Science, Gender and History : The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood [1 ed.] 9781443873932, 9781443862202

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Science, Gender and History

Science, Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood

By

Suparna Banerjee

Science, Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood, by Suparna Banerjee This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Suparna Banerjee All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6220-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6220-2

For Ma and Bapi and To my grandparents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Frankenstein: Radical Science, Nature and Culture Re-framing ‘the Science Question’ in Frankenstein Rebellion, Revolution and Frankenstein Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 The Last Man: Apocalyptic Speculation beyond Autobiography Re-reading Gender in The Last Man The Last Man and (Shelley’s) Art Politics, History and (Anti-)Colonialism Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 55 The Handmaid’s Tale: Dystopian Speculation in the Feminine Frankenstein and The Handmaid’s Tale: Gothic (Pro-)creation and Normative Gender Reading the Past, Making the Future: History-Making and SexualPolitics The Handmaid’s Tale and Feminism: Alienation versus Involvement The ‘Romance’ Theme The Narrative: Tyranny, Text and Resistance Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 83 ‘Open Markets, Closed Minds’: Apocalyptic Speculation in Oryx and Crake Biotechnology, Eugenics and the Apocalypse (Contemporary) Geo-politics and Oryx and Crake Dystopian Mindscapes Gender, and Beyond The Last Man and the New Humans

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Contents

Conclusion ............................................................................................... 129 Notes Notes to Introduction ......................................................................... 137 Notes to Chapter One ......................................................................... 138 Notes to Chapter Two ........................................................................ 140 Notes to Chapter Three ...................................................................... 141 Notes to Chapter Four ........................................................................ 142 Note to Conclusion ............................................................................ 143 Works Cited ............................................................................................. 145 Index ........................................................................................................ 153

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The distinguished contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum observed how in an uncertain world each one of us has to depend inevitably on many others for our survival and for any personal achievement any of us is able to make.h Here I try to specify who such others have been in my case, without whose variously rendered help this book would not have been possible. Foremost among these people are my parents, Hena and Shyama Prasad Banerjee—my beloved Ma and Bapi. Their unstinted material and emotional support sustained me through the years over which I researched for and wrote this book, balancing, after the initial period, a teaching job and the research and then the book with other writings and other responsibilities. My father rendered sundry practical help, suffered my anxieties equally with me, dreamt my dream, and kept up my morale with equal parts love and understanding. This book is more his than mine. And Ma has always been there for me—with her quiet affection and her energizing belief in my abilities. From the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay—where the earliest outlines of this book emerged—I thank Neelima Talwar for suggesting that I explore Mary Shelley’s and Margaret Atwood’s fiction for my doctoral work. The abundant scholarly liberty she thereafter allowed me proved vital to the way the specific thematic shaped up and to the development of the project. During the final stages of my doctoral research and thereafter, while revising my thesis for publication, I contacted senior academics around the world for both material help and critical advice. Thus, Johanna Smith sent me a copy of her excellent edition of Frankenstein that gave me access to some insightful contemporary critiques of the novel. I am thankful to her for this. Other specialists who shared time, material and/or expertise include Sharon Wilson (University of Northern Colorado), Paul Cantor (University of Virginia), Veronica Hollinger (Trent University), Constance Walker (Carleton College), and Hilde Staels (University of Leuven). I am indebted to all of them. Morton Paley (University of California at Berkeley), whom I consulted initially on a point related to Shelley’s h Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People who Know a Thing or Two. Ed. James L. Harmon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. 176.

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critique of Romanticism, fielded with indulgent kindness the many queries I put to him while preparing the final draft of the manuscript for publication. I am grateful to him. I thank the two anonymous experts who read for Women’s Studies my analysis of Shelley’s engagement with science in Frankenstein. Their suggestions helped me sharpen the argument in this part of my manuscript—a section that takes the dialogue around the science question in Frankenstein beyond a strong critical consensus. Likewise, I am thankful to the reviewers at Journal of International Women’s Studies. Their comments on my analysis of Atwood’s involvement with gender in Oryx and Crake led me to incorporate into this part of my work a fresh argument about how Atwood’s critique of motherhood advances a subversive and socially salutary model of ‘feminist mothering’. I thank the ‘Taylor and Francis’ group for granting me permission to re-publish as parts of this book the two articles I wrote for their journals. The section on gender in The Last Man—section 1, chapter 2 of this book—was first published in English Studies as “Beyond Biography: Rereading Gender in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man”. And my article entitled “Home is where Mamma is: Re-framing the Science Question in Frankenstein”, which now forms the first section of chapter 1 of this book, was earlier published in Women’s Studies. I also thank Diana Fox, founder-editor of Journal of International Women’s Studies, for allowing me to re-publish the article that I wrote for her journal. “Towards Feminist Mothering: Oppositional Maternal Practice in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake” now forms the most part of chapter 4, section 4 of this book. A considerable corpus of work germinal to the development of this book was done during my time at IIT Bombay. Over this period I came into contact with many fellow researchers and students, within the Humanities department and outside of it, whose help and friendship proved invaluable to my survival. The ones I would especially like to thank are Omkumar Krishnan, Sindhu Swaminathan, Netra Churi, Sunita Udgikar, Padmaja, Samit Roy and Vivek Kaul. I am much indebted also to many other people, working at different corners of the Institute and the campus, like the Office of the Humanities department, the Central Library and the Academic Office, Hostel-11, the Hostel-8 ‘Communication Center’, the Guesthouse, the Employees’ Cooperative Store, and the Nestle` outlet. These wonderful people not only rendered practical help, big and small, but also provided me with an ambience of human warmth throughout the span of my association with the Institute. I shall always remember them with fondness and gratitude.

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I am happy that my work found its home at Cambridge Scholars Publishing and am thankful to the team that managed the project with enthusiasm and diligent care. In this group, among others, are Samuel Baker, Carol Koulikourdi, Elfreda Crehan, and, above all, Amanda Miller, whose patience, friendliness and zeal make her an author’s delight. My cosy little den in Durgapur deserves to be mentioned as the place where I did a large part of the work that has led to this book. Without those 700 square feet of space in the city that has formed me I would have been lost. I wish my grandfathers, Debendra Nath Banerjee and Kalyani Prasad Chatterjee, were alive today: they were the first to note and encourage my love of the English language and this book would have made them happy. They, along with my grandmothers, and my grandaunt and granduncle on my mother’s side lavished on me in my growing years a sort of love that had been the best and the most nurturing. Over the years, the cherished memory of that love has kept my soul nourished.

INTRODUCTION

This book aims to make a thematically grounded study of a selection of novels by two apparently diverse authors, Mary Shelley (1797–1851) and Margaret Atwood (1939–). Its primary thrust is on the authors’ use of fantastic/speculative fiction to critique socio-political proclivities and cultural constructions from feminine perspectives—from vantage-points of two historically situated female individuals inhabiting the shifting locus of cultural dynamics called ‘woman’. While both writers have been incorporated into the discourses of feminist literary criticism there has not been any substantial critical endeavour so far to study their fiction in comparative conjunction.1 I propose to do this by examining the interfaces among science, gender and history(-making) in four of their novels: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826) by Shelley, and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003) by Atwood. These four texts, which have been described variously as gothic fantasy, apocalyptic fiction, dystopia and speculative fiction, combine meaningful (futuristic) speculation with the quality of ‘the fantastic’. Germinal situations or ideas that are non-mimetic are commingled in them with speculation that has a cognitive basis in and critical link with ambient reality. My interest in the fantastic as a mode of writing that opens up the potential of critiquing or subverting normative structures of thought and praxes has been a major criterion for my selection of the texts.2 Between Shelley and Atwood, as this book intends to bring out, there is a congruence of cultural milieux that results in a congruence of the world views they project in their speculative/fantastic fiction. The early nineteenth century was—as our times have been—a period of great cultural innovations and churnings marked especially by the ascendance of scientific rationality and (capitalistic) imperialism. One main concern of this book, accordingly, is to investigate the ways in which Shelley and Atwood use themes and ideas deriving from science to critique the ideologies and praxes of science and their socio-cultural manifestations. The other major focus will be on exploring how the texts negotiate the changing global politico-economic realities in the context of the shifting patterns of (Western) imperialism and how the category of gender relates to these negotiations. Shelley, a British writer situated at a cultural

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Introduction

moment that was the high noon of British colonialism, and Atwood, an author placed in the contemporary context of the imperialism of global capital, seem to be especially amenable to such an approach. Shelley wrote Frankenstein at a time when there was a lot of cultural interest in science and its potentialities. Scientist-thinkers like William Lawrence, Humphrey Davy, Erasmus Darwin and others were propounding revolutionary theories about the origin and the “principle of life” while Luigi Galvany kindled enormous popular interest in electricity and its powers (Shelley, “Introduction” 171).3 The hopes generated by science made it seem as if human perfection, and even immortality, could be achieved in the long run. On the other hand, theories about evolution, which were then shaping up, impelled new debates about human nature that dovetailed with Rousseauistic discourses on the nature-culture dialectic. Intellectual circles, such as that formed by Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and their friends like Lord Byron and John Polidori, were animated by debates on these new scientific-philosophical topics.4 More than a century later, Atwood writes her speculative novels at a time when scientific advancements, especially in biotechnology and cybernetics, have started to redefine all aspects of material culture and even look set to alter the very meaning of being human. Significantly, at both times, science assumes an aspect that is at once promising and threatening, exciting and deeply unsettling. The early nineteenth century was also a time when British colonialism was at its zenith. Commercial and imperial ambitions on the part of English ‘heroes’, like Raymond in The Last Man, were defining much of public life in England and its colonies and were also affecting familial domesticity at home. Shelley was among the first English writers to have taken cognizance of the political and social impact of colonialism and the spread of international trade that attended it. Already in Frankenstein we find an incipient critique of these elements; in The Last Man the critique deepens and matures even as Shelley recognizes international commerce and colonialism as a composite evil, anticipating “the problems European imperialism was to create in the modern world” (Cantor, “The Apocalypse” 195). In our times capitalistic neo-imperialism ‘globalizes’ the world, making nation states increasingly irrelevant, and promotes ultra-utilitarian materialism as the universal creed while deepening the material differences among nations and among ‘classes’. Atwood is one of the major writers to have projected this milieu in her speculative novels, especially in Oryx and Crake and its sequel The Year of the Flood (2009). In Atwood, moreover, the link between neo-imperial commerce and technoscience has been detected and dramatized—a nexus which was not

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yet apparent in Shelley’s time, when science was purer in its motives. From the gender point of view, the late eighteenth century was the time when the concept of women’s rights emerged through the writings and example of Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft, who in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790) argued for fundamental changes in society’s perception of women and their function and potential. True to this legacy, Shelley’s novels, published between 1818 and 1837, reflect her abiding interest in gendered existence and gender relations—themes she ponders in the context of history and/or the nuclear family. In the late twentieth century ‘feminism’ rose to be one of the most important political and cultural movements in the West (and elsewhere)—securing farreaching consequences for women’s personhood—and then got beleaguered by complacency on the part of women and by various forms of masculinist backlash. Especially, the rise of religious fundamentalism emerged as a potent threat to women’s emancipation—a circumstance dramatized in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Indeed, Atwood has been a major commentator on sexual politics and feminism in our times, from Edible Woman (1969), through Surfacing (1974) and Bodily Harm (1981), to The Handmaid’s Tale and beyond. In all, therefore, the fiction of Shelley and Atwood—both major and popular writers of their respective times—seems to form a suitable framework for a historically situated analysis of the dialectic of science and gender from a feminist perspective. Mine is a feminist approach that attends to the specificities of the respective historico-cultural milieux of the two authors and their texts while situating their work in the context of inter-gender dialectic through history. For I understand gender dynamics as cultural praxes that are changing and historically persistent at the same time—ever changing in their specificities yet always determined by a pattern of relative stability in the way patriarchy accords a “higher intrinsic human value to men than to women” (Rich ix). I draw mostly on feminist theory and criticism that attend to the culturally contingent nature of gender and gender relations rather than on the psycholinguistically inflected analyses of gender that, although insightful, tend toward a biologico-linguistic determinism that I like to avoid. Frankenstein, Shelley’s fantasy of a ‘mad scientist’ infusing life into an assemblage of cadaver parts and then disowning the resulting ‘monster’, is a prescient projection of both the hopes and the fears technology continues to inspire. Shelley’s engagement with the radical science of her times enables her to institute a critique of the ideology and praxes of science. Frankenstein’s failure to give his Creature a tolerable life results from his lack of pragmatism and his neglect of the importance

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Introduction

of familial and social assimilation—his exclusive reliance on scientific rationality—as much as it does from his lack of affective sympathy with the Creature. By the calamitous aftermath of Frankenstein’s extra-cultural creation Shelley underlines the fallacy implicit in the ideology of modern science as conceptualized in the seventeenth century, an ideology that institutionalizes the hierarchical and gendered schism between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ foundational to patriarchy. The conception of ‘nature’ as a fertile and passive (female) entity outside of and subordinate to the human (male) realm of ‘culture’ is characteristic of the thought paradigm underlying the seventeenth-century scientific revolution pioneered by Francis Bacon and Roger Boyle—the paradigm that has characterized patriarchal thinking through history and across cultures (Keller; Ortner).5 This stratified and gendered perception of ‘man’ and ‘nature’—encrypting in science the sexism of patriarchy—is at the root of the ideal of scientific ‘objectivity’ or detachment, an ideal that tends to promote an amoral science divorced from affective and ethical concerns. Shelley’s fictional presentation of the human failure of scientific rationality is, basically, a critique of the positioning of the natural and the cultural as hierarchical and gendered absolutes in both the discourses and the praxes of patriarchal societies. Through her criticism of Frankenstein’s detached and irresponsible science—embodied in the disastrous consequences of his creation both for the Creature and for others—Shelley heralds in English literature the theme of scientific ethics. This is an issue that has assumed much importance in our times, marked as they are with radical developments in biotechnology, like cloning, DNA mapping and genetic modification of species. Hence, scientific ethics is a major theme that Atwood develops in Oryx and Crake, which dramatizes the human and environmental consequences of the reckless operations of technoscience dancing to the tune of global capital. Frankenstein, showing as it does the technological creation of a human-animal hybrid, could also be seen as the first expression in English literature of what has been called the ‘posthuman’—the state of being that is created through technology-mediated inter-penetrations between humans and ‘Others’, like machines and animals. However, although the Creature in Frankenstein could be called the first posthuman entity or ‘cyborg’ in English literature, Shelley does not enter overtly into the problematic of ontological border-crossings or into the issue of technology altering human nature. She is concerned rather with probing the epistemological issues associated with the dialectic of the natural and the

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cultural. By emphasizing their mutual contingencies Shelley undercuts the discursive polarization itself of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’—of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’—that is foundational to Western Modernity and to patriarchal thinking itself (Latour; Ortner).6 Frankenstein is among the earliest critiques of this scientific world-view and, therefore, also among the earliest English texts to engage with what Sandra Harding was to call “the science question in feminism”. The meaning of the human gets interrogated in Atwood also as artificially mutated human-animal hybrids (‘Crakers’) interact with the lone surviving human being (‘Snowman’) in the apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake. Through these interactions, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Atwood recreates a Frankenstein-style creature-creator dialectic while also ironically reversing it to dramatize man’s abjection in the wake of his own creation. By showing the laboratory-made humanoids develop elements of human complexity despite their genetic programming—as also by bringing out their difference from the last ‘normal’ human being—Atwood implicitly contends that human nature cannot be mastered by technology. Like Shelley, Atwood emphasizes the complex and culturally contingent nature of being human and denounces the reductive, positivistic ethos of a technoscience that envisions perfection in programmed simplicity. Both Shelley and Atwood, thus, are hesitant in adopting science as the discourse of Progress. If Shelley adumbrates the negative potentiality of trusting human destiny to scientific rationality alone, Atwood, our contemporary, makes explicit much of the human impact of the ideology of scientism.The eighteenth-century faith in Reason, critiqued by Shelley in both Frankenstein and The Last Man, hardens into the ideology of scientism in Atwood’s dystopian near-future (Oryx and Crake), which is a reflection of our own times. Under the influence of this ideology every human phenomenon is seen as a function of ‘natural’ factors that can be understood in terms of science; human capacities and faculties not amenable to rationality are ignored, and non-utilitarian discursive fields, like those of the liberal arts, are neglected and undervalued. Pervasive scientism, working in tandem with advanced global capitalism, leads to the apocalypse in Oryx and Crake. Shelley’s critique, through Frankenstein’s career, of the (masculine) Romantic ethos of ego-centric transcendence gestures towards the family as an alternative locus of individual fulfilment and, by extension, as the model for the welfare of (national) communities (Mellor, Mary Shelley 115–26).7 However, through her championing of a gender equal family Shelley makes an implicit proto-feminist demand for men to commit to the familial equally with women. Indeed, the critique in Frankenstein of the

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Introduction

sexist and stratified binary of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ endemic to modern science results in an implicit denunciation of the separate spheres ideology, whereby woman and the ‘private’ realm of familial immanence are identified as separate and subordinate to man and his ‘public’ sphere of cultural transcendence. Frankenstein shows how this gendered dichotomy of spheres of activity enervates women’s personhood and how women’s own internalization of societal gender norms impairs their lives. And, as part of her critique of women’s obligatory absorption into the relational and the familial, Shelley makes an incipient criticism of the patriarchal ideology of motherhood that demands of and prepares women for inordinate selflessness and nurture. 8 The Last Man continues to develop Shelley’s perception of the impact of gender on women’s lives both within and outside of the family by showing how gender-based limitations and compulsions over-determine women’s lives. Through the character of Idris, the novel presents a case against women’s obsessive absorption in motherhood, taking forward what was begun in Frankenstein. The later novel, moreover, adds a new dimension to Shelley’s critique of gender: women’s dependence on intergender ‘love’ and the primacy they (are constrained to) accord to it are indicted in The Last Man through the lives of Perdita and Evadne. The novel is an examination of the ideology of heterosexual ‘love’ that reproduces in the erotics of personal lives the subordinate and inferior position women are implicitly or explicitly given in other areas of patriarchal cultures. Ultimately, The Last Man also, like Frankenstein, is a denunciation of the woman/man-private/public schism that Shelley perceives as one of the chief causes of women’s immoderate absorption in the relational and the domestic. The equivalence of the personal and the political in patriarchy is made manifest also in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel which, like Frankenstein, is premised on a speculative interest in the theme of the creation of the human species. The gothic ambience in which the drama of obsessive procreation unfolds in The Handmaid’s Tale resembles the atmosphere of gothic birthing palpable in Shelley’s presentation of Victor creating his Creature in Frankenstein (Moers 216--22). Written partly as a response to the right-wing reaction against feminism and to the growth of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S.A of the nineteen eighties, The Handmaid’s Tale shows a theocratic state machinery forcefully co-opting women as captive child-bearers into polygamous family-like structures headed by males of the elite classes.9 In this way, the sexual-politics of women’s subordination in patriarchal societies at the microcosmic level of the familial and the inter-personal is

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actually subsumed in The Handmaid’s Tale within the macrocosmic level of state-organization. Woman’s ‘power’ of reproduction is here woman’s greatest weakness, the cause of her ultimate oppression and the destruction of her personhood. The containment of womanhood within exaggerated gender roles that Shelley implicitly criticizes in her texts, especially in Frankenstein, is given a dramatic manifestation in The Handmaid’s Tale, as will be shown in Chapter 3. Particularly, Atwood satirizes the Rightist fundamentalist attitudes to motherhood through her presentation of a dystopian society that reduces women to mere breeders in the gothic setup of a theocratic state revolving around reproduction. Atwood, however, does not blame patriarchy alone. The Handmaid’s Tale shows up women’s willful blindness to the sexual-political signifiers in their personal lives, an attitude resulting from an exclusive commitment to their personal survival in the heterosexual polity of patriarchy and the concomitant disinterest in collective efforts to improve their status in society. This apolitical mentality—and the relative lack of trust and sisterhood among women that goes alongside—are related in The Handmaid’s Tale to their dependence on heterosexual ‘love’ or ‘romance’, a dependence that ensures their subordination by making passivity and object-status desirable to them. Atwood probes the relation of ‘love’ to women’s agency, hinting at the need for them to seek out patterns of heterosexual relationships that are more liberating and more equitable than those provided by the traditional grammar of ‘romantic’ love. In The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood denounces patriarchal misogyny and essentialist notions about womanhood; yet, she also emphasizes the fact that patriarchal power politics affects the individual’s personhood adversely, irrespective of gender. She therefore advocates mutual understanding and cooperation between the sexes even as she underlines the importance of solidarity among women. Indeed, Atwood’s critique of women’s complicity with patriarchal power takes note of the way a certain alienating tendency within feminism itself plays into the hands of patriarchal fundamentalism by insisting on the separation of ‘women’s culture’ from the mainstream of patriarchal societies and from public politics.10 Although gender is not apparently Atwood’s major theme in Oryx and Crake, the novel does engage with aspects of patriarchal gender dynamics, hinting at inequities, the implications of which are the more damaging because of their situation in a scientifically super-sophisticated future society. Particularly, Atwood engages with the ideology of femininity, inter-gender ‘love’ and its relation to women’s personhood and, above all, the stifling impact on women of the cultural institution of motherhood.

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Introduction

Oryx, lover to the protagonist Jimmy/Snowman, is the figure through which is brought out the persistence of the inequitable patterns of gender relations characteristic of romantic ‘love’ and the damaging impact such a ‘love’ may have on a woman’s life and agency. Also, through Oryx and Ramona, Jimmy’s stepmother, Atwood illustrates the disharmonious nature of inter-gender interactions whereby women are required to play by the rules of the sexist and inauthentic ideal of ‘femininity’. Indeed, in Oryx and Crake—as in Frankenstein—cardinal aspects of patriarchal womanhood are shown up as masquerade, and this is most palpable in Atwood’s critique of normative motherhood brought out through the relational dynamics of Jimmy and her mother Sharon. This ‘imperfect’ mother of the protagonist is the figure through which Atwood critiques the new-Right ideology of motherhood and presents an illustration of what has been called the subversive practice of ‘feminist mothering’.11 Sharon’s career in the novel, seen along with her upbringing of her son, exemplifies a kind of oppositional maternal practice that combines political engagement with mothering, nurture with rebellion, and liberates the mother’s agency, both personal and societal, from the confines of prescriptive motherhood. In the character of Jimmy/Snowman, the product of Sharon’s mothering, moreover, Atwood presents a kind of sensibility that hints at the possibility of a movement beyond normative gender. The culturally salutary integration of the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’—the rational and the affective—is held out in Oryx and Crake as an ideal, and it is indicated that a non-sexist oppositional mothering could contribute significantly to realizing that ideal in the children we bring up to be the men of the future.12 As observed earlier, the futuristic speculations of both Shelley and Atwood engage with the socio-cultural impact not only of gender disparities but also of colonialism and neo-imperialism. Both Frankenstein and The Last Man recognize that the (masculine) urge toward selfassertive achievement can be as deleterious to communities as to the nuclear family; and this insight is brought out partly through Shelley’s condemnation of colonialism, which she perceives as a function of male ambitions at both the individual and the national levels. At a time when England was riding high on the wave of its colonial exploits around the world and colonialism was a vital part of its cultural identity Shelley’s Frankenstein recognizes the impulse to dominate and exploit other peoples as part of the general malaise that inheres in self-centred (male) aspirations. The Last Man carries forward this considered anti-colonialism. Here Raymond—prototype of England’s political ‘heroes’—is killed in the

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wake of his active engagement in Greece’s war against the Turks, a war fundamentally about the West’s will to subjugate the East. And the ultimate signifier of Shelley’s condemnation of colonialism in this novel is the ‘Plague’ itself. Originating in the East and gradually destroying the world, wrecking families, cities, and nations, it is a symbolic nemesis visited upon the colonizing West, which socio-politically defines itself by annexing and dominating its racial/geopolitical ‘Others’. By exposing the insularity and national/racial pride inherent in the world-view of England’s heroes the novel brings out Shelley’s critique of the Anglocentric imperial mindset. Shelley’s familial ethic, defined by temperance and commitment toward the collective, translates here, as in Frankenstein, into a political ideology that would eschew both the sanguinary, anarchic potential of revolutionary movements and the exploitative and destructive nature of colonialism. If Shelley was concerned with the disruptive potentiality of colonialism—“the conquest and direct control of other people’s land”— Atwood, our contemporary, engages with the impact of “the globalization of the capitalistic mode of production” that defines (Western) imperialism today (Williams and Chrisman 2). It is the imperial power of technologydriven global capitalism that is implicated as the prime agent bringing about the apocalypse depicted in Oryx and Crake. Atwood’s concern with environmental degradation, apparent in Surfacing and in The Handmaid’s Tale, resurfaces here. A highly materialistic, dystopian society of the late twenty-first century USA, Atwood shows, brings forth a catastrophe whereby nature is warped into malevolence and humankind is wiped out by a plague—like in Shelley’s The Last Man. Unlike in The Last Man, however, the plague in Oryx and Crake is unleashed by a scientist working to bioengineer the human species according to the crassly materialistic standards of the people, whose desires are fuelled by the greed of the almighty global biotechnology corporations. If Shelley’s plague in The Last Man is a symbolic revenge, as it were, of the East against the colonizing West, the virus in Oryx and Crake is the scourge of neoimperialism coming back to destroy the imperializing power of global capital rooted in Western economies. The futuristic visions of both Shelley and Atwood negate the conception of history as “change-through-time heading in the direction of perfection”—the idea of history as Progress (Atwood, “Writing Utopia 87). The Last Man, moreover, highlights the masculinist/public bias inherent in mainstream history-making by presenting a personal narrative of loss and loneliness as the final testament of human history. Atwood also, in the The Handmaid’s Tale, shows up the patriarchal bias of

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Introduction

institutional historiography even as she relates our present values to our readings of the past and our collective construction of the future. Her critique of women’s complacency and political non-involvement is made edgier by her emphasis on the responsibility of collective history-making on the one hand and the moral obligation to bear witness against injustice on the other. In both Shelley and Atwood Art, and specifically literature, emerges as a theme integral to their futuristic visions. While literature and the act of composition are a solace to the protagonist faced with loneliness and grief in The Last Man Art generally is conceived in this novel as the embodiment of the best and the finest in humanity—an antithesis to the vulgarity generated in the aftermath of the French Revolution on the one hand and at the advent of imperialist commerce on the other. In Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, likewise, Art is held up as an implied ideal against the philistinism and the moral-aesthetic apathy generated by capitalistic consumerism and the ethos of technoscience. In The Handmaid’s Tale the narrative itself is implicated in the protagonist’s struggle against oppression and loneliness even as it emerges as a means to bear witness against societal injustice and as an instrument to create bonds across generations among fellow victims. The overall insight provided by this study of Shelley and Atwood consists in a shared perception of the values of technoscience and neoimperial capitalism as being at odds with personal liberty and individuality, especially for women, and with familial and communal wellbeing, global peace and environmental stability. Both authors understand the human as a function of the interplay of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, the rational and the affective, the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’. It is posited that for human specificity to be retained reason or rationalistic intelligence on the one hand and feelings and the imagination on the other are to be equally cultivated and integrated. In this context, Art, especially literature, becomes important as both the epitome of and the means to revive the wholeness of the human. Man–woman harmony is upheld as the ideal even as women are alerted to the persistence of patriarchal misogyny and to the politics of the personal. Sharing of the values of moderation, peace and nurture equally among men and women, both the authors imply, needs to be achieved.

CHAPTER ONE FRANKENSTEIN: RADICAL SCIENCE, NATURE AND CULTURE

As the staggering corpus of critical literature that has grown around Frankenstein (1818) shows, the novel engages with myriad issues of philosophical, political, psychological and socio-cultural import. These issues belong to a variety of thematic rubrics, including those of Shelley’s perceived critique of (radical) science, the dialectic of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, the politics of social reformation in the context of the French Revolution, and the nature of being and ‘Otherness’. As has been argued by Anne K. Mellor in Mary Shelley, the novel embodies the author’s critique of elements of a (Romantic) masculinity that tends to consummate itself through insensitive egoism and idealism.1 Positioning herself against this ethos, Shelley endorses an alternative way to personal fulfilment and social melioration through interdependence and harmony in familial and communal lives. However, Frankenstein also hints at an incipient criticism of the gender-biases Shelley felt were intrinsic to the nineteenth-century British nuclear family even as it reveals the tensions inherent to (her) womanhood.2 Also, being among the earliest literary works in English to thematically involve the creation of the species, Frankenstein engages with the subject of procreation in patriarchy. As argued by critics, most notably by Ellen Moers, the anxieties and tensions incident to Shelley’s experiences of motherhood shape her ‘hideous progeny’ in important ways.3 The present chapter will be concerned, primarily, with exploring Shelley’s treatment of the dialectic of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the context of radical science. Hesitating to see Frankenstein’s science as a positive attempt to usurp female procreative power, the argument here intends to establish Shelley’s critique of the conceptual and discursive schism between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’—a schism that underlies the tension between transcendence and immanence, the egoistic and the familial, and ultimately, the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’ in patriarchy.

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This hierarchical and gendered schism is fundamental to patriarchal thought—as Simone de Beauvoir and Sherry B. Ortner shows. This, as we shall see, is also the thought paradigm that actuates modern science as it was conceptualized in the seventeenth century. Frankenstein, while not being a simplistic warning against the excesses of science, critiques this sexist and reductive ideology of modern science and falsifies the stratified dualism of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that is foundational to patriarchy and inimical to the wholeness of the human. This critique, realized in a context of speculation based on the radical science of Shelley’s times, denounces the reductionism of scientific rationality while articulating a feminist apprehension of the public/private (man/woman) dichotomy that constitutes the social expression of the sexism of science. The thematic richness of Frankenstein implicates also, as we noted at the beginning, the issue of anti-authoritarian rebellion and political idealism. Written in the shadow of the French Revolution, Shelley’s legendary first novel evokes on the one hand the idealism and the spirit of rebellion that led to the Revolution and, on the other, the mayhem, the anarchy and the reversal of hopes it left in its wake. Shelley’s engagement with this thematic takes in an incipient critique of colonialism—an evil she views as an integral part of the masculine urge toward ego-centric achievement which, to her, is the chief enemy of familial and communal well-being. The anti-colonial element of Shelley’s political and social critique, however, deepens in her later novels—in Valperga (1823), for example, and especially in The Last Man, which we shall study in the next chapter.

Re-framing ‘the Science Question’ in Frankenstein Frankenstein started receiving serious attention from scholars and critics in the late 1970s; over the decades a critical consensus seems to have formed about the science in the novel vis-à-vis the discursive and cultural category of gender. Critics have argued it with different emphases and from various critical vantage points but, in most analyses, the crux of this interpretive consensus has been to view Frankenstein’s science as a negative manipulation of nature, an attempt, specifically, to usurp woman’s creative power through scientific technology.4 Although there is much to be said for this view, it represents only one way of looking at the science in the novel, a perspective that sees woman’s reproductive function only as power and equates reproductive technologies to male attempts to undermine or usurp that power. This is also partly a function of what Maurice Hindle identifies as “the tendency to read

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today’s concerns back into the novel, to take its ‘message’ about ‘obsessive scientific pursuit’ for granted as a prefiguring of science’s often dangerous advances in the twentieth century” (29–30).5 While it is culturally rewarding to read past texts in the light of present concerns I pursue a somewhat different line here. Instead of reading Frankenstein as a critique of technological violation of nature, I see it as a subversion of the thematic itself of nature-versus-culture and as a critique of both the Baconian conception of modern science—a conception symptomatic of this hierarchical opposition in cultural thinking—and the gender divisions created and sustained by this discursive and attitudinal schism. The theoretical base of this argument is provided by Ortner’s analysis of the universal cultural devaluation of woman in terms of the conceptual categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Ortner’s analysis, in turn, builds on de Beauvoir’s diagnosis of ‘the woman problem’ as being the result of sociocultural factors arising from woman’s procreative function. Accordingly, my position on the science question in Frankenstein is in non-alignment with the critical consensus that sees woman’s reproductive function purely as her cultural power. Some feminist analyses of Frankenstein have dwelt on Shelley’s critique of the destruction of the familial by the workings of (male) Romantic egoism while some others have emphasized how it inscribes “the unresolvable contradictions in being female” in patriarchy (Mellor, Mary Shelley 115-26; Johnson, “My Monster” 250). I perceive both these aspects of the novel as functions of Shelley’s critical engagement with the universal cultural ideology that defines man as an autonomous being separate from and in control of his natural environment—an ideology replicated in the paradigm of modern science through its insistence on ‘objectivity’ and ‘mastery’ of nature and the natural, to which realm woman is perceived to be closer than man. I define this ideology as a universal one rather than as a function of the historically specific moment of Enlightenment anthropocentrism (Shelley’s intellectual heritage) for I understand the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the philosophical-anthropological senses in which Ortner defines them. Distinguishing ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as “conceptual categories,” Ortner defines “culture” as the composite of the processes of “generating and sustaining meaningful forms . . . by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them to its interest”. ‘Culture’ is thus “broadly equated with human consciousness, or with the products of human consciousness (i.e., systems of thought and technology), by means of which humanity attempts to assert control over nature” (72). Women’s relative confinement in and

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identification with the realms of the natural and the familial—consequent upon her natural reproductive function and her culturally imposed role of sole/primary care-giver to the child—is thus a function of this universal ideology of defining man in terms of his opposition to and mastery of nature (Ortner 76–83). Modern science, as conceptualized in seventeenth-century Europe, sharpens this schism basic to cultural thinking as has been shown by feminist theoreticians of the philosophy and sociology of science, like Carolyn Merchant, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Brian Easlea. Nature, in this ideology of science, is conceived as a female thing to be possessed and controlled by man, whose affective detachment from his object effects a divorce between the rational-material (‘masculine’) and the affectiveethical (‘feminine’) categories of experience and values. That Frankenstein recognizes a gender-based division of cultural functions has been observed by Kate Ellis (“Monsters in the Garden”) and by Jean Hall, both of whom relate this aspect of the novel to Shelley’s critique of domestic affection in the context of the (bourgeois) family. Mellor too connects the novel’s representation of the gendered domains of activity to Shelley’s critique of the nineteenth century bourgeois family (Mary Shelley 214–15). I see it neither as the result of a specifically bourgeois family context nor merely as part of Shelley’s critique of gender-bias in the familial structure itself.6 Rather, I read in Frankenstein Shelley’s response to the deep-rooted universal cultural ideology that defines man in terms of his transcendence of nature and the natural, with which woman is more closely identified than man. In order to develop this thesis I shall first put forward the specifics of my perspective on the issue of Frankenstein’s usurpation of female ‘power’. Frankenstein’s creation is not cloning-style unisexual propagation. Although he dreams of fathering a race, his project primarily involves “bestow(ing) animation upon lifeless matter,” not creating a new being of his biological self: he does not propagate himself through his Creature, except, perhaps, as an embodiment of his desires. And his ultimate goal, as he tells us, is to be able to “renew life where death (has) apparently devoted the body to corruption” (32; emphasis added). The text does not seem to present Frankenstein’s scientific project as that of usurping the reproductive power of the female: we have no evidence that when he dreams of being the creator of a superior race Frankenstein means that it would be a unisex population. Indeed, in that case, he would have equipped his Creature to reproduce by himself. He does not do so, and the Creature begs his creator for a female companion with whom he can share a normal sexual and affective existence.

