Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"

Brief Summary of the Book, Why the Author Wrote the Book, and your Reaction to it:

In The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, we are taken to a near-future America where society, as we currently know it, has drastically changed. During the 1980s, pornography, drugs, street violence and other social problems are common. Serious environmental damage by toxic chemicals, biological weapons and nuclear waste has caused widespread infertility and birth defects, leading to negative population growth. A group of powerful men – mostly right-wing fundamentalists – plots and succeeds in murdering the President and most members of Congress. They then take advantage of the subsequent shock and fear of the people to suspend the Constitution and the civil liberties it protected. Of course, this was all done in the name of “protecting” citizens from further potential violence – it was not known by the public that the very people who were “protecting” them were the ones that plotted the murders and succeeded in a hostile takeover of the government.

Over the next few years, the “temporary” government, through fear and psychologically effective propaganda, institutes laws that – while affecting all citizens by making illegal most civil liberties and freedoms enjoyed previously – particularly affect women. It becomes illegal for women to hold jobs, have money, bank accounts, vote, read and write. Sex outside of marriage, divorce, and second marriages are also illegal. Women who had engaged in liaisons outside of marriage resulting in children or who had remarried before the takeover were now criminals. Homosexuality, participating or believing in any religion other than the state-sanctioned one, being non-Caucasian, in-vitro fertilization, birth control, magazines, newspapers, revealing clothing, make-up, cigarettes, and alcohol, amongst many other things, also become illegal or rigidly controlled by sumptuary laws. Renaming the part of the country overtaken “Gilead,” they repressively control virtually all aspects of day-to-day life, both public and private.

The Handmaid’s Tale, written in the form of a diary in reflection, centers around the experiences of the main character, Offred. Offred used to be an educated, working woman. Before the takeover of the government, she married a divorced man named Luke and gave birth to a daughter. Offred, Luke and their daughter attempt to escape Gilead for Canada, but are caught. By law, Offred is a criminal for having married a divorced man, and her daughter is taken away from her and given to a “good” family.

Prisons, as we know them, no longer exist. Criminals, the elderly, non-Caucasians, non-believers who refuse to convert, and infertile women (since by law and doctrine men are never infertile), are sent to places known as Colonies to work – usually cleaning up dangerous toxic waste. Offred, and other female criminals who are assumed fertile, are sent to the Rachel and Leah Re-Education Center, for “training” as a Handmaid, women whose only purpose is to get pregnant and give birth to children for “good” families. She is assigned to a family led by The Commander and his wife, Serena Joy, and is expected to engage in a “ceremony” once a month that involves the Commander having sexual intercourse with her – held by his wife – in the hope that she will become pregnant and give birth to a child for them to raise.

Over time, Offred engages in a twisted “affair” with the Commander that involves playing Scrabble, reading illegal magazines and books, dressing up in sexy clothes and make-up for a “night out” at an illegal club where men can drink, smoke, and have sex with various women, and engages in sex with the Commander outside of the monthly Ceremony. She also becomes passionately and emotionally involved in a sexual relationship with Nick, the Commander’s chauffeur. Eventually, the “Eyes” – the government’s internal security people – arrest her for “Violation of State Secrets.” In a very fast scene, we learn that these particular Eyes are really the Underground in disguise, here to secretly rescue her and get her out of Gilead.

In an ironic twist, at the very end of the book, we learn that the entire story was actually from cassette tapes that were over 150 years old, transcribed by academics and historians after they were found by archeologists sometime during 2190-2195. The fact that she was able to sit down and record her story on these tapes leads us to believe that she was successful in escaping. Ultimately, the society of Gilead is a failure, and the society that develops from it is exactly what the creators of Gilead were most strongly against: a multicultural, egalitarian, educated, secular, and most likely democratic society.

It is apparent throughout the book that the author, Margaret Atwood, was deeply concerned with the trends American society was experiencing during the early 1980s. The Hostage Crisis in Iran was still fresh in the memory of most Americans. The Moral Majority was mentioned on TV news or in newspapers almost daily, extreme right-wing politicians were gaining power, people like Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh were not just the brunt of late-night talk-show jokes, they were testifying in Congress! Aids and herpes were on the front cover of Newsweek and Time, there was (and still is) a great deal of controversy about teaching not just “safe sex,” but abstinence. Feminism had become a dirty word, and many people – quite often women – were espousing the ideas of returning to the “better” lifestyle of several decades earlier, when women stayed at home, cooked, took care of the house and kids, and didn’t have “careers,” much less work. Although Atwood does not make it clear through the use of Author’s Notes or an Introduction why she wrote the book, it is clear from the book itself that she believed if society kept traveling along the trends it was leaning towards, this could be the resulting society. She wanted to – and succeeds in – scaring the reader.

