Hi everyone! Since we have lots of time to read The Handmaid's Tale, I thought I'd post some info and questions to guide you, gentle readers, in your pursuit of higher understanding. Or, just give you something to think about!
Here's a short interview with the always informative Miss Atwood, as well as some discussion questions. Both were pulled from the Random House website. I'll try to post some from another source soon.
Of The
Handmaid's Tale, Margaret
Atwood's dystopian, futuristic novel,New York Times editor Christopher Lehmann-Haupt warns,
"It's a bleak world . . . how bleak and even terrifying we will not fully
realize until the story's final pages."
Set in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, the novel presents a totalitarian theocracy that has forced a
certain class of fertile women to produce babies for elite barren couples.
These "handmaids," who are denied all rights and are severely beaten
if they are uncooperative, are reduced to state property. Through the voice of
Offred, a handmaid who mingles memories of her life before the revolution with
her rebellious activities under the new regime, Atwood has created a terrifying
future based on actual events.
The
significance of The Handmaid's Tale caused Publishers
Weekly to write that it
"deserves an honored place on the small shelf of cautionary tales that
have entered modern folklore--a place next to, and by no means inferior
to, Brave New World and 1984."
A Note to the Reader
Dear Reader,
Every
book is a sort of mushroom cloud thrown up by a large substance of material
that has been accumulating for a lifetime. I had long been interested in the
histories of totalitarian regimes and the different forms they have taken in
various societies; while the initial idea for The
Handmaid's Tale came to me in
1981, I avoided writing it for several years because I was apprehensive about
the results--whether I would be able to carry it off as a literary form.
In
form, the book is a dystopia (negative utopia). A cognate of A
Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Nineteen
Eighty-Four, it is the story of
one woman's altered circumstances, presented as a first-person narrative novel.
The
roots of the book go back to my study of the American Puritans. The society
they founded in America was not a democracy as we know it, but a theocracy. In
addition, I found myself increasingly alarmed by statements made frequently by
religious leaders in the United States; and then a variety of events from
around the world could not be ignored, particularly the rising fanaticism of
the Iranian monotheocracy. The thing to remember is that there is nothing new
about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things
I have written about have--as noted in the "Historical Notes" at the
end--been done before, more than once.
It is an imagined
account of what happens when not uncommon pronouncements about women are taken
to their logical conclusions. History proves that what we have been in the past
we could be again.
An Interview with Margaret Atwood on
Her Novel The Handmaid's Tale
Q: Was
there any special research involved in writing The Handmaid's Tale?
A: I clipped
articles out of newspapers. I now have a large clippings file of stories
supporting the contentions in the book. In other words, there isn't anything in
the book not based on something that has already happened in history or in
another country, or for which actual supporting documentation is not already
available.
Q: It's
hard to pin down a genre for this novel. Is it science fiction?
A: No,
it certainly isn't science fiction. Science fiction is filled with Martians and
space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn't this book at
all. The Handmaid's Tale is
speculative fiction in the genre of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written not as science fiction but as an
extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, The Handmaid's Tale is a slight twist on the society we have now.
Q: You
seem to see a role for the novel beyond entertainment.
A: I was once a
graduate student in Victorian literature and I believe as the Victorian
novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but
that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
Q: What
are we to learn from The
Handmaid's Tale?
A: This is a book
about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken
to their logical conclusions. For example, I explore a number of conservative
opinions still held by many--such as a woman's place is in the home. And also
certain feminist pronouncements--women prefer the company of other women, for
example. Take these beliefs to their logical ends and see what happens. As a
writer, you can chose to create a mainstream novel in which these issues appear
only as the characters discuss them sitting around the kitchen table. But I
decided to take these positions and dramatize them, carry them to their
furthest logical conclusions.
Q: How
would the creation of your imagined republic of Gilead be possible?
A:
First of all, ask yourself the following question: If you were going to take
over the United States, how would you do it? Would you say, "I'm a
socialist and we're all going to be equal"? No, you would not, because it
wouldn't work. Would you say, "I'm a liberal and we are going to have a
society of multiple toleration"? You probably wouldn't say that if you
wanted mass support. You would be much more likely to say, "I have the
word from God and this is the way we should run things." That probably
would have more of a chance of working, and in fact there are a number of
movements in the States saying just that, and getting lots of dollars and
influence. The society in The Handmaid's Tale is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I
studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is
dedicated. The early Puritans came to America not for religious freedom, as we
were taught in grade school, but to set up a society that would be a theocracy
(like Iran) ruled by religious leaders, and monolithic, that is, a society that
would not tolerate dissent within itself. They were being persecuted in England
for being Puritans, but then they went to the United States and promptly began
persecuting anyone who wasn't a Puritan. My book reflects the form and style of
the early Puritan society and addresses the dynamics that bring about such a
situation.
