Handmaid's Tale, The
By MARGARET ATWOOD
1986
Author: Margaret Atwood
Characters
As in her previous novels, Atwood has chosen a first-person female narrator for the story of the plight of a state "handmaid" reduced to a strictly biological destiny. The reader knows the narrator only as "Offred," in keeping with the Gileadean practice of renaming handmaids as the property of whichever commander they serve at the time (hence "Offred" literally means "of Fred"). Like other Atwood protagonists, Offred begins her narration in a state of psychic numbness, determined to keep from thinking about the nightmarish circumstances of her life. Having become a handmaid following a failed attempt to escape across the Canadian border with her husband and child (the former presumably now dead and the latter placed in an adoptive home with politically correct parents), Offred rejects the premises of the new order but attempts to comply with her captors' agenda. In her passivity, she serves as another of Atwood's studies in the psychology of victimization, and her slow renunciation of that stance creates the novel's central drama. In the course of the narrative she shows a growing willingness to risk rebellion on both emotional and political levels, despite the threat to her oft-voiced goal of survival. Offred cannot repudiate her emotional history, nor can she escape the tacit complicity of her generation in failing to challenge the patriarchal backlash against women's growing autonomy in the late twentieth century. But Offred also reveals herself to be an intelligent and reflective woman possessed of an ironic wit. She wryly traces the odd alignments of left- and right-wing politics that made possible the oppressively intolerant Gilead. Ironically, the fundamentalist revolution has co-opted the feminist ideal of a female-centered "women's culture" to serve patriarchy's ends.
Offred is well aware that less compliant women offer alternatives to her own acquiescence. For example, her radical feminist mother (under whose rhetorical intensity she had often chafed "back there") is now condemned to a colony for "unwomen." Her college roommate Moira so aggressively resisted her assignment as a handmaid that, following torture, she has been posted to a high-class brothel, her sexual servitude mitigated by the freedom to live out her lesbian identity in "off hours." Finally, Offred personally witnesses the self-sacrifice of Ofglen, a handmaid whose participation in the Mayday Underground demonstrates the fatal lengths to which some women still go to resist Gilead's oppression.
Among the other factors that undermine Offred's fearful passivity is her Commander's restiveness within the desexualized culture he ostensibly upholds. Trading on his privilege, he recklessly seeks out Offred for "illicit" rendezvous where he provides her with "forbidden" relics of the past such as women's magazines and scrabble games, both of which violate Gilead's laws against female literacy. Susceptible to the predictable Achilles' heel of sexual appetite, the Commander gives Offred a renewed sense of female power, however problematical its terms. He even brings her to a brothel where the full measure of Gilead's hypocritical efforts to destroy unsanctioned (that is, nonreproductive) sexuality are exposed.
The marked bitterness of the most privileged females in Gilead, the Commanders' wives, further dramatizes the kingdom's shaky foundations. Serena Joy, Fred's wife, nationally prominent before the revolution as a Christian fundamentalist advocate of traditional gender roles, has succeeded so well in furthering her cause that she now finds herself relegated to the sidelines; her outrage at her own impotence rips through the idealized facade of her supposedly perfect life. Disabled by arthritis, her crippled condition be-speaks her emotional alienation. Unable to bear her own children, she is subjected to the humiliating necessity of employing a handmaid, whose copulating episodes with her husband she must grimly assist. Like Fred, she proves willing to subvert the prescribed order by arranging a secret affair between Offred and the Commander's chauffeur Nick, justifying this "treason" as a more practical route to pregnancy than reliance on the probably sterile Fred and thus a necessary move to ensure Offred's survival. But her discovery of the Commander's liaisons with his handmaid unleashes her full vindictiveness toward Offred, although she is not the agent who apparently betrays Offred to the authorities. The narrative climaxes with the arrival of a police van which takes the handmaid away as a gender traitor. In fact, through her lover's participation in the Underground, the possibly pregnant Offred is in fact rescued from the sure death that otherwise awaits her at the hands of Serena.
Nick's role in the novel is an ambiguous one. Although a male, he lacks the status of more powerful men like the Commander, indicating that other stratifications besides that of gender sustain Gilead's hierarchy. Forbidden to desire the women around whom he works, he too is victimized by the restrictive sexual gospel of the kingdom. Nonetheless, as a measure of their shared rebel impulses, he and Offred enter into a love affair that is simultaneously comforting, exhilarating, and dangerous. Some feminist critics regard Offred's infatuation with Nick as regressive, throwing her back into heterosexual thrall at the very time she should be moving toward greater autonomy and more overtly politicized behavior; others see it as a crucial step in her evolving recovery of self as well as a reaffirmation of the potential for healing male/female bonds beyond the power abuses of patriarchy. The outcome of the relationship approximates a fairy tale denied its happy ending. Nick rescues Offred and acts for her when she proves incapable of acting to save herself. He makes it possible for her to go into hiding; there, perhaps pregnant with Nick's child, she finds time enough to compose the audio tapes that provide historians with the raw material that becomes this "tale" of Gilead. Offred's own destiny beyond the history recorded on those tapes remains a mystery, however.
