The Commander

This post is about the Commander. We see his type in some of the other texts we have studied. He is a great believer in Gilead yet he thwarts its principles. His office is full of books, “No wonder we can’t come in here. It’s an oasis of the forbidden.” He seems to want to retain some aspects of the past and he certainly wants to relate to Offred. He even trots out the cliched ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ line. Offred realises, “That was what I was there for, then. The same old thing. It was too banal to be true.” Offred can’t reject him as he could send her to the colonies. He takes her to Jezebels and says, “It’s like walking into the past …” He claims that brothels are human nature and can’t be repressed. The thing that differs now however, is the prostitutes at Jezebels tend to be intellectuals forced to be there. They would not have been prostitutes in the past. So in Gilead the Commander has all the benefits of the regime and he retains aspects of the past. He can do this because he is male and he has the power. The Commander represents the hypocrisy, the corruption and the power of the Gileadean regime.

The Handmaid’s Tale and Humanity

The texts we have studied have provoked much discussion on the theme of humanity. In the novel Offred craves human contact. She hates the lack of love, the lack of emotion in Gilead. She says at one point, “But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from. There’s nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere.” Offred sees love as an essential part of society. For Offred to survive she has to feel human and to remember her past. To truly understand Offred we have to understand her pain and anguish. The fact that she has to repress her emotions adds tension to the book. As readers we want her feelings to be recognised but we don’t get that. We never know what happened to Luke, her mother, her daughter and others close to her. All we do get to know is that the Gileadean regime did not survive but those who experienced it had a bleak and terrifying lives. Once again we learn the unsettling lesson of how quickly people can be stripped of their basic humanity.

Themes in The Handmaid’s Tale – Freedom

In The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood discusses different types of freedom. As we have discussed a very important quotation from the novel in regard to the theme of freedom is:

There is more than one type of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

In Gilead the regime says it allows women to have freedom from danger and attack. Offred’s mother fought for women to have the freedom to control their own bodies and their actions. We learn from Offred that she mourns for the loss of the freedom she had in the past. Offred also reflects on her past life and the ways in which her freedom was restricted:

I remember the rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble.Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night.

In the past Offred had the freedom to live her own life and she could work. She could choose her own clothes, what she did in the day and who she would marry. She remembers “I used to dress like that. That was freedom.” She may be able to walk the streets in safety but she has paid dearly for this – she has lost individual freedom.

This loss of freedom is huge. In Gilead the Handmaid’s bodies are not there own; they are the state’s property. They are owned by the Commanders and their wives – they are Of-Fred or Of-Warren. They are spied on, monitored, restricted by The Eyes, The Angels and The Guardians. The Handmaids even spy on one another, “The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers.”

Gilead has a ritualised and segregated lifestyle. Handmaids don’t have personal belongings and their rooms are like cells – the regime makes it like this so they can’t commit suicide. They are not allowed to speak freely and group together. Offred says they learn to communicate silently, “We learned to whisper almost without sound.” The Handmaids try to find their own freedom. Offred’s affair with Nick and meetings with the Commander give her some sense of freedom as they break the boring routine of her life. However, to escape the oppressive regime all Offred really has is her thoughts as her private thoughts can’t be controlled by Gilead. Offred has learned that, “Freedom, like everything, is relative.”

Should The Handmaid’s Tale be banned?

I know that some of you didn’t enjoy the novel but should it be banned from schools?

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in the early 80s, a time when there was a backlash against the feminism of the 70s. In the many of the advances that women had made, the sacrifices they had made in order to create more opportunities for subsequent generations of women, were being ignored or rejected. There were calls for women to return to the home, to leave the workplace and go back to raising children. The 1980s were very conservative times.

The story is told by Offred, a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a society in which women of a lower caste are the concubines for the ruling caste and provide babies for the women. In this society, sexual intercourse is considered degrading to women so only the lower class women have it. Men and women are very strictly segregated, according to their gender as well as to their class. Atwood critiques fundamentalist religions as well as caste societies and the military.

At the time of its publication the novel provoked much discussion and debate. The Handmaid’s Tale is listed as one of the 100 “most frequently challenged books” from 1990 to 1999 on the American Library Association’s website. The Canadian Library Association (remember Atwood is Canadian) says there is “no known instance of a challenge to this novel in Canada” but says the book was called anti-Christian and pornographic by parents after being placed on a reading list for secondary students in Texas in the 1990s.

It has been reviewed this year in some places (including Canada) because of complaints over sexuality and criticism of religious fundamentalism.

