“Untold Stories, Fresh Beginnings”
A repertoire / of untold stories, / a fresh beginning
MARGARET ATWOOD, “The Paper Bag,” 1991
Considering earlier criticism of Margaret Atwood’s short fiction, one becomes aware of a seeming critical paradox: Atwood is a major figure on the contemporary literary scene, and she is the figurehead of Canadian literature. The short story, in turn, has been hailed as “the most active ambassador of Canadian literature abroad” (Bonheim 1980–81, 659), a statement that could be applied with similar justification to Atwood. Her short stories, however, have long been passed over in survey works on her writing, have been treated as mere preparatory exercises, or simply have been seen as less important than her novels and poetry collections.2 There is indeed always the danger that one branch of a multitalented author’s work will languish in relative critical neglect—a particularly relevant danger in the case of a prolific writer such as Atwood, who is, in addition, a renowned literary critic (see chapter 6) as well as a highly sought-after media personality (see chapter 8). There is also the barrier of an implied generic hierarchy, which, at least in the minds of general readers, still gives precedence by and large to the novel over other forms of literary expression. Seen from this perspective, the critical fate of Atwood’s short fiction for some two decades reflects that of the reception of the genre as a whole.
The decade leading to the turn of the century, however, also saw a change in the reception of Atwood’s short fictional prose, with several contributions that either exclusively or in combination with other genres finally directed attention to her short stories.3 Since Wilderness Tips (1991), Atwood’s third collection of short stories, the kind of attention given to her short stories has been close to that lavished on her novels— see, for instance, the immediate and highly positive reviews of her latest short-story collection Moral Disorder.4
It is true that Atwood has published less in this genre (so far four short-story collections) compared with her productivity in the novel or even poetry (twelve novels and twelve collections of poetry, not counting four volumes of “selected” poetry), and that there have been—for her standards—relatively long intervals between the publication of her short-story collections: Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), Wilderness Tips (1991), and Moral Disorder (2006). The fifteen years between her acclaimed Wilderness Tips and Moral Disorder may also be explained by her venturing out into new generic territories of short fiction and prose poetry with Murder in the Dark (1983), Good Bones (1992), and The Tent (2006) (see chapter 2), only to see her return triumphantly to the short-story genre with another generic debut in her oeuvre, the short-story cycle Moral Disorder.
From the perspective of teaching, Atwood’s short stories have always been a favourite that could perhaps even rival her novels. And, indeed, her short stories alone would suffice to place her in the forefront of twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century writers. Although there are discernible currents and even cross-references linking Atwood’s short stories to her poetry and novels,5 her work in the genre is as free of derivativeness as it is varied. This chapter traces some of this work’s main themes, techniques, and lines of development, taking the prominent theme of gender relations in Atwood’s short stories as its cue.
DANCING GIRLS
Atwood’s exceptional thematic and structural variety is already evident in her debut short-story collection, Dancing Girls (1977), the individual stories of which were first published between 1964 and 1977. In looking for a common denominator to link these stories, a statement from Atwood’s poetry springs to mind: “This is not a debate / but a duet / with two deaf singers”6—for these early stories often portray individuals in unfulfilling, dysfunctional, or disintegrating relationships:
This is an interval, a truce; it can’t last, we both know it, there have been too many differences, of opinion we called it but it was more than that, the things that mean safety for him mean danger for me. We’ve talked too much or not enough: for what we have to say to each other there’s no language, we’ve tried them all. ... We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it.7
I want to tell him now what no one’s ever taught him, how two people who love each other behave, how they avoid damaging each other, but I’m not sure I know.8
In Dancing Girls, the characters often confuse their dependence on their partners with love. The stories make clear that dependence is usually the result of a character’s personality defects or poor self-image—ideal prerequisites for becoming embroiled with an unfulfilling, harmful, and often loveless partner (see, e.g., “The Man from Mars,” “Polarities,” “Under Glass,” “Hair Jewellery,” “A Travel Piece,” “Training,” and “Lives of the Poets”). “Ontological insecurity,” as Ronald D. Laing puts it in The Divided Self (1965, esp. 39–61), a lack of self-confidence, the feeling of being trapped within the wrong body—such feelings of inadequacy lead many characters in Dancing Girls into relationships that only serve to confirm and reconfirm their negative opinions of themselves, whether through their partner’s open lack of interest, attitude of dominance, or sexual betrayal. The stories demonstrate how the failure to come to terms with oneself is inextricably linked to an inability to form meaningful relationships: the protagonists are, ultimately, defeated not by their partners but by themselves.
A number of stories in Dancing Girls seem to be literary reworkings of The Divided Self (first published in 1960), a psychiatric work popular in the 1960s. Laing’s study presents a theory of the schizoid or schizophrenic personality, which Atwood took up in her writings of the 1960s and 1970s. Schizo-id means “almost split”; (neurotic) schizoid behaviour therefore constitutes a preform of (psychotic) schizophrenia: “The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relationship with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself.”9 Atwood’s early short stories examine the grey area between (still “normal”) neurosis and (abnormal) psychotic behaviour, repeatedly portraying the incursion of the irrational into everyday life or even the descent into madness.10 Following the unorthodox, “unpsychiatric” approaches of Laing, Gregory Bateson, and others, Atwood questions the very concepts of “normality” and “abnormality.” Her open-ended stories repeatedly imply that it is the social context that is “sick” and that its rigorously anti-emotional conformism prevents the normal development of the “wilderness” of the individual psyche, pushing sensitive individuals (most frequently women) over the brink into what is—for these characters—a more acceptable world of madness.
