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Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a frighteningly credible, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek, novel of a possible future America. Replete with biblical references and peppered with traumatic glimpses of the despotic regime of Gilead, the story focuses primarily on the subjugation of a woman who is referred to as Offred (indicating that she is the handmaid “of Fred,” whom she calls the Commander). While Atwood’s style and her choice of setting place the novel in the genre of science fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale is more effective as a satirical and pseudo-prophetic novel of dystopia, in the vein of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Like the authors of those novels, who, like Atwood, chose a potential future centered around an omnipresent and repressive government, Atwood incorporates grim derivations of some of the more disturbing governmental trends of this century with the personal experiences of those caught in the grasp of dehumanized autocracy. Examples which come to mind include the increasing pressure to abolish the Constitutional barrier between church and state, the recent failure of the women’s movement to establish legally mandated rights to equality, the growing schism between adherents of science and technology and those who fear the power and responsibility such advances create, and the growing sense of individual isolation from the collective of society – a phenomenon that has been on the rise for nearly a century.
My reaction to this novel is one of trepidation. While the misuse of women certainly takes center stage, the callous and self-righteous movement behind the rise of Gilead clearly brutalizes both sexes. Offred and Ofglen several times see the executed bodies of “criminals” displayed on the wall as a warning to the population. Some of the men they see hanging there are former physicians who performed abortions, a priest, and homosexuals. Even the Commander eventually…