My reactions to the book are varied. I remember being proud to call myself a feminist as I was a teenager, but by the time I was 20 (1984), I would actually get annoyed and defensive when someone would say I was a feminist. Feminism – believing that women and men should enjoy social equality – had grown to have a negative connotation, a stigma to it, within a few short years: a stigma that still exists today. Yet the society portrayed, especially how it treated women, was abhorrent to me. Women having virtually no say at all regarding how they lived their own lives made my skin crawl. Most of the time when I sit down to read a book, I read it in one or two sittings. This book so disturbed me, the society portrayed so nauseated me, I had to read it in over 15 sittings over three weeks.

At the same time, I found myself amazed at how prophetic the story was. Written in 1985, long before the Taliban regime and the horror of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Atwood has taken the then-rising power of the Moral Majority, right-wing politics and social backlash against Feminism and stretched them into a society that is frightening, incomprehensible, unbelievable, and alarmingly possible. How could she have foreseen the September 11 attacks and subsequent passing of the Patriot Act, which has given our government powers to suspend the civil rights of any person deemed “of interest?” Did the leaders of the Taliban use The Handmaid’s Tale as a blueprint for their own society? Her understanding of human psychology – especially how we so easily give up a little freedom for the sake of “safety” and how easy it is to quiet protestors by making them afraid of arrest or worse – is intense.

At the same time, I found myself annoyed at little things, especially the numerous typographical errors and the inconsistency of the author’s use of quotation marks around things said by the characters. The tendency to spend a lot of time describing physical features of people and the surroundings but lack of details about what was actually going on in a scene was frustrating at times. The going back and forth from the past to the present, and not exploring the past chronologically, made the story a bit convoluted and tricky to follow at times. While I understand the creative purpose of waiting until the very end of the book to inform us that this was a story told through transcription of an oral dairy recorded after-the-fact, it would have made the idiosyncrasies of the story easier to understand and follow if known up-front.

Sociological Analysis and Interpretation of the Book:

It is amazing how many sociological concepts Atwood weaves throughout her story. Exploring extremism, sociobiology, and the power of bureaucratic authority, she creates a repressive, ultra-conservative monotheocratic, patriarchal society led by a fundamentalist, authoritarian, and totalitarian government, replete with sexism, gender stratification, a caste-like class system, an underground economy, and much more. In more detail, some of the sociological concepts explored follows:

Gender Stratification, Caste-like Class System, Social Status: In Gilead, gender stratification is extreme – women have virtually no rights at all, no say in their own lives, no choices; all power over their lives is in the hands of their husbands or male next-of-kin. Both men and women are forced into highly stratified roles based upon their limited status, roles that become a de-facto Caste system. While men have more rights and power than women, they too are forced to fulfill their expected roles, and fall into statuses that are very limiting. Endogamy – marriage only between people of the same social category/status – is now not only the norm, but the only legally permitted marriage. Although Atwood does touch on and allude to the changed statuses and roles of men, she primarily details the statuses, classes and roles of women (Macionis 140, 147, 247-248, 330):

