Episode 3 of The Custom House: Theocracy & Dystopia in The Handmaid's Tale

The Custom House - Theocracy and Dystopia (Extended Conversation w/Purnima Bose)View Edit

Artist: WFHB
Title: Theocracy and Dystopia (Extended Conversation w/Purnima Bose)
Album: The Custom House
Comment: copyright (c) 2013 Bloomington
Length: 32:36 minutes (29.85 MB)

This week we discuss how Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale demonstrates how easily modern America might become a truly repressive theocracy. The extended cut includes a review of the plot of the novel as well as a discussion of the cultural milieu in which Atwood composed the narrative. There is also a brief discussion of how the movie adaptation with Natasha Richardson, Aidan Quinn and Robert Duvall alters the book's ending.

America is a land founded on commercial ventures intended to gather in the riches of a virgin land but also upon the Puritan plan to set up a theocratic state. In this episode of The Custom House Purnima Bose, a professor in the International Studies Department of Indiana University, discusses how Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale demonstrates how easily modern America can become a truly repressive theocracy.

My Radio Show and Podcast: The Custom House

I am hosting a radio show and podcast on WFHB, community radio, in Bloomington, IN, called The Custom House that will air on Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. through August and continue as a podcast.

The first show aired June 1 and can be downloaded here: Babo's Razor.  This show is about our inability to see through our cultural "blinders" even when there's a razor at our throats.  The fiction that illustrates this for us is Melville's novella, "Benito Cereno."  My guest was Jonathan Elmer of Indiana University.

The second show aired June 8 (has yet to be posted) and featured biographer Christoph Irmscher.  We discussed his book Louis Agassiz: The Creator of American Science.  In one part of our discussion Irmscher details a letter that Agassiz wrote discussing Psalm 8 saying the Psalmist's view is in error as he did not know that the mind of the scientist would bring Man closer to realizing God in himself.

This weekend, June 15, I'll talk with Purnima Bose (International Studies at IU) about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.  We examine the "template" of theocratic totalitarianism that lives just below the surface in America.

Much more to come including shows on photography, environmentalism (Rachel Carson), moral machines, Sylvia Plath, Robert Browning, Autobiography, Herman Melville (Hershel Parker), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), Women and the Law and much more.

One and One and One and One

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale perhaps offers the best explication of thinking that seems specific to gender.  That is, men think this way, women think that way.

Women can't add, he once said, jokingly.  When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. 

What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. 

Just one and one and one and one, he said.

This is dropped here but is returned to later .

What the Commander said is true.  One and one and one and one doesn't equal four.  Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together.  They cannot be exchanged, one for the other.  They cannot replace each other.

This is illustrated by a flashback to the time just before Offred (the handmaid is "Of Fred"--she will carry his child) is captured and loses her husband and her own little girl (never knowing what has become of them).  The three of them are preparing to make a run for the border and in considering this they wonder what they can do with the cat.  They're supposed to be pretending to a day trip for a picnic and so should not take the cat.  They can't "give the cat away" as that would be suspicious and they can't just leave it outside (set it free) because it would "hang around and mew at the door."

I'll take care of it, Luke said.  And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill.  That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought.  You have to create an it, where none was before.  You do that first, in your head and then you make it real.  So that's how they do it, I thought.  I seem never to have known that before.

A calculus is not a good.  A cat becomes an it.  A woman becomes a handmaid--an it, a pet, a replaceable one adding up to the way it should be according to...whom?

There is another section detailing what I'd call a "solidifying" of "being."  Offred flashes back to memories with her mother--her mother's actions and conversation with friends that Offred either participates in or just listens to--and in one she is considering baby pictures.

You were a wanted child, God knows, she would say at other moments, linger over the photo albums in which she had me framed; these albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit by some plague.  She would say this a little regretfully, as though I hadn't turned out entirely as she'd expected.  

(The reference to "replicas" and "plague" seem telling here.)

These too are kinds of one and one and one and one...that add up to one.  But each one, each fresh capture of the being in one moment will be replaced by another.  It is as if this baby might become this imagining (as I expect); no, it's THIS baby that will become THAT child--the one I don't expect...or something else maybe?  Each photo a future superseded by the next photo.  But that then will be superseded by the REAL human person you begin to solidify into.  No need for another picture of what might be; pictures now become representations of what is (will be) lost.

One and one and one and one...