North American Fiction and Film
Chapter 11: Margaret Atwood
Chapter Eleven: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Introduction
In this chapter, we would like to provide you, by way of an introduction,
with some general comments about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
Then we will examine some sections of the text in more detail before providing
you with some review questions which will help you to explore your own reading
of the novel.
The Handmaid's Tale can be read in a number of ways. We intend to read it
as a dystopic cautionary tale which operates on a number of levels, the
main one being to draw attention to the plight of woman in a fundamentalist
and fascistic state in the not too distant future. The revolution conducted
by the Commander and his fundamentalist co-conspirators is reactionary and
embraces repressive cultural mores, among which are those biblical codes
for the moral behaviour of women espoused by Serena Joy and the Aunts. Although
Serena thinks that she has had a victory at this level, she becomes trapped
by these codes in that she is confined to the domestic sphere where she
officiates and gardens but remains a prisoner of her own ideology.
The world described in the novel resembles very many aspects of our own
(Western) world. Consequently, the story functions as a warning (cautionary
tale) that the advances women have made in recent times may be lost at any
time unless there is constant vigilance (see Patrick Murphy's "critical
reading" below). The "lesson" of the cautionary tale clearly
espoused in this novel, then, is that no woman can afford to be complacent,
or, if she is active in her own affairs, no woman can afford not to keep
an eye on the dominant hegemonies of her culture, because reactionary revolutions
are intrinsically patriarchal, which means that women's interests are inevitably
subordinated in the "interests" of social harmony (read "patriarchy").
Readings
Reading 11-1
Reading 11-2
The dystopic novel as cautionary tale
Dystopia
The Handmaid's Tale has frequently been read as a dystopic novel. The term
"dystopia" is often seen as the opposite of "utopia".
A utopic novel or book depicts a nonexistent state and (idealistic) way
of life (such as Plato's Republic) which establishes some sort of "blueprint"
for social progress in the "real" world. Sometimes, this dream
of utopian existence is satirised (as in Swift's Gulliver's Travels), and
sometimes it is presented as a possibility or a result of technological
progress (as in some science fiction novels, such as those of Jules Verne
and H. G. Wells). In contrast, the term "dystopia" means "bad
place," and dystopic novels usually present a very unpleasant imaginary
place where the ominous tendencies of our own world, be they social, political
or technological, are projected into some near future world (the most famous
examples being George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World).
Cautionary tale
The point of the dystopic novel is to provide us with a cautionary tale
(that is, a story with a warning) about the effects of excessive adherence
to "norms" already existing in our world. By watching the characters
grapple with the effects of this excess, we are supposed to learn how to
avoid them and/or their consequences.
The Handmaid's Tale is clearly a novel in this genre. We are presented with
the religious fundamentalist and fascistic world of Gilead where social
control is achieved through a violent oppression based on principles which
depower women (they are not allowed to hold jobs, own property, or participate
in the public sphere in any way). It is significant that many of these oppressive
principles existed in the pre-Gilead society (as is brought out in Offred's
remembered relations with her feminist mother and her husband as well as
the violence of the pre-Gilead society towards women-don't go out at night,
keep the door locked, and so on).
Gilead: A biblical horror-story
Offred's story is set in a pseudo-biblical place called Gilead, and although
the references to Gilead in the Bible are scarce, some fairly unpleasant
things happened there. In Judges (11:1-40), there is a story about Jephthah
of Gilead who promises the Lord to sacrifice the first thing that comes
out of his house on his return from war if the Lord will grant him a victory
over the Amon. He wins, and on his return, his only child, a daughter, greets
him. He tells her that she has to be sacrificed, and she asks for two months
to go to the mountains to "bewail her virginity", which she does,
and then is killed. The "daughters of Israel" celebrate her fate
in an annual ceremony which lasts four days. Aside from the fairly clear
suggestion that virginity is a form of "barrenness" (with which
the novel is concerned), it is clear that men, even fathers, are quite happy
to achieve what they want by sacrificing their daughters. There is no suggestion
that Jephthah's daughter might disobey him, which is probably an index of
his power and her powerlessness.
This reading of Gilead as a "bad" place is confirmed when God
gives "the word" to Jeremiah, the prophet, about the need for
the people of Jerusalem to stop their wickedness, backsliding, deceit, lack
of wisdom, and rejection of the word of God, all of which continue unabated
in that the people are apparently deaf to the threats of God to "treat
the bones of their dead as dung" (that is, they will not rise to heaven),
and so on. The Lord says: "Behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices,
among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you" (8:19).
