This Very Timely Read Was An Accident: The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

When I started reading The Handmaid's Tale, I expected to be writing this review as a comparison between fiction and literature. The similarities between the dystopian young adult novels that I've been devouring over the last few years, such as the Hunger Games trilogy, and dystopian literature like The Handmaid's Tale (as well as my favorite dystopian novel, Brave New World) are more numerous than you might imagine, but the differences are also vast and would make for a very interesting discussion. However, current events have interceded and made this review a more timely one than I would have expected, so that is what this post will be about instead.

The Handmaid's Tale is the story of a future not that divergent from our recent past. The book was written in 1986, so it still reflects many of our society's modern fears--religious war, extremism, and environmental disaster. In the world of the novel, nuclear waste and other poisons have caused a severe drop in fertility, and a takeover by fundamentalist Christian extremists has turned a vast section of North America into a theocratic state in which women are no longer free and equal with men, among other horrors that, I confess, have haunted my nightmares well before I ever read this book. The story is told by a woman whom the reader only knows as Offred, though this is not her actual name. She is the Handmaid of a man (named Fred, hence Of Fred) who holds some high military position within the new government, and her job is to bear him a child, since his wife can no longer do so.

The story jumps around between Offred's present, where she describes her daily activities and the changes taking place in her life, and memories of her past, where she describes--in no particular order--from her personal perspective how the world changed from what I presume was the modern world of the early 1980s to the world that she knows now. The diversions to the past are never quite complete, and are sometimes delivered with maddening vagueness, but in the end the story of her life can be pieced together, and when you finally understand it all, it is almost horrifying that she seems to have adapted to her current situation with such ease. She was a smart, educated young woman, the daughter of a feminist, with a husband and a daughter, and she slowly saw her whole life taken away from her--first her job, then her ability to be an equal functioning member of society, then her husband and daughter, simply because she married a man who had been divorced. They tried to escape what was going to happen to them, but they failed, and now she is alone and doing her best to survive in a world that is as alien to her as it would be to us.

The thing I found the most fascinating about this book was trying to imagine being in Offred's place. Most dystopian fiction that I read takes place long after the events that turned the world on its head in the first place, so the characters generally accept that things, no matter how wrong they are, are that way for a reason. But Offred remembers how the world was before the theocracy that she is now forced to live in. She remembers going to school and having a job, when in the world now women aren't even allowed to read and their daughters will never learn to. She remembers going to feminist marches with her mother as a child, and now all they fought for has been stripped away. As a young woman living in our modern society, I don't think I would survive those kind of changes in my life. I would have fought it to my very last breath, and if I was forced into the situation in which Offred lives, I probably would go stark-raving mad.

The flipside of that fascination, though, was the disturbing realization that not only did I understand most of the biblical references that made up the language of the book's theocratic society (the Handmaids, for example, are a reference to the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah, who, when she discovered that she could not bear children, told her husband to lie with her handmaid so that he might have a son) but I also saw this dystopia as much less impossible than most of the worlds in other books that I read. There are still parts of the world in which women are not educated, or allowed to be independent entities from the men of their household, or are forced to cover themselves to keep from tempting men with their bodies, and these customs persist even among people who live in modern, liberal societies, and are forced upon women in more repressive countries even if they do not adhere to the same religious beliefs as those whose beliefs demand such things of women. Worse, there are conservative elements in our own country, possibly on this very day and at this very hour, discussing how to turn the clock back on a woman's right to control her own body and its ability to bear children. Though there is obviously a difference between denying the woman a right to decide whether or not she has a baby when she chooses to have sex to demanding that women have children for people who cannot have them, it is not a large one, especially since that is practically what anti-abortion activists who tell women to put their babies up for adoption are saying.

It is these sort of revelations that keep bringing me back to dystopian fiction, even though it is about as disturbing to read as it is enjoyable. There is merit in looking at the worst-case scenario, if for no other reason than that there is educational value in trying to imagine yourself in the same situation or a similar one. A part of me wishes that the book had been more informative about how the world came to be that way, about the people who let it happen and the people who fought back, because, at least from Offred's point of view, it all seemed to have happened too easily, which was the most terrifying thought to come out of the whole book. Every time a new election comes around and I see no real options for the progress or betterment of society, I content myself by saying, "Well, at least none of them will have enough power to make it any worse." But lately, as I watch what seems to be a systematic rolling back of women's rights within this country, I am beginning to wonder if I was wrong, and the biggest problem with that is that I'm not sure what can be done to make it right again.

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood