The Handmaid's Tale

This post first published May 17, 2011.

Author: Margaret Atwood
Published: 1985
Publisher: Thorndike Press
358 pages (paperback)
 
I’ve heard some things about this book before, mostly from friends who have had to study it in school. Myself, I’ve only read a few poems by the author. I’ve never actually read any of her novels, so this is my first Atwood book. Anyway, I was really looking for Year of the Flood at the library, but when I saw this book, I decided to take it out as well; as far as I know, it’s one of Atwood’s most famous works.

The story does not reveal itself in a straight forward manner; rather, it reveals bits and pieces of the narrator’s life at a time, and not always in order, so that you are required to piece together what the world is like yourself. As a result, when you first begin to read the story, it may seem confusing and a bit disjointed, but gradually you come to understand that this all takes place sometime in the future, where the USA has been taken over by “Gilneans” — from what I understand, they are some sort of extreme Christianity group.

In this world, the birth rate in the USA has dropped to astonishingly low rates, and more often than not, babies are born deformed or mutated in some way. Our main character Offred (whose real name is not revealed) is a Handmaid, a woman who is established to be fertile and assigned to a Commander and his Wife to bear children for them. Every month, Offred, the Commander and the Commander’s Wife perform the Ceremony — Offred lies on top of the Wife while the Commander performs intercourse with Offred. If Offred becomes pregnant and gives birth to a Keeper baby, then the baby becomes the Commander’s and his Wife, and Offred will be assigned to a new family to have children for them. This new world is supposed to make women safer and protected, from the violence and the rapes and other things that happen to women in the 20th century, but instead, Offred has no freedom and has become nothing but an empty person whose only purpose is to breed. She frequently has flashbacks to ‘the time before’, with her husband and her daughter, and wonder what has become of them.

This was a very interesting book. What fueled me to keep reading is that I kept asking ‘Why?’ questions. Every new thing that Offred reveals about the world she is now in had me intrigued. This book really had me thinking, it is so thought provoking. It had me thinking about things like how the women were being treated as in this book — in the book, it says that the new world is very pro-woman compared to ‘the time before’, but of course, at the same time, it seems so very archaic, as the women are being treated as property, or in the case of the Handmaids, less than human. They are only here for breeding purposes.

The book also makes one think about sexuality; sex is strictly forbidden unless authorized between the right people (for example, a Handmaid and her Commander), and even then, it is considered ‘business’, because it’s only for the purpose of breeding. Neither the Handmaid nor the Commander really take pleasure in doing it. Sex as a recreational activity has been drilled into everyone’s mind as a sin. Yet at the same time, Offred finds out that the ruling elite have prostitution houses set up in secret. Kind of makes you think about human nature, not just sex, but how people can be so very hypocritical as well.

There’s many, many other themes and topics to think about in this book, including religion, feminism, knowledge … What I found interesting, and a little scary, is the message in the book that people will go along with just about anything as long as there is a little compensation for it, even if the compensation is not very much. Surely no woman likes this new world where females are treated as second rate citizens, or like they are not human at all, but as long as you give a few select women some small measure of power (such as the Wives, or the Aunts), they will simply let it all happen and not fight back. The women with the most power (which is not a lot) will keep the other women in line.

I really liked this book, it was truly stimulating to read it. After finishing the last page, you can’t help but relate our own present world to the world inside the book. I highly recommend reading this if you are looking for a piece of good literature; very thought provoking!

My Rating: 5/5