Considerations in the Short: What Is Margaret Atwood’s Genius?
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/26
It’s the rolling tumbleweed wisdom of long-time Canadians lucky enough to see their 70s and beyond.
It’s the wisdom of every old woman who I grew up with; it’s the woman who would be quoted as saying, “A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.”
It’s the genius of the woman when asked, obtusely, if men like her, replies, which men and to ask them.
Life is harder for women, particularly for women who bear children. As the bearing is not only gestation and birth, but bearing the weight of childcare, every human being, now at least, came to the world through a woman.
Most human beings came to the world on a paved road of care built by a woman with much of the road construction materials provided by men and women. Generally, though, the architecture of early care is made a woman’s responsibility. It’s 24/7 — conservative and liberal commentators agree on this.
Given this experiential burden, wisdom emerges. This is the woman’s wisdom H.L. Mencken defended, in spite of his sexist attitudes at times. He defended the truth of the superiority of women won in experience. A wisdom few men can match throughout life and to the end, if the man lives as long as the woman at all.
Margaret Atwood’s genius lies in this wisdom born by experience and the transference of experience in the honest perusal of the historical record. Atwood understands. She sees patterns and integrates them for larger patterns. Let’s call this patternizing.
The degree of this is apparent in the resonance with so many women worldwide aware of this Canadian’s works. Atwood, certainly, is in her final chapter of her life barring some medical miracle for humanity in life extension.
Atwood’s genius is perspective, or rather perspectives. Writers know this sense of patternizing of the minds of others. The ‘bad feminist’ is not, and not in the for or against categories.
She is in the humanist category of understanding the world around her, projecting this in learned fantasy to readers, and letting them decide on the world wanted by them.
Just words, her words after words after words are her power. The choice is ours and she is a historical conduit: the “Antiquated Scribbler.”
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 