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The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood


Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale has recently launched to the forefront of casual conversations in our contemporary society. It’s spike in popularity coincides with the new release of the MGM/Hulu 10 part television series as well as the latest edition of the publication (released April 11, 2017), which includes an introduction by Atwood herself. This introduction has also been published as an essay for The New York Times, on March 10, 2017, titled “Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump”. Much praise has been sung for this dystopian fiction, and many interesting themes and conversations have emerged from the novel. Themes such as ‘State Surveillance’ and ‘Complacency Epidemic’ are relevant to contemporary readers, and were clearly influenced by the conditions in which Atwood wrote the novel; Atwood penned the novel in 1984, while living in West Berlin. Although these themes are interesting and relevant, I have chosen to examine two other ‘conversations’ that are significantly silenced. The importance of ‘Reproductive Rights’ can be analyzed throughout the novel, and the question of ownership of one’s body is a conversation relevant in ‘Trump’s America’, as well as in American history. Moreover, we need to discuss the inherent ‘Whitewashing of the Slave Narrative’, and the problematic elements that haunt the decision to replace the narratives of African slaves with the voice of a white woman.

“Unlike men, women have never enjoyed full control of their own bodies and personal functions without interference from the government… This is most visible in the way women’s sexuality is policed, documented and moralized… making women out to be an extension of their biology rather than individuals in their own right” (Zielinski 2015).

In The Handmaid’s Tale, 'Heteropatriarchy’ is the oppressive ruling system in the Republic of Gilead: “the dominant culture assumes heterosexuality as the norm and enforces a strict gender divide between men and women” (Kirby 2017). In the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘second wave’ feminist movement was demanding access to contraceptives and abortion, were concerned with sexuality, domestic violence, and reproductive rights, and established rape crisis centres and women’s only spaces (Kirby 2017). “Since the 1980s, women’s political struggles in the domains of reproductive rights have made the language of ‘owning’ or ‘controlling’ one’s bodies a commonplace of feminist rhetoric” (Gupta & Richters 2008).

In Atwood’s novel, the United States have fallen and under this new strict regime, readers follow a Handmaid named Offred. Women have lost all of their rights, and are now limited to a life as: a ‘Commander’s wife”, a “Martha”, an “Econo-wives”, an “Un-woman” or a “Handmaid”. Handmaids are ‘gifted’ to Commanders if their wives have not already provided them with a child. In The Handmaid’s Tale, society views “women as wombs and childbearing machines instead of whole persons” (Gupta & Richters 2008). As Offred describes ‘the Ceremony’, she also explains how her body has become separated from her sense of self, that her body is no longer hers to control, and that she has had to sacrifice her body in order to save herself:

“My arms are raised; she holds my hands, each of mine in each of hers. This is supposed to signify that we are one flesh, one being. What it really means is that she is in control, of the process and this of the product. If any. The rings on her left hand cut into my fingers. It may or may not be revenge.

My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose” (Atwood 107).

The novel hyperbolizes the struggle of women’s reproductive right to control their own bodies, but Atwood’s anti-prediction is not a far stretch from our current reality. “Under patriarchal capitalism women are seen as property and their bodies are owned by others, implying an alienation of women from their own bodies” (Gupta & Richters 2008). “Anything to do with pregnancy or children is automatically taken away from women and becomes the domain of the public, as is evidenced by government interference in abortion” (Zielinksi 2015).

In America we have witnessed the Trump administration make decisions about women’s bodies without any consultation with women. We have witnessed a room full of men discuss abortion and reproductive rights, and watched as Donald Trump reinstated the Global Gag Rule policy during his first week in office, which bans organizations that receive U.S. development funding from providing or promoting abortions (Kirby 2017). For all these frightening reasons, The Handmaid’s Tale has been deemed relevant, and has been compared to the current United States of America.

