I've finished rereading The Handmaid's Tale. Thanks, Zoii, for encouraging me to go back to this story.
In the last few years, I've read several books by Muslim authors about the violent misogynist craziness that's going on in some of the Islamic countries, and some of the elements of The Handmaid's Tale reminded me of those books. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, which takes place in Taliban-governed Afghanistan, at one point in the story a woman tries to escape from her situation; there's a similar escape scene in The Handmaid's Tale, with similar psychological elements at play in the community that surrounds the escaping women. And the red dresses with white wings that the handmaids wear reminded me of the required full-body-covering garment that Qanta Ahmed describes in In the Land of Invisible Women, a book describing her year as a a visiting physician in Saudi Arabia.
One of the points made in these other books is one that I see playing out in The Handmaid's Tale also: If you are a person of a certain mindset, if you despise women because you enjoy exercising power over people and women are an easy target, or because you've been crushed your whole life and now it's your turn to have power over somebody else, or because you blame women for every sexual failing you've ever had, or just because you enjoy cruelty -- if you are this kind of person, and you have at hand the tools of a religion, then you may well pick up those religious tools and use them as a way to wield power over women. All three of the Abrahamic faiths call people to act with justice and compassion, but the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Qur'an all contain individual sentences that can used as weapons against women. If you have a misogynistic mindset, you can set aside the great principles of these religions and take up the weapon-sentences instead. We see this in the distorted Christianity of Gideon, much as we see it in the distorted Islam of Saudi Arabia or the Taliban.
There are also those who listen to the isolated weapon-sentences and truly believe that by following them, they are following Christianity, or Islam. The Handmaid's Tale mentions the occasional people who are "true believers". This is a complicated situation, and probably different from the misogynists who are using religion as an excuse.
I don't see a genuine Gideon-like situation emerging in North America at present. But The Handmaid's Tale takes some of the attitudes and dangers that we face in subtle ways, and writes them in exaggeratedly large letters so that they're easy to see: the reduction of women to their reproductive and/or domestic roles; the power relationship between the Commander and the women he controls; the temptation to buy into the system, the way the Aunts do, in order to get a little power for yourself; the way the Commander sort of sees Offred, but not really; and the difficulty of escaping an oppressive situation if everyone around you thinks the oppression should continue.
I still haven't seen the miniseries, because I don't have a subscription to Hulu, but I have wondered how the miniseries presents the many thoughts that go on in Offred's head. Many of the book's insights happen in what Offred is thinking. She can't just say all that out loud to a friend (as often happens in movies and TV shows), because it's dangerous to talk to people in Gideon. Do they use voiceovers, or flashbacks, or something like that?
