if there is something going on, you know it only thru the events and memories of the narrator. Read moreĪtwood doesn't begin her "reveal" until half-way thru the book. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and a tour de force. The Handmaid’s Tale is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing.
In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment’s calm facade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions. The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women and men in its population. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. At the point where the fictional metaphor matters more than the current reality, something’s gone terribly wrong.Before The Testaments, there was The Handmaid’s Tale: an instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” ( New York Times). Because fictional tyrannical dystopias are primarily envisioned as affecting white people, it can be harder to see negative policies that oppress others.
Trump’s policies have traction precisely because they’re seen as primarily affecting those people, over there. But the current presidency isn’t just predicated on sexism, it’s built around demonization of Mexicans, Muslims, black people, and the generalized specter of non-white immigrants. Many people have argued that The Handmaid’s Tale is particularly timely now.
From Orwell to The Hunger Games to Harry Potter and back to War of the Worlds, we constantly imagine tyranny as something that is inflicted on white people. This creates a situation where even anti-racist stories are unable to represent or sympathize with the suffering or struggles of non-white people. If creators are concerned about the horror of violence against people of color, why not center stories on them? The answer is that (generally white) creators believe that the imagined (mostly white) audience will be better able to empathize with a white protagonist.
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