Sawomir Kunicki - Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Fiction

Margaret Atwood’s
Dystopian Fiction
Margaret Atwood’s
Dystopian Fiction:
Fire Is Being Eaten
By
Sławomir Kuźnicki
Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Fiction: Fire Is Being Eaten
By Sławomir Kuźnicki
Refereed by Ilona Dobosiewicz and Jacek Gutorow
This book first published 2017
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2017 by Sławomir Kuźnicki
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): 1-4438-8367-0

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8367-2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Context Is All
Margaret Atwood’s Immersion in the World’s Problems
Edward W. Said’s Concept of Worldliness
Science, Women and Religion
Dystopian Speculative Fiction
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21

The Handmaid’s Tale, or the Republic of Men
Environmental Degradation and its Impact on Society
Underwoman in Pursuit of Identity and Community
Between Theocratic Regime and Misogynistic Perversion
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 75

Oryx and Crake, or the Castle of Scientists
Science and the Disregard for Morality
Between Male Fantasy and Female Manipulation
Post-Religion and the Pursuit of Spirituality
Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 119

The Year of the Flood, or the Kingdom of Gardeners
Abuse of Technology and Science
Women’s Communities with and without Men
The God’s Gardeners’ Green Christianity and Survivalism
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 163

MaddAddam, or the Community of Survivors
Between Rational Pessimism and Ironic Optimism
Women, Men and Pregnancy/Motherhood
Religious Mythology and the Emerging Culture
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 199

Negotiating with the Living
Science, Women and Religion Revisited
Ethics of the Dystopian Project
Copyright Acknowledgments .................................................................. 209
Works Cited ............................................................................................. 211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people:
Margaret Atwood, for her inspiring novels, not only the four ones I focus
on in this book;
Prof. Ilona Dobosiewicz, for her immense help and for being the
motivating force at various stages of this project;
Prof. Jacek Gutorow and prof. Tadeusz Lewandowski, as well as prof.

Mariusz Marszalski, for their critical reading of this manuscript and for all
their helpful suggestions;
Prof. Joanna CzapliĔska and prof. Andrzej Ciuk, as well as prof. ElĪbieta
SzymaĔska-Czaplak, for their faith in me;
Anna KuĨnicka and Emilia KuĨnicka, for their love, patience and being-
there-for-me;
ElĪbieta KuĨnicka-Soátysik and Zdzisáaw Soátysik, as well as Zofia

ChorąĪyczewska and Czesáaw ChorąĪyczewski, for their parental care;
Bartosz SuwiĔski and Agata Haas, for everlasting inspirations,

unforgettable adventures, and shared experiences.
CHAPTER ONE
CONTEXT IS ALL
More and more frequently the edges

of me dissolve and I become
a wish to assimilate the world.
(Margaret Atwood, “More and More,” Eating Fire, 49)
Margaret Atwood’s Immersion in the World’s Problems

The phrase “context is all,” uttered by Offred from The Handmaid’s
Tale, gives the title to this introductory chapter.1 It is crucial not only to
her position in the book’s fundamentalist dystopia, but also to reading all
Margaret Atwood’s works: “I think it’s probably a motto for human
society,” she has commented.2 Thus contexts of different sorts—feminism,
nationalism, postcolonialism, environmental issues, to enumerate just a
few of the most prominent ones—shape Atwood’s literary output and
define her as a writer. Since her poetic and fiction debuts in the 1960s, she
has been undertaking literary tasks both interesting from the formal point
of view, and influential as far as their ethical content is concerned.
“Writers are eye-witnesses, I-witnesses,” as she once explained the duty
that seems to be inscribed in her profession, personalising the politics of
the day.3 The moral duty Atwood writes about throughout all her literary
career, and with increasing commitment, could be termed radical
humanism: “from her early disclaimers of aspiration to a political voice,
her frequent statements that ‘books don’t save the world,’ she has moved
1
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 1996), 154.
2
Jonathan Noakes, and Margaret Reynolds, Margaret Atwood: The Essential
Guide to Contemporary Literature (London: Vintage, 2002), 14.
3
Margaret Atwood, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: Anansi,
1982), 203.
2 Chapter One
steadily to a firm commitment to human rights and the conviction that if

books, in fact, don’t save the world, then nothing else can either.”4
This book explores Atwood’s concepts and ideas gathered around the
three contextual and changing roles I consider of greatest importance not
only to her, but to the surrounding world, as well. These are: science,
women and religion. Such an outline of the analysis both emphasises the
superiority of substance over composition in Atwood’s novels, and
demonstrates her immersion in worldly issues, i.e. in the web of cultural
contexts. However, each of the three fields of my analysis includes literary
material from those of Atwood’s works that could be described as
realisations of her speculative fiction project, or, to put it simply, her
dystopian novels. Thus, I concentrate on the following books: The
Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood
(2009), and MaddAddam (2013), in which the author generally places the
action in the future, experimenting with the aforementioned genre of
dystopia. All of these books were written and published during the last
three decades, which makes their cultural context contemporary. In other
words, these particular novels function within the broad contemporary
context of culture, which corresponds with Fiona Tolan’s comments about
the Canadian author: “The novelist absorbs influences form his or her
culture, and these influences interact in a manner at once unpredictable
and generative, whereby the pure theory that is absorbed undergoes a
process of contamination and manipulation by the novel.”5
Since contextual analysis of Atwood’s works is desirable, it is worth
presenting the author’s brief literary profile. Born in 1939, in Ottawa,
Canada, Margaret Atwood is a highly prolific writer who, by the end of
2016, has published 16 novels, 10 collections of short stories, 17 poetry
volumes, 4 e-books, 7 children’s books, television scripts, libretti, literary
and cultural criticism, as well as numerous essays, reviews, and forewords.
With her works translated into about forty languages, she has established
her literary reputation as the most prominent Canadian writer. It was in
Canada where she spent much of her formative years (mainly in the
backwoods of Northern Quebec, where her father, an entomologist, did his
field research); it was also in Canada, namely the University of Toronto,
where she finished her undergraduate studies in 1961. Indeed, the
Canadian experience seems to have influenced her both as a human being
and as a writer, and she has returned to various aspects of her Canadiannes
4
Barbara Hill Rigney, Women Writers: Margaret Atwood (London: Macmillan
Education, 1987), 16.
5
Fiona Tolan, Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (New York: Rodopi,
2007), 3.
Context Is All 3
throughout her whole literary career, e.g., in 1972 she published the
acclaimed survey of Canadian literature, Survival: A Thematic Guide to
Canadian Literature. However, the scope of interests she expresses in her
writings does not limit her to Canadiannes only.
As a novelist, Atwood debuted in 1969 with The Edible Woman, a
feminist novel that helped establish her significance not only in Canada. In
the next four novels—Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before
Man (1979), and Bodily Harm (1981)—she continued to explore feminist
matters. At the same time, these books marked Atwood’s growing interest
in the issues that would later be considered important to her, like
feminism. They include: ecology, relationships between children and their
parents, and pornography. These novels also helped to spread her popularity
and significance, because in the case of Atwood these two always go
together, no matter how unpleasant the topic she undertakes in her prose.
Nevertheless, her breakthrough novel was The Handmaid’s Tale (1985),
which won two important literary awards (the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke
Award and 1985 Governor General’s Award), and was shortlisted for
another (the 1986 Booker Prize). Subsequent novels have confirmed
Atwood’s significant position in contemporary literature, all of them
exploring new thematic territories, as well as providing the writer with
more literary awards. The first of them is Cat’s Eye (1988), in which
Atwood draws on her childhood and teenage years to present the way
Canada changed throughout the twentieth century. This book was
shortlisted for the 1988 Governor General’s Award and the 1989 Booker
Prize. In The Robber Bride (1993), Atwood concentrates on female–
female relationships, ironizing about such issues as female friendship and
solidarity. This book was a finalist for the 1994 Governor General’s
Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. It was followed by Alias Grace
(1996), the winner of the 1996 Giller Prize, again a finalist for the 1996
Booker Prize and the 1996 Governor General’s Award, as well as
shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction. It was Atwood’s first
historical novel, exploring the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his
housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, in Upper Canada, but focusing on
Grace Marks, their servant, who was convicted of the crime and sentenced
to life in imprisonment. With The Blind Assassin (2000), Atwood finally
won the Booker Prize; additionally, the book was awarded the 2001
Hammett Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2000 Governor General’s
Award and the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction. Being a postmodern roman
à clef and historical fiction about the 1930s and 1940s Toronto (although
narrated from the present-day perspective), the novel also includes
elements of pulp science-fiction in the form of a novel within a novel. One
4 Chapter One
of Atwood’s most ambitious books, The Blind Assassin, also demonstrates

her growing interest in popular culture. This element dominates the novels
constituting the MaddAddam trilogy—all of them very successful both
commercially and artistically, which is exemplified by the literary honours
they have earned. Oryx and Crake (2003) was shortlisted for the 2003
Booker Prize, the 2003 Governor General’s Award, and the 2004 Orange
Prize for Fiction; The Year of the Flood (2009) was longlisted for the 2011
IMPAC Award; finally, MaddAddam (2013) was awarded Goodreads
Choice for Best Science Fiction 2013. Additionally, in 2005, between
Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, Atwood published The
Penelopiad, a novella in which she rewrote the major events of The
Odyssey using the female perspective of the nominal Penelope, Odysseus’
wife. This short book was nominated for the 2006 Mythopoeic Fantasy
Award for Adult Literature and the 2007 IMPAC Award. In 2014, she
wrote the novel Scribbler Moon, but it will not be published until 2114,
being a part of the Future Library project. The Heart Goes Last (2015)
confirms Atwood’s growing anxiety about the current political and social
situation because it is another book in a series envisioning negative future
scenarios, this time with a surprisingly notable amount of the elements of
dark comedy. Her last novel is Hag-Seed (2016), published in the Random
House series of contemporary retellings of William Shakespeare’s plays,
Atwood’s choice being the great playwright’s last individually written
dramatic text, The Tempest. However, knowing her literary and political
activity as well as her vigour, we should not treat the novel as the
Canadian’s farewell.
As I have shown in this short discussion of her works, since her
novelistic debut in 1969 (as well as her poetic debut in 1961 with the
volume Double Persephone), Atwood has shown that she does not intend
to restrict herself to national matters only.6 Quite the contrary, alert to the
shifting contemporary worldwide geopolitical situation, she has
undertaken in her writing such current issues as women’s position in the
world, ecological concerns, and the possible future of contemporary high-
tech societies. Being a cautious observer of the world, she does not avoid
criticising dangerous tendencies, or warning of their possible consequences.
6
In the “Preface” to the second edition of Survival Atwood states: “I wouldn’t
write Survival today, because I wouldn’t need to. The thing I set out to prove has
been proven beyond a doubt: few would seriously argue, any more, that there is no
Canadian literature. For a country with the population of Illinois or Mexico City,
we’ve done more than well—we’ve done spectacularly” (Survival: A Thematic
Guide to Canadian Literature, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 2004,
11).
Context Is All 5
At the same time, in her novels one can detect the traces of romance,
historical fiction, a pseudo-autobiography, dystopian fiction, and science
fiction. As a novelist, she is open not only to new thematic challenges, but
also to the possibilities stemming from a given literary form. Hence, to
decode and understand her ideas fully, it is necessary to approach them in
their form. Consequently, this is what I intend this book to be: an attentive,
contextual analysis of Atwood’s selected novels that takes into
consideration the generic factor; an analysis that investigates how the links
between her prose and worldly matters operate and what the Canadian
writer’s moral intentions are. It is also to answer the question of what
generic forms she employs to achieve her aims, and why she does so.
Finally, this monograph shows that Atwood’s work, so deeply rooted in
culture, changes together with the way the surrounding world does,
making her work a flexible and lively subject of such an analysis.
Consequently, investigating the worldly matters of Atwood’s fiction
requires a method that emphasises its immersion in the external and
contemporary world, a method open to both the formal and ethical aspects
of the object of critical investigation, a method oriented towards various
contexts present in a literary piece of work.
Edward W. Said’s Concept of Worldliness

The contextual method of reading literature definitely corresponds with
the notion of worldliness proposed by Edward W. Said (1935–2003), the
Palestinian American literary theorist and public intellectual best known
for his substantial contribution to the postcolonial critical theory. He states
in The World, the Text, and the Critic: “My position is that texts are
worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to
deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of
course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.”7
In this sense, worldliness may become the motor of a cultural analysis of
various realities and power relations, which “are the realities that make
texts possible, that deliver them to their readers, that solicit the attention of
critics.”8 To a great extent, Said’s stance mirrors the words of Clifford
Geertz, who states: “Believing that man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the
analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law
7
Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 4.
8
Said, The World, 5.
6 Chapter One
but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”9 Hence, meanings are

interrelated with the world in which they are created. As Said continues:
“Words and texts are so much of the world that their effectiveness, in
some cases even their use, are matters having to do with ownership,
authority, power, and the imposition of force.”10 Literary texts are
supposed to be created within a complicated web of contexts—political,
sexual, etc.—with which they should engage in critical argument. What is
interesting here is the fact that Said understands his concept as
multifaceted—concerning not only literary critics and general readers, but
producers of texts, as well: “writing is not free, nor is it performed
uniquely by a sovereign writer who writes more or less as he or she
pleases. Writing belongs to a system of utterances that has all sorts of
affiliative, often constricting relationships with the world of nations, as
Vico called it.”11 A writer, then, is selectively and critically open to what
the contemporary world has to offer. Said specifies: “The point is that
texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are
always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they
are in the world, and hence worldly. Whether a text is preserved or put
aside for a period, whether it is on a library shelf or not: these matters have
to do with a text’s being in the world.”12 In my opinion, this immersion of
texts in the external world suits Margaret Atwood’s literary activity
perfectly. She describes her concerns in the following way: “Politics in the
sense of who has the power and how people behave. That’s what politics is
and that is also what novel writing is about. Politics in the widest sense
affects everybody. So writers write about human thought, behaviour,
action, even when they’re writing fantasy.”13
Thus, according to Atwood, a writer is someone who in their writings
always refers to the current power relations, trying to refute their totalising
and unjust effects. In other words, as Said puts it, a writer is an intellectual
with a moral duty “to speak the truth to power.”14 He understands this
critical attitude in the following way:
9
Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of
Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
10
Said, The World, 48.
11
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said,
edited by Gauri Viswanathan (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 24.
12
13
Peter O’Brien, ed., So to Speak: Interviews with Contemporary Canadian
Writers, (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1987), 176–77.
14
Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures
(New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 97.
Context Is All 7
The goal of speaking the truth is mainly to project a better state of affairs
and one that corresponds more closely to a set of moral principles—peace,
reconciliation, abatement of suffering—applied to the known facts.
Certainly in writing and speaking, one’s aim is not to show everyone how
right one is but rather to try to induce a change in the moral climate.15
Therefore, a writer has an obligation to humanity, which should not be

limited to providing readers with mere entertainment. Standing for a voice
that is heard, a writer is an intellectual whose duty is to represent the
repressed, the humiliated, and the unheard. He elaborates on this thought:
The intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that

cannot be reduced simply to being a faceless professional, a competent
member of a class just going about her/his business. The central fact for me
is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for
representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude,
philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge
to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place
it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and
dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be
co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to
represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept
under the rug.16
Consequently, such an uncompromising attitude requires an unshakable

moral position that cannot change just for the sake of feeling comfortable.
Quite the contrary, a writer’s stance is the reversal of comfort, both when
it comes to them and their audiences. Only then can a writer’s goal be
fulfilled, the goal consisting in “advance[ing] human freedom and
knowledge.”17 To do so, then, a writer must operate in their time and
space, always referring to their contemporary problems and controversies,
because “literature is produced in time and in society by human beings,
who are themselves agents of, as well as somewhat independent actors
within, their actual history.”18
Atwood seems to match Said’s definition of an intellectual perfectly.
In her texts, she relates to numerous contemporary problems, and since she
has been writing for more than forty years, her idea of contemporariness
constitutes a vast realm reflected in different critical readings of her works.
For example, Nathalie Cooke points at Atwood’s three main interests:
15
Said, Representations, 99–100.
16
Said, Representations, 11.
17
18
8 Chapter One
“environmental awareness, Canadian nationalism, and feminism,”19

whereas Linda Hutcheon places Atwood in “both the feminist and
postmodern contexts.”20 Coral Ann Howells adds that Atwood’s self-
consciousness as a writer derives from her “interest in the dynamic powers
of language and story.”21 Barbara Hill Rigney meanwhile points out the
myth and fairy tale elements in her writing.22 Taken together, these themes
do not encapsulate the broad cross-section of Atwood’s literary interests.
Moreover, the considerable time span of her life as an artist makes it
impossible to view all of those themes as one-dimensional. The themes
evolve as Atwood matures both as a writer, and, what is even more crucial,
as a human being. Hence, it is justified to look at those thematic areas,
focusing on their specific and altering cultural contexts, since, as Howells
points out, “as a political writer, [Atwood] is interested in an analysis of
the dialects of power and shifting structures of ideology.”23 In this book,
therefore, I focus on three of Atwood’s worldly motifs that are crucial in
the twenty-first century. These are the motifs of science, women and
religion. My reading of Atwood’s works seems to suit the
contemporariness of the analytic processes. To cite Said one more time:
Criticism in short is always situated; it is skeptical, secular, reflectively

open to its own failings. This is by no means to say that it is value-free.
Quite the contrary, for the inevitable trajectory of critical consciousness is
to arrive at some acute sense of what political, social, and human values
are entailed in the reading, production, and transmission of every text. To
stand between culture and system is therefore to stand close to—closeness
itself having a particular value for me—a concrete reality about which
political, moral, and social judgments have to be made and, if not only
made, then exposed and demystified.24
Nonetheless, before a close reading of Atwood’s novels, it seems

necessary to explain and justify both the very choice of the motifs
analysed, and the selection of the literary material.
19
Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 2004), 3.
20
Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-
Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988), 153.
21
Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood, 2nd edition (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 19.
22
Rigney, Women Writers, 8.
23
Howells, Margaret Atwood, 19.
24
Context Is All 9
Science, Women and Religion

Firstly, science, with which Atwood is undeniably familiar, has been a
vital part of her life from early childhood: “her late father, Carl, was a
zoologist. A man she describes warmly as ‘very remarkable,’ he came
from the backwoods of Nova Scotia, put himself through school by
correspondence course and went on to gain a PhD in entomology.
Eventually he became a professor in Toronto.”25 However, the notion of
science also derives from Atwood’s certified preoccupation with ecology,
a bundle of ideas that could be summarised as “her environmental interests
and increasingly urgent warnings about global warming, pollution and, the
risks of biotechnology.”26 In a way, science seems a reversal of nature,
both its extension and violation, since when put together, these two notions
can be viewed as binary opposites of a particular power relation: one
representing oppression and domination (science), versus the other,
dominated and oppressed (nature). In Atwood’s works this opposition should
not be viewed in such simple terms. Quite the contrary, to her science is just a
tool people use to describe and understand the world. Therefore, science
cannot exist without human beings, who either enhance it with, or deprive it
of meaning. It is this very process that seems of most importance to Atwood.
In our contemporary world, driven by countless scientific inventions, she
does not hesitate to ask whether it is mainly science through which humanity
can acquire knowledge. Or, whether science actually distances us from what
is really important. Consequently, she acts as Said’s intellectual, unafraid to
enquire about inconvenient issues that appear central to all of us, here and
now. The Palestinian critic notes: “literature is produced in time and in
society by human beings, who are themselves agents of, as well as somewhat
independent actors within, their actual history.”27 As a writer and intellectual,
Atwood remains independent. That is exactly why people and their
contemporary attitude to both science and its opposite, the natural
environment, constitute Atwood’s real interest. She states:
Mankind made a Faustian bargain as soon as he invented the first

technologies, including the bow and arrow. Our technological system is the
mill that grinds out everything you wish to order up, but no one knows
how to turn it off. The end result of a totally efficient technological
25
Peter Kemp, “Visions of the Future’s Darkness,” review of Oryx and Crake, by
Margaret Atwood, The Sunday Times, April 20, 2003, accessed November 6, 2010,
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article227358.ece.
26
27
10 Chapter One
exploitation of Nature would be a lifeless desert, having been devoured by

the mills of production, and the resulting debt to nature would be infinite.28
Here one can see a deeply ethical way of Atwood perceiving and rewriting
the contemporary world, a way that gathers in itself all her recurring
interests (e.g. regarding feminism, since in her view it has become
especially visible in the last few years, it is no use talking only about
gender power relations anymore). What is required instead is a close
analysis of such implications, both contextual and political, in relation to
human beings and the natural environment surrounding them. Hence, it is
the concept of worldliness that makes science in the contemporary world
the object of cultural investigation, open to numerous and fast altering
contexts. It also shows that Atwood’s concerns are wide, and science—
with its realisations ranging from genetic engineering to virtual reality—
has been identified by her as one of the greatest new menaces, becoming
an important theme of hers.
Then there is the motif of women. When it comes to Atwood, the
feminist context, which constitutes a broader perspective of this very
motif, appears most important. Rigney states: “Atwood has grown up with
the contemporary women’s movement.”29 This fact is crucial, for it
emphasises the passing of time together with the alteration of subject-
matter. Born in 1939, Atwood’s first years of adulthood, as well as the
beginning of her writing, fall in the 1960s, i.e. the flourishing of second-
wave feminism, which—inspired mainly by Simone de Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex (1949, 1953), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963),
and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969)—“center[ed] on the subjects of
gender, femininity, and sexuality.”30 It was during this period that the
fundamental questions about female identity appeared. In her attempts to
answer them, Simone de Beauvoir noted:
Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to
him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. And she is simply what
man decrees. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and
not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as
opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the
Other.31
28
Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (London:
Bloomsbury, 2008), 201–2.
29
Rigney, Women Writers, 12.
30
Tolan, Margaret Atwood, 2.
31
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1986), 16.
Context Is All 11
Consequently, patriarchy was identified as the kind of cultural theory and

practice that—using all the available instruments that men have in their
privileged and superior position—is responsible for women’s inferior
status. Kate Millet used the phrase “sexual politics” to describe this
situation: “the term ‘politics’ shall refer to power-structured relationships,
arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.”32
At the same time, in the famous 1969 essay “The Personal Is Political,”
Carol Hanisch noted the fact that since patriarchy starts at home, in the
most private sphere of a woman’s life, then this sphere should be made
public: “personal problems are political problems. There are no personal
solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective
solution.”33 Her postulation for women was to act together to fight the
degrading and unjust legacy of patriarchal culture. Hence, unlike first-
wave feminists, who mainly concentrated on emancipation issues, second-
wave feminists emphasised and appreciated the difference between men
and women, making it both the central weapon against the male-
dominated system, as well as the tool to stress their unique identity.
Additionally, as Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore comment: “a second
current of feminist literary criticism grew up alongside and in response to
the analysis of patriarchal culture. This was concerned with women’s
writing, and specially with writing as a mode of resistance.”34 As a result,
the importance of women’s writing was underlined because it not only
demonstrates the shift from passivity to activity, but also plays a
significant role in persuading women to actively disagree with the notion
of their inferiority.
However, Atwood has never been a blind enthusiast of all the ideas of
second-wave feminism. As Howells comments: “Atwood has always been
seen as a feminist icon, albeit a resistant and at times an inconvenient
one,” and, as a sign of which, “her fiction is a combination of engagement,
analysis and critique of the changing fashions within feminism.”35 This
corresponds with Fiona Tolan’s feminist reading of Atwood’s novels.
Tolan, nevertheless, admits:
32
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1971), 23.
33
Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” accessed December 20, 2014,
http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html.
34
Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, “Introduction: The Story So Far,” in The
Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, edited
by Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (London: Macmillan Press. 1997), 6.
35
Howells, Margaret Atwood, 15, 17.
12 Chapter One
A theory such as feminism, which is simultaneously political, popular, and

academic, immediately negotiates sites of interaction with a myriad of
alternative discourses. Consequently, the feminism to be read in Atwood’s
novels is not the feminism that is to be discovered in feminist textbooks.
Therefore, it is to be assumed that the novelist has generated a new and
original contribution to feminist discourse. Her work is never presumed to
be a sole influence or a direct precipitant of feminist development, but it is
identified as a salient and intelligent component of a general cultural
discourse.36
In other words, feminism alone seems not enough for Atwood, as for her
“art is a moral issue, and it is the responsibility of the writer/artist not only
to describe the world, but also to criticise it, to bear witness to its failures,
and, finally, to prescribe corrective measures—perhaps even to redeem.”37
However, such a worldly position does not contradict the feminist attitude,
because “for the feminist reader there is no innocent or neutral approach to
literature: all interpretation is political. To interpret a work is always to
address, whether explicitly or implicitly, certain kinds of issues about what
it says.”38 It is also true, yet, that an extended openness to the issues of the
external world is more characteristic of post-feminism, which started
emerging from second-wave feminism in the 1980s. Consequently, the
ideas of third-wave feminism seem to appeal to Atwood’s cross-cultural
interest to a greater extent. No wonder, since the contemporary version of
feminism, or “feminisms,” as Howells proposes,39 more subtly points at
both the politics of power and cultural analysis, with its postcolonial-
inspired shift towards formerly marginalised groups of women (black,
lesbian, and third world, etc.). Belsey and Moore note: “Drawing on the
[African-American women’s] experience of being rendered doubly
invisible within American culture, a generation of black women activists,
autobiographers, critics and novelists aimed to distinguish the difference
of their history and art.”40 At the same time, post-feminism is much
broader than just emphasising the postcolonial experience. Donna
Haraway notes:
It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective. With

the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender,
race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential” unity.
36
Tolan, Margaret Atwood, 3–4.
37
Rigney, Women, 1.
38
Belsey and Moore, “Introduction,” 1.
39
40
Context Is All 13
There is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women. There
is not even such a state as “being” female, itself a highly complex category
constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social
practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on
us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities
of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.41
Again, the questions of (not only female) identity, this time linked to the
issue of gender, appear most crucial. Judith Butler states: “Because there is
neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalises nor an objective
ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various
acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without these acts, there
would be no gender at all.”42 Complicated and diverse, what tends to be
called post-feminism can be described as the immersion of women in the
world of culture, with all its social, sexual and power relations characteristic of
the very contemporariness of the last thirty years. Such a broad definition,
with the stress on the worldliness of women, appears to match Atwood’s
understanding of post-feminisms. She admits: “I am interested in many
forms of interaction possible among women—just as I am in those
between women and men. I’m interested in male–male interaction.”43 It is,
then, exactly what seems of greatest importance to my analysis: the overall
cultural conditioning of women in the times of post-feminism(s); hence,
Atwood’s motif of women does not restrict itself only to this discourse’s
analysing practices, but encompasses—in a very Saidian manner—women
in the world, with all the cultural contexts of this motif.
Concerning religion, Atwood offers critical insight into the various
power relations that seem to be inscribed in every system of attitudes,
beliefs and practices of that kind. A declared agnostic, Atwood finds
religion interesting mainly in cultural and historical terms. She states: “I
can’t say the established religions have a terribly good track record. Most
of them have quite a history of doing people in—not to mention their
attitude towards women.”44 However, entering the discourse on religion,
she mainly has in mind Christianity, especially in its North-American
context. Here, the notion of her Canadian nationalism returns, since
Atwood has frequently defined it through opposition to the dominant
41
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited
by Simon During, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 1999), 319.
42
Judith Butler, “Subversive Bodily Acts,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited
by Simon During, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 1999), 381.
43
Geoff Hancock, ed., Canadian Writers at Work: Interviews with Geoff Hancock
(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 262–63.
44
Hancock, Canadian, 285.
14 Chapter One
American identity. In the case of religion, the writer proposes a sober

critique of both the Puritans and their seventeenth-century idea of
theocracy, which “was totalitarian and hierarchical in nature,” and the
contemporary legacy of such a standpoint.45 In other words, she traces the
deeply-rooted totalitarian elements of religions (and especially Puritanism),
and she does so by uncovering its violently dominant attitude, e.g. towards
women, where male hegemony demonstrates itself in the most visible
form, at least according to Atwood. She seems to be aware of Millett’s
idea that “religious and literary myth all attests to the politically expedient
character of patriarchal convictions about women.”46 Nevertheless, the
writer’s perception of religion as ideology is far from being one-
dimensional, as she does not restrict herself to only criticizing its
mechanisms. Quite the contrary, as “a prominent figure in cultural
politics,” she realises the vast positive resources that could be gained from
religion.47 These include both ideological matters—her tone when writing
about religion is very often not only harshly critical but also ironically
benevolent—and her fascination with religious artefacts, e.g. the Bible and
its value to the world’s culture, which should not be overestimated. The
inspiration—both thematic and generic—that she gains from this canonical
text of Western civilization is impossible to overlook. She states: “What is
interesting to me about the whole complex [of religious beliefs and
practices] is that mythology precedes religion. If we can talk about
mythology instead of religion, then we’ll be probably on a firmer
ground.”48 This, on the other hand, can be associated with Atwood’s
postmodern poetics, which Linda Hutcheon defines as her “use and abuse
of traditional (male) literary conventions.”49 It also reveals that although
this book is focused on content rather than form, the latter is also of utmost
importance.
Dystopian Speculative Fiction

Atwood is conscious of the themes and style she uses: “her peculiar
astringent blending of these two elements [i.e. form and contents] links her
separate works, which display such technical and intellectual versatility
45
46
Millet, Sexual Politics, 46.
47
48
Branko Gorjup, “Interview with Margaret Atwood,” in Margaret Atwood:
Essays on her Works (Toronto: Guernica, 2008), 242.
49
Hutcheon, The Canadian, 138.
Context Is All 15
that they often seem unrelated.”50 However, as Howells explains, there is a

kind of affinity in all Atwood’s novels:
Atwood is an extremely versatile writer, and in every novel she takes up

the conventions of a different narrative form—Gothic romance, fairy tale,
spy thriller, science fiction of historical novel—working within those
conventions and reshaping them. Her writing insistently challenges the
limits of traditional genres, yet this experimentalism is balanced against a
strong continuity of interests, which are both aesthetic and social.51
Definitely, one of Atwood’s most powerful means of expressing worldly

interests—because it seems that, after all, substance always comes before
form in her prose—is the genre of dystopian or speculative fiction, as both
terms are adequate. Thus, they become the key terms of this monograph
and determine my choice of her literary material to be analysed. However,
these genres are similar and dissimilar at the same time, to various degrees
representing the broader category of science fiction. All these interesting
dependencies and intersections need to be specified.
Starting from speculative fiction, it must be emphasized that for many
critics the term is more or less synonymous with science-fiction (also
referred to as SF), representing a variant on the broader genre. P. L.
Thomas, who uses both these terms interchangeably, notes: “SF and
speculative fiction are genres that move readers to imagine alternative
ways of being alive.”52 What is more, according to Michael Svec and Mike
Winiski, who prefer the term speculative SF genre, its most fundamental
features are:
1. Deep description of the science content or technologies that were

plausible or accurate to the time period.
2. The novum: a plausible innovation as a key element in the speculation.
3. Big Picture: exploration of the impact on society and humanity.
4. Nature of Science: science and technology as human endeavours.53
50
John Moss, A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel, 2nd edition (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1987), 1.
51
Howells, Margaret Atwood, 5–6.
52
P. L. Thomas, “Challenging Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction,” in Science
Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, edited by P. L. Thomas
(Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2013), 4.
53
Michael Svec and Mike Winiski, “Confronting the Science and the Fiction,” in
Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres, edited by P. L.
Thomas (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2013), 38.
16 Chapter One
It can be stated, then, that speculative fiction represents an alternative,

futuristic vision of the contemporary world in which science and
technology appear of utmost importance to the picture of society they
shape. Moreover, even though fictional science always exceeds the actual
possibilities of the state of the art, the vision it proposes carries in itself a
huge amount of probability. Hence, speculative fiction tends to drift
towards the genre of utopia/dystopia, because it envisions a reality that is
always alternative to ours, either more positive, or more negative.
Consequently, Erika Gottlieb proposes the term “speculative dystopian
fiction” as the most appropriate, at the same time emphasising the satirical
value of the genre.54 This is the label I use in the context of Atwood’s
novels, either as the combination of these two words, or both dystopia and
speculative fiction appearing as separate but interchangeable terms. To
explain this generic combination, Gottlieb asks:
What are the most salient characteristics of dystopian fiction if we

concentrate on such well-known representatives of this speculative genre
as Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451, Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s
Tale? All these works are political satires, projections of the fears that their
writers’ own society in the West could be moving towards a type of
totalitarian dictatorship already experienced as historical reality in the
USSR and in Eastern and Central Europe.55
This point of view, showing some affinity between the dystopian genre
and SF, corresponds with Chris Ferns’ opinion when the critic calls
utopia/dystopia “a subgenre of science fiction.”56 M. Keith Booker notes
both similarities and differences between these two genres. He states:
“There is clearly a great deal of overlap between dystopian fiction and
science fiction, and many texts belong to both categories. But in general,
dystopian fiction differs from science fiction in the specificity of its
attention to social and political critique.”57 It seems, then, that
speculative/dystopian fiction is the ground on which the genres of science-
fiction and utopia/dystopia meet, for in this genre futuristic visions are
always determined by a satirical and critical approach to contemporary
54
Erika Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 34.
55
Gottlieb, Dystopian, 7.
56
Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Form, Gender in Utopian Literature
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 10.
57
M. Keith Booker, Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (London:
Greenwood Press, 1994), 4.
Context Is All 17
reality. What is more, it demonstrates that they are so inseparably linked to

each other that it is impossible to determine definite dividing lines. As
Atwood states: “When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly
undefended, the things slip back and forth across them with insouciance.”58 As
a result, both the political and satirical dimension of speculative dystopias,
as well as technocratic and futuristic elements present in speculative SF,
match Atwood’s understanding of the broad genre in an apt way.
Unlike critics who do not seem to notice the difference between
dystopian fiction and science-fiction, Atwood disagrees with such a
categorisation. Commenting on The Handmaid’s Tale, she strongly
opposes identifying her book as science-fiction: “I define science fiction as
fiction in which things happen that are not possible today—that depend,
for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green
monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that certain various technologies
we have not yet developed.”59 She even labels her own version of
dystopian fiction with the neologism ustopia: “Ustopia is a word I made
up by combining utopia and dystopia—the imagined perfect society and its
opposite—because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the
other.”60 By speculative fiction, she understands quite a different type of
prose than most SF critics, i.e. fiction founded on more solid facts: “We’ve
done it, or we’re 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.”61 This disagreement in labelling
her speculative novels SF, provoked by Ursula Le Guin’s reviews of Oryx
and Crake and The Year of the Flood, sucked Atwood into a public
dispute over these terms. She explains her point:
I found that what [Le Guin] means by “science fiction” is speculative

fiction about things that really could happen, whereas things that really
could not happen she classifies under “fantasy.” In short, what Le Guin
means “science fiction” is what I mean “speculative fiction,” and what she
means by “fantasy” would include some of what I mean by “science
fiction.”62
58
Margaret Atwood, “Introduction,” in In Other Worlds: SF and the Human
Imagination (New York: Random House Inc., 2011), 7.
59
Margaret Atwood, “Writing Utopia,” in Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews,
Personal Prose 1983–2005 (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005), 92.
60
Margaret Atwood, “Dire Cartographies: the Roads to Ustopia,” in In Other
Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (New York: Random House Inc., 2011),
66.
61
Atwood, “Dire Cartographies,” 92.
62
Atwood, “Introduction,” 6–7.
18 Chapter One
As Svec and Winiski summarise the dispute: “Margaret Atwood saw SF as

descending from H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds with speculative fiction
tracing its origins to Jules Verne.”63 What is more, this generic category
should not be limited to the future only, and its definition could be as
follows: “The speculative mixing of past and present typifies speculative
fiction, which most often generates other worlds as comment upon our
own. Such fiction raises questions not only about what might happen, but
also about what is happening.”64 In other words, what interests Atwood is
describing the present, and in the vehicle of speculative dystopian fiction
she seems to have found her own method to take part in the discourses of
the contemporariness. As she confessed after the publication of Alias
Grace (the first historical novel of hers in which she employed a similar
technique), in the reference to the past:
The fictional world so lovingly delineated by the writer may bear a more
obvious or a less obvious relation to the world we actually live in, but
bearing no relation to it at all is not an option. We have to write out of who
and where we are, whether we like it or not, and disguise it as we may. As
Robertson Davies has remarked, “we all belong to our own time, and there
is nothing whatever that we can do to escape from it. Whatever we write
will be contemporary, even if we attempt a novel set in a past age.” We
can’t help but be modern, just as the Victorian writers—whenever they set
their books—couldn’t help but be Victorian. Like all beings alive on
Middle Earth, we’re trapped by time and circumstance.65
Characterising her writing, this assertive declaration distinctly corresponds

with Said’s notion of worldliness, with all its cultural references to our
here and now, to which Atwood’s prose seems to be consciously open.
***
The main body of this book consists of four chapters, each devoted to
Atwood’s first dystopian speculative novels analysed in chronological
order. They are: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003),
63
Svec and Winiski, “Confronting,” 38.
64
Madonne Miner, “Trust Me: Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Margaret Atwood’s
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” edited by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House
Publishers, 2001), 23.
65
Margaret Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical
Fiction,” in Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005 (New
York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005), 158–59.
Context Is All 19
The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013). Each of these
chapters is divided into three subsections, in which I approach the given
novel from the perspective outlined in a detailed way in this chapter, i.e. the
issues connected to science, women and religion. However, these three
problematic areas should be treated as starting points for the discussion of
various aspects of Atwood’s novels directly and indirectly associated with
them. In other words, these three interpretative platforms are pretexts rather
than a means in themselves. Their function is also to make my argument
intelligible and palatable. What is more, it is my deliberate decision to
exclude from the corpus of this monograph Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last
(2015), which also carries some characteristics of the genre. I have taken this
decision for a number of reasons, two of which are of decisive importance.
Firstly, the last novel enjoys a relatively poorer critical reception, especially
in comparison to the four first ones’ general acclaim. Secondly, the dystopia
envisioned in The Heart Goes Last drifts towards a parody of the genre,
focusing on hilarious scenes and situations rather than investigating serious
moral problems. No matter if this is done by the writer willingly or not, the
relatively lesser seriousness of the novel’s message makes it stand apart
from the Atwoodian canon of dystopian fiction.
The title of my book is an obvious reference to one of Atwood’s most
famous poems, “Eating Fire,” originally taken from the 1974 volume You
Are Happy. In the first of its five sections we read:
Eating fire
is your ambition:
to swallow the flame down
take it into your mouth
and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent
tongue, a word
exploding from you in gold, crimson,
unrolling in a brilliant scroll
To be lit up from within

vein by vein
To be the sun.66
In my opinion, this is precisely what Atwood urges us to do in her prose,

and especially in her dystopian speculative novels: to read carefully,
66
Margaret Atwood, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965–1995 (London: Virago
Press, 1998), 181.
20 Chapter One
remembering that each word has its value, its power, and to let this word
transform us. It is the writer’s responsibility and her moral duty to use
words in this way. In Negotiating with the Dead, a non-fiction book with
the revealing subtitle, A Writer on Writing, she refers to this problem of
ethics in literature:
This may be overdoing it a bit, especially in the age of the atom bomb, the
Internet, and the rapid disappearance of other species from this earth. But
still, let us suppose that the words the writer writes do not exist in some
walled garden called “literature,” but actually get out there into the world,
and have effects and consequences. Don’t we then have to begin talking
about ethics and responsibilities?67
She leaves that question about the necessity of worldliness in literature

open because the answer appears obvious. Yet, she clearly articulates
some kind of solution, returning at the same time to the already-mentioned
concept of I-witnessing: “Is there a self-identity for the writer that
combines responsibility with artistic integrity? If there is, what might it
be? Ask the age we live in, and it might reply—the witness. And, if
possible, the eyewitness.”68 She concludes this train of thought in the
following way: “The eye is cold because it is clear, and it is clear because
its owner must look: he must look at everything. Then she must record.”69
67
Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (London:
Virago Press, 2003), 86–87.
68
Atwood, Negotiating, 104.
69
CHAPTER TWO
THE HANDMAID’S TALE,

OR THE REPUBLIC OF MEN
In their monstrous night

thick with possible claws
where danger is not knowing,
you are the hugest monster.

(Margaret Atwood, “Cyclopes,” Eating Fire, 92)
***
Fists have many forms;
a fist knows what it can do
without the nuisance of speaking:

it grabs and smashes.
From those inside or under

words gush like toothpaste.
Language, the fist

proclaims by squeezing
is for the weak only.
(Margaret Atwood, “We Hear Nothing,” Eating Fire, 118)
***
This is your trick or miracle,
to be consumed and rise
intact, over and over, even for myths there is
a limit, the limit when you accomplish
failure and return
from the fire minus your skin.
(Atwood, “Eating Fire,” Eating Fire, 182)

22 Chapter Two
Environmental Degradation and its Impact on Society

Although The Handmaid’s Tale is not a book preoccupied with
scientific and environmental issues, echoes and shadows of these problems
are of the highest importance in reference to social and sexual
discrimination. Atwood fully understands “the duality of modern methods
of technology and the regressive acts of a pre-civilized, prehistoric
mentality,” which—according to Erika Gottlieb—constitutes one of the
most important features of dystopian writing.1 Science, then, is used in The
Handmaid’s Tale as a kind of a backdrop, or a point of reference, for the
more visible and stigmatised issues of women’s discrimination and
theocratic domination. Emphasising such an approach, Atwood describes
her reasons for writing the novel in the following way:
To make my future society, I proposed something a little more complex

[than the twentieth-Century dictatorships]. Bad economic times, yes, but
also a period of widespread environmental catastrophe, which has several
results: a higher infertility and sterility rate due to chemical and radiation
damage (this, by the way, is happening already) and a higher birth-defect
rate, which is also happening.2
The scientific issues constitute the background without which the literary
representations of femininity vs. theocracy would not be so convincing
and alarming. Therefore, although not so explicit—and even almost
unnoticeable at first—science turns out to be one of the dominant elements
of The Handmaid’s Tale, and as such requires a closer analytic
investigation.
Atwood’s first effort in the genre of dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale, is
the story of Offred, a handmaid who lives in the near-future state of
Gilead. Situated in the north-eastern part of the United States, the
republic’s name carries a number of biblical connotations, as it appears in
the Holy Book in reference to both persons and geographical names. For
the first time, it is mentioned in the Book of Genesis as a mountainous
region east of the Jordan River, directly connected with the story of Jacob.
Gilead becomes central to the novel and its critique of extreme patriarchy
(the notion discussed in the Religion chapter), since “the Old Testament
mentions Gilead as a backdrop for quite a few important events from
1
Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East, 37–38.
2
Margaret Atwood, “Writing Utopia,” in Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews,
Personal Prose 1983–2005 (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005), 98.
The Handmaid’s Tale, or the Republic of Men 23
patriarchal history.”3 Additionally, however, the name appears in the

traditional Negro spiritual “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” which takes its
title from the “balm of Gilead,” a popular mixture in biblical times that can
be interpreted as a spiritual medicine able to heal Israel, as well as all the
sinners in more general terms.4 This reading links the Old Testament
Gilead with the New Testament concept of salvation, a kind of a promised
land, where misogynistic and totally male-dominated distortion can be
seen on the pages of Atwood’s novel: “The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt
Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead is within you.”5 As in all police regimes,
Gilead completely limits its citizens’ freedom, dividing society into easily
distinguishable, and thus controllable, classes whose social functions are
also clearly established. In other words, the state’s authorities implement
the ancient maxim divide et impera, according to which it is easier to
maintain power by inducing minor conflicts between various social groups
so as to prevent them from linking up. This is particularly true in the case
of women who, although divided into easily distinguished and often
antagonistic classes, have almost no legal rights no matter which position
on the female hierarchy they occupy. The thirty-three-year-old Offred
belongs to the class of handmaids, surrogate mothers, whose aim is to give
birth to children, as Gilead, due to numerous environmental catastrophes,
suffers from underpopulation: “[there was] a graph, showing the birth rate
per thousand, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line
of replacement, and down and down.”6 This would be a huge problem for
all states, but it is even greater for a theocratic one, whose aim seems to be
the process of expansion, impossible without an army of new believers.
Offred lives in the house of the Commander, a high state official, with
whom she is obliged to mate during a monthly ceremony literarily inspired
by the Old Testament story of Jacob’s wives Rachel and Leah, and their
handmaids. In this degrading situation, recalling mostly good memories
from the pre-Gilead times when she lived a relatively happy life with her
partner and their daughter, she tries to survive: both literally, as only
giving birth to the Commander’s child can enable it, and symbolically, as
3
Dorota Filipczak, “Is There No Balm in Gilead?—Biblical Intertext in The
Handmaid’s Tale,” Journal of Literature and Theology 7 (1993): 171–85.
4
The phrase has also gone through to popular culture, as a reference to it, both
direct and highly ironic, can be found e.g. in the title of the song “There Is a Bomb
in Gilead” (2005) by an American punk-rock artist known as Unwoman (which
term, by the way, comes from The Handmaid’s Tale too and is discussed later on
in this chapter).
5
Atwood, The Handmaid’s, 33.
6
24 Chapter Two
preserving her female identity seems the only way not to yield and retain
some sort of dignity. Paradoxically enough, it is only from the semi-
documentary epilogue of the novel entitled “Historical Notes”—a
transcript of an academic seminar from the year 2195 devoted to studying
the already non-existent state of Gilead—that we learn about both the end
of the theocratic regime, and the way Offred’s story is still misread and
misunderstood.
Atwood uses science in her novel as a kind of a decorative, yet very
significant background, indicating the reputed higher technological level
of Gilead’s development and suggesting its importance in the regime’s
emergence. For example, in the years directly preceding the theocratic
turnover, the authorities replace traditional money with plastic cards,
which results both in the establishment of virtual currency and, most
importantly, in subordinating the citizens, who now become dependent on
the state-controlled Compubank. It is an institution that combines the
features of a huge bank with a bureau collecting full data about all the
citizens. Offred describes it: “I guess that’s how they were able to do it
[i.e. to take over the power], in the way they did it, all at once, without
anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it
would have been more difficult.”7 The progress of science enables the
regime to control the masses, especially women, as at some point of this
political process, this shift into open and official misogyny, all females are
deprived of the possibility to access their accounts and become absolutely
dependent on men. Additionally, science and technology are directly
connected with Offred’s pre-Gilead profession: “I worked transferring
books to computer disks. Discers, we called ourselves.”8 This adds one
more layer to the possible readings of science in The Handmaid’s Tale,
which according to Marta Dvorak suggests Atwood’s rather negative
attitude to the social changes triggered by technological progress:
“Atwood targets contemporary readers who increasingly communicate
with one another and the external world through electronic images and
wavelengths.”9 This process appears to be ongoing, as its next phase could
be represented by the Gilead print-out machines called Soul Scrolls:
7
8
9
Marta Dvorak, “What is Real/Reel? Margaret Atwood’s ‘Rearrangement of
Shapes on a Flat Surface,’ or Narrative as Collage,” in Modern Critical
Interpretations: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” edited by Harold
Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001), 147.
What the machines print is prayers, roll upon roll, prayers going out
endlessly. Ordering prayers from Soul Scrolls is supposed to be a sign of
piety and faithfulness to the regime. The machines talk as they print out the
prayers; if you like, you can go inside and listen to them, the toneless
metallic voices repeating the same thing over and over.10
Understandably enough, Atwood’s picture of these devices is highly

ironic. Soul Scrolls suggest the rather soulless nature of the system and the
religion behind it, with this soullessness—this superficiality—achieved to
a great extent thanks to the possibilities provided by technological
advancement.
***
However, science’s most interesting function is far from decorative. It

is responsible—at least partially through the environmental degradation it
has caused—for the oppressive political system of Gilead. Although there
is relatively little about Gilead’s environmental situation in Offred’s
narration—she definitely has limited access to knowledge of geopolitical
facts—the protagonist still possesses some basic information: “women
took medicines, pills, men sprayed trees, cows ate grass, all that souped-up
piss flowed into the rivers. Not to mention the exploding atomic power
plants and the mutant strain of syphilis no mould could touch.”11 No
wonder it is mainly when the narrative perspective changes in “Historical
Notes” that the reader learns about the scale of the environmental
problems that Gilead was forced to face. A dry typescript from an
academic seminar, the “Historical Notes” section offers an apparently
more objective point of view, at least when it comes to analysing the
ecological situation in Gilead. It is underlined by the fact that it is mainly a
scholar—Professor Pieixoto—who is speaking from a perspective when
Offred, together with the Gilead regime, are long gone. This is how,
according to the historian, the ideological assumptions of the state of
Gilead, i.e. its core reasons for existence, are directly influenced by the
conditions of science and its impact on the environment:
Stillbirths, miscarriages, and genetic deformities were widespread and on

the increase, and this trend has been linked to the various nuclear-plant
accidents, shutdowns, and incidents of sabotage that characterized the
period, as well as leakages from chemical and biological-warfare
stockpiles and toxic-waste disposal sites, of which there were many
10
Atwood, The Handmaid’s, 175–76.
11
26 Chapter Two
thousands, both legal and illegal—in some instances these materials were
simply dumped into the sewage system—and to the uncontrolled use of
chemical insecticides, herbicides, and other sprays.12
Thus, the wrong scientific proceedings resulting in environmental

contamination have a huge influence on the political situation of Gilead as
a totalitarian state. All these alarming tendencies that Professor Pieixoto
notes are chiefly connected with how people, both in Gilead and in pre-
Gilead times, deal with scientific innovations and how such actions trigger
environmental degradation. Studying the Gilead regime almost two
hundred years after its collapse (the academic conference on which he
gives his speech takes place in 2195), he has access to information
completely out of reach for Offred, who is forced to exist in political
ignorance. This is also visible in reference to her knowledge about
environmental dangers, on which she does not focus in her narration,
because these are the issues beyond her cognisance. That is why there is so
little about them in Offred’s account, and so many in Pieixoto’s.
Additionally, all these alarming tendencies that the scholar mentions are
characteristic of our times, a fact that makes the novel a kind of a warning
for its readers. Coral Ann Howells states: “early 1980s North American
society has slipped away from its historically specific context to become a
political fable for our time, as if the present is rushing in to confirm
Atwood’s dire warnings about birth technologies, environmental pollution,
human rights abuse, religious fanaticism, extreme right-wing movements.”13
Gilead, then, is an example of a state that finds itself in the final phase of
existence, or even on the edge of extinction. Unfortunately, in such
extreme circumstances, it is quite common that people resort to the most
basic and primitive resolutions, which in this case is religion in its most
discriminatory and misogynistic form.
Consequently, abusing science has a direct impact on the way Gilead’s
society is organised, with the most disastrous effects on women. The first
victims here are the handmaids, who are to remedy the fatal consequences
of environmental contamination. This forced function basically reduces
women to reproductive activities only, because the need for children is
primary in Gilead’s society, which suffers from infertility and, consequently,
underpopulation:
The chances are one in four, we learned that at the Centre. The air got too
full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic
12
13
molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep
into your body, camp out in your fatty cells. Who knows, your very flesh
may be polluted, dirty as an oily beach, sure death to shore birds and
unborn babies.14
In other words, “such is the condition of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale,

where sterility and a general shortage of food result from the changes in an
environment contaminated by nuclear fall-out, the world sliding into slow
decreation.”15 Hence, the handmaids are the chosen ones because they are
able, at least hypothetically, to ensure the survival of the whole nation.
However, it all comes at a cost, which in this case is their complete
subordination, or even humiliation. They are not treated as human beings
any more. Instead, their biological functions seem to be of the greatest and
only importance to Gilead’s male-dominated society, which consequently
directly reinforces the openly misogynistic state. Therefore, it can be said
that together with other features of capitalism and consumerism, the
scientific procedures that resulted in such ecological contamination are to
a great degree responsible for the emergence of the very patriarchal
regime: “the takeover of the theocracy came about gradually, as a response
to the breakdown of consumerist capitalist democracy, to the infertility
caused by the ecological imbalance of nuclear experiments, fallout, and
toxic waste.”16 No wonder that in the male-dominated society women—
the handmaids in this very case—are to pay the greatest price, literally
sacrificing their minds and bodies for the state in which they are not even
fully recognised citizens. However, apart from the handmaids, represented
by Offred, all the other women in the state of Gilead also have to accept a
more or less humiliating position. The most degrading one is occupied by
unwomen, who demonstrate the relationship between the misuse of
science and religion in the most explicit way.
When mentioned for the first time in the novel, unwomen are presented
as both the greatest pre-Gileadean enemies of religious values and a sign
of wrongly understood womanhood, since this is the label the misogynistic
state uses for these feminists. Consequently, they become a tool in the
state’s official propaganda, according to which “back then, the unwomen
were always wasting time. They were encouraged to do it. The
government gave them money to do that very thing.”17 When they appear
in the novel again, this time in the contemporary context of Gilead’s
14
15
Filipczak, “Is There No Balm,” 177.
16
17
28 Chapter Two
existence, their function is strictly linked to the world of environmental

degradation as depicted in Atwood’s dystopia. Categorised as unable to be
brainwashed but still deserving penalty, they are sentenced to live and die
in the Colonies, which are highly toxic sites where dangerous nuclear
waste is processed. Moira, one of the characters, recounts:
In the Colonies, they spend their time cleaning up. They’re very clean-
minded these days. Sometimes it’s just bodies, after a battle. The ones in
city ghettoes are the worst, they’re left around longer, they get rottener.
This bunch doesn’t like dead bodies lying around, they’re afraid of a
plague or something. So the women in the Colonies there do the burning.
The other Colonies are worse, though, the toxic dumps and the radiation
spills. They figure they’ve got three years maximum, at those, before your
nose falls off and your skin pulls away like rubber gloves. They don’t
bother to feed you much, or give you protective clothing or anything, it’s
cheaper not to.18
Furthermore, it is made explicit that these post-scientific Colonies are for

people who are no longer of any use to the fundamentalist state, and no
longer productive since they include mainly older females and former
handmaids who have miscarried three times. This additionally emphasises
the tragic fate of the handmaids. What is more, in the Colonies there are
also men, mainly homosexuals, whom the regime labels Gender Traitors:
“I’d say it’s about a quarter men in the Colonies, too. All of them wear
long dresses, like the ones at the Centre, only grey. Women and men too,
judging from the group shots. I guess it’s supposed to demoralize the men,
having to wear a dress.”19 At the same time, these unmen, as one could
call them, are also known as unwomen. This indicates the intolerant
politics of a state in which being an unwoman means not existing in the
legal sense of this word, regardless of the sex one represents. What is
more, dealing with toxic waste, both in literal and more symbolic terms, is
not only a punishment but a sophisticated torture method.
Science in The Handmaid’s Tale, then, constitutes its core background.
On the one hand, it may seem that its function is limited only to adding
credibility to Atwood’s vision of the near future, since it helps to picture
the world as definitely more technologically advanced than it was in the
year of the book’s publication, 1985. On the other one, however, its role,
although not so exposed and obvious, is far more important. It is science
that seems directly responsible for ecological degradation, which, resulting
in the infertility problem, enables fundamentalist and anti-female tendencies
18
19
to emerge and, consequently, dominate the state of Gilead. Consequently,

for Gilead’s theocratic regime science—together with the technological
progress that stands behind it—becomes a tool thanks to which the state is
able to function so well. It becomes a tool in people’s hands that is
tragically abused, since instead of offering humanity the hope of progress,
it is used to privilege one group of people at the cost of another. Therefore,
it would be wrong to underestimate the role of science in Atwood’s
philosophy, which proves true in her later novels where the picture and
scope of scientific and environmental issues is far more developed, visible
and significant.
Underwoman in Pursuit of Identity and Community

