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The Low Art by Margaret Atwood

1) The narrator is now dead and knows things she wished she had known in life, though death came at too high a price for satisfying curiosity. 2) In the afterlife, everyone arrives with a sack containing words they spoke, heard, or that were said about them. The narrator's sack contains many words about her eminent husband and the fool he made of her. 3) The narrator realized after events that many people had laughed at and mocked her behind her back for being so trusting of her deceitful and unfaithful husband. She now plans to tell her own story from her perspective.

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116 views1 page

The Low Art by Margaret Atwood

1) The narrator is now dead and knows things she wished she had known in life, though death came at too high a price for satisfying curiosity. 2) In the afterlife, everyone arrives with a sack containing words they spoke, heard, or that were said about them. The narrator's sack contains many words about her eminent husband and the fool he made of her. 3) The narrator realized after events that many people had laughed at and mocked her behind her back for being so trusting of her deceitful and unfaithful husband. She now plans to tell her own story from her perspective.

Uploaded by

aquela
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Low Art by Margaret Atwood

(An excerpt)

Now that I’m dead I know everything. This is what I wished would happen, but like so many of my wishes it
failed to come true. I know only a few factoids that I didn’t know before. It’s much too high a price to pay for
the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say.
Since being dead — since achieving this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness — I’ve learned some
things I would rather not know, as one does when listening at windows or opening other people’s letters. You
think you’d like to read minds? Think again.

Down here everyone arrives with a sack, like the sacks used to keep the winds in, but each of these sacks is
full of words — words you’ve spoken, words you’ve heard, words that have been said about you. Some sacks
are very small, others large; my own is of a reasonable size, though a lot of the words in it concern my
eminent husband. What a fool he made of me, some say. It was a specialty of his: making fools. He got away
with everything, which was another of his specialties: getting away.

He was always so plausible. Many people have believed that his version of events was the true one, give or
take a few murders, a few beautiful seductresses, a few one-eyed monsters. Even I believed him, from time to
time. I knew he was tricky and a liar, I just didn’t think he would play his tricks and try out his lies on me.
Hadn’t I been faithful? Hadn’t I waited, and waited, and waited, despite the temptation — almost the
compulsion — to do otherwise? And what did I amount to, once the official version gained ground? An edifying
legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-
suffering as I had been? That was the line they took, the singers, the yarn-spinners. Don’t follow my example,
I want to scream in your ears — yes, yours! But when I try to scream, I sound like an owl.

Of course I had inklings, about his slipperiness, his wiliness, his foxiness, his — how can I put this? — his
unscrupulousness, but I turned a blind eye. I kept my mouth shut; or, if I opened it, I sang his praises. I didn’t
contradict, I didn’t ask awkward questions, I didn’t dig deep. I wanted happy endings in those days, and
happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked and going to sleep during the rampages.

But after the main events were over and things had become less legendary, I realized how many people were
laughing at me behind my back — how they were jeering, making jokes about me, jokes both clean and dirty;
how they were turning me into a story, or into several stories, though not the kind of stories I’d prefer to hear
about myself. What can a woman do when scandalous gossip travels the world? If she defends herself she
sounds guilty. So I waited some more.

Now that all the others have run out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making. I owe it to myself. I’ve had
to work myself up to it: it’s a low art, tale-telling. Old women go in for it, strolling beggars, blind singers,
maidservants, children — folks with time on their hands. Once, people would have laughed if I’d tried to play
the minstrel — there’s nothing more preposterous than an aristocrat fumbling around with the arts — but who
cares about public opinion now? The opinion of the people down here: the opinion of shadows, of echoes. So
I’ll spin a thread of my own

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