By Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale was the kind of book I should've read during university. As I mentioned in my review for Cat’s Eye, I’d been trying to find a used copy of THT for some years It wasn’t until last September when visiting my brother that I finally found a copy at a used book store in Abbotsford.
One reason I didn’t read THT sooner was my fear of (self-)serious fiction, particularly CanLit. I also quietly harboured a suspicion of Margaret Atwood as a visionary writer despite highly reputable rags like The New Yorker hailing her as a “prophet of dystopia”.
Let me be clear that Atwood is, without a doubt, a great fiction writer. But over the years, she has done things that made me question her visionary status. From trivial to worse, there was:
- Her championing of Vincent Lam’s highly overrated debut story collection which I didn’t like very much
- Her snobby dismissal of science fiction as mere genre fiction
- Her public support of Steve Galloway in his sexual misconduct scandal when he was a writing prof at UBC
- Her doubling down on her recent TERFish twitter posts
The last three items certainly demonstrated self-serving arrogance, but even more alarming, there was a lack of fundamental understanding of social issues that reveals a world view that might be possibly and ironically limited by the privilege of being enshrined for decades as a so-called visionary.
For Atwood fans who may disagree, let's take a look at this Guardian article:
Enter science fiction’s saviour, Ursula Le Guin, who in a 2009 review of Atwood’s The Year ofthe Flood criticised Atwood’s “arbitrarily restrictive definition” and laid bare Atwood’s motivations for proposing it: “She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.” This literary bigotry is more than just rhetoric; the very first line of the New York Times review of Oryx and Crake, for instance, proudly declares that “science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L.’” While sympathizing with Atwood’s motivations, Le Guin refused to endorse Atwood’s proposed solution.
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The widespread acceptance of the term “speculative fiction,” as Atwood has defined it, would spell the end for continuing efforts to legitimize science fiction as a genre. The resulting schism, presented as a defensive measure to protect works from the “literary bigots,” would plunder genre-transcendent texts like The Handmaid’s Tale to fill the snobbish stables of “speculative fiction” and leave “science fiction” to describe only much-derided 50s pulp novels.
And how does The Handmaid’s Tale stand as speculative fiction?
The day after Trump’s inauguration as POTUS, there was a well-known photograph taken at the Women’s March on Washington of a protester with a sign bearing the slogan: “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again.”
No one could predict that Donald Trump would become president, but Atwood certainly predicted the rise of the evangelical movement that helped put Trump in the highest office of the US of A. As a first-person account of a woman serving as a reproductive handmaid in a dystopian America ruled by patriarchal evangelicals, The Handmaid’s Tale was a captivating read. I was absorbed by Offred’s cloistered life as a handmaid and her quiet rebellion. But as soon as Atwood widened the scope to depict Gilead, a profound flaw revealed itself. And it wasn’t just the utter lack of sci-fi world-building that was the problem. Atwood is dismissive of genre fiction, yet her portrayal of Gilead as a society was thin at best. If this was genuine science fiction, Atwood would’ve had to flesh out Gilead - significantly. But as “serious literature”, Gilead could conveniently serve as allegory or symbol.
If I had read The Handmaid’s Tale as a naïve university student, I wouldn’t have caught on. But reading this in 2022, with racism and colonialism laid bare by BLM and MMIWG2S, and the horrors of the Residential School system etched into the collective consciousness, the omission is glaringly obvious. A real elephant in the room. I don’t wish to spend my precious time dissecting all this, when it's so easy to google articles that explain this better than I ever could.
By portraying a dystopic America ruled by evangelical Christian, Atwood omitted an entire history that has been part of America since its very founding - a country that was built upon the enslavement and suffering of African peoples. It’s common knowledge that The Handmaid’s Tale is about a society built on the oppression of women, but what’s much less known was that it's also about "a society built on white supremacy":
You’re forgiven for missing that major plot point because even Atwood quickly glosses over it. The narrative never really pans out far enough to give us a full picture of Gilead as a society. Our protagonist, Offred, is a white woman and has a narrow scope of the dystopian world of Gilead. Searching for mentions of race in The Handmaid’s Tale feels like digging for clues.
In fact, the most obvious statement that Gilead was a white supremacist society doesn’t even come until the conclusion, a section titled “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale,” that reads as a lecture given by the historian who found Offred’s recorded story hidden away. In it, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto of Cambridge University, gives his audience some historical context for the fall of the United States and the rise of Gilead. He says,
“Men highly placed in the regime were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birth rates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time.” (Bold text added by [author].)
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The only mention of non-white people at all is a line referring to the “Children of Ham” being relocated to their homeland. Vague as hell, right? I didn’t fully understand the implications of that until I read the “historical notes” section. It’s the only time in the entire three hundred-ish pages that it’s explicitly stated that the forming of Gilead was racially motivated.
I’d like to take a moment to add here that one big problem I have with The Handmaid’s Tale is that I think Atwood has done an abysmally horrible job of addressing race in the novel — and has since refused to comment on her racial insensitivity since. This tweet sums it up.
