"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood (published 1984)

I could only stand to read the first few pages of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
(1984) before feeling that slight creeping of an oncoming panic attack spreading throughout my body. I closed the book. The scenes were too incongruous; something too familiar mixed with  an extreme injustice: a school gym, familiar with its polished wood floors and basketball nets, made into a sparse bunker for women, beds lined up as in an orphanage or hospital. It was late when I peered into this dystopia and that night I had nightmares. I don’t remember what they were. But I knew that I would read the book in full this year (I had tried four years ago and failed to finish), and I knew that the next time I would open it to read I would, like the main character Offred, have to *steel myself* as she does to continue allowing myself to take in the story. Disclaimer: I haven’t watched the new TV series based off of this book and I don’t intend to.


The story is told from the perspective of Offred, a handmaid in a place called The Republic of Gilead. Women in this place have been sanctioned off, split into various groups that resemble a hierarchy: the Wives, the handmaids, the econowives, the maids. The people who live in the Republic of Gilead still remember their past lives before the extreme conservatism of the Republic came into fruition. This is part of the reason why Atwood’s tale is so horrific. Perhaps it is easy to swallow evils when one is born into that world of evil and knows nothing else, at least experientially. But if one was not, and knew something before the dominant oppressive structure of power (in this instance, Gilead), the struggle to rectify, accept, conform, or rebel against the ideology oppressing them is that much harder, that much more psychologically disruptive. And yet there are moments of clarity, however unsettling:


“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. What is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. *We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.*” (p. 56 – 57. Italics mine.) 


Offred’s admission that although what is happening may look, feel, and indeed act differently than what was happening before while still retaining a semblance of the same: that the work is the same, that one cannot possibly fathom the intricate goings-on of life as it is without complete annihilation of the self as subject: this is perhaps what is meant by working at ignoring – the point is, as is clear by the end of the passage: to set the self free, or at least move towards an emancipation of some sort. And it’s not like the whole of the story is about each character’s powerful ignoring of what is happening to them. It is precisely their absolute awareness that leads to their ambivalence to the evils being done which allows them to communicate with one another, and further, to scheme, to plan, for what may lie ahead. It distances so one can perceive and this is perfectly captured by Offred’s story.

The Handmaid’s Tale may be understood as a woman’s dystopia - but doing so points directly to the Republic of Gilead’s problem. Let me explain. The structure of the Republic is problematic for many reasons, but one of them is because it sets genders apart. Female on one side and male on the other. Women are used for certain purposes. Offred’s duty as a handmaid is to provide the Commander (a man, with a Wife) a child. Like the story from the Bible’s Genesis, the Wife, who cannot bear children, gives her husband other women with which he can produce offspring. In The Handmaid’s Tale this is done quite crudely, with Wife, Commander, and Handmaid all in one room, the Commander having sex with the handmaid while the handmaid holds the Wife’s hand as Wife looks on, all this happening under bright fluorescent lights, where no touching is allowed save for what I’ve already described. Worse, if the handmaid conceives a child, that child is not the biological mother’s. After the baby’s birth, it is then “owned” by Commander and Wife. 


“What’s going on in this room, under Serena Joy’s silvery canopy, is not exciting. It has nothing to do with passion or love or romance or any of those other notions we used to titillate ourselves with. It has nothing to do with sexual desire, at least for me, and certainly not for Serena. Arousal and orgasm are no longer thought necessary; they would be a symptom of frivolity merely, like jazz garters or beauty spots… this is not recreation, even for the Commander. This is serious business. The Commander, too, is doing his duty.” (p. 95)


If this, on the surface, seems like a woman’s Hell, then let me play Devil’s Advocate. The Commander isn’t put in such a gracious position either, forced to mate with someone he may or may not like or even be attracted to. Also, he must live with an assigned Wife in close quarters, someone who he may or may not be attracted to. Worse, someone he may or may not even *like*. Even worse, the Wife – on the higher end of the hierarchy in Gilead – with her jewels and cigarettes, perfumes and lotions not allowed to the other women – may or may not be a controlling, jealous, and heavily authoritarian herself (from this tale, however, it seems quite clear that Serena Joy – the Commander’s Wife - is an unpleasant woman that fits the description, partly because the beauty and talent from her previous life as a famous singer was flushed down the toilet with the rest of the Old World, leaving her, seemingly, very bitter). Still, readers can gauge Offred’s character for themselves when she asks herself, at the end of a “session”: Is is worse for me or for her?


What happens when rules as ludicrous as this are placed and enforced within a peoples is that persons under the strain of such oppression will inevitabley break the rules, which is mostly just a breaking of norms and mores that have become part of an unjust social code. As a sinister tactic to get Offred pregnant faster, Serena Joy allows her to see Nick, a middle man between the Commanders and other men who basically just does the big men’s bidding. Fortunately, Offred actually is attracted to Nick and he to her, and, breaking rules, Offred frequents his room regularly, rather than just the once, to allow herself some enjoyment in the dark, foreboding, excruciatingly oppressive world that she inhabits. Nick never says no; it is his way of breaking rules as well: these meetings are strictly forbidden. In the Republic, offenses such as these are punished by public hanging. The Commander, unable to just use Offred for sex, asks that she secretly visit him for nothing else but board games and banter. This, strictly forbidden, is another rule broken to allow the both of them to cope with the trauma of consensual rape (there’s nothing else I can call it). We learn of a woman, a handmaid, named Moira, and how she “escaped” from Gilead, risking her life to disappear from it all.

This world in the Republic of Gilead is described in all its paranoia and cruelty by Atwood in such a way that I felt choked, literally, as if couldn’t breathe, while reading. Tensions are high between everyone, no one knows who to trust, who they can reveal their inner selves to, what can be revealed. The Republic weighs heavy and in stark contrast to their previous world, of movies and outings with friends, of magazines and clothes, of free speech and fleeting lighter, emotions. Of books and pictures. Offred remembers her husband, Luke, and her daughter, and she can no longer really connect herself to them or that life: it is as if she witnesses her memories as fragments of something from a past both fantastical and unbelievable. 


So… as I conclude this review/synopsis… I’m wondering why? Why this imposition of such a rigid, crudely unfair structure? Who, exactly, is this benefiting? And how is it benefiting them? It seems, from my perspective as a reader, that absolutely no one benefits and everyone is under a system that makes each person feel inhuman or else is a system that turns people into hideous witches or else beasts. There is no beauty in the Republic, except for what an individual subject can smuggle into their mind through some insane perplexity of forced consciousness that, again, pushes a subject to ignore. Ignore and then scheme and relish the tiny moments of pure pleasure, taken by any means necessary. And that the beauty found cannot be shared because who knows what would happen to it? What a terrible thing not to be able to share something beautiful.


What can The Handmaid’s Tale tell us about the world we live in today? Perhaps that these events are actually happening. Perhaps that when we see injustices such as this happen in front of us, we should intervene and do something while we still can. Perhaps that all of us must stand up for injustices against females as well as males, do what we can, break the rules. Do this, this tale seems to say, to help lift that unnamed sheet of heavy metal off of our bodies and heads so we can see a path in which we are strong and gentle enough to hold, touch, kiss, embrace, walk, laugh, cry, scream, talk and share freely, with whomever, with everyone, without consequences that threaten to tell individuals how to see their own realities.