I walked into this essay with my hackles raised — “Oh, dear, what’s some faux-intellectual fascist twit got to say now?” — but I was pleasantly surprised to find Atwood criticized not from the Right but from the Left. Your close reading of The Handmaid’s Tale won me over to your thesis that the show’s writers have largely missed the point. I agree that Atwood can be staggeringly tone-deaf in her public displays of politics.
I don’t know enough about your examples of Atwood’s personal failings to pass judgment, but I’m suspicious of your claim she wants teachers to go to jail. Copyright cases seldom involve imprisonment; they’re usually about financial damages. Is a teacher uniquely entitled to break copyright law? To make a class set of a book by photocopying it whole, rather than having the school order a class set? Why? Because education? I say this as a teacher who has photocopied things for my students — within the legal limits of copyright. “Educational purposes” is not a blank check, only a limited carve-out. Check the law.
Appropriation of marginalized people’s trauma? Okay, I can see the merits of the argument. At the same time, I don’t think the blame is to be laid at the feet of Atwood’s narcissism, and I think the reason you’re mistakenly laying it there is that you’re overlooking a key way in which dystopia works. This isn’t surprising, considering your low opinion of the genre, something you think only intellectually fit for teenagers to read.
The point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not to fear-monger about communism. (Orwell was himself a socialist. Read his earlier books.) The point is to critique totalitarianism — that in particular, whether it takes a communist or a fascist guise — and, as a dystopia, it does this by taking things to the furthest extreme imaginable. Yes, it’s a slippery slope argument. Yes, it’s not very nuanced about the threat. But that’s not the point. Orwell is painting a picture of what such a system does to a person’s soul — how it grinds down even someone aspiring to be a freethinking rebel. Winston Smith’s last thought in the story is that he LOVES Big Brother. He loves Big Brother in spite of the fact that he’s seen all the way behind the curtain of the totalitarian state and he knows how evil it is. This ironic tragedy could not be achieved without the image of “a boot stomping on a human face forever.” It’s Winston’s face, in the end. And he’s an everyman character, no one particularly special, to drive home the point that this is what totalitarianism does to everyone.
Offred is an everywoman. Think about when The Handmaid’s Tale was published and where representation in literature was at the time. Think about where the depiction of marginalized experiences was at the time (you alluded to Roots, a good reference point for thinking about this). Think about where the discourse about race was. Would Atwood have made the dystopia clearer by wading into race, writing from a perspective she didn’t understand? No. Showing how various kinds of bigotry go hand in hand, she didn't leave racism wholly out of the story of Gilead, but neither did she center it. She focused on a particular theme — women’s autonomy — and in service of it, she anonymized Offred as much as possible to make her situation relatable to the widest readership possible. Atwood made Offred a formerly privileged person to emphasize her oppression now — it would not land the same way if it was just a continuation of the sort of treatment Offred had already come to expect in life. She took away Offred’s real name in the dystopian world-building, then made fine literary hay out of it — not the other way around.
Suggesting that Atwood was an “appropriating” racist to do things this way, on the one hand you’re asking something of her dystopia that it doesn’t set out to deliver — and that would hamstring it if it tried to deliver. And on the other hand, you’re slipping a bit into the historian’s fallacy — the idea that people in the past had all the same perspectives and information as people today — and judging the author THEN by the standards of NOW (or even your personal standards, your particular moral compass). That’s an impossible bar for 1985 Margaret Atwood to meet.
Tear Atwood apart for being a problematic feminist now, if she is one — be my guest! But this presentist shredding of The Handmaid’s Tale as narcissistic fantasy is beneath your acumen as a reader (as I take it from your facility with close reading). You’re looking so closely at the trees, you’ve forgotten what sort of forest you’re in.
Thanks for the thoughtful, measured response. I enjoyed reading it as a circumspect companion piece to the essay. Both make interesting points. I’m an almost fifty-year-old Canadian woman and Atwood was absolutely sacrosanct in my adolescence when I started reading her novels. Some of my critical responses were quashed because, of course, the inadequacy could only be my own: a naive young reader failing to appreciate literary greatness. And this ambivalence continued into my adulthood. I realize that Atwood has always had her critics, but she has enjoyed an undeniably privileged position in the Canadian literary establishment. It is this aura of untouchable genius and my resistance to it on principle that ignited a little schadenfreude in me while reading the author’s takedown.
But I’m old enough to know better and your response was clarifying. As a stylist, I think Atwood is top-notch.
Well put. I thought the same thing; you put it much more concisely than I could have. I watched a "behind the scenes" clip from the show where the writers talked about some elements that they changed, mainly with race. In the book, Gilead "deports" anyone who isn't white and doesn't have the right genes, meaning anyone with genetic disorders, etc. The showrunners said they wanted the show to reflect 2017, versus 1985, so they did not make race part of Gilead's criteria for labeling some as "undesirable." I think it's easy to forget how long ago The Handmaid's Tale was written because of the show, and she is still alive.
If you can answer the question "Why is every everyman or everywoman a white person?" or "Why is the standard for dystopia to take things that will never ever happen to a white person and make them happen to a white person?" without going into white defensiveness territory or purposely ignorant territory, I will applaud you.
I already answered both of your questions in my original comment when I wrote, “Think about when The Handmaid’s Tale was published and where representation in literature was at the time. Think about where the depiction of marginalized experiences was at the time (you alluded to Roots, a good reference point for thinking about this). Think about where the discourse about race was.” You can tell what the point of thinking about those things is, right?
Sorry, I said all I needed to say on the subject, and I’m afraid I can’t help you any further than that. And trying to bait me into an emotional reaction based on an implied insult, as you have, just won’t work. I’m intelligent enough to realize that’s what you’re doing.
And yk whats funny, you did exactly as I predicted. You immediately retreated into White defensiveness. You proved me right. Congrats. Apparently you weren't that intelligent. Because no matter how you responded, you would get defensive and ignorant. Because that's what your argument was. Both of these things. You just showed your cards.
Did I now? I looked at your questions, noted I'd already offered answers with which there was really nothing wrong, said I'm not interested in playing your game of hurling personal affronts back and forth — and that's defensive?
As much as you're done with me, I've got to be done with you. You seem to be walking around with a giant chip on your shoulder, lashing out at people for the horrendous crime of not nodding along to everything you say. The great pity in this is that you may be right but you're doing all that's in your power to make the other person feel too offended to realize you're right. Assuming the worst of people right away, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
You need to ask yourself what your reason for participating in the discourse is. Are you writing to convince people? Or just to vent your emotions?
Sigh… Do you think you have the market cornered on marginalized people’s experience? You talk as if you do. You haven’t bothered to find out much about who you’re talking to (quite condescendingly in your own right), or you would have learned I grew up as a queer bookworm from the wrong side of the tracks in the rural Deep South, I’m homeless now, and life’s never been a bowl of cherries for me, either. Not that this ought to be a pissing contest over who has the right to say what — but you’re clearly of the opinion it is one.
A person isn’t perforce bad or badly intentioned for not sharing your perspective. So I hope you manage to unburden yourself of that chip and learn to approach folks with some forbearance — it goes much further in getting them to hear you out. Since I can’t think of one more thing I really need to say, again I’ll bid you a better day!
I guess I always saw the whole “make oppression happen to people who aren’t normally oppressed” thing as a device used in dystopian fiction to get privileged people to finally perceive oppression. How heavy-handed the author is with it is a reflection of how solipsistic they perceive their target audience of other privileged white people to be. I never thought of it as appropriation so much as understanding that a lot of people need to be made to believe something could happen to them before they care about it.
I can get how people who have historically experienced all the oppression depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale would feel erased by centering white people like that, but surely you sense how dense (even willfully so) some of us are about it? IDK if Atwood *thinks* she’s somehow addressing everyone (I wouldn’t put it past her), but I have always taken who dystopian authors choose to represent as their Everyman as a big signal as to who their message is directed to. It’s not about making whiteness the default in this case (which is common enough in literature that it’s understandable it would be taken that way).
