A 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood set Twenty Minutes into the Future. A portrait of a Dystopia.The setting is the new Republic of Gilead, a country which is at war, where the roles of society are firmly defined, and women have no rights — especially not handmaids. Our protagonist is a woman who has been trained to be a handmaid, one who conceives and gives birth on behalf of those who are officially wives. A sharp-eyed reader might catch her name in the first chapter; the rest of us just know her as Offred, the name she uses as long as she's with Fred and his wife. Handmaids don't get permanent names.She gives a portrait of the society. She can remember before, when women still had rights; her mother was a feminist. She was married, but her husband was married before, which became important. It was a cashless society, so when the republic of Gilead took over, they just wiped out jobs for women and money for women at the same time. When things started getting more oppressive, she and her fella tried to flee, but she got caught; since she had been "living in sin," as her husband divorced his first wife, hence invalidating his marriage with her according to the fundamentalists that took over, she was made a handmaid.It has been about seven years since then, long enough for seven-year-olds not to remember how it was before. AIDS and R-Strain syphilis have made many people sterile; pregnancies are rare, healthy births even rarer. Women are forbidden to read or write; handmaids must wear red and are forbidden to have peripheral vision. It's a simple job; get pregnant, have a live and unmutated birth, try to get along with the family, repeat as necessary. Three failures without a success, and the handmaid is killed or worse. Offred is with a tough family; the husband is a military man, and the wife (who must wear blue) was a singer who used to crusade about women staying at home and being good wives. She is not enjoying her retirement. There are also two "Marthas" who do all the housekeeping.The previous Offred had committed suicide.Offred befriends another handmaid, Ofglen, and eventually learns that she belongs to a resistance movement to fight or flee Gilead. She eventually falls head-over-heels with another of its members. Offred enters a second underground through Fred, who is willing to share extra things with her, things normally forbidden to handmaids, to get extra time with her; its motives are less noble however.Very popular in Anglophone high school English classes, although the confronting adult subject matter leads to a crusade to ban the book every five years or so.Made into a film in 1990 starring the late Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway. You can find it (with German subtitles) here.
This book contains examples of:
Artistic License - Biology: No form of pollution fits what's described in the book, and you cannot screw up the oceans that badly without massive repercussions. Though the book does acknowledge that Offred is an Unreliable Narrator as she can only speculate on what she is told, which as a handmaid is not much, and even then is filtered through state sponsored propaganda. The Republic of Gilead could be feeding people false information about environmental disasters for all the reader knows.
As The Good Book Says: Gileadian society is full of it. Notably, the Theme Naming of the grocery shops; the bakery is called Daily Bread (Truth in Television, but it is rather an obvious name), the butcher All Flesh, the florist Lilies of the Field, etc.
As You Know: Atwood provides much of the description outside of Offred's perspective through this, whether that be from Aunt Lydia or the historiographers in the far future.
Be Careful What You Wish For: Serena Joy spent most of her pre-Gilead career as a televangelist promoting "traditional family values" (i.e. women should stay in the kitchen and aspire to be baby-factories, etc). But now that everything she preached for has been instituted into Gilead's laws, she is less than pleased with the new situation. (This may be an oblique Take That to conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment in the US on the grounds that it would destroy women's traditional role in the home, but was herself a lawyer who failed to follow this in her own life.)
Also, Offred's mother, a radical feminist, wished for a separate women's culture and that pornography be eradicated. Both very much happened in Gilead.
Bolivian Army Ending: Offred's story has one, although the Distant Finale gives away some of what happened. Her ultimate fate, including whether her escape succeeded or not, remains unknown.
Broken Pedestal: When Offred meets Moira at Jezebel's. Prior to this all she knew was that Moira had overcome an Aunt and escaped - she is understandably shaken to find her in her current position, not just because of the role but because she's finally been broken.
Bury Your Gays: Or rather, "leave your gays hanging on the gibbet as a warning to others." "Gender treachery" in Gilead is punishable by death, along with many other "crimes."
