A Tale of Reading About Handmaids

When the book was published in 1986, it was widely and very loudly praised as a giant hit piece on the religious right. As I learned back then, this was a description of what the world would become if those Christians who voted for Reagan got their way. Indeed, it was prophecy. Women were about to become second class citizens; powerful Men would have slaves called Handmaids on which they could indulge their wildest sexual fantasies. Clearly this is what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and even Reagan really wanted.

I thought that was ridiculous, so I was never even tempted to read the book.

Then the book got a new lease of life when Hulu put out a miniseries which showed what was going to happen when Trump was elected. Curious how it morphed from Pat Robertson’s mid-1980s dream society to Donald Trump’s mid-2010s dream society, but of course the Beautiful People hated both and their view of the enemy has obviously not changed at all in the last three decades. I was still not tempted to read the book.

Then one of my rather bookish, really thoughtful former students told me that the book was actually worth reading; she has been a rather reliable guide to date, so I figured “Why Not?” and I tossed it on the reading list for one of my reading groups.

Verdict: It was actually not a bad book. I have no idea how all those people who thought it was the dream world of the religious right got that insane idea. The ruling group in this tiny little section of a country is battling Baptists and Quakers outside their borders, so it is really hard to see how this can be spun as a Southern Baptist fantasy world when Atwood herself has the Baptists out there as an enemy of this state.

Moreover, the Handmaids are not sexual toys at all but a desperate attempt to generate children in a society where some apocalypse has occurred and sterility has become the norm. Yes, the society is not some egalitarian paradise, and yes there is good reason for you not to want to live in this society, but it is hard to sell this society as some Christian Male Fantasy—all the men are miserable in this society too.

Setting aside all the hype, it is a nice dystopian novel, sort of like a poor man’s 1984 or Brave New World. Perfect beach book if you are looking for something to while away a few hours.

Can the book be taken more seriously? There are a few places where it makes nods in the direction of being something Great, but after your think about it for a bit, it falls short.

First, the story is of a rather improbable coup. The improbable part isn’t a failing for a work of fiction, but it is silly that people took the book seriously as prophecy. Stripped to its essence, the fundamental structure of this society is simply a development of the Division of Labor. It is thus much closer to Brave New World than to 1984—it raises a lot of the same questions as Brave New World in that respect. But, Brave New World is more chilling and thought-provoking in having the Division of Labor be imposed at birth through laboratory manipulation. Handmaid’s Tale gets the Division of Labor in more conventional totalitarian ways: Someone (it is never really clear who) lines people up and give them jobs, like a Giant Sorting Hat: you will be a Commander, you will be a chauffeur, you will be a sterile wife, you will be a cook, you will be impregnated and bear a child.

If the book wants to make a claim to being something really great, it has to be something about the argument of the book, not the structure of the society itself. That is where I also get a bit stuck. Some men don’t think women are equals? Some men think of women primarily as prostitutes or mothers? Hardly earth-shattering. But, what else is there?

My former student was fascinated by the appendix where we discover that the text was a bunch of tapes they found in a locker somewhere. The idea of this being tapes and the historians don’t really know what order the tapes go could have been great. But, if you rearrange the episodes of the novel, the fundamental story is totally unaffected. (There is also not really all that much leeway in rearranging the tapes. Jezebel’s has to come after the visits to the Commander’s office, for example; Nick has to come after the doctor’s office and Jezebel’s; and so on.) Moreover, according to the appendix, there were 30 tapes. That does not correspond to the number of chapters or sections. This just compounds my problem with thinking about the book through the lens of the appendix. To be interesting, there would have to be some way of rearranging the material that changed the way the story would be interpreted. I just can’t find a new interpretation. Arranging it all chronologically, for example, would change the reading experience, but not really the story.

The fact that it is tapes also creates a bit of havoc with the verb tenses. The narrator uses present tense to describe events as they are happening and past tense to talk about her previous life. But, there was no way she could have been making the tapes in real time if she is accurately describing the society. It is weird if she makes the tapes using present tense after the end of the novel. So either we have an unreliable narrator making the tapes in real time or we have some sort of insane person making the tapes later on. This again, could have been really interesting, but I can’t see any way to make these theories generate new ideas.

Like I said, I didn’t think the book was bad; but the structural problems are real. My reading group discussion on the book was fascinating. Most of the students enjoyed reading the book, but nobody thought it made a serious or realistic argument. The most sympathetic reading of the argument is that old white women might like it. (Ouch!…students can be cruel…) I got zero traction trying to talk about the implications of the appendix. Nobody cared about the tenses. I tried, I really did. But, in the end, they thought it was just a silly bit of overblown rhetoric about the threat to women. They enjoyed it; a few of them thought it was one of the most enjoyable books they have read. But none of them sounded like all those people praising it to the skies back in 1986. (The times, they are a-changin…) 

The biggest question the book raises for me is where to shelve it. The fiction in my library is separated into two sections based on whether the book has literary merit. This book is truly on the edge of whether it belongs between Matthew Arnold and W.H. Auden, or over on the non-alphabetized shelves with Agatha Christie and George Martin.