The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

When I was younger I read a lot of fantasy / science fiction novels, and I often enjoyed the world the author created but wanted to see it from the perspective of a "normal" person in it, rather than someone caught up in trying to save the universe. I wish I'd been turned on to Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a dystopian future where women have been largely stripped of their rights. The protagonist isn't the leader of the resistance; she's just an ordinary woman whose role in the new society is to have rich men's babies.

As in The Blind Assassin, it's not to clear to whom the narrator is writing the story. We know that she is basically a prisoner in the Commander's house and has no access to writing utensils or paper, or anywhere to store a manuscript even if she could write it. Periodically she shows awareness that's she's narrating, saying "I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling" or "This is a reconstruction." Later she seems to address the tale to her husband Luke, expressing concern for the audience's perception of her when she has an affair. In the epilogue, which serves a frame story, it's suggested that The Handmaid's Tale is transcribed from taped records made at some point in the process of the narrator attempting to escape.

The frame story shines a spotlight on the "normal" person perspective I highlighted above. The tapes were found decades after the narrator's struggle, and we learn that the patriarchal society has collapsed. But we never learn what happened to "Offred," or even what her real identity was. Even though we know that the horrible oppression has stopped, the narrator's fate still matters. It's easy to look at history's global impact, but events affect individuals, too, and we can forget that. The Handmaid's Tale reminds us.