In Other Worlds

by Margaret Atwood

  In addition to the Victorians, I took courses in American Literature and Civilization because I was told it was my “gap”—one I needed to fill in order to write the required comprehensive exams. We hadn’t heard much about Cotton Mather or John Winthrop or “The Day of Doom” by Michael Wigglesworth up in Canada, worse luck. But that gap was soon filled: ask me anything about the Salem Witch Trials and the rules of spectral evidence, and you will receive an even longer and more pedantic answer.

  Being a confirmed rummager, I enjoyed all of this meandering around in the sidebars of literary history, even though I was not allowed into the Lamont Library, where all the modern poetry was kept, on account of being a girl; but I compensated in the stacks of the Widener, which had everything you might want to know about demonology. In those stacks there were more obscure books than you could ever hope to find elsewhere, even on the Internet today, and I whiled away many a misspent hour reading about things that were none of my business—the Widener stacks being a much bigger version of the book-filled cellar of my parents’ house where I used to avoid doing my homework.

  Having duly passed my Orals, I had to decide on a thesis topic. Dreaded quest! Your thesis was supposed to be about something that hadn’t yet been, as they say, done, and when it came to the major writers, such topics seemed few and far between.

  It was now that my earlier reading in non-canonical literature came to my aid. At first I thought I would write about W. H. Hudson, whose lyrical novel, Green Mansions, seemed worthy of investigation. In it there is an otherworldly girl called Rima who belongs to an anthropological group of one, and can talk to birds and animals, and gets burnt up in a giant Tree-of-Life by hostile Indians. But I soon expanded my scope to include a line of literary descent that led from the earlier Scottish writer George MacDonald—author of, among other things, At the Back of the North Wind, which had captivated me as a child—through H. Rider Haggard’s highly influential book She, all the way to the non-realistic prose fictions of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. I should point out that at that time no one of any academic respectability was paying any attention to this kind of writing, or to “science fiction” and its related forms or subforms, such as fantasy and ustopias. Lewis and Tolkien had come out of academia, but they had not yet been accepted back into it as writers, so I was on my own. However, Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “Art is what you can get away with” hadn’t been lost on me, and I saw no reason why it shouldn’t apply to Ph.D. theses as well.

  I called my thesis “The English Metaphysical Romance” because the books I was studying included other-than-human beings and treated themes that were, in origin and in subtext, theological in nature. Someone once said that such works could only have been produced by Anglicans, no longer Catholic but not exactly Protestant either: the metaphysical romance was where the “real presence” went—the magic, transformational part of the Eucharist changed bread and wine into flesh and blood—once the Anglicans had renounced its factuality and turned it into a symbol.

  Others considered this type of fantasy writing the result of repression in an age that censored any overt mention of sexuality. One related by-product of this repression was the unhealthy Victorian obsession with fairy paintings, showing Titania and her train, revels near giant mushrooms, and related scenes—basically a method of slipping past Mrs. Grundy in order to paint naked people having orgies. Orgies were apparently acceptable if you made the naked or semi-clad people very small and put butterfly wings on them. “I hate fairies,” one of my English friends said to me recently. “Nasty little pink wriggly things!” It’s true, many of the painted Victorian fairies were little and wriggly, though some of them were blue rather than pink. Others, however, were more goddesslike; one could see the connection between Fairy Queens—long lustrous hair, diaphanous draperies and all, and hardly ever a Fairy King in sight—and the kinds of larger-than-life Queen Bee female figures that were rapidly taking centre stage in my thesis.

  These powerful female figures in the “metaphysical romances” I was studying were not goddesses, but they were not normal human women either. What then were they, besides being the great-grannies of Wonder Woman? To this question I now consecrated my waking hours. I divided the thesis into two parts: “The Power of Nature,” in which I explored two kinds of strong supernatural female figures—good ones, which I saw as Wordsworthian nature deities of the “Nature-never-did-betray-the-heart-that-loved-her” variety, and bad or morally ambiguous ones, which I saw as Darwinian, or the red in tooth and claw alternate species. George MacDonald’s North Wind and young-old grandmother figures—to his mind Christian allegories of Grace and the like—I saw as exemplifying the “good” kind, while H. Rider Haggard’s She represented the Darwinian kind—not evil as such but amoral.

  The second part of the thesis was called “The Nature of Power” and was devoted to an examination of the different kinds of societies associated with these two types of female figures—“good” societies, which were always connected to jolly agriculturalists like the hobbits and/or with woodland activities like those of the elvish folk headed up by Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, and “bad” societies, which were not only disagreeable tyrannies full of Orcs and other nasties but highly industrialized and polluting. The bad societies were destructive toward nature and its creatures, especially trees, thus giving us one of the most satisfying scenes in The Lord of the Rings: the revenge of the treeish Ents. (Though in Tolkien’s work, as in many fictional worlds from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Harry Potter, there are hostile trees as well.)

  Thus when I went to see the movie Avatar I knew exactly where I was. I was (a) in a Royal Academy exhibition called Victorian Fairy Painting, with the giant luminous plants, the scantily clothed people with big ears, and so forth; and (b) in my own thesis of the 1960s, with the sin of Tree-of-Life burning, the supernatural female figures, the bad machine-makers and forest-despoilers, and the whole ball of wax.

