The Apolyton Science Fiction Book Club: The Handmaid's Tale

[JohnT]

Before we begin, there are SPOILERS aplenty about this book. Any and all are free to post what you want about this book without having to resort to the spoiler tags. Also, my initial post is rather large, so I've taken the liberty of breaking it up into smaller chapters.

For starters, is The Handmaids Tale (THT) actually science fiction? When you look up the book on Google, everybody and their brother refers to it as a “science fiction dystopia” yadda, yadda, yadda, but the author herself emphatically claims it is not (http://www.randomhouse.com/resources...stale_bgc.html
). Given that her definition of science fiction is “Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that”, I’ll just snort derisively at her for denying she’s in my side of the ghetto.

But seriously, THT is close enough to debate the issue (like 1984, which Atwood favorably compares her novel to: “The Handmaid's Tale is speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written not as science fiction but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, The Handmaid's Tale is a slight twist on the society we have now.”) (Same site as above).

Two, no, three unmistakable conclusions occur: 1. THT can be defined as one damned well pleases, 2. Just as long as you don’t tell Ms. Atwood that you’re defining it as science fiction, and 3. I am capable of creating a paragraph made almost entirely of parenthetical statements.

OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way lets get to the boring crap:

Title: The Handmaids Tale
Published: 1986
Publisher: McClelland and Stewart (Can.), Houghton-Mifflin (US).
Voice/Tense: First-person stream-of-conscious. This is a woman who has little to do but remember, so you will go back and forth in time, even within the same paragraph.
Setting: What is now Cambridge, Massachusetts, with many scenes taking place in and around Harvard.
Themes: Women’s bodies, language as a tool for manipulation, the power of complacency and apathy.

[JohnT]

THT: The Story and Characters

THT is the story of Offred, a handmaiden in a future “Republic of Gilead”, a self-styled theocracy based in current-day Boston, Mass. After a period of declining birth rates and increasing violence towards women, a theocratic government (seemingly mixing Islamic and Christian teachings) arises on the eastern seaboard of the United States immediately following a terrorist attack on Congress. Handmaidens are used by the power-elite as a means to guarantee that they will bear children, heirs to their power. Most women are barren due to environmental contamination (many net sources also refer to nuclear and chemical warfare being waged, but I didn’t get that though I’ve read this book 4 times already. Anybody have a cite?), and the theocracy was partly a result of this demographic pressure.

Offred is playing the game that she actually is telling a story, though she is aware that it is likely that nobody will hear her thoughts. She feels guilty because she ignored what was happening while it was happening, so she explains in Chapter 10:

Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.
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 the 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 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.

I think the above passage is paramount to explaining her mood: Offred purposely forces her to be aware of her audience even if she believes her audience won’t ever be aware of her. She has to do this: telling and reliving this story, the story of her abuse caused by her apathy, is her way of doing penance. By not becoming aware, by turning her eye away from the things that were happening “before”, she is now responsible for the ills that have befallen women everywhere.

But her actions, driven by habit (especially her fear of the unknown) instead of intellect, show the lies that are her thoughts. She NEVER resists, always expects others to do for her, and even comes to terms with her situation; even to the point of falling in love (if that’s what it really was, perhaps empathizing would be a better term) with the Commander. She is removed from the Keep not by her design, but by the rush of outer events that she has always allowed to shape her life. Even her form of penance, telling the story to herself, is passive.

Three other characters loom large in THT’s universe, The Commander, his Wife (Serena Joy), and Offreds friend, Moira.

One of the things that I like about this book is that these people are characters, not caricatures. The one person that Atwood probably had the hardest time with in developing was the Commander: it would’ve been too easy to portray him as a typical Concentration Camp Monster™, but, as seen through the eyes of Offred, he comes to be seen almost as much a prisoner of the system as she.

