Review of Feminist SF: Mainstream Invaders (Part 2 of 2)

Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, has become quite famous, and justly so. The book is a strong, moving work, with nothing in the way of phony sentimentality. Atwood's assumptions and extrapolations can be somewhat dated, speaking as they do from an early 1980s perspective (not to say that life here on the edge of the next millennium is qualitatively different or better). But I think that Atwood's writing is particularly vital, overcoming many flaws in structure and assumption. Atwood makes the main character of the book live in our minds, in a way that is the best argument against the kind of society that can be found in The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood also uses language, and the main character's preoccupation with language, to nice effect, making the case that this book itself is a blow struck against the Republic of Gilead (that is, its possible appearance in our future). The question of genre isn't one often applied to Atwood -- she's a "mainstream writer," and few have cared to categorize her as a science fiction writer for this one book. And perhaps The Handmaid's Tale has more in common with books like Brave New World and 1984, two works that have been equally claimed by science fiction and the mainstream, famous in both, and widely recognized in the mainstream the way many comparable novels, filed away as science fiction, are not. I will return to the matter of genre divisions in various contexts in this column.

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. Does that sound ominous? It should. Fertility has declined in our future, and the official response of Gilead has been to blame women. Offred lives a life of enforced idleness because her ovaries are fertile. Too bad that no one has checked the fertility of the man with whom she is forced to have sex, the Commander. It's also unfortunate that the Commander's wife is unimpressed with this whole deal (perhaps understandably so), and more unfortunate that she blames Offred. Offred gets involved with a resistance movement (or is it resistance?) and also becomes more involved with the Commander, who takes her to the secret luxury spots of the high officials of the Republic. The ending seems abrupt, for all that Offred has no perceptible betterment in her life.

However, a skeleton plot description hardly does the book justice. Offred is a fully realized character in a way that very few novels actually achieve. Despite, or perhaps because of her repressed position in life, Offred has a rich thought life, and the novel reads like a beautifully composed internal monologue. For example, at one point she calls to mind an old TV program in which she had seen an interview with the mistress of a death camp commander in "one of those wars" (187). Offred ponders: "What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think" (188). This lack of perception is perhaps the cardinal sin in Offred's view. Later in the book, she is recalling the change in her relationship with her husband Luke when the first repressive rules were enforced: "...something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was small as a doll... He doesn't mind this, I thought. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other's, anymore. Instead, I am his" (236). These reactions on the part of Offred are intensely felt and intensely described. By the nature of the first person narration, we only get Offred's point of view, and the other characters are often sketchy, such as Luke himself. The Commander has only one human moment (fittingly, at the ending, when he realizes what the events might mean for his career), and the Commander's wife is strictly a shrill bitch, blaming Offred and continuing a meaningless existence. Offred's acquaintances -- it's hard to call them friends when they have no control over their circumstances -- come and go under the paranoid pressures of a totalitarian society.

Offred lives in a society obsessed with control, and with the fecundity of the female body. The fact that no one checks the fertility of the men is Atwood's way of pointing out the absurdity of most constructed sexual roles, as well as a comment about double standards -- several orders of magnitude worse in Gilead than in our society, but still the same idea. Just like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale is about the now, Atwood's now at the time of writing in the early 1980s, with the defeat of the ERA and the general sense of regression that feminists at the time felt. Have we progressed in our society? Perhaps, perhaps not. I think that any righteousness on the part of our society would be false and alarming. Atwood's warning should be taken quite seriously.

Which leads to the question -- would society really develop this way if fertility rates drop drastically? I would certainly hope not, and as a male myself, I feel a little left out by the categories of male-ness offered by the book (to put it kindly). Interestingly, when Atwood finally gets around to explaining the events that led to the establishment of the Republic of Gilead (page 225 in my edition), the chilling bit of future history demonstrates the way in which a certain political authoritarianism uses the suppression of women in terms of its own pursuit of power. This begs the question: is equality between men and women a similarly constructed idea? This is perhaps the case, but my answer is simple. Who cares if equality is a fabricated idea; any notion is constructed. In the end, The Handmaid's Tale stands as warning to pick the foundations of how we imagine our society very carefully.

