Blessed Be the Fruit
Another Book for the Wood Pile
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
The Stats
I’ll summarize: this book gets challenged a lot. According to Atwood, it was banned in Spain and Portugal for a time, but I couldn’t verify this myself. (If you can, will you comment and link to a source?) It made number 7 of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2019.1 And it was just banned by the Nampa School Board in Idaho in May of 2022. The ages of the kids who were assigned The Handmaid’s Tale as optional reading? A senior AP English class. In this article, the father of a student who co-owns a used bookstore said the following:
“You’re not looking at a 5-year-old reading ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ You’re talking about a senior who is taking AP English. My son is 18 years old. He had to sign up for the draft.”
Old enough to go to war. Not old enough to read a few F-bombs. What exactly is going on here?
For…did you guess it?
Sex. Well, the specific reasons cited for the 2019 bans are “vulgarity and sexual overtones.” For being offensive. Rude. Well, I’m not sure what anyone was expecting from a dystopian speculative fiction novel about a right-wing theocratic takeover of the United States. Maybe someone should write it more…politely next time. You know, in keeping with the themes of violent government overthrows.
The gist of it.
In a future where toxic pollution and radiation has rendered most humans on the planet infertile, a right-wing theocratic political group, known as the “Sons of Jacob,” overthrows the United States government. The president is assassinated, the members of Congress gunned down in machine gun fire.
With the government gone, the Sons of Jacob take over the army, organize a stand-in government and declare a state of emergency. The attacks are blamed on Islamic fanatics and the Constitution is temporarily suspended. Roadblocks are erected. Immediately new laws are put into place. Individual rights are nullified.
First, the pornomarts are closed down. Then women are forbidden from having jobs, told to leave or face consequences. Their bank accounts are closed, with only a husband or male next-of-kin allowed access to the money. Protests erupt, but they end quickly when the military starts gunning down protestors indiscriminately. The Republic of Gilead has arisen.
The story is told from the point of view of Offred, a name temporarily given to her when she joins the family of Commander Fred. Of Fred. She writes the pages we read secretly, detailing her life as a handmaid in the household of a Commander, one of the elite leaders of Gilead, and his wife Serena Joy. They are unable to have children. More precisely, according to the doctrine of Gilead, Serena is unable to have children. But Offred stands in the gap. Her job is to have sex with the commander whenever she is ovulating with the hopes that she will give Serena a child.
Through a series of written memories and daily recounting, we see the world of Gilead through the handmaid’s eyes. We hear her conversations, the rituals and routine of the new world that has sprung up around her. We learn of a husband from her former life, Luke, who she fears is dead, potentially killed in their attempt to escape to Canada. We learn of her daughter, a school-aged girl who has been taken away and given to an elite family of Gilead. Her life, one continuous monotony in a neopuritanical society. Until it isn’t.
The Red Center
The reeducating of the handmaids at the Red Center is a frequent flashback. Offred details first going there after her capture. Running into women she knew. Being taught what it meant to be a handmaid in the newly erected Gilead. Aunt Lydia is the teacher. Her and Aunt Elizabeth strike fear into the hearts of the women there. They torture them with cattle prods. Publicly shame and ridicule them. Threaten them with exile to The Colonies if they do not assimilate. Behave. Become handmaids.
In one particularly painful scene, Aunt Elizabeth instructs the handmaids to surround a girl who confesses she had been gang raped years earlier. The other handmaids join the Aunts in chanting after she is asked:
“And who’s fault was it?”
“Her fault, her fault, her fault.”
“Who tempted them?”
“She did, she did, she did.”
The Aunts work in this way at the center. Turning the handmaids-in-training against one another. Against themselves. Tormenting them with blame until they internalize it. Believe it.
Aunt Lydia represents the devilish nun with a ruler. Worse. The Nazi Aufsehren, female guards at the women’s concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. She is a fanatic. A true believer who will stop at nothing to see Gilead succeed. To see children born to the elites of the nation, the commanders and their wives. She quotes twisted versions of bible verses to the “girls,” as she so fondly calls them.
“Blessed be the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed be the meek. Blessed are the silent. I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out, too, but there was no way of checking. Blessed be those that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
By the time the women leave the Red Center, they are outwardly, fully converted. They know their place in society. They are bearers of children. Vessels. Blessed. Only fertile women can be handmaids. The alternative for the ones who aren’t or refuse to comply? Cleaning up toxic waste in The Colonies. The choice is no choice at all: it’s handmaid or death.
A Dress for Every Occasion
In Gilead, appearances are everything. The roles in society are spelled out neatly. Methodically. And you dress for the job.
