In our society today we can look around us and see the obsession that our fellow humans spend on conspiracy theories and the fear of a new totalitarian society. People like Glenn Beck spend hours of their time trying to convince followers that a person like Barack Obama is a socialist who will, if given the chance, turn the United States into a Third Reich or a Stalinist Communist land. Whether or not one takes such arguments seriously or not, the point that fear mongers are allowed so much time to spout them is what is worrisome. As citizens we should be involved in our democracy and take good care in understanding what our politicians are advocating for. That is a significant departure from lying and pretending that something sinister is at work when the reality is otherwise. Case in point: the 2010 midterms where the democratic party lost their majority in congress, proving that democracy is just as alive and well as it was before. I bring this up as an example to show that paranoid thinking is easy to indulge in today, mainly because fact checking often seems to be virtue long forgotten by today’s media. The inability to fairly consider differences of opinion and the conservative American principle of rejecting other countries ideas because they are too “European” is where we are today.
Now onto the dystopian novel that is The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood paints a picture of an American society where a group of fundamentalist Christians have taken over the United States government, using the excuse that society has become too liberal and too free to be able to carry on. This sect, or better put paramilitary organization, of fundamentalists quickly goes about turning the US into a theocracy in many ways reminiscent of present day Iran, though as the book goes on even more extreme in substance and action. Women, within the first couple of weeks of the take-over, have their rights taken away. All the things that women’s suffrage fought long and hard for vanish almost over night. This fundamental aspect of the story then draws our focus away from the more historic aspects of what such a take-over would imply and takes us to the narrator, who relates her experience of the oppression. She doesn’t attempt to be a hero; in fact all she really wants is to have her husband and child returned to her. At times, she even appears to accept the new political regime of oppression as it is and instead looks to her survival first. To be fair in many ways Atwood is more exploring the way women have been oppressed through time, than she is the practical implications of a Theocracy. This is one of the strengths of the novel.
One of the parts that had the biggest impact on me was the idea that a society like this is only truly capable of coming about when the elements needed for its realization are already in place. Christianity historically has not always been very favorable to intelligent and strong women, despite what the more recent teachings of the church would lead us to believe (and they have made significant strides in some of these areas). Still there remains in American and in Europe this nostalgia, it’s fair to call it sexist, that things were better previously in the organization of the “traditional” gender roles. Then again, this is itself the most common fallacy in the appropriation of history by fundamentalists and conservatives: things were actually better before and we were happier without our current freedoms. Its one of the ideas, expressed by the oppressors in the novel, that there are two types of freedom: “freedom to” and “freedom from.” The kind of freedom we had in the liberal USA in the book was freedom to and what they are given by the fundamentalists is freedom from. This is a typical argument we can spot today in the arguments of those who want to tell women how they should dress: that requiring women to cover up gives them freedom is the most normal argument for heard for the veil. Going along with this is the notion that women are to blame for the horrible treatment they are often afforded by men: they dress provocatively and that is why men rape them. This horrible idea doesn’t deserve further explanation as it never has and never will hold any substance.
Atwood also deals with a very important topic in the idea of the control and possession of a person’s body by others. In the case in the book, the women of the Republic of Gilead have lost their ability to choose sexual partners (and preferences) and are either forced into arranged marriages or used to produce offspring for those at the top who are unable to do so for a variety of reasons. Perhaps this is the greatest fear that Atwood expresses: the fear of losing control of ones body. The narrator can accept the significant changes to her society, but what she has the most trouble with is that others want to control her body and dictate how she should care for it. The other idea expressed somewhere in the midst of this is that the men in our society were unhappy with the way things were going: that they no longer felt satisfied with their lives. That such a problem would necessitate oppression is laughable and disturbing all at the same time: and yet it’s been a kind of rationalization used by oppressive regimes before. The notion that those who impose repression are doing it for our best is as old as humanity itself.
For those who have not read the novel I don’t want to write too much more and destroy it for you, but I do on the other hand want to recommend it as a reminder that we should remain active and not give fundamentalism or false historical narratives about our nation’s past the chance to gain ground in our society.
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