The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

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“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
“I believe you into being… I tell, therefore you are.”

Described as a dystopian novel by the critics and as speculative fiction by its author, this well-known controversial novel acts as a cautionary tale; Margaret Atwood’s only rule while writing it and later making the series was: “not [to] include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist”. All the unimaginable things that happen in this tale have precedents in history: the Indian system of castes, religious fundamentalism, the Berlin wall, human trafficking, Puritanism, dictatorships, civil wars, the Internet... you name it. Plenty of reasons to be afraid; our way of living could easily end in a suffocating and puritan Republic such as Gilead, justifying its actions in any given tale. Be aware, stop ignoring, let’s change our story/history, let’s give it another end.

LRB

Critical perspective:

A one-of-a-kind tour de force, Margaret Atwood's futuristic The Handmaid's Tale refuses categorization into a single style, slant, or genre. Rather, it blends a number of approaches and formats in a radical departure from predictable sci-fi or thriller fiction or feminist literature. Paramount to the novel's success are the following determinants:

  • existential apologia a defense and celebration of the desperate coping mechanisms by which endangered women survive, outwit, and undermine devaluation, coercion, enslavement, torture, potential death sentences, and outright genocide. Like Zhukov in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Offred clings to sanity through enjoyment of simple pleasures: smoothing lotion on her dry skin and smoking a cigarette with Moira and her lesbian sisterhood in the washroom at Jezebel's; remembering better times with her mother, husband, and daughter, even the veiled sniping between Luke and his mother-in-law; recollecting the pleasant frivolities and diversions that women once enjoyed — for example, eye makeup, fashions, and jewellery, and women's magazines; and allowing herself moderate hope for some alleviation of present misery, although Offred never gives way to a fantasy of rescue, reunion with her family, and return to her old life.
  • oral history a frequent vehicle of oppressed people who, by nature of their disenfranchisement through loss of personal freedoms, turn to the personal narrative as a means of preserving meaningful experience, and to recitation of eyewitness accounts of historical events in an effort to clarify gaps, myths, errors, and misconceptions. [...] As a desperate refugee on the "Underground Frailroad," her harrowing flight contrasts the knowing titters of the International Historical Association studying Gilead from the safety of women's rights and academic freedom two centuries in the future.
  • speculative fiction a form of jeremiad — an intentionally unsettling blend of surmise and warning based on current political, social, economic, and religious trends. As a modern-day Cassandra, Offred seems emotionally and spiritually compelled to tell her story, if only to relieve the ennui of her once nun-like existence and to touch base with reality. Her bleak fictional narrative connects real events of the 1980s with possible ramifications for a society headed too far into conservatism and a mutated form of World War II fascism. By frequent references and allusions to Hitler's Third Reich and its "final solution" for Jews, Atwood reminds the reader that outrageous grabs for power and rampant megalomania have happened before, complete with tattoos on the limbs of victims, systemized selection and annihilation, virulent regimentation, and engineered reproduction to produce a prevailing Caucasian race.
  • confession an autobiographical revelation of private life or philosophy intended as a psychological release from guilt and blame through introspection and rationalization. […]Offred frequently castigates herself for trying to maintain her humanity and fidelity to cherished morals and beliefs in a milieu that crushes dissent. In frequent night scenes, during which Offred gazes through shatterproof glass into the night sky in an effort to shore up her flagging soul, her debates with herself reflect the thin edge that separates endurance from crazed panic. By the end of her tale, she has undergone so much treachery and loss of belief and trust that the likelihood of total mental, spiritual, and familial reclamation is slim. The most she can hope for is physical escape from the terrors of Gilead and the healing inherent in telling her story to future generations.
  • dystopia an imaginary world gone sour through idealism that fails to correspond to the expectations, principles, and behaviors of real people. In the face of rampant sexual license, gang rape, pornography, venereal disease, abortion protest, and the undermining of traditional values, the fundamentalists who set up Gilead fully expect to improve human life. However, as the Commander admits, some people are fated to fall short of the template within which the new society is shaped, the ethical yardstick by which behavior is measured. His chauvinistic comment is significant in its designation of "some people." These "some people" are nearly all female, homosexual, underground, and non-fundamentalist victims — a considerable portion of the U.S. population.

Indigenous to dystopian fiction is the perversion of technology, as evidenced in Brave New World, 1984, Anthem, and R.U.R. In Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, loss of freedom begins with what appears to be merely a banking error. Only after repeated attempts to access her funds does Offred realize that control of assets no longer exists for the women of Gilead. From credit card subversion, the faceless radical hierarchy moves quickly to presidential assassination, murder of members of Congress, prohibition of women from schools and the work force, control of the media, and banning of basic freedoms. Without books or newspapers, telephones or television, Offred has no means of assessing the severity of society's deprivations. Controlled by Identipasses, Compudoc, Computalk, Compucount, and Compuchek, she must rely on the most primitive measures of gaining information and securing hope, even the translation of scrawled Latin doggerel on her closet wall. Interestingly, Atwood does not resort to farfetched wizardry. Her astute use of televangelism, cattle prods, credit cards, roadblocks, border passes, computer printouts, barbed wire, public executions, and color-coded uniforms reflects the possibilities of subversion of current technology and social control devices.

