29 pages • 58 minutes read
Happy Endings
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Themes
Metafiction
If theme is what a story is about, “Happy Endings” is about what stories are about: Atwood writes a story that is about writing a story. Metafictional narratives are self-reflexive, often radically so, and, in effect, seek proactively to never allow the reader to get “lost” in the story, and instead consistently remind the reader that what they are reading is a construction, and not ‘organic,’ or natural.
“Happy Endings” employs numerous elements of metafiction. Atwood consistently intrudes on the narrative to comment on said narrative, especially in the story’s last section. She does so, in that section, to directly address the reader, another tenet of metafiction. The story rejects conventional plot, and in consistently having the characters in various sections wind up back in Section A, Atwood would seem to flaunt the instability of the narrative, another feature of metafiction. Atwood’s story imitates a story, as opposed to imitating the “real world.”
Feminist Theory and Thought
Yet another aspect of metafiction is the incorporation of theory (and/or criticism) into the narrative itself. In “Happy Endings,” the subtext of the narrative, in nearly every section, is gender roles as seen through the lens of feminist theory. While feminist theory and thought contain multiple schools, and there are multiple waves of feminism, Atwood, in Section A, would seem to be employing core feminist theory in her rendering of the John and Mary in this section: while one character is male and the other is female, they are equal in regard to political, economic, and social power.
This is in stark contrast to Sections B and C, which take on modern and/or modernist notions of narrative; here, patriarchy and sexual objectification govern interactions between characters of differing genders, and, in both sections, characters meet their end because of a perceived or actual slight, with Mary taking her own life in Section B and John killing Mary, James, and then himself in Section C.
These conflicts work as drivers for plot, and the “what” of a story. Atwood, however, as a postmodern writer, implicitly links plot—a central aspect of most fiction—to the male/patriarchal, and challenges the reader, at the end of the narrative, to care less about the plot and more about “the How and Why” (45), which may be viewed, by extension, as Atwood challenging the reader to in turn challenge the traditional gender roles and/or confines within society, and effectively update them to postmodern terms.
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By Margaret Atwood