The names associated with this film are quite imposing. Harold Pinter is a famous playwright, and Volker Schlondorff directed The Tin Drum, which is based on the novel by Gunter Grass (who recently won the Nobel Prize for his writing). Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall, Aidan Quinn, and Faye Dunaway play the roles of the main characters. With all these credentials, and the accumulated experience of these people, you might think that a powerful novel like The Handmaid's Tale would be a fabulous success as a movie. So what happened? Why did I watch the movie version with no sense of being engrossed, entertained, enlightened, or even shocked by the subject matter? On the whole, the film is a faithful adaptation of the book (with one particularly fatal flaw, which I will discuss later), and the acting was competent, if not entirely enthralling. I must say that I noticed many similarities in my response to this film to the 1984 version of 1984 -- the film-makers put in a great deal of effort in both cases, but what was gripping and effortless on the page simply does not translate well to the big screen.

The plot of The Handmaid's Tale proceeds much as in the novel. Offred is a young woman living in the Republic of Gilead. She is a Handmaid, forced to have sex with the Commander because she is fertile in a society suffering from rampant infertility. After various adventures with the Commander, she gets increasingly fed up with her existence and takes some drastic steps to remedy the problems in her life. Unfortunately, the plot was by no means the main charm of the book; instead, the book captures interest and sympathy with its central character of Offred and her internal ruminations. In order to convey similar depth of contemplation, a movie would have to employ a voice-over (which succeeds in very few instances) or utilize top-notch acting in service of a skilful script. No such successful devices are used here.

Worse, the final ambiguity of the book is destroyed in a bloodthirsty movie climax, stereotypically bloody. Would killing the Commander and setting off bombs change anything? No, not in the least. The movie recognizes this, with a TV clip about how much more brutal the "police" are going to be after a bombing of this kind. How to argue with a totalitarian society? There doesn't seem to be much of an answer to that question. The book ends with an academic look back at the Republic of Gilead hundreds of years later, a device, with its vast perspective and the way it shrinks any violent act into triviality, that is obviously not going to wrap up loose ends in the way that this movie version wants to have them wrapped. The compromise deployed here in the stead of this vast perspective is rather dreadful. If only women would rise up, kitchen knives in hand, against their tyrannical masters, then the Republic of Gilead would crumble. Atwood rightly portrays the same depths of anger against tyranny, but in an artful, more subtle way. This distinction could probably best describe the difference between the book and the movie.

As she is coping with this dreadful turn of affairs, Connie is experiencing visions of the future. Specifically, visitations by a person by the name of Luciente, visitations which Connie eventually comes to accept as real. Luciente lives in a utopia, where gender is not a source of inequality, along with a number of other welcome innovations. Piercy's utopia is interesting, if not particularly compelling: the humans of Luciente's society don't ring true because they are in no way perverse. They always know what's good for them. They work things out. And why? Because of the way that their society is constructed. Believable? Maybe. Piercy seems to put society first, implying that notions of inherent evil and so forth are distinctly wrong. Whether Piercy is right is certainly debatable; dramatically speaking, this makes the people in a perfect society utterly boring and righteous. This type of utopia is highly reminiscent of Gilman's Herland. Herland might have been even less nuanced than Piercy's vision here, but at least it was much shorter and didn't bore the reader. Woman on the Edge of Time is also reminiscent of Robinson's Pacific Edge, another book which is superior to Piercy's because of its use of human drama to demonstrate the utopia.

As we find out about the future, we also see that Piercy has a peculiar manner of arguing. She sets up a dichotomy between two ideas, a dichotomy which seems persuasive but is in fact loaded with questionable assumptions. For example, here is part of her argument against electroshock therapy: "A little brain damage to jolt you into behaving right. Sometimes a woman forgot what had scared her, what she had been worrying about. Sometimes a woman was finally more scared of being burned in the head again, and she went home to her family and did the dishes and cleaned the house" (81). What does this mean? I agree with Piercy that electroshock therapy is a bad thing, but as a metaphor for the coercive, domesticating pressures of society on women, it’s a deceptive way of making a point. Full of rage, yes, but perhaps not fully convincing.

However, Piercy does make some interesting observations in the feminist vein. For example, when Connie first meets Luciente, she mistakes Luciente for a man. Why? Piercy implies that most of the markers of femininity, as understood by Connie, the stand-in for the twentieth century, indicate subservience and lack of self-will. Luciente, self-confident and unafraid, naturally seems like a man to Connie. But there's more. At one point, Luciente explains the families of the future to Connie:

"'It was all part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers.'" (105).

Not the same rallying cry that all feminists would use. And in one sense, Piercy is subscribing to the old biology as destiny argument. Gender as essentialism; remove the differences to create equality. In terms of the old debate, it's a new twist that is indeed thought provoking.

