The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
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Book Reviews of The Handmaid's Tale
Book Review: Scrutinizing the Future of America
Summary: 5 Stars
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, is a very unique and interesting novel. This thought provoking novel makes the reader think about life and what is to come in the future. Briefly, The Handmaid's Tale is about a handmaid's life, her efforts to have a child for her Commander, and her continuing survival in a changing world. This novel provides both an interesting read and new look at what life could be like.The background information concerning the novel is extremely important. It is set in what is now the United States in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the novel, this country is the Republic of Gilead. The Republic of Gilead has many new laws that are looked upon now as sexist and restricting. Some women only have the job of conceiving and giving birth to children; at this time infertility is vast. Women at this time do not have rights, or at least compared to today's society, this includes not being allowed to read. This information is essential in understand The Handmaid's Tale.
The Handmaid's Tale is a story unlike any other. The novel is about Offred, a handmaid, whose only job is to conceiving children. Offred lives with Serena Joy and the Commander. One day the Commander invites Offred into his office, which is a very risky situation as it is forbidden to have unnecessary contact with each other. "My presence here is illegal. It's forbidden for us to be alone with the Commanders. We are for breeding purposes" (136). This quote helps to exemplify the fact that this contact is dangerous and that her sole purpose in society is for breeding. In the Commander's office, the two of them do various things that are considered illegal, but in today's society are not. One day Serena Joy confronts Offred about her desire to have a child. The two, even though they have an extreme dislike for each other, conspire a way to make it more likely for Offred to become pregnant. Serena Joy says to Offred, "'Maybe you should try it another way'" (205). Offred questions, "'What other way?'" (205). Serena Joy replies, "'Another man'" (205). One evening, the Commander takes Offred to Jezebel's, an old hotel where prostitution and drinking occurs. Here Offred runs into an old friend and has sex illegally with the commander for the first time. Serena Joy's efforts to find another man work out and Offred sees him, which leads to an interesting and unsuspected ending.
The Handmaid's Tale is an extremely good book that keeps the reader on edge and constantly wanting more. The book achieves its goals of making the reader think about what could happen to the United States and if something to this effect could actually take place. This novel is a lot like George Orwell's 1984 and The Giver, by Lois Lowry. By far, The Handmaid's Tale is the best, but is in the category of novels with extreme changes in society. Atwood writes the novel in a very convincing manner. It seems as though these events really did occur. The Handmaid's Tale is a book that keeps the reader on edge and is something that everyone should read at some point in life.
Margaret Atwood's, The Handmaid's Tale, is a thought-provoking novel that exhibits changes in a society. A different type of lifestyle is looked at through the eyes of what is considered the person that makes the society run. Without these handmaids there would be no society. The Handmaid's Tale is a novel that everyone should read whether it is for enjoyment or learning purposes.
Book Review: A Feminist's Deepest Fears
Summary: 4 Stars
From time to time, an author may wish to hold her society up to a crooked mirror to present an image of what may go wrong should that current trend of wrongs and ills continue unabated. In THE HANDMAID'S TALE, Margaret Atwood wrote of the fears that were then wracking her pro-feminist worldview. In 1986, when Atwood was writing this book, she feared greatly what she saw as an onslaught on human rights in general and feminine rights in particular from a Ronald Reagan led attack by the Christian Right. Atwood saw Reagan as the vanguard of an attack, which included bible thumping televangelists, all of whom wanted to keep women gainfully unemployed, barefoot, pregnant, illiterate, and dependent on men for the bare necessities of life. Atwood chose to write of her alarm in the time honored tradition of the dystopia, a form of literature that presents humanity as de-evolving into unthinking brutes. George Orwell, in 1984, wrote of the crushing of the human spirit under Stalinism. Ray Bradbury, in FAHRENHEIT 451, wrote of a similar crushing of the intellect by a mind numbing pursuit of effete pleasures. And in THE HANDMAID'S TALE, Atwood was alarmed primarily by the loss of the right of a woman to choose whether or not to have an abortion.
