The Handmaid's Tale: Afterthoughts

- June 18, 2021

"I finished reading The Handmaid's Tale. Shattered is the word to describe how I feel right now", I texted my best friends.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is a novel that was on my to-read list for ages. In between, I watched three seasons of the new TV Series adaption of the novel and the 1990 movie based on the novel. The series, like many articles on the internet opined, was at times too emotionally draining to be binge-watched. After all, it is a dystopian story premised on the sexual subjugation of women.

Therefore, I was fully aware of what was in store for me when I finally opened the book. I knew the entire story and how depressing the plot was. Yet, nothing could have prepared me for the overwhelming feeling of emptiness that the book left me with. For this is the tale of how "Offred", the protagonist and other women like her got stripped of all things deemed valuable by humans one by one; rights to own property, to work, and to earn money, freedom to move unhinged, to dress the way one likes, to live with one's partner and to have consensual sex, dignity, choice of any kind, desire, love, family and friends, and even one's own identity. It is a fate far beyond our current collective comprehension, I suppose, of being turned into handmaids or "women of reduced circumstances", to borrow Offred's own words.

To read The Handmaid's Tale is to delve deeper into the human psyche and almost see up close the struggles of a person trying to stay sane in her mind. The book made me feel for Offred, Moira, Luke, Offred's mother and her unnamed daughter etc. and yet, I cannot think of a single sentence in the book intended purely to evoke our sympathies. And I thank the creative genius of Atwood for that.

What really struck me in the novel were the skillful mixing up of the past and present tenses while describing the same event at times and the deliberate absence of quotation marks to separate the lines said to have been uttered by other characters and the thoughts of Offred. These coupled with the first person narration make us feel as if we are indeed listening to Offred narrate her recollections in real time. It tells us that this may not have been how the events described by her actually happened, but rather this was the way in which she remembered them or wished to remember them. It is a beautiful way of capturing the human mind's frailty.

Then there is the jarring epilogue set in the year 2195, well after the downfall of the State of Gilead. After finishing the emotional upheaval of a tale that Offred narrated till then, to read the epilogue and find out the male historians of the future talk about her tale in a distinctly pedantic way and lament about not receiving atleast a 20 minute worth of tape about the inner workings or the economy of the erstwhile Gilead instead of the largely sentimental tape of Offred's felt almost chilling. Is it a reminder that the true horrors of the past are always lost on the future generations or a foreboding that male allyship comes with limitations? I wonder.

Contrast with how the series or the movie unraveled, the book does not tell us if Offred ever made it out of Gilead. The epilogue lets us know that the actual identity of "Offred" or anyone she mentioned in her tale could not be traced, leaving Offred as a nameless handmaid for all of known history. A woman of reduced circumstances is all she became in the end, nothing more, nothing less.