Ustopian Breakfasts:: Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam

Author(s): Shelley Boyd

Source: Utopian Studies , Vol. 26, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: UTOPIA AND FOOD (2015), pp. 160-
181
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.26.1.0160

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 Ustopian Breakfasts: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam

Shelley Boyd

abstract
In the third novel of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, breakfast creates a
sense of hope and adaptability in the most dire of dystopias. In this p­ ostpandemic
world where civilization is all but destroyed, the human survivors, who form a
makeshift community with the Crakers, initially cling to reverse-utopian break-
fasts: nostalgic replications of past meals that offer solace but have no l­ong-term
future because the material circumstances of their existence have ceased.
Eventually recognizing that storytelling and food are powerful, interrelated tools
for humanity’s future reproduction, this tenuous community survives precisely
because they imagine and reimagine themselves and their modes of consumption.
In this way, MaddAddam offers a humble sense of hope through ever-changing
breakfast foods that serve as both the physical means and symbol of humanity’s
imaginative reconstitution into the future.

keywords: Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam, breakfast, storytelling, ­reproduction,

egg symbolism, overconsumption, ustopia, hope

Utopian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2015

Copyright © 2015. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

Breakfast has long been known as the most important meal of the day, and for
Canadian author Margaret Atwood, it happens to be her favorite. She once
described this meal as “the most hopeful . . ., since we don’t yet know what
atrocities the day may choose to visit upon us.”1 In light of this daily serving of
optimism, breakfast’s recurring presence in MaddAddam (2013), the final novel
of Atwood’s dystopian trilogy, appears both unusual and necessary. Having the
most hopeful (or utopian) meal repeatedly frame this account of civilization’s
destruction is in keeping with Atwood’s theory that utopias and dystopias are
not opposites but, rather, co-related. Combining models of “good” and “bad”
societies to coin her term ustopia, Atwood suggests that if you “scratch the sur-
face . . . you see . . . within each utopia, a concealed ­dystopia; within each dys-
topia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the
bad guys took over.”2 Atwood’s trilogy plays with this duality in a number of
ways. The first novel, Oryx and Crake (2003), presents a dystopian world of envi-
ronmental exploitation and excessive consumerism, where science is pursued
for financial gain and power. The scientist Crake bioengineers a pandemic, to
destroy the human race, and a replacement species, the Crakers, resulting in a
posthuman hell for the seeming sole survivor, Jimmy.3 The second novel, The Year
of the Flood (2009), which is a “simultaneal” to the first, depicts the eco-religious
cult the God’s ­Gardeners, who opt for a cultural solution, as opposed to Crake’s
genetic fix, to the world’s ecological crisis.4 In this “utopia embedded within a
dystopia,” the God’s Gardeners preach a green lifestyle and system of beliefs
that contrast with the wasteful societies of the elite Compounds and lower-class
Pleeblands central to Oryx and Crake.5 In the third novel, Atwood’s ustopian nar-
rative gathers the surviving characters—humans and Crakers—from the pre-
vious ­dystopian/utopian novels to form their own makeshift community of
sustenance and care. The humans look to each other and to the Crakers for
food ideas, companionship, and protection, just as the Crakers tend to an injured
Jimmy and seek daily stories from Toby during his convalescence. Advancing
the narrative, ­MaddAddam begins at “zero hour,” the moment to which Jimmy
­originally referred both at the beginning of his novel, when he looks at his bro-
ken watch, and at the end of his novel, when he decides to approach a group of
humans on the beach: the clock reset, but not on human time.
This final installment of the trilogy marks, then, both endings and
beginnings, with breakfast, that “most hopeful” and forward-looking meal,
­appearing repeatedly, albeit not in its usual form and often with a dwindling
menu. A culinary remnant from the human past, breakfast in MaddAddam

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

symbolizes Atwood’s guarded optimism, her sober offering of near-future

worlds (and meals) not unlike our own. Despite the environmental depreda-
tions that humanity has wrought, this new society, while initially resistant to
change, eventually strives to better its circumstances for future generations.
The fictional morning repasts—both the food and the framing narratives—
are a sign, therefore, of the characters’ hope and adaptability persisting in
the most dire of dystopias. These improvised and dynamic meals, like the
dark future of Atwood’s narrative, may not always be appetizing, but they are
essential if humanity is going to greet a new day, prepared and fueled for the
challenges to come. In other words, the MaddAddam breakfast scenes reveal
how this tenuous community survives precisely because they imagine and
reimagine themselves into the future, with food serving as both the physical
means and symbol of their reproduction and sustainability.

Beginnings and Stories Served with Breakfast

Atwood has long recognized and played with breakfast’s invariability, as

she once described life, itself, as “a kind of eternal breakfast” with its rou-
tine serving of daily expectations.6 In her fiction, literal breakfasts and their
larger figurative counterparts (the unfolding life stories of the main charac-
ters) work in tandem as Atwood typically showcases anomalous meals that
bring conflict, change, and the future sharply into focus. In The Edible Woman
(1969), Atwood’s first published novel, chapter 1 opens with the protagonist’s
morning egg having to be skipped and replaced with a bowl of cold cereal.
As Nathalie Cooke reveals, the breakfast scene, hurried and unsatisfying, pre-
pares the reader for this anxiety-ridden story where the future seems forebod-
ing and off-course. Readers must “start to search for clues about what might
have gone wrong,” and eggs (as well as other foods) become symbolic of this
difficult process of maturation as the character Marian McAlpin systemati-
cally loses her appetite.7 Eventually an entire breakfast menu is excluded from
Marian’s regimen; only after she exerts her will and takes control of her life
do her appetite and hope for her future resume.
When it comes to Atwood’s dystopian novels, this same attentiveness to
measured optimism and transformation aligns with the utopian tradition and
humanity’s unending enterprise of “social dreaming.”8 According to Lyman
Tower Sargent, healthy utopias acknowledge that “change is possible, even

