During the announcement of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood recalls how women weren’t allowed into the classical art schools during the 1960s because they could run into nude models
It was here that I decided to become a Victorian (literature student) at a time when it wasn’t at all fashionable. They were considered gauche, kitsch, sentimental, absurd,” Margaret Atwood says, tracing her life and remembering the times she would dash back and forth across the park to take english classes on one side and history and philosophy on the other.
“But the foundations of women’s equality — John Stuart Mill, those kinds of thinkers — were Victorians and the position of women was a real hotbed topic, extending all the way from proper undergarments to higher education. One of my cherished facts is that women weren’t allowed into classical art schools because they might see naked women,” she adds with a laugh. “What a shock!”
Atwood is among the world’s most celebrated authors. Just months shy of her 80th birthday, the longtime Toronto resident has otherwise never been more noticed. She has written the year’s most anticipated novel, The Testaments, the sequel to her classic — The Handmaid’s Tale and a Booker Prize finalist.
In December, Atwood will be honoured in New York by the Centre for Fiction, which has given its first ever on-screen award to her and to Hulu executives for the Emmy-winning adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Hulu and MGM are now planning a series based on The Testaments.
Atwood is a literary writer who tries not to act like one, taking mock umbrage — “Of course. What do you take me for?” — when we ask if she has read The Hunger Games. Whatever the subject — Victorian literature, resistance movements, Game of Thrones — she is not only knowledgeable, but interesting and funny. Her voice, like her writing, is level and pointed, with the slightest inflection turning the mood towards irony, scandal or foreboding.
“There is a great wit along with the breaking of rules taking place” in her books, says fellow author and Canadian Michael Ondaatje. “And as an individual, she has been a remarkably brave spirit, supporting many causes to do with writers and politics,” she adds.
She has written more than 40 books, novels, stories, essays and poems and her awards include the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin and Canada’s Giller Prize for Alias Grace. She is a feminist heroine who in the introduction to a recent edition of The Handmaid’s Tale defines a feminist novel not as idealising women, but humanising them, with all the variety and character and behavior that implies. In her fiction, women are both killers and killed, betrayers and betrayed, rebels and oppressors.
The Handmaid’s Tale reflects an imagination both expansive and grounded. As Atwood likes to point out, everything in the novel either has happened or could happen. Gilead, she says, is not “invented, but curated” and so rooted in the actual and the possible that she speaks of reissuing the book with footnotes. For instance, the iconic handmaid uniforms of bright red cloaks and white bonnets that obscure their faces were inspired by the image on a container of old dutch cleanser. “Each detail I can tell you chapter and verse who did it when,” Atwood says.
In announcing The Testaments last fall, she cited readers curiosity about Gilead and, more darkly, the world we’ve been living in. As she explains, she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in part as a response to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s. She didn’t expect to write a sequel because she didn’t expect the rise of Donald Trump and the world becoming more like the original novel. Even before he became president, she was resurrecting Gilead. In February 2017, she sent a memo to her literary representatives that outlined The Testaments, how it would have three narrators and would be set around 15 years after Offred fled to an undetermined future.
Praised by The New York Times as a “compelling sequel,” The Testaments was in the top 10 on Amazon a week before its publication. Atwood has received letters from readers saying her book helped them cope with depression or make sense of living in religious communities. Naomi Alderman, who wrote The Power, says she was a teenager and an Orthodox Jew when she read The Handmaid’s Tale, which pretty well rearranged her brain. Woman activists around the world have worn the handmaid outfits, protesting in silence against everything from anti-abortion laws in Ireland to the general policies of Trump.
Screen adaptations of acclaimed novels have a long and often unhappy history, but The Hulu Project has been embraced by Atwood, audiences and critics. The series has received six Emmys, including one for lead actress Elisabeth Moss. The writing of The Testaments ran parallel to the making of the series, and was a process of subtle coordination. Atwood says she tried to avoid interfering or revealing any plot details beyond advising the makers. “She’s in the unique position of understanding very well how to adapt her books to different art forms,” says Miller, noting that Handmaid’s Tale had previously been made into an opera and a feature film.
Atwood first gained attention as a poet, starting in the early 1960s with Double Persephone and reaching a national audience in 1966 with The Circle Game. Her emphasis on poetry wasn’t only artistic, she says, “poetry was cheaper to publish than fiction, and Canadians writers in the 1960s were just beginning to establish themselves.” Atwood, Nobel laureate Alice Munro and Robertson Davies were among those who helped Canadian literature become worldwide, with Atwood’s early contributions also including such novels as Surfacing and an influential work of criticism, Survival.
“Atwood deserves recognition as a tireless and unselfish cultural ambassador,” says Russell Brown, co-editor of the Oxford University Press’ anthology of Canadian literature. “She has done more to promote Canadian writing — both within Canada and beyond — than any other writer of her generation.”
Her thoughts may run to the macabre and to disaster, but rarely to despair. Along with tyranny in Gilead, there is resistance, and confidence that hate is no more permanent than love. She has called herself a realist whose outlook is neither better nor worse than the world itself. But she also can’t help believing that better is always possible.
Brown’s co-editor of the Oxford anthology, Donna Bennett, says Atwood’s thinking is characteristically Canadian. Atwood says it’s characteristic of her profession.