essay revise

Essay4 Prompt

Formatting and Guidelines

• MLA heading and guidelines, including work cited page
• Times New Roman, 12pt Font, 1-inch margins
• 4 to 5 double-spaced pages (not including the work cited page)
• Due Tuesday Feb. 13 for peer review—bring three copies to class and submit a

complete draft via Canvas
• Due Thursday Feb. 15 (Final Draft) submitted via Canvas by start of class

o This is also the day of the Final Exam and the day ALL LATE Essays are due.
• Since this is due the last day of class, No Late Submissions are accepted

Assignment Goals

• Writing text-based arguments (text-centered, specific, debatable, justifies discussion,
answers the “so what?” question)

• Demonstrate effective and thorough academic research
• Thorough analysis of evidence from primary and secondary sources
• Avoids vague ideas, summary, description, and focus on purely surface details and plot
• Structure and Organization, including introduction, conclusion, transition/topic

sentences, and paragraph structure
• Appropriate use of MLA formatting including in-text citation and work cited page
• Demonstrating critical thinking, reading, and analytical skills and overall grammatical

clarity
• Detailed and focused revision from an initial draft

Your final assignment is to revise either Essay 1 or Essay 2 into a polished final paper that
demonstrates the critical reading, thinking, and writing skills we’ve developed over the term.
Keep in mind, instructor comments are not the only factor that should guide your revision. Think
of the original submission as a “rough draft,” and for this assignment you will retroactively apply
all our course lessons and learning goals, in addition to instructor and peer comments.

The final essay is longer than the earlier draft so you are not just “fixing” minor problems, but
also strengthening and elaborating on the argument, stakes, evidence, and analysis. Part of the
challenge will be to include three secondary academic sources from scholarly journals. If the
original draft already has a source (such as Essay 2), you may keep it or substitute a new one,
but the essay must have three secondary sources total.

You must include a Work Cited page that documents these sources in following appropriate
MLA guidelines.

Evaluation

• Meets basic requirements (length, structure, organization)
• Success meeting the assignment goals
• Worth 150 points, 50 points for peer review, 100 points for the final draft
• 20% of overall class grade

Last name 1

Name

Professor

English 101

30 January 2018

Societal Expectations

This story has many strong supporting ideas about social stigmas and the main theme I’d like to discuss is the progression of social injustice throughout civilization. Whether it be from superstitious views, religious, or scientific there will always be the few “lusus naturae” that is ostracized from society. In different eras in history there have been people persecuted because of their ideology, skin color, or the disease they carry and as civilization evolve this theme will remain consistent. Therefore, civilization should be a main concern towards the progression of societal justices and freedom.

In this short story “LususNaturae” by Margret Artwood, there is a family society within a town society and ultimately within the grander civilization. The social hierarchy in a family society is having the elder with most authority with no regards to educational background, this is supported by the fact the grandmother use of unproven and even unscientific methods to try to cleanse the narrators ailment by trying to drown her, the narrator says the following about her grandmother “She had her own ideas, which involved puffballs and stump water. Once she’d held my head under the water in which the dirty clothes were soaking, praying while she did” (Atwood 263). The hierarchy is established when the narrators mother did not protest or question the grandmother’s method, all she did was downplay the fact it was “the best of intentions” (Atwood 263). This is evident that the family’s elder has the authority to act and behave in a way society has deemed acceptable. The injustice that was done to the narrator show society pressure people to act and treat others who are different from themselves.

The next level of social hierarchy is the town or community, that the family live in. Neighbors where afraid of contracting an unknown disease so kept their distance, they disguised their true intentions to “scrounge for news” (Atwood 264) by visiting from time to time and bringing the family “eggs and cabbages” (Atwood 264). Discrimination is completely showed out due to her illness in subtle ways. A priest was invited to the residence because of his high social status in the community. In addition, “The priest was bribed…we appealed to his sense of compassion”(Atwood 264). The role of priest represents a noble, admirable spirit. However, he received benefits and betrayed his mission as a priest and instructed the narrator to believe that she should appreciate being a chosen angel, “He said I was lucky… I would go straight to heaven” (Atwood 264). What kind of society produces such behavior? Obviously, only a society that is more concerned of their bottom line. Then the priest has the narrator “[she] was put on display …in a white dress…fitting for a virgin and useful in concealing my whiskers” (Atwood 264). Due to religious and conservative ideas society deemed a priest as someone who holds unchallenged views. The communal view on virgin was sacred and these views persist in some parts of the world today, we see from the article from Soraya Copley “Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology” these views are repeated in a patriarchal society. The narrator being the one ostracized has been conditioned into think it is her fault and she must make the sacrifice to help the collective society move forward but in turn has only hindered in civilization as a whole to make any progress. As Copley states, “Alongside the human race, the natural world falls victim to the thirst for profit endemic amongst politicians who are supposed to represent the interest of the common people” (Copley 47), the community will use and exploit what they can to achieve the collective goal in society, whether that “natural world” is talking about women rights or civil rights.

The illusion of freedom that was gain from faking the narrator’s death has allowed her to live outside the confines of societal expectations. Though she was mentally free from social views of right and wrong and was able to freely engage in ideas of “blighted love, and defiance, and the sweetness of death” (Atwood 264) she was physically confined to her room. In a way the narrator’s fate was tied to civilizations superficial mind set and her freedom from societal ideology ultimately had to come to an end as the narrator had realized and accepted her fate to the sick society which is filled with prejudice and cruelty.

As civilization progresses throughout history people who are different will face challenges and many factors contribute to these challenges. By looking through the development of society’s timeline: Germany deracinated Jews in world war; civil war between north and south; the established of KKK organization; the speech of “I have a dream” by Martin Luther king; the LGBT rights by country or territory… and etc. Above all are sufficiently expressing the alteration of the discrimination from using the extreme controlling means to the fighting for justice environment. Superstitious views are tied to tradition and culture these ideas progress and eventually will lead to new ideas and tradition will take form. Then there are religious views which are harder to change but as we see in society it is slowly progressing from ultra conservative to progressive. As with scientific research as it makes progress it changes civilization world views. As we move forward towards to a brighter future there will always be a select few who will always be treated unjustly, but with short stories, books, and publications, people can reflect on ideas and make better choice for the future generation. Civilization like all other things will evolve and adapt and unfortunately the majority will always outweigh the few.

Work Cited

“LususNaturae”

Atwood, Margaret. “LususNaturae” October 2014 Issue of Prospect Magazine

Eco-fmeinistPersepctives on Nature and Technology

Atwood, Margaret & Piercy, Marge. “Eco-fmeinistPersepctives on Nature and Technology” Volume 25, Number 2, 2013

‘We’re Using up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone.”: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood

J. Brooks Bouson

Journal of Commonwealth Literature

46.1
(2011):
p9-26.
Rpt. in

Contemporary Literary Criticism.
Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 342. Detroit: Gale.
From Literature Resource Center.

Full Text:
COPYRIGHT 2013 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: 

[(essay date 2011) In the following essay, Bouson examines Atwood’s handling of posthumanist and environmental themes in The Year of the Flood, pointing out that this postapocalyptic novel also serves as a critique of contemporary society’s unregulated consumption, corporate greed, and the “commodification and consumption of women.”]

“If the twentieth century begins with a sense of exhaustion and frustration with the end as revelation,” observes Teresa Heffernan, at its close “the end of time–as both catastrophic and redemptive–[has been] resurrected across the cultural spectrum in film, literature, science, politics, and religion”. Just as evangelical Christians await the Armageddon, science has its own version of end times in Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, which predicts an environmental catastrophe, and in the emergence of an extreme group like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which invites people “to die out so that the earth’s biosphere can be restored”.1 Even as the recent “proliferation” of apocalyptic scenarios brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s prediction that we “might come to enjoy the spectacle of [our] own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure”, it also reflects the “cultural anxiety that we may have reached … the end of our species”.2 Giving expression to that cultural anxiety in gruesome yet comic works that create, at once, enjoyable and horrific spectacles of the end of humanity, Margaret Atwood, who has long been known for emphasizing feminist and postfeminist concerns in her novelistic investigations of female victims and survivors, reflects in her 2009 novel The Year of the Flood, as she does in her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, not only on feminist concerns but also on humanist and posthumanist concerns, as she questions the very survival of humankind in an era of environmental destruction, excessive consumption, unregulated biotechnological experiments and pandemic viruses. Even as Atwood draws on what has been called the “microbe mania” that has gripped the contemporary cultural consciousness in our “new age of epidemics” and “pop-culture plague tales”,3 she also conveys in The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake what James Berger describes as the “pervasive post-apocalyptic sensibility” of contemporary culture, which reveals that the “traumatic past” of twentieth-century catastrophes “lives among us”.4 As Berger explains, “we have had the opportunity … to see in a strange prospective retrospect what the end would actually look like: it would look like a Nazi death camp, or an atomic explosion, or an ecological or urban wasteland”.5 Speaking the unspeakable, “post-apocalyptic representations are simultaneously symptoms of historical traumas and attempts to work through them”.6 But while trauma produces “symptoms in its wake, after the event”, apocalypse is “preceded by signs and portents whose interpretation defines the event in the future”.7 Thus, the “apocalyptic-historical-traumatic event becomes a crux or pivot that forces a retelling and revaluing of all events that lead up to it and all that follow”.8

In a repetition of a novelistic trauma, Atwood, in The Year of the Flood, circles back to and forward from Oryx and Crake in her retelling and revaluing of her apocalyptic-traumatic end-of-the-world story, returning to Oryx and Crake’s environmentally devastated and corporation-controlled futuristic world in which an all-powerful scientific elite are given free rein to tamper with nature by creating genetically modified hybrid animals and humanoid creatures. In Oryx and Crake Atwood tells the story of Jimmy-Snowman, who divides his identity into his pre-catastrophe past as Jimmy and his post-catastrophe present as Snowman, when he finds himself the sole human survivor in the posthuman world engineered by his genius-scientist friend Crake. As readers eventually learn, Jimmy has been left alive by Crake, who has killed off humanity through a pandemic haemorrhagic virus, so that he can act as the guide and protector of the Crakers, the bioengineered and environmentally-friendly hominoid creatures created by Crake as a replacement for humanity. If in Oryx and Crake, Atwood focuses on the Compound world–gated communities where elite scientists and business people live and work under the protection of the CorpSeCorps, a ruthless and totalitarian private corporate security firm and police force–in The Year of the Flood, in contrast, she centres her story on the pleebland world where the non-affluent masses live, as she tells the intertwined stories of Ren and Toby, two female pleebland survivors of the pandemic plague and former members of the God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious cult and resistance group.

Like Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood alternates between the pre-catastrophe past and post-catastrophe present of the two central characters, and it, too, contains a mixture of genres: the dystopian end-of-the-world story; the castaway-survivor story; the coming-of-age story (Ren); the romance plot (Ren’s thwarted romance with Jimmy, the love triangles between Ren, Amanda and Jimmy and between Toby, Zeb and Lucerne); the political thriller and mystery story (as readers come to speculate on the connection or even collusion between Crake and the male leaders of the God’s Gardeners, Adam One and Adam Seven/Zeb). Even as Year provides intratextual commentary on and even a re-visionist reading of Oryx by centering on the violent and degrading pleebland world inhabited by Ren and Toby, where vulnerable and unprotected women easily become the sexual prey of predatory men, it also, like Oryx and Crake and like apocalyptic fiction in general, writes toward the ending as readers are urged to speculate on the future by asking, at the end of Oryx, if Jimmy-Snowman will survive and, at the end of Year, if Ren and Toby will continue to survive the “Waterless Flood”, that is, the pandemic virus created by Oryx’s Crake. Indeed, what motivated Atwood to write Year, in part, as she has explained, is that people asked her “what happens next”,9 when they got to the end of Oryx, in which a starving and seriously injured Jimmy-Snowman, who thinks he is the only human survivor, encounters a trio of armed humans and tries to decide whether or not to kill them, aware that if he shoots at them he risks being killed. If in Year, we learn the identity of the other human survivors Jimmy-Snowman encounters in this scene, the ending of Year, even as it writes beyond the ending of Oryx, also leaves the reader in a state of unknowing, a gesture meant to compel, as many Atwoodian novelistic closures do, reader participation in the text.

Atwood, who has had a long-term interest in the victimhood and survival of women, takes this organizing idea to a new level in The Year of the Flood where young postfeminist women like Amanda and Ren have learned, like Oryx in Oryx and Crake, to use their sex for barter and where a woman like Toby is preyed upon by the brutal rapist Blanco, who is free not only to make Toby his sexual slave but also, if he wishes, to kill her and to literally turn her into meat. In an essay on Angela Carter in which Atwood provides an account of Carter’s Sadeian vision, we gain insight into the gruesome world of human cruelty and sexual predator-prey that Atwood conjures up in The Year of the Flood. As Carter offers an analysis of the writings of the Marquis de Sade in The Sadeian Woman, she examines de Sade’s view of human nature which, in describing how the strong not only “abuse” but also “meatify” the weak, draws a distinction between “‘tigers’ and ‘lambs’, carnivores and herbivores, those who are preyed upon and those who do the preying”.10 For de Sade, “predator and prey, master and slave, are the only two categories … that he can acknowledge; above all, for him sex between unequals cannot be mutually pleasurable, because pleasure belongs to the eater, not to the eaten”.11 While for Carter the “nature of men is not fixed … as inevitably predatory, with females as their ‘natural’ prey” and while “lambhood and tigerishness” can be found in both men and women, society can “slant things so that women appear to be better candidates for meathood than men and men better candidates for meat-eating”. Indeed for Carter, “a certain amount of tigerishness may be necessary if women … are to avoid–at the extreme end of passivity–becoming meat”.12

That for the Sadeian male predator “sex between unequals cannot be mutually pleasurable, because pleasure belongs to the eater, not to the eaten”, is illustrated in Toby’s pre-catastrophe life as a sexually vulnerable pleeblander woman who works for the predatory Blanco at SecretBurgers in one of the “worst pleebs”, which is called the “Sewage Lagoon because a lot of shit ended up in it”.13 Offering an extreme–and grotesque–rendering of the bottom-line mentality of the contemporary corporate business world, Atwood describes how the CorpSeCorps allow the pleebmobs to operate corpse disposal businesses–barbaric, cannibalistic businesses with “few supply-side costs” (p. 34)–in which they harvest organs for transplants and then, according to rumour, run “the gutted carcasses through the SecretBurgers grinders” (p. 33). If, as critics have observed, Atwood uses the trope of cannibalism to call attention to “the unchecked will to consume at the heart of the western and European model of society”,14 in Year, she extends this idea as she draws on and literalizes the trope of corporate cannibalism in describing her corporation-controlled world. In a similar way, she draws on and extends a related idea she has long made use of in her fiction–that of the “metaphoric consumption of women in North American culture”15–as she exposes the sexual cannibalism of Blanco, the predatory manager of SecretBurgers, who views the women who work for him–like Toby–as his female prey. That the association of women with the body is part of the “long tradition of female objectification that facilitates, even encourages, the transformation of the female subject into mere flesh”16 is evident in Toby’s story, and Year also draws much of its abject horror from its vision of the male “carnification” of the female subject: that is, the reduction of the woman to a fleshly object or to meat or to a rotting corpse.17 A jealous tyrant and a sexually rapacious and sadistic man, Blanco views women as possessions to be sexually used and abused–indeed, to be persecuted and then turned into meat. The tattoo on Blanco’s back of an “upside-down naked woman”, who is “wound in chains” and whose “invisible” head is “stuck in his ass” (pp. 36-7), offers a stark emblem of his sexist view of women as mindless and replaceable bodies and as sexual slaves.

