The Handmaid’s Tale By Margaret Atwood: Portarayal Of A Dystopian Society
The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood, first published by Mcclelland and Stewart in 1985. The novel deals with questions, problems and predicaments which have a universal rather than culture-specific validity. The novel examines the cultural construction of female identity, language and historical memory. With no Canadian setting, the landscape of the novel is not geographical as cultural, but interior. While giving a shocking treatment to the of sex, procreation and love, “this novel takes on the character of grim prophetic vision of a future world where male chauvinism would have, once and for all, destroyed the finest chords of wifehood, motherhood and womanhood”.
Thus, The Handmaid’s Tale moves through the interior landscape of the protagonist rather than traversing the geophysical or cultural background. The novel is set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the centre of the Republic of Gilead, formerly known as Northen United States of America. The novel predicts “the horrors of a culture so frightened by normal sexuality that it codified and proscribed all such procreation, and created hierarchies. As the novel opens, the government of the United States has been over thrown several years earlier. The country has been taken over by Christian fundamentalists who have renamed it as the Republic of Gilead and made it into a theocratic state. The new ruling male theocracy is founded fundamentalist biblical principles and a social hierarchy designed to promote controlled procreation.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary and poignant tale that dramatizes a futuristic, bleak, totalitarian society where women are denied the basic rights. In other words, the novel depicts the social isolation of women and their separation into rigid, subservient gender role of wives, wombs, workers, whores, and the deprivation of their basic human rights such as the rights to education, jobs propert, citizenship and even one’s own name, and speech. The Handmaid’s Tale revolves around the first- person narrative of Offred, a thirty-three years old woman who is forced into the ranks of the Handmaids after a failed attempt to flee to Canada with her husband Luke and their young daughter. Offred, the protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale escapes from the Republic of Gilead to the Underground Female road to tell her tale of victimization as freedom of speech is a capital offence in Gilead and thus “Offred begins to extend her resisting rejections of Gileadean discourse by “reporting” them to others”. She uses “language” as a means of communication to unlock her inner feelings and bitter experiences as well as a “subversive-weapon” to raise her voice against the marginalization of women. Offred, the narrator-protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale is the victim of such a prohibition ordinance. The protagonist’s first person narrative in the form of a “diary” informs us about everyday life in the fundamentalist dystopian state called Gilead. The novel is an anti-utopia of the not-too-distant future as narrated by Offred, the Handmaid, a victim of theocracy. Offred has been appointed as a “Handmaid” to leading official called Commander to substitute for his old and infertile wife. Thus, in the Republic of Gilead fertile woman have to serve as Handmaids to the infertile wives of the “Commanders of the Faith” and surrender their progeny to their mistresses. The Bible is used by the regime as authority for their laws. The polygamy of the Old Testament provides them with sanction of Handmaids. They regard themselves as a latter-day Jacobs and use their Handmaids in a similar way in this new Gilead. In this way, the Republic of Gilead justifies its “sexists policies with the socio-biological theory of nature polygamy and legitimizes its racist and sexist policies as having biblical precedent”.
Offred is one of the many Handmaids in Gilead to be recruited for ‘breeding purposes’. The childless among the commanders of the Faithful get a Handmaid each. Male infertility in Gilead is unthinkable and as Offred says, “There are only women who are fruitful and woman who are barren, that’s the law” (61). The Handmaid must act as a surrogate mother and bear a child for the aging Commander with the collusion of his barren wife by a literal enactment of the device invented by Rachel in the Bible. If the Handmaid does not succeed by the end of her third two-years posting, she is declared an Unwoman and shipped off to the colonies.
