Happy Endings

“Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.”

These are the last sentences of Section A. Every ‘character’ in “Happy Endings,” barring those that die in other sections of the story, returns here, and their own story ends back at the beginning. 

"Mary falls in love with John but John doesn’t fall in love with Mary. He merely uses her body for selfish pleasure and ego gratification of a tepid kind.” 

Atwood, especially in Sections B and C, aligns patriarchal objectification of women with modernist elements of narrative. Her inclusion of postmodern literary devices is strongly tied to an infusion of feminist thought and theory into the story.

“Crying is bad for your face, everyone knows that and so does Mary but she can’t stop.”

Here, we have another example of where Atwood directly addresses audience (“your face”), a trait common to both “Happy Endings” and much of postmodernist literature. 

“You can see what kind of woman she is by the fact that it’s not even whiskey.”

Atwood again addresses the audience here. This quote is in reference to Mary using sherry, not whiskey, in conjunction with sleeping pills and aspirin to kill herself. There is an element of dark humor here, something common to postmodern literature, as well as inclusion of feminist thought and theory: even in selecting her mode of suicide, Mary remains ladylike—whiskey is traditionally a ‘man’s’ drink, and therefore not suitable for her. 

“John marries Madge and everything continues as in A.”

This is the last sentence of Section B, and follows Mary taking her own life and leaving a note she hopes John will find, as John, the modernist male of the story, is, to Mary, the only one who can save her. John does not save her, and returns to Section A, only to perhaps then find himself—or a version of himself—in Section C. 

“But James is often away on his motorcycle, being free. Freedom isn’t the same for girls, so in the meantime Mary spends Thursday evenings with John."

Section C, which contains this passage, does much in the way of inverting typical gender roles while also shedding light upon them. Mary is able to have something akin to her own version of a sexual fantasy with James, perhaps even objectifying him. The status quo, however, remains her nights with John, a man much older than her and who cheats on his wife with Mary. 

“He goes on about this more than is necessary and Mary finds it boring, but older men can keep it up longer so on the whole she has a fairly good time.”

This passage, also from Section C, furthers notions brought up in the prior quote’s analysis. Mary continues to be objectified and here rationalizes her objectification through thinking that she is at least sexually gratified by the older John. 

“Everything becomes very underwater […].”

This quote, also from Section C, follows James and Mary getting stoned together. One might be able to presume that, here, Mary and James are sexually intimate, and Atwood chooses to privatize this act/image, and, in doing so, attempts to subvert traditional, patriarchal means of describing sex. 

 “He purchases a handgun, saying he needs it for target practice—this is the thin part of the plot, but it can be dealt with later—and shoots the two of them and himself.”

Here, Atwood effectively ignores the concept of how time has to move in a ‘normal’ story—John is able to step out of the narrative’s normal time continuum, obtain a handgun, and return to this same moment in the story. Atwood assures the reader that this issue will be solved at another point in the story, but it is not. 

“The rest of the story is about what caused the tidal wave and how they escape from it.”

This quote, from Section D, is as far as Atwood goes in explaining the tidal wave and its aftermath. It eschews plot—a thematic cornerstone of “Happy Endings” and much postmodernist literature—and instead focuses on the equality of Fred and Madge. 

“If you like, it can be ‘Madge,’ ‘cancer,’ ‘guilty and confused,’ and ‘bird watching.’"

Much like the quote prior, Atwood is disinterested in details, as she equates them to an archaic mode of writing that is replete with patriarchal overtones. Further, she offers the reader choice, as opposed to demanding that the reader be passive, and accept certain details. 

“You’ll still end up with A, though in between you may get a lustful, brawling saga of passionate involvement, a chronicle of our times, sort of.”

Here, we get, at a language level, the mixing of high and low/mass culture. Phrases like a “lustful, brawling saga of passionate involvement” are very bourgeois, but Atwood ends the sentence with “sort of,” a vague or ambiguous phrase that might be seen as lowbrow. This amalgam is common to works of postmodern literature. 

“The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.”

This passage is one of the more challenging ones in the story, in that postmodernist literature seeks to disavow or explode universal truths. At one level, death would seem to be the one universal truth Atwood accepts as inescapable. However, and at the same time, there is a circuit of rebirth created by returning to Section A in the story that can be read as an attempt to subvert the story’s end, or its figurative ‘death.’