We asked our regular contributors to write about the feminist books that they love—books that struck a chord, for one reason or another, books they couldn’t put down, that they’ll never donate, that are underlined and dog-eared and bookmarked eternally, that you can maybe borrow, but you most definitely have to give back. Here’s Caolan on Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:
I last read these books on my Kindle, which promptly broke; here I am with the broken title page of the Ballantine e-book of The Mists of Avalon.
I wanted to talk about these two books together because, for me, they’re two sides of the same coin. Marion Zimmer Bradley‘s The Mists of Avalon (1983) is a feminist revision of the King Arthur mythos, but also a reconstruction of a dreamed-of matriarchal prehistory; Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a feminist dystopian nightmare. In one novel, a society of priestess-revering, Goddess-fearing, woman-respecting Picts and Celts—everybody smeared in woad, wreathed in holly, rising with the sun and running with the deer—is slowly but inevitably crushed by the cold patriarchal grip of early Christianity, with its tyrannical, sex-negative priests making sure that every woman is the property of a man, and/or an illiterate virgin. In the other, a society of somewhat troubled but reasonably happy white North American 70s feminists—a lot of hairy armpits, conflicting attitudes about sex work, militant second-wave moms with casual, complacent daughters—is suddenly and terrifyingly crushed by the cold patriarchal grip of televangelist-style fundamentalist Christianity, as a military coup restructures the US as a theocracy, sends infertile women and feminist rabble-rousers and various other traitors to their deaths in radioactive work camps, and redistributes fertile nonbelievers as property—”handmaids”—to creepy powerful old couples, with whom they are expected to conceive and bear children in creepy sex rituals that physically involve the creepy old husbands and vicariously involve the creepy old wives. Both scenarios were projections—forward or backward—from the real world of the early 1980s, from actual evidence: The Mists of Avalon is a theological-historical-anthropological back-formation, a brilliantly orchestrated reconciliation of 20th-century Wiccan rituals and speculations about the historical Arthur and pseudoarchaeology about actual ruins on the British isles and conflicting medieval French texts and folktales, while the horrors of The Handmaid’s Tale are rooted in contemporary struggles over reproductive justice and women’s rights and the rhetoric of the newly powerful religious right in the US, not to mention the swiftness with which women’s lives were changing in Iran under the Ayatollah, or rather the swiftness with which so many regimes (including our own!) associated nationalism or political stability with women’s subordination.
I read these books at around the same time—maybe in 1991, when I was eleven? The 1980s present from which they made their leaps forward and back in time still felt like my present. This was where my world came from, and where it could be going. The books came from important feminist women in my life, both of whom I knew through my important feminist mother, but who offered slightly different perspectives on what life as a woman might be like. My godmother, a red-lipsticked, spike-heeled painter/playwright, taught me how to paint with acrylics in her home studio; she’d lent me Mists of Avalon at the end of a lesson, where I’d been working on a painting of a bosomy princess in a wine-colored mantilla and an austere-but-bosomy nunlike woman in green (in my mind, baby-swapping was involved). She’d been decorating a styrofoam mannequin with harlequin patterns; downstairs, on her electric typewriter, was the script for a musical about seven singing wet-nurses whose abundant breastmilk and song turned a sickly, doomed baby into a wild, libidinous pop singer. My friend Sandra’s mom, Sue, let me borrow The Handmaid’s Tale when I pulled it off their bookcase, or maybe after she finished reading it at the beach; like my mom, Sue was a nice, funny, smart, responsible single mom, which is why they became best friends the minute they met each other. But she was also finishing a dissertation on Henry James, and had boyfriends, and made cynical comments about celebrities’ sex lives, and read a ton of contemporary literature, including Atwood. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, she read me a poem by Atwood:
you fit into me
like a hook into an eyea fish hook
an open eye
and lent me a book of her short stories in which a woman has a tumor with teeth in it removed from her ovary and keeps the tumor in a jar in her house and thinks of it as a baby.
The Mists of Avalon and The Handmaid’s Tale were exciting like that tumor, exciting in a disturbing way I couldn’t quite understand, in addition to the stuff I understood and agreed with or was terrified by, or already recognized as melodramatic or sensationalistic or heavy-handed or problematic. Here are some things I learned from those books that I now recognize might not be true:
- Sex with men usually involves a ritual, either imposed by a third party (priestesses, the state) or invented by you as part of your complex, mystic struggle against oppression. There will be cool accessories (antlers, other women’s pelvises). [IMPORTANT AVALON-SPECIFIC EDIT: I forgot to mention that just because the first man you have sex with has coarse, wiry chest hair, some men you have sex with may turn out to have other kinds of chest hair, some of which may be of a fine, dark, sensual, semi-feminine, teen-idol softness. This last kind of chest hair is preferred by basically all women, but also it’s nice that there is a whole world of diverse male chest hair out there.]