According to Education Reporter Kristin Rushowy of the Toronto Star in 2008 a parent in Toronto, Canada, wrote a letter to his son’s high school principal, asking that the book no longer be assigned as required reading, stating that the novel is “rife with brutality towards and mistreatment of women (and men at times), sexual scenes, and bleak depression.” Rushowy quotes the response of Russell Morton Brown, a retired University of Toronto English professor, who acknowledged that “The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t likely written for 17-year-olds, ‘but neither are a lot of things we teach in high school, like Shakespeare. … ‘And they are all the better for reading it. They are on the edge of adulthood already, and there’s no point in coddling them,’ he said, adding, ‘they aren’t coddled in terms of mass media today anyway.’ … He said the book has been accused of being anti-Christian and, more recently, anti-Islamic because the women are veiled and polygamy is allowed. … But that ‘misses the point,’ said Brown. ‘It’s really anti-fundamentalism.”

Is it too brutal, sexist for school?

Read an interesting discussion of the novel here.

Setting essay – The Handmaid’s Tale

Still adding essays to moodle and I added material to research for those of you emailing with questions. Hope this helps.

To what extent is setting OR symbolism OR structure a significant feature of novels? Respond to this question with close reference to novel(s) you have studied.

The geographical, social and even time setting of the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, is an extremely significant feature of the novel. This is because Atwood skilfully uses elements of setting to communicate ideas about the nature of the society presented in the novel and how it came about. Atwood uses the setting to make her social commentary on the nature of humanity more deeply entrenched in the novel, instead of just being a surface theme alone. Each part of the setting is calculated by Atwood who said that nothing in her novel has not happened somewhere at sometime in the world.

This is significant of the nature of the society that the protagonist, Offred, lives in. Gilead is a monotheocratic state based on fundamentalist Christian principle, where women have no rights and any deviance from the expected norm is punishable by brutal penalties. Setting the novel in a totalitarian state demonstrates that there must have been some failing of humanity to allow such a cruel regime to come about, and so suddenly. This is used by Atwood to show that there is much to be lost if people do not stand up to retain their rights. Essentially setting the story in a regime like Gilead is a warning about the dangers of complacency.

Offred represents the greater mass of people who are unlikely to do anything when their freedoms are being threatened, because they do not want to ‘rock the boat’. They are too used to their rights and privileges that they take them for granted, and don’t believe anyone would actually take them away from them. This especially targets females, because the Gilead regime functions on the principle that the feminine is submissive and the male dominant. This is epitomised in Offred, who doesn’t do anything when slowly her rights as a woman are taken away from her before the inception of Gilead. She, like most of the everyday people, looks the other way and ignores the changes going on under her nose. This is a chilling reminder about the difference between ignorance and ignoring, because, as Offred said, “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

Read more on moodle

A recent link to The Handmaid’s Tale

In this 2009 article Domenica Marchetta reflects on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and Atwood’s influences.

Repressions of a new day – The Handmaid’s Tale

If you are looking for some extra reading on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale try Paul Gray’s review of the novel on the Time website.

Canadian Author Margaret Atwood’s sixth novel will remind most readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four. That can hardly be helped. Any new fictional account of how things might go horribly wrong risks comparisons either with George Orwell’s classic or with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. To a remarkable degree, these two books have staked out the turf of contemporary antiutopias. Which punishment is it to be this time? Relentless, inescapable totalitarianism or the mindless, synthetic stupors of technology? As it turns out, Atwood’s look at the future takes place under conditions that Orwell would recognise. Repression is the order of the new day in The Handmaid’s Tale. But the villains in this piece are not the ones that Orwell accused, and the most prominent victim and hero is a woman.

She is also the narrator, and the events that led to her current condition must be pieced together from memories she has been conditioned to forget. The  United States of America is now the Republic of Gilead, a Fundamentalist Christian theocracy that arose after “they shot the president and machine- gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.” The current regime is militantly opposed to the recent past, especially all traces of the moral permissiveness that arose in the U.S. during the waning decades of the 20th century. The embattled state must also try to reverse a disastrously declining birthrate, which began to slide with the growing acceptance of abortion and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in the bad old days. It grew worse after the toxic effects of various ecological disasters.

Hence women like the narrator who are of childbearing age and still possess “viable ovaries” have been forcibly recruited into the ranks of Handmaids. After a period of indoctrination, they are assigned to two-year tours of duty with the important men, the Commanders of the Faithful, whose wives are barren. Handmaids are slaves to their own biological possibilities and derive their identity solely from their Commanders. The narrator’s new name, Offred, really identifies her owner; she belongs for the time being to a man named Fred. She explains the duties of her station: “We are for breeding purposes: we aren’t concubines, geisha girls, courtesans. On the contrary: everything possible has been done to remove us from that category. There is supposed to be nothing entertaining about us.”

