Reviews Literature / The Handmaids Tale

That's like saying A modest Proposal is a failure because it was dedicated to the problem of its day.

No, because we still have hilariously out-of-touch rich people condescending to the poor and telling them how to solve their problems in hilariously out-of-touch ways. When's the last time you felt like every other American agreed with Jerry Falwell or Phyllis Schlafly?

That is, indeed, my point: great satire satirizes the universal and doesn't get dated. For all I know, The Handmaid's Tale was good satire when it first came out... but the fact that it is not good satire now prevents it from being great.

I dunno, only a little bit less than half the country is against the "religious freedom" laws that allow for legal discrimination. Maybe I'm just influenced by the area I live where everyone watches Fox News and thinks Obama is the antichrist and agrees with Bryan Fischer on everything.

Though, I would argue that sexism is still a big issue, considering that there's only a few jobs where women an expect the same pay as a man.

There's a difference between "women aren't paid the same work for the same labor" and "women who can read and wear pants caused 9/11." Falwell would literally go on to say the latter.

Sure, they're both crappy, but I'm sure we can agree the latter is crappier.

Remember, when this book was written there was no Fox News. The conservatives hadn't invented it yet because everyone already thought everyone else had the opinions of Fox News viewers. Sure, modern American politics is sharply divided, but that's good. It means we feel free enough to pull in all sorts of directions.

Again, it might just be because I live in an area where saying "Matthew Shepard was just getting mugged!" Would be normal, say global warming is a lie and claim Christians are still being persecuted. I know those are universal problems but it's something I deal with a lot, so I'm probably a bit disproportionately sensitive to them. I just wish someone in congress would actually try to progress at a rate faster than the heat death of the universe.

I find it amazing how many people read this book and don't link it with the Iranian revolution that would have taken place just before Atwood began writing it. Compare the Republic of Gilead with Iran, Saudi Arabia, or ISIS held territories. It's not satire, it's a legitimate look at what ultra-fundamentalist theocracies look like, set in the US to make it more jarring and relate-able to the reader.

I agree. But, and I don't mean this to be a cruel as it probably sounds, I retort:

Sure. But Red Dawn is a similar examination of the Afghan insurgency with a few tweaks to make it more "plausible." And, whatever Red Dawn's other qualities as a film, "timeless" isn't one of them.

Well, I don't think I would agree. I haven't read the book, but I did watch the film (panned for some bizarre reason) and I thought it was quite good. At the very least, it was better than Hunger Games or The Giver, or a lot of other modern dystopias, by a considerable margin.

Huh, really? The Hunger Games I get (I mean, it's going to be just as dated once the whole Reality TV thing dies down a bit), but The Giver? ...Eh, I haven't seen either film. For all I know one's a upgrade and the other's a downgrade.

I admit that I compared book to film when it came to The Giver; never bothered seeing the film after a book fan I know saw it and said they butchered the book. Unlike him, though, I never really liked it in the first place: there are zero memorable characters, and what exactly are we are supposed to learn from it at the end? That getting rid of one's emotions is bad? Not all that revelatory. That putting entire society's emotional history into one/two people is idiotic and doomed to fail? Duh. That colorblind people apparently feel fewer emotions than normal-sighted? Bullshit.

Nevertheless, the main reason The Giver utterly falls flat for me because I never really got why anyone would want that kind of a society in the first place. Yes, sure, you don't get to feel those negative emotions and let's even assume it's desirable to get rid of the positive ones in process. Let's even assume you get everyone in the world somehow to sign up to it and thus eradicate conflict, conveniently ignoring basic questions like why would the top 5/top 1% of the world hand over everything for the sake of it. Once you bypass all those bus-sized logic gaps, then what?

One of the fundamental needs of most human beings is to progress, to know that you're doing something important and that the society will see fruits of your labor, even if you don't live to see them yourself. The society in The Giver does not seem to go anywhere, or even want to go anywhere, much like one in The Hunger Games, even though both have existed for quite a long time and don't face much opposition.

With The Handmaid's Tale film, though, there was a pretty clear idea that all the stuff done to women was a fucked-up "corrective" for the society in the eyes of the leaders, rather than the desired endpoint. It was also very clear that it's only minority that seized power which is fully on-board, and that the order is already crumbling, both with the ending, and before, where we get to see a terrorist attack on the army checkpoint.Dystopia Is Hard and THD film understood that, while The Giver never did. I can quite easily draw parallels between that film and how the Islamic State is already beginning to crumble over in the real life. I can't do anything like that for The Giver.

The "corrective" in The Giver is that it's a society as designed by communist social engineers, rather than people. The intent is to try to make "perfectly rational" individuals who will work and live without letting all that messy humanity get in the way.

You say no one really wants that, but is it true? I've been on the Internet. I've been to college. You can't take a leak without accidentally drizzling on a buncha armchair philosophers moaning and groaning about how what's really wrong with America is people acting "emotionally" rather than "rationally," and how we should always hold that as an ideal.

The other point is, obviously, that everyone in the community is "equal." Regardless of the professions they're sorted into, they all have roughly the same privileges, the same accommodations (bike, house, children, etc.), and, as the geneticists labor over it, the same rough phenotype.