In discussing the various roles of women in The Handmaid’s Tale it is
necessary to refer to second-wave feminism, because the novel was
written in the waning days of the movement. Firstly, the fact that the
society depicted in the novel is completely male-dominated contrasts
visibly and purposefully with Atwood’s individual characters, who are
mainly women. Secondly, the way they handle the difficult situation by
constituting a peculiar kind of a feminine community is significant here. In
this informal and unorganised community, as well as individually, they
seek to express their own voice and identity, so thoroughly oppressed by
the dominant patriarchal system. Consequently, the pursuit of female
personality, both individually and in informal groups, makes The
Handmaid’s Tale a feminist dystopia, a notion that needs discussing.
As hinted above, in this novel Atwood openly refers to the legacy of
feminist thought in the 1970s, the peak of the second wave of the
movement. However, Atwood’s critical interests focus more on the
practical and social aspects of second-wave feminism, better represented
by Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963) and Kate Millett (Sexual
Politics, 1970), than the more theoretical and academic approach of such
thinkers as Helene Cixous (“The Laugh of the Medusa,” 1976). Therefore,
the more down-to-earth issues deriving directly from first-wave feminism,
like the oppressive patriarchal system, which Friedan calls “the problem
that has no name,”20 and the fight for women’s rights, are of definitely
greater importance to the Canadian writer. While early twentieth-century
feminists concentrated on the woman’s right to vote, the dominant
emphasis of the 1970s movement was put on sexuality and the social roles
that stand behind it, with severe criticism of patriarchy and the importance
20
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 9.
30 Chapter Two
of difference applied to male and female experience. To quote Kate

Millett: “sex is a status category with political implications.”21 It was also
the movement that refuted the division into the personal and the political,
which was clearly signalled even in the title of Carol Hanisch’s famous
essay from 1970, “The Personal is Political.” Hanisch states: “personal
problems are political problems,” which, consequently, leads her to the
conclusion that “the most important [for women] is getting rid of self-
blame.”22 Such a thesis completely changed women’s position in the world
because the private/personal side of their existence within society,
previously hidden behind the façade of self-blame, came to light,
becoming a matter of public attention. Additionally, Hanisch shows that
the source of blame should be relocated to the patriarchal system that is
responsible for the position of women, the opinion shared by many
second-wave feminists. In Atwood’s novel, this assumption is realised in
the example of Gilead and its politics: oppressive towards women and,
hence, openly misogynistic. Finally, second-wave feminism was the
movement that put stress on the female self, i.e. a non-male way of
experiencing reality. In The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood (re-)uses some of
these ideas and tries to determine their validity and significance in a time
and place that clearly resembles 1980s America. This decade and this
country provided Atwood with the direct inspiration for her dystopian
novel. However, the book can be also read in definitely more universal
terms. The Republic of Gilead also seems to be an extreme reaction to
second-wave feminism, with its aspirations for complete freedom of
women and the collapse of the patriarchal system of values.
One of the most controversial issues connected with Atwood’s attitude
to feminism is the placement of The Handmaid’s Tale in the generic
context of speculative dystopia. Although Atwood wrote her book fully
aware of all its generic implications, she also endeavoured to enrich her
dystopia with features then alien to the genre, the female voice most
important among them. Consequently, employing the “obvious feminist
focus”23 makes The Handmaid’s Tale a feminist variation on a dystopia.
Atwood herself states:
21
Millet, Sexual, 24.
22
Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political.”
23
Amin Malak, “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian
Tradition,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Margaret Atwood’s “The
Handmaid’s Tale,” edited by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House
Publishers, 2001), 6.
The majority of dystopias—Orwell’s included—have been written by men,

and the point of view has been male. When women have appeared in them,
they have been either sexless automatons or rebels who’ve defied the sex
rules of the regime. They’ve acted as the temptresses of the male
protagonists, however welcome this temptation may be to the men
themselves. Thus Julia, thus the cami-knicker-wearing, orgy-porgy seducer
of the Savage in Brave New World, thus the subversive femme fatale of
Yvgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 seminal classic We. I wanted to try a dystopia
from the female point of view—the world of Julia, as it were.24
Additionally, Chris Ferns points at a different quality that makes The

Handmaid’s Tale a unique representative of the genre:
Far more exclusively than any other dystopian author, Atwood chooses to
focus on the private consciousness of her protagonist—on the one realm
that the State cannot successfully invade. For all the elaboration of the
State’s surveillance mechanisms, it cannot prevent her from committing
treason in her own mind, from thoughtcrime, to use Orwell’s
terminology.25
Therefore, the gender factor present so prominently in The Handmaid’s

Tale has to be emphasised, because it influences the perception of the
novel as a feminist dystopia. According to Judith A. Little, “feminist
dystopias describe the worst misogynistic societies we have experienced
or can imagine.”26 However, the label itself can be understood not in the
sense that it depicts a terrifying society governed harshly and unjustly by
radical feminists (although the traces of the repressive distribution of
power could be seen among women, too), but rather that it shows a society
in which women lose all their power, even though their biological
functions as mothers make them highly required due to a huge
underpopulation problem.
At the same time, it is Atwood’s decision to charge Offred with the
function of a narrator that makes The Handmaid’s Tale a feminist dystopia.
Coral Ann Howells agrees with such a standpoint where generic features of
dystopia are juxtaposed with Offred’s obvious female voice: “[Offred’s]
treasonable act of speaking out in a society where women are forbidden to
24
Margaret Atwood, “George Orwell: Some Personal Connections,” in Writing
with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005, 287–93 (New York:
Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2005), 291.
25
Ferns, Narrating Utopia, 131–32.
26
Judith A. Little, “Introduction,” in Feminist Philosophy and Science: Utopias
and Dystopias, edited by Judith A. Little (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007),
16.
32 Chapter Two
read or write or to speak freely effects a significant shift from ‘history’ to

‘herstory.’ Offred’s tale claims a space, a large autobiographical space,
within the novel and so relegates the grand narratives to the margins as a
mere framework for her story, which is the main focus of interests.”27
Indeed, the protagonist’s point of view appears to Atwood as important as
the implications of the plot. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the writer gives
Offred a voice in the fullest possible way. She makes her a narrator that is
far from being omniscient, and yet becomes the only source of information
not only about her inner thoughts and feelings, but also about the external
world of the regime that surrounds her. Telling her story, Offred is not
interested in factual data. She focuses on her own role in the events that
happen around her (though not only to her), frequently switching from her
present dystopian situation to the times before the patriarchal takeover.
She constitutes a type of narrator that the reader may find difficult to rely
on at first. Yet, over the course of time she proves powerful. It is then a
conscious, inner female voice—Offred’s storytelling/writing—that,
representing identity, becomes the basic and genuine feature of Atwood’s
dystopia, or its axis.
Dominant as it is, Offred’s point of view constitutes only one level of
narration in the novel. The Handmaid’s Tale is constructed in such a way
that it ends with an epilogue that seemingly calls into question the
meaning of the whole story. In other words, the lively voice of Offred’s is
quite tragically juxtaposed not only with the sexual discrimination that
women face in Gilead, but also with the world of the far future, with the
patriarchal state of Gilead no longer existing, but its negative views on
women still present. On the surface, as the epilogue of the novel entitled
“Historical Notes” suggests, the new, post-Gilead world seems to be an
ecologically clean place, with people from multiple cultures, religions and
points of view coexisting in peace and harmony. This is something
impossible to imagine in Gilead. However, all these values seem to be
only superficial. There are scholars of this future world who misread
Offred’s discourse in a most unacceptable way: “these ’Historical Notes’
are a further reinforcing of the authority of Offred’s narrative: the
academics are satirised as trivialisers of history. They have turned Gilead
into a matter of textual authentication and an occasion for levity and
entertainment. The scholars are pompous cultural relativists.”28 First of all,
we learn that this is a male historian, professor Pieixoto, who discovers
27
28
Glenn Deer, “The Handmaid’s Tale: Dystopia and the Paradoxes of Power,” in
Modern Critical Interpretations: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,”
edited by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001), 108.
and edits Offred’s oral diary (in the form of a scattered tape) into what is
entitled The Handmaid’s Tale. For Pieixoto, Offred’s account has little, if
any, historical value. The professor calls Offred’s narrative “an item”—“I
hesitate to use the word document,” he states.29 By repeating this unjust
term several times, he deprives Offred’s story of its most important
quality, i.e. truth. What is more, ironically it is a man who appears to
reconstruct a woman’s discourse about the abuses of the male world. This
fact at the same time not only degrades the narrator’s voice, but also
undermines her identity. Consequently, this results in “a radical shift from
‘herstory’ to ‘history’ as he attempts to discredit Offred’s narrative by
accusing her of not paying attention to significant events.”30 Being more
interested in dry historical facts, i.e. mainly the identity of Offred’s
commander, Pieixoto does not appear to perceive Offred as an individual
human being, or, as a being equal to him, a man. He does what Offred
fears most: that “from the point of view of future, [the handmaids] will be
invisible.”31 Pieixoto’s misogynistic interpretation deprives Offred of her
identity, making her an unimportant part of the great realm of history,
where objective analysis means more than any sign of emotional
subjectivity. Addressing a group of scholars who subsequently applaud
him, the historian comments on Gilead’s totalitarianism:
If I may be permitted an editorial aside, allow me to say that in my opinion

we must be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans.
Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity
culture-specific. Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of
pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from
which we ourselves are happily more free. Our job is not to censure but to
understand.32
Paradoxically then, even though “the voice of the repressed woman we

know as Offred survives longer than the regime that tries to silence it,”33 it
is hard to say that she triumphs over Gilead, since the tendencies that
dominated in that totalitarian state are still present, only this time more
carefully hidden.
29
30
31
32
33
Sharon Rose Wilson, “Off the Path to Grandma’s House in The Handmaid’s
Tale,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s
Tale,” edited by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001),
77.
34 Chapter Two
Returning to the issue of Offred’s voice as the most noticeable emblem

of her female identity, the technical problem of whether Offred’s narrative
is actually writing or telling arises. She states consciously: “I would like to
believe this is story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it.
Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better
chance. Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and
writing is in any case forbidden.”34 These words make it obvious that she
is telling. This interpretation can be reinforced by the fact one learns from
the documentary epilogue to the novel. Offred’s story was recorded on
“approximately thirty tape cassettes, of the type that became obsolete
sometime in the eighties or nineties,” which were only found later, after
Gilead’s collapse.35 Nevertheless, the very nature of Offred’s discourse
makes it more appropriate to accept Glenn Deer’s analysis of The
Handmaid’s Tale, in which, emphasising Offred’s point-of-view narrative
as well as the fact that the protagonist is an educated woman (in the pre-
Gilead years she worked as a librarian), the critic states that “one of the
great compositional problems of the novel is that the oral qualities of
Offred’s taped discourse are always imaginary oral qualities: as we read
the printed discourse, we attend to a complex syntactical and rhetorical
play that is the product of the economy of writing, not speech.”36 It would
be justified then to treat Offred’s discourse as both “a substitute for
dialogue,”37 and a text of culture; i.e. a discourse combining in itself both
oral and written qualities. More importantly, however, Offred’s voice
becomes a representation of her attitude to the regime in which very
frequently contradictory tendencies meet: her decision to speak/write can
be regarded by Gilead’s authorities as treason, since such activities are
forbidden to women. Still, the heroine’s discourse is so often full of
hesitation and evasion that it may be difficult to show its pure feminine
and resistant quality. As Offred states critically: “They used to have dolls,
for little girls, that would talk if you pulled a string at the back; I thought I
was sounding like that, voice of a monotone, voice of a doll.”38
Nonetheless, she seems to be too hard on herself. Amin Malak notes:
What makes Atwood’s book such a moving tale is its clever technique in
presenting the heroine initially as a voice, almost like a sleepwalker
conceiving disjointed perceptions of its surroundings, as well as flashing
34
35
36
Deer, “The Handmaid’s,” 95
37
38
reminiscences about a bygone life. As the scenes gather more details, the
heroine’s voice is steadily and imperceptively, yet convincingly, transfigured
into a full-roundness that parallels her maturing comprehension of what is
happening around her. Thus the victim, manipulated and coerced, is
metamorphosed into a determined conniver who daringly violates the
perverted canons of Gilead.39
Offred’s growing self-awareness is thus reflected in her speaking voice,

which consequently results in her courageous will to disobey: “Offred
refuses to be silenced, as she speaks out with the voice of late twentieth-
century feminist individualism, resisting the cultural identity imposed on
her.”40 All these complexities in decoding the meaning and significance of
her voice influence the way Offred’s female identity can be read, making
the heroine a highly ambiguous character.
When it comes to Offred’s resistant identity and the complicated
patriarchal power structures she finds herself in, the difficulties of perceiving
and evaluating her become visible in reference to her very name. The
heroine confesses:
My name isn’t Offred. I have another name, which nobody uses now
because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like
your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is
wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something
hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this
name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some
charm that’s survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my single
bed at night, with my eyes closed, and the name floats there behind my
eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the dark.41
This conscious act of protecting her real identity may suggest some
survival instinct hidden deep inside Offred. Keeping in mind her real name
and, at the same time, refusing both to utter and forget it, she rebels
against the regime that requires from all its citizens—and especially
women—complete obedience. She dares to question her social status of an
underwoman, which also indicates the validity of her name. The name
“Offred” obviously derives from the Commander who, physically and
symbolically, possesses and “commands” the heroine (“of Fred”). It can be
explained in different ways as well: “Offred’s name also suggests ‘Off-
red’ as a secret rebel, the ‘Offered’ in a blood sacrifice, and, especially, the
39
Malak, “Margaret Atwood’s,” 8.
40
41
36 Chapter Two
‘red’ figure who goes ‘off’ the path.”42 Offred is then a secret rebel who
struggles for her private freedom and identity, but also, symbolically, for
the freedom and identity of other handmaids and women in general.
However, her name implies some passivity, too: “she, herself, is ‘afraid’
(to play on a word that sounds like ‘Offred’)—afraid to rally against the
Revolution, to reveal herself to Ofglen, to spy on behalf of the Mayday
group, to attempt escape, to commit suicide.”43 Sometimes this passivity
manifests itself in the projected denial of her real name and acceptance of
her present situation: “that’s where I am, there’s no escaping it. Time’s a
trap, I’m caught in it. I must forget about my secret name and all ways
back. My name is Offred now, and here is where I live. Live in the
present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got.”44 Nonetheless, such
breakdowns of resistance and doubts in the meaning of fighting for
freedom seem to be inscribed in Offred’s personality, making her a more
reliable character. In the end, the desire to express herself freely and
preserve her identity fully prevails: “she guards her lost name as the secret
sign of her own identity and as guarantee of her hopes for a different
future.”45 Thus, a desire for free manifestation of identity in such
circumstances may mean a desire for survival. Her discourse becomes
what Coral Ann Howells calls “a woman’s survival narrative.”46
Offred’s unwavering decision to keep her name a secret and to use
language as a weapon against the oppressive political system clearly
corresponds with the aforementioned survival procedures. For Offred, true
survival means not only the preservation of her identity, but also creating
it anew, which turns to be a constant, never-ending process. She fully
realises that the only way to survive is to preserve her language, as it plays
the vital part in this process. However, the heroine herself does not seem
to be fully convinced of the strength that lies in her and the language that
she uses: “that is how I feel: white, flat, thin. I feel transparent. Surely they
will be able to see through me. I feel as if there’s not much left of me; they
will slip through my arms, as if I’m made of smoke, as if I’m a mirage,
fading before their eyes.”47 Therefore, she has her moments of doubt as
well. “I don’t want to be telling this story,” she says on one occasion. “I
don’t have to tell it. I don’t have to tell anything, to myself or to anyone
else. I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It’s possible to go
42
Wilson, “Off the Path,” 68.
43
Cooke, Margaret Atwood, 125.
44
45
46
47
so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out. Why
fight?”48 Due to such projected moments of withdrawal, Chris Ferns calls
Offred “the most passive of all the rebels against dystopia.”49 As Offred
states: “I’m too tired to go on with this story. I’m too tired to think about
where I am,” as says the protagonist at one instant.50 Such readings are
partly true because hesitation and withdrawal mark the natural fears of a
person put in the extreme circumstances the totalising, theocratic state of
Gilead offers. Offred shelters herself from the hostile reality she finds
herself living, as probably most people in her situation would: “Steel
yourself, my mother used to say. I never thought much at the time about
what the phrase meant, but it had something to do with metal, with
armour, and that’s what I would do, I would steel myself. I would pretend
not to be present, not in the flesh.”51 Interestingly enough, such fears and
anxieties are an obvious sign of Offred’s intelligence. She fully realises
her unjustly inferior position, stating: “I resign my body freely, to the uses
of others. They can do what they like to me. I am abject. I feel, for the first
time, their true power.”52 This utterance of Offred’s clearly corresponds
with Julia Kristeva’s definitions of abject and abjection: “a ‘something’
that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about
which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of
non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it,
annihilates me.”53 At the same time, Offred’s words may suggest that
whereas on the physical level of her existence in Gilead she cannot beat
the system, there are still a multitude of possibilities in language.
Consequently, the main two options for Offred are either to yield to this
annihilating force that embodies itself in the patriarchal totalitarianism of
Gilead, or—recognising and realising some active potentials of her
identity—struggle for her coherence. She chooses the latter, stating
ironically: “I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how
ignorant I was.”54
As already suggested, Offred’s main weapon against the regime and, at
the same time, her ultimate tool in retaining her identity appears to be
language: “Because Offred recognises the connections between the male
48
49
Ferns, Narrating, 131.
50
51
52
53
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2.
54
38 Chapter Two
control of language and male power, her dialogic resistance to the official,
monologic discourse of Gilead is a conscious form of political
disobedience.”55 Additionally, she seems to be absolutely conscious of the
possibilities of language and highly precise in its use: “through her
dialogic wordplay and focus on words, Offred not only registers her
resistance to the official speech and totalising discourse of the state, she
also signals her desperate desire to retain some sense of control. Words, to
Offred, are more than precious commodities. They are also signposts to
the reality she is determined to hold on to. While the world can be read as
if it were a text, it is not equivalent to a text.”56 This mastery in wordplays,
combined with a sense of desperation, is easily noticeable in the following
passage: “I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean
a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word
for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are
the litanies I use, to compose myself.”57 These puns have both internal and
external connections. Offred actually seems fully aware of this, a fact that
can be detected in her compositions. By controlling language, she appears
to have some sort of power—limited as it must be—over her identity and
destiny; as she recounts the forbidden game of Scrabble, i.e. a game of
words, that the Commander invites her to play: “I win the first game, I let
him win the second.”58 Consequently, she realises the power of language
in her difficult political context:
Offred is depicted as fascinated with the paradoxes of power. Offred’s

ethical assumptions would suggest that she is opposed to irrational modes
of argument and persuasion; she is opposed to the tyranny of propaganda.
Yet this ethical consciousness demonstrates its attraction to the rhetorical
efficiency of violence, power, and the grotesque: Offred has, in her
discursive practice, started to play the game of power politics like a true
Gileadan.59
Far from passivity then, Offred is fully aware of the fact that it is only
through language and its quality of bitter irony that her identity can
survive. She draws the analogy between the red tulips in her Commander’s
55
J. Brooks Bouson, “The Misogyny of Patriarchal Culture in The Handmaid’s
Tale,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s
Tale,” edited by Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001),
53.
56
Bouson, “The Misogyny,” 54
57
58
59
Deer, “The Handmaid’s,” 100.
wife’s garden and blood of an executed man—two seemingly unconnected

pictures: “each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such
valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a
lot of effort into making such distinctions. I need to be very clear, in my
own mind.”60
Language-consciousness and the maturity of her voice provoke
questions about Offred’s narration and its role in the heroine’s survival.
Definitely, Offred makes a highly interesting narrator, who Chris Ferns
likens to D-503 from Zamyatin’s canonical dystopia, We:
The narrators in Zamyatin’s We, or indeed Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

are more active, by contrast, yet at the same time less confident. D-503 and
Offred are hesitant, reluctant to pass judgment, sometimes even confused,
and their narratives reveal, not mind already made up, but rather minds in
the process of being made up. D-503 reveals himself as engaged in an
internal struggle over what to think, over whether to accept or reject the
values of the One State, while Offred, although clearly opposed to the
fundamentalist values of Gilead, is occupied throughout the book with the
question as to what she can or should do about her situation.61
This hesitation, this passive-active tension, is also another factor that

makes Offered a round character, a notion that E. M. Forster defines in
Aspects of the Novel by building an opposition to a flat character.
According to the writer and critic, unlike round characters, flat ones “are
constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one
factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round.”62
Hence, Offred—due to her complexity, her capability of “surprising in a
convincing way”63—possesses all the characteristics of roundness, no
matter how disturbing, or even irritating, they would make her. She says:
“If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there
will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up
where I left off. It isn’t a story I’m telling. It’s also a story I’m telling, in
my head, as I go along.”64
At the same time, Offred can be characterised as a manipulative
narrator. She deliberately slows down or even stops her discourse, jumps
from one episode or flashback to the other, and leaves some scenes
60
61
62
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 73.
63
Forster, Aspects, 81.
64
40 Chapter Two
unfinished. No wonder Glenn Deer points to Offred’s narrative self-

consciousness, as well:
Atwood’s narrator is an authoritative and authoritarian storyteller, one who

manipulates the reader as she tells her story but one who is also caught in
the web of Gileadan power politics. Offred’s powerful narrative skill
conflicts with the powerlessness, the innocence, and the descriptive
phenomenological cast of mind that also characterizes her. It is as if
Atwood’s skill as storyteller continually intrudes, possessing her narrative
creation. Narrative self-consciousness, in fact, does explicitly and
strategically emerge.65
This paradox of inner power as presented in narrative skills, juxtaposed

with external powerlessness, is clearly visible in the following extract
where Offred seems to play with the reader openly:
I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilised. I wish it
showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less
hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were
about love, or about sudden realisations important to one’s life, or even
about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I’m sorry there is so much pain
in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or
pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it. I keep on
going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated
story, because after all I want you to hear it. By telling you anything at all
I’m at least believing in you, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling
you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.66
It seems that the act, or even the process, of believing in some kind of
audience means to Offred also believing in herself and, hence, helps her
constitute her own identity. Moreover, the prospect of an audience—
however difficult to envision—gives her power and strengthens her will to
persevere. This is emphasised by the image of God-like creation that, by
adding to her discourse a dose of quasi-religious heresy, marks the power
of her narrative even more. It also shows that the story holds a kind of
power over Offred. She is enchanted by what she is telling and there is no
escaping it. She has to go on to preserve herself, to endure.
Another crucial element of Offred’s integrity and identity preservation
is the sense of the past, or, to be more precise, the passing of time. The
memories from previous, ordinary life have therapeutic and comforting
properties in her present situation: “our happiness is part memory,” says
65
Deer, “The Handmaid’s,” 95.
66
the protagonist.67 Consequently, as “a creature of her own past,”68 she

refuses to erase her own recollections, which directly defies the rules of
the new regime. Most frequently, remembrance of the past has a
stimulating effect on Offred: “Offred’s memories allow her to envision the
other, and so provide a form of rebellion against the totalitarian system.”69
Sometimes, however, by reminding her of the “good old days,” those
reminiscences can be painful, too. She confesses: “I have them, these
attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.
Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to be done, I
thought. There is nothing to be done.”70 Even so, thanks to the sense of the
passing time, she fully realises the fact that her unbearable present will
become the past one day, that, Gilead will eventually cease to exist. She
summarises her difficult situation in a surprisingly reasonable manner:
“This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction, 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;”71 and
closer to the end of the book: “All I can hope for is a reconstruction.”72 As
Nathalie Cooke notes: “After all, as Offred knows, the one who can
control the story can also control the story’s ending.”73 Offred seems
capable of such skills, which is visible in the epilogue of the novel where
her fragmented and reconstructed account becomes the subject of
academic analysis for the scholars of the distant future. However, it is the
very same word, “reconstruction,” that Professor Pieixoto uses to deprive
Offred’s account of any academic value, questioning her reliability and, in
a broader sense, underrating her genuine identity.
“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,” says Offred, commenting on her social function as a
handmaid.74 This urge to preserve her identity becomes the basis of her
creed. Another feature is the desire to have if not a partner in a dialogue,
then at least someone to receive her story, so that her identity could not
only endure, but also find its full ontological and highly individualised
realisation:
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
Cooke, Margaret Atwood, 130.
74
42 Chapter Two
A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name.
attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more
hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I
will say you, you, like an old love song. You can mean more than one. You
can mean thousands. I’ll pretend you can hear me. But it’s no good,
because I know you can’t.75
Unfortunately, both wishes do not seem to be fulfilled on the pages of

Atwood’s novel. Offred is misread both by her openly chauvinistic and
patriarchal civilization, which—according to Atwood—is an exaggeration of
the intolerant world we live in nowadays, as well as by the future culture
that only pretends to appreciate and value all sorts of diversity—including in
gender—but is actually equally deeply rooted in contemporariness.
Although Offred manages to preserve her identity and her storytelling is
powerful, both cases of misreading her and her discourse are pessimistic,
making her a tragic character and her project only partly successful.
***
Apart from identity—struggling for it and preserving it desperately—

another very important feminist issue in The Handmaid’s Tale is the sense
of female community. What is more, whereas fighting for female identity
is most explicit in the case of Offred, mainly due to the very fact that her
point of view dominates the narrative, the notion of a women’s community
applies to most of the other female characters presented in the novel. The
male-dominated state of Gilead divides them into such artificial female
communities as castes of handmaids, but also wives, aunts and unwomen.
These groups of women are created by men only as a means of control,
since, from the viewpoint of the authorities and as a general rule in
patriarchal cultures, such “communities of women without men are seen
immediately as mutilated. Exiled from time.”76 They are both a distortion
of and a threat to the biological and patriarchal order of things. Luke,
Offred’s partner in pre-Gilead times, states: “Fraternise means to behave
like a brother. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to
behave like a sister. Sororise, it would have to be, he said.”77 These words
uttered by a man may suggest that a community of women will always
lack some basic ingredients that makes it a community in the full
75
76
Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1978), 4.
77
understanding of the word, at least from the male perspective. The female
characters in The Handmaid’s Tale seem to disagree since they struggle to
preserve if not fully formed communities, then at least a sense of them.
Nina Auerbach writes in her Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction:
“All true communities are knit together by their codes, but a code can
range from dogma to a flexible, private, and often semi-conscious set of
beliefs in female communities, the code seems a whispered and a fleeting
thing, more a buried language than a rallying cry,”78 which, in turn, leads
her to formulate at least two important conclusions. Firstly, women’s
communities are most frequently formed on the margins of society, in the
shadow of the male-dominated mainstream: “since a community of
women is a furtive, unofficial, often underground entity, it can be defined
by the complex, shifting, often contradictory attitudes it evokes.”79
Secondly, such communities are always characterised by an almost infinite
variety of attitudes: “many perspectives are possible because communities
of women have no one official banner to wave. The strongest community
we can perceive is one with many voices.”80 These words correspond with
what Atwood says about the issue of female communities in The
Handmaid’s Tale and some dangers they may generate: “the women at the
top have different kinds of power from the power of the men at the top, but
they have power nonetheless, and some of the power they have is power
over other women, as is always the case in those kinds of societies.”81
Dangerous but also promising, this underground plurality of attitudes can
be easily detected in the communities formed or dreamt about by the
women in Atwood’s novel, and although the very idea of a community
seems to be inscribed in most of the female characters, when it comes to
the details and technicalities, its realisation may differ completely.
First of all, this sense of community seems to define the lives of all
handmaids, including Offred. This is parodied in the institution of the Red
Centre, where the women are prepared for their future social function.
Supervised by the caste of Aunts, they are brainwashed there, convinced
of the definition of community that was popular in pre-Gilead times—
proposed by second-wave feminism with the emphasis of femininity as
opposed to male patriarchy—is completely wrong. Instead, as the
patriarchal propaganda suggests, they should fully appreciate the present
state of affairs: “There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia.
Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to.
78
Auerbach, Communities, 8–9.
79
Auerbach, Communities, 11.
80
81
Noakes and Reynolds, Margaret Atwood, 12.
44 Chapter Two
Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”82 This is
made even more explicit during the film presentations, when handmaids-
to-be are shown pornographic images almost simultaneously with footage
from feminist marches, with such slogans as “TAKE BACK THE
NIGHT,” or “FREEDOM TO CHOOSE.”83 The obvious conclusion for
the handmaids is to link both these areas of experience, i.e. to connect the
humiliation of women as presented in the most perverse porn movies with
their desires to be emancipated and gain some sort of power. As an
alternative, the new propaganda teaches women that a better future is
ahead, where a sense of female community will gain its completely new
and proper meaning:
For the generations that come after, Aunt Lydia said, it will be much better.
The women will live in harmony together, all in one family; you will be
the daughters to them. There can be bonds of real affection, she said,
blinking at us ingratiatingly, under such conditions. Women united for a
common end! Helping one another in their daily chores as they walk the
path of life together, each performing her appointed task. Your daughters
will have greater freedom. We are working towards the goal of a little
garden for each one, each one of you—the clasped hands again, the breathy
voice—and that’s just one for instance. The raised finger, wagging at us.
But we can’t be greedy pigs and demand too much before it’s ready, now
can we?84
Surprisingly, on the surface this speech of Aunt Lydia’s corresponds with

the ideas of second-wave feminism, but actually it distorts them
completely. Instead of a community based on freedom and emphasis on
individuals, it offers a strange kind of existence restricted by the
regulations of the purely patriarchal system. In other words, it offers no
freedom at all, and no female community, either. To strengthen the
message, this caricature of freedom that women are given in Gilead is
presented as freedom itself: “where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as
Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or.”85 It turns out that the
kind of freedom that Gilead gives women is just its reverse. Pretending to
liberate women, the misogynistic system puts them back in their cages,
distorting, at the same time, the assumptions of second-wave feminism.
It is also alarming that the main tool in the brainwashing practices that
the patriarchal state uses to reinforce its misogynistic system on the
82
83
84
85
handmaids is the caste of Aunts, i.e. also women. Cleverly enough, Aunts
appear to propagate the idea of female community, both alluding to and
ironically distorting what was one of the main slogans of second-wave
feminism: “What we’re aiming for, says Aunt Lydia, of a spirit of camaraderie
among women. We must all pull together.”86 For the handmaids then,
Aunts act as the ultimate confirmation that the vision of female community
they promote and embody is the only proper option. Amin Malak calls
them “the spokesperson[s] of antifeminism.”87 To a great extent, Aunts
appear to exist both in and out of the system. Being women themselves
and simultaneously supporting a state where absolute power stays in men’s
hands, they are perfect examples of Gilead’s manipulative politics. Aunt
Lydia says: “Men are sex machines and not much more. They only want
one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good. Lead
them around by the nose; that is a metaphor. It’s nature’s way. It’s God’s
device. It’s the way things are.”88 Additionally, Aunts in disguise run the
Jezebel’s, a secret brothel for the government officials, which only
confirms their anti-women actions. Aunt Lydia’s deception is then multi-
layered. Manipulating the handmaids in a highly political way, she
encourages them to use their primitive charm to, hypothetically, gain some
pittance or illusion of power, but more veraciously, to accept their
traditionally female roles and functions in male-dominated society. “Love,
said Aunt Lydia with distaste. Don’t let me catch you at it. No mooning
and June-ing around here, girls. Wagging her finger at us. Love is not the
point.”89 This short teaching demonstrates at least two things about Aunts.
Firstly, how they are wrong; and secondly, how much pleasure they take
from the illusion of power they have, being “a vicious elite of collaborators
who conduct torture lectures.”90 Ultimately, Aunts act as the figurative
face of the system that “upholds the male supremist power structure of
Gilead with its hierarchical arrangement of the sexes, and they play an
active role in the state’s sexual enslavement of the Handmaids.”91 This
blind faith and active participation in the misogynistic system make them
its victims in a similar respect to the handmaids. Aunts seem to remain
completely unaware of their tragic situation only because they are more
successfully brainwashed.
86
87
88
89
90
91
Bouson, “The Misogyny,” 47.
46 Chapter Two
In the discussion of the second-wave feminism and its legacy in the

new definitions of women’s communities as depicted in Atwood’s novel,
the figure of Offred’s mother, unknown by her name, plays a very
important role. This role seems to be of the utmost importance in reference
to their difficult mother–daughter relations; as Offred recalls:
I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were

never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to
vindicate her life for her, and the choices she’d made. I didn’t want to live
my life on her terms. I didn’t want to be the model offspring, the
incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your
justification for existence, I said to her once.92
These expectations of Offred’s mother are directly connected with the

fact that she is presented in the novel as an active feminist in pre-Gilead
times:
I remember also my mother, years before. I must have been fourteen,

fifteen, that age when daughters are most embarrassed by their mothers. I
remember her coming back to one of our many apartments, with a group of
other women, part of her ever-changing circle of friends. They’d been in a
march that day; it was during the time of porn riots, or was it the abortion
riots, they were close together.93
The problem is that those times of numerous marches in support of gaining

more freedom by women, and the arising new definitions of female
communities, coincide with Offred’s formative years, the period in a
person’s life when one is prone to rebel against the values represented by
the older generations. In the case of the young Offred, this rebellion takes
the strange form of questioning her mother’s outlook on life, including that
associated with second-wave feminism. The narrator recalls one of their
conversations: “‘Now, Mother,’ I would say. ‘Let’s not get into an
argument about nothing.’—‘Nothing, she’d say bitterly. You call it
nothing. You don’t understand, do you. You don’t understand at all what
I’m talking about.’”94 In other words, Offred’s relations with her mother
are marked with either a lack of understanding, or a more or less conscious
unwillingness to apprehend her. Both of options are tragic because it is the
mother–daughter relationship that plays a very important part in the
process of female identity formation. That is why, although “both
92
93
94
physically and emotionally absent”95 from Offred’s reminiscences, the

mother’s influence on her daughter’s future life—in this case built around
this problematic absence—is something that becomes one of the main
factors in how Offred’s identity develops. Later on, when a handmaid,
Offred derides her mother: “Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can
you hear me? 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.”96 This
irony is even more apt when her friend Moira informs her about her
mother’s subsequent doings under the Gilead regime:
I saw you mother, Moira said. Not in person, it was in that film they
showed us, about the Colonies. There was a close-up, it was her all right.
She was wrapped up in one of those grey things but I know it was her.
Thank God, I said.
Why, thank God? said Moira.
I thought she was dead.
She might as well be, said Moira. You should wish it for her.97
Moira expresses such a wish not because she detests Offred’s mother, but
because what Offred’s mother becomes is an Unwoman in the Colonies,
i.e. a crossbreed between a prisoner and a blue-collar worker dealing with
the most dangerous toxic waste (I analyse the notions of Unwoman and
Colonies elsewhere in the book). On the one hand, she is punished for her
feminism in the most severe way; on the other, she has a chance to spend
the last days of her life in a female community of sorts, since the
workers/prisoners are mostly women. Offred’s mother constitutes a kind
of a link between the two different visions of womanhood presented in the
novel: paradoxically, fighting for a spirit of female community, she finds
that this fundamental claim of second-wave feminism is distorted in a
highly misogynistic way, which altogether makes her “disillusioned and
defeated.”98
If Offred’s mother is “the good mother [that] is essentially absent from
the text,”99 Serena Joy could be called a bad mother, or a stepmother, who
is significantly present in Offred’s life. She belongs to the caste of the
Wives, i.e. the highest possible female social class in Gilead—at least
hypothetically. This means that being unable to give a child both to her
husband, the Commander, and the state of Gilead, she has to endure the
95
96
97
98
99
48 Chapter Two
highly difficult situation of sharing her spouse with Offred in her own
home. This, as well as the whole politics of the state, is even more
unbearable for her when one learns that in pre-Gilead years she was one of
the most recognisable faces and advocates of the changes to come. Offred
recounts:
Serena Joy was never her real name, not even then. Her real name was
Pam. I read that in a profile on her, in a news magazine, long after I’d first
watched her singing while my mother slept in on Sunday mornings. By
that time she was worthy of a profile: Times or Newsweek it was, it must
have been. She wasn’t singing any more by then, she was making
speeches. She was good at it, her speeches were about the sanctity at home,
about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she
made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice
she was making for the good of all.100
This reminiscence also suggests that, at least to some extent and partly
unconsciously, Serena was present in Offred’s life long before her
handmaid years. The contrast between her previous function and her
present role of Wife indicates some kind of ambiguous discomfort
inscribed in her career. Having been an activist of the new religious
movement, her role is similar to that occupied by Offred’s mother, only in
a reversed version: “the societies that they envision—fundamental
Christian and radical feminist—both necessitate a form of governance that
prescribes for its subjects.”101 Consequently, the juxtaposition of her pre-
Gilead function with her present situation can be described as tragically
binary. Making speeches in which she advocated the idea of femininity as
totally dependent on men, and the community of women as existing
mainly at home, in Gilead she basically gets what she prayed for. Now she
is one of these women forced to retreat to their domestic areas. This may
suggest that she made all those speeches—the very idea of them visibly
violating the principles of the teachings—mainly to gain some kind of
fame, i.e. to became a celebrity. The question of whether she really
believed in what she preached arises, making her situation in Gilead not
only tragic but also bitter-sweet.
This way or another, Serena Joy plunges into passivity, becoming one
of the most tragic victims of the system she advocated so piously. What is
more, she is forced to abandon her public speeches, losing the status of a
media personality: “she doesn’t make speeches any more. She has become
100
101
speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her.
How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.”102 What
mutes her is a combination of the new political situation she finds herself
in and her conviction that she cannot criticise the system she used to fight
for so convincingly. Being a highly manipulative person then and now, in
the new role of the Wife she is forced to define herself anew. Characterised
by a kind of restless desperation, with the central role of the ambiguous
relation with Offred and all the previous handmaids at her home, she
becomes a highly dangerous person: “it’s not the husbands you have to
watch out for, said Aunt Lydia. It’s the Wives.”103 This also emphasises a
crucial role that Aunts play in Gilead: manipulating handmaids by setting
one group of women against the other. Aunts artificially create a web of
enemies that makes it impossible for women to approach one another
without any prejudice. This is very convenient for the system. All such
manipulations affect Serena as well. At some points she acts and
participates in the political games just like in old times, disregarding other
women. It is finally she who, taking care of her and her husband’s high
social position, arranges a sexual rendezvous between Offred and the
family’s chauffeur, Nick.104 Unconsciously, she legitimises the relationship
that has already started to develop between the two young people. More
importantly, she wants Offred—and in turn her and the Commander—to
have a child, which will strengthen their position in Gilead’s hierarchy.
However, this controversial decision also adds one more layer of tragedy
to her character: “she symbolises her world’s sterility. Serena is trapped in
her role.”105 Detesting Offred for her part in the life of her family, she
eventually makes a kind of a deal with her, acknowledging a sort of female
camaraderie between them, although this relationship is forced on her by
the surrounding circumstances.
The notion of female camaraderie seems to be of the utmost importance
in the case of Moira, Offred’s closest friend both before Gilead and during
its regime. In the novel, Moira plays a number of roles that fascinate and,
at the same time, frighten Offred. First of all, during their brainwashing at
the Red Centre, she appears to be the only one still capable of rebelling
against the system. This makes her a kind of a symbolic reminder to the
other women about pre-Gilead freedom:
102
103
104
105
50 Chapter Two
Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already
we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these wall
secure. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere you’d come apart, you’d
vaporize, there would be no pressure holding you together. Nevertheless
Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a
giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. In the light of Moira,
the Aunts were less fearsome and more absurd.106
Her unbreakable nature probably finds its most visible outcome in her first
spectacular escape from the centre. She tricks and overpowers one of the
aunts, an act almost impossible to imagine for the other handmaids. No
wonder, then, that although she is captured and sent back, Moira is
perceived as “one of the few Gilead women to still possess a mouth.”107
That is why it is only her who can afford to express her sarcasm towards
the political and religious state of affairs publically, exemplified by her
attitude to the spiritual “There is a Balm in Gilead,” sung by the
handmaids on numerous occasions, as well as—in more general terms—to
Gilead: “’There is a Bomb in Gilead,’ was what Moira used to call it.”108
What is more, as a declared lesbian, Moira belongs to the Gilead-coined
category of gender-traitors, one of the most despised and oppressed female
groups of the regime. Presented as an open adversary of the theocratic
state and a lesbian activist, she constitutes a major threat to Gilead’s
misogynist politics. Offred recounts: “she’d decided to prefer women, and
as far as I could see she had no scruples about stealing them or borrowing
them when she felt like it. She said it was different because the balance of
power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction.”109
Her vision of a women’s society differs significantly from the one proposed
by Offred’s mother, more traditional at least in this respect. It is even
possible to describe this vision of hers as an attempt not only to form a
female community, but to establish a kind of a perfect women’s state,
where lesbianism appears to be the most important factor. However, “if
Moira thought she could create Utopia by shutting herself up in a woman-
only enclave, she was sadly mistaken,”110 as after one of her ultimately
unsuccessful attempts to escape, given a choice either to end her life
quickly in the radioactive Colonies or become a prostitute in the unofficial
state-run brothel Jezebel’s, she chooses the latter. She explains her
decision to Offred: “Well, shit, nobody but a nun would pick the Colonies.
106
107
108
109
110
I mean, I’m not a martyr.”111 Tragically enough, this decision seems to

break her rebellious character and make her “lose her volition and become
indifferent.”112 Even though she tries to rationalise her present situation,
saying “I’m 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,”113 it is difficult to believe in the preponderance of its advantages.
Ultimately, she becomes one more victim of the patriarchal system, in
which her idea of a female community realises itself in, possibly, the most
distorted way: “Moira comes to witness the realisation of her utopia in
Jezebel’s.”114
Another kind of female utopia, or at least a suggestion of its
possibility, is the organisation known as the Underground Femaleroad, or
Mayday. As Professor Pieixoto explains: “We know that this city [where
the Commander lived] was a prominent way-station on what our author
refers to as ‘The Underground Femaleroad.’”115 Its very name, bearing
visible similarities with the nineteenth-century Underground Railroad, a
network of slave escape routes in North America, clearly indicates its main
goal, which is to save women from Gilead by transferring them out of the
theocratic state. Being an organised network, it also realises some ideas of
second-wave feminism in reference to a female community. Offred
ironically recounts: “Networking, one of my mother’s old phrases, musty
slang of yesteryear. Even in her sixties she still did something she called
that, though as far as I could see all it meant was having lunch with some
women.”116 At the same time, when Offred learns about the existence of
the movement, this knowledge provides her with a kind of hope, a feeling
that she has missed so much: “’You can join us,’ [Ofglen] says. ‘Us?’ I
say. There is an us then, there’s a we. I knew it.”117 In other words, rescue
is still possible, and her mother’s ideas seem surprisingly relevant and
tempting. However, there are at least two factors that make the
Femaleroad different from Offred’s mother’s theoretical assumptions
regarding the olden days. The first of these is the fact that Mayday actually
works. Moira, one of the beneficiaries of the system, tells Offred:
111
112
Bouson, “The Misogyny,” 55–56.
113
114
115
116
117
52 Chapter Two
Each [station] was in contact with only one other one, always the next one
along. There were advantages to that—it was better if you were caught—
but disadvantages too, because if one station got busted the entire chain
backed up until they could make contact with one of the couriers, who
could set up an alternate route. They were better organised than you’d
think, though.118
The second difference is that Mayday is an organisation founded and

maintained by both men and women, which may suggest that only
cooperation of the two sexes can result in gender justice and equality. This
assumption proves right in the cases of both Moira and Offred, for it is
Nick, a secret member of the organisation, who rescues her. “It’s all right.
It’s Mayday,”119 as he explains to her, alluding to the classified password.
Nevertheless, the evaluation of the Underground Femaleroad has to be
multi-layered. It shows that hope still exists in Gilead, i.e. an alternative
women’s community is possible to achieve. Nonetheless, it also reveals
that the realisation of a feminist utopia is impossible without the help of
men. This can be both a positive project, because it emphasises the
peaceful coexistence of the two sexes, but also a negative one, because it
may suggest women’s dependence on men, a situation not that dissimilar
to the Gilead’s misogynistic politics. One more time, then, Atwood
remains ambiguous, mixing the possibility of hope with a clearly ironic
approach.
Finally, the ironic blend of hope and despair in reference to women’s
communities is visible in the relationship between Offred and her
predecessor in the Commander’s house. Although both women do not
know each other, there is a substitute for communication between them, or
at least this is something in which Offred strongly believes. This
communication is connected with the written message that she finds in her
room in the Commander’s home: “I knelt to examine the floor, and there it
was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe a
fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes
carborundorum.”120 Even though at first she does not understand, the fact
that it is linked to another woman in the same situation as her makes it
Offred’s mantra of hope. She repeats it to herself in her moments of
devastating despair and resignation: “I pray silently: Nolite te bastardes
carborundorum. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds right, and it
118
119
120
will have to do.”121 It is only later, during one of her secret meetings with
the Commander, that she learns the true meaning of these words: “’Don’t
let the bastards grind you down.’”122 Tragically, it appears that this
sentence is written in dog Latin, not a proper register of the language,
because it simply mixes its grammatical patterns with foreign vocabulary:
“it is originally an ‘empty’ acoustic image, a signifier without a
signified.”123 At the same time, its elevated and serious message turns out
to be a practical joke, supported by the fact that it comes from the
Commander’s notes and is supposed to be understood between him and his
male friends. It reveals that the situation of the woman who wrote it was
not only similar to Offred’s, but exactly the same since as the
Commander’s handmaid she was also his secret lover, who, just like
Offred, had access to his petty writings. Even though it shows that
Offred’s belief in hope is groundless, the protagonist continues to cherish
the spiritual bond she feels she has with the other woman: “it pleases me to
ponder this message. It pleases me to think I’m communing with her, this
unknown woman. It pleases me to know that her taboo message made it
through.”124 Although originally intended to be a typical male joke, this
sentence—“Don’t let the bastards grind you down”—becomes a kind of a
motto for Offred. Expressing a strong will to endure, not to yield to the
male-dominated world, these words also emphasise the need to be among
women, which, in Offred’s difficult condition at least, comprises a
perspective of happiness, no matter how bitter-sweet it could appear.
Ultimately, in The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood demonstrates that female
characters have two main objectives: preserving one’s identity and functioning
within women’s communities. In the case of the second notion, she tends
to emphasise the great potential that is hidden in such communities of
women, as well as the fact that the chief force that objects to their
emancipation is the patriarchal system dominating our world. It is always
patriarchy that constitutes a kind of a context for the communities of
women, in which point she seems to agree with Nina Auerbach. Auerbach
states: “though the communities gain substance and stature as we proceed,
their isolation has had from the first the self-sustaining power to repel or
incorporate the male-defined reality that excludes them.”125 Maybe that is
why Aunt Lydia calls the situation of Offred “being in the army.”126
121
122
123
Dvorak, “What is Real/Reel,” 150.
124
125
126
54 Chapter Two
Although her idea of female community visibly opposes feminist notions,

and, consequently, the female army as presented in The Handmaid’s Tale
is both weak and artificial since misogynistic men stand behind it. It might
be so because of the still undiscovered and unrealised potential that could
be characterised as highly ambiguous and subversive. When one looks at
female communities using the cultural perspective elaborated and
reinforced by the dominant patriarchal system, such communities will
always appear a bit strange and uncertain. Auerbach comments: “Our
female communities are united by their necessary oddity as well as by
their corporate strength.”127 In other words, it is mainly due to this very
strangeness inscribed in women’s societies that they can define themselves
fully; the strangeness that takes its substance in the apparent difference
from men. These are both women themselves and men that constitute a
kind of a point of reference for femininity, or a mirror, to extend Virginia
Woolf’s concept, which can not only enlarge, but also reduce women.
Therefore, a women’s community is important in establishing and then
preserving female identity. These ideas are simply inseparable.
Between Theocratic Regime and Misogynistic Perversion

