The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, examines the state and society of women when they are stripped down to being mere reproductive vessels for a male-dominated patriarchy. Whereas this would prompt an analysis through the lens of feminism, much of this has already been done. A similarly useful angle might be analysis of the gendered oppression of women in The Handmaid’s Tale by means of classist and capitalist exploitation. This would borrow from Che Guevara’s Socialism and man in Cuba.
In The Handmaid’s Tale we observe the protagonist and ostensible narrator, Offred, describe a system of oppression that ties in religion with class. The commanders are leaders of the system. According to Marxism the bourgeoisie always debases the proletariat and demotes the proletariat to a position of slavery (Guevara, 1965). Such behaviour is portrayed by
Serna Joy who has Kate bear a child for her as a Handmaid and does not allow Kate to speak to her on equal terms (Atwood, 1986, 6). The kind of interaction between Serena Joy and Kate embodies the distrustful relationship between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The relationship is clearly based on hatred. Further, the society in which the handmaids live is a class-based society in which every class is defined through a certain function, which is captured in the division of labour espoused by capitalist systems (Guevara, 1965). The Aunts, for example, are the class of women assigned to indoctrinate the Handmaids with the beliefs of the bourgeoisie and make them docile (Atwood, 1986). They personify Guevara’s concept of capitalism’s own “big school” where the proletariat is educated to be servile (Guevara, 1965). It is thus clear that the society is, at least, sharply divided by a religious landed bourgeois and a proletariat whose labour–sexual and reproductive labour in the case of the Handmaids–is exploited by this upper class. Even the name of the central character–Offred–is the result of a social practice whereby the name of the Commander that owns the Handmaid (in this case, Fred) is added as a suffix to “Of” to signify ownership and a total alienation of the proletariat from their identity and work in a reduced form of consciousness (Guevara, 1965).
There is additionally a critique of religion as a source of female oppression, and this is spread across The Handmaid’s Tale–the state in which the story occurs (Gilead), is a religious one with no line between Church and State. The result is the use of religion to justify the social practices and actions of the upper class. Some instances include the normalisation of the rape of Handmaids through the use of religiously-veiled language such as “the ceremony” and “Commanders of the Faithful” being the men who are permitted to engage in rape (Atwood, 1986), as well as the use of Biblical epithets (Angels, Marthas, etc.) for classes to denote a sort of religious genesis (and so justification) of the oppressive class-based system in Gilead. The result is the trap of dogma described by Guevara, which in conjunction with the capitalist tendency to deconstruct identities for the service of some deceptive greater good (Guevara, 1965), leads to the use of religion as a tool of the dominant class in Gilead. As the novel laments, “how easy it is to invent a humanity for anyone at all” (Atwood, 1986, 61).
In conclusion, The Handmaid’s Tale captures a powerful intersection of oppressions that contributes to its dystopian status: namely the nexus of capitalist oppression on the grounds of sexual and reproductive labour, gendered oppression, and religious oppression. These together generate a society in which Handmaids like Offred are part of a proletariat that is practically enslaved, persecuted, harassed, and annihilated when their purpose is served.
References:
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1986
Guevara, Che. Socialism and Man in Cuba. 1965