With the entire book in context, I think the scene in which the Handmaid remembers her mother at a pornography-burning rally is a lot more significant. Her mother approves of the burning of the magazines, somewhat of a “Gileadian” sentiment in a radical.
I agree with Dangerosa and Lissa that the book-burning is a telling bit. Atwood doesn’t think the radical feminists are necessarily correct: to be a movement, to be radical, is to challenge customary society (even if it’s mostly relatively liberal), to take a “the end is worth the means” stance. This is often morally wrong, and even ignoring that it often has nothing to do with the here and now happiness of the population, anymore so than totalitarianism or theocracy does.
I think that the dead white male thing was already a big deal in the early 1980s–I was in school then and there were controversial courses in women’s studies and gender issues. The best touchstone I have for dating the period is that Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, and it was very much in reaction to what he perceived as an attack on western culture from radical elements of academia.
When I first read this book, I read the name as “Off-Red”, and in fact had a half-baked theory that the “red” would be somehow associated with menstruation. (I knew the basic storyline prior to reading, and that the sole identity of the handmaidens was as breeders, so I really thought I was on to something.)
When Offred goes to the market and meets Ofwarren and Ofglen, it “clicked” and literally sent chills down my spine. Later, the reader finds out that the handmaidens’ names change with each new owner - they are “of” each new master. It goes beyond even objectifying the handmaidens or giving them no identity outside of their male owners - it in fact is impossible for the handmaidens to form any sort of identity, as it will change each time they change owners.
I’m afraid I ran out of time this month & didn’t get a chance to read HT – instead I offer you:
Rinkworks’ Book-A-Minute version
Anyone care to write your own version? 
Well, I guess I’ll have to be the first one to say I didn’t care for the book at all. The whole novel just seemed like thinly disguised man-bashing to me. It was just an implausible “What if all women were good and all men were evil?” scenario. I suppose it’s not any more or less plausible than “1984”, but at least Orwell managed to write that without vilifying an entire gender.
Hijack, but I’ve wanted to say this for a long time. No. It isn’t science fiction. Neither were the Mad Max movies. I think of them as speculative fiction centered on exploring what life will be like if we really, really screw up badly*. Dystopic fiction does have some overlap with SF, but it is not a subset of it.
Back to topic…I have a hard time imagining that anything like the state of Gilead could ever come about here. But recently when in downtown L.A., when I noticed that most of the old famous movie houses are now rented out to evangelical preachers and their congregations, I couldn’t help but think that’s what we’d see if a theocracy were to take over and declare movies to be evil.
blowero,
It isn’t that simple. Nick - bad or good? Aunt Lydia - definately not good. The man at the salvaging - we are led to believe he is a “good guy.” Serena Joy – Do we feel compassion for her or not? But we are seem to be meant to feel at least some compassion for the Commander. How about Janine?
In fact, I think this book is as much about how women aren’t good to each other as about how men treat women. How quickly we (of both sexes) will sell each other out. I did a lot of work with victims of sexual harrassment - its often the women in an office that give a victim of sexual harrassment the hardest time if she chooses to report.
And yet, the comfort we all take in the smallest gestures - sharing our names, eye contact.
We don’t really know if the men stick together or not – doesn’t really seem like they do from what we discover in the epilogue. The book certainly focuses on the woman’s perspective. Offred’s perspective, specifically. We learn a lot about her world, but her world does not have a lot of men in it any longer. Nick, the Commander. Otherwise she is surrounded by other women - other Handmaids, Wives, Marthas.
Not to intentionally get off topic, but Atwood also used the cruelty of women/girls among themselves in Cat’s Eye. Having read that before HT, I picked up on the relationships between the women far more than the “Men bad, women good” concept.
Gilead is a society where women and men have almost completely seperate societies - officially, they only seem to cross paths once a month, though I do assume Wives interacted more often with the Commanders. For the average woman - Handmaid or Martha - it had become a society of women. Within that society, there’s a pecking order. Even when women and men mix more often/more freely, like at Jezebel’s, there’s still what I think of as a clustering of women, where the men are observed - almost like the women are in control there.
Offred seems external to all the groups of women though. She seems to have lost herself when she lost Luke and her daughter, and she kept herself apart and was kept apart by her status, and she only seems to find herself again with Nick and Ofglen.
I kind of rambled - it’s been a while since I read this, though I once wrote a paper on this book as a dystopian novel. I thought I had a copy here, and I guess it disappeared in the move…I need to hunt down a used copy.
Atwood revisits the theme again with The Robber Bride. How women treat other women.
