I’ll start easy. What did everyone think? I’ve read this book several times in the past and this reading was significantly different for me, I think because I’m in a different place in life than in the past. This was the first time I’d read it where I had kids of my own, and after having gone through infertility, had having adopted a child myself, and the idea of someone taking my children away from me was very distrubing, and my son’s birthmom was often in my thought - the loss of Offred’s little girl became much more a central point of this book. I’d also just finished reading Maus for my IRL Bookclub, so it was a month of exploring mans inhumanity to man.
I read this book about a year and a half ago, and wrote my term paper on it for my senior high school English class. Hopefully my memory will serve me well 
I liked the book. It is eerie, because it is all too plausible. I can definitely see a very similar scenario, and even scarier, I can see it coming about. But, perhaps I am just freaking myself out. 
While I don’t have any children, I think that it would be an incredibaly difficult/life shattering experience to have them taken from me.
I will add more thoughts as the conversation gets going…
I have about 3 pages of posts to put up about this book, but they are at the office. I’ll get to it later…
I just read this recently on a friend’s recommendation. I’ll echo the “eerie” comment. Although it is set in a time period in the future, I had no trouble imagining this happening in a WWII setting, or in a contemporary religious cult. The ending bothered me for its vagueness - but I like closure.
Atwood never writes for closure. My IRL bookclub reads a lot of Atwood, and we have one member who hates it because Atwood really never answers all the questions. I think this one may be the worst, because we have no answers, other than Gilead eventually fell, but what became of any of the characters is unknown.
Perhaps the worst part of this book is however I expand the ending, I can’t make it a happy one. I can’t reunite Offred and her daughter in my mind - even if I make myself believe Offred was smuggled to England, I can’t figure out how her daughter would escape and find her.
Well, we know the Wife had knowledge of the daughter’s whereabouts. It’s possible that the chauffer guy could have gotten this information and helped the daughter to escape as well. The fact that Gilead DID fall leads me to the conclusion that the system was destroyed - it would be reasonable to presume that, if all parties involved weren’t killed, some of them would have been rescued.
I think what struck me about the ending is that Offred’s point of view seems to suggest that the system is everywhere, whereas the conference speech seems to indicate it was a very small and barely noticeable segment of the population.
I gotta admit a ill-kept secret: I thought the internet book club thing was a neat idea, so I lifted it to another website (www.apolyton.net) and modified the format a little bit (it’s now just strictly SF) with me as moderator. Anyway, the following is what I wrote, in my capacity as moderator, for the other site. I tried to re-write it so that it would go with this conversation more easily, but damn: that was a lot of work piled upon a lot of work. So I opted for the easy out: using a disclaimer.
As I mentioned in the earlier thread I do have some experience moderating discussion groups here in Knoxville. Thanks!
Before we begin, there are SPOILERS aplenty about this book. Any and all are free to post what you want about this book without having to resort to the spoiler tags. Also, my initial post is rather large, so I’ve taken the liberty of breaking it up into smaller chapters.
For starters, is The Handmaids Tale (THT) actually science fiction? When you look up the book on Google, everybody and their brother refers to it as a “science fiction dystopia” yadda, yadda, yadda, but the author herself emphatically claims it is not (Books | Penguin Random House
). Given that her definition of science fiction is “Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that”, I’ll just snort derisively at her for denying she’s in my side of the ghetto. 
But seriously, THT is close enough to debate the issue (like 1984, which Atwood favorably compares her novel to: “The Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written not as science fiction but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, The Handmaid’s Tale is a slight twist on the society we have now.”) (Same site as above), which makes it close enough in my book.
Two, no, three unmistakable conclusions occur: 1. THT can be defined as one damned well pleases, 2. Just as long as you don’t tell Ms. Atwood that you’re defining it as science fiction, and, 3. I am quite capable of creating a paragraph made almost entirely of parenthetical statements. :rolleyes:
OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way lets get to the boring crap:
Title: The Handmaids Tale
Published: 1986
Publisher: McClelland and Stewart (Can.), Houghton-Mifflin (US).
