Review: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale was an accidentally timely choice when it popped up on my “recommended” list on my library app. I’d heard of the Margaret Atwood novel before but had never known more than that it was a feminist story set in a dystopian future. I began reading before learning that the book is being made into a miniseries this year—and before realizing how eerily fitting that timing is.

While reading, I continually checked and re-checked the Wikipedia page on the book, double-checking that the novel was actually penned in the 1980s, because it seemed—as dystopian novels so often do—wildly ahead of its time. This made me both impressed with Atwood’s prescience and disappointed by the relative stasis of certain cultural issues. How, thirty years later, are we still having similar conversations about women’s rights, women’s health, birth control, abortion, feminism?

For brief context: this is the tale of a “handmaid” of the near future, named—for now—Offred, a possessive nod to the first name of the “commander” she serves. Offred’s service is a strange one; in her society, which has been divided into rigid, gender-defined castes, women who are not married to upper-echelon males are left few options: they are cast out to the unnamed, little-described “colonies,” an option that seems untenable to and is dismissed by our narrator; they serve in an underground ring of prostitutes; they become low-class servants called “Marthas;” or, while still fertile, they become “handmaids,” placed in the service of a questionably sterile commander and his barren wife, their usefulness ticking along with their biological clocks. In periodic “ceremonies” that are at once barbaric and clinical, commanders attempt to impregnate their handmaids in the uncomfortable presence of their wives. It is never quite clear what happens to handmaids who fail to produce children but it is obvious that this is a fate Offred and her fellow handmaids would like to avoid.

Offred’s tale starts in her bare bedroom, which feels more like a cell, in the commander’s house. But it does not stay here: in her narration, Offred jumps and weaves across tenses, living an excruciatingly dull and traumatic present while grieving a rich and passionate past. She is still trying to piece together exactly what happened to her and to her world, and how she landed in the situation in which she finds herself, and her disjointed puzzling gives us clues as to what has happened to her, to her family, and—indeed—to all the women in this theocratic nightmare.

As the pages chip away at her story, we learn that Offred lived in the America we know, but which fell victim to fear-mongering and religious fanaticism. In her world, an attack had frightened people enough to allow themselves to be policed. Autocratic rulers were able to strip women of their rights easily, because money had been completely digitized. By the time Offred and her family, her neighbors, her friends realized they needed to escape, it was too late. The new world in which they live is an inelegant blend of old and new: the women wear Puritanesque clothing of hot wool and white caps, they view traitors hanging in the town square, they bear children not in hospitals but in living rooms, surrounded by other women. But this new world retains some of the creature comforts and efficiencies of modern society: televisions, radios, electric fans, cars, which are enjoyed mostly by the elite who decried their existence.

We do not know how long Offred has been a handmaid, or how long it’s been since the time she refers to as “before.” What we do know, though, is that she is resistant to the new regime, she is not a true “believer,” and she retains hope that her husband and daughter are, if not well, at least alive. We also know that her story begins to get interesting because of a man.

This poked at me as I read The Handmaid’s Tale, because the crux of Offred’s story—which, yes, is littered with past and present exchanges with multi-dimensional women—focuses upon her changing relationship with the commander. When Offred begins to interact with the commander beyond their ceremonial meetings, her story gains a layer of depth and interest, and she gains access to information and levels of boldness we assume she’s frozen for months or years since the time “before.”

I wish that the catalyst for Offred’s story was not a man. I should point out that the commander’s wife is also integral to Offred’s tale, but it is Offred’s relationship with the commander more than with any other woman that emboldens her and—truly—gives her something to live for again. This seemed both incongruous with the overarching message of the book and, sadly, believable—particularly for the oppressive world in which Offred lives.

Interestingly, Offred seizes the most agency in her telling of the tale itself. In the penultimate chapter of her story, she presents three alternative stories for the same act in quick succession. She describes the scene one way, then startles the reader by admitting that the events did not actually transpire as she described. She then tells the scene a different way, and once more reveals that that may not have been how things happened. In taking agency over her account of her memory and allowing herself artistic license, Offred has shaken the stability of her entire story; she has jeopardized her very reliability as a narrator. She has flexed her narrator’s muscle; by making the reader question the validity of the facts as she tells them, she makes the reader question every detail of the past several hundred pages. She has demonstrated, in the final pages of her tale, that it is she who has the power—if not over her society, or her family, or even her own life, then over her story. We cannot begrudge her that.

The novel ends with an epilogue set more than a century in the future, in a lecture by a professor who has discovered and analyzed Offred’s tale and uses it to understand Gilead, the (we come to understand) relatively short-lived monotheocracy that derived from America. It is in this epilogue that we gain glimpses of the structure of and impetus behind Offred’s society.

To me, though, this epilogue does more than tie up some loose ends for the reader; rather, it shows how quickly and easily a person’s life and a society’s struggle can become another blip to be studied in history. Zooming out from Offred’s claustrophobic story, it’s important for the reader to keep the big picture in perspective—and to understand the importance of avoiding becoming just another tragic datapoint to examine.

In other news, it's time for me to blog about something lighter! A happier read hopefully coming to the blog soon...

#recommendations #45 #fiction #bookreview #modernfiction