In the Reading Eyewitness to History: a Slaveã¢â‚¬â„¢s Life: Who Was the Author?
Essay
Margaret Atwood on What 'The Handmaid's Tale' Means in the Age of Trump
In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially chosen "The Handmaid's Tale." I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my virtually illegible scrawlings using a huge High german-keyboard transmission typewriter I'd rented.
The keyboard was High german considering I was living in Due west Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in identify, and was not to crumble for another v years. Every Dominicus the East German Air Strength made sonic booms to remind usa of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Fe Curtain — Czechoslovakia, Eastward Deutschland — I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey data, and these had an influence on what I was writing. And so did the repurposed buildings. "This used to belong to . . . but then they disappeared." I heard such stories many times.
Having been born in 1939 and come up to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could besides be as fast as lightning. "Information technology tin can't happen here" could non be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.
By 1984, I'd been avoiding my novel for a twelvemonth or two. It seemed to me a risky venture. I'd read extensively in scientific discipline fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high schoolhouse years in the 1950s, but I'd never written such a book. Was I up to it? The form was strewn with pitfalls, amongst them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in information technology to be real. One of my rules was that I would non put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the "nightmare" of history, nor any engineering science not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.
Back in 1984, the main premise seemed — even to me — fairly outrageous. Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal republic into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution and Congress are no longer: The Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that accept always lain beneath the mod-mean solar day America we idea we knew.
The firsthand location of the book is Cambridge, Mass., home of Harvard Academy, now a leading liberal educational institution but in one case a Puritan theological seminary. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks, researching my New England ancestors every bit well equally the Salem witchcraft trials. Would some people be affronted by the utilize of the Harvard wall as a display area for the bodies of the executed? (They were.)
In the novel the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and the ability to take feasible babies is at a premium. (In today's real world, studies are now showing a sharp fertility decline in Chinese men.) Nether totalitarianisms — or indeed in any sharply hierarchical society — the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, and so the elite of the authorities suit to accept fertile females assigned to them every bit Handmaids. The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his ii wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. 1 man, four women, 12 sons — but the handmaids could not claim the sons. They belonged to the respective wives.
And and then the tale unfolds.
When I first began "The Handmaid's Tale" it was called "Offred," the proper noun of its cardinal character. This name is composed of a man's get-go name, "Fred," and a prefix cogent "belonging to," so it is like "de" in French or "von" in German, or similar the suffix "son" in English language last names like Williamson. Within this proper name is concealed another possibility: "offered," cogent a religious offering or a victim offered for sacrifice.
Why do nosotros never learn the real proper name of the key graphic symbol, I have often been asked. Because, I reply, so many people throughout history take had their names changed, or accept simply disappeared from view. Some take deduced that Offred'south existent name is June, since, of all the names whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium/dormitory, "June" is the only ane that never appears again. That was not my original thought just it fits, so readers are welcome to it if they wish.
At some fourth dimension during the writing, the novel's name changed to "The Handmaid's Tale," partly in honor of Chaucer'due south "Canterbury Tales," merely partly as well in reference to fairy tales and folk tales: The story told by the cardinal character partakes — for subsequently or remote listeners — of the unbelievable, the fantastic, as do the stories told by those who have survived earth-shattering events.
Over the years, "The Handmaid's Tale" has taken many forms. It has been translated into 40 or more languages. It was made into a film in 1990. It has been an opera, and it has also been a ballet. Information technology is existence turned into a graphic novel. And in April 2017 information technology will get an MGM/Hulu television series.
In this series I have a small-scale cameo. The scene is the i in which the newly conscripted Handmaids are existence brainwashed in a sort of Cherry-red Guard re-didactics facility known as the Red Middle. They must learn to renounce their previous identities, to know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no existent rights merely will exist protected upwardly to a point if they conform, and to call up so poorly of themselves that they volition accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run abroad.
The Handmaids sit in a circumvolve, with the Taser-equipped Aunts forcing them to bring together in what is now called (but was non, in 1984) the "slut-shaming" of 1 of their number, Jeanine, who is being made to recount how she was gang-raped as a teenager. Her mistake, she led them on — that is the chant of the other Handmaids.
Although it was "only a television prove" and these were actresses who would be giggling at java break, and I myself was "but pretending," I plant this scene horribly upsetting. It was way likewise much similar fashion too much history. Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yeah, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the claw: We see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly accept positions of ability over other women, fifty-fifty — and, peradventure, peculiarly — in systems in which women every bit a whole have scant power: All power is relative, and in tough times any corporeality is seen equally amend than none. Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, and think they are doing the Handmaids a favor: At least they haven't been sent to clean upward toxic waste product, and at least in this brave new globe they won't get raped, not as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists. Some are opportunists. And they are skillful at taking some of the stated aims of 1984 feminism — like the anti-porn entrada and greater safety from sexual assail — and turning them to their ain reward. As I say: real life.
