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preferably several examples.” - Margaret Atwood
There is nothing so horrifying as reading about a dystopia, and learning that everything in it has happened, and then looking around and seeing it for yourself. Margaret Atwood has a unique ability to look at how the world treats us and distil it into her poems and stories that read as both raw and refined. Today, Saturday, November 18th, 2023, Margaret Atwood turns 84, and she has published 92 works, including nonfiction, short fiction, children’s books, graphic novels, books of poetry. This speaks to the impact of her work that she’s done so much, worked in so many mediums, and received so many awards. Today we’ll take a step back to see what inspired such a powerful, prolific writer, and examine some of her notable works.
From Reader to Writer
It’s ironic that The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most well-known, well written, and relevant contemporary dystopian novels about America, was written by a Canadian. Born November 18th, 1939, Margaret Atwood grew up in the Canadian countryside because of her father’s entomology research. Cut off from TVs and radios, Atwood explored the countryside, and gained a love of reading because there wasn’t much else to do during the rain. She and her brother were storytellers from a young age. Her brother would write the stories, and Atwood would read them, even writing some of her own. She was particularly influenced by the Grim Brothers and George Orwell, who she claims “ruined [her] life… because [she] thought [Animal Farm] would be like Wind the Willows,” and she didn’t have the context of Stalin or Trotsky to make sense of the story.
Though she began writing at 5, she didn’t start writing seriously until she was 16. Her turn to writing as a career came as a surprise to both her parents, and her schoolteachers, who described her as having no particular talent for it. Her mother even told her, “if you’re going to be a writer you better learn to spell.” Despite the less than enthusiastic support she received; Atwood stuck to her decision. Like many young writers, she started with romance, because it paid the most, and it looked simple enough to write, only to discover that she had no aptitude for the genre. It required a particular style that put asterisks or ellipses at the most important moments; moments that Atwood wanted to write out. This early exploration helped Atwood define her style and learn what she wanted to write.
Atwood graduated from Victoria College at the University of Toronto with an undergraduate in English and published Double Persephone, her first book of poetry, in 1961. She went on to earn a Master’s Degree in English Literature from Radcliffe College in 1962. Atwood spent the next two years working towards a doctorate, but never finished her dissertation. Her early career was dominated by poetry, and her second poetry collection published in 1964, The Circle Game, shows her already exploring the tensions between men and women, perception and reality, and how what seems harmless can have deeper and more disturbing implications. She would return to these ideas often throughout her career, including her first published novel, The Edible Woman, which released in 1969.
Atwood continued to write novels and poetry through the 70s, teaching the odd year at the odd University here and there. In 1976 she started a relationship with Graeme Gibson, a fellow novelist, and the two of them moved to a farm near Alliston Ontario. They had a daughter in 1976, and then returned to Toronto in 1980. The release of The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 was a landmark moment for Margaret Atwood, becoming one of her most well-known and enduring novels today. Though many people’s knowledge of Atwood’s work begins and ends at The Handmaid’s Tale, she continued to write horrifically thought provoking stories. 2003s Oryx and Crake does for our experiments with genome splicing what The Handmaid’s Tale did for violations of women’s rights. Distilling real life examples of genetic experiments into a dystopian environment to draw attention to the ethical violations we have allowed to occur.
Atwood has continued to write into the present day, and even helped adapt The Handmaid’s Tale into a Hulu show. The show premiered in 2017 and has had 5 seasons, with the 6th in production. The initial show runner has also begun working on adapting The Testaments, a sequel released in 2019, for television. The shows, much like Atwood herself, show no sign of stopping.
Writing Style: Nothing Goes in Unless it’s Happened.
The bedrock of Atwood’s writing style is that nothing goes in unless it happened somewhere, at least once. She reads newspapers and magazines often. In the past she’d cut out articles and headlines and keep them in a box, which she has likened to keeping track of URLs and making printouts today. And then, when she starts writing, she doesn’t begin with an idea. She starts with a person, or even an object, and allows the story to spin itself together from there. Frequently her stories explore the female experience, and she writes with a distinct awareness of the role of gender in shaping her character’s identity. She considers both the performative aspects of gender, and the ways they might defy those norms.
Notably, Atwood has stirred controversy in the science fiction community by resisting the label of science fiction for works like The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake, instead calling them speculative fiction. She argues that sci-fi deals with that which doesn’t, or couldn’t, exist, and is descended from H.G. Wells, while speculative fiction, descended from Jules Vern, uses the past and existing trends in the present to speculate about the near future. It’s a subtle distinction that ties into her world view, and her insistence on studying the world around her for inspiration.
The Edible Woman: Reality is What You Make of It
Atwood’s first novel was The Edible Woman, a tale that explores gender stereotypes, eating disorders, loss of identity, and alienation from oneself. In some ways, The Edible Woman acts almost like a cipher for Atwood’s other works, openly wearing its feminism and distillation of reality in even more obvious forms than her later works. The title gives it all away. Marian begins to see herself in the food others eat, slowly losing the ability to eat food as she sympathizes with it and how it’s both used without thought and underappreciated. She becomes so dissociative of reality that the perspective switches from first person to third person. All of this culminates in a cake made to look like her, which she feeds to a man she’s having an affair with, an obvious metaphor for how he’s eating away at her. The Handmaid’s Tale is hardly subtle in its messaging, but The Edible Woman’s themes are blatant in the way early works often are. This makes sense as a proto-feminist work that helped lay the groundwork for second wave feminism, but it also makes it easier to see how Margaret Atwood is taking contemporary issues in the world and applying it to her work.
