CULTURE & POLITICS
The Pillow Book of Margaret Atwood
How I learned to stop worrying and love The Handmaid’s Tale
Sei Shonagon was a low-ranking noble in Heian Japan, and her Pillow Book offers a view of court sensibilities, partly through lists like “Unsuitable Things,” “Infuriating Things,” and “Things That Give an Unclean Feeling.” These lists itemized how courtesans were supposed to think, which was useful in a highly conformist society: “You can judge how unimpressive someone is if they dislike things that most people like, and praise things that others condemn.” (McKinney, 256)¹ If a guard wears ostentatious clothes on his night patrol and passes near the women’s quarters “people will be sure to look down on him” (Morris, 71), for reasons we might still appreciate. But when “Unsuitable Things” includes “a handsome man with an ugly wife,” a modern reader might wonder whether she has accepted prevailing social conventions a bit too uncritically.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale likewise reflects the political taste of her times. We can reverse-engineer a partial view of Margaret Atwood’s “Pillow Book” from the novel’s opening sections. For example ….
Deserving scorn:
- Christian fundamentalists. Tammy Faye Bakker.
- Puritans (same as religious fundamentalists)
- Prudishness (same as Puritanism)
- Sexual exploitation of women (the burning of naughty underwear in Times Square simultaneously skewers male objectification of women and prudishness)
- Convents and nuns
- Totalitarianism and thought police. Police generally. (It could happen here!)
- Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nuclear everything. Industry generally (pollution!)
- “Men and their cars”
- Japanese tourists
For a certain smart set in the 1980s, these were largely non-controversial. The news — with Tammy Faye Bakker’s running mascara and Jimmy Swaggart preaching chastity but practicing otherwise — regularly afforded the delight of savoring someone else’s hypocrisy. When Pat Robertson ran for President and Jerry Falwell started bankrolling conservative politicians, one could wonder “What will happen if those people take over? Ack!”
The Handmaid’s Tale’s opening pages abound with this sort of eye-rolling. Offred lands in a household whose matron is a former televangelist previously famous for singing, accordion-playing and crying on cue. On her daily shopping trip, Offred passes a dress shop and observes “some people call them habits,” then “habits are hard to break.” (24) Religion is restrictive, you see. But — habits belong in convents, and Catholics are being “targeted and eliminated” (xvii) by the regime. Punning trumps clarity. Still, it works if an audience will reliably snort along.
Several times, Offred chooses “nunnery” instead of “convent.” Perhaps, like me, it reminds her of high school Shakespeare, where they taught us the Elizabethan double meaning, revealing adult sophistication. But no one uses the word now. Realism yields to wordplay again.
When the fundamentalists take over, what do the Japanese do? They send camera-toting tourists, “diminutive and neatly turned out,” “cocking their heads to one side like robins, their very cheerfulness aggressive,” “twittering” as they approach (28). Of course. Japanese tourists were ubiquitously annoying in 1984.
But the joke seems dated now. Worse, such fashionable sneering about appearances avoided a substantive issue — what to do (in 1984) when Japanese economic success let them buy up American assets?
Jeering at tourists did not solve this — the Japanese economy collapsed for other reasons. Ironically, it is now sustained by Chinese tourists on shopping sprees and Western visitors buoyed by a weak yen, taking up all the good hotel rooms and trailing litter up the side of Mt. Fuji. Today, when China is buying up American bonds (and more), the solutions may not lie in sniffing about pampered exchange students. Focusing on surface annoyances distracts from issues that matter — and solutions.
In Atwood’s dystopian conceit, American women share the plight of citizens in Communist countries where Atwood lived, echoing the 1960s commonplace that “Amerika” was no better than the fascist countries it defeated in World War II or its Cold War antagonists. We are just a quick coup away from disaster. Offred sleeps on a recycled military blanket with the letters US still visible but “Army” faded away — the Statue in Planet of the Apes, writ small. The “war of the sexes” has become an actual war. Is this an accurate critique, or just fashionable hyperbole?
