In Other Worlds

by Margaret Atwood

  By utopia, I mean books such as Morris’s News from Nowhere, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Hudson’s A Crystal Age, or even Wyndham’s Consider Her Ways. These differ greatly from plot-centred otherworld fantasies such as Tolkien’s and though they may share some elements with “science fiction,” this category is too broad for them. The books I’ve mentioned all send an emissary from an oppressive contemporary society into the future as a sort of tourist-journalist, to check out improved conditions and report back. Such books are not really about the hero’s adventures, though a love affair of some sort is usually thrown in to sweeten the didactic pill. The real hero is the future society; the reader is intended to comparison-shop in company with the time-traveller, questioning the invariably polite inhabitants and grumbling over disconcerting details. The moral intent of such fables is to point out to us that our own undesirable conditions are not necessary: if things can be imagined differently, they can be done differently.

  Hence the inevitable long-winded conversations in which traveller and tour guide, in this case, Connie and Luciente, plod through the day-to-day workings of their societies. What about sewage disposal? birth control? ecology? education? Books of this sort always contain conversations like this, and it is to Piercy’s credit that she has given us a very human and rather grouchy traveller and a guide who sometimes loses her temper. The world of the future depicted here is closest in spirit perhaps to Morris’s. It’s a village economy, with each village preserving the ethnic flavour of some worthy present-day minority: American Indian, American Black, European Jewish (suburban WASP is not represented). It is, however, racially mixed, sexually equal, and ecologically balanced. Women have “given up” childbirth in order that men won’t regret having given up power, and children are educated more or less communally, with a modified apprentice system. There’s quite a lot of advanced bio-feedback, and instant communication through “kenners,” which is uncomfortably reminiscent of such silliness as Dick Tracy’s two-way wristwatch radios. But they do have communal “fooders” and, I’m happy to note, dishwashers.

  Reading utopias is addictive—I found myself skipping through some perfectly acceptable passages about electric shock treatments and visiting hours at the asylum to find out what the inhabitants of Mattapoisett do about breastfeeding (both sexes indulge; men get hormone shots), about motherhood (bottle babies, elective “mothers,” production in balance with nature’s capacity to support it, adolescent separation rituals), about criminals (if incorrigible they’re executed because no one wants to be a prison guard), even about what they use to mulch cabbages. Writing utopias is addictive too, and Piercy expends a good deal of energy trying to get every last detail in, to get it right, and to make rather too sure we get the point.

  Numerous dangers await the author of a utopia. For one thing, inhabitants of utopias somehow cannot help coming across as slightly sanctimonious and preachy; they’ve been like that since Thomas More. And in addition all utopias suffer from the reader’s secret conviction that a perfect world would be dull, so Piercy is careful to liven things up with festivals, ceremonies, nice clothes, and a hopeful description of untrammelled sexual interchange. There are problems, of course, but we are allowed to see the inhabitants working them out through council meetings and “wormings,” a wonderful name for a session at which you accuse and complain. Some of these projections are a bit much: it’s especially hard to write about communication between cats and humans in any way that isn’t whimsical; and utopian children have difficulty being anything but cute or bratty. But the language Piercy has devised for her utopians has unexpected felicities as well as its leaden moments; some of the utopian passages even manage to be oddly moving. The poignancy comes in part from Connie’s hunger for human contact and love, in part from the resemblances she sees between the utopians and her lost child, lover, and friends. The outer virtues of Mattapoisett are overshadowed by an inner one: it is the only place where Connie is loved.

  However, several issues are dodged. The utopians refuse to fill Connie in on history, so we never find out much about how it all happened. They’re engaged in a war with an enemy, but we don’t learn much about this either. And they tell Connie they are not “the” future, but only a possible future, and that they need her help in the present to avoid “winking out.” (I wish this didn’t sound so much like the resuscitation of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan.) At one point Connie stumbles into another future—presumably what will happen if we don’t all put our shoulders to the wheel—in which women are termitelike objects and the air is so polluted you can’t see the sky.

