap between the two cultures, the islands’ and Canada’s, by showing that while St. Antoine and Ste. Agathe are struggling to keep up economically with the "sweet Canadians" (BH 29) and the western world, some Canadians are trying to find primitive elements in their own culture.  A good example is Rennie’s friend, Jocasta, whose store has a window dressed for "Junk Punk:  a stuffed lizard copulating with a mink collar in a child’s rocking chair, motorized, a cairn of false teeth with a born-again tract propped against it:  ‘How can I be saved?’" (BH 24).  Jocasta is popular enough with the Queen Street set for her to be interviewed by Rennie for Toronto Life.  Rennie finds herself attracted to Jocasta because Jocasta is more bizarre than she could be, and contemptuous because Jocasta is so different from the small town people with whom Rennie has grown up (BH 25).

The islanders make their homes out of refuse.  Jocasta makes her fashions out of refuse.  Jocasta is able to make a living and a name for herself by catering to Torontonians’ wish to follow fads.  Her art reflects primitive themes--there being little that is more primitive than finding art in garbage.  A specific tribe forms around Jocasta, or Jocasta joins a tribe.  Either way, the fashions she creates help to form a community that is distinct from others around it.  For example, Jocasta identifies herself with her tribe by purchasing her clothes from the salvation army, while Rennie’s surgeon, Daniel, identifies himself with a very different tribe, "the ultra nouveau wave [sic]," by owning limited stock options and washable Group of Seven silkscreens (BH 153).  Jocasta and Daniel manipulate their immediate physical environments to help associate themselves with others of similar bents.  Within the overall Toronto community, they each find their tribe:  at one extreme, Daniel and urbane culture, at the other extreme, Jocasta and counter-culture.  Jocasta makes her career out of refuse; the islanders make their homes out of refuse.

As someone who is trying to establish or become part of a tribe through her art, Jocasta is rejecting the urban decay that surrounds her and is attempting to build a community in which common social values include participation by individuals, rather than withdrawal.  There is an element of play in her art.  Jocasta has the audacity to try to make meaning out of the decay, the physical rubbish, that surrounds her.  Jocasta invites others to join her tribe by selling her ‘wearable’ art.  The tribalism that her art engenders, and its demand that it be participatory rather than static, like "washable silkscreens," helps Jocasta take a stand against urban decay.  Although her work looks like decay, and is literally the remains of a city’s material culture, it offers something that can be taken up and ritually worn by people who otherwise might be unable to find a creative community with which to associate.

Canadian media specialist Marshal McLuhan examined Western cultures, and particularly Canadian cultures, as though they were collections of tribes.  He was a contemporary urban anthropologist.  In Understanding Media, McLuhan states:  "How art became a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals is the story of the detribalization which came with literacy" (209), and later states, in Counterblast, that:  "The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists" (12).  When Rennie writes for Toronto Life, she explores one of Toronto’s cultures, or tribes, and reports back to her readers.  She is writing local travelogues that take her readers to ‘undiscovered’ cultures, although they are not in foreign lands.  Jocasta’s tribe and its art are so far removed from mainstream society that they can be treated by Rennie as a "cultural ghost" (BH 226) existing as underground culture in a figurative urban underworld.  When Rennie travels to St. Antoine, she is simply expanding the scope of her writings by investigating yet another group.  When Rennie learns about the islanders’ preference for knives over guns for wife killing, she considers herself to be "hot on the sociological trail" (BH 226).  Her writings on Toronto fashions and Caribbean vacations are her way of studying tribalism.

Rennie visits the countryside of the islands to see how the common people live.  In Canada, such a trip would take her to towns similar to the one in which she grew up:  Griswold.  Rennie grew up within a tribe, a group of women centred around her family, that had such sayings as:  "If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all" (BH 66), and "Laugh and the world laughs with you.  Cry and you cry alone" (BH 53-54).  Typical Griswold diseases were "psoriasis and hemorrhoids" (BH 64).  Rennie learned "how to be quiet, what not to say."  The "overpowering" and "threatening" heirlooms that required so much cleaning and polishing were passed from mother to daughter through the generations.  All persons, possessions, and actions were classified as either "decent," or "flashy" and "cheap."  The gossip mill was so efficient that "everyone knew everything, sooner or later."  Gender roles were so highly defined that Rennie thought "men were doctors, women were nurses; men were heroes, and what were women?"  Rennie’s mother’s and grandmother’s duty was to "tend" and "protect" the family’s members and chattels.  A person was only as good as her family’s respectability, and "the best way to keep from disgracing it [her family] was to do nothing unusual" (BH 54-56).  In sum, women were tightly controlled by the norms of their tribe.

Griswold is a stereotypical Canadian small town.  It is mainstream, yet the term ‘tribe’ applies to it much more easily than it does when applied to Jocasta’s or Daniel’s communities.  This is because the family structure forms the Griswold community.  "People in Griswold had a great fear of being left alone.  It was supposed to be bad for you, it made you go funny, it drove you bats.  Then you had to be put in the loony bin" (BH 109).  There are few close ties among Jocasta and other Junk Punks, or among Daniel and other limited option holders.  A person can move from one tribe to another within the overall Toronto community, but will have difficulty separating from the Griswold community.  The fear of ostracism is too great.  A transgression of the social code reflects on more than just one person; it reflects on that person’s family.  The scornful phrase ‘some people’s children’ takes on considerable meaning in such a town.

The women of Griswold are trapped within their community.  Having known little else than their confined way of life, they accept their lot and lead comfortable lives.  When Rennie went to Toronto, she was told she "was still a southern Ontario Baptist at heart" (BH 64).  Rennie’s background was recognizable, although she went to the city to escape Griswold.  The process of social normalization prepared Rennie for her mother’s tribe, not for Toronto, and certainly not for a Caribbean island’s brutal jail.

By illustrating how a spectrum of communities treat women poorly, Atwood lets the horror of one situation, such as the physical violence against women on the islands, reflect onto other communities.  The physical violence in St. Antoine illuminates the psychological violence in Griswold.  In each community, survival is gained through acquiescence.  Speaking or acting out leads to ostracism, at best, or death, at worst.  A wide range of abuse lies between these extremes.  The degree of abuse does not differ between societies; the actions in the films Rennie was shown by the police in Toronto were far more brutal than Lora’s battering.  What differs is the frequency of abuse, and the level of social acceptance of abuse.  In Life Before Man and Bodily Harm, these seem to be related to social and economic conditions.  Women are most easily abused when they have no alternatives.  Urban and societal decay, economic and political havoc, and intense tribalism contribute to producing environments in which women lose, or cannot develop, means of escape.

The insights into patriarchal societies in Life Before Man and Bodily Harm are disturbing, but they are not nearly as troubling as the vision Atwood presents in her next novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.  In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood carries violence against women to an extreme as she illustrates how a patriarchal utopia is a dystopia for women.  Life Before Man and Bodily Harm present what already happens regularly to women; The Handmaid’s Tale presents what might happen if the struggle against victimization is not continued.

Darkening Vision of a New World Dystopia:  The Handmaid’s Tale

There are many utopias in Western literature, including Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Wells’ A Modern Utopia.  None of these utopias prevent the victimization of women.  Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale reject patriarchal utopias.

In The Handmaid’s Tale (HT), Atwood describes a women’s dystopia in a very stratified society.  The fictional setting of the novel, Gilead, is a nation in which men are categorized as Commanders, Eyes, Angels, and Guardians, who are oligarchs, secret police, military officers, and enlisted men.  Women are classified as Daughters, Wives, Econowives, Aunts, Marthas, Handmaids, and Jezebels; all are victimized women ranging from privileged socialites to slave prostitutes.

The Handmaid’s Tale is different from Atwood’s other novels because it is pure speculative fiction.  It does not present subtle insights into the current condition of women, as Atwood’s other novels do.  Instead, it describes a patriarchal religious state that bears little resemblance to existing North American political systems.  However, every aspect of society in The Handmaid’s Tale parallels what already exists in contemporary society.  As speculative as Atwood’s dystopia is, it is built from patriarchal structures that already exist, such as religious fundamentalism, tribalism, and totalitarianism.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, the philosopher-historian Hannah Arendt studies the history of totalitarianism to provide a theoretical framework against which one may compare current political systems.  She examines several forms of totalitarianism, one of which originates from what she terms "tribal nationalism," in which the state preys on the fears of its citizens (227).  This predation is precisely what occurs in Gilead.  Community bonds are brought about through the creation and manipulation of class distinctions.  Gilead is a totalitarian state which could easily exist, given no implausible distortions of contemporary society.

Group norms are established through rituals.  Youths are appealed to through Prayvaganzas.  Older persons, particularly women, who remember pre-Gileadean society, are appealed to through Salvagings and Particicutions.  As dystopian as these rituals seem, they represent aspects of contemporary societies, such as capital punishment in nations in which fundamentalist religions hold or influence political power.  Particicutions offer a release from frustration for groups of victimized women in Gilead.  At the same time, Particicutions are used by the state to manipulate these groups of women.

The segregation of women, and their further division into classes, prevents them from forming a unified front.  The female groups hold the least power of the various classes.  All individual women hold some trivial form of power over other women, which is channelled into further dividing women, rather than into building a common front.  In particular, Aunts are used to control other women.  Thus, among women in similar positions, there is conflict.  Written and oral female traditions are effectively prevented.  Women’s power of procreation is devalued through couvade.  Where alienation might lead to rebellion, controls are instituted.  Handmaids and Jezebels, who are reproductive and sexual prostitutes, are the most dissatisfied female classes.  They are the most alienated women, so they are controlled the most tightly.

