I don’t know where to start with this beatific tragedy.
Truly a tragedy, not for fault of writing, but rather because of it; Atwood’s ingenuity and precise penmanship 35 years ago of the worse societal downfall that I believe the United States is actually spiraling towards today, is horrifying.
Beatific, because, throughout the steadfast and stifling patriarchal religious zeal bursting through each ominous chapter, every other member of the subjugated Gileadean society is blissfully frozen and frozenly blissful in this sexist charade of equity and justice. Unable to act but forced to ponder, the novel is a terrifying vision of white male supremacy at its highest, and most violent, told through the perspective and memories of a Handmaiden. That by no means that each Handmaiden, or each female character, rather, is an echo of another; issues of sex, sexuality, and what to do with it, is the historical context during the book’s inception and eventual publication in Canada.
The structures of the precariously built and maintained male utopia created by the followers of a male-dominated-and-upheld religious cult, that only really valued the ability of women to give birth, were surprisingly swift to be enforced and made into every day life. The Republic, as it was, was a puritanical hell, opposing any and all forms of sexual activity and rewriting their own biblically-based laws and orders. The end result was literal control of reproduction, and women. Women in the novel cannot vote, gain actual employment, read, or do anything else that might allow them to undermine their husbands, and in that vein, the state, all tied up in a pretty bow of Christianity. Their wombs and individualities stripped in the name of the “future”.
It’s shocking how the world in the novel and how the world today continues to forget the pain of the past exercised on women for profit, and the effects it has generations on. The book is a stark reminder that what you allow will continue, and I can’t imagine wasting my one life and platform in silence and submission. But I speak with agency, self-conviction, and privilege, all of which the female characters introduced in the book definitely do not possess.
The Handmaidens certainly aren’t even allowed to breathe in the wrong direction, what more think in the right one? Their minimal resistance, in whatever way as can be expressed at cost of torture or life, is all that can be expected of most oppressed people in reality, and that resistance has value. As long as there is indignation, no matter how small, there will always be hope for change, and that was the big takeaway I got from the novel: hope.
4.8/5
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