Thoughts on Margret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

PLEASE NOTE THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE HANDMAID’S TALE AND GEORGE ORWELL’S NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR

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It has been a couple of days since I finished Margret Atwood’s much referenced and much lauded book, The Handmaid’s Tale and I think I have a lot of thoughts about it. At least, I definitely find myself thinking about it a lot of the time. Not necessarily in that way you get when you put down a book that has taken you on some fantastic journey through lives and worlds previously unfathomable to you yet now known to you in the most intimate of levels, but in the way in which you know you have read something that has hit a nerve somewhere. Yet, try as I might, I have been unable to come to any conclusions as to what I actually feel about the book.

Did I like the book? Sure, it was pretty good. Not the best book I’ve ever read, nor the most beautiful prose, but it was enjoyable enough for me to come away from it open to reading more Margret Atwood. Certain elements of the backstory were left frustrating opaque, but I guess this, in part, could be explained away by the censored world that the protagonist, Offred, inhabits. Some characters felt under-explored or perhaps a little one-dimensional, but again Offred lives in a society which encourages faith over thought, and so it is perhaps not that surprising that she would probe so little behind the masks of her oppressors. In a world in which an ill-judged utterance or opinion could lead to your death, it is only natural that you would reserve your thoughts for only the most deserving. But these quibbles aside, The Handmaid’s Tale was largely a good read.

The reason why I am spending such an inordinate amount of time thinking about this book though is that I came away from it feeling slightly unnerved. It is not that I necessarily buy-in wholesale to the premise of a world in which women have moved so swiftly from a state of near-total objectification (pre-Gilead) to one of complete subjugation (early to mid-Gilead), but I don’t think that is what Margret Atwood was asking us to do. Yes, this is a book of speculative-fiction, but the extreme logical ends to which she takes the Gilead philosophy are, to me at least, simply a mirror to reflect our fears of people with loud and dogmatic voices, something as relevant today as it was 30 years ago or even 80 years ago. In this case, it was women who were the ones to be sacrificed in the name of the survivability of the human race, but it could easily have been a story about any other group or minority. Indeed, without meaning to draw crass and shallow comparisons, it is hard to believe that there was not some intent behind Atwood’s decision to title the novel’s willingly-subservient class of women as the “Aunts” given their obvious similarities to the “Uncle Tom” role assumed by certain black people during the slavery-era (or even beyond). Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but it was something that struck me early on and stayed with me throughout.

You do not have to dig particularly deep into this book to also see the obvious similarities with another famous piece of speculative-fiction, namely George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Both books show you the world through the eyes of characters granted a certain level of status (as dictated by their oppressors) within their societies who are both flirting with ideas of thought and moral treason. Both books are dominated by mistrust and paranoia, and both, at times, leave you the reader feeling helpless. The thing that perhaps separates the two is that, in the end, The Handmaid’s Tale shows you that there was an eventual “out” for the oppressed people of Gilead, and so is perhaps the more hopeful of the two. Whereas Nineteen Eighty Four ends with our protagonist beaten down, broken and accepting of his fate, The Handmaid’s Tale explicitly tells us that not only did Offred escape, but that eventually Gilead society itself crumbled. Just as how the story of the formation of the Republic of Gilead is left obscured, so too is the story of its downfall, and that is undoubtedly a little frustrating. But, still, the more optimistic view of humanity is there. Yes, we may at times dig ourselves into desperate situations, but we also have the capability to dig ourselves out.

But then again, do we? The changed world from which these final revelations about Gilead are revealed is, for all its progress in terms of multi-cultural make up, still seemingly a patriarchal one. While nothing explicit is mentioned about its own time and morals, every speaker mentioned in the epilogue is a male. How are we to know the role women play at that time? The lecturer may talk in a way that suggests he does not necessarily agree with the morality imposed by the Gilead Republic on its people, but no insight is offered as to how things have changed in the years following the republic’s downfall. This could be no different to us wagging a disapproving finger at the Victorians and their seemingly-backwards views, when still today women in our very own western cultures (and many others) are oppressed in a number of different, and at times more insidious, ways.

I think ultimately, what Margret Atwood is asking us to do, or at least this is what I took away from the book, is to not be coerced by charismatic (or otherwise) people into definitive answers on how a “good” and “just” society should be. Like it or not, we all share a tiny planet together with a limited amount of space and resources, and it is up to us to work out a way to live together peacefully and respectful of each other. Everybody’s opinion matters, but on some issues, some people’s opinions will be (rightly) weighted more heavily. As a white male, I feel that of course my opinion matters when it comes to issues such as sexism, racism, xenophobia etc., but at the same time I accept that it is not my place to tell women, or black people or whoever else what they can and can’t be offended by and what should be important to them. I mean, it’s not even that there is a single consensus among any one group as to where our issues and problems lie. And you know why? Because that is the nature of being human. We disagree with each other, regardless of sex, race, religion or political leaning. When it comes to progress (and I think ultimately we are moving in the right direction) the most important thing is to listen and to try and understand. If everybody just “tells” others what they think and ends the conversation there, then we are doomed to failure. While The Handmaid’s Tale may take things to almost illogical and unlikely extremes, the message is clear… We should be listening more to each other.

So yes, that is where my time with The Handmaid’s Tale took me and it has been cathartic to write about it in this way. This is not a review of the book, nor is it (intentionally at least) a manifesto with which to beat people over the head with. Perhaps nobody will read it and I am simply speaking (or typing) to an empty auditorium, but for once that is not really the reason for me writing this blog post. This time, I write simply to bring some calmness to a confused and busy mind.