Change of address

My Margaret Atwood reference site is now located at:

http://www.geocities.com/ladyoracle_atwood.

See you there.

Handmaid

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale

I read this book for the first time in high school, and for the second time about a month ago. I tried to take my time with it this time, but the story kept pulling me forward, and I'm afraid I didn't give the writing the full attention it deserves. Oh well.

What struck me about this book the second time around was the visual imagery. I see such vivid pictures of the city where Offred lives. It's clean & homogenous, all in primary colours & straight lines. The way Atwood describes, for example, the lines of Handmaids walking dutifully, two-by-two, to go shopping, or the careful seating arrangement (Wives, Handmaids, Aunts...) at the Women's Salvaging, or even the clean white plainness of Offred's own room-- It's all so precise and geometrical. I picture all these scenes in blinding sunlight, the people's uniforms glaring & unmistakable. The night-time scenes are brightly lit, by moonlight & searchlights. Offred is always exposed by all this light, and always watched by all these eyes.

The flashbacks to Offred's past, or even her glimpse of Gilead's seedy underbelly (at the Commander's club), provide such a contrast to the orderliness of her daily life. It's a relief, and yet these moments of respite always seem tainted. Offred feels oppressed by the constraints of her life, but she's been sheltered just long enough to start feeling nervous at the thought of the relative chaos of her old, free life. It's disturbing to think of a whole way of life and a whole way of thinking being stolen away so suddenly and so completely.

The Handmaid's Tale was written just over 20 years ago, and interestingly enough, the "near future" in which Atwood set her book has already come & gone. I know 20 years is the blink of an eye in the history of literature, but generally I think science (or speculative) fiction may have a shorter shelf life than other genres, if only because it is usually so clearly the product of a specific time & place.

Just as with other classics, like 1984 and Brave New World, people seem constantly surprised by this book's prescience and continued importance. Many readers see a chilling parallel between The Handmaid's Tale and the new conservatism of the United States. Read the amazon.com customer reviews and you'll see many references to its supposedly increasing relevance. Did Margaret Atwood foresee the rise of American Christian fundamentalism, the growing intimacy of church & state, or the rationalization of the erosion of civil liberties of a terrified populace? In fact, the kernel of inspiration for Atwood was the oppression of women in totalitarian Islamic states. Regardless, however, I don't think it's a matter of prescience so much as it is one of a good author uncovering and dealing with near-universal fears of oppression & regression. Even decades or centuries from now there will probably always be, somewhere in the world, something sinister going on to which people will be able to draw parallels from the classics of speculative fiction. The (sad) truth is, books like Atwood's and Orwell's will probably always seem shockingly clairvoyant and unfortunately still relevant.

Finally, some updates

So I finally made some updates on my Margaret Atwood site. For anyone who's in the process of reading The Handmaid's Tale for the first (or second, or third...) time, I have some trivia & ideas in that section of the site that might (hopefully) be interesting.

The play's the thing

Okay guys, here's a list of things I think we can manage to get together to help add some visual interest to our play. In addition to a few set props, Dr. Jones suggested that each character have at least one identifying prop or costume piece (a hat or something) so that we can tell them apart (especially for actors who are playing more than one part). So here's a list of characters along with the props they should probably have. Please reply to this post, or to my email, if you have any of these things at home and want to volunteer to bring them:

Characters
Horace Cole
prop: book* to lend to Gerald on p.188

Ethel
prop: bell*, to ring for Martha p.186, teacups or something for table

Winifred
costume: "the colours of the NWSPU" (anybody know what they are?)
prop: sandwich board* ("This way to the workhouse"), which she dons on p.189

Agatha
costume: "the National Union colours"
prop: "a big box" p.190 <--never mind

Molly
props: golf clubs & books p.192 <--never mind

Madame Christine
costume: "dressed smartly and tastefully"
props: a legal document* to read on p.193

Maudie Spark
costume: "a hat of huge size" p.194

Aunt Lizzie Wilkins
props: newspapers* (to hand out on p.196), a spaniel (maybe a stuffed animal?)

Lily
costume: "a very cheap and very smart hat"
props: dinner things to give to Ethel, p.187 (kettle, frying pan, etc.)

Gerald Williams
props: (for second entrance only, p.199) suffragette ribbons & badges, a banner ("The men of Brixton demand votes for women this evening")

*Things marked with an asterisk, I can easily bring myself.

Set
What we actually need as part of our stage:
table
chairs
a "window" to look out of
an entrance

If I'm missing anything, please tell me. If you have any ideas for other things, or see things we can probably do without, please tell me.