Besides, unlike, say, Brave New World, it's not like the entire world is like this. The society in The Giver is more like... well, like a commune. There's an outside world, we know from the sequels, where "normal" people live at a roughly-medieval level of development. I could see a bunch of number-crunching social-engineer types setting up something like the culture in The Giver in the aftermath of a war.

In short, The Giver is timeless because it is essentially the perfect rebuttal to every argument you'll ever have with an armchair communist. In order to make people "rational" and "equal," it would be necessary to stop them being people. It's refuting an ideal rather than a specific thing that happened at a specific time. That's what makes it more effective than The Handmaid's Tale.

Well, you could argue that The Handmaid's Tale is about an ideal too, an ideal of the society where women need to be put into their place and their reproductive role is more important than anything else. Sure, it's not as relevant in the USA nowadays, but not-too-different views are still embodied by large chunks of populace in the less-enlightened Middle East countries, or in rural India, etc.

On the other hand, though, I don't think The Giver holds much relevance outside of dealing with what you call an "armchair communist" group. I've seen some of those people online too, where there frequently argue about how there was never a true communist society, etc. To me those people always came off similar to Western fighters in ME, who've read a couple dozen pages of Qu'ran at best before going away to fight for what they think is in it.

Being a Russian myself with hard-left political views, I can assure you that none of the many people in Russia who were happy with the Soviet Union and still regret its demise today actually believe in making everyone less emotional/more "rational". Neither do they believe in the kind of equality The Giver aims to rebut: genetics crap was never relevant, (especially since Soviet Union had few problems with racism and did stuff like affirmative action decades before Western nations). Ensuring everyone is the same materially in the literal way The Giver intends was abandoned back in the 1920's, and since then there was only indirect through the command economy.

In short, to me The Giver always felt like a War On Straw book rather than an actual novel. Perhaps there are people over in America who take early communist ideals so literally that The Giver would impact on them, just like there are still people who take ideas of THD literally enough. For me, though, it fell flat, and most people over in Australia who also read that book seemed to share my opinion of it.

...This is rapidly turning into an irrelevant discussion of The Giver.

I guess I'll just say that the book (haven't seen the movie), is the same way for me: it takes every parallel position to the various religious fundamentalist regimes so ludicrously far that it ceases to be credible. As the other review on this page argues, it doesn't correspond to any real-world regime either, due to the various Dystopian Edicts that define its society. Even its founders don't really have anything enjoyable in life in Gilead.

Again, the least dated messages in the book are, essentially, "Sexism and religious fundamentalist totalitarianism are bad, m'kay?" Fine. But that's all they say. They don't examine, for instance, the causes of sexist and misogynist thinking, outside of a sort of sexual frustration caused by the misogynist laws caused by sexual frustration, and so on.

It doesn't go much into the most dangerous aspects of modern religious fundamentalism; what can make it appealing to desperate and disillusioned individuals who feel alienated by their societies. No, the conspiracy that formed Gilead were just a bunch of right-wing, foaming-at-the-mouth nutjobs, and no individual who is even slightly rounded or human is a believer in their ideology. The Commander, for instance, is ultimately a hollow idol with no real arguments about the good things going on, and Jezebel's existence makes every single officer in Gilead a hypocritical monster.

I don't disagree that misogynist, religiously fundamentalist totalitarianism is a dangerous thing we should be forewarned and forearmed about. But this shallow caricature isn't the right way to do it.

I disagree. Perhaps the *most* dated messages in the book directly have to do with sexism. The most currently-relevant portions of the book have to do with how the religious far-right managed to ensnare the support of the feminist far-left by spinning its advocacy for a "porn-free" "low-aggression" separate sphere for women. It's been a problem for as long as social justice has been around: some radicals *always* think splitting off and forming a separate society where they can be treated "fairly" is the best course of action without recognizing that it's also a reactionary idea. Just look at the far, far-left's advocacy for separate accommodations for "oppressed groups" like women, racial minorities, sexual assault victims, etc. and see how they resemble ghettoes. At its heart, the book is a warning to actually think through the logical consequences of one's beliefs and see how they do or don't mesh with the goals of one's opponents.

Well, years later, as homegrown fascism contests for the soul of my nation, do I stand by my criticisms?

Kind of? I do still think that it’s not a very effective criticism or examination of what makes religious totalitarianism appealing to those supporters it victimizes.

But on the other hand, I can’t deny that she did a better job capturing the preoccupations of the far right then I thought. And I admit, some of it is probably that when I was a younger and angrier man, I had my own problems with a woman complaining about men. That wasn’t fair of me.

I also failed to pick up on the hint that Gilead wasn’t necessarily a full-blown successor state in total control of the continental US. That makes it significantly more plausible than what I originally believed, that its brand of socially reactionary fundamentalist Christianity captured a wide enough audience to dominate the nation entire. Even today, their homegrown fascism is an insular and unpopular ideology that only has political relevance because they are good at gaming the system. There is a reason that most of them have backgrounds in advertising rather than, you know, political science.

I think stories the likes of Handmaids Tale and 1984\'s clasification as either timeless or contemporary depend more on the evolution of society than the author\'s intentions.