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood discusses a multitude of
issues other than ecological degradation and the inferior position of
women in society. Nevertheless, I consider the problem of religion the
most crucial ingredient of the plot. Gilead is an openly religious state and
those in charge are ultra-orthodox, Puritan and patriarchal men who
degrade women in all spheres of life, both public and private. Dorota
Filipczak notes: “As every totalitarian regime, Gilead has its own ideology
that is corrupted version of the biblical way towards a better reality.”128 To
be more precise, the inspiration for Gilead’s religion is clearly defined, as
Atwood, criticising the 1980s American New Right, directly alludes to
seventeenth-century Puritanism with its literal interpretation of the Bible,
as the foundation of this ideology. The writer explains: “Puritan New
England was a theocracy, not a democracy; and the future society
proposed in The Handmaid’s Tale has the form of a theocracy, too, on the
principle that no society ever stays completely far from its roots. Also, the
most potent forms of dictatorship have always been those that have
imposed tyranny in the name of religion.”129 This Puritan foundation is
127
128
129
Atwood, “Writing Utopia,” 97.
also visible in the fact that Atwood dedicates her novel to Mary Webster,
“her own favourite ancestor, who was hanged as a witch in New England
in 1683 but who survived her hanging and went free,” and Perry Miller, “a
great scholar of the seventeenth-century Puritan history, [who] was
Atwood’s Director of American Studies at Harvard.”130 No wonder, then,
that Gilead is a theocratic country situated in the birthplace of both
American Puritanism and its statehood, i.e. in the New England area, with
today’s Massachusetts as its centre. However, apart from the historical
influences of Puritanism, in her novel Atwood underlines the connections
between religion and perverse sexuality as an outcome of the literal and
blind reading of the Bible. As a result, both the biased interpretation of the
Bible and using sexuality as a tool to maintain power strengthen the
superior position of men in contrast to the low status of women. Yet,
Gilead is a country with a huge underpopulation problem and, consequently,
women treated in openly biological terms seem indispensable, because only
women can get pregnant and give birth to children. In the Republic of
Gilead where in vitro fertilisation is out of the question for theological
reasons, this requires a sexual intercourse. The outcome of these two
interrelated conditions is a bizarre mixture of physicality and orthodox
religion that could be viewed as one of the most interesting aspects of the
novel.
Since Gilead is a theocracy, the ultimate core of its whole political
system, its corner stone, is the Bible, with the most crucial passages of the
Holy Book carefully selected by the privileged ones. In other words, there
is no free access to the Bible in Gilead. Offred ironically notes: “The Bible
is kept locked up, the way people once kept tea locked up, so the servants
wouldn’t steal it. It is an incendiary device: who knows what we’d make
of it, if we ever got our hands on it?”131 Dorota Filipczak comments:
“Locked in a special wooden box, [the Bible] becomes a totem of the
totalitarian system in every house. The Bible is a trapped text turned into a
lethal instrument because the regime makes it generate oppressive
laws.”132 It becomes clear that the Bible is a tool to maintain power, that it
is a device for the powerful to manipulate the powerless. Chris Ferns
states: “Religion serves as an effective instrument of control.”133 Religion
is used in Gilead in a way that is not only instrumental but also superficial
and false, as it actually “miserably lacks spirituality and benevolence.”134
130
131
132
133
134
56 Chapter Two
This is symbolically represented by the mechanical, inhuman attitude to

religion illustrated by the aforementioned Soul Scrolls—machines that
print out prayers: “there are five different prayers: for health, wealth, a
death, a birth, a sin. You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then
punch in your own number so your account will be debited, and punch the
number of times you want the prayer repeated.”135 Filipczak understands
this dehumanised approach to religiousness in the following way: “The
absurd situation proves that the sacred is completely withdrawn from life
in Gilead.”136 When it comes to the Bible itself, such a dehumanised and
political treatment of religion is additionally emphasised by the fact that
the careful selection of material that can be read to simple people helps
retain the patriarchal status quo. J. Brooks Bouson comments: “’Blessed
are the silent,’ according to the revised Gileadean Bible. In Gilead, men
have the ‘word’ and women are rendered speechless.”137 Speechlessness,
then, becomes the obligation of all women, and there is a harsh
punishment—amputation of the hand—for those, particularly the
handmaids, who openly express themselves. That is why Gilead’s political
and moral system is actually based on those passages of the Bible that
clearly define men as superior to women, who, in turn, are presented only
as breeding machines.
Consequently, the male authorities of Gilead use the underpopulation
problem as an excuse for implementing the state’s utterly misogynistic
politics based on the literal interpretation of the Bible. Selecting the
excepts from the book, they choose the ones which openly propagate the
patriarchal system. That is why they make the story of Jacob, Rachel and
Leah the core of their politics:
And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her
sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob’s
anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God’s stead, who
hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my
maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may
have children by her.138
This passage Atwood quotes as one of the epigraphs for the novel is just
the beginning of the biblical story that shows the origins of the surrogate
135
136
137
138
The Holy Bible. King James Version (Edinburgh: Collins, 1991), Genesis 30: 1–
3.
motherhood precedent. Additionally, the choice of this particular extract

justifies Gilead’s very name: “Named for a region in ancient Palestine,
Gilead is the place where Jacob and Laban ‘made a deal’ about Laban’s
daughters.”139 Finally, to a great degree it also explains the origins of
female inferiority in Gilead, since “[the state’s name] is firmly anchored in
patriarchal history.”140 Atwood explains:
The text they chose as their cornerstone is the story of Rachel and Leah,
the two wives of Jacob, and their baby competition. When they themselves
ran out of babies, they pressed their handmaids into service and counted
the babies as their own, thus providing a biblical justification for surrogate
motherhood, should anyone need one. Woman’s place, in the Republic of
Gilead—so named for the mountain where Jacob promised to his father-in-
law, Laban, that he would protect his two daughters—woman’s place is
strictly in the home.141
It is this very passage from the Bible that seems central to the entire novel.
It enables men to have children with their maids when their legal wives are
sterile—a situation that is definitely degrading both for the wives and the
handmaids, but not for the husbands. Offred sarcastically recounts:
It’s the usual story, the usual stories. God to Adam, God to Noah. Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. Then comes the mouldy old
Rachel and Leah stuff. Give me children or else I die. Am I in God’s stead,
who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid
Bilhah. She shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by
her. And so on and so forth.142
What happens here is a shift of perspective. It is now the then-mute

handmaid’s point of view that we have a chance to see. Instead of “the
powerless Bilhah [and] her story [that] is written for her by the collusion
of her mistress with the patriarch,”143 the biblical tale is retold by the
handmaid herself. Only then is the feminine aspect of such an attitude to
religion clearly visible. Women are deprived of their dignity. They are to
participate in the public and definitely humiliating mating ritual, while
male supremacy is even more emphasised.
In the most explicit and outrageous way, the perverse mixture of
religion and sexuality reveals itself in the novel through a number of
139
140
141
142
143
58 Chapter Two
rituals, which, taking their roots directly from the religious practices,
emphasise human physicality as well as men’s dominance over women.
The most visible example of these is the one known under the official
name of the Ceremony, which is inspired by the biblical passage
containing the aforementioned story of Jacob, Rachel and Leah. As in
most similar cases, the story is read by Gilead’s authorities not
figuratively, but literally as procreative intercourse, which all the more
underlines the repulsive mixture of sex and religion. As a political act, the
Ceremony involves not only the handmaid Offred playing the part of
Bilhah, her commander acting as a new version of Jacob, and the barren
wife Serena in the role of Rachel. Additionally, during the Ceremony, all
the other members of the Commander’s household have to be present, as
well. They include a chauffeur, a cook and a maid: “they need to be here,
they all need to be here. The Ceremony demands it. We are all obliged to
sit through this, one way or another.”144 The religious context is
underlined here: “intercourse ceremonies for Commanders and handmaids
can be termed ritualistic because they are sanctioned by the state, and are
normally preceded by a kind of religious service.”145 And still, the
Ceremony is an embarrassing and degrading occasion for all the unwilling
participants, but mostly for Offred and the Commander’s wife, Serena.
Occupying a higher position than Offred in the social hierarchy, Serena’s
dignity seems to suffer most. That is why the Commander’s very entrance
to the room where the ritual is going to take place changes into a kind of
an official procedure: “the Commander knocks at the door. The knock is
prescribed: the sitting room is supposed to be Serena Joy’s territory, he’s
supposed to ask permission to enter it. She likes to keep him waiting. It’s a
little thing, but in this household little things mean a lot.”146 What Serena
desperately performs here is an attempt to deprive this unbearably intimate
occurrence of any signs of intimacy and, consequently, emphasises its
public significance only: “the lights were on, as usual, since Serena Joy
always avoided anything that would have created an aura of romance or
eroticism. It was like being on an operating table, in the full glare; like
being on a stage.”147 It is a highly theatrical situation for both the women,
although they have to play completely different roles. Serena’s artificially
constructed image of a woman who considers herself better than others, as
well as her desperation to keep it, can be interpreted as a substitute for
dignity: something that she still believes she possesses. At the same time,
144
145
146
147
it is the feature that distinguishes her from Offred, who, at least from the
public point of view, has been long deprived of any traces of it. Quite
surprisingly, then, it all proves to the advantage of Offred, who has
literally nothing to lose. In this peculiar way, it is Serena who can be read
as the greatest victim of the whole situation: “Serena has begun to cry.
She’s trying not to make a noise. She’s trying to preserve her dignity, in
front of us. The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to
supress it is horrible. It’s like a fart in church.”148
Unlike Serena, who tries to find some rudiments of comfort by
clinging to them hopelessly, this is impossible in the case of Offred. The
protagonist relates one of the Ceremonies:
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’s doing. Copulating
too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one
is involved. It has nothing to do with passion or love or romance or any of
those other notions we used to titillate ourselves with. It has nothing to do
with sexual desire, at least for me.149
Distancing herself from the activity, Offred seems to seek help and
rationalisation in irony, but this is not enough. As she states on another
occasion: “I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure,”150
which makes the definition of Gilead’s sexual policy complete. At the
same time, her words demonstrate how profoundly Gilead’s male-
dominated system interferes in a woman’s privacy, for it is capable of
arousing such strong feelings of resignation and indifference. Offred
realises that she does not count as a human being, and it is only her body
that is of value in Gilead. What Gilead constitutes is a kind of an ultra-
macho state where only male needs are fulfilled, and where women are
there just to serve men in various degrading ways.
The Commander does not appear to feel comfortable during the
Ceremony, either. He somehow senses its awkwardness. The perverse
eroticism connected with the feeling of absolute power definitely enhances
his self-esteem. Nonetheless, the urge to fulfil this particular duty, both
intimate and public, intimidates him:
He look over us as if taking inventory. One kneeling woman in red, one

seated woman in blue, two in green, standing, a solitary man, thin-faced, in
148
149
150
60 Chapter Two
the background. He manages to appear puzzled, as if he can’t remember

how we all got in here. As if we are something he inherited, like a
Victorian pump organ, and he hasn’t figured out what to do with us.151
His supremacy over the women has its roots in the political and religious
system, which is symbolically emphasised by the fact that it is only the
Commander who, as a man, has free access to the Bible. Offred says: “He
has something we don’t have, he has the word.”152 Therefore, it is the
Commander who, as a part of the ritual, reads aloud the biblical story of
Jacob, Rachel and Leah to those he actually commands. He acts as a priest
in the old-new religion. Behind this façade of spirituality there hides a
combination of biology and culture, with the prolongation of the human
species and the confirmation of patriarchal superiority over women.
Nevertheless, his position, both political and personal, proves to be the
main source of his discomfort: “we watch him: every inch, every flicker.
To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have
them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, What’s he
going to do next? To have them sizing him up. To have them thinking, he
can’t do it, he won’t do it, he’ll have to do.”153 Offred’s words indicate
some kind of hidden power that she, as well as all the other females, have
over the Commander, and males in general. This is a power that does not
come from the Bible or religion. It is more sexual, physical, and it is this
kind of power that the Commander seems to subconsciously sense during
the Ceremony. Offred tries to convince her and her readers: “This state of
absence, of existing apart from the body, had been true of the Commander
too, I knew now.”154 However, no matter how distracting such thoughts
can be for the Commander, the female power that Offred refers to is still
vague and unreal in Gilead and its perverse politics.
Another religious ritual that contains in itself some elements of
sexuality is the Prayvaganza, which, additionally, serves the state’s
political purposes. Basically, the Prayvaganza is a ceremony of group
weddings among those who can get married in Gilead. It is a privilege
reserved only to the representatives of the highest classes of society, i.e.
those who deserve it: “during the Prayvaganza service, girls veiled in
white are given away to husbands appointed by the state.”155 The feeling
of love is not the point here because, as the Commander explains to
151
152
153
154
155
Offred: “This way [women] are protected, they can fulfil their biological
destinies in peace. With full support and encouragement. Arranged
marriages have always worked out as well, if not better.”156 This patriarchal
opinion about female destiny and inferiority has its roots in the Bible, too:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, Be fruitful,
and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”157 This is also the
passage that a commander leading the Prayvaganza refers to: “Let the
woman learn in silence with all subjection. For Adam was first formed,
then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived
was in transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved by childbearing,
if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.”158 Women’s
subordination is closely linked here with Gilead’s underpopulation problem.
Women are blamed for not giving birth to children, regardless of the
men’s procreative incapabilities. Dealing with underpopulation determines
all the state’s actions, even if at first sight they could be viewed as a
violation of past religious laws: “sometimes, though, for the women, [the
Prayvaganzas] are for a nun who recants. The old ones they send off to the
Colonies right away, but the young fertile ones they try to convert, and
when they succeed we all come here to watch them go through the
ceremony, renounce their celibacy, sacrifice it to the common good.”159
However, in this case, instead of a wedding, nuns undergo a kind of a
divorce ritual, whose central part is connected with annulling their vows of
chastity. Since “nuns are either deported or converted to serve as
handmaids,”160 their return to society never leads to an official marriage,
but means that they become handmaids and in this way contribute to the
wellbeing of the whole nation. The situation of nuns is another example of
Gilead’s attitude to religion. Everything is subordinated to politics,
whereas politics has its roots in religion. That is why Offred describes one
ceremony in the following way: “We’re off to the Prayvaganza, to
demonstrate how obedient and pious we are,”161 with the combination of
the words “obedient” and “pious” being very meaningful.
This male dominance as a direct representation of such politics seems
obvious during the less restricted conversations between Offred and the
Commander, when their relationship becomes more intimate, and when
156
157
The Holy Bible, Genesis 1: 27–28.
158
159
160
161
62 Chapter Two
Offred actually has no other choice but to be his lover. In a surprisingly

open way, the Commander explains the genesis of Gilead: “The problem
wasn’t only with the women. The main problem was with the men. There
was nothing for them any more. There was nothing for them to do. I mean
there was nothing for them to do with women.”162 His opinion corresponds
with what handmaids are taught during their preparation period in the Red
Centre: “Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more.
They only want one thing. It’s nature’s way. It’s God’s device. It’s the
way things are.”163 According to Gilead’s authorities, the excessively
liberal times before the emergence of the Republic of Gilead—with their
open and free way with sexuality—were responsible for the return to
ultimate orthodoxy that constitutes the surface of Gilead’s patriarchy: “the
spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like
roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and shoulders, on the street, in public,
and legs, not even stockings on them.”164 As Gilead’s politics seem to
suggest, women are partly responsible for their current situation, and the
way things are now is a punishment for their past lack of morality and
modesty. In fact, such rhetoric is just a way to retain power. “Gilead is
obsessed with the female body,”165 and only tries to hide behind the façade
of religiousness.
The next religious ritual whose aim is to humiliate and subordinate
women is the Salvaging, which can be described as a kind of a public
penance resulting in execution. Organised for women exclusively,
Salvagings are a political means to show the masses who is in power and,
consequently, to prevent any signs of disobedience. Offred bitterly notes:
“Women’s Salvagings are not frequent. There is less need for them. These
days we are so well behaved.”166 As Erika Gottlieb states: “Clearly, acts of
terror are no longer a means to an end; they have become the very
language in which the elite in power addresses the population.”167 This
political cause is even emphasised by the fact that not only handmaids are
forced to take part in this quasi-religious ritual, but all the women from a
given administrative area. However, even if the rite is carried out for
females who are inferior to men, there is still a visible hierarchy among
them: “we take our places in the standard order: Wives and their daughters
on the folding wooden chairs placed towards the back, Econowives and
162
163
164
165
166
167
Marthas around the edges and on the library steps, and Handmaids at the
front, where everyone can keep an eye on us. We don’t sit on chairs, but
kneel.”168 The central part of the Salvaging resembles an Old Testament
trial over sinners, although in an improved form. Aware of the power of
imagination, the Gilead authorities do not reveal the offences of the
Salvagers—as the accused and sentenced handmaids are called—to the
general public. This additionally strengthens the feeling of terror. Aunt
Lydia explains:
In the past it has been a custom to precede the actual Salvagings with a
detailed account of the crimes of which the prisoners stand convicted.
However, we have found that such a public account, especially when
televised, is invariably followed by a rash, if I may call it that, an outbreak
I should say, of exactly similar crimes. So we have decided in the best
interests of all to discontinue this practice.169
Even though the official explanation points at the future well-being of the
whole nation, the seed of uncertainty is sowed among the handmaids. This
results in numerous speculations, mostly connected to the nature of the
Salvagers’ relations with their Commanders. What is comprehensible
given the basic assumptions of totalitarian and patriarchal Gilead, the
accused women are not given the right to speak last words and the
Salvaging ends with their public execution: “the white bag placed over the
head, the woman helped up onto the high stool as if she’s being helped up
the steps of a bus, steadied there, the noose adjusted delicately around the
neck, like a vestment, the stool kicked away.”170 According to the religious
authorities, although the female sinners have to pay for their wrongs, now
at least they are salvaged.
Sometimes, however, Salvagings are followed by a Particicution, a
ritual in which a mixture of politically inspired religiousness with perverse
sexuality is even more visible. As it is explained from the perspective of
Professor Pieixoto in the “Historical Notes” section, “it was not only a
particularly horrifying and effective way of ridding yourself of subversive
elements, but that it would also act as a steam value for the female
elements in Gilead.”171 Particicution, then, is another means of restoring
political order in Gilead, this time giving women—mostly handmaids—a
barbaric way to take revenge on a representative of the male sex. The
168
169
170
171
64 Chapter Two
ritual’s whole idea has its roots from the Bible: “if a man find a betrothed
damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man
only that lay with her shall die.”172 The sexual element is very important,
as a Particicution is a chance given to women to release their long hidden
anxieties, frustrations and tensions. During the ceremony, cleverly
encouraged by the authorities, represented by Aunt Lydia, they all face a
man accused of rape, with whom they can do whatever they want, or to be
more precise, what has been intended by the state:
It’s true, there is a bloodlust; I want to tear, gouge, rend. We jostle

forward, our heads turn from side to side, our nostrils flare, sniffing death,
we look at one another, seeing the hatred. There’s a surge forward, like a
crowd at a rock concert in the former times, when the doors opened, that
urgency coming like a wave through us. The air is bright with adrenaline,
we are permitted anything and this is freedom.173
Particicution is a substitute for freedom. It enables women to murder a

man who symbolically represents the whole detested sex in the most
outrageous way, by literarily tearing him apart: “he has become an it.”174
Nonetheless, it is not clear whether the men are actually rapists. Very
likely they could victims of the system, too. Pieixoto comments:
“Scapegoats have been notoriously useful throughout history, and it must
have been most gratifying for these Handmaids, so rigidly controlled at
other times, to be able to tear a man apart with their hands every once in a
while.”175 Consequently, there is a clear political function: “the rite of
Particicution and other legalised murders that put an end to otherness mark
out Gilead’s way towards perfect uniformity.”176 The raw brutality of this
ritual, however, may suggest some animal instincts in the handmaids,
which are subdued by the regime in everyday situations and come to the
surface during the ceremony. By leading the ceremony in this particular
way, the authorities also point at bestiality as the reputedly innate feature
of all females, at the same time validating the need for patriarchy. What
they imply is that women are just animals driven by such a primitive
instinct as lust for sex and murder, unable to control themselves. It is then
religion that provides them with the opportunity to overcome these brutish
urges. Nevertheless, the real mechanism seems the reversal of the above
manipulation: Gilead’s male authorities treat religion in the most
172
The Holy Bible, Deuteronomy 22: 25.
173
174
175
176
instrumental way, serving them only to retain power and the current state
of affairs, in which women are always subordinate.
***
Another representation of the tensions between religion and sexuality

in The Handmaid’s Tale are the relations between men and women, as
exemplified by Offred. In broader terms, it may seem that male superiority
in Gilead is ambiguous, because men’s preoccupation with the female
body can become a weapon in women’s hands. First of all, Gilead’s
patriarchy is politically unjust in the respect that only the privileged have
permission to marry (and consequently, to have legal sex), and only high
officials of the state can possess their handmaids—a rule that stems from
the religious roots of the state. This more or less limits the number of men
that can have sex with women, which somehow violates the sexual status
quo that the state tries to impose on its citizens (excluding women, who
are not considered citizens in the legal meaning of the word). This
situation, at least potentially, gives more power to women, who can use
their bodies, this forbidden fruit of sorts, to manipulate men to achieve
their goals. This fact also makes the privileged male sex afraid of the
females’ sexuality. This is how Offred narrates a meeting with the Angels,
young male guards who are not allowed to start relationships with women:
As we walk away I know they’re watching, these two men who aren’t yet
permitted to touch women. They touch with their eyes instead and I move
my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like
thumbing your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held
out of reach, and I’m ashamed of myself for doing it, because none of this
is the fault of these men, they’re too young. Then I find I’m not ashamed
after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.177
That is why, at least to some extent, women retain the power that they
used to have over men in pre-Gilead times. This “new liberty,” as Fiona
Tolan calls it,178 partly takes its optimistic meaning from the fact that the
patriarchal state of Gilead has officially got rid of sexually abusive
phenomena, such as pornography and prostitution. Paradoxically,
however, the prison-like life in Gilead helps women awaken their gender
consciousness and sexuality. This is especially true of the handmaids, who
are extraordinary representatives of the new society. They are both sacred,
177
178
66 Chapter Two
because they can prolong the existence of the state and the nation by
giving birth to children, and dirty, because they do so by copulating with
other women’s husbands, committing the sin of adultery.
The way the handmaids, including Offred, look suggests their ambiguous
position in society. The most characteristic element of their outfit is the
colour red, associated with sexuality and eroticism: “I get up out of the
chair, advance my feet into the sunlight, in their red shoes, flat-heeled to
save the spine and not for dancing. The red gloves are lying on the bed. I
pick them up, pull them onto my hands, finger by finger. Everything
except the wings around my face is red.”179 Eroticism mixes here with a
kind of religious martyrdom. The handmaids are destined to play their
roles publically rather than in private: “the sexual object for male
consumption and the marginalised woman who is shunned and despised
by other women, the handmaid is the good/bad woman, the saintly
prostitute.”180 Such an interpretation finds its sophistically ironic reflection
when the Commander takes Offred on an illegal date to Jezebel’s: a top-
secret vintage brothel, established for the highest officials of patriarchal
Gilead. Here, Offred literally plays the role of a prostitute. She has to
disguise herself to match all the other women present there:
The women are tropical, they are dressed in all kinds of bright festive gear.
Some of them have on outfits like mine, feathers and glister, cut high up
the thighs, low over the breasts. Some are in olden-days lingerie, shortie
nightgowns, baby-doll pyjamas, the occasional see-through negligee. Some
are in bathing suits, one-piece or bikini. It’s like a masquerade party.181
Indeed, a tragic masquerade it is, where men demonstrate the power they
have over women and their disregard for the political and religious system
they represent and constitute. Additionally, the biblical connotations of the
house’s name need explaining. Queen Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, king of
north Israel circa ninth century BC, was responsible for dispatching her
husband’s great enemy, Naboth. She also inspired her husband to abandon
the worship of Yahweh, because she was a follower of Baal, a minor
Semitic deity. For these deeds she was condemned: “And of Jezebel also
spake the Lord, saying, The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of
Jerusalem.”182 What is more, besides being viewed as a female
manipulator and false prophet, Jezebel is very often interpreted as an early
179
180
181
182
The Holy Bible, 1 Kings, 21: 23.
incarnation of the femme fatale, a fallen woman, a symbol of sexual

promiscuity.183 However, the use of the name Jezebel in The Handmaid’s
Tale becomes even more significant with reference to Moira—a woman
who has no other choice but to become a prostitute—and Offred, a saintly
prostitute herself. Consequently, Offred and the Commander’s visit to the
brothel adds one more layer to the already complex interpretation of a
handmaid. She is a tragic saviour of humankind, and must occupy the
margins of society. The combination of sex and religion in her public
identity is too close to be fully understood.
No wonder that Offred, just like all the handmaids, embodies a
peculiar combination of the sacred and profane. The first notion can be
understood as a set of public and biological functions resulting in a
saviour-like quality of life-giving in underpopulated Gilead, whereas the
second one stands for the openly sexual nature of her vocation. Offred
appears to be fully aware of the embarrassing otherness that she
represents, which she gradually accepts and learns to use as an advantage.
This acceptance, in turn, leads her to question the actual religiousness of
the Republic, which is most visible in her own version of the Lord’s
Prayer:
My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within.

I wish you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean. But You will
do as well as anything.
I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me get
through it, please. Though maybe it’s not Your doing; I don’t believe for
an instant that what’s going on out there is what You meant.
Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on, maybe I’d rather
not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know. The Fall was a fall from
innocence to knowledge.
Deliver us from evil.
Then there’s Kingdom, power, and glory. It takes a lot to believe in
those right now. But I’ll try it anyway. In Hope, as they say on the
gravestones.184
Based on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Offred’s version contains

a number of significant alterations, making it blasphemous. First of all, it
183
The character of Jezebel has entered pop culture as well—the figure appears in
the cinema (Jezebel from 1938, directed by William Wyler), and in music: e.g.
songs by Frankie Laine (a big hit in 1951, written by Wayne Shanklin), Sade
(Promise, 1985), Iron and Wine (Woman King EP, 2005), and Depeche Mode
(Sounds of the Universe, 2009), to enumerate just the most famous ones.
184
68 Chapter Two
changes the very beginning of the most canonical of all Christian prayers:
“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom
come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.”185 Unlike the original,
according to Offred God’s kingdom is not on earth but within her, as,
probably, within every human being. She rebels against viewing Gilead as
the earthly counterpart of heaven. Most importantly, she seems to refuse to
transform her intimate and private sphere of life into a public matter,
which in Gilead is the outcome of the perverse marriage of religion and
sexuality. This kind of disbelief in humanity mixes in her prayer with a
desire to believe in some kind of an absolute, no matter how much the
very idea of a god is distorted by people who consider themselves
righteous and divinely-inspired: “she refuses to give up hope in her
anguished version of the Lord’s Prayer.”186 At the same time, she treats the
concept of hope with a suspicion and an irony that clearly reflect her own
difficult situation as a prisoner incarcerated by both her sex and the state
religion.
***
Another significant issue in the analysis of the way religion and

sexuality are interrelated in The Handmaid’s Tale are the relations
between Offred and the men who, for numerous reasons and in various
periods of her life, become important for her, determining her given public
and private status. These men include Luke, her partner in pre-Gilead
times, now dead; the Commander, with whom Gilead’s political system
forces her to have sex and coexist in a parody of a family unit; and Nick,
the Commander’s chauffer and bodyguard, who eventually becomes
Offred’s lover. Interestingly enough, all these men seem somehow
interrelated, with Offred as their common denominator: “all three men
merge, and this merging requires us to reassess supposed distinctions
among husbands, lovers, and commanders.”187 What is more, the number
is not accidental. It clearly refers to the Holy Trinity, at the same time
underlining the novel’s perverse and profane interplay with one of the
most important dogmas of Christianity. In Atwood’s re-reading of the
trinity, the Commander plays the role of God the Father, because he is the
oldest and he embodies the biblical concept of patriarchy in its fullest way.
Luke is interpreted as the Holy Ghost, now absent from Offred’s life in
Gilead, but in pre-Gilead times the father of her child. Finally, Nick takes
185
The Holy Bible, Luke, 11: 2.
186
187
Miner, “Trust Me,” 26.
the role of Jesus Christ, partly because of his quasi-parental connection to

the Commander, and partly because of the fact that he seems to act as
Offred’s saviour at the end of the novel. Additionally, in all these three
female–male relations, the idea of love, both physical and spiritual, seems
the most crucial issue, although it realises itself in different modes.
Chronologically, the first man in Offred’s life is Luke, her partner in
pre-Gilead times, the father of her daughter but also married to another
woman. After he dies during an unsuccessful attempt to escape from
Gilead, Offred tends to idealise him, considering Luke the greatest love of
her life, and even expecting him to miraculously reappear to rescue her.
Therefore, we can interpret Luke as Atwood’s blasphemous parody of the
Holy Ghost, where religion is as important as sexuality, because it is Luke
who is responsible for impregnating Offred, just like in the case of the
Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary. Additionally, since Luke is no longer
alive, he does not take part in Offred’s life in Gilead, which makes him
appear mythical. This, in turn, has a major influence on the way he is
perceived by Offred, because her deep affection together with his absence
in her life seem to blind her. She continues to ignore Luke’s misogynistic
features, which other female characters in the pre-Gilead period notice.
For instance, her feminist mother openly calls Luke a “chauvinist pig.”188
Additionally, as women’s rights are being more and more limited and
violated, Offred loses her job and access to her credit card for the benefit
of her male partner (now only he can dispose of her money). Luke does
not seem to encourage her to rebel against this degrading situation
actively. In a tricky way he takes advantage of the new situation, saying:
“you know I’ll always take care of you.”189 Sometimes Offred realises the
fact that real love means something completely different to her than it does
to Luke. In his case love is always connected to the sexist idea of power:
He doesn’t mind this, I thought. He doesn’t mind it at all. Maybe he

even likes it. We are not each other’s, any more. Instead, I am his.
So Luke: what I want to ask you now, what I need to know is, Was I
right. Because we never talked about it. By the time I could have done that,
I was afraid to. I couldn’t afford to lose you.190
When it comes to Offred, then, in such moments of clarity she appears to

be the victim of her own delusions. She sacrifices her female individuality
for the sake of a peaceful relationship that seems utterly patriarchal. Luke,
188
189
190
70 Chapter Two
on the other hand, demonstrates a terrifying tendency, a hypothesis that the

urge to use patriarchal power over a woman can be too overwhelming and
tempting for a man to simply ignore it: “as we learn more about Luke, we
realise that he likes old ideas as well.”191 By staying passive and
discouraging, he takes advantage of Gilead’s religion and discriminatory
attitude to sexuality, which results in more or less open misogyny.
Madonne Miner thus likens Luke to the Commander, calling both of them
“two male characters who mirror [each other]; structurally, these two are
twins.”192
Technically speaking, the Commander is another married man that
Offred has sex with, even though the circumstances are quite different.
Although this perverse and degrading relationship is a direct outcome of
the sexual and religious politics of the state of Gilead, Offred admits
bitterly: “The fact is that I’m his mistress.”193 Besides various biblical and
religious resemblances—“The Commander is also Jacob, the father of
Israel, the false god, the anti-Christ, and, significantly, the dispenser of the
patriarchal ‘word,’”194—it is the parallel with the Holy Trinity that seems
of the greatest importance here. The Commander takes the position of God
the Father, the source of power, knowledge and intellectual supremacy.
This is symbolically displayed during the few private conversations Offred
has with him: “Women can’t add, he said once, jokingly. When I asked
him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don’t
make four. What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. Just one
and one and one and one, he said.”195 The ostensible female inability to
think logically becomes one of the cornerstones of Gilead, explaining at
the same time men’s absolute leadership, and women’s frailty. This is yet
another aspect that links the Commander with Luke, because: “like Luke,
the Commander has control over Offred’s life.”196 Nevertheless, in
comparison to Luke, the Commander seems to be sterile, no matter how
blasphemous it would sound, because according to the patriarchal policy
of Gilead, “there is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not
officially.”197 Additionally, with the gradual change of his attitude to
Offred, he tends to take the role of a father-like figure rather than a lover.
Consequently, in their relationship sexuality recedes into the background,
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
and the first sign of this process is the game of Scrabble that the
Commander plays with Offred during their intimate encounter. Offred
recalls: “This is one of the most bizarre things that’s happened to me,
ever;”198 and: “To be asked to play Scrabble, instead [of having sex], as if
we were an old married couple, or two children, seemed kinky in the
extreme, a violation too in its own way.”199 The oddity of this activity is
emphasised by the fact that in Gilead reading, or dealing with letters/words
in any other way, is strictly prohibited for women, whereas females, or at
least handmaids, have relatively easy access to sex in excess, regardless of
the fact that it is forced intercourse. Therefore, the game of Scrabble
becomes a kind of forbidden fruit, the equivalent of what sex was in pre-
Gilead times, a severe violation of the state’s regulations. At the same
time—and it is also worth recalling here the aforementioned visit to a
state-run brothel—the Commander starts to appear as a pathetic little man,
overwhelmed by the official politics of religion and sexuality that he is
actually responsible for, but does not fully comprehend.
The last man in Offred’s life is Nick, the Commander’s chauffer and
bodyguard, but also a secret member of the resistance group called
Underground Femaleroad, which Offred learns only at the end of her
narration. As such, he is directly responsible for rescuing Offred from the
hands of the Commander, his wife, and Gilead’s political system. When
security forces appear to apprehend Offred, “he comes over, close to me,
whispers. ‘It’s all right. It’s Mayday. Go with them.’”200 At the same time,
he becomes her mythical and long awaited saviour, her own equivalent of
Jesus Christ: “unlike Luke and the Commander, Nick risks his own life to
save that of Offred.”201 Nick’s resemblance to Jesus is strengthened when
we realise that it is also Nick who Offred falls in love with, bringing an
imitation of happiness and hope to her miserable life. Therefore, he is the
one who substitutes for Luke in Offred’s pursuit for real love, and because
of this, she also tends to idealise him while living in a world of her own
fantasies. In other words, “Offred makes do with what is available, and
falls in love with Nick.”202 This is clearly visible in the numerous attempts
she makes to describe their first close encounter, all of them highly
unreliable. She ends with the simple conclusion that “this is a delusion, of
course.”203 More importantly, however, due to her feelings for Nick,
198
199
200
201
202
203
72 Chapter Two
Offred again sinks into passivity—just like in Luke’s times, she relies on
her new lover absolutely, almost forgetting about her female personality.
She admits: “The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape, cross the
border of freedom. I want to be here, with Nick, where I can get at him.”204
Like most people at the beginning of a love affair, but also like those
beguiled by religion with its miracles and illusions of eternal happiness,
she subconsciously decides to live on in the world of her own fantasies,
especially because the real world has so little to offer to her. Nick, then,
appears an ambivalent saviour since his sacrifice (never as full as in the
case of Jesus) stupefies Offred and results in her full submission to him.
This once again demonstrates that Gilead’s politics mixes sexuality with
religion in such a way that one of these factors is always used as a means
to achieve the other.
Altogether, Offred’s relationships with these three men, all of them
different and similar at the same time, show that love, real love, is a
dangerous thing, because it can easily become a device of manipulation,
especially when used simultaneously with religion. Love is also connected
with human fantasies, and as such can be used as a tool of exploitation,
too. This becomes especially true in the state of Gilead, where the male
authorities openly state that “love is not the point.”205 Women themselves
do not seem to be the point to them either, as the only choice women in
Gilead have is either to yield and accept their inferior position, or exist on
the margins of the repressive society. Female destiny is to serve males,
because love—when cleverly manipulated—can also become a tool of the
state’s misogynistic politics. Therefore, Gilead’s politics are utterly based
on privileging one sex group at the cost of the other: “‘you can’t cheat
Nature,’ [the Commander] says. ‘Nature demands variety, for men. It
stands to reason, it’s part of the procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s
plan.’”206 Women, then, are treated as objects, mainly in the sexual and
biological sphere of life, and the background for such proceedings is
provided by religion, with the idea of patriarchy as its innate feature.
***
Sex and religion are definitely the two spheres of human existence that
constitute the core of the alarming dynamics as presented in The
Handmaid’s Tale. The novel’s configuration of religion and sexuality
(though the role of environmental issues should not be underestimated) is
204
205
206
perfectly illustrated by Dorota Filipczak. She states that “the barrenness of

people and the decay of nature are reflected in Atwood’s Gilead. Thus,
there is no external sign of divine blessing in the spurious paradise.”207
When combined in unreasonable proportions, religion and sexuality can
become dangerous devices in the strategies of gaining and maintaining
power. They turn into a political tool of repression, which is always
connected with the process of victimising one particular group of people at
the cost of another. Aware of such tendencies, Atwood demonstrates that
mixing sexuality with religion can have ambiguous outcomes, as it is most
visible in the case of the religion-inspired public rituals, as well as the
complicated relationships between men and women. Most importantly, she
knows that religion and sexuality constitute a highly explosive
combination. She states: “sexual relations in extreme Dystopias usually
exhibit some form of slavery or extreme sexual repression;”208 and:
“modern Dystopias have not been uninfluenced by various literary
versions of Hell, especially those of Dante and Milton, which in turn go
right back to the Bible, that indispensable sourcebook of Western
literature.”209 This explosive quality in reference to the mixture of religion
and sexuality can be perfectly summarised by Moira in the language game.
When forced to sing the popular spiritual “There is a Balm in Gilead,” a
hymn that has even more significance in this theocratic state, she responds
by saying “There is a Bomb in Gilead.”210 It is this bomb, understood in
social, cultural and civilizational terms, to which Atwood alludes. In the
situation depicted by Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale, i.e. when men use
religion to exploit women, there cannot be anything good for either men or
women. Both paradoxically and sadly, there are no victors there.
Technically speaking, each bomb’s destiny is to explode, therefore
Atwood proposes a warning, suggesting that political manipulations in
religion and human sexuality can result in tragedy.
207
208
209
Atwood, “Writing Utopia,” 93–94.
210
CHAPTER THREE
ORYX AND CRAKE,

OR THE CASTLE OF SCIENTISTS
we ran west
wanting
a place of absolute
unformed beginning
(Margaret Atwood, “Migration: C.P.R.,” Poems 1965–1975, 25)
***
In your pockets the thin women

hang on their hooks, dismembered
Around my neck I wear

the head of the beloved, pressed
in the metal retina like a picked flower.
(Margaret Atwood, “Hesitations Outside the Door,” Eating Fire, 131)
***
You saunter beside me, talking

of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood.
(Margaret Atwood, “After the Flood, We,” Eating Fire, 3)

76 Chapter Three
Science and the Disregard for Morality

Oryx and Crake, the first instalment of the MaddAddam trilogy,1 is
Atwood’s first novel in which the scientific layer seems to play the most
important, even predominant role.2 Although the writer’s (anti)-scientific
and pro-environmental attitude is easily detectable in her earlier novels
(The Handmaid’s Tale discussed above), it is only in Oryx and Crake that
it finds its full realisation. After a few years of writing rather realistic
novels (focused on the present or the past), Atwood returns here to the
literary genre that seems to be naturally linked with the notion and critique
of science, i.e. dystopia, or speculative fiction. Being perfectly aware of
the book’s generic affinity with The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood explains
the genesis of Oryx and Crake in the following way:
Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a
science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no
teleportation, no Martians. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, it invents
nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent. Every novel
begins with a what if and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx
and Crake is simply, What 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? Writers write about what worries them, and the world of Oryx
and Crake is what worries me now. It’s not a question of our inventions—
all human inventions are merely tools—but of what might be done with
them; for no matter how high the tech, Homo sapiens sapiens remains at
heart what he’s been for tens of thousands of years—the same emotions,
the same preoccupations.3
Hence, it is clear that the same way as scientific inventions are just devices
in people’s hands, so is the genre of speculative dystopia for Atwood.
Moreover, a similar kind of thinking can be justifiably applied to her
1
The MaddAddam trilogy is the most common unofficial title of the collection of
the three novels (apart from Oryx and Crake, they are The Year of the Flood and
MaddAddam), although the Oryx and Crake trilogy is also in use.
2
An interesting pop-culture context appears here. The novel constitutes one of the
reference points for the album Shaking the Habitual, released in 2013 by the
Swedish avant-garde eletro-rock duo The Knife, e.g. it contains two songs—or
rather interludes—entitled “Crake” and “Oryx.” Thematically, the whole album
deals with the issues of feminism and queer theories mixed with environmentalism.
All of them, it is easy to notice, are close to Atwood’s interests.
3
Margaret Atwood, “Writing Oryx and Crake,” in Writing with Intent: Essays,
Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005 (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers,
2005), 285–86.
Oryx and Crake, or the Castle of Scientists 77
interest in the topics of science: it is just a tool that can be used for good or
evil purposes. It can either advance human progress, or be responsible for
mankind’s annihilation. Human beings decide how to use it and, consequently,
are responsible for what can be done with it.
In Oryx and Crake, Atwood tells the story of Jimmy/Snowman, an
apocalypse survivor recounting the events of the years directly before the
biological catastrophe. In his teenage years in the Compounds, highly
modern and strictly guarded areas inhabited by the elite of the society (i.e.
scientists), Jimmy has a close friend, Glenn/Crake, a brilliant scientist-to-
be, disgusted by the decadent, corporate, brutality-driven and overpopulated
world in which he lives. Adult Crake, a literary incarnation of a
Frankenstein-like mad scientist, decides to put an end to all this mess by
destroying the old order of things and proposing a totally new version of
the world. In the Paradice Project, as he calls his grand enterprise, he
manages to achieve his goal by inventing a fatal virus that kills (almost) all
human beings, and creating a biologically enhanced human species—
noble savages perfect in every way—that are to replace the already
annihilated people. According to Crake’s concept, his clones, who are less
intelligent and speculative than mankind, are still better equipped to live in
the adverse circumstances of the post-apocalypse world thanks to their
biological modifications. For example, male urine prevents the attacks of
fierce animals. Thus, the process of urinating becomes a new type of a
ritual undergone twice a day. Moreover, they can cure their physical
wounds by purring and they eat vegetables and caecotrophs “consisting as
they do of semi-digested herbage, discharged through the anus and re-
swallowed two or three times a week.”4 These are just a few examples of
the way they are carefully designed by Crake. As he says: “Woodworking,
hunting, high finance, war, and golf would no longer be options,”5
emphasising the fact that the Crakers—because that is what they are called
by Jimmy/Snowman—have to deal with a far more malevolent situation
that their predecessors. Atwood’s exploitation of dystopian fiction is then
double: her novel is set both before and after the man-made bio-ecological
apocalypse. The world before its ending is the world of the near,
unspecified future, although we can detect in it many objects and trends
that we are already familiar with: technology, mass consumerism,
degradation of the environment, experiments in bioengineering, etc.
Definitely, it is contemporary genetic engineering together with the
violation of the natural environment that constitute her most vital subject-
4
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 158.
5
Atwood, Oryx, 155.
78 Chapter Three
matter: “in Oryx and Crake, questions of genetic predisposition and

cultural experience are examined more explicitly than in any other Atwood
novel.”6 In other words, the way bioengineering is envisioned in the novel
requires a closer investigation.
Probably the most striking realisation of the concept of bioengineering
can be seen in the various new transgenic beings created by the scientists
of Atwood’s future. The splices vary from an unimportant species of giant
butterflies—“the ones [Jimmy] was looking at had wings the size of
pancakes and were shocking pink, and were clustering all over one of the
purple shrubs,”7 pet-like rakunks (a hybrid of raccoons and skunks), and
rather dangerous wolvogs (vicious wolves that look like friendly, domestic
dogs), to more morally-disturbing pigoons—huge pigs with human-tissue
organs in their bodies:
The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof

human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host—organs that
transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off
attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there were more
strains every year. A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon
kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were
perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time. Such a
host animal could be reaped of its extra kidneys; then, rather than being
destroyed, it could keep on living and grow more organs.8
As Atwood states in an interview with Danielle Groen: “As far as

inventing new animals, or using pigs to grow kidneys—that’s starting to
happen now. They’ve broken the code. Whereas when I wrote Oryx and
Crake, they hadn’t quite figured out how to get past the rejection factor.
So ‘What next?’ I say.”9 Additionally, what Atwood depicts in her novel is
the violation of the traditional/natural status quo, where the popular saying
“we are what we eat” gains a completely new meaning, both terrifying and
ironic (in gallows humour, also typical of Atwood), suggesting at the same
time that ours is a veiled quasi-cannibal culture that disregards both human
and animal genetic material. As Jimmy’s mother notes sarcastically:
“That’s all we need. More people with the brains of pigs. Don’t we have
enough of those already?”10 And the course of the novel shows that she is
6
7
Atwood, Oryx, 200.
8
Atwood, Oryx, 22.
9
Danielle Groen, “Margaret Atwood Gets Her Payback,” review of The Year of
the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, Chatelaine 82 (2009): 221.
10
Atwood, Oryx, 56.
right, because in the post-apocalyptic world pigoons seem to be the

greatest danger to Snowman’s life, mainly due to their quasi-human
intelligence and insatiable appetite for food. In one episode Atwood
creates: “seven pigoons have materialised from nowhere. They’re staring
at him, ears forward. Are they the same as yesterday’s? As he watches,
they begin to amble in his direction.”11 The questionable morality of such
playful and irresponsible scientific processes—the “overlapping discourses
of power and ethics,” as Fiona Tolan terms this situation12—is visualised
in a conversation between Jimmy’s parents. Although they both work as
geneticists, it is only Jimmy’s mother who has some doubts that later on
force her to rebel against the whole system. She challenges her husband,
saying: “Be that as it may, there’s research and there’s research. What
you’re doing—this pig brain thing. You’re interfering with the building
blocks of life. It’s immoral. It’s sacrilegious.”13 The whole problem
obviously shows the contemporary tendency in genetic engineering that
could be characterised by the growing ethical disregard for both the source
and the outcome of the experiments. This finds its reflection in Jean
François Lyotard’s words when he defines postmodern science as a
phenomenon “producing not the known, but the unknown.”14 According to
Margaret Atwood: “science is really just a way of describing the world.
What it is not, is something that can give us the answer to essentially
metaphysical and religious questions, such as why are we here?”15 This
statement clearly highlights the discrepancy between science itself—a
theoretical set of rules to understand the mechanics of the world—and
both its practical realisation as well as implementation in real life. Two
sides of the same coin, as one could say.
Science constitutes one of the grand subject-matters of Oryx and
Crake, but also its direct literary source. Atwood’s artistic vision of this
human field of activities is detailed and highly credible. The writer
describes the origin of her 2003 novel in a way that highlights not only the
thematic importance of science, but also the quasi-scientific technique of
her work:
11
Atwood, Oryx, 267.
12
Tolan, Margaret, 279.
13
Atwood, Oryx, 57.
14
Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), 60.
15
Christopher Bantick, Christopher, “Atwood Tackles Future Fears,” review of
Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, Sunday Tasmanian, November 16, 2003,
accessed November 6, 2010, http://-web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail ED 11/2010.
80 Chapter Three
I’d been clipping small items from the back pages of newspapers for years,
and noting with alarm that trends derided ten years ago as paranoid
fantasies had become possibilities, then actualities. The rules of biology are
as inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die.
No animal can exhaust its resource base and hope to survive. Human
civilizations are subject to the same law.16
Additionally, science seems to play a very important role in the two

opening epigraphs of the novel, where a kind of a dichotomy can be
noticed. The first epigram is a quotation from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, the second one from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. This
choice of sources, besides contrasting a female point of view with a male
one, clearly emphasises the clash between Swift’s harsh critique of the age
of reason that stands behind the modern beginnings of science, with
Woolf’s emotionality and desperate human ethics. Consequently, the
novel’s reality consists of two separate realms that seem to contradict and
complement each other: dehumanised science vs. human morality, looking
into the future vs. dwelling in the past, Crake’s numbers vs. Jimmy’s
words. It is, then, the usage of the doubles that is the core of the novel’s
narrative, although the pairs she creates are not simple binary oppositions
where we can easily point at the positive one and discredit its reversal.
Atwood’s technique is far more ambiguous, which can be easily observed
in the way she deals in the book with, actually, two dystopias: the ironic
late capitalist world of today and the post-apocalyptic wilderness. Even
though such a treatment of the doubles enables the writer to remain
ostensibly objective and distanced from the described events, it appears
clear that she has her own opinion, which she wants not only to present,
but also to advocate.
First of all, the doubles technique realises itself on the level of
characterisation of the two male protagonists, especially visible in their
relation to science. Jimmy, representing the old world of ethics and the
power of the word, is contrasted with Crake, his complete alter ego, a man
of numbers deprived of any traditionally understood morality and
preoccupied with the possibilities of science: “in Jimmy’s world, scientists
act as God while ‘word people’ like Jimmy act as their preachers.”17
Jimmy stands for the dying realm of language and arts, for which there is
no room in the new reality: “‘when any civilization is dust and ashes,’
16
Atwood, “Writing Oryx,” 285.
17
Shannon Hengen, “Moral/Environmental Debt in Payback and Oryx and Crake,”
in Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Bind Assassin, Oryx and Crake,
edited by J. Brooks Bouson (London: Continuum, 2010), 136.
[Jimmy] said, ‘art is all that’s left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative
structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You
have to admit it.’”18 Perhaps a bit pathetically, Jimmy tries to defend the
old values. Crake’s opinion on the arts is cold, scientifically sober, and
sarcastic at the same time:
People can amuse themselves any way they like. If they want to play with
themselves in public, whack off over doodling, scribbling, and fiddling, it’s
fine with me. Anyway it serves a biological purpose. The male frog, in
mating season makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to
the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more
powerful frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs—it’s been
documented—discover that if they position themselves in empty
drainpipes, the pipe acts as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears
much larger than it really is. So that’s what art is, for the artist. An empty
drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.”19
Jimmy does not want to—and cannot—agree fully with Crake, and thus he
endeavours to resist his friend’s approach, which seems unjustly degrading
to the arts and the whole of the humanities: “he compiled lists of old
words—words of a precision and suggestiveness that no longer had a
meaningful application in today’s world. He’d developed a strangely
tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in
the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.”20 In other words, it is in
language that Jimmy builds his passive resistance not only to Crake, but
also to the whole culture preoccupied with the prospects of science that he
despises. What Jimmy rebels against is this mechanistic view of humanity
that Crake supports, in which, “[the latter one] dismisses the value of
cultural production, tracing art and romance back through a biological
imperative to procreate.”21
Not surprisingly, it is Crake who becomes both the science-obsessed
perpetrator and the key factor of the future apocalypse: “a demonic figure
perhaps, like H. G. Wells’s Dr Moreau, but also a failed visionary like
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose utopian project results in the near
extinction of the human race.”22 The obvious similarities between Crake
and Doctor Frankenstein make Atwood’s character a kind of a variation on
Shelley’s famous protagonist: “both Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and
18
Atwood, Oryx, 167.
19
Atwood, Oryx, 167–68.
20
Atwood, Oryx, 195.
21
22
82 Chapter Three
Atwood’s Crake are brilliant and ambitious young men who are guilty of
pride and of dangerously misguided thinking, a split between reason or
abstract thinking and emotion. In each case disaster follows.”23 Richard
Gerber describes the notion of the mad scientist that finds its first
prominent literary representation in the character of Dr. Frankenstein in
the following way:
The sinister powerful insane scientist has become a favourite theme of