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/h/the-handmaids-tale/critical-essays/literary-analysis-of-the-handmaids-tale 

The Handmaid’s Tale resonates with historical and contemporary relevance, reflecting the feminist movements of the 1980s and offering a cautionary lens through which to examine issues of the present day. Atwood’s exploration of gender inequality, reproductive rights, and the impact of religious fundamentalism remains a powerful commentary on societal issues. The novel has not only endured as a literary classic but has also found new resonance through Hulu’s successful television adaptation, which premiered in 2017. Starring Elisabeth Moss as Offred, the series brought Gilead to the screen, sparking critical acclaim for its faithful adaptation and reigniting discussions about the book’s relevance in today’s socio-political climate. A sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, was published in 2019.

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/

Biography:

 Regarded as one of Canada’s finest living writers, Margaret Atwood is a poet, novelist, story writer, essayist, and environmental activist. Her books have received critical acclaim in the United States, Europe, and her native Canada, and she has received numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Governor General’s Award, twice. Atwood’s critical popularity is matched by her popularity with readers; her books are regularly bestsellers and her novels have been adapted into popular movies and television series.

Atwood was born in Ottawa and earned her BA from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and MA from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/margaret-atwood

Reviews by our book club members:

This reading in English has been difficult for me, but I had support with the text in Spanish. The story has made my hair stand on end. It's so plausible that it's not like a dystopia, it could be a reality or maybe it's already happened. Let me remember life in the Spanish Republic and what happened 40 years later. Without going that far, what has happened in our days in Afghanistan and Iran? This book should be read in high schools for the message it conveys. Let no one think that our freedoms last forever. What has been achieved step by step can disappear, as also happened in 1939 in Germany. Democracy always hangs by a thread and those who lose the most are always women. Very interesting is the open ending. A ray of hope, it could be that Nick organized the escape, that the guards were fake, the authorization was missing. Or that the narrator, without a name, was simply condemned. Anything can happen. 

PRR

"While the year was passing, coinciding with the one that framed the development of the fictitious Orwellian society, a world was being written that brought together the alienations that human beings continued to endure despite the warnings that human creativity and thought had issued. The following year, in 1985, the Handmaid's Tale came to light. Societies were developing technologically, but the desire for domination of some beings over others remained anchored in the origins of time, in the writings that still support the beliefs that move to people and societies. This time the look-out changes and the until then hidden voice of the feminine vision, makes visible the domination over half of the population that, in addition to being dominated, was considered non-existent. 39 years later, one continues to read the still tear that slowly verbalizes the suffering that accompanies the fight for survival in a world designed by a minority that supports its well-being on the domination of a majority of other human beings: one half and the other." "And nowadays does it still use the present and future verbal time? perhaps part of it depend on us."

FDRF

"Atwood's book is one of the greatest dystopias of the 20th century, comparable to George Orwell's novel, 1984. It describes a fictional, hypothetical, and undesirable society where everybody has lost their human and civil rights. This puritanical dictatorship divides people according to the role they occupy in society, into different groups. The maids, the category to which Offred (our protagonist belongs), have an important and exclusive mission: to reproduce.

The Handmaid's Tale is a novel that leads us to think about the human race's cruelty, the fragility of democratic systems, and man's tendency to 'stumble twice over the same stone.' Being a dystopia, it does not seek action, intricate plots, arguments, and many dialogues. So, the book might be a bit slow or even boring. It is a cold and intimate narrative meant to make us think more than enjoy. 

But if you like dystopias, you must read it, for sure!"

JLJG

In spite of all the great success the novel achieved, for me it is just another dystopia with the aim of warning the world and especially women which kind of society we may reach in the future if we do not stop using chemicals, radiations , and other harmful to the environment elements.

Gilead is the dystopian state where we also find the typical forbidden elements: culture, pleasure, freedom, and where a veiled violence is applied to fertile women, since “wives” cannot have babies, when the problem of infertility may clearly come from their powerful husbands. “Handmaids” are raped every month lying between the wives’ open legs, but no woman can have jobs ( except the “aunts “ who are like old wardens) make up, not even wear different clothes; all of them wear uniforms to define different social groups with specific tasks. 

The structure of the book told as a tale by the narrator Offred (possession of the husband) who had a life of her own before, tries to reach anybody who might read it some time. She is alive and fighting to escape that horror, but she can only accept what people like to do with her until she is finally taken in a black van. Must we suppose she is saved away?

CJ

Praise: 

"Atwood takes many trends which exist today and stretches them to their logical and chilling conclusions . . . An excellent novel about the directions our lives are taking . . . Read it while it's still allowed." 

Houston Chronicle

"A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex . . . Just as the world of Orwell's 1984 gripped our imaginations, so will the world of Atwood's handmaid!"

Washington Post Book World 
https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/the-handmaids-tale/praise

'Fiercely political, yet witting and wise...this novel seems ever more vital in the present day' 

Observer

“Moving, vivid and terrifying. I only hope it's not prophetic.”

Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Listener

“The images of brilliant emptiness are one of the most striking aspects of this novel about totalitarian blindness...the effect is chilling.”

Linda Taylor, Sunday Times
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/354755/the-handmaids-tale-by-margaret-atwood/9781784708238

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