Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a memorably ugly book. You can remember it a few days or a few months or a few years down the line, and it does not, from any angle, become a more beautiful book. There are ugly books that are not worth the trouble of remembering. But once or twice in a year, or in a lifetime, you come across a book that is memorable and ugly.
Books aren’t necessarily meant to be beautiful. If they’re attempting to be memorable, instructive, the chances of beauty are severely diminished, depending on what the writer knows or has learnt of life. I remember The Handmaid’s Tale.
The world that the handmaid lives in
It is a simple world. Wives are wives. Handmaids are baby-carriers. They provide the egg. Husbands provide the sperm. Marthas are maids. Whores are women who don’t willingly or accidentally fall into any of the other categories. Aunts are thugs. They beat off the bits that don’t fit neatly into categories.
Slipping out of line means torture/death.
How did they end up there?
A voluntary submission of control. A feat of digital paperwork. Everyone had an ID, everyone’s ID was linked to their resources, their money, their mobility. All that was needed was to cut off resources and mobility, and close the borders. There was no escape.
The submission came about in the moment when they allowed themselves to be identified, traced, tracked and eventually imprisoned. Maybe they didn’t realise that would happen, at the time. But wouldn’t you have guessed?
Misery has a hierarchy
Here’s what lies at the female version of the top of the Handmaid-Gilead-ladder:
The wives. You would imagine that the top of the ladder is a place of power. But no, the wives are powerless. Their only expression of power or satisfaction is small-minded nastiness. A wife is essentially an incapacitated baby-producer, relying on the handmaid to fill in the missing bits.
Why, then, do they get to be on top?
The wives are the agents of change. You don’t need to convince every woman to give up personhood. Just convince a few, let them spread the message and grant them relative security in exchange for their work. The wives gave up the right to be a person, just like everyone else. But in return, they got to eat a little better and possibly live a little longer, and to be a little meaner to a few more people.
Essentially, a wife is a relayer of information.
Wives, Whores and Marthas in the new world
In the past year, watching women live under a (more) severely curtailed mobility, a (more) substantial reduction in resources, and a (more) inescapable submission of autonomy, I realised a few things:
1. Wives are not wives. Most of the wives I know are Marthas. Put women back in the home, and they survive, not by happy wifehood, but by working. To keep their jobs or to find new ones. Working twice as hard. Twice as long. They’re holding onto work, with an almost primal fear, because it’s the last link they have to a world where they felt a little closer to achieving personhood.
2. Whores are not whores. They’re just the bits that don’t fit. Already, whoredom is nothing more than the bit that is hidden away, the bit that doesn’t fit within a fixed categoryor the day’s work of a good Martha. The secret part, that lies behind the back door.
3. Wives are not wives. They’re not even necessarily married. They’re just influencers. By being at the top and relaying information from the top of the ladder, they keep the Marthas and the handmaids and the whores in control. Serena Joy, the Wife we know from The Handmaid’s Tale, was an influencer – in a religious context. But the context is immaterial, I understand now. A wife is just a relayer of crucial messaging that keeps the massesofMarthas in check.
Serialised, it’s out there in the ether
The Handmaid’s Tale had a recent rebirth, as a streaming TV series. A thing that people watch, over long periods, unlike this tiny almost-undigestible book. Keeping it short was a good idea. After all, it was not a world constructed in anything more than the simplest colour-blocks. It was a parable, an instructional manual. A red light.
I can’t imagine why anyone would want to linger in this world. I find the thought of a serialised Handmaid’s Tale repulsive, absolutely undigestible. But feeding people little bits of poison gets them used to poison. Every day, you can work a little harder, sustain the pain a little better.
I did not would not would never never ever want to watch it. But it’s out there. Fuckem.
The penetrating ugliness of the Handmaid’s world
The handmaid’s world was so horrifying because of its deeply resonant familiarity. A sudden universal burst of religiosity seems less and less plausible now, but a world where women are chopped up into neat square single-coloured boxes is not at all implausible.
It’s always imminent, or in the recent past, or happening, or appearing on the horizon. It doesn’t take a preposterous assumption to make it come to be. It happens because it always has, and because it can.
A beautiful Atwood novel
I remember The Robber Bride in much better detail than I do The Handmaid’s Tale. Again, there’s those clean simple lines of characters to follow. Roz is the businesswoman. Charis is the energy-sensitive hippy. Tony is the intellectual, a historian, living deep in the past. Zenia is the proverbial badwoman.
Zenia done bad to all three. The bad is complex – betrayal, lies, stealing, cheating, false friendship, broken trust. The bad is simple – she stole their men. She stole all three of their men. Mans. To do that, firstly, there had to be a certain dynamic of ownership in the relationships to begin with.
Roz, Charis and Tony all had this in common – they were not property, they were propertied. Their men were financially and administratively dependent on them. Their men were loved, and this made all three women vulnerable, even at the heights of their powers. Their men were also established territory. Zenia was the hostile intruder and occupier.