Keep reading here.

More from Friday -Winston and Offred

On Friday we were talking about the ways in which Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale were similar. Despite the regimes being  completely opposite in their ideology, both achieve the same result in the complete oppression and subjugation of their societies.  Like Nineteen Eighty-Four,  The Handmaid’s Tale traces its protagonist’s efforts to cope, endure, and survive a nightmare world. Offred’s account of her life in Gilead presents a fascinating portrait of the politics of power and the strength of the individual will in its struggle to preserve a sense of self.

In the novels how the regime came into existence is explained early in the text or as the plot progresses. We also understood this in Children of Men, the dystopia is implied in the beginning and we are shown how the world (in particular England) was effected; eventually giving rise to a regime lacking in human compassion. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother is a created entity by the ruling far-left Stalinist party intended to subjugate the public into obedience through surveillance and fear by using the slogan, ” Big Brother is watching you.”

The protagonist or hero in politically dystopian fiction tends to be someone from within the society of the regime who questions their society’s way of life, and has an acute sense of something horribly wrong within the society. The hero becomes so obsessed with the wrongs of the ruling class and the living conditions for society, that the only thing that begins to consume him or her is either escape or overturning the social order, even if he or she risks his or her  life.

Some critics have called The Handmaid’s Tale a “feminist 1984”.  Barbara Ehrenreich in her New Republic article, “Feminism’s Phantoms,” finds Offred to be “a sappy stand-in for Winston Smith. Even her friend Moira characterises her as “a wimp.” However, sometimes, such as in the case of Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, the protagonist is too full of fear to act out. Offred remains a silent victim throughout the book, enduring the excruciating lifestyle that she and her class of women have been forced to live. She lacks the strength and defiance of  Moira, and constantly shifts back to her memories of “the time before,” and the living conditions she took for granted. She has accepted her lot in life. Yet, although Offred cannot be considered a more obvious traditional hero like Moira, an examination of her more subtle rebellion against the oppressive totalitarian regime which governs her life illustrates the indefatigable nature of the human spirit.

Everyone noted the loneliness of Winston and Offred. We understand that they cannot speak out against their repressive societies because they live in worlds that allow no questioning. Another pervasive factor noted was  the use of mass media for propaganda purposes. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was the telescreen, and was installed in every home of the inner and outer party members, workplaces, and businesses (note the feel of this in Children of Men) Unlike our modern televisions, the telescreen had the dual purpose of disseminating state-run broadcasts, as well as to serve as an instrument of surveillance. In addition, microphones were placed throughout urban and suburban areas to control thoughts and actions and to deflect dissent. Offred and Winston have to keep in their desires and their fears.  Another feature of mass media propaganda is the use of state-sponsored social organisations like the Youth Spies and Junior Anti-Sex League in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Aunts in The Handmaid’s Tale. All were designed as a means of both enforcing the ruling body’s political ideologies by recruiting and brainwashing youth (including instilling hatred towards any idea or anyone that differs from the ideology of the ruling class), as well as providing a system of social surveillance to suppress dissent. The “Two Minutes Hate” was used in Nineteen Eighty-Four to stir society into a fanatical frenzy of hate towards the enemies of The Party (especially Goldstein). In Nineteen Eighty-Four the party members are not only watched by the regime, but by their comrades and their children to dissuade any potentially anti-Party behaviours.

We also discussed that both Winston and Offred had their small, secret guilty pleasures that they had to hide for fear of punishment. We noted that they must try and satisfy themselves with these little things. Offred’s  subtle acts of rebellion include hoarding butter from her meals to rub on her face, and saving a match that she considers using to burn down the house. Often during her nights alone in her room she tries to come to terms with what has happened to her and to decide what she can do in order to survive physically and mentally. Both Winston and Offred know that things are not right and they know that they cannot be alone in thinking this but who is there to confide in? This knowledge just makes the loneliness greater. Offred  risks physical harm when she steals a few minutes during bathroom breaks to speak to Moira. During these breaks the two women reminisce about past lives and voice their fears and disgust over their present reality. Offred notes, “there is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with.”

