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Title: The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publication Info: Anchor; 1st Anchor Books edition March 16, 1998
ISBN: 038549081X
Genre: Top 100 Banned Books
Submitted by Carrie Lofty
Authors who survey the future landscape and find distopias—Orwell, Huxley, and even Jack London in The Iron Heel—are harshly judged by readers who have the scorecard of history available to them, ready to make comparisons and award points for accuracy.
So here I go: While we do not live in a society as extreme as Gilead, it is looking more familiar all the time. If I had been asked to read this novel in high school during Clinton’s first term, it would have seemed terribly out of date and pessimistic, merely seven years after its initial printing. Predictions of a severe feminist backlash, an exaggeration of the AIDS crises, the rise of a fundamentalist Christian right—none of these strains had risen to the forefront of everyday thinking in 1993. Fast forward fourteen years and these are pressing, immediate issues. I find this a very startling example of how a novel’s relevance can be so very altered by the context in which it is read.
What I found most compelling was Offred’s continuous mental battle. She kept reminding herself that, only three years before, she wore bathing suits in public. She had a job. She had a daughter. So thorough were the architects of this new society that even a college-educated woman with myriad freedoms and pleasures to lose found herself being seduced by her new reality. After a time, everything becomes ordinary. She had to fight the lassitude of her position, the waiting, the monotony, the degradation, the moments of gripping fear that kept everyone in check, the urge for something more, something past—all of this without going numb or insane.
But she is not a hero. She is not the Huxley protagonists who make their escape, nor is she left a brain-dead proponent of Big Brother. She knows there is an Underground, and the ambiguous ending suggests she may have even benefited from its protection, but she cannot compromise her safety or the little piece of happiness she has found in her objectionable life in order to help its progress. She is, frankly, a very real assessment of a normal person, held fast by fear and apathy, yet propelled forward by hope and the sheer momentum of living. This is Atwood’s most significant achievement, even as the present influences any assessment of the accuracy of her futuristic vision.
I read this book when I was in grad school taking a women in science fiction course. It was, and still is, one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read. I don’t think my classmates at the time knew how close American society is to “Gilead”. And just look at the Fundamentalist religions popping up all over the world …
I read this in high school and it was probably the one book that set me on the course for the dystopic fiction I like to read today. And I think you are right in how chilling the similarities can be made to how our world is moving. The odd thing I remember about the book – butter as a moisterizer?
I read Handmaid’s Tale in a few hours, absolutely wrapt.
Atwood is just VERY GOOD. I feel that way about Joyce Carol Oates, too.
I hate both screen adaptations I’ve seen of it.
My God, I loved this book.
Carrie, thanks for this review. I never would have thought of this without you… At the time, I thought the book a fascinating cautionary tale of a very unlikely future. Now… Now it’s much more frightening. I think it’s time to read this book again.
Wow, I’ve never actually read this one (and knew regrettably little about it; hole in my education?).
Based on this awesome review, it’s heading for the top of my to-be-read!
I read this last year for an english literature class. I hated it. I hated the way Atwood focused on the rape scenes. And i hated offred’s dismissal of the horrible things that were happening. i would never pick this book up again. especially as the ending (historical notes) shows that nothing really changes, and they’re still as mysoginistic and degrading to women as they were in the Gilead society.
horrible book, but probably doesn’t deserved to be banned.
I think, Ayla, that part of the reason I enjoyed it was because Atwood allowed Offred to be human. Nothing really changs, and people dismiss horrible things all the time. It was a unheroic choice for her as a writer, but profoundly ordinary and revealing about how people deal with mass crisis.
Excellent review.
I wouldn’t say I enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale…it was thought provoking and chilling (I grew up in the Bible Belt and in the era of “the moral majority” and could see how things could change swiftly towards a fundamentalist regime). But I also found it hopeful—both in the ambiguous ending and in the afterword that takes place in the future of the story. I would definately read this book again.
It is one of those books that you take something different away from it each time you read it.
great review, carrie. this was one of the atwood novels that stayed in my mind the longest after reading (the other being ‘oryx and crake’) though i have to say, i was very frustrated with the ending that was just a little too ambiguous for my taste, it felt almost as though atwood herself didn’t really know what happened next. but this reminded me that i need to bump up ‘the penelopiad’ on my tbr list!
btw; atwood can be really funny. she was on the rick mercer show (canadian comedian) as one of a series of canadian icons (conrad black was the latest – who knew he could laugh at himself?) doing spoof ‘instructional videos’ – hers was on how to hit a hocky puck
whoa. where did that winking smiley come from? are they alive now?
I was on a long Margaret Atwood bender last year, and this book was certainly included. Her books always make me so angry at men, or (after I read The Robber’s Bride) at other women. It’s rare to find a novel where the heroine is just a normal person, a little cowardly, who’s just trying to live for one more day.
Haven’t gotten up the nerve to read the book. I know I should, but I’m not sure I have the stomach for it.
From the review, THT sounds eerily, scarily close to the reality women experience worldwide—not white Western women (I think that’s a gross and misguided exaggeration in the review), but the what brown and black women in Middle Eastern, African, and Asian countries experience daily.
Anu, I wanted to point out that this book takes place in a (near) future where many women are sterile. The whole focus of society changes, as I can well imagine it would, whether it’s a Western nation or not. Women are suddenly meant to be “protected” and motherhood “revered”. Or somesuch. It’s been a while since I read it!