Also, if we have a rehearsal on Wednesday, hopefully the cast list will be finalized so that I can pass it on to the people who are working on the program.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, some suffragette-related pictures:

I wish I could actually read everything this says, but it's funny anyway:



The National Women's Social & Political Union:



I'm not sure what this is a reference to, but the fine print at the bottom says it was published by the NWSPU:

Who's afraid?

Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own

So I read A Room of One's Own a couple of weeks ago. I alternated between it and Adam Bede for variety. I rewarded myself-- for every 100 or so pages of the latter I let myself read one chapter from the former.

I was surprised, actually. I didn't know what to expect. Fiction? Non-fiction? Some kind of polemic? I just cracked 'er open and started reading and genuinely found myself drawn in. Although the format, obviously, is unique, it seemed to me like a long debate with a good friend. As carefully constructed as her argument is, the tone of the book is so conversational that (regardless of one's dis/agreement), one gets carried along, unresisting. At the end, I looked back and could so clearly see the point without really knowing how she lead me there.

Woolf's tone throughout is disingenuous. Her "narrator" is always saying one thing while clearly leading us to think another. Her message is so serious, but her tone is generally so charming & polite. I think it's brilliant, and so much more effective than the rant it could have been.

Right at the beginning, when she's first chased off the grass by the Beadle, the narrator says: "no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars [...] was that in protection of their turf [...] they had sent my little [idea] into hiding" (9). With this understatement, Woolf sets the tone for most of the rest of the work. She doesn't (usually) spell things out for us. Some of her most cutting observations are thus disguised.

It's not that I think someone writing a persuasive essay needs to be so coy, I just find it's a very good fit in this case. It reminds of something I once read about detective stories-- about how the narrator should always be slightly less intelligent than the average reader, so that we may congratulate ourselves on solving the case before he or she does. It's the same in Room-- we think we see things more clearly, and arrive at conclusions more quickly, than the sometimes clueless narrator, but are usually reminded within a page that that's exactly how Woolf has orchestrated it. No one is a better example than the narrator herself of the idea of "a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority" (88). Woolf slips in and out of "character," at times, but I think this is appropriate-- we get both her own, (presumably) unfiltered opinions in some sections, while in others we are privy to Mary Beton/Seton/Carmichael's confusion and growing indignation at the injustice of her situation.

What I'd like to do is re-read the whole thing through again, and try to remember all the things I was thinking the first time through. No time for that, though. Essays to write, etc. Happy reading, everyone else.

PS: I never saw The Hours (I did read the book, though). Even with the fake nose, does anybody really think Nicole Kidman looks anything like Virginia Woolf?

     

Food for thought

Decided to write about A Room of One's Own for my essay. Specifically, I think I'll focus on Woolf's criticism of Charlotte Bronte, because I think it ties in nicely with her whole "theory" of Women & Fiction, and because, having just read Jane Eyre for the first time, I found Woolf's comments very interesting. Don't want to make a fool of myself by writing anything about this before it's had time to percolate a bit, but to pass the time you can read:
"Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights" from The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf.

More Adam

George Eliot: Adam Bede

I have been thinking some more about Adam Bede, inspired in part by a couple of my classmates. Rachel posted a link to an essay on Eliot by Virginia Woolf. And LoriAnne talked about Dinah in her post this weekend.

Dinah is probably my least favourite character from this book. We're not expected to like Hetty (although we may come to pity her), but I think Dinah is supposed to be admirable. Personally, though, I found her frustrating. Her selflessness was too... simple (i.e. not realistic). I could not understand her insistence that she couldn't move away from Snowfield to live with her family, because the people there needed her. This seemed like egotism in the guise of sacrifice: "No, I'm far too important to these people. They need me to enlighten their poor, ignorant souls." So she won't leave her (unnecessary) poverty for her family, or for poor, devoted, Methodist, Seth, but she will leave it for Adam, because he makes her heart race and her cheeks flush when he's near.

Woolf has some interesting things to say about Eliot's heroines' religion:

"They cannot live without religion [...] Each has the deep feminine passion for goodness, which makes the place where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of the book - still and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no longer knows to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something - they scarcely know what..."

So is Dinah a Methodist preacher because, as a woman, she has no other means through which to do anything with her life? The Methodist movement, in its early years anyway, seems to have granted more freedom and privilege to women than other churches.

Woolf says that "the only romance that George Eliot allowed herself [was] the romance of the past." Eliot definitely seems to thrive on nostalgia-- nostalgia, apparently, for her "simple," provincial past. According to Woolf's essay, though, Eliot's relationship to the past was not so simple. She rose "with groans and struggles from the intolerable boredom of petty provincial society"-- she tore herself free from the shackles of what was expected from someone of her sex-- and did it all in order to write books about a simpler, more conventional, idealized, time and place. One in which, needless to say, Mary Ann Evans would most likely not have been allowed to become George Eliot.