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WORK TITLE: THE TESTAMENTS
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WEBSITE: http://margaretatwood.ca/
CITY: Toronto
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COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
LAST VOLUME: CANR 315
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/6107/maddaddam-by-margaret-atwood http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10246937/Margaret-Atwood-interview.html
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PERSONAL
Born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; daughter of Carl Edmund and Margaret Dorothy Atwood; married Jim Polk, 1968 (divorced 1973); partner of Graeme Gibson (a writer) 1973-his death 2019; children: Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson.
EDUCATION:University of Toronto, B.A., 1961; Radcliffe College, A.M., 1962; Harvard University, graduate study, 1962-63 and 1965-67.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked variously as a camp counselor and waitress; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, lecturer in English literature, 1964-65; Sir George Williams University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, lecturer in English literature, 1967-68; York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, assistant professor of English literature, 1971-72; House of Anansi Press, Toronto, editor and member of board of directors, 1971-73; University of Toronto, writer-in-residence, 1972-73; University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, writer-in-residence, 1985; New York University, New York, NY, Berg Visiting Professor of English, 1986; Macquarie University, North Ryde, Australia, writer-in-residence, 1987. Founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada; inventor of the LongPen and associated technologies; cofounder and a director of Syngrafii Inc. Subject of the documentary In the Wake of the Flood, directed by Ron Mann, 2010.
MEMBER:PEN International, Amnesty International, Writers’ Union of Canada (vice chair, 1980-81), Royal Society of Canada (fellow), Canadian Civil Liberties Association (member of board, 1973-75), Canadian Centre, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary member), Anglophone (president, 1984-85).
AWARDS:E.J. Pratt Medal, 1961, for Double Persephone; President’s Medal, University of Western Ontario, 1965; YWCA Women of Distinction Award, 1966 and 1988; Governor General’s Award, 1966, for The Circle Game, and 1986, for The Handmaid’s Tale; first prize in Canadian Centennial Commission Poetry Competition, 1967; Union Prize for poetry, 1969; Bess Hoskins Prize for poetry, 1969 and 1974; City of Toronto Book Award, Canadian Booksellers’ Association Award, and Periodical Distributors of Canada Short Fiction Award, all 1977, all for Dancing Girls and Other Stories; St. Lawrence Award for fiction, 1978; Radcliffe Medal, 1980; Life before Man selected a notable book of 1980, American Library Association; Molson Award, 1981; Guggenheim fellowship, 1981; named Companion of the Order of Canada, 1981; International Writer’s Prize, Welsh Arts Council, 1982; Book of the Year Award, Periodical Distributors of Canada/Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters, 1983, for Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories; Ida Nudel Humanitarian Award, 1986; named Woman of the Year, Ms. magazine, 1986; Toronto Arts Award for writing and editing, 1986; Los Angeles Times Book Award, 1986, and Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction, and Commonwealth Literature Prize, both 1987, all for The Handmaid’s Tale; Canadian Council for the Advancement and Support of Education silver medal, 1987; Humanist of the Year award, 1987; Royal Society of Canada fellow, 1987; named Chatelaine magazine’s Woman of the Year; City of Toronto Book Award, Coles Book of the Year Award, Canadian Booksellers’ Association Author of the Year Award, Book of the Year Award, Foundation for Advancement of Canadian Letters citation, Periodical Marketers of Canada Award, and Torgi Talking Book Award, all 1989, all for Cat’s Eye; Harvard University Centennial Medal, 1990; Order of Ontario, 1990; Trillium Award for Excellence in Ontario Writing, and Periodical Marketers of Canada Book of the Year Award, both 1992, both for Wilderness Tips and Other Stories; Commemorative Medal for 125th Anniversary of Canadian Confederation; Trillium Award, Canadian Authors’ Association Novel of the Year Award, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canadian and Caribbean Region, and Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, all 1994, and Swedish Humour Association’s International Humourous Writer Award, 1995, all for The Robber Bride; Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 1994; named best local author, NOW magazine readers’ poll, 1995 and 1996; Trillium Award, 1995, for Morning in the Burned House; Norwegian Order of Literary Merit, 1996; Booker Prize shortlist, and Giller Prize, both 1996, both for Alias Grace; International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award shortlist, Dublin City Library, 1998; Booker Prize, 2000, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nomination, and Dashiell Hammett Prize, International Association of Crime Writers (North American branch), 2001, all for The Blind Assassin; inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame, 2001; Booker prize shortlist and Governor General’s literary award nominee, both 2003, both for Oryx and Crake; Enlightenment Award, Edinburgh International Book Festival, 2005; Prince of Asturias literary prize, Fundación Príncipe de Asturias, 2008; Crystal Award, World Economic Forum, 2010; Dan David Prize, 2010; Nelly Sachs Prize, Germany, 2010; Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, Canada, 2012; Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovator’s Award, 2012; Red Tentacle Prize, Kitschies, 2015, for The Heart Goes Last; Imagination in Service to Society Award, Arthur C. Clark Foundation, 2015; gold medal, Royal Canadian Geographical Society, 2015; Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia, 2016; PEN Pinter Prize, 2016; Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, National Book Critics Circle, Winner, Carl Sandburg Literary Awards, Peace Prize, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Lifetime Achievement Award, PEN Center USA, Franz Kafka Prize, Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague, all 2017; Best Graphic Novel Prize, Aurora Awards, 2017, for Angel Catbird, Volume One; Hay Festival Medal for Prose, Adrienne Clarkson Prize for Global Citizenship, Companion of Honour for Services to Literature, New Year’s Honours List, all 2018; Booker Prize, 2019, for The Testaments (shared with Bernadine Evaristo).
POLITICS: “William Morrisite.” RELIGION: “Immanent Transcendentalist.”WRITINGS
Also author of Expeditions, 1966, and What Was in the Garden, 1969.
Reflections: Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer, a six-minute visual interpretation of Atwood’s poem by the same name, was produced by Cinematics Canada, 1972, and by Universal as Poem as Imagery: Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer, 1974. The Journals of Susanna Moodie was adapted as a screenplay, Tranby, 1972; Surfacing was adapted for film, Pan-Canadian, 1979; The Handmaid’s Tale was filmed by Cinecom Entertainment Group, 1989, was adapted as an opera by Danish composer Poul Ruders, for the Royal Danish Opera Company, and was adapted for a television series by Hulu, beginning in 2017. The Atwood Stories, adaptations of Atwood’s fiction, appeared as six half-hour episodes on W Network. Alias Grace was adapted for a Netflix miniseries, 2017. Union Pictures planned to produce a four-part miniseries based on The Blind Assassin.
SIDELIGHTS
As a poet, novelist, story writer, and essayist, Margaret Atwood holds a unique position in contemporary Canadian literature. Her books have received critical acclaim in the United States, Europe, and her native Canada, and she has been the recipient of numerous literary awards. Atwood’s critical recognition is matched by her popularity with readers. She is a frequent guest on Canadian television and radio and her books are often best sellers.
Atwood first came to public attention as a poet in the 1960s with her collections Double Persephone, winner of the E.J. Pratt Medal, and The Circle Game, winner of a Governor General’s Award. These two books marked out the terrain her subsequent poetry has explored.
Double Persephone concerns “the contrast between the flux of life or nature and the fixity of man’s artificial creations,” as explained by a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor. The Circle Game takes this opposition further, setting such human constructs as games, literature, and love against the instability of nature. Human constructs are presented as both traps and shelters; the fluidity of nature as both dangerous and liberating. Sherrill Grace, writing in Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, identified the central tension in all of Atwood’s work as “the pull towards art on one hand and towards life on the other.” This tension is expressed in a series of “violent dualities,” as Grace termed it. Atwood “is constantly aware of opposites—self/other, subject/object, male/female, nature/man—and of the need to accept and work within them,” Grace explained. “To create, Atwood chooses violent dualities, and her art re-works, probes, and dramatizes the ability to see double.”
Linda W. Wagner, writing in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, asserted that in Atwood’s poetry “duality [is] presented as separation.” This separation leads her characters to be isolated from one another and from the natural world, resulting in their inability to communicate, to break free of exploitative social relationships, or to understand their place in the natural order. “In her early poetry,” Gloria Onley wrote in the West Coast Review, Atwood “is acutely aware of the problem of alienation, the need for real human communication and the establishment of genuine human community—real as opposed to mechanical or manipulative; genuine as opposed to the counterfeit community of the body politic.”
Wagner, commenting on The Circle Game, noted that “the personae of those poems never did make contact, never did anything but lament the human condition.” Wagner added, “Relationships in these poems are sterile if not destructive.” In a review of True Stories Robert Sward of Quill and Quire explained that many reviewers of the book have exaggerated the violence and given “the false impression that all thirty-eight poems … are about torture.”
Suffering is common for the female characters in Atwood’s poems, although they are never passive victims. In her later works, her characters take active measures to improve their situations. Atwood’s poems, West Coast Review contributor Onley maintained, concern “modern woman’s anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of a sex role power structure.” Atwood explained to Judy Klemesrud in the New York Times that her suffering characters come from real life: “My women suffer because most of the women I talk to seem to have suffered.” Although she became a favorite of feminists, Atwood’s popularity in the feminist community was unsought. “I began as a profoundly apolitical writer,” she told Lindsy Van Gelder of Ms., “but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me.”
Atwood’s 1995 book of poetry, Morning in the Burned House, “reflects a period in Atwood’s life when time seems to be running out,” observed John Bemrose in Maclean’s.
Noting that many of the poems address grief and loss, particularly in relationship to her father’s death and a realization of her own mortality, Bemrose added that the book “moves even more deeply into survival territory.” Bemrose further suggested that in this book, Atwood allows the readers greater latitude in interpretation than in her earlier verse: “Atwood uses grief … to break away from that airless poetry and into a new freedom.”
Atwood’s feminist concerns also emerge clearly in her novels, particularly in The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Life before Man, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Some of her novels feature female characters who are, as Klemesrud reported, “intelligent, self-absorbed modern women searching for identity. … [They] hunt, split logs, make campfires and become successful in their careers, while men often cook and take care of their households.”
The Edible Woman tells the story of Marian McAlpin, a young woman engaged to be married, who rebels against her upcoming nuptials. Her fiancé seems too stable, too ordinary, and the role of wife too fixed and limiting. Her rejection of marriage is accompanied by her body’s rejection of food; she cannot tolerate even a spare vegetarian diet. Eventually Marian bakes a sponge cake in the shape of a woman and feeds it to her fiancé because, she explains, “You’ve been trying to assimilate me.” After the engagement is broken off, she is able to eat some of the cake herself.
Reaction to The Edible Woman was divided. Nevertheless, many reviewers noted Atwood’s at least partial success. Tom Marshall, writing in his Harsh and Lovely Land: The Major Canadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition, called The Edible Woman “a largely successful comic novel, even if the mechanics are sometimes a little clumsy, the satirical accounts of consumerism a little drawn out.” A Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor described The Edible Woman as “very much a social novel about the possibilities for personal female identity in a capitalistic consumer society.”
In Life before Man Atwood dissects the relationships between three characters: Elizabeth, a married woman who mourns the recent suicide of her lover; Elizabeth’s husband, Nate, who is unable to choose between his wife and his lover; and Lesje, Nate’s lover, who works with Elizabeth at a museum of natural history. All three characters are isolated from one another and unable to experience their own emotions. The fossils and dinosaur bones on display at the museum are compared throughout the novel with the sterility of the characters’ lives. As Laurie Stone noted in the Village Voice, Life before Man “is full of variations on the theme of extinction.”
Life before Man is what Rosellen Brown of Saturday Review called an “anatomy of melancholy.” Comparing the novel’s characters to museum pieces and commenting on the analytical examination to which Atwood subjects them, Peter S. Prescott wrote in Newsweek that, “with chilly compassion and an even colder wit, Atwood exposes the interior lives of her specimens.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Marilyn French made clear that in Life before Man, Atwood “combines several talents—powerful introspection, honesty, satire and a taut, limpid style—to create a splendid, fully integrated work.” The novel’s title, French believed, relates to the characters’ isolation from themselves, their history, and from one another. They have not yet achieved truly human stature. “This novel suggests,” French wrote, “that we are still living life before man, before the human—as we like to define it—has evolved.” Prescott raised the same point. The novel’s characters, he wrote, “do not communicate; each, in the presence of another, is locked into his own thoughts and feelings. Is such isolation and indeterminacy what Atwood means when she calls her story ‘Life before Man’?” This concern is also found in Atwood’s previous novels, French argued, all of which depict “the search for identity … a search for a better way to be—for a way of life that both satisfies the passionate, needy self and yet is decent, humane and natural.”
Atwood further explores this idea in Bodily Harm. In this novel, Rennie Wilford is a Toronto journalist who specializes in light, trivial pieces for magazines. She is, Anne Tyler explained in the Detroit News, “a cataloguer of current fads and fancies.” Following a partial mastectomy, which causes her lover to abandon her, Rennie begins to feel dissatisfied with her life. She takes on an assignment to the Caribbean island of St. Antoine in an effort to get away from things for a while. Her planned magazine story, focusing on the island’s beaches, tennis courts, and restaurants, is distinctly facile in comparison to the political violence she finds on St. Antoine. When Rennie is arrested and jailed, the experience brings her to a self-realization about her life. “Death,” Nancy Ramsey remarked in the San Francisco Review of Books, “rather than the modern sense of ennui, threatens Rennie and the people around her, and ultimately gives her life a meaning she hadn’t known before.”
Anatole Broyard in the New York Times, claimed that “the only way to describe my response to [Bodily Harm] is to say that it knocked me out. Atwood seems to be able to do just about everything: people, places, problems, a perfect ear, an exactly right voice and she tosses off terrific scenes with a casualness that leaves you utterly unprepared for the way these scenes seize you.” Tyler called Atwood “an uncommonly skillful and perceptive writer,” and went on to state that, because of its subject matter, Bodily Harm “is not always easy to read. There are times when it’s downright unpleasant, but it’s also intelligent, provocative, and in the end—against all expectations—uplifting.”
In The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood turns to speculative fiction, creating the dystopia of Gilead, a future America in which fundamentalist Christians have killed the president and members of Congress and imposed their own dictatorial rule. In this future world, polluted by toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation, few women can bear children; the birthrate has dropped alarmingly. Those women who can bear children are forced to become Handmaids, the official breeders for society. All other women have been reduced to chattel under a repressive religious hierarchy run by men.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a radical departure from Atwood’s previous novels. Her strong feminism was evident in earlier books, but The Handmaid’s Tale is dominated by the theme. As Barbara Holliday wrote in the Detroit Free Press, Atwood “has been concerned in her fiction with the painful psychic warfare between men and women. In The Handmaid’s Tale … she casts subtlety aside, exposing woman’s primal fear of being used and helpless.” Atwood’s creation of an imaginary world is also new. As Mary Battiata noted in the Washington Post, The Handmaid’s Tale is the first of Atwood’s novels “not set in a worried corner of contemporary Canada.”
Atwood was moved to write her story only after images and scenes from the book had been appearing to her for three years. She eventually became convinced that her vision of Gilead was not far from reality. Some of the anti-female measures she had imagined for the novel actually exist. “A law in Canada,” Battiata reported, “[requires] a woman to have her husband’s permission before obtaining an abortion.” Atwood, speaking to Battiata, pointed to repressive laws in the totalitarian state of Romania as well: “No abortion, no birth control, and compulsory pregnancy testing, once a month.” The Handmaid’s Tale does not depend upon hypothetical scenarios, omens, or straws in the wind, but upon documented occurrences and public pronouncements; all matters of record.” Stephen McCabe of the Humanist called the novel “a chilling vision of the future extrapolated from the present.”
Yet, several reviewers voiced a disbelief in the basic assumptions of The Handmaid’s Tale. Mary McCarthy, in her review for the New York Times Book Review, complained that “I just can’t see the intolerance of the far right … as leading to a super-biblical puritanism.” And although acknowledging that “the author has carefully drawn her projections from current trends,” McCarthy asserted that “perhaps that is the trouble: the projections are too neatly penciled in. The details … all raise their hands announcing themselves present. At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined.” Richard Grenier of Insight observed that the Fundamentalist-run Gilead does not seem Christian: “There seems to be no Father, no Son, no Holy Ghost, no apparent belief in redemption, resurrection, eternal life. No one in this excruciatingly hierarchized new clerical state … appears to believe in God.” Grenier also found it improbable that “while the United States has hurtled off into this morbid, feminist nightmare, the rest of the democratic world has been blissfully unaffected.”
Despite what he saw as a flaw, French saw The Handmaid’s Tale as being “in the honorable tradition of Brave New World and other warnings of dystopia. It’s imaginative, even audacious, and conveys a chilling sense of fear and menace.” Prescott compared the novel to other dystopian books. It belongs, he wrote, “to that breed of visionary fiction in which a metaphor is extended to elaborate a warning.” Prescott went on to note: “Wells, Huxley and Orwell popularized the tradition with books like The Time Machine, Brave New World and 1984—yet Atwood is a better novelist than they.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt identified The Handmaid’s Tale as a book that goes far beyond its feminist concerns. Writing in the New York Times, the reviewer explained that the novel “is a political tract deploring nuclear energy, environmental waste, and anti-feminist attitudes. But it [is] so much more than that—a taut thriller, a psychological study, a play on words.” Van Gelder saw the novel in a similar light: “[It] ultimately succeeds on multiple levels: as a page-turning thriller, as a powerful political statement, and as an exquisite piece of writing.”
In The Robber Bride, Atwood again explores women’s issues and feminist concerns, this time concentrating on women’s relationships with each other—both positive and negative. Inspired by the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom,” the novel chronicles the relationships of college friends Tony, Charis, and Roz with their backstabbing classmate Zenia. Now middle-aged women, the women’s paths and life choices have diverged, yet Tony, Charis, and Roz have remained friends. Throughout their adulthood, however, Zenia’s manipulations have nearly destroyed their lives and cost them husbands and careers. Lorrie Moore, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Robber Bride “Atwood’s funniest and most companionable book in years,” adding that its author “retains her gift for observing, in poetry, the minutiae specific to the physical and emotional lives of her characters.” About Zenia, Moore commented, “charming and gorgeous, Zenia is a misogynist’s grotesque: relentlessly seductive, brutal, pathologically dishonest,” postulating that “perhaps Ms. Atwood intended Zenia, by the end, to be a symbol of all that is inexplicably evil: war, disease, global catastrophe.” Judith Timson commented in Maclean’s that The Robber Bride “has as its central theme an idea that feminism was supposed to have shoved under the rug: there are female predators out there, and they will get your man if you are not careful.”
Atwood maintained that she had a feminist motivation in creating Zenia. The femme fatale all but disappeared from fiction in the 1950s due to that decade’s sanitized ideal of domesticity; and in the late 1960s came the women’s movement, which in its early years encouraged the creation of only positive female characters, Atwood asserted in interviews. She commented that “there are a lot of women you have to say are feminists who are getting a big kick out of this book,” according to interviewer Sarah Lyall in the New York Times. “People read the book with all the wars done by men, and they say, ‘So, you’re saying that women are crueler than men,’” the novelist added. “In other words, that’s normal behavior by men, so we don’t notice it. Similarly, we say that Zenia behaves badly, and therefore women are worse than men, but that ignores the helpfulness of the other three women to each other, which of course gives them a power of their own.”
Francine Prose, reviewing The Robber Bride for the Washington Post Book World, recommended the book “to those well-intentioned misguided feminists or benighted sexists who would have us believe that the female of the species is ‘naturally’ nicer or more nurturing than the male.” Prose found the book “smart and entertaining” but not always convincing in its blend of exaggerated and realistic elements. New York Times contributor Michiko Kakutani also thought Atwood has not achieved the proper balance in this regard: “Her characters remain exiles from both the earthbound realm of realism and the airier attitudes of allegory, and as a result, their story does not illuminate or entertain: it grates.”
Alias Grace represents Atwood’s first venture into historical fiction, but the book has much in common with her other works in its contemplation of “the shifting notions of women’s moral nature” and “the exercise of power between men and women,” wrote Maclean’s contributor Diane Turbide. Based on a true story Atwood had explored previously in a television script titled The Servant Girl, Alias Grace centers on Grace Marks, a servant who was found guilty of murdering her employer and his mistress in northern Canada in 1843. Some people doubt Grace’s guilt, however, and she serves out her sentence of life in prison, claiming not to remember the murders. Eventually, reformers begin to agitate for clemency for Grace. In a quest for evidence to support their position, they assign a young doctor, versed in the new science of psychiatry, to evaluate her soundness of mind. Over many meetings, Grace tells the doctor the harrowing story of her life—a life marked by extreme hardship. Much about Grace, though, remains puzzling; she is haunted by flashbacks of the supposedly forgotten murders and by the presence of a friend who had died from a mishandled abortion. The doctor, Simon Jordan, does not know what to believe in Grace’s tales.
Several reviewers found Grace a complicated and compelling character. “Sometimes she is prim, naive, sometimes sardonic; sometimes sardonic because observant; sometimes observant because naive,” commented Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books. Turbide added that Grace is more than an intriguing character: she is also “the lens through which Victorian hypocrisies are mercilessly exposed.”
Prose, however, writing in the New York Times Book Review, thought the historical trivia excessive. “The book provides, in snippets, a crash course in Victorian culture.” Prose added: “Rather than enhancing the novel’s verisimilitude, these mini-lessons underline the distance between reader and subject.” She also noted that some readers “will admire the liveliness with which Ms. Atwood toys with both our expectations and the conventions of the Victorian thriller.”
“Dying octogenarian Iris Chasen’s narration of the past carefully unravels a haunting story of tragedy, corruption, and cruel manipulation,” summarized Beth E. Andersen in a Library Journal review of Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. The novel, which earned its author the Booker Prize, involves multiple story lines. It is Iris’s memoir, retracing her past with the wealthy and conniving industrialist Richard Griffen and the death of her sister Laura, her husband, and her daughter. Iris “reveals at long last the wrenching truth about herself and Laura amid hilariously acerbic commentary on the inanities of contemporary life,” wrote Donna Seaman in Booklist. Interspersed with these narrative threads are sections devoted to Laura’s novel, The Blind Assassin, published after her death.
Seaman called the work a “spellbinding novel of avarice, love, and revenge.” Andersen noted that some readers may guess how the story will pan out before the conclusion, but argued that “nothing will dampen the pleasure of getting there.” Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called The Blind Assassin an “absorbing new novel” that “showcases Ms. Atwood’s narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic.” Kakutani also noted that Atwood writes with “uncommon authority and ease.”
Atwood has remained a noted writer of short stories as well as novels. Wilderness Tips and Other Stories, published in 1991, is a collection of ten “neatly constructed, present-tense narratives,” reported Merle Rubin in the Christian Science Monitor.
While finding Atwood’s writing style drab and unappealing, Rubin nevertheless praised the author for her “ability to evoke the passing of entire decades … all within the brief compass of a short story.”
The tales in Atwood’s 1992 collection, Good Bones —published in 1994 as Good Bones and Simple Murders —“occupy that vague, peculiar country between poetry and prose,” stated John Bemrose in Maclean’s.
Describing Atwood as “storyteller, poet, fabulist and social commentator rolled into one,” Bemrose claimed that “the strongest pieces in Good Bones combine a light touch with a hypnotic seriousness of purpose.” In the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Howard labeled Good Bones and Simple Murders a “sprightly, whimsically feminist collection of miniatures and musings, assembled from two volumes published in Canada in 1983 and 1992.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer, who characterized the entries as “postmodern fairy tales, caustic fables, inspired parodies, witty monologues,” declared each piece to be “clever and sharply honed.”
