The Handmaid's Tale Review

This week's novel is the appropriately timed The Handmaid's Tale, the women's rights dystopia by Margaret Atwood.  I had the chance to read this one in high school, but you had to get parent permission to read it because it "had sex in it," so I joined the group that read Flatland.  I am now suspicious of this reasoning for requiring parent permission, because Brave New World had sex too and there was a group that read that with no parental input.  Hmmmmm.  So anyway, I avoided the horror of reading this book for a good long while, until my biffle read it and recommended it and it kept popping up in the news, so I checked it out.

In the future of what was once Boston, women's rights have been stripped away to the point that they're not even allowed to read, much less own property or have a say in their futures.  Birthrates have plummeted, and the culture has focused on having babies and created a group of "handmaids" for wealthy households.  The man of the house attempts to impregnate the handmaid, if they are successful, she hands the baby over to the family before being reassigned to a different family to try again.  Our narrator tells of the loneliness of her position and of how little power she has.  Her mostly solitary existence gives her plenty of time to ruminate on her life before with her husband and daughter and friends, and on how she came to be a handmaid.

Since the battle cry this week is Intersectional Feminism, I need to point out that this book is super white.  It's second wave feminism through and through, but it's from the 80s so that's expected.  It's a wonderful set piece in feminist literature, and it's a start, but we have to expand on it.

I'm not going to go into much of how awful the human rights violations are in this story.  They're awful.  Consent cannot be given under coercion, and "she had a choice: she could always die," is not a choice. 

But I do want to talk about one aspect.  When a handmaid does manage to get pregnant, they aren't allowed ultrasounds or epidural or much medical care beyond a midwife and a team of other handmaids chanting "breathe, breathe, breathe."  It's like obstetric medicine has regressed along with everything else.  But this makes no sense if you consider that they claim that the point of this whole operation is to produce more healthy babies.  Ultrasounds can warn you about possible complications that can be handled with forewarning.  C-sections can take care of a great many complications.  And if they're worried about birth defects (which is the big problem in this dystopian future), it would make sense for them to do in vitro fertilization where they can assure a fetus will not be born a monster baby, AND they wouldn't just be rolling the dice trying to get pregnant.  But they don't, because honestly it's not about healthy babies, it's about controlling women.  It reminded me so starkly of what I hear constantly in our own time, in the real world.  [Insert my pro-choice rant here, which will get me way too wound up to type out, and you know what it says anyhow.]

What really makes this book stand out, aside from its content, is that it's wonderfully crafted.  There are sections in recollections where the dialogue is not enclosed in quotation marks a la James Joyce.  It works amazingly well, because it blends the spoken dialogue with the narrator's reactions to what's being said, and this style choice occurs most often when the narrator is remembering her time being trained to be a handmaid--or in other words, where she's being brainwashed and threatened into submitting to their new culture and her new place within it.  It's hard to tell if the brainwashing being said, or is the narrator thinking it because she's been convinced.  It's subtle and beautiful and heartbreaking.

***

Next week: The Girl from Everywhere, traveling through time on a tall ship by Heidi Heilig.