the contemporary and the traditional. This gives the story the patina of an inverted fairy tale, with women regarded as breeders who at the same time are controlled by rigid Victorian values and restrictions.
The place of women in the society of Gilead is a reversal of the advances made for women in our own time and a revival of attitudes Atwood sees as remaining dear to a large segment of the population. In this vision, the revival of family values so touted by a conservative segment in American society today has come to pass in a way that highlights control, subordination, and the isolation of women and their biological functions into a ghetto that is society-wide and that is enforced most brutally. Also revived is the power of class conflict and a social hierarchy, and though Offred and her mistress may seem worlds apart, both are controlled in this male-dominated society in ways that determine every aspect of their lives, limit their choices, and return them to a time when women were expected to know their place and stay in it.
Offred's description of the place where she lives evokes the sense of the past as something that has come back into the present that infuses this novel, extending beyond location and dress to underlying social attitudes:
Late Victorian, the house is, a family house, built for a large rich family. . . A sitting room in which I never sit, but stand or kneel only (Atwood 11).
The image of the sitting room evokes class differences not unlike a distorted version of television's Upstairs, Downstairs, with slavery replacing normal servitude. Atwood's novel demonstrates that the role of women in society has long been an issue of social class as well as gender, and the advancement of women in our own time has a strong sense of overcoming class differences and achieving economic parity as well as greater freedom of choice in a number of areas, social, economic, political, and personal.
Crapo d...