I did think it was weird that they made Gilead some sort of post-racial society in the series, though. The comment from Aunt Lydia mentioned in this piece was specifically when Aunts were sitting around discussing placement of Handmaids, and it was mentioned that one particular commander didn’t want “a Handmaid of color”. I think the producers thought “okay, we addressed it” but they just made the inconsistency more glaring by explicitly stating that racist commanders are outliers.
That’s pretty insightful, Michelle, and I think it sits next door to what I argued. I’ll add that, in the show, putting a privileged person in the position of the oppressed so that just how wrong the oppression is finally lands for her is the very gist of Serena Joy’s story, last season.
I’d like to see more reasonable, intellectually sound approaches to the literature of the past. We don’t have to think it was perfect, not by a country mile, and we needn’t expect authors now to follow in its footsteps. But we should realize its intentions for what they were, and given the intentions, what its methods were — not for the sake of apologetics, but because this is just thoughtful reading.
I’m rewatching season one right now and June says the same line about a bed and chair being all you need that Serena says in the refugee shelter. I had totally missed the reference.
And that's the big issue with your comment, you don't read enough authors who aren't white to understand why her work isn't even nearly good. Kindred by Octavia Butler was made before her book. And that has more feminism in its first page. You seriously do not understand how many strides were made back then. And it shows. 😐
I’ve read Butler — both novels and short stories. I’ve written about reading Butler and her influence on my own science fiction. I’m linking that piece below for you.
Once again, you’re trying to bait me. You can’t possibly know who I have read, so your remark about that is just a wild shot in the dark. Either you want me to lose my cool or you’re losing your cool yourself. At any rate, no dice. I’m not here for the sort of discussion where someone’s a misogynist or a racist (or whatever) just for not sharing your opinion about a book.
I'm not losing my cool. The racism isn't very subtle with this one. But your whole argument was bad faith to begin with so yeah I might be a little miffed about the fact that you have the audacity to weigh minority experiences under your whiteass eye and be like “I can see the merits.” Are you deadass? It's not a discussion. It's a fact. Dystopian stories don't have to be just blatantly stealing and ripping of real black history (everything that happened during slavery matches The Handmaids Tale word for word). They can be stories that center minorities. The Hunger Games was originally that type of story until they casted a white girl for Katniss. Chain GANG All Stars. Kindred. Parable. All of these stories don't center white people. So how is that argument even acceptable at all? Product of its time doesn't work when it was published during the 80s. Around the time there were so many works to read from. And yeah I've seen strategies like this before. I've lived my life black. What would you know of anti-black racism? You read a book and call yourself progressive and now you feel like an expert? You can barely recognize that this is a tired racist “product of its time" argument. So yes, I am saying this is racist. Don’t white liberal me. I know how racist y'all are. And weird. That you are trying so hard to a defend this book from the truth of it. It is a blatant rip off. It is just made to make women like Atwood feel less like perpetrators and more like victims. I wrote and entire article on it as well. It's disgusting because historically women like Atwood were the Serena Joy of this situation. And here they are pretending to be Offred. Instead of trying to defend this and yourself so hard when being called out, why not look at what you wrote and ask yourself why did you feel that way? Why did you feel the need to say that specifically? Why in that specific way? I have been condescended to by white person after white person about how what they said isn't really racist. As if they would know what that is. Because all they know of racism is saying the obvious racist stuff not the subtle stuff like your comment. So excuse me if I see through your bullshit. It's racist. Period. I'm the authority on this. If you wouldn't tell a woman, that wasnt misogynistic when she complains about a misogynistic comment. Why should you do this exact thing about racism?
This is a tired argument that women of color have heard a million times before. You aren't going to condescend to us about our own history. As if I don't know it better. As if I don't know there were numerous black political activists during that time writing feminist work that has more merit. Be serious. It's not even hard. Toni Morisson wrote around that time. You can't be serious?? James Baldwin was very accomplished along with Audre Lorde. ARE WE SERIOUS??? Some of the most prolific civil rights workers were alive during that time. It was never easier to speak with them. Either she know of them at all or she didn't care to. I'm thinking the latter.
I can't bait you with something that you are. Defensive. You can't start on the defensive and somehow switch it up. Especially with someone like you who feels the need to showboat their supposed intelligence. You will just continually condescend and think you are always in the right. Which prevents real growth. But I'm done with you now. But thanks for doing both of the things I said in separate comments. It seems I didn't shoot in the dark. I got bullseye.
I guess I'll never know if this article had anything substantive to say because of the repulsive, puerile writing style. How tedious to come across someone that feels the needs to swear every other sentence.
I want to list out ever swear I can think of just for fun: fuck bitch ass cunt butthole stupid dumb vagina boob breast jesus god penis anus cock whore the n word pussy fart nut-sack the r word Satan asshole turd
They’re Canadian. They have absolutely nothing of interest to say about their moribund, incredibly boring culture so they make up for it by employing the shock tactic of profanity, which last worked for 14 year-olds in 1990. Today it just makes them doubly boring and even more predictable.
How utterly predictable you seem, since you aren’t even willing to state where you come from. Which, to me, as a Canadian says you’re ashamed of your country, which neither Ms. Atwood nor I are ashamed to state. If you find that statement belittling, that is on you, not either of us.
In addition to the above, we voted for a person who can actually speak in complete sentences. Imagine that marvel in the “USAmerica” of today, (speaking of “moribund, incredibly boring culture”. Ferme ta bouche!
Alias Grace was one of my favourite books in high school. I read that chonker twice. Her writing is so good, it felt like braille against my brain.
But I could never get into her as a person.
And your issue with race is spot on. Race swapping violates reality so subtly, you can hardly put your finger on what’s wrong. But I realized that it’s because race comes with its own realities, experiences and perspectives. Like, I HATE seeing a black, female mercenary with a hood accent and braids or weave in movies. A woman who hasn’t bleached AAVE from her vocabulary isn’t worldly enough to have the connections and powers of a international mercenary. She is not sitting in the salon for seven hours. She does not have a predictable routine…. Anyway.
I like a vitriolic takedown as much as the next man, but if you demand rigour (copyright theft = car theft is indeed lacking it, and the point about spaceships is well made) you ought to provide it yourself. Describing someone as “a prolific mass murderer of indigenous people” and linking to an article with the headline, “until not a single Indian remains” which is itself a strategically snipped excerpt from what the guy actually said (“until not a single Indian remains unassimilated”) is just a better-disguised example of double-dealing. The guy sounds like an ocean-going asshole: why not just say that?
Duncan Campbell Scott was one of the major architects of Canada’s residential school system. You can read about his role in these schools in basically every single book on the subject—pick one almost at random and you’ll find him. He presided over its greatest expansion and the period of its greatest death toll. His letters (as reproduced in John Milloy’s book “National Crime”) show a wanton disregard for human life, acknowledgement of the mass deaths, and general callousness about the situation. Disregarding this, he continued to expand the system and continued to enforce its application—you can read more about the specifics of this in the first volume of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If you’re seeking to litigate whether Scott was indeed a “murderer” I would refer you in light of the preceding information to s. 229(b) of the Criminal Code of Canada.
Pure tosh. You can see it in the primary sources, such as the principal of Red Deer Industrial School writing a letter to Scott begging him to provide him more funds after so many children died at his school that he had to save on grave-digging costs by burying children two to a grave. Scott himself acknowledges the high mortality rate in several of his letters. In his letter to Superintendent General Arthur Meighen he describes--and this is a direct quote--the "very high death rate among the pupils" throughout the system.
