This is a guest article by Alisha Upwall.
Dystopian novels are a favorite of mine. Something about a bleak future with reminiscences of how good it used to be versus the stark reality of what a “better” utopian-esque society looks like is fascinating to me. Although Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, the book has gained a resurgence of popularity, including a multiple award-winning TV series on Hulu that debuted in the spring of 2017 with a second season ready to debut on Hulu Wednesday, April 25th.
The story follows the path of a woman named Offred who, like other fertile women, is forced to be a handmaid—someone whose role in society is to bear children, but not raise them. Due to an extremely high rate of infertility, the upper class chose to recreate their society based on Biblical ideas where husbands and wives who are infertile would use a handmaid to bear children for the couple. Women are forced into this role and raped monthly in a ceremony involving the entire household.
The themes are (obviously) mature, and especially with the TV series, they don’t hold back. As painful as it was to watch these scenes, most episodes included a fertility ritual—I was encouraged by how it was produced. These scenes were not sexualized at all. There is no nudity during the rape scenes and camera angles do not glorify what is happening. In the few episodes where consensual sex is shown, camera angles are completely changed becoming much more sexualized. Where there was no consent before, when there was, it was made obvious by how much differently the scenes were filmed.
Key differences between The Handmaid’s Tale versus other more recently published dystopian novels are the inclusion of flashbacks—people actively remembering how life used to be, and that the timeline for societal changes is short—within the last few years. Being the first generation to decidedly make immense changes to how their society functions, the flashbacks and memories about how the changes came to be are frequent and disturbing (especially as their society is eerily similar to current American society).
That the impetus for these changes was brought on due to concerns that presently affect our society made the premise of the story convincing—horrifying even—to consider how a small group of powerful people can change life for everyone. It also says a lot about our current society that some of our basic concerns haven’t changed as much as we might like to think in the last 30-some odd years. Women’s rights have improved considerably, but as political parties and groups vie for control even now over medical decisions for women (not to mention the ever-present rape culture, dress codes for school-age girls inching toward our more Puritan roots in some areas, and then there’s the #metoo movement) we still have progress to make. Atwood keys in on fears that power in the wrong hands could do real harm to all of us, especially for the more vulnerable in our society.
Interestingly, Atwood and the writers for the series do a phenomenal job at showing how this type of life and society harms women and families—the exact ones it says it will protect and provide for. The handmaids are revered in word, but in action they are treated as slaves. The upper-class wives are shown to deal with sharing their husbands sexually in extremely different ways (for even the same woman). From outwardly needing to show they approve of the situation they are in to those in authority or outside their social circles to inwardly and to close friends despising it—the pain these women face from sharing their husbands sexually is palpable.
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| Margaret Atwood |
As the handmaids are trained in a center to ensure that they know proper etiquette for the monthly ceremonies they must go through, alongside having their wills broken (so that they will concede to being raped regularly), they are also called together to take vengeance upon members of the community who are found guilty of sexually assaulting a handmaid or not fulfilling her duty as a handmaid. This comes across as a cathartic release of anger as these women literally stone people to death. It also leads to a fantastic turning point in the story where these women take back power that has been wrested from them and stand up to the system that has repressed them.
While the first season of the TV series ends where the last chapter of the book does, it will be interesting to see where the writers take the story. The epilogue of the book, however, is where my reading was frustrated. Although the contents of the book are horrifying, there is hope that Offred will make it, that she will persevere and find freedom. In the epilogue though, it’s revealed that Offred’s story is from a collection of tapes found by historians years into the future. The writing style is so incredibly different—which makes sense as it’s part of a paper presented at a conference. The real problem I had was that in the end, Offred’s story is not her own. It is told by men who have carried on sexist cultural customs. It was disappointing that things hadn’t seemed to change much in society for women in the future.
What I did appreciate about the book and TV series was that the oppressed people in Gilead knew what they had left behind. They remembered because they either were of the elite who chose to create their society, or they were caught up in the gradual changes before they realized the ramifications, and it was too late. Although the changes the elite made were destructive to American ideals and society, there is an under girth of hope that things will change because they remember that life used to be different. Atwood makes a case for people choosing to take an active role in government to make life better for everyone.
Alisha Upwall is a writer and editor living in Riverton, Utah. She works when she should be sleeping, and spends her days reading, entertaining her daughter (with the help of caffeine), and making gourmet food for herself when everyone else is away.
The Handmaid's Tale is available on Amazon (link).
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