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It is only after being horrified by the destructive acts and the terrible appearance of his Creature that Frankenstein comes to fear the propagation of its offspring and destroys the female monster. This act could be seen as betraying Frankenstein’s fear of the female will and a free female sexuality, as has been done by Mellor and Mary Jacobus (Mellor, Mary Shelley 120; Jacobus, “Is there a Woman in this Text?” 100–04). But it still does not serve to characterize his original motive as that of usurping female procreative power. And if the novel shows the “systematic annihilation” of “the generative female”, as Burton Hatlen observes, it also shows the annihilation of male figures—little William, Clerval, and the senior Frankenstein—through the same agency (295). Frankenstein’s scientific project is more about the issue of science defining itself by objectifying and mastering nature than a male attack on the female’s generative power. The power to give birth, in the absence of the power not to give birth— in the absence, that is, of choice—can hardly be reckoned only as a prerogative, except in a rather asocial, metaphysical sense. Even after the advent of contraception the extent to which women can enjoy real choice in the exercise of their fecundity remains more or less contingent upon familial and social circumstances and the degree of personal autonomy they enjoy within these structures. The body politic of patriarchy, built around the institutions of marriage and the family, demands that woman serve man by giving him his progeny; this could and does result in her cultural power—the “dubious power of fecundity”—being also the cause of her cultural bondage and exploitation (de Beauvoir 160). As will be shown in Chapter 3, Atwood’s dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale is a trenchant projection of this double-bind for women. Frankenstein does bring into play the theme of reproductive creation through images that evoke female reproductive experiences. The very young author of the novel was having a rather demanding, chaotic, unique experience with sexuality and motherhood around the period during which she conceived and wrote it—as Moers’ biographical research shows us (220–222). In a creative response to that experience Shelley projects the physical and mental states associated with gestation and birthing on the scientist, who undergoes “midnight labours,” faints, grows “pale” and “emaciated with confinement,” and suffers from “nervous fever,” anxiety and mental agitation (32, 37). By likening Frankenstein’s absorption in his project to childbearing on the one hand and to the “doom” of obligatory “toil” and “slavery” on the other Shelley registers her reaction, as it were, to women’s biological destiny, and gives a subversive thrust to the patriarchal stereotype of the happy mother-artist, proudly and blissfully

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“occupied by (her) favourite employment” (33).7 Also, as Moers observes, the “motif of revulsion against newborn life” evoked by Frankenstein’s immediate rejection of his Creature is “within the normal range of (maternal) experience” and makes the book’s “most feminine” moment by projecting “the trauma of the after-birth” (218). Yet, in ideological terms, Frankenstein’s revulsion and rejection also set in motion his parental failure, his inability to nurture and acculturate his Creature. It is significant that Shelley introduces the theme of culpable parental irresponsibility in a way that evokes a new mother’s negative post partum experiences, which constitute an aspect of motherhood that is the most suppressed in cultural discourses. This association of what is most reprehensible about Frankenstein’s conduct with real female experience is symptomatic of the author’s ambivalence toward Frankenstein’s radical scientific project in particular and self-assertive ambition in general, a point to which we shall return. When Frankenstein conceives his scientific project of creating a human being out of cadaver parts he, in his callous self-absorption, fails to visualize the practical consequences of such an extra-cultural creation. Indeed, he conceives his ambition “to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man” in the face of sobering facts: “The materials at present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an undertaking. But I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed” (31). Here what he expresses is not only his confidence in his own talents but also the practical and moral blindness that is the consequence of his selfabsorption and the deficiency of theoretical reason. While his persistence and scientific genius do actually enable him to produce a human creature, his real failure inheres in his inability to give that creature a human life. Even in the creation of the being the failure of theoretical, scientific reason is signaled tellingly by the grotesqueness of the Creature’s appearance which was no part of Frankenstein’s design. Despite choosing “beautiful” features for the Creature the final product of Frankenstein’s fanatic toil is horrid to look at (34). Given that this is the single most important thing about the Creature—the reason for his terrible rejection by human society—as well as the most crucial circumstance in the novel’s plot, this unintended result of Frankenstein’s technology could be taken as a measure of Shelley’s lack of faith in theoretical reason (as distinct from pragmatism and affective sensitivity) as the cornerstone of scientific speculation. 8 Frankenstein greatly contributes to his Creature’s misery by making him into a being of gigantic proportions. Merely because he feels impeded by “the minuteness of the parts” of the human frame, he decides to make

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his creature “eight feet in height, and proportionably large” (32). This betrays a criminal lack in him of the necessary awareness that what he is working on will be an autonomous being capable of human feelings, and that it will be his responsibility to give that being a tolerable existence in human society. Frankenstein’s exclusive focus on his project to bestow life on inanimate matter makes him blind to everything else, including the fact that the life he would create would only begin with the infusion of the “spark of being” into the assemblage of dead matter—that life is not one supreme moment but a process consisting in a “chain of events and existence” determined not by the manageable sureties of science but by the complex contingencies of nature-in-culture (34, 100). Through the disastrous results of Frankenstein’s ambitious technological experiment Shelley makes the point that any attempt to treat the natural aspect of the human animal to the exclusion of the cultural is untenable, for it is through a constant interpenetration of the natural and the cultural that the human constitutes and expresses itself. Frankenstein’s failure inheres in his inability to provide his Creature with a cultural environment conducive to the growth of healthy emotions and in his failure to establish it in the network of relations—the “chain of existence and events”—that is the essence of the nature-culture continuum constituting human life (100). We may note here that “existence,” denoting the biological, is said to form a “chain”—not a graded binary opposition—with “events,” denoting the cultural. It is through a combination of a deficiency in the real-world perception that life unfolds in a cultural matrix and a lack of affective attachment to the being created that Frankenstein dooms his Creature to a miserable existence. Frankenstein’s scientific ambition, although partly altruistic, is inspired in large measure by egoism. Recognizing the “variety of feelings that bore [him] onwards”, he muses on his ultimate wish to “renew life” in dead bodies even as he dreams of being “the first to break through” the “ideal bounds of nature” and of claiming complete “gratitude” of “a new species” (32). And the primary consequence of Frankenstein’s transgressive ambition is his alienation from the realm of the affective and the familial, and the destruction of his family itself. He is perceptive enough to point this out himself as he expresses his state of mind while he has been toiling at his project: . . . but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of nature, should be completed. (33)

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In proposing the fulfilment afforded by familial mutuality as a salutary way of defining and realizing the self, Shelley advances Walton’s career as an alternative to Frankenstein’s. Although Walton sets out toward the North Pole on a quest to satisfy his imaginative drives, he is ultimately shown to be mindful of the welfare of his crew, and returns to England. And, unlike Frankenstein, he balances the claims of the self with those of relationships—as his frequent and affectionate letters to his sister show. His abandonment of his expedition—seen along with the fact that he is the ultimate survivor—serves to emphasize the moral value of curbing the claims of the self in the interest of the relational within a familial/communal context. The emphasis Shelley puts on familial acculturation and social embeddedness is particularly strong in her presentation of the Creature’s life. When abandoned, the Creature is a gigantic baby. Unsupported by any familial or social context, he is totally helpless and goes about learning about his own basic needs and teaching himself necessary skills for survival. In this ‘natural’ state he evinces the instinct for selfpreservation and comes to feel compassion for the De Lacey family. His compassion subsequently engenders his desire to make their acquaintance. By thus showing the natural instinct for compassion leading directly to the social instinct for establishing relations, Shelley marks a fluidity between the state of nature and that of culture, and undoes the conceptual hiatus between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that is central to Rousseau’s philosophy (O’ Rourke 317–318). This conceptual separation, basic to patriarchal thinking, got a fillip from the Romantic/Rousseauistic discourses on the superiority and the primacy of the natural. The Creature’s career is one major locus of Shelley’s critique of this conceptual and discursive schism. In the Creature’s life-story Shelley both expounds and undercuts Rousseau’s concept of the ‘natural man’—the pure animal being of the human creature that gets corrupted by the artificiality and decadence of civilization. Save the first outgoing emotion of the Creature that makes him turn to its creator in a gesture of clinging dependence, all his feelings of sympathy and benevolence are aroused in response to his cultural environment, as is his sense of right and wrong. The Creature himself points this out to Frankenstein when he concludes the anecdote of the De Laceys thus: “Such was the history of my beloved cottagers. It impressed me deeply. I learned, from the views of social life which it developed, to admire their virtues, and to deprecate the vices of mankind” (85). Cultural documents in the form of books give him “an infinity of new images and feelings”; Goethe’s “Sorrows of Werter ” gives him the sense of “something out of self” and Plutarch’s “Lives” teaches him “high thoughts” and

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“elevate(s) (him) above the wretched sphere of (his) own reflections” (86). To be sure, social rejection turns the Creature into a monster. But by showing even virtuous people like Felix and Agatha turn away from him in horror, Shelley emphasizes a monstrousness in him that inheres in his physical difference from other human beings, a difference that could be seen as an outward index of his terrible lack of relatedness—his status as the Other to human culture. It is this lack of a cultural context that is monstrous about him, and at one sad point in his narrative he seems to make the connection himself: “I was dependent on none, and related to none. ‘The path of my departure was free’; and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic: what did this mean? Who was I? What was I? . . .” (86). The Creature’s unjust rejection by society is thus a direct fall-out of Frankenstein’s culpable parental failure to provide a relational (cultural) ambience to the Creature—which is a function of his inability to factor into his scientific reason the value of the social-familial. For the family, although associated with natural immanence, is also the intermediary between nature and culture, being the “synthesizing agent for culture and society”—the primary site where “animal-like infants” are “culturiz[ed]” into new members of society (Ortner 83–84, 80).The Creature’s miserable career, then, underscores the mutual contingency, the enmeshed contiguity of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’—a circumstance Frankenstein’s science ignores. The trope of the family as a communal ideal pitted against the (Romantic) masculine ethos of individualism is, however, complicated in Frankenstein by the recognition of the negative impact on women of rigid gender roles intrinsic to the patriarchal structure of the family. Frankenstein’s society of nineteenth-century Geneva is defined by strict gender division: while the men function as explorers, scientists, and politicians in the public sphere, the women are confined to the private realm as maids, homekeepers or nurses. The desirable and praiseworthy woman, like Elizabeth, emerges as a composite of relative mental inconsequence and “docile” servitude (19). Thus, Frankenstein describes Elizabeth as one who can submit with “grace” to “constraint and caprice”, has the hardihood to endure “great fatigue”, and a mind characterized by a “luxuriant imagination”—one suited to follow only “the aerial creations of the poets” (19–20). The deleterious impact such a conception of womanhood has on women’s agency is signaled by Justine’s and Elizabeth’s inability to prevail upon the male judicial establishment (Mellor, Mary Shelley 116). And since the role of the care-giver is only the woman’s—since motherhood is constructed as utter selflessness—the mother feels constrained to act out that role, even to the point where it

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causes her own destruction. Thus, Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein dies a preventable death through her insistence on nursing her sick but recovering adopted daughter, Elizabeth “long before the danger of infection was past” (24). So palpable is the culturally imposed and imbibed difference in gender roles between the wife/mother and the husband/father that even the Creature, who is an outsider to culture, learns about this segregation early in his life: “I heard of the differences of the sexes; . . . how the father doated on the smiles of the infant . . . how all the life and cares of the mother were wrapt up in the precious charge” (81). While the father merely enjoys the children, the mother’s very existence is defined by her motherhood. The means to escape the negative impact on women of rigid gender structures is embodied by an alternative, egalitarian model of the family provided by the De Lacey household, where all work is equally shared by the male and the female members even as the children care for their blind old father lovingly. Moreover, this gender-equal family shelters Safie, who could be seen as Shelley’s depiction of the educated and (potentially) independent woman, modeled on Wollstonecraft’s ideal of womanhood as presented in her writings. But this positive archetype of the family, along with the independent woman, vanishes from the novel mid-way, dramatizing Shelley’s despairing perception of the unattainability of that ideal within the context of nineteenth-century British society as she knew it (Mellor, Mary Shelley 118). Indeed, the whole moral of self-abnegation and commitment to the family that Frankenstein seems to endorse is “argued very ambivalently” by Shelley as the ambiguity in her attitude to Frankenstein’s project shows (Levine 31). As both common readers and critics perceive, Shelley is not unambiguously opposed to Frankenstein’s radical technoscience.9 But while retaining a good measure of the reader’s sympathy with the ‘mad’ scientist she also sympathizes with the Creature, the result of Frankenstein’s technology, and presents his case persuasively, gracing the apparently monstrous being with this “saving” feature that “rather than using grunts and gestures (he) speaks with the highest elegance, logic and persuasiveness” (Brooks 329). In textual terms, Shelley’s ambivalence toward the science depicted in the novel is reflected in the words of the scientist himself before he dies. While acknowledging that his ambitions have brought him only unhappiness, Frankenstein still hopes that where he has failed “another” may “succeed” (152). Yet, at the end of her novel Shelley leaves an image of Frankenstein’s scientific achievement contrasted with his parental failure, as the Creature declares his despairing wish to die in the frozen Arctic wastes. Despite Walton’s reprimand to the

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Creature, the reader’s sympathy at this point veers toward that miserable being (Jansson xiv). As major critics on the novel have argued, the author of Frankenstein was torn between her considered moral position in favor of the familial ethos of self-denial and mutuality and an inner drive toward seeking fulfilment through self-assertion.10 But this tension is basically a reaction to the gender-based separation of spheres promoted in patriarchal cultures by the conceptual opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. The emotional detachment of the male scientist from his creation—the chief cause of the Creature’s misery—is symptomatic of a sexist ordering of the realms of the affective and the rational whereby woman and the ‘private’ realm of the familial-domestic are identified and positioned as separate and subordinate to the male (‘public’) sphere of intellectual sublimation and transcendence. Frankenstein creates a human organism by means of technology; but it is through contact with human culture and through a vicarious education that the Creature becomes aware of his own humanity. It is important to note, as Peter Brooks reminds us, that the Creature’s consciousness of both his humanity and his unique situation in life is the result of his mastery of language, the network of signs “that implies the structure of relations at the basis of culture” (331). When the Creature wishes to enter into relation with the De Laceys he wishes to enter this cultural order from which his hideous difference excludes him. He realizes that in order to be human he has to enter the systemic network of inter-subjective relations that names and defines individual human subjects. Having failed to establish relations with ‘normal’ human beings he pleads with his creator for a mate who would resemble him and with whom he could “become linked to the chain of existence and events from which (he is) excluded” (100). The unfair denial by Frankenstein to grant this wish makes the Creature act out a monstrousness of which his hideous physicality is taken to be an emblem by the people he meets. Thus the Creature’s career illustrates the indefensibility of Rousseauistic idealism by showing the fragility of natural goodness; through it Shelley offers a “counter example” to “pedagogical utopias as Rousseau’s Emile” (Brooks 337). By emphasizing the culturally defined nature of humanity this critique, moreover, serves to point out the inextricable, mutually implicating connection of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and the futility of pining for a pristine, primal Nature to which humanity could and should return. The calamitous consequences of Frankenstein’s scientific achievement points up the importance of the familial sphere of culture—the importance of both the “culturiz(ing)” role the family plays in assimilating the child into the greater community and the humanizing impact on the individual of domestic intercourse within the family (Ortner 73). In recent times Jean

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B. Elshtain has made a similar point by extolling the cultural—and potentially political—significance of familial and domestic values. But Elshtain seems to put the onus of reconstructing the public and the private into a humane and equitable polity on women alone. Also, she argues for the inviolability of the private realm, thereby ironically reinforcing the very schism that she identifies as the cause for women’s political exclusion. Shelley’s is a more liberal feminist position that implicitly urges against treating the familial realm as a women’s ghetto—urges against the marginalization of the moral and the affective—by positing that men should commit themselves to the familial equally with women. Shelley’s idealization of the gender-equal De Lacey family and of Walton and her incipient criticism of the way women’s lives are undermined by their exclusive focus on the familial constitute markers of her realization that for the family to ensure the well-being of all members men need to commit to it as much as women. Indeed, the most explicit and strongest statement in favor of the relational as opposed to the egoistic come from the protagonist himself as he preaches self-discipline and the value of the affections to a fellow male: A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. . . . If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no allow can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful . . . not befitting the human mind. (33)

Shelley’s championing of the family and the familial affections is a reaction to patriarchy’s devaluation of the familial realm, to which it limits woman. In showing the disastrous consequences of Frankenstein’s abandonment of his Creature, both for the Creature himself and for others, Shelley proposes her ideal of familial bonds as the basis of morality and the context of identity-formation.11 However, the idealization of a genderequal family (and of an affectively bonded male figure) reflects a feminist demand for men to commit themselves to an equal degree to the task of the preservation of the species. The force of the caveat is further augmented by Shelley’s ambiguous response to Frankenstein’s science. By upholding the value of the familial, Shelley champions woman’s cultural role. But at the same time her dualistic attitude toward Frankenstein’s self-assertive scientific project and her upholding of a gender-equal domestic space together betray her insight that the domestic condition impedes woman’s participation in culture’s project of transcending nature. As de Beauvoir points out, woman herself shares in

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culture’s devaluation of her reproductive-nurturant role and wishes to participate in the greater processes of culture in order to realize her humanity: For she, too, is an existent, she feels the urge to surpass, and her project is not mere repetition but transcendence towards a different future -- in her heart of hearts she finds confirmation of the masculine pretensions. . . . Her misfortune is to have been biologically destined for the repetition of Life, when even in her own view Life does not carry within itself its reasons for being, reasons that are more important than the life itself. (96)

Shelley’s upholding of the family and the familial affections on the one hand and, on the other, her critique of men’s deficient commitment to the familial and her ambiguous attitude toward Frankenstein’s scientific project together bring out this basic tension in the cultural situation of woman. This tension—fundamentally a function of the hierarchical binary of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’—is realized in Frankenstein in the specific context of nineteenth-century England. The categorical rift between ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ the legacy of Enlightenment humanism, could be viewed as deriving from the Cartesian tradition of Western metaphysics: cogito ergo sum is the formulation of a conceptual separation between the living organic being of the human animal and its faculty for intellection, between ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ This in its turn is an intellectual formulation of the implicit foundational ideology of all human cultures that defines man’s fulfilment in terms of his mastery of the natural givens of his existence. Shelley’s fictional presentation of the human failure of scientific reason is thus, basically, a critique of the positioning of the natural and the cultural as hierarchical and gendered conceptual absolutes in both the discourses and the praxes of patriarchal societies. This conceptual separation, as Bruno Latour has argued, is one of the absolutisms that have defined modernity since the beginning of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century (13). Shelley’s critique of the scientific apprehension of nature as separable from culture, her critique of scientific ‘objectivity,’ then, prefigures Latour’s arguments about the disjunction between the scientific and humanistic discourses of knowledge—an “invent(ed)” “separation between the scientific power charged with representing things and the political power charged with representing subjects” (29). Fundamentally an expression of a masculinist, reductive universal ideological paradigm, this conceptual and attitudinal error breeds the ideology of scientism enshrined in today’s techno-capitalistic world, an

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ideology that attempts to ‘explain’ everything in terms of its ‘nature’ and ends up marginalizing the ethical/affective/aesthetic from the structures of power, including institutionalized education, thereby compromising the wholeness of the human. We shall have occasion to return to this while discussing Atwood’s apocalyptic-speculative novel Oryx and Crake in Chapter 4.

Rebellion, Revolution and Frankenstein The epigraph to Frankenstein from Milton’s Paradise Lost serves as a declaration that the theme of anti-authoritarian rebellion is significantly related to the text that follows. The epigraph also tells us of the nature of the rebellion with which the novel is concerned: Adam’s plaint to God epitomizes the revolt of the created against the creator that Frankenstein illustrates. Indeed, Frankenstein is an important participant in the dialogue between Milton and the Romantics, and it reads Milton’s text as a questioning of traditional authority rather than as an unproblematic affirmation of the claims of the same. Perceiving in Frankenstein a critique of the patriarchal mythos of creation, Hatlen sees the novel as “strain[ing] to bring into being . . . the generative, anti-patriarchal creator . . . freely creating in her own right, and claiming no residual rights of possession over the beings she creates” (295–96). However, Shelley’s attempt to move toward this alternative mythos of unpossessive and unpossessed (female) creation is not sufficiently evident in Frankenstein and does not seem to work out at the level of the text. This is so because Shelley is concerned not so much with pitting an alternative to the ‘male’ mode of creation than with critiquing the irresponsible, loveless manner in which the egoistic male creator might relate to the created. As we have seen in the previous section, the novel’s plot works out in terms of the consequences of too little parental care and control rather than too much. What Adam’s words to God quoted in the epigraph constitute is more a remonstrance against parental injustice and irresponsibility than a rebellious challenge to parental authority itself. The main thrust of Shelley’s critique is against a male mode of defining the self through egoistic transcendence rather than through shared familial immanence. Her feminism inheres in the ideal upheld in Frankenstein of an egalitarian framework of gender relations wherein the male and the female creators would be equally committed to the care of the offspring and the preservation of the harmonious family. Her’s is an approach that seeks to

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reform and democratize patriarchy from within rather than overthrow the established order itself. Extrapolating from Shelley’s perceived support for parent-children hierarchy, Mellor posits that the author of Frankenstein endorses the British class system as she found it, conceiving “certain political groups as children” to be entrusted to the care of the aristocrats and idealizing the concept of the “polis-as-family” (Mary Shelley 87). But Shelley’s apparent support for social status quo and her ideal of the state as family seems related more to her commitment to the principle of care and harmony than to any conscious endorsement of class tyranny. For that matter, Shelley’s support for parental authority over children is not sufficiently corroborated on the textual level. It is qualified when the narrative condemns as “proud and unbending” the disposition of Caroline Beaufort’s father, the patriarch who inflicts enormous hardship on her daughter and even accepts her marriage to a man old enough to be her father in order to save his ego (18). While Frankenstein idealizes egalitarian gender relations within the family and endorses women’s education and independence—through Safie—it does not seem to involve itself with the issue of intergenerational power dynamics within the family. We appreciate better Shelley’s ideal of national/social harmony—her aversion to radicalism—when we place Frankenstein in its immediate historical context. Shelley came to intellectual adulthood at an era that saw the frustration of the hopes kindled by the French Revolution in anarchy and sanguinary violence. The situation gave rise to paranoiac fears in England of the precipitation of a similar bloody chaos through mass uprisings.12 Shelley, committed to the principle of care and preservation through her ideal of familial harmony, could disregard neither the misery of the dispossessed aristocrats nor the destruction of lives and livelihood of common people caused by the French Revolution—the latter reflected in her description of “the melancholy aspect of devastation” worn by the “wretched” French villages she saw in 1814 (History of a Six Weeks’ Tour 22–23). Shelley’s apparent political conservatism feeds into debates on her attitude to English colonialism as expressed in Frankenstein. Victor’s comment that “America would have been discovered more gradually” if men kept closer to their families does seem to point to an unquestioning acceptance of colonialism as “England’s social mission” (33; Spivak 262). But this could equally plausibly be seen as an illustration of Shelley’s fear of the repercussions that could be consequent upon a precipitous disturbance in the normal course of things, a fear and distrust of attempts to suddenly bring in great changes. Her emphasis seems to fall not on the

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‘discovery’ of America and its colonialist implication, but on an easy pace of bringing in change—on temperance—and on men’s commitment to the family. Thus, the repentant Frankenstein deplores—in the same speech— the destruction of the “empires of Mexico and Peru” and the enslavement of Greece through masculine ambitions (33). As we shall see in Chapter 2, Shelley’s opposition to colonialism develops more fully in her apocalyptic novel The Last Man, which engages with the theme in the context of a critique of political idealism and the Anglocentric mentality. Even in Frankenstein the theme of revolutionary politics is palpable. As Lee Sterrenburg’s analysis of political metaphors in Frankenstein shows, readers in the nineteenth century saw in the Creature an embodiment of the spirit of the French Revolution, an emblem of rebellion against the authority of Church and State. More generally, it was also viewed as a type of the working class rebel aiming to overthrow the social status quo (“Mary Shelley’s Monster”). If we try to deduce Shelley’s attitude toward anti-authoritarian rebellion and to the prospect of social revolution from the text of Frankenstein we perceive a dualism. Both the modern Prometheus’ ambition to revolutionize humankind in defiance of the natural/divine order and the Creature’s rebellion against the injustice of the creator are shown to produce destruction of the community and the self. But, as we have seen, Shelley had been ambivalent in her attitude to Frankenstein’s project. And the Creature’s narrative lodged at the heart of the novel—containing his just outcry against parental and social injustice—is testimony to her sympathy with the cause of the rebel against misrule. The sad victory that is afforded to the Creature as it prepares to end his miserable existence on a pyre in the frozen Arctic wastes expresses both this sympathy and the recognition, on the part of the author, of the dreadful potential of violent anti-authoritarian impulses like that of the Creature. Frankenstein makes it plain that Shelley was alive to the evil of class-based social oppression, the injustice inherent in the way a man without either “high and unsullied descent” or “riches” was “doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few” (80). Yet, she also feared the potential consequences of a violent, collective effort to set right that age-old wrong. As Paul O’Flinn puts it, Frankenstein seems to be “shaped by a passion for reform” along with a “nervousness about the chance of revolutionary violence” (25–26). This ambivalence in Shelley’s mind vis-à-vis the idea of revolutionary reforms is brought out by Sterrenburg’s analysis of the political metaphors or types in the novel—metaphors that belong to the anti-Jacobin conservative tradition of writers like Edmund Burke and Abbé Barruel on the one hand and that of the liberals like William Godwin and

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Wollstonecraft on the other. For instance, while the Creature is a monster symbolizing the power of the rebellious masses in the Burkean tradition his narrative holds identifiable social forces responsible for perverting his goodness: moving “into the mind of the Monster”, Shelley debunks the Burkean theory of invidious external forces engendering the Revolution (Sterrenburg, “Mary Shelley’s Monster” 243–59). The possibility of erroneous and prejudiced perception of the social Other and its potential for engendering evil is highlighted just as social injustice on the part of the powerful is held culpable. Shelley does see the evil of social oppression— what Wollstonecraft called the “inveterate despotism of ages” (252). But, in a post-revolutionary age, she is also keenly conscious of the sanguinary and anarchic potential of a sudden reversal of the established political order. Shelley’s unfinished biography, “Life of William Godwin” might provide us with another clue to her dualism vis-a-vis the Revolution in particular and revolutionary politics in general. Picturing the Revolution as a giant—like the Creature—she writes: The giant now awoke. . . . Who can now tell the feelings of liberal men on the first outbreak of the French Revolution. In but too short a time . . . it became tarnished by the vices of the Orleans—dimmed by the want of talent of the Gerondists—deformed and blood-stained by the Jacobins. But in 1789 and 1790 it was impossible . . . not to be warmed by the glowing influence. (qtd. in Mellor, Mary Shelley 82)13

While Shelley condemns in strong terms the sanguinary aspect of the Revolution’s aftermath she also acknowledges the inescapable attraction of its originating ideals and betrays her own share in that attraction. This excerpt from the biography reveals, moreover, Shelley’s love of and respect for human virtues and the finer qualities of the human mind. Her hatred of the ‘vices’ of the Orleans and her observation that ‘want of talent’ ‘dimmed’ the brilliance of the Revolutionary ideals hint at this temperamental affinity with the fine and the noble in humanity. This is not class-based elitism, and it was largely because of this veneration of the ‘beauty’ of the human mind and the worth of its attainments (as in Art) that Shelley feared and abhorred sanguinary revolutions. This love of the Apollonian combines with her familial ethic of care and preservation to motivate her ‘nervousness’ about the Dionysian force of revolution. The text of The Last Man provides another, fuller, illustration of the workings of these elements of Shelley’s mind and temper, as we shall see in the next chapter. This later novel evinces also a maturation of Shelley’s attitude towards England’s colonialism and the imperial mindset so that it becomes

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the first English novel advancing a criticism of colonialism and detecting the dangers incident to the same. *** Shelley in Frankenstein engages speculatively with certain developments in the frontline science of her times, advancing thereby a critique of both scientific rationality and the patriarchal ideology that underpins modern science. While she imagines the possibility of science arriving at the ‘posthuman’ she neither celebrates nor deplores the consequent creation of the ‘cyborg’. Indeed, Shelley does not seem to consider the implications of human-animal hybridization implicit in Frankenstein’s creation. She appears to assume the full humanity of the Creature—who is described as a “rational animal”—and concerns herself with understanding the nature of that innate humanity (151). Her analysis of the nature of the human leads her to emphasize the role of culture and the culturally generated affections. Undoing the stratified dualism of culture/nature, she shows that the human inheres as a function of nature in culture. In our times Atwood launches a similar critique of the reductive positivism of science in Oryx and Crake, which shows a group of genespliced humans generated in the laboratory by a scientist whose motives are not too unlike Frankenstein’s. However, the theme of eugenical science is related by Atwood not only to man’s ambition for power and glory but also to the global scourges of excessive materialism and consumerism. The issue of scientific ethics, first broached in Frankenstein, is a major one in Atwood’s novel, which dramatizes the negative impact on both the environment and the human world of an irresponsible technoscience working at the behest of global capital. Oryx and Crake is indeed an ironical revisitation of Frankenstein. In discussing the latter novel we shall see how Atwood both builds on and reverses Shelley’s Creature-Creator drama, in the process bringing out the dialectic between human nature and technoscientific capitalism. The preoccupation with the theme of the creation of the human species that animates Frankenstein (and Oryx and Crake) features in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale also. The gothicity of (pro)creation that lends Frankenstein much of its power as a fantasy is the chief element that animates Atwood’s dystopian speculation in The Handmaid’s Tale. Shelley’s tentative critique of the idea that woman’s procreative capacity is her cultural power develops in Atwood’s novel into a projection of that ‘power’ as a potential source of women’s greatest oppression in patriarchy. Before we turn to Atwood’s dystopian visions, however, we

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shall trace how The Last Man carries forward Shelley’s critique of inequitable gender relations on the one hand and her examination of the colonialist impulse and political idealism on the other.

CHAPTER TWO THE LAST MAN: APOCALYPTIC SPECULATION BEYOND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Despite the intense critical attention given to Shelley’s first novel since the 1970s and the attendant canonization of it, the rest of her substantial and varied oeuvre remained relatively neglected till the 1990s. From among the substantial corpus of the ‘other Mary Shelley’ her third novel, The Last Man, along with Valperga and Mathilda, has received the most critical commentary.1 The present study of this novel sutures it to the reading of Frankenstein in Chapter 1, seeing both novels as being Shelley’s responses to her abiding personal preoccupations as well as to the cultural environment in which she wrote her texts. In Frankenstein Shelley comments on the dialectic of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in the context of contemporary science and its androcentric biases. Critiquing the (masculine) Romantic ethos of individualistic transcendence, Shelley advances her ideal of the egalitarian family as both an alternative means of self-fulfilment at a personal level and a model for gradual, evolutionary melioration of socio-polity. At the same time, however, Shelley is alive to the disharmonious gender-contours of the nineteenth-century British nuclear family and their negative impact on both women’s selfhood and domestic harmony. The apocalyptic vision of global annihilation of the human species through a plague dramatizes in The Last Man both Shelley’s denunciation of egoistic pursuit of power and glory on the part of men and her critique of the exclusionary English attitude toward geographical/racial ‘other’ peoples. The criticism of imperial ambitions on the part of English men incipient in Frankenstein gains in momentum in The Last Man as Shelley denounces imperialism and concomitant attempts to spread the Western ideal of civilization throughout the globe. The apocalypse described in the novel is a subversion of the eighteenth century vision of history as a movement toward perfection; the plague, in its grand sweep and in its non-

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relatedness to the political events described in the novel stands as nullification of Reason and knowledge. In The Last Man Shelley is still committed to the ideal of the family: here, as in Frankenstein, she criticizes male egoism and ambitions for their disruptive impact on familial and personal bonds. However, her awareness of the stifling impact on women of gender imbalances within (and outside of) the family is palpable too in The Last Man. Indeed, her critique of gender gains a new dimension in this novel as she deals with the thematic of inter-gender ‘love’ in its relation to female lives.

Re-reading Gender in The Last Man As feminist critics have shown, elements of Shelley’s personal situation, both as a private female individual and as an English genteel woman of her times, shape Frankenstein in important ways. In The Last Man—Shelley’s first novel after the death of her husband Percy Shelley— the autobiographical elements are more pronounced: the novel has been read as a roman à clef that gives fictionalized portraits of her husband (Adrian), the Shelleys’ friend and iconic Romantic poet, Byron (Raymond) and Shelley herself (Perdita and Verney). In some readings the novel has been viewed as Shelley’s attempt to come to terms with her sense of loneliness and grief after the deaths of those closest to her, especially of Percy Shelley, Byron and her two young children, Clara and William.2 Constance Walker and Jacobus (First Things 105–28) see the novel as a means to exorcize and come to terms with maternal bereavement and mourning. Mellor, apart from seeing in the The Last Man Shelley’s response to bereavement, reads in it her personally motivated “critique of male egoism” and insensitivity (Mary Shelley 151–54). Swerving the focus away from the autobiographical yet building on extant criticism, I endeavour to bring out the ways in which this novel analyses cardinal elements in women’s experience as gendered individuals in patriarchy and relates these elements to their material and conceptual bases in culture. Already in Frankenstein Shelley evinces the perception that her ideal of the egalitarian family was unattainable in reality because of gender imbalances inherent in the institutional structure of the family and male egocentrism. In The Last Man her ideal of domesticity is subject to a harsher critique. Here she confronts her realisation that male ambition and egoism, unequal commitment to relationships and the family, and the consequent stifling of female personhood are the real-world forces which the ideal of the egalitarian, fulfiling family may not be able to withstand.

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The novel begins, however, with the idyll of the family as Shelley delineates the community of friends and lovers among the royal people at Windsor. Raymond, a power-hungry nobleman, rejects a politically advantageous marriage with Idris, the last monarch’s daughter, to wed Perdita, with whom he has fallen in love despite himself. This allows for the marriage between Idris and Verney, Perdita’s brother. The two couples and Adrian live in perfect “felicity” at Windsor. Verney’s description of this period in the life of this “happy circle” paints an idyllic picture of peace, leisure, love and the joy of perfect companionship (70): Then we were as gay as summer insects, playful as children; we ever met one another with smiles, and read content and joy in each others’ countenances . . . Jealousy and disquiet were unknown among us; nor did a fear or hope of change ever disturb our tranquility. (71)

When Raymond decides to campaign for the position of the Lord Protector of England Shelley brings the close-knit community of the two families from the isolated, peaceful sphere of Windsor to the larger political community of London. While caring for the agitated Raymond before the election Perdita, Verney observes, looks and speaks “as if she dread[s] the occurrence of a frightful calamity (77). Immediately after the election “she fear[s] . . . a life of magnificence and power in London; where Raymond would no longer be her only, nor she the sole source of happiness to him” and is “half-sorry at his triumph” (81–82). This brings out—symbolically, as it were—the conflict between familial harmony and the pursuit of masculine ambitions that is an abiding theme in Shelley. Additionally, it is important to observe that Perdita’s longing for exclusivity in a love that is threatened by worldly success is expressive of the special nature of feminine love as Shelley understood it—a theme which will be discussed later in this section. For some time after Raymond assumes office, however, his married life with Perdita is amicable. She enthusiastically participates in Raymond’s activities and assists him in executing his plans of reforming and improving the administration of the country: “each project was discussed with her, each plan approved by her” (93). Their union is presented as harmonious and egalitarian, with Perdita counselling Raymond with both her intellect and her love. This harmony between familial felicity and political ambition is soon qualified as Raymond gets involved with Evadne, who is still in love with him. When Perdita discovers Raymond’s secret visits to Evadne she emotionally withdraws from Raymond and goes into a state of apathy. Chagrined and impatient, Raymond leaves England to go off to Greece

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and fight the Turks. Perdita’s response to Raymond’s betrayal of her trust is seen as a function of her “unsubdued self-will”, as “stubbornness rooted in pride” (95; Lokke 121). But to see Perdita’s inability to move beyond her hurt over Raymond’s disloyalty in these terms would be to ignore Raymond’s inability to face up to his guilt and his proud refusal to persist in his attempts to convince the heart-sick Perdita of the constancy and genuineness of his love for her. Perdita’s words, as she despairingly gazes on some flowers, bring out the deep hurt and utter desolation experienced by her: Her faculties were palsied. She gazed on some flowers that stood near in a carved vase . . . ‘Divine infoliations of the spirit of beauty,’ she exclaimed, ‘Ye droop not . . .; the despair that clasps my heart, has not spread contagion over you!—Why am I not a partner of your insensibility, a sharer in your calm!’ (106)

Thus Perdita discourses on “the indivisible treasure of love” that is deeper than affection and friendship: ‘Take the sum in its completeness, and no arithmetic can calculate its price; take from it the smallest portion . . . separate it into degrees and sections, and like the magician’s coin, the valueless gold of the mine, is turned to vilest substance. There is a meaning in the eye of love; a cadence in its voice, an irradiation in its smile, the talisman of whose enchantments only one can possess; its spirit is elemental, its essence single, its divinity an unit.’ (102; emphases added)

These words highlight the absolute value Perdita sets on love, the extent to which she makes it into a sacred ideal, even as they express her belief in its inviolability. The intensity of her attachment to Raymond and its constancy is brought out by her subsequent actions: she rushes to Greece to nurse him when he is wounded, and chooses to die and be buried in his tomb when he is dead. Analysing the significance of Perdita’s death beyond its biographical resonance, Mellor remarks that it “embodies Mary Shelley’s recognition that the gender-determined role of devoted wife within the bourgeois family is inherently suicidal” because “the wife submerges her identity into that of her husband, sacrificing her self to his welfare” (Mary Shelley 154). Verney describes Raymond and Perdita’s marital union thus: “Her love gave birth to sympathy; her intelligence made her understand him at a word; her powers of intellect enabled her to assist and guide him” (95). Although Verney’s marking of her intellect and intelligence and the fact that Raymond consented to be guided by her hint at an egalitarian mode of

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interaction between the spouses, it is difficult not to notice how Perdita’s entire being is devoted to Raymond; and we are not told that this utter devotion is reciprocated by him. But Perdita’s glowing words on love bring out not only the wife’s subordination to the husband but also the intensity and idealism inherent to her sensibility. They also express Shelley’s perception of the nature of “woman’s love” as the locus of a woman’s greatest happiness, a central preoccupation in her life that can have for her all the force and importance of a personal religion (114). In Perdita’s words to Verney about her passion for Raymond there is corroboration of this: ‘. . . Lionel, you cannot understand what woman’s love is. . . . [Raymond] gave me an illustrious name . . . the world’s respect reflected from his own glory: all this joined to his own undying love, inspired me with sensations toward him akin to those with which we regard the Giver of life. I gave him love only. I devoted myself to him: imperfect creature that I was, I took myself to task, that I might become worthy of him. . . . I was ready to quit you all . . . to live only with him for him. I could not do otherwise . . . he was my better soul, to which the other was perpetual slave.’ (114; emphases added)

There is in these words not only a suggestion of the all-engrossing nature of “woman’s love”, but also a hint of why it should be that way. Perdita’s deification of Raymond is actuated by the idealization bestowed by love; but it is heightened by her gratitude for the fact that his “glory” has “reflected” worldly prestige onto her. Thus, her exaltation of Raymond is a function of her pre-marital social class—which changes after her marriage—and is therefore a function of her gender. She enjoys the reflected glory of Raymond’s social status and is beholden unto him because of that: although she has ascended in the eyes of the people by marriage, she is clearly not an equal of her husband in marriage. It is to be noted that Raymond himself attains to his rank in a republican England through his political and military achievements. As a woman Perdita has no avenue open to her but marriage to raise herself socially or to achieve a sense of self-worth. (It is significant that even for a future time Shelley cannot conceive of women participating in public life independently.) Perdita’s words about her “imperfection” as a “creature” suggest a self-repudiation bordering on the self-hatred women internalize through socialization in patriarchy.3 Her specific attempts at selfimprovement constitute a striving after the patriarchal ideal of femininity, whereby women are schooled into a life of artificial self-restraint and internalize a sense of their own weakness and inferiority: “ . . . I took myself to task, that I might become worthy of him. I watched over my

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hasty temper, . . . schooled my self-engrossing thoughts, educating myself to the best perfection I might attain, that the fruit of my exertions might be his happiness”(114). Through her presentation of the life of Perdita, Shelley shows how too much emotional investment in an inter-gender relationship can become self-destructive for a woman. She also suggests, however, that this stifling and even death-dealing emotional dependence derives, to a large extent, from a social reliance that has its roots in the inequitable gender-structure of the society Shelley projects in the novel. Perdita’s thoughts after her emotional devastation at Raymond’s perfidy are more explicit: He . . . can be great and happy without me. Would that I also had a career! Would that I could freight some untried bark with all my hopes, energies, and desires, and launch it forth into the ocean of life – bound for some attainable point, with ambition or pleasure at the helm! But adverse winds detain me on the shore; like Ulysses, I sit at the water’s edge and weep. (129)

These words express her longing for a foothold in the socially significant public realm of action that men inhabit (“the ocean of life”). Yet, uttered in the context of her emotional desolation at the discovery of Raymond’s infidelity, her words also indicate this deprivation of a “career” as a possible reason for her inability to move beyond that grief: he can be “great” and “happy” without her, but the reverse would not be true. Here is Shelley’s (tentative) analysis of women’s concentration of their entire beings in love relationships with men. To this gender injustice she traces the roots of the ideology of inter-gender ‘romantic’ love, premised on the hierarchically placed concepts of the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’, that is to say, on the superior-stronger/ inferior-weaker model of gender relations. Evadne, another woman-in-love in The Last Man, is also a victim of this gender-based disparity of opportunities. Of an ambitious and energetic nature, she first becomes a slave to her own passion: “Overpowered by her new sensations, she did not pause to examine them, or to regulate her conduct by any sentiments except the tyrannical one which suddenly usurped the empire of her heart” (35). When her passion for Raymond is not reciprocated she focuses her energies on the attainment of worldly prestige and power but is frustrated by her husband’s lack of the requisite abilities. Nurtured by Raymond in her miserable state of poverty and illness and admired by him for her talents and love for him, she again makes him the centre of his existence and dies fighting for him in Greece with his name on her lips.

