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.

Upbeat Ecology with David Suzuki

During my prep work for a class, I looked at the list of required readings and groaned – “Not another environmentalist essay!” Why is it that no ESL student can get through a course without being subjected to ecology? I braced myself for a preachy and tedious reading.

Maybe you relate to my feeling that reading environmentalist stuff is about as much fun as spending an afternoon with Eeyore. But in this case, I was pleasantly surprised. The essay was actually an excerpt taken from a book called David Suzuki’s Green Guide by the man himself. The title interested me because it suggested practical points of action at the personal level. I was also interested in reading something Canadian with more of a political edge.

I checked out the book from the library and it’s been my subway reading for a few weeks. It’s broken into chapters on home, food, travel, simplicity, and citizenship. Some of the suggestions are predictable – live close to your work, eat less meat, bike instead of drive, spend more time outside. There were many things, though, that surprised me:

·         Changing how you eat can have a bigger impact than switching from a gas to electric car 

·         Out of reduce, reuse, recycle, reduce is by far the most important

·         Raising livestock has a larger impact on the environment than the worldwide transportation sector

·         Producing beef requires 70,000 liters of water per kilogram

·         By 2006, the clever Swedes had reduced their greenhouse gas emissions to 7.2% below 1990 levels, surpassing their Kyoto target

·         A townhouse consumes 22% less energy than a detached house, and an apartment unit consumes 40% less energy

·         An article published in The Economist magazine stated that GDP is “badly flawed as a guide to a nation’s economic well-being.” It overlooks trust, community, rest, and, of course, the state of the environment. It’s not hard to see this point when you realise that the wealthiest person you know is not often the most satisfied with life.

·         In the long run, environmental choices almost always save you money

Another thing I appreciate about the book is the “Inspiration” sections sprinkled throughout each chapter. These show how people and companies and governments have put the principles into practice with great success. For example, the German government passed rigorous legislation to cut down on the packaging waste going to dumps and incinerators. Since the law came into effect (sometime in the 1990s), they have reduced waste by 70%.  Now that is a refreshing break from the Eeyores of ecology.

Source

David Suzuki and David R. Boyd. David Suzuki’s Green Guide. Greystone Books: 2008.

Windows onto Old Toronto

Sometimes I like to walk around Toronto streets and wonder what it all would have looked like in the beginning – back when it was called “York.” What was it like to walk along Bloor St. when St. Paul’s was a ‘countryside’ church and there was mostly wilderness to the north? Today, we walk the same streets under the same blue sky, but I imagine the city would be scarcely recognizable to an early settler.

This past week, I came across two resources that have been like a window onto the streets of old Muddy York. The first is a website dedicated to showcase historical maps of Toronto. Here is my favorite one:

Unlike a typical map, this gives you a perspective as if you were flying over Toronto Island looking north. It’s done in the most intricate detail – difficult to appreciate when you look at the whole. But you can zoom in to find each street and building as it appeared in 1876. Here’s what my neighborhood, St. James Town, looked like then:

Today it's home to about 24,000 souls living in 18 high-rise buildings. Imagine!

To get a perspective closer to the ground, there is a wonderful book titled Pen Sketches of Historic Toronto by J. Clarence Duff. The Red Lion Hotel, pictured below, gives a sense of the rural atmosphere on the city borders. The hotel was popular with locals, with its tavern and dance hall providing a warm atmosphere for social events.

I love this second one. The Church of the Holy Trinity was built on the outskirts of the city when it had about 20,000. Here, it’s pictured surrounded with peaceful cottages and greenery. 

 

What surrounds it today? That’s right, the Eaton Centre, the beating heart of our city shopping scene. At first it seemed to me a great shame that the church lies mostly forgotten when it used to be the focal point of the community around it. But perhaps that's what makes it a place of tranquility today. As summer is coming up, the leafy courtyard is well worth a visit for its own sake.

Sources

Historical Maps of Toronto. "1876 PA Gross Bird's Eye View of Toronto." Compiled by Nathan Ng.

J. Clarence Duff. Pen Sketches of Historic Toronto. Volume 2.

Catholicism in Quebec: Then and Now

Canada doesn’t stand much chance of ever winning a soccer title. But who needs soccer when your nation produced the Pope? Well, we came close (according to Maclean’s), but sadly cardinal Marc Oullet was bested by Jorge Bergoglio in last month’s papal election. The event got me thinking about Roman Catholicism in Quebec and how it developed to its state today.

Cardinal Marc Oullet with the former Pope Benedict XVI

From the founding of New France until the middle of the 20th century, the church was a defining feature of social life in Quebec. Religious leaders saw the new world as virgin territory, a haven of piety against the growing secularism in France. Did you know that Montreal was originally intended to be an outpost of religious devotion? 150 years later, while the Revolution raged in France, Catholic historians saw the hand of Providence in shielding religion in the St. Lawrence colony from secularism in the mother country. Even until 1960, Quebec had more clergy than both Ireland and France.

Today, the 80% of the people still identify with the Catholic Church, but only 20% attend church services. By Maclean’s assessment, they have become “allergic to the worship of their own deity.” So what happened? Essentially this: Quebec went though the same breadth of social change that took France 200 years. Let’s look at the forerunners of that change.

On August 1948, when Marc Oullet was just four years old, a group of painters in Montreal published the Refus Global. In the same tradition as The Communist Manifesto, they challenged the materialism and repression they saw in society. They accused the clergy of enslaving people in a regime of fear: “They have extorted with us a thousand times more than they ever gave.” Against this, they sound a call to freedom for the masses – “submissive slaves” – and their emotional development, material progress, and collective hope.

A sample work by one of the Montreal painters, Jean-Paul Riopelle. La Forêt Ardente

To be sure, power is often a corrupting force, and there’s no doubt that the artists had legitimate grounds for protest. At the same time, it would be unjust to forget that the church was the sole provider of social services to the sick, poor, and marginalized - not to mention the only caretaker of education for hundreds of years. I think it’s a shame that we're so quick to forget years of faithful service.

Well, what was the reaction to the Refus Global? It was condemned – universally. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines published articles overnight censuring the manifesto. Paul-Emile Bourdas, the lead writer, was fired from his position as an art teacher. The public wasn’t ready to question the church – not, at least, until the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

You may remember the scene from The Devil Wears Prada: Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is consulting with her fashion minions when Andy (Anne Hathaway) snickers at their discussion over two apparently identical belts. Miranda turns and fixes her with an icy stare. In the dressing down that follows, she rebukes Andy for her false pride and points out that her ‘decision’ to buy the sweater she is wearing was, in fact, a choice made for her by the fashion industry. What was once avant garde trickled down into society where it shaped the fashion choices of Andy and millions of other unsuspecting people.

In much the same way, the Refus Global stands as the forerunner of secularism in Quebec. Though rejected at first, its ideas would later motivate the wholesale departure from the church – whether people were aware of it or not.

Sources:

Maclean’s article, “Cardinal Marc Oullet: The Canadian who Could be Pope,” gives interesting commentary on Oullet and the state of Catholicism in Quebec:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/02/18/the-canadian-who-could-be-the-next-pope-2/

You can read the full text of The “Refus Global” here:

http://thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/refus-global-manifesto