Editor’s Note: This is one of several blog entries on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. For the first in the series, go here.

The Handmaid’s Tale was one of many texts which, when I finally read it, turned out to be very different from what right-wing religious educators had led me to expect. Extrapolating from muttering (male) disapproval, I had conjured vague and terrible antics of “sexual revolution,” women tearing themselves away from virtuous domesticity, turning on Christianity, probably taking the Pill and having abortions and, worst of all, enjoying sex too much.

Obviously, nothing at all like Atwood’s novel, in which the protagonist is subjected to depersonalizing, utilitarian sex as a kind of stand-in for her master’s infertile wife, her sexuality commodified not for pleasure but for reproduction, in a politically mandated surrogate motherhood which entails the utter erasure of the woman as anything other than a reproductive function. Her past relationships are wiped out, her real family torn apart.

She is the victim of a sexual assault that is no less heinous for being legal, and for the purposes of reproduction instead of sexual frisson. Sex is presented in this story as potentially frightening, and not in an orgiastic context, but in a relation of utility.

(We women always knew that it can be frightening, in this context).

The relationships that permit survival of the human amidst this dehumanization are fundamentally those of “philia.” The erotic has been abolished from the public scene (which means, of course, it thrives wickedly in secret corners).

In the right-wing religious circles where pearls are clutched over books like The Handmaid’s Tale, it is customary to criticize contraception as a “separation of the unitive from the procreative.” I am surprised that the critics of The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t see that this was exactly what was going on in the story. It’s just that, instead of the end goal being pleasure, the end goal is procreation.

I am left wondering whether the critics of the text ever read it, or if they did, whether they understood it at all.

Because, for all its flaws (predictability, insufficiently developed character) the story is deeply moral. Not in the sense of “moralizing,” but in the sense of exploring how, amidst the intersections of power, desire, and market commodification, the human negotiates survival. It shows how, when the personal is reduced to the usable, market forces relativize human dignity. But we survive.

We all knew it’s wrong to commodify the human, right? Anyone familiar with slave narratives, for instance, can point to just how terrible a violation this is. We know better now – but, slavery was once considered normal or natural. What that we consider natural and normal now might we later look back on as moral travesty? And, even now, we forget that what horrifies us when it happens to White women in Atwood’s novel was standard fare for Black women in the slave states.

The Handmaid’s Tale – and reactions to it – reveals to us just how accepting our culture is of the commodification of female fertility. This commodification is written into our history and literature. Consider, as an overt instance, the sequence of wives of Henry VIII. Written into the socio-economic marriage code was an expectation of fertility, as the capital a woman brings to the contract. This expectation continues today: in some religious circles, with the denigration of women who have chosen not to be mothers, or who opt for smaller family size; in the secular neoliberal market, with the commodification of the fertility of surrogate mothers.

Consider our mythologies. The feminine, in the lexicon of archetype, is reduced to the virgin, the mother, or the crone. In the former, female fertility is kept walled-off, but it is a walled-off-ness that is “for” the male gaze, not “for” the woman herself as person. In the latter, the Divine Feminine is celebrated for her fecundity, earth-goddess, Gaia-Tellus, fruitful and abundant. Neo-pagan devotees of the Mother Earth Goddess are wise to point out that you cannot reduce women to motherhood:
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Not all women are mothers, or want to be mothers, and pregnancy and birth are not the only forms of creativity open to women. However, everyone — female and male — has had a mother, and we are acculturated to desire a good mother.

It is also noteworthy that in the tradition of mother-goddess devotion, the elevation and power of the creative feminine contrast sharply with the degradation to mere utility of the fertile female in a market-driven civilization. Thus, too, chthonic and elemental interweavings render the Crone a figure of power, wisdom, and pride – as opposed to the contemporary “old maid” archetype, the woman passed her expiration date, her virginity no longer of value because unused and unclaimed (as de Beauvoir points out, connected also with archetypal terrors of dark places and dusty attics).

