The Handmaid's Tale

School has restarted! For me, it means the time for reading some new novels has begun again. Every year, my daughters (now my daughter, the elder one having now entered college) will be given a new reading list. Shortly before the deadline for handing in their homework assignment, they will send me emails about the literature assignment given to them and then ask me through the MSN for ideas on how to tackle the problems and would later send their draft or revised assignment to me for comments, and all too often just one day before the assignment is due! But I always manage to give them some ideas or other although if they were to ask me at the last minute, that would mean that I got to work during my lunch hours. I'm not complaining though. That is one of most natural ways I can bond with them. But through helping them, I also help myself. Throughout the years, in this way, I have come to know of many new authors whose names I have never previously heard of. In so far as I have more experience about various kind of literature and may for that reason be able to see deeper into various aspects of what the authors are trying to do, I may have benefited from such reading even more than my daughters. This morning, my younger daughter MSNs me again. It's about a novel by Margaret Attwoood called "The Handmaid's Tale."

Margaret Attwood is a contemporary Canadian essayist, feminist, novelist and poet. The novel was was first published in 1985 and the same year won the Canadian Governor General's Award and two years later won the first Arthur C Clarke Award. The book has already been adapted for the radio, the stage, opera. In 1990, it was adapted by the famous English dramatist Harold Pinter into a film of the same name directed by Volker Schlöndorff and starring Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. The film was released as a DVD in 1991. But I have neither seen nor heard any of its adaptations whether as film or otherwise. 

It was an interesting novel, set some time in 2195 or thereabouts about a prior time in the land which used to be America. The name of the country is Gilead. It is a kind of techno-theocratic society whose citizens are neatly divided into various classes according to their social and political functions. There are five classes of men: the "Eyes" are secret service agents and state detectives in charge of internal intelligence and surveillance and checking on any violations of the republic's laws and regulation by its citizens; the "Guardians of the Faithful" are policemen for routine maintenance of order and other menial functions, usually chosen for their stupidity, older or disabled or very young and impressionable. When the Guardians have done their work well, they may be promoted to be "Angels", professional soldiers who fight to defend or to expand the Republic's boundaries and who are permitted to marry and finally the "Commanders of the Faithful", a very privileged class who are given special rights to establish their own households, acquire a "Wife" and if necessary a "Handmaid" (a concubine for the express purpose of procreation if the Wife is infertile) so that the population may be maintained and "Marthas" (female domestic servants) and enjoy protection by the Guardians.  Then there is a non-class called "Gender Traitors". They are homosexual men and if found, are either executed or sent to the "Colonies" for hard labor to do either farm work or to clean toxic nuclear waste and eventually to die. 

The women in the Gilean Republic are divided into 7 classes which are further divided into two main sub-classes according to whether they enjoy official legitimate status or are treated as illegitimate or marginal to the mainstream of society or " Unwomen". "Wives" wear blue dresses and are permitted to marry the highest functionaries and after their husbands die, they become "Widows" and must wear black. "Daughters" wear white until marriage and are either the natural or adopted daughters of the ruling class and "Handmaids" wear red dress, shoes and gloves but white wings and are fertile women who have broken laws and who are permitted to reform themselves through education and their function is to produce children for the Commanders of the Faithful when their wives are infertile. Then there are "Aunts", whose social role is to train and monitor the Handmaids. Such roles are generally taken by single, infertile and often older women who wish to avoid being sent to the "Colonies". They are the only class of women permitted to listen to discs, no one in the Republic being permitted to read and write ( hints of Fahrenheit 451) and society has reverted to using merely photographs and pictures instead of words as language and the former university library has been turned into the headquarters of the "Eyes". Next follow the "Marthas" who wear green smocks, being infertile women who specialize in domestic work. Finally, there are "Econowives" who are women who marry lower class men, ie. any one who does not belong to the Commanders of the Faithfuls and they wear  multicolor dresses of red, blue and green to reflect their multiple social roles. In Gilead land, the women are not encouraged to sympathize with each other and the dominant feelings between the different classes is fear, suspicion, contempt and jealousy and "mind your own business" mentality. Then there is a class of marginal women like those who are sterile, widows, feminists, lesbians, nuns, political dissidents. If found, they are sent to the "Colonies". So are Handmaids who fail to produce a child after three 2-year terms for producing children for the Commanders. Then finally there are the "Jezebels", the professional prostitutes and artists, reserved only for entertaining the Commanders and their guests in special clubs where they are permitted to drink to smoke etc. They are women who refuse to integrate into any of the officially designated roles and are sterilized, something otherwise illegal in Gilead land. 

