Although Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is often described as a work of feminist literature there are no heroic, or even admirable female characters. Instead, the cast of female characters serves as an inventory of all the ways a woman can fail in the context of oppression.

The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a world in which women are highly subservient to men, some even to the point that they only exist to fulfill the biological process of reproduction necessary for the survival of the species. Such is the lot of our protagonist Offred, and it is from her we get our entire perspective of the civilization of Gilead, a society in which she and many other women are very much prisoners and slaves.

(I have a different edition of the book, so I apologize that the page numbers are off.)

We’ve said a lot already about some pretty powerful issues that can’t be ignored in this book. Here, I think I’d like to talk about something that isn’t perhaps as critical to understanding the novel’s implications for our own real, modern world, at first glance or otherwise. I’m interested in how the novel deal with empathy; as a human characteristic, as a potentially gendered characteristic, its sentimentalization (or lack thereof), and the ways that these understandings of empathy might inform society, dystopic or otherwise.

Given that this was the first week the book and the movie could be so directly contrasted, the differences between literary and Hollywood conceptions of what makes a good story really struck me. My generalized conclusion: Hollywood is SO LAME!

To me, Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” is, in large part, a cautionary tale about the dangers of apathy. It is difficult to see the Republic of Gilead as anything but a totalitarian regime, with only the interests of the very few at heart. Women are entirely subservient to men. The men they service are limited to the aging and supposedly infertile commanders, leaving the majority of men with very little contact with women. Basically, the majority of the population is disenfranchised.