popular imagination, and the utopian fantasies are full of them. They may
not be insane from the ‘scientific’ point of view, of course, but from the
merely human one. Just like the devil, the sorcerer, and the witch in former
ages, nowadays the scientist, preferably the insane scientist, lurks behind
everything.24
That is who Crake really is: a great enemy of imagination, the arts, and
morality. However, at one point he departs from Gerber’s description. I
would not call him insane. His two grand ideas—annihilating human
beings and peopling the earth with a new human-like species—are logical,
carefully planned and painstakingly implemented. Nevertheless, he is a
mysterious figure whose black clothes correspond with his original
nickname: “Crake is dialect for crow and if, anywhere in fable and myth,
there are no stories that do this bird any credit, Atwood simply adds to its
discredit.”25 From the very moment he appears in the novel as a teenager,
he distinguishes himself from others: “Crake was different. More like an
adult; in fact more adult than a lot of adults. You could have an objective
conversation with him, a conversation in which events and hypotheses
were followed through to their logical conclusions.”26 Logical and
completely sane objectivity is one side of the coin, the other being an
insatiable appetite for knowledge of all kinds, which makes Crake a
character similar to Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, a figure eager to
widen his horizons at any cost, and make science a morally-haphazard
territory.
23
Karen F. Stein, “Problematic Paradice in Oryx and Crake,” in Margaret Atwood:
The Robber Bride, The Bind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, edited by J. Brooks
Bouson (London: Continuum, 2010), 147.
24
Richard Gerber, Utopian Fantasy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.,
1973), 57.
25
Helen Elliott, “A Perverse Way Flays the Future,” review of Oryx and Crake, by
Margaret Atwood, The Australian, May 3, 2003, accessed November 6, 2010,
http://web.-ebscohost.com/ehost/detail ED 11/2010.
26
Atwood, Oryx, 69.
Crake acts in the novel as both a model and an exaggeration of a

scientist, a leader of the social elite consisting of multitude of characters
representing this profession. First of all, these scientists are similar to the
aforementioned Dr. Faustus in the respect that in initially looking for
knowledge to improve the world, they end up with just unimportant games
and toys. This can be exemplified in the novel by their experiments with
genetic splices—new animals created just for their fun, just to prove their
ability to create such organisms. As Jimmy’s mother reminds her husband:
“Don’t you remember the way we used to talk, everything we wanted to
do? Making life better for people—not just people with money. You used
to be so you had ideals, then.”27 Another problem is that the scientists do
not seem to be interested in taking responsibility for their actions any
more. This only partly refers to Crake, at the same time, making him
different from Dr. Frankenstein. The playfulness is a visible part of
Crake’s grand scheme of annihilating human beings and replacing them
with his surrogates through the Paradice Project. Its very name does not
only refer to the Garden of Eden, but also includes elements of gambling,
proving that he actually does not know the outcome of the project and is
predominantly curious about the way it will evolve. It is just a game of
dice, as he seems to suggest, a game that he initiates. Such an approach
could be the result of Crake’s education at the Watson-Crick Institute, a
university for the most brilliant scientists, a place where silly playfulness
meets with the utopian aspirations of the scientists, not only Crake’s. In
the description of the premises, Atwood again reminds us of the potential
dangers and unknown outcomes of scientific procedures referring directly
to contemporary experiments in genetics quoted above: “at the
entranceway was a bronzed statue of the Institute’s mascot, the
spoat/gider—one of the first successful splices, done in Montreal at the
turn of the century, goat crossed with spider to produce high-tensile spider
silk filaments in the milk.”28 In the place named to commemorate two
geneticists responsible for the discovery of the DNA structure, all the
elements of reality appear to come from their experiments in genetics,
everything is artificially-created and thus fake:
First [Jimmy and Crake] went to Décor Botanicals, where a team of five
seniors was developing Smart Wallpaper that would change colour on the
walls of your room to complement your mood. This wallpaper—they told
Jimmy—had a modified form of Kirilian-energy-sensing algae embedded
in it, along with a sublayer of algae nutrients, but there were still some
27
Atwood, Oryx, 57.
28
Atwood, Oryx, 199.
84 Chapter Three
glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper was short-lived in humid weather

because it ate up all the nutrients and then went grey; also it could not tell
the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to
turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really needed was a
murky, capillary-bursting greenish red.29
This once again demonstrates that what the scientists do is waste their
energy and potential on unimportant, trivial experiments, mainly to show
that they are capable of creating such new things. Behaving like gods, they
are not interested in the actual outcome of their experiments but in the
experiments themselves—science for science’s sake. In this sense, Crake
is a typical scientist. However, at the same time he notices the degradation
of such reality, the wasteland that surrounds him, and decides to act. In
this respect he differs from other scientists in the novel because he realises
what Jayne Glover describes as the belief that “science has been employed
to try to control and even change the damage being done to the earth.”30
His solution is an ultimate and risky one, demonstrating that he treats
science—with its almost unlimited possibilities—just as a toy in his hands,
actually taking no responsibility for what the future generated by him
holds.
***
Science also plays a crucial role when it comes to power, becoming a

very important tool in the hands of the technocratic regime. Technological
inventions help the totalitarian state control the masses and, thus, retain its
power. First of all, this is realized on the most basic, mechanical level of
the system maintenance, i.e. its secret police forces. In Oryx and Crake,
however, the state-run officers are replaced by the CorpSeCorps, a quasi-
police that have evolved from the private corporate guard companies.
Using high-tech gadgets, such as spray-guns, is one thing, but their
procedures are not restricted just to safeguarding the Compounds and
bugging people’s phones and e-mails. The CorpSeCorps are mainly
responsible for maintaining the existing political status quo, which
requires such activities as getting rid of those citizens who endanger it.
One of the victims of the system is Crake’s father, once a highly situated
official who dies in unexplained circumstances, although it is hinted that
he was executed just for knowing too much. The way Atwood pictures the
29
Atwood, Oryx, 201.
30
Jayne Glover, “Human/Nature: Ecological Philosophy in Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake,” English Studies in Africa 52 (2009): 52.
totalitarian state also shows that sometimes the most traditional techniques
are the most effective ones: “shooting was for treason. Otherwise it was
gas, or hanging, or the big brainfrizz.”31 Atwood seems to openly mock
state-of-the-art technology, opting for more vintage solutions, which only
emphasises the old truth that the best ways to control the masses are the
most traditional ones. Additionally, it ironically underlines Atwood’s
standpoint that the tools of manipulating and maintaining power are just
simple tools, that human beings actually decide how to use them.
Moreover, in Oryx and Crake science and its inventions interact with the
culture of consumerism, without which the totalitarian rules probably
would not be possible: “double-entry on-screen bookkeeping, banking by
fingertip, using a microwave without nuking your eggs, filling out housing
applications for this or that Module and job applications for this or that
Compound, family heredity research, negotiating your own marriage-and-
divorce contracts, wise genetic match-making.”32 By providing more and
more convenient products, consumer society becomes even more addicted
to and dependent on the science that is responsible for the excess of such
goods, which in turn helps the regime to control the consumers/citizens.
This is a culture of ultimate overabundance in which science turns into
mere technology, and plays the most crucial role providing in the masses
with never-ending numbers of products, thus accelerating the need to
purchase and possess.
The most extreme and cruellest example of such procedures is the case
of the HelthWyzer, a corporation responsible for producing new and better
drugs for new diseases. The only problem, at least from an ethical point of
view, is that this corporation also creates those new illnesses, providing a
basic capitalistic demand for their products. Crake soberly and sarcastically
notes:
They’re creating them. They’ve been doing it for years. Naturally they
develop the antidotes at the same time as they’re customizing the bugs, but
they hold those in reserve, they practice the economics of scarcity, so
they’re guaranteed high profits. The best diseases, from a business point of
view, would be those that cause lingering illnesses. Ideally—that is, for
maximum profit—the patient should either get well or die just before all of
his or her money runs out. It’s a fine calculation.33
31
Atwood, Oryx, 258.
32
Atwood, Oryx, 42.
33
Atwood, Oryx, 211.
86 Chapter Three
Again, what Atwood suggests here is that the advantages that applied
science provides us can be easily misused in the hands of the corrupt
representatives of our kind. Here the reference to Michel Foucault’s notion
of biopower as a highly developed and self-conscious form of governing
people seems interesting. The French philosopher states that the aim of the
power understood in modern terms is:
to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces

under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and
ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them
submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of
death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-
administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was
based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse
of the right, of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life.34
In other words, modern regimes like the one depicted in Oryx and Crake
operate on a definitely more sophisticated and indirect level than the old
power. They realise that it is the life of an individual that is to be colonized
and taken over, not their death. Life becomes then the focus of biopower:
“power of death now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize,
and multiply it, subjecting to precise controls and comprehensive
regulations.”35 Atwood’s novel is a perfect illustration of Foucault’s ideas
because the post-capitalistic technocracy envisioned in it seems to realize
the philosopher’s idea. What is more, the picture of gadget-driven
capitalism in Oryx and Crake is the system in its exhaustion phase, where
science only seems to keep it alive in an artificial way. What Atwood
depicts here are her harsh views on capitalism and its mechanism, the
critique of which finds its most direct outcome in her 2008 collection of
essays, Payback, where, juxtaposing nature with our scientific and
corporate civilization, she states: “Mankind made a Faustian bargain as
soon as he invented his first technologies, including the bow and arrow.”36
Now we are following the same old path, she seems to suggest, a path that
leads directly to our extinction—as her protagonist Crake fully realises and
implements in his Paradice Project.
34
Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The Foucault
Reader, edited by Paul Rainbow, translated by Robert Hurle (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984), 259.
35
Foucault, “Right of Death,” 260.
36
Atwood, Payback, 201.
Science also influences the way society is organised in Oryx and

Crake, because it directly determines which people have power
(representatives of post-capitalistic corporations, but also scientists who are
useful to the authorities), and which do not. The seemingly privileged
ones, namely scientists, live in closed and strictly guarded areas called
Compounds; all the rest dwell in what is left of the twentieth-century big
cities, here named pleeblands. In a far too optimistic and child-like way,
this division can be explained the way Jimmy’s father, a scientist himself,
describes it to his then young son:
Long time ago, in the days of knights and dragons, the kings and dukes
had lived in castles, with high walls and drawbridges and slots on the
ramparts so you could pour hot pitch on your enemies, and the Compounds
were the same idea. Castles for keeping you and your buddies nice and safe
inside, and for keeping everybody else outside.
“So are we the kings and dukes?” asked Jimmy.
“Oh, absolutely,” said his father, laughing.37
This is only partly true. The safety and well-being of the Compounds’
inhabitants are strictly connected with their utility in genetic engineering
processes. The dangerous and contaminated pleeblands offer their dwellers
(as well as amazed visitors from the better world, and it must be
remembered that the novel is narrated from the perspective of such
protagonists) definitely more freedom and sometimes brutal truth: “real
musicians on the street corners, real bands of street urchins. Asymmetries,
deformities: the faces here [in pleeblands] were a far cry from the regularity
of the Compounds. There were even bad teeth;”38 and: “everything in the
pleeblands seemed so boundless, so porous, so penetrable, so wide-open.
So subject to change.”39 However, that is only one side to the coin. The
other constitutes a completely reversed picture: “vacant warehouses,
burnt-out tenements, empty parking lots. Here and there were sheds and
huts put together from scavenged materials—sheets of tin, slabs of
plywood—and inhabited no doubt by squatters. How did such people
exist?”40
The Compounds’ dwellers are relatively safer and wealthier, that is
true, but their freedom is also limited. They generally do not have access
to the truth outside the walls. Moreover, they are deprived of the privilege
to choose their way of life, for it is not possible for them to cross the
37
Atwood, Oryx, 28.
38
Atwood, Oryx, 228.
39
Atwood, Oryx, 196.
40
Atwood, Oryx, 185.
88 Chapter Three
border between the Compounds and pleeblands freely. What Atwood

ironically adds to this typically dystopian picture is her conscious
ecological way of thinking. Jayne Glover notes: “As a type of eco-science
fiction, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake demonstrates how the tensions between
idealistic and apocalyptic trends within the genre are able to question the
assumptions of current ecological thinking by alerting us to the
subterranean complexities of such philosophies.”41 It is then the prison of
the Compounds that provides its dwellers with clean air and water, healthy
(or at least healthier) food, longer life expectancy, etc. On the other hand,
pleeblands dwellers live in overpopulated and extremely polluted areas
that visibly represent the world’s final phase. As Howells says:
It is a world of accelerating environmental degeneration, where devastating

droughts and floods have wiped out much of the east coast of America as
well as the orchards and the Everglades in Florida within one generation.
Human beings have become radically separated from their natural
environment, and that condition of alienation finds its parallel in patterns
of social breakdown.42
Paradoxically, this separation from nature is justifiable both in the case of

the pleeblands and the Compounds. The lower classes of the society live
their miserable lives mainly to survive all those seemingly adverse
circumstances. In order to forget their situation they delve into the
capitalistic mode of existence: “accepted wisdom in the Compounds said
that nothing of interest went on in the pleeblands, apart from buying and
selling: there was no life of the mind. Buying and selling, plus a lot of
criminal activity.”43 The privileged ones appear to exist in a kind of an
unrealistic, heavenly state (e.g. the aforementioned Watson-Crick Institute),
which contradicts the obvious truth. Both, consciously or unconsciously,
seem to reject the truth.
For the Compounds’ inhabitants like Jimmy, the pleeblands represent a
sort of forbidden fruit, some kind of missing reality. A reality that, if not
acquired physically can be only experienced virtually, i.e. on-line. In other
words, virtual reality becomes the most obvious way to circumvent all the
safety-freedom restrictions of the dystopian world. Carol Ann Howells
describes it as one of the most important areas in Atwood’s fiction, stating:
“Though Atwood does not venture into the cyberspace territory, she does
explore the psychological effects of living in a high-tech world of
41
Glover, “Human/Nature,” 51.
42
43
Atwood, Oryx, 196.
artificially constructed reality.”44 Such a standpoint is clearly visible in

Oryx and Crake. When young, Crake and Jimmy play computer games
almost all the time, not only exploring cyberspace, but primarily delving
into the illusion of freedom it offers. Surfing the Net they find such sites as
hedsoff.com, “which played live coverage of executions in Asia,”
alibooboo.com, “with various supposed thieves having their hands cut off
and adulterers and lipstick-wearers being stoned to death by howling
crowds, in dusty enclaves that purported to be in fundamentalist countries
in the Middle East,”45 sites showing assisted suicides, and the like:
“shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com were the best;
they showed electrocutions and lethal injections.”46 The relatively easy
access to such explicit content of grotesque but terrifying violence is
possible by means of science and technology. Hence, it is science that
constitutes a vital part of the boys’ lives. Virtual brutality watched on a
computer screen appears to be more distanced and unreal, and thus
provides Crake with some extreme ideas, such as the total eradication of
humankind. Cyberspace influences the boys’ adult actions, which, at least
in the case of Crake, seem equally fatal as the virtual stimulus.47
Definitely, for Crake and Jimmy, the representatives of the future
intelligentsia as we may assume, science—with all its possibilities raging
from cyberspace to hi-tech gadgets—constitutes a reality that is both
dangerous and alluring. Consequently, the question of moral indifference
as an outcome of the processes of science arises here; or, as Glover calls it:
“[t]he lack of ethical philosophising over the positives and negatives of
living in such a deeply technological world.”48 Howells, referring to Jean
Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, comments: “In Atwood’s satirical
version of a world where everything is a reproduction of a vanished
original, human beings are alienated not only from their environment but
also from themselves.”49 What Atwood pictures here is the last possible
phase of the decadence, “globalisation’s endgame,”50 a stage that cannot
have any possible continuations, because it is the very end itself. This can
be easily noticed in the descriptions of the world after Crake’s generated
apocalypse, where the natural environment becomes absolutely unpredictable
44
45
Atwood, Oryx, 82.
46
Atwood, Oryx, 83.
47
Teenage Jimmy and Crake also surf pornography sites, but I discuss this issue
elsewhere in the book.
48
Glover, “Human/Nature,” 53.
49
50
90 Chapter Three
and highly dangerous: “[Snowman] awakes to thunder and to a sudden

wind: the afternoon storm is upon him. Those howlers can come on very
fast, and a metal bed frame in a thunderstorm is no place to be. Sometimes
there are hailstones as big as golf balls.”51 However, to state that according
to Atwood science has simply lost its credibility would be too simple an
explanation. Of course, in a highly polluted and contaminated reality of
pre-apocalypse Oryx and Crake, it is science that, being the most powerful
tool in people’s hands, has the potential to change the state of things.
Nevertheless, as Snowman comments: “the whole world is now one vast
uncontrolled experiment and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in
full spate.”52 These are people who, in charge of this device, fail to do
anything except commercialise science in the corporate civilization. In
such a case, as Crake’s fatal project of the total apocalypse demonstrates,
science becomes the ultimate tool in the process of human beings’
annihilation. Stephen Dunning notes: “while Oryx and Crake may not
offer much by way of substantial hope, it stands as a clear warning of what
we must hope to avoid. Science, freed in the novel from all restraints,
threatens human survival, even without Crake’s radical intervention.”53
Between Male Fantasy and Female Manipulation

Discussing the role of women in Oryx and Crake, we come across an
unexpected obstacle, at least at first sight. The novel seems surprisingly
male. Although one of the eponymous protagonists, Oryx, is female, the
book concentrates on Jimmy/Snowman and Crake, as well as the issues of
science and morality, where the differentiation between sexes appears
unimportant and irrelevant. With this book Atwood definitely expands the
borders of her feminist discourse to what one might call humanism or
culture in general. However, she still has a lot to say on the subject of
women in Oryx and Crake. This fact realises itself in a number of layers,
sometimes covering territories that the writer has never visited before. For
example, it is this novel in which for the first time Atwood draws
extensively from third-wave feminism. Also known as postfeminism, this
movement was initiated at the end of the 1990s. Postfeminism criticises
the achievements of second-wave feminism, with its emphasis on and
preoccupation with Western, white, middle-class women. It also proposes
51
Atwood, Oryx, 44.
52
Atwood, Oryx, 228.
53
Stephen Dunning, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the
Therapeutic,” Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 98.
a kind of extension of the then-inadequate definition of the female, where

the interdependence between the private and the public becomes the most
important issue. Consequently, criticising the false universalism of the
previous feminisms, postfeminism opts for plurality, where the category of
women finds its full realisation not only in terms of sex and gender, but
also culture, race, and origin, with the emphasis on difference. Reusing
this theoretical base, Atwood adds to this multi-layered discourse her very
original point of view. The category of women is also approached from
more male perspectives, since it is from Jimmy/Snowman’s point of view
that the whole story of Oryx and Crake is narrated.
Importantly enough, the male narrative perspective marks an interesting
example when comparing Oryx and Crake with Atwood’s other novels.
Coral Ann Howells states: “for the first time [she] has chosen a male
narrator, for the story is told not in the first person but through third-
person indirect interior monologue, which shifts restlessly between the
narrative present and Jimmy/Snowman’s memories.”54 As a consequence,
Atwood employs a great deal of irony. On the surface this irony enables
her to draw attention to the female points of view, which now can be
presented in a more neutral, distanced manner. Nevertheless, she actually
seems to criticise the corpus of male literature, which pretends to present
women from an objective viewpoint while actually manipulating readers by
suggesting a distorted image. A more pluralist and thus post-feminist
reading of this manoeuvre proposes an even more radical interpretation:
“Oryx and Crake depicts a much more negative scenario for feminism,
signalled by the loss of the female voice, in which Atwood’s protagonists
inhabit a future that is not only postfeminist, but posthuman.”55
Moreover, besides Jimmy, there is another equally important male
protagonist, Crake, who does not speak in the novel as a narrator because
he does not have to. His actions—destroying mankind and engineering the
perfect species to replace the old and corrupt one—constitute the very core
of the plot, and speak for him. Crake also does not have a share in the
narrative because of the differences between him and Jimmy/Snowman.
The first is a man of numbers, whereas the second describes himself as a
man of letters. What we see here is Atwood’s further step in exploring the
already-mentioned theme of the double, “the most striking feature of Oryx
and Crake,”56 here applied to masculinity. Howells reads this curious
relationship in a way that emphasises the gender ambiguity of the
protagonists: “the Crake-Jimmy double act complicates stereotypes of
54
55
56
92 Chapter Three
gender and of the artist, for both protagonists are split within themselves,
illustrating the contradictory impulses within human nature.”57 In that case
Jimmy, who represents the pre-technological past, and Crake, an Übermensch
questioning the traditionally understood ethics with well-defined differences
between good and evil, complete each other like two antitheses of the
same phenomenon, providing a kind of a background to decode the female
protagonist in the novel, Oryx.
The additional context for Oryx’s interpretation is the pornographic
factor so frequently criticised by Atwood, which obviously corresponds
with the post-feminist discourse she has been undertaking in recent years.
Postfeminism is visible in the most explicit correlation between the private
and the public spheres of life, because pornography always realises itself
in the exploitation of the former in the latter. No wonder that Oryx
becomes the key figure, for “she articulates significant tensions
surrounding the notions of sexual liberation, free will, exploitation,
commercialism, race, exoticism and ethnicity that congregate around the
theme of pornography.”58 In the novel’s reality, virtual pornography,
together with cyber violence, constitute the main area of interest for
teenage Jimmy and Crake. They not only watch—the mechanics of
voyeurism being used here deliberately—but they also have a chance to
participate, which is a possibility that state-of-the-art technology enables.
The way Atwood handles the pornographic images in the novel may shock
when we consider her distant, cold way of describing them, and the almost
absurd amount of pervasive details, including sites with child pornography:
Then they went to HottTotts, a global sex-trotting site. “The next best thing
to being there,” was how it was advertised. It claimed to show real sex
tourists, filmed while doing things they’d be put in jail for back in their
home countries. Their faces weren’t visible, their names weren’t used. The
locations were supposed to be countries where life was cheap and kids
were plentiful, and where you could buy anything you wanted. The act
involved whipped cream and a lot of licking. The effect was both innocent
and obscene: the three [of the girls] were going over the guy with their
kittenish tongues and their tiny fingers, giving him a thorough workout to
the sounds of moans and giggles. The giggles must have been recorded,
because they weren’t coming from the three girls: they all looked
frightened, and one of them was crying.59
57
58
59
What we see here is a caricature of the stereotypical way women are seen
by men, simply as sexual objects deprived of any traces of personality.
Consequently, these explicit images help Atwood show the mechanisms of
male-oriented society, where women have to perform men’s various
fantasies, because they are forced to do so.
At the same time, women, and this is clearly visible in the position of
Oryx, resist surrendering their identity. They just pretend, and by doing so,
take part in the great mystification that is not only a part of virtual reality,
but also seems to be a part of this male game. The typically male
interaction of virtual violence with pornography seems equally shocking.
It once again shows that the society that Atwood depicts is one of cultural
excess, where “the real thing” is replaced by its meaningless equivalent:
So they’d rolled a few joints and smoke them while watching the
executions and the porn—the body parts moving around on the screen in
slow motion, an underwater ballet of flesh and blood under stress, hard and
soft joining and separating, groans and screams, close-ups of clenched eyes
and clenched teeth, spurts of this or that. If you switched back and forth
fast, it all came to look like the same event. Sometimes they’d have both
things on at once, each on a different screen.60
However, behind the veil of cold-blooded distance, Atwood hides the

bitterest pessimism possible, stating: “the body had its own cultural forms.
It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its
romance.”61 Atwood, then, seems totally disillusioned with contemporary
culture, which she hyperbolically defines as a mixture of violence and
pornography. As Fiona Tolan notes, “in Oryx and Crake, violence and
pornography have been entirely normalised within popular culture.”62
Furthermore, they are the symbols of the power that men still have over
women. They are also typically male sexual fantasies that normalise
themselves in contemporary civilisation. This is even more apparent in the
case of Oryx, who is, to some extent, the hyperbolised and consciously
exaggerated realisation of such fantasies.
Therefore, although Oryx and Crake is surprisingly full of male
protagonists and is narrated from the viewpoint of one of them, it would be
too simple a solution to describe it as a male-oriented novel, the
justification of which can be visible in the very title of the book: besides
Crake there is this mysterious, female Oryx (who is properly introduced
60
Atwood, Oryx, 86.
61
Atwood, Oryx, 85.
62
94 Chapter Three
only in the sixth chapter of the novel), and no place for Jimmy. The
nickname Oryx means “the ancient name of an African antelope.”63 The
first appearance of Oryx in the novel is strictly connected with virtual
reality and porn sites. Jimmy and Crake come across her searching for
pornographic material:
This was how the two of them first saw Oryx. She was only about eight, or
she looked eight. They could never find out for certain how old she’d been
then. Her name wasn’t Oryx, she didn’t have a name. She was just another
little girl on a porn site. None of those little girls seemed real to Jimmy—
they’d always struck him as digital clones—but for some reason Oryx was
three-dimensional from the start.64
It is exactly then that the typical scenario of such virtual broadcasts is

broken, reversing this male fantasy and making it visible that Oryx is a
female character who manipulates male spectators, rather than being just a
tool in their hands:
Oryx paused in her activities. She smiled a little hard smile that made her
appear much older, and wiped the whipped cream from her mouth, then
she looked over her shoulder and right into the eyes of the viewer—right
into Jimmy’s eyes, into the secret person inside him. I see you, that look
said. I see you watching. I know you. I know what you want.65
From that breakthrough moment, she seems to influence both Jimmy and
Crake. She haunts their teenage dreams, as well as defines their artificial
ideal of a woman who becomes a kind of a feminist caricature—a
distortion of the original that remains unidentifiable, a degrading male
fantasy, an artificially generated construct rather than true essence. Thus,
Oryx actually functions as a catalyst. She provides a kind of a mirror in
which the two protagonists’ masculinity is both reflected and distorted.
This seems an open reference to and an ironic interplay with Virginia
Woolf’s passage from A Room of One’s Own:
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the

magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man twice its natural
size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and
jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be
scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and
bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our
63
Elliott, “A Perverse Way.”
64
Atwood, Oryx, 90.
65
unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have

existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost
them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are
essential to all violent and heroic action.66
The situation does not change much when Oryx reappears a few years
later, becoming the partner of one of them (Crake), and the lover of the
other one (Jimmy): “With Crake and Jimmy, Oryx is always performing
her role as fantasy object, making love with both of them in turn in what
looks like a parody of those male fantasies of the eroticised female
body.”67 Oryx synthesises the stereotypical and compound male vision of
a woman. The fact that she acts as an object becomes Atwood’s tool of
harsh criticism pointed at the male-dominated world: a world in which
women lose their subjectivity and become constantly exploited, becoming
the victims of male dominance.
Besides representing the pornographic realm in its most high-tech and
outrageous form, Oryx’s story is also full of details connected to the third-
world child trade, extreme poverty, sex slavery, paedophilia and
prostitution—to enumerate only the most striking ones. Therefore, the
character of Oryx embodies the mixture of postcolonial and postfeminist
contexts. She does not represent a Western, middle-class, white woman,
and hence is subjected to the violent processes of multiple marginalisation.
Her story begins in some third-world village in a poverty-stricken family,
which adds to her representation a truly postfeminist context: “the mother
of Oryx sold two of her children at the same time, not because she was
hard up. She thought the two might keep each other company, look out for
each other. Oryx took this double sale as evidence that her mother had
loved her.”68 Then she continues as a child labourer, which also includes
prostitution. It is not a surprise that she re-enters Crake’s life during his
university years as an employee of Student Services, i.e. a sexual agency
created to provide the most brilliant scientists with carnal pleasures.69
Fiona Tolan states: “Oryx is enigma. Constructed from disparate scraps of
information, the proliferation of details about her life and her past only
serve to perversely further obscure her from the reader. The more we learn
about Oryx, the less real she becomes.”70 During her relatively short life
she experiences an unbelievably great number of various types of
66
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Vintage, 2001), 29.
67
68
Atwood, Oryx, 121.
69
Atwood, Oryx, 309.
70
96 Chapter Three
exploitation, both physical and mental. However, to limit Oryx just to the
sum of male fantasies would be far too superficial. Her ability to distance
herself from the hardships she has to endure makes her one of the most
intriguing character in the novel. She objectively tells shocked Jimmy
commenting on the child trade: “You don’t understand. Many people did
it. It was the custom.”71
This peculiar distancing of hers is also true when it comes to the two
male protagonists of the novel and their attitude to Oryx. When Jimmy’s
obsession with her virtually drives him mad, for Crake she becomes a
great source of influence in his Paradice Project. At the same time, she
constantly escapes any categorisation, actively resisting all male attempts
to possess her self: “although Jimmy wants Oryx to fit nicely into his
romantic idea that she is a woman who has been saved from the evils of
the world, Oryx thwarts his desire to rewrite her past as the story of lost
innocence and colonial victimisation.”72 This can be illustrated by the
conversation between her and Jimmy, when he shows her a pornographic
picture, presumably of her, which was downloaded by him and Crake:
“I don’t think this is me,” was what she’d said at first.

“It has to be!” said Jimmy. “Look! It’s your eyes!”
“A lot of girls have eyes,” she said. “A lot of girls did these things.
Very many.” Then, seeing his disappointment, she said, “It might be me.
Maybe it is. Would that make you happy, Jimmy?”73
What is more, when Jimmy, trying to tame and textualise her stories of
exploitation, says: “none of it was your fault”, the only thing she answers
is: “none of what, Jimmy?,”74 proving that it is actually Jimmy who has
problems dealing with her past, not her. Clearly, Oryx plays out her game
in the most ambiguous way, manipulating the male protagonists—not only
Jimmy—into believing that they have power over her. In other words,
despite being “the most uncanny figure in the novel, as with her multiple
shifting identities she shimmers on the borders between fantasy and
reality,”75 Oryx plays the role of the most important linkage between
Jimmy and Crake. Stephen Dunning notes: “Oryx’s role in the work is
much more enigmatic. She emerges as the oppressed, exploited ‘Other,’
71
Atwood, Oryx, 119.
72
Mark S.J. Bosco, “The Apocalyptic Imagination in Oryx and Crake,” in
Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Bind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, edited
by J. Brooks Bouson (London: Continuum, 2010), 167–68.
73
Atwood, Oryx, 91.
74
Atwood, Oryx, 114.
75
incarnating possibilities of communion and love that neither Snowman nor

Crake can fully grasp.”76
Furthermore, Oryx’s role is not limited to complex sexual games with
Jimmy and Crake. She also takes an active part in Crake’s apocalypse
project, becoming a marketing director for the BlyssPluss Pill. Crake’s
means to achieve his ultimate goals, the pills, include the fatal virus
responsible for annihilating mankind. The pill itself is a drug whose
hedonistic advantages, so tightly linked with the commercialised and
corporate civilization Atwood depicts, seem to surpass the adverse side-
effects:
The aim was to produce a single pill, that, at one and the same time:
a) would protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases,
fatal, inconvenient, or merely unsightly;
b) would provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess,
coupled with a generalized sense of energy and well-being, thus
reducing the frustration and blocked testosterone that led to jealousy
and violence, and eliminating feelings of low self-worth;
c) would prolong youth.77
These are only three characteristics of the pill that the customers are aware
of, the other two being the sterilising nature of the drug (a both sexes
birth-control pill, as we could call it), and the very annihilating factor that
activates a few weeks after launching the product on the market. In other
words, the notion of the Paradice Project has to reappear: “they were
inextricably linked—the Pill and the Project. The Pill would put a stop to
haphazard reproduction, the Project would replace it with a superior
method. They were two stages of a single plan, you might say.”78 This
hidden quality, programmed by Crake, becomes the direct cause of the
pandemic that in a short time wipes away almost the whole population of
the earth. Oryx is either completely unaware of the pill’s fatal feature, or
she cowardly and unconsciously denies some basic knowledge of it: “Oh
Jimmy. I am so sorry. I did not know. It was in the pills I was giving away,
the ones I was selling. It’s all the same cities, I went there,” as she realises
just after the apocalypse unleashes.79 Oryx, then, becomes a catalyst for all
the tendencies that Atwood writes about and criticises: from unrestricted
carnal pleasures illustrated by the mechanical cyber-pornography, to the
civilisation in which everything has its price and market.
76
Dunning, “Margaret Atwood’s,” 89.
77
Atwood, Oryx, 294.
78
Atwood, Oryx, 304.
79
Atwood, Oryx, 325.
98 Chapter Three
Oryx is also directly connected with the female clones Crake

engineers, which are designed to resemble her physically. As well, she
becomes both their teacher and, later on, a kind of a deity. However, the
most important resemblance seems to be linked with their relation to the
typically male fantasies that Oryx as well as the female Crakers embody
and deconstruct. On the one hand, the bodies of the women of the future
are perfect in every detail; on the other, they are not convincing enough to
treat them as real creatures:
They’re every known colour from deepest black to whitest white,

they’re various heights, but each one of them is admirably proportioned.
Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripples of fat around their
waists, no bulges, no dimpled orange-skin cellulite on their thighs. No
body hair, no bushiness. They look like retouched fashion photos, or ads
for a high-priced workout program.
Maybe this is the reason that these women arouse in Snowman not
even the faintest stirrings of lust.80
Hence, perfection kills emotions. As an example of Baudrillard’s simulacra,

female Crakers simply lack authenticity, whereas it is the very genuineness
that usually arouses male desire. It seems that the whole concept of the
emotionless Crakers inscribes itself in Atwood’s criticism of the current
culture with its preoccupation with perfect, stainless, and thus fake images.
Additionally, Crake programs the clones to diminish, if not get rid of,
extreme emotions, which constitute what human beings are, but which
also—according to him—are completely irrelevant to the enhanced
species. Its realisation is clearly visible in Crake’s idea of sex and mating,
here designed to be a poorly technical act of reproduction, a seasonal ritual
involving one woman and four men: “there’s no more unrequited love
these days, no more thwarted lust; no more shadow between the desire and
the act. No more prostitution, no sexual abuse of children, no haggling
over, no pimps, no sex scandals. No more rape.”81 What Crake seems to
misunderstand here is the false equation between the feeling of love and
the dangers that can derive from it when it is exploited and violated. His
only solution is then to get rid of love, which would consequently make all
the problems connected with emotions disappear. At the same time, such a
solution would give more power to women, since the female Crakers seem
to be the final step in evolution, following and extending post-feminist
Oryx with the inseparable mixture of her political position and private
80
Atwood, Oryx, 100.
81
Atwood, Oryx, 165.
decisions. In other words, where Oryx had to consciously manipulate, the

women of the future behave in their most natural way, at the same time
being liberated from the numerous exploitations their prototype has to
endure. However, this picture is highly ironic because it displays where
the typically sexist male point of view can and actually does lead us: to the
world of perfection where this very perfection ceases to have any profound
meaning, a civilisation of sexual meaninglessness. It would be completely
inappropriate to hail Crake as a champion of the women’s liberation
movement, as what he proposes is just a veiled prolongation of a typically
male point of view, where the exploitation of the sexes, both female and
male, does not cease to exist, bringing real liberty to none of them.
***
Jimmy’s mother is another very important female character, although

she seems to remain in a secondary capacity. Besides Oryx, she influences
Jimmy in the most profound way, making it clear that masculine
consciousness cannot exist without its female counterpart. However, the
relationship between her and Jimmy is characterised by ambiguity:
“maybe she had loved Jimmy. In her own manner. Though he hadn’t
believed it at the time. Maybe, on the other hand, she hadn’t loved him.
She must have had some sort of positive emotion about him though.”82
What is most important for teenage Jimmy’s growing consciousness is that
she is the only person around him who expresses her open dissatisfaction
with the world they are living in, with its biogenetics that she considers
unethical. Not so surprisingly, then, she also leaves her teenage son, taking
with her his favourite pet rakunk (a spliced skunk) named Killer. She
states: “I have taken Killer with me to liberate her.”83 What she does
seems a cruel act with a deliberate intention to hurt her son. However, she
just intends Jimmy to remember this painful situation that will,
consequently, lead him to awaken a critical way of thinking and to
question the world in which he has to function. Still, her feelings towards
Jimmy seem quite ambiguous. She concentrates her actions concerning her
son on the hard lessons she wants him to learn, and not on a warm kind of
a feeling that, at least in theory, constitutes much of the definition of
motherly love. She chooses the difficult path of a parent. Disillusioned
with the surrounding world, she attempts to shape her son’s personality
using extreme methods, even risking breaking the emotional bond between
82
Atwood, Oryx, 61.
83
Atwood, Oryx, 61.
100 Chapter Three
them. This is why when she reappears in Jimmy’s life on the TV screen as
a member of the underground resistance movement, she seems to give her
son a kind of a moral pattern to follow, something that Jimmy initially
understands only subconsciously. Only a few years later does he learn
about her crimes against the corporate state, which according to the police
are: “inciting to violence, membership in a banned organisation, hampering
the dissemination of commercial products, treasonable acts against the
society.”84 Finally, Jimmy learns about her death watching footage of her
execution: “the woman was looking right at him, right out of the frame: a
blue-eyed look, direct, defiant, patient, wounded. But no tears. Then the
sound came suddenly up. Goodbye. Remember Killer. Don’t let me
down.”85 Her last words are directed to her son. The name of the pet
animal triggers the painful memories deep inside him and acts as a code
understood only by him: “Jimmy’s conscience is formed by his mother.
Her resistance to the status quo evokes a lost ethics and a courage born of
spiritual resistance that Jimmy desperately wishes he could access.”86
Jimmy’s mother makes him re-evaluate his system of beliefs, regardless of
the fact that this process is still highly subconscious. To a great extent,
Jimmy owes his ironic attitude to life to his mother. This attitude realises
itself mainly on the linguistic level: “he compiled lists of old words too—
words of precision and suggestiveness that no longer had a meaningful
application in today’s world, or toady’s world, as Jimmy sometimes
deliberately misspelled it on his term papers.”87 In this sense, through his
mother Jimmy represents what Atwood has been advocating in her
writings since the beginning of her career. A writer has some strict
obligations to the world and language is one of the most powerful weapons
in their implementation. Importantly enough, all these values are both
expressed and initiated by a woman, showing one more time that women
possess great power, maybe even greater than male characters can realise:
i.e. the power to influence and manipulate.
Feminism and female characters are also very important to Jimmy—
often in surprising ways—during his university years. He studies
humanities at the Martha Graham Academy, an educational institution that
is in a dilapidated state—both when it comes to the condition of the
facilities and the level of teaching. These facts are even more visible when
one compares Jimmy’s school with the state-of-the-art Watson-Crick
84
Atwood, Oryx, 286.
85
Atwood, Oryx, 258.
86
Bosco, “The Apocalyptic Imagination,” 167.
87
Atwood, Oryx, 195.
Institute, where Crake studies. However, what is most important in the

context of female influence on Jimmy is the patron of the institution:
The Martha Graham Academy was named after some gory old dance
goddess of the twentieth century who’d apparently mowed quite a swath in
her day. There was a gruesome statue of her in front of the administration
building, in her role—said the bronze plaque—as Judith, cutting off the
head of a guy in a historical robe outfit called Holofernes. Retro feminist
shit, was the general student opinion.88
The choice of such a patron for the humanities institution, disrespected in

technocratic times, helps Atwood to display the huge discrepancy between
this branch of knowledge and sciences. She also seems to point to the
linkage between femininity and the humanities, both inferior to men and
science respectively, and thus occupying a similar cultural and historic
position. Additionally, it shows how much Jimmy—this old-fashioned
man of words—owes to women, who, besides Crake, are mainly
responsible for his growing cultural and political consciousness. This is
also true in reference to Amanda Payne, Jimmy’s girlfriend during his
university years, a postmodern visual artist known for her vulture
sculptures, or simply vulturising:
The idea was to take a truckload of large dead-animal parts to vacant fields
or the parking lots of abandoned factories and arrange them in the shapes
of words, wait until the vultures had descended and were tearing them
apart, then photograph the whole scene from a helicopter. So far she’d
done PAIN and WHOM, and then GUTS.89
To link a female artist with the vulturising technique does not seem to be a
coincidence, as again, this character of Atwood’s demonstrates that to
realise oneself fully in a contemporary, male-dominated world, a woman
has to manipulate, this time with words. This is even truer in reference to
Amanda Payne, when one learns that this is not the real name of Jimmy’s
girlfriend: “this name was an invention, like much about her. She’d had to
reinvent herself, she told Jimmy.”90 Superficially, it is Amanda’s art in
which she tries to stab the balloon of fantasy to get to the real thing. Being
an image person, she contrasts with Jimmy-a-man-of-words, and Crake-a-
man-of-numbers. In images she seeks the truth. Fed up with Jimmy’s
passivity and mediocrity, at some point she surprises him with another of
88
Atwood, Oryx, 186.
89
Atwood, Oryx, 244.
90
Atwood, Oryx, 241.
102 Chapter Three
her vulturising plans. This time, using an animal carcass, she attempts to
depict the word LOVE.91 To combine dead tissue with such an elaborate
feeling seems shocking even to Jimmy, showing his inferiority in the area
of emotions. More universally, Jimmy and Amanda’s relationship is more
evidence of the power that lurks in women, as well as their great potential
to judge and manipulate: all as a means to undermine male dominance and
patriarchal culture.
Male fantasy and overcoming it with the help of the art of manipulation
is then the surface on which Atwood projects her (post)feminism in Oryx
and Crake. Despite appearances, the novel is female-oriented. By
employing the male point of view to some extent, Atwood is a manipulator
herself, which she, as a novelist, has the ultimate right to be. Aware of the
contemporary position of feminist thought, i.e. fully realising the
importance of the (post)feminist discourse in the broad field of humanism,
she tries to fight the patriarchal rules on which our society is based with
the tenacity that characterises her literary output. To present a woman as a
manipulator, then, is quite typical of her irony. In manipulation we can
easily detect the will and power that make it possible, but also the
underlying necessity that stands behind this urgency, namely the need that
forces women to struggle against patriarchy and to redefine themselves in
the anticipated circumstances of complete equality of the sexes.
Post-Religion and the Pursuit of Spirituality

In contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is not
preoccupied with religion. What Atwood deals with here is the more
universal issue of spirituality in human life and culture. Drawing a picture
of a future society in which access to the absolute in any form is replaced
by the overwhelmingly consumerist desires fuelled by state-of-the-art
technological inventions, she asks whether human beings can actually
function without a spiritual side. She demonstrates her point of view on
various levels of the plot, where materialistic reality as well as the main
characters of the novel and the clones generated by Crake seem most
important. Additionally, picturing the complex relations between nihilistic
Crake, humanistic Jimmy and Oryx (who escapes any definitive label),
Atwood enters an intertextual game with stories and language typically
associated with the literary world of the Holy Bible. She indicates the
cultural importance of this most fundamental text of the western religions,
and uses Christianity as her main point of reference. Atwood suggests that
91
Atwood, Oryx, 247.
in post-religious times, there is actually nothing to replace people’s desire

for spirituality. What she tries to show, then, is an assumption that without
religion-related spirituality people would lose a great deal of humanity.
Instead of who we are, we become simply biology-driven animals not able
to create any form of culture.
The phenomenon of consumerist reality conditioning the terms of
human existence constitutes an interesting background to the way
spirituality is approached in Oryx and Crake. Although the society of
Atwood’s dystopia is clearly polarised into the privileged, who live in the
technologically advanced Compounds, and all the rest dwelling in the
dilapidated pleeblands, there seems to be little difference regarding their
life prospects. In the post-religious reality dominated by technological
progress and all the opportunities it enables, people concentrate on the
materialistic side of life, always wanting more: “cosmetic creams, workout
equipment, Joltbars to build your muscle-scape into a breathtaking marvel
of sculpted granite. Pills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter,
browner, blacker, yellower, sexier, and happier.”92 The society of
Atwood’s novel is the society of the late or even final phase of capitalism,
where all needs are craftily reinforced by clever slogans, frequently
involving vocabulary characteristic of the changing times, at the same time
emphasising the sensation of novelty. More importantly, this is also a
society that openly rejects any kind of religion or spirituality, replacing the
concepts with goods and services that provide citizens with a false
sensation of transcendental fulfilment. Concentrating on physical beauty
and the ways to retain it, people forget that it is just a poor substitute for
“the real thing,” i.e. something definitely above and beyond their everyday
existence. Such a picture of reality has a considerable influence on Jimmy
and Crake and their actions. They are brought up “in a soulless,
materialistic world that is cut off from the spiritual wisdom of the past.”93
When triggering his project of human clones, Crake openly responds to,
exploits and mocks the needs of the ultra-materialistic society. Officially,
the perfect clones that he works on in the Paradice project are to fulfil
people’s desire for a better, more comfortable life. As such, they are
presented simply as products or goods that one can purchase in a shop and
then throw away: “they were naked, but not like the Noodie News: there
was no self-consciousness, none at all. At first he couldn’t believe them,
they were so beautiful. Black, yellow, white, brown, all available skin
colours. Each individual was exquisite.”94 People’s attitude to the clones is
92
Atwood, Oryx, 248.
93
Hengen, “Moral/Environmental,” 138.
94
Atwood, Oryx, 302.
104 Chapter Three
deprived of any typically human reactions, and instead, is driven only by

the consumerist desire to buy and possess, and thus to enhance their life in
an artificial way. The spiritual level of this endeavour is definitely absent.
The second important element of the future post-religious society that
functions as the counterpoint to Crake’s actions is the omnipresent virtual
reality, which is strictly connected with consumerist existence in the high-
tech world, and yet, provides the protagonist with an interesting kind of
inspiration. When young, besides visiting explicitly violent and
pornographic internet sites, Crake and Jimmy play an on-line interactive
game called Extinctathon, whose main goal is to challenge other players
by enumerating the greatest possible number of extinct species: “Adam
named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones do you want
to play?”95 However challenging such a game is, it is not impossible to
play it. In Atwood’s vision of the future, killing (and eating) endangered
species is one of the most trendy crazes. When it comes to religion and
spirituality, the Extinctathon carries a number of Christian connotations.
First of all, there is the very idea of the end of the world. The name of the
game is an innovative combination of two words: “extinct” with
“marathon,” a blend suggesting a long process with a rather obvious result.
The idea of the game openly corresponds with the Bible’s Book of
Revelation: “the introduction of the Extinctathon game heightens the
apocalyptic tenor of Atwood’s narrative, for Adam, the first human being,
is now the crazed, mad Adam of the end of time.”96 It becomes clear only
years later that the Extinctathon’s administrators actually form a kind of an
alterglobalist sabotage group, whose main goal is to destroy the world in
its highly materialistic form. Crake describes them: “I thought at first they
were just another crazy Animal Liberation org. but there’s more to it than
that. I think they’re after the machinery. They’re after the whole system,
they want to shut it down. So far they haven’t done any people numbers,
but it’s obvious they could.”97
Additionally, the Extinctathon draws directly from and ridicules the
name-giving passage from the Bible: “And Adam gave names to all cattle,
and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.”98 The nickname
of the game’s grandmaster is then connected with the religious sphere of
human life, at the same time being its sinister reversal. Adam was the first
man who gave names to animals and thus symbolically brought them to
life. MaddAddam is his complete opposite. It annihilates the whole species
95
Atwood, Oryx, 80.
96
Bosco, “The Apocalyptic Imagination,” 168.
97
Atwood, Oryx, 217.
98
The Holy Bible, Genesis 2: 20.
by taking away their names, at least on a metaphorical level. Furthermore,

MaddAddam presents the logical prediction that the process of annihilation
will not be restricted to animals only, but will continue until it reaches the
human species. As one watches the fatal epidemic bringing the old world
to its end from Jimmy’s point of view: “the end of a species was taking
place before his very eyes. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family,
Genus, Species. How many legs does it have? Homo sapiens sapiens,
joining the polar bear, the beluga whale, the onager, the burrowing owl,
the long, long list. Oh, big points, Grandmaster.”99 Such a bleak scenario
is something that the human species has to anticipate. Atwood states in
Payback, the novel’s quasi-companion book of non-fiction, deliberately
using the financial-like rhetoric: “Maybe a pandemic plague is part of
Nature’s cost-benefit analysis. A way of wiping the slate clean and
balancing the accounts. When Mankind becomes too irritating—too
numerous, too filthy, too destructive to the Earth—a plague results.”100
The Extinctathon hence becomes one of Crake’s greatest sources of
inspiration. It provides him with concrete ideas about the total annihilation
of the whole species in the manner of the biblical apocalypse, with Crake
himself playing the role of MaddAddam. Additionally, it demonstrates that
the ultimate corruption of human beings triggers his nihilistic way of
thinking. In one of the conversations with him, his friend states: “‘I
thought you didn’t believe in God,’ said Jimmy. ‘I don’t believe in Nature
either,’ said Crake.”101 We could add to this list Crake’s obvious
disillusionment with human beings who express their unjustified
pretensions to spirituality.
When it comes to Crake’s grand plan to improve the world through
apocalypse-like measures, it assumes two stages. Firstly, he wants to get
rid of all human beings to make room for his creatures. He achieves this
goal by inventing the irresistible BlyssPluss Pill. This medicine, however,
is also directly responsible for the fatal virus known as JUVE, Jetspeed
Ultra Virus Extraordinary. The scientist explains: “All it takes is the
elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees,
microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time
between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”102 In his
view, a complete annihilation of our species and its replacement by the
enhanced version, version 2.0, is an instant and ultimate remedy for
mankind. He states: “As a species we’re in deep trouble, worse than
99
Atwood, Oryx, 344.
100
Atwood, Oryx, 187.
101
Atwood, Oryx, 206.
102
Atwood, Oryx, 178.
106 Chapter Three
anyone’s saying. Take it from me, we’re running out of space-time.”103