“Cross me up, I’ll snap you like a twig”, Blanco says when he tells Toby he is “promoting” her after killing her predecessor, who is found in a vacant lot cut up and with her neck broken (p. 37). Toby’s life as Blanco’s “woman” is one of constant sexual torture and humiliation:

His view was that a woman with an ass as skinny as Toby’s should consider herself in luck if any man wanted to stick his hole-hammer into her. … She should thank her lucky stars. Better, she should thank him: he demanded a thank you after every degrading act. He didn’t want her to feel pleasure, though: only submission.(p. 38)

After Toby is rescued by the God’s Gardeners, she still feels endangered by Blanco, who is enraged at the fact that Toby kicks him as she is being spirited away by Adam One and his followers: “That kick of hers would be very expensive. It would take a publicly advertised gang rape or her head on a pole to wipe the slate” (p. 47). Even after spending years with the Gardeners, the sexually traumatized Toby still has nightmares about Blanco’s “skinless-looking blue-veined hands coming for her neck. Say you love me! Say it, bitch!” (p. 97). As Toby realizes, “Freedom from Blanco was worth a lot: she was lucky she hadn’t ended up fucked into a purée and battered to a pulp and poured out onto a vacant lot” (p. 103). “You’re meat!” as Blanco later says when he sees Toby during his thwarted attack on the Gardeners (p. 255).

Even as Atwood, in telling the story of the middle-aged Toby, invokes the Sadeian world described by Carter in which sexual relations are viewed in “‘terms of butchery and meat'”,18 she also offers an admonitory satire on our contemporary postfeminist society as she engages with second-wave and postfeminist ideas in telling the story of the other woman survivor, Ren, who is twenty-five years old when the plague hits. As she does in her other works, Atwood depicts the generational divide between feminists and postfeminists in telling the stories of Toby and Ren, for while the middle-aged (feminist) Toby is aware of the potential brutality of male-female relations, the younger (postfeminist) Ren, who grows up both in the privileged world of the Compounds and in the communal world of the God’s Gardeners, seemingly chooses, or at least accepts, her own sexual commodification and humiliation. After spending several years at the Martha Graham Academy where she takes courses in Dance Calisthenics, Ren eventually ends up working at Scales and Tails, which is part of the SeksMart. Sex workers like Ren, who are known as “the cleanest dirty girls in town”, see themselves the way Mordis, the manager of Scales and Tails, sees them–as “a valuable asset”. In the morally bankrupt and sexist culture Ren inhabits, where the sexuality of women is degraded not honoured, Mordis shows that he has “ethics” because he never takes “freebies” from his sex workers. When clients become violent, he stands up for his workers. “‘Nobody hurts my best girls,’ he’d say. It was a point of honour with him” (p. 7).

A product of her postfeminist culture with its bottom-line corporate business culture mentality, Ren, who works as a trapeze dancer at Scales, views herself solely as a sexual commodity. “Ren, you make them shit thousand-dollar bills”, Mordis tells her (p. 55). Unlike the “cream of the crop” sex workers like Ren, women prostituting themselves outside the Corp-controlled SeksMart system are “pathetic” and “wrecked” old women called “Hazardous waste” by the Scales girls (p. 7). When Painball veterans are brought to Scales, Mordis uses temporary sex workers for the “bristle work”–“smuggled Eurotrash or Tex-Mexicans or Asian Fusion and Redfish minors scooped off the streets”–because the Painballers, who easily go into “full rage mode”, want “membrane” and any “damage” to regular girls like Ren would be “pricey” (p. 130). Cheerfully acknowledging the voyeuristic male gaze that turns women into pornographic objects and sexual commodities, the Scales girls wink at the club’s hidden cameras in “mid-moan” when they are doing “plank work” to express their camaraderie with those who have been placed in the Sticky Zone, that is, medical confinement, which is where Ren ends up during the Waterless Flood (p. 8). Like postfeminist Ren, her pleeblander friend Amanda has been socialized to view sex as a commodity women can use to “trade” or barter for goods or services. “You trade what you have to. You don’t always have choices”, according to Amanda (p. 58) and she also argues that love is “useless” because it leads to “dumb exchanges” in which the individual gives “too much away” (p. 219). By emphasizing Ren and Amanda’s passive acceptance of their sexist world in which women have become consumable sexualized and eroticized objects, Atwood accentuates her fear, expressed in The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, that the recent gains women have made as a result of the feminist movement may be short-lived and that there is a thin line, indeed, between the postfeminist’s embrace of her sexuality and the sexist world of the prefeminist past.

If in Oryx and Crake, Atwood satirizes but also expresses alarm about the pervasive violence of contemporary culture by describing how, as teenagers, Jimmy-Snowman and Glenn-Crake play violent computer games like Barbarian Stomp and Extinctathon and watch live executions on the Web, in The Year of the Flood she extends her critique of media violence in her horrific account of the onscreen Painball game, a gruesome spectacle in which condemned criminals, like Blanco, are placed in the Painball Arena–an enclosed forest that contains hidden cameras–where they engage in a savage and deadly game of predator and prey. Like a regular paintball gun, the Painball gun shoots paint, “but a hit in the eyes would blind you, and if you got the paint on your skin you’d start to corrode, and then you’d be an easy target for the throat-slitters on the other team” (p. 98). In a passage that anticipates the closure of the novel, in which Ren and Amanda, along with several other surviving members of the God’s Gardeners–Shackie, Croze and Oates–become caught up in a deadly Painball game with the brutal, sadistic Blanco and his two companion Painballers and Oates ends up strung up in a tree with his throat cut and his kidneys removed, Year describes how some teams hang their victim–their “kill”–on a tree and mutilate the corpse to intimidate the opposing team: “Cut off the head, tear out the heart and kidneys. … Eat part of it, if food was running low or just to show how mean you were” (pp. 98-9).19 Even as Atwood provides intratextual commentary on the passage in Surfacing in which the Surfacer-narrator finds strung up in a tree “like a lynch victim” or martyred Christ the body of a heron that has been preyed upon by the violent “Americans” who are spreading the “virus” of Americanism into Canada,20 so in Year she extends this idea by showing that the “virus” of Americanism–that is, the American culture of violence and corporatization and commodification and unbridled consumption–has gone global. If cannibalism has traditionally been used to reinforce the “opposition between civilization and savagery”,21 for Atwood the global consumer culture bred by the virus of Americanism promotes a form of what Deborah Root has described as the “cannibal psychosis” that drives the rapacious violence and cannibalistic consumption of contemporary culture in which “consumption is power, and the ability to consume excessively and willfully becomes the most desirable aspect of power”.22 Thus, as Fredric Jameson has commented, “the Fall” in Atwood’s novel is “a fall into Americanism” in a “global near future” in which “the term American is no longer necessary”.23 Moreover, global Americanism has inspired Crake to create his “global” pandemic virus, a violent, predatory act that imitates Americanism even though Crake’s intent is to wipe the earth clean of the “virus” of Americanism.

As Atwood offers a strident critique of global Americanism in The Year of the Flood, she also voices a deep fear that has long plagued Western society and that has found expression, over time, in utopian hopes and their related dystopian fears: that scientific advances will lead not to a progressive utopian future but instead will result in humanity’s reversion to a savage dystopian (even pre-human) past. Indeed, while Year is set in a ruined futuristic cityscape on the northeast coast of the United States, the future world Atwood conjures up as she expresses her moral outrage against the violence and barbarism of contemporary culture invokes the idea of degeneration, which, as William Greenslade has observed, “was an important resource of myth for the post-Darwinian world” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.24 As Greenslade explains, degeneration became a “fully fledged explanatory myth” in the late nineteenth century when there was a growing sense of the disparity between the “rhetoric of progress” and the “facts on the ground, the evidence in front of people’s eyes, of poverty and degradation at the heart of ever richer empires”.25 An explanatory myth that speaks to the “‘dark side of progress'”, degeneration describes “the boundless capacity of a society to ‘generate’ regression: on the one hand, generation and reproduction, on the other, decline, degradation, waste”.26 Viewed through a degenerationist frame, the “post-Darwinian city” is a place of “moral darkness” where the “struggle for life” produces a “new species” of people–“menageries of sub-races of men and women”.27 Not unlike earlier writers who succumbed to what Greenslade calls the “explanatory lure of forms of biological determinism”,28 Atwood, in part, draws on the idea of degeneration in The Year of the Flood as she describes a world taken over by the degeneracy instilled by the “virus” of Americanism which fosters, on one extreme, the selfish individualism and greed of the wealthy elite and, on the other extreme, the predatory behaviour, unbridled violence and rapacious cannibalism of Blanco and his cohorts. If Crake’s pessimistic–and Freudian–view of the “murderous threat posed by unrestrained instincts” makes him, in the words of Stephen Dunning, “a Freudian with the technological resources to change radically what Freud took to be the permanent features of our psychological landscape”,29 he also harkens back to the biosocial model of the degenerationists and radical eugenicists who believed in the decline of civilization or that “civilisation itself could be on the verge of extinction”.30 Thus, in the post-Darwinian and eugenicist belief system of Crake, the radical solution to humanity’s ills in a twenty-first century world of global, social and economic decline is the destruction of humanity and the creation of the Crakers, noble savages that are environmentally friendly, peace-loving and socially and economically egalitarian.

Not unlike Crake, whose “ultimate solution” grows out of his degenerationist assumptions, the God’s Gardeners also see the need for a cleansing renewal of humanity and the creation of a new social and moral order. Indeed, The Year of the Flood, in its account of the horrors of life for the have-nots of society, invokes the post-Darwinian rhetoric of social panic and degeneration in describing the spectacle of poverty found in the teeming and violent pleebland slums where the innocent are preyed upon by marauding youths, brutal mobsters and competing criminal gangs. If through Year’s degenerationist discourse, Atwood expresses her own long-held fears about environmental and social decline and her scepticism about our ability to make wise use of the scientific and political tools at hand, she also, in an unexpected manoeuvre for readers long familiar with her work, looks to religion–specifically eco-religion–as she seeks evidence of our ethical capacity to find a remedy to humanity’s ills, including the ever-spreading and deadly “virus” of Americanism. Against her dark vision of a corporation-controlled, consumer-driven and morally corrupt elite class, Atwood offers, as a kind of counter-vision and counter-narrative of sweetness and light, her story of the eco-religious sect, the God’s Gardeners, a radical fringe group of environmentalists and anti-capitalist revolutionaries.

Readers initially view the God’s Gardeners through the sceptical eyes of Toby, who, after being rescued by the sect, cannot imagine herself “sticking it out among these fugitives from reality for long” (p. 47). To Toby, not only are the Gardeners a “clutch of sweet but delusional eccentrics” (p. 103), but the female members of the sect have a “smiling, bossy sanctimoniousness” that she dislikes and she finds the prayers of the sect “tedious” and the theology “scrambled” (p. 46). “Why be so picky about lifestyle details if you believed everyone would soon be wiped off the face of the planet?” Toby wonders (pp. 46-7) as she ponders the Gardeners’ belief in the Waterless Flood–the “massive die-off of the human race” (p. 47) that will come as a pandemic plague spreads “germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery” and thus causes “total breakdown” (p. 20). If Atwood, who has long described herself as an agnostic, is in part tongue-in-cheek as she describes the religion of the God’s Gardeners, she also extends in Year the ideas she expressed in Oryx and Crake about the hard-wired aspect of religion, for despite Crake’s best effort to get rid of the “G-spot” in the brains of his genetically modified Crakers,31 it is clear that his hominoids are developing a religion as Jimmy-Snowman tells them Genesis-like stories about their creation. Indeed, as Atwood has remarked, “We seem to be hard-wired to have a belief system of some kind. … Very few people don’t have some belief system that includes something other than themselves. That just seems to be part of the tool kit that we have as human beings”.32

Drawing on the idea that environmentalism will not work if it does not become a religion,33 Atwood mixes together science, religion and environmentalism as she imagines the eco-religion of the pacifist and vegetarian God’s Gardeners. Although Atwood has explained that she “did not know” of the existence of the Green Bible when she wrote Year,34 her Gardeners not only read the Bible as a green text but they also have all the usual trappings of an organized religion, for they listen to sermons, they sing hymns, they have special feast days and marriage and burial ceremonies, and they follow their own saints’ calendar as they set aside special days on which they honour environmental saints and martyrs, including Saint Dian Fossey, Saint Euell Gibbons, Saint E. O. Wilson, Saint Rachel Carson, Saint James Lovelock, Saint Stephen Jay Gould and Saint Jane Jacobs. When the sceptical Toby, after being rescued by the Gardeners, first sees their rooftop garden–the Edencliff Rooftop Garden–she is awe-struck by its beauty:

She gazed around it in wonder: it was so beautiful, with plants and flowers of many kinds she’d never seen before. There were vivid butterflies; from nearby came the vibration of bees. Each petal and leaf was fully alive, shining with awareness of her. Even the air of the Garden was different.

Toby feels as if “a large, benevolent hand had reached down and picked her up, and was holding her safe”, and later, when she hears Adam One talk about “‘being flooded with the Light of God’s Creation'”, she realizes that “without knowing it yet that was how she felt” (p. 43).

That Toby perceives nature as a benevolent force even while she is aware of its predator-prey savagery is suggestive since, as Atwood has remarked, in the “Nature-as-metaphor battle” prevalent in the nineteenth century–and revived in Atwood’s novel–nature is envisioned, contrastingly, as a “Wordsworthian” good mother and a “Darwinian” bad mother.35 These contrasting images are brought together in the scene in which Toby, after the plague, sees liobams for the first time. A lion-sheep splice, the liobam was “commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists … to fulfill the lion/lamb friendship prophecy” and thus “force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom” by melding predator and prey. At first appearing gentle “with their curly golden hair and twirling tails”, the liobams have “long, sharp canines” (p. 94). While Toby is fascinated as she watches while the two liobams “gambol together”, she “doesn’t relish the thought” of being “mangled and devoured” by a liobam, preferring instead to be attacked by “a more conventional beast of prey” (pp. 94-5). The fact that Toby sees a liobam-like creature during her drug-induced vigil suggests her own ability to be both the peace-loving gardener and the fierce warrior. Indeed, when Toby tells Pilar what she has seen–a golden-colored lion-like animal with “gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur” (p. 171)–Pilar says that Toby’s animal vision is “a good sign” and means that she will be “helped with strength” when she needs it (p. 178).

In Adam One’s sermons, which are addressed to his “Fellow Gardeners in the Earth that is God’s Garden” (p. 51), Atwood gives expression to her long-held environmental concerns that humanity–plagued by the global “virus” of Americanism–is greedily consuming and destroying the environment. As Adam One states, “Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything? … God’s commandment to ‘replenish the Earth’ did not mean we should fill it to overflowing with ourselves, thus wiping out everything else” (pp. 52-3). To Adam One, who reminds his followers of the “knots of DNA and RNA that tie us to our many fellow Creatures” (p. 53), the Gardeners’ “role in respect to the Creatures is to bear witness” and “to guard the memories and the genomes of the departed” (p. 253). As he mourns the “wholesale slaughter of ecosystems” (p. 90), Adam One warns that his followers “must be ready for the time when those who have broken trust with the Animals–yes, wiped them from the face of the Earth where God placed them–will be swept away by the Waterless Flood” (p. 91). “More practical” and “more tactical” behind the scenes (p. 246), Adam One explains to his inner circle that he wants to reconcile “the findings of Science” with a “sacramental view of Life” (p. 240) in his eco-religion and “to push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction by pointing out the hazards of annoying God by a violation of His trust in our stewardship” (p. 241). And yet, while the God’s Gardeners are taught to cherish nature and respect animals, in their extreme environmentalism and view of all life as interconnected, they also see themselves as potential victims in nature’s Darwinian predator-prey arrangement. Adam One, who finds in the image of the fox snake ingesting a frog a reminder of the “intertwined nature of the Dance of Life”, also reminds his followers that the “Spirit of God … is not always peaceful: it has a ferocious side to it as well” (p. 233). He teaches his followers that they must be “willing” to “offer” themselves “to the great chain of nourishment” (p. 125) and to “repay the gift of Life by regifting” themselves “to Life when the time comes” by becoming compost (p. 161).

Opposing the political-economic order, the God’s Gardeners actively resist their society with its rampant consumption and environmental and social exploitation, and they include in their ranks former scientists, who come from the higher echelons of the biotechnological corporate world. Over time, as the God’s Gardeners grow in influence, they have branches in different pleebs and other cities and “cells of hidden Exfernal sympathizers embedded at every level, even within the Corporations themselves”. As Toby comes to realize when she becomes Eve Six and gains new knowledge of the inner workings of the group, the Gardeners are not “wrapped in some otherworldly sheepfold-like cocoon” but are “a real and potentially explosive power” (p. 189). Unlike Adam One who insists that the Gardener way is “the way of peace”, to Zeb and his schismatic MaddAddam followers “peace goes only so far”: “There’s at least a hundred new extinct species since this time last month. They got fucking eaten! We can’t just sit here and watch the lights blink out” (p. 252). Actively doing battle with the corporate powers that are ruling and destroying the world, Zeb’s MaddAddam group of eco-activist scientists and eco-warriors commit public acts of bio-resistance. When, for example, they create an asphalt-eating microbe that destroys highways, their purpose, as Shackie, Croze and Oates later explain, is to use “bioform resistance” to “destroy the infrastructure” so that the earth can “repair itself” before “everything” goes “extinct” (p. 333). Blamed by the CorpSeCorps for the acts of bio-resistance, the God’s Gardeners are attacked: their Edencliff Rooftop Garden is destroyed and members of the pacifist group are “hounded and pursued”, some of them ending up “murderously spraygunned in the course of raids carried out against them” while others are “mutilated and tossed into vacant lots” and still others end up “disappeared, snatched from their places of refuge, to vanish into the prisons of the Exfernal Powers” (p. 311).

Even as Atwood circles back to and elaborates on Oryx and Crake by describing the MaddAddam group and its acts of eco-resistance, she also returns to Oryx’s Extinctathon grandmaster Crake, showing the connection not only between Crake and the MaddAddam group but also between Crake and the God’s Gardeners. If some readers of The Year of the Flood feel that they are “undergoing, and failing, a test of [their] cleverness at guessing from hints, reading between lines and recognising allusions” to Atwood’s earlier novel Oryx and Crake,36 others may take a special pleasure in unraveling Atwood’s gamelike novelistic clues as they draw connections between the two works. Even more compelling, as Year replays and reworks Oryx’s traumatic-apocalyptic plotline, it gets caught up in what James Berger describes as the paradox of post-apocalyptic representation, which “impossibly straddles the boundary between before and after some event that has obliterated what went before yet defines what will come after”.37 Not only is “every action before the apocalypse … simultaneously an action after the apocalypse”, writes Berger, but “the event itself exists as a monstrous possibility”. Moreover, the “narrative logic” of apocalyptic representation, which “insists that the post-apocalypse precede the apocalypse”, is also “the logic of prophecy”.38

Just as the apocalyptic-traumatic event compels a retelling of the events that lead up to and that follow it, so Atwood feels compelled to retell the before-and-after events of Oryx in Year, especially in telling the story of Glenn-Crake. But while the genius-scientist Crake is a central character in Oryx and is the agent of Year’s Waterless Flood, there are only fragmentary traces of his disquieting story and presence in Year. And yet Crake takes on a kind of portentous meaning to informed readers of Year and his appearances in the novel, not unlike the return of the repressed, seem at once strangely familiar and uncannily strange as readers recognize the “monstrous possibility” portended by his prophetic words. When the adolescent Crake, who acts as a “boy courier” (p. 243) for the Gardeners, has Pilar’s biopsy samples tested and then returns with news of her fatal cancer diagnosis, Amanda and Ren, his contemporaries, recognize from the way that he talks that Crake is a Compound “brainiac”, for he states that illness is “a design fault” that can be “corrected” and he also is convinced that if he were “making the world”, he would “make it better” (p. 147). When the fourteen-year-old Ren returns to the HelthWyzer Compound after her mother, Lucerne, leaves Zeb, she meets Oryx’s Jimmy-Snowman and Glenn-Crake in high school, and Crake, who already knows “a lot” about the God’s Gardeners, questions Ren about the beliefs and practices of the group and he also asks her if she thinks that the “Waterless Flood is really going to happen” (p. 228). Years later, when Ren is working at Scales, she again encounters Crake, a graduate of the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute who has become a top scientist at the Rejoov Compound. Not only does Crake ask the Scales girls that he rents for the evening to purr like cats and sing like birds–details chillingly significant to readers of Oryx who recall that Crake’s hominoids, the Crakers, purr like cats and have strange singing voices–but Ren also hears him discuss the Paradice Project. “Sometimes he’d say he was working on solutions to the biggest problem of all, which was human beings–their cruelty and suffering, their wars and poverty, their fear of death”, Ren learns from listening to Crake discuss with his investors his creation of the Crakers, which he sees as a genetic improvement on humanity (p. 305).

Initially Adam One and the surviving God’s Gardeners, who were tellingly not “taken by surprise” by the global pandemic, are hopeful as they prepare to leave their sheltering Ararat, imagining that the “outer world is Exfernal no more–that the Waterless Flood has cleansed as well as destroyed, and that all the world is now a new Eden. Or, if it is not a new Eden yet, that it will be one soon” (p. 345). Despite their disappointment with the debris-filled–and corpse-littered–world left by the plague, the Gardeners, according to Adam One, are nevertheless “privileged … to witness these first precious moments of Rebirth” (p. 371). But as the Gardeners prepare to leave their place of refuge, Adam One also tells them to meditate on the “Alpha Predator aspects of God”–“God the Tiger. Or God the Lion. Or God the Bear” (p. 346). Even more chillingly, he asks his followers to consider this: “Which is more blessed, to eat or to be eaten? … We would not be Human if we did not prefer to be the devourers rather than the devoured, but either is a blessing. Should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life” (p. 347). When one of the plague survivors is killed and devoured by wild dogs, Adam One states that she has “made the ultimate Gift to her fellow Creatures, and has become part of God’s great dance of proteins” (p. 404). And then, when the few surviving Gardeners, who have made their way back to the site of the Edencliff Rooftop Garden, begin to succumb to the plague and Adam One also recognizes that he, too, is showing symptoms of the virus, he prepares his followers for the end of humanity: “It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place” (p. 424). Yet while the lamb-like Gardeners face extinction as they prepare to “become part of God’s great dance of proteins” (p. 404), the conclusion of Year does include a gesture of hope not only for ecological renewal but also for human survival.

Offering two competing visions of humanity in Year’s closing scenes, Atwood tells the story of the brutal Painball game played by Blanco and his companion Painballers, who ruthlessly hunt down, kill and mutilate Oates and take captive and sexually torture Amanda and Ren, side by side with the story of Toby’s fierce acts of bravery and loving acts of human compassion and of Ren’s acts of loyalty, love and forgiveness. After Ren escapes from the Painballers, Toby uses her knowledge of poisons to kill Blanco while she uses her healing powers to restore Ren, coming to see Ren as a “precious gift” (p. 357), as someone to “cure” and “cherish” (p. 360). In stark contrast, Amanda, who has long followed the materialist and sexist ethos of her culture by “trading” to get what she wants and who remains the captive of the two remaining Painballers, becomes the ultimate female victim when the men, after torturing her, try to “trade” her–a sign that the men are “tired” of Amanda, making her “disposable” (p. 399). Imagining that if they trade Amanda to the Crakers, whom they see as “savages”, the Crakers will “human-sacrifice” Amanda after having group sex with her, one of the men then jokes that she is “a sex toy you can eat” (p. 417).

Even as Atwood exposes the predatory ruthlessness and sexist savagery of the Painballers in these scenes, she also emphasizes the feminist ideal of female solidarity by describing how Ren and Toby put their own lives at risk to save Amanda. In a replay and extension of the end of Oryx, Atwood describes how Jimmy-Snowman, who is about to shoot the Painballers, hesitates when Ren tells him that the woman the men are using as a shield is Amanda. When the armed Toby, who is “skinny, tattered, teeth bared,” surprises the men and keeps them from rearming, Ren grabs their weapon and then Amanda gets free of her rope noose and attacks and subdues the men (p. 419). Afterwards, Ren feels fortunate to still be alive: “We’re lucky, I think. To be here. All of us, even the Painballers” (p. 428). And yet the survival of Ren side by side with the Painballers suggests the staying power not only of human kindness but also of human cruelty–that is, lambhood and tigerishness. Indeed, as Ren, Toby, Amanda, Jimmy and the two Painballers sit around a fire, the flickering lights make them look “softer and more beautiful” than they are, but also “darker and scarier too” (p. 428).

If Toby is presented as a feminist heroine in Year, she also, not unlike Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale and Jimmy in Oryx and Crake, represents the average person who has long ignored the warning signs of the coming apocalypse. As Toby recalls the past, she admits to herself that while she “knew there were things wrong in the world” because they were talked about and were in the news, “the wrong things were wrong somewhere else”. When she was in college “the wrongness had moved closer” and while people “knew” they did not admit it, and when other people discussed it–“We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone”–people like Toby “tuned them out, because what they were saying was both so obvious and so unthinkable” (p. 239). Seeing her cautionary tales, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, as a form of environmental consciousness-raising, Atwood seeks a wide public readership for these works as she challenges her readers to think the unthinkable. Atwood, who has long talked of the moral imperative that drives her work, also believes in the transformative–and ethical–potential of imaginative literature, and indeed, Year, like Oryx, is a feminist, anti-corporate and radically ecological work in which Atwood, in sharing her fears of an outrage against current trends in contemporary society, also wishes to prod her readers to meaningful political thought and action.

Even as Atwood offers an admonitory satire in The Year of the Flood on the violence and greed of a contemporary culture driven by rampant consumerism and environmental and social exploitation, she also offers a hopeful gesture at the end of the novel by suggesting that the ragtag group of human survivors–including not only Toby, Ren and Amanda, but also Shackie, Croze, Zeb and some of the MaddAddam scientists–might rebuild society and set up a new social-political utopian enclave among the dystopian ruins of the old order. But while Atwood offers a glimmer of hope at the end, lingering questions remain as she, in the mysterious final scene of the novel, presents her readers with a typical Atwoodian puzzle to solve. When an enraptured Jimmy-Snowman says, “‘Listen to the music. … You can’t kill the music'”, Ren listens and hears something “faint and far away, but moving closer”: “It’s the sound of many people singing. Now we can see the flickering of their torches, winding towards us through the darkness of the trees” (p. 431). Are the “many people” singing Crakers, who sing in their eerily and strangely beautiful crystalline voices during their religious-like processions? Or are they human survivors from the Gardener movement singing Gardener hymns of praise as they journey out of their safe houses into the post-apocalyptic world swept over by the Waterless Flood? Creating a space for utopian hope and desire in her radically dystopian novel, Atwood reclaims utopian possibility in the closure of The Year of the Flood even as she offers us a grim warning that the very survival of humankind is at risk if we continue to ignore and refuse to act on what we all know: “We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone”.

Notes

1. Teresa Heffernan, Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, p. 150.

2. ibid., p. 151.

3. Daniel Dinello, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005, pp. 248 and 249.

4. James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp.xiii and xix.

5. ibid., p. xiii.

6. ibid., p. 19.

7. ibid., pp. 20-1.

8. ibid., p. 21.

9. Erica Wagner, “Margaret Atwood Interview”, Times Online, 15 August 2009. Retrieved 27 December 2009 at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6796036.ece

10. Margaret Atwood, “Running with the Tigers”, in Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. Lorna Sage, London: Virago Press, 1994, pp. 117 and 118.

11. ibid., p. 120.

12. ibid., p. 121.

13. Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, New York: Doubleday-Random House, 2009, p. 30. Subsequent references are to this edition and are included in the text.

14. Marlene Goldman, “Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips: Apocalyptic Cannibal Fiction”, in Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001, p. 172.

15. Lynda Hall, “‘He Can Taste Her Blood’: Dr. Jordan’s Consuming Desires in Alias Grace”, Margaret Atwood Studies 2,1 (2008), 28.

16. Amelia DeFalco, “Haunting Physicality: Corpses, Cannibalism, and Carnality in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace”, University of Toronto Quarterly 75,2 (2006), 779.

17. ibid., 774-6.

18. “Running with the Tigers”, p. 127.

19. In describing the Painballers, Atwood draws on the native cannibal figure of the Wendigo, which she describes in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. “In their indigenous versions”, writes Atwood, “Wendigo legends and stories are confined to the eastern woodlands, and largely to Algonquian-speaking peoples such as the Woodland Cree and the Ojibway” (p. 66). In the northern Canadian forests, “the belief that one has become a Wendigo or has been possessed by the Wendigo spirit” is a documented “form of insanity” (p. 68). According to Atwood, “fear of the Wendigo is two-fold: fear of being eaten by one, and fear of becoming one. Being eaten is simpler: a matter of mere gulps and gollops. Becoming one is the real horror, for, if you go Wendigo, you may end by losing your human mind and personality and destroying your own family members, or those you love most. You can be changed into a Wendigo by being bitten by one, or by tasting human flesh–even if driven to it by imminent starvation …” (p. 67). In their mindless cruelty and rapaciousness and cannibalism, the Painballers have “gone Wendigo”–that is, they have become destructive and human-flesh-eating monsters. For an interesting discussion of Atwood’s use of the Wendigo figure in her short-story collection Wilderness Tips, see Marlene Goldman’s “Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips: Apocalyptic Cannibal Fiction”, in Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001, pp. 167-85.

20. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing, New York: Warner, 1983, pp. 138 and 152.

21. Kristen Guest, “Introduction: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Identity”, in Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001, p. 2.

22. Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, pp. 10 and 9.

23. Fredric Jameson, “Then You Are Them: Review of The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood”, London Review of Books 31,17 (10 September 2009). Retrieved on 6 January 2010 at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n17/fredric-jameson/then-you-are-them

24. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, p. 1.

25. ibid., p. 15.

26. ibid., p. 16.

27. ibid., p. 38.

28. ibid., p. 5.

29. Stephen Dunning, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic”, Canadian Literature 186 (2005), 94.

30. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940, p. 17.

31. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, New York: Doubleday-Random House, 2003, p. 157.

32. Sinclair McKay, “Margaret Atwood: The Canadian Novelist Talks to Sinclair McKay About Books and Bees”, Telegraph, 20 August 2009. Retrieved 16 December 2009 at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6061404/Margaret-Atwood.html

33. People have observed, as Atwood comments, that “unless environmentalism becomes a religion it’s not going to work”. Environmentalism “has that element of faith, and when you meet all the people doing things on behalf of this cause, you think this is a lot like dedicating yourself as a nun must have been in medieval times, going out and teaching kids to make gardens. The towers are toppling, and you are doing this. You must believe that come what may this is the thing to do” (“Margaret Atwood Interview”).

34. Rick Kleffel, “Authors Find Fertile Mix of Science and Religion”, NPR interview 1 January 2010. Retrieved 11 February 2010 at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122107126&ft=1&f=3

35. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, p. 22.

36. Ursula Le Guin, “The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood”, The Guardian 29 August 2009. Retrieved 27 December 2009 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/29/margaret-atwood-year-of-flood

37. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse, p. 19.

38. ibid., p. 6.

Source Citation  
(MLA 8th Edition)

Bouson, J. Brooks. “‘We’re Using up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone.’: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 342, Gale, 2013. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1100115146/LitRC?u=glen55457&sid=LitRC&xid=6c238063. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018. Originally published in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 46, no. 1, 2011, pp. 9-26.

Gale Document Number:
GALE|H1100115146

Surfacing and the Rebirth Journey

Annis Pratt

The Art of Margaret Atwood.

Ed.
Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson .

Toronto:
Anansi,
1981.
p139-157.
Rpt. in

Contemporary Literary Criticism.
Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 371. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale.
From Literature Resource Center.

Full Text:
COPYRIGHT 2015 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: 

[(essay date 1981) In the following essay, Pratt examines the use of archetype in Surfacing from the perspective of feminist criticism. She argues that the protagonist’s “rebirth journey” is significant because, through it, she “transforms herself from victim to hero, turning patriarchal space inside out so that it can no longer limit her being.”]

