🥀The Handmaid’s Tale🥀

• My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The power of adaptivity. The power of silence. The uncanny, grotesque phenomenon in which the impossible becomes possible, even worse, omnipotent enough to rule the world — This. This is what describes the world of Gilead.

The Handmaid's Story depicts the world that we might encounter one day: a world where people are given roles such as handmaids, who are in charge of carrying the children for the Commanders and their Wives. The narrator is one of the handmaids, covered in red dresses from head to toe, including their whole faces with white wings. For them, there's no freedom to read, write, talk, or even to use their hands (i.e. knitting).

In a confined environment in which conformity and submission are the only means to survive, Offred learns to stay silent and obey her job as a handmaid despite the incorrigible recall of her stifled memories of her old life where freedom, love, and motherhood existed. Despite her crippling frustration and rage toward this society where everything is forbidden, she somehow adapts to it.

I think this book criticizes the conformity that puts our society at stake. No matter how much we disagree with social norms, we often find ourselves trying to conform to them, which sometimes requires us to let go of something. And that might be sacrificing others to save ourselves.

When Offred hears the news of Ofglen's suicide, she goes: "So she's dead, and I am safe, after all. She did it before they came. I feel a great relief. I feel thankful to her. She has died so that I may live. I will mourn later." — In the society of Gilead, nothing matters until it's your problem. The friendship. The love. The connection. The emotions. They crash down to ashes when faced with jeopardy and the possibility of being hung by ropes on The Wall for people to watch the end of your life..

This is the first book that got me so tongue-tied on the spot. The fear of possibility. The eerieness of how detailed, specific, and realistic this whole story is as if it can happen tomorrow. As if it soon will be my own story. Maybe it's what all dystopian books make you feel. Or maybe it's just this book.

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