Our theme for the month of March is “I was wrong about.”
How dare she.
That’s what I thought, when I was sleeping (or rather, not sleeping, but reading) in the sunshine room with no windows, a fake skylight with daffodils and blue sky, bright yellow walls, two high twin beds. Thick, long, heavy blankets, with weird little patterned knots, like cheap pants pilling, but durable, and warm. The pillows on that bed were never comfortable, the smell of the blankets distinct, not bad, but baby powder-ish.
This room was in the finished basement of my grandmother’s house; she’s dead now. She died before I apologized for my responses—vehement pro-life defenses characterized by all the nuance you’d expect from a relatively precocious thirteen-year-old on the internet, which is to say, very little—to her repeated denunciations of Trump, sometime around 2016. But I remember laying in this high bed in the yellow room, the bed I had scrambled over my siblings for, and I remember reading voraciously, my eyes sometimes bouncing over entire words or paragraphs in my absorption. I would emerge from texts, disoriented and gasping, and somehow return to my family and my day. The lack of windows, especially, meant time stretched and compressed itself in imperceptible ways.
I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in the yellow, windowless room, and I remember being shocked and fascinated (references to sex and rape were still rare to my sheltered sensibility), but mostly, I remember being outraged.
How dare she? How dare she twist my Scripture? How dare she strawman my faith, my sacred texts so horribly as a false justification to tear the entire Christian paradigm down?
Upon recent rereading, I realize now how insane that take is. Priests wearing collars are left hanging on the Wall, Baptists lead the guerilla military resistance, and Quakers are part of a coordinated network to help Handmaids escape. And yet, in my absorption in the experience of reading and the defensiveness I’d been conditioned into in part by online rhetoric I’d been consuming, it was easier to say “how dare she write an imaginary story that could be possibly construed as evidence for why Christianity should not exist” instead of “how dare they (characters in this text) employ Scripture to such twisted, unjust ends.”
And so—I was wrong about the textual support for the anti-religion conclusions I drew about the The Handmaid’s Tale (though I could certainly make alternate, more nuanced claims about religious discourses in The Handmaid’s Tale now), and I was wrong to ignore the fact this text could be employed to encourage my faith and spur my thinking about how texts, especially the Bible, can be resemiotized and reinterpreted. (Also, Margaret Atwood, for all her flaws, can write pretty darn beautiful prose, which should not be skimmed.)
So far, I’ve been decently impressed with the TV show. It’s been largely true to the book (though I’ve only seen the first few episodes) and certainly more graphic. The appeal of Atwood’s prose is lost, and only occasionally captured with visual sequences, and I’m interested, though skeptical, given there are like, three more seasons, to see if the story continues to align with (or meaningfully add to) Atwood’s original project.
But, perhaps this opinion too (TV shows are nearly always much more terrible) will be something I’ll be wrong about.
Savannah Shustack graduated from Calvin in 2024 with a major in literature and plans to have the job of “books” one day. Rather like Ken, she is still figuring life out; the job “books” provides plenty of wiggle room, though she’s currently leaning toward being a librarian. Savannah is a New England native who enjoys watching hockey (Go Bruins!) and playing board games—especially ones she can win.
