so we just finished reading margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale in english, and boy let me tell you what a RIDE it has been. i personally don’t really want to put myself or anyone reading this through the pain of rehashing this bleak world, but there’s little to be said about it otherwise, so here we are.
first of all, this book is sad. and not in the boo-hoo weepy way, but in the sour sinking-feeling-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach way. i never wanted to but this book down once i got into reading a section, but i also never wanted to pick it back up again after. it’s definitely something that caters to a morbid curiosity we have for chaos (among other things).
the government was massacred and completely overthrown by christian extremists, their rule gradually tightening its grip into what is now the republic of gilead. women’s value is assigned based on two things: how “morally corrupt” they are, and their ability to bear children. offred is our narrator and a handmaid, a woman whose sole function in society is to have children in a state where populations have been decimated by diseases causing death and infertility. she describes this world as she experiences it, with the occasional flashback to her life before the republic and the limbo period between that and becoming a handmaid.
we want this world to be unfathomable. we want it to be impossible. we don’t want to ever consider for a second that any aspect of this world could ever exist – this pious, totalitarian nightmare. and what’s scarier is that it could happen, that it is happening, somewhere in some way. certainly not to such extremes, but freedom is a privilege not all of us our granted. the book discusses this as well – this “freedom to” versus “freedom from.” there is a freedom to autonomy for women, but there is also a freedom from men’s unwanted attention to women; the republic has chosen the latter, and its citizens suffer for it.
i’m someone who has always been vehemently independent, and the thought of losing my autonomy (especially in such an extreme setting as this one) makes my skin crawl. this society, this world of the handmaid’s tale, is abhorrent. the thought of my existence becoming nothing more than my body is terrifying, but i cannot help but fear its possibility. sure, it’s an extreme state of mind, but in this day and age, even the ability to fear it is a virtue.
