Book #1 - The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

[Dee]

Favourite parts then...

I just enjoyed Margaret Atwood's style so much from start to finish. The speechlike language mixed in with the lyrical, the realistic with the dreamlike descriptions. I loved how the narrator kept qualifying the story as a reconstruction, and how she constantly reviewed her own story and the process of story telling.

One of my favourite parts was in Chapter Eighteen, the section beginning with "This is what I believe." Offred telling us about her three simultaneous convictions of what's happened to Luke. Dead/imprisoned/joined the resistance.

"The things I believe can't all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe in all of them, all three versions of Luke, at one and the same time. This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. Whatever the truth is, I will be ready for it."

The three descriptions of possibities were all described so brilliantly. But this line was the one that got me choked up:

"I picture the clothes. It comforts me to dress him warmly."

[Dee]

I also enjoyed the encounters between Offred and Nick, especially the time in the living room at night, when he comes in to find her to tell her the Commander wants to see her and she's already there unable to sleep, feeling like she wants to steal something. The way they touch each other in the dark is so unexpected, so charged, so emotional. This craving to be touched, cherished, desired in this barren world.

The birthing scene was also mesmerising. Then the prayer at the end of Chapter Thirty. The randomness of the Scrabble game was almost a comic relief. Imagining being discovered:

"Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words."

The absurdity of the situation was just so brilliantly written.

Then there was this fresh take on "living in the moment", because what if "the moment" is unbearable?

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”

[Dee]

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.”

[Dee]

All this heartache:

“I try to conjure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't.

It's my fault. I am forgetting too much.”

[Dee]

"By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.”

[Dee]

“My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my single bed at night, with my eyes closed, and the name floats there behind my eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the dark.”

[Dee]

I went back to reread Offred's last meeting with Moira at the end of Chapter 38. I think my assessment was more wishful thinking than what is actually written here. Even though Moira pulls herself together to show Offred a little sparkle of her true self, - and I was desperately trying to find hope in that, - the general sense is that she has resigned to her fate. She knows she could have it worse, much worse, and she now believes she couldn't have it any better.

I'd like to think she holds onto some faint hope still, that before her time is up at Jezebel's, she could find a way to avoid the colonies. But the final paragraph seems to suggest otherwise:

"Here is what I'd like to tell. I'd like to tell a story about how Moira escaped, for good this time. Or if I couldn't tell that, I'd like to say she blew up Jezebel's, with fifty Commanders inside it. I'd like her to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that didn't happen. I don't know how she ended, or even if she did, because I never saw her again."

If Offred didn't see her again, that doesn't necessarily mean that Moira was sent to the colonies, but if we think of Offred surviving to tell the tale, you would think she'd have seen Moira again if she had made it too. Against all odds, the tone here is suggesting that they have eventually ground her spirit down. That's just so depressing.

I wonder how they will handle this in the tv series.
Will Offred get any reunions past her escape from the Commander's house?

From the book's ending, we have no way of knowing.

[Lori]

"The cruel part is how this exchange is still void of real emotions, how it lacks personal connection. That's why I liked your analogy, that she is treated like a pet. A pet in general, not a unique one with a name. Offred is not "Sooty", she's not "the cat", she's just "a cat"."

The last line is so apt. No name - not even THE cat - just A cat. Therein lies the crack in the already thin veneer.

[Lori]

I like the passages you have chosen, Dee. I remember those exact ones having a similar effect on me. When Offred would take the time to express her thought processes, when she could bear it.

I'm not anxious to crack open politics and religion which are touchy subjects and have their place here in separate threads, if someone would like, as invariably they do inform who we are a lot of the time. But with The Handmaid's Tale, I suppose to ignore the deeper implications and the intent of the author to incite or inspire on those levels would be a bit intellectually dishonest. However, it can be a worm hole, yes? I knew this when the book was selected, having read it previously.

It does strike me that as women everywhere are reading this book, watching the series, and discussing the absurdity of such a society, there are millions of people in slavery throughout the world to varying degrees. People treated with less respect than Offred was, people in desperate situations.

