THE HANDMAID'S TALE
Margaret Atwood
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986
311 pp., $16.95 (cloth)
There is no balm in Gilead, only repression, regimentation, and joylessness. Taking a lesson from Iran's fundamentalists, America's homegrown mullahs have assassinated the president, exterminated the liberals on Capitol Hill, scrapped the Constitution, muzzled the press, and, in collusion with the army, proclaimed the Republic of Gilead, a Bible-believing Protestant utopia. Women have been liberated from liberation; fired from their jobs and deprived of credit cards, they have been thrust back into their proper domestic sphere. Sexual intercourse, other than for procreation, has been banned. Pornography, rock music, books, newspapers, and magazines have been proscribed; reading and writing are reserved to the privileged few whose orthodoxy is immaculate. Abortion and birth control rank with the most heinous crimes, and doctors who once promoted such practices are hunted down and hanged, their lifeless bodies prominently displayed on "The Wall" as a lesson to potential malefactors. The black "Children of Ham" are being rounded up and herded to North Dakota for resettlement. Jews are forced to convert to Protestantism or emigrate to Israel; recalcitrants are ferreted out and executed. Catholics, Quakers, and Jehovah's Witnesses face eradication. The saints reign in Zion, instruments of God's will and agents of his wrath. If you think Reagan is bad, warns Miss Atwood, wait till Jerry Falwell pulls the levers of power.
In pre-Gilead days, Offred, the protagonist of The Handmaid's Tale, typified a species of young woman that abounds in contemporary America. Well-educated, employed, liberated, she coupled freely and casually and, as she recalls, "used to think….as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives." Marriage and a child only heightened her bliss; she thrived in a world where smart young career women breakfasted on granola, dined in chichi little restaurants, fattened their bank accounts, drove Saabs, and enrolled their offspring in progressive day-care centers. And then the iron fist of repression smashed her cozy existence.
In a desperate attempt to escape to Canada (Miss Atwood is, not coincidentally, Canadian), she, her husband, and daughter were seized by the police and separated, never to be reunited. After a stint at the Rachel and Leah Re-education Center, Offred was admitted to the Order of Handmaids, whose function is to produce children for the ruling Commanders whose wives cannot conceive. After two unsuccessful assignments she finds herself stationed in the home of Commander Fred (hence her name, "Of-Fred") in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Massachusetts, that is, in the pre-Gilead era). With the birth-rate disastrously reduced because of nuclear mishaps, toxic spills, and pollution of the atmosphere, Offred is a "national resource," or, as she says, "a two-legged womb," with nothing to do but while away endless boring days. Fed, vitamined, and bathed, she exists solely for the monthly "Ceremony," a passionless ritual in which the Commander plants his seed in hopes of harvesting a crop nine months later.
Ignorant of the Religious Right, feminist writer Marge Piercy has lavished praise upon The Handmaid's Tale
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