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

expected, just not radical change,” while dystopias “tell us it is not too late to
change.”9 This drive to imagine a future and what is possible is the reason why
Cosimo Quarta has termed the human race Homo utopicus: a species “which
has hope as its moving force and the future as its ever-moving horizon, prom-
ising the better.”10 Particularly relevant to Atwood’s MaddAddam—where tra-
ditional breakfast foods, including those ever-symbolic eggs of growth and
new beginnings, are difficult to come by—is Quarta’s linking of humankind’s
evolution to a changing food supply. Long ago, the search for alternative food
sources during times of scarcity meant the development of an intellectual
capacity for perceiving “new possibilities.”11 For Joseph Carroll, a proponent
of literary Darwinism, this adaptive flexibility is directly related to the fact
that humans are a “story-telling species”: humans “generat[e] plans based on
mental representations, . . . engag[e] in collective enterprises requiring shared
mental representations, and produc[e] novel solutions.”12 In MaddAddam, the
hungry survivors dream of dietary innovations when they discuss raiding sea-
birds’ nests atop derelict office towers. Their imaginations propel them into
future scenarios as they weigh the risks and benefits of such an egg-seeking
venture. In other words, readers witness the Homo utopicus impulse at work—
the same desire that drives Atwood to experiment with future worlds: “The
Utopian-Dystopian form is a way of trying things out on paper first to see
whether or not we might like them, should we ever have the chance to put
them into actual practice.”13
In MaddAddam, then, food and storytelling (the literal breakfast and the
account of life’s “eternal breakfast”) operate as future-oriented practices.
Together, they enable society, since new edible materials, if procured, turn
mental projections into realities. Examining power as exercised through the
body, Mervyn Nicholson concurs that while “sex is the means of species-
reproduction . . . eating is the means of self-reproduction. . . . . To exist is an
activity of daily transformation; one continually forms and transforms one-
self, and the material means by which one performs this act of self-creation
is food.”14 A lack of dietary staples, a change in food preferences, or a shift
in social values and food taboos means that the process of eating is rarely
straightforward. The fact that the survivors in MaddAddam never consume
eggs and decide against their risky quest “for the sake of a few gull eggs,
which are likely green and taste like fish guts anyway,” suggests that they
are struggling with the material limitations of a postpandemic world as well
as the imaginative hurdles involved in creating a new beginning.15 Curiously,

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

the “pro-eggers” of the group counter the majority’s objections with the
claim, “An egg is an egg”—suggesting that perceptions and creative fortitude
are powerful tools when it comes to a society’s survival and betterment.16
As Etta Madden and Martha Finch argue in their analysis of utopian food-
ways, when it comes to a community’s vision, food is a persuasive, everyday
means of “reshap[ing] . . . practices according to personal tastes and desires”
because “even members at the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy are agents
of change, altering communal identity.”17 Food communicates and initiates
transformation; however, this reproductive process is contingent upon a
group’s ongoing narratives of what constitutes nourishment and sustainable
cultural practices.

Breakfasts of the Future: Fantasies and Nightmares

When imagining the future, Atwood admits that she “like[s] to wonder what
people would have for breakfast. . . . Breakfast can take you quite far.”18 Food in
her dystopian fiction is especially revelatory in that processes of transforma-
tion are often curtailed because existing social hierarchies demand replication
to maintain the status quo. Atwood defines power politics as “who is entitled
to do what to whom with impunity; who profits by it; and who therefore
eats what,” which means that breakfast frames her dystopian novels in sym-
bolic ways, signaling fixed, dark circumstances, as well as impetuses for social
change.19 In The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood’s first speculative novel, the
main character, Offred, partakes in repetitious, solitary breakfasts that reflect
her marginal status in the dystopian society of Gilead and her singular role as
the fertile womb within the Commander’s home: “Another plate with an egg-
cup on it, the kind that looks like a woman’s torso, in a skirt. Under the skirt
is the second egg, being kept warm.”20 The controlled reproduction of both
the self (through regimented daily sustenance) and the repressive society
(through enforced procreation and exploitation of the handmaid’s ovum) is
conveyed through the meal. The two eggs, Glen Deer argues, remind Offred
of her situation: a handmaid “literally gives birth—lays her egg—while seated
in a special ‘birthing stool,’ a chair that allows the Commander’s wife to sit
behind and above the surrogate mother.”21 According to Atwood’s theory of
ustopia, an “us” versus “them” mentality, so clearly exhibited by Gilead’s elite,
inevitably leads to oppression since some “people . . . just don’t or won’t fit

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

into [a] grand scheme.”22 As critics note, Gilead depends upon the women’s
sexual and symbolic cannibalization, a process that the Commander describes
through a destructive/productive image of breakfast food: “‘You can’t make
an omelet without breaking eggs.’ . . . Thus the women become for him the
eggs which are broken and consumed to create a better life for the patriarchal
ruling class.”23 Although Offred’s breakfasts are unvarying, occasional disrup-
tions offer alternative starts to the day and, therefore, small signs of hope
within the otherwise totalitarian regime.24
Reminiscent of Gilead’s maintenance of established hierarchies, the
dystopian world of MaddAddam initially includes morning meals character-
ized by replication and a resistance to change. The human characters enact
their former status as top consumers in a world of abundance, even though
they find themselves struggling to survive in a postapocalyptic world of scar-
city. Of the half-dozen breakfasts featured in MaddAddam, early renditions
appear as dreams, memories, or poor copies of a former civilization’s scripted
menus: those twenty-first-century iconic North American plates of eggs,
bacon, and toast with coffee. Of course, this traditional fare appears earlier in
Oryx and Crake when a half-starved Jimmy dreams about a leisurely seduction
over breakfast: “‘Bring home the bacon,’ he says. He can almost smell it, that
bacon, frying in a pan, with an egg, to be served up with toast and a cup of
coffee. . . . Cream with that? whispers a woman’s voice. Some naughty, name-
less waitress, out of a white-aprons-and-feather-dusters porno farce. He finds
himself salivating.”25 In MaddAddam, Toby’s present-day narrative alterna-
tively begins with an innocent dream of childhood in the chapter “Morning”:
“From the kitchen comes the sound of her mother’s voice, calling; her father,
answering; the smell of eggs frying.”26 Both characters’ reveries play with
connections between food and reproduction—offering “eternal breakfasts”
of hope for the continuation of life, even though their present scenarios seem
finite. His girlfriend, Oryx, having been murdered by Crake, Jimmy appears
the sole human survivor—a “leftover” without a mate whom Chung-Hao
Ku reads as monstrous because of his “genetic immobility.”27 As for Toby,
having lost her parents and then her fertility because of an egg-harvesting-
for-pay procedure, she (like Jimmy) cannot have a family of her own. Their
breakfast fantasies belong to the past, and as Toby awakens, her idyllic dream
descends into an apocalyptic nightmare with everything going up in flames.
She recalls the words of Adam One: “The fate of Sodom is fast approaching.
Suppress regret. Avoid the pillar of salt. Don’t look back.”28 The biblical tale

