Leave it to Margaret Atwood to device a course on the essence of America for Martians.
The Martians have come to Atwood to "study America."
As somebody partial to the value of literary texts as the best window on society, Atwood suggests the following course materials:
The Maypole of Merrymount & Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick by Herman Meville
All three novels have to be interpreted allegorically.
Moby-Dick, for instance, becomes an allegorical hologram of ruthless capitalism, American style:
Moby-Dick is about the oil industry,” they said. “And the Ship of American State. The owners of the Pequod are rapacious and stingy religious hypocrites. The ship’s business is to butcher whales and turn them into an industrial energy product. The mates are the middle management. The harpooners, who are from races colonized by America one way or another, are supplying the expert tech labor. Elijah the prophet — from the American artist caste — foretells the Pequod’s doom, which comes about because the chief executive, Ahab, is a megalomaniac who wants to annihilate nature.
Nature is symbolized by a big white whale, which has interfered with Ahab’s personal freedom by biting off his leg and refusing to be slaughtered and boiled. The narrator, Ishmael, represents journalists; his job is to warn America that it’s controlled by psychotics who will destroy it, because they hate the natural world and don’t grasp the fact that without it they will die. That’s enough literature for now. Can we have popcorn?
But the course is more complex than meets the eyes. It is interspersed with Atwood's own take on America.
"America", she teaches, is a placeholder for human fantasy, being many things to many people. It is also a nation that since its inception through to these times, is riddled with "internal contradictions".
Atwood also dispenses real-life advice to Martians. The Martians want to do a full tour of the nation and propose visiting, among other sites, the Boot Hill Museum in Kansas.
Atwood dissuades such a plan because the Martians who look like diagrams of the female uterus, replete with fallopian tubes and ovary bunches, might be mistaken for human uteri.
The Martians are surprised by the hostility that the appearance of a group of human uteri might evoke in the breasts of American males, as a quick Google search of the term tells them that the female uteri is the source of creation.
Why would a representation of whence they come arouse anger?
Atwood doesn't know; in certain parts of America, she says, males are peculiarly obsessed with the female uteri. They perceive it as demonic.
"It's a hangover from the Young Goodman Brown Days," she feels:
If they saw you [Martians] hopping around — worse still, eating popcorn [the Martians have taken an instant liking for these] — they’d go completely berserk, and pronounce you pregnant, and put you in jail.
Atwood suggests that her Martian students visit New York City and Radio City Music Hall instead, because in New York the Martians won't stand out, and if harassed, Martians can cry "specism!"
All in all, a lively course!
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