Atwood has been very vocal about her insistence that everything she included in The Handmaid’s Tale has happened in history, that every injustice is one that women have faced. I think the point is to drive home the fact that if it happened before then it can happen again. But who did it happen to before? She’s reluctant to address that because the answer is largely…not white women. Black women, brown women and indigenous women have been abused and enslaved for centuries. The dystopia is when it begins happening to white women.
Here's a passage from an article from The Verge:
The novel is narrated by Offred, a college-educated white woman forced into service as a handmaiden. Atwood openly acknowledges that Offred's experiences of violence and sexual coercion are based on American slavery. The network that rescues handmaids is clumsily named the Underground Femaleroad, after the historic Underground Railroad. Atwood also mentions that the regime hates the song "Amazing Grace,” which was originally written as a protest against the slave trade. Handmaids, like black slaves before them, are not allowed to read, need passes to go outside, and can be publicly lynched for perceived crimes against the regime.
Atwood also links the handmaids’ plight to the oppression of women in some Arabic Muslim countries. The handmaids are forced to wear enveloping, draping outfits that mix nun's habits and burqas. And Offred muses that handmaid gatherings look like "paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans, turbans on their heads, or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunuch in the background standing guard." In her world, independent Western women have fallen into an Orientalist nightmare. The terrible thing about being a handmaid is that you cease to be white.
The book does explain why black people are absent in Gilead: the regime is not just sexist, but racist. It is only interested in white babies, and therefore only interested in enslaving white women. The novel mentions a news report about the "resettlement of the Children of Ham," which suggests American people of color are being forcibly relocated — and given the American historical precedents, probably murdered outright. Gilead obligingly moves black people away so the novel can present black people's experiences without black characters. Atwood critiques the regime, but also collaborates with it to push black people aside.
And from an article published on Vulture:
The most incisive aspect of The Handmaid’s Tale is that it portrays America not as it could be, but how it’s always been.
In Atwood’s novel, black people are mentioned in only a few sentences to alert readers that they’ve been rounded up and sent to some colony in the Midwest, in a move that resembles South Africa’s apartheid. This decision feels like the mark of a writer unable to reckon with how race would compound the horrors of a hyper-Evangelical-ruled culture. Furthermore, it misrepresents how black and brown people resist in times of crisis. As writer Mikki Kendall noted on Twitter, “black people did not survive slavery, Jim Crow, and the war on drugs to be taken out by a handful of white boys with guns.”
The Handmaid’s Tale [the show] is best described as post-racial. In an interview with TVLine Miller explains this choice, saying, “The evangelical movement has gotten a lot more integrated” in the years since the book was published. In actuality, the evangelical movement continues to twist scripture in order to support virulent racism — a practice that goes back to this country’s founding, when slaves were stripped of their own practices and forced into Christianity while being barred from reading the same Bible slave masters used to assert their superiority as not just biological fact, but a spiritual imperative. More importantly, Handmaid’s post-racial view of America rings false because in times of strife, divisions don’t dissolve — if anything, they become more ingrained (which proves true for gender on the show). As Soraya Nadia McDonald posits in a piece for the Undefeated, “So Gilead is post-racial because the human race is facing extinction, and that prompted Americans to get over several hundred years’ worth of racist education and social conditioning that depicted black people as inferior and less than human?”
How can you attempt to craft a political, artistically rich narrative that trades in the real-life experiences of black and brown women, while ignoring them and the ways sexism intersects with racism? The Handmaid’s Tale creates a claustrophobic reality, particularly for black viewers and the characters that mirror us onscreen. Its catchy feminist rhetoric is a mask for how it propagates the same systems it seeks to critique. The bodies and histories of black and brown women prove to be useful templates for shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, but our actual voices aren’t.
Its catchy feminist rhetoric is a mask for how it propagates the same systems it seeks to critique.
THIS. Although meant for the TV series, it also accurately sums up my feelings about The Handmaid's Tale and its author. If you want to be brutally honest about what Atwood actually did, she appropriated the history and suffering of African slaves and transformed it into appealing yet serious fiction for white people. And she greatly benefited from that. TJ Klune also continues this tradition with a book I'm a bit embarrassed at having read. Atwood is a talented writer, but not the enlightened visionary the literary world has made her out to be. Atwood came to prominence at a time when white feminism and CanLit was gaining traction and becoming an establishment. In this sphere, she should be revered. But her status as a prophet of dystopia, not so much.
So yeah, I don’t know if I can continue reading Atwood anymore. I have the first season of THT but don’t think I can watch that either knowing its post-racial politics will bother me. I still have Oryx and Crake (which I realize is a triology, ugh) and have decided to sell it. I think Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid's Tale are enough to say I’ve read Atwood and can opine about her as an author. There are so many books that I want to read and I’d much rather read from authors I truly respect. In fact, I may look into more books by Le Guin (I think I’ve only read The Farthest Shore and it was a long time ago).
