Stone Mattress

A look at the short fiction of Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress

This is the final instalment on my exploration of the short story for paying subscribers (although of course short stories will emerge within the main content of the newsletter from time to time!)  To end the series, I am offering this newsletter for free to all subscribers.  To see what I offer for an upgrade to a paid subscription, please check out my subscription tiers.  Thank you for your support!

*Trigger warning: contains references to male violence*

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has never been one to shy away from the big issues.  Her famous dystopian novel The Handmaids Tale tells a terrifying story of a religious totalitarian society which has overthrown the government of the United States, taking all rights away from women, and forcing a hierarchical class whereby some women become ‘handmaidens’, forced to reproduce for the ruling class.

Interviews with Atwood in 2017 revealed her fears that her dystopian prophecies may not be as far from the mark as we might assume.  In fact, Atwood based the events of her dystopian novel on real events she found when researching puritan values in 17^th Century America.  Further, it is interesting to note that following the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017, sales of Atwood’s book shot up. 

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Atwood pointed out that history can often repeat itself, stating that current legislation governing women’s abortion rights, for example, echo The Handmaids Tale, as well as the values upheld in early America. 

‘We think as progress being a straight line forever upwards.  But it has never been so, you can think you are being a liberal democracy but then – bang – you’re Hitler’s Germany.  That can happen very suddenly’. 1  

Atwood has an astonishing oeuvre of work including novels, poetry, and short fiction.  Interestingly, some of her short fiction shows evidence of her feminist novels.

Atwood’s short story collection, Stone Mattress, contains some beautifully constructed prose; she has a way of presenting the characters and places they inhabit in a way that places the reader right at the centre of their world, even when that world is far from the one we inhabit.

Known for her speculative fiction, ‘Lusus Naturae’ is a dark tale of a young woman born with a genetic abnormality, and whose family mistake her for a vampire, faking her death and burial via a corrupt priest, and keeping her in one room of the house.  Eventually a grown woman and alone in the house, she begins to venture outside, coming across a couple of lovers, and finding herself unable to resist jumping on top of the man, thinking she’s kissing him, but instead biting him like an animal.

The bloody result of this encounter is that the townsfolk, including her own family members, approach the house with fire torches, in order to kill the beast that she has become, despite her pleas to be seen as a human woman.

‘I am a human being’.

It feels that throughout these stories, Atwood is showing the intolerance of society toward those deemed ‘different’, and this particular story reminded me of the character of Bertha, the ‘mad woman in the attic’ in Jane Eyre.

The title story of the collection stood out for me as being the most connected to the legacy of protest against the treatment of women’s rights of Atwood’s earlier work.

In this story, Verna, an older woman who doesn’t state her age, has taken a vacation, a trip to the arctic on board a ship.  The opening line sets the dark intentions of the story, and reminded me of the foreshadowing technique used in much of Muriel Spark’s works.

‘At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone’. 

Verna then gives us basic details of her former husbands, whom, as the story develops, we come to realise all died fairly soon after marrying Verna.  Though Verna doesn’t see herself directly as a murderer; meeting them through her rehabilitation work, she allowed them to indulge in activities which should have been off-limits.

But it is easy to like Verna.  She is a complex character, and you get the feeling from the outset that there is a reason she appears so cool and callous in her search for her next rich husband.

Before the ship disembarks, she attends a buffet and drinks evening with other members of the trip.  Circulating the room, working out which unattended male might be worth approaching, she starts a conversation with ‘one of the Bobs’ (they each display name badges).  He comments on her unusual name, which she informs him is Latin for spring, and he delivers his full name to her, which causes her to flush. 

She realises, with intense shock, that he is the young man who took her to the winter formal in high school. 

Three years his younger, studious and innocent, she relates that night she has buried deep when Bob Goreham forced her with alcohol and raped her in his car.  This, we discover, led to her reputation being ‘ruined’ in the small town, the townsfolk and high school students laughing and gossiping about her, her mother disowning her and completely blaming her when she quickly discovered she was pregnant.  She was packed off to a church-run ‘Home for Unwed Mothers’ on the outskirts of Toronto, where she tells us:

‘They were treated to bouts of prayer and self-righteous hectoring…what had happened to them was justly deserved, the speeches went, because of their depraved behaviour.’ 

This kind of referencing appears to hark back to an earlier age when practices like this were all too commonplace.

Verna relays the story of her time at the home, the humiliating experience for the young girls, and the child being taken from her quickly after a long and difficult birth, whereupon she heard a nurse comment:

‘It was all for the best…because those sorts of girls made unfit mothers anyway’.

The underlying story here is that Bob was never affected by any of this.  Celebrated as a hero by his friends, openly spreading gossip of his entertainment via Verna that night after the formal, whereas she lost everything. 

‘Cheap.  Cheap and disposable.  Use and toss.  That was what Bob had thought about her, from the very first.’

She tells us that there had been no true words for the act of rape back then; that was simply something which happened ‘when some maniac jumped on you out of a bush’.

Believing herself ruined anyway, she decides never to return home to her mother and a town full of people she despises, instead stumbling upon an older married man, with whom:

‘She traded noontime sex…for the price of her education.  A fair exchange, to her mind’.

Her choice of career in physiotherapy had followed, allowing her to meet rich, elderly men with life-threatening conditions, and thus building her life around her looks and sex appeal.

Her dismay at the fact that Bob doesn’t even recognise her, despite her having such an unusual name, intensifies her sense of the injustices she felt at his hands.  She quickly realises it is Bob who turned her into a murderer, no one else, and she considers how to go about killing him with an air of theoretical calm.  She makes a deal with herself:

‘If I tell him who I am and he recognises me and then apologises, I still won’t kill him.’

What follows is a precise murder plotted and executed worthy of any of the best crime fiction.  Though the story sounds dark, Atwood’s prose, as with all the stories in the collection, retain an element of playfulness and humour. 

‘She’s read a lot of crime novels.’

By the time Verna comes to executing the deed, the reader is totally on her side, feeling this Bob character deserves all he gets, even when Verna declares at the last minute that he’s aged, he’s frailer, and wonders if she should let ‘bygones be bygones, boys will be boys.’

At the end of the story, a tired and empty Verna feels at peace.  She thinks back to her third husband and his annoying quotations, thinking of how ‘Those Victorians always coupled sex with death’; an interesting note to end the story on.

Thankfully, homes where young pregnant women were shipped off to are no longer accepted as part of our society.  But Atwood’s reflections on the ways in which women’s morality in comparison to men’s was dealt with – punished in the one, and celebrated in the other – as well as her stories around the way human beings treat ‘difference’, still feel sadly relevant.  

1 (2017, Guardian Online).