The Handmaids wear red dresses, stockings so not an ankle can be seen. White bonnets that extend out past the eyes and encompass the entire face, like horse blinders. They can not look out into the world, and no one can look at them. They are at the center of a society obsessed with reproduction, yet completely anonymized. Invisible. They are, in many ways, the lowest class of Gilead. Lonely women who sit, and walk, and shop, and wait. Until their time comes to meet with the Commander.
The Wives wear blue. Their dresses are more expensive, lighter in the summer heat. They live lives of quiet obscurity, but they are the only women who have any form of power. The only ones besides the Aunts. Only in charge of their households and women from lesser classes, they spend their time knitting, smoking, drinking. Their lives are completely, utterly boring.
The Marthas, who handle the cooking and cleaning, wear green. Offred hears them gossip, knows they think less of the Handmaids because of the nature of their duties. They are cut off from the friendships with other women that many of the Marthas and the wives still enjoy, albeit limited due to the danger of any dissenting opinion against Gilead.
There are Econowives, those whose function is to do all things required by the women of Gilead: they bear children, clean the house, do the will of their husbands. They wear stripes, indicating their many functions. They are given to the men who do not hold Commander status, the lower class of Gilead. The Guardians, for example, who work for the Commanders. If the Econowives can not bear children, no Handmaid will be assigned to her family. That right is reserved for the elite.
The Unwomen are the bottom class of women in Gilead. They are those who were unwed, divorced, educated, activists, journalists, adulteresses, or “gender traitors”, the term for LGBTQ people in Gilead, in the time before the overthrow. They hold no rights as citizens. They are not protected under any laws. They can be arbitrarily detained, sent to The Colonies, or hung from The Wall for all to see. This sentence hangs over the Handmaid’s heads if they do not produce a child for their commander. They get three postings, a total of six years, before they are deemed failures.
The Jezebels are the last class of women. Unofficial, possibly only known only among the men of Gilead, these women are forced prostitutes. They provide entertainment and sex outside of the confines of Gilead’s strict purity laws. Offred is taken to a brothel filled with Jezebels by her commander. In the scene, we find out that the ruling class of Gilead doesn’t actually believe in or follow their own edicts for the country. They have the appearance of purity, austerity, passion. But in reality, they drink, dress women in lacy lingerie. They reap the rewards of total control as they punish the masses. Hypocrites, all of them.
Reading
Women are forbidden from reading. Offred secretly keeps a journal, the writing we read as a found artifact after the fall of Gilead. The penalty for such a crime, death, or worse, The Colonies. When the women are sent to the Red Center, they can not read bible verses. They can only listen to them on a recording. The voice that reads them is a man’s.
The Aunts, the Wives, none of them are allowed to hold a book. All such things are locked away so that women can not get their hands on them. Even the signs of the shops where the women get their food and household staples are taken down and replaced with pictures to prevent women from reading a word.
Religion of Gilead
I thought this was a fascinating part of the story. There is a definitive nod to Christianity. The commander reads from the bible to his household. There are prayer gatherings. The language is adopted from biblical language.
The very concept of a handmaid is taken from the story of Rachel and Leah, the two wives of Jacob. When Rachel can not conceive, she asks Jacob to sleep with her handmaid.
“And she said, behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.”
-From the Bible, King James Version, Genesis 30:1-3
Mirroring this, the handmaids are made to lay in the lap of the Commander’s Wives as they are raped. A body between a man and wife. A container to hold a baby, and nothing more.
While the Republic of Gilead uses the bible to shape and justify many of their practices, they are not Christian in any historical sense. They function as a breakaway cult would. Changing the scriptures from their original writing to something that fits in with their version of the world. One where women are totally submitted to men in every way. Their goal? Procreation. A sexually pure society where sex is for reproduction. Nothing more.
The resistors Offred hears about? The Amish. Baptists. Methodists. Catholic nuns. Jewish resistors. Feminists. Rebels. There are networks of religious believers who work to free women from captivity alongside secular people. They form a sort of underground railroad. Help women move from one house to the other until they reach Canada. They are a major part of the resistance.
I love how Atwood wove together the secular feminists, the Amish, the educated professional women, the nuns. She does not make this a religious thing in particular. She paints a picture of how religion can be used to justify utter oppression. But it is also deeply religious people who fight against the regime.
This pattern is seen time and time again in history. It isn’t some centralized political philosophy or religious belief that makes people do the right or wrong thing when it really comes down to it. There’s something deeper than the groups that people adhere themselves to, woven into the fabric of an individual. I’m fascinated by this. I’m terrified by it. Wouldn’t it be simpler if you could just look at the labels a person identifies with, the church they go to or the fact that they don’t, and know if they are good?
