It’s a chronicle of a time so eerily foretold that it’s impossible to read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and not be shaken with what is happening in the U.S.—or world—right now. In Atwood’s famous dystopian novel, which has never been out of print since it was first published in 1985—gaining even more popularity after Donald Trump came to power and a new adaptation on television—the liberal democracy of America is replaced by a theocratic dictatorship.
The Republic of Gilead has instead puritanical 17th century roots with a Secret Service that watches over the people, a ‘Red Center’ which is a confessional. The majority religion is snuffing out the minority religions. Power is in the hands of a few and society has to live by what they dictate. The population is at risk of perishing, because there is a sharp decline in fertility, and the powerful have “handmaids” assigned to them to bear children. The historical precedent can be traced right back to the Bible, to Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their handmaids, who are mothers with no rights.
The handmaids in Atwood’s tale set in Cambridge, Massachusetts (with a history of burning witches) too have no rights and, in parallels with present-day realities in some parts of the world, they are forced to wear “long and concealing” clothes, “to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen”. The controlling Aunts wield unbelievable power over the girls and their minds. As Aunt Lydia says: “There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it..... We were a society dying of too much choice.”
Even songs with the word ‘free’ are not sung in public ever. It’s a man’s world where women have no control over their lives—they are divided into classes, each assigned a different colour according to the work they do. So it’s green for Marthas or houseworkers, blue for wives, red for handmaids, brown for Aunts. The story is told through Offred, not her real name, a handmaid in the household of Fred, a Commander. Her claustrophobic, bleak life is offset by her memories of another life, when she had a husband and daughter. And yet that was a time she lived with her family “by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it... There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods... the newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams... We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
The Handmaid’s Tale won the first Arthur C. Clark Prize for science fiction in 1987, but Atwood has often said that it doesn’t really fit that genre. But then does a label matter when a book still touches readers, three decades after it was published?
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
