I am at work all day for 12 hours, and I can do absolutely nothing about the packing or the bank or the sellers' inability to provide documentation in a timely manner. So, rather than angst about it, I am distracting myself during the down times at work by watching The Handmaid's Tale.
I started watching it when it first aired in 2017, because I read the book well over 20 years ago (sometime in 2003, if memory serves), and while at the time I hadn't developed as many critical thinking skills and also lacked a lot of the historical knowledge of the real-life atrocities that informed Atwood when she wrote it, I still remember thinking how eerily plausible it all was.
Anyway, I'm just starting Season 3, and I think the narrative is trying to make me feel sorry for Serena, because she's just as trapped as the other women, or something like that. Certainly June/Offred seems to vacillate between hatred and sympathy, including a heavy-handed moment of symbolism in which she literally extends a hand to pull Serena out of a house fire.
I'm having trouble agreeing with the narrative on this. Serena is not just getting her face eaten by leopards after voting them in. She literally helped to create the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. She was one of the architects of the movement. She wanted this for everyone else, she actively campaigned for all women to be oppressed, and thought she would somehow be magically immune. We're given a bit of backstory on Serena, about her inability to have children (brought on because she was publicly campaigning to end women's rights), her work with her husband, and that's meant to humanize her. It does, to an extent, but my sympathy for her is still very limited.
I don't know that she's deserving of our sympathy for suffering the consequences of her actions. However, since the show appears to be setting her up for a redemption arc, I am intrigued to see how they are going to proceed with it. I think that a redemption arc could be really interesting if it's handled with delicacy and acknowledges all the harm she's caused. I don't think Serena can be redeemed without her deliberately undertaking to repair the harm she's caused, while being cognizant that there are some harms that simply cannot be repaired or ever properly atoned for.
I also have lots of thoughts on June/Offred, and they basically boil down to her being a complicated, often unlikable character. She's a really interesting protagonist who makes shitty choices for often questionable reasons. She bucks against the system but still uses her limited privileges within it. She's quick to use other people for her own gains, doesn't necessarily think about the consequences of her actions for others, but she's also brave and willing to fight for other people when she sees the need for it. She can be empathetic and insightful when she's not being oblivious.
What I find most interesting about her is that her past is a cautionary tale. She exemplifies most of us (and by "us" I mean cis white women like me), living her little life and paying so little attention to what's going on around her that the new laws that take away her freedoms catch her unawares. (Why the show portrays Moira the same way perplexes me--perhaps there just weren't any WOC writers in the room.)
June lived blinded by privilege, including ignoring many of her 2nd generation feminist mother's warnings. Her mother is problematic in her own way (see: 2nd generation feminist), but makes many valid points about June ignoring or throwing away the work of previous women, and the inherent danger of that. Most of this is implied in their dialogue, rather than explicit, but it's still there. June leaves it all behind because she resents her mother for "abandoning" her in favour of her "work." To be fair, her mother is very much lacking in the nurturing department, so it's not unnatural for June to mistakenly equate being a feminist with being a bad mother. Where June goes wrong is never bothering once in her life to stop and question her deeply held beliefs (honestly, girl, therapy would have helped!). Her knee-jerk reaction to pull away from everything associated with her mother leads her to ignore what's going on in politics, and it costs her everything.
I'm not saying she could have stopped what happened, but she might have been less blindsided had she been paying even a little bit of attention. Of course, that would have made a much less dramatic narrative for the TV show. I suppose I am thinking about this more deeply right now than I ever would have in the past, because the parallels with what is happening today are stark and pretty obvious. This is not reality imitating fiction, of course. This is reality repeating reality that was portrayed in fiction to make a point. Margaret Atwood is a towering literary figure for a reason, and her depictions of dystopias are always chillingly on point.
There are lots of themes and through lines that are worth exploring that I haven't fully thought through yet. There's the ritualized subjugation and infantilization of women, learned and acquired helplessness. There are themes of collaboration, what is means to be complicit in your own oppression (complying in advance, complying after the fact in order to survive, and exploiting the system for one's own gain on both small and large scales). There are themes of secrecy and lies, betrayal and loyalty, and what they all mean when living under an oppressive regime. There's also a lot to examine about the rules of society--who is allowed to break them and who isn't.
I do really like the writing when it comes to the characters and the plot taking place in the present time of the show. If I had unlimited time and brain bandwidth I'd want to do deeper dives into many of the characters, mostly the women but also some of the men: Serena, June/Offred, Emily/Ofglenn, Janine/Ofwarren, Fred Waterford, Joseph Lawrence, Aunt Lydia, and plenty of others.
Where I start having trouble is the world building. Atwood's novel is written in the epistolary style, strictly from the point of view of Offred, who is given no other name in the book, and encapsulates a very limited moment in time--the duration of her stay with the Waterfords (I don't remember if that's what they're called in the book). There is an metafictional epilogue which reveals the whole novel into a conceit that we are observing historical documents, a primary source no less, of a historical period that has come and gone. Gilead has been gone for 200 years, we are told, and very few records remain of its existence.
