TheDaak review

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Vintage, 1996, 512 pages, Dimensions: 12.9*3.1*18.8 cm, 9780099740919, Price: 499 INR

By Gautam Kumar

A Tale of Feminist Dystopia

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet and novelist of remarkable repute. A range of themes run through her vast oeuvre, especially feminism. The Handmaid’s Tale was a critical success. It came out in the twilight of the second wave of feminism. It’s a dystopian fiction strongly rooted in reality. A coup is organised. Power is seized. The Republic of Gilead, a Christian theocracy, is established in the United States. What does it mean for women? Everything! Atwood tells us. It’s a violent retreat into the state of impossibilities, an attack more serious than simple curtailment of freedom. Deep down, it’s an anti-feminist counter-revolution. Almost total. This regime controls not only life but also death. Whispers are heard. Movements surveilled. Heart-beats counted. Touch is a crime. Thinking is blasphemy. Patriarchy is watching everybody. It is an all-around attack on the very idea of scope, of anything. 

In the Republic of Gilead, women are split within and without. Characters of a certain age are divided by the past and the present as if the coup tore their existence into halves. In their minds, they keep shuffling between the borders of a dream they were striving close to through feminist advances before the coup and a nightmare they are living now. Once on the way to becoming a rightful shareholder, now they stand utterly disenfranchised. Here, memory also becomes a source of pain. There are also women of the older generation, such as Aunt Lydia, who religiously work to inscribe the mandate of this theocratic regime into the minds of the younger ones. It’s painfully interesting to see how this regime ideologically antagonises women of one generation to the next. It produces a rupture into the possible histories of women’s solidarity across time. The older ones teach the younger ones to be submissive, to blame themselves, to prize whatever form of freedom they have now, to see themselves as a vessel, to just re-produce in order to replenish the stock of children. It’s a national duty. This nascent nation is suffering from a low rate of fertility due to pollution and radiation in a post-war situation. Women are coerced into offering their wombs; they give children to the fathers of this nation. Handmaids constitute a special category for this task. Mostly, they are women left with no family network after the coup. They are now exterior to the structure of family and kinship in this new nation. They serve an important purpose though;  they reproduce children. With a biblical precedent as justification, they are forced to live on the periphery of kinship criteria and rejuvenate national demography. Their sexual exploitation is religiously sanctified. However, child-bearing is the central ideology around which any woman’s life revolves in Gilead. Offred, a handmaid and the protagonist, gives a moving description of the way the Commander fucks the lower part of her body. Only the lower part. All this while, his wife sits with her in such a way that they seem to be one flesh. All women together are a single piece of flesh in this Republic. Beyond the womb, there is no woman! Men can be somatically sterile, but they hold power in Gilead. They reproduce the social order through the power to make laws. Phallus has acquired the political strength to penetrate the lives of women. 

This regime carefully partitions womanhood. There are Wives, Handmaids, Econowives, Jezebels, Unwomen, etc. They belong to different classes according to the orthodox biblical assessment. Among them, there is a stark sartorial separation. Wives wear blue, and handmaids red. Econowives are wives of low-class men. They wear dresses of differently coloured stripes. Widows put on black. Jezebels engage in prostitution. Unwomen are barren. The relationships between women of different classes are coloured by varying levels of animosity. Apart from this, there is a recurring reference to colonies, where the ‘the Children of Ham’ or the blacks are resettled. The establishment of Gilead bears strong conservative antipathy towards ‘others’ such as homosexuals. Those who were not willing to follow the diktats of this regime were sent to the colonies. The story gives occasional glimpses into it. Life there must be worse than it is in the heart of Gilead. 

Is it all gloomy, then? No. Resistance is essential to this novel. In this dystopia, there are sources of relief too. Life erupts time and again in the novel. The totalitarian structure crumbles a little with a kiss! With an urge of a cigarette. With an act of pilfering. With the mere utterance of a forbidden word. With a feeling of lust. With musings of the past. With thoughts of a different future. With a willingness to know what is going on. These are highly subversive acts in Gilead. A treason. Apart from this, a concerted attempt to dismantle this regime is also carried out by the subversives as secretly as possible. Mayday is their code of communication. When caught, they meet different fates, all leading to death. Some are salvaged or hanged on the wall. Some are sent to the colonies. Yet others are used for ‘particicution’, where they are presented as offenders and handmaids are called upon to punish them, pitching one oppressed against the other. The possibility of resistance titillates the reader throughout. There is no final point, though. 

Actually, Gilead itself is in a prolonged state of suspension. Every act is doubtful. Suspicion pervades. An atmosphere of distrust encompasses it. Life is abrupt here; there is no planning. To do so, one needs control, which women have none. True to the spirit of Gilead, the story ends abruptly, in suspense. The protagonist exhibits subversive tendencies from the beginning. A figure of authority gets to know about one such act. Subsequently, the black van comes to take her. She leaves. Where to? It’s up to the reader’s imagination. She leaves on a note of possibility and impossibility. On a note of hope and despair. The van may lead her to anything; salvage, colonies, or escape from Gilead. The metafictional epilogue at the end suggests this regime changes at some point in time. The story is interestingly spread across time. It asks the reader to switch to the past and the present with the protagonist, which is actually smooth. Set against the backdrop of the second wave of feminism, it holds its achievements dear. A real fear of losing them animates this dystopian imagination to a fair extent. This work is a check to complacency. A warning to the tendencies of normalisation. It is an important read to understand the reaches of power. The Handmaid’s Tale is a literary accomplishment which urges us never to take equality for granted, and that retreat from struggle puts it in great peril.