The Handmaid's Tale: Trash or Treasure?

By Brittain B.

     Set in the future and under the rule of a totalitarian government, the unnamed narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale is faced with many trials and tribulations that push her into the safeguard of her mind. The dystopia she must endure puts her in the position of a surrogate mother for a commander and his wife. Children, in this future scenario, are highly valuable and the few women that remained fertile are treated as slaves. She must learn to cope with her new reality, either by facing it head on or by withdrawing to her thoughts. The story starts with the narrator in a large gym, and she is being held with many other women. The narrator begins to tell her story to us. She is one of the few fertile women left in the world due to the previous war, nuclear activity, and women ceasing to bare children and getting infected. The story continues through many trials and conflicts within the life of the narrator, such as dealing with loneliness and the heartbreak that came from being separated from her husband, and the humiliation of being forced to perform sexual rituals. The narrator struggles to find a true reality in her life, either in her past with her husband or in her present situation.
     The issues she is surrounded by continually have an affect on her and her thoughts. We are saddened each time the narrator brings up stories and memories of her husband, who the reader soon finds out, will never be with her again. The narrator remains nameless thought the entire book because names in her society have become worthless and she is assigned a new name in every new house she is placed. She tells us that she knows her real name, but does not reveal it for she finds no use in it anymore. This is just one of the disheartening parts of this story; though the author, Margaret Atwood, does make the plot interesting and is careful to add description for the readers to enjoy her book. However, we find that as we read we are stuck in a “gloomsville,” so to speak, and find ourselves depressed at most stages of the book—oftentimes even disgusted.

     I did not enjoy this book personally because it contained many vulgar scenes and language, and as a believer I felt that some of that content could have been taken out to broaden the book’s reading audience. I do not think that, as believers, we should fill our minds with unnecessary filth, and I think that this book is one of the examples that we should watch out for in literature. The images and thoughts remain in my head of certain chapters that were extremely awkward and needless. Some would argue that those chapters and instances are needed to have a sense of what the author was going though, and allow us to have a better understanding of how far society had gone away from morals and order and thus would realize what the narrator was going though. I would not fully agree with that, but would say that it is important to have a better understanding for a work of literature and its characters but as believers, we must be careful and prudent in our selections of reading material.

     The sexually explicit material within the majority of the chapters is an immediate turn off toward the book as a whole, as it distracts the reader from other beneficial material within the book. Explicit language is also used frequently, which can also distract readers, even up to the point where they do not wish to continue reading—I found myself in that category in several of the chapters. While this was an interesting book, I would not recommend it to a fellow believer, due to the vulgar material throughout the story.