Old Babes in the Wood, “Death by Clamshell” #MARM2025

“I was big on grit,” she says in an interview* where she describes finding old pages of writing from her childhood and teenagehood. She wrote a novel about an ant, still unfinished. And there were musings on the Hungarian Revolution and despair.

“I had an eye for lawn-litter and dog turds on the sidewalk. In these stories it was usually snowing damply, or raining; at the very least there was slush. If it was summer, the heat and humidity were always wiltingly high and my characters had sweat marks under their arms; if it was spring, wet clay stuck to their feet.”

And this is evident, even still, in “Death by Clamshell” which is presented as the words of Hypatia of Alexandria.

“Many in your world have the idea that there has been progress since my day, that people have become more humane, that atrocities were rife back then but have diminished in your era, though I don’t know how anyone who has been paying attention can hold such a view.”

Women were expected to clean-up after clay-soiled feet and zip-up complaints:

“A wife should keep it zipped and do the cleaning up of any messes that might prove troublesome. So on the home front lips were pressed together, topics were avoided. “Did you hear about the murder of our respected and beloved wise woman, astronomer, philosopher, jewel of Alexandria, and adviser to the Prefect? This sentence was not spoken.”

MARM 2025 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Death by Clamshell” (November 4)
The Blind Assassin Parts I-IV (November 6)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Freeforall” (November 11)
The Blind Assassin Parts V-VI (November 13)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 86^th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Metepsychosis” (November 18)
The Blind Assassin Parts VII-IX (November 20)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Airborne: A Symposium” (November 25)
The Blind Assassin Parts X-XV (November 27)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

But there is a streak of humour throughout, too. This bit startled me into laughter:

“Aphrodite was said to have been born from a bivalve of some kind. Two shells that open, revealing a pulpy, salty, but tasty interior. Make what you wish of that.”

Early in her career, back when her poetry collections outnumbered her novels, Graeme Gibson** (in 1972—two years after they’d met, a year before they’d move in together, following Atwood’s divorce from James Polk) asked about the particular problems confronting women writers.

Writing is viewed as a “really male thing to be doing” she replies. “And if you’re a woman doing it, that really threatens” considering [male writers] have “gone to all this trouble to tell anybody who sort of scorns their activity that what they’re doing is really very hairy-chested.”

A little less so in Canada, she says, than America. “What you get instead is the other side of the coin. If people can’t say you have a water-color feminine sensibility, they’ll say something like she thinks like a man. […] They feel that they have to make you an honorary male if they’re going to say you’re good.”

Gibson asks how women’s responses differ. “Back in the days when you were supposed to pay attention to the diapers and the washing of dishes (note, more grit!), I was a threat to other women’s life positions. Now [with “Women’s Lib”] I get made into a kind of hero, which is just as unreal. It makes me just as uncomfortable. It’s turning me from what I am as a writer into something I’m not.”

All these years later, imagined-Hypatia tells her own side of the story, with a particularly acute and astute final statement that directly confronts cultural assumptions about women which continue to shape opportunities and restrict freedoms around the globe.

*Janet Sternberg The Writer on Her work, Volume II (1991)
**Graeme Gibson Eleven Canadian Novelists (1973)