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature is Atwood’s most direct presentation of her strong support of Canadian nationalism. In this work, she discerns a uniquely Canadian literature, distinct from its American and British counterparts, and discusses the dominant themes to be found in it. Canadian literature, she argues, is primarily concerned with victims and with the victim’s ability to survive. Atwood, Onley explained, “perceives a strong sado-masochistic patterning in Canadian literature as a whole. She believes that there is a national fictional tendency to participate, usually at some level as Victim, in a Victor/Victim basic pattern.” Nevertheless, “despite its stress on victimization,” a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor wrote, “this study is not a revelation of, or a reveling in, [masochism].” What Atwood argues, Onley asserted, is that “every country or culture has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core: for America, the Frontier; for England, the Island; for Canada, Survival.”
Several reviewers find that Atwood’s own work exemplifies this primary theme of Canadian literature. Her examination of destructive gender roles and her nationalistic concern over the subordinate role Canada plays to the United States are variations on the victor/victim theme. Atwood believes a writer must consciously work within his or her nation’s literary tradition, and her own work closely parallels the themes she sees as common to the Canadian literary tradition. Survival “has served as the context in which critics have subsequently discussed [Atwood’s] works,” stated a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor.
In her novel Oryx and Crake, Atwood returns to themes from The Handmaid’s Tale. “Once again she conjures up a dystopia, where trends that started way back in the twentieth century have metastasized into deeply sinister phenomena,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. The story begins with a character called Snowman, the lone survivor of an Armageddon-like catastrophe. He wanders the streets trying to survive and finds that bioengineered animals are the only living creatures remaining. As the novel progresses, Snowman recalls his days as a boy and his childhood friend named Crake. Eventually, readers learn that Crake became a scientist, one who was involved in the secret project that caused the global catastrophe. Kakutani called the novel “at times intriguing.”
Referring to Oryx and Crake as a “scorching new novel,” Science contributor Susan M. Squier wrote, “Atwood imagines a drastic revision of the human species that will purge humankind of all of our negative traits.” Squier went on to note that “in Oryx and Crake readers will find a powerful meditation on how education that separates scientific and aesthetic ways of knowing produces ignorance and a wounded world.”
Atwood also writes for children, and while much of her writing for adults is known to be quite dark, her books for juveniles are far more whimsical. For example, Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes features a text of “alliterative ‘R’ sounds, making it a challenging read-aloud,” noted Denise Parrott in Resource Links. The story, illustrated by Dusan Petricic, revolves around Rude Ramsay, a red-nosed rat named Ralph, and their new friend Rilla. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that “Atwood’s prose is both amusing and enlightening in its use of rich vocabulary.”
Atwood and Petricic also worked together on Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda, a takeoff on the Cinderella tale. “Atwood’s hilarious tale will amuse listeners of almost any age with its alliteration and clever wordplay,” wrote Patricia Morley in the Canadian Book Review Annual. Bill Richardson, writing in the Toronto Globe & Mail, concluded: “I think the virtue in this cascade of consonants is the joy that lives in the sound of the words, the merely phonetic exuberance that’s at least as important, at a certain age, as meaning.”
Atwood has also continued to write about writing. Her lectures Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing were published under the same title in 2002. She has also released several collections. These include the 2004 publication Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004 and the 2005 collection Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing, 1970-2005. Each collection is representative of Atwood’s oeuvre.
Although the author has been labeled a Canadian nationalist, a feminist, and even a gothic writer, it seems reasonable to say that, given the range and volume of her work, Atwood incorporates and transcends these categories.
In The Year of the Flood, Atwood returns to the world that her novel Oryx and Crake was set in. In the work, no one takes a small religious sub-sect seriously when they predict impending doom until it actually comes. A waterless flood wreaks havoc in this dystopian tale.
In a review of the work, Jeanette Winterson, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, lauded: “Atwood is funny and clever, such a good writer and real thinker that there’s hardly any point saying that not everything in the novel works. Why should it? A high level of creativity has to let in some chaos; just as nobody would want the world as engineered by Crake, nobody needs a factory-finished novel. The flaws in The Year of the Flood, are part of the pleasure.” Library Journal contributor Leigh Anne Vrabel opined: “Another win for Atwood, this dystopian fantasy belongs in the hands of every highbrow sf aficionado.”
Atwood’s next work, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination is a collection of essays that address he relationship with the science fiction and fantasy genres over the course of her career. The work is not merely a defense of the genres, but also an analyses of how they are regarded by the public as well as a guide to some of her favorite science fiction and fantasy writers.
Reviewing the work in the Los Angeles Times, contributor Nick Owchar commented: “Atwood gives us a bracing tour of the writers and books she admires (like Ursula Le Guin, and ‘She’ by H. Rider Haggard), her interest in ustopia (a mix of utopia and dystopia) in her fiction, as well as some autobiography.” London Telegraph contributor Paul Kincaid opined: “The problem is that this is a book that means well towards sci-fi; Atwood wants to take it seriously, and wants her readers to take it seriously, yet she can never quite conquer her own ambivalence towards the genre.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the work: “A witty, astute collection of essays and lectures on science fiction by the acclaimed novelist” and described it as “wholly satisfying, with plenty of insights for Atwood and sci-fi fans alike.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman observed that in this work “Atwood deepens her discerning, many-tentacled analysis of the resonance of stories about imaginary realms and beings.” A Publishers Weekly contributor offered: “This enjoyable volume, tellingly dedicated to Ursula K. Le Guin, reveals a writer with strong, often fascinating, if idiosyncratic opinions.” Utopian Studies contributor Daniel Lukes concluded: “ In Other Worlds looks clearly and elegantly back into dystopia’s literary pasts, bur unfortunately not always as thrillingly into either its presents or its futures, as the dystopian fiction that has made and continues to make Margaret Atwood a major contemporary literary force, between this world and others.” Library Journal contributor Nancy R. Ives called the work “a clever, thoughtful investigation that will appeal to science fiction readers and Atwood’s loyal fans.”
Atwood concludes the trilogy begun with Oryx and Crake with MaddAddam, published in 2013. In this volume, the flood pandemic has eradicated most of humanity, but Toby and her friends survived. The Crakers, a sexually lively, story loving semihuman race engineered by the deceased Crake, join them in their return to the MaddAddamite cob house. When their prophet, Jimmy the Snowman, falls ill, Toby, still a member of the green resistance group called God’s Gardeners, takes up the task of preaching Craker theology to them. Meanwhile, the longtime object of her affections, Zeb, has been in search of the founder of God’s Gardeners, from whom he broke away to become one of the MaddAddamite bioterrorists. Now, he needs their help in order to fend off an attack by the vicious Painballers and raids by the half-pig half-human pigeons. As his journey progresses, readers are invited into his twisted past, which involves murdering his own father.
“Atwood has brought the previous two books together in a fitting and joyous conclusion that’s an epic not only of an imagined future but of our own past, an exposition of how oral storytelling traditions led to written ones and ultimately to our sense of origin,” remarked Andrew Sean Greer New York Times Book Review. Greer added: “It’s a pleasure to read a futuristic novel whose celebration of beauty extends to the words themselves. And words are very important here; by the moving end of MaddAddam, we understand how language and writing produced the beautiful fiction that described our beginnings. … This finale to Atwood’s ingenious trilogy lights a fire from the fears of our age, then douses it with hope for the planet’s survival.”
Washington Post reviewer Michael Dirda was equally complimentary. “Atwood’s three-part masterpiece is one of those stories that are thrilling and funny and romantic and touching and, yes, horrific by turns and sometimes all at once. Best of all, MaddAddam, like the final volumes of many other trilogies, draws multiple plot strands together, showing how seemingly disparate elements from the earlier books are really deeply interconnected.” Dirda concluded: MaddAddam is a marvel of sustained artistic control, neatly reshuffling pieces and filling in all the gaps from the two earlier books, including those we weren’t aware of, before rising to a deeply moving, if not wholly unforeseen, conclusion. It is further proof that Margaret Atwood … is an utterly thrilling storyteller and not just Canada’s greatest living novelist.”
London Observer reviewer Justin Cartwright was critical, writing: “I never felt that this world was fully realised, even on its own terms. A dystopian novel, I think, depends for its success on having roots in a reality we are familiar with or fear, but Atwood’s book is, for all its bravura, whimsical rather than moving.” London Guardian reviewer Theo Tait had a mixed reaction to MaddAddam and the Oryx and Crake trilogy more generally: “It is not simply a question of the broad outlines being well-worn, but of the numerous tropes deployed: the mad scientist releasing the virus; the millenarian cults and cannibal gangs; the survivors subsisting, ironically, on throwaway consumer items; the tech-noir and cyber-punk stylings; flooded cities; the vine-wrapped skyscrapers,” Tait wrote. “I should say at this point that I thoroughly enjoyed MaddAddam and the other two books (I also enjoyed Survivors). But they do present an eccentric spectacle—of a fierce, learned intelligence, throwing out references to Robinson Crusoe, Blake and especially Milton, while writing what is essentially an epic B-movie.”
“One might expect a dystopia to be rather messier and more entropic,” noted Sarah Churchwell in the New Statesman, adding that “all of Atwood’s protagonists … endure in order to come together in MaddAddam and tie up her storylines rather too neatly. Though it remains inventively imagined and compulsively readable, MaddAddam offers a kinder, gentler dystopia than the more brutal and challenging world of Oryx and Crake, to my mind the tour de force of the trilogy. MaddAddam provides a satisfying end to the tale—perhaps, ultimately, too satisfying. But read as a whole, the MaddAddam trilogy shows a master artificer inventing nothing less than a cosmogony, one shining constellation at a time.”
Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales, released in 2014, is Atwood’s first collection of short stories since Moral Disorder: And Other Stories, published in 2006. The collection kicks off with three loosely connected stories about women who have been romantically involved with the same poet. In the story “The Freeze-Dried Bridegroom,” a man who bids on a storage space gets a surprise, and a woman born with a genetic defect is mistaken for a vampire in “Lusus Naturae.” Another one of the stories, “Torching the Dusties,” features an old woman with Charles Bonnet syndrome who has to come to terms with her hallucinations while a group sets out to burn down her retirement home. And in the title story, a woman finds a way to get revenge on the first man who did her wrong.
“Witty and frequently biting, Stone Mattress is keen to the ways in which we choose, all our lives, to love and to hurt—and in Atwood’s world these two actions are always choices, creating consequences for which we will one day be held to account,” asserted Matt Bell in a review of the book for the New York Times Book Review Online. “Poignant, funny, distressing, and surreal, Atwood’s stories bring the extraordinary to the ordinary,” claimed Library Journal reviewer Joy Humphrey. And Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman felt that “Atwood is shrewdly brilliant, gleefully mischievous, and acerbically hilarious in” Stone Mattress.
The Heart Goes Last, released in 2015, is a work of dystopian fiction about Stan and Charmaine, a young couple who offer to be part of a social experiment, called the Positron Project, after losing their jobs and home in an economic crisis. The experiment involves living in a settlement where they will be inmates in Positron Prison for a month and then living comfortably together in a suburban town called Consilience for a month.
The Heart Goes Last “is a jarring, rewardingly strange piece of work. At first a classic Atwood dystopia, rationally imagined and developed, it relaxes suddenly into a kind of surrealist adventure. The satirical impulse foregrounds itself. Narrative drive ramps up, but in the service of something less like a novel than a political cartoon, in which raw inventiveness undercuts the very idea of story, revealing it to have been a fairly flimsy disguise all along. Atwood allows her sense of the absurd its full elbow room; her cheerfully caustic contempt … goes unrestrained,” related M. John Harrison in a review of the novel for the London Guardian Online. The Heart Goes Last “is a heady blend of speculative fiction with noir undertones that is provocative, powerful and will prompt all readers to reassess which parts of their humanity are for sale,” remarked BookPage reviewer Stephenie Harrison. And Booklist reviewer Seaman also praised the novel, noting that it is a “laser-sharp, hilariously campy, and swiftly flowing satire” that “delves deeply into our desires, vices, biases, and contradictions, bringing fresh, incisive comedy to the rising tide of postapocalyptic fiction.”
Atwood returned to the world of The Handmaid’s Tale with her 2019 sequel, The Testaments. There had been more than three decades between these two installments of the happenings in Gilead, though the author had actually begun making notes on such a sequel in the early 1990s. Still, as she told the online CBC, she was reluctant to craft such a furtherance of the plot, as it seemed that years of struggle by feminists had confirmed women’s rights. However, as politics became more conservative following the 9/11 attacks, this trend in history changed. Atwood noted in the CBC article, “Instead of going away from Gilead, we turned around and started coming back towards Gilead.” Additionally, there appeared to be a large appetite for a return to Gilead on the part of viewers who were first introduced to Atwood’s dystopian tale via the Hulu network’s award-winning miniseries launched in 2017.
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was narrated from the point of view of Offred, one of the forced surrogates or handmaids, fertile women who must bear children to powerful men in this new society of the Republic of Gilead. That novel ended with Offred forced to enter a van occupied by men whose allegiance was unknown to the reader. Did they belong to the republic or the resistance? And was Offred heading off to the secret police of freedom?
In The Testaments, Atwood does not attempt to directly answer that question, knowing that she could not return to Offred’s voice. Instead she jumps events fifteen years forward from the finale of the original novel and focuses on three female narrators; two of these are apparently Offred’s daughters as well as another character from the original novel, Aunt Lydia. The latter is a member of the women who indoctrinate the handmaids into the culture and beliefs of Gilead. Lydia is a collector of secrets.
The other two narrators, Agnes Jemima and Daisy, are, the readers slowly learn, the daughters of Offred. Agnes was the child taken from Offred as she attempted an escape to Canada in the earlier novel. Daisy, who lives in Toronto, is the child with whom Offred was pregnant at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. As the three different tales unfold–as their testaments are given–the reader is left to assume that Offred did make it to freedom and still works with the resistance, hoping to be reunited with her daughters one day.
A Kirkus Reviews critic termed The Testaments an “artful feminist thriller.” Likewise, an online Publishers Weekly reviewer called this a “confident, magnetic sequel,” and went on to note: “Atwood’s eminently rewarding sequel revels in the energy of youth, the shrewdness of old age, and the vulnerabilities of repressive regimes.” Further praise came from London Guardian website contributor Anne Enright, who noted: “The Testaments is Atwood at her best, in its mixture of generosity, insight and control. The prose is adroit, direct, beautifully turned. All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood’s name is written at the top of it. To read this book is to feel the world turning, as the unforeseeable shifts of the last few years reveal the same old themes.”
Writing in the online BBC, Laura Freedman similarly commented: “Atwood’s prose is as powerful as ever, tense and spare. … Her word games are ingenious. She forces you to think about language and how it can be made to lie. The plot is propulsive and I finished in six hours flat.” However, Freeman felt that Atwood made a “misstep” with this novel, answering too many questions: “The horrors and repressions of Gilead, so shocking on first encounter, so convincingly realised, are here repeated. If you’ve seen one ululating birth, one man torn apart by Handmaids, you’ve seen them all.” A further criticism came from NPR contributor Danielle Kurtzleben, who felt that the novel “might punch you in the gut, but it doesn’t quite pull at your heartstrings.” A similar guarded praise came from Slate critic Laura Miller, who concluded: “All of this and a corker of a plot, culminating in a breathless flight to freedom, makes The Testaments a rare treat. The Handmaid’s Tale, while magnificent, was never that. But—let’s not kid ourselves—that’s because, of the two novels, it is the least reassuring, the least flattering, and, sadly, the most true.” Atwood was cowinner of the 2019 Booker Prize for The Testaments.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Beran, Carol L., Living over the Abyss: Margaret Atwood’s Life before Man, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1993.
Bloom, Harold, editor, Margaret Atwood, Chelsea House (Philadelphia, PA), 2000.
Bouson, J. Brooks, Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1993.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 4, 1975, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 13, 1980, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 25, 1983, Volume 44, 1987.
Cooke, John, The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje, Edwin Mellen (Lewiston, NY), 1996.
Cooke, Nathalie, Margaret Atwood: A Biography, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1998.
Davidson, Arnold E., Seeing in the Dark: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1997.
Davidson, Arnold E., and Cathy N. Davidson, editors, The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, House of Anansi Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1981.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 53: Canadian Writers since 1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.
Gibson, Graeme, Eleven Canadian Novelists, House of Anansi Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1973.
Grace, Sherrill, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood, Véhicule Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1980.
Grace, Sherrill, and Lorraine Weir, editors, Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System, University of British Columbia Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1983.
Hengen, Shannon, Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors, Reflections, and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry, Second Story Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1993.
Howells, Coral Ann, Margaret Atwood, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1996.
Irvine, Lorna, Collecting Clues: Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1993.
Lecker, Robert, and Jack David, editors, The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1980.
Marshall, Tom, Harsh and Lovely Land: The Major Canadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition, University of British Columbia Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1978.
McCombs, Judith, and Carole L. Palmer, Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, G.K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1991.
Michael, Magali Cornier, Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1996.
Nicholson, Colin, editor, Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1994.
Nischik, Reingard M., editor, Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact, Camden House (Rochester, NY), 2000.
Rao, Eleanora, Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1993.
Sandler, Linda, editor, Margaret Atwood: A Symposium, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1977.
Stein, Karen F., Margaret Atwood Revisited, Twayne (New York, NY), 1999.
Sullivan, Rosemary, The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, HarperFlamingo Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1998.
Thompson, Lee Briscoe, Scarlet Letters: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1997.
Twigg, Alan, For Openers: Conversations with Twenty-four Canadian Writers, Harbour Publishing (Madeira Park, British Columbia, Canada), 1981.
Woodcock, George, The Canadian Novel in the Twentieth Century, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1975.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Blind Assassin, p. 1796; January 1, 2004, review of Oryx and Crake, p. 776; March 1, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983-2005, p. 1130; September 15, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, p. 11; June 1, 2013, Donna Seaman, review of MaddAddam, p. 30; August 1, 2014, Donna Seaman, review of Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales, p. 35; August 1, 2015, Donna Seaman, review of The Heart Goes Last, p. 28.
BookPage, October, 2015, Stephenie Harrison, review of The Heart Goes Last, p. 19.
Bookseller, February 4, 2005, review of Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing, 1970-2005, p. 36.
Book World, November 7, 2004, Elizabeth Ward, review of Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, p. 12.
Canadian Book Review Annual, 2004, Patricia Morley, review of Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda, p. 465.
Christian Science Monitor, December 27, 1991, Merle Rubin, review of Wilderness Tips and Other Stories, p. 14.
Contemporary Literature, winter, 2003, Susan Strehle, review of Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, pp. 737-742.
Detroit News, April 4, 1982, Anne Tyler, review of Bodily Harm.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), December 11, 2004, Bill Richardson, review of Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda, p. D18; January 21, 2006, Aritha van Herk, review of The Tent, p. D4.
Guardian (London, England), August 28, 2013, Theo Tait, review of MaddAddam.
Humanist, September-October, 1986, Stephen McCabe, review of the Handmaid’s Tale, p. 31.
Insight, March 24, 1986, Richard Grenier, review of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2004, review of Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, p. 802; October 1, 2005, review of The Tent, p. 1057; September 1, 2011, review of In Other Worlds; July 15, 2013, review of MaddAddam; July 15, 2014, review of Stone Mattress; July 15, 2015, review of The Heart Goes Last; September 15, 2019, review of The Testaments.
Library Journal, August 9, 2000, Beth E. Andersen, review of The Blind Assassin; March 15, 2005, Nancy R. Ives, review of Writing with Intent, p. 84; August 1, 2009, Leigh Anne Vrabel, review of The Year of the Flood, p. 62; October 1, 2011, Nancy R. Ives, review of In Other Worlds, p. 79; August 1, 2013, Shaunna E. Hunter, review of MaddAddam, p. 82; September 1, 2014, Joy Humphrey, review of Stone Mattress, p. 100.
London Review of Books, November 17, 2005, Thomas Jones, review of The Penelopiad, p. 23.
Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2011, Nick Owchar, review of In Other Worlds.
Maclean’s, January 15, 1979, review of Two-headed Poems, p. 50; October 15, 1979, review of Life before Man, p. 66; March 30, 1981, Mark Able, review of True Stories, p. 52; September 16, 1991, John Bemrose, review of Wilderness Tips and Other Stories, p. 58; October 5, 1992, John Bemrose, review of Good Bones, p. S10; October 4, 1993, Judith Timson, review of The Robber Bride, p. 55; February 6, 1995, John Bemrose, review of Morning in the Burned House, p. 85; September 23, 1996, Diane Turbide, “Amazing Atwood,” pp. 42-45; July 1, 1999, Margaret Atwood, “Survival, Then and Now,” p. 54.
Ms., January, 1987, Lindsy Van Gelder, “Margaret Atwood,” p. 48.
New Statesman, August 23, 2013, Sarah Churchwell, “Living in the End Times,” p. 42; September 18, 2015, Randy Boyagoda, review of The Heart Goes Last, p. 67.
Newsweek, February 18, 1980, Peter S. Prescott, review of Life before Man, p. 108; February 17, 1986, Peter S. Prescott, review of The Handmaid’s Tale, p. 70.
New Yorker, September 18, 2000, John Updike, review of The Blind Assassin, p. 142; September 16, 2019, Jia Tolentino, “All Aunt Lydia’s Children,” review of The Testaments.
New York Review of Books, December 19, 1996, Hilary Mantel, “Murder and Memory.”
New York Times, March 6, 1982, Anatole Broyard, review of Bodily Harm, pp. 13(N), 21(LC); March 28, 1982, Judy Klemesrud, “Canada’s ‘High Priestess of Angst,’” p. 21; September 15, 1982; January 27, 1986, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Handmaid’s Tale, p. C24; October 26, 1993, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Robber Bride, p. C20; November 23, 1993, Sarah Lyall, “An Author Who Lets Women Be Bad Guys,” pp. C13, C16; September 3, 2000, Thomas Mallon, review of The Blind Assassin; September 8, 2000, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Blind Assassin; May 13, 2003, Michiko Kakutani, review of Oryx and Crake, p. E9.
New York Times Book Review, February 3, 1980, Marilyn French, review of Life before Man, p. 1; February 9, 1986, Mary McCarthy, review of The Handmaid’s Tale, p. 1; October 31, 1993, Lorrie Moore, review of The Robber Bride, pp. 1, 22; December 11, 1994, Jennifer Howard, review of Good Bones and Simple Murders, p. 22; December 29, 1996, Francine Prose, review of Alias Grace, p. 6; December 7, 2003, review of Oryx and Crake, p. 69; September 20, 2009, Jeanette Winterson, review of The Year of the Flood.
Observer (London, England), September 8, 2013, Justin Cartwright, review of MaddAddam.
O, the Oprah Magazine, November, 2005, Vince Passaro, review of The Penelopiad, p. 184; September 6, 2013, Andrew Sean Greer, review of MaddAddam.
Publishers Weekly, July 24, 2000, review of The Blind Assassin, p. 67; July 24, 2000, “PW Talks to Margaret Atwood,” p. 68; August 23, 2004, review of Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, p. 54; August 15, 2011, review of In Other Worlds, p. 66; June 10, 2013, review of MaddAddam, p. 50; June 29, 2015, review of The Heart Goes Last, p. 42.
Quill and Quire, April, 1981, Robert Sward, review of True Stories; September, 1984.
Resource Links, December, 2003, Denise Parrott, review of Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, p. 1; April, 2005, Adriane Pettit, review of Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda, p. 1.
San Francisco Review of Books, summer, 1982, Nancy Ramsey, review of Bodily Harm, p. 21.
Saturday Night, July-August, 1998, Rosemary Sullivan, “The Writer-Bride,” p. 56.
Saturday Review, February 2, 1980, Rosellen Brown, review of Life before Man, p. 33.
School Library Journal, November, 2004, Caroline Ward, review of Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, p. 90.
Science, November 14, 2003, Susan M. Squier, review of Oryx and Crake, p. 1154.
Spectator, August 31, 2013, Richard Davenport-Hines, “Escapism for the Gullible,” p. 34; September 19, 2015, Naomi Alderman, review of The Heart Goes Last, p. 47.
Studies in the Novel, spring, 2004, Earl G. Ingersoll, review of Negotiating with the Dead, p. 126.
