Similarities in the Works of Atwood and Wilson

Upon first consideration, the works of Margaret Atwood and August Wilson may not appear to share much in common. Beyond the distinction in genres, Atwood’s works are often dominated by the exploration of sexism while Wilson’s works seem suffused with the examination of racism. Through social commentary, both authors are exploring the influence, past, and, in the case of Atwood, possible future outcomes of their respective motivating social force. Themes and motifs in Wilson’s plays Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Gem of the Ocean and Atwood’s Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Door, and The Tent are not, however, exclusive to the individual author. Among other shared themes, Wilson’s works also scrutinize the role of women in society, while Atwood’s works recognize, to a lesser extent, the affect of racism on societal tension. This sharing of themes and motifs make the authors an excellent pairing for comparison in a journal article or literature course.

Atwood often takes her societal portrayals to the extreme due to the dystopian and worst case scenario nature of her plots. Wilson’s societal portrayals are much more realistic, constrained as he is by placing his plays in a specific past time period. Atwood nearly bridges this gap with the realistic setting of Surfacing, however the gloomy, often cynical, plot and ambiguous ending can overshadow any similarity the text shares with Wilson’s period plays. The tone and mood of Surfacing forces the reader to draw more connections with The Handmaid’s Tale and her flash fiction pieces like “Winter’s Tale” and “Salome was a Dancer” and her poem “Your Children Cut Their Hands…” than with Wilson’s heart wrenching but cautiously optimistic plays. The works do share themes, however, like the necessary struggle to overcome adversity, the affect of unbalanced and stereotypical gender roles on society, the cause(s) and outcome(s) of alienating an individual or group from society, and using the spiritual, supernatural, or metaphysical to prompt character transformation.

A similar quality in both authors’ works is a demoralized or overtly struggling main character, often surrounded by struggling secondary characters as well. In most of the texts, the characters’ struggles are the obvious affect of their place and role in society. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a radical example of societal restrictions due to totalitarian rule, Offred struggles for a voice, independence, basic rights, the “freedom to” rather than the “freedom from” (24). Because she is a woman, she is offered the role of six possible positions: Aunt, Wife, Econowife, Martha, Handmaid, or Unwoman Colonist. Her choice, however, is severely limited by the Puritan-like belief system. Because she married a man who had previously been divorced and because she could bear children, all of her options were reduced to Handmaid or Colonist, which really isn’t much of a choice if she at all valued her life and future (10, 224). As Rosemary Sullivan notes in her article “What If? Writing The Handmaid’s Tale”—which explores probable personal and societal influences that lead to Atwood’s creation of the dystopia—the female roles defined by the ability to have children, or lack thereof, stemmed from the fears of approaching mass infertility during the 1980s (850). Any infertile society that valued children would naturally reduce women’s rights, opportunities, and freedoms to find a viable solution.

The narrator of Surfacing has more economic means available than the characters in other works do, since her parents could afford to buy an isolated cabin and send her to college, and seems less trapped by her position in society (30, 49). She is held back throughout most of the novel, however, by her fragmented existence—her inability to acknowledge her past abortion and its repercussions to her life—and her, as of yet, unfound power. Her past lover, the father of her aborted child, is also able to manipulate her view of gender roles in their society. He is able to convince her that women are unimportant, particularly in the fields of Art and Art History, latter affecting her choice of jobs and leaving her an unhappy illustrator and commercial artist: “For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he said I should study something I’d be able to use because there has never been any important women artists…but he was right, there never have been any” (49). As Carol P. Christ contends in “Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women‘s Spiritual Quest and Vision,” it is not until she reclaims the power of her female biological role, in the act of conceiving a child, that the narrator is fully able to acknowledge her “psychic suicide” during the first part of the novel and begin the process of reversing her gender-imposed alienation from society (330).

The Door and The Tent also deal with societal alienation through the main characters and speaker, though in much smaller doses. The most memorable societal struggle in The Door is the disenfranchised poet lamenting, at times, both the normalizing success of poets and their occasional dismissal. In “Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later,” the speaker acknowledges that poets have been tolerated, celebrated, but mostly ignored, “by this crowd that has finally admitted / to itself it doesn’t give / much of a fart for art, / and would rather see a good evisceration / any day” (Door 30). Paradoxically, shortly after the speaker complains about the tastes of audience, the speaker complains that the worst is becoming respectable, anthologized, taught in schools, “with cleaned-up biographies and skewed photos” (33). The speaker is not happy with the condition of the poet in either situation, marginalized or normalized by society. The Tent has many such examples of characters being alienated by their society, like the narrator of “Voice.” The flash fiction piece necessitates a focus on the narrator and little mention of the society she is being alienated from, but still readers can infer values exhibited by the society: an appreciation of beauty, a preference for specialization, a marginalizing of the person in preference for what he or she can do: “Soon I was sought after, or rather my voice was. We went everywhere together…My voice was courted. Bouquets were thrown to it. Money was bestowed on it. Men fell on their knees before it“ (Tent 21-22).

In all three of Wilson’s plays, the main characters negotiate the stress of being considered and treated like second class citizens because of their race and past roots in slavery, financial and career limitations, and isolation from the dominant society. Troy does manage to overcome the odds of his position in society somewhat in Fences, becoming “the first colored driver” in the rubbish business (45). Still, arguing over financial issues pushed him to seek an extramarital affair: “She gives me a different idea . . .a different understanding about myself. I can step out of this house and get away from the pressures and problems . . .be a different man. I ain’t got to wonder how I’m gonna pay the bills or get the roof fixed” (68-69). Race and financial issues motivate the strife between brother and sister in The Piano Lesson. The existence of the highly desired piano is owed to slavery, the division of families, and depriving human beings of their rights. Both siblings view using the piano differently as a way to honor their ancestors and Boy Charles: Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to the buy land his family worked as slaves, while Berniece seeks to honor their deceased by keeping the piano as a symbol of their roots and, perhaps, as a cautionary tale (50-52). Gem of the Ocean examines the continually changing societal values of the black community, specifically the demise and loss of its spiritual center, which is represented by Aunt Ester. As Richard Noggle observes in “‘…if you live long enough the boat / will turn around’ The Birth and Death of Community in Three Plays by August Wilson,” the “ultimate failure of community in Wilson’s world is more often due to failings within the community itself: an inability to come together, to discover power from within, to respect life” (64). This is demonstrated by Caesar turning his back on the black community in the pursuit of money and the “white policing” power.



Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Door. New York: Random House, 2009.

---.The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Random House, 1998.

---. Surfacing. New York: Random House, 1998.

---. The Tent. New York: Random House, 2007.

Christ, Carol P. “Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and
Vision.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2.2 (1976): 316-330.

Noggle, Richard. "‘…if you live long enough the boat will turn around’: The Birth and
Death of Community in Three Plays by August Wilson." College Literature 36.2 (2009): 58-73.

Sullivan, Rosemary. “What If? Writing The Handmaid’s Tale.” University of Toronto
Quarterly 75.3 (2006): 850-856.

Wilson, August. Fences. New York: Penguin, 2009.

---. Gem of the Ocean. New York: Penguin 2006.

---. The Piano Lesson. New York: Penguin, 2009.