The Handmaid's Tale

The Hulu series, The Handmaid’s Tale, is a scalding, brutal, at times sickening portrayal of life in some future totalitarian and theocratic state in New England known as Gilead.

The storylines are so reprehensible they leave one churning with rage and shattered with sorrow. They offer a glimpse into a horrifying future that may not be impossible to imagine.

Gilead is growing childless. Those in charge have devised a way to repopulate the state. Women of childbearing age are simply taken off the streets or out of their homes and proclaimed handmaids for commanders, slick and morally compromised men who have wives unable to conceive. A handmaid is chosen for them, even if she is already married and has children of her own. They are permanently separated from her. She has no rights. Her only existence is to serve the elite couple she is assigned to.

The lead character in this inhuman existence is June (Elizabeth Moss), whose name is changed to Offred. Once a month, in the most fertile time of her cycle, she has meaningless, silent sex with her commander while his wife sits behind Offred holding her hands. This is called the “Ceremony,” which begins with the Commander reading from the Bible before having sex with his handmaid.

This is the fate of all the handmaids, who go through these humiliating exercises only to give over the child they give birth to. If they are unable to get pregnant, there are alarming consequences.

Women in this society are used and abused. They are reduced to little more than their ovaries. They have no unique identity. They all wear the same uniform. They all offer the same banal greetings, "Under His eye," "Praise be," "May the Lord Open." They live to be impregnated by a callous Commander who has taken away all of their meaning as a person of choices, depth, and personal growth. They are nothing but a worn receptacle.

Offred, whose husband and young daughter lived in blissful unity and had established a home of genuine love and nurture, is overcome with the burden of her existence. When she attempts to fight the depravity of her situation, her self-worth is crushed by the cruelty of those in charge of her. The Commander’s wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), is a vengeful and bitter woman who resents everything in Offred’s person. Her treatment of Offred is vicious.

Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), is over the girls in the re-education center they first enter where she forces on them trite slogans, Biblical quotes, and a primitive ideology of subservience, surrender, and condescension. Her manner is so offensive it is often difficult to watch.

There is a mortifying history in this country, and across the world, of the mistreatment of women. We often fail to in any significant way see their endless courage, the deeper beauty of their spirits, the intelligence they have always possessed often greater than any man’s, and the profound power of their ability to bring children into the world.

There is a line in one of the episodes where Offred says, “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

Women have had to work at ignoring the petty treatment of them ever since Eve walked out of the Garden. There have been times when some refused to quietly accept the hypocrisy of men and raged against the inequities between them. They were often met with overwhelming resentment and hostility, sometimes even by other women.

Today, women are fighting back, acknowledging their worth, standing up for their fair share. They have always been at the front of revolutions. The world owes them a giant debt of gratitude and reverence. As men, we must admit, they are unquestionably our equals. And often, better than the best days in our own humanity.

Novelist Anais Nin wrote, “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”

That’s a future we all could live in. And the chances of it being beautiful and powerful are extraordinary.

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The Unclad Soul

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