The Handmaid’s Tale
By Margaret Atwood
Publication Year: 1985
Type: Fiction
Genre: modern classic, dystopia
Read on 2018-08-04
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2018 Reading Survey ➞
★★★☆☆
Did not live up to the hype. In all seriousness my experience reading the book was one of constantly being taken out of the story by how alienated I felt from the experiences and concerns of Offred as a white woman written by a white woman. Atwood isn’t entirely to blame for this - I realize I’m reading The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time in 2018 after having ingested decades of feminist and cultural theory that have been reacting directly to these types of texts. I would just say to all the editors still putting this book on their must-read-before-you-die lists to maybe...consider bumping this for something else.
Positives:
Subtly composed, for example (as she writes in her new post-Trump intro) Atwood’s insistence on writing only events that have actually happened in human history. I think knowing this before I read the book lent a lot of gravitas to plot elements that I would’ve otherwise written off as hokey.
Also the non-chronological flashbacks to pre-Gilead is well done. I enjoyed the historicism of the 60s, 70s, and 80s that we’re written in - rare in a dystopian novel and worked very well.
The sort of closing of the circle/spectrum of ideological extremes with Offred and Moira’s contrasting ends is cool if slightly heavy-handed.
Negatives:
The writing style is just...so bad. Short, choppy, and repetitive prose that reminds me of bad slam poetry that tries to be deep by repeating the same words over and over again.
Pacing is crap. Nothing really /happens/ and the protagonist Offred is such a wet towel and you don’t even really get to see how she gets that way (or how she was before - did this woman ever have a personality?). Atwood must have known this as she was writing because she keeps having the narrator remind us that she’s sorry she couldn’t tell a better story or give specific characters more heroic endings but - that is literally just one massive cop out that cheapens the effect Atwood was probably going for.
Character development? What character development. I can’t believe I’m about to say this but the men in this book are too unsympathetic. The idea of men in this book is just poorly done. Both Luke and the Commander are not individual characters with motivations and personalities who act accordingly to those traits, but rather just man-shaped flesh sacks for Atwood to write as she wishes to Make Her Point. Like I can suspend my disbelief enough to imagine this dystopian regime but I’m just confused why there weren’t any male characters depicted acting like human beings rather than solely as Agents of the Patriarchy. Honestly the more I think about this the more all the characters are written this way.
Race is not explicitly addressed which is probably the biggest failing of this book. Atwood makes such an effort to situate this book in the context of post-Reagan era America and it’s like ??? Um?? I assume the Martha’s are meant to be women of colour but again - it’s all subtextual. For the amount of time and care Atwood takes to explore birth control and other second wave feminist issues as they had been tackled by the Gilead regime, I just find it insane that she doesn’t even try to address the implied white racial supremacy in as nuanced a fashion. It’s like she just threw up her hands and went “Whoops! Silly me! Guess this one’ll just be for the white feminists! Sorry folks you’ll have to wait for third wave feminism to hit to get started on that!”
