First Anchor Books Edition, June 1998
copyright 1972 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
cover illustration by Honi Werner
The quest, “the evil grail,” as the protagonist names it, is the truth of the abortion. She says she was directed by her lover to have the abortion, but she also admits her culpability, complicity. The quest is also, then, her healing.
She is broken, distanced, isolated, and does not feel love--though her companions, especially David and Anna serve more as representatives of a cultural relationship dynamic she is rejecting rather than one she seeks to ascribe to. And she is not in love with her partner, Joe, who seems a cipher to her.
The quest is related to a healing of mind and body, for which she must make an archetypal descent—into a lake, into a psychological realm, to nakedness, in a wilderness, real and psychological. She feels ill, she bleeds, she emerges raw, and she emerges transformed, though into what exactly we are not advised because, it seems, that it cannot be said with words.
I read the quest as gradual and graduated. I read it as occurring in phases, recursive phases. The awakening phase of the quest begins when she realizes she is waking, in the garden (37); and in acknowledgement (70); then in a burst when she realizes she has been concealing from herself her abortion (79); self reflection (106); she realizes she has been apart from herself (109); and when she realizes how distanced and isolated she is, and that she cannot love (112).
She has guides. She calls on her parents to have left her the signs she needs to put the puzzle of her metaphysical journey together. She has been searching for her father’s legacy, her father’s maps to Indian artifacts, to validate that truth on behalf of her father, and she is searching for her mother’s love, that her mother, too, would have left her something of meaning, and she finds the drawings she made as a child, expressing fertility and female power.
The quest is to know herself (who is she? She is nameless) to find her agency (144)(as if she doesn’t have enough already; she is guide, cook, bottle washer, survival expert, and virtually takes care of herself and the others on the island). But finding her own agency, not that which she uses only to take care of others, means overcoming guilt and shame, releasing herself—entirely—from former victimization. She has been a product of patriarchy, and as such is confused, ashamed, amnesiac, and has repressed the truth she cannot bear, that she was complicitous in her own victimization and in the abortion.
She knows certain things intuitively, such as of her brother’s near drowning (28) which foreshadows, as image, the truth that will be revealed to her through diving in a place that holds the power of a truth she needs. The place is a sacred place, marked on the map her father left. (And this is a theme that has to do with the environment: that nature is sacred and certain places are sacred, that they hold the power of the gods, of truth, and the energy, and those places may allow us to meet our own truths. But others who do not revere those places destroy them. Here Atwood gestures toward the ways of life of western World, particularly the U.S.A.)
In the sacred places it is possible to connect to the primeval, go back to the beginnings, to death and new life, and whatever transcends those, to the cycle of life and death, or the gods/god, a force that contains the creative and destructive.
To do so it is necessary to get beyond conventions and language that have dissected the world into opposites—oneself & the other & therefore conflict and war; good & evil; good & bad morality; being good & being bad which results in shame, guilt. These are the conventions of a patriarchal society and as woman she has been a complicit victim in accepting and living in and by these definitions.
To transcend these definitions she apparently needs to go “mad,” or what at least would be called mad by those who ascribe to “civilized” life. She needs to leave conventions, language, to live as an animal, immersing herself in a wilderness, descending into fear, really. It requires bravery to go on a journey that compels a union with natural elements, with such immensity, force, and danger.
By submitting to nature and its wildness, by submitting to the gods, she pieces this together, and she faces unremembered memories, rids herself of parts of her life that are not germane to her natural wild self, the spiritual self (she burns things, finally); she reunites with her parents spiritually, realizes her unborn possible child; unites sexually with her present lover on the forest floor in order to conceive a child.
She is washed, pure, more animal, less logical, and she has “saved” herself, through submission to natural forces. She does love—she uses the word, love, finally.
The novel is complex and could also be read for Atwood's perspective on the nature of human perception, thought, and memory; on the relationships between thought and reality; on transformation of energy; on connections among humans, animals, organisms, plant life and how it is interconnected; and on the energy that manifests that is not visible to us—that is human emotions such as love and of human spirit that bind us to our biological and hereditary lineage in both directions.
It suggests to me that the physical realm is really not all that much, though many humans dwell on it, and also destroy it not even because they need to use it but out of the need for an illusion of power, and beyond that, out of recklessness, sport, and/or evil; but that the realm of the physical is this world and there is indeed a metaphysical realm.
The quest that ushers entry into that realm is not something that can be done through the logic of language, so there is a process occurring both when writer writes and reader reads that goes beyond language, and it is fascinating and it is difficult, and Atwood tucks messages regarding this very thing, in the writing.
