Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has been on my to be read list for a while now, and recently, I finally pulled it down from the shelf and read it. From the opening sentence, when Offred tells us, “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium,” to Professor James Darcy Pieixoto’s keynote speech at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, I remained whooly invested in Atwood’s dystopian novel. I could focus on so many things with The Handmaid’s Tale, from the fact that Offred recorded the manuscript and scholars, who found it later, compiled it into The Handmaid’s Tale to the fact that the novel, while not having Black characters, highlights the ways that authoritarian and fascist regimes work, eliminating “undesirables” first before moving on to everyone else who stands in their way. Instead of looking at these things, I want to focus on a couple of moments where Offred thinks about how easy it was for society to fall into Gilead, the slow slide it took.

Througout her manuscript, Offred talks about the “before times,” how life went about in a routine. She details her relationships, her college experience, her marriage, he child, and getting fired from her job at the beginning of the takeover that followed the coup. Even after getting fired, to make way for men in the workplace, Offred and her partner Luke carry on, trying to survive within the confines of Gilead before they attempt to escape. Of these moments, Offred tells us, “[W]e lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual.” Though they see the incoming storm, they maintain their everyday existence. Eventually, however, the fascist takeover becomes normal. Offred ends this section by telling us, as she lives as a Handmaid in a patriarchal and fascist society, “Even this is as usual now.”

One of the ways that fascism succeeds comes from the populace either ignoring its encroachment of the populace’s ignorance. These things, while similar, have distinct differences. To maintain a semblance of stability and routine, Offred tells us, “We lived, as usual, by ignoring.” Even though her and Luke saw what happened, they ignored it so that they could survive in the moment, but others had no clue at all. They were completely ignorant of the facts. Fascism changes society gradually, not all at once, like “a gradually heating bathtub,” and since the administration didn’t target Luke and Offred initially, instead going after LGBTQ individuals and Black and Brown individuals, they felt they had “more freedom” because they existed “in the gaps between the stories” of atrocities. They, essentially, lived within Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came.”

How does a society, who knows the past, let itself succumb to such a fate? During his talk, Pieixoto points out the cyclical nature of history, the fact that individuals, though they may know history, fail to learn from it, or if they do learn from it, they take bits and pieces of that history to use for thei own means. He tells us that Gilead’s “racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel, that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did.” The powerful have used the playing on fears, the false construction of fears, as a weapon for centuries. It becomes easy to implement oppressive systems when they fear that something threatens their very existence.

Offred, detailing how Luke killed their cat because they could not take it with them when they tried to escape, points out the way that language plays into this construction of fear. She notes that Luke, instead of calling the cat “her,” tells Offred, “I’ll take care of it.” This move from “her” to “it” made it easier for him to stomach killing the cat while also constructing it as a non-biological entity. Offred states, “That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought.” Later, at the salvaging, when the Guardians bring in a prisoner for the Handmaid’s to kill, thus releasing their frustration on him, Offred proclaims, “He had become an it.”

Continually, Offred, even though she participates in Gilead, in order to survive, questions how it came to exist in the first place. To help her, she thinks back to Holocaust documentary her mother had her watch when she was younger. Her mother has her watch it to show her the horrors of what happened, but even when her mother explained that these things occurred, Offred “thought someone had made it up.” When she learns about the crematorium ovens, her mind goes to the “thought that these people had been eaten” because she equated ovens with nothing more than cooking.

However, the key thing that Offred thinks about with the documentary concerns how the commandant’s mistress, as he mother calls her, talks about the Holocaust. The commandant “had been cruel and brutal,” yet this woman, interviewed for the documentary, saw him as a lover. She saw him as a partner, possibly to use for advancement like Serena Joy in Gilead. Offred contemplates the woman, and she asks, “What could she have been thinking about?” Answering her own question, Offred echoes her early thoughts about the ways that ignoring atrocities works in these moments, and tells us, “Not much, I guess; not back then, not at they time. She was thinking about how not to think.” The woman knew about the Holocaust, but she chose to ignore the atrocities and focus on herself.

She constructed an identity for her partner, crafting him with “humanity.” She came to believe that the man she loved “was not a monster” and that he had “some endearing trait.” “How easy it is to invent humanity,” Offred tells us, “for anyone at all.” She ignores the commandant’s murder of Jews and others, and crafts a “likable” figure for him, a mask to hide his mostorous nature. A few days after the interview, the woman killed herself without any asking “her whether or not she loved” the commandant. Refeclting upon the interview, Offred remembers “the make-up” that the woman word, the mask that covered her acquiescence to the horrors of the Holocaust.

All of this is familiar. We know the fascist playbook, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which originally debuted in 1985, lays it all bare. While reading The Handmaid’s Tale, I also watched The Simpsons’ episode “Coming to Homerica” from season 20 and Michael Moore’s 1994 film Canadian Bacon. Each of these, through comedy, touch on similar issues of the ways that, as Lillian Smith puts it, “The Devil knows that if you want to destroy a man, all you need do is fill him with false hopes and false fears. These will blind him to his new direction and he will inevitably turn away from the future and destroy himself and those close to him.”

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.