Unlike women, men hold power, which allows them to make use of escape mechanisms.  Although all male classes hold power, some hold more power than others; the Commanders hold the most power of all.  State supported terrorism is used by the Eyes, who are Gilead’s secret police.  Even the male class which holds the least power, the Guardians, is supportive of the state because of the promise of future promotion.  The male class stratification is directed toward enforcing acceptance of state authority.  The ultimate state sanctioned reward for men is permission to reproduce.  Non-sanctioned rewards include access to brothels, which reflects contemporary double standards.  Atwood presents the believers of literal interpretations of the Bible as power-hungry hypocrites.  The most cynical men in The Handmaid’s Tale are also the ones who hold the most power.

The Handmaid’s Tale tells of a nation, Gilead, in which fundamentalist Christian doctrine is carried to an extreme.  It is a women’s dystopia.  The society had been designed as a utopia, but has failed, and actually has been a dystopia from its outset.  The story, narrated by the protagonist, Offred, shows how the inception of Gilead was violent, and how it led to a total denial of human rights for women.

Gilead ostensibly bases its social order on the Bible.  Gilead is a totalitarian state, and could easily exist in the contemporary world.  In fact, the society is held together by guilt and terror.  Very distinct social ranking, and enforced institutional and ritualistic lifestyles, lead to what might be a self-sustaining, patriarchal system.  The novel is pure speculative fiction, but everything in it parallels what has already occurred in the contemporary world.  When utopian novels are written, they take elements of the contemporary world and combine them to project an ideal society.  Atwood uses this technique to pull together the most horrifying aspects of the contemporary world to create a dystopia.  There are no fantasies, unrealistic scenarios, or impossible devices in The Handmaid’s Tale.

The totalitarian state of Gilead is formed through what Arendt terms "tribal nationalism" (227).  The state preys on the fears of its citizens.  The perceived need for strict social ranking in the early days of Gilead is brought about by panic.  The decline of the United States is the main element.  This includes the poisoning of the environment by radiation and the social and economic restructuring of the nation due to the education and employment of women.  Some of Gilead’s citizens are willing to follow leaders who prophesy a powerful nation that is as strong as the sum of its past triumphs, and who claim that Gilead is surrounded by enemies.  Arendt states:  "Tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is [sic] surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all’" (227).  Gilead would be a perfect example for Arendt.  The result of self-righteous extremism in Gilead’s totalitarian state is suppression of dissent.  Suppression of dissent helps prevent the formation of any communities within the state that might criticize the state.

State condoned community bonds are brought about through the creation and manipulation of the distinctions among arbitrary social classes.  Class distinctions are very important to Gilead’s large public rituals.  There are three common public rituals:  Prayvaganzas, Salvagings, and Particicutions.  Each helps to preserve the status quo.  In each ritual, specific classes have specific duties.  At best, the rituals help to form a community bond.  At worst, the rituals force individuals to join with others in slaughter.

The leaders of Gilead use rituals to create and enforce group norms.  The most understandable rituals are Prayvaganzas.  When one is held for men, it resembles a military church service.  When one is held for women, it resembles an Evangelical Pentecostal service.  The Prayvaganzas celebrate "the things we are supposed to rejoice in the most" (HT 206).  For men, these are triumphs celebrating military victories.  For women, these are large group marriages and religious conversions.  There is a difference between personal values and class values.  Individually, women like Offred do not rejoice in the religious conversion of other women.  It is appropriate that the Handmaid class rejoices because conversion brings another member into its fold and strengthens the group against dissenters.  When the Handmaids are forced to attend the Prayvaganzas, individually they might not wish to be there, but collectively their numbers do support the event.  A group ethic takes over, so individuals are coerced into saying and doing what the group expects of them, which leads to successful Prayvaganzas.

Prayvaganzas directly appeal to youths.  The dystopian social order benefits from Prayvaganzas because Prayvaganzas provide positive social activity in which younger people may rejoice.  For example, military pageants probably are enjoyed more by young warriors than older, more worldly people.  The younger citizens would be less aware of the injustices and less troubled by the inconsistencies of the Gileadean system because they would be young enough to see the world in black and white, and would not remember a different political and social system.  The youths would not be concerned with oversimplification of issues and absolute dogmas, and consequently would not wish to speak or act out, even if they could.  Offred thinks of this when she attends a group wedding:

Salvagings and Particicutions are directed toward older persons, particularly women, who can remember life before Gilead.  For Offred’s generation--those who were adults before Gilead was created, but are still young enough not to be sent to the Colonies--Prayvaganzas are not times for rejoicing.  The other two ceremonies, Salvagings and Particicutions, are more effective in influencing this older group, for these ceremonies are reminders of what will happen if anyone does not conform.  Salvaging and Particicution rituals seem to be unrealistic attributes of a dystopia, but they represent existing aspects of contemporary societies.  Capital punishment exists in contemporary nations in which fundamentalist religions hold or influence political power.

In Gilead, Salvagings are segregated by gender, and attendance is compulsory.  Class distinction is rigidly adhered to; noticeably, the Handmaids, who bear the children that Gilead requires, must kneel, while the ‘superior’ classes sit (HT 257).  Salvaging is public hanging.  The identities of the victims are kept secret.  This helps prevent or debilitate conspiracies.  When a woman’s walking partner, who may well be a spy for the government, is transferred, the remaining woman does not know if her partner was indeed a spy who will cause her to be Salvaged, if her partner was Salvaged herself, or if her partner simply was transferred.  To dampen the possibility of dissent even further, the crimes committed that led to Salvaging are not announced, ostensibly because the crimes might be imitated.  "...a public account, especially when televised, is invariably followed by a rash, if I may call it that, an outbreak I should say, of exactly similar crimes" (HT 259).  One may easily envision a society like Gilead arising if the United States or Canada is broken into smaller nations, for such a fragmentation would cause significant social and economic upheaval.  Political and religious extremism might follow, until one comes to Salvagings and Particicutions.  One only has to search back a few centuries in Western culture to find religiously motivated public executions, or to observe other contemporary nations, such as Iran, in which religiously motivated public executions are commonplace.  Then, one should remember that the United States is one of the few Western nations that currently employs executions, and is religious enough to require reaffirmations of belief in God by its major political leaders.

Women find a release from frustration in Particicutions, which are controlled riots directed toward violently murdering state selected male victims.  The women behave as though they are the Bacchic Maenads of whom Euripides wrote, for they enter a frenzied state and rip apart their victim (Morford and Lenardon 186-218.  A good discussion of the Maenads and many other Greek myths can be found in Morford and Lenardon’s Classical Mythology).  In a utopian society, everyone would become physically active through Participaction--a Canadian coinage, participation/action, used by the Canadian government to promulgate fitness.  Atwood manipulates the term to create dystopian Particicution--participation/execution.  To play a match of Particicution, Handmaids form a circle around a male.  When the whistle blows, they rip the victim apart.  When the whistle blows a second time, the match and the victim are finished.  Particicution victims are said to be guilty of horrendous crimes, so when this assumed guilt is coupled with a general distrust of men in a predominantly gender segregated, patriarchal social order, the women feel little remorse over their actions.  They do not hesitate much in joining, and enjoying, the sport.  Particicution gives the women a chance to vent their anger, but there is a hidden cost.  They are drawn closer to accepting the Gileadean system.  They are no longer passive victims.  They are violent murderers.  Their only excuse is that they must participate to survive, for failure to participate would put them at risk by identifying them as dissenters.  They literally must be team players.

The state uses Particicutions to manipulate groups of women.  Atwood shows how Offred perceives her involvement in a Particicution.  Initially, Offred does not want to participate, although she realizes that she must.  "It’s a mistake to hang back too obviously in any group like this; it stamps you as lukewarm, lacking in zeal" (HT 261).  An Aunt incites the Handmaids by telling them that the man being Particicuted raped two women at gunpoint, and that one of them, who was pregnant, died.  The crowd becomes extremely agitated.  To the crowd, this man represents what the patriarchal society is doing to them.  Offred joins in the Handmaids’ hatred.  "A sigh goes up from us; despite myself I feel my hands clench....  It’s true, there is bloodlust; I want to tear, gouge, rend" (HT 262).  After the man is killed, Offred returns to her normal psychological state and regrets what has happened and how she felt during the murder.  "Now I’m beginning to feel again:  shock, outrage, nausea.  Barbarism" (HT 263).  This shows how easily groups can be manipulated.  Few of these women would assault the man if they were on their own, for as Handmaids, they are dedicated to being raped ritually for the good of the nation.  Only when the Handmaids are brought together as a group and given moral and legal sanctions, do they allow themselves to lose control and attack.  The Gileadean system plays the Handmaids perfectly, having them obey when it wants them to obey, and explode when it wants them to explode.  In the community’s eye, the man is a very sick and violent criminal.  Any dissenters who do not condemn the man invite public hostility upon themselves, thus exposing themselves to further danger.  Their only logical route toward survival in the dystopia is to keep quiet and try to live with the anguish of seeing another person murdered.

In addition to creating rituals which build state condoned community ties, the state prevents women from forming a unified front by segregating them from men and further dividing them into social, economic and moral classes.  Gilead is a highly structured, artificial social order.  The women have no mechanisms for coping with their daily difficulties.  Having slight power over other women, or occasionally slaughtering a man, does not provide enough of a remedy.

If survival were possible, many women might tolerate the society with a blind hope that things might improve.  Offred is like this.  She clings to the hope that she will be reunited with her daughter, who was taken from her to be raised by an unknown Commander and Wife.  The odds of surviving are so slim for most women in Gilead that many lose hope.  They are terrified to speak to each other, and thus are not able to unite to fight the system.  They are segregated into classes, to which their loyalties are bound, for each class has a significantly different outlook on its own future than other groups.  For example, Wives live comfortably, Handmaids do not.  As long as the Wives are willing to live in a social order in which they are absolutely dominated by their masters, they have good lives.  Through their husbands, they have more material possessions and social status than most other Gileadeans, although Gilead is economically impoverished.  Handmaids, however, have quite a different view of the world.  They are very low on the social scale.  They have no control over their own lives in any way at all.  They will die in a few years.  Gilead’s women have difficulty uniting their classes because their outlooks differ greatly, although they have a common cause.

