The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is so synonymous with mainstream feminist literature that it almost seems a sin to criticise it. Luckily for me, it lives up to the hype, more or less.

The book follows Ofred, a handmaid in service to a Commander of Gilead. She is a concubine, a potential surrogate mother and a sexual slave, whose fertility is rare and tightly controlled in this Christian dystopia. Ofred’s days are boring, interspersed with awkward breeding, secrets, and a yearning for the old world, where she was free.

Atwood writes this book in a non-linear fashion, jumping between points in Ofred’s life as a way of highlighting the suffering and restriction of her station in comparison to the past. Her prose is perfectly crisp, and layered with beautifully unexpected turns of phrase. This book predicts the modern resurrgence of misogyny couched in religion, and does a masterful job of illustrating how horrible yet mundane it is. The way Atwood portrays the inner life of a woman is now my understanding of the female experience, for better or worse.

This is book is intentionally uncomfortable but should be read by everyone, and deserves its place as a modern classic.