But Reproductive Rights are not just a problem in America. Globally, women are struggling to maintain or obtain control over their bodies. For example, with regards to “surrogacy, the contracting couple and infertility specialists temporarily own a woman’s body. The woman is referred to as a (gestational) carrier, not as a woman, leave alone one who has a name, and her legal rights are subservient to that of the genetic parents” (Gupta & Richters 2008). The idea of surrogate mothers is not a bad idea because it does help couples who struggle to conceive themselves, but we must be weary of echoing The Handmaid’s Tale, and treating women as a womb instead of a person. Moreover, “the recent case of a 22 year old orphan sold by an orphanage owner to a 48 year old farmer and general merchant in India under cover of ‘marriage’ to be a surrogate for him and his childless wife (Kumar 2005)” (Gupta & Richters 2008); a real life ‘Handmaid’ situation. Countries all over the world continue to control, restrict, and dominate women's bodies. “In some countries as in Israel, the pro-natalist ideology of compulsory motherhood makes reproduction a ‘national mission’, while others, like China and India, anti-natalist population policies influence reproductive decisions to limit the number of children to one or two in order to meet population control agendas” (Gupta & Richters 2008).

Women’s Reproductive Rights are still endangered. We still need to fight for the basic human right to make decisions over one’s own body. Atwood’s novel should spark not only discussions surrounding women's rights, but also revolutionary action to protect and aid women who are still controlled. “During the second feminist wave in the West in the 1970s, women, with their demand for women’s right to self-determination regarding reproductive decisions, tried to wrest back control over their own bodies and lives that for ages had been denied to them by husbands, doctors, or the state” (Gupta & Richters 2008) - but the key word in this quote is “the West”; not ‘the World’. We must remember that “Dictating who can have children, how many, and under what circumstances is a tool of state power”, has always been a tool of state power, and will continue to try and control women’s lives (Kirby 2017).

“Before slavery was abolished in the United States, slave owners valued the ability of black women to give birth. Black women’s children would be born into slavery. So their reproductive lives were controlled to maintain the slave labour force. Since abolition, there have been efforts to limit the black population. Now, the motivation is to avoid any challenge to the white-dominated social order” (Kirby 2017).

Secondly I want to tackle the conversation surrounding Atwood’s ‘Whitewashing of the Slave Narrative’, and the problems with placing a white woman’s struggles in a narrative style reserved historically for fugitive or former African slaves. The ‘slave narrative’ is a type of literary work or genre consisting of personal accounts, either written or orally related, of enslaved Africans; titles include “Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself” in 1789, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself” in 1845, and “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs in 1861. This literature coincided with the rise of the abolition movement in the early 19th century. Americans in the North wanted to help publish and read eyewitness accounts of the harsh realities of slavery in the South, to help push their abolitionist, activist agendas. This narrative style is a large part of America’s slavery history, and cannot be ignored or forgotten.

Atwood, in her New York Times article, admitted that:

“One of my rules was that I would not put any events in the books that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the ‘nightmare’ of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities” (Atwood 2017).

Moreover, she describes the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale as “a group of authoritarian men [who] 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 can’t control money or have jobs outside the home” (Atwood 2017).

Atwood’s admittance to consciously comparing [white] women with African American slaves is problematic, because it is creating and promoting a culture of substitution and silencing. Different forms of oppressions are not interchangeable, although they may intersect. Atwood is whitewashing a non-white story, a slavery narrative of an oppressed person. “Whitewashing is itself a kind of violence borne from colonialism, a caricature of the ‘Other’ created by the white gaze in order to establish dominance and supremacy over colonized peoples” (Porras 2017). Atwood wrote a terrifying dystopian narrative featuring a white female narrator, which is currently evoking empathy and outrage, but by promoting this fictional white story, instead of the historical truth of Black racism and oppression in American, it steals the attention away from the original minorities’ story.

Atwood is not subtle about her substitution of the black slave narrative with a white female. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the fictional world is “in an age of plummeting Caucasian birth rates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time” (349). The novel is unquestionably white, with little to no mention of people of colour.

Furthermore, Atwood substitutes historical terms in her novel with the mention of “the Underground Femaleroad” (Atwood 285). She goes on to write, “what our author refers to as ‘The Underground Femaleroad,’ since dubbed by some of our historical wags ‘The Underground Frailraod.’ (Laughter, groans.)” (Atwood 345-6). This wordplay is explicitly referencing the Underground Railroad, a system which helped fugitive slaves escape to Northern states as well as Canada.

