The Handmaid's Tale: Did She Actually Read It?

This was a couple of years back at a local pro-life protest when the The Handmaid's Tale television show was all the rage among certain subgroups in our society. Similarly costumed women have shown up at other events nationally.

In this case, our little Handmaid wandered freely through the more than 100 pro-lifers, trying to debate, chanting, and so on, obviously unafraid us; we are not the violent ones after all.

Not sure if she was trying to get a rise out of people. It didn't work. A few briefly debated. More just smiled and nodded and wished her well.

Eventually, she left.

Maybe she thought there would be more red capes? Or media (which tends to ignore us no matter how many of us pro-lifers show up)?

There's certain irony in that she targeted a largely Catholic event to try to make her point, confusedly linking us to the men oppressing women in the novel. Indeed, Catholics were among the groups that the Sons of Jacob targeted because they were threats to their control. Although it's not made clear why, I suspect part of the reason was that Catholics and some other religious groups would not go along with the oppression of women as envisioned in Margaret Atwood's dystopia.

As Atwood herself noted in the preface to a 2017 edition of the novel, "(In The Handmaid's Tale) the Catholics and the Baptists are being targeted and eliminated."

The fuller quotation is:

"In the book, the dominant "religion is moving to seize doctrinal control, and religious denominations familiar to us are being annihilated. Just as the Bolsheviks destroyed the Mensheviks in order to eliminated political competition, and Red Guard factions fought to the death against one another, the Catholics and the Baptists are being targeted and eliminated. The Quakers have gone underground, and are running an escape route to Canada, as - I suspect - they would."

In they novel, she writes:

"There are three new bodies on the Wall. One is a priest, still wearing a black cassock. That's been put on him, for the trial, even though they gave up wearing those years ago, when the sect wars first began; cassocks made them too conspicuous."

(Hmm, sort of like the priests sneaking into England in disguise during the persecutions of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.)

More from the novel:

"The Appalachian Highlands, says the voice over, where the Angels of the Apocalypse, Fourth Division, are smoking out a pocket of Baptist guerrillas, with air support from the Twenty-first Battalion of the Angels of Light."

"'Five members of the heretical sect of Quakers have been arrested,' he says, smiling blandly, 'And more arrests are anticipated,'

"Two of the Quakers appear onscreen, a man and a woman. They look terrified, but they're trying to preserve some dignity in front of the camera. The man has a large dark mark on his forehead; the woman's veil has been torn off;, and her hair falls in strands over her face. Both of them are about fifty."

"Then to the Wall. Only two hanging on it today; One Catholic, not a priest though, placarded with an upside-down cross, and some other sect I don't recognize."

"Sometimes though, for the women, they're for a nun who recants. Most of that happened earlier, when they were rounding them up, but they still unearth a few these days, dredge then up from underground, where they've been hiding, like moles. They have that look about them too: weak-eyed, stunned by too much light. The old ones they send off to the Colonies right away, but the young fertile ones they try to convert, and when they succeed we all come here to watch them go through the ceremony, renounce their celibacy, sacrifice it to the common good."

Anyway, that gives you an idea what's in the book.

Catholics and Baptists and Quakers, oh my.

I wonder if our little counter-protesting Handmaid actually read the book? Maybe. But more likely she was just influenced by the television show and the example of others.

Haven't seen her since.

Pax et bonum