The Handmaid's Tale

My grandparents left Uganda in the 1970s, forced out by mounting racial tension and changes in the law making it impossible for Indians to own businesses and property. They just missed the violence, but I've heard stories of other family members, who lingered. One member, watched as her husband was brutally beaten and murdered. I didn't ask what happened to her, and I don't really want to know. I recite this with horror, but with a sort of cool detachment. It happened in a far off place; it's ancient history.

I feel that this story (The Handmaid's Tale) is not quite fiction. It could have happened to me if I were Jewish in 1930s Europe; it could be happening to me now if I were born a few thousand miles to the east; it could happen to show more me in the future under some Donald Trump-esque regime. It's a story that history writes, forgets, and re-writes in an endless cycle. show less

I try not to hold this against the books, but the main reason I have such an aversion to dystopian fiction is the gaggle of morons who pounce on their keyboards every time something mildly unfortunate happens in the world, slam the caps lock button, and type, "TIME TO MOVE 1984 INTO THE NON-FICTION SECTION, AMERICA!"

I enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale, but after I set it down, I immediately said to myself, "Reading the comments is going to ruin this for you." Sure enough, I look on goodreads at the top reviews, and they've all been edited within the last few months to start off, "Now that we live in a country run by Donald Trump..." How do people live their lives like this? I'll never understand it.

Here's the thing. There's nothing wrong with show more trying to understand a novel's context, because no book is 100% independent from contemporary politics and culture, but analyzing the context of a novel has absolutely nothing to do with whether the author got it right or not. The strength of The Handmaid's Tale or 1984 or Brave New World or any like them cannot be entirely based on the author guessing the future correctly. Where's the literary merit in that? A man that I love but do not respect once said, "Plausible scenarios do not make for good literature." He then demanded that I repeat it after him, and I did, but I would now revise it to something more like, "Accurately representing reality or prophesying events to come is a quality that's completely unrelated to good writing."

So, independent of all that, is The Handmaid's Tale a good book? Yeah, I think so. Atwood makes it easy to sympathize with Offred's plight, and even though the men are all kind of blandly stupid, I found myself invested in their stories. The background to the formation of the state doesn't really hold up under much scrutiny, but the novel is a success on an emotional level if not a logical one.

Now, as far as the ending goes, it can go eat its own shit for all eternity. I'm not talking about the end to Offred's story, which was fine by me. I mean this found footage dogshit that people have been pulling for centuries for inexplicable reasons. Why do authors say to themselves, "I know what will make this story better: one extra layer of distance between the narrator and the reader! Why wouldn't that improve things?" They do this over and over and over again and I have never in any book I've ever read seen it do anything other than detract from the story.

If you're into dystopian fiction, go ahead and read this, and if you're into getting really angry, read the reviews. show less

Offred is a handmaid's whose story unfolds in Atwood's famous dystopian novel. She lives in a world run by men, where women are powerless. They've lost their right to make decision, to learn how to read and even to have a job. The rulers claim they have "freed" the women from the painful tasks of having to find a husband or take care of themselves. Any women who are fertile are turned into handmaids and assigned to a home where they are forced to bear children for a married couple.

When I began the book I assumed this was a dystopian set decades in the future, where the women had no memory of life as we know it. I quickly learned that Offred used to have a job, money of her own, a husband and child, etc. The decline into her current show more policed state was swift and terrifying.

I loved Atwood's bleak prose. Offred's resignation and despair were palpable. The tense relationships between the characters were thrilling. Offred was forced to walk a tight rope of suspicion in every conversation, never knowing who she could trust.

In one scene Offred is using butter she hid and saved from a meal as lotion on her skin. It's been so long since she's been anything but the potential carrier of a child that the concept of being loved is almost obsolete to her now. She says...

"As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will some day get out, that we will be touched again, in love or desire."

It was the small acts of rebellion like this, breed from a spark of hope, that made Offred such a heartbreaking character. After Offred loses her ability to support herself she struggles in her relationship with her husband. That shift of dependance in their relationship changed everything...

"We are not each other's, anymore. Instead, I am his."

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Though it's 25 years old, it's more relevant than ever. Atwood's writing reveals the story bit by bit, allowing the horror of the changed society to creep up slowly. The story is masterfully told, creating a chilling world that's a far too easy to imagine. show less

''But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve.''

