Margaret Atwood

HOOVER: What does a post Roe v. Wade United States, look like? 

ATWOOD: Don’t know. Neither do you. 

MH: This week on Firing Line…

ATWOOD: But let’s get to the crux of the matter, which is, does the state own your body? If the state owns your body they should pay. 

These words, from renowned author Margaret Atwood, just weeks before the Supreme Court shocker. The draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.  Atwood, author of the 1985 dystopian classic “The Handmaid’s Tale” — about a society with forced procreation — has been warning about the future for decades…

ATWOOD: I never just make things up out of nothing

In recent years, her novel became an Emmy-award winning drama series… 

Aunt Lydia: Well good morning girls. 

Handmaids: “Good morning Aunt Lydia”… 

And a global symbol of feminist resistance…

PROTESTER: What do we want? The right to choose! When do we want it? Now! 

…over concerns reality was becoming more like her dystopia, what does Margaret Atwood say now? 

 

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Charles R. Schwab, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, The Fairweather Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation and by, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Damon Button and the Simmons Family Foundation. Corporate Funding is provided by Stevens Inc. and Pfizer inc.

 

HOOVER:  Margaret Atwood, welcome to Firing Line 

 

ATWOOD And I’m happy to be here with another Margaret. 

 

HOOVER You were born in 1939, which was the start of World War Two and you are now 82 years old. When you began writing your sixth novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, in 1984, you lived in West Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall. How did the experience influence the plot and its themes? 

 

ATWOOD Well, not in any completely obvious ways, but as I say, background. So in West Berlin, it was an enclosed part of the city. There was a wall all the way around it. All of those pictures that you’ve seen of Checkpoint Charlie, that was all still there. You probably saw a movie called “The Lives of Others” about East Berlin at that time. I went to East Berlin. It was ok for Canadians to go there. And people were very reluctant to engage you, of course. Czechoslovakia, which I also visited at that time, was a little more open. You could talk to people in fields, just not in anything enclosed, such as a car or a room. And Poland was even more open. So in Poland, we were right in the writers union, a government-controlled thing for writers, and they said, ‘would you like some samizdat. That would be forbidden manuscripts. And we said, sure. And they said, ‘wait just a sec.’ They were keeping them right there on the premises. So very different degrees of openness, but very conscious at all times that you had to be careful about what you said to whom. And you also had to be careful about what you said when you came out because you could get people in trouble. So there are many kinds of totalitarianisms. There’s no one thing that gives rise to them. We’ve got ones of the left, we’ve got ones of the right. You can even have ones of the kind of center, believe it or not. I used to think that was impossible, but it’s not. And it just depends on whether there is a small group of people or a kingpin permanently in place, and whether dissent is tolerated. 

 

HOOVER The Handmaid’s Tale, for anyone living under a rock, is a dystopian story about a society where fertile women are rare and handmaids are forced to procreate and then hand over their children. Your new book, Burning Questions, which is a chronology of essays from 2004 to 2021, reflects on The Handmaid’s Tale and you write, “I didn’t put anything into this book that hadn’t already been done somewhere, or could be done given available technology.” You are sometimes referred to as a prophet of dystopia, a title that I know you’ve rejected. But reflect for me on the purpose of the fictional worlds that you’ve created. 

 

ATWOOD OK, so if you don’t– if you see a great big hole in the road up ahead and you don’t want people to fall into it, you say, ‘there’s a great big hole in the road up ahead.’ If you do want them to fall into it, you either say there isn’t a great big hole in the road up ahead, or you say nothing. So I see great big holes in the road up ahead, and I say, ‘there’s a great big hole in the road up ahead, don’t fall into it.’ That is the purpose of books like that. But also, because it’s about things that have already happened or are happening, rather than a distant planet far, far away, it allows you to become more aware of the world around you. 

 

HOOVER The Handmaid’s Tale, of course, was adapted into an Emmy Award winning series on Hulu, to which you are a consultant and even had a cameo– 

 

ATWOOD I did.

 

HOOVER –appearance in Season One, during a scene where the handmaid Janine is testifying about a sexual assault that she experienced. Take a look at this scene.

 

TV CLIP

Aunt Lydia: Whose fault was it, girls? 

Girls: Her fault, her fault, her fault….

