Science for feminists: Margaret Atwood's body of knowledge

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by June Deery

Many powerful ideas of modern science have fallen on artistic deaf ears. Except for writers of science fiction, relatively few contemporary fiction writers have made natural science a central preoccupation. In fact, most authors ignore scientific developments altogether. An interesting exception is Margaret Atwood, who not only refers to science but also does so from a woman's perspective, something comparatively rare in literary evocations of science. Science is not Atwood's central concern, but she does suggest, albeit in a light and at times even whimsical fashion, that modern physics is suited to describing women's experiences. In so doing she produces a striking adaptation of a predominantly male discourse (natural science).

Despite an obvious display of science in her popular novel Cat's Eye, there has been little examination of this aspect of Atwood's work, with the exception of an admirable chapter in Susan Strehle's Fiction in the Quantum Universe (1992) which examines Atwood's use of physics in Cat's Eye as it relates to subject-object relations. In actual fact, as I will demonstrate, almost every major theme in Atwood's writing - the formation of feminine identity, the construction of personal past and cultural history, body image, colonization - all are at some point described in terms of the basic laws of physics. In particular, Atwood applies new discoveries about the interrelationship of time, space, energy, and matter to significant aspects of human experience, especially women's experience under patriarchy.

We know that for centuries science has been culturally coded as masculine as opposed to the more feminine arts and letters.(1) At one point Atwood suggests, with some humor, that natural science originated in the male desire to avoid comparing penises, scientific measurements being a transfer of the male obsession with size (Good Bones 98-99). Yet physics, the "hardest" and most masculine science of all, has in this century become modestly aware of fundamental limits? Scientists have had to accept restrictions, uncertainty, and a certain degree of inscrutability. With the exploration of the subatomic realm, it now seems to students of Atwood's generation that "The universe is hard to pin down; it changes when you look at it, as if it resists being known" (Cat's Eye 410), primarily because the observer affects the condition of the subatomic object under observation.(3) To the extent that relativity theory and quantum mechanics recognize such limits, to the extent that they look at interrelationships and participation, Atwood has been able to use these bodies of knowledge to describe metaphorically women's constraints and their adaptive strategies. As we shall see, she also invokes scientific ideas to a limited extent in her role as a writer, in the forms her novels take. Of course, neither relativity theory nor quantum mechanics strictly applies to the macroworld of human experience; indeed, the way physics has gone off stage, so to speak, has been disturbing and alienating for laypeople this century. What Atwood does is demonstrate that scientific models can be used to describe figuratively the middle, human realm once we switch from the physical to the psychological. Her use of a scientific frame doesn't so much tell us something new about human experience as give us new terms in which to view our behavior which is to partly create a new reality.

Atwood's references to science should not be altogether surprising, given the interest in science that runs in the family: Among immediate relatives, her father is an entomologist and her brother a neurophysiologist. Atwood herself enjoyed studying science at school, so much so that she believes that if she hadn't become a writer she would have gone on with science (Sandler 46), and today she reads popular scientific accounts as a recreation (Walker 176). There is no evidence that Atwood possesses a thorough grasp of physics or that she has any serious intent to instruct her readers. Instead, she focuses on a few striking ideas and runs with them in her imagination. Her sources are already-mediated popularizations, not the original papers of Einstein, say, or Heisenberg. On the acknowledgments page of Cat's Eye, Atwood writes:

The physics and cosmology sideswiped herein are indebted to Paul Davies, Carl Sagan, John Gribbin, and Stephen W. Hawking, for their entrancing books on these subjects, and to my nephew, David Atwood, for his enlightening remarks about strings.(4)

Clearly, this author is making no pretensions about having a profound understanding of science (even deferring to her nephew). She is offering her own "rendition,"(5) which can be heard by those outside the field, by those who have never read these men or the men who preceded them, a rendition that uncovers a similarity between science and other fields such as feminist thought. Atwood is not suggesting, nor am I, that feminism directly influenced science, nor that science has in this regard influenced feminist thinking. But one can see them as part of a common episteme where their consonance is intriguing.(6)