The Handmaid's Tale

Grim and Shocking Tale!!

A grim tale of possible future that makes you think should we raise voice against the totalitarian regimes when they start making disastrous changes or just act ignorant and think it will not impact us. The main character had the same thinking and very well conveys it by saying “we are the people who live in the white spaces of newspapers always thinking that actions by government will never impact us.”

On the other note, the book is slightly difficult to read but you slowly get hooked to the story of Offred and how world came to a dark future like this.

The Handmaid's Tale is a novel with depth to it, in the sense that it defines cognitive space in which ideas can be packed. And it is not limited in what it fills that space with; it is jammed packed. The fiction itself at the surface layer is simple enough to dispatch. The rate of failed pregnancies rises to 75% which gives rise to an ultra-fascist religious sect who assassinates the heads of American government and seize power by way of martial law and the military. In the ensuing republic of Gilead, women have virtually no individual rights and our narrator-protagonist serves as a handmaid - a concubine and surrogate mother to the powerful among the Gileadean leadership.

The fiction itself does not bear close scrutiny well. The narrator, Offred, provides what is tantamount to an oral history with the assumption that the listener/reader is in some ways familiar with both Gilead and the time before. What we, as a reader from an alternative history, learn of her world is mostly through well-distributed crumbs of direct exposition and aggregated inference. In fact, the most illuminating segment about the fiction comes as an addendum to the original novel, added during a later reprinting. This takes the form of a seminar presented decades later, in an era in which Gilead is a largely forgotten memory, by a professor of Gileadean studies. While the addendum is elucidating, it fails to enrich the original work. Offred's hazy, biased, and suspect presentation of the specifics of her world is a strength of the novel; the more concrete a work of transformative fiction is, the harder it is to disentangle from those details and force abstract ideas into the spotlight.

At some angles, the tale it offers appears to be a work of feminist literature - and it is to the extent that it espouses the opinion that the unegalitarian scenario presented, while inherently less favorable towards women, is an existential dampener for both genders - it is not “just” or “simply” that. As must any work in which totalitarianism is a central factor, it speaks to themes of compliance, of obedience, and of fervor. It speaks to the hopelessness of resistance in the face of an entrenched practice and the courage of those who participate to any degree in movements such as the Underground Women's Road or the Underground Railroad before it.

The volume of substance to unpack from The Handmaid's Tale is why it has survived the test of the first few decades of its literary life and is, in a time of political uncertainty and unrest, enjoying a resurgence. One may group it with 1984 and Brave New World as the 20th century's enduring cautionary tales of sad dystopias borne of man's folly that remain relevant in parts well into its future. As with these other works, it would be hyperbolic to consider it at all predictive. Any yet, a rational reader must concede that while the fiction presented lives outside the boundaries of our probable futures that it is not that far; it is closer to our reality than 1984 and certainly than Brave New World.

The author's note in this edition touches on the irony of the expression “instant classic,” and yet it is difficult to argue with the early critics who used the expression. Atwood's own rule that what she put into her novel must be based on something that has happened in recent history is why this novel remains even now so accessible.