| abstract | - The setting is the new Republic of Gilead, a country which is at war, where the roles of society are firmly defined, and women have no rights -- especially not handmaids. Our protagonist is a woman who has been trained to be a handmaid, one who conceives and gives birth on behalf of those who are officially wives. A sharp-eyed reader might catch her name in the first chapter; the rest of us just know her as Offred, the name she uses as long as she's with Fred and his wife. Handmaids don't get permanent names. She gives a portrait of the society. She can remember before, when women still had rights; her mother was a feminist. She was married, but her husband was married before, which became important. It was a cashless society, so when the republic of Gilead took over, they just wiped out jobs for women and money for women at the same time. When things started getting more oppressive, she and her fella tried to flee, but she got caught; since she had been "living in sin," as her husband divorced his first wife, hence invalidating his marriage with her according to the fundamentalists that took over, she was made a handmaid. It has been about seven years since then, long enough for seven-year-olds not to remember how it was before. AIDS and R-Strain syphilis have made many people sterile; pregnancies are rare, healthy births even rarer. Women are forbidden to read or write; handmaids must wear red and are forbidden to have peripheral vision. It's a simple job; get pregnant, have a live and unmutated birth, try to get along with the family, repeat as necessary. Three failures without a success, and the handmaid is killed or worse. Offred is with a tough family; the husband is a military man, and the wife (who must wear blue) was a singer who used to crusade about women staying at home and being good wives. She is not enjoying her retirement. There are also two "Marthas" who do all the housekeeping. The previous Offred had committed suicide... Offred befriends another handmaid, Ofglen, and eventually learns that she belongs to a resistance movement to fight or flee Gilead. She eventually falls head-over-heels with another of its members. Offred enters a second underground through Fred, who is willing to share extra things with her, things normally forbidden to handmaids, to get extra time with her; its motives are less noble.... Very popular in Anglophone high school English classes, although the confronting adult subject matter leads to a crusade to ban the book every five years or so. Made into a film in 1990 starring the late Natasha Richardson, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway.
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