A LOOK INTO THE FUTURE?
Margaret Atwood was once condemned for being bleak. Now people want to know where she hides her crystal ball,
How do you quickly deprive women of their autonomy, let alone their power?
Look no further than the chilling and powerful “Late,” Episode 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale, the new Hulu television series based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel published in 1985.
The show — gorgeously shot, brilliantly acted — is now drawing record audiences in Canada on Bravo.
In a flashback scene that actually generated fear in the pit of my stomach, two young women, who led independent lives before their country is overtaken in a theocratic uprising, enter a café to order coffees.
Our heroine Offred (a riveting Elisabeth Moss) discovers her bank card isn’t working.
Back at her office, she’s calling the bank to find out what’s up, when suddenly she and all the women in the office are herded to the front to be told by a mildly apologetic male boss, surrounded by menacing looking men, that they can’t work there anymore. Or anywhere else.
And just like that, all progress for women is wiped out. As a friend of mine put it, “Freeze women’s bank accounts and toss them out of the workplace, and you’ve got them under your thumb.”
In Atwood’s futuristic vision, some of the women become reproductive slaves, others turn into enforcers. The series will venture beyond the novel in a second season. Yay, more fear to come.
“Oh it can’t happen here or now,” pooh-pooh the naysayers, and they’re probably right. Yet startling pictures have emerged from U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House that show health care policy involving women’s reproductive rights (or lack thereof ) being made solely by a sea of old white males.
What is this, if not the patriarchy? And if we’re far along the road to equality, why does the patriarchy even exist in 2017, let alone in the Oval Office?
Women continue to provide the most impressive resistance to Trump’s retro administration. This week at a Senate hearing into Russia’s interference in the election, former U.S. acting attorney general Sally Q. Yates filleted GOP creep Ted Cruz like a fish as she explained to him why she thought Trump’s initial travel ban, since struck down by the courts, was illegal because it was based on religious discrimination.
Meanwhile one Canadian woman is everywhere, basking in a sea of adulation. Well, Margaret Atwood doesn’t bask. She’s too busy giving a master-class on how to stay relevant. Her book The Handmaid’s Tale, circa so long ago many of its newest fans were still in onesies, is now atop the bestseller charts.
Atwood is too busy tweeting to her 1.5 million followers; or being profiled in the New Yorker; or admonishing the Ontario government for cutting an annual grant to Toronto Public Library for a digital program (after she tweeted her displeasure, the funds roared back).
In short, she’s too busy doing the dizzying number of things she does every day in her role as Margaret Atwood.
When she started out as a poet, Atwood couldn’t possibly have known she would by 77 have achieved an almost perfect career arc, publishing dozens of books of poetry, fiction and non fiction, winning two Governor General’s Awards, the Giller, the Booker and who knows, maybe a Nobel Prize soon.
Atwood has written so much I’ve abstained from whole phases of her work and still consider her one of the most seminal literary influences of my life.
There are lines from her poetry that reside in my head: “Don’t ask for the true story; why do you need it? It’s not what I set out with, or what I carry. What I’m sailing with, a knife, blue fire, luck, a few good words that still work and the tide.”
She has also inspired me as a consummate citizen who says yes to requests for help because she knows she has power.
As a journalist, I sought several times to capture her in lengthy magazine profiles, an exercise both frustrating and memorable.
One of the first things she said to me was, “No offence Judith, but I don’t want you in my home.” I was doing a big Chatelaine profile of her as Woman of the Year and she didn’t want me judging her carpets, she said.
So she came to my house and judged my carpets instead. Or at least my career, as a bit of what I indecorously blabbed to her about being a journalist ended up in her 1981 novel, Bodily Harm.
I got to read it before it was published and I thought wow, what a crafty journalist she was, mining everything for detail.
Once media wary and self-protective, Atwood has become one of the most media savvy authors of any generation.
After hours of listening to her unmistakable voice, startlingly flat, laced with mischievous wit, I used to do a decent imitation of it as a party trick.
There was a time Atwood was con- The Handmaid’s Tale. demned for being “bleak,” whether it was her mordant take on male/female relationships or her jeremiads about the environment.
As events unfold fast in Washington — rumours, retro laws, firings (bye, James Comey) — no one seems to lay that bleak thing on her anymore.
They just want to know where she hides her crystal ball.
That first time I wrote about her, Atwood revealed her mantra for writing: “The very act of writing is an act of hope; it’s an act of faith.”
In her introduction to the reissue of The Handmaid’s Tale, she wonders whether those currently being deprived of their civil liberties will record what is happening to them.
Will their messages “be suppressed and hidden? “Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.” Yes, let’s. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson