Already it has turned too chilly to sit outdoors and read, unless the sun is shining, which it was not when I wanted to sit with Payback and Dancing Girls this week. But it’s still warm enough to be comfortable in a sweater to do the raking and burlapping (isn’t this a word?), and the final finishes for the summer’s garden. There are a lot of slender birch trees that have been choked by wild grape vines on this property, so we are trying to work them free from the trees’ trunks and branches, while still allowing some grapes to grow in other places.
Thinking about this negotiation for territory, in the yard, as a balance system fits with the second chapter of Payback; next, Margaret Atwood considers how the imbalanced state of indebtedness has been linked with the concept of sin. I was thinking about Anne’s comment (on earlier MARM posts this year) about it being a dry narrative and it’s true that I approach these lectures with a sense of doing some homework.
In this chapter, there’s not quite as much mythology to sort through, but there’s more religion, and that does smack of the classroom (or pulpit). There are also quite a few quotations from literary works, including Mary Webb’s Precious Bane and George Orwell’s 1984. However, as with a good teacher, once I’m sitting in my seat, Atwood offers just enough entertainment to hold my interest.
She, herself, is aware that we learn best when we are fully engaged. She recalls being a child in Sunday school and how the “most interesting parts of the Bible” were “studiously avoided.” Which ones? “[T]hose dealing with sex, rape, child sacrifice, mutilations, massacres, the gathering up in baskets of the lopped-off heads of your enemy’s kids, and the cutting up of concubines’ bodies and sending them around as invitations-to-a war.” She doesn’t go to those lengths in Payback (good thing!).
The primary source from which she draws elements of entertainment is her own life, memories of her upbringing most often. I got a huge giggle out of the idea that, as a chid, she assumed that “pawnshops had something to do with chess.” Isn’t that just sensible, really?
I also loved the story about her aunt and her aunt’s friend travelling to Montreal from Nova Scotia to help her mother, who was in hospital (following her brother’s birth), and what debts were incurred (financial and social) in that process. It’s a very natural way to illustrate a set of relationships’ give-and-take, of an exchange system. (She also refers to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift here, too: a formative text for Atwood.)
The details surrounding the journey and her mother’s care are fascinating. My favourite part is how the two women, on their journey home, travelling on the cheapest fares (so, sitting upright the whole way home, in rigid wooden seats), negotiated to “rent” two pillows for forty-eight cents, when the rate was twenty-five cents per pillow. I won’t spoil it (it’s only a little spicy).
Another detail that tickled me is the origin of the talk of a “clean slate” or a “dirty slate.” Atwood observes how the phrase has come to mean you’ve atoned for your sins, you’ve made “reparation for whatever you’ve done wrong.” But the colloquial use of the term is based on the “slate in bars and pubs where regular customers’ running tabs were recorded” where a “dirty slate” is “smeared all over with debts,” a situation which is “dirty for both debtor and creditor alike.” Who knew?
The next story in Dancing Girls is “The Man from Mars” and it was originally published in the Ontario Review which, despite its name, is actually an American journal/literary magazine, edited for many years by Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith. (Once upon a time, Margaret Atwood was only published in literary journals and magazines too: emerging writers—have hope, don’t give up! Also once upon a time, JCO’s oeuvre was still in the double digits. Again, who knew?)
It’s fascinating to read this decades-old story that grapples with a privileged class’s insincerity towards people whose cultural identities are rooted elsewhere—rooted in “other” places, with the limitations of small-L liberal sympathy and compassion, with the superficial habit of “tolerance” which is a world apart from “acceptance.” In this story, the liberal love-everybody-but-NIMBY ideology rests in Christine’s mother but, ultimately, Christine recognises that she has inherited more of this outlook than she wants to admit.
Christine is critical of, but not antagonistic towards, her mother: “She prided herself on her tolerance; also there was a scarcity of girls.” She acknowledges the contradictions, in her mother being willing to employ a hired girl that most women would refuse, and she also acknowledges the friction that her mother’s deeply rooted beliefs and behaviours towards “the girl” bring to the situation—what, today, could be called microaggressions.
When her mother catches wind of “The Man from Mars,” she invites him to the house on a telephone call; Christine is appalled, but she goes through the motions. Readers are sympathetic to her because she recognises that she is not all that different from her mother, and her self-awareness makes us curious about how her own beliefs and ideas might shift or remain rigid.
She’s a young woman in her mother’s home, and we readers wait, with these women, for the young man to arrive. Perhaps Christine will provide a counterweight to her mother’s judgement. But “he wasn’t quite the foreign potentate her [mother’s] optimistic, veil-fragile mind had concocted.” And we realise that Christine knew that and she allowed the young man to accept the invitation anyway.
Christine puts her mother in a position where she will openly judge the young man’s “other-ness” (my word) and puts the young man in an awkward (and eventually devastating) situation by allowing this pantomime to play out, allowing this tolerance-that-actually-masks-intolerance to unfurl.
Going much further risks a spoiler, but not yet. This part only sounds like a spoiler: “’That kind don’t hurt you,’ one of the policemen said: ‘They just kill you.’” The other policeman says: “Nut cases.” This isn’t a spoiler because, although it sounds like something horrible has happened, nothing has happened. Nothing actually ever happens. Not in terms of plot or story.
The spoiler bit comes in the final pages of the story, when Christine comes to realise something about the young man and about her response to him and her ideas of what life is like on “Mars.” (It’s also not a spoiler to say that the story has nothing to do with Mars and that’s not where he’s from. Although, if you want to think more about Margaret Atwood and science-fiction, check out Bill’s post for MARM.)
The story works, even decades later, because it rests with Christine, with one woman’s attempts to challenge and conform to various expectations:
“Her parents never expected her to be a brilliant social success and weren’t overly disappointed when she wasn’t. She was spared the manoeuvring and anxiety she witnessed among others her age, and she even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn’t a cock-tease, a cold fish, an easy lay or a snarky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.”
The story works because, even decades later, these expectations still don’t work; we all have to wrestle with some version of them, have to make our own way knowing that means we are disappointing some people even when we are satisfying others.
What are you reading for MARM this year?
Or, are you just about to choose…right now!
(This is the fifth iteration of Margaret Atwood Reading Month: here are links to previous participants’ posts, if you’re looking to reminisce or to find some inspiration to join. If you notice that one of your earlier posts is missing, please let me know!)
Oh dear, it’s looking like once again I’ll fail to join in with MARM! I really enjoyed this post. When I was little I thought pawnshops were prawn shops – some sort of crustacean specialist fishmongers!
I always thought “clean slate” came from school slates – when they fill up you have to wipe them clean and start again with a clean slate! I don’t think I’ve heard “dirty slate” before. Huh.
And I definitely didn’t hear any of those more eventful stories at Sunday School. Lol
So far my MARM plans are still wishy-washy. I know, it’s Nov.17! Tomorrow is her birthday!
That sounds like a very Anne-0f-Green-Gables carrotty conclusion to draw! Heheh
You and she were definitely missing the “good stuff” then. Hee hee
I cannot believe it’s the middle of November already. Usually I think of December as a slippery month, but this year the warm weather (right ’til it snowed) is throwing me off…
I really do always think of Anne when I think of slates. How did you know? Haha!
Oh dang I just left a whole big comment and then something went wrong with wordpress and my comment wouldn’t save!! I was wondering if you had been following this news story that Atwood was banned in Russia?
One benefit to having a comment disappear is that it can forever be your most insightful and pertinent comment evahr. Hee hee
I’ll link to this literary coverage rather than the news media, because I love this photograph they’ve used, showing all her years: her willingness to take a stand is admirable, isn’t it.
That is a wonderful photo of MA – majestic even!
Perfect description!
I was hoping to get some Margaret Atwood essays read. I still may but November is running away with me.
That sounds very romantic, an elopement with the month that has the most dramatic skyscapes.
In our previous rental we battled a profuse grapevine that threatened to climb across and engulf our birch tree and, thereby, the plum tree all the way on the other side of the garden!
I like how you’re working your way slowly through these two collections.
True! The vine has an incredible ability to find new pathways to flourish. Hopefully the current tenants are willing to keep an eye on your climber now that you’ve moved.
I do have a couple of other projects on the go with MARM in mind, but they haven’t progressed far enough to write about yet. I can’t remember if you’ve read Dearly (I know that wasn’t your plan) but it has some beautiful poems that might resonate with you just now, not necessarily in a MARM-sense but a just-to-read-them sense.
It appears that the landlord now lives there full time, so I have no doubt he’s keeping the garden under control (more so than we would have, our ‘untidiness’ also being in the name of biodiversity!).
I adored Dearly — one of my top few releases of that year. I’ve read an earlier collection of hers, The Door, to review soon, but perhaps I should get Dearly back off the shelf to sit on the bedside pile.
Hahaha I like to think that giving the birches a fair chance is not standing in the way of biodiversity. *insert thinky face* But there’s plenty we’ve left “untidy” for at least one more growing season, in any case. Simply by virtue of having run out of time. And now there’s snow covering everything!
Ohhh, right, I remember now. It might be nice to have Dearly for company. If only for browsing moods rather than reading moods.
Love hearing the origin of the “clean slate” saying!
Isn’t one of those things that, once you hear it, it seems like you’ve always known it!
Well, thanks for the mention, that’ll be it for me this month. If I’d known she’d written ‘The man from Mars’ I would have included it in the case against her (It’s years since I read The Martian Chronicles but I remember the stories as anti-racist and anti-colonial, barely SF at all. I think I’d better work up a review.)
I don’t know how writers remember their childhoods in such detail. MA is one person I’m younger than but I barely remember Sunday School at all, despite going almost constantly until I was 17.
It was nice to have you at the MARM party even so. I’d love an excuse to reread some Ray Bradbury, but there’s nothing in the library up here except for F451 (not that that’s not worth rereading).
This just came up with a girlfriend-from-school last week, when I was asking her about a teacher we’d discussed in the past, and she said she has no idea how I remember so much about my early years. Maybe I was just writing and rewriting things in my mind, even back then, even with no pen in hand to secure the memories.
Enjoyed reading this. I think have read that story before because it sounds really familiar. But of course I remember nothing beyond that 😀
I checked back and I see that I actually did log this collection at some point, so I guess I’ve read these before too. *grins Well, here’s to rereading! Heheh
At the moment, I’m trying to decide between Dearly, or (some of) a big chunky collection of non fiction which just arrived. Decisions, decisions!
Ohhh, I love Dearly so much. That new collection is getting a lot of attention too!