  The Mattapoisett call to action only bewilders poor Connie, whose scope is of necessity limited. She ends by bumping off a few of the evil asylum shrinks, and because of the ambiguity of the last sections we’re left with the uneasy feeling that Mattapoisett may have been a paranoid fantasy after all. The only evidence against this interpretation is that Connie isn’t educated enough to have such a utopian vision.

  Woman on the Edge of Time is like a long inner dialogue in which Piercy answers her own questions about how a revised American society would work. The curious thing about serious utopias, as opposed to the satirical or entertainment variety, is that their authors never seem to write more than one of them; perhaps because they are products, finally, of the moral rather than the literary sense.

  H. Rider Haggard’s

  She

  When I first read H. Rider Haggard’s highly famous novel She, I didn’t know it was highly famous. I was a teenager, it was the 1950s, and She was just one of the many books in the cellar. My father unwittingly shared with Jorge Luis Borges a liking for nineteenth-century yarns with touches of the uncanny coupled with rip-roaring plots; and so, in the cellar, where I was supposed to be doing my homework, I read my way through Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle, and Dracula and Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells, and also Henry Rider Haggard. I read King Solomon’s Mines first, with its adventures and tunnels and lost treasure, and then Allan Quatermain, with its adventures and tunnels and lost civilization. And then I read She.

  I had no socio-cultural context for these books then—the British Empire was the pink part of the map, “imperialism and colonialism” had not yet acquired their special negative charge, and the accusation “sexist” was far in the future. Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading. Any book that began with some mysterious inscriptions on a very old broken pot was fine with me, and that is how She begins. There was even a picture at the front of my edition—not a drawing of the pot but a photograph of it, to make the yarn really convincing. (The pot was made to order by Haggard’s sister-in-law; he intended it to function like the pirate map at the beginning of Treasure Island—a book the popularity of which he hoped to rival—and it did.)

  Most outrageous tales state at the very beginning that what follows is so incredible the reader will have trouble believing it, which is both a come-on and a challenge. The messages on the pot stretch credulity, but, having deciphered them, the two heroes of She—the gorgeous but none too bright Leo Vincey and the ugly but intelligent Horace Holly—are off to Africa to hunt up the beautiful, undying sorceress who is supposed to have killed Leo’s distant ancestor. Curiosity is their driving force, vengeance is their goal. Many a hardship later, and after having narrowly escaped death at the hands of the savage and matrilineal tribe of the Amahaggar, they find not only the ruins of a vast and once-powerful civilization and the numerous mummified bodies of the same but also, dwelling among the tombs, the self-same undying sorceress, ten times lovelier, wiser, and more ruthless than they had dared to imagine.

  As Queen of the Amahaggar, “She-who-must-be-obeyed” wafts around wrapped up like a corpse in order to inspire fear; but once tantalizingly peeled, under those gauzy wrappings is a stunner, and—what’s more—a virgin. “She,” it turns out, is two thousand years old. Her real name is Ayesha. She claims she was once a priestess of the E
gyptian nature-goddess Isis. She’s been saving herself for two millennia, waiting for the man she loves: one Kallikrates, a very good-looking priest of Isis and the ancestor of Leo Vincey. This man broke his vows and ran off with Leo’s ancestress, whereupon Ayesha slew him in a fit of jealous rage. For two thousand years she’s been waiting for him to be reincarnated; she’s even got his preserved corpse enshrined in a side room, where she laments over it every night. A point-by-point comparison reveals—what a surprise!—that Kallikrates and Leo Vincey are identical.

