Mehnaj Ahmed – Feminism & Technology: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Creating “Crakers for Kids”

When we were making the stories, our first task was figuring how to distill all of what was to become the lore of the combined Craker and human populations after all of the characters we had grown to know and love had died. We eventually settled on picking 4 characters – Toby, Zeb, Snowman, and Crake. Each group member picked 1 character to write approximately 20 sentence-long pages about.

Although we devised our stories independently, we worked on the actual art together (for the most part). This was so we could create consistency in our visuals – whenever we draw humans, or pigoons, we followed the same style. There was some divergence in our stories (for example, Sarah’s story has no human characters: Zeb’s a snake, and the Rev is a dog), but we didn’t want things to seem like they were all written by one author. Each story is told in our own distinct voice and handwriting (sorry in advance if my handwriting’s difficult to decipher).

We also drew a lot from collaging techniques, mirroring the “gleaning” of the God’s Gardeners, as well as the post-Flood society. Luckily, Christy had a ton of stickers, which helped us add a certain childlike charm to the way we constructed our stories. I had a lot of fun making a two-page collage spread (pp. 29-30), where I used a mix of flattened dried flowers/leaves, tissue paper, and flower stickers to create the God’s Gardeners’ rooftop garden.

I drew my greatest inspiration from Aesop’s fables, because of the instructive nature of Toby’s story. There were some deviations, clearly – I chose to be very explicit with all of my morality, going for an inversion of the essential rule of “show, don’t tell.” Kind of boring, but realistically, it’s what the Crakers (and their perpetual questioning) would prefer. At one point, my story innocently glosses over the deadly fight between the MaddAddams and the remaining Painballers, with a little footnote – if you want to hear more, you can read it elsewhere. That way, I get to placate the prying Crakers, without having to include too much of that difficult-to-explain gore.

We also worked on consistency in terms of Craker lore – for instance, we decided that all characters would move to the “sky” with Oryx and Crake after death, and that Oryx and Crake would exist as humans as well as godlike figures. Since our stories take place a few generations after the events of MaddAddam, we figured some things would become codified as the combined human/Craker culture progressed.

Lifecasting and the Male Gaze

We’re all being watched. Whether it’s Google Analytics watching where we choose to spend our time on the Internet, or more malicious forms of spyware scanning for the input of valuable data, it’s always taking place in some way. Even written records can prove to be dangerous and always subject to the gaze of outsiders. Adam One is highly aware of this monitoring, which is reflected in the way in which he chooses to run the God’s Gardeners. For instance, written records are forbidden, and there is only one laptop available, concealed by the Adams and Eves. This is an extension of the fear that every middle schooler has, that someone will read their sincerest innermost thoughts (usually in the form of a diary, or in my day, a blog on Xanga), but with actual real-world ramifications. Besides exposing us to harm, there’s a sense of discomfort associated with exposing our inner lives to the world. Both within the world of Oryx and Crake and our real world, artists utilize that discomfort to evoke feelings in viewers.

This is demonstrated in Oryx and Crake with the lifecaster Anna K., who broadcasts every aspect of her life on the Internet. For Crake and Jimmy this is just part of their illicit titillating Web crawls, but the tasks she performs while streaming are more elaborate than expected: “tweezing her eyebrows, waxing her bikini line, washing her underwear.” These are somewhat mundane tasks, which are almost embarrassing in a way – revealing the things that women must do to make themselves presentable (plucking of body hairs), things that humanize women and reveal how odd these rituals are. This is probably why Jimmy was so entranced with Anna K. – for a teenager, especially, it is novel to get these glimpses into a woman’s life.

Jennifer Ringley was one of the first lifecasters, and likely who Margaret Atwood modeled Anna K. after. Between 1996 and 2003, Ringley streamed her entire life on JenniCam.com, starting from her dorm room at Dickinson College to her apartment in Sacramento. Like with Anna K., this included glimpses of nudity and she would keep the webcam on even as she participated in sexual acts. Although Jennifer did not view JenniCam as an art project, it was, like Anna K., an uncensored contrast to the ways in which women are typically presented (sanitized, unblemished, etc.).

Countless other artists have played with the concept of surveillance. For instance, Jill Magid’s “Evidence Locker,” a work of performance art, consisted of her walking around Liverpool in a bright red trench coat. Various police cameras would watch her, and Magid collected around eleven hours of CCTV footage. Magid had to file police requests to retrieve the footage, and which she filled out as if she were writing letters to a lover. Magid’s choices are a little different from Ringley’s and Anna K.’s – the latter two created their own avenues to share their private lives, while Magid chose to highlight how the government peers in at us, without us noticing.

I think it’s a little interesting that many of these artists toying with these concepts are female, because malicious groups on the Internet so frequently target women. In JenniCam’s early days, Ringley received death threats from teenage hackers. However, when I think about it more, I see where these artists are coming from – they’re writing their own narratives, taking over the male gaze and its way of glossing over the unpleasant parts.

That said, it must be exhausting to keep this up. Ringley ended JenniCam after having to deal with the fallout from carrying out an affair, visible to public scrutiny. I’m sure, with time, Anna K.’s operation would be over as well.

