I liked Atwood’s prose – thought-dense and fast. An incredible review from Cecily can be found here. I will rather confine to discuss a few points:
OneI liked Atwood’s prose – thought-dense and fast. An incredible review from Cecily can be found here. I will rather confine to discuss a few points:
One criticism that I saw in negative reviews is that the book is anti-men. I don’t think it is – though the founders of Atwood’s dystopian country are all men; but not all the men of the country – until the last chapter, you won’t even find any man who genuinely believes in the new order. There are men who benefit from the order and those who are serving it, but no man (whom Handmaid comes to know enough) really believes in it – not even commander Fred, who is having nausea for old times. The only person in Handmaid’s world who seems to be really believing in the new system is Aunt Lydia, a woman. In fact, I actually missed a male priest who like Lydia would preach the new Order. Come to think of it, even Lydia might only be acting her part – but I doubt it.
I'm clarifying it because it made me avoid the book for a lot of time. GR had suggested it after I read 1984 but I kept avoiding it since some reviews suggest that it was ... okay, what is the anti-male equivalent of the word 'misogynist'?
In the last chapter, you do find that founder of the new order were men – but a few, upper-class men. But whichever way you see it, Atwood is not at all suggesting that there exists a conspiracy universal to all men to keep the women down (though I do remember getting an invitation to meeting of one such secret society)
Instead the villain here is a collectivism, a wrong sort of collectivism which forces functions on individual rather than letting them choose. In Orwell’s 1984 it was political collectivism, here it is religious. Women did come off worse and so did the children – and that is the way with most existing socio-political systems from which Gilead borrowed.
This is how Lydia defend it:
“There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from.”
It is way of religious and political collectivists to presume (wrongly) and preach that two are somehow mutually exclusive. Freedom to earn as much as you want means you no longer get freedom from hunger. Freedom to chose your clothes means you no longer have freedom sexual violence and so on.
Not only that, they won’t let you chose between two freedom (the act in itself in itself would be a ‘freedom to’) but rather force the ‘freedom from’ on you while excluding the other, the way we do with our children who we think are incapable of making intelligent choices.
All that is good but what I didn’t like was the way historians forgave the society on grounds of cultural relativism and all:
“Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific. Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors we ourselves are happily more free. Our job is not to censure but to understand.”
I want to think that she was being ironical. As Handmaid points out:
“How easy it is to invent humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation."
While you can always be respecting the culture and doing other such relativist things as long as individuals are making choices that are affecting only themselves; whenever people starting choosing for others (as those founders did) the relativism becomes a terrible excuse. In the first place, an individual shouldn’t be allowed to deciding for others as far as possible, and where it can’t be helped (political leaders, parents, religious leaders, teachers, etc) – the decision-makers shouldn’t be allowed any defenses on grounds like culture-relativism, ignorance, etc. They are supposed to know better. Governments and religions of all things can’t be allowed such defenses.
Last, whenever I question the position of women in Hinduism in the debate with my friends (believe me it happens too often); my opponents are almost always pointing to all the goddesses that Hindus worship. As Atwood points out that “Gilead was, although undoubtedly patriarchal in form, occasionally matriarchal in content." and:
“To institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.”
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