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Among the male characters, Adrian, presented as an epitome of personal excellence and benevolence, gets to the brink of insanity and death through his excessive, unreciprocated attachment to Evadne. Verney describes him thus: “the sensitive and excellent Adrian, loving all, and beloved by all, yet seemed destined not to find the half of himself, which was to complete his happiness” (71). There is a suggestion here that Adrian could not get beyond his unreciprocated passion for Evadne because he held an ideal of a perfect love, something his imagination told him only Evadne could have given him. It is significant that Adrian survives his despair by being absorbed into the extended community of his friends’ families at Windsor; and the first time in the novel he shows himself as a responsible and courageous man is when he becomes an active participant in the public life of his country and takes charge of the welfare of its people. In the cases of Perdita and Evadne—and Idris too, as I shall presently argue—there is no interest to the soul beyond the emotion of love, either romantic or maternal, and so they are stifled by the torturous intensity of that emotion. The Countess of Windsor, although presented negatively as an unfeeling, scheming woman, illustrates too the limitations of gender. Not immersing herself in the role of the mother, she nurtures strong personal ambition and wishes to rule England by restoring the monarchy. But after his husband’s abdication of the throne she is in a position of having to acquire power indirectly through either her son or her son-in-law. Her son’s republicanism and her daughter’s refusal to accept a suitably highborne match frustrates her lust for power and she is absent from the parliamentary debates concerning the Protectorship: this illustrates the fact that even a Royal woman, on her own, can reach nowhere near political power. The Countess’ daughter Idris, however, seeks self-fulfilment in love and a family. Like Perdita, the limitations of the relational and the domestic afflict her as she is destroyed by maternal anxieties. The text presents her above all as a mother: “Idris, the most affectionate wife, sister and friend, was a tender and loving mother. The feeling was not with her as with many a pastime; it was a passion” (180). The death of her second child in fever causes her “triumphant and rapturous emotions of maternity” to be changed into those of “grief” and “fear” for the welfare of her two surviving children. (180). After the plague reaches England her maternal anxieties deepen and cripple her physically and psychically. As her husband Verney retrospectively relates, “[i]f Idris became thin and pale, it was anxiety that occasioned the change; an anxiety I could in no way alleviate. She never complained, but sleep and appetite fled from her, a

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slow fever preyed on her veins” (253). So great is her torment that “she compare[s] this gnawing of sleepless expectation of evil, to the vulture that fed on the heart of Prometheus” (242). When her eldest son is seriously ill with the plague, Idris goes out frantically in search of a physician and Verney, ignoring a cold winter storm. Her already debilitated body cannot withstand the stress of this event and she soon dies of pneumonia. In this presentation of the suffering and death of a woman-as-mother Shelley underlines the self-destructive potential of motherhood. Yet she also probes deeper. While relating the circumstances leading up to Idris’ death, Verney regrets compelling her to withdraw from her efforts to care for the Windsor community: . . . gloomy prognostications, care, and agonizing dread, ate up the principle of life within her . . . I often wished that I had permitted her to take her own course, and engage herself in such labours for the welfare of others as might have distracted her thoughts. But it was too late now. (253)

Thus, Shelley links Idris’ obsessive absorption into motherhood to the absence in her life of any other field of endeavor that can engage her physical and psychic energies. In Shelley’s perception, then, woman—as lover and as mother, within the family or outside of it—are doomed to frustration, suffering and (self-)destruction. And Shelley ascribes this to women’s proclivity toward excessive dependence on emotional interaction with men and on their inordinate absorption into motherhood. She also indicates that this intensively relational self-definition is the result of their forced exclusion from independent participation in the public world outside of the family. This containment of women within the domestic and familial is an index not only of the imposition on them of a relational mode of being but also of the schism between the natural and the cultural prevalent in all patriarchal societies. We have seen in Chapter 1, following Ortner, how the culture-over-nature hierarchy basic to patriarchal thinking devolves into a man-over-woman framework wherein the woman—perceived as being closer to the natural—is identified with the domestic, private sphere. This identification results in women’s containment within that sphere, their being more or less barred from participating in the wider, public life of society—the realm of the cultural (Ortner 72–80). Shelley’s The Last Man, like Frankenstein, illustrates the deleterious effects of this conceptual schism on both women and the family and argues for the necessity for mankind to rectify such schizoid and inequitable social arrangements.

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As Ellis observes in “Subversive Surfaces”, it is not merely in an assertion of the central importance to culture of woman’s focus on relationships that the radicalism of Shelley’s critique of male egotism inheres. Shelley, she points out, goes “beyond her mother’s veneration of bourgeois domesticity as the highest expression of woman’s God-given rationality” to a questioning of the “context in which relationship occurs”, namely, the (bourgeois) family, and the “opportunities for emotional victimization” its “ideology of separate spheres” creates for women (222, 226–27). While Ellis sees the damaging ‘home’ and ‘world’ dichotomy as specifically bourgeois, I would rather see it as a function of the universal (patriarchal) identification of woman with the familial/immanent as opposed to the cultural/transcendental sphere of life. Although productive labour is shared between the spouses in non-bourgeois families, the primary responsibility for childcare, as everywhere, lies with the woman, and this, as Ortner shows, initiates the conceptual process whereby the woman is identified with the devalued realm of the familial-natural. And this process is active even when women participate in productive cultural activities, as in modern industrial economies. The force of Shelley’s conviction of the negative impact of the familial containment of women is indexed in her presentation of the figure of Clara, Verney’s daughter. At the age of puberty the sensitive, intelligent and lively girl suddenly changes into a sad, timid recluse, and the change is presented so as to suggest its intensity beyond what is normal at this age: She lost her gaiety; she laid aside her sports, and assumed an almost vestal plainness of attire. She shunned us, retiring with Evelyn to some . . . silent nook; . . . [she] would sit and watch [him] with sadly tender smiles, and eyes bright with tears . . . She approached us timidly, avoided our caresses, nor shook off her embarrassment till some serious discussion . . . called her for awhile out of herself. (345)

Speculating as to the cause of this change, Mellor observes that it could be an expression of Clara’s inner resistance to a future life involving a sexual liaison and motherhood (Mary Shelley 156). There are not enough clues in the text for us to be able either to confirm or disprove this speculation. In any case, Clara is loved and cherished at her uncle’s household, so that it is unlikely that her disinterest in life is due entirely to her grief at the loss of her parents. We cannot say how much of it is due to her foretaste of the life of homemaking and motherhood (after Idris’ death she is the only female left to take care of her young cousins and of her uncle’s household). But, the girl’s desire to visit her parents’ graves at the cost of a

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long, perilous voyage and her behaviour during this voyage would seem to support Mellor’s speculation. When in response to Verney’s lament of the approaching end of “glorious humanity” Adrian murmurs “[y]et they shall be saved”, Clara, the only possible female propagator of humanity, is “visited by an human pang” and creeps near Adrian, “pale and trembling”. To Adrian’s anxious assurances of safety the “sweet girl” responds: “Why should I fear? Neither sea nor storm can harm us, if mighty destiny . . . does not permit . . . one death will clasp us undivided” (352). It is difficult to share Mellor’s perception that Clara feared or disliked Adrian himself—the girl draws near to him in a moment of fear and her words also do not indicate that she has any aversion to him as companion or protector (Mary Shelley 157). However, her strong accents in her final statement seem almost to prefer the eternal but asexual embrace of Adrian in death than a life as his wife and the progenitor of humanity. Through Clara Shelley presents her bleak prognosis about the fate of women in their familial role if inequitable gender-structures prevail; she conveys her hopelessness about “the future possibility of female fulfilment and even survival within a family to which men do not make an equal commitment” (Mellor, Mary Shelley 157). I would like to indicate a corollary to Mellor’s observation, one that follows from Shelley’s implicit condemnation of the Private/Public schism in society. For women to achieve healthy relationships with men and for them to find fulfilment within the family it is necessary, Shelley implies, that social structures be such that both men and women are permitted full and free participation in the realm of culture (the public sphere) even as they share the onus of preserving the realm of nature (the familial) equally. To sum up, Shelley’s perception of the inherently unequal nature of gender relations under patriarchal arrangements—a perception already embodied in Frankenstein—is augmented in The Last Man by her insight into the impact on women of excessive devotion to the familial and the relational. While ruing the too intense attachments on the part of women to the family, to motherhood and to ‘love’ Shelley hints at a connection between this constriction of their lives and the ideological biases that engender these inordinate intensities. The absence of the scope for women to realize their selfhood by participating in the public realm is decried. The ideology of the separate spheres for the genders and the hierarchical conceptualization of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ that motivates it are denounced even as a demand is implicitly made for men to commit themselves equally with women to the familial and the communal.

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In the later chapters we would see how Atwood shares much of Shelley’s concerns with gender and gender relations. Atwood writes her speculative novels, like The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, in times when women have gained access to the public realm of culture. Yet she discerns that in the societal perception of women and in women’s own minds much the same state prevails—so that women’s lives and their agency still continue to be delimited and hampered by the ideologies of ‘love’ and motherhood. Indeed, the values of global techno-capitalism and neo-imperialism, Atwood shows, foment essentialist patriarchal notions about women and threaten to hurl them back into the pre-feminist era. Before we move on to Atwood, however, we shall look into another facet of Shelley’s critique of male egoism—one that subverts the high ideal of Art current at her time and puts forward a tentative alternative model of Art and its cultural role. As the category of Art is significant to the chosen texts (and the social visions) of both Shelley and Atwood this deserves to be examined.

The Last Man and (Shelley’s) Art One significant aspect of the novel’s critique of masculine egotism is the way Shelley evokes and undercuts the Romantic conceptions of the Imagination and Art. Mainstream Romantic poetics conceived of the human imagination as a supremely powerful faculty that afforded insights into truth and helped create art that transcends the contingencies and limitations of life (Bowra 4–6). This cult of the Imagination is of a piece with the Romantic belief in the value and the power of the individual self, a belief that the major Romantic poets shared. The exalted conception of the Imagination and the attendant belief in the cultural power and redemptive potential of Art, as Morton D. Paley shows, are undercut in Shelley’s The Last Man (113–14). The debunking of the imagination as deified by the Romantic poets is associated in the novel with a similar subversion of the ideal of Art. We shall see how this subversion works out in the text. Both Perdita and Evadne, two of the chief female characters in the novel, are shown to be painters. Perdita paints only copies after the styles of Raphael, Corregio and Claude (39). But Evadne creates original designs, one of which attracts Raymond to her—with disastrous consequences not only for Raymond, Perdita and herself, but for the whole of the familial community at Windsor (Paley 114). I would like to observe that here it is not art per se but woman’s art that is shown to doom the artist and her circle. While art or creative talent is associated with unlawful passion that wrecks families an additional implication could be that under

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present gender-structures of society transcendent and ambitious creativity in women can only exist outside the orbit of domesticity and can bring only ruin in its wake. The lofty ideal of art is also subtly mocked as Verney, the last man, looks on specimens of Roman art and is seized by strange and mixed feelings: Each stone deity was possessed by sacred gladness, and the eternal fruition of love. They looked on me with unsympathising complacency, and often in wild accents I reproached them for their supreme indifference--for they were human shapes, the human form divine was manifest in each fair limb and lineament . . . [O]ften . . . I clasped their icy proportions, and coming between Cupid and Psyche’s lips, pressed the unconceiving marble. (370; emphases added)

On an earth where everyone is dead these masterpieces of human achievement do not bring any mental comfort to the last man alive. Rather, they seem to mock humanity by emphasizing the fact that “icy proportions” and “unconceiving marble”, however perfectly wrought, are no compensation for the heart-warming solace of real human companionship. Before Verney sets out in search of survivors who might re-people the earth his epiphanic encounter with classical art serves to underscore the irony inherent in the ideal of achieving permanence through art. However, the novel posits another model of art in the shape of Verney’s authorship. He conceives of literature as a humanizing power and an agent of social integration. But, as will be shown, even this conception of the cultural power of art—here literature—gives way in the novel to one that ascribes no special power to art, save that incident to its consolatory and testimonial functions. Another purpose that is tentatively suggested for art is related to a contemplation of the mainsprings of human action. As Verney says after taking up writing as a vocation early in the novel: In early youth, the living drama acted around me, drew me heart and soul into its vortex. I was now conscious of a change . . . I was inquisitive as to the internal principles of action of those around me: anxious to read their thoughts justly, and for ever occupied in divining their inmost mind. (138–39)

This conception of art is one that conceives of it as an Apollonian ideality as opposed to the unfathomable Dionysian forces governing human actions and events in the world: “All events, at the same time that they deeply interested me, arranged themselves in pictures before me. I gave

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the right place to every personage in the group, the just balance to every sentiment.” (139; Lokke131) One would like to add that this idea of art as an instrument of quest implies an ethical impulse that would see “every personage” in their right place in life, “every sentiment” justly bestowed on its object. Art here is the means to explore what ought to be, rather than a mere reflection of what is. And, this idea of art exploring with Apollonian detachment the complexities of life and human motives also takes in the consolatory, personal function of art. As Verney continues: “This undercurrent of thought, often soothed me amidst distress, and even agony. It gave ideality to that, from which, taken in naked truth, the soul would have revolted: it bestowed pictorial colours on misery and disease, and not infrequently relieved me from despair in deplorable changes” (139). As we approach the end of the novel and the only example of living art is that of Verney’s literary record of the end of the world, this consolatory and memorializing function of art is all that remains. Verney arrives in Rome and decides to wait for fellow survivor(s) of the plague to come and meet him and, meantime, he embarks on his lonely project of writing down, for the “children of a saved pair of lovers”, the record of how the world ended (372). He thinks thus of his self-imposed task and his only occupation: I will write and leave in this most ancient city, this ‘world’s sole monument’, a record of these things. I will leave a monument of the existence of Verney, the Last Man. At first I thought only to speak of plague, of death, and last, of desertion; but I lingered fondly on my early years, and recorded with sacred zest the virtues of my companions. They have been with me during the fulfilment of my task. (372)

This modest view of art as commemoration of life and as a palliative to personal desolation is a far cry from the lofty conceptions the Romantic poets held of art, whether as part of the compensation for man’s fall from divine innocence (Wordsworth), or as the medium of transcendence of the flux of life (Keats), or as the locus of wisdom and cultural power (Percy Shelley). Shelley’s attitude to art is brought out in The Last Man also by the way she handles and perceives her own art—the narrative of the novel. She begins The Last Man with an “Author’s Introduction”. Herein the reader is told that the novel—the story of the last man on earth—is only an imperfect translation and edition of certain inscriptions on scattered leaves found in the cave of the Sibyl of Cumae in 1818 by the “Author” and her/his companion. This ingenious use of the ‘found-manuscript’ device

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deflects responsibility away from the author while the “Introduction” itself embodies an interaction between the writer and the reader. Both of these functions of the “Introduction”, as Samantha Webb points out, mark a movement away from the Romantic/(Percy) Shelleyean rhetoric of authorship that claims social agency and “an ultimate cultural authority” for the writer (120). This process of commenting on the model of authorship as power continues within Verney’s narrative itself. Adrian, with his literary education and refinement enters Verney’s life as a powerful bearer of Western civilisation and admits him within the “sacred boundary which divides the intellectual and moral nature of man from that which characterizes animals” (21–22). After a point, Verney chooses literature as a vocation: “I turned author myself . . . As my authorship increased, I . . . found another and a valuable link to enchain me to my fellow-creatures . . . Suddenly I became as it were the father of all mankind. Posterity became my heirs” (124). Waxing eloquent on the transcendental function of literary composition, he goes on: My thoughts were gems to enrich the treasure house of man’s intellectual possessions . . . these aspirations . . . filled my soul, exalting my thoughts, raising a glow of enthusiasm, and led me out of the obscure path in which I before walked, into the bright noonenlightened highway of mankind, making me citizen of the world, a candidate for immortal honours, an eager aspirant to the praise and sympathy of my fellow men. (124–25)

But this conception of the cultural power of (literary) art is treated with irony in the novel. Lionel’s authorial situation—that of being an author with no readership except the dead—is an ironic undercutting of his vision of literature as a means of cultural integration. The power of literature to influence minds or to effect real change is also questioned when Verney’s efforts to use literature to take Perdita out of her terrible apathy ultimately fails. As he relates, “[m]y schooling first impelled her towards books; and, if, music had been the food of sorrow, the productions of the wise became its medicine”. But, although she seems initially to come out of her depression of spirits under the influence of this “medicine”, Verney’s mission “to restore her to the happiness it was still in her power to enjoy” does not succeed: “. . . I could discover, amidst all her repinings, deep resentment towards Raymond, and an unfading sense of injury, that plucked from me my hope, when I appeared nearest to its fulfilment” (126). This failure hints at a perception that literature does not function as a panacea that would work the same magic on everyone, a

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perception that underlines the importance of the receptivity and the mental agency of the reader. Such a contingent conception of art is implicit also in the frame narrator’s words that introduce the text of the novel. This editor does assert her agency in arranging the Sibylline leaves and reminds us that her “own peculiar mind and talent” have gone into moulding their “form”: “Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer”. But she also qualifies this assertion of authorial agency by acknowledging that “the leaves of the Cumaean Sibyl have suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence in my hands” (4). This self-deprecation on the part of the artist—this emphasis on what she calls “imperfect powers”—implies the limitations and contingencies to which authorial power is subject (4). This attitude, therefore, marks a rejection of the Romantic conception of the author as the revealer of Truth or the legislator of the world—one whose self-imposed task it was to “guide mankind toward salvation . . . and to destroy the mind-forged manacles of society” (Mellor, Mary Shelley 79). This model of authorship constitutes a resistance to the totalizing epistemology of literature and the arts as the arbiters of human history. The editor, instead of claiming any political power for the prophetic text she edits, merely posits the narrative as a means for her to gain psychological comfort. As the editor says, the “labour” of editing the Sibyl’s leaves “have cheered long hours of solitude” and she found “solace” from “the narration of misery and woeful change” because, in the process, “the imagination . . . softened [her] real sorrows and endless regrets by clothing them in that ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain” (4). Even Verney, who aspires through his authorship to attain “immortal honours”, ultimately inscribes his narrative as his personal history, which happens to be the history of the last man (125, 371). If reading fails to take Verney out of his wretchedness in the last pages of the novel—underscoring the importance of reception and the mental state of the reader—the “occupation” of writing a memoir is one that he takes up with some enthusiasm, “linger[ing] fondly on his early years” and recording “the virtues of his companions” with “sacred zeal” (371–72). Indeed, toward the end of the novel, as Shelley depicts Verney’s mental misery, what emerges as anodynes to his “incalculable pain” and his links to dead humanity are reading, and writing, and the “hallowed ruins” of Roman art, among which Verney tries to “lose his sense of present misery . . . by recalling to . . . [his] brain vivid memories of times gone by” (364, 366, 368).

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This idolization of art and literature—made in the context of the last man’s lament for the lost race and his still abiding hope for the future— does indicate a veneration of art on the part of the author. However, Verney’s high praise of the artistic wonders of Rome—which would soon be made meaningless in a world devoid of human beings—seems to suggest also the subtle irony with which, as we have seen, Shelley debunked the high Romantic ideal of Art Thus, the “stupendous remains of human exertion” that Verney admires in Rome are contrasted time and again in the last pages of the novel with their present slight audience, which consists of Verney, “the sole remaining spectator”, the last of the race that those “forms of divine beauty” were meant “to represent and deify” (366, 369, 370). Human achievements, even the finest specimens of Art, Shelley seems to imply, obtains significance only in a human context as meaning and worth are invested in them by the admiring human contemplation, without which they are no more than “relics” (372). The Romantic reverence for the immortality of ‘Art’ is questioned by this emphasis on the fact that art depends for its immortality on the continuance of humankind. The “eternal survivor[s] of millions of generations of extinct men” survive in vain if the meaning-making human gaze perishes (367). The value of art that Shelley acknowledges and venerates consists in its capacity to soothe human beings caught up in Life’s travails and in its functions as the epitome of human culture and “a valuable link” amongst generations of humanity (124). In the next two chapters we shall see how Atwood in her speculative perception of our times develops a cognate yet distinctive model of Art. Both The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake posit art, especially literature, as the ultimate means of communication and bonding between persons and between cultures. Like in Shelley’s The Last Man, literature in Atwood is a consolation for and a palliative to personal desolation and grief. However, in The Handmaid’s Tale, specifically, it emerges also as a powerful tool to fight victimhood and oppression at both the personal and the collective levels. The concept of art is even more significant to the speculative vision contained in Oryx and Crake. Here Atwood’s critique of the crass materialism fostered by neo-imperial capitalism posits Art as the only antidote—the epitome of human culture and the embodiment of human specificity. The next section shows how Shelley’s mistrust of male idealism combines with her insight into English national snobbery and ethnocentrism to shape her politics and her attitude to colonialism.

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Politics, History and (Anti-)Colonialism In The Last Man Shelley engages with different political systems, namely, democracy, monarchy, republicanism and theocracy, which are represented by one male leader each. Thus, Adrian represents hereditary monarchy, Ryland supports democracy, Raymond, the most powerful ‘hero’ in the novel, introduces republicanism to England, and “the socalled prophet”, with his doctrine of “the elect”, preaches a kind of theocracy (321, 323). However, all political systems are ultimately defeated by the Plague, which erases all distinctions and makes ideologies meaningless.4 It could be said that Shelley’s apocalyptic vision parallels revolutionary politics with a revolutionary catastrophe that makes a mockery of the former. England’s transition from monarchy to a republican government makes conditions “the same for all”, á la Rousseau (60). But even as “magnificent dwellings, luxurious carpets and beds of down (are) afforded to all” the new-found equality is set to be made meaningless by a “more leveling” one to be conferred by the plague that is dealing death to all (252). The plague, then, could be taken to symbolize the failure of utopian political ambitions, detracting from the worthiness of the revolutionary pursuit of equality and liberty championed by radical thinkers like Godwin and Percy Shelley. In its function of subverting the eighteenth century intellectual belief-system—the organicist/Burkean faith in the resilience of (English) society and the utopian hopes of rationalists like Godwin—the plague represents the ineffectuality of Reason and knowledge, of mind and wisdom in shaping the history of humankind (Sterrenburg, “Apocalypse without Millennium” 337). The Last Man thus, like Frankenstein, falsifies the conception of history as a progressive expression of Reason. Shelley’s last-man narrative, moreover, seems to advance a critique of mainstream history-making by implicitly bringing out the dialectical interaction of public (masculine) history and the realm of the domesticfamilial—an interaction that works to the detriment of the personal and the domestic. Placing Shelley’s later fiction in the tradition of the British historical novel begun by Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley series, Deidre Lynch observes that The Last Man, like Valperga (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), dramatizes the intersection between those events that seem to make or to alter history and the continuities of everyday life (134–35). The flow of the domestic-quotidian is shown in The Last Man to be disrupted by public events precipitated by men, events like change of governments and wars. Verney’s narrative, which is purportedly an edited version of the Cumaean Sibyl’s prophecies about the

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course of human history, is mainly a relation of his brief personal happiness amid friends and relatives and the sufferings and loneliness experienced by him when they are dead and gone. This personal discourse—contrasted with a public history of revolutions and wars— closes not with a vision of human ‘Progress’ but with the prospect of a lonesome travel by the last man, the issue of the solitary voyage being uncertain at the end of the novel. The main device that highlights the conflicted interactions of the domestic and the political is the literalized metaphor of the plague.5 As England advances from monarchy to republicanism it is the plague that disrupts the narrative of public politics, replacing it with one of death, suffering and anarchy. Also, it is noteworthy that the plague begins to spread when the British army is about to vanquish the Turks in Greece. Raymond visualizes his impending conquest of the Turks at Constantinople in terms that are as grandiose as they are ethnocentric: Raymond . . . counted on an event which would be as a landmark in the waste of ages, an exploit unequalled in the annals of man; when a city of grand historic association, . . . which for many hundred years had been the stronghold of the Moslems, should be rescued from slavery and barbarism, and restored to a people illustrious for genius, civilisation, and a spirit of liberty. (141)

But just when this anticipated victory (under the leadership of the heroic male leader) is about to take place the plague erupts and suspends the issue. Thus, “[w]here Western man expects to encounter and to master his other, he finds himself faced with the absolute Other” that “replaces the victory of the West over the East” (Johnson “The Last Man” 264). The plague thus falsifies, we may say, the categories themselves of the East and the West by coming to afflict all, irrespective of race, class or gender. The novelistic device of the inscrutable plague, therefore, could be seen as representing Shelley’s denunciation of colonialism and the (English) racial pride that appears to have been part of its motivation. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Shelley is critical of colonial/imperial ambitions on the part of English men because it proves detrimental to domestic harmony. In The Last Man this critique gets sharper even as Shelley uses the plague—originating on “the shores of the Nile”and spreading as a result of an European attempt to conquer the Turks—to embody her perception of English colonialism as being inimical to England and the world (139).6 Indeed, Shelley here seems to be making a prescient connection between imperialism and what the narrator calls “the fictitious reciprocity of commerce”, and diagnoses them as being a

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composite destructive force for the world (187). As Paul Cantor points out, the course of the plague as described in the novel traces the English “imperial trade routes (“The Apocalypse” 196). In Chapter 4 we shall see Atwood making the same connection between imperialistic global commerce and disease. In Oryx and Crake the neo-colonialism of a global techno-capitalistic order generates its own nemesis through an epidemic, a ‘plague’ that is human engineered but ultimately out of human control. Like Shelley, Atwood relates imperialism and global commerce to disease and destruction. Like Shelley’s plague, moreover, the virulence in Oryx and Crake afflicts both the imperialized and commercially exploited people of the lower classes as well as the moneyed elite working for the multinational ‘Compounds’.7 Beyond this connection between the imperialist impulse and the spread of the plague, however, there is a further, more significant point about Shelley’s critique of Empire and that is brought about by the way she handles the subsequent course of events vis-à-vis the protagonists’ actions and attitudes. The novel begins with Lionel’s description of England as a land richly endowed with the mental powers of its people and safe from all dangers: I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook . . . which . . . appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous population . . . England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship, which mastered the winds and proudly rode the waves. In my boyish days she was the universe to me . . . the earth’s very centre was fixed for me in that spot, the rest of her orb was as a fable. . . . (5; emphases added)

The myth of the safe ship of England—safe and superior, safe because superior—is tenaciously nurtured by the heroes in the novel. Thus, Lionel turns with “rapturous delight” from “the physical evils of distant countries, to my own dear home, the selected abode of goodness and love . . .”, ignoring the plague as a disease which is destroying only Asia Minor (180). The idea of the state of England as a safe ship survives in the political circles of Lionel’s England in the face of surrounding devastation: We talked of ravages made last year by pestilence in every quarter of the world. . . . We discussed the best means of . . . preserving health and activity in a large city thus afflicted—London, for instance. . . . ‘We are all dreaming this morning,’ said Ryland, ‘it is as wise to discuss the probability of a visitation of the plague in our wellgoverned metropolis, as to calculate the centuries which must escape

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If the conservative Ryland construes the evil of the plague as remote and improbable, the liberal Lionel too sees it as a problem for Greece, and feels only pity: But, though it seemed absurd to calculate upon the arrival of the plague in London, I could not reflect without extreme pain on the desolation this evil would cause in Greece. The English for the most part talked of Thrace and Macedonia, as they would of a lunar territory, which, unknown to them, presented no distinct idea or interest to the minds (176).

Thus, the English heroes’ inability and unwillingness to face the truth— their glorification of England and the attendant disregard of other countries—contribute to England’s ruin. Ironically, Ryland—an advocate of equality and democracy and successor to Raymond as Protector—provides a particularly odious illustration of the exclusionism that characterises the ethnocentric snobbery of the English world-view. When the plague reaches England the country is flooded with foreign people seeking an escape to a climate less conducive to the spread of the pestilence. At this worst of times for the people Ryland abandons his position, saying: “‘Death and disease level all men. . . . I neither pretend to protect nor govern an hospital – such will England quickly become.’ . . . ‘Every man for himself! the devil take the protectorship, say I, if it expose me to danger!’” (sic; 194–95). Refusing to assume leadership of an England thronged by “foreigners”, Ryland sounds as if he identifies the disease with the hordes of strange people whom he seems to abhor (194). Unlike Raymond and Ryland, Adrian is able to conceive of the humanity of ‘other’ peoples. Recognizing the Turks as human, he flinches at the spectacle of their massacre by the English army led by Raymond: “‘The Turks are men; each fibre, each limb is as feeling as our own, and every spasm, . . . is as truly felt in a Turk’s heart or brain, as in a Greek’s’” (128). He also seems to arrive at a tentative feel for the dangerous, willed myopia of the leaders of England if not for their near-xenophobic national snobbery: “I have long expected this; could we in reason expect that this island should be exempt from the universal visitation? The evil is come home to us, and we must not shrink from our fate” (194). But it is Lionel who is ultimately driven to accept, in praxis, the idea of the humanity of ‘other’ peoples as he decides to leave Rome—his “magnificent abode”—for unknown shores in search of living humanity: “. . . it was still possible, that could I visit the whole extent of earth, I should

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find in some part of the wide extent a survivor” (373). Yet he also is unable to see the flaws in his civilization or in his people. Imagining his future readers, he can only think of the greatness of the departed races of European peoples, blind still to the pride that contributed to their fall: Yet, will not this world be re-peopled, and the children of a saved pair of lovers, in some to me unknown and unattainable seclusion, wandering to these prodigious relics of the ante-pestilential race, seek to learn how beings so wondrous in their achievements, with imaginations infinite, and powers godlike, had departed from their home to an unknown country? (372)

Still, as witness to the apocalypse, Lionel exposes the exclusions necessary in order to create and maintain the illusion of the inviolate superiority of imperial England: he shows how in order to conceive of England as the very center of the earth, the rest of the earth has to be relegated to a “fable” (5; Fisch “Plaguing Politics” 268). Through the device of the plague and the responses of her heroes to the pestilence Shelley registers her denunciation of English colonialism and the ethnocentrism and blind national pride that were inherent to the colonial spirit. A rather different view of Shelley’s treatment of colonialism is taken by Alan Richardson, who sees The Last Man as belonging “squarely in the tradition of British colonialist discourse” and perceives the near-total conquest of the East by the West at Constantinople as proof of Shelley’s sympathy for colonialism; it is only the plague, he observes, that seems to thwart the total conquest of Asia by the “civilizing” West. We have already registered an opposite reading of the situation—one that takes into account the fact that the plague too is an invention of the author and as such has ideological and metaphorical valence. The global devastation that happens to spread from the juncture in space and time where the West is to conquer the East underlines Shelley’s sense of the inappropriateness and the dangers of totalizing attempts to impose the Western humanistic ideal of civilization on the rest of the world. Lionel’s initial vision of the world and of England’s position in it—a position of centrality and superiority— is progressively exposed in the novel as a myth as the narrative moves steadily toward the annihilation of humanity to the last man (Johnson, “The Last Man” 265). Richardson sees Adrian’s induction into the British army of the mixed force of North Americans, Scots and Irish as colonialist taming and appropriation of the force of the colonized. However, given the tenor of Adrian’s speech that effects the merger, its anti-violence rhetoric focused on the unity of mankind against a malevolent nature, one would rather see

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the episode as Shelley’s endorsement of a model of social melioration by the benevolent wisdom of an enlightened aristocracy. It is an image of aristocratic generosity of this kind that Shelley presents in making the “rich” of the afflicted England give up their “pleasure-grounds”, their “horses” and other items of “luxury” for the benefit of their “fellow creatures” under the influence of Adrian’s “benevolent eloquence” (171– 72). As Mellor’s biographical research shows, “Mary Shelley was by temperament a conservative who endorsed a cultural and social tradition based on a model of monarchical democracy, class stability and organic evolutionary growth” (Mary Shelley 211).8 However, as we have already seen in Chapter 1, Shelley was sympathetic to the principle of social equality, and the enlightened republican sympathizer Adrian—of royal lineage—is positively presented in The Last Man. Moreover, Shelley’s conservatism is impelled as much by political orthodoxy (and pragmatism) as by her innate love and veneration of human excellence, to which violent politics poses the threat of destruction. As England makes the transition from monarchy to republicanism material conditions become equal for all citizens even as the plague threatens to bring death to one and all with a matching impartiality. Shelley describes the new situation thus: As the rules of order and the pressure of laws were lost, some began with hesitation and wonder to transgress the accustomed uses of society. . . . We were all equal now; but near at hand was an equality more leveling, a state where beauty and strength, and wisdom, would be as vain as riches and birth. (252)

The narrator Verney, who is a projection of Shelley herself, does observe the change in the “accustomed uses of society”, but does not seem to rue it. Rather, he is sensitive to the vanity of “riches and birth”. At the same time, we note that the narrator’s concern with the approaching epidemic gets its charge from the fact that it would make non-material, asocial human attributes and attainments as meaningless as those of wealth and class. While indiscriminate death dealt by the plague would make apparent the vanity of categories used to make distinctions among people it would also disrespect categories whose bases are not spurious. The narrator’s respect for “beauty, and strength, and wisdom” seems to indicate a high-mindedness and discernment that are not be conflated with vulgar snobbery. Toward the end of the novel, when he extols the glories achieved by his race he reflects this discernment, this respect for the distinction that qualities of the mind and personal achievements confer on individuals, irrespective of birth and standing—qualities and attainments

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that take the human collective to a higher state of being. No human society, Shelley seems to be saying, should suffer to lose these, either through post-revolutionary anarchy or through the contagion of the spirit of commerce, the vulgar materialism, that Shelley thought might be endemic to democracy.9 While not subscribing to the rationalist’s utopianism about the human mind being potentially capable of attaining “godlike” mastery over the fate of the race Shelley had too deep a love for the real merits of that “wondrous” mind to be able to countenance the prospect of its ruin through a sudden—and hence anarchic—political revolution. Her political critique of the post-Revolutionary era goes beyond a denunciation of sanguinary or anarchic political movements, and unmasks the egoism, the lust for power and the ethnocentric, colonialist ambitions that drive (English) men toward courses destructive to peace and the wellbeing of both the home and the world. .

*** To conclude, Shelley’s perception of gender relations in The Last Man makes her indict male egoism while also unmasking the deleterious impact on women of a too intense devotion to the familial and the relational. Her future vision negates the eighteenth century conception of history as Progress while advancing a post-anthropocentric understanding of the world. At a time when England was at the pinnacle of colonial glory and Anglocentrism was taken for granted Shelley took a nuanced view of the colonial project, linking it up with (male) lust for power on the one hand and irrational national pride—bordering on xenophobia—on the other. In Atwood’s speculative vision—to be examined in the next two chapters—we find embodiments of many of the concerns that animate Shelley’s texts. Particularly in Oryx and Crake, as we shall see, there is a conception of nature that is an extension of Shelley’s vision. Whereas Shelley perceives nature as a neutral power indifferent to and beyond human will, Atwood’s contemporary understanding projects the animosity of a nature corrupted by human intervention. Oryx and Crake, especially, dramatizes human-induced environmental changes, including those effected by genetic engineering. Both authors’ apocalyptic speculations work around the notion of a global pestilence that is ultimately beyond human powers, although, in Atwood, it is of human origin. Shelley’s postanthropocentric understanding of life is elaborated in Atwood, who projects worlds wherein the human and the natural, the natural and the technological mingle and remain in flux.

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The anti-colonialism heralded in English literature by Shelley is taken forward by Atwood, whose speculative novels, particularly Oryx and Crake, envision the negative impact on the world of neo-imperialistic capitalism fuelled by technoscience and the ethos of consumeristic materialism. The critique of scientific positivism initiated by Shelley in Frankenstein develops in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which relates the workings of imperialistic commerce with technoscience, thereby bringing out the congruence between scientism and the commercial-consumeristic spirit.

CHAPTER THREE THE HANDMAID’S TALE: DYSTOPIAN SPECULATION IN THE FEMININE.

As observed in the Introduction, several of the themes that Shelley deals with in Frankenstein and The Last Man are traceable in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. Shelley’s covert anxieties about procreation in patriarchy (Frankenstein) and her interest in the theme of creation/destruction of the human species (Frankenstein and The Last Man) are echoed in The Handmaid’s Tale in the form of a religious fundamentalist regime that treats women solely as breeders for the state. Urged on by concern about a declining Caucasian birth-rate—but ignoring the environmental reasons for it—the patriarchs of this state (‘Gilead’) use fertile women as baby-making machines for infertile elite couples in a weird sort of surrogacy rationalized through an insidious use of Biblical passages. If nature seems to be an amoral power in Frankenstein, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is an intensified presentation of the contemporary global reality of the perversion of nature through human interventions. Against the backdrop of a warped nature unfolds a drama of “prodigal breeding” even as procreation and nurture are made grotesquely abnormal and exploitative in a sinister effort to “return things to Nature’s norm” (190, 232). In Frankenstein, as we have seen, the author’s personal anxieties about maternity are metaphorically projected; in The Handmaid’s Tale women’s patriarchal role as child-bearers for men is taken to its logical end, making manifest “the correspondences between the personal and the political” (Rubenstein 102). While Frankenstein’s science seems to replicate women’s ‘power’ of reproduction The Handmaid’s Tale shows up how that power may, in actuality, prove to be the greatest onus, the locus of catastrophe for women in patriarchy. The epigraph from Genesis draws attention to the religious fundamentalist nature of the totalitarian state of Gilead, which uses biblical dicta, sometimes distorting them, to disempower and sexually exploit fertile women.

