The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale is a fascinating story that highlights the importance of self-esteem, individual thought, and personal choice through a stylized and engaging narrative.

The purpose of this Substack is to reflect on the ways fiction authors express their philosophical ideas in their works. Where possible, I will integrate those themes with other ideas and evaluate them. Though I may occasionally comment on various aspects of the writing, these articles are not reviews. For those who are unfamiliar with the works discussed, I will include the relevant details from the story in the “context” section, so if you are familiar with the work, I recommend you skip that section. I will try to avoid the most important spoilers, but there will be some, as it is often impossible to properly analyze the meaning of a story without accounting for how it ends.

Warning: brief mentions of sexual violence, suicide

Context

In a future United States, in which pollution has caused the birthrate to plummet (and of the few babies that are born, many are deformed), a puritanical Christian sect takes over and forms the Republic of Gilead. The “republican” government is determined to create a country that is, in their minds, orderly and in line with Biblical commandments. (A republic is a government in which the people elect leaders who make decisions; Gilead, as far as we see, has no such system.)

The new government starts transforming the country by restricting normal life (the new government bans porn and prohibits women from having bank accounts or working), before establishing the system that’s in place for most of the novel: one in which the government assigns everyone a role and accompanying duties. Most striking are the women’s roles, which conform to traditional expectations of women: cooking, cleaning, shopping, and child-rearing. Such roles include “Marthas” who cook and clean, “Wives” who manage the household, and “Handmaids” whose primary task is to bear children for the man of the house. Poorer households have only one woman who performs all those roles, degradingly referred to as an “Econowife.” The men don’t come off much better; most we meet in the story are either soldiers or manservants (though a few hold ordinary jobs such as shopkeepers and chauffeurs).

The narrator is known as “Offred” (meaning “of Fred,” referring to the official she was supposed to bear children for); we never learn her real name. In the early days of the regime, she attempted to escape to Canada with her husband and daughter, but they were caught and separated. Because she was young and fertile, she was given the choice of a life of hard labor or becoming a Handmaid, and she chose the latter. Throughout the novel, she is unable to reunite with her family.

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Major Ideas:

• Religion is useful for controlling people

• Self-esteem is essential for liberty

• Viewing people in terms of their social utility is wrong

Religion is useful for controlling people

The authoritarian villains of The Handmaid’s Tale are Christian, which naturally suggests that the book is intended to be critical of either Christianity or religion in general. Margaret Atwood denies both in the introduction to the 2017 edition of the novel, stating that “the book is not ‘anti-religion.’ It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny.” She further says that she chose Christianity as opposed to any other religion simply because it is the most influential in the United States (xvii-xviii).

She explains that the reason many tyrannies use religion is because it makes it easy to create heretics (xvii). This is true, but it is not the fundamental reason many oppressive regimes use religion (or a quasi-religious ideology). Designating people as heretics is useful to a tyranny because those individuals can then serve as scapegoats—they can be punished without fear of retribution. But this is only possible because of the belief that the law comes from God, the source of all that is good. As such, few dare to question it since, on this view, it’s not merely disruptive but morally wrong to question his word.

Religions also create fanatics. Though it is unlikely that all those who lead theocratic regimes are sincere believers (many are power lusters, opportunists, and/or sadists), they are able to take power because there are sincere believers who think they ought to do whatever it takes to ensure their religious rules are enforced. According to such people, the end justifies the means when the end is ordained by God.

Of course, much the same can be said for many non-religious ideologies and personality cults that various tyrannies have used throughout history, and the border between the two is often blurry. For example, many think of Hitler as an atheist (and some religious people use him as an example of the dangers of atheism), but in fact he was raised by a Catholic mother and used Catholicism and the church to support his regime (though he seems to have rejected the religion earlier in life, he did not publicly speak against it until 1942).¹ Nazi ideology also borrowed from a variety of religious and mystic traditions, including Nordic paganism and Eastern religions.² However, the trait that stands out to many observers of socialist and communist movements (including National Socialism) is how much these allegedly scientific ideologies are treated as religions or personality cults. Atwood makes a slight nod to this similarity with one of the Gileadean slogans, a misogynistic variation on a Marxist idea: “From each according to her ability, to each according to his need” (117).

In short, though Atwood may not have intended the book to be anti-religion (and though some religious people cherish freedom of thought and don’t wish to push their beliefs on others), the fact is that The Handmaid’s Tale brilliantly showcases how religion can be used to control people through both fear and genuine belief.

Self-esteem is essential for liberty

Though the Gileadeans took over by force, their ideas had been gaining influence prior to the coup, and they were only able to maintain control through the (at least tacit) consent of the majority. They gained (and keep) this consent through three main methods: religion, terror, and grinding down people’s self-esteem. How terror serves as a method of control is fairly obvious—the regime often kills dissenters and displays their bodies publicly to intimidate others who might be tempted to break the rules. But a more subtle method is systematically destroying their citizens’ self-esteem, which makes it easier to condition people to fall into the rigid and structured lives they’ve been assigned.