Social Concerns
The Handmaid's Tale gives heightened, prophetic urgency to a number of Atwood's long-standing social preoccupations. The novel is set in a futuristic society called the Republic of Gilead, a new nation resulting from a fundamentalist coup in what was once the northern United States. The action occurs in Boston and explicitly recalls Puritan New England, earlier site of a community insistently pursuing a single-minded messianic agenda. (The Canadian Atwood herself has New England ancestors, one of whom was tried as a witch and survived hanging; the novel is dedicated to her, as well as to Harvard scholar Perry Miller, with whom she once studied). Like its historical antecedent, Gilead is a theocracy whose legal, political, and ethical strictures rest upon conservative interpretations of the Bible cannily used to legitimize a patriarchy of elite white males who repress the majority of the population through overtly racist and sexist policies.
The inequities of this society are shown to be intimately related to a number of other catastrophes that have ravaged Gilead. In earlier works Atwood had identified the United States as the locus of a dehumanizing capitalistic and technocratic ethos which wages war on nature. Gilead dramatizes the inevitable ecological disasters attendant upon such practices. Nuclear accidents, toxic pollution, virulent new diseases, and the chemical mistreatment of their own bodies have so reduced the fertility rate among whites that the chances of bringing a healthy new baby into the world are now one in four. The schism dividing humans from the ravaged natural world only intensifies human predatoriness and produces a society whose paranoid isolationism propels it into a perpetual state of war against subversive citizens and supposedly hostile neighbor states. War becomes a state of mind justifying a pervasive militarism with its attendant drain on national resources; as such, it reinforces the patriarchal hierarchies that undergird the culture. Gilead bases this social vision on a religious ideology which sanctions its power politics as God's will; the world of this novel is shown to be a logical, if exaggerated, expression of the chauvinistic self-righteousness with which Americans have historically exercised their raw might around the world.
Atwood's indictment of modernity's technocratic assault on nature complements an equally unyielding portrait of a decadent mass culture whose consumer fetishism, narcissism, and cultural debasement produces postmodern anarchy and spawns the drastic anti-dote of a Gilead. As with all dystopias, The Handmaid's Tale identifies the seeds of its futuristic nightmare in the excesses of the present and suggests the ease with which those excesses can trigger a violent backlash annihilating the cherished freedoms of the culture it is ostensibly trying to save. Atwood's treatment of contemporary culture is more ambivalent here than in earlier works, however. Although she is clearly repulsed by its pervasive corruption of individual sensibility, she cautions against simplistic efforts to repress its most revolting elements. She thus raises the troubling question: What degree of liberty can a democratic society safely exchange for cultural stability?
Themes
By making her protagonist a woman of child-bearing age, Atwood foregrounds gender as the central dichotomizing agent within Gilead, illuminating the degree to which misogynist hostility toward female sexuality and envy of women's procreative capacities can lead to their systematic subordination. Atwood creates a nightmarish society which forbids women virtually all access to power, be it financial, educational, political, or familial. At its inception Gilead denies women money and credit, eliminates their jobs, and outlaws female literacy. Later policies group women into segregated categories: Handmaids, whose apparent fertility has been commandeered by the state to "breed" offspring for childless white male Commanders and their wives; Aunts, who serve as the government's indoctrination agents of other women; Marthas, whose function is that of asexual workers in the homes of the elite; Econowives, who marry lower-echelon males and serve in multiple capacities as wives, mothers, and laborers; and Unwomen, whose "unfitness" politically or biologically has relegated them to certain death cleaning up toxic waste sites. Such stratifications pit the women of different groups against one another, illustrating an important component of Gilead's systematic misogyny: the exploitation of hostilities women direct against one another. While such tensions are frequently the result of the power structures that control their lives, the women of Gilead operate in complicity with them by fomenting divisive grievances and distrust among themselves. This in turn thwarts any collective effort by women as a group to resist their institutional helplessness.
Animosities among women had permeated the pre-Gilead world as well, polarizing them into opposing camps championing antithetical notions of female possibility. Despite their mutual intolerance, their shared essentialism about women's "nature" and their respective campaigns against the worsening dangers for women in post-industrial economies unwittingly combined to facilitate Gilead's revolution and its reimposition of strict gender roles. There is a grimly ironic link between the women-led protests of escalating violence in pre-Gilead America and the seductive promise of the new society to make life "safe" again for women. The price of moving, as one of the Aunts puts it, from "freedom to" to "freedom from" is nothing less than women's hard-won autonomy.
