Book Review: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A great novel set in the future. Offred is a Handmaid or the lowest rung in the female caste system. Her only job, procreate and hand her child over to her wife for proper child rearing. The novel tackles great issues such as terrorism and cultural politics on several levels -against the state and against gender.

I find the novel haunting on several levels particularly the relationship and treatment of women that gave me the pause. Women judged by their previous actions created a great riff: the pious are wives; the women who were promiscuous were handmaids; and the submissive women were domestics. Atwell describes a society in which requires promiscuous women to have relations with sterile men and then hand over the kid, if there was a kid. Promiscuous women are the property of men - even their names denote ownership.

One thing that invited questions was the act of conception, this new pious land degrades the sanctity of marriage without intimacy and with a factual sterility that implies process not a sign of faith in love. The society who sets out to be pious becomes fanatical imposing its will upon its people.



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