In this section, Jeremiah continually refers to the "daughter of Israel"
which he uses as a metaphor for all that is good and virtuous.
The Lord says (through Jeremiah): "For the hurt of the daughter of
my people am I hurt; I am black; astonishment hath taken hold of me."
(8:20); "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why
then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?" (8.22).
The paradox of this section lies in the way that the sinning of the people
of Gilead is seen as an abuse of "the daughter of Israel": on
the one hand, it is her virtue and goodness which needs protection and which
ought to be followed as an exemplar; on the other, it is a kind of "rape"
the people commit on her in their wickedness. The parallels between this
and the Gilead of the novel are striking.
Gilead: A totalitarian, fascistic (biblical) regime
When this "metaphor" is applied to Gilead, a similar paradox is
apparent. In establishing a fundamentalist religious state which is supposed
to redress the wickedness of the pre-Gilead society, the Commander and his
co-conspirators have resorted to a totalitarian, fascistic regime which
abuses its "daughters" as much if not more than the society from
which they were supposed to be rescued. Women who are infertile are declared
to be "unwomen" and sent to the colonies to clean up the chemical
wastes. The irony here is that the wives who resort to handmaids are themselves
"unwomen" by the standards of a society which defines women according
to their fertility. A few women are kept for "duty" at Jezebels,
the sleazy "whorehouse" to which the Commander takes Offred (the
Commander brags that these women were once lawyers, doctors and so on).
To name their new "utopia" (which is really a dystopia) Gilead
seems incongruous to say the least, but it accords with the biblical notion
of a "bad place" of transgression and treachery.
The handmaid
The biblical reference which justifies, according to Gilead's new customs,
the exploitation of the handmaid's fertility comes from Genesis. Rachel,
one of Jacob's wives, bears no children, and this is particularly galling
given that her sister, Leah, who is also married to Jacob, bears "fruitfully"
(a word used frequently in the novel). Rachel says to Jacob:
Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel:
and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit
of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she
shall bear upon my knees, that I also may have children by her. (30:2-4)
Bilhah bears Jacob children but she, like Offred, appears to have no choice
in the matter. Here we have in a literal form the abuse of the "daughter
of Israel" mentioned earlier: women are valued only for their ability
to reproduce, and their consent is not required.
As such, the "ceremonies" preformed in the novel under the aegis
of this scriptural precedent appear to be a grotesque performance of the
biblical quotation used for their justification. This is particularly the
case when they are contrasted with the Commander's behaviour. For instance,
when he takes Offred to Jezebels (which leads to her being banished from
the house by Serena) we discover that it is not the first time he has "ruined"
a maid-so to speak. The hypocrisy of his behaviour could not be more pointed,
though he justifies it with time-worn cliches about how Serena does not
understand him, and so on.
The biblical connection, then, is clearly used by the men to justify their
pleasure, and to legitimate their power over women; they do not themselves
believe in the moral codes which they expect women to abide by. Of all the
means men have devised of empowering themselves over women throughout history,
religion and theology are shown here to be the most potent. However, female
desire always manages to find a way of escaping these strictures, as the
novel shows in Offred's relationship with Nick and her final escape.
Complacent "non-feminism"
The Handmaid's Tale may also be read as an explicit warning about the dangers
of the complacent "non-feminism" evident in many contemporary
women. This warning is played out in the contrast between the world of Gilead
and Offred's memories of the time before, particularly her relation with
her "feminist" mother, whose advice and warnings she ignored (130-132),
and who is contrasted with the "bad" mother, Serena Joy. Offred's
mother wants her to take responsibility for her self and for ensuring that
the hard-won rights of women are not eroded; Serena Joy believes in a fundamentalist
cultural feminism which argues that the role of women is in the domestic
sphere from where they can practice biblical moral codes which will empower
them and control the excesses of men.
Both mothers "abandon" Offred. Her mother is one of the first
casualties of the fundamentalist revolution. Serena, who hadn't counted
on the physical and emotional "barrenness" of her position, is
banished to the domestic sphere she lauded. She is reduced to re-living
past glories within a loveless and sexless marriage, and she has, in acting
as an agent of the patriarchal system, negated herself by unwittingly rendering
herself powerless, a negation she forces on other women.
From this sphere she is forced to participate in her husband's infidelities,
both in the form of the fertility ceremonies themselves (Serena holds Offred's
hands while the Commander "performs" sex) and through his trips
to Jezebels. Serena, in effect, abandons her beliefs and resorts to exploiting
Offred's fertility. Although this is legitimated by scriptural precedent,
she abandons even this when she sends Offred to Nick in a desperate and
illicit attempt to get Offred pregnant after she recognises that the Commander
is probably sterile.
