. Spinning .

As I said, I wasn’t nuts about Offred, the main character in this novel, and while I’m open-minded enough to accept what an author is laying down as setting, environment, language, etc., I did also have a small problem suspending a belief that the good old U.S.A. could never end up in this society as Atwood has presented it.  If anything, I figured our people would forsake clothing and be running around nude before they’d put on the habit of a nun–or even require others to do so.

But Atwood comes from a background of feminism that seeks the deeper meaning and the possible paths that come from any change in society’s norms and ideals.  She may fear the religious zealot; I fear more the godless liberal.  Both are extremes; both, without the balance of opposing viewpoints and activists, pose potential danger.  I wonder though, if the balance of power were to shift enough, or if some plan were plotted out carefully enough, and if a move were made fast enough, with the power of the internet and the way hackers can tear through it so easily, well, conceivably something could happen to upheave society.

Amazingly, Atwood not only allows the protagonist to escape, while the escape is run-of-the-mill, the way it is handled is brilliant.  At the end of Chapter 46, Offred is taken away in the dreaded black van, but there is the possibility that her lover, Nick, has set this up as an escape rather than sure doom.  At this point, it is up to the reader to play out the ending.

And then, Atwood zooms two centuries into the future to plop us in the middle of a seminar on the Gilead society, as taken from studies done on cassette tapes found and attributed to Offred.  Since the tapes were make after rather than during her time as presented by the novel, we may assume she escaped.  Atwood also takes this opportunity to lay out a bit more of the structure and inception of Gilead, which answers those questions some of us have as readers, but were clearly not necessary to the story itself.  It’s an Ahah, rather than Well, jeez….

And, with Atwood’s natural instinct of keeping her readers thinking about the story long past the last page, even this final historical section ends with the main speaker asking the audience–and the reader–Any questions?

So, while dated and a bit more improbable than when the story was written in 1985, and despite my distance from the protagonist, I’m still in awe of Atwood’s abilities as a writer.  It seemed to me that just when I was getting bored, or aware of a slow pace, or ticked off with a particular scenario, Atwood’s timing brought me back into the story with gusto.  Everything is planned out; everything, is gone over; everything is done well.

I have a few more Atwood’s on the shelf I haven’t read yet and I’ll be looking forward to these as well as ordering perhaps Good Bones and Simple Murders, or one of her newest projects.

So as I mentioned, I’m not enthralled with Atwood’s main character and my general feeling was one of her first being a wimp (even her best friend Moira felt this way) for going along with everything so placidly–even while Atwood hammers home the fact of her mother having been a social activist, a manipulator (her first (?) opportunity to infiltrate the system is via her relationship with the Commander, and she uses it), and her rather me-me-me self-victimizing attitude.

Obviously the reason for the arrangement is damaging chemicals that have rendered many of the women barren, or incapable of producing a baby without severe defects.  It would seem to me that if the population is truly in trouble, keeping a young, healthy woman in the service of an albeit properly credentialed older household for two to three years in the hopes of a successfull pregnancy and birth is not the quickest way to solve the problem.  Although I’m sure the government doesn’t want uncontrolled breeding resulting in thousands of defective children.  The couple in each case, a Commander and his Wife, are usually unable to have children and of course, want one.  The handmaid needs to produce or else she may be sent to a worse fate.  Human nature being what it is, the workaround of having a young stud do the impregnating instead of the aging Commander is brought up by the doctors, the girls, and the Wives themselves.  Here, Serena (the Wife) brings a photo of her daughter to Offred as payment for their agreement to allow the chaffeur, Nick, to give it a shot:

I take it from her, turn it around so I can see it right-side-up.  Is this her, is this what she’s like? My treasure.

So tall and changed, Smiling a little now, so soon, and in her white dress as if for an olden-days First Communion.

Time has not stood still.  I has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.  I have been obliterated for her.  I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph.  A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become.  You can see it in her eyes:  I am not there.

But she exists, in her white dress.  She grows and lives.  Isn’t that a good thing?  A blessing? 

Still, I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that.  Better she’d brought me nothing.  (p. 228)

Offred appears to be upset by the loss of herself in her daughter’s life; more so than with the loss of her daughter.  She appears to resent her child’s life:  Smiling a little now, so soon  —  evidently too soon for Offred’s likes.  She uses the metaphor of "a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water."  Laying blame on a child is another resentment of her daughter’s life without her.  And the final lines: "Still, I can’t bear it,…" would seem a true motherly anguish, are spoiled by the self-centered "to have been erased like that."

While this won’t prevent me from rooting for Offred’s escape, I can’t help but find the Commander’s rather sad and more human needs and actions more worthy of my sympathy.

Finally getting the time-consuming computer problem solved (with a fax machine, second hard drive, and scanner to hook up still plus a camcorder to fiddle with), I’ve gotten back into sitting around eating bon-bons and reading some of the days away.

Before I comment on some of the good, let me point out one thing that has bothered me since I first encountered it early in the book.  On the floor of the closet in her room, Offred finds the inscription, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum."  She doesn’t know what it means, but takes it as a message from the handmaid who had the room prior to her.  Now she’s a college graduate, having had to take some language, I’m sure.  I find it hard to believe that she couldn’t have arrived at some close general translation.  Even I guessed at "no let the bastards …." before checking it out on the internet. 

A small thing, but I find that something even minor like this sets me at a wary frame of mind, not totally trusting the author enough to fall totally into the story he/she weaves (the bliss, as Barthes would have it).

That said, I’m very admiring of Atwood’s methods in sequencing the plot structure.  We’ve started off with a rather slow story as Offred merely leaves the house to go to the grocery.  But we know something is terribly wrong:  it becomes obvious that she’s on the East Coast of the U.S.A., that a war’s going on, that the social structure has become completely strange, and in it all, she gives us very little bits of information as to how it’s all come about.  But do we have to know?  Offred’s current position appears to be her second one, so we know a few years have gone by since the big change.  We know her husband and daughter are lost to her, and that the three of them tried to escape but were caught.  This is the present, it’s bad enough.  It doesn’t really matter what brought the population to this point, especially since it appears that the story isn’t focusing on any major rebellion that could turn things over again.

Atwood finally lets us know how things came down, but it’s not until page 175 (out of 300), and again, little by little we find out how it personally changed Offred’s life.  At about the same point in the book, Offred’s present is changing as her relationship with the Commander becomes more relaxed and she finds out what happened to the handmaid before her–information she feels gives her some power over the Commander.  Oddly enough, Atwood has her character falling back upon what are known as "feminine wiles" in this silent but evidently still very much alive battle of the sexes.

The pacing at this time in the book is definitely picking up, and Atwood has left several hints that had I posted on them with my immediate reaction, would have shown me to have become quite an astute reader as she comes back to them with a purpose later in the story.

So far, my admiration for Atwood has been fully justified by this book.

Atwood is fairly open with her metaphors, and pretty versatile about the way she uses them.

It’d be hard to say that the whole novel is a metaphor, and yet in certain ways it is: Feminism, religious extremism, government control, gender bias, it’s all here.  Even the dress code of the handmaid’s is metaphorical; red, similiar to a nun’s habit in shape and form.  Oddly enough, after half a book of calling the headress "wings," Attwood finally mentions the word "wimple" which historians and Catholics will immediately recognize.

There are nuances in metaphor, but there are ones made obvious by Attwood, as in the protagonist’s recalling a TV program about the mistress of one of Hitler’s SS commanders.  This is immediately following Offred’s puzzling secret meeting with the Commander, wherein he asked her to play Scrabble with him and sought only that and a good night kiss from her.  Both actions, and the meeting itself, would be forbidden.  The mistress, she remembers, insisted that her lover was not a monster.  But what Offred remembers the strongest: 

Nobody asked her whether or not she had loved him.

What I remember now, most of all, is the make-up.  (p. 146)

The make-up:  Colored over, dressed up, hiding the truth.  Here is where Atwood becomes more subtle with her use of metaphor, and where it is up to the reader–and Atwood doesn’t really like to let the reader misconstrue her meaning–to consider the possibilities.