I’m literally years late to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, as I’ve avoided this book on principle for a long time. Not because of its content, but more to its hype and the fact that I’m usually not a huge fan of capital “L” literature. But it was selected by the members of the book club I’m proctoring, and after finishing it, I’m of two minds. On one hand I loved it and can totally get behind the hype. On the other, it left me wanting, and slightly disappointed.
Being so late to the party, everyone pretty much knows the basic premise – hostile coup takeover, decimation of human rights, theocratic totalitarian government, total female subjugation, paranoia….every terrible thing that any government has ever done. So let’s get down to the craft, because as much as I didn’t want to enjoy this read, Atwood’s prose is so good. First, her use of color as a way to build the regime’s structure and characterization was brilliantly executed. As we know, handmaids in this regime are forced to wear red clothes, while wives wear blue, domestic staff wear green, and on and on. Atwood’s very specific about her colors, and the way she juxtaposes them against a mostly vague landscape brings symbolism and loaded meaning to everything. She’s done two things with the clothing of this book, one is to uniform the masses into impersonal vessels (even the wives aren’t seen as anything other than a title), and to bring emotional responses to the characters or factions without her, the author, wasting page space telling us how to feel. The red of the handmaids’ garb alludes to blood and a womb-like essence, bringing attention to their purpose of being reduced to birthing vessels. On a deeper level, as it’s also the color of the cardinals and other high members of the Catholic faith, it puts us into the mindset of understanding that the handmaids hold some position of importance in this world that other characters do not. And on a basic level, it objectifies them by making it impossible for people not to look at them. The wives are in blue, the color most often attributed to the Virgin Mother, and red’s opposite on the color wheel, making the wives everything opposite of the handmaids. And the red comes up everywhere, from the tulips in the garden, to the slash of red blood on the white bag of the accused hanging on hooks outside the college, to the lipstick Moira uses at Jezebel’s, always bringing us back to the thing Offred can’t escape. It’s a brilliant way to frame a story, and it worked for me.
I also enjoyed the first person narrative and her choice to tell both the story of how normality crumbled and how the people are living in the ‘now.’ The story is impactful in that Atwood chooses to start us in the ‘now,’ which allows us to know that something is off, but we’re pulled along into the unknown as Offred unravels both past and present simultaneously. By juxtaposing Offred’s memories of her losing all her rights and human dignities while she’s literally sitting in subjugation was powerful storytelling, and would not have garnered the emotions it did had we done the rise of the Gilead regime in real time.
I also found it interesting, although slightly annoying, that we’re not sure if we can trust Offred’s account since Atwood cleverly adds several sections where Offred admits that she’s not telling it right. So we’re left to wonder, just like the academics in the last chapter, about whether or not this narrator is reliable. While it annoyed me, I do think it worked for selling the authenticity of the story, which would be so fraught with emotion and PTSD or depression, that it would be almost impossible for someone in Offred’s position to tell a full truth.
However, the fact that this story is taking place in what was a version of 1980s Harvard, MA, and there are zero POC anywhere in this novel, made me raise an eyebrow. I totally buy that based on the type of regime Atwood created, there probably wouldn’t have been POC in the town or anywhere near the Commander, but I feel like Jezebel’s or film footage scenes were great opportunities to have shown where POC existed in this world. I realize it was written in a time where making sure stories were well represented wasn’t even heard of, let alone considered, but it’s something that cheapened the story for me a little.
However, overall, the most interesting thing about the novel for me was actually the Introduction by the author, written in 2017. Atwood was living in West Germany in the 80s while writing this story, and much of the paranoia and depression permeating the book was taken right from conversations she was having with her neighbors and friends. Nothing in her regime was made-up, they were literally all things that some government had done in some time period, which is probably why this book is so scary. Because we’ve already seen these things happen; the names might be different, the places far away, or the time period removed, but the terrifying thing is we know it can happen because it already did. And Atwood played cleverly and deftly with the idea that it could happen anywhere if we let it.
Overall, this was 4 stars for me. I’m knocking off one for representation, but I’m glad I read it, and I do believe it’s an important piece of literature.