The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
ISBN 0-7710-0813-9

Summary

A dystopian tale describing the life of a woman living in the mid-1980′s in Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian society that rose from the destruction of the United States after a coup. The tale is told out of order with a present tense first narrative voice, and is revealed at the end of the book to have been stitched together from cassette tapes discovered over a century later. Gilead is plagued by infertile couples, and so maintains strict control over women of proven fertility. “Unwomen” (lesbians, whores, unfertile women, or rebels) are sent for hard labor in “The Colonies.” Women who produce healthy babies (not “shredders” which are destroyed immediately) are guaranteed to never have to go to The Colonies.

Offred, the protagonist, is a “Handmaid,” or a woman assigned to a childless couple (The Commander and Serena Joy) for breeding purposes only. Any offspring she produces will be raised by that couple, and she would then be reassigned. The trio engage in Old Testament concubine-style sex, with the Handmaid lying between the wife’s legs to indicate that the sexual relations are proxy. Awkwardness and dissatisfaction ensue. In Biblical fashion, men are regarded as always virile, with the women being fertile or infertile in the manner of farmland. Although Offred is fertile, she fails to become pregnant and Serena Joy secretly instructs her to begin an affair with the chauffeur as The Commander is likely sterile. However, Offred has also been ordered by The Commander to have an affair with him, and they play Scrabble, talk, kiss, and have sex like an ordinary couple from days past. Eventually Offred is helped to escape by the chauffeur. Her fate is not told, but the epilogue, set some 150 years later, reveals that the story was told on cassette tapes.

Analysis

Within five minutes I was already thinking “Orwell did it better.” The opening chapters scream it out: “THIS IS A SECOND WAVE FEMINIST TRYING TO REWRITE NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.” It’s not that anybody but Orwell can do dystopian near-future fiction, but for goodness sake just write your own novel and don’t try to capitalize on someone else’s ideas. There’s a reason why movies like Brazil and V For Vendetta sucked; they were shabby copies instead of fresh interpretations of an idea. If there’s one thing a feminist author ought to know, it’s that deliberate failure to use her own voice is unforgivable. I also found the religious setting problematic. It wasn’t useful and has caused distracting criticism of the book. Orwell was smart enough to know to steer clear of religion in his work — readers of faith would fixate on what they perceived to be an outright assault on Christianity rather than a critique of the dangers of totalitarian government. This book would have gotten its point across much better and not drawn nearly as much off-topic controversy had Atwood found a more graceful way to handle the issue.

I was annoyed by such overt references such as black-market cigarettes and “in the houses of the commanders, there is still real coffee,” and the narrator’s discovery that “she was a woman who might bend the rules” too instantly makes me think of Winston’s hope that O’Brien can be trusted. The Though Police are transformed to “Eyes” and The Party to religion. Even the date of the book’s publication — 1985 — and the author’s decision not to push her dystopia to the not-so-distant future makes a connection to Orwell’s book. Gileadean society too closely mimics that of Oceania, with the only difference being that it is a theocratic society in a manner that parallels the Islamic revolution that overthrew Persia in 1979 and established the nation of Iran. Frankly, the book would have been better had the Orwellian references been thrown out and the tale were allowed to stand on its own dystopian merits, because as the book develops it gets better and does in fact have some original ideas.

In particular, the names of the women in the book interested me. It’s hard for many women to shake the idea that our customs regarding surnames leave women without family, lineage, or identity. Miss (Surname of Father) becomes Mrs. (Surname of Husband), but first names at least are retained, and as these are more commonly used, many contemporary feminists fail to see that as problematic. Atwood’s society completely deletes female identity. Women’s names are dictated based on who owns them. The narrator is Offred because she belongs to a Commander named Fred.

The main reason I could not completely buy into Atwood’s world is that women are so starkly enslaved at all social levels that I can’t believe anybody would go along with it. The antebellum South or Oceania are able to function because the social groups are stratified. In this world women of all groups are so abjectly oppressed that I can’t see how it could have possibly happened. The sheer effort it would take to compel women to stop working and take up professions as domestic property in the post-Feminist world is mind-boggling. I realize that the “on-the-ground” perspective of the narrator and the incomplete, unreliable and biased first-person voice makes the story more intimate and issue drive, but come on.

A small gaffe that I found amusing was the anthropologist, commenting on Offred’s tapes, is that they were “made obsolete by the compact disc.” One of the charming aspects of 1980′s fiction and film is its total failure to grasp the technical revolution that was just around the bend. We were just a few years away from the Internet and digital media. Compact discs are now obsolete. They certainly wouldn’t be used by a college professor in the twenty second century. Minor, but trivially laughable.

The only aspect of the book that genuinely touched me was The Commander’s desire to play Scrabble with Offred and his desire that she should kiss him like an affectionate wife. Very few Feminists bother to address how sexism wounds men as well as women, and his desire for affection and initmacy shows that these are common concerns for both genders. It also raises the issue that while sexism imprisons women in the role of those who are oppressed, men are imprisoned in the role of oppressors, which doubtless carries guilt and self-torture with it.

Another aspect that I wish I could have seen developed further (and which would have lent greater credibility to Atwood’s world) is the irony of Serena Joy’s career. It is too difficult for a system of inequality to maintain itself if the men have to hold the women down. The best sexist systems convince women to hold each other down by persuading them that it is the only way for their male deity and his male representatives to be pleased with them. Women who learn to out-patriarch the patriarchs are rewarded by men with positions of authority. Much like the African-American slaves who took pride in being “house slaves” rather than field hands, these women are content to be inferior, as long as they are given some power within the system. They fail to see the larger picture of oppression and how they perpetuate it. Whether they are to blame for that is not for me to say. But that does not make it less true. Serena Joy is an interesting character up until the part where I learned that after effectively preaching for women to retain strictly Biblical roles as the powerless property of men, she too loses all of her power and becomes a sit-at-home former televangelist. It would have been more interesting to see this character, who evokes memories of Anita Bryant, to be used as a teacher and role model for women rather than just another one of those who are oppressed.