Margaret Atwood by John Moss

Author:John Moss [Moss, John and Kozakewich, Tobi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2006-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

NOTES

1. There are a number of similarities between The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, and between them and Oryx and Crake. Both Offred and Grace are writing or speaking from positions of incarceration and panoptical supervision; both regard their opportunities to talk with the oppressor community and to enter its living spaces as a kind of pleasure and a possible way to freedom; both are produced by their circumstances as autobiographers. Oryx lives literally in an artificial class-free pleasure dome; her sexual oppression has been so overwhelming that it appears not only to have removed her from class and from relationships with other women but also to have caused her to view both this oppression and isolation as irremediable. Atwood emphasizes the mechanistic quality of Oryx’s reply when Jimmy asks her about her rape: “‘Why do you want to talk about ugly things?’ she said. Her voice was silvery, like a music box…. ‘We should think only beautiful things’” (144).

2. “Disgrace” in this passage offers a resonant pun on “Grace” as well as an instructive example of the conflation of the theological and the social that can be found in the evolution of middle-class English values from at least Samuel Richardson onward (see R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism). Moreover, the passage points to the fact that Richardson, with his novels of cross-class sexual attraction and middle-class mores, is a major presence in Alias Grace, not only in the epistolary parts of its narrative but also in the moral views of Grace and in the privileged-man/abject-woman structure of their relationship.

3. Atwood creates a similar levelling of class difference in Bodily Harm when she constructs rural lower-middle-class Griswold and upper-middle-class Toronto as equally committed to superficiality and concealment and mistrustful of the sensuous.

4. Both Fowles and Atwood create a traditional fictional pairing of lovers at cross-purposes, setting up a reader’s anticipation that—as in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—the novels will end in reconciliation. But while Fowles uses the failure of his lovers to critique such novelistic conventions, Atwood—by attributing the failure of her lovers to Dr. Jordan—seems to confirm the convention, and to imply that but for Jordan’s naivety the story might have unfolded as expected.

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