The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The dystopian vision of The Handmaid’s Tale is chilling in its premise and powerful in the way that it uses its imagined future to shine a bright spotlight onto the difficulties of being a woman.
Coming from a conservative background it would be easy for me to take offense at the portrayal of a right wing totalitarian society rising from a Christian-values driven sect to take over America. However that would be counter-productive to understanding the story. The story is flawed as a deconstruction of the religious right in that it presents the consequences of the most extreme forms of fundamentalism and ignores the implausibility of transforming Massachusetts of all places into a bastion of religious oppression. But that does not take away from the need for this story to be heard and the power of Atwood’s portrayals of womanhood.
The story shows us primarily how women are treated in the society of Gilead and how they are forced to think about themselves and everyone around them as a consequence of the judgements and perspectives of those around them. The society shapes expectations and hands down punishments that place women in the position of property and forces their value towards their ability to produce children. The writing is powerful and takes care to showcase a variety of ways that the people in this restrictive society act and react to the repression, expectations and societal pressures. Women are shown in various ways bending themselves to the restrictions that are placed on them, joining in the repression, making themselves into nothing and shaping themselves to meet the expectations around them. They are shown to be judged by their reproductive worth, by their purity, by their looks and by their use to men. The story isn’t chilling and heartbreaking because this is something we can look forward to if the religious right were to achieve ascendancy: it is chilling because this is what we do every day in so many little and not-so-little way in the society we live in now.
In reading it I feel like I came to a more full realization of the weight of the difficulties of being a woman.