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Unlike Shelley’s texts—which were written during the heyday of English colonialism—Atwood’s novel builds on the postcolonial reality of economic imperialism. While Shelley denounces colonialist ambition because of its implications for familial and national welfare Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale hints at the exploitative impact of American imperialism on less powerful countries. In Atwood’s dystopian worldview the USA actually has “Colonies” to which aged or infertile women are deported. That these colonies are described as “toxic” reflects contemporary global processes whereby noxious electronic and other waste materials generated by the developed economies often get dumped on the shores of third-world countries (248). Shelley’s concern with classwar in the context of the French Revolution is sounded, albeit mutedly, in The Handmaid’s Tale, which shows the combined stimuli of religious fundamentalism, racism and class-hegemony impelling the formation and workings of the Gilead regime. As we shall see, Atwood here probes, like Shelley in The Last Man, into the ideology of inter-gender ‘love’ and its relation to women’s personal and social agency. The traditional concept of ‘romantic’ love— premised on male power over women and women’s subordination and loyalty to men—is interrogated in The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel upholds the ideal of harmony between the sexes even as it exhorts us to seek out new, more egalitarian forms of heterosexual relationships. In the context of late twentieth-century America, Atwood relates this issue to institutional feminism.1 While denouncing separatism The Handmaid’s Tale alerts women of the so-called ‘postfeminist’ generation to the potential dangers of ignoring patriarchal misogyny in their personal and social lives. As Atwood says, “. . . for women to define themselves as powerless and men as allpowerful is . . . to shirk responsibility. . . . [T]o depict a world in which women are already equal to men, in power, opportunities, and freedom of movement, is a similar abdication” (“Writing the Male Character” 63).2

The dystopian society that Atwood projects in The Handmaid’s Tale speculatively elaborates on these fallacies as it shows women’s complicity in their own victimhood and links it to their complacent non-involvement in sexual-politics. The micro-politics of interpersonal relational dynamics between the genders are here mapped onto the macro-political level as the theocratic state confers absolute power over women to men of the upper classes. And through the devices of ‘flashback’ and epilogue, Atwood shows how the seeds of Gilead are being sown in contemporary patriarchal

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societies. Indeed, in another similarity with Shelley (The Last Man), The Handmaid’s Tale reflects Atwood’s concern with historiography, showing how our (in)actions in the present—including our reading of the past— determine the configuration of the future that we build for ourselves.

Frankenstein and The Handmaid’s Tale: Gothic (Pro)creation and Normative Gender Both Shelley’s Frankenstein and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are gothic novels that dramatize monstrous creation. The Creature Frankenstein creates is a product of technology and in his total lack of cultural context—his lack of relatedness for which his creator is responsible— inheres his monstrosity. The outward hideousness of the Creature— unintended by the creator—is like a sign of this monstrousness, which is realized through the enraged destructive acts the Creature carries out. In The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood presents the monstrosity of a situation wherein a totalitarian regime treats fertile women solely as baby makers. Frankenstein dramatizes an attempt to take procreation out of the natural order and away from the feminine, although this was not the scientist-creator’s main motive. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale shows a religious fundamentalist regime literalizing women’s natural destiny as procreators. The hubris involved in Frankenstein’s contra-natural creative project is ironically replicated in Atwood’s novel wherein the ‘natural’ is adopted at the cost of the cultural even as the family, the basic unit of society, is warped into its gothic double. The patriarchs of Gilead claim to “return things to Nature’s norm” by treating women as mere procreators shorn of personal integrity (232). Ironically, however, the ‘Commanders’ of Gilead manage to pervert all naturalness about child-bearing and rearing by devising an odd kind of surrogate motherhood. The thoroughly unnatural state of affairs whereby a human individual is treated merely as a productive womb gets an outward manifestation in the weird ritualistic ‘Ceremony’ involving the Wife, the Handmaid, and the Commander in mechanistic baby-making sessions. Even as Gilead attempts to force women into their ‘natural’ role it thus ends up creating a grotesque community—shorn of genuine human relationships—that is a perversion of both the family and society as human cultural constructs. Thus, The Handmaid’s Tale implicitly underscrores the interplay and the mutual contingency between the natural and the cultural—a perception expressed, as we have seen, through Shelley’s fantasy of technoscientific creation of life in Frankenstein.

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Frankenstein’s “supernatural enthusiasm” for his technoscientific project of creating a superior race takes him steadily away from his family, friends and even from his fiancée, Elizabeth (30). As he retrospectively narrates: “I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed” (33). And his hideous progeny, the poor Creature—denied both a cultural context and parental love—takes vengeance upon his irresponsible sire by killing off Frankenstein’s kin, and even implicates Justine in a murder. In The Handmaid’s Tale we see a parallel to such destruction of the familial in the wake of monstrous creation. Atwood here projects a state that, in returning things to the natural ‘norm’, creates an abnormal social set-up wherein the existing structures of family and motherhood are perverted into a monstrosity shorn of familial and affective bonds. The protagonist Offred’s monthly cycle dictates and synchronizes the activities of the ‘Household’ but without causing any interaction of lives. All possibilities of such interaction is countered by elaborate ceremoniousness, including dress codes, occasional scripture readings, and a curbed, ritualistic speech (Teewen 118). The very act of sexual intercourse—supposed to be the most private and intimate interaction between two individuals—is made grotesque and coercive through the ‘Ceremony’ in which man, wife and Handmaid engage passionlessly once every month. The images of gestation and birthing, obsessive labour in graveyards and a cloistered cell, the hideousness of the Creature and, finally, the frenzy of violence animating the creature-creator dialectic make for a gothic intensity in Frankenstein that mirrors the monstrosity of Victor’s unnatural, extra-cultural creation of a human being. Under the patriarchal totalitarianism projected in The Handmaid’s Tale ‘natural’ procreation is undertaken in an unnatural, counter-cultural manner that, ironically, destroys the patriarchal institution of the family and creates a gothic drama of “prodigal breeding”—the spectacle of an entire society geared obsessively and exclusively toward baby-farming. The gothic feel of the novel is produced also by the atmosphere of terror that pervades the ‘Re-education Centre’, for example, where the Aunts—trainers and caretakers of the Handmaids—admonish the captive women against breaking the draconian rules of the regime and discipline them with electric cattle prods. In the nightmarish world of the novel an ambience of terror is kept up through exhibited hangings, public executions, and constant surveillance by spies, all of which form the repressive apparatus of state power. All movement of the Handmaids and other categories of women (except the Wives) are severely restricted and

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orchestrated. A trip to the market, for example, is both compulsory and regulated, the Handmaid being escorted by another Handmaid, each keeping an eye on the other. The same is the case with compulsory monthly visits to the doctor. Just as the Oceanians in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four knew Big Brother was watching them, the Handmaids in Gilead are aware that “[t]he Eyes of God run over all the earth” (203). A winged eye forms the official symbol of the Gilead government and is inscribed all over the landscape as a sinister reminder of the total serfdom the regime inflicts. Even language is policed and interaction between individuals takes place through the ritualistic exchange of set phrases. This austere and regimented linguistic system and the color-coded overalls worn by all—red for Handmaids, blue for domestics, and so on—further enhance the nightmarish feel of the police state. Coming back to Shelley’s gothic novel, Frankenstein gives an extreme manifestation of women’s performance of prescriptive gender roles. The principal female characters—Victor’s mother Caroline Frankenstein, his fiancée Elizabeth, and Justine Moritz, the servant-girl—are representations of normative womanhood characterized by docility, lack of individuality and self-sacrificial devotion to patriarchal notions of the perfect woman. Thus, Caroline Frankenstein is presented as the epitome of feminine perfection as a daughter, wife and mother. She marries a much older man to save his father’s pride, is the type of a dutiful wife, and dies nursing her adopted daughter Elizabeth for much longer than is necessary. True to this norm, Elizabeth, raised by Caroline, is presented as a submissive, beautiful, and unthinking girl possessed of every ‘feminine’ virtue that makes her the ideal future spouse for Victor. Epitomizing the contradictions involved in being a ‘woman’ in patriarchy, Elizabeth is intelligent but not interested in understanding the world, capable of serious application but habitually gay, delicate yet a hardy worker, and quite able to enjoy freedom yet graceful in submitting to caprice and restraint (20). Justine—described in the novel as a successor to Caroline and a mother figure to Victor’s young brother—is so meek as to be unable to defend herself in the court even when charged with a murder, and is even halfconvinced by her confessor of her responsibility for William’s death. None of the chief women characters, Caroline, Elizabeth or Justine, is said or shown to have any streak of assertive individuality or any other trait that would bear out their personhood beyond the patriarchal-familial roles they enact. Rather, it is the relative lack of mental power or independence that makes Elizabeth especially dear to Frankenstein as it provides a contrast to

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his own “investigating” intellect and domineering personality and creates a coveted “[h]armony” in their companionship (20). Atwood, in The Handmaid’s Tale, takes the patriarchal way of defining women in terms of their function vis-à-vis men to its logical end. Here the containment of women’s personhood in the relational-familial is replicated at the level of state organization, making the personal patently political. Gender roles—those of wife, daughter, child-bearer, widow, maid, and warden (‘Aunt’)—define and regulate women’s lives in the patriarchal totalitarian state, so that their clothing, movements and language are all delimited by the roles they play. The narrator Offred and other fertile women like her are reduced to mere child-bearers, stripped of their personal lives, their jobs, their money and even their names. Referred to by the name of the man to whose ‘Household’ she is assigned, ‘Of-fred’ experiences first-hand a revolution that has resulted in the total abolition of personhood for most women. Women who cannot or will not fulfil any of the above functions are relegated to the ‘Colonies’ as ‘Unwomen’, the nomenclature bringing out the equation made in Gilead between women and their patriarchally defined functions. The female individuality and specificity that remain repressed in the performance of the idealized feminine erupt, as it were, in the text of Frankenstein through Victor’s monstrous Creature, who acts out the pent up female energy, eloquence, and passion that become unspeakable and hence “unrepresentable” within the terms of male-defined prescriptive femininity (Hollinger 211).3 In The Handmaid’s Tale the subversion of the power of the totalitarian state is woven into the performance itself of normative femininity, as we shall see in the subsequent sections. Although the novel presents an oppressive state wherein women are literally imprisoned within the bounds of essentialist definitions of womanhood, it also shows how the oppressed women, particularly the protagonist, subvert the regime’s power through stray acts of rebellion, through a continuous process of “inner jeering” and, above all, by telling against that power in a self-conscious narrative that is the text of the novel (147). Shelley’s texts, as we have seen, bring out the need for women to have freedom to participate in the wider public realms of culture in order for them to come out of their compulsive and compulsory preoccupation with the domestic-familial. Perdita’s words in The Last Man distinguishing her situation with Raymond’s—emphasizing the lack in her life of any context beyond the relational—come to mind here. The Handmaid’s Tale takes an ironical look at women’s containment within prescriptive femininity and creates a world wherein women have gained “freedom from” (rape and other atrocities) in exchange of “freedom to”: “There are more than one

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kinds of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you have freedom from. Don’t underrate it” (24). While Aunt Lydia tries to make her “girls” be thankful for the passive freedom Gilead has given them they lead servile lives and regularly undergo the torture of state sanctioned rape called the ‘Ceremony’. Ironically, she advocates the girls to be impenetrable: “Modesty is invisible. To be seen . . . is to be penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable” (28). If we read this injunction metaphorically what we have in her chillingly earnest concern for the girls is a parody of the isolationism inherent to the separatist feminist’s ideal and the sexualpolitical non-involvement that defined many young women’s attitude in the so-called ‘postfeminist’ (American) society that led to Gilead. As we shall see, Offred herself makes the connection between the Household’s ghetto of women and the separatist ideal once professed by her mother (137). As speculation based on socio-political proclivities contemporary to the author’s time The Handmaid’s Tale brings out how the values and attitudes we practise in the present determine the future that we create for ourselves while also shaping our construction of the past. Shelley in The Last Man presents a survivor’s narrative that adumbrates the conflicted relation of public (masculine) history and history-making with the domestic and the relational. Atwood, in our times, re-presents a novelistic concern with historiography through another survivor’s tale and its reception, positing formal history as a construct that reflects the masculinist values of patriarchal societies. In the next section we shall read The Handmaid’s Tale so as to bring out both its critique of mainstream historiography and its cautionary message.

Reading the Past, Making the Future: History-Making and Sexual-Politics The ‘Historical Notes’, forming the epilogue, is the only sustained and explicit explanatory material in The Handmaid’s Tale, providing background information about the Gileadean order. It tells us, for example, how Gilead was formed through a violent coup involving the “President’s Day Massacre”, and how the new order formed an instant pool of young, fertile women, single or separated, depriving them of their children, who were taken by the state. The section also informs us that prior to the formation of the regime the population of the USA was dwindling due to reproductive policies and environmental damage (311–24).

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The real significance of the ‘Historical Notes’ for readers and critics lies, however, in the myriad connotations it throws up for the interpretation of the novel’s cautionary function and its critique of historiography. The first and the most obvious meaning that the section yields is one of hope: if an “International Historical Association” deliberates on the Gilead regime in the year 2195 then Gilead must have been outlived. This implies that we would be able to outlive a regime like Gilead even if we were powerless to hinder its formation in the first place. But this optimistic message is qualified if we make a closer study of the proceedings of the “Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies” described in this section (311). Such a study nullifies the hope the section initially holds out by showing that people have not learnt any lessons from the dark history of the Gilead regime but continue, rather, with the same attitudes toward women that made Gilead possible. At the outset Professor Crescent Moon informs the audience that Offred’s narrative has been edited by Professor Wade and Professor Piexoto, and that the latter academic is to deliver a talk entitled “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale” (300). A woman’s testimony, apparently, cannot be accepted without circumscribing and authenticating it by an imposed male perspective. This seems to have a symbolic relation to the broader devaluing and tampering of Offred’s account by the editing process. The two male academics have collaborated to construct Offred’s record of her experience in Gilead as a readable tale (312--13). The original tapes, they inform the audience, were discovered in Bangor, Maine, “a prominent way station on what our author refers to as ‘The Underground Femaleroad’”; but they declare that “what we have before us is not the item in its original form” (313). Offred’s tapes begin with a few songs as camouflage and then a female voice “takes over” (314). It is this controlling authority of a woman that the two men denigrate by arranging—and annotating—Offred’s tapes. These unnumbered tapes were originally arranged “in no particular order, being loose at the bottom of the locker”, and Wade and Piexoto undertook to “arrange the blocks of speech in the order in which they appeared to go”. Piexoto elaborates on how Offred’s accent, her occasional “obscure referents” and her “archaisms” made the editors’ job difficult and how they felt challenged to determine the “nature of the material”. In fact, the professor blandly tells us at this point that they have considered the possibility that Offred’s narratives might be a forgery that cashed in on publishers’ craving for sensational records of Gilead to satisfy people’s hunger for “hypocritical self-congratulation” (314). Indeed, the impulse behind his paper, as he says, is “to consider the

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problems associated with the soi disant manuscript . . . which goes by the title of The Handmaid’s Tale”, a manuscript that he hesitates to call “document” (312–13). The callousness that can suspect the pain expressed through Offred’s (apparently impassive) narrative as imposture is symptomatic of the usual male attitude to history, an mindset that would make men fret over dry details of time, place and mechanism while grossly ignoring the human experience which constitutes the true value of history.4 As Annette Kolodny puts it, Piexoto’s discourse, with its putative objectivity, “flattens the uniqueness of Offred and her telling into a domesticating matrix”, using it to flesh out “a context that no longer exists” and, thus, consigning it “safely to history” (46). Adding to this observation, one may say that the professor’s handling of Offred’s narrative not only flattens its specificity but also blunts the edge of its effectiveness as a testimony against extreme patriarchal exploitation of women. Kolodny’s phrase “domesticating matrix” is more telling than she apparently intends it to be. The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel that extrapolates on patriarchal domestication of women and their sexuality; and, as breeders for the fundamentalist state, the Handmaids are cooped up into lives lived as ‘matrix’ (in the sense of ‘womb’) (133). The fact that Offred’s record has been edited also brings in the problematic of interpretation and history-making. We are told that Offred recorded “some thirty tapes”, the vagueness about the number suggesting the irreverent, lackadaisical attitude of the editors to their material as also lending a touch of indeterminacy to the text that is handed down to us (313). The intricate arrangement of Offred’s narrative into forty-six chapters laid out in fifteen sections—with the title ‘Night’ recurring seven times—is a construct wherein the putative history of a private individual has been given a fictional shape through edition and transcription. The novel thus becomes doubly fictional, leading to questions as to where the memoir ends and the fiction begins: “Where, then, is the boundary between novel and history?” (Davidson 87). This postmodernist ontological confusion between memoir and fiction—between history and literature—is taken to another level by the similarities that surface between the values and attitudes of the post-Gilead twenty-second century and those of Gilead. The blurring of the bounds between novel and history could be seen to have a metaphorical correlation with Atwood’s message of warning as the sexist values of postGilead (and Gilead) are frighteningly similar to patriarchal principles operative in the contemporary world. If people do not watch out against insidious misogynistic tendencies in their social and mental worlds,

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Atwood suggests, the ‘history’ embodied in The Handmaid’s Tale could be their future. The reductive, patriarchal devaluation and disrespect of women that defined every aspect of Gilead are shown to continue unchanged in 2195, and at the highest levels of education. This is made apparent in the epilogue by the misogynistic jokes cracked by Professor Piexoto and the learned audience’s laughing acceptance of those, like when he talks about “enjoying” a chair(woman) in the sexual sense and when he refers to the “Underground Femaleroad” in Gilead as the “Underground Frailroad” (312, 313). More importantly, the continuing accordance of inferiority to women is proved by the devaluation of Offred’s narrative by the academic community. Not only does it have Offred’s record of her experience transcribed, shaped and annotated by male scholars; it also condones, and implicitly ratifies, the explicit belittling of her intelligence and the value of her account by one of those scholars. Thus, Professor Piexoto sarcastically mentions that Offred “does not see fit to supply [them] with her original name”, thereby betraying his insensitivity to the conditions of her victimhood and his utter lack of appreciation of her remarkable achievement in telling against Gilead (318). He also harps on the “gaps” in Offred’s story that had to be filled in by speculation and trashes her narrative—even as the learned audience listens in silence: . . . many gaps remain. Some of them could have been filled by the anonymous author, had she had a different turn of mind. . . . . What would we not give, now, for even twenty pages or so of printout from Waterford’s private computer! However, we must be grateful for any crumbs the Goddess of History has designed to vouchsafe us. (322)

This telling remark shows that even in 2195 discourses by men are valued over those by women. By focusing on the identities and activities of the Commanders Piexoto renders Offred invisible and silent within her own narrative. Also, while the professor longs to know the workings of the Gileadean “empire” he fails to realize either the political or the human significance of an intimate account of a woman’s life under patriarchal totalitarianism (322). His attitude is indicative of the deficiencies of institutionalized (masculine) historiography, which prioritizes the mechanistic over the affective and the public over the private in a manner that reminds us of Shelley’s implied critique of masculinist history-making in The Last Man.

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Professor Piexoto’s callousness to the narrator’s suffering is actually given academic respectability by himself (and his audience) in the name of the ideal of scholarly neutrality. Thus, in the initial part of his talk he says, sounding almost like an apologist of Gilead: . . . [W]e must be cautious about passing moral judgments upon the Gileadeans. Surely we have learnt by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific. Also Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, . . . and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are happily more free. Our job is not to censure but to understand. (Applause). (314–15)

This moral relativism refuses to condemn the gross violations of human rights perpetrated by Gilead, thereby implicitly endorsing them and keeping alive the totalitarian impulse. This once again highlights how, in the very process of studying history, historians fail to “understand” its lessons because of indiscriminate adherence to academic principles. Although Professor Piexoto talks of the contingency of values, he and his audience fail to realize that his putative value-neutrality is in itself a dogma which needs to be abandoned while dealing with something as heavily freighted with human import as the Gilead regime. Insensitive, unexamined objectivity on the part of academics, who shape our attitudes and our discourses, thereby shaping our world, is dangerous non-involvement, amounting to culpable complicity. In order for history not to repeat itself it is not enough merely to study the past: it has to be studied right. The juxtaposition of Offred’s lived experience— which engages the reader’s empathy—with Piexoto’s ‘objectivity’ and his focus on details of male personages inscribes the readers into the text as writers of history. Even as we reject the professor’s cautious, callous and sexist historiography we realize that we must always be aware of who writes our history and what their interests and prejudices are, in order for our future not to resemble Offred’s past. Our job here, Atwood seems to tell us, is not to remain neutral and passive but to be involved and take sides. She alerts us to the blunder of passivity and to the sin of forgiving the unforgivable, urging us to attack and weed out patriarchal fundamentalism and misogyny from our beliefs and practices—before our society starts resembling Gilead. While The Handmaid’s Tale is a speculative extrapolation of trends and attitudes immanent in patriarchy we women still have the power to choose our future. Whether the novel serves as a cautionary tale or whether it proves to be prophetic would depend on the choices we make.

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The Handmaid’s Tale and Feminism: Alienation versus Involvement Atwood’s concern with the feminist movement ties in with her interest in the processes of history-making in a way that delineates the relationship of history with present actions and values on the one hand and the building of the future on the other. The Handmaid’s Tale, as Gayle Greene notes, is one of the novels that were written at least partly in response to the real situation for women in the USA in the 1980s, the time of rampant antiabortion movements—the time of various kinds of sexist ‘backlash’ against feminism’s success at winning more liberty for women (205). Atwood herself points out this realistic-speculative aspect of the novel in no uncertain terms: In The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing happens which the human race has not already done at some time in the past, or which it is not doing now, perhaps in other countries . . . We’ve done it, or doing it, or we could start doing it tomorrow. Nothing inconceivable takes place and the projected trends on which my future society is based are already in motion. (“Writing Utopia” 85–86)

On the basis of present “trends” we are presented with a totalitarian society wherein women’s sexuality is controlled and exploited through a violent oppression based on religious fundamentalist principles that thoroughly disempower women. Through the Aunts, whose version of women’s unity is an ironical throwback to separatist radicalism, and through Serena Joy, the ‘Wife’ who was once a gospel singer preaching that women’s place was the home, Atwood critiques both the isolationist ideology of cultural feminism and the gender essentialism advocated by the religious Right. Thus, Aunt Lydia dreams of a future in which “[w]omen will live in harmony together . . . . [w]omen united for a common end!” (171). And the traditionalist Serena, a Wife caught in a passionless, adulterous marriage and living the restricted life of a Household, is ‘‘taken at her word”, Offred observes (26). The kind of world the Aunts and the Wives create for fellow women in Gilead is ingeniously connected by the author with the gynoecium-like women’s haven the cultural feminists like Offred’s mother dreamed about: “You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies” (137). Besides being an index to the narrator’s complacent condescension to her mother’s feminism, this is also an ironically inflected critique of feminism’s failure

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to assimilate itself into the currents of actual social praxis in patriarchy. As Offred muses: “. . . there was more than one way of living with your head in the sand and . . . if Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself in a women-only enclave, she was sadly mistaken. Men were not just going to go away . . . You couldn’t just ignore them” (181). “The implication”, as Greene puts it, “is that Gilead has been brought about partly because feminism has lost sight of the larger issues and failed as an effective force in society” (206).5 Atwood’s position on feminism, however, is more complex than a mere denunciation of separatism. Through the characters of Moira, Offred’s mother and Ofglen Atwood seems to register her response to feminine resistance and rebellion as well. The heroic, dauntless Moira makes repeated failed attempts to escape Gilead and is ultimately placed at Jezebel’s, the underground brothel, for a few years “good years” before she is sent to the “boneyard” (261). Ofglen, a Handmaid who is part of an underground resistance group named ‘Mayday’, is another rebellious woman who meets a sorry end. At a ‘Salvaging’ she deals a fatal blow to the alleged rapist and saves him from a painful, mutilating death, thereby risking her own exposure as a non-conformist. Later, after being arrested, she commits suicide in order to save her fellow rebels. And Offred’s feminist mother, who ended up as a neurotic alcoholic, was not a happy person. While the ultimate fates of these three rebellious women are not too encouraging and could be viewed as negation of women’s agency, these could, with equal justification, be perceived as part of Atwood’s critique of radicalism. Also, the lifelong feminist struggle of Offred’s mother, the swashbuckling heroism of Moira, and the courage and sacrifice of Ofglen are not unappreciated by the protagonist Offred. Although she did not have an easy relationship with her demanding mother, Offred longs to have her back (190). She also recognizes the value of Ofglen’s martyrdom and is thankful because, as she says: “She has died that I may live” (298). The most prominent rebel against the regime, however, is Moira, and although her’s is a sorry end, Atwood does not negate the value of her courage and her indomitable spirit of resistance. This is proved by the fact that almost all through her narrative Offred looks up to Moira and admires her courageous, rebellious nature. In admiring her, Offred acknowledges what she lacks. Seeing Moira at Jezebel’s, resigned to her lot, Offred muses: “I don’t want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. . . . I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack” (261). She gets upset hearing “indifference, a lack of volition” in Moira’s voice, but then recognizes that the regime’s

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oppression has got the better of her spirit: “[h]ow can I expect her to go on, with my idea of her courage, live it through, act it out, when I myself do not?” (261). Moira tries to soothe her: “‘I am still here, you can see it’s me. Anyway, look at it this way: it’s not so bad, there’s lots of women around. Butch paradise, you might call it’” (261). In this remark Offred recognizes a flash of Moira’s older spirit—“something” that “used to be so central to her”— and is comforted (261). Moira’s ultimate fate, and her resignation to it, then, does not indicate Atwood’s condemnation of the indefatigable spirit of “incorrigibles” like her. Rather, it may be taken as indicative of her message that for women to triumph over patriarchal exploitation isolated acts of rebellion—“singlehanded combat[s]”—may not be not enough. The ‘Mayday Resistance’— an organized group that has both women and men, like Nick, in its fold— succeeds in rescuing Offred and possibly other Handmaids too. What Atwood seems to be suggesting through her treatment of Moira and Offred’s mother is that isolation—be it uncoordinated individual valour of the kind Moira shows or principled separatism—could be counterproductive in securing women’s well-being in a patriarchy. If Atwood denounces feminist separatism she is critical of complacent non-involvement as well. The Aunts and Serena Joy satirically illustrate the consequences separatism might end up with; but, equally, they also illustrate women’s complicity in women’s victimization. Also, through the character of Janine, who entirely supplicates before the regime and ultimately loses her sanity, Atwood points out the danger of women’s placid indifference to gaining control of their own lives. Observing that Gilead makes contemporary patriarchal societies look good, Greene comments that “to reject Gilead leaves us with no alternative but to endorse the old system—our system” (207). Atwood evinces, she says, “a distrust of society itself” even as she ignores the power that we, as members of society, have of choosing “how society will be planned and who will do the planning” (207, 205). But a critical reading of the ‘Historical Notes’ along with Offred’s reminiscences, as we have seen, shows Atwood making, rather than denying connections between our times and Gilead, and herein lies the power of its cautionary message. Also, we should not ignore the fact that Offred’s rescue is brought about largely by the alertness and activity of a political organization—the subterranean rebel group called ‘Mayday’. By creating a speculative world where the humanity of women is brutalized through treating them as state-owned breeders, Atwood extrapolates on Rightist attitudes about women and the family, making manifest how under patriarchal social organizations—based on

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domesticating women and their sexuality—the personal is deeply, inescapably political. Therefore, what Atwood suggests for women as a way out of exploitation is resistance as an organized political activity—not necessarily exclusive of men or of women who seem apparently to conform. Individual victimhood has to be seen in connection with that of others for the systemic pattern of institutionalized exploitation to be perceived and destroyed. Thus, if women, metaphorically speaking, have to coin a term corresponding to “fraternize”, they have also to integrate men who are more or less oppressed by the established order and are able and willing to help them (21). A fundamentalist order based on a reductive view of human life ends up oppressing both men and women. Thus, in Gilead men are either sexstarved workers, like the ‘Eyes’—who are often hanged to death for what Giliead calls gender treachery—or reduced to stud-service, like the ‘Commanders’. Whether powerful or subordinated, they are doomed to lives devoid of relationships and other human satisfactions. Even the Commander, we are shown, has to seek illicit channels to enjoy companionship and similar simple pleasures of life, like a conversation or a game of scrabble. It is the free individual—man or woman—that Atwood champions in The Handmaid’s Tale: it is their unique and inviolable humanity that she wants to see survive. Indeed, the systemic logic underpinning women’s victimization in Gilead works out more in terms of the oppression and exploitation of the female individual by the state than of men’s oppression of women.6 Offred, the apparently unheroic protagonist of the novel, survives this utter oppression. But this is not the victory of mere meekness and passive endurance. Her survival depends on several crucial factors, among which are the underground resistance network and her secret affair with Nick. Her clandestine relationship with Nick is in fact part of the spontaneous resistance that Offred puts up against the regime that has outlawed interpersonal interactions.7 A significant part of Offred’s resistance against Gilead’s oppression also consists in the very act of her narration, even if that is done as a running stream of thoughts in her head which was later recorded, post facto. Recognizing this subversive implication of her narration, Rubenstein remarks that “her story is an act of self-generation that opposes the oppressive obligations of procreation” thrust on her in Gilead (105). “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” was the message left to Offred by her predecessor in the Household: she pays heed to that and strives to survive, her narration being part of her strategy for survival, as we shall discuss in a subsequent section (102). However, by underlining the

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fundamental resemblances between Gileadean attitudes toward women and subterranean misogyny in pre-Gilead, Atwood highlights the danger of the kind of complacency that made women of Offred’s generation live “by ignoring” the markers of gender inequity in their personal and social lives (66). Shelley in The Last Man shows women’s constriction within the relational-familial realm and rues the fact that they do not have scope to engage their energies in larger, societal-cultural pursuits. Atwood, in our times, emphasizes the fact that even after women have gained access to the ‘Public’ their engagement with the sexual-politics inherent to patriarchal inter-gender dynamics remains inadequate. In The Handmaid’s Tale she indicts women’s solipsistic non-involvement in the political as much as she denounces the kind of feminist radicalism that tends to resemble rightist essentialism on women.

The ‘Romance’ Theme In another similarity with Shelley in The Last Man, Atwood concerns herself with women’s dependence on inter-gender emotive relationships. The Handmaid’s Tale takes a critical look at the concept of heterosexual ‘love’ or ‘romance’—a concept that is traditionally premised on an inequitable relation between the sexes. In this section we shall explore Atwood’s critique of ‘romance’ in some detail as it is Offred’s eroticamatory involvement with Nick that is one of the most significant drivers of the novel’s plot and hence crucial to an understanding of Atwood’s thoughts on the subjects of inter-gender bonds and women’s agency. Offred’s survival, obviously, owes a lot to her relationship with Nick. Her clandestine affair with him is in itself a rebellious act in the totalitarian state of Gilead out to crush the (female) individual. As such, it is part of Offred’s resistance to the regime. But, in practical terms as well, her association with Nick proves crucial to her ultimate survival. Apparently, it is Nick who engineers her rescue at the end, risking his life in the process. How, then, are we to interpret Atwood’s intentions here? Is she making the traditional prescription of ‘love’ for woman’s survival and fulfilment? Offred defies the rules of Gilead in order to meet Nick, thereby endangering herself. Apart from being rule-bending, Offred’s affair with Nick is promising. It holds out the potential of pregnancy for her which, in Gileadean terms, would mean her life-long survival as opposed to deportation to toxic ‘Colonies’. What she makes, in effect, then, is an attempt to hoodwink the regime while pretending to play by its own rules.

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Soon, however, her utilitarian liaison with Nick takes on the contours of an interpersonal relationship as Offred starts getting emotionally involved with him, and he seemingly reciprocates. They start out with a no-nonsense approach to the affair. In one early encounter Nick says, before getting intimate with Offred, “‘[n]o romance’ . . . ‘[o]kay?’” Offred reflects that in pre-Gilead times this would have meant “no strings”, but that in the present context this means that neither needs to take the risk of standing by the other, if caught (274). Their encounter is characterized apparently by a muted tenderness and desire— in stark contrast to the state-sanctioned ‘Ceremony’ that allows neither. In response to Offred’s haste Nick expresses his frustration with the studservice he is rendering: “I can just squirt it into a bottle and you can pour it in” (274). Although Offred negates this speech at once, it is clear from this that she feels his humanity, which is something Gilead is out to destroy: people in Gilead are strictly regimented and disciplined, signifying only in terms of their service to the baby-farming regime. The relationship, in fact, becomes so satisfying for Offred that it feels like compensation enough for what she has to go through in Gilead, and she seems to lose her desire to escape: “The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape, cross the border to freedom. I want to be here, with Nick, where I can get at him” (283). She remembers her mother’s words in this context: “Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, so long as there are a few compensations” (283). Offred does seem to be resigning herself to the torture of life as a Handmaid in Gilead for the “compensation” of having a man’s love. And if that is so, how are we to read Atwood’s position on the relationship of inter-gender love to women’s autonomy or to their agency in shaping their destiny? Several critics are of the opinion that The Handmaid’s Tale is not a “stridently” feminist novel (Malak 84). They point out Atwood’s implicit condemnation here of separatist feminism and they perceive Offred’s affair with Nick in positive terms.8 However, while Atwood’s disapproval of feminist isolationism is unequivocal, her position on the role of traditional hetero-sexual bonding in women’s lives is not so simple. One of the major voices that interrogate the optimistic reading of the political significance of ‘love’ in The Handmaid’s Tale is that of Madonne Miner. Noticing subtle clues that point to similarities in Offred’s relations with the Commander, Nick, and Luke, who dominated and betrayed Offred, Miner concludes that in The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood casts doubts “upon love stories generally” (160–61).9 Besides, as Miner puts it, “whatever political commitment Offred might be capable of making vanishes in the light of her commitment to romance” because she “loses all

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interest in Mayday and in the possibility of escape” (162). And, lastly, Miner focuses on Offred’s descriptions of her relationship with Nick, descriptions that illustrate “decidedly conservative narrative forms”, which mirror equally conservative forms of inter-gender relations (150). In love with Nick, Offred does admit she no longer wants to escape Gilead. But, “[t]elling this”, she is “ashamed of [her]self” (283). Fully aware of the implication of her state of mind she sees the admission “as a kind of boasting”: “There’s pride in it, because it demonstrates how extreme and therefore justified it was, for me” (283). This could mean that Offred’s need for love or intimacy was extreme, given her unbearable experience in Gilead, and therefore her sudden disinterest in the possibility of escape was “justified”; or it could imply that by choosing to satisfy her desires at great risk to herself she was making a personal choice, thus subverting the logic of the regime from within it (hence the “boasting”). Discussing the Offred–Nick affair, Freibert observes that Offred’s interactions with Nick is an example of how women may “transcend their conditioning, establish their identity, joyfully reclaim their bodies . . . and reconstruct the social order” through positive risk-taking (285). While the narrative does not seem to probe the effects and implications of the affair far enough for us to fully share this celebratory perception of the same, it is easy to see that Offred reclaims her body for herself through her risky encounters with Nick.10 That in her affair with him Offred was satisfying herself sexually is amply evident in the narrative, right from the night they first meet in Serena’s parlour and exchange the first kiss to later occasions, described by Offred thus: “we make love each time as if we know beyond a shadow of doubt that there will never be any more, for either of us, with anyone, ever” (109–10, 281). In a police state that has banned sexual gratification for all and reduced female bodies to “ambulatory chalices” this affair, then, does have a subversive valence apart from its function as a survival strategy for the victim (146). There were days, Offred tells us, when she would not put it, to herself, “in terms of love”, but of survival: “I said I have made a life for myself, here, of a sort” (283). But while justifying it in terms of survival, Offred is aware of the anti-feminist/anti-political implications of her admission: she compares her attitude to that of colonial “settlers’ wives” and of “women who survived wars, if they still had a man” (283). To be fair to Offred, however, one must mention that even after her affair with Nick, she does not really lose interest in ‘Mayday’, as is evident from her reaction to Ofglen’s apparently disloyal action at the ‘Salvaging’ and from her interactions with the new Ofglen, who, she discovers, “isn’t one of us” (292, 294–96).

