Review: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Why do we read Dystopian literature? Why do writers write such stories? I think we need to be constantly reminded of how precious is the liberty that we enjoy. We, who are fortunate enough to live in societies and countries where the Government is not suppressing individual freedom, at least not overtly and totally. The Handmaid’s tale is poignant tale of women living under a totalitarian patriarchal regime, in a nation that formerly used to be the United States of America.

The irony is that the state of affairs described in the Handmaid’s tale exist in our world today. There is no nation called Gilead and the maids are not named “Offred” or “Ofglen”, but the fact that women are considered merely a tool for serving males is not a concept foreign to a number of societies in today’s world. In traditionally patriarchal societies of China and India, there already exists a problem of gender imbalance.

Imagine, if this problem exacerbates to the point where some maniac decides that henceforth, women should be considered a depleting resource of national importance and shall serve the nation by child-bearing and child-raising alone. The fact that such a move will also effectively eliminate all women from the work-force, thus increasing the number of jobs available for men would make a lot, if not all men happy. In the developed world, where declining birth rate, fear of loss of jobs through AI and automation and a growing discontent among the mainstream population due to unequal distribution of wealth, how unlikely does the aforementioned scenario sound?

Dystopian novels tend to serve as stark reminders of how the future might unfold were our society to take the freedom we enjoy lightly and the Handmaid’s tale does a very good job of it. In my humble opinion, it ranks among the best dystopian novels written till date, and one that might just become true, if we are unfortunate enough.


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