Telegraph (London, England), October 19, 2011, Paul Kincaid, review of In Other Worlds.
Toronto Life, September, 2015, Rachel Heinrichs, review of The Heart Goes Last, p. 98.
Utopian Studies 23, September 20, 2012, Daniel Lukes, review of In Other Worlds.
Village Voice, January 7, 1980, Laurie Stone, review of Life before Man.
Washington Post, April 6, 1986, Mary Battiata, review of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Washington Post Book World, November 7, 1993, Francine Prose, review of The Robber Bride, p. 1.
West Coast Review, January, 1973, Gloria Onley, “Margaret Atwood: Surfacing in the Interests of Survival.”
ONLINE
Atwood Society, http://www.themargaretatwoodsociety.wordpress.com (October 16, 2019).
Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (September 5, 2019), Sophie Gilbert, “The Challenge of Margaret Atwood.”
BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/ (September 6, 2019), Laura Freeman, review of The Testaments; (October 16, 2019), “Seven Life Lessons from Margaret Atwood.”
Biography, https://www.biography.com/ (June 20, 2019), “Margaret Atwood.”
CBC, https://www.cbc.ca/ (September 6, 2019), Amara McLaughlin, “Why Margaret Atwood Waited More Than 30 Years to Write The Testaments.”
Fantastic Fiction, https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ (October 16, 2019), “Margaret Atwood.”
London Guardian Online, http://www.theguardian.com/ (September 23, 2015), M. John Harrison, review of The Heart Goes Last; (September 10, 2019), Anne Enright, review of The Testaments.
Margaret Atwood, http://www.margaretatwood.ca (June 17, 2016).
New York Times Book Review Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (September 19, 2014), Matt Bell, review of Stone Mattress.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (September 3, 2019), Danielle Kurtzleben, review of The Testaments.
Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/ (November 2, 2012), author profile.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (September 9, 2019), review of The Testaments.
Quill and Quire, http://www.quillandquire.com/ (November 5, 2012), Chelsea Donaldson, review of Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop’s Wunderground Washery.*
Slate, https://slate.com/ (September 4, 2019), Laura Miller, review of The Testaments.
Time, https://time.com/ (September 10, 2019), Lucy Feldman, “Let’s Break Down the Most Mysterious Parts of The Testaments, With a Little Help From Margaret Atwood.”
Wired, https://www.wired.co.uk/ (September 10, 2019), Sophie Charara, review of The Testaments.
Margaret Atwood
(Margaret Eleanor Atwood)
Canada (b.1939)
Wife of Graeme Gibson
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays.
In addition to the classic The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include Cat's Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize and Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2008.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto, Canada.
Genres: Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, Fantasy, Children's Fiction, Mystery
New Books
September 2019
(hardback)
The Testaments
(Handmaid's Tale, book 2)
Series
Handmaid's Tale
1. The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
2. The Testaments (2019)
MaddAddam Trilogy
1. Oryx and Crake (2003)
2. The Year of the Flood (2009)
aka God's Gardeners
3. Maddaddam (2013)
Novels
The Edible Woman (1969)
Surfacing (1972)
Lady Oracle (1976)
Up in the Tree (1978)
Life before Man (1979)
Bodily Harm (1981)
Unearthing Suite (1983)
The Labrador Fiasco (1986)
Cat's Eye (1988)
For the Birds (1990) (with Shelly Tanaka)
The Robber Bride (1993)
Alias Grace (1996)
The Blind Assassin (2000)
The Heart Goes Last (2015)
Omnibus
The Margaret Atwood Omnibus (1987)
Collections
Double Persephone (1961)
The Circle Game (poems) (1967)
The Animals in That Country (poems) (1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (poems) (1970)
Procedures for Underground (1970)
Power Politics (poems) (1971)
You Are Happy (poems) (1974)
Selected Poems (poems) (1976)
Dancing Girls (1977)
Two-Headed Poems (poems) (1978)
True Stories (1981)
Bluebeard's Egg (1983)
Murder in the Dark (poems) (1983)
Interlunar (poems) (1984)
Selected Poems II (poems) (1986)
Poems 1965-1975 (poems) (1987)
Wilderness Tips (1991)
Poems 1976-1986 (poems) (1992)
Good Bones (1992)
Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)
Morning in the Burned House (poems) (1995)
Bones and Murder (1995)
Ten (1996) (with T C Boyle, Nadine Gordimer, David Guterson, Jay McInerney, Candia McWilliam, Will Self, Patrick Süskind and Tobias Wolff)
Eating Fire (poems) (1998)
The Tent (2006)
Moral Disorder (2006)
The Door (poems) (2007)
Hymns of the God's Gardeners (poems) (2009)
Crimespotting (2009) (with Lin Anderson, Kate Atkinson, Chris Brookmyre, John Burnside, Isla Dewar, A L Kennedy, Denise Mina, Ian Rankin and James Robertson)
I'm with the Bears (2011) (with Paolo Bacigalupi, T C Boyle, Toby Litt, Lydia Millet, Wu Mingi, David Mitchell, Nathaniel Rich, Kim Stanley Robinson and Helen Simpson)
Stone Mattress (2014)
The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie (poems) (2014)
The Blind Assassin / The Handmaid's Tale / The Robber Bride / Alias Grace (2016)
A Trio of Tolerable Tales (2017)
Freedom (2018)
Chapbooks
Bottle (2004)
Picture Books
Anna's Pet (1980) (with Joyce Barkhouse)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)
Novellas
Death by Landscape (1989)
I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth (2012)
Moral Disorder: A Story (2014)
The Bad News (2018)
Series contributed to
Best American Short Stories (with Shannon Ravenel)
The Best American Short Stories 1989 (1989)
Myths
2. The Penelopiad (2003)
The Myths Volume I - VI (omnibus) (2006) (with David Grossman, Victor Pelevin and Jeanette Winterson)
The Myths Series Collection Books 1-3 (omnibus) (2016) (with Karen Armstrong and Jeanette Winterson)
Hogarth Shakespeare
4. Hag-Seed (2016)
Anthologies edited
The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1982)
The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1987) (with Robert Weaver)
The Canlit Foodbook (1987)
Non fiction
Survival (1972)
Second Words (1982)
Strange Things (1995)
On Writers and Writing (2002)
Moving Targets (2004)
Writing with Intent (2005)
Curious Pursuits (2005)
Waltzing Again (2006)
Payback (2007)
Glances at Germany, Poland, and the Euxine (2009)
In Other Worlds (2011)
The World Split Open (2014) (with Edward P Jones, Ursula K Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson and Wallace Stegner)
Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia and The Handmaid's Tale (2015)
The Burgess Shale (2017)
Anthologies containing stories by Margaret Atwood
First Words (1993)
The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993)
The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (1995)
Virtually Now (1996)
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Ninth Annual Collection (1996)
Wild Women (1997)
Mistresses of the Dark (1998)
Short stories
When it Happens (1983)
Freeforall (1986)
Homelanding (1989)
Daphne and Laura and So Forth (1995)
Half-Hanged Mary (1995)
Shopping (1998)
Awards
The Man Booker Prize Best Novel nominee (1989) : Cat's Eye
The Man Booker Prize Best Novel nominee (1996) : Alias Grace
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Best Book nominee (1997) : Alias Grace
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards Best Novel nominee (1998) : Alias Grace
The Man Booker Prize Best Novel winner (2000) : The Blind Assassin
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Best Book nominee (2001) : The Blind Assassin
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards Best Novel nominee (2002) : The Blind Assassin
The Man Booker Prize Best Novel nominee (2003) : Oryx and Crake
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Best Book nominee (2004) : Oryx and Crake
John W Campbell Memorial Award Best Novel nominee (2010) : The Year of the Flood
MARGARET ATWOOD, whose work has been published in over forty countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid's Tale, now a successful MGM-Hulu television series currently preparing its fourth season, her novels include Cat's Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize; The Penelopiad; The Heart Goes Last; Hag-seed; and The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, published in September, 2019. She lives in Toronto some of the time.
Margaret Atwood Biography
Author, Literary Critic, Poet (1939–)
Updated:Jun 20, 2019Original:Oct 27, 2015
Margaret Atwood is an award-winning Canadian poet, novelist and essayist known for books like 'The Circle Game,' 'The Handmaid’s Tale,' 'Cat's Eye,' 'The Blind Assassin' and 'Oryx and Crake,' among an array of other works.
Who Is Margaret Atwood?
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Canada. The internationally-known author has written award-winning poetry, short-stories and novels, including The Circle Game (1966), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2000), Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Tent (2006). Her works have been translated into an array of different languages and seen several screen adaptations, with both Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace becoming miniseries in 2017.
Margaret Atwood
'Handmaid's Tale' on Hulu
Atwood’s novels Surfacing, The Blind Assassin and The Robber Bride have all received screen adaptations. The Handmaid’s Tale, also performed as an opera, was turned into a 1990 film starring Natasha Richardson as the title character Offred, along with Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth McGovern, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. (The screenplay was penned by Harold Pinter.)
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Decades later, Handmaid’s Tale was adapted into a spring 2017 TV miniseries for Hulu, starring Elisabeth Moss as Offred, along with Samira Wiley, Alexis Bledel and Joseph Fiennes. It later won multiple Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series, giving Hulu its very first Emmy honors. In addition, Atwood’s novel Alias Grace, a murder tale set in the mid-19th century in upper Canada, released as a Netflix miniseries in the fall of 2017. (Atwood has cameos in both series.) The MaddAddam trilogy has also been taken on board by HBO for future adaptation.
Acclaimed Literary Career
Atwood’s first published work was the pamphlet of poetry Double Persephone (1961), published via Hawkshead Press. More poetry followed during the decade as seen with the books Talismans for Children (1965) and The Animals in That Country (1968). She then published her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969, a metaphoric, witty work about the social status of a woman about to wed.
A tenacious spirit, Atwood would later describe taking Greyhound buses to read at gymnasiums and sell books. Atwood continued to publish poetry as well as the novels Surfacing (1973), Lady Oracle (1976) and Life Before Man (1980). Several more books followed, yet it was 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale that garnered Atwood a massive wave of acclaim and popularity. A prescient warning over what could be, the book chronicles a puritanical, theocratic dystopia in which a select group of fertile women — a condition which has become a rarity — are made to bear children for corporate male overlords.
Speculative Fiction and Comics
Atwood is a prolific writer who has penned additional novels that include Cat’s Eye (1989) and The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize. Continuing her output of speculative fiction with real-world parallels, the new millennium saw Atwood releasing the environment focused MaddAddam trilogy, consisting of Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). In addition to The Penelopiad (2005) and The Tent (2006), she also released the book of essays In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, looking at the nuances of sci-fi/fantasy genre writing.
In 2016, Atwood published the graphic novel Angel Catbird, an undertaking done with fellow Canadian artist Johnnie Christmas which profiles the super-heroic adventures of a genetic engineer who becomes part feline, part owl. The work is slated to be followed up by the February 2017 release, Angel Catbird: To Castle Catula.
Atwood lives in Toronto with her partner Graeme Gibson. The two have a daughter.
Background and Education
Atwood was born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada to a nutritionist mother and entomologist father who fostered a love of nature. Also growing up in Quebec and showing a passion for writing at an early age, Atwood eventually pursued her undergraduate studies at Victoria College at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1961. She then earned her master’s at Radcliffe the following year. Over the course of her career, Atwood went on to teach at a variety of colleges and universities in both Canada and the United States.
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Citation Information
Article Title
Margaret Atwood Biography
Author
Biography.com Editors
Website Name
The Biography.com website
URL
https://www.biography.com/writer/margaret-atwood
Access Date
October 5, 2019
Publisher
A&E Television Networks
Last Updated
June 20, 2019
Original Published Date
April 2, 2014
Seven life lessons from Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books, including novels such as Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 dystopian classic, The Handmaid's Tale, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award-winning television series.
Now you can hear Margaret Atwood's powerful and hugely-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, on Radio 4. The Testaments picks up 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown.
Listen to The Testaments
Margaret Atwood's powerful and hugely-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid's Tale.
Listen to The Testaments
The acclaimed author offers up invaluable insights and fascinating life lessons.
1. Anger has to go somewhere
Margaret says she can’t really know whether the impetus for writing The Handmaid’s Tale was art or anger. But one thing she does believe is that if anger is an impetus, and a propelling “rocket fuel”, then “the anger has to go somewhere. And for some people it goes into action; for other people it goes into art; for some people it goes into both.”
2. Watch out for the zeitgeist – it’s not always your friend
In Margaret Atwood’s book Negotiating with the Dead, which is about writing and why we write, she states, “Watch out for the Zeitgeist - it is not always your friend.” How then, one audience member asks, do we survive a dangerous zeitgeist?
The author’s response is simple: keep living. “If you can keep alive long enough,” she says, “it will change. We try out ideas and then they don’t work the way we thought they should, and then there’s a revision of how those ideas should work. And that’s just the way we go on.”
3. Fiction allows us to test things out
“Storytelling is one of the oldest human technologies we have,” the writer says, and fiction is a valuable tool because it “allows you to try out” something “without actually having to do it.”
She thinks, “probably it was a big educational tool amongst earlier human beings because you could say to children, for instance, this is gonna to be a story about how your uncle Jim got devoured by a crocodile right over there, and then you tell a gruesome tale and the child is not going to go swimming there. They don’t have to test it out” themselves.
In fiction, utopias and dystopias – like Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale – “are ways of testing out possible arrangements of society without actually having to do them.”
4. Be careful who you talk to in a totalitarian state
The Handmaid Tale’s narrator, Offred, isn’t as rebellious as protagonists in some other dystopian novels, like 1984 or Brave New World. But, Margaret says, that’s because she is a single individual, isolated from other possible underground movements and, as in real life, “you have to take totalitarianism seriously.”
There were counter movements within Nazi Germany but “those people all got caught and they were executed.”
When she was writing the book the author herself went to East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Poland, all of which were still behind the iron curtain, and “you had to be very careful who you talked to and you didn’t know who to trust” – informers were everywhere.
5. Developments in biotechnology could change our society
When asked whether there are there things on the horizon in science or technology that either excite or terrify her, the writer gives the example of recent developments in “biotechnology in particular.”
We “can make embryos out of skin cells” which, she says, could lead to a society where we are all women, or where women are no longer needed! Thankfully, she says, “They haven’t got the glass bottles yet. We’re not yet in Brave New World.”
6. America should be wary of a Gilead-like regime
When asked whether she believes a Gilead-like society is more or less likely in the West since she wrote the book, she states, “It’s not likely in England, because you did it already in the 17th Century” and “you had your religious wars and you had Oliver Cromwell and then you didn’t like it and you had the restoration.”
But, she says, “The United States has never done that. They’ve had civil war, but it wasn’t a religious war. So it’s more likely in the United States.”
But even then, though there might be a return to traditional values and a “lie down on the floor and let me put my foot on your head” approach, it’s “unlikely under a religious banner. Much more likely under a sort of revisionist pseudo-biological weirdo thing.”
7. The future is not pre-determined
Just like in The Handmaid’s Tale, modern-day America is experiencing a decline in fertility rates. As James Naughtie says, this has led some people who are reading the book now, many decades after it was written, to say that Margaret Attwood is, “for good or ill, some kind of prophet.”
The author is quick to respond: “I’m not a prophet because there is no ‘the future’… There are an infinite number of possible futures, and the one that we get is going to depend on… how we behave now – but you’re not doomed to just one of them.”
Listen to The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s powerful and hugely anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.
Margaret Atwood
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Margaret Atwood
CC OOnt CH FRSC
Atwood at the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair
Born
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
November 18, 1939 (age 79)
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Residence
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Alma mater
University of Toronto
Harvard University
Period
1961–present
Genre
Historical fictionspeculative fictionscience fictiondystopian fiction
Notable works
Surfacing (1972)
The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Cat's Eye (1988)
Alias Grace (1996)
The Blind Assassin (2000)
Oryx and Crake (2003)
Spouse
Jim Polk
(m. 1968; div. 1973)
Partner
Graeme Gibson
(m. 1973; died 2019)
Children
1
Signature
Atwood's voice
Menu
0:00
from BBC Radio 4's Front Row, July 24, 2007[1]
Website
margaretatwood.ca
Margaret Eleanor Atwood CC OOnt CH FRSC (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, inventor, teacher, and environmental activist. Since 1961, she has published 17 books of poetry, 16 novels, 10 books of non-fiction, eight collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and one graphic novel, as well as a number of small press editions in poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including the Man Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Atwood is also the inventor and developer of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television, increasing her exposure.
Atwood's works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics".[2] Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales which interested her from a very early age.[3] Atwood is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writers' Trust of Canada. She is also a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto.
Contents
1
Personal life and education
2
Career
2.1
1960s
2.2
1970s
2.3
1980s
2.4
1990s
2.5
2000s
3
Recurring themes and cultural contexts
3.1
Theory of Canadian identity
3.2
Feminism
3.3
Speculative and science fiction
3.4
Animal rights
3.5
Political involvement
4
Adaptations
5
Awards and honours
5.1
Awards
5.2
Honorary degrees
6
Works
6.1
Novels
6.2
Short fiction collections
6.3
Poetry collections
6.4
E-books
6.5
Anthologies edited
6.6
Children's books
6.7
Non-fiction
6.8
Drawings
6.9
Graphic novels
6.10
Television scripts
6.11
Libretti
6.12
Audio recordings
6.13
Filmography
7
See also
8
References
9
Further reading
10
External links
Personal life and education[edit]
Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the second of three children[4] of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist,[5] and Margaret Dorothy (née Killam), a former dietician and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia.[6] Because of her father's research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec and travelling back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was 12 years old. She became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories and comic books. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto, and graduated in 1957.[7] Atwood began writing plays and poems at the age of six.[8]
Atwood realized she wanted to write professionally when she was 16.[9] In 1957, she began studying at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she published poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal, and participated in the sophomore theatrical tradition of The Bob Comedy Revue.[10] Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French.[7]:54
In 1961 Atwood began graduate studies at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.[11] She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued doctoral studies for two years, but did not finish her dissertation, The English Metaphysical Romance.[12]
In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk, an American writer;[13] they divorced in 1973.[14] She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon afterward and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, where their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born in 1976.[13] The family returned to Toronto in 1980.[15] Atwood and Gibson were together until 18 September 2019, when Gibson died after suffering from dementia.[16]
Although she is an accomplished writer, Margaret Atwood claims to be a terrible speller.[17]
Career[edit]
1960s[edit]
Atwood's first book of poetry, Double Persephone, was published as a pamphlet by Hawskhead Press in 1961, winning the E.J. Pratt Medal.[18] While continuing to write, Atwood was a lecturer in English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, from 1964 to 1965, Instructor in English at the Sir George Williams University in Montreal from 1967 to 1968, and taught at the University of Alberta from 1969 to 1970.[19] In 1966, The Circle Game was published, winning the Governor General's Award.[20] This collection was followed by three other small press collections of poetry: Kaleidoscopes Baroque: a poem, Cranbrook Academy of Art (1965); Talismans for Children, Cranbrook Academy of Art (1965); and Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein, Cranbrook Academy of Art (1966); as well as, The Animals in That Country (1968). Atwood's first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969. As a social satire of North American consumerism, many critics have often cited the novel as an early example of the feminist concerns found in many of Atwood's works.[21]
1970s[edit]
Atwood taught at York University in Toronto from 1971 to 1972 and was a writer in residence at the University of Toronto during the 1972/1973 academic year.[19] Atwood published six collections of poetry over the course of the decade: The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Procedures for Underground (1970), Power Politics (1971), You Are Happy (1974), Selected Poems 1965–1975 (1976), and Two-Headed Poems (1978). Atwood also published three novels during this time: Surfacing (1972); Lady Oracle (1976); and Life Before Man (1979), which was a finalist for the Governor General's Award.[20] Surfacing, Lady Oracle, and Life Before Man, like The Edible Woman, explore identity and social constructions of gender as they relate to topics such as nationhood and sexual politics.[22] In particular, Surfacing, along with her first non-fiction monograph, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), helped establish Atwood as an important and emerging voice in Canadian literature.[23] In 1977 Atwood published her first short story collection, Dancing Girls, which was the winner of the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction.[19]
By 1976 there was such interest in Atwood, her works, and her life that Maclean's declared her to be "Canada's most gossiped-about writer."[24]
1980s[edit]
Atwood's literary reputation continued to rise in the 1980s with the publication of Bodily Harm (1981); The Handmaid's Tale (1985), winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award[25] and 1985 Governor General's Award[20] and finalist for the 1986 Booker Prize;[26] and Cat's Eye (1988), finalist for both the 1988 Governor General's Award[20] and the 1989 Booker Prize.[27] Despite her distaste for literary labels, Atwood has since conceded to referring to The Handmaid's Tale as a work of science fiction or, more accurately, speculative fiction.[28][29] As she has repeatedly noted, "There's a precedent in real life for everything in the book. I decided not to put anything in that somebody somewhere hadn't already done."[30]
While reviewers and critics have been tempted to read autobiographical elements of Atwood's life in her work, particularly Cat's Eye,[31][32] in general Atwood resists the desire of critics to read too closely for an author's life in their writing.[33] Filmmaker Michael Rubbo's Margaret Atwood: Once in August (1984)[34] details the filmmaker's frustration in uncovering autobiographical evidence and inspiration in Atwood's works.[35]
During the 1980s, Atwood continued to teach, serving as the MFA Honorary Chair the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, 1985; the Berg Professor of English, New York University, 1986; Writer-in-Residence, Macquarie University, Australia, 1987; and Writer-in-Residence, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, 1989.[36] Regarding her stints with teaching, she has noted, "Success for me meant no longer having to teach at university."[37]
1990s[edit]
Atwood's reputation as a writer continued to grow with the publication of the novels The Robber Bride (1993), finalist for the 1994 Governor General's Award[20] and shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award,[38] and Alias Grace (1996), winner of the 1996 Giller Prize, finalist for the 1996 Booker Prize,[39] finalist for the 1996 Governor General's Award,[20] and shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction.[40] Although vastly different in context and form, both novels use female characters to question good and evil and morality through their portrayal of female villains. As Atwood noted about The Robber Bride, "I'm not making a case for evil behavior, but unless you have some women characters portrayed as evil characters, you're not playing with a full range."[41] The Robber Bride takes place in contemporary Toronto, while Alias Grace is a work of historical fiction detailing the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Atwood had previously written the 1974 CBC made-for-TV film The Servant Girl, about the life of Grace Marks, the young servant who, along with James McDermott, was convicted of the crime.[42]
2000s[edit]
Novels[edit]
Atwood at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
In 2000 Atwood published her tenth novel, The Blind Assassin, to critical acclaim, winning both the Booker Prize[43] and the Hammett Prize[44] in 2000. The Blind Assassin was also nominated for the Governor General's Award in 2000,[20] Orange Prize for Fiction, and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002.[45] In 2001, Atwood was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.[46] Atwood followed this success with the publication of Oryx and Crake in 2003, the first novel in a series that also includes The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), which would collectively come to be known as the MaddAddam Trilogy. The apocalyptic vision in the MaddAddam Trilogy engages themes of genetic modification, pharmaceutical and corporate control, and man-made disaster.[47] As a work of speculative fiction, Atwood notes of the technology in Oryx and Crake, "I think, for the first time in human history, we see where we might go. We can see far enough into the future to know that we can't go on the way we've been going forever without inventing, possibly, a lot of new and different things."[48] She later cautions in the acknowledgements to MaddAddam, "Although MaddAddam is a work of fiction, it does not include any technologies or bio-beings that do not already exist, are not under construction or are not possible in theory."[49]
In 2005 Atwood published the novella The Penelopiad as part of the Canongate Myth Series. The story is a retelling of The Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope and a chorus of the twelve maids murdered at the end of the original tale. The Penelopiad was given a theatrical production in 2007.[50]
In 2016 Atwood published the novel Hag-Seed, a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest, as part of Penguin Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare Series.[51]
On November 28, 2018, Atwood announced that she would publish The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, in September 2019.[52] The novel features three female narrators and takes place fifteen years after the character Offred's final scene in The Handmaid's Tale.