  Having brought Leo to his knees with her knockout charms, and having polished off Ustane, a more normal sort of woman with whom Leo has formed a sexual pair-bond, and who just happens to be a reincarnation of Ayesha’s ancient Kallikrates-stealing enemy, Ayesha now demands that Leo accompany her into the depths of a nearby mountain. There, She says, is where the secret of extremely long and more abundant life is to be found. Not only that, She and Leo can’t be One until he is as powerful as She—the union might otherwise kill him (as it does, in the sequel, Ayesha: The Vengeance of She). So off to the mountain they go, via the ruins of the ancient, once-imperial city of Kôr. To get the renewed life, all one has to do—after the usual Haggard adventures and tunnels—is to traverse some caverns measureless to man, step into a very noisy rolling pillar of fire, and then make one’s getaway across a bottomless chasm.

  This is how She acquired her powers two thousand years before, and to show a hesitating Leo how easy it is, She does it again. Alas, this time the thing works backward, and in a few instants Ayesha shrivels up into a very elderly bald monkey and then crumbles into dust. Leo and Holly, both hopelessly in love with She and both devastated, totter back to civilization, trusting in Her promise that She will return.

  As a good read in the cellar, this was all very satisfactory, despite the overblown way in which She tended to express herself. She was an odd book in that it placed a preternaturally powerful woman at the centre of things: the only other such woman I’d run into so far had been the Wonder Woman of the comics, with her sparkly lasso and star-spangled panties. Both Ayesha and Wonder Woman went all weak-kneed when it came to the man they loved—Wonder Woman lost her magic powers when kissed by her boyfriend, Steve Trevor; Ayesha couldn’t focus on conquering the world unless Leo Vincey would join her in that dubious enterprise—and I was callow enough, at fifteen, to find this part of it not only soppily romantic but pretty hilarious. Then I graduated from high school and discovered good taste, and forgot for a while about She.

  For a while, but not forever. In the early 1960s I found myself in graduate school, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There I was exposed to Widener Library, a much larger and more organized version of the cellar; that is, it contained many sorts of books, not all of which bore the Great Literature Seal of Approval. Once I was let loose in the stacks, my penchant for not doing my homework soon reasserted itself, and it wasn’t long before I was snuffling around in Rider Haggard and his ilk once more.

  This time, however, I had some excuse. My field of specialization was the nineteenth century, and I was busying myself with Victorian quasi-goddesses; and no one could accuse Haggard of not being Victorian. Like his age, which practically invented archeology, he was an amateur of vanished civilizations; also like his age, he was fascinated by the exploration of unmapped territories and encounters with “undiscovered” native peoples. As an individual, he was such a cookie-cutter country gentleman—albeit with some African travelling in his past—that it was hard to fathom where his overheated imagination had come from, though it may have been this by-the-book-English-establishment quality that allowed him to bypass intellectual analysis completely. He could sink a core-sampling drill straight down into the great English Victorian unconscious, where fears and desires—especially male fears and desires—swarmed in the darkness like blind fish. Or so claimed Henry Miller, among others.

  Where did it all come from? In particular, where did the figure of She come from—old-young, powerful-powerless, beautiful-hideous, dweller among tombs, obsessed with an undying love, deeply in touch with the forces of Nature and thus of Life and Death? Haggard and his siblings were said to have been terrorized by an ugly rag doll that lived in a dark cupboard and was named “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” but there is more to it than that. She was published in 1887, and thus came at the height of the fashion for sinister but seductive women. It looked back also on a long tradition of the same. Ayesha’s literary ancestresses include the young-but-old supernatural women in George MacDonald’s “Curdie” fantasies, but also various Victorian femmes fatales: Tennyson’s Vivien in The Idylls of the King, bent on stealing Merlin’s magic; the Pre-Raphaelite temptresses created in both poem and picture by Rossetti and William Morris; Swinburne’s dominatrixes; Wagner’s nasty pieces of female work, including the very old but still toothsome Kundry of Parsifal; and, most especially, the Mona Lisa of Walter Pater’s famous prose poem, older than the rocks upon which she sits, yet young and lovely, and mysterious, and filled to the brim with experiences of a distinctly suspect nature.