People can pick and choose examples. My grandmother went to an Indian Day School (I write more about her on the blog here: https://discordiareview.substack.com/p/my-uncle-his-wife-an-axe ) with a rather low mortality rate overall, though they were still physically (and often sexually) abused. But on the whole, as a system, no, it was quite deadly, and the people who ran the system admit as much in their own documents.
"It is “about” the United States, but its ideological usefulness has been in propagandizing against our “illiberal” Islamist enemies in countries like Iran and Afghanistan. Much like the United States used to airdrop copies of Nineteen-Eighty-Four over Soviet nations, Iranian women are given copies of The Handmaid’s Tale and begin dressing up like handmaids in protests backed by US intelligence. The recognizable symbolism resonates with Western liberal readers of the book when they see it on TV, and this can be used to manufacture Western consent for destructive regime change operations—and with it regional instability and countless dead which will leave the aforementioned women even worse for wear (see similar “humanitarian” concerns about Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc. and how those turned out)."
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!!!
Cuz the regimes in Iran & Afghanistan, and the former one in Libya, were AWESOME. So GREAT!!!! Everybody is/was so happy in those countries! Especially the women.
Afghanistan War Enjoyer, please tell the families of the hundreds of the thousands of dead living with their destroyed infrastructure and failed reconstruction how much "better" this sought to make things. Easy to simp for the destruction of other countries via foreign intervention when you don't have to live in the aftermath.
Least I’m not “simping” (PSST- pretty sure it’s SYMP-ing. Like SYMPATHY? Alas- Let’s not get bogged down in semantics.) for a regime of illiterate hillbilly religious maniac pederasts. At least when the Coalition was there a woman could have a job in Kabul & a few other cities. There was some culture- like music! I mean ANY MUSIC. At all. Kids could play football- can’t do that anymore!
But, yeah… It’s a fucking paradise under the Talibs.
Did I say anything about anyone “thanking” me? Or even thanking the US/NATO? No, no I did not. “Simp” isn’t a word. Neither is “symp” for that matter, but at least it’s a part of THE CORRECT WORD, you fucking illiterate Trotskyite wannabe.
It's slang, and it doesn't derive from "sympathy." You're aware that people continued to coin informal vocabulary after your childhood back in the fucking Stone Age, yes?
As for "Trotskyite," Christ, that IS an insult. How dare you compare me to those cultish compulsive newsletter-printers. I'm a damn Tankie.
In the 1960's Afghanistan had more female students in University than male and females even comprised over 50 percent of the faculty. One of their biggest exports was Elvis impersonators. Then some self-righteous folks started funding religious extremists in order to "give the Soviet Union its' own Vietnam". Guess where that money came from. No need to feel left out though. Current trends show the same transition at work in many western nations. I am sure religious fundamentalism will work out so much better this time.
Afghanistan was objectively better for women under the communists before America gave tens of billions — through Pakistan — to radical Islamists like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Because they wanted to bleed the USSR.
When the Soviets withdrew after a decade, and the Islamist warlords and then the Taliban took power, women's lives became hell. So yeah, women in Afghanistan were better off before the United States intervened the first time.
A minor point, but as I recall, the propaganda and rationale for regime change against our "radical Islamic terrorist" enemies consisted mainly of three things – revenge for 9/11; fear of the WMDs we were assured were there; and trying to prevent any further terrorist attacks on American soil. I don't recall anything much being said about the oppression of Islamic women. The aim of the war was to kill jihadists, not liberate the women of Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq. It's hard to picture the government bothering to provide copies of The Handmaid's Tale to Islamic women. They didn't really give a crap about them, and didn't need that to stir up war sentiment in the U.S.
Wow. I’m teaching Oryx and Crake this semester as an excellent treatise on the way in which language shapes power and knowledge (Foucault et al). As a professor of literature, I will argue that Atwood is one of the most talented authors I’ve ever read. Anyone who reads this screed with tacit agreement does not only not know how to appreciate literature—but lacks a fundamental grasp of its purpose.
My wife is a professor of English literature and has also written academically on Atwood's Cat's Eye and disagrees with your assertion, so by the rules of the appeal to authority game we're playing here I guess you two cancel each other out.
Note that I never called Atwood necessarily "untalented"—I've historically enjoyed The Edible Woman and Surfacing, for instance—but I have used The Handmaid's Tale here as an example of what I find to be rather thoughtless about her work. But even there, I think Atwood's grapling with language is her best merit, I even admitted that my favourite portions of the novel are the ones, for instance, which deal with Offred's relationship to her true name, I think that the reflections on naming and power are quite poignant in that book.
That being said, though perhaps you weren't meaning it to these ends, I think even Atwood herself would push back against someone calling one of her novels a "treatise," I think that based on my experience of her through interviews and her writings (and what I know of her from a number of friends who know her personally) that she would consider that to be a reduction of her work to didactic tool. If this is, however, what you meant, then I would offer that as far as I am concerned—and in anticipation of another appeal to authority, I imagine my many award-winning writer friends would back me up on this, including the Giller-shortlisted novelist whose work I've published on this very site—you may be lacking a fundamental grasp on the purpose of literature, because literature's necessary purpose is not to instruct or to teach. It CAN do those things, but that is not its "purpose."
Well, ok then! Be proud of your wife she must be good with ambiguity!! All of Atwood’s novels are “treatises” like most well crafted Lit ; it makes a point. Cats Eye is a trauma Bildungsroman much like O&C— Atwood is a genius, but there are many literary geniuses. Still, Atwood rocks it literarily #Faucault #Sauserre -#Hegel #Kant #Nietzche etc etc, your wife should know all that #criticaltheory.
This piece is just a stretch of juvenile ranting. I swear like a trooper, but lacing this article with so much personal abuse, and so much of it pathetic and childish, just made me despair. Plus, the fucking writing was shit.
And like the whole little crew of Canuckistanis who "hate" Margaret Atwood, this "person"'s shit writing is all you need to understand where said hate comes from.
The biggest problem with the show is they make Gilead right. The societal fertility collapse thing was mentioned in passing in the last chapter as one possible explanation. In the show it become a near societal wide crisis that consumes all other problems, and thus make the Gilead response into something harsh but still rational.
They even have other countries accepting that this problem is so bad that Gilead’s methods are worth emulating. It’s just a bizarre choice. They were trying to write a show dealing with the evil that lurks in human nature while holding an ideology that asserts that unconstrained human nature is intrinsically good, so I guess even the religious theocrat rapists must actually have a rational historical materialist basis?
I read this as an attempted takedown from a jealous mind who writes with far less skill than the target of his wrath. Nothing more. Fortunately, Ms Atwood needs no defence.
I've always been so perplexed by this cliche comment you see in the discussion of any literary polemic (there's dozens of them in the comments section of this very article). I've personally never thought to levy it against any of the literary polemics that I myself think are stupid (I hardly think Nabokov was "jealous" of Dostoyevsky and Faulkner), mostly because it just doesn't make any sense. If the author of a literary polemic is so "jealous" of literary talent, then why do they often also have writers whose genius they champion? Why would I choose to be jealous of Margaret Atwood and not say... Lucy Ellmann, whose work I uphold (or to return to Nabokov, why wasn't he jealous of Tolstoy or Jane Austen?)? Wouldn't it stand to reason that I'd be too jealous of her as well?
I just read Handmaid’s last year for the first time and what struck me as the most disturbing is how the left has co-opted it as a story for the pro-choice effort, when it’s really a far more compelling case against surrogacy, which few people seem to be questioning right now, especially on the left. The only group that has taken a stand against it are Catholics. I then found Atwood’s actions when it comes to talking about abortion so disingenuous and opportunistic. Like you said, abortion wasn’t even legal in Canada when she wrote this, and I just don’t think it was about abortion at all really. How we came to wear the handmaids garb at prochoice marches makes almost zero sense to me — though I haven’t seen the show, so maybe that’s the problem for me.