I remember reading it soon after it came out and being frightened by the chance it might actually happen. One of the things I remember vividly is a funeral procession for a miscarriage – something that happened frequently. (And I remember the butter being used as a moisturizer – as a handmaid she’s not allowed to do anything to make herself attractive and using it was one tiny rebellion.)
When this book first came out it truly seemed like science fiction. I remember thinking at the time that it was a bit of an overreaction and a touch agitprop like. The frightening rise of fundamentalism in this country wasn’t as pervasive as it is now. She really is a visionary.
The world she describes is one we can all imagine now as a possible nightmare like reality. At the time the book came out Democracy and social freedom in the US were taken for granted as solid and unassailable.
Every once in a while it hits me how beleagured and oppressed Women are in most of the world. And how privaleged we are in the West to have the basic freedoms we enjoy. We are so lucky!
For example, for a large part of the planet, womens sexualty is so hated and frowned upon that it is physically destroyed.
Millions of women have been genitally mutilatd. Its incomprehensible.
Atwood’s book should be read and discussed in schools everywhere.
Huge fan of this book. I remember reading The Handmaid’s Tale in high school and having it profoundly affect me. Your review makes me think it is time for a re-read.
I remember this from grade 11 English. I loved the book when i read it at home. then we talked about it for over a month, perfect way to realize that studying a book in class can ruin it.
I remember how wrong it seemed to me. The food stamps so everyone got what they ‘deserved’ based of course on the men’s job importance, the complete lack of choice that everyone had. Even the colour coding of people’s clothes based on their ‘jobs’.
I don’t think that it should be banned, but it shouldn’t take a month to discuss in a high school class.
I’m posting this comment on behalf of Arielle Célestin, who blogs from Port au Prince, Haiti at
http://3rdworldgirl.blogspot.com/
—-
I’m emailing you because I can’t comment the blog from my pc at work. IT dept crack down and all that. It’s also my only access to the net outside of a cybercafé.
Anyway, I’m just sooo happy with the posts about Banned Books but most especially the review of one of my favorites : The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
I love that book. I picked it up in 01, while studying in Canada. Atwood had just released her other masterpiece (IMO), The Blind Assassin.
As a woman born, raised and living in a country with a disturbing codependence with dictatorship and oppression, I was amazed at Atwood’s skill at conveying the slippery slope feel of totalitarism. I couldn’t believe this was just fiction. Surely, I thought, she must have lived it a bit to write so well about it.
I see it in the eyes of people who haven’t lived in such an environment: how could you let this happen? why didn’t you do something, protest, denounce? they seem to ask.
Well, there were people who did that here but they are usually dead shortly after. Two years ago, the Ministry for Women Affairs here had several streets renamed after famous Haitian women. One of them, a journalist, was taken from her home, beaten, raped and tortured by Duvalier for her opinions. Would you keep fighting or would you submit?
I think the reviewer made a just assessment of the character of the heroine. When you are an ordinary woman, how do you cope with your life being taken away from you?
Anyway, I just wanted to say how much I appreciated both the book and the review. Banning Books is truly a crime. More people should read THT. Might open their eyes a bit.
Keep up the good work and congrats on the upcoming book!
Arielle Célestin
While the idea is intriguing, this book probably would never get onto my shelf. I like writers who seem to somehow peek into the future, but I can’t read them for some reason. Also, the idea that women would be suddenly reduced to even worse positions than what they had back in the DARK AGES is repugnant and would make me throw the book away immediately. That someone would think that that could happen with our society as it is and how it’s going is even more ridiculous and revolting. As crazy as Christians can be, the grand majority isn’t crazy enough to start shoving women into a tight corner like that, especially ones like we’ve got in Texas. It’s the fanatics that make the whole look ugly, and that’s why I hate them so much, not to mention how damaging they are to everything else around them. Especially the ones who own shotguns and know how to use them.
I believe I read this book in the early 90s. All I remember about it was that it freaked me out. I normally avoid books like this because they make me sad for days, but I would still recommend it to someone else.
“As crazy as Christians can be, the grand majority isn’t crazy enough to start shoving women into a tight corner like that”
I would 85% agree with you on that—I think that there are a lot of men who’d have a problem with their daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, etc. being taken away and “repurposed.” And I think the majority of Christians aren’t crazy like that, the only ones who have to be are the ones in power and that’s a lot smaller of a percentage.
I took away the major theme to the work to be “Evil thrives because good men do nothing” or whatever the quote is. Most people probably weren’t crazy enough to want “Gilead” to come into being…they just weren’t motivated enough to actively stop it. That’s what still scares the living crap out of me today, and it’s been fifteen years since I read the book, and I’ll freely admit I probably didn’t have a good understanding of it at the time, being in high school. I kept asking, “When is she going to do something to stop this?” and later on, “Why *won’t* she do anything about it?”
first off-i think Margaret Atwood is one of the jewels in contemporary fiction-to me she is a bellwether of all things possible,and some we wish were not so,i.e.The Handmaids Tale….Scary? you bet….but life for women in this day is pretty scary unless you have money and a real good vocabulary…i vote for this as a Queen of Banned Books because it is so eerily close to becoming true….mea culpa