Sexual Subjugation in Desperate Dystopia

Just finished reading 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood.

I was taken back to my A'Level years, when we read and dissected Atwood's 'Cat's Eye' every which way to make sense of her stuccato, heavily comma'ed first person narrative style, multilayered themes and deep cultural references. It was much harder then - the simple experience of having lived 8 more years since then has equipped me with more tools with which to deconstruct her strange and sad worlds.

This story in particular tells a tale of a future, somewhere in the early 21st century, where the United States as we know it no longer exists - the President and Congress were all shot dead and the Constitution was suspended. The country has been replaced instead by the Republic of Gilead, a nation run using fundamentalist Christian ideals to redefine gender roles and societal norms to cope with the decline of healthy human births, a decline brought about by some form of ecological disaster, not described but merely alluded to.

In a world where sex for pleasure is a forbidden concept, and children are a scarce resource, women are now essentially classified based on their reproductive abilities. Our narrator, Offred, is a Handmaid - a woman employed by a highranking male Commander ("of Fred") with a barren wife, solely for the purpose of having sex with him once a month in the hopes that she will give birth to a child that he can raise with his wife. The wife may well not be barren, but infertility in men is considered impossible and the lack of bearing a child is wholly a woman's fault.

Offred comes to this fate because she had been married to a divorced man before the revolution and in light of new laws, had committed adultery and must be punished. However, she bore her husband a child, and was therefore fertile enough to be a Handmaid.

Women in Gilead are no longer allowed to read or have access to money - they must follow pictorial signs and use pre-assigned tokens. Stratification by status is depicted by the color of their clothing, all of which allows no portion of the skin to be seen and, in the case of the Handmaids, includes a headress with blinkers on it so that they have no peripheral vision.

Life in Gilead is reminiscent of Orwellian stories that predicted societies run by fear and extremist totalitarian regimes, and Offred describes the change in times, the fates of different people in her life, and her conflicting feelings: of hatred for the regime and the brainwashing, but fear of being killed for her blasphemous thoughts; of wanting to break free from her life, but wanting to conform to the rules for the comfort of some kind of routine; of apathy towards the mandatory sex she must have with the Commander, but an adulterous yearning for real passion with someone else since her husband must now be dead.

The book is an interesting read, occasionally shocking and disturbing, but intriguing in the way Offred's (we never learn her real name) tale unfolds and shows a fascist world that could have been the aftermath of the feminism and fundamentalism of the 70's and 80's.