Imagine: You are a woman, and you have no name. Your name has been taken from you. All identity and individuality vanquished. Your name has been replaced by the word Of and the first name of your Master. You are Offred, Ofglen, Ofcharles, you are a nobody, you belong to a man who's not your husband, but someone who uses your body as a vessel for procreation. If you do not provide a child, you are banished to the Colonies, to clear away the toxic mud and die.

This is the harrowing world of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Strongly echoing George Orwell's 1984, we are witnessing the USA after a coup show more which established a totalitarian government. Who are the ones in power now? The Army? The Church? The two combined? Whoever they are, one of their aims is to turn women into creatures that are no longer considered human beings, but something a little superior to animals.

One of the most dramatic and poignant sequences of the book is a flashback to the day the coup took place.Offred describes the invasion in the Congress, the massacre of its Members and the President's, the day she discovers that her personal bank account has been handed over to her husband, naturally, without notice or explanation. It becomes known that the same has happened to every bank account that belongs to a woman. They have no right to have money, to work or to read.Furthermore, our narrator loses her job because the library is closed down under the threat of the army of the new State. The Constitution of the Unites States of America exists no more. The way in which Atwood describes the aftermath of the coup sent chills down my spine. The raw, but poetic language conveys the new, nightmarish, brutal reality clearly.

The relationship between Offred and her ''owner'', the Commander is a complicated one. It is chilling in the sense that you feel something is about to happen, to change. There is great tension whenever the two characters are together as we share her suspicions and fear. Offred's relationship with Nick, the chauffer, is a dead-ringer for Winston's affair with Julia in 1984 and an additional reason for the reader to feel uncomfortable over Offred's future.

Her only way to escape her reality lies with her mind. Her thoughts and memories of an era of freedom. She isn't brainwashed, just as Winston wasn't brainwashed. The new States with their pious doctrines and the Ministry of Truth have failed to contaminate every single soul. There are some who remember and wish for the civilized world of the past -however problematic-, where women had identity and independence, where love wasn't a crime punished by death.

Offred takes heart only at the thought of her daughter for whom she hasn't lost hope that she is alive.It is the only way to keep her sanity, amidst the violence of her society. There is violence towards the women who are himiliated, punished for transgression and executed, there is violence towards the men who are believed to be members of the Opposition. They are vicioucly killed under false pretenses, in a way that turns the repressed women into beasts.

The Handmaid's Tale is a classic of our times. Is it original? No. After 1984 no dystopian novel can be called ''original'', but unlike Orwell's bleak universe, Atwood allows a brief glimpse of hope, makes us think that all is not lost, that there are some -however few- who can fight against Hell and retain their sanity. show less

The way this is talked about is very different from what the novel is. Thankfully the afterword and the following lecture touch on this in part. It's precisely not a feminist dystopian warning about the future, but a more complicated story using feminist themes. There's no gender war - instead a lot of complicity in the new world, which is clearly a dystopia, but not a didactic lesson about them. It reminded me a lot about Kindred in that the most effective and uncomfortable parts of the narrative is the narrator becoming numb to, or even participating in what should be transgressions. We also get very passive narratives where the protagonist isn't out to topple the system, undo wrongs or even remotely the center of what's happening. show more While this is certainly more realistic, it's also breaking the conventions of storytelling and that might be the least talked about part I enjoyed the most. There's a Hobbit-esque frame narrative where the Handmaid's Tale itself is an object in its own world which helps justify the sometimes baffling side tracks and hypotheticals posed in the story. show less

I've been resisting the hubub over the Hulu series, but this article pushed me into re-reading the book: https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/anti-blackness-handmaids-tale

First, re-reading it 20 years later was satisfying. Many of the books I loved in high school and college have lost their allure on re-reading (eg, 1984, The Great Gatsby). The Handmaid's Tale holds up. Atwood is not just a polemicist (though she is that); she is also an artist. While she's smacking you in the face with her social commentary, she's also bathing your aching head in her soothing, skillful prose.

Second, re the Bitch magazine writer's assertion that African-American women's experience is applied wholesale to white women while African-American women show more themselves are erased, yes and no. Or rather no and yes. It seems clear to me that Atwood was interested in exploring the logical extension of conservative Christian theocracy's attitudes toward women, based on real theocratic states of the past and present, which is quite different than the supposed biblical justifications for slavery as it was practiced in the United States.

