Imagine: You go
to the store. When you attempt to ring up your purchases, you find
that your card keeps being declined with a cryptic "invalid
number" message, even though you know there's more than enough
on your account. The man at the till - who has without comment
replaced the woman who worked there just yesterday - seems to know a
bit more about your debit card woes than he's letting on. After you,
and all your female colleagues, are sent home from your office on the
orders of rather inhospitable-looking gentlemen with automatic
weapons, you find out that all of your assets have been frozen and
can only be released to your husband or closest male relative.
And that's just the start...
Even two weeks
after finishing Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in a
24-hour flurry of pages, I find that the profound sense of dread I
have felt creeping into the back door of my consciousness is making
it quite hard to approach the book with any semblance of analytical
distance. In part, this is due to Atwood's beautiful writing, which
creates such a powerful empathic bond with the narrator that I felt
as if, instead of reading the memoirs of Offred, I lived them.
And like an all-too-plausible nightmare, part of me remains
stubbornly unwilling to partake in the profound relief I should be
feeling that the world of THT is in fact not (yet?) a reality.
But: Even
before opening THT, I was acutely aware of the beating that
the rights of women have taken over my lifetime. In 2008,
women have already lost the right to sue for pay discrimination
(rendered a practical impossibility by Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire
Co.). In 2008, the state has already been given a green light to
dictate what medical care we may receive without regard to any
attendant risks to our health (thanks to Gonzales v. Carhart), and
the same decision, reached by an all-male majority, spends about as
much time on the "feminine mind", deemed too emotionally
immature and indecisive to make important medical decisions, as it
does on actual constitutional issues. In 2008, we have a Supreme
Court Justice who believes a man should have as much power over his
(adult) wife as he does over his (minor) daughter.
The fundamentalist
clerics who had just begun their ascent to power in the mid-80s, when
Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, far from being thankfully
raptured out of existence on 1 January 2000, have had plenty of
reason to celebrate. From the grip they now have over our Air Force
to the indoctrination centres featured in the documentary Jesus
Camp, from the pressure they now exert over our educational
system (getting science out of our schools and taking the sex and the ed out of Sex-Ed), the dream shared by the likes of Ralph
Reed, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Tim LaHaye of becoming one of
the most powerful reactionary forces in our society has come
frighteningly true.
Thus, in reading
The Handmaid's Tale, I found that I perceived the
fundamentalist Christian theocracy it described (which came to power
by suspending the Constitution after an alleged Islamic terrorist
attack) not as speculative fiction, but as a warning of an entirely
possible future.
The Handmaid's Tale is
the story of Offred ("of Fred"), told as a first-person,
oral memoir. In "the time before", Offred was a
university-educated IT professional who worked at a local library,
and was married with a 5-year-old daughter. What we hear of her life
in "the time before" (as she always calls it) is told in
brief, disconnected flashbacks, distant recollections of a time that
hardly seems real to her anymore. And understandably so. In the time
in which the principal story is set, she has lost all she once had.
First, she lost her bank account (transferred to her husband, Luke).
Then, she lost her job (it is now illegal for women to work outside
the home). Then, she lost her home, her husband, and her daughter
(Luke was previously divorced, rendering the marriage adulterous and
thus criminal in the new order). Not only that, she has lost the
mystery novels she used to enjoy reading (women are forbidden access
to reading or writing materials in an effort to eliminate female
literacy), and every last vestige of control over her body.
Offred's new
status, which brought with it her new name, is a great honour. Or so
she is constantly told. She is a Handmaid, a fertile woman assigned
to a member of the élite of the new regime, a Commander of the
Faithful, so that he might use her uterus to conceive a child. If she
fails to conceive - by definition her failure, as official
doctrine holds that there is no such thing as male infertility - she
will be sent to the Colonies, the slave-labour camps of the new
regime, as an Unwoman. If she does conceive and give birth to a
healthy child, she will be spared this fate. Her posting in the
household of Commander Fred is her last chance.
She is not the only
woman-in-captivity in Fred's house. Together with her are two
Marthas, infertile women used for domestic services, and Fred's wife,
whom she calls Serena Joy. To the Marthas, she is a pariah, though
fraternisation with them is illegal, anyway. To Serena Joy, she is
the object of resentment, though Serena Joy has plenty of resentment
to go around. In "the time before", Offred remembers seeing
her on television, copiously made up, evangelising to women about the
joys of staying home and being submissive to one's husband, joys in
which she did not herself partake. Now, she - like all women - has
been completely banished from the public sphere, and divides her days
between knitting the same scarf over and over again, smoking, and
making Offred - with whom she must now share her husband - feel as
unwelcome as possible.
Offred's days are
spent in mind-crushing boredom. Most of the time, she stays in her
room, which has been carefully rid of any potential instrument of
suicide, with the only reading material she has left: a pillow
embroidered with the word FAITH and a hidden inscription in the
closet reading Nolite te bastardes carbondonum, a message she
surmises was left by her predecessor, who was found hanging from a
light fixture that has since been removed. She wears the same thing
every day: a blood-red ankle-length dress designed to obscure every
contour of her body below the neck and a bonnet designed to cover her
hair and eliminate her peripheral vision. Once a day, she is allowed
to leave the house to do the day's shopping, accompanied by another
Handmaid to ensure mutual surveillance.
Her partner on
these daily shopping excusions is Ofglen. After enduring multiple
painstakingly orthodox conversations about safe topics ("Blessed
be the fruit", "May the Lord open," amongst other
gibberish), Ofglen begins outing herself as a member of a resistance
group known as Mayday, thus becoming the only person with whom Offred
can speak with anything approaching candour. From Ofglen, she learns
that Mayday is bringing women to safety in Canada (or "removing
our precious national resources from the country" in official
regime parlance). On their excursions, they always pass by the Wall,
where the recently executed are hanged, allowing Offred to ascertain
whether any of them is her husband.