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In describing her first encounter with Nick Offred gives two different versions, which happen to be variations on the traditional script of ‘love’. The first is in the register of Harlequin erotica; the latter is mechanical and devoid of the trappings that mask gender hegemony in traditional erotic descriptions. Indeed, the second description lacks emotive content altogether, although it shows the new lovers quoting “from late movies, from the time before” (274). It is true that both the descriptions reflect ageold inter-gender praxes. Yet, it is significant that Offred does not ratify any of these descriptions but cancels them both out in a typically self-aware dismissal of narrative veracity: “It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened . . .” (275). It does not seem right to ignore this fact while interpreting a novel which provides—as will be seen—a foregrounded narrative that despairs of transmuting experience into language. Also, we should note that if the first description reflects traditional male (sexual) dominance of women, the second echoes the language of flirtatious interactions without attachment or understanding. J. Brooks Bousson rightly sees this hesitancy as “the narrative’s reluctance to commit itself to the romance plot” but stops short of reading beyond the “reluctance” (“A Psychoanalytic and Feminist Approach” 126). Offred is aware of the “limited number of scripts” according to which love is played out between the genders (Miner 164). Her negation of both the descriptions signals, as it were, her wish to move beyond these limitations to reach out to truer, more egalitarian and affectionate inter-gender bonds. That Nick was not, in fact, exploiting or merely using Offred is evident from his rescuing act that might have cost him his life. For all that the narrative tells us, theirs could have been a non-hierarchical loverelationship that did actually surpass the traditional grammars of romance. If the narrator lacks a language to describe this sort of a relationship it does not follow, as Miner herself admits, that Atwood questions intergender love per se (166). It does, however, underscore the need for women to recognize and move beyond the patterns of domination and inequality inherent in the traditional conception of heterosexual bonding, a conception reflecting the systemically patriarchal construction of gender that ascribes a higher value to men than to women. Howells sees “heterosexual love” as a power that “continually subverts” Gilead’s authority and Malak perceives The Handmaid’s Tale as “cherish[ing] a man–woman axis” (Howells Private and Fictional Words 69; Malak 84). However, through Offred’s self-aware, ironic descriptions the novel exhorts us to raise questions about a “man–woman axis” so long as what revolves round that axis is the debris of the traditional, patriarchal

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conception of inter-gender relationships. The subversive power in Gilead is not so much inter-gender love per se but inter-personal relationships generally. The novel positions itself against separatism, either feminist or misogynist. Offred’s involvement with Nick makes her endure Gilead better; similarly, her remembrances of her former husband Luke, her clandestine friendship with Moira, and even her whispered exchanges with Ofglen help her endure the severe repression. She longs for her student days with Moira, just as she longs for her feminist mother, although she did not have an entirely easy relationship with the latter. Offred does not explicitly tell us about Luke’s betrayal of her to the regime; neither does she connect his rightist, patriarchal attitudes to herself and to the Gileadean coup with those of the more openly misogynistic Commander. But, unlike Greene, who doubts if Offred ever sees “the whole picture” of man’s domination of woman, I would maintain that it is precisely because Offred sees these damning connections that she “put[s] in a lot of effort into making . . . distinctions” (Greene 206; 44). She is not really oblivious of the contiguities between her experiences in preGileadean America and her life as a Handmaid—as is evident in her admission that before the regime women like her lived “by ignoring” the signs of imminent catastrophe (66). She is aware also that in making do with “compensations” women are in danger of forgiving the unforgivable —which she does not do. 11 Offred has never been the sort of rebel Moira and Ofglen have been. She knows she has neither the courage of the underground resistors nor the swashbuckling of Moira; and if we take into account the practical realities of her situation we would have to admit that it would hardly have been possible for her to escape Gilead unassisted. But the assistance comes not merely in the shape of a love-affair but also as an organized rebellion on the part of the victims of Gilead cutting across categories: the Handmaid Ofglen and the Eyes who assist in Offred’s final rescue are part of this rebel group as much as Nick himself. It is the value of human bonding—irrespective of gender—that Atwood seems to be emphasizing in The Handmaid’s Tale. The thematics of the novel sets the individual against the state. That the female individual is victimized more than the male is part of the nature of the state itself, which is a sexist theocracy run by religious fundamentalists. Offred as the female individual subverts the authority of the autocratic state in several ways, as we have already observed. Her varying degrees of private bonding with people, Nick included, augment the force of her resistance. Forming connections, however fragile, is not only symbolic of the defiance by the female individual of the writ of the patriarchal

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fundamentalist state; it also proves to be crucially significant to Offred’s ultimate survival. A scene early in the novel seems to assume a metaphorical significance in this context of the importance of making connections in order to survive—and go beyond—victimhood. It is night-time in the ‘Rachel and Leah Centre’, and the Aunts are on patrol: the Handmaids, lying in spacedout cots touch each others’ fingers across the darkness, making contacts and letting each know that the others exist—in the same draconian darkness, with similar hopes and fears (14).

The Narrative: Tyranny, Text and Resistance Both Shelley and Atwood use ingenious narrative patterns and elements of metafictionality, like narrative foregrounding, intertextuality, and framing devices, for various authorial purposes. Thus, we have seen how in the survivor narrative of The Last Man Shelley uses narrative indeterminacy and foregrounding to register her critique of the concept of history as a teleological process marked by gradual improvement, and how she employs the frame of the “Author’s Introduction” to mark her distance from the (mainstream) Romantic ideology of Art.12 The survivor’s testament that is Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, likewise, uses a selfconscious narrative to bring out the connections between Gileadean totalitarianism and sexual politics in pre-Gilead as also to highlight the protagonist’s strategic use of narrative as a tool for surviving state oppression. In this section we shall explore this use of narrative against the experience of oppression and arrive at an understanding of Atwood’s conception of narrative or literary art in the process. The use of (verbal) language is heavily restricted and controlled in Gilead, especially for the Handmaids, who may only engage in the minimum of ‘phatic communion’ by making neutral comments on the weather or by exchanging pre-set Biblical phrases, like “Blessed be the fruit” or “Praise be” (294, 296). The protagonist defies this silencing diktat of Gilead by narrating her experience of life as an inmate of the prison-state. The narration, thus, is an act of defiance of the writ of the state by the oppressed female individual. More importantly, Offred’s ongoing act of narration, even if only “in [her] head” at first, emerges as her strategy for enduring and surviving the terrible oppression itself (49). Among the significant features of Offred’s narrative is its palimpsestlike nature. She herself draws the reader’s attention to this in the beginning as she describes hearing “a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style” in the gymnasium-turned Re-education Centre for Handmaids (13). Gilead

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has replaced the democratic order by its own totalitarian regime; but for people belonging to the transitional generation, like Offred, it cannot efface memories of the past. Their experience of Gilead impinges on and interacts with that of pre-Gilead in a dialectic whereby each comment on the other. The most obvious result of this palimpsestic interaction of the past and the present is in the structure of Offred’s narrative. In most chapters the narrative juxtaposes events, or thoughts and feelings located in the present setting of Gilead with Offred’s reminiscences of those about her life in pre-Gilead. For instance, in chapter 5 Offred walks with Ofglen along the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is now the heart of the republic of Gilead, and remembers walking the same streets with Luke, her husband: Luke and I used to walk together, sometimes, along these streets. We used to talk about buying a house like one of these, an old big house, fixing it up. We would have a garden, swings for children. We would have children. . . . Such freedom now seems almost weightless. (33)

This weaving together of the past and the present allows Offred both to hold on to her history, and hence to her sense of self, and also to keep herself firmly grounded on her terrible present, against which these incursions of the past seem like “flashes of normality” (58). Sometimes, however, such juxtaposition of the past and the present serves not to distinguish, but to liken. Chapter 10 opens with Offred singing ‘Amazing Grace’ in her head. As she waits in her room, she recollects Moira’s “underwhore” party and the memory is juxtaposed with her recollection of stories she had read in the papers just prior to the rise of Gilead—stories about women “bludgeoned to death or mutilated, or interfered with” (66). The suggestion, unmistakable, is that pre-Gilead has led to Gilead while women like Offred lived by “ignoring”. As Offred realizes, “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bath-tub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it” (66). In Chapter 21 Offred narrates the scene of a ‘Birthing’—of Janine giving birth, to the chanting of instructions by the Handmaids and in the presence of Aunt Lydia and the Wife. As Offred returns to the ‘Birthmobile’ she talks to her mother, in her mind, sarcastically likening her mother’s ideal of a “women’s culture” to Gilead’s oppressive ghetto of women focused on procreation (137). Thus, throughout most of the narrative, Offred weaves a complex pattern of observations about the past and the present that helps her maintain a “perspective” to what happens to

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her and helps her hold out against her terrible present, thereby making her survival possible. As she observes: “Perspective is necessary. . . . Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be” (153). Another important aspect of Offred’s narrative is that it draws attention to its status as a narrative, a “reconstruction” of reality (144). This narrative self-consciousness is made apparent at numerous points in the novel, notably in Chapter 23 where she says, explicitly: This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It’s a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn’t have said, what I should or shouldn’t have done, how I should have played it. If I ever get out of here— (144)

She checks herself at this point and says: “Let’s stop here. I intend to get out of here. It can’t last forever” (144). A similar clinging on to hope is expressed, again, through narrative reconstruction in Chapter 28, where Offred thinks of Moira, saying “[s]he was still my oldest friend. Is” (181). In Chapter 38 Offred again draws attention to her perception that storytelling is subjective. At the end of the chapter, she reflects on her struggle as narrator and tells her audience that the “story” she wants to tell is not aligned to truth: Here is what I would like to tell. I’d like to tell a story about how Moira escaped, for good this time. Or if I couldn’t tell that, I would like to say she blew up Jezebel’s, with fifty Commanders inside it. I’d like her to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that didn’t happen. (262)

Readers get reminded of the constructed character of Offred’s narrative most remarkably in chapter 40, wherein she gives two different versions of her first sexual encounter with Nick, and then negates both, saying, “I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate” (275). Apart from the obvious message about the constructed nature of narrative—and hence of history—two other points are underscored here: that reality always defies language and that it also tends to fall short of expectations. Offred’s narration—her mental running commentary on the reality around her—keeps her alert even as it prevents her from feeling the full force of that reality. As she muses:

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This highly objective self-awareness, with its built-in hope of survival, is what keeps her sane, helping her hold out against Gilead’s misogynistic madness. Thus, during the ‘Ceremony’ she attempts to “keep the core of [her]self out of reach, enclosed, protected” by the objectivity of her intellect detaching itself and observing her experience (274): My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he is doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. . . . I lie still and picture the unseen canopy over my head. (104–105)

All the while it lasts Offred keeps herself mentally occupied—and distanced—by alternately thinking of people’s obsession with sex in preGilead and describing concrete details of the situation. “One detaches oneself”, as she says, “[o]ne describes” (106). At one point in the narrative Offred observes herself in the act of observing and relates it to her life as a woman in Gilead: “I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born” (76; emphases added). The self-conscious narrator here skillfully relates the “composed” character of her story with the constructed artificiality of her life as a captive breeder in Gilead. And the echo of de Beauvoir’s legendary sentence in The Second Sex (“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”) extends this congruence between artificiality and compulsory procreation to femininity itself, that is, to womanhood as it is lived in patriarchy (295). One major aspect of Offred’s narrative consists in her musings about her body—which she views as “treacherous ground”, a “swamp” that has betrayed her into being a “two-legged womb” given over to “breeding purposes” (73; 136). She uses her highly aware meditations about her body as a means both to vent her resentment at being reduced to a womb and to create a sense of distance between herself and her body that helps her in fighting her Gileadean experience.

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Offred verbalizes her willed alienation from her body dramatically when she muses: “I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely” (72–73). Commenting on one of the differences between her pre-Gileadean past and her present, Offred muses: I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. . . . There were limits but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I am a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am. . . . Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. (83–84; emphases added)

The perceived immanence of her fecundity—“more real” than herself in Gilead—seems to engulf and nullify her, making her feel like “sedentary flesh”, “a prize pig” or, at best, “a child” (79, 63). The “[l]unar” rhythm of her womb seals her into Gilead’s stifling baby-farm, cut off from the currents of “solar” time, as it is lived in the rest of the world (209). It is this nullification of her selfhood by her captured animality that Offred resists by telling her story, the acts of observing, commenting and telling being assertions on her part of her human consciousness and agency. As part of self-consciously describing her experience in Gilead, Offred “detaches” herself from the present context of her life, a context defined and constrained utterly by her body. This is especially true, as has been observed, of her description of the “Ceremony”, wherein she dissociates herself from her body, objectifying the latter in an ironic parody of Gilead’s metaphoric fragmentation and reification of female bodies. She tries, so to say, to think herself out of her body, to define her identity as a human person as distinct from and more than that of a fertile female body conscripted into the service of a totalitarian patriarchy. By giving linguistic expression to her experience in Gilead Offred disobeys the regime’s diktat against speech. Moreover, she bears witness to the Gileadean outrage against womankind by recording her painful experience—her “sad and hungry and sordid story”—for the women of the future so “that lessons may be learned, judgments made and future atrocities avoided” (279; Kolodny 46). After all, as Offred reflects, Gilead “isn’t really about who can do what to whom and get away with it”, but “about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it” (144–45; emphasis added). She points out to the reader that to forgive is a power

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because it implies the choice of not forgiving and because it confers impunity to the guilty: “. . . remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest” (144). Even if someone lacks the power to resist or avenge oppression s/he still has the power not to condone it: “Never tell me it amounts to the same thing” (145). Offred does not forgive. Torn between the imperative to retain her life and sanity on the one hand and her highly perceptive awareness of the sins of Gilead on the other, she goes on telling the story of her nightmarish experience to a future audience in whom she reposes her trust. The complex, foregrounded narrative steeped with Offred’s objective awareness of her situation prevents us from losing ourselves entirely in the story, so that we may attend critically to the clues that reveal aspects of contemporary sexual-politics critiqued in the novel. However, “the attacks of the past” by way of Offred’s memories, her piteous holding on to hope, and the obvious pain that comes through much of the narrative, despite its objectivity, keep the reader sufficiently engaged too with the protagonist (52). What this tactical use of narrative brings out is Atwood’s belief in the power of the art of narration—the power of the word—to share, to connect, to resist, and, above all, to testify. In an eloquent expression of the importance of the reader’s receptivity—a point made by Shelley in The Last Man—Atwood’s narrator stresses the need of an audience for the narrative to fulfil its destiny: But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone. Even when there is no-one. A story is like a letter (49–50).

She knows her story will be read by “someone”, some day, and that is why she now keeps on going with it, although “it hurts [her] to tell it over, over again”: . . . after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance. . . . By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you. . . . I believe you into being. . . . I tell, therefore you are. (279)

The revision of Descartes’ famous words (“I think, therefore I am”) “stresses the interdependence of all of us in the contemporary world” (Brydon “Beyond Violent Dualities” 54). This underscores the novel’s message of interconnected victimhood and the need for cooperation and organized collective action to move beyond it. Emphasizing the inviolability of the individual as against the coercive collective (and stressing the need for individuals to connect), The Handmaid’s Tale sends

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out a ‘Romantic’ message through a postmodern narrative that balances the reader’s empathetic engagement with critical distance. *** As speculative fiction The Handmaid’s Tale builds on the specific dangers patriarchal misogyny, aided by religious dogmatism, might pose for women. The relationship of equivalence between inequities in man– woman relationships at the interpersonal level and the macro-politics of institutionalized patriarchy—the equivalence between “the personal and political dimensions of (women’s) victimhood and survival”—is brought out in the novel (Rubenstein 101). However, although The Handmaid’s Tale envisions a socio-cultural catastrophe specifically for women, part of Atwood’s novelistic polemic, as we have seen, is directed against separatist feminism even as the novel shows how narrow patriarchal ideologies undermine the humanity of both men and women, thereby making equality, understanding and co-operation between the sexes an imperative. The novel warns women against ‘postfeminist’ complacency and lack of sexual-political engagement, highlighting the perilous potential of ignoring patriarchal misogyny and essentialist thinking on women. Shelley’s Frankenstein makes a fictional critique of stereotypical cultural roles for women, that of the mother included. In The Handmaid’s Tale we find a speculative elaboration of women’s entrapment into the role of mothers to the extent that their very lives depend on their function as procreators and their personhood is annihilated. The novel unmasks the biological essentialism whereby patriarchy identifies woman with the natural-immanent as opposed to the cultural—the basic patriarchal thought paradigm implicated in the gender critiques of Shelley’s texts. Like Shelley’s The Last Man Atwood’s dystopia engages also with the unequal gender contours of heterosexual ‘love’. However, instead of putting down heterosexual bonding altogether, Atwood seems to urge women to seek out newer, more liberating and equitable modes of relating emotively with men. Critiquing the masculinist biases of mainstream historiography, The Handmaid’s Tale indicates how our reading of the past and our actions in the present determine our future. It underscores Atwood’s position as a politically and morally committed writer, condemning as it does the callousness and the culpable relativism practised by intellectuals while interpreting cultural discourses and praxes. The novel, therefore, vindicates the critical perception of Atwood as an author who looks to the

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vocation of writing as an “irrevocable commitment” to her society and to her own humanity (Rigney 121). The Handmaid’s Tale, which shows the negative impact of patriarchal power politics on the freedom of the individual, both male and female, tells the story of the resilience of an individual while underscoring also the importance of collective resistance. The protagonist records her story of personal grit for the reader whom she brings into existence by her belief and psychological need—the reader for whom she leaves the lesson about the terrible price of complacency and sexual-political non-involvement. In the next chapter we shall trace the development in Atwood’s speculative engagement with gender issues, particularly, the ideologies of motherhood, femininity and ‘love’, and see how she relates her gender critiques with her concerns with technoscience and the neo-imperialism of global capital.

CHAPTER FOUR ‘OPEN MARKETS, CLOSED MINDS’: APOCALYPTIC SPECULATION IN ORYX AND CRAKE

Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) is a work of speculative fiction, like The Handmaid’s Tale, that projects a negative vision of the future, extrapolating from human proclivities in the contemporary world and sending out a message of warning to the readers. But while both novels are dystopian tales sharing a concern with global environmental degradation and imperialism, Oryx and Crake differs from the earlier novel both in its nature and scope. The dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale implicates sexualpolitics in the USA of the 1980s and the novel is decidedly feminist in its political thrust; Oryx and Crake presents a biotechnology-driven apocalypse that takes in the whole of humanity, human civilization and the earth itself in a cosmic sweep that implicates both politico-cultural and philosophical issues. In this the novel resembles Shelley’s The Last Man, both works presenting survivor narratives woven around the experiences and memories of one last man stranded amid loneliness and desolation in a post-apocalyptic world. Like in The Last Man, moreover, the apocalypse in Oryx and Crake implicates imperialism. If Shelley’s novel shows the socio-cultural impact of colonialist ambitions and Anglo-centric snobbery Atwood visualizes an end to the world brought forth by the excesses of neo-imperialistic capitalism fuelled by technoscience. Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oryx and Crake weaves a creation myth. Frankenstein creates a human being from cadaver parts, a human being who has the inner beauty of goodness and wisdom while being monstrous on the outside. He longs for the company and the affections of normal human beings, of the race of his creator, but is refused because of his physical monstrousness, the denial turning him into a real monster on the rampage. The super-scientist Crake in Oryx and Crake creates hybridized humans (‘Crakers’) who are uniformly beautiful and know nothing but a near-perfect goodness programmed into their genes—a goodness the price

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of which has been the imaginative and intellectual complexity, the very specificity, of the human mind. Frankenstein and Crake appear similar in their utopian ambitions about mankind—as has been argued by Wilson in her analysis of the themes and images of the two novels (“Frankenstein’s Gaze”). However, unlike Frankenstein, who dreamt of creating a magnificent race, grander than humankind, Crake, the creator in Oryx and Crake, has a corporatesponsored brief of making hassle-free, beautiful and docile humans that would not over-multiply (292–93, 304). While Frankenstein’s dream reflects his lonely ambition Crake’s conception of biologically superefficient and mentally simple beings is a measure of the puny materialism of his times. His is the unimaginative utilitarian vision that conceives of human beings merely as the highest mammal. His analysis of the human fails to fathom human nature as he goes about purging his created humans of imagination and complexity—of humanity itself. Is the bland, robot-like simplicity of the new beings preferable to human complexity that has the potential for evil? Is there no alternative to the reductionism of science in ameliorating human nature? What, indeed, is the nature of human specificity? We are asked to ponder. The theme of normative physicality in its interrelation with social being that Shelley handles in Frankenstein recurs in Oryx and Crake. Unchosen bodily distinction, as we have seen, is both the cause of the social rejection of the Creature and the token of its lack of cultural context, its ‘Otherness’. Yet the Creature’s physical difference belies a mental similarity with ‘normal’ human beings: he is a human creature with a mind characterized by intelligence and native goodness, which gets perverted under the stress of alienation. In Oryx and Crake people strive to achieve a culturally constructed standard of physical perfection that reinforces the schism between the normative bodily frame and inward human difference. The bio-engineered humanoids in whom the bodily ideal is fully realized embody, as we shall see in this chapter, a pervasive homogeneity that signifies the end of individual difference and hence, in a sense, the end of humanity. These human-animal hybrids, embodying physical perfection and a programmed, non-human simplicity of mind, are an ironical counterpart to Frankenstein’s outwardly monstrous human Creature. Atwood’s novelistic speculation on the nature of the (post)human implicates gender issues also. Like Shelley, particularly in The Last Man, Atwood highlights the deleterious impact on women of their constriction within the patriarchal constructions of inter-gender ‘love’ and motherhood. She also shows how the ideals of masculinity and femininity perpetuate gender stereotypes even in supposedly advanced societies. Critiquing what

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has been identified as the patriarchal ‘institution’ of motherhood in the context of the rise of Rightist fundamentalism, Atwood presents an instance of ‘mothering’ that both underlines the lacunae in the sexist ideology of motherhood and gestures toward an alternative.1 Resembling The Last Man again, Oryx and Crake ends not with any definite future vision but with openness and uncertainty. Even as the last man in both novels is poised for a new uncertain future we are invited to imagine the beginning of a new history. Before Verney sets out on his world-wide voyage, he hopes that the earth might still be re-peopled by a “surviving pair of lovers” to be found in some corner of the postapocalyptic world (372). Yet, his dominant mood is one of “restless despair” and he asserts that he does not expect any “amelioration” of his condition although he harbours faint hopes of finding “a survivor” (373). Significantly, both The Last Man and Oryx and Crake adumbrate at the end scenarios that have the potential for renewed colonialism. When Verney sets sail in search of another survivor he starts his voyage into the world with the mental baggage of European supremacy, and a prospect of cultural imperialism is raised through the cargo of European literary classics that he travels with (372). His impassioned farewell to Rome resonates with an assumption of European superiority that is the hallmark of Western imperialism. For him, as we have seen, England is the “centre of the earth” and “the rest is like a fable”, and he is clearly apprehensive to leave “the verdant land of native Europe” (5, 374). Indeed, the sense of European pre-eminence is so intense in him that we are left wondering if he would be able to consort with any “survivor” he may find in the shores “far” from Europe, which alone he seems to consider the scene of “civilised life”: “Farewell Italy!—farewell . . . to civilised life”, he exclaims (373). Similarly, Oryx and Crake invokes the subject of colonialism toward the end. Snowman hears of three armed individuals, ‘normal’ human beings like him, who were spotted in the vicinity by the Crakers: the novel concludes with him conjuring up images of colonial violence and subjugation even as he worries for the safety of the hybrid humans (364, 366). Oryx and Crake—like Verney’s tale—is instinct with the pathos of loneliness suffered by the protagonist. Left as the last man alive in the world Verney feels “girded, walled in, vaulted over, by seven-fold barriers of loneliness” (370). The last man in Atwood’s novel has the same feeling. Tortured by loneliness and by his own half-crazed mind that seems to perform “perverse experiments” on itself, Snowman longs to get out and realizes the irony of the situation: “What could be more out than where he is?” (45). So acute is the misery of being left without any human

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companion that the narrator (reflecting Snowman’s point of view) perceives Snowman’s organic humanity itself as an “aberration”, especially in comparison with the plastic perfection of the lab-created Crakers. His despairing expressions of loneliness and sense of abjection (“He’s humanoid, he’s hominid, he’s an aberration. . . ”) echo the voice of Verney toward the close of The Last Man (Atwood Oryx and Crake 307). Accepting loneliness as his “familiar” and “sorrow” as his “constant companion”, Verney records: “My hair has become nearly grey—my voice . . . comes strangely on my ears. My person, with its human powers and features, seems to me a monstrous excrescence of nature” (372). As we have seen in Chapter 2, Verney starts writing a memoir in order to alleviate the misery of loneliness, dedicating it to dead humanity, yet hoping it will be read by some future readers, “the children of a saved pair of lovers” who will “seek to know” about the apocalypse (372). Snowman also thinks of “keep[ing] a diary” to “[s]et down his impressions”—like captains of sinking ships or “castaways on desert islands”. But he abandons the idea because “even a castaway assumes a future reader” and “Snowman can make no such assumptions” (40–41). Unlike Verney, the survivor of a natural epidemic, Snowman is left alone on an earth that, he believes, has been thoroughly depopulated by a technologically generated apocalypse. And the inheritors of the earth—man’s technological creations—would not be able to inherit the legacy of man’s last words. Snowman can have “no future reader, because the Crakers can’t read” (41). Subtly suggested here is the symbolic significance of literature as the epitome and the carrier of human culture, a significance the novel brings out cumulatively as it progresses. By emphasizing the monstrous agony of being left without a human consort the last man narratives of both Shelley and Atwood underscore the importance of a cultural context for human survival. Both The Last Man and Oryx and Crake perceive a culturally embedded existence as being integral to a realization of the human. In the context of Oryx and Crake this understanding of the human serves to critique the reductionist proclivity of modern science and reminds us of Shelley’s insight embodied in Frankenstein about human specificity being the function of the interplay of the natural and the cultural. Unlike in The Last Man (or in The Handmaid’s Tale), however, the narrative in Oryx and Crake does not purport to render an edition of a ‘found manuscript’. Instead, we are given a third person relation of events set in the protagonist’s present while aspects of the past—of “another state of existence”—impinge on his consciousness through memories and reflections that work with the logic of association (The Last Man 373). In

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the following sections we shall take a look at these two worlds projected in Oryx and Crake—the dystopian near-future one and the post-apocalyptic one—endeavouring to understand the human implications of Atwood’s speculative vision. In the process we shall further trace the patterns of similarity (and difference) between Atwood’s apocalyptic novel and Shelley’s The Last Man.

Biotechnology, Eugenics, and the Apocalypse Jimmy is the protagonist, with whose childhood Oryx and Crake begins. Jimmy’s world—situated in the USA of the middle of the twenty-first century—is controlled in a totalitarian manner by giant corporations dealing in biotechnology; these business firms, called ‘Compounds’, promote extreme consumerism on the one hand and contribute to rampant environmental degradation and exploitation of the poor on the other. This world ends in a virus-caused apocalypse biologically engineered by the über-scientist Crake, the friend for whose high-profile, high-secret laboratory Jimmy for a time works along with Oryx, the woman both love. When the world ends Jimmy is the sole human survivor on a radically altered earth, living by scavenging in the ruins and acting as care-taker and god-man to the group of human-animal hybrids that were created by Crake before the apocalypse. In this life Jimmy comes to be known as ‘Snowman’ to the humanoids called ‘Crakers’. The narrative, like Atwood’s earlier dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, juggles two time-frames, Snowman’s experiences in the apocalyptic world being punctuated and accented by his memories of the pre-apocalyptic but already dystopian times when he was Jimmy. The ‘Snowman’ sections of the novel project an apocalypse of cosmic proportions. All of the human species (except Snowman) are dead and all of human civilization is extinct. The earth is teeming with bizarre, dangerous animals—“hostile bioforms”—and the climate and the environment have gone terribly wrong, so much so that the whole of nature itself seems to be taking revenge on the last of the human species (28). The first image of apocalyptic devastation is at the beginning of the novel, an image of Snowman’s surroundings as he wakes up at dawn: On the eastern horizon there’s a grayish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. The offshore towers stand out in dark silhouette against it. . . . The shrieks of the birds . . . and the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted

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That Snowman is living out a nightmare in a wasteland-like landscape is hinted at, as is the “dark” and “deadly” might of nature, warped out of its benignity by human excesses. There is also a subtle suggestion of the perceived nonchalance of the universe in the “distant” ocean that grinds against the rubble left by the ruin of humanity, “wave after wave sloshing against the various barricades” in an unhurried rhythm, “wish-wash, wishwash”, never missing a beat, even as the last man lives out a terrible existence amid deep physical and mental misery (3). Like Shelley’s apocalyptic vision in The Last Man Atwood’s apocalypse projects an antianthropocentric apprehension of the world. The narrators of both the last man narratives perceive nature as being indifferent, and even hostile, to humanity. Observing a twilight scene toward the end of The Last Man, Verney contrasts the changeless serenity of nature with the end of humanity and the ruin of the human world: Yes, this is the earth; there is no change – no ruin – no rent made in her verdurous expanse; she continues to wheel round and round, with alternate night and day, through the sky, though man is not her adorner or inhabitant (365).

While Shelley perceives nature as an entity indifferent to humanity Atwood projects a future wherein nature has turned positively malevolent to the lone surviving human being, having first been warped and degraded by man’s technology.2 Verney in The Last Man fancies “the wild scenes of nature” as being “the enemy of all that lives”; in Snowman’s case, as we shall see, the enmity of nature is no mere fancy (366). A large part of Snowman’s agony after the apocalypse is caused by the animosity of nature made wrong, a nature that appears to punish the last human being alive on the earth by means of atrocities of the weather. In the chapter ‘Nooners’, for example, we see Snowman suffer the intense heat that now define the entire daytime and is followed by daily thunderstorms. In one instance the image of the torrential rain beating down on Snowman becomes emblematic of his situation: The lightning sizzles, the thunder booms, the rain’s pouring down, so heavy the air is . . . white all around, a solid mist . . . like glass in motion. . . . Snowman -- goon, buffoon, poltroon -- crouches on the rampart, arms over his head, pelted from above like an object of general derision. He’s humanoid, he’s hominid, he’s an aberration, he’s abominable. . . .” (307)

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The passage brings out the abjection of the last human alive—a being who suffers intense physical and mental agony and, bereft of all dignity, perceives himself to be a monstrous aberration, the fool and the dupe of the earth. This loss of self-esteem on the part of the last human being, the indignity of the highest creation implied in the utter destitution of Snowman is what constitutes the real horror of the apocalypse for the readers of Oryx and Crake. The landscape of the ruin continues to be drawn in the next chapter as “ground-up coral and broken bones” are swept up by the waves on “the white beach” along with other items of “[f]lotsam”—“things from before” (6--7). We are going to learn in subsequent chapters that the temporal difference between present time and time before, in objective terms, is only a matter of months. But this very proximity between the two temporal realities points up the finality of the apocalypse, the rupture that has been made in the fabric of human history by the technology-induced global plague. Snowman’s dysfunctional watch showing “a blank face” and clocking “zero hour” is symbolic of that rupture: this “absence of official time” that “causes a jolt of terror to run through him” brings home to us the frightful fictional reality of the absolute end of humanity. It is an apocalypse without millennium that the novel projects, much like Shelley’s The Last Man, and “[n]obody nowhere knows what time it is” because time itself has stopped, along with human history (3; sic). In Shelley’s apocalyptic novel, as we have seen, revolutionary politics, grand ambitions, wars and upheavals lose themselves in a narrative of loss and loneliness woven by the experiences and memories of Verney, the last man. Verney dedicates his narrative, the composition of which has been his life-line, to “[t]he Illustrious Dead”, “[s]hadows” who would read in the history of the “Last Man” the story of their “[fall]” (371). A similar undercutting of the idea of history as Progress is achieved by Atwood in Oryx and Crake, which falsifies the scientific teleology of progress by the drama of a science-led apocalypse that reduces humanity to the last man and the last man to an ‘apelike’ being shorn of all human dignity (8). The pre-apocalyptic world that Atwood shows as part of Jimmy’s experiences is ruled by biotechnology. Genetic engineering is the name of the game as business houses, impelled by human desires and by their own greed, create newer and newer species of plants and animals to be used either as food or for combating diseases and ageing. With time, such genetic tinkering with life results in an earth teeming with new, often hostile, life-forms—including dangerous microbes—while many original natural species die out, or interbreed with the new ones to create bizarre hybrids.

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At Watson-Crick, the elite university Crake goes up to, the researchers create new species of both plant and animal life for commercialization, in the process, throwing up startling applications of technology that are both grotesque and irreverent to life. At the “BioDefences” department, for example, Jimmy is introduced to the wolfog—a created life-form that embodies a particularly sinister aspect of man’s technological creativity (205). These gene-spliced dogs with a “large pit-bull component” of genes are “bred to deceive” and would be kept, we are told, in “moats” surrounding the Compounds to fend off trespassers (205). In the chapter named “Bottle”, Snowman sits on his tree in the dark of the night and, oppressed by ennui, gets talking to a pack of wolvogs nearby. Their deceptive “supplicating whine” makes him reflect on their cunning and malice: “they still look like dogs, still behave like dogs”, but, unlike “real dogs”, “[t]hey’ll sucker you in, then go for you” (108). In Shelley’s apocalyptic novel the last surviving human being gets the company of a lone dog, “a shaggy fellow”, who arouses affection and pity in Verney’s heart. Tending sheep in the “Campagna” the dog acts out “[l]essons learned from man” in a depopulated world and responds with ‘boisterous gratitude” to Verney’s caresses (373). Through the presentation of the wolvogs Oryx and Crake sounds an ironic echo of the situation. Here, the human lessons that dogs have been made to imbibe in their genes are those of cunning and malevolence, and the last man gets not companionship but deceit and malice from them. A single whim of reckless human ingenuity has devastated a long tradition of friendship between two species of the living world. “It hasn’t taken much”, as the narrator muses, “to reverse fifty thousand years of man-canid interaction” (108). By emphasizing the mutual dependence and interactions between man and one of his kin Shelley adumbrates a posthuman understanding of life. In our time Atwood complicates that conception: she shows how the biotechnologically realized posthuman moment in history is the point where violation of ontological boundaries ironically enhances the distance and the discord between man and his “companion species”.3 The transgressive and exploitative genetic engineering practised by the biotechnology firms reaches its acme in organ-farming and human-animal hybridization. Illegal cloning of babies for organ harvesting is rampant (23). A purported improvement on this is the sus multiorganifier project that cultivates “an assortment of human-tissue organs” in “a transgenic knockout pig host” (22). These pig-human hybrids or “pigoons” embody human cunning passed on to the animal world, their “crafty, wicked heads” sometimes having even “human neo-cortex tissue” growing inside (22, 235). However, the transgression of the natural order by human

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technology is nowhere more apparent than in the project—planned and headed by Crake at his “Paradice” laboratory—to create a new breed of hybridized human beings with pre-selected characteristics drawn from the whole range of the Order Mammalia. Indeed, this theme of the posthuman manipulation of human evolution that was introduced to English literature by Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the major thematic drivers of the plot of Oryx and Crake, turning as it does on the impact of this supposedly eugenic project of creating superior humans by means of biotechnology. As Crake explains to Jimmy, the “Paradice method”, would limit “spoilage” in the customization of babies so that the customers would get “exactly what they’d paid for”. The method would create—“with ninetynine per cent accuracy”—entire populations that would have pre-selected characteristics, like beauty, “of course”, and docility and inbuilt immunity (304). While showing off the uniformly beautiful and blithely naked “floor models” to Jimmy Crake boasts that the project has altered “nothing less than the ancient primate brain”, its “destructive features, the features responsible for the world’s current illnesses”, like “racism”, having been eliminated (302, 305). However, as we shall see, the alteration of the “primate brain” to root out the sorts of “hard wiring” that lead to undesirable traits comes at the cost of the fullness, the complexity that constitutes and defines human specificity itself (305). Thus, if the Crakers do not suffer from troubled sexuality, they do not have the human concept of love; if they are innately incapable of lying, they are also strangers to humour. In a latter section we shall further probe the implications of this eugenical ‘project’ for Atwood’s understanding of the nature of the human (‘The Last Man and the New Humans’). The utopian dream of human perfection in body and mind that Shelley critiques in her speculative novels is here revisited by Atwood. As has been argued by critics, like Cantor, Sterrenburg and Fisch, Victor in Frankenstein and the ‘heroes’ in The Last Man are all, in their own ways, votaries of the ideal of perfectibility.4 Frankenstein dreams of creating a superior race of human beings and of achieving immortality for humankind. The idealist Adrian in The Last Man longs for a state where “death and sickness” would be “banished” from the earth and believes that “we have only to will it, and our habitation becomes a paradise” (59–60). The hybridized humans Crake creates in his ‘Paradice’ laboratory, we are told, are free from diseases of both the mind and the body, and are immortal in not having either the conception or the anticipation of mortality. When Snowman shepherds them back to ‘Paradice’, where they were conceived and created, we, as readers of both Shelley and Atwood,

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perceive the irony. In the post-apocalyptic world these designer beings are both our successors and heirs to the ruins of human civilizations. The world is reduced to an artificial ‘Paradice’ amid a vast wasteland and humanity is a group of robot-like humanoids perfect in a plastic way but devoid of human complexity, of human specificity itself. It is not the ‘Paradice’ project alone, however, that precipitates the ultimate catastrophe projected in Oryx and Crake. The ‘BlyssPluss Pill’, designed to give human subjects an “unlimited supply of libido” and acting as a surreptitious sterilizer, is instrumental in spreading the fatal virus that wipes out humanity through a global epidemic. Thus, in Crake’s plan the “Pill and the Project” are “inextricably linked”: the Pill, by sterilizing people “would put a stop to haphazard reproduction and the Project would replace it with a superior method”, filling the world with a supposedly superior breed (304). Although this is one man’s plan, the novel shows that this man’s vision is true to the spirit of his times. The incumbent power structures and the social ambience ensure him the position, the resources, and the market demands required for his work to be conceived and executed. The next two sections will focus respectively on the political and the socio-cultural aspects of the dystopian preapocalyptic world portrayed in Oryx and Crake.

