In my recent post on apocalyptic fiction, I promised you a post on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – and here it is! The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 and is therefore the most recent of my reviewed books of Atwood (I have previously written reviews on The Edible Woman and Surfacing). However, it is actually the first book I read by Atwood – I read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for the first time because it kept appearing in connection with science fiction and dystopian literature. That sparked my interested and I was not disappointed – on the contrary, I think The Handmaid’s Tale is a very important work of the genre. It also encouraged me to read more of Atwood’s books, as my previous reviews here indicate. [Massive spoilers follow].

38447The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Offred, a handmaid in the theocratic Republic of Gilead. The novel is set in what once was Boston and Cambridge – the names of the cities are not mentioned, but there are obvious references to indicate this. In between reading and re-reading this novel, I have visited Boston – and this added another layer of depth to my second reading experience. I have stood on the shore of the river and on the campus of Harvard, both of which are showplaces of the novel. Harvard (again not mentioned by name) is grimly abstracted – what was once a place of education is now the place where offenders are hanged, their dead bodies shown off by hanging them on the wall for days.

Gilead came into being after coup in which the president and the entire Congress of the United States were assassinated. Before that (or tied into it), there presumably was some sort of catastrophe, probably of nuclear nature, as there are references to nuclear clean-up sides – places where offenders who are not sentenced to death are sent. But ultimately, their sentence is also a death sentence, since sooner or later they will die from radiation poisoning. Offred is a survivor of the catastrophe, who is now assigned to her post as a handmaid in the house of an influential man, the “commander”. A handmaid’s purpose is to bear children and nothing else. Once a month, Offred, the commander and the commander’s wife take part in a ceremony which ideally would result in the pregnancy of Offred. However, the birth rate has continually been declining – which is one of the reasons why Gilead was established in the first place. Gilead has total control over women and their bodies. (Most) women are deprived of everything – they are not allowed to have possessions, they have to wear specific clothing, basically they are reduced to their ability to bear children.

The most important fact to know about Gilead is that it is a theocracy. It is based entirely on concepts in the Bible, specifically the Old Testament. Large parts are taken from the story of Rachel and Leah, both married to Jacob, who competed in bearing children by using their handmaids as proxies. Ritual greetings such as “Praise be” or “Under His Eye” are all very reminiscent of the omnipresent God of Christianity – though it is never explicitly mentioned in the book that Gilead is based on Christianity. It is, however, quite obvious with a bit of historical knowledge. Many of the atrocities in the book have at one point or other already been committed in the name of (the Christian) God in real-life history. Atwood herself states in her essay “Writing Utopia” that “in The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing happens that the human race has not already done at some time in the past”. Therefore, the novel is a highly realistic “what if” scenario, which shows us what could happen if radical Christians would take over the US government – and as we all know, there are quite a lot of those in the US. Controlling reproduction is something many countries have attempted at some point or other – just look at Texas! If it weren’t for Wendy Davis, Texas might just have restricted abortion, basically controlling women’s wombs.

Atwood also states that “no society ever strays completely far from its roots”; taking this into account, Gilead is a revival of the Puritan society out of which the US originated. Puritans were, similar to the enforcers of Gilead, very restrictive – they actually came to New England to practice their religion (which includes persecution of sinners), not for complete freedom of religion for everyone. Puritan New England was a theocracy in which all laws were dictated by God.

All people in Gilead are assigned specific roles. Men are the ones in power; they can either be the highest ranking “commanders”, the secret state police-like “Eyes”, the “Angels” who are soldiers who fight in the war or the “Guardians” who work in menial positions. Women, however, are mostly deprived of all their rights. Their assigned roles are even color-coded for ease of recognition. “Wives”, wearing blue, are at the top; they are married to the commanders and have relative freedom, however, they are not allowed to work. “Handmaids”, wearing red, are fertile women who are assigned to a commander’s household for the purpose of bearing children. “Aunts”, wearing brown, are the only women who have an illusion of power: they are the one who indoctrinate handmaids. Usually they are old-ish infertile women who grab the only chance of power they will have in Gilead. “Marthas”, dressed in green, are basically housemaids who cook and clean. Lastly, “Econowives” are wives of men in lower positions and wear green-red-blue.

At the center is, of course, the protagonist and handmaid Offred. Offred is not her real name (which we never learn) – handmaids take the name of the commander they are assigned to, so she is “of Fred” (and also, “offered”, which I’m sure is a pun intended by Atwood). Stripping handmaids of their names takes away the last part of personal identity they used to have. The are birth machines and nothing else. Every handmaid gets three chances, that is, if a handmaid doesn’t get impregnated by commander #1 within a limited time frame, she will be assigned to commander #2. As we later learn, most commanders appear to be infertile as a result of the catastrophe – though in Gilead, there is no such thing as infertile men, and saying so is punishable (probably by death). Handmaids who do get pregnant often did so illegally, for example by receiving help from a doctor. And even if they carry a baby to term, there is still a chance that their baby is an “unbaby”, a baby with a birth defect (as a result from contamination).

Offred narrates the novel from her perspective. Over the course of the novel we learn that she used to be married and had a daughter. She doesn’t know what happened to her family after the coup. She chose to become a handmaid because it was the best option she had in the new society – the alternative would have been to have been sent to “the colonies” (which can be either waste clean-up sites or farms). Offred often spends her time with thinking – ingressing into her inner self and recalling her memories. While doing so, she often uses “we” instead of “I”; she speaks for all women (or all handmaids). She is a very passive protagonist because she is so limited in her role as a handmaid. There is a certain ambiguity in her perspective; you might wonder how female readers can identify with such a passive protagonist. Offred accepts her circumstances to stay alive. She is a heroine, but not in a heroic way. Her former best friend Moira, on the other hand, is heroic because she gave the ultimate sacrifice – she was excluded from the society of Gilead and is now a whore in a shady nightclub. Despite its strict laws against assaulting women, Gilead still has such secret organizations.

