Book Review : Hatching Family Histories and Fears of the Holocaust

Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories by Margaret Atwood (Houghton Mifflin: $16.95)

The first story in this remarkable collection is “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother.” What dear moments, and what a sweet mother. Here are her little tales--of taking her children to a tea party, only to have her baby daughter take one cookie and talk to it, while her rambunctious son wolfs down the entire contents of the rest of the platter. Or tales of earlier times, when mother-the-girl sang round songs with her other girlfriends, or put on amateur theatricals in the church basement. Or moments when the horses ran away, when the hay wagon almost tipped over. Even stories--later--of girls gone wrong; of “romantic betrayals, unwanted pregnancies, illnesses of various horrible kinds, marital infidelities, mental breakdowns, tragic suicides, unpleasant lingering deaths.”

And yet, when the child-narrator here grows up, she has the feeling that her own mother has become afraid of her: “At any time I might open my mouth and out would come a language she had never heard before. I had become a visitant from outer space, a time-traveler come back from the future, bearing news of a great disaster.” This daughter-narrator spins tales of quite a different density.

In “The Salt Garden,” for instance, this is how she continues the mother-daughter scene: A mother of today’s time, trying to remember domestic tricks which made past times so cozy and lovely as it was lived within walls, tries to construct a “salt garden” for her little daughter--some unassuming chemical legerdemain that involves dissolving salt in boiling water and letting it crystallize again in lovely patterns. Suddenly “. . . there is a sudden white flash, and the kitchen is blotted out with light. Her hand goes blank, then appears before her again, black, like an after-image on the retina. The outline of the window remains, framing her hand, which is still suspended above the glass. Then the window itself crumples inward, in fragments, like the candy-crystal of a shatterproof windshield. The wall will be next, curving in towards her like the side of an inflating balloon. In an instant Alma will realize that the enormous sound has come and gone and burst her eardrums so that she is deaf, and then a wind will blow her away.”

News of Disaster

This then, is the news of the great disaster. Runaway hay wagons, marital infidelity, even slow unpleasant deaths have, in the space of a generation, been rendered obsolete.

If a young woman now were to have visions, for instance, Our Lady of Lourdes would not show up on the retinal screen; Our Lady of Fatima would be on indefinite sabbatical. Now it’s the upcoming Holocaust, in blinding black-and-white, and Alma, young mother and lost soul enduring these visions, is so inured to them that she’s able to organize a breaking marriage, a “torrid” affair, and even find time to shop for her daughter and make salt gardens for her amusement.

The already exhausted reader may agree (peevishly), but also think, what’s new about any of this? We already know that the world changed forever in August of 1945, that all human stories became obsolete, and maybe humans along with them. We already know that if the planet’s life may not perish in the sudden death of nuclear holocaust, it may very well erode by way of acid rain, the death of certain species, the death of the wilderness. (The narrator’s own parents are here lovingly presented as birdlike, frail, watchful, endangered.) But the answers posed to these 41-year-old questions are fresh and new.

Given the fact that the world may be coming to an end, may, in a sense, have already come to an end, how do we behave? And given the possibility that this deplorable state of affairs may be a product of the male-dominant culture, how do women, in particular, behave? Is there any way women can change things? Failing that, have there been ways that women have brought this god-awful set of events, this “news of a great disaster” on themselves, just as much as the idiot-savants in their atomic laboratories?

The title story, “Bluebeard’s Egg,” gives us the main clue here. Bluebeard’s main character is Sally, “contented” third wife to a successful heart surgeon. Yes, he’s a heart man, but what does that mean? Is he a heart mechanic, concerned only with valves and circulation; is he a Don Juan, a romance-champion, or is he the dummy, the dim-brain his wife proclaims him to be? (Pause to remember the zillions of wives in the Western world who have sworn off trying to understand their husbands or communicate with them, on the grounds that they’re just too relentlessly stupid.)

University Extension Course

In traditional domestic tradition, Sally takes a university extension course in narrative strategy. (But she doesn’t want her husband to “get the idea there was anything in her life that was even remotely as important as he was.”) The class is assigned “Bluebeard” as its theme, and told to look for the “point of view.” This is hard to paraphrase, but after some hard knocks (listed almost verbatim from Katherine Mansfield’s classic story, “Bliss”), Sally finally gets it. It’s the egg in the story that must have known everything all along, the cold, passive, don’t-blame-me egg: “This is something the story left out, Sally thinks: the egg is alive, and one day it will hatch. But what will come out of it?”

These stories, despite their bleak content, are filled with a combination of love, curiosity, speculation. In the last tale here, again about the narrator’s parents and their strangeness, their rural life style, their devotion to the earth, the storyteller remarks that her father knows the Earth is doomed. But her mother--athletic, fearless, curious, gallant--wants to live for a hundred years, to stay around and find out; to see, in a sense, which comes first, that planetary death we’ve heard so much about, or Bluebeard’s egg, finally hatching.