Chel_of_the_sea

I'm a trans woman who'd heard of you in passing, but never read any of your works, until a student brought in The Handmaid's Tale for help with an assignment. Specificially, she was supposed to analyze a passage where Offred is walking through this fragrant, heady summer garden and getting a little overwhelmed by it.

I was totally unfamiliar with the book, but that passage wigged me the hell out. I have never felt so uncomfortable with literary analysis. I'd read books like 1984 growing up, that present a sort of masculine dystopia where the horror is in the fact that 'the man' can crush you and subject you and take your stuff. But I really felt like I got something new out of your writing, because the horror was in how insidious and invasive the dystopia in Handmaid's Tale was. It was literally inside you, a part of you, something that twists and corrupts natural and beautiful things. It was fascinating, and ended up simmering in my head for months afterward. It was the first time I'd ever felt like I'd read something specifically for women in a certain way.

I got the impression, though, that it was in many ways supposed to be a metaphorical way of talking about things you saw as real-world problems (one line about Serena Joy being 'furious about being taken at her word' stuck out to me). Obviously, some of those issues are still very relevant thirty years later, but there's also been a lot of changes in that time.

My question, then, is: if you were to rewrite this dystopia today, how would you change it? What new issues would you want to look at? What old ones would you say have been solved?

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