Margaret Atwood and that peculiar Canadian-ness

Sometimes you look for a little foothold. A resting place to slip in your feet while you climb up the precipice of a literary text. Especially when the spatial and temporal space is distant. But then, one of the more powerful rationale of literature is, that in its natural polyphony, it reveals also a glint of the, of the? What’s that old fashioned word? Humanity. Which, in the radical literary theory laden classrooms, has become a bit of liability. Humanism and Universalism have became academia’s new punching bags, now debunking the old order as one steeped in white privilege, with a misplaced confidence of a kind that gives it the self righteousness to claim its importance as “universal” and its concern as that of entire humanity. So there are all kinds of fault lines one studies in literature classroom today: gender, nationality, caste, sexuality. Many a mad woman in the attic has surfaced to take her place under the sun, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are done digging graves.

So to engage with Margaret Atwood today (or to see her series on Netflix/Masterclass) is to place her oeuvre within a two-fold context: Its avowed Canadian-ness, coupled with its place in the post colonial matrix of power, and importantly a woman-centric perspective. And of course late developments in Postcolonial Feminism do bring about a blend of the two in no uncertain terms. One realises also by this time that for Atwood, Postcolonial, much like Canadian-ess, is a state of mind. As for Canada, the feisty 80-year-old is akin to national treasure.

Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) is about exploitation, both overt, like that of nature, and also insidious: In a woman carrying the weight of expectation/abuse, subsequently transferred on to her body. Oftentimes victimhood becomes the singular defining point of a woman’s existence. Atwood attempts to venture beyond this fixation with a victim worldview. She explores the insidious: Exploited women become aligned with the perpetrator, and contrary to expectation, eschew solidarity with a fellow sufferer, a natural ally. So sometimes victims, in pursuing puny benefits willingly forego a larger meaning to their lives. Part of the reason is women’s own internalisation as being largely sexual beings. That happens to Anna as she craves her husband David’s approval. Her near pathological obsession with make-up, her abhorrence of his boorish ways, his awful treachery, her meek acceptance of his little daily injustices and yet a deep seated anxiety to be accepted as lover.

Atwood also deftly uses space, alternately giving it meaning of dystopia and utopia. In Surfacing, the ecology of the lake (that quintessentially Canadian setting) spills into the literary space as it defines the family lake house she is temporarily inhabiting with friends to unlock the mystery of the father’s disappearance. The protection of the delicate ecology of the lake inhabited by loons and beavers, herons and barred owls, hedged in by birches from the exploitative “yanks” becomes synonymous with protecting her own fragile sanity. The threat posed by the American usurpers is very real. Her total break from nature leads to disillusionment, a turbid poison slowly spreads into her soul, rendering her emotionally defunct. She is deeply aware of her abhorrent inability to love and she suffers in this dark self realisation. And this constant, dull suffering is also a vapid sign of sorts, of the continuing fidelity she owes the man who once loved her. In that she cannot love another. More than the loss of a man she truly loved, more than the guilt of an aborted child, is her sheer inability to love that makes her feel empty. The weight of emotional sterility crushes her vitals. Her manifold struggle ends with a ritual cleansing that entails re-establishing a connect with nature, that she had lost in the face of excessive reason and obsessive patterns reinforcing a pathological need for approval, even from her own exploiters. In the specific The Handmaid’s Tale too, this continues with a vivid envisioning of a dystopia where women’s womb is disconnected from her feelings. The dystopia will reign as long as this gap is not bridged.

It is through ritualistic cleansing that she reclaims the right over her mind and body. A dip in the lake inhabited with many perilous creatures is lethal but redeeming. So she rejects the refuge of old conditioning, and discards sterile reason based on superfluous benefit. And in using fire to destroy the beliefs she has outlived, and in taking back a lover who might be somewhat timorous but at least owning the capacity to love her truly, traverses towards another side. There is hope that love will enliven the congealed mass of frozen feeling within her. Eventually it is a familiar quest for that elusive state: A certain wholeness of being. And the answer is love.

The author is a teacher