The Handmaid's Tale - The Graphic Novel!

When I first read The Handmaid's Tale long ago, soon after it was published in the 1980's I was startled by its vision of a possible future for the United States. I've even taught the book a time or two over the decades. But I was convinced it was sufficiently distant and the chances of it really happening so remote that I took as a mere allegory for the real struggles, women had at the time in achieving a level status in society. Boy was I wrong. 

Having quashed a woman's constitutional right to control her own body and determine for herself what will happen to her in the only life she has, the "Conservatives" (they are actually "Reactionaries", but no one calls them that.) who are ascendant in some states (mine included) swiftly took that right away as soon as the States became responsible to protect it. Since then, they have gone further in some states, and now the struggle is to protect a woman's access to any kind of birth control and consequently much needed medical assistance. There is even talk of outlawing recreational sex, though no one takes that seriously. (I've learned to take everything they say seriously.) 

It is in that new present-day context that I read The Hand Maid's Tale - The Graphic Novel. I have not watched any of the television series, so all I know about Margaret Atwood's cautionary story is what she herself has put into words. I has been long enough since I read the novel that his adaptation still has moments of freshness, as details I'd forgotten fall into place. The story is adapted by Renee Nault, and it's important that it's a woman who adapts this story. Not that a man couldn't have done it well, but no man could share the feelings which run to the core of this nightmarish tale of a not-that-distant dystopian future. 

For those who might not know, let me describe what the story is. It's the personal document of one woman who we know as "Offred", but that is meaningly since women of Gilead are forbidden to have names. Her name means "Of Fred" and indicates that she has no identity apart from the man who once a month ritualistically tries to impregnate her. Due to war and toxins birth rates in the world have declined and many cannot have children. For wives of important and rich men this means that they are supplied surrogates who live in the home of the wealthy and wear only red and speak rarely if ever, and serve effectively as an alternative womb. These tragic women are stripped of identity and freedom to choose. They are sex slaves in an aberrational Christian cult which runs "Gilead" or what is today Maine and surrounding states. We only glimpses of the larger world because glimpses are all that Offred has. She once had a husband and a child, but those things were taken from her by the repressive state regime which uses the Bible to justify its perversions. 

As the novel and this graphic adaptation make clear, this is not a story which will have a happy ending or really an ending at all. We are privy to the thoughts, memories, hopes and fears of one woman for a period of time and then no more, save for a coda ending which suggests that Gilead must have passed into the history books as all societies must. The artwork by Nault in this story is tenderly rendered and is designed to propel the story and not to exist on its own. 

If you want an insight into what some of the more loathsome Christian cultists desire for society today as I write this, take a look at The Handmaid's Tale and you might get a terrifying glimpse. 

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