• At the “top” of the social order of women are “Wives” and their “Daughters.” Wives, dressed in blue, are married to men who have some social standing in the government or the military. Just like all women, they have virtually no rights, but they do have some very limited power. They get to arrange the marriages of the Daughters, they are in charge of the day-to-day running of their households, they can discipline their “Martha’s” and “Handmaid,” and raise children – their own or those that are the product of their Handmaids (Atwood).
• “Daughters,” an ascribed status, are the female children of Wives. They dress in white and are highly prized, because children are so rare (Atwood, Macionis 147).
• “Aunts” are generally older women who were widowed or never married, are infertile, and strong believers in the state-sanctioned Church. They are the only women who actually have any sort of employment – they “work” for the state church/government complex, retraining criminal women for work as Handmaids. Aunts are the only women for whom it is legal to read and write.
• “Martha’s,” dressed in dull green, are infertile women and women of low socioeconomic status who become members of Wive’s households as servants.
• “Econowives,” dressed in cheaply made stripped dresses, are women of low socioeconomic status who were on their first marriage before the takeover. Econowives have to do all their own housework, since they are not privileged enough to be assigned Marthas. Over time, Econowives will be “phased out” – meaning since people of low socioeconomic status are not allowed to marry and having sex or children outside of marriage is illegal – they will simply die out.
• “Handmaids,” dressed in bright red, are fertile women who – due to the “sins” (crimes) of their past are no longer allowed to raise their own children or marry – are assigned to infertile Wives and their husbands for the sole purpose of getting pregnant by the husband and providing a child for them. Other than the fact that they are fertile – which is considered a precious national resource – Handmaids have no social standing, no rights, no power, no choices. They do not have their own names – they are named “Of” and the first name of the man they are assigned to be bred by (i.e., “Of” + “Fred” = “Offred”). Should a Handmaid fail to become pregnant after being placed with three different families, she risks becoming an “Unwoman”. Because the Handmaids are actually engaging in sexual intercourse with men that are not their husbands, albeit sex that is against their wishes, essentially state-sanctioned rape, a “necessary evil,” there is a strong negative stigma attached to them (Macionis 198). The Wives refer to them as “sluts and whores,” and the Econowives spit on the sidewalk when they see them (Atwood 44).
• Unwomen are women who have committed a crime and subsequently been killed or assigned to the Colonies. Unofficially, some Unwomen end up working in illicit clubs as prostitutes.

Total Institutions and Resocialization: The Rachel and Leah Re-Education Center is a total institution, whose primary purpose is resocializing its inmates as Handmaids. Within the Center, the women are not only stripped of all their possessions, they are even stripped of their names – becoming only a number, which is tattooed on their ankles. Through drugs, restrictive diets, endless lectures, classes, and severe physical punishments, they become Handmaids. Those that cannot be “re-educated” satisfactorily become Unwomen. As is true of any resocialization process, its effectiveness is uneven. Some of the women become completely brainwashed into the new way of thinking, others simply act and say what is expected of them out of pure survival instinct (Atwood. Macionis 133, 198).

Rituals: Rituals are used to enhance and further ensconce the power of the Gilead government and its doctrine. Some of the rituals are public – such as the Prayvaganzas and Salvagings – and serve not only as entertainment of sorts, but also allow the people in power to see who associates with who, and listen to what people say within the privacy of a large crowd. They use the information discovered at these public gatherings to further weed out any malcontents, rebels, and others who simply appear to be non-conforming, further enhancing their power and hold over the people. Other rituals are private, such as the once-monthly mating of the husband with the Handmaid, sprawled between the legs of the wife and held by her (Atwood. Macionis 177).

Collective Behavior: Atwood demonstrates Collective Behavior in a particularly gruesome scene. During a Salvaging – an event where criminals are hung – two Handmaids and a Wife are killed for their unstated crimes. As a special “treat,” the Aunts who are leading the Salvaging bring out a Guardian (soldier) and tell the Handmaids that he brutally raped a pregnant Handmaid, resulting in her losing the baby. The Handmaids are so angered at his crime that they – with the Aunt’s encouragement – beat the Guardian to death. They do not just beat him up, though: they physically tear his body up into pieces. Offred, while disgusted with the whole thing, cannot help but join in with the barbarism: the feelings of anger and revulsion of the crowd at the crime is contagious. The Salvaging is a particularly heinous ritual of the Gilead society, but one with a powerful latent function: it allows the Handmaids to release their pent-up frustration, anger, and even sexual energy in a socially accepted manner (Atwood 277-281. Macionis 14, 164, 601).