An excellent example can be found in the short story “Polarities.” Morrison, the protagonist, is a classic case of the schizoid personality. Although he initially seems to fit well enough into his social environment, Atwood’s use of a combined authorial and figural third-person narrative allows the reader a deeper insight into his mental world. It becomes obvious that there is a conflict between Morrison’s behaviour on the one hand and his thoughts and opinions on the other. Morrison often asks his colleague Louise questions that signal some kind of interest in her—a tactic that takes her in for large stretches of the narrative. The narrator’s comments, however, expose Morrison’s emotionally dysfunctional personality. Morrison confuses Louise with his combination of apparent interest in her on the one hand and distance and coldness on the other: “‘What’s finished?’ he asked. He hadn’t been paying attention” (40); “‘What aspect?’ Morrison asked, not interested” (46). He thus distorts the purpose of questions, using them as a defensive tactic. He wants to prevent any meaningful communication that might force him to commit himself and overcome his emotional distance. Louise, desperate for certainty and dependent on Morrison in her state of mental crisis, thus falls over the edge into the “sanctum” of madness, which she can, after all, control.11
Louise’s communicative strategies are diametrically opposed to Morrison’s. Her statements carry the dialogue forward rather than slow it down. Louise expresses emotions and even fear, and her questions communicate a genuine interest in Morrison and a desire for information. The title of the story is thus an accurate reflection of the characters’ relationship: activity and passivity, action and reaction, directness and indirectness, openness and dissimulation, initiative and blockage, interest and indifference—these polar opposites constantly clash in the dialogues and narrative, inevitably leading to tragedy. Morrison is able to open himself up to Louise, and to come to terms with his feelings, only after she has mentally divorced herself from reality and is no longer in a position to place any demands on him. In a crisis himself now, he becomes aware of his own psychological inadequacy: “He saw that it was only the hopeless, mad Louise he wanted, the one devoid of any purpose or defence. A sane one, one who could judge him, he would never be able to handle” (62).
“Polarities,” like many of Atwood’s early short stories, closes on an open, ambiguous note. The text suggests several possible interpretations of the ending: that Morrison mentally and physically freezes or even freezes to death or that, as is the case with Louise, his mental defences cave in and he falls into psychosis. In both cases, the closing scene should be interpreted metaphorically as an expression of his fantastic visions, for the sequence of perceived objects is unrealistic and goes far beyond what the human eye can see (“the mountains”—“then forest upon forest”—“after that the barren tundra and the blank solid rivers”—“and beyond ... the frozen sea” [65]). The vividness of this climactic scene is evidence of Atwood’s poetic talent: in the space of only a few lines, Atwood evokes highly complex mental processes and developments.
Morrison’s characterization in this story is based on a homogeneous series of metaphors, which often suggest constraint and limitation (e.g., “He would never survive a winter buried like that or closed in one of the glass-sided cardboard-carton apartment buildings” or, even in sexual contexts, “He imagined his long body locked in that athletic, chilly grip” [41, 44; emphasis added]). His worldview, his attitudes, influence the language and the choice of metaphors used in connection with them. Morrison projects his neurosis, his feeling of congestion and imprisonment, onto everyday objects and the people surrounding him, especially Louise. Language and content are thus inextricably linked (an aspect of “mind style”; see Nischik 1991b, 1993a).
The fundamental image in Louise’s world, on the other hand, is that of division—a split in her personality that Louise tries to overcome by creating a circle.12 Her visions and imagery depend on the contrast between wholeness and division and on the (re-)creation of wholeness. In this sense, Morrison might be an ideal partner for Louise, who, demonstrating reason in madness, recognizes his mental inadequacy far earlier than he himself does.13 Her metaphoric world clearly demonstrates her attempt to overcome the divisions and repressions from which he is suffering. “Polarities” seems to accept the view of psychosis as socially determined, as in Laing’s “antipsychiatric approach”: “Without exception ... the behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unliveable situation. ... What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience” (1965, 114–15, 27). If one thinks of the seemingly “normal” Morrison, this view does not seem too extreme. He and Louise share only one thing among the “Polarities” that characterize this story: their inability to unite intellect and emotion and to overcome the divisions in their personalities.
As is often the case in Atwood’s works, “Polarities” presents the problems of individuals against a national backdrop. It is no coincidence that Louise, obsessed with the idea of wholeness, is a bilingual Canadian (“her mother was a French Protestant, ... her father an English Catholic” [60]) now living in Anglo-Canada. Interestingly, during one of Morrison’s visits to her sickbed, she falls back into French, thus cutting Morrison off from her completely. It is, moreover, a typically Atwoodian conceit that Morrison, who thinks in terms of dominance and power, should be an American teaching at a Canadian university (probably the University of Alberta in Edmonton).14 Atwood, an ardent supporter of Canada, has often spoken out against the political, economic, and cultural dominance of her country by the United States (see Goetsch 2000/02 and chapters 6 and 7). The polarity between Canada and the United States can be traced throughout the course of “Polarities,” for example in Leota’s claim that Americans are stealing Canadians’ jobs (the question of Americans being employed at Canadian universities was hotly debated in political circles during the 1960s).15 Atwood also makes use of the USA/Canada dichotomy in stories such as “Hair Jewellery,” “Dancing Girls,” and “The Resplendent Quetzal” from Dancing Girls or in “Death by Landscape” from Wilderness Tips (as well as in her novels Surfacing and The Handmaid’s Tale and in her poetry) (see Broege 1981; and McCombs 1988a). Finally, “Polarities” also serves to demonstrate the centrality of the (often Canadian) setting of Atwood’s texts, which frequently has great importance for the characters involved (see “Death by Landscape”). In “Polarities,” external (e.g., climatic) conditions often parallel the characters’ mental states, functioning almost as an “objective correlative”: external and internal paralysis go hand in hand.
