The Handmaid's Tale – Making sense of sensibility

'Why do men feel threatened by women?' I asked a male friend of mine. …  'They're afraid women will laugh at them,' he said.  …  Then I asked some women students in a poetry seminar I was giving, 'Why do women feel threatened by men?' 'They're afraid of being killed,' they said.' (Margaret Atwood, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960-1982)

At university I came up with a working definition for sensibility: an acute perception towards an object, person or situation that functions on an aesthetic, moral, and / or subconscious level, the last element usually being brought to the surface slowly, and, tellingly, revealing much more about the first two elements.  My professor told me it lacked rigour and was contradictory - "The last bit isn't very acute, is it?" - and so I never used it in any further essays.  That piece of very fair criticism stuck with me though and it has helped me wrap my head around the flaws of my own sensibility.

The flawed definition came to me again a few weeks ago during my morning run, a tiring plod that had me looking worse for wear within minutes.  Unshaven, sweating and lumbering, I'm quite a sight.  Tracing the perimeter of the local park, I nevertheless hug the inside of the path.  Some twenty metres ahead a young woman suddenly steered her walk directly to the inside too, placing herself on collision course with me.  Annoyed I veered to the outside, flashing her an angry look as I passed.  She looked terrified.  But why, then, did she feel the need to encroach into my 'airspace'?  Anger gave way to irritation and then, as the flickers of my subconscious began to lift thoughts into the light, questions began to take aim at my sensibility.

I recalled a song, Courtney Barnett's 'Nameless, Faceless', a wonderful put-down of misogynistic internet trolls.  It quotes as part of its chorus those brilliant lines of the novelist Margaret Atwood highlighting differences between women and men.  Barnett sings out her desire to enjoy a walk in the park, and intersperses the chorus with the novelist's words:

I wanna walk through the park in the dark,

Men are scared that women will laugh at them,

I wanna walk through the park in the dark,

Women are scared that men will kill them,

… I hold my keys between my fingers.

Circling my route for the second time, calmer, and beginning to exercise empathy, I noticed the thick clumps of bushes and trees on the perimeter side of the park, accessible and secluded enough for the homeless to often seek shelter for the night.  Was the woman afraid to be trapped between myself and, in her eyes, this could-be-rapist bolt-hole?  The look on her face may have indicated that.  It has taken time but I'd probably found my way, not as acutely as I would have liked, to the truth.

I found myself thinking about my definition again after watching last week's harrowing episode of the adaption of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.  Season 2, Episode 10, contained not one, but two instances of the monstrous 'conception ritual', or rather State prescribed rape, where fertile adulteresses and 'sexual deviants' - the Handmaids - are forced into the role of surrogate mothers, leaning back on an infertile wife whilst a husband rapes her.  The post-show blogs and reviews crackled with fury.  Did we really need to see this 'ritual' again and again?  Wasn't it becoming gratuitous?  

'Blessed be the fruit'

My initial instinct regarding the second rape, where the victim is the by now heavily pregnant June, was that it was necessary in that it not only emphasised the religious hypocrisy, weakness and total degeneracy of the character of Fred, but that it also brought to the fore how he was using this particular rape as a form of punishment for June.  I disagreed with those who said there was no need to show this over and over again.

Once again, over the course of the next fifteen minutes I changed my mind.  This episode had another desperately sad turn to take.  June, parted from her four year old child at the very beginning of The Handmaid's Tale,  begs Fred for the opportunity to see her daughter (and yes, do watch this scene and try and defend the Trump administration's forced separation of children and parents).  Fred, and he certainly has an ulterior motive in doing this, sets up a meeting.  And it was close to unwatchable for me.  Hannah, June's daughter, for the first minute of the meeting refuses to acknowledge her mother.  Hannah’s anger at June's inability to stay with her and keep her safe, eventually gives way and mother and daughter are temporarily reconciled before being ripped apart once more.  As a non-resident parent I occasionally get this initial cold treatment from my own little boy - it dissipates within twenty or so seconds but still makes me sad.  I don't live in Gilead and there is nothing extreme, permanent or even unusual in my situation.  Nevertheless, I don't want to see that scene ever again, and I certainly wouldn't appreciate a variation on it in the next episode.  Which also means that I might need to refine my views on the earlier rape scene which I deemed artistically essential to the story.   

There might be a better way to look at my shoddy definition of sensibility.  Maybe those different strands of aesthetics and morality are often working against each other in the same person, and it's only when you exercise a degree of introspection and trawl your subconscious that you can release their tensions and contradictions.  Failure to do that can have devastating consequences.  The purveyors of the new dogma of Gilead, couched in the nastiness of the Old Testament, have certainly tried to soften the brutal immorality of the rape scene by bringing a cold theological and therefore ostensibly moral aesthetic to their ritual.  It doesn't come close to working, for anyone with even the slightest sense of wrong or right.     

'Under His Eye'

But things can change.  Or, as is more likely, are changing already.  And that is what is so scary about this series. Emotions, the sort that are the product of a strong and questioning sensibility, can prove troublesome to power.  We are already seeing our leaders, once again, not giving emotions the time of day.  Or rather, not putting themselves into a situation where they could encounter an emotional response, or if they did, certainly not allowing their already flimsy sensibilities to be modified through any kind of introspection.  There's an old argument, one that isn't emphasised nearly enough, that this is what stories do.  Books are the best way to do this, but with amazing stories like The Handmaid's Tale making their way onto our television screens, it's not the only medium that works.  That said, the idea that Donald Trump would sit down of a Sunday evening to catch up on The Handmaid's Tale, let alone pick up a Margaret Atwood novel, is hard to envisage.

The wonderful Margaret Atwood

My sensibility is, like my old definition of it, flawed.  And I'm certainly not unique in that.  Perhaps all sensibilities are flawed through their very nature, that is one of an instant emotional response.  Nevertheless, it's clear that a flawed sensibility is better than no sensibility at all.  Hopefully, in the months and years ahead, that will be enough to ward off any descent towards Gilead or comparable situations.   

Postscript: Does Donald Trump read books? 

A little bit of digging revealed the following snippet from 2005 in The New York Times.  His repeated assertion that he rarely reads and doesn't have the time for it, is undercut by this letter. Here's the most remarkable paragraph:

"Most writers want to be successful. Some writers even want to be good writers. I've read John Updike, I've read Orhan Pamuk, I've read Philip Roth.  When Mark Singer enters their league, maybe I'll read one of his books. But it will be a long time - he was not born with great writing ability. Until then, maybe he should concentrate on finding his own "lonely component" and then try to develop himself into a world-class writer, as futile as that may be, instead of having to write about remarkable people who are clearly outside of his realm."

Why then would he contradict this?  His repeated assertion that he rarely reads and doesn't have the time for it reveals – if this letter is the real Trump – a Machiavellian monster carrying out an astonishing manipulation of half the American electorate.  That thought is actually far scarier than what is almost certainly the truth: that this is a ghosted letter, that contains a few well-worn Trump tropes – ‘loser’, ‘great’, and ‘they don’t have what it takes’ - to give it an air of authenticity.