In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [36]
The writing of The Handmaid’s Tale gave me a strange feeling, like sliding on river ice—exhilarating but unbalancing. How thin is this ice? How far can I go? How much trouble am I in? What’s down there if I fall? These were writerly questions, having to do with structure and execution, and that biggest question of all, the one every writer asks him- or herself with every completed chapter: Is anyone going to believe this? (I don’t mean literal belief: fictions admit that they are invented, right on the cover. I mean, “find the story compelling and plausible enough to go along for the ride.”)
These writerly questions were reflections of other, more general questions. How thin is the ice on which supposedly “liberated” modern Western women stand? How far can they go? How much trouble are they in? What’s down there if they fall?
And further: If you were attempting a totalitarian takeover of the United States, how would you do it? What form would such a government assume, and what flag would it fly? How much social instability would it take before people would renounce their hard-won civil liberties in a tradeoff for “safety”? And, since most totalitarianisms we know about have attempted to control reproduction in one way or another—limiting births, demanding births, specifying who can marry whom and who owns the kids—how would that motif play out for women?
And what about the outfits? Ustopias are always interested in clothing—either less of it, compared to what we wear now—that was popular in Victorian times—or more of it, compared to what we wear now. The clothing concerns usually centre around women: societies are always uncovering parts of women’s bodies and then covering them up again. (Maybe this is just to keep things interesting: now you see it, now you don’t, though the “it” changes a lot. What was it that used to be so very alluring about a trim set of ankles?)
My rules for The Handmaid’s Tale were simple: I would not put into this book anything that humankind had not already done, somewhere, sometime, or for which it did not already have the tools. Even the group hangings had precedents: there were group hangings in earlier England, and there are still group stonings in some countries. Looking further back, the Maenads, during their Dionysian celebrations, were said to go into frenzies during which they dismembered people with their hands. (If everyone participates, no one individual is responsible.) For a literary precedent, one need search no further than Emile Zola’s Germinal, which contains an episode in which the town’s coal-mining women, who have been sexually exploited by the shopkeeper, tear the man apart and parade his genitalia through town on a pole. A less raw but still shocking precedent is Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” (which I read as a teenager, shortly after it came out, and which made a chilling impression on me).
The coverups worn by the women in The Handmaid’s Tale have been variously interpreted as Catholic (as in nuns) or Muslim (as in burkas). The truth is that these outfits are not aimed at any one religion. Their actual design was inspired by the Old Dutch Cleanser figure on the sink cleaner boxes of my childhood, but they are also simply old. Mid-Victorians, with their concealing bonnets and veils to keep strange men from leering at their faces, would not have found them so unusual.
Old Dutch Cleanser:
I prefaced the novel with three quotations. The first is from the Bible—Genesis 30, 1:3, the passage in which the two wives of Jacob use their female slaves as baby-producers for themselves; this ought to warn the reader against the dangers inherent in applying every word in that extremely varied document literally. The second is from