(Mis)understanding dystopia
I read something today that was so bad, that at first I thought it was a parody. So bad, it heads toward being actually offensive. So bad, in fact, that I thought I’d write about it like a big, mansplaining bumhole.
“The Handmaid’s Tale is just like Trump’s America? Not so fast” by Jessa Crispin is the piece I’m on about. There’s a lot wrong with it, and I could go through paragraph by paragraph like an old school fisking, but I don’t want to keep you too long. Instead, I’ll just look at the two worst things about the piece and then shut my face.
The first, and maybe the worst, is that this essay about a work of dystopian fiction fundamentally misunderstands what dystopian fiction even is. Here’s what I mean:
I knew I was supposed to worry that this could be my fate, that this Could Happen Here, given our nation’s misogyny and sentimental notions of motherhood.
I knew I was meant to hate the Christian women who are blind and deaf to their surrogates’ suffering. But this story is too easy. And for me, a white middle-class (ish) straight woman living in New York, to claim victimhood in our society, rather than admit I am a participant in this society who finds herself moving around the spectrum of oppressor and oppressed every day and learning how to examine that, feels disingenuous.
This is what’s wrong with that. For me, as a white, middle-class (ish) straight man living in London, to claim victimhood in this society feels disingenuous. Therefore 1984 is shit.
Do you see the problem there?
Sure, dystopian fiction is supposed to hold a mirror up to society, but more than that, it’s supposed to ask the question, ‘what if society was different, and you were not safe?’ White, straight, middle-class men are a notch or two away from being the least able to claim victimhood in our society, and yet 1984 is still effective because the novel is fiction. It’s a pretend reality in which things we are familiar with have been exaggerated enough to make them (and almost everyone else) victims.
It’s the same with The Handmaid’s Tale. You can believe everything is hunky-dory and tickety-boo for women in reality if you like, but the fictional world in which it operates is not like that, whatever you believe about reality. That’s the whole point.
Now, on to the second thing. The one that nudges the piece towards actual offensiveness and made me write this. I’m going to have to add a longer quote here, so bear with me:
Watching the first episode of the television adaptation, bored and restless, I started to think about who I’d rather have on the screen. Offred has a kind of snarky, hyperbolic inner monologue voiceover, thinking at one point, “I need to grab the nearest machine gun,” and instead just buys some oranges at the market. In the way that most of us tweet angrily about something Trump said and then go back to our lives. I thought of Johanna Kilb, the mother from Heinrich Boll’s 1959 novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine and wished I was watching her instead.
Johanna was unable to just go back to her life in Nazi Germany, even though as a Christian German woman, she was safe from the atrocities. She refused to participate to be the good mother, refused to buy food on the black market to keep her children from going hungry, refused to compromise with totalitarianism to make her life more comfortable.
When she abandoned her family and tried to board the train that was sending her city’s Jewish residents to the camps, refusing to survive a murderous regime even if it wasn’t her the regime wanted to murder, she was hauled off to the asylum instead. Give me that story, I thought, so that we are forced to see what an uncompromising resistance actually looks like.
There’s a lot wrong with that, aside from the obvious ‘ooh, I wish this was a more clever thing that you probably haven’t read because you’re not clever like me’ undertone.
In the scene Crispin mentions, Offred is at the market because she has no choice but to be there. The oranges are not for her. This is a regular duty, on which she is sent with an assigned companion who she cannot talk to in any meaningful way in case she is an informant. They are permitted two routes home, one long and one short, and the long one is permitted because it takes them past the hanging bodies of people who have disobeyed or are deemed deviant for one reason or another.
The stakes for Offred rebelling in any way are established in this episode as being high. Death, mutilation, torture. Whatever her position might have been before, Offred is a victim now. And the life she goes back to after buying oranges is one of brutal oppression and rape.
But this is boring. Offred has it easy, it seems to Crispin. What she’d rather see is a white Christian woman in Nazi Germany, who foregoes her privileges and abandons her family to try to get taken way with Jewish people to the camps — but ends up in an asylum instead because the stakes for Christian women who choose to disobey aren’t nearly as high as they are for Jewish women, whether they obey or not.
Here’s what’s wrong with that. Crispin seems to be blaming Offred for not rebelling, for being a victim, for not being as brave as Johanna Kilb. “ Give me [Kilb’s] story,” thinks Crispin, “so that we are forced to see what an uncompromising resistance actually looks like.” So what does that say about the people on the train Kilb is so desperate to board?
Crispin would rather hear about the Christian.
Now, there’s obviously a world of difference between fictional events and actual history. I’m not trying to draw any kind of parallel between The Handmaid’s Tale and the holocaust. What I’m saying is that the society in The Handmaid’s Tale is one where Offred is one of the victims, and is not safe. She is not in an equivalent position to Johanna Kilb.
As I said earlier, dystopian fiction is supposed to ask ‘what if society was different, and you were not safe?’ If your reaction to that is, ‘but I am safe — this story should be about how people who are safe react in a society where other people aren’t’, then you’re getting it wrong.
