Read Full Transcript EXPAND
MH: The author of The Handmaid’s Tale and her burning questions…This Week on Firing Line.
Atwood: Well, the single, most burning question is what’s going to happen in the Ukraine.
She’s the renowned author who has been warning about the future through her novels and other writings for decades. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” has become a classic of dystopian fiction, more than 8 million copies sold.
Atwood “I never just make things up out of nothing”
A dire warning about authoritarianism heard throughout the world, an Emmy-award winning drama series…
Aunt Lydia: Well good morning girls.
Handmaids: “Good morning Aunt Lydia”…
And a global symbol of feminist protest…
Protest nats: What do we want? The right to choose! When do we want it? Now!
Now, the Canadian writer has a new collection of essays tackling the world’s most pressing issues / problems, from threats to democracy to the climate crisis.
Atwood: So that’s what’s coming up for us, I’m afraid to say, on planet Earth.
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 Fairweather Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation and by, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Damon Button and Simmons Family Foundation. Corporate Funding is provided by Stevens Inc. and Pfizer inc.
INTERVIEW
HOOVER Margaret Atwood, welcome to Firing Line
ATWOOD And I’m happy to be here with another Margaret.
HOOVER You published your first book of poems, The Circle Game, in 1964, and your first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969. Now, more than a dozen novels later, you have just published Burning Questions, a chronology of essays from 2004 to 2021 on topics ranging from climate change to the state of democracy. What is the single most burning question that you are asking right now?
ATWOOD Well, the single, most burning question isn’t in the book because it hasn’t happened yet. And that would be what’s going to happen in the Ukraine. So that is first and foremost in our attention right now. But there’s a lot of background playing behind that, which is a slower crisis evolving. And since everything’s connected, let us call that one the climate crisis, which in turn will fuel social unrest, wars, and big migrations of people. So that’s what’s coming up for us, I’m afraid to say, on planet Earth. But right now, what is going to happen in the Ukraine.
HOOVER 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, and you reference in Burning Questions, quote, “the tone for a novel about a modern totalitarianism was readily available. East German fighter planes broke the sound barrier every Sunday, reminding us by their sonic booms, and they could swoop down at any moment.” 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. 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 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. And that is probably what it is like living in Russia today, although it isn’t called communism. So there are many kinds of totalitarianisms. There’s no one thing that gives rise to them. We’ve got ones of the left, 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, 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. 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. Baby stealing, that’s happened in a number of different countries and times, and it’s in the Bible. So it’s the Rachel and Leah and the handmaid stories. Some people have said ‘all fertile women.’ That it’s not quite the situation in The Handmaid’s Tale. You don’t get to be a handmaid just because you’re fertile. You get to be a handmaid because you are judged to have committed adultery by getting such things as divorces, because they are– They used to be actually forbidden. You may not remember that, you’re too young, but it used to be very, very hard to get divorces because it was thought that the Bible said that you shouldn’t have them. So in Gilead, they have reinstated that. You can’t get divorces. But you can get handmaids.
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 For the uninitiated audience, can you explain what we’re seeing.
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 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 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. It was not just another job for them. And they were giving it their everything. And they have continued during COVID to be able to shoot. So they’re currently shooting Season Five. Quite a feat to be able to carry on.
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. 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.’
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. 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 program is now filming its fifth season, and apparently another one is coming out after that. The showrunner, Bruce Miller, has said that he knows the ending of the series.
ATWOOD Oh does he?
HOOVER Do you know how it ends?
ATWOOD No. He hasn’t told me. [laughs] I think I’ll phone him up after this and say… Yes. They run a very, very tight ship over there. They have a writers’ room. I was allowed into it just to get my picture taken in it with them all, but it’s before they had written anything on their whiteboard. So they’re very careful about leaks. They don’t want to signal. They don’t want snippets of information coming out. And they have been very closed-room about it.
HOOVER Well, your novel 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, 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. 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 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, 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.
BUCKLEY: What would be an example of that?
SCHLAFLY: Well, a great glaring example on which there is full agreement between both the proponents and the opponents is the matter of the draft. Women are exempt from the draft. Selective service says only young men of age 18 have to register. But the Equal Rights Amendment will positively make women subject to the draft and on an equal basis with men.
HOOVER In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, you referred to Schlafly as having nixed the Equal Rights Amendment–
ATWOOD: She did.
HOOVER: –and you named a cafe the Shlafly Cafe in The Testaments. What message were you trying to send your readers?
ATWOOD Well, people make saints and icons out of those in the past with whom they agree. So she would be honored by the Aunts and would be considered to have reinforced women’s traditional role, which they are all for. She thought the draft argument was a big negative, but there are a number of countries that have women in the military now. Big surprise. And some of them are in the military because they wanted to be in the military. So this is—-
HOOVER Including the United States.
ATWOOD Yes, exactly. So my secret feeling is that she really won it because there was a rumor going around that women would have to pee standing up. But that wasn’t true.
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 reduced to being 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.
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.
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. We’ve seen those costumes on the steps of the Supreme Court. And 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 you predicted a, quote, “horrific backlash” if that happens. What does a post Roe v. Wade United States, look like?
ATWOOD I 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? If they’re going to claim women’s bodies and put in enforced childbearing, they should pay for that. If they make you have a baby, they should pay for your food, your lodging, your clothing, your medical care. 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.
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 you suggested there was still time to combat climate change, and you wrote, “If we wait too long, it will be too late. End of story.”
ATWOOD: Yeah, I know.
HOOVER: That was 16 years ago. Is it too late?
ATWOOD You know, you’re going to have to ask some climate scientists that. 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. We were going to launch right about now. I’m glad we didn’t, in the middle of everything else that’s going on. So we’re launching in September, partly because we just got too much input and too much interest.
HOOVER You signed an open letter with other writers, including J.K. Rowling, in July of 2020 defending the right to free speech and condemning cancel culture. Has the left gone too far trying to cancel certain types of speech?
ATWOOD OK, let’s not say just the left. How about–
HOOVER Oh, I won’t. I just start with them and then I go to the right.
ATWOOD Yeah. So what’s happening right now? Let’s just take snowflakery. This is going to upset some people. OK, that is now being hit back across the tennis net with the big wave of book banning. That’s coming from the right. So maybe they’re not calling that cancel culture, but it’s the same thing. So any democracy is going to have this problem. In a totalitarianism it isn’t a problem because you just shut down any conflicting speech. But if you have a democracy which, in theory anyway, permits open debate, where do you draw the line? And this is going to be an ongoing conversation. But rush to judgment is not the answer. I’m all in favor of due diligence, evidence-based policy, and making a distinction between beliefs, no evidence need be required, and fact, which is verifiable. That is, you can test it out. You can see whether it’s true or not.
HOOVER Let me ask you about something you said in Amsterdam, in 2018, because you recognize that the right is now trumpeting free speech, but that you added quote, “The left has foolishly taken the bait thrown out by the right, and it’s busily trying to shut down certain manifestations of speech that it doesn’t like.”
ATWOOD So that was 2018, and that was true then. I think we’re coming out of that period. I think it’s much less true now. There is one other thing that is universally true: any weapon that you devise will be adopted by the other side and used against you. And you can look at– you can look at that across the board. So if you think it’s fair for you to do that to Person X, Person X is going to shortly do it to you.
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.