Yes interesting point about surrogacy. There are feminists and campaigns going on against baby-selling, and against removing newborn babies from their mothers. (They don’t do that to puppies before they sell them). There’s Surrogacy Concern, and various women’s rights organisations.
Surrogacy is indeed very disturbing. Atwood didn’t have to courage to do anything groundbreaking. By her own admission (or so I read) she modeled her dystopia on the actual lives of Islamic women.
Women’s Declaration International is anti-surrogacy but they are also for women’s sex based rights, which it appears Atwood and the left couldn’t care less about.
I understand that you can disagree with opinion, but I cannot understand demonising her with insults. Do you really think at her age, with the amount of press she published, YOU are going to be a perfect being for everybody on this planet? Do you really think we are not going to be called from future genarations as "barbaric, conservatives", we will, because we, including you haven't reached to realise how wrong we are as a species. So it's easy to humiliate others, hope this flow of immaturity doesn't become a spot on your far greater lagacy and impenetrable ideals.
I knew atwood was bad but didn't realize she was this terrible. these contemporary dystopias are usually very facile and boring. another ridiculous example of a 'dystopia' is "the plot against america". I am guessing since the reality is not so bad for middle class jewish people or women, they need to try and get "victim" points by imagining a disastrous future. but their imaginary future is neither interesting not is it convincing. the issue is, both their knowledge is history and their political imagination are lacking. they can only imagine fascism as it appeared in the early 20th century. but fascism won't come with goose steps and brown shirts once again. as one american theologian said, it will come with smiley faces. but even that is a little false because 'fascism' as defined by the complete merger of capital and the state, is already here. it doesn't even need a set of symbols anymore because it is automatic and invisible. If that is the case then the series' "color-blind" fascism might make sense because that is what we have, a supposedly non racist, non symbolic but effective fascism.
Agreed: it's a very boomer and out of touch take that completely ignores the fact that tyranny can be (and is) inflicted on anyone, on whichever 'group' by ruthless unaccountable oligarchs.
I used to live right by her in the Annex in Toronto. I’d chat with her long-suffering and sweet, kind husband Graeme Gibson, almost daily. Old Peggie herself would never say hello. That poor man. She also happens to be a big NIMBY, fighting attempts to build a medium-density condo that may shade her urban estate. She’s pals with the likes of Galen Weston and Adrienne Clarkson of the same parish, also NIMBY capitalist bullies all.
Yeah and one of the other bloggers here also wrote about her connections to arms-profiteer Scott Griffin—she's not the most principled woman in the world, that's for sure.
I remember sitting in the background of an on-stage interview she did with Matt Galloway at Inidgo at the Manulife Centre about a decade or so ago. I was gagging the whole time as Matt fawned over her uncritically.
Margaret Atwood's pretentiousness can easily be put to the side when assessing the merits of her work. This isn't a case of "Death of the Author", but rather removing one's personal biases from polluting their consumption of some work.
I don't think your analysis is "wrong" but definitely hostile. I think there are equivalently charitable interpretations that explain what makes the book so popular and strong.
People generally critique white feminist, not for its weak depth and dismissiveness for their true privilege, but in an ironically misogynistic way. The fact of the matter is that white women will be most mobilized if they specifically are targeted, and so The Handmaid's Tale is not a holy script for feminist ideology, but a spark to mobilize people to what could be.
I think it's incredibly dismissive to say that Gilead could never occur, of course it wouldn't. But we could remove women's autonomy for their reproductive health; we could mark women by their relationship to the men that own them; we could force them to wear certain clothes. The underlying themes of control and ownership of women are what's important, not the specific mechanisms that run Gilead.
Finally, as Atwood says "everything I've written about in [her books] has already happened". You claim that it's dismissive to make allusions to the Holocaust and references to the Underground Railroad, but instead I think it's an attempt to bring these lessons to a more "mainstream audience".
We tend to build our morality around shared truths. Abortion rights are very contentious, but the Holocaust is almost universally abhorred, so making an allegory between the Holocaust and Abortion rights is a way to get people to see the "truth". Is it in poor taste? Perhaps, but I think it's also a strong application of history.
I'd argue the best way to respect the history of the Holocaust is to make sure it never happens again. Comparing a situation to a tragedy like the Holocaust, despite being way less severe is a "good sign" because we are not at Holocaust-level and have time to stop the path. Women are not being marked for their fertility, perhaps they may never be, but it's important that we are vigilant to make that happen, rather than have faith in idk whatever, that it won't happen.
This piece seems like a veiled criticism of white feminism, with the veneer of attacking a specific problematic author to gain extra legitimacy.
This bitch hates cats. What else do we need to hear? (I joke I kid you should really read her artist stand-in in Cat’s Eye—who grew up in the same neighbourhood as Marg, with the same history of violence against women—debate the victimhood of a young woman who was raped and murdered while walking home. And then later go on to say she hopes a woman dies of her botched back-alley abortion. Author isn’t narrator blah blah blah except in this case where it has been literally substantiated. Plus, you’ve already discussed all of my more serious and direct attacks on her as a political entity.)
That book!!! I read it a few years ago and got a distinct flavour of "Other women are such bitches; I wonder why they all hate me?" from her self-insert character.
IIRC, the novel ends abruptly. Offred plans to escape to Canada with her lover and her diary is “found.” That’s when I realized Ms. Atwood had written herself into a corner and couldn’t figure out how to resolve her dilemma. The movie version shows us a pregnant Offred & her lover climbing the mountains in the snow, much like the von Trapp family.
I assume the mini-series will end with the Handmaids, led by Offred, leading a rebellion against TPTB, and establishing an Amazonian Utopia.
"IIRC, the novel ends abruptly. Offred plans to escape to Canada with her lover and her diary is “found.” That’s when I realized Ms. Atwood had written herself into a corner and couldn’t figure out how to resolve her dilemma."
Interesting - I didn't know this. I couldn't get into Handmaid's Tale as a book, so I never got this far. But she was never my cup of tea, so to speak. We had to read Edible Woman in college, and I didn't get into that, either. My favorite book of hers is not one that is critically acclaimed - Lady Oracle. I loved that one because it was so funny. But, getting back to your point - she ended that one abruptly, too. It's like she couldn't figure out what to do after the character faked her death and then decided to come back to get her friends out of jail for the crime so just stopped.
Interesting. Stephen King is another author who seems to have difficulty writing a satisfying ending to his novels. His short stories are better, IMHO.
I walked into this essay with my hackles raised — “Oh, dear, what’s some faux-intellectual fascist twit got to say now?” — but I was pleasantly surprised to find Atwood criticized not from the Right but from the Left. Your close reading of The Handmaid’s Tale won me over to your thesis that the show’s writers have largely missed the point. I agree that Atwood can be staggeringly tone-deaf in her public displays of politics.
I don’t know enough about your examples of Atwood’s personal failings to pass judgment, but I’m suspicious of your claim she wants teachers to go to jail. Copyright cases seldom involve imprisonment; they’re usually about financial damages. Is a teacher uniquely entitled to break copyright law? To make a class set of a book by photocopying it whole, rather than having the school order a class set? Why? Because education? I say this as a teacher who has photocopied things for my students — within the legal limits of copyright. “Educational purposes” is not a blank check, only a limited carve-out. Check the law.
Appropriation of marginalized people’s trauma? Okay, I can see the merits of the argument. At the same time, I don’t think the blame is to be laid at the feet of Atwood’s narcissism, and I think the reason you’re mistakenly laying it there is that you’re overlooking a key way in which dystopia works. This isn’t surprising, considering your low opinion of the genre, something you think only intellectually fit for teenagers to read.