In the free world, we've come leaps and bounds from where we were. I wish that for the world. We also must not let what is happening within our own borders go unanswered. I, personally, have been extremely frustrated with the lack of attention the issue of current slavery has received. It is more prevalent now throughout the world than it has ever been in history. Finally, it is getting airtime. It affects so many people, mainly women and children. It is murder of the spirit and ultimately murder of the body. Even the ever-yapping Hollywood has been silent and is now finally speaking out at this late date for a huge population of hurting people.

In my opinion, one challenge in these issues is to not love the process so much that the process itself becomes the narrative, with progress ignored and non-villians demonized. (*See the men torn asunder in Gilead.) In other words, do not love the story so much that it defines rather than serves to move past to the better place that is being created. Celebrate the achievements and push them further. Then, we can lift up others with us to move towards something rather than staying in the comfort zone of the past where the fight is the focus, not the better end-product. It is a complicated world and not a wonderful place for a lot of women. See N. Korea. See many parts of Africa and the Middle East, etc. A lot of these women do not know what freedom looks like - they cannot envision it and often do not welcome the concept out of fear or due to their inherent loss of personhood and lack of education. It is very sad and the answers complex.

The end. (Do I need more Napoleon Dynamites?)

[Dee]

What a book like this (and the tv series based on it) achieves is keeping the subject in the general awareness, gets people to talk about it, and make them recognise the connections to real issues. It's how people will continue to put pressure on political leaders to push for control, for tighter legislations on reinforcing basic human rights. But it's a hideous world still, with so many corners of it where women are subjugated, and children are sold or kidnapped into slavery. What can a book like this do, other than inform, educate and warn us?

What I've found the scariest part of this book was how easily the transition happened from the world as we know it to this absurd society. Through lies and twisting of truths and pushing religious doctrines into the forefront. Creating chaos and then presenting a severely controlling regime that establishes "order". People welcome the order first as a relief from anarchy, before they realise what this "order" entails. Once in power, the new regime can push the boundaries and goalposts fast almost without any resistance. By the time people wake up to their world changed, it's too late.

Another scary thing is the indoctrination that only focuses on what is considered "better" in this new world and shuts down any discontent with the loss of rights and freedoms.

Like Aunt Lydia puts it in Chapter 5:

“There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it."

The fact women in general are generally considered to be safe from men's advances in this new world is supposed to make it alright that the Handmaids are required to perform duties of sexual nature.

Of course it's all a lie. Just in Offred's story we have seen three men making sexual advances on her illegally: the Commander, the Doctor, and Nick.

But still, the Aunts try to sell this new kind of freedom 'from' to the girls as some major achievement that should more than compensate them for the freedoms they've lost. Sadly not an unfamiliar tactic from our real world.

And of course, like the Commander said, "better never means better for everyone".

[Dee]

Margaret Atwood about her book:

"The deep foundation of the US – so went my thinking – was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself."

"I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the "Christian" tradition, itself. (I enclose "Christian" in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the church's behaviour and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organisation would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)

The Handmaid's Tale has often been called a "feminist dystopia", but that term is not strictly accurate. In a feminist dystopia pure and simple, all of the men would have greater rights than all of the women. It would be two-layered in structure: top layer men, bottom layer women. But Gilead is the usual kind of dictatorship: shaped like a pyramid, with the powerful of both sexes at the apex, the men generally outranking the women at the same level; then descending levels of power and status with men and women in each, all the way down to the bottom, where the unmarried men must serve in the ranks before being awarded an Econowife.

The Handmaids themselves are a pariah caste within the pyramid: treasured for what they may be able to provide – their fertility – but untouchables otherwise. To possess one is, however, a mark of high status, just as many slaves or a large retinue of servants always has been. Since the regime operates under the guise of a strict Puritanism, these women are not considered a harem, intended to provide delight as well as children. They are functional rather than decorative."


From https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/ ... ret-atwood

[Moonchime]

Blimey O'Riley, a few days without the internet and when I get back in the water I find you two have written a book about a book already. I'm coming back later with a few random thoughts!