My first book for the Women Unbound Book Challenge is done!

Confession: I finished it before Christmas, but my life is bonkers from then until now and I’m finally ready to write again. You don’t mind, right?

Especially because my reaction and appreciation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale hasn’t dimmed one bit. My reaction was very British… Brilliant.

(Anyone else notice how much the islanders say that word? Or is it just those interviewed for their work in the tv series Doctor Who?)

I feel like Atwood’s self categorized piece of “speculative fiction” was a perfect choice for the first book in the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. It deals with a future society in which women have been stripped of their rights and society as a whole organized into a caste system for the good of all mankind. Those who have — eek, perhaps this is time for a SPOILER ALERT!!! — proven fertile and able to bear children are put into service as surrogate mothers for the upper class wives who are unable to bear children. This is the theme I found most enthralling. For society had not simply removed women’s right to external entities like having money or holding a job or marrying whom she pleases. No, they went so far as to physically disassociate their sexuality from her occupation as a child-bearer or as a wife. No one was having fun in bed. No woman felt like a woman. Which is just enough of a step further in the line of discrimination against women than we are accustomed and what made this book so thought provoking.

In the story, women among the privileged elite participated in their husband’s adultery with a handmaiden, lying still and silent underneath the girl, watching the amputation – and subsequent death of herself – claim another. The handmaiden herself faired little better as an object, an womb surrounded by an invisible person hood. It was all rather appalling to picture and Atwood’s story is a slow unfolding of the details of how this society works as a whole with small tidbits and references to a political uprising that brought them to this place. The story is told from the point of view of one particular handmaiden and her struggle to understand her new place in the world, whether she likes it, whether she can live with herself and participate and believe the brainwashing or choose her own path.

I found it reprehensible that anyone might suggest that any society, particularly thinking of our own that has fought over so many years to secure legal rights and break social mores surrounding what women are and are not allowed to do, could degenerate into what is alive and well in Atwood’s world. And yet I felt like I must consider the possibilities. For to not be on watch, to not put forth my own genuine femininity and guard and treasure it, would be to open the door for repression masquerading as revolution.

The Handmaiden has to make hard choices and constantly be on watch. She has to decide whether to be a rebel and if so, what kind of rebel? She taught me to duly watch and, more importantly, be thankful, both for my own self and for, in an odd way, the men around me who have been unafraid to let my femininity become what it will.

I am really looking forward to reading more of Margaret’s work in the future. For now, I have my pile of further Women Unbound reading but I am tickled to know that Atwood is worthy of the immense persona she carries as a Canadian literary giant who just happens to be a woman.

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