Voice/Tense: First-person stream-of-conscious. This is a woman who has little to do but remember, so you will go back and forth in time, even within the same paragraph.
Setting: What is now Cambridge, Massachusetts, with many scenes taking place in and around Harvard.
Themes: Women’s bodies, language as a tool for manipulation, the power of complacency and apathy.
THT is the story of Offred, a handmaiden in a future “Republic of Gilead”, a self-styled theocracy based in current-day Boston, Mass. After a period of declining birth rates and increasing violence towards women, a theocratic government (seemingly mixing Islamic and Christian teachings) arises on the eastern seaboard of the United States immediately following a terrorist attack on Congress. Handmaidens are used by the power-elite as a means to guarantee that they will bear children, heirs to their power. Most women are barren due to environmental contamination (many net sources also refer to nuclear and chemical warfare being waged, but I didn’t get that though I’ve read this book 4 times already. Anybody have a cite?), and the theocracy was partly a result of this demographic pressure.
Offred is playing the game that she actually is telling a story, though she is aware that it is likely that nobody will hear her thoughts. She feels guilty because she ignored what was happening while it was happening, so she explains in Chapter 10:
[q]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.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
We were the people 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.[/q]
I think the above passage is paramount to explaining her mood: Offred purposely forces her to be aware of her audience even if she believes her audience won’t ever be aware of her. She has to do this: telling and reliving this story, the story of her abuse caused by her apathy, is her way of doing penance. By not becoming aware, by turning her eye away from the things that were happening “before”, she is now responsible for the ills that have befallen women everywhere.
But her actions, driven by habit (especially her fear of the unknown) instead of intellect, show the lies that are her thoughts. She NEVER resists, always expects others to do for her, and even comes to terms with her situation to the point of falling in love (if that’s what it really was, perhaps empathizing would be a better term) with the Commander. She is removed from the Keep not by her design, but by the rush of outer events that she has always allowed to shape her life. Even her form of penance, telling the story to herself, is passive. She might think she is resisting, but she isn’t.
Three other characters loom large in THT’s universe, The Commander, his Wife (Serena Joy), and Offreds friend, Moira.
One of the things that I like about this book is that these people are characters, not caricatures. The one person that Atwood probably had the hardest time with in developing was the Commander: it would’ve been too easy to portray him as a typical Concentration Camp Monster™, but, as seen through the eyes of Offred, he comes to be seen almost as much a prisoner of the system as she.
[q]He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.[/q]
This initial sympathy wears away as the novel progresses, as we see that his “sympathy” for Offred is little more than a childish desire to break the rules that he implemented, a desire that puts her at risk of death, with little risk for himself (remember, the previous handmaiden killed herself when her dalliances with the Commander were discovered, while he just got another handmaiden). His moral blindness to the dichotomy that is Gileadean society is finally evident when they visit Jezebel’s, a whorehouse for the male power elite. Regardless, we do not find out until the very end of the novel that this Commander was an actual founder of Gilead, and is ultimately responsible for the repression of millions. I actually think the story would’ve been stronger w/o that piece of information, but it’s out there and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Moira was probably the easiest to write, coming closest to being Ms. Atwood’s voice in all this. Moira did not live in the gaps between the stories, she was the story, and she tried to make Offred aware of what was going on the entire time. Given the strong sense of fatalism to the novel, I tend to read Moira’s story as a woman who has always been aware that she is fighting a losing battle, but can’t let go of that fight until after her capture in Maine. She is the voice of the Old World, the tablet that the palimpset of Gilead has been placed over. Because of this ease in drawing her, Moira comes the closest to becoming a caricature… I came to call her “exposition lady” after a while.
