The Handmaid’s Tale Revisited
This article was first published in the Minden Times in November, 2024.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood was published in 1985 and hit the mainstream media as a TV series starting in 2017, with a sixth season pending. It is undeniably a dystopia, a desperately bleak world characterized as patriarchal, totalitarian, and theonomic (which means governed by ‘divine’ laws).
The Republic of Gilead, the world of the novel, is a patch of North America within the Colonies, a Gulag where the misbehaving are sent to sort through radio-active debris. Sterility is wide-spread because of environmental degradation, so women who are fertile are a valuable commodity. They become Handmaids whose job is to bear children for high-ranking men, called Commanders, when their wives cannot. (It is presumed, of course, that it is the women who are sterile.) During the time in their monthly cycle when Handmaids are potentially impregnable, a ritualized event takes place where the Handmaid lies between the legs of the Wife while being sexually serviced by the Commander to whom she belongs. The naming of Handmaids reflects their status as concubines: they are Of-X, the name to the current Commander by whom they are owned. The protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale is Of-fred.
It's a gristly read and it has received its share of pushback from disgruntled possible readers – the seventh most challenged book in the 1990-2000 decade, according to the American Library Association. The push-back that Atwood has strenuously denied from the outset is that the book is science fiction, a work of imagination. Rather she calls it ‘speculative fiction’ because “I didn't put in anything that we haven't already done, we're not already doing, we're seriously trying to do, coupled with trends that are already in progress... So all of those things [in the book] are real, and therefore the amount of pure invention is close to nil" she says, in a 2006 article in the University of Toronto Quarterly.
Atwood also called the book a ‘cautionary tale’, which was poo-pooed by many on many grounds. It wasn’t believable enough. Even if the individual aspects of the dystopia existed somewhere sometime, they couldn’t/wouldn’t come together in the way they did in the book. Even if that might happen somewhere sometime, it couldn’t/wouldn’t happen here and now.
Maybe not. Maybe so.
Carol Off, in At A Loss for Words: Conversation in the Age of Rage, published by Random House in 2024, reports on an interview with Atwood at her home in June 2023. Off asked Atwood, “‘What does it mean to you that this image of the red-clad Handmaid has become the international symbol for the present state of women’s rights? You’ve captured the moment.’ Her answer: ‘Who cares? I’m supposed to be happy that there’s a necessity for this image to be used? That’s supposed to make me satisfied? I would much rather that people had paid attention earlier and that this was not necessary.’” (p 254)
Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in the era of Ronald Reagan; it was ‘discovered’ in the era of Donald Trump. Atwood showed Off her collection of feminist literature that informed her belief that the rights of women will be challenged whenever they rise, that the cycle will continue as long as, says Atwood, ‘our vigilance slackens over time.’ We are lulled into a state of false security. We forget that change is a constant. We talk ourselves into believing that we deserve a rest, that goodness will hold while we enjoy the fruits of our labour.
Demonstrably not so.
The frontispiece of Carol Off’s book cites George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.’ Then she delves with journalistic fervour and discipline into the history of usage of six words: Freedom, Democracy, Truth, Woke, Choice, Taxes. (She doesn’t include Feminism, but she acknowledges that Atwood had done a similar deep dive using a different genre of exposition.) She paints a disturbingly convincing picture that while our vigilance was slackened, the infrastructure of each of those six words was methodically dismantled to set the table for the political/cultural/social/economic debacle we are now witnessing. There is no going back, no Making America Great Again. There is only rediscovering and recreating the reality those words once represented. Doing the methodical, difficult, time-consuming work of identifying and reclaiming the core values. Pounding the pavement to find the words, perhaps new words, that can bind us together in community. That can recover the necessity and goodness of living in harmony -- within ourselves, with each other, with nature, with the world.
Our work is cut out for us.