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston does not clearly remember things having ever been different. He wants to find someone who still has any knowledge of what it used to be like before Oceania and the Party. Winston Smith really only knows the harsh world of Oceania and this reinforces the oppressive atmosphere of the book. In Oceania the party pretends that this is how it always was, and this is how it always will be. Offred does remember a time when she had something else. For instance when  Offred’s thoughts turn to the teenagers who must have once populated the former gymnasium, she commits a more personal act of rebellion. The citizens of the new Republic are repeatedly warned to forget the past or to view it with contempt. Yet, throughout her narrative, Offred continually flashes back to her life before the formation of Gilead, especially with her husband Luke and their daughter. These recollections of the freedom and happiness she used to have in her friendship with Moira, in her work, and in her life with family help her to maintain crucial ties to her past life and thus to a sense of identity. Throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred proves her consistent efforts not only to survive, but also to maintain her individuality. When Offred begins her story with a flashback to her time at the Rachel and Leah Centre, she illustrates the politics of power that characterise the novel. She notes the Aunts guarding them with electric cattle prods and leather belts, restricting their movement and interaction with each other. The Handmaids-in-training seem on the surface to submit to this treatment. At night, however, under the threat of severe beatings, they struggle to maintain contact with each other through silent communications in the dark.

Offred can recall how that she and other women had “freedom to” rather than “freedom from” and we discussed examples of this. She is now  forced to live in a system that she doesn’t believe in. Offred can remember a time when love, sex, and birth were something different than the distressing parody they’ve become. In Gilead the regime “prescribes a pattern of life based on frugality, conformity, censorship, corruption, [and] fear.”  The novel also illuminates the intricate politics of power: leaders define acceptable roles for subordinates (in this case, the women), who are said to be unable to perform more valued functions (reasoning and governing skills). As a result subordinates often find it difficult to believe in their own ability. Subordinates are encouraged to develop childlike characteristics — submissiveness, docility, dependency — that are pleasing to the dominant group. This group then legitimises the unequal relationship and incorporates it into society’s guiding concepts. In Gilead’s power structure women are subservient to men because they are considered not as capable as men. This system in Gilead involves the marginalisation of women.

The ultimate tool of societal control in these fictional political dystopias is fear, with the height of such fear being torture and even death. In The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s the Eyes, in Children of Men, it’s the Police and in Nineteen Eighty-Four it’s the Thought Police.  In these societies, stories of the secret police often circulate involving arrest, torture and execution for anything deemed to be treason by the regime. With such powerful and secret security organisations in place, the people of the dystopian society do everything in their power to appear to be ordinary conforming citizens incapable of dissent. People  try to remain invisible and show their loyalty to the ruling class. A perfect example of the implementation of complete fear is in Nineteen Eighty-Four after Winston is captured and endures day-to-day torture in the The Ministry of Love, culminating in horror when he was exposed to what he dreaded most in Room 101, breaking both his promise to himself, as well as his spirit. Another example is when Offred is found out by Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Offred waits in her room in complete fear when she hears the security van for The Eyes pull into the driveway, creating an intense sense of anxiety and anticipation for the reader.

In both texts we follow the protagonist’s struggle in their belief that things can be made better, as he or she begins to take actions that could risk their life if discovered. The climax and ending  involves someone or a group within the totalitarian regime discovering the main character’s  behaviour and attempts to suppress he or she by force. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston  is forced into conformity and succumbs to hopelessness. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we never really know what happens to Offred, as her tapes from the Gilead are found centuries later and discussed in an academic conference. We do know however, that in both texts that the regime eventually ended.

Technology and The Handmaid’s Tale

In The Handmaid’s Tale technology seems to have reversed. Gilead is no techno-dystopia, we see that that society has stepped backwards in time, to a kind of government and lifestyle of times long gone. Technology as we know it seems to have been largely removed from this society. Interestingly, this rejection of technology includes medical techniques to help deal with problems of infertility even though it is such a struggle to conceive a child in this society.

A link between 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale has been compared to other cautionary tales, such as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Margaret Atwood says that she feels there is at least one way her novel is like Nineteen Eighty-Four.

”You’ll notice,” she says, “and not many people have, that the section on Newspeak at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four talks about Newspeak in the past tense. It’s written in ordinary language, not Newspeak. The obvious implication from that is that the regime has fallen, that someone in the future, we don’t know who, has lived to tell the tale and to write this analysis of Newspeak in the past tense.

”And my book isn’t totally bleak and pessimistic either, for several reasons. The central character – the Handmaid Offred – gets out. The possibility of escape exists. A society exists in the future which is not the society of Gilead and is capable of reflecting about the society of Gilead in the same way that we reflect about the 17th century. Her little message in a bottle has gotten through to someone – which is about all we can hope, isn’t it?”