Gradually, the
situation in the household of Commander Fred becomes somewhat more
complicated. Fred, it seems, would like to see Offred privately,
outside of the officially sanctioned context of the "Ceremony"
(the bizarre monthly ritualised rape in which the Commander attempts
to inseminate his Handmaid). While this is strictly forbidden, Offred
has no real option and acquiesces, uncertain what she is to expect.
As it turns out, she is to expect a game of Scrabble and the
opportunity to read an assortment of magazines so banal that she
could barely tolerate them in "the time before", but which
now are like a bottle of Perrier in the intellectual desert of her
life. In exchange for this, Fred wants her to kiss him "like you
mean it". She must also endure his lectures on what a lovely
idea this new order was. From him, she discovers that the inscription
in her closet is dog Latin for "Don't let the bastards grind you
down", an enterprise in which her predecessor met with rather
limited success.
To make matters
even more uncomfortable, Serena Joy begins speaking increasingly
candidly with Offred, and even offers her one of her cigarettes
(nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine are all illegal for Handmaids, and
Offred spends many a paragraph talking about how much she's dying for
a smoke). As it turns out, Serena Joy is convinced that her husband
is sterile, as appears to be the case with many of the Commanders. In
order to secure a child for Serena Joy and safety from the Colonies
for Offred, Serena Joy proposes that she sleep with Fred's driver,
Nick, a rather enigmatic character who is either affiliated with the
Mayday Resistance or with the secret police ("the Eyes"), a
proposal to which Offred agrees.
There are too many
facets to The Handmaid's Tale to attempt a full synopsis
without it becoming a mediocre retelling of a brilliant story; thus,
I will leave the remainder to the interested reader, and move on.
Margaret Atwood's
prose is a tour de force. Her style beautifully reproduces the
feeling of oral recollections retold without the aid of anything but
the teller's memory. The descriptions of Offred's daily life are
laden with free associations of words, puns, and other verbal tics
that can often be heard from a person trying to force vague or
difficult memories to the surface. Her writing gives Offred's story
an immediacy and an urgency that break down any analytical walls that
may separate the content of the book from the mind of the reader. It
is all too easy to see and feel oneself in Offred's position, to feel
what she feels, to see the world and her life as she sees them. It
is, indeed, like an all-too-real nightmare that leads one to spend
the entire day not entirely certain whether the events in the dream
actually happened or not.
I am no stranger to
heavy reading material. For years, atrocities and dystopias,
historical and fictitious, have been a major staple of my library. It
is exceedingly rare for me to be shaken by something I have read. I
was shaken by The Handmaid's Tale, and, to a certain extent,
still am. One of the most peculiar side-effects of reading THT has
been a heightened awareness of things that I normally take for
granted (as I should be able to do).
In particular, it
has made me extremely conscious of the very act of reading, even in
trivial instances. Normally, unless I am reading a language I cannot
yet read well, reading for me feels like a purely sensory act. I see a word. The underlying interpretive act that connects the
symbolic data in front of me to the phonetic and conceptual
representations and associations I have in my mind is normally
reflexive and unconscious. Since I began THT, I have become
remarkably aware of this process. The day I started reading it, I had
to go to the supermarket to buy a bottle of red wine, where I found
that I was extremely aware (and somehow rather surprised) to find
myself reading the words on the wine labels. I have the same feeling,
the same vague fascination and relief now any time I read
something and don't need to be clandestine about it, the things one
feels about something to which one is not entirely accustomed.
Perhaps, though,
the greatest threat to the rights that allow us, as women, to live
our lives is the fact that we have grown accustomed to them,
to the extent that we often give little or no thought to our exercise
of them. Even less do we think about how recent, how
utterly new those hard-fought victories are. It was not
until the early 1970s that the Supreme Court decided - parting with
about a century of precedent and the entire enactment history - to
interpret the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to
the US Constitution as even a limited prohibition on sex
discrimination. The right to self-determination over our reproductive
systems, now in great danger, was not officially recognised until
1973. A late-1950s business law hornbook I bought years ago at a
used-books store includes a footnote in its section on "Contractual
Capacity and Disability" (essentially who is legally capable of
concluding a binding contract) listing the states in which as of the
date of publication a married woman could not sign a contract without
the written consent of her husband, even if he was in no way bound by
it. In the decade that saw the publication of that hornbook, Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor graduated at the top of her class at Stanford -
an achievement that would cause every major institutional law firm to
roll out the red carpet for a male graduate - and could not find a
firm that would offer her a position as more than a legal secretary.
Last but not least, there are still people living today who remember
our first major victory, suffrage (which we have had for all of 88
years).
Put briefly, our
social and legal victories are nowhere near sufficiently settled or undisputed to be taken as a matter of course. A small, but powerful
and well-funded, minority has been working tirelessly for decades now
to reverse every single one of them, and their every success is
thanks in part to our complacent assumption that what we have so
recently won can safely go undefended. In reading The Handmaid's
Tale, it is worth keeping in mind that every major feature of the
society Atwood describes has been actively advocated in one form or
another by the people who rejoiced at the nomination of the men who
gave us Gonzales v. Carhart. It seems to me that we need a
reminder of how vulnerable our rights really are (and if there's
anything I felt whilst reading the book, it was vulnerable),
and Margaret Atwood's excellent book is a very powerful reminder.