Book Review : The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

'The Handmaid's Tale'

by Margaret Atwood

Through the first 'wood' in the coppice of Atwood !

Wasn't soft, breezy reading though. The narrative waltzes too frequently between past and present events. At times the reader is asked to divine what might have happened ('It didn't happen that way.' Oh! ' it didn't happen that way either', and finally 'not sure how it happened ',says Offred, the protagonist).That doesn't deter, rather eggs the reader on and keeps him hooked to the very end.

Gilead is a totalitarian dystopic state. As is commonplace with dysfunctional regimes Gileadeans breathe in a miasma of state repression, coercion ,fear, covert surveillance, neighbour vigilantism and disinformation. All of it the book portrays with chilling repugnance. One's sensibilities are truly, brutally outraged.

Ironically, the raison d'etre of a dystopia is a utopia ! The Gileadean utopia is the orthodox social order enshrined in the Old Testament. That forms the basis for repurposing the role of women and reinterpreting man-woman relationship in Gilead.

A woman , asserts the commander , cannot "usurp authority over the man...For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived . But the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved by child bearing".

Gileadean women are purely human breeders. Love does not enter the equation, is expendable and dispensed with. Equally, her right to property, education, assertion of her individuality, fashionable wear and vanities are redundancies that they have to do without.

What if a woman fails to concieve ? Gilead's answer is Genesis; 30:1-3 OT where Rachael tells her husband ,Jacob, " Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees that I may also have children" So if the wife of a ruling elite is barren an ovulating woman is billeted with her to do what Bilhah did under the watchful eye of the wife. Soon she delivers or fails impregnation within the assigned two years she moves to another needy housewife. She is the Handmaid- a wandering womb or renter of female reproductive organs. And the novel is an autobiographical fiction of one such handmaid, Offred.

And for men variety is the spice of life. Says the commander,

"it's part of the nature's plan . Women know this instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes in the old days ? To trick men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day."

Dystopian fiction transport the reader to a world beyond the real one. The unfamiliar, uncharted , frothing with inconceivable possibilities naturally evokes reader's curiosity and inquisitiveness, both essential to holding his interest. The ones that seem too far-fetched in the context of the times they are conceived in, like Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' end up as entertaining time pass. No more. But those that seem even remotely plausible disturb the reader's equipoise and invade social 

consciousness. Hey, this could happen ! Beware. 

Atwood's dystopia is one such. Not too imaginative in the context of the times we live in. World history alternates between totalitarian and liberal regimes, so a totalitarian regime is no anachronism. Faced with an adverse demography -more deaths than births, could not a totalitarian regime institutionalize the role of Handmaids in some form ? A blood curdling plausability !

With Right on the ascent, a cacophany of nativity, racism, religious fanaticism reverberates throughout the world. It looks longingly to an antediluvian social order, a utopia of bliss, harmony, strifeless existence, a figment of tortured imagination wholly lacking in historicity.

Nearer home, at times men in the corridors of power get 'nostalgic' about a distant hoary past when pushpak vimans air taxied , test- tube babies were born, plastic surgeries performed and wars live telecasted. When the distinction between mythology and history gets blurred, when faith overrides reason, alarm bells should start ringing.

For in that imagined idyllic state women fare poorly- property of men to be used to rear children and service the family, to be staked at the gambling table, to sate male lust as courtesans, to strike politically profitable matrimonial alliances between royal families, in short, womanhood minus any pretence of individuality.

So when a law maker opines that rapes occur due to women dressing up immodestly exposing too much skin, or because women keep moving till late night, Atwood springs to mind. Or when men in power state a women's proper place is the home echoes from Atwood's dystopia reach me to shake my sense of complacency and disturb my equanimity. 

That is precisely why 'The Handmaid's Tale' resonates and compels me to think twice- can it really happen?

One last thought. History records an upward linear progression in women's rights. Surely, the future cannot be so perversely monstrous to abrogate, circumscribe it all . Yet, aren't there enough provocations in the air to at least pause and wonder ? That's what the novel asks of us.

A must read.