It is indeed an impossible thing, on finishing Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, to shake off her unique vision of dystopia. While her predecessors in the genre, particularly Orwell and Huxley, dreamed of world orders that were arguably still quite distant from our own, Atwood anchors her political nightmare with harrowing details and timely specificity. Hulu’s web-series adaptation, which finished its second season this past summer, updates the settings while losing nothing of the novel’s horrific structure.
Atwood’s characters occupy a near future in which the United States of America has been overthrown in a violent coup and replaced by an oppressive, pseudo-Christian government called the Republic of Gilead. To cope with widespread infertility (itself one of the motives for revolution), officials have instituted the use of ‘handmaids’, fertile women used as surrogates by Gilead’s political elite. Justification for the practice is taken from the Genesis account of Rachel, who presented the handmaid Bilhah to her husband as a way to bypass her sterility and have children.
In what’s known in the book and show as ‘the ceremony’, Gilead’s handmaids are systematically raped on a monthly basis. Between pregnancies and births, they live lives stripped of everything from freedom of movement to their own names – the protagonist is known as Offred, literally “of Fred”, the name of her commander. They’re herded by a class of women known as the Aunts, with the ever-present Aunt Lydia guiding them through the proceedings with a mix of tenderness, taser prods and Deuteronomy. Offred and her companions’ attempts to assert whatever agency they have left is met with mixed results. The action, when it comes, is brief. And violent.
The novel may have been written in 1985, but the show’s release in 2017 wedges it irrevocably into our politically fraught moment: depictions of the time before Gilead’s creation look suspiciously like our own. Protests resemble the Women’s March, cultural pundits debate reproductive anxiety and proto-Gilead supporters use freedom of speech to lock in appearances on campus. It all hits a little too close to home, raising concerns that the series itself would be appropriated as another volley in our current culture war.
Which is exactly what happened: it became the show-of-the-moment and people on all sides of the cultural divide took to using it as gunpowder. Some outlets argued the series serves as a warning for conservative women everywhere, while others claimed Gilead to be a logical consequence of the sexual revolution. For a few weeks, it seemed like everyone from The New Yorker to The Guardian to Rolling Stone was drawing lines in the sand. What we weren’t prepared for, in those early days, was how The Handmaid’s Tale would prove to be so much more.
A well-documented tendency of an increasingly polarized culture is how, when people perceive themselves as under threat, group dynamics encourage the dumbing down of complex issues to one-dimensional talking points. It seemed, at least in the early episodes, that The Handmaid’s Tale was heading down this path: the heroes are resourceful, witty, empowered women (editors, professors, activists) lined up against naive, brutal, religious fundamentalists. Everything was set so the story could run like a well-oiled script, telling us more about our cultural assumptions than about our shared, messy humanity. But what makes the show so surprising, not to say refreshing, is how it resists this impulse well into the new season.
Part of what the series does so well is taking some of the most divisive topics of our moment – religion, say, or misogyny – and rarely settling for ideological cheap shots or soapbox characters. Take Offred, for example. Known before Gilead as June, she starts the second season running away from the regime and holes herself up in what used to be the offices of the Boston Globe. Despite Gilead having appropriated Old Testament language and symbols for their fundamentalist, totalitarian nightmare, she stands vigil for victims of the state with nothing less than prayer: “God, by whose mercy the faithful departed have found rest, please send your holy angel to watch over this place. Through Christ our Lord, amen.” Instead of rooting oppression in something as broad and diverse as religion, The Handmaid’s Tale outlines a complex story of revenge and humility, humanity and complicity, of how inescapable the spiritual impulse can be even among people who have been wounded in the name of God.
Or take Serena Joy, the mistress of the household Offred finds herself in. She represents so much of what the modern world rejects: the oppression of women, the domination of religion over the state, the totalitarian impulse itself. But in the past she was a public intellectual, one of the prominent figures in the creation of Gilead, now reduced to a voiceless domestic accessory. Her wavering between complicity and resistance has launched dozens of confused thinkpieces wondering if she should ultimately be an object of revulsion or sympathy. Or an object at all. What’s revolutionary in her treatment is that nothing she does is softened: she’s both monster and victim. Serena becomes a symbol of so much of what’s become anathema in our culture, and yet the show creates space in a way to dialogue with her person, her position and her worldview. And if we can imagine ourselves in Serena’s shoes, we can do the same for our co-workers, our relatives, anyone we can’t stand on the internet.
