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That Way Maddness Lies: Returning to Carnism in Margaret Atwood’s Science Fiction

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Vegetarianism and Science Fiction

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the culmination of all the themes explored in the previous chapters within the works of Margaret Atwood. It begins by examining the repeated associations between carnism and sexual violence in Atwood’s early feminist novels before exploring the continuation of these themes in Atwood’s landmark feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments. Following a brief examination of Atwood’s explicit rejection of science fiction’s vegetarian tradition in Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin (2000), the analysis then turns to Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13), showing how the series endorses a similar “primitivist” and essentially carnist politics to that seen throughout post-1970s science fiction, despite Atwood’s overt engagement with science fiction’s predominantly vegetarian Romantic tradition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As a graduate student, Atwood began a dissertation on H. Rider Haggard’s foundational “lost world” novel She (1887), wherein the immortal goddess-figure Ayesha declares herself a vegetarian in comparison to both the cannibalistic African tribes she rules and the hunting-enthused Englishmen who find themselves in her country (Haggard 198). Although Atwood does not comment on Ayesha’s vegetarianism, she declares her a “supremely transgressive female who challenges male power,” while acknowledging the Darwinist recasting of traditional purity tropes, such as vegetarianism, as ascendant, rather than regressive, qualities (“H. Rider” 113, 111, see also 109),

  2. 2.

    Charis is referred to as Karen in the cited passages.

  3. 3.

    Both Offred’s husband and her Commander claim that “men needed more meat than women” (73). The overbearing patriarch of Atwood’s later story “Hack Wednesday” (1990) agrees, although the story’s female narrator argues that meat is actually of greater necessity for women, due to the “blood-consuming” demands of childbirth and menstruation (244–45). As the fictional editor of Don LePan’s Animals (2009) points out, however, “the required amounts … of protein and other nutrients could [also] be readily obtained through the consumption of significant amounts of nuts and soy or other legumes” (61n).

  4. 4.

    Atwood herself has been written into the Star Trek extended universe. In David R. George’s novel Provenance of Shadows (2006), Spock asks Dr McCoy to give Captain Kirk his copy of her novel Life Before Man (wherein characters play a Star Trek party game). The reference even alludes to interspecies empathy, with McCoy interpreting the novel’s opening lines, in which one of the protagonists likens herself to a “peeled snail,” to signal the vegetarian Spock’s intense distress (George 336; Atwood, Life 11, 155).

  5. 5.

    Both Atwood and Gibson have been actively involved with Ontario’s Pelee Island Bird Observatory since it’s foundation in 2004. The sanctuary’s emphasis is on observation, rather than conservation, however, and the couple also supported the installation of “organic farms” on the island (Munroe).

  6. 6.

    There is also a potential implication of human-Craker predation when Jimmy tells the Crakers their flesh is “made … out of a mango,” after constantly eating mangoes in the early chapters (Oryx 110, 4–5, 6, 13).

  7. 7.

    A similar example of machismic “meat nostalgia,” occurs in Elizabeth Dougherty’s dystopian novel The Blind Pig (2010), wherein genuine bacon sandwiches are considered an irresistible “downfall” for “many vegetarians,” while male consumers of “real” meat are described as “actually manly” and having arms like “steel bands” (237–38, 217, 208). The novel also has its equivalent ChickieNobs and Chicken Little, in the form of the grotesque “Singers”: twisted masses of cultured organs that emit a humming sound, as their flesh is harvested (114). For a comparison with Oryx and Crake, see Nora Castle, “In Vitro Meat and Science Fiction: Contemporary Narratives of Cultured Flesh,” Extrapolation 63, no. 2(2022): 149–79.

  8. 8.

    The authenticity of Oryx’s story is questioned throughout Oryx and Crake, with its illegitimacy perhaps supported by Zenia’s nefariously fabricating a similar story about being sold into sexual servitude in The Robber Bride (162–67). Atwood has treated Oryx’s story as genuine during interviews, however (Heilmann and Taylor 255).

  9. 9.

    Atwood similarly addresses the abundance of meat in Classic mythology during The Penelopiad, suggesting that, although Greek heroes “did have the odd fruit or vegetable … you’ve probably never heard of these because no one put them into the songs much” (39).

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  1. Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Joshua Bulleid

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Bulleid, J. (2023). That Way Maddness Lies: Returning to Carnism in Margaret Atwood’s Science Fiction. In: Vegetarianism and Science Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_8

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