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

of Lot’s wife nostalgically peering at her lost home frames Toby’s mornings
at the cobb house (a shelter made of clay, sand, and straw that is located at
the edge of Heritage Park, where the humans and Crakers have gathered), as
the group continually mimics breakfasts of old. There are, however, visible
gaps in the routine. On her first morning, Toby stands up from bed, chooses
a bedsheet for her toga-like attire, and then has little to do: no shower, no
­mirror, no toothbrush. She lacks the material items to perform the practice
of getting up to greet the day before she heads out for breakfast.
With civilization destroyed, the notion that breakfast will simply con-
tinue as it always has is an illusion that is neither sustaining nor sustainable.
Nevertheless, the initial cobb-house mornings feature reverse-utopian break-
fasts: nostalgic replications of past meals that provide temporary solace but
have no long-term future because the material, technological circumstances
of their existence have ceased. Readers witness breakfast scenes composed
of gleaned leftovers (mismatched tableware and scavenged food products,
including a single box of Choco-Nutrinos cereal) as well as edible substitutes
for popular menu items that situate this meal of Atwood’s near-future in a
backward-looking light. Rebecca, the former chef from the God’s Gardeners
who was praised by Adam One for her ingenious recipes, is in charge of cook-
ing. Hot coffee is always on offer, but in reality it is “what they’ve all agreed
to call coffee,” since the beverage no longer exists.29 Rebecca hopes that the
caffeine-free concoction made out of “burnt twigs and roots and crap” will
have a “placebo effect,” as long as its drinkers ignore the taste and texture.30
Each morning, the residents maintain a fiction when they request this iconic
beverage and consume their fry-up.
While this “coffee” offers temporary comfort, other more disturbing
fictions pervade the meal. Rebecca’s menus consistently include protein,
or “ham again,” a staple that is really pigoon, a genetically engineered
pig that was crossed with human DNA to farm replacement organs for
humans.31 On Toby’s first morning, this former God’s Gardener who
took the “Vegivows” is greeted with “pig in three forms: bacon, ham, and
chops. . . . Burdock root, Dandelion greens. Dog ribs on the side.”32 This
radical break from v­ egetarian cuisine is explained by the fact that Rebecca
cooks with what is readily available. At the conclusion of The Year of the
Flood, when Toby first arrives at the cobb house, Rebecca welcomes her
longtime friend with a serving of cold pork and declares, “Needs must
when the devil drives. . . . Anyways, at least we know what’s in it—not

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

like at SecretBurgers.”33 In the more extended s­urvey of breakfasts in

MaddAddam, however, something other than necessity seems to be taking
place, as Atwood uses breakfast to address humanity’s proclivity not only
for hope but also for creature comforts procured at great environmental
and ethical expense.
The multiple “ham” dishes (which are really pigoon) create a ­problematic
illusion of past abundance on a number of levels. First, eating pigoon meat
is a transgression of dietary taboos from the Compounds featured in Oryx
and Crake, since, as Ku explains, “the relationship between humans and other
species has always been one of binary opposition and hierarchy,” and the
­consumption of pigoons not only challenges this status but seems “horri-
bly cannibalistic.”34 Second, referring to pigoon meat as “ham” reverts to a
time when pigoons neither existed nor posed a threat to the breakfast menu
and human subject. Although this collective delusion offers reassurance to
cobb-house residents by mimicking the past circumstances of top consum-
ers, this reverse-utopian foodway is at their expense in much the same way
that Gilead’s symbolic cannibalization of its own (its handmaids) is ulti-
mately destructive to that society’s future well-being.35 Exploring similar
kinds of monstrous selfishness at work in Oryx and Crake, Danette DiMarco
­contends that Atwood often turns to motifs and myths of cannibalism in
order to expose “western culture’s unhealthy and systemic commitment to
over-consumption.”36 In MaddAddam, the “ham” dishes point to the survi-
vors’ misdirected hope for continuity and familiarity despite human-wrought
ecological devastation. This disturbing ustopian foodway ironically captures
what Quarta describes as the quandary that often lies at the heart of utopian
projects: the desire to meet the “concrete needs of a particular society, even
if these needs are not immediately realisable due to the unreadiness of the
times.”37 Unfortunately, as former members of and witnesses to a civilization
destroyed by its own overconsumption, the cobb-house residents have chosen
to emulate practices that will only lead to entropy and decline.

