Tips from Margaret Atwood

       On a spring day in 1982, NDP Member of Parliament Margaret Mitchell stood up in the House of Commons to speak on the topic of battered wives. As she outlined the nature and extent of the problem, she was heckled and laughed at by her fellow MPs.

       That event falls roughly in the middle of Margaret Atwood’s career, and I find it helps me to put her writing in context. Just one year later, she published Bodily Harm, her 5th novel which features a protagonist addicted to harmful relationships. Themes of power and its abuse run through her writing, with women often on the receiving end.

       Recently, I picked up Wilderness Tips (1991). I had previously read Alias Grace, but this was my first time reading her short fiction. I have to stay that I mostly enjoyed it. Anyone reading Atwood knows that they are holding in their hands a work of fine craft. But at the level of gut response, I find the insistent adultery distasteful. One character expresses the majority view when he says “Monogamy is a curious anthropological artefact, or else a sort of heroic feat.”

       The male characters aren’t universally bad, but there are some real villains. George, of the story “Wilderness Tips,” is “not all that fond of men on purely social occasions because there are few ways he can manipulate them.” He is married to a woman with two sisters, one of whom he has sporadic affairs with, and the other he has his sights on. The narrator tells us “George would like to go to bed with Pamela, not because she is beautiful … but because he has never done it.” What is generally true in the other stories is especially clear here: modern marriage is an empty charade.

       My favorite story is “Uncles,” and not only because it includes a rare healthy marriage. It features a young woman named Susanna who rises from obscurity to national fame as a celebrity journalist. The pivot point of the story comes in a conversation with one of her former newspaper colleagues. He asks her to write a guest feature about how the women’s movement has accomplished its goals, but also hurt men in the process. In this memorable exchange, she splutters “How about the wage differential? How about the rape statistics? How about all those single mothers on welfare? They’re the fastest-growing group below the poverty line! I don’t think that was a goal, do you?” Their conflict foregrounds the way that successful women inspire jealousy among men, while still advocating for an unfinished cause. Perhaps Atwood’s own experience comes out here.

       In the 1700s, one poet wrote that he was guided “As with a moral View design’d to cure the Vices of Mankind.” I don’t think that Atwood has any deliberate moral purpose in her fiction – she is too postmodern for that – but she does draw our attention to injustice. So often, she leads us to take a hard look at what is ugly and brutal in society. That act, though it doesn’t offer any cure in itself, counters our tendency toward callousness. It allows us to go out of our insular world to feel the real pain of others. Without that empathy, there can be no change.

Wrestling with 'A People's History'

Over the past several weeks, I’ve watched a few episodes of a documentary series put out by the CBC titled Canada: A People’s History. Its 30 hours of content, spread over 17 episodes, chronicle the history of Canada from the earliest First Nations to the 20^th century.

 

The visual medium has been a nice break from my usual reading in textbooks. The series is geared towards people who aren’t especially interested in history, so they spruce up the main narrative with lots of interesting side stories. I especially like how they tell much of the story in monologues given by the historical characters in period costume.

When I first started reading history last summer, I expected to find heroic stories, brave deeds, overcoming the odds and the like. Time and again, I’ve found myself surprised by episodes that would be better described as beastly and cruel.

Let’s take the Seven Years’ War for example (1756 – 1763). In Europe, France and Austria squared off against Britain and Prussia, and the conflict spilled over into their colonies around the world. While American settlers were pushing west into the Ohio Valley (claimed by New France), the French and their Native allies organized a campaign of guerrilla warfare. In one case, they raided a settlement of 55 families, burned all the buildings and killed many. The survivors were forced to run a gauntlet of Natives wielding clubs. Later, in 1756, one French commander reported that he had been “occupied more than eight days merely in receiving scalps” (1). These ghastly tactics crushed the western expansion.

But the French didn’t have a monopoly on brutality. During the siege of Quebec (June – Sept 1759), the Canadien Habitants had evacuated their villages to the safety of the citadel. Seeing this, General James Wolfe sent 1600 soldiers to lay waste to the countryside; they destroyed the crops, slaughtered the livestock, and torched all the buildings. After the British got the upper hand on the Plains of Abraham, they captured the town. But because the winter food was destroyed, both the garrison and the defeated population had to face a winter of deprivation and disease.

The battered shell of Quebec after months of bombardment

I could go on. What does all this mean? I’m struggling to reconcile my idealism with what I find in the historical record. Maybe this is one of the values of studying history. History would say to us “Look at the sort of world we live in. Take off your rose-coloured glasses, rub your eyes, and look at it long and hard. What do you see? Men die like beasts, good men like bad, wise men like fools. You see evil running rampant” (2). 

That quote comes from a theologian talking about the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, and I’m finding the same message in the book of history. From our human perspective, the ways of this world are inscrutable. Any honest person who would set out to make history a collection of noble stories that favour their nation must, in the end, conclude “behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (3).

Sources

(1) Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel. History of the Canadian Peoples. p161.

(2) J.I. Packer. Knowing God. p113-114.

(3) The Bible. Ecclesiastes 1:14.

Mark Starowicz, Executive Producer. Canada: A People’s History.