In Trump's America, The Handmaid's Tale matters more than ever

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum

52

Does It Hold Up is a chance to re-experience childhood favorites of books, movies, TV shows, video games, and other cultural phenomenon decades later. Have they gotten better like a fine wine, or are we drinking cork? This piece was originally published in December 2014.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a friend that I was in the middle of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “It’s like 1984 for feminists, right?” he asked. Sort of, I said. But it’s a lot scarier. It’s about how you’ll lose every right you have, and none of the men you know will care. Then I said he would probably betray me if they froze all women’s bank accounts. That was the peak of my paranoia, but it held on for several more days, as I read on the subway while half-consciously figuring out how I might theoretically escape to Canada. 1984 was for lightweights.

As a warning against totalitarian government, 1984 has become so culturally ubiquitous that it can cover almost anything. According to a recent check of Google News, net neutrality, GPS locators, a new U2 album, and “tolerance” are all Orwellian concepts. There’s a comforting, almost apolitical universality to it, because we can all happily agree that the world of 1984 is evil, then blithely map our own ideology onto how we’ll get there. Big Brother is anyone who disagrees with you — impersonal, unknowable, monstrous, and diluted into meaninglessness. The Handmaid’s Tale dares to name an enemy, and if you’re female, the enemy could be everyone you’ve ever loved.

Margaret Atwood Flickr

Margaret Atwood (Flickr / Mark Hill)

The Handmaid’s Tale is an evergreen cautionary fable in the women’s movement, but not long after I read it in high school, I relegated it to the realm of poetic but gimmicky literary science fiction and a certain era of American politics. Set in a totalitarian, Christian fundamentalist regime called "Gilead" in which women are property, it was written in 1985 — when the Moral Majority was going strong — and I read it during the George W. Bush administration, when abstinence-only education, purity balls, and the Westboro Baptist Church were all part of the national conversation.

As the times changed, it stopped feeling relevant. But when I read it again, as the internet was debating whether gendered harassment should just be considered a basic fact of life, I decided that was exactly why it still mattered.

Everything that I originally remembered from The Handmaid’s Tale was from its somewhat shallowly drawn dystopian future. The book’s America has been locked off and strictly gender-segregated, with women divided into classes based on fertility and obedience. Environmental disasters and war have ravaged the country, and Gilead’s leaders rule through tactics lifted from history’s worst dictators. A woman named Offred (literally "of Fred," the head of her household) is a Handmaid, one of increasingly few fertile women; she’s a surrogate womb for her de facto owner’s wife, but constantly in danger of being sent to one of the remote concentration camps where the old and infertile are worked to death. Under its flowing prose, it uses intentionally derivative ideas, and it was written a decade after the wildly original feminist science fiction of writers like James Tiptree, Jr. and Joanna Russ. Novels like A Walk to the End of the World and Swastika Night had already addressed similar premises, with less literary flair but more interesting speculation.

"I thought, already he’s starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you’re starting to get paranoid."

Beyond this, the book is unmistakably a product of its time in a way I hadn’t originally realized, full of references to lesbian separatist collectives, AIDS, and the porn-focused "sex wars" that saw radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin strike an unlikely alliance with Reagan-era religious conservatives. There’s a cruel and fairly direct swipe at Christian anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and televangelist Tammy Faye-Bakker, though Dworkin’s compatriots don’t come off much better. And it’s quite specific about how Gilead’s leaders come to power — a fringe religious group massacres top politicians and freezes women’s bank accounts — which makes it easy to dispute its realism. But as improbable as Gilead’s sudden formation is, the apathetic public response to it feels like a grotesquely accurate caricature of real life. Unlike 1984’s Winston Smith, Offred remembers the old world well. And the book’s real horror is not the fantastic future as much as the past.

Atwood covered ironic misogyny and the notion that sexism is over long before somebody thought to put "feminist" on the Time banned words list. When Offred muses about what she’s lost, she can’t do it without stumbling over one of the little indignities that many women are still expected to ignore, to pretend are just unimportant quirks in an otherwise equitable world: avoiding being out alone at night, having your husband’s job treated as a birthright and your own as an afterthought, expecting to be treated as a target anywhere you go. Offred spends the book looking for her lost husband, something that I found romantic on my first read. On my second, it was far more frustrating. Luke, in her memories, is well-meaning and kind. But there’s a constant tension, as he dismisses her fears about what will turn out to be a genocidal theocracy because the only people affected — until it’s too late — are women. "It’s only a job," he tells her, after she’s been summarily fired under martial law:

Hush, he said. … You know I’ll always take care of you. I thought, already he’s starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you’re starting to get paranoid.

Handmaid's Tale - MOVIE

The Handmaid's Tale was adapted into film in 1990. (A Piece of Monologue)

Her memories are ambiguous enough that it’s never clear which of those thoughts is right. The same goes for Offred’s memories of her mother, a radical feminist who chides her for her complacency and for failing to appreciate "how many women’s lives, how many women’s bodies, the tanks had to roll over" to get as far as her husband doing some cooking. It’s a strange, extreme, silly pronouncement — except that in retrospect, it will end up being completely appropriate.

Margaret Atwood is often credited with the quote "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." But killing, in The Handmaid’s Tale, is indirect. Unlike in any number of other gender dystopias, most men don’t oppress women because they hate or fear them, but because they can’t empathize enough to love them when it becomes inconvenient. "Better never means better for everyone," the head of Offred’s household reminds her, as he’s attempting to win her friendship. "It always means worse for some." And women gave up everything by empathizing too much and turning on each other to support the men they loved.

The Christian fundamentalism of The Handmaid’s Tale feels dated; no one worries these days about Westboro Baptist staging a coup d’etat. Sometimes, though, we use that to pretend that liberal or intellectual circles are magically enlightened. "New Atheism" was once a welcome opposition to evangelical culture; now, it’s becoming sadly associated with condescending evo-psych sexism and self-righteous attacks on anyone who challenges its progressive bona fides. One of Silicon Valley’s biggest benefactors, Peter Thiel, has lamented that letting women vote "rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron."

If we can't be trusted to name the obvious, why should we be trusted to know a dystopia when we see one?

Almost any American I know would condemn Atwood’s patched-together hellscape. But plenty of people, male and (less often) female, think that pointing out anything but the most egregious misogyny is silly, distracting, anti-religious, or "misandry." Women are 50 percent of the population, but let them get 33 percent of speaking time in film instead of 17 percent, or 30 seats in the Senate instead of 20, and we’ll be living in a matriarchal nightmare. We can’t even imagine what an equal world, a world where men and women face the same dangers, get the same opportunities, and have the same amount of power, would look like. To some extent, that equality probably isn’t even possible. But we’ve thrown ourselves into pretending that we’re already there, making do with an idea of egalitarianism where women are grudgingly tolerated, and the pay gap, abysmal rape statistics, and consistent underrepresentation in most of public life are simply matters of personal preference. If we can’t even be trusted to name the obvious, how can we say with any conviction that we’ll be able to recognize a dystopia when we see one?

The world of 1984 has never existed. Neither has the one of Brave New World, or A Clockwork Orange, or any of the other dystopias that are supposed to tell us about the human condition. But all you have to do to recreate The Handmaid’s Tale is go back a few hundred years or move to the right country. A paranoid, in this case, is just a woman in possession of all the facts.

Loading comments...