The quest, “the evil grail,” as the protagonist names it, is the truth of the abortion. She says she was directed by her lover to have the abortion, but she also admits her culpability, complicity. The quest is also, then, her healing.
She is broken, distanced, isolated, and does not feel love--though her companions, especially David and Anna serve more as representatives of a cultural relationship dynamic she is rejecting rather than one she seeks to ascribe to. And she is not in love with her partner, Joe, who seems a cipher to her.
The quest is related to a healing of mind and body, for which she must make an archetypal descent—into a lake, into a psychological realm, to nakedness, in a wilderness, real and psychological. She feels ill, she bleeds, she emerges raw, and she emerges transformed, though into what exactly we are not advised because, it seems, that it cannot be said with words.
I read the quest as gradual and graduated. I read it as occurring in phases, recursive phases. The awakening phase of the quest begins when she realizes she is waking, in the garden (37); and in acknowledgement (70); then in a burst when she realizes she has been concealing from herself her abortion (79); self reflection (106); she realizes she has been apart from herself (109); and when she realizes how distanced and isolated she is, and that she cannot love (112).
She has guides. She calls on her parents to have left her the signs she needs to put the puzzle of her metaphysical journey together. She has been searching for her father’s legacy, her father’s maps to Indian artifacts, to validate that truth on behalf of her father, and she is searching for her mother’s love, that her mother, too, would have left her something of meaning, and she finds the drawings she made as a child, expressing fertility and female power.
The quest is to know herself (who is she? She is nameless) to find her agency (144)(as if she doesn’t have enough already; she is guide, cook, bottle washer, survival expert, and virtually takes care of herself and the others on the island). But finding her own agency, not that which she uses only to take care of others, means overcoming guilt and shame, releasing herself—entirely—from former victimization. She has been a product of patriarchy, and as such is confused, ashamed, amnesiac, and has repressed the truth she cannot bear, that she was complicitous in her own victimization and in the abortion.
She knows certain things intuitively, such as of her brother’s near drowning (28) which foreshadows, as image, the truth that will be revealed to her through diving in a place that holds the power of a truth she needs. The place is a sacred place, marked on the map her father left. (And this is a theme that has to do with the environment: that nature is sacred and certain places are sacred, that they hold the power of the gods, of truth, and the energy, and those places may allow us to meet our own truths. But others who do not revere those places destroy them. Here Atwood gestures toward the ways of life of western World, particularly the U.S.A.)
In the sacred places it is possible to connect to the primeval, go back to the beginnings, to death and new life, and whatever transcends those, to the cycle of life and death, or the gods/god, a force that contains the creative and destructive.
To do so it is necessary to get beyond conventions and language that have dissected the world into opposites—oneself & the other & therefore conflict and war; good & evil; good & bad morality; being good & being bad which results in shame, guilt. These are the conventions of a patriarchal society and as woman she has been a complicit victim in accepting and living in and by these definitions.
To transcend these definitions she apparently needs to go “mad,” or what at least would be called mad by those who ascribe to “civilized” life. She needs to leave conventions, language, to live as an animal, immersing herself in a wilderness, descending into fear, really. It requires bravery to go on a journey that compels a union with natural elements, with such immensity, force, and danger.
By submitting to nature and its wildness, by submitting to the gods, she pieces this together, and she faces unremembered memories, rids herself of parts of her life that are not germane to her natural wild self, the spiritual self (she burns things, finally); she reunites with her parents spiritually, realizes her unborn possible child; unites sexually with her present lover on the forest floor in order to conceive a child.
She is washed, pure, more animal, less logical, and she has “saved” herself, through submission to natural forces. She does love—she uses the word, love, finally.
The novel is complex and could also be read for Atwood's perspective on the nature of human perception, thought, and memory; on the relationships between thought and reality; on transformation of energy; on connections among humans, animals, organisms, plant life and how it is interconnected; and on the energy that manifests that is not visible to us—that is human emotions such as love and of human spirit that bind us to our biological and hereditary lineage in both directions.
It suggests to me that the physical realm is really not all that much, though many humans dwell on it, and also destroy it not even because they need to use it but out of the need for an illusion of power, and beyond that, out of recklessness, sport, and/or evil; but that the realm of the physical is this world and there is indeed a metaphysical realm.
The quest that ushers entry into that realm is not something that can be done through the logic of language, so there is a process occurring both when writer writes and reader reads that goes beyond language, and it is fascinating and it is difficult, and Atwood tucks messages regarding this very thing, in the writing.