Lastly, we have the woman who got exactly what she wanted, without realizing that she didn’t want it: The Commander’s Wife, Serena Joy. A former televangelist and gospel singer, she preached a return to traditional values and paid her price for it:
[q]In the garden behind the house the Commander’s Wife is sitting, in the chair she’s had brought out. Serena Joy, what a stupid name. It’s like something you’d put on your hair, in the other time, the time before, to straighten it. Serena Joy, it would say on the bottle, with a woman’s head in cut-paper silhouette on a pink oval background with scalloped gold edges. With everything to choose from in the way of names, why did she pick that one? Serena Joy was never her real name, not even then. Her real name was Pam. I read that in a profile on her, in a news magazine, long after I’d first watched her singing while my mother slept in on Sunday mornings. By that time she was worthy of a profile: Time or Newsweek it was, it must have been. She wasn’t singing anymore by then, she was making speeches. She was good at it. Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all.
Around that time, someone tried to shoot her and missed; her secretary, who was standing right behind her, was killed instead. Someone else planted a bomb in her car but it went off too early. Though some people said she’d put the bomb in her own car, for sympathy. That’s how hot things were getting.
…
She doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.[/q]
Imagine realizing you campaigned for your own enslavement! Serena Joy is in trouble too, she needs to have a handmaiden have a baby, and soonest lest she start to lose her place in society. She is an unrepentant traitor to her gender, and she has no interest in any other woman other than their ability to give her a baby. Had she discovered that Offred had, in fact, slept with the doctor and gotten pregnant that way, she would’ve likely kept it secret – as a matter of fact, she probably expects the Doc to make his advances.
For the story’s sake (I don’t know her real-world thoughts) Atwood took it for granted that all men were sexist pigs: in story terms, I don’t think that is really worth debating (but debate it all you want!) What is interesting is the fact that she doesn’t have that high of an opinion of women, either: all of her female characters are responsible, in one way or another, for letting Gilead happen to them. Through their apathy, through their fatalism, and through their active sponsorship, it feels like Atwood thinks the women of this universe almost got what they deserved for not being fiery feminists.
Dammit, can somebody please fix the Quote tags? Thanks!
If there is a place where THT falls apart under scrutiny, it lies with the society that Atwood envisioned being formed by the demographic pressures caused by a massive breakdown in human fertility. I do not think the enslavement of women would be a “natural” or “logical” development to lowering birth rates, but regardless of whether I believe it or not, can Gilead be a stable society?
Here are some quotes from Chapter 19 that will give us an idea as to how bad the population issue is:
Couple this with what we learn in regards to the “solution” to this problem: There are many quotes scattered throughout the books that state that Offred has only 3 chances to become pregnant via the Commander (Chapter 24 mentions “I have one more chance”), or else she becomes an Unwoman. Other fertile women are shot, tortured, in hiding, and otherwise not helping to raise the birth rates… and those that do happen to get pregnant, 1 out of four births is a mutant: not very good planning by the Founders, huh?
Obviously we have a non-sustainable society, one in which the most fertile of women are given three chances to get pregnant or dead, one in which the sperm donors are crusty old men who refuse to test their viability, who are only allowed to fulfill their duty once a month. It really was no surprise to see Gilead had fallen by the end of the book, what I don’t understand is how could anybody would even think that the Gileadean solution was viable to begin with, much less support it for 3+ years.
Hal Clement posed a similar problem (declining birth rates) in the novel Half-Life, Frank Herbert did so in The White Plague, and D. F. Jones in his Implosion and they all (well, the first two) dealt with the changes that society would have to go through in order to deal with this problem in a much more… logical way.
So, maybe Atwood was right: maybe THT isn’t science fiction at all, because by the strict standards of the genre, her novel doesn’t really hold up.
Ugh. No more for a while.
Gracious. That is way more in-depth than I would ever think to get. Not that I am not enjoying it – I would just never think to deconstruct something that thoroughly.
I rather like the new (to me) offshoot classification of science fiction - “speculative fiction” - and that’s where I would file this book.
IIRC, in the publishing world “speculative fiction” is the broad category that contains the subcategories “science fiction”, “fantasy”, “alternate history” and the like.
I started to read this a long time ago, didn’t she have a husband before the big “revolution” or whatever, and they were trying to escape to Canada?
What was her real name?