The narrator is a mid-thirties woman named Offred, not her real name. She "belongs" to her male captor, Fred. Thus she is "of" Fred. We never learn her former name. What the reader does learn is that sometime around the end of the twentieth century, the forces of the radical right merged with those of the Christian Coalition to usurp political power in the United States. The President is assassinated. Most United States Senators and Congressmen are eliminated and a theocracy is brutally instituted. The Bill of Rights is "temporarily" suspended, and a perverted Christian thuggery takes over. It is with no small amount of prescience that the new regime seems to have been a model that the Iranian Mullahs might have read as they were crunching on women's rights at about the same time. Women in the new America are forbidden to work or to have money. Clearly Atwood has read carefully her Orwell, since both writers share many of the same plot devices. Orwell has the Thought Police; Atwood the Eyes. Orwell provides flashbacks how Big Brother came to be: Atwood similarly unfolds the origin of the theocracy of Gilead. And both present humanity at the lowest common denominator-as worthy only of being a face stamped on forever by a boot. However, Atwood's nihilistic vision of a dark humanity is leavened slightly by her subtly suggesting that such a religious rot is only a local phenomenon, limited to the new Republic of Gilead. Other countries, like Canada, seem to have been spared the ubiquitous lashing of the rod by a host of Jimmy Swaggart types. What becomes clear by the novel's end is that the fear of an anti-feminist rogue regime is more feminist paranoia than even a remotely possible dystopia. The feeling that one has after finishing Atwood's polemic is one of amazement that there must have been so many women-hating, bible thumping thugs in positions of power who were awaiting the first chance to turn the United States of America into a copycat regime that now controls the lives of women in nearly every country of the Mid East. As such, THE HANDMAID'S TALE can now be read for its tremendous drama rather than for its original mission to spread the alarm of the end of feminism.
Book Review: Hardly unlikely....
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been reading the other reviews, and noted that many women here seem to think that the Handmaid's Tale more accurately describes the life of women in Muslim Countries and is something that could never happen in a "Christian" nation.Wake up.
The latest attempts to remove abortion rights (by defining the fetus as a person) show that the Christian Right is willing to use any back door they can get to deny women our human rights. I re-read the book for the third or fourth time after the non-election of 2000, and thought that Atwood was prophetic.
Offred's life is the end result of many of the reforms that are "suggested" by various Right-Wing Christian Groups. It is a terrifying glimpse at a future that I, and many other women, hope never arrives.
As Atwood so carefully outlines, the Bible has a history of being used to promote completely different points of view: while it was being used by African American ministers to prove that slavery wasn't allowable, it was also used by White Southern Ministers to prove that blacks were meant to be a slave race.
It has been used to prove that women cannot speak in church and to prove that women cannot even ask questions of their minister (only their husband, and they must rely upon his answer). This is a daily reality for women who live in conservative Amish or Mennonite communities.
The Bible states, repeatedly, what women cannot do. The Qur'an, on the other hand, states repeatedly what rights women have. Which means that it is actually EASIER to use the Bible as a tool to deny women's rights than it is to use the Qur'an.
I do not say this lightly. My husband is Palestinian, and I have lived in Saudi Arabia. But when I interacted with non-related men, I was more valued for my mind when I lived in Saudi Arabia. In America (which is where I grew up), I find myself increasingly convinced that men are only interested in interacting with me as a sexual being. There is constant pressure for me to wear less, to put on make-up, and to "do something" with my hair.
That is not to say that living in Saudi Arabia is pleasant. But as a woman wearing the Abaya with so many other women, I was, essentially, completely unidentifiable. Men did not follow me, look at me, or ask me about my availability. I only interacted with them as a cerebral being. In some ways, this allowed me MORE freedom than I experience in America, dressed as an average American female (jeans, t-shirt, skirt-suit, etc.).
Needless to say, there are many Muslim countries where women are not forced to veil, such as Jordan, Turkey, etc. But in these countries, I have experienced more harrassment than in Saudi Arabia - until I decided to put on the Abaya, after which I was left alone.
I tried the same experiment in America - only to find that the Abaya made me stick out, that men spent even longer trying to undress me with their eyes, and attracted far too much attention.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can be so blinded by their preference for a particular religion that they do not see that the same faults of another religion exist in the one they practice. The Handmaid's tale shows what happens when the Bible is read from the viewpoint of a misogynist, right-wing male, and many parts of it fit very closely with how members of the Ku Klux Klan, the Amish, and various other groups with conservative readings of the Bible treat "their" women. And its not a pretty picture.
Book Review: Cunning manipulative middlebrow entertainment
Summary: 2 Stars
Whatever one might else say about Margaret Atwood, there is no doubt she's a professional. She is a skillful, cunning manipulative writer. But whereas other writers use modernist techniques to reach a deeper insight, Atwood uses them to evade fundamental questions. Here are two examples. 1) At one point Offred has a meeting with the chauffeur who will impregnate her because Offred's master, Fred, is sterile. Atwood provides three versions of this meeting which introduces a note of fashionable uncertainty while hiding her inability to discuss real intimacy. 2) At the end of the book, Offred is being taken away from Fred's house. It is not clear whether she is being liberated or arrested, and the book concludes with a pompous academic conference that does not clarify the matter. The conference is obviously a joke on Atwood's part. The problem I have is that Offred could not have written the account that concludes her story until after the events took place, and where she would have a reasonable idea of what happened to her. Atwood may find it intriguing to leave the matter in doubt, but a real political prisoner would not play this sort of modernist game.In general, Atwood's dystopia plays on women's fears, but does not enlighten or elucidate them. She chose an easy target in attacking American fundamentalism, whose illiberalism, parochialism and paranoia make them fair game. But in her account of making women victims she is subtly stacking the deck. She uses analogies from Nazism and slavery which, on second glance, are quite tendentious. For example the regime comes about because Congress and the Cabinet have been assasinated and a military regime claims it was done by foreign terrorists. But are Americans really quite that naive? The imposition of a misogynist state supposedly happens step by step, sort of like the path towards the Holocaust. But it is one thing for Germans to fail to realize the fate of 1% of their countrymen and for Americans to fail to recognize the fate of 50% of their own families. Likewise, it is hard to imagine any modern state that would want to dramatically shrink the workforce and cut the literacy rate in half. In Atwood's Gilead, women are forbidden to read, an idea which Atwood obviously got from slave code prohibitions against literacy. But this ignores the fact that American Evangelicalism prides itself on bringing the bible to the masses. To prevent women from reading the bible goes against their fundamental principles. Indeed, renaming the country is another "off" thing, given the intense patriotism of American Fundamentalists. And why would they rename the country "Gilead," as in "there is no balm in"? I can't help but note that Atwood does not take the demographic crisis Gilead faces with all due seriousness. After all, a 90%-95% sterility rate implies extinction. Most people would support conscription to fight off an enemy that would do that. Is conscripting women's wombs so really out of the question? It is at least an argument that should be taken more seriously. Finally Atwood does not deal with the fact that most churchgoers in Western countries are female. This brings in questions of complicity that Atwood simply ignores. Ultimately, this is middlebrow entertainment.
Book Review: Atwood's Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
"I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happiness, then at least more active." So says master writer Margaret Atwood regarding her tour de force, The Handmaid's Tale. Set in the future (in what is currently Massachusetts), Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is the chilling portrayal of a totalitarian society as told through the eyes of a Handmaid named Offred. Offred, who can remember the time when she had a home, a husband and a daughter, now serves as a "birth vessel" and is valued only for her powers of reproduction.Offred (her name was derived from "of" and the name of her own Commander, "Fred") is forced to live her life in a new dictatorship called the Republic of Gilead. Offred is allowed to leave her Commander's home only once each day; her freedom, like that of other ordinary civilians, has been stripped from her and she exists at the mercy of the heads of state who are known as the Commanders.
The Republic of Gilead, however, is a society in the midst of crisis. Its land and atmosphere have been polluted by nuclear waste and all but a handful of the population has been rendered barren. Those infertile women, women who will never, or never again, reproduce, are known as "Unwomen," and are sent to the Colonies where they must toil as laborers with no privileges, working to clean up the nuclear waste. The only exceptions are the infertile Wives of the Commanders. Women lucky enough to still retain their fertility, like Offred, are considered a treasured "object" of society and one whose role is to bear children for the Wives of the Commanders who cannot. In the Republic of Gilead they have a saying, "There's no such thing as a sterile man...there are only women who are barren." Offred, though, knows that in this nuclear aftermath, sterile men do, indeed, exist, and so she prays for a baby; not a baby that she, herself, wants to love, but one that will keep her from the dreaded fate of the "Unwomen."
Many of the events in The Handmaid's Tale are derived from the biblical story of Leah and Rachel and Atwood has chosen to use many biblical names throughout the book. There are Handmaids and Marthas, Angels and Guardians and many others.
The Handmaid's Tale is written in Atwood's masterful prose but this is not a linear tale. Be prepared to drop back in time, then flash forward, then drop back again. The writing, though, flows effortlessly and Atwood, as always, manages to keep readers riveted to the page.
Although many people might feel that The Handmaid's Tale is too futuristic to be plausible, many of the events depicted have happened or are happening somewhere in the world at this very moment. It doesn't take more than a few minutes to recall places where gender discrimination and human rights have all but been stripped away. Atwood, herself, said, "One of the things I avoided doing was describing anything in the novel that didn't happen in this world."
Chilling, moving, vivid, terrifying and sometimes even humorous, The Handmaid's Tale is a profoundly moral story. It is a true masterpiece of power and grace that will someday attain the status of a classic.