Today as I was driving to work, my local NPR station broadcast a request for listeners to call or email the station and report what, if anything, has changed about them since the September 11th terrorist attack. "Well," I thought grimly, "I've gotten bigger."
Yes, I'm one of those nervous nibblers--when my anxiety level increases, my body goes into preservation mode, which translates into "store enough fat to make it through the winter in case all the food gets tainted." I'm sure I've put on at least five pounds . . . which were warmly welcomed by all the other completely unnecessary pounds I'm carrying around with me.
Fortunately, my feeding mode is pretty much a hand, mouth, deep subconscious psyche thing, leaving my conscious mind free to think "My God, did I really eat that whole box of Oreos?!" and "Mmmm, my mashed potatoes are getting almost as good as Mom's!" while I read the news about the latest bio-terrorism fears and realities and watch film clips with names like "Women: Terror under the Taliban."
There was one film clip, in particular, in which a resistance movement in Afghanistan filmed a woman who addressed the camera and said in an quietly urgent voice "I need you to know that this is me . . . ." as she removed her veil. The film clip of her ended there (presumably, she did indeed reveal her full face to the camera, and it was withheld from the national news for her security), but I was struck with a sense of deja vu.
Later (I think it was when I was preparing a vat of homemade turkey chili), I listened to a group of journalists and politicians expound upon issues of national security. They concluded that U S citizens have been living in a dreamworld and that many of the freedoms we take for granted (moving around without ID, not having armed guards at most public sites) were going to be tested. Deja vu again!
It finally came to me when I read an article by a member of the Taliban in which he defended the lack of civil rights for women in Afghanistan by reminding us that before the Taliban took over, chaos reigned in Afghanistan--women were habitually raped and killed. The Taliban allowed women to retreat to a place of safety; behind their burqas, inside their homes . . . and my mind immediately flew to a scene in the film version of The Handmaid's Tale in which one of the Aunts (the female re-education officers) showed a video clip of a turbulent rally during the 60s. She says, "In those days, women had 'freedom to,' now you're being given 'freedom from' . . . don't underrate it."
"Yes," I thought, "that's it. The Handmaid's Tale." Margaret Atwood's dystopian vision of the successful coup of the United States by a Christian fundamentalist off-shoot, resulting in the loss of all civil rights for women, and most civil rights for everyone else. Like many women, I discovered The Handmaid's Tale early in college, found it brilliant, and read it several more times--each time scaring myself into a mini-feeding spree of anxiety, as I recognized how much of it was already true and how easy it might be for other parts to be realized.
The parallels between women's lives under Taliban rule and The Handmaid's Tale are shocking: Handmaids are concealed, their identities subsumed into their male guardian's identity; Afghani women are required to wear the full-body burqa and may not appear in public without a male relative. Members of the Republic of Gilead (Atwood's name for the former USA/Canada) are summoned to sports stadiums regularly for executions; Afghani resistance groups have been filming the public executions of women which have taken place in soccer stadiums built by relief organizations. Women of Gilead are forbidden to read; women in Afghani are not allowed to be educated. Frankly, even Atwood didn't imagine that women would be both not allowed to work and forbidden from seeking medical attention from anyone but a female doctor, thus ensuring that there is no medical care at all for women.
Of course, comparing the horrors of The Handmaid's Tale to life under the Taliban may not prompt anyone to buy several panic bags of candy corn. After all, we all know it's awful over there. We, thankfully, are here in the West, where things like that are impossible. Consider, though, the way in which the leaders of Gilead prepared their coup . . . they invaded network security. Our Handmaid, just as all the other members of her society, uses debit card or credit cards for nearly everything. One morning on the way to work, our Handmaid stops by a gas station for a pack of cigarettes. "I'm afraid your card isn't going through," the attendant tells her. "That's ridiculous," she sniffs. "Try it again." No, it's true. There doesn't seem to be any money in her account. The same thing happens all over the city--but it seems only to be happening to women's accounts. Within a couple of hours, the credit card companies have disabled their credit services due to panic. There is confusion and terror. Marshall law is invoked. Finally the word comes out that women's accounts have been closed, but that their funds have been placed in the accounts of their husbands, their fathers, their brothers. In order to have any chance at all of getting any of their money, women must silently accept the situation. Within weeks, months, the Republic of Gilead is established. And by the time our Handmaid writes her tale (a matter of several years at most), she has become reduced to a veiled number. She is nameless.
Perhaps there's something a bit sick about thinking of reading The Handmaid's Tale right now--after all, if we're living it, why read a fictionalized version? Well, first of all, because I believe that my feeding frenzy has probably reached a saturation point beyond which increasing my anxiety level has no effect on my appetite. But, more seriously, it is because dystopias can serve both as a warning and a solution. We become so deeply involved in our own world's problems, or so numb to the shock and horror that we see around ourselves, that we fail to see the ways in which we can avoid the horror. By reading The Handmaid's Tale, we are presented with a dystopian future, the majority of which hasn't yet occurred.
Perhaps by seeing it clearly, we can avoid it
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is a dystopia about a world where unrealistic things take place. The events in the novel could never actually take place in our reality." This is what most people think and assume, but they're wrong. Look at the world today and in the recent past, and there are not only many situations that have ALMOST become a Gilead, but places that have been and ARE Gileadean societies. We're not in Kansas any more, Dorothy!