Revisiting The Handmaid’s Tale now, nearly 40 years later, post-January 6, we can ask: Was Atwood prescient, or did she give artistic voice to a generalized, superficial disdain that counterfeited substantive thought? In my view, parts of the story remain quite vital — but not necessarily the parts that command public attention.
Language, religion, integrity
Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book is still considered a model of Japanese prose. Her elegant language makes even pages of bare lists a literary delight. Makura (枕) can refer to a pillow, a poetic headword, or the setup for a comic story. While hinting at private thoughts, the title both declares serious literary intent and engages in ritual self-deprecation: these scribblings have reduced a valuable bundle of paper to a cushion for sleeping, and maybe it’s all a joke.
Atwood also displays magnificent technique, as in the opening lines of The Handmaid’s Tale:
“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it for the games that had once been played there ….” (3)
The partitions of the basketball court have become functionless markings, just as the Handmaids-in-training have been robbed of language and, we learn, their names. They mouth silent messages and lipread, just as prisoners in other dystopias tap Morse code through cell walls.
Atwood was a poet before she was a novelist. So, when Gilead bans not just magazines but Scrabble, this seems oppressive indeed — what is life without wordplay? Offred’s inner dialog not only bears witness to what she has suffered; it maintains her contact with the richness of language despite Gilead’s Soviet-style thought policing.
But there is more to language than just the texture of signification — also important is its relation to the signified. The language of the opening passage is gorgeous. But if Tammy Faye’s fundamentalists seized power — would they really outlaw basketball?
Not even the Soviets did that. I cannot imagine the few Christian fundamentalists I know abnegating their passion for team sports. 17th-century Puritans might have. But they wouldn’t have sung and played the accordion on TV like Atwood’s Serena Joy. Atwood melds flamboyant televangelists and austere Puritans into a monolith of “Christian extremists,” a convenient target.
Atwood argues that religious extremism was present at the founding, an inherent part of the American tradition. “Half-hanged” Mary Webster who was convicted of witchcraft by Puritans may have been an ancestor of Atwood’s . Or not — her grandmother kept switching stories. In any event, it’s true the Salem trials happened under the Puritans’ watch, as did the cornucopia of offenses documented by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
But the Puritans also produced the quirky integrity of the Adams family. When pundits today hold that “facts are stubborn things” they are quoting John Adams. John Quincy Adams promoted scientific progress and devoted his final years to the fight for abolition. His son Charles Francis was the vice-presidential candidate for the Free Soil Party and played a key role in the Civil War as Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Great Britain. They supported democracy, and causes we might today call “progressive.” If you doubt their Puritan roots, consult Henry Adams.
Who are the present-day Puritans? Instead of flamboyant figures like Tammy Faye Bakker, maybe Harvard-trained Bill McKibben, whose moralistic activism increasingly sounds like “Fossil fuel executives in the hands of an angry God” (but animated less by grace and forgiveness than Jonathan Edwards’ original). When Noam Chomsky exposed the obscenity of the Vietnam War by equating American imperialism with fascism, he spoke in the tradition of Old Testament prophets; reading them contributed substantially to his early education.
Neither McKibben nor Chomsky is likely to acknowledge this. McKibben downplays his religious feelings: “I enjoy the music and the fellowship” (don’t be alarmed). Professor Chomsky expresses sympathy for Catholic priests who resist US foreign policy in Central America, but quickly adds “My position is that we should not succumb to irrational belief.” Their moral fervor has roots in Judeo-Christian tradition, but like Atwood they bow to convention. Religion is not cool.
A Balm in … which Gilead?
Further into the story, a Moonie-style mass wedding begins with the singing of a hymn, “There is a Balm in Gilead” — fitting, apparently, for a dystopia named Gilead. Offred remembers Moira’s snarky rendition: “There is a Bomb in Gilead.” This joke works better with a faux Southern accent. We can imagine Moira in Cambridge enjoying — subconsciously — her superiority to the silent “l”s and unwashed Bible-thumping that spawned Tammy Fay Bakker. Following this lead, Offred lampoons the music chosen by her fundamentalist overlords, prizing wordplay as a silent rebellion.
