The Handmaid's Tale by
Margaret Atwood
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
This was a "scandalous" book when I was in high school. I can see why "concerned" parents wouldn't necessarily want their youth to read it, but it wasn't meant to be scandelous as much as thought provoking. Like most dystopian books written more than 5 years ago, most of the text is centered on the description of the new world and the new rules society has put in place. Like most dystopian societies, the rules put in place are to help rectify the problem, in this case low birth rate,but they take away all choice because people as a whole aren't apparently choosing what is best for society. Because it involves birth, it involves sex, who can do it, who can get pregnant, etc. but it isn't a sexual book. Atwood was commenting on what she saw as the slipping of equal rights in America, and this was her warning of what would happen if we as women didn't fight for women's rights, both reproductively and economically. By imposing extremes she basically says that without equal voice with men, we become only useful for procreation.
The government is a theocracy, but it is not necessarily an anti-God book, or a book devoid of hope or faith. Just a warning that power in the wrong hands, even or especially cloaked under the guise of spirituality can be the most dangerous. Atwood has some great themes, and her language is brilliant. But I had a hard time getting past the narrator. I've heard it argued that you shouldn't base your review of a book, film, etc. based on the likability of the characters, but I'm human, and I can't help it. The narrator is not a heroine. She submits to everything that the new regime puts her through, from taking away her child to becoming a handmaiden (this is ast least her second "job"), to submitting to what her employers put her through. She sort of joins the resistance movement, but doesn't actually do anything. Perhaps I wouldn't have done anything either. That's the safest option yes? But these days I'm spoiled with characters who do something, try to change their situation, and even when she acts out at the end, it doesn't feel like a choice she is making.
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"There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it."
"....Lauren Bacall or Katharine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word
undone. These women could be undone; or not. they seemed to be able to choose. We seemed able to choose, then. We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice."
"When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that."
"Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.
' We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
....The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others...
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories."
Of magazines: "What was in them was promise. They dealt in transformations; they suggested an endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing one another, stretching on, replica after replica, to the vanishing point. They suggested one adventure after another, one wardrobe after another, one improvement after another, one man after another...The real promise in them was immortality."
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