The show necessarily has to deviate from that after the first season, which follows the novel reasonably closely if my memory serves (which, honestly, it does not serve well these days, so I could be mistaken). The show therefore has to start doing its own world building, and honestly Gilead doesn't hold up particularly well under too close scrutiny. Here's a list of my issues, in no particular order:
- The economy. How the fuck does anything work if suddenly 55% of the working population doesn't work anymore? At higher levels, the loss of institutional knowledge would be pretty devastating, and at lower levels the loss of personnel would be even worse. Women have always been part of the workforce, even when inequality was at its worst. They've been labourers, factory workers, secretaries, assistants, and with increasing equality they have occupied every single rank and position in society. You can't declare all of that illegal overnight and not create a huge, chaotic vacuum. That's never addressed in the show.
- The rules governing women. We are apparently meant to believe that society transitioned pretty quickly and smoothly into one in which women are not allowed to work, not allowed to have their own money or bank accounts, aren't allowed to read, and are rounded up and put into re-education centres according to whichever "class" they've been assigned to (Wife, Handmaid, Martha, Aunt, Econowife). We see some protests initially which are violently put down (armed men gunning down protesters with automatic weapons), and then we just never see anything else from that time period. There is no mention of how these centres were initially set up, nor whose buy-in was required for that. The Aunts run the centres, we are given to understand, but who trained them in the first place? To get a system that regimented takes a lot of time and a lot of practice, and getting all of the centres across Gilead to adhere to the same SOPs must be an administrative nightmare.
- Societal structures and systems. At one point in Season 2 Commander Waterford yells at his wife to call 9-1-1, and that made me wonder who the fuck is still staffing all these institutions, and how they're still running apparently smoothly after removing half the workforce. See my first point about the economy. I worked as a dispatcher and telecomms operator for nearly two decades, and more than half my coworkers were women. We were already short-staffed and stretched thin, and finding qualified candidates to work was time-consuming and incredibly lengthy. Multiply this across every police force across a nation, every other 24-hour centre you don't even know exists. The people in charge of Gilead have completely upended the order of things, have done away with most modern technology, but we're meant to believe that 911 still works? It stretches credulity, at the very least.
- Then there's the costuming. It was established in the book and preserved in the show, and visually it's extremely striking. However it makes no sense from any perspective other than "it looks really cool." Coordinating identical outfits for literally millions of women across an entire country? Come on. If it were local to one city I might be more inclined to believe it, but nation-wide? No. For one thing, there would have to be an extremely long transition period while they get all of the outfits designed and then produced. Also, who is physically making these outfits? We're meant to believe that Gilead has protectionist policies, so they're not outsourcing to another country like China, but in the former USA/now Gilead, the vast, vast majority of sewists would have been women, who are now not allowed to work. Are you telling me that they somehow trained up a bunch of willing men to do "women's work?" Or are we meant to believe that people in each household are expected to sew their own outfits? If so, why do they all look mass produced and not like some terrible homemade hodge-podge?
- The costuming has a secondary problem, which is that it provides the women with too much anonymity. This is demonstrated over and over and over in the show. June/Offred routinely is able to run around and disguise her movements simply by donning the uniform of a different class of woman: either a Wife or a Martha. Each uniform grants her a layer of protection, either through privilege or invisibility. And as June herself says toward the end of Season 1: "They should have never given us uniforms if they didn't want us to be an army." I am reasonably sure that at least one or two of the organizers of the movement would have thought of this.
- Last but not least, a pet peeve of mine: everyone is constantly miserable. The thing is, this is absolutely contrary to human nature. Yes, under oppressive regimes there is always an undercurrent of fear and constant paranoia about who might be about to report you to the State. But humans aren't built to be somber 24/7: they will take every opportunity for celebrations, small and large. They make food and they hang out over cups of tea or get together for illicit parties. There is so little joy in The Handmaid's Tale, and the vast majority of group encounters are weirdly manufactured and ritualized. Like, where is the secret underground dance party like in Titanic? Why doesn't Offred ever sit and gossip over a cup of tea with Rita after so many months of living under the same roof, even if it's surface-level nonsense?
:::ETA:::
I am back with more thoughts that I forgot about.
- What about the future? Particularly the future Handmaids. In the present, Handmaids are picked specifically because they successfully bore a living child in the past. What is the plan for the next generation of women? There's no telling which little girl will be able to bear children successfully, so what is the plan for them? Only two classes of women can potentially have children (unless you count some of the Jezebels), the Handmaids and the Econowives, should the latter be lucky enough to be fertile, and the Handmaids' babies are of course given to the Wives. Who in the next generation will be picked to be a Wife, a Handmaid, or a Martha? Or any class of woman, for that matter? The whole system falls apart within a generation, because what Wife would allow her daughter to become a Handmaid? Even a Martha would be an unthinkable fall in station. So that leaves only the children of the Econowives who'd have to be divvied up, and that seems unsustainable to me.
Anyway, thank you for putting up with all my Handmaid's Tale thinky thoughts. Maybe one day I'll get back to the other characters I mentioned, or some of the more interesting themes. We shall see.
Catch you on the flip side, friends!
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