(Contemporary) Geopolitics and Oryx and Crake The plot of Oryx and Crake is woven around politico-cultural issues relevant to the contemporary world order. The pre-apocalypse world portrayed in the novel through Jimmy’s experiences and through Snowman’s memories is ruled and defined by neo-imperialistic market capitalism. Globally, business is dominated by big biotechnology firms engaged in creating products purportedly designed to maintain the health and youth of a gullible population or to indulge the hedonic desires of their own people. A borderless capitalistic world is what we get in Oryx and Crake. Nation states and their governments are not any more the units of real power, which belongs to the mighty corporate entities who are engaged in cut-throat rivalry among themselves for market-shares and for human resources, resorting even to sabotage-killings of scientists and stealth of created life-forms. While making national borders irrelevant, however, these Compounds carve up the world into two very different lifestyle-segments. On the one hand, are the people—employees and their families—who live luxuriously in the Modules, or still more luxuriously within the premises of the Compounds themselves. The rest of the world, on the other hand, lives in

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“the pleeblands” consisting of polluted, chaotic, more or less poor cities with teeming, diverse populations (27). As threats of infection and other dangers increase the privileged people, like those with ‘OrganInk’, realize that “it [is] best for everyone at OrganInk Farms”, including the junior executives, “to live all in one place, with foolproof procedures” because “[o]utside the OrganInk walls and gates and searchlights things [are] unpredictable” (27). Throughout the novel we see how these foolproof procedures, motivated by manic fear of “[o]ther companies, other countries, various factions and plotters”, end up sealing off life in the Compounds, virtually destroying all privacy for the inhabitants (27). The security arrangements of the Compounds are fanatically supervised not by the security establishments of the respective nations but by the “CorpSeCorps” that operates globally and wields enormous power over people’s lives (27). The security obsession of the Compounds leads to the CorpSeCorps making virtual prisoners of the employees and their families. Snooping on personal lives is a matter of course and high-tech hacking into personal computers and e-mail accounts is routine: we learn from Crake how his father’s e-mail was hacked when the authorities suspected him of anti-compound activities and how his computer was “deep cleansed” after his execution (212). That brings us to the ruthless penal regime that suppresses rebellions and prevents leakage of Compound secrets by eliminating people through staged accidents or executions. Crake’s father, who was suspected of informing people about the disease-creating activities of ‘HelthWyzer’, was made to fall off a pleebland overpass into rush-hour traffic. Anything that threatens to hurt the often unethical business plans of the Compounds is crushed cruelly and anti-market activities are recognized in law as crimes meriting the ultimate penalty. Thus, among the charges brought against Jimmy’s mother by the CorpSeCorps—charges that lead to her execution—are that of “hampering the dissemination of commercial products” and “treasonable crimes against society”, like participating in pro-peasant, anti-imperialistic demonstrations (286). The social arrangements made under the totalitarian hegemony of the Compounds are explicitly likened to feudalism through Jimmy’s father’s description of the arrangements for the security and exclusivity of the Compounds. The kings and dukes of “long ago” had their “castles, with high walls and drawbridges and slots in the ramparts” to pour hot pitch on their enemies; the Compounds, he explains, are “the same idea” (28). Further into the novel we get to see these arrangements: the ramparts with watch-towers and high-tech screens that allow people down below to be shot with “sprayguns” and the moats in which RejoovenEsense plans to

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float the vicious wolvogs (270). Like the castles, the Compounds, Jimmy’s father explains, are “for keeping you and your buddies nice and safe inside, and for keeping everybody else outside” (28). Atwood here seems to highlight the similarity in the natures of feudalism and capitalism because both foster class-based social inequity and enmity. While feudal lords fed off the labour of the lower classes, the Compounds amass the money of the pleeblands people and that of each other by exploiting human hopes and fears and by creating and indulging consumerist desires. The repressive undemocratic spirit of high capitalism is also underscored by this comparison. The respective people of the Compounds and the pleeblands live almost as two distinct sub-species leading lives so different that a member of one would not know how to function as a social being in the other. As Jimmy looks out at the pleeblands from the window of a sealed-off train he marvels at the shabby houses, the smoke-belching chimneys and the piles of garbage, although the shopping malls and the bars—havens of consumerism—look familiar (196). It is their vulnerability to “chance”, their unpredictability, that makes the pleeblands—“mysterious and exciting” and “also dangerous”—seem exotic to Jimmy (196). And although this brings out his bored dissatisfaction with Compound life the epithets are also the very terms of colonial mystification of the colonized Other (196). The lack of understanding is less flatteringly—and more snobbishly— reflected in the general Compound opinion about the pleeblands, which are thought of by most as filthy, uninteresting commercial dens with “no life of the mind” (196). Thus, on his first visit to the pleeblands Jimmy is mildly surprised that the pleeblands people do not look like “the mental deficients the Compounders were fond of depicting” (287, 288). The assumption of automatic superiority on the part of the Compounds is too much like the developed world’s attitude to the developing nations to be coincidental. Shelley’s The Last Man—the prototypical English text engaging with the issue of colonialism and its cultural impact—stages a similar drama of ethnocentric snobbery through the mindset demonstrated in words and deeds by the protagonists, Raymond, Ryland, and the otherwise impeccable Adrian. In the global capitalistic order presented in Oryx and Crake the antagonism is no longer between races, or between nations, which have become largely irrelevant, but between widely different economic classes separated by the neo-imperial machinery of big capital. An illustration of the operation of this capitalistic neo-imperialism is provided by what has been called “the gen-mod coffee wars”—the global

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resistance movement in reaction to the forced cultivation of a highyielding spliced coffee bean that threatens to reduce small growers across the world to “starvation level poverty” (178–79). Even as riots break out and ‘Happicuppa’ personnel are bombed, “peasants [are] massacred” by “various armies”: in this war “a number of countries” support the cause of capitalistic imperialism, the cause of a particular Compound of one powerful country (179). The contemporary resonance involving the convergence of power around the USA is hard to miss. In a covert allusion to the colonial barbarism projected in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness the narrator at one point mentions Jimmy being shown pictures by the CorpSeCorps of “a row of heads on poles” in “ex-Argentine” (257). Although the police do not tell him anything about those heads, the reader knows what they signify, given the brutal penal regime of the Compounds It is also possible to see in this grim and grotesque image the spectre of real international events, like the prisonatrocities carried out at the behest of American authorities in Iraq. Faced with the Crakers, alien in their hybrid humanity, Snowman remembers a “late-twentieth century” book that discourses, in the manner of an “earnest aid worker” on “indigenous peoples”, whose “belief systems” can only take in “simple” concepts (97). In Snowman’s impatience with the “[c]ondescending, self-righteous” voice it is possible to find Atwood’s disapproval of the West’s self-imposed ‘white man’s burden’ often disguising its economic neo-colonialism. In another telling image graphs and maps charting the infection rates and the spread of the last deadly epidemic is shown on television using “dark pink . . . as for the British empire once”: the world-wide plague unleashed by a Compound is specifically linked to the canker of colonialism (341). In Shelley’s speculative vision the plague that causes global annihilation originates in the East so that it looks like the colonized Other’s revenge upon the colonizing West. Atwood presents a situation wherein the imperialist global order centred in the Compounds creates a toxicity within itself that infects and devastates both worlds, the central and the marginal. The shrinking power of nation states, especially the weaker ones, under the impact of neo-imperialistic projects of breaking down national frontiers—economically and otherwise—is reflected in the novel: “world political leaders”, we learn, are brought down “with such rapidity that it hardly matter[s]” (82). At “alibooboo.com” fundamentalist repression runs the show: “various supposed thieves” have their hands cut off and “adulterers and lipstick-wearers are stoned to death . . . in dusty enclaves that purported to be in fundamentalist countries in the Middle East” (82). But Crake points out to Jimmy—in what could be taken as Atwood’s

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oblique allusion to the role of American media in dealing with the issue of Iraq—that the images and sound bytes on these sites could be fake: the “bloodfests [are] probably taking place on a back lot somewhere in California with a bunch of extras rounded up from the streets” (82). Such extreme media manipulation of public perceptions of the world, made possible by technology, signals the collapse of objective reality for the people under the reign of neo-imperialistic capitalism. Another website, “headsoff.com”, features “live coverage of executions in Asia”, whereby “enemies of the people” are eliminated (82). Although the narrative specifically mentions executions in “someplace that looked like China” this is not likely to be state sponsored murder of those who do not toe the party line in communist China. Given the politico-economic reality of contemporary China, which has emerged as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, the so-called enemies of the people are likely to be individuals who do not acquiesce in the capitalisticconsumerist ethos of the new China. The allusion to Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People serves to subtly point out the similarity in the character of all forms of totalitarianism. Totalitarian regimes, communist or capitalist, Chinese or American, repress the people it governs by ruthless use of power concentrated in the hands of a group that imposes its ideas, its world-view and its laws on the ruled. In the world projected in Oryx and Crake power has concentrated in the hands of big business entities and their very own police, the CorpSeCorps. Indeed, in Jimmy’s boyhood, times “when voting mattered” are already memory for the people (63). The Compounds maintain their power by amassing wealth through the exploitation of the vulnerabilities of people, both within the Compounds and in the pleeblands. When Jimmy, dazzled by the opulence of the RejoovenEsense Compound, asks Crake about the source of all that money Crake indicates “[g]rief in the face of inevitable death”, the “wish to stop time”—“[t]he human condition” (292). The exploitation of people’s desires and fears for commercial gain is what drives the economy of the Compounds, which go about “rip[ping] off . . . desperate people” by giving them “hope at exorbitant prices” (56). One of the worst instances of exploitation of consumers is carried out by HelthWyzer. As Crake reveals to Jimmy, this company for which Crake’s father worked creates new diseases and embeds the “hostile bioforms” into their over-the-counter vitamin pills before marketing them in the pleeblands (211). The process operates, as Crake explains, on the basis of the concept of illness as a tool for “money osmosis” causing wealth to flow from the sick to the “curepeddlers”, like Helthwyzer and RejoovenEsense (210). Thus, HelthWyzer

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customizes the antidotes to the diseases it spreads but ensures “high profits” through them by practising “the economics of scarcity”, that is, by artificially creating a shortage (211). It is a variation of this “elegant concept” that Crake later uses in order to spread the ultimate fatal disease that wipes out humanity (212). Meanwhile, it is noticeable that the diseases HelthWyzer creates are unleashed on the pleeblands, the third-world equivalent in Oryx and Crake. The “BlyssPluss Pill”, created by RejoovenEsense and designed to give the users unlimited sexual pleasure and everlasting youth, is a fine example of capitalism feeding off human vulnerabilities (294). In order to kick-start their “elegant” plan to steer “human nature” toward “a more beneficial direction” by promoting indiscriminate promiscuity the Compound tests the Pill on people from “the poorer countries”, the tests resulting in ludicrous, but also pathetic results (293, 296). It is the pleeblands, serving as client-pool, that largely create the profits for the biotechnology Compounds. On his visit to the pleeblands Jimmy is shown around the “Street of Dreams” that peddles expensive and high-end cosmetic body-cure products under bright clamouring signs. It is here, as Crake tells Jimmy, that “our stuff turns to gold” amid stiff competition from Russia, China and Japan, although, “[o]f course, nothing is perfect” (288–89). To sum up, the global technocratic world order projected in the novel practises a neo-imperialist politics defined by fear, hatred and exploitation of the economic Other. In its obsession with segregating the Compounds from what is perceived to be the inferior Other the regime also imposes “total order and control” on its own people (Staels 433). This fear of the contagion of ‘otherness’ and the preoccupation with order and perfection (as we have seen also in the previous section) remind one of Shelley’s The Last Man, which dramatizes a similar preoccupation on the part of the English elite with a sealed-off superiority and (political) perfection (Fisch, “Plaguing Politics”). In both novels order lapses into chaos as the respective global scourges make all distinctions meaningless and subvert dreams of perfectibility, ultimately leading to the desolation of a worldwide wasteland.

Dystopian Mindscapes The end of the world in Oryx and Crake comes about as the result of the machinations of capitalistic greed and man’s over-reaching technological ambitions. The ultimate catastrophe, as we have seen, is brought about by one person’s crazy vision about the future of humanity.

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But Crake’s plans and the manipulation of human desires and fears that is the basis of the capitalistic order are motivated and advanced by the innate materialism, insensitivity and spiritual deracination of the people themselves. The capitalistic exploitation of human vulnerabilities that drives the plot is both the cause and the effect of this area of “darkness” within minds (333). As Crake astutely points out to Jimmy, the people in their society—as in ours—are always hungry for “more” and the materially “better”; it is this hunger that the Compounds and Crake pretend to cater to, ensuring that it is never satiated (296). In her article, “Orwell and Me” Atwood identifies the specific cultural catastrophe of contemporary times thus: The twentieth century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made hell—the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four [sic], and the hedonistic, ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. (4)

“But with 9/11”, she continues, “all that changed”. “Now it appears that we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once—open markets, closed minds” (4). Oryx and Crake, written under the shadow of 9/11, embodies Atwood’s prescient dystopian vision of our times: it dramatizes the potential consequences of this specific conjunction of elements in the outer and the inner worlds we inhabit today. People’s obsession with appearance and youth provide the impetus to the “body-oriented” compounds to devise extreme technologies (288). Cosmetic correction of various physical attributes and body-parts fuel big businesses. Thus, OrganInc Farms tries to develop “a genuine start-over skin” using a “young, plump skin cell that would eat up the worn cells . . . and replace them with replicas of itself, like algae growing on a pond” (55). What OrganInk banks on while spending their dough on this project is people’s desperation to retain their youth: “What well-to-do and onceyoung, once-beautiful woman or man, cranked up on hormones . . . but hampered by the unforgiving mirror, wouldn’t sell their house . . . their kids, and their soul to get another shot at the sexual can?” (55). They do, in fact, use the genes and organs of their own progeny, obtained through cloning and organ-farming, in order to prolong their own life and youth, as we have already noted. And they patronize businesses that devise ever new ways of exploiting and torturing animals, created or naturally existing. The people who work for these businesses—scientists and word-mongers— participate willy-nilly in the exploitation of animals and humans alike.

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The inner emptiness of the people in Jimmy’s world expresses itself in sexual over-indulgence and perversions. Indeed, it is the object of all sections of people to be “sexier and happier”, the conjunction reflecting the mindset that equates happiness with material and physical pleasures (248). Openly accessible websites, such as “NoodieNews” or “Hottots”, feature nude news-casters or paedophilia (81, 89). Even men’s tastes in pornography take on intense degrees of sadism and grotesqueness (271). The hunger for instant thrills feeds into the aggression that cut-throat capitalism generates: coupled with extreme insensitivity this leads to cruel, bizarre games involving people eating live animals, or pulling them apart by hand (85). These, along with live executions and paedophilic shows, are normal diversions for Jimmy and Crake in their school days. And people are so crushed by ennui that they even sign up for assisted suicide packages which are filmed and webcast (83). Imaginatively stunted and coarse in their tastes and predilections, people in this society have discernment only in material things. But, although in their food they prefer the tastier real items instead of the labcreated artificial ingredients, they are dead to genuine beauty and to sensations beyond the physical, and do not rue the disappearance of natural plant or animal species from the earth. “[F]ake palm trees” or “canned music” is fine with them so long as they get “real campari [and] real soda” (302). Watching the sunset from the watchtower window of the RejoovenEsense Compound Snowman regrets he has to “make do with the real thing” as in the absence of the ten videocam screens he cannot “turn up the color brightness or enhance the red tones” (276; emphasis added). His attitude here tellingly reflects the penchant for the gaudy and the artificial that is endemic to the mental make-up of most people in his society. Ethico-political non-involvement is another characteristic of the people. While showing off various gene-spliced creations of the WatsonCrick researchers to Jimmy Crake observes: “After it happens that’s what they look like in real time. The process is no longer important” (200). The means, the “process” is not important so long as the crass consumeristic end is somehow achieved. This remark epitomizes the moral-political apathy that leads this world along its course toward the apocalypse. The amorality that goes hand in hand with the materialism innate to this world makes most of the people indifferent to issues of ethical import. At the height of the global unrest induced by Happicuppa we find Jimmy and Crake watching peasants being massacred by armies: Crake rues the destruction of the cloud forests but is indifferent about the deaths because “[t]here have always been dead peasants” (179). The soldiers and the

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peasants—victims alike of capitalistic neo-colonialism—look the same, dusty and unkempt, but people like Jimmy and Crake, snug in their Compound cocoons, could not care less: “taking sides” is unthinkable (179). Non-involvement comes naturally to them, having been brought up within “walled spaces” that “shut things out” (184). If the coffee is “real” and strong “who cares” if it is Happicuppa or non-modified coffee grown by small farmers? (208). As Jimmy’s father argues, so long as you and your kin are safe and snug, “why knock it”? (27). In fact people who do try to “knock” the system inspire disgust and fear in the minds of the majority, who are anxious to go with the flow. Thus, Jimmy’s mother’s disappearance to join anti-Compound groups becomes not just a personal loss for him but also a stigma on him and a taboo in the Compound community. Value-free, indifferent consumerism enables people to ensure long lives through cruel organ farming methods that treat animal lives as consumer products. People perceive their own babies in much the same way: “illegal baby-orchard[s]” are an open secret, as we have seen, and having a child is seen as an investment. For the procreative purpose many people approach agencies such as “Infantade, Foetility, [or] Perfectababe” for babies “that fit all their specs” (250). Giving an idea of people’s predilections while explaining the ‘Paradice’ project, Crake tells an amazed Jimmy “you’d be surprised how many people would like a very beautiful, smart baby that eats nothing but grass” (305). Crake might have had a personal motivation behind what he does—the motivation to see the end of the world that incited and condoned the murder of his conscientious father, or to genetically modify the imperfections of humankind. But his basic attitude to the human being as merely a higher order of primates— who could be customized to resemble the “bonobo chimpanzees”, for example—is a measure of the scientism and the materialism that define much of people’s lives in the world of Oryx and Crake (293, 294). Indeed, early in the novel we are introduced to the concept of two categories of persons—the “numbers people” and the “word people”, the former constituting the pool of “tech genius” and the latter being people who could show their “neuron power” in nothing better than “long sentences” (25). This categorization creates a deep class division between people as early as in childhood and goes on to define the kind of work they do and the sort of life they live. In this global technocratic system, led by the ideologies of scientism and materialism, no real social science education is needed for state-craft or for policy-making by national governments, which are made largely redundant. And the need for the humanistic functions of studying the

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extra-material aspects of life and sensitizing people about those elements of being human have been made absent by the capitalistic power-structure and the philistine society. The condition of Martha-Graham, a decrepit liberal arts university, is reflective of the state of education in the arts and the humanities in Jimmy’s society. “Our Students Graduate With Employable Skills” is the new motto Martha-Graham adopts to lure students. Accordingly, it shifts its focus to new areas with “utilitarian aims” such as “Webgame Dynamics” and “Problematics”, the last offering courses in manipulation and linguistic deception, like “Advanced Mischaracterization” and “Applied Rhetoric” (188). The students are prepared for a career in “[w]indow-dressing”—“decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2-D verbiage” (188). But although such window-dressing is vitally important for the businesses of the Compounds, the people who do that work are shabbily treated. Jimmy working for AnooYoo finds himself, “corporately speaking”, to be “a drudge and a helot” (248). The insult is inscribed in demeaning nomenclature as well: thus, the students at Watson-Crick refer to the “dull-normal” word people as the “neurotypicals” because they are “[m]inus the genius gene” (194). On his visit to Watson-Crick Jimmy is introduced all around as “Jimmy, the neurotypical” so that, after a while, he feels as if he were a zoo animal. (203). On the other hand, the sloppy and off-putting public demeanour of the Watson-Crick crowd, going about in T-shirts with highly abstract science equations on them, appear freaky to Jimmy, and the narrator terms them “brainiacs” (174). The word “neurotypical” hints at neurological deviation in the non-typical brainy maniacs, indicating a link between high intellect and relative lunacy. Indeed, the name “Asperger’s U” that Watson-Crick goes by among the students is a reference to a neurological disease called ‘Asperger’s’ because of Glenn Asperger, a piano genius who displayed the “[d]emiautistic” tendencies that the Watson-Crick students detect in themselves (193). The narrator makes explicit the connection between extreme analytical intelligence and psychological abnormality when Snowman wonders whether Crake had been “a lunatic or an intellectually honourable man” thinking things through to their “logical” end, and whether the two are at all different (343). Shelley’s Frankenstein critiques scientific rationality for its alienation of the affective-ethical elements of being human and presents one ‘mad’ scientist’s misconceived contra-cultural project of technologically immortalizing and improving the human species. Oryx and Crake, set in a contemporary context, shows how a society dominated by the cognate ethos of scientific positivism and materialism breeds a

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population of super-intelligent but affectively deficient human beings—the ‘numbers people’ who dominate every aspect of Jimmy’s world. Atwood’s depiction of the ultra-utilitarian, materialistic cultural milieu is highlighted by intertextual references to canonical English literature. Here, as in Shelley’s The Last Man, literature becomes a motif as Snowman remembers lines from grand old texts—like Macbeth and The Wasteland—that appear to be in sync, often ironically, with aspects of his situation. The crass materialism of the Compound society depicted in Oryx and Crake does not leave any space for books that are not needed for survival or for any material purpose, and Jimmy’s job at the library at Martha-Graham is to destroy old books (315). The attitude of disrespect toward non-science pursuits is epitomized in the web-show, “At Home with Anna K.”, in which a woman reads out Macbeth on the toilet-seat. It is through her that Jimmy gets introduced to Shakespeare and to words like “Incarnadine” and “Sere” (84). Incidentally, the lines that the narrative quotes at this point are from Macbeth’s soliloquy about the “creepy” pace of empty days leading to “dusty death”: it is an instance, among others in the novel, of the narrator making a comment through thematically appropriate intertextuality (84). Language expresses the sensibilities and the world-view of a people, and the ultra-rationality of the society depicted in Oryx and Crake is expressed in the people’s language, which is often clinically exact and connotation-free. Thus, they talk about “parental units” instead of families, avoiding the associations of cohesiveness and commitment, and they call a prostitute “professional sex-skills expert”, thus making the buying and selling of sex value-free (71, 11). Jimmy feels compelled, in Crake’s presence, to talk of “courtship behavior” instead of ‘romance’; and poor and powerless nations are referred to as “marginal geo-political areas”, the expression avoiding the stronger connotations of national sovereignty inherent in ‘countries’ (166, 295). A dead ‘word person’ whose house Snowman enters after the apocalypse is described as “an ideological plumber, a spin doctor, a hairsplitter for hire” (233). The last epithet connotes the capacity for subtleties in word-usage which correspond to the sophistry, the deceptive language that the Compounds habitually use in order to sell ultimately ineffectual body-correction products, or procedures aimed at lengthening life and youth. In Jimmy’s society it cannot be imagined that the hairsplitting could be more than word-deep, that it could actually correspond to fine discriminations in feelings and states of mind. It is a coarse, materialistic society, one that has no use for precise or subtly connotative words—as Jimmy comes to realize, wandering about amid

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“arcane lore” in the library (195). One particularly clever use of words is made by Crake in his interpretation of immortality. Explaining away the difference between perception and actuality, he describes immortality as the “absence of being”, the absence of the consciousness of imminent death, prompting Jimmy to call his explanation “Applied Rhetoric 101” (303).5 Against this kind of a coarse and utilitarian linguistic setting there is Jimmy, a word person, who demonstrates a fondness for apparently useless fine words, especially in his university days. But even his love of connotative words is inspired more by indignation than by love. Finding himself “among the rejects”, he rebels against “the system” by “pursuing the superfluous” as an end in itself, misquoting Oscar Wilde to himself (195). It is his hurt ego that makes him cling to what he excels at: thus, when none at AnooYoo can detect his neologisms he is “depressed” not because of the general indifference toward words but because his cleverness goes unrecognized (249). Nevertheless, even his epicurean and egoistic attitude to words is a welcome trait in the techno-crazy, philistine world of Oryx and Crake. Moreover, his love of words seems to connote his capacity to form attachments to the past—an affective quality due to which he cannot “bear to throw anything” out of the library, a quality that is symbolic also of the status of the last man he comes to assume later (241).6 Words (and literature) do indeed play a greater part in the Snowman phase of Jimmy’s life as he lives “stranded” in desolation: “All, all alone. Alone on a wide wide sea” (10). Arcane words, like “bemoaning”, “Lovelorn” and “Forsaken”, drift through his mind as he grapples with bereavement and loneliness (312). In a state of acute anguish a line from Macbeth—“Out, out, brief candle”—flashes in his mind; and, trying to understand his complex feelings of guilt, anger and sheer destitution, he lands on the word “vexation” , “old” but “serviceable” (107, 161). It is as Snowman that Jimmy understands also the role of words in embodying and expressing human minds and human culture: both the lost civilization and his lost history haunt him in the form of words that take him back to the past of his species. We shall discuss this point in more detail in a subsequent section. Commenting on the role of literature in the novel, Diana Brydon says that here literature cannot humanize and Jimmy as a representative of the humanities is imperfect (“Atwood’s Global Ethic” 448, 453). While this is largely true, we need to remember that the ultra-consumeristic, scientismdriven society does not leave any space for literature to be effective or to produce better representatives of the humanities. Even so, Jimmy/Snowman’s

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love of semantically rich old words and the thematically relevant literary allusions in the narrative together project language and literature as products of human culture that are antithetical to the ultra-materialistic ethos of the dystopian society projected in the novel—products that indicate the possibility of an alternative to the soul-dead state of humanity presented herein. Imperfect he may be, but Jimmy/Snowman is still the carrier and representative of that cultural legacy—the sole one after the apocalypse. Fusing science with fantasy, extrapolating from cultural trends in the increasingly philistine world of today, Atwood’s speculative novel makes us ponder, “[w]hat if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?” (Atwood, “Writing Oryx and Crake” 323). Art, specifically, literature—projected as both the embodiment and the transmitter of the indefinable supra-rational elements of humanity—constitutes one of our chief “saving graces”, Atwood seems to be saying. As we shall see in the next section, Jimmy/Snowman is presented in the novel as having an affective and sensitive temperament, which, while not being effective in resisting the onset of the apocalypse, is yet a locus of hope in a society full of insensitive, ethico-politically blind people. Atwood suggests a better integration of the worlds of the sciences and the arts as a step toward cultivating human wholeness and toward preventing our world from resembling Jimmy’s like an exact copy: “Not real can tell us about real”, and we are being told to take care that the “not real” of the novel does not become the ‘real’ world(s) we inhabit— physically or mentally (102).

Gender, and Beyond Although gender dynamics is apparently not one of Atwood’s major concerns in Oryx and Crake, the narrative does evince considerable engagement with gender-issues, especially with prescriptive and deterministic male/societal attitudes towards women and with social constructions of gender and motherhood. Inter-gender emotive relationship or ‘love’, like in Shelley, emerges as a sub-theme as well. Especially, this section will focus on Atwood’s presentation in this novel of the patriarchal construct of motherhood, paying attention also to the way this theme here is linked up with the question of women’s agency in personal life and in society. The ideological notions of masculinity and femininity, we are shown, are unchanged in the supposedly advanced near-future society of the USA

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that Jimmy grows up in. As a young boy he is encouraged to “eat up” so he may “put up some hair on [his] chest”, petted as a “tough guy” by the hairdresser, and is gifted a multi-function knife on his ninth birthday by his father who “was always giving him tools, trying to make him more practical” and, one may add, more of a man (25, 17, 37). At one of the early CorpSeCorps grilling sessions that Jimmy has to endure after his mother’s desertion of home he feels so bad that he could have cried. “If he’d been a girl he could have burst into tears and got them to feel sorry for him, and shut them up that way”, we are told, but already the adolescent Jimmy is ‘man’ enough to feel constrained to check himself from expressing his feelings that way (64). (It is also suggested that Jimmy understands women sometimes use their cultural license to express feelings in order to have their way with men.) Much later, in his days of lonely misery, Snowman mentally hears his father’s voice as he tries to stop himself from howling like a clown: “Stop sniveling, son”, he imagines his father saying, “[p]ull yourself together. You’re the man around here” (162). The last ‘man’ on the earth hesitates to claim for himself the relief of a passionate bout of crying because he is hampered by his gender training. Also noteworthy is the fact that Snowman discounts the Craker men from his notion of manliness. Thus, the word ‘man’ gets its full gender weight since its application here transcends biological sex in equating emotional self-control—and human maturity itself—with masculinity. This attitude that Snowman unconsciously expresses is brought out also in Atwood’s presentation of the construct of femininity through the character of Jimmy’s father’s colleague Ramona. Although she is supposedly a “tech genius”, Ramona is shown to camouflage her intelligence under the masquerade of a femininity that is of a piece with mindless ‘charms’ and artifice. She comes to work overly made-up and talks in short sentences with vague words in them, “like a shower-gel babe in an ad” (25). Jimmy’s epithet (“babe”) signals the modern man’s equation of female attractiveness and immaturity. It is also indicated that even in a high-tech future society a model selling shower-gel and a woman scientist are captives of the same conception of female comeliness that aims to deny full humanity to women. According to Jimmy’s father, Ramona “wasn’t stupid”; only she “didn’t want to put her neuron power into long sentences” (25). Ramona’s reluctance to show off her “neuron power” is an indication of women’s willed or cultivated lack of intelligence relative to men—part of their performance of normative femininity. The comment seems also to be an oblique and slightly vexed comparison with Sharon whereby the other

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woman is given the advantage over the wife. Sharon, as presented in her interaction with her husband, is a rather articulate woman with her “own ideas” and, despite being a “tech-genius” herself, is also a thinking and feeling individual who reflects seriously on issues of broader, political or ethical import (25). Ramona is likened to a picture Jimmy saw at the hairdresser’s of a woman with “a mean stare” and a T-shirt pulled off one shoulder: “she had the same sort of puffed-out mouth, and big eyes like that, big and smudgy” (17, 24). Watching her eat her salad, the narrator comments: “She took very small bites, and managed to chew up the lettuce without crunching. The raw carrots too. That was amazing, as if she could liquefy those hard, crisp foods and suck them into herself, like an alien mosquito creature on DVD” (25).

Ramona’s table manners, we see, reflect her dainty femininity. Moreover, the connotative phraseology used in the description seems to evoke not only sexual images but also male fear of active female sexuality. The allusion to the “alien mosquito” serves to characterize the sexually alive woman as both dangerous and strange. But this putatively predatory sexuality is set, as we have seen, in a context of docility, conventionality and artifice, traits that conform to, rather than challenge, the established order of things. Thus, Ramona is presented as a figure of constructed feminine attractiveness, a desirable female object for male consumption. In comparison, Sharon, who bothers about the ethical implications of OrganInk’s activities and “has smart coming out of her ears”, is perceived as “not so hot” by her husband: he discusses her with his attractive colleague as “a problem”, a mental case (25, 24). Another locus of Atwood’s presentation of womanhood in this novel is Oryx, one of the two major female characters in the novel. Apart from Sharon, it is this character, marginal in terms of class and race antecedents, who brings out Atwood’s critique of female gendered existence in a modern patriarchy. The grown-up Jimmy prefers women who are “delicate and breakable”, women who have been “messed up and who need[s] him” (100). He comes to like and obsess over Oryx, a beautiful and delicate child-woman who, however, manipulates him with her girlish innocence and charm—which are really part of her feminine tact. Her clever roleplaying is illustrated, for example, when she parries Jimmy’s insistent questions about her past, slyly foiling his attempts to be allowed to feel sorry for her; or in her interaction with Jimmy over her picture downloaded from the child-porn site called “HottTotts” (113–17, 114, 91–

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92). Once in answer to Jimmy’s embarrassed and agonized queries she reacts thus: ‘That’s all,’ said Oryx. . . . . ‘What do you mean that’s all?’ . . . . ‘What about, did they ever . . .’ ‘Did they ever what?’ ‘They didn’t. Not when you were that young. They couldn’t have’. ‘Please Jimmy, tell me what you are asking.’ . . . . ‘It wasn’t real sex, was it’? he asked. ‘. . . it was only acting. Wasn’t it’? ‘But Jimmy, you should know. All sex is real.’ (143–44)

At one point, when Jimmy admits to his incredulity about what he calls her “story”, she retorts: “‘[i]f you don’t want to buy that, Jimmy . . . what is it that you’d like to buy instead?’” (142). On such occasions Oryx shows a maturity that enables her move beyond her terrible past as a child sold to slavery and pornography. This is exemplified by her reaction to Jimmy’s queries about her past (“‘Why do you care? . . . I don’t care. I never think about it. It’s long ago now’”; “‘Jimmy, you worry too much’”) and by her canny understanding into the nature of Jimmy’s feelings for her (“‘You want me to pretend? You want me to make something up?’”) (117; 136; 92,). Thus, while Jimmy wants her to “share his negative energy, his rage, pain and grief” at being abandoned by his mother Oryx “refuses to be fixed in time by Jimmy and to coincide with the fantasy object he has made her into” (Staels 442). Taking care not to disclose too much about her past to Jimmy, Oryx subverts his complacency by likening him with her ex-master: ‘Why do you think he is bad?’ said Oryx. ‘He never did anything with me that you don’t do. Not nearly so many things’. ‘I don’t do them against your will,’ said Jimmy. ‘Anyway you’re grown up now’. Oryx laughed. ‘What is my will?’ (141)

Apart from suggesting an element of compulsion in her relations with men, Oryx’s comment here hint at a communication-gap and at a lack of willingness on Jimmy’s part to know her mind or to honour her wishes: “‘You don’t understand me, Jimmy.’ / ‘But I want to.’ / ‘Do you?’” (316). Through her female protagonists and the men’s attitudes to them Atwood seems to hint at men’s need to have women appear mindless and meek— ‘small’, both literally and otherwise—in comparison to themselves, who need to feel superior to the women they desire. A subtle connection is

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indicated between male heterosexual desire and lust for power—between heterosexual relationship itself and sexual-politics. If male desire is related to men’s urge to feel superior and powerful the converse is shown to be true for women. Here the chief figure is Oryx, who, for all her precocious worldly wisdom, idealizes Crake. Thus, in her perception, Crake ‘“lives in a higher world . . . in a world of ideas’”, doing “‘important things”’ (313). But the narrator hints that Oryx is more satisfied in her interactions with Jimmy. Thus, Snowman remembers Oryx as saying, “‘Crake is my boss. You are for fun’” (313). And “Crake’s sexual needs were direct and simple, according to Oryx; not intriguing, like sex with Jimmy” (314). Nevertheless, she respects the scientist more and even considers herself dedicated to him and what she calls his “vision” (322). Jimmy is presented as more of a normal human being than Crake. His being more satisfying as a lover is an index to his interactive faculties, his relational mode of being, in comparison to the reclusive, withdrawn Crake, and he is clearly much in love with Oryx. Still, when Jimmy suggests that he and Oryx go away from ‘Paradice’ to “‘be together’” she responds with an incredulity that is part tact (in hiding her realization that he may only be testing her) and part a measure of her commitment to Crake, who is her “hero”: ‘‘‘But Jimmy’. Wide eyes. ‘Crake needs us!’” (319; 322; 320). She goes on to explain herself to Jimmy thus: “‘You are a good boy. But I would never leave Crake. I believe in Crake, I believe in his . . . vision’” (321–22). We are reminded here of Perdita in Shelley’s The Last Man, who professed this kind of a dedicatory love for the heroic Raymond. Indeed, Perdita’s love for Raymond was so much a part of her being that her life gets devastated, as we have seen in Chapter 2, when he betrays her with Evadne. That Oryx is killed as part of Crake’s apocalyptic plans and killed by her hero himself would have been merely ironic had it not been for the fact that she was likely aware of her fate beforehand, as is suggested in the narrative (322). To Crake’s comment that if he were not around Oryx wouldn’t be either Jimmy responds thus: ‘“She’ll commit suttee? No shit! Immolate herself on your funeral pyre?’” (321). Given the narrative’s indication that Oryx was possibly aware of her impending death, her fate at the hands of Crake does seem like the act of dedicatory self-immolation that Jimmy mentions to Crake with a touch of vexed humour. Oryx’s apparent enthusiasm about Crake’s plans of making the world a better place by limiting human population does have some credibility, given her background. Arguing against Jimmy’s incredulity toward Crake’s motivations, she says: “‘He has found the problems, I think he is right. There are too many people and that makes the people bad. I know

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this from my own life, Jimmy. Crake is a very smart man!’” (322). But her refusal to countenance Jimmy’s criticism of Crake sounds like an attempt to shut out any voice that might create a chink in the idolized construction of Crake in her mind. Even if we believe in her altruism we can never be sure how much of that was motivated by her background and how much was impelled by her hero-worship of Crake. In any case, as Wilson observes, Oryx is an “object of exchange” that Crake uses to humour Jimmy; she is thus the locus of the sexual-politics in the creation/destruction drama that the novel stages (“Frankenstein’s Gaze” 404). However, Oryx demonstrates strength in her ability to survive the vicissitudes of her life as a child sold to slavery. She gains practical maturity through her struggle for survival and is unwilling, as we have seen, to let Jimmy push her into the role of a pitiable victim. In response to Jimmy’s anger at the man who bought her, she replies, “‘Oh Jimmy you would like it better maybe if we all starved to death?’”, and Jimmy perceives a touch of “amused contempt” in her “rippling laugh” (119). In her days as a child made to appear in porn-movies she learns that “‘[e]verything has a price’”, and that although “having a money value was no substitute for love”, “it was good to have a money value” because “love was undependable, it came and then it went. . . .” (139, 126). But, this knowledge of the harshness of the world does not make her cynical. What she tells Jimmy in response to his persistent attempts to dig out unsavoury details about her past reflects the resilience of her spirit and her unbeaten joy de vivre: “We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around [sic]. You are looking only at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It’s not good for you” (144). As Michelle Lacombe observes, Oryx—“speak[ing] for and from the margins of power”, like Sharon—“is not a victim, nor she who refuses to be a victim, so much as she who deconstructs” the “binary logic” of the victor-victim model (429). However, this positive figuration of womanhood in the posthuman world still leaves us with an image of womanhood as masquerade. “Her inventions”, we are told, “were seamless” as “she was the best poker-faced liar in the world”; and, having known that “men liked variety”, she took care “to dress up, pretend to be different women” (314, 231). As observed earlier, then, Oryx’s survivalrelated need to please men constrains her to dissemble, to manipulate, to lie—to adopt, in short, the “vices of slaves” (Olsen 78).7 Atwood’s presentation of gender relations in the scientifically ultra-advanced society of near-future USA does not leave us with any model of interaction

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between the sexes that allows women a position of authenticity and dignity. The author’s critique of women’s gendered existence in contemporary patriarchies is the sharpest, however, in her engagement with the issue of motherhood as it is perceived and practised. This critique is wrought into the presentation of both the pre-apocalypse world of Jimmy and the apocalyptic world inhabited by Snowman. The narrator’s observations about the Crakers’ lives reveal that sex-based division of labour—one of the most significant factors of gender inequity in patriarchy—is retained by the super-engineer Crake, who is not shown to worry about gender parity at all while envisioning his creatures. The fact that a radical thinker like Crake cannot think beyond the prevalent norms of gender—that he does not even consider gender patterns as a possible item for improvement in humanity—reflects the depth and the force with which gender ideologies are naturalized in patriarchal cultures. Expectedly, the Craker men are not shown to share in child rearing. Although, Crake, we are told, thought that among humans “[f]ar too much time was wasted in childrearing” and “in being a child”, he obviously did not think beyond shortening childhood itself (158). Snowman illustrates the attitude of the average contemporary man when he remarks that “firetending is about the only thing the [Craker] women do that might be classified as work. Apart from helping to catch his weekly fish, that is. And cooking it for him” (158). The home and the hearth remain the undervalued responsibility of the women: the familiar disparity in the sharing of domestic duties and the relative cultural unimportance accorded to homebased work in patriarchies persist among these designer beings of the future. Snowman’s attitude toward women’s labour is indeed dishearteningly revealing—and familiar. Childbearing and rearing are not regarded by him as “work”: the average man brought up in a putatively developed near-future world still cannot attach any productive worth to these activities. On the other hand, the male Crakers are given a “special piss” that they use to mark and secure their territories (155). Snowman remembers Crake’s rationale for this: “they’d need something important to do, something that didn’t involve childbearing. . . .” In the absence of ‘masculine’ activities like “[w]oodworking, hunting, high finance, war and golf”, Crake reasons, this “men only” potent urine would serve the purpose of making the men feel important and superior to the women (155). Both the super-scientist and the average man of the high-tech future reason according to the universal cultural ideology that, as we have already discussed, defines man in terms of his detachment from and

