Margaret Atwood’s Old Babes in the Wood, “My Evil Mother” #MARM2024

I don’t like the word ‘evil’: does anyone?

Well, some. If only for effect. The showrunners for this show, for instance.

[I’ve not watched it. But maybe I should: I had fun with the early seasons of Supernatural and, then, lost interest when the angels arrived. And I have enjoyed some of the Kings’ other shows, most recently The Good Fight—especially the last season.]

‘Evil’ seems to belong in films like The Bad Seed and The Exorcist, but it also gets applied to anyone you’d rather view as less-than human.

So, maybe it makes sense in a story that opens with a teenaged girl’s frustration at the control exerted over her by her mother.

Because she’s not seeing her as a person, only as a barrier of sorts. A restrictive barrier, daughter might say. A protective barrier, mother might retort. 

“My Evil Mother” is one of the longer stories (with  “Two Scorched Men” and “A Dusty Lunch”, both Nell and Tig stories, one from the collection’s first part, the other from the final part).

But it feels short.

Partly because of the crisp style that sets this collection apart.

Partly because, if you’ve read a lot of Atwood, there are so many familiar themes.

I already felt as though I knew this girl and her mother—a girl who eventually grows up. The story opens when she is pressured to break up with a boyfriend, but we also witness her introducing her mother and fiancée, and decades afterwards.

MARM 2024 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Training” (November 5)
Old Babes in the Wood, “My Evil Mother” (November 7)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 10)
Dancing Girls, “Lives of the Poets” (November 12)
Old Babes in the Wood, “The Dead Interview” (November 14)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 18)
Margaret Atwood’s 85^th Birthday (November 18)
Dancing Girls, “Dancing Girls” (November 19)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Impatient Griselda” (November 21)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 24)
Dancing Girls, “Giving Birth” (November 26)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Bad Teeth” (November 28)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

The prose feels nearly perfect (check out the parallelism, and word selection, like ‘fornicating’ which is abundantly motherly, although you KNOW that MA knows all the synonyms). Even the informal elements feel sculpted (note the “arranged by me” where some wordier variation of “which I arranged by phone” could have been, the -ish in warmish, and the take-a-breath pauses in the m-dashed aside).

Finally they met; tea at the King Edward Hotel in downtown Toronto, arranged by me. I didn’t think my mother would kick up in such a genteel atmosphere, and she didn’t. Nothing untoward happened. My mother was polite, warmish, attentive; my husband-to-be was deferential, attuned, subdued. I did catch her sneaking a look at his hands—she’d want to get a peek at his heart line, to see if he was likely to go off the rails and start fornicating with secretaries—but she was discreet about it. Aside from that, she acted the part of a nice middle-class mother, of an outmoded variety. My husband-to-be was a little disappointed; he’d been led to expect something less orthodox.

There are quite a few snorty-laughy lines in this story, and it probably would make sense to share those. But I’ve chosen this ordinary passage because of this question of expectations. (And because I wonder if anyone else remembers if it wasn’t the King Edward Hotel where they all go out for drinks in The Edible Woman.)

Not only are expectations between mother and fiancée thwarted but, also, early on, the girl has one impression of her gym teacher, and her mother has quite another opinion about that woman, which subverts the girl’s understanding. And, the girl believes that she knows where her father is but, soon, some holes in her mother’s story (that she transformed him into the garden gnome beside the front steps) arise. All through, people are more than what they seemed.

But expectations of readers who have followed Atwood’s career (and those who have made assumptions based on international acclaim) are also shaken when we compare these new Atwood stories to earlier work. “My Evil Mother” echoes earlier stories like “Bluebeard’s Egg” which is also steeped in fairy tales, women’s lives, marriages, and expectations, but “Bluebeard’s Egg” feels heavier. It echoes earlier novels like The Robber Bride which also considers how women connect with and disappoint one another, broken marriages and trust contracts, and the myths we spin about ourselves and other people, but those novels are long and complex.

An Alias-Grace Atwood reader might find these stories feel thin, and I do find myself thinking that from time to time while reading.

But when I stop to think, I also find myself thinking about how powerful humour is. I think about writers like Thomas King and Paul Beatty and GauZ’, who make us laugh but also comment on colonization and misogyny, legacies of inequity we have inherited (and, sometimes, perpetuate, deliberately or accidentally).

I wonder: does it have to feel weighty to be substantial.

In theory, I say no. But, in reality, part of me still peers closely to find an intricate structure or a reverberating metaphor. Why can’t a well-told story simply fall open, the way a pit falls away from a fully ripened peach. There are other squares in my Bingo where this story would fit-several-but how can I not choose the Mother corner, when it’s right there in the title. 

It doesn’t have to be complicated to work.