Canis Latinicus: "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" is carved into the closet's wall in Offred's bedroom. She thinks it's a real Latin phrase; later the Commander tells her that it's a fake Latin joke for "don't let the bastards grind you down".
The Conspiracy: We can assume it's of the Group variety. Why? Well, how else did a group formed by Fundamentalist Christians, The Far Right and anti-pornography activists manage to infiltrate the highest echelons of the pre-Gilead government and military?
Confirmed in the book with a far-right cabal in the US government known as the Sons of Jacob that plots its takeover.
The fruits of their plan? The President's Day Massacre: In which The President was assassinated, Congress massacred, and the Constitution suspended. In other words, nothing less than the total collapse of the government. Goodbye America, hello Gilead.
And they blamed it on Muslim terrorists - at the time pre-dating 9/11 and resulting conspiracy theories of an "inside job" by 16 years.
Color-Coded Characters: Women in Gilead are divided into castes, reflected by the color of robes they wear. Wives wear blue, Daughters wear white, Aunts wear brown, Marthas wear green, and Handmaids wear red. Econowives wear garish multi-color robes to show that they play multiple roles.
Corrupt Church: Fundamentalist Christianity cranked up to the point where it does not even resemble Christianity anymore, and was explicitly compared in the book with Iran.
Not to mention the regime is constantly making war on rival Christian sects which they persecute, from Catholics to Quakers and Baptists.
Distant Finale: After (quite a bit less than) 100 years Gilead collapses but the Gileadean civil war with dissident groups has exhausted the Western powers. It's implied that the Caucasian race may have been crippled or wiped out by the reproductive crisis.
Also a textbook case of Dystopia Is Hard; the fundamentalists got exactly what they asked for, but actually running a brutal theocracy is a hell of a lot harder than founding one. There are already cracks showing a mere seven years after the initial coup... although the epilogue mentions the fact that the society survived long enough that historians have designated the story as falling in the "Early" period.
Genre Shift: The emotionally-laden story of Offred is immediately followed by the transcript of a speech given at a Gileadean study symposium that clinically dissects the story, dismissing a lot of it as too vague and unreliable as a primary historical source.
Happiness in Slavery: Some women like the lifestyle of a Handmaid. Others see indentured prostitution as a better option.
Especially true for the Marthas.
History Repeats: the Epilogue, where it is pretty clear that humanity has learned nothing from the misogynistic Gilead; casual sexism is still alive and well.
Jerkass: Selena's not-so-subtle attitude towards Offred.
Literary Agent Hypothesis: The epilogue contains an academic history essay where it is revealed that the novel you are just reading is a transcript of tapes Offred recorded as she was being smuggled out of the country.
Lady in Red: Played with. Most people assume that Handmaids are massive sluts.
Mandatory Motherhood: Played straight in Gilead, because of the fact many high-ranking women are infertile or too old to get pregnant, so going on the Biblical precedent of Jacob, Rachel and Leah, they force "handmaids" to bear a child in their place.
No Ending: Subverted immediately by the Literary Agent Hypothesis epilogue that follows on the next page, although Offred's ultimate fate is still ambiguous.
No Name Given: Our protagonist, and all other handmaids, but if you really read between the lines, her first name is probably June, implied by a line in the first chapter: "We learned to lipread, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way, we exchanged names, from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June". Everyone in the list appears later in the story, except June.
Subverted in the 1990 film adaption, where Offred's name is Kate.
This is a major plot point as when the Fundamentalists take over, they simply freeze all women's bank accounts so their money is gone, then make it illegal to employ them (Offred mentions having all-electronic money made this easier as well. Then women reading is banned...
A few subtle hints in the book lead some to believe it's June.
Oddly enough, in the film adaption Offred is called Kate.
Oppressive States Of America: It's unclear how much of the former USA constitutes Gilead, but the professor in the epilogue vaguely mentions that it "redrew the map". The story takes place in New England.
