At first I thought it would be a difficult read for me because the narrative jumps from the present to the past, or to random memories and thoughts, but I gradually got used to it and really enjoyed the book. It was something new for me.
I finished the book today and I can't stop thinking about it. I'm pretty creeped out.
Despite the fact that the book was published in 1985, it seems very up-to-date. The idea that such a regime was created (among other reasons) because "men could no longer control women" seems too real. I believe that there are men who would like to have women fully in their power. To control what they can wear, what they can do and especially what they must do.
In many countries, the government tries to control birth rate by banning abortions. Ideas against the freedom of women similar to those in the book can actually be seen in today's society.
I can't formulate it well, but the emergence of similar restrictions for women, even if not in such a drastic form, does not seem unrealistic to me.
Did you have similar feelings after reading this book ?
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Margaret Atwood did an AMA here [you might want to take a look](http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2qprzk/i_am_margaret_atwood_author_of_the_handmaids_tale/) 🙂 [Here’s a link to all of our upcoming AMAs](http://www.reddit.com/r/books/wiki/amafullschedule)
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I’m a big Margaret Atwood fan, and I’ve read several of her books. (I even saw her at a book festival on two separate occasions!) If I recall correctly, I think she based the book on only situations that had actually occurred in human history. So in essence the terrible dystopian climate she envisioned in the book could actually happen. I think that’s why it’s so scary.
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I read this in college and absolutely loved it. I find with conservative/liberal values, the pendulum continues to swing. When it swings too far left, it corrects itself, but then goes a bit too far right, then starts the swing back and so on.
Check out her book “Oryx and Crake”. That is one of my favorite books she’s written.
I loved the book, and I think your conclusion is close to exactly what Atwell wanted us to realize after reading it. Not only is the story something that could happen, all of its elements are things that have already happened somewhere in the world at some point in time.
I have encountered a lot of people in my life that would love nothing more than to have power over and control others. It’s not enough that they can have their own beliefs, they need others to go by their beliefs too.
Thanks for bringing up this book so I could remember it fondly
I had similar feelings. The U.S (if you’re not from the U.S) has a new House speaker, and he made a comment saying, “Every woman should give birth to one able-bodied worker”. Or something along those lines, absolutely disgusting. I think the dystopian nightmare of a Christo-facist regime could be a possibility. If you ever watch “Shiny Happy People” they talk about the Joshua Generation where they want to infiltrate every aspect of society
Atwood used real-world regimes and systems as her inspiration for her dystopias (“Oryx and Crake” is a corporate dystopia, for example), so they often feel very possible.
Some authors write women or men fantastically well, and Atwood is one of the rare ones that write both incredibly well. What makes her among my favorite authors, however, is she can *also* write psychopaths, dull-witted, empathetic, and beautiful characters across the board. The Madadam is her masterpiece on that front, and I can’t recommend it more highly.
I am watching the TV show right now and it creeps me out. And what irritates me the most is that noone is happy. Even the men are not. It is a total unnatural way of life that only serves one purpose, power and control in the name of “a” god. what for? to what end? Endless pain? Look to Iran. That´s a state like Gilead, where women are controlled in the street, raped and without any rights. so it is real.
(Edit: typo, I am a non english so pardon mistakes)
My high school English teacher assigned this book my senior year, and 20 years later I still think about it and my badass teacher for having teenagers read it. I wish I could find her and tell her how much this book stuck with me.
In Weimar Germany, Berlin was the queer capital of Europe. Gay nightclubs, gay theater, and films flourished. Academics were publishing papers relating to gender identity and sexual orientation with the Institute for Sexual Research. They were even giving trans women hormones to aid their transition, the most notable patient being Einar Wegener (Danish Girl).
Then the Nazis came to power.
The poem, ‘First they came’ is iconic but it fails to mention that the LGBT+ community was among first undesirables to be purged by the party.
It can happen. It can happen fast.
Edit:Danish girl
It’s such a little book, but it took me weeks to read it (also made me cry multiple times)
It’s legitimately the scariest book I’ve ever read, in part because it’s so relevant.
/r/WelcomeToGilead is a sub-reddit for posting current news stories featuring political moves reminiscent of what’s happening in *Handmaid’s Tale.*
Atwood has stated that she never wrote anything she didn’t see happening in the real world.
Le Guin has a fantastic foreword to *The Left Hand of Darkness* that all sci-fi is descriptive, not speculative, that it merely describes the present in a different context, not the future.
All literature is a product of the time it is written, and social commentary doubly so.
And if it feels prescient, that only means we have made little enough progress in the intervening years that it describes the now just as well as it described the past.
