The Handmaid's Tale

There are plenty of spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.

I can’t find it now, but I remember reading a passage in which Orwell talks about his political fiction and how it was important to him that his novels be art first and political second.  Political fiction that is mere didacticism will not have an impact because it will never be read or tolerated.

Atwood was clearly inspired by Orwell’s 1984, and she also appears to have shared his position concerning political fiction.  The Handmaid’s Tale flies far above political handwringing to create a compelling and disturbing narrative.  Atwood can successfully critique the direction she saw America heading in the mid 80s because she wrote a story about a character with real blood in her veins and placed her in a world made of flesh and bone, bricks and concrete.  The arts of language and narrative come first in her telling of Offred in Gilead, and Atwood is a master of those arts.

Part of what makes the novel powerful—the part that I was struck by—is how imperfect a hero Offred is.  She didn’t see the warning signs about where the world was heading when she was younger, and when she finally did, she didn’t think much further than herself and possibly her daughter.  As readers, we rally behind her insight and her ability to analyze the horrors that she endures, but once she kicks off her affair with Nick, she loses interest in the larger movement that Ofglen and others are fighting for.  Offred is not here to start a revolution; she just wants her own freedoms back.  To the reader she is simultaneously understandable and frustrating.  Presenting her protagonist in this way allows Atwood to position her readers both behind Offred’s eyes and above her, so that we can feel for her without being trapped in her perspective, always forcing a little distance between us.  Most readers are savvy enough to know that you can’t fully trust a first-person narrative, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to be critical of what we’re told.  Offred’s shortcomings help us do just that.

But what I really want to talk about are the endings.  I use the plural because there is the ending to Offred’s account and also the ending of Atwood’s novel, the “Historical Notes on the Handmaid’s Tale.”  Talk about a roller coaster ride!  First, trained by 1984 and similar dystopias, I was expecting some real dark shit to go down at the end of Offred’s account.  That it ended with her being escorted out to the Mayday folks was surprisingly uplifting.  Yes, technically it’s a Lady-or-the-Tiger ending, but since we know she is writing the narrative we have just read, it is unlikely that she was taken away and killed by the Gilead government (although as I write that, I am certain some enterprising scholar out there has written a solid essay about why we should believe that very thing).  So boom, surprise happy ending!  But wait!  Enter James Darcy Piexoto and the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies.

What a powerful and devious move by Atwood!  After taking us through a dark and emotional journey through the looking glass, she jerks us into the brightly lit halls of some convention center or hotel where smug pricks like Professor Piexoto is saying shit like this: 

If I may be permitted an editorial aside, allow me to say that in my opinion we must be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans.  Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific.  Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are more happily free.  Our job is not to censure but to understand. (Applause.)

Fuck you and your detachment from which you can look at the subjugation of half the populace and be simply fascinated.  Instead of Gilead becoming this historical moment that is learned from, it has become a subject for scholars to analyze and chuckle politely over.  There is a Gileadean Society?  This is their twelfth symposium?  Good God.  It reminds me of Don Delillo’s White Noise and Jack Gladney’s position as head of Hitler studies.  Instead of Offred’s story having any power to change the world, we learn in this afterward that it has been absorbed by the world and turned into a curiosity.  This is a much darker ending than if Offred had been hung on the wall.  Even when Gilead falls, nothing will have changed except the names of places and people.

That final chapter is both horror and warning.  Heed this tale and the emotions it stirred, and threat them with reverence.  Don’t let the monstrosities of our past and present become intellectual playthings without meaning. 

The most disturbing thing about reading the novel in 2018 is how prescient it has proven to be.  Though written in the Reagan years as the religious right was first becoming a political force, it is only more apt today as the GOP in the Senate fights to confirm Brett Kavanaugh on the highest court in the country.  Moreover, Atwood identifies the growing environmental concerns and the rampant racism in America and a panic over the “browning” of America.  The Handmaid’s Tale is a wonderful and disturbing novel.