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing has been generally accepted as an archetypal narrative dealing with a quest for rebirth and transformation. Thus, in a New York Times Book Review column, Francine du Plessix Gray suggested that Atwood has taken a “primeval, matriarchal direction” in her “quest for religious symbols,” and that the “stages of the heroine’s quest are starkly archetypal: Heroine of the thousand faces, she descends, like Persephone, into the world of the dead; she tests, like Perseus, the extreme limits of human endurance; she finds her ultimate vision in the self-enforced solitude.”1 Theologian Carol Christ points out that the hero’s spiritual discoveries by no means alienate her from her own or nature’s body: Atwood, she writes, creates a quest in which “spiritual insight surfaces through attention to the body,” leading to an “achievement of authentic selfhood and power which depends on understanding one’s grounding in nature and natural energies.” Contrasting the spiritual quest, defined as the “self’s journey … in relation to cosmic power or powers,” to the social quest for integration into a collective, Christ nonetheless recognizes that the interiority of such quests as that which structures Surfacing does not necessarily preclude “acommunal dimensions.”2

The journey into the solitary world of the psyche is a process which feminist theoreticians are beginning to recognize as transformational in both the individual and the collective sense. Archetypal narratives, as well as theological formulations and the rituals by which women enact them, are being examined as repositories of power; sources of energy which can enable women to break through social norms dictating gender rigidity into a “new cosmosis,” as Mary Daly puts it, beyond patriarchal space. My intent as a feminist archetypal critic has been threefold: first, to describe the archetypal patterns informing women’s literature; second, to study the way in which such patterns effect literary structures; and third, to speculate about the process by which such texts act upon their audience. In this essay I will be concerned with defining the archetype of the rebirth journey as it applies to the feminine experience in a set of analogous texts. My approach to Surfacing will thus be archetypal and contextual, a process which Black English more aptly defines as “diggin’ out the meaning by shakin’ out the context.” Having placed Surfacing in the context of archetypal and fictional analogues, finally, I will look into the way that such an archetypally informed literary text might effect social change.

The Rebirth Journey

Feminist archetypalists find it helpful to engage in a process which French feminists call volant, punning on the dual connotations of voler as meaning both to steal and to fly away. Descriptions of the process of transformation or “individuation” provided by Jung and his followers are highly informative in elucidating literature. It is important to note, in this context, that Jung deplored the term “Jungian” and disliked his theories to be too rigidly applied, urging each scholar to come to terms with his or her own interpretation of unconscious materials.3 Insofar as it applies to the individual life span (in contrast to the rebirth process of reincarnation or metempsychosis) Jung defines Wiedergeburt as involving either renovation or transformation of an individual so that all of his or her faculties are brought into conscious play. This may involve a “renewal without any change of being, inasmuch as the personality which is renewed is not changed in its essential nature, but only its functions, or parts of the personality, are subjected to healing, strengthening, or improvement.” It may, moreover, take the form of transformation of personality in that the individual undergoes an “essential transformation” or “total rebirth” by taking on the characteristics of a superhuman figure to whom he or she is “initiated in mystery, rite, or dream.”4

The process by which such a crystallization of the personality comes about is one by which the self, which Jung differentiates from the ego, leaves the narrow bounds of its persona or social mask and plunges into the unconscious. The ego, as Jung defines it, “extends only as far as the conscious mind,” whereas the self comprises the “whole of the personality, which includes the unconscious as well as the conscious component. The Ego is thus related to the self as part of the whole.”5 The inner or rebirth journey is at one and the same time personal and communal, in that the world of the unconscious is one shared with the entire human race. The problem which Jung acknowledged, however, is that there is less likely to be a correlation between the world of the unconscious and that of the conscious mind in the feminine as in the masculine experience, since a man can easily discern “definite recognizable patterns” in his inner world bearing analogues to mytho-religious structures provided by his society or mesocosm. A woman’s unconscious, however, is less likely to reflect the received myths of society as known, having its analogues in the pre- or acivilizational worlds of a lost culture. I am suggesting that the various stages of the masculine rebirth journey are likely to be symbolic vehicles for learned experience, whereas the stages of woman’s rebirth quests conform to codes and hieroglyphs alien to western culture. As a result, the male quester will have far less difficulty as a transformed personality in reintegrating into his culture than the woman hero, whose adventures increase her chances for death, madness, self-sacrifice, and accusations of “deviance” at the level of culture.

After reading widely in the field of British and American women’s fiction, I found it possible to develop a description of the woman hero’s quest as to some degree different from that of the male. Woman’s ego or persona can be understood as having its day to day life in the world of cultural experience, by definition a world of gender and social norms. This same layer of being, in my formulation, finds its reflection in the layer of unconscious materials, which for convenience I term the subconscious, immediately “below” that of conscious experience. It is from these two “upper” realms of culture and of subconscious reflections of personal and familial roles that the normative values of much of women’s fiction derive, and these realms play an important role in determining the accommodationist denouements of many novels of manners, family life, and even of social protest. When a woman author wants her character to enact possibilities unsuitable to these realms, she cannot choose material from them but must delve into unconscious materials necessarily alien to her mesocosm or social matrix. In taking her hero down into the unconscious and in returning her from it, however, the author almost never lets her bypass these “upper” worlds but depicts her absorbing them and transcending them in a process of working through inauthentic role behaviours. The world of the unconscious in such fiction is quite likely, moreover, to be a timeless one, precisely because it has no correlation to historical time; and, correspondingly, spaceless or obscure in landscape, patriarchal space being alien to it. In such a world the identity of the self seems in flux, undergoing shifts and leaps in harmony with the interior vision and with the universe as a whole but “deviant” in the sense of being strange to the normative perspective. Because the images, symbols, and archetypal narratives of such a world are puzzling, bizarre, even “crazy,” they are extremely difficult to absorb into the day to day life of consciousness, and hence comes the tearing apart of narrative structure, tacked-on denouements, and sense of irresolution characterizing so much of women’s fiction.

The creation of any schema carries with it the danger of being too absolute, of becoming a model so rigid that texts have to be distorted to fit its dictates. In setting forth the following series of stages in fictional rebirth journeys I intend to indicate only the broadest outlines and to call attention to the fact that not every novel proceeds in this particular sequence of phases. There is, nonetheless, significant enough recurrence of most of the phases in such fiction to make the outline helpful in elucidating the texts.

Phase I: Splitting Off from the World of the Ego

This first aspect of the interior journey takes the form of an acute consciousness of dissatisfaction with the roles and norms typically assumed by the persona and of a consequent turning away from society. Marge Piercy, in Small Changes, shows her hero Beth setting out on a social quest after a particularly awful evening with her husband; Nin’s Lillian in Seduction of the Minotaur, like Lessing’s Martha in The Four-Gated City, crosses an ocean to a new world of endeavour; in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay’s plunge into interior space is precipitated after a trying day with her husband, and Atwood’s hero in Surfacing is introduced to the reader driving away from the city where she has had a traumatic experience.

Phase II: The Green World Guide or Token Helps the Hero Cross the Threshold

As in the epiphanic visions of childhood and adolescence, naturistic moments which help fictional heroes aspire to a different realm of being from the ordinary, the rebirth journey hero is helped to cross the threshold into the unconscious world by some ordinary phenomenon which takes on extraordinary portent. Rhoda, in Woolf’s The Waves, enters a trance through the simple device of a puddle; Kate, in Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark, dreams of a seal which she is to carry on her journey; Mrs. Ramsay’s lighthouse and Beth’s turtle in Small Changes perform similar functions. As for Atwood’s hero, “the lake was the entrance for me.”

Phase III: Confrontation with Parental Figures

In women’s rebirth fiction this confrontation most often takes place with memory figures rather than with actual persons, and constitutes an experience which belongs both to the realm of subconscious or societal experience and to the powerful mother- and father-imagos haunting the deepest reaches of the unconscious. It is thus a key phase if the hero is to complete the full plunge to the nadir of her unconscious, and frequently becomes an agon or terminal struggle if unsuccessful. As we shall see below, the heroes in The Four-Gated City and Seduction of the Minotaur, like Atwood’s hero, experience this struggle as a difficult passage crucial to their final developments.

Phase IV: The Green World Lover

Whether as an actual or a reverie figure, an ideal and distinctly non-patriarchal lover often aids in the final journey of the self into the fountainhead of Eros or Libido which contains the drive and energy of the transformed personality. In Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! a tall corn god of fertility and death bears Alexandra through despair to survival; Heathcliff provides such a quasi-naturistic figure leading Brontë’s Catherine on to a consummation after death or liebestod in Wuthering Heights; the love-making of a character called “Three” in June Arnold’s The Cook and the Carpenter becomes a catalyst in the integration of the Carpenter’s personality, and in Atwood’s Surfacing Joe, a figure from the world of the Ego and of the City, is transformed in the hero’s mind into a primevally naturistic lover, a furry buffalo. Sometimes the Green world lover actually is an animal, as may be the case with the unicorn archetype which appears so often in women’s poetry and needlework.6 It appears as a heron in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” a fox in Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, a donkey in May Sarton’s Joanna and Ulysses, a stag in witchcraft rituals, and a bull in the Cretan mysteries of Minos. The hero may love it, pretend to be it (as in Jo March’s identification with a horse in Little Women), or follow it. In the modern novel of rebirth such figures seem to represent the incorporation into the personality of one’s sexual and natural energies, one’s Pan, as it were, one’s own internal Adonis.

Phase V: The Shadow

Although the figure of one’s “shadow” or worst personality, one’s anti-self, does not necessarily appear as such in all rebirth novels, at some phase in the inner journey there tends to be a coming to terms with all that is negative or destructive prior to tapping one’s deepest streams of creativity. Martha, in Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, overtly struggles with a figure she calls her “self-hater” as she is guided by the “devil” through a series of self-recognitions which she calls the “stations of the cross.” Nin’s Lillian finds herself denying help to her animus-figure or potential guide in Seduction of the Minotaur, and, indirectly, taking responsibility for his death; the shadowy or life-denying side of Mrs. Ramsay’s lighthouse seems to claim her for death a third of the way through the novel, and Atwood’s hero is constantly aware of her brother as the technologically violent, murderer-side of her own personality.

Phase VI: The Final Descent to the Nadir

Psychoanalytically, the plunge to the nadir of the unconscious is a fulcrum of danger, taking one to the self beneath self, and as likely to lead to madness as to transformation. Fictional heroes often experience a chaos of surreal images and symbols at this phase, disassociated fantasies and chaotic noises that mimic clinical madness. This experience, which I would term “literary insanity” in contrast to the objective horrors of true madness, can either disintegrate the hero entirely or provide the turning point in her quest. The problem is that “insanity,” as Phyllis Chesler and others have documented, tends whether literary or clinical to mimic the accepted role of women in society, that of a victim trapped and suffocating within an enclosure. Even if she is able to take the leap through this layer of being, the transformed hero is going to have difficulties at the ascent phase in re-integrating herself into “normal” society.

Phase VII: Ascent and Re-Entry into Society as Known

Although there is no doubt that the masculine hero who has assimilated his “anima” or “feminine other” as well as his “shadow” into a fully integrated personality may have some difficulty in a gender role oriented society, such heroes are depicted returning to the level of the ego and contributing the elixir they have won to their civilizations. For the fully transformed woman hero, however, re-entry is far more problematical, since her assumed role in society is by necessity secondary or auxiliary and thus her elixir is not only devalued but a threat to civilization. She is met upon her ascent, thus, with a forceful backlash, an attempt to dwarf her personality and re-accommodate her to secondary status. It is for this reason that so many women’s rebirth novels are, at best, open-ended, the hero’s precise place in society being left to guesswork on the part of the reader. Sometimes, however, a non-civilizational “new space” is actually provided for her, as in the case of the post-nuclear-holocaust island where Lessing’s Martha finds her collective. Although the returning woman hero is unlikely to be able to affect a broad sector of her society, however, she is quite often depicted as passing on her boon or elixir to one apprentice, a younger woman who may in turn pass the tradition of transcendence to her own initiate. Lily Briscoe is such an apprentice to Mrs. Ramsay, Rita to Martha in The Four-Gated City, the young woman interviewer to Mrs. Stevens in Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, etc. In many cases the hero seems to initiate herself, looking back to her own mother or to an idealized mother-figure as model. This seems to me to be the case with Atwood’s hero in Surfacing and with Nin’s Lillian in Seduction of the Minotaur. Sometimes, finally, the transformed woman hero seems to be transferring her boon of power not to any figure within the text but to the woman reader herself.

Although a full scale textual analysis of a series of rebirth novels would be too cumbersome for my purpose here, it seems helpful to approach Surfacing obliquely, by comparison to several texts structured in conformity to the same archetypal narrative. Since I have written elsewhere about Mrs. Ramsay’s rebirth journey in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,7 I will summarize here those broad features which are of help on providing a context for Surfacing, and then develop an analysis of Seduction of the Minotaur for the purposes of comparison and contrast.

Mrs. Ramsay and the Androgynous Elixir

With a markedly erotic set of kinesthetic images, Woolf describes Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as barren and sterile, having to be completed by Mrs. Ramsay’s pouring of a “delicious fecundity,” a “fountain and spray of life” into his empty being. This experience of plunging down into her own “fountainhead” of energy and giving life to the world through it is linked consistently with the figure of the lighthouse through imagery of rising, illumination, circling, and stroking. The actual lighthouse, contemplated by the weary Mrs. Ramsay, thus becomes an inner imago or archetypal symbol around which she rallies her self be repeated journeys into the depths of her unconscious. The rays of the lighthouse become, thus, emanations of an inner or green world lover, “as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight.” Wholly an inward and nonsocial force, the lighthouse provides her with escape from her world, “something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband.” Ultimately, then, Mrs. Ramsay turns away from those she has attempted to fructify with her inner elixir, and dies of “a stroke.”8

Although empowered by an unusual androgynous fusion of forces normatively considered “male” and “female” in sexual import, Mrs. Ramsay is not able to survive with the totality of self she has achieved, the process having, apparently, been too one-sided. “When the libido leaves the bright upper world,” writes Jung, “whether from choice, or from inertia, or from fate, it sinks back into its own depths, into the source from which it originally flowed.” Once back at the sources of being, however, a fulcrum is reached which is a “dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life.”9 It is at this point, I would conclude, that Mrs. Ramsay becomes unable to return to the level of the ego, and perishes. In the structure of the novel, “Time Passes” in turn constitutes a fulcrum of the tripartite plot division, in which Mrs. Ramsay becomes embodied in the “ebb and flow” of objects which take over the abandoned house at their will, arranging themselves not according to human dictates but according to a timeless and spaceless essence. The process by which the house and its contents settle into a personless flux of “things as they are” and are rescued only at the last moment by the return of the family constitutes a rebirth experience within the wider rebirth structure of the total text. As a tour de force of lyric prose, “Time Passes” provides a variation on the tranquil, personless state of mind which is at one and the same time Mrs. Ramsay’s elixir and her nemesis.

The third section of To the Lighthouse reverses the archetypal Demeter/Kore narrative (although Jane Ellen Harrison notes that mother/young woman or mother/daughter are always interchangeable in import) in that Lily Briscoe is apprenticed to the spirit of the mother figure who is depicted as having descended into the world of the dead. Brooding over the painting and adding in brush strokes in a kinesthetic pattern reminiscent of Mrs. Ramsay’s lighthouse trances, Lily seems to perceive the older woman leaving the world behind for the realm of the dead. She sees that she has let her “flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on to the grass and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without question or complaint,” is journeying away “Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn.”10 The field of flowers suggests the Rharian plain at Thria which Demeter fructified after the restoration of Persephone, and the spilled basket the basket of flowers which Persephone dropped when she was abducted from a field by Pluto. The basket may also represent Demeter’s Cista Mystica of the Eleusinian mysteries, the basket in which she keeps the sacred (and purportedly androgynous) symbols sought by the initiate. Lily is able to put the final stroke to her painting when Mr. Carmichael, whom she perceives as Neptune, stands erect and looks out to sea: she has perhaps been empowered by an appearance of Poseidon, lover of Demeter and father of Persephone. Where in the Demeter/Kore narrative and in the rites based upon it the mother grieves after the abduction and rape of her daughter and quests through heaven and earth to bring her back to life, in To the Lighthouse Lily as daughter or younger woman apprentice seeks the meaning of Mrs. Ramsay’s life after her death. Her role is one of enquiry into the source and nature of Mrs. Ramsay’s unique elixir, of absorption of it into her own art, corresponding perhaps to the quest of the Eleusinian initiate for an understanding and assimilation of the power of the goddess. As a rhetorical structure, To the Lighthouse constitutes a ritual of passage in which a younger woman learns, on the one hand, to preserve herself from such tyrannical (and gender-rigid) demands as Mr. Ramsay’s; and, on the other hand, to absorb sufficient inner and asocial powers to pursue her own creativity.

Seduction of the Minotaur and the Hieroglyphic Elixir

Anais Nin’s Seduction of the Minotaur is the last novel in the five volume Cities of the Interior, a multivolumed work which differs from such novel sequences as Lessing’s The Children of Violence and Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage in being less sequential than cyclical, dealing not with the development of one hero but with the interaction of three—Lillian, Sabina, and Djuana. The first and last volumes nonetheless are chiefly concerned with Lillian’s quest for selfhood, and the final volume is structured as a rebirth journey which she undertakes upon a “solar barque” to the land of “Golconda,” which is also the land of her own unconsciousness. Lillian’s descent into the underworld parallels Mrs. Ramsay’s in some ways, but the denouements form an interesting contrast: where Mrs. Ramsay’s power is explicit in nature and absorbed by Lily, Lillian is left without a full understanding of what she has experienced, her elixir or goal of her quest being hieroglyphic.

Before she is able to proceed into the depths of the unconscious, Lillian must come to terms with personal material having to do with memories of her mother and father and of how they perceived her. “Already,” she muses, “she regretted having come. This was not a journey in her solar barque. It was a night journey into the past, and the thread that had pulled her was one of accidental resemblances, familiarity, the past. She had been unable to live for three months a new life, in a new city, without being caught by an umbilical cord and brought back to the figure of her father.” Lillian’s problem is that she cannot perceive herself adequately behind the mirrors of her parents’ eyes: “Lillian had never seen herself with her own eyes … You retained as upon a delicate retina, your mother’s image of you, as the first and the only authentic one, her judgement of your acts.” What Lillian needs to grow is the ability to possess her own self-vision, in spite of or in contrast to the way husband/lover/mother/father have previously defined her personality. She is beset and confused not only by these familial distortions of her authenticity but also by gender expectations to which she does not conform. As an adolescent, Nin remarks in the first volume of the sequence (Ladders to Fire), she has been both “aggressive” and “womanly,” and although Nin associates the one with masculinity and the other with femininity she sees her hero as one human unity: “She had two voices, one which felt deep like the voice of a man, and another light and innocent. Two women disputing inside of her.”11

As an inner and empowering imago paralleling Mrs. Ramsay’s lighthouse, Lillian carries inside of her mind an “inner chamber” containing a figure which is neither herself nor her own mother but an idealized archetype of maternity:

The mother madonna holding the child and nourishing it. The haunting mother image forever holding a small child.
Then there was the child itself, the child inhabiting a world of peaceful, laughing animals, rich trees, in valleys of festive color. The child in her eyes appeared with its eyes closed. It was dreaming the fertile valleys, the small warm house, the Byzantine flowers, the tender animals and the abundance. It was dreaming and afraid to awaken. It was dreaming the lightness of the sky, the warmth of the earth, the fecundity of the colors.
It was afraid to awaken.12
As in the Demeter/Kore archetype, in which mother and daughter mingle in being and take on each other’s powers, Lillian, in this passage, is at one and the same time mother and child. The inner world of the child is the paradisiacal vision of the green world filled with friendly animals which occurs so often in women’s embroidery and tapestry work as the tree of life or the island of animals dominated by a beneficent goddess and her maidens. The madonna figure represents a positive imago in contrast to Lillian’s maternal experiences both with her own mother and as a mother to her children, whom she has left behind with her husband because they were imposed upon her by social norms and not sprung from the inner authenticity of her own choices:
Who had desired the children? She could not remember the first impetus, the first choice, the first desire for these, nor how they came to be. It was as if it had happened in her sleep. Lillian, guided by her background, her mother, her sisters, her habits, her home as a child, her blindness in regard to her own desires, had made all of this and then lived in it, but it had not been made out of the deeper elements of her nature, and she was a stranger in it.13
The world to which she turns for renewal of self in Seduction of the Minotaur is the green and tropical land of Golconda, and she attempts through it to undo the alienation from nature that has made her bear children in this absent-minded fashion. During her re-immersion into the plant and animal world of Golconda the memories of mother and father are dealt with, and Lillian is enabled to undertake the plunge into the unconscious through the guide or animus figure of Dr. Hernandez. He dies before he is able to help her to complete her quest, however, and she realizes that having failed him, she has failed herself: “If only they had gone down together, down the caverns of the soul with picks, lanterns, cords, oxygen, x-ray, food, following the blueprints of all the messages from the geological depths where lay hidden the imprisoned self.” He cannot go with her, however, and she must undertake a journey without the help of all the tools that he might have provided. As a result:
She was now like those French speleologists who had descended thousands of feet into the earth and found ancient caves covered with paintings and carvings. But Lillian carried no searchlight and no nourishment. Nothing but the wafer granted to those who believe in symbolism, a wafer in place of bread. And all she had to follow were the inscriptions of her dreams, half-effaced hieroglyphs on half-broken statues. And no guide in the darkness but a scream through the eyes of a statue.14
This chaotic world of jumbled signals is that timeless realm of surreal imagery and confused voices which Lessing’s Martha as well as Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay and Atwood’s hero experience. She has no true nourishment with her, only a “wafer” which is at one remove from bread, a merely sacramental food which is useless to Lillian since she does not have any “blueprint” to the mythological or theological system informing it. Like the hieroglyphs in the caves and the inscriptions in her dreams, the bread is at a level removed from helpful substance, a symbolic and ritual vehicle which has lost its referent. In this way it corresponds to the empty forms and puzzling masks surviving from prepatriarchal times, coded ciphers which are confusing, at best, and more often horrifying to the visitor from the world of “normal” society.

The incomplete nature of Lillian’s inner quest is recapitulated in a vision that she has of her own reflection in the window of the airplane in which she is flying home. She sees not herself but a “minotaur,” which “was not a monster. It was a reflection upon a Mirror, a masked woman, Lillian herself, the hidden masked part of herself unknown to her, who had ruled her acts.” In the pre-Hellenic Cretan religion the minotaur was the animal lover of the queens, the “bull of Minos” corresponding to the horned god of the witches. He thus represented the animus and the green world lover for the queen, who participated in a Hieros Gamos or love-making ritual with him in order to establish her erotic, political, and religious hegemony. Queen and Minotaur, like Lady and Unicorn, Indian Maiden and Buffalo, are powerful figures of feminine autonomy and erotic power. For Lillian, however, the minotaur is merely at the level of “mask” worn as cover to the self, the indication being that the archetype is not wholly assimilated or integrated with her self and that she is not fully transformed. Her persona or ego is thus at the denouement in disjunction with its own unconscious materials, the hieroglyphs containing her elixir remaining encoded.

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and the Elixir of Maternity

Where the outcome of Lillian’s quest is problematical, that of the hero of Atwood’s Surfacing is as precise as Mrs. Ramsay’s. As in To the Lighthouse, a quest is described in which the hero plunges down through subconscious to unconscious materials and is empowered by absorbing the archetypal symbols available to her at the fountainhead of her personality and being. This achievement, moreover, is at one and the same time a spiritual and a markedly naturistic one, the green world and a green world lover or erotic figure making the outcome an integration of body and soul. As in Woolf and in Nin, moreover, the text is structured according to a penetration of a world of unconscious materials which are at one and the same time so wholly new as to seem bizarre and, through analogy with such archetypes as the Demeter/Kore narrative, wholly and radically “old.”

The island in the Canadian lake constitutes a green world of childhood remembered and a locus of transformation or rebirth, thus conflating Lillian’s child’s dream and the land of Golconda as well as unifying the consciousness Woolf divided between Mrs. Ramsay and her disciple, Lily. The hero brings her own patriarchal space or subconscious gender world with her in the form of David and Anna, a couple hideously involved in normative “male and female” behaviour.

The hero’s mother and father provide her with figures both from the subconscious or familial and from the unconscious realms. On the one hand, they represent her memories of her actual parents, but on the other hand they bring gifts, like Mrs. Ramsay’s, which transcend the personal. These gifts, moreover, constitute hieroglyphs which, unlike Lillian’s, are translatable into agents of transformation. The hero comes to the island because of reports that her father, who has been living alone following her mother’s death, is missing. Looking at his scribbled notes, she is at first fearful that he has gone mad but soon realizes that they are sketches of ancient Indian cave drawings and symbols. Whether her father is dead, mad, or returned from the dead becomes all one to the hero, who finds herself drawn by the power latent within these archetypal figures into a world which she seeks for her own sake. Having found the site of the drawings, and having dived down to it from her canoe, she comes upon a “dark oval, trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead.” It is, in actuality, her drowned father, but it also suggests the memory of the foetus whose abortion had traumatized her and of the frogs and snakes that her brother had put to death in closed jars, “evil grails.” She realizes that her father had achieved a new and powerful world, whose elixir she in turn desires to absorb.

He had discovered new places, new oracles, they were things he was seeking the way I had seen, true vision; at the end, after the failure of logic. When it happened the first time he must have been terrified, it would be like stepping through a usual door and finding yourself in a different galaxy, purple trees and red moons and a green sun.15
The “new places” which she will seek are repositories of power finding their expression in an old/new language of hieroglyphs, alinguistic, prespeech, and implicitly acivilizational like so much of the content of women’s unconscious realms. Where the father has translated them for scholarly interpretation, the hero will have to find some far less culturally acceptable use if she is to become an effective woman self.

“It would be right for my mother to have left something for me also, a legacy,” she realizes. “His was complicated, tangled, but hers would be simple as a hand, it would be final.” To a certain extent the mother’s legacy is the image of herself as a strong figure close to nature, able to scare away bears, rescue her son from drowning, and tame the wild birds. More personally, the hero finds her mother’s boon in a scrapbook of her own childish drawings, specifically one of “a woman with a round moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside her and gazing out. Opposite her was a man with horns on his head and a barbed tail.” The gift of her own drawing is a gift from her own unconscious, and although at first glance Atwood seems to be sexually stereotyping these figures, they represent, when taken together, the same type of androgynous projection as Mrs. Ramsay’s “masculine” and “feminine” qualities and the mixture of two voices, “male” and “female,” in the unitary woman, Lillian. The dual symbol is analogous to the powerful queen and her horned consort, and in turn to the figure of a witch with her stag lover. The hero has deplored the split in herself between “head,” which she associates with “the gods of the head,” “antlers rooted in the brain,” and the round moon body. The goal of her quest is to integrate body and head, nature and mind, in one personality. Her transformation consists, thus, in taking over one by one the faculties which she has projected upon others rather than bring them to consciousness as parts of an integrated selfhood. Thus her decision to get pregnant by Joe, whom she associates, archetypically, with a buffalo, seems at first glance to be one which will force her back into a social role but is actually a self-actualizing choice, in that it is derived not from the subconscious realm of personal or gender role expectations but from an unconscious world where maternity is a form of power. Her act of conception, self-initiated and self-contained, is one in which she is wholly central and authentic:

He trembles and I can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been prisoned for so long, its eyes and teeth phosporescent; the two halves clasp, interlocking like fingers, it buds, it sends out fronds. This time I will do it by myself, squatting on old newspapers in a corner alone; or on leaves, dry leaves, a heap of them, that’s cleaner. The baby will slip out easily as an egg, a kitten, and I’ll lick it off and bite the cord, the blood returning to the ground where it belongs; the moon will be full, pulling. In the morning I will be able to see it: it will be covered with shining fur, a god, I will never teach it any words.16
The lost child is in one dimension the aborted foetus, the imagery of leaves and fronds contrasting to the metallic imagery surrounding an operation which the hero regrets. It is also, however, her own lost child or childhood, surfacing to empower her, an inner self that she is delivering into personal transformation that is the rebirth experience. By uniting herself with nature, literally floating naked in the water and wandering at one with the island in a prelinguistic, “mad” state, she conceives new life in an affirmation of a woman’s unique powers of birth. All of this is done wholly in rejection of her culture, which, in the guise of David, considers her a deviant, a man hater. In Mary Daly’s terminology, she goes “crazy” deliberately in order to empower herself through “the role of witch and madwoman … tantamount to a declaration of identity beyond the good and evil of patriarchy’s world, and beyond sanity and insanity.”17 Where Mrs. Ramsay dies, leaving Lily a heritage which she can personally assimilate but which has little import for her role in society; and where Lillian returns to her family without having fully absorbed her elixir; Atwood creates a hero shockingly deviant precisely because, having fused in her personal transformation both spiritual and natural powers, she fully intends to complete her rebirth journey by returning to the mesocosm.

The Rhetorical Effect of Rebirth Fiction

Feminist critics have sometimes worried that writers like Woolf, Nin, and Atwood focus too narrowly upon inward, “personalistic” visions, to the point of suggesting a retreat from social life rather than engagement with it. “For Mrs. Ramsay,” writes Elaine Showalter, “death is a mode of self-assertion. Refined to its essences, abstracted from its physicality and anger, denied any action, Woolf’s vision of womanhood is as deadly as it is disembodied. The ultimate room of one’s own is the grave.”18 My hypothesis, in contrast, is that the retreat into sanctuaries and rooms constitutes a reculant pour mieux sauter, a drawing back in order to leap further; and that fantasies are indeed prevalent in women’s fiction but to a positive effect, constituting projections of worlds of being desired by author, hero, and reader alike, treasure houses of energies locked into symbols whose import has been forgotten. As Mary Daly puts it, the contents of our inner selves constitute “those flames of spiritual imagination and cerebral fantasy which can be a new dawn.” It becomes the task of the feminist archetypalist to decipher these symbols through comparison to a broad range of analogues not only in literature but in the preliterary materials of folklore, craft, and mythology.

As I have indicated throughout this essay, one variety of archetypal rebirth narrative seems particularly helpful in elucidating Surfacing and analogous texts—the Demeter/Kore story, dealing with the Anabasis of the daughter from the world of the dead and leading to mysteries or rituals in which initiates reenact Demeter’s quest and rescue. Scholars have long recognized that the Demeter/Kore archetype and its embodiment in the Eleusinian rituals constitutes a uniquely feminine experience, in the sense that its appeal and ultimately its empowering effects are felt far more strongly by women than by men. Jane Ellen Harrison was perhaps the first to point out that the material is “almost uncontaminated by Olympian [Aryan/Patriarchal] usage” and that it derives from pre-Hellenic Thrace and Crete.19 Jung recognizes that, although a male initiate might experience the Demeter/Kore figures as animas, they are of far greater importance as imagos representing the superordinate or fully integrated feminine personality of the woman: “The Demeter-Kore myth,” he asserts, “is far too feminine to have been merely the result of an anima-projection. Although the Anima can, as we have said, experience herself in Demeter-Kore, she is yet of a wholly different nature. She is in the highest sense femme à homme, a man’s woman, whereas Demeter-Kore exists on the plane of mother-daughter experience, which is alien to the man and shuts him out. In fact, the psychology of the Demeter cult has all the features of a matriarchal order of society, where the man is an indispensable but on the whole disturbing factor.”20 The effect of participation in the Demeter/Kore mystery, and of absorbing its underlying archetype, Jung feels, is one in which by a mutual empowering, an intermingling of the elixirs of mother and daughter, an individual achieves “a place and a meaning in the life of the generations” and, at the same time, “is rescued from her isolation and restored to wholeness. All ritual preoccupation with archetypes ultimately has this aim and this result.”21

Women’s rebirth fiction represents, it seems to me, one form of “ritual preoccupation with archetypes” having as its effect the transformation not only of the hero but of the reader. The archetypal narratives and symbols that one finds in such fiction (and which may indeed be remnants of a far more coherent tapestry than has been imagined) make of each novel a ritual experience for the reader analogous to participation in such mysteries as that enacting the Demeter/Kore narrative. The novel, and indeed all of our literature, might be defined as a literate or written-down variation on pre-literary and folk practices which are available to the reader as to the author in the realm of the unconscious, even when they have long been absent from day to day life. A woman knitter once wanted to learn to spin wool for herself, and found the directions in the handbook to spinning difficult to follow. When she actually picked up her spindle and began to wind the threads through it and to twirl it in rhythm she found that her fingers knew already what was arcane to her intellect. She coined the term “unventing” for such a rediscovery of a lost skill, through intuition, a bringing of latent knowledge out of oneself, in contrast to “invention” or creation from scratch. Following this model, I would suggest that the woman’s novel is a form of “unvention,” depending upon a repository of knowledge lost from the mesocosm but still available to the author and recognizable to her reader as deriving from a world with which, at some level of her inner mind, she is already familiar.

