Book Review: "The Handmaids Tale" by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaids Tale (1985)

4.5 Stars out of 5

Margaret Atwood

311 pages

Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
                           Don't get fooled again                            

Pete Townshend

Here in the summer of 2016 there seems to be a widespread interest in post-apocalyptic dystopias, at least as written in fiction and cinematic drama. One wonders what it is motivating such an interest; perhaps there is a sense that the modern grasp on our version of civilization is loosening, that it might take something as minor as a flu epidemic or a presidential vote to cause a collapse. It was a different world in 1985 when Margaret Atwood wrote “The Handmaids Tale”, her 6^th novel. It is tempting to look back at that era and wonder what existential worries were on her mind and in the Canadian social mind in general. For it is certain that Atwood writes this book with a Canadian sensibility: in her book, the despotic empire to the Canadian south is now known as the Republic of Gilead, and her heroine’s family attempts at a dash to safety is to the Canada of the book’s universe. Atwood has also infused this book with her long history of writing on women’s issues, on the depredations done to the environment, and has even brought some of the mythic sensibility she has used extensively in her poetry. Atwood is perhaps best known for her novels, winning the Booker Prize in 2000 for “The Blind Assassin”, as well as many other prizes. She has also published extensively in works of poetry, screenplays, children’s books, edited several books and even written three librettos. That being said, she has an ax to grind with her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, and she grinds it most expertly.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” has a title and religious sensibility inspired to some degree by the 14^th century Frame Tale by Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales”. Unlike Chaucer’s magnum opus, this book is written with a single, highly declarative, first person voice. This voice belongs to a young Bostonian woman in her early thirties, Offred. Offred opens her recitation of her situation in a voice so filled with anger it will almost certainly affect the reader on an emotional level. Offred was once a wife and a mother with a birth name. Now as she writes of her life, she is a handmaid to a high official in the Republic of Gilead by the name of Fred, Offred's husband and little girl lost to her forever. This government is a theocratic monster that rules the lives of all its citizens with a completely oppressive hand: there are no freedoms of any kind. As Offred begins her “reconstruction” of the events in the months leading to the overthrow of the US government and of her later life as a handmaid, she weaves a tale of personal oppression that is justified by the new government as a transition from “freedom to” to one of “freedom from”. Atwood has one of the mouthpieces from the new government (Aunt Lydia) explain to a group of women she is “instructing” that even though they may no longer have the freedoms to do the things they might want to do, they are now free from rape and other abuses by men. The reader will soon learn this is a gross misrepresentation of the new reality. It is however, a more than subtle dig by Atwood at the “at risk” lives of women in contemporary America.

The use by Atwood of the term Gilead may refer to the “Balm of Gilead” or perhaps to the Hebraic translation into English for Joy-Forever. It is certainly a name filled with biblical and literary allusions and almost certainly was chosen with care by Atwood as she works to create a world that has Christian aspirations but in fact is no different from the world of George Orwell’s “1984” or the historical world of Nazi Germany. Offred’s reconstruction is filled with examples of the mind and word control experienced by her and her contemporaries as they are being trained to be handmaidens to the various political elites in the government of Gilead. The handmaids are dressed head to toe in red with white blinders shielding any view of their faces or of their own views to/from either side. The handmaids each live with a man in power (commanders dressed in black) and their wives (dressed in blue), and a retinue of servants (the female cooks and maids, all dressed in green). In this dystopian future, there is widespread sterility due to environmental damage, and the handmaids have been chosen for their proven fertility to mate in a highly stylized manner with the commanders. Needless to say, this demeans the handmaids as persons, upsets the wives in blue, and greatly distorts the world views of the commanders as to their Earthly power.