BLUEBEARD’S EGG
Atwood’s second short-story collection, Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), is no longer concerned with schizoid and schizophrenic mental states (although rudimentary traces of this concern might still be detectable in Joel in “Uglypuss”; the protagonists of “The Salt Garden” and “The Sunrise” have other pathological problems to contend with: e.g., epileptic fits). The stories in Bluebeard’s Egg were written in the 1970s and early 1980s. Noteworthy in this context is also the development in the reception of R. D. Laing, whose considerable influence in the 1960s declined rapidly from the 1970s onward (see Nischik 1991b, 84–85). Correspondingly there was a move away from individual psychological problems toward sociopsychological themes. Individuals were increasingly seen as part of their social surroundings and operating as members of specific groups. It is remarkable in this context, then, that in Dancing Girls characters are often presented in exceptional circumstances, separated from their accustomed social surroundings (e.g., on journeys or abroad), reinforcing the rootlessness of these “tourist” characters.16 In Bluebeard’s Egg, on the other hand, characters are usually portrayed at home or within their family circles. The collection contains a number of “family stories,” such as “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” “Unearthing Suite,” and “Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of Language,” which exude a warmth completely alien to the desperate characters and the dark tones of the earlier stories.17 Nevertheless, Atwood in this second collection keeps faith with one of her major themes: relationships in their terminal stages and partnerships in crisis. In contrast to Dancing Girls, however, where stories on these themes are suffused with desperation and hopelessness, the stories of Bluebeard’s Egg hold out a glimmer of hope—alternative realities that provide a source of comfort for the (usually female) protagonists by rendering the situation more tolerable.
The contrasts outlined above between Atwood’s first and second short-story collections could be clearly illustrated by a comparison of “The Resplendent Quetzal” (1977) and “Scarlet Ibis” (1983), a particularly appropriate comparison given the strong thematic similarities between the two stories.
“Scarlet Ibis” presents a marital relationship drained of life and any hint of joy. The spouses, Christine and Don, travel to Trinidad with their youngest daughter, four-year-old Lilian, in the hope of finding new impulses for their dreary existence. The trip ostensibly fails in its purpose: Don and Lilian complain about everything, even about the activities Christine proposes for them. Christine, the focus of the story, is repeatedly rejected by her exhausted, overworked husband, and the two seem to be unable to communicate except for banalities. During the climax of the holiday, a boat trip to a bird reserve, conflicts are not aired but transplanted into imaginary worlds, and Christine’s internal monologues replace dialogues between her and her husband. She constantly withdraws from the threat of reality by fleeing into a world of the imagination, as when she imagines her (not very rosy) future with Don. Correspondingly the story contains a high number of modal verbs18 and adverbs, conditional forms, and if and as if clauses: “Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would say he was coming on with a headache. Maybe she would find herself walking on nothing, because maybe there was nothing there” (186; emphasis added). The imaginary alternative world exists parallel to the real world of experience and appears at times to have a greater reality for Christine, as it is mentally more present and holds out more hope.
Her escapist fantasies eventually come to a head during the sighting of the rare tropical birds:
She felt as if she was looking at a picture, of exotic flowers or of red fruit growing on trees, evenly spaced, like the fruit in the gardens of mediaeval paintings. ... On the other side of the fence was another world, not real but at the same time more real than the one on this side, the men and women in their flimsy clothes and aging bodies. (199)
This fleeting, epiphanic experience of remarkable beauty and freedom for a short time leads to a rapprochement between Don and Christine and briefly awakens in her a feeling of existential security (“Don took hold of Christine’s hand, a thing he had not done for some time. ... Christine felt the two hands holding her own, mooring her, one on either side” [199–200]). Retrospectively, however, this experience is trivialized by Christine, reduced to a “form of entertainment, like the Grand Canyon: something that really ought to be seen” (201). Brought back down to earth in this way, even the alternative realities can provide no relief for Christine, serving only to increase her existential insecurity and immobility. By conforming to expectations and ignoring her own emotional needs, she prevents change: “She tried to think of some other distraction, mostly for the sake of Don” (182). Untold stories, no fresh beginnings.19
WILDERNESS TIPS
The stories in Wilderness Tips (1991), Atwood’s third short-story collection, were written in the 1980s. In these stories, the “untold stories” in the protagonists’ lives come to the surface more often. The characters admit their existential needs more readily, both to themselves and to others, and have a greater ability to transcend catastrophes in their lives, achieving at least the suggestion of a “fresh beginning.” The collection moves away from the family-oriented stories of Bluebeard’s Egg, often presenting characters at the workplace. In “Hairball” and “Uncles,” we see talented women who have worked their way up the career ladder in the face of resentment and envy among male colleagues.
In “Hairball,” calculating, career-oriented fashion designer Kat is met with the fierce opposition of her money- and power-mad colleagues, which in turn leads her younger lover—in a way her pupil and her “creation”—to dethrone his mentor in a coup d’état while she is undergoing major surgery. However, this personal and professional betrayal does not, as it might well have done in Dancing Girls, result in the female victim’s retreat into bitterness and denial (or an escape into severe illness); rather, it leads to a symbolic act of revenge. This retaliation cannot make good the harm Kat has already suffered, but by accepting her pain, by realizing how unhappy her totally work-oriented life has been, and by meeting an outrageous act with an outrageous response, Kat, in the story’s last sentence, is preparing herself psychologically for a fresh beginning: “She has done an outrageous thing, but she doesn’t feel guilty. She feels light and peaceful and filled with charity, and temporarily without a name” (56). In Wilderness Tips, women at times appear as victims of very subtle gender discrimination. They now refuse, however, to participate in their subjugation and domination, taking a stand instead and transforming previously “untold stories” into (symbolically encoded) spoken texts.
