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The sexual counterrevolution

If you're familiar with science fiction, or speculative fiction as it's often called now, you're bound to be disappointed with The Handmaid's Tale in one respect: it's not particularly innovative conceptually. Futures in which existing currents are extrapolated into society-wide dogma are a staple of the genre. The idea that the conservative backlash against progress might grow into a distorted kind of Christian-Right dystopia is not exactly a new one.

Moreover, it is not developed credibly in
The Handmaid's Tale. The depiction focuses almost entirely on the role of women as baby-makers and housekeepers in the former United States, now called the Republic of Gilead. (Gilead, by the way, in the Bible is the land in which part of Jacob's story takes place—Jacob who used his wife Rachel's maid as a surrogate mother for his children, as quoted in the novel.) But we don't see how this state of affairs came about or get any idea of all the other political and social upheavals that must have been involved.

Margaret Atwood's interest, as always, is in the power relationships between the sexes. But even this is incredible in the novel. The bizarre ritual, for example, by which high-ranking men fornicate mechanically with slaves, known as "handmaids", while the latter are held between the legs of the official wives in bed is meant to shock the reader with its coldness, but I found it awkward and ridiculous. I seriously doubt any party would go along with this set-up. Yet somehow, in only a very few years, this society in which this is the norm overthrew existing American power and became entrenched. How? Why?

But we're not supposed to ask such questions. Atwood is not interested in those issues and neither are her readers, I'd bet. They're willing to stipulate the religious right-wingers are victorious in order to proceed with this thought experiment in which the position of women is examined.

As a narrative, The Handmaid's Tale doesn't go much further than that. What there is of a plot is designed chiefly to get the heroine, Offred (her patronymic Gileadean name from "of Fred", as her real name is never revealed), around enough to show us the various ways women are treated in this projected world. The conclusion is thrown in quickly when the tour is complete.

Why is this novel so highly regarded then?

It does tell us something about the position of women. I suspect half the readers will find this to be exaggerated nonsense and the other half will find it revealing. And I don't think the division is necessarily along gender lines. Some liberated women will no doubt be repulsed by what they see as revelling in victimhood, and some liberated men will feel guilt over what they recognize as their fellows' attitudes reflected in the rulers of Gilead.

Atwood is also very good at drawing the reader into a character's inner world with telling details of daily life that other authors would miss. We do care about Offred. As much as I could, that is, while simultaneously being bored by her. When was she going to do something? A vain hope.

A novel has to be more than a character study and social inquisition. I understand A Handmaid's Tale was influenced by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, another novel whose plot exists mainly to show us around an alternative world and thus reveal our own. Nineteen Eighty-Four though goes much deeper into that other world, and thus our own. And, much as I have problems with Nineteen Eighty-Four, at the end I was provoked. At the end of Handmaid's Tale, I was slightly amused but unmoved.

Except it wasn't the end. After Offred's first-person account of her life as a handmaid, Atwood has added a clever chapter in which future academics discuss the diary we've just read. It too was apparently inspired by Orwell's book with its appendices. However it comes across to me as a last-minute attempt to add historical context. Too late. What I really wanted was a better story along the way.

— Eric

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