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I read a report recently that US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth shared a CNN video featuring two Christian nationalist pastors, Douglas Wilson and Toby Sumpter, in which they expressed their desire for the United States to become a 'Christian nation' and floated the idea that women shouldn't have their own vote. As Sumpter put it: In my ideal society, we would vote as households. I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household. Excitedly, the following morning, I showed the report to my English class. They immediately understood why. We are currently studying Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale , a dystopian novel recounting the establishing of the Republic of Gilead through the eyes of the narrator, a woman named 'Offred' — a name that suggests both possession (she is 'of' or belongs to 'Fred') and sacrifice (as in 'offered'). We have spent time examining Atwood's use of analepsis in the novel: what life was like before the creation of Gilead and during the early days of the theocratic dictatorship. We have read Offred's testimony, the witness she has borne to the insidious erosion of the rights of women and to the convergence of environmental disaster, social upheaval and economic turmoil that give rise to Gilead itself. Margaret Atwood attending the Rome International Festival, at Colosseum Archaeological Park on 5 July 2023 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Maria Moratti / Getty Images) The unmistakable effect of Atwood's use of analepsis is to make the novel's past feel eerily like our present. This was undoubtedly her intention. In her 2017 'Introduction' to the edition we are using, she said she didn't want The Handmaid's Tale to veer 'into allegory and a lack of plausibility': If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the 'nightmare' of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. Atwood wrote the novel in 1984 while she was living in West Berlin. It's a part of Europe that knows just how easily liberal democracy can slide into tyranny. But she wanted to convince North American readers who insist such a slide 'can't happen here' that it can, by constructing the Republic of Gilead 'on a foundation of the 17th-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew'. In a recent interview, Atwood reiterates this point: that American politics tends to swing like a pendulum between fundamentalist theocracy and egalitarian democracy. Even those Puritans who fled religious persecution and established a new colony in Massachusetts — where The Handmaid's Tale is set — 'did it to get religious freedom for themselves, but not for anyone else. One of the next things they did was to persecute Quakers.' The idea of a Christian nation — that is, a nation with not only a divine purpose but a divine mandate — undergirds the notion of American exceptionalism. That's why religion is always lurking in the background of US politics, and religious texts like the Bible are so co-opted in the interests of political power. US President Donald Trump poses with a Bible outside St John's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, on Monday, 1 June 2020. (Photograph by Shawn Thew / EPA / Bloomberg via Getty Images) As one of my students pointed out, Atwood's novel is not anti-religion; she just doesn't like this kind of religion. This student was looking at the point in the novel when Offred offers up her own version of the Lord's Prayer, privately, humbly, earnestly. There is nothing exceptional about Offred. Atwood is at pains to show how compromised her protagonist is, how fallible, how fallen. As much as she does not want to, she must accept the world she inhabits. As the novel progresses, we see how both her transgressions (small acts of rebellion) and her obedience to the state reveal her personal struggle to survive and retain what is left of herself, and her past, as the future grows increasingly bleak. But the future is not entirely bleak. One of the more remarkable parts of The Handmaid's Tale is the 'Historical Note' that appears as a kind of appendix to the novel itself. It is presented as the transcript of an international symposium on Gileadean Studies, hosted in the year 2195. This not only amplifies the satirical and speculative nature of the text, but by treating Gilead as something that is now studied, something that no longer exists, it offers the reader a glimmer of hope. This hope, however, does not extend to Offred. We don't know what happens to her at the end of the novel, aside from the fact that she somehow managed to record her experiences on tapes. The hope, of course, is that regimes like Gilead may come and they may ruin lives, but like Shelley's Ozymandias , they will crumble, overtaken by the sands of time. Atwood's clever use of place as palimpsest is a reminder of this — as a high school gymnasium becomes the re-education centre for women and Harvard University's walls are used to display the bodies of the recently executed enemies of the state. While the buildings may remain, their uses will change as regimes and ideologies do. The philosophy department at Harvard University. (Diana Haronis / Contributor / Moment Mobile / Getty Images) It has been five years since I last taught The Handmaid's Tale . The change that has taken place in the lives of my students has been extraordinary. They have witnessed a global pandemic, the rise of AI, continued environmental degradation, social upheaval, political and economic turmoil. Five years ago, my students didn't accept that the world they had inherited was something they could do nothing to change. Five years ago, students were walking out of school as part of the worldwide School Strike 4 Climate; they were talking, reading and writing like people who believed they could make a difference. When I go back and read my students' work from five years ago, they wrote about feeling 'frustrated' or 'worried' about the decisions made by older generations regarding the environment, but there was still a hope for change. They wrote about the negative effects of social media, but that the 'form of control' over their lives hadn't reached the 'extent' it had in The Handmaid's Tale . They also wrote about how the issues surrounding the control of women, while concerning, had not reached the level of 'theocracy and oppressive regimes' in their experience. And while, thankfully, people are still taking to the streets, there is a pervasive sense that the world has inexorably shifted — as Atwood suggests, the pendulum has swung. Copies of Margaret Atwood's book on display during the Interactive 'The Handmaid's Tale' Art Installation opening at The High Line on 26 April 2017 in New York City. (Photo by J. Countess / Getty Images) Five years later and I can't help but feel the mood has changed. Now, my students are talking about rewriting the 'Historical Notes' appendix and substituting our world for that of fictional Gilead. If American politics has re-embraced divine exceptionalism as justification for its actions in the world, then could it be that many of us here in Australia are turning to acceptionalism ? It seems that — like Voltaire's Candide , who lampooned Leibniz's philosophy — 'all is for the best, in this the best of all possible worlds'. Maybe our cognitive dissonance has led us to accept that this is the best of all possible worlds, even though we know it is not. In reading and teaching Atwood's novel, it has forced me to ask myself some challenging questions: Are we at risk of accepting pernicious ideologies uncritically? Have we come to believe that the climate catastrophe and environmental degradation are irrevocable, and are therefore happy to burn the whole house down? Have we, as women, tacitly acquiesced to the belief that we really are inferior men, that we don't have the faculty or ability for leadership or decision making? Have we all simply accepted a version of the unknown and unknowable future that leads us to despair and inaction in the present? There's nothing exceptional about Australian acceptionalism. It is parochial and quotidian — but that's the point. The danger is that we will simply do nothing about anything; we will simply go on living our lives. I'm then reminded of the way Offred recollects her life before the Republic of Gilead: Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantly: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. Siân Lim teaches high school English on Gadigal Country.