[Margaret Atwood slaps Elisabeth Moss]

Aunt Lydia: And why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? 

Girls: Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson… 

 

HOOVER Can you explain what we’re seeing with the women in that scene? 

 

ATWOOD Well, we’re seeing a blame and shame. We’re seeing slut shaming, bad things that happen to women are their fault. Of course, that doesn’t happen anywhere but in the movies, does it? And we’re also seeing Elisabeth Moss, who is the central character, initially refusing to do it. And my little cameo, which we had to shoot four times because they said I was not hitting her over the head hard enough. It’s very odd to have your leading lady to turn around and say, “Come on, come on, hit me harder.” I said, “no, no, I might hurt you.” “Come on, give me a swipe.” They did add the sound effect. So yeah, so that’s what we were seeing. Compliance and group shaming. Because in Gilead everything, including infertility, is the fault of women. 

 

HOOVER What was it like for you to step into the world that you had created decades ago and to portray one of the enforcers? 

 

ATWOOD [00:13:55] Well, pretty odd. Let me say that there weren’t very many roles for people my age except among the aunts. But Ann Dowd is pretty brilliant, the Aunt Lydia character. And I was lucky enough to find myself with a very dedicated team who were thoroughly into the story. I don’t think it was just a– it was not just another job for them. And they were giving it their everything.

 

ROE V WADE 

 

HOOVER The costume that is worn by the handmaids in your novel has become a symbol of subjugation of women and is worn in protest by women around the world. Take a look at this protest in front of the Supreme Court.

 

PROTESTER: We are sending a message to the world that in the name of humanity we refuse to accept a fascist America.

 

HOOVER The Supreme Court is currently considering a case from Mississippi, Dobbs versus Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that could overturn Roe v. Wade. In 2019, in an interview you mentioned that you agreed that Roe v. Wade might eventually be overturned, but also predicted a, quote, “horrific backlash” if that happens. What does a post Roe v. Wade United States, look like? 

 

ATWOOD Don’t know. Neither do you. Nobody does. We can speculate about a few things happening. But let’s get to the crux of the matter, which is, does the state own your body? Does the state own your body, or anybody else’s body? When you have the draft, the state is claiming to own your body. It’s saying, you shall be in the army. But if the state makes that claim, it then has to provide your food, your lodging, your clothing, your medical care, and your education, your training. So if they’re going to claim women’s bodies and put in enforced childbearing, they should pay for that. If the state owns your body they should pay. If they are going to make you have a baby, they should pay for your food, your lodging, your clothing, your medical care, and your training. And if they’re not prepared to do that, I would say that it is a dereliction of duty of  the largest order. The United States already has a rather shocking maternal and newborn death rate. How come? How come? And you’re just going to see that go up. So if you want to own people’s bodies, you need to pay for them, I would say to people who want to bring in enforced baby making. And it’s been done. You can go to Ceaușescu’s Romania. He mandated that women of childbearing age had to have four children. You had to take a pregnancy test every month. If you didn’t get pregnant, you had to explain why, as if anybody can explain that. And that meant that the orphanages filled up with neglected children and people jumped out the window. So if you’re not going to pay for this, you’re just going to cause a situation like that. I think some women would like to have more children, but they can’t afford it. So give them the money they probably would, if what you want is more babies. 

 

TV CLIP 

 

HOOVER You know, after Season One, most of what happens in the television series doesn’t actually take place in your novel. Do you like that in the series Offred, who is the protagonist played by Elisabeth Moss, transforms from a passive person, someone who didn’t participate in the protest as the authoritarian state of Gilead was taking over, into somebody who fought the regime from the inside. 

 

ATWOOD The thing about totalitarianisms if they’re serious, if you are visibly resistant there are consequences. And we just saw a whole bunch of people getting arrested in Russia for protesting the war in Ukraine. And I refer you to an organization of students under Hitler called the White Rose. They all got caught. They ended up on meat hooks. So they will kill people. And, and so it’s a big risk in such a regime to be involved in a resistance movement or to be un-compliant. So I think the television series, the character gets– she has incredible luck, let’s put it that way. And there were people in resistance movements who had incredible luck. It’s not out of the question. A number of them survived. They didn’t get caught. A number of them did get caught. So there’s historical precedence for either one. But let us say that Elisabeth Moss in the series has incredible luck. Incredible luck of not getting caught.  