The "power" of both mothers is both negating (in that her mother
denies the power of the feminine in Offred by encouraging her individualism
and independence from men, and Serena emphasises the feminine to the point
where Offred is defined only by her capacity to reproduce) and negated (neither
position reflects the lived experience of Offred or of the other women in
the novel).
The consequences of denial
Both mothers suffer badly from the consequences of their own denials, as
does Offred, who is both a victim of her own failure to understand the implications
of her "mothers'" denials and an unwitting perpetuator of their
consequences for, as a daughter, she ought to have gone beyond enjoying
the benefits of her mother's "struggles" (freedom, birth control,
the right to vote, to own property, and so on) and strengthened them so
as to pass them on to her own daughter. Offred's responses to her mother
show both her rejection of her mother's values and a longing (with the benefit
of hindsight) for their return:
I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never
easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate
her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life
on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of
her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for
existence, I said to her once.
I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no
point to it, this wanting. (132)
Her complacency ("freedom from" her mother's feminism) has backfired
and allowed the "bad" mother (wicked, jealous step-mother, whatever)-who
is always waiting in the wings to do the bidding of patriarchy-to remove
these "privileges" as well as the right Offred ought to have had
to bring up her own daughter (that is, her daughter is taken from her and
raised "properly"-read: indoctrinated-by a Serena/state sanctioned
family). The cautionary tale comes, then, in the way that Offred is portrayed
as being complicit in her own fate. The novel shows that her ignorance is
inexcusably dangerous.
A warning about men
The novel can also be read as a warning about the way that men, including
academics/intellectuals, revert to type when given the opportunity. This
warning is played out in the way that Luke, Offred's husband, Nick, her
illicit lover, and the Commander, her "patriarch," all "collude"
with the academics at the conference, where Offred's "manuscript"
is discussed. They all attempt to mute Offred's voice by denying her experience
as a woman outside those aspects they can appropriate for their own benefit.
All the men in the novel attempt to legitimate and enhance their own power
through the violent and/or social repression of women.
For example, Luke chides Offred's mother for her feminist views and appears
less than enraged when Offred loses her job and her bank accounts are transferred
to him (185). The Commander plays the double role of enforcer of Gilead's
repressive moral codes and controller of its transgressions (he "tempts"
Offred in his study and takes her to Jezebels, the seamier underside of
Gilead and symbol of its irruptions against these codes). Nick plays her
illicit lover (exploits her sexually) and abandons her (to the mountains).
The academics at the conference are concerned about the identity of the
Commander and question the authenticity of the tapes Offred makes of her
experiences rather than with the implications of what she says about the
experiences of women like herself. In one way or another, then, all the
men in the novel refuse to relate to Offred as a women outside her sexuality
or her fertility.
Compulsory heterosexuality
The novel can also be read as a warning about the effects of compulsory
heterosexuality. Clearly, at its most repressive in the novel, heterosexuality
tolerates no rival: Serena Joy, Aunt Lydia and her cohorts, and society
in general tolerate no deviations from the male/female sexual relation (many
of the people executed on the "wall" have a sign which says "gender
treachery" around their necks). At one level, this might be expected
in a society whose moral codes are shaped by Serena Joy-men and women have
their roles, and no deviation will be tolerated. At another, compulsory
heterosexuality in a society which has almost lost the ability to reproduce
might be considered practical common sense.
However, as with many other codes and customs of Gilead, compulsory heterosexuality,
which is enforceable through violence, is really just an extension of the
codes and customs of our society, particularly those of religious fundamentalists
who insist that any other kind of sexuality is a breach of God's law. In
other words, the novel asks the question: what might happen if religious
fundamentalist conservative "norms" were enforced as if they
were everyone's?
The answer is a society like Gilead where irruptions of desire are repressed
violently, a repression which, in a sense, is only a shade different from
what happens in various societies and/or cultures of our world (the academic
conference makes explicit connections between Gilead and Iran). It is as
if various "norms" of our society are taken to their extremes
in Gilead, a process which, in effect, subverts those norms by exposing
them as an obscenity (both in Gilead and in our society). Moira, for instance,
who is bi-sexual and who refuses to be a handmaid, is punished for her transgressions
by having her hands and feet more-or-less crippled on the grounds that she
does not need these to perform her function as a handmaid (or as a sex object
in Jezebels). What we see on display in Gilead, then, are the "norms"
of our own world taken to extremes with sometimes devastating consequences.
