Greetings from Gilead

 Once upon a time, a young woman named Lada chose to read The Handmaidstale. She bought the book from the Bookdepositry, it was a Penguin VINTAGE paperback. As she read she made miniscule notes and underlined parts of M. Atwood's well known story. I bought the book at an online antiquarian shop just for the marginalia, because of course I already have a hardback copy, also a vintage edition with read gilded edges. 

Red, the color of sisterhood. Red, because we all bleed. Red because life and birth. Red, the color of love. In Margaret Atwood's dystopia the very segregated society of Gilead is, a sort of hyper republican, militant version of a fundamentalist Abrahamitic dictatorship. I believe the novels popularity has persisted since the 1980's when it first came out. The Vintage edition that I held in my hand was printed in 2010. The series by HBO came out in 2017. I first watched the series back in 2018 or 2019, I'm not sure precisely but I didn't come to know the story firsthand by reading. The television show became dear to me, it was a strong impression on soft feminist soil, a lasting boot print in the murky muddy hillslopes of my inner landscape. I'm sure it was in the year of 2019 when i first read the book. Since, by that time I had watched all the available seasons of the show, I wasn't honestly too impressed about the book. 

The TV series only follows the plot of the book in the first season, so basically the show has a life of it's own. Atwood was asked to write a sequel to the show. The Testaments is set in the far future, probably even beyond what the last and final Season 6 has to offer (the final season is coming out in January 2025).

I decided to re-watch the first season as I was almost done with my re-read of The Handmaidstale. For the first time ever I felt like the TV show was simply too boring. I rather listened to Clair Danes on Audible reading at a pace of a whopping 1,65 while I followed the text. For some chapters I read without Audible and at times I just listened. This was a first for a lot of things for me, as goes to reading. My first deep read, my first complete re-read of any book, my first versatile read and the first time that I genuinely wanted to read rather than watch telly. 

"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..." p. 100 June Osbourne, our protagonist goes on to describe how the commander tries on the handmaid, like a "sock over a foot, unto the stub of himself" the commander is described as the utter fool, yet he is the one who holds absolute power. 

In many ways Gilead centers around life: women who can bear children and the offspring that the commanders are desperately trying to produce. I'm thinking about the renown medical paper in real life, The Lancet, I believe it's called, and their global analysis on plummeting birthrates and outrageous death-rates globally in 2024 and into the near future. I heard about it on the radio perhaps three months ago while I was driving. A cause of concern for any conscientious Social Scientist, only, there's no press room for those, the unprofessional soothsayers have the final word. Are we seeing the horror scenario of The Handmaidstale arise? -A society with not enough babies born, and what does this mean for women in general. What are the real life implications? 

As I said, the men in Gilead hold all the power yet they don't have the power to reproduce, so they must control women. This is the central thesis of feminism: Women, who give birth aka. mothers are powerful but society makes them think otherwise. 

I realized for the first time that non of the groups of women in Gilead: Wives, Martha's, Handmaids, Econowives, Aunts...non of them are free to live a life for themselves, they are only to serve the purpose of society and they have no freedom of individuality, essentially no right to be human. I think, most women and men of our day and age can relate. The hyper individualism that we live in, yet turns on itself, and one must identify with one group or another. The right to be oneself is a faux.

I noticed that a lot of the story revolves around transactions. Language is a transaction, even unspoken gestures, tokens of power and submission. The children and women are the society's only true assets as they are essentially the future, that's why the women are under hard control. The transition into Gileadian rule was possible June notes, only because they had given up the usage of cash. Centralized monetary power can not handle the dispersion of power in bills and coins and so now more than in the 1980's the noose tightens in our own world.

Remember Lada, the young girl who followed me in the margins, she wondered about the codes of color "In the vase there was red and blue flowers" blue the color of the wives and red that of the handmaids, both Serena Joy (the wife) and June (the handmaid) where two flowers in the same vase. Lada noticed the ever ongoing repression and fear in June and in the society overall. At times June, the protagonist was placid, almost colorless, at times she was full of repressed rage and then at the end full of surrender onto the handsome Nick, who also was an eye or a so called secret police. The TV show highly exaggerated the role of the "Eyes" in the book, they didn't have such a prominent role, and I wonder, if there isn't some hidden meaning behind that. 

The Handmaidstale is a masterful critique of societies everywhere that are against women, even in the Nordic welfare state that claims to be the cradle of egalitarian society, as a female I can with hand on my heart say: it is not. This story is a feministic masterpiece, a crown, a prism of understanding. 

June continues p. 100 "To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness that is composed of women, a woman who can see in darkness, while he himself strains blindly forward. She watches him from within" 

At the end when June is rescued she steps into a van and says "And so I step up into the darkness within; or else, the light" I usually don't like this kind of ambiguity, like in Murakami's The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage because this type of word play, light is dark and dark is light, is the kind of freemason stuff I don't endorse. The Bible says in 1 John 1:5 "God is love and in Him there is no darkness" for a believer in Christ, God is all powerful and uncapable of doing evil or harm. I think Handmaid's Tale makes it implicitly clear why people can create a hell on earth using Biblical references: their theology is wrong. Christ set the very simple rule of love, yet (hu)man in his and her incapacity to love may interpret scripture to do evil, that doesn't mean that there's a blessing in it. God's word is not Aladdin's lamp.

I think ambiguity is not Atwood's point, at least not for me because I see another meaning, a meaning beyond and something other. June throws herself into the unknown at last, she surrenders. The father of her unborn child asks for her trust but she knows that there is no trusting him, yet she ascends into the van and into an unknown future. 

The TV show then takes on a life of it's own, especially season 3 is so grotesque, goring in violence that I hardly at that point felt a need to go on but then at the ending of season 5 it all made sense and one just hoped for a better ending for June and her daughters. 

I enjoyed, truly enjoyed re-reading Handmaid's tale this time, I hold the book to be supremely better than the entire show. I'm grateful for my visit to Gilead once more, I know why I had to return, I learned so much about myself as a reader and about reading, also because I too must write. I must.