23
Apr
2009
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
This is a fantastic dystopian novel. Set some time in the not-so-distant future, America has taken fundamentalism to the extreme. Women are for cleaning, cooking, and making babies. Literally. This is not one of those societies where men believe that women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. It is a society that utilizes women either as status wives, handmaids (whose sole purpose is to bare children), or Marthas (cooks and cleaners, usually nonwhite). If a man can’t afford to clothe and feed all of them, he might get an econowife, who has to be all three.
America has now become Gilead. How exactly this happened is somewhat unclear. In the pre-Gileadian times, life was terrible for women. They were treated as sex objects, who were duped into believing in romance. They may have had jobs, but not control. Presumably what happened was a change in alliance. Ultra-feminists and the Christian Right teamed up to remedy the sexualized image of women. The fundamentalists then were able to marginalize the feminists.
Women are not the only ones who were targeted in this society. The Gileadians gave Jews a choice: Go back to Israel or convert to Christianity. While most chose to leave, their transporters were dubious at best.
It is important to note that only in North America has this happened. In one scene the narrator, whose true name is never known, encounters Japanese tourists who want to take her picture. She would like to reach out to them but knows it would be dangerous. A tour guide explains to the tourists that women in Gilead do not feel or act the way women in other nations do; they are shy and defensive of their privacy.
The role of a handmaid, as I said, is to produce babies. As this is a fundamentalist Christian society, they use Biblical stories for justification. The story of Rachel and Leah in Genesis suggests that it is permissible to use a maid to bear children for a husband, and then for the true wife to raise the child. The sexual act is ritualized in such a way physically implicates this message. The handmaid lies between the legs of the wife, while the husband has sex with her. They only do this once a month, when she is most fertile.
Hopefully for the handmaid she becomes pregnant, as this will secure her fate, and she can never be declared an Unwoman. That is, unless she gives birth to a shredder. While abortion is considered an abomination and strictly forbidden (doctors who perform them are hung on the city walls as a warning to others), if a baby turns out deformed, it disappears quickly.
Of course, most men want more from a wife than someone who does needlepoint all day, and more from a sexual partner than someone who just lies there (enjoyment is strictly forbidden). The man of the house takes our narrator into his study, secretly, to play board games. At least, that’s what they do at first. Through him she discovers the dark underbelly of this society, and the fate of some of her friends.
It’s a spooky read. Male or female, you’ll be freaked out by this book. But that’s the purpose of a dystopian novel, right? Freak you out and give you something to think about.
Buy The Handmaid’s Tale on Amazon
If you like this book/author, you might like:
(my reviews in blue)
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
1984 by George Orwell
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradburry
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Children of Men by P.D. James
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
The World Without Women
Other works by Margaret Atwood*:
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
Life Before Man
Lady Oracle
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
Oryx and Crake
The Year of the Flood
The Edible Woman
The Blind Assassin
Dancing Girls
Bluebeard’s Egg: Stories
Surfacing
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes
The Robber Bride
Second Words: Selected Critical Prose
Strange Things : The Malevolent North In Canadian Literature
Wilderness Tips
Cat’s Eye
Good Bones and Simple Murders
Alias Grace
Circle Game
The Door
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Bodily Harm
The Tent
Power Politics
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983-2005
The Journals of Susanna Moodie: Poems
Selected Poems: 1965-1975
Selected Poems II: 1976 – 1986
*Note: This is not an exhaustive list. For the most part it only includes works still in print, though you can still find many of her works used.
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