Colour-coded identity
The novel can also be read as a parody of those who attempt to define identity
in terms of discrete features of its attributes; more simply, the novel
shows that stereotypical definitions of what it is to be a woman are uni-dimensional
nonsense. In Gilead, those activities considered feminine are divided up
according to various colour codes: blue for the wives; red for the handmaids;
and brown for the Marthas. There are hierarchies within these colour-coded
identities; Serena and the other wives possess a status which is dependent
on the status of their husbands (even the quality of the food they can purchase
depends on this).
As usual, however, these oppressive "ideological" gestures undermine
themselves. That they need to resort to wearing blue so as to differentiate
themselves from the other "levels" of femininity is, unfortunately
for Serena and the other wives, a mark of their failure-a symbol of their
covert status as "unwomen," for the handmaids dress in unmistakable
red, the colour of blood and life which defines them, and their very presence
mocks the wives' barrenness. The wives make no secret of their contempt
for the handmaids, and their jealousy frequently leads to violence (for
example, the "Marthas" exchange gossip about wives who have resorted
to knives or scissors to settle a score with a handmaid or to put a handmaid
in her place; 21).
Patriarchy, as usual, sets women against each other in a divide and conquer
pattern which makes them easier to control (Offred wonders, for instance,
why there's a word for men getting together ["fraternise"] but
not one for women [21]). The handmaids themselves are not above these petty
jealousies, as Janine's behaviour before and after her confinement demonstrates.
The point is that female and/or sexual identity cannot be compartmentalised
in this way, and the attempt to do so inevitably ends in disaster. Serena
seems to have exchanged her sexuality for moral control, and in the process,
lost those aspects of her identity as a woman which define her. What this
suggests is that female sexuality is a site of struggle both for the morality
of the society (that is, it needs to be controlled in order for men to possess
the power they covet) and for the women themselves (that is, the women still
measure their self-worth according to a scale of attractiveness and fertility
which renders them objects of exchange for men). This site of struggle and
its sinister implications is parodied throughout the novel but never more
stridently than in the colour-coding of the roles that women are allowed.
Offred's narrative
Narrative technique
Offred's narrative begins in media res; that is, it starts off in the middle
of the (more-or-less) present although, as the narrative progresses, we
realise that she is narrating from some point in the near future even though
she is using the present continuous (that is, the events in the present
are told as if they are happening now). Offred uses flashbacks combined
with limited hindsight to fill us in on the details which lead up to this
present, and this has the advantage for her as a narrator of, in effect,
having a double hindsight: that is, she can locate the events in the past
in contrast to the circumstances of the present, and she can situate the
present in the context of these hindsights whilst moving the story along
to its conclusion. This complex narrative structure ensures that the reader
is forced to work a little harder for comprehension.
The gymnasium
For instance, in the first chapter, Offred is in the gymnasium where women
like her have been brought to be trained as handmaids (we only find this
out in later chapters), and this gym is used as a point of reference for
the pre-Gilead world. At this stage, Offred does not explain how or why
she and the others are where they are. Her senses tell her things which
go beyond immediate perception, however, and she smells, as an "afterimage"
(an interpretive frame used constantly through the novel), the (pre-Gileadean)
gymnasium with its sweaty smells, evocations of dances, desire, longing,
relations between men and women:
There was old sex in the room and loneliness and expectation, of something
without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was
always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on
us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking
lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures
flickering over lifting flesh. We yearned for the future. How did we learn
it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air; and it was still in
the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had
been set up in rows, with spaces between so we could not talk. (13)
The past and the present here are divided by no more than a semi-colon.
The yearning for the future which characterises youth is combined with both
an anxiety about what shape it will take and a sense that as they move towards
it, particularly in the realisation of their sexuality, reality never quite
meets expectation. The eagerness to embrace the future is combined with
a fear of its realisation, an effect which is cleverly transferred to the
present at the semi-colon when the gym ceases to be a place of past yearning
and becomes a venue of some sort of very regimented present.
At this stage of the story, however, the narrator could quite easily be
talking about a summer camp in her senior year-by which stage she would
have had enough experience both to have felt the yearnings and to have experienced
some of their realisations. This atmosphere changes when the lights go out,
and Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth start to patrol with "electric cattle
prods" (14). Obviously, we now realise, the inhabitants of the gym
are prisoners of some sort. This pattern of creating impressions which are
more-or-less familiar, and then undercutting them, continues throughout
Offred's narrative and serves to reinforce the similarities and differences
between the world of the reader and the dystopic world of Gilead.
