No, 'The Handmaid’s Tale' Is Not 'Unexpectedly Timely'

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-25/no-the-handmaid-s-tale-is-not-unexpectedly-timely

by LeeHwang • 9 years ago

18 18 9 years ago

angersock5• 9 years ago

Concluding paragraph sums it up nicely:

There is nothing wrong with enjoying implausibilities on a screen or page. But there is something very wrong with hysterically declaring that those things are reality. That risks confusion so we will not notice the real dystopia rising -- or the rest of the world will be too tired of our cries to hear any warnings we shout.

lj3• 9 years ago

When entertainment is taken for reality, it has jumped the narrow gap from escapism to propaganda.

BEEdwards• 9 years ago

I agree with the conclusion, but this authors "I'm so smart and mature and over it" opening made me roll my eyes.

chillingeffect• 9 years ago

Part I

After completing a rereading, I am interested to see the show.

Isn't it possible the show is different from the book? With updates that resemble the last 5 years? How can this author purport to not find resemeblances when they haven't even watched the show, only re-read the book. I thank her for the comparison with the book, but I don't think it's what all those people calling Handmaid's Tale are referring to.

Not that I don't wish the writer was correct- it's just that it's highly likely people are comparing the show with today's society and not the book.

Having read the book, some of the most vivid scenes to me were the hermetic, sterile sex and hyperpatriarchy. Perhaps those are the elements modern people are comparing to modern day? Again, even though I dislike Atwood's material (I agree with McArdle here, it's a way too concentrated and cherry-picked collage of dystopian elements) and don't believe the patriarchy is as deeply embedded as my facebook friends, I can absolutely see why people would say elements from the story relate to today.

McArdle however seems to be comparing the totality of the story to today and saying, "no, not 100% of it is true."

Part II (all sources from Wikipedia)

On the historical elements, McArdle writes: > a careful student of history would note that a decade after the Reichstag fire, most of German society still looked pretty much like it had in 1925.

So is she saying Germany of 1943 resembled Germany of 1925? She writes: > they didn’t gut-renovate the economy, wipe out all religions that competed with the state, and completely reorganize society in the space of a few years;

  27 February 1933: Reichstag Fire
  9–10 November 1938: Kristallnacht
  May 1940  Auschwitz I was first constructed to hold Polish political prisoners, who began to arrive in May 1940
   From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe

I find it hard to swallow that Germany of 1925 resembles Germany of 1943, when the persecution of Jews, blacks, homosexuals and gypsies was in full swing. Yes and there was a World War going on. Yes, not all religions were wiped out, but how could Germany of 1943 possibly resemble 1925? Is she focusing on the idea that the "culture" was similar and people still got married and had kids? Amdist the war, the Final Solution and even a major eugenics program including sterilization and euthansia, life was normal?

I find McArdle playing a contrarian, even hipster role here, denying resemblances between the story and modern reality. Not that I am pushing hard for the resemblances, but with my superficial research and recall of history and the story, I'm finding major problems with this review.

angersock5• 9 years ago

Amdist the war, the Final Solution and even a major eugenics program including sterilization and euthansia, life was normal?

Why is this hard to believe? That's part of the horror of it, right? These folks were withdrawn from society and dealt with out of the sight of the majority of citizens.

WillyOnWheels• 9 years ago

The Hulu series is well written. The colors are amazing.

I think it's perfectly valid to see some parallels in current society with the dystopian society in The Handmaid's Tale. The US has a vice president who doesn't allow himself to have dinner with a woman he's not married to. The President and his team make statements to the media every day that would have been hard to predict in the most outlandish dystopian novels.

It's just a TV show.

I am sad that Elizabeth Moss is a Scientologist!

tptacek4• 9 years ago

This is a pretty stupid McArdle column.

McArdle has decided, on behalf of the entirety of pop culture, than when critics refer to the message behind THT as "timely", they mean "THT is a warning about impending theocracy in North America". In fact, in sampling 3 reviews from the front page of Google that used the word "timely", all of them made the far more obvious connection: between THT and concerns about misogyny and sexism, a huge feature of the 2016 election.

Further, McArdle's attempt to knock back the idea that the overall story of THT is something out of 1992† is incoherent and actually pretty fatuous.