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mastery of nature and the natural—an ideology replicated in the paradigm of modern science. Women’s relative confinement in and identification with the realms of the natural and the familial—initiated by her natural reproductive function and reinscribed by her culturally imposed role of sole/primary care-giver to the child—is a function of this universal ideology of defining ‘man’ in terms of his opposition to and mastery of nature (Ortner 76--83). The corollary of this is that “historically and crossculturally”, “[t]he sexual division of labour and women’s responsibility for childcare are linked to and generate male dominance” (Chodorow 214). Expectedly, childbearing as a female function belonging to the immanent realm of the natural is discounted from the male sphere of transcendental activities by the brilliant scientist in Oryx and Crake. In his created beings he not only keeps up the sexual division of labour but positively bolsters the gender-based disparity in cultural importance by working at deliberate ego-mollification of the male beings. Atwood’s critique of the patriarchal construct of motherhood, however, really develops through the character of Jimmy’s mother Sharon, one of the two chief female figures in the novel. The character of Sharon is presented, mostly, from her son’s point of view, which is reflected through the narrative voice; and this perspective finds her to be an unsatisfactory mother. But, even while showing Jimmy’s confused and hurt feelings at what he perceives to be neglectful mothering, Atwood advances a critique of the neo-conservative American model of perfect motherhood—the ideal that in recent times has worked to reincarcerate women in domestic femininity (Foy 409--11). In the two-tiered narrative that juggles two timeframes and creates a distance between Snowman and Jimmy, Snowman’s memories of Jimmy’s mother bring out the narrator’s critique of the cult of perfect motherhood even as they illuminate aspects of the protagonist’s character. The second section of Chapter 3 (“Lunch”) is especially rich in such memories. It begins with the third person narrator rendering a conversation Jimmy had with his mother about why she left her job. We are told about his nanny, Dolores, who would cook the egg just the way he liked it, but who had to go when his “real mummy” started staying at home full-time. We are given hints that staying home with her son might not have been the only reason for Sharon to have quit her job; we learn also that Jimmy liked Dolores a lot and missed her (30). Significantly, the narrator reports Jimmy’s perception that Sharon’s staying at home full-time “was held out to him as a treat”: there is a suggestion that he failed to perceive why it should be so (30). Thus, the narrator subtly undercuts the perception widespread in patriarchal cultures that full-time mothering is invariably

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necessary and good for the child. Also, the new-right postulation that a mother’s total selflessness is what the child wants and needs is undercut by Jimmy’s preference for a Sharon who enjoys her work and herself— perhaps in one of her “explaining moods”, when she will be telling Jimmy about cells and microbes or “on days when she appeared brisk and purposeful”—rather than a Sharon trying to act her role of a ‘good’ mother or a Sharon listless and apathetic (29, 30). This demonstrates the truth of the feminist recognition “that mothers and children benefit when the mother lives her life, and practises mothering, from a position of agency, authority, and autonomy (O’Reilly 11). Societal expectations of women as mothers and the internalization of those expectations by women themselves combine to produce a state of things that not only militates against the freedom and personhood of women but also hampers the relationship itself between the mother and the child. In the particular context of Atwood’s speculative future society Sharon’s culturally induced difficulties with motherhood—for she clearly suffers from her sense of being a deficient mother—show the “current United States obsession with ‘family values’” persisting in the near-future, and “our era’s dominant faith in the inevitability of progress” is undercut (Brydon, “Atwood’s Global Ethic” 454). In the second half of the chapter the narrator goes on to relate another occasion that is significant to Jimmy’s relationship with his mother: Snowman has a clear image of his mother -- of Jimmy’s mother -sitting at the kitchen table, still in her bathrobe . . . She would have a cup of coffee in front of her, untouched; she would be looking out the window and smoking. . . . She sounded so tired; maybe she was tired of him. Or maybe she was sick. (31)

Jimmy’s sense of deprivation at being at the receiving end of what he perceived as imperfect mothering and the confusion and anxiety engendered in him by his intuitive insight into Sharon’s depression are brought out by the episode remembered—that of his mother apathetically issuing out directives to him about fixing his own lunch. So much was Jimmy bothered by such depressed moods of hers that magenta, the colour of her bathrobe, “still makes him anxious whenever he sees it” (31). The distancing of ‘Jimmy’ from his present is Snowman’s effort to protect himself from his painful memories of his mother. In the same chapter we get another rendition of Jimmy’s interaction with Sharon which is an ironic reversal of the above. She has arranged a “real lunch” for him, so elaborate it frightens Jimmy. She is “carefully dressed” and “all sparkling attention” to Jimmy and the “silly stories” he

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cooks up partly to act his part of the cared-for child: “He knew he was expected to appreciate all the effort she had put into his lunch, and so he too made an effort”, “overdoing it” and ultimately getting her to laugh (32). The strain of the deliberate effort that Sharon puts in to act her part of the ‘good’ mother gets across to her child: “What she reminded him of at such times was a porcelain sink: clean, shining, hard” (32). Thus the narrator again chips away at the myth of perfect motherhood, by showing both the mother and the child to be ill at ease while enacting such roles. The scene also provides an illustration of Jimmy’s emotional intelligence and his concern for his mother’s happiness. The chapter ends with another encounter of Sharon and Jimmy, now older and “more devious” (32). Hating and fearing his mother’s depressed sulkiness, Jimmy tries to get “a reaction” from her by deliberately pestering her with questions and comments he knows would irritate her. When Sharon loses her composure and expresses her inner disquiet through convulsive crying or other extreme behaviour Jimmy would be feeling love for her: “He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which” (33). In this chapter, focused on Snowman’s memories of “Jimmy’s mother”, the narrator hints at the nature of Jimmy’s relationship to her. Also, a subtle critique of the neo-conservative ideal of perfect motherhood is advanced even as Jimmy’s puzzlement at his mother’s depression and his sense of deprivation are compassionately handled. Through the depiction of Sharon’s depression and the Sharon-Jimmy relational dynamics, then, Atwood brings out the absurdity and the negative impact of the tenets of “new momism”—“a highly romanticized but demanding view of motherhood” that promulgates “the myth that motherhood is eternally fulfiling or rewarding, that it is always the best and most important thing [mothers] do, that there is only a narrowly prescribed way of doing it right . . .” (Douglas and Michaels 34). Moreover, Sharon’s relations with her son Jimmy shows the complex interplay of authenticity and role-playing in the way she lives through motherhood, bringing out the tensions created between motherhood as experience and institution in patriarchy. In a capitalistic totalitarian regime like the one presented in Oryx and Crake the relationship between the personal and the political becomes imbued with the dynamics of the state and the individual. Hence, Atwood’s treatment of motherhood in this novel is bound up also with the theme of women’s agency both in personal lives and in society. In the soul-dead apathetic society presented in the novel the apparently imperfect

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mother is the chief figure that represents dissent. The ultimate motherly offence—that of deserting the child—is also the very act that is the locus of anti-establishment dissent and protest: “[i]t is at the site of the absent mother that the reader can locate resistance to the hopelessness of the future Atwood describes” (Foy 418). The new-Right ideals of family and perfect motherhood are undercut by this strategic location of the most visible point of dissent in the novel. Incidentally, it is Oryx, another woman Jimmy loves, whose voice cuts through Jimmy’s personally inflected self-absorbed perspective on Sharon. It is she alone among Jimmy’s numerous girlfriends who refuses to be taken in by his self-pitying, opportunistic use of his mother’s disappearance, “refus[ing] to feel what he wanted her to feel”: “So Jimmy, your mother went somewhere else? Too bad. Maybe she had some good reasons. You thought of that?” (191). Thus, a woman who is mature and forgiving enough to condone her own mother for selling her to slavery in childhood becomes the one who tries to make Jimmy see his mother’s act in a broader perspective, thereby countering his solipsistic world-view. An imperfectly mothered, betrayed girl child develops the sensibility and the understanding that are needed to appreciate that motherhood is not an absolute bond free from the contingencies of life and that a mother is also an individual player in a society. While Atwood does not show details of any political processes aimed at dismantling the capitalistic totalitarianism that gobbles up the world in Oryx and Crake, Sharon’s action signifies individual protest both against a totalitarian regime and the collective moral apathy of a people. This in itself is valuable in the late-capitalistic global scenario wherein politics has become redundant. Sharon’s distaste for the “theme park” life of the Compounds expresses a sensibility at odds with the general crassness around her; and her unease with the activities of the OrganInk compound signify a moral temperament that connects the personal and the political and leads her to an act of the ultimate personal courage and rectitude. When Sharon is face to face with the CorpSeCorps firing squad she looks at the camera and shouts—obviously to Jimmy, who is watching the proceedings on television—“Goodbye. Remember Killer. I Love you. Don’t let me down (258). The reference to the gene-spliced dog, Killer, that his father gifted Jimmy and that Sharon took away while leaving home is obviously a code to make Jimmy recognize her; coupled with this is a reminder to Jimmy of one of the major evils—rampant genesplicing—that led to the end of the world. Her dying exhortation to her son to not let her down expresses her expectation that Jimmy as an adult would honour the upbringing she gave him and would behave as a responsible

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and ethically aware individual, possibly taking forward her legacy of antiestablishment rebellion. The association of Sharon’s desertion of her child with her decision to leave the morally tainted ‘Compound’ life and with her subsequent political activism underlines the oppositional nature of her maternal practice. Having been an “outlaw” from the “institution of motherhood” Sharon adumbrates a model of what theoreticians like O’Reilly calls “gynocentric or feminist mothering”—one that “regards itself as explicitly and profoundly political and social” and aims at making mothering, “freed from motherhood” a “site of empowerment and a location of social change” (Rich 195; O’Reilly 3). Atwood’s critique of motherhood in Oryx and Crake is integral to her engagement in this novel with the dynamics of gender and science. The ideology of scientism—one that tries to reduce every human phenomenon to its ‘natural’ or ‘scientific’ causes and negates the non-material aspects of human existence—reigns supreme in the dystopian society Jimmy grows up in. This ideology, which trashes human faculties and attributes that do not align with the ethos of materialism, starts with genetic customization of babies to ensure high scientific intelligence. It continues to work at the next stage, so that parenting reflects the same predilection for raising children by the “math-and-chem-and-applied-bio yardstick” of the Compounds—the yardstick by which Jimmy, a word person, seems disappointingly “dull normal” (50). The cultivation of mental traits attuned to the needs of capitalistic materialism, namely, utilitarian rationality and aggression, dovetails into gender-making. Thus, Jimmy’s father always gifts him “some tool or intelligence-enhancing game”, like a special multipurpose knife, and playfully asks him to screw in light-bulbs (50). His expectation that Jimmy would not cry when told he could be killed for getting a cough reflects conventional gender assumptions the contemporary reader readily recognizes (19--20). Despite such an ambience, however, Jimmy develops an emotional sensitivity that is at odds with the utilitarianism and materialism that define the world around him. Complementing the presentation of Jimmy as a self-absorbed, parochial male are streaks of tenderness, sensitivity and empathy in him that run counter to his father’s attempts to genderize him into a “tough guy” (17). These ‘feminine’ traits are reflected, for example, in his feelings for animals, like the pigoons, whom he thinks of as friends and tries to amuse while visiting them with his father at OrganInc Farms (26). In his earliest memory of a Compound bonfire he is concerned about the painted ducks on his shoes, who would be hurt, he fancies, by the scalding disinfectant he is made to walk through; and the burning cattle carcasses give him anguish as they have their “heads on” and he has “done

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nothing to rescue them” (15, 18). Although these sentiments defy logic, precisely because of that reason they also hint at Jimmy’s affective and moral sensibilities which are most clearly evident in Snowman’s solicitousness for the Crakers and in his guilt for not trying to counter Crake’s plans of destroying the world. Jimmy’s emotional intelligence is expressed also in his understanding of his father playing “the role of a Dad” while being “secretly disappointed” with him and through his precocious perceptivity about his father’s affair with the lab-assistant Ramona (52; 50; 66). Jimmy’s ethico-emotional sensitivity is indicated again in a conversation that he has with his friend Crake while watching the videofootage of a global resistance movement—the “genmod coffee wars”— against the cultivation of a high-yielding spliced coffee bean that threatens to devastate small growers across the world (178--79). As we have seen in the previous section, Jimmy draws Crake’s attention to the “dead peasants”—the upshot of the unjust and unequal war in which poor peasants are being “massacred” by the combined armies of a number of countries supporting the cause of capitalistic imperialism (179). Jimmy cannot muster the courage to openly support the peasants because in the apolitical plastic cocoon of a ‘Compound’ that he belongs to “taking sides” is not the done thing (179). Yet the human and ethical import of the unjust war does not leave him untouched. It is this emotional and moral susceptibility that later makes Snowman suffer from guilt for not having done anything to save the world from the apocalypse—for not being able to see that Crake was planning it. While Jimmy’s sensitivity might have been innate we cannot ignore the facts that he has been mothered by an ethically sensitive woman and has grown up in a household where debates about the morality of bio-capitalistic projects have been frequent (56–57). Jimmy’s emotional insight is most evident, however, in his relations with his mother. His love for his mother gives him an instinctive insight into her unhappiness and angst. He tries to bring her out of her suffering, as we see in the chapters called ‘Bonfire’ and ‘Lunch’: he gets her to talk about the science that she loves and has abandoned, wanting to “try her best with him … to keep on going”, playing more of a child than he really is (21). The episode mentioned earlier, where Sharon prepares an elaborate lunch for Jimmy and tries to be “all sparkling attention” despite her unhappiness is touching as much for Sharon’s pathetic attempt to be a good mother as for little Jimmy’s understanding of her state of mind. He makes “an effort” to feign delight, although he understands these moods of hers to be out of her character: “he’d get what he wanted”, telling her silly stories, “because then she’d laugh” (32). Indeed, that is what he wants,

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“[m]ore than anything”— “to make her laugh, to make her happy” (31). “If only he could have one more chance to make her happy”, the narrator reports him to be longing (68). And although he does not fully appreciate her concerns, he continues to rue that he had possibly disappointed her. To add a caveat, mixed in with Jimmy’s attempts to bring Sharon out of her apathy and make her feel better is the urge to get “a reaction”. He nags her about the pigoons—the hybrid animals created by his father’s company—until she breaks down, and then he gloats over his own power, “congratulating himself” for being able “to create such an effect”, even as he tries to comfort her (33). Even this early in his life, Jimmy, already gendered, takes pleasure in exercising power over a woman. Indeed, he grows up to be enough of a gendered male to want to have his girlfriends in emotionally broken states so that he could “draw out of them their stories of hurt, … apply himself to them like a poultice” and get his ego mollified (190). He so far objectifies women that to him their physical assets and “problems of [their] own” are on the same plane—consumables to be savoured (285). However, despite Jimmy’s ‘manly’ need to dominate and feel superior to women, in his unchosen role as the caretaker of the Crakers Snowman emerges as a mother-figure whose masculinity—biological and psychological—does not deter him from feeling tenderly solicitous for those alien humanoids who are like children in their naïve simplicity. After the apocalypse he rescues them from ‘Paradice’, the high-end laboratory where they were kept by Crake, and since then he cares for them with a mix of resigned apathy and real concern. In his roles as care-taker and myth-maker to the Crakers, who perceive him both as a curiosity and an authority, Snowman seems to transcend the rigidities of the patriarchal gender system he has inherited. Also, Jimmy’s love of obsolete, connotative words (“golden oldies”)— a trait he retains as Snowman—signals the androgynous quality of his sensibilities while also underlining his status as a representative of genuine humanity in a world populated by humanoids. (191).8 This is because language itself is presented in Oryx and Crake as an epitome of human culture, both material and non-material, and as a symbol of the unique wholeness of the human. Jimmy’s concern for the survival of this human wholeness—what he calls “human meaning”—is expressed in a conversation that he has with his genius friend Crake while the latter is conceptualizing the new breed of gene-spliced humanoids (166–67). Jimmy, of course, does not quite measure up to the ideal Sharon apparently aspired to achieve through her mothering of her child; he seems indeed to have let her down. He ends up as an employee of ‘AnooYoo’, a

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biotech firm working on anti-ageing products that con people, and does not sympathize with rebellious groups like the environmentally active ‘God’s Gardeners’. He also tries to dominate and manipulate his girlfriends. However, Jimmy/Snowman’s empathy and nurture, his ethical sensibility, his love of connotative words and his appreciation of and concern for “human meaning” mark him as different from the other men we meet in the novel. These normatively ‘feminine’ supra-rational qualities develop in him despite his father’s gender training and despite the influence of a patriarchal culture that thrives on a sexist organization of gender. Apparently, Sharon’s deficient motherhood has produced an individual who, if not free from the pernicious impact of gender socialization, is yet able to evince a salutary ‘femininity’ that subverts the sexist gender dichotomy fostered by patriarchy. Sharon’s ‘imperfect’ motherhood, then, indicates the possibility of a non-sexist mothering that does not destroy a child’s inherent ‘feminine’ qualities. Also, Sharon’s maternal sin—her desertion of her child—enables her to escape the morally ambiguous world she is trapped in. By thus getting involved in subterranean political activity aimed at subverting the iniquitous and repressive capitalistic order, Sharon—an outlaw from the institution of motherhood—emerges as a woman who tries to combine mothering with activism: the patriarchal narrative of obsessive and oppressive motherhood is disrupted.9 Thus, Sharon’s motherwork illustrates the paradigm of what has been called ‘feminist mothering’. As Tuula Gordon’s study of ‘feminist mothers’ has shown, two of the “particular factors” making up a maternal practice that resists and opposes the patriarchal ideology of motherhood are non-sexist childrearing and the mother’s involvement in political activism (Feminist Mothers 149). Sharon’s career in the novel is an instance of what Elisabeth Badinter has called the process of “negotiation between the woman and the mother” (5). That negotiation is not wholly successful or complete—Sharon does suffer from maternal guilt and anxiety and Jimmy is less than the ideal non-sexist man. Yet, through Sharon’s maternal practice and its product Atwood presents an oppositional discourse of childrearing that both critiques and disrupts the patriarchal master-narrative of motherhood. This counter-narrative also indicates the potentiality of a gynocentric mothering that gives cognizance to the mother’s needs as an individual on the one hand and to the socio-political implication of motherwork on the other, The (partial) undoing of gender represented by the character of Jimmy/Snowman—the product of Sharon’s gynocentric motherwork—is symptomatic of the ideal Atwood seems to put forth in the novel. The scientism innate to the techno-capitalistic society and the persistence of

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gender stereotypes tend to create and reproduce a schism between the ‘female’ principle of affective and moral maturity and ‘male’ (ultra)rationality. Yet, rationalistic intellect and moral and affective sensibilities are not shown to be really antagonistic in Oryx and Crake. Thus we have Sharon, a ‘numbers’ person and a talented scientist, as the most prominent figure of ethical and political dissent in the soul-dead apathetic world of the novel. We also learn of Crake’s father who tries to organize people against the devilish business plans of the HelthWyzer Compound and pays with his life for that. The traits of high ratiocinative intellect, aggression and competition are conventionally identified as masculine because these are dominant in contemporary human culture and much of human culture has always been predominantly masculine. So the opposite principle in human nature consisting of the affective faculties and an imaginative mode of knowing is ‘feminine’ by default. But Atwood seems to advocate the cultivation of a model of intelligence that has elements of both. She advances an ideal of developing the human mind by balancing intellect with emotional maturity, affective normalcy and empathy with other beings. Charles P. Snow argued for a dialogue between what he called the ‘two cultures’ of the sciences and the humanities, especially literature; Oryx and Crake calls for a fusion of the respective sensibilities. If the “Roses” of human culture have to bloom the “Blood[y]” proclivities of the human mind have to be softened: the “Roses” have to bloom in the minds first (80).10 The pre-apocalypse dystopian world projected in Oryx and Crake—a world that reflects our own—shows the persistence of gender stereotypes that delimit the humanity and personhood of both sexes, but especially of women. Like in Shelley’s The Last Man and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, inter-gender ‘love’ is shown to reflect women’s subordination by men and by systemic patriarchy. And, like in Frankenstein and The Last Man, prescriptive motherhood is critiqued for its potential to undermine women’s lives. The critique of the patriarchal ideology of motherhood is, however, complemented in Oryx and Crake by an indication of how that ideology could be subverted from within, resulting in a salutary dissolution of gender rigidities on the one hand and the mother’s enhanced liberty and agency on the other.

The Last Man and the New Humans In the poem “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein”—the sole explicit reference to Shelley in her ouevre—Atwood develops a creature-creator dialectic that resembles the one in Shelley’s Frankenstein:

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In Oryx and Crake the created humanoids—products of utopian ambition combined with market-driven desires—are not murderous or disobedient. Even so, they illustrate the same pattern as in Frankenstein of creation going beyond the creator, insofar as they develop in directions unforeseen and unintended by Crake. Also, the patterns of the desertion drama in the two creation tales are similar. In Frankenstein the creator first abandons the creature and then ends up pursing it, hemmed in by the same alienation that he first made the creature suffer. In Oryx and Crake it is the last of the creator’s race who ends up being alienated; alone amid a happy group of the created beings and miserable beyond endurance, he feels like one locked up in a worldwide prison. “Get me out!,” he cries mentally, and whimpers to the dead and absent Crake: “Why am I on this earth? How come I am alone? Where’s my Bride of Frankenstein?” (45; 169). “I am your past’, he imagines telling the Crakers, “I am your ancestor, come from the land of the dead. Now I’m lost, I can’t get back, I’m stranded here, I’m all alone. Let me in!” (106). The last man, with his human emotions, failings, and

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imperfections, appears alien to these designer beings who come to accept his “monstrousness” (100). It is this human being, representative of the race of the creator, who feels banished by the created. Looking like an apparition to the beautiful new creatures, shut out because of his human nature from their simple, programmed community life, he goes about scavenging for food, weighed down with the double burden of his personal past and the remnants of dead human culture. When he whistles to himself as a signal to the new beings he fancies the sound to be like a “leper’s bell”, although he knows they are programmed to be immune to the contagion of humanity (153). Atwood’s presentation of the Crakers vis-à-vis Snowman brings out her perception of the specificity of humanity as we know it. It is Crake’s plans that ultimately destroy the human species. But when he explains the ‘Paradice’ project to Jimmy, it is clear that he speaks on behalf of the Compound establishment. In fact, the making of genetically modified human “prototypes” is projected as the future equivalent of nuclear programmes: such programmes are being carried out, Crake tells Jimmy, by many countries amid the tightest security and secrecy arrangements (303). Although his intention to kill off human beings all at once has been a general secret, his human-engineering vision is only a reflection of the extreme rationality and materialism of his times. Thus, Crake defines war as “misplaced sexual energy, which [they] consider to be a larger factor than the economic, racial and religious causes often cited” (293). This proclivity to reduce everything about human beings to the body, to ‘nature’—a tendency of which we will presently see more—is a reflection of the materialism and scientism that define Crake’s society. He, and other scientists like him, only take these to their “logical conclusion” by wanting to genetically remove what they consider rectifiable flaws in human nature, like troubled sexuality, “pseudospeciation” or racism, the concept of property and the associated question of paternity and hierarchy (343, 305). Although love “is a hormone-induced delusional state that result[s] in altered body chemistry and [is] therefore real” the human convention of imperfect monogamy irritates Crake (193, 164). So he makes his creatures guiltlessly polygamous like the extinct bonobo chimpanzee: monogamy or pair-bonding is abolished. The sex rituals of these creatures, involving “musical outbursts”, penis-waving dance numbers and “marathon” mating sessions involving three men and a woman, sound eerie. But these constitute an improvement, the narrator concedes, on human conventions of inter-gender relationships, insofar as they remove prostitution, childabuse, rape and sexual frustration: “Sex is no longer a mysterious rite . . .

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inspiring suicides and murders. . . . [n]ow it’s more like . . . a free-spirited romp” (165). But this clinical sex-only conception has eradicated the supra-physiological, mental and emotional aspects of inter-gender relationships. Anything that cannot be understood in material-scientific terms has been out of the reckoning for Crake and his fraternity in the genesis of these new humans. Going out of his way to introduce in his creatures the rabbit-like ability to recycle digested nutrients as food, Crake defends against Jimmy’s objection with the premise that the mechanism would ensure optimal utilization of resources. Jimmy’s imagination revolts at the idea of human creatures eating their own excrement, but Crake argues that the objection is “purely aesthetic”, and, therefore, pointless (159). The banishment of the imagination from his scheme of things is illustrated by his dictum that “no name [for the ‘Paradice’ workers] could be chosen for which a physical equivalent . . . could not be demonstrated” (7). Ironically, though, he names his beings after long-dead historical personages, like Abraham Lincoln, Simone de Beauvoir and Sojourner Truth, as if to spite and mock human history. The customized minds of the Crakers are like human children. Crake gets Oryx to teach them simple concepts only, like which food to eat and which to avoid. But, although they are programmed not to wonder about their origins they do ask where they have come from, as we get to know from Oryx: in reply Oryx tells them about Crake. In fact, Oryx creates a semi-theological lore about Crake being their creator and protector and tells them she is teaching them even when away from them, just as Crake is always overseeing and protecting them. In an early indication that they are capable of abstraction and symbolism, despite Crake’s plans to the contrary, they believe what they are told. Later, Snowman adds to the myth-making when in response to questions from the Crakers he fashions Crake as benevolent divinity and himself as his only emissary and confidante. Although evil is alien to their genetic software, the imperturbable mildness and goodwill programmed into the Crakers are non-human in their bland perfection. Much as Snowman longs for human company, he still tries to avoid them as he sets out on a scavenging trip because, as he puts it, “they are always so goddam affable” (155). Their absolute goodness has made them humourless, as we have seen. Humour, as Crake explains, needs “a certain edge, a little malice” (306). Not being able to retain that “edge” along with innate goodness, he tries—and succeeds—to edit humour out of their systems: his scientific planning, obviously, have

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no place for mental complexity, which is the basis of human specificity itself. The incommunicability of human culture to the Crakers as well as their difference from human beings is best brought out by the part in the narrative wherein Snowman imagines trying to explain human concepts, like that of the toast, to them (98). Coming against conceptual barriers at every step of the imagined explanation, Snowman despairs of the whole attempt. The complexity that is the result of human evolution is also the signifier of the specificity of the human being. Pithily alluding to his status as the last representative of human civilization Snowman says to himself, “Toast is me. I am Toast” (98). The article—and the word signifying it— becomes the emblem of both the lost human civilization and of the distance between that and the Crakers, who have not inherited it, despite being the inheritors of the earth. What Snowman has within himself—his human longings, his memories, concepts that define his world-view (all things that constitute his humanity)—is incommunicable to the hybrid Crakers: “what he’s got they’ll never catch. They’re immune from him” (153). The loss of the continuity of human culture as well as the death of the heart in the population that has died is beautifully brought out in the narrator’s thoughts on the artistic marvels of the world. The Taj Mahal, the Louvre, the Pyramids—embodiments of the imagination and of the nonmaterial aspects of human nature—would be unintelligible to the Crakers, who have not inherited human culture: they will perceive them as surreal “phantasmagoria . . . made by dreams”, that are crumbling away because “no one is dreaming them any longer” (222). In this last man’s lament for lost human glory we once again find an echo of the voice of Shelley’s last man. Towards the end of Shelley’s apocalyptic novel Verney is in Rome, “the wonder of the world, sovereign mistress of the imagination”. Wandering among its palaces and cathedrals, he hears “the voice of dead time” in his “waking dreams”, and “the Enchantress Spirit of Rome” rests on him, the “sole remaining spectator” of its “wonders” (367–69). Although, in Oryx and Crake there are the Crakers to inherit the earth, the situation is no better as these children of man’s science have not the capacity to appreciate man’s art: they are unable, in their programmed simplicity of mind, to inherit the legacy of “human meaning” (167). The distance between normal humanity—represented by Snowman—and the designer humanity of the children of Crake is brought out, as observed earlier, at a number of places in the novel, each instance either enlivened with subtle humour or sobered with pathos.

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The touching “generosity” of the Crakers “breaks [Snowman] up” even as he “feels like weeping” at realizing the unbridgeable gap between them and himself, between them and humanity (161). However, Atwood hints at the ultimate intractability of (human) nature and the limited power of science by showing these new creatures tending towards human complexity, despite their programming. They develop incipient political instincts and tact (euphemism), and, evincing a capacity for empathy, they show signs of tenderness towards Snowman. They even begin to develop “symbolic thinking”, the very basis of human culture, including language and art: we get a hint of this when we learn that they have been performing rites in front of Snowman’s effigy (360-61). While expressing concern for Snowman’s safety the Craker women put his lack of a protective body odour in euphemistic terms. The statement about Snowman one of them makes (“Your smell is not very strong”) is the earliest sign of complexity and the potentiality of evil taking root in them—despite Crake’s designs— as euphemism is basically lying (161). Similarly, when ‘Abraham Lincoln’ shows signs of leadership we are left wondering whether this is entirely positive as the narrator reminds us, in Crake’s words, that in human history leadership has almost always led to tyranny, slavery and massacres (155). But this also indicates the emergence in the Crakers of individual variation—one of the defining traits of humanity. The narrative also keeps emphasizing the distance between humanity—represented by Snowman—and its heirs, the Crakers. As a group of Crakers, both men and women, work at healing Snowman’s foot by “purring” Snowman “tries to sense a responding vibration inside himself”, but fails (365–66). The image is an expression of the irony and the pathos of the situation: as the last human being lies in agony, both physical and mental, the alien children of humankind tries in vain to ease him. This is also one of the instances when the text draws the reader’s sympathy towards both the miserable last human being like us and to the humanoid Crakers with their designer innocence, just as Shelley did with Frankenstein and his botched creation. Noticing the incipient development in the Crakers of traits that could be construed as acquisitiveness or envy, Brydon observes that Atwood indicates through these the stability of human nature and its ills (“Atwood’s Global Ethic” 454). But the Crakers are man’s technological creation. As such their negative proclivities indicate Atwood’s critique of eugenic technology itself. Human nature cannot be ameliorated by genesplicing, Atwood seems to be saying. The gold and the dross in it are so intermixed (by being functions of the human imagination) that it is beyond positivistic technoscience to change it for the better. Therefore, Atwood’s

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insight that human nature has a stable core—as the development of the Crakers shows—is actually a glimmer of hope rather than a pessimistic rebuttal of the possibility of change. It is because human nature seems to have a stable core that there is space therein for both good and evil, and it is the responsibility of the current generations to ensure that the good triumphs over the evil for the most part. It is here that humanistic education can still play a role. That in a deracinated, materialistic world there are still people like Jimmy, who has a love for the apparently redundant and non-utilitarian, is cause for cheer, however imperfect he may be as a carrier of human cultural legacy. Indeed, in its critique of people’s demand for (superficial) perfection in themselves and their progeny and in its subversion of technology’s impulse toward perfecting humanity by purging it of its complexity, Oryx and Crake is Atwood’s novelistic denunciation of the ideal of perfectibility and the belief in the inevitability of progress that underpin modern science. The ‘Children of Crake’ exemplify what Harraway has called “cyborgs”, for “[t]he cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed” (Simians, Cyborgs and Women 151). However, Atwood, unlike Harraway, does not seem to celebrate the ontological confusions, despite their putative potential for subverting oppressive polarizations created by Western patriarchy. She seems less sure of the positive implications of the cyborgification of humanity and deplores the posthuman “pollution” of both human and animal “uniqueness” (Harraway, Simians 151–52). Oryx and Crake, rather, seems to be a fictional elaboration and problematization of Fukuyama’s thesis about the posthuman situation. Opining that “there are no fixed human characteristics” and hence no essential “human nature” Fukuyama still argues that “human nature . . . is a meaningful concept, which has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species” and that “conjointly with religion”, it “defines our most basic values” (7). Atwood’s text offers us a context wherein to ponder the meaning of these theoretical pronouncements in terms of lived experience. The future of humanity—of both kinds—is ambiguously poised as the novel ends but does not conclude the dialectic it generated. We hear of a trio of armed human beings whom the Crakers encounter in Snowman’s absence. Snowman emerges as a morally responsible agent worrying about the humanoids while “rehearsing the future”, and we find ourselves worrying with him (366). We too feel concerned about the safety of the Crakers, so strange in their simple, albeit programmed, goodness even as we both hope for and fear the development in them of ‘normal’ humanity.

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“Tomorrow is another day”, as Snowman once tried telling himself; and we keep hoping for the best, wondering at the same time what would constitute the ‘best’ scenario for humanity in this posthuman, postapocalyptic future (148). *** Oryx and Crake indicts the ethos of market capitalism that defines much of today’s world—the crass materialism and the insensitivity on the one hand, and the often anti-nature pursuits of science, which is the new God, on the other. The cruel, selfish violation of nature, symbolized in the novel by “Alex the Parrot” (who turns from green to a lurid red in Snowman’s dream), is one of the principal causes that brings on the apocalypse in Oryx and Crake (336). Technological excesses resulting in terrible environmental changes and warping of the natural order are driven by the capitalistic political order that stokes the materialistic desires of people. The crazy pursuit of material well-being, of pleasure and plenitude, fosters social inequality; also, the neglect of the non-material aspects of life coarsens the fabric of the human mind and kills off the finer feelings of the human heart. The theme of the ‘posthuman’ alteration of the human that was dormant in Shelley’s Frankenstein comes to the fore in Oryx and Crake as Atwood speculates on the proclivities of contemporary technoscience and probes the nature of the human. The cruel and contra-natural violation of species distinctions and the exploitation of human vulnerabilities by means of technology also rekindle the debate around scientific ethics that Shelley initiated through the disaster that followed Frankenstein’s irresponsible technological creation of life. The anti-imperialistic note sounded in Shelley’s The Last Man gets stronger in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which presents a speculative elaboration of the divisive and iniquitous geopolitical order that the imperialism of global capital, aided by technoscience, tends to engender. Atwood’s abiding concern with patriarchal gender politics provides a powerful secondary subject in Oryx and Crake. Particularly, the novel engages with the themes of inter-gender ‘love’ and the construct of motherhood, showing how these ideologies undermine women’s liberty and their agency in personal and social lives. Like Shelley in The Last Man, Atwood traces the inter-relation between patriarchal domination of women and their constriction within the ideology of ‘love’. Shelley’s concern with the destructive potential for women of the patriarchal construct of motherhood—apparent in Frankenstein and, more pointedly,

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in The Last Man—is also shared by Atwood. Oryx and Crake shows how the “Motherhood religion” undermines women even in advanced societies.11 While delineating the patterns of the new-Right ideology of motherhood, however, Atwood also hints at the possibility of an oppositional maternal practice that dovetails with enhanced agency of the mother and contributes to a subtle dismantling of the gender schisms fostered by prescriptive motherhood and gender socialization. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Shelley’s Frankenstein makes a critique of scientific rationality and indicts the sexist schism that patriarchal thought institutes between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’—the schism that is sharpened and perpetuated by the ideology and praxes of modern science. Oryx and Crake, set in a context defined by contemporary biotechnology’s extreme advances and the ideology of scientism that recognizes only the natural-material, arrives at a similar position. The novel advocates the cultivation of the mind that would combine ‘masculine’ intellect with the ‘feminine’ qualities of sympathy, affective maturity and moral sensitivity. The problem of making people choose goodness over evil, Oryx and Crake seems to tell us, cannot be solved by making goodness innate and, therefore, obligatory—by obliterating, in other words, the categories themselves of good and bad. That produces, as we have seen, a simplistic, non-human perfection, not rounded, organic human goodness. If choice and individuality are eliminated humanity itself is destroyed. The necessary task of making human beings sensitive to the living and the nonliving world, of making them appreciate the non-material aspects of being human allow no short-cut. And herein lies the importance of the imagination and the affections; in this inheres the significance of literature and the Arts—human pursuits that cultivate and express the imagination and the feelings. Herein lies also the significance of the Word, which emerges in Oryx and Crake as both the carrier and the epitome of “human meaning”.