Dwindling Menus, Waning Hope

Breakfast, as the cobb-house residents remember it, can only be maintained

as long as both their material world and cultural views permit it, and there are
signs that past traditions are breaking down. When Toby arrives at the table

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

for her first morning, she recalls one of Adam One’s litanies about how after
the waterless flood, tree roots would destroy urban infrastructure including
electricity generators, to which Zeb had added at the time, “Then you can
kiss your morning toast goodbye.”38 The remembered exchange connects
to Oryx and Crake when Jimmy-as-Snowman uses the “arcane metaphor” of
“toast” to warn the Crakers against the consequences of asking too many
questions.39 Just as Jimmy realizes that he is the one who is “toast” because of
his ties to an obsolete technological civilization, Toby confronts a breakfast
world that is literally disappearing. The only toast-like substance to appear
in ­MaddAddam—“a slice of toasted sawdust”—is recounted in Zeb’s story of
working in the north prior to the BlyssPluss pandemic.40 Back then, a­ uthentic
breakfast foods were expensive and scarce because of an overpopulated
world, and Zeb’s story foreshadows the fact that the meal has been nearing
the end of its life-span for some time because its very existence is contingent
on a world of abundance defined solely in human and industrial terms.
Ironically, the nostalgic perspectives of some cobb-house residents lead
to misperceptions of the expired past as a time of easy sustenance, whereas
the future represents hunger and decay. In Rebecca’s mind, food has a ter-
minal future, as she refers to their morning gathering as the “Last-chance
café.”41 The limitations of this backward mode of thinking become especially
apparent when Rebecca requests that someone glean replacement baking
powder and soda from a mini-supermarket. Her entreaty is cut short, how-
ever, by Ivory Bill’s observation: “Did you know that baking soda comes from
the trona deposits in Wyoming? . . . Or it used to come from there.”42 The
interruption foregrounds the fact that a food system—designed for consumer
convenience and facilitated by industry, long-distance transportation, and gro-
cery stores—has ceased. The notion that breakfast ingredients come from the
store is not far removed from the beliefs of Zeb’s father’s cult, the Church of
PetrOleum, which preached that “oil . . . put the food on the table” because it
fueled the machinery used in production and delivery.43 In direct contrast, the
God’s Gardeners taught their children that food grows from the earth (not
the supermarket), yet even Rebecca, the former eco-cult’s cook, has a diffi-
cult time extracting her thinking from civilization’s industrial foodways: their
complexity abets almost total consumer dependence. In the long run, the
cobb-house residents’ only choice is to learn to eat local, but even when they
attempt to do so, their approach is not sustainable. When “­ coffee” is in short
supply, Rebecca announces, “We need to dig some dandelions. We’ve used

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

up the ones around here.”44 Residing in one location, this small ­community
overconsumes and fails to produce the surplus that food historians claim is
necessary for breakfast’s existence.
As staples become exhausted, the purpose of breakfast likewise wanes
without a meaningful cultural context for the future. When Toby first
admires the communal table setting of china and crystal, she reflects that
the dishes have become merely things, and Rebecca comments that eventu-
ally their devotion to ceremony will break down: “I can see the day coming
when we’re not gonna be bothered with dishes anymore, we’ll just eat with
our hands.”45 Continuity in mealtime rituals is typically taken for granted, but
Atwood implies that the human survivors will necessarily turn in a new direc-
tion, become part of a different order as their material culture falls away.46
This prediction holds true when the morning meal loses its priming effect for
the day’s activities. While some are up early to tend to their tasks, others drift.
At one point, Toby sees the daytime as “irrelevant” and spies “others slack-
ing off as well. Standing still for no reason, listening though no one’s talking.
Then jerking themselves back to the tangible, visibly making an effort.”47 In a
statement reminiscent of Offred’s private reflections in The Handmaid’s Tale,
Toby admits that she now lives for the night, losing herself in her lover, Zeb,
and in his stories and her dreams of the past.48 The daytime world appears
upside down, a dystopia in which the reverse-utopian morning meal fails to
break the fast. Darkness becomes the most fulfilling time, but “it’s dangerous
to live for the night.”49 Without a forward-looking sociocultural milieu, life
and breakfast lack purpose.
Signs of despair emerge especially when Toby yearns for her former life
with the God’s Gardeners but believes that this utopian cult would now prove
pointless, as there is nothing against which to define itself: “The enemies of
God’s Natural Creation no longer exist,” and animals and plants are “thriv-
ing unchecked.”50 Pruning the kudzu vine, Toby doubts the relevancy of the
human gardener even though, as Annette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs claim,
“the links between gardening and utopian dreaming are ancient and deep,”
with gardens appearing in everything from world religions to Thomas More’s
Utopia and beyond.51 Toby’s speculation is disturbingly close to what some
critics argue is a contemporary form of ironic utopian dreaming: where we
imagine “a world without people and take solace in the presumed resilience
of nature” as it flourishes without us.52 As the worlds of Oryx and Crake and
The Year of the Flood fall away, the reverse-utopian breakfasts of MaddAddam

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

seem part of an empty system of meals that punctuate a pointless sense

of human time. Indeed, their dwindling substance in terms of food, effect,
and significance marks a transition past “zero hour” when the human “us”
seems expendable. Such a complete dissolution of utopian dreaming seems
unlikely, however, because of Atwood’s fundamental belief in life as “an
­eternal ­breakfast” and the fact that, as Quarta observes in his theory of Homo
utopicus, it would be “the sound of an alarm bell for humanity.”53 In other
words, if the makeshift cobb-house society is to survive with some degree
of hope, they must first let go of their reverse utopianism, since the material
world can no longer support past culinary practices and lifestyles. Looking to
the future means reimagining both life and breakfast in light of the present
environment while also incorporating tragic lessons from the past.

Eternal Breakfast/Eternal Kudzu

Despite breakfast’s initial familiarity and iconic status, then, Atwood

­systematically recasts the nostalgically prepared meals in a dystopian light
to make room for critical change. If MaddAddam is about moving forward,
then ­humanity’s former control and normative status will lose traction.
The ­Crakers are set to inherit the earth, and their daily experience does not
include breakfast: “These people do not have meals as such. They graze like
herbivores.”54 At one point, when Toby tries to send the young Craker named
“Blackbeard” on his way so that she can get on with breakfast, she begins to
see how the meal may appear through Craker eyes as she revises her narrative:

“Is it a fish?” says the boy. “This breakfast?”

