The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Imagine the horrific aftermath of a nuclear war. Imagine the United States government being overthrown and replaced with a dystopian society, known as Gilead. Imagine, on American soil, families are separated. Children are ripped away from their parents and placed with powerful couples. Imagine losing the right own property or have a bank account. Imagine being tortured for reading or writing. The Handmaid’s Tale is about all of these things, and so much more.
Margaret Atwood introduces us to the Republic of Gilead, where the roles of people, especially women, are clearly defined and brutally enforced. Due to the nuclear effects on reproductive health, birth rates are down. Young women who have remained fertile (Handmaids) are forced to produce babies for prominent families. They are made to participate in mandatory monthly impregnation rituals with their commanders, and later ordered to hand their baby over to them and their wives. Handmaids are trained and disciplined by the “aunts”. Aunts are women higher up in the hierarchy, authorized to administer torturous punishments to disobedient handmaids. Additionally, handmaids unable to produce a baby, or any woman deemed useless or rebellious, can be shipped to radioactive, contaminated wastelands and used as slave labor. Public executions are also common and take place for a variety of senseless reasons.
June is a happily married woman, with a daughter and a successful career in the Boston area. Frightened by the unfolding changes in society, she and her family attempt to flee to Canada. In the process, June and her daughter are captured and separated. June is sent to be trained as a Handmaid under the tyrannical Aunt Lydia, and later ordered to live with Commander Fred and his wife, Serena Joy. No longer June, “Offred” is desperate to get her daughter back and escape the Republic of Gilead. Despite being under the constant supervision of “The Eyes” (Gilead’s secret police), she joins a secret resistance group called “Mayday” and risks everything to save her daughter and take back their freedom.
The Handmaid’s Tale gripped me right from the beginning and refused to let go. I am shook to the core. Every page had me in Gilead and I remained there long after the last page was read. One cannot help but imagine the horrors of a real-life Gilead right here in America. The treatment of women in particular was one of the central themes in this novel, and I found myself envisioning my own loved ones being stripped of their freedom and placed in the role of baby breeding machines for prominent families. I thought of older, professional women reduced to a life of servitude, and watching their husbands being executed for refusing to join a murderous regime. Of course, such thoughts brought my mind to similar real life atrocities – the legalized abuse of women in other countries, public executions for holding certain religious beliefs, the Holocaust, and so on. There is simply no denying the parallels between the events of this novel and the world in which we live.
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, is poignant and extremely thought provoking. Through this book, we consider the effects of power on the human capacity for ruthlessness, and vice-versa. That is, when the wrong people are in positions of power and unable to handle such power, the damage to a society can be devastating. Additionally, the character development is extraordinary, well-paced, and well-presented. Over time, we see ordinary people doing the unimaginable in order to survive, and then finding the strength to fight back in the name of freedom, risking everything to do so. We are reminded of the great lengths to which a mother will go in order to protect her child (all moms will relate!). Atwood expertly presents the strength and fragility of the human spirit, and the breakdown thereof, in a totalitarian society. This book is not for the faint of heart, but an excellent, engaging, extremely well-written work. I highly recommend The Handmaid’s Tale for adult readers.
The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale is The Testaments. See that review here.
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“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of oppression, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” – Harry S. Truman