Not everything is controlled, however, for Offred's yearning for the past
and for human contact comes out in her memories, her desire to talk to the
guards ("If only we could talk to [the guards]. Something could be
exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some trade-off, we still had our
bodies. That was our fantasy" 14), and in her disobedience (the women
in the gym talk to each other by learning to lip-read and whisper). In the
space of the first two pages of the novel, then, Offred has established
the complex narrative structure which will characterise the rest of the
novel-an account of her present situation, mixed with nostalgic hindsight,
tempered by an anxiety for the future.
Narrative as palimpsest
Offred characterises the conflation of the past and the present as something
of a "palimpsest of unheard sound" (a palimpsest is writing material
or printing blocks on which the original writing has been effaced to make
way for a second writing, or a document turned and written on the reverse
side).
This image is a powerful one: it suggests, on the one hand, that when we
read, as she "reads" the past, we know that the words and images
have been "written" with some "meaning" attached; on
the other, it suggests that the meanings produced in the act of reading
are a function of the present. In other words, the image of the palimpsest
suggests that this is exactly what the narrator will be doing in constructing
her narrative-producing a reading of both events in the present and (her
memory of) the past, memories which remain only as traces over which she
writes her own meaning/story. The palimpsest suggests the doubly fictional
nature of the tale- the narrative stance she adopts as mediator of her own
experiences is nothing more than a convenient fiction.
Gender treachery
Like the gym, Offred's room in the Commander's house is a site of loneliness
and yearning, and what she yearns for is human contact. What she finds is
alienation and distortion. For example, the only mirror in the house is
"convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish" and this distorts,
like the society she lives in, her identity: "like a distorted shadow,
a parody of something, some fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending
towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped
in blood" (19). She knows that red is the colour of blood which "defines"
her (17).
She is a sort of Little Red Riding Hood who has woken up in a world filled
with danger, seduced by the promise of safety in the (grand) mother figure,
until she realises, too late, that the wolf has taken her place. She has
descended with carelessness to her present state, and she has no option
but to proceed despite the danger. She has no idea how to extricate herself
from her situation, and no real sense of its final consequences. It is part
of her narrative technique to pepper her narrative with similar allusions,
but not to dwell on or tease out their significance.
Tulips
This tendency to spot the signs but more-or-less ignore their significance
is exemplified in Offred's response to the tulips in Serena's garden: "the
tulips are opening their cups, spilling out colour. The tulips are red,
a darker crimson towards the stern, as if they had been cut and are beginning
to heal there" (22). When she later comes across Serena in the garden,
she uses an image of genital mutilation to describe her activities:
[Serena] was aiming, positioning the blades of the shears, then cutting
with a convulsive jerk of the hands. Was it the arthritis, creeping up?
Or some blitzkrieg, some kamikaze, committed on the swelling genitalia of
the flowers? The fruiting body. To cut off the seed pods is supposed to
make the bulb store energy. Saint Serena, on her knees, doing penance. (161)
This image of the "castrating bitch" is all the more powerful
because the castrating impulse is directed at the flower, the symbol of
female rather than male genitalia. Serena, powerless against the patriarchy
she has helped to institute, turns her aggressions against her own kind.
She is a "gender traitor" of the worst kind. Offred's narrative
makes these kinds of connections in the details she provides, but refuses
to cognise them.
"There is no connection"
For example, on returning from her shopping, Offred goes via the "Wall"
which, after the "Men's Salvaging" of the morning, has a number
of men hanging from hooks. Their heads are covered with bags, and on one,
blood has seeped through where the mouth might have been (41-42). Offred
wonders:
I look at the one red smile. The red of the smile is the same as the red
of the tulips in Serena Joy's garden, towards the base of the flowers where
they are beginning to heal. The red is the same but there is no connection.
The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither
thing makes a comment on the other. The tulip is not a reason for disbelief
in the hanged man, or vice versa. Each thing is valid and really there.
It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every
day and in every way. I put a lot of effort into making such distinctions.
I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind. (43)
Madonne Miner calls this a "denial of connection" which she believes
Offred makes to protect herself "from the hardest truths in her life"
("Trust Me" 152).
Whilst we might be prepared to allow Offred her denial on the grounds that
making distinctions rather than connections is a useful survival strategy,
that she is at pains to distinguish between blood, red tulips, and (genital)
mutilation so as not to confuse them sits uncomfortably with the fact that
she herself is wearing a blood red dress. In effect, she sees her own death
in the colour of blood, which is supposed to define her role as handmaid,
as giver of life.
