Book Review | Essay
Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump
In
the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially
called “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow
legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a
huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I’d rented.
The
keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was
still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly
in place, and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday
the East German Air Force made sonic booms to remind us of how close
they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain
— Czechoslovakia, East Germany — I experienced the wariness, the
feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the
oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an
influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. “This
used to belong to . . . but then they disappeared.” I heard such stories
many times.
Having
been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew
that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as
fast as lightning. “It can’t happen here” could not be depended on:
Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.
By
1984, I’d been avoiding my novel for a year or two. It seemed to me a
risky venture. I’d read extensively in science fiction, speculative
fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the
1950s, but I’d never written such a book. Was I up to it? The form was
strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into
allegory and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary
garden I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I
would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in
what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology
not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no
imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.
Back
in 1984, the main premise seemed — even to me — fairly outrageous.
Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States had suffered a
coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a
literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution
and Congress are no longer: The Republic of Gilead is built on a
foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that have always lain
beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew.
The
immediate location of the book is Cambridge, Mass., home of Harvard
University, now a leading liberal educational institution but once a
Puritan theological seminary. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in
the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks,
researching my New England ancestors as well as the Salem witchcraft
trials. Would some people be affronted by the use of the Harvard wall as
a display area for the bodies of the executed? (They were.)
In
the novel the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and
the ability to have viable babies is at a premium. (In today’s real
world, studies are now showing a sharp fertility decline in Chinese
men.) Under totalitarianisms — or indeed in any sharply hierarchical
society — the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of
the regime arrange to have fertile females assigned to them as
Handmaids. The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his two
wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. One man, four women, 12
sons — but the handmaids could not claim the sons. They belonged to the
respective wives.
And so the tale unfolds.
When
I first began “The Handmaid’s Tale” it was called “Offred,” the name of
its central character. This name is composed of a man’s first name,
“Fred,” and a prefix denoting “belonging to,” so it is like “de” in
French or “von” in German, or like the suffix “son” in English last
names like Williamson. Within this name is concealed another
possibility: “offered,” denoting a religious offering or a victim
offered for sacrifice.
Why
do we never learn the real name of the central character, I have often
been asked. Because, I reply, so many people throughout history have had
their names changed, or have simply disappeared from view. Some have
deduced that Offred’s real name is June, since, of all the names
whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium/dormitory, “June” is the
only one that never appears again. That was not my original thought but
it fits, so readers are welcome to it if they wish.
At
some time during the writing, the novel’s name changed to “The
Handmaid’s Tale,” partly in honor of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” but
partly also in reference to fairy tales and folk tales: The story told
by the central character partakes — for later or remote listeners — of
the unbelievable, the fantastic, as do the stories told by those who
have survived earth-shattering events.
Over
the years, “The Handmaid’s Tale” has taken many forms. It has been
translated into 40 or more languages. It was made into a film in 1990.
It has been an opera, and it has also been a ballet. It is being turned
into a graphic novel. And in April 2017 it will become an MGM/Hulu
television series.
In
this series I have a small cameo. The scene is the one in which the
newly conscripted Handmaids are being brainwashed in a sort of Red Guard
re-education facility known as the Red Center. They must learn to
renounce their previous identities, to know their place and their
duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be
protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of
themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or
run away.
The
Handmaids sit in a circle, with the Taser-equipped Aunts forcing them
to join in what is now called (but was not, in 1984) the “slut-shaming”
of one of their number, Jeanine, who is being made to recount how she
was gang-raped as a teenager. Her fault, she led them on — that is the
chant of the other Handmaids.
Although
it was “only a television show” and these were actresses who would be
giggling at coffee break, and I myself was “just pretending,” I found
this scene horribly upsetting. It was way too much like way too much
history. Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse
others to keep themselves off the hook: We see that very publicly in the
age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will
gladly take positions of power over other women, even — and, possibly,
especially — in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: All
power is relative, and in tough times any amount is seen as better than
none. Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, and think they
are doing the Handmaids a favor: At least they haven’t been sent to
clean up toxic waste, and at least in this brave new world they won’t
get raped, not as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists.
Some are opportunists. And they are adept at taking some of the stated
aims of 1984 feminism — like the anti-porn campaign and greater safety
from sexual assault — and turning them to their own advantage. As I say:
real life.
Which brings me to three questions I am often asked.
First,
is “The Handmaid’s Tale” a “feminist” novel? If you mean an ideological
tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are
incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are
human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior that
implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to
them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes.
In that sense, many books are “feminist.”
Why
interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important
in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not
secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known
that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations would die
out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls and children
has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant
to subdue and exploit a population. Kill their babies and replace their
babies with yours, as cats do; make women have babies they can’t afford
to raise, or babies you will then remove from them for your own
purposes, steal babies — it’s been a widespread, age-old motif. The
control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive
regime on the planet. Napoleon and his “cannon fodder,” slavery and its
ever-renewed human merchandise — they both fit in here. Of those
promoting enforced childbirth, it should be asked: Cui bono? Who profits
by it? Sometimes this sector, sometimes that. Never no one.
The
second question that comes up frequently: Is “The Handmaid’s Tale”
antireligion? Again, it depends what you may mean by that. True, a group
of authoritarian men seize control and attempt to restore an extreme
version of the patriarchy, in which women (like 19th-century American
slaves) are forbidden to read. Further, they can’t control money or have
jobs outside the home, unlike some women in the Bible. The regime uses
biblical symbols, as any authoritarian regime taking over America
doubtless would: They wouldn’t be Communists or Muslims.
The
modesty costumes worn by the women of Gilead are derived from Western
religious iconography — the Wives wear the blue of purity, from the
Virgin Mary; the Handmaids wear red, from the blood of parturition, but
also from Mary Magdalene. Also, red is easier to see if you happen to be
fleeing. The wives of men lower in the social scale are called
Econowives, and wear stripes. I must confess that the face-hiding
bonnets came not only from mid-Victorian costume and from nuns, but from
the Old Dutch Cleanser package of the 1940s, which showed a woman with
her face hidden, and which frightened me as a child. Many
totalitarianisms have used clothing, both forbidden and enforced, to
identify and control people — think of yellow stars and Roman purple —
and many have ruled behind a religious front. It makes the creation of
heretics that much easier.
In
the book, the dominant “religion” is moving to seize doctrinal control,
and religious denominations familiar to us are being annihilated. Just
as the Bolsheviks destroyed the Mensheviks in order to eliminate
political competition and Red Guard factions fought to the death against
one another, the Catholics and the Baptists are being targeted and
eliminated. The Quakers have gone underground, and are running an escape
route to Canada, as — I suspect — they would. Offred herself has a
private version of the Lord’s Prayer and refuses to believe that this
regime has been mandated by a just and merciful God. In the real world
today, some religious groups are leading movements for the protection of
vulnerable groups, including women.
So
the book is not “antireligion.” It is against the use of religion as a
front for tyranny; which is a different thing altogether.
Is
“The Handmaid’s Tale” a prediction? That is the third question I’m
asked — increasingly, as forces within American society seize power and
enact decrees that embody what they were saying they wanted to do, even
back in 1984, when I was writing the novel. No, it isn’t a prediction,
because predicting the future isn’t really possible: There are too many
variables and unforeseen possibilities. Let’s say it’s an
antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it
won’t happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.
So
many different strands fed into “The Handmaid’s Tale” — group
executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn program of the
SS and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of
slavery, the history of American polygamy . . . the list is long.
But
there’s a literary form I haven’t mentioned yet: the literature of
witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it,
trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to
understand it and share it. This is an act of hope: Every recorded story
implies a future reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel
Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who
lived during the Black Death, although their accounts often stop
abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan
genocide and the world’s indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden
in her secret annex.
There
are two reading audiences for Offred’s account: the one at the end of
the book, at an academic conference in the future, who are free to read
but who are not always as empathetic as one might wish; and the
individual reader of the book at any given time. That is the “real”
reader, the Dear Reader for whom every writer writes. And many Dear
Readers will become writers in their turn. That is how we writers all
started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
In
the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties
proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with
many of the rights for women won over the past decades, and indeed the
past centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups
seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being
expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone,
somewhere — many, I would guess — are writing down what is happening as
they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record
later, if they can.
Will their messages be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall?
Let us hope it doesn’t come to that. I trust it will not.
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