The regime achieves this in multiple ways; for the women, they impose a variety of legal restrictions (the men have fewer restrictions, though they are also far from free). Women are not allowed to read (even the Bible), they are not allowed to work, and the testimony of a lone woman is not admissible in court. The implied reasoning for each of these laws is clear: thinking—even about their governing belief system—is dangerous, they aren’t capable of or “meant to” work, and they aren’t trustworthy.

But in the case of the Handmaids, who are relegated to the task of childbearing, the government does not rely solely on laws that some might privately question or reject. They subject these women to an indoctrination period before they were sent out to their households. During this time, they are made to confess horrible things in their past (such as having been gang raped) and blamed for it by their peers. This idea—that if something bad happens to a person, it’s God’s punishment for something she did wrong—is consistent with certain religions.³ The effect is that a person may come to accept blame for anything bad that happens to her, regardless of whether it actually is her fault.

This is not the only horror the Handmaids are made to participate in; they are also encouraged to beat criminals to death. In the instance of this we see, the women are told the man is a rapist (actually, he is a political prisoner), and deserves his fate. The crowd is whipped into a frenzy with a horrific description of his “crime,” then set loose. Afterward, Offred regrets her part in the prisoner’s death, reflecting “I’m not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that’s the point” (281). 

By making ordinary people complicit in the regime’s crimes, by teaching them that they are guilty for things they weren’t able to control, by preventing them as much as possible from engaging their minds, and by instilling in them the belief that they are not trustworthy, the government is grinding down their perception of their self-worth and teaching them to submit.

Viewing people in terms of their social utility is wrong

The Gileadeans pitched their ideal society as a solution to the country’s population crisis. The government promised that it would pair healthy, fertile individuals, ensure the potentially childbearing women did nothing to risk their health or fertility, and facilitate conception of a strong, properly formed fetus. This treats people as pieces of a machine, to be fitted in the appropriate slot so that society can function smoothly. But people are not cogs, to be shuffled around and fitted into the clockmakers’ plan. Each person is an individual, with ideas, thoughts, plans, hopes, accomplishments, relationships, memories, and emotions. Ignoring all of that and trying to force them to behave differently is deeply wrong (and has disastrous consequences).

The story mostly focuses on female characters and their lack of choice, but most of the men, too, are forced to behave in ways and spend their time in service of goals they didn’t choose. And the immoral methods (sexual slavery, brainwashing, executing dissidents) required to maintain this plan deeply violates each individual’s right to his or her own life. 

We see in detail that Offred has precious little intellectual stimulation; she can only walk within the same few streets to the same few shops, perform the same few tasks, and talk to the same few people about the same few subjects. She cannot read or watch movies or listen to music. As a result, she spends much of her time dwelling on what she has lost, and suicide flits around the edges of her thinking, eternally out of reach (this is deliberate; homes are fitted with shatterproof windows that don’t open all the way, Handmaids aren’t given knives at mealtimes, etc). Without choices, her loved ones, or even something to think about, life loses all meaning. It’s not surprising that, as we learn from the epilogue, the republic didn’t last—it wasn’t a stable form of government, because it destroyed people’s lives.

Many have complained that Atwood’s “prediction” is unlikely to come true.⁴ But the warning she offers is not solely against using Christianity to sexually enslave women. It’s against the broader principle of viewing people as a means to serve their society rather than as individuals with a right to their own lives. She wrote the novel while living in West Berlin, having visited many then-communist countries (xiii). Communism explicitly claims that the individual is less important than the group; one has to conclude she was well aware of the consequences of this idea.

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Side Note

There is a Hulu TV adaptation of the novel that Atwood helped create. Alas, I have not seen it, so I cannot comment on it.

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In Conclusion

Though dark, The Handmaid’s Tale is a fascinating story that highlights the importance of self-esteem, individual thought, and personal choice through a stylized and engaging narrative. The emphasis on the psychological aspects of authoritarianism it highlights are a particularly fascinating way to demonstrate that people are not cogs in a machine, but individuals who should live for themselves.

1.  Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: Meridian, 1982); Walter Laqueur, “Hitler and the Catholics,” New York Book Review, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/06/25/hitler-and-the-catholics/; Michael S. Rosenwald, “Hitler hated Judaism. But he loathed Christianity, too,” The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/20/hitler-hated-judaism-he-loathed-christianity-too/.

2.  Eric Kurlander, “Nazism and Religion,” Oxford University Press, December 23, 2019, https://oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-680.

3. “How the Church Teaches Victim Blaming and Silence,” We Are Her, July 30, 2019, https://www.weareher.net/blog/how-the-church-teaches-victim-blaming-and-silence.

4. Jon Dykstra, “Why is dystopian fiction worth reading?” Reformed Perspective, February 26, 2019, https://reformedperspective.ca/why-is-dystopian-fiction-worth-reading/; Megan McArdle, “No, 'The Handmaid’s Tale' Is Not 'Unexpectedly Timely',” Bloomberg UK, April 25, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-25/no-the-handmaid-s-tale-is-not-unexpectedly-timely?embedded-checkout=true.