The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
“I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: Don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a Laundromat, by yourself, at night.” The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood.
I’d heard good things about this book before I read it. I bought it on my Kindle app several months ago because it was on sale for $2 because I knew it was unlikely I’d get it for that cheap anywhere else, or if I waited. For a long time I kind of forgot that I had it on my Kindle app. So I finally got around to reading it and wondered if maybe I just wasn’t going to like it as much as everyone else seemed to.
The beginning was kind of slow in the sense that it begins like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro begins, by assuming that the reader knows background information about this new society and women’s role in it. I understand why this is done, and Atwood did it well, but it made it hard to stay interested occasionally. For anyone who is interested in reading this book, I’m going to give some background information about the society. If you don’t want it, skip the next paragraph.
America has gone back to older values, though they have changed slightly, and one religion has power while the rest are prosecuted. Population is way down. I’m not sure if it’s ever stated why, though I know there are some areas of the states that are full of radiation, so my best guess is probably war, unless pollution just got really bad. Women no longer have many rights. They can’t read, drink, smoke, but they are also more protected and revered than men because they are the child bearers.
We never get to learn the name of the main character of the book because she’s a Handmaid and they no longer have rights to their names. Instead, they are assigned to Commanders and then called Of(Commander’s name)’. For example, the main character is Offred, because her Commander is Fred.
One of the main conflicts of the book is that Offred is trying to get pregnant because if she doesn’t, well, the outcome is not favorable. A lot of the book, though, deals with how Offred is adapting to this new society, because she was an adult when everything changed. She’d been married with a child of her own when suddenly the world she was living in changed. I found it interesting how she had to adapt her mindset to survive both physically and emotionally. There were moments in the book where she would look back at her life before the changes almost with disbelief that what was normal to her then now seems so immoral or immodest to her.
A refreshing aspect of this book was that Offred was not involved in any sort of rebellion to this society. She was not the leader of some revolution as the main female characters in so many dystopian novels are these days. She went along with everything she was supposed to and didn’t try to think of ways to escape the hand she was dealt. She doesn’t seem to think that she can get away from where she is, get away from this society as a whole to a place where life will be like it was before. Offred does think about her husband from before a lot, and wonders what eventually happened to him, and wonders if her daughter remembers her. Any rebellious acts or thoughts are all started by others around her. People who she believed were as accepting of their lot in life as she was.\
Overall, I’d give the book a 10/10. I would like to go back and reread it sometime, knowing all the background of the society, to see if there’s anything in the beginning that I missed or skipped over in my efforts to try to figure out what was going on.
Read on!
Molly
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