Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood: 
The Handmaid’s Tale (4*)

Having come to realise that the horrifically violent television serialisation of The Handmaid’s Tale exceeds by far anything in the original, I got the book. I certainly would not watch it. From what I’ve read, the televised version falls little short of militant Islamic beheading videos.

So, what did I make of the book? In essence, it’s a bit silly. Am I going to get into in trouble for saying that? It is feminist fiction about the subjugation of women in a totalitarian patriarchy. 

In the Republic of Gilead, women are the property of men. Some even take the names of the men to whom they belong. The narrator, Offred, ‘Of-Fred’ (sounds like ‘offered’), belongs to Fred, a ‘Commander’. She is one of the handmaids whose role is to bear children to leading men when their wives no longer can. Other women have other specified roles.

Handmaids wear colour-coded religious habits with winged hoods to prevent seeing anywhere other than on the ground ahead. They are pious and submissive, and walk with bowed heads. They are not allowed to read or write, or look at others, with compliance enforced by a system of severe physical punishments. Once each month, they are ceremonially raped by their commanders and their wives until they either conceive or are discarded.

Offred may go out, but only in the company of another handmaid, Ofglen. They are only allowed to whisper in permitted phrases.

… we peer at each other’s faces, looking down the white tunnels of cloth that enclose us…
“Blessed be the fruit,” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us.
“May the Lord open,” I answer, the accepted response.
… “The war is going well, I hear,” she says,
“Praise be,” I reply.
“We’ve been sent good weather.”
“Which I receive with joy.” (p29)

They pass through checkpoints and look at executed corpses hanging on a wall. Offred secretly needs to know that her husband from her previous life is not among them.

And here lies my problem. Offred, and everyone else in the republic, previously lived in a free Western society. She had her own name, friends, summer dresses, a house, a car, a cat, a husband, a child and a career. Then, suddenly, one day she finds her bank account has been frozen, and on arriving at work that she and all women have been “let go” from their jobs. She and her husband try unsuccessfully to escape. She is sent to a training school to learn her new duties.

It remains vague how long it took to establish the republic, how big it is or how its economy works. The changes seem to have taken place within just a few years because Offred previously had a child and is still of child-bearing age. Gilead also seems quite small but there are references to slaves, colonies and wars. Tourists and trade delegations visit from ‘normal’ countries. It is difficult to imagine how such a place could function.

In other words, albeit an entertaining read, I find the concept ridiculous. Whereas the post apocalyptic society in, say, The Chrysalids, is entirely believable, this is not. Could we really within the space of a few years move from a present day western society to one in which women are slaves to cardboard-character men and forced to take specific roles? Would we have stood for it?

But I’ve been had. I’ve taken it too literally. It’s a satire. It does not matter whether it could be possible. What matters is that this is what a brutal patriarchy, or any other repressive regime, might feel like. And yet, for me, it gave no strong sense of terror or foreboding. Perhaps the televised version does. I’m still not going to watch it. I have no desire to read the recent sequel, The Testaments, either.

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985. Today, this kind of tyranny would be more of a possibility through big data, compulsory device tracking, surveillance cameras and denial of rights to specific groups or individuals, which could be any of us, men or women. Indeed, in some parts of the world, we can see it happening now. How far could it go?

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

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