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Science for feminists: Margaret Atwood's body of knowledge
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by June Deery
In The Robber Bride, it is Zenia, another tormentor, who haunts the other characters and, again, they are not always sure if she is alive or dead. While in Cat's Eye, space-time is explicitly discussed in scientific terms, in The Robber Bride it tends to come up under the discussion of history, the central idea being that what one discovers as a historian depends on one's viewpoint in time and space. Atwood has caught the contemporary academic excitement and anxiety over this and other discoveries of constructiveness in the social sciences. For example, she both supports and satirizes the historiographical debate in the epilogue to The Handmaid's Tale. Most constructivist accounts of history have come in the wake of new depictions of scientific method, most notably the late Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There is also some kinship between this view of history and essential features of modern physics: relativity's foregrounding of viewpoint and the quantum mechanical notion that the observer affects and is part of the observation. Atwood doesn't make these analogies explicit, but she does enact in her writing what both natural and social scientists have to say about epistemological subjectivities. The Robber Bride features a full-blown relativistic framework that demonstrates how knowledge is both temporally and spatially situated. Readers of The Robber Bride occupy three different characters' viewpoints, three constructions of the "same" past events. Interwoven are discussions of professional history making that highlight uncertainty and the uneasy relation between factual temporal knowledge and subjective agenda or memory. Atwood's professional historian, Tony, acknowledges that
Every sober-sided history is at least half sleight-of-hand: the right hand waving its poor snippets of fact, out in the open for all to verify, while the left hand busies itself with its own devious agendas, deep in its hidden pockets. (Robber 457-58)
This applies both to personal and cultural memory. Private "battles" between Zenia and the others are counterpointed with discussions of larger military battles that Tony is studying. In each case, viewpoint is crucial. To better understand historical events, Tony spatializes them by constructing maps and material models that she can observe in total and from different angles. However, adding together the three characters' views of events in the novel does not provide the reader with as complete a picture as Tony hopes she enjoys when looking down on her models of famous conflicts.
Much of Atwood's writing explores history making in colonial and postcolonial situations. In this case, space-time formation affects energy. As a colony, Canada borrowed another's history, a faux past. At Elaine's school, stories of British monarchs and Scottish clans were superimposed on Canada's own history or histories to produce a blurring of reality and an uncertain knowledge. Students like Elaine had to struggle to orient themselves in space and time, and this blocked the energy needed to focus on self-identity. As Atwood remarks in an interview, "You can only indulge in the luxury of figuring out yourself when you're oriented in space and time. [As a colony] Canada was a country that lacked such orientation" (Hammond 110).
