Oryx And Crake

Margaret Atwood’s science fiction novel, Oryx and Crake, can more accurately be referred to as “speculative fiction.” Dystopian speculative fiction “takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions” (Snyder). Atwood utilizes her novels in order to share her views on politics, feminist and modern society. She creates these dystopias to distinctly mirror aspects of modern society that are threatening to women. Consumerism within the modern world diminishes the possibility of gender equality, when society degrades and exploits women. By creating characters such as Oryx, Atwood emphasizes how easily women

can be forced into dangerous situations in a struggle to survive. In Oryx and Crake, Atwood “relinquishes the hope for a future generation of unified women, and moves instead to describe a postfeminist, posthuman world” (Tolan), further driven by corruption and commercialism. Atwood utilizes speculative fiction to highlight the plight of women within societies, potentially modeling real-world nations.
The highly-commercialized setting in which the novel takes place in stimulates the thriving industry of underage pornography and sex trafficking. Both Jimmy and Crake find HotTots, an underage porn site, with exceptional ease. The limited power of women within patriarchy forces women to make sacrifices. Women like Oryx lose their identities as human beings in the process of trying to survive in a society that does not value them. In the village where Oryx was born, children were “sold, or thrown into the river, to float away in the sea; because there was only so much food to go around” (Atwood 116-17). Despite the fact that Oryx could use her sexual prowess to make money, she is apathetic to her oppression due to the lack of a loving family in her childhood. Oryx seems comfortable with the economic transaction because selling her sexuality is the only real power that she has in her commercially centered world. She if forced to sacrifice her dignity in return for survival, because “everything has a price” (Atwood 139). One can certainly assume that if Oryx had not been placed into this world of cruel circumstances where gender equality is nonexistent, she would not have chosen the prostitution as her profession. Since the world in the novel is so profit-driven, a woman’s sexuality is the most powerful and valuable weapon she has in order to survive. Consequently, because women are only valued for their bodies in their objective society, they lose their identities along the way. Jimmy’s uncertainty about elements of Oryx’s identity, even so fundamental as her name, “[emphasize] that Oryx exists as a fantasy object of desire; that is, there are as many "Oryx's" as there are men whose fantasies call her into existence” (Hall). By making Oryx just one in a million prostitutes lacking personality, Hall emphasizes how the society had effectively stripped her of her identity as a woman and an independent person. Using Oryx as a fantasy image for men for entertainment and pleasure, her identity has become obsolete. Atwood’s criticism of society’s vision of women as objects and its effects are shown when Oryx recalls her childhood without a family. Oryx is scarred by her loveless childhood, because although she knows she has value in her modern society, “having a money value was no substitute for love” (Atwood 126). Because of society’s objectification of women in a patriarchal economic-drive world, women are exploited in the process. With the absence of a loving family in her life, Oryx has become apathetic towards her experience of forced prostitution and oppression. Women involved with sex work often lack a voice and are only defined by their bodies. Atwood uses Oryx to epitomize the oppressed women of society who are voiceless.
Although Oryx faces abandonment and objectification through pornography and sex trafficking, she does not appear to regret her previous life.

She believes that her femininity in a drastically misogynistic society is an advantage because of her ability to use her sexuality and body to benefit monetarily from her situation. Oryx even chastises Jimmy for implying that the man who bought was a bad man. She comments that “if it [weren’t] for him, [she] wouldn’t be here. You should like him!” (Atwood 316). She then proceeds to encourage Jimmy to like him. Atwood’s use of situational irony allows her to emphasize that sex work is the product of a corrupt and commercially driven society, giving young women no other alternatives. Atwood uses Jimmy and Oryx to juxtapose the gender gap in their society when Jimmy cannot fathom Oryx’s life because it varies so drastically from his own. To highlight Jimmy’s ignorance to the oppression Oryx has faced and give an objective point of view of their society, Atwood purposefully narrates the novel in a male perspective. In her other novels, Atwood is most known for her “use of first-person narrative to explore female imagination, consciousness and creativity” (Showalter) to chronicle the struggles of women through victimization and oppression. By telling the story through the eyes of Jimmy, rather than Oryx, Atwood shows the inherent inequality between men and women. The abuse of the female identity that is dominant in modern society becomes apparent in the narrative through Atwood’s juxtaposition of the polar points of view. Oryx believes that being bought and sold as a sex object has improved her life, giving her a means of survival when there were no other alternatives for women like her. In such a society, women are able to use their sexuality to their advantage over men. When Jimmy and Crake first encounter the video of eight-year old Oryx, she produces an immediate and powerful effect on them. While watching the video “the

