Book Review

The Handmaid’s Tale and the Infantilization of Critique

It is a curious habit of certain modern writers to mistake intensity for insight. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, frequently hailed as prophetic, is better understood not as a warning of tyranny, but as an artefact of intellectual laziness—masquerading as moral urgency. It is the kind of literature that flatters its readers’ prejudices while demanding nothing from their reason.

Educated in the liberal arts bubble of mid-20th-century North America—Victoria College and Radcliffe—Atwood inherited a tradition not of philosophical skepticism or analytical clarity, but of interpretive self-indulgence. These were institutions where feelings were treated as arguments and ideology as evidence. The result is a novel composed in the register of resentment, not reflection.

Unlike Orwell, who understood that tyranny arises not merely from cruelty but from structure—from institutions that incentivize fear, from language eroded by propaganda, from power seeking stability through lies—Atwood offers a grotesque melodrama in which all nuance is sacrificed for affect. Her imagined theocracy is not so much a study in systemic power as it is a collage of liberal anxieties rendered in blood-red crayon.

There is no serious attempt to grapple with how institutions actually function, how beliefs are formalized into law, how incentives shape outcomes, or how complex societies sustain themselves—even under repressive regimes. These are questions Marx, for all his faults, at least had the discipline to ask. Atwood, by contrast, is content to recite the catechism of gender grievance, mistaking volume for argument and enemies for evidence.

Her Gilead is a place where every man is a predator, every woman a victim, and every conflict a morality play. It is, in short, a children’s story for adults who have lost the ability—or the courage—to think clearly. It confirms the reader’s feelings while anesthetizing their reason. It seduces not by its truth, but by its utility: it gives the comfortable illusion of rebellion without the inconvenience of analysis.

This is not literature of resistance. It is literature of submission—to one’s own biases, to narrative over evidence, to feeling over form. And those who consume it uncritically are not being armed against tyranny. They are being trained to whimper at shadows while real power passes by—silent, unseen, and unchallenged.

In the end, The Handmaid’s Tale tells us nothing about theocracy, authoritarianism, or the machinery of state power. But it tells us a great deal about the modern Western intellectual: terrified of offending, addicted to outrage, and utterly uninterested in how the world actually works.

Postscript: On Cats and Consequence

One hesitates to mention cats at all, for they have done nothing to deserve conscription into this argument. But if one must speak plainly—as is increasingly unfashionable—then let us be clear: when a civilization raises its daughters not to build, question, or endure, but to tremble theatrically before imagined spectres, it does not liberate them. It prepares them for loneliness disguised as defiance.

The archetype Atwood has furnished—the eternally aggrieved woman, armed with slogans but unarmed for reality—is not destined for rebellion. She is destined for a studio apartment, furnished with bitter slogans and half-read paperbacks, her only companionship a creature that purrs without judgment and requires no intellectual consistency.

There is no tyranny in such a life. Only quiet decay. The tragedy is not that she was silenced—but that no one ever demanded she speak with precision.

Cats ask nothing of you. Neither, increasingly, does society.