The point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not to fear-monger about communism. (Orwell was himself a socialist. Read his earlier books.) The point is to critique totalitarianism — that in particular, whether it takes a communist or a fascist guise — and, as a dystopia, it does this by taking things to the furthest extreme imaginable. Yes, it’s a slippery slope argument. Yes, it’s not very nuanced about the threat. But that’s not the point. Orwell is painting a picture of what such a system does to a person’s soul — how it grinds down even someone aspiring to be a freethinking rebel. Winston Smith’s last thought in the story is that he LOVES Big Brother. He loves Big Brother in spite of the fact that he’s seen all the way behind the curtain of the totalitarian state and he knows how evil it is. This ironic tragedy could not be achieved without the image of “a boot stomping on a human face forever.” It’s Winston’s face, in the end. And he’s an everyman character, no one particularly special, to drive home the point that this is what totalitarianism does to everyone.
Offred is an everywoman. Think about when The Handmaid’s Tale was published and where representation in literature was at the time. Think about where the depiction of marginalized experiences was at the time (you alluded to Roots, a good reference point for thinking about this). Think about where the discourse about race was. Would Atwood have made the dystopia clearer by wading into race, writing from a perspective she didn’t understand? No. Showing how various kinds of bigotry go hand in hand, she didn't leave racism wholly out of the story of Gilead, but neither did she center it. She focused on a particular theme — women’s autonomy — and in service of it, she anonymized Offred as much as possible to make her situation relatable to the widest readership possible. Atwood made Offred a formerly privileged person to emphasize her oppression now — it would not land the same way if it was just a continuation of the sort of treatment Offred had already come to expect in life. She took away Offred’s real name in the dystopian world-building, then made fine literary hay out of it — not the other way around.
Suggesting that Atwood was an “appropriating” racist to do things this way, on the one hand you’re asking something of her dystopia that it doesn’t set out to deliver — and that would hamstring it if it tried to deliver. And on the other hand, you’re slipping a bit into the historian’s fallacy — the idea that people in the past had all the same perspectives and information as people today — and judging the author THEN by the standards of NOW (or even your personal standards, your particular moral compass). That’s an impossible bar for 1985 Margaret Atwood to meet.
Tear Atwood apart for being a problematic feminist now, if she is one — be my guest! But this presentist shredding of The Handmaid’s Tale as narcissistic fantasy is beneath your acumen as a reader (as I take it from your facility with close reading). You’re looking so closely at the trees, you’ve forgotten what sort of forest you’re in.
Thanks for the thoughtful, measured response. I enjoyed reading it as a circumspect companion piece to the essay. Both make interesting points. I’m an almost fifty-year-old Canadian woman and Atwood was absolutely sacrosanct in my adolescence when I started reading her novels. Some of my critical responses were quashed because, of course, the inadequacy could only be my own: a naive young reader failing to appreciate literary greatness. And this ambivalence continued into my adulthood. I realize that Atwood has always had her critics, but she has enjoyed an undeniably privileged position in the Canadian literary establishment. It is this aura of untouchable genius and my resistance to it on principle that ignited a little schadenfreude in me while reading the author’s takedown.
But I’m old enough to know better and your response was clarifying. As a stylist, I think Atwood is top-notch.
Thank you, Meaghan!
Well put. I thought the same thing; you put it much more concisely than I could have. I watched a "behind the scenes" clip from the show where the writers talked about some elements that they changed, mainly with race. In the book, Gilead "deports" anyone who isn't white and doesn't have the right genes, meaning anyone with genetic disorders, etc. The showrunners said they wanted the show to reflect 2017, versus 1985, so they did not make race part of Gilead's criteria for labeling some as "undesirable." I think it's easy to forget how long ago The Handmaid's Tale was written because of the show, and she is still alive.
Islamic women live the handmaid’s tale every single day.
Eh?!
ok buddy
If you can answer the question "Why is every everyman or everywoman a white person?" or "Why is the standard for dystopia to take things that will never ever happen to a white person and make them happen to a white person?" without going into white defensiveness territory or purposely ignorant territory, I will applaud you.
I already answered both of your questions in my original comment when I wrote, “Think about when The Handmaid’s Tale was published and where representation in literature was at the time. Think about where the depiction of marginalized experiences was at the time (you alluded to Roots, a good reference point for thinking about this). Think about where the discourse about race was.” You can tell what the point of thinking about those things is, right?
Sorry, I said all I needed to say on the subject, and I’m afraid I can’t help you any further than that. And trying to bait me into an emotional reaction based on an implied insult, as you have, just won’t work. I’m intelligent enough to realize that’s what you’re doing.
And yk whats funny, you did exactly as I predicted. You immediately retreated into White defensiveness. You proved me right. Congrats. Apparently you weren't that intelligent. Because no matter how you responded, you would get defensive and ignorant. Because that's what your argument was. Both of these things. You just showed your cards.
Did I now? I looked at your questions, noted I'd already offered answers with which there was really nothing wrong, said I'm not interested in playing your game of hurling personal affronts back and forth — and that's defensive?
As much as you're done with me, I've got to be done with you. You seem to be walking around with a giant chip on your shoulder, lashing out at people for the horrendous crime of not nodding along to everything you say. The great pity in this is that you may be right but you're doing all that's in your power to make the other person feel too offended to realize you're right. Assuming the worst of people right away, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
You need to ask yourself what your reason for participating in the discourse is. Are you writing to convince people? Or just to vent your emotions?
Take care, and try to have a better day.
Proving the point. Once again. This is so funny.
Sigh… Do you think you have the market cornered on marginalized people’s experience? You talk as if you do. You haven’t bothered to find out much about who you’re talking to (quite condescendingly in your own right), or you would have learned I grew up as a queer bookworm from the wrong side of the tracks in the rural Deep South, I’m homeless now, and life’s never been a bowl of cherries for me, either. Not that this ought to be a pissing contest over who has the right to say what — but you’re clearly of the opinion it is one.
A person isn’t perforce bad or badly intentioned for not sharing your perspective. So I hope you manage to unburden yourself of that chip and learn to approach folks with some forbearance — it goes much further in getting them to hear you out. Since I can’t think of one more thing I really need to say, again I’ll bid you a better day!
I guess I always saw the whole “make oppression happen to people who aren’t normally oppressed” thing as a device used in dystopian fiction to get privileged people to finally perceive oppression. How heavy-handed the author is with it is a reflection of how solipsistic they perceive their target audience of other privileged white people to be. I never thought of it as appropriation so much as understanding that a lot of people need to be made to believe something could happen to them before they care about it.
I can get how people who have historically experienced all the oppression depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale would feel erased by centering white people like that, but surely you sense how dense (even willfully so) some of us are about it? IDK if Atwood *thinks* she’s somehow addressing everyone (I wouldn’t put it past her), but I have always taken who dystopian authors choose to represent as their Everyman as a big signal as to who their message is directed to. It’s not about making whiteness the default in this case (which is common enough in literature that it’s understandable it would be taken that way).
I did think it was weird that they made Gilead some sort of post-racial society in the series, though. The comment from Aunt Lydia mentioned in this piece was specifically when Aunts were sitting around discussing placement of Handmaids, and it was mentioned that one particular commander didn’t want “a Handmaid of color”. I think the producers thought “okay, we addressed it” but they just made the inconsistency more glaring by explicitly stating that racist commanders are outliers.
That’s pretty insightful, Michelle, and I think it sits next door to what I argued. I’ll add that, in the show, putting a privileged person in the position of the oppressed so that just how wrong the oppression is finally lands for her is the very gist of Serena Joy’s story, last season.
I’d like to see more reasonable, intellectually sound approaches to the literature of the past. We don’t have to think it was perfect, not by a country mile, and we needn’t expect authors now to follow in its footsteps. But we should realize its intentions for what they were, and given the intentions, what its methods were — not for the sake of apologetics, but because this is just thoughtful reading.
So I appreciate your contribution!
I’m rewatching season one right now and June says the same line about a bed and chair being all you need that Serena says in the refugee shelter. I had totally missed the reference.