Secondly, he wishes to substitute mankind with the clones created
according to his own formula of humanity. The whole novel, then, is about
transferring his words into actions. The Paradice project can be described
in Jean François Lyotard’s terms as something both paradoxical and
catastrophic.104 It is about the end of the old world, and about a new
beginning at the same time. The new human beings seem to be better
equipped to deal with the hardships of post-apocalypse life, and, at the
same time, definitely lack, at least initially, the spirituality that seems to be
inscribed in human nature and is thus inalienable.
It appears that Crake’s idea of human perfection is limited only to
biology, which enables the Crakers to survive in the post-apocalyptic
world. They feed on vegetables and caecotrophs: “semi-digested herbage,
discharged through the anus and re-swallowed two or three times a
week.”105 Animal-like mating is restored, thanks to which “there’s no
more unrequited love these days, no more thwarted lust; no more shadow
between the desire and the act.”106 They are endowed with the ability to
cure themselves by purring.107 Finally, their most rudimentary bodily
functions can ensure their safety:
The men are performing their morning ritual, standing six feet apart in a
long line curving off into the trees at either side. They’re facing outward as
in pictures of muskoxen, pissing along the invisible line that marks their
territory. The chemicals programmed into the men’s urine are effective
against wolvogs and rakunks, and to a lesser extent against bobkittens and
pigoons.108
What Crake plans and, at least hypothetically, succeeds in generating, is a

breed of clones, quasi-people deprived of typically human vices, but
emotionally barren, with neither vivid imaginations, nor artistic drive. At
least at the beginning, the Crakers are creatures stripped of the drive
towards any form of spirituality, including both imaginative thinking and
religious symbolism. As such, they clearly stand for Crake’s success.
However, the multitude of his plans are still in the sphere of theory. Since
just the first generation of the Crakers exists, there still remains the
question how these theoretical prospects will operate in practice. For
103
Atwood, Oryx, 295.
104
Lyotard, The Postmodern, 60.
105
Atwood, Oryx, 158.
106
Atwood, Oryx, 165.
107
Atwood, Oryx, 156.
108
Atwood, Oryx, 154.
example, although it seems that the repellent characteristic of the male

Crakers’ urine works, it would be highly speculative to say anything about
the way they will handle death among their group when it occurs.
Additionally, the urinating habit, though inspired by similar behaviours
characteristic of numerous animals and thus emphasising the importance
of biology, openly functions in the novel as a kind of a ritual, a word
equally associated with the sphere of religion and culture. This can
illustrate that Crake is wrong. It also shows that eventually he is going to
lose because his vision of humanity deprived of any manifestations of
spiritual and religious thinking is impossible to imagine, and thus doomed.
Consequently, Crake’s project for a new type of humanity seems
wrong both from the civilizational and biological perspectives. What the
nihilistic scientist, whom Coral Ann Howells calls “double dealer who
gets millions of dollars for his biological research because he promises to
deliver modern miracles,”109 proposes is a revolution instead of evolution,
where the laws of nature and culture are equally violated. In many ways
the Crakers may be perfect, but this perfection makes them inhuman,
which openly corresponds with his basic assumption that “extreme
emotions could be lethal.”110 Undervaluing the long history of human
civilisation that has always been connected with some kind of spirituality,
he decides to change all people radically and, as a consequence, improve
them. This resembles a similar process he undergoes himself. In his
formative years, seemingly parodying the biblical act of name-giving, he
changes his original name, Glenn, to a completely new one: “there was
never any real Glenn; Glenn was only a disguise. Crake is never Glenn.
And never Glenn-alias-Crake or Crake/Glenn, or Glenn, later Crake. He
is always just Crake, pure and simple.”111 Crake prefers extreme solutions,
and the idea of annihilation is just one of them. The ethical ambiguity of
such an endeavour seems to be inscribed in the definition of revolution.
When we realise that the outcome of the project is not only to get rid of
humankind but also its diverse cultures, the moral judgment on Crake’s
actions is negative.
Interestingly enough, there is one more thing strictly associated with
spirituality that Crake would like to redefine in his vision of humanity:
immortality. However, the way he approaches the idea is highly
problematic. He says: “’Immortality’ is a concept. If you take ‘mortality’
as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then
‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the
109
110
Atwood, Oryx, 166.
111
Atwood, Oryx, 71.
108 Chapter Three
fear, and you’ll be…’”112 Besides presenting Crake as a dangerous

character determined to achieve his goal, this unfinished sentence shows
his rational way of thinking. He links immortality with the body instead of
the soul, at the same time depriving it of the spirituality that seems to be
inscribed in the concept. Therefore, his idea of immortality is based on
lack of knowledge about mortality as such. He makes the Crakers die
painlessly and without any cause at the age of thirty-five, which is,
hypothetically, to eliminate the fear of death in them. Additionally,
emphasising the importance of physicality in his vision, Crake
concentrates only on the process of bodily reproduction and multiplication,
i.e. cloning, which actually distorts the very idea of immortality. Jean
Baudrillard states:
Cloning is the last stage of the history and modelling of the body, the one
at which, reduced to its abstract and genetic formula, the individual is
destined to serial propaganda. What is lost in the work that is serially
reproduced, is the aura, its singular quality of the here and now. What is
lost is the original, which only a history itself nostalgic and retrospective
can reconstitute as “authentic.”113
It appears that Crake simply confuses Baudrillard’s aura, in which the

sensation of the present is most important, with some biological quality
that is supposed to replace spirituality. He tries to achieve something
impossible, i.e. to replace the soul with the body, to create a new definition
of immortality, in which the continuity of the bodily sameness as an
outcome of the process of cloning is to substitute human’s dreams of
eternal life. However, just as in the case of the Crakers, bodily perfection,
no matter how frequently multiplied, is not enough to replace something
that is irreplaceable. Being too perfect, too overwhelmingly exquisite, the
Crakers seem to be unreal and artificial. They symbolise both their
creator’s unlimited ambition and his ultimate defeat. Crake’s decision to
deprive the clones of the elementary human desire for immortality seems
to be a serious violation of humanity as such, of what makes us human
beings. All revolutions assume radical actions explicite, but here we could
ask whether his idea of a change is too radical and too finite.
The final failure of Crake’s concept of humanity is connected with the
two other protagonists in the novel, Oryx and Jimmy/Snowman, who more
or less consciously serve as his assistants in the Paradice Project.
112
Atwood, Oryx, 303.
113
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser
(Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 99.
Altogether, similarly to The Handmaid’s Tale, this trio of characters also

helps Atwood enter an intertextual game with the Christian idea of God
and Christianity in general. Stephen Dunning states: “The relationship
between Crake, Snowman, and Oryx unmistakably suggests the Christian
Trinity whose authority science has effectively displaced.”114 In such a
reading of the novel, Oryx, the Crakers’ first teacher, represents the Holy
Ghost, the only part of the Trinity that is not male. However, it is also
worth mentioning that as Crake’s life partner and Jimmy’s lover, she can
mock Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ closest female friend and a former prostitute,
as well: “she is virgin and whore.”115 This second characteristic of hers
could be justified by the fact that adult Crake meets Oryx through Student
Services, which is a high-class brothel for scientific geniuses, but is also
linked with her mysterious past involvement in child prostitution. In the
case of Crake, the interpretative possibilities are more important and even
more multi-layered. First of all, he can function as God the Father, the
Crakers’ creator who then stands in the centre of Snowman’s mythology.
That is why after his death, the humanoids who are deprived of his real
image envision him as a creature living in the sky.116 Additionally, this is
how Snowman narrates to them the reputed meeting with their creator:
“You can’t see him,” Snowman says, a little too sharply. “You
wouldn’t recognise him. He’s turned himself into a plant.”
“Why would Crake become food?” asks Abraham Lincoln [i.e. one of
the Crakers with such a nickname].
“It’s not a plant you can eat,” says Snowman. “It’s more like a tree. It’s
a tree with a mouth.”117
This passage openly parallels the biblical story of the burning bush as a
representation of God, at the same time parodying the story.118 Hence, the
possibility of the Holy Eucharist, i.e. of God in the form of food, is
implied to the Crakers, which can extend the Christian meaning of Crake,
also linking him with Jesus Christ. This alternative is emphasised by the
114
115
Danette DiMarco, “Paradice Lost, Paradice Regained: Homo Faber and the
Makings of a New Beginning in
Oryx and Crake,” Papers on Language & Literature, May 6, 2013, accessed April
26, 2014,
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-133280082/paradice-lost-paradise-
regained-homo-faber-and-the.
116
Atwood, Oryx, 361.
117
Atwood, Oryx, 362.
118
The Holy Bible, Exodus 3:1–22.
110 Chapter Three
quasi-rhetorical question he asks Jimmy: “Would you kill someone you

loved to spare them pain?”119 What is more, this possibility is reinforced
by the scene in which Crake, murdering Oryx, actually forces Jimmy to
kill him: “he looked at Jimmy, a direct look, unsmiling. ‘I’m counting on
you,’ he said. Then he slit [Oryx’] throat. Jimmy shot him.”120 In a parody
of the cornerstone story of Christianity, Crake sacrifices himself for the
good of his people, the Crakers, just as in the New Testament when Jesus
dies for the sins of all people. Jimmy has no other choice but to take care
of them, as planned by their creator: “Paradice begins with Crake and ends
with Jimmy.”121 As Crake tells Jimmy sometime earlier referring to his
future function as the Crakers’ teacher: “I want—I’d want it to be you.”122
The choice of Jimmy/Snowman as the Crakers’ supervisor and teacher
after the end of the old world seems to be a decision that contradicts
Crake’s rational and anti-religious philosophy. First of all, Jimmy acts in
the novel as Crake’s complete alter ego. Whereas the former calls himself
a man of science, the latter is presented as a man of words, a relic of the
pre-technological past. Secondly, it is Jimmy who constitutes, to a certain
degree at least, a highly moral figure: “the lover of art and words and the
empathetic humanist, Jimmy becomes the teacher of the Crakers and his
messages to them are actually ones of love.”123 For example, this is the
benevolent but also the Bible-inspired way he tries to explain to the
Crakers their genesis as well as their present situation: “’In the beginning,
there was chaos. The people in the chaos were full of chaos themselves,
and the chaos made them do bad things. They were killing other people all
the time. And then Oryx said to Crake, Let us get rid of the chaos. And so
Crake took the chaos, and he poured it away.’”124 Jimmy starts to act as an
ethical mentor to the Crakers, and his teachings very often contradict what
has been painstakingly planned by Crake. At first, he uses his talent for
words: “internal consistency is best. Snowman learned this earlier in his
life, when lying had posed more of a challenge for him. Now even when
he’s caught in a minor contradiction he can make it stick, because these
people trust him.”125 With time, however, he cannot ignore the Crakers’
need for some kind of spirituality, which realises itself both in the affinity
between religion and art, and in reusing biblical rhetoric. He perfectly
119
Atwood, Oryx, 320.
120
Atwood, Oryx, 329.
121
DiMarco, “Paradice Lost.”
122
Atwood, Oryx, 321.
123
Stein, “Problematic Paradice,” 151.
124
125
Atwood, Oryx, 96.
understands that he invents—he calls it “his fabrication”—and then

consciously participates in a kind of a liturgy.126
As a consequence, the Crakers’ requests to listen to the stories
explaining the world to them lead Jimmy—calling himself Snowman—to
invent a primitive quasi-religious mythology with Crake and Oryx as its
central deities, and the Crakers themselves as their children: “Crake is
watching over you, he’ll say. Oryx loves you.”127 The Crakers are then
treated as uneducated worshippers by Jimmy. They are God’s children,
and that is why he refers to them using this priest-like and parental voice.
“What can he tell them?” he asks himself at one point,128 and then
answers: “Get your story straight, keep it simple, don’t falter.”129 Adopting
and, to a great extent, parodying religious rhetoric, he decides on the story
about the origin of the world, reusing biblical motifs and themes: “as an
inhabitant of the post-catastrophe world engineered by Crake, he is
surprised to discover that he relies on religious phrases and metaphors to
make sense of his condition and to communicate with his charges. He is
keenly aware that he plays the unwilling priest and prophet for the
Crakers.”130 When asked by the Crakers about his own origin, he answers:
“I come from the place of Oryx and Crake. Crake sent me.”131 This marks
a turning point in his attitude to his function. Reluctant at first, he
eventually agrees to the role of a prophet and priest, aware of the fact that
to a great degree he contradicts Crake’s ideas about religion and even
destroys the work of his friend’s life. He states: “Crake was against the
notion of God, or of gods of any kind, and would surely be disgusted by
the spectacle of his own gradual deification.”132
Nevertheless, it is Crake who wants Jimmy/Snowman to take
responsibility for the humanoids, which he does. As he perfectly realises,
it is he as a man of words who has to become responsible for the Children
of Crake and Oryx, as he often calls them. This also includes—
contradictory to Crake’s previous assumptions—inventing a quasi-
religious mythology that would bring them metaphysical comfort. Trying
to invent such a kind of mythology, Jimmy fully comprehends the
versatility of the Bible, to which he feels obliged to refer. This is what he
proposes as the creation myth:
126
Atwood, Oryx, 103-04.
127
Atwood, Oryx, 367.
128
Atwood, Oryx, 7.
129
Atwood, Oryx, 96.
130
Bosco, “The Apocalyptic Imagination,” 162–63.
131
Atwood, Oryx, 349.
132
Atwood, Oryx, 104.
112 Chapter Three
Crake made the bones of the Children of Crake out of coral on the beach,
and then he made their flesh out of a mango. But the Children of Oryx
hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid
two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of
words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake
had already been created by then, and they’d eaten up all the words
because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the
second egg hatched out. And that is why the animals can’t talk. [italics in
original]133
This passage can serve as an example of pure religious rhetoric when we

compare it with the Bible: “And God said, Let there be light: and there
was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the
light from the darkness.”134 It also demonstrates that in such extreme
conditions as Jimmy/Snowman and the Crakers find themselves, the words
from the Bible as well as the transcendental desires that stand behind them
become the ultimate, or even the only, point of reference. Reusing the
biblical story, Snowman decides to refer to the Christian culture that he
comes from, as only such religious rhetoric can help him explain to the
Crakers elementary knowledge about the world that he would not be able
to express convincingly in other terms. The Bible, and the whole culture
that stands behind it, becomes the ultimate tool in his teachings. Without
it, the Crakers would find it difficult to apprehend the world around them.
What is also interesting is the fact that the Crakers are not passive
receivers of Snowman’s stories, since they start to respond to the Bible-
based teachings he provides them. Their responses are both primitive and
highly symbolic at the same time. For example, a fish that the Crakers, the
creatures who do not apprehend the idea of murdering, ritually kill for him
becomes a ceremonial token of an exchange for a story he is to tell them:
Every week, according to the phases of the moon—dark, first quarter, full,
second quarter—the women stand in the tidal pools and call the unlucky
fish by name—only fish, nothing more specific. Then they point it out, and
the men kill it with rocks and sticks. That way the unpleasantness is shared
among them and no single person is guilty of shedding the fish’s blood.135
Paradoxically, the ability to kill, which is reputedly eradicated by Crake in

the clones, returns because the need for some kind of a ritual prevails
within them. The Crakers may not understand the act of killing itself, but
133
Atwood, Oryx, 96.
134
135
Atwood, Oryx, 101.
they accept its symbolic importance. This deep necessity is something that
Crake has underestimated, which also marks the beginning of his defeat.
What is interesting, the very figure of a fish directly corresponds with
Christianity and its myths on a number of levels. Firstly, it is associated
with two of Jesus’ miracles, known as the Miraculous Draughts of Fishes.
The first one takes place during the early stage of Jesus’ activity, and
results in recruiting Peter and Simon as his disciples: “And Jesus, walking
by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew
his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith
unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”136 At least this
is what the Gospel of Matthew emphasises, whereas the Gospel of Luke
pays equal attention to the multiplying of the fish.137 The second one, i.e.
the miraculous catch of one hundred and fifty-three fish, occurs years
later, after Jesus’ resurrection.138 Moreover, Jesus miraculously multiplies
fish (and loaves of bread) on one more occasion, this time to feed 5,000
people who follow him to the desert to listen to his teachings: “And he
commended the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five
loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and
brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the
multitude. And they did all eat, and were filled.”139 Mainly as a
consequence of the last miracle, known as the miracle of the seven loaves
and fish, from the earliest years of Christianity fish have been considered a
symbol of both the religion and Jesus Christ. This is emphasised by the
fact that the fish symbol was used by the early Christians as a means of
communication and recognition. This, however, originates in the Greek
word ichthys, colloquially known as the “Jesus fish,” because its first
letters stand for Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, i.e. Jesus Christ, Son of
God, Savior. This symbol is still in use nowadays, and the reason Atwood
incorporates it into her story marks its significance for the final reception
of Crake’s project.
The ultimate failure of Crake’s concepts becomes even more apparent
when the Crakers proceed with Snowman’s mythology and fulfil their own
urge to take an active part in a kind of a spiritual ceremony:
There they are. They’re sitting in a semi-circle around a grotesque-

looking figure, a scarecrowlike effigy. All their attention is focused on it:
136
The Holy Bible, Matthew 4: 18–19.
137
The Holy Bible, Luke 5: 1–11.
138
The Holy Bible, Luke 21: 1–14.
139
The Holy Bible, Matthew 14: 19–20.
114 Chapter Three
they don’t at first see [Jimmy/Snowman] as he steps out from behind the
shrub and limps forward.
Ohhhh, croon the women.
Mun, the men intone.
Is that Amen? Surely not! Not after Crake’s precautions, his insistence
on keeping these people pure, free of contamination of any kind. And they
certainly didn’t get that word from Snowman. It can’t have happened.140
Seemingly, Crake’s idea of the strict interdependence between religion and

the arts appears adequate. As Jimmy reminds himself of his dead friend’s
warnings:
Watch out for art. As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble.
Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view.
Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the
afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.141
Firstly, the above scene shows that very often art is created owing to the
desire for religious spirituality, i.e. for the glory of God or any other kind
of a deity. Secondly, art understood in such terms becomes the very
representation of spirituality itself, being the realisation of some higher,
non-materialistic aspirations of human beings. This correlation becomes
even more visible when Jimmy/Snowman notices the bizarre statue the
Crakers build and learns that it is a primitive image of him. Furthermore,
the word that he overhears is actually “Snowman,” the name they call him,
rather than “amen.” The word-man Jimmy, then, becomes the Crakers’
deity, equal to if not greater than Crake himself. Atwood’s irony is
complete in the final pages of the novel, mostly in the chapter “Idol,”
whose title seemingly parallels the biblical warning against the false idols
expressed in the most explicit way in the First Commandment: “Thou shalt
have no other gods before me.”142 In Atwood’s novel, the idol depicts
Jimmy, and his nickname, as chanted by the Crakers, turns out to be a
primitive version of a religious ceremony. One of the Crakers explains to
Jimmy: “We made a picture of you, to help us send out our voices to
you.”143 As a result, the Crakers unconsciously rebel against Crake’s
concept, according to which “[the Crakers] would have no need to invent
any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money.”144
140
Atwood, Oryx, 360.
141
Atwood, Oryx, 361.
142
The Holy Bible, Exodus 20:3.
143
Atwood, Oryx, 361.
144
Atwood, Oryx, 305.
Consequently, Jimmy has no other option but to play the role of a

prophet in the new religion he constantly narrates to the Crakers: “above
his head flies the invisible banner of Crakedom, of Crakiness, of Crakehood,
hallowing all he does.”145 This demonstrates that the need to create
mythologies and to search for some kind of spirituality is hard-wired into
human nature, something Crake clearly either neglects or underestimates.
Such an interpretation shows Atwood’s ironic intertextual game with the
Bible, as well as her criticism of religion in its institutionalised form. The
Crakers proceed with the idol they created: “already the children are
destroying the image they made of [Snowman], reducing it to the
component parts, which they plan to return to the beach. The picture of
Snowman has done its work: now that the real Snowman is among them
once more, there is no reason for the other, less satisfactory one.”146 The
false idol is then destroyed, because real spiritual experience is of a greater
importance to the Crakers. Why would they need any artificial counterparts
if they have direct access to the prophet of their unnamed religion? This is
another very important issue that Atwood brings to her readers’ attention.
There seems to be a possibility of some higher form of human existence in
which the desire for spirituality is unobstructed by any man-made
institutions, and only this kind of faith makes us who we really are, homo
sapiens. As a result, the quotation from one of Crake’s fringe magnets—
“we understand more than we know”147—is correct in a completely
different way than the highly rational and utterly scientific protagonist
thinks. The knowledge that seems essential to all human beings lies in
their willingness not to limit themselves only to scientific facts, but to
experience life in a more open and thus spiritual way.
Last but not least, the novel’s numerous representations of spirituality
realise themselves in the motif of paradise. First of all, Atwood’s
intertextual game with one of the most important concepts of Christianity
(as well as numerous other religions) is visible in Crake’s central venture,
the Paradice project. From the beginning of the scientist’s research, this
very name suggests an enterprise that involves high risk, and hint that it is
actually impossible for Crake to succeed completely. Being a pun on the
word “paradise” combined with the word “dice,” this ambiguous linguistic
combination stands for something hazardous, whose outcome is utterly
unknown. At the same time, the neologism suggests a substantial dose of
gambling, a game that Crake is almost bound to lose. This premonition of
failure is visible in Crake’s new people. Enumerating the Crakers’ vices
145
Atwood, Oryx, 96.
146
Atwood, Oryx, 363.
147
Atwood, Oryx, 301.
116 Chapter Three
their creator tries to dispose of, Atwood also points at the features he does
not manage to eliminate. Among them, dreaming seems most important.
The word “dream” stands for the whole set of imaginative powers so
characteristic of human nature: “they dreamed themselves. Crake hadn’t
been able to eliminate dreams. We’re hard-wired for dreams, he’d
said.”148 What is important, Crake is completely aware of this small
flaw—as he would call it—in the humanoids, but he still belittles it since
altogether the Crakers seem to reify his own concept of humanity. Crake’s
people are not that distant from the biblical Adam and Eve, as lacking a
distinct identity, to a great extent they initially appear to disappoint. Their
childish unawareness of the surrounding post-apocalyptic reality pictured
as a barren and dangerous wilderness is irritating and unpromising, and as
such resembles Adam and Eve’s lack of a profound interest in the
distinction between good and evil.
In the course of time, however, the Crakers demonstrate how wrong
their creator is about them. In his attempts to uproot any desire for
spirituality in the humanoids the scientist completely fails: “Crake believes
he is producing simple beings who will permanently lack the symbolism
and mythologies that lead to religion and its ensuing divisiveness.”149
When Christian Paradise is a place where both spiritual and physical
perfection were born, Crake’s Paradice stands for a scientific laboratory in
which only the clones’ bodies are mastered. Additionally, in both the
stories, their inhabitants have to leave the place of their origin, either as a
kind of punishment, as in the Bible, or in search for better living
conditions, as in Atwood’s novel. Paradoxically then, paradise becomes
Paradice: a dangerous place with no life prospects. Jimmy starts to play a
very important role here. Being Crake’s assistant in the project before the
end of the world, he now becomes Snowman, a prophet of the new
religion that: “in the dawn light he punched in the door for the last time
and opened up the bubble, and led the Crakers out of Paradice.”150 Taking
care of the clones, he also participates in a highly symbolic scene in which
he actually banishes himself from the place where he feels safe, and where
he could possibly survive for a longer time. As a prophet responsible for
the followers of the cult he invents himself, he decides to sacrifice his
well-being—or even his life—for them: “‘Oryx and Crake wish you to
have a better place than this,’ said Snowman.”151 In other words, although
148
Atwood, Oryx, 352.
149
Stein, “Problematic Paradice,” 153.
150
Atwood, Oryx, 351.
151
Atwood, Oryx, 349.
in an act of ultimate Christian-like goodness he loses his paradise, in

symbolic terms he regains it for the Crakers.
Furthermore, the Paradise-Paradice dichotomy also builds an interesting
background for the informal assembly called God’s Gardeners, a group of
religious and vegan fundamentalists that become crucial in the novel’s two
sequels, presented as one of the last survivors of the apocalypse. In the
2003 book they are portrayed only marginally, as one of few organisations
that resist the corporate and consumerist culture, both fighting against it
and rejecting its legacy of technological advancement. As such, this
Christian group plays a vital role in the resistance movement, standing
behind numerous acts of sabotage aimed at the destruction of scientifically
engineered facilities: “conspiracy theories proliferated: it was a religious
thing, it was God’s Gardeners, it was a plot to gain world control.”152 At
the same time, their name carries some interesting connotations with the
motif of paradise, suggesting that they should be responsible for restoring
and taking care of the quasi-biblical earthly Garden of Eden after the end
of the old world. What Atwood seems to imply here is the idea that after
the nihilistic Paradice, there is a possibility of a return to a benevolent
paradise. In other words, people—both the single survivors from the old
world and the Crakers—are still capable of humanity.
Atwood’s attitude to spirituality, contrary to her scientific protagonist’s
views on this issue, seems positive. Without spirituality, she suggests, we
lack a vital element constituting our human nature. With the example of
the humanoids, the writer shows that without reaching beyond what we
can apprehend with our five senses, we are like the Crakers at the
beginning of the Paradice project. Perhaps perfect in form, but barren in
content. This is spirituality—no matter whether expressed through the
means of religion or artistic creativity—that fulfils our inner needs,
without which we would be just like T. S. Eliot’s hollow men: “Shape
without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without
motion.”153 The Crakers, who aspire to this higher form of existence,
appear to be more humane than their creator. They also demonstrate that
the desire for spirituality is so deeply rooted in humankind that any
attempt to undermine it, however well prepared and painstakingly
conducted, is doomed to failure. Consequently, spirituality appears to be
the most fundamental element of homo sapiens, regardless of whether we
link it directly with religion or any other form of human creative and
imaginative activity. Spirituality, at the same time, becomes a very
152
Atwood, Oryx, 341.
153
T. S. Eliot, Wybór poezji (Wrocáaw: Zakáad Narodowy im. OssoliĔskich, 1990),
148.
118 Chapter Three
important and effective weapon against the technology-based, highly

materialistic reality that surrounds and overwhelms us. “Crake thought
he’d done away with all that [i.e. spiritual behaviour], eliminated what he
called the G-spot in the brain. God is a cluster of neurons, he’d
maintained.”154 In her novel, nonetheless, Atwood shows how wrong he is.
154
Atwood, Oryx, 157.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD,

OR THE KINGDOM OF GARDENERS
I said, In exile
survival
is the first necessity
Survive what? you said.
In the weak light you looked

over your shoulder.
You said
Nobody ever survives.
(Margaret Atwood, “Roominghouse, Winter,” Eating Fire, 36)
***
How long will you demand I love you?
I’m through, I won’t make

any more flowers for you
I judge you as the trees do

by dying.
(Margaret Atwood, “You Did It,” Eating Fire, 119–120)
***
This is the year of sorting,

of throwing out, of giving back,
of sifting through the heaps, the piles,
the drifts, the dunes, the sediments,
120 Chapter Four
or less poetically, the shelves, the trunks,

the closets, boxes, corners
in the cellar, nooks and cupboards—
the junk, in other words,

that’s blown in here, or else been saved,
or else has eddied, or been thrown
my way by unseen waves.
(Margaret Atwood, “Year of the Hen,” The Door, 7)
Abuse of Technology and Science

The Year of the Flood is the second instalment of the MaddAddam
trilogy. Regarding the similar plots of the three books (the last one being
MaddAddam), Atwood prefers to call all of them “simultaneouels,”
explaining: “they cover the same time period, and thus are not sequels or
prequels; they are more like chapters of the same book.”1 The affinity
between the books is additionally emphasised by the very genesis of the
idea behind them: “People asked me what happens two minutes after the
end of Oryx and Crake, and since I didn’t know I thought it might be
instructive to me to go back and see what might happen.”2 When it comes
to the science-oriented level, providing her readers with a dystopian vision
of a near-future society—“her dark vision of a corporation-controlled,
consumer-driven and morally corrupt elite class”3—she continues to
concentrate on the way humanity uses and abuses science, either for their
own materialistic good or for their own annihilation. Therefore, different
attitudes to science and technology in The Year of the Flood constitute a
very important theme. The way Atwood approaches science broadens the
range of the issues she has something to say about: “[Atwood] not only
[reflects] on feminist concerns but also on humanist and posthumanist
concerns, as she questions the very survival of humankind in an era of
environmental destruction, excessive consumerism, unregulated
biotechnological experiments and pandemic viruses.”4
1
Atwood, “Dire Cartographies,” 93.
2
Erica Wagner, “Margaret Atwood Interview,” The Times, August 15, 2009,
accessed January 3, 2011,
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/extracts/article2457492.ece.
3
J. Brooks Bouson, “We’re Using up the Earth. It’s almost Gone: A Return to the
Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood,” The
Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48 (2011): 17.
4
Bouson, “We’re Using,” 10.
The Year of the Flood, or the Kingdom of Gardeners 121
In brief, the plot of The Year of the Flood centres on the same period of
time and the same events as depicted in Oryx and Crake, but does so by
employing a completely different perspective. Although Glenn/Crake and
Jimmy/Snowman, the two protagonists of Oryx and Crake, do appear in
The Year of the Flood to provide an interesting reference point for the
events of the whole trilogy, their involvement is largely insignificant.
Similarly to the first book, The Year of the Flood focuses both on the
events after the biological apocalypse, and those leading to it, although
this time Atwood employs three distinctive narrative perspectives, which
Fredric Jameson calls “an enlargement of narrative perspectives [as] the
godlike figures of the first books are reduced to secondary roles and walk-
on parts [in the second one].”5 The first point of view is the third-person
narration of Toby, a woman in the prime of her life who is saved by the
God’s Gardeners sect from the hands of a violent and sexist brute named
Blanco. Living in constant danger from furious Blanco, who is intent on
taking revenge on her, Toby stays with the group. Though she initially
approaches the sect’s dogmas cautiously, after learning more facts about
the Gardeners she decides to accept an official position of an Eve in the
sect’s hierarchy. Eventually, due to the growing danger of Blanco’s
activities, she is forced to live in hiding as a manager in a branch of the
AnooYoo corporation, where she faces and manages to survive the
epidemic. Ren, one generation younger than Toby, is the second
protagonist and, at the same time, the first-person narrator of the story.
Similarly to Toby, she is also associated with the God’s Gardeners. As a
teenager she comes to live with the group, when her mother Lucerne,
desperate to follow her lover Zeb, also a member of the sect, decides to
abandon her previous materialistic life to be with him. However, Ren
spends only a few years with the Gardeners. At some point her capricious
mother abandons Zeb, returning with her daughter to the Compounds. A
few years later, after receiving a university education, Ren ends up as an
erotic dancer and prostitute at SeksMart, where she accidently survives the
bioengineered apocalypse, too. The story then is told in a series of
alternating flashbacks from the pre-apocalypse lives of the two protagonists,
with accounts of how they survived and managed to reunite not only with
each other, but also with the other people, including some of the
Gardeners. Here appears the third point of view from which we have a
chance to follow the events of the novel, i.e. the perspective of the sect,
5
Fredric Jameson, “Then You Are Them,” review of The Year of the Flood, by
Margaret Atwood, London Review of Books, September 10, 2009, accessed
January 6, 2010, http://lrb.co.uk/v31/-n17/fredric-jameson/then-you-are-them ED
11/2010.
122 Chapter Four
and mainly their leader, Adam One, as the story is enhanced with a series
of his sermons and the group’s religious hymns. This additional point of
view provides not only information about the God’s Gardeners themselves
—their beliefs and actions—but also an additional commentary on the
gadget-based reality preceding the Waterless Flood, as they call the
anticipated apocalypse. Consequently, unlike the characters of Oryx and
Crake living in the corporate Compounds, those from The Year of the
Flood inhabit the poorest parts of the dystopian reality, i.e. the polluted
and brutality-driven pleeblands: “whereas Jimmy/Snowman has grown up
within a privileged though barricaded enclave, The Year of the Flood takes
place in the space outside such enclaves, at the very bottom of the social
heap.”6 Jameson interprets this in the following way: “Oryx and Crake
gave us the view of [the] system from the inside and as it were from
above; The Year of the Flood gives us the view from below.”7 Such a
radical shift of narrative perspective results in an even more profound
insight into the mechanisms of the near-future reality. Viewed from below,
as if from outside the clean, rich and hi-tech spheres of the society, the
capitalistic reality of The Year of the Flood seems to be a direct product of
the way people misuse science. On the other hand, it is this consumerist
order that becomes the main reason for Glenn/Crake to use science as a
weapon against it. This re-establishes science as a field of human activity
still capable of grand actions, regardless of the costs and ethical controversies.
Although set in the near future, The Year of the Flood shows tendencies
characteristic of the beginning of the twenty-first century, only slightly
exaggerated and hyperbolised. Atwood seems to refer directly to the
technocratic and commercial usage of science as an ethos that not only
determines but dominates our times. To use Carolyn R. Miller’s words:
“our culture is a highly technological one, and the ethos which it inspires
must necessarily be technological. Some features of the ethos of
technology, in other words, are central to human consciousness.”8 This
emphasis on technology rather than science appears justified in the novel’s
context. The main goal of science in The Year of the Flood is to serve the
capitalistic regime that, in turn, manipulates its citizens. In the
environmentally contaminated reality of the novel—e.g. people have to
wear special “nose-cone air filters”9 to breathe normally—it is science that
is primarily responsible for providing the consumerist masses with more
6
Atwood, “Dire Catastrophes,” 92.
7
Jameson, “Then You Are Them.”
8
Carolyn R. Miller, “Technology as a Form of Consciousness: A Study of
Contemporary Ethos,” The Central States Speech Journal 29 (1978): 234–35.
9
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 22.
and more technically advanced gadgets and applications. They offer a

sensation of novelty that can be thus mistaken for something more
significant, and they only distance human beings from one another.
Science as envisioned by Atwood could be actually reduced to free-market
technology or applied science, because the production of more and more
hi-tech applications becomes the dominant field of scientists’ activities.
Such a state of affairs once again correlates with Miller’s juxtaposition of
science and technology: “It is true that modern science and technology are
intertwined and greatly dependent on each other. But they are distinct
activities. Technology can be provisionally defined as the manipulation of
the contingent and local to achieve material results, to diminish it from
science as the study of the universal to achieve verifiable understanding.”10
Indeed, in Atwood’s novel technology becomes the tool that only
apparently serves human beings, whereas its real purpose is to enable the
capitalistic elite to control the citizens and maintain the proper functioning
of the regime. Preoccupied with technology as such, the system-owned
scientists forget about the grander purposes they should serve. Thomas S.
Kuhn writes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of the mechanisms
of their implementation:
Though values are widely shared by scientists and though commitment to

them is both deep and constitutive of science, the application of values is
sometimes considerably affected by the features of individual personality
and biography that differentiate the members of the group. Individual
variability in the application of shared values may serve functions essential
to science. The points at which values must be applied are invariably also
those at which risks must be taken.11
In The Year of the Flood, the real risk as well as the real challenge seem to
be the last things scientists concentrate on, delving into pure and futile
play characteristic of the materiality-driven and dehumanised world in
which they live. In this context, the activities of Glenn/Crake, the brilliant
but wicked scientist already known from Oryx and Crake, appear the
complete reversal of this domineering attitude. He is the only one who
remembers that behind science should stand some kind of values—not
always accepted and even understood by the others, but still there.
Glenn/Crake is the only scientist that understands a kind of a mission he
has to fulfil. He is a true scientist who, according to Karl Popper’s
10
Miller, “Technology,” 228.
11
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 185–86.
124 Chapter Four
definition “puts forward statements, or systems of statements, and tests

them step by step. In the field of the empirical sciences, more particularly,
he constructs hypotheses, or systems of theories, and tests them against
experience by observation and experiment.”12 The tragedy of our world, as
presented in a fictionalised version by Atwood, is that neither of the
approaches to science—the capitalistic focus on applications or Glenn/Crake’s
extreme solutions—is a source of optimism for humanity’s future.
The first reason for this pessimism derives from the fact that the
fictional world of Atwood’s The Year of the Flood—dominated by
numerous corporations already known from Oryx and Crake—can be
viewed as an example of aggressive capitalism with applied science in its
service. What makes the second volume different from the first is the level
of minuteness in the hypotheses about the way corporations use science
for their own benefits, which stems from the already mentioned change of
the narrative perspectives. The world of The Year of the Flood is one with
corporations being omnipresent and omnipotent: “‘the Corps have to sell,
but they can’t force people to buy,’ [Zeb]’d said. ‘Not yet. So the clean
image is still seen as a must.’”13 Bouson comments on this in the following
way: “[Atwood] voices a deep fear that has long plagued Western society
and that has found expression, over time, in utopian hopes and their related
dystopian fears: that scientific advances will not lead to a progressive
utopian future but instead will result in humanity’s reversion to a savage
dystopian (even pre-human) past.”14 This may be visible in the case of the
HelthWyzer Corp, which produces and sells health products. Jimmy’s
parents work there, as we remember from Oryx and Crake. However, it is
only thanks to Toby’s mother’s point of view that some inconvenient facts
concerning the experiments on patients come to light:
Then Toby’s mother came down with a strange illness. She couldn’t
understand it, because she’d always been so careful about health: she
worked out, she ate a lot of vegetables, she took a dose of HelthWyzer Hi-
Potency VitalVite supplements daily. She took more supplements, but
despite that she became weak and confused and lost weight rapidly: it was
as if her body had turned against itself. No doctor could give her a
diagnosis, though many tests were done by the HelthWyzer Corp clinics.15
It is only much later in Toby’s adult life among the God’s Gardeners that
Pilar—an ex-Compound scientist—reveals to her the secret practices of
12
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2005), 3.
13
Atwood, The Year, 260.
14
15
the HelthWyzer that eventually led to her mother’s death: “‘Did it ever
occur to you, my dear that your mother may have been a guinea pig?’”16
This is made even more explicit by Ren’s father, a HelthWyzer-employed
scientist, when he confesses that “HelthWyzer had been sticking a slow-
acting but incurable gene-spliced disease germ inside their supplements so
they could make a lot of money on the treatments.”17 While experimenting
with medications, scientists treat the corporation’s customers as unaware
guinea pigs and, at the same time, make them absolutely dependent on
their products. Once again this parallels Foucault’s concept of biopower,
which the philosopher defines as “numerous and diverse techniques for
achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.”18 As
Pilar warns Toby: “‘those Corporation pills are the food of the dead, my
dear. Not our kind of dead, the bad kind. The dead who are still alive.’”19
The company demonstrates a pattern characteristic of all corporations
envisioned in Atwood’s novel. They use the possibilities science gives
them with a complete disregard for the ethical side of their actions. Such
an attitude also exemplifies the lack of standards that science and scientists
display. Instead of concentrating their research on finding drugs that
would actually help people in need, scientists just become a tool in the
hands of those who want to enrich themselves, and for whom the human
factor does not play any important role. Consequently, scientists become
an integral part of the system in which profits replace ideals, and where
science becomes purely servile.
The next factor that shows science’s preoccupation with unimportant
accessories is the way the issues connected with the natural environment
are dealt with. In the near-future world of The Year of the Flood, the
typical attitude to nature is to exploit its potential to the very end. As
Bouson describes it: “Atwood expresses her own long-held fears about
environmental and social decline and her scepticism about our ability to
make wise use of the scientific and political tools at hand.”20 This situation
is clearly connected to the fact that science in the reality of The Year of the
Flood is totally subordinate to the materialistic system it helps maintain:
“all science and technology is Corporation-owned, in the service of
furthering capitalist growth and keeping the populace unrevolutionary,
while destroying the resources and ecological balances of the planet at an
16
17
18
Foucault, “Right of Death,” 262.
19
20
126 Chapter Four
ever-increasing rate.”21 Nature, then, becomes one more area that could be
transformed into profits with the invaluable help of technology in the
service of the system. This is visible in the fact that more and more species
are becoming extinct, which is not considered a problem. Earth with its
resources is supposed to serve human beings, not the other way round. The
most explicit example here is a chain of luxury restaurants called Rarity,
where “you could eat endangered species. The profits were immense; one
bottle of tiger-bone wine alone was worth a neckful of diamonds.
Technically, the endangered trade was illegal but it was very lucrative.”22
What Atwood confronts is the problem of humanity using up and,
literarily, devouring all the natural resources that the Earth provides us.
These include clean water and air, but also all the other species living on
this planet. What is worse, corporation-employed scientists, although
equipped with all of the latest and very often revolutionary means that
technology provides them, do nothing to save the environment or the
endangered species. Their only activities in this field are connected with
creating new splices of plants and animals that start to outnumber the old
ones, such as liobams, “the lion-sheep splice;”23 spider/goat splices, used
for “bulletproof vest[s] made of silk;”24 pigoons, huge pigs with extra
human cells and DNA for future transplants;25 Mo’hairs, sheep with
colourful hair used as a kind of organic wig;26 and even hybrid bees, “bee
cyborg spies controllable by a CorpSeCorps operator, equipped to
transmit, and thus to betray.”27 Such actions appears to be a caricature of a
pro-ecological action. The scientists’ main purpose is to entertain themselves,
which actually shows a lack of a grander purpose and general futility. No
wonder that “[t]he ecological catastrophe is presented as being the result
of a breakdown of culture,”28 which reflects what Adam One—an ex-
scientist himself—has to say about the impropriety of most scientists’
activities: “all those scientists and business people were destroying old
21
Ursula Le Guin, Review of The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, The
Guardian, August 29, 2009, accessed December 27, 2009,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/29/margaret-atwood-year-of-flood.
22
23
24
25
Atwood, The Year, 220–21
26
27
28
Hannes Bergthaller, “Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the
Problem of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of
the Flood,” in English Studies (London: Routledge, 2010), 732.
Species and making new ones and ruining the world.”29 The tragedy of
this situation stems from the fact that scientists waste this almost infinite
power that science provides them with on petty, unimportant experiments
that they—either in their arrogance or ignorance—interpret as grand ones,
because they obviously interfere with the natural world: “they are conducting
sinister experiments, monkeying with human and animal genetics.”30
However, such experiments become evidence of the misuse of science
when the real problem—“environmentally devastated and corporation-
controlled futuristic world.”31—remains unsolved. Such a state of affairs
seems even more tragic when we realise the unlimited possibilities science
creates—all of them utilised in an improper way.
What is more, this gloomy vision of science is reinforced by those
scientists who, disagreeing with the lack of values characteristic of the
consumerist approach, rebel against the technocratic system but sadly offer
no real alternative to replace it. Such an attitude is represented by the
MaddAddam assembly, initially connected mainly with the online game
called Extinctathon (the one that teenage Jimmy and Glenn/Crake play so
often in Oryx and Crake): “EXTINCTATHON. Monitored by MaddAddam.
Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead one. Do you
want to play?”32 Both the game and the underground organisation that, as
it soon turns out, stands behind it have been founded and led by Zeb, a
high-ranking ex-God’s Gardener unhappy with Adam One’s policy of
non-violence. Zeb is not alone in his views. There are others following
him: “MaddAddam? Toby wrote on her desk pad. Your group? You’re
plural? I contain multitudes, wrote Zeb.”33 Uninterested in any form of
religion, the group mainly consists of former scientists, previously
associated with the corporations, now actively expressing hatred for the
system that employed them: “top scientists—gene-splicers who’d bailed
out of the Corps and gone underground because they hated what the Corps
were doing.”34 They commence a course of biological sabotage aimed at
destabilising the capitalistic regime, i.e. using more or less the same kind
of weapon—science, against the science-based system: “we were doing
29
30
Michiko Kakutani, “A Familiar Cast of Fighters in a Final Battle for the Soul of
the Earth,” review of The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, The New York
Times, September 14, 2009, accessed April 24, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/books/15kaku.html?_r=0.
31
32
33
34
128 Chapter Four
bioform resistance. We’d take the bioforms to the locations and let them
loose. Zeb figured if you could destroy the infrastructure then the planet
could repair itself. Before it was too late and everything went extinct.”35
The MaddAddam are then a group of radical environmentalists who,
aware of their enemy’s advantage, demonstrate that science still has some
greater aims, not only those focused on petty experiments and the well-
being of the system: “actively doing battle with the corporate powers that
are ruling and destroying the world, Zeb’s MaddAddam group of eco-
activist scientists and eco-warriors commit public acts of bio-resistance.”36
Nonetheless, their programme should be viewed negatively. They limit
themselves only to the dismantlement of the system they detest so much.
These destructive actions are not followed by any consistent ideas about
the future of the world they are so determined to change. Paradoxically,
their activities resemble those of the regime. Science to them, just as to the
technocratic authorities, is just a tool to exploit and destroy, and not to
create.
Finally, the MaddAddam scientists end up as the victims of the regime
because the CorpSeCorps track the group down and bring their actions to a
halt. Surprisingly, the person directly responsible for such a sequence of
events is Glenn/Crake, another, even more crucial link in the process of
regime destabilisation, and another scientist who believes in the mission
science has to fulfil, even though his perception may be controversial.
From the very beginning of the MaddAddam’s existence, Glenn/Crake is
very close to the group, first as a grandmaster of the Extinctathon, then as
a mole of the organisation inside the Compounds. Therefore, it may be
suggested that the MaddAddam’s approach to science has had a direct
influence on the way he himself perceives its role in his adult years.
Nevertheless, the idea of cooperation seems alien to the brilliant scientist
and, additionally, he knows that his project of humanity’s ultimate
annihilation is too extreme for the group members to comprehend: “Zeb
didn’t believe in killing people, not as such. He just wanted them to stop
wasting everything and fucking up.”37 Therefore, it is Glenn/Crake who
eventually informs on the MaddAddam and, after convincing the
authorities of the probable benefit of his own research, recruits its
members to use their potential, reinforced by the more or less shared
beliefs, in his own project: “they ended up as brain slaves in a place called
the Paradice Project dome. It was a choice between that and being
35
36
37
spraygunned, so they took the jobs.”38 The MaddAddam members, on

whom Atwood focuses in MaddAddam, become a tool in the hands of
Crake: a mad and cold-hearted scientist, “too seduced by his own
brainpower to trust nature.”39 Quite ironically, the ones who believe in
higher standards of science and want to fight against a version of science
that—diminished to technology alone—is abused by the capitalistic
regime, become an instrument in Glenn/Crake’s hands. As a scientist,
Glenn/Crake proves his moral superiority both over the scientists working
for the system, and over those who disapprove of such a scientific mission,
but still appear to be too weak to take measures. Consequently, the
character of Glenn/Crake requires a closer investigation.
***
Oryx and Crake concentrates on Glenn/Crake’s teenage years, with his

friend Jimmy/Snowman and his work on the Paradice Project as a crucial
part. In The Year of the Flood the profile of the perpetrator of the end of
the world is deepened in numerous ways. First of all, the reader has a
chance to take a look at his early childhood, during which he secretly stays
in touch with the God’s Gardeners, and during which he already shows
some signs of both his potential and his future actions, i.e. the realisation
of the most fundamental principles of unlimited science. This is how Ren,
who has a chance to know Glenn at that time, recounts her first
conversation with him: “‘Illness is a design fault,’ said the boy. ‘It could
be corrected.’ ‘So, if you were making the world, you’d make it better?’ I
said. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact, I would.’”40 Being a kind of an
inside man of the God’s Gardeners in the Compounds and a friend of
Pilar’s, he provides the sect with important information about the way the
system operates and, in exchange, he learns a lot about the sect itself:
“Glenn already knew quite a lot about the Gardeners, but he wanted to
know more. What it was like to live with them every day. What they did
and said, what they really believed.”41 Later on, all this information
becomes a surprising inspiration not only to his project of creating
38
39
Jeanette Winterson, “Strange New World,” review of Oryx and Crake, by
Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review, September 20, 2009, accessed
January 3, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/books/review/Winterson-
t.html?pagewanted=all.
40
41
130 Chapter Four
surrogate people, but also the complete annihilation of humanity. The

Crakers, although programmed to be immune to any form of religion,
follow a strict vegetarian diet and can be characterised by the sect’s
benevolent mortality. Additionally, the Gardeners’ idea of the Waterless
Flood carries a direct resemblance to Glenn/Crake’s fatal epidemic,
“namely to cleanse the world of the toxic garbage of human society.”42
They are both, at the same time, the outcome of his scientific research at
the Paradice Dome that Glenn/Crake carries out. Finally, he achieves his
goal. He creates the perfect humanoids who, to a great extent, embody his
peculiar idea of immortality. There is implanted “some kind of perfectly
beautiful human gene splice that could live forever” in them.43 His
scientific achievement is beyond the comprehension of the capitalistic
authorities, because he does not intend to launch the humanoids onto the
market, and, consequently, become another element in the common
practice of making science servile. His plans are far greater, for they are
tightly interrelated with the secret dimension of his research—the ultimate
bioengineered pandemic that brings an end to civilisation as we know it.
Paradoxically, Glenn/Crake’s scientific experiments bring back
significance to science. In his studies, Glenn/Crake approaches issues
much greater than those dominating his contemporary world: “sometimes
he’d say he was working on solutions to the biggest problem of all, which
was human beings—their cruelty and suffering, their wars and poverty,
their fear of death.”44 Discontent with the world he lives in—“a decadent,
science-led, self-destructive society controlled by corporate businesses”45—
and the servile position of science in it, he realises his ideas by triggering
the apocalypse that is to cleanse our world of those who, according to him,
are the greatest threat to the future of the Earth:
This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few

hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This
was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had
all the signs: it travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through
cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The
42
43
44
45
Caroline Moore, Review of The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, The
Telegraph, September 10, 2009, accessed April 22, 2014,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/6167348/The-Year-of-the-
Flood-by-Margaret-Atwood-review.html.
lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were
failing as their keepers died. It looked like total breakdown.46
Beneath his cold, methodical minuteness and visible hatred for humankind,
however, there is an idealistic conviction that his actions are right and just.
This belief stems from the importance of science, which he restores:
“Crake, underneath his veneer of cynical aloofness, nourishes a deep
disgust of the world he grows up in, and he is motivated not by greed but
by genuine desire to change it.”47 Glenn/Crake’s actions parallel Thomas
S. Kuhn’s definition of all the past scientific revolutions that, as a
repeating pattern, are bound to take place in human history from time to
time:
Each produced a consequent shift in the problems available for scientific

scrutiny and in the standards by which the profession determined what
should count as an admissible problem or as a legitimate problem-solution.
And each transformed the scientific imagination in ways that we shall
ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world within which
scientific work was done. Such changes, together with the controversies
that almost always accompany them, are the defining characteristics of
scientific revolutions.48
In Glenn/Crake’s case, the direct cause of this revolution is the secret

lethal virus contained in the BlyssPluss pill, which on the surface is
another product to satisfy the insatiable needs of consumers, this time to
enhance their sexual experiences: “hassle-free sex, total satisfaction, blow
you right out of your skin, plus 100 percent protection.”49 Nonetheless,
when activated, this super-sex pill becomes Glenn/Crake’s ultimate
weapon to destroy humanity: “it gave you the best sex ever, but it had
serious side effects, such as death.”50 On the one hand, the scientist
restores science’s significance by literally annihilating the rotten
civilisation humankind represents; an apocalypse whose pictures visibly
resemble the past holocausts: “There were bundles of rag and bone. ‘Ex-
people,’ said Croze. They were dried out and picked over. And the teeth—
mouths look a lot worse without lips. And the hair was so stringy and
detachable.”51 On the other hand, in his actions he focuses on the planet,
46
47
Bergthaller, “Housebreaking,” 735.
48
Kuhn, The Structure, 6.
49
50
51
132 Chapter Four
giving it a kind of a second chance by populating it with his perfect

humanoids, who are not as destructive as human beings: “in the post-
Darwinian and eugenicist belief system of Crake, the radical solution to
humanity’s ills in a twenty-first century world of global, social and
economic decline is the deconstruction of humanity and the creation of the
Crakers, noble savages.”52 His motivations are then idealistic: he proves
the importance of science, which is still capable of radically changing the
world history.
Similarly to Oryx and Crake, in The Year of the Flood Atwood does
not express much optimism for humankind. It seems that science or
technology are directly responsible for such an attitude. The only sign of
positive thinking, a peculiar and distorted gesture of hope in this reality
“driven by rampant consumerism and environmental and social
exploitation,”53 is directly connected with Glenn/Crake’s grand project of
the surrogate people, who, despite being presented in a rather marginal
role in this novel, become one of the writer’s focuses in MaddAddam. This
optimism is rather ironic, because the Crakers’ survival and well-being is
strictly connected with human annihilation. In this context, the ending of
the novel appears very important: the reader can see the four survivors,
including Ren, Toby and Jimmy/Snowman, deliberating over what to do
with the two criminals they have just captured. At one point, they hear
some strange, distant music heralding a group of unknown people: “We
listen. Jimmy’s right, there is music. It’s faint and far away, but moving
closer. It’s the sound of many people singing. Now we can see the
flickering of their torches, winding towards us through the darkness of the
trees.”54 Atwood finishes her book here, leaving us uncertain about the
potential friendliness or hostility of the strangers, although we may
assume—and this assumption proves right in MaddAddam—that they are
the mild and peaceful Crakers approaching. This positive interpretation
emphasises the power of imagination, our genuine idea of how to use the
potential of science, because “the imagination is needed to see something
that is, in an important sense, not there—without thereby blinding oneself
to that which is, that is, without distorting or denying the scientific and
historical record.”55 Nonetheless, if the only positive outcome of scientific
experiments is directly linked with humanity’s annihilation, then the
ending may be just a rhetorical veil behind which Atwood hides her
scepticism about humans’ future, which derives from their inability to treat
52
Bouson, “We’re Using,” 16–17.
53
54
55
science in both a meaningful and creative way, i.e. to make use of the
aforementioned power of imagination.
Women’s Communities with and without Men