Non-fiction[edit]
In 2008 Atwood published Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a collection of five lectures delivered as part of the Massey Lectures from October 12 to November 1, 2008. The book was released in anticipation of the lectures, which were also recorded and broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas.[53]
Chamber opera[edit]
In March 2008, Atwood accepted her first chamber opera commission. Commissioned by City Opera of Vancouver, Pauline is set in Vancouver in March 1913 during the final days of the life of Canadian writer and performer Pauline Johnson.[54] Pauline, composed by Tobin Stokes with libretto by Atwood, premiered on May 23, 2014, at Vancouver's York Theatre.[55]
Graphic fiction[edit]
In 2016 Atwood began writing the superhero comic book series Angel Catbird, with co-creator and illustrator Johnnie Christmas. The series protagonist, scientist Strig Feleedus, is victim of an accidental mutation that leaves him with the body parts and powers of both a cat and a bird.[56] As with her other works, Atwood notes of the series, "The kind of speculative fiction about the future that I write is always based on things that are in process right now. So it's not that I imagine them, it's that I notice that people are working on them and I take it a few steps further down the road. So it doesn't come out of nowhere, it comes out of real life."[57]
Future Library project[edit]
With her novel Scribbler Moon, Atwood is the first contributor to the Future Library project.[58] The work, completed in 2015, was ceremonially handed over to the project on 27 May of the same year.[59] The book will be held by the project until its eventual publishing in 2114. She thinks that readers will probably need a paleo-anthropologist to translate some parts of her story.[60] In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Atwood said, "There's something magical about it. It's like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for 100 years and then they'll wake up, come to life again. It's a fairytale length of time. She slept for 100 years."[59]
Invention of the LongPen[edit]
In early 2004, while on the paperback tour in Denver for her novel Oryx and Crake, Atwood conceived the concept of a remote robotic writing technology, what would later be known as the LongPen, that would enable a person to remotely write in ink anywhere in the world via tablet PC and the Internet, thus allowing her to conduct her book tours without being physically present. She quickly founded a company, Unotchit Inc., to develop, produce and distribute this technology. By 2011, Unotchit Inc. shifted its market focus into business and legal transactions and was producing a range of products, for a variety of remote writing applications, based on the LongPen technologies and renamed itself to Syngrafii Inc. As of September 2014, Atwood is still Co-founder and a Director of Syngrafii Inc. and holder of various patents related to the LongPen technology.[61][62][63][64][65][66]
Recurring themes and cultural contexts[edit]
Theory of Canadian identity[edit]
Atwood's contributions to the theorizing of Canadian identity have garnered attention both in Canada and internationally. Her principal work of literary criticism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, is considered somewhat outdated, but remains a standard introduction to Canadian literature in Canadian studies programs internationally.[67][68][69] The continued reprinting of Survival by Anansi Press has been criticized as a view-narrowing disservice to students of Canadian literature by some critics, including Joseph Pivato.[70]
In Survival, Atwood postulates that Canadian literature, and by extension Canadian identity, is characterized by the symbol of survival.[71] This symbol is expressed in the omnipresent use of "victim positions" in Canadian literature. These positions represent a scale of self-consciousness and self-actualization for the victim in the "victor/victim" relationship.[72] The "victor" in these scenarios may be other humans, nature, the wilderness or other external and internal factors which oppress the victim.[72] Atwood's Survival bears the influence of Northrop Frye's theory of garrison mentality; Atwood uses Frye's concept of Canada's desire to wall itself off from outside influence as a critical tool to analyze Canadian literature.[73] According to her theories in works such as Survival and her exploration of similar themes in her fiction, Atwood considers Canadian literature as the expression of Canadian identity. According to this literature, Canadian identity has been defined by a fear of nature, by settler history, and by unquestioned adherence to the community.[74]
Atwood's contribution to the theorizing of Canada is not limited to her non-fiction works. Several of her works, including The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and Surfacing, are examples of what postmodern literary theorist Linda Hutcheon calls "historiographic metafiction".[75] In such works, Atwood explicitly explores the relation of history and narrative and the processes of creating history.
Atwood continued her exploration of the implications of Canadian literary themes for Canadian identity in lectures such as Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995).
Among her contributions to Canadian literature, Atwood is a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize,[76] as well as a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.[77]
Feminism[edit]
Atwood's work has been of interest to feminist literary critics, despite Atwood's unwillingness at times to apply the label feminist to her works.[78] Starting with the publication of her first novel, The Edible Woman, Atwood asserted, "I don't consider it feminism; I just consider it social realism."[79] Despite her rejection of the label at times, critics have analyzed the sexual politics, use of myth and fairytale, and gendered relationships in her work through the lens of feminism.[80] She later clarified her discomfort with the label feminism by stating, "I always want to know what people mean by that word [feminism]. Some people mean it quite negatively, other people mean it very positively, some people mean it in a broad sense, other people mean it in a more specific sense. Therefore, in order to answer the question, you have to ask the person what they mean."[81] Speaking to The Guardian, she said "For instance, some feminists have historically been against lipstick and letting transgender women into women’s washrooms. Those are not positions I have agreed with",[82] a position she repeated to The Irish Times.[83][84] In an interview with Penguin Books, Atwood stated that the driving question throughout her writing of The Handmaid's Tale was "If you were going to shove women back into the home and deprive them of all of these gains that they thought they had made, how would you do it?", but related this question to totalitarianism, not feminism.[85]
In January 2018 Atwood penned the op-ed "Am I A Bad Feminist?" for The Globe and Mail.[86] The piece was in response to social media backlash related to Atwood's signature on a 2016 petition calling for an independent investigation into the firing of Steven Galloway, a former University of British Columbia professor accused of sexual harassment and assault by a student.[87] While feminist critics denounced Atwood for her support of Galloway, Atwood asserts that her signature was in support of due process in the legal system. She has been criticized for her comments surrounding the #MeToo movement, particularly that it is a "symptom of a broken legal system."[88]
Speculative and science fiction[edit]
Atwood has resisted the suggestion that The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake are science fiction, suggesting to The Guardian in 2003 that they are speculative fiction instead: "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen."[13] She told the Book of the Month Club: "Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians."[89] On BBC Breakfast, she explained that science fiction, as opposed to what she herself wrote, was "talking squids in outer space." The latter phrase particularly rankled advocates of science fiction and frequently recurs when her writing is discussed.[89]
In 2005, Atwood said that she does at times write social science fiction and that The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake can be designated as such. She clarified her meaning on the difference between speculative and science fiction, admitting that others use the terms interchangeably: "For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do ... speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand and that takes place on Planet Earth." She said that science fiction narratives give a writer the ability to explore themes in ways that realistic fiction cannot.[90]
Animal rights[edit]
Margaret Atwood repeatedly makes observations about the relationship of humans to animals in her works.[91] A large portion of the dystopia Atwood creates in Oryx and Crake rests upon the genetic modification and alteration of animals and humans, resulting in hybrids such as pigoons, rakunks, wolvogs, and Crakers, which function to raise questions on the limits and ethics of science and technology, as well as questions on what it means to be human.[92]
In Surfacing, one character remarks about eating animals: "The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people ... And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life." Some characters in her books link sexual oppression to meat-eating and consequently give up meat-eating. In The Edible Woman, Atwood's character Marian identifies with hunted animals and cries after hearing her fiancé's experience of hunting and eviscerating a rabbit. Marian stops eating meat but then later returns to it.[93]
In Cat's Eye, the narrator recognizes the similarity between a turkey and a baby. She looks at "the turkey, which resembles a trussed, headless baby. It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird." In Atwood's Surfacing, a dead heron represents purposeless killing and prompts thoughts about other senseless deaths.[93]
Political involvement[edit]
Atwood has indicated in an interview that she considers herself a Red Tory in what she sees as the historical sense of the term, saying that "The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things."[94] In the 2008 federal election, she attended a rally for the Bloc Québécois, a Quebec separatist party, because of her support for their position on the arts, and stated that she would vote for the party if she lived in a riding in Quebec in which the choice was between the Bloc and the Conservatives.[95] In an editorial in The Globe and Mail, she urged Canadians to vote for any other party other than the Conservatives to prevent them gaining a majority.[96]
A member of the political action group The Handmaid's Coalition
Atwood has strong views on environmental issues, and she and Graeme Gibson were the joint honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International. Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. She stated that she had chosen to attend the event because the city has been home to one of Canada's most ambitious environmental reclamation programs: "When people ask if there's hope (for the environment), I say, if Sudbury can do it, so can you. Having been a symbol of desolation, it's become a symbol of hope."[97] Atwood has been chair of the Writers' Union of Canada and helped to found the Canadian English-Speaking chapter of PEN International, a group originally started to free politically imprisoned writers.[98] She held the position of PEN Canada president in the mid 1980s[99] and was the 2017 recipient of the PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award.[100] Despite calls for a boycott by Gazan students, Atwood visited Israel and accepted the $1,000,000 Dan David Prize along with Indian author Amitav Ghosh at Tel Aviv University in May 2010.[101] Atwood commented that "we don't do cultural boycotts."[102]
In her dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) all the developments take place near Boston in the United States, now known as Gilead, while Canada is portrayed as the only hope for an escape. To some this reflects her status of being "in the vanguard of Canadian anti-Americanism of the 1960s and 1970s".[103] Critics have seen the mistreated Handmaid as Canada.[104] During the debate in 1987 over a free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States, Atwood spoke out against the deal and wrote an essay opposing it.[105] She has said that the 2016 United States presidential election led to an increase in sales of The Handmaid's Tale.[106] Inspired by the book, the political action group The Handmaid's Coalition was formed in 2017 in response to legislation and actions aimed at limiting the rights of women and marginalized groups. Activists, dressed in red cloaks and white hats as described in The Handmaid's Tale, lobby and protest to bring awareness to politicians of laws that discriminate against women.[107]
Adaptations[edit]
The novel Surfacing (1972) was adapted into an eponymous 1981 film, written by Bernard Gordon and directed by Claude Jutra.[108] The film received poor reviews and suffers from making "little attempt to find cinematic equivalents for the admittedly difficult subjective and poetic dimensions of the novel."[109]
The novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985) has been adapted into several eponymous works. A 1990 film, directed by Volker Schlöndorff, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, received mixed reviews.[110][111] A musical adaptation resulted in the 2000 opera, written by Poul Ruders, with a libretto by Paul Bentley. It premiered at the Royal Danish Opera in 2000, and was staged in 2003 at London's English National Opera and the Minnesota Opera.[112] Boston Lyric Opera mounted a production in May 2019.[113] A television series by Bruce Miller began airing on the streaming service Hulu in 2017.[114] The first season of the show earned eight Emmys in 2017, including Outstanding Drama Series. Season two premiered on April 25, 2018, and it was announced on May 2, 2018, that Hulu had renewed the series for a third season.[115] Atwood appears in a cameo in the first episode as one of the Aunts at the Red Center.[116]
In 2003, six of Atwood's short stories were adapted by Shaftesbury Films for the anthology television series The Atwood Stories.[117]
Atwood's 2008 Massey Lectures were adapted into the documentary Payback (2012), by director Jennifer Baichwal.[118] Commentary by Atwood and others such as economist Raj Patel, ecologist William Reese, and religious scholar Karen Armstrong, are woven into various stories that explore the concepts of debt and payback, including an Armenian blood feud, agricultural working conditions, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.[119]
The novel Alias Grace (1996) was adapted into an eponymous six-part 2017 miniseries directed by Mary Harron and adapted by Sarah Polley. It premiered on CBC on September 25, 2017, and the full series was released on Netflix on November 3, 2017.[120][121][122] Atwood makes a cameo in the fourth episode of the series as a disapproving churchgoer.[123]
In the Wake of the Flood (released in October 2010), a documentary film by the Canadian director Ron Mann, followed Atwood on the unusual book tour for her novel The Year of the Flood (2009). During this innovative book tour, Atwood created a theatrical version of her novel, with performers borrowed from the local areas she was visiting. The documentary is described as "a fly-on-the-wall film vérité."[124]
Atwood's children's book Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop's Wunderground Washery (2011) was adapted into the children's television series The Wide World of Wandering Wenda, broadcast on CBC beginning in the spring of 2017.[125] Aimed at early readers, the animated series follows Wenda and her friends as they navigate different adventures using words, sounds, and language.[126]
Director Darren Aronofsky had been slated to direct an adaption of the MaddAddam trilogy for HBO, but it was revealed in October 2016 that HBO had dropped the plan from its schedule. In January 2018, it was announced that Paramount Television and Anonymous Content had bought the rights to the trilogy and would be moving forward without Aronofsky.[127]
Awards and honours[edit]
Atwood holds numerous honorary degrees (e.g., from Oxford University, Cambridge University, NUI Galway and the Sorbonne),[128] and has won more than 55 awards in Canada and internationally.
Awards[edit]
Governor General's Award, 1966, 1985[129]
Companion of the Order of Canada, 1981[130]
Guggenheim fellowship, 1981[131]
Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, 1986[132]
American Humanist Association Humanist of the Year, 1987 [133]
Nebula Award, 1986 and Prometheus Award, 1987 nominations, both science fiction awards.[134][135]
Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Science Fiction, 1987[136]
Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1988[137]
Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year, 1989
Outstanding Canadian Award - Armenian Community Centre of Toronto, 1989[138]
Trillium Book Award, 1991, 1993, 1995[139]
Government of France's Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1994[140]
Helmerich Award, 1999, by the Tulsa Library Trust.[141]
Booker Prize, 2000[142]
Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, 2007[143]
Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, 2008[144]
Nelly Sachs Prize, Germany, 2010[145]
Dan David Prize, Israel, 2010[146]
Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, Canada, 2012[147]
Los Angeles Times Book Prize "Innovator's Award", 2012[148]
Gold medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, 2015[149]
Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia, 2016[150]
Franz Kafka Prize, Czech Republic, 2017[151]
Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Germany, 2017[152]
Companion of Honour, 2019[153]
Honorary degrees[edit]
Trent University, 1973[154]
Queen's University, 1974[155]
Concordia University, 1979[156]
Smith College, 1982[157]
University of Toronto, 1983[158]
University of Waterloo, 1985[159]
University of Guelph, 1985[160]
Mount Holyoke College, 1985[161]
Victoria College, 1987[162]
Université de Montréal, 1991[163]
University of Leeds, 1994[140]
McMaster University, 1996[164]
Lakehead University, 1998[165]
University of Oxford, 1998[166]
Algoma University, 2001[167]
University of Cambridge, 2001[168]
Dartmouth College, 2004[169]
Harvard University, 2004[170]
Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2005[171]
National University of Ireland, Galway, 2011[172]
Ryerson University, 2012[173]
Royal Military College of Canada (LLD), 16 November 2012 [174]
University of Athens, 2013[175]
University of Edinburgh, 2014[176]
Works[edit]
Novels[edit]
The Edible Woman (1969)
Surfacing (1972)
Lady Oracle (1976)
Life Before Man (1979, finalist for the Governor General's Award)
Bodily Harm (1981)
The Handmaid's Tale (1985, winner of the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award and 1985 Governor General's Award, finalist for the 1986 Booker Prize)
Cat's Eye (1988, finalist for the 1988 Governor General's Award and the 1989 Booker Prize)
The Robber Bride (1993, finalist for the 1994 Governor General's Award and shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award)
Alias Grace (1996, winner of the 1996 Giller Prize, finalist for the 1996 Booker Prize and the 1996 Governor General's Award, shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction)
The Blind Assassin (2000, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize and finalist for the 2000 Governor General's Award, shortlisted for the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction.)
Oryx and Crake (2003, finalist for the 2003 Booker Prize and the 2003 Governor General's Award and shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.)
The Penelopiad (2005, nominated for the 2006 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and longlisted for the 2007 International Dublin Literary Award)
The Year of the Flood (2009, Oryx and Crake companion, longlisted for the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award)
MaddAddam (2013) (Third novel in Oryx and Crake trilogy)
Scribbler Moon (2014; written in 2014 as part of the Future Library project)[59]
The Heart Goes Last (2015)
Hag-Seed (2016)
The Testaments (2019, finalist for the 2019 Booker Prize)[177]
Short fiction collections[edit]
Dancing Girls (1977, winner of the St. Lawrence Award for Fiction and the award of The Periodical Distributors of Canada for Short Fiction)
Murder in the Dark (1983)
Bluebeard's Egg (1983)
Wilderness Tips (1991, finalist for the Governor General's Award)
Good Bones (1992)
Good Bones and Simple Murders (1994)
The Labrador Fiasco (1996)
The Tent (2006)
Moral Disorder (2006)
Stone Mattress (2014)
Poetry collections[edit]
Double Persephone (1961)
The Circle Game (1964, winner of the 1966 Governor General's Award)
Expeditions (1965)
Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966)
The Animals in That Country (1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
Procedures for Underground (1970)
Power Politics (1971)
You Are Happy (1974) Includes the poem Song of the Worms
Selected Poems (1976)
Two-Headed Poems (1978)
True Stories (1981)
Love Songs of a Terminator (1983)
Snake Poems (1983)[178]
Interlunar (1984)
Selected Poems 1966–1984 (Canada)
Selected Poems II: 1976–1986 (US)
Morning in the Burned House, McClelland & Stewart (1995)
Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965–1995 (UK,1998)
"You Begin." (1978) – as recited by Margaret Atwood; included in all three most recent editions of her "Selected Poems" as listed above (US, CA, UK)
The Door (2007)
E-books[edit]
I'm Starved For You: Positron, Episode One (2012)
Choke Collar: Positron, Episode Two (2012)
Erase Me: Positron, Episode Three (2013)
The Heart Goes Last: Positron, Episode Four (2013)
Anthologies edited[edit]
The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1982)
The Canlit Foodbook (1987)
The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1988)
The Best American Short Stories 1989 (1989) (with Shannon Ravenel)
The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1995)
Children's books[edit]
Up in the Tree (1978)
Anna's Pet (1980) (with Joyce C. Barkhouse)
For the Birds (1990) (with Shelly Tanaka)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2006)
Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop's Wunderground Washery (2011);[179] inspired a cartoon series called Wandering Wenda in 2016.
Non-fiction[edit]
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)
Days of the Rebels 1815–1840 (1977)
Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982)
Through the One-Way Mirror (1986)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982–2004 (2004)
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005 (2005)
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008)
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011)
On Writers and Writing (2015)
Drawings[edit]
Kanadian Kultchur Komix featuring "Survivalwoman" in This Magazine under the pseudonym, Bart Gerrard 1975–1980
Others appear on her website.
Graphic novels[edit]
Angel Catbird, with Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain (2016)
War Bears, with Ken Steacy (2018)
Television scripts[edit]
The Servant Girl (1974)
Snowbird (1981)
Heaven on Earth (1987)
Libretti[edit]
The Trumpets of Summer (1964) (with composer John Beckwith)
Frankenstein Monster Song (2004, with rock band One Ring Zero)[180]
"Pauline", a chamber opera in two acts, with composer Tobin Stokes for City Opera Vancouver (2014)
Audio recordings[edit]
The Poetry and Voice of Margaret Atwood (1977)
Margaret Atwood Reads "Unearthing Suite" (1985)
Margaret Atwood Reading From Her Poems (2005)
Margaret Atwood as herself in Zombies, Run, as a surviving radio operator in themes.
Filmography[edit]
2017 she is credited as playing herself in all 26 episodes of Wandering Wenda where she wears funny hats to match the various themes
Unable to copy bio
Let's Break Down the Most Mysterious Parts of The Testaments, With a Little Help From Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood on the Sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale"
Author Margaret Atwood says her new book, "The Testaments" is an answer to all the questions about "The Handmaid's Tale" that readers have asked over the years.
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BY LUCY FELDMAN
SEPTEMBER 10, 2019
When most people think of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 classic dystopian novel, they think of the color red. The long red robes and white bonnets worn by women forced into reproductive slavery in the Republic of Gilead have become a symbol of oppression, an eye-catching cue that represents both Atwood’s influence and the global problems she probes in her fiction. So fans took notice when her publisher revealed bright green cover art for The Testaments.
In recent interviews for a cover story on the legendary author, Atwood answered TIME’s questions about the most intriguing aspects of her highly anticipated sequel, the color of the cover included. For the latter, she has a surprisingly simple answer: “I colored it with my crayons and said, ‘I think it would look better green.’” She adds that the color, “spring green,” evokes hope.
Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale hits shelves today. Like the original, The Testaments strikes a balance between propulsive storytelling and dark references to both past and present. But while the new book answers some crucial questions about Gilead, it also leaves many open to interpretation — which is Atwood’s way. The author prefers to let readers come to their own conclusions. “I’m the person who’s against dictatorship, remember that?” she says. “I’m not going to tell the reader what to think.”
Photograph by Mickalene Thomas for TIME
TIME’s cover story on Atwood avoided spoiling details from the The Testaments beyond the broad identities of its three narrators. This article draws on interviews with Atwood to answer a few of the most compelling questions about the book and analyze the meaning of those narrative choices. Do not read further if you have not yet read The Testaments and do not want to learn more details about its contents.
Here are Atwood’s answers to nine burning questions about The Testaments.
Does Offred survive?
Offred’s story in The Handmaid’s Tale ends with her stepping into a van that will take her “into the darkness, within; or else the light.” In an interview with TIME, Atwood says, “We will learn enough to know that it was more like the light than the darkness.”
So in a word, yes. Offred is alive in The Testaments. But this is Atwood we’re talking about, and nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
Why is the book called The Testaments?
Atwood has a three-pronged answer to this question, drawing on the structure of the novel — which is told by three narrators — and the religious aspects of Gilead. “It has several different meanings: last will and testament, Old and New Testaments. And what does a witness give? A testimony, but also a testament,” she says. “So it’s those three: the witness, the will and ‘I’m telling you the truth.’”
Who are the narrators of The Testaments?
When she announced The Testaments, Atwood teased that the new novel is narrated by three women, but she revealed nothing of their identities. Fans who hoped Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale, might be one of the three will be disappointed. The new book does not drop back into the mind of the woman who first described to us all the horrific customs of Gilead. One of the reasons Atwood waited as long as she did to write a sequel, she tells TIME, was because she felt re-creating Offred’s voice would be impossible. “She had said her piece, quite thoroughly,” Atwood says. But once she realized she could access Gilead through different characters, she knew she could write a follow-up.
So who are these women? One of the three narrators is someone readers already know: Aunt Lydia, a notorious villain in the original book. She’s since been brought to life by Ann Dowd in Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. (TIME recently revealed that Dowd also reads the role in the audiobook edition of The Testaments.) In the new book, Atwood complicates readers’ long-held assumptions about Lydia, who trains women to become handmaids and often adds to their misery with her abusive tactics. To flesh out Lydia’s story, Atwood says she asked herself, “How do you get to be such a person? How do you act within that structure? What are your fears, what are your goals, when you’re in that position channeling J. Edgar Hoover, who collected dirt on everybody?”
Lydia’s narration comprises the meatiest third of The Testaments, the one most revealing of Gilead’s inner workings, because she sees — and records — everything. As Atwood points out to TIME, Lydia is a woman of secret yet significant power in the regime. Such women are rare, and dangerously underestimated, in Gilead. Through Lydia’s narration, Atwood allows us access to a mind far more complex, with many more shades of grey, than her original novel let on.
The second narrator is another person we know from the original, but not nearly as well. Agnes Jemima was too young when Gilead took power to remember what life was like before it. She’s growing up in a nice house with her mother and father, a powerful Commander, and learning the duties she will be expected to uphold as a wife. But when her mother dies, she learns that she once had another mother: a woman now serving as a handmaid. And she has vague memories of running through the woods with an unknown woman as a young child. If it sounds like she might be Offred’s daughter — the one who was ripped from her arms as she and her husband Luke attempted an escape to Canada — well, you might be onto something. (More on that later.)
The third narrator is brand new — again, sort of. Daisy is a teenager living in Toronto with oddly overprotective parents who run a second-hand clothing store. Gilead is a constant topic of political conversation in her school. Daisy wrote an essay on Baby Nicole, a child who was “stolen” by her handmaid mother and taken to Canada, and is now held up by Gileadeans as a symbol of the evil that exists outside its borders. One day Daisy attends an anti-Gilead rally against her parents’ wishes. The next day, her 16th birthday, they’re dead. And all their friends are acting like Daisy is in danger, too. Soon, they reveal the truth: she is Baby Nicole. Her “parents” were agents of the Mayday resistance, the campaign to overthrow Gilead, who were assigned to protect her.
Are the two young narrators related to Offred?
Readers of The Handmaid’s Tale will remember that when Offred stepped into the van at the end of the novel, she thought she might be pregnant with Nick’s baby. That was, according to Atwood, about 15 years before the action of The Testaments begins. And here is a baby — Daisy/Nicole — who was born to a handmaid 16 years ago and smuggled into Canada. Simple math suggests that this teenager could be Offred and Nick’s daughter.
A reasonable reader could then conclude that both of these young narrators — Daisy/Nicole and Agnes Jemima — are Offred’s daughters. Which would make them half sisters. And yes, in fact, we do eventually learn that these two share a mother, who was a handmaid.
Let’s call this theory reasonable, rather than certain, because again, Atwood prefers to let readers make up their own minds. Nowhere in The Testaments does it say that Daisy/Nicole and Agnes Jemima’s mother ever went by the name Offred. And the author herself won’t confirm. “We are pretty sure,” Atwood says. “But we don’t really know.” Their mother’s namelessness is reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, since we never learn Offred’s real name. Her anonymity underscores the point that the horrors Offred suffers could happen to anyone.
But there’s another layer to this question: While the two books don’t use names, Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale does. Atwood had everything to do with those names; she works closely with the team behind the show.
Up to this point in Hulu’s series, which has aired three seasons and has been picked up for a fourth, Offred (who is known as June) has two daughters. The elder, Hannah, is from her marriage to Luke before Gilead. She gets taken from her parents, just like in the book, before the events of the first season. Much later, June learns that Hannah has been given a new name in Gilead. June’s second daughter in the show is a baby she has with Nick. And what are these daughters called? Agnes and Nicole. The latter was Atwood’s decision. Bruce Miller, the Handmaid’s Tale showrunner, tells TIME that standing by for Atwood to name the new baby was like awaiting the announcement of a new pope: “I was waiting for white smoke,” he says.
So, we have Agnes and Nicole as June/Offred’s daughters in the show. And Agnes Jemima and Nicole/Daisy as the children of a handmaid in The Testaments. Which means that if you read the two books and the show together, then yes, the two young narrators of The Testaments are Offred’s daughters. I suggest to Atwood that readers can choose whether they want to include the show in their reading of the two novels. She offers a very on-brand response: “I love choices like that.”
So wait, what happens to Offred in The Testaments?
The story is really about Lydia, Daisy/Nicole and Agnes Jemima. But we do learn some things about the girls’ mother. If we conclude that Offred is that person, here are a few essential things about her life after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale.
First, she lives.
Second — no surprise — she’s working with Mayday somewhere in Canada.
Third, she follows the lives of her children from afar and hopes to be reunited with them.
Does Aunt Lydia turn out to be good?
Critics are already discussing the moral standing of Aunt Lydia, whose motivations prove so much more complex in The Testaments than they seemed in The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood tells TIME that she didn’t think much about Lydia’s reasons for upholding the regime when writing the original novel. But she has tapped a timely nerve with her expansion of the character in The Testaments, probing the fraught territory of women’s complicity in the bad behavior of men and walking a line that leaves room for readers to debate. Atwood won’t be weighing in. “Let Aunt Lydia speak for herself, and make up your own mind,” she says.
How does The Testaments fit into the world of the Handmaid’s Tale TV show?
The show is a continuation of Atwood’s original story, set in the world she created, and the author advises on its story through regular conversations with Miller. There are elements in The Testaments that viewers of the show will recognize. But The Testaments picks up years after June’s current life in the show, so while they are closely tied, the stories are completely different. Atwood tells TIME it was important to her to avoid writing a novelization of the Handmaid’s Tale show while also making sure not to introduce contradictions between them. There are a few details that the most vigilant of fans might recognize as different between the new book and the show, but overall they work as companion pieces.
As for the on-screen future of The Testaments, TIME broke the news that Hulu and MGM are developing the new novel for the screen, working with Miller on determining how best to produce the material. It’s unclear at this stage what form the interwoven stories of Lydia, Daisy/Nicole and Agnes Jemima will take — whether they will be incorporated into the existing show or produced another way.
What do the letters on the windowsill mean?
This question only makes sense once you’ve read the novel, but it is a tantalizing one. As she did in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood ends The Testaments with a transcript from a Gileadean studies conference long after the regime has fallen. In it, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto discusses the recently discovered manuscripts that comprise The Testaments and analyzes their contents. He shares that the letters N, A, G, V and AL are carved on a second-floor windowsill in Roosevelt Cottage, which once functioned as a refugee center for escaped Gileadeans, and says Agnes Jemima and Daisy/Nicole may have stayed there for a time. Pieixoto suggests that the letters might have been carved by the half sisters and might be the initials of the central players in their stories: Nicole, Agnes or Ada (a member of the Mayday Resistance), Garth (also Mayday), Victoria (another name Agnes Jemima goes by) and Aunt Lydia. But he points out that we will never know for sure. Atwood, for her part, suggests he’s on the right track. “I think our professor makes a pretty good guess,” she says.
Will Atwood write more Gilead novels?
Atwood’s use of Lydia, Agnes Jemima and Daisy/Nicole to broaden and deepen our understanding of Gilead is effective. If The Handmaid’s Tale was a psychological study — a claustrophobic look at one woman’s sequesterment and inner life — The Testaments is the more sociological counterpart. Offred’s reader knew only as much as she did: very little. But the three narrators together offer a fascinating higher-level view of the world Atwood created. It’s easy to imagine that Atwood could add even more perspective on Gilead through the eyes of more characters. And she wrote the book in part because she sees the world as shifting more toward Gilead than away from it, a sentiment unlikely to dissipate in the near future.
But Atwood isn’t much for discussing her future plans — she tells TIME that doing so often leads to regret. That said, she also doesn’t say she won’t write more Gilead novels. When I ask her to confirm that she’s not saying no to the possibility, she says, “I never say never.”
Write to Lucy Feldman at lucy.feldman@time.com.
The Challenge of Margaret Atwood
With her new book—the much-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale—the Canadian author is leading a resistance. But it’s not the one you might think.
Rosdiana Ciaravolo / Getty
SOPHIE GILBERT SEP 5, 2019 BOOKS
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Early last month, I crossed the international border from the United States to Canada—a relatively simple act that also feels a touch more fraught these days than it used to. During the final phase of the third security checkpoint at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, so close to the end that I could see Lake Ontario sparkling through the large windows, a stern border guard had some questions. Why are you here? For work. What do you do? I’m a journalist doing an interview. Who with? Margaret Atwood.
With that, the dark-haired guard fixed me with a look that was almost like disappointment. “Oh, her,” she said, waving me through. “Everybody always comes for her.”
It’s funny to imagine, but not improbable: hordes of brash reporters storming polite Toronto hourly demanding not Drake, not Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, not even an erstwhile Raptor or Maple Leaf, but Atwood, the 79-year-old author and high priestess of Canada’s literary arts. A lovely idea, but it’s not true, Atwood told me later, when we were settled in a hotel suite, after she’d raided the minibar for salted cashews and quizzed me briefly about the iniquity of the new British prime minister, Boris Johnson. You can’t write and do press at the same time; it’s too distracting. And Atwood is almost always writing. It isn’t that she minds doing interviews—she prefers it now to when she first started doing press, in the 1960s and ’70s, when reporters “couldn’t quite get their heads around female people writing, and also Canadian people writing,” and seemed fairly hostile to the idea of both. And now it’s different because—?
She tilted her neck upward regally, fluffing her gray curls so they sprung outward, an imperious, septuagenarian Orphan Annie in the gentle afternoon light. “Because”—her eyes twinkled at me—“I’m venerable.”
Queen Margaret, soothsayer, poet, sometime Game of Thrones fan, historical encyclopedia, Booker Prize winner, is indeed venerable. Thirty-four years ago she published The Handmaid’s Tale, a work of speculative fiction imagining a repressive theocracy in the United States, and ever since she’s been name-checked virtually every time reproductive rights are restricted, or biblical language is invoked to justify appalling actions. The book is narrated by a handmaid whose only title connotes the man she’s assigned to bear children for through acts of rape—she’s called Offred, to signify that she is the property “of Fred” Waterford, an elite commander in the totalitarian Republic of Gilead.
Almost instantaneously, The Handmaid’s Tale became a modern classic. Its portrayal of radical religious fanatics staging a coup in an America ravaged by infertility, pollution, and disease was inspired in no small part by George Orwell’s 1984, which was also the year when much of it was written, while the Christian right’s Moral Majority movement was at its peak. Atwood began work on it while living in what was then a walled Berlin; she finished it in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she’d been warned not to ride a bicycle outside, which would cause locals to assume she was a communist and try to run her off the road. Soviet authoritarianism and cloying American paranoia bookended the creation of her story.
Though The Handmaid’s Tale has never been out of print, and though Atwood maintains that popular interest in it crests with every American election, it became even more of a phenomenon in late 2016, after the Donald Trump–Mike Pence ticket prevailed in the U.S. presidential election and only a few months before a television adaptation of the novel debuted on Hulu. The visual iconography of the handmaids—women depersonalized by scarlet cloaks, rendered faceless by wraparound white bonnets—became a fixture at protests and assemblies around the world. But before any of this had happened, Atwood had already decided, earlier in 2016, to write a sequel.
Nan A. Talese
We had met in this Toronto hotel room to discuss The Testaments, the most anticipated book of the year, and a novel so exciting that Atwood’s first event on release day, September 10, is being live-streamed to more than 1,000 cinemas around the world. The book is under such tight security that when a galley was couriered to me in August, it bore a fake name and a fake title, and was accompanied by a non-disclosure agreement. The Testaments, set about 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale and structured around the testimony of three women, is the kind of release that booksellers dream of, with its associated panel discussions and costume parties. (One event at a London bookstore features embroidery and placard making.) And every time I asked Atwood a question about it, she deflected it with the instinctual dexterity of Roger Federer on Centre Court.
A query about whether the TV show altered her perception of her characters prompted a dissertation on the 50 shades of red that the Hulu costume designer Ane Crabtree went through to get the handmaids’ outfits right. A question about how she tried to channel the voice of a 16-year-old girl spawned an anecdote about Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man. A back-and-forth about why she wanted to revisit The Handmaid’s Tale’s antagonist, Aunt Lydia, whose sense of humor and self-awareness is sharper in The Testaments than anyone might have imagined, led Atwood to say, “Of course, the question is, what do Mother Superiors think about in their spare time? What about Hildegard von Bingen? She certainly lived her life on the edge.”
About an hour in, after Atwood and I had discussed the children of the hippies, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s utopian romances, Madeleine Albright’s warnings against fascism, Morris dancing (“We don’t quite know what it means. Was it a pagan thing? A fertility ritual?”), and Margery Kempe, “a mystic who did quite a lot of crying,” I was beginning to understand that Atwood did not want to talk about The Testaments, really, and that the questions I was asking her were irritating because they kept demanding an interpretation of a book that she didn’t wish to interpret. The last line of The Handmaid’s Tale—“Are there any questions?”—hints at the deliberate ambiguity of her stories. Everything I was trying to get her to do—explain characters she created, or events she invented for them—seemed to be everything she was most politely but ardently opposed to doing.
Part of that, I’m guessing—she obviously wouldn’t tell me—is because Atwood is dancing around a line. The Handmaid’s Tale has been a 1990 movie, an opera, a play, a ballet, a one-woman show, and the inspiration for a concept album by the band Lakes of Canada. But over the past three years, as waves of readers have claimed the novel as a symbol of the “resistance,” and as Hulu’s TV adaptation has expanded her story in new—sometimes questionable—directions, the fictional world of Gilead has become a phenomenon that threatens to escape its author’s hold.
Atwood said she’s okay with that. She darts back and forth between embracing the hype—the live-stream for the book release, she told me proudly, is the “biggest one” the producers have ever done—and downplaying it. (The most fuss she’s ever gotten at home in Toronto, she said, was when she faced off against Mayor Rob Ford in an effort to maintain adequate funding for local libraries.) So much in Atwood’s work is about duality: pairs, or doubles, or opposing forces striking each other out. And if The Handmaid’s Tale is all about Offred’s passivity and powerlessness, The Testaments is defined by action. Its characters find power in unlikely places. They make bargains that seal their fate. They wield influence and significant authority over others. They make decisions, and so must readers.
The character of Aunt Lydia, in particular, has an arc that challenges simplistic readings of The Handmaid’s Tale. Her narrative could be interpreted as an author trying to regain authority over her own universe, while still leaving enough space for the readers she knows will cast their own verdict. “There are different sorts and levels of judgmentalism in people,” Atwood said. She said she doesn’t want to frame the book explicitly, because she knows each reader “brings to every book who they are, and each one of those who they ares is different.” Faced with the same situations as the characters in The Testaments, “the question for them is, probably, what would you do? What would you have done?”
Aunt Lydia is a faint presence in The Handmaid’s Tale, but she casts a heavy shadow. When Offred is first captured by Gilead agents in the novel while trying to flee to Canada, she’s transported to the Rachel and Leah Center, named for the Old Testament passages upon which Gilead’s regime is based. (“And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die ... And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.”)
Presiding over the Rachel and Leah Center, where women are drugged, disciplined, and trained to be handmaids, is Aunt Lydia, one of the women tasked with enforcing this new system of reproductive assignment. Filtered through Offred’s perspective, Aunt Lydia is less a person than a slogan generator—the maxims she spouts about women doing their duty plague Offred’s narrative, impossible to shake out of her memory. With “the tremulous smile of a beggar, the weak-eyed blinking, the gaze upwards,” Aunt Lydia is portrayed more as an irritant than an active oppressor. When Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, she told me in her dry, steady voice, she “wasn’t thinking about [Lydia] that much at all.” Until she read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, she never paid much attention to Mr. Rochester’s wife, either. “She’s sort of a fixture, like a lamp or something. You aren’t thinking about her past or her inner life or anything else about her. She’s just an impediment to Jane Eyre getting married.” She offered me a cashew.
Over the years, people kept asking Atwood whether she would write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and she kept saying no. Because what they were asking, she thought, is whether she would continue the story of Offred, and the answer to that was definitive. “That would be impossible,” she said. “You couldn’t really recreate that voice, you couldn’t build that out anymore.” But jumping forward in time, to examine Gilead’s second generation, seemed more layered with possibility. What would Gilead look like once it outgrew its “first flush of ideological weirdness,” as Atwood put it? With every revolution, she said, there’s the smashing-up-stained-glass-windows phase (Oliver Cromwell) and the butchering-the-Cossacks phase (the Bolsheviks), and then there’s what happens next. What, in Gilead, would happen next?
As she thought about continuing the story, Aunt Lydia—weak-eyed, blinking, inanimate—seemed to her like a fairly obvious choice of character to revisit. (“I’ve always been a Richard III fan,” Atwood said, obliquely.) The book is divided among three narratives: One is Lydia’s, written illegally in blue ink and hidden inside a copy of Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua: A Defense of One’s Own Life. One is the recorded testimony of a young woman named Agnes about growing up in Gilead. (The name will be familiar to viewers of the Hulu series.) The third is the testimony of a teenage girl named Daisy who grew up over the border in Canada, and who can’t shake the feeling that her parents are keeping something from her. When I mentioned to Atwood that I loved the contrast between the voices of Agnes and Daisy, she fixed me with an inscrutable gaze and said, “Ye-es, well you would, wouldn’t you?”
Lydia, though, is the most dynamic presence, and the one who gets the most attention from the author. Without giving too much away, her perspective dominates The Testaments and offers crucial new detail and context about how Gilead was founded. Lydia’s narrative is labeled “the Ardua Hall Holograph” in the novel, with holograph seeming to have a double meaning—someone who was once flat is becoming three-dimensional in front of our eyes.
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In the Hulu Handmaid’s adaptation by Bruce Miller, now in its third season, Lydia is a formidable creature played by the astonishing Ann Dowd, a character who fluctuates disorientingly between zealotry, empathy, and ritualized sadism. It is very hard, Atwood said, to answer the question of whether the series has influenced the way she thinks about her own characters. “Of course, it has to in some way. I don’t sit around thinking about what millimeter it changes this or that.” Words, she said, are always subject to interpretation, whereas film and TV are more literal. In the original novel, Lydia is seen entirely from the outside. In the television series, she gets more depth, thanks to Dowd’s multilayered performance and Miller’s expansion of her biography. But The Testaments makes her something else again: a chronicler of Gilead who in some sense challenges both Offred’s appraisal of her and the reader’s.
While Atwood’s sequel and the television series don’t stick rigidly to the same story lines, they have a fascinatingly symbiotic and cordial relationship that seems unlike any other in literature, or Hollywood. “We’re in touch,” is how Atwood described her interactions with Miller, which she characterizes as “very respectful.” The goal on both sides is not to do anything that directly contradicts something the other person has done, or might want to do. (HBO’s Game of Thrones, unable to wait for George R. R. Martin’s final novels before finishing its series, famously went off in its own direction.) Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, is named June in the show, which Atwood understands, because she says it’s impossible to have a TV character without a name—you can’t have everyone keep saying, “Hey, you,” for multiple seasons. Similarly, while Gilead in the novel is a white-nationalist state, Hulu’s diversity policy, she said, necessitated Miller’s making his version of Gilead essentially color-blind.
In jumping forward in time with The Testaments, Atwood is leaving Miller space to finish June’s story. There are also revelations in The Testaments that confirm specific details in the series, including the names of Offred’s two children. For that, Atwood said, each side got to pick a name. The TV people chose Agnes, which means “holy,” or “chaste.” She chose Nicole, which means “victory of the people.” Atwood was meticulous in her efforts not to say anything evaluative about the Hulu series, although she did say that she loves Miller. (She also adores Sarah Polley, whom she said did a “tippity-top job” in adapting her 1996 novel, Alias Grace, for CBC and Netflix.) And yet, by focusing so much of The Testaments on Aunt Lydia, Atwood also appears to be staking her own, unchallengeable claim to the character.
For the duration of her career, people have tried to put Atwood in boxes—Female Writer, Feminist Writer, Political Writer, Canadian Writer, Prophet. (The only label she seems to appreciate, for the record, is “clairvoyant,” since the world has gone on to graciously prove her right on several occasions.) In a blistering 1976 essay titled “On Being a Woman Writer,” Atwood rails against the people who’ve tried to claim her for various political causes, against what she sees as “the development of a one-dimensional Feminist Criticism,” and against interviewers who insist on “trying to find out what sort of person you are.” The worst interviewer of all, she writes, is “Miss Message,” a person incapable of understanding her work for what it is (fiction), and hell-bent on trying to get her to say something about an issue that turns her into “an exponent, spokeswoman, or theorist.” (When I read this essay a few weeks after our interview, I gulped.)
The adoption of The Handmaid’s Tale as a seminal feminist text has always troubled her—large parts of the novel are a repudiation of the second-wave feminism embodied in Offred’s memories of her mother. For similar reasons, Atwood has tended not to identify herself as a feminist, although by most modern interpretations of the term she fits the bill. She wanted to write The Handmaid’s Tale, she documents in her 2005 book Moving Targets, as a counterpoint to speculative works such as 1984 that had sidelined women characters—to create “a dystopia from the female point of view.” However, she clarifies, “this does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered feminist by those who think women ought not to have these things.”
Her rejection of “feminist” as a label, then, isn’t because she doesn’t think women are and should be equal to men in intellect and status and humanity. It seems to be related to the imperfect ways in which her work has been co-opted over the years. More than ever since the 2016 election, feminism has become a marketing tool—a gauzy, Spotify-playlist-blasting, pussy-hat-wearing, immensely profitable bandwagon. The ill-fated announcement in 2018 of a branded Handmaid’s Tale wine collection, featuring an “earthy” Offred Pinot Noir, a “bold” Ofglen Cabernet, and a “sophisticated” Serena Joy Bordeaux Blanc, exemplified late capitalism’s most shameless instincts to sell things to women. (The wine collection was canceled, following significant backlash, just 24 hours after it was announced.)
Atwood’s Offred—compelling, astute, and utterly powerless—isn’t a feminist icon. (The Hulu series might disagree on this note.) She’s a character in a novel. So, too, is Aunt Lydia. In electing to dedicate so much of The Testaments to Lydia’s narrative, Atwood is making sure that readers remember this about her work. Her characters aren’t meant to be quoted in inspirational memes, or reproduced on placards, or held up as paragons of empowerment or feminist virtue. They’re meant to be compelling to read about. Atwood has long chafed at the idea that she’s doing women a disservice by painting them as complex individuals with the capacity to be as good and bad as men are. Women, both as characters and as people, she writes in the 1978 essay “The Curse of Eve—Or, What I Learned in School,” have to “be allowed their imperfections.” (When I made the fatal error of saying something platitudinous about what women can do when they work together, Atwood responded in a flash, “Them and bonobo chimps.”)
The Testaments, then, is both a novel and an act of correction. Being as venerable as Atwood is inevitably means you will be claimed by the world, and to be claimed by the world means having your work interpreted (and co-opted) by people whose intentions and ideas don’t always align with yours. It means having film and television writers rework your stories into different forms, and stretch and remodel them in ways that you might be okay with, or you might not. The imperfect interpretation of Atwood’s work is so inevitable that it’s written into The Handmaid’s Tale, in a final section of the novel set hundreds of years in the future wherein a professor of “Gilead Studies” tries to analyze the tapes on which Offred’s narrative has been recorded, bringing his own biases to the process.
Atwood understands this. “When you publish a book, it’s not your book anymore,” she told me. “It belongs to the readers. If nobody’s reading the book then it’s just lying there. It’s inert, like a musical score that nobody plays.” And being so highly esteemed has its advantages: It was fun to go to the Emmys, Atwood said—she took two women from her office, and they had a “screamingly good time.” She would be lying if she said she wasn’t pleased that so many people were still reading The Handmaid’s Tale, and that there was so much anticipation for The Testaments. “But it wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t pleased. The same thing would still be happening.”
And yet, to publish a sequel after so long is to inevitably suggest that it is her book, and her world, after all. The Testaments isn’t the story that many devout Handmaid’s Tale readers might expect. It complicates characters who once seemed simple, and tangles up easy judgments. It asserts its author’s stamp on a fictional landscape without shutting itself off to subjective interpretation. When I asked Atwood why so much of her work featured the testimonies of women, she thought for a second, then described it as an “archaeological” interest in the unreliable nature of storytelling. “Things that are buried come to light. Things that are hidden are revealed.” But, “being the kind of novelist I am,” Atwood said, “there’s usually—in fact there’s always—something we don’t know.”
QUOTE:
"Instead of going away from Gilead, we turned around and started coming back towards Gilead."
Why Margaret Atwood waited more than 30 years to write The Testaments
Written by Amara McLaughlin
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Women’s rights, real-life politics inspiration for sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, author says
CBC Radio · Posted: Sep 06, 2019 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: September 6
Margaret Atwood says she had notes about a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale that date back to the early 1990s, but didn't notify her publishers until 2017. (Andrew Nguyen/CBC)
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Canadian author Margaret Atwood says the world's dynamic and uncertain political climate was the push she needed to write The Testaments — the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid's Tale many fans had been seeking for more than 30 years.