In very few instances in women’s fiction do we find a hero who has been able to return to the “upper world” of the ego wholly in control of the “unvented” archetypal materials experienced in the rebirth journey. What makes Surfacing so unique in this genre is that the hero seems wholly transformed and wholly determined to “surface” in her full powers back into the world of culture. What has happened to her is that she has been so empowered by her fusion of spiritual or psychic and natural energies that she has brought about an implosion of her own world, a shifting of her selfhood from its stance on the margins of male society to a state of being in which her own feminine personality is central and patriarchy has itself moved to her margins. She thus transforms herself from victim to hero, turning patriarchal space inside out so that it can no longer limit her being. Although the reader does not experience the hero’s return to society, her impression is that she can never be returned to a peripheral or secondary status.

In what way, then, does the novel as experienced ritual affect the reader and lead, in turn, to social change? The restorative power of women’s fiction upon both the individual and her collective, it seems to me, consists in the dialectical nature of its rhetorical process. Most novels, indeed, seem to be strung upon a deadlock between contrary forces—societal and gender norms, on the one hand, and the desire of the heroes for human development, on the other—and rarely is this polarity resolved into synthesis within a given text. Even, as in the case of Surfacing, when the process which dialecticians describe as aufheben—to negate, absorb, and transcend—seems most fully carried out, the social future of the hero remains uncertain. Such texts seem to provide a description of blue and yellow and of the process by which they will become green, only to launch their messages into a color blind society. Insofar as it negates patriarchal behaviour patterns, absorbs (via the hero’s coming to terms with the materials of the subconscious) social roles, and points towards a consciousness that transcends gender, the novel is a symbolic vehicle indicating a state of being which it does not in and of itself contain. It asks a question, poses a riddle, cries out for action, but remains essentially rhetorical, an artifact or ideal equation but not a mode of action. Life does not, however, consist in hypotheses or in ideas but in the affecting of society by individuals. In my hypothesis, the final element in the fictional dialectic, the synthesis, does not occur within the text but in the mind of the reader, the text being social only insofar as he or she is prepared to put the symbolic message into action. Such a relationship between fiction and its audience, or between any work of imagination and the perceiver, is comparable to the relationship between dream and dreamer. In our waking life we derive benefits from those long hours of the night spent in the world of the unconscious, where we flex our psychic muscles in the face of nightmare and vision alike. Fiction is recreational in the same sense as the dream, “made up” for essentially ethical ends, for praxis, and its effect is to bring us face to face with both negative experiences and visions of the good so that we may negate the one, absorb the other, and thus prepare ourselves for transcendence.

Women novelists (to put it another way) have been gathering us around campfires where they have “spooked” us with horrific lore and provided us with adventures for emulation. They have given us maps of the patriarchal battlefield and of the landscape covering our ruined subculture, and they have brought out of those ruins the lost symbols of our power. Most importantly, they have puffed up the worst aspects of the enemy so that he/she becomes laughable, a paper monster. They have strengthened us with moments of epiphany when we feel a quality rising from our depths which altogether transcends gender polarities so destructive to human life. They have dug the goddess out of our ruins and cleansed the debris from her face, casting aside the gynophobic masks hiding her power and her beneficence. In so doing, they have made of women’s fiction a pathway to the authentic self, the roots of our selves before consciousness of self, and shown us the way to the healing waters of our innermost being.

Notes

1. Francine du Plessix Gray, “Nature as Nunnery,” New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1977, p. 29.

2. Carol P. Christ, “Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and Vision,” Signs, 2, No. 2 (Winter 1976), 330, 317.

3. See Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975), p. 3.

4. C. G. Jung, “Concerning Rebirth,” The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 114.

5. C. G. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious, p. 187.

6. I have written an article on this subject entitled “‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’: Notes towards a Pre-Literary History of Women’s Archetypes,” Feminist Studies, 4, No. 1 (February 1978), 163-94.

7. “Sexual Imagery in To the Lighthouse,” Modern Fiction Studies, 18, No. 3 (Autumn 1972), 417-431.

8. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth, 1960), p. 95.

9. C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 293.

10. To the Lighthouse, pp. 308-9.

11. Anais Nin, Cities of the Interior (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1974), pp. 531, 540, and from Ladders to Fire, p. 58.

12. Ibid., Ladders to Fire, p. 14.

13. Ibid., p. 18.

14. Seduction of the Minotaur, p. 544.

15. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Popular Library, 1972), p. 171.

16. Ibid., p. 191.

17. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 65-66.

18. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 297.

19. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 120.

20. C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 177, and as quoted in C. Kerenyi, Eleusis—Archetypal Images of Mother and Daughter, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. xxi-xxxii.

21. “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” p. 188.

Source Citation  
(MLA 8th Edition)

Pratt, Annis. “Surfacing and the Rebirth Journey.” Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 371, Gale, 2015. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1100118846/LitRC?u=glen55457&sid=LitRC&xid=90954b12. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018. Originally published in The Art of Margaret Atwood, edited by Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson, Anansi, 1981, pp. 139-157.

Gale Document Number:
GALE|H1100118846

Critical Essay on “Surfacing”

Wendy Perkins

Novels for Students.
Ed. Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale, 2002.
From Literature Resource Center.

Full Text:
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: 

In her most popular and critically acclaimed novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood traces her heroine’s efforts to cope, endure, and survive the oppressive totalitarian regime that governs her life. In a similar vein, Atwood places the unnamed narrator in Surfacing into a more realistic, contemporary setting that does not threaten her physical safety. Yet, she too must reconstruct herself to preserve a strong sense of self.

What finally brings her back to reality and to a refusal to allow herself to be victimized any longer is her belief that she is pregnant with Joe’s child. She considers the possible new pregnancy as a way to absolve herself from the guilt she feels over the abortion.

The narrator in Surfacing has been victimized and disabled by a society that promoted male superiority and domination. She entered into a relationship with a married man who forced her to abort their unborn child. This experience so devastated the narrator that she has suppressed her memory of it and has cut herself off from any real contact with her world. At one point in the novel, she admits

I realized I didn’t feel much of anything, I hadn’t for a long time. Perhaps I’d been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn’t have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing on a wound, shutting me into my head.

When she looks at the pictures she had made as a child, searching for some answers to her growing sense of unease, she finds

no hints or facts, I didn’t know when it had happened; I must have been all right then; but after that I’d allowed myself to be cut in two. . . . There had been an accident and I came apart. The other half, the one locked away, was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached, terminal . . . numb.

She acknowledges that she “rehearses” emotions, “naming them: joy, peace, guilt, release, love and hate, react, relate, what to feel was like what to wear, you watched the others and memorized it,” and that “in a way it was a relief, to be exempt from feeling.”

She has tried to form a relationship with her lover Joe, but only halfheartedly. When he asks her if she loves him, she responds, “I want to. . . . I do in a way,” but ultimately, she cannot give him what he needs, a confirmation of himself. She concludes, “David is like me. . . . We are the ones that don’t know how to love, there is something essential missing in us . . . atrophy of the heart.”

For the first half of the novel, she allows herself to be victimized to a lesser degree by Joe. While she does refuse to marry him, she quietly accepts his bullying. Henry C. Phelps in his article on Surfacing for the Explicator concludes that Joe exhibits “a seeming solicitude toward women that masks a more fundamental antipathy.” Phelps notes that Joe’s behavior reveals a “blend of overt concern and strained hostility toward women.” For example, “relief gleams through his beard” when Joe does not accept the narrator’s offer to search for her father. He reveals his own lack of emotion when he asks the narrator to marry him, couching his proposal in what Phelps considers “tepid, even antagonistic terms”: “We should get married,” Joe remarks. “I think we should . . . we might as well.” When she refuses, he becomes hostile: “Sometimes,” he complains, “I get the feeling you don’t give a s— about me.” Later, when she continues to rebuff his attempts to reconcile, he seems as if he is about to hit her.

In an effort to suppress the painful memory of the abortion, she creates a fictional past that provides a more comfortable explanation for her inability to commit to a relationship with Joe. She tells him that “I’ve been married before and it didn’t work out. I had a baby too. . . . I don’t want to go through that again.” She has convinced herself that she had a baby with her “husband” and that for some unnamed reason gave the baby up. Yet she notes that previously she had never told Anna or Joe about her baby, explaining

I have to behave as though it doesn’t exist, because for me it can’t; it was taken away from me, exported, deported. A section of my own life, sliced off from me like a Siamese twin, my own flesh canceled. Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.

Jerome H. Rosenberg, in his article on the novel for Twayne’s World Authors Series Online comments on the narrator’s fictionalization of her past:

We do not perceive these “facts” as deliberate lies; rather, they are related to us as elements of the narrator’s most profound belief regarding her past. If we recognize them as falsehoods at all, we realize that they are the protagonist’s psychological defense, her means of avoiding yet one more death, one more sign of mortality–but this one a result of her own actions, her own decision to act, her own assertion of power. It is this secret, what she later calls this “death . . . inside me,” that she has layered “over, a cyst, a tumor, black pearl.” And it is this repressed guilt that she must bring to the surface, must exorcise, before she can become whole.

Patricia F. Goldblatt notes that “After enduring, accepting, regurgitating, denying, and attempting to please and cope, Atwood’s protagonists begin to take action and change their lives.” In Surfacing, the narrator’s search for herself is ironically triggered by her search for her father. As she tries to recall the details of her past while she looks for clues on the island about her father’s disappearance, the truth of her own life begins to emerge. When she dives below the surface of the lake, she symbolically submerges into her own past and allows her emotional response to the abortion to surface. Goldblatt concludes, however, that before the narrator can establish a strong sense of identity, she hits “rock bottom. . . . Fed up with the superficiality of her companions, [she] banishes them and submits to paranoia.” Alone on the island, she tries to strip away the trappings of civilization to discover a sense of self:

Everything I can’t break . . . I throw on the floor. . . . I take off my clothes . . . I dip my head beneath the water . . . I leave my dung, droppings on the ground . . . I hollow a lair near the woodpile . . . I scramble on hands and knees . . . I could be anything, a tree, a deer skeleton, a rock.

What finally brings her back to reality and to a refusal to allow herself to be victimized any longer is her belief that she is pregnant with Joe’s child. She considers the possible new pregnancy as a way to absolve herself from the guilt she feels over the abortion. After she and Joe have intercourse, she insists, “He trembles and then I can feel my lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me.” She must return to civilization and contact with others because her child “must be born, allowed.” This “act of healing” as Rosenberg terms it helps her reconstruct herself by establishing a strong sense of who she is and what she wants. Rosenberg concludes

To renounce power, to remain a passive victim of others, she sees, is an exercise in futility: if she wishes to survive in the historical, struggle-ridden world into which we are all born, she must “join in the war, or . . . be destroyed.” She wishes there were “other choices” but sees there are not. What is morally essential, however, is for her to acknowledge her power, accept her imperfection, take responsibility for her actions, and “give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone.”

By the end of the novel, when she determines to reenter society and perhaps establish a strong relationship with Joe, she accomplishes these goals.

Commenting on Atwood’s focus on the “plight of women in society” in her novels, Goldblatt concludes that Atwood:

has reconstructed this victim, proving to her and to us that we all possess the talent and the strength to revitalize our lives and reject society’s well-trodden paths that suppress the human spirit. She has shown us that we can be vicariously empowered by our surrogate, who not only now smiles but winks back at us, daring us to reclaim our own female identities.

In Surfacing, Atwood illustrates for her readers, through the transformation of the main character, the indefatigable nature of the human spirit.

Source Citation  
(MLA 8th Edition)

Perkins, Wendy. “Critical Essay on ‘Surfacing’.” Novels for Students, edited by Elizabeth Thomason, vol. 13, Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420037671/LitRC?u=glen55457&sid=LitRC&xid=adc1be83. Accessed 9 Feb. 2018.

Gale Document Number:
GALE|H1420037671

Rereading Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood:
Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology

S o r a y a C o p l e y

Abstract

This article rereads early dystopian eco-narratives and explores the ways
in which Margaret Atwood and Marge Piercy manipulate established
generic conventions to make correlations between their fiction and the
‘real’ world. It explores the avenues of hope which both authors find
necessary for the future by close textual analysis of the three novels under
discussion. The article is significantly informed by eco-feminist theories,
which centre on a basic belief that ecological crisis is the inevitable effect
of a Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture. It explores the ways in
which the symbolic equation of woman with nature is implemented by
characters in the novels, and the consequences this has for other characters.
The article explores the engagement of both authors with the eco-feminist
idea of women’s unique agency in an era of ecological crisis.

Introduction

Both Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood issue profound warnings
not only with regard to the catastrophic consequences of patriarchal
capitalism on the planet, but also in their exploration of the role of the
individual in bringing about political change. The following article
rereads earlier novels by both authors and explores the contemporary
global relevance of these texts with reference both to traditional
Western ideologies and to early-twenty-first-century journalism
which contextualizes some of the controversial issues dealt with by
Atwood and Piercy, such as genetic engineering, new reproductive

Critical Survey Volume 25, Number 2, 2013: 40–56
doi: 10.3167/cs.2013.250204 ISSN 0011–1570 (Print), ISSN 1752–2293 (Online)

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 41

technologies, environmental degradation, agricultural processes, and
gated communities. Both authors’ recognition of difference,
complexity, hybridity, fluidity, and partial and situated knowledges is
reflected, as Raffaella Baccolini points out, not only through the
contents of their novels but also through the forms, which collapse
boundaries between genres thus deconstructing ‘genre purity’.1
However, my main motivation is not primarily to explore the ways in
which Atwood and Piercy manipulate and defy established generic
conventions, but rather to make correlations between their fiction and
the real world today, and to explore the avenues of hope which they
illuminate for the future. Whilst I do not rely on any single theorist,
the article is significantly informed by eco-feminist theories, which
centre on a basic belief that ecological crisis is the inevitable effect of
a Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal culture built, as Ariel Salleh says:
‘on the domination of nature and domination of Woman “as nature”.
Or, to turn the subliminal Man/Woman=Nature equation around the
other way, it is the inevitable effect of a culture constructed upon the
domination of women, and domination of Nature “as feminine”’.2 I
explore the ways in which the symbolic equation of woman with
nature is implemented by characters in the novels of Atwood and
Piercy, and the consequences this has for other characters. Also of
interest to me is the engagement of both authors with the eco-feminist
idea of ‘women’s unique agency in an era of ecological crisis’.3

Nature and Progress

The pollution of the environment and of the food chain by reckless
humanity is not a new subject in dystopian writing. It has been a
major preoccupation in a range of feminist dystopian texts for over
forty years, and it continues today with renewed emphasis on post-
apocalyptic and eco-critical dystopias. The major project of many
eco-feminist writers is to interrogate society by analysing it from the
perspective of utopians, who frequently refer to the anthropogenic era
as the age of greed and waste. In Woman on the Edge of Time (1975),
for example, Marge Piercy facilitates an interrogation of our
destructive and damaging ways. What seems normal and acceptable
to Connie is challenged by Luciente, when she asks in wonder, ‘it’s
not true, is it, the horror stories in our histories? That your food was
full of poisonous chemicals … that you ate food saturated with

42 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

preservatives?’4 Whilst many chemicals and preservatives are
purposely used in food production today, the shocking truth of
Luciente’s insight is also reflected at present in the situation of the
Inuit people, whose diet of seal and fish has been polluted by industrial
chemicals swept to the Arctic by ocean and air currents, subsequently
emerging in high levels in Inuit breast milk and being blamed for
deforming the sexual organs of female polar bears.5 Luciente goes on
to emphasize the outrageous despoiling of the natural world in the
twentieth century to Connie, who has seemingly never questioned her
society’s methods of dealing with waste products, or considered them
to be anything other than entirely normal, by crying out in exasperation
and disbelief, ‘to burn your compost! To pour your shit into the waters
others downstream must drink! That fish must live in! Into rivers
whose estuaries and marshes are links in the whole offshore food
chain!’ (WET, 55).

