Quotable: Margaret Atwood
In my advanced fiction class, we’ve been reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel my students seem to have fallen in love with, much to my delight. Here’s a small excerpt we discussed last week, when we talked about all the rules women (and men) are subjected to in the Republic of Gilead:
Women were not protected then.
I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: Don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the doo. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night.
I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.
Now we walk the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.
There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.
(Photo credit: George Whiteside/House of Anansi)