Q: Why
the intense focus on fertility in Gilead?
A: In a society in
which the birthrate plummets below replacement, that body of people will be
forced to determine whether or not it will simply slide gently into oblivion
and vanish from the face of the earth. (One theory is there that will be no
Germans by the year 2020 because their birthrate is so low; Germany is going to
be Turkish.) Scandinavian countries are now below replacement, as is Romania.
What does a society do at this point? Either it accepts the situation or it
puts into existence conditions that will increase the number of births.
Q: So in
Gilead this process is taken to what you see as a logical conclusion?
A: Yes. It is a
society in which you have a sort of "farming" of women. Parallel to
that, you have to realize that male sterility is on the increase and so are
spontaneous miscarriages and birth defects. How could this be? It's because we
are pouring about 300,000 different chemicals into our water and drinking it.
Plus, of course, there's a great deal of radiation. They've found PCBs in polar
bears and they are worried about the future of the polar bear species because
PCBs build up in their systems and produce male sterility. So fertility in
Gilead is at a premium. Fertile women, women who can reproduce, are prize
objects for those in power. And as is the case in which prize objects are
Cadillacs and you want to have as many Cadillacs as you possibly can, so too
when the prize objects are fertile women, then you want to have as many fertile
women as possible. Thus in Gilead we return to biblical polygamy.
Q: Are
there some good things about Gilead?
A: Yes. women aren't
whistled at on the street, men don't come climbing in the window in the middle
of the night. Women are "protected." Sardonically speaking, in
totalitarian countries the streets are much safer, for the most part.
Q: It
seems that within this frightening world, certain parts of the feminist
revolution have survived. Is that true?
A: No power
structure can institute total serfdom (unless they kill off most of the people)
without giving a few "perks." If you were to go back and study what
the Germans did during World War II, you would see that what they did was move
into another country and find a group of people willing to help them out. They
would develop a little army of Ukrainians in Ukraine, Poles in Poland, etc. Any
imperial power does the same thing; the British in India developed terrific
regiments made up of Indians. And so, in Gilead, we have troops of women.
Q: But
wouldn't there be violent resistance against a system such as Gilead?
A: Yes, of course we
would have resistance. After all, this is United States and it is North America
and it is a pluralistic society and we have many people with differing points
of view. A number of people would not take this lying down.
Q: The
way the reader comes into The
Handmaid's Tale is through a diary or a journal, memories rescued and viewed
from a time in the future. The curtain is drawn back slowly. Why did you choose
to write it that way?
A: What I've written
is only the view of one woman who lives in that society. I reveal Gilead
through the eyes of that one woman. It would be cheating to show the reader
more than the character has access to. Her information is limited. In fact, her
lack of information is part of the nightmare.
Q: We can
figure out that the main character lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a
Canadian, can you explain why Canada didn't take more people in who were trying
to escape from Gilead in their "underground railroad"?
A: Canada's role in
this novel is the role Canada has always taken in bad times in the States.
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you
made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That
was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters. For the most part, if
a resister did make it to Canada, he was safe--but there were some Canadians
who did collaborate in hauling people back across the border. So Canada's
position would be to do what she always does: try to remain neutral without
antagonizing the superpower to the south.
Discussion questions:
1. The novel begins
with three epigraphs. What are their functions?
2. In Gilead, women
are categorized as wives, handmaids, Marthas, or Aunts, but Moira refuses to
fit into a niche. Offred says she was like an elevator with open sides who made
them dizzy, she was their fantasy. Trace Moira's role throughout the tale to determine
what she symbolizes.
3. Aunt Lydia,
Janine, and Offred's mother also represent more than themselves. What do each
of their characters connote? What do the style and color of their clothes
symbolize?
4. At
one level, The Handmaid's Tale is
about the writing process. Atwood cleverly weaves this sub-plot into a major
focus with remarks by Offred such as "Context is all," and "I've
filled it out for her...," "I made that up," and "I wish
this story were different." Does Offred's habit of talking about the
process of storytelling make it easier or more difficult for you to suspend
disbelief?
5. A palimpsest is a
medieval parchment that scribes attempted to scrape clean and use again, though
they were unable to obliterate all traces of the original. How does the new
republic of Gilead's social order often resemble a palimpsest?.
6. The commander in
the novel says you can't cheat nature. How do characters find ways to follow
their natural instinct?
7. Why is the Bible
under lock and key in Gilead?
8. Babies are
referred to as "a keeper," "unbabies,"
"shredders." What other real or fictional worlds do these terms
suggest?
9.
Atwood's title brings to mind titles from Chaucer's The
Canterbury Tales. Why might
Atwood have wanted you to make that connection?
10. What do you feel
the historical notes at the book's end add to the reading of this novel? What
does the book's last line mean to you?