This is what’s crucial about The Handmaid’s Tale: in a culture increasingly satisfied with drawing battle lines across ideologies, political policies or identities, the show instead gives us the option to enter the experience of a problematic other. It complicates narratives and encourages viewers to challenge the black-and-white paradigms we receive from our echo chambers. It suggests an alternative to culture war, and reminds us that there are controversies and differences that may not just disappear. That we may need to learn how to approach the things we loathe. That learning to sit in that tension, to refuse tidy answers, is a way of honestly approaching things as we they are. That this all comes with a price. And that maybe, just maybe, we can start feeling our way out of these trenches.
Josh Nadeau is currently holed up in Kyrgyzstan and, when not writing or jotting notes, may be found winter cycling, hitchhiking or engaged in general shenanigans. He hopes, when he’s older, to maintain a sense of awe.
Can you give an example of what you mean by how the”proto-Gilead supporters use freedom of speech to lock in appearances on campus”?
Do you perhaps mean those who disagree with the liberal establishment’s views and believe that fertile, faithful, and permanent marriage between one man and one woman is best for women, men, children, and society? And doesn’t that phrase perhaps include scorn for those who believe that it is awfully hypocritical for the liberal establishment to champion freedom of speech while banishing free speech from their opponents?
Wouldn’t it be more than a bit nasty and judgemental to imply that those of us who want to follow God’s laws for our protection in marriage are “proto-Gileads?”
I tried following the world’s views myself during the 1960s, and I came limping back to the Church because I realized from observing what happened around me and to me that God is not a Big Meanie in the sky and the rules against misuse of our God-given sexuality are for our protection.
The premise of Handmaid’s Tale has always seemed to me to be generated by and to foster paranoia.
After the success of Atwood’s book, more women than ever became likely to say, “I don’t want to be a baby factory!” They have been duped into believing that their happiness is best served by freely available contraception and abortion and even freedom from marriage. The Catholic Church knows different and teaches us there is a kinder more life-affirming way.
Women are not free when all that is offered them is “guy sex,” the kind of sex that is focused on genital satisfaction, with no emotional attachment promised and with license to casually move on to the next partner. “Guy sex” ignores the emotional and physical satisfactions of true intimacy, which is not prevented–by barriers, chemicals, or unnatural hormones or the shaming of natural feelings of possessiveness–from finding its true completion in marriage, conception, pregnancy, birth, nursing, and child raising, which all are intrinsic parts of our feminine nature. Instead many women have been convinced that to be free is to be able to act like the worst of men, and in the process to deny our full sexual fulfillment, which, in spite of the Playboy ethic our society has internalized, does not stop at the orgasm.
There is no need to “refuse tidy answers.” The Church, not our “echo-chamber,” is the source of the correct–although much dreaded by some–black and white answers. And because God is a gentleman, He doesn’t force us to accept His truths. So, we are free to reject them, to our harm, if we are more comfortable taking refuge in fuzzy shades of grey that don’t contradict the dominant culture.
The things that “everybody knows” change from one era to another. “Everybody knew” that undesirables should be removed from the gene pool, which led to the Nazi and other genocidal atrocities. “Everybody knows” now that contraception, abortion, sex outside of marriage of any natural or unnatural variety are to be championed as if they were positive goods.
The concomitant atrocities of millions of abortions and the unhappiness of many women, and men, who are used without love, marriage, and children raised without stable families are already commonplace, and it is easy to imagine a not distant dystopian future when the popular commonly held fallacies about sexual freedom are lived out to their logical and atrocious conclusions in horrible ways that exceed anything Atwood could imagine.
Hi Roseanne!
I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding – when I mention how “proto-Gilead supporters use freedom of speech to lock in appearances on campus” I’m referring to how in the show there was a flashback to when Serena Joy and her husband promoted their views at a university. Major protests appeared and turned violent in a way that reflects campus protest politics today. But the sentence describes events in the show when literal proto-Gilead supporters were upping their influence in the country, rather than branding actual conservative campus speakers as proto-Gilead.
For me, the choice to associate our political moment with the formation of a state like Gilead had me worried, much like you, that this was going to be used as a two-dimensional bat to hit ‘those bad conservatives’ over the head with. The unexpected thing that happened, to a relief that both of us can share, is that ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ as a show avoids a kind of partisanship that could have been really, really lazy. It points out elements of hyprocrisy, among both conservatives and liberals. And even though it obviously leans towards the left it still educates people who identify as liberal about what it means to have empathy with your ideological opponents. June’s prayer and Serena’s sympathetic-yet-uncompromising potrayal are revolutionary when you put them in our cultural moment today. And that’s something that can be unequivocably celebrated, even if there are other elements of the show that people can legit take issue with.
