“We’ve Done It, Or We’re Doing It, Or We Could Start Doing It Tomorrow”
Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Some often muse whether life imitates art or if art imitates life.
For Margaret Atwood, the debate is more nuanced and about genre: “The Handmaid’s Tale…is set in the future,” Atwood explains in “Writing Utopia.”“This conned some people into believing it is science fiction, which, to my mind, it is not.”
What may seem like a trivial distinction — something merely academic — is incredibly important to Atwood, and to anyone reading this novel (or more recently, viewing the Hulu series):
But in The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing happens that the human race has not already done at some point in the past, or that it is not already doing now, perhaps in other countries, or for which it has not yet developed the technology. We’ve done it, or we’re doing it, or we could start doing it tomorrow. Nothing inconceivable takes place, and the projected trends on which my future society is based are already in motion. So I think of The Handmaid’s Tale not as science fiction but as speculative fiction; and, more particularly, as that negative form of Utopian fiction that has come to be known as the Dystopia….
Dystopias are often more like dire warnings than satires, dark shadows cast by the present into the future. They are what will happen to us if we don’t pull up our socks. (pp. 93, 94)
What might these dire warnings entail in 2018 Trumplandia? At least two come to mind: The manipulation of women to control women and the threat of theocracy to a democracy.
“Puritan New England was a theocracy, not a democracy;” Atwood explains, “and the future society proposed in The Handmaid’s Tale has the form of a theocracy, too, on the principle that no society ever strays completely far from its roots” (p. 97).
These words should be echoing in the background each time we hear or read “Make America Great Again” since Atwood warns, “But true dictatorships do not come in in good times. They come in in bad times, when people are ready to give up some of their freedoms to someone — anyone — who can take control and promise them better times” (p. 98).
Two aspects of Atwood’s speculative Republic of Gilead should give us pause in fact: “biblical justification” and:
Woman’s place, in the Republic of Gilead — so named for the mountain where Jacob promised to his father-in-law, Laban, that he would protect his two daughters — woman’s place is strictly in the home….How do you getwomen back in the home, now that they are running around outside the home, having jobs and generally flinging themselves around? Simple. You just close your eyes and take several giant steps back, into the not-so-very-distant past — the nineteenth century, to be exact — deprive them of the right to vote, own property, or hold jobs, and prohibit public prostitution in the bargain, to keep them from hanging out on the street corners, and presto, there they are, back in the home. (p. 99)
And, as Atwood’s dystopia dramatizes, create a hierarchy of women so that they become consumed with controlling and resisting each other — while failing to see the higher hands of men controlling the entire puppet show.
Dire warning?
Like the legitimate and illegitimate women of Gilead, enter the women of Trumplandia: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kellyanne Conway — quoting scripture, invoking the sacred nature of Law, and routinely lying with well-manicured hair and the sort of make up rendered illegal in Atwood’s dystopia.
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“At the front of The Handmaid’s Tale there are two dedications,” Atwood notes, detailing:
[T]he American Puritans did not come to North America in search of religious toleration, or not what we mean by it. They wanted the freedom to practice their religion, but they were not particularly keen on anyone else practice his or hers. Among their noteworthy achievements were the banishing of so-called heretics, the hanging of Quakers, and the well-known witchcraft trials. I get to say these bad things about them because they are my ancestors — in a way, The Handmaid’s Tale is my book about my ancestors — and the second dedication, to Mary Webster, is indeed to one of these very same ancestors. (pp. 96, 97)
“Half-Hanged Mary” is Atwood’s poetic recreation of Webster’s monologue throughout her being hanged as a witch, an act that, remarkable, ended with her surviving: “Under the law of double jeopardy,” Atwood adds, “you couldn’t execute a person twice for the same crime, so she lived for another fourteen years” (p. 97).
In the poem, Webster narrates:
I was hanged for living alone,
for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,
tattered skirts, few buttons,
a weedy farm in my own name,
and a sure-fire cure for warts;Oh yes, and breasts,
and a sweet pear hidden in my body.
Whenever there’s talk of demons
these come in handy.
And then about her hanging:
The men of the town stalk homeward,
excited by their show of hate,
their own evil turning inside out like a glove,
and me wearing it.
The men shouting the authority of God attempt to execute Webster — a woman, and poor — while “The bonnets come to stare,/ the dark skirts also.”
Yet Webster implores:
Help me down? You don’t dare.
I might rub off on you,
like soot or gossip. Birds
of a feather burn together,
though as a rule ravens are singular.In a gathering like this one
the safe place is the background,
pretending you can’t dance,
the safe stance pointing a finger.
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Does life imitate art, or art, life? And as Atwood suggests, when art is drawn from life, why do we resist the dire warnings?
Biblical justification and the sacred rule of law by a people shouting “Make America Great Again” over the cries of children behind chain-linked fences after being pulled from their parents’ arms.
Dire warnings we either cannot see or will not see: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity” (William Butler Yeats).