 

As if to further humiliate both the wife and her husband’s government-sanctioned mistress, each time the commander takes the handmaiden for sex, the wife lies beneath the handmaiden in a manner designed to show she is part of the process – the reality is quite clearly, that this process badly hurts the wife and the handmaiden on a deep emotional level. The process is good enough for the male, but far less so for the females involved. Even the birth process has the wife sitting in a two seat birthing chair just behind the handmaiden as she gives birth. Needless to say, the handmaiden having done her “farm animal-like” duty is removed from the household forever, the baby given over to the wife, and the child raised by the commander and his wife. There is a harsh reality here too: the babies are in fact really raised by the house servants. All of these processes are done under a religious umbrella; an umbrella that may give the patina of sacred duty and behavior, but is really just one more means of authoritarian control.

Having displayed the harsh reality of this new totalitarian regime and its pervasive influence over all aspects of life; Atwood proceeds to detail the hypocrisy of Gilead. Anyone reading about the  sterile manner in which procreation takes place would be justified in wondering where the commanders found their true personal escapes. The government would presumably wish that they found such escape in fulfilling their duty to society/the government, or perhaps in church. It is easy to presume that these unorthodox sexual relations would leave the commanders sexually frustrated, alienate the commanders’ wives and that in addition to each couple’s reproductive sterility, their marital unions would also become emotionally sterile. In their search for the pleasure not found at home, the commanders create a quasi-sanctioned hide-away where they can to some extent reproduce the illusions of sex as peddled in the cathouses and bars of the ante-Gilead era. This might be a politically logical back-water in Gilead, but it really seems like another opportunity for Atwood to explore how women are used, abused and discarded in the contemporary sex industry. Her depiction feels real and it is clear as one reads this book, that the context of Gilead's whorehouse  is not the only context in which women are second class citizens.

As the book reached for its climax, it becomes clear that it is not (as the Gilead government asserts)just the women that have become sterile from industrial pollution. Such an assertion may provide balm to these medieval male egos, but it is very unlikely to be the case from a scientific point of view. If the commander’s wife cannot procreate, and if the commander cannot either (no matter the façade that is put on), then what is the handmaiden and the elite couple to do in order to obtain a child? They find a solution that is as artificial as having the wife lay beneath the handmaiden as her husband/commander penetrates the handmaiden. The details are familiar enough to anyone in modern society and for spoiler-aversion reasons won’t be gone into here. The key is that Gilead is a society built on hypocrisy: they scream their biblical injunctions, they require the lower classes to live by them and enforce such adherence with an iron hand, but they do not require the elite to live them, only to appear to do so. It’s so much like the line from The Who’s 1971 anthem, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.

The themes that Atwood explores in “The Handmaid’s Tale” are or should be required reading for every single person voting in 2016: lying by changing the meaning of words, hypocrisy, the oppression of women (and by extension anyone not in power), the duality of "freedom to" vs. "freedom from", and the long term/unknown damage to our environment/to ourselves. These are great themes presented with remarkable control of the language used by Atwood. The use of such a simple/declarative voice gives added emotional weight to the messages inherent in the themes. The primary flaw for me is that book feels tendentious; it is too much of a sermon constructed from a fictionalized scenario designed to take the reader to a specific place that is supposed to be inevitable. Could Gilead form in the US – yes, without a doubt? I do doubt that it would form as easily as described in Atwood’s book. I doubt also that it is the most likely scenario for the loss of American freedoms. I think such losses are possible, not necessarily probable. I also believe that when “the new boss” takes over, it will be done by the slow steps of an evolution, not the big steps of a revolution. I believe and fear that the moneyed interests will slowly erode our rights as they control more and more of our government. Then one day, we will wake up and ask ourselves, “what have we become”?

Read this book, it is very much worth reading and being shaken by. Don’t use it or my worries stated above as signposts for the loss of American freedoms. Do vote and do watch carefully for charlatans proclaiming they are working for you, when after a little thought, you will realize they work for themselves alone. Some aspect of the human condition seems to require that there will always be someone out there that wants to control you. Do not let them. Use the rights you have left and vote with your head and your heart, not your gut. Stay free.