A Life, Removed

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Woman can no longer hold bank accounts. Women can no longer hold jobs. Women are not allowed to read. If you are a handmaid, you are not allowed to do much at all. Walk to the market. Wait. And bear children. That is your job as a handmaid, or mistress as some would call it. You are here to bear children for your commander and his wife. You are only useful if you can bear children. Offred is at her third home and has her last chance to bear a child before being sent away to the Colonies if not worse. Offred had a daughter once, before things changed. She had a job, her own money. She was in love with her husband, Luke. But now she doesn’t even know if her daughter or her husband are alive. Everything before this is a memory. Her life and the lives of everyone around her has changed. Religion has taken over in the Republic of Gilead, what used to be the United States. The President is dead, as well the members of Congress and the constitution has been suspended. At first everyone assumed things would eventually go back to normal, but the rights of everyone, especially women, were slowly being stripped away.

                The Handmaid’s Tale brings out the fear women have of going back to the stone age. Here you have a country where women essentially have no rights and are viewed as possessions. Every woman has a purpose whether you are a wife, maid or a child bearing vessel, but you are only good for that purpose. The most frightening thing to me about this novel is that she remembers what it was like before. She remembers when things were different. She remembers what it was like to be independent, educated, important, valued, a mother. This change happened so swiftly, so quickly and everyone was too scared to say anything, scared of dying or missing. Religion was the backbone. Religion and simplicity.  Life would be so much simpler for women, and of course men, if women didn’t have to make any decisions anymore. So the choice was taken away.

              This was a complex story.  Because of the world we live in now, it is hard to imagine a world where women can be stripped of every single right. Even though we see the debates over birth control and women’s rights in the news all the time, we know there are too many women and men who would fight for us to keep those rights. But what if? That what if is what makes things complex. The novel never says explicitly what happened or how the take over occurred: how the army changed, how women were abducted for reproductive purposes or how these roles were created. Offred recalls what she can of the changes when she reflects on the time before but she only knows and has been told so much. Reading this novel made me grateful. You don’t realize how precious things are until they are taken away from you. That realization came to late for Offred, whose hidden joy is the fact that she can still remember her loved ones and her real name.