 

HOOVER You told the New York Times in 2019 that you, quote, “had done some yelling” about plot developments that you had disagreed with in the Hulu series.

 

ATWOOD Yeah, a bit. 

 

HOOVER How is the experience as an author of watching your story develop in ways that you don’t completely agree with? 

 

ATWOOD Well, they didn’t do those things. So I basically said, ‘you can’t kill Aunt Lydia.’ They had at that point, I think, stuck a knife into her and shoved her over the stairs. And, cliffhanger, we didn’t know whether– what was going to happen to her. So I said, ‘you can’t kill Aunt Lydia.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re not going to. We weren’t going to anyway.’ And I said, ‘and hands off that baby.’ So they said, ‘Oh, we weren’t going to kill the baby.’ So it’s ok. They were not going to kill the baby. 

 

HOOVER What you’re saying is you won all those battles. 

 

ATWOOD No, I didn’t win them. They weren’t battles, as it turned out, because they had already decided not to do those things. So what is it like? I think we’ll just reframe the question a bit: What is it like to let other people play in your sandbox? So if you don’t want other people to play in your sandbox, you don’t make movie and TV deals. That’s just what it is. If you’re saying, ok, you can develop this, at that point, you don’t have any actual control over it. You cannot veto it. You cannot stop it. You have given a team permission to forge ahead. It’s a different art form. There are going to be different ways of handling the story. It’s inevitable. I worked in television and film myself in the 70s and it’s always a problem, how do you take an inner thought and convey it in pictures and voice. 

 

HOOVER The Handmaid’s Tale ends as a complete cliffhanger. You don’t know whether Offred is about to escape the brutal regime or be captured. And in 2019, 35 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, your readers finally got a sequel called The Testaments. And Gilead seems poised to collapse under the weight of its own corruption at the end of The Testaments. Is there a message about the sustainability of authoritarian regimes? 

 

ATWOOD I think they’re hard to sustain in the long run. Because either they depend on the force of will of a single individual, like Tito in Yugoslavia was holding together these disparate elements, and as soon as he died you got civil war. So either it’s like that, or there is a succession of generations. So first generation, true-believers – those would be the old Bolsheviks in the USSR. They really believed that their efforts were going to produce the golden age. So then Stalin gets control and the Bolsheviks are a problem for him because they believe that the golden age should appear and it’s not appearing. So he eliminates them. He has these show trials in the thirties. Then we got an interlude, which is World War Two, in which Stalin briefly becomes friendly Uncle Joe. And then there’s a pivot after the war and he becomes unfriendly Uncle Joe, and you get the Cold War. And then you get another generation succeeding. So how are they going to hold it together when they no longer have a charismatic leader totally bent on domination? What’s going to happen then? You have a few of them. They try their hardest, but the true believer element is vanishing. OK. So when you don’t have a golden city that’s going to appear at the end of all of this, and it’s just not appearing, a lot of the air goes out of the helium balloon. Same thing happened with the American Puritans in the 17th century. It was going to be the city of God. It was going to be a light to all nations. And then that somehow doesn’t happen. Whose fault is it? Well, first of all, it was witches. It must because of the witches. Stalin, it must be because of of traitors from within. So you got these purges, these kinds of visions purges and then nothing is holding it together except force, because you no longer have the belief. And that’s when they start to fall apart. And that’s what’s happening in The Testaments. So true-believer Aunt Lydia is no longer a true believer. And there are quite a few precedents for that. As I say, I don’t put things in that haven’t happened. 

 

HOOVER Why did you choose to end The Testaments on what you’ve described as a more positive note than one might have expected? 

 

ATWOOD Oh, because I’m a soppy optimist. [laughs] Yeah. Well, that’s a little bit too bold. I think things often happen that way, and I’m old enough to have seen a number of them come and go. Although now we’re seeing a number of them come, but possibly we might be about to see a number of them go. Because one thing that the confrontation over the Ukraine has done is make people more aware of democratic values. And possibly they should be defending them more – what do you think – even within their own countries. So do you want authoritarian regimes in your own countries if this is the result? And the Western countries seem to be putting up their hands and saying no. But let’s see what form that may take. So in order to really represent the free world you have to have free countries, don’t you? 