A number of stories in Wilderness Tips are innovative in Atwood’s short-story oeuvre in that they are narrated retrospectively, demonstrating on the one hand how experiences from the past are reinterpreted in retrospect and on the other how formative they can be. “Death by Landscape” contains an additional new feature within Atwood’s short prose (see, however, Cat’s Eye), placing gender problems for the first time in a same-sex context that goes beyond the mother-daughter and father-son relationships Atwood hitherto examined. In this story, the tentative friendship that for several years links the Canadian schoolgirl Lois with the American girl Lucy turns out in retrospect to carry more emotional power than any of Lois’s subsequent relationships, including that with her husband, Rob. The lasting bond that links the girls is strengthened by Lucy’s mysterious, unsolved disappearance into the Canadian wilderness during a summer camp excursion. After the death of her husband, the adult Lois reviews her life up to that point, recognizing that it has taken two paths: an “official” life she has lived physically, and an “unofficial” inner life of the mind—a typical division with Atwood’s characters. In this story, the “untold story” develops into the conscious, dominant path:
She can hardly remember getting married, or what Rob looked like. Even at the time she never felt she was paying full attention. She was tired a lot, as if she was living not one life but two: her own, and another, shadowy life that hovered around her and would not let itself be realized—the life of what would have happened if Lucy had not stepped sideways, and disappeared from time. (127–28)
Here (as in “Weight” in the same collection), the gender conflicts found in many early stories are reduced in importance by the fact that, for the female protagonists, their emotional and (in “Weight”) intellectual friendships with other women turn out to be the deepest, most personal, and most formative relationships in their lives. Relationships between men and women, on the other hand, are marked too strongly by conventional gender patterns (not to say rituals) of behaviour and seem rather to get in the way of the women’s individual development.
It becomes clear in examining the configuration of relationships in Wilderness Tips that Atwood has come full circle in comparison with her earliest collection. In the later stories, in contrast to her first ones, Atwood presents profound partnerships between kindred spirits who are so closely linked they do not even need physical closeness yet are far away from the claustrophobic relationships of dependency portrayed in earlier volumes. In Wilderness Tips, these profound relationships20 overcome not only physical distance but also marriage to another character and may even outlive the death of one of the partners in the surviving partner’s mind (e.g., in “Isis in Darkness” or “The Age of Lead”). These relationships are, however, rarely enjoyed in a conventional sense—the characters always recognize their importance too late, and they do so only tacitly. Fear or death of one of the partners always represents an insuperable hindrance.
“Death by Landscape” and “Hairball” are good examples of Atwood’s firmly Canadian perspective. These and other stories work with the huge expanses of the Canadian landscape, its unexplored wildernesses, which, particularly in “Death by Landscape,” turn nature into a “protagonist” with a profound effect on plot.21 They evoke the Canadian tradition of landscape painting, particularly that of the Group of Seven. They tell of canoe trips and summer camps in “Death by Landscape” (and in “True Trash”). They contrast Canada and the United States or Canada and Britain in “Hairball.” They examine a curious piece of Canadian exploration lore (the failed Franklin expedition to the Arctic in the nineteenth century) in “The Age of Lead,” combined with the contemporary ecological problems that affect Canada so profoundly, not least due to its geographical proximity to the United States. They tackle the theme of immigration in “Wilderness Tips” and contemporary Canadian political problems in “Hack Wednesday.” These and other motifs in Wilderness Tips (whose stories are nearly all set in Canada) demonstrate how “Canadian” a writer Atwood is in spite of her cosmopolitanism. As well as dealing with supranational themes, such as gender relations, she also conveys specifically Canadian characteristics to an international audience.
MORAL DISORDER
Moral Disorder (2006), Atwood’s latest short-story collection, is her first book of short stories in fifteen years. It is her most homogeneous short-story collection to date, in fact her first short-story cycle. Moral Disorder is clearly also her most “autobiographical” book, with Atwood the writer and family person in her mid-sixties taking stock and looking back, sketching the development of her protagonist Nell from childhood to adulthood and older age. In contrast to Alice Munro’s short-story cycle Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Moral Disorder is not predominantly a portrait of the artist as a young woman; rather, it stresses the personal development of Nell within her family context over a long range of time (only two of the eleven stories deal with Nell’s childhood, one with her youth, eight mainly with an adult Nell). Recurring characters next to the protagonist, who is present in all stories, are Nell’s parents, her sister Lillie (eleven years younger), plus Tig, Nell’s long-time partner, and his ex-wife Oona. Three stories, following each other in the middle of the collection, deal with Nell and Tig’s life on a farm (“Monopoly,” “Moral Disorder,” and “White Horse”) before the couple moves back to the city in the following story, “The Entities,” and the final two stories then deal with Nell’s father and mother, especially their worrisome old age stamped by severe illness.
The structure of the book is predominantly chronological, within a largely retrospective framework and a sometimes montage-like alternation between narrative past and narrative present (“The Headless Horseman,” “The Labrador Fiasco,” “The Boys at the Lab”). Yet the introductory story, “The Bad News,” presented in the present tense, shows an older Nell and Tig (“after this long together” [2]), thus opening the book with the latest chronological story, probably to signal an important aspect and tone of the collection as a whole. “The Bad News” honours its title by exuding a sense of loss—of vitality, of reckless optimism—and a sense of fear and anxiety. Danger seems to lurk everywhere, also on a larger, political scale, since “the leaders of the leading countries, as they’re called, those aren’t really leading any more, they’re flailing around; you can see it in their eyes, white-rimmed like the eyes of panic-stricken cattle” (3). The hope for the future boils down to the unrealistic wish that “things stay the way they are, I pray” (8). Afraid of old age, illness, and a potential loss of mental capacity, Nell is in a precarious mental state: “This has become my picture of my future self: wandering the house in the darkness, in my white nightdress, howling for what I can’t quite remember I’ve lost. It’s unbearable. I wake up in the night and reach out to make sure Tig is still there, still breathing. So far, so good” (5).
