“Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood ed. by Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo

Abstract

Reviewed by: “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood ed. by Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo Shuli Barzilai Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo, eds., “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020. xiii + 421 pp. The reiterated “It” in the main title of this book is identified in the subtitle: The Bible. Among its varied functions in Atwood’s writings, the Bible may represent a dangerous object, to be kept under lock and key from unauthorized readers. The referents of the reiterated “We” in the book title are such forbidden (mostly female) readers. Thus in Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, rather than regarding the Bible as a sacred text to be communally shared and interpreted, the totalitarian rulers of Gilead recognize its potential to undermine their hegemony. The narrator Offred’s ironic question — “Who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it?” — underscores her subjugation in Gilead as a “handmaid,” a two-legged womb, who is not allowed to read and write, even while designating the insubordinate thoughts that the regime has not succeeded in quelling or eradicating. In contrast to the Bible oppressively interpreted and utilized in Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible encompasses many texts for Atwood. As Rhiannon Graybill and Peter Sabo observe at the outset of their introductory essay, “The work of Margaret Atwood is full of Bibles” (1). Her biblically literate reach extends not only to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament but also to non-canonical texts. Atwood got her hands on it/them, so to speak, from the beginning of her decades- long career. As the contributors to The Bible and Margaret Atwood fully demonstrate, Atwood’s Bibles, including apocalyptic literature, provide a continual source of inspiration, appearing in multiple explicit references and allusions throughout her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Moreover, biblical texts are made to do different types of narrative work and perform wide-ranging functions. Atwood draws upon the Bible for themes, motifs, (in)tangible objects, storylines, subtexts, and more. The essays collected here substantiate the extraordinary frequency and variability of her uses of the Bible. However, despite the critical discussion surrounding Atwood’s works as well as the media attention focused on her public persona, this significant aspect of her literary production has been largely under-examined and neglected to date. The Bible and Margaret Atwood identifies and fills a gap in the existing scholarship. In addition to the editors’ excellent “Introduction” and “Afterword,” the collection contains fifteen essays equally divided among five parts. Each part bears the name of an Atwoodian work or phrase: “Surfacing,” “In Other Worlds,” “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down,” “Scales and Tails,” and “Negotiating with the Dead.” [End Page 173] The three essays presented in Part One, “Surfacing,” exemplify the informative and often innovative analyses presented in this collection. The section opens with Hannah Strømmen’s overview, “‘Always a Potent Object’?: The Shifting Role of the Bible in Margaret Atwood’s Novels,” which persuasively shows that from The Edible Woman (1969) to The Testaments (2019) Atwood’s fiction has reflected a variety of attitudes and approaches to the Bible in the modern world. Along with the secularizing trends that characterize contemporary culture, her novels also present the Bible as a powerful and potent factor on disparate individual, sociopolitical, and ideological levels. Strømmen’s definitive summation is corroborated by many of the essays that follow: “As Atwood’s characters find themselves constrained by different scripts — sexist, classist, nationalist, religious — their fictional lives demonstrate the possibilities of resisting and rewriting these scripts, sometimes through a rewriting of scripture itself” (49). In “Margaret Atwood’s Survival as Prophetic Canadian Nation-Building,” Sara Parks and Anna Cwikla assess Atwood’s impact as an expressly Canadian writer. Her early critical work revealed or even discovered a national literary pattern: an obsession with survival both in the literal sense, given Canada’s vast harsh wilderness, and in the sense of self...