 

HOOVER Do you think that in the United States we had taken a respite from feeling like we needed to defend representative democracy and be on guard against authoritarianism?

 

ATWOOD Yes. Yes, I do think you took a bit of a breather. And I think you got involved in sectarian warfare, which has weakened your country. And I think you need– You know, if you’ve been number one for a long time, you take things for granted. But number one doesn’t necessarily stay number one, especially if it’s tearing itself apart from within. 

 

HOOVER So then what’s– what is the remedy for that? 

 

ATWOOD I don’t know. There are some things I don’t know. But maybe, you know, pop awake, and have a look at who is trying to weaken you. And to whose advantage is it that you should be weak? 

 

HOOVER In 1973, the original host of Firing Line William F. Buckley Jr. welcomed conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly to the program, where she argued against the Equal Rights Amendment. Take a look at this. 

 

SCHLAFLY: We find as we look into the matter, that ERA won’t give women anything which they haven’t already got or have a way of getting. But on the other hand, it will take away from women some of the most important rights and benefits and exemptions we now have. 

 

HOOVER One of the major characters in The Handmaid’s Tale, Serena Joy, is a former conservative activist and author who advocated for traditional values and then becomes a housewife as men take over. There are readers who have speculated that Serena Joy was based on Phyllis Schlafly.

 

ATWOOD No. It’s a composite of a number of people. But what they all have in common is that they thought women should be in the home, but they weren’t in the home. They were out there having quite a public career, saying that women shouldn’t be in public. It’s a bit of a contradiction. By the way you wouldn’t have a job, I’m just I’m just telling you that. 

 

HOOVER I have to do something else, wouldn’t I? 

 

ATWOOD You would have to do something else. 

 

HOOVER At the beginning of The Testaments, you include a quote from George Eliot’s novel that reads, “every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives or else be a monster.” Feminism doesn’t have to be monolithic, but some people have wanted it to be which has made you resist the term feminism. 

 

ATWOOD No, I don’t resist the term. I just ask people to tell me which kind they’re talking about. If you say Christian, do you mean Ukrainian Orthodox? Do you mean Quakers? Do you mean the pope? You have to define what kind you’re talking about. Same with feminism. I think there are 75 different kinds. So I’m not the kind that thinks all male babies should be eliminated except 10 percent kept for breeding. I’m not that kind. [laughter]

 

HOOVER I could have guessed. 

 

ATWOOD So I support an organization called Equality Now which works on laws. And it works to make the status of women and girls in various countries more equal. So that kind. And I’m a supporter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And for me, feminism is a subset of being human. Women are human beings, radical though it may seem. That is where I begin. 

 

CLIMATE CHANGE

 

HOOVER In your 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, it’s set in the not-so-distant future where New York is underwater because of rising sea levels, and New England’s climate is semi tropical. In a 2006 speech entitled Wetlands, you suggested there was still time to combat climate change, and you wrote, quote, “The air, the Earth and the water are a common good and should be commonly protected. All will benefit if they are. All will suffer if they are not. If we wait too long, it will be too late. End of story.” 

 

ATWOOD: Yeah.

 

HOOVER: That was 16 years ago. 

 

ATWOOD: I know.

 

HOOVER: Is it too late? 

 

ATWOOD You know, you’re going to have to ask some climate scientists that. You are getting a lot of thinking and inventions that are being put into how to mitigate the situation that we’re in. There are all kinds of new inventions that are coming on stream that will cut energy use, cut carbon emission. And we’re putting those together in a project to be launching in September called Practical Utopias. 

 

HOOVER What is your hope? I mean, what do you ultimately hope to achieve out of this eight week virtual learning experience?

 

ATWOOD Possibly some patterns that could be used in real life, and certainly an awareness of the problems that we face. So you will come up with something, You know, how about this wonderful invention? And the next question is going to be, Well, how much does it cost? What kinds of materials does it use? And do you have to import them from somewhere far, far away? Like that. So people looking at these will have to look at all of those kinds of factors. And I think that’s going to be pretty, pretty fascinating. 

 

HOOVER Well, with that, Margaret Atwood, writer of dystopian fiction and self-described ‘soppy optimist.’ Thank you for joining me here on Firing Line. 

 

ATWOOD And thank you.