IkariGendou's Full Review: Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
This book was so terrifying to me that it took me three tries to get all the way through it. (I was aided, in the end, by an unabridged reading from Recorded Books LLC, which I also highly recommend.) What terrifies me now is not only that it is beginning to come true, right here in the United States, but that no one is trying to stop it.
It is not my intention to rail against any particular group, nor to rain epithets and hysterical warnings of "the evil in our midst." I ask only that everyone who has read this book, and those who read it now for the first time, begin to see the patterns being subtly woven into our society even as we sit in our homes and read of a potential future.
Atwood offers no explanation of how the country/state of Goliad was created, nor is there any build-up whatsoever; instead, we are thrust into the very essence of the intensely controlled daily life of a Handmaid, a woman who has had her freedoms completely usurped so that she may become a brood mare for the State. Women may not speak; they may not read or write; they must dress and act a certain way, and at the correct times, they must engage in a bizarre form of sexual coupling which is meant to "correct" the barren wife's "error" by literally placing the Handmaid between herself and her husband. (Never once is it suggested that the man is incapable of seeding children -- that, of course, can't be, it's always the woman's fault.)
As the Handmaid goes about her daily chores of exchanging vouchers for meats, bread, and vegetables -- all the shops have signs with pictures for their wares, and the vouchers are merely colored slips, since reading of any kind is forbidden to women -- she can also see where "traitors to the state" have been hung and displayed at the walls of the city. Those bearing a purple placard are "gender traitors" -- found guilty of homosexual acts. Later in the book, a man who had not earned the right to his own Handmaid, and who had been accused of having sex with a woman, is literally kicked and clawed to death by a gathering of Handmaids, who find that they can express their fury only in this way -- and they do so, with deadly efficiency.
In the United States, in this time -- doctors are killed for performing abortions; gay men are killed for being gay; women of a particular Christian denomination have been told that they must be subservient to their husband, who seems to have been given the right to beat upon his wife and children without penalty; whole neighborhoods and towns drive out "undesirables" like lesbians (Gonzales TX, summer 2000); national organizations like the Boy Scouts have become intolerant of "deviants," and are lauded by our government as "bastions of Christian morality; and a major Christian organization actually rails against a Hindu prayer opening a session of Congress, explaining that "freedom of religion" does not apply to "cults and lesser beliefs" but only to fundamentalist Christianity.
When this book was presented by Atwood (herself a Canadian), the general attitude in Canada was, "It couldn't happen here." In England, the attitude was, "A ripping good yarn." In the United States of the 1980s, when the book was first released, the sentiment was, "How long have we got?"
Read this book carefully, and look around you. This cautionary tale was not borne solely from Atwood's vivid imagination. It has a source -- a very active, living, and terrifying source. Perhaps it is time that we reminded people to re-read "1984" and "Brave New World" ... and "The Handmaid's Tale."
In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies? Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Comman...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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