"I was no, no, no, no, no for awhile, but then No. 1: history changed," Atwood told The Current's interim host Laura Lynch.
"Instead of going away from Gilead, we turned around and started coming back towards Gilead."
Atwood reflected on the years between the novels, referencing the fall of the Berlin Wall, which people thought was the "end of history," and decades of feminist struggle that seemingly suggested women's rights were achieved and irreversible.
Then the 9/11 attacks rocked the U.S. and the world. That signalled that politics would "become a lot more conservative, which societies always do when they're attacked," Atwood said, with all of that leading to the 2016 U.S. election and the ongoing state of political discourse.
INTERVIEW: Margaret Atwood talks to CBC's Shelagh Rogers about The Testaments
EXPLORE: As Margaret Atwood enters her 80th year, explore her life and career
"People who think that progress is a one-way street and only ever goes in one direction have not read a lot of history. You cannot count on the yellow brick road leading to the City of Oz."
The Testaments hits shelves Tuesday in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. — although copies of the book were mistakenly shipped to some customers a week early.
Watch
Atwood poised for international stardom with The Handmaid's Tale
34 years ago 05:30
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is hailed as a literary breakthrough. 5:30
Even with the success of the 1985 original that elevated Atwood to the bestseller list, she said publishers never put any pressure on her to write the sequel.
When she revealed her intention to write a followup, they were nervous. So was she.
"It's a high-wire act, and would I fall off?"
I made a rule for myself, which was nothing goes in for which there is not a historical precedent.
- Margaret Atwood
But before the sequel was even published, Indigo projected it would be the top fiction title of 2019, and Canada's largest book retailer told The Current it's been one of the year's biggest preorders.
Atwood is again in the running for both the Man Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller prize, and a TV series based on the forthcoming novel is already being planned by MGM and Hulu, which made the Emmy-winning TV version of The Handmaid's Tale.
Returning to Gilead
The original tale is told from the perspective of Offred, a forced surrogate or handmaid.
She narrates how fertile women are bound into sexual servitude in order to bear children to powerful men and their barren wives. In the nightmarish world of the Republic of Gilead, women's bodies are not their own. Under the careful watch of facilitators, handmaids are controlled — assigned to powerful couples — and harshly reprimanded for disobedience.
Atwood showcases the cover of her new novel, The Testaments. (Margaret Atwood/Instagram)
Atwood is mindful not to fabricate any of the abuses that her characters suffer.
"I made a rule for myself, which was nothing goes in for which there is not a historical precedent."
The sequel is centred around a "time jump" in Gilead, according to Atwood. It picks up 15 years after readers saw Offred forced to leave the Commander's house and get into a van with men of unknown allegiance — either to the republic or the resistance.
As the van door slammed in the book's final scene, Offred was headed toward freedom or at the mercy of the secret police.
Watch
What’s changed since the Handmaid’s Tale was published?
1 month ago 01:53
Margaret Atwood’s novel was published in 1985. She reflects on the years between the novels. 1:53
Atwood said she had notes about a sequel that date back to the early 1990s, but didn't notify her publishers until 2017.
For those intervening decades, she wrestled with the idea. Readers wanted to know whether Offred escaped Gilead, an answer the 79-year-old said she couldn't deliver.
"I've been thinking about it off and on in a negative way ever since I published the first book, because readers kept saying: 'What happens next, and tell us whether Offred gets out.' And I said: 'Well, I can't tell you. I don't know,' " she said.
Atwood told Lynch that she didn't feel she could continue Offred's story "because you can't recreate a voice like that."
Who are the 3 female narrators?
Instead, Atwood said she focused on exploring what happened to Offred's two daughters: the one who was taken before Gilead was created, whose name was never revealed in the book, and the other she was pregnant with in the last chapter.
The third narrator in The Testaments, Atwood said, is Aunt Lydia.
"I've always wondered about Lydia."
Looking back over totalitarianism, they do ultimately fall apart.
- Margaret Atwood
In The Handmaid's Tale, Lydia is given the title of Aunt to signify women who are assigned to indoctrinate the handmaids with the beliefs of Gilead society. At the Red Centre, or re-education facility, they learn to renounce their previous identities and accept their assigned fate.
"In the original novel, she's seen completely from the outside. We know nothing about her except her speechifying and her bad behaviour," said Atwood. "But we don't know how she got into that position, [and] what she actually thinks."
In The Testaments, Aunt Lydia's character "collects secrets," and this knowledge is the source of her power, said Atwood. This differs from The Handmaid's Tale where Offred "can't know a lot of things" because she is the sole narrator and therefore the reader only sees Gilead through one lens.
TIMELINE: Explore 80 years of Margaret's milestones
"We find quite a lot out about how the Aunts' operation actually runs, what they're really doing … and the origin story about Lydia," Atwood said.
The author said Aunt Lydia also serves as an allegory for how people's behaviour can be influenced by totalitarianism when they're faced with a near-impossible dilemma of whether to join the resistance and face death or play along and wait for opportunities.
Watch
What Margaret Atwood thinks of protesters dressing as handmaids
1 month ago 00:39
The distinctive red cloaks and bonnets have become a symbol of resistance. 0:39
"Your choices: co-operate or get shot. Which would you do?" she said. "Some people elect to get shot. She does not elect to do that."
Asked whether she's hopeful for equality and political stability in the future, Atwood said: "I'm always optimistic.
"Looking back over totalitarianism, they do ultimately fall apart."
Written by Amara McLaughlin. Produced by Julie Crysler.
QUOTE:
"artful feminist thriller."
Atwood, Margaret THE TESTAMENTS Talese/Doubleday (Adult Fiction) $28.95 9, 10 ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid's Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America's current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it's not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents--first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There's Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid's Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It's hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid's Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Atwood, Margaret: THE TESTAMENTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964558/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5cee51a8. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964558
Byline: Jia Tolentino
All Aunt Lydia's Children
Margaret Atwood writes a sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale."
tifIllustration by Daniel ZenderAtwood has said that the new book was inspired by questions she got from readers, and by "the world we've been living in."57
The political deployment of imagery from Margaret Atwood's novel "The Handmaid's Tale" began in Texas, in the spring of 2017, at a protest against the state's ongoing campaign to restrict abortion rights. The TV adaptation of the book would soon begin streaming, on Hulu. The show stars Elisabeth Moss as the novel's narrator and protagonist, Offred, a woman stripped of her job, her family, and her name in a near-future American theocracy called Gilead. Offred is a Handmaid, forced to live as a breeding concubine; each month, she is ceremonially raped by her Commander, a man of high status, in the interest of rebuilding a population that has dwindled owing to secular immorality, environmental toxicity, and super-S.T.D.s. Like all Handmaids, she wears a scarlet dress, a long cloak, and a face-obscuring white bonnet, a uniform that Atwood based, in part, on the woman on the label of Old Dutch Cleanser, an image that had scared her as a child.
Women wore this uniform to the protest in Texas, and they have since worn it to protests in England, Ireland, Argentina, Croatia, and elsewhere. When "The Handmaid's Tale" was published, in 1985, some reviewers found Atwood's dystopia to be poetically rich but implausible. Three decades later, the book is most often described with reference to its timeliness. The current President has bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy," and the Vice-President is a man who, as governor of Indiana, signed a law that required fetal remains of miscarriages and abortions, at any stage of pregnancy, to be cremated or buried. This year, half a dozen states have passed legislation banning abortion after around six weeks; Alabama passed a law that would ban abortion in nearly all circumstances, including cases involving rape or incest. (All these laws have yet to take effect.)
At first, I found it moving to see women at protests in Handmaid garb. Sometimes they carried signs with the dog-Latin phrase "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum," which, in Atwood's novel, is scribbled in Offred's closet, a message from a previous Handmaid: Don't let the bastards grind you down. The costumes could be read as an expression of inter-class solidarity: women with the time and the resources to protest tend not to be those who suffer first when reproductive rights are restricted, but the former were saying, on behalf of the latter, that they would fight for us all.
Only a portion of the women in Gilead are Handmaids; others are Marthas, who cook and clean, or Aunts, who indoctrinate other women into the life style of subjugation, or Wives, obedient trophies who smile graciously while other women do all the work. But the novel confines you within Offred's perspective-it suggests, even demands, identification with the Handmaids. The TV show, with its lush cinematography and its sumptuous art direction and its decision to have Moss say things like "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches," turned this suggestion, perhaps inevitably, into a marketing angle: we are all Handmaids. It has reinvented the subdued Offred of the novel as the destructive, mesmerizing, apparently unbreakable June. (That's the name Offred had before Gilead-though, in Atwood's original conception, Offred's real name had disappeared.)
As the show became popular, and the iconography spread, its meaning became diffuse. The Handmaid seemed to evolve from a symbol of advocacy for victims into a way of playacting victimhood. Women were buying red cloaks and white bonnets on Amazon, leaving four- and five-star reviews with tongue-in-cheek Gilead greetings. "Blessed be the fruit," one customer wrote, noting that she "got lots of compliments." Another review: "Perfect. Can't wait for Halloween!" M-G-M, which produces the TV adaptation, briefly attempted to sell a line of Handmaid-themed wine. The twenty-two-year-old billionaire cosmetics entrepreneur Kylie Jenner threw a "Handmaid's Tale"-themed party for her best friend's birthday. An instinct toward solidarity had been twisted into what seemed like a private fantasy of persecution that could flatten all differences among women-a vision of terrible equality, which, in an era when minute gradations of power are analyzed constantly, could induce a secret thrill.
Sometimes I found myself wondering how many of the women indulging this fantasy would, in some future real-life Gilead, become not Handmaids but Wives. This was, it turns out, not only a judgmental thought but a simplistic one. Atwood has now written a sequel, "The Testaments" (Nan A. Talese), set fifteen years after the first book ends. The new novel, like its predecessor, is presented as a story assembled from historical artifacts, with an epilogue that depicts a twenty-second-century academic conference about Gilead. But, in "The Testaments," Handmaids and Wives hardly enter the picture at all. Instead, it is about the Aunts, and three of them in particular: one whom we already know from the first book, and who, we learn, helped to establish Gilead's shadow matriarchy, within a thicket of rapists; one who was raised inside Gilead, and who grew up devout and illiterate and expecting to be married by the age of fourteen; and one who is sent to Gilead, as a teen-ager, by the resistance, which is based in Canada, and which carries out reconnaissance missions and helps citizens of Gilead to escape.
The book may surprise readers who wondered, when the sequel was announced, whether Atwood was making a mistake in returning to her earlier work. She has said that "The Testaments" was inspired by readers' questions about the inner workings of Gilead, and also by "the world we've been living in." But it seems to have another aim as well: to help us see more clearly the kinds of complicity required for constructing a world like the one she had already imagined, and the world we fear our own might become.
Atwood, who was born in Ottawa in 1939, has been the most famous Canadian author for decades. She published her first book, a collection of poems, in 1961, and has since written, among other things, seventeen novels, sixteen poetry collections, ten works of nonfiction, eight short-story collections, and seven children's books. As a novelist, she has a wide tonal range, moving from sarcasm to solemnity, austerity to playfulness; she can toggle between extremes of subtlety and unsubtlety from book to book. In her "MaddAddam" trilogy, begun in the early two-thousands and set in a near-future world where overpopulation leads society to reduce everything to its base functionality, Atwood takes aim at technocracy and corporate control: people eat "ChickieNobs," the product of genetically engineered chickens that consist of a mouth surrounded by twenty breast-meat tubes; the Crakers, a humanoid race designed for a minimum of trouble and a maximum of efficiency, have giant penises that turn blue when the females of the species are in heat. "Cat's Eye," on the other hand, which was published in 1988, is a quiet study of the ways that women and girls are gently and devastatingly cruel to one another. I reread it recently, and felt a sensation I associate with reading Atwood: nothing was really happening, but I was riveted, and fearful, as if someone were showing me footage of a car crash one frame at a time.
Atwood's best novels bring to bear a psychologist's grasp of deep, interior forces and a mad scientist's knack for conceptual experiments that can draw these forces out into the open. "The Blind Assassin," published in 2000, does this: a novel about two sisters growing up in rural Ontario, it contains a novel-within-the-novel, which itself contains another novel, a science-fiction story set on a planet called Zycron. So does "The Handmaid's Tale," which had become required reading by the time I bought it for an English class in college. I was acquainted with theocracy, and the sick appeal of female subservience: I had grown up Baptist in Texas, with the idea that girls should consecrate their bodies for God and for their future husbands. At the religious school that I attended for twelve years, we regularly stood and pledged allegiance to the American flag, the Christian flag (white, with a red cross on a blue canton), and the Bible. In this context, Gilead seemed a little effortful: you didn't need to rename the butcher shop All Flesh and rebrand rape as a supervised monthly ceremony in order to bend a society to someone's bad idea of God's will. But, such broad strokes aside, the novel is characterized by remarkable patience and restraint. Coming across the book's offhand mention that oranges have been scarce "since Central America was lost to the Libertheos," you can spend twenty pages wondering about Gilead's import-export structure-and, all the while, the existential diminishment of the utterly ordinary Offred is quietly lighting you on fire.
Christianity and white supremacy are intertwined and foundational ideas in America, and, in the novel, Jews who refuse to convert are shipped off to Israel, while the "Children of Ham" are resettled in the Midwest. The precedent of slavery in the conception of Gilead, which is alluded to in the epilogue of "The Handmaid's Tale" and acknowledged by Atwood in an introduction to a recent edition, has been consistently underplayed in the book's reception. In the TV adaptation, in a seeming attempt at deference to contemporary concerns about representation, Gilead is uneasily and halfheartedly post-racial; Moira, June's best friend, who is also a Handmaid, is played by Samira Wiley, who is black. The show depicts a purity-obsessed society in which the powerful-who are all white in the book, and virtually all white on the show-mostly don't care about having white children, or maintaining the appearance of "pure" lineage. Atwood is a producer on the show, and she has noted that racial dynamics have changed since she wrote the book. Bruce Miller, the adaptation's showrunner, has said that he saw little difference between "making a TV show about racism and making a racist TV show." That's an odd line to draw, given the series' willingness-its requirement and mission, really-to be unpleasant. Season 3 features a scene in which June has to patiently persuade her new Commander to rape her. The difference between making a TV show about female punishment and making a TV show that punishes women may also be smaller than Miller thought.
The adaptation has moved well past where the novel ends. According to Hulu, viewership increased seventy-six per cent between Seasons 1 and 2, and forty per cent between Seasons 2 and 3. The show has dragged out Offred's plight beyond all reason-Season 3 takes place some five years after the rise of Gilead, and Season 4 is in the works-while taking a tremendously long time to provide details about how, precisely, Gilead was established and, later, destabilized. Learning such things is one of the only possible upsides, to my mind, of staying in this world beyond the condensed period required for reading a novel. How was Gilead's freaky nomenclature decided on? Aren't Gileadeans worried about incest, since kids rarely know who their real parents are?
"The Testaments" addresses these and other questions in sidelong mentions, which help to make more concrete a world that, in the first novel-partly because of Offred's fiercely enforced ignorance-felt abstract, like a landscape obscured by fog. (The publisher has emphasized that "The Testaments" is "not connected" to the TV show, though certain plot elements overlap.) We learn that four founding Aunts invented "laws, uniforms, slogans, hymns, names" for Gilead, and allowed the Commanders to take credit. They maintain a genealogical registry that records both the official and unofficial parentage of each child. They have begun to send Aunts-in-training to Canada, to recruit women as replacements for the steady stream of female refugees flowing out of Gilead. (In the sequel, as in the TV adaptation, the sharpest contemporary resonances are with the plight of asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border.)
The four founding Aunts are Vidala, Helena, Elizabeth, and Lydia-the last of whom is the central character in "The Testaments." Formerly a judge, she once presided over cases about expanded rights for sex workers; she briefly volunteered at a rape crisis center. (In the TV show, she is a former schoolteacher with a background in family law.) Aunt Helena was a P.R. executive for a high-end lingerie company; Aunt Elizabeth was a Vassar-educated executive assistant to a female senator. Only Aunt Vidala was a true believer, working for Gilead before it overthrew the U.S. government. The rest were rounded up at gunpoint, along with all other women of post-childbearing age and high professional status, and taken to a stadium that had been repurposed as a prison. "Some of us were past menopause, but others were not, so the smell of clotting blood was added to the sweat and tears and shit and puke," Aunt Lydia recalls. "To breathe was to be nauseated. They were reducing us to animals-to penned-up animals-to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman."
Confined in this torture chamber, Aunt Lydia finds it ridiculous that she'd "believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I'd soaked up at law school." One day, she's thrown into an isolation cell, beaten, and Tasered. Tears pour out of her eyes, and yet, she writes, a third eye in her forehead regards the situation, as cold as a stone. "Behind it someone was thinking: I will get you back for this. I don't care how long it takes or how much shit I have to eat in the meantime, but I will do it." She is taken to a hotel room, where, after three days of recuperation, she finds a brown dress waiting for her-a dress she's seen on the women, future Aunts, who have been ceremonially shooting other women in the stadium as a way of proving their loyalty. She puts it on, picks up a gun, and passes the test. When a Commander assembles the founding Aunts in his office and tells them that he wants them to "organize the separate sphere-the sphere for women," Aunt Lydia tells him that such a female sphere must be "truly separate." She understands that this is her chance to establish a part of Gilead that will be free from interference or questioning by men.
She does not do this out of feminist instinct: she's seeking a structure that will permit her to acquire leverage over as many people as possible. By the time she begins writing the account that constitutes her portion of "The Testaments," she has amassed enough power to act like a free agent. "Did I hate the structure we were concocting?" she writes. "On some level, yes: it was a betrayal of everything we'd been taught in our former lives, and of all that we'd achieved. Was I proud of what we managed to accomplish, despite the limitations? Also, on some level, yes."
It's not exactly plausible that Aunt Lydia has been waiting all this time to join the resistance. But her story functions as a parable: the tale of a woman who, in trying to save herself, erects the regime that ruins her. "The Testaments" is the story of her excruciatingly belated turn away from Gilead-of the final days of her plan to bring down the empire, which draws in the other two narrators and relies on their willingness to put their lives on the line. No one but Aunt Lydia, who has been weaving a network of strings to be pulled at her pleasure, could undermine Gilead so effectively. Still, her actions are not presented as redemptive. "What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot?" she'd once told herself. She is a vortex of ambiguity, pragmatism, and self-interest-the true literary protagonist of Atwood's Gilead. "Making poison is as much fun as making a cake," Atwood once wrote, in a short story. "People like to make poison. If you don't understand this you will never understand anything."
One of the oddest things about watching the Handmaid become a figure as much a part of the Zeitgeist as Rosie the Riveter-whom one character in "The Testaments" describes as a woman "flexing her biceps to show that women could make bombs"-is seeing Gilead transform, in the journey from novel to television show, from a niche world that commanded mainstream interest into a mainstream phenomenon that seems to target a shrinking niche. On the show, the couple who imprison Offred as their Handmaid, Commander Waterford and his wife, Serena, are played by attractive actors in their forties and thirties, respectively. I'm not sure what is gained-other than, perhaps, additional viewers-by transforming them into sexy rapists. I also don't quite grasp who benefits from the sight of a pack of Handmaids strutting in slow motion, fresh off the victory of having resisted orders to kill one of their own in a public stoning, their red skirts swaying to the tune of Nina Simone's "Feeling Good."
Precisely who is being addressed is a crucial and carefully considered matter in the novel. Offred writes to a nebulous "you" that sometimes feels like God, sometimes like her husband, sometimes like a figure she's invented to keep her from believing that she's already dead. In the academic symposium that serves as a coda to the novel, Atwood plants a reminder of how inevitable it is that we would interpret Offred's story in a way that serves our own interests. Delivering the keynote speech, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto-after calling Gilead's escape network, known as the Underground Femaleroad, the "Underground Frailroad"-urges his audience to "be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans. . . . Our job is not to censure but to understand."
"The Testaments" ends with another speech from Professor Pieixoto, at a symposium held two years after the one in "The Handmaid's Tale." He's introduced, as he was in the first book, by Professor Maryanne Crescent Moon, and her words lightly nod to the mania for Handmaid costumes: Moon tells her fellow-academics about a planned Gilead reenactment, but advises them "not to get carried away." Pieixoto then begins his talk by noting the changed cultural climate, in which "women are usurping leadership positions to such a terrifying extent," and hopes that his "little jokes" from the previous symposium will not be held against him. Gilead Studies has become surprisingly popular: "Those of us who have laboured in the dim and obscure corners of academe for so long are not used to the bewildering glare of the limelight," he says. "The Handmaid's Tale" has long been canonical, but it was once a novel. It is now an idea that is asked to support and transubstantiate the weight of our time.
The other narrators of "The Testaments" are girls who have no knowledge of life before the existence of Gilead. They speak in a manner that suggests that they have made it to a safe place, with a sympathetic listener-which feels like an act of generosity, or political encouragement, on Atwood's part. Agnes, the older of the two, grew up in a Commander's family, and recounts her childhood with sadness and a trace of longing, explaining the way that being trained into subservience can feel like being honored, and blessed. "We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us," she remembers. "We were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world." She remembers her mother, Tabitha, singing a song about angels watching over her bed-which made her think not about wings and feathers but about Gilead's Angels, the men in black uniforms with guns. Tabitha asks her, Isn't it wonderful to be so cherished? "What could I say but yes and yes?" Agnes says. "Yes, I was happy. Yes, I was lucky. Anyway it was true."
Agnes has a secret identity, which viewers of the TV show will grasp right away. Readers who haven't seen the show will catch on fairly quickly. The same is true for the other narrator. She is called Daisy when she is in Canada and goes by Jade after she is smuggled into Gilead, but her real name is suggested early on in her portion of the narrative, when she rants about Baby Nicole, the child of a Handmaid and a Commander who became a national figure after her mother smuggled her into Canada and disappeared. (Baby Nicole, a sort of hybrid of Elien Gonzelez and JonBenet Ramsey, features prominently in Seasons 2 and 3 of the show, though her story plays out somewhat differently there.) "I'd basically disliked Baby Nicole since I'd had to do a paper on her," Jade says. "I'd got a C because I'd said she was being used as a football by both sides, and it would be the greatest happiness of the greatest number just to give her back."
Aunt Lydia has Gilead wired; she knows how to get Baby Nicole back into the country, and she knows how to get her out again. Like Offred in "The Handmaid's Tale," she is addressing an unknown audience-at least, until the end of her story, when she begins speaking to the reader in a way that made me shiver: for the first time in Gilead, Atwood was writing through a character who'd drawn an arrow and shot it straight across the divide. "I picture you as a young woman, bright, ambitious," Aunt Lydia writes, as the end approaches. "You'll be looking to make a niche for yourself in whatever dim, echoing caverns of academia may still exist by your time. I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears, your nail polish chipped-for nail polish will have returned, it always does. You're frowning slightly, a habit that will increase as you age."
She goes on, "How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to." The breakthrough of "The Testaments" lies here, in the way it solves a problem that "The Handmaid's Tale" created. We were all so busy imagining ourselves as Handmaids that we failed to see that we might be Aunts-that we, too, might feel, at the culmination of a disaster we created through our own pragmatic indifference, that we had no real choice, that we were just aiming for survival, that we were doing what anyone would do.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tolentino, Jia. "All Aunt Lydia's Children." The New Yorker, 16 Sept. 2019, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600491058/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6e9493b2. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A600491058
QUOTE:
: "The Testaments is Atwood at her best, in its mixture of generosity, insight and control. The prose is adroit, direct, beautifully turned. All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood’s name is written at the top of it. To read this book is to feel the world turning, as the unforeseeable shifts of the last few years reveal the same old themes."
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood review – a dazzling follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood is at her best in this Booker-shortlisted return, three decades on, to the patriarchal dystopia of Gilead
Anne Enright
Tue 10 Sep 2019 08.00 BST
Last modified on Thu 26 Sep 2019 17.40 BST
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Prescient vision … Margaret Atwood. Photograph: Arthur Mola/Invision/AP
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argaret Atwood had a cameo in the television series based on her book The Handmaid’s Tale. She played an Aunt in a scene where a woman is ritually shamed by a group of handmaids for “getting herself” gang raped at the age of 14. “Her fault, she led them on,” is the chant they use. Atwood says she found the scene “horribly upsetting”, although it was possibly not so wrenching to write as it was to enact or, later, for us to watch.
In the original book, a few deft sentences lead the reader, not into the magnetising shaming of another human being, but to the narrator Offred’s insight into her own complicity. “I used to think well of myself,” she says. “I didn’t then.” The scene is moral, not sensational; it works through the brain, not through the eyes. This is one reason Atwood’s work feels so ageless and necessary. She thinks.
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Atwood certainly has had an enormous amount to think about since her novel went supernova, not just as the hugely successful television adaptation, but as a powerful symbol of resistance to the misogyny of Donald Trump and the Christian rightwing. The series became a kind of visual enlargement of the agonies of the age, or the female agonies at least. It was sometimes hard to look, or to look away.
In The Testaments, Atwood reclaims the right to consider such difficulties rather than simply imagine them. She is interested not in how people become degraded, as objects (that is so easily done), but how they became morally compromised.
The novel picks up 15 or 16 years after Offred disappears to an unknown fate at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. There are three narrators, two of them young and idealistic, one of them old and endlessly cunning. The most compelling portrait is that of wickedness – of course it is. The story is driven and described by the infamous Aunt Lydia, and she is just as terrifying, in her astringency, as you would expect her to be.
In Lydia’s world view, people rise and fall by strength or weakness, and justice is a kind of theatre. “Innocent men denying their guilt sound exactly like guilty men, as I am sure you have noticed, my reader.” She appeals to the heartless survivor in all of us – at least this is what she seems to say, that when the chips are down, we will revert to our most primitive state. A crowd of imprisoned women is described as “crocodiles”, ready to “leap, thrash about and snap”. Their first sighting of a mass execution does not dull their appetite for food, in fact it does the opposite: afterwards, Lydia is given an egg sandwich and, “I am ashamed to say, I gobbled it up with relish”.
To read this book is to feel the world turning, as the unforeseeable shifts of recent years reveal the same themes
Her induction into the order of Aunts is described with a chilling vigour. Tortured, imprisoned and tested, she is given a choice, and she chooses “the path most travelled by”, one of compromise, betrayal and lies. The first book was good on the envy between women, when they have no power; The Testaments looks at collaboration – another vice of the oppressed. Lydia, however, collaborates as an equal, not as a victim; she is not in thrall. Indeed, she is happy to destroy women who have internalised the values of the patriarchal regime: one girl, Shunammite, is coldly sacrificed to her own silliness, a move that Lydia seems to enjoy.
Lydia may be in charge of the novel, but hers is not the only point of view. The younger women, introduced as Agnes and Daisy, have not lived a life of compromise, they do not remember the old days and they betray no one. Daisy is as bolshy and idealistic as any other teenager, Agnes is loyal and ready to love. The girls are courageous and hopeful and they venture out in the second half of the novel like the heroes of old. They believe in friendship: they even witness the perseverance, after death, of a person’s soul.
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Aunt Lydia, right, in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Photograph: Sophie Giraud/Hulu
The dystopia of Gilead has worn very well, even though its putative future date now lies in our collective past. People use computers, but the internet, that constant plot spoiler, has been more or less suppressed, and with it, the tendency of history to spin off into unlikely or cruel absurdities. Trump could not exist in this enclosed universe. Gilead was first imagined by Atwood after living in West Berlin before the fall of the wall. It is a place where people do not know things, including the sins of those in charge. Information is used at the end of the book as a liberating force rather than a randomising one. Authority exists, it has been centralised, and it can be overthrown.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred refers, with amazing prescience, to “false news”: in The Testaments the news has turned “fake”. The word “slut” is more frequently employed, but otherwise there is no need to change what was, in 1985, so properly realised. As Atwood says, everything in this future dystopia has happened somewhere already, and Gilead owes much to the US’s Puritan past. She is strong on idleness and good manners as weapons of oppression; for Atwood, perhaps the worst possible fate in life is to have nothing to do all day.
As a novel, The Handmaid’s Tale is held together by the sexual tensions between the characters. It is, among other things, a claustrophobic book about adultery, or one in which adultery has been turned to ritualised rape. The characters in The Testaments do not yearn and mourn as Offred did. They have, at the beginning of the book, been scattered by happenstance. This open, plot-driven novel brings them together in a way that owes less to Pinter’s Betrayal, and more to a Shakespearean comedy of children lost and found.
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood – read the exclusive first extract
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In all this losing and finding, Aunt Lydia behaves as the novelist does, bringing people together for the purpose of plot, which in her case is also plotting. The novel is her conspiracy of one.
Some Gilead facts invented by the readers make it into The Testaments. “June” was chosen by fans as Offred’s given name, and Atwood is happy to accept the suggestion. “Nicole”, a baby who first appears in the TV series is, in The Testaments, nearly fully grown.
You might call this interleaving of book and reader postmodern, but there is more here than a posh writer’s punning. Gilead, the fiction, is a kind of overgrown child. Atwood has taken it by the hand and made an open, free-running story, one that remains, as ever, deeply informed. In writing The Testaments, she also reclaims its world from all the people who think they own it now: the writers of fanfiction and the television producers (she told them they could not kill Lydia, apparently). A story that feels universal is, actually, hers: she gets to decide.
Perhaps no other writer has managed her own phenomenon with so much grace and skill. The Testaments is Atwood at her best, in its mixture of generosity, insight and control. The prose is adroit, direct, beautifully turned. All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood’s name is written at the top of it. To read this book is to feel the world turning, as the unforeseeable shifts of the last few years reveal the same old themes. It is also a chance to see your own political life flash in front of your eyes, to remember how the world was 30 years ago and say: “If she was right in 1985, she is more right today.”
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• Anne Enright’s The Green Road is published by Vintage. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is published by Chatto (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
QUOTE:
"Atwood’s prose is as powerful as ever, tense and spare. ... Her word games are ingenious. She forces you to think about language and how it can be made to lie. The plot is propulsive and I finished in six hours flat." However, Freeman felt that Atwood made a "misstep" with this novel, answering too many questions: "he horrors and repressions of Gilead, so shocking on first encounter, so convincingly realised, are here repeated. If you’ve seen one ululating birth, one man torn apart by Handmaids, you’ve seen them all."
By Laura Freeman
6 September 2019
Strange the things that stay with you, what you remember and what you forget. If someone had said “The Handmaid’s Tale” at any time in the 18 years since I first read Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, one scene would have come to mind: the Ceremony, the ritualised rape of the Handmaid Offred by the Commander, while Offred rests her head in the lap of his wife. Nothing else in the book – not the hangings, the scapegoatings, the slut-shamings, the unbabies – had the power of that menacing ménage a trois.
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“Which of us is it worse for, her or me?” wonders Offred. Both women, fertile chattel and barren wife, are debased; both suffer a peculiar humiliation. The Wives, Handmaids and domestic Marthas of Gilead are helpmeets, vessels and servants. They have no right to work, earn, talk back, walk alone. They have no right to read and no right to pleasure. It’s unclear which of these Atwood considers the greater wound.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s new book has been hotly anticipated (Credit: Alamy)
“‘It can’t happen here’ could not be depended on,” writes Atwood in her introduction to the 2017 edition of The Handmaid’s Tale. “Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.” The Testaments, published next week, sets out, in part, to answer the question that has appalled readers since The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985: “How did it happen?”
This book arrives shrouded in secrecy: modest bonnet, long robes, lowered eyes. Never have I had such difficulties getting hold of a book to review – it turns out, this might have been easier if I’d ordered it on Amazon. Even the Booker Prize judges were given watermarked manuscripts to be locked in drawers. Embargo. Omertà. Loose lips sink ships.
At the same time, never have I known such hype and hoopla. Worldwide launch. Midnight readings. Appearances by Atwood talked up like God on the Holy Mount. The windows of Waterstones book shops acidly green.
The Testaments’ cover shows images of servitude and, on the back, freedom (Credit: Penguin/ Random House)
When it arrives, a courier appears on the stairs. Motorcycle helmet. Black leathers. Visor down. As he turns around I half expect to see the Eye of Gilead embroidered on his back. The book comes in a jiffy bag stamped: “All things come to she who waits.” On the front cover: a handmaid in her distinctive cloak and bonnet. On the back: a girl with a ponytail and a single earring. Servitude and freedom; modesty and anarchy. The green satin bookmark is a nice touch. A little flicker between the pages, like the tail of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He started it, you know, not Eve.
Agnes and Nicole are innocents where Offred knew experience
Readers of The Handmaid’s Tale and followers of the MGM/Hulu TV adaptation have been speculating: is it a prequel or a sequel? And is it the equal of its Handmaid mother? The answer to the first question is: both. The prequel part deals with the illicitly-kept history of Aunt Lydia, one of Gilead’s instructresses of female morality, as she remembers how ‘It can’t happen here’ happened. “I’d believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school,” Aunt Lydia writes. “These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I’d depended on that as if on a magic charm.”
The chapters in which Aunt Lydia writes of her arrest, the end of her career as a “so-called lady judge”, and her internment in a sports stadium are among the most chilling in the book. They recall in their indignity and intensity the story of French Jews waiting in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris to be deported to the Nazi death camps. It doesn’t take much – filth, hunger, fear – to make her an unwilling willing servant of the regime.
Fact and fiction
The sequel chapters are narrated by two teenage girls: Agnes in Gilead, Nicole in Canada. I thought I’d been clever to work out who these girls are. Too obvious, too early. Now having read the coda – The Testaments ends, as does The Handmaid’s Tale, with a transcript from a future academic Symposium on Gileadean Studies – I’m wavering. Atwood demands scepticism. What is fact, what is fiction, who destroys the evidence, who lives to tell the tale? “Gilead news is saying it’s all fake,” says one of the characters. Sounds familiar.
In both books the Marthas are always baking. You sense Atwood kneading her dough, shaping her gingerbread women, leaving paths of breadcrumbs. There are clues and echoes and trails to be picked up by readers: May Day, Moon June, Commander Judd, the Underground Female Road. That’ll get the fan-girl forums going.
The tension of sex, whether endured or longed for, is gone
In two important respects, however, this is a weaker and less satisfying book. The first is voice, the second is place. The Handmaid’s Tale (singular) was one woman’s telling. We look from under Offred’s headdress, we stare at her bedroom ceiling. The Testaments (plural) divides our attention and sympathies between three interleaved stories. We are with Nicole, Agnes and Lydia, but we are Offred. As for space, The Handmaid’s Tale was a chamber piece. Gilead, as Offred knows it, is bedroom, house, daily walk. She has no book, no occupation, not even the knitting allowed to Serena Joy. The rapes aren’t the worst of Gilead. It’s boredom that kills. “The long parentheses of nothing.”
Atwood’s masterpiece – or “mistresspiece” – The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 (Credit: Alamy)
The Testaments is all over the place: bus, boat, van, woods, river, sea, school, dentist, diner, hotel, condo, charity shop, refugee centre. The later chapters turn into a road-tripping buddy-movie with prayerful Agnes and kick-ass Nicole as the mismatched odd couple. Three of the Nicole scenes are so obvious, so made for a film franchise – The Hunger Games in bonnets – that I almost laughed. There’s a Karate Kid montage as Nicole learns to fight, a tough-girl makeover complete with tattoo and green hair and a night spent by Nicole, chastely, in the arms of the muscular, yet sensitive, Garth.
The chapters in which Aunt Lydia writes of her arrest and internment are among the most chilling in the book
Agnes and Nicole, unformed and formulaic, are less interesting than Offred. They are innocents where Offred knew experience. One of the things that makes The Handmaid’s Tale such a tricksy, defiant book, is that Offred remembers sex before it was sinful and supervised. She remembers the pleasure of seduction and shared joy. She aches to be touched, she swings her hips to tempt a young guard, she feels the thrill of “enticement” wearing a sequinned bodysuit, she risks her life to make love to a forbidden man. Agnes and Nicole are virgins and so the tension of sex, whether endured or longed for, is gone.
Aunt Lydia with Offred in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale – Lydia is one of three narrators in The Testaments (Credit: MGM/ Hulu)
The horrors and repressions of Gilead, so shocking on first encounter, so convincingly realised, are here repeated. If you’ve seen one ululating birth, one man torn apart by Handmaids, you’ve seen them all. Atwood’s prose is as powerful as ever, tense and spare. She invests certain phrases with ironic fury: adulteress, precious flower, Certificate of Whiteness, fanatics, defiled. Her word games are ingenious. She forces you to think about language and how it can be made to lie. The plot is propulsive and I finished in six hours flat. But if The Handmaid’s Tale was Atwood’s mistresspiece, The Testaments is a misstep. The Handmaid’s Tale ended on a note of interrogation: “Are there any questions?” Those questions were better left unanswered.
★★★☆☆
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is published by Penguin/ Random House, £20
Margaret Atwood's The Testaments is done with Handmaids
The Handmaid's Tale sequel is upon us but it might not be exactly what you're expecting if you've been paying attention to Handmaid-mania in politics and on TV
By Sophie Charara
10 Sep 2019
Chatto & Windus / WIRED
This piece contains minor spoilers for the novel but does not reveal major plot points.
In June, Kylie Jenner threw a birthday party themed around her friend’s favourite TV show. The Kardashian and her pals pouted and posed on Instagram Stories in sexy red capes, cloaks, full make up and white bonnets.
There were, of course, think pieces and takedowns. Jenner and co were trying to imprint a new, fundamentally different meaning – Little Red Riding Hood meets party girl – onto the iconic costume from The Handmaid’s Tale. But that’s just not going to happen at this stage and Margaret Atwood, the author of the classic 1985 dystopia, knows it.
French and Saunders have done it, Funny or Die has done it. SNL did it twice, once with Amy Schumer, and the Hulu show that inspired Jenner’s party has been renewed for a fourth season. But the most visible use of the Handmaids costume, since sales of the book starting going up again after 2016, has been as an international uniform and symbol for women protesting anti-abortion and regressive reproductive rights laws from Alabama to Ireland.
It’s a powerful visual, both culturally and politically, but one striking image can’t sustain a 400+ page narrative about a totalitarian regime. Half the world has been clamouring for more Atwood, but specifically for more Handmaids – something to cut through as an icon or a parable, anything to shine a light on 2019 or act as a clarion call with Handmaids getting justice or better, vengeance.
Atwood has granted us a sequel, The Testaments, which returns to Gilead, formerly the United States, where women’s bodies are the property of the state, fertile women are forced to live as Handmaids and endure rape in order to produce children, and society is divided into various classes which oppress and are oppressed by each other. But this tale is not actually about Handmaids.
It would have been easy for Atwood to revisit the red cloaks and build on the memes, but instead she focuses on women who are serving Gilead’s interests in different ways. Handmaids are never far from the minds and stories of the three narrators in The Testaments, which include Agnes Jemima, who comes of age in Gilead, and Daisy who looks on in horror from Canada. That said, Atwood is far more concerned with the lives of Aunts (women who supervise, among other things, Handmaids training), Supplicants (Aunts-in-training), Wives (the privileged spouses of Gilead’s ruling class of Commanders), and the children of Handmaids, who are raised by Commanders and their Wives.
Through their narrow viewpoint, we return to the homes and schools of Gilead, which is at war – possibly on multiple fronts – fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. Each character’s tale overlaps in some ways with Offred’s tapes (i.e. the events of the original book) but also offers fresh perspectives on familiar rituals, and new concoctions like Rubies Premarital Preparatory school for teen Wives-to-be, and the Pearl Girls missionary program. Handmaid plotlines in The Testaments are there mostly to propel our new heroines’ emotional and intellectual journeys.
It’s a shrewd move that allows Atwood to return to themes of subjugation, sexual crimes and sisterhood without getting boxed in by her original protagonist Offred, the Handmaids and all the protests and parodies stored within those red robes and white bonnets. Nothing Atwood could write could give that image more power than it already has; it’s complete.
None of Atwood’s new colour and costume-coded social classes are likely to make a similar leap to internationally recognised meme. The “spring green” palette of the teenage brides-to-be is affecting but ambiguous. Will we see middle-aged, morally conflicted, childfree women dressing in the drab, brown robes of the Aunts to make some sort of feminist statement? I doubt it.
The news is very much out there that none other than Aunt Lydia, Gilead’s most terrifying enforcer (in the “women’s sphere” of fertility and domesticity at least), is one of the three narrators. It’s a decision that’s the reverse of Go Set A Watchman, Harper Lee’s ‘first draft’ of To Kill A Mockingbird which stars an alternate, overtly racist Atticus Finch.
There’s no rewriting her own literary history here from Atwood, though, simply a detailed appeal, concerning a character widely regarded as monstrous, to consider her origin story and the system and principles within which she has been operating all these years. It’s the kind of setting straight we saw in Atwood’s 2005 mythological retelling The Penelopiad.
This is one of the ways in which Atwood reconfigures the classifications that the original set out: Virgin Mary blue for Wives; memeable Mary Magdalene red for Handmaids; green for Marthas; brown for Aunts etc. Perhaps because the regime is close to falling apart, these groups are less rigid, everyone’s place in Gilead society seems less certain, including the powerful Commander Judd, who was part of the initial Sons of Jacob coup and sits on the Council. This fluidity, this having some choice in the matter, may also have been required to get the plot where it needed to go.
Still, it’s intriguing to see who is classified, how they’re classified and who doesn’t get a look in. Marthas (Gilead’s female domestic servant class) still don’t get much of a narrative in The Testaments, though that’s not a surprise, and an Angel (male guard) jokes that there’s two types of women “sluts” and “ugly ones”. It’s difficult not to think of the incel community’s divvying up of men and women into ‘muscular, popular’ Chads, ‘attractive’ Stacys and ‘average looking’ Beckys.
Atwood has said that part of the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale came from reading canonical stories about utopias and dystopias which featured exclusively male protagonists and “decorative” women who often weren’t wearing many clothes. Again, The Testaments doesn’t go down the route of overly feisty, rebellious Handmaids to overcompensate. It opens with the dry description of a statue by the woman it was made to honour: “Already I am petrified.” Women can be “precious flowers” or pearls but they’re also told stories about witches.
In a similar way, though discussions of bodies, bodily fluids and women’s duty to deal with them are real and present – “that thick red knowledge” – Atwood clearly didn’t feel obliged to do too much of a Part Two on pregnancy, perhaps because other writers such as Megan Hunter, with The End We Start From, and Louise Erdrich, with Future Home of the Living God, have recently taken on pregnancy and dystopia.
The Handmaid’s Tale’s coda The Twelfth Symposium ends with the line ”Are there any questions?” and, according to Atwood in the acknowledgements of the sequel, the question that “came up repeatedly” from readers over the past 35 years was: how did Gilead fall?
Offred was mostly limited to minor but meaningful acts of rebellion in the 1985 book. And if there’s one overarching tonal difference it’s the frequency and scale at which the women of The Testaments actively question and disobey the rules. They have to, of course, as from the outset, this was always designed to be the account of disastrously extraordinary times for the Gilead project, whereas Offred’s story, we are led to believe, was being repeated in homes across the country.
With one sickeningly inevitable choice Atwood has made, The Testaments is even darker, but for most of the book these three particular narrators are shielded from the very, very worst of Gilead either through childhood innocence, some limited personal power or the actions of other women. As such none have quite the raw intensity of Offred’s shock journey from regular American woman to Handmaid concubine in a sinister theocracy, though one of the strands does pose juicy questions around survival, complicity and manipulation when all the choices around you are bad.
There is a lot of plot, more than you’ll expect, and TV showrunners will eat this up, especially the sections with serious YA appeal which will undoubtedly turn off some readers. The espionage thriller storyline of The Testaments is more intimate and plausible, within the constraints of Atwood’s original, chilling conception, than where the Hulu show has already found itself. In the show, things take a more “revolutionary” turn, to use the Season 3 trailer’s words, with the finale seeing Elizabeth Moss’ Offred running through the woods in her red Handmaid’s cloak to distract guards and help dozens of children and women make an aeroplane getaway to Canada. (To be fair to Hulu, a 1990 movie adaptation, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, saw Natasha Richardon’s Offred actually kill her Commander.)
A similar narrative arc might have been tempting for Atwood: to transform the Handmaid from victim to fully realised, regime-fighting rebel, ripping off her coned hat at some opportune moment. But The Testaments is all the better for choosing other, quieter forms of resistance for women under Gilead’s rule, and this helps it to stand apart. There are moments of touching solidarity and sacrifice throughout, but Atwood isn’t writing fanfiction of her own dystopian novel. The sequel is able to buoy you as a reader in a way The Handmaid’s Tale had no interest in doing, but sit with it and it’s still slippery and at times satisfyingly unsatisfying. This is an intriguing book from a woman who knows she can do bleak any day of the week.
The Testaments, unsurprisingly for its name, is full of biblical stories, fables and allusions to real world politics – the Aunts eat in the Schlafly cafe, a nod to conservative anti-abortion lawyer Phyllis Schlafly – and Atwood has lots to say, or ask, not only about shame, self-control tactics and surveillance but also about handbags, hair and nail polish, the latter of which we’re told always returns in the end.
All our heroines have the agency to, at some moment or other, look at themselves in the mirror and reflect on what they see and whether they recognise themselves. There is a suggestion that once we relax out of the innocence of childhood there’s an internal Aunt Lydia to reckon with and in the Vasily Grossman quote featured at the beginning of the book, the “face we hate” is in fact a mirror. Turn that into a meme.
The Testaments is published on September 10
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Apple
Apple iPhone 11 review: forget the Pro, this is the iPhone you need
If you decide you can live without a zoom lens and an OLED display, then the iPhone 11 has everything you need for a fairly reasonable price
By Sophie Charara
5 hours ago
Pros
Night mode; same A13 chip as the Pros; good battery for an iPhone; affordable-ish
Cons
Notch looks outdated; no screen update; the iPhone XR exists
Price
£729
8 / 10
Apple
Picking an iPhone now feels a lot like picking a laptop. It used to be that the iPhone you’d be interested in would be “the new one”. Apple put paid to that whole idea years ago but now it feels like a legitimate exercise to line up all your options and compare the numbers. Or at least the features that matter to you. Because not only are there three new ones, including this iPhone 11, there’s also last year’s bestselling iPhone XR still on sale and cheaper than ever. So that’s four already.
This is not going to be a grand iPhone review, waxing on about innovation out of Cupertino, but it’s worth saying now that the iPhone 11 is a futureproof phone – it has the fewest features of the 2019 cohort but even these might be overkill for a lot of people. So let’s do it, let’s situate the iPhone 11 in the line-up to help you pick the right model. It won’t be as tedious as choosing a laptop, honest.
Dual cameras come to the ‘cheap iPhone’
For at least three years, it’s been conventional wisdom that Android has raced ahead when it comes to phone cameras. That doesn’t take into account the fact that the iPhone has always produced very sharp, bright, balanced images in good light and has always been very capable for video. But it’s fair to say Huawei, Google and the rest have offered more technically superior, not to mention versatile, camera hardware and software to Apple recently. Now with the iPhone 11 series Apple has caught up... and then some.
Next to the £629 iPhone XR, which as we said should be on your shortlist, the iPhone 11 offers two big improvements that will cut through. It’s a dual camera setup, with a second 120 degree, 13mm equivalent ultra-wide lens and there’s a new auto night mode that works a treat. The thing that’s missing here is the third telephoto lens of the 11 Pro but there is decent 5x digital zoom.
The ultra-wide is fun if you like to experiment, it’s not too distorted and Apple makes the most out of it. Just tap the icon in the camera app to toggle between 1x (regular wide) and 0.5x (ultra wide) when shooting still photos or video.
