ABAW: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Houghton Mifflin, 1986 via Anchor Books, 1998.

This is Atwood’s classic book about a dystopian near future in which a Christian sect (anti-Baptist, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, misogynist, totalitarian, and violent, among other things) takes over the United States and establishes communities of surrogate pregnacy based on a very narrow reading of the Bible. This book terrified me. Atwood brings the tale of the dissolution of the US into Gilead so close to reality as to make it feel immediate and tangibly possible. Even now, more than twenty-five years after its first publication. 

The mood of the tale is claustrophobic. There is only isolation. Touching is a privilege mostly denied. The main character is isolated in her mind. No talking. No touching. No knowing. No trusting. Only grief, and fear, and uncertainty among the patterned certainties.

The only hope in the book is that the society is untenable. It is cruel and corrupt and in the process of collapsing on itself.

Two confessions.

1. While I am an academic nerd, I found the academic epilogue off-putting at first. I thought about it for some time before I understood the purpose of the pseudo-academic discussion of Gilead. I was still grated by the subtle cues that while Gilead had failed and the world had changed with the passage of time, that world still bore a great deal of the subtle and not-so-subtle misogyny that we can witness right now without much effort. Atwood deftly points to the biases that academic culture often bears when examining the “quaintness” of the past. And I use that word, “quaintness”, with a very sharp degree of etymological calculation. 

2. I did not — in spite of my time living and breathing inside The Canterbury Tales for several years of my life — connect the title of this book with Chaucer’s collection until I read that epilogue. (I know, duh) I’m still digesting the implications of the connection.

Beautifully wrought story about the horrors of fanatical and narrow-minded governance from an important contemporary social critic.