“Sometimes,” says Toby. “But for breakfast today, I will eat part
of an animal. An animal with fur. Perhaps I will eat its leg. There
will be a smelly bone inside. You wouldn’t want to see such a smelly
bone, would you?” she says. That will surely get rid of him.
“No,” says the child dubiously. He wrinkles his nose. He seems
intrigued, however: who wouldn’t want to peek from behind the
curtain at the trolls’ revolting feasts?55

Here, humans and their breakfasts have become monstrous. Toby tries to
justify that cobb-house residents are eating animals in the “right way” as

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

opposed to consumer ways of the past, but the difference seems minuscule
since the reverse-utopian breakfasts have ostensibly bypassed the God’s Gar-
deners’ strict vegetarianism and depleted all edible resources.
In contrast to the humans’ questionable practices and dwindling menus,
the Crakers are situated in a world of reliable, daylong sustenance. Kudzu vine
is the Crakers’ favorite plant: “The stuff gets in everywhere. It’s tireless, it can
grow a foot in twelve hours, it surges up and over anything in its way like a
green tsunami.”56 While this green flood seems disastrous for humans, it brings
bounty to the Crakers, who enjoy “eternal mouthfuls of leaf.”57 Eventually,
this plant-specific abundance precipitates a move on the humans’ part toward
Craker-style breakfasts: kudzu pancakes, kudzu fritters, kudzu with other forage.
There is even talk of creating kudzu wine. But the most radical change is when
the humans remove their one staple, pigoon, from their breakfast menu. The
pigoons and humans join forces to stop the Painballers, psychopathic prisoners
roaming loose and inflicting violence on both animals and humans as “meat,”
and this interspecies alliance is expressed through new food taboos. The pigoons
will no longer dig up the cobb-house garden as long as the humans do not kill
and consume pigoons. This agreement carries considerable weight because no
“ham” is served during what is clearly a “battle breakfast” and the last meal of
Jimmy’s life, which he consumes before being killed at the Paradice dome during
the confrontation with the Painballers.58
While a formal pigoon–human alliance establishes new dietary r­ egimens,
there are earlier signs of shifting practices when Toby loses her morn-
ing appetite for pork. Following her ingestion of an Enhanced Meditation
­formula, Toby communes with the spirit of Pilar (her deceased mentor
from the God’s Gardeners), which appears in the body of a mother pigoon
and her piglets—their eyes glowing the color of elderberries, the bush that
was used for Pilar’s composting following her death in The Year of the Flood.
The experience pushes Toby to revise her categories of food versus non-
food, animal versus human. In his discussion of food and power, Nicholson
presents the agency of self-reproduction in terms of the human consumer,
but Toby ­experiences the inverse of this scenario. Humans are not so much
­self-reproduced but, rather, partially carried forward within other creatures.
Hence, Toby witnesses Pilar-turned-compost-turned-elderberry-turned-
pigoon. The p­ erishable-permeable nature of bodies is similarly experienced
by Zeb when he ingests a bear and acknowledges, “It was living on in me.”59
These survivors rediscover food consumption as a transformative process of

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

sustainment not simply from the standpoint of the consumer but from the
position of the consumed. The realization points to a food ecology, which
was one of Toby’s salient lessons from her past: “Everything digests, and is
digested. The Gardeners found that a cause for celebration, but Toby has
never been reassured by it.”60 In other words, the notion that humans are at
the top of the food chain with breakfast always available for self-reproduction
is inherently flawed. Ultimately it is not merely eating but also digestion by
another that facilitates continuation, albeit in the most humble of ways.

The Fate of Leftovers

At the end of human civilization, when breakfast is dwindling, then, Atwood

suggests that there is hope, but only through interspecies communion. For
the cobb-house residents, their reconstitution occurs not so much by being
eaten (the Crakers are herbivores) but by being interbred. As Nicholson has
argued, eating and breeding facilitate reproduction, and in MaddAddam,
Atwood foreshadows humankind’s plight of perishability when Zeb recounts
his story of Bearlift, an organization dedicated to saving starving polar bears.
In the past, Bearlift conducted aerial food drops of urban leftovers in the
hope that the animals would learn to adapt. Toby muses that the word adapt
is “another way of saying tough luck,” and indeed, the polar bears did not
survive intact but migrated south and interbred with grizzly bears, resulting
in pizzlies and grolars: offspring with variable physical traits and tempera-
ments.61 The polar bears’ predicament is not unlike that of the cobb-house
residents, who scavenge until their dependency on finite food supplies leads
to other methods of species continuation. By the conclusion of the novel,
four “green-eyed Craker hybrid” children have been born.62 While these
sexual exchanges alter the so-called integrity of the human genome, which
has already been manipulated through bioengineering, alternative means of
procreation are necessary. Thus, the males of the group seem eager “to pitch
in” with the raising of the hybrid children; as Ivory Bill observes, “This is the
future of the human race.”63
This move away from replication (so often pursued in Atwood’s d­ ystopian
fiction) and toward reproduction necessarily means that transformation and
new forms of social dreaming are possible. Alongside genetic reformulations,
then, vestigial human survival occurs through the sharing of n ­ arratives with

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

the Crakers. Social dreaming is “impregnated with the historical,” Quarta

observes, as the hopeful projections of Homo utopicus advance generation by
generation in the collective imagination.64 The depleted ­material world of
MaddAddam curtails the group’s chances, but ­storytelling and ­language serve
as “the chief medium for conveying information in non-genetic ways.”65
Even though Toby cannot bear children because of the past ­egg-harvesting
that left her infertile, her voice lives on in the Book, which the Craker
Blackbeard relates: “Now this is the Book that Toby made when she lived
among us. . . . This is the Book, these are the Pages, here is the Writing. . . . And
she showed me how to turn the marks back into voice, so that when I look at
the page and read the words, it is Toby’s voice that I hear. And when I speak
these words out loud, you too are hearing Toby’s voice.”66 Undoubtedly some
­stories will fall away in time or be lost to the elements as books face their own
material limitations. Yet Toby has provided ample instructions to the Crakers,
who must recopy the Book and include blank pages at the end. This way the
Book—not singular but plural—can be added to through new voices and car-
ried forward in an open-ended fashion, affording stories a much longer shelf
life and reproductive capacity than a single box of expired cereal.
As with food-based and sexual reproduction, then, narrative reproduc-
tion is dynamic in its accommodation of changing circumstances, shifting
points of view, and expressive needs and desires. In Atwood’s trilogy, readers
are served a succession of breakfast stories: a seduction plot, an apocalyptic
nightmare, a fantasy of perpetual “coffee” and “ham again,” a troll’s feast,
and experiments with kudzu. Cumulative knowledge and imaginative flexibil-
ity are essential for relating and fostering hope: in other words, for letting go
of the past so as to embrace alternatives. In day-to-day existence, this means
that a product such as Choco-Nutrinos can be described either as “a palat-
able breakfast cereal” for children or as “alien-looking granules from Mars,”
out of place in the world of “zero hour.”67 Tellingly, while the humans con-
tend with “breakfast issues” and worry about “food options,” the Crakers
enjoy near-paradisal conditions that free their minds to focus on other mat-
ters.68 Craker “meals” are often described in figurative terms suggesting that
their physical and imaginative inheritances from their human predecessors
go hand in hand. For instance, when Jimmy is unconscious and healing from
his wounds, the Crakers keep vigil as “an oval of chairs is arranged around
the hammock, as if Jimmy is the central offering at a feast.”69 The Crakers
are similarly ­“insatiable” for stories of Zeb and demand a daily serving,