power dynamics of this encounter are reversed; Oryx is the one who is on display” and should be the most vulnerable. Instead “Jimmy claims that he is symbolically stripped naked by Oryx's gaze” (Hall). Even when women have lost their identities as human beings and are seen as sex objects, they still possess incredible power over their oppressors. As the importance of media grows along with technological advances, women struggle even more to reclaim their identities as more than possessions of men to be used for pleasure. Atwood uses her dystopian novels to portray the plight of women in oppressive, patriarchal societies that are extreme versions of today’s society, and to emphasize the strength and power of women to overcome the struggles that they face for equality. Oryx and Crake is a reflection and a warning Atwood makes against the current state of society and how a lack of action may result in a society similar to the one in the novel.
With the creation of the genetically perfected child-like humans named Crakers, Oryx’s role within the dystopian society changes from sex object to mother figure. Atwood’s use of the either/or fallacy within the novel effectively emphasizes the only two options women have within a patriarchal society, and their lack of choices regarding their futures. After the Crakers are perfected, Oryx’s job is to teach them about botany, while marketing the BlyssPluss Pill, which creates a worldwide pandemic. Therefore, Oryx is “[reinvented] as ‘Mother Goddess”’ (Hall), further representing her status as a fantasy, seemingly unattainable. Even as the role of the mother figure, Oryx’s fate is dictated by society and not her own will. The novel “offers the repetition of traditional gendered narrations” that are modeled in real-world society, representing the women “as mother or whore, as unattainable or sexually available” (Evans). Society gridlocks women into these two radical roles and takes advantage of their burdens. In today’s media, women are criticized for being too promiscuous, engaging in pornography similar to Oryx, or seeming unattainable. In modern media, women who engage in sex are seen as tainted, while mothers are portrayed as pure, leaving no room for a middle ground. As Snowman, Jimmy often tells stories about Oryx and Crake. To further emphasize Oryx’s role as a mother to the Crakers, Jimmy begins to call them Children of Oryx. His retelling of the origins of the Children of Oryx resembles the story of the biblical Creation of Man. In his creation story, Jimmy tells the story of the “people of chaos” destroying themselves along with the Crakers. Against Oryx’s wishes, the Children of Oryx were being killed and all she wanted was the “people to be happy, and to be at peace, and to stop eating up her children” (Atwood 103). Similar to that of a mother worrying over the wellbeing of her children, Oryx shows these motherly qualities in that she wants to keep the Crakers safe from harm. Although the Crakers are not her own children, Oryx creates a motherly attachment to them. Oryx’s motherly attachment represent society’s belief that women are only valued as mother figures. Oryx represents the symbolic figure of Eve as the Earth Mother, bringing a sense of innocence to Oryx’s character that competes with her polar sexual prowess as a prostitute. Oryx’s role in the novel’s society as a combination of mother figure and sex worker completes the duality of Oryx’s character. In Oryx and Crake, Oryx represents both polarized views of women: mother or sex worker.
Along with Atwood’s criticism of the oppression of women within her own society, she also warns about the regression of feminism in the near future. The novel’s focus on a bioengineered post-human age represents modern society’s steep path towards a technological driven future. Atwood uses this to emphasize her fears that “the recent gains women have made as a result of the feminist movement may be short-lived” (Bouson), and introduce the idea of post-feminism as a “relinquishing of feminism to capitalist notions of desire, consumption, and self-fulfilment [sic]” (Tolan). Because of the imaginative art of the speculative fiction genre, Atwood can use her literature composition to critiques aspects of modern society. With her futuristic setting, readers can comfortably imagine modern society transforming into something similar to the novel. Even though modern technology is not equipped to create genetically modified humans, many other aspects of Atwood’s dystopia are comparable to real life, and emphasize the yielding of gender equality to capitalist greed and consumerism. The reader can then begin to realize that by furthering modern technology, society is regressing to an almost pre-human age, where consumerism breeds greed, hatred, and oppression. As the technology advances, media plays an important role in the progression of the postfeminist era. Atwood highlights this in her novel by describing a global network that “draws little distinction between images of prisoners being executed in Asia, child pornography, and political speeches” (Laflen). Making controversial goods, such as child pornography, easily accessible to the public without any restrictions or consequences will produce a population that is no longer empathetic to these atrocities, all the while, dehumanizing the women who are forced into prostitution and pornography as sex workers. As media continues to grow and become more perverse, women will no longer be seen as equals, but as sex objects to ogle over. Through her novel, Atwood is attempting to arouse awareness in the fragility of modern feminism, especially in some Arab countries, where women’s roles are already regressing and society is entering into a post-feminist era controlled by expanding commercialism and the expansion of technology.
Atwood’s speculative fiction novels delve into the depths of society to accentuate the prevalent inequalities between sexes and the possibility of a post-feminist future. Her criticism of society’s view of women as objects of sex and perversion is accurately portrayed in the story of Oryx and her life of prostitution and sex trafficking. The novel’s setting is meant to represent the path that modern society is moving in order to show that feminism and women’s identity has become threatened by the increasing access to information at any time and place. The duality of Oryx’s character within the novel, accentuates the two polarized roles women, mother or whore, which are portrayed as in the media. Oryx’s struggles of being sold as a young girl, sex trafficking, and prostitution throughout her life, show the oppression women in modern society experience, especially in developing countries, as a means of survival. Atwood uses the patriarchal structure of real-life nations, prevalent in human nature, to develop a dystopian world that is hostile to the equality between genders. Women are driven towards careers of prostitution and pornography in order to survive in such a hostile environment, because of the belief that women are only valued for their bodies and sexual prowess. To Atwood, these women would not have originally chosen these professions of sex work in a world where there is equality between men and women. Though Atwood is not antagonistic towards prostitution and sex workers and their life choices, she does sympathize with the women in such industries. Atwood uses her novels to provide a voice to the countless, helpless women in real-life nations who are being oppressed and whose voices cannot be heard. She brings to light the implicit inequalities within the patriarchal society in place and the struggles women face to overcome such oppression within society. Oryx is more than just a character; she represents the women in society who are being oppressed by the everlasting patriarchy within the world.