Even today there are places in the world where there is startling similarity to this fictitious dystopia. In Pakistan, women's rights are non-existant, and many policies are that of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale. In Gilead, the handmaids must cover their bodies and faces almost completely with vales and wings. In Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Bahrain, and similar South Asian countries, this is a must for women. Other Gileadean-like persecutions take place towards women. In Pakistan, women can be raped, and unless there is full proof that there was no consent, the man will get off scot free, and the women charged with pre-marital sex and sentenced to a prison term. In Afghanistan, the police force has and continue to torture and rape innocent women for unnecessary reasons. This is similar to The Handmaid's Tale in that Offred, and other handmaids, not only go through the devestation of "The Ceremony", but also can be used and possibly even raped by their Commanders, and there is nothing the handmaid can do about it. If she speaks, she is usually not believed, and then she is sent away because she broke the law. The handmaid would usually die for making such accuasations.
Women are given little to no rights in Gilead. They obey what they are told by the men or by the Aunts (who get their orders from the men). They are not permitted to read or write, or participate in any extra-curricular activity. They are alive only to serve a purpose. In countries such Iran, women are subject to similar laws. Although more recently.
OfThe Handmaid's Tale,Margaret Atwood's dystopian, futuristic novel,New York Timeseditor Christopher Lehmann-Haupt warns, "It's a bleak world . . . how bleak and even terrifying we will not fully realize until the story's final pages."
Set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the novel presents a totalitarian theocracy that has forced a certain class of fertile women to produce babies for elite barren couples. These "handmaids," who are denied all rights and are severely beaten if they are uncooperative, are reduced to state property. Through the voice of Offred, a handmaid who mingles memories of her life before the revolution with her rebellious activities under the new regime, Atwood has created a terrifying future based on actual events.
The significance ofThe Handmaid's TalecausedPublishers Weeklyto write that it "deserves an honored place on the small shelf of cautionary tales that have entered modern folklore--a place next to, and by no means inferior to,Brave New Worldand1984."
A Note to the Reader
Dear Reader,
Every book is a sort of mushroom cloud thrown up by a large substance of material that has been accumulating for a lifetime. I had long been interested in the histories of totalitarian regimes and the different forms they have taken in various societies; while the initial idea forThe Handmaid's Talecame to me in 1981, I avoided writing it for several years because I was apprehensive about the results--whether I would be able to carry it off as a literary form.
In form, the book is a dystopia (negative utopia). A cognate ofA Clockwork Orange, Brave New World,andNineteen Eighty-Four,it is the story of one woman's altered circumstances, presented as a first-person narrative novel.
The roots of the book go back to my study of the American Puritans. The society they founded in America was not a democracy as we know it, but a theocracy. In addition, I found myself increasingly alarmed by statements made frequently by religious leaders in the United States; and then a variety of events from around the world could not be ignored, particularly the rising fanaticism of the Iranian monotheocracy. The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted inThe Handmaid's Taleexcept the time and place. All of the things I have written about have--as noted in the "Historical Notes" at the end--been done before, more than once.
It is an imagined account of what happens when not uncommon pronouncements about women are taken to their logical conclusions. History proves that what we have been in the past we could be again.
An Interview with Margaret Atwood on Her NovelThe Handmaid's Tale
Q:Was there any special research involved in writingThe Handmaid's Tale?
A: I clipped articles out of newspapers. I now have a large clippings file of stories supporting the contentions in the book. In other words, there isn't anything in the book not based on something that has already happened in history or in another country, or for which actual supporting documentation is not already available.
Q:It's hard to pin down a genre for this novel. Is it science fiction?
A: No, it certainly isn't science fiction. Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn't this book at all.The Handmaid's Taleis speculative fiction in the genre ofBrave New WorldandNineteen Eighty-Four.Nineteen Eighty-Fourwas written not as science fiction but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too,The Handmaid's Taleis a slight twist on the society we have now.
Q:You seem to see a role for the novel beyond entertainment.
A: I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
Q:What are we to learn fromThe Handmaid's Tale?
A: This is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusions. For example, I explore a number of conservative opinions still held by many--such as a woman's place is in the home. And also certain feminist pronouncements--women prefer the company of other women, for example. Take these beliefs to their logical ends and see what happens. As a writer, you can chose to create a mainstream novel in which these issues appear only as the characters discuss them sitting around the kitchen table. But I decided to take these positions and dramatize them, carry them to their furthest logical conclusions.
Q:How would the creation of your imagined republic of Gilead be possible?
A: First of all, ask yourself the following question: If you were going to take over the United States, how would you do it? Would you say, "I'm a socialist and we're all going to be equal"? No, you would not, because it wouldn't work. Would you say, "I'm a liberal and we are going to have a society of multiple toleration"? You probably wouldn't say that if you wanted mass support. You would be much more likely to say, "I have the word from God and this is the way we should run things." That probably would have more of a chance of working, and in fact there are a number of movements in the States saying just that, and getting lots of dollars and influence. The society inThe Handmaid's Taleis a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated. The early Puritans came to America not for religious freedom, as we were taught in grade school, but to set up a society that would be a theocracy (like Iran) ruled by religious leaders, and monolithic, that is, a society that would not tolerate dissent within itself. They were being persecuted in England for being Puritans, but then they went to the United States and promptly began persecuting anyone who wasn't a Puritan. My book reflects the form and style of the early Puritan society and addresses the dynamics that bring about such a situation.