Plato’s Republic and the Nazi state are drawn on by Atwood to provide examples of how women are treated in male utopias.  The Republic is one of the oldest and most influential utopias in Western literature, and the Nazi state was one of the more infamous dystopias of Western culture.  In The Handmaid’s Tale, the female groups hold the least power of the various classes.  Offred is a breeding slave who can expect to die as soon as she can no longer produce babies.  Atwood takes much of Gilead’s form from Plato’s Republic, including the functions of Commanders and Guardians.  Plato believed that women should be forced to produce offspring for the state and then retire in comfort (258-259).  A significant similarity between the Republic and The Handmaid’s Tale is that in both, women have no control over their own lives.

Unfortunately, Offred is a typical example of a Gileadean woman who is not married.  For an example of how true to life Atwood is in The Handmaid’s Tale, consider that the Nazi S.S. ran homes for young women for breeding purposes, and ran many concentration and extermination camps in which internees were worked to death or outright murdered en masse.  There are several classes of women in Gilead, but none is safe.

For Atwood, there is little differentiation between Plato’s use of women in his utopia and Himmler’s Lebensborn (Snyder 206.  Brief entries on World War II and the Nazi leaders are provided by Louis Leo Snyder in his Encyclopedia of the Third Reich).  In both, the individual woman is subjugated totally to the needs of the state, and the state is controlled by males.  In respect to Atwood’s treatment of women in Gilead, a significant comparison can be made between Plato’s and the Nazi’s states.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates says:  "’The woman...shall bear for the state from the age of twenty to forty..." (259).  Plato believed that women should be impregnated by young, successful warriors (258).

According to Gerdes, Himmler’s physician, the S.S. believed that "All single and married women up to the age of thirty-five who do not already have four children should be obliged to produce four children...(Gerdes 273).  Bormann, a very powerful Nazi leader who strengthened the Nazi party against the S.S. (Snyder 36), also believed that women should be impregnated by young, successful warriors (Bormann 272).

In both Plato’s utopia and the Nazi’s dystopia, women were to become something similar to handmaids.  Atwood does not believe in patriarchal utopias, for in them women are prevented from holding real power or, indeed, controlling their own bodies.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, each woman holds some trivial form of power over other women, which further divides women by preventing them from building a common front.  This power is not real power that can be used to improve their lot.  There are many female class divisions.  The system works while the women quibble.  Again, Atwood has explored class systems throughout the world when writing The Handmaid’s Tale.  The women regulate themselves and each other, which allows them to function with little contact with the Guardians.  If the women are to be treated as prizes, they must not be tarnished by too much contact with the players who compete for them.  The males suffer a clear-cut military society in which paths of authority are fairly vertical.  The female segments of society have far more checks and balances because there can be no simple chain of command without a good deal of power at the top of the chain.  Instead, the relatively small amount of power that the women hold, such as the power to turn in each other to the Eyes, is spread throughout their groups.  For example, Wives have their status diminished when their husbands turn to Handmaids, but have their status augmented if the Handmaids give birth.  The Handmaids surrender their children to the Wives, but gain their own survival by avoiding being sent to the Colonies.  The system is hideous but efficient.

Aunts are used by the state to control other women.  Aunts exercise sergeant-major-like power over Handmaids and Jezebels.  Thus, Handmaids and Jezebels live closer to death than other classes.  This puts the Handmaids and Jezebels in a constant struggle for survival, and forces them, whether they wish it or not, into direct conflict with the Aunts.  If Handmaids do not reproduce, they go to the Colonies, where death awaits them.  If Jezebels, who are slave prostitutes, do not please their customers, who are Commanders and male foreign trade delegates, they go to the Colonies.  Handmaids and Jezebels depend solely on their health.  Both classes are directly associated with extramarital sex, which socially soils them.  They have little to lose if they rebel, so they are kept under control by Aunts.

There is conflict among women who are in comparable positions.  Among similar classes, there are tremendously different outlooks that the oligarchy uses to keep the women cowed.  Offred is a Handmaid.  Moira is a Jezebel, a fallen Handmaid used as a prostitute rather than as a surrogate.  Both have similar pre-Gilead backgrounds; both shared Handmaid training; both must copulate on demand.  Yet Offred wishes to live while Moira does not seem to care any more.  The system breaks people, but preferably only after they are no longer useful.  It does not matter if a Jezebel is broken.  It matters somewhat if a Handmaid is broken because Handmaids are required to produce the next generation.  The system forces women to make repulsive decisions that will help them to survive in the short term, but eventually will lead to death.  In this dystopia, as long as there is enough breeding stock, women from the pre-Gilead era are exterminated to prevent an overthrow of the system (HT 233).  When Offred expresses relief when she learns that Moira has seen a film of her mother working in the Colonies, Moira says that Offred should wish that her mother were dead (HT 236).  The conflict among women serves to lessen resistance.

Written and oral female traditions are quashed.  Slavery, torture, and death keep the women in line, but the Gileadean oligarchy cannot afford to allow an oral tradition to pass from mother to daughter, for where there is communication there is power.  The women may not read, the punishment being the loss of a hand (HT 259), which prevents a written tradition.  The elimination of a written tradition is extended to oral traditions by permitting only the wealthy Wives and morally acceptable Econowives to raise children.  The Wives and Econowives are the most satisfied women, so they would be the least likely to indoctrinate their children against the state.  The most victimized groups of women, Jezebels, Handmaids, and Marthas, are not permitted to raise their own children.  The risk of their passing on pre-Gileadean values is too high.

Some background to the Wives’ couvade is found in Fitz John Porter Poole’s "Transforming the ‘Natural’ Woman."  Poole studies rituals among the Bimin-Kuskusmin that affect the status of women in that culture.  In particular, he examines couvade among women, and compares it to couvade among women and men.  In The Handmaid’s Tale, the power of procreation that is held by women is devalued through Handmaid/Wife couvade.  The two reproduction ceremonies, copulation and birthing, are pathetic.  Sex is reduced to procreation only.  "One detaches oneself" (HT 89).  Birthing is especially tragic, for after the Wives turn the event into a tea party, the child is taken from its mother and the mother is removed, eventually to act as another Commander’s Handmaid.  Communication across the gender, class, and generation barriers is prevented.  The physical positioning of the participants in the copulation ceremony causes humiliation for all.  There is no communion among them.  The birthing ceremony does not include males, but there is still no communion among the Wives and the Handmaids.  Couvade, through the Wife’s doubling of the birthing process, and her position on the birthing stool, only alienates the Wife from the Handmaid.  Also, when the doubling is between a mother and another woman, rather than a man, the superfluous woman is not there on her own behalf.  She is a representative of the father (Poole 137).  The presence of the group of Wives at birthing trivializes the event, and their prerogatives of sitting forward on comfortable seats in windowed vans and eating fine foods, contrast sharply with the Handmaids’ eating sandwiches while sitting on benches in vans with blacked-out windows.  Women from both classes know that the birthing is a matter of life and death for the Handmaid, but for the Wife is simply a good excuse for being visited while pretending to be ill.

This ‘divide and rule’ strategy is discussed in William Kornhauser’s sociological study, The Politics of Mass Society, in which he investigates the balance of power between the state and the individual and examines how alienation can be used by social groups to influence the actions of individuals.  Kornhauser states:  "The individual’s lack of ego-integration makes him highly susceptible to manipulation....  the individual who is self-alienated is forced to turn to this mass opinion for directives on how to feel about himself" (109).  In The Handmaid’s Tale, controls are established where alienation might lead to rebellion.  Alienation offers the possibility of rebellion, but it also offers the possibility of mass manipulation by the state.  The handmaid Janine’s constant need for reaffirmation of contact with others is an example of Kornhauser’s point.  Janine lost track of who she was.  She became a tool for the Aunts and eventually disintegrated mentally.  Her self-alienation was deliberately used by the state to manipulate her.

The most dissatisfied female classes, Handmaids and Jezebels, are the most alienated, so they are controlled the most tightly.  Handmaids do not communicate enough to think and behave as a group.  Although they are trained together, they live in the homes of the Commanders they are currently servicing.  They seldom have the opportunity to gather together.  Because they are ostracized by Marthas, reviled by Wives, and separated from members of their own class, Handmaids are extremely alienated, and eventually this social alienation turns into self-alienation.  They cannot slip easily into a home-life as other women can.  They wander as chattels, traded from household to household.  Their alienation weakens the check that the household unit usually has on females in Gilead.  The female members of the household are interdependent; they develop working relationships with each other that allow the household to function smoothly.  Handmaids are not part of this.  They are interlopers who disturb the rhythm of the household, demand time and effort from the Marthas, and humiliate the Wives.  There is no incentive for the Handmaids to ease into the household ambience, even if it were possible for them to overcome the hostility of the householders.  The Aunts prepare the Handmaids for alienation, so consequently the closest bonds Handmaids maintain are with Aunts, with whom they are in conflict.  Thus, the Aunts’ positions are strengthened.

Jezebels are isolated from other women.  Jezebels are slave prostitutes with no hope for life.  Strangely enough, they recommend their lot, for although they will certainly die, they have far greater freedom than any other female class.  No one cares about them because they can do no harm.  They are totally isolated from society, except for their clients, who enjoy their irreverence.  There is no question of being executed without losing self-dignity, or rebelling to the end.  Life for a Jezebel simply leads to a relatively painless death.  Moira sums up the life with:

At best, life as a Jezebel offers a place within a relatively self-regulating community of women.  It may be "butch paradise" (HT 234), but it is no worse than the life in Gilead outside of the brothel.  The sadness comes from knowledge of what is to come.  Jezebels do not cling to threads of hope the way other classes do, and they do not survive.  Their alienation from society, and the self-abasement they feel for their role as prostitutes, leave them open to accepting the fate that the state decrees.

In Gilead, men hold the significant power, which allows them to make use of escape mechanisms.  The flaws in the effectiveness of the system become apparent when one considers the leaders of the nation.  Women have no escape mechanisms, but in Gilead this does not matter.  It does not matter if they go mad, like the Handmaid Janine, or die, like the Salvaged women, as long as they breed in reasonable numbers and do not disturb the social order.  Young men can escape through military adventures and hope of advancement.  Older men, the patriarchs, have several escapes readily available, although they live in the public’s eye in a very puritanical social order.  They have a great deal of power over women and younger men, they have the best economic positions, they have control over activities in their homes, and they have privacy.  However, these advantages are not enough, for the Commanders still find that they require an escape outside of Gileadean society.  They visit the Jezebels, where they can be much more free in what they say and do.

The power patterns in Gilead--a male ruled totalitarian state--are examples of ancient patriarchal Judeo-Christian traditions.  Although all male classes hold power, some are far more privileged than others.  The Commanders hold the most power.  Each male class has its social and economic prerogatives.  Prerogatives for Commanders include socially active Wives, Handmaids (concubines), servants, large homes, and automobiles.  If Gilead were not impoverished and had remained on a dollar based economy, rather than a full rationing token system, the Commanders would be wealthy, for their prerogatives are the trappings of a wealthy class.  Gilead’s secret police, the Eyes, enforce state supported terrorism.  Eyes float slightly outside the class system.  They are a terrorist appendage of the totalitarian state, similar to the Nazi Gestapo, or the Stalinist K.G.B.  In a society in which everyone has something to fear, they are not popular.  Offred does not know what their prerogatives are, aside from collecting persons in black vans and transporting them to torture and death.  The Guardians, who hold the least power among the men, are still supportive of the state because of the promise of future promotion.  The Guardian class is the most common male class.  Guardians have no authority outside of whatever task they are assigned, they live in barracks, they may not touch women, and they may not sexually touch themselves.  As Offred notes, "They have no outlets now except themselves, and that’s a sacrilege" (HT 22).  "Sacrilege" is no exaggeration, for this type of sexual prohibition is supported in the Bible.  For example, Onan was slain by God for spilling his seed (Genesis 38.9-10), and elaborate cleanliness taboos are set out against spilt seed (Leviticus 15.1-18).

The enforcing of acceptance of state authority is the purpose behind stratifying male social groups.  If a member of one male class works hard and effectively enough, he might be promoted to the next class and enjoy significantly better prerogatives.  The Commander explains that this system is a means for men to regain the ability to feel, for he believes that prior to Gilead, men had nothing to work or fight for (HT 198).  While this philosophy appeals to the Commander’s religious rationalization, it avoids the central issues that lie behind the regulation of this society.  Spartan conditioning of Gilead’s young men works well at producing a generation who will support the status quo, for their only chance of advancement is through supporting the system with all their might.  Any inclination to rebel is reduced because the dormitory lends itself to mateship.  While a person might go against an abstract organization, he would be less likely to go against his close friends.  Close living coupled with common group goals has produced mindlessly loyal young military men for centuries. Gilead has adopted this system.

The greatest reward the state offers to men is permission for them to reproduce.  Because the male reward in this society depends on access to, and domination of, women, women find themselves without power.  Instead of participating as equals, women are trophies.  Any status a woman might have is a reflection of her man’s status.

Brothels, which reflect contemporary double standards, are rewards to which the most privileged males have access, although the brothels are not officially sanctioned by the state.  Atwood uses Offred as a narrator, so she does not delve into how the Commanders can justify their hypocritical lives to themselves, but the scenario is realistic.  Double standards can easily be found in first-world nations.  Specific peccadillos involving religious leaders have recently brought to task several television evangelists.  Much more serious activities involving priests and altar boys have come to light in Newfoundland.  One may reasonably believe that Gilead would have escapes, such as access to Jezebels, for its more powerful members.

Offred’s Commander and his fellow leaders enforce strict, literal interpretations of the Bible.  Atwood portrays them as power-hungry hypocrites.  Gilead presents itself as a utopia, but its leaders are not able to function within the rules they set out for the populace.  They have people executed on fraudulent accusations, they frequent brothels, although not remaining chaste is a capital offence for women (HT 259), and they commit genocide in the name of Christianity.  The women suffer the worst by far.  This is ‘justified’ in Gilead by the writings in the Bible that assumed original sin.  There is no discussion of the movement away from matriarchal toward patriarchal religions, or the context of early Christianity among other Semitic religions.  There certainly is no questioning of the validity of Christianity.  There is only a highly selective, conveniently literal interpretation of the Bible. 

The Commanders, who hold the most power in Gilead, are presented by Atwood as the most cynical men in The Handmaid’s Tale.  Ironically, the most relieving aspect of this dystopia is the cynicism of the leaders.  In a society dedicated to the eradication of freethinking, in which women may not converse intelligently with men, the leaders are sources of information. In brothels, there is conversation among the leaders, the lowest class of women, and visiting foreign men.  Practically, though, this isolated example of open communication makes little difference to the women.  Whether the leaders are cynical or truly believe in what they are doing, the women remain economically, psychologically, and physically victimized, with no reasonable hope for survival.  After the carnage Offred witnesses and the genocide of which she learns, her rescue by the chauffeur, Luke, is little more than a contrived deus ex machina.  Atwood’s use of an improbable, and possibly failed, rescue seems cynical, which reflects the attitude of cynicism in which the leaders of Gilead hold their society.

In conclusion, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood shows what might be, given no implausible distortions of contemporary society.  Gilead is a fictional women’s dystopia, but it could come to be.  The formation of Gilead’s social order can be described by Arendt’s term "tribal nationalism" (227).  Community bonds are deliberately fostered by the state through the creation and manipulation of class distinctions.  Socially acceptable group norms are established through rituals directed at specific segments of the population.  As dystopian as these rituals seem, they represent aspects of contemporary societies.

The segregation of women, and their further division into classes that hold almost no power, prevents women from forming a unified front.  Gilead’s social system is designed so that any trivial power that women might hold is squandered in petty conflicts with other women.  Often, regulation of women is enforced by women, which further reduces women’s ability to form a cohesive front; the state encourages conflict among women.  Written and oral female traditions are effectively prevented.  Women’s power of procreation is devalued through couvade.  Alienation is tightly controlled to effect state manipulation, and the most alienated classes are controlled the most tightly.

Men hold power and have access to escape mechanisms.  Social, economic, and political power is held by senior men, while junior men are held in line through indoctrination, mateship, and promise of advancement.  Class stratification is geared toward enforcing acceptance of state authority, with the ultimate reward being permission to reproduce.  Non-sanctioned rewards reflect contemporary double standards.  Atwood cynically presents the politically powerful patriarchs, who believe in literal interpretations of the Bible, as power-hungry hypocrites; in fact, the most cynical men in The Handmaid’s Tale are also the ones who hold the most power.  The novel is a warning against what could be if women fail to recognize and reject victimization.

The Handmaid’s Tale differs greatly from Atwood’s next novel, Cat’s Eye.  Cat’s Eye follows a child as she grows up in Toronto.  There is little of the dramatic violence of The Handmaid’s Tale present.  However, the small details of the child’s life in Cat’s Eye can be explored in regard to patriarchal society, and the socialization that the child undergoes can be considered indoctrination into patriarchal society, with its inherent victimization of women.  As the protagonist of Cat’s Eye remembers her childhood, the reader of the novel remembers The Handmaid’s Tale, so the small details of Cat’s Eye take on significant importance.  Socialization in Cat’s Eye is disturbing, but not terrifying, unless The Handmaid’s Tale’s patriarchal, totalitarian state is considered.

Childhood’s Inescapable Underside:  Cat’s Eye

Cat’s Eye (CE) explores the themes that Atwood developed in her earlier novels.  Power patterns, rituals, values, creativity and female spirituality, urban decay, and violence against women are brought together here.  The subtlety of Atwood’s narrative is enhanced by the absence of dystopias as extreme as the ones presented in Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale.  The primary subject of Cat’s Eye is childhood as remembered by an adult.  Atwood provides reminiscent episodes, each centred on its own particular topic.

Social camouflage is central to The Edible Woman.  Marian’s and Ainsley’s methods of camouflaging themselves and their other survival strategies are presented.  The women must either accept patriarchal hierarchal power patterns or lessen their ability to survive physically.  They dress and behave in ways that help them to be socially acceptable, especially to males.  Atwood continues this theme in her novels, and explores it again in Cat’s Eye, in which it comes to the front with the children’s use of camouflage as they establish their social territories.

Elaine is the protagonist and narrator of Cat’s Eye.  Objective narration is impossible because Elaine is highly selective in what she recalls from her childhood.  However, objectivity is not particularly important to Cat’s Eye because the lasting impressions of the events, and not the events themselves, are important.  In "Chapter One," which is less than two-hundred words long, Elaine recalls one of her brother’s childhood activities, mentions "the imprecision of words," and the selectivity of memory:  "Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing" (CE 3).  When Elaine recalls something from her childhood, its present and future effects on her are more important than what actually had happened.  Her interpretation of childhood events is distorted, but this is irrelevant.

Elaine remembers her childhood as a miserable time.  Her memories show how, as a child, she struggled to establish herself socially, which was a painful process that required her to camouflage, or socially inure, herself.  Elaine’s memory may be subjective and selective, but what she remembers is enough to illustrate how vicious children can be, and how sometimes children are conditioned brutally by their peers and the adults with whom they come in contact.  The childhood remembered by Elaine shows how a child must conform in order to survive.  Through Elaine’s selective memories, Atwood is able to show an underside of childhood, and how this underside is inescapable later, during adulthood, because of the long-term effects of childhood socialization.

Atwood makes the process of camouflaging immediately obvious by presenting Elaine as a child who initially lives an idyllic life with a loving family away from the social pressures of community living, and then placing her into a reasonably realistic urban society, complete with its typical ills.  Elaine is shocked when she enters urban society, so the survival process she is involved in is heightened through contrast, rather than shown as a non-dramatic, ongoing process.

Atwood initially explores Elaine’s childhood at length in "Chapter Four," in which Elaine recounts travelling through the bush with her parents and brother.  The first paragraph is one sentence:  "Until we moved to Toronto I was happy" (CE 21).  This sets the tone for the chapter, and firmly establishes Elaine’s negative attitude toward urban life.  Nothing in the chapter dealing with rural life is presented in a negative manner.  Even Elaine’s brother’s car sickness is presented only as a "weakness" (CE 21).  Wartime food rationing results in a "book with coloured stamps" (CE 22), rather than any actual hardship.  A caterpillar blight is described as a "beautiful infestation" (CE 22).

Negative impressions in "Chapter Four" are given only when Elaine remembers urban life.  Defecating in the bush does not trouble her, but loud toilets do.  "In [cities such as Sault Ste. Marie, Sudbury, and North Bay,] there are flush toilets, white and alarming, where things vanish in an instant, with a roar" (CE 23).  Occasionally, Elaine fights with her brother, but this gives them something to share.  "Because they’re secret, these fights have an extra attraction" (CE 25).  The events Elaine describes are considered to be positive, and in retrospect, pleasant.  The close relationship between Elaine and her brother is very touching.  The final subsection of the chapter is one line:  "Such are my pictures of the dead" (CE 26).  This statement adds poignancy to the chapter, and helps to secure sympathy for Elaine as she continues her idiosyncratic reflections of her childhood.

When she is a child, Elaine is totally adapted to rural living with her family.  Elaine must adapt to Toronto.  The process is slow, painful, and inescapable.  In the rest of "Part Two," chapters "Five" through "Seven," Elaine recounts the beginning of her transition to city life.  Before moving to the city, Elaine wishes she had girlfriends.  "I want some friends, friends who will be girls.  Girl friends.  I know that these exist, having read about them in books..." (CE 28).  The trade-offs Elaine must make to gain girlfriends are foreshadowed, in "Chapter Four," by what she occasionally must tolerate to gain her brother’s companionship.  Although Elaine recounts their fighting with fondness, she notes that "I don’t win these fights:  Stephen is bigger and more ruthless than I am, and I want to play with him more than he wants to play with me" (CE 25).  Elaine’s need for companionship is stronger than her need for defense.  When, in the next chapter, Elaine wishes she could have girlfriends, it is reasonable to expect that she might again be willing to sacrifice self-defense for companionship.

Also notable in Elaine’s wish for girlfriends, is that she has learned about them in books.  She does not want girlfriends because once she had had girlfriends and now wishes to have some again.  Instead, she has an idealized notion of what girlfriends are which is based on books.  The books Elaine reads for school are highly distorted in their presentation of society.

If this is Elaine’s basis for her concept of urban society, then one can understand why she has trouble integrating into Toronto life.

 When Elaine and her family move into their new house in Toronto, Elaine is disappointed because the house does not meet the expectations she has developed from influences such as her school reader.  "At first I think there must be some mistake; but no, this is the house all right....  I feel trapped....  we are a far cry from picket fences and white curtains, here in our lagoon of postwar mud" (CE 32-33).  Elaine’s disappointment cannot be attributed to distress caused by moving because she has moved about all her life.  Her disappointment is a result of the large gap between the idealized society she learned about through the education system and the actual society to which her family must adapt.  There is no place for her unless she gives up her previous way of life, although through her eyes her earlier way of life is far superior to urban life.

To survive in Toronto, Elaine and her family must camouflage themselves.  In the bush, what Elaine’s mother and father wore "wasn’t all that different" (CE 34).  Gender differentiation through costume only becomes extreme when they move to the city.  Elaine’s father dresses as a professor.  Elaine has no trouble describing him.  "Now, however, our father wears jackets and ties and white shirts, and a tweed overcoat and a scarf" (CE 34).  Elaine’s mother does not dress as a person with any easily defined role.  Elaine’s description of her mother is very awkward.  "Our mother’s legs have appeared, sheathed in nylons with seams up the backs.  She draws on a lipstick mouth when she goes out" (CE 34).  Elaine’s father "wears" clothes, but her mother is "sheathed."  Her father’s anatomy remains unchanged, but her mother "draws on a lipstick mouth."  Elaine notices the camouflage, but to judge from her awkward description, seems not to be comfortable with it.

The use of clothing, jewellery, and makeup as camouflage continues in Cat’s Eye.  Elaine is still concerned with camouflage when her life’s work is being shown in a retrospective at a gallery in Toronto.  She is concerned about the colour of the dress she will wear to the opening.  She avoids selecting a dress that will show her aging body.  "What I’d like is to be transformed, which becomes less possible.  Disguise is easier when you’re young" (CE 44).  The social camouflage that dress effects is taken very seriously by Elaine.

When Elaine is a child new to Toronto, she is hurt by other children’s and other parents’ hostility about her home, dress, and mannerisms.  The first two girlfriends Elaine makes are Carol and Grace.  Initially, when Elaine plays with them, she feels very unpolished.  "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" (CE 52).  Carol takes pride in showing Elaine her home.  She flaunts her variety of clothes, her mother’s twin set sweaters, her parents’ twin beds, her mother’s hair’s cold wave, and the rubber gloves and spray nozzle her mother uses while washing dishes (CE 50-51).  These belongings reflect Carol’s familial lifestyle, and although Elaine’s adult recollection of Carol’s family’s belongings is sardonic, as a child, Elaine does not recognize the problems such a lifestyle encompasses.  She is unaware of the stress caused by constantly striving for social acceptance through ownership of material goods.  Elaine accepts Carol’s family as a norm to which she should conform.

Unfortunately, Elaine has no way of competing with Carol in this sphere.  She cannot show Carol any mass-consumer durables because her family has not settled into a life which glamorizes ownership, in this example ownership of neat, clean, balanced, and emotionally cold goods.  Elaine notes:  "My own parents’ room is less symmetrical, and also less neat" (CE 51).  When Elaine shows her home to Carol, it does not meet Carol’s standards, however biased these standards are.
       
Carol comes to my house and takes it all in--the unpainted walls, the wires dangling from the ceilings, the unfinished floors, the army cots--with incredulous glee.  "This is where you sleep?"  she says.  "This is where you eat? These are your clothes?"...I begin to suspect that more may be required.  (CE 49)

Even if Elaine’s home and clothing were up to Carol’s standards, the home’s location would still segregate Elaine in the eyes of her schoolmates.  Although the home is not literally on the wrong side of the tracks, it is "past a cemetery, across a ravine" (CE 45).  Elaine and Carol must take a bus to school and eat their lunches in the school cellar.  They "are considered a little foreign" (CE 47).  This foreignness is compounded by Elaine’s unfamiliarity with urban children and by the stories about Elaine that Carol tells at school.  "It’s as if she’s reporting on the antics of some primitive tribe:  true, but incredible" (CE 49).

Elaine’s other friend from her first winter in Toronto is Grace, who is very similar to Carol in her treatment of Elaine.  Both children try to assert themselves over Elaine.  The greatest difference between Grace and Carol is that Grace is more dominating and uses illness as an excuse to force her friends to do what she wants.  Elaine seems to have learned this from her mother, just as Carol has learned the value of twin sets from her mother, whatever ascribed value that might be.  In reference to Grace’s mother, Elaine states:  "Bad hearts have their uses; even I can see that" (CE 57).  In reference to Grace, Elaine comments:  "The things we play are mostly Grace’s ideas, because if we try to play anything she doesn’t like she says she has a headache and goes home..." (CE 52).  Elaine and Carol are made to feel guilty by Grace:  "...she [Grace] is quietly reproachful, as if her headache is our fault" (CE 52).  Elaine must learn to stand up for herself if she is to reduce the degree of social disdain she suffers from her peers, but if she does so, she will be ostracised because her friends are not inclined to accept her in a non-subservient role.

Although Grace is not a person with whom one might wish to play, Elaine and Carol have little choice, due to their homes’ locations.  If they wish to play, they must play with whomever is available, and the only person available is Grace.  There is a repetition of Elaine’s reason for allowing her brother to defeat her in their fights.  Concerning the fights, she says:  "...I want to play with him more than he wants to play with me" (CE 25), while concerning Grace’s manipulation, she says:  "...we want to play with her more than she wants to play with us" (CE 52).  The pattern of power being central to socialization is consistent, regardless of whether the society is urban or not, but becomes more noticeable when Elaine must leave the protection of her family.

Elaine learns to exert power over others while she learns to camouflage herself.  The most obvious illustration of this is her treatment of her third childhood friend, Cordelia, whom she meets during her second year in Toronto.  Cordelia takes over leadership of the group from Grace, and forces the other children to humble themselves in order to remain within the group.  Instead of rejecting this behaviour, each child reinforces it by willingly ganging up on whomever happens to be the victim of the day.  In one instance, Cordelia accuses Elaine of laughing at her, throws Elaine’s hat on thin ice in a ravine in which evil men are said to lurk, and orders Elaine to fetch the hat, after which Elaine will "be forgiven" (CE 187).  By the time Elaine is a high school student, she has begun to learn how to hold power over others through cruelty.  She begins to dominate Cordelia.  For example, Cordelia humbled herself in front of her high school peers when she ruined a play by bouncing a cabbage across the stage during a performance of Macbeth.  Elaine recounts her actions on the day following the mistake:
       
I ought to feel pity, but I do not.  Instead, on the way home from school the next day, I say "Bumpity bumpity bump, plop," and Cordelia says, "Oh, don’t."  Her voice is toneless, leaden.  This is not a joke.  I wonder, for an instant, how I can be so mean to my best friend.  (CE 246)

Elaine learns to use power properly as she matures, rather than simply to exert it aimlessly or cruelly, as she and her friends did as children.  She is able to use physical force without malice when she is an adult.  When someone tries to steal her purse, she steps on the thief’s hand, bringing her "shoeless foot down hard on the wrist" (CE 44).  Much more importantly, she is able to accept the power struggles as unavoidable, put uncomfortable and disturbing past events behind her, and look to the future without prejudice.  She can remember Cordelia as a friend, rather than an adversary, which, in turn, allows her to miss what might have been, rather than regret what has been.  "This is what I miss, Cordelia:  not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen.  Two old women giggling over their tea" (CE 421).