And that's the big issue with your comment, you don't read enough authors who aren't white to understand why her work isn't even nearly good. Kindred by Octavia Butler was made before her book. And that has more feminism in its first page. You seriously do not understand how many strides were made back then. And it shows. 😐
I’ve read Butler — both novels and short stories. I’ve written about reading Butler and her influence on my own science fiction. I’m linking that piece below for you.
Once again, you’re trying to bait me. You can’t possibly know who I have read, so your remark about that is just a wild shot in the dark. Either you want me to lose my cool or you’re losing your cool yourself. At any rate, no dice. I’m not here for the sort of discussion where someone’s a misogynist or a racist (or whatever) just for not sharing your opinion about a book.
https://singulardream.substack.com/p/opening-organically
I'm not losing my cool. The racism isn't very subtle with this one. But your whole argument was bad faith to begin with so yeah I might be a little miffed about the fact that you have the audacity to weigh minority experiences under your whiteass eye and be like “I can see the merits.” Are you deadass? It's not a discussion. It's a fact. Dystopian stories don't have to be just blatantly stealing and ripping of real black history (everything that happened during slavery matches The Handmaids Tale word for word). They can be stories that center minorities. The Hunger Games was originally that type of story until they casted a white girl for Katniss. Chain GANG All Stars. Kindred. Parable. All of these stories don't center white people. So how is that argument even acceptable at all? Product of its time doesn't work when it was published during the 80s. Around the time there were so many works to read from. And yeah I've seen strategies like this before. I've lived my life black. What would you know of anti-black racism? You read a book and call yourself progressive and now you feel like an expert? You can barely recognize that this is a tired racist “product of its time" argument. So yes, I am saying this is racist. Don’t white liberal me. I know how racist y'all are. And weird. That you are trying so hard to a defend this book from the truth of it. It is a blatant rip off. It is just made to make women like Atwood feel less like perpetrators and more like victims. I wrote and entire article on it as well. It's disgusting because historically women like Atwood were the Serena Joy of this situation. And here they are pretending to be Offred. Instead of trying to defend this and yourself so hard when being called out, why not look at what you wrote and ask yourself why did you feel that way? Why did you feel the need to say that specifically? Why in that specific way? I have been condescended to by white person after white person about how what they said isn't really racist. As if they would know what that is. Because all they know of racism is saying the obvious racist stuff not the subtle stuff like your comment. So excuse me if I see through your bullshit. It's racist. Period. I'm the authority on this. If you wouldn't tell a woman, that wasnt misogynistic when she complains about a misogynistic comment. Why should you do this exact thing about racism?
https://open.substack.com/pub/vibeordie/p/you-will-never-ever-ever-ever-ever?r=5pi95i&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This is a tired argument that women of color have heard a million times before. You aren't going to condescend to us about our own history. As if I don't know it better. As if I don't know there were numerous black political activists during that time writing feminist work that has more merit. Be serious. It's not even hard. Toni Morisson wrote around that time. You can't be serious?? James Baldwin was very accomplished along with Audre Lorde. ARE WE SERIOUS??? Some of the most prolific civil rights workers were alive during that time. It was never easier to speak with them. Either she know of them at all or she didn't care to. I'm thinking the latter.
I can't bait you with something that you are. Defensive. You can't start on the defensive and somehow switch it up. Especially with someone like you who feels the need to showboat their supposed intelligence. You will just continually condescend and think you are always in the right. Which prevents real growth. But I'm done with you now. But thanks for doing both of the things I said in separate comments. It seems I didn't shoot in the dark. I got bullseye.
I feel a little sorry for you.
This was thorough, thanks.
I appreciate this well thought out comment, it articulates what I was thinking better than I could’ve
Glad to hear I nailed it for you, Nicole!
I guess I'll never know if this article had anything substantive to say because of the repulsive, puerile writing style. How tedious to come across someone that feels the needs to swear every other sentence.
You're fucking missing out
Bro really said "deplorable, milord" after this one
There’s no one as tiresome as someone offended by useful words like fuck.
I wasn’t offended, but I did think the writer came off as a bit immature.
Plus the adjective is “principal,” not “principle.”
Haha. That’s amusing. Repulsive and puerile apparently aren’t used to express offense.
I didn’t say it was puerile and repulsive—that was someone else!
But for what it’s worth, “puerile” definitely doesn’t express offense. Only disapproval.
And that gets you a new subscriber from someone of a similar mind. Gratuitous swearing is basically verbal farting.
Only if you use farts for emphasis. I prefer the word fuck.
Farts are hilarious, as was this article
Ivan out here clutching his pearls
Well when I use puerile it’s definitely an insult
I want to list out ever swear I can think of just for fun: fuck bitch ass cunt butthole stupid dumb vagina boob breast jesus god penis anus cock whore the n word pussy fart nut-sack the r word Satan asshole turd
They’re Canadian. They have absolutely nothing of interest to say about their moribund, incredibly boring culture so they make up for it by employing the shock tactic of profanity, which last worked for 14 year-olds in 1990. Today it just makes them doubly boring and even more predictable.
How utterly predictable you seem, since you aren’t even willing to state where you come from. Which, to me, as a Canadian says you’re ashamed of your country, which neither Ms. Atwood nor I are ashamed to state. If you find that statement belittling, that is on you, not either of us.
In addition to the above, we voted for a person who can actually speak in complete sentences. Imagine that marvel in the “USAmerica” of today, (speaking of “moribund, incredibly boring culture”. Ferme ta bouche!
As a Canadian. Fuck you. Not sorry.
Hear hear!
Oh do get fucked, Ivan.
So good. And I hate long essays.
Alias Grace was one of my favourite books in high school. I read that chonker twice. Her writing is so good, it felt like braille against my brain.
But I could never get into her as a person.
And your issue with race is spot on. Race swapping violates reality so subtly, you can hardly put your finger on what’s wrong. But I realized that it’s because race comes with its own realities, experiences and perspectives. Like, I HATE seeing a black, female mercenary with a hood accent and braids or weave in movies. A woman who hasn’t bleached AAVE from her vocabulary isn’t worldly enough to have the connections and powers of a international mercenary. She is not sitting in the salon for seven hours. She does not have a predictable routine…. Anyway.
Good post.
Hmmm… Started strong there. Then you went full CREEP.
I like a vitriolic takedown as much as the next man, but if you demand rigour (copyright theft = car theft is indeed lacking it, and the point about spaceships is well made) you ought to provide it yourself. Describing someone as “a prolific mass murderer of indigenous people” and linking to an article with the headline, “until not a single Indian remains” which is itself a strategically snipped excerpt from what the guy actually said (“until not a single Indian remains unassimilated”) is just a better-disguised example of double-dealing. The guy sounds like an ocean-going asshole: why not just say that?
Duncan Campbell Scott was one of the major architects of Canada’s residential school system. You can read about his role in these schools in basically every single book on the subject—pick one almost at random and you’ll find him. He presided over its greatest expansion and the period of its greatest death toll. His letters (as reproduced in John Milloy’s book “National Crime”) show a wanton disregard for human life, acknowledgement of the mass deaths, and general callousness about the situation. Disregarding this, he continued to expand the system and continued to enforce its application—you can read more about the specifics of this in the first volume of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If you’re seeking to litigate whether Scott was indeed a “murderer” I would refer you in light of the preceding information to s. 229(b) of the Criminal Code of Canada.
Have you read Grave Error?
Pure tosh. You can see it in the primary sources, such as the principal of Red Deer Industrial School writing a letter to Scott begging him to provide him more funds after so many children died at his school that he had to save on grave-digging costs by burying children two to a grave. Scott himself acknowledges the high mortality rate in several of his letters. In his letter to Superintendent General Arthur Meighen he describes--and this is a direct quote--the "very high death rate among the pupils" throughout the system.