Guin, they never established the actual identity of Offred, but IIRC in one chapter she spoke of exchanging real names with other women in the school. If you read closely, you’ll see that she then covered the fates of most of those names - what I can’t remember is which name she didn’t talk about, which I simply postulated was hers.
She did have a husband, but he had been married before, and that qualified him for the status of adulterer or some such, so he was eliminated. Since Offred doesn’t know his eventual fate, we never find out, either.
She doesn’t reveal her name to the audience, but she does reveal it to Nick. In the final chapter, it is revealed that future scholars cannot place any of the characters so they assume that she might have changed the names to protect the innocent.
Her husbands name was Luke, and she was his second wife - actually, he broke up with his first wife to marry her (likely story!).
I don’t have the book with me right now (I lent it to my sister for the weekend), but I remember 4 names from the prologue: Janine, Moira, Alma and June. Janine was Ofwarren, Moira was her schoolmate and Offred remember Alma when she met another Alma. The problem is, I can’t remember if there was a fifth name or not.
I liked the book, but the big flaw I had with it was that I can’t buy the woman making a couple of token protests over being fired and then just going along with it. I was waiting for some kind of explanation of how/why they were able to accomplish this without all sorts of sexual discrimination lawsuits, or how they were able to abolish sexual discrimination laws without all sorts of highly visible protests, because I find it highly doubtful that anyone could pull off abolishing SD laws and passing new laws banning employment of females and getting the new laws to be effective immediately and getting all the firings done in one day, much less without anyone opposed to the idea finding out in advance and spreading the word (it would take a very secretive, very well-coordinated organization). Not that I couldn’t believe that it could be done, just that I find it hard to believe it could be done without someone leaking it. Even if Offred didn’t care about it, I was expecting her mother to have said something about it.
Luckily, I can employ suspension of disbelief quite easily.
I agree, Kat. It’s hard reconciling how the country will be able to replace that many productive hands - can you imagine having the army replace every position currently filled by women? Regardless, it is hard to see how we can get from here (“here” being defined as 1981-84ish) to there in a space of 20-30 years. Cromwell’s Commonwealth had the backings of a people long-accustomed to religious authority, by 1980 this country had 200+ years of non-religious rule and was quite happy with it.
This book seems to be a slight over-reaction to the election of Ronald Reagan, an artistic rendering of a N.O.W. rant regarding the perils of the Religious Right. I’m not fond of the people either, but please, c’mon! :rolleyes:
I liked this book much more than I initially thought I would. As Kat said, you have to suspend disbelief - I don’t mind that aspect because you have to do so with many books & movies.
Like liirogue I find The Handmaid’s Tale eerie. I can’t remember the exact quote but Offred says something along the lines of “Middle Eastern Terrorists (or maybe it was Extremists) were blamed at first”. That sent chills down my spine, given our current world events.
JohnT, I guess I have to respectfully disagree. I’m pro-choice and I found the book to be scary - and in this sense, not too far fetched. I don’t wish to turn this into a GD, that’s JMHO.
I’d like to think that Offred does make it to England - I do wonder about Luke & her daughter though.
Kat, the fifth name is Dolores. The book says:
I guess Offred is Dolores.
Re the marches:
This explains why people don’t protest more.
As an aside:
It’s frightening how freezing the women’s Compucards took so much control. Our society has become more & more dependant on Credit/Debit cards - people rarely carry cash these days. This aspect is plausible.
Okay, well, I got this book specifically because of the SDMB Bookclub (though I’d heard enough about it before, that there’s a good chance I would have gotten around to trying to read it anyway eventually).
I wanted to like it. I kept reading, hoping it would get better. But after 100 pages or so without any characters or plot that I could get a handle on, and with that present tense stream-of-consciousness writing style grating on me, it got really frustrating, and by about page 150, I gave up on it.
Would I have liked the story if it had been told in a more traditional way? I don’t know, but probably not. There wasn’t anything in the part I read, at least, that really resonated with me or thought-provoked me–though there were things that maybe should have, that made me wonder why I didn’t care more about them.
Anyway, that’s one man’s reaction. I hope the rest of you got more out of it than I did.