June 2018
‘A dystopia premised on the theocratic oppression of women.’
Reading this book is like looking through a glass darkly, you must be patient as, little by little, the initial situation is put into context. A huge historical dislocation has happened very quickly – within the memory of witnesses, like the French Revolution or the Nazi domination of Europe, or the Russian Revolution – suddenly everything you knew is done away with as the long-term forces which have been inherent in society for years suddenly jolt into a complete overthrow of what went before. America becomes the totalitarian state of Gilead by a violent coup which destroys the President and the entire political elite.
But behind these shifting political forces is something of even more magnitude – the destruction of the planet. Earth’s health has collapsed, and this scenario underwrites everything else: nuclear fall-out, poisons and toxins, collapse of fisheries and agriculture, a world choked and poisoned, which has caused a catastrophic fall in female fertility in what used to be called the USA. We learn at the end of the novel that Canada has not undergone a similar overthrow as US and that England still exists outside the sway of Gilead.
But for a lot of the novel you don’t really know what has happened in any detail, in fact you are kept hooked in the process of finding out, discovering with Offred as she tries to make sense of her memories in the ‘life before’ and calibrate them with the strange, frightening and ill-understood present time.
I find it very difficult to say where it stands as ‘feminist’ literature. I’m not even sure where the power is placed in this novel – men seem to be killed, hanged and otherwise done away with, some men are menial and used in service, but surely men must be the rulers as it is a violent oppressive state. But women oppress, too, the Wives lord it over the Handmaids and Marthas – there’s a hierarchy and one suspects it of being patriarchal but we never have the full disclosure of how this state is run.
The Commanders don’t seem to command anything and we only ever see them in a domestic or leisure situation. (They have illicitly kept prostitution going for their own purposes).
But all ruling power will cease when you run out of people to rule over, so the theme of human reproduction is dominant in this state where babies are only conceived with great difficulty, where men and women have grown infertile because of disease and pollution on a grand scale, where there is a high risk of fetal abnormality, where babies are born ill, deformed, unviable or sterile and where there is a catastrophic fall in fertility in the general population, at least the Caucasian one. The blank space in this book the thing that is never said, the point that is never made is the comparison that stares you in the face- the treatment of women in this theocratic state, the restrictions imposed on them – no reading, no voting, no jobs, no private money, no ownership of property, no independence – is rather like some theocratic states today: the control of women’s bodies is both a present-day political instrument as well as an historical fact. Patriarchies have always operated that way and still do.
However, the uncertainty about what is happening in Gilead is an integral theme of the tale, as is the unreliability of the narration. Offred constantly undermines her own narration because she herself knows so little, or cannot recall, or is not telling us everything.
The ending is equivocal, we don’t know if she is being rescued or is heading for punishment. We never know what happened to Luke, or her mother, or her daughter, our ignorance reflects hers.
It’s dystopic fiction, not science fiction, says Atwood, but rather ‘speculative fiction.’ All the things in the book have happened in one way or another at one time or another. In a future Republic of Gilead we have a surveillance state organised around the control of fertility and reproduction. The state assumes control over women’s bodies through political subjugation with a religious ideology similar to a Puritan, New England 17th century ‘blame and shame’ culture. But I found the religious theme fairly weak, merely suggested, as this is political subjection, operated through fear and ignorance as in Stalinist Russia or most totalitarian states today. She borrows from literary forerunners, as any novelist in this genre must do. As in Orwell’s 1984, the state controls language and the use of names, the manipulation of identity and memory through control of terminology.
Although this novel has no male character with a strong identity, whom we get to know or have some insight about, and although it is told wholly from a woman’s angle, I don’t know what Atwood is really saying about women, their status and relation to power, to one another, to men. It puzzles me. I’m not sure what Atwood is really saying.
I feel she is writing with deliberate opacity. This is a novel of ambiguous darkness (a lot of it happens at night) and essential loneliness. Some critics talk about her message being bleak, but I’m not sure she has a message. This non-transparency and obliqueness is even more accentuated in the Historical Notes at the end which purport to give an academic reconstruction of the rise and fall of Gilead and of Offred’s ‘documents’ which is the story we have been told which has survived on tapes and turned up in 2195. Careful analysis, logical conjecture and some research where possible, have led academics to theorise about the characters and their identities. It’s all very clever, perceptive, it’s making fun of the sober academic world where Atwood worked for many years. It is, in fact, like the whole novel, mercilessly intelligent and lucid, but also beautifully written, reminding me very much of the work of Angela Carter who was someone else who had a disillusioned view of humankind and a vibrant style. Someone else who had rejected ‘romance’ and the possibilities of love.
I feel it is in the highest mode of jocular irony that the closing line of the novel is: “Are there any questions?”
I have nothing but questions.