They are not an afterthought of nature
Margaret Atwood on The Handmaid’s Tale:
Over the years, “The Handmaid’s Tale” has taken many forms. It has been translated into 40 or more languages. It was made into a film in 1990. It has been an opera, and it has also been a ballet. It is being turned into a graphic novel. And in April 2017 it will become an MGM/Hulu television series.
In this series I have a small cameo. The scene is the one in which the newly conscripted Handmaids are being brainwashed in a sort of Red Guard re-education facility known as the Red Center. They must learn to renounce their previous identities, to know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.
The Handmaids sit in a circle, with the Taser-equipped Aunts forcing them to join in what is now called (but was not, in 1984) the “slut-shaming” of one of their number, Jeanine, who is being made to recount how she was gang-raped as a teenager. Her fault, she led them on — that is the chant of the other Handmaids.
Although it was “only a television show” and these were actresses who would be giggling at coffee break, and I myself was “just pretending,” I found this scene horribly upsetting. It was way too much like way too much history. Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook: We see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly take positions of power over other women, even — and, possibly, especially — in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: All power is relative, and in tough times any amount is seen as better than none.
Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook. Oh hell yes.
Which brings me to three questions I am often asked.
First, is “The Handmaid’s Tale” a “feminist” novel? If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are “feminist.”
Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations would die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population. Kill their babies and replace their babies with yours, as cats do; make women have babies they can’t afford to raise, or babies you will then remove from them for your own purposes, steal babies — it’s been a widespread, age-old motif. The control of women and babies has been a feature of every repressive regime on the planet. Napoleon and his “cannon fodder,” slavery and its ever-renewed human merchandise — they both fit in here. Of those promoting enforced childbirth, it should be asked: Cui bono? Who profits by it? Sometimes this sector, sometimes that. Never no one.
Magnificent.
I was at a reading of one of my plays today. In the play, a teenage girl dresses like a boy and takes a boy’s name to be allowed to do something she is not allowed to do because “girls don’t do that”. She insists that she is not a girl, she is a person.
As soon as this was read, and the discussion period started (this is a play still in the development process), one of the people had to go on about this girl being “trans”. She was not “trans”. She was a girl who wanted to be a person, and only took a boy’s persona because she was not allowed to do the same things her brothers were allowed to do. It isn’t the first time one of my plays has been mistaken for being a “trans” statement – the last time, the play was not feminist, it was environmentalist!
Sorry, sort of off topic, but I am getting sick of not being able to make a feminist statement without it being taken as a statement on behalf of trans rights. Can’t anyone even see the difference anymore? A girl wanting to do things that she is not allowed to do must be trans…it isn’t possible she could just be kicking against the limits of being a girl in a world where girls are not respected or allowed to do things that are too “boyish”/
iknklast, as I’m sure you know by now, ‘intersectional’ feminism means a brand of feminism that is not intersectional with other social issues, but rather is subservient to them. And, dear god, the fucking shallowness of it all is revealed again: the protagonist has a vagina, but put on trousers! Therefore she must be a man. What a baffling mix of 21st and 19th century gender theory.
And, Holms, if you recall, refusing to quit wearing “men’s clothes” was one of the things that condemned Joan of Arc to burn. I don’t have a lot of sympathy with her piety or her religious visions, but damn, it’s so easy to be supportive of her in terms of what the inquisition thought of her.
Atwood has an uncanny ability to spectacularly miss the point.
The misogyny expounded in this fictional tale of patriarchal/religious control is actually quite tame when compared to the real instances of patriarchal/religious misogyny now overtaking us.
The whole Handmaid’s Tale revival just comes across as an exercise in nostalgia in the face of whole pattern of denial with regards to the entire subject.
In the article Atwood regales us with tales of mid-Victorian dress, nun’s habits, Puritan bonnets and the label off of some old 1940s Dutch Cleanser…to bring us up to date on misogyny’s current incarnations.
Can she not spell ‘hijab’?
She then invokes, the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, the SS, Napoleon, the Soviet Blok and 17th century American Puritanism ( that’s still lying just beneath the surface of contemporary society, dontchaknow!) in an attempt at relevance.
