7-28-24
It’s been almost four months since I got Hekate! As you may have seen on my story, she’s been gaining weight nicely after being very small as a stray. I’ve also been told recently that her tummy nips may be as noticeable as they are (see picture below) because she might have given birth on the street! There’s so much about Hekate’s former life I’ll never know.
This week, I have a positive book review to share! I’ve been rereading The Handmaid’s Tale, partially because of the novel I’m writing about pregnancy and fascism, but also because Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite writers. The Blind Assassin is my absolute favorite by her, but Handmaid is actually much better than I remembered. First, though, let’s address the discourse.
The Handmaid’s Tale is criticized as a piece of literature to rally around because its world is positioned as speculative—when the reproductive rights of people of color, disabled people, queer people, etc., have already been infringed many times in this nation’s history. The book is only sci-fi, critics note, to white women—and not entirely to them either. Atwood in fact approaches the novel with a profound sense of historicity—she’s said before that every detail in the book is taken from a real-life precedent. The whole point of the book is that atrocities have happened before, they are happening now, and they will happen again.
Consider the very first sentence of The Handmaid’s Tale: “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.” The Handmaid describes being able to smell the sweat of teenagers through the ages; the music of their school dances is “a palimpsest of unheard sound.” Most buildings the Handmaid enters have such a history, and Atwood is always reminding us of both the nostalgic and ugly aspects of those histories. Atwood also adds on an epilogue to Handmaid that frames the entire story as research material for a future history symposium, where a later, at least temporarily more progressive society asks itself how the horrors of Gilead could have happened.
It’s true, though, that this aspect of the book is less obvious. I would argue Atwood definitely knew the often-racially-inflected historical precedent of her book, but I also know the average white cis woman might have no idea, using Handmaid as their main form of political education/ engagement without bothering to even understand it. Like many works with annoying fandoms, Handmaid is better than its most vocal proponents make it seem.
The first recommended book in my Substack’s short history! 7-28-24 will be a day to remember.
😍