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

but with Jimmy incapacitated, Toby must act as a substitute storyteller,

­mimicking the past rituals by wearing Jimmy’s hat, listening to the watch
for Crake’s voice, and eating the smelly fish.70 In many ways the Crakers,
like the cobb-house residents, appear to replicate their own “meals” of old.
At one point, Blackbeard assumes the role of storyteller but only pretends to
eat the fish. Just as Toby requests that the fish be cooked (not raw, which was
Jimmy’s oversight), Blackbeard refuses to eat what is, to his mind, abject (the
fish both fascinates and horrifies the Crakers, who cannot bring themselves to
assimilate it), suggesting that these “feasts” accommodate individual prefer-
ences and cultural taboos in the process of retelling and recontextualization.
While literal ­breakfast foods of the past can only transport one back in time
on a finite pathway of nostalgia until the material ingredients run out, stories
of “life’s eternal breakfast” appear to be dynamic, timeless offerings, moving
both backward and forward as they are told, retold, and reimagined.

How Do You Take Your Eggs?

Because utopias are “typically invented and usually in story form,” it stands to
reason, then, that Atwood’s ustopian breakfasts in MaddAddam move between
the material level of food and the symbolic level of creation myth, as “eggs”
assist in the imaginative reconstitution of a humanlike species.71 The novel opens
with “The Story of the Egg,” as this iconic breakfast food—­tellingly absent from
cobb-house menus—appears as both the site and symbol of the Crakers’ origins.
From this single Egg (the Paradice dome), the Crakers came into being, an event
described in the purest of terms with chaos on the outside. In this myth, Atwood
draws upon egg symbolism: the creation of life and the universe, a reproductive
unit that links generations, and a symbol of resurrection.72 This initial version
of “The Story of the Egg” later changes when Blackbeard travels to the Para-
dice dome, sees the destruction that the initial creation of the Egg wrought, and
recounts the battle with the Painballers upon his return: “And the bad men went
into the Egg, even though the Egg should only be for making, not for killing. . . .
The Egg was dark, not light, as it used to be. We could see when we were inside
the Egg, I do not mean that kind of dark. The Egg had a dark feeling. It had a
dark smell.”73 In the case of ironic “back to the garden” utopias where human-
ity has doomed itself but nature persists, Mark Jendrysik believes that it is far
too costly to imagine an Eden that “forget[s] the violence and destruction of its

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

creation.”74 Through this revised story of the Egg, Atwood similarly insists on an
informed outlook, moving tragic lessons from the past forward as a significant
part of the Crakers’ narrative inheritance. MaddAddam may be about beginnings
and life’s “eternal breakfast,” but readers cannot ignore the dystopian aspects:
the tragic demise of humanity, for whom eggs and their symbolic potential seem
almost out of reach.
With Blackbeard’s revised story of a now-dark Egg situated alongside
Toby’s story of two smaller eggs (that Oryx laid inside the Egg), many read-
ers may wonder if Atwood’s recounting of these three eggs, as well as her
naming of the one Craker “Blackbeard” (after a pirate), is the author’s mis-
chievous way of alluding to her own short story “Bluebeard’s Egg.” Atwood
may be self-pirating her earlier fiction for egg symbols and its allusions to
Bluebeard folklore: the dangers and benefits of the quest for knowledge, the
human “desire to master and possess” nature and the other, and the notion
that stories are not fixed but always in process.75 While an in-depth analysis
of this short fiction is not possible here—a story that, itself, reshapes a fairy
tale within a contemporary setting—the Bluebeard folktale appears to have
informed Atwood’s ustopia.76 The changing story of “The Egg” becomes,
then, Atwood’s metafictional gesture of cultural transmission through regen-
erations of her own storytelling, as well as its mythical and folkloric origins.
In the context of MaddAddam, where storytelling facilitates social renewal
and hope, the narrative of the first Egg transforms, just as the two smaller “eggs”
laid inside of it evolve through an ongoing creative process. In Oryx and Crake,
Jimmy’s version of these two additional eggs presents the hungry Children of
Crake eating up all the words (hatched from the first smaller egg), with none
left for the animals (hatched from the second smaller egg): “And that is why the
animals can’t talk.”77 In MaddAddam, Toby revises the story: “Some of the words
fell out of the egg onto the ground, and some fell into the water, and some blew
away in the air. And none of the people saw them. But the animals and the birds
and the fish did see them, and ate them up. They were a different kind of words,
so it was sometimes hard for people to understand them.”78 Through her story,
Toby acknowledges the value of interspecies exchange, a form of communion
at which human societies have not excelled in the past. Fortunately, the Crakers
show more promise than their predecessors. Toby allows for the hidden power
of “leftovers” (the words still remaining in the egg) to shape the course of the
future and its stories in unanticipated ways. As with the eating of food, the eat-
ing of words is tied to the powers of reproduction: one “ingests” the means

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

of communication and thereby transforms oneself, existing narratives, and the

future. Atwood used this edible-word image previously in The Handmaid’s Tale
when Offred, forbidden to read or to write, imagines eating the letters from the
Commander’s Scrabble game, enabling herself to challenge Gilead’s fixed dys-
topian narrative. With animals now possessing expressive points of view in the
revised creation myths of MaddAddam, humanity’s hierarchical assumptions and
narratives of overconsumption may be questioned. Of course, the power of left-
overs similarly applies, but in a different way, to the remaining human survivors
of MaddAddam, who will likely fade away but not without being incorporated
into the new world. After all, by the conclusion of the novel, both Toby and
Zeb have passed on, but their stories move into the future through Blackbeard’s
recounting.