In such an “existential” context, it is not surprising that gender, for the first time in Atwood’s short-fiction oeuvre, does not play a big role in this collection. In her mid-sixties, Atwood seems to be involved mainly with other issues. On the other hand, it is significant that the only two stories in which gender does figure rather prominently come in the first third of the book, which deals mainly with a young/er Nell in her childhood and youth. These periods are crucial for gender socialization, especially given the stories’ setting in the 1950s and 1960s, when gender was a particularly prominent social issue:
I’d never got over the Grade Two reader, the one featuring a father who went to a job every day and drove a car, a mother who wore an apron and did baking, two children—boy and girl—and a cat and a dog, all living in a white house with frilly window curtains. ... My future would not be complete—no, it would not be normal—unless it contained window curtains like these, and everything that went with them. (79–80)
“The Art of Cooking and Serving” and “My Last Duchess” thus belong to the relatively few stories in Atwood’s short-story oeuvre—similar to “Betty” (Dancing Girls), “Hurricane Hazel” (Bluebeard’s Egg), and “Uncles” and “Death by Landscape” (Wilderness Tips)—that show gender at work in the crucial younger, formative stages of life, and they clearly show gender as transmitted and performed, certainly not as in-born femininities and masculinities.
The second story in the book, which also explains the cover images of the Canadian edition (19), shows a young Nell mainly in a daughter-mother relationship and, presumably in the 1950s, under strong conventional gender influences. Under the title “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” Atwood renders a female initiation story: initiation into domestic life and giving birth/mothering on the one hand and eventual distancing from familiar influences and turning to peer group activities on the other. The story suggests conventional gender expectations and restrictions in Nell’s upbringing, for instance by the fact that knitting is one of her prime pastimes, not least because her mother is expecting a “late” child (who in later stories appears as Nell’s younger sister Lillie). Lillie is an unplanned baby and turns out to be “one of those” (22), as the doctor puts it, a nervous and nerve-racking child who hardly ever sleeps and who exhausts her family, especially her mother. Before the baby’s sex is known, Nell reflects on the gendered colour system for babies, blue for boys and pink for girls (11–12). She is praised by others for knitting diligently for the baby (“a good little worker” [20]), thus being re-enforced in gendered socialization patterns that train little girls in the direction of motherhood. Whereas Nell, “with single-minded concentration” (14), is fully integrated into the family preparations for the birth of the third child, Nell’s brother is hardly mentioned. In any case, his task under the new circumstances is not exactly taxing, compared with the change of life the baby’s birth means for Nell: “We would all have to pitch in, said my father, and do extra tasks. It would be my brother’s job to mow the lawn, from now until June” (13).
When Nell does not knit the layette for the baby or clean the house, another pastime of hers is to read a cookbook published in 1929–30, ten years before she was born (incidentally just like Atwood herself ). Sarah Field Splint’s The Art of Cooking and Serving gives her orientation in a context of female socialization:
Sarah Field Splint had strict ideas on the proper conduct of life. She had rules, she imposed order. Hot foods must be served hot, cold foods cold. “It just has to be done, however it is accomplished,” she said. That was the kind of advice I needed to hear. She was firm on the subject of clean linen and shining silver. (18)
Nell’s imagination is particularly kindled by the two chapters entitled “The Servantless House” and “The House with a Servant”: “Both of them were windows into another world, and I peered through them eagerly. I knew they were windows, not doors: I couldn’t get in. But what entrancing lives were being lived in there!” (18). The book sets her thoughts in motion: “Did I want to transform, or to be transformed? Was I to be the kind homemaker, or the formerly untidy maid? I hardly knew” (19). In her insecure, transgressive state of development, Nell is thankful on the one hand for guidance through role models but on the other cannot decide on one or the other—perhaps because both of them are heavily engendered and she is looking for other options. This indeed proves true at the end of the story, when Nell rebels against her mother and the nurturing role her mother is steering her toward in a gender-essentialist manner: “‘Why should I?’ [help her mother with the baby] I said. ‘She’s not my baby. I didn’t have her. You did.’ I’d never said anything this rude to her. Even as the words were coming out of my mouth I knew I’d gone too far, though all I’d done was spoken the truth, or part of it” (23). To act against ingrained gender roles in an open manner may entail pain, in more than one sense: “My mother stood up and whirled around, all in one movement, and slapped me hard across the face” (23). Nevertheless, the end of the story sees young Nell drifting away from the domestic, nurturing role supposedly cut out for her, mentally drifting into a new kind of outside world of peer groups, “to all sorts of ... seductive and tawdry and frightening pleasures I could not yet begin to imagine” (23).
Whereas this distancing between mother and daughter in puberty is a usual developmental step, giving birth to a child is rendered in rather unusual problematic terms in this story, thereby also working against any kind of euphemistic motherhood myth. First, Lillie is a late, unplanned baby. Due to her mother’s advanced age, her birth is expected with trepidation: “Until my new baby brother or sister had arrived safely my mother would be in a dangerous condition. Something terrible might happen to her” (12). Second, the baby totally disarranges the family with her constant wailing. Third, her mother changes to her disadvantage, physically and mentally, after giving birth to Lillie. Perhaps no wonder, then, that Nell eventually and explicitly opts against this kind of female familial restriction by rejecting responsibility for her younger sister and placing her into her exhausted mother’s range of activities and worries. Again the men in the family seem to have little to do with the baby; they are not shown to support the mother in her caring for the child and do not seem to particularly care.
