Submitted by Danielle (aka GaiaGrrl)

Bio: Danielle (aka GaiaGrrl) is a High School teacher in the city of Boston.  She has taught English for 7 years, during which she has encouraged her students to read as many banned books as possible, and to think independently.  She prides herself on having taught over 20 books on the banned book list.  She is also a mom-to-be, and looks forward to similarly corrupting the future youth of our society.

I first encountered the story of The Handmaid’s Tale while channel surfing by HBO.  Though the movie was not terribly good, (Aidan Quinn was still delectable, however) it teased me with glimpses of a frightening future.  When I read Atwood’s novel, I was simultaneously chilled and fascinated.  Atwood’s writing transformed my familiar Cambridge, MA landscape into a place where the a woman’s sexual identity determined her fate.

The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in the not-very-distant future in Harvard Square, Massachusetts.  Atwood paints a future where infertility plagues the majority of the world.  A women’s role is determined by her class, race, and her ability to produce children.  As religious wars rage throughout the country, fertile women are trained in camps (set up in defunct buildings of Harvard University).  These women are stripped of their identities, dressed in red, and called “Handmaiden’s”.  Rich government officials are given these handmaiden’s to bear children for them, and then they are moved on to the next family.  The narrator of this novel is a Handmaiden renamed Offred (because she is given to a man named Fred.) We join Offred’s tale as she joins her first household, and the history leading up to this event is told in a series of flashbacks, spurred on my memories that are activated by the new world in which she finds herself.  It’s a gripping narrative that provides more questions than answers.

Last summer I picked this novel up to re-read it.  I was astounded by the similarities in the future it described, and the present in which we were living.  Offred’s awareness of herself as a narrator of a tale made me feel as if she were writing this as a warning to all women, and I found myself with a deeper understanding of her pain and struggles.  I decided to teach it to my junior class this year, and it made them think about issues they had never really considered before.  As a class we created a timeline of the fictional events leading up to the creation of Handmaids, only to discover that our actual society had already progressed more than halfway through these events.  The fictional shooting in the government that led to a suspension of the constitution paralleled 9/11 and the Patriot Act.  From there, the steps to Atwood’s future are few and easy to imagine.  (I knew that this book had broken through to my students when a group of boys and girls came to my room at lunch to talk about it with eachother.)

The best thing about Atwood’s tale is that there are no easy answers.  Though we can see the harm that religious zealots to do women, we can also see the foibles of 70’s feminists who censored our sexual freedoms.  What is a community of women?  Can there be freedom without equality?  These questions will run through your mind, and you will find yourself wishing everyone read this book so that they asked these questions as well.  I look forward to making more students do just that!