Feminist Book Club: The Handmaid’s Tale

This month’s selection is The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The novel tells the story of Offred, a woman whose sole value is her ability to breed. The story begins after an abundance of pollution triggers a plunge in the birth rate, and civilization as we know it has been decimated in a calculated overthrow by a fanatical religious sect. What’s left is an oppressive dystopia in which women have been stripped of all personal freedoms, beginning with the right to hold jobs and maintain their own finances, and culminating in the loss of the right even to read. Offred has already lost everything when we meet her: her job, child, husband, friends, and family have all been taken, one by one, by the regime. Even her name is gone, replaced by the shorthand Of-Fred; that is, belonging to Fred, a Commander and the master of her household. Offred’s sole duty is to enter the bedroom of the Commander and his Wife (yes, Wife with a capital W—it’s a title), and to submit to sex with the Commander for the purpose of becoming pregnant. The encounters are ritualistic and perfunctory, leaving the reader both transfixed and horrified. In addition to her ovulatory bedroom visits, Offred also gets to go to the market once a day. Other than that, her schedule involves a whole lot of staring at the ceiling and remembering “the time before,” when she had her own family, her own desires, and the ability to be free outside of her thoughts.
Offred’s thoughts are, in fact, nearly the whole of the novel. She’s a human whose presence in the outside world has been corralled, bound, tamed, and (no pun intended) sterilized. She’s not allowed an opinion, nor is she able to speak without constant deference to some patriarchal figure—whether it be her Commander or the decidedly male incarnation of God favored by the regime. As such, she lives almost entirely in her internal experience, regularly dissociating into memory or fantasy to escape intolerable circumstances. Given the injustice of those circumstances, the reader is often struck by the incongruence of Offred’s reaction to them. At rare moments in the novel, her anger flares briefly, as when she covets a pair of garden shears or marvels irately at the Commander’s entitlement. However, for much of the novel, her internal monologue is shockingly ambivalent and even complacent. Atwood shines here—she refuses to tell the reader what to feel. She simply sets a horrific scene, shrugs, and walks away. We’re left to wring our hands in Offred’s general direction and beg her to resist, to fight, to care. Of course, anyone familiar with trauma dynamics knows the dissociation, submission, and numbness Offred often demonstrates are not exactly out of the ordinary for trauma survivors. In fact, these responses are not only perfectly normal, but often are survivors’ only available tools for fighting to live another day. When Offred finally does dare to resist, we become the ambivalent ones—parts of us cheer while other parts are frozen in fear, certain she’ll be caught and wondering if it wouldn’t have been better for her to simply accept her fate.
If we take Offred’s personal dilemma and stretch it to fit a whole society, we arrive at the crux of the novel: do we choose to preserve personal freedoms and bear all the risks a free society demands? Or do we give up our individual freedoms for the promise of order and security? Feminists know a version of this as the “Patriarchal Bargain,” or the notion that women can and often must agree to abide by the rules of a system that perpetually disadvantages them in exchange for whatever power that system doles out, or sometimes simply just to survive. The women of The Handmaid’s Tale know this bargain well. Their very lives hinge on their ability to continuously prove their value to men.
It would be remiss not to mention the notable absence of people of color, the disabled, and other oppressed groups in this book. The story is entirely comprised of able-bodied, heterosexual white people and focuses almost completely on the plight of white women in their childbearing years. At first, this might appear to be an oversight endemic to late 20th-century feminist discourse—as though it simply didn’t occur to the author to include the plight of anyone other than white folks. And maybe that was the case. However, another angle is that Atwood says more with her choice to exclude other oppressed groups than she could have otherwise. The subtext of this choice is that they are all simply gone, having been summarily exterminated by an iron-fisted dictatorship, one imagines as a first order of business.

Published in the U.S. in 1986, the book is nearing its 30th anniversary. It might seem counterintuitive, for that reason, to emphasize how modern it feels. Whether or not it’s a sign of our times, the book reads as though it was written yesterday. There are so very many reasons to read and love this book—from the richly poetic sensory descriptions of Offred’s world, to the author’s artful narrative neutrality toward the story’s villains. Perhaps most captivating of all, though, is the timeless quality of the novel’s central themes. After all, we still live in a world where the environment is treated an afterthought, where oppressed groups have to fight for basic human rights, and where speaking truth to power is often a risky proposition. I suspect Atwood would be pleased if, some day soon, her flagship novel began to read less like an apropos cautionary tale and more like a far-fetched dystopian fantasy.
Next month’s selection: Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, by Carrie Brownstein