Gavin wondered if anyone had predicted that an Orwellian, totalitarian state might come in a religious guise.
Well the answer’s yes, of course. Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale describes a totalitarian theocracy that specifically (for this is Atwood) oppresses women. She just picked the wrong religion.
Atwood’s novel doesn’t really take on the broader theme of totalitarianism, in the manner of 1984 and other dystopian nightmares, or of theocracy, except in their specific impact on women. She has a particular, feminist, fish to fry; but it’s interesting to hear that before she, perhaps unconvincingly, decided on Christianity as the theocracy of choice, she did consider Islam, in the context of Iran and the then recent Iranian revolution.
Surely the iconography and condition of women in The Handmaid’s Tale are directly read from Islam? In Atwood’s story, women have no property rights, they don’t study, they don’t wear make-up. Sexual expression is tightly regulated and homsexuals are hanged.
Where in the world does this sound like? The USA, the last surviving Enlightenment revolution where freedoms are constitutionally guaranteed, and religion and state rigourously separated? Or, Say Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or the Sudan?
The tendency in recent times by some on the Left to make common cause against the USA with theocratic fascists has coloured my re-reading of Atwood’s book. The Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t intended to be a prediction, and the theocracy was, if you like, a dark satire of Atwood’s projections of American, right-wing, fundamentalist Christianity. I can’t help but feel some irritation at the bien-pensants of the West continually, and safely, kicking out minor and temporary problems whilst before them lies a whole ocean of the traditional Islamic repression of women.
