What began as a chance to prove I could still read a novel front to back has become a burden that I would like to put down, forget about, and pretend I never entered. But leaving is not an option for me. The only option I have is to finish what I started, whilst all along hoping and believing that Atwood will give me some consolation prize of meaning and hope in return for the nightmare she has dragged me thru. Ordinarily I have the option to scream and kick, something I do quite well. But under these circumstances, being as it is I’m chained to her book post, I am no longer allowed to fight back, or even capable of fighting back. I must simply sit and endure the journey Atwood has so elegantly laid out for me. If it were happening to me and not some character in a book I could protest, but this past has already been laid in ink, and there’s no changing it now. On top of that, the battle isn’t even raging anymore. According to the most reliable sources the war is over and women have won. We are free. Free to work. Free to choose who we sleep with. Free to choose when we have children. Free to choose how and when we enslave ourselves.
So exactly where should I direct this ball of flames that Atwood has so generously taken the time to blow on and inflate? I am not the property of some man. I have never been raped in the usual sense. I was not forced to marry and submit to someone I would not even enjoy talking to. I have no reason to be furious. Not like Iris. Not like all these other women who had to endure so much more. I had the luxury of coming after the feminist movement, after the realization that women are equal to men, after the end of the war. (Or wait, was that just a myth I was taught in order to ensure my injection into the workforce when I came of the proper age? Still, staring at ceilings is not my forte so I guess another form of slavery would fit me better.)
Nonetheless, I still believe women of earlier periods would have envied my lifestyle and I not theirs. When I inject myself into their earlier, more barbaric realm, I imagine myself getting beaten to death for my sarcasm or burnt at the stake for my rebellious attitude. The thought of me submitting to such an insulting and demeaning, not to mention painful, existence is beyond my imagination. I rack my brain trying to imagine myself even being capable of surviving in this world that claims me as a material good. And nothing, nothing comes. Surely I would have died somewhere, somewhere in the beginning as the fog began to lift. I must have been murdered; killed by someone who was kind enough to open the exit door for me.
At least then there would have been an exit. Now there is just a protest; an incessant whine that is followed by a reminder of the fact that I did not have to endure such hardships and therefore should not be so melancholy.
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