- Sex with women is a temporary, comforting escape into fellowship and kindness but is ultimately not important to the main plot, which usually involves sex with various men and various resulting magic pregnancies.
- Pregnancy is very important and sacred but healthy motherhood cannot be depicted in fiction. Your children will be taken from you and raised by other people (oh God the stuff about the lost daughter in The Handmaid’s Tale, now that I have my own daughter, oh God I don’t want to read that stuff again). You will have a bad relationship with your own mother. I didn’t encounter an honest literary depiction of motherhood until I discovered Sylvia Plath two years later (and for years, Plath was my model for work/life balance, maybe still is, can you believe it). (See Becca Klaver’s post on Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day for an alternative depiction of feminist motherhood).
- Feminism involves some kind of cool uniform (deerskin tunic, medieval-style red handmaid’s gown) and also a lot of cool grooming rituals (marking your brow with woad, smearing your skin with melted butter when you can’t get hand cream.) Well, maybe that part is true.
It occurs to me now that a lot of this stuff—ambivalence about sex and the possibility of consent, acknowledgement of but discomfort with lesbian desire, anxiety about whether a hero’s journey could accommodate motherhood, obsession with skin cream—might give us a glimpse into the particular anxieties haunting mainstream 80s feminism. Many of these concerns are still painfully relevant, of course—I am not dismissing them. But these books are valuable to me not just as feminist handbooks, but as documents that help tell one part of the history of feminism, documents that we can be interested in and learn from but not always agree with.
This last point is especially important to keep in mind when talking about Zimmer Bradley, who turns out to have done some terrible things: she protected and defended her husband, a convicted sex offender, and in 2014 her daughter revealed that Zimmer Bradley was an abuser herself. I can’t align myself with fans who deny or ignore Zimmer Bradley’s actions in order to preserve her legacy as a feminist heroine; I worry that writing about her at all counts as support for those actions. The question of whether it’s possible to continue to appreciate work by someone whose actions or politics you find abhorrent is hard to answer, whether you’re talking about Ezra Pound or Woody Allen or Bill Cosby; Zimmer Bradley’s case is useful to me as a personal reminder that the history of feminist literature and thought isn’t exempt from that question.
So, I have some caveats. But what really got me, and continues to get me, about these novels were the communities of women they imagined, the glimpses they provided of a “girl version” of life, of history, even of dystopia. I read a lot of books by and about men, but I always thought women were more interesting (I just recently realized that the reason I found The Hobbit unbearably boring was the fact that there were zero female characters, unless you count that one implied ewe at Beorn’s house). The Mists of Avalon and The Handmaid’s Tale invited me into so many fascinating women-centric or women-only spaces. The island of Avalon, where all the priestesses lived together and taught each other secret herb lore and ate apples and predicted the future. The queen’s court at Camelot, where queens and princesses in jewel-toned medieval gowns embroidered with gold thread and played the harp and talked politics. An Arthurian legend populated almost entirely by women, where women weren’t just prizes or obstacles or decorations, but where they drove the plot and talked to each other, hanging out in gorgeous, extravagant gatherings of queens and priestesses and witches, sisters and mothers and foster-mothers and mentors and friends. In A Handmaid’s Tale, the dormitory full of handmaids-in-training; a secret club full of prostitutes who used to be/still are militant feminists; the domestic life at the handmaid’s household, everyone in color-coded dresses, the mistress in blue, the handmaid in red, the servants in green; the handmaids having creepy, violent parties together for special occasions like the birth of a child or an execution. These were all troubling and scary, but so interesting, so much more interesting than Orwell, because they showed us the secret life of women, the life no one ever seemed to want to write about.
And what gets me now is that these books are my alternate canon, the books I read before Malory or Orwell. So that no matter what happened, no matter how absorbed in the Western canon I got, no matter how much I learned to identify with Arthur or Stephen Dedalus or the guy from 1984, I always thought these feminist versions were the real version, that Morgan le Fay was really a priestess and not an evil sorceress.
I don’t think these shadows will/have come to pass. Zimmer Bradley’s reconstruction has always struck me as a beautiful fantasy of how matriarchy might have worked, but from the real history and anthropology I’ve read, there may have been cultures where women were respected, even worshiped—even societies where individual women held a lot of power—but that didn’t mean women in general, women as a population, weren’t oppressed, used, treated as property, subject to violence. And Atwood’s dystopia, while scary, is so aesthetically pleasing, so beautifully ordered. I guess you could say that’s true of purity balls, too, but they seem tackier than Atwood’s Brave New World meets book of hours meets Ren Faire dystopian aesthetic. I don’t think it will happen that way.
Most profoundly, though, most scarily, these books taught me: they took everything away from us. And they want to take what we still have from us again. Constant vigilance, girls.
And I listened.
