Summary of chapter 5 of class 9 moments
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Answer:
Atwood explores the belief that humans have earned mastery over their environment. ‘[A]fter many years / of hard work’, the human in the first stanza surveys their environment and confidently asserts that they ‘own this’. This sense of entitlement is not limited to cultural structures, such as homes. The list greedily expands outward from ‘room’ and ‘house’ to ‘half-acre, square mile, island, country’, encompassing the whole natural world.
Whether simply in a ‘room’ or a whole ‘country’, the human here imagines themselves as always standing in the ‘centre’. However, believing that the environment revolves around us is a fallacy of human perception, as well as arrogance. In the second stanza, repulsed by the human’s claim of ownership, the plants, animals, land and elements all recoil from the human.
This withdrawal highlights how close the relationship with the environment was. Humans here are imagined as immersed in their environment: the trees protectively yet tenderly held people in their ‘soft arms’. Similarly, the first two stanzas contain only one long, flowing sentence, reflecting this connectedness. Atwood suggests that, as a result of our sense of entitlement, we have forfeited this close and protective relationship environment, leaving us vulnerable. The inability to breathe highlights the necessity of nature’s support.
In the final stanza, the environment speaks in short, sharp sentences which sound firm and authoritative. Nature speaks collectively, defying subordination by boldly stating ‘You own nothing’. In fact, strikingly, nature goes even further: ‘We never belonged to you […] It was always the other way round’. Atwood here radically reframes the relationship between nature and humans, challenging the concept of human dominance over the environment. Humans remain indebted to nature for their survival.
The use of ‘you’ in the poem is used to universally address all humans. Yet ‘you’ is also intensely personal. In this way Atwood confronts the reader with the idea that every individual must (re)consider their own attitudes and place in relation to their environment and the larger world.
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