Just to put this in perspective; Atwood’s home town, Toronto, now sees its various secular school boards implementing ‘prayer spaces’ characterized by a gender apartheid which sees women sitting at the back at all time and which views menstruating girls as so unclean their prayers are too filthy to even offer up to god. The city’s mosques are all gender-segregated and full to bursting; its churches gender-integrated…but empty.
Had Atwood written The Handmaid’s tale in 1930s Québec, she’d have been spot on…sort of. But she wrote it in the mid-80s, in Toronto, when Islam was already in its current ascendancy, and so she’s not just 50 years too late, she’s not even writing about the right religion.
One suspects, though, that even were St Peter’s to become a mosque, they’ll still be doing remakes of this.
If this is all there is to Feminism in the Age of Trump, then Feminism no longer exists.
It’s being supplanted by ‘World Hijab Day’
Oh do get a grip, John. The Christian version still exists and is still being promoted. It still has power in legislatures and courts. It still lives in people’s heads. Atwood is allowed to write about that, and she’s allowed to not write about the Islamist version.
And, John, if you went to certain communities, such as the Amish or the FLDS, you would see that there are still women stuck in those ancient molds. And the family I grew up in was only slightly different, in that we were allowed electricity, and we could wear skirts that were very short – hit us mid calf (any skirt above the knee was strictly forbidden; my mother remade my sister’s cheerleader costume).
And there are many Christian wives that we don’t see, because they present the smiling front heading to church, and keep to themselves in their Christian communities, unwilling to interact with people outside their own faith community for fear of “loss of faith”. These women are often kept on a very short leash, and frequently abused.
Quiverfull, and the Christianist home-schooling movement more broadly. It’s not a small population, more’s the pity.
John, are you Steersman?
Ha! I’m sure he’s not. Steersman has a very recognizable (and very tedious and annoying) style of writing – a kind of wannabe 18th century erudite style that just comes off as pompous and circuitous. I’m not sure he’s able to write in any other way – he used to try to comment in disguise but the style was always a giveaway. John doesn’t write like him at all.
Probably not, but I detect a similar ‘but but Islam is worse!’ vibe.
Content overlap, but not style.
@iknklast #2
iknklast, have you heard of Dr. James Barry, aka Margaret Ann Bulkley? She was the first British woman to become a doctor. Disguised as a man, she completed medical school, became an army surgeon, and eventually rose to become Inspector General of military hospitals. She was the first British surgeon to perform a caesarian section in Africa in which both mother and child survived.
Of course, she’s been posthumously trans’d. Look up her Wikipedia article (and check out the “Talk”). Barry is referred to as “he” throughout and described as “assigned female at birth.” The latest incarnation of the article is actually an improvement on the first one I saw, which didn’t mention her sex until the third paragraph. Current version still uses mostly masculine pronouns, but calls Barry a woman in the second paragraph (and feminine pronouns wherever it refers to Margaret Bulkley.)
@John, #5, the 1980s saw the rise of rightwing evangelical Christianity as a powerful political bloc in the United States. Every conservative politician since then has kowtowed to them. Jeff Sharlett has written about their considerable power and influence.
Of course The Handmaid’s Tale reflects Islamic as well as Christian theocracy. It’s about theocratic totalitarianism, and theocratic totalitarianism always seeks to control women. The theocracy of the book is Christian because Christianity was and is the dominant religion of the country the book’s set in (which happens to be the most powerful country in the world.)
As for the current article, Atwood was obviously thinking about the current primary threat to democracy, which occupies the White House and is enthusiastically supported by our Christian theocrats.
Somebody is missing the point here, but it ain’t Atwood.
(Of course THT also illustrates that male supremacist societies control women because of our bodies–our capacity as childbearers and as fucktoys. Any day now some Transcultist is going to denounce it and demand some Women’s Library remove it from their shelves.)
LM @ 13, that’s as bad as the Mormons and their ‘baptising’ the dead. Unless someone comes up with unequivocal evidence that Bulkley considered herself a man trapped in a womans body, as opposed to a women dressing and passing as a man in order to be allowed to study and practice medicine and her chosen profession without harassment, I’ll regard her as a women.
How dare someone who says gender is about self-identification retrospectively assign gender to another person who cannot speak for themselves. It’s simply outrageous.