  I never finished my thesis, since I got diverted by novel-publication and film-script writing around 1969–70; but in the course of riffling through obscure books that, at that time, nobody but me was interested in, I discovered lots and lots of utopias. The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was so cluttered up with them that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote a parody operetta called Utopia Limited. I also discovered—beginning around the turn of the century but gathering steam as the twentieth century progressed, if progressed is the word—a strain of increasingly darker and more horrifying dystopias.

  Why this change? In the nineteenth century, there had been many rapid technological, scientific, and medical changes—improved sewer systems and sanitation, antiseptics such as carbolic acid, anesthesia, vaccination, advances in transportation and manufacturing, and many more. The future looked set to continue in this ever-rosier direction, or as Tennyson’s fiery young idealist put it in his poem “Locksley Hall,” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” (The metaphor came from trains, but Tennyson hadn’t looked very closely at the tracks: he thought they were concave.)

  The nineteenth century’s positive utopias were inspired, as well, by various radical social thinkers, including William Cobbett and Karl Marx, and by Christian socialists such as Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin. Many people still really believed that humankind was almost perfectible if only society could change the way it was organized. People wrote utopias—such as William Morris’s arts-and-crafts socialistic News from Nowhere or Edward Bellamy’s technically advanced utopia Looking Backward—because they really did think that humankind could do better than the inequality, social injustice, vice, dirt, disease, and squalor the writers witnessed all around them. Their utopias are versions of the Before-and-After makeovers you used to see in women’s magazines. Before, a sloppy, sad, run-down failure; but add a nifty haircut, flattering wardrobe, more healthful diet, well-applied eyeshadow, and look! A smiling, energetic, and sexier whole different person! (Though if the who
le different person is smiling too eerily, watch out: you may be in a dystopia after all because, like the how-may-I-help-you women in The Stepford Wives, that person may be a robot.)

  Along with the literary utopias, the nineteenth century spawned hundreds of actual ones—groups of people who set up new communities—from the socialist Finnish colonies on the west coast of Canada, to the Esperanto-speakers who thought that a universal language might result in world peace, to the Oneida Community that practised an intricate form of polygamy and morphed into a flatware company. These had as their ancestors a large number of utopian religious communities, ranging from the Quakers, a disruptive cult that would sometimes streak church gatherings before it settled down into the more sober-sided version that went in for oatmeal and prison reform, to the Shakers (who did away with sex—oddly enough, they have died out), to the Mennonites and Amish.

  The seventeenth-century Puritan New Englanders began, too, as utopianists. The phrase “a city upon a hill, a light to all nations” may sound familiar, since it was used recently by an American president, but it was first attached to America in the seventeenth century by John Winthrop, and comes from the inspiring utopian prophecy in the Book of Isaiah crossed with a sermon by Jesus. The New England Colony saw itself as the City of God in action—like so many utopias, it was going to start again and do things right this time. However, as Hawthorne pointed out, the first public-works items the colony built were a prison and a scaffold—acknowledgements of its own dystopic underbelly.

  The nineteenth-century literary utopias concentrated less on religious structures and more on material improvements, but the lustre of both physical and spiritual utopian light dimmed considerably in the twentieth century. Despite this dimming, in the burst of Edwardian splendour that preceded the First World War there were brilliant upflarings of utopianism in the world of art, now dubbed, collectively, “utopian modernism.” These European art movements wished not merely to reflect the world but to change it. Under this heading we find everything from Italian Futurism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Russian Constructivism: all wanted to overthrow established ideas and conventions and set up their own new and improved versions.

  Though utopian from their own point of view, some of these movements are dystopian from ours; indeed, in their frequent celebration of violence, they point to a recurring motif in literary as well as in political utopian thinking: the brave new order often comes about as the result of war and chaos.

  Then along came the real war—the Great War—which did change the world but at horrifying cost. And then, in this changed but not improved postwar world, several societies had a chance to practise utopian social engineering on a large scale. Most noteworthy were the U.S.S.R. under Lenin and Stalin and Germany under Hitler. The result, in each case, was unprecedented bloodshed and the ultimate collapse of the supposedly utopian system.

  Lest we assume that communists and fascists were the only sorts of thinkers to go in for this sort of thing, there are many lesser-known entries in the list of failed utopias, including a capitalist-and-workers’ paradise set up by Henry Ford in the 1920s and 1930s. It was called “Fordlandia,” after its founder, and has recently been the subject of two books, both of them called Fordlandia: a factual account by Greg Grandin and a novel by Eduardo Sguiglia. Fordlandia was situated in the backwoods of Brazil, where the happy workers were supposed to grow rubber trees to make tires for Henry Ford’s Fords; but despite urban planning, and swimming pools for management, and despite or perhaps because of Ford’s efforts to regiment all employees and turn them into teetotallers like himself, the community soon fell apart in a welter of corruption, waste, vice, snakebites, tropical diseases, violence, and rebellion.

