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I’m finally on the Margaret Atwood bandwagon! I’ve been meaning to get on it for so long and I’ve felt so left out every time people talked about The Handmaid’s Tale and I had to admit I had never read it. Or anything by Atwood.
That ends now!
This year, in addition to the shame, I had two other reasons to read Atwood’s classic tale this year: it was originally published in the decade I was born and it’s a dystopian novel, both of which are requirements for this year’s Read Harder Challenge.
It took me a while to get into this book and at first I was really scared I wasn’t going to like it. I hate that feeling of diving into a book everyone has been raving about only to find I don’t like it.
It took a while because Atwood spends a lot of time explaining the world she’s created. She doesn’t do it in a boring, purely exposition way. She introduces the reader to her world at the same time she introduces her main character to her new employers/housemates. The only name we get for her is Offred. We never learn what name she was born with and it turns out all women in this society are named “Of+male name”, which I found horrifying.
The novel gets its name from the fact that the narrator, Offred, is a handmaid, which means her sole job is to reproduce. Handmaids get assigned to families and once a month, when they’re ovulating, there’s a ceremony in which the patriarch of the household reads bible verses about procreation and then they all go up to the master bedroom and he has sex with the handmaid, always in the missionary position with the handmaid literally laying between the legs of his wife. If she gets pregnant, they’ll raise her child as their own and the handmaid will be assigned to another family to start the process all over again.
Women who hit menopause without bearing any children are banished to “The Colonies.” The narrator isn’t entirely sure what goes on in the colonies because all she knows is what she’s been told by the establishment, but she recognizes that’s an untrustworthy source. What she has been told is that it’s a toxic place in which society’s “undesirables” are used to clean up the toxic waste. But they don’t bother giving them any kind of protective gear so the rumor is that they usually die within a few years.
Because it’s imperative to the women that they get pregnant, it’s common for them to sleep with other men in order to achieve the desired end. Many of the household patriarchs are old men who might not be able to perform any more, but society refuses to recognize that a man could possibly be sterile. So some women sleep with their doctors or other men in their lives in order to get pregnant.
The story jumps around in time between what’s happening now (Offred is stuck in this house doing very little until she gets pregnant), the rise of this awful society, and Offred’s time in some sort of “correctional” facility in which women were kidnapped and held hostage while certain women called “Aunts” explained to them their places and expectations in this new society and why it would be so much better than before.
A lot of this book sounds like the Holocaust. Like the Nazis, the people bringing this new era to America took steps to bring about their male-dominated society. They took away women’s rights one at a time so that no one thought to protest until they made it illegal for women to hold jobs and froze all their bank accounts so they weren’t allowed to buy anything. Some women did protest that, but many of them were gunned down. There is no doubt the current regime is one based on terror.
Throughout the book, Atwood does an excellent job showing Stockholm syndrome and how people can get used to anything. Offred spends much of her time avoiding thinking because it’s less painful that way.
The chapter in which she describes losing her job is heart wrenching, especially in the way she talks about how it came between her and her husband. He promises to take care of her and she can’t make him see that’s not the point. The point is she has just been stripped of all her autonomy in one fell swoop. She is completely dependent on him and that has to fundamentally change their relationship, whether they want to admit it or not.
One of the most devastating scenes is when Offred runs into her best friend who had escaped the correctional facility. While Offred was learning how to behave in the new world that was being created, her friend was planning her escape. The first time she was brought back and beaten, but the second time she never came back and Offred assumed she had made it out. Then Offred runs into her old friend at a brothel, only to find that she had been captured while trying to make it over the border. Now she’s much like Offred, doing her best to get along in this new society, just in a different capacity. It’s that chapter that destroys all Offred’s hopes.
I almost didn’t read the last chapter. It’s titled “Historical Notes” and I just thought it was an author’s note on how she conducted her research for the book. Instead, it’s a fictional lecture by a professor approximately 150 years in the future discussing the novel as an historical document that’s recently been found. He speculates on who the author might have been, which family she might have been assigned to, and what might have happened to her after her narration ended. It was a fascinating conclusion to the book that provided even more information on the world Atwood created for her dystopian novel.
This book really is a must read.
What did you guys read this week? Any other classics? Did they live up to your expectations?