It took me quite some time to put my finger on what frustrated me about Neuman’s article “‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism and the Handmaid’s Tale“, after all, I agree with most of what Neuman points out in her argument: Atwood’s female characters can be read as symbolic, the personal is political, in every dystopia there is an implicit utopia, and vigilance is the key to staying abreast of rapidly changing political climates and the only way to ensure the world remains safe and free for everyone.
However, there is something that frightens me about reducing characters in dystopic novels to mere symbols. One of the great powers of literature, as we learned last semester, is that it speaks to people’s imaginations, allowing them to put themselves in the shoes of the characters they read about and thus picture themselves in circumstances they had never before imagined. And certainly one of the greatest rhetorical devices in The Handmaid’s Tale is just that- anyone and everyone can relate to Offred. Through Offred’s eyes readers can see all the injustice that happens in Gilead: the commander’s insistence that Gilead has made a huge improvement in the lives of many, Serena Joy’s vindictiveness, the horrors of the Red Centres, the pain of losing loved ones and wondering every day if it is their faces that hide behind blood-stained sacks on salvaging hooks. Even after Offred ceases, as Neuman claims, to be vigilant, readers still share in the terrifying spectacle of the salvaging and experience a chill of fear when discovering Ofglen is no longer the Ofglen she ought to be.
One of the greatest weapons in a dystopia’s arsenal is reducing people to symbols. A child playing happily on a lawn is symbolic of the success of the regime, and of other children, all of whom are surely similarly happy under the government. Hung “gender traitors” or other enemies of the state are symbolic of the regime’s strength, and it’s capacity to destroy those who stand in its way. A pregnant woman in a red dress symbolizes hope that one day there might be a generation of children that no longer remembers infertility, families that never struggle to conceive. The problem with turning people into symbols is that it erases their individuality and denies them the chance to represent themselves as they see themselves. Reducing people to symbols robs them of their story.
The personal is political, but the political is personal too. Reducing Offred to a symbolic warning sign to those of us who become easily complacent in our (relatively) egalitarian times is a denial of her complexity, but it is worse than even that. Reducing Offred’s story to a warning robs the story of the same impact that reading is trying to create. The strength of Offred’s warning comes from her realness- through Offred we see that oppression happens to people like us, pedestrian, fallible, complacent, peaceful, intelligent and curious people who never see grey skies approaching in time to really save themselves. Offred’s complexity is what lends her story credibility, and her unique experience and individuality is what makes her pain unbearable to watch. In the end, a symbolic reading of Offred may be possible, but it also does the very thing that the Gileadian regime was trying to do in the first place: silence a unique voice by reducing it to one attribute of many.