‘‘I’ll obliterate myself, if that’s what you really want; I’ll empty myself, truly, become a chalice.’’
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood has rightly said, time and again, that dystopian fiction is much less about the future and more so about pressing concerns of the present. The monumental success of HBO’s adaptation of Atwood’s 1985 novel shows that, alarmingly, the socio-political concerns that were bubbling over thirty years ago still haven’t been assuaged. Five presidencies on America and, by extension, the entire Western world, finds cause still to stage and explore the horrors of a dystopian fundamentalist regime. We are still fearful for our females, our minorities, our diversity under the mindless tyrants whose ideology falls apart at the seams after a few probes.
The only other Atwood I have read was The Blind Assassin last summer, which blew me away with its rich depiction of a world and generations and the intensity of its relationships. It’s a door-stop, one to really run away with, and this immersive style of Atwood’s is of course, at the forefront in The Handmaid’s Tale. Except you can’t really run away with Handmaid – it pulls you away with it. Distant-but-not-distant-enough is the Republic of Gilead, an America of the future where a woman’s fertility is sanctified and is the only thing of value – her only weapon – in a society run by male Commanders based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. The Republic of Gilead justifies the use of the handmaids for procreation by referring to two biblical stories: Genesis 30:1–13 and Genesis 16:1–4. In the first story, Jacob’s infertile wife Rachel offers up her handmaid Bilhah to be a surrogate mother on her behalf, and then her sister Leah does the same with her own handmaid Zilpah (even though Leah has already given Jacob many sons). In the other story, which appears earlier in Genesis but is cited less frequently, Abraham has sex with his wife’s handmaid, Hagar (Wikipedia). Handmaids live with an assigned Commander and the Commander’s Wife – it is said the wife is infertile automatically, never her husband – and perform in a Ceremony: the ritualistic rape of a Handmaid by the Commander as she sits between the outspread legs of the Commander’s Wife, her expensive rings cutting into the Handmaid’s gripped hands like a scorned ghost. This passage in Atwood, Offred’s detached, numbed first-person perspective is one of the most alarming and visceral examples of the overarching theme of emptiness in the female experience in Handmaid. The aforementioned quote, ‘I’ll obliterate myself, if that’s what you really want; I’ll empty myself, truly, become a chalice,’ is the precise example of this: the handmaids are to become nothing but a vehicle, an object to be filled with the blood and semen of the holy – the men. They are supposed to be thought incomplete if empty – waiting, always, for the glorious fill of pregnancy to fulfil their function.
Like all satire, seminally Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Atwood takes the undertones of a social climate to their nth degree. Women in Gilead are stripped of anything apart from their reproductive ability – watching television, reading, writing, normal clothes, friends, idle chatter amongst other things are all prohibited lest the fragile regime crumble under an uprising. Yet, as Atwood has mentioned, she merely takes the current ‘casually held attitudes about women’ and guides them to their logical conclusion. The attitudes of oppression which are ingrained into the people who are the highest in world government – women are vessels to be ‘grabbed’ by their ‘pussies’ are simply made more normalised and prevalent. One of the first executive measures of Donald Trump’s new administration was to reverse Democrat policy to promote “non-natural” family planning abroad – a move soon followed by the revival of Reagan-era cuts to pro-choice clinics. The handmaids of Gilead are the result of just a few more years of cut, cut, cutting away at pro-choice clinics. Handmaids can be hung from the wall for killing a child or sent to the Colonies as an ‘unwoman’ if they cannot conceive. The publishing of The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 was said to be a response to the ‘climate of control’ garnered by Reagan’s presidency which promoted firm religious rhetoric, patriotic nationalism and social conservatism. It’s hardly necessary to list how this has regurgitated, horrifically, in the Trump presidency. But for the sake of this piece:
- Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement
- The America First foreign policy cosies the US up to Saudia Arabia (where females under must have a male guardian at all times and are prohibited from marriage/divorce/education/employment/travel/a bank account/surgery without their permission, not to mention sexual segregation and the fact of females’ legal ability to drive only just celebrating its first birthday)
- He demanded federal funding of a Gilead-like wall on the US-Mexico border
- His pro-life history is lengthy, but to shorten it: on the 3 May 2018 he signed an executive order that aims to prevent funding for abortion
- Thinks Christians are discriminated against
Need I continue? Gilead is the America of Trump’s dreams, complete with seedy backstreet brothels where handmaidens are smuggled in, dressed up like ‘Jezebels’ to arouse those forgotten fantasies of the few in power who can afford to bend the rules under the guise of piety. It’s utterly believable and startling in its possibility. Atwood navigates us through this future/present world with Offred, whose rosy flashbacks of life Before tell us how her husband and daughter were near ripped from her arms in a frenzied fleeing near the US-Canada border. She exists in two spheres: the oppressive daytime wherein she moves, speaks and lives as a programmed robot with minimal divergence from everyday routine, and the intermittent ‘Night’ chapters, her moments alone, to ruminate and remember a life that has passed – can it return? Offred is, slowly, giving up hope. The found-manuscript form of Handmaid works, like early text of female persecution The Scarlet Letter, to fully realise and factualise Offred’s harrowing experiences. When the words are found in Handmaid, Gilead is over. For us, Gilead is a warning that looms to break loose onto the life we know now.
Atwood’s writing is utterly and consistently exceptional, beautiful – an instruction on wordplay and extended metaphor. Falling in love was so romanticised, she presses – ‘We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely.’ She drags to the forefront the horrors and fears that are still quiet but are just less than latent now – that the future is positive, that there’s an end to suffering, that it’s just all a dream, that life has meaning. Offred, in moments of existentialist musing, comes out with unsettling lines like, ‘But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.’ It’s terrifying and cynical, a world which has seemingly no escape. The plot builds to moments of hope which are ultimately quashed, and questions left unanswered because as she says, there is no plot. Offred is snatched away, into the light, uncertain but at least it’s a change from the monotony: something is happening.
I eagerly await the follow up, The Testaments, released in September. Like everyone I want to know what happened to Offred – was it freedom, prison, death? But I’m also thirsty for how Atwood has written the politics of today into Gilead ten years after the original story, when it wasn’t a far cry from 2019 in the first place.
“And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.”
hbiswriting 