The Joyless Republic of Gilead: Reflections of a Political Scientist on the Operatic Production of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Bread riots, signs of famine, the emergence of widespread socio-economic discontent – all point to a dramatic decline in the capacity of governance in the United States in the last years of 'the time before.' Combined with the historical conjuncture of calamitous earthquakes, leading to the opening up of the San Andreas fault, the 'objective conditions' were established for the collapse and overthrow of the United States government and the establishment of the theocratic Republic of Gilead, the setting of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which has recently opened as an opera by the Canadian Opera Company.

The opera is actually set at an academic conference many years after the fall of Gilead itself and is aimed at comparing Gilead's experience in the twenty-first century with that of Iran's theocratic experience in the twentieth. It is this comparison which guided my own reflections and led me to ask three basic sets of questions about the nature of Gilead's polity: how did it come into being, how did it perpetuate its own rule, and what was the nature of political space within Gilead?

First, if Gilead's experience was anything like that of Iran's in 1979, it was religious radicals in Gilead who hijacked the revolution away from a more broad-based political opposition, part of which was democratically oriented. Religion's powerful resonant moral frame, combined with its inbuilt organizational structure and institutionalized connections with capital (the bazaari classes in the case of Iran), gave these political forces an unassailable advantage. The speed with which Gilead's religious radicals took hold of power and immediately eliminated oppositional elements suggests a similar degree of vanguard organizational capacity.

Gilead also displays predictable strategies in trying to perpetuate, if not consolidate, its rule. Similar to Iran, one is immediately struck by the intensity of Gilead's coercive statecraft – the imposing display of security forces, the omnipresence of 'the eye,' public executions, the threat of banishment to 'the colonies,' and the rigid policy of censoring anything from 'the time before.' Yet, Gilead is no exception to the rule that even the most coercive regime must generate some degree of compliance if it is to survive. Apart from attempts at religious indoctrination, Gilead offers two intriguing examples of compliance-generating forms of statecraft. The creation of the social category of 'the handmaid' itself, while oppressive to the handmaids, may provide the rest of Gilead's women with negative incentives to comply with the regime. Even more intriguing is the use of the handmaids themselves to punish the regime's transgressors – a strategy that not only gives the handmaids an odd stake in the regime, it also serves to destroy the moral fibre of any potential emergent opposition.

Is there any autonomous political space in Gilead's theocratic republic? Certainly, it appears that Gilead's ruling elites have carved out some for themselves – note the emergence of illicit nightclubs, the access to banned material from 'the time before,' and the willingness to bend the rules over the procreation of children. Yet, what kind of space does the dystopia of Gilead exists for those below? Atwood's focus is on the existence of clandestine opposition movements intent on overthrowing the regime. But, if Gilead's rule is as resilient as that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, then we might have to be content with understanding the nature of less dramatic forms of autonomous political space, in the hope that these might lead to something more politically significant in the longer term. Here, the Iranian experience is rich with examples of these more 'everyday forms of resistance' from Bayat's analysis of the efforts of Tehran's urban poor to carve out for themselves 'a fully autonomous life' that 'renders the state irrelevant' (122) to Yaghmaian's description of the use of 'happiness' by the political opposition in Iran, particularly women, as 'a new weapon ... defying the bearded men in slippers' (17). Not only do these everyday forms of resistance provide individuals with...