If you like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’... you’ll love this
Editor’s note: Here’s a list of books that explore the idea of women and freedom in wonderfully different ways—from horror to humour. Sneha Pathak showcases the great inventiveness of the feminist imagination.
Written by: Sneha Pathak is a freelance writer and translator. Her works have appeared in The Telegraph, Deccan Herald, Strange Horizons, and The Chakkar. You can follow her on Instagram.
Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is one of the iconic books of our times. Set in a dystopian world where women have been stripped of all their agency, the message of the novel continues to haunt us today as powerfully as the day it was published. Here is a list of nine books in various genres that echo similar messages and ideas, such as questions about the accepted gender roles and norms, the agency of women over their bodies, and create a world which, if not dystopian, is often different from what we see around us.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin: The novel is an example of early feminist science fiction. The book imagines a world where the creatures are ambisexual, (they can be either male or female). When a male native from the planet Terran visits this alien world of Winter, he must attempt to understand and bridge the gap between himself and its inhabitants. The novel asks important questions about identity and seeks to address what happens when the concept of male and female disappears. In contrast to Atwood’s novel—where gender dictates freedom—LeGuin attempts to break the gender binary altogether. With its rich imagery and beautiful writing, she creates a new and different world worth exploring.
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado: The story collection has been described as original, wild, surreal, as well as strange. The unique collection explores and experiments with themes such as violence, women and their bodies, female desire, queerness, and tends to merge psychological horror with myths and fairytales. Not meant for a light read or for the light-hearted, ‘Her Body and Other Parties’ is an intense book that places female bodies at its centre, quite like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. But here Machado takes a different, more experimental, approach to a similar idea.
Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: Perhaps the oldest recommendation in the list, the book was first published in 1905. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, who is also known as Begum Rokeya, imagines a world where gender roles have been reversed. As a result, readers travel to a different world called ‘Ladyland’, which is ruled by women and where women are free to live and govern their lives as well as their lands. Men, meanwhile, have been restricted to the ‘mardana’ and relegated to the background. ‘Sultana’s Dream’ might sound simplistic in today’s world, but it is a story much ahead of its time with its radical theme and ideas.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood: This is a mammoth book at around six hundred pages. And yet, upon reading it, it is easy to see that every page is essential to the exploration of the complicated interpersonal relationships. It brings out the themes of resistance that are skilfully braided into the book. It is the story of two sisters and features a novel titled ‘The Blind Assassin’, a roman à clef in the world of the novel. With its sprawling narrative canvas and memorable women characters, looking for agency over their lives, this one is a book to be remembered. It isn’t a typical dystopia like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, but the lives and the struggles of the women at the centre of the story stem from similar concerns—men denying women agency.
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark: This debut novel is a dark comedy that inverts the idea of the male gaze as it follows Irina, a photographer who looks for men to pose for her and then sells their explicit pictures. Through a complex protagonist who is not a ‘good’ person, Clark’s novel comments on power relationships and the taboos as they exist in today’s society. ‘Boy Parts’ is the kind of novel that elicits extreme reactions from readers with its not-so-likeable protagonist and startling plotline, and has been described by The Guardian as a book that will “make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror.” If ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ painted a picture of an out-and-out dystopia where women were at the mercy of men’s whims, ‘Boy Parts’ attempts to invert the dynamics where a woman is no longer the victim but the perpetrator.
Black Milk by Elif Shafak: Motherhood, a major underlying theme in Atwood’s novel, is at the centre of Shafak’s memoir. It is about being a mother and a writer, at the same time. In ‘Black Milk’, she writes about the time when she suffered from post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter in 2006 and the difficulty in balancing being a good artist with being a good parent. Shafak further weaves the journey of her life as a parent-writer with many great women of literature, such as Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Doris Lessing, and Rebecca West.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman: The novel, first published in 1995 in Belgium, has seen a recent surge in popularity. The book is set in a dystopian world where forty women have been imprisoned underground for a long time. One day, they get a chance to break free of their prison and into a world that is very different from what they remember. But this prison break does not exactly spell freedom for them. ‘I Who Have Never Known Men’ is a meditation on human nature and the search for meaning in a world that can contain needless cruelty as well as instances of hope and friendship. Like Atwood’s novel, women’s freedom has been curtailed here, and themes such as female bonding and loss of identity find their echoes in both books.
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Apko Matsuda: This is a collection of stories that play on and rewrite popular Japanese ghost and yokai tales from a feminist perspective. Each woman who populates these stories has a busy, bustling life like any other, except that they are ghosts. There exist subtle connections between the stories that are revealed as a reader moves through the collection. Worldly and other-worldly creatures coexist in ‘Where the Wild Ladies Are’, often surprising readers with the unexpected relationships that develop between them.
The Trouble with Women by Jacky Fleming: Here is a tongue-in-cheek, satirical, and hilariously illustrated book that lists for its readers all the things that have been considered wrong with women, things that have been used as reasons—nah, excuses—to repress and oppress women through the ages. I remember laughing hard as I turned the pages of this short but potent book. It may take 30 minutes to read ‘The Trouble with Women,’ but chances are you will continue to think about and recommend it for a long time.
