“The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) is a dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood set in the near future when much of the US sinks into a Christian theocracy called Gilead. Atwood began writing the book in 1984 and it reads very much like a White feminist “1984” modelled on a slave narrative. There is even an Underground Femaleroad to Canada.
Note: This post is based on the book, not the television show, which I have not seen.
Our story: A terrorist attack in the US kills the president and much of Congress. Sons of Jacob (Christian revolutionaries) set up the Republic of Gilead, a right-wing military dictatorship on the model of Iran. Parts of the former US are at war with Gilead, other parts, called the Colonies, are toxic wastelands (nuclear warfare?) that Gilead controls.
Ethno-state: Native Americans are wiped out, Black Americans are sent to National Homelands in the Midwest as the Children of Ham. One character is “beige” but everyone else seems to be White.
Preventing “White genocide”: Gilead’s main concern, other than war, is the long-term drop in the Caucasian birth rate. No one knows the cause but feminism is blamed. So one fine morning every woman in Gilead finds that her bank card no longer works – and that she has been laid off at work. Women overnight become dependent on their fathers or husbands – or the government. They can no longer get passports to leave the country.
In time even reading becomes a crime for women.
Dress code: Women wear colour-coded clothing dividing them into Wives, Widows, Daughters, Econowives (working-class housewives), Marthas (servants), Aunts (trainers), and Handmaids (surrogate mothers). Women incapable of dutifully fulfilling one of these roles become Unwomen sent to the Colonies to clean up toxic waste (or become Jezebels at secret sex clubs).
Handmaids wear red (pictured at top). They are assigned to the top men whose Wives are unable to have children. If after six years and three masters a Handmaid has produced no offspring, she becomes a Jezebel or an Unwomen. Handmaids have no names of their own but are named for their current master: Offred (Of Fred), Ofglen (Of Glen), etc. They are trained by Aunts to dress and act the same way.
Love life: Handmaids are allowed to have sex with their master once a month (reverse rhythm method). The wife must be present. Anything else, like a secret love affair, even one with the master himself, could get the Handmaid sent to the Colonies or the Salvaging (public hanging). Love and sex become subversive, part of what makes Gilead into a police state, searchlights and all.
Religion: Even though Gilead says it models itself on the Bible, it seems much more interested in the harsh patriarchy of the Old Testament than in the love and mercy of the New. “Faith is only a word, embroidered.” Gilead pushes its own extreme form of Christianity, one of outward behaviour, not of the heart. Quakers, Catholics and Baptists are named as enemies. Jews flee. Machines in Gilead print out prayers – but does God listen?
– Abagond, 2019.
See also:
- books – books I read in 2019
- George Orwell: 1984
- slave narratives
- Harriet Tubman – a conductor on the Underground Railroad
- The Curse of Ham
- Richard Spencer – ethno-state, White genocide, etc.
- Fake Christianity
- Iran
- Wahhabis
558
This political nightmare climate we are living in, especially as it pertains to women having agency over their bodies is reminiscent of the dystopian world of Gilead.
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I saw the 1990s movie version of The Handmaid’s Tale.
What I will never forget is how people were unable to leave Gilead at will. Trump supporters cheer on walls and surveillance at the Southern and Northern US borders. They tend to forget that walls that keep other people out, can also keep you in.
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“Religion: Even though Gilead says it models itself on the Bible, it seems much more interested in the harsh patriarchy of the Old Testament than in the love and mercy of the New.”
So, even in the new kingdom, post apocalypse, whites still believe that they are going to be on top and black people will still be their footstool. The Bible clearly says otherwise. It is already written that white people are going into slavery.
Hang on, this is how they are going to collectively pay for their centuries and millennial of crimes perpetrated upon the peoples on the earth.
Isaiah 14:1-2 For the Lord will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet choose Israel, and set them in their own land: and the strangers shall be joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob. 2 And the people shall take them, and bring them to their place: and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the Lord for servants and handmaids: and they shall take them captives, whose captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors.
Psalm 37:13-14 The Lord laughs at him, For He sees that his day is coming. The wicked have drawn the sword And have bent their bow, To cast down the poor and needy, To slay those who are of upright conduct.
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White women seem to love this series but there’s one person they always overlook: Serena Joy.
She helped make the roles and rules of Gilead only to be pissed and bored when she was forced to abide by them like any other woman.
White women always think they’re going to be the exception. Good luck with that.
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I found the series boring. I couldn’t get past the first season.
Theocracy is politicized patriarchy.
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I don’t own a tv or a car because the tv and the car were invented to separate me from my humanity. So I never saw A Handmaids Tale.
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Why did they make this a white-only show?
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So this white female author, wrote a novel trying to make white women the only oppressed group? Give me a break!
