Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: A breeding machine for God and fatherland. Rules, rules, and more rules. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum
Surrogate for God and Fatherland
The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the books discussed in the VPRO radio series Utopia: On Dreamers and Doom Thinkers, which the program OVT broadcast last summer. Jos Palm, Julie Blussé, Maarten Doorman, and a rotating guest examined works like Thomas More’s Utopia, Plato’s Republic, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984. I was already familiar with most of the books featured, but Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was new to me.
Big Brothers Are Watching Us
History never unfolds exactly as utopias or dystopias predict. Yet they can serve as genuine incentives or warnings in how we think about our future—especially when it comes to the structure of society. Brave New World, for instance, shows us how a population can be made happy yet unfree through conditioning and entertainment. 1984 is frequently cited in critical articles about modern surveillance: multiple Big Brothers (nation-states and tech giants) are watching us.
The Republic of Gilead
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is not a concrete prediction of the future, but a warning: the freedoms we enjoy are far less permanent than we might assume. The novel is set in the Republic of Gilead, located in what was once the northern United States. Christian fundamentalists have gradually established an autocracy there. In a society increasingly destabilized by ecological catastrophe, they first gained power by promising that their old fundamentalist rules would restore order and security. Then, in the chaos and panic following an attack on the government, they consolidated their power into a totalitarian regime.
Breeding Machines
One of the problems the Republic of Gilead must solve is the fact that a large portion of the population has become infertile. A shortage of offspring looms. This turns the few women who are still fertile into a kind of national treasure. They are trained by “Aunts” to serve as Handmaids—essentially breeding machines or surrogate mothers—for powerful couples who remain childless after several years of marriage. Offred, the novel’s protagonist, is one such Handmaid.
Offred
To make the position and function of the Handmaids clear even in language, they are given names derived from the men they are meant to bear children for. Hence the name Offred (in Dutch, Vanfred). Offred became a Handmaid after the regime captured her while she was trying to flee to Canada. Becoming a Handmaid was one of the options presented to her. It was not an appealing choice, but it was always better than the alternatives: cleaning up toxic waste or a life as a sex slave.
Dress Codes
Gilead’s rulers have also established strict rules about how women must dress. Handmaids wear red cloaks. On their heads, they have red caps beneath which are white coifs with large flaps that cover their faces, allowing them to see only straight ahead. Housekeepers (called Marthas) wear green. The wives of the powerful wear blue.
Shopping Excursions
Offred spends most of her day alone in her room in Fred’s house. Once a day, she is allowed to go to the store. She always goes with Ofglen, another Handmaid. For Offred, these shopping trips are extremely important. For a long time, they are her only chance to hear news from the world beyond her room. At first, she and Ofglen only exchange the prescribed pleasantries. As the novel progresses, she discovers that Ofglen is a member of an underground women’s movement. From then on, they speak more freely with each other.
The Ritual
In her role as a Handmaid, Offred is both required and limited to having sex once a month with her Commander. This follows a fixed ritual. First, Fred reads aloud to the entire household from the Bible. The passage is the story from Genesis in which Rachel urges her husband Jacob to have a child with her handmaid Bilhah, since she herself remains childless. After the reading, Offred, Fred, and his wife Serena Joy retire together to the bedroom. There, the three of them perform a complicated and humiliating mating ritual.
Underground Movements
Rules, rules, and more rules. In a theocracy, a few powerful figures determine—based on a selective reading of some holy scripture—how people within the community must behave. This applies to both public and private life. It makes life barely livable. So all kinds of underground movements emerge to escape the rules. Often, a black market for forbidden goods arises as well. Such is the case in The Handmaid’s Tale. But breaking the rules is dangerous. The punishments are barbaric: amputation, hanging, or lynching.
Private Encounters
Those in power usually have more ways to escape their own rules than their subjects do. Thanks to their networks, they know better which underground options exist. And they are subject to less scrutiny. Fred, too, allows himself certain freedoms. He invites Offred into his private study. At first, he simply wants company and to play Scrabble with her. For both of them, it is liberating to be able to say all the words that come to mind without the risk of arrest.
An Attempt at Control
Of course, it does not stop at Scrabble. The relationship between the Commander and Offred becomes increasingly sexual. Although Offred does not feel attracted to Fred, she does reciprocate his advances. Partly because, in her mind, she has little choice. But at the same time, it gives her a sense of control. It also makes her daily life far more interesting. And it offers an additional chance to gather information from beyond the walls of the house where she is confined.
Arrest or Liberation?
Ultimately, Offred breaks more and more rules, as do the people around her. By the end of the novel, Offred faces the threat of arrest. She herself does not know which violation has sealed her fate. And neither do we. We never even find out exactly how her story ends. Are the men who take her from the house agents of the government? Or has Nick—Fred’s household servant and Offred’s secret lover—quickly arranged to get her to safety?
Transcription
The Handmaid’s Tale is an extremely gripping book. This is partly because, for almost the entire novel—except the final chapter—we are trapped in Offred’s claustrophobic perspective. She records her story and thoughts onto a cassette tape, often still searching for the right words or examples. The novel is a transcription of this. As a result, we as readers are brought very close to Offred’s emotional life and her struggle to remain true to her own ideas and history.
Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum
Carved into the floor of the closet in Offred’s room are the words: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Not letting the bastards grind her down is what Offred spends the entire novel trying to do. By keeping her memories of her old friend Luke and their daughter as vivid as possible. By not forgetting who she was and what she did. And above all, by trying as little as possible to grow accustomed to the new situation. That is difficult, because if you are not careful, everything simply becomes normal.
Our Hard-Won Freedoms
The Handmaid’s Tale shows how we can lose hard-won rights such as freedom of the press, suffrage, an independent judiciary, and sexual freedoms if a portion of the population believes this is for the better and the rest cannot be bothered to defend them. The novel also shows that once we have lost our freedoms, we do not simply get them back.
More Than a Simple Battle of the Sexes
In the Republic of Gilead, women are subjugated by men. But the novel is certainly not a simple depiction of a battle between the sexes. For example, there are parallels in how both the Republic of Gilead and Offred’s mother’s feminism seek to control women’s sexuality. Additionally, some women support the republic’s fundamentalist principles. And in the end, in this republic, men are just as much prisoners of the system, especially those of lower status.
Nothing New Under the Sun
One interesting particularity of The Handmaid’s Tale, compared to many other dystopias, is that the depicted society does not require any new major technological inventions or newly devised dogmas. When writing the novel, Atwood took as her starting point that the rules and regulations of the Republic of Gilead must have examples in the real world. This principle has largely been maintained for the TV series as well. In an interview with Jennifer Vineyard for The New York Times, Atwood discusses this further.
Pascal Klaassen
January 2018
Originally published in Dutch on RodeMuur.nl. Translated with AI (Vibe / Mistral).