Redheaded Reviews: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

It's not entirely clear what happened other than a terrorist attack took out the President and Congress leaving the United States under military rule. They kept promising elections but never delivered. Instead, a different military associated with a certain religious sect takes over. Due to nuclear and chemical waste in the water children have become rarer.

So a system has been set up where those who can have children but are not married or are in second, etc... marriages are turned into handmaids. A handmaid is someone who sleeps with a wife's husband in order to produce a child for that couple. She is rewarded by never being sent to the colonies. You get three tries with three different men before your time is over. The book doesn't really explain what happens if you don't produce a child after three tries but it can't be good. But then maybe you're turned into a Martha which is someone who cleans or cooks for the Commanders' households. It's hard to say because this has only been going on for three years. But it's possible you get sent to the colonies to do toxic cleanup if you are unlucky or farming if you are lucky.

Offred, our narrator, who is named after the Commander she serves doesn't give us her real name but she does give us information about her life before. She was involved with a married man whom she was living with and had a child with. She tries not to think about whether Luke is alive or dead though she has a memory of him being shot and she tries not to think about her daughter being raised by some other woman.

She is to wear red gloves and shoes and dress that covers her entire body and a white bonnet called wings on their head that blocked their faces from the sight of others for the most part. The ruler of the home was the Wife who tended to hate the Handmaids. On conception nights everyone in the household would be there in the room to witness it and the Wife would be behind the fully dressed Handmaid as her husband performed his duty.

There are Angels who fight the war for the government and Guardians who man the checkpoints and do things for the Wives. There are Eyes who are spies for the government. Anyone can be an Eye. When Offred goes to the market every day she always goes with one other Handmaid. Ofglen. After a while, she finds that Ofglen is not so pious as she supposed and is full of information she gets from the underground. But there's always the chance that you'll end up killed and hanging from the wall if you do something really wrong.

All of this happens gradually--one small freedom at a time until one day they're all gone. It's a scary book because it could really happen--that is really happening. Offred isn't a fighter or a hero either. She's just a woman who is trying to survive. When her Commander asks to see her during the night when no one is around she says yes because to say no would mean trouble for her with him even though if she is caught by the Wife she would be in even more trouble. But you can't blame her for not being a fighter in the way Ofglen is. She battles her own battles in her own way. She is just trying to survive and perhaps do more than that. This is a seminal piece of work and very important to the pantheon of literature, especially women's literature. The language is beautifully written and filled with symbolism of fertility. I give it five out of five stars.

Quotes

Or I would help Rita make the bread, sinking my hands into that soft resistant warmth which is so much like flesh. I hunger to touch something, other than cloth or wood. I hunger to commit the act of touch.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 14)

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 74)

But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 131-2)

Sanity is a valuable possession. I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 140)

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes. Wool blanket.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 247)

One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other. Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick. Should does not apply.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 248)

You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 248)

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 306)

I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale p 340)

Truly amazing what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

-Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale 349)

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come, and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.