“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
Margaret Atwood
I’m sure to most of us, it feels like there is a major shift in the status quo coming. Society feels like it’s going to implode, explode, or otherwise cease to exist as we know it. Anger and fear are at an all time high, at least in my lifetime. Reading dystopian novels like this are becoming increasingly difficult for me as they seem to be more of a premonition than a fictional novel.
The Handmaids Tale is one of those such books. This book came on to my radar after the overturning of Roe vs Wade in the states. It sat on my shelf for some time after that as I had to find the courage to read it. We as humans, especially humans that have grown up in free and open societies can forget just how fragile having basic human rights and freedoms are. Women’s rights specifically is what this post is about. Our ability to be free to choose where we live, how we love, who we love, what we do, our careers, our education, and our ability to pick our own destinies is something that even on planet earth today, is granted to very few of us in the grand scheme of things.
Gilead is the country that is born from a militaristic coup that results in the death of the President and most members of congress. The new society is governed by many laws that are pulled from the bible and religion is used heavily to wrest control over the people in this society. The book doesn’t go into many details regarding the founding of Gilead so I won’t touch much on this. There are some stark similarities between this and events in the world over the last couple years. This includes the attempted insurrection on January 6th. A legal political party and losing president encouraged the use of violence in an attempt to wrest control over a diplomatic society. There are now increasingly controlling and restrictive laws that are being presented by many state governments. Most of these laws directly target women. In order to control a group of people you need to take away their means of escape, and/or means of supporting themselves. Ofred talks about this in the latter part of the book. The governing power freezes the bank accounts of women and transfer the funds to their husbands. This financially binds them to their husbands. There are many societies in the real world that also do this. Women are forbidden from having their own means and thus, they are dependent on their male guardians. This makes it next to impossible to leave. It’s easy to make someone subservient if they have no other options.
In the book, there’s a severe drop in birth rates and most births result in babies that suffer from birth defects or deformities. They are called “Unbaby” or “Shredders”. This is the reason that handmaids are born. They are fertile women that are used by higher up commanders to reproduce. Their wives are barren and they use these women as middlemen(Women?) to keep the population from dwindling. This is especially important when you are deporting racial, religious, and sexual minorities to outside colonies. Forcing a woman to conceive and carry a child, whether desired or not, is another way to tie them to a society or life they may not want or desire. In the handmaids tale these women are programmed through Aund Lidya to believe that their purpose in life is to bear children from men they do not choose and that this is a gift from God. There is also mention of Janine having an abortion after a rape that she experienced when she was younger. She was trained by Aunt Lydia and the other Handmaids to believe that these things were her own fault and that she deserved to suffer because of it. Ofred’s description of her life as a Handmaid sheds light on many real life comparisons you could make for many women around the world.
There are many things in this book that we can compare to real life events and rhetoric that is starting to come from “Advanced” societies, such as the United Sates. In many ways we are walking a thin line between continuing to grow and move forward as a human race, or descending into a darker timeline. Our rights and freedoms are so fragile that we could be one election, supreme court decision, or law away from losing everything that we think we stand for. Reading this book brought up many anxieties that I’ve had about the future of the planet and our own personal futures but I will hold on to the hole that we’ll come to our senses and that we’ll fight to keep these books as they’re intended to be….. Fiction.
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”
Margaret Atwood
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