The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale: Offred is a national resource. In the Republic of Gilead her viable ovaries make her a precious commodity, and the state allows her only one function: to breed. As a Handmaid she carries no name except her Master’s, for whose barren wife she must act as a surrogate. But Offred cannot help remembering subversive details of her former life: her mother, her lover, her child, her real name, women having jobs and being allowed to read, fun, “freedom.” Dissenters are supposed to end up either at the Wall, where they are hanged, or in the Colonies, to die a lingering death from radiation sickness. But the irrepressible Moira shows Offred that it is possible to cheat the system.

A short break from Palahniuk mania for the minute, and instead, some classic feminist dystopian fiction. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrator, Offred, is a Handmaid, a surrogate, live-in fertility vessel. She occupies the lowest position in the household of the Commander, she is given no voice, and no freedom. Her sole occupation is to assist the Commander and his Wife in producing a progeny.

She remembers, partially and quietly, her past life, her friends, her child, her husband and the political path that led to her current situation and the creation of the Republic of Gilead. She repeatedly reflects that after her, the future Handmaids won’t be able to remember anything from before, their reality as Handmaids will be the only one they know. This idea was profoundly effective, the idea that you need to have some grasp of alternate possibilities in order to hope. While Offred does hope, dream and remember about how things were before, and how things could be, she is ultimately oppressed by the new system. She can remember all the freedoms she took for granted in the past – of reading, studying, working, walking the streets without supervision – but the idea of these alone, purely because of the system in place, does not set her free. It almost becomes frustrating, because for every possible way out, the new political/social system seems to have a method of preventing it. Offred herself, however, never frustrates the reader because we recognize the brutality of a system which denies her her rights. The first person narration allows the reader to see her as an active subject, as a woman with thoughts and feelings that wildly contradict the social structure. Hers is a quiet subversion.

Also hugely effective is Offred’s recollection of the systematic removal of women’s rights that occurred with the political changeover. Almost overnight, women are forbidden access to their own money, they are fired from their jobs. What is most chilling about this, is it feels as though it is entirely possible. It doesn’t seem so alien and impossible.

“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 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 who were 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.

Dystopian science fiction with a decidedly feminist twist, The Handmaid’s Tale offers a chilling glimpse of an all too possible future.