At the other end of the social spectrum is Serena Joy, the commander’s wife. As a wife, she leads a relatively free life – as free as it gets in Gilead. She runs the household, knits and does garden work, but she is excluded from economy and politics. Serena Joy used to be a TV celebrity before Gilead, something which doesn’t exist anymore. We only see her through the filtered perception of Offred, so we can only speculate what her actual opinion on Gilead or her attitude towards Offred is. Offred is certain that Serena Joy hates her for what she is. However, Serena is elemental in pushing the plot forward towards the end of the novel.

Some scholars have the twisted idea that Gilead is actually a feminist utopia (not dystopia). This is because Gilead enforces some things which radical feminists have fought for, such as a complete ban of pornography, banning cosmetics and making rape punishable by death. Men are not allowed to be present at childbirth, not even doctors. Also, it is actually women who commit the indoctrinations, the Aunts. I disagree with this theory because ultimately every woman in Gilead is dominated by men. It’s men who have the real power and who enforce it. But I also don’t agree with radical feminist views of banning pornography or cosmetics, because I think women should have the right to do whatever the hell they want to do – even if it is objectifying themselves. (Which is not good, but prohibiting something is usually also not good). I think that Gilead is a satire on radical feminism. It looks at society and shows us how ridiculous some ideas are, but it also shows us the possible consequences if they should come into being.

This also accounts for the religious fanaticism, which I assume is what made Gilead possible. Christians are usually easily offended by reading The Handmaid’s Tale because of its “negative depiction of Christians” and its “graphic sex scenes” – but actually, neither is true. The sex scene in the novel is absurdly disembodied, it could just as well be a description of a person buttering a piece of bread. Atwood herself has stated that the Bible has much more graphic scenes of reproduction and rape than her novel could ever have.

But more importantly, Christianity is never explicitly mentioned in the novel, nor is anything that would indicate it. It’s in fact the reader who fills in these blanks with a little bit of social and historical knowledge, which then makes it obvious that Gilead is a Christian theocracy. However, Offred herself mentions in one chapter of the book that she is a Christian and says her own prayer. This prayer, derived from the Lord’s Prayer, is highly individualized; apparently this is a no go for some Christians, as this holy text is abstracted. She personalizes it and makes almost every line her own; she says “My god who art in heaven” and asks “I wish I knew what you were up to”. Only one line is unchanged: “deliver us from evil” – because evil is everywhere she looks. Her despair becomes clear in the closing lines of her prayer when she says “how can I keep on”. She gets not actual closure from praying but she also doesn’t deny the existence of a god.

The entirety of The Handmaid’s Tale becomes ironic once you have finished reading Offred’s eyeswitness account – following it are “Historical Notes” in the form of a transcript of the “twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention” (held in the year 2195, roughly 200 years after Gilead). Here, we learn that Offred recorded her account on “thirty or so tapes”, presumably after escaping the commander’s household and waiting for a transport out. We also learn that it was a man who transcribed her account into a manuscript, apparently editing it to his whim, putting it into 46 chapters and 15 parts. He also named it “The Handmaid’s Tale“, apparently as a nudge to Chaucer. All of this then makes Offred’s story a highly unreliable source of information, because it has been at such intense mercy of a male editor. It’s all the more ironic that Offred during the course of the novel says “If it’s a story I’m telling, I have control over the ending”, but in fact she has no control at all. She’s trapped in a construction of fictional mediation, which is followed by more fiction.

This frame story of academics who study Gileadean society aims to validate the text; it depicts academics, mostly a Professor Piexoto, talking about the tapes. It gives the story more authority, but ultimately it is almost exclusively men who discuss Offred’s account. They have the last word about how we perceive the story, they might even go as far as constructing history as they please. They even tell bad jokes as comic relief and mention weird leisure activities during their conference, such as a “nature walk” or “fishing expeditions”, somewhat ridiculing themselves and their work.

Some (real-life) scholars believe that the fictional scholars of 2195 are paving the way for a new Gilead, since it is obviously exclusively the men who have the last word in every situation there. Though there are women present at the Symposium, they don’t have much to say. The men have more authority in the “Historical Notes” than the female eyewitness (Offred) has. The men claim the right to define her and determine the meaning of her story, therefore the meaning of women. The Historical Notes take the focus entirely off of Offred – it should therefore be “Professor Piexoto’s Tale“. During her account, Offred says “Context is all.” In relation to the Historical Notes this is again a very ironic remark – the context of the story changes completely. The Handmaid’s Tale is a deeply pessimistic novel by itself, but the Historical Notes and their tendency to another patriarchal society make it even more pessimistic.

The Handmaid’s Tale encompasses a wealth of possibilities. I have barely scratched the surface with this little all-round-review. If you’re up for it, you could write entire books about this masterpiece of dystopian literature. In my opinion, it is one of the most well-crafted but also one of the most scarily realistic works of the genre I have encountered so far. When I first read it, I was convinced that this novel could easily become reality in the US – and were it not for Wendy Davis, we might have been one step closer to it.

Sources:

  • Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. First American Edition 1986. USA: Fawcett Crest / Ballantine Books, 1989. Print.
  • Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Guides: The Handmaid’s Tale. USA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. Print.
  • VanSpanckeren, Kathryn, and Jan Garden Castro. Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Print.
  • Wisker, Gina. Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.
  • …and a few copied pages of which I don’t have the titles and authors.