Crosspost: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Crossposted from Feminist Quill, written on September 24, 2015

Title: The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Year of Publication: 1985
Series: N/A
Goodreads Rating (Avg.): 3.99 
Goodreads Rating (Mine): 5

Plot Description: In a dystopic world ravaged by pollution and sexually transmitted diseases, infertility is the second biggest problem faced by what once used to be the United States of America. The biggest problem is the Religious Right, although they probably don't see it that way.

Offred, the eponymous protagonist, is a part of one of the Gileadean empire's greatest schemes to combat infertility - that is to say, the imprisonment of women of child bearing age and their subsequent induction into sex slavery as Handmaids. The Handmaids are surrogates to the infertile wives of rich and powerful (and ever fertile) men deemed worthy of this shot at reproduction.

This review falls smack dab in the middle of my reviewing of the Shifter series, which is, incidentally also set in a universe where women are controlled for reproductive purposes.

Offred provides a first person narrative voice that is muted and numbed in tone but unceasingly rebellious in its content. Her thoughts shift from scene to scene the same way one would flip through a book one has read too many times already. And while her memories may not make for a pleasant book, it's a compelling one all the same.

Sometimes she isn't in the mood for the really tough parts, so she might read to you from a different, only slightly less horrifying scene. This gimmick, in my opinion, works well for the empathetic reader, because by the end of the first chapter, you're dreading hearing Offred tell her story just as much as she dreads telling it.

The Handmaid's Tale has been marked down both as feminist dystopia as well as speculative fiction. I find these classifications incredibly stupid for one particular reason: Both terms refer to a vague and distant future filled with horrid things that may or may not happen, and this is a singularly inaccurate way of describing The Handmaid's Tale. 

This book is Contemporary like nobody's business. Look around you, and you'll see the events described in this book happening on a large scale, systemic basis somewhere or the other in the world. Sex slavery? Saudi Arabia has perfected it to the extent that their diplomats feel it's NBD to be practicing it* carrying on with it in their embassies to foreign countries. 
* These guys don't need to 'practice' sex slavery anymore, because they've got it down pat.

Regulation of human rights of women with regards to reproduction? The State of Alabama tried to terminate a woman's 'parental rights' to her foetus. On grounds of chemical endangerment of said foetus. Because she wanted an abortion. 

Between the Planned Parenthood Bill and the rising prices of female contraception everywhere, there really shouldn't be much doubt as to whether there's a call to increasing regulation of female bodies, should there?

The fact that male politicians continue to legislate female bodies (on the basis of arguments that sound like they came out of a Insult and Dehumanization Randomizer) whilst carrying on with their often hypocritical personal lives merely holds a mirror up to characters like Commander Fred. I'm talking about those people who are literally half a step away from instituting a Gilead involving morally legitimized surrogacy cum sex slavery whilst maintaining that prostitutes are still a necessity because "men like variety".

Patronymics (the handmaids are stripped of their original names and named after the man they now belong to - E.g.: OfFred, OfWayne, OfWarren, OfGlen), victim blaming, male privilege, and systematized rape culture. All of it exists in the extremely non fictional here and now.
(What are our surnames but patronymics after all?)

And the Religious Right is everywhere. 'Which religion?' is an irrelevant question. All of them. And they're all always Right. And the one thing they all seem to agree on is woman's rightful place (or rather, the lack thereof) in the universe.

Ookay, point made. Rant over. The next rant observation has to do with the other reviews of this book on Goodreads. In hindsight, I suppose it shouldn't have been surprising that The Handmaid's Tale has a wildly polarizing effect. For one thing, the style of writing doesn't work for everyone. Some think it's inconsistent to juxtapose Offred's everyday monotone (submissive, quiet, repressed) with sentences that suddenly end with "The Commander is fucking." Others just found it too distracting.

The other notable thing about the reviews is that on the one hand you have reviewers who - like me - see in this book a very accurate description of the world around us today (and possibly read dire warnings of the book eventually coming true). Others are quick to denounce the book as the most speculative of speculative fiction, and state categorically that "Time has not been kind to Margaret Atwood's vision." [As I've already stated, I firmly believe that the latter lot are completely wrong.]
Something I grappled with quite a lot was my inability to understand why all the characters were so subdued. It wasn't possible, my brain reasoned, for human beings raised in lives of independence and freedom to bend their knees so easily.

Throw a frog into boiling water and it will hop out immediately. Drop it in ordinary water and slowly bring it to boil, and the frog will cook in it and die without realizing what is happening to it (until it's too late).

Besides, that's basically what happened during the Holocaust anyway.

The Handmaid's Tale is a beautifully nuanced book that looks at all aspects of life under the patriarchy. It looks at the impact on the Handmaids - simultaneously the objects of revulsion and hope by the rest of the community and on the Wives - considered Failures because of their inability to conceive and set aside. It looks at the Young Men who are both considered ineligible for wives (and by extension Handmaids) as well as forbidden to masturbate by religion and on the Daughters fated to grow up to be Somebody's Wife. The book even takes pity on the Husbands who seem to have it all, even Husbands like Commander Fred who wrote the system only to find, too late, that he'd robbed himself of the twin pleasures of intimacy and variety.

Motherhood is one of the central themes of the book - Offred is a mother to a lost child who is now someone else's daughter somewhere else in the city. She is also expected to be a mother again - only for a while, only for nine months - and she hopes for this as well. Except a new pregnancy means something different to her than the first one had - it's freedom from the threat of exile, protection from a variety of punishments, and sadly, a hunger for approval, like a dog hungers for its owner to recognize that it has been a good dog. (This makes quite a lot of sense, because in addition to the fact that she's a sex slave being forced to bear children, it's also important to note that the real mother of any children born to her would be the Commander's wife.)

The book's real ending depicts an academic conference at least a couple of centuries into the future, adding additional context in a manner reminiscent of the found-footage genre of horror movies. And as with that genre, the reader finds themselves stepping out of an intensely engaging personal narrative of horror into a disorienting context where characters who are centuries removed from the book's subject remark upon those past events in a lighthearted manner.

After I was done reading, I compared notes on the book with the friend who recommended The Handmaid's Tale to me. We were specifically talking about which part of the book made us feel the most physically nauseous. For her, it was the scene where Offred and her fellow inmates at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Centre are made to repeatedly chant "It was your fault!" at a new girl who had recounted her story of having been gangraped at the age of fourteen.

For me, it was the moment Offred realizes that the government's move to remove women from full citizenship made her inoffensive husband happy, not sad. She has lost everything, she thinks, but he has gained instead. Everything that was hers is his now, and she too, is his.