The power patterns, the rituals, and the values remain consistent as Elaine grows from a child living in the bush, to a child living in the city, to an adult.  If Elaine wishes to be accepted by others, she must allow them, to some degree, to maintain the power they are used to holding.  She must allow her brother to win the fights and Grace to have her way.  To some extent, she must follow the rituals of the society to which she wishes to belong.  She must play the games that Carol and Grace play, such as making scrapbooks out of clippings from catalogues and then commenting on them in false tones, even if she does not enjoy these games.  She rationalizes her actions with this:  "But it’s the thing you have to say, so I begin to say it too"  (CE 53).

When she is an adult, Elaine is still deeply concerned that she should dress appropriately for her art retrospective.  Elaine’s values never change significantly.  Elaine realizes that if she is to survive, she must socialize, although this means that she must suffer from allowing others to hold power over her, and also must exert her own power over others.  Elaine learns to accept her own actions and to put feelings of guilt behind her.  When Elaine is a child living in the bush, her values allow her to accept her actions, and not to feel poorly when she acts heartlessly, as she does when ‘heartlessly’ collecting caterpillar specimens.  When Elaine is an adolescent, she protects herself by behaving offensively.  "Girls at school learn to look out for my mean mouth and avoid it.  I walk the hall surrounded by an aura of potential verbal danger, and I am treated with caution, which suits me fine" (CE 234).  When Elaine is an adult, she still holds the same values that allow her to act dispassionately, and even cruelly, with compunction but without deep regret.  Elaine has learned to survive by fitting into society, but she is still very much the same person she was as a young child.

For Elaine, female spirituality is directly tied to her own creativity.  When, as a child, Elaine goes into the ravine to retrieve her hat, she almost dies from exposure after she breaks through the thin ice of the creek.  When she is about to pass out in waist deep ice cold water, Elaine has a vision of a woman who, she thinks, might be the Virgin Mary.  This spirit calms her and tells her to go home (CE 189).  When Elaine has this vision, she is very close to death--so close that the vision is nearly an out of body experience.  At the time, Elaine is keenly aware of how close to death she is.

The closer Elaine is to passing out, the stronger the vision of the spirit becomes.  Elaine does not believe it is her own will that gives her the strength to wade out of the water and climb out of the ravine.  When Elaine is met by her mother, the vision of the spirit disappears and Elaine rejoins the temporal world.  "She throws her arms around me, and as she does this the Virgin Mary is suddenly gone.  Pain and cold shoot back into me.  I start to shiver violently" (CE 190).

The memory of this encounter stays with Elaine throughout her life.  In Surfacing, spiritual experiences parallel the plot’s climaxes, so there is no opportunity to examine how the character is affected by a vision many years after the incident.  In Lady Oracle, spiritualism is often treated in a farcical manner.  It is not presented as an issue that is so serious that it is both deadly and vital, although Atwood does use childhood flashbacks in Lady Oracle the same way as in Cat’s Eye.  The presentations of the difficulties of childhood socialization are the same in both Lady Oracle and Cat’s Eye, but the presentations of spirituality differ significantly in tone.

Elaine’s adult life after her childhood spiritual experience should be examined to see how the experience helped her survive.  Immediately, the vision keeps her alive and struggling long enough for her mother to find her.  In the short term, the whole ordeal helps Elaine stand up to Cordelia, Grace, and Carol.  When Cordelia announces that Elaine "should be punished" and that she is being contradictory and "insolent," Elaine, for the first time, walks away (CE 193).  Elaine curtails her friendship with the three girls, and makes a new friend, Jill, who does not play the same sort of sadistic games.  The visionary experience has helped Elaine find strength in herself that enables her to survive the emotional terrorism of Cordelia’s pack.  "Kapow.  Krac.  Kaboom.  I know that I have the will to do these things.  I intend to do them somehow" (CE 194).

In the long term, the vision leads Elaine to become an artist.  While she is young, Elaine is not always comfortable with the way she finds herself using the power to hurt others that she has developed.  Thus, she feels badly when, several years after the ravine incident, her "Bumpity bumpity bump, plop" (CE 246) comment devastates Cordelia.  Rather than leave off with this balance between using power for survival and maintaining moral values, Elaine finds herself using the power she has developed to become a successful artist.  Art and her vision are intertwined.

Elaine’s most recent work at her retrospective is built upon the vision she had in the ravine.  In it is the bridge over the ravine, the winter snow, the "Virgin of Lost Things," and the creek "underneath the earth, underneath the bridge, down from the cemetery.  The land of the dead people"  (CE 408).  The power to survive that she gained as a child from the vision has become the power that she uses to create.  Elaine says of her paintings:  "Whatever energy they have came out of me.  I’m what’s left over" (CE 409).  The spirituality has led directly to creativity for Elaine, by affording both the subject matter to be examined through art, and more importantly, the strength and drive to create art.

Urban decay is treated subtly in Cat’s Eye.  In Surfacing, urban decay is presented directly in the novel, especially in the dead heron scene, in which Canadian sport fishermen are taken by the narrator to be decadent, urban Americans.  In Cat’s Eye, there is no need for such a direct attack on urban decay, for Elaine’s memory of her childhood contrasts the bush and the city.  The bush is Eden.  The city is one level above the cemetery and ravine, the underworld in which the dead dwell.  Although Atwood does not frontally attack urban decay in Cat’s Eye, her position is clear.  Elaine rarely says anything positive about city life.  When Elaine walks through what might be considered an attractive part of Toronto, she describes what she sees with terms such as these:  "black smears," "metal blood," "doomed," "barging," "sterility," "squared-off," "peculiar," "dowager," "demoted," "trademark," and "cheaper" (CE 311).  This impression of Toronto has not changed since her childhood description of her property as a "lagoon of postwar mud" (CE 33).

The decay does not lead directly to problems the way it does in Life Before Man, but indirectly it is still both a cause and an indication of trouble.  Atwood uses dreary descriptions of the city as a background for Elaine’s childhood friends and their families.  Elaine’s peers did not have home lives as happy as Elaine’s.  Cordelia is a disturbed person who has difficulty surviving.  She is afraid of her father (CE 164).  Her mother tries to improve her family’s social standing by moving into bigger houses in better neighbourhoods.  Grace’s mother fervently hangs onto her belief in God, and seems to be a "transplant to the city, from a place much smaller.  A displaced person..." (CE 405).  Both Grace and her mother have socially correct and convenient ailments.  Grace’s father "lives a secret life of trains and escapes in his head" (CE 405).  Carol’s mother tries to be urbane with her modern possessions.  Carol’s father beats adolescent Carol on "the bare bum" with a belt buckle (CE 164).  Elaine does not draw a connection between the run-down appearance of the city and the strained lives of her friends, but there seems to be a connection:  urban decay.  The physical decay evident in the city is a visible sign used by Atwood to represent social putrefaction.

Violence against women is treated obliquely.  Elaine does not question why her friends fear their fathers, for she has no fear of her own father--he is not like the other fathers.

The fear Elaine’s friends have of their fathers is both real and justified.  Elaine describes the fathers in a gothic style, as though the fathers might be only mythical beings with unknown powers, but the welts on Carol testify to the physical abuse which the children accept as normal treatment.

Elaine demonstrates how psychological violence inflicted upon a person can also lead to that person’s self-destruction.  One of Elaine’s husbands, Jon, treated her poorly.  From little things, such as playing games with her daughter that pretended to put the child in league with him against Elaine (CE 340), to big things, such as openly and regularly sleeping with other women (CE 372), Jon slowly whittles away Elaine’s strength.  She is unable to stand up to this constant psychological abuse, and attempts suicide by slashing her wrists (CE 373).  The psychological abuse has led to self-inflicted physical abuse.

Violence against women is a strong theme in Atwood’s novels, especially Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale.  In returning to contemporary Canadian society, Atwood tones down the violence that is present in her two previous novels.  Having shown direct connections between societal norms and individual instances of violence in these earlier novels, now Atwood is able to drop a word or a phrase to make her points on the subject.  There is no question of what the belt buckle spanking of an adolescent is about:  sexually triggered child abuse, no more, no less.  Likewise, there is no need to question why one mother is an intense social climber, why another is a severe religious evangelist who is continually ill, and why yet another appears far more concerned with her twin sets that present "her breasts pronging out" (CE 50) than she is with a daughter with welts on her buttocks.  These women represent the psychological, and sometimes physical, violence against women that forces them to accept their subordinate lot.  Elaine’s schoolmates’ mothers are presented as typical women in the recent past of Canadian society; therefore, their actions are all the more shocking.  Atwood brings home to bourgeois Toronto the horror of Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale.  She does not have to overstate her case.  If the reader of Cat’s Eye has previously read either Bodily Harm or The Handmaid’s Tale, then the usually subtle narrative Atwood provides in Cat’s Eye is enough to provide a powerful and disturbing insight into how society can be unaware of insidious psychological and physical violence against women.  The reader does not have to be presented with extreme examples of violence to become aware of its existence.  Because the extreme examples are avoided, there is no escaping Atwood’s assessment that violence against women is inherent in society.

In Cat’s Eye, no absolute dystopia is examined and no absolute utopia is proposed.  The society Atwood presents is a reflection of current Canadian society.  Elaine falls from Eden when she moves south to Toronto, but no vision of either heaven for which to quest, or hell to avoid, is presented.  Atwood has treated dystopias in her earlier works, and has dismissed them.  She presents a world that is very realistic, and consequently, offers insights into grey areas.

