Why should you read "The
Handmaid's Tale"? - Naomi R. Mercer
“Ignoring isn´t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it”
-Margaret Atwood, The Handnmaid´s Tale
In Margaret Atwood's near-future novel,"The Handmaid's Tale," a Christian
fundamentalist regime called the Republic of Gilead has staged a military
coup and established a theocratic government in the United States. The
regime theoretically restricts everyone, but in practice a few men have
structured Gilead so they have all the power, especially over women. The
Handmaid's Tale is what Atwood calls speculative fiction, meaning it
theorizes about possible futures. This is a fundamental characteristic shared
by both utopian and dystopian texts. The possible futures in Atwood's novels
are usually negative, or dystopian, where the actions of a small group have
destroyed society as we know it. Utopian and dystopian writing tends to
parallel political trends. Utopian writing frequently depicts an idealized
society that the author puts forth as a blueprint to strive toward. Dystopias,
on the other hand, are not necessarily predictions of apocalyptic futures, but
rather warnings about the ways in which societies can set themselves on the
path to destruction. The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, when many
conservative groups attacked the gains made by the second-wave feminist
movement. This movement had been advocating greater social and legal
equality for women since the early 1960s. The Handmaid's Tale imagines a
future in which the conservative counter-movement gains the upper hand and
not only demolishes the progress women had made toward equality, but
makes women completely subservient to men.Gilead divides women in the
regime into distinct social clases based upon their function as status symbols
for men. Even their clothing is color-coded. Women are no longer allowed to
read or move about freely in public, and fertile women are subject to state-
engineered rape in order to give birth to children for the regime.
Although The Handmaid's Tale is set in the future, one of Atwood's self-
imposed rules in writing it was that she wouldn't use any event or practice
that hadn't already happened in human history. The book is set in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, a city that during the American colonial period had been
ruled by the theocratic Puritans. In many ways, the Republic of Gilead
resembles the strict rules that were present in Puritan society: rigid moral
codes, modest clothing, banishment of dissenters, and regulation of every
aspect of people's lives and relationships. For Atwood, the parallels to
Massachusett's Puritans were personal as well as theoretical. She spent
several years studying the Puritans at Harvard and she's possibly descended
from Mary Webster, a Puritan woman accused of witchcraft who survived her
hanging. Atwood is a master storyteller. The details of Gilead, which we've
only skimmed the surface of, slowly come into focus through the eyes of its
characters, mainly the novel's protagonist Offred, a handmaid in the
household of a commander. Before the coup that established Gilead, Offred
had a husband, a child, a job, and a normal, middle-class American life. But
when the fundamentalist regime comes into power, Offred is denied her
identity, separated from her family, and reduced to being, in Offred's
words,"a two-legged womb for increasing Gilead's waning population."She
initially accepts the loss of her fundamental human rights in the name of
stabilizing the new government. But state control soon extends into attempts
to control the language, behavior, and thoughts of herself and other
individuals. Early on, Offred says,"I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I
must compose, as one composes a speech."She likens language to the
formulation of identity. Her words also acknowledge the possibility of
resistance, and it's resistance, the actions of people who dare to break the
political, intellectual, and sexual rules, that drives the plot of the Handmaid's
Tale. Ultimately, the novel's exploration of the consequences of complacency,
and how power can be wielded unfairly, makes Atwood's chilling vision of a
dystopian regime ever relevant.