About whether or not the story’s premise is about fostering or generating paranoia, I’d say that in one sense it certainly does. But that’s what the best science fiction (or ‘speculative fiction’, as Atwood herself once pushed as a label) does. It takes a societal element to an extreme and uses that scenario to challenge our perceptions and ask necessary questions. And the fact that there’s a rising sub-genre of reproduction-based speculative fiction implies that there are a number of questions that we yet haven’t resolved. These aren’t questions of belief or doctrine so much as how our beliefs should manifest themselves in the world. Like, as in how they interact with other beliefs in a secular system. What the balance is between freedom and doing harm – whose ‘harm’ or experience of trauma takes higher priority, and so on. The Church proposes answers, but the gap between those answers and how people try to implement them in the world is a whole other question.
What I like about ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, and why I think it’s so important to people on either side of our polarized divide, is that it blows open certain debates that need to be had. And these aren’t only about freedom of choice, the rights of the unborn or the meaning of fertility, but about what it means to have a common humanity in in the wake of trauma, repression, political inequality and ideological disagreement. The book/show is far from perfect, but we’ll be richer as a culture for taking its questions seriously.
(Re: something else mentioned by Roseanne. It deserves a separate comment because it’s very much a separate issue)
I think you bring up something really important when you say “[t]here is no need to ‘refuse tidy answers.’ The Church, not our ‘echo-chamber,’ is the source of the correct–although much dreaded by some–black and white answers.”
This speaks to a tension that might underlie a lot of the ideological pressures within our culture. In my opinion, and this would be a post/discussion all by itself, one of the reasons that genuine culture war starts is when our idea of what truth is (a particular philosophy/spirituality/approach, like for example liberal humanism or Catholicism) gets mixed up with an echo-chamber that rises up around it. Just because someone believes right things (or what we think to be right things) doesn’t mean that their actions/attitudes can’t get distorted by an echo chamber of folks who believe the same. This can lead them to do bad things in the name of said rightness. And then the people who end up suffering because of this might reject even the good/right thing behind it because of the bad things done in its name.
This is what was behind the discussion of unChurch in the series posted a while back about Spotlight: https://dappledthings.org/9623/beyond-the-spotlight-part-ii-or-night-time/. Unfortunately we’re still developing a cultural language do engage with these kinds of nuances and we’re not there yet. We move forward but slowly.
Thanks, Josh, for your good reply. I wrote another reply after I read your reply and the Spotlight essay, but my flaky mouse did its slippery little trick of suddenly moving me away from what I was writing onto another page, and it all disappeared.
Maybe two sentences will do. Combing through negative portrayals of religious believers in secular books and music to seek out glimmers of tolerance for religion or for people who believe in traditional sexual morality is not the way to counter the evil things some so-called Christian believers have done. The only way is to show people The Way, which is Christ and the Church He founded, and the only way we really can help show people the way is by becoming holy ourselves.
Hi Roseanne, thanks again for the thoughtful response.
We agree on a lot of things, but one part where we might not is about what we should be doing in reaction to how the world’s been spinning. I totally agree that getting closer to God, as the source of peace, is going to bring people to peace. But sometimes our way of trying to show people this is the case can be flawed, and sometimes these flaws bloom into blind spots or problematic behaviours that can end up damaging people.
If this is sometimes the case (and I think it is – maybe this is where our disagreement lies?), then we have a couple options in front of us. We can a) keep going like we have always done, ie doing damage while thinking we’re doing good, or b) try to understand where our blind spots are and try to encounter reality in a more full way.
Going through art, especially art produced by groups we may not have direct access to/be in agreement with can be a huge help in helping resolve those blind spots. Going back to the Spotlight essays, “combing through negative portrayals of religious believers in secular books and music” isn’t about finding “glimmers of tolerance for religion” or whatnot. It’s about using their legit concerns about us to actually assess whether or not we’re screwing up majorly in our attempts to do what is good and right.
And I think that the anti-partisan framework of The Handmaid’s Tale is an incredible step on the part of the left to address some of these issues. We don’t need to agree with everything a piece of art stands for in order to praise what it does tremendously, refreshingly right.
Huzzah- this is the most sensible thing I’ve read on the interwebs about the Handmaid’s Tale. Thanks for highlighting the alternatives to over-hyped partisanship.