Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [96]
Trevor warbled out of the kitchenette, bearing a tray with crystal sherry glasses. “Thank you, this is very nice,” Marian said politely as he dispensed hers. “What a beautiful glass!”
“Yes, isn’t it elegant? It’s been in the family for years. There’s so little elegance left,” he said, gazing at her right ear as though he could see inside it a vista of an immemorially ancient but fast-vanishing history. “Especially in this country. I think we all ought to do our bit to preserve some of it, don’t you?”
With the arrival of the sherry Fish had put down his pen. He was now staring fixedly at Marian, not at her face but at her abdomen, somewhere in the vicinity of the navel. She found it disconcerting, and said, to distract him, “Duncan tells me you’ve been doing some work on Beatrix Potter. That sounds exciting.”
“Huh? Oh yeah. I was contemplating it, but I’ve got into Lewis Carroll, that’s really more profound. The nineteenth century is very hot property these days, you know.” He threw his head back against the chair and closed his eyes; his words rose in a monotonously intoned chant through the black thicket of his beard. “Of course everybody knows Alice is a sexual-identity-crisis book, that’s old stuff, it’s been around for a long time, I’d like to go into it a little deeper though. What we have here, if you only look at it closely, this is the little girl descending into the very suggestive rabbit burrow, becoming as it were pre-natal, trying to find her role,” he licked his lips, “her role as a Woman. Yes, well that’s clear enough. These patterns emerge. Patterns emerge. One sexual role after another is presented to her but she seems unable to accept any of them, I mean she’s really blocked. She rejects Maternity when the baby she’s been nursing turns into a pig, nor does she respond positively to the dominating-female role of the Queen and her castration cries of ‘Off with his head!’ And when the Duchess makes a cleverly concealed lesbian pass at her, sometimes you wonder how conscious old Lewis was, anyway she’s neither aware nor interested; and right after that you’ll recall she goes to talk with the Mock Turtle, enclosed in his shell and his self-pity, a definitely pre-adolescent character; then there are those most suggestive scenes, most suggestive, the one where her neck becomes elongated and she is accused of being a serpent, hostile to eggs, you’ll remember, a rather destructively phallic identity she indignantly rejects; and her negative reaction to the dictatorial Caterpillar, just six inches high, importantly perched on the all-too-female mushroom which is perfectly round but which has the power to make you either smaller or larger than normal, I find that particularly interesting. And of course there’s the obsession with time, clearly a cyclical rather than a linear obsession. So anyway she makes a lot of attempts but she refuses to commit herself, you can’t say that by the end of the book she has reached anything that can be definitely called maturity. She does much better though in Through the Looking Glass, where, as you’ll remember …”
There was a smothered but audible snicker. Marian jumped. Duncan must have been standing in the doorway: she hadn’t noticed him come in.
Fish opened his eyes, blinked, and frowned at Duncan, but before he could make any comment Trevor bustled into the room.
“Has he been going on about those horrid symbols and things again? I don’t approve of that kind of criticism myself, I think style’s so much more important, and Fischer gets much too Viennese, especially when he drinks. He’s very wicked. Besides, he’s so out of date,” he said cattily. “The very latest approach to Alice