Additionally, Atwood’s novel speaks of women being sent to live and work in “the Colonies… [and] city ghettoes” (Atwood 287). The term ghetto is again a historically black term, which was the name given to poor slums in American cities where black people were segregated and forced to live. She also explains that the UnWomen living in the Colonies in the South are forced to work in “agriculture: cotton and tomatoes and all that” (Atwood 288). This is speaking directly to slave narratives, and how historically Africans were forced to pick cotton on plantations in the South.

In the book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Dr. Carol Anderson explains that:

“In the fall of 1865, the state [Mississippi] passed a series of laws targeted and applicable only to African Americans (free and newly emancipated) … The codes required the blacks sign annual labour contracts with plantation, mill, or mine owners. If African Americans refused or could show no proof of gainful employment, they would be charged with vagrancy and put on the auction block” (Anderson 2016).

Atwood again steals from history when a law had been passed in Gilead to prevent women from owning land, possessing their own money or from working, removing all rights previously guaranteed to women. Offred recalls a memory, “I have to let you go, he said. It’s the law, I have to. I have to let you all go. He said this almost gently, as if we were wild animals” (Atwood 203). This quote describes the exact moment when women were no longer treated like humans, and were from then on treated as ‘lesser’ and ‘Other’.

Finally, I want to address how the names of the Handmaid’s borrow from the historical names of slaves. Slaves had to take the names of their slaveowners, and would often change names if they changed hands. If they escaped or were freed, many people changed their names and chose new identities. Atwood explains that the central character and narrator “Offred”, her “name is composed of the man’s [Commander’s] first name, ‘Fred,’ and a prefix denoting ‘belonging to,’ … Within this name is concealed another possibility: ‘offered,’ denoting a religious offering or a victim offered for sacrifice” (Atwood 2017). This naming process as described by Atwood is undeniably connected to the slave narrative literary genre, and the themes of ownership.

We must be cautious of what tales we tell, and how we share stories. Whether Atwood was conscious, or not, of her decision to whitewash the slave narrative, it must be critiqued and analyzed. The decision to replace the narratives of African slaves with the voice of an oppressed white woman is problematic because it silences and undermines the original narratives. Whitewashing has been a major controversy and issue not only within Hollywood, but also in our story-telling across North America. Changing the story to suit or include us, claiming a story that is not ours to claim, and (re)labelling the victim as white is a problematic micro aggression that cannot go un-examined. We must continue to question what we read, appreciate the progressive themes that are present, but not look past the problematic elements. For feminism to truly be intersectional we must address the continued history of falsely claiming narratives as our own.

Works Cited

Anderson, Carol, Ph. D. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, New York, NY. 2016. Print, 1-246.

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Emblem, McClelland & Stewart Ltd, Toronto, ON. 1985. Print, 3-358.

Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump”. The New York Times. March 10, 2017. https://nyti.ms/2mtyjSC

Gupta, J. A., Richters, A. “Embodied Subjects and Fragmented Objects: Women;s Bodies, Assisted Reproduction Technologies and the Right to Self-Determination”. Bioethical Inquiry. 2008. 5:239-249.

Kirby, Jane. Fired Up About: Reproductive Rights. Between the Lines Publishing, Toronto, ON. 2017. Print, 1-151.

Porras, Franco E. H. “Why Whitewashing Is a Form of Violence”. Odyssey. April 10, 2017. theodysseyonline.com

Zielinski, Caroline. “Why Women Are Still The Property of Men”. The Daily Telegraph. 2015. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/why-women-are-still-the-property-of-men/news-story/b18f0a4d456db6967e7c05f4f309604f

Sonic Approved

A huge shout out to Between the Lines publishing company for sending us Fired Up About Reproductive Rights. If you're interested in this book, or any of their other "Fired Up About" series, please check them out! They are super informative pocket sized young adult non-fiction.

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