The Failings of the Social Mythology of Capitalism: from The Age of Lead to The Year of the Flood.

New Brunswick

Congreso; NEMLA (Northern East Modern Languages Association) Conference; 2011

NEMLA (Northern East Modern Languages Association)

Since the beginning of her literary production Margaret Atwood has been concerned with the impact of the American way of life and its association with the capitalist system, a model which has exceeded its frontiers and can be identified with any region that adheres to a liberal economy. Canada is an example of this, as has been pointed out in Surfacing. Capitalism, sustained by an incessant large-scale production and consumption and a premium for competition and private or personal initiative and enterprises, is by its very nature a system which constantly needs to be fuelled to persist and grow and, therefore, requires constant expansion of its boundaries. Imperialism becomes the natural consequence and the logic of the market permeates and justifies any kind of intervention and initiative under the rule of the demand and its provisions. In her first works, ´The Edible Woman´ (1969) and ´Surfacing´ (1970), the Canadian writer denaturalizes the blessings of capitalism by pointing out different aspects of the weaknesses of the mythology built around a capitalist based economy. Consumption (´The Edible Woman´), and a literal and metaphorical colonization, and its attendant exploitation and domination, of other regions, be them countries, the natural world, subjects (minorities) or women (´Surfacing´) are the targets of Atwood?s critique. ´The Age of Lead´ (1998) also moves forward into this direction by unveiling the environmental and health consequences for those who, inadvertently of their risks, cling to the social mythology of the sixties, and later on to the ´consumering´ eighties, and to that of the incipient entrepreneurial and technological lifestyle of the nineteenth century explorers. This paper will examine the particular way in which ´The Year of the Flood´ (2009) continues and further stresses the failings of the capitalist mythology, a metanarrative in its homogenizing effects, within the perspective of ecological sustainability as initially delineated in ´The Age of Lead´. Yet it is my contention that though the environmental consequences of this social mythology are shown at their worst stage in this text, there is eventually an overall criticism of the construction of mythologies or metanarratives, which mystify reality and fall into the temptation of erasing diversity, in the presence of a scientific and religious fundamentalism with ecocentric overtones.