Science for feminists: Margaret Atwood's body of knowledge

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by June Deery

Forms of emotional energy also materialize in Atwood's writing. For instance, in The Robber Bride, Roz sees red when she's angry. And not just metaphorically. "She actually sees it, a red haze obscuring her eyes" (435). Charis observes an even more variegated manifestation when Zenia is angry: "A dark aura swirls out from around her. . . . It's a turbulent muddy green, shot through with lines of blood red and greyish black" (Robber 66). Atwood has color-coded emotions before; for example, she describes a particular "pale-mauve hostility" among women in The Edible Woman (16). But in The Robber Bride, color has taken on material form, energy appears to have mass, and mass, energy.

A particularly sensitive character like Charis also claims to be able to detect characters' electrical fields (Robber 62). In a bad environment she feels "Ions are bombarding her, wavelets of menacing energy" (Robber 61), and when the evil Zenia enters, even Tony, a less-observant character, feels "Waves of ill will flow out of her like cosmic radiations" (Robber 33). Sexual abuse is also depicted in terms of bad energy. To survive her abusive uncle, Charis converted her body/matter into energy/spirit and escaped in an astral "body of light" (Robber 394). She dreamt she could in this way "change herself into energy and pass through solid objects" (Robber 394-95).

QUANTUM WOMEN AND NEWTONIAN MEN

Atwood's world is one of radical uncertainty, a continuation of the modernist angst fatuously encapsulated in Yeats's "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold," which she cannot resist citing (Robber 91). For the historian, Tony, "everything has been called into question. Even in the best of times, the daily world is tenuous to her, a thin iridescent skin held in place by surface tension" (Robber 35; note the scientific "surface tension"). Atwood's heroines experience the world of quantum mechanics. Most of them are unknown, protean, inscrutable, treacherous - yen to themselves. They have "a tendency to exist" (Cat's Eye 261). They appear and fade and reappear. They are hard to keep track of. They marry and change their names (Cat's Eye 243). They are, in Tony's words, "a bugger to predict" (Robber 37). For these women, things are not separate or well behaved. Things pour into each other, slip under their feet, interpenetrate. Things are not even things. The bemused narrators can only observe and wonder that Newton or Descartes or Galileo ever thought they could fix things down. And by observing they wonder also to what extent they create what they see. They wonder how responsible they are for their own unhappiness, or happiness. It's a burden. It makes them light (Cat's Eye 13). Gravity reduces them, atom by atom (Cat's Eye 442). Irony and duality blur their vision. Like wave/particles, characters appear to be enemy/friends and self/others - all of which breeds a mild paranoia.

The men, on the other hand, are mostly perceived as solid, fixed, linear, sterling, predictable. They are a still point, a calculable presence. Even their betrayal is predictable and forgivable, whereas female treachery is inexplicable. The women know enough about women not to trust them, and not enough about men to withdraw forgiveness. They choose, at least, to see men as reliable and secure. They continue, in other words, to identify them with the traditional Western subject: "he" who is coherent and stable.(7)