Was Atwood negligent in failing to consider African-American women's experience? You betcha. That's a significant failing of the book. Is she guilty of wholesale appropriation of African-American women's experience for the sake of drumming up sympathy for white women that they don't deserve? No, I don't think so. show less

A swift, hard slap of a book, shocking both both for its content and it's unrelenting bleakness. Atwood's dystopian fantasy of an totalitarian Christian America deserves some credit for consistency. The fictional world she has created here is completely imagined and none of its characters escape its horror, or even get much of a reprieve from it. This novel's emotional palate is dominated by isolation and constant fear. Reading it is, in some ways, a discomfiting experience, but it's tightly plotted and well paced. Even after I'd decided I didn't much like it, I stayed up well past my bedtime to see how its unnamed narrator ended up. She, by the way, is one of the best features of the book, a courageous, honest, and human voice fighting show more to survive in an almost comically brutal and inhuman social environment. She's not a particularly likely narrator, having no discernible interest in literature and having led a rather unexceptional life before becoming enslaved by the Sons of Jacob, but Atwood's decision to make her the focus of her novel pays off. Her tale-telling becomes both an act of rebellion and a desperate, inspiring bid for survival, and I can't remember the last time I rooted so hard for a character to make it out of a book alive.

Still, I've got to confess that I'm confounded by this book's popularity and by the numerous raves it gets here. It's so unrelentingly depressing that it sometimes seems like a pure product of the Republic of Gilead instead of a rallying cry against it. It's also hard for me to think of Atwood's novel as anything but a product of its time, that time being the mid-eighties when liberals and counterculture types watched, aghast, as the Reagan revolution and the Moral Majority made "traditional values" their rallying cry in a bid to undo the social shifts of the nineteen sixties and seventies. As might be expected, Atwood exposes the hypocritical lusts of her future society´s totalitarian moralists, but she completely misses some of its larger ironies, such as American Christianity's general acceptance of free-market capitalism and the consumer society. "The Handmaid's Tale" was also written before the rise to prominence of sex-positive "third wave" feminism and its subsequent assimilation into mainstream culture, and this robs it of some of its relevance. In fact, most of this novel's ideas about gender seem rooted in a rather unimaginative reading of seventies-era second wave feminism, and unlike the works of, say, Angela Carter or Katherine Dunn, "The Handmaid's Tale" doesn't seem very interested in redefining, or even playing along the edges of, already established gender roles. There are few grey areas here, even in the most private thoughts of Atwood's narrator. I like to think that really great literature expands the boundaries of human possibility, but I can't say that that happens here. While there's nothing wrong with writer's having ideologies or political opinions, Atwood's seem to constrain her here. The imaginative boundaries of this novel seem to have been set before the author even put pen to paper. As seventies-era feminism recedes into the past and readers are less familiar with the political debates that inform this book, I can't help but think that "The Handmaid's Tale" will be robbed of much of its context and, with it, most of its meaning.

Of course, you could argue that the narrator of "The Handmaid's Tale" isn't the center of the book at all. According to this argument, what really keeps readers turning the pages are the Sons of Jacob themselves, or, better said, the totalitarian impulse that motivates them. While I'm neither a Christian or a conservative, I have a suspicion that "The Handmaid's Tale" is one of those books that tells us less about the motives of its villains, in this case, America's cultural and religious reactionaries, than what the author imagines those motives to be. To say that her portrayal of them lacks subtlety is an understatement. I was far too young to vote when Atwood's book was published, but I get the impression that the events described in it would have seemed laughably implausible even in an America where Pat Robertson, of all people, could win Iowa's Republican caucus. Of course, I must admit that some of this book's appeal lies in its funhouse mirror portrayal of American life; every facet of American society seems turned grotesquely inside-out here. The familiar has become horrific in "The Handmaid's Tale," and to those who struggle to survive in Gilead, even the most prosaic elements of modern America seem to belong to a long-lost paradise. Iran, which is, as of this writing, a real live repressive misogynistic theocracy, is mentioned in the book's final pages, and I'd be interested to know how an Iranian reader would react to "The Handmaid's Tale." As for myself, I can't say I was terribly impressed or irrevocably changed by it. show less