The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

A is for Atwood, and welcome to 2015.

The Handmaid's Tale - is it a rewrite of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four?  That was the question I started asking myself with increasing frequency as I worked my way through this book.  It is a question I still haven't satisfactorily answered.

Where Orwell explored how power, violence, surveillance, collaboration and language can be used by a minority to subjugate a majority, Atwood explores how the same methods can be used to subjugate women.  These can be either overt or subtle.  It is of interest to observe how some individuals will relinquish personal freedoms, such as the freedom of speech or expression, for the guarantee of food, shelter, warmth and work, or to be free from punishment or social opprobrium.  How is it that aspects of a society work in such a way to make some women work against the interests of women in general?  These are some of the matters Atwood explores in this book.   

The Handmaid's Tale is a first-person account of a young woman who identifies herself as Offred.  She lives in the near future in the Republic of Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian state that replaced the United States of America after some unspecified ecological and military upheavals.  Political and administrative power has been placed in the hands of a minority of men.  Women have been relegated to the roles of wives for both the elite and the workers, invigilators of social orthodoxy, prostitutes or child-bearers.  There have been demographic upheavals too:  human populations have crashed, and there has been an epidemic of sterility  Offred is a handmaid, a woman who has yet to be proven barren (Atwood's word) and must compulsorily attempt to bear children for the Republic.

Is it better to die on your feet than to live on your knees?  If history is any guide, the probable answer is "no" for most people for most of the time. If we are to look for an answer in the behaviour of the characters in The Handmaid's Tale, we may discover the simple and complex reasons why this may be the case.