But “Balm in Gilead” is not a generic hymn. It’s a spiritual, by enslaved people whose illiteracy was enforced by their masters. The Library of Congress helpfully notes that they were “fascinated by Biblical stories containing parallels to their own lives” and that spirituals were “codified protest songs.” Nina Simone’s flatly unemotional version of “Balm” simmers with suppressed rage. Paul Robeson’s doleful rendition lingers over the verses, richly invoking a sad captivity in which time creeps forward, punctuated by short bursts of frantic hopeful energy. Mahalia Jackson’s version proceeds even more dolorously.
Time drags in captivity — as it does for Offred:
I had a lot of time to pass…. So. I explored this room, not hastily, then, like a hotel room, wasting it. I didn’t want to do it all at once, I wanted to make it last. (51)
Offred has every reason to empathize with oppressed people robbed of language. Instead, she mocks their music. Elsewhere, Fred calls Offred “smart.” So why doesn’t she grok “Balm in Gilead”?
Atwood’s dystopic Gilead riffs on the Genesis story of Rachel and her handmaid. “Balm in Gilead” comes from a different part of the Bible. The enslaved composers heard Jeremiah’s lament “Is there no balm in Gilead?” (referring to the Babylonian captivity) and reframed it. In their hearing, the salvation procured by Jesus’ suffering and love promises relief from their suffering. Its prospect bolsters their hopes for freedom. Atwood has wandered unknowingly into Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Offred parrots Moira’s joke because Atwood is in over her head.
It’s odd. Atwood knows that America’s enslaved were denied access to language and kept in a situation like Offred’s. She explains as much in her Introduction. But within the narrative itself, she dismisses “Balm” as another oppressive “hymn.” Why pass up a fashionable sneer at America’s “Puritan tradition”?
Falling in love with love
On the next page, Fred asks Offred what is missing in Gilead (this is when he calls her “smart”). She replies “falling in love.” Reflecting on the spiritual’s underlying meaning would have made a great transition to the story’s final section, which embraces love’s saving power. True, this is not the unconditional love embodied in “Balm.” It’s the sort of love that makes babies. Nonetheless, Offred’s love story lifts the narrative’s depressing tone.
Fred offers a clinical defense of arranged marriage as designed in Gilead. Then, when it seems apparent that Fred cannot help Offred conceive, Serena Joy offers a different sort of arrangement involving Nick, the chauffeur/spy. Offred goes along, and experiences a vibrant passion that makes her forget everything else—then apologizes, repeatedly and profusely.
I am coming to a part you will not like at all, because in it I did not behave well, but I will try nonetheless to leave nothing out. After all you’ve been through, you deserve whatever I have left, which is not much but includes the truth. (268)
How did she not behave well? It’s a puzzle. But the psychology of her shame is rich and deep. And she nonetheless persists in telling the story. She displays her own quirky integrity.
Why apologize? To whom? Offed mentions the obvious:
And I thought afterwards: this is a betrayal. Not the thing itself but my own response. If I knew for certain he’s dead would that make a difference? (263)
Falling for Nick is plain vanilla adultery if Luke is still alive — but that’s highly unlikely, and she always refers to Luke in the third person, not as “you.”
The “you” in her apology is someone who has “been through” so much — perhaps her daughter after she’s grown? This is doubtless part of Offred’s complex emotions, but a recent photo has convinced Offred she has been removed from her daughter’s life.
Perhaps, she’s apologizing to all of Gilead’s women. But for what?
Partly the reasons are political. Romance makes her abandon the struggle. She evades Ofglen’s proposal of a spying mission, not because she is afraid but because she regrets time away from Nick.