He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

This initial sympathy wears away as the novel progresses, as we see that his “sympathy” for Offred is little more than a childish desire to break the rules that he implemented, a desire that puts her at risk of death, with little risk for himself (remember, the previous handmaiden killed herself when her dalliances with the Commander were discovered, while he just got another handmaiden). His moral blindness to the dichotomy that is Gileadean society is finally evident when they visit Jezebel’s, a whorehouse for the male power elite. Regardless, we do not find out until the very end of the novel that this Commander was an actual founder of Gilead, and is ultimately responsible for the repression of millions. I actually think the story would’ve been stronger w/o that piece of information, but it’s out there and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Moira was probably the easiest to write, coming closest to being Ms. Atwood’s voice in all this. Moira did not live in the gaps between the stories, she was the story, and she tried to make Offred aware of what was going on the entire time. Given the strong sense of fatalism to the novel, I tend to read Moira’s story as a woman who has always been aware that she is fighting a losing battle, but can’t let go of that fight until after her capture in Maine. She is the voice of the Old World, the tablet that the palimpset of Gilead has been placed over. Because of this ease in drawing her, Moira comes the closest to becoming a caricature… I came to call her “exposition lady” after a while.

Lastly, we have the woman who got exactly what she wanted, without realizing that she didn’t want it: The Commander’s Wife, Serena Joy. A former televangelist and gospel singer, she preached a return to traditional values and paid her price for it:

In the garden behind the house the Commander’s Wife is sitting, in the chair she’s had brought out. Serena Joy, what a stupid name. It’s like something you’d put on your hair, in the other time, the time before, to straighten it. Serena Joy, it would say on the bottle, with a woman’s head in cut-paper silhouette on a pink oval background with scalloped gold edges. With everything to choose from in the way of names, why did she pick that one? Serena Joy was never her real name, not even then. Her real name was Pam. I read that in a profile on her, in a news magazine, long after I’d first watched her singing while my mother slept in on Sunday mornings. By that time she was worthy of a profile: Time or Newsweek it was, it must have been. She wasn’t singing anymore by then, she was making speeches. She was good at it. Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all.
Around that time, someone tried to shoot her and missed; her secretary, who was standing right behind her, was killed instead. Someone else planted a bomb in her car but it went off too early. Though some people said she’d put the bomb in her own car, for sympathy. That’s how hot things were getting.
…
She doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.

Imagine realizing you campaigned for your own enslavement! Serena Joy is in trouble too, she needs to have a handmaiden have a baby, and soonest lest she start to lose her place in society. She is an unrepentant traitor to her gender, and she has no interest in any other woman other than their ability to give her a baby. Had she discovered that Offred had, in fact, slept with the doctor and gotten pregnant that way, she would’ve likely kept it secret – as a matter of fact, she probably expects the Doc to make his advances.

For the story’s sake (I don’t know her real-world thoughts) Atwood took it for granted that all men were sexist pigs: in story terms, I don’t think that is really worth debating (but debate it all you want if you must!) What is interesting is the fact that she doesn’t have that high of an opinion of women, either: all of her female characters are responsible, in one way or another, for letting Gilead happen to them. Through their apathy, through their fatalism, and through their active sponsorship, it is as if Atwood thinks the women of this universe almost got what they deserved for the crime of not being fiery feminists.

[Bosh]

Also take a look at the movie, its quite well done, Duvall's in it IIRC.

[JohnT]

Gilead: is it possible?

If there is a place where THT falls apart under scrutiny, it lies with the society that Atwood envisioned being formed by the demographic pressures caused by a massive breakdown in human fertility. I do not think the enslavement of women would be a "natural" or "logical" development to lowering birth rates, but regardless of whether I believe it or not, can Gilead be a stable society?

Here are some quotes from Chapter 19 that will give us an idea as to how bad the population issue is:

There was no one cause, says Aunt Lydia. She stands at the front of the room, in her khaki dress, a pointer in her hand. Pulled down in front of the blackboard, where once there would have been a map, is a graph, showing the birthrate per thousaind, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line of replacement, and down and down. (empasis mine, JT)

There are no dates after the mid-eighties. Thus must have been one of the schools that was closed down then, for lack of children.

Possibly it will be the sound of death today also. We will soon know. What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, as we all hope? Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog’s, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There’s no telling. They could tell once, with machines, but that is now outlawed. What would be the point of knowing, anyway? You can’t have them taken out; whatever it is must be carried to term.
The chances are one in four, we learned that at the Center. The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your body, camp out in your fatty cells.