If you haven’t read it, The Robber Bride may be Atwood at her most readable.
I think it’s interesting that the book has been perceived as being ‘anti-men’. Much of the blame for the way things are in the book is laid at the feet of women. I don’t have the book to hand at the moment, but there’s a scene with a hanging, and Offred comments about the arrangement of the bodies in a specific colour order, saying that a specific woman must have had a hand in it. Even such things as hangings are handled and influenced by the women.
In my readings of it, what struck me was not so much that men were bad, as that men were absent or separate. This is a book about women; men, where they appear, are minimally important. It seems there is a whole other aspect of the society that is the man’s life (war and defense), but it’s so distanced from the world that Offred lives in that it barely shows up in the narrative.
It is implicit in the society she’s created that men do have the majority of the power. Men set up the structure. Women didn’t take away their own rights to work or own property. Although, she makes it clear that they were complacent in some of the early changes - it was for their own good - women were in so much danger of rape. In some ways she’s taken the rhetoric of anti-rape anti-porn feminism, oiled it up, and sent it down its slippery slope.
But she seems much more concerned about the cruelty of women towards each other. Serena Joy knows all about Offred’s daughter, but offers her no information and only “sells” her a little information. Aunt Lydia’s petty cruelty and power trip. Offred’s own feelings toward Janine.
One of the interesting things about this novel is how anti-heroic it is. Offred is likeable - but she never really goes out of her way to challenge or change the system. She is like a leaf getting blown around by events, always taking the path of least resistance, except perhaps with Nick, where her own selfish needs make her take risks. She’s willing to risk her life for the contact with Nick, but not stick her neck out for information to give the resistance.
Moira and Ofglen provide us our heros in this book - and they, of course, are both doomed. Ofglen is willing to sacrifice herself for the freedom of others. Moira is really just trying to save herself, but in doing so, dooms herself.
Of course, there is also our hero, Nick. Who Atwood tells us almost nothing about, and we don’t really know if he dooms himself or not. If I can imagine a “happy” ending for anyone in this book, it is Nick’s - where after smuggling Offred out, he escapes to join the armed resistance.
Yes, but only in the sense that women have allowed (through their inaction) the “evil men” to bring the society to such a state. The premise of the book is clear: men, because of their lust for power and their hypocrisy regarding sexuality, have subjugated all women, on the flimsy pretense that they are doing it for the moral good of society. There are evil women characters, but they are merely lackeys for the men, who call all the shots. The problem I have with this scenario is that it is extremely contrived. Societies that subjugate women DO exist, but this isn’t a story about that, it’s a “what if this happened to OUR society” story that presents a horribly exaggerated worst-case scenario. But then it seems we are somehow expected to believe that this really could happen.
Which is exactly my objection to the book. The male characters are barely developed at all. They remain virtually charicatures of evil. The one male character that IS developed at all, the Commander, is portrayed as spineless and pityable. I didn’t get the impression that the author wanted us to empathize with this character at all.
Alright, I’m chipping back in now
I think the reader is supposed to have divided feelings about the Commander. Yes he was spineless, but at the same time, just how much could he have really done if he wanted?
It seems that what spooks most of the women who have joined in the discussion (myself included) is that while Atwood provides a farfetched explanation as to why our society devolves into that society, we are surrounded by farfetched goings on all day long. I will use segregation as an example. The reasons given were ridiculous, but yet it happend. Who would have ever thought that the Supreme Court would interpret the same document in two ways, resulting in mass changes in daily life? Blacks were considered inferior because of their skin. Is it that much of a jump to think that the same sort of thing could occur based on whether or not you have a penis?
Oh boy, I’ve set myself up in this one… :eek:
liirogue: “The reasons given were ridiculous, but yet it happend. Who would have ever thought that the Supreme Court would interpret the same document in two ways, resulting in mass changes in daily life? Blacks were considered inferior because of their skin. Is it that much of a jump to think that the same sort of thing could occur based on whether or not you have a penis?”
But what of the advances that led to the creation of that Supreme Court and that document? The document didn’t exist forever - ask yourself: was the world a better place for women’s rights before 1776? That was when we first began declaring that “All men are created equal” - think about that for a second: it took us 7,000 years of history to give ourselves equality under the law. Is it not then surprising that it might take a century or three to refine that to “all people are created equal?”
