The Handmaids Tale Book Review New York Times
Essay
Margaret Atwood on What 'The Handmaid'south Tale' Means in the Age of Trump
In the bound of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called "The Handmaid'southward Tale." I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard transmission typewriter I'd rented.
The keyboard was High german considering I was living in Due west Berlin, which was nonetheless encircled past the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in identify, and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the Due east High german Air Forcefulness made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Mantle — Czechoslovakia, East Germany — I experienced the wariness, the feeling of existence spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. "This used to belong to . . . but then they disappeared." I heard such stories many times.
Having been built-in in 1939 and come to consciousness during Globe War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast every bit lightning. "It can't happen hither" could non exist depended on: Annihilation could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.
By 1984, I'd been avoiding my novel for a year or ii. It seemed to me a risky venture. I'd read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, only I'd never written such a book. Was I up to information technology? The form was strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in information technology to exist real. I of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the "nightmare" of history, nor whatever technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. And then is the Devil.
Back in 1984, the master premise seemed — even to me — fairly outrageous. Would I exist able to persuade readers that the Usa had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution and Congress are no longer: The Republic of Gilead is congenital on a foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that have always lain below the modern-day America we thought nosotros knew.
The immediate location of the volume is Cambridge, Mass., home of Harvard Academy, at present a leading liberal educational institution just in one case a Puritan theological seminary. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks, researching my New England ancestors as well as the Salem witchcraft trials. Would some people be affronted by the use of the Harvard wall as a display area for the bodies of the executed? (They were.)
In the novel the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and the power to have viable babies is at a premium. (In today's existent world, studies are now showing a sharp fertility refuse in Chinese men.) Nether totalitarianisms — or indeed in whatever sharply hierarchical guild — the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of the government adapt to have fertile females assigned to them as Handmaids. The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. One man, iv women, 12 sons — but the handmaids could non claim the sons. They belonged to the respective wives.
And so the tale unfolds.
When I first began "The Handmaid'due south Tale" it was called "Offred," the name of its central character. This name is composed of a man'south kickoff proper noun, "Fred," and a prefix denoting "belonging to," so it is like "de" in French or "von" in German, or like the suffix "son" in English last names like Williamson. Within this name is concealed some other possibility: "offered," cogent a religious offering or a victim offered for sacrifice.
Why practice we never learn the real proper name of the central character, I have often been asked. Considering, I reply, so many people throughout history accept had their names changed, or have simply disappeared from view. Some accept deduced that Offred's existent proper noun is June, since, of all the names whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium/dormitory, "June" is the only 1 that never appears again. That was not my original thought simply it fits, so readers are welcome to it if they wish.
At some time during the writing, the novel'south name changed to "The Handmaid's Tale," partly in honor of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," simply partly besides in reference to fairy tales and folk tales: The story told by the fundamental grapheme partakes — for later or remote listeners — of the unbelievable, the fantastic, every bit do the stories told by those who have survived earth-shattering events.
Over the years, "The Handmaid'southward Tale" has taken many forms. It has been translated into 40 or more languages. It was made into a picture show in 1990. It has been an opera, and it has also been a ballet. It is beingness turned into a graphic novel. And in April 2017 information technology will get an MGM/Hulu television series.
In this series I have a modest cameo. The scene is the ane in which the newly conscripted Handmaids are being brainwashed in a sort of Cherry-red Guard re-educational activity facility known as the Red Center. They must learn to renounce their previous identities, to know their identify and their duties, to sympathize that they have no real rights but volition exist protected up to a point if they conform, and to think then poorly of themselves that they volition accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.
The Handmaids sit down in a circle, with the Taser-equipped Aunts forcing them to join in what is now called (only was not, in 1984) the "slut-shaming" of one of their number, Jeanine, who is being made to recount how she was gang-raped every bit a teenager. Her fault, she led them on — that is the chant of the other Handmaids.
Although information technology was "only a television set show" and these were actresses who would be giggling at coffee pause, and I myself was "just pretending," I found this scene horribly upsetting. It was style too much similar way besides much history. Yep, women volition gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook: We see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly have positions of power over other women, even — and, perhaps, especially — in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: All power is relative, and in tough times whatever corporeality is seen every bit better than none. Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, and think they are doing the Handmaids a favor: At least they haven't been sent to clean up toxic waste, and at least in this brave new world they won't get raped, non as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists. Some are opportunists. And they are good at taking some of the stated aims of 1984 feminism — like the anti-porn campaign and greater safe from sexual set on — and turning them to their own advantage. As I say: real life.