Couple this with what we learn in regards to the "solution" to this problem: There are many quotes scattered throughout the books that state that Offred has only 3 chances to become pregnant via the Commander (Chapter 24 mentions “I have one more chance”, or else she becomes an Unwoman. Other fertile women are shot, tortured, in hiding, and otherwise not helping to raise the birth rates… and those that do happen to get pregnant, 1 out of four births is a mutant: not very good planning by the Founders, huh?

Obviously we have a non-sustainable society. One in which the most fertile of women are given three chances to get pregnant or get dead, one in which the sperm donors are crusty old men who refuse to test their viability, who only get to do their thing once a month. It really was no surprise to see Gilead had fallen by the end of the book, what I don’t understand is how could anybody would even think that the Gileadean solution was viable to begin with, much less support it for 3+ years.

Hal Clement posed a similar problem (declining birth rates) in the novel Half-Life, Frank Herbert did so in The White Plague, and D. F. Jones in his Implosion and they all (well, the first two) dealt with the changes that society would have to go through in order to deal with this problem in a much more… logical way.

So, maybe Atwood was right: maybe THT isn’t science fiction at all, because by the strict standards of the genre, her novel doesn’t really hold up.


Ugh. No more for a while.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Boshko
Also take a look at the movie, its quite well done, Duvall's in it IIRC.

Book club.

[JohnT]

Saturday night on Apolyton... this place is crammed full of people wanting to talk books.

[St Leo]

I read it a couple months ago and, not realising that the Book Club had settled on it, I have not reread it.

IMHO, THT is a much better book than 1984 and BNW. However, I do not wish to dwell on that.

Reading THT reignited my rage at the religious establishment. In the book, the people let Gilead happen by tolerating religion and religious fundamentalism until it's too late. The values that faction represents run contrary to modern western civilization.

A Canticle for Liebowitz asserted that Christianity kept knowledge locked up in its monasteries so that it could be retrieved in a Renaissance. Unfortunately, it is Christianity which was responsible for colossal knowledge loss when the Roman Empire became Gilead and fell to the wiser hordes around it.

I felt something similar after finishing up Asimov's Nightfall. If we had ignored the warnings of computer scientists about Y2K because we were ignoring the loud rantings of doomsday religionists about Year 2000, something very similar to Nightfall would have happenned to our society.

THT touched me like few books had before and since. It appeals more to my id than to my superego.

[JohnT]

"A Canticle for Liebowitz asserted that Christianity kept knowledge locked up in its monasteries so that it could be retrieved in a Renaissance."

But not in our world: I don't think that Miller actually believes that the RW Catholic church planned the Renaissance - looking ahead 1,000 years is hard enough today, imagine doing it in 476. How are you going to predict the Carolignian (sp) Renaissance 200+ years later, not too mention the Vikings, the Battle of Hastings, Magna Carta, etc, etc.

But it makes for an interesting story.

[St Leo]

Well, some bits of Nightfall are really hard to believe after Y2K. Scientific predictions about a disaster that coincides with a mystical prophecy of a disaster tend to be heeded. This is kinda repeated in Diaspora where initially the claims about the gamma ray burst are dismissed because it coincides with a millenium of some sort.

[JohnT]

Speaking of Asimov, Foundation is next month's book.

[Velociryx]

Excellent thread, John T! Dang....with that kind of in-depth treatment, I'd be almost scared to give you a copy of my book to review!

-=Vel=-

[JohnT]

Bring it on!!!

[Ben Kenobi]

Unfortunately, it is Christianity which was responsible for colossal knowledge loss when the Roman Empire became Gilead and fell to the wiser hordes around it.

-St. Leo

In what sense is Christianity responsible for the fall of the Western Roman Empire?

Liebowitz is right (and I have read the book,) in that monasteries preserved knowledge just by harbouring those who could read, and in the books that they preserved.

Whether they predicted the Renaissance, or not is unimportant. I think they preserved the books because they felt they were valuable.

[St Leo]

In what sense is Christianity responsible for the fall of the Western Roman Empire?

In what sense wasn't it? Oh, wait, you can't prove a negative. Dang it. Must think of something.

In pre-Christian conquests, the gods of the vanquished were integrated into the Roman Pantheon and everyone was happy. Christianity prevented further expansion by turning it into a convert-or-die situation. Ergo, no decent attempts were made to pacify Germania until the Germans got to pacify the Roman Empire.

[JohnT]

Bump. Was I the only one to read this book, ever?