Anyway, I think that Atwood could have come up with a better society than Gilead. Guys, let me ask you a question: if you had a chance to design a society where you had the “god-given” right to a succession of mistresses, would you come up with with the idea that you can only have sex with her once a month (for only 3 months at that), with your wife, fully clothed and hating every second of it, underneath your mistress while you two are doing the nasty?
blowero: “The premise of the book is clear: men, because of their lust for power and their hypocrisy regarding sexuality, have subjugated all women, on the flimsy pretense that they are doing it for the moral good of society.”
Actually, another reason they are doing it is because the birthrate has fallen below replacement levels, and somehow, some way, this is supposed to help raise the population: old men screwin 30 year old women, once a month for just 3 months. If she fails to catch pregnant after a couple of Commanders, she gets sent to the Colonies to clean up radiation pits. Yeah, that makes sense. It’s a wonder how they took care of all the kids. :rolleyes:
I forgot to type in a “g” and I’m not too sure if that was a bad thing… if I wanted to sound a little country, that is.
“screwing.”
Has anyone seen the movie version? What did you think?
I like to call all these new anti-femminists like Ann Coulter and Christina Hoff Sommers, Serena Joys.
blowero, I know what you mean. I feel the same way about Tolkein - could the guy have bothered to write one halfway decently written female character and fleshed her out a little? There are entire genres of literature I’m not too interested in because they have a severe lack of 3D female characters.
I think the handmaid thing in this society is central to the book, but a small part of the society in general. Most women are econowives. Handmaids are reserved for very important men who have no children. I don’t find it believable, but then again, I’ve met and heard of some goofy believers in my time who have justified strange things based off religious texts - and some very strange (what seem to me to be) inconsistencies. And, I don’t find huge chunks of the SF/Fantasy genre (if THT can be classed as such) believable. Or dystopian literature. 1984 is not “believable” nor is Brave New World.
I don’t agree that the premise of the book is that clear. I believe that what you’ve described is the background to the greater premise which is more about the women who were complicit in the changes, through agreement or inaction. The men are evil, yes, and there’s no shortage of anger directed at them, but I think the goal was more to examine how much the women themselves could be blamed for their situation.
I might be unusual in that reading, but I suppose that’s what makes book discussion fun.
I don’t think we agree on what the word “premise” means. By premise, I meant the central idea on which the story is based. This central idea, that a patriarchal society has developed that cruelly oppresses women, while giving a nod and a wink to men who wish to pursue immoral sexual pleasures, is clearly spelled out in the epilogue. Again, I just find it a contrivance to say: “Look, here is a fictional society I have created where men really suck”, and then to try to make the case that the story is advancing the cause of feminism. I understand that the story focuses on the details of the women’s lives, but that doesn’t change the idea on which the story is based.
And I don’t buy the argument that the author’s intent was to make the women in the story seem just as bad as the men, because of their inaction. To give you an example, let’s say I wrote a story about the Holocaust (the difference being that the Holocaust really happened, unlike the Handmaid’s Tale). Let’s imagine that in my story, I don’t spend a lot a time on the Nazis, but instead focus on how a lot of Jews didn’t see what was going on until it was too late, and how they didn’t do anything to fight the Nazis. (I’m not saying that is or isn’t the case; this is just for the sake of comparison). Who are the villains in my story? The Jews? Of course not. I can focus on the Jewish characters for 99% of the book, and only spend one page explaining what the Nazis did, but it doesn’t change the central premise, which is that the Nazis are evil people.
The thing is, I get the impression that some women actually welcomed these changes and enjoyed participating in them. It sounds like they were creating exactly the sort of society Serena Joy spoke in favor of and she may have approved of the changes until they affected her. Also, look at the aunts. Instead of being marginalized for being old and unattractive, they had positions of very real power (note that when I say “old and unattractive”, I mean in the more obnoxious sense demonstrated by beer commercials, etc.).
I’ve been reading Ms. Magazine for over a decade now, and I’m aware that there is one school of thought that suggests that the whole world would be better if women didn’t have to interact with men and had their own sphere. If I recall correctly, this school of thought was a lot more common around the time THT was written. Here we have a society where women only interact with women (ok, almost only), and they’re supposed to be collaborating to create or maintain a better world. Look at how many times Offred is told how much better things will be for the next generation to come because they won’t have to live in fear the way she did. Instead, however, it’s a sort of nightmare.
I’ve also got to ask one question which has been bothering me for a few days. Supposedly, to become a handmaid, you had to be a woman who had demonstrated her fertility by carrying a child to term. Maura was in training to become a handmaid, but I don’t remember there being any mention of her having a child and she was apparently a lesbian. How did she get into the program? Did I miss something?
CJ