The Handmaid's Tale

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Sometime in the near and threatening future, in what was once but is no longer the United States, is the Republic of Gilead. The citizenry is ruled with iron discipline and savage cruelty, in a chilly state that out-Puritans the Puritans themselves. One of the bizarre results of a move to Theocracy is a literal interpretation of the Old Testament, and the virtual imprisonment of women in the name of “a return to traditional values.”

The birthrate in Gilead has fallen drastically, to the point where even the potential ability to bear a viable child rather than a genetically-doomed “shredder” is somewhat of a rarity. No woman able to bear children can be spared; and, just as in Biblical times, when barren Rachel sent her handmaid in to her husband Jacob to bear him a child that she would claim as her own, so the Handmaids of Gilead are used to bear children for their Commanders, to become the children of the Commanders’ Wives.

Offred, the Handmaid who tells her own horrifying story, has lost even her own name; she is a property for the use “of Fred.” This chilling vision of a sterile dystopia is at moments frightfully convincing, at others painfully — very painfully — funny. The warning note sounded here for the benefit of the complacent and the self-righteous is, alas, unlikely to be heard by those who would most benefit from it. Vintage Atwood.