103. the HANDMAID'S TALE

Margaret Atwood 1986

In this ingenious futuristic novel of caution, the state of Maine is under Gileadian empire, a totalitarian regime where women are either handmaids, Commander's Wives, Aunts or Marthas and men are either Commanders, Angels, Guardians or Eyes. Offred, the narrator is a handmaid, one whose only function is to have babies of their Commander's for their wives. She has three chances to have a Keeper, or a normal baby. Otherwise, If she delivers an abnormal baby, a Shredder, she is salvaged or is considered Unwoman. This dystopian book full of scary possibilities certainly lives one with lots to think about and maybe pray for, for days.

'We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone.'(opening lines)

'We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semidarkness we could stretch our arms, when the Aunts weren't looking, and touch each other's hands across space. We learned to lipread, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.'(4)

'Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us. The skirt is ankle-length, full gathered to a flat yoke that extends over the breasts, the sleeves are full. The white wings too are prescribed issue; they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen.'(8)

'Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, touches us. No one whistles. There is more than one kind of freedom, saint 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.'(24)

'The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay. (37)

'To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, What's he going to do next? To have them flinch when he moves, even if it's a harmless enough move, to reach for an ashtray perhaps. To have them sizing him up. To have him thinking, He can't do it, he won't do, he'll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there's nothing else available.'(87)

'Not a hope. I know where I am, and who, and what day it is. These are the tests, and I am sane. Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.'(109)

'You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.'(117)

'I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence. I said to her once. I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.'(122)

'She'll be allowed to nurse the baby, for a few months, they believe in mother's milk. After that she'll be transferred, to see if she can do it again, with someone else who needs a turn. But she'll never be sent to the Colonies, she'll never be declared Unwoman. That is her reward.'(127)

'Scrabble! I want to laugh, shriek with laughter, fall off my chair. This was once the game of old women, old men, in the summers or in retirement villas, to be played when there was nothing good on television. Or of adolescents, once, long long ago.... Now of course it's something different. Now it's forbidden, for us. Now it's dangerous. Now it's indecent. Now it's something he can't do with his Wife. Now it's desirable. Now he's compromised himself. It's as if he's offered me drugs.'(138)

'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum... Don't let the bastards grind you down.'(186)

'Every night when I go to bed I think, in the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn't happened this morning, either.'(199)

'I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.'(263)

'As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.'(311)

First Anchor Books Edition, April 1998
311 pages
Book owned