In Other Worlds

by Margaret Atwood

  My rules for The Handmaid’s Tale were simple: I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime, or for which it did not already have the tools. Even the group hangings had precedents: there were group hangings in earlier England, and there are still group stonings in some countries. Looking further back, the Maenads, during their Dionysian celebrations, were said to go into frenzies during which they dismembered people with their hands. (If everyone participates, no one individual is responsible.) For a literary precedent, one need search no further than Emile Zola’s Germinal, which contains an episode in which the town’s coal-mining women, who have been sexually exploited by the shopkeeper, tear the man apart and parade his genitalia through town on a pole. A less raw but still shocking precedent is Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” (which I read as a teenager, shortly after it came out, and which made a chilling impression on me).

  The coverups worn by the women in The Handmaid’s Tale have been variously interpreted as Catholic (as in nuns) or Muslim (as in burkas). The truth is that these outfits are not aimed at any one religion. Their actual design was inspired by the Old Dutch Cleanser figure on the sink cleaner boxes of my childhood, but they are also simply old. Mid-Victorians, with their concealing bonnets and veils to keep strange men from leering at their faces, would not have found them so unusual.

  Old Dutch Cleanser:

  I prefaced the novel with three quotations. The first is from the Bible—Genesis 30, 1:3, the passage in which the two wives of Jacob use their female slaves as baby-producers for themselves; this ought to warn the reader against the dangers inherent in applying every word in that extremely varied document literally. The second is from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal: it alerts us to the fact that a straight-faced but satirical account—such as Swift’s suggestion that the grinding Irish poverty of his times could be alleviated by selling and eating Irish babies—is not a recipe. The third—“In the desert there is no sign that says, ‘Thou shalt not eat stones’ ”—is a Sufi proverb stating a simple human truth: we don’t prohibit things that nobody would ever want to do anyway, since all prohibitions are founded upon a denial of our desires.

  The Handmaid’s Tale was published in Canada in the fall of 1985, and in the United States and the United Kingdom in the spring of 1986. In the United Kingdom, its first reviewers treated it as a yarn rather than a warning: they’d already experienced Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan republic and seemed to have no fear of re-enacting that scenario. In Canada, people asked, in anxious Canadian fashion, “Could it happen here?” In the United States, Mary McCarthy, writing in the New York Times, gave the book a largely negative review on the grounds that it lacked imagination, and anyway it was unlikely ever to take place, not in the secular society she perceived as the American reality. But on the West Coast, so attuned to earthquake tremors, switchboards on talk shows lit up like Las Vegas, and someone graffitied on the Venice Beach seawall: “The Handmaid’s Tale Is Already Here!”

  It wasn’t already here, not quite, not then. I thought for a while in the 1990s that maybe it never would be. But now I’m wondering again. Of recent years, American society has moved much closer to the conditions necessary for a takeover of its own power structures by an anti-democratic and repressive government. Approximately five years after The Handmaid’s Tale was published, the Soviet Union disintegrated, the West slapped itself on the back and went shopping, and pundits proclaimed the end of history. It looked as if, in the race between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World—control by terror versus control through conditioning and consumption—the latter had won, and the world of The Handmaid’s Tale appeared to recede. But now we see a United States weakened by two draining wars and a financial meltdown, and America appears to be losing faith in the basic premises of liberal democracy. After 9/11, the Patriot Act passed with barely a cough, and in Britain citizens have accepted a degree of state supervision that would once have been unthinkable.

  It’s a truism that enemy states tend to mirror one another in organization and methods. When colonies were the coming thing, everyone wanted one. Atom bombs in the United States created the desire for some in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union was a large bureaucratic centralized state, and so was the America of those times. What form will the United States assume now that it’s opposed by unrelenting religious fanaticisms? Will it soon produce rule by the same kind of religious fanaticism, only of a different sect? Will the more repressive elements within it triumph, returning it to its origins as a Puritan theocracy and giving us The Handmaid’s Tale in everything but the outfits?

  I’ve said earlier that dystopia contains within itself a little utopia, and vice versa. What, then, is the little utopia concealed in the dystopic Handmaid’s Tale? There are two: one is in the past—the past that is our own present. The second is placed in a future beyond the main story by the Afterword at the end of the book, which describes a future in which Gilead—the tyrannical republic of The Handmaid’s Tale—has ended, and has thus become a subject for conferences and academic papers. I suppose that’s what happens to ustopian societies when they die: they don’t go to Heaven, they become thesis topics.

  After The Handmaid’s Tale there was a period of approximately eighteen years during which I did not write ustopian novels, but then came Oryx and Crake in 2003. Oryx and Crake is dystopic in that almost the entire human race is annihilated, before which it has split into two parts: a technocracy and an anarchy. And, true to form, there is a little attempt at utopia in it as well: a group of quasi-humans who have been genetically engineered so that they will never suffer from the ills that plague Homo sapiens sapiens. They are designer people. But anyone who engages in such design—as we are now doing—has to ask, How far can humans go in the alteration department before those altered cease to be human? Which of our features are at the core of our being? What a piece of work is man, and now that we ourselves can be the workmen, what pieces of this work shall we chop off?

  The designer people have some accessories I wouldn’t mind having myself: built-in insect repellant, automatic sunblock, and the ability to digest leaves, like rabbits. They also have several traits that would indeed be improvements of a sort, though many of us wouldn’t like them. For instance, mating is seasonal: in season, certain parts of the body turn blue, as with baboons, so there is no more romantic rejection or date rape. And these people can’t read, so a lot of harmful ideologies will never trouble them.

  There are other genetically engineered creatures in the book as well: Chickie Nobs, for instance, which are chicken objects modified so they grow multiple legs, wings, and breasts. They have no heads, just a nutriment orifice at the top, thus solving a problem for animal rights workers: as their creators say, “No Brain, No Pain.” (Since Oryx and Crake was published, the Chickie Nob solution has made giant strides: lab-grown meat is now a reality, though it is probably not in your sausages yet.)

  A sibling book, The Year of the Flood, was published in 2009. Its original title was God’s Gardeners, but although this was perfectly acceptable to the British publisher, the American publisher and the Canadian publisher objected to it on the grounds that people would think the book was a far-right extremist tract, which goes to show how thoroughly the word God has been hijacked. Many other titles were proposed, including “Serpent Wisdom,” which the Canadian publisher liked but which the U.S. felt suggested a hippy New Age cult, and “Edencliff,” which the British thought sounded like “a retirement home in Bournemouth.” Book titles are either immediately obvious, like The Edible Woman, or very hard to decide on, and The Year of the Flood was the second kind.

  The Year of the Flood explores the world of Oryx and Crake from a different perspective. Whereas Jimmy/Snowman, the protagonist of Oryx and Crake, has grown up within a privileged though barricaded enclave, The Year of the Flood takes place in the space outside such enclaves, at the very bottom of the social heap. Its pre-disaster plot unfolds in neigh
bourhoods that the security forces—now melded with corporations—don’t even bother to patrol, leaving them to criminal gangs and anarchic violence. However, this book, too, has a utopia embedded within a dystopia; it’s represented by the God’s Gardeners, a small environmental religious cult dedicated to the sacred element in all Creation. Its members grow vegetables on slum rooftops, sing sacred-nature hymns, and avoid high-tech communications devices such as cell phones and computers on the grounds that they can be used to spy on you—which is entirely true.

  Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood cover the same time period, and thus are not sequels or prequels; they are more like chapters of the same book. They have sometimes been described as “apocalyptic,” but in a true apocalypse everything on Earth is destroyed, whereas in these two books the only element that’s annihilated is the human race, or most of it. What survives after the cataclysmic event is not a “dystopia,” because many more people would be required for that—enough to comprise a society. The surviving stragglers do, however, have mythic precedents: a number of myths tell of an annihilating flood survived by one man (Deucalion in Greek myth, Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh epic) or a small group, like Noah and his family. Do the surviving human beings in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood represent a dystopic threat to the tiny utopia of genetically modified, peaceful, and sexually harmonious New Humans that is set to replace them? As it is always the reader rather than the writer who has the last word about any book, I leave that to you.

  People have asked, many times, about the “inspiration” for these two books and their world. Of course there are proximate causes for all novels—a family story, a newspaper clipping, an event in one’s personal history—and for Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood there are such causes as well. Worries about the effects of climate change can be found as far back as 1972, when the Club of Rome accurately predicted what now appears to be happening, so those worries had long been with me, though they were not front-page stories in the spring of 2001 when I began Oryx and Crake. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, I accumulated many file folders of research; and although in both there are some of what Huckleberry Finn would call “stretchers,” there is nothing that’s entirely without foundation.

  So I could point to this or that scientific paper, this or that newspaper or magazine story, this or that actual event, but those kinds of things are not really what drive the storytelling impulse. I’m more inclined to think that it’s unfinished business, of the kind represented by the questions people are increasingly asking themselves: How badly have we messed up the planet? Can we dig ourselves out? What would a species-wide self-rescue effort look like if played out in actuality? And also: Where has utopian thinking gone? Because it never totally disappears: we’re too hopeful a species for that. “Good,” for us, may always have a “Bad” twin, but its other twin is “Better.”

  It’s interesting to me that I situated the utopia-facilitating element in Oryx and Crake not in a new kind of social organization or a mass brainwashing or soul-engineering program but inside the human body. The Crakers are well behaved from the inside out not because of their legal system or their government or some form of intimidation but because they have been designed to be so. They can’t choose otherwise. And this seems to be where ustopia is moving in real life as well: through genetic engineering, we will be able to rid ourselves of inherited diseases, and ugliness, and mental illness, and aging, and … who knows? The sky’s the limit. Or so we are being told. What is the little dystopia concealed within such utopian visions of the perfected human body—and mind? Time will tell.

  Historically, ustopia has not been a happy story. High hopes have been dashed, time and time again. The best intentions have indeed led to many paved roads in Hell. Does that mean we should never try to rectify our mistakes, reverse our disaster-bent courses, clean up our cesspools, or ameliorate the many miseries of many lives? Surely not: if we don’t do maintenance work and minor improvements on whatever we actually have, things will go downhill very fast. So of course we should try to make things better, insofar as it lies within our power. But we should probably not try to make things perfect, especially not ourselves, for that path leads to mass graves.