Observing just the major events in Elaine’s life presents a very distorted image of a pitiful figure.  Elaine lived in a great garden with a loving family.  She left the isolation of the garden for the company of her kind, only immediately to become an outcast whose only friends tormented her.  When Elaine was an adolescent, she made no more close friends, lost two of her three earlier friends, and treated her only remaining friend like dirt.  When Elaine was an adult, her marriages and relationships with men failed, and she attempted suicide.  Elaine’s only major triumphs are both ironically flawed.  Although she is a successful artist, her work is critically misinterpreted; she is a successful mother, but the society she brings her daughters into has wounded every woman to whom she has been close.  By the end of the novel, Elaine’s parents, brother, and best friend are dead.  Elaine literally flies into the sunset troubled by what she will continue to miss in life.

Fortunately, Atwood takes such great care with the details between the major events in Elaine’s life that the richness of the novel carries over to Elaine.  Elaine, with all her faults, is a vibrant character with a will to survive.  She is neither a hero who will find a better way, nor a tragic figure who is doomed to fall.  Elaine’s being ordinary makes the minutiae of her life interesting because they are understandable, but they are presented in a context that makes them very alarming.  A conventional, classical hero could not illustrate the underside of childhood the way Elaine can, for Atwood builds her novel with a slow accumulation of details, not heroic, physical actions.  Thus, when Elaine describes the more recent works that are being shown at her retrospective, the works seem so splendid that the critics’ misinterpretation of them does not matter.  The love Elaine has shown for her family is presented in such detail that her compassion shows strongly.  The events that Elaine had to struggle through lose importance when compared with the richness of her characterization.  The emphasis of the novel is on the character, Elaine, not on the events.  This allows the background to be as important as the events in the foreground.

Because the background is developed as strongly as the action, the attention given to society and its flaws does not seem unduly biased.  There are no broad generalizations that can be refuted or improbable actions that can be dismissed.  In this context, Elaine’s life is not a failure.  Elaine survives, relatively intact, and still has the strength to look to the future, rather than to be despondent about what has happened to her in the past.  The last paragraph of the novel implies this:  "It’s old light, and there’s not much of it.  But it’s enough to see by" (CE 421).  In Cat’s Eye, there is no need to create utopias, for Elaine realizes she cannot go back to her early childhood and can never find any other ideal world.  Nor is there any need to create dystopias, for the society in which Elaine lives is examined so closely that any exaggeration used to show it as a dystopia would detract from the parallels that Atwood makes between the novel’s society and current Canadian society.

Cat’s Eye has continual flashbacks to Elaine’s childhood.  Socialization quickly becomes a central issue, and social camouflage is a reasonable way of describing the process of socialization as it applies to Elaine, a child who must survive in a harsh children’s society.  Power patterns, rituals, and values are intertwined in this process, for power must be gained through selectively accepting or breaking rituals, and even if power conflicts with values, power still must be gained to ensure survival.  Female spirituality and creativity are shown as tools for survival, and they are complementary.  For Elaine, spirituality leads to creativity, and creativity gives her a method of exploring herself and her spirituality.  Elaine uses the power she develops to fight the psychological and physical violence against women that surrounds and often involves her.  Atwood avoids creating utopias or dystopias in Cat’s Eye.  The types and degrees of violence Atwood presents are endemic and systemic to urban Canadian culture.  To overstate her case by illustrating extremes of violence, such as violence in Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, would reduce the disturbing effect of the novel by distancing the society it portrays from current Canadian society.

Conclusion

Victimization, particularly of the protagonist and her immediate female acquaintances, is central to each of Margaret Atwood’s novels.  Atwood uses her characters to show how survival entails initially recognizing and then rejecting victimization.  In Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing, the protagonist concludes her narration with "This above all, to refuse to be a victim"  (S 206).  When this novel began, its protagonist did not realize that she was a victim.  Atwood assumes, and clearly demonstrates in her novels, that women are systemically discriminated against because of the way society is structured, and that although, and often because, this victimization is continuous, many women do not realize how they are being affected.

Atwood does not offer a miraculous solution to victimization, but she does suggest that recognition of victimization permits a person to work toward its avoidance.  Recognition of victimization demands examining society from the margin, away from the mainstream point of view.  This ‘consciousness raising’ requires creativity, specifically, creativity to explore the world, see it in a different light, and realize that society damages women.  Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution, published the same year as Surfacing and Survival, helped increase people’s awareness of how women are treated in patriarchal society.  Through her popular fiction, Atwood approaches the same issues as Rowbotham.  Atwood uses her novels to fight victimization by ‘raising consciousness’.

Creativity is also required in fighting for survival once victimization has been recognized.  There is no pat solution.  If one were to reject all victimization, one would not be able to live within society.  The protagonist of Surfacing explores the rejection of social conformity, to the degree that at one point she hides, naked, on an island, in the bush.  At the other extreme, if one were to accept all victimization, one would not be able to survive.  The Handmaid’s Tale illustrates this, for in it, lack of resistance has led to a society in which women live in fear and most women die prematurely.  Creativity is required to fight against victimization without the result being alienation from the rest of society.  If victimization cannot always be reasonably avoided, if the cost of fighting greatly outweighs the benefits, then an effective compromise must be discovered.  Creativity aids one in avoiding having to make a compromise, and when this is impossible, creativity aids one in making the least damaging compromise possible.

Compromise involves the use of power.  Atwood is concerned with power, for power either can be used to manipulate women, or can be used by women to avoid manipulation.  Although blatant physical force is examined in Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, usually Atwood is concerned with subtle, but continuous, force applied by society against women.  In The Edible Woman, as in most of Atwood’s novels, there is no villain, but the protagonist sees herself and her female acquaintances being destroyed.  The Edible Woman’s female characters are economically impoverished, married to a ‘bread winner’, or comfortably self-supporting but socially undervalued.  The Edible Woman’s protagonist is faced with two choices.  She can fall into the economic trap in which she sees older, unmarried women, or she can marry and become a chattel of her husband.  In The Edible Woman, the major accomplishment of the protagonist is her overcoming of her social conditioning enough to realize that she is faced by these choices.

Social conditioning is brought about partly through rituals.  The courtship ritual is questioned by Atwood.  In The Edible Woman, courtship is presented as a chase, in which the female, either consciously or subconsciously, arouses the male into pursuit.  Atwood then explodes this ritual by using the chase as an opportunity for the woman to question her wish to be caught.  The protagonist, who is being pursued, eventually decides against being caught, which puts her at odds with those who expect her to follow properly through the courtship with the ritual of marriage.  Whether or not she will survive in the future is not answered, but at least she has avoided disaster for the time being.  In Surfacing, a ritualistic vision quest is undertaken by the protagonist to help her come to a decision on carrying her ritualistically conceived foetus to term.  The spiritual rituals she goes through permit her to break free of society in a way that she thinks is appropriate.  She finds the power to consider the possibility of raising her child on her own.  She no longer believes that she must either abort her foetus or marry her lover; she is free to examine her values.

Values are constantly brought into question in Atwood’s novels.  On a personal level, the protagonists must seek a balance between their responsibilities to those around them and their own needs for survival.  The reader is directed to ask why women are forced to make such impossible decisions so regularly, and why they so often must sacrifice their own well-being.  Atwood leads the reader to ask why the protagonists of The Edible Woman and Surfacing feel guilty when they try to find ways of surviving.  By doing this, Atwood shows how absurd such guilt feelings can be when lifetime decisions are affected by short term societal conventions.  Sometimes ‘doing the right thing’ is not the right thing at all.  Questioning values leads to establishing alternative values, and perhaps the new values that Atwood’s protagonists develop are less destructive to women.

Creativity, when applied to thinking about values, leads to one’s vision of one’s self.  Atwood’s novels are sometimes narrated by the protagonists, who are not objective.  The reader has to balance how the protagonists describe themselves and their actions against the events of the novels.  In Atwood’s novels, the reader can watch the protagonists develop greater understandings of the societies in which they live.  Gradually, the protagonists’ dissatisfaction changes from general unhappiness to specific objections that they can try to overcome.  The protagonist of Lady Oracle uses her creativity as a gothic romance writer to create characters for her novels.  She then goes further by creating characters for herself.  She occasionally disappears and assumes a new identity.  ‘Creative’ may be a weak term to use when describing this behaviour, but any derogatory term should be avoided because the protagonist at least takes action, and the action is relatively effective in her situation.

Creativity requires being able to see beyond social constraints.  Female spirituality is a part of creativity.  Creativity leads to spirituality, as with the protagonist of Surfacing, and spirituality leads to creativity, as with the protagonist of Lady Oracle.  This spirituality helps the protagonists find or develop power:  the power to make difficult decisions and act upon them.  Spiritual involvement helps the protagonist of Surfacing develop enough self-awareness and strength to decide on her pregnancy without being pushed by her lover or her friends.  Spiritual involvement in Lady Oracle provides the young protagonist with examples of women who are self-supporting and self-respecting at the same time.  Later, spiritualism, in the form of automatic writing, provides the means for the protagonist to become a critically acclaimed writer.  Society restricts female creativity.  Female spirituality offers a way for women to break out of society into a world in which they are not so constrained.  If the spirituality leads to visions, the women return to society with greater insights and with greater determination.  They gain creativity and power.

Victimization can be reduced by exercising power.  Victimization in Atwood’s novels only occasionally takes the form of physical force and is never presented as a battle between good and evil.  Victimization results from inroads continually made on female resistance.  Victimization is greatly accelerated when women initially lack power, such as in Bodily Harm.  Inattention and inactivity, such as in the pre-Gilead society of The Handmaid’s Tale, also increase the possibility of a rapid deterioration of the female condition.  However, these two novels are used as examples of the potential consequences of the disintegration of women’s rights.  They are not primarily examples of how such disintegration is attained.  Atwood’s novels show how daily life gradually wears women down.  The little battles, whether they are won or lost, gradually reduce the resiliency of women.  Urban decay plays a significant role in this attrition.  The contrast between Toronto and the northern bush is brought out in Cat’s Eye.  Most of the protagonist’s troubles occur because of the urbanites’ distorted attitudes.  Mothers are compulsive, fathers are feared, children are sadistic.  Urban decay is an unavoidable part of urban life.