In the Gilead Republic, even babies are classified. Those who are born without any defects are permitted to live as "Keepers" and to grow up to become various class members. Then there are "Unbabies" otherwise called "Schredders". These are babies born with various birth defects. They will be killed or otherwise "vanish". Before their birth, no pre-natal checks are conducted and no abortions are permitted and doctors found to have done these are immediately executed and their bodies publicly displayed as warnings to the others.

The Gilead Republic began life by a military coup under the pretext of having to fight against some terrorists invading America and because of a need to restore order, after which they disbanded Congress and suspended the Constitution and siezed all the women's assets, expelled dissidents, operating through a popular movement called "Sons of Jacob", a sort of religiously right wing movement which smacks of the KKK and the Nazis. Once successful, the rulers re-organized society along the lines above described. The story recounts the life story of one of the Handmaids, called "Offred" (Of Fred) and is supposed to be pieced together from the records of some 30 cassette tapes later discovered concerning her life before and after the coup and forms the subject of a Symposium on Gileadean Studies in 2195. She used to be married, had a husband called Luke, a mother with whom she disagreed and a daughter who also differed from her and has since been re-trained as a Handmaid and when the story opened she was sent to serve a Commander called Fred . The tapes show her daily life as a handmaid, her relationship with her friends and her enemies, and show her to be a lady much given to reflection, sensitive to her physical environment, and also emotionally sensitive to how people feel, is nostalgic about the days before the military coup. The story ends when she was being escorted away in a black van but without any indication of its destination. 

It was a very imaginative tale. You can see how Attwood skilfully adapts techniques which she might have learned from the Scarlet Letter, The Brave New World, 1894, Canterbury Tales and perhaps some other literary masters too. Attwood calls the novel a "speculative novel" and dislikes the term "science fiction" when it was so described by some journalists. The novel is written in the first person. That gives it plenty of opportunities for stating directly what passed through the narrator-protagonist's mind: the thoughts and feelings that she had, the kind of choices she was faced with as and when various events happened. That gives it a kind a immediacy which it would otherwise be impossible to reproduce. Her way of writing is remarkably similar to the way Kafka writes, although in the case of Kafka, he writes in a kind of mock-third person narative perspective which is in fact first person because he writes as if he knew the most intimate thoughts of his character K as events unfolded. She has a very laconic style which I like. She writes in simple sentences, and often just ellipses. I can feel the influence of Hemingway and perhaps of Camus in her writing. She merely states the facts in various sensory modes: sights, sounds and also feelings implicit in the kind of questions she asks, the suppositions she makes and the possibilities she explores. In the novel, Attwood uses numerous words and images with complex allusions to biblical events, to Jewish history and to some recent contemporary events. Therefore the novel operates on two levels: the superficial "factual" level and then the level of an "allegory"" of a possible kind of society towards which religious fundamentalists appear to be  pushing America. The abundant use of puns serves both to cast an air of irony upon what is depicted and as an implied criticism of that which the narrator is relating. On the one hand, the criticism can be treated as the subjective thoughts of the narrator only but it can equally be treated as the voice of the author hiding behind that of the narrator. The nature of the humor suggested by the relevant puns is not the kind of slapstick humour one finds in some French mimes. It is humour of an altogether much darker hue. The whole novel can be treated as a kind of ominous foreboding of the coming of a new dark age when women are reduced to being either a kind of "holy" child-bearing "machines" valued only for their biologcal function for the survival of the society in which they are living or alternatively as pure "sex objects" to satisfy the animal urges of that society's dominant males.  It is well worth a read.