  As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar pointed out in their 1989 book, No Man’s Land, the ascendency in the arts of these potent but dangerous female figures is by no means unconnected with the rise of “Woman” in the nineteenth century, and with the hotly debated issues of her “true nature” and her “rights,” and also with the anxieties and fantasies these controversies generated. If women ever came to wield political power—to which they were surely, by their natures, unsuited—what would they do with it? And if they were beautiful and desirable women, capable of attacking on the sexual as well as the political front, wouldn’t they drink men’s blood, sap their vitality, and reduce them to grovelling serfs? As the century opened, Wordsworth’s Mother Nature was benign, and “never would betray/The heart that loved her”; but by the end of the century, Nature and the women so firmly linked to her were much more likely to be red in tooth and claw—Darwinian goddesses rather than Wordsworthian ones. When, in She, Ayesha appropriates the fiery phallic pillar at the heart of Nature for the second time, it’s just as well that it works backward. Otherwise men could kiss their own phallic pillars goodbye.

  “You are a whale at parables and allegories and one thing reflecting another,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in a letter to Rider Haggard, and there appear to be various hints and verbal signposts scattered over the landscape of She. For instance, the Amahagger, the tribe ruled by She, bear a name that not only encapsulates hag but also conflates the Latin root for love with the name of Abraham’s banished wilderness-dwelling concubine, Hagar, and thus brings to mind a story of two women competing for one man. The ancient city of Kôr is named perhaps for core, cognate with the French coeur, but suggesting also corps, for body, and thus corpse, for dead body; for She is in part a Nightmare Life-in-Death. Her horrid end is reminiscent of Darwinian evolution played backward—woman into monkey—but also of vampires after the stake-into-the-heart manoeuvre. (Bram Stoker’s Dracula appeared after She, but Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla pre-dates it, as does many another vampire story.) These associations and more point toward some central significance that Haggard himself could never fully explicate, though he chalked up a sequel and a couple of prequels trying. “She,” he said, was “some gigantic allegory of which I could not catch the meaning.”

  Haggard claimed to have written She “at white heat,” in six weeks—“It came,” he said, “faster than my poor aching hand could set it down,” which would suggest hypnotic trance or possession. In the heyday of Freudian and Jungian analysis, She was much explored and admired, by Freudians for its womb-and-phallus images, by Jungians for its anima figures and thresholds. Northrop Frye, proponent of the theory of archetypes in literature, says this of She in his 1975 book, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance:

  In the theme of the apparently dead and buried heroine who comes to life again, one of the themes of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, we seem to be getting a more undisplaced glimp
se of the earth-mother at the bottom of the world. In later romance there is another glimpse of such a figure in Rider Haggard’s She, a beautiful and sinister female ruler, buried in the depths of a dark continent, who is much involved with archetypes of death and rebirth.… Embalmed mummies suggest Egypt, which is preeminently the land of death and burial, and, largely because of its biblical role, of descent to a lower world.

  Whatever She may have been thought to signify, its impact upon publication was tremendous. Everyone read it, especially men; a whole generation was influenced by it, and the generation after that. A dozen or so films have been based on it, and a huge amount of the pulp-magazine fiction churned out in the teens, twenties, and thirties of the twentieth century bears its impress. Every time a young but possibly old and/or dead woman turns up, especially if she’s ruling a lost tribe in a wilderness and is a hypnotic seductress, you’re looking at a descendant of She.

  Literary writers, too, felt Her foot on their necks. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness owes a lot to Her, as Gilbert and Gubar have indicated. James Hilton’s Shangri-La, with its ancient, beautiful, and eventually crumbling heroine, is an obvious relative. C. S. Lewis felt Her power, fond as he was of creating sweet-talking, good-looking evil queens; and in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, She splits into two: Galadriel, powerful but good, who’s got exactly the same water-mirror as the one possessed by She; and a very ancient cave-dwelling man-devouring spider-creature named, tellingly, Shelob.