The two female protagonists of Life Before Man try to adapt to urban life; they meet with limited success.  They survive, but pay a terrible price.  One is terrified of the possibility of having to raise her children in poverty, for she had a horrid childhood.  As she explores feasible ways of raising her children, she finds there is no place in urban society for her as a single mother.  The other female protagonist tries to adapt to urban living by camouflaging herself.  She withdraws from society into her career as a paleontologist.  When she becomes pregnant she realizes that it is impossible to remain disguised, and that society has no place for her as a mother with a career.  The quality of life in the city is shown to be unsatisfactory because normal human interaction is no longer possible.  The increased pressure results in even further increased pressure.  The first to give way under this pressure are women who do not fit nicely into the social and economic support networks, the primary one being marriage.  The next to fall are women who do marry, for in order to mold themselves into the role of housewife, they must sacrifice too much of their own selves.  The situation is better for men, but is still unsatisfactory.  One of the male characters in Life Before Man withdraws from society.  Another kills himself.  However, because men generally hold economic power over women in the societies presented in Atwood’s novels, when the men suffer under stress, they transfer it to the women whom they dominate, as does the father in Cat’s Eye who beats the bare buttocks of his adolescent daughter with a belt buckle.

Urban living and its inherent decay lead to psychological and physical violence against women.  This in itself is not remarkable, for population congestion and poverty lead to greater violence against both men and women.  What is important to Atwood’s novels is the regular depiction of women’s difficulties in defending themselves.  The housewives of Cat’s Eye must live out their marriages in a society in which divorce is possible, but frowned upon, and can lead to impoverishment.  The female protagonists of Surfacing and Life Before Man face single parenthood in a society in which women are expected to marry, careers cannot accommodate parenting needs, and women are paid less for equal work and do not receive promotions at the same rate as men.  The protagonist of The Edible Woman and her roommate struggle to earn a living in a society in which they have few career options other than marriage.  There is little these women can do to prevent psychological violence being brought upon them because they live close to the edge of survival.

Atwood turns from psychological violence in urban living to physical violence on a large scale in Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale.  In Bodily Harm, the women living on a pair of Caribbean islands are treated like dogs.  A husband may murder his wife with impunity, living conditions are abominable, and women have nowhere to turn and little hope for a future.  The protagonist, who visits the islands from Toronto, slowly realizes how bad the situation is.  Eventually, she is imprisoned with a woman whom she believes to be a whore.  As the two grow close in prison, the protagonist learns about what love and sacrifice are, but the cost of the lesson is high.  Possibly, she dies in prison.  She and the island women did nothing to deserve their lot; they were trapped by circumstances.  They had no recourse but to accept whatever violence was wrought against them.  The Handmaid’s Tale shows women treated worse than the women in Bodily Harm.  In Bodily Harm, it is a tragedy that women die by violent means.  In The Handmaid’s Tale, it is a mercy if they die prematurely.  They are kept in constant fear of being hanged or sent to zones of high radiation in which cancer is a certainty.  Many are permitted to live only as long as they can breed.  Reading, a possible escape from oppression, is punishable by loss of a hand.  The women cannot avoid physical violence.

Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale show how vulnerable women are to violence.  This is difficult to demonstrate in Atwood’s other novels because extreme and widespread violence would render the subtleties ineffective.  Currently, Canada is not an exceedingly violent country.  The problems Canadian women face are often more subtle.  While there is an absolutely unacceptable level of physical violence against women, the solutions will be found through working to change society’s attitude toward women.  This means addressing social and economic issues that encourage the devaluation of women.  Atwood’s more subtle novels do this by illustrating how society devalues women on a daily basis in both large and small matters.  Murder is unacceptable in Canada, so novels like Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, which deal with extreme violence, do not force the reader to examine issues that are faced often in Canadian life.  These two novels deal with what could be.  The others deal with what is, and consequently offer material that can be thought about and acted upon.

However, the warning set out by the darkening vision of The Handmaid’s Tale is worth noting.  Currently, religious extremists are lobbying the government and the media with considerable success.  Immigrants are being lashed out against.  French, English, and aboriginal linguistic and cultural disputes exist.  Social and environmental programs are being cut by attrition through inflation, and others vitally needed, such as day care, are not being instituted or expanded.  Most importantly, the Equal Rights Amendment to the American Constitution has failed to pass, and the sexual equality rights in the Canadian Constitution, which already are vulnerable to parliamentary override, may be lost in the Meech Lake Accord.  The inattentiveness that the protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale laments is present in Canadian society, so Atwood’s warning is well taken.

When Atwood’s protagonist in Cat’s Eye reflects on her childhood in Toronto, she does not see much that is pleasant.  She had extreme difficulties learning to socialize with other children who did not seem to her to be as vulnerable as she was.  By learning to deal with her childhood, the protagonist learns to enjoy the present.  She learns to accept the bad things that have happened to her, and to accept the bad things she has done to herself and others.  Her understanding of these actions frees her to reject victimization.

Atwood shows how rejection of victimization entails breaking away from society to a greater or lesser degree.  This break can involve causing pain to others.  As a child, the protagonist of Cat’s Eye developed a "mean mouth" to protect herself from a society that hurt her.  Although her behaviour hurt others, it did protect her.  Atwood realizes that everyone is part of the problem because, in order to survive, everyone must go along with the surrounding group to some degree.  Going along with the group supports the group and makes resistance more difficult for dissenters.  The political and mass media activity of many conservative evangelical religious organizations exemplify what Atwood warns of in The Handmaid’s Tale.

While The Handmaid’s Tale presents a dystopia, Cat’s Eye offers hope, for it supports survival through creativity, rather than ignorant violence.  Atwood realizes that many compromises must be made if individual women are to survive, but that survival entails confrontation.  The protagonist of Cat’s Eye succeeds in her profession and raises two daughters who also succeed.  In retrospect, the sacrifices were worth making.  Learning to live with guilt is part of surviving.

In Atwood’s novels, the protagonists struggle to understand why they are dissatisfied with the world around them.  None of them fit easily into society.  They learn to recognize that they are being victimized, and try to deal with the problem.  Some barely move beyond recognition of victimization, others attempt rejection, and of these some fail, but most survive.  All of them use the one agent that is the most difficult for others to take away:  their creativity.  The protagonists are not conventional heroes.  They do not perform any extraordinary feats.  They are women, often in typical situations, who refuse to accept what is handed them.  They do what they can to fight victimization.

Works Consulted
                           

Primary Sources

Atwood, Margaret.  Bluebeard’s Egg.  1983.  Toronto:  McClelland-Bantam, 1984.

-----.  Bodily Harm.  1981.  Toronto:  McClelland-Bantam, 1982.

-----.  Cat’s Eye.  Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1988.

-----.  "The Curse of Eve--Or, What I Learned in School."  In Women on Women.  Edited by Ann B. Shteir.  Toronto:  York University, 1978.

-----.  Dancing Girls.  1977.  Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart-Bantam, 1978.

-----.  The Edible Woman.  1969.  Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1973.

-----.  The Handmaid’s Tale.  1985.  Toronto:  McClelland-Bantam, 1986.

-----.  Lady Oracle.  1976.  Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart-Bantam, 1977.

-----.  Life Before Man.  1979.  Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart-Bantam, 1980.

-----.  "Paradoxes and Dilemmas, the Woman as Writer."  In Women in the Canadian Mosaic.  Edited by Gwen Matheson.  No place:  Peter Martin Associates, 1976.  Reprinted in Feminist Literary Theory:  A Reader.  Edited by Mary Eagleton.  1986.  New York:  Basil Blackwell, 1987.

-----.  "Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother."  Queen’s Quarterly 90 (1983):  663-675.

-----.  Surfacing.  1972.  Markham, Ontario:  McClelland and Stewart, 1973.

-----.  Survival:  A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.  Toronto:  House of Anansi, 1972.



Secondary Sources

Abel, Elizabeth, editor.  Writing and Sexual Difference.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Adachi, Ken.  "Atwood Returns to Familiar Territory."  Review of Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood.  Toronto Star.  1 October 1988:  M3.

-----.  "Atwood’s Cat’s Eye Odds On to Win."  Article on Governor General’s Awards.  Toronto Star.  2 February 1989:  F1.

Arendt, Hannah.  The Origins of Totalitarianism.  1951.  Second enlarged edition.  New York:  Meridian, 1958.

Bettelheim, Bruno.  The Informed Heart:  Autonomy in a Mass Age.  No place:  Free Press of Glencoe, 1960.

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Christ, Carol P.  Diving Deep and Surfacing:  Women Writers on Spiritual Quests.  Second revised edition.  Boston:  Beacon Press, 1986.

Daly, Mary.  Beyond God the Father:  Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.  Boston:  Beacon Press, 1973.

Davey, Frank.  Margaret Atwood:  A Feminist Poetics.  Vancouver:  Talonbooks, 1984.

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-----.  "Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle:  The Artist as Escapist and Seer."  Studies in Canadian Literature 3 (1978):  166-177.

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-----.  "Tales Within Tales:  Margaret Atwood’s Folk Narratives."  Canadian Literature 109 (1986):  57-86.

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-----.  Violent Duality:  A Study of Margaret Atwood.  Montréal:  Vehicule Press, 1980.

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-----.  Understanding Media:  The Extensions of Man.  Scarborough, Ontario:  New American Library, 1964.

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-----.  Women, Resistance and Revolution.  London:  Penguin, 1972.

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