The idea of connection is itself based on one of the most basic features
of language-the metaphor (as in "love is a rose", "death
is a tulip"). It is this feature of language which helps us to generalise
from our experiences, generalisations which are supposed to help us progress
the "human condition." Gilead and its protectors (the Commander,
the aunts), and the other characters in the novel (Serena, Luke, Nick and
Offred herself) are into denial in a big way. Like Offred, they are all
forced to pick their way through objects of which the significance remains
a mystery to them. Failure to attribute significance correctly, then, can
have tragic consequences; denial, in one form or another, is shown as a
major source of tragedy in the novel.
Serena's bargain
In Chapter Three, Offred takes us back to the time when she first came to
the Commander's house. She turns up at the front door even though some of
the wives believe that the handmaids ought to arrive at the back. Aunt Lydia
believes that the handmaids have a right to the front door, and is lobbying
for this privilege to continue. Offred notes: "There is push and shove,
these days, over such toeholds" (23). This battle for status continues
within the house when Serena lays down the rules. She says that she wants
to see Offred as little as possible: "As far as I'm concerned, this
is like a business transaction. But if I get trouble, I'll give trouble
back. You understand?" (25).
Offred says that she does, and we recognise in Serena's rent-a-womb gestures
the extent to which she fails to identify with Offred as a woman. As Offred
says: "I was disappointed. I wanted, then, to turn her into an older
sister, a motherly figure, someone who would understand and protect me"
(25-26). Serena behaves as a "bad" mother (as discussed above)
in her attempts to turn her "necessary" relation with Offred into
a commercial transaction in the same way that she legitimates this in terms
of biblical precedent. This reliance on "mothers" and the role
they are expected to play towards their daughters (or women with other women)
recurs continually throughout the novel, and it is mostly done in this fashion-a
feeling or yearning on the part of Offred for comfort and protection, followed
by a feeling of abandonment (or vice versa).
Spies and eyes
Offred comes across Nick, the chauffer, cleaning the car and, contrary to
rules, he winks at her. She wonders whether he is an "eye" (30),
which means spy. Apparently, Gilead is structured so that everyone spies
on everyone else. As it turns out, Ofglen, the woman she meets to go shopping,
is part of the resistance, but Offred does not know this at this stage.
The handmaids are all given names which tie them to the men who will father
their children (Of-Fred, Of-Glen). When Offred and Ofglen come across a
check point, the Guardians salute them and check off their numbers. One
of the Guardians makes eye-contact with Offred, which is a breach of the
rules. Offred notes: "It's an event, a small defiance of the rules,
so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold
out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of the
drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes" (31). She wonders
what it would be like to peel off her "shroud" and show herself
to him (31) and as she walks off, she moves her hips a little (32).
Although she feels a little ashamed at this "girlish" display
of sexuality, she nonetheless enjoys the feeling of power it gives her:
"I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope
they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the
painted barriers, surreptitiously. . . . They have no more outlets now except
themselves, and that's a sacrilege" (32). The irony here is striking.
Men have constructed a society which has removed one of the few powers women
possess over men-the power of their sexuality. They do this to control women,
though this control is never complete: small breaches of the rules occur
all the time. In seeking to control women's sexuality, however, men have
deprived themselves of the opportunities for interaction, pleasure and love
that female sexuality offers them. In controlling women in this way, they
have, in effect, castrated themselves. No where is this self-castration
more evident than in that fact that the Commander, who already has, crudely
speaking, limited sexual "access" to Offred, needs nonetheless
to invite her to his study for an "illicit" relation, and to take
her to Jezebels for "illicit" sex.
Freedom from; freedom to
In Chapter Five, Offred makes an explicit comparison between the "violence"
against women in Gilead and the violence to which they were subject in pre-Gilead
times. The violence of Gilead is sanitised, hygienic: it happens as a legitimised
way of life and can be minimised by conformity. In pre-Gileadean times,
the violence was random, obscene. Offred remembers that she would never
run at night because "Women were not protected then" (34). Women
lived by an unwritten set of rules:
don't open yout door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. .
. . 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. (34)
Now, in Gilead, women can go along the street in safety: "no man shouts
obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us" (34). Aunt Lydia rationalises
these changes as the difference between "freedom from" and "freedom
to": "'In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are
being given freedom from. Don't underrate it'" (34). Again, Offred
does not deal with the significance of this.
The implied philosophical argument here is a long and keenly fought one.
Ought individuals within society to have complete freedom to do as they
please? Indeed, the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, which informs
much of the capitalist, market-forces theories of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, is based on the notion that the greatest good for the greatest
number is to be achieved by the majority of people pursuing their own individual
happiness; that is, having freedom of choice (for a "philosophical"
discussion of these issues see Plato's Republic, Jean Jacques Rousseau's
Social Contract and/or John Stewart Mill's On Liberty).
