These Days
by Cindy Layton
There was a moment I remember. As I read, the meaning of a character’s name came to focus and it crashed upon me, like a tree limb. I heard a cracking sound and time stood motionless and I had, for that fraction of a second, the illusion that I could step aside to avoid the direct hit, and then it landed, taking me down.
The name was Offred.
I felt sick.
Margaret Atwood’s writing reaches beyond resonance. She hollows the marrow from the bones and replaces it with the damn truth.
I read her interview where she explained the events in The Handmaid’s Tale were based in fact and I began the search to identify them. The examples are everywhere. Start with the stunning idea of Offred. The contraction of Of and Fred. In fictional Gilead, a woman is required to change her name to reflect the man with whom she would bear children.
I just finished The Testaments, sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and went on to read Tara Westover’s Educated. Coincidentally, they couldn’t be better matched for the sequence.
This memoir, Educated, is the bridge that makes speculative fiction, and all fiction, feel so real. It’s filled with the kind of touchstones that fiction writers need, to provide a place for their readers to find themselves.
Tara Westover grew up in a fundamentalist community in Idaho. Her parents believed the government and most other institutions were dangerous. She was not allowed to go to school or see a doctor. She was expected to marry young, raise a family and prepare for the End of Days.
Instead, at seventeen, she stepped inside her first classroom, without even a working knowledge of how to use a textbook. She was sometimes crippled by the fears ingrained in her of the secular world and the dangers it posed. Undaunted, she earned a PhD in history, graduating from Cambridge University and completing a fellowship at Harvard. Her individual story is one of triumph over impossible odds. She leap-frogged over lifetimes of hard-won gains in the experiences of women, propelled herself into the current century, and claimed her right to create her own destiny.
While I champion her success I have more global questions. Is her experience a larger story of contrast? Does the fundamentalist society represent the remnants of us, as we once were? Are her achievements the fast-forward of our society into the present day?
Or is her experience a reminder that not that long ago, things were different? (1) Those differences hover beneath the surface of progress. Sometimes those differences breach for air. Are the fundamentalists that Westover grew up with better viewed as, not a throw-back to the past, but a threat to the tenuous changes that could be challenged? Many of their core beliefs, while they may seem outdated in the “real world” were considered mainstream not that long ago, existed for hundreds of years prior, and persist in other cults/cultures today. Is the community of Westover’s experience the thread that reaches back, creating a conduit for the resurgence to travel?
Atwood shows us what a simple matter it would be to both take an eraser to our penciled changes and black marker to redact the rest. Creeping adjustments and wholesale upheavals happen because those changes were considered too small to oppose and then too big to fight.
Today, we know we won’t have a woman president. We wait.
Today, the fate of women’s rights rest in the hands of the six men who control the Supreme Court. We wait.
Today, Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to jail but hundreds of thousands of rape kits go untested. We wait.
While we wait, we write.
(1) As we celebrate one hundred years of women’s suffrage consider if one hundred years is enough time to codify and cement that concept against insurgency. Hundreds of years and thousand of societies existed before women were “given” the right to vote.