But even with this empowering ritualized approach, we can’t escape from the reality that women are being defined through the use made of reproductive organs. In the case of masculine archetypes – warrior/knight, mage/sage, trickster – the emphasis is on a larger sphere of action in the world.

And we don’t notice this distinction so much, until it is cast into a dystopian scenario in which the commodity value of female fertility has risen to peak desirability, because of severely diminished supply.

It would be a mistake to disregard this detail in The Handmaid’s Tale: that the oppressive and dehumanizing service into which Offred is pressed is not something simply invented out of thin air, as a way to keep women subjugated, just for fun. The emphasis, in most summaries, is on the repressive powers of fundamentalist religion. But simply to focus on this is to miss the point that it is not simply fundamentalism, but fundamentalism allied with capitalism that poses the menace.

Offred is subjugated and utilized by the Commander and his wife because of market forces: fertile women are rare. Rarity ups the market value (which is not the same as personal value, clearly). And here again I am puzzling as to why anyone thinks this is a bad book (other than the sex scenes, which are anything but salacious – painful, rather). At no point does the narrative in The Handmaid’s Tale depict female fertility as something negligible or ideally avoided. Quite the contrary, it shows just how heavily civilization as such depends on the capacity of the female to reproduce.

Bracket out this story. Imagine that suddenly everyone realized just how much they depend on our wombs and vaginas, for the survival of civilization itself. One might imagine that the recognition of such stark dependency would lead to a re-envisioning of the female as powerful, creative, the source of life. Phallic power? Ha. The power to create a whole new human and squeeze it forth bloodily into the world is far more potent, sacred, and priestly.

But that’s not what happens in the story.

It’s not what happens in real life, either.

Go figure.

And the diminished supply of female fertility is itself the result of a commodification of the eco-system that has brought about such dire pollution as to render most women infertile. Looping back to the topic of the mother-goddess: here we have once again a connection between the fertile earth and the fertile woman, but it is a dire one. The brunt of what is done to the natural world is most forcibly felt by women. Issues of environmental ethics, then, are closely connected with those of reproductive ethics and the whole sphere of women’s rights. The suffering of the earth is the suffering of women. The disruption of right relation with nature leads to a disruption of right relation between persons:

“If dominating and destructive relations to the earth are interrelated with gender, class, and racial domination, then a healed relation to the earth cannot come about simply through technological ‘fixes’. It demands a social reordering to bring about just and loving interrelationship between men and women, between races and nations, between groups presently stratified into social classes, manifest in great disparities of access to the means of life. In short, it demands that we must speak of eco-justice, and not simply of domination of the earth as though that happened unrelated to social domination.”

                                   Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing

There is something fundamentally amiss in a culture that values a woman only for her capacity to give birth, but denies her the prestige and ritual power due to this capacity, and this wrongness is reflected in polluted eco-systems, fractured relationships. The experience of a woman who is regarded in this way is a little like what Heidegger referred to as the technological attitude towards being as “standing reserve” – “ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so it may be on call for a further ordering” (The Question Concerning Technology). I don’t just mean on a metaphysical level. I mean daily, practical experience of women feeling that they are expected to be silent and unobtrusive until called for (to serve the tea, to birth the baby, to provide sexual satisfaction). This “standing by” capacity is represented, in The Handmaid’s Tale, in the clothing the women are obligated to wear. They stand out in their red cloaks, but not as individuals, and their faces are hidden. Even their names are lost. They are reduced to the possession of the man who will impregnate them, just as the land is reduced to the possession of the corporations that seek to profit from it. The BEING of the woman-herself – of the soil, lake, tree, bird itself – is obliterated.
Rebecca Bratten Weiss is a lecturer in literature and philosophy, with an emphasis on women’s issues and ecology.   As well as teaching, she writes fiction and poetry, and runs a small eco-gardening business.