Techniques
In The Handmaid's Tale Atwood again uses her trademark Gothicism to convey the grotesque dislocations produced by Gilead's social agenda. The hallucinatory imagery filling Offred's narration, usually Atwood's way of revealing the intense psychic alienation of her protagonists, here derives from horrific governmental policies made all the more haunting by Offred's matter-of-fact delivery. Harvard Yard has been turned into a public torture and execution area, with the bodies of "gender traitors" such as homosexuals, rapists, adulterers, and abortionists regularly displayed as evidence of the fate awaiting the unorthodox. Women participate in violent group assaults called "particicutions," in which supposed criminals are literally ripped to shreds by frenzied female mobs. Gilead's extensive behavioral rules eerily contribute to the ominous climate surrounding women. The red robes and white blinders the handmaids wear, as well as the demure and silent pairings in which they travel in public, offer only two examples of how Atwood builds the disorienting atmosphere of the novel.
Offred's first-person interior monologue intensifies the reader's experience of the claustrophobic entrapment women suffer in Gilead. A familiar narrative device in Atwood's fiction, here it receives two compelling twists, both revealed at the novel's conclusion. One is the sudden opening out of the text from its Gileadean milieu to a futuristic frame of reference set in 2195, some two hundred years after the events just described. This epilogue is presented as "a partial transcript" of a yearly conference of academics engaged in the study of Gilead, now a defunct society primarily of interest to antiquarians. Such a transition releases readers from the suffocating confinement of Offred's consciousness and offers the reassurance that the historical nightmare recorded in the text proper has ended. The intertextual complexity generated by the tonal layerings of the epilogue qualifies such effects, however. Atwood presents the scholarly conference satirically, not only exposing the reductive treatment being given Offred's riveting story but raising provocative doubts about just how much of Gilead's patriarchal repression has in fact passed away. While women and men function as seeming equals within this academic community, the female chair of the conference busily orchestrates the social niceties of the occasion as back-drop to the remarks of the male speaker, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto. The professor reveals a penchant for sexist humor and evinces far greater interest in discovering the identity of the Commander than in Offred's own story.
Pieixoto also reveals the other narrative "trick" at work in the text: the news that Offred's voice has survived, not as a written document, but as a series of tape-recordings made after her escape from Boston. Just as the recovery of women's history is often dependent upon nonliterary and oral forms, Offred's tapes speak across centuries of a woman's hunger to reclaim and validate her life. Yet the narrative composed from her tapes is the work of an insensitive male and his faceless assistants who have become interpretive mediators intruding between the reader and the speaker. The professor entitles their text The Handmaid's Tale—not only a self-conscious homage to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales but a smirking sexual distortion of the great poet's original language. To Pieixoto's final comment, "Are there any questions?" one is prompted to ask, in true postmodern perplexity, just whose story exists within these pages after all.
Literary Precedents
Much has been made of Atwood's obvious indebtedness to the tradition of dystopian fiction preceding TheHandmaid's Tale, most notably George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Atwood's work is antiutopian in its concern with the power constructions whereby ideologically driven regimes establish and maintain their dominance over select populations. She uses differentiations based on gender, race and class to imagine a rigidly hierarchical society whose absolutist cultural values, permitting no compromise, foster brutal persecution of "deviance." Dystopian fictions are cautionary tales that warn against what their authors view as society's most dangerous existing tendencies. The nightmarish ambiance born of the genre's characteristic extremism saturates The Handmaid's Tale, whose alien philosophical and political foundation rests paradoxically upon enough familiar detail to make it jarringly immediate.
Atwood claims that every abuse and horror of Gilead social policy has either been practiced at one time in history or has a direct parallel in the contemporary world. She has been faulted by some critics for not having imagined as self-enclosed and original a new society as exists in Nineteen Eighty-four but Atwood argues that Gilead is intended as a relatively recent historical development without the temporal leap into the future that characterizes other such fictions. She also eschews labeling the novel science fiction, preferring to call it "speculative fiction."
In comparison to this dystopian element, very little attention has been paid to the tradition of feminist Utopian writing with which The Handmaid's Tale is also in dialogue. Unlike Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland or Marge Piercy's more recent Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), both of which present idealized communities where hierarchical gender polarizations and the conflicts they produce are replaced by virtues associated with female culture such as nurturance and egalitarianism, Atwood's novel posits a dark alternative where female subservience is the central fact of society.