{"id":6249,"date":"2007-04-17T07:15:37","date_gmt":"2007-04-17T11:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6249"},"modified":"2016-06-24T13:40:13","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T17:40:13","slug":"the-books-the-handmaids-tale-margaret-atwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6249","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale\u201d (Margaret Atwood)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:<\/p>\n

\"038549081X.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg\"Here is an excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – by Margaret Atwood. This is the book that put Margaret Atwood on the map. It was also my introduction to her. It was published in 1985 but I didn’t read it until a couple of years later. I remember I read it on my brother’s recommendation. He had read it in an English class in college – and was raving about it to me. I also remember that he and I stood in the dining room of Mitchell’s house in Cranston during some late-night party, and he was talking about the book to me and how I HAD to read it. I did and for a while there it changed my life. I bounced back to my old self eventually – but it rocked my world view. It made me angry in such a universal way – that anger threatened to take over my entire personality. I trembled with anger. That’s how I feel reading Anne Frank’s diary, too – it’s a rage that shimmers. It’s an annhilating sensation, it’s so big that you want to tear everything down … just as a gesture. Even the good things. Because if there is a world that can lock up a little girl ike Anne Frank … and then murder her … then who the fuck cares about the good things? Good things can GO TO HELL. Like I mentioned in another Atwood post – Atwood is not a warm<\/i> writer. She’s not affirming, or positive. She’s clear, cold, and unemotional. The Handmaid’s Tale<\/i> is where she takes that rather odd voice of hers – unique – the voice that had been finding its outlet in books not quite equal to the rage underneath – and busts out of the prison. Not that her earlier books are unworthy – but when you read The Handmaid’s Tale<\/i> you can feel the break with the past that it is. No more Mr. Nice Girl. This is what I am REALLY thinking.<\/p>\n

I’ve read it since – many times – and I have to say it doesn’t really hold up, although there is much of it that does. But the book’s main impact is the one of first impression. I’ll never forget what it was like to read that book for the first time.<\/p>\n

I am baffled by the “coda” at the end. Entire scholarly papers have been written about that coda – and I get the point, intellectually – It just so does not work for me. Like – not at ALL. In my opinion (and I remember talking about this with my brother way back when) – it completely weakens the entire book. Brendan had another view of it – he said, “Go back and read it again – and watch how they treat the chairwoman. It’s subtle – but it’s there. They treat her like an idiot.” And this is true. It’s very depressing, especially after the book you’ve just read – of a Saudi Arabian type world, only they’re Christians instead of Muslims, and women are either useless, or only valued for their wombs. The coda gives historical context … like: “let us study this world that is now gone away … ” But that, to me, was the problem. The book is so pessimistic, it’s one of the bleakest books I’ve ever read … and to have this coda tacked on, letting us know that the regime did fall and women were freed … It just didn’t work for me. The last line of the narrator’s part of the book – “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light” … leaves you in a state of suspended animation, and hope – but hope that is so strong it is akin to despair. Does she get away?? What happens??? I think the book is far more powerful when it does NOT answer those questions. I just do not like the coda.<\/p>\n

Atwood fans – I would LOVE to hear your responses to this. Did it work for you? And why?<\/p>\n

The story is well-known. An extreme Christian fundamentalist group – very well-organized – has taken over America in what amounts to a military coup. Congress killed, the President killed – and a new regime installed. Women categorized as either useless (menopausal) – and those women are shuffled off to concentration camps to do manual labor – or useful (child-bearing age) – and the women who are useful are assigned to couples high up in the regime who are childless for whatever reason. The handmaid’s job is to sleep with the husband – and have a child. Many children. If it turns out that you are infertile – you will be sent off to a camp to die. It’s never the fault of the male … there is no such thing as sterile men. Only useless women.<\/p>\n