Oryx as a Deconstruction of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”

Disclaimer: Even though I think it’s a convenient term to use, I feel like tropes are a highly misused and over applied concept used to inaccurately dissect fiction.

When I first read Oryx and Crake in high school, something about the character of Oryx bothered me – something about how shallowly fleshed out she is, something that I couldn’t exactly articulate. She just seemed, in spite of her vague troubled past, too perfect, with two men wildly in love with her and an ability to innately form bonds with all living beings. This time, in my reread, I had pinned it down – Oryx reads like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, one of the most aggravating (and misogynistic) fictional tropes.

A “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (hereafter shortened to MPDG) was a concept originated by Nathan Rabin to refer to Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown for a 2007 review (which I read in the print edition of the AV Club). Since then, the term has caught on fire, but I’ll rely on TVTropes.org to do the explaining for those who haven’t heard of it:

Have no fear, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is here to give new meaning to the male hero’s life! She’s stunningly attractive, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies (generally including childlike playfulness and a tendency towards petty crime), often with a touch of wild hair dye. She’s inexplicably obsessed with our stuffed-shirt hero, on whom she will focus her kuh-razy antics until he learns to live freely and love madly.

While Rabin eventually abandoned the term, the damage has been done and you will see any character with vaguely Zooey Deschanel-esque traits being hit with the term. You will have to agree, that the term fits pretty well for Oryx – the only traits we definitively know are how hot she is (something Jimmy/Snowman can’t seem to let us forget), her idiosyncratic speech patterns and behaviors, and how she teaches two men, a jaded sex addict and an impossibly aloof scientist, to love.

Since MPDGs are more plot device than human, they lack depth. Although we only really get a look at Oryx’s depths from Jimmy’s flawed narration, it’s clear that she’s been through a lot. Throughout Oryx and Crake, we get hints at a darker backstory for Oryx presented from Jimmy’s perspective – being trafficked from a young age, living in a man’s locked garage. Still, at least outwardly, she seems to act like these hardships have not influenced her, to the point where Jimmy is frustrated with her serene nature: “Where was her rage, how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to bring it up?” (143). Oryx’s behavior compels Jimmy and provokes him, unlike all of these other women he has dated – all of these women tried to change and understand him, while he is trying to change and understand her. However, unlike Jimmy, Oryx never truly displays her emotions, making her seem impossibly calm in the face of some terrible stuff. To the men in her life, and the uninformed reader (look at some frustrated readers and you will see what I’m talking about), this transforms her into a two-dimensional archetype.

Oryx is a character that has lived her whole life learning how to please men, whether it is sexually, financially, or for some general form of companionship. For her, in the context of her relationship with Jimmy, that means obliging him in his beliefs that he’s a savior: “Sometimes he suspected [Oryx] of improvising, just to humour him; sometimes he felt that her entire past – everything she’d told him – was his own invention” (316). This is a moment of lucidity from someone who has otherwise projected a life’s worth of insecurities onto a person. To maintain her relationship with Jimmy, who has spent pretty much his whole life feeling like he’s destined to protect this one woman, she needs to maintain this illusion. Jimmy wants to feel like he’s right about the state of Oryx’s life, that she’s the same person in the porn movies he watched as a child, that she needs to be saved by him. In short, Oryx is trying to be a MPDG – it is this mystery that motivates him to care about her. It’s not sure why Oryx might need Jimmy’s interest – it might be a part of her role as Crake’s employee.

Although as a reader we don’t really get to see it, much of the same goes on with Crake and Oryx – Oryx is shown to have a true admiration of Crake’s scientific genius. However, this could very well be out of this same sense of obligation – when Crake is talking about his hiring process for Oryx, he says: “She was delighted to accept. It was triple the pay she’d been getting, with a lot of perks; but also she said the work intrigued her. I have to say she’s a devoted employee” (310). Although Crake is convinced Oryx is truly fascinated in his work, she is in no position to deny Crake’s request for her to work with him – she is a prostitute in the pleeblands who has spent most of her life in poverty. Crake is a narcissist with confidence in his own skills, so he could easily just be misinterpreting her skills of self-preservation (in how she fulfills his sexual and emotional needs for the sake of a well-paid, comfortable job) as genuine interest. To do so gives Crake some feeling of meaning in his life – he has never felt this sense of affection for another person, and she plays an instrumental role in bringing his evil plans to life. While she might not necessarily be his sole reason for living, she certainly motivates him.

To the reader, Oryx is more than a MPDG – she is someone who’s learned to cope with a world that Jimmy and Crake know nothing about, one where it is essential to be interested in the men in her life and unconditionally support their interests no matter how demented they may be. Neither of these men see that, though – they see a beautiful (yet strange and whimsical) girl, one whose love has some transformative power. Since the novel is presented from the men’s views, Oryx is shown to be an incomprehensible character whose motivations are hazy. Oryx has essentially become a plot device in other men’s lives because it’s easier and more profitable (both in terms of fulfillment and monetarily) than assuming victimhood at the hands of these men. This can be agitating, because as readers we want to see “powerful,” interesting female characters, ones who stand up to the men in their lives when they do disgusting things, but there is power in the way that Oryx has controlled her narrative.