Consider: McArdle goes out of her way to observe that Orwell --- to her the only realistic dystopian fiction writer --- cribbed details from communist dictatorships in the USSR and China. That 1984 doesn't talk about (what she perceives to be) a credible future for the United States is excusable, because she can't write a takedown of George Orwell.

Now consider: Islamic State didn't exist in 1985, and in fact few people in the west appreciated the toll Islamic theocracy took on women in the middle east. But substitute Wahhabism for fundamentalist neo-Puritan Christianity, and a whole lot of THT seems uncannily predictive, right down to the public execution of gay people and members of other Islamic religions. Remember, Winston Smith's story took place in London, not Moscow.

If McArdle was just criticizing a TV show, I wouldn't care. But, by subtext, she's attempting to diminish the potency of the book (the book, by the way, is even more biting than the show, which strips away a lot of the systemic racism of the book's Gilead). McArdle isn't always full of it; sometimes she writes some interesting things. This isn't one of those times.

† Note to McArdle: Suzanne Vega is still recording albums; she didn't stop existing when you stopped listening.

pvg2• 9 years ago

Islamic State didn't exist in 1985, and in fact few people in the west appreciated the toll Islamic theocracy took on women in the middle east.

That doesn't sound quite right. The Iranian revolution was recent and a direct influence on Atwood's writing.

tptacek4• 9 years ago

Oh, that's a good point! Good thing Bloomberg doesn't publish my comments as columns. :)

My comment could have been about 60% shorter if I just observed that, like Orwell's commentary about how the repressive undercurrents of Soviet Communism could portend things about authoritarianism in the west, The Handmaid's Tale is a pretty obvious device suggesting that the Iranian Revolution "can happen here".

Which, of course, is an observation banal apparently high school kids get assigned essays on it. Go me, for not noticing.

angersock5• 9 years ago

And, of course, 1984 is drawn from Soviet communism, but not "about" communism.

I wouldn't say that 1984 is actually drawn from Soviet communism any more than it reflected the overall trend of the times towards ever-more-centralized government...a trend visible in both Britain and the United States at the time.

It was more a complaint about nationalism and centralization ( http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwe... ) and police states than a comment on the Soviet system.

Also, if you "don't really follow any of this", I think you're being facetious or willfully dense. Let's try again. You claimed:

in fact, THT's dystopia is more relevant today than Orwell's was or is.

I claim that you are incorrect in this, to a borderline hysterical degree. You say that the THT is more relevant, when 1984 actually features a lot of things that have come to pass and will continue to pass.

Compared to the future sketched in THT, we do not have Old Testament class hierarchies and uniforms. We do not have women being completely unpersoned by the .gov for not bearing children. We do not have the Constitution any more likely being suspended in any meaningful way than we did 16 years ago. We do not keep an underclass of women for breeding purposes. We do not ban women from reading or writing or playing Scrabble. We do not prevent women from voting. We do not prevent women from owning property. We have not rounded up African-Americans for forced relocation. We have not purged Catholics, Jews, or Muslims. We do not execute homosexuals. We do not enslave women.

Now, looking over at things that have actually come to pass from 1984, we have: Secret government torture rooms (Guantanamo Bay, and your own city's black sites). Televisions with two-way cameras (Samsung smart TVs, in this case) surveilling owners. Effect two-minutes-hate of America's enemies over on Fox News (or the Left's or Right's enemies if you read Twitter) every day. History being changed and edited electronically (Wikipedia edit wars and other operations). An ever-expanding lower class, Orwell's proles or what people who don't live in affluent neighborhoods might call the poor, kept asleep with booze and drugs and sexual imagery and vice. A permanent state of military conflict justifying the state security apparatus of every major player.

It's pretty obvious that 1984 is the more relevant dystopia today, tptacek. Would you prefer to elaborate on why you think that this is not the case?

(there are other, more appropriate future sketches than either of those two novels, but they aren't being discussed here)

dang• 9 years ago

Would you please not post ideological blather here? This is not substantive discussion.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14231623 and marked it off-topic.

pottersbasilisk• 9 years ago

For my own education, Im not sure I understand why tptaceks comment was not considered ideological blather and this one was.

angersock5• 9 years ago

As opposed to the well-written and reasoned post by tptacek?

C'mon, man, this is sloppy moderation and you know it.

No, 'The Handmaid’s Tale' Is Not 'Unexpectedly Timely'

Related Stories