Are we living in a 'Handmaid's Tale' world?

The Handmaid’s Tale, Joseph Stollenwerk’s faithful one-woman stage adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, describes the Republic of Gilead, a dystopian American theocracy run amok in an instant due to unspecified terrorist attacks. Red-clothed Handmaids without property or rights live in reproductive slavery to a society dominated by male Commanders, in a twisted version of the biblical narrative of Jacob’s wives. At Curio, Isa St. Clair starred as the Handmaid Offred in one of the most effective and well-designed productions I’ve ever seen staged there.

Tangled feelings

When I walked out of the show, I was in a strange mental place. Atwood’s novel stuck high in my mind for years, and after the show I tried to untangle my renewed appreciation for the story’s trenchant warnings from my relief that my own life apparently bears little resemblance to Offred’s. But the fiction’s hyperbolic allegory highlights the problems of being a woman while also exaggerating those problems in a way that gives me (and perhaps people in positions of power) a falsely soothing sense of gratitude.

After all, my friend and I can go chat in a local bar instead of intoning “blessed be the fruit” and “may the Lord open” in an economy devoid of written words. Compared to Offred and her friend Ofglen (Gilead’s ladies take their names from their Commanders), we have it pretty damn good.

A Republican fantasy?

In Mark Cofta’s review, he calls the show’s premise “the dream behind Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and the evangelical movement’s attempts to ban sex education and criminalize birth control.” Or, more pungently, “a Pat Roberson wet dream.”

It is true that ultimately the goal of movements to restrict abortion access or stifle sex education are to control women and their bodies — but it would be too easy for proponents of these efforts to look at the Republic of Gilead and say “never!” with a perfect measure of plausible deniability. Accusing them of literally lusting after Atwood’s misogynistic dystopia makes the risky reality of contemporary American women’s lives less potent.

Part of Atwood’s point, of course, is the slippery slope, but the reality remains that even luminaries like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter don’t want to deprive women of all property and due process under the Constitution and enslave them to a bizarre Old Testament-saturated extramarital sex ritual. Check that — it’s not a “sex ritual,” as Mark writes; it’s a rape ritual. As the script implies and Mark understands, Offred calls her rapes a choice, but since she could either work herself to death in a radioactive waste dump or be a handmaid (which often leads to suicide or execution), that “choice” is like being forced to drink either ipecac syrup or a mustard solution and then saying you chose to vomit.

Look around you

We shouldn’t get distracted by pointing fingers at the Pat Robertsons of the world. Misogyny, though often subtle, is the fabric of everyday society, not just far-right conservative broadcasts. Consider the picture I saw in the bar.

What does it do? Well, the point is to remind pregnant ladies not to drink alcohol (a tenet American doctors have clung to for decades, while some research may be eroding this gospel). But it’s not the drink in the picture that’s crossed out: it’s the whole woman. As usual, a woman’s body is public property, ripe for simplistic depersonalized display, judgment, and categorical rules. And this is West Philly, not the Republic of Gilead.

The picture also reinforces the concept that women, contrary to being capable of attending to their own well-being and the well-being of a fetus, need prominent and graphic public reminders of basic health facts.

Still not convinced that the picture behind the bar indicates a widely sexist society? There was no crossed-out image of a person holding a beer behind the wheel — though I’d argue that drunk drivers, besides the fact that they are actually breaking the law, imperil many more people than does a pregnant woman who sips a beer.

Getting home

I was still thinking about it when I hugged my friend goodbye and hailed an Uber, and for the first time ever since I started using the app, the driver who popped up was a woman. I’ve never had problems with male drivers (from the young man in a rumbling sports car to the middle-aged dad with a Quran on the dashboard), but when I saw a woman would be driving me, I got a surprising rush of relief from a worry I’d never acknowledged.

The ride with her reminded me of the female unity Atwood depicts between some of Gilead’s handmaids (when Offred’s commander offers her an illicit privilege, she responds in the plural, instead of speaking only for herself). On the way home, I chatted with the driver and she told me that many other women had expressed delight and a gratified sense of safety (no unwanted pick-up lines!) at riding with her.

When we pulled up to my house, she said something no other driver ever has: “I’ll wait here until you’re in the door.”

It was a tiny, unbidden, and yet appreciated mark of kindness and solidarity. I don’t know her, but she understands, perhaps in a way that no man can, that just walking from the curb to your front door late at night in a quiet neighborhood carries a risk, however small.

Offred’s keepers insist the new regime gives women “freedom from” instead of “freedom to” — freedom from harassment in the place of freedom to be independent members of society. Maybe some people would tell me not to go out late at night if I don’t want to worry about who is driving me home or what could happen before I get in the door.

This might be the seed of the world Atwood is warning us about in Handmaid’s Tale. But I don’t want to minimize my own reality, or single out extremist pundits, in the process of absorbing that allegory.