It's Dangerous to Read Newspapers - Margaret Atwood Context Flashcards
Explain the context of the poem
• The world was a very violent place in 1968. The War in Vietnam was raging with a series of military offensives and massacres
o Newspapers were filled with gruesome images of the war and equally graphic images of student protesters being beaten for marching against it
o There were riots in the streets, pictures of buildings being set afire, students being shot, and what looked like society falling apart
o And, most shocking of all, there were two very high level assassinations: Presidential front-runner Bobby Kennedy and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King
• But Atwood does not start with this
o She starts, instead, with herself in a sandbox
o While she is creating castles in her sandbox, murdered Jews are being hastily buried in pits in Germany and Poland
o This is a strange juxtaposition of images. Both show digging and activity, but one represents innocence and the other, evil
o Why does she do this? She does it to shock us and pull us into the poem and she does it to give us a subtle message: Our whole lives, whether we are aware or not aware, there is suffering and evil and destruction
o Even when we are oblivious as children, bad news still exists
Explain the impact of Atwood’s childhood experiences on the poem
• The next stanza brings us further into her childhood and early teens. While children today might not know the expression, children in Atwood’s day were superstitiously careful when walking on sidewalks. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” was the rhyme every child knew
o Only this time, it isn’t “step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” it’s “step on a crack, and detonate a bomb.”
o The fear during the Cold War was of nuclear annihilation: the end of the world. Students in the early 1950‘s would have known about the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they would have participated in the drills every school conducted, drills in which they heard an air raid siren and were told to huddle under their desks until the all clear was given
• In the first two stanzas, Atwood is a child — in a sandbox and walking to school — and yet already the news of the world has infiltrated her life
o Whether she was reading the newspapers or not, the bad news, the news that spoke of destroyed life and the potential destruction of the whole world, was out there every day
• If the child Atwood felt she could control the world by being orderly or not stepping on cracks, the adult Atwood is not so naïve
o By now a grownup and literate, she sits in her chair “as quiet as a fuse.” This simile works in two ways: It shows her nervousness and fear, and it shows her complicity. A fuse is the thing that allows a bomb to explode
o By “reaching out in love” and “having good intentions,” she hopes she can avoid adding to the violence in the world
o If she is the fuse, perhaps her good behaviour can keep at least one bomb from being lit
o Just as she tries to control her world as a child by being orderly and careful, she tries to control her world as an adult by being a good person
Explain the poem’s meaning
• But it isn’t to be. When her “passive eyes” read the news, she isn’t responsible for it but she feels guilty and declares “I am the cause.”
o This is the same guilty feeling we have watching people on TV suffering in a famine. We don’t cause the suffering of others by having more but we feel guilty and spoiled, all the same
o Atwood looks at the massacres in Vietnam (“the jungles are flaming, the underbrush is charged with soldiers”) and feels that by being safe in North America and just watching from afar, she is culpable
o If her country is involved in the war and her country is sending soldiers to kill, then she is “completely lethal.” It doesn’t matter if she has good intentions or if she feels compassion, “(her) hands are guns.”
• Even when she tries to speak against the war, when she hits a key on her electric typewriter, “speaking of peaceful trees,” it is meaningless
o She has no power to stop the war or to stop any of the ugliness she reads about in the newspaper
o By the time she has typed a sentence, she knows another village will have exploded
• By the time we reach the end of the poem, we realize she has made the same point she starts out with
o When she was a child playing in her sandbox, unaware of the news of the day, atrocities were happening
o Now, as an adult, no matter what she does — whether she is quiet and passive or involved and aware — the atrocities in the world will still occur
o She cannot affect the events occurring in the world and she cannot be unaware. She cannot have the innocence she had in her childhood sandbox
o Her “passive eyes” will “transmute” everything she looks at
o If she looks at a sandbox now, she will see the dead bodies being shovelled into the pits
o The images of the 20th century are part of her and she cannot “unsee” what she has seen
o The news is part of who she is and how she sees the world. Her innocence is lost. In a sense, reading that first newspaper is like taking a bite of the apple: Dangerous