The centering of whiteness is unreal with these people.
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Over 40% of slave-owners were white women.
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@ Cherry Boy
In the book, African Americans are sent to “National Homelands” which are probably similar to reservations or concentration camps, but the reader never knows for sure because the narrator of the book doesn’t know for sure. The reader does get the sense that people of color are being oppressed, but it is relegated to the background, which is a failing of the book.
The TV show is not all white. The show did away with the whole concept of the National Homelands in order to have a diverse cast. There are a number of black supporting characters, including a woman who was one of the best pediatricians of her day before Gilead arose.
However, the show’s colorblind approach has erased any type of racism from the world of Gilead. I’ve seen a number of critical articles examining the way race is being handled in the show. Here are two:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mic.com/p/after-three-seasons-the-handmaids-tale-remains-brazenly-unaware-of-racism-18658839/amp
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/6/15/15808530/handmaids-tale-hulu-margaret-atwood-black-history-racial-erasure
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Also, while the book is rightly criticized for being white-centric, one interesting thing Atwood does is in the epilogue, set at least a hundred years later, where professors with non-European names are holding an academic conference about the long-dismantled Gilead and discussing the text of The Handmaid’s Tale, a document that managed to survive those times. Atwood makes it very clear that people of color are now in charge of academia and are dispassionately dissecting the past lives of white people as intellectual curiosities, instead of vice versa. While it isn’t made entirely clear, the reader gets the definite sense that in this future time, POC are in ascendancy, having ultimately been the ones who survived the apocalypse brought about by whites.
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In the first paragraph of the post I changed:
to:
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I never liked her books except for Alias Grace which is a historical novel.
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The 1990 film version of The Handmaid’s Tale did not gloss over the fate of Black people. Scenes of Black people imprisoned and laboring in the National Homelands were sprinkled through television news shots in the background of the main character’s lives.
There was also a young Black female supporting character who disappears early in the film only to reappear in a secret sex club for the upper crust toward the end. In that scene she is sporting a prosthetic hand. Her hand had been chopped off because she attempted to escape bondage.
Sometimes I come across Christian Right types pooh-poohing the current television show and saying it could never happen here. Then I read other rightwing types insisting that they must have a White ethnostate. An ethnostate where they would institute the very same policies found in Atwood’s book: war, expulsion or imprisonment of non-Whites, non-Christians and White women who refuse to behave according to their dictates.
I read an interview with Margaret Atwood a few years back where she talked about how women in the UK discussed The Handmaid’s Tale as a fanciful tale of fiction. Women in Canada discussed the book as a remote possibility. Women in the US, however, found the book and its themes both terrifying and imminent.
Perhaps we are closer than we think to such a calamity.
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@ Afrofem
“expulsion or imprisonment of non-Whites, non-Christians and White women who refuse to behave according to their dictates”
Also murder. It’s been awhile since I read the book, but if I remember correctly, some of the white men the protagonist witnessed being executed were Catholic priests, Quakers, or gay.
And the leaders of Gilead say all the Jews are being relocated to Israel by ships, but in the epilogue we find out that the Jews were actually thrown into the ocean.
“I read an interview with Margaret Atwood a few years back where she talked about how women in the UK discussed The Handmaid’s Tale as a fanciful tale of fiction. Women in Canada discussed the book as a remote possibility. Women in the US, however, found the book and its themes both terrifying and imminent.”
The book was partly based on what had happened to women in Iran less than 10 years before.
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I remember from reading the book, the women who weren’t able to get pregnant were called unwomen.
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@ Solitaire
Good points.
I’ve read analyses of the planning material from the Christian Right. The deeper you go, the more bloodthirsty and terrifying their plans become. They are ready and willing to murder and expel anyone who refuses to knuckle under or don’t fit their ideas of who is “godly”.
For years now, Political Research Associates (PRA)have been tracking and analyzing all sectors of the Right in the US and abroad. Their work is meticulous and heavily footnoted.
In a lengthy 2016 article about Christian Dominionists, “Dominionism Rising:
A Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight”, PRA analyst, Frederick Clarkson describes many aspects of their movement. Most prominent is Seven Mountains dominionism (7M). Clarkson describes 7M as:
https://www.politicalresearch.org/2016/08/18/dominionism-rising-a-theocratic-movement-hiding-in-plain-sight
Your comment about what happened to women in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah brought to mind my reading about how Leftists and free thinkers spearheaded the Iranian Revolution. Midway through the revolution, ultra-right-wing Muslim groups hijacked the revolution to their own ends. The mass killings of “enemies of the revolution” that followed were not of Shah supporters (most of them fled the country), but of the Leftists and others who refused to go along with the new regime.
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