There are also aesthetic reasons. Her future reader might expect adult, reasoned behavior, or attraction to another troubled intellectual like Luke. Instead, she falls for Nick, a stud straight from Harlequin central casting with hair-stippled forearms and a cigarette held at a jaunty angle. Just having a cigarette makes him naughty, and it turns out he has a stash of booze as well. Such clichéd romance is not cool, but Offred persists.
Atwood, likewise, drops her intellectual pretense to a Chaucerian tale. This romance is in the “June — spoon” style abhorred by Aunt Lydia and contemporary sophisticates alike. Sneaking down the servants’ stairway, creeping up the stairs to the bachelor flat, timidly knocking — it’s all a little corny, and she knows it. But she writes it anyway. It’s “true.”
Offred tries to deny that hers is a love story:
I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish It showed me in a better light, … I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. (267)
Neither of us said the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck. (270)
Paradoxically, this protest makes the story more convincingly romantic.
Offred aspires to rationality, but her experience is primitively biological. After the Salvaging she wants food and sex, like a stressed plant producing flowers:
But also I’m hungry. This is monstrous, but nevertheless it’s true. Death makes me hungry. Maybe it’s because I’ve been emptied; or maybe it’s the body’s way of seeing to it that I remain alive, continue to meet its bedrock prayer: I am, I am. I am, still.
I want to go to bed, make love, right now. (281)
Encountering death intensifies her urge to reproduce. Perhaps Offred thinks her future reader will be like Moira or her university friends: cool, detached, wearing sweatshirts and jeans. Her story isn’t what they would expect. She has gone primal.
The ambiguity about Nick’s identity furthers her passion. More than a political statement about loss of trust in a police state — this evokes the poignant mystery of love, presented in the novel’s opening as preceding Gilead:
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, of something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? … (3)
Surrendering to the irrationality of romance revives a part of herself suppressed by Fred’s coldly designed social order. All along, in fact, her sexuality has given her hidden power. Early in her stay at Fred’s compound, she waggles her hips as a silent tease to two young guards — she revels in the power she still has, even in her straitened circumstances. She’s ashamed, then she’s not.
Through her love story, Offred gains dimension, through her passion, her shame, and her unexpected sense of power. Her voice is frank, honest, and human, more engaging than her tricky wordplay and handwringing over Puritanism and hypocrisy. Her shame at her story — at the reality of her biology — forces us to confront how our inner urges are at odds with our desire for sophistication.
Gilead now?
But politics intrudes. In her 2017 Introduction, Atwood draws parallels between her dystopia and Trumpian America:
Is The Handmaid’s Tale a prediction? This is [a] question I’m asked — increasingly, as forces within American society seize power and enact decrees that embody what they were saying they wanted to do, even back in 1984 when I was writing the novel.
…In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades and indeed the past centuries. (xviii-xix)
In 1985, Mary McCarthy had doubted the story’s plausibility, but in 2017 and then again in the wake of January 6, we might think Atwood was on to something. Donald Trump was elected with a coalition that included evangelical Christians, then refused to accept the results of the next election. Gilead’s coming seemed imminent — “those people” were finally taking over.
But hundreds of challenges to the election were rejected by courts whose judges were appointed by Democrats, Republicans, and even by Trump himself. Judges still take the law seriously. Would-be militiamen broke into the Capitol, but no column of tanks was ordered to support the President’s power bid, nor were both houses of Congress machine-gunned per Atwood’s script. Irony of ironies, the ultimate quirky integrity was supplied by an evangelical Vice-President.
Perhaps totalitarianism is not a literary trope, nor a style. Its ascendancy in prewar Italy, Germany, and Spain resulted less from toxic rhetoric than from fledgling institutions that failed to defend against extremism. America, facing similar pressures, has achieved a different result, so far.
