‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a dystopian novel that feels way too relevant right now
Margaret Atwood’s classic is just as scary 30 years later
“Once upon a time, in the recent future, a country went wrong,” begins the ominously baritone voiceover for the trailer to the 1990 film adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. And it’s a chillingly relevant scenario.
Since its publication in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel has sold millions of copies, been adapted for screens big and small, translated into at least 35 languages, made into an opera, and inspired thousands of Halloween costumes and feminist tattoos. The latest iteration is a Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss set to air in April 2017.
The book, a searing study of female life in a super-patriarchy, continues to endure because, like all great tales of fearsome futures (1984, Brave New World), it produces an unsettling jolt of recognition. Atwood’s cautionary classic is a powerful and haunting depiction of a world where women are property, and it’s compelling for the ways in which it doesn’t seem that farfetched, particularly at this moment. The most disturbing facet of the novel is the way in which women internalize their oppression, and come to police themselves and others. As the notion that “feminism lost” in 2016 pervades our political landscape, the book’s continued importance is unquestionable.
The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States of America, where a staged terrorist attack (blamed on Islamic extremists — really) has paved the way for ecological disaster and a theocratic new order. The Republic is surveilled by the Eyes of God, the menacing secret police. To counter rapidly declining birthrates, the Old Testament-obsessed military dictatorship in power designates an entire class of women Handmaids, or babymakers. They must dress in red habits (“the color of blood, which defines us”), and are the property of elite male Commanders whose wives are barren. Women who aren’t fertile are called Unwomen, naturally, and remanded to the Colonies, where they toil on clean-up crews, wading through toxic waste. With conception as the aim, the Handmaids are subjected monthly to “the Ceremony:” rape by the Commanders, while their wives look on.
“Think of it as being in the army,” says one of the female guards, or Aunts, early in the novel.
Women in Gilead are not permitted to vote, hold jobs, or own property. Reading or otherwise acquiring knowledge is also prohibited. The book’s protagonist, whose real name is never revealed, is Offred — literally “Of Fred.” Other Handmaids, the chattel of other men, are similarly named: Ofglen, Ofwarren, etc. Through flashbacks, the reader learns that Offred was once married with a daughter, but was separated from her family when they tried to flee to the Canadian border. Once captured, she was taken to the Rachel Leah Re-education Center, or Red Center, where Handmaids are “trained” under the watchful eye of the Angels (male guards), and the Aunts, who patrol the barracks with electric cattle prods in their leather belts. Fraternizing is forbidden among the women, but they learn to read one another’s lips and share the names they had before the fall of their country, “from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.”
Atwood preferred to call The Handmaid’s Tale a work of “speculative fiction” instead of “science fiction,” because it wasn’t — isn’t — that improbable. Some of the Republic’s features are drawn from things that have happened in history, and others are certainly imaginable. For instance, the reader discovers a taxonomy of instruments and elixirs women used to terminate pregnancies — knitting needles, toilet cleaner — that put me in mind of this recently published list, “What Women Used Before They Could Use the Law.”
“Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already,” Atwood wrote in The Guardian in 2012. “And the deep foundation of the US…[is] the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.” All of which sounds a little uncomfortable at the moment.
Ironically, though perhaps unsurprisingly, the Republic of Gilead forms as the result of moral panics about women’s bodies, especially rape, pornography, and prostitution. And the efforts to stop these things aren’t all commandeered by the religious right. Offred’s own mother was a feminist activist, and Offred remembers a pre-Gilead rally she witnessed as a girl, where her mother and others were burning pornographic magazines. Through memories of Offred’s mother, Atwood hints at the dark overlap between these two seemingly unlike ideologies, and offers a gentle indictment of a paternalistic feminism that seeks to curtail women’s freedom. (Incidentally, the book came out during the feminist sex wars, a period of heated debate within the women’s movement about the place of pornography and sex work).
Of course, the things that totalitarian or puritanical systems seek to ban cannot be made to disappear. Rather, they are enshrined or driven underground. In the Republic of Gilead, the sexual violence the government sought to stop is institutionalized in the name of reproduction. Porn and sex work, its naughty cousins, are simply further marginalized. And the notion that any encounter between a man and a woman could ever be truly transactional or pure in any way, is exploded on every page.
A simple — though arguably quite satisfying — reading of The Handmaid’s Tale draws direct comparisons between the Draconian limitations placed on Gilead’s women and contemporary impositions on women’s freedoms, and leaves it at that. But the real beauty of the novel is that it offers a darkly nuanced view of patriarchy and sexual politics as experienced by women.
Atwood succeeds especially at illuminating the double-edged sword of male attention.
In Gilead, men are everywhere squirming with nerves and desire. And though women are objectified and reviled, of course, they are also potent agitators, from the point of view of biology, at least. As in life, their capacity to cause men this exquisite torment affords them some sustenance. Passing young male guards who haven’t yet been “given” women, Offred feels ashamed of their gaze. But, she says, “then I find I’m not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there…I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously. They will suffer, later, at night, in their regimented beds.”
In a world where women’s bodies are their only currency, their sexual power is amplified.
And yet the vengeful dream of using one’s body to get what one wants is also shattered by the anonymity of the Handmaids. Recalling the training center, Offred says of the male guards, or Angels, “They were objects of fear to us, but of something else as well. If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy.” The literal male gaze is the only thing that grants women existence. It might also grant them freedom, but that isn’t anything to bank on. Like so many things in Gilead, it’s simply subject to men’s whims.
Even more unsettlingly, The Handmaid’s Tale also brilliantly mines women’s participation in their own repression. Atwood showcases the female jealousy that attends the dynamic between Handmaids and Marthas, the domestic servants who live in Commanders’ homes. Some even see the Handmaids’ status as one of ease, and as such enviable. “‘If I hadn’t of got my tubes tied,’ one Martha says to another, “‘it could of been me, say I was ten years younger. It’s not that bad. It’s not what you’d call hard work.’” The Aunts also undermine the Handmaids’ experience of state-sanctioned rape. One in particular, Lydia, urges Offred to try to put herself in the position of the Commander’s wife. “Try to think of it from their point of view,” she says. “It isn’t easy.”
Among other things, The Handmaid’s Tale reminds us that the mechanics of oppression are so often masqueraded as benevolent truths, even gifts. Those in power believe, or act like they believe, that they care about women — worship them, even. But their formulation is simple: the price of women’s protection is their subjugation. Many women come to believe this, too.
In the context of Gilead, where erotic and reproductive capital are all they have, the competition between women becomes complex and fierce. Throughout the novel, grim evidence abounds that men, women’s primary oppressors, become almost superfluous to the perpetuation of the system. Having internalized the dominant cultural messaging, women aren’t merely complicit in their own subjugation, they become expert in ensuring and carrying it out. As Atwood said in a conversation with the writer Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, “you have to grant some women a tiny bit more power so that they’ll control the others.” Those with power work to sustain the system, largely by sowing doubt, envy, and ill will among the others. As Aunt Lydia warns Offred, “It’s not the husbands you have to watch out for…it’s the Wives.”
