“I can hear in his voice that he is afraid of me. A woman like me is always a temptation, if possible to arrange it unobserved: as whatever we may say about it later, we will not be believed.” There is a line in Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel, to stop a person dead in her tracks. With a poet’s economy, she says in 40 words what has, post-Weinstein, gushed out in torrents. The real power imbalance between men and women is not one of physical strength or even, in the first instance, of economic, professional or social muscle. It is one of credibility. If sexual abuse is the “what”, creating a world in which a woman’s testimony is always a little bit suspect is the “how” – whether you’re a doctor in mid-19th-century Toronto or a producer in early 21st-century Hollywood.
Alias Grace arrives on the screen, via Netflix, at a time when fans are pining so ardently for more material from the author of The Handmaid’s Tale that they would probably watch a dramatisation of Atwood’s lecture on robotic pens (she invented one, an achievement so crowded out by her writing that we’ll park it under “curiosities”).
The show is visually opulent – some critics, including our own, have noted that it’s not quite grimy enough for Victorian poverty – and moves like a panther, with performances so elegant and instinctive that you almost don’t notice how fast it’s going. It isn’t, however, Handmaid-lite, a coda for the chilling near-future world which will surely define dystopian TV for the decade.
Described when it was published as “historiographical metafiction”, it is the story of Grace Marks, a servant convicted aged 16 of the murder of her employer and his lover, who when we meet her, has been incarcerated in one institution or another for 15 years. Based on real events, it has some devastating accounts of poverty and starvation, but the pressing portrait is of the brutality of powerlessness. A woman without power, before the institutions that govern her, cannot simply bod along unimportantly, scum on the surface of the social cauldron: she must be abused, raped, violated, pried open, dismembered. Her impotence is a challenge, an invitation, a temptation; it is unignorable.
To drop this historiographical bomb into what is now an urgent and international debate on structural inequality feels like more than just coincidence. And it arrives after the prescience of The Handmaid’s Tale, which detailed the possible consequences of an authoritarian, patriarchal, unaccountable politics, disturbingly like the one we are watching in real time.
Nick Lee, who acquired The Handmaid’s Tale for Channel 4, said after the Emmys: “We acquired the show earlier this year, so were aware of the particular resonance of themes in the show. Whether the original commissioners at Hulu had read those tea leaves or not, the drama is so compelling and the story so powerful that even without the parallels it would still be a standout drama.” OK, sure, yes; but about those tea leaves: how did Atwood do it? How did she write the narration of the future?
Atwood always rejected the label “feminist”, though her first novel, The Edible Woman, she called “proto-feminist”, having written it in 1965, in anticipation of rather than response to the second wave. She noted rather tetchily that “every time you write something from a woman’s point of view, people call it feminist”, a writerly and workmanlike variation on Rebecca West’s famous, “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
This is the root of her biting relevance; not that she has some cultural crystal ball, but that she has always introduced the untold story, the female perspective, which is the missing piece of every puzzle. Her writing fell on to parched ground, history or myth that had previously been dry and incomplete, having erased the experience of half its participants: so it was always recognisable on some elemental level, such as discovering the family secret that brings everyone into focus. The secret was that women had consciousness, too, which truth has exploded on to the telly alarmingly late in the cultural life-cycle.
These novels aren’t just about men and women: individual women are oppressed by individual men, but also by structures, conventions, norms, institutions, by other women, by their mothers, by their biology and their bodies. If giving a woman’s perspective is the most radical act of fiction, surely a close second is to reject the necessity of men as the engines of propulsion.
In a brief and insightful interview with Joyce Carol Oates, in the late 70s, Atwood sketches the difference between poetry and prose: “If you think of writing as expressing ‘itself’ rather than the ‘writer’… Poetry is the most joyful form, and prose fiction – the personality I feel there is a curious, often bemused, sometimes disheartened observer of society.”
It doesn’t necessarily follow that the prose-writer, however gifted, would be able to range across decades and centuries, picking out the observations that would make them universal. It’s often tempting to ascribe Atwood’s timelessness to her interest in myth, or in the gothic, or in metaphysical romance, or in supernatural fantasy – these tropes inoculating the reader against too ready an identification of time and place, so that nothing becomes dated. But you could pick over the range of her academic interests for ever, looking for clues: truthfully, Atwood is interested in everything.
Atwood’s novels suit the times, yet they seem to work especially well on TV. When she writes, she knows the geography of her fictional environment inside out. She would never write the texture of her landscapes from imagination alone: and it tells in the way you remember the novels – in visual frames as much as in dialogue or in narration – and in the proposition they present for the screen, detailed, sumptuous and complete.
TV’s new love of Atwood has its downsides, too, thanks to the built-in spoilers: you almost want to go back in time and unread them, so you can unspoil it for yourself. But anyone with a passing knowledge of Canadian criminology will know what happens to Grace Marks: it is transfixing nevertheless to watch it unfold.
