At first I thought it would be a difficult read for me because the narrative jumps from the present to the past, or to random memories and thoughts, but I gradually got used to it and really enjoyed the book. It was something new for me.
I finished the book today and I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m pretty creeped out.
Despite the fact that the book was published in 1985, it seems very up-to-date. The idea that such a regime was created (among other reasons) because >!“men could no longer control women” seems too real. I believe that there are men who would like to have women fully in their power. To control what they can wear, what they can do and especially what they must do.!<
In many countries, the government tries to control birth rate by banning abortions. Ideas against the freedom of women similar to those in the book can actually be seen in today’s society.
I can’t formulate it well, but the emergence of similar restrictions for women, even if not in such a drastic form, does not seem unrealistic to me.
Did you have similar feelings after reading this book ?
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Read the second one! It is so satisfying
Whatever you do now, don’t read the testaments!
Oh, why so ? Others recommended it.
The testament is the sequel
This book was shit
I have seen many similar opinions and respect it. In the beginning of the book, I thought I will not like it too, but then it changed for me.
Would you mind saying more ? Why do you not like it ?
I had the same feelings watching the show as well as reading the book. The show really hit home for me and I was deeply uncomfortable watching it at times because it was so easy to imagine falling into this kind of reality if we had an infertility crisis. I honestly don’t think it would be too far off.
I look at the state of abortion rights in different states here in the US and it really, really scares me.
If a new season of the show comes out, I don’t know if I’ll watch it, just to avoid going somewhere dark mentally. I don’t love the direction they’re going with June’s character either.
Most places where “men control women” are shitholes anyways where also men live like shit.
Alias Grace is an excellent read as well. I highly recommend it.
Whatever you do, don’t watch the tv show.
I too have similar feelings towards that book. The book may be fiction but it does parallel with what is happening in real life. Although the book is fiction, personally for me it is a reminder that we should never take our rights, especially women’s rights, for granted and we must continue to uphold and keep fighting for our rights because you will never know when it will be taken away from us if we rest on our laurels in regards to living in countries that have many rights
I read this in my early twenties and it definitely showed me how easily freedom can be taken away. Just one or two small laws changed and you’re nothing but property passed from father to husband.
I’m glad the wrong kind of men don’t read Atwood because the change they make at the beginning would be terrifyingly easy for the wrong kind of leaders.
Yes, it’s a powerful book. One of my all time favorites.
Book has come back to me since it so eerily predicting exactly the kind of country Republicans want to establish.
Read it in 2007, a year when the younger Bush was floundering and toxic conservatism seemed vanquished forever (I was nineteen and politically myopic). It seemed as remote as 1984.
Reread it last year for a class I was TAing. Tremendously uncomfortable.
I read it in Utopian Lit my last semester of college—2001. I’ve reread it several times since, have watched the whole Hulu series, and have given a copy to my older teen daughter to read when she’s ready. I think it’s by no means fun to read, but it’s incredibly important, especially given current political trends where we live.
I was very impressed by Margaret Atwood as a teenager but the older I get the more I see the myriad of holes in her work.
But even when I was a teenager, I still thought The Handmaid’s Tale is terrible. Both as a novel and as speculative fiction. It’s on a par with Ayn Rand’s brand of political commentary (still better written but then so is anime fanfiction). It’s basically the left wing equivalent of some conservative fantasy where the gays in San Francisco create a communist dictatorship where every Jesus-loving patriot is sent to the gulag.
I think what offends me most about it is her total ignorance about the country that inspired her to write The Handmaids Tale: Iran. The basic premise of her idea is that Iran was a prosperous, modern country where women didn’t wear headscarves and society was secular, until a small group of religious fanatics took power. In actuality, Iran in 1979 was still extremely conservative outside the major cities, not to mention extremely poor. Khomeini had broad popular support, and he was largely just enforcing the cultural standards of the majority of the population on the small westernized elite.
Ideas against the freedom of women similar to those in the book can actually be seen in today’s society.