In discussing women in the second instalment of the MaddAddam
trilogy, it is necessary to perceive them in the broader context of Margaret
Atwood’s two previous dystopias. Fredric Jameson points out that: “as the
protagonists of Oryx were males, it seemed only fair to write a sequel for
the female characters.”56 More importantly, on the level of feminist
thought, to which the writer constantly refers, Atwood’s approach in The
Year of the Flood seems to be a synthesis of her earlier considerations,
which stem from second-wave feminism and postfeminism, respectively.
Consequently, she centres on women’s relations with other women and
men. As in the case of Offred, it is mainly through such relations that
women from The Year of the Flood constitute their identities, at the same
time redefining the world in which they function. This is why it is mainly
in the characters of Toby and Ren, the two protagonists of the 2009 novel,
that Atwood proposes two, both similar and dissimilar, attitudes to our
postfeminist reality, in which they have to re-establish their female
position. This redefinition is equally important in reference to other
women who, just like in The Handmaid’s Tale, constitute a kind of post-
patriarchal community, as well as men, who play such a significant role in
Oryx and Crake, and without whom it would be impossible to save
humanity in the world after the ecological apocalypse. In contrast to the
way science operates in The Year of the Flood, there is hope in the future,
and to a great extent it originates in women and their relations with one
another, as well as with men.
As opposed to Ren, a protagonist but also a first-person narrator, the
middle-aged Toby can be characterised by a greater dose of objectivity—
partly because of the third-person narration that Atwood uses in her case,
partly because of the very kind of a woman she is. From the first moments
of her appearance in the novel, she is presented as a strong and brave
person, capable of taking uncomfortable but necessary decisions. Bouson
summarises: “Toby’s fierce acts of bravery and loving acts of human
compassion.”57 For instance, when her father commits suicide, to avoid
being persecuted by the CorpSeCorps, Toby understands that she has to
act quickly and without sentiment: “she wrapped what was left of her
56
57
134 Chapter Four
father in a blanket, then in plastic heavy-duty garbage bags, sealed him

with duct tape, and buried him under the patio stones. She felt terrible
about it, but it was a thing he’d have understood. He’d been a practical
man.”58 In the world of the technocratic regime, being sentimental dooms
an individual. Survival can be ensured only by an uncompromising and
practical attitude. Ursula Le Guin explains it: “Toby’s nature is tougher,
but she is tried to the very limit and beyond.”59 That is why, when in need
of money, Toby does not hesitate to use the organs of her body: “after the
money from the hair was used up, she’d sold her eggs on the black market.
When she tried a third time, they told her there were complications, so she
could never donate any more eggs, or—incidentally—have any children
herself.”60 The price she has to pay is enormous, but she manages to
survive one more day, which is an achievement in the pleeblands of
Atwood’s dystopia. This, as well as her experiences with the sexist brute
Blanco, toughens Toby, at least in the eyes of others. Young Ren, one of
Toby’s pupils at the God’s Gardeners, describes her in the following way:
“Toby was the Dry Witch. Witch because she was always mixing things
up and pouring them into bottles and Dry because she was so thin and
hard. We could never make Dry Witch Toby cry. The boys said she was a
hardass.”61 This thick skin is also an element of Toby’s survival instinct,
which is even more visible in her decision, partly forced on her by the
circumstances, to become a member of the God’s Gardeners. Gratitude is
one thing, but “Toby wasn’t much for standard religion,”62 so her
resolution seems—at least initially—to derive directly from her
pragmatism. In other words, she knows that very often camouflage is the
key to the success: “Toby could tell a sham when she saw one, being a
sham herself.”63 Yet, it would be completely wrong to call Toby a two-
faced person, since that would debase her urge to survive. Toby is just a
good-natured and reliable person, whose features become obvious when
we realise the transformation she undergoes at the God’s Gardeners—a
transformation that is possible thanks to her relations with other people,
both men and women, but primarily the senior Gardener and her moral
mentor, Pilar.
Pilar appears in Toby’s life when, after a few weeks of recovery, the
latter still does not know whether to stay with the God’s Gardeners, or to
58
59
Le Guin, Review.
60
61
Atwood, The Year, 61–62.
62
63
continue living on her own. Pilar, or Eve Six, which is her official title
(indicating her important position in the Gardeners’ hierarchy) plays a
crucial role in convincing Toby to link her future with the sect. She
suggests passing on expertise about bees and mushrooms—her main
responsibility in the community—to the newcomer.64 Just as her name
suggests, Pilar is not only one of the most important founders of the sect,
but a highly reliable woman, a rock “who’d seemed eternal, who’d surely
always been there, or if not always, at least for a very long time, like a
boulder or an ancient stump.”65 As a Gardener she follows a peculiar kind
of spirituality that allows her to attribute quasi-magical powers to bees and
to believe that mushrooms enable contact with “the unseen world.”66 Yet,
an ex-scientist, as all top Gardeners, she balances this rather irrational
attitude with a more rational, scientific approach: “according to Pilar, the
bees all over the world had been in trouble for decades. It was the
pesticides, or the hot weather, or a disease, or maybe all of these—nobody
knew exactly.”67 This strange blend of irrationality with rationality plays a
huge role in convincing Toby that the God’s Gardeners are more than just
a group of fanatical zealots. Eventually, Toby accepts the odd way of life
the God’s Gardeners follow and stays with the sect.
Although it is Adam One, the leader of the God’s Gardeners, who
decides to rescue Toby from the hands of Blanco, it is Pilar who makes her
become a vital part of this community: “now Toby spent all her spare
hours with Pilar—tending the Edencliff beehives and the crops of
buckwheat and lavender grown for the bees on adjacent rooftops.”68 With
the passing of time, this teacher-pupil relationship drifts more towards a
mother–daughter bond. This plays a significant role in Toby’s
transformation from a distanced and sceptical outsider into a senior
member of the sect, and even Pilar’s successor. As a result, when Pilar is
on her deathbed, the prospect of her death is a devastating experience for
Toby: “But what about me? thought Toby. I’m being deserted. It was like
the time her mother died, and then her father. How many times did she
have to go through the process of being orphaned?”69 The direct outcome
of their close, family-like attachment—“‘you’ve been my family here,’
[Toby] said. ‘And you’ve been mine,’ said Pilar simply”70—is the natural
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
136 Chapter Four
transfer of duties for the sake of the greater good, or the continued
prosperity of the community. That is why Toby, reluctantly at first, accepts
Pilar’s last wish that she takes over her responsibilities and becomes an
Eve. On the metaphorical level, it can be viewed as Pilar’s sacrifice, an
outcome of which is the completion of the process of Toby’s merging into
the God’s Gardener’s community. A sacrifice—it should be added—that is
worth it.
Not all the women in Toby’s life play such a positive role as Pilar. In
Toby’s relations with Lucerne, we can see that female communities are not
always built on the same principles. Having been a Compound dweller
before, Lucerne appears among the Gardeners as Zeb’s partner, with
whom she has decided to link her future. Although she has left her
corporate life behind, escaping with her daughter Ren, it seems that Zeb is
her main and only reason for abandoning the previous style of life. Ren
describes it: “[Lucerne] herself didn’t seem all that happy. She’d sit at the
table brushing her hair, staring at herself in our one small mirror with an
expression that was glum, or critical, or maybe tragic.”71 She finally
returns to her Compound husband, proving to be at least as cool and
practical as Toby: “she’d stepped out of sex as if out of a loose dress. Now
she was brisk, decisive, no nonsense.”72 Indeed, this allusion to sex is a
very appropriate one, because sharing her life with Zeb, Lucerne appears
to be a stereotypical woman, building her image on the clichés
characteristic of a male perception of the female as a sexual creature, i.e.
using her sexuality as the primary basis for her relationship with Zeb: “a
mirage of the flesh, hormone-fuelled obsession.”73 But such a picture has
nothing to do with the real situation of their relationship, full of noisy
arguments over unimportant things. A relationship that is based on fake
feelings from the very beginning, which Lucerne relates to Toby using
timeworn phrases typical of harlequin literature—the same way Offred
from The Handmaid’s Tale describes her feelings for Nick:
And then he’d kissed her. That kiss had gone right into her like a knife, and
she’d crumpled into his arms like—like a dead fish—no—like a
petticoat—no—like damp tissue paper! It was like a high-speed collision,
said Lucerne, and she’d thought, How can I survive this, I’m going to die
right here and now! And she could tell he felt the same.74
71
72
73
74
The choice of Toby as her confidant is very important here because it

reveals that not only does Lucerne consider herself better and more
womanly than anybody else, she does not regard Toby a fully sexual
creature: “‘You?’ Lucerne sad said, opening her large eyes with their dark
lashes. ‘Why would them [i.e. the Gardeners’ children] make dirty jokes
about you?’ Nothing sexual about you, was what she meant. Flat as a
board, back and front. Worker bee. There was a plus to that: at least
Lucerne wasn’t jealous of her. In that respect, Toby stood alone among the
Gardener women.”75 The source of Toby’s discomfort is not Lucerne’s
biased opinion as such, but rather the fact that it is actually she, Toby, that
feels attracted to Zeb and at the same time has to listen to intimate stories
involving him. Still, she silently endures Lucerne’s confessions, which
makes her an even stronger person able to restrain her own feelings, an
ability that is surprisingly rewarded at the end of the novel when she and
Zeb become happily united. Toby’s principles of trust, understanding and
mutual devotion appear to be more important than Lucerne’s pure
fantasies and vicious manipulations. This advantage that Toby has over
Lucerne becomes even more complete in the context of the two women’s
relations with Lucerne’s daughter—Ren.
***
In contrast to both Toby and Lucerne, Ren seems to be torn between

the luxurious life in the Compounds and the Spartan one with the God’s
Gardeners. Although she was born in the Compounds, where she also
spent her early childhood, the period at the God’s Gardeners constitutes
her formative years. Initially, however, she finds it difficult to accept such
an abrupt change in her life: “when Lucerne and Zeb first took me away
from the Exfernal World to live among the Gardeners, I didn’t like it at
all.”76 With the passing of time she accepts this new situation, adapting to
it fully and finding among the Gardeners a lifetime friend, Amanda. When
forced by her mother to return to the luxuries of corporate life, she cannot
find her place there. Faced with the old-new reality in which she is an ex-
Gardener in the HelthWyzer Compound, she consciously delves into the
world of fantasies, deliberately using her status of an outsider: “I saw the
temptation. I saw it clearly. I would come up with more bizarre details
about my cultish life, and then I would pretend that I thought all these
things were as warped as the HelthWyzer kids did. That would be
75
76
138 Chapter Four
popular.”77 Such an attitude also defines the twenty-five-year-old Ren as a

narrator that we cannot trust entirely since, to a great extent, what she says
may be the product of her imagination. She confesses on another occasion:
“It’s make-believe. Wishful thinking, I know I shouldn’t do it: I should
face reality. But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows.”78
This declaration links her narrative qualities with Offred’s from The
Handmaid’s Tale as both the women, unable to live in the realities
surrounding them, try to find relief in the fantasies they create. In the case
of Ren, this fantasy is her job at Scales and Tails, a fancy night club and
brothel, a part of the state-controlled SeksMart corporation: “they checked
everything, here at Scales. They had a reputation to keep up: we were
known as the cleanest dirty girls in town.”79 Surprisingly, accepting this
degrading position, Ren finds in it an illusion of freedom, a type of reality
in which she does not need to think about issues too painful, too dark and
too difficult to solve. When not working, she says: “I could hardly wait to
be back in my normal life. Not that it was normal exactly. But I was used
to it.”80 In her fantasies she takes the very basics she is provided with at
Scales for real happiness, and disillusioned by her previous life she stops
expecting more: “I wasn’t only a disposable, I was a talent.”81 Ursula Le
Guin reads both her character and her story in the following way: “Ren’s
chapters are a litany of a gentle soul enduring endless degradation with
endless patience.”82 Nonetheless, living in the world of fantasies, Ren does
not fully realise that they are actually not her own fantasies: “Scales
customers didn’t care about your life history, they just wanted epidermis
and fantasy, they wanted to be carried away to Never-Never Land.”83 The
fact that Ren cannot judge reality properly and confuses others’ needs with
her own, especially when these others are repulsive men, makes Ren a
truly tragic character.
To a great extent, Ren’s maladjustments are influenced by her
complicated relations with her mother, Lucerne. First of all, the decisions
both to move to the Gardeners’ and back to the Compounds are entirely
Lucerne’s, derived from her own prospects for happiness. Lucerne’s
greatest concerns are her relations with other men, i.e. her husband and
Zeb, with little regard for her daughter. When escaping back to the
77
78
79
80
81
82
Le Guin, Review.
83
Compounds, she even uses her reputed love for Ren to manipulate the
HelthWyzard guards info believing her own version of the story, which is
to give her a better chance to start her life anew. To discourage her
daughter from questioning it, she does not hesitate to threaten her:
Before our psychiatry sessions, she’d squeezed my shoulder and say,

“Amanda’s back there. Keep that in mind.” Meaning that if I told anyone
she’d been lying her hair off she’d suddenly remember where she’d been
imprisoned, and the CorpSeCorps would go in there with their sprayguns,
and who knew what might happen?84
As a mother, then, Lucerne is ruthless. She considers her daughter a

burden she has to carry, but only to some point. When an opportunity for a
new liaison appears on the horizon, she leaves both her husband and Ren
behind. Ren recalls the only subsequent meeting with her mother:
“Although I hadn’t ever wanted to see her or talk to her, it was a very bad
feeling to know that she didn’t want to see me or talk to me either. It was
like being erased off the slate of the universe—to have your own mother
act as if you’d never been born.”85 The realisation deriving from the above
encounter forces Ren to start living on her own, which, in turn, exerts a
direct impact on the young woman’s decision to join SeksMart: “I needed
to be on my own. I wanted to be someone entirely. I didn’t want to owe
anyone anything, or be owned anything either. I wanted no strings, no
past, and no questions asked. I was tired of asking questions.”86 Lucerne
does not prove to be a good mother, or any kind of a mother, to be precise.
But upon learning about her death in the post-apocalyptic world, Ren
appears not to hold any grudges against her: “despite how she acted later,
she was my mother once, and I used to love her.”87 As in the case of
Offred and her mother, it is also extremely difficult for these two
characters from The Year of the Flood to establish healthy mother–
daughter relations. Ren eventually appears to be morally superior, because
she is able not only to forgive her mother but also to express some
rudiments of the love that she still feels for her.
Discussing mother–daughter bonds, it is also necessary to take a closer
look at the relations between Ren and Toby, both during their simultaneous
stay at the Gardeners’ and, chiefly, after that period when the women more
or less depend on themselves and later, quite surprisingly, on each other.
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85
86
87
140 Chapter Four
From the very beginning of their relationship, first on a teacher–pupil

basis, Toby realises how fragile and vulnerable Ren really is. Considering
her a good person—in contrast to her best friend, Amanda—Toby also
sees her other features: “Ren was overly pliable—she risked being always
under somebody’s thumb.”88 Later on, when for safety reasons Toby
undergoes plastic surgery to transform her into Tobiatha—a fake,
undercover identity—she starts working at AnooYou where she offers Ren
help: “she’d take me on at the AnooYoo Spa as an apprentice, and I could
live right on the premises, and they’d train me. I’d be working with
women, not with men who’d be drunk and violent. It would be a healing
atmosphere, and I’d be helping people.”89 However, Ren finally decides to
cut herself off from all the people connected with her past and rejects
Toby’s helping hand. It is only in the post-apocalyptic world that they
meet again: Toby barricaded in her spa, believing herself to be the only
survivor of the apocalypse; Ren escaping from the three Painballers, i.e.
the brutal male criminals who keep her and Amanda imprisoned, violating
and raping both of them—the kind of men that Toby warned Ren about.
Torn between the two possible ways to help the young woman—either by
aiding her to die or by healing her—she decides on the second one:
“you’ve known this girl since she was a child, she’s come to you for help,
she has every right to trust you;”90 and: “her homicide impulse of the night
before is gone. Now she’d like to cure her, cherish her, for isn’t it
miraculous that Ren is here?”91
Their reunion signifies a rebirth of some community, because restores
hope to Toby’s life. As it soon turns out, when after some period of time
necessary for Ren’s recovery they set off to find and rescue Amanda, this
optimism spreads to the young woman, too: “Ren still believes they’ll find
Amanda. She wants Toby to fix and cure everything, as if she herself were
still a child; as if Toby were still Eve Six, with magic adult powers.”92
Such opinions only reinforce the already suggested impression of Ren as a
naïve and gullible person, prone to confusing her fantasies with reality.
Fortunately for both of them, Toby is completely aware of Ren’s
personality: “if she were an animal, what would she be? Mouse? Thrush?
Deer in the highlights? She’ll fall apart at the crucial moment.”93 This is
why, once again, she has to be strong and in charge: not only to convince
88
89
90
91
92
93
herself that it is true, but to reassure Ren, for whom she now feels
responsible. At the critical moment before attacking the Painballers, Toby
shows Ren that she is tough and trustworthy, just as Pilar was to her, and
just like Lucerne was not to Ren: “she pauses, turns, smiles at Ren. Do I
look reassuring? she wonders. Calm and in control? Do I look as if I know
what the hell I’m doing?”94 Even though she herself considers the rescue
mission doomed to fail, it succeeds. By saving Ren and then Amanda,
Toby makes the prospect of a future female community possible, which,
though all the three women are not in good shape, can be interpreted as a
sign of optimism. As Bouson sees it: “Even as Atwood exposes the
predatory ruthlessness and sexist savagery of the Painballers, she also
emphasises the feminist ideal of female solidarity by describing how Ren
and Toby put their own lives at risk to save Amanda.”95 This notion of
female solidarity becomes a source of both the women’s strength and
determination. Survival alone ceases to be the goal itself. It is the life of
another person, the woman in this particular case, that becomes essential.
This parallels Snyder’s interpretation:
Toby and Ren are survivors both literally and metaphorically, before and
after the flood. Their positions as service workers and women make them
vulnerable to exploitation and violence, yet they are equipped with
emotional fortitude, practical knowhow, and quanta of good luck, which
help them to make it through to the other side.96
Despite the difficult situations they are forced to face, Toby and Ren not
only endure, but also become stronger women as a result—a thing that
cannot be said about Amanda.
***
Amanda, who appears as Amanda Payne, the conceptual artist in Oryx

and Crake, is one of the most ambiguous female characters in The Year of
the Flood, and to a great degree a reminiscent of Oryx from the first
volume of the trilogy. Little is known about her life before she, as a
teenager, enters the God’s Gardeners. We know only that “she was a
refugee. A lot of Texas refugees had turned up after the hurricanes and the
94
95
96
Katherine V. Snyder, “It’s the End of the World as We Know it,” review of The
Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood, Women’s Review of Books 27 (2010): 19.
142 Chapter Four
droughts. They were mostly illegal.”97 What characterises her past is a

mixture of mystery with shady origins, a combination that also fits Oryx.
Additionally, when a Gardener, she is viewed by others as a “sly little
operator”98 who has a bad influence on her best friend, Ren. According to
Toby, their teacher at that time, “she was sly, Amanda. Too well versed in
the ways of the Exfernal World. It was unfortunate that Ren had been
swept into Amanda’s all-too-attractive orbit.”99 Consequently, just like
Oryx, she displays some talent for manipulating people, which makes
Toby dislike and distrust her. Yet, this time quite similarly to Toby, she is
endowed with a strong survival instinct enabling her to escape dangerous
situations. As Toby admits at one point, “it was a mistake to underestimate
Amanda.”100 As a young woman, she continues manipulating people with
the help of the arts she creates, which can be interpreted as a direct
reaction to the years spent with the Gardeners: “Amanda had become a
bioartist: she did art involving Creatures or parts of Creatures arranged
outdoors on a giant scale.”101 What does not change with the passing of
time is the feeling of true friendship between Ren and Amanda.
Eventually, she saves Ren from a locked room at Scales after the
ecological apocalypse.102 Although she pays a high price for that—she is
captured, tortured and raped multiple times—the bond between the two
young women survives, the direct outcome of which is Ren’s
determination to rescue her. In contrast to Ren and Toby, Amanda does
not seem to recover from what has happened to her. Broken physically and
mentally, she ultimately does not appear to be as tough as Toby: “she’s
crying gently, off and on, and twisting the raggedy ends of her hair.”103
However, the source of her disillusionment is not the friendship between
her and Ren, but men’s violence, which raises another very important
issue in The Year of the Flood: the question of men’s importance to the
female communities. In other words: can women’s communities exist
without men, even given the brutality and hostile and sexist attitude to
women most of the men in the novel display?
It is not easy to answer this question, because the picture of men in the
novel is mostly negative. The men are mainly unfriendly and dangerous
characters, but characters who seem to exert an influence on females. Such
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
a situation can be illustrated by Blanco, Toby’s manager at the

SecretBurger, who, using raw physical force, literally turns her into his
own sexual possession:
She’d been Blanco’s one-and-only for less than two weeks, but it felt like
years. His view was that a woman with an ass as skinny as Toby’s should
consider herself in luck if any man wanted to stick his hole-hammer into
her. She should thank her lucky stars. Better, she should thank him: he
demanded a thank you after every degrading act. He didn’t want her to feel
pleasure, though: only submission. Despair was taking her over: she could
see where this was going, and it looked like a dark tunnel. She’d be used
up soon.104
What he represents is not only a typical sexist attitude to women,

characterised by the act of their objectification, but an approach that could
be summarised in terms of a predator–prey relationship: “[Atwood]
exposes the sexual cannibalism of Blanco, the predatory manager of
SecretBurgers, who views the women who work for him—like Toby—as
his female prey.”105 This is emphasised by Blanco’s subsequent hunt for
Toby, on whom he wants to take revenge. Although with the help of the
Gardeners she escapes him, she humiliates his masculine pride, which he
cannot forget; thus his urge to punish her becomes even greater. Jeanette
Winterson comments on the situation: “Atwood is very good at showing,
without judging, what happens when human beings (usually men) cannot
love. In the worst of them, like Blanco the Blot, brutality and sadism take
over.”106 That is why after a few years spent in the Painball arena, a state-
run prison that actually hardens the most dangerous ones instead of
rehabilitating them, he returns seeking revenge on Toby: “’Blanco’s
raging. Ordinary mob guys don’t scare him any more.’”107 This time Toby
is far from passive: she changes, toughens and finally, in the period after
the catastrophe, she first wounds him fatally, and then gives him a lethal
dose of drugs: “she’s just committed a murder. Or an act of mercy: at least
he didn’t die thirsty. Don’t kid yourself, babe, says the voice of Zeb in her
head. You had vengeance in mind.”108 Surprisingly, killing Blanco in an
act of self-defence—it is an either-him-or-her situation—she feels some
doubts and remorse about her justified deed, which additionally marks the
difference in Toby’s principles of life and those represented by the
104
105
106
Winterson, “Strange New World.”
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108
144 Chapter Four
younger generation of women. As Bouson puts it: “in The Year of the
Flood young postfeminist women like Amanda and Ren have learned, like
Oryx in Oryx and Crake, to use their sex for barter and where a woman
like Toby is preyed upon by the brutal rapist Blanco.”109
Indeed, Ren and Amanda’s attitude to their own womanhood is
completely different from Toby’s. Primarily, the two young women treat
their sexuality as a kind of a product that can be used for their benefit. This
fact is visible in Ren’s decision to start working at Scales and in the way
the words of the manager, Mordis, please her: “Mordis said I was
something special—I was the answer to every dream, wet ones included. It
was so encouraging to be doing something I was good at.”110 Accepting
the job of a dancer and prostitute, Ren also agrees to be treated as an
object, which Mordis does not even try to hide. Amanda displays a similar
attitude, “trading” with men since her teenage years. Ren recalls: “she
used to do that kind of trade but she’d told me she’d never liked it and it
was strictly business.”111 In other words, “like postfeminist Ren, her
pleeblander friend Amanda has been socialised to view sex as a
commodity women can use to ‘trade’ or barter for goods or services.”112
As a woman aware of her sexuality, she knows that “’men’ll have sex with
anything, given the chance,’”113 and she tries to use this fact to her own
advantage. However, this is a dangerous business, as Amanda soon learns
when, together with Ren, she is captured by three brutal ex-Painballers
who exploit both women in the most extreme ways. Ren confesses: “I
don’t want to think about what happened next. It was worse for Amanda
than for me.”114 It seems that Amanda has to pay a double price: both for
herself and for Ren, who, unlike her, is rescued earlier and recovers faster.
The reason for this may be Ren’s character. She is presented as a better but
also more naïve person, which finally, after the successful raid on the
Painballers, compels her to state: “My body hurts all over, but at the same
time I feel so joyful. We’re lucky, I think. To be here. All of us, even the
Painballers.”115 On the other hand, when it comes to Amanda, the tragic
irony is the fact that before the raid, the Painballers want to exchange her
for weapons—“‘they wanted to trade the woman for spraygun cells’”116—
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110
111
112
113
114
115
116
i.e. to do the same kind of business that she used to do, but this time under
completely different circumstances. All she can do is to remain passive,
which leads her to feel both disillusioned and defeated. She cannot do
what Toby is able to do: forgive, forget, and move on.
The ability of Toby to forgive marks the distinctive gap between the
two generations of women presented in The Year of the Flood. The gap
parallels two different outlooks on the position of women as envisioned by
the two waves of feminism. Bouson comments:
As she does in her other works, Atwood depicts the generational divide
between feminists and postfeminists in telling the stories of Toby and Ren,
for while the middle-aged (feminist) Toby is aware of the potential
brutality of male-female relations, the younger (postfeminist) Ren
seemingly chooses, or at least accepts, her own sexual commodification
and humiliation.117
Toby’s awareness of the possible dangers behind women’s relations with

men paradoxically enables her to differentiate between the potential rights
and wrongs that stem from such relations. Her attitude to men is not
generally hostile because she can judge and decide for herself, as in the
case of Zeb, one of the top Gardeners. From the moment she becomes a
member of the group, she feels attracted to him, although she decides to do
nothing, knowing that Zeb is in a relationship with Lucerne. She appears
to dislike Lucerne, but she does not behave like a femme fatale trying to
win him for herself. This shows that good relations among women are to
her a priority. Even long after Zeb’s relationship with Lucerne ends, Toby
remains reserved, never letting herself be overemotional about it: “after
Lucerne had flown the coop four years ago she’d wondered briefly if there
might be more, sometime, between her and Zeb. But nothing had come of
that hankering.”118 She only allows herself more emotional thoughts when
miserable and desperate, alone and deserted in the post-apocalyptic world.
She imagines: “There are still people. Alive, maybe one of them is Zeb,
come in search of her: he must have guessed she’d still be here, still be
holed up, still holding out.”119 She does not consider such thoughts really
possible, treating them just as her fantasy. Yet, when she and Ren reach
the group of the survivors with Zeb’s MaddAddam group, her fantasies
prove facts. She is told: “‘You were the Inaccessible! The secret lady! Zeb
would never tell us who you were. We thought you were some hot bimbo
117
118
119
146 Chapter Four
he had.’”120 It seems that pure feelings between a woman and a man are
still possible in a world of sexual exploitation and mechanical attitudes to
sexuality. Ren narrates Toby and Zeb’s reunion: “when I go outside Zeb is
there in the yard, and Toby’s got her arms around him. She’s smiling—not
a thin smile, a real one.”121 Atwood is not unnecessarily extreme in her
views on women’s communities, realising fully that one sex cannot
function and develop without other. It is only the agreement between
them, based on equality and mutual respect, that can become the source of
hope for a better future.
Nevertheless, the relationship between Ren and Jimmy, later known as
Snowman, could be interpreted as a parody of Toby and Zeb’s mature and
reasonable attitude towards each other. When Ren meets Jimmy for the
first time as a teenager back in the Compounds, she almost instantly falls
in love with him: “I could tell he was sad underneath, because I was that
way myself. We were sort of like twins in that way, or so I felt at that
time.”122 This feeling continues to develop, even though it appears that
Jimmy does not return it. This fact becomes a source of torment for Ren:
“Why did it have to be Jimmy who was the very first person I’d fallen in
love with? The worst thing about it was that I couldn’t get interested in
anyone else. There was a hole in my heart that only Jimmy could fill.”123
The situation becomes more complicated when Amanda starts to date
Jimmy, badly influencing Ren’s relationship with her best friend.
Surprisingly, this does not make Ren change her feelings for Jimmy, and
they even survive the pandemic, exploding anew when she meets him in
terrible health, feverish and hallucinating. Although he does not
understand a word she says, she informs him: “’I just want you to know
that you broke my heart; but anyway, I’m happy you’re still alive.’”124
This single utterance functions as a kind of catharsis for Ren, bringing the
grudge to an end and signalling a new possibility that the woman,
probably in a naïve way characteristic of her, imagines. There is
something optimistic in her dreams and fantasies. It is as if she has
developed under Toby’s influence, and is now ready to take on full
responsibility not only for herself, but also for the relationship that is
ahead. Bouson describes Ren’s personality in terms of “acts of loyalty,
love and forgiveness.”125 Her attitude, though not as convincing as in the
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124
125
case of the older protagonist, serves as another reminder that if there is any
future for humanity in the devastated and disillusioned world, it should be
based on mutual agreement between the sexes, even on the feeling of love.
Though naïve, the suggestion that we should be benevolent to one another
remains the only alternative for human beings.
Women’s communities stand in the centre of Atwood’s deliberations
concerning humanity. On the one hand, her thoughts can be considered
critical. Le Guin states: “Perhaps the book is not an affirmation at all, only
a lament, a lament for what little was good about human beings—
affection, loyalty, patience, courage—ground down into the dust by our
overwhelming stupidity and monkey cleverness and crazy hatefulness.”126
It seems more justifiable, however, to view the role of women in Atwood’s
novel in more optimistic terms, the only element of optimism present in
The Year of the Flood. Women prove responsible for themselves and boast
proper relations with one another. As Winterson frankly puts it: “it is
friendship between women that is noted and celebrated—friendship not
without its jealousies but friendship that survives rivalry and
disappointment, and has a generosity that at the end of the novel allows for
hope. Atwood believes in human beings, and she likes women.”127 Even
so, the females from Atwood’s novel also realise men’s significance in the
process of their mutual survival. Biology aside, women, represented by
Toby and, partly, Ren, appreciate the value of their relationships with men,
including those in their lives and futures, but only on the principle of their
mutual esteem. This is what humanism is according to Atwood: neither
concentrating on the differences between sexes, nor the discrepancies
between various approaches to feminism, but cherishing these differences
and treating them as material for a better future; a future that, as opposed
to the generally gloomy impression the book leaves, is actually possible
only, or at least primarily, thanks to women.
The God’s Gardeners’ Green Christianity and Survivalism

One of the most important elements of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of
the Flood is the religious group God’s Gardeners.128 Although the sect
126
Le Guin, Review.
127
Winterson, “Strange New World.”
128
The significance of the sect is emphasised by the fact that initially Atwood
planned to title the novel The God’s Gardeners, although she eventually rejected
the idea because “she couldn’t risk it being mistaken for ‘a right-wing nut-bar
book’” (Emma Brockes, “Margaret Atwood: ‘I Have a Big Following among the
148 Chapter Four
appears in Oryx and Crake, it is only in The Year of the Flood that the
Gardeners become the main focus. Representing the complicated and
ambiguous way Atwood perceives religion, the God’s Gardeners can be
viewed as, to quote Fredric Jameson, “the most stimulating new feature of
The Year of the Flood.”129 Deriving their convictions from these excepts
on the Bible that could be, and are, interpreted in a pro-ecological way—
“the God’s Gardeners read the Bible as a profoundly green text.”130 The
sect proposes an interesting, science-based variant of eco-Christianity,
which is a direct reaction to the corporate world in which they live.
Consequently, the Gardeners are a sect that, thanks to leader Adam One’s
“green” teachings, attempts to present themselves as a group that consciously
rejects all technological amenities characteristic of Atwood’s late-
capitalist and gadget-driven society. Yet, comprised of former scientists,
the community turns out to actually make use of the latest technological
inventions, appearing highly organised and thus dangerous. Basing their
dogmas mainly on the ecologically interpreted biblical myths of creation
and apocalypse, the beginning and the end of the world, the Gardeners are
among the few who are well-prepared for Glenn/Crake’s biological
catastrophe. This may suggest a positive and more universal conclusion:
only in a community, whether female or spiritual, can humanity survive.
The God’s Gardeners can be characterised as a kind of an underground,
minority, non-violent sect, an offshoot of Christianity understood in a
traditional way, living in constant danger of the Corporations and the
commercialised lifestyle behind them. As Bouson views it: “the God’s
Gardeners actively resist their society with its rampant consumption and
environmental and social exploitation, and they include in their ranks
former scientists, who come from the higher echelons of the
biotechnological corporate world.”131 But they are not the only active sect
in the novel’s world:
A lot of fringe cults worked the Sewage Lagoon, trolling for souls in
torment. Groups of turbaned Pure-Heart Brethren Sufis might twirl past, or
black-clad Ancients of Days, or clumps of saffron-robed Hare Krishnas,
tinkling and chanting, attracting jeers and rotting vegetation from the
Biogeeks,” The Guardian, August 24, 2013, accessed August 11, 2014,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/24/margaret-atwood-interview).
129
130
Sinclair McKay, “Margaret Atwood: The Canadian Novelist Talks to Sinclair
McKay about Books and Bees,” The Telegraph, August 20, 2009, accessed
January 3, 2011,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6061404/Margaret-Atwood.html.
131
bystanders. The Lion Isaiahists and the Wolf Isaiahists both preached on
street corners, battling when they met.132
The popularity of various sects—to a great extent all of them are heretical
variations of the religions known to us—can be interpreted as a direct
reaction to the post-capitalistic and post-religious world depicted in
Atwood’s novel. The religious movements seem to reflect society’s
growing dissatisfaction with the decadent, run-down world in its late phase
of capitalism. In such turbulent times of exhaustion, some people tend to
count more on the superstitions centred on various visions of the
upcoming apocalypse. Stories and myths about the end of the old world
and its rebirth in a new, purified version fuel these religions.
In the case of the God’s Gardeners, the obvious successors of “old”
Christians, the essential reference point is the biblical story of Noah and
the flood that washes down almost all the living creatures from the face of
the Earth: “And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before
me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will
destroy them with the earth.”133 The focus of the myth is the survival of
the chosen ones—in this case Noah, whom God orders to build an ark that
will carry the representatives of all species, which in turn will help to
populate the earth after the flood: “And the Lord said unto Noah, Come
thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before
me in this generation.”134 Although the Gardeners make the story their
cornerstone, they extend the biblical idea of the flood, cleverly adjusting it
to their particular situation. Adam One explains to the other members of
the sect:
We God’s Gardeners are a plural Noah: we too have been called, we too
forewarned. We can feel the symptoms of coming disaster as a doctor’s
feels a sick man’s pulse. We must be ready for the time when those who
have broken trust with the Animals—yes, wiped them from the face of the
Earth where God placed them—will be swept away by the Waterless
Flood. But we Gardeners will cherish within us the knowledge of the
Species, and of their preciousness to God. We must ferry this priceless
knowledge over the face of the Waterless Flood, as if within an Ark.135
Interestingly enough, Adam One’s words emphasise not only the myth’s
survival aspect, but also the eco-friendly attitude employed by the sect.
132
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135
150 Chapter Four
The God’s Gardeners, the representatives of humankind, become the ark

itself, a conveyor of the knowledge that will play an essential role in
restoring animal life to the world after the apocalypse. By drawing directly
from the Noah story, in their mythology the God’s Gardeners move back
to the creation myth, with Adam and Eve’s attitude to nature as different
from Noah’s. Northrop Frye,136 in his famous The Great Code: The Bible
and Literature, understands this in the following way: “There are two
levels of nature: the lower one, expressed in God’s contract with Noah,
presupposes a nature to be dominated and exploited by man; the higher
one, expressed in an earlier contract with Adam in Paradise, is the nature
to which man essentially belongs.”137 This directly parallels the passage
from the Book of Genesis in which God tells Noah and his sons: “And the
fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and
upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon
all the fishes of the sea; into your hands they are delivered.”138 Although
the Gardeners’ flood myth is the same as the biblical myth—people are
only the helpers in providing for the well-being of all the creatures—it
seems that the stress moves away from human beings to other animals.
Making use of more or less the same concepts, the God’s Gardeners
approach the idea of the Waterless Flood in a more ecological way.
The God’s Gardeners’ interpretation of the Waterless Flood inscribes
itself perfectly in the apocalyptical tendencies of the future society from
The Year of the Flood. For example, as with all religious groups
preoccupied with such ideas, the Gardeners naively believe themselves to
be the only ones to survive it. Toby presents it the following way:
A massive die-off of the human race was impending, due to overpopulation

and wickedness, but the Gardeners exempted themselves: they intended to
float above the Waterless Flood, with the aid of the food they were
stashing away in the hidden storeplaces they called Ararats. As for the
flotation devices in which they would ride out this flood, they themselves
would be their own Arks, stored with their own collections of inner
136
Northrop Frye (1921–1991) seems crucial here—mainly in the context of his
studies of the biblical language and mythology—not only because he was one of
the most influential twentieth-century Canadian literary critics and philosophers.
He was also Margaret Atwood’s lecturer at the University of Toronto, a fact that
has had a significant impact on her. Howells notes: “As an undergraduate in
Toronto she was taught by the late Professor Northrop Frye, whose influence as
role model Atwood gratefully acknowledges” (Howells, Margaret Atwood, 12).
137
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (San Diego: A
Harvest/HBJ Book, 1983), 137.
138
animals, or at least the names of those animals. Thus they would survive to
replenish the Earth. Or something like that.139
Although the naivety of these beliefs—emphasised by the ironic language

used by Toby—seems obvious, the faith in the end of the world and the
prospect of surviving it, together with the store of knowledge about other
species, is the main factor that cements the group, establishing its ultimate
goal. This faith distinguishes the Gardeners from the rest of the society
they view as rotten. As Adam One perorates: “Nothing will remain of the
Exfernal World but decaying wood and rusting metal implements. For all
works of Man will be as words written on water.”140 The Waterless Flood
is then, just as the biblical one—“with reference to God’s promise to Noah
that he would never again destroy the human race by water”141—a kind of
a punishment that God imposes on mankind. The God’s Gardeners are
amongst the few who are prepared for all the disastrous consequences it
brings. The concept of the Waterless Flood is rooted in culture, biblical
heritage in this case, because “it seems clear that flood myths are better
understood when they are compared with other flood myths, not when they
are compared with floods. An actual flood may be the occasion of a flood
myth: it can hardly be its cause.”142 Nonetheless, as Adam One realises,
the upcoming pandemic is real and has a real purpose: “it is not this Earth
that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. [The Waterless Flood] is
a plague—a plague that infects no Species but our own, and that will leave
all the other Creatures untouched.”143 No wonder that animals are essential
to the God’s Gardeners’ system of dogmas and beliefs.
As a pro-ecological and Christian group, the God’s Gardeners emphasise
in their dogmas and actions not only respect, but also some kind of
obligation to animals. Animals become the ultimate focus of the whole
survival idea—an idea that differentiates the sect from “old” Christianity
in which animals are just supposed to serve human beings. Adam One
explains, alluding to the biblical story of Adam’s act of naming the
animals: “To Name is—we hope—to greet; to draw another towards one’s
self. Adam’s first act towards the Animals was thus one of loving-
kindness and kinship, for Man in his unfallen state was not yet a
carnivore.”144 He reinterprets the biblical passage—“and whatsoever
139
140
141
142
Frye, The Great Code, 36.
143
144
152 Chapter Four
Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof”145—
replacing the power that Adam gains over the animals by naming them
with respect derived from his “green” philosophy. Such a strategy in
which the power structures—social, sexual, cultural, etc.—are shifted, is
very typical of Atwood, who seems to enrich the biblical text with a new
meaning, in this particular example: a pro-ecological one. At the same
time, this relationship between human beings and nature resembles Frye’s
interpretation of these parts of the Bible where a similar issue appears:
The upper level of man’s relation with nature is the one assigned to Adam
and Eve in the garden of Eden, where man lived only on the fruits of trees
and in which all animals were domestic pets to be given names. This world
has disappeared, and with the “fall” of Adam and Eve man descended into
the indifferent and alien nature that we see around us now. He will never
regain it until he knows thoroughly what hell is, and realises that the
pleasure gained by dominating and exploiting, whether of his fellow man
or of nature itself, is a part of that hell-world.146
By interpreting biblical truths in a pro-ecological way, Adam One

proposes an idealistic concept of a return to a state when a man was an
integral part of nature, not a creature believing himself to be above it.
Thanks to his arguments, Adam One establishes vegetarianism as one
of the main principles of his sect. He rejects the idea that since human
beings are superior to all other species, they can treat them how they like,
which also includes the right to eat them. According to Adam One, the
state of being carnivorous is somehow connected with human beings’
generally vicious nature: “What is it about our own Species that leaves us
so vulnerable to the impulse of violence? Why are we so addicted to the
shedding of blood? Whenever we are tempted to become puffed up, and to
see ourselves as superior to all other Animals, we should reflect on our
own brutal history.”147 This brutality both includes and derives from meat-
eating. The Gardeners do not only represent a philosophy of non-
violence—“‘our way is the way of peace’”148—they also follow a strict
vegetarian diet. To justify such practices, Adam One once again refers to
the Bible, this time to the Miraculous Draughts of Fishes, reinterpreting it
in a “green,” pro-ecological way:
145
146
Frye, The Great Code, 75–76.
147
148
The Fish was an apt symbol, for Jesus first called as his Apostles two
fishermen, surely chosen by him to help conserve the Fish population.
They were told to be fishers of men instead of being fishers of Fish, thus
neutralising two destroyers of Fish! That Jesus was mindful of the Birds,
the Animals, and the Plants is clear from his remarks on Sparrows, Hens,
Lambs, and Lilies.149
Adam One’s speech is full of humour and irony, for he completely

reverses the meaning of the word “fisherman.” While Christians interpret
“fisherman” in metaphorical terms as the followers of Jesus, he treats it
literarily, thus emphasising its vegetarian undertone. His words can be
read as blasphemous because the way he uses one of the most significant
Christian symbol—i.e. the Fish standing in for Jesus himself—is
unorthodox. It cannot come as a surprise, then, that his opinion of all the
“old” religions is negative: “Other religions have taught that this World is
to be rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new
Heaven and a new Earth will then appear. But why would God give us
another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly?”150 His “green”
readings of the Bible are perfect examples of the manipulative skills that
he so frequently displays. His deliberate misinterpretation of fish as one of
the most basic Christian symbols in an eco-friendly way is to serve the
unity of the community he leads, and to legitimise its dogmas.
Adam One is definitely the central figure of the God’s Gardeners,
because he is the main factor cementing the eco-Christian community.
Being the “eccentric but charismatic founder and leader”151 of the sect,
Adam One provides the Gardeners with comforting sermons in which he
formulates and develops their “green” religion. Although officially the
Gardeners are a democratic assembly, it is he who suggests important
doctrinal and organisational solutions. In all his activities he remains calm
and reassuring, which is confirmed even by the initially doubtful Toby:
“though his beard had now turned an innocent feathery white and his blue
eyes were round and guileless as a baby’s, though he seemed so trusting
and vulnerable, Toby felt she would never encounter anyone as strong in
person. He didn’t wield this purpose like a weapon, he simply floated
along inside it and let it carry him. That would be hard to attack: like
attacking the tide.”152 Some kind of mysterious ambiguity seems to be
inscribed in the way this prophet-like character is represented in The Year
149
150
151
Snyder, “It’s the End of the World,” 19.
152
154 Chapter Four
of the Flood, and it is only in MaddAddam that we have a chance to learn

more about his pre-Gardener life. What is clear from the very beginning is
the fact that Adam One, just like most Gardeners, is an ex-scientist who
used to work for the corporations he now so unhesitatingly rejects,
believing the style of life they propagate is responsible for the decadent
phase of the Earth. Such a critical approach is visible in one of his most
remarkable sermons, in which he links the corporate lifestyle—but also
science and the insatiable hunger for knowledge behind it—with the
upcoming end of the world:
According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The

ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism
into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into
technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into
humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from
seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a
joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished
past and the distant future.
The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked
into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and
more, but not getting any happier.153
What Atwood presents here using Adam One’s words, is another example
of the way her irony operates. Progress, which is conventionally
understood as a positive phenomenon, is reinterpreted as something that
becomes the main obstacle in human beings’ pursuit of knowledge.
Science distances humankind from some kind of truth that seems essential
to their existence. Bergthaller states: “the God’s Gardeners must
resuscitate the Biblical myth of the Fall in order to explain the strange fact
that humans, in order to behave naturally, must cultivate themselves.”154
Scientific and cultural progress, then, functions in the novel as the
antithesis of nature. Searching for more and more knowledge, human
beings recede from what should be of the utmost importance for us, as
Adam One could say. This shows Adam One as a consciously
manipulative figure, representing less regard for truthfulness than one
would expect. Katarina Labudova states: “Atwood suggests that those who
have knowledge and information, have also power. The God’s Gardeners
also manipulate the information they have and they also excuse it with the
153
154
same reason as the manipulators in the Corporations.”155 For example,

Adam One decides not to tell the Gardeners about the suicidal
circumstances of Pilar’s death, believing they could be too demoralising to
the community: “‘Forgive me, dear Toby,’ he said when the rest [of the
Gardeners] had gone. ‘I apologise for my excursion into fiction. I must
sometimes say things that are not transparently honest. But it is for the
greater good.’”156 He realises that being a leader is a difficult mission that
very often requires sacrifices and problematic compromises. Toby
describes him: “Adam One was a different person behind the scenes. Not
entirely different—no less sincere—but more practical. Also more
tactical.”157
This practicality finds its realisation in the various connections
between religion and science, which are not only characteristic of Adam
One, but which define the whole sect. First of all, it must be said that the
sect is not as zealous as its members wish it to be viewed. Adam One
explains the Gardeners’ religious doctrine to Toby as follows:
In some religions, faith precedes action. In ours, action precedes faith.

