The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

At first glance there’s a cheerfulness to this scene. It’s like a masquerade party; they are like oversize children, dressed up in togs they’ve rummaged from trunks. Is there joy in this? There could be, but have they chosen it? You can’t tell by looking.

It’s a juvenile display, the whole act, and pathetic; but it’s something I understand.

“Who are these people?” I ask him. “It’s only for officers,” he says. “From all branches; and senior officials. And trade delegations, of course. It stimulates trade. It’s a good place to meet people. You can hardly do business without it. We try to provide at least as good as they can get elsewhere. You can overhear things too; information. A man will sometimes tell a woman things he wouldn’t tell another man.” “No,” I say, “I mean the women.” “Oh,” he says. “Well, some of them are real pros. Working girls”—he laughs—“from the time before. They couldn’t be assimilated; anyway, most of them prefer it here.”

She gazes without interest or speculation around the room. This must be familiar scenery.

I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack.

doesnt everyone?

Surely her cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz, will get her out of this. She will think of something.

The penalty for rape, as you know, is death. Deuteronomy 22:23–29. I might add that this crime involved two of you and took place at gunpoint. It was also brutal.

I know this can’t be right but I think it anyway. Everything they taught at the Red Center, everything I’ve resisted, comes flooding in. I don’t want pain. I don’t want to be a dancer, my feet in the air, my head a faceless oblong of white cloth. I don’t want to be a doll hung up on the Wall, I don’t want to be a wingless angel. I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject.

Each one of them seems the same size as all the others. Not one seems preferable. Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

“Iran and Gilead: Two Late-Twentieth-Century Monotheocracies, as Seen Through Diaries.”

Men highly placed in the regime were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birthrates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter, as witness the pagan elements in medieval Christianity and the evolution of the Russian “KGB” from the czarist

Its racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did.

She appears to have been an educated woman, insofar as a graduate of any North American college of the time may be said to have been educated. (Laughter, some groans.)

As I have said elsewhere, there was little that was truly original with or indigenous to Gilead: its genius was synthesis.

Judd—according to the Limpkin material—was of the opinion from the outset that the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves. For this there were many historical precedents; in fact, no empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group. In the case of Gilead, there were many women willing to serve as Aunts, either because of a genuine belief in what they called “traditional values,” or for the benefits they might thereby acquire. When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting. There was, too, a negative inducement: childless or infertile or older women who were not married could take service in the Aunts and thereby escape redundancy, and consequent shipment to the infamous Colonies, which were composed of portable populations used mainly as expendable toxic-cleanup squads, though if lucky you could be assigned to less hazardous tasks, such as cotton picking and fruit harvesting.

the notion that the Aunts should take names derived from commercial products available to women in the immediate pre-Gilead period, and thus familiar and reassuring to them—the names of cosmetic lines, cake mixes, frozen desserts, and even medicinal remedies?