This is not an argument for complacency. But to produce a convincing vision of “Amerika” gone fascist, a futurist should identify the props that have held its democracy together so far. Atwood warns that “it” could happen suddenly as in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. But this just describes history’s external form. With insight into the dynamics of a totalitarian takeover, one could write a narrative in which props have been kicked away and characters struggle to restore them.
The Handmaid’s Tale is not that story. Gliding along a surface of wordplay and hyperbolic satire, the novel has no logical resolution. The love story is gripping; the politics go nowhere. Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book is a collection of well-crafted fragments with no plot, and no overarching framework. We celebrate the author’s wit, but hardly anyone reads it seeking wisdom. Is The Handmaid’s Tale much different?
Quo Vadis?
At the end of Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Noam Chomsky, his wife talks about solutions, or lack thereof. People ask Chomsky what they can do about the awfulness he describes. He tells them to “organize,” vague advice that she calls a “fake answer.” Such is the nature of polemic. It lacks valence. It is clear what it scorns. Less clear is where it wants us to go.
The Handmaid’s Tale trails off to a “Lady or Tiger” conclusion. Is Nick a savior in disguise, or a cold-hearted traitor? A double agent? A triple agent? Is this Mayday or is Offred headed to the Wall? The story doesn’t say. It is hard to find a logical denouement for a polemical story.
Instead, Atwood has taken pains to explain her novel. She tacks on a fictional epilogue in which some 22nd-century academics demonstrate how not to think about the story. Fortunately, we learn, Gilead did not persist, and the free speech of stuffy pedants has been restored. But even these know-it-alls can’t say how Offred’s story ends. This gloss proved insufficient, so in the 2017 edition, Atwood added an Introduction in her own voice, more explanation.
Amidst the murky ending, one thing is clear: Offred wants Nick’s baby. It’s the most urgent mark of her humanity. Nonetheless, a clamorous public has insisted on viewing the novel as a cautionary tale about abortion rights, and the need for militant feminism.
When a May Supreme Court leak revealed that Roe’s demise was imminent, a group of handmaids surrounded Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s house in protest. … everyone from Democratic candidates to journalists to horror writer Stephen King took to social media to declare their belief that we are now living in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Atwood does not renounce this enthusiasm — what author would? But she demurs a bit in the 2017 Introduction. This is not an ideologically feminist work, it’s a “story in which women are human beings — with all of the variety of character and behavior that implies.” (xvi)
The clues were in the novel, true enough. Offred’s mother is an ideological feminist — also emotionally distant and ineffectual. Offred herself is no ideologue. Yet Atwood feels the need to assert Offred’s dimensionality in the Introduction because, apparently, so few readers appreciate it in the novel. In my opinion, this course correction is laudable. The novel’s conventionality exposes her to pigeonholing: Sneering at religion implies full acceptance of the 1980s intellectual catechism. But Atwood deserves credit for expressing second thoughts.
In the years after Atwood’s waspish parody, Tammy Faye Bakker also resisted pigeonholing. Jim and Tammy did their most notoriously lucrative work in the evangelical heartland of Charlotte, but they were originally from Minnesota. Rather than “stand by her man” (country music!) she divorced Jim and remarried, and then advocated for LGBT inclusion within the evangelical community. She was not a saint, certainly, but she refused to become a regional cliché or a predictable entry in the Pillow Book of 20th-century sophisticates. She made a case for her humanity, flaws and all. Perhaps even Serena Joy deserves a little love.
And to be fair to Sei Shonagon, there is more to her Pillow Book than judgmental lists. There’s also this:
“Nothing is more wonderful than sympathy … if someone unexpected responds to the tale of your sorrows with reassuring words, it fills you with pleasure. It’s such a simple thing to do, yet so rare.
It’s unusual to find someone, either man or woman, who’s overall both tender-hearted and truly talented — though actually there must be many such people around. (McKinney, p. 208)
¹I’ve used both Ivan Morris’ and Meredith McKinney’s translations of Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book — page references are noted as “Morris” and McKinney. Other page references are to the Anchor Books paperback of The Handmaid’s Tale. return