You’ve been acting as if you believe, dear Toby. As if—those two words
are very important to us. Continue to live according to them, and belief
will follow in time. We should not expect too much from faith. Human
understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.158
He enters the long-lasting theological dispute concerning faith versus good

deeds as an individual’s main obligation within a religious community. It
cannot come as a surprise that, representing a more practical approach, the
sect’s leader opts for actions, central to the Gardeners, which may parallel
Jameson’s rhetorical questions: “Is this religion not itself ideology? And is
this book not the expression of an ideological doctrine?”159 At the same
time, Adam restores to science as a crucial tool to realise his vision of
religion in which faith alone is not enough. He explains: “[people] could
not achieve their goal of reconciling the finding of Science with their
sacramental view of Life simply by overriding the rules of the former.”160
The most noticeable example of such a marriage between science and
155
Katarina Labudova, “Power, Pain, and Manipulation in Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood,” Brno Studies in English 36 (2010):
142.
156
157
158
159
160
156 Chapter Four
religion is the long list of the saints that the Gardeners worship. What is
surprising—besides a few traditional Christian saints like Francis of
Assisi—is that the list includes people connected with the natural
environment’s preservation, mainly past environmentalists, from the
Polish naturalist Aleksander Zawadzki, through conversationalist Jacques
Cousteau, to the geneticist David Suzuki.161 As young Ren recalls: “every
day had at least one saint and sometimes more, or maybe a feast, which
meant over four hundred of them. Saint Dian Fossey, because the story
was so sad, and Saint Shackleton, because it was heroic. But some of them
were really hard. Who could remember Saint Bashir Alouse, or Saint
Crick, or Podocarp Day?”162 The ridiculous eclecticism of the list may
suggest some kind of desperation inscribed in the God’s Gardeners. They
draw inspiration for their religion from every possible source that is at
hand. However, all these quasi-saints and their ecological activities
provide a kind of a framework for the new religion, disallowing the
community from forgetting the simple fact that most of the Gardeners’
founders are ex-scientists themselves.
Science is also visible in the religious language Adam One and the
other Gardeners use. This mixture of scientific arguments with religious
rhetoric can be noted both in Adam One’s sermons and—chiefly—in the
hymns in The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook, a collection that Atwood
creates for the sect by drawing inspiration not only from the Bible, but also
from the canon of western literature, including William Blake and Emily
Dickinson. In one hymn, the central idea of the Waterless Flood is
explained:
My body is my earthly Ark,

It’s proof against the Flood;
It holds all Creatures in its heart,
And knows that they are good.
It’s builded firm of genes and cells,

And neurons without number;
My Ark enfolds the million years
That Adam spent in slumber.163
161
It is worth noticing that Atwood expands the God’s Gardeners’ list of saints,
adding a few men of letters, e.g. Christopher Smart (1722–71), Robert Burns
(1759–96), and Farley Mowat (1921–2014). The list also contains the name
Stephen King, not the contemporary American writer, but the Australian explorer
(1841–1915).
162
163
The vision of the religion proposed by the Gardeners is then a kind of a

reconciliation between spirituality and science. Bergthaller comments:
“Faith is necessary to complement scientific insight if the latter is not to
breed nihilism and despair.”164 In more universal terms, what Adam One
and his followers do is to reconcile science with spirituality, something
that the Compound scientists, as well as Glenn/Crake, completely
disregard. The sect’s leader explains explicitly: “Science is merely one
way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say:
where would any of us be without Love?”165
***
However, spirituality and love, mixed with science or not, cannot

ensure the Gardeners’ survival since, by rejecting the state’s dominating
style of life openly, the community becomes the regime’s enemy. Such a
situation, similar to that involving the first Christians in the Roman
Empire, forces the sect to employ a practical approach to their survival,
becoming a kind of an underground resistance group (although, ironically,
they dwell on rooftops). First of all, persecuted by the corporate
authorities, the Gardeners almost completely abandon written language—
even their Hymnbook has only an oral form—seeing it as the regime’s
device to control the masses. Ren recollects the teachers’ orders:
Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails. They told us
to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on.
The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books
could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. As for
writing, it was dangerous, because your enemies could trace you through it,
and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you.166
Apart from a visible reference to Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, these

teachings demonstrate the peculiar survivalism that the Gardeners believe
is able to ensure them the regime’s lack of interference. The conscious
decision to exist on the margins of the capitalistic society is simply a way
to survive. Adam One explains: “They view us as twisted fanatics who
combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and puritanical attitude
towards shopping. But we own nothing they want, so we don’t qualify as
164
165
166
158 Chapter Four
terrorist.”167 This practical approach determines survival, and the art of

camouflage is an integral part. Good organisation and discipline mixed
with religious spirituality cater for the group’s relative well-being, too.
This may be visible in the God’s Gardeners’ preoccupation with a new
beginning, which reflects the way the sect is organised. Its members
accept the names Adam and Eve as a direct reference to the biblical
creation myth. Nevertheless, Eden-like democracy and equality remains in
the spheres of myth. Toby states: “Adam One insisted that all Gardeners
were equal on the spiritual level, but the same did not hold true for the
material one: the Adams and the Eves ranked higher. In many ways it was
like a monastery. The inner chapter, then the lay brothers. And the lay
sisters, of course.”168 This is another factor that describes the God’s
Gardeners as not only a religious community preoccupied with spiritual
progress, but also an organisation that is determined to exist regardless of
adverse circumstances. Adam One and the leaders of the sect are aware of
the fact that to survive very often means to deny and sacrifice some core
beliefs and dogmas, an approach shared by many a religious community in
danger.
The most emblematic self-violation of the Gardeners’ dogmas, and at
the same time a sign of an unshakeable will to survive, is the abandonment
of vegetarian practices. Although the Gardeners follow a strict vegetarian
diet, they are also instructed that under extreme circumstances, turning
into carnivores may be the only chance for survival. The very existence of
the sect is more important than its dogmas. Adam One reasons: “let us ask
ourselves: Which is more blessed, to eat or to be eaten? To flee or to
chase? To give or to receive? For these are at heart the same questions.”169
The same controversial issue finds its more poetic (and more ironic)
development in one of the oral hymns:
But we are not as Animals—

We cherish our Creatures’ lives;
And so we do not eat their flesh
Unless dread Famine drives.
And if dread Famine drives us on,

And if we yield to tempting Meat,
May God forgive our broken Vows,
And bless the Life we eat.170
167
168
169
170
The survival principle allows the Gardeners to dispense with their

vegetarian philosophy, so much emphasised in Adam One’s teachings,
when the threat of annihilation is real: “remember, nothing is unclean to us
if gratitude is felt and pardon asked, and if we ourselves are willing to
offer ourselves to the great chain of nourishment in our turn.”171 Meat-
eating, then, is allowed only when the hypothetical approval to be eaten in
the future is understood and accepted. In other words, activity is justified
only by the acceptance of passivity, a doctrine that becomes the source of
disagreement between peace-loving Adam One and his more extreme
brother, which eventually makes some of the Gardeners leave the sect and
form the more active MaddAddam.
The MaddAddam group is also interesting as a point of reference to the
God’s Gardeners. The sect’s practical approach to religious dogmas is
discussed when Zeb, Adam’s brother and right hand, teaches the Gardener
children that the rules of survival are direct and simple: “‘seeing without
being seen. Hearing without being heard. Smelling without being smelled.
Eating without being eaten!’”172 In this brutal world they happen to live in,
to ensure one’s existence prey has to transform into predator. This is an
idea not fully comprehended by Adam One, who advocates a non-violent
approach. No wonder, with the growing tensions and threats, that such
inner disagreements lead to a schism. Under numerous extreme
circumstances, more and more Gardeners decide to act with Zeb’s
MaddAddam rather than stay passive with Adam One. Eventually, Adam’s
tendency to change the rules—“there are times when the rules must
bend”173—becomes a weapon against him and his idea of a community.
His philosophical defeat is even more explicit when one investigates a
newly created splice called liobam, an idealistic attempt to reconcile in one
creature the features of predator (lion) and prey (lamb): “they don’t look
dangerous, although they are. [People]’d reasoned that the only way to
fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second
would be to melt the two of them together. But the result hadn’t been
strictly vegetarian.”174 Adam’s non-violent attitude is impossible in the
brutal world his sect is forced to function. In order to survive, one has to
eat instead of being eaten. Nonetheless, Bergthaller reasons: “It is not
enough to simply survive—what is needed is a symbolic order within
which the fact of survival can appear as meaningful and ‘good.’”175 This
171
172
173
174
175
160 Chapter Four
means that Adam’s views are still relevant, even if they are difficult to
imagine.
The overall evaluation of the God’s Gardeners is rather ambiguous, as
is Atwood’s attitude to religion and spirituality. On the one hand, the way
Atwood approaches her Gardeners is ironically distanced, making the
whole novel “a satire on organised religion.”176 She seems to understand
the dangers behind the idea of a sect, with its limitations on individual
freedom and imagination. At the same time, despite the irony and
criticism, the writer’s treatment of the sect is rather benevolent and
affectionate, mainly because of the fact that their dogmas centre primarily
on environmental issues: “drawing on the idea that environmentalism will
not work if it does not become a religion, Atwood mixes together science,
religion and environmentalism as she imagines the eco-religion of the
pacifist and vegetarian God’s Gardeners.”177 She appears to propose a kind
of a controversial compromise. Believing that pro-ecological actions have
a chance to succeed only if they are reinforced by a framework typical of a
religion, she makes her eco-religious Gardeners the only possible
alternative for our planet’s better future. Fredric Jameson comments on the
way Atwood’s idea of religion functions:
It is a pleasure to report that this [religion], with its prophets, its sermons,
its taboos and even its Hymnbook, wears astonishingly well: ecological,
communitarian, cunningly organized decentralised units, each with its
“Ararat” of supplies stashed away against the inevitable Waterless Flood of
plagues to come and police repression as well, and despite its regressive
primitivism utilising computerised information and informers strategically
planted among the elites. Functional hierarchy (the Adams and the Eves) is
here made palatable by co-operative egalitarianism and a serene acceptance
of the frailties of human nature.178
In broader terms, such a picture of organised religion is possible because

“[Atwood] believes that religion—that is, the stories we tell ourselves
about where we came from and where we are going—is hard-wired into
us: that there is no escape, so long as we remain human beings.”179 The
God’s Gardeners embody one more humanistic feature appreciated by the
novelist. They constitute a community and symbolise a kind of agreement
that is possible amongst people. The God’s Gardeners—a religious
community with the eco-Christian system of beliefs—are in all respects
176
McKay, “Margaret Atwood.”
177
178
179
Wagner, “Margaret Atwood.”
the lesser evil, the last straw that humanity simply has to clutch at in order
to survive.
CHAPTER FIVE
MADDADDAM,
OR THE COMMUNITY OF SURVIVORS
Kill what you can’t save

what you can’t eat throw out
what you can’t throw out bury
What you can’t bury give away

what you can’t give away you must carry with you,
it is always heavier than you thought.
(Margaret Atwood, “November,” Eating Fire, 138)
***
Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island.

I said, I am a desert island.
(Margaret Atwood, “People Come from all over the World,” Eating Fire, 159)
***
I learned that the earliest language

was not our syntax of chained pebbles
but liquid, made

by the first tribes, the fish
people.
(Margaret Atwood, “Fishing for Eel Totems,” Eating Fire, 99)
Between Rational Pessimism and Ironic Optimism

Concluding Atwood’s speculative trilogy, MaddAddam continues more
or less the same trains of thought that she introduced in the two previous
novels. In these considerations, Atwood introduces slight alterations with a
164 Chapter Five
larger dose of optimism, mixed with a gentle irony that she allows herself
to display. In her review of MaddAddam, Michele Roberts notes: “Atwood
has created something reminiscent of Shakespeare’s late comedies; her wit
and dark humour combine with a compassionate tenderness towards
struggling human beings.”1 When it comes to science and the way its role
can be significant in the humanity’s future, the writer focuses on two
distant and yet interrelated aspects. Once again she returns to the character
of Glenn/Crake, a central figure for her story, the perpetrator of the
Waterless Flood. What is different in the third volume is the fact that this
time, by enriching the picture of the protagonist’s early childhood, Atwood
attempts to get to the core of his motives. We have the chance to meet
Glenn as a nine-year old child, and to learn about the world he grew up in
to better understand his future actions. At the same time, in the post-
apocalyptic sections of the novel, Atwood pays more attention to the
Pigoons—“large, ferocious pigs with near-human intelligence, originally
created for organ transplants”2—already present in the previous two
novels. In MaddAddam, the Pigoons become such an important vessel of
the author’s ideas about humanity.3 Being either human beings’ source of
food or their fierce enemies in the past, the Pigoons now prove essential to
humanity’s survival due to the human tissue in them. The picture of
science in MaddAddam appears paradoxical. Pessimism derives from the
objective observation of the world, whereas optimism finds its roots in
ideas that can be both unimaginable and repulsive. As Sady Doyle
summarises the novel’s main point: “the question of MaddAddam is not
whether humanity should survive, but how.”4
As the final volume of the story Atwood began with Oryx and Crake
ten years earlier, MaddAddam is very tightly connected to the two novels
preceding it. This connection is much stronger than the one between Oryx
and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Therefore “it is necessary to have
1
Michele Roberts, Review of MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood, The
Independent, 16 August 16, 2013, accessed August 11, 2014,
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-review-
maddaddam-by-margaret-atwood-8771138.html.
2
Paul L. McEuen, “A Post-Pandemic Wilderness,” review of MaddAddam, by
Margaret Atwood, Nature 500 (2013): 398.
3
It may not be an unimportant coincidence that it is only in MaddAddam that the
word “pigoon” is spelt with a capital letter, a situation that does not happen in the
two previous volumes.
4
Sady Doyle, “Dystopia for the ‘Lulz,’” review of MaddAddam, by Margaret
Atwood, In These Times, August 22, 2013, accessed August 11, 2014,
http://inthesetimes.com/article/15415/margaret_atwoods_dystopia_for_the_lulz/.
MaddAddam, or the Community of Survivors 165
read the earlier volumes to appreciate MaddAddam’s complexity.”5 Being

a peculiar “simultaneouel” to both of the two previous instalments,
MaddAddam shifts between the “present” story—here involving the group
of the post-apocalyptic survivors we already know (mostly from The Year
of the Flood)—and the “past,” pre-catastrophe events primarily centred on
Zeb and his brother Adam, the God’s Gardeners’ and MaddAddam’s
leaders-to-be respectively. The “present” story begins exactly at the point
where The Year of the Flood ends: with Toby, Ren, Amanda,
Jimmy/Snowman, and two violent, now captured Painballers listening to
some strange music approaching. It appears that these sounds are
generated by the Crakers, who are coming to rescue Jimmy/Snowman,
their unwilling guide and prophet. Despite good intentions, the Crakers
accidentally set the two criminals free, which becomes the motor of the
action. Now the plague survivors have to struggle not only with the
adverse living conditions, the direct outcome of the pandemic, but also
with the highly dangerous representatives of their own species. At the
same time, in these sections of the book, narrated from Toby’s point of
view, we can see the way the new world starts to function, with the
remaining MaddAddamites reaching some kind of a symbiosis not only
with the peace-loving Crakers, but also with the Pigoons that eventually
turn out to be essential in defeating the Painballers. Zeb’s flashback story,
narrated by him, is also of great importance. It provides the readers with
crucial information about Zeb, his brother Adam, and his reasons for
establishing the God’s Gardeners, as well as about Glenn/Crake, who
appears in them as a young boy. On the “present” level of the novel, all
these stories constitute a kind of a new mythology. It is a new gospel that
Toby, replacing Jimmy/Snowman, narrates to the Crakers, teaching at the
same time one of them, named Blackbeard, to read and write. When at the
end of the novel Blackbeard takes over Toby’s responsibilities as a
chronicler and the Crakers’ guide, and when the four human–Craker
children are born, it can be interpreted both as a sign of hope for the future
and typically Atwoodian irony.
Pessimism and rationality are mainly represented in the novel by
Glenn/Crake, the key figure in the world’s total rearrangement. When he
appears in Zeb’s story for the first time, he is known only by his real
name. As “a thin boy in a dark T-shirt,”6 Glenn seems both lonely and
5
Ruth Scurr, “Clear-Eyed Margaret Atwood,” review of MaddAddam, by
Margaret Atwood, The Times Literary Supplement, August 14, 2013, accessed
August 11, 2014, http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/clear-eyed-margaret-
atwood/.
6
Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 234.
166 Chapter Five
interesting. This suits Zeb, who resides in the corporate Compounds as a

kind of an undercover agent. What additionally attracts the adult to the boy
is the disturbing strangeness that Zeb senses in Glenn: “he had that look
about him, a wary, distrustful look, as if he didn’t know what bush or
parking lot or piece of furniture was going to chasm suddenly to reveal the
lurking enemy of the bottomless pit. What was that haunting entity?
Nothing definite, perhaps. More like a lack, a vacuum.”7 At nine, Glenn
already displays the stirrings of the kind of a character that he is to
become: obscure, distressing, uncontrollable. Glenn is also a loner who
makes an exception by letting Zeb get closer to him: “it wasn’t hero-
worship, not exactly; not did Glenn want Zeb to be his dad. More like an
older brother, Zeb decided. There weren’t that many kids his age at
HelthWyzer West for Glenn to play games with. Or not ones as smart as
him.”8 Zeb teaches the young boy all the computer skills that will become
so important to Glenn’s future:
Before he knew it, Zeb was giving young Glenn some extracurricular
lessons in coding, which meant—practically speaking—in hacking as well.
The kid was a natural. How tempting was it to take that talent and hone it
and polish it and pass on the keys to the kingdom—the Open Sesames, the
back doors, the shortcuts? Very tempting. So that is what Zeb did. It was a
lot of fun watching the kid soak it all up, and who was to foresee the
consequences?9
Aware of the risk he is undertaking, Zeb plunges into this dangerous

teacher–pupil game. The final outcome will be the end of the world, with
Glenn-the-pupil outsmarting Zeb-the-teacher.
The use of the word “game” seems adequate in Glenn/Crake’s context
because it refers to the necessary amount of gambling that characterises
his future ventures. Just as the idea for the Paradice Project stems from
Glenn’s connections and fascinations with the God’s Gardeners, the
possibility of an even more hazardous and dangerous BlyssPluss Pills—
the drug containing a lethal virus—finds its roots in Glenn’s formative
years and his interest in chess. This is the game that young Glenn
frequently plays not only with Zeb, but also with Pilar, an important God’s
Gardener then working undercover as a corporate scientist. When Zeb
spots both of them for the first time, he makes the following observation:
“a small, black-and-grey-haired older woman playing chess with Glenn,
7
Atwood, MaddAddam, 236.
8
9
over on the sidelines. It was an odd combo—almost-old lady, uppity

young kid.”10 Yet, the three of them—chiefly Pilar and Glenn—are
peculiarly connected with the important role of chess. It appears that the
BlyssPluss Pill in its still underdeveloped phase is hidden in one piece of
Pilar’s set, a bishop. This is exactly the scientific formula on which
Glenn’s father is working and for which he is murdered. Pilar states:
“‘[Glenn] doesn’t know they killed his father. He doesn’t know yet. Or not
directly. But he’s very bright.’”11 Later on, it is Pilar who takes control
over the mysterious genetic material, but has to transport it to a safe place
and, thus, uses Zeb as a courier, explaining the contents of the chess-man
in the following way: “‘vectors for bioforms. And these vectors are inside
some other vectors that look like vitamin pills: three kinds, white, red, and
black. And the pills are inside another vector, the bishop.’”12 When the
bishop returns to her, she is still unable to examine it fully, and decides
that after her death the piece is to find its way to the then teenage
Glenn/Crake: “‘Pilar said he was mature for his age, and Adam felt Pilar’s
deathbed wishes should be respected.’”13 Ipso facto, the keys to the future
world’s destruction are in Glenn’s hands, although it is unclear whether
Pilar is or is not fully aware of the consequences of her deed; as Toby
recalls her great mentor and friend: “She remembers Pilar’s wrinkled little
face, her kindness, her serenity, her strength. But underneath, there had
always been a hard resolve. You wouldn’t call it meanness or evil.
Fatalism, perhaps.”14 It is again Glenn/Crake who outsmarts the others,
and the long list of such characters only confirms his extraordinary
intelligence. It also demonstrates that Glenn/Crake’s unfavourable attitude
towards the decadent world surrounding him is not only his own, and that
this bitter pessimism may have be shared by others, such as Pilar.
***
If Glenn/Crake’s early childhood recapped by his literal and figurative

games with Zeb and Pilar can represent the odd and pessimistic rationality
in science’s implications for humankind, then optimism in MaddAddam
realises itself even more peculiarly in the form of the Pigoons. These huge,
genetically modified pigs with human tissue built in—including a
prefrontal cortex—are present in both the previous volumes of the trilogy,
10
11
12
13
14
168 Chapter Five
either as a warning against morally questionable experiments with human

DNA before Crake’s pandemic, or as strong and highly dangerous
creatures preying on vulnerable survivors in the post-apocalyptic world. In
MaddAddam the functions and positions of these creatures change
drastically.15 At first, the situation looks the same as in the previous
novels. The Pigoons attack the MaddAddamites’ camp, trying to strip
them of their vegetables. The survivors, having returned to carnivore
practices, treat the huge pigs not only as enemies, but also as food, even
though they realise some strangeness connected with eating this sort of
pork. One of the characters admits: “‘Ever since we turned a couple of [the
Pigoons] into bacon I still feel kind of weird about eating them. They’ve
got human neocortex tissue.’”16 Their attitude starts to alter after Toby’s
drug-induced hallucination in which—probably as a sign of remorse over
killing a few Pigoons in the past—she spots a couple of these creatures.
From then on, she begins to dream about them:
Toby has dreamt all night: piglet dreams. Innocent piglets, adorable
piglets. Piglets flying, pink ones, with white gauzy dragonfly wings;
piglets talking in foreign languages; even piglets singing, prancing in rows
like some old animated film or out-of-control musical. Wallpaper piglets,
repeated over and over, intertwined with vines. All of them happy, none of
them dead.17
What is important in these dreams is not only the message to stop

butchering the Pigoons, but the fact that for the first time she notices some
kind of beauty in these pig–human splices. She realises the Pigoons’
affinity with her own kind. The process of acceptance is triggered when
Toby’s post-hallucination flashbacks convince her that the Pigoons
deserve to be treated on a basis equal to humans: “the Pigoons were not
15
The Pigoons, first introduced by Atwood in 2003, are not figments of her
imagination any more as there are official reports of similar current experiments in
Japan. Atwood comments: “They’ll grow kidneys first, like I said would happen.
They’re trying to put this law in place that says you can never have human cortex
tissue in an animal. Dream on. Somebody’s going to do it, just to see what
happens” (Jared Bland, “It’s ‘Scary’ Watching Aspects of her Fiction Come to
Life, Margaret Atwood Says,” The Globe and Mail, August 24, 2013, accessed
August 11, 2014.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/is-
apocalyptic-atwood-a-bona-fide-prophet-dont-even-go-
there/article13934419/?page=all).
16
17
objects. [Toby] had to get that right. It was only respectful.”18 It does not
matter anymore if the scientists’ past genetic experiments were right or
wrong. Humankind has no better option but to accept the new situation
and find advantages in it.
Similarly, the Pigoons, in a human-like way reason that allying with
the MaddAddamites can be profitable. They are capable of analytical
thinking. When endangered by the violent Painballers, the intelligent pigs
offer to the antagonistic group of the survivors, who are still in the
possession of weapons, a peace proposal: “there are fifty or so in all. Fifty
adults, that is. In the centre of the group, two of the boars are moving side
by side; there’s something lying crossways on their backs. It looks like a
mound of flowers—flowers and foliage. What? thinks Toby. Is it a peace
offering? A pig wedding? An altarpiece?”19 They not only prove their
intelligence, far exceeding typical animal behaviour—they can
differentiate between “good” and “bad” people—but they are also able to
analyse and draw conclusions from the calculus of probability when their
survival is at stake. The Pigoons appear to understand the conditions of
trans-specific coexistence, although the terms of their offering are not one-
sided and servile. Blackbeard translates the Pigoons’ words using his
limited knowledge of English:
If you help them to kill the three bad men,20 they will never again try to eat
your garden. Or any of you. Even when you are dead, they will not eat you.
And they ask that you must no longer make holes in them, with blood, and
cook them in a smelly bone soup, or hang them in the smoke, or fry them
and then eat them. Not any more.21
The peace agreement—accepted by the MaddAddamites—also presupposes

the return to vegetarianism, partially at least. This agreement is kept long
after winning the battle with the Painballers, resembling social behaviour
characteristic of human communities before the apocalypse. For example,
Toby humorously relates:
Two young Pigoons—barely more than piglets—dug under the garden

fence and were discovered eating the root vegetables, the carrots and beets
in particular. The MaddAddamites had slacked off their vigilance as
18
19
20
It appears later that the two Painballes captured Zeb’s brother Adam and kept
him hostage—that is why the Pigoons think there are three bad people, not just the
two who escaped at the beginning of the novel.
21
170 Chapter Five
regards the Pigoons, thinking that their agreement would hold. And it is
holding, with the adults; but juveniles of all kinds push the rules. A
conference was called. The Pigoons sent a delegation of three adults, who
seemed both embarrassed and cross, as adults put to shame by their young
usually are.22
This new world order, we could conclude, has the same petty old
problems, characteristic of all communities that mankind establishes or co-
establishes.
The problem appears, however, as to what generic category should be
employed to characterise the Pigoons and, consequently, what measures
ought to be used to evaluate their behaviour. On the one hand, physically
they are still pigs—it would be almost impossible to tell them apart from
ordinary pigs. On the other, they resemble human beings mentally too
much to ignore the similarities. They communicate with one another just
like humans do: “a low level of grunting is going on, from pig to pig. If
they were people, Toby thinks, you’d say it was the murmuring of a
crowd. It must be information exchange.”23 They display social behaviour
rather untypical of animals—when one of their kind is murdered by the
Painballers, the rest of them participate in a ritual much like a funeral:
The herd of pigoons divides in two, and the pair of boars moves slowly
forward. Then they roll to either side, and the flower-covered burden
they’ve been carrying slips onto the ground. They heave to their feet again
and move some of the flowers away, using their trotters and snouts. Now
the whole herd is deploying itself in a semicircle around the—what? The
bier? The catafalque? The flowers, the leaves—it’s a funeral.24
They are, therefore, capable of showing respect for the deceased, and, in
more universal terms, of the cultural expressions of grief. Decorating a
corpse with flowers cannot be categorised as an example of animal
instinct. They form a kind of an organised and hierarchical society—when
preparing for the battle with the Painballers, “the three Pigoon scouts are
out in the front, snuffling along the ground. To either side of them, two
more act as outsiders, testing the air with the wet disks of their snouts. Six
younger Pigoons are running messages between the scouts and outsiders
and the main van of older and heavier Pigoons: the tank battalion, had they
been armoured vehicles.”25 The Pigoons seem to understand the idea of a
22
Atwood, MaddAddam, 377-78.
23
24
25
community and the benefits deriving from it, i.e. mainly the greater
survival chances. In this sense, combining the human-like awareness of the
necessity to survive with a more natural animal instinct, the Pigoons
appear to surpass the last representatives of humankind.
The Pigoons’ superiority over human beings, at least in some aspects
of existence, becomes a fact that cannot be ignored. This is an issue that
the MaddAddamites soon realise, understanding that to a great degree, the
thing that the Pigoons value in them most is the simple circumstance that
they possess weapons and they know how to use them:
The Pigoons alongside tilt their heads to look up at their human allies from
time to time, but their thought can only be guessed. Compared with them,
humans on foot must seem like slowpokes. Are they irritated? Solicitous?
Impatient? Glad of the artillery support? All of those, no doubt, since they
have human brain tissue and can therefore juggle several contradictions at
once.26
Capable of abstract and imaginative thinking, the Pigoons are also able to
form judgements. At least hypothetically, they may be aware of their
advantage over humans. This, in turn, makes the MaddAddamites ponder
on their ignorance regarding the Pigoons’ real potential, as well as their
more and more complete dependence on the new allies: “‘I wonder what
they’re saying?’ Toby asks. ‘We’ll find out,’ says Zeb, ‘when they’re
damn ready to tell us. We’re just the infantry as far as they’re concerned.
Dumb as a stump, they must think, though we can work the sprayguns.
But they’re the generals.’”27 This is probably when Zeb—representing all
the human survivors—admits his species’ inferiority, or at least he
renounces any groundless claims to considering humanity better. This
parallels David J. D. Koepsell’s view: “We have dignity in a way in which
no other animal does, which is not to say that other animals lack
dignity.”28 The discovery of a given species’ uniqueness and validity, in
this case the Pigoons, is the key to humanity’s survival. It becomes clear
that the success of a new world in which these two animals can live side
by side depends on their mutual cooperation and trust.
26
27
28
David J. D. Koepsell, “The Ethics of Genetic Engineering: A Position Paper for
the Center for Inquiry Office of Public Policy,” 10, August 2007, accessed August
25, 2014,
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads/attachments/genetic-engineering-
ethics_2.pdf, 10.
172 Chapter Five
It is not easy, therefore, to suggest any finite estimations of the role of

science in MaddAddam. Atwood continues presenting science in a
negative light characteristic of the two previous novels of the trilogy, i.e.
as a tool that is too tempting to human beings not to be used for their own
destruction. This is true in the stance represented by Glenn/Crake, if not
the rationality standing behind his actions. After all, his motives seem
right because he wants to save our planet. Nonetheless, if Glenn/Crake’s
project is positive, who is it positive for? Humanity is certainly not the
beneficiary here. Yet still, there are the Pigoons: an example that science
can produce something good and far-reaching. And there arises another
controversy. Is it a sign of optimism that Atwood presents pigs with
human DNA as the source of hope for humanity? If so, then the model of
human civilisation has to change fundamentally. Humankind simply
cannot exist on its own, in isolation from the surrounding environment.
This surrounding environment cannot be safeguarded by human beings
from the position of power and privilege. Koepsell argues in “The Ethics
of Genetic Engineering:” “the essence of technology is to alter the human
relationship to nature,” and that “nature itself is indifferent to our dignity,
and so altering nature cannot violate our dignity. In fact, it dignifies us to
use the talents we have to alter our environment and our biology to
improve our lives. Technology in any form is an outgrowth of our
intellectual abilities: at its best, it allows us to overcome natural
shortcomings.”29 Thus, Atwood’s ideas may be treated as an optimistic
project in the sense that she instructs us on how we should approach
science so that it can define us as representatives of humankind. It is this
definition that needs radical reinterpretation as well as a new, positive
perspective. As James Kidd states, “Atwood has faith in the future of
mankind, no matter how desperate the present.”30
Women, Men and Pregnancy/Motherhood

Approaching women in MaddAddam, Atwood develops her earlier
considerations on this issue from the two previous volumes of the
dystopian trilogy. What strikes us most is the optimistic tone, already
signalled in The Year of the Flood. Atwood’s vision of post-feminism
tends to drift towards a more universally understood humanism. The writer
29
Koepsell, “The Ethics,” 7, 8.
30
James Kidd, “Some Hope in a Hell of an Ending,” review of MaddAddam, by
Margaret Atwood, The South
China Morning Post, August 11, 2013, accessed August 11, 2014,
http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/books/article/1295491/some-hope-hell-ending.
continues to focus on women’s communities, which provide the main

female characters of the novel with some kind of a framework wherein
they can realise their femininity. Additionally, she extends the scope of
such communities to include men, too, because they also influence the
way females view themselves and their identity. This is why so much
attention is devoted in the story to the relationship between Toby and Zeb.
Yet, women’s communities cannot be ideal, since there are frictions and
disagreements within them, as represented by the relationship between
Toby and the femme-fatale-like Swift Fox. Moreover, Atwood returns to
the image of a bad mother, which she explores both in The Handmaid’s
Tale and The Year of the Flood. Nonetheless, the concluding remarks of
MaddAddam are definitely more optimistic. When humanity’s survival is
at stake, neither internal differences among women, nor the experience of
bad motherhood, appear decisive. Instead, the writer proposes pregnancy
as a source of optimism, which firstly unites a woman with a man, and
then allows for good motherhood. The new transgenic has to be
emphasised here, as the inter-specific children, the Craker–human splices,
enable some sort of survival and prolongation of life. In the post-
apocalyptic world of MaddAddam, the world in which human beings are
painfully outnumbered and have to struggle to survive, pregnancy and
motherhood acquire a new meaning, becoming a sign of hope for
humanity’s future.
When discussing both women’s communities and women–men
relationships, Toby seems central to Atwood’s considerations. One of the
two protagonists in The Year of the Flood, in MaddAddam she is definitely
the most important character, who provides us with her perspective on
most of the events in the novel. Jeet Heer describes her: “thanks to Toby,
the trilogy gains that human dimension which only the best fiction
possesses.”31 Her defining characteristic is the relationship between her
and Zeb that has just started in the previous volume of the trilogy, but
becomes the greatest concern in MaddAddam. At the beginning of the
novel, Toby still does not seem to believe that such a relationship is
possible in the long run. When Zeb is outside the survivors’ camp on a
risky expedition, doubts dominate Toby’s thoughts: “her strongest desire
is to have Zeb come back safe, but if he does, she’ll have to face up once
again to the fact that she’s neutral territory as far as he’s concerned.
Nothing emotional, no sexiness there, no frills. A trusted comrade and foot
31
Jeet Heer, Review of MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood. The National Post,
August 30, 2013, accessed August 11, 2014,
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/books/book-reviews/book-review-maddaddam-
by-margaret-atwood.
174 Chapter Five
soldier: reliable Toby, so competent. That’s about it.”32 The absence of her
lover has a direct influence on her self-esteem, as now the emotional and
physical bond between them appears to be of greatest importance for her.
When he returns safe, the relief she feels has all the characteristics of a
physical experience: “Toby feels her body unclench, feels air flowing into
her in a long, soundless breath. Can a heart leap? Can a person be dizzy
with relief?”33 And indeed, the bond they establish is both physical and
emotional. It resembles the first moments of enchantment. This is visible
in the way Toby perceives their intimate contacts:
She’d waited so long, she’d given up waiting. She’d longed for this, and
denied it was possible. But now how easy it is, like coming home must
have been once, for those who’d had homes. Walking through the doorway
into the familiar, the place that knows you, opens to you, allows you in.
Tells the stories you’ve needed to hear. Stories of the hands as well, and of
the mouth.34
She describes their intimate relationship in terms of the safety

characteristic of a family home, a home for which she has longed. This
implies a possibility of permanence. Indeed, their relationship develops
into something more than a short-term affair built around sex. What
characterises it is its mutuality—Zeb proves to be completely worthy of
her affection, Toby cannot imagine her life without him: “it’s hard to
concentrate on the idea of a future. She’s too immersed in the present: the
present contains Zeb, and the future may not.”35 It is only in the bond with
him that Toby can fully realise herself and her femininity. When long after
the main events described in the book Zeb eventually is killed during one
of his reconnaissance trips, Toby does not see any reason to live.
Blackbeard, her pupil and another very important character in MaddAddam,
narrates: “Then Toby took very old packsack, which was pink; and into it
she put her jar of Poppy, and also a jar with mushrooms in it that we were
told never to touch. And she walked away slowly into the forest, with a
stick to help her, and asked us not to follow her.”36 There is no life without
Zeb for Toby, which is even emphasised by Toby and Zeb’s alternate
narrations of the novel, where “Zeb’s cool, ironic, show-off monologues
are balanced by the tone of Toby’s introspection: warmer, more sensual,
32
33
34
35
36
less relentlessly knowing.”37 In broader terms, there is no possibility for

women to exist without men, especially in a post-apocalyptic world in
which a very small number of survivors must struggle not only to survive,
but also to prolong their species’ existence.
At the same time, women’s communities appear to be as dissimilar as
any single-sex group may be. In MaddAddam this is shown with the
example of the complicated bonds Toby establishes with Pilar and Swift
Fox. As I describe it in the The Year of the Flood section, Toby’s
connection with Pilar is intimate and profound, more like a mother–
daughter relationship than just friendship. Although Pilar is long deceased
when the “present” action of MaddAddam takes place, she still remains
very important to Toby. First of all, thanks to Zeb’s retrospections, Toby
has a chance to learn more about Pilar’s activities from the times before
they knew each other, both with her unexpected acquaintance with young
Glenn, and her contribution, either conscious or not, to his project for the
world destruction. It is especially her involvement in the BlyssPluss pill’s
development that broadens Toby’s knowledge about Pilar, making the
picture of her more complex, as now the late friend and mentor of hers
cannot be viewed as a positive character. Yet, this newly acquired
knowledge does not prevent Toby from perceiving Pilar as a guard. She
explains to the Crakers, using a simplified, quasi-religious language they
are able to comprehend: “I have a different helper, whose name is Pilar.
She died, and took the form of a plant, and now she lives with the bees.”38
Toby alludes to the fact that in the place where she, together with Zeb,
buried Pilar, an elderberry bush was planted. In the moment of a crisis,
when the most important decisions about the survivors’ actions are to be
taken, Toby does not hesitate to consult Pilar, however strange it may
sound. She explains to Zeb: “’Think of it as a metaphor. I’ll be accessing
my inner Pilar.’”39 This makes it clear that the female bond the two of
them have established is still strong, regardless Pilar’s death. For Toby,
Pilar proves a powerful symbol of the desire to live decently and act
morally; that is why in her drug-induced meditation, looking at the
elderberry bush on Pilar’s grave—“much larger now. White bloom
cascades from it, sweetness fills the air”40—she even addresses her
directly, stating: “I know you’re here, in your new body.”41 Just as there
are no easy answers in Atwood’s writings as a rule, Pilar’s reply is equally
37
Roberts, Review.
38
39
40
41
176 Chapter Five
ambiguous. Instead of words, Toby notices the Pigoons—their eyes

resembling berries: “elderberry eyes.”42 She interprets this as a good sign,
for it becomes the beginning of a new world order, built around humans’
agreement with the intelligent pigs. Although treated in symbolic terms,
the female community established by Pilar and Toby continues to provide
Toby with solutions crucial for the existence of the entire MaddAddamite
group.
Nonetheless, the relations among women can be also negative, as in
the case of Toby and Swift Fox, one of the former MaddAddamite
scientists. As the protagonist summarises the latter’s character: “Fox by
name, fox by nature, she thinks. Handle a spraygun, indeed.”43 The
language she uses imposes her own negative perspective on how Fox is
viewed. From the first moments Toby meets her in the MaddAddamites’
camp, she cannot help feeling some unidentified reluctance towards the
younger woman: “she must have been over thirty, but she was wearing
what looked like a twelve-year-old’s ruffle-edged nightie. Now where had
she picked up that? Toby wondered. Some looted HottTottsTogs or
Hundred-Dollar Store?”44 What most disturbs Toby is not just the clothes
Fox wears, but the atmosphere of sexual innuendo that she spreads around
her. Toby views her as an aged Lolita, a post-apocalyptic femme fatale
whose main goal is to use her feminine sexuality to provoke men, with
complete disregard for other women: “[Swift Fox] makes a show of
yawning, stretching her arms up and behind her head, thrusting her breasts
up and out. Her straw-coloured hair is pulled into a high ponytail, held in
place by a powder-blue crocheted scrunchie.”45 For Toby, this
unsophisticated tactics of sexual display is directly connected with Zeb
and the fact that she herself is older than Fox. According to Michele
Roberts, “the gender politics of MaddAddam remains fairly conventional.
In this fallen world of hierarchical difference, men and women stand for
separate values even as they are equal in corruption.”46 Indeed, in viewing
Fox as a typical example of a female predator, Toby unconsciously
follows the patriarchal pattern that forces one woman to perceive another
in highly unfavourable terms (i.e. as enemies), which only helps to sustain
such a system. She actually falls victim to the patriarchal politics, which
leads her to develop some kind of an obsession with Swift Fox, and also
underestimate her own femininity. As a result, she imagines the younger
42
43
44
45
46
Roberts, Review.
woman in Zeb’s arms. When a group comprising Zeb, Swift Fox and a few
other MaddAddamites go on a two-day long expedition, Toby cannot
suppress the bouts of irrational jealousy, which at the same time lowers
her self-esteem: “you’ve lost, she tells herself. You’ve lost Zeb. By now
Swift Fox must already have him, firmly clamped in her arms and legs and
whatever orifices appeal.”47 Such thoughts have a very negative influence
on the idea of female communities, weakening the bond the women should
feel for one another. This disturbing tendency reaches its peak when Toby
allows herself to formulate a shockingly sincere opinion on Swift Fox:
She consciously suppresses the word slut: a woman should not use that
word about another woman, especially with no exact cause. Really? says
her inner slut-uttering voice. You’ve seen the way she looks at Zeb.
Eyelashes like Venus flytraps, and that sideways leer of the irises, like
some outdated cut-rate prostibot commercial: Bacteria-Resistant Fibres,
100% Fluid-Flushing, Lifelike Moans, ClenchOMeter for Optimal
Satisfaction.48
What is emblematic here is the fact that she realises that calling Fox a slut
is equally degrading to her. Thinking this way, she accepts the invitation to
the game that Fox proposes, and she accepts the position that patriarchy
imposes on her. Therefore, this moment of free expression passes very
quickly, and Toby simply proves more clever than the provocative Fox:
“’gender roles suck,’ says Swift Fox. Then you should stop playing them,
thinks Toby.”49 Even though Toby cannot escape playing them from time
to time, either, eventually she reassures herself about the groundlessness of
her accusations. This is a positive solution both for her relations with other
women and her relationship with Zeb.
Even though viewed as a deep, true and mutual bond, Toby and Zeb’s
relationship can also appear a strange, or even controversial example of
pure love. As we already know from The Year of the Flood, in her early
years difficult conditions deprived Toby of the chance to have children.
She recalls these circumstances in MaddAddam: “She’d sold some of her
eggs to pay the rent, back in her pleebland days, before the God’s
Gardeners had taken her in. There’d been infection: all her future children,
precluded. Surely she’d buried that particular sadness many years ago. If
not, she ought to bury it.”50 Now Toby is barren, and there is no possibility
of motherhood, or no chance to contribute to the community’s future. This
47
48
49
50
178 Chapter Five
fact becomes a source of doubts concerning her usefulness to the other

survivors. Such thoughts also influence the way she perceives her own
relationship with Zeb. First of all, he is not only the informal leader of the
MaddAddamites, but also a macho-type man (the story of him being
forced to kill and eat a bear is already a legend). Therefore, Toby imagines
he is desired by many a female survivor, mainly by Swift Fox. In the most
desperate moments, she even views her relationship with Zeb as
something reprehensible:
[Zeb] should be doing what alpha males do best: jumping the swooning
nubiles that are his by right, knocking them down, passing his genes along
via females who can actually parturiate, unlike her. So why is he wasting
his precious sperm packet? they must wonder. Instead of, for instance,
investing it wisely in the ovarian offerings of Swift Fox. Which is almost
certainly that girl’s take on things, judging from her body language: the
eyelash play, the tit thrusts, the hair-tuft flinging, the armpit display. She
might as well be flashing a blue bottom, like the Crakers. Baboons in
spate.51
These opinions of Toby’s, emotional as such, fuel her low self-esteem, and
the way she views herself as a woman and a member of the community.
That is why she develops such a close bond with the Craker child,
Blackbeard. She teaches him to read and write, and unconsciously
prepares for the function of the survivors’—both the people and the
Crakers—annalist (I discuss this issue later on in the book). We can even
say that, unable to have her own biological children, Toby compensates by
transferring her maternal feelings on to Blackbeard. She realises this on
one occasion: “she doesn’t think she could live with herself if little
Blackbeard got killed.”52 She almost allows herself to plunge into a kind
of dangerous illusion: “if I’d had a child, thinks Toby, would he have been
like this [i.e. like Blackbeard]? No. He would not have been like this.
Don’t repine.”53 Eventually, she stays rational and reasonable, which has a
healing influence on her own evaluation of herself as a woman. Even if
she cannot give birth to her own (and Zeb’s) offspring, by providing
unselfish love for Blackbeard, by taking care of the Crakers (which
triggers the process of their and the MaddAddamites’ rapprochement), and
by serving the group as their chronicler, she contributes to the survivors’
and women’s society at least as much as those women who get pregnant.
51
52
53
***
In MaddAddam motherhood remains a very important issue, which can

be seen in the case of the unusual relations of young Adam and Zeb with
their mothers. In their formative years, the two boys live with their
father—the Church of PetrOleum’s reverend—and his second wife, as
well as Zeb’s mother, Trudy. Strangely enough, when it comes to Adam’s
mother, the Rev and Trudy present her in negative terms, forcing their
opinion on the boys: “Zeb’s mother, Trudy, was the goody-goody, and
Adam’s mother, Fenella, was the shag-anything trashbunny. Or that was
the story told by Trudy and the Rev.”54 Nevertheless, Zeb—from whose
perspective these parts of the novel are narrated—seems to sense that it is
not entirely true. He tries to fulfil the painful absence of Adam’s mother
with his own version of events and his own fantasy about the woman:
He used to daydream that he’d been left behind by Fenella, who must have
been his real, worthless mother. She’d been forced to flee in a hurry, and
hadn’t been able to tote him along when she was running away—she’d
dropped him on the doorstep in a cardboard box, to be taken in and trodden
underfoot by this Trudy person, who was unrelated to him and lying about
it. Fenella—wherever she was—deeply regretted her abandonment of him,
and was planning to come back and get him once she could manage it.55
It appears that in his adolescent years, the emptiness left behind by Fenella
defines him as a young man. This erotic tension combined with the
unhealthy secrecy around Adam’s mother has a deep impact on Zeb: “[He]
had quite a crush on her: if only he could talk to her and tell her what was
going on she would be on his side, she’d despite the whole setup as much
as he did. She must have done, because hadn’t she run away?”56 The
juvenile feeling finds its most visible representation in the way he views
his own and Adam’s position within the family: “sometimes he felt jealous
of Adam, because he’d once had Fenella for his mother, and all Zeb had
was Trudy.”57 When he learns from Adam what really happened to
Fenella—she was killed by Trudy and their father, and buried in their
garden—this piece of information has a devastating effect on him: “if
Adam’s story was true—and why would he invent this?—it changed Zeb’s
whole view of himself. Fenella had shaped his story about his past, and
also the one about his future, but suddenly Fenella was a skeleton: she’d
54
55
56
Atwood, MaddAddam, 114–15.
57
180 Chapter Five
been dead long ago. So, no secret helper waiting out there: he’d never had
one.”58 The whole mythology he has built around the absent Fenella
collapses, which symbolically marks the end of his childhood, becoming a
kind of a painful rite of passage for the young boy. Additionally, it cannot
be ignored that the unsolved problem of miscommunication between
parents, mainly mothers and their children, already appears in The
Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. In MaddAddam, however, Atwood
proposes a more positive solution to this issue in the form of pregnancy,
no matter how ambiguous or even alarming it may seem at first.
Pregnancies act in the novel as a sign of hope for the human race, but
also as a factor that both cements the survivors’ society and reinforces the
combination of power and dignity in the female characters. This last
element is mostly visible in the case of Amanda, Ren’s closest friend and
Jimmy/Snowman’s former girlfriend, already known from the first two
volumes of the trilogy. When MaddAddam begins, she is still in the shock
from the multiple violent rapes performed on her by the two Painballers.
Toby describes her: “she used to be so strong: nothing used to frighten her.
She’d been a tough pleebrat, she’d lived by her wits, she could handle
anything. Of the two of them, Ren was the weaker, the more timid.
Whatever has happened to Amanda—whatever was done to her by the
Painballers—must have been extreme.”59 As a consequence of this assault,
Amanda is broken, absent and passive. She does not participate in the
social life of the MaddAddamites. No wonder that once it becomes clear
that she is pregnant, the information is not met with enthusiasm. Toby
recalls: “Poor Amanda. Who could expect her to give birth to a murderer’s
child? To the child of her rapists, her torturers?”60 As it soon turns out,
there is one more possibility as far as the father of Amanda’s child is
concerned, connected with the hectic events of the night the Painballers
were accidently set free. There had also been an opportunity for sexual
contact between the Craker men and Amanda: “Toby looks over, across
the fire: Amanda has disappeared in a flickering thicket of naked male
limbs and backs. What should she do? This is a major cultural
misunderstanding.”61 As Ruth Scurr puts it: “MaddAddam revisits the
subject of female fertility in the brave new world of gene splicing.”62
Although it is comforting for Amanda to believe her child has not been
fathered by one of the Painballers, the prospect of carrying a human–
58
59
60
61
62
Scurr, “Clear-Eyed Margaret Atwood.”
Craker splice seems disturbing. Toby reasons: “What if Amanda is

harbouring a baby Craker? Is that even possible? Yes, unless they’re a
different species altogether. But if so, won’t it be dangerous? The Craker
children are on a different developmental clock, they grow much faster.
What if the baby gets too big, too fast, and can’t make its way out?”63 In
more direct terms, Amanda’s doubts are expressed by Ren: “‘Great
choices! An ultracriminal or some kind of gene-spliced weirdo
monster.’”64 There appears the possibility of a transgeneric hybrid, with
not only consequences for the mother, but also for the entire community of
the MaddAddamites—and, in more universal terms, for humanity.
Additionally, as it soon turns out, Amanda is not the only pregnant
woman in the survivor’s camp. There are two other females who probably
are also carrying Craker children. The first one to realise she is pregnant is
Ren, who says: “‘[Amanda] wasn’t the only one, anyway, with the cultural
misunderstanding or whatever you [i.e. Toby] want to call it. For all I
know, I’ve got one of those Frankenbabies inside me too.’”65 As her initial
reaction clearly suggests, just like Amanda, she is worried about the
situation. She does not know what to expect if the inter-species pregnancy
is confirmed. Unlike Ren and Amanda, when Swift Fox—the third
mother-to-be—learns about her state, her reaction is much more
optimistic: “‘Three’s a company, says Swift Fox. ‘Count me in. Bun in the
oven, up the spout. Farrow in the barrow.’”66 Once again Swift Fox,
consciously or not, plays the gender roles she detests so much. The
language she uses to describe her pregnancy indicates this, as it is typical
of the patriarchal approach. Still, aware of the various possibilities such an
unusual biological situation can bring, Swift Fox fully realises the gravity
of the situation as far as the future of the MaddAddamites is concerned.
This is visible in her conversation with the still rather desperate Ren:
“‘Who’d bring a baby into this?’ [Ren] sweeps her arm: the cobb house,
the trees, the minimalism. ‘Without running water? I mean.’ ‘Not sure
you’ll have that option,’ says Swift Fox. ‘In the long run. Anyway, we
owe it to the human race. Don’t you think?.’”67 For Swift the prospect of a
hybrid child is both fascinating from the scientific point of view—she
cannot hide her excitement and curiosity about the potential of the child
she is carrying—and promising as far as the survival and future existence
of the human race is concerned. She views it as a kind of a new beginning,
63
64
65
66
67
182 Chapter Five
full of unexpected options. Although it is impossible to rule out a certain

dose of hesitation, Atwood seems to support Swift’s optimistic reading of
the situation.
Consequently, the three pregnancies and their outcome are presented as
the first manifestations of a new life that is born within the MaddAddamite
group in the post-apocalyptic world characterised by destruction and
death. When the deliveries eventually take place, it turns out that four
instead of just three babies are born, all of them human–Craker hybrids:
Over the past two weeks, all three births have taken place. Or all four,
because Swift Fox gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Each of the twins
has the green eyes of the Crakers, which is a great relief to Toby.
Amanda’s baby is fortunately of Craker descent, not Painballer: the large
green eyes are unmistakable. Ren’s baby is also a green-eyed Craker
hybrid. What other features might these children have inherited? Will they
have built-in insect repellent, or the unique vocal structures that enable
purring and Craker singing? Will they share the Craker sexual cycles?68
Even though their future existence, as well as their co-existence with the
representatives of the old human race, still remains an open question, the
very fact of the births fills the survivors with hope. Janet Christie
comments, referring to the entire trilogy: “the books hint at salvation and
survival through evolution.”69 Symbolic as such, this hope is also included
in the act of naming the children, which reverses the MaddAddam’s
practice of giving names to dead animals (practiced in the Extinctathon
game), returning to its positive, biblical connotations. Blackbeard narrates:
The baby of Ren is called Jimadam. Like Snowman-the-Jimmy, and like

Adam too. Ren says she wanted the name of Jimmy to still be spoken in
the world, and alive; and she wanted the same for the name of Adam. The
baby of Amanda is called Pilaren. That is like Pilar, who lives in the
elderberry bush, with the bees; and also like Ren, who is Amanda’s very
good friend and helper. The babies of Swift Fox are called Medulla and
Oblongata. Medulla is a girl and Oblongata is a boy. Swift Fox says these
names are for a reason that is hard to understand.70
68
69
Janet Christie, “Interview: Margaret Atwood on her Novel MaddAddam,” The
Scotsman, 31 August 31, 2013, accessed August 11, 2014,
http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-margaret-atwood-on-
her-novel-maddaddam-1-3069846.
70
By mixing the names of their then deceased friends and relatives, Ren and
Amanda seem to make it clear that the future will not be possible without
those who have sacrificed their lives. In other words, the legacy of the past
is displayed as a link between one generation of humanity and the next one
that follows, between one community of the survivors and another. This
interpretation is emphasised when one analyses the names of Swift Fox’s
children, whom she names after medulla oblongata, a part of the brainstem
that connects the brain to the spinal cord, and which contains the vital
cardiac, respiratory, vomiting and vasomotor centres. The four babies can
be viewed as a transitional phase between old humanity and its new
version, which will eventually emerge in the future.
Moreover, apart from helping the survivors realise that there is a future
for human race, regardless of its final shape, the births of the four human–
Craker children have a direct impact on the MaddAddamite community’s
present situation. The newly-born children not only boost the human
beings’ morale, but also play a crucial role in cementing their group, with
the essential role of women as mothers. The appearance of new life seems
to reawaken the old communal practices, because now there is a necessity
to raise the children in a decent way. We can observe the return to the
family as a social unit: “Crozier and Ren appear united in their desire to
raise Ren’s child together. Shackleton is supporting Amanda, and Ivory
Bill has offered his services as soi-disant father to the Swift Fox twins.
‘We all have to pitch in,’ he said, ‘because this is the future of the human
race.’”71 The MaddAddamites seem to be aware of the significant role they
are to play. Their community is to serve as a birthplace for generations of
human beings, or even a new civilisation, which parallels Helena Michie’s
statement: “the question of responsibility is articulated through a
collapsing of boundaries, not only between mother and foetus but between
mother and father.”72 The survivors’ community in which men and women
decide to raise children on equal bases is neither women’s nor men’s, and
these children help the human beings to realise it. Additionally, the
differences and arguments among the women appear of minor importance
now, when such grand aims are at stake. This is visible when, long after
Toby’s departure from the MaddAddamites and her ostensible suicide in
the wilderness, Swift Fox gets pregnant for a second time. Blackbeard
says: “Then Swift Fox told us that she was pregnant again and soon there
71
72
Helena Michie, “Confinements: The Domestic in the Discourses of Upper-
Middle-Class Pregnancy,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and
Criticism, edited by Robert R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (Houndmills:
Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997), 67.
184 Chapter Five
would be another baby. And Swift Fox said that if it was a girl baby it
would be named Toby. And this is a thing of hope.”73 In the face of the
common good, all the past animosities become unimportant and futile. At
the same time, the female role of mother, presented by Atwood in her
earlier writings in rather negative or at least ambiguous terms, is possibly
rehabilitated. Instead of Offred and her mother’s lack of mutual
understanding, or Zeb’s fantasies filling in the emptiness after his mother’s
departure, for the new society in MaddAddam it is the only alternative,
based on good motherhood, and parenthood in broader terms. What is
more, all three mothers understand how important their role is, giving the
community they belong to a chance at a new beginning. Indeed, we can
agree with Blackbeard that this is a thing of hope.
Consequently, MaddAddam, the final volume of Atwood’s dystopian
speculative trilogy, offers some positive and probable prospects for the
future. This is especially visible in reference to women’s role, whose
significance lies in conscious participation in building communities to
which women and men contribute on equal bases, without any patriarchal
prejudices. Both the experiences of pregnancy and motherhood only
enhance women’s importance, because they are indispensable to the future
of humanity. To state that women find self-realisation in motherhood
would be an obvious overstatement, but to link this state with their female
awareness and to underline its necessity in the process of the human
beings’ survival seems justified. At least in the world after the total
biological and ecological catastrophe women are able to ensure
humankind’s future, becoming a synonym of hope. However uncertain this
hope may be, it is still there—as Atwood herself comments: “’I think the
pleasure [of anticipating the end of the world] is we like to walk it through
in advance, with a consciousness that’s still human. So you can’t actually
wipe out the human race and then a story about it.’”74
Religious Mythology and the Emerging Culture

