15: Book Review 4, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
A still from The Handmaid’s Tale television series adaptation with Hulu.
Both the dystopian plausibility of the story as well as the narrative voice’s delivery as if a series of diary entries—bit by bit in seemingly rushed whispers—makes this novel so disturbing and visceral. Offred’s (June’s?) steady descent into resignation, watching her be slowly “broken” like a horse and figuratively boiled alive in the hellscape of Gilead stirred within me a guttural fire of anguish.
Atwood crafts her pain and fear in such a way to invoke a low level of fight or flight response in the reader. I repeatedly found myself asking, “when will she escape? How about NOW? Maybe this is it. Yes. Run girl, run!”, only to be left at a cliff in closing. I want so badly to believe she escaped. There exist wrongs in this world that cannot be excused for any cause, even the continuation of the human race cannot justify the absolute moral depravity of sexual slavery. When people are reduced to functional objects, to animals, we rob the entire world of the natural agency we all are born with. We rob ourselves of humankind altogether.
Another still from the Hulu television series adaptation.
One of the most stunning parts of writing Atwood accomplishes in the novel is the unspoken inner dialogue many women live with day-to-day in a patriarchal world, the proclivity to doubt the progress society has made outwardly in suspicion of a lingering inward belief in women’s inferiority. (Who are we kidding, it is not always left silently believed, it is often voiced and loudly by misogynists or sexists clinging to old dogma or power, although progressively less often). This was best demonstrated in the scene when the women of what later became Gilead first lost their jobs and access to bank accounts, when they were beginning to be stripped of their agency as if they were children.
“We still have…he said[…]We still have each other, I said. It was true. Then why did I sound, even to myself, so indifferent? He kissed me then, as if now I’d said that, things could get back to normal. But something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me. He doesn’t mind this, I thought. He doesn’t mind at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other’s, anymore. Instead, I am his. Unworthy, unjust, untrue. But that is what happened.” (182)
I have felt this exactly in this way before when a power dynamic shifted in a relationship. Suddenly it’s as if you have unceremoniously submitted to some unspoken agreement, an assumption or a choice is made on your behalf; you become a dependent agent in flux, almost infantilized. I imagine Atwood must have known this feeling, too, to have been able to articulate it so poignantly.
There is also an overarching theme of the slow burn. The red of the dresses, the fires of primordial hell wielded as the ultimate threat by way of sin. Society devolves from a fairly free place (the modern United States) to a steady deconstruction of rights--mostly for women--that results in a dystopian totalitarian regime centered around early Puritan ideals conflated into a violent gun-wielding farce.
“You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way.”(117)
A still from the television series adaptation from Hulu of the Commander and his wife.
Atwood perfectly illustrates normalizing the abnormal, first through force, then submission, then complete ignorance. It reminded me of an excerpt from Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “when a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead. In terms of the wildish nature of women, it is this normalization of violence, and what scientists subsequently termed ‘learned helplessness,’ that influences women to not only stay with drunken mates, [etc.] but causes them to feel unable to rise up to support the things they believe in with all their hearts.”(263)
Estes calls it “injury to instinct.” This idea of course also applies to instances of colonization, whereby the colonizers strip a native people of their culture, evangelize and convert those who don’t fall victim to genocide in reservations or boarding schools, generation after generation. It becomes the unanswerable question of, “what’s worth risking my life for?”. Atwood captures this idea with this excerpt; “We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”(56)
What do you do when it’s all you come to know? What would you do when there’s no viable way out that doesn’t mean certain death? Who could you trust, if anyone? Margaret Atwood lays out all the cards, a hand of doom, and indirectly asks her audience, “what would you do?”, knowing there is no right answer, knowing that one escapes the Handmaid’s Tale purely by sheer luck, human hope, and sacrifice.
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Thanks for reading! <3
Gabrielle
