Reading Response to Atwood

Margaret Atwood has a way of creating futuristic universes in which society is fairly technologically advanced but gender norms and roles are backward. The non-egalitarian treatment of women in The Year of the Flood reminds me of the mistreatment of women in Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, albeit a little less strict. In both books, men are more powerful than women, and it’s socially acceptable for men to mistreat women. Toby highlights her father’s faithfulness to and love for her mother by his dedication to caring for her in a society in which men divorced their wives, something “a lot of men did when something too debilitating and expensive struck their wives” (Atwood, 2009, 27). Men like Blanco, Toby’s boss at SecretBurgers, and Mordis, Ren’s boss at Scales and Tales, are both men who are in a charge of a workforce of women and both are in positions that involve objectifying and sexualizing their female employees; except sexual harassment and coerced sex are not a part of the SecretBurgers manager’s job description, Blanco just brings a little something extra to the table.

Side note: I was just a little repulsed at how women were equated to products. Mordis described the appeal of sleazy clubs because it “separated our brand from the run-of-the-mill product the guy could get at home, with the face cream and the white cotton panties” (Atwood, 7). So the “cleanest dirty girls in town” of Scales and Tails were the exciting and “better product”, while wives and women who wore white cotton panties were the pedestrian and inferior “product” (Atwood, 7).  Pigs.

Although Toby mentioned the Gardeners’ opposition to words, I wasn’t struck by the irony of the technologically advanced, but illiterate society until 60 pages in. Writing and the printing press are two of the earliest forms of technology, and they allowed for the widespread education and learning that led to other technological advances. If not for writing and the accessibility of books after the printing press, scientists and thinkers would have had a hard time learning the foundations of their fields, which allowed them to build on top of that knowledge to make new discoveries and advances. Amanda (Toby’s friend) slowly re-acquired her ability to express herself with written language by starting with one letter and slowly adding more to create words. The world of The Year of the Flood has knowledge of gene slicing and has created rakunks and green rabbits, but people didn’t have written language. Incroyable.