The problem with this view is that the individual's needs inevitably come
into conflict with the community's and, without some reliable mechanism
for mediating this conflict, all sorts of difficulties (including criminal
conduct, rebellion, and so on) will arise. In the case of Gilead, the cost
of making the streets safe for women is not only the removal of any power
they might have, as we have seen, but also the removal of free choice altogether.
The Commanders take the place of parents in that they decide what is good
for the population and the form of punishment to be received by transgressors.
The fact that Gilead itself goes through a number of revolutions and purges
before it is replaced, as we find out at the academic conference, suggests
that Aunt Lydia's solution to the problems of freedom, choice and violence
is simplistic to say the least. All dictatorships fail eventually, and mostly
because their leaders are poor readers of philosophy and/or history. The
only way to get a population to follow your beliefs is to follow processes
which naturalise as common sense the ideologies you espouse (for a fuller
discussion of this point see Chapter Three of Catherine Belsey's Critical
Practice). Gilead clearly fails in this regard in spite of its biblical
pretensions.
"I would like to believe this is a story"
In Chapter Seven, Offred dwells on the nature of language and of her story
telling. She says that the night is hers provided she "lies" still.
She thinks of the active/passive difference between lie and lay, noting
that getting "laid" was something that men used to say, although
she qualifies this by suggesting that she doesn't really know what men said
as she only had their "words" for it (47). The disparity, here,
between words and the things they are mean to represent is striking.
This meditation on the mean of the word "lie" starts a train of
associations in Offred's mind. She thinks of the pre-Gileadean times when
she used to go out. This reminds her of a paper she once wrote on "date
rape," which in turn reminds her of the time her mother and her friends
participated in a "book-burning" of pornographic magazines, the
kind where women are "chained" up. As she helps fling the magazines
into the fire, she notes how the naked parts of women's bodies were being
turned to ashes in the fire (49). These associations constitute a dilemma
for which Offred has no answer: human contact in her heterosexual world
involves men, but men appear to be perpetrators of obscene violence on women.
Going out with men involves the risk of being raped, and yet contact with
men was what she and her friends yearned for.
These memories are immediately juxtaposed with memories of the time she
had been arrested after being caught trying to escape with Luke and her
daughter. When she realises that her daughter has been taken from her, she
screams "What have you done with her?" (49), only to be told that
her daughter has been taken away from her because she was "unfit"
to be her mother. These images crash together in her mind as she lies alone
in bed, and they reflect (again) her propensity to deny connections. What
does one do with thoughts such as these over which one seems unable to "lay"
some sort of narrative thread which will bring them all together in some
coherent way?
Offred answers this implied question by affirming the process of story-telling,
an affirmation which is also a denial:
I would like to believe that this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe
it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only
stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control
over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life
will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
It isn't a story I'm telling.
It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along.
Tell rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing
is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be
telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There is
always someone else.
Even when there is no one. (49)
Offred's state of mind here is reflected in the notion that as absurd and
obscene as the events she has experienced might be, she can come to terms
with them by formulating them into a story. This hope she has of making
a narrative which will make sense of her experiences is subverted by the
realisation that the realism she is basing her own tale on is constituted
by fabrications. The writer only appears to have control because he or she
can control the ending. Remove this power and the story loses not only its
power to explain but also its power to predict, and it's this power she
would like to have over her own life. She will always be in media res, in
the middle of things.
The story remains in her head as a collection of images over which she appears
to have little control. Besides, who would she be telling her story to?
She convinces herself that even when she tells it to herself, that someone
is listening (maybe Luke, or her mother), but the measure of her desperation
(she no longer has anyone to talk to beyond phatic, albeit controlled, communication)
comes with this invention of another self within her who will act the role
of auditor. Not only is this an index of her desperate isolation, it also
shows how realist stories, with their sense of an ending, are totally inadequate
to the task of embodying and communicating anyone's lived experience. [See
also Offred's commentary about story as reconstruction, 144-145.]
Critical readings
Pseudo-documentary framing
Patrick D. Murphy reads Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as an instance
of what he calls "pseudo-documentary framing," the idea that the
narrative tale of Offred is "framed" by another tale, the account
of the academic conference, the "Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies"
held at the significantly named "University of Denay" (or deny)
in "Nunavit" (or none-of-it). This places Offred's tale in the
category of the "discovered manuscript" and brings questions to
bear, given the time difference (2195 versus the "late twentieth century"),
about what has been learned in the interval. Murphy concludes that the patriarchal
society of Gilead, albeit in a less violent form, continues in Nunavit because
the conference paper presented by Professor Pieixoto continues with the
male autobiographical obsession of trying to establish the actual identity
of the Commander rather than dealing with the experiences of Offred and
the women of Gilead.