Really? There are people in today’s society who are advocating forcibly marrying young women to senior political figures? There are people in today’s society who are calling for polygamy, rape, and slavery? There are people in today’s society who are calling for the complete removal of all civil liberties and the enforcement of a theocracy that executes every dissenter?
This is what’s wrong with a lot of Margaret Atwood’s work: she keeps trying to pull the ‘oooh, we’re only a few steps away from this, you need to be scared… are you scared yet? Well you need to be more scared!’ schtick. Trouble is the moment you take a step back, you realize that what she’s actually done is taken a few trending headlines and accelerated them to the greatest hyperbole she can get away with. It’s like a haunted house where the monsters are just cardboard cut-outs of overused characters: Atwood waves it in your face as hard as she can, but it’s still just a limp-fanged Dracula you wouldn’t be scared of unless you’d already been primed to be on edge.
Are you not scared by what’s happening with(for just one thing) abortion? Obviously the fight isn’t over, but the attack is fucking terrifying, especially how quickly it moved from a hypothetical “oh they’ve been threatening this for years” to an “oh shit this is actually happening right now in the 21st century” reality.
We’re on edge because we’re actively under attack. And that “we” covers a hell of a lot more than just women of childbearing age, at this point.
This review is excellent. Please ignore the downvotes, I appreciate the sane take in this sea of fearmongering comments.
It is fun watching the upvotes yoyo up and down. From the timing, it seems like my comment is generally agreed with in Europe and highly controversial in the US and Canada.
Thank you for your input !
I didn’t know about the inspiration by Iran before this discussion but I will definitely learn more about it.
Really?
I think yes. But as I said - similar - not precisely the same. Arranged or forced marriage still exists. I read that there are groups online which call for violence on women, rape included (more radical incel groups).
There are people in today’s society who are calling for the complete removal of all civil liberties and the enforcement of a theocracy that executes every dissenter?
I hope not.
what she’s actually done is taken a few trending headlines and accelerated them to the greatest hyperbole she can get away with
I agree that she basically took every bad thing that has ever happened to women and made a regime out of it. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. At the very least, it shows what has been going on somewhere in history (or the possible future, if we’re talking about abortion laws). And if it makes people learn more about such wrongdoings (or realize that they are/were real) and educate themselves about the issue of limiting freedom, then the book has the right effect.
I didn’t know about the inspiration by Iran
While that is the primary inspiration that Atwood herself cites, I would say that the main trigger for her writing the novel was the rise of the evangelical right in America under Reagan.
It’s very hard to understand now just how dominated America was by the liberal, urban upper middle class from the forties to the late seventies. The Republican party was still just the party of rich people who didn’t want to pay tax, and the Democrats had increasingly dropped their traditional base in the South. Even when there was a nominally right-wing President, the balance of power rested with liberals. Eisenhower basically laughed at the members of his party who wanted to repeal Social Security and it was under Nixon that abortion was legalized; Nixon’s administration also created the EPA.
Basically, the reason Fox News keeps going on about the ‘liberal elite’ is because it strikes a chord for the Boomers, who grew up when America was a much more liberal country.
Then Reagan won the 1980 election and the liberal upper middle class lost. their. shit.
They couldn’t understand where these people had come from. Kind of like the shock when Trump won only even more so, because by 2016 everyone was used to the religious right but in the late 1970s it wasn’t seen as a serious force in politics. Previously evangelicals hadn’t voted as a block; Southerners had voted Democrat in line with their economic interests while conservatives elsewhere in the country had voted for the Republic ideals of self-reliance and American patriotism more than their religious stance. It was Reagan (or his campaign managers) who took advantage of the South’s swing away from the Democrats to pull the evangelicals and other religious groups into a powerful religion-based voting demographic.
A lot of liberals had blithely assumed that religion was a Medieval relic that wasn’t a real force in American society any more. So Reagan’s victory triggered a not inconsiderable amount of hysteria along the lines of: ‘we’re only one step away from a Christo-fascist theocracy’.
They weren’t, of course. Nor were they in 2000 when Bush won and we had to go through the whole song and dance again. But that didn’t stop Atwood jumping on the bandwagon.