People can pick and choose examples. My grandmother went to an Indian Day School (I write more about her on the blog here: https://discordiareview.substack.com/p/my-uncle-his-wife-an-axe ) with a rather low mortality rate overall, though they were still physically (and often sexually) abused. But on the whole, as a system, no, it was quite deadly, and the people who ran the system admit as much in their own documents.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
"It is “about” the United States, but its ideological usefulness has been in propagandizing against our “illiberal” Islamist enemies in countries like Iran and Afghanistan. Much like the United States used to airdrop copies of Nineteen-Eighty-Four over Soviet nations, Iranian women are given copies of The Handmaid’s Tale and begin dressing up like handmaids in protests backed by US intelligence. The recognizable symbolism resonates with Western liberal readers of the book when they see it on TV, and this can be used to manufacture Western consent for destructive regime change operations—and with it regional instability and countless dead which will leave the aforementioned women even worse for wear (see similar “humanitarian” concerns about Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc. and how those turned out)."
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!!!
Cuz the regimes in Iran & Afghanistan, and the former one in Libya, were AWESOME. So GREAT!!!! Everybody is/was so happy in those countries! Especially the women.
Afghanistan War Enjoyer, please tell the families of the hundreds of the thousands of dead living with their destroyed infrastructure and failed reconstruction how much "better" this sought to make things. Easy to simp for the destruction of other countries via foreign intervention when you don't have to live in the aftermath.
Least I’m not “simping” (PSST- pretty sure it’s SYMP-ing. Like SYMPATHY? Alas- Let’s not get bogged down in semantics.) for a regime of illiterate hillbilly religious maniac pederasts. At least when the Coalition was there a woman could have a job in Kabul & a few other cities. There was some culture- like music! I mean ANY MUSIC. At all. Kids could play football- can’t do that anymore!
But, yeah… It’s a fucking paradise under the Talibs.
Sure, and now they have both the Talibs AND the aftermath of twenty years of war. Are they supposed to thank you for that, yankee?
Also--the word is "simp" you boomer dipshit.
Did I say anything about anyone “thanking” me? Or even thanking the US/NATO? No, no I did not. “Simp” isn’t a word. Neither is “symp” for that matter, but at least it’s a part of THE CORRECT WORD, you fucking illiterate Trotskyite wannabe.
It's slang, and it doesn't derive from "sympathy." You're aware that people continued to coin informal vocabulary after your childhood back in the fucking Stone Age, yes?
As for "Trotskyite," Christ, that IS an insult. How dare you compare me to those cultish compulsive newsletter-printers. I'm a damn Tankie.
In the 1960's Afghanistan had more female students in University than male and females even comprised over 50 percent of the faculty. One of their biggest exports was Elvis impersonators. Then some self-righteous folks started funding religious extremists in order to "give the Soviet Union its' own Vietnam". Guess where that money came from. No need to feel left out though. Current trends show the same transition at work in many western nations. I am sure religious fundamentalism will work out so much better this time.
Yeeeeaaaah. None of that is true, but it’s fun to pretend!
Did you seriously write down “one of their biggest exports was Elvis impersonators”? 😂😂😂😂😂🤣 In the 60’s???
Afghanistan was objectively better for women under the communists before America gave tens of billions — through Pakistan — to radical Islamists like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Because they wanted to bleed the USSR.
When the Soviets withdrew after a decade, and the Islamist warlords and then the Taliban took power, women's lives became hell. So yeah, women in Afghanistan were better off before the United States intervened the first time.
If you really believe that- I have a bridge to sell you in New York.
Thanks so much for taking it upon yourself to speak on behalf of all women and our global problems, you dipshit.
Clearly I was only speaking for ALL THE WOMEN in Iran, Libya, and Afghanistan. Not the entire world. But your comment is still very stupid.
Nah dude— you are speaking OVER all the women in Iran, Libya, and Afghanistan. Try again.
No. The handmaid’s tale is their reality, and Atwood stole it to fear monger for middle class white women.
A minor point, but as I recall, the propaganda and rationale for regime change against our "radical Islamic terrorist" enemies consisted mainly of three things – revenge for 9/11; fear of the WMDs we were assured were there; and trying to prevent any further terrorist attacks on American soil. I don't recall anything much being said about the oppression of Islamic women. The aim of the war was to kill jihadists, not liberate the women of Afghanistan, Iran, or Iraq. It's hard to picture the government bothering to provide copies of The Handmaid's Tale to Islamic women. They didn't really give a crap about them, and didn't need that to stir up war sentiment in the U.S.
Wow. I’m teaching Oryx and Crake this semester as an excellent treatise on the way in which language shapes power and knowledge (Foucault et al). As a professor of literature, I will argue that Atwood is one of the most talented authors I’ve ever read. Anyone who reads this screed with tacit agreement does not only not know how to appreciate literature—but lacks a fundamental grasp of its purpose.
My wife is a professor of English literature and has also written academically on Atwood's Cat's Eye and disagrees with your assertion, so by the rules of the appeal to authority game we're playing here I guess you two cancel each other out.
Note that I never called Atwood necessarily "untalented"—I've historically enjoyed The Edible Woman and Surfacing, for instance—but I have used The Handmaid's Tale here as an example of what I find to be rather thoughtless about her work. But even there, I think Atwood's grapling with language is her best merit, I even admitted that my favourite portions of the novel are the ones, for instance, which deal with Offred's relationship to her true name, I think that the reflections on naming and power are quite poignant in that book.
That being said, though perhaps you weren't meaning it to these ends, I think even Atwood herself would push back against someone calling one of her novels a "treatise," I think that based on my experience of her through interviews and her writings (and what I know of her from a number of friends who know her personally) that she would consider that to be a reduction of her work to didactic tool. If this is, however, what you meant, then I would offer that as far as I am concerned—and in anticipation of another appeal to authority, I imagine my many award-winning writer friends would back me up on this, including the Giller-shortlisted novelist whose work I've published on this very site—you may be lacking a fundamental grasp on the purpose of literature, because literature's necessary purpose is not to instruct or to teach. It CAN do those things, but that is not its "purpose."
Well, ok then! Be proud of your wife she must be good with ambiguity!! All of Atwood’s novels are “treatises” like most well crafted Lit ; it makes a point. Cats Eye is a trauma Bildungsroman much like O&C— Atwood is a genius, but there are many literary geniuses. Still, Atwood rocks it literarily #Faucault #Sauserre -#Hegel #Kant #Nietzche etc etc, your wife should know all that #criticaltheory.
This piece is just a stretch of juvenile ranting. I swear like a trooper, but lacing this article with so much personal abuse, and so much of it pathetic and childish, just made me despair. Plus, the fucking writing was shit.
Exactly why I liked it
Indeed.
And like the whole little crew of Canuckistanis who "hate" Margaret Atwood, this "person"'s shit writing is all you need to understand where said hate comes from.
The biggest problem with the show is they make Gilead right. The societal fertility collapse thing was mentioned in passing in the last chapter as one possible explanation. In the show it become a near societal wide crisis that consumes all other problems, and thus make the Gilead response into something harsh but still rational.
They even have other countries accepting that this problem is so bad that Gilead’s methods are worth emulating. It’s just a bizarre choice. They were trying to write a show dealing with the evil that lurks in human nature while holding an ideology that asserts that unconstrained human nature is intrinsically good, so I guess even the religious theocrat rapists must actually have a rational historical materialist basis?
I read this as an attempted takedown from a jealous mind who writes with far less skill than the target of his wrath. Nothing more. Fortunately, Ms Atwood needs no defence.
I've always been so perplexed by this cliche comment you see in the discussion of any literary polemic (there's dozens of them in the comments section of this very article). I've personally never thought to levy it against any of the literary polemics that I myself think are stupid (I hardly think Nabokov was "jealous" of Dostoyevsky and Faulkner), mostly because it just doesn't make any sense. If the author of a literary polemic is so "jealous" of literary talent, then why do they often also have writers whose genius they champion? Why would I choose to be jealous of Margaret Atwood and not say... Lucy Ellmann, whose work I uphold (or to return to Nabokov, why wasn't he jealous of Tolstoy or Jane Austen?)? Wouldn't it stand to reason that I'd be too jealous of her as well?