Playboy Bunny: Moira wears one of these costumes when she ends up in a brothel. Offred tries and fails to work out why men find the rabbit motif sexy.
Precision F-Strike: "My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body."
Punny Name: The location of the convention at the end of the book is Denay, Nunavit—Deny none of it.
Red Oni, Blue Oni: Offred wears red, while Serena Joy, who despises her, wears blue.
Released To Elsewhere: Possibly, with the TV report about the Children of Ham being "resettled" to "national homelands" (a la apartheid South Africa) in North Dakota.
Also, Jews can convert or go to Israel, most choosing the latter. (However, many of the ships carrying them are in fact scuttled at sea.)
Being sent to the Colonies initially sounds like it might be a cushy alternative to living in Gilead proper. Then it's revealed that they're irradiated wastelands at worst, and labour camps at best.
Rule 34: Or at least evidence it exists inside Gilead.
One of the more mundane discomforts for women in Gilead is that skin lotions and moisturisers are forbidden as vanity products, a microcosm of the general harshness of a life without human comforts. Or to put it another way, there is no balm in Gilead.
Sterility Plague: Declining fertility rates due to AIDS, "R-Strain Syphilis", and nuclear fallout when the reactors in California melt down from its earthquake is a central theme in both the film and book versions.
Strange Bedfellows: The anti-pornographic alliance between radical feminists and fundamentalist Christians shown before the United States became Gilead. This undermined them in the end, as their fundamentalist "allies" turned on women in general. This was a then-current strange bedfellows alliance in the early 1980s.
Take That: Atwood includes a mild dig at the concept of cultural relativism used in anthropology research in the Epilogue.
Unreliable Narrator: The writer of the epilogue seems to think Offred was one of these.
She even says "This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction." There's some initial ambiguity as to whether this refers solely to the following scene or to the entire tale, but she goes on to explain in general terms why her recollections can't possibly be complete and accurate.
A 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood set Twenty Minutes into the Future. A portrait of a Dystopia.The setting is the new Republic of Gilead, a country which is at war, where the roles of society are firmly defined, and women have no rights — especially not handmaids. Our protagonist is a woman who has been trained to be a handmaid, one who conceives and gives birth on behalf of those who are officially wives. A sharp-eyed reader might catch her name in the first chapter; the rest of us just know her as Offred, the name she uses as long as she's with Fred and his wife. Handmaids don't get permanent names.She gives a portrait of the society. She can remember before, when women still had rights; her mother was a feminist. She was married, but her husband was married before, which became important. It was a cashless society, so when the republic of Gilead took over, they just wiped out jobs for women and money for women at the same time. When things started getting more oppressive, she and her fella tried to flee, but she got caught; since she had been "living in sin," as her husband divorced his first wife, hence invalidating his marriage with her according to the fundamentalists that took over, she was made a handmaid.It has been about seven years since then, long enough for seven-year-olds not to remember how it was before. AIDS and R-Strain syphilis have made many people sterile; pregnancies are rare, healthy births even rarer. Women are forbidden to read or write; handmaids must wear red and are forbidden to have peripheral vision. It's a simple job; get pregnant, have a live and unmutated birth, try to get along with the family, repeat as necessary. Three failures without a success, and the handmaid is killed or worse. Offred is with a tough family; the husband is a military man, and the wife (who must wear blue) was a singer who used to crusade about women staying at home and being good wives. She is not enjoying her retirement. There are also two "Marthas" who do all the housekeeping.The previous Offred had committed suicide.Offred befriends another handmaid, Ofglen, and eventually learns that she belongs to a resistance movement to fight or flee Gilead. She eventually falls head-over-heels with another of its members. Offred enters a second underground through Fred, who is willing to share extra things with her, things normally forbidden to handmaids, to get extra time with her; its motives are less noble however.Very popular in Anglophone high school English classes, although the confronting adult subject matter leads to a crusade to ban the book every five years or so.Made into a film in 1990 starring the late Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway. You can find it (with German subtitles) here
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