The Handmaid’s Tale: It Could Never Happen Here
The Handmaid’s Tale is Atwood’s most well-known book in the mainstream and bares the dubious honor of being added to American Highschool mandatory reading, terrorizing teenagers alongside Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison. Though we joke, it’s a remarkable achievement to be placed next to such classical authors and notable contemporary writers. Its depiction of a post United States society founded on deprivation of women’s rights is haunting, made all the more so from Atwood’s insistence she only including things in the story that have actually happened somewhere in the world. On its release, there were two dominant positions about the book in America. Those who thought it could never happen in America, and those who looked around and wondered how much time was left. Its position as a modern classic with timeless wisdom to impart on its readers has only become more relevant with the overturning of Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, and the ensuing political battles for women’s reproductive rights.
One of the most striking aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale is its ending. The revelation that Gilead and all of its horrible regressions have already passed, and the story is itself a transcription of Offred’s life. Although it invites more questions, and some might say its victimizes Offred even more, it also tells us that Gilead has collapsed. Knowing this is salve to real life attempts to undermine the United States’ democracy and take away civil rights from American citizens. Even if malicious malefactors seize the reins of power and try dehumanize us, strip our rights, indoctrinate us, and bend us to their own ends, their reign of terror is inherently unstable because their base is so narrow. If the government strips women of their rights, discards the elderly, rejects babies that don’t meet their standards, and concentrates all privileges to a ruling class of men, who does the government even serve? With such a narrow base, it’s inevitable that the balance of power will shift again, and the regime will eventually fall.
The Testaments: I Won’t Allow It to Continue
Gilead might have a narrow base of true citizens, but it’s able to balance its weight on that base in The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testaments is the story of those who pushed it over and used that inherent instability pull it down. Through Lydia, the same Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid’s Tale, we see the founding of Gilead, and learn how even those women supposedly indoctrinated at the highest levels despise this status quo, and seek to undermine it by supporting Mayday, a resistance organization. In Agnes we see the reality of young women growing up in the Gilead regime. Their lives are controlled, literacy isn’t achievable for them, and even the daughters of the elite can only hope to become housewives. And when Agnes, a woman raised in this society, is slipped evidence of corruption and hypocrisy at the highest level, she recognizes the opportunity it represents for a better life. Finally, is Nicole, a girl smuggled out of Gilead, and who Gilead is desperate to get back. From her we get to see more of the international stage Gilead exists in, how people escape from it, and what Gilead will do to get them back. After her adopted parents are killed by Gilead, Nicole’s decides to work with Mayday and slip back into the country and obtain vital intel. Gilead’s crimes are so great that a sixteen-year-old girl who was saved from them is willing to go back if it means trying to take them down.
From these three perspectives we see a gambit of motivations, learn about the kind of people willing to take a stand, and see even more clearly how fragile a state like Gilead is. A single scandal of hypocrisy and corruption at the highest level is enough to completely topple the regime. It offers an important reminder that we have to take a stand for what we believe. Evil is terrifying, and terrifyingly fragile. You don’t have to do everything, only something, to contribute to a better world.
Writing Advice: How to get Published as a New Author
Atwood rightly points out that times have changed. When she was getting started, there wasn’t a very large literary scene in Canada, and she was able to find a niche in the poetry community. Now, the publishing industry is larger than ever. We’re printing more books and poetry than ever before, but there are also more people writing books and poetry than ever before. Today, it’s impossible to have a book traditionally published without an agent. Publishers just have too many manuscripts on their desks to look through them all. You’ll be lucky if they read the first five pages. You’re more likely to get five paragraphs to pull them in. With all of this in mind, Margaret Atwood’s advice is to become familiar with literary magazines and find the ones that publish the stories you want to write. There’s an audience out there for you somewhere, they just don’t know they want to read you yet. Take the time to introduce yourself to them, build up your reader base, establish yourself as a writer where you can, and when you’ve carved out your own niche, start looking at bigger projects.
Atwood Today
Margaret Atwood is a fascinating author who’s been placed alongside some of the greatest authors ever. Despite her advanced age, and the passing of Graeme Gibson in 2019, Atwood continues to write poetry and stories. Dearly, published in 2020, serves as a reflection and retrospection of the life she’s led, and in 2023 she released Old Babes in the Wood, a collection of short stories. Earlier in 2023 she also announced she would be writing a memoir about her life, after insisting she would do no such thing in the decade prior. She currently splits her time between finishing the manuscript for a book of stories, preparing videos for various causes, doing book tours around the world, and much more. If you’re interested in learning more you can find her official website at https://margaretatwood.ca/. We hope this exploration of Margaret Atwood has inspired you to learn more about the world around you, read up on past and current events, and check out the rest of Margaret Atwood’s astounding library of work.