Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, a weekly publication exploring the lives and literature of women.
This essay forms part of my Short Story Salon feature. At the end of the essay, I will suggest some stories to read this month. Upgrade to a paid subscription below to join the end of month discussion thread!
Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has never been one to shy away from the big issues. Her famous dystopian novel The Handmaids Tale tells a terrifying story of a religious totalitarian society which has overthrown the government of the United States, taking all rights away from women, and forcing a hierarchical class whereby some women become ‘handmaidens’, forced to reproduce for the ruling class.
Interviews with Atwood in 2017 revealed her fears that her dystopian prophecies may not be as far from the mark as we might have once assumed. In fact, Atwood based the events of her dystopian novel on real events she found when researching puritan values in 17th Century America.
Atwood pointed out that history can often repeat itself, stating that current legislation governing women’s abortion rights, for example, echo The Handmaids Tale, as well as the values upheld in early America.
‘We think as progress being a straight line forever upwards. But it has never been so, you can think you are being a liberal democracy but then – bang – you’re Hitler’s Germany. That can happen very suddenly’. 1
Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood is perhaps best known for her fiction novels told from a feminist perspective, though also writes nonfiction and poetry. Beginning writing at the age of just five, she returned more seriously a decade later, wishing to write professionally from her teenage years onwards.
Atwood has an astonishing oeuvre of work including novels, poetry, and short fiction. Interestingly, much of her short fiction reveals similar themes to those which feature in her novels. Her poetry is often inspired by myths and fairy tales.
Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, published in 1969, is a social satire of North American consumerism and shows her early work as an author of feminist literature.
Though eschewing traditional genre labels, Atwood did label The Handmaid’s Tale a book of speculative fiction.
Many of the primary themes in her works include myth, religion, gender identity, and the position of women in society. She is also an activist for the environment and this further feeds into her work.
Atwood’s short story collection Stone Mattress contains some beautifully constructed stories. She has a way of presenting the characters and places they inhabit in a way that places the reader right at the centre of their world, even when that world is far from the one we inhabit. The blend of realism and less realistic elements only adds to the dystopian effect of some of these stories.
Known for her speculative fiction, ‘Lusus Naturae’ is a dark tale of a young woman born with a genetic abnormality, and whose family mistake her for a vampire, faking her death and burial via a corrupt priest, and keeping her in one room of the house.
Eventually a grown woman and alone in the house, she begins to venture outside, coming across a couple of lovers, and finding herself unable to resist jumping on top of the man, thinking she’s kissing him, but instead biting him like an animal.
The bloody result of this encounter is that the townsfolk, including her own family members, approach the house with fire torches, in order to kill the beast that she has become, despite her pleas to be seen as a human woman.
‘I am a human being’.
It feels that throughout these stories, Atwood is showing the intolerance of society toward those deemed ‘different’, and this particular story reminded me of the character of Bertha, the ‘mad woman in the attic’ in Jane Eyre. Similarly, the ‘mad',’ or different woman, must be removed from view.
The title story of the collection stood out for me as being the most connected to the legacy of protest against the treatment of women’s rights of Atwood’s earlier work. in ‘Stone Mattress',’ Verna, an older woman who doesn’t state her age, has taken a vacation, a trip to the arctic on board a ship. The opening line sets the dark intentions of the story, and reminded me of the foreshadowing technique used in much of Muriel Spark’s works.
‘At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone’.
What an opening line!
Atwood remains a leading voice in the feminist literary space. The stories in Stone Mattress are some of the darkest short fiction we have read so far in the Salon - I hope you join me this month in discovering (or re-discovering) them for yourself.
It is to the story ‘Stone Mattress’ that I will be focusing my attention in my end of the month reflection, but please feel free to read as many or as few stories as you feel called to. As always, I have collated a few free online stories below, should you prefer to read that way.
‘Stone Mattress’ (this appears on The New Yorker, for which you may need a subscription to read)
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