“The Art of Cooking and Serving” thus renders traditional gender roles in problematic terms, showing these roles to work against the independence and freedom of choice particularly of women. Giving birth to a child and nurturing it are shown to be the concerns of women, who must either accept the prescribed role or, painfully, opt out of it, as Nell does at the end of the story, leaving her overtaxed mother in the lurch:
My mother ... slapped me hard across the face. She’d never done that before, or anything remotely like it. I didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything. We were both shocked by ourselves, and also by each other.
I ought to have felt hurt, and I did. But I also felt set free, as if released from an enchantment. I was no longer compelled to do service. On the outside, I would still be helpful. ... But another, more secret life spread out before me, unrolling like a dark fabric. (23)
That Nell may be a budding writer is suggested by her involvement with words and language even when a child: “I was knitting this layette because my mother was expecting. I avoided the word pregnant, as did others: pregnant was a blunt, bulgy, pendulous word, it weighed you down to think about it, whereas expecting suggested a dog with its ears pricked” (12). Even names are evaluated by young Nell: “It was by a woman called Sarah Field Splint, a name I trusted: Sarah was old-fashioned and dependable, Field was pastoral and flowery, and Splint—well, there could be no nonsense and weeping and hysteria and doubts about the right course of action with a woman called Splint by your side” (17).
Yet the main issue in this story is Nell’s considering and eventually choosing particular (symbolic) options for her future life. Nell is first presented as a conforming eleven-year-old girl who feels responsible for helping her mother with domestic chores (“When I wasn’t knitting, I swept the floor diligently” [15]). In connection with Splint’s cookbook, she briefly dreams of a domestic existence for herself, yet she focuses only on potential positive aspects of such an existence: “How I longed for a breakfast tray with a couple of daffodils in a bud vase, as pictured, or a tea table at which to entertain ‘a few choice friends’ ... or, best of all, breakfast served on a side porch” (18). The older Nell gets, the more she comes to realize the disadvantages of an exclusively domestic life, with “woman” equalling maternity and household and, in the case of her mother, apparently making up a whole existence; this becomes especially virulent with/after the birth of the third, unwanted child: “Despite her superior ability, she was slacking off ... , her face pale and moist, her hair damp and lank, her stomach sticking out in a way that made me feel dizzy. ... She always knew what to do in an emergency, she was methodical and cheerful, she took command. Now it was as if she had abdicated” (14). When Nell has turned fourteen and the situation at home has further deteriorated after the birth of her sister (“From having been too fat, my mother now became too thin. She was gaunt from lack of sleep, her hair dull, her eyes bruised-looking, her shoulders hunched over” [21]), she is still following in her mother’s footsteps: “I avoided the boys who approached me: somehow I had to turn away, I had to go home and look after the baby, who was still not sleeping. My mother dragged around the house as if she was ill, or starving” (22). It is through her rebellion against her mother’s dismal domestic life and against her mother’s expectations for her that Nell steers her own life in a new direction—at the cost of alienation between mother and daughter, but with a feeling of release and relief, and with hope for her future life.
After “The Headless Horseman”—which deals mainly with the problem-laden relationship between the two sisters22 in the narrative past and present—comes “My Last Duchess.” This is the second story in the book that foregrounds gender, though already to a smaller extent than “The Art of Cooking and Serving” does. “My Last Duchess”— also the title of a well-known poem/dramatic monologue from 1842 by Victorian poet Robert Browning—deals with Nell at high school age, in particular her boyfriends, here Bill, as well as the relevance that literature and her English teacher, Miss Bessie, have for her. Nell is good in English and rather fascinated by her English lessons, whereas Bill prefers algebra and approaches literature as one would non-fictional texts. He thinks he does not understand Browning’s poem and literature in general, and thus at first he accepts Nell as his tutor so that he can pass his English exam. Finally, however, as they begin to quarrel about the poem, disagreeing about how to evaluate the figures of the Duke and Duchess, it becomes the occasion for them to end their relationship.
The reason for the separation is less trivial than it may seem at first because it involves Nell’s newly gained critical awareness of the apparent female gender conformity of the Duchess, which Bill defends. His “She was a nice normal girl” Nell counters with “She was a dumb bunny,” which eventually leads to Bill indirectly attacking Nell and degrading her intelligence: “At least she wasn’t a brainer and a show-off ” (72). Their quarrel thus finally boils down to their different conceptions of what a young woman may be or should do. Nell, after she has first drawn up a list of opposite characteristics of the Duke and Duchess “for the purposes of the final exam” (67), a list that conforms to the received critical view of the Browning poem, eventually comes to see the poem in a somewhat different light, not least because of her discussion with Bill. Nell comes to view the Duke with some sympathy (in contrast to Bill, who outright rejects the Duke’s ruthless behaviour) yet without defending him. More importantly, she judges harshly the Duchess’s pleasing demeanour of always smiling at seemingly everybody, thus taking an unconventional view of the poem: “The more I thought about the Duchess and about how aggravating she must have been— aggravating, and too obliging, and just plain boring, the very same smile day after day—the more sympathy I felt for the Duke” (66–67). With this oppositional, independent-minded view and because she is more knowledgeable about literature than Bill, Nell unwittingly provokes her boyfriend’s denigration of her. Thus, both the Duchess and Nell are criticized and rejected by their partners—both, in the final analysis, for having a mind of their own and for refusing to be dominated and controlled by their male partners. For while ostensibly obliging, the Duchess’s constant smiling at everybody, especially men, may also be regarded as her indirect opposition to her husband’s arrogant and highly possessive stance toward her.23
After their quarrel, Nell cries and briefly ruminates about such strange emotional mechanisms (“It was so sad. Why did such things have to disintegrate like that? Why did longing and desire, and friendliness and goodwill too, have to shatter into pieces? Why did they have to be so thoroughly over?” [73]). But she then turns to read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles in bed, for “Miss Bessie would be tackling it on Monday” (73). Reading this novel makes Nell compare her own fate with that of the literary character Tess (“Tess had serious problems—much worse than mine” [73]), think about questions of canon (“Who chose the books and poems that would be on the curriculum? What use would they be in our future lives?” [74]), and, finally, think about her English teacher, Miss Bessie (“Me, and Miss Bessie. Miss Bessie, too, must have been up late” [74]).