  Why is it that when we grab for heaven—socialist or capitalist or even religious—we so often produce hell? I’m not sure, but so it is. Maybe it’s the lumpiness of human beings. What do you do with people who somehow just don’t or won’t fit into your grand scheme? All too often you stretch them on a Procrustean bed or dig a hole in the ground and shovel them into it. With so much stretching, hole-digging, and shovelling going on as the twentieth century ground on, it was difficult to place faith in the construction of utopias, literary or otherwise. It became much easier to depict awful societies not as the tawdry Before side of an After happy-face future but as the much worse thing we might instead be heading toward. The future societies imagined by mid-and late-twentieth-century writers, and indeed by early-twenty-first-century ones, are much more likely to be dark than bright.

  Throughout this chapter I’ve been using the term ustopia, and now I’ll expand on it. Utopia, as you know, comes from Thomas More’s book of that name—which in his case may mean either “no place” or “good place,” or both. Some are of the opinion that More’s book was a sort of joke: utopia can’t exist because fallen human nature doesn’t permit it. Nevertheless, his term stuck, and now, by general usage, utopias are thought to portray ideal societies or some version of them. Their program is to do away with the ills that plague us, such as wars, social inequality, poverty and famine, gender inequalities, fallen arches, and the like. (People—especially women—are always better looking in nineteenth-century utopias than the authors thought they were in real life.)

  Dystopias are usually described as the opposite of utopias—they are Great Bad Places rather than Great Good Places and are characterized by suffering, tyranny, and oppression of all kinds. Some books contain both—a sort of “look on this picture, then on that,” as Hamlet puts it—one, noble and virtuous; the other, corrupt and vicious. Polar opposites.

  But scratch the surface a little, and—or so I think—you see something more like a yin and yang pattern; within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over. Even in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—surely one of the most unrelievedly gloomy dystopias ever concocted—utopia is present, though minimally, in the form of an antique glass paperweight and a little woodland glade beside a stream. As for the utopias, from Thomas More onwards, there is always provision made for the renegades, those who don’t or won’t follow the rules: prison, enslavement, exile, exclusion, or execution.

  Forty years after having abandoned my “metaphysical romance” thesis with its chapters on good and bad societies, I find I have produced—so far—three novel-length ustopias of my own: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood.

  Why did I jump the tracks, as it were, from realistic novels to dystopias? Was I slumming, as some “literary” writers are accused of doing when they write science fiction or detective stories? The human heart is inscrutable, but let me try to remember what I thought I was up to at the time.

  First, The Handmaid’s Tale. What put it into my head to write such a book? I had never done anything like it before: my previous fiction had been realistic. Tackling a ustopia was a risk. But it was also a challenge and a temptation because if you’ve studied a form and read extensively in it, you often have a secret hankering to try it yourself.

  I began the book—after a few earlier dry runs—in Berlin in the spring of 1984. I had a D.A.A.D. fellowship, in a program run by West Berlin to encourage foreign artists to visit, as the city was at that time encircled by the Berlin Wall and its inhabitants felt understandably claustrophobic. During our stay we also visited East Berlin, as well as Poland and Czechoslovakia, and I thus had several first-hand experiences of the flavour of life in a totalitarian—but supposedly utopian—regime. I wrote more of the book once I was back in Toronto, and completed it in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the spring of 1985, where I was the holder of an M.F.A. chair. Tuscaloosa and Alabama provided another kind of flavour—that of a democracy, but one with quite a few constraining social customs and attitudes. (“Don’t ride a bicycle,” I was told. “They’ll think you’re a communist and run you off the road.”)

  The writing of The Handmaid’s Tale gave me a strange feeling, l
ike sliding on river ice—exhilarating but unbalancing. How thin is this ice? How far can I go? How much trouble am I in? What’s down there if I fall? These were writerly questions, having to do with structure and execution, and that biggest question of all, the one every writer asks him- or herself with every completed chapter: Is anyone going to believe this? (I don’t mean literal belief: fictions admit that they are invented, right on the cover. I mean, “find the story compelling and plausible enough to go along for the ride.”)

  These writerly questions were reflections of other, more general questions. How thin is the ice on which supposedly “liberated” modern Western women stand? How far can they go? How much trouble are they in? What’s down there if they fall?

  And further: If you were attempting a totalitarian takeover of the United States, how would you do it? What form would such a government assume, and what flag would it fly? How much social instability would it take before people would renounce their hard-won civil liberties in a tradeoff for “safety”? And, since most totalitarianisms we know about have attempted to control reproduction in one way or another—limiting births, demanding births, specifying who can marry whom and who owns the kids—how would that motif play out for women?

  And what about the outfits? Ustopias are always interested in clothing—either less of it, compared to what we wear now—that was popular in Victorian times—or more of it, compared to what we wear now. The clothing concerns usually centre around women: societies are always uncovering parts of women’s bodies and then covering them up again. (Maybe this is just to keep things interesting: now you see it, now you don’t, though the “it” changes a lot. What was it that used to be so very alluring about a trim set of ankles?)