What The Handmaid’s Tale Tells Us About Today’s Society
If we view The Handmaid’s Tale as a feminist work, we are underestimating the series. If we think The Handmaid’s Tale is a satire of religion, we are making the most intricate interpretation of the work. If we decide The Handmaid’s Tale is just a fantasy, science fiction or not, we are making the worst decision ever. In today’s era, which we live somewhat satisfactorily in, The Handmaid’s Tale is coming at the right time, waking those blindly followers.
The Handmaid’s Tale is adapted from a novel written by Margaret Atwood in 1985. It uses techniques similar to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to describe the story of Offred in an imaginary world. Offred was previously a publisher. After the country was taken over by a republic dictatorship, Offred lost her property, work, status, and identity like all other women. After an failure to flee to the border of Canada with her family, she was punished to be a handmaid. She was then required to wear a red dress and a headset that blocks the her sights. Moreover, she was responsible to reproduce for a military general whose wife was incapable of reproduction.
After watching the series, my primary reactions are shocking and criticizing. Like many other audience, I am unable to accept the interpretation of the role of women in this society. Its deprivation of women’s physical autonomy and metaphorical religious criticism make it seems like the author is using this work to express her hatred on men. After publishing the novel, Atwood continues to defend for the satire and metaphor in the story. She even shows evidence from the newspapers to prove that some of the plots have occurred in the real world or history. In the eyes of Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale is not nonsense, nor is it a science fiction, but it is something beyond all these…
In The Handmaid’s Tale, women became the assets of the world. It focused on the feminist movement, feminist core message, and the malfunction of social structure, all of which forced the prevalence of extreme politics. Women were forced to reproduce, losing their physical autonomy. In many ways, the story somehow echoes Trump’s ruling in today’s American society. How can we deprive women autonomy? As long as women lose their jobs and private assets, they can then be easily owned. In the series, Offred and her friend participated in a protest that requests for fairness and justice for women. It is basically the same protest as the Women’s March on Washington D.C. in the beginning of 2017 (In fact, the protest is an anti-Trump political movement).
Most depictions of the series are creepy. It is like a horror story, but it is not the typical kind of horror fantasy, because it is so realistic. It is so realistic that it make us afraid. There seems to be a dark cloud covering our hearts. On one hand, people are experiencing harm. On the other hand, people are the horrible monsters who harm others. Today, the status of women seems to have improved a lot compare to the past. However, there are still news about sexual assault, or about men forming the glass ceiling effect, which is a “pervasive resistance to the effort of women and minorities to reach the top ranks of management in major corporations.”
If the description of the materialized women, the prohibition of literacy, and the exploitation of freedom is merely the past history of women oppression, then how can we explain the different compensation between male and female, the silence from the victims of sexual violence, and women’s fight for job opportunities, physical autonomy, and the stereotypes in the eyes of men in today’s society? If the religious system and dictatorship belong only to the past uncivilized mankind, how can we face the pressure from the radical religions, the wars caused by religion, and the debates or standards evolved from religions? If the class division, color discrimination, and property difference are merely products of industrial revolution and imperialism, how can we explain the problems of capitalism, racial discrimination, and concentrated property?
Perhaps, we should not wonder whether the world in the series will one day occur, for it had occurred many years ago. Instead, we should wonder why the society has to separate people into different groups or classes. Why do we allow our fear to control over our freedom?
History continues to repeat. In this era of restlessness, nothing can be prospective. A few years ago, we were speaking of a liberal marketing economy, saying that the far-right politics can not be in power, saying that people can fight against the government, and saying that populism cannot go beyond reason. What kind of world are we facing right now? What kind of society? What kind of era? If The Handmaid’s Tale is an extreme nightmare, what we need to do, perhaps, is to try to wake up instead of sleeping eternally, falling into this deepest fable, being unable to escape.
