The Handmaid's Tale

It's the title of the book I have to read for my English class, written by Margaret Atwood. It's a good book, but I hate it. Set in the U.S., it's a novel about how woman are oppressed in a dystopian world. The main character is separated from her husband and daughter; she is made into a child-producing machine, because she is in the minority of women who are still fertile. It's horrifying, actually, that 1/2 of the population has been reduced to a walking uterus. Science has been abolished, and people have reverted to devoting themselves to religion. This novel focuses on the whole "all women are sinners because Eve was tempted" thing.

One interesting thing I noted about the novel, however, is that though it is the men who confine the women, it is the women themselves who are prison wardens. They spy on each other and report on each other, and in a way it is them who trap themselves. Isn't that the way way things are in life, though? Perhaps the boundaries we have are all self-imposed, and if consent could be reached, we'd have progress.

I still haven't finished the book- it's been a horribly unproductive day. I know I should finish reading it, but reading it makes me feel sick. I don't know why, but this novel makes me feel more uncomfortable compared to the other ones I've read. Maybe I just don't take dystopian novels too well. After all... it all sounds so real and probable. I feel as if we could achieve the world in The Handmaid's Tale by tomorrow. None of the other texts have been this bad- because I had been withdrawn. I could never fully understand what it would be like to live in Latin America (The House of the Spirits and Chronicle of a Death Foretold), Africa (Purple Hibiscus) or India (The God of Small Things). The novels I had previously read were all pretty bad- but none had struck me so hard. I had sort-of understood feminism through Virginia Woolf, but even then it seemed distant- something that did not concern me.

From a female perspective, living in the world of The Handmaid's Tale would be hell, but I don't think it is any better for a man. You could not escape the indoctrination, if you wanted to survive. How hard it would be, to hold on to your sanity, pretend that you believe in something until you are not even sure whether you actually do believe in it. Everyone else around you is the same. You cannot tell whether they are just pretending, or whether they have gone mad like the rest of the world. It'd be hard to get a woman, and getting a man was apparently illegal. The world must be suffocating- there is nothing to strive for...

Or would you feel pleasure instead? That sense of total dominance over someone. That 1/2 the population is automatically inferior to you because you are a man. Would that make you feel good? I do not know, as I have never felt that way. I imagine it could be pleasurable though, to seize power in your hands...

This novel is about feminism, but it is also about religion. I've noticed that many people around me can freely claim to be an atheist. That would not have been allowed, once upon a time. Reading this novel, I re-lived that time. I've never really appreciated atheism. Though not a believer myself, I've always sympathised with the religious. After all, everyone needs to hold on to something- and some people prefer to hold on to something which is great, powerful and loving- the perfect being- even if it was imaginary. Oh don't cry out "He's NOT imaginary!", that's not the point. The point is that I thought religion was a good thing, and I've never thought about the consequences of religion taken to the extremes. I see it now--- and it's enough to make me wish that religion did not exist. That's like saying I want atheism taken to the extreme though...

I wonder how that feels. Perhaps when I read a text about atheist extremes I will wish that we were all religious. Ultimately... I think I prefer the current state of co-existence. Yeah, it's like sitting on the fence. I take amusement though, in hearing moral debates about stem-cell research, abortion and homosexuality. There would be frustration, because people can appear so ignorant and stupid--- but isn't that sort of interesting?

I speak like a child watching a freak-show.