Murphy argues that The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopic novel, and that the
pseudo-documentary framing technique reduces the "dystopic" distance
between "tenor and vehicle." This is a case of what he calls "parabolic
freedom": that is, the notion that the pseudo-documentary framing ensures
that the interaction of the vehicle (relations in the fictional universe)
and tenor (relations in the empirical universe) are not rendered too tenuously.
This helps in keeping the dystopic world (of Gilead) removed enough from
everyday experience to ensure its rendering is "defamiliarising"
in that it provides for the possibility of something "truly different
coming about" (the world is run by fundamentalist oppressors who ruthlessly
suppress and exploit women) yet close enough to ensure that it becomes a
significant case of a "parable about ourselves" (the means of
suppression and exploitation exist in our own "empirical universe"
25).
This "ethico-political liberation" is important, Murphy suggests,
because upon it rests the difference between "sublimation" and
"cognition" during the reading process: that is, the difference
between, on the one hand, "'a way of turning our concerns into a satisfying
shape, a way of relieving anxiety, of making life bearable'" (Robert
Scholes qtd in Murphy 26), a sublimation which can have negative political
consequences because it provides the possibility of a "cathartic reduction
of anxiety" which leads to "escapism or reinforces smug assumptions"
thereby encouraging "social inaction" and the continuation of
"the status quo"; and, on the other, a way of knowing about "'ourselves
and our existential situation'" (Robert Scholes qtd in Murphy 26),
a cognition "which encourages discomforting reading and social action
through explicitly commenting on the reader's contemporary predicament"
(25-26). For Murphy, the power of the novel, then, comes in its evocation
of action rather than in cathartic sublimation (that is, after reading the
novel, we feel like doing something to redress some of the ills identified
with our society). Do you agree with this reading?
Scrabble
Madonne Miner argues that in the section of the text where the Commander
invites Offred to his office for what she thinks will be some sort of forbidden
sexual activity but in fact is a game of Scrabble (147-150) constitutes
an interpretative frame from which to view the novel ("'Trust Me':
Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale"
148). Scrabble, a game once played for pleasure and to help children improve
their grasp of language, is now something which, as Offred notes, is "dangerous,"
"forbidden" and "indecent" (Tale 149), so much so that
"it's something he can't do with his Wife" (Tale 149). The implication
is that in playing Scrabble with Offred, the Commander is betraying his
Wife, committing adultery.
Miner believes that this sequence of Tale provides instructions for the
reading process, "lessons in how to construct meaning out of disparate
pieces" (149). For instance, the grammar of reading suggests that "Offred's
words must belong to that club of words adjudged legitimate by a dictionary,"
which means that our readings of the text themselves are "legitimised
by signs of their membership in acceptable schools/traditions of reading"
(Reading 149). However, like the Commander and Offred who, although they
begin by obeying the rules, end up bending them (taking more letters than
allowed, making up nonsense words, and so on) the reader may move beyond
the legitimate into a "more free-wheeling creativity" (Reading
149).
The effect of this reading is to suggest that Offred is not to be trusted
as a narrator, for implicit in her narrative, particularly in her relation
with Nick, is the notion that "love" is a force for redemption
whereas, Miner believes the novel clearly shows love as a force of entrapment.
Do you agree with this reading?
Review questions
11-1 When Offred meets the commander alone in his study for the first time,
she imagines that he wants her to engage in some form of forbidden sexual
activity. However, he says to her: "'I'd like you to play a game of
Scrabble with me'" (148). Offred wants to laugh with relief until she
realises that Scrabble is also "forbidden," "dangerous,"
"indecent" (149). At first, they play by the rules, and then they
both begin to cheat openly.
What is the significance of this scene in the context of the story? What
does it suggest about the nature of desire?
11-2 What do you make of the term "Gender Treachery" (53), and
its use with the novel?
11-3 Why is Offred so taken with the "taboo message" left by her
unknown predecessor ("Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" 62)?
11-4 What other evidence can you find in the story which links the violence
of the pre-Gileadean past with the excesses of the Gileadean present?
11-5 What is the significance of the "ceremony" (chapter 16, 104-106)?
11-6 What does Offred mean by "context is all" (154)?
Works cited
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