Reading: The Handmaid's Tale
Sep. 27th, 2019 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI don't think I've re-read The Handmaid's Tale since I was at university; I recall trying to re-read it then because I was writing an essay on it and finding bits of it so upsetting I struggled to get through it, and while I've occasionally looked up references I haven't tried to re-read it since. (I also haven't watched the TV series, because I definitely didn't think I could handle that.) However, I do want to read The Testaments, and given how long it has been I thought I should probably refresh my memory of The Handmaid's Tale first, so I screwed my courage to the sticking point and picked my copy (second-hand when I bought it, well-read and still bearing the stains of a 25-year-old banana-in-bag incident) off the shelf for a re-read.
I was surprised at just how much I'd forgotten; some scenes I still remembered vividly, but others I had no recollection of at all (I only remembered the narrator's attempted flight with her husband and child from the 1990 film, and not from the book, and I'd forgotten most of her best friend Moira's story and a lot of the domestic details of life in Gilead which show the universality of oppression). If anything, it hits harder now than it did then; partly because the world (or at least the Western world) has got so much grimmer and less optimistic in recent years, partly because in addition to this I'm now so much more aware of the real-world antecedents of Gilead (as Atwood says, there is nothing in the novel that hadn't already happened, somewhere in the world, when she wrote the novel, but I didn't know much about those at 18 or 20 and read it as pure fiction), and partly simply because I was a rather emotionally immature 18- or 20-year-old and didn't have the same capacity to empathise with other people - not just the narrator, but so many of the other characters who we only see through her eyes - that I do at 45. I found it a really tough read, but it is also still an amazing book; Atwood is an incredible writer, and I think this may be her masterpiece. It's a vivid, compelling and utterly chilling portrayal of a dystopian future. Despite being over 30 years old now, it still feels very contemporary, with the exception of the concern about falling birthrates which is definitely of its time. I'm a bit sorry I left it this long to revisit it, although I certainly need to read at least a couple of much lighter, fluffier books before I venture on to try The Testaments.
I was surprised at just how much I'd forgotten; some scenes I still remembered vividly, but others I had no recollection of at all (I only remembered the narrator's attempted flight with her husband and child from the 1990 film, and not from the book, and I'd forgotten most of her best friend Moira's story and a lot of the domestic details of life in Gilead which show the universality of oppression). If anything, it hits harder now than it did then; partly because the world (or at least the Western world) has got so much grimmer and less optimistic in recent years, partly because in addition to this I'm now so much more aware of the real-world antecedents of Gilead (as Atwood says, there is nothing in the novel that hadn't already happened, somewhere in the world, when she wrote the novel, but I didn't know much about those at 18 or 20 and read it as pure fiction), and partly simply because I was a rather emotionally immature 18- or 20-year-old and didn't have the same capacity to empathise with other people - not just the narrator, but so many of the other characters who we only see through her eyes - that I do at 45. I found it a really tough read, but it is also still an amazing book; Atwood is an incredible writer, and I think this may be her masterpiece. It's a vivid, compelling and utterly chilling portrayal of a dystopian future. Despite being over 30 years old now, it still feels very contemporary, with the exception of the concern about falling birthrates which is definitely of its time. I'm a bit sorry I left it this long to revisit it, although I certainly need to read at least a couple of much lighter, fluffier books before I venture on to try The Testaments.
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Date: 2019-10-01 07:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-01 06:45 pm (UTC)