For Piercy’s utopians, progress cannot be equated with a global
capitalist system in which millions starve through the inefficient use
of land and the poor distribution of food and resources. Barbarossa
explains to Connie, ‘coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, they all took land
needed to feed local people … Imagine the plantation system, people
starving while big fincas owned by foreigners grew for wealthy
countries as cash crops a liquid without food value’ (195). Such
unjust, inefficient and destructive use of land is endemic throughout
the world today and is perhaps epitomized by the dual degradation by
monopolizing palm oil companies of both the Indonesian rainforest
which, according to Friends of the Earth, contains ‘10% of all of the
world’s flowering plant species, 17% of all birds, 12% of all mammals
and 16% of all reptiles and amphibians’ and which is being
progressively destroyed, and of the plantation workers who carry out
exhausting work often for a sickening wage of £1 a day.6 Interestingly,
when this article was written, Atwood had just published Oryx and
Crake (2003), the first novel of her acclaimed trilogy. Similarly, in
the 1970s, when Piercy was writing, there were the beginnings of a
global awareness of the destruction of nature and the setting up of
such movements as Greenpeace, Save the Whale, the WWF and many
more. For utopians, the notion of progress involves striving to bring
about a time in which the environmental ravages, human exploitation,
and unjust suffering brought about by patriarchal capitalism has been
transcended, a time when ‘the oceans will be balanced, the rivers flow
clean, the wetlands and the forests flourish. There’ll be no more

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 43

enemies. No Them and Us’ (WET, 328). In Luciente’s time, one of
the most fundamental commitments made in order to try to establish
greater equality and a more harmonious world is revealed in the
decision ‘to feed everyone well’. This involves cultivating regional
self-sufficiency and seriously limiting the amount of meat consumed,
since ‘mammal meat is inefficient use of grains’ (100).

The contemporary urgency of this point for the world must not be
underestimated. As George Monbiot pointed out in 2004, ‘if in the
next 30 years there is a global food crisis, it will be because the arable
land that should be producing food for humans is instead producing
feed for animals’.7 Those animals provide meat, milk, and eggs which
are sold to the world’s richer consumers, failing to benefit poorer
people. In Piercy’s future Mattapoisett, by using resources efficiently
and without greed, the people are not only nourished fairly but also
reconnected to the land. As Jackrabbit explains, ‘place matters to us
… We’re strongly rooted’ (WET, 124). To Connie, the utopians’
simple rural lifestyle at first appears to be profoundly regressive, and
she laments, ‘back on the same old dungheap with ten chickens and a
goat. That’s where my grandparents scratched out a dirt-poor life. It
depresses me’ (70). The people of Mattapoisett, however, do not
eschew the use of technology altogether, but rather advocate an
appropriate balance between the use of technology and a simple
respect for life in all its forms. According to Luciente: ‘There was
much good in the life the ancestors led here on the continent before
the white man came conquering. There was much brought that was
useful. It has taken a long time to put the old good with the new good
into a greater good’ (70–71).

The shared attitude of the utopians towards the environment is
characterized by an acute awareness of the limitations of natural
resources and a sincere commitment to acting responsibly in the light
of this awareness. Luciente explains, ‘we have to account. There’s
only one pool of air to breathe’ (278). Recycling is fundamental in
Mattapoisett: ‘We compost everything compostible. We reuse
everything else’ (55). Renewable, non-polluting energy sources are
utilized through the villagers’ energy technology in the form of wood,
wind power, water power, tidal power, solar power, and methane gas
from human waste and compost. Advanced knowledge in the field of
genetics is applied sensibly in order, for example, to breed out the
irritant in mosquitoes whilst still respecting them as an important part
of the food chain (97), and to create vegetables resistant to pests (53)

44 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

and drought (210), whilst still protecting and maintaining the genetic
diversity of the ecosystem. The utopians thus avoid imposing
homogeneity upon their crops, choosing instead to honour and
preserve the inherent diversity of the natural world, which so many
farmers have unfortunately failed to do since the Second World War,
resulting in a situation whereby, as Janine Benyus points out, ‘in
places like India, where there were once thirty thousand land-tailored
varieties of rice, their replacement by one super variety swept away
botanical knowledge and centuries of breeding in one fell swoop’.8

Fundamental to the utopians’ ability to implement humanitarian
and environmentally-friendly agricultural policies is the anti-
hierarchical character of their group relations, which emphasize
debate, cooperation and consensus decision-making. All community
members take turns running the government and, as Tom Moylan
points out, ‘profit and power do not determine the use of the advanced
knowledge of the culture’.9 On the contrary, questions regarding the
direction of science are decided democratically at town meetings
(WET, 277), in which everybody takes an interest. The major political
issue left unresolved at the end of the novel is that referred to as the
‘Shaping Controversy’, a debate between different factions of the
community regarding the appropriate application of genetic
technology, in which Luciente spends many hours engaged, defending
the position that breeding should not be for selected traits but rather
should involve random genetic mixing, since no one ‘can know
objectively how people should become’ (226). The social structure of
Mattapoisett allows the voices of the people to be heard, ensuring that
no new technological practices are insidiously introduced to serve the
interests of any one particular group. Unfortunately the same cannot
be said for contemporary Western ‘democratic’ countries, in which
corporate interests rather than the public good too often motivate
science. In this time of rapid technological advance, Bryan Appleyard
worries that:

There is a danger that people will sleep through this moment, only to
wake and find themselves in a brave new genetic world. They will sleep
because they feel excluded from the realm of science. They feel they have
nothing to say about what scientists do and how they change the world.
Thus they will slip into that most risky of habits – leaving science to the
scientists.10

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 45

Piercy emphasizes that such political apathy and failure to engage
in the struggle against monopolizing corporate forces results in
catastrophic outcomes, as illustrated by the technological dystopian
future in which, as Moylan points out, ‘the forces of phallocratic
capitalism have remained dominant and produced a hierarchical
society that is overpopulated, polluted, sexist and racist’.11 Through
this dystopian vision, Piercy warns that the ‘progress’ desired by
Western phallocratic capitalist systems will continue to involve
exploitation of the natural world, exacerbating pollution and
corrupting the food chain; increasing surveillance and decreasing
freedom of movement; a widening divide between rich and poor, and
men and women, who are physically adapted to become sex objects;
and the establishment of a terrifying distinction between cyborg and
human. The progress which Piercy seeks is defined in contrast by the
committed assumption of political responsibility by every person
through the sobering experience of ecological crisis, which will
enable us, like the utopians, to reaffirm ourselves as ‘partners with
water, air, birds, fish, trees’ (WET, 125).

According to Sardar, the most immediate impetus of science fiction
is ‘horror, fear, disquiet and disaffection at the power of the human
intellect’.12 This certainly seems to be true of Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake (2003), in which nature, all living creatures, and
ultimately the human race itself, fall victim to the overreaching of
unscrupulous manipulators of the biological sciences. One of the first
striking images in the novel is of the animals destroyed on a bonfire,
looking at the young Jimmy ‘reproachfully out of their burning
eyes’.13 Jimmy’s father and his colleague suspect biological sabotage
in the form of a deadly virus unleashed by a rival business in order to
ensure the destruction of their animals and so dominate the market.
The scene ends ominously, with Jimmy’s father insinuating that he
will retaliate in kind. Thus we see that this is a world in which the
deadly combination of capitalism and science is running rampant at
the expense of innocent creatures – a world not dissimilar to our own,
in which, as Peter Singer points out, ‘each year, US industrial
laboratories slaughter an average of 63 million animals – primates,
dogs, rabbits, pigs, frogs and birds’.14

The gross manipulation and destruction of animals and the
ecosystem by humans is a major theme in Atwood’s novel. At
OrganInc, pigs are used as vessels in which to grow human organs
suitable for transplantation, swelling them up like balloons and thus

46 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

earning them the nickname ‘pigoons’. These animals are frightful and
uncanny, and often, it is implied, with understated horror, end up ‘on
the staff café menu’ (OC, 27), an image which magnifies and
extrapolates from the shocking and potentially lethal corruption of the
food chain occurring within current farming practices, and reminiscent
of the BSE crisis in Britain which has now lasted more than 20 years.15
Whilst Jimmy casually watches ‘Felicia’s Frog Squash’ and other
‘animal snuff sites’ on the internet, reflecting that ‘one stomped frog,
one cat being torn apart by hand, was much like another’, his father’s
colleagues play at ‘create-an-animal’ in their laboratories (93–94). In
a number of reckless experiments, toads are genetically spliced with
chameleons, snakes are blended with rats, raccoons mixed with
skunks rabbits are made luminous green with the iridocytes of
jellyfish, the genetic traits of bobcats are tampered with, wolves are
spliced with dogs, and chickens are horrifyingly manipulated
genetically until they bear closer resemblance to octopi, growing
‘bulbs’ of meat and lacking eyes and a beak as apparently they don’t
need those.16 It is perhaps significant that Atwood incorporates a
reference to the human destruction of frogs since, according to E.O.
Wilson, ‘among the most massive losses of recent decades has been
the frog die-off’ due to changes in habitat and atmosphere as a result
of human actions.17 The ‘progress’ which such scientific capabilities
supposedly signify and engender is completely turned on its head in
the novel, as the improvement of the human lot is entirely overlooked
and many of the hybrid animals are let loose to disrupt the balance of
the ecosystem and threaten other species. The green rabbits breed
with the wild population and become a nuisance (OC, 110), the
‘wolvogs’ have no trouble reversing ‘fifty thousand years of man-
canid interaction’, killing and eating all the domesticated dogs (125),
the ‘bobkittens’ which are created to cull the green rabbits instead end
up attacking dogs, babies, and joggers (192–93), and by the end of the
novel the ‘pigoons’, some of which may have been implanted with
human neocortical tissue, ominously roam free in a world from which
the human race has all but obliterated itself, leaving behind a legacy
of global warming in the form of scorching sunshine, humidity,
thunderstorms, and a global ecosystem in crisis.

Atwood’s engagement with biopolitics is juxtaposed with global
politics. Jimmy and Crake sometimes watch dirtysockpuppets.com, a
current affairs show about world political leaders. According to
Crake, however: ‘With digital genalteration you couldn’t tell whether

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 47

any of these generals and whatnot existed any more, and if they did,
whether they’d actually said what you’d heard. Anyway, they were
toppled and replaced with such rapidity that it hardly mattered’ (94).
Atwood portrays the virtual collapse of global politics, whereby a
public dedication to the common good and a system of stable,
representative government has been displaced by rampant
consumerism, as evidenced by the commoditization of nature and the
natural world, and encapsulated in the novel by the vacuous reduction
of language to slogans for advertising purposes. This is underpinned
by the cult of the body, seemingly severed from ‘its old travelling
companions, the mind and the soul’, and pursuing its own cultural
forms: ‘executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance’
(97–98). Oryx and Crake emphasizes the way in which social and
political progress in terms of the shared improvement of the human
lot is being increasingly suppressed by the pursuit of private interests.
This is a pressing contemporary concern since, as Helena Paul and
others point out:

Governments with the largest number of corporations – in the US, Europe
and Japan – have become increasingly complicit in corporate interests.
Politicians and corporate executives regularly swap places in a flurry of
revolving doors, especially in the US. All of this is facilitating the entry
of private corporations into areas of public interest which were formerly
the preserve of local communities or governments.18

Alongside the human race, the natural world falls victim to the thirst
for profit endemic amongst politicians who are supposed to represent
the interests of the common people. This is illustrated by the
suppression of a secret Pentagon report regarding climate change for
four months by the Bush administration, reported publicly in February
2004. According to Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the
Environmental Protection Agency, ‘this administration is ignoring the
evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil
companies’.19 Western governments and the powerful corporations
which dominate global relations have become, as suggested by
Atwood through her depiction of corporations such as HelthWyzer,
with their starvation-causing Happicuppa coffee bean, the epitome
not of progress but rather of self-seeking, irresponsible destruction.

The secret report suppressed by the White House predicts that, by
2020, ‘nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread
rioting will erupt across the world’.20 Piercy’s vision of the future in

48 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

He, She and It (1991) is not dissimilar to this, as she presents a world
recovering from nuclear warfare that had ‘burned Jerusalem off the
map’, rendering much of the Middle East ‘a pestilent radioactive
desert’.21 We learn that, ‘Shira had been born since the Famine, after
the rising oceans had drowned much of the rice and breadbaskets of
the world, after the rising temperatures had shifted the ocean and air
currents, leaving former farmlands scrubland or desert, after the end
of abundant oil had finished agribusiness on land’ (HSI, 37). In the
wake of such horrific nuclear destruction, human suffering, and
ecological crisis, the human race is finally finding ways to progress
towards more humanitarian and environmentally friendly practices.
The experience of ecological devastation instils the characters with a
profound love and respect for the natural world, and indeed the
narrator tells us that ‘no one before the twenty-first century had ever
loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty
of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom
they were precious and rare and always endangered’ (37). As in Oryx
and Crake, mainstream national politics have become practically
obsolete, but in He, She and It the authority previously wielded by
government has been displaced more promisingly onto ‘the remains
of the old UN, the eco-police’ who, following the death of the two
billion in the Great Famine and the plagues, ‘had authority over earth,
water, air outside domes and wraps’ (33). This reawakened sense of
responsibility and stewardship towards the land is accompanied by a
commitment to eradicating world hunger, albeit by means of the
unappetizing vat food, made of algae and yeasts (41). Although two
‘multis’22 dominate the production and distribution of ‘vat food’, they
at least manage to keep people ‘alive and nourished’ which, after the
Famine, ‘seemed a great accomplishment’ (306). The responsible
global approach to the natural world is informed by an acute awareness
of the dependency of the human race upon the environment for its
sustenance and survival, and a nostalgic desire to regenerate and
revive the natural world, returning it to its original, unpolluted state.
As Shira asserts to Yod, ‘the sky is not blue because of the greenhouse
effect. We hope someday the sky will be blue again’ (89).

Whilst a certain level of global awareness of the need to try to
restore and protect the natural world has been attained in He, She and
It, progress in overcoming humanitarian and environmental problems
also has a local flavour. In Tikva, access to knowledge is considered
to be an important key to the liberation of the human race into a more

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 49

egalitarian and harmonious way of life, and so each child is equipped
to access the internet (55). In Nili’s native and ravaged Israel,
however, the women have so far chosen not to access the internet, but
clone and engineer genes, undergoing additional alteration after birth
in order to tolerate high levels of radiation, and bypassing the need
for men in reproduction, thus overcoming the widespread infertility
caused by radiation and toxic pollutants. Nili asserts, ‘we have created
ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land’ (198). In another
different setting, people such as Lazarus in the Glop devise their own
strategies to try to overcome the monopolies on food distribution
upon which they are so dependent, finally beginning to establish their
own means of food production and distribution. I tend to agree then
with Anna Martinson that:

Piercy’s He, She and It is an example of the localization of standpoint.
The solutions developed in Tikva differ from the solutions developed in
the Black Zone or the Glop. None of the approaches are necessarily better
than the others, and each developed in trajectories necessitated by the
specific requirements of each situation. Each approach has something to
learn from and teach the others (as Nili travels with Riva to the Glop, and
later Malkah travels with Nili to the Black Zone).23

Piercy thus does not present a simplified or romanticized view of
progress and does not privilege any single set of ideals, reflecting
instead the complexities and difficulties of life as it is really lived by
different people in different places with different perspectives.