There’s also the handy option to always capture shots with the ultra wide too, as a sort of backup if the main lens doesn’t get everything in the frame; the idea is they’re stored for 30 days in case you want to switch. Elsewhere, there's a few minor photo extras, such as the very stylised High Key Low Mono effect in Portrait mode and the slow motion selfies.
A night mode that’s worth the upgrade
Apple
But the auto night mode is essentially the reason to upgrade to the iPhone 11. Take that away and it’s difficult to make the case – right now at least, remember that futureproofing – why you shouldn’t just buy an XR.
You can’t manually trigger night mode (classic Apple) but it’s very sensitive to the extent that the icon will pop up in the corner even when you’re in a semi badly lit room. You can turn it off and play around with the slider that changes the extended shutter time to, for example, two or three seconds for taking a variety of long and short exposures.
It’s all very quick and intuitive to use and the results are immediately obvious. The larger main sensor helps for low light video too, though stills are where the real nighttime action is. There’s also no night mode on the ultra-wide angle lens and the difference is, forgive us, night and day.
As long as you keep your hand still, and the optical image stabilisation on the main camera does help here, the night/poorly lit scene is illuminated in a way that doesn’t necessarily look very natural but does produce extremely usable images. So good that in side-by-side comparisons with rival flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S10, for instance, it now comes down to personal preference which look you prefer.
Spec and battery boosts that add up
Even putting the new features of iOS 13 to one side – dark mode, Find My and revamped privacy controls are a few that stick out – Apple has made tweaks here and there. None turn the iPhone 11 into an entirely different experience to the iPhone XR but nonetheless you might want to pay for them.
There’s an hour extra battery, which doesn’t hurt, and Apple’s claim that the 11 can go for 10 hours of video streaming is on par with what we’ve seen in our testing. There’s no 18W fast charger in the box (unlike with the Pros) and we haven’t been able to test out whether it can go from nought to 80 per cent in 30 minutes yet. But if you want to buy one, it costs £29.
Throw the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max into the mix and the 11 Pro only offers one more hour of regular use over the iPhone 11, a neat example of how narrow the gap between this £729 phone and the £1,000+ phone really is.
Apple also says this is now the “toughest glass in a smartphone”, down to it being strengthened via a dual ion-exchange. We dropped our iPhone 11 a couple of times and it survived unsmashed – only time will tell if iPhones can realistically go without cases long term.
It’s easy to forget that the audio performance of the iPhone, with good headphones, is excellent. Apple has put more effort into spatial audio this year, with Dolby Atmos support which now seems to be something of a standard across phones. Of course that relies on the quality of what you’re watching or listening to – we still think the stereo speakers lend themselves to music and podcasts more than movies and games, though.
Design and screen: must try harder
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The new colours for the glossy back, including pastel green and purple, are fun but the sleek profile is long gone with a double bump on the back to accommodate the new camera setup. One ding is that the overall design does now look outdated next to the latest Android phones, due to the slightly large notch and fairly noticeable bezels, in a way that perhaps it didn’t last year.
It’s still well made and ergonomic but it’s tricky to see a way back to the clean lines with the focus so heavily on camera hardware. For the first time, part of an iPhone looks a bit ugly and that can’t be good for Apple’s street cred.
The 6.1-inch LCD display is still terrific. Side-by-side you’ll notice that the fancy OLEDs on the 11 Pro will go brighter or produce deeper blacks for those arthouse movies or photo editing you’re planning to do. But we don’t think it’s a problem that Apple has kept this screen tech one of the few points of difference between the real flagships and this very, very good go-to iPhone.
It seems a bit lax to have this display stuck on 326ppi, though. This has been the threshold for Apple’s Retina displays for aeons now and we’d certainly like to see a higher resolution next time around. The 11 Pro, by comparison, is a pin-sharp 458ppi on its smaller 5.8-inch screen. Perhaps after the success of the iPhone XR, Apple went all-in on this spec.
Verdict
In the US, this is a $700 (£560) smartphone. For an iPhone this good, that's incredibly affordable. Over here in the UK, £729 is a good price but it's not exactly troubling OnePlus until you consider the quite generous trade-in program that's worth checking out.
The iPhone 11 runs on the same A13 Bionic chip as the Pro models and that means that when features like Apple’s Deep Fusion computational photography tech, i.e its machine learning-powered camera feature that stitches together multiple images for even better results, come out of developer beta, the humble iPhone 11 will get that too.
It also has Apple’s U1 chip inside, which right now allows you to point your iPhone 11 at another iPhone 11 for quick, fuss-free AirDrops but could very quickly become key to Apple’s plans for precise, location tech.
Which is to say that for most people, this will be more than enough iPhone. The 11 offers enough to make it well worth the extra £100 over the iPhone XR and to be honest, it’s really quite difficult to find things to criticise with this phone.
This not an amateur device, far from it. Aside from the slightly better battery life, especially on the Pro Max, the iPhone 11 Pro isn’t solving problems with the iPhone 11, it’s just layering specs on top of an already excellent product. If you decide you can live without a zoom lens and an OLED display, we'd be very surprised if you missed them.
The iPhone 11 is on sale now starting at £729 SIM-free in white, red, yellow, black, purple and green finishes and in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities.
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Why we’re destined to sympathise with anti-heroes like the Joker
In Joker, Joaquin Phoenix portrays a down-and-out's transformation from failed stand-up comedian into violent criminal – and there are fears it could inspire violence. But why are we so obsessed with anti-heroes?
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Joaquin Phoenix's Joker, depending on the critic you consult, is either a needlessly provocative and amoral piece of trash, or a resonant character study of the isolating effects of mental illness.
Whatever camp your own opinion falls in, cinemas across America felt the need to accompany the film’s release with armed security, supposedly out of fear that the film could incite young men into copycat violence. It's been argued that the character could strike a chord with people who feel and angry at society, and who identify with the film's violent protagonist. But why do some people treat anti-heroes like the Joker like heroes?
For starters, we’re hard-wired to identify with fictional characters. “Empathy with others emerges in preschool children, and both sympathy and identification with protagonists in fiction stories probably derive from it,” writes Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Toronto.
This identification is often stronger with anti-heroes, who – unlike clean cut, one-dimensional heroes – contain multitudes. Anti-hero motives are more understandable, argues Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, who studies communication and culture at Aarhus University, because we are not “complete angels in real life".
“As divided creatures, anti-heroes are much more like us," says Kjeldgaard-Christiansen. “When you look at a guy like Walter White [from Breaking Bad], his motivations are really quite understandable. He wants what is good for his family; he wants what's good for himself; and he doesn't always care so much about what's good for everyone else. So he's not necessarily all that far from your common spectator, just in terms of the basic things that he wants and needs and believes.”
This identification is coupled with a compulsion Kjeldgaard-Christiansen calls the 'agentic aspect' – anti-heroes may be immoral, but they are also enchantingly capable. They deal with their problems effectively – in the Joker’s case by various murders – and this can-do attitude is attractive for people who may not be able to take such drastic action in their own lives.
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Another factor behind our love of anti-heroes is the ‘primacy effect’. Joker charts Arthur Fleck’s journey from loner and failed stand-up comedian into something much darker and more violent, but in fiction, we tend to put more emphasis on our first encounter with a character. We accept this initial depiction as the bedrock of their nature.
“That's who we believe they essentially are,” says Kjeldgaard-Christiansen. “And everything else is sort of a corruption or a kind of superstructure added onto that nature.” As we witness the pile up of iniquities that mould the Joker – an initially moral, unhappy man – into a serial killer, we are beguiled into forgiving him by those first impressions.
Related to this forgiveness is the very structure of narrative itself. “It has been argued many times that when you take a character's perspective, all things being equal, you tend to identify more strongly with the character,” says Kjeldgaard-Christiansen. “This is for the simple reason that you experience the outside world impinging on them, and all of the pressures that they that they are under, and you can really understand from the inside, and when we understand someone, we tend to be more forgiving of them.”
However, despite all this, if you feel a comradely bond to the Joker, this also says a lot about you. “There is evidence to support that the more people are similar to the anti-hero of some stories, the more they tend to say that they root for him or her or that they liked the character,” says Kjeldgaard-Christiansen.
In this vein, it’s worth remembering that Phoenix's Joker – vengeful, seething, male – is not a new kind of hero, nor is the likelihood that fans may relate to him in ways we find abhorrent. Sopranos creator David Chase was famously disgusted by fan obsession with his mobsters; Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan has spoken out against people who support Walter White. A quick scan of the comment section of YouTube clips finds Sopranos fans cheering on Tony curb stomping out his enemy’s teeth, and Breaking Bad fans admonishing Walt’s wife Skylar for suggesting his penchant for dissolving people in acid might be a bad influence on their son (the actor playing the latter even received a death threat).
“People who themselves aren't all that moral tend to identify more strongly with outright villainous character,” says Kjeldgaard-Christiansen. Some people might recognise themselves in evil characters, but welcome the comparison. “This is a little bit more of a sinister explanation but seems to map onto the real world.”
QUOTE:
"confident, magnetic sequel," and went on to noted: "Atwood's eminently rewarding sequel revels in the energy of youth, the shrewdness of old age, and the vulnerabilities of repressive regimes."
The Testaments
Margaret Atwood. Doubleday/Talese, $28.95 (432p) ISBN 978-0-385-54378-1
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Atwood's confident, magnetic sequel to The Handmaid's Tale details the beginning of the end for Gilead, the authoritarian religion-touting dystopia where fertile single women (handmaids) live in sexual servitude. The novel opens in New England 15 years after the first novel ends. Aunt Lydia has become a renowned educator, an ally of Gilead's spy chief, and an archivist for Gilead's secrets. Ensconced in her library, Aunt Lydia recalls how she went from prisoner to collaborator during Gilead's early days. Now she is old and dying and ready for revenge. Her plan involves two teenagers. Gilead native Agnes Jemima is almost 13 when she learns her real mother was a runaway handmaid. Rather than marry, Agnes Jemima becomes an aunt-in-training. Sixteen-year-old Daisy in Toronto discovers she is the daughter of a runaway handmaid after the people she thought were her parents die in an explosion. Aunt Lydia brings the girls together under her tutelage, then sends them off to try to escape with Gilead's secrets. Since publication, The Handmaid's Tale has appeared as a movie, graphic novel, and popular miniseries. Atwood does not dwell on the franchise or current politics. Instead, she explores favorite themes of sisterhood, options for the disempowered, and freedom's irresistible draw. Atwood's eminently rewarding sequel revels in the energy of youth, the shrewdness of old age, and the vulnerabilities of repressive regimes. (Sept.)
QUOTE:
might punch you in the gut, but it doesn't quite pull at your heartstrings."
'The Testaments' Takes Us Back To Gilead For A Fast-Paced, Female-Centered Adventure
September 3, 2019 4:00 PM ET
Danielle Kurtzleben - square 2015
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN
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The Testaments
The Testaments
The Sequel to the Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Hardcover, 432 pagespurchase
What do the men of Gilead do all day?
We learn very little about it in The Testaments. We hear of one who mostly shuts himself in his study, away from his family, to work all day. We learn that a high-ranking government official serially kills off each of his teenage wives once they get too old for his tastes, then seeks out new targets. We learn that another respected man is a pedophile who gropes young girls.
So. We know that Gilead men are at best nonentities, at worst monstrous. Beyond that, they are chilly, dull, uninterested in the women around them — to the point that they also seem kind of dim. Mostly, they lurk just outside the frame, threatening to swoop in at any moment to wreak havoc.
And that absence only emphasizes that the women of Gilead are more fascinating than ever. The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's follow-up to her classic novel The Handmaid's Tale, returns to that dystopic theocracy 15 years later via three protagonists: Agnes, a girl in Gilead who from a young age rejects marriage, though her parents intend to marry her to a powerful Commander. Daisy is a Canadian girl repulsed by Gilead, raised by strangely overprotective parents. And Aunt Lydia — yes, that Aunt Lydia — has near-godlike status as one of Gilead's founding Aunts and spends her days quietly collecting dirt on Commanders and fellow Aunts.
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Telling much more about how the lives of Agnes, Daisy and Aunt Lydia do and don't intersect would be to spoil the fun of The Testaments. The book builds its social commentary on gender and power into a plot-driven page turner about these women's machinations as they deal with their stifling circumstances.
So. We know that Gilead men are at best nonentities, at worst monstrous. ... And that absence only emphasizes that the women of Gilead are more fascinating than ever.
"Fun" is a loose term here, of course. As with The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments contains a lot of gut punches (as one may have gathered by now, what with all the murderous, pederastic men everywhere).
And a lot of the time, it's women administering these gut punches to each other. Despite the awful men everywhere, one of the main themes The Testaments explores is how women hurt one another — whether it's friend versus friend, Aunt versus student, or even mother versus daughter.
Keeping women from getting too close is by design, as Agnes tells us she learned in her early school days:
Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious.
Perhaps it's just the sheltered, shuttered views we get from these three characters, but between the Handmaids, household help, Wives and Aunts, it seems that women are the overwhelming majority of Gilead's citizens. To keep them busy, one gleans, the ruling class simply divides them against each other — by class, social status, age.
Hear Margaret Atwood Read From 'The Testaments,' Her Sequel To 'The Handmaid's Tale'
FIRST READS
First Read: Margaret Atwood's 'The Testaments'
(Race is notably absent from that list. Readers hoping to hear more about race in Gilead will be sorely disappointed — In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood made it clear that the regime had mostly eliminated minorities. This angered many readers, but Testaments barely addresses the topic further.)
All of this is more visible by virtue of giving us three very different protagonists — which is maybe the smartest choice Atwood makes. This Gilead isn't — and can't possibly be — as fresh and mind-blowing as it was to readers in 1985, but the sheer novelty of this expanded view allows her world to continue to surprise us.
This Gilead, 15 years later, introduces us to the Aunts' training program, the Pearl Girls — young female missionaries sent abroad (wearing pearls, yes, but fake) — unsettling wedding customs, and even how the Aunt program got started. Which means learning the backstory of brutal Handmaid villain Aunt Lydia.
This Gilead isn't — and can't possibly be — as fresh and mind-blowing as it was to readers in 1985, but the sheer novelty of this expanded view allows her world to continue to surprise us.
Ah, Aunt Lydia. She's the antithesis of Handmaid's Offred as a protagonist. Offred was a sort of cipher — a beaten-down victim of the new regime who, aside from a little spark of rebellion, seemed like she could be any handmaiden.
The Testaments' Lydia, however, is by turns stone cold, crafty, grandiose ... and endless fun to spend time with.
Now, above all, she's plotting. Which means she is a different Lydia from Handmaid's one-dimensional villain. That one seemed to be a Gilead true believer. Without giving too much away, it turns out that this Lydia isn't quite the Gilead cheerleader we thought she was.
Even if this Lydia is a great narrator, there is also a gaping hole: Atwood never makes it totally clear why Aunt Lydia does what she does — when and how her problems with Gilead leadership developed. Even in Handmaid days, was she plotting against Commanders and other Aunts? We don't find out much about this.
The headstrong Daisy and sheltered Agnes pale in comparison with Lydia. Their voices are largely indistinguishable, and especially in Daisy's case, it becomes clear that Atwood hasn't quite mastered the art of speaking as a sulky teenage girl. At the root of this may be that Atwood remains an unsentimental writer. Shattering horror visits these two, yet somehow, it's never wrenching to read. The Testaments might punch you in the gut, but it doesn't quite pull at your heartstrings.
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That's perhaps not entirely for the worse. Despite the misfortunes that visit her characters, Testaments is nowhere near as dark as Handmaid. This may just be because the world is bigger here: With more perspective and also characters simply moving around more, there's more room for light to come in.
It also means there's more of Gilead to sit and wonder about here. Indeed, think too hard about some points (No, seriously: What DO the men do all day? And isn't Aunt Lydia a little too conveniently amazing with hidden cameras? The Aunts have power and don't have to put up with forced marriage — why aren't more girls begging to be Aunts?), and the world Atwood weaves starts to fray at the edges.
Many readers will also spot the big reveals coming far before they arrive — how will these characters collide? It's no exaggeration to say you might see it a dozen chapters early.
If that's a weakness of the book, it manages to be a minor one. Testaments is more than 400 pages, but a fast and even thrilling more-than-400 pages. The joy of the book isn't in the plot twists but in seeing these women hammer away at the foundations of Gilead, and wondering how much it would take for the whole thing to crumble.
QUOTE:
"All of this and a corker of a plot, culminating in a breathless flight to freedom, makes The Testaments a rare treat. The Handmaid’s Tale, while magnificent, was never that. But—let’s not kid ourselves—that’s because, of the two novels, it is the least reassuring, the least flattering, and, sadly, the most true."
The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale Is an Unlikely Crowd-Pleaser
Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments takes as much from the hit TV series as it does from her original novel.
By LAURA MILLER
SEPT 04, 20199:24 AM
A handmaid
Illustration by Slate
When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, the Christian right was on the rise in the U.S. and the Soviet Union seemed an indelible element of the global political landscape. It would be a mistake to think that the former had a greater influence on Atwood’s masterpiece than the latter. True, the novelist has said that, before writing it, she’d been researching the small-scale theocracies the Puritans established in colonial America. (That’s one reason the book is set in Massachusetts.) But The Handmaid’s Tale is a direct descendant of George Orwell’s 1984, the kind of bleak literary contemplation of the human spirit under the totalitarian regimes that flourished in the post–World War II era, when it often felt like such states were inevitable. “Always, at every moment,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in Orwell’s novel, “there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
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Atwood’s Gilead is that kind of place, and it’s infused with the understanding that, for much of human history, most places were that kind of place if you had the misfortune to be a woman. The citizens of Gilead spend remarkably little time thinking about God or Scripture, and its leaders, even less so. Ideology—communism, fascism, religion, racial supremacism—merely provides a rationale for the exercise of raw power and conveniently designates a class of victims and slaves. “The same wailings from the new arrivals, the same barking and shouts from the guards,” a character in Atwood’s new novel, The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, recalls of Gilead’s convulsive birth. “How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot.”
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Readers who come to The Testaments fresh from the Hulu series based on The Handmaid’s Tale may be surprised to learn that these lines—their sardonic dryness so quintessentially Atwoodian—come from Aunt Lydia, the overseer of the “women’s side” of Gilead, and an object of veneration and terror in every version of the story. A cipher in the first novel and a true believer driven to zealotry by sexual humiliation in the TV series, the Aunt Lydia of The Testaments is another beast entirely, a cunning political survivor with an extensive collection of other people’s secrets and no love for Gilead itself. This Lydia plays the long game, and one of the many pleasures of this enthralling novel comes from witnessing how her plans finally pay out. Recognizing that she is reaching the end of her vitality, Aunt Lydia has no illusions about her future should she weaken. She, like everyone else, must die, but she prefers to decide “when and how.” Oh, and also “who to take down with me. I have made my list.”
Gilead will fall, too. This we’ve known from the beginning. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is framed as primary source material presented to an academic conference on “Gileadean Studies” at the end of the 22nd century, long after the collapse of the dictatorship. One part of the novel is Aunt Lydia’s handwritten account of her final months, with recollections of her own imprisonment and torture following the overthrow of the United States government and the establishment of Gilead. It alternates with two other narratives, both transcriptions of recorded testimony, one from a young woman raised in a powerful Gilead family and the other from a 16-year-old Canadian girl who becomes involved in a plot to smuggle out a dossier of documents incriminating enough to undermine Gilead’s rulers and ultimately topple the regime.
Atwood picks up plot elements that originated in the TV series—a baby named Nicole born to a handmaid in Gilead and spirited across the border to Canada, Aunt Lydia’s past as a family-court judge (in the series, a lawyer)—and twists them to her own ends. In The Testaments, Baby Nicole, hidden away in parts unknown, becomes a literal poster child, a rallying symbol for both Gilead and its critics. “So useful, Baby Nicole,” Aunt Lydia observes. “She whips up the faithful, she inspires hatred against our enemies, she bears witness to the possibility of betrayal within Gilead and to the deviousness and cunning of the Handmaids, who can never be trusted.” Daisy, who will soon go undercover as a bogus convert to the Gilead religion, joins a protest in which marchers wave Baby Nicole signs, vowing that the child will never be returned to captivity.
The Testaments is fun to read in a way that The Handmaid’s Tale is not.
But The Testaments owes more to the TV series than a handful of details. Its tone hews closer to the series than to the novel that precedes it. The Offred of the novel version of The Handmaid’s Tale—trapped, impotent, and considering suicide to the very end—confronts that eternal quandary: deciding whether or not to trust a man. Nick, her lover, is either a member of the Mayday resistance or a government spy. When she steps into a black van on the novel’s last page, she thinks, “Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped.”
By contrast, the Offred played by Elisabeth Moss in the TV series is a steel-nerved, gun-toting rebel who engineers a plan to smuggle 52 children out of Gilead and stabs a would-be rapist with a pen before finishing him off by whacking him in the head with a statuette. The novel was a study in how easily agency can be stripped from a person who’d previously considered herself free and strong. Like a prisoner, Offred studies every detail of her spartan room, discovering a motto scratched on the wall by a previous inmate: mock Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” But she finds out that the handmaid assigned to the house before her killed herself, a discovery that casts the viability of such defiance into doubt. The Offred of the novel, like 1984’s Winston Smith, is ground down. “Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes,” she says, resigning herself to her fate. “That is what gets you in the end.”
To judge by history, Atwood’s version of The Handmaid’s Tale, the one in which everyone, or nearly everyone, capitulates to the power of the state, is the more realistic. It’s also less entertaining than a story in which the downtrodden outwit and rise up against the tyrants. The Handmaid’s Tale makes for lugubrious reading because Offred is so helpless. It is a novel of stasis, boredom, despair—punctuated by moments of pure terror. It replicates the emotional state of living under totalitarianism. Wouldn’t we all rather believe that we’d be brave and resourceful enough to join the resistance? And if we’re really honest with ourselves, just how likely is it that we would be?
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The Testaments is fun to read in a way that The Handmaid’s Tale is not, fun in the same way that the TV series, for all its grim lighting and performances, is crowd-pleasing. Its characters are not powerless or crushed. Aunt Lydia, it is soon revealed, is secretly working toward Gilead’s downfall. Clever Agnes Jemima, another of the book’s new narrators, who was raised to be a docile wife to a Gilead commander, begins to have doubts. Daisy, a smart-mouthed teenager, is both refreshingly irreverent and hopelessly naïve. “I thought I knew what was wrong with people then,” she recollects during her testimony, “especially adult people. I thought I could set them straight.” When Aunt Lydia asks if Daisy, a recent arrival at Ardua Hall (a sort of convent for trainee Aunts), would prefer to just go back home to Canada, Daisy asks, “Like how? Flying monkeys?” Later, when Aunt Lydia enlists several novices to participate in a risky scheme, Daisy protests that the older woman is resorting to “emotional blackmail.” “I appreciate your views,” Aunt Lydia replies, “but your juvenile notions of fairness do not apply here.”
Banter like this may be irresistible, but it would have cost a girl a beating in the novel version of The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testaments comes adorned with much splendid writing. Atwood, who is also a poet, can turn a metaphor that feels both original and like something you’ve always known: “ ‘Life is not about hair,’ I said then, only half jocularly. Which is true, but it is also true that hair is about life. It is the flame of the body’s candle, and as it dwindles the body shrinks and melts away.” She has always grounded her fiction in the creatureliness of experience, whether it’s Offred stealing butter to use as hand lotion in The Handmaid’s Tale or Daisy observing that the woman who raised her “had a distant smell. She smelled like a floral guest soap in a strange house I was visiting. What I mean is, she didn’t smell to me like my mother.”
All of this and a corker of a plot, culminating in a breathless flight to freedom, makes The Testaments a rare treat. The Handmaid’s Tale, while magnificent, was never that. But—let’s not kid ourselves—that’s because, of the two novels, it is the least reassuring, the least flattering, and, sadly, the most true.