Is Woman on the Edge of Time science fiction? Yes, it falls into the classic subgenre of the field, the dissertation on a possible utopia. In this case, Piercy provides a mix of today's dystopia with tomorrow's utopia. Piercy makes many astute sociological observations, both in Connie's present and Luciente's future, much in the same way that writers like Le Guin convey insightful things to us. However, the book has the faintest hint of the most dreaded type of ending (it was all a dream!), which horrifies me quite frankly. This might not necessarily invalidate the book as science fiction, but it certainly lowers it in my estimation. This style of ending does possess some irony in this case -- Connie is in the insane asylum because she has visions of a civilization far saner than ours -- but I would have preferred that the book stayed faithful to what rage it does have.

Acker deliberately sets out to offend 95% of her potential audience. Disgust, lust, graphic details, profanity, along with a fragmented storyline that puts Lessing's Shikasta to shame. Strangely, Acker ends the book with a vision that would leave her nothing to write about. To wit: "And then I thought that, one day, maybe, there'ld be a human society in a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn't just disgust" (227). In general, I had the feeling that the last third of the novel petered out in terms of vigour and relevance. It begs the question: how do you wind down a non-standard narrative? When writing a typical storyline, the options for an ending are clear: a marriage will do fine, or the main character dying a horrible death if it's a tragedy. But any book like this one by Acker is a different matter altogether. The complete lack of conventional plot and character indicators also makes it much more difficult to decide exactly what Empire of the Senseless might mean. Is it only an assault on the senses, shock value for its own sake? Partly so, yes.

Empire of the Senseless has little in the way of plot. The two main characters, Abhor and Thivai, recall various events in their past. Paris is taken over by Algerian terrorists. The last third of the book is taken up by a long sequence where Abhor and Thivai roam about on the river, followed by a segment with Abhor in prison. These last sections were easily the worst in the novel, and didn’t measure up to the impact or the vivid style of the earlier sections. The characters are still opaque to my mind, but this is not necessarily a criticism, as this opacity seems to be Acker's intent. The chapters of the book alternate between the viewpoints of either Abhor or Thivai, ostensibly, but the perspective switches constantly and recklessly. Identity is wrecked altogether, re-creating a kind of postmodern condition fictionally.

Is Empire of the Senseless science fiction? There are some of the trappings of science fiction. For example, Abhor is half human and half robot, but the account of her genesis is entirely dissimilar to any parallel story in more typical science fiction. The book is apparently set in the future, but that feeling is continually undercut by references to Ronald Reagan. For example, near the beginning of Chapter 3, Acker makes this comparison: "Dr Schreber was paranoid, schizophrenic, hallucinated, deluded, disassociated, autistic, and ambivalent. In these qualities he resembled the current United States President, Ronald Reagan" (45). However, it's just as difficult to fit this particular work by Acker into any mainstream slot. If anything, Empire of the Senseless takes place in a weird parallel world.

As I've mentioned, Acker's writing style might not be everyone's favourite fireside or bedside companion. However, in its own twisted way, this is quite a powerful book. Amid all of the graphic and disgusting scenes, the reader can piece together various bits of intellectual and literary meaning. For example, here is Acker's explanation of the title, offered apropos of not much: "Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language which normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning" (134). Difficult prose, difficult flow, but she uses all of the buzzwords that make modern day literary theorists jump for joy. And sometimes Acker creates phrases that are as beautiful as anything more conventional writers could come up with: "Physical and mental lust were eating out my body at the same time I knew there was only loneliness. The CIA had created loneliness in that city and made the sun into a piece of ice" (167). You don’t need to know about Empire of the Senseless’ subplot about CIA infiltrating Paris with some weird drug in order to get a sense of the heavy burden of societal systems on this person’s body. Interestingly, that might be a satisfactory way of summing up the book: Acker makes it abundantly clear that the body, in all its rebellion, subservience, and chaos, is never trivial and never commonplace. As a call to awareness, the book is memorable in the extreme; Acker, perhaps wisely, does not suggest any further steps in the process.

James Schellenberg lives in southern Ontario, which is in Canada. He is currently feeling wistful that Canada is never mentioned in dystopic visions of horror like The Handmaid’s Tale, nor in utopian panoramas of peace and love like the future in Woman on the Edge of Time.

Last modified: November 18, 1999

Copyright © 1999 by James Schellenberg (james@jschellenberg.com)