The question of how Zenia could infiltrate the territories of three women in the heights of their power is also interesting. She did it because she appealed to them, differently. To the bits of their intelligence that they couldn’t quite reveal, to the bits of their lives that they hadn’t fully understood or lived. To the secret worlds they inhabited, the secret selves they wanted to save. Zenia was an actualised badwoman, and she gained power by appealing to the hidden badwoman in all of them.
I remember the end, when Zenia died, and Roz, Charis and Tony tried to say a ritual farewell. They collected her ashes in a vase. They tried to throw the vase into the sea, but just before they could, hovering over the edge of the boat, just above the water, the vase split into two and the ashes flew away like a ghost in the wind.
I feel a little chuckle rising now, when I think about that ending. The dance of an untameable ghost. Ashes can also talk back.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Colours
Wives are blue, handmaids are red, Marthas are green. Zenia is a colour you’d call dark. She wears wines, purples, almost-blacks, blacks. I imagine her the colour of a plum. An overripe plum.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Roz, Charis, Tony, they get to be many colours. Even though Charis can see their auras, and note the predominant shade, you can’t deny that there’s a bit of Zenia plum-dark in all of them.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Wives aren’t wives, whores aren’t whores. Handmaids are unnecessary, when surrogates are around. Thugs are happy, because there’s always work for a thug.
But traitors are traitors. Know thy enemy.
Women in the new world
When I step out into the streets now, I see an old, familiar sight. It gives me that sinking feeling. That thing you see when you step into a neighbourhood you don’t love, a bit of the past you don’t want to remember, when you travel up north, when find yourself unable to find transport home in the night.
Streets populated only by men. In seven days, I saw a woman walking alone three times. I saw sporadic couples. On the other hand, I saw men alone, men in groups, men in gangs, men in twosomes, men with their mothers, men with their dogs, men in cars, men on bikes, men in uniform, men taking naps on sidewalks, men drinking tea on pavements, men speeding and crashing their bikes. Men staring, men waving, men screaming out hellos on their bikes.
A salon employee I spoke to just before the second spell of introductory passages to the new world said of course we never got back the crowd from the old days, just about 60 to 70% of that.
I wonder if it will be the same with the streets. After every wave, just about 60 to 70% of the women that used to haunt the streets will return, and eventually, women will have been put back in their place.
A horse or a mule or some other beast of burden
In the past year, I watched women deal with the sudden shifting of axis of the world in the same way that the rest of the world did. By having some form of amnesia, by telling themselves it would all go away very soon, by denying it was happening at all. On the surface. Beneath the surface, I saw two options forming:
Option A: Work ten times harder. Imagine a horse, a mule, or some other beast of burden carrying ten bags up a hill. Some wily Rumplestiltskin sneaks up on it and adds another five. The horse/mule knows, by the perceived weight, by how much harder it is to climb, that something has been added. It also knows, that whatever happens, it must not stop. So it pulls its blinkers on tighter, pulls its belly in, girds its loins, grits its teeth and keeps going. This is one way of not letting the bastards get you down.
Option B: Imagine a horse, mule or some other beast of burden carrying ten bags up a hill. When five new bags are added on, it drops a few. I can’t do it anymore, it says, but I must not stop. So I will pick these up someday. Someday. This is another way of not letting the bastards get you down.
The ghost of option C hangs over it all like a guillotine. Already a few women I know have taken this way out and I hope that if it was a way out it was also a way up.
The broiler chicken crossed the road
I tried, over the past few days, to think of Option D. There might be a thousand more options, but I only have the energy to think up one. What I came up with was an image.
Image: Priyadarshini John
A thousand years ago, before all of this and all of that, I walked on these same streets where now there are only men, rats and piles of trash to keep me company. On one of these walks, I saw a chicken darting across the road. It was a broiler chicken.
If life were fairy dust sprinkled by a fairy godmother on tiny souls before they were born, the broiler chicken only got one grain, one mote of dust. This chicken is not born to live, it’s bred to die. It gets as much life force as it takes to grow too quickly to ever develop or mature, to not move, to be easy to kill, and to live in a coop where it can’t turn around.
image: Priyadarshini John
However, once upon a time, I saw a broiler chicken on the road, that had escaped its coop, that had made it out into the world, that was living in the world. It was darting around, dangerously, recklessly. It was foraging for food, it was no longer white because it was covered in mud and dirt, it was flitting between pavement and road, and it looked happy.
If any chicken could have an expression, not in its beak or in its eyes but in its body, its movement, its chi, this was it, and this chicken looked happy.
The world of these chickens is a world of coops. Even I, a lifelong carnivore, have avoided eating chickens in the past few years. Everything has to die, and for us to eat something has to die, but the chicken didn’t get to live before it died.
This escaped chicken had only one grain of fairy dust to sustain it. It was enough to skip the coop, to get out into the world, to roll around in the mud, to play, to eat, and to communicate the absolute joy of living on the very edge of reality.
When I walk the same streets now, while eagles circle overhead, a dirty, busy, bedraggled and gloriously happy chicken comes to my mind. Not so much a vision as a prayer.
Image: Priyadarshini John
