This month, three friends and I drove to San Francisco to see the opera “The Handmaid’s Tale.” For those who are not familiar with it, in 1985, Margaret Atwood wrote this dystopian novel about a brutally misogynistic society “where the few fertile women left are stripped of their rights, held captive, constantly spied on and ritually raped in hopes that they might bear children.” The book has been adapted into many artistic disciplines. Because “The Handmaid’s Tale” was turned into a TV series in 2016, the image of the red robe and white headdress became a popular icon during the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade. However, the form of an opera takes us into extreme emotions, where we feel shaken by the intensity of the music and the images on the stage.
The handmaid named Offred shares her life before and after revolutionaries overthrow the United States to create the patriarchal Republic of Gilead. With plummeting birth rates, fertile women are assigned to an elite household where they are made to undergo a procreation “ceremony” so an infertile wife can have a child to complete her role as a mother.
Women’s rights have been stripped away from the handmaids, and they are left without their individual life stories. Dressed all alike in red robes and the white headdress of the Handmaid, their voices call out to the world to remember what once was before reproductive rights were removed.
When Atwood wrote the novel, she could not have known what would be happening in America in 2024, how women would be denied control over their bodies and how the government would decide what health care they could have. In the story, women are only considered containers for babies, not individual human beings with hopes and dreams.
Men are depicted as treating women as objects for their own enjoyment or for fulfilling their task to create babies for the society whose population has decreased. The Commander of Offred’s household tells her that the feminist movements gave men nothing to fight for because sex was too easy. In order to feel fulfilled, they had to subjugate women. As difficult as the book and opera are, Atwood has written this novel as a “literature of witness,” asking readers to look around and see what is happening around us. The last scene of the opera offers light in the darkness. By Offred telling her tale, she offers hope to a future audience that they will learn from her experience and have faith in humanity.
I had difficulty watching the rawness of the scenes which lacked tenderness or moments of intimacy. As a former high school teacher, I wondered what it would be like for teenagers to sit through the degeneration of relationships. Would it stimulate discussion about the seriousness of what has been lost, or would it be so edgy it would be an object of pop-cultural humor? How would it be described on social media?
As we walked out to the lobby, an elderly woman said to me, “What did you think? I didn’t like it.” I realized I needed time to absorb it before I could say. My friends and I walked around to the exit where Irene Roberts, one of my former students who was a lead performer in the show, was being celebrated by family and friends. In the words of the San Francisco Chronicle review, “American mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts is the big star of this show, giving a courageous, vulnerable and gorgeously sung performance as the Handmaid Offred.” I wondered what it was like for Irene to sing that role time after time. But then, she is an artist, and likely gives herself to each role, creating the character and living into their experience.
For me as the observer, I am left with thoughts about the danger of our present situation and the way women are denigrated. Is “The Handmaid’s Tale” a description of what is or a warning of what might become?