George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, while not the seminal
work of dystopian literature, is certainly one of, if not the most
influential. The premise a thought
experiment wherein an authoritarian government monitors its citizens’ behavior
for purposes of subjugation, it puts freedom at the ultimate premium: a
person’s ability to comprehend reality.
Wholly politicized, Orwell delved deeply into the individual aspects of
replete authoritarianism, but left gender as a sub topic. In 1985 Margaret Atwood produced The Handmaid’s Tale, and in doing so
foregrounded gender in a dystopian setting just as powerfully disturbing and
politicized as Orwell’s.
Not an imitation, The Handmaid’s
Tale, while borrowing the geo-political premise of Orwell, remains
unique. North America at war, differing
religious and political factions have taken pockets of power after a mass
assassination of the American president and senate. The Gileadans one of the major players
arising in the aftermath, they enforce their religion on the society they
rule. Nuclear weaponry having been used
in the aftermath of the assassinations, the Gileadans sequester their women and
heavily regulate behavior to the point of making them prisoners under the guise
of protecting the procreation of mankind.
This protection in the form of moderated ovulation, copulation, and
conception, each woman is in fact a baby factory, disposed of when they pass
the age of child bearing, sent to clean the radiation belt in the zone
beyond. Power and control wholly in the
hands of men, it is in the house of a Gileadean commander that the story of The Handmaid’s Tale takes place.
The titular handmaid is a woman named Offred, and her voice narrates the
story. The Commander’s concubine, she
spends her days trying to follow the innumerable rules imposed upon her by
Gileadean code: covering the head and body, remaining silent, eating what is
provided, paying obeisance, doing the grocery shopping, and participating in
the rituals and ceremonies that are propagated as a means of ritualizing, and
therefore subjecting, the women’s lives.
Part of her daily walk for shopping taking her past the Gileadean court,
the bodies hanging from the hooks on the wall serve as strong reminders of the
penalty for breaking the rules.
Complicit, Offred’s life goes smoothly in the home, that is, until being
invited into the Commander’s office for a private meeting one evening. His request taboo in itself, granting the
request could get her in as much trouble as rejecting it. Though taking time to play out, Offred’s
decision settles her fate in Gilead.
Atwood effectively mixing in pieces of backstory through memories and
daydreaming, a significant portion of The
Handmaid’s Tale tells of how Kate—as she was known before the
revolution—came to be in the Commander’s house.
Once having a daughter and a relationship with a man named Luke, slowly
the reader learns how they were separated after the assassinations. Characters from her past not devices in place
to produce a syrupy ending, Kate/Offred’s former life instead serves to
contrast her life among the Gileadans.
Personal freedom and the difficulty of being separated from family and
loved ones not the only ideas under discussion, Atwood, thankfully, adds
several more significant layers.
Reduced to a literal sex object, the main theme of The Handmaid’s Tale is what it means to be a woman in a world utterly
controlled by men. Offred’s
recollections of the past not reflecting a perfect societal image, but compared
to her life at the Commander’s, the juxtaposition becomes black and white. Offred states at one point: “I avoid looking down at my body, not so
much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that
determines me completely.” Bizarre
sex scenes with the Commander’s wife, the birthing party, the temptations she
is faced with that normally would mean nothing, hiding butter in her shoe—the
lights hitting Offred’s reflect with questions regarding what it means to be a
woman. The idea of being a human
incubator only part of the meaning, community, self-perception, love, family
and relationships, communication, self-determination, and a variety of other
topics round out Atwood’s agenda.
It would be remiss were I not to mention the denouement. Entirely unpredictable, Atwood looked at the
dystopian scene and chose to go a different route. Where Orwell chose tragedy and other writers
go the more heroic path, Atwood delicately threads the needle, taking a middle
road. To give particulars would ruin the
story, so I will suffice at saying it’s an event to think upon—not in the sense
of ‘What happened?’, rather ‘To what end did Atwood conclude the story as
such?’. And it is deliberate. A springboard that transcends plot, it forces
the reader to think upon all of the aforementioned issues, begging the
question: what more could one ask for in a book?
Atwood receiving a lot of praise for her prose, I went in with
expectations of a certain variety. They
were not met, but that is my fault.
Rather than lush or poetically fluid, Atwood writes The Handmaid’s Tale in a deceptively flat tone. The words Offred uses to describe her life
and memories appear limited, but resonate subtly to the point of complete
empathy before the reader realizes. The
daydreaming and memories of the past are garbled with the present narrative,
but that is only realistic; our brains do not perform recall in linear
narrative form, which Atwood properly represents. It is thus in the “epilogue” that her talents
as a writer become most obvious. The
style contrasting due to the prior mood of the text (it would spoil the story
perhaps to say more), it makes clear what came before was the narrative of an
average woman. To make this point more
obvious, it was not a woman coincidentally able to express herself in the most
beautiful of prose, or a journalist who just so happened to be captured by the
Gileadeans and therefore able to offer the most crystal clear narrative. No, Offred is a quotidian woman, and her
story and voice, as contrasted by the “epilogue”, give evidence with a
quotidian voice. Atwood hit a note
(perhaps c minor?), and stuck with it throughout, completely to the novel’s
success.
In the end, The Handmaid’s Tale
is a core sample of feminist literature no matter whether the perspective is
genre or not. Though written in the
tradition of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell, Atwood’s is a dystopia of strictly
feminine perspective that challenges down to the last detail. Written in relevant prose, it should be
required reading in schools alongside these other authors.
Side note: the copy of The
Handmaid’s Tale I read was second-hand, and the previous owner had filled
the margins with notes and gone through in a red pen underlining passages and
phrases. I have read such marked up
books before, but generally the person starts with good intentions, and by page
50 the handwriting peters out. Not the
case with this copy. Front to back,
nearly every page had a mark of some kind.
From paragraphs of notes to comments such as “Guards: sex”, “Flirts”,
“only has body to barter with”, “prison. violence and isolation”, “no name.
national resource. womb” there was a complete immersion. The notes served to motivate me: I had to
heighten my awareness to match the previous owner’s attention to detail and
sub-text. I appreciated it. So, to whoever you, former owner of The Handmaid’s Tale who writes in neat
print with blue and red pens and so carefully underlines, thank you for the
inspiration.
Side-side note: there was a Hollywood rendering of the novel done by
Volker Schloendorff. Not the best or
worst adaptation, the script writers and director saw fit to change a few
things, but kept the majority in line with the book, the overall result a bit
of a shoehorning. One of the annoying
things changed is the ending. Building
Offred’s character to a ‘woman with agency’ throughout the film, the final
minutes undercut the development with a classic ‘woman in distress-dependent on
man’ scene that doesn’t quite fit. If
that scene can be ignored, then all else is true enough, more or less, to the
book.
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