Nature: From Human to Posthuman

In He, She and It, Piercy utilizes the figures of the cyborg Yod and his
seventeenth-century ancestor Joseph, the golem, in order to explore the
postmodern theme of the construction of human identity. However, it
is the presence and embodiment of the cyborg that most denaturalizes
the human, raising questions about gender, reproduction, the body,
cultural identity, and kinship, blurring the distinction between human
and machine. Critics such as Keith Ansell Pearson and Silvio Gaggi
argue that, since humans have always used tools to supplement and
extend themselves both physically and mentally, the human is, as
Christine Wertheim asserts, ‘something absolutely distinct from the
natural because it is essentially artificial, even if this artificiality plays

50 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

itself out around and through a biological core’.24 In the words of Gaggi,
‘it is not just a matter of using tools to extend our “selves”. It is a matter
of becoming “one” with our tools’.25 This ‘one’, however, consists of
parts that can be deconstructed and reconstructed, swapped and
changed, thus undermining the notion of a fixed, coherent, and unitary
human subject or an immutable and definitive ‘human nature’. This is
illustrated when Shira tells Yod: ‘We’re all unnatural now. I have
retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a
computer. I read time by a corneal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous
unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure, and half her teeth are
regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart
and Gadi a kidney’ (HSI, 150). Whilst the human race has not yet
reached the level of technological advancement depicted by Piercy,
human bodies today do incorporate machinery in such forms as
pacemakers, dialysis machines, and contact lenses, and the juxtaposition
of human and cyborg in the novel allows us to recognize, as Deery
points out, ‘that the human and the machine are contiguous, not
opposing terms. It is all a matter of degree’.26

Whilst being human can be likened to existing in a permanently
contingent state of machine-like artificiality, Piercy also emphasizes
qualities in her cyborg which are perhaps more traditionally associated
with the human. However, although Yod is in many ways distinct
from human beings – for example, in his inability to grow physically,
in his complete lack of need for sleep, and in his inability to apprehend
beauty or appreciate music – he does possess numerous human
qualities, many of which operate independently of his primary
function as protector of the town. He can disobey, deceive, and lie,
and is capable of love and friendship, enjoying sex and desiring to be
loved and respected by others. He declares, ‘I’m a cyborg […] but
I’m also a person. I think and feel and have existence just as you do’
(HSI, 375). Yod’s human qualities explicitly invite comparison with
those of the other male characters, particularly with the scientists
Avram and Shira’s ex-husband Josh, who are shown to be lacking in
love and emotion. We learn of Shira that ‘she enjoyed better rapport
with a machine than she had with Josh. In fact she had always found
computers easier to communicate with than Josh’ (103). Malkah also
compares Yod with human men, reflecting, ‘men so often try to be
inhumanly powerful, efficient, unfeeling, to perform like a machine,
it is ironic to watch a machine striving to be male’ (340–41). Piercy
thus problematizes white male identity, which has for so long operated

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 51

as the norm and standard of human nature, against which all others
are judged and measured. As Deery points out: ‘Women and people
of color have had to consider their status as other and their identity as
marked, vulnerable to definition and redefinition. But the postmodern
white male identity is no longer unmarked, neutral, or obvious, in
part, Piercy indicates, because of the presence and possibility of
nonhuman or posthuman entities’.27

Piercy complicates the boundary between human and machine, as
Yod is not born of woman but is rather ‘a fusion of machine and lab-
created biological components’ (HSI, 70). The majority of humans in
the novel are not born of woman, as infertility is a widespread problem
due to environmental pollution, creating great dependence on
reproductive technologies and engendering the view that conceiving
and carrying a baby ‘the ancient way’ is ‘a bit gross’ (192). According
to Shira, who herself discovers she was created using sperm from a
man who died eighteen years before her birth, acknowledging that
‘half the kids in this town are born from petri dishes or test tubes. At
Y-S they used to say every baby has three parents nowadays – the
mother, the father, and the doctor who does all the chemistry’ (191–
92). The fact that Yod is not born of a woman therefore does not
necessarily disqualify him from human status, and nor does his
inability to reproduce, since this is also a trait which he shares with
many humans. Further confusing the distinction between human and
cyborg, Yod is able to form a family with Shira and Ari, proving
himself to be a far more attentive and loving parent than Avram, Riva
or Josh (349). It is in the collapsing of such seemingly monolithic
categories as ‘human’ and ‘machine’ then that Haraway perceives the
dissolution of patriarchal, logocentric systems of power which, as
critics such as Hélène Cixous have demonstrated, have traditionally
subjected all thought to a system of dual, hierarchical oppositions,
creating a ‘masculine edifice which passed itself off as eternal-
natural’.28 In evading the neat labelling and categorization which
phallocentric society seeks to impose upon all living creatures, the
figure of the cyborg possesses, as Haraway asserts, ‘great riches for
feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the
breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and
similar distinctions structuring the Western self’. It is the liberating
potential to confuse the oppressive boundaries erected by patriarchal
systems of thought ‘that cracks the matrices of domination and opens
geometric possibilities’.29

52 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

One of the oppositions – perhaps the most fundamental opposition
– which Piercy examines is that established in patriarchal society
between men and women. As the title suggests, in He, She and It
Piercy interrogates and problematizes conventional gender
demarcations, primarily through the figure of Yod, whose male body
has undergone adaptation by Malkah to incorporate some feminine
wiring. Malkah discusses with Shira her contribution to Yod’s
development, explaining: ‘Avram made him male – entirely so.
Avram thought that was the ideal: pure reason, pure logic, pure
violence. The world has barely survived the males we have running
around. I gave him a gentler side, starting with emphasizing his love
for knowledge and extending it to emotional and personal knowledge,
a need for connection’ (HSI, 142). Whilst Piercy’s polarization of
masculine reason as opposed to feminine emotion borders precariously
on essentialism, she does seem to argue, through the representation of
Yod, for the benefits of a blend of different gender characteristics,
which in his case allow him to be both a chivalrous protector and a
sensitive lover. He craves touching and intimacy and desires total
telepathy, which Shira identifies as a fantasy of women. He is also a
considerate and attentive lover, prioritising female desire. Ultimately,
however, Yod’s behaviour evades and confuses gender classification,
and Shira reflects, ‘sometimes Yod’s behavior was what she thought
of as feminine; sometimes it seemed neutral, mechanical, purely
logical; sometimes he did things that struck her as indistinguishable
from how every other male she had been with would have acted’
(321). Moreover, the problematization of gendered behaviour which
Yod embodies also reveals itself in Shira’s contemplation of her own
gendered behaviour, thrown into sharp relief by the presence of Yod.
She realizes that ‘so often she found that with Yod, when she moved
into her usual behavior with men, she was playing by herself. Whole
sets of male–female behavior simply did not apply’ (245). Piercy thus
seems to take a somewhat ambivalent approach to the issue of gender,
seeming on the one hand to argue that men and women possess
distinct masculine and feminine traits, implying that human nature is
inherently gendered, and on the other hand that interaction between
the sexes consists largely of gendered performance, bearing little
relation to the true people hiding behind the façade. However, the
notion of a ‘true’ person is itself problematized in the novel, revealing
as it does through the correlation of human and cyborg the instability,
contingency, and flux which characterizes human nature.

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 53

Jennifer Gonzalez asserts, in her historical study of visual
representations of cyborg bodies, that her motivation was to explore
the relationship between representations of cyborgs and representations
of race and racial mixtures, having observed the prevalence of the term
‘miscegenation’ in discussions of the concept of cyborgs. The hybrid
character of the cyborg, who dissolves the boundary between human
and machine, seems to confront humans with its ‘otherness’, invoking
fear associated with the loss of racial purity. However, as Gonzalez
points out, what makes the term ‘hybrid’ controversial is that:

it appears to assume by definition the existence of a non-hybrid state – a
pure state, a pure species, a pure race – with which it is contrasted. It is
this notion of purity that must, in fact, be problematized. For if any
progress is to be made in a politics of human or cyborg existence,
heterogeneity must be taken as a given.30

The figure of the cyborg thus demands that humans confront the
‘otherness’ within ourselves, breaking open the rigid and constricting
categories into which we have been forced by a phallocentric system,
and which work to keep us in fear of all those who are different,
fuelling the capitalist system, as Wertheim points out, by maintaining
individuals as ‘passive, discrete and possessive’ through ‘the
repression of this relational and equivocal otherness’.31 The figure of
the cyborg has the revolutionary potential, as Haraway argues, to
provide ‘a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have
explained our bodies and ourselves. This is a dream not of a common
language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia’.32

Conclusion

Atwood and Piercy strive to emphasize that ‘political confrontation is
not merely a choice but a human responsibility’.33 The future we want
to see must be fought for and brought into being through both
individual and collective political action, the penalty for political
passivity being dystopia, which reiterates those familiar fears of the
erosion of personal freedoms, the continued despoiling of the
environment and destruction of animal and plant species, the
imposition of rigid and divisive codes of behaviour, and an intensified
divide between rich and poor. Whilst neither Atwood nor Piercy
suggest simply that women are the sole agents of positive political

54 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

change in society, as illustrated in the important role of Lazarus in
ameliorating conditions in the Glop in He, She and It, they both
suggest that women, precisely due to their status as women, can be
significant agents of subversion. Women, having been historically
oppressed by men and contained within the domestic sphere, cut off
from channels of power and alienated from one another, surely have
less investment in the status quo; they are more motivated to overthrow
existing power structures and try to replace them with more egalitarian
and democratic structures. However, whilst some women may indeed
be able to lead the way in the emancipation of the world from
patriarchal capitalism, a continued focus upon a sexual divide seems
somehow to re-entrench essentialist notions regarding men and
women, assuming false commonalities between people of the same
sex, and signalling collectivities which do not, in fact, exist. The most
important aspect of Atwood’s and Piercy’s speculative fiction is
surely that change is possible; more than that, that change is inevitable,
and it is up to us as individuals to determine whether that change is
for good or for ill. It is time to act wisely, they warn, before it is too
late, for our planet and for our freedom.

Notes

1. Raffaella Baccolini, ‘Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of
Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler’, in Future Females, The Next
Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, ed. Marleen
Barr (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 18.

2. Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (London:
Zed Books, 1997), 12–13. Salleh notes that ‘the word “nature” is a mystifying construction
in capitalist patriarchal discourse, just as “man” and “woman” are’. She goes on to say that,
in her book, ‘static ideological terms like “Woman”, “Humanity”, “the State”, “Nature” are
occasionally capitalized to convey the false concreteness that must be resisted in making
change’ (14).

3. Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics, 3.
4. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (London: The Women’s Press, 2000),

54. Hereafter cited as WET, with page numbers provided in parentheses in the main body of
the article.

5. ‘We’re being poisoned from afar’, declared Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the head of the
Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents 155,000 Inuit, in May 2004 – see Alister
Doyle, ‘‘Dirty Dozen’ Toxins are Banned by UN Pact’, Guardian, 17 May 2004.

6. Daniel Elkan, ‘What’s Your Bank up to in the Rainforest?’ Guardian, 29 May 2004.
7. George Monbiot, ‘Starved of the Truth’, Guardian, 9 March 2004. Monbiot is a

regular columnist in the Guardian and writes on environmental matters.

Eco-feminist Perspectives on Nature and Technology 55

8. Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: Morrow,
1997), 17.

9. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible (New York: Methuen, 1986), 130.
10. Bryan Appleyard, Brave New Worlds: Genetics and the Human Experience

(London: HarperCollins, 2000), 3.
11. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 136.
12. Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Introduction’, in Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction

Cinema, eds Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 3.
13. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004), 20. Hereafter cited as

OC, with page numbers provided in parentheses in the main body of the article.
14. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Cape, 1975), 32, cited in Salleh,

Ecofeminism as Politics, 56.
15. Eric Schlosser writes: ‘About 75 percent of the cattle in the United States were

routinely fed livestock wastes – the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle – until
August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year,
purchased from animal shelters’. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: What the All-American
Meal is Doing to the World (London: Penguin, 2002), 202

16. See OC, 57–58, 109–10, 192–93, 241, 238.
17. E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life (London: Little Brown, 2002), 54.
18. Helena Paul, Ricarda Steinbrecher, Lucy Michaels, and Devlin Kuvek, Hungry

Corporations: Transnational Biotech Companies Colonise the Food Chain (London: Zed
Books, 2003), 227.

19. Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, ‘Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change
Will Destroy Us’, Observer, 22 February 2004.

20. Ibid.
21. Marge Piercy, He, She and It (New York: Fawcett Books, 1991), 3, 11. Hereafter

referred to as HSI, with page numbers provided in parentheses in the main body of the article.
22. In the post-apocalyptic world of He, She and It, humanity is starkly divided between

tightly controlled corporate enclaves run by a handful of multis – huge, wealthy multi-
national enterprises with their own social hierarchy, and the Glop outside these enclaves,
where people live with poverty, violence and disease in an environmentally ravaged
landscape. An exception are the ‘free towns’ such as Tikva, that are able to sell their
technologies to the multis while remaining autonomous.

23. Anna M. Martinson, ‘Ecofeminist Perspectives on Technology in the Science
Fiction of Marge Piercy’, Extrapolation 44, 1 (2003): 50–68 .

24. Christine Wertheim, ‘Star Trek: First Contact: The Hybrid, the Whore and the
Machine’, in Sardar and Cubitt, eds, Aliens R Us, 91, original emphasis.

25. Silvio Gaggi, ‘The Cyborg and the Net: Figures of the Technological Subject’,
Bucknell Review 46, 2 (2003), 125.

26. June Deery, ‘Science for Feminists: Margaret Atwood’s Body of Knowledge’, in
Future Females, The Next Generation, 92.

27. Ibid., 92.
28. Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David

Lodge with Nigel Wood (Harlow: Pearson, 2nd edn, 2000), 266.
29. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New

York: Routledge, 1991), 174.

56 Critical Survey, Volume 25, Number 2

30. Jennifer Gonzalez, ‘Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes From Current Research’, in
Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward and Fiona Hovenden (eds.), The Gendered
Cyborg: A Reader (London and New York: Routledge in association with The Open
University, 2000), 67.

31. Wertheim, ‘Star Trek: First Contact’, 91.
32. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 181.
33. Barbara Hill Rigney, Margaret Atwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), 120.

Notes on Contributors

Jim Clarke is a doctoral candidate in the School of English, Trinity
College Dublin, where he is completing his PhD on the aesthetics of
English polymath Anthony Burgess as a scholar of the International
Anthony Burgess Foundation. He has an additional research interest
in the intersection of SF and religion, and is currently working on a
book on SF and Catholicism. A former national newspaper journalist,
he also conducts research on the culture and history of tabloids.

Soraya Copley is an independent scholar and lives in Newcastle, UK.
She studied at the University of Newcastle, where much of her
postgraduate research focused on women’s writing, in particular
women’s science fiction. She wrote her postgraduate thesis on
women’s science fiction, focusing on the work of Margaret Atwood
and Marge Piercy.

Rowland Hughes is Principal Lecturer in English Literature and
American Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. His research and
teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American
literature, Native American literature, and literature and the
environment. He has published work on American literature, British
and American cinema, and literary theory.

Sidneyeve Matrix is Queen’s National Scholar and Associate
Professor in the Department of Media and Film at Queen’s University,
Canada, where she teaches courses on mass communication and
digital technology trends. Her research on science fiction and
cyberpunk film and media was published as Cyberpop: Digital
Lifestyles and Commodity Culture (by Routledge, 2006). She has also
published research on media convergence, geosocial technologies,
and social media communication and marketing.

Hannah Stark is Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania,
where she works on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, feminist theory,
contemporary literature, and representations of the non-human.

Critical Survey Volume 25, Number 2, 2013: 112–113
doi: 10.3167/cs.2013.250210 ISSN 0011–1570 (Print), ISSN 1752–2293 (Online)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.