We are never as far removed from the past as we like to think.
I read it as a teenager and a couple of things stuck in my head permanently and have proved themselves evergreen in relevance. The concept of freedom to vs freedom from. Especially after 9/11 when the rhetoric turned to increasing security for “American freedom”. Also the scene at beginning when women were steadily losing their autonomy and the protagonist tried to talk to her partner about it. He downplayed it. It was such a privileged centrist response.
I cried the first time I finished reading it. I live in the Philippines and when I read it, the most powerful person in government, former President Duterte, would casually spout misogynistic comments. He spoke about his regrets not being able to rape a nun and he would make sexist remarks against his female critics. It didn’t help that Trump was also simultaneously leading at institutionalizing sexism in governance in the US.
The world in Handmaid’s Tale felt so real I cried myself to sleep because I was so scared for women.
I read this in my early twenties and it definitely showed me how easily freedom can be taken away. Just one or two small laws changed and you’re nothing but property passed from father to husband.
I read it in the ‘80s; it’s been heavily on my mind since then,
I too have similar feelings towards that book. The book may be fiction but it does parallel with what is happening in real life. Although the book is fiction, personally for me it is a reminder that we should never take our rights, especially women’s rights, for granted and we must continue to uphold and keep fighting for our rights because you will never know when it will be taken away from us if we rest on our laurels in regards to living in countries that have many rights
Was it only last year that there was a big deal about women’s reproductive rights? And I agree. I read this book, and it gave me George orwell’s 1984 vibes. Where the book was written many years before things were predicted to happen and they started happening present day. Soon, the government will be controlling or at least monitoring our thoughts. (I swear I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but if the shoe fits…)
Book has come back to me since it so eerily predicting exactly the kind of country Republicans want to establish.
I read it in Utopian Lit my last semester of college—2001. I’ve reread it several times since, have watched the whole Hulu series, and have given a copy to my older teen daughter to read when she’s ready. I think it’s by no means fun to read, but it’s incredibly important, especially given current political trends where we live.
It’s what will happen if Project 2025 is enacted, why it’s so terrifying.
I live in Texas. We are definitely living in Gilead.
This is one of the times where I wish I were not so triggered by sexual violence. Because, although I felt like The Handmaid’s Tale was a good book, I just could not fully appreciate it, because of how creeped out I was.
I never really liked the book even if I agree with what it’s trying to say. It just… Wasn’t that great for me.
I agree – kind of unrelated but I recently listened to a podcast with Margaret Atwood and she almost didn’t write The Handmaid’s Tale. It took her 3 years to actually start writing the book and she didn’t think it would ever be successful. She was convinced that it was too “kooky” of a story and readers wouldn’t relate to it but she couldn’t get the story out of her head so eventually she did it.
Kind of scary that it has become so relatable and this is a good reminder that if you want to do a thing, do the thing. No matter how kooky it seems.
When I was a teenager one day I happened to be in the Harvard Square area when I was reading Handmaid’s Tale (we had it assigned for summer reading in high school believe it or not).
So I had been sitting on a bench somewhere reading a few chapters, and at one point she mentions what the location of the hanging wall *used* to be called before Gilead—and no joke—a few minutes later after I finished the chapter and was walking around, I found myself right there at that particular intersection/spot she had described, having literally read that exact part in the book just a few minutes before.
Definitely a hair standing up on the back of my neck kind of a moment for me.
I read it at a time the Republic of Ireland where I’m from, where it was illegal to have an abortion, where if you got pregnant you could be forced against your will to go through a pregnancy, where women died of complications with miscarriages because doctors couldn’t by law intervene to abort the child and save the woman’s life. Where women were forced to give birth to a child that wasn’t viable and who then suffered a cruel unnecessary death. Where a clinically dead woman was kept on life support, decomposing because she was pregnant and they valued the fetus over that of her families wishes to let them both pass. Where in the not so distant past women who got pregnant out of wedlock by incest, rape, where shipped off to mother & baby homes run by vicious nuns to have their children and these children sold to Americans and the records of these sales destroyed. These women forced to wok in magdeline laundry’s shunned and shamed, their children if not adopted, starved, experimented on, dumped in septic tanks and those who survived sent to industrial schools to be rape by priests. So to me the handmade tale was Ireland and while we have overturned the abortion ban, our government have sealed the records of thousands of women who were locked up in these homes so they can’t find them or be found by their children, all against their will. Where the catholic church still refuse to compensate these women for the trauma indured and where over 700 babies remains lie in a septic tank in Galway on the grounds of an old laundry.
So while I found the handmade tale disturbing and deeply sad, the reality of Ireland wasn’t much better.