A Final Serving of Hope

In MaddAddam, what we know as breakfast persists, but through an

­evolutionary, highly literary process, as the novel serves up d­ isappearing
substitute foods and memories of past meals alongside ­ever-changing
“eggs” in symbolic form. This process of breaking down and being
­reconstituted invariably gives this “meal”—in both a literal and fi ­ gurative
sense—a ­capacity to generate fearful apprehension, as well as hope for
redemption. For some readers, Atwood’s ustopia will not sit easy, as it
invites them to imagine and then reimagine the future in ­discomforting
ways. In his study of Atwood’s apocalyptic imagination, Mark Bosco notes
that “just as ­Dickens’s Scrooge has a dreadful ­experience but wakes up the
next ­morning, so r­ eaders of Oryx and Crake . . . can ‘wake up’ after r­ eading
her book and say ‘It hasn’t happened yet, I can still mend my ways.’”79 In the
final book of the ­trilogy, Toby awakens from an ­apocalyptic ­nightmare
only to ­discover that it is her reality. Hope lingers, but on a ­modest scale,
­reflecting the n­ ovel’s larger message that humanity needs to be h ­ umble
in our ­expectations for the future: to view our ecological e­ xistence in
a ­deferential and responsible light. For cobb-house residents, survival
is ­possible, but only as a remnant, as they are materially and ­culturally
­reproduced with the help of other creatures. Relinquishing the past and
its material comforts is necessary, since the replication of a flawed status
quo fails to address changing circumstances or allow for ­transformation.

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

While the reverse-utopian breakfasts offer temporary solace, they also

­disturb ­readers who recognize these fantasy meals as being oddly close to
their own. As such, Atwood effectively closes a gap between her ­dystopian
novel and her r­eaders’ present, a strategy similarly used in The Hand-
maid’s Tale to “prompt readers to change the world.”80 Readers must heed
Atwood’s warning that what they take for granted—that ­“eternal ­breakfast”
of human life—is, in fact, finite when ­perpetuated through self-deluding,
unchanging fictions of bountiful food. Perhaps there is time for the human
imagination and its propensity for social ­dreaming to break fixed modes
of consumption and to create sustainable paths f­orward. Clearly, Atwood
believes that we must heed the alarm, awaken, and change our ways, but
ideally not until we have had our breakfast—that is, if there is anything to
be had of our daily serving of hope.

Notes
1. Margaret Atwood, “Spotty-Handed Villainesses: Problems of Female Bad
Behaviour,” in Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing (London: Virago Press, 2005), 173.
2. Margaret Atwood, “Dire Cartographies: The Roads to Ustopia,” in In Other Worlds:
SF and the Human Imagination (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011), 85.
3. See Allison Dunlap, “Eco-dystopia: Reproduction and Destruction in Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” Journal of Ecocriticism 5, no. 1 ( January 2013): 1–15, Directory
of Open Access Journals, http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/article/view/389/402.
Dunlap reads Crake as a misguided dreamer set on saving the earth by ridding it of
humankind—a form of ecological utopianism that “Atwood condemns” (10).
4. Sheryl Ubelacker, “Atwood as Inventive as Ever in Promoting New Novel The Year
of the Flood,” Canadian Press, September 10, 2009, CBCA Complete, http://ezproxy
.kwantlen.ca:2048/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/360115833?account
id=35875.
5. Atwood, “Dire Cartographies,” 93.
6. Atwood, “Spotty-Handed Villainesses,” 173.
7. Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 2004), 33.
8. Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian
Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719246.
9. Lyman Tower Sargent, “In Defense of Utopia,” Diogenes 209 (2006): 13–14,
DOI:10.1177/0392192106062432.
10. Cosimo Quarta, “Homo Utopicus: On the Need for Utopia,” trans. Daniele
Procida, Utopian Studies 7, no. 2 (1996): 161, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719515.
11. Ibid., 158.

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

12. Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and
Practice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), Ebook Ebrary Academic
Complete, 25, 23.
13. Margaret Atwood, “Writing Utopia,” in Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing
(London: Virago Press, 2005), 88.
14. Mervyn Nicholson, “Food and Power: Homer, Carroll, Atwood, and Others,”
Mosaic 20, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 37.
15. Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2013), 206.
16. Ibid.
17. Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch, eds., Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 13.
18. Joe Berkowitz, “How Margaret Atwood Creates Scary-Plausible Future Worlds,”
Fast Company, October 28, 2013, http://fastcocreate.com.
19. Margaret Atwood, “Amnesty International: An Address (1981),” in Second Words:
Selected Critical Prose, 1960–1982 (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995), Ebook Canadian
Publishers Collection, 394.
20. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985), 120.
21. Glen Deer, “The Handmaid’s Tale: Dystopia and the Paradoxes of Power,” in
Margaret Atwood: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea
House, 2000), 101. See also Emma Parker’s article “You Are What You Eat: The Politics
of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood,” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 3
(Autumn 1995): 349–68, http://www.jstor.org/stable/441857, for a discussion of the
handmaids’ indoctrination: “The handmaids . . . are permitted to consume only that
which the authorities consider will enhance their health and fertility,” and during their
training, breakfast is “accompanied by biblical exegesis” (354).
22. Atwood, “Dire Cartographies,” 84.
23. Karen Stein, “Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal: The Handmaid’s Tale,” in
Margaret Atwood: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House,
2000), 200–201.
24. One such variance occurs when the housekeeper drops the breakfast tray and
Offred agrees to pretend that she ate the ruined eggs, feeling buoyed by this momentary
alliance.
25. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, Seal Books ed. (Toronto: Random House,
2004), 184.
26. Atwood, MaddAddam, 25.
27. Chung-Hao Ku, “Of Monster and Man: Transgenics and Transgression in Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 32, no. 1 ( January 2006),
Communication and Mass Media Complete: 112, 118.
28. Atwood, MaddAddam, 25.
29. Ibid., 140.
30. Ibid., 34.
31. Ibid., 140.
32. Ibid., 34.