Alienation and Isolation: While all of the characters suffer some alienation and isolation, due to the restrictive social roles they must fit in to, the Handmaids suffer the most. They are not permitted to have any friends or social life at all, with the exception of attending births. They do not have names of their own. They have no possessions of their own. They do not socialize with the members of the families where they are placed – not even with the household help. They eat their meals alone in their rooms. They cannot read, all store names have been replaced with pictographs representing what they sold – “… even the names of shops were too much temptation for us” (Atwood 25). They have nothing to do at all except go for a walk to do the grocery shopping (with tokens, not money), get pregnant and give birth. Offred feels so isolated she cannot even refer to her own room as “her room” or “my room” – instead refers to it, with one exception, as “the room” (50). Another Handmaid, Ofwarren, whose real name is Janine, is so negatively affected by the alienation and isolation she feels that she struggles with holding on to reality. She lapsed into a semi-catatonic state while at the Rachel and Leah Center, mumbling words she once said while working as a waitress, and had to be slapped by Moira, another inmate at the center, until she came some-what back to her senses (216). Later on, during a Salvaging, Ofwarren’s grip on reality is so tenuous that after helping to tear the Guardian to pieces, she goes around saying “You have a nice day” to the other handmaids (Atwood 281. Macionis 177).

Role Strain: While experienced in some degrees by all characters, Atwood uses the character of Serena Joy most effectively to show role strain. Serena Joy, the wife of the commander that Offred is assigned to, wants very much to have a child – after all, having a child is the only worthy thing women can do. But she is unable to become pregnant, so must use a Handmaid. On the one hand, she is somewhat proud of being of high enough social standing to deserve a Handmaid, on the other hand, the Handmaid is a constant irritant and reminder of her own failure. She is in conflict between her role as a wife and potential mother, as the direct authority over the Handmaid who she needs more than needs her, her high social standing yet failure to achieve pregnancy.

Ageism and Discrimination: Anyone who is too old to serve the society at large in a productive manner, especially women, are killed outright or sent to work at the Colonies, usually doing toxic-waste or nuclear-waste cleanup. They also sent all non-Caucasians to the Colonies during the early days of the regime. In the Colonies, people are barely fed and due to the dangerous nature of their work, most people rarely live three years (Atwood. Macionis 396).

Deviance and Deterrence: The threat of being sent to the Colonies, killed outright, lose your children and be retrained as a Handmaid are all strong deterrents in Gilead. The Gilead society has labeled a wide range of behaviors as not just illegal but deviant and sinful, from homosexuality and premarital sex to wearing clothing that isn’t legally permitted. Offred, by virtue of having a child with a divorced man, was deemed “unfit” and had her child taken from her (Atwood 105).

Clothing is used as a surprisingly strong method of conformance and deterrence. Women must wear long dresses that cover them from neck to ankle, and cover their heads with veils and nun-like wimples. The colors of these dresses show what their status is, and allows those in power to tell at a glance when someone is some place they are not supposed to be. Wearing clothing other than that which was legally permitted was cause to be arrested and sent to the Colonies (Atwood. Macionis 191. 214).

State church: There is only one legally sanctioned church, a fundamentalist Christian religion that, oddly enough, apparently doesn’t have any actual churches, only computer stations where people can purchase prayers for their health, wealth, children, etc. The church is essentially the entire Gilead society – every moment of every day is to be spent for the betterment of the society at large. Since it is now illegal for women to read, Bibles are locked up by the husbands, further enhancing the power of the men: the only way for women to know the Bible and teachings of the state Church are through them.

Underground economy: People are human, after all, and old habits are hard to break. Through the use of the blackmarket, the desire for cigarettes, alcohol, non-sanctioned clothing, old fashion magazines, fiction books, and illicit sex can be acquired. Of course, only those of the highest social status can take advantage of the blackmarket.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood has used numerous sociological concepts and a strong understanding of human psychology to create a believable, detailed authoritarian society that is best summed up in one single line: “A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze” (Atwood 165). Yet at the same time, she is also criticizing our own society and people, our lack of appreciation for the freedoms we, especially women, now enjoy. She is sounding a warning bell that we should not laugh off and minimize the dangers that exist within our own cultural milieu, and making a strong statement that the freedom we so strongly believe we live in is not free at all. Are we not ourselves just rats in a maze, living within the roles we are assigned and assign to ourselves, even though we believe we are free to choose? Do we not, far too often, overlook threats to our way of life that do not affect us directly? Are we not far too willing to give up small freedoms in the name of safety? These and the many other questions she raises in The Handmaid’s Tale are hard questions to ask, much harder questions to answer.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret 1985. The Handmaid’s Tale.New York: Fawcett Columbine

Macionis, John J. 2003. Sociology. 9^th Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Written for Professor Swanson’s Sociology I class at Pikes Peak Community College, 13^th October 2003.