The whole book is narrated by a nameless woman – women take the names of the man they are assigned to: Offred (of Fred), Ofjohn (of John) – and we never learn her name from before. She is in the transitional generation – she remembers the time before. She had a daughter – and a husband – but because it was his second marriage, their union is invalidated by the new regime. The daughter is taken away from them. He is hunted down and eventually disappears. They had tried to escape into Canada but they were trapped at the border. So now this woman – who has no idea what happened to her little girl, her husband – now lives with The Commander and his wife Serena Joy (who, in the time before, was a Tammy Faye type – an evangelical television personality) – and just tries to survive. She tries to keep her mind intact. She tries to remember who she is … even though the entire world has wiped her out. There are other plot-lines … her best friend from “before” was a hot-shit funny wise-cracking lesbian named Moira … what happened to Moira? Where is Moira? She eventually finds out … but it is a tragic story. To me, the story of Moira is the saddest in the book.<\/p>\n

Women are separated from one another by design … you can be hauled off as a spy if you try to reach out, and complain to someone, or even if you just try to talk like a human being, and not a Christian automaton. There are accepted modes of behavior now – rigid – it’s a totalitarian world. The secret police are everywhere … and the ironic thing is that those who are “handmaid’s” are supposed to be grateful. Because they have been “allowed” to live. They are supposed to praise God every day for the chance to be of use.<\/p>\n

Anyhoo, that’s Handmaid’s Tale<\/i>. It’s what brought me to Atwood.<\/p>\n

In terms of writing mastery – nothing can touch Cat’s Eye<\/i> – which comes later – not only is it a great Atwood book, it’s a great book period. Handmaid’s Tale<\/i> doesn’t have that complexity – but then again, it’s not meant to. This is a stripped-down world, a black and white world … where people, with all their grey areas, all their foibles, struggle to maintain their humanity.<\/p>\n

One of the things that is interesting here is that “the Commander” – the military dude she is assigned to – is a cold and frightening presence. She sleeps with him repeatedly – and it’s awful … and you never get to know him. Until ….. Late one night he summons her to his study. She goes. This is strictly forbidden. “Fraternizig” is forbidden. Her job is not to be a mistress, or to have a love affair, or to join the family she is assigned to. Her job is to sit in her room and wait until the ovulation period … not moving, not speaking, not reading, nothing … and then try to get pregnant. So anyway – The Commander summons her. It is about 2 in the morning. She is terrified. She goes into his study … and there he sits … and he asks if she would like to play Scrabble. This is such a shock, such an odd odd moment … The world she lives in is not a world that values leisure time. Also, all language has been wiped out. Signs are now in pictures. So to see a Scrabble board … it’s against the law … He asks her to play. Terrified, she obeys. But eventually … it becomes this nightly secret “date” they have. They barely talk – they just play Scrabble. Atwood describes the love of words … how voracious our narrator feels just seeing LETTERS again … the thrill of putting letters together … It’s almost sexual. Very moving. What’s interesting here is that even though the two of them barely speak … you get the sense that this world, this new world, where he is at the top of the heap, is no great shakes for him either. Male privilege is isolating – for both genders. He never says that … and she never comments on it … but just the fact that in the middle of the night this cold man, who holds her entire life in his hands – yearns to play a nice game of Scrabble … says it all.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt.<\/p>\n


\nExcerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – by Margaret Atwood. <\/b><\/p>\n

Now there’s a space to be filled, in the too-warm air of my room, and a time also; a space-time, between here and now and there and then, punctuated by dinner. The arrival of the tray, carried up the stairs as if for an invalid. An invalid, one who has been invalidated. No valid passport. No exit.<\/p>\n

That was what happened, the day we tried to cross at the border, with our fresh passports that said we were not who we were: that Luke, for instance, had never been divorced, that we were therefore lawful, under the law.<\/p>\n

The man went inside with our passports, after we’d explained about the picnic and he’d glanced into the car and seen our daughter asleep, in her zoo of mangy animals. Luke patted my arm and got out of the car as if to stretch his legs and watched the man through the window of the immigration building. I stayed in the car. I lit a cigarette, to steady myself, and drew the smoke in, a long breath of counterfeit relaxation. I was watching two soldiers in the unfamiliar uniforms that were beginning, by then, to be familiar; they were standing idly beside the yellow-and-black-striped lift-up barrier. They weren’t doing much. One of them was watching a flock of birds, gulls, lifting and eddying and landing on the bridge railing beyond. Watching him, I watched them too. Everything was the color it usually is, only brighter.<\/p>\n