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

33. Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
2009), 392.
34. Ku, “Of Monster and Man,” 112–13.
35. Although cannibalism is sometimes necessary in times of great need, it is usually
not pursued to the excessive degree of cobb-house residents. In contrast, pigoons restrict
cannibalism among their own kind: “Dead farrow are eaten by pregnant mothers to
provide more protein for growing infants, but adults . . . are contributed to the general
ecosystem” (Atwood, MaddAddam, 373).
36. Danette DiMarco, “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous,” College Literature 38,
no. 4 (Fall 2011): 135, DOI:10.1353/lit.2011.0038.
37. Quarta, “Homo Utopicus,” 163.
38. Atwood, MaddAddam, 32.
39. Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 118.
40. Atwood, MaddAddam, 65.
41. Ibid., 141.
42. Ibid., 143.
43. Ibid., 113.
44. Ibid., 207.
45. Ibid., 34.
46. Toby and Rebecca’s exchange brings to mind the opening of Much Depends on
Dinner (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), in which Margaret Visser contemplates
the meaning of everyday household items: “None of these objects is necessary; many
cultures eschew them altogether, and there was a time when our ancestors lived very
happily without them. We invented them, however, to fill needs: chairs, forks, and
hallways were required by the sort of people we have become; having them now
prevents us from being different” (11).
47. Atwood, MaddAddam, 136.
48. In Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, almost every other chapter is titled “Night.”
Nighttime allows Offred, who is otherwise powerless, a small degree of self-defined
freedom: “The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet”
(47). During the night, she is free to remember her birth name, identity, and former
life—a seeming utopian world destroyed by Gilead.
49. Atwood, MaddAddam, 136.
50. Ibid., 209.
51. Annette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs, “Nature, Utopia, and the Garden,” in Earth
Perfect? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden, ed. Annette Giesecke and Naomi Jacobs (London:
Black Dog Publishing, 2012), 9–10.
52. Mark S. Jendrysik, “Back to the Garden: New Visions of Posthuman Futures,”
Utopian Studies 22, no. 1 (2011): 35, DOI:10.1353/utp.2011.0027.
53. Quarta, “Homo Utopicus,” 164.
54. Atwood, MaddAddam, 93.
55. Ibid.

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 Utopian Studies 26.1

56. Ibid., 209.

57. Ibid., 367.
58. See Heather Arndt Anderson’s comments on the “battle breakfast” in Breakfast:
A History (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013). Anderson notes that breakfast is
sometimes “the last meal of one’s life,” and during World War I, soldiers were served
steak and eggs if the battle was anticipated to be especially dangerous (3). This same
menu has been served to astronauts and is still served to “death row inmates . . . if no
other request is specified” (3).
59. Atwood, MaddAddam, 331.
60. Ibid., 221.
61. Ibid., 59.
62. Ibid., 380.
63. Ibid.
64. Quarta, “Homo Utopicus,” 160.
65. Carroll, Reading Human Nature, 17.
66. Atwood, MaddAddam, 385.
67. Ibid., 140–41.
68. Ibid., 205.
69. Ibid., 99.
70. Ibid., 106.
71. Marius de Geus, “Ecotopia, Sustainability, and Vision,” Organization and
Environment 15, no. 2 ( June 2002): 188, DOI:10.1177/10826602015002006.
72. For further discussion of these prominent egg-related themes, see Anna Marie
Fisker’s “The Language of the Egg” and Joan P. Alcock’s “The Egg: Its Symbolism and
Mythology,” in Eggs in Cooking: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookering
2006, ed. Richard Hosking (Blackawton, U.K.: Prospect Books, 2007), http://www
.oxfordsymposium.org.uk.
73. Atwood, MaddAddam, 359.
74. Jendrysik, “Back to the Garden,” 44.
75. Sherrill Grace, “Courting Bluebeard with Bartók, Atwood, and Fowles: Modern
Treatment of the Bluebeard Theme,” Journal of Modern Literature 11, no. 2 (1984): 254.
For further discussion of this short story, see Carol Merli, “Hatching the Posthuman:
Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bluebeard’s Egg,’” Journal of the Short Story in English 48 (Spring
2007): 81–94, http://jsse.revues.org/780.
76. Readers can find the story in the same-titled collection: Margaret Atwood,
Bluebeard’s Egg (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983), 115–46. In the story, Sally, the
married protagonist, learns from her Comparative Folklore class that the egg symbolizes
many things: “a fertility symbol, or a necessary object in African spells, or something
the world hatched out of ” (139). Initially the egg seems “innocent and passive” in Sally’s
interpretation of the Bluebeard fairy tale, but she eventually revises her understanding
of this symbol, her world, her marriage, and herself: she sees past the shell’s pristine
surface to something “red and hot inside it” that one day “will hatch” (146). In the context
of my reading of the optimism present in MaddAddam, it is telling that Atwood scholar

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 shelley boyd: Ustopian Breakfasts

Reingard M. Nischik reads the dark stories of Bluebeard’s Egg as “hold[ing] out a glimmer
of hope—alternative realities that provide a source of comfort for the (usually female)
protagonists by rendering the situation more tolerable” (Engendering Genre: The Works of
Margaret Atwood [Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009], 78).
77. Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 116.
78. Atwood, MaddAddam, 290.
79. Mark Bosco, S.J., “The Apocalyptic Imagination,” in Margaret Atwood: “The
Robber Bride,” “The Blind Assassin,” “Oryx and Crake,” ed. J. Brooks Bouson (London:
Continuum, 2010), 171.
80. Stein, “Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal,” 193.

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