The Real Life Stories
The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985. The book was met with critical acclaim, winning the 1986 Booker Prize. But not everyone found the story believable. In fact, those were some of the early criticisms. Atwood’s defense was that every issue she listed in the story had happened at some point in history. Gilead’s culture was not taken from her imagination. It was taken from true stories of what oppressive governments and religious groups have done to people in the real world throughout history.
“When it first came out it was viewed as being far-fetched. However, when I wrote it I was making sure I wasn’t putting anything into it that humans had not already done somewhere at some time.”
-Margaret Atwood, speaking to The Guardian
Atwood cut articles from newspapers. She kept track of the stories that inspired the events in The Handmaid’s Tale. A few of them are noted below:
Women Forced To Have Babies
Nicolae Ceausescu, the communist President of Romania from 1965 to 1989, passed Decree 770 to bring the falling population from 20 million to 30 million. The law made abortion and contraception illegal except under certain conditions.2 The enforcement involved monthly, government mandated gynecologist appointments. Any detected pregnancies were monitored by the government until birth. Secret police watched hospital procedures. Sex ed was revamped to focus on the benefits of motherhood and giving children to the homeland.
The results? A baby boom in a poor country, 40 children per classroom, deaths due to self-induced abortions, the highest mortality rate among pregnant women in Europe (ten times that of neighboring countries) and large numbers of children in Romanian orphanages. Most of the children in Romanian orphanages were not orphans in the true sense of the word, but children born to impoverished parents who could not take care of them.
Catholics Say Cult Taking Over
This is a newspaper headline from a clipping that Atwood kept that inspired some of the restrictions for women in Gilead. It details a sect called the People of Hope, a charismatic Catholic group that started in New Jersey. As part of their teachings, women were subordinate to men. They were isolated from anyone other than fellow cult members. The so-called cult had arranged marriages. And the name of the wives in this sect? Handmaidens. Atwood had that underlined.
Fertility Rates
If you didn’t know, fertility rates3 are dropping, and at an alarming rate. Headlines from the 80’s that Atwood collected featured titles like “Lead-poison in work place on increase,” and “Infertility: not uncommon male problem, but often treatable.” Atwood used was inspired by these stories when she created the infertility crisis that creates an environment where the theology and politics of Gilead thrive. A pressured society desperate for children. The religious/political group with all the answers.
My Personal Thoughts.
I love Margaret Atwood’s writing. Her imagery is beautiful. Her sentences are staccato poetry. Words cut and sewn together like patterned fabric in a quilt. The story is horrific, but many of the descriptions reminded me of summer warmth, bouquets of flowers in kitchen sunlight. The smell of fresh baked bread. Those images are cut through by utter brutality. Executions, fear, humiliation. I thought it was very effective, the contrast of the words with the horrific images they portray.
I’ll give you some examples.
“I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. It transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.”
Isn’t that gorgeous? And again, here.
“Falling in love,' we said; 'I fell for him.' We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion; so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. 'God is love,' they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.”
One more. I can’t help it.
“I can’t think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass.”
I’m stunned that parents would want to ban their children from reading this book. It’s not all easy. There is brutality. Offred is a very flawed character. Sometimes cowardly. Sometimes hatefully defiant. There are sexual overtones. Longing for real love. Hanging bodies. Tortured women. Brothels.
What should we ban next? Maybe high-schoolers should avoid reading articles about Afghanistan. The terrible and horrific conditions real women live under everyday. What exactly are we trying to stop them from learning? From knowing?
I wonder if it is lost on some people that the things that happen in The Handmaid’s Tale have happened throughout all of history. Different countries, different political ideologies, different religions. The lockdown of sexuality to one ordained expression. The strict rules around modest dress. The government mandated birthing. The crushing of dissent. In thousands of different versions and time periods, this type of oppression has taken place. It is taking place right now. There are examples of it all over the world.
So what are we banning in all reality? Someone’s story. Saying it can not be told. Forcing the teller of such tales, like our dear Offred, into hiding. Left to etch the details onto paper in the dark. Shove it under a floorboard. Let it lie in wait for when the empire falls, and the people are free to hear with open ears, to see with open eyes. To find out the truth.
These included women over 45, women who already had four children, women whose life would be threatened by carrying to term due to medical complications, and women who were pregnant through rape and/or incest.
In case you didn’t know what fertility rates really meant. The total number of births in a year per 1,000 women of reproductive age in a population.
Really good analysis. I haven’t read the book and only watched the first season. I enjoyed the first season. Very interesting concept! Thanks for the break down.