It’s going to be all right, I said, prayed in my head. Oh let it. Let us cross, let us across. Just this once and I’ll do anything. What I thought I could do for whoever was listening that would be of the least use or even interest I’ll never know.<\/p>\n

Then Luke got back into the car, too fast, and turned the key and reversed. He was picking up the phone, he said. And then he began to drive very quickly, and after that there was the dirt road and the woods and we jumped out of the car and began to run. A cottage, to hide in, a boat, I don’t know what we thought. He said the passports were foolproof, and we had so little time to plan. Maybe he had a plan, a map of some kind in his head. As for me, I was only running: away, away.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to be telling this story.<\/p>\n

I don’t have to tell it. I don’t have to tell anything, to myself or to anyone else. I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It’s possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.<\/p>\n

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum<\/i>. Fat lot of good it did her.<\/p>\n

Why fight?<\/p>\n

That will never do.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Love? said the Commander.<\/p>\n

That’s better. That’s something I know about. We can talk about that.<\/p>\n

Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.<\/p>\n

Falling in love<\/i>, we said; I fell for him<\/i>. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love<\/i>, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.<\/p>\n

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you<\/i>, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.<\/p>\n

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.<\/p>\n

Or sometimes, even when you were still loving, still falling, you’d wake up in the middle of the night, when the moonlight was coming through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadows in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in daytime, and you’d think, Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men? Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go? Who can tell what they really are? Under their daily-ness.<\/p>\n

Likely you would think at those times: What if he doesn’t love me?<\/p>\n

Or you’d remember stories you’d read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found – often women but sometimes they would be men, or children, that was the worst – in ditches or forests or refrigerators in abandoned rented rooms, with their clothes on or off, sexually abused or not; at any rate killed. There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that you had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.<\/p>\n

But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight. With that man you wanted it to work, to work out. Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for th eman. If you worked out enough, maybe the man woudl too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn’t work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.<\/p>\n

If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.<\/p>\n

It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything was available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeter of our lives. I was like that too, I did that too. Luke was not the first man for me, and he might not have been the last. If he hadn’t been frozen that way. Stopped dead in time, in midair, among the trees back there, in the act of falling.<\/p>\n

In former times they would send you a little package, of the belongings: what he had with him when he died. That’s what they would do, in wartime, my mother said. How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute ot the loved one. And he was, the loved. One.<\/p>\n

Is<\/i>, I say. Is, is<\/i>, only two letters, you stupid shit, can’t you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?<\/p>\n

I wipe my sleeve across my face. Once I wouldn’t have done that, for fear of smearing, but now nothing comes off. Whatever expression is there, unseen by me, is real.<\/p>\n

You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.<\/p>\n

So. More waiting. Lady in waiting: that’s what they used to call those stores where you could buy maternity clothes. Woman in waiting sounds more like someone in a train station. Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it’s this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.<\/p>\n

The knock comes at my door. Cora, with the tray.<\/p>\n

But it isn’t Cora. “I’ve brought this for you,” sayus Serena Joy.<\/p>\n

And then I look up and around, and get out of my chair and come towards her. She’s holding it, a Polaroid print, square and glossy. So they still make them, cameras like that. And there will be family albums, too, with all the children in them; no Handmaids though. From the point of view of future history, this kind, we’ll be invisible. But the children will be in them all right, something for the Wives to look at, downstairs, nibbling at the buffet and waiting for the Birth.<\/p>\n

“You can only have it for a minute,” Serena Joy says, her voice low and conspiratorial. “I have to return it, before they know it’s missing.”<\/p>\n

It must have been a Martha who got it for her. There’s a network of the Marthas, then, with something in it for them. That’s nice to know.<\/p>\n

I take it from her, turn it around so I can see it right-side-up. Is this her, is this what she’s like? My treasure.<\/p>\n

So tall and changed. Smiling a little now, so soon, and in her white dress as if for an olden-days First Communion.<\/p>\n

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.<\/p>\n

But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn’t that a good thing? A blessing?<\/p>\n

Still, I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that. Better she’d brought me nothing.<\/p>\n

I sit at the little table, eating creamed corn with a fork. I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife. When there’s meat they cut it up for me ahead of time, as if I’m lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That’s why I’m not allowed a knife.<\/p>\n