Stone Mattress

“Next there are shots of calamities: a multiple car-crash pileup, a fallen tree that’s bashed off part of a house, a snarl of electrical wires dragged down by the weight of the ice and flickering balefully, a row of sleet-covered planes, stranded in an airport, a huge truck that’s jackknifed and tipped over and is lying on its side with smoke coming out. An ambulance is on the scene, a fire truck, a huddle of raingear-clad operatives: someone’s been injured, always a sight to make the heart beat faster. A policeman appears, crystals of ice whitening his moustache; he pleads sternly with people to stay inside. It’s no joke, he tells the viewers. Don’t think you can brave the elements!” 

When Constance turns on the television to hear updates on the winter storm, the newscast emphasizes how dangerous the storm is and how people should stay inside and not risk their lives by leaving their homes. This idea of one staying inside where it is safer references Constance’s hesitance to enter the real, outside world and instead retreat back into the fantasy world she created. This quote also reflects Atwood’s motif that casts winter as a deadly elemental force.

“The implication is that Constance has failed to be prepared, which in fact is true. It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.” 

Constance is hopeful to hold on to any wonder that can come to her and feels that being prepared all the time hinders that possibility. Being prepared for everything in life would mean that Constance would have to face the real world. Instead, she’d rather live in a fantasy world. However, even when she enters Alphinland, she doesn’t know what is going to happen.

“If she’d foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better. It would have had a shape, a more defined structure; it would have had boundaries. As it is, it’s grown like urban sprawl.” 

Constance is so unprepared in life that she doesn’t even plan out her stories. She would rather place boundaries on the fantasy setting to keep the public out, as it is her world and she is the one who shapes it. Nevertheless, she needs its commercial success to provide her a paycheck.