Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Less Speculative Every Day

When Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was first published 30 years ago, New York Times reviewer Mary McCarthy didn’t think much of it. She deemed it “readable,” that literary side-eye of yore, and said (albeit apologetically) that it “lacks imagination.” She found the characters flat and the set-up unbelievable, and complained that it “does not tell me what there is in our present morés that I ought to watch out for unless I want the United States of America to become a slave state something like the Republic of Gilead, whose outlines are here sketched out.”
I don’t mention this to engage in petty historical comeuppance, but to note how Atwood’s oral history of the repressive post-American country of Gilead, today considered a classic of dystopian—not to mention feminist—literature, was perceived upon publication. The society of The Handmaid’s Tale, with its theocratic enforcement of strict gender roles and reproduction, has become as familiar a metaphor as Big Brother or Soma, instantly recognizable even to people who haven’t read the book. It’s been translated into a gazillion languages and adapted as both a film and an opera(!). It hit a nerve, and continues to do so.
The tale is told from the perspective of Offred, a handmaid in the household of the Commander, one of Gilead’s architects and leaders. Due to declining white birthrates, the government has assigned women of childbearing age to infertile couples; these are the handmaids. Women’s roles are rigorously defined—wives, infertile serving women (called Marthas after the biblical story of Lazarus), disposable “unwomen.” In describing this horrific landscape, Offred is introspective and musing, her emotional responses almost muted. As she recounts in the moment her tightly prescribed movements in Gilead, she remembers, in broken, non-linear passages, the events of “before,” which is how she refers to what we would recognize as modern America.

I first read The Handmaid’s Tale at 15, and while I certainly identified with Offred, there was an edge to my feelings. There I was, at the cusp of making grownup decisions, confident no Commander was going to tell me what to do. Offred never particularly does anything: things happen to her. She’s an odd main character for a dystopia, not particularly rebellious or active. Fifteen-year-old me would have positively died for an arrow-wielding Katniss Everdeen to shoot up the place. Like Winston from 1984, her rebellion is largely in her head (or bed), though unlike Winston, hers is penned in further by her lack of writing (the manuscript we’re reading is said to be recorded on cassettes).
In order for a dystopia to be effective, it has to be plausible, but what we perceive as plausible (if not, strictly speaking, likely) changes through time. Any book set in the future becomes anachronistic as time goes by, but sometimes the futuristic novel can be eerily prescient. Every time someone interviews William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” in the short story collection Burning Chrome, they hassle him for failing to foresee cell phones. By the same token, the saccharine tablets and Soviet cabbage in 1984 read as quaint, but the ever watchful eye of social media has added freight to his two-way televisions, conceived of well before the personal computer.
By my reckoning, using time cues from the novel, we should be about midway through Gilead’s early period, which is about when The Handmaid’s Tale takes place. It seems almost funny, then, to hear Offred remark that the elimination of paper money in lieu of electronic funds is one of the society’s proximal conditions. Credit is a serious problem for many, if not most Americans, though it has more to do with debt load than currency. The various nuclear and environmental disasters of pre-Gilead also feel familiar, if exaggerated. While Atwood’s California is hit with a nuclear meltdown after an earthquake—it was “nobody’s fault,” Offred deadpans—in our reality, we’ve weathered the Gulf oil spill, Katrina, even the Fukishima radiation that reached California’s shores sometime last year.

Reading it now, closer in age to the Marthas (infertile household servants) or Wives than the Handmaids, I see these women differently. In my youth, their motivations seemed theoretical, schematic: See the feminist and the anti-feminist advocate the same policies. While I’m not sure porn-burning feminists like Offred’s mom still exist, I think one needs only to read one of the thousands of op-eds about Miley Cyrus to see her spirit lives on. Serena Joy, the Commander’s wife, was a religious television star of some stripe, not unlike the reality tv stars and female politicians now who publicly advocate a world like Gilead, in sensibility if not particulars. In the book, she is an angry ghost, entrapped by a world she helped create. “How furious she must be,” Offred observes, “now that she’s been taken at her word.” All dystopias start as utopias to someone, ways of constructing society which will solve an intractable problem or eliminate some injustice. There is no random violence against women in The Handmaid’s Tale; all the violence is pointed, particular, sanctioned.
Closing the book as a teenager, I can’t remember what I thought of the epilogue, but this time around, it filled me with a demoralized resignation not dissimilar to Offred’s. The academics of post-Gilead treat her story so lightly—one-upping one another with cute literary references, cracking crude jokes—that I almost long for the earnestness of Gilead, its seriousness. I would never willingly exchange my intellectual freedom for physical safety, but in a post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-Ferguson, post-Charlie Hebdo world, I understand how willingness has little to do with it.
Are there any questions?
The Testaments will be published on September 10, 2019. Preorder the B&N Exclusive Edition now.