CONCLUSION

This study of a selection of novels by Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood has sought to explore how the authors have used elements of ‘the fantastic’ to embody their critical thinking on socio-political proclivities and cultural formations of their respective times. Specifically, we have looked at Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake from a feminist, postcolonial perspective and have explored the interfaces of (techno)science, gender and history(-making) in these four works of speculative/fantastic fiction. Shelley’s Frankenstein and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, based on speculation rooted in the radical science of the respective times, critique scientific rationality for its alienation of the affective capacities of the human mind—capacities that engender inter-subjective feelings and aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. In Frankenstein, especially, this critique is realized through Shelley’s falsification of the gendered and hierarchical binary of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that is the cornerstone of modern science and of patriarchal thought. In both novels eugenical biotechnology is critiqued for its reductive positivism and its failure to master human nature, which is understood as the function of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. The inadequacy of reason as a guiding principle for the welfare and amelioration of the human race or human society is emphasized by both authors. The ideal of scientific ‘objectivity’ is shown to mask a sexist, exploitative attitude to nature and a dangerous split between reason on the one hand and feelings and values on the other. Shelley’s critique of this ideal for its alienation of the supra-rational elements of being human is a critique too of the ethico-social irresponsibility that it may potentially entail. By indicating this through the consequences of Frankenstein’s extra-cultural creation, Shelley heralds in English literature the theme of scientific ethics. The issue of the sociocultural responsibility of science that has assumed a new urgency in our own times gets a pronounced treatment in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake—a novel that presents a scenario wherein the putative value-neutrality of science is corrupted to form a nexus between technoscience and the vested interests of global capitalism. While perceiving nature and culture as mutually implicated categories Shelley’s texts, especially The Last Man, present nature as a power

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indifferent to human destiny. Her perception of nature’s indifference to events in the human world negates the eighteenth century faith in the congruence between the natural and the human orders and undercuts anthropocentrism. In our times, Atwood’s environmental vision extends trends of our contemporary world into the near future. The Handmaid’s Tale hints at the sort of technologically induced environmental degradation that is carried forward to the next level in Oryx and Crake, which presents a nature perverted to positive malice by human interference even as the distinction between ‘real’ nature and its constructed embodiments gets blurred through man’s manipulation of natural species. This scientific experimentation with life finds its logical end in man’s attempt at creating a putatively better race of human beings through the application of ultra-advanced biotechnology. In a notable congruence between Shelley and Atwood—reflecting the respective scientific milieux of their times—the science in both Frankenstein and Oryx and Crake involves biotechnology. But while in Shelley’s novel the scientific impulse is motivated by a mixture of egoism, utopianism, altruism, and a genuine curiosity into the ‘principle of life’, Atwood’s speculative vision is a composite of the eugenic impulse on the part of an individual scientist along with elements of neo-imperial corporate greed and people’s materialistic desires. Indeed, the apocalypse in Oryx and Crake is not an immediate result of man’s scientific excesses; it is brought on by these other factors, just as the catastrophic consequences of Frankenstein’s creation is less the result of the creation per se than that of his inability to acculturate the Creature. Both Shelley and Atwood probe into the nature of our being and explore what it means to be human. Atwood in Oryx and Crake, like Shelley in Frankenstein, makes the point that the human creature takes on its specificity through the integration of reason with feelings and the imagination and through an interaction of what we are accustomed to call ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. The correspondence between ultra-rational mental abilities and interactive and emotional impairment—suggested in Frankenstein—is an insight that is emphasized in Oryx and Crake. Atwood’s novel, moreover, indicates the pernicious impact on human mind and culture of a narrow concept of intelligence that serves to institute and perpetuate a schism between the rational and the emotive-aesthetic, and hence between the sciences and the humanities. Both authors are hesitant in accepting science as the tool for and the discourse of human progress. Shelley apprehends the negative potentiality of an exclusive faith in scientific rationality in shaping human destiny; Atwood, in our times, dramatizes some of the grievous consequences of the

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invasion of the natural and the human by the ideology of scientism. However, neither Shelley nor Atwood is opposed to science per se. If Shelley seems to share in her era’s enthusiasm for radical science, despite her ambivalence toward it, Atwood counts scientific breakthroughs, like penicillin and heart transplant, amongst great and entirely positive human achievements—in the same league as Shakespeare’s tragedies or the Taj Mahal. Shelley’s critique of Frankenstein’s science is integral to her engagement with the (Romantic) masculine ethos of self-centric transcendence that is shown to be inimical to the family and the community. Against this ideal she pits the nuclear family as the locus of self-fulfilment for both genders as well as the model for communitarian peace and stability. Frankenstein advances an ideal of a gender-equal family, wherein both the male and the female partners would be equally committed to the welfare of the family as a unit. But already in Frankenstein Shelley’s celebration of the nuclear family is qualified by her recognition that, in reality, it might not be equally beneficial to both sexes as it tends to lead women into too much of self-effacement and an excessive absorption into the relational-domestic. Women’s compulsory and compulsive enactment of societally prescribed gender roles that oblige them to forfeit individuality and self-assertion is highlighted. The recognition that the family demands of and prepares women for a too tight confinement of their physical and mental energies, the intensity of commitment being unmatched by men, is incipient in Frankenstein and more developed in The Last Man. Although the nuclear family is still Shelley’s ideal in The Last Man, the recognition of this lacuna becomes deeper in this later novel, which makes a keener observation of the impact on women of their containment in relational existence. The gender-related inadequacy in the family ideal is related to inordinate emotional investment on the part of women in ‘love’ and/or in motherhood; and this is traced, in its turn, to the absence of the scope for women to participate in the wider public sphere of life. The critique of the gendered schism of the cultural and the natural that Shelley advances in Frankenstein is a denunciation of the sexist ordering of the realms of the affective and the rational whereby woman and the ‘private’/domestic realm of natural immanence are perceived as separate and subordinate to man and the ‘public’/cultural sphere of transcendence. However, while Shelley laments women’s want of access to the public realm, there is a corresponding demand, implicit especially in Frankenstein, that men should commit themselves equally with women to the welfare of the family.

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Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale too shows the possible impact on women and on society in general of restrictive identification of women with rigid gender roles. In the context of Rightist neo-conservatism, Atwood’s dystopia dramatizes the possible consequences of biologically essentialist attitudes toward women. Presenting a gothic social structure revolving around procreation—reminiscent of the gothicity of Frankenstein— The Handmaid’s Tale revisits Shelley’s critique of the patriarchal identification of women with domestic immanence. Atwood alerts women to the negative potential of complacency and sexual-political noninvolvement while denouncing the radical politics of separatist feminism because of its proximity to regressive gender essentialism. Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s apocalyptic revisitation of the creation drama of Frankenstein, shows how a society driven by the cognate ideologies of scientism and consumerist materialism fosters misogynistic attitudes and stifling expectations of women. As in Shelley’s Frankenstein femininity is shown to encode women’s perceived inferiority and weakness (and men’s need to feel power over them). Even in a putatively high-tech futurity, women, we are shown, still have to perform the feminine masquerade for their (social) survival. While Shelley identifies the familial constriction of women’s energies as the reason for too much dependence on their part on ‘love’ or on motherhood, Atwood shows how, even after a neardissolution of occupational segregation in Western societies, women are still impacted by these constraining dependencies and cultural imperatives. Atwood’s presentation of women’s absorption into inter-gender relationships indicates their own continued fascination with the traditional concept of ‘romantic’ love premised on the stratified positioning of the masculine and the feminine. The relative identification of women with the natural/domestic as opposed to the cultural/public continues in a materialistic world controlled by techno-scientific capitalism. Indeed, the ideology of scientism and the ultra-materialistic value-system that it generates are shown by Atwood to actually foment regressive, biologically deterministic attitudes toward women and to engender the oppressive cult of perfect motherhood. Shelley shows how motherhood assumes a stifling and destructive aspect partly because of societal expectations of the woman-as-mother and partly due to the woman’s obsession bred by her compulsory confinement within the relational-familial realm of experience. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake brings out how a scientifically super-advanced society’s regressive attitudes toward women and the family still continue to configure motherhood as an oppressive institution. However, through Sharon and Jimmy—the “selfish” mother and the “forsaken” child—Atwood also

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tentatively indicates the possibility of practising an oppositional motherwork, a mode of ‘feminist mothering’, that helps to combine political agency, liberty and a non-sexist child-rearing.1 While being sensitive to the deleterious impact on women of the gendered schism of the public and the private Shelley is critical of masculine pursuits that are in principle opposed to her cherished ideal of familial mutuality. Thus, she puts down the colonial impulse—integral to men’s lust for power and self-assertion—for its disruptive impact on familial and communal/national peace in Frankenstein. The Last Man carries forward this critique. While bringing out the negative impact of colonialism on harmony both in the family and in the national community, Shelley discerns in The Last Man the element of national and racial snobbery as germane to the imperialist mindset. If Frankenstein is a critique of the colonialist desire for adventure and power, The Last Man combines this critique with a denunciation of blind national pride on the part of the English protagonists and a deeply entrenched Eurocentrism in them. In The Last Man Shelley engages also with the socio-cultural impact of political idealism in the wake of the French revolution. Her condemnation of colonialism here is combined with recognition of the human consequence of sanguinary politics on the one hand and the crudeness, the lack of refinement and discernment that may attend precipitous democratization of societies on the other. Shelley’s temperance and her ideal of the family blend with her love of the noble and the fine in human nature and human attainments. Accordingly, she implicitly endorses a model of evolutionary social reformation under the care of an enlightened aristocracy rather than anarchic revolutions—a model of politics consonant also with her resistance to totalitarian ideologies and notions of perfectibility. Atwood’s speculative vision discerns the patterns of neo-colonialism in the contemporary world. In a global capitalistic economy, marked with extreme imbalances of wealth and power among nations, colonial exploitation takes on forms like the thrusting of environmental hazards on to poorer countries by the richer, more developed ones, as in The Handmaid’s Tale. Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s next dystopia, is a speculative presentation of capitalistic imperialism at its zenith. In the latter novel capitalism, fuelled by technoscience, is shown to have taken control of the world, and nation states are of no importance as big business houses carve up the world into gated cities of super-affluence and disorderly pockets of poverty at various levels. Imperialism continues in the form of gross, often unethical exploitation by the business corporations of the consumerist

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desires of the people of both worlds, but especially of the poorer sections. Like in Shelley’s The Last Man the imperial centre is overwhelmed by the same disease that destroys the marginalized, quarantined ‘other’ world: imperialistic greed and lust for power, and smug assumption of superiority are the diseases that manifest themselves, as it were, as the plagues in both The Last Man and Oryx and Crake. The dystopian/apocalyptic speculations of Shelley and Atwood project visions of human history that undercut, respectively, the eighteenth century conception of history as Progress and our era’s positivism, rooted in our faith in science and globalised capitalism. Although separated by more than a century, both Shelley and Atwood accentuate the gender inflections of mainstream historiography. By presenting a narrative of the domestic and the personal as the last human testament Shelley’s The Last Man offers a model of history-making that revises conventional history’s accent on the public (masculine) world of conflicted interactions among nations and communities, of ambitions, rivalries and violence. This alternative historiography brings out the troubled dialectic between the public/male and private/female worlds at the same time as it indicts this schism for its deleterious impact on women and on communities. The processes of history-making take on a central importance in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which dramatizes the reversal of ‘progress’ for women by showing how gender essentialism, fomented by religious fundamentalism and misogyny, brings about the abolition of liberty and personhood for women. Atwood also brings out the nexus between history and sexual politics by showing how mainstream historiography reflects patriarchal values and attitudes to women. The novel shows how close our own era’s attitudes toward women are to those presented in its dystopian world of patriarchal totalitarianism and how history-making is determined by and reflects the power relations between the genders. To sum up, the mutually supportive ideologies and praxes of technoscience and patriarchy on the one hand and those of capitalism and (neo-)imperialism on the other combine to create conditions inimical to human liberty, especially for women, who continue to be hampered and diminished by gender essentialism and the (notional) continuance of segregation of spheres. These sets of cognate ideologies also set in motion processes that heighten economic inequality and threaten to rend the delicate fabric of environmental stability even as ‘man’ and other species on the earth interact artificially according to rules set by man’s selfish, utilitarian technologies. A positivistic materialism that Shelley so presciently perceived as being innate to modern science commingles with the ethos of global neo-imperial capitalism to start redefining both the

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human and the natural in ways that alter the specificities of both. Man’s science, however, continues to be baffled by the nature of the human, which, both authors perceive, is the outcome of the interplay of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’, of the rational/‘masculine’ and the affective/‘feminine’ elements of being. Moderation over radicalism, pragmatism over idealistic excess are upheld by both authors even as the importance of harmony between the sexes and of sisterhood among women are underlined. While the constriction of women’s individuality and personhood within the relational-domestic is decried and the continued impact of the private/public schism is regretted, intemperate egotism is perceived as being deleterious to both individual and collective wellbeing. Indeed, a significant aspect of the apprehension of the human presented in the novels studied is the compelling perception—expressed through apocalyptic visions of loneliness—that human beings cannot live without the context of a social-familial web of relationships and interactions. Humanity realizes itself, both authors perceive, not only as a function of the natural, to be understood and controlled by science. The category of the ‘cultural’, to be apprehended not only by reason but also by the imagination and the feelings, is equally significant. And here comes in Art and humanistic education, which are implicitly held out as the loci and the carriers of human meaning on the one hand and as instruments to awaken sensitivity to the supra-natural and supra-rational aspects of being human on the other. Shelley resists the Romantic ideology of Art as the arbiter of human destiny and a tool for the artist to obtain power over his audience. She conceives of it rather as the epitome and the repository of human culture and as a personal consolation for the artist faced with isolation and grief. Atwood posits a more assertive model of art in The Handmaid’s Tale. Here, literature emerges as both a means of personal survival and a powerful medium for creating and communicating bonds both between persons and between categories of people who share common experiences of oppression or victimization. Both authors conceive of Art as a refining and sensitizing power and as the repository of lived human experience, thoughts and values—all that signify and communicate human specificity and make for continuity among generations and bonding between people, communities and civilizations.

NOTES

Notes to Introduction 1. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake has been compared with Frankenstein. See Wilson (“Frankenstein’s Gaze”) and Staels. Hollinger has compared the workings of femininity-as-masquerade in Frankenstein and The Handmaid’s Tale. Cynthia Kuhn compared The Last Man with Oryx and Crake in a paper presented at the MLA Convention, 2004. 2. Moving beyond the “generic reductionism” that aims to distinguish between various “fantasy forms”, modern genre criticism has embraced a more fluid and inclusive understanding of what has been called “the fantastic” (Armitt 3, 6; Hume 30). This mode of writing has been perceived, like in Rosemary Jackson’s eponymous book, as the “literature of subversion”— “a form of writing which is about opening up subversive spaces within the mainstream” (Armitt 3). 3. See Mellor, Mary Shelley 89–107 for information on the scientific ambience in England around the time Shelley conceived Frankenstein. See Butler for an overview of the ‘vitalist debate’ between William Lawrence and John Abernethy (302–07). 4. On this point see Shelley’s “Introduction” to the 1831 edition of the novel. See also Mellor, Mary Shelley 36, 40. 5. On the conception in modern science of nature as a passive female see especially, chs. 2 and 4 of Keller’s book; see also Merchant (esp. chs. 1 and 9) and Easlea. 6. Latour views this polarized understanding of the natural and the cultural/human as the hallmark of Modernist thinking and relates it to the rift between the sciences and the humanities. Ortner identifies the sexist and schizoid conception of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as being foundational to patriarchy. 7. Mainstream “‘masculine’ Romanticism”, focused on “the development of the autonomous self” and on revolutionary politics, has been contrasted with a “‘feminine’ Romanticism” practised by the period’s women writers that insisted on the “primacy of the family and the community” and on “a politics of gradual . . . social change” (Mellor, Romanticism and Gender 2--3). Fisch (“Plaguing

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Politics”) notes Shelley’s critique of “masculine Romanticism” in The Last Man (280). 8. Hollinger discusses the working of exaggerated gender roles in Frankenstein as part of her comparative study of the novel with Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (210–15). Mellor discusses the “rigid division of sex-roles”, including that of the mother, in Frankenstein in the context of the separate spheres ideology (Mary Shelley 115–17). 9. Atwood makes the influence of “New England Puritanism” on The Handmaid’s Tale explicit in talking about the novel, which is actually set in the USA of a speculative near-future. (“Writing Utopia” 90–92). On the influence of the antifeminist ‘baclkash’ 1980s on the novel see also Greene (205) and Bousson (Brutal Choreographies 135–36). 10. In The Handmaid’s Tale, as we shall see, Atwood critiques ‘separatist feminism’—a proclivity within ‘second-wave’ feminism toward women’s willed separation from male-defined and male-dominated activities and relationships (Frye 406–14). She also satirizes the cognate position that insists on women’s ‘difference’ and celebrates ‘women’s culture’, putatively based on woman-centric experiences and feminine values. 11. The distinction—first theorized by Rich—between the patriarchal ‘institution’ of motherhood and the mothering ‘experience’ has been developed into a discourse of oppositional ‘mothering’ by scholars like Gordon and O’Reilly (Feminist Mothering), among others. This will be taken up in a section of Chapter 4 (“Gender, and Beyond”). 12. In a 2012 interview Steinem lamented that in both American and Asian societies “[w]e’ve had the courage to raise our daughters more like our sons, but not to raise our sons more like our daughters”. This failure to train “our sons” to share in the familial-domestic has resulted, Steinem observes, in “women having two jobs—one inside the home and one out.”

Notes to Chapter One 1. See, especially, chs. 4, 5 and 6. On the egoism that drives Frankenstein see also Johnson (“My Monster, My Self” 258) and Poovey, who notes his “vanity” and “egotism” in the context of her examination of Shelley’s conflicted engagement with “egotistical self-assertion” (124, 131). On Frankenstein’s Romantic idealism see ch.3 of Cantor’s Creature and Creator (103–32). 2. For analyses of how aspects of female experience and womanhood get reflected in Frankenstein see, for example, Poovey (114–42), Gilbert and Guber (213–47), Moers, and Johnson (“My Monster, My Self”), apart from Mellor’s Mary Shelley, esp. chs. 1 and 2.

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3. “Now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny to go forth and prosper”, writes Shelley in her ‘Introduction’ to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein (173). It is interesting to note how the author’s apparently unpremeditated expression invokes the interplay of maternity, gothicity and creation that is germinal to the novel. 4. See, for example, Mellor (Mary Shelley 115–26) and Hatlen (295). 5. As Butler shows, Frankenstein, in its own time, was perceived to have erred on the side of science rather than against it in the “vitalist debate” between scientific materialism and a spiritualist perception of the principle of life (304). 6. Ellis (“Monsters in the Garden” 124) and Mellor (Mary Shelley 214–15) attribute the gender division of roles to the rise of capitalism because in preindustrial, non-bourgeois families productive labour was shared between husbands and wives. However, the labour of child-rearing falls always, and everywhere, primarily to the woman. The rest of the process whereby she comes to be devalued and more or less identified with the domestic/natural is consequent upon this and is therefore active even when she partakes of productive cultural activities. 7. Shelley’s experiences, such as they were, would have made it possible for her to have “mixed feelings about motherhood” (Johnson “My Monster/My Self” 246). Moers shows how Shelley’s experiences with her own body enfolded as a “horror story of maternity” almost throughout her years with Percy Shelley, but especially around the conception and composition of Frankenstein (218–219, 214). 8. Also, by emphasizing the perceived signification of the Creature’s body Shelley introduces into her novel the thematic of bodily difference and its dialectic with normalcy and social being, an issue that assumes importance, as we shall see, in the dialectic between technoscience and human nature projected in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. 9. The motivation for Frankenstein’s project, as he verbalizes it, reflects the dream Shelley had after the death of her infant daughter (chronicled in her journal entry of March 19, 1815) (Moers 221–22). Shelley dreamt of re-vivifying the dead infant by rubbing it before the fire (Mary Shelley’s Journal 41); and Frankenstein wishes to be able to give “in process of time”, “renew[ed] life” to bodies “apparently” dead (32). 10. Thus, Poovey reads the ambiguities in Frankenstein as an expression of the tension between “[Shelley’s] conflicting desires for self-assertion and social acceptance” while Johnson perceives in them the anxieties incident to the assertion of female subjectivity and authorship (Poovey 131; Johnson, “My Monster, My Self” 246–251).

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11. In her biographical essay on Rousseau Shelley asserts that “the most characteristic part of man’s nature is his affections”—the ones he feels in caring for his sexual partner and offspring. “[T]he love of a parent for his child”, she opines, is “the noblest and most devoted passion of the human soul” (qtd. in Kucich 237). 12. Frankenstein was written at a time of widespread social disturbances in England, and subsequently the “‘Frankenstein monster’” came to serve as an emblem of “revolutionary scares” generated, for example, by the reform movement of the 1830s and the enfranchisement of the working classes in the 1860s (Sterrenburg. “Mary Shelley’s Monster” 260). 13. Shelley’s incomplete and unpublished biography of William Godwin is part of the Bodleian Library’s Abinger Shelley Collection (Dep.c. 606/1). The quotation is from page 151.

Notes to Chapter Two 1. The quoted phrase refers to the title of a collection of critical essays, The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein (eds, Fisch, Mellor, and Schor), one of the earliest critical compendiums to attempt a movement in Shelley criticism beyond her legendary first novel. 2. Poovey reads in the novel “a simplified indulgence of self-pity”, an expression of “pain, loss and grief” (155, 153); Fiona Stafford sees it as “an expression and study of grief” while recognizing the “cathartic” impact on Shelley of such an expression. (124, 221). 3. As we know, one of the earliest and most insightful discussions of the impact of women’s socialization in patriarchy on their self-image is part of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. 4. On Shelley’s survey of political systems in The Last Man and its relationship to the plague see, especially, Sterrenburg (“Apocalypse without Millennium” 337), Johnson (“The Last Man” 264) and Fisch (“Plaguing Politics” 273). 5. Shelley simultaneously complicated and literalized the metaphor of the plague frequent in post-Revolutionary nineteenth century writings: see Sterrenburg (“Apocalypse without Millennium”). On the significance of the plague see also Sontag. 6. The time of the plague in The Last Man coincides fairly with the cholera outbreak in India in 1823, an epidemic that subsequently spread over to Europe. See Fisch (“Plaguing Politics” 270) and Paley 126. 7. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake projects a future marked by the omnipotence of the

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machinery of global technocracy. As we shall see in Chapter 4, it is a world where countries as autonomous political entities do not exist, although inequality between the ‘Compounds’ and their commercially exploited hinterland (the ‘pleeblands’) is stark. 8. On Shelley’s conservatism see also Sterrenburg (“Mary Shelley’s Monster” 243, 261) and Cantor (“The Apocalypse” 200--03). Cantor observes that in the final parts of The Last Man Shelley projects the idea of an aristocracy of aesthetic talent and sensibility, thus offering “a paradoxical democratization of the aristocratic idea” (206). 9. The narrator Verney is one of the two characters in the novel in which Shelley projected elements of herself. See Mellor, Mary Shelley 157—58. Poovey too identifies Verney as “Shelley’s persona in The Last Man” (152).

Notes to Chapter Three 1. The Handmaid’s Tale, set in the USA, speculates on gender-related proclivities that were especially apparent in the USA of the 1980s. Faludi’s Backlash, which records the widespread neo-conservative attacks on women’s liberties in the USA of those times, is a key text in understanding the realities the novel builds on. See Bousson (Brutal Choreographies 135–136). 2. I use the concept of ‘postfeminism’ for its connotations of a relative disinterest in feminism among young (North American) women of the 1980s and thereafter and the attendant belief that feminism is no longer necessary (see Aronson). It is, as we shall see, a useful concept in understanding the feminism in The Handmaid’s Tale (Greene 205–06). 3. Hollinger analyses both the “construction” of femininity in Frankenstein and its “negation”, primarily through the Creature (209–12). In their chapter on “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve” Gilbert and Guber also see the Creature as the metaphoric expression of repressed female individuality—the monstrous double of the “disguised, buried, or miniaturized” manifestation of “femaleness” in Frankenstein (213–47, 232). 4. As we shall in the next section, the impassivity, the objectivity of Offred’s narrative is an important aspect of her narrative strategy, which in itself is a part of her policy for endurance and survival. 5. Identifying The Handmaid’s Tale as “an intra-feminist polemic”, Ehrenreich sees Gilead as a sinister “utopia of cultural feminism” (79, 78). 6. State repression of “individual humanity” in The Handmaid’s Tale has been discussed by Feur (92–97) and Malak (83).

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7. Offred also rebels against the regime through her “inner jeering” at the Commander, her fantasy of murdering him, and her subversions of the Gileadean code of conduct—as when she swings her hips at the guards at a check-post (147, 150, 31). Above all, she rebels against Gilead’s invasion of her personhood by reclaiming her past in nightly recollections spread through sections of her narrative named “Night”. 8. Like Malak, Howells opines that Atwood’s emphasis in this novel is not narrowly on feminism: “Atwood’s primary focus” here, she says, “is on human particularity” (“Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions” 164). On Atwood’s implicit condemnation of separatist feminism see Ehrenreich (79) and Greene (206). Offred’s affair with Nick has been seen as an espousal of man–woman relationships and as an empowering feminist strategy (Malak 84; Freibert 285). 9. Greene makes a similar point when she reads Offred’s romance with Nick in terms of her (and Atwood’s) post-feminist resignation to what Offred calls “reduced circumstances” (8; Greene 205). 10. Howells concurs with Freibert: Offred’s affair with Nick, she comments, is “the oppressed female’s attempt to defy patriarchal control of her body” (“Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions” 168). 11. Offred bears witness against the regime through her narrative, which she doggedly goes on creating partly as an antidote to and partly in defiance of her painful experience (See section on ‘Narrative’). 12. On Shelley’s narrative style in Frankenstein and its implications see Poovey (128–131), Newman, Hodges, and Morgan.

Notes to Chapter Four 1. The distinction between normative ‘motherhood’ and a potentially oppositional ‘feminist mothering’ is central to my analysis of motherhood and gender in Oryx and Crake (‘Gender, and Beyond’). See also note 10 to the ‘Introduction’. 2. On the indifference of Nature in The Last Man see Sterrenburg (“Apocalypse without Millennium” 324). 3. The allusion, obviously, is to Harraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto. 4. On Frankenstein’s utopianism that both demonstrates and parodies Godwin’s theories, see Sterrenburg (“Mary Shelley’s Monster” 247–48). See also Cantor (Creature and Creator 103–32). The (political) perfectibility and totalizing idealism that motivate the male figures in The Last Man have been analysed, notably, by Fisch (“Plaguing Politics”).

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5. Although Crake’s words may ring true in existential-philosophical terms, he edits out much of the human mind and its reflective quality in order to achieve this kind of immortality—and certain other “enhanced” features—in his new humans (303). 6. We shall trace the connotations of this character trait of the protagonist in terms of the idea structure of the novel in the section ‘Gender, and Beyond’. 7. Writing on women’s degrading need in patriarchal societies to be “dissembling, [and] flattering, manipulating, appeasing” men, Olsen identifies these as the “vices of slaves” (78). 8. While the Crakers are human-animal hybrids who lack human complexity, the pre-apocalyptic world too is inhabited by philistine, self-alienated people who exist only as cogs in the vast machine of global capitalism. 9. Rich uses the phrase “outlaws from the institution of motherhood” in connection with her description of a relatively free, non-prescriptive mothering experience in Of Woman Born (195). 10. The reference is to a computer game played in their school days by Jimmy and Crake wherein the counters represented cultural events and items, ‘Blood’ standing for “human atrocities” like the Napoleonic Wars and the bombing of Hiroshima and ‘Roses’ for “human achievements” like the discovery of Penicillin and the works of Shakespeare (78--80). As Snowman later remembers, “the Blood player usually won” (80). 11. “The Motherhood religion” is a phrase used by Judith Warner as the title of Part II of her study of the oppressive institution of motherhood (Perfect Madness).

Note to Conclusion 1. The phrases ‘selfish mother’ and ‘forsaken child’ echo the title of Chapter 4 (Part II) of Warner’s book Perfect Madness (“Selfish Mothers, Forsaken Children”). ‘Feminist mothering’ is a term used, among others, by O’ Reilly in her eponymous book.

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INDEX

Alienation, (women’s political), 66– 70 Apocalypse/Apocalyptic vision, 5, 9, 31, 47, 51, 53, 83, 86, 87– 90, 99, 104, 116, 117, 126, 130, 134, 135 Apocalyptic fiction/novel, 1, 5, 24, 26, 90, 123, 132 Apollonian, the, 27, 42, 43 Armitt, (Lucie), 137 Aronson, (Pamela), 141 Art, 10, 27, 41, 46, 104, 123, 124, 127, 135 humanistic education and, 135 Shelley’s conception of, 41-46 literary, 75 of narration, 80 Roman, 42, 45. Romantic ideal/ ideology of, 41–43, 46, 75, 135 Autobiography 31 Bacon, (Francis), 4, 13 Badinter, (Elisabeth), 118 Barruel, Abbé, 26 de Beauvoir, (Simone), 12–15, 22, 78, 122, 140 Birth(ing), 6, 15–16, 58, 76 Bowra, (Maurice), 41 Brydon, (Diana), 80, 103, 112, 124 Biotechnology, 2, 4, 9, 83, 87–92, 97, 127, 129, 130 Bodily distinction, 84 Bodily Harm, 3 Bousson, J. Brooks, 73, 138, 141 Boyle, (Roger), 4 Brooks, (Peter), 20, 21 Burke, (Edmund), 26, 27, 47 Butler, (Marilyn), 137, 139

Byron, (Lord), 2, 32. Cantor, (Paul), 2, 49, 91, 138, 141, 142 Capitalism, 41, 92, 94, 97, 99, 126, 129 global, 5, 9 neo-imperialistic, 10, 46, 54, 83, 96 technoscientific, 28, 132–34, 139, 143 Chrisman, (Laura), 2 (Neo-) Colonialism, 12, 25, 26, 27, 28, 46, 47–54, 56, 85, 94, 95, 100, 133. (Neo-) conservatism, 52, 132 Shelley’s, 25–28, 141 Culture, 28–32, 38–41, 46, 60, 65, 86, 103, 104, 110, 111, 117–119, 120–24, 127, 129–30, 135, 137 cultural, the, 4, 7, 17, 22, 23, 31, 38, 39, 57, 81, 86, 131, 132, 137 acculturation, familial, 18 patriarchal, 118 women’s, 66, 76, 138 Cyborg, 4, 28, 125, 148, 149 Darwin, Erasmus, 2 Davidson, (Arnold E.), 63 Davy, Humphrey, 2 Douglas, (Susan), 113 Dystopia(n), 1, 5, 7, 9, 15, 28, 55, 56, 81, 83, 87, 92, 97, 98, 104, 115, 119, 132, 133, 134,142 Easlea, (Brian), 14, 137 The Edible Woman, 3

154 Egoism/Egotism, 53, 130, 135, 138 Frankenstein’s, 17 male, 11, 32, 39, 41, 53 Romantic, 13 Ehrenreich, (Barbara), 141, 142 Ellis, (Kate Ferguson), 14, 39, 139 Enlightenment, 13, 23 Embodiment/Physicality, 84 Eugenics/Eugenical technology, 87, 91–92, 124, 129–30 Evolution, 2, 91, 123, 133 evolutionary social change, 31, 52, 133 Faludi, Susan, 141 Family, the, 6, 15, 19–26, 38, 40, 57, 68, 131, 137 the ideal of, 5, 19, 20, 31, 32– 33, 114, 133 familial, the, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14, 17, 21, 22, 23, 39, 40, 53, 58, 111, 138 (British) nuclear, 3, 8, 11 bourgeois, 14, 34, 39 family values, 112 gender equal, 5, 22 patriarchal institution of, the, 58 Fantasy, 28, 57, 104, 137 Fantastic, the, 1, 129, 137 Femininity, 7, 8, 35, 60, 78–84, 104–106, 111, 118, 132, 137, 141 Feminism, 3, 5, 6, 7, 24, 56, 66, 67, 71, 141 cultural, 66, 141, second-wave, 138 separatist, 7, 81, 132, 138, 142 Feur, (Louis), 141 Fisch, (Audrey), 51, 91, 97, 137, 140, 142 Foy, (Nathalie), 111, 114 Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, 1–9, 11–28 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, 47, 145

Index Freibert (Lucie M.), 72, 142, 148 Fukuyama, Francis, 125, 148 Fundamentalism: patriarchal, 7, 65 religious/Christian, 3, 6, 56, 134 Rightist, 85 Galvany, Luigi, 2, Gender, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 32, 36, 37, 40, 141 essentialism, 134 gender bias in the family, 11, 14, 32 gender-contours of nineteenth century family, 31, gender-injustice, 36 gendered schism between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’/ the private and the public, 11– 13, 14, 19, 21, 23, 40 hegemony, 73 inter-gender relationship, 36, 74, 121, 122, 132, relations, 3, 8, 24, 25, 29, 36, 40, 41, 53, 72, 109 roles/norms, 6, 7, 14, 19, 20, 34, 35, 59, 60, 131, 132, 138 Gilbert, (Sandra), 138, 141 Godwin, (William), 26, 27, 47, 140, 142 Gothic fantasy/novel, 1, 57–59 Greene, (Gayle), 66, 67, 68, 74, 138, 141, 142 Guber, (Susan), 138, 141 The Handmaid’s Tale, 1–10, 15, 28, 41, 46, 55–82 Harraway, (Donna), 125, 142 Hatlen, (Barton), 15, 24, 139 Hindle, Maurice, 12 History, 31, 45, 61, 75, 77, 85, 89, 129, 134 as construct, 47–53, 61–65, 77 masculine, 47, 61

Science, Gender and History as Progress, 9, 53, 75, 89, 134 history-making, 9, 47, 61–65, 66, 129 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 25 Historiography, 10, 57, 61, 62, 64, 65, 81, 134 Hodges, (Devon), 142 Hollinger, (Veronica), 60, 137, 138, 141 Howells, (Coral Ann), 73, 142 Humanoid, 5, 84, 87, 92, 117, 120, 124, 125 Hybrid, human-animal, 4, 5, 28, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 95, 117, 123, 143 Hume, (Katherine), 137 Immanence, familial/natural, 6, 11, 19, 24, 79, 131, 132 Imperialism, 1, 9, 31, 48, 49, 83, 133; American, 56; capitalistic, 1, 2, 95, 116, 126, 133; cultural, 85; economic, 56; neo- 2, 8, 9, 41, 82, 94, 134; Western/ European, 1, 2, 85 (Non-) Involvement, 10, 56, 61, 65, 66, 68, 70, 82, 99, 100, 118, 132 Jackson, Rosemary, 137, 149 Jacobus, (Mary), 15, 32 Jansson, (Siv), 21 Johnson, (Barbara), 13, 48, 51, 138, 139, 140 Keats, (John), 43 Keller, (Evelyn Fox), 4, 14, 137 Kolodny, (Annette), 63, 79 Kucich, (Greg), 140 Kuhn, Cynthia, 137 Lacombe, Michelle, 109

155

The Last Man, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 26, 27, 29, 31–54 Latour, (Bruno), 5, 23, 137 Lawrence, William, 2, 137 Levine, (George), 20 Lokke, (Karie), 34, 43 Loneliness, theme of, 9–10, 32, 48, 83, 85–86, 89, 103, 135 Love/ Romance, 6, 7, 8, 32–41, 56, 70–75, 102, 132, 142 Lynch, Deidre, 47 Malak, (Amin), 71, 73, 141, 142 Mary Shelley’s Journal, 139 Mathilda, 31 Mellor, (Anne K.), 5, 11–15, 19, 20, 25, 27, 32, 34, 39, 40, 45, 52, 137–41 Memoir, 45, 63, 86 Merchant, (Carolyn), 14, 137 Miner, (Madonne), 71, 72, 73 Moers, (Ellen), 6, 11, 15, 16, 138, 139 Morgan, (Monique R.), 142 Motherhood, 6, 7, 8, 16, 19, 20, 38– 41, 58, 82, 84, 85, 104, 110, 111–115, 118, 119, 126, 127, 131, 132, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152; ‘motherhood religion’, 127, 143 surrogate, 57; Shelley’s experiences of, 11, 15 maternal practice, (oppositional), 8, 115, 118, 127 mothering, feminist/gynocentric/nonprescriptive, 8, 85, 112, 115, 118, 133, 138, 142, 143 motherwork, (gynocentric/oppositional), 118, 133

156 Nature, 2, 9, 13, 51, 53, 55, 57, 87, 88, 111, 121, 126, 129–30, 137, 142 natural, the, 4, 13, 14, 17,18, 23, 26, 38, 53, 57, 81, 86, 111, 127, 130–32, 135, 137 nature-culture dialectic/schism, 2, 4–6, 10, 11–24, 28, 31, 38, 40, 57, 86, 127, 129, 131–32, 137 human nature, 2, 4, 5, 28, 84, 97, 119, 121, 123– 25 , 129–30, 133, 135, 139, 140 Newman, (Beth), 142 Objectivity: scientific, 4, 13, 23, 129 as moral/scholarly attitude, 63, 65, cognitive/narrative, 78, 80, 141 O’Flinn, Paul, 26 O’Rourke, (James), 18 Ortner, (Sherry B.), 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 19, 21, 38, 39, 111, 137 Orwell, (George), 59, 98 “Orwell and Me”, 98 Oryx and Crake, 1–10, 24, 28, 41, 46, 49, 53–54, 55, 83–127, 129, 130, 132–34, 137, 139, 140, 142 Paley, (Morton D.), 41, 140 Personal, the, 6, 10, 47, 55, 60, 69, 113, 114, 134 Polidori, John, 2 Political, the, 6, 48, 55, 70, 113, 114, Postfeminism, 141 complacency, postfeminist, 81 generation, 56 society, 61 Posthuman, the, 4, 28, 90, 91, 109, 125, 126

Index Poovey, (Mary), 138, 139, 140, 141, 142 Procreation, 6, 11, 55, 57–58, 69, 76, 78, 132 Public-Private, 6, 19, 21, 36, 38, 40, 47, 48, 60, 61, 64, 70, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135 Reason/Rationality, 1, 4, 5, 10, 12, 16, 19, 23, 28, 32, 47, 101, 102, 115, 119, 121, 127, 129, 130, 135 Rebellion, v, 8, 12, 24, 26, 60, 67, 68, 74, 93, 115 Revolution, French, 10, 11, 12, 25, 27, 53, 56, 133, 140 politics/movement, revolutionary, 9, 26, 27, 47, 53, 89, 133, 137 reforms, 26 violence, 26–27 scientific, 4, 23 social, 26, 60 Rich, (Adrienne), 3, 115, 138, 143 Richardson, (Alan), 51 Rigney, (Barbara Hill), 82 Roman à clef, 32 Romanticism: Art/poetics, Romantic, 41–43, 46, 75, 135 author, Romantic conception of the, 45 ethos, Romantic, 5, 19, 31, 41, 131 Frankenstein’s Romantic idealism, 138 gender and, 5, 11, 13, 19, 31, 131, 137–38 and the Imagination, 41 and the natural, 18 Shelley’s critique of, 11, 41–43 Rousseau, (Jean Jacques), 2, 18, 21, 47, 140 Rubenstein, (Roberta), 55, 69, 81

Science, Gender and History Schor, (Esther), 140 Science, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 11–24, 84 in Frankenstein, 3–5, 11–24, 28, 31, 55, and the humanities/the arts, 104, 119, modern, 14, 86, 111 nature-culture dialectic and, 12–24 in Oryx and Crake, 5, 28, 83– 84, 87–92 radical, 11, 20, 28 scientism, ideology of, 5, 23, 54, 100, 103, 115, 118, 121, 127, 131, 132 technoscience, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 28, 54, 82, 83, 124, 126, 129, 133, 134, 139 Sexual-politics, 6, 56, 61, 70, 75, 80, 108, 109, 134 Shelley, (Percy B.), 2, 32, 43, 44, 47, 139 Sontag, (Susan), 140 Speculative fiction, 1, 81, 83 “Speeches for Dr. Frankenstein”, 119 Spivak, (Gayatri C.), 25 Staels, (Hilde), 97, 107, 137 Stafford, Fiona 140 Sterrenburg, (Lee), 26, 27, 47, 91, 140, 141, 142 Surfacing, 3, 9

157

Teewen, (Ruud) 58 Theocracy, 47, 74 Totalitarianism, 55, 57, 58, 60, 64– 66 , 70, 75, 76, 79, 87, 93, 96, 98, 113, 114, 133, 134 Transcendence, 5, 6, 11, 14, 21, 23, 24, 31, 43, 131 Utopia(nism), 21, 47, 53, 84, 91, 120, 130, 141, 142 Valperga, 12, 31, 47 Walker, Constance, 32 Webb, (Samantha), 44 Williams, (Patrick), 9 Wilson, (Sharon R.), 84, 109, 137 Wollstonecraft, (Mary), 3, 20, 27 Wordsworth, (William), 43 “Writing the Male Character”, 56 “Writing Oryx and Crake”, 104 “Writing Utopia”, 9, 66, 138 The Year of the Flood, 2