Miss Bessie, rendered in respectful, positive terms from the beginning (“Miss Bessie was the best English teacher in the school. Possibly she was one of the best in the city” [56]), toward the end of the story emerges as a crucial influence on Nell’s life, more important than her quickly changing boyfriends at this time of her adolescent life. This influence is due partly to the teacher’s personal characteristics: Miss Bessie is a respected, knowledgeable, critical, and strict but well-meaning teacher, ambitious to lead her pupils to the best achievements they are capable of, and she seems to be good-looking and dresses elegantly. But her significance for Nell is due at least equally to her superior knowledge of English literature. Literary texts, this story argues, are a school for life if an “attentive reader” (55) knows how to decode them sympathetically: “They [the teachers] knew something we needed to know, but it was a complicated thing. ... These women—these teachers—had no direct method of conveying this thing to us, not in a way that would make us listen, because it was too tangled, it was too oblique. It was hidden within the stories” (75).
With such considerations, her English teacher, and the teachings of literature transmitted through her, intermingle in Nell’s mind. In a kind of epiphany, Nell sees her teacher as someone who has taught her significant lessons for life, but it is the thoughtful pupil herself who has to draw the conclusions from the books: “These girls [literary figures like the Duchess, Tess, or Ophelia] were all similar. They were too trusting, they found themselves in the hands of the wrong men, ... they let themselves drift. They smiled too much. They were too eager to please. Then they got bumped off, one way or another. Nobody gave them any help” (74). Nell learns not to be too compliant but instead to stand up for one’s self and opinions. The Browning poem and, in conjunction, her English teacher, who acts as a catalyst for her freshly gained awareness, displace Bill in the order of importance in Nell’s ponderings:
I ought to have been brooding over Bill—didn’t he require more tears? Instead, in the bright place at the back of my head, there was an image of Miss Bessie. She was standing in a patch of sunlight. ... She seemed distant but very clear, like a photograph. Now she was smiling at me with gentle irony, and holding aside a curtain; behind the curtain was the entrance to a dark tunnel. I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not—the tunnel was the road of going on, ... but the entrance was where Miss Bessie had to stop. (75)
The motif of holding aside the curtain (placed in front of the dark tunnel in Miss Bessie’s case, the painting in the Duke’s case) also points to some important parallels between Miss Bessie and the Duke, though the former is definitely the more positive and important figure for Nell. Both Miss Bessie and the Duke are correlated with culture and art, with indirect teachings of significant lessons via art. Their complex “untold stories” seem to be weightier, more important, and more resonant than any clear, directly told messages. The deciphering that art requires of the “attentive reader” makes her part of the story, as Nell’s ruminations demonstrate, rather than a mere passive listener or viewer. Nell’s teacher, by way of instructing her pupils how to appreciate literature, can give Nell knowledge, criteria, and “pattern[s]” (75) by which to perceive the world, but it is Nell who has to make her own experiences, guided by values in which she believes. In her painful situation of yet another broken relationship with a boyfriend, this is the lesson that Nell slowly learns. A statement from George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara proves true for Nell too: “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something” (1964, 316). In Nell’s own words,
Very soon I would be a last year’s student. I would be gone from Miss Bessie’s world, and she would be gone from mine. Both of us would be in the past, both of us over and done with—me from her point of view, her from mine. Sitting in my present-day desk there would be another, younger student. ...
Meanwhile, I myself would be inside the dark tunnel. I’d be going on. I’d be finding things out. I’d be all on my own. (75–76)
With this statement, prospectively referring to a “teacherless” Nell dependent on her own resources, the story ends.
“My Last Duchess” may be read as another initiation story—initiation into literature, into the lessons it may teach for life, into mental independence. The story may also be understood as another contribution by Atwood to unearthing the “female tradition” (see Nischik 2007)—here concerning education (all of Nell’s teachers seem to have been female), giving significant impulses for life. Miss Bessie, her devoted English teacher, has had a much larger impact than Bill on Nell, a future writer of literature herself, after all. As Nell sees it, the demanding Miss Bessie supports and trains and gives and then lets go, releasing her understanding pupil to write her own life script, in which her devoted English teacher plays a seminal part, as this story demonstrates.
CONCLUSION
Although the recent stories in Moral Disorder, which were first published between 1996 (“The Labrador Fiasco”) and 2006, foreground gender issues to a lesser extent than the stories in Atwood’s previous collections, two of them do explore, in a retrospective setup, the formation of gender in earlier stages of life, a topic partly introduced in some of her earlier stories (see above) but particularly pronounced in her two later short stories. The social constructedness of gender, the performance status of femininities and masculinities, thus become particularly clear in her recent short fiction.
It can thus be said that Atwood’s treatment of gender relations and gender difference forms a constant thread running through her short-story works. It can be argued that, in the course of some four decades,24 Atwood’s treatment of gender issues in her short stories and short fictions (see chapter 2) has developed largely according to the various stages of “victim positions” Atwood differentiated early on in Survival (1972, 36–38): “Position One: To deny the fact that you are a victim” (e.g., Louise in “Polarities”); “Position Two: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim, but to explain this as an act of Fate, ... the dictates of Biology (in the case of women, for instance)” (e.g., Christine in “Scarlet Ibis”); “Position Three: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable” (e.g., Kat in “Hairball” seems to be close to it, but she eventually moves on to position four, a creative non-victim; an example of position three is Julie in “The Bog Man” from Wilderness Tips); and finally “Position Four: To be a creative non-victim” (e.g., Gertrude in “Gertrude Talks Back”; Nell in “My Last Duchess” comes close to this position due to the story’s future-oriented ending). Especially in Murder in the Dark and Good Bones, Atwood’s often inverse views on gender conceptions become even more incisive, perceptive, and demanding, though not without a light-hearted, humorous treatment of a complex issue. Atwood exposes with penetrating insight the often gender-linked conventions and psychological, linguistic, and mythological substructures embedded in daily reality. If, as she sees it, human beings tend to transform threatening and irrational elements of their environment into rationally comprehensible ones, then it is the task of the writer to counter this move toward the conventional.