Handmaids have no names of their own but acquire them from their Commanders. Inevitably, they are dressed in red, the colour of blood, which defines them. They are focused to wear long, full-sleeved red robes, closed red shoes, a headdress with a veil and white wings to limit their version. The wives who aid their husbands during the insemination, known simply as the ‘ceremony’, are in charge of household discipline and decide what television programmes the members of the household should be shown. They are clad in blue robes resembling those of the virgin. The Handmaids have been so successfully brainwashed that the abnormal becomes the normal for them, and the normal seems abnormal. For instance Offred and her companion Ofglen, visit the wall every time they go on their usual rounds; this is where almost as a matter of course the renegades of the regime are hanged. “What I feel toward them is blankness”(43) she says. On the other hand, Offred finds herself gawking at the Japanese tourist in their short skirts and spiked heels. “We are fascinated” she says “but also repelled. They seem so undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds about things like that” (38). Like women in purdah, the Handmaids seems to have regressed into a primitive, all women world. Atwood might have had the state of present day Iran in mind, but Gilead can find its reflection elsewhere too. To the interpreter’s question whether they are content, Offred answers, Yes we are happy” (39).
The fear of self-expression has led to an act of self-betray. Gilead is a highly alienating structure of society, especially for women. Women are prohibited from communicating with one another, under the ‘Divide and rule’ policy of patriarchy. Women are separated according to their functions, as Wives, Marthas (housekeepers), Handmaid (child-bears), Aunts (disciplinarians), and Jezebels (prostitutes), and kept in segregation. Marths are forbidden to become friendly with Handmaids; Wives regard Handmaids with hostility and envy; Aunts are used to oppress Handmaids; and Handmaids are not supposed to talk with each other. There is constant invigilation to prevent the forging of relationships among women. Women however overcome the externally imposed interpersonal alienation and reach out to one another secretly. The bonding among women and the slow forging of a caring sisterhood is a strategy by which female space is acquired in the novel. In Gilead, women are alienated from their own bodies by the elaborate clothes that have to be worn by them at all times, covering them fully in many layers. The Handmaid’s clothes are specially designed to hide bodily contours and the wings and veils are meant to prevent her “from seeing and also from being seen” (18). She is not even allowed to bathe by herself. Around her ovulation time, on the night before the “ceremony, felling completely dehumanized-“I wait, washed, brushed, fed like a prize pig” (79). Gileadean woman are alienated from the universe around them by the severe restriction on their freedom of movement. They are forbidden to read and write, for that is a man’s prerogative in Gilead. By thus being denied self-expression through writing and speaking and being denied perception of reality around them through reading, they are isolated from the world around them. However they try to keep in touch with the world through furtive reading, whenever possible and through a secret exchange of oral information with one another. When Gilead first came into being, the very step of the new regime had been to freeze women’s credit cards and bank accounts and take away their jobs and property rights, thus destroying their financial independence, which is the primary requisite in any true liberation of women. With the loss of her job, the protagonist had felt stripped of her independence and individuality, perceiving herself as a doll-wife, her husband’s possession.
A deliberate and systematic attempt is made in Gilead to obliterate all sense of individuality and identity in women, by taking away their names from them. The Aunts are given the names of popular brands of cake –mixes and cosmetics. The Handmaids lose their original individuating name. A Handmaid’s name indicates merely the male to whom she is assigned. The name “Offred” is composed of the preposition ‘of’ indicating possession and the name of her Commander. It is a Gileadean variation of the contemporary patronymic “Mrs. Fred. ”The separation of woman according to their functions in Gilead, promotes their fragmentation. The Wives are mainly decorative in functions and are dressed in blue. The middle-aged housekeepers, called Marthas, are dressed in green. When they become weak and sick and cease working, they are deported to the colonies. The Handmaids, dressed in red, are young women in their twenties pre thirties and serve as child-bearers to elderly childless Commanders. The Biblical precedent of Hagar, Bilhah and zilpah, who served Abraham and Jacob as Handmaids were quoted in support of the practice. Prostitution continued in Gilead, though its presence was assiduously denied by the Establishment. These women were dressed in feathers and sequins and the system of prostitution was justified as being dictated to by Nature: “Nature demands variety for men. It stands to reason, it’s part of the pro-creational the Handmaid’s role was the most dehumanized. Handmaids were valued only as walking wombs, for their child-bearing function, annihilating all other personal traits. They are a “national resources,’’(75) “containers,” (107) “two- legged wombs,” “sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. ” (146)
In the case of most of the Handmaids, Gilead succeeds in reducing woman’s perception of herself as a mere function. Offred experiences anguished disappointment at the onset of menstruation because of her failure to conceive: “I have failed once again to fulfil the expectations of others, which have become my own. ” (83) She herself thinks of herself only as a womb, i. e. only in the child-bearing context and regards herself as a failure when that functions is not fulfilled. In the separation of women into functions, wives become ornaments. Serena Joy’s way of creating female space in this context is through gardening. This is a device resorted to by many Wives in Gilead, reminding one of Alice Walker’s discovery about her mother’s garden: “Many of the Wives have such gardens, it’s something for them to order and maintain and care for. ” (22) That it is a subversive device and a symbol is made clear. “There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly into the light, as if to point, to say: whatever is silenced, will clamour to be heard, though silently. ” (161)The Aunts in Gilead are rigid, middle-aged women who have internalized patriarchal values and are used to impose them on other women. The basic principle of colonialism, “control of the indigenous by members of their own group” (320) is adapted in Gilead to the control of women, for it is believed that “The best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purpose was through women. Suicide is one of the ways in which the women in Gilead attempt escape from their intolerable oppression. Offred’s predecessor had hanged herself from the light fixture.
