The End of Howard the Handmaid’s Tale

So, the other day I was thinking that I would be doing a lot better with this project if it weren’t for The Economist. Oh, David Cameron and your Big Society; if I didn’t spend so much time reading about it, maybe I’d have tackled Crime and Punishment by now. But we digress.

The Handmaid’s Tale was my second Margaret Atwood; I liked it about as well as I liked The Robber Bride. Which is to say, it was all right. Of course, I’m not a big fan of stories about dystopian near futures (well, any sort of speculative dystopian story; it takes a lot to overcome that for me). Like all good dystopian stories, it actually reveals a lot about what is happening and about our society as it is now, which is always interesting.

In contrast to Hardy’s novel, Atwood’s depicts institutionalized violence against women. Well, Hardy’s does as well, of course, but through the lens of individuals’ actions which are permitted/tolerate/almost encouraged in a society that has institutionalized violence against women, whereas Atwood’s explores state violence against women, primarily in the form of extremely coercive and overt reproductive control, and the ways that creates individual violence against women. The story actually is funnier than this would lead you to believe; it is also very bleak.

I started to have the most incredible moment of deju vu when I started Howards End. Confession time: I must be incredibly ignorant. When I read On Beauty, I had no idea that it was a re-telling/re-imagining of Howards End. Howards End, not surprisingly, focuses the issues through class and to a more limited extent gender. On Beauty adds race (of course, race is not absent from Howards End, but all the characters are white, and Forster isn’t consciously exploring race at all, which says something itself about white privilege).

I’m always fascinated about novels about eccentric families that have a similar make-up to my family (like I Capture the Castle), though in this case that makes me Helen, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Tibby was my favorite sibling in this case.

In terms of the On Beauty parallels, I’m still not sure why Zadie Smith chose this novel or what she wanted to say with that re-telling. It’s very strange. A closer reading of both in comparison is probably warranted. I do wonder what reading them in the wrong order (in a sense) did to my perspective on both.