Bless. This was awesome.
I just read Handmaid’s last year for the first time and what struck me as the most disturbing is how the left has co-opted it as a story for the pro-choice effort, when it’s really a far more compelling case against surrogacy, which few people seem to be questioning right now, especially on the left. The only group that has taken a stand against it are Catholics. I then found Atwood’s actions when it comes to talking about abortion so disingenuous and opportunistic. Like you said, abortion wasn’t even legal in Canada when she wrote this, and I just don’t think it was about abortion at all really. How we came to wear the handmaids garb at prochoice marches makes almost zero sense to me — though I haven’t seen the show, so maybe that’s the problem for me.
" How we came to wear the handmaids garb at prochoice marches makes almost zero sense to me" - forced birthing is the common thread.
Re surrogacy - radical feminists have always opposed it as inherently exploitative, but true radical feminists don't have a high profile these days.
Yes interesting point about surrogacy. There are feminists and campaigns going on against baby-selling, and against removing newborn babies from their mothers. (They don’t do that to puppies before they sell them). There’s Surrogacy Concern, and various women’s rights organisations.
Surrogacy is indeed very disturbing. Atwood didn’t have to courage to do anything groundbreaking. By her own admission (or so I read) she modeled her dystopia on the actual lives of Islamic women.
Women’s Declaration International is anti-surrogacy but they are also for women’s sex based rights, which it appears Atwood and the left couldn’t care less about.
I understand that you can disagree with opinion, but I cannot understand demonising her with insults. Do you really think at her age, with the amount of press she published, YOU are going to be a perfect being for everybody on this planet? Do you really think we are not going to be called from future genarations as "barbaric, conservatives", we will, because we, including you haven't reached to realise how wrong we are as a species. So it's easy to humiliate others, hope this flow of immaturity doesn't become a spot on your far greater lagacy and impenetrable ideals.
Well said!
I knew atwood was bad but didn't realize she was this terrible. these contemporary dystopias are usually very facile and boring. another ridiculous example of a 'dystopia' is "the plot against america". I am guessing since the reality is not so bad for middle class jewish people or women, they need to try and get "victim" points by imagining a disastrous future. but their imaginary future is neither interesting not is it convincing. the issue is, both their knowledge is history and their political imagination are lacking. they can only imagine fascism as it appeared in the early 20th century. but fascism won't come with goose steps and brown shirts once again. as one american theologian said, it will come with smiley faces. but even that is a little false because 'fascism' as defined by the complete merger of capital and the state, is already here. it doesn't even need a set of symbols anymore because it is automatic and invisible. If that is the case then the series' "color-blind" fascism might make sense because that is what we have, a supposedly non racist, non symbolic but effective fascism.
Agreed: it's a very boomer and out of touch take that completely ignores the fact that tyranny can be (and is) inflicted on anyone, on whichever 'group' by ruthless unaccountable oligarchs.
I used to live right by her in the Annex in Toronto. I’d chat with her long-suffering and sweet, kind husband Graeme Gibson, almost daily. Old Peggie herself would never say hello. That poor man. She also happens to be a big NIMBY, fighting attempts to build a medium-density condo that may shade her urban estate. She’s pals with the likes of Galen Weston and Adrienne Clarkson of the same parish, also NIMBY capitalist bullies all.
Yeah and one of the other bloggers here also wrote about her connections to arms-profiteer Scott Griffin—she's not the most principled woman in the world, that's for sure.
https://discordiareview.substack.com/p/griffin-canadian-poetry-bullshit
I remember sitting in the background of an on-stage interview she did with Matt Galloway at Inidgo at the Manulife Centre about a decade or so ago. I was gagging the whole time as Matt fawned over her uncritically.
Respectfully disagree.
Margaret Atwood's pretentiousness can easily be put to the side when assessing the merits of her work. This isn't a case of "Death of the Author", but rather removing one's personal biases from polluting their consumption of some work.
I don't think your analysis is "wrong" but definitely hostile. I think there are equivalently charitable interpretations that explain what makes the book so popular and strong.
People generally critique white feminist, not for its weak depth and dismissiveness for their true privilege, but in an ironically misogynistic way. The fact of the matter is that white women will be most mobilized if they specifically are targeted, and so The Handmaid's Tale is not a holy script for feminist ideology, but a spark to mobilize people to what could be.
I think it's incredibly dismissive to say that Gilead could never occur, of course it wouldn't. But we could remove women's autonomy for their reproductive health; we could mark women by their relationship to the men that own them; we could force them to wear certain clothes. The underlying themes of control and ownership of women are what's important, not the specific mechanisms that run Gilead.
Finally, as Atwood says "everything I've written about in [her books] has already happened". You claim that it's dismissive to make allusions to the Holocaust and references to the Underground Railroad, but instead I think it's an attempt to bring these lessons to a more "mainstream audience".
We tend to build our morality around shared truths. Abortion rights are very contentious, but the Holocaust is almost universally abhorred, so making an allegory between the Holocaust and Abortion rights is a way to get people to see the "truth". Is it in poor taste? Perhaps, but I think it's also a strong application of history.
I'd argue the best way to respect the history of the Holocaust is to make sure it never happens again. Comparing a situation to a tragedy like the Holocaust, despite being way less severe is a "good sign" because we are not at Holocaust-level and have time to stop the path. Women are not being marked for their fertility, perhaps they may never be, but it's important that we are vigilant to make that happen, rather than have faith in idk whatever, that it won't happen.
This piece seems like a veiled criticism of white feminism, with the veneer of attacking a specific problematic author to gain extra legitimacy.
This bitch hates cats. What else do we need to hear? (I joke I kid you should really read her artist stand-in in Cat’s Eye—who grew up in the same neighbourhood as Marg, with the same history of violence against women—debate the victimhood of a young woman who was raped and murdered while walking home. And then later go on to say she hopes a woman dies of her botched back-alley abortion. Author isn’t narrator blah blah blah except in this case where it has been literally substantiated. Plus, you’ve already discussed all of my more serious and direct attacks on her as a political entity.)
That book!!! I read it a few years ago and got a distinct flavour of "Other women are such bitches; I wonder why they all hate me?" from her self-insert character.
Good point!
Hate this hate that… seem like nice folks, must be big fun at parties.
IIRC, the novel ends abruptly. Offred plans to escape to Canada with her lover and her diary is “found.” That’s when I realized Ms. Atwood had written herself into a corner and couldn’t figure out how to resolve her dilemma. The movie version shows us a pregnant Offred & her lover climbing the mountains in the snow, much like the von Trapp family.
I assume the mini-series will end with the Handmaids, led by Offred, leading a rebellion against TPTB, and establishing an Amazonian Utopia.
"IIRC, the novel ends abruptly. Offred plans to escape to Canada with her lover and her diary is “found.” That’s when I realized Ms. Atwood had written herself into a corner and couldn’t figure out how to resolve her dilemma."
Interesting - I didn't know this. I couldn't get into Handmaid's Tale as a book, so I never got this far. But she was never my cup of tea, so to speak. We had to read Edible Woman in college, and I didn't get into that, either. My favorite book of hers is not one that is critically acclaimed - Lady Oracle. I loved that one because it was so funny. But, getting back to your point - she ended that one abruptly, too. It's like she couldn't figure out what to do after the character faked her death and then decided to come back to get her friends out of jail for the crime so just stopped.
Interesting. Stephen King is another author who seems to have difficulty writing a satisfying ending to his novels. His short stories are better, IMHO.
At least that sequel might be bad enough to be good