Science for feminists: Margaret Atwood's body of knowledge

THE MATTER OF SPACE-TIME

Where the male - and by extension, female - observation has had a huge, physical impact is on women's bodies. Atwood closely inspects the importance of the body as space and mass for women's cultural identity, highlighting the obvious relation between the individual body and the body politic. This is played out in The Handmaid's Tale where the association of women and body/matter reverts to an Aristotelian economy of procreation in which women passively supply the mass that is shaped by male force. Here and elsewhere in Atwood's writing, women are so closely identified with the body that a change in body shape, in space occupied, generally means a new relation to the rest of the world. Food is a quotidian example of energy-matter interchange to which women pay particular attention. When the body stores food (energy) as mass, it has dire consequences for women. A strong ideological image of femininity insists that women shouldn't be massive or occupy too much space, whereas Elaine observes of boys that "There always seems to be more of them in the room than there actually are" (Cat's Eye 108). Women are taught to be ordered and controlled. Diets are entered into like warfare and result in intimate battles fought by women against themselves; again we see this clearly in Roz, who pictures her body as "a besieged fortress" (Robber 79). This cultural pressure leads to all kinds of eating disorders, a perennial topic in Atwood's writing. Occasionally, there is a suggestion that body fat can be powerful. In Lady Oracle, as the protagonist, Joan, grows increasingly fat, she becomes invisible to men and to women, and this provides a certain power and protection. It also contravenes physics in that the more mass she has, the less observable she becomes as an object. However, ordinarily, occupying more space means a serious reduction in self-esteem for women and signifies defeat, not growth.

SPACE-TIME IN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

In a lecture on "The First Pico-seconds and the Quest for a Unified Field Theory," Stephen reminds his audience, which includes his sister Elaine, that "time cannot exist without space and space-time without . . . matter-energy" (Cat's Eye 352). Elsewhere Atwood suggests, perhaps whimsically, that space and time are especially closely linked in women's minds. She speculates that men's brains separate space and time in a way women's don't: For men, there is "Space over here, time over there . . . in their own sealed compartments" (Good Bones 76), whereas Atwood's heroines repeatedly conceptualize time in spatial terms. Elaine thinks of time "having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water" (Cat's Eye 3). A more humble image emerges later when she thinks of herself as a bag lady picking up temporal shreds (Cat's Eye 408). In The Robber Bride, Charis domesticates the bizarre and unusual by explaining foresight in this way: "there is a fold in time, like the way you fold the top bedsheet down to make a border, and if you stick a pin through at any spot, then the two pinholes are aligned, and that's the way it is when you foresee the future" (255). Atwood's characters also recognize cosmic space-time relations, as when Elaine looks up into outer space and realizes that what she sees is the past because stars are echoes from another time (Cat's Eye 110).