  We’re stuck with us, imperfect as we are; but we should make the most of us. Which is about as far as I myself am prepared to go, in real life, along the road to ustopia.

  NOTES

  1. John Gardner, Grendel, 1971.

  2. The Tempest’s Golden Age is in Act II, Scene 1.

  3. Underground fairylands and other worlds are numerous. I’ll mention only two: George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie (1883) and Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill (1896).

  4. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote an engaging preface to Treasure Island in which he describes this process.

  5. Escape from caverns via animal tracking is a very old motif. See, for instance, One Thousand and One Nights.

  6. “Copper cylinders”: See James de Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, 1888.

  7. “Hell hath no limits,” Doctor Faustus, Scene 5, pp. 120–135. “Paradise,” Paradise Lost, lines 585–7.

  8. Honours English: a now-defunct course at the University of Toronto that covered everything from Anglo-Saxon to T. S. Eliot.

  9. At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald (1871) contains a huge flying female character—the North Wind—with an astonishing amount of hair.

  10. “Someone once said …” Scott Symons, in conversation with the author.

  11. Sexual dimorphism in fairy fantasy writing was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often featuring a large, long-haired female and a small boy. (See, for instance, Jean Ingelow, Mopsa the Fairy, 1910.) In later incarnations such as She and The Lord of the Rings, power substitutes for size.

  12. Victorian Fairy Painting is the catalogue of the 1997 exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

  13. Tennyson and train tracks: “Locksley Hall,” 1835.

  14. The “city upon a hill” phrase was quoted by George W. Bush, twice, 2000 and 2001.

  15. Greg Grandin, Fordlandia, 2010; Eduardo Sguiglia, Fordlandia, 2000.

  16. Emile Zola, Germinal, 1885.

  “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” A tattoo inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale belonging to Kat Thomas, co-creator of BiblioBabes.ca. Tattoo by Captain Matt of CaptainMatt.ca:

  An Introductory Note

  When I began looking through my past publications in search of other pieces about SF and related topics, I found I’d written quite a lot more on this subject than I’d remembered and started quite a bit earlier. My first such published article—on H. Rider Haggard’s She—dates back to 1965.

  I’ve chosen to begin with an excerpt from a review of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time that appeared in 1976. It’s clear that I was pondering the problems of utopia/dystopia writing at least nine years before I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. The other nine pieces range from an introduction to She to an examination of Jonathan Swift’s science academy in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels and touch on everything from the forms of dictatorships to human genetic engineering.

  I’ve done some light editing to remove some overlaps and repetitions, but otherwise the pieces are as originally published.

  Woman on

  the Edge of Time

  by Marge Piercy

  None of the reviews of Woman on the Edge of Time I’ve read to date seems even to have acknowledged its genre. Most have assumed that the book is intended as a realistic novel, for that is certainly how it starts out. It appears to be the slice-of-life story of a thirty-seven-year-old Chicana welfare recipient named Consuelo, whose past history we are given in the first few pages of the book. Consuelo had a child, was deserted by her husband, and subsequently took up with a black, blind pickpocket whose death drove her into a depression in which she accidently broke her daughter’s wrist. For this offence she was committed to a mental institution and has h
ad her child taken away from her. The only person left for her to love is her doped-up prostitute niece Dolly, but in defending Dolly she breaks the nose of Dolly’s pimp and is recommitted by him. The rest of the book takes place “inside” (with one escape and one visit to the outside), and the descriptions of institutional life are enough to make the reader believe that Connie will be driven mad by sadistic doctors and indifferent attendants. This part of the book is rendered in excruciating, grotty, Zolaesque detail, pill by deadening pill, meal by cardboard meal, ordeal by ordeal, and as a rendition of what life in a New York bin is like for those without money or influence it is totally convincing and depressing.

  However, even before Connie is recommitted she has been having visits from a strange creature named Luciente. Luciente turns out to be a visitor from the future; Connie thinks the visitor is a young man and is surprised when she is revealed as a woman. By making contact with Connie’s mind, Luciente can help Connie project herself into the world of the future, Luciente’s world. Connie travels there extensively, and needless to say the reader goes with her.

  Some reviewers treated this part of the book as a regrettable daydream or even a hallucination caused by Connie’s madness. Such an interpretation undercuts the entire book. If Connie is insane, her struggles to escape from the institution must be viewed in an entirely different light from that in which the author puts them, and the doctors, the pimp, and the indifferent family are somewhat justified in their callous treatment. Other reviewers did not see Connie as insane but took Luciente and her troupe to be a pointless exercise in “science fiction,” an exercise that should have no place in a piece of social realism. But Piercy is not that stupid. If she had intended a realistic novel she would have written one. Woman on the Edge of Time is a utopia, with all the virtues and shortcomings of the form, and many of the things reviewers found irksome are indigenous to the genre rather than the author.