Which brings me to three questions I am often asked.
First, is "The Handmaid'south Tale" a "feminist" novel? If you lot mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral selection, no. If you mean a novel in which women are man beings — with all the diverseness of character and behavior that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yep. In that sense, many books are "feminist."
Prototype
Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an reconsideration of nature, they are non secondary players in human destiny, and every social club has e'er known that. Without women capable of giving nativity, human being populations would dice out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population. Kill their babies and replace their babies with yours, equally cats practice; brand women have babies they tin't afford to raise, or babies y'all will then remove from them for your own purposes, steal babies — information technology'south been a widespread, age-quondam motif. The control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive authorities on the planet. Napoleon and his "cannon provender," slavery and its always-renewed human merchandise — they both fit in here. Of those promoting enforced childbirth, it should be asked: Cui bono? Who profits by it? Sometimes this sector, sometimes that. Never no one.
The second question that comes upwards ofttimes: Is "The Handmaid's Tale" antireligion? Once again, information technology depends what you may mean by that. True, a grouping of authoritarian men seize control and attempt to restore an extreme version of the patriarchy, in which women (like 19th-century American slaves) are forbidden to read. Further, they tin't command coin or have jobs outside the home, unlike some women in the Bible. The regime uses biblical symbols, as any authoritarian regime taking over America doubtless would: They wouldn't be Communists or Muslims.
The modesty costumes worn by the women of Gilead are derived from Western religious iconography — the Wives clothing the bluish of purity, from the Virgin Mary; the Handmaids wear cherry, from the claret of parturition, only as well from Mary Magdalene. Also, cherry is easier to see if you lot happen to be fleeing. The wives of men lower in the social scale are called Econowives, and wearable stripes. I must confess that the face-hiding bonnets came not simply from mid-Victorian costume and from nuns, just from the Old Dutch Cleanser packet of the 1940s, which showed a woman with her confront hidden, and which frightened me equally a child. Many totalitarianisms have used clothing, both forbidden and enforced, to place and control people — think of xanthous stars and Roman majestic — and many have ruled behind a religious front end. It makes the creation of heretics that much easier.
In the book, the dominant "organized religion" is moving to seize doctrinal control, and religious denominations familiar to united states are being annihilated. Simply as the Bolsheviks destroyed the Mensheviks in order to eliminate political competition and Red Guard factions fought to the decease against 1 some other, the Catholics and the Baptists are being targeted and eliminated. The Quakers have gone secret, and are running an escape route to Canada, every bit — I suspect — they would. Offred herself has a private version of the Lord's Prayer and refuses to believe that this authorities has been mandated by a just and merciful God. In the real earth today, some religious groups are leading movements for the protection of vulnerable groups, including women.
And then the book is not "antireligion." It is confronting the utilise of faith every bit a front for tyranny; which is a unlike thing altogether.
Is "The Handmaid'due south Tale" a prediction? That is the third question I'thou asked — increasingly, as forces within American society seize power and enact decrees that embody what they were saying they wanted to do, even dorsum in 1984, when I was writing the novel. No, information technology isn't a prediction, because predicting the future isn't really possible: At that place are likewise many variables and unforeseen possibilities. Allow's say it's an antiprediction: If this future can be described in particular, maybe information technology won't happen. Only such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.
So many different strands fed into "The Handmaid's Tale" — group executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn program of the SS and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of slavery, the history of American polygamy . . . the list is long.
But there's a literary class I haven't mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story every bit all-time she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may exist discovered later on, by someone who is complimentary to understand it and share it. This is an human activity of promise: Every recorded story implies a hereafter reader. Robinson Crusoe keeps a journal. So did Samuel Pepys, in which he chronicled the Great Fire of London. So did many who lived during the Black Expiry, although their accounts often stop abruptly. So did Roméo Dallaire, who chronicled both the Rwandan genocide and the earth's indifference to it. So did Anne Frank, hidden in her hole-and-corner annex.
In that location are two reading audiences for Offred's account: the ane at the end of the book, at an bookish conference in the time to come, who are free to read but who are not always as compassionate as 1 might wish; and the private reader of the book at whatever given time. That is the "real" reader, the Beloved Reader for whom every writer writes. And many Dear Readers volition become writers in their plow. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a volume speaking to us.
In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Bones civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades, and indeed the by centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and contemptuousness for autonomous institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere — many, I would guess — are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will call up, and tape later, if they tin can.
Volition their letters be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an sometime house, backside a wall?
Permit us promise it doesn't come to that. I trust it will non.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html
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