The Gilead administration therefore takes preventive measures to block this particular escape-route. In the Handmaid’s room, “They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to. ”(17) In the bathroom razors are removed: framed pictures have no glass and the window-pane-glass is shatter proof so that there is no “cutting edge” (18). Ofglen is a neighbour and fellow Handmaid of Offred and she has been partnered with Offred to do the shopping for the household each day. They are careful to appear perfectly pious to each other when they first meet. Months later, the two become more free to share their fears, opinions and desires with each other. Ofglen tells Offred that, she belongs to a secret, subversive society, named Mayday resistance and she gets Offred involved in it. But in contrast to relatively passive Offred, Ofglen is very daring. Ofglen later commits suicide before the government comes to take her away for being part of resistance. One of the worst deaths, the novel has to offer is Ofglen’s death, for she is not even spared the dignity of absence: she is replaced by another woman with the same, and essentially the same appearance. Then, one afternoon, Offred goes to her usual corner to wait for Ofglen. When the approaching woman reaches Offred, Offred realizes that it’s a different woman. Offred doesn’t know how she will be able to find out what happened to Ofglen, since they’re not supposed to be friends. She asks whether Ofglen was transferred, and the woman replies that she is Ofglen. This is the condition of women in Gilead, how they are dehumanized.
Offred, the Handmaid, in her “reduced circumstances” (99) obeys “ritualized subjugation” to the ruling elite because she knows what the statement “Give me children,or else…die” (genesis) means. She is compelled to discharge her duties as a Handmaid knowing fully well the consequences.
Under the pressure of terrifying alternatives, Offred feels: “I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject. ” (268). Offred is forced into pregnancy tests every month. The doctor who examines Offred and other Handmaids periodically for signs of pregnancy never even sees their faces. The Commanders who attempt to impregnate them once a month, are indifferent to their appearances is unimportant for them, the Handmaids are not given face cream. Their bath is regulated by others. Their eating of food is not chosen by them. They are fed only with what the authorities regard as healthy food. For minor offences like reading, their arms and legs which are seen as inessential for reproduction, are ruthlessly chopped off. As part of their “re-education” in submission, Offred and other Handmaids are made to watch pornography films from the seventies and eighties in which women appear in various attitudes of submission, brutalization, and grotesque mutilation. To keep obedient to the regime, the Handmaids are ordered to listen and utter the prayers which soul scroll machines say while printing them.
The Handmaids are also taught by the “Aunts,” the thought-police of Gilead, to walk with their heads bent down low. So silence and powerlessness go together in the lives of Offred and other Handmaids. Their predicament lucidly illustrates Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion in The second sex about man’s marginalization of woman. This view corroborates Michel Foucault’s observation about the power sex correlative. According to this observation the regime assigns roles to Handmaids, and decrees after social, religious, and cosmic concepts convenient to the interests and desires of the ruling elite. Consequently, Offred, the narrator-protagonist becomes the victim of a prohibition ordinance of sex in the Republic of Gilead. Offred feels the indignity and terror of living under a futuristic regime controlled by Christian fundamentalists. She is aware of her present reality which is oppressive denying her individuality, nurturance and autonomy. Her life turns into a painfully prolonged prison term.