Seen in toto, Atwood’s treatment of gender relations in her short stories and short fictions may be read as “Instructions for the Third Eye,” to take up the title of the resonant rounding-off text of Murder in the Dark. Atwood admonishes us, female and male readers, to transcend the dualistic thought pattern of either/or, which chains us to fixed identity positions and gender roles, and to be open to liberating, non-essentialist views of gender relations. In her recent short-story cycle Moral Disorder—although its protagonist in her younger years repeatedly feels subjected to gender clichés—an altogether non-essentialist view of gender relations seems to be achieved eventually, so much so that over larger parts of this collection gender is seldom foregrounded. In her short stories and short fictions, too (see the previous chapter), Margaret Atwood acts once again as a chronicler of our times, exposing and warning, disturbing and comforting, and challenging us to question conventions and face up to unarticulated truths. As Nell reflects at the end of “The Entities” in Moral Disorder, “All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about or I can bury it. In the end, we’ll all become stories” (2006, 188).
NOTES
1. From Two-Headed Poems (1978), in Eating Fire (1998, 198–99). The main title of this chapter is also taken from this poem.
2. See, e.g., Rigney 1987, 108–13, where “A Travel Piece” (1975) from Dancing Girls is interpreted as a thematic preform of the novel Bodily Harm (1981); or see Grace and Weir 1983, which contains survey articles on Atwood’s novels and poems but omits her short stories, as do VanSpanckeren and Castro 1988; Rao 1993; Staels 1995; Mycak 1996; and Cooke 2004.
3. See Nischik 1991b, 1993c, 1994, 1994a; diverse articles (by Meindl, Suarez, and Keith) in Nicholson 1994; Howells, Cooke, and York in York 1995; Manley and Arnold Davidson in Wilson, Friedman, and Hengen 1996; Roth 1998; Ljungberg 1999; Stein 1999; and Sturgess 2000/02.
4. Reviews appeared within days of the publication in September 2006 in the New York Times (20 September), the Boston Globe (20 September), the London Free Press (9 September), and the Globe and Mail (two reviews, 6 and 9 September).
5. See, e.g., Thompson 1981; and Sturgess 2000/02.
6. “Two-Headed Poems, xi” (1978), in Eating Fire (1998, 227).
7. “The Grave of the Famous Poet” (1972), in Dancing Girls (1977, 84).
8. “Under Glass” (1972), in Dancing Girls (1977, 76).
9. Laing continues: “Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with’ others or ‘at home in’ the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as ‘split’ in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves and so on. ... [T]here is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-inthe-world” (1965, 17).
10. See “Polarities” (1971) alongside the short stories “The War in the Bathroom” (1964), “Under Glass” (1972), and “A Travel Piece” (1975), all in Dancing Girls, as well as the novels The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), and Lady Oracle (1976).
11. For a more detailed analysis of the polarities in the communication structure, and of Morrison’s frequent indirect speech acts, see Nischik 1994c.
12. This tallies with the authentic comments of schizophrenics; see Laing 1965. In a more general context, see Grace on Atwood’s attempts at synthesization in “Articulating the ‘Space Between,’” in Grace and Weir 1983, 1–16.
13. “The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact mind of many sane people whose minds are closed” (Laing 1965, 27).
14. See also the metaphors of conquest and destruction applied to Morrison in the context of his relationship with Louise: e.g., “a defeated formless creature on which he could inflict himself like a shovel on earth, axe on forest, use without being used” (62).
15. See, e.g., Mathews 1969.
16. See the classic statement on this in Atwood’s short story “A Travel Piece” from Dancing Girls: “for those who are not responsible, for those who make the lives of others their transient spectacle and pleasure. She is a professional tourist, she works at being pleased and not participating; at sitting and watching” (152).
17. For a detailed interpretation of “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother,” see Nischik 2007.
18. Modality is a grammatical category that expresses the attitude of a speaker toward realization of the speech act expressed in his or her utterance. Modalities, then, would include possibility, certainty, necessity, obligation, hope, desire, intention, etc.
19. See also Davey 1986: “The juxtaposition of these kinds of narrative creates recurrently surreal effects. Many of the characters, particularly the women, live psychologically in the hidden story, while functioning physically in the official story. They dream and think in the language of symbols but they speak in cliché. They trivialize their inner lives in order to live a life of conventional fiction. Almost all of Atwood’s couples remain strangers to each other because of this failure to declare the hidden story” (12–13).
20. The one portrayed in “Hairball,” in contrast, is among the most superficial in the entirety of Atwood’s work and ends disastrously.
21. See, in this context, Atwood’s well-known statement in the afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie: “We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here: the country is too big for anyone to inhabit completely, and in the parts unknown to us we move in fear, exiles and invaders” (1970, 62).
22. “She takes a pill every day, for a chemical imbalance she was born with. That was it, all along. That was what made the bad times for her. Not my monstrousness at all. I believe that, most of the time” (48).
23. For two useful treatments of the Browning poem, referring also to the Duchess’s covert opposition to the Duke, see Miller 1989; and Heffernan 1996.
24. Considering first separate publication of individual early stories.