TV Shows Love – Let's Chat About The Handmaid's Tale

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This TV Show has been around for quite a while, but I hadn't watched it yet as it is not on Netflix, and it was a tiny bit difficult for me to find it; eventually my best friend found the DVDs for me, and I basically devoured both the 2 season inspired by Margaret Atwood's book in less than 2 weeks.

I read the book long time ago (at least 3 years ago) and I remember I liked it very much. One of the best written distopic novels of our time, exactly like Orwell's 1985, The Handmaid's Tale is a novel wanting to shock the reader, pushing them to think, to reflect about where we are going as a society.

The TV show follows more or less precisely the events narrated in the book, so we will focus on the show in this little article. If you hadn't watched it yet, and you plan to do it, I will advise you to when stop reading at a certain point, as this article will not be spoiler free.

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The show is set in a not too far away future, in the USA; or better, what it used to be the USA. In this distopic future, the world we, as humankind, have created is pretty much a disaster: very polluted, moral values almost disappeared, and lifestyle so frenetic and concentrated on work and career that there's no time for family anymore. Women in a particular way have been focusing on work, on making as much money as men, and basically completely destroyed the “angel of the house” vision of them. In doing this though, the birth rate has drastically dropped, and because of pollution, smoke, drugs and bad life habits, more and more often children have been born already dead, or have died very young, making some people think human kind is in danger of extinction.

According to a pretty exstremistic religious group, life in this way has become not tolerable. Women should abandon their egoistic goals, and focus on being mothers, on what they call “women's biological destiny”. This group of people managed to organise an attack (making it pass as a terroristic attack), leading to a war. After the civilian war this extremistic group managed to reach the political power, and created a new republic, called the Republic of Gilead.

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Gilead is a place where the power has a pyramid structure, at the top of which are the Commanders, powerful men which are also religious leaders. According to their religion women have to subdue to men, obey, and not work, not read, not write, but only think of domestic duty, helped by their Martas, which are actually governess.

They have a powerful army on their command, any they forbid everybody from leaving the Republic, killing all the people opposing the government. At the bottom of this pyramid lay the “no women”, the Handmaids. Those are women who, before the war, were adulterous, rebels, gay, but most importantly, fertile. As the fertile rate dropped so much, one of the Commanders' plan is to protect humankind, and so reunited all fertile women and forced them to be used as reproductive tools. Those women have no more rights, must obey their commanders and their wives, and must no oppose their destiny.

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All women trying to escape or refuse to obey, are mutilated, tortured and punished in the most horrible ways. Each of them is assigned to a Commander, who will have sex with them once a month, everytime they can be fertile, in what is called “the Ceremony”, a true act of rape where the Commander has sex with the Handmaid while his sterile wife observes and participates to it. When the girl gets pregnant, she will give birth in the Commander house, feed the baby for the first period, and then she will be sent to another house, to be used by another Commander.

For this reason, those girl cannot use their names anymore, and are given a new name by the government, according to the Commander they are going to serve. As they are only used as tools, and have no rights, they are used as objects, and their name becomes the name of the Commander they serve, marked by the particle of possession: OfGlen, OfJohn, OfWarren, and so on.

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The main character of the story is June, a Handmaid assigned to Commander Fred Waterford, one of the creators of Gilead; her new name though becomes OfFred, which can also be read as “offered”, to mark the fact that the girl is offered to a man to become his reproductive tool. June used to be married and had a daughter. Before the creation of Gilead, when they started to suspect the new political power was becoming more and more dangerous, June and her family tried to escape, but they were caught by the army, and June was taken away. For long time she thought that her husband Luke was dead, but later in the show she finds out he is alive, and this gives her the strength to fight for her freedom and try to escape.

SPOILER ALERT!

At the end of Season 1 June manages to escape, thank to the help of Nick, Commander Waterford driver, who falls in love with her and wants to help her be free again. June gets very close to run away and reach Canada, which still is a free Country and the place where Luke is, but she is found and taken away again.

Life in Gilead is no easy for the Handmaids, especially for a free spirit like June, who refuses to submit. Commander Waterford wife, Serena, is not an easy woman to get along with either. Jelous of her husband, she hates that June has to have sex with him, especially because she feels that Fred likes her. Her hate gets stronger, but at the same time changes, when June gets pregnant. Moreover, Serena is a very smart woman, cultured, who helped her husband to write down the laws of Gilead, and abandoned her status as a free woman to embrace the religious dictatorship of her husband and his allies.

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At the beginning of the series she really doesn't get along with OfFred, and punishes her all the time, but during season 2 they kind of become allies, until Fred finds out that Serena is getting deeper and deeper in his affairs and forces her to step back, through corporal punishments. Serena's strong belief in her husband starts crumbing from that moment, but she blames OfFred as well for that, and her status of enemies will be restored.

The Handmaids though will not accept that easily their horrible destiny, and some of them will take part to a secret organisation, the May Day, which should help Gilead fall. June will take part in the plans as well, and will manage to find all the letters written by the Handmaids, telling about their horrible lives and the tortures they are forced to live.

Thanks to help of Nick, those letters will reach Luke's hands, and will be published in Canada, giving life to a massive wave of protest against Waterford and Gilead. The Commander was actually trying to make his dictatorship alive by creating economic boundaries with nearby Countries, keeping secret the true horror of Gilead of course, but the letters written by the girls make some light on the true nature of the republic, and pushes people to take an action, and free their relatives and friends who didn't manage to escape during the war.

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Only a few episodes left of Season 2. Season 3, which will probably reach our screens in autumn, will be focusing on the fall of Gilead, and maybe give an end to the story of June. I really liked the show, which is so captivating, so well narrated, and keeps the audience stick on the screen. I adored the lights, so cold and quite “greenish”, matching so well the main color of Gilead, the color of the Wives, and such in contrast with the Handmaids color, which is red.

I strongly suggest you to watch the show if you haven't yet, because it will capture you. Like 1985, it is about a future which is absolutely possible, and highlights the danger of those actions taken in the name of good (saving mankind) but lead by egoism, evil, hunger for power. It also wants people think that as much as horrific the situation of the Handmaids is, and as much as one thinks it is just a TV show, some women are really living a similar way of life nowadays, in the remote (and not so much) Countries of the world, and wants to be a shout out of alert, and maybe starting to do something to change it.