Tramadol Order Cod Margaret Atwood may be the most significant author in world literature who has not yet won the Nobel Prize. Two of her novels (The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) have won the Booker Prize—the elite annual British award for the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. And four other novels have been finalists for the same award: Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, Cat’s Eye, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Any of these I might have chosen as number 6 in “The Ruud List of the 100 Most Lovable Nobels in the English Language.” In particular, Atwood’s 2000 novel The Blind Assassin, which was also listed on Time magazine’s “100 Best Novels Since 1923,” was a major contender. But who can deny the overall cultural influence of Atwood’s best-selling novel, The Handmaid’s Tale? Not only has the novel sold millions, but the long-running television series that it spawned has given the story many more fans. And aside from being a finalist for the Booker Prize, the book also won Atwood Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award for Fiction (Canada’s rough equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), as well as the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel published in Britain for the year 1985.
Best Place To Order Tramadol Online The Handmaid’s Tale appears on at least 67 different “Great Books” lists, among them the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s 2015 “Select 100” list as voted on by faculty staff and students, The Guardian’s “100 Best Political Books,” and the 2004 “50 Essential Reads by Contemporary Authors” as chosen by the Orange Prize for Fiction. It placed 94th on Penguin Publishing’s “100 Must-Read Classics, as Chosen by Our Readers,” 71st on “The 100 Favorite Novels of Librarians,” 57th on the Gazette’s 2005 ”Top 100 Books, As Chosen by Canadians,” 53rd on the Modern Library’s 1998 “Readers’ List,” 36th on the Library Journal’s “Books of the Century,” 29th on Entertainment Weekly’s “Top 100 Noves,” 22nd on NPR’s “Top 100 Science-Fiction/Fantasy Books,” 16th on the BBC’s “The 100 Stories that Shaped the World,” 11th on The Guardian’s “50 Best-Loved Novels Written by a Woman,” 8th on the Reader’s Digest list of “The Greatest Books of All Time,” and 3rd on The Times’ list of “The New Modern Classics—The Nation’s Favorite 20th Century Novels” (based on sales data over a five-year period).
In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past several years, let me quickly summarize the situation of The Handmaid’s Tale: Set in the near future in New England, the novel depicts a futuristic patriarchal theocracy, the Republic of Gilead, established after a white supremacist faction overthrew the democratic government of the United States. The narrator and protagonist of the book, whom we never know by her birth name but only by her Gilead name of Offred (thus named because she belongs to Fred, one of the Commanders in the Gilead hierarchy) is a Handmaid: her role in this society is to bear a child to her master, because his wife, like most of the women in this society, is not fertile (the result of the pollution of the environment). Just how Offred feels about this suppression of her true name—i.e. her true identity—she makes clear in no uncertain terms:
My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that’s survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my single bed at night, with my eyes closed, and the name floats there behind my eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the dark.
Only men have any position of power or influence in Gilead. Women cannot legally own property or money, and are denied the right to literacy. This fact particularly rankles with the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, a former television evangelist who was highly invested in the patriarchy and helped bring about the revolution that created Gilead, only to find that it was not quite the ideal she envisioned. “How furious she must be,” the narrator opines, “now that she’s been taken at her word.”
In addition to Handmaids and Wives, other women have specific roles in this society: Marthas are cooks and maids, Aunts are those who train and essentially brainwash Handmaids so that they accept their roles—that is, what they must do during the “Ceremony,” in which they are basically raped by their Commanders while the wife looks on, all performed as a religious ceremony. All women must abide by a strict dress code that identifies them—not unlike the Stars of David that Nazis forced Jews to wear so that they could be instantly identified.
We do learn that Offred had tried to escape to Canada with her husband and her daughter before Gilead had tightened its iron grip across the whole country. She had been captured and her daughter taken from her and given to one of the ruling families. Her memories focus often on her daughter, and Serena Joy uses a picture of her daughter at her new home to entice Offred into breaking some rules. Offred also thinks often of her husband who was taken from her when they tried to flee into Canada with their daughter. Is he dead or alive? She worries, as well, about her mother, who being past childbearing age would be considered an “unwoman,” and has likely been sent to the “colonies,” where she would have been put to work cleaning up toxic waste.
Offred is also concerned for her college friend Moira, who was assigned with Offred to the training school for Handmaids. This is where the new Handmaids are told, by the Matriarch Aunt Lydia, in charge of their indoctrination:
There is more than one kind of freedom….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.
They no longer have the freedom to do what they like. What they do have is the freedom from responsibility. Their masters will be doing the thinking for them. Offred’s friend Moira will have no part of this: with more bold initiative than the others she is able to escape—to where Offred does not know, but she fears the worst. She does know that running away is not really a viable option in this society: “It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”
Offred soon realizes she is not the first Handmaid in this Commander’s house. She sees messages written in hidden places on the walls of her room that have been left by the Handmaid she replaced, the most significant of which reads “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” which she later learns means “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” She also learns that the house’s previous Handmaid had escaped: she had died by suicide.
Offred’s domestic situation is governed by strict laws, but she soon learns that laws in conflict with human nature—which covers nearly all the laws of Gilead—are bound to be broken. At the urging of the master’s wife, who believes he is infertile, Offred begins a sexual affair with her master’s driver Nick, whom she continues to meet unbeknownst to Serena, though she is never sure how much she can trust him. At the same time her master, the Commander, breaks some rules himself by secretly inviting Offred to his office to play games of Scrabble with him, and to read old magazines, two forbidden activities since women are not supposed to be allowed to read. When Offred actually makes a connection with another Handmaid, Ofglen (a member of a resistance movement), with whom she makes a daily walk to buy groceries and to look at the bodies of executed “traitors” to Gilead hanging on “the Wall,” she is shocked to learn one day that her friend has hanged herself, and has been replaced by a new “Ofglen” as if nothing untoward has happened.
The plot and theme of the novel are chiefly what readers have been absorbed by. But I should say a word about the narration as well: Offred speaks in the present tense throughout, except when she is remembering the past. It gives an air of immediacy to the story, as if it is happening now. It also considers the question of how Offred can possibly be telling this story. She can’t be writing it, as writing is strictly forbidden. And who can she be speaking to, in her constricted circumstances? We learn in the book’s afterward that she had dictated the story onto cassette tapes, which have been discovered by anthropologists a hundred years later. Offred has consciously tried to imagine an audience at some remote and freer time and place: “If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending…” she says at one point. “But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.” Later she seems to put all her hopes for a meaningful life on an audience she imagines at some time being able to hear her story:
By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.
I won’t reveal any more of the plot, just in case you haven’t read the book. But suffice it to say that this novel, what Atwood calls “speculative fiction” rather than science fiction, depicted an imagined future based on certain societal and political trends Atwood saw at work in 1980s America. Since those trends were magnified exponentially with the rise of Trumpism in America, the television series based on the book gained wide popularity in 2017. It was the success of the series that inspired Atwood to write The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, to great success and a Booker Prize. To some extent the sequel gave the continuing TV show some direction, though they may have jumped the shark afterwards.
But it’s important to stress that Atwood’s novel is not a narrowly focused satire of excesses of some particular politician. Keep in mind that one of the major influences on Atwood’s creation of The Handmaid’s Tale was her study of American Puritanism when she studied at Harvard. The book is a warning about dangerous trends in modern culture, not only in the U.S. but throughout much of the world, that glorify some of history’s most egregious offenses, and seek to normalize them in the modern world. In that sense it is a worthy successor to books like Orwell’s l984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, or even Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. You’ve gotta read this book if you haven’t. Don’t rely on the TV series for what you know about Atwood’s magnum opus.