Which brings me to three questions I am oft asked.
Start, is "The Handmaid'due south Tale" a "feminist" novel? If you hateful an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you hateful a novel in which women are human being beings — with all the diverseness of character and beliefs that implies — and are likewise interesting and of import, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, and so yes. In that sense, many books are "feminist."
Epitome
Why interesting and important? Considering women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an reconsideration of nature, they are non secondary players in homo destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human being populations would die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls and children has long been a characteristic of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population. Kill their babies and replace their babies with yours, as cats do; make women take babies they can't afford to raise, or babies you will then remove from them for your ain purposes, steal babies — it'south been a widespread, age-old motif. The control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive regime on the planet. Napoleon and his "cannon forage," slavery and its e'er-renewed human being merchandise — they both fit in here. Of those promoting enforced childbirth, it should be asked: Cui bono? Who profits past it? Sometimes this sector, sometimes that. Never no one.
The second question that comes upwardly frequently: Is "The Handmaid's Tale" antireligion? Again, it depends what you may mean by that. True, a group of authoritarian men seize control and endeavor to restore an extreme version of the patriarchy, in which women (like 19th-century American slaves) are forbidden to read. Further, they can't command money or have jobs exterior the home, unlike some women in the Bible. The regime uses biblical symbols, as any disciplinarian regime taking over America doubtless would: They wouldn't exist Communists or Muslims.
The modesty costumes worn by the women of Gilead are derived from Western religious iconography — the Wives clothing the blueish of purity, from the Virgin Mary; the Handmaids wear scarlet, from the blood of parturition, but also from Mary Magdalene. Likewise, red is easier to see if you lot happen to be fleeing. The wives of men lower in the social scale are called Econowives, and wear stripes. I must confess that the face-hiding bonnets came non only from mid-Victorian costume and from nuns, but from the Old Dutch Cleanser package of the 1940s, which showed a adult female with her confront hidden, and which frightened me equally a child. Many totalitarianisms have used wear, both forbidden and enforced, to place and control people — remember of yellowish stars and Roman regal — and many have ruled backside a religious front. Information technology makes the creation of heretics that much easier.
In the volume, the dominant "religion" is moving to seize doctrinal control, and religious denominations familiar to us are being annihilated. Merely as the Bolsheviks destroyed the Mensheviks in club to eliminate political competition and Red Baby-sit factions fought to the death against one another, the Catholics and the Baptists are being targeted and eliminated. The Quakers have gone underground, and are running an escape road to Canada, as — I suspect — they would. Offred herself has a private version of the Lord'south Prayer and refuses to believe that this government has been mandated past a only and merciful God. In the real world today, some religious groups are leading movements for the protection of vulnerable groups, including women.
Then the book is not "antireligion." It is against the use of religion as a front end for tyranny; which is a unlike thing altogether.
Is "The Handmaid's Tale" a prediction? That is the 3rd question I'm asked — increasingly, as forces within American social club seize power and enact decrees that embody what they were maxim they wanted to practice, even dorsum in 1984, when I was writing the novel. No, it isn't a prediction, because predicting the hereafter isn't really possible: At that place are likewise many variables and unforeseen possibilities. Let's say information technology's an antiprediction: If this future tin be described in item, maybe information technology won't happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.
Then many different strands fed into "The Handmaid'southward Tale" — grouping executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn program of the SS and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of slavery, the history of American polygamy . . . the listing is long.
Merely there'due south a literary form I haven't mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story equally all-time she can; and then she hides information technology, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand information technology and share it. This is an act of promise: Every recorded story implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a periodical. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the world's indifference to information technology. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her secret addendum.
At that place are two reading audiences for Offred's account: the one at the end of the volume, at an academic conference in the future, who are gratis to read simply who are not e'er as empathetic as 1 might wish; and the individual reader of the book at whatsoever given time. That is the "existent" reader, the Dear Reader for whom every author writes. And many Beloved Readers will go writers in their plow. That is how nosotros writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
In the wake of the contempo American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic ceremonious liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the by decades, and indeed the by centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, information technology is a certainty that someone, somewhere — many, I would guess — are writing downwardly what is happening every bit they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record afterward, if they tin can.
Will their messages exist suppressed and hidden? Will they be institute, centuries subsequently, in an former business firm, behind a wall?
Allow u.s.a. promise information technology doesn't come up to that. I trust information technology will not.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html
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