Moral Disorder Response - Katie Yook

Moral Disorder Response

Katie Yook

In Moral Disorders, Margaret Atwood gives us excerpts of a woman at different stages of her life.  However, each separate chapter feels like it is about a different woman.  By doing this, Atwood is demonstrating an individual’s ever-changing identity.  We are constantly changing—our habits, opinions, relationships, moods, circumstances.  Though we feel like we have such a strong sense of identity, we can actually change who we are at any time.  This emphasizes our agency to choose who we are.  The only thing that is unchanging and ingrained in us is our true nature.

The book opens with “Bad News.”  I see it as a story about daily routine and habits.  Connecting this to the idea that we are ever-changing, our morning routine and habits don’t make us who we are.  It is just a pattern of behavior that people find comfort and structure in.  The girl “needs” coffee in the morning, because she is a “coffee person,” but she really does not need it.  This story is also about bad news, as indicated by the title.  The girl has apocalyptic fears and a strong fear of distant disaster.  It is as if she is waiting for something bad to happen, not in her personal life, but in the world.  She also fears death and believes her and Gilbert are lucky because they are still alive.  Another one of her anxieties is the fear of growing old and losing her memory.  This points to the fragility of humans.  They can’t handle the bad news, which is streaming constantly, but the bad news is so distant in place that it doesn’t stick, and she stops caring after perhaps a week.

“Art of Cooking and Serving” gives attention to societal norms.  For example, the worry on the mothers’ friends faces reflect the friends’ judgment yet passivity in helping the mother out.  Also the narrator prefers to use the euphemism “expecting” instead of “pregnant” because it sounds better.  The narrator also learns to not stare at disabled children on the street, a norm she probably learned, but that isn’t beneficial.  The story juxtaposes of gender roles.  The brother would have helped the family by mowing the lawn but instead went to boys camp to chop wood.  While the brother is out learning to be a man, most of the responsibility is given to the girl.  The narrator says, “meanwhile my mother was being no use at all” because she wasn’t helping her knit.  Basically the mother is useless because she can’t assist in domestic work.  The mother is “slacking off” as if she was knitting in a factory and being a housewife is an occupation.

Throughout the book and especially in “Labrador Fiasco,” we see people getting older and losing energy.  There is strong distinction between how these people were versus how they are now and it’s really depressing.  In this story, the setting switches between an outdoor adventure and a household in which the father’s family is worrying about how old and inactive he has become.  The father “wants to go home” to the way things were, but the past can never be experienced again and time goes nowhere but forward.  The father is unhappy in his situation but things can’t change, and we sympathize with his helplessness.

As for the lack of finality in the book’s ending, I enjoyed it.  It causes the story to spill out into real life.  It makes the story so much realer to life.