The systemic erasure of women’s identities in Margaret Atwood’s fictional nation of Gilead is, at first glance, as far-fetched as it is horrifying. Upon further analysis, however, certain Gileadean institutions, practices, and prejudices mirror reality closer than we may like to admit.
The most glaring example is the way women’s names are changed, in Gileadean society, to be Of-[insert man’s name here]. Thank goodness we don’t do that in real life, right?
If you take a moment to reflect on this blatantly dehumanizing and oppressive law, however, our society does, in a way, function along those lines. Most heterosexual marriages, especially in western cultures, involve the woman taking her new husband’s last name. This erasure of women’s history and familial connections can make tracing women’s genealogy far more difficult than men’s, who’s paternal ancestry often easily be traced back centuries.
In a similar vein, I’ve seen placards thanking wealthy donors that refer to, for example, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Edward Brown.’ The woman isn’t acknowledged beyond ‘Mrs.’ The fact of her existence is present on that thin sheet of metal, yes, but only in the context of the man she married. She’s literally nameless. The practice of women’s maiden names being taken from them when they marry is beginning to change, whether the couple hyphenates, the man takes the woman’s name, or the woman keeps her own name, but the fact of the matter remains that western culture has subjugated and diminished women’s identities for centuries.
While historically, women rarely had the option to keep their maiden names once they entered a marriage; in more recent times the option to retain one’s birth name has become legal and is beginning to become more normalized. However, should a woman elect not to take her husband’s name, she often faces some combination of social backlash or turmoil within her relationship. In some cases, despite the fact that it was perfectly legal for the women in question to keep their birth name after marriage, there are legal difficulties associated with doing so. An American woman had to take the issue of whether she could vote using her maiden name, which she had “openly and solely used, and been well-known to use, before her marriage,” to court in 1961. Of course she had ‘widely and solely used’ her own name before getting married. She won her case, overturning a law that had been passed fifteen years prior preventing a married woman from remaining registered to vote under her birth name. The justification for the previous case had been cited as ‘the long-established custom, policy and rule of the common law among English-speaking peoples whereby a woman’s name is changed by marriage and her husband’s surname becomes as a matter of law her surname.’ (People ex rel. Rago v. Lipsky)
This area of common law, known as coverture, dictated that upon marriage, the woman and man become one entity, and that entity is the man- her identity was completely subsumed by his. William Blackstone described coverture in his late-18th century work, Commentaries on the Laws of England:
“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage… For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage (Blackstone).”
Atwood would have borne witness to these and other legal abuses of power against women growing up. Certain aspects of coverture survived as late as the mid-1960s in America, and economic or workplace discrimination based on gender wasn’t illegal until the late 1960s, when she was in her twenties. Women in America were still gaining the right to own and control their own property and finances as late as 1895, less than five decades before Atwood was born; white women had been granted the right to vote less than two decades before she was born. The concept of Gilead did not emerge from a vacuum.
The nation’s unbridled misogyny doesn’t only affect women, however. ‘Gender traitors,’ the Gileadean label for gay men, are also abused in Atwood’s chillingly convincing dystopia. From the extreme patriarchal view present in The Handmaid’s Tale, a woman’s role is to bear children and provide for men; if she cannot or will not do so, she is useless, worthless, something to be abandoned or killed. From the same patriarchal (and, by extension, homophobic) view, gay men are indeed ‘gender traitors’; only women are supposed to be attracted to men, and women are inferior to men. A man taking on a ‘woman’s role’ by partnering with a man would be viewed by the patriarchy as rejecting his social standing, as anything feminine or womanly is automatically lesser.
The punishment for being gay in Gilead is death by hanging, or a slow death by hard labor and exposure to lethal radiation. I found this to be honestly one of the most believable aspects of the novel, because it mirrors what occurs in reality around the world. In several nations, gay men are legally thrown off of rooftops. Stoned. Electrocuted. Flogged. Tortured. Even in nations where homosexuality is legal, where same sex couples can marry, or at least where you won’t be killed by the government, societal discrimination can still be crippling and even deadly. Women in the US began gaining more rights- to property, to individual identity, to working outside of the home- in the 1960s and seventies. Life was improving, they were beginning to be heard and gain ground. Meanwhile, the gay community was dying in droves during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and early nineties, the epidemic approaching its peak as Atwood was writing her novel in 1985. Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in Colorado in 1998 for being gay- one life of many that have been snuffed out for the crime of homosexuality in modern America. The concept of Gilead did not emerge from a vacuum.
I was both impressed with Atwood’s creativity and unsettled by this system that’s so efficient in its erasure of women’s identities and in its extent to other reaches of society. The Handmaid’s Tale is a work of dystopian fiction, true. But we must acknowledge that it draws deeply from the wells of reality and history.