Although in MaddAddam Atwood elaborates on the eco-Christian sect
of the God’s Gardeners—chiefly about its origins connected with the way
Adam, the sect’s future leader, was raised—her main focus, as far as
religion is concerned, lies elsewhere, namely in the human surrogates
known as the Crakers. It is “the literary evolution of the Crakers from
73
74
Brockes, “Margaret Atwood.”
figures of fun to bearers of real emotion, and from illiterate evident fools
to surprise saviours, the perpetuators of humanity”75 that can be viewed as
the most important aspect of the novel. Consequently, the most absorbing
sections of the novel are devoted to the way these creatures come to
discover their identity, both as individuals and as members of a
community. Religion plays a crucial role in this process, because Atwood
approaches this issue in the Crakers’ context from two angles. Firstly, she
focuses on the religious spirituality to which the Crakers, contrary to the
way they were designed by Glenn/Crake, seem prone. Secondly, she deals
with the way religious mythologies begin to play the crucial role in the
process of the Crakers’ culture emergence. The latter approach can be read
through Northrop Frye’s ideas from The Great Code. The critic notes:
Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a
mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from
his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means
that our imaginations may recognise elements of it, when presented in art
or literature, without consciously understanding what it is we recognise.
Practically all that we can see of this body of concern is socially
conditioned and culturally inherited.76
Through mythologies, one of the most important aspects of religion, the

Crakers acquire culture because it is not possible to divide these two
spheres of existence. This is especially visible in Toby’s stories in which
various life circumstances are explained to the Crakers in a way they are
able to comprehend. Thanks to these mythologies, the surrogates not only
get access to general knowledge, but also to some kind of spirituality.
Religion in MaddAddam, then, becomes a positive phenomenon, a device
of cultural development, and a basis on which some form of humanity can
be rebuilt in the world after its almost total annihilation.
As suggested above, apart from proposing a new, positive approach to
religion, Atwood continues her crusade against the negative mechanisms
characteristic of religions in their institutionalised forms, which—
according to the writer—have little in common with spirituality. To
achieve this, in retrospections narrated from Zeb’s perspective, she returns
to his and Adam’s childhood in the house of their father—the Rev, a
75
J. Robert Lennon, “Margaret Atwood’s Latest Novel a Love Letter to
Literature,” review of MaddAddam, by Margaret Atwood, The Globe and Mail,
August 30, 2013, accessed August 11, 2014.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/margaret-
atwoods-latest-novel-a-love-letter-to-literature/article14041469/.
76
Frye, The Great Code, xviii.
186 Chapter Five
founder and a high minister in the Church of PetrOleum. As the genesis of

the congregation is explained: “‘Peter is the Latin word for rock, and
therefore the real, true meaning of Peter refers to petroleum, or oil that
comes from the rock.’”77 In an ironic way Atwood criticises a more
general tendency of some congregations to be more preoccupied with
money and business than with spirituality, which should be their primary
responsibility. Even though this particular cult’s foundational theology
refers directly to the Bible—“And I say also onto thee, That thou art Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church”78—the passage is interpreted by
Adam and Zeb’s father in a manipulative way. The Rev’s real motives
become clear when in one of his fiery sermons he explains to his followers
the real meaning of the second element of his church’s name. Oleum is the
Latin word for oil: “‘Does it not say in the Bible that you should forbear to
hide your light under a bushel? And what else can so reliably make the
lights go on as oil? That’s right! Oil, my friends! The Holy Oleum must
not be hidden under a bushel—in other words, left underneath the rocks—
for to do so is to flout the Word!’”79 The Church of PetrOleum becomes a
platform for rich people, who are happy about their social and economic
status and do not want to change or sacrifice for the well-being of others.
The Rev’s congregation seems more like a parody of a religion than an
actual church:
The Rev had his very own cult. That was the way to go in those days if you
wanted to coin the megabucks and you had a facility for ranting and
bullying, plus golden-tongued whip-‘em-up preaching, and you lacked
some other grey-area but highly marketable skill, such as derivatives
trading. Tell people what they want to hear, call yourself a religion, put the
squeeze on for contributions, run your own media outlets and use them for
robocalls and slick online campaigns, befriend or threaten politicians,
evade taxes.80
The recipe seems simple and thus brilliant. The church achieves great
success among the ruling elite and affluent corporate citizens. This is
beneficial not only for the Rev, because they supply him with their money
and political support—something priceless in these unstable and turbulent
times—but also for the churchgoers, who can now feel spiritually safe
because their conscience is appeased. Consequently, the Church of
77
78
The Holy Bible, St. Matthew 16: 18.
79
80
PetrOleum allows them to continue their materialistic and exploitative way

of life.
The Rev’s church lacks what should be the most important ingredients
of any religion, i.e. spirituality and selfless affection. Instead of a genuine
desire to improve himself, others, and the world, the Rev cares only about
his material profits and his comfortable life. His and his followers’ lack of
scruples is presented by Atwood in a highly ironic manner. Zeb recalls:
“‘In the Rev’s church—and around the Rev’s dinner table too—we didn’t
pray for forgiveness of even for rain, though God knows we could have
used some of each. We prayed for oil. Oh, and natural gas too—the Rev
included that in his list of divine gifts for the chosen.’”81 No wonder that
materialistic greed and hypocrisy, represented by the PetrOleum, have an
impact on both Adam and Zeb, who are brought up in such an atmosphere.
It can be even stated that the former’s decision to establish the God’s
Gardeners is directly influenced by the disgust he feels for the Rev and his
vision of religion—at least this is his motive when he designs the
challenge game Extinctathon. Zeb speculates: “[Adam]’d been known to
view with mild contempt the Rev’s interpretation of Genesis, which was
that God had made the animals for the sole pleasure and use of man, and
you could therefore exterminate them at whim. Was Extinctathon a piece
of anti-Rev counterinsurgency on the part of Adam?”82 The very fact that
the boys know the Rev’s real nature (together with Zeb’s mother, Trudy,
he murdered his first wife and Adam’s mother, Fenella) makes them feel
aversion towards this duplicitous vision of religion. As we know from The
Year of the Flood, Adam’s God’s Gardeners are a complete reversal of the
Church of PetrOleum. They are egalitarian instead of elitist, consciously
primitive instead of hi-tech, pro-ecological instead of human-centred.
The God’s Gardeners, nonetheless, play only a marginal role in
MaddAddam. Instead the Crakers, with their insatiable appetite for
mythological stories, appear most important to Atwood in her re-
evaluation of religion. Although designed by Glenn/Crake as human
surrogates without any aspirations for religion with its spirituality and
mythologies, with the passing of time they seem to display a real interest
in such matters, only reinforced by Jimmy/Snowman, who in Oryx and
Crake begins to invent a set of origin stories for them, with Crake and
Oryx as their central deities, and the Paradice Dome—the Egg in the
Crakers’ nomenclature—as their equivalent of the biblical Garden of
Eden. As the Crakers explain to Toby: “‘only [Jimmy] can talk with
81
82
188 Chapter Five
Crake.’ ‘Only he can tell the words of Crake, about the Egg.’ ‘About the
chaos.’ ‘About Oryx, who made the animals.’ ‘About how Crake made the
chaos go away.’”83 Against his will, Jimmy becomes the prophet of the
new religion, with such haphazard emblems of his authority and
responsibility as the red cap he has to wear and the ritual of eating a raw
fish. Yet, when the Crakers find themselves in a camp with the
MaddAddamites, Jimmy/Snowman is unable (he is in a coma at first) and
unwilling to continue his stories. For the Crakers, the natural candidate to
replace him is Toby: “‘you will learn [the stories],’ says [one of the
Crakers]. ‘It will happen. Because Snowman-the-Jimmy is the helper of
Crake, and you are the helper of Snowman-the-Jimmy. That is why.’”84
Toby substitutes Jimmy/Snowman as the prophet and the priest of the
Crakers, retelling them the stories already invented by her predecessor:
They already know the story, but the important thing seems to be that Toby
must tell it. She must put on Jimmy’s ratty red baseball cap and his
faceless watch and raise the watch to the ear. She must begin at the
beginning, she must preside over the creation, she must make it rain. She
must clear away the chaos, she must lead them out of the Egg and shepherd
them down to the shore. Once Toby has made her way through the story,
they urge her to tell it again, and then again.85
It is repetition and order that is so important to the Crakers. It becomes a

kind of a religious ritual, a liturgy with all the necessary props each
religion has, and with Toby in the limelight: “requisitioned by the Crakers
to keep alive their myth of origin, [Toby] regularly dons a prophet’s outfit
(Snowman’s red baseball cap) and translates event into their kind of
language.”86 Consequently, Toby finds herself in a very uncomfortable
position. By accepting the Crakers’ will—and it seems she has no other
option if she cares about their safety—she has to adopt their perspective,
with Glenn/Crake as a good deity, not the mad scientist she perceives him
to be, and with the ecological catastrophe that annihilated human
civilisation as a happy beginning of the humanoids’ history. For Toby her
new function is more of a sacrifice than it was for Jimmy, because it
involves a huge dose of hypocrisy, which she despises as an ex-God’s
Gardener: “she doesn’t like to tell lies, not deliberately, not lies as such,
but she skirts the darker and more tangled corners of reality. It’s like trying
83
84
85
86
Roberts, Review.
to keep toast from burning while still having it transformed into toast.”87
Yet, having in mind the Crakers’ well-being and safety, as well as
believing them to be the real future of the world, she decides to choose the
lesser evil, even if that means telling lies. As she explains this strategy to
herself: “There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story
of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the
story.”88
The stories told by Toby constitute the Crakers’ myths, focused on
their origin and main deities, which define their identity and indicate their
place in the world. Their themes and language resemble the themes and
language of the Bible, acquiring the quasi-religious quality so important to
the Crakers. For example, she retells Jimmy’s origin myth:
In the beginning you lived inside the Egg. The Egg was big and round and
white, like half a bubble, and there were trees inside it with leaves and
grass and berries. And all around the Egg was the chaos, with many, many
people who were not like you. And the chaos was everywhere outside the
Egg. But inside the Egg there was no chaos. It was peaceful there. Then
one day Crake got rid of the chaos and the hurtful people, to make Oryx
happy, and to clear a safe place for you to live. And then Crake went to his
own place, up in the sky, and Oryx went with him.89
The passage visibly mirrors the very beginning of the Bible: “In the
beginning God created the heaven and earth. And the earth was without
form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit
of God moved upon the face of the water. And God said, Let there be
light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and
God divided the light from the darkness.”90 In both the Bible and Toby’s
story, the circumstances are more or less the same. The world is emerging
from the emptiness and chaos at the beginning of some kind of a
civilisation. What is different is the set of deities—or one deity—and a
given community: the “old” human beings in the Scripture and the Crakers
in MaddAddam. It shows that mythologies are crucial to people
apprehending reality, a phenomenon that Northrop Frye understands as
follows:
Certain stories seem to have a peculiar significance: they are the stories
that tell a society what is important for it to know, whether about its gods,
87
88
89
90
190 Chapter Five
its history, its laws, or its class structure. These stories may be called myths
in a secondary sense, a sense that distinguishes them from folktales—
stories told for entertainment or other less central purposes.91
What Toby tells the Crakers are such myths, since the humanoids use them
to understand the world and their own place in it: “[Toby’s] bedtime
stories are part ritual and part myth creation: a way to make a chaotic,
violent and capricious world seem comprehensible for the gentle, child-
like Crakers.”92 Hence the Crakers seem satisfied with such a simple but
vivid reading of reality, not displaying any interest in inquiring into the
truth. They instinctively feel what Frye understands in the following way:
“A mythology rooted in a specific society transmits a heritage of shared
illusion and verbal experience in time, and so mythology helps to create a
cultural history.”93 With the emergence of the Crakers’ mythology, we
may witness the beginning of what can later on evolve into their culture.
Just like the development of the Crakers’ culture is an ongoing process,
their mythology needs to develop, too, with or without Toby’s direct help.
Toby’s active participation in creating the humanoids’ myths is visible in
the way she continues to interpret the current reality for them, hence
inventing new stories, like those about Adam and his brother Zeb. The
Crakers inform her: “We know the story of Crake. Now tell us the story of
Zeb, Oh Toby.”94 Doing so, she creates metaphorical version of the whole
community’s existence after the apocalyptic catastrophe. It is a kind of an
oral chronicle in the form of a myth. Sometimes, however—and that could
be the case of the Crakers’ mythology being created as if on its own—she
just accepts her position as a bystander, both allowing herself some kind of
passivity and accepting the humanoids’ active participation in the process
of myth-creation. This is visible when the Crakers overhear
Jimmy/Snowman’s uttering in distress the word “fuck,” which they do not
know how to interpret: “it takes Toby a moment to figure it out. Because
Jimmy said ‘Oh fuck’ rather than plain ‘fuck,’ they think it’s a term of
address, like ‘Oh Toby.’ How to explain to them what ‘Oh fuck’
means?”95 The solution comes on its own, marking the first time the
Crakers take a direct and active role in inventing their own mythology.
They enhance this common swearword with an additional religious
meaning:
91
Frye, The Great Code, 32–33.
92
Kidd, “Some Hope.”
93
94
95
“Fuck is a friend of Crake’s?” asks Abraham Lincoln [one of the

Crakers].
“Yes,” says Toby. And a friend of Snowman-the-Jimmy.”
“This Fuck is helping him?” says one of the women.
“Yes,” says Toby. “When something goes wrong, Snowman-the-
Jimmy calls on him for help.” Which is true, in a way.
“Fuck is in the sky!” says Blackbeard triumphantly. “With Crake!”96
Atwood exposes some of the religion’s dangerous mechanisms in a

characteristically ironic way, allowing the Crakers to give the swearword a
completely different meaning. Obviously, the word “fuck” is not sacred in
itself—it is only through the way they use it that “fuck” acquires religious
significance. This reflects Frye’s assumption that “there may be a potential
magic in any use of words.”97 The whole situation shows the Crakers’
insatiable hunger for metaphysics and shows that they do not intend to stay
passive. They subconsciously sense, rather than consciously realise, that
words are powerful, and that the ones speaking them—giving a meaning to
them—can possess a share of that power, too. Words are the actual
cornerstones of cults and civilisations, especially when they become an
integral part of a given mythology.
Another example of such mythologisation is visible in the
MaddAddamites’ journey to the Paradice Dome, where the human survivors
are to fight a decisive battle with the Painballers. From the Crakers’ point
of view—represented here by Blackbeard—this journey gains a symbolic
meaning of a pilgrimage back to the place where they come from. The
Paradice Dome, known by the Crakers as the Egg, is the place where
Glenn/Crake created them. As such, it is a highly significant spot—“‘that
is where the stories come from,’” as one of them states.98 The Paradice/Egg
signifies both the beginning of the Crakers’ existence, and the roots of
their still emerging culture. It is even more visible in the way the word
“egg” functions symbolically in the surrogates’ mythology: “and [Oryx]
laid two smaller owl eggs, inside the giant Egg. One smaller egg was full
of animals and birds and fish. The other egg she laid was full of words.
But the egg hatched first, before the one with the animals in it, and you ate
many of the words, because you were hungry; which is why you have
words inside you.”99 This passage clearly corresponds with The Bible: “In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
96
97
98
99
Atwood, MaddAddam, 389–90.
192 Chapter Five
was God.”100 The Egg is then closely linked with the power of words—
because it is its source—and with a demiurge who stands behind their
creation. The Egg is the paradise/paradice that was lost but will now be
regained. Michele Roberts comments: “Paradise Regained embodies the
acknowledgement of failure, of death, which permits re-growth.”101
However, as the Crakers soon learn, the Egg does not only stand for the
beginning—“‘Oh Toby!’ says Blackbeard. ‘Look! It’s the Egg! The Egg
where Crake made us!’”102—but also for the end: “Blackbeard looks
puzzled. ‘Why do the men want to go into the Egg?’ he asks. ‘The Egg is
for making. The Egg is good. It does not have killing things.’”103 It is
inside the Egg that both Jimmy and Zeb’s long sought-after brother,
Adam, are killed. For Blackbeard, the return to the Egg serves as a kind of
disillusionment, a moment when he learns the truth and enters a higher
level of self-awareness. He later tells the other Crakers: “And the Egg
wasn’t the real Egg, the way it is in the stories. It was only an eggshell,
like the shells that are broken and left behind when the birds hatch out of
them.”104 This understanding, together with Blackbeard’s growing self-
consciousness, is closely connected with his conviction that the Crakers do
need mythology to develop their culture.
The same necessity to develop culture is visible in the way the
Crakers’ attitude to their central deity, Crake, changes. From the very
beginning, the way he functions in their mythology is determined by the
fact that they did not have a chance to see him in his physical form: “‘they
think Crake is some sort of a god,’ says Crozier [one of the
MaddAddamites]. ‘But they don’t know what he looks like.’”105 In their
stories, he does not die but simply departs from the earth after creating the
humanoids: “and Oryx and Crake left the Egg and flew up into the sky.”106
However, when the group of the MaddAddamites with Blackbeard enter
the Paradice Dome, they notice two skeletons—Crake and Oryx, as we
already know from Oryx and Crake. It does not come as a surprise that the
discovery has a devastating effect on Blackbeard when Jimmy/Snowman
unintentionally reveals the truth to him:
100
The Holy Bible, St. John 1: 1.
101
Roberts, Review.
102
103
104
105
106
Now the truth is hitting him: Oryx and Crake are these skeletons. He heard
Jimmy say that; it registered. He turns his frightened face up to her: she
can see the sudden fall, the crash, the damage. “Oh Toby, is this Oryx, and
is this Crake?” he says. “Snowman-the-Jimmy said! But they are a smelly
bone, they are many smelly bones! Oryx and Crake must be beautiful! Like
the stories! They cannot be a smelly bone!” He begins to cry as if his heart
will break.107
What Blackbeard discovers is that the myths created for the Crakers by
Jimmy/Snowman and Toby present just one version of reality. The beauty
as well as power of mythology is mainly contained in the words that are
used to transmit it, which means that one does not need an actual deity to
believe in it. After returning to the camp Blackbeard tells the Crakers
about what happened. He says: “And Oryx and Crake had different forms
now, not dead ones, and they are good and kind. And beautiful. The way
we know, from the stories.”108 Blackbeard is fully aware of the complexity
of the situation and the various options he has. Thus, he knows that the
story he chooses to tell the other Crakers is not a lie. It is just another,
more beautiful version of the truth. As J. Robert Lennon views it: “When
Blackbeard comes to understand the complexity and potentiality of
language, he is discovering the complexity and potentiality of life
itself.”109 This also marks the turning point for the Crakers’ developing
civilisation.
The issue of the Crakers’ emerging culture is also closely connected to
their mythology’s transition from oral to written form. According to
Atwood, this transition “‘is a very old human skill that gives us an
evolutionary advantage.’”110 Ruth Scurr states: “MaddAddam is
remarkable for enacting the transition from oral to written history within a
fictional universe—one complete with myths and false gods.”111 This
aforementioned transition parallels the gradual change of the narrative
perspective from Toby’s point of view to the Crakers’ autonomous
accounts of their reality. Although it is Toby that pushes the Crakers’
culture towards the written word, eventually the Crakers themselves—
represented by Blackbeard—take over this process. At some point in her
post-apocalyptic life Toby realises that “she ought to write things down for
generations yet unborn. If there is anyone in the future, that is; and if
107
108
109
Lennon, “Margaret Atwood’s Latest Novel.”
110
Christie, “Interview.”
111
194 Chapter Five
they’ll be able to read; which, come to think of it, are two big ifs.”112
Believing in her project’s positive and prospective outcome, Toby reflects
Atwood’s thoughts on the topic of a receiver of a written message: “The
fictional writer who writes to no one is rare. More usually, even fictional
writers writing fictional journals wish to suppose a reader.”113 And Toby
soon realises it is the Crakers, represented by the young Blackbeard, for
whom she actually writes. Hence, this whole process involves teaching the
young Craker what writing (and reading) is—as she explains to the child:
“‘Each letter means a sound. And when you put the letters together they
make words. And the words stay where you’ve put them on the paper, and
then other people can see them on the paper and hear the words.’”114 Such
actions have their cultural and religious consequences. When she comes
across Blackbeard later that day and spots him teaching the art of writing
to the other Craker children, she thinks: “Now what have I done? What
can of worms have I opened? What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws?
The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel
they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined
them?”115 Toby fully understands the power standing behind writing,
which can be both liberating and destructive. She also links this power of
language, words, and—eventually—writing with religion. As Atwood
states in Negotiating with the Dead:
Writing had a hardness, a permanence, that speech did not. So as soon as

tale-tellers took to writing—or as soon as other people took to writing
down their tales, which is more like what actually happened—the writers-
down became inscribers, and what they wrote took on a fixed and
unchanging quality. God doesn’t content himself with speech or even with
paper for the Ten Commandments: he chooses stone, thus emphasising the
solidity of what is written.116
Unlike orally transmitted stories, what is written has a better chance to last
and exert influence on a greater number of receivers, in this case readers.
This is where religion as a form of culture—this Pandora’s box—emerges,
with all its difficult to foresee advantages and disadvantages. Passing on
this kind of knowledge seems a necessity for Toby, even though she
constantly has her doubts: “why is she teaching this practice to little
112
113
114
115
116
Blackbeard? Surely, the Crakers would be happier without it.”117 She

understands that her practices may be dangerous to the Crakers, but she
cannot help suppressing herself, subconsciously agreeing to her function
as a tool through which culture has a chance to develop.
Consequently Blackbeard, whose perspective finally replaces Toby’s,
plays a crucial role in the transition from oral to written tradition. This, in
turn, enables the Crakers’ culture to develop. Although he bears the name
of the legendary pirate known for his robberies and murders, from the
moment he appears in Toby’s life as a little boy he triggers some unnamed
tender feelings in her. Apart from innocence—a feature typical of the
Crakers—he also displays a rare curiosity about his species. He becomes
Toby’s pupil, learning how to read and write, with all the cultural
consequences of this process of gaining knowledge. In the course of time
during which he accumulates more and more skills and information, he
starts to identify with the journal Toby keeps—“he views Toby’s journal
as a joint possession of theirs, which is fine, thinks Toby”118—which may
be interpreted as the first step in the transfer of Toby’s duties and
responsibilities as the Crakers’ defender and prophet, a sign that
“eventually [Blackbeard] will become the historian of his people, keeper
not only of the journal, but of the novel itself.”119 This process reaches its
climax when Blackbeard literally takes over Toby’s functions not only as
the author of the journal. The passages written by him replace those
previously produced by her indicating the change of the narrative
perspective, too. He becomes the priest-like figure addressing the other
Crakers and mythologizing the current events for them. He tells them:
“Toby cannot tell the story tonight. So now I will try to tell this story to
you.”120 Similarly to Toby’s and Jimmy/Snowman’s practices, he assumes
the position of a prophet in the Crakers’ religion: “Please don’t sing.
Because when you sing I can’t hear the words that Crake is telling me to
say.”121
Blackbeard’s growing religious awareness goes hand in hand with his
mastering of the art of writing. He notes down in the journal: “I am
Blackbeard, and this is my voice that I am writing down to help Toby. If
you look at this writing I have made, you can hear me (I am Blackbeard)
talking to you, inside your head. That is what writing is.”122 The same
117
118
119
Lennon, “Margaret Atwood’s Latest Novel.”
120
121
122
196 Chapter Five
significance might apply to the skill of reading: “This is my voice, the

voice of Blackbeard that you are hearing in your head. That is called
reading.”123 The cultural ability to read and write is the key to his social
position in the emerging Craker civilisation, because—as Scurr writes—
“with Toby’s encouragement, Blackbeard (Blackbard) emerges as the first
Craker writer to set himself apart from the group and create a text, or a
score for voice, that does not disappear in performance, but remains to be
passed on and interpreted by future generations.”124 The whole process of
making Jimmy’s and Toby’s mythology the Crakers’ own is complete
when, after Toby’s departure and death, Blackbeard establishes her journal
as the Crakers’ holy book. He informs his audience: “This is the Book,
these are the Pages, here is the Writing. And in the book [Toby] put the
Words of Crake, and the Words of Oryx as well, and of how together they
made us, and made this safe and beautiful World for us to live in.”125 What
Toby’s journal becomes is the Crakers’ equivalent of the Holy Bible, a
sacred text containing both the explanation of their genesis and a kind of
guide for how to live. It is emphasised by the fact that the text is in a
written form, gaining the quality of permanence so important to the
community the Crakers have formed. The Crakers’ holy book, then,
becomes the cornerstone not only of their religion, but also of the
civilisation they are to create for themselves. The permanence of the
writing parallels the durability of the tradition that stands behind this
process, which Blackbeard explains to the Crakers in the following way:
And Toby gave warnings about this Book that we wrote. She said that the
paper must not get wet, or the Words would melt down away and would be
heard no longer, and mildew would grow on it, and it would turn black and
crumble to nothing. And that another Book should be made, with the same
writing as the first one. And each time a person came into the knowledge
of the writing, and the paper, and the pen, and the ink, and the reading, that
one also was to make the same Book, with the same writing in it. So it
would be always there for us to read.126
The Crakers’ civilisation has solid roots in the recorded (i.e. written)
religious mythology from which it can emerge, and on which it can
flourish.
What is emblematic of the way Atwood approaches religion in
MaddAddam is the optimistic overtone, at least in comparison with her
123
124
125
126
previous writings on this topic. This optimism comes from the conviction
that religion, if deprived of the institutional aspirations that are
unnecessary and even dangerous, can possess great cultural potential. This
is exemplified by the Crakers, who seem to treat religion, with its
mythologies and spirituality, as a starting point for their still unshaped
culture. As Toby comments on their insatiable appetite for civilisation:
“How much of a Craker behaviour is inherited, how much is cultural? Do
they even have what you could call a culture, separate from the expression
of their genes?”127 It appears true that Atwood does not believe in
humanity in its old version—there may not be any future for us—but there
is definitely hope for those who will succeed us, the Crakers. The last
survivors of humankind, represented by Toby, sense this inevitable
historic shift. The source of optimism as far as the Crakers’ civilisation is
concerned is closely connected with religion, which, according to Atwood,
is the most fundamental factor for any culture to emerge. Drawing on the
cultural aspects of religion, or religious elements of culture, the writer
seems to come to the conclusion that without the storage of mythologies
each religion produces—both in oral and written form—there is no
possibility of a civilisation.
127
CHAPTER SIX
NEGOTIATING WITH THE LIVING
Time for gardening again; for poetry; for arms

up to the elbows in leftover
deluge, hands in the dirt, groping around
among the rootlets, bulbs, lost marbles, blind
snouts of worms, cat droppings, your own future
bones, whatever’s down there
supercharged, a dim glint in the darkness.
(Margaret Atwood, “Sor Juana Works in the Garden,” The Door, 30)
Science, Women and Religion Revisited

“Was it possible to write a story with no moral implications at all?,”1
asks Atwood in her collection of essays Negotiating with the Dead. This
question is fundamental to the art she practices. The answer she proposes
does not surprise: “An art of any kind is a discipline; not only a craft—that
too—but a discipline in the religious sense, in which the vigil of writing,
the creation of a receptive spiritual emptiness, and the denial of self all
play their part.”2 Hence, for Atwood writing is synonymous with a moral
vocation because it carries faith in the possibility of making the world a
better place. Rejecting the assumption that literature is written only for
aesthetic purposes, that it is created only for its own sake, she takes the
position that literary texts have an ability to influence—and hence alter—
reality. She understands her profession in terms similar to Edward W.
Said’s notion of the intellectual. As the critic notes:
The intellectual must be involved in a lifelong dispute with all the

guardians of sacred vision or text, whose depredations are legion and
whose heavy hand brooks no disagreement and certainly no diversity.
Uncompromising freedom of opinion and expression is the secular
1
2
200 Chapter Six
intellectual’s main bastion: to abandon its defence or to tolerate tamperings

with any of its foundations is in effect to betray the intellectual’s calling.3
Atwood’s stance—which she expresses in all her novels—can be viewed

in Said’s terms. She states: “Once the words have been set down they form
part of a material object, and as such must take their chances.”4 Such an
attitude is clearly visible in all four speculative dystopias analysed here,
mainly in reference to the issues of science, women and religion.
Analysing the way the role of science has changed in Atwood’s four
speculative dystopias, it is easy to observe a movement from pessimism
towards a more optimistic attitude. This shift in her approach is closely
connected to the fact that referring to science, Atwood frequently
juxtaposes it with utterly commercial technology. In The Handmaid’s Tale
and in Oryx and Crake science, with its grand project of discovering the
truth about the world and thus improving people’s living conditions, is
actually absent. Its place is taken by mere technology, deprived of that
ethical dimension. In The Handmaid’s Tale, technology is responsible for
the environmental degradation that creates a social moment in which
orthodox religious forces gain more and more power. In Oryx and Crake,
by providing the masses with the latest applications and gadgets,
technology distances people from the real progress that science is
supposed to create. Technology, then, only induces the ever-growing
materialistic demand that becomes the foundation for the consumerist
system. Stephen Dunning states: “Atwood recognises that a world devoid
of qualitative distinctions will be driven by base appetites and fears,
stimulated by the latest technological innovations and marketed for
maximum profit.”5 In these two novels Atwood envisions a reality in
which people do not know—or are not interested in learning about—the
difference between morally justified activities and ones that lack this
value. Unlike science, which is linked to the real progress, i.e. the highly
ethical concept of advancing people’s well-being, technology is used by
the masses in a commercial manner, without any ethical quality involved.
The way the contrast between applied technology and idealistic science
realises itself in Atwood’s novels—mainly on the pages of the
MaddAddam trilogy—is very ambiguous and controversial. The reason is
that the herald of science’s moral mission is the brilliant, yet nihilistic,
scientist Glenn/Crake, who expresses his grand ambitions in the Paradice
Project. Nevertheless, the way his motives and actions are presented—
3
Said, Representations, 88-89.
4
5
Negotiating with the Living 201
especially in The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam—may suggest some

amount of positive elements inscribed in his venture. First of all, he
appears the only one to apprehend the threats of the contemporary,
consumerist reality. He opposes the technocratic system he is a part of,
trying to dismantle it from the inside. Adapting to the difficult social and
political situation, he does not remain passive and resigned like the
majority of the envisioned society. He succeeds in his ventures, even if the
victory ultimately involves the destruction of humanity. He can even be
called a fictional incarnation of Said’s intellectual, because, as the critic
states: “the hardest aspect of being an intellectual is to represent what you
profess through your work and interventions, without hardening into an
institution or a kind of automaton acting at the behest of a system or
method.”6 Crake is this kind of a character: a scientist who believes in his
ideas and activities so much that he does not hesitate to sacrifice all human
beings. He understands that to cleanse the Earth of unnecessary and
dangerous technology, he also has to annihilate all human beings who
have become absolutely dependent on such technology. It is true that this
decision makes him an unsympathetic character, but it also gives moral
fibre to his controversial actions.
The way Atwood approaches the issue of science and technology in her
novels proves her to be an uncompromising intellectual. She does not
hesitate to criticise the contemporary tendency to rely on commercial
technology. Instead, she unwaveringly expresses her opinions because for
her, the real progress of humanity means more than just the latest gadgets.
She believes that science has grander objectives to achieve. This, again,
resembles Said’s understanding of the true intellectual’s position:
There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set
down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. Nor
is there only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead
or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement, or position. There is
always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give
meaning to what is being said or written. Least of all should an intellectual
be there to make his/her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be
embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.7
Said’s words parallel Atwood’s attitude to science as expressed in her

novels. Instead of comforting her readers, she makes them think by asking
inconvenient but crucial questions. Do we use the potential of science in
6
7
202 Chapter Six
an ethical way? Where will the purely commercial use of science

eventually lead us? Is it too late to change this catastrophic sequence of
events? Ultimately, as the development of science in her novels
demonstrates, she does not leave us completely hopeless. The ending of
MaddAddam carries hope that human beings are intellectually and morally
capable of ensuring their survival. The reason is that they can understand
and appreciate the moral dimension of science, without which human
scientific activity remains futile and meaningless. Eventually, human
beings will make use of science and technology, not the other way round.
To sum up the way the theme of women has changed in Atwood’s four
dystopias, we may look at the shift in feminist thought from its second
wave to its various postfeminisms. At first, most visible in The
Handmaid’s Tale, patriarchy seems the main reference point. The way she
approaches this social system resembles Kate Millet’s description of how
human personality is formed under patriarchy. She notes:
Sexual politics obtains consent through the “socialisation” of both sexes to

basic patriarchal politics with regard to temperament, role, and status. As
to status, a pervasive assent to the prejudice of male superiority guarantees
superior status in the male, inferior in the female. The first item,
temperament, involves the formation of human personality along
stereotyped lines of sex category (“masculine” and “feminine”), based on
the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its
members cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates:
aggression, intelligence, force, and efficacy in the male; passivity,
ignorance, docility, “virtue,” and ineffectuality in the female.8
Patriarchy, with its biased categories that make women seem inferior,
determines the way such characters as Offred, Moira, Oryx, Toby and Ren
function in the male-dominated world. The struggle to preserve one’s
female identity becomes these characters’ most fundamental goal. They
realise that the invariable position may result not only in mere survival,
but also in victory, no matter how fragmentary and bitter it could be, as
Offred’s story demonstrates. A similar situation—i.e. a constant fight with
the patriarchal system—also appears in Atwood’s twenty-first-century
novels. The stories of Oryx, Toby and Ren—all of them entangled in
complicated power relations with brutal and sex-hungry men—show that
the problem still exists nowadays, in the postfeminist times. Yet, they all
manage to remain themselves in these adverse circumstances. Atwood’s
female characters once again show that the most effective weapon against
patriarchy is to retain one’s identity, which expresses itself in a determined
8
and uncompromising attitude to this unjust system. Even when patriarchy

requires external signs of women’s subjection, what actually counts is the
preservation of the inner self. In their inner worlds, the female protagonists
create a space in which the decisive battles against patriarchy are fought
and, eventually, won.
With the passing of time, Atwood broadens the scope of feminisms she
refers to in her novels. This shows that she is not indifferent to the changes
occurring in the contemporary world. Although the ideas of second-wave
feminism are still important to the way her books can be read, we can
observe that there appear more and more elements characteristic of the
worldly plurality that postfeminims allow for. It seems that Atwood is
tempted to extend the meanings of the female category, accepting the
legacy of gender studies. Judith Butler notes: “If the inner truth of gender
is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on
the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor
false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary
and stable identity.”9 This conviction that ambiguity is inscribed in one’s
identity is represented in Atwood’s novels by such characters as Moira, a
declared lesbian, and Oryx, an ambiguous figure that escapes any
categorisation, hence becoming open to all possibilities of definition.
Gender interpretations can be useful to appreciate the way Atwood’s
characters—especially these two—manipulate others, mainly men, to
retain their identities. What is more, the second-wave concept of women’s
communities—as proposed by Nina Auerbach—seems crucial to the
interpretation of Atwood’s dystopias, especially when this idea is read
through the legacy of postfeminisms. It can be said that the relationships
between women—often complex and ambiguous—constitute the foundation
of diverse female identities, especially in the context of a continued
struggle against male dominance. However, it is easy to observe—mainly
in the novels written in postfeminist times—that women alone are not
enough to change the system that always oppresses women, no matter if it
is religious orthodoxy or excessive consumerism. The subversive potential
of men has to be taken into account, since only cooperation between
women and men can improve this oppressive situation. Most male
characters from the MaddAddam trilogy begin to comprehend the
necessity to co-exist with women, while women—no matter how seriously
hurt by men in the past—display the ability to forgive. It can be read as the
possibility of a new beginning for both of them, because, ultimately, only
the female and male communities can ensure the survival of humanity.
9
Butler, “Subversive Bodily Acts,” 378.
204 Chapter Six
Atwood understands that women are immersed in worldly issues and the
male element has to be included in their endeavours to subvert the legacy
of patriarchy. She also understands she has a moral obligation to present
her point of view and enters the political debate on women’s position in
the world. Cultural, political and worldly context once again proves the
most decisive factor in Atwood’s project for making the world a better
place to live for all of us, regardless of the sex or gender one represents.
Discussing the change religion—that she elsewhere defines as “a
theology with a set of worked-out abstract dogmas and special dwellings
set aside for worship, such as temples”10—has undergone in Atwood’s
speculative dystopias, we can observe a surprising shift from the writer’s
negative attitude to formalised religion, to a more positive appreciation of
its hidden potential to exert a positive impact on culture and civilisation.
She demonstrates the most negative picture of official religion in The
Handmaid’s Tale, where it is linked to the feminist criticism of patriarchy.
As Kate Millet notes: “Patriarchy has God on its side. One of its most
effective agents of control is the powerfully expeditious character of its
doctrines as to the nature and origin of the female and the attribution to her
alone the dangers and evils it imputes to sexuality.”11 To a great extent,
Atwood’s first dystopia, visibly influenced by Millet’s thought, can be
read through this feminist idea, with the state of Gilead using Christianity
to maintain the patriarchal distribution of power. Religion as a dangerous
ideology appears also in Oryx and Crake, where Crake’s decision to
annihilate humanity derives from his negative opinion about religion,
which he views as the cause of society’s mediocrity and decadence. In a
way, the scientist’s actions may be interpreted through Richard Dawkins’
views on religion as expressed in The God Delusion. The evolutionary
biologist states: “Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as
well as the lives of the others. Thousands of people have been tortured for
their loyalty to a religion, persecuted by zealots for what is in many cases
a scarcely distinguishable alternative faith.”12 In a similar mode, Edward
W. Said warns about the problems stemming from the relationship
between power and religion and underlying the latter’s cultural
importance. He notes: “Like culture, religion furnishes us with symbols of
authority and with canons of order whose regular effect is either to compel
subservience or to gain adherents. This in turn gives rise to organised
10
Margaret Atwood, “Burning Bushes,” In Other Worlds: SF and Human
Imagination (New York: Random House Inc., 2011), 43.
11
12
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
2006), 164.
collective passions whose social and intellectual results are often

disastrous.”13 Religion viewed as a threat to both individuals and peoples
reflects the way it functions in Atwood’s first two dystopias. As a way of
thinking about the world that privileges one group of human beings at the
expense of the other—the practice visible in both novels—formalised
religion always leads to some kind of a disaster. It cannot come as a
surprise that for Atwood it is a moral obligation to stigmatise religion
understood in such terms.
Nevertheless, in her two subsequent speculative dystopias—The Year
of the Flood and MaddAddam—Atwood begins to incorporate in her
works the new approach connected to the appreciation of some elements
of religion that carry an undeniable cultural potential. One source is the
civilizational importance of the Bible. To a great degree, her attitude
resembles Said’s opinion on the scripture, which he formulates drawing on
Frye’s ideas:
Yet in the genealogy of texts there is a first text, a sacred prototype, a

scripture, which readers always approach through the text before them,
either as petitioning suppliants or as initiates amongst many in a sacred
chorus supporting the central patriarchal text. Northrop Frye’s theory of
literature makes it apparent that the displacing power in all texts finally
derives from the displacing power of the Bible.14
It can be said that the Bible is still a vast and significant source of power.
The power that derives from this text can be both destructive and
stimulating. In the two last volumes of the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood
realises the Bible’s positive cultural significance. Both The Year of the
Flood and MaddAddam are characterised by a growing faith in human
beings and the way they act. This goes hand in hand with the concept of
spirituality. When applied to religion as its foundational quality,
spirituality influences the perception of religion as a pure and
uncontaminated system that is actually beneficial to humanity. It appears
that when treated openly and neutrally, without any presupposed
prejudice, religion may become a powerful tool to create culture. That is
why—however controversial this point of view might seem—humanity
cannot afford to exist without at least some basic aspects of religion.
Interestingly enough, the genre of speculative dystopia may be interpreted
as a cultural proof for this statement. As Erika Gottlieb notes: “dystopian
13
14
206 Chapter Six
fiction is a post-Christian genre,”15 suggesting that religion is one of the

most basic points of reference in this genre. This is also true when
Atwood’s works are concerned, as (post)religion—always present directly
or indirectly in her prose—becomes one of her most crucial themes in the
four speculative dystopias. Still, the writer proves capable of the
unorthodox but sober perception of religion. Doing so, she once again
demonstrates the features of a true intellectual in Said’s meaning of the
word: always expressing what she thinks, and never making morally
dubious compromises that would contradict her system of values.
Ethics of the Dystopian Project

What is characteristic of the changes that have occurred in Atwood’s
perception of science, women and religion over the last thirty years is the
gradual shift from a pessimistic approach towards a more optimistic one:
from dystopia to utopia; from disillusionment, in which there is no place
for hope, to this kind of illusion that presupposes such a possibility.
Without diminishing their artistic value, Atwood makes her novels—and
especially her four speculative dystopias—the conveyors of ideas aimed at
changing the world and us—its inhabitants—for the better.16 This
transition seems to be influenced by the sensation of inevitable death. She
will be seventy-seven at the end of 2017. She states in Negotiating with
the Dead: “not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps
all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with
mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to
bring something or someone back from the dead.”17 However, in
opposition to the title of the aforementioned non-fiction book, her
method—this growing awareness that as a writer she has moral obligations
to her readers—can be called negotiating with the living, i.e. building a
15
Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction, 3.
16
This quality of Atwood’s fiction—together with its commercial potential—has
been noted in cinema and television. The Handmaid’s Tale was filmed twice. The
cinematic version from 1990 is directed by Volker Schlöndorff, and star Natasha
Richardson as Offred, Faye Dunaway as Serena Joy and Robert Duvall as the
Commander. In 2017, the novel was made by the Hulu service into a TV series.
This version is created by Bruce Miller, and features Elizabeth Moss as Offred,
Yvonne Strahovski as Serena Joy, and Joseph Fiennes as Commander Fred. Since
2014, there have also been rumors of the TV adaptations of the MaddAddam
trilogy (possibly developed by Darren Aronofsky for HBO), although no concrete
information has yet surfaced.
17
kind of a bridge between the teachings of the already passed with the
generations that are yet to come. She notes: “the desire to know is very
much part of being human. We are the species that asks questions and
continues to play into adulthood. We invented grammar, which includes
the past tense, allowing us to imagine where we’ve come from, and the
future tense, allowing us to imagine where we are going.”18 The notion of
mortality with all its ethical implications—e.g., what will be left after we
perish and how we can make it meaningful—is directly connected to the
conviction that there is a kind of a moral duty each writer should fulfil to
be the medium between the wise dead and the living, who still search for
some kind of truth. Atwood expresses this thought in the poem “Another
Visit to the Oracle:”
I’m doing this to help you.

What would you prefer?
You’d like me to amuse you?
Do some jigs, or pranks?
I lack the airiness,
I lack the feathers.
That’s not what I do.
What I do: I see

in darkness. I see
darkness. I see you.
I’ll tell your story—

your story that was once so graceful
but now is dark.
That’s what I do:
I tell dark stories
before and after they come true.19
This is exactly what she does. She tells dark stories to prevent them
from happening in reality and, simultaneously, to make the world a
brighter place. It may be difficult and unpleasant for her readers, but
Atwood does it precisely because she believes in human beings. Actually,
she manages to reconcile the seriousness of her stance as expressed in her
novels, with a more accessible way to deliver her ideas. In her literary
method, the stress is put on the act of telling stories, with the plot as the
most significant means to achieve her goals. All the other aspects of the
18
Gorjup, “Interview with Margaret Atwood,” 242.
19
Margaret Atwood, The Door: Poems (London: Virago Press, 2007), 104–06.
208 Chapter Six
novel—even the characters—are more or less subordinated to the message

she attempts to transmit. This practice also includes the language she uses.
Atwood’s literary language seems almost transparent, making her novels
not only artistically but commercially successful. Without committing any
literary treason, she makes transparency and directness of the language the
crucial feature of her prose. This enables her to reach a far bigger range of
readers. As a result, what she has to say about the world is better heard,
and has greater chances of changing people’s way of thinking in the way
she intends. Her literary position can be read through Said’s assumption
that being an intellectual is always an ethical vocation: “my argument is
that intellectuals are individuals with a vocation for the art of representing,
whether that is talking, writing, teaching, appearing on television. And that
vocation is important to the extent that it is publicly recognisable and
involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability.”20 Atwood
seems a perfect representative of Said’s category—an intellectual and a
writer whose job is not to entertain (at least not only), but to exert an
influence on human beings. She succeeds in always remaining a credible
source of moral judgments. Immersed in the worldly matters, Atwood
keeps pace with the fast changing world. She consciously enters
interrelations with new contexts she is able to evaluate morally. As these
readings of her novels demonstrate, she allows herself to be influenced by
worldly contexts only to update and modify her own critical position. This
attitude makes her assessment of the changing roles of science, women
and religion up-to-date and, hence, significant to her readers.
20
Said, Representations, 12–13.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some fragments of this volume appeared earlier in other books. For this
publication they have been significantly reedited and supplemented. These
include the following fragments.
Excerpts of Chapter 2 (“The Handmaid’s Tale, or the Republic of Men”)

appeared in:
“Writing to Preserve the Self: A Woman’s Resistant Position in the
Patriarchal Dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” in
The Self Industry: Therapy and Fiction, edited by J. Szurman, A.
WoĨniakowska and K. Kowalczyk-Twarowski (Katowice: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu ĝląskiego, 2015), pp. 123–36.
“The Category of Underwoman as an Outcome of the Dialogue between
Science and Religion in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” in
Face the Face, Page to Page: PASE Papers in Literature, Language
and Culture, edited by D. Babilas, A. Piskorska and P. Rutkowski
(Warszawa: Instytut Anglistyki Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2014), pp.
239–46.
Excerpts of Chapter 3 (“Oryx and Crake, or the Castle of Scientists”)

appeared in:
“Genetically Modified Future: Pre- and Post-apocalyptic Visions of the
World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake” in Alternate Life-
Worlds in Literary Fiction, edited by E. KĊbáowska-àawniczak, Z.
Wąsik and T. BruĞ (Wrocáaw: Wydawnictwo WyĪszej Szkoáy
Filologicznej we Wrocáawiu, 2011), pp. 121–30.
“Civilization Renewal Project—The Utimate Solution of Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake” in Fearful Symmetries: Representations of
Anxiety in Cultural, Literary and Political Discourses, edited by L.
Drong and J. Mydla (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu
ĝląskiego, 2013), pp. 136–46.
“Science vs. Ecology: About the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake” in Yesterday’s Tomorrows: On Utopia and Dystopia,
edited by P. Gallardo and E. Russell (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), pp. 381–94.
210 Copyright Acknowledgments
Excerpts of Chapter 4 (“The Year of the Flood, or the Kingdom of

Gardeners”) appeared in:
“Science and Technology at War with Humanity: Two Ways to Destroy
Our World According to Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood” in
War and Words: Representations of Military Conflict in Literature and
the Media, edited by W. Drąg, J. Krogulec and M. Marecki (Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), pp. 73–85.
Excerpts of Chapter 5 (“MaddAddam, or the Community of Survivors”)

appeared in:
“Women, Men and the Hope of Pregnancy/Motherhood in Margaret
Atwood’s MaddAddam” in Revolution, Evolution and Endurance in
Anglophone Literature and Culture, edited by M. Martynuska and E.
Rokosz-Piejko (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2017), pp.
119–27.
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Margaret Atwood’s

Fire Is Being Eaten

Refereed by Ilona Dobosiewicz and Jacek Gutorow

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2017 by Sławomir Kuźnicki

ISBN (10): 1-4438-8367-0

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 75

Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 119

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 163

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 199

Copyright Acknowledgments .................................................................. 209

Works Cited ............................................................................................. 211

I would like to thank the following people:

Prof. Jacek Gutorow and prof. Tadeusz Lewandowski, as well as prof.

ElĪbieta KuĨnicka-Soátysik and Zdzisáaw Soátysik, as well as Zofia

Bartosz SuwiĔski and Agata Haas, for everlasting inspirations,

More and more frequently the edges

(Margaret Atwood, “More and More,” Eating Fire, 49)

Margaret Atwood’s Immersion in the World’s Problems

steadily to a firm commitment to human rights and the conviction that if

of Atwood’s most ambitious books, The Blind Assassin, also demonstrates

Edward W. Said’s Concept of Worldliness

but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”9 Hence, meanings are

Therefore, a writer has an obligation to humanity, which should not be

The intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that

Consequently, such an uncompromising attitude requires an unshakable

“environmental awareness, Canadian nationalism, and feminism,”19

Criticism in short is always situated; it is skeptical, secular, reflectively

Nonetheless, before a close reading of Atwood’s novels, it seems

Science, Women and Religion

Mankind made a Faustian bargain as soon as he invented the first

exploitation of Nature would be a lifeless desert, having been devoured by

Consequently, patriarchy was identified as the kind of cultural theory and

A theory such as feminism, which is simultaneously political, popular, and

It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective. With

American identity. In the case of religion, the writer proposes a sober

Dystopian Speculative Fiction

that they often seem unrelated.”50 However, as Howells explains, there is a

Atwood is an extremely versatile writer, and in every novel she takes up

Definitely, one of Atwood’s most powerful means of expressing worldly

1. Deep description of the science content or technologies that were

It can be stated, then, that speculative fiction represents an alternative,

What are the most salient characteristics of dystopian fiction if we

reality. What is more, it demonstrates that they are so inseparably linked to

I found that what [Le Guin] means by “science fiction” is speculative

As Svec and Winiski summarise the dispute: “Margaret Atwood saw SF as

Characterising her writing, this assertive declaration distinctly corresponds

To be lit up from within

In my opinion, this is precisely what Atwood urges us to do in her prose,

She leaves that question about the necessity of worldliness in literature

THE HANDMAID’S TALE,

In their monstrous night

you are the hugest monster.

without the nuisance of speaking:

From those inside or under

Language, the fist

(Margaret Atwood, “We Hear Nothing,” Eating Fire, 118)

(Atwood, “Eating Fire,” Eating Fire, 182)

Sawomir Kunicki - Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Fiction

Sawomir Kunicki - Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Fiction